doc0 none It is proposed to grow and characterize ternary alloys of conventional III-V compounds (e.g. GaAs, InAs) with III-N compounds (e.g. GaN, InN) on GaAs substrates. These alloys are expected to be cubic with the zincblende structure and to possess a direct bandgap. However, the large lattice mismatch between GaAs and GaN and the difference in atomic orbital energies between As and N result in a very unusual compositional dependence of the bandgap. The optical bowing coefficients in GaAs1-xNx are at least an order of magnitude greater than those encountered in common III-V alloys. Its bandgap decreases rapidly with increasing N fraction. This offers a possibility of preparing novel optoelectronic devices, on GaAs substrates, operating in the 1.3 - 1.55 mm range. The materials needed for this study will be grown by Metalorganic Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MOMBE). The effect of nitrogen incorporation on physical microstructure and optical bandgap of epitaxial layers will be determined by a variety of experimental techniques. Raman scattering will be used to investigate microstructural effects such as nitrogen incorporation, spontaneous ordering, and phase separation. Raman results will be modeled using bond polarizability, a two-component molecular model, finite size, and strain effects. Near band edge optical properties will be studied extensively by cw and time-resolved photoluminescence. These will focus on how nitrogen incorporation modifies carrier recombination. Ellipsometry and reflectance methods will be used to gain information of the above-bandgap optical properties. Phenomenological deformation potentials model will be used to account for strain effects in quantum wells and superlattices of InGaAsN GaAs. Finally, quantum well structures based on InGaAsN GaAs will be used as active layers to make vertical cavity lasers operating in the wavelength range of 1.3-1.55 mm doc1 none This project will focus on development of new cutting tool designs to allow increases in high speed machining (HSM) productivity. The researchers will investigate a new method of increasing the damping in the tool body through creation of internal features, which will dissipate energy through friction during tool vibration. These features will be designed to utilize the high centripetal accelerations experienced during the high spindle speeds used in HSM to dramatically increase the resulting energy dissipation. This centrifugal damping will provide significant increases in the dynamic stiffness of the tool, and result in direct productivity improvements in HSM. The researchers will also investigate the form and placement of the cutting edges on the tool body. Previous work in this area has shown that unequal spacing of the cutting edges can result in enhanced stability and improved productivity. This investigation will expand on this research to include analysis of undulating cutting edges, and experimentally verify the results. The final result of this research will be an increased understanding of the role of the cutting tool in high-speed milling. We will formulate optimal design rules and experimentally demonstrate the productivity increases achievable by intelligent design of milling cutters for HSM. The research team expects these results to gain rapid commercial acceptance by HSM users doc2 none The purpose of the proposed work is to design a novel cooling device for microelectronic systems using ultrasonic flexural waves (UFW s) of a resonating structure. The ultrasonic nature affords two essential features of such a device: Efficient cooling that derives from a high rate of acoustic streaming of air that causes convective heat transfer away from a heat source near the resonating structure and noise-free operation which is recognized as an important consumer benefit. To achieve this, three objectives are sought. First, the design of a chip-size cooling mechanism and on-chip assembly that will ensure optimum cooling capability will be investigated. Second, a heat transfer analysis of UFW-based acoustic streaming will be carried out with a goal of accurately predicting the cooling performance of such a device. Thirdly, based on the heat transfer analysis, a prototype design will be undertaken utilizing thin-film MEMS technology for power efficiency and economic viability. Final testing and evaluation will be carried out using specifications and procedures typically employed for computer processors doc3 none The objective of this research project is to develop a wireless sensor to detect cracks in welded steel connections. The Northridge earthquake caused extensive damage to the connections of structural steel, special moment-resisting frames. Critical welds fractured in more than 200 buildings throughout the epicentral area; however, the damage was difficult and expensive to detect because the steel members are covered with fireproofing. Removal of the architectural cladding and fireproofing for inspection is expensive, time consuming, and disrupted the normal activities of the building occupants. The proposed sensor relies on RF technology. The sensor is a resonant circuit, similar in design to adhesive Electronic Article Surveillance stickers that are used to control inventory in retail stores around the country. The sensors will be attached to the structural steel frame during construction, and are passive. The frequency characteristics of the sensor will change when a crack in the weld material or base metal beneath the sensor reaches a given size. A wireless transmitter receiver will be used to interrogate the sensor and obtain information about the presence of cracks without removing any of the architectural finishes or fireproofing. The proposed crack detection sensor is attractive because it is inexpensive, robust, easy to install, and maintenance free. The research has been divided into eleven tasks need to transfer this technology into structural evaluation. Critical issues that must be addressed include selection of appropriate components for manufacturing of the sensor (polymer film, wire coil, and adhesive layer) determination of required surface treatment for the steel, evaluation of optimal sensor placement based on the configuration of the welded connection, determination of optimal coil geometry, and development of a wireless transmitter receiver to generate a frequency sweep to interrogate multiple sensors. This project is supported under the 3rd -Year Competition under NSF 98-36 US - Japan Cooperative Research in Urban Earthquake Disaster Mitigation doc4 none Engelhardt The objective of this research project is to develop and validate safe and economical link-to-column connections for use in steel eccentrically braced frames. The Northridge and Kobe earthquake exposed fundamental deficiencies in US design, detailing and welding practices for connections in steel moment frames. Recent research conducted in both countries, however, has lead to major strides in understanding the problems associated with steel moment connections. Eccentrically braced frames (EBFs) provide an alternative to moment frame as a lateral force resisting system in steel buildings. The higher stiffness provided by an EBF could offer important advantages over a moment frame, and the use of EBFs have been constructed since the Northridge Earthquake, many using a configuration where the EBF link is attached to the column. The link-to-column connection in such systems plays a critical role in the seismic performance and safety of the frame. Many of the welding and design conditions responsible for the poor performance of moment frame connections in the Northridge Earthquake are also present in EBF link-to-column connections. At the same time, the force and inelastic deformation demands at link-to-column connections are substantially greater than at moment frame connections. However, virtually no research effort has been directed towards link-to-column connections in EBF to date. Nonetheless, EBF construction is proceeding on he West Coast for major building projects using questionable connection details that have not been verified by testing. A program of combined analytical and large-scale experimental studies will be conducted on link-to-column connections for seismic-resistant steel EBFs. A variety of promising connection details will be investigated and refined using inelastic finite element studies. Connection performance will then be evaluated using full-scale cyclic loading tests, followed by the development of design recommendations. This project will be conducted in close collaboration with investigators at Kyoto University in Japan. The planned collaboration includes coordinated experimental investigations between the US and Japanese sides, participation of a doctoral student from Kyoto University in the US side research, an dynamic testing of specimens fabricated in the US at Kyoto University using loading equipment not available in the US. This project will also include additional collaboration with the National Center for Research in Earthquake Engineering in Taiwan. This project is supported under the 3rd-year competition under NSF 98-36. US Japan Cooperative Research in Urban Earthquake Disaster Mitigation doc5 none The Kocaeli, Turkey, earthquake (M=7.4) of 17 August was particularly destructive because the fault ruptured in a densely developed urban area. This project is for an integrated study of the factors that controlled the nature of the ground motions: the earthquake source, wave propagation along the path, and near-surface modifications of these motions at the recording sites. The ground motions may be analogous to motions from earthquakes of this magnitude on strike-slip faults in the United States; in particular for the San Francisco Bay area and the Greater Los Angeles region. One critical result of the study will be calibration of parameters of the composite source model for a strike-slip earthquake with slip comparable to an earthquake on the San Andreas fault doc6 none Jahnke The Skidaway Institute of Oceanography will continue the scientific planning and management activities of the Coastal Ocean Processes (CoOP) research initiative by maintaining a CoOP planning office. The CoOP program seeks to promote interdisciplinary research in the coastal ocean. Its goal is to obtain a new level of quantitative understanding of the transports, transformations and fates of biologically, chemically, and geologically important matter over the continental margins. CoOP planning is being undertaken by a group of scientists dedicated to organizing large-scale efforts in interdisciplinary coastal ocean basic research. Through a series of workshops and the deliberations of a scientific planning committee, activities are undertaken to define the actual process studies and long-term measurements to be made. The office will communicate information about the CoOP program and the scientific results from CoOP projects by maintaining a CoOP web site and by regularly publishing a newsletter doc7 none Support is provided to study the formation of eighteen-degree water (EDW) in the western North Atlantic, where the heat flux from the ocean to the atmosphere is as large as or larger than the surface heat flux anywhere in the world. Subduction, circulation around the gyre, and temporal variability of the EDW would be addressed using PALACE float data from the Atlantic Circulation and Climate Experiment (ACCE), XBT data collected from ships of opportunity, and a series of studies using the MICOM isopycnal coordinate numerical model. The combined analyses of the observations and model output will focus on the identification of the sites of EDW formation, the identification of EDW properties, the quantification of the amount of EDW formed for a given year as well as large scale circulation impacts of EDW formation and its relation to climate phenomena. This proposal is a contribution to the Analysis, Interpretation, Synthesis and Modeling phase of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE doc8 none Funds are requested to complete the analysis and synthesis of the Deep Basin Experiment conducted as part of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE). The data include current meter mooring at choke point and fracture zone, neutrally buoyant floats and hydrographic data with tracers and nutrients. It is propose to use a combination of data analysis, inverse methods, and a hierarchy of quasi-analytic and numerical models to produce a dynamically consistent understanding of the deep circulation within the Brazil Basin. Newly discovered features of the deep circulation will be incorporated in the analysis. These include a prominent zonal banding of the deep circulation, an apparent low frequency (order 2 year) sloshing within the basin, numerous small vortices embedded in the larger scale circulation, and plumes of anomalous water extending away from the boundary into the basin interior doc9 none This action is to continue support for operation of the Guerrero network, together with analysis of the data collected. The Guerrero Accelerograph Network was installed in as a 30-station network of strong motion instruments along the coast of Mexico. The purpose of the network is to recover accelerograms from an expected magnitude 8 earthquake in the Guerrero seismic gap. While this major earthquake has not yet occurred, the network has obtained accelerograms from numerous small to moderate-sized earthquakes. In the 15 years through the end of , the network recorded high-quality digital accelerograms from 738 earthquakes with magnitudes less than 3 to 8.1. The Guerrero network is operated as a joint project of the Instituto de Ingenieria at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City, and the University of Nevada at Reno. Major support is provided by UNAM, which has upgraded most of the equipment from 12-bit to 19-bit digital recorders, as well as providing the major part of the field support, data playback, and data organization. Data from the expected break on the Guerrero gap will have international significance. In the United States, the data will provide estimates of ground motion in the Pacific Northwest due to a comparable earthquake expected on the Cascadia subduction zone; also for locations affected by the subduction zone in Alaska doc10 none This research project will examine the work of experts as they design industrial facilities, specifically warehouses. The four phases of the research are: observing experts at work and collecting data on their work process and work product; analyzing collected data to develop models of the design process and design decision making; evaluating models and designs through panels of experts; and developing, instantiating, and evaluating a computational architecture and tools to support design decision making. The research approach combines the methods and tools of ethnographic studies, operations research, and information technology for distributed decision making. The successful completion of this research will provide a formal representation of the warehouse design process as practiced by experts, a computational architecture based on the formal representation, and examples of computational tools within the architecture. The research will improve the practice of warehouse design by bringing a consistent, repeatable discipline to warehouse design decision making, thereby enabling the development of commercially viable computational tools. The research will improve teaching by developing a coherent, formal process model, along with industrial case data. The research will impact future research by providing a platform for specific research addressing the optimization of specific warehouse design decisions doc11 none A unique response reduction strategy for complex structures subjected to shock-induced vibrations is proposed. The vulnerability of flexible structures to large magnitude transient inputs is well documented. Various methods have been proposed and, in some cases, implemented through which the reliability of these structures can be enhanced. Typical solutions include passive isolation and auxiliary damping devices, which have been employed for many years with varying degrees of success. The primary focus of the proposed research is the development of a new type of passive nonlinear shock isolation system for protection of flexible structures, based upon the concept of nonlinear localization. Here, rather than relying strictly on compliance and adequate rattle space, the system takes induced vibrational energy and passively confines it to a preassigned secondary system away from the primary structure to be isolated, where it can be passively dissipated. The technique has been applied successfully to complex systems subjected to periodic loading, and in this project its efficacy under transient conditions will be studied, both analytically and experimentally. The project consists of three main tasks. First, a series of one-dimensional simulations and scale model experiments will be conducted to validate the concept of nonlinear localization in the context of protecting flexible structures subjected to large, transient inputs. Next, performance of a shock isolation system applied to a large, complex structure subjected to a series of multi-axial transients will be evaluated by modeling and simulation. Finally, a proof of concept experiment will be conducted using a larger scale structure on a multi-axis simulator. Through the use of nonlinear localization, the resulting shock isolation system will serve a dual purpose, providing protection in the linear regime for small-scale inputs and in the nonlinear regime for larger scale transients, while limiting the deformation ordinarily required for protection in the latter regime. The potential payoff is more compact and efficient passive protective systems. Impact of Budget Revision: The original two year budget provided for a total of two months (one month per year) of summer support for each of the two PI s and two calendar years of support for each of 2 Ph.D.-level graduate students. In order to reduce the overall budget from $261,868 to $180,000, summer support for each investigator is reduced to .10 month per year for each PI. This change will impact the summer progress of the graduate students, though hopefully not in a substantial way. Further, one Ph.D.-level student has been replaced by an M.S.-level student. On the experimental side, there will be no change to the one-dimensional experiment. We will, however, attempt to coordinate the multi-axial test program with another academic institution having an appropriate shaker facility. Assuming some coordination is possible at minimal cost, the goals of the project will remain fundamentally unchanged. The budget has been revised to reflect this doc12 none Barnes The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) will operate the R V Urraca during as a general oceanographic research vessel in support of NSF-supported research projects. The Urraca is a 96 ft. vessel, constructed in and refitted in , and is owned and operated by the Smithsonian Institution. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 114 operational days during , of which 15 days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The remaining cruises will support Smithsonian and other agency projects. Preventative maintenance will take place in the month of June. The projects scheduled on the Urraca include several oceanographic disciplines and will fully utilize the capabilities of the vessel. Operations will take place regionally off both coasts of Panama. The Urraca is part of a fleet of ships used by the National Science Foundation in support of marine science research. Most oceanographic projects require highly specialized equipment to be permanently installed on the vessel, thus the necessity for specialized ships. These vessels do not operate in the same mode as general cargo fishing vessels. As a result, NSF supports the operation of a variety of ships specifically dedicated to oceanographic research that are operated by universities and institutions around the country doc13 none This grant provides funding for the development of an analytical model and experimental verification of high-speed machining (HSM) of different workmaterials. In specific, thermal modeling of shear localization in HSM will be conducted using different difficult-to-machine materials, such as titanium alloys, nickel-based superalloys, and hardened steels taking into account various heat sources (primary, preheating, and image) using the classical Jeager s stationary and moving heat source models. The onset of shear localization will be predicted based on thermo-mechanical shear instability of different workmaterials. Depending on the thermo-mechanical properties of the workmaterial and the cutting conditions, the cutting speed for the onset of shear instability will be determined. In addition to the conventional machine tools, such as a precision lathe and an NC milling machine, a high-speed spindle (Bryant) (50,000 rpm, 50 hp) will be used for conducting the high-speed machining tests. Attempts will be made to measure the temperature generated in machining under shear localized conditions using either advanced thermally sensitive paints and optical infrared techniques. Some of the difficult-to-machine materials including titanium alloys, nickel-base superalloys, and hardened steels are challenging materials in the aerospace and aircraft industries. New tool materials and tool geometries are being specifically developed to dramatically increase the productivity in machining. Fundamental knowledge on the nature of chip formation process, forces, energy consumed, tool wear can provide the basis for the implementation of this technology in industry. The PIs would interact with tool manufacturers as well as aircraft and automobile industries on this technology Development of infrastructure and training of qualified graduate and undergraduate students (including the U.S. - born , women, and minorities) can provide the human resources necessary for advancing manufactuirng technologies in the U.S. industry doc14 none Laser forming (LF) is a process in which sheet metal forming is achieved through controlled temperature gradients and thermal stresses produced by the rapid absorption of power from a scanning laser beam. LF requires no hard tooling and has the flexibility for low-volume fabrication and rapid prototyping of sheet metal components. LF can also be used to fine adjust sheet metal parts for, say, pre-welding fit-up. The goal of this project is to advance the state of knowledge in LF technology, and to develop capabilities for LF to produce sheet metal components with controlled dimension, mechanical properties, and microstructures, and to markedly improve accuracy, scalability and reliability of the LF process. The project will develop a numerical model for LF having much improved prediction capabilities and accuracy by coupling microstructural transformations analysis with thermal and mechanical analysis and by incorporating accurate material data at high temperatures and high strain rates; and carry out an aggressive experimental program for model validation through detailed in-process and post-process characterizations. Other thermal-mechanical manufacturing methods will be able to leverage upon the improved understanding and prediction capabilities of the coupled thermal-mechanical- microstructural model to be developed in this project. The success of the project will open-up new opportunities for manufacturing of high-performance but conventionally hard-to-form materials, leading to innovative applications, thus opening new design options doc15 none This project aims at establishing a collaborative research program between Purdue University and Precise Corporation to develop state-of-the-art technologies for high- speed spindles. The research efforts will focus on developing comprehensive analytical and empirical models as well as conducting critical experimental studies for new high spindles with hybrid ceramic bearings. The study will determine the potential benefits of ceramic bearings in terms of dynamic and thermal characteristics as well as durability. Analytical modeling will include lubricant effects and fully three-dimensional thermal expansion in addition to bearing geometry, bearing material, preload, preloading method, external load, operating conditions and spindle shaft configuration to determine dynamic and thermal characteristics. Experimental test rigs will be developed to determine friction and temperature characteristics of hybrid ceramic bearings under operating conditions. The research will establish speed-load regions for advantageous application of hybrid ceramic bearings, and thus will lead to the establishment of a scientific and technological basis for high speed spindles with ceramic bearings that can provide full benefits of high speed machining. The analytical modeling tool and experimental database to be developed from this joint effort will provide a systematic tool to help achieve optimal design of high speed spindles to avoid a costly failure of expensive machines doc16 none Gawley This two-year award for U.S.-U.K. collaboration in organic synthetic chemistry involves Robert E. Gawley and a postdoctoral researcher from the University of Miami and Iain Coldham of the University of Exeter. The objective of the collaboration is to develop new methods for the synthesis of complex heterocyclic compounds. The investigators will extend their work on the configurational stability of aminoorganolithiums. Both groups have studied reactivity patterns in these generally unstable compounds and propose to identify structural characteristics using complementary sets of related, yet different compounds. The U.S. investigator brings to this collaboration a unique approach to the study and development of unstabilized alpha-lithio amines. This is complemented by the U.K. investigator s expertise on the structure and preparation of the compounds. His laboratory prepared a compound that demonstrated configurational stability even at room temperature. The project will advance understanding of new methods for synthesizing complex nitrogen heterocycles and of the science of organic synthesis. Heterocyclic compounds are important to pharmacology because the vast majority of pharmaceutical drugs contain the cyclical arrangement of molecules that are typically found in this system doc17 none Mylonakis The object of this research is to improve the understanding of the effect of soil-structure-interaction (SSI) on the seismic response of pile-supported highway bridges. The collapse of 18 piers of the elevated Hanshin expressway during the Kobe earthquake (as well as of other bridges in California and around the would in recent earthquakes) has raised concerns about the current understanding of the seismic behavior of such structures and the adequacy of existing seismic regulations. In the case of Hanshin Expressway, preliminary examination of seismological and engineering information indicates that the dynamic interplay between soil, piles and superstructure may have contributed to the collapse of the bridge. A collaborative research program is being conducted involving a U.S. and a Japanese engineer to investigate the role of SSI on the collapse. The main objectives are: (i) to analyze the seismic response of the collapsed segment; (ii) to repeat the analysis for adjacent segments that did not collapse; (iii) to evaluate the results by comparing with results from earlier studies that did not consider SSI effects, and with predictions based on current seismic provisions. The Japanese collaborator is Dr. Takashi Tazoh, General Manager of the Geotechnical Division at Shimizu Corporation. He is providing seismological, geotechnical, and structural data for the site an is performing alternative analysis using analytical techniques pioneered at Shimizu. The research will be purely analytical; no experiments are planned. Apart from shedding light on the causes of the collapse, the research will develop practical analysis tools which can be of immediate value to engineers. This project is supported under the 3rd - Year Competition under NSF 98-36 US - Japan Cooperative Research in Urban Earthquake Disaster Mitigation doc18 none Gertler Description: This award is for support of a joint research project by Dr. Janos J. Gertler, Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia and Dr. Alaa Sheta, Assistant Professor, Computers and Systems Department, Electronics Research Institute, Cairo, Egypt. These two scientists plan to extend current research carried out by Dr. Gertler in the area of fault detection and diagnosis under a separate NSF grant. The extension will utilize paradigms inspired by natural evolution and genetics in adaptive process modeling and control. These computational algorithms are known as Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs). The two scientists plan to develop model structures using EAs. This model will be utilized in creating parity relations. The EA-based approach is expected to enhance the analytical method and provide more accurate results. In a related effort, they will consider the development of an intelligent controller for the selected chemical process. The type of controller chosen is the model-based predictive controller. This type of controller has been successfully used in many industrial processes with promising results. Scope: This award will allow a US scientist to collaborate with an Egyptian scientist. The research area, a new field within the broad topic of Intelligent Control (IC), is one in which control algorithms are developed by emulating certain characteristics of intelligent biological systems. Dr. Gertler, the US scientist, is well known in the area of fault detection and diagnosis. Dr. Sheta, the Egyptian scientist, is an expert in the area of system identification, control, optimization and evolutionary algorithms. He has developed a number of methods for identification and control of nonlinear dynamical systems in noisy environments. In this project, Dr. Sheta will be responsible for developing model structures for the process under study, and for the adaptation of a simulation program for the process, and will be involved in experimentation on chemical process simulators. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting US-foreign scientific collaboration in areas of mutual benefit. Funding for this project is provided by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Electrical and Communications Systems doc19 none Sandip Dey Barium strontium titanate, (Ba, Sr)TiO3 or BST, films with high permittivity are being considered for numerous applications including charge storage cells for 4, 16, and 64 gigabit (Gb) dynamic random access memories (DRAMs). The realization of Gb DRAMs with long refresh times is contingent upon the fabrication of electrically-reliable, trench IrO2 (Ba, Sr)TiO3 Pt storage cells on Si by manufacturable, metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) processes. Currently, the research efforts of our laboratory are focused on MOCVD of Ir, Pt, and BST, coupled with nanostructure evolution, electrical characterization, and modeling of interfaces. A critical issue that remain unresolved, which may eventually determine the refresh time, is the lack of understanding of the effects of interfacial space charge on the transient current and dielectric dispersion of the trench capacitor. Therefore, to realize mechanically robust, trench test cells, satisfying the geometric and electrical requirements of a 4 Gbit DRAM cell, a systematic and vertically-integrated program will be implemented to: a) fabricate trench IrO2 (BST) Pt test cells on TaxSiyNz-passivated poly-Si plugs by sequential deposition of (i) Pt by MOCVD and or sputtering, (ii) conformal BST by MOCVD, followed by photolithography, etching, and focused ion beam (FIB) milling of BST to define the geometry of one 4 Gbit cell, and (iii) conformal Ir by MOCVD followed by its oxidation, photolithography, and etching b) quantitatively determine the space charge distribution at the Schottky BST Pt interface in a test trench and its relationship to transient current, and dielectric dispersion by frequency and time domain techniques c) optimize BST MOCVD parameters, from feedback of electrical characterization, by response surface analyses; fabricate cells with the required electrical performance The integration of the aforementioned ideas to fabricate the next generation of storage cells will be challenging but novel, and the concepts may well be extended to the 64 Gb level. A successful outcome will provide a solution for fabricating storage cells with longer refresh times. Arizona State University (ASU) is the appropriate place to initiate such an exciting research program. The PI has carried out research on MOCVD of dielectrics and metals, and interfacial phenomena in perovskite films over the last decade. An interdisciplinary approach will train personnel in a technologically important area, so that they can apply their science and engineering skills in the US industries and research laboratories upon completion doc20 none This grant provides funding for the development of a numerical tool for determining optimal process parameters in bulk forming processes, such as rolling, extrusion, and forging. The developed numerical tool will determine the optimal process geometry; temperature and speed that satisfy specified design criteria for a given two-dimensional forming process. An optimization algorithm based on an adaptive arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian finite element formulation for modeling large deformation thermo-elasto-viscoplastic contact problems will be used. The algorithm will be implemented in the context of an existing advanced computational framework that has tools for mesh generation, adaptivity, and parallel computing. Experiments involving the extrusion process will also be performed to validate the algorithms developed. Experimental dies will be manufactured according to the optimal die shapes predicted in this work and tested at the predicted optimal die speeds. A model press, which can extrude plasticine material marked with a grid, will be used in these experiments to observe the material flow behavior. If successful, the results of this research will lead to improvements in the design of bulk forming processes and new developments in optimization methods for handling complex nonlinear problems. The primary goal of this work is to determine optimal process geometry, thermal conditions, and process speed in bulk forming processes that will satisfy typically prescribed design criteria. These design criteria may include generating a uniform flow of the material, generating a specified material property distribution in the formed product, minimizing the production time, or minimizing the energy required for the process. Determining the process parameters to achieve these objectives will help to reduce the cost and improve the quality of the final product in processes such as extrusion and forging. The proposed work will also contribute to the computational tools and methodologies available for nonlinear optimization problems doc21 none This proposal attempts to design an efficient power conditioning system for PV interconnection to a residence. The design is based on DC-DC converter and Inverter topology, and this topology itself is not a new scheme; it has been used in many cases of PV systems. Also, the proposed scheme is designed to use the maximum power point (Voltage or current) derived from a MPPT algorithm (which assumed to be installed in a microcomputer based system). Actually, the main reason that the MMPT is not well accepted in a small PV project is that the high-cost of the computer based maximum power tracker. The PV market and application have yet to justify the adoption of MPT in terms of the benefit of just a little more power drawn from the PV cells against the initial costs of the MPT. In a small size PV application, more economical power tracker is highly sought. In addition, if the DC-DC converter is included in the proposed scheme, could the DC-DC control scheme, such as current control, accommodate the MPPT control doc22 none This grant provides funding for a study of how workers should be assigned to tasks, assuming that the workers can be cross-trained to capably perform a variety of tasks. The goal is to develop easily implementable, robust, and dynamic work assignment policies that achieve improvements in performance measures such as throughput, sojourn time, and work in process. The research will also seek to identify the conditions under which particular work assignment strategies will be of greatest benefit, quantify the magnitude of the resulting performance improvements, determine the aspects of these strategies that have the greatest impact towards improved performance, and investigate the sensitivity of the results to the specific (modeling and analysis) assumptions made. In order to achieve the goals of this project, organizations will be modeled as queueing systems and analyzed using several methodologies (i.e., Markov chain analysis, Markov decision processes, stochastic comparisons, fluid relaxation, and simulation). If successful, the results of this research are expected to include detailed guidelines for how cross-training and dynamic work assignment strategies can be used to improve an organization s performance and for how much benefit can be obtained by implementing these strategies. This research is also expected to to provide qualitative insights that managers can use to implement simple changes in how their organization s workforce is utilized that are likely to yield improved performance doc23 none Ramirez The Daikai Station Kobe, Japan was the first underground structure not crossing an active fault the collapsed during an earthquake. Preliminary analysis and that of others have indicated that the middle column was grossly inadequate to resist lateral deformations. However, the Daikai failure is only a warning. The numerous examples of damage and even complete collapse of underground structures observed during the Kobe Earthquake help define a problem that merits serious investigation. Of great concern is that there may be in the USA and Japan, underground structures under similar conditions to the Daikai Station. The problem is multifaceted in that it requires that approaches be developed to both conduct the earthquake risk assessment of existing underground structures as well as the design of new ones, given the appropriate ground motion characteristics. This calls for clearly defining structural performance not only in terms of safety, but serviceability as well. The objectives of this research project are: Identification and evaluation of the load-transfer mechanisms between the ground and the structure during a seismic event, (2) Determination of the deformation capacity of reinforced concrete members during inelastic cycles of displacement, (3) Development of new techniques and criteria for seismic performance of cut and cover underground structures and identification of critical elements for cumulative damage assessment of cut and cover underground structures. The research team in this project includes USA and Japan based structural and geotechnical engineers from both academia and practice. This project is supported under the 3rd-year competition under NSF 98-36. US Japan Cooperative Research in Urban Earthquake Disaster Mitigation doc24 none Haas Construction is increasingly dependent on expensive and automated equipment. Safe and efficient operation of this equipment requires that the location and orientation of each piece of equipment with respect to the objects in its immediate work environment must be established and maintained during operation. The main objective of this research therefore is to develop new methods for rapid local area sensing and 3D modeling for planning and control of construction operations involving automated equipment. It is a premise of this research that such modeling can be made feasible by deploying sensors efficiently and adding manual guidance doc25 none This research project addresses crack blunting and concomitant defect generation at the atomic length scale, processes that profoundly impact the macroscopic mechanical response of structural metals and alloys. The performance and reliability of high strength steels, aluminum alloys, etc., are compromised when subject to adverse conditions such as low temperature, stress, and or harsh chemical environments. The scope of this project goes beyond traditional continuum-mechanical treatments, in that it attempts to appropriately model material behavior at the various length scales from macroscopic to atomistic, while self-consistently bridging the various theories. One advantage of the approach taken is that linear elastic fracture mechanics, as well as the stress singularities and empirical fracture criteria associated therewith, are discarded in favor of physically-motivated criteria imposed at the near-atomic length scale. Specifically, this effort will probe: 1) the phenomenon of brittle crack growth in the presence of pre-existing, apparently mobile, dislocations; 2) the role of nanoscale blunting of a sharp crack propagating through a dislocation-free zone, embedded in a plastically deforming medium; and 3) the mechanics of twinning and complex stacking fault formation. The results are expected to improve our understanding of the brittle-to-ductile transition and to yield practical methods for reducing the likelihood of brittle failure of structural metallic alloys. The specific systems to be considered in this research include aluminum and high strength steels, with a strong focus on aerospace applications (e.g., cracking scenarios in aging aircraft, and the extreme temperature and chemical environments associated with turbine and rocket powerplants). In addition, a pilot program to explore the use of micromachined fixtures ( MEMS technology) to test some of the concepts arising from this work, and or to measure key materials properties, will be undertaken doc26 none Reaction involving formaldehyde (CH2O) and formyl (HCO) radical lie on the primary oxidation pathway for methane and other funds, but there are still large uncertainties in the high-temperature rate coefficients of key reactions involving these species. This uncertainty stems largely from instability to measure CH2O and HCO with sufficient sensitivity. To address this situation, sensitive optimal diagnostics to measure CH2O and HCO are developed and used to measure important rate coefficients from shock-tube studies. Formaldehyde is measured using vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) lamp absorption at 174 nm. Formyl is measured using frequency modulation (FM) laser absorption at 614 nm. These techniques are applied to the investigation of several elementary reactions in shock-tube studies and species concentration time-history databases from pyrolysis and oxidation experiments doc20 none This grant provides funding for the development of a numerical tool for determining optimal process parameters in bulk forming processes, such as rolling, extrusion, and forging. The developed numerical tool will determine the optimal process geometry; temperature and speed that satisfy specified design criteria for a given two-dimensional forming process. An optimization algorithm based on an adaptive arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian finite element formulation for modeling large deformation thermo-elasto-viscoplastic contact problems will be used. The algorithm will be implemented in the context of an existing advanced computational framework that has tools for mesh generation, adaptivity, and parallel computing. Experiments involving the extrusion process will also be performed to validate the algorithms developed. Experimental dies will be manufactured according to the optimal die shapes predicted in this work and tested at the predicted optimal die speeds. A model press, which can extrude plasticine material marked with a grid, will be used in these experiments to observe the material flow behavior. If successful, the results of this research will lead to improvements in the design of bulk forming processes and new developments in optimization methods for handling complex nonlinear problems. The primary goal of this work is to determine optimal process geometry, thermal conditions, and process speed in bulk forming processes that will satisfy typically prescribed design criteria. These design criteria may include generating a uniform flow of the material, generating a specified material property distribution in the formed product, minimizing the production time, or minimizing the energy required for the process. Determining the process parameters to achieve these objectives will help to reduce the cost and improve the quality of the final product in processes such as extrusion and forging. The proposed work will also contribute to the computational tools and methodologies available for nonlinear optimization problems doc28 none Chase This proposal is submitted by ANSER to the NSF for an advanced control system for a single stage-to-orbit launch vehicle application powered by a MHD energy-bypass engine. An advanced adaptive control system for an airbreathing MHD energy-bypass engine will be required to stabilize the interactions among the magnetic field, the boundary layer, and the conducting airflow in the MHD channels. The characteristics of a MHD energy-bypass engine are extremely nonlinear and vary widely with changing flight conditions and operating environments. The research for this application will focus on two classes of adaptive hierarchical control systems: (1) a back-propagated adaptive-critic design (ADC) model predictive control (MPC) system and (2) a back-propagated neural network model predictive-control system. Both of these control systems are potentially capable of controlling the kind of extreme non-linearity inherent in MHD energy-bypass engines. Processes within a MHD energy-bypass engine have a time constant in the nanosecond range. While previous aircraft and missile applications of adaptive-critic control systems provide some insight into the MHD energy-bypass engine application, the research team feels that those applications would be totally inadequate for the MHD energy-bypass engine control system. A new advanced control system is needed. Controllability of the MHD energy-bypass engine is a key issue and should be addressed during the engine design process. The MHD energy-bypass propulsion system to be used in this research was defined by an ANSER-led research team during the NASA Highly Reusable Space Transportation (HRST) program 2 years ago. The MHD energy-bypass airbreathing engine extracts energy from the engine inlet flow by means of a MHD generator and adds the energy back into the flow by means of a MHD accelerator in the engine exhaust nozzle. Textron and Princeton MHD design and performance codes will be used to generate engine performance and sensitivity databases to develop and evaluate advanced control system alternatives. Princeton investigators, assisted by Dr. Eduardo Sontag from Rutgers, will define and model an advanced control system for a MHD energy-bypass propulsion system. ANSER will use the same design optimization code used in the NASA HRST study to determine the complete range of engine operating parameters and the impact of the control system on the overall performance of an MHD energy-bypass engine. Both single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) and cruiser applications will be considered. The products to be generated during the proposed investigation include (1) an advanced control system that can control and optimize the performance of an energy-bypass engine and (2) experiments to verify the limits of the control system s ability to control the energy-bypass processes doc29 none The goal of this proposed study is to test the theory of educational improvement in urban settings based upon systemic reform as delineated by NSF s process and outcome drivers by: 1. estimating the quantitative relationship between individual elements of NSF s process drivers and the change in student achievement (i.e., the outcome drivers); 2. measuring the synergistic effects of the drivers upon each other; and 3. attempting to estimate a quantitative relationship between the drivers and student achievement. Additionally, the proposed study will collect data at the middle and high school levels. The proposed study is designed to examine the evidence supporting the theory of systemic reform, not to evaluate the success of the CPMSAs doc30 none JAFFE The proposal is for a planning grant to establish a middle school consortium among five rural school districts. The school districts are located in Monterey, San Benito, and Santa Cruz counties, three of the seven counties in California with the highest proportion of limited English-proficient students. During the planning year the consortium will establish a leadership team of middle school language and science teachers who are experienced teaching ELL students and who are seeking innovative, integrated and coherent strategies to improve instruction for all students in their schools. The intended planning exercise will be to design a regional teacher professional development plan for all middle school teachers of science doc31 none Lee The PI and his group will study novel photonic devices fabricated by gray-scale lithography which exploit a new type of optical resonant micro-cavity known as an Asymmetric Resonant Cavity (ARC). The ARC is a compact dialectic micro-cavity based on total (or partial) internal reflection which has been shown to support high-Q modes, emit with high directionality and (in the case of semiconductor mid-infrared lasers) with high output power. The ARC concept is based on smooth oval deformations of cylindrical or spherical whispering gallery resonators. Prior to the work proposed below, only limited use has been made of sophisticated modem lithographic techniques in developing the ARC-based devices, which require sub-micron accuracy and well-controlled height profiles. They will investigate ARCs based on glass, Er-doped glass, GaAs, InGaAs GaAlAs and silicon germanium. The proposed project will demonstrate further useful properties of ARCs for meso-optical devices, by employing the newly developed gray scale lithography. Specifically they hope to test and demonstrate the following important features: Improved lasing characteristics of ARC micro-lasers over a wide range of wavelength bands and gain materials. The possibility of lasing emission from ARC micro-lasers from two qualitatively different modes, i.e. different in both emission directionality and wavelength. Demonstrate similar properties for ARC-based optical amplifiers. Improved input-output coupling between waveguides and ARC micro-resonators due to nonevanescent coupling to ARCS, resulting in much improved design tolerances. Demonstrate how to exploit unique directional properties of ARC resonances for filtering operations useful for wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) applications in planar integrated optics. Demonstrate device configurations which convert planar propagation or emission to propagation or emission perpendicular to the plane. Configurations proposed are ARCs with auxiliary mesoreflectors, or axicon-domed ARCS. These configurations rely essentially on unique features of gray-scale lithography. Lithography can be applied to define lateral shapes, but exposure control will define the surface profiles. UCSD will develop two complimentary fabrication methods. One is based on dry etching for ARCs of height profiles 5 microns and another on Sandia s LIGA foundry process for profiles 5 microns. Both methods will employ gray scale lithography, which UCSD pioneered, and which is superior to binary lithography for producing higher quality and lower cost optical components. However, the gray scale technology must be modified by employing thicker diamond-like-coatings on the gray scale masks for wider dynamic ranges of exposure, and thicker analog photoresist layers. The LIGA process at Sandia now works only with binary lithography; but they have agreed to work with us to introduce gray scale lithography into their LIGA process. Moreover, Sandia has produced LIGA parts only in PMMA, metals and ceramics to date, whereas the preferred materials for ARCs are glass, silicon and germanium. The exciting possibility of designing, producing and testing meso-optics of arbitrary 3D shapes, is within reach with gray-scale technology. Application of gray scale technology to Sandia s LIGA foundry process as well as meso-optics for redirecting ARC emission is totally new. This is a collaborative project between UCSD and Yale. Yale (ADS and RKC) will be responsible in defining the shapes, sizes and materials of ARCs to be fabricated. UCSD (SHL) will be responsible for the fabrication of ARCs and sample examination. Yale (RKC) will measure the fabricated ARCs in terms of their performance and provide feedback to the Yale design group and to the fabrication group at UCSD, while focusing on possible application to the integrated optics field and WDM part of the telecommunications field doc32 none Schunk The proposed research is a continuation of theoretical studies of the effects that plasma and neutral gas transport processes have on the Earth s ionosphere and thermosphere. The research spans a 5-year period and will be conducted by a group that is composed of six scientists and a graduate student. The research involves model data comparisons, theoretical studies of ionosphere dynamics and electrodynamics, polar wind studies, and high-resolution thermosphere studies. The overall approach is to consider the ionosphere as an integrated system, which interacts with both the magnetosphere and thermosphere. The members of the group will study different, but related, ionospheric problems, with the result that almost all of the major ionospheric regions will be studied, including the E region, F region, and topside ionosphere at equatorial, middle, and high latitudes. In the course of these studies, some of the group s models will be upgraded or improved, but most of the proposed studies will be conducted with existing ionospheric, thermospheric, electrodynamic, and polar wind models. Also, in many of the proposed studies, data will be needed from several incoherent scatter radars, ionosondes, ground-based magnetometers, superDARN radars, and satellites, but all of the data required are either already available or will be available on the World Wide Web in the near future. The proposed research is directly relevant to the National Space Weather Program as well as to the NSF-sponsored community-wide initiatives called CEDAR and GEM, and to NASA s TIMED satellite doc33 none Popel The amount and rate of accumulation of biological information is increasing exponentially. The importance of this information explosion cannot be understated - it has transformed the nature of both biology and medicine, and has led many to claim that biology has become an information science. There is, however, growing recognition that the tabulation of genetic and molecular building blocks from which biological systems are composed is not sufficient for understanding the functions of these complex systems. Rather, it is becoming clear that the emergent, integrative behaviors of biological systems are a result of regulated interactions among all the components that form complex structures with specific properties, and that knowledge of each system component, however detailed, is not sufficient by itself to understand these integrative behaviors. Achieving an understanding of molecules, cells, tissues and organs as integrative entities is the next major frontier of biomedical science. Because of the inherent complexity of real biological systems, the development and analysis of information-based computational models is necessary to achieve this understanding. The objective of the workshop is to bring together researchers who are developing experimentally-based computational models of biological systems spanning hierarchical levels of analysis that include: a) regulation of gene expression; b) sub-cellular and cellular dynamics; and c) tissue and organ function. The meeting will provide a forum for presentation of the state-of-the-art in modeling research, allow for assessment of the degree to which an integrative understanding of system function is being achieved by existing models, and help to identify new areas of high growth potential for the next generation of models. The meeting will also include a panel discussion Using Computational Models in Education doc34 none Fuentes The Principal Investigator will conduct research in the Arctic atmospheric boundary layer to gain a better understanding on the processes leading to ozone depletion. The project will be part ol the Polar Sunrise Experiment- (PSE ) with three main objectives: To investigate and quatitfy the ozone depletion due to surface (snowpack) bases processes. To define the vertical transport of ozone from the stable marine boundary layer to the underlying snowpack. To specify the ocean to atmosphere exchange of lieat, water vapor and after ozone depletion episodes. During February - May , a series of surface- and airborne-based measurements will be undertaken at two experimental sites, at Alert and Williams Island. The Principal Investigator will attempt for the first time to determine in situ ozone fluxes to the snowpack using the eddy covariance and will test the hypothesis that accumulation of ozone reactive materials on and or inside the snowpack contribute to boundary layer ozone destruction during the Polar sunrise. He surmises that processes occurring within the snowpack may explain important missing details in ozone depletion mechanisms. To verify if the snowpack constitutes a sink for ozone, detailed measurements will be made in the interstitial air within the snowpack. Gas-phase measurements at five depths, from the surface to 100-150 cm, will be achieved through air sampling with chamber systems, coupled with highly sensitive ozone analyzers. During spring Arctic ozone depletion episodes, the atmospheric column extending from the surface to about 300 meters (m) can be devoid of ozone. Above the 300-meter level, the height of the capping inversion of the mixed layer, ozone mixing ratios can exceed 40 ppbv. This ozone reservoir can serve as a source of surface ozone via downward transport by turbulent eddies. Because the Arctic troposphere is dark for several months, the atmospheric boundary layer is stable and stratified, thus preventing atmospheric vertical mixing. Therefore, photochnmically reactive chemical species may accumulate in the boundary layer and become available to partake in reactions when sunlight resumes. He will investigate the role of ocean to atmosphere exchange of energy and momentum on the chemical composition of the boundary layer by defining the individual components of the energy balance for the camp surface. The data set will be used in the development and validation of numerical modeling systems to understand the atmosphere-ocean energy exchange capacity at the ice-camp site, thereby characterizing the availability of activation energy for local chemical reactions doc35 none The proposed research to be undertaken will continue and extend a long-standing program of research in nonlinear econometric methods. The view is that an econometric specification is an approximation to the underlying data generating mechanism. In keeping with this view, methodologies have been developed that sequentially improve the approximation as information becomes available, and permit reliable inference at each intermediate stage of model evolution. These objectives have been accomplished at a level of generality that encompasses most nonlinear econometric inference procedures. The basic idea is to endow a procedure with nonparametric properties by replacing the structural model with a truncated series expansion, the error density with a truncated expansion, or both. By letting the truncation point grow adaptively with sample size, the approximation is accurate enough at each intermediate stage to permit reliable inference and ultimate convergence to the underlying data generating mechanism is assured. Tightly parameterized structural modeling can be carried out within this paradigm. The idea is to require that moments implied by the structural model match the scores of a model developed according to the methodology described above. This estimator has certain advantages. Estimates can be made as efficient as if maximum likelihood had been employed. Unlike maximum likelihood, the computational burden does not increase if the state vector is partially observed either because the structural model contains latent variables or because data is missing. Studentized scores serve as diagnostic tests and, because the scores correspond to identifiable features of data, failure to pass a diagnostic indicates which features of data a tightly parameterized structural model cannot explain. This is an invaluable aid to model development. The specific proposal is to establish that the advantages claimed above follow from assumptions that are more primitive than the high level assumptions used to date, to improve computational efficiency, and to continue an ongoing program of empirical work that exploits the new methodologies discussed above. Initial work will focus on the estimation of structural macro models with attention to the simultaneous use of time series and panel data. Reduced form applications will focus on methods for extracting the continuous time volatility process from discretely sampled asset prices and efficiently predicting functionals of the continuous time process such as integrated forward volatility doc36 none Balll State University will provide ten-week summer research experiences during this three-year project to a total of eighteen undergraduates from primarily small universities and colleges. Research opportunities are offered in theoretical condensed matter physics (quantum wires and superlattices), experimental high energy physics (charmed baryons) , nuclear physics (nuclear reactions in astrophysics) and observational astronomy (binary stars and galactic structure). The primary goal is to promote and intensify undergraduate interest in training and careers in physics and astronomy, especially for students who have limited research opportunities at their home schools. A multiplier effect is sought by including teaching majors in physics in a balanced mix of participants. The personal interactions, guidance, tutorials, and supporting activities assist participants to become progressively more independent as they learn about the nature of research and the research process doc37 none Information and communication technologies (ICT) are used pervasively in the real estate industry. This study examines how people and organizations in this industry work and how this work adapts and is affected by the use of ICT. Since real estate agents act as transactional intermediaries, this industry is affected by a shift to electronic transactions and the potential disintermediation this implies. Since many industries are shifting towards more information knowledge-based structures, understanding how ICT use is changing this industry will provide empirical evidence about potential changes that might be expected in other industries. The study has three objectives: 1. Describe how the use of ICT changes the ways individual knowledge workers conduct their work; 2. Describe organizational and industrial changes related to the use of ICT; 3. Describe how changes in individual work relate to changes in organizational and industrial structures and processes. At the individual level, the researchers focus on changes in work design and social capital. At the organization and industry levels, ideas from transaction cost and coordination theory are applied doc38 none Under the direction of Dr. Takeshi Inomata, Mr. Mark Child will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. The goal of his research is to reconstruct prehistoric Mayan ritual practice and examine the potential continuity between ancient and post contact periods. While early Spanish manuscripts provide extensive descriptions of multiple aspects of Mayan life, it is uncertain to what extent these are biased by European preconceptions. According to Spanish accounts the Mayan worldview included the hot cold dichotomy and, supposedly, Mayans believed that good health resulted from an appropriate balance of the two. Illness, they believed was the result of a preponderance of cold and to remedy this people entered ritual sweat baths to increase the amount of hot in their body. As Dr. Child notes, this concept is surprisingly close to the European four humors belief and there is reason to doubt its prehistoric Mayan existence. Through archaeological excavation at the site of Piedras Negras in Guatemala Mr. Child will attempt to reconstruct sweat bath ritual. While several examples of sweat baths are known from other Middle American sites, Piedras Negras is unique in the number it contains. Eight have been identified and excavation to date indicates that their sequential construction spans the occupation of this major site. However adjoining rooms appear to have been built over a relatively short period of time. Based on his prior work at the site, Mr. Child believes it is possible to reconstruct how sweat baths were used since they contain a wealth of artifacts including carefully crafted obsidian (volcanic glass blades) and pumice stones. Hot cold is only one of many dicotomys attributed to the prehistoric Maya and through careful mapping, excavation and plotting of excavated remains it should be possible to determine where activities and gendered use of the sweatbaths were divided along such lines. This research is important for several reasons. It will provide data of interest to many Middle Americanist archaeologists. It will shed light on the long-term continuity of tradition over time and help determine whether specific concepts are primarily historical in nature or reflect more basic aspects of the human mind. This award will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc39 none LOW Stephen Low Productions, Inc., is testing the viability of shooting large format film of volcanic vents on the deep ocean floor. The tests will be carried out during the course of the currently scheduled November, , dives involving the deep sea submersible, Alvin, at the 9 Degree North site on the East Pacific Rise. The expedition plans to shoot approximately 20,000 feet of 15 perforation, 70 mm film resulting in approximately 10 to 20 minutes of footage. The objectives of this research are to confirm the feasibility of lighting and filming the deep sea volcanic vents in the large film format from Alvin, and to develop and optimize the deep water, large-format filming capabilities of Alvin. The research effort is proposed on behalf of a consortium of US based organizations now forming for the production of a 40-minute, large format film, Volcanoes of the Abyss. Key production personnel involved in this research will be: Stephen Low, Director Producer; Pietro L. Serapiglia, Producer; William W. Reeve, Camera Specialist; and Alexander Low, Project Manager. Scientists working with the production crew in this phase are: Richard A. Lutz, biologist from Rutgers University; Fred Grassle, Director, Institute of Marine Dave Gallo, Director, Special Projects, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and Emory Kristof, Deep Sea Imaging Specialist, National Geographic Society doc40 none This proposal seeks support for dendrochronological research on the long-lived conifer northern white cedar, found growing on the cliffs of the Niagara Escarpment in Canada. Previous research by Canadian scientists resulted in the development of a published 1,783 year ring-width chronology from the Bruce Peninsula in Ontario, and we have an unpublished extension of this chronology, which spans nearly 3,000 years. The potential for further extension has been clearly demonstrated through the discovery of abundant subfossil material. The proponents have been given access to, and permission to use, the entire collection of more than 2,500 living and dead tree core and section samples collected over the past decade by the Canadian research team at the University of Guelph. They propose to catalog and analyze these samples, developing the strongest subset of samples to use for dendroclimatic analysis. They also propose to develop two new chronologies, from the far western and northern extensions of the Escarpment, and to sample further on the Bruce Peninsula on the eastern extreme, in order to more completely model the climate signal of T. occidenta is across space and time. The second year of this project will be dedicated to dendroclimatic analyses, toward the goal of climate reconstruction doc41 none Singson The reproductive biology of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans facilitates the identification of mutations that affect sperm and no other cells. This provides a unique opportunity to define sperm components required for sperm-egg interactions. Worms with mutations in the spe-9 gene produce spermatozoa with wild type morphology and motility that cannot fertilize oocytes even after contact between gametes. Therefore, disruption of spe-9 function affects either gamete recognition, adhesion, signaling and or fusion. The spe-9 gene encodes a sperm transmembrane protein with an extracellular domain that contains ten epidermal growth factor (EGF)-like repeats. A common feature of proteins that include EGF-like motifs is their involvement in extracellular functions such as adhesive and ligand-receptor interactions. Additionally, the overall structure of the predicted SPE-9 protein is similar to that of ligands for the Notch LIN-12 GLP-1 family of transmembrane receptors. These results suggest that SPE-9 functions in the specialized cell-cell interactions required for fertilization. In order to gain a better understanding of the role of SPE-9 during fertilization we will follow several lines of investigation. Immunofluorescence will be used to localize the SPE-9 protein in sperm and reveal the cellular region important for gamete interactions. Mutation analysis experiments will be conducted in order to determine important functional domains of the SPE-9 protein. Finally, extragenic suppressors of spe-9 will be isolated in order to identify additional genes involved in worm sperm-egg interactions. This work will provide new insights into conception and complement studies of fertilization in other organisms doc42 none The American Psychological Association (APA) hopes by the application to obtain a $25,OOO National Science Foundation (NSF) block grant to support international travel for approximately 50 US psychologists participating in the scientific program of the XXVII International Congress of Psychology, taking place July 23-28, in Stockholm Sweden. The majority of the project grantees will be young scholars, either students or individuals who received their degrees within the last eight years. The Swedish Psychological Association, under the patronage of His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustav of Sweden, is organizing the Congress, which is the quadrennial meeting of the prestigious International Union of Psychological Science (IUPsyS). APA is joined in this effort by the National Academy of Sciences, which houses the US National Committee (USNC) of the IUPsyS. This request has precedent in grants received in ($12,000 for the XXVI Congress in Montreal, Canada), in ($18,000 for the XXV Congress in Brussels, Belgium) and in ($25,000 for the XXIV Congress in Sydney, Australia doc43 none This award, provided by the Office of Polar Programs, allows a US investigator to join an Italian Antarctic Program geological field team in northern Victoria Land, Antarctica, in order to study volcanic and intrusive magmatic rocks that are believed to be important to detailed understanding of the initial phase of breakup of the Gondwanaland supercontinent. Mesozoic break-up of Gondwanaland was marked by a major magmatic event during which voluminous basaltic magmas were both erupted at the surface and emplaced as intrusive sills and dikes at depth within the Permian and Triassic sedimentary sequence of the Transantarctic Mountains. The volcanic rocks were erupted at the surface mainly as quiescent flood basalt lava flows but also explosively, as a result of subsurface magma water interaction. In contrast to southern Africa, the basaltic magmatism in Antarctica was preceded by an episode of explosive silica-rich eruptions. These silicic rocks are recorded throughout the Transantarctic Mountains. The silicic eruptions were associated with crustal extension and the formation of a rift zone, which then controlled the transport and dispersal of the basaltic magmas associated with supercontinent break-up. The rift zone is documented in the Beardmore Glacier region, but in Victoria Land the current evidence is equivocal. In north Victoria Land no complete stratigraphic section is known that encompasses the Triassic strata and overlying volcanic units. There are isolated occurrences of sedimentary rocks with silicic volcanic debris but their stratigraphic relations are unclear; silicic debris is also incorporated in the basaltic pyroclastic rocks but its source is unknown. The accumulation of basaltic extrusive rocks in a rift has been inferred but without evidence for contemporaneous faulting. In the adjacent Deep Freeze Range, which is postulated to be part of the Jurassic rift shoulder, there is a continuous section from the basement rocks to the flood basalts, thus spanning the interval in which silicic magmatism should be recorded. Rocks reported in this interval include sedimentary strata variously regarded as Triassic or Middle Jurassic, basaltic pyroclastic rocks, and Middle Jurassic quartzose sandstones and basaltic lavas. The Deep Freeze Range offers an opportunity to resolve questions about silicic volcanism and tectonic setting during Jurassic evolution of north Victoria Land and to test the hypothesis that Early Jurassic rifting and associated silicic volcanism preceded basaltic magmatism and controlled the transport and emplacement of Gondwanaland break-up magmas. The results of this study are expected to have implications for understanding the tectonic setting of the silicic and basaltic magmatism that marks the initial stages of break-up in Antarctica. The paleovolcanologic and tectonic setting of north Victoria Land will be developed. In addition, results are anticipated to address the point source and long-distance transport model versus the local derivation model for Ferrar magmas. Understanding of Gondwanaland break-up processes will be advanced by results of this study doc44 none Research on diving physiology of aquatic birds and mammals began as early as the mid- s, but major advances in the field were not made until the late s and early s. Since that time, there has been an intense interest in the field, with studies focused on the physiology, biochemistry, behavior and ecology of this group of organisms. Most of the research has focused on seabirds and marine mammals, while fewer studies have been conducted on turtles, crocodiles and sea snakes. Gerald Kooyman has been a pioneer in developing techniques to study diving animals in the wild. His studies of the physiological adaptation and biochemical mechanisms of diving in Antarctic penguins and seals resulted in landmark papers. This symposium in his honor will bring together a distinguished group of international scientists to discuss to their work in the fields of physiology, behavior, ecology, biochemistry, and conservation. Topics to be discussed include be the diving physiology of dolphins, the feeding ecology of baleen whales, the diving behavior of leatherback sea turtles, the behavior of sea lions, the ecological energetics of fur seals and the biomedical significance and application of diving ecology. The symposium s schedule will provide time for interactions between the speakers and students. Papers presented at the symposium will be made available to the scientific community through publication in the journal Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology doc45 none To make full use of the available computing power in stress analyses of structures and of manufacturing processes constitutive equations for modern materials and loading conditions are needed. The time (rate)-dependent mechanical behavior of solid polymers is the target of this program. A combined experimental theoretical investigation is proposed. The incremental viscoplasticity theory based on overstress (VBO) modified for solid polymer inelastic behavior will be investigated and improved. Uniaxial and biaxial screening tests on several commercially available solid polymers will lead to the selection of two polymers for which a constitutive equation will be developed doc46 none Kelley, Michael The Principal Investigator and his graduate students have developed valuable hardware and software tools for the study of the mid-latitude ionosphere. The hardware tools include a cooled CCD Imager capable of making sequential exposures of five different filtered emissions. The system can be remotely operated via the Internet and has already provided new insights into the structure of the region, during both quiet and active times, through analysis and interpretation of the airglow data. Additional software tools facilitate the analysis of GPS data, including validation of methods for determining the absolute TEC from the data stream, as well as data processing and display software, which make comparisons with other data sets much more straightforward. The purpose of this renewal proposal is to build on this developed expertise by planning and excuting simultaneous observation campaigns with the Arecibo Radar and with other groups interested in the Caribbean sector for scientific studies, as well as validation of TEC methods, spacecraft instrument calibration and tomographic work. In addition to the imager and GPS aspects, the PI will assure that Arecibo Radar time is available for the campaigns by writing observing proposals on a timely basis and coordinating the various groups. In addition, he will take a leadership role in interpreting and publishing the data sets on a timely basis. During the tenure of this proposal, he will also explore opportunities for short campaigns in other locations for the purpose of solving specific problems or extending the spatial coverage of a particular phenonmenon doc47 none Pelegri In this study, effects of anisotropy and microscale on materials properties will be incorporated in a model to predict the interfacial reliability of MEMS devices. The goals of the proposed study are to: a) develop innovative testing methodologies to measure interfacial fracture toughness at the meso and microscale levels, b) experimentally demonstrate the loss mechanisms and mode mixity effects on the structural integrity of PZT Silicon interfaces, and c) formulate a law for the energy release rate and the fracture toughness that account for the materials anisotropy at the PZT Silicon interface. In addition, viscous loss mechanisms for the PZT material and the nature of structural losses for the silicon will be investigated. In the educational plan the PI proposes to increase and modernize student involvement in the ongoing research, within and outside the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, by promoting research transfer into classrooms, and simultaneously increasing the number of women represented in engineering. To increase the gender diversity, the PI will collaborate with Douglass College of Women. Among other activities, a seminar series, with distinguished women in the field, will be held in order to attract more women and minorities in engineering. The PI proposes to develop a new course in which she will promote state-of-the-art experimental techniques, modern principles and methods of analysis used in the study of MEMS. The syllabus of the course will be closely related to the proposed program in order to create a direct link between research and teaching doc48 none PI: Cecilia L Ridgeway, Shelley J Correll This project combines experimental and survey methods to assess a new analysis of how women and men come to occupy different occupational positions. The theoretical foundation uses ideas from status characteristics theory to explain women s and men s different conceptions of their competence (under specified conditions), and subsequent occupational aspiration. Predictions from this theory will be tested in a small groups laboratory. The second part of the study examines survey data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of high school students for evidence of the same processes as the experimental research finds. Results will be important for extending an established theory in micro-sociology, as well as for showing some real-world applications of the theoretical principles developed doc49 none Ustach This award to Duke University will provide instrumentation for oceanographic research for use on R V Cape Hatteras, a research vessel operated by the Duke UNC Oceanographic Consortium as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. Specific instrumentation to be acquired includes a replacement deck unit for the CTD, a new carousel unit for water sampling, and two oxygen sensors and related shipboard instruments to allow continuous measurement of dissolved oxygen during CTD lowerings. The shared-use instrumentation supported here will assist marine scientists conduct studies, particularly in the western North Atlantic Ocean, during and future years doc50 none The definitions of P and NP are based on polynomial time computations. It has been a long-time concern whether one should call a problem with computational complexity Q (n100) tractable . A commonly accepted explanation is that in practice most problems in P in fact can be solved in time O(n3) or better. However, recent research has shown that some very important practical problems seem to require algorithms whose complexity is bounded only by very high degree polynomials. On the other hand, there are many NP-hard problems, described in a parameterized version, for which it is desired to construct the precise solutions deterministically, while a wide range of applications is only interested in solving these problems with a small or moderate value for the parameters. The point is how to take advantage of this fact and develop most efficient algorithms for these intractable problems in practice. The research studies the refinement of the classification of tractability and intractability, based on the recently developed theory of parameterized complexity, with the aim of identifying impractical polynomial time algorithms and efficient exponential time algorithms for practical problems. The following specific issues in algorithm theory are investigated: developing efficient parameterized algorithms for intractable problems. This includes two steps: identifying fixed-parameter tractable problems, and development of most efficient parameterized algorithms for the problems. identifying hard polynomial time solvable problems, based on the framework of the W[1]-hardness. Problems from other practice will also be studied based on this framework. investigating the relationship between parameterized complexity and approximability. Parameterized complexity suggests new techniques for proving non-approximability for certain optimization problems that may otherwise be not easy or even impossible based on classical complexity theory doc51 none Kovscek Description: This project supports a cooperative research project by Professor Anthony Kovscek, Department of Petroleum Engineering at Stanford University, Stanford, California and Professors Serhat Akin and Suat Bagci of the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. They plan to investigate mechanisms of governing oil production, and their mathematical description, by a recently introduced enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technique called vapor extraction (VAPEX). It is aimed at heavy oils (density ranges from 940 to kg m3) which are far more viscous (greater than 100 cP) than conventional crude oils. This large viscosity frustrates production. The idea is to inject a suitable solvent, such as propane, into a heavy-oil reservoir to form a vapor filled chamber and to dissolve in the crude oil causing a reduction in its viscosity. The resulting solution drains by gravity to a well placed low in the formation. It is planned to study vapor chamber formation and gravity drainage in the laboratory using X-ray computed tomography (CT, i.e. CaT scan) to visualize fluid phases inside porous media, and to examine process mechanisms at the pore scale using transparent silicon micromodels. With this knowledge a mathematical numerical model of the process will be developed. Scope: The collaborating scientists have complementary experience and expertise needed to conduct the project. Dr. Kovscek s laboratory at Stanford has high-pressure silicon micromodels, which may give insights into the pore-level physics of the VAPEX process. Dr. Serhat Akin has in the past worked on several CT-scanning experimental projects in order to understand multi-phase fluid flow in porous media and measure relative permeabilities. The visits by the Turkish scientists to Stanford will help with the experimental results, contribute towards the modeling efforts, and build onto our knowledge of imaging multi-phase flow using CT scanners and silicon micromodels. This project fits the mission of the Division of International Programs (INT) for support of mutually beneficial research. This project is supported by the Division of International Programs, the Division of Earth Sciences, and the Division of Civil and Mechanical Systems doc52 none Fai This U.S.-Hungary research project between George Fai of Kent State University and partners Peter Levai of the Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics and Gabor Papp of Eotvos University, Budapest, will examine perturbative quantum chromodynamics (pQCD). The objective is to expand our understanding of large transverse-momentum particle production data from hadronic and nuclear collisions in a wide energy range. This project examines particle production in nuclear collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) with the intent of ascertaining the presence of nontrivial collective phenomena such as the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Researcher efforts will feature theoretical description of observables in such relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The U.S.-Hungary team will attempt to identify a kinematical window, where the measured photon, lepton and hadron data reveal either QGP formation or the appearance of some other exotic state of strongly interacting matter. Plans include the development of a phenomenological model based on pQCD to describe the experimental data and to determine whether genuine collective effects, e.g. QGP formation, are necessary to reproduce the data. If successful, genuine collective effects revealed by the data will further our understanding of strong-interaction physics. Such new knowledge is critical for the progress of high-energy nuclear physics and should contribute to astrophysics and cosmology as well. This project in nuclear and particle physics fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc53 none Patel This is a three year joint research project proposed by Dr. Virendra Patel, the Iowa Institute of Hydraulic Research (IIHR), University of Iowa, Dr. W-F Tsai of the National Science Council s National Center for High-Performance Computing, and Dr. C. L. Yen of the National Taiwan University. This project seeks to develop 3-D models to forecast river floods by integrating state-of-the-art prediction methods for typhoons, rainfall, watershed run-off and river flows and using advanced computer and communication technology. Both U.S. and Taiwan groups are complimentary in resources and know-how. The U.S. team (IIHR) has a powerful computer model and the know-how to make it work in real-world applications. The NCHC has the computing resources in both hardware and manpower. Developing a flood forecast system for a river system such as the Tan Sui River is important since this river is characteristic of subtropical rivers on island environments. Flash floods are a major issue and are difficult to forecast. This project could help us to understand the nature of the river-flooding in subtropical areas and how to mitigate it. This project is jointly supported by the NSF and the National Science Council of Taiwan doc54 none The investigators will use observations of energetic neutral atoms (ENA) to study the dynamics of the ring current. They will perform a case study of the October 29, , geomagnetic storm to determine the relative contributions of neutral atoms, the charge-exchange loss-rate of ring current ions, the energy spectral variations of ions during the storm, and the relationship between ENA and the magnetic index Dst. They will also conduct a statistical study of ENA events observed by the Geotail satellite. The statistical study will identify trends in the composition of ENA during the course of a magnetic storm. Comparison of ENA observations between the Geotail and Polar satellites will be made to compare the total ENA intensity at two locations in space. The study will help develop the ENA technique as a diagnostic tool for the structure of the inner magnetosphere doc55 none Social scientists long have focused their attention on the structure, function, and impact of institutions. Recent lines of inquiry have examined patterns of regional growth in terms of differences in institutional configurations across regions. Some researchers have argued that certain kinds of institutions are more likely to foster innovation, with attention being given to identifying and understanding these institutions. These lines of inquiry face two related problems; however, as institutionalist perspectives in regional development run the risk of ignoring economic forces extant outside the region, and they tend to be vague about the role of public policy. This doctoral dissertation research project aims to increase knowledge of how regional differences in institutions simultaneously influence decisions about investments in and the use of seaports as well as the organization of production and distribution activities. The project seeks to identify the characteristics of institutions (both the formal contractual, organizational, technical and regulatory systems as well as the informal norms, networks and relationships between actors) that are more likely to enhance or promote innovation, the accessing of new markets, and productivity gains. These issues will be examined through comparative analyses of the different ways that Toyota USA has used nine U.S. ports as integral components of its production and distribution system since . The research is guided by working hypotheses that innovation-enhancing institutions are characterized by close and multi-layered relationships between private and public actors, that policy can change the character of these institutions, and that they make a difference to regional economic development outcomes. These hypotheses will be tested through the conduct of interview-based case studies of the ports at Oakland, Long Beach, and Baltimore as well as documentary and quantitative analyses of all nine ports used by Toyota USA. This project will contribute to the current theoretical debates about the importance of institutions and the relationship between local and global forces in regional development outcomes. The findings should be of substantial policy relevance, because they will highlight the ways in which public policy choices in institutional design can and do influence certain aspects of regional growth performance. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc56 none This award supports the initial activities and planning of a series of science policy seminars, forums and related events over the next decade that will build on the experience gained from the productive, long-standing relationship between the National Science Foundation of the United States of America (NSF) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). The principal objective of the series will be to explore issues with significant implications for the vitality of science and engineering in the borderless, knowledge-based economy of the 21~ century. A Coordinating Committee will be responsible for the organization and implementation of the series of events. Consideration will be given to the establishment of an Advisory Board representing leading government and nongovemment scientific institutions in the two countries to provide strategic guidance. This proposal covers planning and oversight for the first three years and travel costs for participants in the first two events planned in the series doc57 none Recent research has highlighted the importance of natural disturbances in the development of many forest ecosystems. Colorado forests are characterized by large-scale disturbances with historical return intervals often shorter than the life span of dominant tree species. Disturbances therefore are an important factor in the development of these forests. Fire and high winds are very important forms of disturbance that repeatedly have affected the structure and function of Colorado forests. In a major windstorm blew down over 10,000 hectares of forest in and around the Mount Zirkel Wilderness in northwestern Colorado, providing a rare research opportunity. The objectives of this study are to investigate the effect of four main factors on susceptibility for forest stands to wind disturbance: (1) a stand s fire history; (2) a stand s species composition; (3) a stand s wind disturbance history and; (4) a stand s topographic characteristics. This study will combine traditional dendrochronological techniques with analyses employing a geographic information system (GIS) to study the interactions between fire and wind disturbance regimes in this Colorado subalpine forest. Data will be collected in the field and entered into the GIS for descriptive analysis. These data will be analyzed using multivariate regression and other multivariate statistics to relate stand susceptibility to wind damage to these four categories of environmental factors. This study will quantify the roles of fire and large-scale blowdowns in subalpine forests and lend insight into how interactions among different disturbances determine forest structure, composition, and health. These insights will allow management of forests to be within the limits that result from natural disturbances. The effects of large-scale blowdowns on forest ecosystems may be especially important to understand since global climate change may increase the frequency and intensity of catastrophic winds. This research therefore will guide management decisions of these forests by not only yielding important spatial information about disturbances in subalpine forests but also by addressing the largely unanswered question of how a site s previous disturbance history affects its response to future disturbances. Geographic information systems provide new opportunities for the spatial analysis of ecosystem processes. This research will combine GIS-based analyses with well-established dendrochronological procedures that have been used for temporal analysis of forest dynamics. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc58 none Baer This U.S.-Hungarian research project between Tomas Baer of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and his partner Laszlo Szepes of Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, features synthesis of organometallic complexes and their subsequent examination by photoelectron spectroscopy (PES) and photoelectron photoion coincidence (PEPICO) spectrometry. Both labs contribute expertise in ab initio MO calculations. Together, their objective is to measure the bond and ionization energies of gaseous organometallic complexes. To do this, a number of cyclopentadienyl- and carbonyl-containing cobalt and manganese complexes will be used. Specifically, the researchers expect to derive information concerning: 1) the adiabatic and vertical ionization energies of the stable organometallic molecules; 2) the photoelectron spectrum of the stable organometallic molecule; and 3) the bond energies of the organometallic ion not only as found in the organometallic species produced by thermolysis but also the lignad itself. If successful, results should improve our understanding of metal-organic lignad interactions and may contribute to the future design of homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysts. This international project in experimental physical chemistry fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the Untied States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc59 none Relatively little scientific attention has been given to the hydrologic impact of vegetation removal and regrowth following fires in Mediterranean-type shrublands, such as California chaparral. The few studies that have addressed this problem have been carried out over short periods of time in small experimental watersheds that were completely, or nearly completely, burned. Fires in large chaparral watersheds rarely burn the entire watershed,however, and it is not known how variations in fire size and location affect streamflow volumes and their seasonal variations. This doctoral dissertation research project therefore will use a physically based, spatially explicit computer model to simulate streamflow in two large chaparral watersheds in southern California. Multiple model runs with randomly generated fires that vary in size and location will be used to investigate the impacts of fire and vegetation regrowth on long-term streamflow dynamics in these watersheds. Satellite data collected over the past fifteen years will be analyzed to determine vegetation regrowth characteristics for the hydrologic model. This project will contribute toward reliable modeling of streamflow, which is necessary for the sound management of watersheds and for water resources planning, water quality prediction, flood mitigation, and ecosystem preservation. Fires produce the most dramatic and repeated transformation of landscape conditions in chaparral watersheds and watersheds in other Mediterranean-type ecosystems. Approximately six percent of the Earth s terrestrial surface is covered by shrublands similar to chaparral vegetation. The results of this project therefore will have hydrologic relevance beyond watersheds in southern California and will be significant for research and watershed management in similar ecosystems. The study also will shed light on the hydrologic response of watersheds to changes in fire regimes that may accompany hypothesized global warming. Because this project employs novel procedures to obtain model inputs from remotely sensed data, the hydrologic modeling approach and findings will have relevance to users of other physically based, spatially distributed models. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc60 none Walder This two-year award for U.S.-U.K. collaboration on lava-flow interactions with snow and ice involves Joseph Walder of Portland State University and the Cascades Volcano Observatory of the U.S. Geological Survey in Vancouver, Washington, and R. Stephen J. Sparks of the Centre for Environmental Geophysical Flows, University of Bristol. The research collaboration is aimed at understanding flood generation and debris flows caused by the movement of lava over snow and glacier ice. Several distinct sets of experiments are proposed. Simulated lava flows will be released over ice and artificial snow, and the rate of meltwater production will be determined as a function of lava temperature, viscosity, discharge rate and ice-surface slope. Simulated lava flows will also be released over ice blocks containing features that emulate glacial crevasses and a glacial meltwater drainage system. Experimental results will be compared to theoretical models that then can be scaled to make predictions about real-world phenomena. The U.S. investigator brings to this collaboration expertise in glaciology and the interaction of hot volcanic grain flows with snow. This is complemented by the U.K. investigator s expertise in physical volcanology. The Bristol Centre is the best facility in the world for experimental work on ice-lava interactions and has specialized equipment for simulating lava flows over ice. The project will advance understanding of how flooding occurs and may be used to predict flooding caused by eruptive volcanic activity doc61 none This project compares political structures and economic conditions in five high crime cities. Time series analyses will be used to determine factors associated with crime rates; in particular, analyses will focus on effects of economic restructuring in the years since , and on shifting political trends, in affecting crime rates. Outcomes of the work include a more detailed study of the links between economic conditions (e.g., growth of specific jobs linked to particular types of crimes), and a better basis for developing policies to reduce crime rates doc62 none We propose to build a cache storage buffer based upon parametric amplification that will be capable of operating in the Gb s range, permitting kbits of data to be stored. We will carry out experiments to explore various ways of reading, writing, and erasing the stored data patterns. Our work has shown that the ultrafast parametric nonlinearity can be exploited either to provide broad-band tunable gain or dynamic gain modulation for clock-recovery. We propose to combine the two to demonstrate an optical phase-lock loop, which in principle can be extremely fast as it relies on the Kerr nonlinearity for envelope-phase discrimination. Such a phase-lock loop will also be wavelength tunable-a feature that is quite important as it adds the function of wavelength conversion to the standard 3R all-optical regenerator. Simultaneous to the above experimental studies we will also develop numerical models of the various optical systems. This will provide a design tool to determine the parameter values allowing the most efficient operation of the experimental setups. We have previously demonstrated the possibility of stably propagating sub-picosecond pulses in fiber lines in which conjugating gain is used to compensate the linear loss. We propose to assemble a re-circulating loop experiment in which linear loss will be compensated by a pair of non-degenerate parametric (conjugating) amplifiers. The location of the two amplifiers will be chosen based upon further theoretical numerical results. We will experimentally and theoretically study the stability properties of the sub-picosecond pulses by making various signal and noise measurements, and will compare the experimental results directly with numerical simulations. The proposed experiments will be performed in both the and nm wavelength regions in order to demonstrate the wideband capability of parametric amplification doc63 none PI: Jerome Karabel, Anthony S Chen This dissertation research traces the initiation and growth of state and national policies of non-discrimination in employment in the period -71. The project uses historical records, and builds on existing theory in political sociology, especially the tradition that traces social change through institutions. The first part of the research plan is to relate institutional and legal arrangements in 29 states that passed non-discrimination laws between and . Several hypotheses related to conflicting interest groups (civil rights associations, trade unions, religious and ethnic organizations) will be tested using event history analysis. The second part is a detailed historical study of three large states (California, Illinois, and New York), with an emphasis on explaining the timing of passage of non-discrimination policies. The third part of the study considers how non-discrimination transformed to affirmative action in the years after passage of the Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Acts. Here the focus is primarily on influences of civil rights groups, and their differing legislative, judicial, and administrative agendas. The research adds to understanding of political change and social structure by permitting assessment of a variety of hypotheses regarding significant influences. Because of the natural variation across states in many of the variables to be studied, it will be possible to compare alternative proposed mechanisms of the changes doc64 none Recent development in parameterized complexity theory has revealed abundant sophisticatd local solution structures for many intractable combinational optimization problems. Techniques and results developed in the area have given rise to the consideration that these solution structures can be closely related to neighborhoods in local search heuristics. This project is to investigate such a relationship and, based on which, to develop innovative techniques for the design of effective local search: computational complexity and performance guarantee. Parameterization on neighborhoods is introduced to scrutinize the relationship between neighborhoods and the computational complexity of local search algorithms. This approach will essentially show what quantities in a sophisticated neighborhood make the algorithms converge fast. It is also expected to demonstrate how difficult in terms of complexity to improve the effectiveness of a simple neighborhood. A systematic technique is also investigated to derive neighborhoods from existing techniques used in parameterized tractibility. This will result in a general framework for the design of effective local search algorithms for various parameterized tractable optimization problems doc65 none For many inner-city neighborhoods, welfare payments play a fundamental role in the local economy and create a measure of stability in everyday life. In such so-called welfare neighborhoods, local social service providers and service-dependent individuals engage in routine interactions. One facet of these institutional-individual relationships is the nature of the spatial settings within which such interactions occur. Settings like welfare offices, shelters, and sober-living homes are the primary locales where relationships between social welfare institutions and service consumers are forged. Initial cursory examinations indicate that major changes in national social policy, such as the welfare reforms of , are fundamentally altering both the practices of local social welfare institutions and the survival adaptations of service-dependent people. This doctoral dissertation research project will focus on whether welfare reform has reconfigured the settings in which social welfare and other key neighborhood institutions interact with local service-dependent populations. Through the conduct of a case study in the University Park of central Los Angeles, this project will examine how welfare reform, institutional practices, and individual survival patterns work themselves out in particular spatial settings. A two-pronged research design (1) will document changes in the spatial settings of institutional welfare-service delivery under welfare reform, drawing heavily on the USC Welfare Reform Neighborhood Impact Study s large-scale longitudinal survey of 40 local institutions and (2) will use retrospective and bimonthly longitudinal surveys to chart changes in the survival patterns of local service-dependent residents as they negotiate the spatial settings of welfare and other neighborhood services. While focusing on one particular welfare neighborhood, the project results will shed light on processes operating in other welfare neighborhoods in large cities. The project will shed light on the spatial setting of service delivery, a dimension largely missing from previous geographical accounts of the welfare state, and it will explicate ways in which welfare reform is contingent upon the neighborhood context. The project s examination of the concept and reality of welfare neighborhood will complement urban geographical studies at the city, county and state levels, and the proposed analysis will enrich state-centered studies of social welfare, adding emphasis regarding the role of local institutions and neighborhoods as factors that shape the implementation and the ultimate success of welfare reform. Project results also will provide valuable answers to questions asked by those providing services to dependent individuals. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc66 none This project studies variations in organ dontion rates and links them to differences in organizational structures and cultural climates surrounding the donor banks. A variety of quantitative data will be analyzed using time-series and other techniques, supplemented by qualitative historical data on advertising and news accounts of organ donations. The research is important to sociological understanding of organizations, for donor banks constitute an unusual combination of professional and volunteer employees, and non-profit and emotional foci in their structures. The work may have policy implications as well, for it may identify structural characteristics and cultural forms associated with more successful appeal for donors doc67 none The investigators use magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) modeling to study the triggering of magnetic substorms and the response of the magnetosphere to changes in the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF). Specific areas of study include: the propagation of solar wind induced transients in the magnetosphere and their ionospheric signatures; magnetotail and plasma sheet configuration during substorm growth phase; the effects of solar wind transients on plasma sheet thinning; and the dynamics of the near Earth plasmasheet and magnetotail during changes in the IMF. The study will initially involve only model simulations. Later, the investigators will use solar wind inputs from actual substorm events. The studies are aimed at improving our understanding of geomagnetic substorms leading to an improved predictive capability doc68 none The objective of this project is to improve understanding of the kinetics, mechanisms, and products of atmospheric aldehyde (RCHO) reactions. Aldehyde photolysis plays a crucial role in the formation of photochemical smog and regional ozone, via formation of free radicals such as HCO (formyl radicals) and their subsequent conversion into HO2 and OH radicals. Photofragmentation quantum yields of aldehydes exhibit dramatic wavelength dependence in the actinic uv region ( 290 nm). Despite the importance of aldehyde photolysis in the chemistry of the troposphere, few wavelength dependent studies of aldehyde photodissociation pathways and quantum yields have been carried out under conditions that can be readily extrapolated to those of the atmosphere. In this proposal, the photolysis of C3 and C4 aldehydes, pinonaldehyde and caronaldehyde (terpenes oxidation products), and glycidaldehyde and glyoxal (aromatic degradation products) will be studied by combining pulsed laser photolysis with cavity ring-down spectroscopy, FTIR, and mass spectrometry for product characterization. In addition, the relationship between aldehyde alkyl group structure and photodissociation quantum yields will be investigated doc69 none The investigators will study geomagnetic storm processes in the ring current using ground-based magnetometer measurements and data from satellites such as GOES, AMPTE, and Geotail. The study will focus on the transport and energization of oxygen ions and the excitation of ultra-low frequency waves and their role in ring current decay. The data will be used to determine if there is a one-to-one correspondence between the onset of the storm recovery phase and substorm onset, and to what extent the tail current contributes to mid-latitude geomagnetic indices. Ultra low frequency waves may be related to the decay of ring current ions. The study will contribute to our understanding of Space Weather effects associated with large magnetic storms doc70 none The investigators will study the large-scale structure of the magnetosheath using magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) models and data from the ISTP satellites. Areas of study include the occurrence of the magnetospheric sash predicted by MHD simulations, the depletion layer in the magnetopause, and disturbances produced by shocks in the magnetosheath. Processes occurring at the magnetopause generate characteristic signatures that can be observed remotely from positions within the magnetosheath considerably removed from the magnetopause. By identifying these magnetosheath signatures, the investigators will gain useful information concerning the occurrence patterns of magnetopause phenomena. The award will support collaborative efforts with a professor at Istanbul Technical University. The research results will support the goals of the National Space Weather Program and the Geospace Environment Modeling Program doc71 none PI: Edwin Amenta, Chris Bonastia This project analyzes archival and other historical records to explore differences in U.S. and British policies regarding racial segregation of residence. The goal is to understand why British policies officially promoted integration before U.S. policies did. Answers will be sought in analyses of political institutions and cultural understandings. It focuses on an institutional home theme, that the location of relevant institutions in different governmental and non-government agencies influences their policies and how those policies get implemented. Basically, promoting residential integration did not find a single government institution to promote it, while in Britain an institutional support was found. The work is significant for adding to understanding of how cultural climates and larger institutional structures affect the policies and operation of agencies doc72 none SES PI: Michael Burawoy, Rachel Sherman This project compares work environment and culture in two hotels, one offering luxury accommodations and the other offering a more standard environment. PI s will interview about 100 managers, employees, and guests at the two hotels, and will develop ethnographic descriptions of them as well. The project uses ideas from the social organization of work, research into controlled emotion production, and analyses of the prestige or status value of objects and activities. Outcomes of the work will be to test hypotheses related to producing status value, and a better understanding of how the organizational structure produces either standard or luxurious surroundings doc73 none Robinson This one-year award will support US participation in an international workshop, New Approaches to the Study of Genes, Brain, and Behavior with Honey Bees, to take place in Bellagio, Italy, on June 26-30, . Gene Robinson of the University of Illinois, and Alison Mercer, University of Otago, New Zealand, will organize the workshop. The workshop involves US researchers participation in a forum for a multidisciplinary group of researchers from the US, Europe, and Asia to develop opportunities for future collaboration on emerging technologies in neuroscience and genomics, enhancing the value of the honey bee as a model for integrated studies of behavior, neurobiology, and genetics. The focus of the meeting will be on studies of behavior that demonstrate, at the molecular level, the influences of genes, the environment, and their interaction. The goal of these studies is to explain the function and evolution of behavioral mechanisms that integrate the activity of individuals in a society, neural and neuroendocrine mechanisms that regulate behavior within the brain of the individual, and the genes that encode these brain mechanisms and thereby influence social behavior doc74 none The East African Great Lakes are home to some of the most diverse animal communities on the Earth, and they hold immense importance as sources of protein and employment in one of the world s poorest regions. Lake Malawi is home to more species of fish than any other lake in the world. Of the more than 500 species in the lake, 95 percent are found nowhere else. The Malawian cichlids are one of the best examples known of a vertebrate species flock, a closely related grouping of species which radiated over a very short evolutionary time period. One of the world s least-developed nations, Malawi, controls more than half the shoreline of Lake Malawi. Fishing is an important source of food, providing about 75 three-quarters of the animal protein consumed in Malawi, with almost a quarter million people involved in fishing or related processing and trading activities. Threats to the fish community in Lake Malawi include sedimentation due to land degradation, the introduction of exotic species, and overfishing. Plans for conservation of biodiversity in Lake Malawi must take into account the needs of the surrounding human communities. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine efforts at participatory management within the artisanal fishing sector, which uses small-scale equipment, which uses some or all of the catch for subsistence, and which trades through local market-distribution networks. The project will emphasize the collection of sociological and fisheries data. Interviews and discussions during group meetings with members of various stakeholder groups in fishing communities around the lake will provide information about the roles of fishing in the local village economy, change in fish stocks and fishing methods, and traditional methods of fisheries regulation. The project also will include an assessment of community perceptions of the status of the fishery and of the capacity for community management of aquatic resources. Fishing grounds used by each village will be mapped for each gear type or fishing method. A detailed analysis of catch composition will be conducted in order to describe which species are being caught where, when, and by which gear. A focused comparison of fish habitats and distributions will be undertaken both at a publicly accessible beach and at a nearby privately owned beach where fishing effort is much lower. This project will provide valuable new insights into the geography of catch composition and other aspects of fishing activity, thereby providing an analysis of the relationship between the use of fish resources and biodiversity. This will enhance both fundamental understandings and provide valuable new insights for those seeking to develop sustainable fisheries-management strategies. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc75 none Remarkable changes in national governments over recent decades have had profound impacts on a wide range of institutions. Although much attention has focused on economic and political systems, nations in transition also have experienced significant changes in human geography, as the factors that influenced the spatial behavior of individuals and groups have been dramatically transformed. These changes are evident even in nations like Vietnam, where communist regimes retain political control, but major economic reforms unleashed a flurry of land-development activity during the s. This doctoral dissertation research project will explore how the Vietnamese government s legal and planning efforts to promote development have impacted the practices of private land developers and the spatial patterns of activity in the urban fringe of Ho Chi Minh City. A combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques will be used to analyze satellite images of land-use change over the last decade and to survey land developers to determine how and why their land-development practices have changed. Special attention will be given to identifying and analyzing the impact of state policies on land-development processes. Because development patterns have been far more scattered and irregular than planners had anticipated, it is anticipated that the direct role of state action will be less significant than intended, but the role of state-sanctioned property rights may still be found to be important in creating a framework within which individuals and groups can operate independently with greater confidence. This project will provide valuable new insights and information about the contemporary spatial dynamics of Vietnam, a nation that receives relatively little scholarly attention. The project will contribute empirical evidence to ongoing debates in the scholarly literature regarding the impacts of property rights and land titles on land development in developing nations, and it will shed new insights about the motivations and actions of private entrepreneurs in transitional societies. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc76 none PI: Herbert J Gans, Sara S Lee This project will interview a sample of 100 second generation Korean-Americans to study determinants and effects of their ethnic identity. While most studies of immigrants focus on the first generation, this one will extend knowledge of ways in which culture is transmitted across generations, and how various cultural influences are assimilated in the respondents self-concept. Other sociological variables whose impact will be studied are social class, mobility (many of the target group have been upwardly mobile), and gender. The results will enhance understanding of immigrant experiences and effects of migration across widely different cultures and geographical locations doc77 none A knowledge of the electric field pattern (convection pattern) in the magnetosphere is essential to and understanding of the flow of particles and energy within the magnetosphere. Many models are available for normal conditions, but no models are currently available that describe the magnetospheric electric field during magnetic storms. This project will utilize electric field measurements from the DMSP satellite in conjunction with the Ae index to produce a storm-time electric field model parameterized on the Ae index and storm phase. Results will be compared with AMIE modeling and radar observations doc78 none G.I. Tardos, CUNY Partial travel support is requested for the participants at the Conference for Handling of Particulate Solids (Israel) to be held in conjunction with the Particle Technology Forum of the AIChE (US), Society of Powder Technology (Japan), European Particle Technology Party, Particle Technology Group of IChemE (UK) and International Freight Pipeline Society (US) meetings, at the Grand Nirvana, Israel, May 29 to June 2, . This is an international meeting on particle science and technology, with focus on particle generation, processing and transport in gases or liquids. The research has relevance to chemical, mechanical and civil engineers, materials scientists, physics, and metallurgy. The Proceedings will be made available to the scientific community and industry. The Conference will creates opportunities to develop interdisciplinary interactions with academic communities from other countries and with industry, as well as to evaluate recent research results in particle science and technology doc79 none Carnivorous plant fens are rare and diverse plant communities found only on the eastern seaboard of the United States and in the serpentine soil ecosystems of northern California and southern Oregon. An important ecological aspect of these communities is their boundaries, which exhibit high species abundance, diversity, primary productivity, and high variability in the spatial characteristics of the fens. Size and shape of these communities can change dramatically from one year to the next in response to an array of environmental factors, especially fire and nutrient availability. The specific qualities of these dynamic and complex boundary ecotones are poorly understood, however. This doctoral dissertation research project seeks to determine the nature of these vegetation boundaries in the Darlingtonia fens of southern Oregon and to explain their dynamics in terms of succession. The focus of the project will be on testing the hypothesis that, over time and in the absence of fire, the Darlingtonia fen communities become smaller and less diverse due to an increase in availability of nutrients. Specific research objectives are (1) to determine the presence of biogeochemical gradients across the boundaries of the communities, (2) to identify the effects of disturbance and soil properties on boundary composition and structure, and (3) to examine the historical and short-term effects of fire on western fen communities. Three Darlingtonia serpentine soil ecosystems with different burn histories will be used as test sites. The doctoral candidate conducting this study will analyze the historical role of fire and fire suppression on the ecotones found in these communities; describe the community composition and structure of ecotone vegetation; analyze physical and chemical characteristics of the soil and water (such as pH, N mineralization, %P, %K, Mg:Ca ratio, and heavy metal concentration); and analyze short- and long-term community responses of a serpentine soil ecosystem ecotones to fire, which is a common disturbance. The outcomes of this project have both theoretical and management implications. This project will evaluate a successional model for western Darlingtonia fens and will provide a conceptual basis for future studies in these and other uniquely adapted ecosystems. The role of fen ecotones, their dynamics, and their impacts on diversity need to be identified to ensure effective present and future management. The research also will provide an ecological basis for developing management strategies by the U.S. Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy by describing community structure and ecosystem dynamics as they relate to succession and disturbance. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc80 none Ford The Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LS-AMP) is a comprehensive statewide-coordinated program aimed at substantially increasing the number and quality of minority students earning baccalaureate degrees in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) areas supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and subsequently to increase the number of minority students enrolling and succeeding graduate school. A mediator-aim, for the attainment of the above goal, consists of enhancing and institutionalizing, systemic mentoring, student research participation, and a reform-imbued instructional infrastructure at LS-LAMP institutions, in collaboration with other systemic programs in the state, national laboratories, and professional organizations. LS-LAMP began in with a five-year objective of doubling, by the end of , the number of minority SMET students receiving BS degrees from partner institutions (from 500 to 1,000) and of sending 20% of these graduates to enroll and succeed in SMET graduate school programs in Louisiana and elsewhere. Indicators of the attainment of the objectives of Phase I are presented farther below. By the end of the five-year period of Phase II, LS-LAMP proposes not only to maintain the gains of Phase I but also to increase the number of high-quality SMET BS degree production to per year while institutionalizing its entire operation. No fewer than 40% of these graduates will successfully pursue SMET graduates degrees. The basic strategies of LS-LAMP are a comprehensive collaboration, the statewide replication and expansion of exemplary, systematic mentoring and outreach programs, including the Timbuktu Academy and others, and institutionalization. A notable feature of LS-LAMP Phase II resides in the coordinated approach to complete institutionalization of our activities that are focused on increasing minority participation in SMET. Southern University and A&M College serves as the lead institution for LS-LAMP program with the active input and advice of an array of collaborating public and private sector entities including the LS-LAMP Governing Board, chaired by the Commissioner of Higher Education, Dr. E. Joseph Savoie. Currently, there are eleven (11) Louisiana higher educational institutions and one research organization participating in LS-LAMP. They are Dillard University (DU), Grambling State University (GSU), Southern University and A&M College (SUBR), Southern University at New Orleans (SUNO), Southern University at Shreveport (SU-S), Tulane University (TU), the University of New Orleans (UNO), the University of Southwestern Louisiana (USL), and the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON). The grantee and fiduciary agent for Ls-LAMP is the Louisiana Board of Regents. The Board of Regents, in consultation with the lead institution, issue contracts to LS-LAMP partner institutions as per the cooperative agreement between the Regents and the National Science Foundation (NSF doc81 none The expanded Washington Baltimore Hampton Roads Alliance for Minority Participation (WBHR-AMP) includes Howard University as the lead institution with Hampton University, Morgan State University, the University of the District of Columbia, Bowie State University, Norfolk State university and Virginia Sate University as partners. For Phase II, the administration has been completely restructured to ensure the involvement at the highest academic levels at all of the partner institutions. In addition, we intend to implement strategies that will emphasize retention, recruitment and tutoring throughout the undergraduate SEM programs rather than just at the initial year. The goals and objectives established for the expanded WBHR-AMP in Phase II are: To work closely with staff of existing programs such as EXCEL, HBCU initiatives, TRAGG, ONR, McNair Scholarship Program and institution-wide counseling and tutorial programs for freshmen sophomore students in SEM areas to ensure that students are receiving good introductory course work and individualized counseling to successfully complete majors in SMET fields; To provide junior senior level students at all of the participating institutions an opportunity to integrate research into their SEM curriculum by providing academic credit for their underrate research and ensure that they have an opportunity to work in a research environment through a semester summer exchange during the academic semester at a level one research university, in industry and or at national or governmental laboratories; To facilitate the transfer of SMET students from community colleges that have articulation agreements with institutions within the WBHR Alliance for summer transfer enrichment programs, and ensure their successful completion of B.S. degrees in an SMET field; To provide mentoring workshops to SEM faculty and introduce all members to new pedagogy for teaching and mentoring students in SEM field by working closely with existing program sand implementing new initiatives; and To prepare prospective SEM graduates for graduate training in SEM fields by providing assistance and tutorials for Graduate Record Examinations, senior comprehensive examinations and seminars in research methodologies and instrumentation. The expected impact on SEM students is to graduate approximately B.S. level students per year in the next five years; actively recruit and retain at least 200 community college transfer students in undergraduate degree programs in SEM fields; and enroll approximately 300 SEM students per year in doctoral degree programs in SEM fields doc82 none Using concepts and measures drawn from developmental psychology, social psychology, and social neuroscience, this research examines factors that create, trigger, and maintain violence and neglect in family relationships. It is proposed that a focus on competitive power within close relationships acts to increase the risk of violence. Those parents who are overly focused on maintaining a power advantage in the family are expected to respond inappropriately to their children s behavior. In this research, parents who are at risk to become abusive are identified before the birth of a child. Families are then studied for the first two years of the child s life. It is expected that parents who are initially power-oriented (and especially if their children have a difficult temperament) will respond in maladaptive ways to their very young children. Such parents are expected to be more likely to (a) show physiological stress responses (e.g., increased production of cortisol; elevated levels of blood pressure), and (b) exhibit biased interpretation and recall of children s behaviors (e.g., interpretation of children s actions as intentional challenges to their authority). These responses, in turn, are expected to increase the likelihood that such parents will show ineffective caregiving tactics, and will either physically abuse or neglect their children. If predictions are confirmed, our understanding of families under stress will be improved, and new insight will be gained into the kinds of prevention efforts that are most likely to prevent child maltreatment doc83 none Exciting new lines of research recently have focused on the development of spatial reasoning and skills among different groups of people. Some of these studies have examined differences among males and females. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine how teenage girls conceive of space and use spatial strategies to maneuver through social contexts that are controlled adult and influenced by gender. The research seeks (1) to provide a better understanding of girls spaces and of the ways girls create and manipulate space for expression of their identities; (2) to investigate the relationship of specific spaces, including institutional and personal spaces, and girls articulations of their everyday experiences and behaviors in those spaces; and (3) to provide a means for teenage participants to express and represent meanings of space and identity in their everyday lives. Media analysis and interviews with adult service providers and educators will provide contextual data on the spaces in which girls spend much of their time in Charleston, South Carolina. These sources of information also will contribute to analyses connecting adult-ordered space with spatial actions of teenage girls. The study then will focus on individual and group interviews with teenage girls and will use participatory research methods to provide a means for teenage participants to express and represent meanings of space and identity in their lives. Participatory activities will include map-making exercises, photography, journal writing, and dissemination of these research activities and products. This research will shed valuable new light on the range of strategies that girls employ to negotiate spaces that are defined and enforced by adults. The results of this research will expand understandings of the relationships between space and girls identity expression in order to produce knowledge that more accurately relates to their own everyday behaviors and attitudes. The project will contribute to understandings of the importance of space and place in gender-related social science, and it will explore new types of participatory research methods. While studying the teen participants as social actors, the project also will encourage their awareness of space through the research activities. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc84 none For decades, many environmental groups in the United States have focused on their efforts on what they perceived as the need to protect the public lands in the West from the people who live and work in the West. In recent years, however, an emerging set of environmental organizations in the western U.S. has challenged this perspective. These new non-governmental organizations (NGOs) support ideas of community conservation and participatory development long favored by international environmental organizations. These organizations attempt to build political alliances between rural businesses and environmental interests by framing the protection of nature as a legitimate economic concern and by decoupling the opposition between environmental protection and productive activity. The complex and dynamic relationship between environment and economy is particularly salient as the Old West of extractive industry increasingly is confronted by a New West that emphasizes tourism. In the wake of the western jobs versus environment debate of the early s, these regional NGOs increasingly are reshaping western understandings of nature and work and the relationship between the two. This doctoral dissertation research project will explore how the categories of work and nature are negotiated and employed in the everyday practices of the staff of these new NGOs and the residents of the rural communities where their projects are located. This project will conduct detailed case studies of the actions of three western regional NGOs, the Sonoran Institute, the Sierra Business Council, and Shorebank Pacific. The research will focus on the origins of these new NGOs, the degree to which these organizations have adopted and adapted international models of conservation and development, and the impacts of the ideas and actions of these new NGOs on livelihoods and local identities in rural communities. Data and information will be gathered through eighteen months of multi-site ethnographic analyses. Research methods to be employed include participant observation; surveys and interviews with NGO leaders and staff as well as with local residents; and analyses of reports, internal organizational documents, newspaper articles, and election results. This project will help shed light on the specific practices and histories through which institutions and communities in the American West have perpetuated and transformed discourses of conservation and development. The project also will analyze the specific social and cultural practices through which understandings of environment, economy, and locality are constituted in the increasingly common community-based conservation projects appearing throughout the U.S. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc85 none India s white revolution, the development of a grassroots dairy industry with strong participation by women s cooperatives, has been justifiably celebrated as a successful effort to provide income and employment to the rural poor. The success of dairying in the Kheda district of Gujarat state in western India has not been readily replicated elsewhere, however. In the nearby Khargone district of Madhya Pradesh, for example, diarying has met with relatively little success despite support from the World Bank and the European Economic Community. The failure of dairy development in Khargone was especially troubling to planners because both Kheda and Khargone had very similar experiences with the Green Revolution, registering marked increases in agricultural productivity through hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizers, large-scale irrigation technologies, and mechanization of harvesting and plowing. This doctoral dissertation research project examines the hypothesis that dairy success outside of Kheda district is best explained by differences in gender equality linked to divergent histories of Green Revolution development despite apparent similarities. The doctoral candidate will use ethnographic and time-geographic techniques to conduct a comparative analysis of gender equality and recent agrarian histories in the two districts. Ethnographic studies will use participant observation and oral history techniques to focus on gender equality and personal biography formation since the . Time-geographic studies will examine the spatial and temporal organization of agricultural production to uncover differences in the organization of women s work between the two districts. This study is significant in that it undertakes an in-depth analysis of why policies that are successful in one place fail when transferred to an area that appears strikingly similar to the successful area in all important respects, a problematic of central concern in development studies. Recent research on issues of gender and development has uncovered important differences in work loads and project organization between women and men, differences that are qualitative as well as quantitative. This study will contribute to both research areas by looking for connections between project success and gender work loads and by developing new conceptual and methodological tools to aid planners in understanding the root causes of success and failure in development initiatives. The research should enable to project planners and managers to more successfully implement of dairy projects that help both the rural poor and urban children in need of milk supplements. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc86 none Oak trees (Quercus spp.) in the southern Appalachians of the southeastern U.S. produce fruit in the form of acorns in most years. During some years, however, the production of acorns (also known as mast) is especially heavy for all oak trees in an area. These extreme mast events represent a significant resource expenditure for the trees, and they have profound impacts on wildlife and wildlife dynamics. The development of detailed longitudinal records of masting in the southern Appalachians is making available information that permits scientific examination of the dynamics of longer-term masting cycles and whether any changes have occurred in response to climate change or other factors. This doctoral dissertation research project will employ new methods for dendrochronological mast reconstruction to explore spatial aspects of masting in oaks in the southern Appalachians. One hundred-year mast histories will be developed for several locations in the southern Appalachians, and these reconstructions will be used to examine temporal trends in mast production, to explore links between climate and mast events, and investigate the spatial dynamics of mast events. The project will generate a set of long-duration oak chronologies that are spatially distributed throughout the southern Appalachians. Multiple chronologies will enable a spatial analysis of the effect of climate on tree growth by comparing individual stand records with twenty U.S. Historical Climate Network (USHCN) meteorological stations throughout the region. This project will contribute broadly to the development of dendrochronological techniques. The long-term mast reconstructions developed through this project will allow foresters, ecologists, and biogeographers to better understand mast ecology by looking back in time. The project also will add insights into the role of scale in the dynamics of natural systems. The analysis of masting at different scales will enhance understandings of the roles of driving mechanisms in mast dynamics. The mast records also can be used by wildlife managers to examine the role of mast in past wildlife population fluctuations and by ecologists to examine how extreme mast events contribute to oak-establishment pulses. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc87 none International migration has brought people from many different cultures together, dramatically changing the ethnic composition of areas where immigrants settle, posing challenges for both established residents and newcomers as well as well as for those trying to serve the rapidly changing populations. Geographers, sociologists, and scientists from many other disciplines have used a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to study the processes of social interaction within and among different groups that come to live in close proximity to each other, especially in urban areas. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine the processes of adaptation and incorporation of immigrants into host societies, with special emphases on the concrete processes through which immigrant construct their identities and the ways that immigrants interact with each other and more established residents of their new communities. The doctoral student conducting this project will conduct a case study of Duisburg-Marxloh, a neighborhood located in Germany s older industrialized Ruhr area where many immigrants from Turkey have relocated. By gathering information from multiple sources, including intensive interviews, focus groups, observations, archival records, newspapers, and statistical sources, the student will to address how German characterizations of Turks and their neighborhoods and the construction of Turkish identities; the role of the ethnic neighborhood in the construction and reinforcement of Turkish identities; the interaction between Turks and Germans in public and private neighborhood space and the influence of those interactions on perceptions and attitudes; differences in identity construction along gender, generation, age, religious, and class lines; and the processes through which different neighborhood experiences affect immigrants responses towards German society and culture. In addition to providing valuable new insights into the processes through which immigrants form their own identities and relate to longer-established residents of their communities, this project will enhances prevailing theories of cultural assimilation and inform those engaged in the development of policies and programs for new immigrants. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc88 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Robert Madix Institution: Stanford University The goal of this project is to further fundamental understanding of the growth and chemical activity of mixed metal oxides, which are important catalytic materials. Model single crystal oxide surfaces will be used as supports, and supported oxide will be fabricated and studied using a number of surface science tools. In particular, vanadia supported on titania and alumina single crystal surfaces at submonolayer to monolayer coverages will be studied. Supported vanadia will be grown using chemical vapor deposition and immersion in aqueous solution. The growth morphology and structure of the supported oxide will be studied by scanning tunneling microscopy. The electronic structure will be studied by photoelectron and electron energy loss spectroscopy. Related surface reactivity will be examined by both temperature programmed methods and by steady state reaction techniques. Methanol oxidation and butene reduction will be used as test reactions. A large number of commercial heterogeneous catalysts are based on supported vanadia species, and this work has the potential to guide the preparation and development of vanadia and other supported oxide catalysts doc89 none A number of theoretical frameworks have emerged from the work of researchers examining the complex political, economic, and cultural dynamics through which individuals and groups engage in agricultural production. Among the theories that have shed new light on certain facets of this problem are political ecology, non-market struggles in agricultural production, and contract farming. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine how the land-management practices, land-use controls, and land access of clove farmers in north central Indonesia change in response to their use of different strategies for obtaining credit. The project will be conducted in Tincep village in the province of Minahasa on the northern part of the island of Sulawesi. A range of qualitative research approaches, including participant observation, survey, and in-depth, semi-structured interviews as well as analyses of government documents and traders record books, will be used to assess which economic, political, and social strategies farmers in conjunction with specific crediting strategies. Special attention will be given to analyses of the roles that different kinds of creditors, including some technically outlawed under contracts between farmers and the state. Among the broader questions to be addressed through this project are: Why have clove farmers chosen to engage in particular crediting arrangements with village-based crop mortgagers or city-based speculators at specific times in the harvest cycle and over specific periods during the last decade? How do struggles over land-management practices reflect struggles over who has legitimate standing to take part in different kinds of capital accumulation? What is the impact of different types of crediting systems on land-management and production practices? This project will shed new light on the highly variable roles and relationships of different groups in the clove-based agricultural economy of the region. It will examine how state policies have fostered the development of particular kinds of crediting practices, and it will challenge more standard notions of what it means to be a farmer, a creditor, or a local official and how this shapes what kinds of credit-related relationships arise in this production system. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc90 none Rabalais, Steven C. This project will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessel Pelicanoperated by the Louisiana Unviersities Marine Consortium (LUMCON) and dedicated to use in support of ocean science research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. This Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Steven Rabalais is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire Magellan Astech Global Positioning System, Shipboard Network Server, and Dive Compressor Shack doc91 none The concentrations of raindrops and cloud droplets in the atmosphere may be regarded as random variables that fluctuate with time and location. Recent work by Jameson and Kostinski has shown that these concentrations have probability distributions that deviate from the theoretical Poisson law that applies to purely random distributions. The deviations are caused by the tendency of drops to concentrate in clumps or patches. This clustering of drops has implications for precipitation development and for the propagation of radiation through clouds and precipitation. The objectives of this research are (1) to continue studies on quantitative characterization of clustering; (2) to evaluate the effects of clustering on the scattering of radar waves by raindrops; (3) to determine the significance of these effects on the estimation of rainfall rate from radar measurements. The work will also attempt to determine whether clustering can account for significant Bragg-type scattering by clouds and precipitation in addition to the well-understood Mie or Rayleigh scattering. The approach is a combination of (1) analysis of data from various instruments that measure drop sizes and concentrations and (2) theoretical investigations building on the earlier work on the characterization of clustering doc92 none Invasive species are an important component of human-induced global change. Invasive plants can alter both the structure and composition of native plant communities and the disturbance regimes of invaded ecosystems. Although some of the ecological effects of nonindigenous plants invading riparian zones have been studied, feedbacks between fluvial disturbance regimes in riparian zones and nonindigenous plants invading these habitats are poorly understood. This doctoral dissertation research project will investigate the effects of invasive Ligustrum sinense (Chinese privet) on floodplain forest structure and composition as well as on rates of floodplain sedimentation in the Oconee River watershed of the Georgia Piedmont. The study will include both a landscape-scale analysis of L. sinense spread and subsequent geomorphic changes and a local-scale investigation of altered forest composition and structure, fluvial landforms, and changes in sedimentation rates associated with invasive L. sinense. The landscape-scale analysis will use aerial photograph interpretation to determine the timing of L. sinense invasion and its rate of spread. Attention also will be given to any changes in stream channel morphology associated with L. sinense invasion. The local-scale analyses will use sampling transects in two heavily invaded areas and an area with sparse density of L sinense to collect vegetation data, soil samples, and depth-to-water-table measurements as well as needed data to calculate average annual rates of sediment accretion. Comparisons will be made of vegetation and environmental data among sites to identify fluvial landforms and conditions associated with successful L. sinense invasion and to determine whether L. sinense invasion has been associated with changes in the composition and structure of floodplain forests and changes in rates of floodplain sedimentation. This project will improve general understandings of possible feedback relationships between flood regimes and vegetation changes caused by invasive plants; and it will provide insights into the fate of Piedmont floodplain forests invaded by L. sinense in the coming decades. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc93 none Launched in November , the University System of Maryland (USM) Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) is a comprehensive program that is designed to extend and increase the impact of current initiatives to increase substantially the quantity and quality of minority and other students receiving baccalaureate degrees in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET). The proposed USM LSAMP, Phase II will continue and expand activities begun in Phase I. It also is expected to increase the number of minority and other SMET students earning doctoral degrees and entering SMET careers, especially faculty positions. The following SM institutions to participate as full partners in the proposed USM LSAMP, Phase II: 1) The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), 2) University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP); and 3) The University of Maryland, Eastern Shore (UMES), a historically black institution. Dr. Freeman Hrabowski, III, President of UMBC, will continue as the principal investigator of the proposed USM LSAMP, Phase II. He has received national recognition for his leadership in developing innovative programs to expand education opportunities for minority SMET students. Dr. Hrabowski received the National Science Foundation s Education Achievement Award for his outstanding commitment and dedication in the education for minorities in the fields of science and mathematics, and his latest book, Beating the Odds, focuses on the fundamentals that help Black males achieve academic excellence. Also participating in the proposed USM LSAMP, Phase II will be the 18 public community colleges in Maryland. The following community colleges are located in close proximity to the participating USM institutions and serve as the primary feeders of minority and other SMET transfer students: 1) Anne Arundel Community College; 2) Baltimore City Community College; 3) Community College of Baltimore County at Catonsville; 4)Chesapeake Community College; 5)Howard Community College; 6) Montgomery Community College; 7) Prince Georges Community College; and 8)Wor Wic Community College. During Phase II, efforts to increase the number of minority and other SMET students transferring to USM LSAMP universities from the remaining 10 community colleges will be expanded. In support of NSF s goal, the primary goal of the proposed USM LSAMP, Phase II is the following. To produce approximately 574 minority SMET baccalaureate recipients by the end of the - academic year; approximately 648 minority SMET baccalaureate recipients by the end of the - school year; approximately 722 minority SMET baccalaureate recipients by the end of the - academic year; approximately 796 minority SMET baccalaureate recipients by the end of the - academic year; and approximately 887 minority SMET baccalaureate recipients by the end of the - academic year The secondary goals of the proposed USM LSAMP II are the following. To increase the number of minority students entering SMET graduate programs. To increase the number of minority students entering SMET careers, especially faculty positions. Based in evaluations of current and previous programs aimed at increasing minority participation in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology at the participating USM universities, the proposed USM LSAMP, Phase II s design includes the following characteristics:. Strong commitment by institutional leaders to the program s success and to its complete institutionalization beginning on January 6, ; Removal of financial barriers for minority students; A Summer Bridge Component; An Academic Year Component; Focus on improving knowledge and skills; Focus on motivation and support; Focus on monitoring and advising; Focus on academic and social interaction; Focus on filter SMET course curricula revision; and Involvement of feeder community colleges doc94 none PI: Lynn Smith-Lovin, Mark Konty This project attempts to measure cultural values using the Rossi-Jasso factorial vignette method. If successful, this will constitute one of the first methodologically sound measures of values. The second stage of the project uses the values ascertained in the first stage to predict behavior in a situation of potential helping of a stranger. This stage will be useful in assessing the importance of value measurement: do values actually predict anything about action? This project has the potential to contribute to empirical methods, as well as providing some tests of theoretical links between values and behavior doc95 none This proposed research involves the generation of high-resolution, precisely-dated tree-ring chronologies from data-sparse subantarctic regions, including Tasmania, New Zealand and southern South America. Such records are essential for developing a network of Southern Hemisphere paleoclimatic data comparable to that which already exists for the Northern Hemisphere. The proponents are utilizing the subantarctic chronologies in modeling and reconstruction of indices of temperature and atmosphere-ocean circulation for the Southern Hemisphere extratropical latitudes. Specific objectives include: (1) to develop additional ring-width and maximum latewood density chronologies to improve our existing network for subantarctic forest sites; (2) to extend selected tree-ring records and reconstructions further back in time using living and subfossil wood material; (3) to continue to model and reconstruct temperature, precipitation and circulation indices for subantarctic latitudes; and (4) to produce chronologies from several additional tree species doc96 none The complex political processes associated with environmental politics in the U.S. involve local residents, including property owners, businesses, and residents; governmental bodies ranging from local through state to federal agencies; and non-governmental organizations, some of which are locally based, but many of which have regional or national constituencies. Scholarly attention has focused on all three general groups, although more attention has focused on local-and national-scale interactions than on political activities at the regional scale. This doctoral dissertation research project will contribute to a better understanding of contemporary environmental politics through a case study examining the goals, strategies, and representational practices of one particular environmental organization. The Greater Yellowstone Coalition, based in Bozeman, Montana, attempts to influence public policy in a region experiencing rapid growth and characterized by divergent interest groups -- urban and rural populations, long-time residents and new migrants, ranchers and environmentalists. The study will situate the coalition within this regional politics and will proceed to a detailed analysis of the coalition s activities over the last five years. Attention will focus on three interrelated dimensions: (1) the goals of the coalition, how those goals are defined, and how well they represent the views of coalition members; (2) the specific strategies (legal, legislative, and scientific) that the coalition has used in attempting to achieve these goals as well as the varying spatial scales at which those strategies have been deployed; and (3) representations (especially of Yellowstone National Park, the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, and Montana as the last best place ) that the coalition has used in pursuing those strategies. The study will include a survey of 1,500 coalition members (approximately 20% of total membership), extensive interviews with coalition leaders and staff, and careful analysis of the materials produced by the coalition in the last five years, including newsletters, advertisements, reports, and legal documents. This project will enhance understanding of the mechanisms of environmental politics and the ways in which environmental policy is shaped from the grassroots level. More broadly, it will contribute to research on regional change in the age of globalization. The rapid transformation of the ways of life and land uses in the greater Yellowstone region affects the goals and policies of the coalition, while the coalition s activities help shape the direction and pace of change. The coalition therefore represents regional organizations that have become active players in reshaping the landscape of the West, and analysis of its operations and actions provides one lens through which the mechanisms and processes of regional change can be better understood. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc97 none The objective of this project is to systematically investigate the cellular responses of Escherichia coli in regulating its metabolic activities upon precise genetic perturbations. The synthesis of succinic acid will be used as a model system. The role of two key cofactors, NADH NAD+ and CoA, will be investigated. In addition, the effect of enzyme properties on the redistribution of metabolic fluxes and on succinic acid productivity will also be investigated. The specific objectives are to test the following hypotheses to increase flux through the succinic acid synthesis pathway: (1) reducing the effect of feedback inhibition of an enzyme which is involved in a key step of the product synthesis pathway; (2) if the product synthesis pathway requires the cofactor NADH, the overall flux through that particular pathway will be enhanced by manipulating the NADH NAD+ pool; and (3) in situations where a cofactor has multiple roles, fine tuning of the co-factor level may be required for optimal product formation doc98 none The All Nations Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation program (ANLSAMP) is a national Native American initiative that aims to build upon the successes and lessons learned from the previous Phase 1 five-year program. The overall goal of this Phase II program is to establish a comprehensive ANLSAMP interactive network designed to increase substantially the quality and quantity of American Indians receiving baccalaureate degrees and graduate degrees in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) by: 1) Increasing the number of B.S. degree programs offered in SMET fields at Tribal Colleges from to 2 to 10; 2) Increasing the number of B.S. programs in different SMET disciplines from one to four; and 3) Increasing the graduation rate of Native students with B.S. degrees in SMET fields from 112 to 224. Through this proposal, the following partnerships will be funded to meet the goals above: 1) TCUs who want to develop an associate degrees in SMET fields; 2) TCUs who want to have associate to bachelor of science degrees in SMET fields; and 3) The development of regional SMET education networks. Specific goals and objectives will accomplished through four major activities: Management, Networking, Research and Project. With the inclusion of all Tribal Colleges in this proposal, ANLSAMP will strengthen an already cohesive Tribal College network for SMET education, support the purpose of the Executive Order and enable the management team to leverage other resources more effectively doc99 none This award, supported by the Division of International Programs and the Geography and Regional Science Program in the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, allows Anna Nagurney of the University of Massachusetts to collaborate with Lars-Goran Mattson, Lars Lundqvist, and Fari der Ramjerdi of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. The project will synthesize models of sustainable transportation developed at the two institutions and to extend the integrated models by incorporating the impacts of information technologies on transportation and land use. The project is expected to expand relevant theoretical frameworks and assist in the evaluation of alternative policies for meeting environmental quality standards. The collaboration is an outgrowth of the Social Change and Sustainable Transport initiative that has been jointly sponsored by NSF and the European Science Foundation doc100 none PI: Theda Skocpol, Irene Bloemraad This project studies political incorporation-immigrants participation in the politics of their new countries and their rates of seeking citizenship. Two groups are studied: Vietnamese and Portuguese, in two U.S. and Canadian cities, for two time periods - and - . The primary focus of study is how policies and practices instituted by the two countries governments-such as Canada s official policy of promoting multiculturalism-have or have not affected assimilation rates. This project uses historical data (for the earlier time period), and government statistics, and interviews for the contemporary period. Results will display effects of macro-level structures upon assimilation as well as increasing understanding of general processes of immigrant incorporation doc101 none abs The investigators will continue operation of a neutron monitor network comprising nine stationary monitors and two transportable ship-borne monitors. A neutron monitor is an instrument that measures the number of high energy particles impacting Earth from space. These particles, mostly protons and helium nuclei, are called cosmic rays. Data from the neutron monitors will be employed together with data from spacecraft and other ground-based instruments in a broad range of investigations of cosmic rays in relation to the sun and solar wind. Specific science objectives include the study of acceleration and transport of solar energetic particles, the scattering of cosmic rays in the solar wind, and the use of cosmic rya observations for space weather forecasting. The project includes education and public outreach through the development of a web site and scientific collaboration with the U. S. Air Force Academy and Russian scientists. The distribution of stations around the globe, particularly in the polar regions, are essential for determining the distribution of cosmic rays in space. The use of this network to study cosmic rays inspires the name of the project: Spaceship Earth doc102 none TAPPED IN: A Testbed for New Models of On-line Teacher Professional Development investigate the resources, capabilities, and technological support that TPD efforts will need to hold professionally valuable on-line activities within next-generation virtual environment platforms; (b) develop, implement, and evaluate innovative TPD implementation models that integrate face-to-face and asynchronous interaction with richly collaborative synchronous on-line activities; and (c) identify social, motivational, and technological factors that contribute to (or obstruct) the effectiveness, sustainability, and scalability of a new concept of on-line TPD community. The project will investigate four categories of issues-Implementation Process, TPD Benefits and Outcomes, Community Building, and Technology Use and Satisfaction-using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. SECTION A - PROJECT SUMMARY Research on educational applications of Internet technology and research on teacher professional development (TPD) each can substantially benefit from the experience and expertise of the other. TPD programs need mechanisms for extending their reach that computer networks can provide. Education technology research suggests that virtual communities for TPD and socialization can help teachers learn new skills and adopt new approaches that will facilitate their transition to reform-based classroom practices. The common ground on which the two disciplines can come together is the opportunity to jointly develop effective, scalable on-line TPD models based on the social computing affordances of a new generation of Internet technologies. Many K-12 research and teacher enhancement projects are exploring the intersection of TPD and technology by providing email, listservs, and Websites to distributed groups of teachers in the context of some pedagogical intervention. However, we believe that most current offerings only peripherally reflect established notions of successful working communities. They provide few of the tools, communication channels, and contextual supports needed to sustain the kinds of cognitive, collaborative, and social interactions that are characteristic of successful collaborative work or communities of practice, and therefore provide limited insights into how to achieve sustainable and scalable on-line TPD communities. Education technology researchers need to better understand the practices and social structures of teacher professional development communities in order to develop appropriate communication channels and collaborative tools to support those practices and structures. For example, real-time collaboration and social interaction are central characteristics of successful professional development that serve as key mechanisms for facilitating learning of new teaching strategies and promoting success in adapting to new practices. However, with the exception of the occasional satellite video link-up, chat, or CUSeeMe session, on-line teacher support projects have not begun to tap (much less systematically investigate) the potential benefits of real-time collaboration through the Internet, leaving an incomplete research foundation on which to base the development of on-line TPD communities. As a consequence, efforts by school districts, TPD providers, and state and regional projects to establish and sustain on-line TPD communities too often result in a disappointing mismatch between capabilities that are expedient to implement and the expressed needs and requirements of TPD activities. The goal of the proposed 3-year project is to establish an on-line TPD research testbed to (a) The research will help SME&T education reform researchers and practitioners better understand and implement next-generation Internet technologies and help inform local and state policy-makers of the cost efficiencies and benefits of investing in on-line professional development. Participation in such communities will accelerate teacher adoption of SME&T education reform efforts by providing wider and more equitable access to high-quality TPD opportunities. Our findings will also help NSF achieve its goal of infusing urban, rural, and state systemic initiatives with the fruits of NSF research on content and pedagogy by providing a familiar and supportive venue for introducing new ideas and technologies into a context of ongoing TPD activity doc103 none Winokur Cost sharing is provided to continue supporting interagency activities to encourage and facilitate productivity in the areas of marine science research and education. This funding supports a science assistant to the Research Vessel Clearance Officer at State Dept. The research vessel clearance office provides guidance to embassy personnel, heads of research institutions and government agencies, and other individuals, regarding the implementation of international and U.S. marine policy. The office manages the procedure for arranging international access for U.S. marine scientific research. With the support provided by the science assistant position, the research community obtains an additional point of contact at the State Department through which necessary clearances can be arranged in a timely fashion. Owing to the ever increasing reporting and compliance requirements invoked by foreign counties for granting clearances to conduct ocean research projects in their exclusive economic zones, and the past effectiveness of the science assistant, this remains an important support activity for effectively conducting global ocean science research doc104 none This project is a component of Southern Ocean Iron Experiment (SOFeX). SOFeX is an effort to seed a small area within the Antarctic Circumpolar current with iron, to follow this patch of water by measuring the distribution of an inert tracer (SF6) added with the iron, and to assess the chemical and biological responses to this addition. Recent observations have indicated that iron plays a controlling role in the production and export of organic matter in all regions of the Southern Ocean. Furthermore, because the Southern Ocean contains the largest pool of inorganic macronutrients of the world ocean, it has the greatest potential to influence the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide by acting as a sink for CO2. In order to predict the impact of natural variations in iron supply on carbon partitioning, it is imperative that we understand the complex biological interactions that occur upon iron enrichment. This component will measure primary productivity within an outside the iron-enriched path of water to quantify the direct response of iron to the in situ phytoplankton assemblage on time scales of days. Productivity of three size fractions will be measured: 5um, 5 but 20 um, and 20 um. The quantitative taxonomic composition of the three size fractions will be directly determined by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The photosynthesis versus irradiance (P vs. E) responses of the same fractions also will be measured for two reasons. First, the P vs. E response is a sensitive measure of iron limitation. Secondly, the data will be used to investigate iron irradiance interactions because it has been hypothesized that phytoplankton adapted to low light require more iron than do those adapted to higher irradiances (a condition especially important in the Southern Ocean). The bacterial biomass and production both within and outside the patch will be measured to assess the heterotrophic response to iron addition. Experiments will assess whether the bacterial response is direct (a result of inorganic iron limitation removal) or indirect (a result of organic substrate addition due to the stimulation of phytoplankton photosynthesis and DOC production, or via increased grazing on the increased phytoplankton biomass generated by iron additions). The taxon-specific growth rates of phytoplankton will also be measured directly using a pigment-labeling technique. Resolving the responses of diatoms relative to other taxa is critical for accurate modeling of the phytoplankton response to varying iron supply because diatom blooms play a pivotal role in the export of carbon to the deep sea. The results of the SOFeX project will provide insights into the response of the biogeochemistry and ecology of the Southern Ocean to iron enrichment and produce a new understanding of the functioning of this poorly known, but critical oceanic region doc105 none The Southern Ocean is a critical region for understanding the role of the oceans in global carbon cycling and its potential to regulate climate change. Besides being an area of high influx of atmospheric carbon and deep water formation, the persistently high concentrations of major nutrients in Antarctic circumpolar waters represent the largest pool of unrealized primary production potential in the oceans. This project is part of a larger effort to test the hypothesis that iron availability limits phytoplankton production and biomass accumulation, nutrient utilization and C02drawdown in the Southern Ocean. Drs. Landry, Chisholm and Bidigare, will contribute by investigating the effects of iron enrichment and silicate availability on the species composition and size structure of the plankton community and taxon-specific growth rates and fluorescence responses of the phytoplankton. Functional and taxonomic components of the plankton community from bacteria to mesozooplankton will be quantified by a combination of flow cytometry, taxon-specific pigments, video image-analysis microscopy and optical plankton counting. In addition, they will use dilution and gut fluorescence techniques to determine micro- and mesozooplankton contributions to grazing and to evaluate grazing as an alternate control mechanism preventing significant net growth of some or all of the phytoplankton populations. The research will bring a community perspective to the interpretation of these in situ fertilization experiments which is essential for a mechanistic understanding of the biological and geochemical responses doc106 none Members of the Montastraea annularis complex are the major reef building corals in the Caribbean, and they have been a model system for studies of the ecology and geology of coral reefs. Three taxa have been described (M annularis, M ftanksi and M faveolata), although their status as separate species has been questioned. Since the s, these corals, along with several others, have declined drastically in abundance at many sites. In order for M annularis to persist and recover, it must reproduce. However, almost nothing is known about the reproductive success of this or any Caribbean coral. The major focus of this proposal is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the spawning behavior, gamete compatibilities and fertilization rates of the three members of the M annularis complex. Data collected previously from Panama suggest that differences in spawning times and gametic compatibility are sufficient to maintain reproductive boundaries among the three taxa. These barriers have the additional consequence of increasing the distance between potential mates on many reefs. Fertilization rates in the field appear to be quite low, most likely because of the distances between spawning conspecifics. Selfed crosses are generally unsuccessful. Preliminary work has established research protocols for collecting these types of data, but the bulk of the data collection over a range of spawning conditions lies ahead. We propose to accomplish this through a five-year program in Panama. Laboratory experiments will determine how gamete longevity and gamete concentration influence fertilization success. This provides important information for determining the consequences of asynchronous spawning. Field studies will document the spawning times of each taxon and the fertilization rates and gamete concentrations in the water column during spawning events. Drogues that simulate gamete dispersal will be used to determine the patterns of dispersal under a variety of conditions in order to get a more robust understanding of how gametes can be advected from the reef. This work will provide the first information on in situ rates of fertilization success and the mechanisms that influence fertilization rates for any Caribbean hard coral. The importance of this species to coral reef communities and the recent declines in this coral make the proposed study all the more timely doc107 none Interfaces in package assemblies where delaminations during processing and service are identified. A fundamental approach for designing and predicting the mechanical reliability of these interfaces is proposed, with a view to replace the current empirical and rather time-consuming approaches that utilize accelerated test protocols. Implementation of the proposed strategy requires (1) the development of a fundamental interface-strength-measuring tool capable of testing interfaces, in-situ, in actual device and package structures, (2) measurement of the tensile strength, in-situ, of the selected interface as a function of humidity, temperature, and time variables, and (3) quantification of the moisture content using FTIR and thermogravimetric analyses on each tested sample. These will result in interface strength charts for predicting degradation at the selected interface for varying humidity and temperature conditions. Well developed simulation codes can then predict stress concentrations, moisture accumulation, and temperature rise at any of the interfaces within the package assembly for determining (a) whether the interface will be able to survive processing and system integration cycles during the design phase itself, prior to any IC fabrication and packaging, and (b) the level of interface strength needed at the time of manufacturing for ensuring a prescribed service life. The above procedure will first be demonstrated by studying the underfill Si3N4 passivation layer interface. Measurement of the interface tensile strength, in-situ, will be accomplished by modifying a laser spallation method, developed previously by the PI doc108 none Funding is recommended for a Rapid Response Proposal to study the sedimentological aftermath of the mid-September Hurricane Floyd and the flood that followed and crossed the coast of North Carolina. Two questions are to be addressed: 1) What kind of sedimentary signature does a 100-500 year flooding event leave behind the Outer Banks barrier inslands? and, 2) Is there widespread mobilization of fine-grained recent sediments from temporary storage in estuarine areas? Sedimentary accumulation and remobilization processes are important to understand not only for the sequestration of sedimens and metallic and organic pollutants, but also for nutrient storage and release. The study provides a unique opportunity to answer some of the more important questions related to sequestration and resuspension redoposition of sediments by major storms doc109 none This award is one of two made to provide support for a collaborative research project. The companion award is to Yongqiang Liu, Georgia Institute of Technology, . This project is a modeling study of processes that control the concentrations of oxidants at northern mid and high latitudes over North America. A suite of 1-D, regional 3-D, and global 3-D models will be used to analyze airborne observations collected during the Tropospheric Ozone Production about the Spring Equinox Experiment (TOPSE). Major scientific issues to be examined include: (1) the altitude and latitude distributions of the springtime O3 maximum and factors contributing to the variation in the spatial distributions; (2) the correlations among O3, NOx, NOy, CO, and hydrocarbons by time and latitude and their implications on the origin of the springtime O3 maximum and sources of HOx and NOx; (3) the impact of halogen radicals on chemistry in the Arctic and vicinity in spring. These studies will involve assessing the relative roles of transport and chemistry in the tropospheric chemistry of this region doc110 none This award is one of two made to provide support for a collaborative research project. The companion award is to Yuhang Wang, Rutgers University, . This project is a modeling study of processes that control the concentrations of oxidants at northern mid and high latitudes over North America. A suite of 1-D, regional 3-D, and global 3-D models will be used to analyze airborne observations collected during the Tropospheric Ozone Production about the Spring Equinox Experiment (TOPSE). Major scientific issues to be examined include: (1) the altitude and latitude distributions of the springtime O3 maximum and factors contributing to the variation in the spatial distributions; (2) the correlations among O3, NOx, NOy, CO, and hydrocarbons by time and latitude and their implications on the origin of the springtime O3 maximum and sources of HOx and NOx; (3) the impact of halogen radicals on chemistry in the Arctic and vicinity in spring. These studies will involve assessing the relative roles of transport and chemistry in the tropospheric chemistry of this region doc111 none The investigators will continue the operation of, and analysis of data from, the western half of the Magnetometer Array for Cusp and Cleft Studies (MACCS) located in Arctic Canada. For the past eight years, the MACCS array of twelve magnetometers has provided critical information in support of studies of Earth s space environment. Because of the interaction of the solar wind with Earth s magnetic field, magnetic field lines at the boundary between interplanetary space and the magnetosphere map to the polar cusps, small regions near 75 degrees magnetic latitude at local noon in the northern and southern hemispheres. These cusp regions are the focus of much ground-based research because of their potential to provide diagnostics of plasma interactions along this remote and invisible boundary. Future scientific efforts using MACCS data will emphasize long-period ULF waves, dayside-nightside coupling, and transients such as sudden commencements, sudden impulses, traveling convection vortices, and magnetic impulse events, all of which appear to be driven by the solar wind and interplanetary magnetic field. The data reduction and analysis efforts associated with this project are highly suitable for undergraduate research participation, and it will build on currently strong programs of faculty and undergraduate student research. The study will benefit through collaboration with visiting scientists from Russia doc54 none The investigators will use observations of energetic neutral atoms (ENA) to study the dynamics of the ring current. They will perform a case study of the October 29, , geomagnetic storm to determine the relative contributions of neutral atoms, the charge-exchange loss-rate of ring current ions, the energy spectral variations of ions during the storm, and the relationship between ENA and the magnetic index Dst. They will also conduct a statistical study of ENA events observed by the Geotail satellite. The statistical study will identify trends in the composition of ENA during the course of a magnetic storm. Comparison of ENA observations between the Geotail and Polar satellites will be made to compare the total ENA intensity at two locations in space. The study will help develop the ENA technique as a diagnostic tool for the structure of the inner magnetosphere doc113 none This proposal describes the formation of the Illinois Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (Illinois LS-AMP) and presents a comprehensive plan for improving the quality of undergraduate education for under-represented minority students in science, mathematics, engineering and technology (SMET). The Alliance will focus on increasing the number of minority students from Illinois LS-AMP who choose to major in a SMET discipline, persist in the science pipeline and are prepared to attend graduate school or to teach in SMET disciplines. Illinois LS-AMP activities will enhance the growth of the SMET community at and among Alliance institutions and promote linkages and partnerships in undergraduate SMET education throughout Illinois. In order to accomplish these objectives, the Alliance will utilize strategies that include: 1) pre-college and community college bridge programs to ease the transition and better prepared freshman and transfer students; 2) faculty and peer mentoring to help retain students in SMET disciplines; 3) supplemental instruction (study groups, tutorials, workshops, study skills training) to strengthen students ability and resolve to succeed in gatekeeper and higher level courses; 4) academic year and summer undergraduate research to prepare and develop students for transitioning to graduate school; 5) curriculum revision; and 6) industry internships. The Illinois LS-AMP universities from a diverse group of public and private institutions in urban and rural settings: Chicago State University (CSU), lead institution, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU), DePaul University (DPU), Illinois State University (ISU), Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville (SIUE), Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), and Governors State University (GSU). The participation of the City Colleges of Chicago completes the Alliance. The presidents of Illinois LS-AMP baccalaureate institutions and the Chancellor of the Chicago Community College (CCC) System will comprise a Governing Board committed to the institutionalization of successful AMP activities, establishing policy and obtaining additional financial and resources support from the Illinois legislature, Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE), foundations, and industrial and business communities. The Illinois LS-AMP has a strong assessment component, with external evaluation and internal feedback. External suggestions and assistance will be furnished by a Program Advisory Committee (PAC), the composition of which provides a connection with the Illinois business community, the public high schools, graduate schools, state and national policy makers and national research institutions doc114 none In recent years, there has been an explosive growth of new process technologies, new device concepts, and new markets for integrated sensors and actuators, also referred to as micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). This growth has led to new challenges for computer-aided-design (CAD) of MEMS, with the ultimate goals being accurate, easy-to-use behavioral models that capture all the essential behavior, and permit predictable design modifications and optimization. This research investigates the lack of design guidelines for reliability with regard to dynamic (shock) loading. Such loading can occur either by choice (for example, MEMS launched on satellites), or by accidental drops onto hard surfaces. There is evidence that the small moveable parts of MEMS devices, such as suspended proof masses in accelerometers, experience fracture from dynamic loading levels which the devices are expected to withstand based on quasi-static loading models. It is hypothesized that the inertia of a packaged MEMS, when subject to even modest acceleration, provides a reservoir of kinetic energy which can then be transferred to the mechanical elements as acoustic waves, and cause fracture due to stress wave loading. This project examines the validity of this hypothesis by using numerical analyses to establish expected behavior. For confirmation, experimental studies of subjecting Si microstructures to stress-wave loading are being made. Modeling procedures to anticipate such failures, and by proper design, prevent them are being developed doc115 none Phytoplankton productivity in high nutrient, low chlorophyll areas is limited by the bioavailability of iron. Iron uptake by marine microorganisms appears to be strongly influenced by the redox and solution speciation of dissolved Fe, yet very little is known about the physical-chemical processes such as photochemical reduction, colloid formation, and organic complexation that affect Fe chemistry and bioavailability in the oceans. For this reason, the principal investigators propose to undertake a set of process-oriented studies to investigate (1) the diel photochemical and thermochemical redox cycling of Fe in the upper 100 meters of the Gulf of Mexico (GOM); (2) the redox speciation of dissolved Fe supplied by wet (rainfall) and dry (aerosol) deposition, and the physical-chemical transformations that occur within the first few hours following deposition; and (3) the complexation and potential reduction of Fe(III) by colloidal and low molecular weight dissolved organic ligands in the open oligotrophic GOM, and including ligands from natural diatom blooms, harmful algae (dinoflagellate) blooms, and from riverine input of terrestrial aquatic organic ligands. It is expected that results from this study will further our understanding of the abiotic, inorganic processes regulating the distribution and speciation of Fe, as well as provide data required to model oceanic Fe cycling doc116 none Michigan Rural Systemic Initiative The Michigan Rural Systemic Initiative (MIRSI) to Improve Science, Mathematics and Technical Education seeks to organize a consortium of seventeen school districts and two Native American academies in isolated rural school districts in northern Michigan. The Michigan RSI is working collaboratively with universities, community colleges, Tribal Colleges and other agencies to promote local capacity for systemic reform. The initiative will promote standards-base MST by enhancing teacher knowledge of content and technology processes to increase student achievement. Regional coordinators located in the school districts will make available technical assistance, professional development activities and a web-based technology venue to increase access to information and innovations in mathematics, science, and technology education. Web-based technologies will allow rural educators, students, parents, and stakeholders to participate in learning communities for investigations, communications, collaborations, and publications. The RSI will assist districts in the re-alignment and leveraging of resources and to institute the policy changes necessary for true systemic change. The goals of the proposal are to: (1) improve support for the development of a reform agenda for rural schools by forming new regional and statewide collaborations among the rural districts, Michigan State University, North Central Regional Education Laboratory, and other institutions or agencies; (2) to increase community and business involvement in the schools to support the rural agenda in mathematics, science and technology; (3) enhance the understanding of the rural communities and cultures by gathering base-line data from self-studies that examine the contextual variables within the communities and that support the reform agenda; (4) to generate a comprehensive and sustainable implementation plan for systemic reform in mathematics, science, and technology education that transcends levels, and addresses a local and regional vision, seeks a commitment to policy, fiscal and instructional reform, a comparison of programmatic strengths and weaknesses, a secure level of resources to promote change and an expedited reform through state and local policy changes. This proposal aligns with the Michigan School Improvement Plan doc117 none PI: Theda Skocpol, Ziad Munson This project studies how individuals are recruited into, and mobilized to activity within, pro-life movements. The design draws on ideas from social movements, religion, and political sociology; it emphasizes the role of ideas in this social movement. The research uses documents produced by pro-life groups, and interviews with both activists and non-activists. Four sites that represent different religious composition, demographic characteristics, and levels of interest in the pro-life movement have been chosen: Boston, Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, and Charleston. Outcomes of this project should include a fuller understanding of the role(s) of religion in social activism, and conditions and processes of mobilization of social movements in contemporary U.S. society doc118 none Under the direction of Dr. Kenneth Hirth, Mr. Carl Wendt will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will conduct archaeological excavation at el Bajio, a small Early Formative Olmec settlement which is located in the San Lorenzo region of Veracruz, Mexico and dates to ca. 1,500-900 BC. The Olmec are well known both to researchers and non-archaeologists because of the monumental art they produced. Basalt boulders many tons in weight were transported to large sites and then carved into stylized heads. Because the Olmec constitute the earliest complex society in Middle America and provide the base from which later Mayan cultures arose, they can shed light on the processes which led to the rise of New World civilizations and thus have been the focus of considerable archaeological attention. However, as Mr. Wendt notes, while major excavation has been conducted at large central Olmec sites, very little is known about the broader social and regional context in which they were situated and only a very limited understanding of Olmec social, political and economic organization has been attained. Mr. Wendt s research will help to remedy this situation. El Bajio is bisected by an actively eroding stream which cuts across the center of the site. While water cuts away several meters each year and is rapidly leading to El Bajio s destruction, it has also offered a unique opportunity because it is possible to trace features of the settlement in the wall of the river bank and to gain insight into the spatial organization of the village most of which is buried under several meters of sediment. Mr. Wendt will first clean this cut wall and produce a horizontal map. This will provide a guide for future excavation. He will also conduct a remote survey using both auger holes and magnetometer readings to search for buried features. On this basis he will select several houses for extensive horizontal excavation. The data thus collected will allow him to reconstruct the economic and social organization of the village and determine the extent to which it was organized along hierarchical lines. He will determine the degree of status differentiation based on variation among household contents. He will also compare cultural materials excavated at el Bajio to counterparts from a larger regional center and examine the extent to which it was integrated into a larger regional network. These bottom up data will complement those from top down excavations at the more important centers. This project is important for several reasons. It will provide data of interest to many regional archaeologists. It will shed new light on the rise of Middle American civilizations and contribute to training a promising young archaeologist doc119 none The GEM meetings involve well defined campaigns that are coordinated by one or two scientists. The PI for this project is one of the coordinators for the GEM Inner Magnetosphere Radiation Belts campaign. This project will provide for the dissemination of information and planning activities for that campaign as well as providing travel money for the PI to attend the GEM meetings doc120 none In recent years, studies of dissolved iron in the ocean and the results of open-ocean iron enrichments experiments have demonstrated that the growth and biomass of phytoplankton are limited by low concentrations of available iron in waters characterized by high concentrations of dissolved nitrate and low standing stocks of chlorophyll ( HNLC waters ). The seminal open-water iron fertilization experiments were done in the early s in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. Since that time, abundant new evidence has come to light that an even more extensive, and globally significant, HNLS region exists in the broad eastwardly flowing Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica. In this project, researchers at the Moss Landing Marine Laboratory, Rutgers University, Oregon State University, University of Miami, and Lamont-Dougherty Earth Observatory will perform an open-water iron fertilization experiment in the Southern Ocean in regions just north of and just south of the Antarctic Polar Frontal Zone (APFZ) along 170 W, an area characterized by high major nutrients and extremely low dissolved iron concentrations. The team will investigate (1) the role of iron on the biological pump in silicate-rich versus silicate-poor HNLC waters, (2) iron mediation of differential drawdown of major nutrients, (3) iron limitation of carbon fixation and export from surface waters, (4) the biophysical response to added iron, and (5) the potential effect of iron-induced carbon export on midwater remineralization and denitrification. The underlying hypothesis driving this field study is that the rate of phytoplankton production and the quantity of plant biomass in the Southern Ocean are differentially limited across the APFZ by iton and silicate availability during the major growth season and are responsible for the persistence of the HNLC condition. The results of this work are expected to contribute significantly to our understanding of important biogeochemical processes in the Southern Ocean. Factors that control the rate of new production bear directly on the global carbon cycle, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, and climate control. This Southern Ocean Iron Experiment (SOFeX), north and south of the APFZ, will be carried out in a single field expedition in the austral summer of - doc120 none In recent years, studies of dissolved iron in the ocean and the results of open-ocean iron enrichments experiments have demonstrated that the growth and biomass of phytoplankton are limited by low concentrations of available iron in waters characterized by high concentrations of dissolved nitrate and low standing stocks of chlorophyll ( HNLC waters ). The seminal open-water iron fertilization experiments were done in the early s in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. Since that time, abundant new evidence has come to light that an even more extensive, and globally significant, HNLS region exists in the broad eastwardly flowing Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica. In this project, researchers at the Moss Landing Marine Laboratory, Rutgers University, Oregon State University, University of Miami, and Lamont-Dougherty Earth Observatory will perform an open-water iron fertilization experiment in the Southern Ocean in regions just north of and just south of the Antarctic Polar Frontal Zone (APFZ) along 170 W, an area characterized by high major nutrients and extremely low dissolved iron concentrations. The team will investigate (1) the role of iron on the biological pump in silicate-rich versus silicate-poor HNLC waters, (2) iron mediation of differential drawdown of major nutrients, (3) iron limitation of carbon fixation and export from surface waters, (4) the biophysical response to added iron, and (5) the potential effect of iron-induced carbon export on midwater remineralization and denitrification. The underlying hypothesis driving this field study is that the rate of phytoplankton production and the quantity of plant biomass in the Southern Ocean are differentially limited across the APFZ by iton and silicate availability during the major growth season and are responsible for the persistence of the HNLC condition. The results of this work are expected to contribute significantly to our understanding of important biogeochemical processes in the Southern Ocean. Factors that control the rate of new production bear directly on the global carbon cycle, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, and climate control. This Southern Ocean Iron Experiment (SOFeX), north and south of the APFZ, will be carried out in a single field expedition in the austral summer of - doc120 none In recent years, studies of dissolved iron in the ocean and the results of open-ocean iron enrichments experiments have demonstrated that the growth and biomass of phytoplankton are limited by low concentrations of available iron in waters characterized by high concentrations of dissolved nitrate and low standing stocks of chlorophyll ( HNLC waters ). The seminal open-water iron fertilization experiments were done in the early s in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. Since that time, abundant new evidence has come to light that an even more extensive, and globally significant, HNLS region exists in the broad eastwardly flowing Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica. In this project, researchers at the Moss Landing Marine Laboratory, Rutgers University, Oregon State University, University of Miami, and Lamont-Dougherty Earth Observatory will perform an open-water iron fertilization experiment in the Southern Ocean in regions just north of and just south of the Antarctic Polar Frontal Zone (APFZ) along 170 W, an area characterized by high major nutrients and extremely low dissolved iron concentrations. The team will investigate (1) the role of iron on the biological pump in silicate-rich versus silicate-poor HNLC waters, (2) iron mediation of differential drawdown of major nutrients, (3) iron limitation of carbon fixation and export from surface waters, (4) the biophysical response to added iron, and (5) the potential effect of iron-induced carbon export on midwater remineralization and denitrification. The underlying hypothesis driving this field study is that the rate of phytoplankton production and the quantity of plant biomass in the Southern Ocean are differentially limited across the APFZ by iton and silicate availability during the major growth season and are responsible for the persistence of the HNLC condition. The results of this work are expected to contribute significantly to our understanding of important biogeochemical processes in the Southern Ocean. Factors that control the rate of new production bear directly on the global carbon cycle, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, and climate control. This Southern Ocean Iron Experiment (SOFeX), north and south of the APFZ, will be carried out in a single field expedition in the austral summer of - doc123 none In recent years, studies of dissolved iron in the ocean and the results of open-ocean iron enrichments experiments have demonstrated that the growth and biomass of phytoplankton are limited by low concentrations of available iron in waters characterized by high concentrations of dissolved nitrate and low standing stocks of chlorophyll ( HNLC waters ). The seminal open-water iron fertilization experiments were done in the early s in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. Since that time, abundant new evidence has come to light that an even more extensive, and globally significant, HNLS region exists in the broad eastwardly flowing Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica. In this project, researchers at the Moss Landing Marine Laboratory, Rutgers University, Oregon State University, University of Miami, and Lamont-Dougherty Earth Observatory will perform an open-water iron fertilization experiment in the Southern Ocean in regions just north of and just south of the Antarctic Polar Frontal Zone (APFZ) along 170 w, an area characterized by high major nutrients and extremely low dissolved iron concentrations. The team will investigate (1) the role of iron on the biological pump in silicate-rich versus silicate-poor HNLC waters, (2) iron mediation of differential drawdown of major nutrients, (3) iron limitation of carbon fixation and export from surface waters, (4) the biophysical response to added iron, and (5) the potential effect of iron-induced carbon export on midwater remineralization and denitrification. The underlying hypothesis driving this field study is that the rate of phytoplankton production and the quantity of plant biomass in the Southern Ocean are differentially limited across the APFZ by iton and silicate availability during the major growth season and are responsible for the persistence of the HNLC condition. The results of this work are expected to contribute significantly to our understanding of important biogeochemical processes in the Southern Ocean. Factors that control the rate of new production bear directly on the global carbon cycle, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, and climate control. This Southern Ocean Iron Experiment (SOFeX), north and south of the APFZ, will be carried out in a single field expedition in the austral summer of - doc120 none In recent years, studies of dissolved iron in the ocean and the results of open-ocean iron enrichments experiments have demonstrated that the growth and biomass of phytoplankton are limited by low concentrations of available iron in waters characterized by high concentrations of dissolved nitrate and low standing stocks of chlorophyll ( HNLC waters ). The seminal open-water iron fertilization experiments were done in the early s in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. Since that time, abundant new evidence has come to light that an even more extensive, and globally significant, HNLS region exists in the broad eastwardly flowing Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica. In this project, researchers at the Moss Landing Marine Laboratory, Rutgers University, Oregon State University, University of Miami, and Lamont-Dougherty Earth Observatory will perform an open-water iron fertilization experiment in the Southern Ocean in regions just north of and just south of the Antarctic Polar Frontal Zone (APFZ) along 170 W, an area characterized by high major nutrients and extremely low dissolved iron concentrations. The team will investigate (1) the role of iron on the biological pump in silicate-rich versus silicate-poor HNLC waters, (2) iron mediation of differential drawdown of major nutrients, (3) iron limitation of carbon fixation and export from surface waters, (4) the biophysical response to added iron, and (5) the potential effect of iron-induced carbon export on midwater remineralization and denitrification. The underlying hypothesis driving this field study is that the rate of phytoplankton production and the quantity of plant biomass in the Southern Ocean are differentially limited across the APFZ by iton and silicate availability during the major growth season and are responsible for the persistence of the HNLC condition. The results of this work are expected to contribute significantly to our understanding of important biogeochemical processes in the Southern Ocean. Factors that control the rate of new production bear directly on the global carbon cycle, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, and climate control. This Southern Ocean Iron Experiment (SOFeX), north and south of the APFZ, will be carried out in a single field expedition in the austral summer of - doc125 none GOLDENBERG This one-year project will conduct research designed to identify ways of organizing curriculum materials that will not only effectively teach elementary school mathematics to children, but also simultaneously provide professional development for the elementary teachers who use the materials. As new curriculum materials are created it is critical we find out how the use of innovative curriculum materials can provide professional development for the teachers who use those materials. The project will use existing elementary school mathematics curriculum materials ( Math Workshop, written several decades ago by Wirtz, Botel, Beberman and Sawyer) as a base for creating one or two sample units which illustrate a proposed curriculum organization framework. These materials will be piloted with a small group of teachers and students in Massachusetts. Evaluation data will include teacher interviews and classroom observations. The evaluation will focus particularly on the ways that teachers knowledge of mathematics changes as a result of using the materials. These data will be analyzed to determine if the proposed framework is appropriate. If not, the data will suggest ways of modifying that framework. NSF s support for this project is $84,791 doc126 none OPP- This contract is for specified support of the United States of America Antarctic Program (USAP). The support provided includes administrative functions at the Denver, Colorado Headquarters and at field offices in Port Hueneme, California; Christchurch, New Zealand; and at two or more locations in Antarctica. In Antarctica, the contractor is responsible for the operations of McMurdo, South Pole and Palmer Stations and the seasonal air support facilities (Williams Field, Annual Sea-ice Runway, and Pegasus Runway) near McMurdo Station. The contractor is also responsible for the management of a biological laboratory and field support facilities at McMurdo Station, the lease operation and maintenance of an ice-strengthened research ship (LAURENCE M. GOULD), and the lease of a research vessel with ice-breaking capability (NATHANIEL B. PALMER). Additionally, all major construction at U.S. facilities in Antarctica is the responsibility of the civilian contractor. While the contract was awarded on October 18, , the effective date for assuming the USAP support mission is April 1, . Therefore, this award of $10,000,000 will fund the transition period, from contract award until April 1 (approximately $1.2M), and the first month of the third quarter of Fiscal Year doc127 none This Conference is designed to address issues to inspire and prepare women in engineering to assume leadership positions in academic institutions from the department chair level through higher leadership positions such a provost. The conference goals are: (1) to explore and define various models of leadership; (2) to establish a vertical network of alliances; (3) to identify the skills needed for various leadership roles; and, (4) to disseminate the results of the conference to women in academia. The conference will be organized with a conference chair and co-chair, a steering committee of nationally renowned academic leaders, and will be limited to 40 participants to encourage personal contact, team interaction, and active participation in the sessions. Topics will include institutional skill building (i.e., budget preparation and management), and personal skill development (i.e., leadership styles and conflict resolution methods). Evaluations will be conducted and a Webster will be created to disseminate the findings experiences of the conference, with continued networking established via the web. This Conference addresses key issues identified by the NAE workshop on women in science and engineering doc128 none This proposal requests partial support for US Students who will be presenting papers at the IEEE International Conference on micro-electromechanical systems at the MEMS conference to be held at the Seagaia complex in Miyazaki, Japan from January 23-27, . As in the past year the conference is co-sponsored by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. The conference has a strong interdisciplinary scope, serving the electrical, mechanical, bio-medical, and the material engineering communities. The conference is expected to have about 130 papers doc129 none Marshall The most powerful methods for quantifying the incompleteness of the fossil record in local sections are based on Strauss and Sadler s ( ) confidence interval approach. This family of methods (including the distribution-free and generalized methods of Marshall [ , ]) assume that the section has been continuously sampled, and that fossils may be found essentially anywhere in the section. However, in most sections these assumptions are violated, either because only parts of the section have been (e.g., for core data), or can be, sampled, or because fossils are restricted to specific bedding planes, or narrow stratigraphic intervals. As an alternative, Weiss and Marshall ( ) developed a Bayesian approach for estimating the uncertainty in stratigraphic end points of taxa in local sections that have been sampled discretely. However, the method is based on some overly simple assumptions: that collecting intensity is equal at all sampled horizons; that species remain at the same relative abundance at all times; and, that the beds sampled have no vertical thickness. Further, our approach (like all others) does not make use of abundance data in the fossil record. Here we propose to develop the method presented in Weiss and Marshall ( ) into a series of more sophisticated methods that can accommodate the inhomogeneities typically seen in the fossil record, as well as take advantage of abundance data when it is recorded. Our ultimate goal is to provide a statistical tool-kit that can be broadly applied to a wide range of problems doc130 none This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) award supports a collaborative effort by researchers at three institutions to develop mechanical machining processes and equipment necessary to produce miniature devices by a truly 3D method. This requires the capability to bridge the micro- to macro- fabrication and design domain in order to capture the features and the machining challenges that occur at the meso level. While there are a number of instances where micro and meso machined features are accomplished using conventional or ultra-precision machine tool sizes and technologies, there is a need to create a miniaturized machine tool system for the effective production of miniature mechanical products. The goal of this SGER is to build and demonstrate the milling, drilling, and turning capabilities of a meso-scale universal machining center, capable of producing features in the 50 to micron range. If successful, the longer-term goal is to pursue the further reduction in size of this meso machine-tool to achieve a micro machine-tool system doc131 none This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) award supports a collaborative effort by researchers at three institutions to develop mechanical machining processes and equipment necessary to produce miniature devices by a truly 3D method. This requires the capability to bridge the micro- to macro- fabrication and design domain in order to capture the features and the machining challenges that occur at the meso level. While there are a number of instances where micro and meso machined features are accomplished using conventional or ultra-precision machine tool sizes and technologies, there is a need to create a miniaturized machine tool system for the effective production of miniature mechanical products. The goal of this SGER is to build and demonstrate the milling, drilling, and turning capabilities of a meso-scale universal machining center, capable of producing features in the 50 to micron range. If successful, the longer-term goal is to pursue the further reduction in size of this meso machine-tool to achieve a micro machine-tool system doc131 none This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) award supports a collaborative effort by researchers at three institutions to develop mechanical machining processes and equipment necessary to produce miniature devices by a truly 3D method. This requires the capability to bridge the micro- to macro- fabrication and design domain in order to capture the features and the machining challenges that occur at the meso level. While there are a number of instances where micro and meso machined features are accomplished using conventional or ultra-precision machine tool sizes and technologies, there is a need to create a miniaturized machine tool system for the effective production of miniature mechanical products. The goal of this SGER is to build and demonstrate the milling, drilling, and turning capabilities of a meso-scale universal machining center, capable of producing features in the 50 to micron range. If successful, the longer-term goal is to pursue the further reduction in size of this meso machine-tool to achieve a micro machine-tool system doc133 none Michael Dick Graham Langmuir The Gakkel Ridge occupies a unique and important place within the global system of ocean ridges because it is: 1) the slowest spreading ridge; 2) the deepest ocean ridge; 3) the sole region where polar mantle compositions can be sampled directly; and 4) in a unique tectonic setting surrounded by continental lithosphere in close proximity. The Ridge s strike is perpendicular to spreading direction which results in very few transform offsets and it appears to be the ridge above the coldest upper mantle. This combination of characteristics permits a large number of hypotheses of ocean crust formation to be tested. The Gakkel Ridge has been unsampled petrologically, largely due the permanent ice cover of the Arctic Ocean that makes geophysical data difficult to obtain. This perennial ice cover over the Ridge will require two icebreakers working in tandem to mount a safe and effective expedition. Recent developments make a sampling expedition possible. The U.S. SCICEX bathymetry, sidescan and gravity data collected from a submarine provide the necessary background data to plan a good sampling program. German colleagues, in response to InterRIDGE planning efforts, have in place ice breaker, Polarstem, for a two-ship, 50-day international expedition dedicated to study of the Gakkel Ridge. The United States will also provide an icebreaker, the new USCG Healy. The Principal Investigators will sample basalts, peridotites, and related rocks along 600 km of the Gakkel Ridge. Detailed geochemical study of these rocks along with geophysical estimates of crustal and lithospheric thickness can be combined to generate quantitative models of oceanic crust formation under ultra-slow spreading conditions. Concurrently, with the basement sampling, a reconnaissance will be carried out as a hydrothermal survey using MAPR devices attached to the dredging (or coring) wire and rosettes. The survey would be designed to lay the groundwork for future hydrothermal and related biological studies along Gakkel Ridge. Finally, sampling along Gakkel Ridge and interpretation of the data will provide a basic understanding of the makeup of Arctic Ocean crust, and its influence on Arctic Ocean chemistry doc134 none Robertson The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twentyfour months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twelve-month postdoctoral research visit by Dr. Robin Robertson to work with Drs. Hartmut H. Hellmer and Aike Beckmann at the Alfred-Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany. The goal of this research is the investigation of the role tides play in mixing and Antarctic Bottom Water formation in the Ross Sea. The tidal velocity structure for the Ross Sea, including under the ice shelf, will be simulated utilizing realistic bathymetry and hydrography. A parallelized version of a sigma coordinate model will be used for the simulation. The four largest tidal constituents (two semidiurnal and two diurnal) will be simulated both individually and in combination. The expected results will include estimates of the three-dimensional tidal velocity fields. A crude parameterization of the mixing due to tides will also be developed for use in larger scale circulation models. The effects using multiple tidal constituents and of different hydrographic scenarios on the velocity fields and mixing will be investigated. The Alfred-Wegener Institute is ideally situated to develop collaborations with other European institutions involved in Antarctic research, such as the British Antarctic Survey, an Italian group in Venice, and a Norwegian group in Bergen, adding to the value of this international collaboration with Germany doc135 none Furse The IEEE-AP URSI Conference on Antennas and Propagation is an annual international conference co-sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and the Union of Radio Science international (URSI). The conference regularly draws about one thousand participants representing academia and industry. The Antennas and Propagation Society of the IEEE along with several subgroups of URSI will meet in Salt Lake City, Utah in July . Each year, the Antennas and Propagation Society promotes student participation in the conference through a number of mechanisms. One of the most important is the Student Paper Competition at the conference. This selective program brings the world s best students together in an integrated program in which they present their work to a technical audience including a group of judges. The program helps develop the students technical audience as well as their communication and presentation skills. It also helps introduce them to the international technical community and helps to build a community of students who will lead the next generation of antenna engineers. The AP provides financial support of various forms including assistance in low cost housing, but does not reimburse travel expenses. Travel support from NSF will ensure that the program is open to the widest range of interested applicants from the U.S. Universities. This proposal requests travel support to defray the travel expenses for young investigators whose papers have been selected for presentation at the Conference, but who lack funds and might not be able to attend without travel support. It is proposed that the AP Technical Program Committee select those to receive the support. The total amount requested is $15,000 on the basis of an average travel grant of S700 for 20 participants. Plus 2 weeks of secretarial help. The secretary will collect papers, mail them out for review, collect reviews, and mail travel reimbursements after the conference doc136 none Loper, David This is a proposal to model, analyze and parameterize small-scale flows relevant to Earth s core and the geodynamo problem. The research project will consist of three phases, roughly coinciding with the three year duration of the grant. The first phase consists of solving explicitly for the local velocity and magnetic fields generated in a rotating hydromagnetic fluid by a small-scale buoyant parcel of prescribed (Gaussian) shape, including effects of the viscous, Lorentz and inertia forces and ambient stratification. This portion of the project is the most straightforward, although determination of the rise velocity may require solution of a non-linear problem when inertia or stratification is included. In the second phase the solutions obtained during the first phase will be generalized to include the effect of parcel deformation by the fluid flow and the associated temporal evolution of the flow structures. Also, the short-term temporal development of the wake structure associated with a Gaussian parcel, starting from an initial static state, will be analyzed. It is anticipated that this phase will involve a combination of classical analysis and numerical computation. In the third phase the solutions found during the first two phases will be used to quantify (i.e., parameterize) four important nonlinear effects: helicity, electromotive force, Reynolds stress and effective diffusivity. The first two of these are important in the development of more realistic a-w and a2 dynamo models, while the last two should lead to an improvement in the parameterization of small-scale motions in fully 3-D numerical models doc137 none Baldwin This planning grant funds the Colorado School of Mines for industry university interactions to determine the feasibility and viability of becoming a research site of the Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC) for Membrane Applied Science and Technology. The Co-Directors of the site would be Dr. Robert Baldwin and Dr. Douglas Way. The Colorado School of Mines expertise will broaden the Center s research base by addressing research in Sample Membrane Interactions Using Field Flow Fractionation, Separation of Gene-Therapy Products with Field Flow Fractionation, Cyclodextrin Modified Adsorbents and Membranes for Chiral Separations, Cell-Bacteria Sorting Using Laser Tweezers, Switchable Selective Channels in Porous Materials for Separations, Separation and Fractionation of Viral Precursers by Field Flow Fractionation, Membrane Reactor for Methanol Ethanol Reforming, The Influence of Free Volume on the Permeation and Sorption in Super-Glassy Polymers, Faujasite Membranes for CO2 N2 Separations and Fundamentals of Nanofiltration at High Composition doc138 none Zeitler This Americas Program award will support a planning visit to Ecuador by Drs. Peter Zeitler, David J. Anastasio, Anne S. Meltzer, and Frank J. Pazzaglia, all from Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pa., to meet with Dr. Minard Hall and other colleagues from the Instituto Geofisico Nacional, associated with the Escuela Politecnica Nacional of Quito. The purpose of the visit is to carry out join research planning with scientists of the Instituto, to investigate field logistics, and examining key field sites, with the goal of developing two joint research projects, as well as a joint training program for advanced students of active tectonics and geologic hazards. The projects include a study of the geodynamic mass balance in the northern Andes between volcanic eruptions and erosion; study of neotectonic deformation and catastrophic sedimentation in the Interandean Valley; and a program that will involve research experience in these areas for advanced students doc139 none This award is for participants to attend and deliver lectures at the Dusty Plasma Mini Conference to be held in conjunction with the American Physical Society (APS), Division of Plasma Physics Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington, 14-19 November . Dusty Plasmas play an important role in the aeronomy of the lower ionosphere. For example, the formation of noctilucent clouds and its role in determining the dynamics of the D region is an outstanding problem of significant interest. There are a number of other important applications of dusty plasmas as well. It is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary science with a promising future. The American Physical Society will provide funding to key invited speakers, who would otherwise be unable to attend the meeting due to lack of funds. The participation of these speakers is necessary to maintain a high quality of scientific content for this conference doc140 none Dresselhaus This US-Brazil proposal requests support for Dr. Mildred S. Dresselhaus of MIT to work with Dr. Marcos A. Pimenta at the University of Minas Gerais in Brazil on Raman scattering in carbon nanotubes. This research will address aspects of Raman scattering from carbon nanotubes. Raman scattering is one of the most common and useful methods to characterize carbon materials. This collaboration, which has been ongoing, has established a basis for analysis of the Raman spectra of graphite obtained at different wavelengths and they have extended this approach to the nanotube materials doc141 none This proposal is a request for partial support for an international workshop entitled Scientific Drilling on Lakes Malawi and Tanganyika. The meeting is co-sponsored by the International Continental Drilling Program (ICDP) and the International Decade of East African Lakes (IDEAL) Project. The conference will (1) refine the scientific goals for drilling in these lakes, (2) develop linkages for add-on science, and (3) advertize prospects for scientific drilling on these lakes to the earth science community both inside and outside of Africa. Logistical and engineering aspects of drilling will also be examined and discussed doc142 none While progress has been made over the last decade on understanding the dynamics of tornadoes and their parent storms, much is still unknown concerning the factors that cause tornado genesis and that control the intensity and longevity of any given tornado. In this research, the Principal Investigator will investigate how the large scale environment conditions (e.g. wind shear and buoyancy) control the intensity and longevity of tornadoes within supercell thunderstorms. This work builds on and is a logical follow-up to the Principal Investigator s previous research on the development of low-level rotation and tornado genesis within supercell thunderstorms. Two separate lines of research will be pursued. First, the Principal Investigator s current research will be extended down to the tornado scale in an effort to advance understanding of tornado genesis. The previous work has resulted in refinements to the Rotunno and Klemp paradigm for origins of low-level rotation in supercells. The Principal Investigator s new theory demonstrates the dynamical role the inflow environment s near-surface horizontal vorticity has on mesocyclogenesis and can be used to predict the near-surface vertical wind shear profiles which are optimal for the generation of strong low-level mesocyclones within supercells. Extension of this work includes examining whether tornado-scale circulations are directly related to the mesocyclone circulation, as well as a study to understanding the role of shear and buoyancy in determining the spatial scales and magnitude of the low-level circulation and convergence needed for the generation of tornadoes. Second, an attempt will be made to explicitly model a particular supercell and tornado observed during the Verification of Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment. This part of the study will provide a much needed evaluation of the current state of cloud simulation realism and hopefully identify specific aspects of convective scale modeling which need to be improved. Potential benefits from this research are many. Aside from increasing basic understanding of storm and tornado dynamics, the operational community will benefit from this research. Understanding which particular environmental profiles of wind shear, temperature and moisture that are most conductive for tornadoes will enable operational forecasters to pinpoint and focus on small regions where conditions are favorable for the formation of intense tornadic storms. By more fully understanding the dynamics associated with these supercells and their tornadoes, improved severe weather forecasts and Doppler radar observations can then be used more effectively to forecast and detect tornado formation and warn the public doc143 none Badrinath Roysam Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Experimental Partnership-Real Time Computer Vision Based Spatial Mapping and Referencing for Minimally Invasive Surgery The goal is to develop core computer vision technology for a new generation of highly capable instruments for minimally invasive surgery. The specific applications are in opthamology. Developing the technology requires facing and overcoming several fundamental barriers that have plague computer vision systems. These include poor quality image data during surgery, difficult to model biological tissues, large scale and unpredictable motions of the eye, a need for extreme accuracy over long duration, a need for predictable response in a real-time implementation, and a need for transparency of the system as a whole. The computer vision technology will distinguish these instruments by making them spatially-aware . This means they include capabilities for spatially mapping and spatial referencing. Spatial mapping is the problem of building and maintaining a seamless, wide-area map (mosaic) of the three-dimensional region of surgical interest and its surrounding. This map will be constructed from images acquired during diagnostic exploration and forms the basis for absolute and hence verifiable spatial referencing. Novel aspects of the work in mapping include: (1) a fast, recursive technique for tracing elongated structures and then detecting their branching and cross-over points, (2) a feature-based image-to-image matching algorithm that used a high-order transformation model and a hierarchy of robust estimation techniques, (3) a joint optimization of all image-to-mosaic transformations simultaneously, and (4) a 3-D reconstruction of the retinal surface despite an inherent inability to calibrate the imaging system. These techniques are each useful in other domains besides ophthalmology doc144 none In this US-Brazil award Jose N. Onuchic of the University of California, San Diego will collaborate with Vitor B. P. Leite and Jorge Chahine of Universidade Estadual Paulista in Sao Jose do Rio Preto, Brazil. Their studies will involve the application of energy landscape theory towards problems in biology such as protein folding and the solvent dependence of electron transfer reactions in biological molecules. Electron transfer reactions are central to the bioenergetic pathways of both animals and plants on earth, such as the early steps of photosynthesis. An understanding of the mechanism of protein folding impacts most of the functions in living organisms doc145 none Principal Investigator: Nancy U. Crooker, Boston University The investigators will foster the development of SHINE (Solar and Heliospheric INterplanetary Environment), an affiliation of researchers dedicated to promoting enhanced understanding of and predictive capabilities for solar disturbances that propagate to earth. SHINE is patterned on the successful GEM (Geospace Environment Modeling) and CEDAR (Coupling, Energetics, and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions). Activities will consist primarily of organizing and coordinating workshops, and providing limited travel support to attend these workshops doc146 none This US-Brazil award provides support for Dr. Daniel R. Farkas of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute to collaborate with Dr. Eduardo Marcos at the University of Sao Paulo on the fine algebraic structure of derivations and Hochschild cohomology. This project studies different types of derivations for a finite-dimensional algebra and analyzes how they all fit together. Derivations are formal operators that mimic the behavior of the derivative familiar from first-year calculus. They provide important information about algebras. In this project U.S. and Brazilian researchers will investigate both theoretical issues and the algorithmic problems that arise in trying to produce realistic examples. Progress will rely on symbolic computations, for which a package developed at Virginia Tech will be used. Students who are part of Virginia Tech s senior masters degree program are involved in the project as algorithm developers and programmers, and some of them will travel to Brazil as technical experts and research aides doc147 none Flowers The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Gwenn E. Flowers with support for 12 months to work with Dr. Helgi Bjornsson, Head of Glaciology at the Science Institute of the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, Iceland. The objective of this project is to understand the dynamics of ice cap hydrology that influence stable and unstable modes of water flow beneath Vatnajkull, Iceland s largest ice cap, and to test, improve and refine a numerical model in preparation for larger-scale investigations. Dr. Flowers will use a numerical model of glacier hydrology that she developed as the core of her doctoral research. She will use information available through the Science Institute of the University on Vatnajkull surface and bed geometry and hydraulic characteristics to evaluate how well the modeled drainage structure honors that which is presently observed. This project represents a first attempt to describe a complete computational picture of glacier hydrology. The results will benefit the field of glacier hydraulics and its impact on glacier dynamics. Dr. Bjornsson has been described as one of Iceland s preeminent glaciologists. He is the current vice-president of the International Glaciological Society. The Science Institute supports approximately 30 earth scientists, including 15 geophysicists, who would also interact with Dr. Flowers doc148 none Barton This three-year award supports U.S.-U.K. collaborative research on reactions of small molecules with metallaboranes and studies of macropolyhedral boranes. The project involves Lawrence Barton and a graduate student from the University of Missouri and John D. Kennedy and a graduate student from the University of Leeds. The research addresses synthetic, structural, behavioral and spectroscopic studies of the reactions of small molecules with metallaboranes and the formation of macropolyhedral clusters, i.e. species larger than the typically accepted limit of 12-vertix icosahedron. The U.S. investigator brings to this collaboration expertise in polyborane and metallapolyborane chemistry and x-ray diffraction measurements. This is complemented by the U.K. investigator s expertise in the field of polyborane clusters and in NMR spectroscopy. Much of the NMR joint work will take place in the Leeds laboratory. The project will advance understanding of metallaborane clusters and may result in compounds with very novel properties doc149 none Ambrose The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Barbara A. Ambrose with support for twenty-four months work with Dr. Elena Alvarez-Buylla Roces at UNAM s Instituto de Ecologia in Mexico City, Mexico. The objective of this project is to examine the genetic basis of an unusual floral pattern (carpels peripheral, stamens central) in Lacandonia, and compare it with DNA-based phylogeny. The origin of flowers is an important puzzle in the evolution of plants. The project concerns a fundamental aspect of plant development using a model system that is only available in Mexico. This project will make an important contribution to our understanding of flowering plant evolution. Dr. Alvarez-Buylla s lab is fully equipped to develop all state- of-the-art techniques in molecular biology and biochemistry of plants. The host has extensive experience in phylogenetic analyses which will complement the PI s experience in molecular biology techniques doc150 none Shao-Horn The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Yang Shao-Horn with 24 months support to work with Dr. Claude Delmas, Head of the Solid State Ionics Group at the Institute of Condensed Matter Chemistry (ICMCB) in Bordeaux, France. This project is co-funded by NSF s Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. This project will study structural and electrochemical properties of layered lithium manganese derivatives having the O2 type oxygen stacking. The aim is to determine and improve the electrochemical behavior of novel layered lithium manganese derivatives with the O2 type structure as the positive electrode in lithium rechargeable cells. Dr. Delmas has extensive knowledge in intercalation chemistry of layered compounds. ICMCB is one of the largest public research labs in the world involved in solid state chemistry and materials science. It is supported by approximately 200 researchers and supporting staff, with state of the art facilities in solid state chemistry and materials science doc151 none Betty H. Cheng Michigan State University TITLE: Meridian: An Integrated Toolkit for Developing Interactive Distributed Applications The proposed project involves the integration and validation of MERIDIAN, a collection of tools designed to help automate the development of IDAs. Collectively, these tools will support diagram-based modeling, rigorous correctness analysis, software reuse, automated code generation, and software visualization. Moreover, they will interact with one another through explicit design representations with formally defined semantics, enabling requirements to be traced from high-level models to low-level code. Interactive distributed applications (IDAs) are those that involve direct interaction with users and whose processing and data components are distributed across a network. Examples of IDAs include distributed data management systems, on-board driver pilot navigation assistance systems, computer-supported cooperative work environments, distance education tools, and a variety of public safety systems. The increasing interest in IDAs is fueled by several factors, including the advent of the World-Wide Web, the development of new middleware technologies, the introduction of scripting languages for graphical user interfaces, and the availability of new network services and protocols doc152 none MAGNETIC MICROSTRUCTURE AND INFORMATION STORAGE This research project addresses the challenges facing the magnetic storage industry as storage densities approach the superparamagnetic limit. It is designed to contribute to the long-term basis of the technology in a form that will be useful to the practitioners in industry. Storage density and stability are related to the magnetic microstructure of storage media. A useful microstructural magnetic unit of a storage medium is the smallest piece of the medium whose magnetization can be altered, and which will reliably retain its altered state for a specified length of time. Each stored bit in virtually all existing magnetic storage systems comprises a large but shrinking number of microstructural magnetic units, and in all practical and economically viable systems the microstructural units have widely varying characteristics (particle, grain, or cluster size, orientation, etc.). We will apply innovative atomic and magnetic force microscopic (AFM and MFM) techniques that we have developed to measure the characteristics of the micromagnetic unit in a given medium, and modeling techniques that enable us to infer them indirectly. We propose to develop a carbon nanotube AFM MFM tip that will give finer resolution to the measurements, and we will extend their scope to unconventional (perpendicular and patterned media) storage. In the storage medium environment, the stored bit is subjected to forces that shorten its thermal decay lifetime. We will combine our previously reported spin stand quantification of the effect of temperature and storage density on stability of written information with MFM measurements to measure thermal effects on the write process and medium noise doc153 none The objective of this experimental research is to improve the performance, predictability, and reliability of embedded applications by simulating a processor, building a hardware filed-programmable gate array prototype and implementing a real-time operating system and virtual machine environment to support associated embedded applications. This work must be approached experimentally rather than theoretically due to the difficulty in designing and implementing analytical models which are complex enough to inform the design of real world systems. The design of hardware and software elements concurrently should lead to greater integration and higher performance by several orders of magnitude than the design of either element separately doc154 none Computing the values of integrals is one of the fundamental problems of calculus and its applications; numerical integration solves this problem for complex functions that cannot be handled analytically. This project will significantly extend the ParInt 1.0 system for performing numerical integration developed under previous NSF support. It will add techniques that enable the system to handle integration problems with a variety of difficult characteristics (e.g. singularities, high dimensions, etc.). This includes the development of a hierarchical process structure for the computation of large collections of integrals (e.g. finite element problems), extrapolation techniques for singular problems, and Quasi-Monte Carlo techniques for solving problems of high dimensions (e.g. computational finance). Corresponding additions to the package s graphical interface will allow for easy use across research disciplines. In particular, visualization tools to help the user see why a problem is difficult (and suggest alternative formulations) and a server allowing users to submit integration problems remotely will be incorporated doc155 none Parallel iterative methods are leading candidates for solving large-scale engineering and scientific problems, which usually appear as sparse linear systems. However, their robustness and overall efficiency remain mixed and problem-specific. These characteristics are closely tied to the preconditioners used as inputs to these methods. Preconditioners for general sparse linear systems remain by far the biggest stumbling block to obtaining good performance for iterative solution methods on high-performance computers in engineering and scientific applications. Accordingly, the main thrust of this project is to develop a class of preconditioning techniques based on the researchers Algebraic Recursive Multilevel Solver (ARMS) framework. The researchers will develop the new methods and test them on realistic problems arising from the researchers collaborations. The project will develop a class of parallel multi-level ILU-type preconditioning techniques using ARMS methods. Recursive multi-level ILU methods allow the unification of many standard iterative solvers into a single generic code. Their multi-level nature allows them to bridge the gap between the excellent problem-specifc performance of multigrid methods and the general-purpose nature of preconditioned Krylov solvers. The project will examine performance and scalability for classes of existing and new procedures thus obtained, including Schwartz procedures, Schur complement methods, direct solvers, and multilevel techniques. It will also conduct extensive realistic tests. In summary, this work promises advances in three important components of developing parallel solution methods: effective and scalable algorithms, use of effective computer science tools and data structures, and testing and validation doc156 none Schlottmann The PI will investigate a new tool, which promises to improve both the speed of forward modeling and the insight into the full seismic waveform in-version problem. This tool is based on path integration, a theoretical technique first developed by Feynman ( ) as a new formulation of quantum mechanics. The method is in some ways like a finite-frequency extension of geometric ray theory (which assumes infinite frequency). Ray theory gives traveltime and some amplitude information on wave arrivals corresponding to propagation along isolated paths whose traveltimes are minimum, maximum, or simply lie at a critical point. Instead of relying on isolated paths that connect a seismic source to a particular receiver, path integration involves a summation (i.e., integration) over all paths between the two. In so doing, it can account for all waveform effects, including diffraction, which is not reproduced at all by ray theory. Path integration has many numerical advantages. Compared to grid-based methods, it requires for less computational time and memory. In particular, it relies on Monte Carlo integration over a random sample of all the source-receiver paths. That this method is feasible and fast has already been shown by Lomax. His path summation method, which was developed for constant-density acoustic media, bears a resemblance to the path integration scheme but lacks a firm theoretical basis. The PI will investigate the improvement in accuracy that should result from a more rigorous result doc157 none Dijk The processes occurring inside opaque rocks are inherently difficult to measure directly and analyze quantitatively. Therefore, they are not well understood. As a result, existing conceptual and theoretical models are based on unvalidated assumption and simplifications. The principal objectives of this research are (i) to visualize and study fluid flow, chemical transport and fracture evolution (due to thermoelastic stress, and chemical dissolution and precipitation) inside single fractures and fracture networks, (ii) to determine the validity and accuracy of existing conceptual and theoretical models, and (iii) to apply and extend existing predictive models for fluid flow, chemical transport, and fracture evolution. For this purpose, experimental techniques will be developed to generate laser-induced fractures and fracture networks of prescribed geometry in transparent materials, and to visualize the processes occurring in these fracture networks. The project has both scientific and practical significance. The principal scientific benefit is the experimental and theoretical investigation of fluid flow, chemical transport, and fracture evolution. Practical, long-standing problems (e.g., in subsurface hydrology and rock fracture mechanics) will benefit enormously from the increased knowledge of these processes, and the development of more valid and accurate predictive models doc158 none Brodsky Pulsating behavior in volcanic systems is ubiquitous and physically significant for understanding the force balance of eruptive processes. The PI will carry out a systematic study of oscillations over a wide range of frequencies using the analytical and numerical tools of fluid mechanics. The goal is to formulate a set of criteria by which specific mechanisms or classes of mechanisms can be associated with documented observations doc159 none Active Singularity Approach to Control of Nonsmooth Mechanical & Electromechanical Systems Using Wavelet-Based & Impulsive Control Methods The common feature in the behavior of systems with impacts and impulsive control actions is the presence of singularities which manifest themselves in discontinuities and nonsmoothness in system motion, jumps in system dimension, lack of continuous dependence on the initial conditions and other irregularities. This proposal focuses on the introduction of a control action into the system during the singularity phase rather than the traditional approach of control during the nonsingular phase of the system motion. The goal of the research are to a) develop a mathematical framework for representing control actions, system motions, and system dynamics during the singularity phase of system motion and combining them with the regular motion phase, b) develop the ultra-high-speed time-localized state estimation and system identification procedures, which utilize signals containing both smooth and impulsive measurement data, c) develop procedures for the design of open-loop and feedback control laws to satisfy specific control objectives with control actions applied during the singularity phase as well as during the regular system motion, and d) apply the procedures developed to the high speed fault clearing in the boiler-turbine units with fast valving, modeling and control of impact-based motions in MEMS, and control of the robotic systems for cutting and welding with impulsive endpoint return motion doc160 none Reyes The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Darwin R. Reyes with support for twenty-four months to work with Dr. Andreas Manz at Imperial College of Science in London, England. This project is co-funded by NSF s Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. The goal of this research is to develop a separation system capable of multiplex protein analysis - `proteomic array analysis - to analyze the levels of proteins in samples of genomic complexity. It will involve the use of microfabricated channels (pseudo-gels) on polymers or quartz substrates for electrophoretic separations of proteins, first by isoelectric focusing and then by sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) gel electrophoresis. Ultimately, the device will be employed to separate complex multiprotein biological samples. Dr. Manz is one of the pioneers in microchip technology used for chemical applications. He was involved in the development of high-speed analyzers based on capillary electrophoresis, liquid chromatography and flow injection analysis doc161 none Gawronksi For many years disaster research shied away from explicitly accepting disasters as seriously political occasions. The last few years, however, have seen increasing attention to the deeply political nature of disaster events. Nonetheless, a politics of disaster has yet to be fully articulated either conceptually or empirically. A three-day workshop will be held in spring, in San Jose, Costa Rica to move the disaster research community forward in understanding and analyzing disaster events as political occasions, and to do so at a hemispheric level. The workshop will focus on six topics: (1) theoretical links alternate models on quantitative relationship between disasters and political social unrest; (2) additional variables to the disaster-unrest models; (3) case studies or case study-type evidence on how disasters have affected politics in various nations of the hemisphere, including the U.S. and Canada; (4) development and support of politically aware but insulated protected government institutions capable of effective disaster management, including those which are capable of coordinating civil-military relations; (5) media treatment of disasters and the role of credit-taking and blame-avoidance by public officials; and (6) special problems of corruption in response, recovery, and reconstruction-and the consequent need for transparency strategies doc162 none Goldberg The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twentyfour months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr.Joel Goldberg with support for 12 months to work with Professor Donald Hilvert at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland on the directed molecular evolution of a single-chain catalytic antibody with increased stability and catalytic efficiency. This project is co-funded by NSF s Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. This project will prepare a library of RNS-protein fusions for the directed evolution of proteins in order to generate mutant antibodies with increased stabilities and altered catalytic properties. The PI and host will start with a catalytic antibody which efficiently converts chorismate to prephenate. This project will provide insights into the mechanisms used by proteins to maintain active, folded conformations and promote chemical reactions. Professor Hilvert is an expert on protein and catalytic antibodies. The entire infrastructure for the Laboratorium fur Organische Chemie and the Department of Chemistry at the ETH are available for this project doc163 none The proposal deals with very important area of theory development and modeling for hybrid power systems, dynamic available transmission capability (capacity), use of General Minimal Residual method (GMRES) to speed up model computation, congestion reduction via real-time control using FACTS devices. Past work includes application of Trajectory Sensitivity Theory to parameter variations, initial conditions and machine (e.g. generator) sensitivity as well as locating vulnerabilities in a power network. This proposal addresses problems in security assessment within a restructured industry. Such operation has shifted the focus of concern in dynamic security assessment to the assessment of available transmission capacity. In order to handle this redefined problem, the proposal addresses (i) modeling of the system in greater detail, to incorporate power electronic devices for network flow control within a nonlinear hybrid model, and (ii) the use of trajectory sensitivity to evaluate contingent dynamic stability. A particular strategy proposed is to use the results obtained in the iterative problem solver technique to solve both the state space and the sensitivity models, since the Jacobean for both the models is the same while using the simultaneous implicit method doc164 none As well known, practical control problems are always dominated by constraints. Until recently these constraints have been conspicuously absent from almost all-modern control literature, as taking such constraints into account leads to hard complex nonlinear problems. On the other hand, ignoring such constraints can be detrimental to the stability and performance of control systems. There are disastrous examples for detrimental effect of neglecting constraints such as the Chernobyl unit 4 nuclear power plant disaster in or YF-22 crash of April 19. One of the most commonly encountered constraints in control engineering is the actuator s constraint and limitations. Actuator magnitude and rate saturations are some of the most common and significant constraints in a control system. Taking such constraints in analysis and design of control systems immensely increases the industrial relevance of modern control theory. During the 90 s we have witnessed renewed and intense research activity in the area of control of linear plants with constrained actuators. This research area is broadly viewed as one of the major areas of research in nonlinear control theory. In the past few years, the research activities in this area including the work of this investigator and his co-workers have given rise to the emergence of powerful analysis and design tools for control systems with actuator constraints. Using the structure of amplitude and rate saturation nonlinearity in a meaningful way, this investigator and his co-workers through the support of a prior NSF grant produced a body of work that concerns with (a) external stability, (b) internal stability, (c) external as well as internal stability, (d) output regulation, and (e) additive disturbance rejection in both global and semiglobal framework. The performance and robustness issues whenever actuators are subject to amplitude and rate constraints are not dealt with in the literature or in our prior work. Hence, dealing with performance and robustness issues is a natural next step for research in this area, and is the focus of this proposal. The problems associated with performance and robustness issues whenever actuators are constrained, though complex and challenging, are highly crucial for control engineering applications and thus should be viewed as fundamental research problems in nonlinear control theory. This proposal formulates a number of research tasks, which form the core of this nonlinear research area doc165 none Hartshorn This proposal will fund travel, subsistence expenses, publications and other administrative expenses for the participation of ten undergraduate students in a research oriented tropical biology program to take place at the Organization of Tropical Studies, (OTS), Costa Rica, under the auspices of Duke University. The students, chosen from economically disadvantaged and under-represented populations, will be introduced to a diversity of tropical habitats, and through interactions with senior scientists and researchers and hands-on learning, to the scientific principles that guide current research in tropical ecology, as well as to a variety of research techniques. They will also be exposed to the representative environmental challenges facing developing tropical nations. Costa Rica is an ideal place for this activity because of its astonishing richness of ecosystems and biodiversity. The goal of this activity is to improve the number and diversity of undergraduate students being provided with a quality international experience in tropical biology. Support from NSF will aid the effort to attract promising students to tropical ecology and to become familiar with development and conservation issues in the international arena doc166 none This project is a comprehensive field and laboratory program that involves coordinated seismic, petrologic and theoretical modeling studies along an 800-km-long section of the Galapagos spreading center between 91 and 98 degrees west. The objectives of the project are to: (1) determine how the compensation of the Galapagos swell is partitioned between variations in crustal thickness and mangle density by measuring crustal thickness along the swell and the degree of melting inferred from the chemistry of basalts, (2) determine if there is a threshold factor that controls the transition from an axial high to a rift valley, (3) determine how the extent of magmatic differentiation of ridge basalts relates to the presence or absence of a melt lens, and (4) determine why the degree of partial melting appears to be lower near the hotspot doc167 none This project studies effects of remittances by distant faily members on household and community structures in Vietnam. Recipient and non-recipient households are compared in terms of family hierarchies and community political power relations. In addition, results are compared to a second country, the Philippines, with a different historical background. Three kinds of analyses will be conducted. The first stage is to analyze existing data on income, education, and changes in agriculture to test some ideas on effects of remittances. The second is factor analysis of those data to uncover patterns involving remittances, household economic patterns, demographic factors, and the local economies. The third set of analyses will come from semi-structured interviews conducted in recipient and non-recipient households, to explore effects of the income on daily life patterns such as power relations within the family. This research builds on other work by the PI s on remittances, and will explore both established and novel patterns. It is the first such study conducted within Vietnam, a country in which traditional agriculture is rapidly modernizing and also being supplanted by industrial production. Comparisons with the Philippines will permit controlling for other factors that otherwise might lead to conclusions from spurious correlations within a single country. The value of this work is to improve theoretical understanding of rural change and economic development doc168 none Huey The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Bryan D. Huey with support for twelve months to work with Drs. G. Andrew D. Briggs and Oleg V. Kolosov at Oxford University. This project is co-funded by NSF s Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. The project is entitled Novel Investigation of Individual Domain Switching in Ferroelectric Thin Films. The first of three objectives is (as the title indicates) the development of a novel technique for the study of individual ferroelectric domain switching, with the only known simultaneous resolution at nanometer and nanosecond scales. Second, the switching response of individual domains will be characterized from milliseconds to nanoseconds, as a function of position. Third, the minimum separation between individually addressed domains will be determined to ensure orientation stability as a function of switching speed. This research will be the only known direct study of individual domain switching at technologically relevant time scales. Andrew Briggs has extensive background in ultrasonic and scanning probe measurements and theory. Oleg Kolosov jointly invented Ultrasonic Force Microscopy (UFM) and therefore has considerable experience with UFM development and application. He previously performed pioneering research into ferroelectric domain manipulation doc169 none Hudson - Temporal and spatial variations in concentration, temperature, and potential occur in many reacting systems including liquid and gas phase reactions, gas-solid heterogeneous reactions, and biochemical reactions; such nonuniformities can have a strong effect on the overall rate of reaction as well as the system dynamics. In this work, the PI plans to carry out experimental studies on spatiotemporal patterns and coupling among reaction sites during electrochemical reactions. He plans to use several techniques to study the temporal and spatial structures. The time and space scales are interrelated because of interactions through the potential and concentration fields with the length scale generally decreasing with increasing frequency. Some of the studies will be done using arrays of electrodes to measure the current, or rate of reaction, independently at many locations on the reaction surface. The method is applicable to all types of electrochemical reactions over a large range of conditions since the current is measured at each electrode at a high sampling rate. The length scale of the reaction surface is varied by changing the number of electrodes in an array, the size of the individual electrodes, or the spacing among the electrodes. Electrochemical reactions are strongly coupled through the electric field, i.e., long rage coupling plays in important role in the system characteristics. The PI plans to use a novel experimental setup to study the effects of global coupling during metal electrodissolution reactions. Through the use of a set of individual and collective external resistors he is able to vary the degree of global coupling without changing the other parameters of the system. The dependence on coupling strength will be determined; transitions form disordered (turbulent) to ordered or coherent states and the occurrence of synchronized and clustered states will be studied. The PI also plans to study the impact of temporal and spatiotemporal forcing. Such forcing, sometimes called charge modulated electric fields, is useful in applications such as the manufacture of multilayered GMR materials and the superfilling of vias for interconnect technology. He will investigate copper deposition under pulsed conditions with an emphasis on the resulting spatial structure. Microstructuing using ultra-short pulsed voltage inputs will also be investigated. The reduction in size of electronic devices has led to the search for new technologies for the manufacture of on-chip interconnects. The high-frequency methods the he will be investigating may lead to greatly improved spatial resolution. In addition, the electrode arrays will be used in the forcing studies. He will investigate the ordering of spatiotemporal chaos with inputs to a single channel of an array. Such ordering is complicated due to the existence of numerous unstable spatial modes but such ordering is important in plasma, laser devices, and in both chemical and biological systems where variations in both time and space occur. Finally, he plans to look at the effects of temporal and spatial forcing on electrocatalytic reactions of interest in fuel cell applications, the oxidation of hydrogen and of small organic compounds. By using addressable microarrays the PI will investigate the possible influence of temporal forcing on reaction rate, likely through the removal of inhibitors from the surface, and also the effect of the input of impulses of varying spatial scale on activation doc170 none Satyanarayanan, Mahadev Carnegie Mellon University Post-doctoral Training in Mobile Information Access CISE Postdoctoral Associates in Experimental Computer Science: Postdoctoral Training in Mobile Information Access Postdoctoral training in the broad area of mobile information access will be offered that has four research thrusts: 1) Systematic and thorough evaluation of the performance characteristics of the Odyssey mobile computing platform and the Coda File System, including identification of appropriate performance metrics, design of synthetic workloads and benchmarks, instrumentation to collect usage data, and analysis of results. 2) Exploring the scalability of Odyssey and Coda involving the design of carefully controlled experiments that stress the limits of these systems. 3) Designing and implementing mechanisms in Odyssey and Coda that opportunistically exploit compute servers and intermediate caches in the infrastructure close to a mobile computer. 4) Developing a methodology and a set of techniques and tools for generating system configurations that are well-fitted to the unique characteristics of mobile computing hardware. In addition, opportunities will be offered to participate in the mentoring of graduate and undergraduate students and guest lecture in courses doc171 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Jale Akyurtlu Institution: Hampton University The objective of this project is to use a novel catalyst system in the synthesis of hydrocarbons from the oxides of carbon and hydrogen. The Fischer-Tropsch (FT) synthesis is a practical route for the conversion of synthesis gas to gasoline, diesel oil, wax and alcohols. Because an array of products is synthesized, the product separation and upgrading of lower-grade fractions limit the commercial application of FT syntheses. Ruthenium clusters supported on alkali earth, metal-promoted zeolites, which have been successful in ammonia synthesis, will be evaluated and characterized. Issues to be investigated include metal particle size and location influences, metal reducibility, metal-zeolite interactions, cation type and concentration effects, pore structure influences, and acidity effects. A mechanistic study of the FT synthesis will also be performed. This project will involve undergraduates from Hampton University and will be performed in collaboration with the University of Virginia. Because established gas reserves have increased over oil reserves in the past two decades, a shift towards gas as an important feedstock for fuels and syntheses may occur. If successful, this work will aid in the design of new catalysts for the production of valuable chemical products doc172 none The objective of this project is to focus on enzymes of technical importance from two key organisms, Pyrococcus furiosus and Thermotoga maritima. Both of these have been well characterized by the Principal Investigators and are suitable models for this project. Basic and applied objectives are to be pursued. The project is divided into five main areas. Areas one to four focus on answering specific biochemical questions on four enzymes: chitinases, glycosyl transferases, prolidases, and aminoacylases. The fifth area addresses the optimization of the hyperthermophile gene expression in E. coli doc173 none Peirce This is an award to support research to advance our understanding of processes responsible for nitrogen production, transformation and transport in soil that were made possible by studying the extremely large disturbances caused by the hurricane in September of (designated as Hurricane Floyd) that adversely impacted the environmental quality of rural and urban regions of North Carolina. The proposal leading to this award was submitted to NSF under the Special Guidelines for an SGER (Small Grant for Exploratory Research) in the NSF Grant Proposal Guide (NSF 94-2). The research to be conducted under this SGER will be coordinated with research being conducted under NSF Grant No. 98- in which the investigator is studying the significance of nitric oxide flux from sludge-amended soils under conditions that simulate field application. Results of the research supported by the SGER are expected to provide the basis for further research on the potential for biologically augmenting and enhancing the decontamination of soil that has been polluted by gasoline, lubricating oil and diesel fuel that has leaked from underground storage tanks or otherwise entered soil where the hydrocarbons pose a potential for contaminating groundwater doc174 none Kirby, M The PI will test the hypothesis that planktonic productivity decreased in the latest Pliocene in tropical America by analyzing biomass growth in Neogene and Quaternary bivalves, such as pectenids, oysters, chamids, and arcids from Panama and Costa Rica. A decrease in biomass growth across the Plio-Pleistocene boundary for each taxon would be consistent with a drop in productivity. In addition, analysis of biomass growth in living epifaunal bivalves from upwelling areas (with higher planktonic productivity) will faster biomass growth. The estimation of biomass in fossil suspension feeders may be used as a relative measure for the amount of planktonic productivity in the past doc175 none Bonheyo The causal relationships between microbial metabolism, water and carbonate chemistry, and potential DNA preservation in travertine fluid inclusions will be evaluated at Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park. Analyses will be done on a single modern spring (three 1 m2 stations from 40? - 75?C) and corresponding ancient deposits (100, , 8,000, 25,000, and 45,000 years old). Creation of this aqueous-solid-microbial process model in the modern will quantitatively track the entombment and fossilization of microbial DNA doc176 none Kirby This project will investigate the active displacement field surrounding the eastern termination of the Kunlun Fault, in western Sichuan and Gansu Provinces, China. The study is aimed at furthering understanding of the role that large ( km) strike-slip faults play in active intracontinental deformation in Asia. Unresolved issues addressed here include: 1) whether these faults control the extrusion of coherent, rigid blocks of crust or whether they are simply passive features developed in a continuously deforming medium, 2) whether these faults are confined to the crust or penetrate through the lithosphere, and 3) how displacement is accommodated at the terminations of such large structures. Results from this study will also have important implications for the utility of mass budget approaches to balancing Indo-Eurasian convergence velocities. In addition to broadening the PI s experience with paleoseismic techniques, this study is unique in that it focuses on the spatial variability of displace near the termination of one of these structures doc177 none Hartshorn This US-Brazil proposal requests support to Dr. Gary S. Hartshorn of Duke University for sponsorship of six graduate students to participate in a research-oriented tropical biology program in Brazil. The goal of this project is to provide emerging U.S. scientists with intensive language skills in Portuguese, a well-rounded knowledge of Brazilian customs and culture and hands-on field experiences conducting ecological research in the Amazon. The Organization for Tropical Studies (ORS), will work in collaboration with Duke University and the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazonia (INPA) and the Smithsonian Institution s Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project BDFFP) in Brazil to provide six U.S. graduate students and Ph.D. candidates with support to join sixteen Brazilian graduate students in a research-oriented, field course taught in Portuguese on the ecology of the Brazilian Amazon. The Amazon holds the greatest number of species on earth and produces approximately 10% of the world s carbon dioxide emissions, the latter primarily from deforestation and habitat conversion and burning. The Amazon is one of the critical keys to reducing biodiversity loss and slowing global climate change. This project will help get more well-trained researchers into the Amazon to study it while there is still time doc178 none The State Leadership Center (SLC) is proposing a collaborative venture with the National Science Foundation (NSF) in an effort to foster the use of research and to support state policies and programs aiming to advance systemic educational reform and improvement. Working with a team of state educational technology directors and a team of highly-qualified researchers, the SLC will prepare five commissioned papers on various aspects on what is known about preparing teachers to use modern telecommunications technologies for achieving standards-based educational reform. The authors of these papers will have the opportunity to discuss their findings in panel discussions during the State Educational Technology Leadership Conference in Washington, DC in January. Following the conference, the papers will be published along with an overview and distributed widely to state educational policymakers and program administrators. The SLC presently works will all states involved in the processes of changing and upgrading performance standards for teachers. Recent reports from states indicate that virtually all states are attempting to broaden and deepen the disciplinary and pedagogical knowledge of teachers, improving their ability to deliver more challenging and difficult courses of instruction, particularly, courses in science, mathematics, and technology that are available to all students. Recent reviews of the states five-year plans [developed in response to the Goals and Technology Literacy Challenge Fund requirements] attest to the fact that states recognize the integration of technology as a critical element for achieving higher performance standards. However, state officials need better and research-based information on what is being learned about effective statewide practices and investment strategies. State policymakers want to know what legislative mandates, regulatory requirements and administrative directives are most likely to stimulate institutional reform and renewal. As advanced telecommunications infrastructures emerge and as virtually all schools and classrooms are wired, state officials increasingly are directing their attention to human resource issues. By concentrating on policies and programs relating to teachers, the SLC is responding to one of the most pressing concerns of states: ensuring the quality of the next generation of classroom teachers. This initiative will help state officials to learn and share information on how a state, region or school system can develop collaborative and constructive relationships with institutions of higher education or other partners to ensure that teachers will operate effectively in new and different learning environments. The researchers involved in this project are expected to analyze, review and report on the information needs of state education policymakers and administrators, thereby, helping the SLC in providing states with technical assistance. The researchers are also expected to provide NSF and other agencies supporting education-related with recommendations for expanding the application of research for advancing and sustaining statewide systemic educational reforms. The proposed research papers will be reviewed and discussed during the national conference of state officials in January and subsequent in a forum arranged by NSF and SLC. The purposes of the two meetings are: to help states in aligning new teacher technology standards with new content and performance standards for students; to help NSF and the SLC in determining the information needs of state education officials and the means to assure that states benefit from the body of research developed by NSF and other agencies supporting education-related R&D doc179 none Bindschadler This award is for support for continuation of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Program workshops that have been run by Dr. Bob Bindschalder at NASA GSFC for the last several years. The WAIS program has successfully focused a broad cross-section of the Antarctic research community on two urgent global issues: future sea level and rapid climate changes. WAIS is multidisciplinary and the requested support is to foster continued cross-disciplinary interaction. WAIS workshops began in -first to formulate the objectives of WAIS and, beginning in , to exchange and present scientific findings in a forum where cross-disciplinary scientific discourse was promoted and progress toward WAIS goals could be annually assessed. The funds provided here are to support future WAIS workshops by assisting in the notification, organization and execution of the annual WAIS workshops for the next three years. In addition, the funds will be used to further enhance these workshops by offering travel stipends to attract new participants deemed by the WAIS working group to be key persons in further enhancing the WAIS program doc180 none Wolfson, Ouri University of Illinois, Chicago CISE Postdoctoral Associates in Experimental Computer Science: Data Replication in Peer to Peer Broadcast Networks A mobile computing problem that has generated a significant amount of interest recently is data broadcasting. The problem is how to organize the pages in a broadcast from a server to a large client population in the dissemination of information. A strongly related problem is how to replicate (or cache) the broadcast data in the mobile units that receive the broadcast. Our research involves the study of the problems of broadcast and replication in a peer-to-peer rather than client-server architectures. These architectures are motivated by new types of emerging wireless broadcast networks where receiving nodes may be disconnected, turned off or out of power, and messages may be corrupted. Further, reliable broadcasting by acknowledgment and retransmission may not be justified due to increases in communication costs. The postdoctoral associate will explore fundamental principles of peer-to-peer broadcast replication: when to broadcast, what to broadcast, and the cost functions to measure the efficiency of a given replication approach. Various broadcast replication algorithms will be compared analytically and experimentally and the associate will 1) design and analyze various broadcast replication algorithms, and 2) design and conduct experiments to compare these algorithms doc181 none PROPOSAL NUMBER: PI: Ahmed Louri, University of Arizona Optical interconnection technology has the potential to provide efficient and adequate solutions to the fundamental communication problems facing high-performance scalable parallel systems. For several years, progress in inserting optical interconnection technology into computer systems was hindered by the relatively high cost of optoelectronic components and devices as compared to electronic devices. However, more recently, there have been significant developments in optical and optoelectronic devices, and packaging technologies, which make optical interconnection technology a viable and cost-effective option for building high bandwidth, low latency, and scalable interconnection networks. This research investigates into the application of the recent advances in optical interconnection technology to the communication problems facing scalable parallel computing systems. The ultimate goal is the development and design of high bandwidth, low latency, and high connectivity optical interconnection networks that will not only enable parallel computing systems to be size scalable but also generation scalable. These networks will allow the system to increase in size as well as the ability to use successive, faster generations of processors in a cost-effective manner, and with minimal redesign. The approach consists of combining the unique advantages of optical systems with architectural innovations into an integrated solution. On the architectural side, the proposed research develops crossbar-connected networks that can scale to a large number of processors yet still have close to constant network diameter, very low node degree, high bisection bandwidth, and a reasonable cost. On the technology side, implementation methods that will utilize the large bandwidth of wavelength division multiplexing, the inherent benefits of low-power, high-speed, and compact size of free-space optics, and the flexibility of optical fiber and waveguides will be investigated in order to greatly reduce network and remote memory access latencies. Each optical interconnection technology (free-space, waveguide, fiber) will be used where it is most appropriate doc182 none Hovis The Solution Calorimetry Laboratory at Lafayette College engages in the investigation of the thermodynamic properties and behavior of geologically significant materials. During the grant period the energetics of glasses liquids will be investigated in simple systems in order to relate established immiscibility to enthalpies of mixing and to develop configurational entropy models that will test the validity of Adams-Gibbs models developed from viscosity data. Zeolites will be the first amorphized silicates to be investigated calorimetrically, the primary objects of the study being to understand fundamental nature of these materials, their differences from thermally amorphized analogs, and the behavior of water in amorphous materials. An ongoing study of felsic water-bearing magmatic systems will be brought to conclusion, yielding information on the thermal budgets of hydrous magmas and quantifying the energetics of speciation in the context of spectroscopic data. Mixing energies will be measured for K-Rb and other feldspar systems in the hope of developing generalized mixing models. Measurement of enthalpies associated with alkali-water-vacancy coupled substitution will be concluded for the analcime - pollucite and analcime - Rb-leucite systems. The critical temperature of high-Si nepheline - kalsilite will be determined in an effort to connect K-Na mixing properties to phase behavior. A quantitative study of energies associated with microstructures in halide minerals will be initiated. A number of these projects will involve collaborative efforts with scientists in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Several projects, including one on the thermal expansion of nepheline - kalsilite minerals, have been developed specifically for undergraduate participation. These projects will teach students about the methods, philosophy, and importance of scientific research doc183 none Grebogi This U.S.-Hungary mathematical research project between Celso Grebogi of the University of Maryland, College Park, and Tamas Tel of Eotvos University in Budapest features motion of small, chemically or biologically active particles in non-zero inertia, advected by hydrodynamical flows. The researchers expect the motion of the advected particles to be typically chaotic and will examine the reaction kinetics and population dynamics of the advected chemical components and biological species. Grebogi and Tel intend to define the conditions under which this chaos in phase space can possess a component observable in the physical space of coordinates. Mathematically, when this happens, the dynamics of the material lines present an exponential growth leading to the enhancement of chemical biological activity in the flow. Particles that are lighter or heavier than the fluid are expected to obey different reaction equations because their interaction with the centers of vorticity in the fluid differs. The model flows to be considered are flow past a cylinder, a convective cellular flow, and a velocity field induced by point vortices. Results should contribute to new numerical algorithms for finding and visualizing invariant chaotic sets and for chaos control. If successful, such results have potential for interdisciplinary applications to a variety of phenomena, including chemical and biological activity in the atmosphere or an aquatic medium, with implications for fields such as oceanography, chemical engineering, and ecology. This project in applied mathematics fulfills the program objectives of advancing science by enabling leading experts in the U.S. and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and pool research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc184 none FALK With a Small Grant for Exploratory Research, The Institute for Learning Innovation will to conduct a study, A Multi-Factor Investigation of Variables Affecting Informal Science Learning. Prior research has revealed seven variables, or the suite of variables encompassed by these seven variables, that affect visitor learning in science centers. This research will study to what extent each of the variables contributes to learning outcomes, or which of these variables explains the most variance. It is anticipated that the results of this study will have an important and direct impact on future investigations into science center learning and efforts to facilitate science center effectiveness doc185 none This research is being done in collaboration with Dr. Jenni Evans of Penn State University. Extratropical transition of tropical cyclones is a poorly understood process, yet the resulting systems can have a tremendous impact on the weather in the northeastern U.S. and Canada, producing intense flooding rains, wind storms and wave damage. As a tropical storm transitions into an extratropical storm, its structure changes from a nearly axisymmetric cyclone with maximum winds near the surface to a highly asymmetric cyclone with strongest winds aloft. The transitions often involve interactions with surface fronts or upper level troughs or may result from mergers with pre-existing extratropical storms. The principal investigators will investigate the transition process by examining a number of observed cases of transitions to document the life cycle and structural changes and by conducting model simulations with a state-of-the-art mesoscale model. As part of this effort, they will test a variety of conceptual models of the transition process. A major new resource they will exploit is the availability of AMSU satellite data. These data will be used to derive thermal profiles and wind fields that will be incorporated into the model simulations. It is hoped that a better understanding of the transition process will improve forecasts doc186 none Peters The main goal of this study is to characterize the degree to which biotic and abiotic mechanisms control the concentration and speciation of arsenic in groundwater. One explanation for observed variations is that sulfide minerals are inorganically dissolving under varying redox conditions. Another possible cause may be spatially variable catalysis of dissolution processes by microbial communities. Either of these two mechanisms or some combination may explain the observed heterogeneity of arsenic concentration and speciation measurements in groundwater wells. This work will provide information that will aid in making more informed decisions with respect to the management and remediation of arsenic-affected regions. For example, if bacterial activity can be shown to catalyze the reaction of a more harmful species of arsenic into a less harmful one, then one effective remediation plan might involve encouraging such activity. Similarly, if it is discovered that the inorganic process of pyrite dissolution limited by oxygen diffusion primarily controls arsenic concentration, then corrective action might involve drilling deeper wells to obtain unoxygenated water doc187 none Scheuermann, Peter Northwestern University CISE Postdoctoral Associates in Experimental Computer Science: An Architecture for Mining of Semi-Structured Data on the Web With the explosion of the Web and the advent of digital libraries, the demand for knowledge discovery techniques for semi-structured data has increased greatly. Semi-structured HTML documents are characterized by a rich data model, i.e., they contain both structured values and unstructured concepts. Exploring the semantic knowledge about the relationships among these unstructured concepts is important but costly as an on-line process. The postdoctoral associate will assist in developing a prototype Web mining system that will allow its users to specify a set of constraints, either data values or concepts, and obtain a set of rules that contain the given constraints and other items related to the constraint set. In order to derive these rules, the system makes use of a concept library that differentiates between general concepts and concepts associated with specialized domains. Specifically, the associate will 1) develop new methods for generating partially constrained association rules and classifications rules that make use of the extended concept hierarchies kept in the library, 2) investigate the various lexical tools available and see how to integrate them into Wordnet (which forms the basis of the concept library), 3) explore various heuristic methods for deciding when a given concept belongs to a specialized concept library or to the general concept library, and 4) explore the use of sampling techniques in reducing the search space of rule generation doc188 none A. Majumdar, U. California - Berkeley The proof of concept of a new DNA based self-assembly approach for replication of nanoparticle patterns will be investigated. The initial pattern is created using scanning probe microscope or electron-beam lithography. That pattern is introduced in a solution of thiolated single-stranded DNA of sequence J K to create a J K coded pattern on a substrate, which is replicated with a JK coded nanoparticles attached on the substrate. An enzyme DNA ligase introduced in the solution covalently binds only the sections JK of the nanoparticle pattern. By heating the solution to 70-80 degrees Celsius the covalent bonds remain while the weak hydrogen bonds are broken, and the nanoparticle pattern detaches from the substrate pattern. By decreasing the solution temperature and then heating again, new replicas are created. The proposed approach allows for model replication of the initial pattern. The contribution is novel and may have important long-term effects on replication, self-replication, and fabrication methods of nanostructured systems. The approach is applicable to the 1-20 nm range where other methods of controlled fabrication are limited and not yet practical doc189 none Kailath A number of different so-called NGL (next generation lithography) techniques are currently begin explored for continuation of the so-far incredibly successful optical lithography techniques, which can take the PI s to devices with 70 nm critical dimensions, one of the more interesting classes of NGL techniques, called microcontact or soft lithography, has demonstrated exceptional patterning fidelity in even the fabrication of 10 nm feature sizes and working integrated devices. Microcontact lithography methods involve a 1:1 conformal mask or template, brought into direct contact with the surface of the substrate with several different approaches for completing the printing process subsequent to contact, including physical, chemical, and photonic means. Recently, a novel microcontact NCL strategy utilizing permeable membrane materials (PMM) has been developed in the PI s Stanford semiconductor manufacturing group. In this approach, pattern transfer is achieved by molecular transport of reactive species through a permeable porous template to form a spatially selective etch-resistant mask on the substrate surface. At the dimensions envisaged for microcontact NGL techniques, extremely precise positioning and alignment of mask and substrate will be needed during the entire printing trajectory including extension, hold, and retraction. The PI s propose to develop an optimal multivariable control system for this purpose, with their recently developed PMM system as a specific test vehicle. Preliminary explorations have led them to focus on a dual servo 6-axis piezeo-driven nanopositioning flexure stage along with real-time mask-substrate gap detection and laser interferometry for positioning and alignment. Overall, the fine-stage system will employ six piezoactuators and nineteen high resolution positioning detectors. Although the control laws will be developed and demonstrated on their PMM technology and a related near-field direct write patterning system, the strategy will be generally applicable to other microcontact NCL techniques that employ flexure positioning methods. Some details on their proposed approach follow. First, a state-space model of the flexure stage will be identified using recent advances in the so-called subspace methods developed by Cho and Kailath at Stanford. In the planned approach, frequency domain data will be generated and a linear time invariant model will be computed. Subspace identification techniques offer a non-iterative method to generate multivariable state-space models. For their application which has considerable redundancy in the sensor set, the subspace approach to model identification is useful since, by employing results from displacement structure theory, fast algorithms can be obtained. They also plan to investigate the use of the subspace identification output to determine a minimal set of detectors and actuators to control the unit. Using the identified model, they will design an optimal mixed H2 H controller. The H2 H control objective is applicable to this project because of the need to optimize the positioning speed for an increase in throughput while guarding against worst-case crashes of the mask to the substrate surface. Both stochastic and bandlimited disturbances due to vibrations, as well as internal effects such as nonlinear beam bending moments, hysteresis, and variable initial conditions and topography effects, enter the plant and must be compensated along the desired positioning trajectory. In brief, this proposal envisages the extension and application of recent control design theories to design a very high performance nanopositioning control system. A specific new so-called PMM technology will be the testbed for the development. However the techniques are relevant to several microcontact technologies; they should also be useful for specific applications such as fabrication on curved surfaces, and for manufacturing MEMS (microelectro- mechanical systems), microsynthetic and microfluidic systems doc190 none This project will use theoretical chemistry methodology to investigate heterogeneous reactions on supercooled sulfuric acid atmospheric aerosols. Specifically, quantum chemical electronic structure calculations and molecular dynamics simulations in model systems designed to realistically mimic atmospheric environments will be used. The reactions to be studied will be those involving halogen and nitrate compounds that play a crucial role in stratospheric ozone depletion. Specifically, these include the hydrolysis of bromine nitrate (BrONO2) and N2O5 in the atmospherically relevant acidity range, the reactions of HOCl with HBr and HCl, and XONO2 + HY, with X, Y = Cl, Br doc191 none The objective of this award is to develop the capabilities, through strong linkages within the Earth System History community, dedicated computational facilities, and dedicated support staff, to enable an understanding of the full range and character of natural variability of the Earth s environmental system preserved in the geologic record, with the objective of contributing to a comprehensive theory of climate change. The project proposes case studies using numerical models of the atmosphere, oceans, cryosphere, and biosphere, along with increased observations and model-data comparisons. The scientific questions associated with the past climate evolution of the earth will address three major topics: (1) the processes that are responsible for the first-order changes in climate that have occurred over the last 600 million years, (2) the processes that are responsible for fast or abrupt changes in past climate, and (3) improved assessment and evaluation of model predictions of climate change. The proposal hopes to establish a nation-wide integrative partnership in Earth system history modeling. This nation-wide integrative partnership in Earth system history modeling is designed to substantially increase the capabilities and opportunities in Earth system modeling by addressing the problems of limited computational resources, the lack of shared facilities designed to promote the needs of the entire community, and inadequate opportunities to extend the results of model studies and enhance their value across the full spectrum of Earth science disciplines doc192 none Giambelluca The expansion of rural road networks and the intensification of cultivation on steeply sloped lands contributes significantly to hydrologic change and sedimentation in major river systems of mainland southeast Asia. Domestic and international conservation projects conducted in highland watersheds of this region have historically focused on the agricultural practices of ethnic minority (hill tribe) groups. While improper cultivation techniques on steep slopes are certainly responsible for serious downstream effects in some areas, expansion of the rural road network may be equally or more important. To advance scientific understanding of the impacts of roads on regional hydrology, they must be studied at the watershed scale, within the context of other hydrologically important land-cover changes. This is true for all regions of the world, temperate or frigid. The objective of the proposed study is to investigate the roles of, and the interaction between, roads and nonroad land surfaces in altering watershed functions and accelerating soil erosion in areas undergoing tropical deforestation. We propose to (1) validate the Distributed Hydrology-Soil-Vegetation Model (DHSVM) with field data collected during a prior NSF-supported project investigating road impacts in the 93.7-ha. Pang Khum Experiment Watershed (PKEW) in northern Thailand, (2) continue field measurement of soil-vegetation-atmosphere-transfer (SVAT) processes and road-related hydrologic erosion variables in PKEW, (3) investigate the frequency of runoff generation on roads by subsurface flow processes (i.e., interception of subsurface flow by the road prism), and (4) identify indices that will allow us to extend our methodologies to larger catchments. To study the hydrologic and sediment fluxes measured in PKEW, we will couple sediment detachment and routing equations with equations describing surface flow in DHSVM. The adapted model will help us to determine the sources of overland flow and transported sediment, and to study where these fluxes are redistributed with PKEW, or transported from the basin. We will finally use the model to quantify watershed impacts resulting from the emergence of roads and the expansion of agriculture on steeply sloping lands within PKEW over the last 50 years. The project unites two groups of researchers who have been studying road-related impacts: one group has been working in the tropics; the other in the U.S. Pacific northwest. Although set in Thailand, this research will directly contribute to the study of road-related impacts in all mountainous areas of the United States undergoing land conversion doc193 none CTS- E.Ruckenstein, Research foundation of SUNY at Buffalo It is proposed to advance our understanding of the phenomenon of homogeneous nucleation , with an emphasis on better experimental purity of supersaturated solutions and also with the help of a detailed theoretical interpretation at the microscopic level. Purity (i.e. the elimination of contaminants, to be found often in the neighborhood of the walls) will be achieved by employing the electromagnetic levitation trap technique, which provide and isolate a large sample of droplets of nearly identical properties. The characteristics of the space-time interaction between solute clusters and the supersaturated solution will be measured reliably: such macroscopic properties as the induction times of the initial microdroplets will then enable the determination of the constants which quantify best the microscopic model. Special interest is centered on the stochastic nature of this model. The accuracy of this experimental input will rest on the construction of new devices, especially the linear quadrupole electromagnetic levitator trap which will produce an accurate time sequence of the nucleation process doc194 none Flatte The PI presents here a coherent theoretical program investigating the optoelectronic properties of antimony-based heterostructures. Great flexibility has already been demonstrated in the design of optoelectronic devices which use materials based on the (roughly) lattice matched AlGaSb InAs material system. Such materials have been used in mid-wave infrared (MWIR) lasers, long-wave infrared (LWIR) detectors, and resonant interband tunneling diodes (RITD s). These MWIR and LWIR lasers and detectors have broad spectroscopic applications to environmental monitoring and non-invasive medical sensing. RITD s, which have the largest peak to valley current ratios of any RTD devices, are intended for use in a variety of microwave and fast digital device applications. For each type of device the expected properties of antimony-based heterostructures are superior to those of competing systems. Current barriers to the realization of these superior properties are: (1) maturation of growth and processing technology, (2) detailed experimental probes of the material properties of device elements, and (3) theoretical understanding and modeling of materials and devices. The wide range of choices and applications of antimony-based heterostructures has made efforts in this last category vital to further progress in the field. In the proposed effort progress in understanding the properties of materials and devices, and in designing better devices, will be accomplished principally through efforts to (1) develop appropriate and accurate transport models, (2) improve the accuracy of the electronic structure models currently used, and (3) account for interface chemistry and structure in this mixed-anion system. The P.I. s have been engaged in the past in several collaborative efforts with non-academic institutions, including industrial and government laboratories, and they are committed to continuing these efforts in the future. Specifically, the RITD effort will be coordinated with efforts at HRL and JPL, and the interface modeling effort at HRL doc195 none Because of the infrequent occurrence and the difficulty of recognizing individual events in the stratigraphic record, few studies have examined the impacts of individual, large flood events on floodplain sedimentation. Although a considerable amount of research has demonstrated that a strong relationship exists between moderate flow events and sediment transport and channel morphology, the role of large floods in landscape modification remains uncertain. The extraordinary floods of September in eastern North Carolina resulted from hurricanes Dennis and Floyd provide an unusual opportunity to examine the geomorphic effectiveness of a low frequency, high magnitude flood. The proposed study examines the magnitude and spatial variability of floodplain sedimentation along the Tar River, North Carolina by (1) measuring and mapping spatial patterns of sedimentation, floodplain scour, and particle size, (2) linking these patterns to floodplain characteristics, (3) comparing the field data with sediment loads measured by the U.S. Geological Survey, and (4) quantifying the storage and location of several sediment-associated contaminants in the flood deposits. Field data will be collected from about 100-150 sample sites along five transects across the Tar River. Particle size analysis, chemical analysis, and spatial analysis will be applied to analyze these data. The significance of the project is to provide a useful data set that can rarely be collected. The data and the associated research will help improve our understanding of basic sediment transport and deposition dynamics during rare floods and will allow comparisons with the dynamics of rare floods on more controlled river systems. The research will also provide additional evidence necessary to understand the importance of large, catastrophic events in the sedimentary record doc196 none Collins This award supports a planning visit for Professor Richard Collins, Wright State University to travel to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Chennai. During this ten-day visit, Collins and Megha Singh, Department Head for the Biomedical Engineering Division, IIT will hold a series of discussions with senior researchers in order to develop research protocols for a multi-year program of scientific and technical cooperation between their institutions doc197 none This collaborative proposal seeks support for a project to obtain and interpret ice-core records from the Tien Shan area of central Asia and to collect and analyze modern observational data from the area. Specifically, the project will obtain ice cores 200-250 m in length from the Inilcheck Glacier in the central Tien Shan and perform the analyses necessary to prove that these ice cores provide a detailed paleoclimatic record for the last -300 years. Detailed meteorological, hydrological, and glaciological measurements will also be made and placed in the context of historical measurement in the area doc197 none This collaborative proposal seeks support for a project to obtain and interpret ice-core records from the Tien Shan area of central Asia and to collect and analyze modern observational data from the area. Specifically, the project will obtain ice cores 200-250 m in length from the Inilcheck Glacier in the central Tien Shan and perform the analyses necessary to prove that these ice cores provide a detailed paleoclimatic record for the last -300 years. Detailed meteorological, hydrological, and glaciological measurements will also be made and placed in the context of historical measurement in the area doc199 none CTS- P.N. Kumta, Carnegie-Mellon University The objectives is to develop a new alkoxy hydrazine sol-gel (HSG) process in order to obtain nanocrystalline TiN with controlled structure, identify the mechanisms that govern the transformation of the amorphous precursors forming nanocrystalline nitrides, understand the nucleation and growth processes contributing to the high surface area of the microstructure, and explore the potential application to supercapacitors . The work includes a series of spectroscopic and structural investigations, synthesis protocols, and reaction pathways. Understanding the mechanisms contributing to the high surface area and the role of particle size, shape and orientation on the electrical capacity characteristics will be a main outcome. The research project will be carried out in collaboration with research groups at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories and Entek International. If successful, the project will have impact on understanding synthesis and operation of supercapacitors , microstructural evolution of a group of nanocrystalline materials, chemical routes to advanced materials, and electrochemistry doc200 none This award supports a workshop that focuses on the social and organizational aspects of geographically and functionally distributed work. There is a perception among leading researchers that technological and economic change during the past five years has lead to substantial change in the way that Americans work and that we have little overall understanding of the long-term implications of these changes. Workers are increasingly mobile, use a variety of technologies to connect with their colleagues and have to contend with a variety of complex work arrangements that might include: long-distance commuting; working on teams where members are distributed geographically; extensive travel; and multi-organizational work (e.g., due to joint ventures, mergers, consulting, outsourcing, etc.) With more advanced computing and telecommunications technologies, such as Internet 2, on the horizon, even more significant changes are envisioned. Much new research is being conducted by a variety of researchers from psychology, sociology, anthropology, information science, computer science, industrial engineering and history. Due to the diverse backgrounds, venues for publication and academic peer groups, there have been few opportunities for these researchers to meet and share their research studies and perspectives. This workshop will bring the key researchers from these various disciplines together and will result in a web site and book where the research will be collected. Overall, the workshop will contribute to the establishment of a research agenda for this important line of work doc201 none In recent years, there has been a growing national awareness that the fast-paced development and deployment of information technology can transform society in paradoxical and or unintended ways. There is general agreement that more research is needed to identify, understand, anticipate, and address the scope and trajectory of these changes. One new and promising approach is to better understand how the design of information technologies can be linked to social outcomes. Instead of assuming that the design of information technologies is a simple engineering feat whereby value-neutral systems specifications are produced and then - given sufficient time, money and skilled labor - achieved in a particular artifact, the design process is better understood as one where various stakeholders can have conflicting goals and priorities and where trade-offs are constantly balanced. In addition, designers often have implicit (and sometimes incorrect) assumptions about users and how they will use a particular artifact. As a consequence, a variety of social values can come to be embodied in artifacts, resulting in both intended and unintended consequences. To begin to understand how this works in practice and how designers of IT can become more sensitive to their role in fostering certain outcomes, more interest in doing this kind of research needs to be generated. This proposed workshop on Value-Sensitive Design intends to: 1) further develop and refine a research agenda; and 2) stimulate research by cultivating a broad community of researchers. To insure that multiple perspectives and communities are represented, multi-disciplinary research teams (often faculty and graduate students) will be identified by the organizers and its steering committee and invited. Each of four broad knowledge areas will be included - designers, humanists, social scientists and technologists doc202 none Transient luminous events (TLEs) such as red sprites, blue jets, and elves are newly discovered phenomena that link tropospheric electrical activity with the stratosphere and mesosphere. These phenomena are almost always associated with positive cloud-to-ground lightning, which occurs less frequently than negatively charged lightning. Two major storm types are known to produce positive lightning, namely supercell storms and nocturnal mesoscale convective systems. The STEPS project (SevereThunderstorm Electrification and Precipitation Study), conducted in western Kansas in the early summer of , will provide extensive information on these storm types, including dual-Doppler and polarimetric radar observations, aircraft microphysical measurements, high-resolution lightning maps, and balloon-borne measurements of the electrical field. This research project contributes to STEPS by documenting and characterizing TLEs above the storms using optical, acoustical, and radio methods. The goal is to determine the physical differences between storms that produce TLEs and those that do not. The data will also be used to determine to what extent Schumann resonance measurements at sites far away can detect sprites and elves doc203 none J. Domaradzki, University of Southern California Large Eddy Simulations (LES) provide an important base of support for the computational engineering descriptions of turbulent flows. That is, they provide a means to incorporate more physical reality into the engineering computations than are offered by other (eg. RANS) methods. The PI is recognized as one who has made original and creative contributions to the essential aspect of LES computations: the sub-grid scale model. He has named this model: Sub Grid Scale Estimation (SSE). He will, with this award, extend the identified types of flows for which his SSE model is applicable and, in the process, refine it to better undergrid these technologically important computations doc204 none SES 00- - Michael E. Gorman (University of Virginia) Workshop on Cognitive Studies of Science these include the Society for Social Studies of Science, the Cognitive Science Society, the History of Science Society, the Society for History of Technology, and the Philosophy of Science Association. No one belongs to all of these groups, and none attends all of the relevant society meetings. As a result, only a small portion of those interested in fine-grained cognitive studies of science and technology will meet and interact any one of these meetings. In addition, this disciplinary diversity, although intellectually exciting, places an especially heavy burden on students and young scholars. The Workshop is designed to prove especially beneficial to this precise group. No previous Conference or Workshop has addressed Cognitive Studies of Science and Techmology in precisely the manner that this Workshop will. For example, a NSF-funded workshop at the University of Minnesota on cognitive models of science focused almost entirely on theoretical explanations of scientific cognition. The Workshop supported by this award will build on the success of this early Workshop but will focus more on scientific discovery than hypothesis testing and will include the invention of new technologies as a major focus. The Workshop will emphasize the need to apply existing findings to detailed case studies of actual cognition. While the earlier Workshop focused on implications for philosophy, one goal of this Workshop is to contribute to developing a multidisciplinary agenda, consistent with the NSF s emphasis on crosscutting programs doc205 none Principal Investigator: Jay M. Pasachoff, Williams College The investigators will test proposed mechanisms to explain the heating of the solar corona via weakly compressive magnetohydrodynamic waves. The main effort is to use high time resolution observations of the solar corona taken during total eclipses to explore the spatial and temporal spectra of coronal oscillations in order to distinguish standing and propagating waves. In the eclipse, observations were coordinated with the TRACE spacecraft, which has higher spatial, but lower temporal resolution. Observations will also be conducted during the eclipse in Africa. This eclipse will occur near the peak of the solar activity cycle, making more loops, and brighter loops, than usual available for study. The investigators will also use their data to map the temperature of the solar corona by studying ratios of highly calibrated CCD images of the corona at ultraviolet wavelengths. In a third project, by arrangement with the EIT and LASCO groups on the SOHO spacecraft, the investigators have obtained data to match the field and passband of the now-defunct LASCO C1 coronagraph. These data permit an important extension of the previous correlative studies using the EIT and LASCO instruments doc206 none This proposal is a well-defined example of collaborative efforts between engineers and economists in the field of competitive electric power industry. This collaboration is essential for development of necessary understanding and computer tools for this industry. More specifically, the proposal deals with a development of a general framework that integrates game-theoretic aspects of power markets with the operational physical constraint of electric power systems. The object is to develop an analytical framework for studying the design, functioning and performance of alternative market mechanisms, considering the game theoretic aspects of those markets subject to the unique physical constraints of the system. Simulation tools will be developed and utilized to illustrate the performance of various market designs, rule specifications, regulatory policies, and strategic behavior of the various players. A significant tradeoff is addressed, that between model complexity and study of multifarious solution strategies. Unlike most economic studies, the former is preferred to the latter, as being more realistic and informative in the present context doc207 none Indeck It is predicted that spin electronics has the potential to fill many of the electronics needs for the 2lst century. Spin electronics is viewed as one of the next strategic industries and may be able to meet much of the storage demands for information technology. The advantages of magnetic devices would be increased data processing speed and decreased electric power consumption compared to semiconductor devices. The market is large (over $50 billion annually) and breakthroughs are needed to create such magnetic devices. To examine the area this workshop is organized to engage researchers and technologists from industry, academia, and national labs in a two-day, invited workshop to present results, discuss issues associated with the underpinnings of the current technology, their limits and challenges, and examine solutions. The focus of the discussions will be on spin electronics as a solution for information storage. The participants will be assessing technology to identify future directions of research, advance the rate of research, provide greater visibility, identify future application trends, establish short term needs and project long term goals, integrate research and education, and promote university industry government partnerships in this area of technology. The workshop will identify technological challenges and opportunities and provide the NSF and the scientific community with a set of recommendations for future efforts and a vision of the future for spin electronics. This document will be available to all participants, their organizations, the NSF, and other industry and government scientists and policymakers doc208 none Davis This research project is conducted under the auspices of the National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP). It addresses a major challenge in biological oceanography, which is the development of predictive capability. Pressing issues such as fishery yields, pollutant transfer, carbon cycling, and sound and light transmission in the ocean all require accurate predictions. The vast majority of marine species are planktonic during at least a portion of their lives and therefore have populations that grow and die while being transported by ocean currents. Episodic factors such as storms, water mass interactions, and predator-prey patchiness are a major source of variability in marine populations. At present, our predictive capability is limited by the sparseness of data and the inability to sample with adequate time and space resolution to capture episodic features that control population size. Recent technological advancements in automated plankton identification (via optical imaging) and in design of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) make it plausible to sample plankton in association with other environmental variables (e.g. temperature, salinity, light, nutrients, fluorescence, currents) autonomously with high resolution in both time and space. Ultimately, networks of AUVs equipped with plankton imaging systems deployed in specific regions of the world ocean can be envisioned to provide quasi-synoptic high-resolution data in time and space. This project will merge plankton-imaging technology with AUV technology by incorporating the Video Plankton Recorder (VPR) into the REMUS AUV. The VPR is an underwater video microscope that images plankton and other particulate matter in the size range of 100 microns to 2 centimeters. The REMUS AUV is designed to carry a payload of scientific instrumentation on pre-programmed missions using a combination of long and ultra-short baseline navigation. With up to 6 hours of endurance using rechargeable lead acid batteries or 18 hours from primary lithium cells, REMUS is well suited for repetitive space time data sampling. The VPR design will be made modular such that generic use in other AUVs will be possible. This initial design will allow for on-board real time compression and storage of digitized video using wavelet compression hardware. The compressed video then will be uploaded for analysis with an automated image processing system. The new VPR-REMUS system will be tested in a variety of habitats using Eulerian and Lagrangian sampling methods to automatically quantify distribution patterns of plankton taxa, fluorescence, hydrography, and currents doc209 none DAY The Science Museum of Minnesota is producing a 40-minute large format film on the life work of Dr. Jane Goodall. Much of the film will be shot at Goodall s principal research site, Gombe National Park in Tanzania and will focus primarily on the chimpanzees she has studied. While reviewing the four decades of Dr. Goodall s research with the chimpanzees, the film also will explore the work of Elizabeth Vinson, a young researcher who is continuing Dr. Goodall s research. Vinson is the first person at Gombe to quantify measures of individual chip difference in tool using skill and techniques and to examine how social dynamics affect the development of this behavior in young chimps. Featuring Vinson s work contributes to the film in a number of ways. It connects Goodall s milestone observation of non-human animal use of tools to a real, contemporary and substantive field project. It also will enable the filmmakers to tell the story of a new generation of researcher. The film and the accompanying educational materials will convey substantive science and stress the importance of long-term scientific field studies. An array of educational materials and programs will be created to support and build on the learning experience from the film. These include: Freestanding kiosk exhibits for display at museums that lease the film. These small exhibits will highlight real artifacts and specimens, including chimp tools and field notes from Dr. Goodall s work. Technology at the kiosks will feature video sequences of chimp behavior and enable visitors to access the project s online activities. A Discovering Chimps website will enable users to meet the chimps, take a Gombe virtual tour, learn about Gombe researchers and to find related resources - both on and offline. An educator leadership institute will be a help prior to the release of the film to train educators from twenty museums how to make the most effective use of the film and outreach material. Women-in-Science classes for children and parents will be designed and offered by both the Science Museum of Minnesota and Discovery Place in Charlotte, NC. The design of these classes will be available to other museums that lease the film doc210 none Wikelski This award supports six graduate students and two senior faculty to collaborate with groups at the Max Planck Research Centers for Ornithology in Seewiesen and Andechs, Germany. The research comprises three main projects: a broad-scale comparison of physiological traits between several bird species that live in the New World tropical zone, a detailed analysis of one species (Saxicola torquata) that occupies many Old World habitats from the equator to the arctic circle, and an effort to understand the energetics of migration of birds between summer and winter habitats. The foreign sites offer a state-of-the-art wind tunnel for energy measurements of birds in flight, laboratory-accustomed birds from four geographically different habitats, unique data sets, hybrid species, and life history data doc211 none The primary objective of the proposed work is to understand how climatological stationary waves are maintained in the AMIP-2 participating GCMs and how stationary waves respond to greenhouse gas increases in the atmosphere. A secondary objective is to understand the linkage between the trend in the Arctic Oscillation(AO) which is the leading mode of the month-to-month variability in Northern Hemisphere sea level pressure, and the stationary wave changes in response to green house gas increases. The research is motivated by the fact that stationary waves determine regional climate conditions and are hence a key determinant of regional climate change. Different GCMs tend to give inconsistent regional climate simulations and regional climate predictions. These differences arise primarily because of differences in model physical parameterizations, in particular the convective parameterization schemes. The work is important because it will lead to better understanding into how best to utilize information provided by GCM experiments using greenhouse gas forcing doc212 none FLEISCHER The Materials Research Society will develop Materials MicroWorld. This will be a nationally traveling exhibition that promotes public understanding of basic scientific principles, issues, and trends in materials research. Materials MicroWorld will be developed in two exhibit versions, -sq.ft. and - sq.ft., to serve large and small science centers nationwide. Accompanying educational materials and training videos will enable each museum to tailor exhibit-related programming to suit the needs of audiences and the capabilities of staff. An electronic Best of Materials Science Activities booklet will be developed for publication on the Materials Research Society website to deepen understanding of exhibit concepts and provide parents and educators with a variety of explorations on materials science that can be safely conducted at home or in school doc213 none GOUDY The Montshire Museum of Science, on behalf of the TEAMS Collaborative, will develop TEAMS Traveling Exhibit Collaborative. Four charter members of the TEAMS collaborative, a partnership that includes the Monthshire Museum of Science, Norwich, VT; the Catawba Science Center, Hickory, NC; the ScienCenter, Ithaca, NY; and the Discovery Center Museum, Rockford, IL, request funding to expand the collaborative by incorporating three new museum partners. They will develop, evaluate, and produce two copies each of four -square foot traveling exhibitions. Each TEAMS exhibition will be accompanied by maintenance manuals, teacher s guides, and program materials for community science events. Three charter museums will mentor the three new museum members, which include the Health Adventure in Asheville, NC; the Rochester Museum and Science Center in Rochester, NY; and the Family Museum of Arts and Science in Bettendorf, IA. The four new exhibit topics being proposed by the collaborative are Sound Slices, The Body as a Machine, The Physics of Motion, and The Science of Sports doc214 none The goal of this research project is to understand better the dynamics of severe convective storms and tornadoes. Mobile Doppler radar data sets collected in tornadoes will be analyzed in detail and a small, focussed field experiment will be conducted to collect and analyze additional data in order to obtain a better statistical characterization of tornadoes and their environment. The main thrust of this effort will be to estimate wind speeds near the ground in tornadoes, determine the three-dimensional wind field in tornadoes, determine why tornadoes form and dissipate and find out why some supercell storms produce tornadoes, while others do not. Additionally, the Principal Investigator will collect pilot dual-wavelength radar data this will help in development of techniques to map the liquid water and drop size distribution fields in severe storms. Successful completion of this research will lead to better conceptual models of tornadoes and tornado genesis and eventually lead to more accurate predictions doc215 none METZNER Jim Metzner Productions is developing a means to broaden and deepen the reach and impact of the Pulse of the Planet, the short-format science and nature radio series that is currently carried on approximately 300 stations. The plans are to develop and broadcast a Spanish-language version of the series and to continue production and increase the carriage of the short-format programs. In addition to broadcast radio, the series also will be available in RealAudio on the National Geographic Web site, and the project has its own Web site doc216 none Greene The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Lesley H. Greene with support for twenty-four months to work with Dr. Christina Redfield at Oxford University on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Studies of protein folding. The protein folding question is the second-half of the genetic code, and it remains unresolved. This project postulates that a discrete group of evolutionarily conserved residues were specifically selected for and maintained throughout evolution specifically to facilitate correct folding in relevant biological time. The PI, Dr. Redfield and her group will use nuclear magnetic resonance to study the dynamic process of protein folding at atomic resolution. They will examine each stage of folding in vitro. They predict that evolutionarily conserved regions in proteins become structured on a faster folding time-scale than nonconserved regions. The proposed studies will test the prediction and provide with atomic resolution a window to view the folding process and further the boundaries of our current knowledge. Dr. Redfield is an expert spectroscopist. This experience will also involve her collaborators: Professor C. M. Dobson, Dr. Carol Robinson, Dr. Lorna Smith, Dr. P. J. Hore and Dr. J. Boyd of Oxford Centre for Molecular Sciences doc217 none SHUMWAY Travelers and Hitchhikers: Links from Land to Sea is a 5,000 sq. ft. exhibit which will be housed at the New England Aquarium, with two additional 1,200-4,800 sq. ft. modules produced for exhibition at participating consortium and partnering venues. The exhibit will invite visitors to travel with sea turtles, frogs, and fish as they tell their stories of journeys through an interconnected mosaic of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine habitats. A fourth module will use aliens, or introduced exotic species, to illustrate the disruption caused when humans make inappropriate connections across habitats. The underlying theme and message for the visitor is the connection between aquatic biodiversity and their own everyday lives. The animals and the four (4) modules have been chosen to emphasize a different aspect of these interconnections among rivers, land, and sea. The traveling version can either stand alone as one (1) module telling one story or be installed with all four (4) in combination. Sea turtles will emphasize land to sea, the frogs from water to land, and the immersive environment of the fish will allow the visitor to experience the physical connections from stream to sea. Finally, the introduced species module will illustrate how ecosystems can become fragile and broken due to human action. It is expected that over 2,000,000 visitors will be informed of aquatic biodiversity through this exhibit. In addition, activity carts and educator resource kits will be produced to further enhance the message of biodiversity conservation to all audiences doc218 none ZORFASS ScienceQuest is an innovative program created by the Education Development Center that fosters an interest in science and technology among adolescents ages 10-14. This program builds on the successful ThinkQuest model, in which small teams of 2-3 students work with adult coaches to research subjects of interest and share their knowledge through the creation of websites. ScienceQuest teams focus on science topics and are housed in HUD Neighborhood Network technology centers, located in communities with HUD-assisted or insured housing residents. Participants include individuals with and without disabilities from low-income urban areas. Students select a science topic and research it using online resources, hands-on experiments and visits to museums and science centers. Coaches such as scientists, teachers, museum staff and other role models, as well as on-line scientists, provide assistance by setting goals, devising an action plan and identifying appropriate resources. The I-Search model, a four-step strategy used to direct student inquiry, is used to guide investigations and aid in content acquisition. Once completed, websites are mounted on the ThinkQuest server. Parental participation is encouraged throughout the process. ScienceQuest will be piloted in the greater Boston area in year one, and disseminated to 75 Neighborhood Network sites throughout the country in years two and three of the grant. Each site may have one or more teams. With more than 500 Neighborhood Networks in place, ScienceQuest has the potential for widespread dissemination doc219 none HIRSHON The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is developing, producing and testing a pilot phase for an after school program designed to engage children 9-12 years old in recreational science education. The materials will provide a structured yet flexible daily experience aligned with age-appropriate learning goals. Individuals and teams of children engage in the program by registering on-line, following the developing story line, and performing science activities on and off line. The activities will remain available on the Internet for continued use by after school programs, home schools, small teams of children and individuals working independently doc220 none MCGHEE WGBH is producing a three-hour television series about the scientific quest for a unified set of laws governing the universe. The programs, to be broadcast as part of the on-going NOVA series, will place special emphasis on the new development in physics known as string theory. Inspired by Columbia University physicist Brian Greene s best-selling book of the same name, The Elegant Universe will explore the ways in which our understanding of matter and forces, space and time have shifted over the years, most recently with the emergence of string theory in the s and its resurgence in the last five years. Greene will play a prominent role in the series, both on camera and as a consultant helping the producers shape the programs. The series, planned for broadcast in the fall of , will communicate critical scientific concepts through filmed experiments, carefully crafted explanations, and the latest in computer animation. Interviews with scientists and historians, re-creations of key breakthroughs in the history of science, and sequences featuring physicists working on today s most pressing problems will allow viewers to share in the excitement of scientific discovery. Outreach material will be developed for the public and for teachers. NOVA Online will produce a rich companion Web site to allow viewers whose interest is piqued by the series to enhance their learning in a number of ways, including interactive animations of famous experiments and essays that go deeper into subjects than the programs could doc221 none APSELL WGBH is producing a two-hour NOVA special that will examine the scientific undertaking to decipher all three billion letters of the human genetic code. The program will take viewers inside the labs where this effort is going on and will examine the difficult decisions that are arising from our growing understanding of the human genome. The central narrative thread in The Human Blueprint is the extraordinary race now going on between two teams striving to be the first to read, or sequence, the human genome. On one side is the official Human Genome Project, funded by the federal government and coordinated by the National Human Genome Research Institute; on the other side is private industry, in the form of a well-financed company run by a biologist with a long track record of finding quicker, cheaper ways to plumb the secrets of the genetic code. To support the extended use of the series, The Human Blueprint will be featured in the NOVA teachers guide and will be the subject of an enhanced Web sit at NOVA Online. The Executive Producer for the programs will be Paula Apsell, Executive Producer for NOVA, and the series will be produced by Elizabeth Arledge who has produced science programming for WGBH, WNET and CBS News. Dr. Joseph Levine will serve as science consultant to The Human Blueprint and will work with the producer to plan program research, suggest sequence possibilities, review program treatments and critique the film at early stages. Dr. Levine has a Ph.D. in Biology from Harvard University and served as the science editor for the WGBH series The Secret of Life. Advisors to the series include: W. French Anderson, Professor of Biochemistry and Pediatrics and the Director of Gene Therapy Laboratories at the University of Southern California School of Medicine David Baltimore, President of the and Chairman of the NIH AIDS Vaccine Research Committee Paul Berg, Director of the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Research at Stanford University Robin Blatt, Founder of the Genetic Resource at the Massachusetts Health Research Institute David Blumenthal, Director of the Institute for Health Policy and Professor of Medicine and Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital Robert Cook-Deegan, Director of the National Cancer Policy Board, Institute of Medicine and the Commission on Life Sciences of the National Academy of Sciences Ronald G. Crystal, Director of the Gene Therapy Core facility at Cornell University Medical College Georgia M. Dunston, Professor of Microbiology and Acting Director of the National Human Genome Center at Howard University Philip R. Reilly, Executive Director of the Shriver Center for Mental Retardation Lydia Villa-Komaroff, Vice President of Research and Professor of Neurology at Northwestern University doc222 none The author uses a variety of approaches to examine how an environment in which risk premiums vary through time and or small sample problems (peso problems) exist can be used to explain many asset pricing anomalies. Three separate projects focussing on financial markets are planned. The first two projects primarily focus on the apparent predictability of (international) asset returns. In one project, joint with Robert Hodrick, the PI will investigate whether or not statistical inference problems can account for the predictability in exchange rate and bond markets. To work on the Expectations Hypothesis, they will develop a novel methodology to estimate a statistical model imposing the non-linear Expectations Hypothesis null. This method can be used to examine alternative, potentially better behaved tests of the hypothesis, and eventually lead to improved statistical inference in other applications as well. In a second project, joint with Steve Grenadier, the author provides a stochastic valuation model for bond and stock returns that integrates three different pricing traditions (term structure factor models, present value models, and consumption based asset pricing) in a tractable framework. An application of the general model examines the effect of changes in dividend growth uncertainty on equity prices, and investigates whether time-variation in this uncertainty can generate the asymmetric return volatility patterns that are observed in the data. The third proposed project groups a number of studies focussing on regime-switching models, which constitute natural models to examine peso problems. Two studies focus on interest rate dynamics, including one study attempting to detect whether regime switches in interest rates are caused by regimes in (expected) inflation or by regimes in real rates. Another project focuses on the joint behavior of interest rates and exchange rates in the European Monetary System (EMS). The EMS constitutes a natural laboratory for the study of peso problems because of its many speculative crises and accompanying large interest rate and exchange rate movements. The author also applies regime switching models to equity markets to examine two puzzles in portfolio choice: the under-investment of investors in equity markets, and the under-investment in international assets -- the home bias. The PI postulates that these may be explained by a fear of market crashes, which is particularly acute when investors exhibit disappointment aversion. Finally, the author uses a novel structural break methodology in studying the market integration process in emerging markets doc223 none Previous research in the Bighorn Basin has provided tantalizing evidence suggesting a relationship between biotic change and shifts in climate at the time of the Paleocene Eocene boundary and two early Eocene time periods, but poor resolution of critical parts of the record renders the correlation inconclusive. Using a combination of approaches -magnetostratigraphy, physical stratigraphy, paleosols, and mammalian faunas- this project will developed a high- resolution chonostratigraphy and provide the framework for correlating upper Paleocene- lower Eocene sections across the basin, and for establishing whether regional event can be correlated with the marine record. The Bighorn Basin is possibly the best localities globally where sediments recording coeval changes in climate, mammalian faunas, and floras at the Paleocene Eocene boundary and two early Eocene intervals have been preserved. The proposed work is essential for future research seeking to establish the relationship between biotic and climate changes globally during the early Tertiary interval of Greenhouse conditions doc224 none Schulz 00- This project will examine the potential of plant elemental nutrient content, specifically the ratios of Carbon to Nitrogen to Phosphorus (C:N:P) to cause ecological bottlenecks for susceptible life stages of herbivores. This study is designed to examine a predicted life history constraint posed by the C:N:P content of phytoplankton on aquatic herbivores. Specifically, the study will address the questions: (1) Do the differing nutritional contents of various copepod life stages result in different C:N:P requirements during the life spans of these organisms, and are stages requiring high phosphorus content food a potential bottleneck in the development of copepod populations?; and (2) Can selective feeding by copepods, superior to that of other planktonic taxa, allow these organisms to consume high quality food particles and mitigate nutrient imbalances? Results will be broadly applicable in a biogeographic sense (copepods are very cosmopolitan, inhabiting arctic, temperate, and tropical lakes, as well as oceans) and in a life history comparison with other organisms, such as insects, for which food quality has been incorporated into optimal foraging models doc225 none BARTLETT The Children s Museum of Indianapolis will develop a 6,000-sq. ft. traveling exhibition about bones, helping children and adults learn about the science of bones, maintenance of healthy bone structures and the cultural and artistic uses of bones. Also, the exhibition will help inform upper elementary and middle school audiences of career possibilities in science, further an understanding of bones as revealed through modern technology and promote understanding of the skeletal system. A Web site, teacher workshops, kits and other materials and events will support learning through this exhibition doc226 none CRANE The Mount Washington Observatory is expanding the daily, nationally broadcast radio program, The Weather Notebook. The two-minute programs inform an estimated 2.5 million weekly listeners about the science underlying weather. During this three-year phase of the project, the project will broaden the range of science content by deepening the connections of weather and climate with other scientific disciplines, especially earth systems science. The project also hopes to double the size of the listening audience by increasing the number of stations carrying the series. In addition, they will produce Spanish-language versions of the programs and distribute them through the Hispanic Radio Network. In response to listeners requests for longer programs, the project will produce 20 to 30 approximately five-minute modules that will be broadcast in existing radio series such as Marketplace and The Cultivated Gardener. Ancillary educational materials will be provided for students, teachers, families and others interested in further learning about topics included in the broadcast programs doc227 none The Dublin Core metadata process began in and has brought together a multidisciplinary spectrum of practitioners and theoreticians to address issues related to standards for resource description of electronic resources on the internet. Progress in metadata definition and standards adoption is critical to building large scale, distributed digital libraries. Metadata is essential to providing contextual data through which information objects gain meaning and usability. The Dublin Core metadata process has been particularly successful in defining the metadata agenda and building international consensus. It has spawned projects incorporating its basic element sets in about 25 countries, covering numerous disciplinary subject materials doc228 none The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative proposes to develop tools and techniques leading to the systematic digital documentation and new electronic publication of cuneiform sources. Despite the 150 years that have passed since first decipherment of cuneiform many basic research tools remain to be developed that will allow this material to be studied in depth by specialists and generally made available to the public. This project, conducted in close collaboration with a number of organizations (including the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the California Digital Library) will: Create virtual archives of widely dispersed early cuneiform tablets Implement an integrative platform of data presentation combining raster, vector and 3D imaging with text translation and markup Establish for collaborating museums a lasting archive procedure for fragile and often decaying collection of cuneiform records The project s dataset will be built using platform-independent text encoding and markup conventions and linked to accurate, high-resolution images. Typologies and extensive glossaries of technical terms will be included, later supplemented by linguistic tools for accessing the primary sources by non-specialists doc229 none Diebold This award to Columbia University will provide instrumentation for ocean sciences research for use on R V Ewing, a research vessel operated by the university s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. Specific instrumentation to be acquired includes a set of eight kits for extended life for seismic sources (airguns), and one new high-speed sound source (GI gun). The shared-use instrumentation supported here will assist marine scientists conduct studies throughout the world ocean during and future years doc230 none MCCREEDY Parent Partners in School Science (PPSS) is a partnership project between The Franklin Institute and the Philadelphia School District. This is a three and one-half year program which will provide a pivotal role for the informal science learning center to be a facilitator in parental support of K-4 school instruction in science. The PPSS program will involve teachers, families and children in grades K-2 the first year, grades 1-3 the next, and finally grades 2-4 in the third year. The incorporation of the national science standards and working with Home and School Associations (HSA) in the area schools, the program will impact over children, parents and 45 educators participating over the life of the project. There are several goals and elements in the program. This will certainly demonstrate how an informal science center supports learning and it is also hoped to become a model for effective parent-teacher and parent-child collaboration to support learning. There will be Exploration Cards developed, which are at-home schince challenges for families, Discovery Days that are museum-based days of science inquiry using the yearly theme, Parent Teacher Workshops at the museum, and finally a Science Celebration which is a showcase of participants year-long achievements via an exhibit to be displayed at The Franklin Institute for a month, then traveling the exhibit to participating schools. The project s structure, disseminination acitivites and products are designed for national application and as a model for use in both formal and informal education communities. It is hoped the program will offer new opportunities for science center methology and pratice to provide direct support for the school agenda in science doc231 none Gray This is an award to support exploratory research on the ways in which metal oxide surfaces mediate the interactions between ionizing radiation and organic compounds particularly those with large oxidation-reduction potentials such as hexachlorobenzene. Specific objectives are to determine how oxide surfaces affect reaction rates induced by ionizing radiation and to relate band energy of metal oxides to surface adsorption and rate of chemical transformations that are induced by ionizing radiation. The investigator also plans on applying knowledge gained in the initial phases of this project to explore its application for decontamination of liquids and solid materials used in production processes for potential reuse in production and in determining the feasibility of radiation-induced metal oxide catalysis in accelerating radiolysis for decontamination of contaminated soils and solutions. The proposal leading to this award was submitted to NSF under the Special Guidelines for an SGER (Small Grant for Exploratory Research) in the NSF Grant Proposal Guide (NSF 00-2). Results of this research are expected to provide the basis for further research on the potential for use of radiolysis in decontamination of contaminated soils and sediments doc232 none How do hierarchical systems, such as governments and corporations, respond to change? Is there a tendency for such systems to become unresponsive to their envi-ronment? What are the factors determining the rigidity of such systems? To address these questions, this project represents a social system as a set of ordered levels. At each level is a population of agents and associated with an agent is a behavioral rule. In each period, agents observe the realization of a stochastic environment and choose an ac-tion according to their rule. Two dynamics determine the rules deployed by agents in the system. First, a selection (or promotion) dynamic determines which agents advance to higher levels in the hierarchy and thus affects the population mix of rules at high levels. Second, a social learning dynamic determines the rules that agents adopt when they enter the system. New agents seek to imitate high-ranking (that is, successful) agents by trying to infer the rule they used from their historical record. These two dynamics describe a feedback system defined on the space of behavioral rules: the history of high-ranking agents determines the rules adopted by new agents, selection then operates on this cohort to generate a new set of high-ranking agents who influences the next generation of new agents. Analysis conducted under NSF grant characterized the set of dynamically stable outcomes and explored their dependence on features of the internal structure (for example, the number of levels in the hierarchy) and the external structure (for example, the volatility of the environment). Initially, the space of behavioral rules over which evolution took place included rules that differed in their responsiveness to the environment. In the current project, the space is redefined to allow rules to differ in what they are responsive to. One rule - the individual learning rule - has an agent choose that action which is best based upon their own (noisy) signal of the environment. A second rule - the social learning rule - has an agent choose that action that most agents chose in the previous period. Organizational inertia might then emerge when most agents use a social learning rule. A second modification of previous work is to endogenize what it means to perform well. In the context of a corporation, agents do not advance based on some fixed and exogenous notion of performance (such as profit) but rather on the subjective evaluation of higher-ranking agents. If, depending on their traits, different agents interpret performance in different ways then performance is itself endogenous as the traits of higher-level agents are the product of past selection. This research embodies this feature of the selection process to provide a richer description of dynamics within a hierarchical society doc233 none Mary L. Soffa University of Pittsburgh Prof. Soffa has been highly successful in personally mentoring graduate students. Of Prof. Soffa s sixteen graduated Ph.D. students, 50% are women. Of her master s degree students, twenty-four (53%) are women, one is African American, and one is physically disabled. She currently advises six doctoral students including two women. Among her mentees is a Swedish female that was the first woman to receive a doctorate in computer science in Sweden. Among her graduates, eleven have received prestigious pre-doctoral fellowships, two are full professors, three are associate professors, two are assistant professors, and one has received the NSF Young Investigator Award. While serving as Dean of Graduate Studies, she implemented an innovative program to recruit under-represented students that increased their number by 100% in four years doc234 none This is a collaborative project whose principal objective is to develop an improved chronology of the southern (terrestrial) margin of the Scandinavian Ice Sheet (SIS) during the last glaciation in order to compare the history of this margin with that of the western margin of the SIS, with other ice sheets, and with other records of climate change in order to further evaluate the relationship between ice-margin fluctuations and climate change. The project will construct a chronology by dating (1) key organic-bearing units by AMS radiocarbon and (2) erratic boulders on moraine surfaces using cosmogenic nuclides (10Be and 26Al). Prominent recessional moraines delimit five to six retreat phases following the late Weichselian maximum at about 18,000 yr B.P., clearly suggesting a strong millennial-scale signal (five to six moraine building events between 18,000 and 10,000 yr B.P). However, dating control constraining the age of retreat phases along the southern SIS margin is all but lacking. The project will investigate (i) the age of the nonglacial interval before advance of the southern SIS margin to its last glacial maximum position, (ii) the age that the southern margin reached its last glacial maximum, and (iii) the area(s) of recessional phases of the southern margin that are prominently recorded by recessional moraines. The project will focus on deposits and landforms of the SIS in Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Belarus, and Russia doc235 none Under this US-Brazil-Canada dissertation enhancement research award, Sarah M. Stai, under the sponsorship of William A. Searcy of the University of Miami, will work with Regina H. F. Macedo of the University of Brasilia in Brazil and Frank Rohwer at the Delta Waterfowl and Wetlands Research Station in Portage la Prairie in Canada. They will study the promiscuity and sperm competition in Muscovy ducks. This project has three objectives: 1) to characterize male-female associative patterns through behavioral observations and to estimate the number of mates through DNA analysis; 2) to explore why this species is an exception to the rule of monogamy in waterfowl through cost-benefit analysis, a comparative approach, and hypothesis testing; and 3) to test the passive sperm loss model, a proposed mechanism for sperm competition. The elucidation of the adaptive significance of promiscuity and an ability to predict the outcome of sperm competition will lead to a better understanding of Muscovy duck reproductive strategies and of mating system evolution in waterfowl. The field research will be done in Brazil and the captive research will be done in Canada. This project will provide benefits to research, teaching, and wildlife management and conservation doc236 none This US-Brazil award provides support for cooperative research between Dr. Kenneth Mopper, Washington State University, and Dr. Armando A. H. Vieira of Federal University of Sao Carlos in Brazil on the production and fate of algal extracellular polysaccharides in a eutrophic reservoir near Sao Paulo, Brazil. The PIs will work on an ecosystem in which large quantities of dissolved polysaccharides are produced by only a few species of cyanobacteria in a heavily eutrophied reservoir. The main goals are to investigate the ecological functions and environmental implications of the microalgal extracellular polysaccharides (EPS) that are produced in great abundance in this reservoir. The results from these studies will be used as a basis for eutrophication management and water restoration programs both in Brazil and the U.S. In addition, the PIs will train personnel and students in conventional and non-conventional limnological techniques doc237 none Under the U.S. Weather Research Program, several aspects of hurricane prediction have been identified as high priority areas of research. Better understanding and prediction of rainfall from hurricanes after they make landfall is one of these high priority areas. The major goal of this research is to understand the mechanisms that control the amount and distribution of rainfall in hurricanes after landfall. Specifically, the Principal Investigators will examine the total rain volume, the areal coverage of heavy rainfall, the symmetry of rainfall with respect to the track, and the type of rainfall (convective versus nonconvective). The presence or absence of trough interactions with the hurricane and extratropical transition of the hurricane are significant factors in the evolution of precipitation after landfall and these interactions will be included in the study. Two major methodological approaches will be employed: a climatological study of total rainfall in a large number of hurricanes in order to establish the range of possible behavior; and case studies of extreme events. Rainfall estimates will be made using existing raingauge data for the climatological study and operational Doppler radar data (WSR-88D) for the case studies. National Lightning Detection Data will be used to provide additional information about the nature of the precipitation. Successful completion of this research will lead to better understanding of precipitation processes within tropical cyclones, which eventually will result in better forecasts of post landfall flooding doc238 none P. Liu, Cornell University The reliable prediction of loads on near-shore submerged structures is a most challenging part of hydraulic engineering. This effort, with its computational development work, its allied experimental observations, and its industrial involvement is an example of the contributions that can be made in the context of the NSF GOALI program. The experiments will buttress and help guide the more generalized CFD developments. The industrial partner input will ensure that the in-depth academic contributions can be brought to a focus that will support the final applications doc239 none Ammar Description: This award is for support of a US-Egypt Workshop on Information Technology to be held in Cairo, Egypt, March 12-14, . The Egyptian co-organizer is Dr. Ayman El-Dessouki, President of the Electronics Research Institute in Cairo. The purpose of the workshop is to address some of the main topics that affect the changes taking place in the area of information technology (IT), which in turn are affecting life in most countries, including the United States and Egypt. The focus in this workshop will be on five areas: 1. Software development. 2. Evolution and trends in e-business. 3. Tele-computing for education and medicine. 4. Internet and information networking. and 5. Mobile satellite communications. The workshop participants will contribute to the proceedings, which will highlight areas of research where collaboration would be mutually beneficial. Scope: This award will support a US-Egypt workshop in an area that is taking on increasing importance in most developing countries. It has assumed a central place in the developmental efforts in Egypt. The area is also in the middle of phenomenal expansion in the United States. There are associated issues such as: the global market for the information sector, the pervasive impact on the society in all sectors of activity, the effect on balance of trade for mature economies and for developing countries, and the effect on employment patterns. The US organizer is a well-known computer scientist with impressive credentials who is also quite familiar with the working scientific community in this field in Egypt. The Egyptian organizer is the president of the main governmental research organization dealing with this area. Participants are selected on the US side and on the Egyptian side to represent academia, governmental laboratories and private sector researchers. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting US-foreign scientific collaboration in areas of mutual benefit. Funding for this project is provided by the Division of International Programs through the US-Egypt Joint Fund program, and by the Division of Electrical and Communications Systems, the Division of Computer-Communication Research, the Division of Experimental and Integrative Activities, and the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems doc240 none TERC, Mass Networks Education Partnership, and Massachusetts Department of Education Youth Tech Entrepreneurs are hosting a first annual Students as Technology Leaders national conference in October . The goal of the conference is to promote national awareness and sharing of diverse models and best practices for information technology (IT) teaching and learning. The weekend format includes keynote speakers from industry, panel discussions, industry exhibits, and the showcasing of exemplary IT programs. The project s goal is to identify and encourage national awareness and to accelerate the implementation of exemplary IT student leadership and service learning models that meet the following needs: engaging and motivating students, providing school technical support, promoting civic good, and ensuring the development of the IT workforce. Applications to attend the conference are being solicited from exemplary community college and high school IT programs throughout the nation. From these applications, a database of IT programs that can provide models and resources for others is being developed, and a diverse and gender-balanced group of 15 high school and 10 community college teams are being selected to showcase their programs at the conference. Outcomes include developing a database of exemplary IT program nominees and applicants, highlighting invited programs for national attention, and recognizing and inspiring approximately 250 students and teachers. Post-conference deliverables include published and videotaped proceedings, a compilation of best practices, and IT program start-up and public relations kits. NSF funds are being matched by support from IT companies doc241 none Johnson This award to Oregon State University in collaboration with University of Washington will provide support to test instrumentation for oceanographic research, specifically a seafloor drilling system, PROD, that if successful will allow sampling of sediments to depths greater than 100 meters subbottom with minimal disturbance in a variety of water depths and substrates. The system, built and operated by Benthic Geotek, Ltd., is designed to operate from a variety of multipurpose oceanographic research vessels, substantially increasing opportunities for acquisition of drilled material, which is presently accessible to most US marine researchers only via the Ocean Drilling Program drillship JOIDES Resolution. The PROD system uses fiber-optic technology to control a bottom-mounted drilling system, and it includes capability to use hydraulic piston coring, a technique to acquire samples with little disturbance in unconsolidated sediments, as well as rotary drilling, which allows penetration of harder sediments and rock. The testing supported here will be the first time the system is operated in deep water, as well as its initial operation from a US academic research vessel. Any samples obtained during the test program will be archived at Oregon State University for future investigation by interested researchers doc242 none A new ultra low temperature refrigerator, the superfluid Joule-Thomson refrigerator (SJTR), will be developed. The SJTR is a single-phase refrigerator that can be used in zero gravity as well as terrestrial environments. It is projected to provide cooling to temperatures of 0.5 Kelvin (K). The SJTR uses a cold (~1 K) superleak-bypassed piston compressor to compress the 3He component of a 3He-4He liquid mixture . In the SJTR cycle, the compressed 3He is discharged by the compressor and passed through counterflow heat exchangers to a superleak bypassed throttle. The 3He component of the mixture cools as it passes through the throttle and the fluid is used to absorb heat from a thermal load. The 3He component is warmed back up to the compressor temperature by passing back through the counterflow heat exchanger. The 3He is then recompressed in the compressor where it continues back through the cycle. The project will include the development of the cold compressor and a demonstration of the superfluid Joule- Thomson concept doc243 none Beard Crawford Sinha As exotic material accretes to a continental margin by convergent tectonics, a number of important changes in conditions occurs, some of which lead to production of magma that subsequently becomes involved in the ongoing structural development of the accretion. As tonalitic plutons are commonly generated as continental margin arcs accrete, their composition provides information about the P-T-X H2O conditions of the source region, and combined with fabric and structural data, provide constraints for the transport and emplacement processes that might lead to chemical modification of magmas as they traverse and are emplaced in the crust. The project will utilize a suite of tonalitic plutons on Revillagigedo Island in southeastern Alaska that record early stages of continental arc magmatism. Results are expected to detail and track the origin, modification and tectonic interactions of these magmas in this convergent setting doc244 none A Workshop is being planned for April on materials science of concrete to define opportunities for future on concrete using the principles and tools of materials science. The proposal requests $10,000 from NSF to support this workshop. The workshop will contribute much to the scientific, engineering, and educational activities intake area of concrete materials. It will help the research community define its research program regarding this important class of materials. It will keep concrete research directly linked to materials science. And it will open for discussion current topics in materials acting that may have application in concrete research. The overall focus of the workshop will be applications of current developments in materials science to future research in cementitious materials. Specific topics will include: surface chemistry, microscopy, imaging, computational, chemistry, spectroscopic techniques, and transport doc245 none Wohl Physical and chemical erosion processes are rarely considered in tandem. Physical erosion processes have received rigorous, quantitative treatment in surface channels where on-going research has begun to integrate studies of reach-scale processes with landscape evolution and morphology. Chemical erosion processes have received considerable attention in karst terrains, but have yet to be fully integrated into studies of surface channels. Combining studies of physical and chemical erosion is desirable and is most needed in terrains where both may be of equal importance. The latter include fluviokarst where streamflow processes and landscape evolution are intimately linked to fluvial and karst processes. Using techniques initially developed for surface channels, open channel flow will be examined in an internally drained fluviokarst basin, Buckeye Creek, in southern West Virginia. Closed conduit flow will be examined using a quantitative model developed expressly for this project. Quantitative modeling of surface and subsurface flood flows will provide direct insight into the mechanisms by which fluviokarst streams erode while simultaneously transporting insoluble sediment derived from resistant strata in the headwaters of the basin. The latter processes must diverge from those in typical surface streams due to intermittent closed conduit flow in the cave(s) and backflooding upstream of cave entrances and passage constrictions. Although backflooding has the effect of increasing head and possibly flow velocities within constrictions, flow velocities and shear stress must decline upstream, with the result being a relative decrease in physical erosion and sediment transport above some threshold. The manner by which constrictions and their affected reaches are coupled is of direct relevance to mixed alluvial-bedrock streams. In both cases, the manner by which reaches with relatively high and low stream powers form continuous profiles despite dramatic differences in transport processes and capabilities is unknown and will be studied by quantifying flow properties in each type of stream segement. Simultaneously, the relative roles of chemical and physical erosion in shaping reach-scale and basin-scale stream morphologies and profiles will be addressed by numerical estimation of the ability of the surface and cave streams to abrade, pluck, and quarry, by direct measurement of sediment transport rates, and by directs measurement of solute transport in the cave stream doc246 none Veziroglu Description: This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. T. Nejat Veziroglu, Director, Clean Energy Research Institute, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, Dr. M.H. Barakat, Solar Energy Department, the National Research Center (NRC), Cairo, Egypt, and Dr. Ahmed Fakhry, Emeritus Professor at the NRC in Cairo, Egypt. These scientists plan to conduct theoretical and experimental investigations of the assessment and optimization of the annual performance of solar photovoltaic (PV)-hydrogen (H2) energy systems. Two systems will be investigated - one with a storage system to even out the diurnal and seasonal insolation changes, and the other, with no such storage. In the theoretical part, the relations between the operational characteristics and efficiency of each system and the variables will be obtained. The results will be optimized for the most efficient solar PV Hydrogen Production System for a given set of conditions. Also a program will be generated for optimizing the cost. In the experimental investigation, a solar PV Hydrogen Production system will be operated around the year, and the results will be used to check and refine the theory. Scope: The US PI is an active investigator with extensive experience in both solar energy and hydrogen energy. The Egyptian scientist is a leader in the research on solar energy in Egypt. The topic of solar PV- Hydrogen energy development and optimization is important to developing countries as well as to the United States. Egypt has a serious problem with air pollution as it expands its economy to meet the needs of a growing population, and is seeking new and clean means for energy generation. This project is designed to address that need. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc247 none In this US-Argentina dissertation enhancement research award, Mr. Peter B. Adler, Colorado State University, under the sponsorship of Dr. William K. Lauenroth, will work with Dr. Osvaldo E. Sala at the Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina. The project is entitled Effects of Grazing on Shrub-Steppe Ecosystems of North and South America. This project will involve the comparison of the effects of livestock grazing on vegetation in the uniquely paired shrub-steppe ecosystems of North and South America, specifically the Great Basin and the Patagonian steppe of southern Argentina. Field studies in each region, complemented by a greenhouse experiment will focus on vegetation and soil responses across gradients of grazing intensity and precipitation. The PIs will evaluate the effect of grazing on above ground net primary production, community species composition, small-scale spatial heterogeneity, and soil carbon. The sagebrush-steppe of the Great Basin and the Patagonian steppe of southern Argentina have very similar climates and vegetation growth forms. The results of these studies will test current theory in community ecology, providing useful information to natural resource managers in both regions doc248 none This research project addresses the population age structure and nutritional status of the two primary target organisms for GLOBEC, the euphausiids Euphausii diapacifica and Thysanoessa spinifera. Using recent advances in quantifying biochemical markers of metabolism (lipofuscins), the researchers will determine the population age structure of both zooplankton in the California current system with particular emphasis on populations separated by physical zonation off the central Oregon. Lipid analysis in subsets of the same populations will provide a measure of nutritional status and feeding history. Sampling in conjunction with the current GLOBEC long term monitoring program (L-TOP) will provide information on physical structuring of each population together with measures of nutritional status over seasonal and interannual time scales to better predict their production, recruitment and thus importance in salmonid growth and survival. The research objectives include: 1. Application of recent advances in biochemical methods to determine the age structure in populations of the two major euphausiid species Euphausia pacifica and Thysanoessa spinifera and the effects of mesoscale dynamics on maintenance or disruption of cohort populations seasonally and interannually. 2. Examine the effects of physical zonation in shelf waters on the nutritional status and thus reproductive potential in juvenile and adults euphausiids (and eggs) using lipid classes; seasonal and interannual measures will be used provide information on the potential effects of changing nutritional status on subsequent recruitment and variations in abundance. 3. To combine age structure information with lipid analysis in sets of the same individuals to understand the impact of nutritional status on age structure in field populations of E. pacifica and T. spinifera over seasonal and interannual time scales. 4. To investigate individual lipids in euphausiids and other zooplankton as molecular markers of diet and their potential as markers of trophic transfer to their predators doc249 none GLOBEC Long-Term Observation Program in the Marine Ecosystem of the Northern California Current The goal of the Long-Term Observation Program (LTOP) within GLOBEC North East Pacific Program is to provide the fundamental seasonal description of the physical, chemical and biological environment at a few critical locations; the LTOP also aims to provide information on interannual variability and long-term changes. The specific objectives of the LTOP in the Northern California Current region are: seasonal sampling (five times per year) of two-dimensional temperature, salinity, density, velocity, dissolved oxygen, nutrient, chlorophyll and zooplankton fields through September ; to determine whether the domains north and south of Cape Blanco have similar interannual variability; and to determine whether the - regime shift in the large-scale climate is reflected in significant differences between contemporary ( - ) and historical ( - ) observations of the marine ecosystem off central Oregon. The PIs will sample three cross-margin transects in spring and summer to compare the upwelling regimes north and south of Cape Blanco and to estimate the large-scale alongshore gradients between 40 degrees N and 45 degrees N; only one transect will be sampled during the downwelling season (late fall and winter) when there is high alongshore homogeneity. Sampling will be enhanced during the two years ( and ) of GLOBEC Process Studies in the California Current by adding two intermediate cross-shelf sections on spring and summer cruises in those years. Sampling on all lines will include underway sampling as well as on-station sampling of the water column. WOCE-type drifters drogued at 15 m will be deployed at five locations off Newport on all spring and summer cruises. One mooring will be maintained off Newport to provide a continuous record of the temporal variability of the marine ecosystem that can be used to identify more precisely the timing of the spring and fall transitions, the onset of anomalous conditions associated with El Nino episodes, and the coastal ocean response to local wind forcing doc250 none GLOBEC Mapping the Evolution of Mesoscale Jets and Eddies in the Upwelling Ecosystem off Cape Blanco, Oregon, using Long-Range High-Frequency Radar The PIs will exploit a new capability in ocean observing systems that will enable the space and time mapping of surface currents over an entire coastal upwelling system, including associated jets and eddies. The capability involves the use of High Frequency (BY) radar instruments deployed along the shoreline. The new aspect of these measurements is that it will use systems tuned to the low-frequency end of the B17 band, around 5 MHz, rather than the now commonly used systems that operate between 12 MHz and 25 MHz. The difference in range capability is dramatic. The standard systems typically measure 30 Ian to 50 km from shore with range resolution on the order of 2 km. New data presented here shows that these same instruments operating at 5 MHz are capable of measuring 200 km from shore with range resolution on the order of 6 Ian. This range has been proven by combining the very efficient transmitter technology contained in the commercially available CODAR SeaSonde with a tuned transmit antenna produced for the University of Michigan!s Multifrequency Coastal Radar (MCR). We propose to use a three-site array of these radars to obtain a three-year time-series of daily maps of mesoscale surface currents over an area approximately 350 km x 180 km in extent, centered on Cape Blanco, Oregon. This region is the planned focus of intense in-situ biophysical sampling over a range of space and time scales during the GLOBEC Northeast Pacific (NEP) program. Recent studies show that Cape Blanco is often a separation point in physical regimes during the upwelling season, where a shelf-trapped alongshore current jet to the north separates from the coast and flows offshore, leaving an eddy-rich regime further south (Smith, ; Barth and Smith, ). A core hypothesis of GLOBEC NEP is that spatial and temporal variability in mesoscale circulation dominates the physical forcing on zooplankton production, distribution, retention and loss in coastal regions. The radar-derived maps will be used to study the properties of the eddies and jets, and the pathways of particles in the surface layer. The PIs will examine the instances of eddy generation, to determine their frequency of formation, whether they occur preferentially at particular locations, in response to particular wind-forcing events, in winter as well as summer. The propagation characteristics and time-space variations in intensity and scale will be examined. Eddy-jet and eddy-eddy interactions are expected to be well captured by the radar, which can make observations through periods of cloudy skies. Statistics of jet core location and speed will be determined through the seasons, and the relationship between separation events and wind forcing will be examined. Time-series maps of mesoscale currents will provide test cases for modelers. They will also complement satellite remote sensing of surface temperature, ocean color, and surface height doc251 none This project addresses the Retrospective aspect of the U.S. GLOBEC Announcement of Opportunity. The researchers will analyze acoustic and supporting hydrological and topographic data collected in summer and by the National Marine Fisheries Service with an eye to examining the spatial distribution of euphausiid patches and fish shoals as they relate to bottom topography, upwelling, current velocity, stratification and phytoplankton biomass. Additionally, the researchers will participate in and analyze data collected in in the same area (Monterey, CA, to Queen Charlotte Islands, B.C., Canada). The researchers will examine a series of hypotheses concerning the possible association of large euphausiid patches near the shelf break north of Cape Blanco, Oregon, with minimum alongshore and onshore-offshore currents, large phytoplankton biomass and upwelling-driven currents directed towards the shelf break. The scientists will also test hypotheses about the proximity of euphausiids with a major predator fish, Pacific whiting, and how it changes south to north of Cape Blanco, the possible enhancement of euphausiid density along the edges of submarine canyons, and the effect of El Nino on both euphausiid and whiting distribution and abundance. The analyzed data will form a baseline data set for use by ongoing and proposed GLOBEC monitoring and process studies doc252 none The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) will establish a AAAS NSF Fellowship Program patterned after seven other AAAS science and engineering fellowship programs. The program will recruit postdoctoral to mid-career scientists and engineers. Up to three Fellows for NSF will be selected. Fellows will learn how NSF funds science, while providing scientific, engineering and educational input on issues relating to NSF s mission support fundamental science and engineering research and education. Individuals will be selected in a widely announced, highly competitive process, for one-year fellowships. The fellowships potentially are renewable for a second year. AAAS NSF Fellows will be placed in offices throughout NSF, working on projects of mutual interest to the Fellows and the host directorate or office. Fellows will work with staff involved in planning, development and oversight of agency programs in all fields of fundamental research. Assignments may involve significant interagency, congressional or international activity, as well as involvement with the National Science Board, NSF s policy-setting body. The program includes an orientation on executive branch and congressional operations, as well as a yearlong seminar program on issues involving science, technology and public policy doc253 none Sequence Stratigraphic Architecture of a Middle Ordovician Carbon Isotope Excursion Gregory Ludvigson EAR- A late Middle Ordovician (453 million year-old) shift in the stable carbon isotopic ratios (13C 12C) of sedimentary carbonate rock strata in the mid-continent United States has now been identified in time-equivalent rocks in Pennsylvania and Estonia. Recent research results suggest that expression of this geochemical event was global in extent, and recorded a short-term decrease in the concentration of atmospheric CO2. This event is related to an increase in the rate of burial of marine organic matter that resulted from short-term paleoceanographic changes. Published depositional interpretations of the rock strata in which the carbon isotope shift was originally discovered in Iowa suggest that this time interval was characterized by non-deposition in more offshore settings over much of the eastern United States. However, this idea has never actually been tested regionally with carbon isotope profiles of rock stratigraphic sections. New studies of time-equivalent nearshore green calcareous shales in northwest Iowa show that the carbon isotope shift is also present in these rock strata, and suggest that this geochemical event might have applications for tracing this particular interval of geologic time across geographic boundaries separating major sedimentary rock types. The aims of this project are to: 1) develop stratigraphic profiles of the 13C 12C ratios of the mineral calcite (CaCO3) in the Decorah Formation and overlying underlying rock strata from six drillcores along a transect perpendicular to the ancient Ordovician shoreline, extending from southeast Minnesota through eastern Iowa into central Illinois; 2) develop matching stratigraphic profiles measuring the amount of organic carbon contained in these rocks; and 3) develop profiles of the 13C 12C ratios of organic matter in a selected subset of those drillcores. The larger scientific goals of the project are to test the idea that the carbon isotope excursion interval was characterized by non-deposition in much of the eastern United States, and to further test ideas on the causes of the excursion event. The aims of this project are to: 1) develop stratigraphic profiles of the 13C 12C ratios of the mineral calcite (CaCO3) in the Decorah Formation and overlying underlying rock strata from six drillcores along a transect perpendicular to the ancient Ordovician shoreline, extending from southeast Minnesota through eastern Iowa into central Illinois; 2) develop matching stratigraphic profiles measuring the amount of organic carbon contained in these rocks; and 3) develop profiles of the 13C 12C ratios of organic matter in a selected subset of those drillcores. The larger scientific goals of the project are to test the idea that the carbon isotope excursion interval was characterized by non-deposition in much of the eastern United States, and to further test ideas on the causes of the excursion event doc254 none Sleep Old cratons are a prominent feature of the Earth. The lithosphere is typically 200-250 km deep beneath the older cratonic regions of continents and much thinner beneath ocean basins. Data from rocks entrained in volcanic lavas indicate that this thickness as been stable for over 2 billion years in some locations. The PI seeks to investigate the physics of why the lithosphere is this thick and has remained so over time. A supply of heat from below is needed to offset the heat lost upward by conduction to the surface. He will consider two linked processes that act to maintain this thickness: (1) small-scale free convection that occurs within the thermal boundary layer at the base of the lithosphere, and (2) the transfer of heat by stirring that is caused by horizontal movement of the tectonic plates. Ponding of hot buoyant mantle plume material at the base of the lithosphere is a third process that supplies heat and will be investigated. The stirring process is most efficient if the viscosity of the Earth s interior increases rapidly with depth near the base of the lithosphere. It is also possible that the thick lithosphere beneath continents is stable because it is more buoyant than its surroundings. The PI will investigate how this situation can arise and persist. He will also investigate processes including partial melting which are associated with the lateral flow. The PI proposes to obtain the conditions that self-consistently lead to the present state of cratons and their thickness histories. Potentially observable features including the thickness of the anisotropic layer from shear at the base of plates, changes in the vigor of convection associated with changes in plate speed, and displacement of the thermal boundary layer of cratons by shear form plate motions will be examined doc255 none abs The investigators will continue theoretical studies and associated computer simulation and modeling of a range of basic solar wind properties and their interactions with cosmic rays, including energetic solar particles. The research will include studies of the structure of the interplanetary magnetic field and plasma, with particular emphasis on the effect of the field s structure on cosmic ray and energetic particle acceleration, propagation and anisotropies. Previous work on the transport and acceleration of cosmic rays in the heliosphere has led to the creation of a large library of software for the modeling of cosmic ray transport and acceleration. This library will be extended and used to obtain full two- and three-dimensional, time-dependent simulations of cosmic ray transport and acceleration. Mechanisms of particle acceleration in interplanetary space, and the effects of energetic particles on the dynamics of the solar wind and its termination will be studied. The investigators will improve two-dimensional models to include the dynamical effects of galactic and anomalous cosmic rays on the global solar wind, and to study time-dependent, transient effects which are expected to be important during the current solar maximum doc256 none This proposal seeks support for a study to develop high-resolution paleoclimatic records for the southeastern United States from instrumental and historical data extending back to the latter stages of the Little Ice Age (ca. - ). The rich documentary evidence will be used to improve our understanding of climate variability by: 1) reconstructing interannual to decadal variability of Southeast climate and integrating the results with dendroclimatological reconstructions of growing season conditions; 2) describing climatic responses as they relate to teleconnections of phenomena such and ENSO and NAO; 3) assessing decadal climatic variability that results from regional changes over the North Atlantic and larger areas; and 4) reconstructing landfall hurricane frequencies and relating temporal variations to climatic change doc257 none OCE- Seawater that circulates within submarine hydrothermal systems undergoes profound chemical change as it traverses high temperature and pressure conditions that are far different from those of the ambient ocean. Consequently, the hydrothermal water venting from the seafloor is markedly different in composition from the seawater from which it is derived, and for some elements represents an important component of the global mass balance. To understand this process, the rock water ratio of reactions beneath the seafloor must be understood. In this work, Li isotope systematics in mid-ocean ridge hydrothermal systems will be investigated because Li has been found to be a good tool for understanding the rock water behavior within the seafloor systems. The Li isotopic composition of previously collected hydrothermal fluids will be determined on samples that have already been analyzed for major and minor elements and for Li concentration. These samples are from four different sites along the mid-ocean ridge system doc258 none Reagan Sims Because of its high viscosity and ability to concentrate water, rhyolite is capable of highly explosive eruptions that have the potential to cause widespread destruction. One of the most recent rhyolitic eruptions in the continental U.S. took place at the Medicine Lake volcano in northern California about 850 years ago. This eruption ejected about 1 km3 of rhyolite and dacite in lava flows and tephras from a chain of vents near the summit of the volcano. Much larger eruptions of rhyolite are possible from Cascades volcanoes (e.g. the climactic eruption of rhyolite from Crater Lake caldera years ago). Recent U-series data we collected on climactic ejecta from Crater Lake suggest that these rhyolites were generated over 105 year time-scales. The goal of our current project is to determine the time-scales of required to generate the smaller volumes of rhyolite erupted from the Medicine Lake volcano. We intend to determine whether these rhyolites migrate directly to the surface after being generated, or whether there is a potential that they are accumulating in the crust doc259 none Combinational logic equivalence checking is used extensively in various formal verification approaches. Problems can be encountered when the candidate functions are too large to be represented in the memory of a computer. This motivates the need for probabilistic approaches for equivalence checking. This project is an exploration of performing probabilistic equivalence checking based on the Haar spectrum of two partially represented functions. Subsets of Haar spectral coefficients are obtained from partial Haar spectral diagrams efficiently. The probability that two logic functions differ can be iteratively refined as additional pairs of Haar spectral coefficients with equal numeric value are calculated. The problem of representation of very large functions is addressed through the use of the partial Haar spectral diagram and the probabilistic aspect arises through the use of iteratively refining the error probability as more matching pairs of spectral coefficients are found. The use of the Haar wavelet is desirable as compared to other transforms since certain subsets of the coefficients are mutually independent which greatly reduces the complexity of the probability calculations doc260 none Dietrich Tectonic forcing of the evolution of mountainous landscapes is widely thought to occur through the upstream propagation through the river network of knickpoints created by faulting along range boundaries. The September 21, , magnitude 7.6 earthquake in Taiwan offers a rare opportunity to study how the signal of tectonic uplift is transmitted through an evolving landscape. The 60 km long surface rupture, along the base of the western foothills of the Central Range, created waterfalls from 2 to 8 m high across several major rivers. In this initial exploratory phase of our work PIs will survey the initial scarp profiles and channel geometry, measure bed sediment size distributions, collect bedrock samples for strength and abrasion resistance testing, and document geomorphic features from past uplift events. They anticipate rapid evolution of the channel-crossing fault scarps because of the weak underlying mudstones and sandstones, the high annual rainfall and high coarse sediment load. They will use the results of the field surveys and laboratory testing in a numerical model of bedrock channel incision, to predict the rate and style of upstream knickpoint propagation. In subsequent field campaigns they will re-survey the evolving fault scarps and channel conditions to compare with model predictions. In addition to providing insight into how an uplift event propagates through a landscape, this work may help constrain the recurrence interval for earthquakes of this magnitude, information of considerable practical importance to engineers studying this disaster doc261 none Walker Quantitative assessment of biotic and facies relationships resulting from a Category 4 hurricane in three beach-to-reef settings on San Salvador Island, Bahamas, will examine out-of-habitat transport of biotic hardparts, the preservational quality of hardparts, and sedimentary fabrics in association with biotic distributions. This research will provide a quantitative checklist of storm-related features for the refined interpretation of fossil doc262 none Putting Human Exploitation of Marine Resources in Temporal and Environmental Context By Paul L. Koch Diane Gifford-Gonzalez Widespread evidence exists for intensified resource use by humans in coastal California over the past several thousand years. This includes a shift from inland foraging in the early Holocene to use of marine shellfish, fish, mammals in the middle Holocene. Around B.P., human foraging changed again, shifting away from reliance on coastal resources to those of the interior. Around the same time, the northern fur seal, formerly common in central and northern California, disappeared from central California archaeological sites, never to reappear in aboriginal sites. These changes in settlement and subsistence have been interpreted by some as the result of resource depression caused by growing human populations. In contrast, researchers working in the Santa Barbara region, where there is a well developed record of Holocene variations in rainfall, ocean temperature, and upwelling intensity, contend that the late Holocene shift was climatically driven. This argument is part of a broader debate that links changes in human ecology in the southwestern U.S. to the Medieval Climatic Anomaly. This argument has recently been extended to explain human and marine mammal shifts in central California, but little paleoclimatic data at high-temporal resolution exist for this region, or for the region farther north, where northern fur seals were harvested into historic times. The timing of the earlier shift to intensified use of coastal resources in the middle Holocene ( B.P.) is intriguing as well. Elsewhere on the globe, evidence is mounting for a shift in ocean circulation and global climate at this time, perhaps relating to the onset of modern El Nino La Nina climatic cycles. At present, well-constrained paleoenvironmental data from the central and northern California coast are lacking. Thus it is impossible to determine if changes in human settlement and resource use are the result of climatic forcing. In our multidisciplinary project, we will use direct 14C AMS dates of archaeological materials to construct a finely-textured temporal framework for the study of cultural, paleoecologic, and paleoclimatic changes on the central and northern California coast. We have several goals. Chemical and isotopic variations in mollusk shells will be a key source of information on past ocean conditions. Likewise, isotopic variations in marine mammals can reveal migration patterns and trophic dynamics, and how they changed with inferred changes in climate. As a consequence, we will focus our dating efforts on these materials. We anticipate the following results: 1) construction of a time series of mollusk shells from both central and northern California that will form the basis of future paleoclimatic research, 2) an assessment of whether or not stratigraphic relations at a number of California archaeological sites are reliable, or if they have been perturbed by animals burrowing and churning, and 3) precise information on the timing of changes in the marine mammal fauna and human communities in both regions. Detailed isotopic and faunal analyses will be conducted once we ve established a robust chronologic framework doc263 none DUGGER The Standards for Technological Literacy: Content Standards for the Study of Technology describe what students in the K-12 school system should understand about technology and how they should learn it. Phase III is to develop standards for professional development of teachers, both inservice and preservice, standards for assessment and program standards. The project builds upon similar standards in othe disciplines doc250 none GLOBEC Mapping the Evolution of Mesoscale Jets and Eddies in the Upwelling Ecosystem off Cape Blanco, Oregon, using Long-Range High-Frequency Radar The PIs will exploit a new capability in ocean observing systems that will enable the space and time mapping of surface currents over an entire coastal upwelling system, including associated jets and eddies. The capability involves the use of High Frequency (BY) radar instruments deployed along the shoreline. The new aspect of these measurements is that it will use systems tuned to the low-frequency end of the B17 band, around 5 MHz, rather than the now commonly used systems that operate between 12 MHz and 25 MHz. The difference in range capability is dramatic. The standard systems typically measure 30 Ian to 50 km from shore with range resolution on the order of 2 km. New data presented here shows that these same instruments operating at 5 MHz are capable of measuring 200 km from shore with range resolution on the order of 6 Ian. This range has been proven by combining the very efficient transmitter technology contained in the commercially available CODAR SeaSonde with a tuned transmit antenna produced for the University of Michigan!s Multifrequency Coastal Radar (MCR). We propose to use a three-site array of these radars to obtain a three-year time-series of daily maps of mesoscale surface currents over an area approximately 350 km x 180 km in extent, centered on Cape Blanco, Oregon. This region is the planned focus of intense in-situ biophysical sampling over a range of space and time scales during the GLOBEC Northeast Pacific (NEP) program. Recent studies show that Cape Blanco is often a separation point in physical regimes during the upwelling season, where a shelf-trapped alongshore current jet to the north separates from the coast and flows offshore, leaving an eddy-rich regime further south (Smith, ; Barth and Smith, ). A core hypothesis of GLOBEC NEP is that spatial and temporal variability in mesoscale circulation dominates the physical forcing on zooplankton production, distribution, retention and loss in coastal regions. The radar-derived maps will be used to study the properties of the eddies and jets, and the pathways of particles in the surface layer. The PIs will examine the instances of eddy generation, to determine their frequency of formation, whether they occur preferentially at particular locations, in response to particular wind-forcing events, in winter as well as summer. The propagation characteristics and time-space variations in intensity and scale will be examined. Eddy-jet and eddy-eddy interactions are expected to be well captured by the radar, which can make observations through periods of cloudy skies. Statistics of jet core location and speed will be determined through the seasons, and the relationship between separation events and wind forcing will be examined. Time-series maps of mesoscale currents will provide test cases for modelers. They will also complement satellite remote sensing of surface temperature, ocean color, and surface height doc265 none GLOBEC NEP: Satellite-Observed Ocean Climate Variabili1y The PIs will extend in time and expand in scope the satellite data development and satellite-based analyses of ocean climate variability in the Northeast Pacific (NEP), begun during the GLOBEC Pilot Project phase ( - 00). The overall scientific problem is to characterize and quantify the dominant modes of variability in the NEP as embodied by satellite measurements of surface transports, temperature and chlorophyll patterns. Our analyses address multiple spatial and temporal scales using merged satellite data products over GLOBEC target study regions in both the California Current (CCS) and the coastal Gulf of Alaska (CGOA). GLOBEC NEP field studies require both spatial and temporal context. The primary goal of this project is to quantify the degree of seasonal and interannual variability in small scale and mesoscale circulation patterns in each of the process study sites, and to relate changes in this variability to the seasonal and interannual changes in the strength of forcing by local winds and basin scale circulation. This goal will be accomplished through a systematic analysis of spatial temporal scales utilizing satellite measurements. The PIs will define and quantify a) small event-scale coastal features such as fronts, eddies and convergences (50 m - 100 km). These features are thought to be critical to local success survival of GLOBEC target species, b) mesoscale circulation seasonal variability over the shelf, upwelling fronts, coastal jets, buoyant plumes and eddies (10 km - 500 km) - these also affect transport and retention of populations; and c) forcing and processes at basin and interannual scales (100 km - 10,000 km). A second, related goal is to quantify changes in the timing and strength of seasonal transitions in both study regions. Specific objectives of the project are divided into two aspects of satellite oceanography, with which the three PIs have extensive experience: 1) Acquire, process, subset, QC, and archive satellite data in the NEP region at multiple scales and make these data electronically available to others in the program; 2) analyze these data, in conjunction with ancillary data, to address GLOBEC research goals at basin- meso- and nearshore scales. The core data sets are altimeter fields, NOAA AVHRR and NASA SeaWiFS data at both l km and 4 km resolution and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. These are supplemented with model and buoy winds, tide gauge sea levels and in situ data. Close collaboration with investigators carrying out field measurements will link scales and patterns determined in the satellite data analyses to 3D in situ processes doc265 none GLOBEC NEP: Satellite-Observed Ocean Climate Variabili1y The PIs will extend in time and expand in scope the satellite data development and satellite-based analyses of ocean climate variability in the Northeast Pacific (NEP), begun during the GLOBEC Pilot Project phase ( - 00). The overall scientific problem is to characterize and quantify the dominant modes of variability in the NEP as embodied by satellite measurements of surface transports, temperature and chlorophyll patterns. Our analyses address multiple spatial and temporal scales using merged satellite data products over GLOBEC target study regions in both the California Current (CCS) and the coastal Gulf of Alaska (CGOA). GLOBEC NEP field studies require both spatial and temporal context. The primary goal of this project is to quantify the degree of seasonal and interannual variability in small scale and mesoscale circulation patterns in each of the process study sites, and to relate changes in this variability to the seasonal and interannual changes in the strength of forcing by local winds and basin scale circulation. This goal will be accomplished through a systematic analysis of spatial temporal scales utilizing satellite measurements. The PIs will define and quantify a) small event-scale coastal features such as fronts, eddies and convergences (50 m - 100 km). These features are thought to be critical to local success survival of GLOBEC target species, b) mesoscale circulation seasonal variability over the shelf, upwelling fronts, coastal jets, buoyant plumes and eddies (10 km - 500 km) - these also affect transport and retention of populations; and c) forcing and processes at basin and interannual scales (100 km - 10,000 km). A second, related goal is to quantify changes in the timing and strength of seasonal transitions in both study regions. Specific objectives of the project are divided into two aspects of satellite oceanography, with which the three PIs have extensive experience: 1) Acquire, process, subset, QC, and archive satellite data in the NEP region at multiple scales and make these data electronically available to others in the program; 2) analyze these data, in conjunction with ancillary data, to address GLOBEC research goals at basin- meso- and nearshore scales. The core data sets are altimeter fields, NOAA AVHRR and NASA SeaWiFS data at both l km and 4 km resolution and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. These are supplemented with model and buoy winds, tide gauge sea levels and in situ data. Close collaboration with investigators carrying out field measurements will link scales and patterns determined in the satellite data analyses to 3D in situ processes doc267 none Evans This project has as a major goal, to recalibrate the Fe-Ti-oxide thermometer for realistic conditions of eruption of intermediate to silicic compositions. The experimental work proposed will be conducted in the CNRS laboratory in Orleans, France, by hydrothermally equilibrating a synthetic rhyolite composition doped with substantial but variable amounts of FeO, TiO2 and MgO at controlled T (700-900 degrees C), P, and O2 (NNO+1 to NNO+3) conditions. These experiments will establish the composition dependence of coexisting ferrian ilmenite and Ti-magnetite, with and without Mg, on T and O2 in the range in question. Solution parameters that correctly accomodate the solution of geikielite into the rhombohedral Fe-Ti oxide will be required to fit these experiments. The results of this experimental work should help increase the applicability of this popular geothermometer to rocks that were previously outside the appropriate compositional range doc268 none Meyer In recent decades, large canopy fires have swept through ponderosa pine forests of the semi-arid western United States. In central Idaho, ~300-year tree-ring records indicate a dramatic decrease in the frequency of low-intensity surface fires in the early s, suggesting that fire suppression and fuel buildup due are largely responsible for recent catastrophic burns. The role of climatic variations in changing fire regimes, however, is much less understood. Intensified burning and ensuing slope erosion might also be a symptom of climatic warming over the last century, leading to unusually severe droughts and intense convective storms. Thus, are recent canopy fires, slope erosion, and debris flows in ponderosa pine forests truly exceptional in postglacial history? What has been the frequency and magnitude of these events in the past? And, has the frequency of severe fires and slope erosion changed in response to Holocene climatic variations? We will address these questions through the Holocene stratigraphic record in numerous small alluvial fans in the Payette River drainage of central Idaho. Recent debris-flow and flood events from burned basins allow development of facies models for distinguishing fire-related sediments in fan stratigraphic sections. Burned soil surfaces provide unambiguous stratigraphic markers and accurate fire dates, and fire-related debris-flow deposits are datable evidence of both intense canopy fires and geomorphic response. A large set of 14C dates will yield estimates of the probability and frequency of fire-related sedimentation events over time and space. Dating of colluvial slope deposits and mainstem fluvial activity will combine with alluvial fan records to allow comprehensive system-wide analysis of Holocene geomorphic response to fire, climatic change, and intrinsic controls. It will also provide a long-term context for understanding fire regimes in ponderosa pine ecosystems and natural hazards in mountain environments doc269 none Brandon Recent work has shown that coupled enrichments in 186Os 188Os and 187Os 188Os for some Hawaiian lavas is consistent with the hypothesis of core-mantle interaction within the Hawaiian plume source. If this is correct, then these are perhaps the most robust geochemical data to date, that show some plumes originate in the D region of the deepest part of the mantle. Alternatively, these data could instead be consistent with entrainment of ancient recycled crust provided certain conditions hold. As a further test of these hypotheses, high precision 186Os 188Os and 187Os 188Os data for lavas from Iceland and the Austral Islands will be obtained. These two suites are ideal for subsequent testing of the roles of core-mantle interaction and ancient crustal recycling in generating radiogenic Os compositions in plumes because of the following. Seismic evidence suggests that Iceland plume originates from D just above the core-mantle boundary. It is a high 3He hotspot with active volcanism in a relatively fixed position for at least 60 million years. Taken together, these observations support a deep mantle origin for the Iceland plume where core-mantle interaction may occur. Some Austral Islands lavas have 187Os 188Os that are too high to be produced by reasonable models for entrainment of outer core into plume sources. Therefore, the these lavas can be used to make a rigorous test of the role of ancient crustal recycling for potentially producing radiogenic 186Os 188Os in plume-derived lavas. The ultimate result of this study will be to provide a greater understanding of the significance of chemical exchange between the outer core and plume sources, the role of crustal recycling to produce Os isotopic signatures in plumes, and the use of coupled enrichments of 186Os 188Os and 187Os 188Os to constrain the depths of origin of plumes doc270 none This project is a continuation of laboratory investigations of the nature and reactivity of carbonaceous aerosols. Soot reactivity will be studied using long path FTIR spectroscopy and microgravity techniques. The reactions to be studied include those of soot with nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and ozone. An effort will be made to correlate chemical reactivity with physical and chemical characteristics of soot particles, such as particle size, surface area, porosity, PAH content, surface functionalities, and unpaired electron density, fuel type and combusion conditions doc271 none Gilbert, Freeman The study of the splitting and coupling of free oscillations can potentially provide some unique information about the Earth -- in particular about how density varies laterally relative to shear velocity and bulk sound speed. Mode splitting has been studied for many years but it is clear that the time is ripe to revisit this field. In particular, the rapid expansion of the global seismic network and the occurrence of many large (and deep) earthquakes in the past few years means that mode splitting analyses are capable of much higher precision than in the past. Some studies have already argued that 3D density can be recovered (and that density variations are negatively correlated with shear velocity in the lower mantle). This result is controversial and the investigators present some experiments that indicate that claims of density recovery with the current mode data set are premature. However, they believe that, with expanded data sets and new analysis techniques, the precision needed to recover the 3D density structure of the Earth and its 3D anelastic structure is now within reach. The investigators propose to use a relatively new technique (the matrix AR method) to do this analysis. They have demonstrated that the method works and it has the significant advantage that it requires no information about the source. In addition to studying the long-wavelength (elastic, anisotropic, and anelastic) structure of the Earth, their analysis can also be used to study the low-frequency excitation of earthquakes and identify those events which are anomalous (slow earthquakes doc272 none Kent The record of paleopole positions assembled from paleomagnetic data indicate an abrupt change in directions of plate motion near the Triassic Jurassic boundary. This is a renewal of a project to more accurately document the early Jurassic pole position in the Hartford Basin and attempt to locate the J1 cusp. Results have significance to understanding plate geometry, plate interactions and Jurassic flood basalt eruptions coeval with the J1 cusp doc273 none This project supports the continuation of the measurement of the atmospheric oxygen nitrogen (O2 N2) and argon nitrogen (Ar N2) ratios and carbon dioxide (CO2) mixing ratio in flask samples collected at ground-based stations around the world. These data will improve the characterization of sources and sinks of CO2 and provide a test bed for global models that describe carbon sequestration, particularly in relation to climate forcing, and will allow for early detection of any major shifts in carbon cycle function. The O2 N2 data are used for separating oceanic and terrestrial influences on atmospheric CO2. The atmospheric Ar N2 ratio is sensitive mainly to thermally-induced ingassing and outgassing of Ar and N2 by the oceans. By constraining large-scale air-sea heat exchanges, the Ar N2 measurements can provide an improved basis for understanding the oceans role in the climate system, and for understanding climatic processes that influence the retention of CO2 in the atmosphere doc274 none Lundstrom Igneous petrology has experienced an exponential increase in the number of observational geochemical data over the past 20 years, leading to fundamental changes in our view of the physics of magmatic processes. Interpreting these data requires a better understanding of how trace elements distribute themselves between mantle minerals and melts. This project will provide relevant trace element partitioning data for a wide range of elements (rare earth elements, high field strength elements, and large ion lithophile elements) between clinopyroxene or plagioclase and potential mantle melts. Specifically it will provide constraint on the partition coefficients between clinopyroxene and melt relevant to the upper portions of a mantle-melting column by focussing on depleted clinopyroxene compositions in equilibrium with depleted basaltic melts. Particular attention will be paid to the effects of variations in both melt and crystal composition. In addition, the project will constrain the partition coefficients for a variety of trace elements between plagioclase and melt. Melts examined in this case will range from basaltic to andesitic. The experiments will be performed in either a piston cylinder apparatus or a 1-atmosphere furnace using both natural and synthetic starting materials. Experiments will be analyzed by electron and ion microprobe. Results will be parameterized with the goal of predicting trace element partitioning behavior as a function of depth in mantle melting column. These experiments will provide needed partition coefficient data for interpreting trace element and uranium-series disequilibria data from a variety of tectonic regimes on the planet. The resulting data will be incorporated into geochemical models of two-phase flow in order to gain further constraint on the physics of magmatic processes in the mantle doc275 none Nekvasil Experiments simulating step-wise fractional crystallization will be continued on natural alkalic magmas ranging from basalts to rhyolite that are found world-wide on ocean islands and in continental hotspot and rifted regions as both volcanic and plutonic suites. These experiments will determine if crystal fractionation can play a dominant role in generating the compositional diversity of magmas in such suites, and if so, under which conditions of pressure, dissolved volatile content, and oxygen fugacity this fractionation may have taken place. Such information is invaluable for placing constraints on the thermal and compositional profiles of the mantle and lower crust and on magma diversification processes in general. Furthermore, since silica-rich lavas of quartz-oversaturated alkalic suites are highly volatile-rich and such volatiles play a major role in volcanic explosivity, experimental data on the increase of magmatic volatile content during fractionation of water-bearing minerals is directly applicable to the evaluation of potential volcanic hazards doc276 none Wu This one-year award will support US student participation in an international workshop, Three-Dimensional Modeling of Seismic Waves Generation, Propagation and Their Inversion, to take place at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, September 25 - October 6, . The workshops will be sponsored by UNESCO, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Central European Initiative-Earth Sciences Committee, and the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS). Leading seismologists will map the Earth s interior through tomography. The workshop provides a venue for students-lecturers interactions and for student interactions with students from developing countries and Eastern and Western Europe. Half of the lecturers are from European universities allowing American students to stay abreast of the development of 3-D imaging in Europe and to develop future professional contacts doc277 none Langmuir The presence in many orogens of presumably mantle-derived garnet peridotite in high-grade crustal material has remained difficult to understand, as continental crust was thought to be too buoyant to be subducted into the mantle, and correspondingly, mantle peridotite too dense to be intruded upward into continental crust. This project will utilize two occurrences of garnet peridotite in continental orogenic rocks in the Caledonian Orogen of Norway. Extensive isotopic data will be employed to test several possible models for these occurrences. Results should help explain the common but apparently anomalous occurrence of those rocks not only in the Norway examples, but in other similar orogens doc278 none In this proposal we consider a large class of discrete-state systems such as traffic networks, manufacturing systems, computer networks, distributed parallel computing. A livelock in such systems is a situation when some process is unable to finish because its clients perpetually create more work for it to do after they have been serviced. This phenomenon is different from that of a deadlock where there is essentially no activity as each process is perpetually in a state of waiting, anticipating the release of resources that are held by other processes. The issue of deadlock- and livelock-avoidance is particularly important to the synthesis of protocols, routing, cache memory management, computer operating systems, manufacturing systems, traffic management, operations management of large organizations, etc. In this proposal, we present a collection of open-problems in the synthesis of supervisory control policies that guarantee liveness (i.e. absence of deadlock and livelock) in Petri net (PN) models of the discrete-state systems described above. We also present some open-issues in the performance improvement of PN models that are deadlock- and livelock-free under supervision doc223 none Previous research in the Bighorn Basin has provided tantalizing evidence suggesting a relationship between biotic change and shifts in climate at the time of the Paleocene Eocene boundary and two early Eocene time periods, but poor resolution of critical parts of the record renders the correlation inconclusive. Using a combination of approaches -magnetostratigraphy, physical stratigraphy, paleosols, and mammalian faunas- this project will developed a high- resolution chonostratigraphy and provide the framework for correlating upper Paleocene- lower Eocene sections across the basin, and for establishing whether regional event can be correlated with the marine record. The Bighorn Basin is possibly the best localities globally where sediments recording coeval changes in climate, mammalian faunas, and floras at the Paleocene Eocene boundary and two early Eocene intervals have been preserved. The proposed work is essential for future research seeking to establish the relationship between biotic and climate changes globally during the early Tertiary interval of Greenhouse conditions doc280 none Constable One of the most enduring issues in geophysics is concerned with understanding why the Earth has a magnetic field and why it displays such a variety of temporal variation. Fluid motion in the Earth s liquid-iron outer core is responsible for most of the magnetic field s secular variation, and it is also responsible for maintaining the main part of the field itself. The researchers will investigate reduced-dimensional solutions to the magneto-hydrodynamic equations describing the geodynamo. On account of their simplicity, and resulting savings in computer memory and time, a number of geophysically important issues can be addressed. In particular, the role of the Ekman number, which measures the relative importance of fluid viscosity and the Coriolis force, can be studied systematically. An unresolved issue, which they shall address is whether or not in the geophysically relevant limit of small Ekman number (low viscosity) the Earth s dynamo operates in a state that is independent of viscous core-mantle coupling. It is expected that the simulated magnetic field will exhibit highly time-dependent, and possibly chaotic, variation with vanishingly small Ekman number. In comparing these dynamo simulations with the paleomagnetic polarity timescale and paleosecular variation recorded in sedimentary and lava data, the investigators will analyze both the data and the simulated magnetic field with similar tools and methods, including: phase analysis, stationary and non-stationary statistical modelling, and multi-taper spectral techniques doc281 none Scholtz, Christopher An experimental study of pressure solution deformation will investigate and determine the mechanism and creep law of the process and to examine the effect of clay on its nature and rate. Pressure solution is an important rock deformation process known to modify porosity and permeability in sedimentary rocks, and to alter strength and strain along faults. Until recently, the main obstacle in investigating the mechanism and creep law of pressure solution was the poor constraints on the single most important factor in the process, the stress at the contact. A set of experiments will be conducted, utilizing a simple and cheap apparatus, that will enable us to follow pressure solution processes while monitoring the contact stress. By conducting experiments at various temperatures, stresses and clay contents and compositions, a well constrained definition of the mechanism and creep law will be obtained, as well as an understanding of the effect of clay on the process doc282 none This is a proposal to investigate the mechanism causing a correlation observed between magnetic mineral concentration and paleorainfall variations in recent lake sediments from northeastern Pennsylvania. We propose to study the recent sediments from two different small glacial lakes, one dominated by sediment from allochthonous sources (Lake Waynewood) and one dominated by authigenic sources (Lake Ely), so a general model of the relationship between rainfall and mineral magnetism can be developed. Freeze cores will be collected at several locations in each lake. Mineral magnetic parameters (c, SIRM, ARM, ARM SIRM, SIRM c, HIRM) will be measured to magnetically characterize the lake sediments. Elemental analyses will be conducted to determine the importance of erosion (Na, Mg, K) or the possibility of reduction diagenesis (S, Mn, Fe). Electron microscopic (SEM, TEM) examination of magnetic extracts will look for magnetosotnes and evidence of dissolution due to reduction diagenesis. EDS will be used to determine if authigenic, ferromagnetic iron sulfides have been created. High resolution (1 mm) magnetic scanning of the cores with an FIT scanning magnetometer will allow a more detailed look at the SIRM variations and extension of the record into the low sedimentation rate, pre-settlement horizons doc283 none This project is a 2-year project to integrate models of the ionosphere, magnetosphere, solar wind and solar corona. The first stage will be to couple MHD models of the corona and solar wind. This will allow the study of small scale solar wind effects that drive much of space weather. The second step will be to couple a global MHD model of the magnetosphere with the Rice Convection model of the inner magnetosphere. The third project will link a global ionosphere thermosphere model with a model of the equatorial region that simulates the important instabilities that give rise to strong radio scintillation effects. The project will be a prototype for a large, longer term, center-style effort doc284 none Hentschel Juveniles of species that, as adults, feed on deposited or suspended particles face a transition from a rich larval diet (plankton or yolk) to a poor adult one (sediment-associated organics). Small body size further imposes digestive and foraging limitations that probably constrain juveniles to specialize on relatively labile foods in the sediment or benthic boundary layer (e.g. benthic diatoms, phytodetritus, organic-rich flocs, animal prey). Recent research has revealed size-dependent changes in the diets of several interface-feeding polychaetes. Although evidence of changing diets is clear, the ways in which worms feeding activities shift as juveniles grow to adults is unresolved. For species foraging at the sediment-water interface and known to facultatively switch between deposit feeding and suspension feeding in response to hydrodynamic conditions, more frequent suspension feeding during the juvenile stage is a likely means by which small worms might increase the quality of their diet and their rate of growth. Such a size-dependent shift in feeding behavior and niche could have dramatic implications for population and community dynamics. If suspension feeding were the dominant means by which juveniles overcome size-specific food limitation, a habitat s hydrodynamic characteristics would strongly affect rates of juvenile growth and recruitment to the reproductive, adult stage. While flow s influence on dispersal and larval settlement has received considerable attention, flow-related effects on juvenile growth are a relatively unstudied organism-flow interaction that might impact the structure and dynamics of benthic populations and communities as significantly as flow s effects on dispersal and settlement. The study focuses on four species of spionid polychaetes because 1) although spionids are the best studied interface feeders, size-dependent feeding behavior and growth rates have not been measured in relation to flow; 2) existing data point to size-dependent diet changes and food-related recruitment bottlenecks in several spionids; and 3) spionids are abundant members of many benthic communities, playing central roles in food webs and geochemical processes. To test the hypothesis that juveniles tend to suspension feed more often than adults, the size-dependent feeding behavior of individuals will be observed in a laboratory flume under a variety of flow and food conditions. To quantify the nutritional consequences of size-dependent shifts in feeding behavior, growth rates of different size classes will be measured under selected flow and food treatments in four identical, counter-rotating annular flumes that will be set up as hydrodynamically distinct mesocosms. To reveal physical constraints on feeding mechanics and behavior in relation to intraspecific body-size variations, rates and efficiencies of particle capture will be quantified in a small-volume flume. To better extrapolate results from lab experiments on individuals to dense field populations, density--dependent effects on juvenile growth rate and particle ingestion will be tested. Insight into linkages among feeding behaviors and mechanics, growth rates, particle characteristics, and flow speed will provide a multifaceted and mechanistic understanding of the relationships between a habitat s hydrodynamic regime and the rates of growth and recruitment to adulthood in spionid populations. In terms of educational and human resources, the collaborative effort combines and broadens the expertise of a postdoctoral associate, a junior faculty member, and a tenured faculty mentor. In addition, integrating behavioral observations and manipulative experiments involving ecological, physical and biochemical parameters provides an ideal format to introduce undergraduates to interdisciplinary research at both a major research university and a small liberal-arts college doc285 none Mussa This is a planning visit grant for Professor Renatus Mussa, of the Department of Civil Engineering at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, to meet with Professor David Mfinanga, of the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, for the purpose of finalizing a collaborative research fellowship project on Telemetered Traffic Monitoring Sites (TTMS) for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applications. The completed project will be submitted to the International Research Fellowship Program. The need to make highways as safe and productive as possible is as important to developing countries as it is to the United States. At the same time, the transportation community is shifting away from building new roads to the use of smart systems for the operation and management of transportation systems. The Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University is creating a Wireless Communications in Transportation (WCT) Laboratory which will remotely collect traffic and roadway data through TTMS sites in foreign countries. The University of Dar es Salaam has a viable transportation-engineering program, and the program s faculty members are engaged in teaching and research. During this planning visit, Professor Mussa and Dr. Mfinanga will jointly choose installation sites and finalize arrangements for the installation, operation and maintenance of the TTMS. This project is being jointly funded by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Civil and Mechanical Systems doc286 none Retallack Long records of climate change well back into geological time are important for understanding the nature and direction of global change. To date one of the most important records has come from the oxygen isotopic composition of foraminifera from deep sea cores. The three-year project proposed here is to obtain a comparably complete and long-term record of paleoclimate on land. This record comes from a long sequence of fossil soils (paleosols) ranging in age from modern back to 45 million years old in the high desert of northeastern Oregon and southeastern Washington states. The methods used to determine paleoclimate, and particularly ancient rainfall regimen, include depth tyo horizon of calcareous nodules in the paleosols and also the chemical composition of well-weathered parts of the paleosols. Several parts of the record have already been studied successfully as pilot studies for the project, and the rate of progress is encouraging for completion of a 45 million year record complete to a resolution of gaps of no more than 200,000 years. Such a long-term paleoclimatic record will be relevant to wider questions of global paleoclimatic change, and will be important for reassessing computer models of climate and ideas about plant-animal coevolution. The proposed record will also be an important new record of paleoclimatic data for land that can be compared with existing long records from the sea doc287 none CATE This Interagency Agreement supports activities of the Interagency Arctic Research Policy Committee (IARPC) for which NSF has lead agency role. These activities include editing and preparation of the camera copy of the Spring and Fall issues of the Journal, Arctic Research of the United States. The Journal serves an essential step in fulfilling the requirements of Public Law 98-373, the Arctic Research and Policy Act. It contains information on research activities of the Federal agencies involved in the Arctic and reports and minutes of meetings from the Arctic Research Commission and IARPC. Under this agreement, CRREL also provides editorial support services for the U.S. Arctic Research Plan and the IARPC doc288 none Palo, Scott E As part of this proposal both ground-based and TIDI observations from the TIMED satellite of the horizontal wind field will be used to estimate the spatial structure (latitude, longitude, and height) and temporal evolution of the semidiurnal tide, both migrating and non-migrating, on a monthly basis. The impetus for this effort is twofold. First, the semidiurnal tide has a significant influence on the structure of the MLT. However, little is understood about the underlying variability of the tide and the possible sources of this variability. One possible source of longitudinal variability is due to the non-migrating tidal components, which may result from zonally asymmetric heating in the lower-atmosphere, non-linear wave-wave interactions, or from in-situ sources in the MLT. To attack the problem of variability the longitudinal variability that results from the non-migrating tidal components must be separated from the source and propagation effects, such as the quasi-biennial oscillation, which can modify the structure of the migrating semidiurnal tide. To accomplish these research goals this proposal will utilize data from 21 ground-based meteor and MF radar systems. These data will be collected and analyzed in conjunction with the TIMED TIDI measurements. As a result of this proposal ground-based mean and tidal (24, 12, and 8 hour) estimates will be provided every 4 days from each station. These tidal estimates will be analyzed in conjunction with the TIDI measurements to provide an estimate of the zonal mean circulation, the migrating and non-migrating semidiurnal tides in the MLT on a monthly basis. An effort will be made to integrate ground-based measurements from stations not included herein but which are also funded as part of the TIMED CEDAR program to extend these results to other latitudes doc289 none abs The investigators will study the dynamics of the mesosphere and lower thermosphere over Antarctica using measurements from the TIMED instruments and a meteor radar to be installed at South Pole station. Specific science objectives include: the space-time decomposition of wave motions; delineation of the spatial climatology over Antarctica with emphasis on the structure of the polar vortex; dynamical response to energetic events; and interannual variability. The proposed meteor radar is a VHF system that will be able to measure the spatial structure and temporal evolution of the horizontal wind field over the South Pole. The investigators will also make use of existing ground-based radars at Davis, Syowa, Rothera, and Scott Base in the determination of the spatial climatology. Wind and temperature measurements to be made by NASA s TIMED satellite during orbits over the South Pole will provide opportunities for combined ground-based and space-based experiments and validation activities doc290 none abs The investigators will study geomagnetic storm influences on the lower thermosphere using a coordinated set of ground-based and TIMED satellite observations in the 100 to 150 km altitude region. The ground-based observations of neutral winds and temperatures are planned at key upper atmosphere facilities. The study will be based on a special alert system that will enable all the incoherent scatter radars and associated instrumentation to operate during geomagnetic storm intervals. Selection of data sets from the TIMED satellite during magnetic storms will provide the required data base to investigate storm effects. Inclusion of general circulation and electrodynamic modeling efforts will enhance the overall understanding of the structure and dynamics of the lower thermosphere on a global scale doc291 none The primary goal of this program is to make measurements of small-scale gravity waves, their characteristics and seasonal variability with a view to ascertaining the momentum and energy transported into the MLT and associated chemical heating rates. This will be achieved by operating a Latitudinal Chain of stations consisting of three all-sky CCD imagers with overlapping fields of view each capable of quantitative measurements of nightglow wave structure. Located at three strategic mid-latitude sites in the Rocky Mountain area: Bear Lake Observatory (BLO), UT, Grand Junction, CO and Starfire Optical Range, NM, the PIs will be able to make composite field measurements of small-scale waves over a large geographic area ( 1,000,000km2) sufficient to permit frequent and meaningful comparisons with the TIMED limb viewing instruments. Measurements will be performed on a continuous basis (15 nights month centered on the new moon) for the 2 year duration of the TIMED mission. During TIMED overflights TIDI will measure the mesospheric wind field above the latitudinal chain while SABER will observe the MLT temperatures and will sample the distribution of radiating species. In this manner the PIs will obtain coordinated measurements of small-scale waves for repeated TIMED overflights covering several seasons and local times. This chain will also link together proposed cluster measurements at Ft. Collins, BLO and Starfire thereby further enhancing the potential of coordinated measurements over this important source region doc292 none The objective of this project is to investigate a cybernetic model-based approach to metabolic engineering. This approach would address various ways in which the metabolic engineering goal may be compromised by regulatory phenomena in the overall pathway and to provide for the optimal design of genetic changes. The formulation of the cybernetic model, based on experimental data with both wild type cells and selected genetic strains derived therefrom, is viewed to capture the regulatory features in the entire pathway. Such a model forms the basis of examining the consequences of all possible genetic changes in the pathway. Also, the resulting model is suited for model-based optimal control of the bioreactor for maximizing product formation. The model system is an E. coli strain that produces ethanol. This collaborative GOALI project involves Purdue University, the University of Delaware, and the DuPont Chemical Company doc293 none Selverstone Developments in metamorphic petrology allow pressure, temperature time paths to be determined for many metamorphic rocks, however accompanying deformation commonly affects these estimates in a variety of poorly understood ways, sometimes leading to incorrect or misleading results. The goal of this project is to examine in detail the interrelationships between metamorphic and deformational processes is an amphibolite-facies shear zone exposed in the Alps that exhibits a variety of shear and flattening fabrics. Results will be used to develop a set of textural guidelines for distinguishing between samples that allow meaningful calculation of pressure temperature conditions from deformed rocks vs. those that yield spurious results. Deformation processes, compositions and fabrics will be used to estimate the effect these parameters have on bulls rheologies of the lithologies involved. This work has considerable importance in many areas where processes of metamorphism and deformation have operated synchronously doc294 none The Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE) has funded Collaboratives for Excellence in Teacher Preparation (CETP) to prepare more teachers of mathematics and science to fill increasing demand; to produce a more diverse supply of mathematics and science teachers; and to prepare better teachers of mathematics and science at both the elementary and secondary level. However, there is little research on the effects that these innovations have had or would have on the education of prospective teachers. Therefore, this proposal seeks funds to examine one CETP project -- the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Teacher Education Collaborative (STEMTEC) -- as a way to gain knowledge that would allow us to identify and better understand the ways such a project affects the development of new science teachers. In particular, we will focus on the effects of STEMTEC on undergraduates enrolled in science courses and preservice teacher education programs, and the K12 teachers who have collaborated in the development and implementation of STEMTEC activities. In short, we seek to understand how and why STEMTEC innovations lead to, or fail to produce, a larger number and more diverse body of better prepared K12 science teachers doc295 none This grant provides partial travel support for approximately ten scientists and ten graduate students from the United States to attend the 15th in the series of international conferences on nucleation and aerosols, to be held at the University of Missouri on August 6-11, . Scientists and students receiving the awards will be chosen by the conference organizers on the basis of need and the contributions they can make to the conference. Approximately two-thirds of the $18,000 budget will be used for this purpose. The remaining third will be used to subsidize publication of the conference proceedings doc296 none Steven N. Ward For the past several years, the Dr. Steven Ward has been involved in an ongoing collaborative research project with Dr. Kerry Sieh of that involves interpreting the various tectonic and non-tectonic signals recorded in coral microatolls sampled over the Sumatran subduction zone. The growth patterns of coral microatolls provide records of relative sea level variations over many decades. These relative vertical motions find their source in many tectonic and non-tectonic processes including: seismic earthquakes, slow silent earthquakes (creep events), steady interseismic loading, seasonal and eustatic climatic effects, and local environmental influences. This project will fund work in geophysical, geodetic, and tectonic modeling to complement the geological and chemical strengths of the research team. This research will focus on the geophysical modeling, geodetic inference, and computer simulations of coral growth doc297 none Advances in multimedia digital signal processing (DSP), wireless communication systems, integrated circuit technology and portability requirements have fuelled research into the design of energy-efficient deep submicron (DSM) systems. Noise has emerged as a problem of significance for design in the DSM regime. This research addresses the dual challenge of designing reliable and energy-efficient DSP systems in the presence of DSM noise. Three coupled approaches are being explored: 1) algorithmic noise-tolerance (ANT) that employs stochastic signal processing techniques to combat DSM noise, 2) noise-tolerant dynamic circuit design techniques that provide noise-immunity with minimal energy penalty and 3) a CAD methodology that optimally folds the results of 1) and 2) in order to achieve a specified degree of system reliability and energy-efficiency doc298 none Proposal: C-CR PI: Donald Yeung, University of Maryland Conventional memory latency tolerance techniques are limited on pointer-intensive applications because pointer-chasing memory references must perform sequentially and prevent the overlap of multiple cache misses. Pointer-chasing computations, however, traverse several independent pointer chains. Such independent traversals provide a source of memory parallelism that has remained untapped by the existing latency tolerance techniques. This research develops novel pointer prefetching techniques to exploit inter-chain memory parallelism. Compared to existing techniques, the new techniques address more effectively the memory bottleneck for pointer-chasing computations commonly found in non-numeric applications. The research consists of three major thrusts. First, techniques are developed to schedule prefetches across multiple independent pointer-chain traversals simultaneously; thus overlapping cache misses from separate pointer-chasing loops or recursive function calls. Both compile-time and run-time scheduling techniques are investigated. Second, architectural support is developed to issue prefetch requests according to the required prefetch schedules. Initially, a prefetch engine capable of traversing pointer-based data structures is studied. The research also investigates into lightweight microthreads to perform prefetching inside a multithreaded CPU. Finally, compiler support is developed to automatically extract program information for computing the prefetch schedules and for generating the prefetch requests at runtime doc299 none Stahl Transition metals play an important role in cellular redox reactions. Iron, the most abundant transition metal ion in biology, poses a two-fold challenge: the reduced state can be toxic and the oxidized state is very insoluble under physiological conditions. Consequently, biological systems must maintain fine control over the uptake, transport, storage, and use of iron. This research project is to investigate a ferroxidase enzyme that plays a critical role in biological metabolism. Molecular biological and genetic studies of the organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae revealed the existence of a novel eukaryotic iron uptake pathway. A cell surface ferrireductase provides ferrous ions for two different membrane transport systems. One mediates iron(II) uptake under iron-replete conditions and also transports other divalent metal ions. The other consists of an oxidase-permease complex that operates under low-iron conditions and is very selective for iron(II). This latter one, Fet3p, is a 72 kDa membrane-bound ferroxidase that belongs to a class of enzymes known as multi-copper oxidases. Fet3p is a smaller protein that appears more amenable to detailed study because of the availability of a soluble variant that lacks the membrane domain. This project will explore several kinetic and structural aspects of Fet3p in order to gain mechanistic insights into the role of multicopper ferroxidases in iron homeostasis. This research will include aspects of dioxygen reduction as well as iron oxidation and will provide fundamental insights into the function of multicopper ferroxidases and their role in iron metabolism. Techniques that will be used to accomplish this task include, stopped-flow spectroscopic studies under different conditions such as pH, equilibrium dialysis, and NMR spectroscopy. l doc300 none McDuff, Russell E. This project will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessels Thomas G. Thompson and the Clifford A. Barnes operated by the University of Washington and dedicated to use in support of ocean science research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. This Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Russell E. McDuff is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire Fume Hood Chemisty Isotope Van, Overhaul Hiab Crane, Remotely Operated Underwater Pelican Hook, Slip Rings, Shipboard Computers, and Deep Water Echo System doc301 none This proposal seeks funds to investigate the vertical distribution of ozone, carbon monoxide, temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, pressure throughout the atmospheric boundary layer at Summit Greenland in the summer of . Cooperating programs are assessing the photochemical processes occurring in the snow pack which deplete ozone and increase the concentrations of other atmospheric contaminants. This SGER proposal would help in evaluating the relative importance of the snow pack processes by determining the concurrent distributions in the atmospheric boundary layer above the snow pack. At least 10 vertical profiles to altitudes of m above the snow surface will be conducted over a 2 week period in mid-summer doc302 none Staudigel This proposal requests funds to continue to support a grass-roots initiative to establish a globally relevant and interdisciplinary data base and modeling resource in geochemistry (i.e., the Geochemical Earth Reference Model). Over the next two years, GERM will convene a second workshop in and continue the development of a web-based data base that will ultimately lead towards a much improved understanding of the Earth as a dynamic system. It is also planned to establish ways to tie the GERM data base with other geochemical resources, such as existing data bases in geochemistry from the U.S. and abroad, and the new electronic journal G3 published by the American Geophysical Union. Once established as a relational data base, GERM will be expanded by the addition of modeling tools. Ultimately, GERM will develop into an on line tool for modeling Earth evolution to help reconcile differences between existing geochemical models, and include geophysical data such as the heat loss of the Earth. This proposal defines a path toward the ultimate goal of establishing a comprehensive global geochemical and geophysical model of the Earth doc303 none James W. Kirchner Physical erosion and chemical weathering are interdependent processes that sculpt mountainous landscapes, regulate the composition of soils, deliver sediment and solutes to aquatic habitats, and, over long timescales, help regulate global climate. Until recently, long-term rates of erosion and chemical weathering have been difficult to measure. As a result there is presently no clear consensus about how erosion and weathering affect the evolution of landscapes, soils, aquatic habitats, and climate. Recent advances now permit long-term average rates of physical erosion and chemical weathering to be inferred from the chemical composition of eroding sediment in watersheds. The concentrations of cosmogenic nuclides (26Al and 10Be) can be used to measure long-term rates of erosion. Chemical weathering rates can be inferred from erosion rates by comparing the concentrations of insoluble elements (such as Zr and Nb) in rocks and soils, which reflect the fraction of erosion that is accounted for by chemical weathering. This project will measure how chemical weathering rates vary with climate and physical erosion rates. Preliminary results show that climatic effects on weathering rates are small compared to erosional effects. However, the climatic effects are measurable, when the effects of erosion are explicitly accounted for. To expand on these results, six sites have been selected that span a wide range of climates (4 to 24 C in temperature; 10 to 420 cm yr in precipitation). To minimize effects of variations in bedrock weathering susceptibility, this study will focus exclusively on granitic bedrock. At each of the six sites, 5 small watersheds will be selected, and samples of stream sediment, bedrock, and hillslope soils will be collected for analysis. Cosmogenic nuclide concentrations in the stream sediment will be used to measure long-term erosion rates. The fraction of erosion that is accounted for by chemical weathering than will be inferred by comparing the bulk chemical composition of soil and bedrock. This project will quantify how long-term rates of weathering and erosion vary with climate while, for the first time, explicitly measuring how chemical weathering and physical erosion interrelate. These results should contribute to better models of nutrient cycles and long-term climatic evolution, more accurate assessments of sediment and solute delivery to aquatic ecosystems, and a more quantitative understanding of soil development and landform evolution doc304 none Kelly Liu This proposal will conduct a high resolution study of the major discontinuities beneath a km long profile along the 20 degree S latitude line across central South America. The study will utilize a unique data set, which is a combination of broadband data sets from three portable seismic experiments conducted during - . Preliminary results by non-linear stacking of 752 high quality radial receiver functions suggest clear spatial variations of both the 410 and 660 discontinuities across the profile. Some interesting features include: 1) the 660 discontinuity is depressed by at least 35 km, or as large as 65 km, by the subducting slab, 2) west of the Andes, the depth to the Moho is about 40-45 km, but it increases to 65-80 km over a distance of less than 50 km and decreases to about 45-50 km beneath the eastern boundary of the Andes, 3) the transition zone thickness is about 250 km of the ocean side, and 260 km on the continent side, indicating that the former is hotter than the later, and 4) there exists a group of strong negative arrivals above the 300 km depth, but only above the slab on the continental side. The study will use a set of procedures such as phasing depth imaging of P-to-S and S-to-P conversions, conversions of waves from deep local earthquakes at discontinuities, and synthetic seismogram to improve and expand the preliminary results, and to measure the spatial variations of other properties of the discontinuities such as their sharpness and velcoity contrast. The research will develop a procedure to stack converted waves from tilted interfaces to directly map the subducting slab doc258 none Reagan Sims Because of its high viscosity and ability to concentrate water, rhyolite is capable of highly explosive eruptions that have the potential to cause widespread destruction. One of the most recent rhyolitic eruptions in the continental U.S. took place at the Medicine Lake volcano in northern California about 850 years ago. This eruption ejected about 1 km3 of rhyolite and dacite in lava flows and tephras from a chain of vents near the summit of the volcano. Much larger eruptions of rhyolite are possible from Cascades volcanoes (e.g. the climactic eruption of rhyolite from Crater Lake caldera years ago). Recent U-series data we collected on climactic ejecta from Crater Lake suggest that these rhyolites were generated over 105 year time-scales. The goal of our current project is to determine the time-scales of required to generate the smaller volumes of rhyolite erupted from the Medicine Lake volcano. We intend to determine whether these rhyolites migrate directly to the surface after being generated, or whether there is a potential that they are accumulating in the crust doc243 none Beard Crawford Sinha As exotic material accretes to a continental margin by convergent tectonics, a number of important changes in conditions occurs, some of which lead to production of magma that subsequently becomes involved in the ongoing structural development of the accretion. As tonalitic plutons are commonly generated as continental margin arcs accrete, their composition provides information about the P-T-X H2O conditions of the source region, and combined with fabric and structural data, provide constraints for the transport and emplacement processes that might lead to chemical modification of magmas as they traverse and are emplaced in the crust. The project will utilize a suite of tonalitic plutons on Revillagigedo Island in southeastern Alaska that record early stages of continental arc magmatism. Results are expected to detail and track the origin, modification and tectonic interactions of these magmas in this convergent setting doc307 none Wesnousky The manner in which relative plate motion between the Pacific and North American plate is accommodated along the San Andreas fault system is relatively well known, although 25% of the relative plate motion occurs east of the San Andreas system. How slip is distributed through central Walker Lane and the Basin and Range province is poorly documented. This project will investigate quaternary deposits along the major strike-slip faults in central Walker Lane to define the style, timing and slip rates during the late quaternary. These data will be used to test models and define the mechanics of slip transfer through this important element of the Pacific - North American plate boundary doc308 none Wolff Larson Much of our understanding of how Earth s mantle works comes from measurements of trace element abundances and isotope ratios in ocean island basalts. Both act as conservative flight recorders of the mantle sources and transport histories of magma up to the point of eruption and freezing upon Earth s surface. Application of basalt geochemistry to the mantle depends on the assumption that basaltic magmas are not significantly affected by their passage through the crust en route to the surface. While most scientists would admit the possibility of some degree of host-rock assimilation by rising magma, a powerful argument in favor of ocean island basalts as faithful recorders of source chemistry is that crustal host-rocks - dominantly earlier erupted basalts - exert no chemical leverage on the magma that they may be incorporated into. We shall test this assertion, and place limits on the maximum extent of assimilation that may reasonably be expected in an ocean island setting, by studying an extreme case. In contrast to many islands, Tenerife has an extensive development of fusible felsic rocks both on the surface and within the island structure. Also, in the formation we propose to study, there is abundant evidence for intimate mingling of mantle-derived basaltic magmas with felsic magma, some of which is derived from melting of subsurface rock. The preservation of mingling textures in rapidly-quenched ignimbrites will allow us to study basaltic-felsic interactions in detail, while the compositional leverage provided by the felsic rocks will allow us to constrain the extent to which the mantle isotopic and, especially, trace-element characteristics of ocean-island basalts are compromised by crustal interactions doc309 none Fink Lava domes are among the most common eruption products of stratovolcanoes and calderas. Existing models suggest that the energy of a dome collapse event depends on the lava volatile content and strength of the dome s carapace. The proposed research will synthesize both existing and new field observations, geochemical analyses, laboratory simulations, rheological measurements, and numerical modeling to better quantify those factors that lead to explosive activity at seemingly benign lava domes. Five individual tasks will be undertaken that track the migration of dome magmas and the factors that control their explosivity. The results of these components will be developed in parallel so that one part of the project can inform and guide the others. We will attempt to integrate, and in some cases collect, fresh observations of new dome eruptions to validate our models. We will take advantage of extensive new results and associated conceptual advances recently published and in press from the Soufriere Hills eruption in Montserrat. This multifaceted research effort should help mitigate volcanic hazards by identifying those lava domes, or parts of lava domes, with the greatest destructive potential doc310 none Teng, Ta-liang This project will carry out a 3D crustal structure study making use of the excellent data set recovered from the Chi-Chi (Taiwan) mainshock and several of its large aftershocks, plus three year worth of seismic background strong-motion recordings of several hundreds smaller (M ~4 - 5) events. These events are recorded by (1) a complement of 700 freefield digital strong-motion stations, (2) 75 3-componeent short-period network stations and (3) 12 broadband stations. The investigators will use the above data set to study a large sedimentation basin in southwestern Taiwan, with the objective to deduce a 3D crustal structure of resolution up to 3 s period. The upper crustal structure will be determined by a standard array processing technique using 1D surface-wave phase velocity inversion analysis for the period range 3 - 15 s. Lower crustal structure can be determined by dispersion data of long-period (10 s - 100 s) surface waves recorded at an array of broadband stations. A group of adjacent 1D crustal models will be pieced together to obtain a 3D crustal structure doc311 none Facies Architecture and Paleobiology of a Terminal Proterozoic Carbonate Ramp, Kuibus Subgroup, Namibia John P. Grotzinger This project will attempt to improve our understanding of the first-order, long-term evolution of carbonate platforms by investigating the three-dimensional stratigraphic architecture and paleobiology of the terminal Proterozoic Kuibis carbonate platform of southern Namibia. The Kuibis platform has ramp geometry, marked by relatively gentle gradients in facies from intraclast-ooid grainstone shoals into deeper-water heterolithic assemblages of thin-bedded lime mudstones, thrombolitic stromatolitic laminites, and shales. Sediment transport was dominated by wave- and storm-produced currents, as shown by interspersed beds of hummocky cross-stratified and quasiplanar stratified calcarenites, in addition to finer-grained graded beds probably deposited from dilute turbidity flows. The ramp also contains numerous reefal facies, formed of thrombolites, stromatolites and diverse fossils of what may be one of the oldest assemblages of calcified metazoans. Reefs have variable geometry, forming sheet-like biostromes or distinct patch reefs in updip positions, or large pinnacle reefs in deeper-water, more downdip positions. The objectives of this research are to: 1) document the detailed paleoenvironments of the Kuibis platform by mapping it in three dimensions, 2) quantify the spatial arrangement of facies between parasequence boundaries, 3) test various hypotheses for the origin of thrombolite textures, 4) quantify the taxonomic diversity of calcified fossils using new digital 3D reconstruction techniques. The proposed research will provide important information that will be useful in understanding facies development within the earliest calcified metazoan and microbial ecosystems, the quantitative distribution of facies within parasequences, and the morphology and taxonomic diversity of the oldest calcified metazoans doc312 none Goldfinger Nelson Several models of earthquake characteristics such as the seismic gap hypothesis, repetition rate, clustering and other slip-predictable or time-predictable models remain poorly tested because of the lack of a long enough historical earthquake record. This research continues work on the turbidite history along the Cascadia convergent margin where submarine channels along the margin have recorded Holocene history of regional submarine slides probably triggered solely by great earthquakes. Cores will be dated and correlated across the area to test the hypothesis that these are recording the history of large subduction-related earthquakes. If verified, the turbidite event-based paleoseismicity record is expected to provide a long enough record so that current seismic hypotheses can be more adequately tested doc313 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Thomas McGovern and his colleagues will conduct three seasons of archaeological investigation at the site of Hofstadir, a medieval settlement in Iceland. First excavated in , researchers uncovered a large hall structure with a central long fireplace and side benches and postulated it functioned as a temple. More recent work which has further uncovered the building and located a series of surrounding house sites indicates that the complex has a complicated occupational history and likely was primarily a full scale high status farmstead. Dr. McGovern will direct additional research at this site to understand how its function changed over time and how its occupants derived their sustenance from and in turn influenced the environment. They will conduct extensive horizontal excavation and combine this with extensive survey and test-pitting of satellite sites and fields within the farm. They will also sample sites and features in the broader region. Iceland was first settled by humans from Scandinavia and the British Isles during the Viking age and extensive contemporary literature describes the latter stages of this occupation. This documentary record (sagas, law codes, annals) provides rich evidence for a socially complex non-state society. These writings have been employed by historians and anthropologists for studies of Iceland and the development of general theories of chieftainship. However, although the early settlement period is described in sagas and other later accounts, all these documents date to after AD and are clearly secondary sources much influenced by medieval rather than Viking period social and economic contexts. The first 225 years are, in effect, prehistoric and thus can be understood only through systematic archaeological and paleoecological investigation. Dr. McGovern s research will help to accomplish this goal. The work will shed important new light on human environment interactions and the effect of human behavior on island ecosystems. Human impact on local animals, vegetation, soils and drainage patterns was rapid and profound. By 950 AD ca 80% of the native scrub woodlands had been cleared and soil erosion had begun in the higher elevations. By the later Middle Ages, accelerated loss of groundcover led to more widespread erosion of ca 40% of the topsoil present before human settlement and massive alteration of river drainage patterns. Iceland thus represents an extreme case of pre-industrial human impact on the environment and provides an excellent laboratory to understand such interactions doc314 none Adrian Lenardic A continental craton is a region that has remained tectonically stable for on the order of a billion years. Many cratons are also associated with thick lithosphere that has been isolated from mantle recycling for an equally long period of time. Understanding the factors that provide for the stability of cratons and for the longevity of deep cratonic lithosphere are related issues that bridge the gap between studies of continental tectonics and of mantle dynamics. To address these issues, the investigators will constrain the present day thermo-chemical structure and explore the thermo-tectonic evolution of the crust and mantle lithosphere below several cratons. They will work with collaborators from Montreal and Australia to collect and compile data constraints for thermal models of the cratonic lithosphere in the Canadian Shield and in Western Australia. They will then develop data constrained models for the present day thermo-chemical structure of cratonic lithosphere within these regions. The heat that comes from the convecting mantle will be treated in a fully self-consistent way and both vertical and lateral variations in lithospheric structure will be explored. The researchers will also work directly with data oriented colleagues to collect, analyse, and synthesize all the data that can constrain the evolution of target cratons. They will then explore models of coupled mantle convection and continental tectonics to isolate the factors that allow for the longevity of deep cratonic lithosphere and the stability of cratonic crust. This will be accomplished using a powerful new numerical simulation tool that has been designed to bridge the gap between mantle convection modeling and continental tectonics modeling. The advanced modeling methodology, together with the data that will be brought to bear on the problem at hand, will allow this team to develop rigorous and testable models that address the cratonization of continental crust and the longevity of cratonic lithosphere in a self-consistent manner doc315 none Mitra Deformation in accretionary wedges commonly involve thrust faults and folds, and as material is progressively brought closer to the surface by uplift and erosion, it enters the brittle field. Yet large-scale folds occur, which may indicate fold tightening by cataclastic flow, a mechanism that has not been studied in detail. This project will study a first-order fold developed in quartzite in the internal portion of the Sevier fold and thrust belt, and will gather data on fractures, fracture networks and strain in order to test models for cataclastic flow. Results should aid understanding the process of large-scale cataclastic flow and place constraints on its role in folds in an orogenic wedge doc316 none J. A. Tossell To fully understand important geochemical and mineralogical processes such as variations in the properties of aluminosilicate melts, the dissolution and deposition of aluminosilicate minerals, and the acidity and other types of reactivities of mineral surfaces it is necessary to know on an atomistic basis the chemical species which are present and their properties. While useful information is available from experimental studies, it is now possible to calculate identities, energies and other properties for reasonable candidate chemical species entirely from quantum mechanical first principles using large scale computation. We will directly compute, using well-established methods, the properties of silicate and aluminosilicate species existing in melts, in hydrous melts equilibrated with water, and in aqueous solutions both near room temperature and pressure and under high P,T supercritical aqueous conditions doc317 none GLOBEC Long-term Observation Program in the Marine Ecosystem of the Northern California Current Both temporal and alongshore spatial variability are significant in all regions of the California Coastal Study (CCS). Alongshore differences can occur as a result of alongshore gradients in wind stress; changing bottom topography (in particular canyons and banks) and coastline irregularities; and buoyant inflow from rivers (in particular the Columbia River and the Strait of Juan de Fuca). As part of the GLOBEC NEP study, the specific objectives of this project are: 1) to provide data on alongshore and temporal variability in the coastal ocean nearshore environment of the Pacific Northwest region on scales of hours to several years and 2) in conjunction with other GLOBEC investigators, to determine dominant factors controlling alongshore and temporal variability in ocean water properties and currents. To fulfill these objectives the PIs will maintain moored arrays to measure currents and water properties at two locations, one off southern Oregon (Coos Bay); the other off the central Washington coast (Grays Harbor). With the addition of these two arrays, the GLOBEC field study will include an alongshore time series array sufficient to define large scale alongshore water property gradients and responses to forcing mechanisms. These installations will continue an already two year long time series at each site. In addition, an earlier 5 year time series (the longest on the West Coast shelf north of Point Conception) is available at the Coos Bay site. Thus, by the end of this project, the Coos Bay site would include 11 record years, the Washington site, six years. The data obtained will provide vital information to modeling studies of this area over the next decade doc318 none GLOBEC Collaborative Research: Mesoscale and Finescale Mapping of Physical and Biological Fields in the Northern California Current system This project will address the mesoscale physical and biological oceanographic distributions and processes that influence juvenile salmonid habitat along the Oregon California coast. The PIs will characterize, across a range of spatial scales, the circulation patterns associated with upwelling fronts and coastal jets, particularly in response to coastal promontories such as Cape Blanco. These patterns will be evaluated in the context of the retention and or loss of phytoplankton and zooplankton biomass and species within the coastal system in both spring and late summer. An instrumented, towed, undulating vehicle (a SeaSoar) will be used to map physical and biological distributions over spatial scales of 5-30 km. The SeaSoar will be equipped with appropriate sensors instrumentation to measure physical fields (conductivity, temperature, depth), phytoplankton and bio-optical parameters (multiwavelength fluorometers and multi-wavelength absorption meters), copepod and small euphausiid mesozooplankton (Optical Plankton Counter), and large euphausiids and fish (HTI Acoustics system) for the mesoscale region extending from Newport, OR to Eureka, CA. In addition, there will be continuous underway surface sampling and along-track Acoustic Doppler Current Profiling (ADCP) of water transport. Immediately following each mesoscale survey will be a sequence of interconnected finescale mapping surveys of a region ca. 50 km offshore by 80 km along-shore, followed by process-oriented field studies. The different sampling regions are expected to display contrasting juvenile salmonid habitat properties due to the offshore transition of the main jet of the California Current at Cape Blanco which results in distinctly different physical and biological regimes north and south of the Cape doc319 none PI: Stephan Graham The composition of grains in sandstone can be diagnostic of the original source of those grains, as in the case of volcanic grains eroded from volcanic arcs. Conventionally, such analyses are conducted with a standard optical microscope, but the broad compositional similarity of sand from all volcanic arcs often results in ambiguity as to specific sources. Greater interpretational leverage would be provided by an ability to determine the ages of individual grains, and that capability exists in the Sensitive High Resolution Ion Microprobe (SHRIMP). The application of SHRIMP technology to a geologically well-characterized arc-related sedimentary basin (i.e., one for which the sources of sediment are independently known) could serve as a standard against which studies of poorly known but analogous basins might be gauged. The Mesozoic strata of the Great Valley basin of California present such an opportunity, because the bulk-grain and trace element compositions of sediment are already determined, and the sources of sediment in the adjacent Sierran and Klamath arcs are generally known. Thus, SHRIMP study of the ages of Great Valley zircon sand grains will form the basis of a model of sediment source relations in an ancient arc-related basin, as well as provide insights into long-term rates of erosion of volcanic arcs and sedimentation of derivative sediments. The Great Valley model subsequently will be compared with results of SHRIMP analysis of zircon grains from the Mesozoic Methow basin of Washington and British Columbia. If consistent with the Great Valley study, the Methow results may demonstrate the broader utility of the analytical method, as well as contribute to solving some specific problems of the geologic evolution of that region doc320 none Theory and numerical experiments demonstrate that the intensity achieved by tropical cyclones is sensitive to the relative importance of surface fluxes of momentum and enthalpy in the storm core, yet very little is known about such fluxes in extremely high wind speeds. Extrapolation to high winds of the functional form of surface exchange coefficients deduced from observations at moderate wind speeds leads to the prediction that storms of greater than nominal tropical storm strength should never be observed. It is hypothesized that this paradox can be resolved by a proper account of the physical processes affecting surface fluxes at high wind speeds. Attacking this problem requires a multi-disciplinary program of theoretical, numerical and laboratory work in order to address several crucial physical processes that are neglected or poorly handled in present tropical cyclone models. Accordingly, Principal Investigators from four institutions (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, University of Rhode Island, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory) have formed a research team to perform this research. Specifically, the Principal Investigators will: 1. Investigate the effect of re-entrant sea spray on air-sea enthalpy exchange through theoretical analysis and laboratory experiments: 2. Conduct a program of theoretical and experimental research designed to yield quantitative estimates of air-sea heat exchange by bubbles; and 3. Produce better estimates of the effect of waves on air-sea momentum exchange. This research should lead to better formulations of surface fluxes in very high wind speeds. These formulations will be implemented in numerical weather prediction models to improve the accuracy of tropical cyclone intensity prediction doc320 none Theory and numerical experiments demonstrate that the intensity achieved by tropical cyclones is sensitive to the relative importance of surface fluxes of momentum and enthalpy in the storm core, yet very little is known about such fluxes in extremely high wind speeds. Extrapolation to high winds of the functional form of surface exchange coefficients deduced from observations at moderate wind speeds leads to the prediction that storms of greater than nominal tropical storm strength should never be observed. It is hypothesized that this paradox can be resolved by a proper account of the physical processes affecting surface fluxes at high wind speeds. Attacking this problem requires a multi-disciplinary program of theoretical, numerical and laboratory work in order to address several crucial physical processes that are neglected or poorly handled in present tropical cyclone models. Accordingly, Principal Investigators from four institutions (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, University of Rhode Island, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory) have formed a research team to perform this research. Specifically, the Principal Investigators will: 1. Investigate the effect of re-entrant sea spray on air-sea enthalpy exchange through theoretical analysis and laboratory experiments: 2. Conduct a program of theoretical and experimental research designed to yield quantitative estimates of air-sea heat exchange by bubbles; and 3. Produce better estimates of the effect of waves on air-sea momentum exchange. This research should lead to better formulations of surface fluxes in very high wind speeds. These formulations will be implemented in numerical weather prediction models to improve the accuracy of tropical cyclone intensity prediction doc320 none Theory and numerical experiments demonstrate that the intensity achieved by tropical cyclones is sensitive to the relative importance of surface fluxes of momentum and enthalpy in the storm core, yet very little is known about such fluxes in extremely high wind speeds. Extrapolation to high winds of the functional form of surface exchange coefficients deduced from observations at moderate wind speeds leads to the prediction that storms of greater than nominal tropical storm strength should never be observed. It is hypothesized that this paradox can be resolved by a proper account of the physical processes affecting surface fluxes at high wind speeds. Attacking this problem requires a multi-disciplinary program of theoretical, numerical and laboratory work in order to address several crucial physical processes that are neglected or poorly handled in present tropical cyclone models. Accordingly, Principal Investigators from four institutions (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, University of Rhode Island, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory) have formed a research team to perform this research. Specifically, the Principal Investigators will: 1. Investigate the effect of re-entrant sea spray on air-sea enthalpy exchange through theoretical analysis and laboratory experiments: 2. Conduct a program of theoretical and experimental research designed to yield quantitative estimates of air-sea heat exchange by bubbles; and 3. Produce better estimates of the effect of waves on air-sea momentum exchange. This research should lead to better formulations of surface fluxes in very high wind speeds. These formulations will be implemented in numerical weather prediction models to improve the accuracy of tropical cyclone intensity prediction doc323 none Leavitt- This contract with VECO Rocky Mountain Inc. is for support of the National Science Foundation s Arctic Research Program. The support provided includes critical administrative functions including developing effective and efficient field plans for currently up to 50 projects annually. The contractor then executes a significant portion of the support to those plans, including materials procurement and shipping, construction of field camps, making travel arrangements with specialized none commercial or none scheduled airlift or sealift providers, the operation and maintenance of remote field camps in the Arctic, and providing technological assistance with instruments and global communication solutions. The contract was awarded on xx December, with an effective date as 1 December, . Preliminary tasking is to prepare field plans for Arctic research projects for the summer field season doc324 none RENSBERGER The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is conducting a three-day symposium to consider how to use images to communicate science and technology most effectively. Participants will include scientists, imaging technologists, computer scientists, photographers, science writers, illustrators, computer modelers, mathematicians, and others involved with communicating the basic science and findings from research. The focus of the conference will be on communication -- both from the scientific community to the general public, and within the scientific community. The 300 conference attendees will hear presentations from professionals working in the area. However, they will spend the majority of the time working collaboratively on solutions to model problems such as how to represent the interaction of a receptor with a ligand, how to make visually explicit the passage of time at all scales, and how to explain visually a sequence of events. Those who have committed to attend the conference will participate for several months in a conference web site prior to and after the meeting. The web site will enable participants to critique and make modification to various images and text used to communicate science. It also will be used to enable participants to collaborate in working groups on the model problems. The PI s for the project are Boyce Rensberger and Felice Frankel. Rensberger is director of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships program at MIT. He is a science writer and editor and has worked in these capacities for both the New York Times and The Washington Post. Frankel is Artist-in-Resident and research scientist in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. She photographs and digitally images research data in science and engineering. She has collaborated with George Whitesides to publish On the Surface of Things: Images of the Extraordinary in Science doc325 none Burbank A long-standing structural problem focuses on the modes of accommodation of the stresses that arise due to oblique motion between crustal blocks. The project will test several hypotheses regarding the nature of continental transtension and a transition from extension to transtension, using the northern Owens Valley, White-Inyo Mountain and Fish Lake Valley, parts of the Eastern California Shear Zone. This study promises to bring detailed U-Th He, fission-track and ArAr chronologic perspective to bear on the nature of continental transtension. Results are important for reconstruction of the stress field history of southern California from Miocene times to recent, and should be helpful in understanding transtensional behavior elsewhere doc326 none O Connell The proposed research is to study flow and circulation (i.e. the development of flow over time) in the mantle over the past 150 My. The work will involve Earth models that incorporate the geometry and motions of lithospheric plates and is constrained by seismic tomographic models of mantle heterogeneity and observed subducted slabs. The changes of plate geometry and motions over the last 150 My, and the evolution of the internal density field are also included in the model. The flow models have previously been used to predict the motions of plumes and hotspots in the mantle. The investigators will apply models of mantle flow to several geophysical phenomena and observations. One aim is to model the tractions on lithospheric plates and to construct finite element models of stress and deformation in the lithosphere. The results will be compared to global stress observations, as well as areas of intraplate deformation. The effects of the rheological and strength heterogeneity of continents will be investigated. They will also calculate the strain field and evolution of the upper mantle in order to compare it with observations of seismic anisotropy, particularly beneath the Pacific plate. The flow models will also be used to compare predicted flow patterns with the orientations of subducted slabs. These should provide strong constraints on mantle viscosity models and seismic inferences of mantle density heterogeneities, and lead to a better understanding of the dynamics of plate motion and subduction doc327 none PETER H. SCHULTZ The Argentine loessoid deposits collectively called the Pampean Formation (PF) represent an important depositional sequence extending back to the Miocene. These deposits preserve a rich fossil record providing a reference for faunal evolution in South America. It also records major climate changes in both paleosols and depositional rates. Since the Late Cenozoic, 10-15 objects larger than 1 km in diameter should have impacted the Earth. This translates into about 6 craters larger than 1 km in the thick PF deposits and continental shelf. The high silica (60%), broad area (over a million square km), soft substrate, and relatively dry climate all create ideal conditions for generating, capturing, archiving, and identifying this impact record. PI has discovered four such events and proposes to investigate their nature, distribution, and implications. Specifically, PI will determine the nature, origin, and distribution of impact glasses captured in the Argentine Pampas during the Late Cenozoic. The first year will focus on: (1) a broader database for absolute ages using Ar Ar laser fusion and stepwise heating; (2) a systematic petrographic and geochemical study of selected glasses at different localities; (3) field studies to assess the extent and nature of glass-bearing layers at different sites; and (4) magnetostratigraphic profiling across selected intervals. The second year will emphasize: (1) paleomagnetic profiles of loess sections at different levels benchmarked by first-year results; (2) compositional systematics of glasses as a means to determine the parent crater localities and substrates; and (3) detailed lithostratigraphy and correlation s with the fossil record doc328 none Shiller Understanding what controls dissolved trace element concentrations in rivers is of substantial interest to researchers examining basic scientific questions related to geochemical weathering and transport of elements and to scientists involved in pollution control evaluation and monitoring of water quality for human health and biotoxicity purposes. With the adoption of ultraclean sampling and analysis methods more workers are now producing relaible fluvial dissolved trace element data and progress has been made in outlining some of the controls on fluvial dissolved trace elements. However, we are not yet to the point where one can use the hydrological and chemical characteristics of a river to make a reasonable prediction of how dissolved trace element concentrations will vary seasonally or even what levels of dissolved metals to expect. It is especially important to understand the processes affecting Fe and Mn between dissolved and particulate hypotheses of this project: 1) There is rapid cycling of Fe and Mn between dissolved and particulate form is rivers. 2) This cycling can be strongly temperature-dependant and hence seasonally variable. 3) Changes in the rapid cycling affect the dissolved-particulate partitioning of Fe and Mn as well as particle-reactive trace elements such as Zn and Pb. 4) The cycling involves redox processes for Mn and possibly Fe, though organic complexation may be a more important factor for Fe. Objectives of our proposed work include understanding the extent, relevence and mode of microbial oxidation of Fe and Mn in rivers, elucidating the process(es) of reduction of Fe and Mn in rivers, understand under what conditions photochemical processes are important for Fe and Mn cycling in rivers, and understanding the role of DOC in fluvial Fe and Mn cycling. Our approach involves studying the variability, controls, and rates of the various key processes (e.g. microbial oxidation, reduction by DOC, photochemistry) that transform Fe and Mn from one phase to another. OUr work will involve both field and laboratory studies. The field work includes monthly sampling of river systems as well as detailed process-oriented studies of two or more of the systems having different hydrogeochemistries (Mississippi and Pearl Rivers). Laboratory studies will be used to identify the most important processes at work as well as determine rate constants. Field and laboratory work will also be done to characterize the fluvial organic matter and relate organic composition (e.g., functional groups related to complexation or reduction) to Fe and Mn cycling. With rate and process information, models can be constructed to predict Fe and Mn concentrations in rivers as a function of time. The benefits of this increased understanding of the controls on fluvial dissolved trace elements are several-fold. First, it gives us a better capability to predict dissolved trace element concentrations, both temporally at times when samples from a given system are not taken and can spacially in systems for which no data exist. Second, information on how various processes can cause seasonal dissolved trace element variability is pertinent to the design of sampling and monitoring programs. Finally, an understanding of what processes are important in the regulation of dissolved trace element concentrations gives us better insight into how human activities can affect fluvial trace elements in ways beyond direct metal contamination. For example, the microbial connection suggests a means by which toxins could indirectly affect dissolved trace elements. The work will also provide basic information on fluvial hydrogen peroxide levels and its generation as well as results pertinent to the issue of the photooxidation and fate of chromophoric dissolved organic matter. Besides the two PI s, a microbiologist will be involved in this work doc329 none Both circulation models and some geologic data suggest that monsoonal circulation characterized the Pangean supercontinent. The timing of monsoon onset, however, and data on wind directions, intensities and seasonality at paleoequatorial latitudes, remain poorly constrained. The objective of this study is to characterize the provenance of ancient eolian siltstones of western North America (western equatorial Pangea) to delineate paleodispersal and thereby paleoatmospheric circulation in late Paleozoic time. To achieve the objective, the Pls and students will integrate petrographically based framework mineralogy and grain-size analyses with singlecrystal detrital zircon age dating to precisely establish both silt provenance and size spectra, and thereby identify surface wind directions and strengths. The detrital zircon age spectra should reflect the age spectra of their sources, i.e., basement terranes and or silt-bearing strata exposed in late Paleozoic earliest Mesozoic time. We will address the possibility and implications of silt recycling by using existing detlital zircon reference sections published for North America, supplemented by key cratonal reference sections. Preliminary results indicate that detrital zircon and grain-size data can be used to constrain prevailing and subordinate wind directions and strengths, and provide information on seasonality. Results of detrital zircon geochronology in particular suggest that this work may additionally contribute to improvements in constraints on maximum ages of the target redbeds and of late Paleozoic stage boundaries. Ultimately, study results should also contribute to (1) an improved understanding of the low-latitude paleoclimate and potentially paleotectonism of late Paleozoic western Pangea, and (2) our understanding of climate change, and calibration of climate models in general doc330 none Fritz - Hyperfiltration (a.k.a. reverse osmosis ) occurs when solution advects through permselective material like clays. Isotopes of solutes are advected toward the membrane of the same velocity; however, they diffuse back into the high-pressure reservoir of different rates owing to differences of individual isotope s aqueous diffusion coefficients. For a two-isotope solute like NaCl, the developed hyperfiltration model predicts that signfiicant fractionation ( 5 per mil relative to SMOC) should occur in pore water of arenaceous and or carbonate material adjacent to the upgradient side of a clay lens or shale. The easiest way to test the model is to experimentally investigate its most specific prediction: the d37Cl minimum. This aspect of the model is easily testable because solution fluxes of 10-5 to 10-7 cm.sec-1 are easy to replicate in a laboratory. Calculations show that the position of the d37Cl minimum occurs at about 10 of the length of the developed concentration polarization layer (as measured outward from the membrane s high-pressure interface). The predicted magnitude of the d37Cl minimum can attain -5 per mil for a clay membrane of moderate (20%) ideality. The unique aspect of this project is in situ sampling of solutions directly from a CPL. Until now, this has neither been done nor even considered. The proposed experiments will yield show unequivocally that a minimum does (or does not) exist. Should the experiments fail to confirm the theory, then hyperfiltration plays no meaningful role in fractionation of solute isotopes in aqueous systems. If, however, the experimental data support the model, then isotope geochemists may have to reevaluate interpretations of their solute isotope data if their groundwater samples flowed through membrane-functioning units doc331 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Douglas Charles and student assistant will analyze material excavated from the Smiling Dan site, located in the lower Illinois River valley. The salvage excavation, conducted as part of the central Illinois Expressway project revealed an intact archaeological occurrence located below plow induced surface disturbance. Such a situation is rare in the heavily agricultural Midwest. The cultural materials date to ca. - years before the present and are associated with the Middle Woodland culture. In all, the area covers square meters and excavation revealed three house structures and a total of 182 pit features. Because evidence of postmolds was preserved, the size and shape of the structures can be reconstructed. Large amounts of lithic, ceramic, floral and faunal materials were recovered and these potentially permit reconstruction of subsistence practices and social organization. While preliminary analysis has been conducted by other researchers, the full potential of this material has not been realized. It is uncertain whether all structures and associated pits represent a single synchronous occupation or whether they result from sequential episodes. Through a careful examination of microstratigraphic relationships it should be possible to resolve this question. This work involves careful plotting of material in three dimensional space and an attempt to refit broken material recovered from different parts of the site to establish contemporanity. With this information, it will then be possible to address a number of site specific questions. Was Smiling Dan occupied year round? Did all members of the household reside there at the same time? Where patterns of residence seasonally structured? What percentage, and what specific elements of subsistence and maintenance related activities occurred at Smiling Dan rather than at special purpose sites? The Middle Woodland period marks the rise of complex societies in the US Midwest. For many years archaeologists have focused attention on impressive mound sites which contain ritual objects and which required large organized labor forces for their construction. Many researchers however believe that such centers were not living sites but rather were used primarily for ceremonial functions. Very few habitation sites have been examined in detail and Smiling Dan s importance rests on its assignment to this latter category. It is also unusual because of the extensive and carefully detailed and recorded excavation which was conducted there. Dr. Charles research will provide data of interest to many archaeologists and shed important light on the functioning of Middle Woodland society doc332 none Phillips The late Pleistocene history of Lake Lahontan has been intensively studied for over 100 years. It is well known that the late Pleistocene Labontan lake cycle is only the most recent of several lake cycles since the mid Pleistocene, but very little is known about the timing of extent of these lakes, in large part because these cycles have been evidenced only by poorly exposed lacustrine sediments that yielded limited information on lacustrine extent. A new avenue of research as recently been opened by the discovery of sequences of shorelines above the Lahontan maximum level and above the shore elevations of other late Pleistocene pluvial lakes in Nevada. Chronological constraints on these shorelines are presently minimal. We propose to date these shoreline features using the accumulation of cosmogenic 36C1 and 10Be. Establishing a chronology of these lake cycles will enable a long-term comparison of paleoclimate in the Great Basin with that of global glacial-interglacial cycles, will aid in understanding the origin of the apparent long-term decrease in maximum lake extent, will help to reconstruct the geomorphic integration of the Humboldt River system, and will contribute to explaining the geographical distribution of aquatic biota in the (presently) closed drainages of the western and central Great Basin doc333 none he in situ cosmogenic 14C (in situ 14C) research group at the University of Arizona, after a number of years developing reliable extraction techniques and equipment, is now prepared to bring in situ 14C into the mainstream of cosmogenic nuclide surficial process studies, alongside 10Be, 26Al, 36Cl, 3He, and 21Ne. Current extraction equipment and procedures reduce blank levels to (2.4 0.1) x 105 14C atoms, and allow reliable in situ 14C extraction at lower temperatures ( C) and in less time than the previous method. Experiments have shown that this new procedure can effectively isolate the in situ 14C fraction with replicate analytical precision approaching 2% (n = 5), while maintaining consistency with earlier results. This is a level of precision and accuracy comparable to or exceeding those currently obtainable with in situ cosmogenic 10Be, 26Al, 3He, 21Ne, and 36Cl. The precision on current measurements will allow measurement of in situ 14C in a 5 g quartz sample after about 400 years of exposure (sea level, high latitude). Having achieved a viable extraction technique with NSF funding, this proposal focuses study of in situ 14C on key applications to which it is uniquely well suited. The proposed investigation, incorporating an extensive field and laboratory analytical program, will build on advances in in situ 14C research by (1) constraining the relative magnitudes of in situ 14C production mechanisms at sea level and high latitude by high-energy neutron spallation (spallogenic 14C) and slow, negative muon capture (muogenic 14C), (2) independently estimating shallow subsurface ( 20 m depth) and atmospheric attenuation lengths for spallogenic and muogenic in situ 14C production, and (3) empirically testing theoretical models of spallogenic and muogenic production rate variation with altitude and latitude. Such production rate variations can be measured with in situ 14C to a much greater extent than is possible with other currently used cosmogenic nuclides, by taking advantage of its rapid (~20 kyr) attainment of secular equilibrium and insensitivity to low and moderate ( 1 cm kyr) erosion rates. These advances will allow other researchers to use in situ 14C routinely to determine production rates for a range of cosmogenic nuclides on a site-by-site basis, potentially making the use of scaling models unnecessary. Samples used in this study will come from altitude and latitude transects in the western U.S., Chile, Australia, and Antarctica. Finally, results of this research will be fully published to enable widespread application of in situ 14C to surficial process studies doc312 none Goldfinger Nelson Several models of earthquake characteristics such as the seismic gap hypothesis, repetition rate, clustering and other slip-predictable or time-predictable models remain poorly tested because of the lack of a long enough historical earthquake record. This research continues work on the turbidite history along the Cascadia convergent margin where submarine channels along the margin have recorded Holocene history of regional submarine slides probably triggered solely by great earthquakes. Cores will be dated and correlated across the area to test the hypothesis that these are recording the history of large subduction-related earthquakes. If verified, the turbidite event-based paleoseismicity record is expected to provide a long enough record so that current seismic hypotheses can be more adequately tested doc335 none Veblen Weathering rates for silicate minerals exert important controls on groundwater and surface water quality, nutrient availability, and the global carbon cycling and its impact on global climatic changes over geological time. Yet, weathering rates derived from watersheds and soil profiles are several others of magnitude slower than laboratory measurements. Understanding this large discrepancy remains a fundamental problem in modern geochemistry, hampering our ability to understand and predict surficial processes and environmental changes quantitatively. To provide insights into discrepancy, we propose to study the in situ silicate dissolution and precipitation rates in large aquifer system with relatively simple and well-constrained chemistry and hydrology. The chosen field site is a sandstone aquifer, located in northern Arizona and mostly composed of the Navajo sandstone. Groundwater in this aquifer has an optimal residence time up to approximately 35,000 years. The kinetic rate constants derived from this aquifer first will be much better constrained than in watersheds and soil profiles because of the saturated hydrologic environment and unusually abundant data. A new transmission electron microscope at John Hopkins, with capabilities 0.12nm imaging and 1 nm compositional mapping resolution, will provide atomic scale information of microstructure and fine-scale chemical variations at weather feldspar doc336 none Seaman Felsic magmas are the sources of the keystone components of continental crust, and of the most explosive volcanic eruptions that commonly occur on Earth. The major factors in the evolution and eruptive behavior of felsic magmas are their water concentrations and their degree of oxidation. In this study, synchrotron spectroscopy will be used to explore the possibility that plagioclase crystals preserve information about the oxidation state and the water concentration of the magmas from which the crystals grew. Both Fe 3+ G Fe and H2 concentrations in the nominally anhydrous plagioclase will be measured and their use as proxies, for, respectively, oxygen fugacity and water concentration of the magmas that produced the crystals, will be explored. Synchrotron microXANES (X-ray absorption near-edge structure) spectroscopy of oxidation state of Fe in plagioclase crystals is based on measuring small energy differences in cation oxygen bonds between ferrous and ferric ions that bond to oxygen. Synchrotron microFTIR (Fourier transform infrared) spectroscopy, like conventional FTIR spectroscopy, provides a correlation between the wavelength of light absorbed and the nature of chemical bonds in the mineral. Synchrotron microFTIR analysis of H2 in plagioclase will utilize a very bright source, eliminating the need to remove and polish oriented single crystals, and allowing for the analysis of crystals in their spatial context. These techniques will be tested on the Lower Purico ignimbrite (~1 Ma) in the Andean Altiplano Puna Volcanic Complex, for which independent measurements of maximum magmatic water concentrations have already been determined by SIMS and FTIR, and oxygen fugacity determinations have been made on the basis of crystallization temperatures and mineral equilibria by deSilva ( , ) and Schmitt et al. ( ). Along with testing these new techniques, goals of this study include acquiring insight into the interplay of oxygen fugacity, water concentration, mineral assemblage, and the eruption style of siliceous magmas across a large range of geologic time doc337 none Yeh The development of a reliable model for basin water resources management is a challenging problem because real aquifer structure is highly complex and mostly unknown and that we only have very limited data to calibrate the model. The three major difficulties are: (1) How to determine an appropriate level for model complexity; (2) How to parameterize and identify the unknown distributed parameter values; and (3) How to judge the sufficiency of existing data for the chosen model. In our recent studies, we have developed a new approach to fix model complexity and to estimate a model structure and its corresponding parameter values for groundwater modeling in a 2-dimensional distributed parameter system. We have defined a generalized inverse problem, in which the model complexity level is set by available data and the accuracy requirements of model applications. We have further developed a stepwise regression method to solve the generalized inverse problem in two dimensions as well as a new methodology for constructing groundwater models. The utility of the new methodology was demonstrated by an application to a water resources management problem of a groundwater basin in Southern California. We have found that management requirements were satisfied by a simple model structure with a few identified parameters to represent various hydraulic and mass transport properties. We also found that existing data are insufficient to identify certain boundary conditions with the required accuracy. This work explores new frontiers in groundwater modeling. The key objectives are: (1) To make our methodology for model structure identification more general. We will consider zonation and such other parameterization methods as finite element interpolation and kriging. We will extend the methodology to three dimensions. Parameter structures to be identified will include not only hydraulic conductivity but also initial and boundary conditions and source terms. (2) To build the theoretical basis of the generalized inverse inverse problem. We will define model structure identifiability and find its sufficient conditions. We will also consider how information on geological structure can be incorporated into model structure identification procedure in three dimensions. (3) To develop methodology for observation design. After the least complex model structure is found, we can formulate the observation design problem into an optimization to find the most cost-effective design from all sufficient and feasible designs. Our ultimate goal is to quantitatively link observation design to model structure complexity, model parameter identifiability, and model application reliability. Results will be compared to Monte Carlo simulations. We will apply our research results with a water resources agency in Southern California doc338 none Ague, Carson How long does it take to build a mountain range? Geologists can now address this basic question because modern isotopic techniques allow the ages of individual mineral grains in rocks to be determined with unprecedented accuracy. As age determination methods improve, it has become apparent that minerals may preserve a complex record of multiple geologic events separated in time by millions or even billions of years. Fluids, including water-rich solutions and silicate melts, flow through Earth s crust during mountain building, carrying with them heat and chemical species such as greenhouse gases (e.g., CO2) and valuable ore metals. In this regard, a fundamental question actively debated today is: do these migrating fluids impact the U-Th-Pb isotopic systematics of commonly studied minerals like monazite and zircon, providing a record of the actual rates and timing of fluid flow through the Earth during mountain building? To address this question, our proposal seeks to develop new petrological and geochemical criteria to identify the effects of fluid infiltration on the morphology, chemistry, and isotopic systematics of monazite and zircon. The research centers on electron microprobe, rock chemical, and ion-microprobe study of well characterized, Early Paleozoic metamorphic fluid--rock interaction zones cutting the Archaean gneisses of the Napier Complex, East Antarctica. Ultimately, our findings are expected to determine the complete pressure-temperature-time history of the fluid infiltration, and have implications for tectonic and chronological models of the assembly of the Gondwana supercontinent doc339 none Johannesson Understanding the chemical behavior of the rare earth elements (REE) and other heavy metals in the environment is critical to predicting their impact on, as well as their fate and transport within, the environment. One of the most important factor affecting these and other heavy metals in natural waters is solution complexation. Solution complexation, for example, may exert controls on the mobility, effective solubility, reactivity, and toxicity of heavy metals in the environment. Unfortunately, metal speciation with naturally occurring organic ligands, and its direct connection to those processes and total metal concentrations, is only poorly known for most trace metals, including the REEs. Although geochemical models do exist that allow predictions to be made of REEs complexation with inorganic ligands (i.e., CO32-, P 4 3-, SO42-, OH-, CI- in natural waters, their in situ complexation behavior with naturally occurring organic ligands in natural waters has not been specifically studied. This disparity in our understanding of REE complexation exists despite the fact that stability constants for REE complexes with many simple organic acids are of the same magnitude, or greater, than stability constants for the strongest REE-inorganic (i.e., carbonate) complexes. Therefore, it is possible that organic complexation also controls the speciation of the REEs in natural waters, as has been shown to be the case for many transition metal cations. Consequently, considering what little is known about the [in situ] complexation of REEs with organic ligands in natural waters, the chief objectives of our study are: (1) modify and develop a specific electrochemical technique to (a) measure the fraction of dissolved REEs complexed with naturally occurring organic ligands in natural waters, and (b) measure the strength (i.e., conditional stability constants) of these naturally occurring REE-organic ligand complexes; (2) apply the modified electrochemical method to measure organic complexation of REEs in waters that span the pH range of natural waters and contain various concentrations of inorganic complexing ligands and dissolved organic carbon concentrations; and (3) develop a qualitative model of REE solution complexation that addresses competition between inorganic ligands and naturally occurring organic ligands and that builds upon an earlier equilibrium thermodynamic model. These objectives will be addressed using a combined laboratory and field approach. We will modify the competitive ligand equilibration adsorptive cathodic stripping voltammetry (CLE ACSV) technique currently used for transition metals to quantify the amount of dissolved REEs that occur in natural waters as solution complexes with naturally occurring organic ligands. Natural water samples will be collected to compare and contrast concentrations, where organic ligands must compete with inorganic carbonate complexes, neutral pH waters with moderate concentrations or inorganic complexing ligands and low DOC, and acidic waters with high DOC. Our results concerning REE complexation with natural organic ligands will be combined with an equilibrium (inorganic ligand speciation) model currently in use doc340 none Jeanloz Understanding the properties of H2O deep inside the Earth has major implications for deciphering the geochemical cycling of water and the possible initiation of melting inside the planet, as well as the geophysically observed properties of the mantle. Thermodynamic analysis even suggests that ice may be present at depth, subducted within cold rapidly-sinking slabs. The proposal requests support for a 2-year experimental effort intended to document 1) the crystal-structural identity, 2) thermal equation of state and 3) melting temperature of crystalline H2O (Ice VII, and potentially other polymorphs) at high pressures and temperatures, providing fundamental constraints on the stability and the geophysically relevant properties (elasticity, density) of H2O phases at lower-mantle pressures, ~20-80 GPa doc341 none Wang All core formation models depend on knowledge of mechanisms of the liquid iron-silicate separation. The investigators propose to study the iron-silicate separation process by in-situ synchrotron X-ray radiography in the large-volume press at GSECARS and the Advanced Photon Source. Their pilot experiments have demonstrated that droplets of Fe-rich melt from a mechanical mixture of silicates and Fe (with controlled amounts of light elements) can be observed by in situ radiography during the separation process. Computed microtomography has been applied to the recovered samples to generate three-dimensional reconstructions of the size and spatial distribution of the melt droplets as a function of pressure, temperature, composition, and time. In the proposed study, the investigators will examine systems containing selected light elements, such as C, S, H, O, and Si, with various metal silicate volume ratios at pressures up to 15 GPa and K. They will start with simple compositions by selecting pure constituents but as understanding increases will work on more realistic compositions such as iron meteorite and carbonaceous meteorite. Currently a white beam is used for the radiography experiments but monochromatic radiation will be used in future experiments to enhance image resolution and contrast. In addition, the team plans to develop an X-ray transparent Drickamer-type high-pressure cell for in-situ microtomography, which will greatly enhance resolution power to the micron level. Samples will be examined at various stages of the experiment by microtomography to reconstruct the evolution of the size and spatial distribution of the Fe-rich droplets as a function of light element, pressure, temperature, and time. Recovered samples will be sectioned and examined by scanning and transmission electron microscopy to resolve metal-silicate interaction to sub-micron level. Composition analyses will be performed and element partitioning will be studied using electron microprobe and X-ray fluorescence microprobe. These experiments will provide first-hand laboratory observations on iron-silicate separation and improve our understanding of possible core formation mechanisms and dynamics of the core-mantle boundary. The results will be used to constrain existing models regarding physical and chemical processes of the formation of the core doc342 none Bock The west coast of Sumatra and the Mentawai Islands offer a unique opportunity to study the process of strain accumulation and release along the Sumatran fault and subduction zone. Two giant historical earthquakes ( and ) suggest that infrequent very-large earthquakes dominate strain relief at the Sumatra subduction zone. The Sumatran fault has also been known to produce several Mw 7 earthquakes. GPS measurements collected from to revealed the spatial distribution of surface deformation, suggesting that the subduction interface is completely locked along the source region of the giant earthquake, but is only partially locked along the source region of the event. The data have also resulted in slip rate estimates for several segments of the Sumatran fault. The investigators plan to conduct campaign-style surveys at approximately fifty of their established GPS monuments on Sumatra and the Mentawai islands. The new measurements from these sites will be analyzed in conjunction with their earlier data to obtain an updated, time-averaged velocity field for the Sumatra forearc and one segment of the Sumatran fault. With this analysis they hope to resolve two important questions about the Sumatran fault and subduction zone. First, they hope to determine whether the strain segmentation of the Sumatran subduction zone observed by the - measurements is a long-term signal, or if it was a transient effect caused by, for example, an aseismic slip event. The second question they hope to resolve is the slip rate for the Sumatran fault segment located about 1 S. Their current estimate of the slip rate there is 235 mm yr, considerably larger than the 11 mm yr estimated from stream offsets. This is a collaborative proposal between UCSD s Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) and the Indonesian National Coordination Agency for Surveying and Mapping (BAKOSURTANAL doc343 none Tikoff McClelland Tectonic models for orogenic belts rely on various kinematic indicators to determine such things as maximum and minimum stress directions, stretching directions and sense of shear. One fundamental assumption has been that tectonic transport directions parallel mineral or extension lineation directions, however three-dimensional numeric modeling of shear zones indicates that this is not always a valid assumption. This project will address this issue using the western Idaho shear zone that marks the accretion of allochthonous terranes to the west to the north American plate during the Late Cretaceous. The kinematic and geologic data have resulted in several, disparate models for this accretion. This study is an integrated structural, microstructural and U Pb geochronologic project designed to determine the kinematic history of the late Cretaceous western Idaho shear zone that will employ three-dimensional techniques to test the validity of the assumption that tectonic transport is parallel to lineation. Results should help clarify the kinematics of this suture and evaluate one of the important kinematic assumptions used in interpretations of many orogens elsewhere doc344 none Latitude-Dependent Climatic Response to Milankovitch Orbital Forcing and its Expression in Cretaceous Rocks of the Northern Hemisphere Bradley B. Sageman The proposed research seeks to document and constrain changes in the behavior of the hydrologic cycle and atmospheric circulation patterns over North America during the mid-Cretaceous greenhouse. The key to this reconstruction is the preservation of orbital signals in hemipelagic deposits of the Western Interior basin. These deposits offer an opportunity to examine the effect of the same climatic changes on two fundamentally different pathways of sedimentation in the basin that are sensitive to changes in hydrologic and atmospheric conditions: detrital and biogenic. Because orbital forcing places predictable constraints on the behavior of these two pathways, a succession in which orbital parameters are quantified offers the possibility to deconvolve the relative roles of each. Ultimately, by placing processes like biogenic sedimentation within a quantified time series, greatly improves the ability to reconstruct biogeochemically significant events such as the flux of organic matter to sediments resulting from increased primary productivity. This component of the global carbon cycle, which has been inferred to play a major role in many critical events in Earth history, such as oceanic anoxic events, is notoriously difficult to constrain in the ancient rock record. This project is based on recent quantitative documentation of orbital signals in rhythmic limestone-marlstone facies of Cenomanian-Turonian (C-T) age in the central Western Interior using spectral techniques. With that work as a foundation, PI will apply improved spectral methods to reconstruct detailed sedimentation rates for the C-T interval, and quantify changes in biomarker-type organic compounds based on the spectrally defined time scale. His data set will include samples from core comprising a paleolatitudinal transect of the basin. These two components will allow him to test the following key working hypotheses: (1) Does limestone-marlstone formation reflect climatic forcing of siliciclastic dilution, carbonate productivity, or a combination of both? (2) Does the unique pattern of bedding in the C-T deposits reflect latitude-dependent forcing of different orbital parameters through different depositional pathways? Specifically, does obliquity dominate detrital flux through forcing of the higher latitude hydrologic cycle, and precession dominate biogenic flux (carbonate) through forcing of lower latitude surface water conditions? and (3) How are the Milankovitch scale variations expressed in limestone-marlstone facies influenced by longer-term changes in the ocean-climate system, such as the global carbon burial and ocean anoxic event termed OAE II? Can he detect feedback in the carbon cycle-climate relationship via changes in latitude-dependent orbital forcing (i.e., did obliquity become more dominant due to carbon burial, CO2 drawdown, and climatic cooling)? The application of an integrated quantitative cyclostratigraphic-organic geochemical methodology represents a significant innovation in the study of ancient climate-ocean dynamics and will significantly advance knowledge of the Milankovitch climate-sedimentation linkage during the mid-Cretaceous greenhouse doc345 none Robert E. Reilinger The Investigators propose to monitor and analyze postseismic deformation for the 17 August , Izmit (M=7.4) and the 12 November , Duzce (M=7.1), Turkey earthquakes. Together, these earthquakes resulted in a continuous surface break along a 150-km segment of the western North Anatolian fault, with right-lateral surface offsets reaching 5 m. The tight constraints on secular strain and co-seismic fault slip for these events and the detailed monitoring of the early phase of post-seismic motions, provide an important opportunity to develop the observations needed to constrain models of after-slip and viscoelastic relaxation. Distinguishing the possible contributions of these mechanisms has implications for the rheology of the continental lithoshere and localized rheology in the fault zone - rheological properties that are currently poorly constrained by observations and that are critically important for modeling dynamic processes associated with plate interactions. In addition, it is anticipated that the results of this study will enhance our understanding of the mechanics of the earthquake cycle in this and similar tectonic regions (such as the San Andreas fault). While this work is not meant to be a comprehensive study of earthquake hazards in this area, the results will be directly relevant to estimating the partitioning of slip on the various branches of the NAF in the Marmara region. Furthermore, the co-seismic and post-seismic fault parameters resulting from the proposed research are needed to constrain models for stress transfer to adjacent fault segments, providing an improved physical basis for estimating earthquake hazards doc346 none Zebker Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) observations of the Western Galapagos during - show that at least six out of the seven volcanoes on the islands of Isabela and Fernandina have been deforming, some at unusually high rates. Four volcanoes are inflating, including Sierra Negra on southern Isabela Island at rates of up to 0.9 m year. The total uplift of Sierra Negra during -99 is more than 2.5 m. The uplift is caused by pressure increases in shallow magma chambers beneath the volcanoes at depths 1.5-3.0 km. Two other volcanoes, Cerro Azul on Isabela Island and Fernandina volcano, erupted during the observation period. These volcanoes show a complicated pattern of pre-eruptive inflation, co-eruptive deflation, and localized deformation due to shallow intrusions. Amazingly, decades-old lava flows are continuing to subside at the present time. The high-resolution spatially-dense InSAR data can be used to constrain subsurface magmatic processes. Preliminary results indicate that some of the observed signals are well-modeled by simple symmetric pressure sources, while others cannot be explained by such models. Data from Sierra Negra volcano appear to require episodic faulting, or other inelastic deformation, accompanying inflation. The investigators propose to investigate the current activity and its relation to subsurface processes using a combination of new observations and model development, as enabled by radar interferometry. They will use the observations to constrain the geometry and volume changes of magma chambers beneath the volcanoes, the dynamics of flow between storage chambers and intrusive eruptive dikes, and the role of faulting and inelastic deformation associated with sustained magma chamber inflation. They also will examine temporal variability in these processes as evidenced in the InSAR measurements. Analysis of these high-resolution InSAR observations of Galapagos volcanism requires creation and validation of interferograms, development of inverse methods suited to InSAR data, and extension of these methods to derive detailed models of subsurface activity and inelastic response in the overlying rock. Specifically, the team will i) develop analytical methods that capitalize on the dense nature of the InSAR observations, ii) extend modeling capability by examining more physically realistic magma chamber geometries, iii) examine inelastic response observed in some Galapagos calderas, iv) test whether there is evidence that the magmatic systems at the various volcanoes are coupled or interacting, and v) study the extraordinary observation of subsidence of lava flows that are up to 20 years old doc347 none Harvey The drinking water of Bangladesh is severely contaminated with arsenic. Over one-half of the approximately four million wells that constitute the country s drinking water supply have levels of naturally occurring arsenic above the World Health Organization s standard of 0.01 mg L, exposing as many as 50 million people to dangerous levels of arsenic in their drinking water. Concentrations as high as 0.5 mg L are common. It has been suggested in the popular media [New York Times, November 10, ] that this may be the largest mass poisoning in history. Our primary research question is: What causes high levels of arsenic in the groundwater of Bangladesh? If the source, fate and transport of arsenic in the environment are not understood, future water management schemes run the risk of compounding the problem. We will test a set of working hypotheses for the cause(s) of arsenic contamination that include : (A) Depositional explanations for the distribution of solid and dissolved arsenic; (B) Geochemical hydrologic reasons for high dissolved arsenic concentrations; and (C ) Anthropogenic causes of arsenic mobilization. From this understanding of the cause of high levels of dissolved arsenic, we will consider how arsenic concentrations may change in time and how arsenic is distributed throughout the country. Specific issues include: (A) Are arsenic concentrations correlated with particular sedimentary characteristics or surface hydrologic characteristics? (B) Can we develop better methods to site wells by interpolating arsenic concentrations from sampled locations? (C ) Do arsenic levels rise due to pumping or infiltration of fertilizers? (D) Can deep wells provide a long-term solution? The installation of deep wells has already begun on an ad hoc basis. We will conduct field and laboratory experiments, coordinated with modeling exercises, focusing on a cluster of 15 wells that range in depth between 3 m and 200 m installed in the Munshiganj district. We have also extracted a 200-meter core of solid aquifer material isolated from the atmosphere to maintain the redox state, perhaps the key control on arsenic activity. We will study the mechanisms that bind arsenic by analyzing the sediments and pore water with methods including X-ray adsorption spectroscopy (XAS), micro-probe analysis and growth of bacterial cultures, as well as sequential extraction of the preserved sediment samples. We will then study the effect of geochemical perturbations on arsenic mobilization in situ by injection-withdrawal tests from our installed wells using water that has been chemically altered to test hypothesized arsenic binding mechanisms. An understanding of arsenic binding mechanisms will support predictions regarding arsenic mobility and transport. Reactive-transport modeling will be used to consider mobilization due to pumping and redistribution by seasonal groundwater fluxes. Regional maps of arsenic concentration will be estimated by geostatistical methods constrained by knowledge of variations in sedimentary characteristics. Students and faculty will actively participate in the field, laboratory, and modeling work. To gain a sound scientific basis for long-term water management, we will convey our research to decision-makers to help provide safe drinking water for Bangladesh. This is a collaborative project with MIT, the University of Cincinnati, and Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology doc243 none Beard Crawford Sinha As exotic material accretes to a continental margin by convergent tectonics, a number of important changes in conditions occurs, some of which lead to production of magma that subsequently becomes involved in the ongoing structural development of the accretion. As tonalitic plutons are commonly generated as continental margin arcs accrete, their composition provides information about the P-T-X H2O conditions of the source region, and combined with fabric and structural data, provide constraints for the transport and emplacement processes that might lead to chemical modification of magmas as they traverse and are emplaced in the crust. The project will utilize a suite of tonalitic plutons on Revillagigedo Island in southeastern Alaska that record early stages of continental arc magmatism. Results are expected to detail and track the origin, modification and tectonic interactions of these magmas in this convergent setting doc349 none Willis This award to Oregon State University provides shipboard technical support, shore-based support, as well as maintenance and calibration of shared-use scientific instrumentation, for researchers using R V Wecoma, a general purpose research vessel operated by the university s College of Oceanographic and Atmospheric Sciences as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The award also provides support for research using two portable systems, either on Wecoma or other UNOLS vessels, including a large piston coring system for sediment sampling and an undulating tow vehicle for profiling chemical, biological, physical and optical properties of the water column. The technical support awarded here will assist NSF-funded researchers conduct a diverse suite of oceanographic studies, principally in the North Pacific Ocean, beginning in doc350 none Bird The proposed study is an experimental, theoretical, and geologic investigation of zeolite-solution interaction that aims to quantify ion exchange reactions between aqueous solutions and heulandite in geologic systems. Research is based on experimental evaluation of Ca2+, Na+, Sr2+, and K+ exchange reactions in natural heulandite, a common rock-forming zeolite, known to concentrate Sr2+ in its crystal structure via ion exchange. Our goal is to provide thermodynamic data required to model reactive mass transfer between heulandite and ground-waters in basaltic aquifers, with reference to attenuation of radioactive 90Sr derived from nuclear waste respositories. This study includes binary cation exchange experiments on heulandite to determine the thermodynamic properties of the exchange reactions and crystal-chemical investigation on the effects of ion exchange on the crystal structure of heulandite employing X-ray diffraction and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques. Finally, the credibility of the laboratory experiments and thermodynamic analyses will be tested using measured fluid and mineral compositional relations in Icelandic geothermal metamorphic systems. The work will be conducted at Stanford University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory. The specific objectives of this study are to determine: 1) Gibbs energies and enthalpies of ion exchange reactions, 2) quantitative description of cation sites and site occupancy in heulandite as a function of composition and 3) activity-composition models for binary solid solutions in the interchannel sites in heulandite. The results will facilitate geochemical modeling of alkali- and alkaline earth-metal mass-transfer in groundwater aquifers where zeolites occur. Our findings will provide essential data to help develop heuristic and quantitative models of groundwater-zeolite interaction and the fate of 90Sr in basaltic aquifers contaminated with nuclear waste such as those below the U. S. Department of Energy sites at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, WA, and the Idaho National Engineering Laboratories, ID, as well as in more silicic volcanic rocks at Yucca Mountain, NV, where heulandite occurs doc351 none Agnew, Duncan Carr This proposal requests funds to support the continued operation of a portable laser strainmeter adjacent to the southern San Andreas fault and co-located with a fully anchored laser strainmeter. The investigator had planned to pull out the portable instrument in the fall of , but is requesting funds to continue to operate the instrument because over the last six months a number of unusual strain events have been observed. First, there has been observed several aseismic but rapid strain changes which are unlike the previous behavior of the strain record since . Second, there has been observed the postseismic response to the Mw 7.1 Hector Mine earthquake of 17 October . This earthquake triggered a swarm of earthquakes adjacent to the southern termination of the San Andreas fault, near the strainmeters, leading to genuine concern over the possibility of accelerating deformation in the area. Given the current level of activity, it is very likely that continued operation of this instrument will detect further such events. Understanding better where, and perhaps how, these events occur should provide important information on fault mechanics in general and about the behavior of the San Andreas fault at its southern end: one end of that segment of the San Andreas which has the longest elapsed time since the last large earthquake doc352 none The objective of this proposal is to illuminate the relative importance of the transient and permanent components of stress perturbations in triggering earthquake aftershocks. The PI proposes to undertake a study of the global scale that uses existing data. The simple notion that underlies the proposed work follows previous research on triggering of aftershocks by the Landers earthquake. For earthquakes that feature unilateral rupture propagation, permanent (static) stress changes are spatially symmetric while peak transient (dynamic) stresses are asymmetric. This difference provides a means to study the relative roles of each of these components of stress perturbations. The proposed work will seek to determine whether a systematic relationship exists between the spatial symmetries of aftershock distributions and the propagation characteristics (rupture directivity) of the mainshock. The research will: 1) survey databases and the literature to determine which earthquakes have both reliable estimates of directivity effects (or their absence), and statistically reliable aftershock (and before mainshock) catalogs, and 2) devise and apply metrics that compare the spatial distribution of stress fields with aftershock occurrence patterns, focussing on spatial symmetry or asymmetry. Additional research steps will also be included, such as waveform modeling of at least some earthquakes to constrain models of dynamic stresses at seismogenic depths and numerical elastic modeling to estimate the static stress field changes doc353 none Nielson Drilling is the only means for collecting samples of subsurface rocks and fluids and installing monitoring instrumentation at depth, and it can serve as the focus for advances in understanding continental dynamics. However, scientific drilling projects tend to be technically complex, involve multiple institutions and require expertise that most universities and geological scentists do not possess. In addition, geologists time is better spent focusing on the scientific rather than the management aspects of the drilling project. Scientific drilling often requires drilling equipment and practices that are not available in the commercial sector. DOSECC (Drilling, Observation and Sampling of the Earth s Continental Crust, Inc.) was formed in to provide assistance to the National Science Foundation and the academic community in the implementation of Continental Scientific Drilling. DOSECC is a non-profit corporation and a consortia of 47 universities and other research organizations. The mission of DOSECC is to promote and facilitate scientific drilling as an important component of earth science research. In fulfilling that mission, DOSECC facilitates communication between the scientific and the drilling engineering communities and providws technical, logistical, and fiscal management support to a research drilling program. By taking on these functions, DOSECC relieves the project investigators of much of the burden associated with the execution of a drilling effort, enabling them to focus on the scientific objectives. DOSECC also improves the cost-effectiveness of scientific drilling by avoiding the missteps and lost time that can waste expensive rig-time and project resources doc354 none Guggenheim The presence of palygorskite and sepiolite in soils and sediments is widely used as a paleoenvironmental indicator because of their restricted environments of formation. In addition, their physical properties (especially their sorption capacity and catalytic behavior) has lead to their extensive industrial and environmental use as sorbants. The physiochemical transformation of palygorskite-sepiolite to smectite has been identified in samples from the Meigs-Attapulgas-Quincy district, an important source of these clays. Because this transformation can considerably affect the use of the palygorskite-sepiolite as industrial sorbants, the proposed project investigates the palygorskite-sepiolite to smectite transformation and its influence on the type and distribution of reactive surface sites and changes in micro-fabrics. The micro-fabric, morphology, and surface micro-topography of a natural palygorskite-sepiolite-smectite assemblage from the Meigs-Attapulgas-Quincy district will be studied using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM), and the bulk structure of palygorskite-sepiolite will be studied using synchrotron X-ray diffraction and TEM data. Atomic models of the bulk and surface structures of palygorskite, sepiolite, and especially transitional forms will be developed from the TEM, X-ray, and AFM data. The purpose of this study is to obtain a step-by-step understanding of the transformation and to model the variation in sorption behavior. The results are important for environmental (e.g., heavy-metal adsorption) and commercial applications (e.g., bleaching and clarifying agents of oils) as well as the potential ability to use altered lithofacies to indicate paleoenvironmental information doc355 none Garcia Lavas provide essential clues to the crustal and mantle processes associated with volcanoes. Kilauea Volcano is an ideal natural laboratory for evaluating how physical processes within volcanoes cause observable changes in lava composition and it is the best-studied volcano in the world. Thus, we can address fundamental problems from a well-constrained perspective. This project involves making precise trace element and isotope analyses for quantitative modeling of mantle melting processes, assessing source heterogeneity and evaluating crustal contamination effects on the composition of Kilauea historical lavas. We will make a comprehensive petrologic and geochemical characterization of historical Kilauea lavas, including lavas from the ongoing Puu Oo eruption. We have documented long-term, systematic isotopic and compositional variations within its historical summit lavas (~200 year period) and short-term geochemical variations during the ongoing (17+ years) Puu Oo rift zone eruption. The magma for the Puu Oo and other major rift zone eruptions is thought to have bypassed the summit reservoir and to give us a clearer picture of mantle melting processes and source heterogeneity. The cause for the lower oxygen isotope ratios in oceanic island basalts compared to mid-ocean ridge basalts remains controversial. Some studies have been related the differences to distinct mantle sources, while other studies have invoked crustal contamination. We documented evidence for extensive crustal contamination in some Kilauea historical lavas, including those from the Puu Oo eruption but have not determined the oxygen isotope value for Kilauea s source. New techniques will be use to determine oxygen isotopes for well characterized samples from the ongoing eruption, other historical lavas and hydrothermally altered rocks from a 3 km deep geothermal well to better understand mantle source heterogeneity and crustal contamination processes for Kilauea. The results of this project will allow us to: 1. evaluate the relative importance of mantle source heterogeneity and changes in extent of partial melting in controlling geochemical variation of historical Kilauea lavas; 2. determine the amount of crustal contamination in Kilauea lavas and better understand the oxygen isotope heterogeneity in its source; and 3. decipher the mantle melting processing associated with the ongoing Puu Oo eruption doc356 none Ritzi We will develop a hierarchical spatial random function (HSRF) model that represents permeability, sedimentary structures, and sedimentary units defined by bounding surfaces in granular aquifer systems. At the smallest scale, facies are defined as regions of unimodal permeability and, if present, of cross-strata sets with common orientation to the laminae. Facies will be represented by a continuous random variable having anisotropic correlation controlled by bedding and or the orientation of cross-strata sets. Assemblages of facies, such as the combination of facies filling a single channel, will be represented by an indicator random variable and associated transition probabilities which represent the proportions, geometries, and juxtapositioning of each facies. A complex of facies assemblages, such as juxtaposed channel fill, bar accretion, and overbank assemblages within channel belt deposits, is represented by a higher-tier indicator random variable with transition probabilities representing the proportions, geometries, and juxtapositioning of the assemblages. The continuous and indicator variables of all three levels will be mathematically expressed in a single HSRF model suitable for integration with analytical expressions for solute spreading. The HSRF model departs from current models and approaches in that it can capture complex, non-Gaussian spatial distributions and can incorporate interpretive sedimentology to constrain the geostatistical models. In combined field studies and model temperament, we seek to address the following questions relating to (1) the distribution of permeability in granular media and (2) solute spreading. (1) Questions relating to distribution of permeability: o Does the HSRF model, with its three hierarchical levels, capture the aspects of permeability and sedimentary structure important for understanding solute spreading at the scale of typical plumes? o Are the attributes of any one hierarchical level correlated with those of another level? o Can the HSRF model be used to improve the conditional estimation of permeability at unknown locations? o Can the HSRF model be used as a framework for incorporating geological sedimentological soft data as geostatisticl models are developed? (2) Questions related to solute spreading: o What are the relative contributions of the three hierarchical levels to both longitudinal and lateral solute spreading? o As the univariate statististics and the spatial correlation of permeability become increasingly different across facies boundaries, at what point are the moments of solute spreading significantly affected? o Under what conditions can representation of any of the hierarchical levels be ignored? o Under what conditions can transport in a multimodal heterogeneity be modeled with effective, plume-scale-dependent parameters? To answer these questions, we are conducting a collaborative, interdisciplinary project involving investigators at both the University of California, Berkeley, and Wright State University. As in past URI-funded projects at Wright State University, the project will provide research experiences for undergraduates doc357 none Vidale This project proposes to measure the fine-scale structure of the Earth s inner-core and estimate its rotation using newly discovered inner-core-scattered waves (ICS). The PIs recently showed an extended ( 200 s) scattered wavetrain following the inner-core-boundary reflection (PkiKP), which can be explained by short-wavelength (3.5 km) small amplitude ( 3%) stiffness variations distributed across the outer half of the inner-core. These initial results indicate the inner core is one of the more heterogeneous places in our planet. This project would amass a database of array ICS waves from different epicentral ranges, the research will be able to place constraints on the amplitude variation of distinct physical properties. Analysis of ICS waves provides a simple test for inner-core motion. Scattered waves generated by two Novaya Zemlya nuclear tests separated by less than a kilometer occurring in and recorded at LASA show small but coherent changes in the ICS waves. Energy scattered in the inner core to the west of the great-circle path is up to 0.1 s earlier in than . The opposite trend appears for scattering from the east. This pattern suggests an inner-core rotation rate of 0.15 degrees per year. Investigation of additional events is needed to confirm the initial result, test for the temporal stability on the inner-core-rotation rate, and determine the inner-core super-rotation pole doc358 none MARONE During an earthquake, fault surfaces slip at speeds of several cm s to several m s. The frictional properties at these slip rates play an important role in determining key aspects of seismic rupture, including earthquake stress drop, heat production, and the mode of dynamic rupture expansion. However, little is known about friction at dynamic slip velocities. The limited available data have been collected under a narrow range of conditions and significant discrepancies exist between these data and the friction database at lower velocities appropriate to earthquake nucleation. This proposal is to conduct laboratory experiments spanning slip speeds from m s to micron s. An important goal will be to quantitatively connect friction observations over the entire velocity range and to study the problem of scaling laboratory friction data to seismogenic faults. Bare rock surfaces and granular fault gouge will be studied under a range of normal stresses and surface conditions, and friction data will be analyzed in terms of existing friction theory. A major goal of the experimental program will be to identify the micromechanical causes of velocity-dependent friction and friction evolution (state) effects doc359 none Jackson, David D. This project will support work development and testing a long-term earthquake potential model (probability as a function of location, magnitude, and time) based on past seismicity and seismic moment balance. Work has been done testing a simple model based on a smoothed version of past seismicity in several regions of the Pacific Rim. This model will be improved in several ways. First, the research will explicitly introduce time-dependent long-term clustering of earthquakes. Second, the model s dependence on magnitude and focal mechanism of past earthquakes will be optimized. Third, the research will examine the relationships between magnitude distribution and tectonic environment to apply appropriate magnitude distributions for various tectonic regimes. In this process, the work will test several major hypotheses about earthquake recurrence and the dependence of maximum magnitude, seismic coupling, and b-value on tectonic environment. The work will also test for characteristic earthquakes, quasi-periodic earthquake recurrence, clustering, and the dependence of maximum magnitude and seismic coupling on plate convergence rate and the age of the subducted plate doc360 none Cashman The Sierra Nevada - Basin and Range boundary zone in northwestern Nevada - northeastern California records the superimposed effects of several tectonic regimes. In this area, Neogene basins straddle both the geologic physiographic boundary between the Sierra Nevada and the Basin and Range, and the time span during which it evolved, thus providing the opportunity to better understand paleotopography and tectonics along this orogenic boundary. Results will help answer several long-standing questions of regional interest, and will also pertain to fundamental questions about how and why continental crust deforms doc361 none Williams Bowring The presence of high-pressure rocks at the surface implies considerable crustal-scale tectonism, however the processes by which this occurs during the evolution of a continental shield is not well understood. This project will examine the Snowbird tectonic zone of the western Canadian Shield to test two models for the age and tectonic scenario responsible. The work also involves application and refinement of a new electron microproble age mapping and dating technique that may prove to be widely applicable to studies of lower crustal rocks and metamorphosed rocks in general doc362 none University of Southern California The M7.1 Hector Mine, California, earthquake in provides an excellent site for capture of fault-zone guided waves. 3 days after the mainshock coordinated by the USGS, we deployed a seismic array of a 60-channel GEOMETRICS recorder from PASSCAL across the surface rupture near the epicenter and recorded ~800 aftershocks in 10 days. The data show 4-6 Hz fault-zone trapped waves at stations close to the surface rupture for events occurring within the rupture zone. Afterwards, the SCEC organized a deployment of 83 PASSCAL REFTEKs at 2 sites on the rupture zones. ~ aftershocks were recorded in 4 weeks. We propose to do a systematic analysis and FD-FE modeling of fault-zone trapped wave data for more information about the internal structure of the rupture zone, physical nature of fault segmentation, the relationship between the fault zone structure and dynamic rupture process as well as the healing of the fault after a major earthquake. The main tasks of this proposal are: 1. To delineate the physical properties and fine structure of the fault zone in 3-D. 2. to repeat seismic surveys using explosions for monitoring the fault healing. 3. to simulate the rupture through the fault stepovers characterized by trapped waves, and assess the rupture velocity variations, extent of slip, dynamics stresses and nonlinear energy dissipation in the fault zone during the rupture for a better understanding the damage mechanism, fault friction and rheology. 4. to analyse shear-wave splitting for additional information on the stress state and fracture matrix around the rupture zone doc363 none Hilton In this proposal, we will conduct a noble gas study of a series of groundwaters from three well-studied semi-arid regions. The aims are twofold: first, we plan to assess the potential of the 4He accumulation method to accurately estimate groundwater residence times over a range of ages from 100s to 500,000 years. The approach will involve inter-calibration with a number of different groundwater dating techniques (tritium, 14C and 36Cl, and integration of the total database into previouslydeveloped groundwater flow models for the individual basins. An important feature will be ascertaining the nature of the crustal He flux and its quantification in the three studied areas, particularly as one, the West Mojave River Basin, is situated on tectonically active crust while the other two, Central Australia and Botswanna, lie on stable cratonic platforms. We will concentrate on deriving long-term, paleo-recharge rates for the three regions-a parameter of vital importance to current resource management strategies-but other hydraulic quantities (e.g., aquifer permeability can be also assessed using the 4He technique. The second aim is to utilize the noble gas abundances (concentrations of Ne, Ar, Kr and Xe) to derive both temperatures and environmental conditions at the time of recharge. In each of the studied areas, we will select waters, dated by 4He and other techniques, to focus on the last glacial period. Through the relationship between noble gases and stable isotopes d18O and d2H, we plan to determine (paleo) temperature variations and other localized effects (e.g., rising water tables) characteristic of past recharge regions. Through collaboration with colleagues from the Geological Surveys of the respective regions (U.S., Australia and Botswanna), we will have unprecedented access to a wide range of geochemical and geophysical data on the regions of study, logistical support for new sample collection, training opportunities on state-of-the-art groundwater software, and localized expertise on real-world resource and groundwater management issues doc364 none Refining the Age of Neoproterozoic Glaciation in the Boston Basin, Massachusetts: New U-Pb Zircon Constraints on the Last Snowball Earth Margaret Thompson As climatologists struggle to agree upon future dimensions of global warming, debate is also heating up among earth scientists who study sedimentary rocks formed during ice ages at the close of Precambrian time. According to the hypothesis dubbed snowball earth , climatic conditions in this era were so extreme that the world s oceans froze over resulting in mass extinction of marine micro-organisms and shut-down of precipitation and related chemical erosion on land. The deep freeze gave way to equally extraordinary greenhouse conditions after an estimated ten million years with the accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide supplied by erupting volcanoes. These dramatic claims of the snowball earth hypothesis will be tested in this study by refining currently available age constraints for terminal Precambrian glaciation recorded in the Squantum Tillite Member of the Roxbury Conglomerate south of Boston, Massachusetts. Improved ages will pinpoint the duration of the Squantum glaciation, and also clarify whether the Squantum deposits are the same age as glacial deposits in the Avalon Peninsula of eastern Newfoundland. Ages will be obtained by measuring U Pb ratios in minerals extracted from lava flows, volcanic ash beds and argillite that can be related to previously dated rocks above and below the glacial beds. The maximum depositional age (approx. 590 million years) will be refined using samples from coastal exposures in Hingham, Massachusetts where a lava flow is overlain by conglomerate containing limestone boulders that will be analyzed for C and Sr isotope signatures characteristic of post-glacial cap carbonate elsewhere in the world. Fine grained sandstone at the top of the Hewitts Cove section is also significant because it has recently yielded Aspidella fossils which in Newfoundland are younger than approx. 565 million years. Because surface exposure of rocks above the Squantum deposits is poor, the minimum age of glaciation (approx. 570 million years) will be refined by dating ash beds and ash-rich argillite overlying the Squantum beds in the Main Drainage Tunnel and the Inter-Island Tunnel. Dates from this study will not only provide the first robust estimate of the duration of a terminal Precambrian glacial event, but will also furnish a valuable maximum age constraint on soft bodied Ediacaran fauna preceding the explosion of life forms in Cambrian time doc365 none van der Hilst This project will continue geophysical investigation of the Australian continent, and will provide new constraints on the short (seismic) and long term (flexural) strength of the Australian lithosphere and a better understanding of the origin of the wavespeed variations (composition, temperature, anisotropy) and the dynamic stability of the continent. The work project will expand the previously conducted seismic imaging (with emphasis on anisotropy and uncertainty assessment), develop and apply geodynamical tools to constrain the rheology of the continental upper mantle, and synthesize the results of geophysical probing and the available geological data. Specific objectives are: 1) produce high resolution models for P and S wavespeed and their ratio by joint inversion of P and S travel time residuals and fundamental and higher mode Rayleigh wave dispersion; 2) quantify azimuthal and radial seismic anisotropy by joint interpretation of Rayleigh wave dispersion and body wave birefringence and of the Love-Rayleigh discrepancy; 3) assess model uncertainty by application of different inversion techniques and by using a Spectral Element Method to calculate synthetic seismograms for the 3D anisotropic models; 4) further constrain lithospheric thickness with radial changes in the character of azimuthal and radial anisotropy; 5) determine the (anisotropic) effective elastic thickness of the continental plate and its relationship with seismic lid thickness and anisotropy and with intra-plate deformation; 6) use geodyanmical calculations and seismological constraints to model sub-lithospheric anisotropy and mantle flow around continental keels; 7) combine gravity geoid anomalies, heat flow, and the 3D wavespeed models to constrain 3D variations of compositional bouyancy in the continental mantle doc366 none Thurber, Clifford H. This proposal seeks funds to continue efforts to archive high quality seismic data sets from the University of Wisconsin data archives. This renewal request will support archiving (to the IRIS DMC) the following data sets collected by Professor Meyer s research group: the and Kenya Rift teleseismic experiments; the Mono Lake local array; the -7 Midcontinent Rift experiment (western WI eastern MN), and a data set collected in along the South American subduction zone (Tumaco Columbia earthquake sequence). The digital data are accurately timed and the station locations are known with sufficient accuracy to make it a worthwhile effort to preserve the data, given the intrinsic scientific importance of the regions studied and events recorded doc367 none Clifford H. Thurber In most instances, the seismicity associated with magmatic activity (eruptions or intrusions) has apppeared rather diffuse, suggesting that the activity may surround the zone of a conduit or propagating dike. A radically different view of the relationship between seismic activity and propagating magma for Kilauea s East Rift Zone has been put forward by Gillard et al. [ ] and Rubin et al. [ ]. By combining the results of high-precision earthquake location (HPEL) with theory and mechanical modeling, these authors conclude that the observed seismicity is concentrated in pencil-thin features near the top edge of a deep magma body underlying Kilauea s East Rift. This localization is due to the stress concentration at the upper edge of the weak magma-rich zone. These results emphasize the value of applying HPEL to digital seismic data from volcanic systems, and also point to a potential new way of identifying dikes and magma bodies using seismicity patterns. The PI s work so far studying seismicity at several volcanic systems has resulted in the clarification of seismicity within two large volcanoes, Mount Pinatubo and Mauna Loa. In each case, two separate but diffuse clusters of seismicity become well-defined features after relocation analysis. This project will continue and expand this work to include several other active systems. Some key aspects of the project are the use of state-of-the-art techniques for arrival-time determination and earthquake location and the access to several unique, high-quality data sets from volcanic systems around the world doc368 none Reilinger Description: This award is to support the collaboration of Dr. Robert Reilinger, Principal Research Scientist, Earth Resources Laboratory, Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Dr. Aykut A. Barka, Professor of Geology at Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey, and Dr. Semih Ergintav, the Marmara Research Center, Gebza, Turkey in research to monitor and analyze post-seismic deformation for the Turkey earthquakes. Other collaborators include Dr. Roland Burgmann, Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of California, Berkeley, California, and Dr. Kurt Feigl, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Toulouse, France. The earthquakes in Izmit (M=7.4) and Duzce (M=7.1) resulted in continuous surface break along a 150-km segment of the western North Anatolian fault, with right-lateral surface offsets reaching 5 m. This research builds on earlier studies of strain accumulation along the fault system ( - ) and recent studies of co-seismic and post-seismic deformation for the Izmit event. Ongoing work supported primarily by the Turkish partners to define the details of the Duzce earthquake co-seismic fault slip will be critical to the modeling effort. The tight constraints on secular strain and co-seismic fault slip for these events and the detailed monitoring of the early phase of post-seismic motions provide an important opportunity to develop the observations needed to constrain models of after-slip and viscoelastic relaxation. Distinguishing the possible contributions of these mechanisms has implications for the rheology of the continental lithosphere and localized rheology in the fault zone. The results will enhance our understanding of the mechanics of earthquake cycle in this and similar tectonic regions (such as the San Andreas fault). Scope: This project will support important collaborative research for which the primary support is provided by NSF s Division of Earth Sciences. This award will support the travel, living expenses and field expenses for the US scientists while in Turkey and partial support for the foreign scientists while visiting MIT. The latters participation in field research and meetings at MIT is expected to lead to improvement in the fieldwork and in the interpretation of the results obtained and the conclusions to be reached. The project fits well with the objective of the Division of International Programs for encouraging mutually beneficial collaboration on research of important scientific problems. Funding for this project is provided by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Earth Sciences doc369 none Chamberlain, Kevin R. Duebendorfer, Ernest M. A mesoproterozoic magmatic belt extends from California to Labrador, yet its tectonic significance is controversial, largely because of the absence of regionally extensive structures of pervasive fabrics that can be used to deduce tectonic setting. This project addresses this problem by an integrated program of mapping, structural analysis and U-Pb geochronology on synkinematic minerals from 1.4 Ga shear zones in Southern Wyoming. Results are expected to help resolve various compressional or extensional models for this tectonic episode doc370 none Murdoch Sheet fractures in crystalline rock are an important control of ground water whose occurrence, characteristics, and processes of formation are poorly understood. The objective of this project is to combine information from several well-studied sites in the vicinity of western South Carolina with results from a new borehole test to improve the ability to characterize sheet fractures. The new test will use a straddle packer fitted with a precision borehole extensiometer, similar to devices used to measure rock deformation during geothechnical investigations. The device will be centered on a fracture and then used to conduct either injection or recovery tests. The resulting data will provide fracture aperture, or axial displacement of the borehole, as functions of pressure and the volume of injected (or recovered) fluid. The transient aperture change during an injection-displacement test will provide an additional descriptive record that goes beyond what can be measured during conventional packer tests. Preliminary theoretical analyses have been derived, and additional analyses will be developed, to predict transient aperture, volume and driving pressure, as functions of fracture length, spacing, connectivity and other variables. Those solutions will be invested to estimate characteristics of sheet fractures, such as fracture length and connectivity, which are beyond the resolution of conventional packer tests. Characteristics that can be measured using conventional packer test, such as fracture storativity, will also be evaluated using the new method. The results of the analyses will be compared to findings from field mapping of surface exposures, as well as core descriptions, borehole flowmeter logs, temperature logs, borehole radar, concentional packer tests, and other methods. This study will also investigate natural variations in pore-fluid pressure and fracture aperture due to Earth tides, barometric pressure fluctuations or other effects. Those loadings may contribute to the growth of sheet fractures, and provide insights into conceptual models of sheet fracture formation. In addition, the response of fracture aperture to natural stresses holds the potential for estimating properties, such as hydraulic conductivity, storativity and elastic modulus, without pumping tests. The primary contribution of this research is expected to be the development of a new method for determining mechanical and hydrologic characteristics of gently dipping fractures in crystalline rock. This will advance the ability to site productive wells, stimulate well productivity by hydraulic fracturing, and evaluate risks associated with contaminant migration doc371 none Farley Rusmore The relationships between topography, tectonics, exhumation and climate are complex, and identifying and separating the factors is difficult. The Coast Mountains of British Columbia are a single physiographic range bordered by a transform margin in the north and a convergent margin in the south, yet preliminary data indicates that the Cenozoic exhumation history along the length of the range was uniform. This circumstance provides an opportunity to evaluate the dominant mechanism controlling the formation and evolution of this mountain range. The work involves an integrated low-temperature geochronologic, paleomagnetic and structural study across the southern part of the orogen and comparison to similar recent work to the north. Results are expected to shed light on the factors controlling topography in this orogen, which should help understand the formation of mountain ranges in general doc372 none Shen This proposal is to begin a series of high pressure melting experiments using the laser heated diamond anvil cell coupled with the third generation synchrotron x-ray micro-beam. This work will provide melting data on major components of the Earth s core (Fe, FeO, FeS, and Fe-Ni-O-S system) to pressures equivalent to those present in the Earth s core. The results of this study will have important implications for the Earth s thermal state and dynamic processes. Experiments will be performed at GeoSoilEnviroCARS (GSECARS) at the Advanced Photon Source (APS), Chicago. A newly developed laser heated diamond anvil cell (DAC) system will be used for generating a sample volume (~20 mm in dimension) at pressures to 250 GPa and sufficiently high temperatures for melting ( K). In situ x-ray diffraction with micro x-ray beams (~5 mm) will be used as a probe for melting determination. This proposal brings together expertise in the high pressure DAC technique and the new third generation synchrotron radiation (APS) which is ideally suited to study the long-standing problem of high pressure melting doc373 none Simpson Gromet Argentina contains basement rocks that are key to understanding Paleozoic evolution of the paleo-Pacific margin of Gondwana and the possible relationship of events there to the development of the Appalachian margin of Laurentia. Recent work in the structurally complex rocks of Eastern Sierras Pampeanas has produced data in conflict with predictions of existing models of the evolution of this margin by a continental collision. This project will test and further investigate the possibility that the structures and metamorphic signatures are the result of a continental margin accretionary prism that underwent ridge subduction instead. Results have considerable implications to attempts to reassemble the Gondwana supercontinent doc361 none Williams Bowring The presence of high-pressure rocks at the surface implies considerable crustal-scale tectonism, however the processes by which this occurs during the evolution of a continental shield is not well understood. This project will examine the Snowbird tectonic zone of the western Canadian Shield to test two models for the age and tectonic scenario responsible. The work also involves application and refinement of a new electron microproble age mapping and dating technique that may prove to be widely applicable to studies of lower crustal rocks and metamorphosed rocks in general doc375 none Johnson This project is a one-year exploratory study needed to examine the feasibility of Cr isotope measurements as indicators of Cr(VI) reduction and Cr contamination sources. Cr is a common groundwater contaminant because of its use in electroplating and other industrial processes. The complex redox chemistry of Cr determines its mobility and bioavailability, and in most Cr-contaminanted sites, Cr(VI) reduction is an important natural attenuation mechanism. Cr is also of interest in oceanographic and sedimentological studies, as both Cr(VI) and Cr(III) are present in ocean and estuarine water, and Cr concentration and speciation data hold information about redox conditions. Stable isotope ratios of nitrogen and sulfur have proven useful in tracking reduction of nitrate and sulfate to lower oxidation states, and in identifying sources of nitrate and sulfate in groundwater. This project is an initial step toward developing a similar capability for Cr isotopes. For nitrogen and sulfur, lighter isotopes are reduced preferentially, and thus isotope ratio shifts in nature provide evidence that reduction reactions are occurring, and indicate the degree of reduction. It is likely that in chromate reduction, 52Cr will be reduced preferentially relative to 53Cr, and observed shifts in 53Cr 52Cr ratio of the Cr in groundwater would indicate Cr(VI) reduction. Cr isotopes are thus promising as a new geochemical toll, but the isotopic fractionations must be observed in controlled experiments before extensive research can be undertaken. The proposed study will measure the size of this kinetic isotope effect and assess the potential for Cr isotope applications. Three experiments are planned, in which Cr(VI) reduction will occur in simple solutions, on mineral surfaces, and in sediment slurries. Also, Cr isotope ratio variations in groundwater from one field site will be examined in order to observe this kinetic isotope effect in nature and establish the practical measurement precision. This research has potential impacts in gaining an understanding of Cr isotope systematic that may then be used in further studies applied to groundwater, surface water, oceanographic, and sedimentological studies. Cr isotopes may ultimately be a practical tool for the use in understanding Cr sources and transport at contaminanted sites. This project is designed to be part of a Ph.D. dissertation for a graduate student, to be combined with similar work on Se isotopes that is in progress doc376 none Anderson Wallace The objectives of this study are to document the sources of crystals in the Bishop Tuff, a large volume, fragmental deposit of silicic volcanic rock that formed as a result of a huge explosive eruption, about 500 times larger than the Mt. St. Helens eruption. The crystals are important because they contain a record of processes related to how the magma formed and how and why it erupted. The traditional interpretation for the origins of such crystals is that they grow from the melt in which they erupt (such crystals are termed phenocrysts ). Recently, this traditional view has been challenged by those working with radiometric isotopic systems capable of providing independent measures of time. New interpretations are that most of the crystals formed a long time before eruption and were recycled from older, previously crystallized magma bodies (such crystals are termed xenocrysts ). Reheating of these older, largely crystalline bodies is hypothesized to have liberated crystals that became entrained in the erupting magma. In this interpretation, crystals contain little or no information about either how the magma formed or what made it erupt. Large bodies of silicic magma are an important part of planetary differentiation, and it is vital to test concepts that are related to their origin. A record of apparent formation of phenocrysts is contained in successively grown zones on crystals and in melt inclusions (now glass) that were trapped during crystal growth. We will use this record to test ideas regarding the sources of crystals in the Bishop Tuff magma. This study involves field relations of volcanic deposits, textural information, and geochemistry, and will provide an opportunity for students to learn and appreciate the need for field tests of hypothetical ideas doc377 none PI s: Douglas A. Wiens and Gideon Smith, Washington University The detailed structure of the Tonga subduction zone is being studied with seismic data from two dense seismic arrays. The arrays are to be deployed for about a year, one within the active island arc (Tonga), the other in the backarc environment (Fiji). Data from the arrays is used to characterize and model seismic wave propagation effects within the subducting oceanic plate and the adjacent mantle. These wave propagation effects result from interactions with seismic velocity discontinuities in and near the subducting plate. The depths, velocity contrasts, and sharpness of the velocity discontinuities will be used to help better understand the temperature, mineralogy and presence of water in the subducting slab and the surrounding mantle at greater spatial detail than is possible from data recorded teleseismically. Dense array data also allows higher precision studies of the mechanics of deep earthquakes doc378 none Holt, William E. The investigators propose to use recent GPS VLBI SLR observations, Quaternary fault slip rates, the geoid, crustal thickness variations, and topography data to quantify both the strain rate tensor field and the vertically averaged deviatoric stress tensor field within western North America. Results to date indicate that gravitational potential energy (GPE) differences control the large fault-normal compression observed along the California coast as well as the extension at the Wasatch Range. Deformation in the Basin and Range is driven, in part, by gravitational potential energy differences but the extension directions there are strongly modified by plate interaction stresses. The analysis will be extended to investigate the state of stress north to Alaska, and south to include the Rivera Triple Junction. The area of analysis will include the effects of GPE differences out to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. A coupled analysis will investigate the self-consistent kinematics using observations from GPS, VLBI, SLR, and Quaternary fault slip rates. The proposed joint kinematic and dynamic modeling is important because it provides a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between geodetic observations (GPS, VLBI, SLR), lithospheric strain rates, and lithospheric stress. Refined models of the dynamics will be investigated using forward modeling methods with velocity boundary conditions determined from the kinematic modeling. They will also investigate the possible role of basal tractions in affecting the dynamics. This work should provide important input to enhance the planning and implementation of the proposed Plate Boundary Observatory and USArray initiatives doc379 none Rubin We will develop a hierarchical spatial random function (HSRF) model that represents permeability, sedimentary structures, and sedimentary units defined by bounding surfaces in granular aquifer systems. At the smallest scale, facies are defined as regions of unimodal permeability and, if present, of cross-strata sets with common orientation to the laminae. Facies will be represented by a continuous random variable having anisotropic correlation controlled by bedding and or the orientation of cross-strata sets. Assemblages of facies, such as the combination of facies filling a single channel, will be represented by an indicator random variable and associated transition probabilities which represent the proportions, geometries, and juxtapositioning of each facies. A complex of facies assemblages, such as juxtaposed channel fill, bar accretion, and overbank assemblages within channel belt deposits, is represented by a higher-tier indicator random variable with transition probabilities representing the proportions, geometries, and juxtapositioning of the assemblages. The continuous and indicator variables of all three levels will be mathematically expressed in a single HSRF model suitable for integration with analytical expressions for solute spreading. The HSRF model departs from current models and approaches in that it can capture complex, non-Gaussian spatial distributions and can incorporate interpretive sedimentology to constrain the geostatistical models. In combined field studies and model temperament, we seek to address the following questions relating to (1) the distribution of permeability in granular media and (2) solute spreading. (1) Questions relating to distribution of permeability: o Does the HSRF model, with its three hierarchical levels, capture the aspects of permeability and sedimentary structure important for understanding solute spreading at the scale of typical plumes? o Are the attributes of any one hierarchical level correlated with those of another level? o Can the HSRF model be used to improve the conditional estimation of permeability at unknown locations? o Can the HSRF model be used as a framework for incorporating geological sedimentological soft data as geostatisticl models are developed? (2) Questions related to solute spreading: o What are the relative contributions of the three hierarchical levels to both longitudinal and lateral solute spreading? o As the univariate statististics and the spatial correlation of permeability become increasingly different across facies boundaries, at what point are the moments of solute spreading significantly affected? o Under what conditions can representation of any of the hierarchical levels be ignored? o Under what conditions can transport in a multimodal heterogeneity be modeled with effective, plume-scale-dependent parameters? To answer these questions, we are conducting a collaborative, interdisciplinary project involving investigators at both the University of California, Berkeley, and Wright State University. As in past URI-funded projects at Wright State University, the project will provide research experiences for undergraduates doc380 none Bodnar Sinha Zircon (ZrSiO4) is a common accessory mineral present in most granitoid rocks. Zircon crystals from granitoid rocks often contain crystallized melt inclusions trapped during crystal growth from a magma. The zircons typically range from 30 to 250 um and the melt inclusions range from 20 to 120 um. Preliminary major and trace element analyses suggest that the melt inclusions preserve magma chemistries and provide information not easily attainable by traditional bulk rock analyses. The chemistry of the melt inclusions will be used to assess chemical evolution of magmas from melting of source rocks (to produce parental magmas) to final crystallization of magmas. This information, in turn, will be used to infer magma histories and the chemical changes that a melt undergoes during crystallization in the earth s crust. During melting and crystallization, some elements have an affinity for the crystalline minerals that form, whereas other elements have an affinity for the melt phase. We will use the melt inclusion and co-existing zircon chemistries to provide new partitioning data for various trace elements which are commonly used to infer petrogenesis of grantitoid rocks. Preliminary results indicate that partitioning data obtained from melt inclusions in refractory minerals, acting as miniature natural autoclaves, may be superior to data obtained in during short-duration laboratory experiments. Preliminary major and trace element data suggests that melt inclusions in zircon preserve original melt compositions. However, these compositions often disagree with magma compositions inferred from bulk rock analyses. Reconciliation of this discrepancy will be a main focus of the proposed research doc381 none Mao A series of high-pressure experimental studies of the elasticity and equations of state of mantle and core materials needed to address major problems concerning the structure, dynamics, and evolution of the Earth s deep interior is proposed. The project takes advantage of numerous recent developments in diamond-anvil cell techniques, including cell design, high-temperature methods, synchrotron single-crystal and polycrystalline x-ray diffraction, synchrotron x-ray spectroscopy, and Brillouin scattering spectroscopy. The following experiments will be performed. (1) P-V-T equations of state of iron, iron alloys, and iron compounds will be studied to core pressures using polycrystalline x-ray diffraction with monochromatic x-radiation, hydrostatic pressure media, and an improved pressure calibration. (2) The shear modulus and elasticity tensor of core materials (initially e-Fe) will be determined up to 50 GPa and temperatures up to K using radial x-ray diffraction methods with monochromatic synchrotron radiation. (3) The technique will be further applied to study the rheological properties of these materials (including Fe, Fe-Ni, FeO, and FeS2) with accurate measurements of the intensities of reflections as a function of temperature and time. (4) The phonon densities of states of iron-bearing materials will be determined to core pressures using nuclear resonant inelastic x-ray scattering, as recently done for Fe to 153 GPa. Combined with theoretical calculations, the technique will be extended in later stages of the project to simultaneous high pressures and temperatures. (5) The P-V-T equations of state of principal deep mantle oxide and silicate phases will be determined using polycrystalline x-ray diffraction in hydrostatic media over the entire geotherm of the lower mantle. (6) This will be complemented by single-crystal x-ray diffraction of select phases for complete structure refinements to 100 GPa using a new combined energy dispersive angle dispersive technique. (7) Brillouin scattering measurements of deep mantle phases [initially stishovite and (Mg,Fe)SiO3 perovskite] will be carried out to pressures above 50 GPa, and in the later stages of the project their temperature derivatives will be determined with resistive heating techniques. These results will provide an essential baseline for interpreting seismic velocity distributions and anisotropy of the lower mantle. (8) Finally, the calibration of pressure will be extended to high pressures and temperatures ( 800 K and 50 GPa) using the integrated Brillouin x-ray diffraction approach recently applied to MgO at room temperature doc376 none Anderson Wallace The objectives of this study are to document the sources of crystals in the Bishop Tuff, a large volume, fragmental deposit of silicic volcanic rock that formed as a result of a huge explosive eruption, about 500 times larger than the Mt. St. Helens eruption. The crystals are important because they contain a record of processes related to how the magma formed and how and why it erupted. The traditional interpretation for the origins of such crystals is that they grow from the melt in which they erupt (such crystals are termed phenocrysts ). Recently, this traditional view has been challenged by those working with radiometric isotopic systems capable of providing independent measures of time. New interpretations are that most of the crystals formed a long time before eruption and were recycled from older, previously crystallized magma bodies (such crystals are termed xenocrysts ). Reheating of these older, largely crystalline bodies is hypothesized to have liberated crystals that became entrained in the erupting magma. In this interpretation, crystals contain little or no information about either how the magma formed or what made it erupt. Large bodies of silicic magma are an important part of planetary differentiation, and it is vital to test concepts that are related to their origin. A record of apparent formation of phenocrysts is contained in successively grown zones on crystals and in melt inclusions (now glass) that were trapped during crystal growth. We will use this record to test ideas regarding the sources of crystals in the Bishop Tuff magma. This study involves field relations of volcanic deposits, textural information, and geochemistry, and will provide an opportunity for students to learn and appreciate the need for field tests of hypothetical ideas doc383 none Malin This project involves a near-surface 3D geophysical investigation of the drill site area near Parkfield, CA for the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD). Major portions of the fieldwork and data analysis will include advanced training of students in the investigation methods and extensive interactions between industry, government, and the universities involved in the investigation. The scientific purpose of the investigation will be to further characterize the near-surface fault and basin structure of the site. Knowledge of the near-surface structure is essential for interpreting the results of the deeper drilling and more regional geophysical investigations that are currently planned. In addition, these data will help to establish some of the near surface complications the drilling effort may encounter. The geophysical methods to be included in the site investigation are potential field and field gradient profiling, seismic profiling, magnetic field survey, and radar profiling. The drill site investigation will be conducted as part of an advanced, multi-university near-surface geophysics field camp and seminar. The camp will also be used as a focus for industry-university-government cooperation and interaction on the SAFOD project. The camp will primarily include students from Duke, Stanford and UC Berkeley, but will also be open to students from Questa College Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and other institutions participating in the SAFOD effort. The educational purpose of the field camp will be two fold: 1) to demonstrate the techniques and value of 3D geophysical surveying and data; and 2) to acquaint a large group of students with the scientific objectives and research possibilities of the SAFOD program. By sharing the data in an open and coordinated fashion between each of the participating institutions, it is hoped that several competing models of the drill site will emerge, with the ultimate test being provided by the drilling itself doc384 none Zreda The goal of this proposal is to determine how production rates of in-situ cosmogenic isotopes change with elevation. This goal will be achieved by measuring cosmogenic 36Cl and or 3He in samples from lava flows that extend over long distances in the vertical. Hawaii is the ideal location for this project because: (1) many very long lava flows have been mapped (some extend over 2 km in the vertical); (2) the stratigraphy of lava flows is well established; (3) individual flows can be traced in the field, thus making it possible to ensure that samples are collected from the same lava flow; and (4) many flows are well dated, thus making it possible to combine attenuation lengths from two or more lava flows into a composite record. At least ten samples from different elevations will be measured in each lava flow, and the concentration of accumulated cosmogenic isotopes will be expressed as a func-tion of elevation. Data from individual lava flows will then be combined and a composite function describing the dependence of production rates on elevation will be developed. This function will be compared with the measured neutron intensity, and the applicability of the measured neutron atten-uation length over geological time scales will be assessed. Finally, improved altitudinal scaling for-mulation for cosmogenic production rates will be constructed, which should be an important contribution to the improvement of all cosmogenic dating methods doc385 none Meigs Spotila That feedbacks potentially exist between climate change, erosion, and crustal deformation has focused attention on the topography of active orogenic systems. Studies of linkages between deformation, denudation and topographic development are complex, and have primarily utilized fluvial rather than glacial systems. Glaciated regions have a characteristic topographic form that is distinct from that of fluvial terrains, however basic relationships such as how mean topography relates with patterns of rock uplift are essentially unknown for landscapes dominated by glacial erosion. This project will investigate the long-term consequences of glacial erosion for topography, exhumation and deformation by study of the Chugach St. Elias Range, Alaska, an actively deforming glaciated orogenic belt. Results will enable testes of how deformation and glaciation have influenced orogenic topography over the last few million years. A better understanding of the role of glaciers in mountain system will provide a more complete context for the analysis of ancient collisional belts in the rock record doc386 none MAGNETIC STRATIGRAPHY AND TECTONIC ROTATION OF THE MIDDLE EOCENE COWLITZ FORMATION AND EQUIVALENTS, OREGON AND WASHINGTON Donald R. Prothero The Eocene-Oligocene transition was a critical point in Earth history, when the tropical greenhouse world of the Cretaceous to early Eocene was replaced by essentially modern icehouse conditions of the early Oligocene. This project will conduct magnetostratigraphic sampling on key exposures of marine rocks, which record the beginning of the Eocene-Oligocene transition in Washington and Oregon. Some of the most important exposures are of the upper middle Eocene Cowlitz Formation in western Washington. These strata yield the classic Cowlitz-Coaledo molluscan faunas, and are also important for their oil and coal deposits. Preliminary results from the type area of the Cowlitz Formation at Olequa Creek show that it yields both normal and reversed polarities. Based on a 40Ar 39Ar date of 38.9 + - 0.01 Ma, the type section of the Cowlitz Formation probably correlates with magnetic Chron C17n-C17r (36.5-38.5 Ma). PI proposes to sample further sections in the Cowlitz Formation, and its equivalent, the Hamlet Formation of Oregon. The magnetic stratigraphy of these sections offers the potential of much higher-resolution correlation of middle Eocene to Oligocene strata with the global time scale, and with other Eocene-Oligocene strata and faunal sequences. This will allow the underexploited data base of the Pacific Northwest marine molluscs and benthic foraminifera to be compared with the growing body of knowledge about the effects of the Eocene-Oligocene climatic changes on the organisms of the rest of the world. High-precision, high-resolution chronostratigraphy of these strata will also be important to petroleum geologists who study these important reservoir rocks, and to geologists who want to better understand the timing of events in this tectonically active region. In addition, the rocks of the type section at Olequa Creek show a clockwise tectonic rotation of 97 + - 11 degrees, consistent with other results reported from the region. By sampling a large number of Cowlitz-equivalent outcrops in both Oregon and Washington, PI hopes to improve understanding of the complex tectonic rotations that each structural block has undergone since the Eocene doc387 none Bennett The turbulent flow of groundwater through karst-aquifers effectively transports sediment and colloids through the subsurface and may provide a pathway for the rapid transport of organic contaminants. Sediment storage in karst aquifers, in contrast, may sequester contaminants for long time periods while altering the flow properties of the aquifer. The availability and transport of sediment in a karst aquifer are in turn profoundly influenced by changes in land-use and the associated changes in runoff and stream discharge. While there has been extensive research into the hydrodynamics of sediment transport in surface water, little is known about karst hydrodynamics, less about the connection between the surface and subsurface domains, and almost nothing about the dynamics of sediment transport in karst aquifers. The proposed study will investigate the transport of sediment in the urbanizing Barton Creek segment of the Edwards aquifer watershed of central Texas. Sediment characteristics, sediment transport, and sediment chemistry will be examined in Barton Creek across the primary recharge area in SW Austin, into the aquifer, and out at the watershed s only discharge points at Barton and Cold Springs. The goals of this project are to 1) Characterize the sediment chemistry in the stream at the recharge point and compare that to the discharged sediment; 2) quantify the transport of sediment through this section of the aquifer using natural and introduced tracers; and 3) quantify the sediment budget in urbanizing and agricultural watersheds under different flow regimes. We will characterize the sediment in the Barton Creek runoff at base and stormflow stages, at the Barton and Cold Springs discharge points, and directly in the aquifer using several monitoring wells between the recharge and discharge points. A sediment mass-balance will be developed by comparing sediment recharge into the aquifer to sediment discharge at the springs. Samples will be collected during baseflow and stormflow conditions to examine sediment loading, size distribution, and mineralogy as a function of discharge. Tracing of water flow using fluorescent dyes in cooperation with the City of Austin, and both natural and introduced sediment tracers, will be used to characterize sediment transport in the karst aquifer. A novel sediment tracer using DNA-labeled clay will be used to quantify transport time from the recharge feature and the loss of sediment to storage in the aquifer. The potential for contaminant transport by suspended sediment will be characterized by analyzing surface area sediment organic carbon, and contaminant loading will be characterized by analysis of total petroleum hydrocarbons on selected sediment samples. This project will provide fundamental insight into sediment transport processes into and through karst aquifers, the mobility of sediment and sediment-bound contaminants, and the sources of mobile sediment in urban and rural watersheds doc388 none Voight, Barry A month-long deployment of broadband seismographs at the summit of Merapi volcano (Java, Indonesia) in has yield a remarkable data set of volcanic earthquakes associated with active andesitic dome growth. These earthquakes, traditionally termed multiphase (MP) events, are usually characterized by 3-4 Hz ground motions on short-period stations. However, data collected within a few hundred meters of the dome showed relatively high-amplitude, distinctive, very-long-period (4 sec) horizontal ground motions superposed on the MP waveforms, with nearly identical waveforms at the same stations over many events. Very-long-period pulses are not observed at broadband stations at greater distance. Dominance of horizontal ground motions, pulse amplitude decay with distance, the close proximity of stations near lava dome, and character of modern broadband seismographs all suggest that these deformational pulses are due to dynamic, near-field tilts caused by lava extrusion processes at the actively growing Merapi dome. A two year-project is proposed to analyze these data using numerical methods to compute synthetic displacement and rotation fields and two conduct a one-month long PASSCAL RAMP deployment of broadband seismographs, in conjunction with high-data-rate tiltmetry, to collect more data during expected sustained actiity at Merapi. The results of this study will have important implications in interpreting broadband signals associated with volcanic processes, and may lead to fundamentally new understanding of seismic processes associated with active volcanic dome growth doc389 none Chamberlain During orogenesis large amounts of tectonically driven rock uplift combined with erosional processes produces high topography. Knowledge of the timing of uplift is critical to many dynamic models of orogenesis, but paleotopographic history is difficult to determine. This project will attempt to develop a paleotopographic record for the Sierra Nevada by using oxygen isotopic data from smectite of known volcanic age and origin. The method assumes that the smectite developed from volcanic ash quickly, in situ, in equilibrium with the isotopic composition of rain water at the time of diagenesis, unaltered since, and that the measured isotopic ratios faithfully proxy the rain shadow effect of mountainous topography as weather patterns cross mountain ranges orthogonally thus providing a robust rain shadow effect proxy for the desired paleotopography. A successful outcome will provide critically needed data for cordilleran tectonic models, and will help provide and test this method for use in ancient orogens elsewhere doc390 none Wernicke Lee The western US is an example of a diffuse plate boundary, where the total strain caused by the Pacific-North American relative plate movement is not entirely accommodated by the boundary transform. This project will continue investigations of late Quaternary strain release across the northern Basin and Range province as part of a large effort to understand how strain is partitioned and accommodated at this diffuse plate boundary. Results are expected to lead to better models of the dynamics of Basin and Range faulting and how they relate to the overall plate boundary organization doc391 none Castillo One of the hallmark geochemical features of volcanic arc lavas is the depletion of their concentrations of high field strength elements (HFSE such as Nb, Ta, and Zr) relative to those of other trace elements. The main objective of this study is to test in the Sulu Arc models that have been proposed to explain this geochemical feature such as melting or dehydration of the subducted basaltic crust plus overlying sediments and presence of ocean island basalt source component in the mantle wedge beneath the arc. The Sulu Arc system offers a unique opportunity to constrain the origin of HFSE depletion in arc lavas because it contains basalts with variable Nb and other HFSE concentrations (i.e., from typical Nb-depleted arc basalts to rare high-Nb basalts) and the oceanic crust subducting beneath the arc system has been sampled by the Ocean Drilling Program. The investigation will employ various geochemical and isotopic tracers (e.g., REE, Nb Ta, Ba La, Pb Ce, 87Sr 86Sr, 143Nd 144Nd, 206Pb 204Pb, 18O 16O) in order to fingerprint the behavior of many trace elements, particularly the HFSE, during the generation of arc lavas. Results of the study will also be useful for a general understanding of the source materials of lavas in the global arc system doc392 none Marone The seismic cycle requires that faults re-strengthen between earthquakes. Frictional healing (as evidenced by increasing static friction during quasi-stationary contact) is considered the most likely mechanism of interseismic strength recovery. However, the mechanisms of frictional healing are poorly understood. This proposal is to study the physical and chemical mechanisms of fault healing and frictional aging in simulated granular fault gouge. The results of the experiments will have significant implications for understanding the distinction between time- and slip-dependent friction evolution. Recent theoretical studies of dynamic rupture indicate that this distinction plays a key role in determining seismic characteristics such as frequency-magnitude scaling and the mode of rupture expansion (as a classical, self-similar crack or a self-healing slip pulse). Thus, the results will connect in an important way to other studies of earthquake source physics including theoretically-based studies and those based on field observations doc393 none Weidner A knowledge of the kinetics and mechanisms of the transformation of olivine to its high-pressure polymorphs wadsleyite and ringwoodite under subduction zone conditions is important for understanding the dynamics of subduction, the mechanism of deep earthquakes, and the mechanical properties of subducting lithosphere. The goal of this research is to study the transformational characteristics of olivine to its high-pressure polymorphs in the pressure and temperature domain of a subducting slab (i.e., high pressures and relatively low temperatures). The investigaotors will utilize a synchrotron x-radiation source coupled with a multi-anvil high-pressure system to conduct experimental studies in the pressure range up to 20 Gpa and a wide range of temperature. The transformation kinetics and mechanisms will be examined as a function of grain size, deviatoric stress, water content, and defect concentration (i.e., oxygen fugacity; hot-pressing vs. cold-pressing). Transformation mechanisms will be investigated through TEM analysis of recovered partially-transformed samples. The investigators will determine the effect of deviatoric stress on the transformation mechanisms and will also quantify the structural properties of high-pressure phases with time through structural refinements using monochromatic x-rays doc394 none Davis In large-scale systems of thin-skinned folding and thrusting a more or less uniform regional stress field is assumed and there is generally a distinct parallelism of folds and thrusts observed oriented approximately perpendicular to the direction of tectonic shortening. However, where the structures are not parallel, it does not follow that the stress field was not regionally uniform; basement inherited features can control structural orientations resulting from a homogeneous stress field. This project will use extensive spatial kinematic data from basement-cored uplifts in the Colorado Plateau that have diverse orientations and model the stress field that was responsible. It is expected that this work will illuminate the regional variations in the Laramide stresses acting on the Colorado Plateau and the effect various pre-existing basement features may have had on the final orientations of various structures. Results should help develop an integrated overview of the structural response of the Colorado Plateau to Laramide tectonics doc371 none Farley Rusmore The relationships between topography, tectonics, exhumation and climate are complex, and identifying and separating the factors is difficult. The Coast Mountains of British Columbia are a single physiographic range bordered by a transform margin in the north and a convergent margin in the south, yet preliminary data indicates that the Cenozoic exhumation history along the length of the range was uniform. This circumstance provides an opportunity to evaluate the dominant mechanism controlling the formation and evolution of this mountain range. The work involves an integrated low-temperature geochronologic, paleomagnetic and structural study across the southern part of the orogen and comparison to similar recent work to the north. Results are expected to shed light on the factors controlling topography in this orogen, which should help understand the formation of mountain ranges in general doc396 none Hearn, Thomas M. This project focuses on upper mantle structure beneath China and surrounding regions of the Asian continent. Asian tectonics is now dominated by the Indian-Asian continental collision and uplift of the Tibetan Plateau in the south and subduction along the eastern margin. Reactivated fold belts accommodate much of the deformation. These fold belts formed during the Phanerozoic amalgamation of cratonic blocks and blocks along eastern Eurasia. It is not clear, however, what the relationship of these blocks and fold belts are to their deeper mantle structure. Lithospheric thickness, collisional downwellings, and mantle anisotropy remain inadequately resolved. The tomography will use P phases from 0 to past 50 degrees distance to image the upper mantle beneath China and its surrounding regions. A key development in the tomography is the introduction of anisotropy. Previous tomographic studies show that anisotropy is essential to the problem and cannot be ignored. Anisotropic tomography has been developed and applied to the two-dimensional Pn problem. This proposal will extend anisotropic tomography to three-dimensions and apply it to the Asian data sets doc397 none Dilles, J. Reed, M. The Butte district, Montana, contains North America s largest copper reserves and is among the world s largest producers of copper and silver. Butte is a superb example of a giant porphyry Cu-Mo magmatic-hydrothermal ore deposit where data and samples from more than 100 years of underground mining plus hundreds of drill holes, including 11 vertical holes of 1.5 to 2.3 km depth, provide exceptional access to the system. Butte has served as the basis for much of modern understanding of ore formation processes, and our goal is to build improved hypotheses, that include the links of hydrothermal ores to magmas, via application of new and state-of-art analytical techniques. In the completed phase of research, we used isotopic dating techniques to establish that porphyry magmas that produced mineralization were emplaced about 76 to 68 million years ago, but that hydrothermal ore fluids and rocks cooled to less than 300 degrees C between 64 and 61 million years ago. Application of additional isotopic dating (using U-Pb, Ar-Ar and Re-Os) will enable us to understand this age difference. Our earlier work with isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen shows that magmatic brines produced high-temperature copper-molybdenum ores (biotite alteration) as well as later iron-sulfides (sericitic alteration). Those findings will be enlarged by application of state-of-the-art techniques (laser-ICP-MS and cathodoluminescence) on micrometer-scale samples of ore fluids trapped in quartz to establish temperature, pressure, and chemical composition of various ore fluids. We plan to synthesize the geology, geochemistry, and hydrothermal alteration mineralogy, and ore mineralogy into a series of maps and cross-sections that illustrate the three-dimensional spatial and temporal evolution of a giant magmatic-hydrothermal system doc398 none Wen, Lianxing This project will conduct a joint study of seismic structure, composition and dynamics of the mantle, with a strategic focus on Africa. Combining seismic forward waveform modeling and travel time inversion, we will attempt to map the geometry, magnitude and sharpness of seismic anomalies throughtout the mantle beneath Africa. With improved seismic models of the lower and upper mantle, we will also study the geodynamical and compositional aspects of mantle anomalies using other geophysical contraints, including geoid, topography at the Earth s surface and core-mantle boundary, intra-plate stress, plate motion, and experimental results from mineral physics doc399 none 6 Soukoulis This two-year award, which supports U.S.-Greece cooperative research on photonic band gap materials, involves Costas Soukoulis of Iowa State University and G. Kiriakidis of the University of Crete and the Research Center of Crete. The objective of their research is to develop new experimental and theoretical tools to understand the characteristics of photonic crystals, referencing Sub-THz and THz crystals, defects, novel materials, and fabrication at infrared wave scales. The U. S. investigator brings to this collaboration expertise in a new dielectric structure that has full three-dimensional PBG that facilitates fabricating crystals with higher photonic band gap frequencies. This is complemented by the Greek investigator s strengths in fabricating photonic crystals using deep x-ray lithography. Each side provides complementary equipment for the proposed research. The research is expected to lead to understanding of how to design and build photonic crystals, which may be used in such applications as millimeter-wave antennas and thresholdless semiconductor lasers doc400 none Denish O. Shah, Brij M. Moudgil U. of Florida The University of Florida Center for Surface Science and Engineering and the Engineering Research Center for Particle Science and Technology will host the 13th International Symposium on Surfactants in Solution (SIS- ) from June 11 to June 16, . The official venue for the symposium is the Sheraton of Gainesville in Gainesville, Florida. This will be the first symposium of the new century and the new millennium. We are confident that four plenary and many invited speakers will set the tone for the future direction of research in this area. The synergism among the expected 600 scientists from all over the globe will promote the breaking of new grounds and generation of new ideas in the scientific community. We are very enthusiastic to support the attendance of at least 150 post-doctoral associates and graduate students from academic institutions within the United States who will particularly benefit from the exchange of ideas at the symposium. This series of biennial symposia has been running since , and has been hosted by various countries: Bulgaria, Canada, France, India, Israel, Sweden, USA and Venezuela. We expect that researchers from more than 45 countries will attend this biennial conference. This international symposium covers the entire fundamental aspects and technical applications of surfactants. The most recent developments and innovative research on surfactants have been traditionally presented in this forum. This conference provides a rare but ever-important bridge of communication between the scientists from academia and industry, with one of the goals being to expedite the technology transfer process from universities to industrial laboratories. This will also help maintain the innovation in emerging technologies by the US industries. In , the Center for Surface Science & Engineering at the University of Florida hosted the symposium in Gainesville, Florida, which was attended by nearly 500 researchers from all over the world. For the SIS- , the scope of the scientific program has been considerably expanded by the co-sponsorship of The Engineering Research Center for Particle Science and Technology at the University of Florida, We welcome and anticipate an enthusiastic global participation in this milestone event, SIS- . We have invited four outstanding plenary speakers (Table 1) and 48 invited speakers (Table 2) for various topical symposia. We expect about 200 oral presentations and many poster presentations. In addition, a part of the symposium will include papers honoring Professor P. Somasundaran of Columbia University, New York, on his 60th birthday for his valuable contributions to surfactant science doc385 none Meigs Spotila That feedbacks potentially exist between climate change, erosion, and crustal deformation has focused attention on the topography of active orogenic systems. Studies of linkages between deformation, denudation and topographic development are complex, and have primarily utilized fluvial rather than glacial systems. Glaciated regions have a characteristic topographic form that is distinct from that of fluvial terrains, however basic relationships such as how mean topography relates with patterns of rock uplift are essentially unknown for landscapes dominated by glacial erosion. This project will investigate the long-term consequences of glacial erosion for topography, exhumation and deformation by study of the Chugach St. Elias Range, Alaska, an actively deforming glaciated orogenic belt. Results will enable testes of how deformation and glaciation have influenced orogenic topography over the last few million years. A better understanding of the role of glaciers in mountain system will provide a more complete context for the analysis of ancient collisional belts in the rock record doc402 none Jackson The investigators plan to collect and process new GPS data at about 35 previously observed sites in the epicentral region of the Hector Mine earthquake in southern California. The purpose is to extend the time series at each site with two additional measurements over one year. These data will be important for detecting and modeling afterslip on the Hector Mine fault and viscoelastic stress relaxation in the lower crust resulting from the earthquake. These data would supplement the continuous GPS data collected at five sites and several INSAR scenes observed after the earthquake. The new GPS data will improve the geographical coverage dramatically beyond that offered by the permanent GPS, and will offer higher precision than can be assured by the InSAR doc369 none Chamberlain, Kevin R. Duebendorfer, Ernest M. A mesoproterozoic magmatic belt extends from California to Labrador, yet its tectonic significance is controversial, largely because of the absence of regionally extensive structures of pervasive fabrics that can be used to deduce tectonic setting. This project addresses this problem by an integrated program of mapping, structural analysis and U-Pb geochronology on synkinematic minerals from 1.4 Ga shear zones in Southern Wyoming. Results are expected to help resolve various compressional or extensional models for this tectonic episode doc404 none Liquid composite molding (LCM) is an important method of producing fiber reinforced composite materials. In LCM processing, resin flow induced defects are recognized as the largest cause of quality and reproducibility problems. The resin flow pattern is highly related to the fiber preform permeability and its variations in the entire area of the model. In order to characterize the fiber preform permeability accurately for downstream applications, this Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) will investigate a means of conducting on-line permeability measurements that can detect local permeability variations. The feasibility of this requires the demonstration that a measurable pressure drop can be determined over the length scales appropriate for this process, and the demonstration that resin permeability can be adequately related to the gas permeability proposed for this on-line measurement technique. The problem being addressed is a significant one to the fiber composite industry, and this project, if successful, would have a tremendous impact upon the production of high performance composite products via an environmentally clean mold-filling characterization methodology doc405 none Lesher This program investigates melting of nominally anhydrous garnet peridotite between 3 and 5.5 GPa using the octahedral multianvil apparatus. The goals of the experiments are determination of 1) high pressure solidii in P-T space, 2) the compositions of near-solidus melts and crystals, 3) the specifics of the melting reaction, and 4) the functional relationships between temperature and melt fraction required to determine melt productivity. We are performing experiments on a range of garnet lherzolite compositions that differ in the proportion of clinopyroxene. These compositions extend the observational basis for peridotite melting of typical MORB mantle to possible analogs for plume mantle. The experiemts employ micro-exchange techniques to characterize the compositions of melt fractions below 0.1, and more classical approaches at higher melt fractions. Exhaustive P-T calibration work in our laboratory above 3 GPa ensures a level of reproducibility and control of sample environment in the multianvil apparatus similar to that routinely achieved in the piston-cylinder apparatus at lower pressures. The fundamental phase equilibrium data at high pressures obtained in this study will contribution to the very limited experimental database for garnet peridotite melting. Such data are essential for quantitative modeling of melting of peridotite by mantle upwelling beneath ocean spreading ridges, oceanic lithosphere, and continents doc406 none Stock The northern Gulf of California straddles the transition from oceanic to continental deformation along the Pacific-North American plate boundary, and has accommodated at least 300 km of relative motion since Miocene time, but has not yet produced true oceanic crust in between. This has led to controversy about how early stages of such large-scale oblique rifting occurs. This project builds on prior work that indicates that detailed volcanic history of two areas on either shore of the Gulf are matching portions of a single caldera complex, implying that material underlying the gulf is entirely new rather than being highly extended remnants of thinned continental crust. This work will rigorously test this important hypothesis. Results should increase understanding of early stages of oblique rifting of the Gulf of California, and this should be broadly applicable to similar tectonic situations doc407 none Krajewski The long-term goal of this research is to develop an allometric-hydrologic scaling theory for drainage basins, which can be applied to global drainage networks. We define hydrologic-allometry scaling to mean the existence of empirical power-law relationships among hydrological, ecological, topographical and atmospheric variables and mass of water being transported in drainage networks or physically relevant space-time scales. This research aims to synthesize a wide variety of disparate empirical observations within a broad theoretical framework. The first major objective of this proposal is to develop a theory for extrapolating observed streamflow time series from a few sparsely located stream gauging stations to ungauged locations defined by complete Strahler streams. Spatial extrapolation requires that streamflows be separated into peakflow and lowflow time series because different time scales are inolved in runoff generation and transport in physically based filter to separate lowflows from peakflows of gauged locations. Diagnostic tests of this filter will be carried out using available in-situ measurements of rainfall, evaporation and gauged streamflows. An integrated numerical model of runoff generation processes from a hillslope will be used to test the filter as part of these diagnostic studies. Another key step is to develop a testable space-time theory to route water in channel networks. Our approach will attempt to combine observations of hydraulic geometry, principles of fluid mechanics such as conservation of mass, and property of random self-similarity recently reported in the topology of channel networks. The second objective is to extend the results in objective 1 to incorporate the effect of spatial variability in rainfall, evapotranspiration and runoff generation processes. This objective will be investigated in two steps. First will be to estimate space-time rainfall at one sq. km. Pixels every 6 minutes using WSR-88D radar estimates. Evapotranspiration (ET) and soft moisture in the rooting zone will be estimated from remotely sensed products, e.g., moderation resolution imaging spectrometer (MODIS). Second step will be to test the sensitivity of the filter and the routing developed in Objective 1 to spatial variability in rainfall, evapotranspiration, and runoff generation, using these remotely sensed products. Effect of error structure in remotely sensed products on the filter and the routing will be investigated. Comparisons of these results with those obtained under Objective 1 will be carried out to understand the robustness of the filter and routing to errors in remotely sensed products. We will test Objectives 1 and 2 on a few selected basins, e.g., Flint in Georgia, which is about 7,000 sq. km. The existing digital elevation models (DEM) will be used to extract network structure for geomorphologic analysis. In the long run, a test of the concept involving new measurements is needed for a few basins serving as natural laboratories, but field tests are outside the scope of this proposal. Progress on these two objectives will make contributions toward the classic, long-standing, unsolved hydrology problem of Prediction from Ungauged Basins (PUB). Our third objective is to investigate empirical allometric-scaling relationships, and assess space-time scales over which scaling holds. Suitable biophysical constraints involving the coupling of atmosphere, terrain, water, and vegetation will be identified for river networks. We will carry out some exploratory studies on this objective. The new Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) and MODES products provide global topographic and vegetation data sets respectively. Satellite-based estimates of space-time rainfall seems less attractive at this point mainly due to their poorer spatial and temporal resolution but this situation would change in the future. Use of these remotely sensed products in developing and testing this theory would make it feasible to explore applications to global networks in the future doc408 none Rakovan The presence of palygorskite and sepiolite in soils and sediments is widely used as a paleoenvironmental indicator because of their restricted environments of formation. In addition, their physical properties (especially their sorption capacity and catalytic behavior) has lead to their extensive industrial and environmental use as sorbants. The physiochemical transformation of palygorskite-sepiolite to smectite has been identified in samples from the Meigs-Attapulgas-Quincy district, an important source of these clays. Because this transformation can considerably affect the use of the palygorskite-sepiolite as industrial sorbants, the proposed project investigates the palygorskite-sepiolite to smectite transformation and its influence on the type and distribution of reactive surface sites and changes in micro-fabrics. The micro-fabric, morphology, and surface micro-topography of a natural palygorskite-sepiolite-smectite assemblage from the Meigs-Attapulgas-Quincy district will be studied using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM), and the bulk structure of palygorskite-sepiolite will be studied using synchrotron X-ray diffraction and TEM data. Atomic models of the bulk and surface structures of palygorskite, sepiolite, and especially transitional forms will be developed from the TEM, X-ray, and AFM data. The purpose of this study is to obtain a step-by-step understanding of the transformation and to model the variation in sorption behavior. The results are important for environmental (e.g., heavy-metal adsorption) and commercial applications (e.g., bleaching and clarifying agents of oils) as well as the potential ability to use altered lithofacies to indicate paleoenvironmental information doc409 none Paleontology and Geology of Newly Discovered Oligocene Faunas and Floras in Western Ethiopia John Kappelman: One of the still unanswered questions about African faunal evolution concerns the tempo and mode of the transition from the more archaic terrestrial vertebrate faunas that date to older than 33 million years in age, to the more modernized faunas that first occur about 23 million years ago. The transition between the two faunas is dramatic and includes numerous extinctions, reductions in diversity of once dominant groups, and suspected immigrations of new groups from Asia and Europe that subsequently evolved to become the dominant groups on the continent. The ten million year long period of time that separates these two faunas was until recently unsampled by any significant fossil vertebrate localities located anywhere on the African or Arabian continents. During the winter of - reconnaissance surveys in Western Ethiopia located a series of fossiliferous sediments on the western Ethiopian Plateau. These sediments preserve abundant and diverse plant fossils (pollen, leaves, seeds, nuts, pods, and tree branches, stumps, and trunks), vertebrate fossils, and trace fossils. Preliminary radiometric dating places the fossils at about 27 million years in age. Together this evidence shows that the Chilga late Oligocene faunas and floras are the first significant fossils of this age reported for the entire continent of Africa as well as the first sub-Sahara site located in the interior of the continent. Our study of the Chilga Oligocene faunas and floras will aim to characterize the communities that lived during this time period in order to understand the transition from archaic to modern faunas and floras. Work will include recovering fossils from the currently known localities, surveying for new localities, screen washing for small mammals, documenting the depositional setting of the lacustrine and fluvial beds, reconstructing the paleoenvironments, and carrying out a program of radioisotopic and paleomagnetic dating to establish firm chronostratigraphic control. The Chilga region provides the first real opportunity for studying one of the most dramatic faunal and floral transitions known for African. A better understanding of the nature of this transition should provide new information for understanding the complex interplay among extinctions, immigrations, and radiations that characterize later transitions in African faunas and floras doc410 none Gupta The long-term goal of this research is to develop an allometric-hydrologic scaling theory for drainage basins, which can be applied to global drainage networks. We define hydrologic-allometry scaling to mean the existence of empirical power-law relationships among hydrological, ecological, topographical and atmospheric variables and mass of water being transported in drainage networks or physically relevant space-time scales. This research aims to synthesize a wide variety of disparate empirical observations within a broad theoretical framework. The first major objective of this proposal is to develop a theory for extrapolating observed streamflow time series from a few sparsely located stream gauging stations to ungauged locations defined by complete Strahler streams. Spatial extrapolation requires that streamflows be separated into peakflow and lowflow time series because different time scales are inolved in runoff generation and transport in physically based filter to separate lowflows from peakflows of gauged locations. Diagnostic tests of this filter will be carried out using available in-situ measurements of rainfall, evaporation and gauged streamflows. An integrated numerical model of runoff generation processes from a hillslope will be used to test the filter as part of these diagnostic studies. Another key step is to develop a testable space-time theory to route water in channel networks. Our approach will attempt to combine observations of hydraulic geometry, principles of fluid mechanics such as conservation of mass, and property of random self-similarity recently reported in the topology of channel networks. The second objective is to extend the results in objective 1 to incorporate the effect of spatial variability in rainfall, evapotranspiration and runoff generation processes. This objective will be investigated in two steps. First will be to estimate space-time rainfall at one sq. km. Pixels every 6 minutes using WSR-88D radar estimates. Evapotranspiration (ET) and soft moisture in the rooting zone will be estimated from remotely sensed products, e.g., moderation resolution imaging spectrometer (MODIS). Second step will be to test the sensitivity of the filter and the routing developed in Objective 1 to spatial variability in rainfall, evapotranspiration, and runoff generation, using these remotely sensed products. Effect of error structure in remotely sensed products on the filter and the routing will be investigated. Comparisons of these results with those obtained under Objective 1 will be carried out to understand the robustness of the filter and routing to errors in remotely sensed products. We will test Objectives 1 and 2 on a few selected basins, e.g., Flint in Georgia, which is about 7,000 sq. km. The existing digital elevation models (DEM) will be used to extract network structure for geomorphologic analysis. In the long run, a test of the concept involving new measurements is needed for a few basins serving as natural laboratories, but field tests are outside the scope of this proposal. Progress on these two objectives will make contributions toward the classic, long-standing, unsolved hydrology problem of Prediction from Ungauged Basins (PUB). Our third objective is to investigate empirical allometric-scaling relationships, and assess space-time scales over which scaling holds. Suitable biophysical constraints involving the coupling of atmosphere, terrain, water, and vegetation will be identified for river networks. We will carry out some exploratory studies on this objective. The new Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) and MODES products provide global topographic and vegetation data sets respectively. Satellite-based estimates of space-time rainfall seems less attractive at this point mainly due to their poorer spatial and temporal resolution but this situation would change in the future. Use of these remotely sensed products in developing and testing this theory would make it feasible to explore applications to global networks in the future doc411 none Oliver, William This award supports the activities of the PI, a post-doctoral fellow, and a graduate student in continuing the analysis of the ionospheric observations obtained by the MU incoherent scatter radar located in Shigaraki, Japan. This instrument is the only one located in the Asian sector that is capable of observing the weak incoherent scatter originating from free electrons existing in the F-region ionosphere. It is a phase radar which makes possible the simultaneous detection of signals in multiple directions. This unique capability is used to study the propagation of gravity waves within the F-region in terms of statistics of occurrences and directions of propagation. The project research will emphasize four themes: winds, temperatures, waves, and electric fields. Models and new data assimilation algorithms will be developed to represent these measurements for comparison with global circulation models that are developed from first principles. These results form the only long-term, single-station time series of such measurements from the Asian sector and will be a particularly valuable resource. Of particular interest is the new data analysis procedure called the layer wind technique that enables the raw data to be analyzed more effectively to extract Doppler shift information with a greater ratio of signal to noise doc412 none Principal Investigator: David Falconer, University of Alabama in Huntsville The investigator will develop quantitative measures of the global non-potentiality of solar active regions in order to predict generation of flare-associated coronal mass ejections (CMS) by these active regions. The main effort is to expand the results of a promising pilot study of four active regions to a statistical meaningful sample of 30-40 active regions. In the pilot study, two new measures of non-potentiality were developed (global net current flow and length of the main neutral line) and found to be correlated with each other and with the overall non-potentiality of the active regions. In addition, two cases in which these parameters were unusually large produced CME. The expanded study will: (1) Test the tentative conclusions of the pilot study. (2) Search for other correlations. (3) Investigate the relationship of the new measures to the previously observed sigmoidal structures. (4) Develop techniques to apply the new measures to operational forecasting doc413 none This project extends in several new directions the method of optimizing thermodynamically the geometry of tree-shaped flows between points and volumes. The geometric details of the flow structure will be deduced from the maximization of global thermodynamic performance (e.g., overall flow resistance) subject to global constraints. Examples are the tree-shaped networks that collect and distribute water and electric power over a territory. The method will also be extended to economics, where the flow consists of goods, and the global objective is revenue maximization. In the field of bioheat transfer, the method will be applied to the pairs of fluid trees (arteries and veins) that are present in vascularized tissues. Flows that are shaped as trees are found everywhere in natural systems, animate and inanimate (e.g., lungs, rivers, lighting). They are also prevalent in engineering, economics and society. The objective of this project is to deduce the optimal geometric structure of tree-shaped flows from the principle of maximizing the global performance of the system permeated by the flow. For example, in a tree network for the distribution of water and electric power over an urban area the global objective is minimum flow resistance and minimum cost. In economics, in the distribution or collection of goods over a territory, the objective is the maximization of revenue. In vascularized tissues under the skin, where trees of arteries and veins are arranged in pairs and in counterflow, the objective is the minimization of flow resistance and body heat loss. All these flow structures will be generated and studied from the point of view of geometric optimization based on global thermodynamic optimization doc414 none This project will analyze Cenozoic deep sea sediments for their content of 3 He in fullereness and in mineral phases in order to partition the 3 He budget among terrestrial and extraterrestrial phases, and to assess the variation in extraterrestrial flux of noble gases to the planet doc415 none Drivers of Technological Changes in the Twenty First Century The University of Miami will organize a workshop to examine the drivers of technological changes in the twenty-first century and the demands that these changes place on human resource development. The expected impact of the fast pace of technological change on industry s competitiveness will be examined. Industry s needs for highly educated and trained work force will require a shift in educational paradigms. Universities and academic institutions will have to respond with educational programs more in tune with the demands of the new century. This proposed workshop is intended as a follow-up on a previously funded NSF project entitled Management of Technology and the Paradigm shift in Education in Response to the Technology Revolution . The Project resulted in a report entitled Management of Technology: Future Directions and Needs for the New Century. The report and its findings will be presented to a large audience al the 9th International Conference Oil Management of Technology to be held in Miami Florida February 20-25. . The conference is usually attended by 400 highly qualified researchers and practitioners of technology management from all over the world. Two main objectives of the current project workshop are: 1) To present and solicit comments on the findings of the University of Miami NSF report from a large group of experts in the field and; 2) To hold a special workshop at the International conference on MOT to discuss the responses and to develop a plan of action that will facilitate implementation of the report s findings doc397 none Dilles, J. Reed, M. The Butte district, Montana, contains North America s largest copper reserves and is among the world s largest producers of copper and silver. Butte is a superb example of a giant porphyry Cu-Mo magmatic-hydrothermal ore deposit where data and samples from more than 100 years of underground mining plus hundreds of drill holes, including 11 vertical holes of 1.5 to 2.3 km depth, provide exceptional access to the system. Butte has served as the basis for much of modern understanding of ore formation processes, and our goal is to build improved hypotheses, that include the links of hydrothermal ores to magmas, via application of new and state-of-art analytical techniques. In the completed phase of research, we used isotopic dating techniques to establish that porphyry magmas that produced mineralization were emplaced about 76 to 68 million years ago, but that hydrothermal ore fluids and rocks cooled to less than 300 degrees C between 64 and 61 million years ago. Application of additional isotopic dating (using U-Pb, Ar-Ar and Re-Os) will enable us to understand this age difference. Our earlier work with isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen shows that magmatic brines produced high-temperature copper-molybdenum ores (biotite alteration) as well as later iron-sulfides (sericitic alteration). Those findings will be enlarged by application of state-of-the-art techniques (laser-ICP-MS and cathodoluminescence) on micrometer-scale samples of ore fluids trapped in quartz to establish temperature, pressure, and chemical composition of various ore fluids. We plan to synthesize the geology, geochemistry, and hydrothermal alteration mineralogy, and ore mineralogy into a series of maps and cross-sections that illustrate the three-dimensional spatial and temporal evolution of a giant magmatic-hydrothermal system doc417 none Barber This award to Duke University provides shipboard technical support, shore-based support, instrument maintenance and instrument calibration for researchers using R V Cape Hatteras, a research vessel operated by Duke University of North Carolina Oceanographic Consortium as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The technical support awarded here will assist NSF-funded researchers conduct oceanographic studies in the waters along the mid-Atlantic coast of the United States and Georges Bank region in CY and beyond doc418 none Kezunovic This planning grant funds Texas A&M to become a research site of the multi-university Industry University Cooperative Research Center for Power Systems Engineering. The research projects being considered for addition to the Center s established research agenda are, 1. Power System State Parameter Estimation and Measurement Design for Distributed Multi Utility Operation, 2. Power System Reliability Analysis Including Dynamics and Control Effects, 3. An Approach to Select Cost-Effective ASD Ride-Through Technologies, 4. Accurate Fault Location in Transmission and Distribution Networks Using Modeling, Simulation and Limited Field Recorded Data, 5. Power System Monitoring Using Wireless Substation and System-Wide Communications doc419 none Barber Duke University will operate the R V Cape Hatteras during as a general oceanographic research vessel in support of NSF-supported research projects. The Cape Hatteras is a 135 ft. vessel, constructed in , and is owned by NSFand operated by Duke University. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 190 operational days during , of which 84 days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The remaining cruises will support Navy, NOAA, and State projects. The projects scheduled on the Cape Hatteras represent several oceanographic disciplines, including marine geology and geophysics and will fully utilize the capabilities of the vessel. Operations in will mainly take place in the North Atlantic ranging from Boothbay, ME to Florida. The vessel will be in the shipyard for most of January. Plans for a mid-life refit are underway, with a target date of actual shipyard time taking place in September-December . The refit includes plans for a 24 ft midbody addition to the vessel. The Cape Hatteras is part of a fleet of ships used by the National Science Foundation in support of marine science research. Most oceanographic projects require highly specialized equipment to be permanently installed on the vessel, thus the necessity for specialized ships. These vessels do not operate in the same mode as general cargo fishing vessels. As a result, NSF supports the operation of a variety of ships specifically dedicated to oceanographic research that are operated by universities and institutions around the country doc420 none Bianchi Understanding what controls dissolved trace element concentrations in rivers is of substantial interest to researchers examining basic scientific questions related to geochemical weathering and transport of elements and to scientists involved in pollution control evaluation and monitoring of water quality for human health and biotoxicity purposes. With the adoption of ultraclean sampling and analysis methods more workers are now producing relaible fluvial dissolved trace element data and progress has been made in outlining some of the controls on fluvial dissolved trace elements. However, we are not yet to the point where one can use the hydrological and chemical characteristics of a river to make a reasonable prediction of how dissolved trace element concentrations will vary seasonally or even what levels of dissolved metals to expect. It is especially important to understand the processes affecting Fe and Mn between dissolved and particulate hypotheses of this project: 1) There is rapid cycling of Fe and Mn between dissolved and particulate form is rivers. 2) This cycling can be strongly temperature-dependant and hence seasonally variable. 3) Changes in the rapid cycling affect the dissolved-particulate partitioning of Fe and Mn as well as particle-reactive trace elements such as Zn and Pb. 4) The cycling involves redox processes for Mn and possibly Fe, though organic complexation may be a more important factor for Fe. Objectives of our proposed work include understanding the extent, relevence and mode of microbial oxidation of Fe and Mn in rivers, elucidating the process(es) of reduction of Fe and Mn in rivers, understand under what conditions photochemical processes are important for Fe and Mn cycling in rivers, and understanding the role of DOC in fluvial Fe and Mn cycling. Our approach involves studying the variability, controls, and rates of the various key processes (e.g. microbial oxidation, reduction by DOC, photochemistry) that transform Fe and Mn from one phase to another. OUr work will involve both field and laboratory studies. The field work includes monthly sampling of river systems as well as detailed process-oriented studies of two or more of the systems having different hydrogeochemistries (Mississippi and Pearl Rivers). Laboratory studies will be used to identify the most important processes at work as well as determine rate constants. Field and laboratory work will also be done to characterize the fluvial organic matter and relate organic composition (e.g., functional groups related to complexation or reduction) to Fe and Mn cycling. With rate and process information, models can be constructed to predict Fe and Mn concentrations in rivers as a function of time. The benefits of this increased understanding of the controls on fluvial dissolved trace elements are several-fold. First, it gives us a better capability to predict dissolved trace element concentrations, both temporally at times when samples from a given system are not taken and can spacially in systems for which no data exist. Second, information on how various processes can cause seasonal dissolved trace element variability is pertinent to the design of sampling and monitoring programs. Finally, an understanding of what processes are important in the regulation of dissolved trace element concentrations gives us better insight into how human activities can affect fluvial trace elements in ways beyond direct metal contamination. For example, the microbial connection suggests a means by which toxins could indirectly affect dissolved trace elements. The work will also provide basic information on fluvial hydrogen peroxide levels and its generation as well as results pertinent to the issue of the photooxidation and fate of chromophoric dissolved organic matter. Besides the two PI s, a microbiologist will be involved in this work doc421 none The objective of the project is to investigate the metabolic engineering of solventogenic Clostridia using modern molecular biology and genetic techniques. The primary goal of this interdisciplinary proposal is to genetically alter the metabolism of Clostridium acetobutylicum. The proposal describes four areas of activity; (1) a detailed examination of the regulation of the sol locus genes through a putative repressor, SolR; (2) a molecular analysis of the function of sporOA and of ORF (orfY) gene products, both of which are likely to be important in the expression of the sol locus genes; (3) an analysis of patterns of gene expression using cDNA arrays; and (4) the further development of antisense RNA as a metabolic engineering tool doc422 none Irrigation agriculture was the economic backbone of the ancient civilizations that flourished on Peru s desert coast. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Frances Hayashida and collaborators will explore the technology and organization of late prehispanic coastal agriculture through interdisciplinary fieldwork on the Pampa de Chaparri in the Lambayeque region of the north coast of Peru. Archaeological evidence indicates that the pampa was cultivated when Lambayeque was under the rule of the Chimu and Inka empires (early 14- early 16 Centuries). Fields were watered by one of the few well-preserved canal systems on the north coast that has not been destroyed by historic and modern cultivation and settlements. Researchers thus have the unusual opportunity to investigate late prehispanic agriculture in the region and to explore the broader question of how large-scale agriculture was structured in ancient states. What were the political, social, and environmental factors that informed decisions about land use, water distribution, and crops? To what degree were these decisions directed by the state? During a six-month field season in , data will be collected on (1) the distribution and chronology of settlements, canals, fields, roads, and other features, (2) the ancient environment and changes since the prehispanic occupation, and (3) crops and cultivation practices. Fieldwork will include systematic archaeological survey and site mapping and test excavations of canals, fields, and settlements. Team members will also collect data on the modern and ancient environment though study of soils, geomorphology, modern vegetation, and pollen and other botanical remains from the excavations. In , researchers will return to Peru for 2.5 months to analyze material from the season. The results of these two seasons will yield information on crop and water management, the scale of production, the organization of labor, and the role of the state versus local polities in planning and management. Results will also establish the direction of future fieldwork. Fieldwork on the Pampa de Chaparri will contribute to studies of ancient civilizations by providing a detailed case examination of the relationship between water, land, crops, people, and politics in the past. By focusing on the articulation of states with farmers and by recording agricultural practices and technologies that persisted over centuries, the research can also contribute to modern development policies and projects doc423 none This proposal seeks support for a study of millennial scale climate events during marine isotope Stage 3 (~25 to 65 ka) from data in a depth transect of cores from the Blake-Bahama Outer Ridges. The project has two main objectives: (1) to test models of paleohydrographic change for Stage 3 events by making depth profiles in a limited geographic area, and (2) to investigate evidence for decade to century scale climate change in a Stage 3 time series from the Bermuda Rise. The first objective will test the model that massive discharges of icebergs, known as Heinrich events reduced production of both shallow and deep components of North Atlantic Deep Water, whereas more typical stadial events suppressed only the deep component. The second objective will investigate evidence for high-frequency oxygen isotopic oscillations in planktonic foraminifer from the Bermuda Rise. To put these results in a climatic context, we will develop the best possible age model for Stage 3 in the open ocean, and compare our new data to both existing alkenone-based temperature series and geochemical proxies for deep ocean ventilation changes doc424 none Gregg Although channeled lava flows are common throughout the solar system, relations between channel morphology, eruption and emplacement parameters, and lava properties are not well understood. Results from our previous study, combining analytical models with carefully controlled laboratory simulations raised many questions that could not be addressed with available data. Our current proposal addresses these limitations by collecting data from additional laboratory simulations, specifically to isolate the effects of underlying slope and slope breaks on channel development, the effects of rheology, and the effects of temperature-dependent viscosities on channel morphology. This will be accomplished by using PEG (a Newtonian fluid with a temperature-dependent viscosity), kaolin-charged PEG (a Bingham fluid with a temperature-dependent viscosity) and kaolin slurries (an isothermal Bingham fluid) to generate channeled flows on different underlying slopes (1degree-50 degrees) in the laboratory. Velocity distributions within channeled laboratory flows will be carefully measured using neutrally buoyant colored beads injected into the flow as tracers. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) flow simulations developed by Dr. Sakimoto will be modified to treat the conditions found in laboratory flows. Preliminary CFD simulations will be run to understand the significance in laboratory flows of such effects as non-homogenous temperature distributions, heat loss from the PEG and tank bottom to the laboratory environment, and diffusion of PEG into the surrounding sucrose solution. Morphologic parameters from the simulated flows conducted by Dr. Gregg will be measured used to validate and refine CFD simulation results. The CFD simulations, in turn, will be used to fully characterize and understand the physical processes that dominate flow emplacement and cooling in the laboratory. These results will be tested against natural basaltic lava flows, such as the Mauna Loa, Hawaii eruption and smaller pahoehoe channels produced during the current eruption of Pu u O o at Kilauea volcano, Hawaii doc425 none Wyatt This SGER project would develop three processes for integration into a single fabrication sequence needed for a testable prototype of a device for blind patients to allow them to walk down a street unaided. Improved vision at this level depends more on having a sufficiently wide visual field than on the ability to resolve small objects or text with high acuity. Three experiments are to be conducted to establish that the basic steps for fabricating the inflatable retinal prosthesis are feasible. Also needed is verification that the polyimide layer, though not adequate to protect CMOS circuitry against saline, is adequate to insulate gold leads from current shunting in extended soak tests. The first experiment is to determine the dependence of the ultimate achievable length of the microchannels on the height and width of the oxide stripes which give rise to the channels after etching. This will determine whether the 3-5 mm length required will necessitate etching from both ends of the device simultaneously, or whether single-ended etching will be sufficient. The second experiment is to develop a workable process for creating the silicon nib structure shown in the proposal (Figure 2). This will involve multiple-step etching in a Bosch process rapid silicon etching system and conventional RIE tools. An appropriate masking material for the process must be developed, and an endpoint indicator determined. The third experiment is to develop a suitable method for attaching the silicone tube carrying the compressed air to the silicon polyimide implant structure in a blocompatible manner. In parallel with these process development steps, the polyimide electrodes already fabricated would be tested to determine if their saline resistance is adequate for protecting the gold wires. The fabrication experiments are to be conducted at the NSF-funded Cornell Nanofabrication Facility (CNF) in Ithaca, NY by Dr. Douglas Shire, an independent contractor who has been collaborating with the PI on the Retinal Implant Project for the past two years. Immersion testing of existing polyimide arrays will be done at MIT s Draper Laboratory under the supervision of the PI. The CNF and the MIT test system are capable of carrying out the work. Its successful completion will provide the proof-of-concept for a detailed proposal addressing the long-term biocompatibility, encapsulation and power conversion issues for a flexible, inflatable retinal prosthesis. A proof-of-concept resulting from this investigation would be used as the basis of a non-SGER proposal, which would be subject to full merit review doc426 none Sakimoto Although channeled lava flows are common throughout the solar system, relations between channel morphology, eruption and emplacement parameters, and lava properties are not well understood. Results from our previous study, combining analytical models with carefully controlled laboratory simulations raised many questions that could not be addressed with available data. Our current proposal addresses these limitations by collecting data from additional laboratory simulations, specifically to isolate the effects of underlying slope and slope breaks on channel development, the effects of rheology, and the effects of temperature-dependent viscosities on channel morphology. This will be accomplished by using PEG (a Newtonian fluid with a temperature-dependent viscosity), kaolin-charged PEG (a Bingham fluid with a temperature-dependent viscosity) and kaolin slurries (an isothermal Bingham fluid) to generate channeled flows on different underlying slopes (1degree-50 degrees) in the laboratory. Velocity distributions within channeled laboratory flows will be carefully measured using neutrally buoyant colored beads injected into the flow as tracers. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) flow simulations developed by Dr. Sakimoto will be modified to treat the conditions found in laboratory flows. Preliminary CFD simulations will be run to understand the significance in laboratory flows of such effects as non-homogenous temperature distributions, heat loss from the PEG and tank bottom to the laboratory environment, and diffusion of PEG into the surrounding sucrose solution. Morphologic parameters from the simulated flows conducted by Dr. Gregg will be measured used to validate and refine CFD simulation results. The CFD simulations, in turn, will be used to fully characterize and understand the physical processes that dominate flow emplacement and cooling in the laboratory. These results will be tested against natural basaltic lava flows, such as the Mauna Loa, Hawaii eruption and smaller pahoehoe channels produced during the current eruption of Pu u O o at Kilauea volcano, Hawaii doc427 none Recent studies in the California Current suggest that there are at least two types of ecological physiological strategies. The nearshore community (dominated by large chain-forming and centric diatoms) may pursue a non-equilibrium strategy to exploit a physically-disrupted environment. For example, their ability to utilize light varies much more rapidly than their ability to harvest light, implying that they may respond rapidly to changes in physical forcing such as light and nutrient availability. The offshore community (dominated by small flagellates) follows an equilibrium strategy with light harvesting and utilization nearly in balance. The researchers hypothesize that the non-equilibrium community is more favorable for higher trophic levels such as euphausiids and hence juvenile salmon, and that spatial and temporal changes in the patterns of mesoscale variability will govern the extent of the non-equilibrium community. The researchers will use rapid measurements of phytoplankton physiology in conjunction with detailed measurements of the physical environment. The investigators will track mesoscale features north and south of Cape Blanco, using bio--optical drifters, while making detailed fluorometric measurements. These will include Fast Repetition Rate Fluorometry (FRRF) and spectral measurements of downwelling irradiance and upwelling radiance, including sun-stimulated fluorescence. These in situ observations will be compared with data from the next-generation ocean color sensor, MODIS, which will measure chlorophyll fluorescence efficiency. These measurements will focus on five basic questions: 1. What are the scales of variability of primary productivity and how are these related to physical processes? 2. How do the patterns of mesoscale variability and primary productivity vary north and south of Cape Blanco? 3. How does the relationship between mesoscale variability and productivity change seasonally during the upwelling season? 4. What is the relative importance of light and nutrient availability on phytoplankton productivity in the nearshore zone? and 5. How long are phytoplankton retained within a feature and what is the relative importance of in situ growth versus advection convergence in determining phytoplankton standing stocks doc428 none Arup K. Chakraborty University of California at Berkeley Exploiting Biomimetic Recognition between Polymers and Surfaces to Design Nanoscale Separation Processes Many vital biological processes, such as transmembrane signaling and pathogen-host interactions, are initiated by a protein recognizing a particular pattern of binding sites on part of a surface bearing receptors. The development of synthetic systems that can mimic such recognition between polymers and surfaces could have significant impact on applications such as the development of nano-scale separation processes and synthetic viral inhibition agents. Can such biomimetic systems which exhibit the hallmarks of recognition be designed? This project explores the question by studying the interactions of disordered heteropolymers (DHPs) with surfaces bearing patterns of binding sites. DHPs are copolymers with more than one type of segment. The sequence in which the segments are arranged is aperiodic and is described statistically. Thus, these molecules may be considered to carry a statistical pattern encoded in the sequence distribution. By studying the interactions of DHPs with surfaces bearing multiple types of sites distributed in a manner that is also described statistically, one can examine whether synthetic systems can mimic the hallmarks of recognition when the statistics characterizing the DHP sequence and that of the surface pattern are related in a special way. It appears that recognition due to statistical pattern matching can be achieved through proper design of the DHP sequence and surface-site distribution statistics. This result indicates that hierarchical organization of structural patterns on scales much larger than the monomeric units is crucial for recognition to occur. The findings motivate research aimed toward exploiting the phenomenon of recognition due to statistical pattern matching in practical applications such as the development of nanoscale separation systems. Several important questions to be addressed are: 1] In adsorption applications where one wishes to separate a mixture of macromolecules, what is the highest solution concentration of DHPs that can be processed while maintaining a high separation (recognition) efficiency based on statistical pattern matching? 2] Given a particular DHP sequence, how can one design the optimal surface pattern for efficient recognition? Is there an algorithm that can be used routinely to carry out such design? 3] Is there an analytical model that provides insight into the kinetic processes that have been revealed by statistical simulations? 4] Can one use matching of shapes between DHP conformations and surface patterns to augment recognition? Research aimed toward addressing these questions using field-theoretic methods and computer simulations is the focus of this project. Synergy between the proposed efforts and experimental work being carried out in other provides an understanding of the basic principles that lead to creation of biomimetic recognition in synthetic systems. Successful results of this research can help scientists and engineers develop nanoscale separation devices, sensors, and viral inhibitors faster and less expensively. The basic notion to be exploited is that pattern recognition can be elicited in man-made materials by statistical matching, beyond the specific matching exhibited by living systems. Scientists and engineers wanting to design macromolecules that recognize a target pattern may use the approaches developed in this project to speed up their search. Similarly, appropriate patterns of active sites on sorbents for specific separations may be identified by use of the statistical concepts and lead to potentially useful nanostructures doc429 none With National Science Foundation support Drs. Michael Whalen and Paul Minnis will conduct three seasons of archaeological fieldwork in the Casas Grandes region. Although located in northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico, Casas Grades is one of the pueblo-style cultures that are best known from the adjacent southwestern U.S. At its apogee (ca. A.D. - ) Casas Grandes has been characterized as the largest and most complex prehistoric community in the puebloan world. It is further recognized both as the center of one of the major interaction systems of the region and as a link between the cultures of Mesoamerica and those of the U.S. Southwest. Despite its acknowledged status as one of late prehistoric North America s few indigenous complex societies, the Casas Grandes polity has been so little studied that most aspects of its size, structure, level of centralization, and mode of operation remain obscure. Dr. Whalen s and Minnis work in Chihuahua since has been designed to remedy this situation, first with a large settlement pattern survey and more recently with a program of excavation at selected sites. In contrast to the original and highly influential interpretation which has prevailed for the last 25 years, recent work agues that the Casas Grandes polity was not, as had been argued, highly centralized, but rather existed at an intermediate level of sociopolitical complexity. It was not able to exert uniform control over its near neighbors. More likely it represents a less comprehensive, less centralized situation of irregular control in a politically unstable context. This idea has been developed as far as possible from the survey and limited excavation data available. Its further explication requires data on how and to what extent the regional center of Casas Grandes impacted its neighbors. This complex question will be approached through excavation at outlying settlements. Apparent at Casas Grandes is a leadership package that involved economics, prestige goods, and ritual. Drs Whalen and Minnis will trace the extent to which these attributes spread over the surrounding areas doc429 none With National Science Foundation support Drs. Michael Whalen and Paul Minnis will conduct three seasons of archaeological fieldwork in the Casas Grandes region. Although located in northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico, Casas Grades is one of the pueblo-style cultures that are best known from the adjacent southwestern U.S. At its apogee (ca. A.D. - ) Casas Grandes has been characterized as the largest and most complex prehistoric community in the puebloan world. It is further recognized both as the center of one of the major interaction systems of the region and as a link between the cultures of Mesoamerica and those of the U.S. Southwest. Despite its acknowledged status as one of late prehistoric North America s few indigenous complex societies, the Casas Grandes polity has been so little studied that most aspects of its size, structure, level of centralization, and mode of operation remain obscure. Dr. Whalen s and Minnis work in Chihuahua since has been designed to remedy this situation, first with a large settlement pattern survey and more recently with a program of excavation at selected sites. In contrast to the original and highly influential interpretation which has prevailed for the last 25 years, recent work agues that the Casas Grandes polity was not, as had been argued, highly centralized, but rather existed at an intermediate level of sociopolitical complexity. It was not able to exert uniform control over its near neighbors. More likely it represents a less comprehensive, less centralized situation of irregular control in a politically unstable context. This idea has been developed as far as possible from the survey and limited excavation data available. Its further explication requires data on how and to what extent the regional center of Casas Grandes impacted its neighbors. This complex question will be approached through excavation at outlying settlements. Apparent at Casas Grandes is a leadership package that involved economics, prestige goods, and ritual. Drs Whalen and Minnis will trace the extent to which these attributes spread over the surrounding areas doc431 none The only barriers to reproduction between some closely related species are female mate preferences. Factors that cause female mate preferences, or the characteristics of males they are based on, to evolve (i.e., change over generations) can lead to the formation of new species. Scientists are just beginning to understand the role of the environment in this process. In guppies, a small stream-dwelling fish native to Trinidad, females prefer males with larger and brighter orange spots. The orange spots contain two types of pigments, one of which males can synthesize (drosopterins) and the other of which they must obtain from their food (carotenoids). The main source of carotenoids for guppies is algae, which grow on rocks in the stream. Wider streams make larger gaps in the forest canopy, and consequently receive more sunlight and have larger standing crops of algae. This project will examine how variation among streams in forest canopy cover affects the evolution of male coloration and female mate preferences. The methods will include field experiments, laboratory breeding experiments, color measurements, and biochemical analyses. The broader goal is to develop a deeper understanding of how the environment affects the evolution of mate preferences and the traits they favor. This study will contribute to our knowledge of biological diversity doc432 none Ren This is a three year cooperative proposal between Dr. Shang-Fen Ren of Illinois State (ISU) University and Drs. Bang-Fen Zhu of Chinese Academy of Science and Shang-Yuan Ren of Beijing University. This project will study low dimensional semiconductors and host 2-4 ISU Physics undergraduate students to carry out summer research at the collaborative institutes in Beijing each summer for three summers. This is an excellent project. INT provided a supplement in to Dr. Ren s DMR grant, allowing her to take two ISU students to Beijing University for a four-week research project. The experience gained by the students was excellent. This project is a continuation of the idea of combining research and education for training undergraduate students for a primary undergraduate institute in the United States. This proposed research is important and has the potential to make a contribution to the theory of quantum dots. The combination of research and education in undergraduate training is unique. The Chinese Academy of Science, the Natural Science Foundation of China and the NSF jointly support this project doc433 none Throne Knowledge of how electrical potential patterns on the heart surfaces evolve over time can be an extremely valuable tool in the diagnosis and treatment of a wide variety of cardiovascular diseases. Hence, researchers have proposed numerous minimally invasive approaches for inferring cardiac electrical activity from measurements of electrical activity made at more accessible locations. In these types of inverse problems the goal is to estimate an input (the surface electrical potentials) based on a measurement of the output (the electrical activity measured at a less invasive location). These particular inverse problems are extremely ill-conditioned, and consequently small errors in the measurements cause enormous (hundreds of times larger) errors in the estimated cardiac potentials. The overall goal in this project is to employ data fusion-- systematic combination of signals from multiple sensors, types of sensors, and sensor locations-- to improve the potential estimates on the interior and exterior surfaces of the heart. The development of minimally invasive, stable inverse techniques will substantially affect the treatment of cardiac disease. In addition, the data fusion techniques developed for these inverse problems will impact research in such diverse fields as identifying sources of electrical activity within the brain, structural damage identification, electronics cooling, materials characterization, and online machine tool wear monitoring doc434 none Levin # Why do two persons, faced with exactly the same decision, decide differently? Tile existence of individual differences in judgment and decision making has been widely noted but riot many previous studies have focused on identifying the antecedent conditions. Tin this proposal we focus on stable person characteristics that relate to the manner in which information is processed in arriving at a judgment or decision. The proposed experiments will provide links between individual difference indices and measures of the process by which a decision maker reaches his or her final choice. Individual difference measures to be used in the proposed research include personality factors such as extraversion and neuroticiscn which have been shown in previous research to account for significant variance in various tasks in memory and cognition, measures of affective state, and most notably, a measure of cognitive style widely and successfully used in the areas of persuasion and attitude change but only recently used in the area of judgment. and decision making. Such measures should provide us with new insights into why, in the same situation, one person will decide one way and another person will decide the other way doc435 none Principal Investigator: Amitava Bhattacharjee, University of Iowa The investigators will study the anisotropy and spatial inhomogeneity of the energy spectrum of turbulence in the solar wind, with explicit treatment of the solar wind plasma as a compressible fluid. The main effort is to use a reduced set of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) tailored to the plasma regimes relevant to the solar winds to describe mutual, simultaneous interactions of three and four propagating waves. Over the past few years the investigators have developed the so-called four-field system of equations that has shown much promise in describing turbulence in plasmas at modest (~ 1) beta. Numerical solutions of these equations have been compared, and found to be in good agreement, with results from compressible MHD simulations. The proposed work builds on this recent success. In addition, Hall-MHD simulations will be used to examine wave-wave interaction processes occurring at shorter wavelengths. Eventually, the four-field approximation will be extended to include this shorter scale physics with the addition of a generalized Ohm s law in the formulation doc436 none Moecher This grant provides partial support for the costs of a software and hardware upgrade for the existing ARL SEMQ electron probe microanalyzer operated by the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Kentucky. The PI is an Associate Professor who has been the Director of the Probe Lab since . The PI and his graduate students will be the primary users of the instrument, however, other faculty and their students in the Department (Prof. Kieran O Hara, Prof. Susan Rimmer), on campus (Kwok-Wei Ng, Physics Dept.), and in the surrounding area (Eastern Kentucky University, University of Cincinnati, Miami University of Ohio) will make regular use of the instrument. The upgrade consists of new automation (operating system and computer) and new energy dispersive and backscattered detectors for enhanced micro-imaging capabilities. In particular, the PI s research requires the instrument to have X-ray mapping capabilities of major and trace elements. New software that integrates wavelength and energy dispersive detector signals will provide this capability. Projects that will benefit from the upgrade include: (1) chemical and isotopic variability among minerals in polymetamorphic rocks; (2) petrogenetic and stable isotopic studies of pseudotachylyte (melt rocks generated by frictional fusion in brittle fault zones); (3) petrography of sub-glacial sediments and tills; (4) P-T-t studies of metamorphic rocks from the Appalachian orogen; (5) carbonatite petrogenesis; (6) chemical changes in mylonites; and (7) chemical analysis of high temperature superconducting compounds. The acquisition of the new operating and imaging system will also enhance undergraduate instruction and graduate training that are already active on the existing instrument doc437 none Emslie This award provides support for the travel of six graduate and undergraduate students to the Southern Hemisphere Ornithological Congress in Brisbane, Australia. The participants will come from four universities in the U.S. and include at least three women. The students will participate in a special symposium on the conservation and ecology of seabirds of the southern oceans. The topic is very timely and important. Long-lived seabirds such as albatrosses and petrels in these oceans have been impacted by human activities, such as long-line fishing, tourism, oil spills, introduction of non-indigenous disease, etc. The symposium will provide a unique educational opportunity for these students to learn from and interact with well-respected experts in the biology and ecology of seabirds. This symposium will also provide the students with first-hand knowledge of the importance of international collaborations in science and may lead to future collaborations doc438 none Robinson, Walter & Black, Robert University of Illinois & Georgia Institute of Technology The collaborative research will examine coupling between the troposphere and stratosphere. Until recently, the dynamical coupling has been regarded as uni-directional with tropospheric planetary waves propagating upwards, and inducing changes in stratospheric dynamical fields. Recent evidence indicates variations in the stratospheric polar vortex can also directly induce significant circulation anomalies in the troposphere. The PIs propose to study the coupling between stratosphere and troposphere during intraseasonal AO events, by applying potential vorticity (PV) and diagnostic modeling approaches, to both observational analyses and mechanistic numerical modeling experiment. The work is important because it will increase our knowledge and understanding of high latitude climate variability due to the Arctic Oscillation doc439 none This Postdoctoral fellowship research project seeks to understand biocultural human adaptation to the Zacapu highland lake environment in the context of a growing population. The limited archaeological evidence for the determination of human subsistence in the Zacapu Basin does not make it clear whether or not these populations practiced intensive maize agriculture. While there is abundant archaeological evidence for an intense exploitation of aquatic resources (amphibians, clams, fish, waterfowl etc.), the role of maize in the diet remains unclear. Given the nutritional and symbolic value of maize throughout Mesoamerica at the time, it is inconceivable that maize was not an important component of the diet in the Zacapu Basin. The Zacapu Basin presents an opportunity to examine the adaptive strategies that human populations in the region may have used to obtain food from less-than-optimal environments, and the role that these strategies played in the formation of the Tarascan State. This project has three objectives: 1) to assess the levels of maize consumption at the Lomas sites through time, 2) to evaluate the nutritional adequacy of the diet, and 3) to determine dietary shifts on a smaller time-scale within each site. Stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes from bone collagen will be used to determine relative proportions of maize in the diet. Skeletal and dental indicators of nutritional stress and disease will be used to assess the nutritional and health status of the population, and fluoride dating techniques will be used to refine the relative chronologies of primary and secondary burials as well as commingled remain doc440 none This Postdoctoral research fellowship research project investigates two aspects of Haitian immigrant experience: (1) ways in which values about education and educational achievement are communicated across generations of Haitian immigrants; (2) how the acculturation of children and older family members (i.e., parents, grandparents) to American society influence this process. Two groups of Haitian immigrants will be studied, one whose adolescent children are first-generation immigrants (Haiti-born) and another whose adolescent children are second-generation immigrants (U.S.-born). The first-generation immigrants will be recruited from current participants in the Harvard Immigration Project. The second-generation immigrants will be recruited from the Haitian community in the greater Boston area. Data will be collected using primary assessment tools from the Harvard immigration project: observations, interviews, focus groups, and academic records doc441 none The goal of this Postdoctoral research fellowship research project is to investigate the development of White children s use of the stereotype that Black Americans have low academic ability. Four experiments will be conducted to determine how the ability stereotype influences White children s perceptions and attributions of their Black peer s academic ability. Experiment 1 will test whether White children over 9 years of age judge a Black student as lower in ability than a White student with the same performance. Experiment 2 will determine whether White children of all ages may attribute Black students academic failures and White students academic successes to internal factors such as ability. It will also investigate whether White children over 9 years of age explain away Black students academic successes and White students academic failures by attributing these performances to external factors such as task difficulty or internal unstable factors such as effort. Experiments 3 and 4, were designed to determine whether White children over 9 years of age incorporate teacher feedback that suggests that a Black student has lower ability than a White student, but ignore teacher feedback that suggests that a Black student has higher ability than a White student doc442 none Since , analyses of national censuses and large-scale sample surveys have shown that a woman s school attendance is negatively correlated with her fertility and her offspring s mortality even when other socioeconomic factors are controlled. One theory about this relationship is that maternal schooling is a factor in the uptake of maternal and child health services by influencing a women s openness to mass means of communication and her decontextualized language skills. This postdoctoral fellowship research project pursues this insight into the importance of communicative means by examining the relative effects of more proximal and culturally accessible health services. This research into the schooling-sensitive communicative barriers of the health system will be conducted at a well regarded clinic in a rural, highland Maya community in Chiapas, Mexico doc443 none Shankar This U.S.-Argentina proposal will give support to Dr. Natarajan Shankar of SRI International for the organization of a workshop on Programming Methodology, to be held in conjunction with the 29th Argentine Meeting on Computer Science and Operational Research, to be held in Argentina. The co-organizers are Professor Armando Haeberer of Pontifical Catholic University of Brazil, Professor Gabriel Baum of the University of La Plata, Argentina and Professor Rafael Lins of the Federal University of Recife, Brazil. Following the two-day workshop, there will be an eight-day school directed at young researchers in Argentina and Brazil. The Argentine Society for Informatics and Operations Research is sponsoring these events. The subject of the workshop and school is Program Design Using Logic. It will cover the spectrum of programming methodology including a basic background in calculational logic, requirements modeling, refinement calculi, and logics for imperative programs. Correct computer programming is critical to ensure that computer software is reliable. This impacts every aspect of daily life, including commerce, communications, power and transportation. A strong U.S. presence at this workshop will help create strong ties and promote lasting collaborations with researchers in South America doc444 none This award is for partial support for the cost of an Engineering Foundation Conference entitled Processing and Catalytic Chemical Properties of Nanostructured Materials to be held in Maui, Hawaii from January 16 to 21, . The grant will provide partial travel support, registration, and accommodation expenses for invited speakers, young researchers, and students to attend the conference. There is significant technological potential for the emerging of area of nanostructured materials in chemical processing, especially in relation to catalytic applications. Because of recent developments in new chemical synthesis methods and improved characterization techniques, there are now possibilities for designing features for reactive materials on the nanometer scale. Research advances in the past few years have clearly shown that nanostructure design can substantially improve the surface characteristics of materials as well as offering new insights into the structure sensitivity of chemical reactions. In view of the great interest in nanostructured materials and the importance of catalytic materials to industrial processes, it is timely to have a conference that will bring together international researchers from academia and industry to present advances in the fields of chemical processing and catalytic properties of nanostructured materials and to discuss future research directions doc445 none United Engr Trustees Charles V. Freiman and John A. Herbst Partial travel support for invited speakers and U.S. young researchers participating at the Population Balance Modeling of Particulate Systems conference in Kona, Hawaii, on January 23-28, , has been requested. The objective of this meeting is to evaluate the current research results in the field, and identify research needs and new research directions and technological developments. Engineers, chemists and physicists from academe and industry will attempt to identify common principles and approaches and develop collaborations. The conference is organized in nine technical sections, including overviews on modeling and simulation, mineral systems, biological environmental systems, advanced materials, chemical petroleum systems, model solutions, research needs and directions, and applications. Established and young researchers from Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia will participate. There will be about 80 participants. This workshop is addressing topics modeling particulate systems with a broad area of relevance. Despite its importance, this field received less attention in the last 5-10 years and a new reassessment and redirection of the research is timely. Ample time will be allowed for questions and discussions. The workshop is expected to be an interactive forum for participants, particularly younger researchers, to debate actual technical issues, collaborations and professional activities. A purpose of the meeting is to facilitate the establishment of long term cooperation among researchers in academe and industry in the area of population balance modeling doc446 none This collaborative proposal seeks support for a study to examine the timing of ice-margin retreat from the last glacial maximum positions of multiple lobes at three carefully selected sites in southern South America. Date from the three widely spaced, well mapped moraine sequences from outlet lobes of the Tierra del Fuego ice cap will help evaluate the synchroneity of outlet lobe responses to climatic changes. A combination of cosmogenic 3He, 10Be, and 26 A1 methods will be used to date glacial retreat from each of the moraine sequences doc447 none Heydt This is a proposed project in electric power engineering. The main thrust is the application of advanced mathematical tools in the area of power system component and load modeling. The project spans five researchers at three universities; two universities are in Mexico and one in the United States. The emphasis is on the condensation and processing of time series recorded electrical system measurements for power system load and component models. A goal of the work is the enhancement of model accuracy. The use of these models in a deregulated environment is proposed to manage power system operating risk while maximizing operating revenues. Of course, accurate models are also needed in the mainstream operation of power systems, regulated or deregulated, for such tasks as stability studies, reliability analysis, system loading, and control of power flow. The main methods to be studied are: symbolic analysis, blended models, data mining, and risk management. Because the level of mathematical models is complex, part of the project is to prepare these methods in a form suitable for visualization by power system operators. The project contains an educational component which includes a research experience for undergraduates, development of a web site on electrical load and component modeling, and a workshop meeting for researchers and students from both Mexico and the USA. The intent of the website is to acquaint students and practicing engineers alike on the capabilities of advanced modeling techniques. In the case of power engineering students, the goal is to attract highly qualified persons to the field. In the case of practicing engineers, the PI would like to provide to them tools so that they can utilize the data at their disposal doc438 none Robinson, Walter & Black, Robert University of Illinois & Georgia Institute of Technology The collaborative research will examine coupling between the troposphere and stratosphere. Until recently, the dynamical coupling has been regarded as uni-directional with tropospheric planetary waves propagating upwards, and inducing changes in stratospheric dynamical fields. Recent evidence indicates variations in the stratospheric polar vortex can also directly induce significant circulation anomalies in the troposphere. The PIs propose to study the coupling between stratosphere and troposphere during intraseasonal AO events, by applying potential vorticity (PV) and diagnostic modeling approaches, to both observational analyses and mechanistic numerical modeling experiment. The work is important because it will increase our knowledge and understanding of high latitude climate variability due to the Arctic Oscillation doc449 none Gao The objective of this project is to develop a new design course sequence in the broad area of Assistive Technology for undergraduate students in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department, University of Massachusetts Amherst. A two-semester design course entitled Senior Design Projects to Aid the Disabled is to be developed and integrated within the established undergraduate curriculum of the Department. Through close collaborations with the Lemelson Assistive Technology Development Center (LATDC) at Hampshire College and Adaptive Design Services (ADS) under the Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation (DMR), the new design course sequence is to apply rigorous analytical and computer simulation approaches to specific design problems originated by disabled clients. The output of each design project will be a prototype of a functional mechanical and or electromechanical device that satisfies the specific need of an individual client. The new course will strengthen the existing undergraduate curriculum by introducing mechanical and industrial engineering students to a new area of great social importance. It further enhances the Department s effort in promoting its newly identified research thrust area in assistive technology and biomedical engineering doc450 none Islam The drinking water of Bangladesh is severely contaminated with arsenic. Over one-half of the approximately four million wells that constitute the country s drinking water supply have levels of naturally occurring arsenic above the World Health Organization s standard of 0.01 mg L, exposing as many as 50 million people to dangerous levels of arsenic in their drinking water. Concentrations as high as 0.5 mg L are common. It has been suggested in the popular media [New York Times, November 10, ] that this may be the largest mass poisoning in history. Our primary research question is: What causes high levels of arsenic in the groundwater of Bangladesh? If the source, fate and transport of arsenic in the environment are not understood, future water management schemes run the risk of compounding the problem. We will test a set of working hypotheses for the cause(s) of arsenic contamination that include : (A) Depositional explanations for the distribution of solid and dissolved arsenic; (B) Geochemical hydrologic reasons for high dissolved arsenic concentrations; and (C ) Anthropogenic causes of arsenic mobilization. From this understanding of the cause of high levels of dissolved arsenic, we will consider how arsenic concentrations may change in time and how arsenic is distributed throughout the country. Specific issues include: (A) Are arsenic concentrations correlated with particular sedimentary characteristics or surface hydrologic characteristics? (B) Can we develop better methods to site wells by interpolating arsenic concentrations from sampled locations? (C ) Do arsenic levels rise due to pumping or infiltration of fertilizers? (D) Can deep wells provide a long-term solution? The installation of deep wells has already begun on an ad hoc basis. We will conduct field and laboratory experiments, coordinated with modeling exercises, focusing on a cluster of 15 wells that range in depth between 3 m and 200 m installed in the Munshiganj district. We have also extracted a 200-meter core of solid aquifer material isolated from the atmosphere to maintain the redox state, perhaps the key control on arsenic activity. We will study the mechanisms that bind arsenic by analyzing the sediments and pore water with methods including X-ray adsorption spectroscopy (XAS), micro-probe analysis and growth of bacterial cultures, as well as sequential extraction of the preserved sediment samples. We will then study the effect of geochemical perturbations on arsenic mobilization in situ by injection-withdrawal tests from our installed wells using water that has been chemically altered to test hypothesized arsenic binding mechanisms. An understanding of arsenic binding mechanisms will support predictions regarding arsenic mobility and transport. Reactive-transport modeling will be used to consider mobilization due to pumping and redistribution by seasonal groundwater fluxes. Regional maps of arsenic concentration will be estimated by geostatistical methods constrained by knowledge of variations in sedimentary characteristics. Students and faculty will actively participate in the field, laboratory, and modeling work. To gain a sound scientific basis for long-term water management, we will convey our research to decision-makers to help provide safe drinking water for Bangladesh. This is a collaborative project with MIT, the University of Cincinnati, and Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology doc451 none This is funding to subsidize travel and housing expenses of students selected to participate in the Student Research Workshop to be held April 29-May 3, in Seattle, Washington during the ANLP NAACL joint conference (Applied Natural Language Processing and North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics). The intimate workshop format will encourage student participants to begin building a rapport with established researchers. Students will have sufficient time to present their research (25 minutes) and then receive feedback from a panel of established researchers in the field (15 minutes). The workshop will provide students with invaluable exposure to outside perspectives on their work at a critical time in their research, and will also allow them to put their work into perspective based on feedback from the panel and from fellow participants. This nurturing effort should pay dividends by more effectively guiding students in this rapidly changing research field, and seems to be an inexpensive yet effective means of encouraging young and upcoming computational linguists doc452 none Within the order Primates, lemurs have traditionally been considered to be unique in that females can be dominant to males (referred to as female dominance). Recently the universality of female dominance among lemurs has been questioned although there have been no systematic studies of this behavior to date on wild populations. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to answer the following questions: 1) how do male and female reproductive strategies influence the expression of female dominance and female feeding priority?, 2) can female feeding priority exist in the absence of female dominance?; 3) are there alternative behavioral strategies that individuals can use to influence their foraging efficiency in the absence of or in conjunction with female dominance and feeding priority?, 4) can these behaviors be considered types of feeding priority, and 5) how do environmental constraints (specifically ecological stress) and male deference work together to influence the expression of female dominance, feeding priority, and or alternative ways to increase foraging efficiency. These questions will be answered by examining the feeding ecology and behavior of three endangered species of primate (Varecia variegata, Propithecus diadema edwardsi and Eulemur fulvus rufus) in the Ranomafana National Park over a three and a half year period. This research has several important implications. The main objectives are: a) to test specific predictions regarding the relationship of female dominance and feeding priority in lemurs; and b) develop methods that can document the subtle ways female primates influence their feeding ecology through non-aggressive means in response to reproductive demands and seasonal changes in food. This research has the potential to contribute in a broader way to primatology by challenging existing paradigms that rely on a narrow definition of a dominance hierarchy to identify individuals who have social and ecological influence within social groups. In fact in recent anthropological studies on humans, researchers emphasize that the concepts of status and prestige can be considered distinct entities from dominance. In human societies that are male dominant, females can still have power and prestige in public or private domains. Although the cultural concepts of power and prestige are not appropriate to non-human primates, the concept that females can behave in subtle ways that influence social dynamics and foraging efficiency should be examined more carefully in non-human primates, particularly if these behaviors significantly impact survivability and reproductive success. It is assumed in this project that male and female mating strategies in addition to the ecological stress experienced by females when reproductive, work together to influence the expression of female dominance, feeding priority, and or alternative strategies to improve foraging efficiency. These alternative strategies include intersexual differences in food selection and coordination of group movements. To test this hypothesis, behavioral and ecological data will be collected on at least two study groups of each lemur species during different reproductive phases and food availability periods doc453 none Watts The objective of this research is to understand the mechanisms of manganese oxide-catalyzed Fenton-like reactions and the conditions under which these reactions occur. Preliminary results have shown that manganese oxide catalysts may produce reductants with as low as 0. M (20 mg L) hydrogen peroxide, one thousand times less than the concentration required in iron-catalyzed systems, potentially providing a more stoichiometrically efficient and economical system for the enhanced desorption and transformation of organic contaminants generated by industry and present at contaminated sites. Specific objectives of the research include investigating process conditions that promote the generation of reductants in manganese oxide-catalyzed Fenton-like reactions; identifying the reductant species; investigating contaminant transformation pathways and potential for mineralization; and evaluating the generation of transient oxygen species from soil-catalyzed decomposition of hydrogen peroxide and their ability to desorb contaminants from soils and sludges. The results of this research are expected to provide more effective and economical processes for the displacement and treatment of industrial contaminants from sludges and soils, promoting effective pollution prevention through volume reduction of process water and sludges and cleanup of source areas at contaminated sites doc454 none Keller This cooperative research project, CELEBRATION : A Seismic Investigation of Lithospheric Structure in the Trans-European Suture Carpathian Mountains Region is an ambitious regional project involving researchers from the geophysical and geological communities in the US, Poland, the Slovak Republic, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Researchers from Denmark, Finland and Sweden will also contribute to this project. The principal investigators are Dr. G. Randy Keller from the University of Texas at El Paso and colleagues from the Institute of Geophysics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the University of Warsaw, Eotvos Lorand Geophysical Institute in Budapest, the Slovak Geological Survey, the Institute of Geophysics in Bratislava (Slovakia) and the Geophysical Institute in Prague (Czech Republic). Eastern Europe contains a variety of interesting and important tectonic features. Three of these features are the Trans-European Suture Zone (TESZ), the Carpathian Mountains, and the Pannonian basin. In , the PI and his colleagues joined researchers from Poland in a very large seismic experiment (POLONAISE 97) that targeted the northern portion of the TESZ region. This project was very successful and has yielded a series of scientific papers in major journals. The PI now proposes to expand this collaboration to neighboring countries in the region in order to undertake another experiment (CELEBRATION - Central Europe Lithospheric Experiment Based on Refraction) that targets the southern portion of the TESZ as well as the Carpathian Mountains and Pannonian basin. This research will augment two of the PI s ongoing research efforts in the US. One deals with the tectonic history of the southern margin of the North American craton. The other involves a study of the structure and evolution of the souther Rockies. The joint study of the Carpathian Mountains and Rocky Mountains is expected to provide additional insight into the processes involved in mountain building. This project in earth sciences research fulfills the program objectives of bringing together leading experts in the U.S. and Central Eastern Europe to combine complementary efforts and capabilities in areas of strong mutual interest and competence on the basis of equality, reciprocity, and mutuality of benefit doc455 none The PI s previous research on the Atlantic economy during the century up to has confirmed that globalization debates today can be better understood if history is taken seriously and if, as trade theory suggests, we look at factor and commodity prices, rather than simply at trade flows and GDP aggregates. The current proposal will exploit a very-nearly-established data base of factor and commodity prices from 26 regions in the Third World -some starting as early as , to explore the determinants of long run economic change in Latin America, the Mediterranean and Asia prior to the industrialization boom in the second half of the 20 century. The agenda will be to take a new look at the theses of W. Arthur Lewis and other economists writing in the s and s, now guided by the improved theory of the s as well as by a vastly augmented, extended and improved historical data base. The project will explore the extent of global commodity market integration between the Third World and the industrial leaders in Europe and North America from about to . It will decompose the sources of terms of trade changes in the pre- Third World into that accounted for by the spectacular decline in transport costs between center and periphery and that accounted for by demand and supply in world markets. The 20th century debate over the evolution of the terms of trade facing primary product producers goes back almost fifty years when economists used poor commodity price evidence to establish a case for industrial protection in the Third World. The project should raise the quality of this terms of trade debate by the construction of a commodity price data base quoted in home markets using a set of country-specific trade weights for all 26 countries in the sample. Also, by using econometrics and general equilibrium models to explore the impact of the price shocks on these Third World countries -- including on their factor income distributions and thus on attitudes towards various policy options - additional light will be shed on the terms of trade debate. The project will also include the estimation Third World factor supply responses -- especially that of labor and land - and a comparative assessment essential to any understanding of long run economic performance in the Third World. This part of the project will decompose the long run labor supply into local demographic responses and across-border migration from labor surplus to labor scarce areas in the Third World -- flows that were at least as big as the mass migrations from Europe to the New World. It will also include tests of the global integration of financial capital markets distant from the Atlantic economy, the only place where such tests have been performed prior to this proposal. Finally, the project will use new evidence to explore the evolution of living standard gaps between center and periphery within Europe since the 14th century, between India and Europe since the late 16th century, and between China and Europe since the early 18th century. This part of the project will make it possible to develop a much sharper understanding of the determinants of economic change in the very long run doc456 none ROBINSON This Implementation Center at Ithaca College sustains and expands the work of COMPASS, a secondary school implementation program that focuses on the five comprehensive secondary school mathematics curriculum programs developed with support from NSF. This work began under grant # . The COMPASS structure incorporates a Central Site together with five Satellite Sites, one for each curriculum program. The primary functions of the Central Site are to inform various constituencies about these innovative curricula, aid school districts in the first general phases of curriculum selection and implementation, and coordinate requests for additional information and assistance from the Satellite Sites. The primary goals of the Satellite Sites are to provide curriculum program-specific information to various constituencies and to assist school districts with program-specific implementation strategies including professional development. This effort involves working with policy makers at the school, district, regional or state level as well as with parents, businesses and community leaders, the higher education community, and others. As one component of this work, COMPASS hosts an annual national conference for secondary school decision-makers focusing on curriculum awareness, selection and implementation doc457 none Chan The objective of this proposed work is to explore plasma chemistry in Plasma Doping (PD) process and the development of in-situ diagnostics. The goals are: (1) to understand the characteristics of dopant ions in current dopant plasmas; (2) to experiment with new type of dopant plasmas with emphasis on the safety aspect; (3) to develop an accurate in-situ dose measurement technique; and (4) to develop analytical and numerical models for better predictions and control on doping profiles. The research will provide more precise and broader knowledge of processes that have significant plasma chemistry effects. In particular, present study can help the PI s optimize dopant recipes, process conditions, and provide a basis for the design and the calibration of implantation dose measurement. The approaches to achieve the above objective include experimental study, analytical modeling and simulation. Plasma doping experiments with varied process parameters and gas recipes will be performed. The simulations will be performed using existing tools such as PDP2, Crystal-TRIM etc. Plasma chemistry will be investigated by both analyzing the plasma components in the chamber and the dopant profiles in the implanted wafers. Since plasma components may be altered by target bias voltage, the emphasis will be put on the analysis of the implanted wafers and the development of in-situ diagnostics. A dynamic sheath model of multispecies plasma will be used to provide a basic function for fitting the experimental SIMS data of doping profile. Simulation tool Crystal-TRIM, which can simulate channeling effect, will be used to find implantation straggling and ranges. The influence of ion energy distribution, multiple ion species, pre-amorphaization and dopant diffusion enhanced by thermal effect and co-implanted non-dopant ions such as hydrogen and nitrogen, will be considered doc223 none Previous research in the Bighorn Basin has provided tantalizing evidence suggesting a relationship between biotic change and shifts in climate at the time of the Paleocene Eocene boundary and two early Eocene time periods, but poor resolution of critical parts of the record renders the correlation inconclusive. Using a combination of approaches -magnetostratigraphy, physical stratigraphy, paleosols, and mammalian faunas- this project will developed a high- resolution chonostratigraphy and provide the framework for correlating upper Paleocene- lower Eocene sections across the basin, and for establishing whether regional event can be correlated with the marine record. The Bighorn Basin is possibly the best localities globally where sediments recording coeval changes in climate, mammalian faunas, and floras at the Paleocene Eocene boundary and two early Eocene intervals have been preserved. The proposed work is essential for future research seeking to establish the relationship between biotic and climate changes globally during the early Tertiary interval of Greenhouse conditions doc459 none A workshop will assess the state-of-the-art and identify critical research issues in nanotribology in several areas of overlapping interest: MEMS, meso-manufacturing, nanotechnology, and microsystems in general by bringing researchers from these diverse communities together. The workshop will include participation from experimentalists, theoreticians, and numerical modelers in an evaluation of nanotriboilogical problems of stiction, nano-scale friction and wear, MEMS lubrication, etc doc460 none An SGER award will support development of a novel scanning capacitance measurement technique for lubricant film thickness mapping on engineering surfaces. It is expected that this technique will allow non-destructive mapping of variations in lubricant thickness as small as 0.1 nm and with a nanoscale lateral resolution. Existing techniques allow measurements only with a microscale lateral resolution. The proposed technique is of great interest in applications where lubricant films of mono-molecular thickness are used. It is expected that the proposed technique, if successful, can be developed for quality control purposes for the $ 100 billion per year magnetic storage industry, the emerging microdevices industry, and other applications using ultra-thin films. An existing AFM will be adapted with a scanning capacitance microscopy module, which will be modified to operate with a sharp, conducting probe. The measurements, as envisioned, will consist of an initial conventional AFM topography scan of the metal surface, followed by a scan in the same track but in the capacitance mode and with the tip at 100 nm height above the metal surface, as controlled by input from the topography scan doc461 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Sharon Steadman and her colleagues will conduct two field seasons of archaeological research in the Yozgat province of central Turkey (Anatolia), at the site of Cadir Hoyuk. The team consists of field archaeologists, specialists in faunal analysis, paleobotany, lithics analysis, and ceramic analysis. Investigation will concentrate on the prehistoric occupation at the site of Cadir Hoyuk in the north central Anatolian plateau, primarily on the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze I periods (ca. - B.C.) prior to the rise of the early second millennium state-level societies. The lack of extensive prehistoric remains in this region has left a large gap in the understanding of the transition in the north central plateau culture history from the early farming herding settlements in the fifth fourth millennia to the rise of the Hittite Empire State in the early second millennium B.C. Previous work in this region has demonstrated that the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze periods witnessed extensive socio-economic changes, including the rise of long-distance ( international ) trade, the influx of a new, migratory, population, and the development of increasingly complex society (culminating in the second millennium Hittite empire). However, previously excavated sites were lacking in continuous occupation, making the documentation of a lengthy and coherent occupational sequence impossible. Dr. Steadman s previous work at Cadir Hoyuk has demonstrated that this is a multi-period site, with a long occupational sequence.The NSF-funded research program will focus on the following three investigative goals: 1. What was the nature of the indigenous Chalcolithic EB occupation in this region of Anatolia? 2. What was the nature and extent of long-distance trade in the north central plateau region? 3. What impact did the Late Chalcolithic arrival of a new population (later to become the second millennium Hittite State) have on the indigenous Anatolian socio-economic organization? The proposed fieldwork provides previously unavailable insight into the north central plateau occupational history before, during, and after two important events in this region s prehistoric sequence: the florescence of long-distance exchange, and the arrival of immigrants who forever after changed the nature of central Anatolian demographics. The site of Cadir Hoyuk has the utmost potential to provide answers to the proposed research questions and will go far in enabling us to establish a secure prehistoric cultural sequence for this little understood region of the Anatolian plateau doc462 none Todd The goals of this research are the development and field-testing of an innovative real-time method for measuring, visualizing and quantifying chemical air emissions and emission rates. With the proposed method, two-dimensional pollutant concentration maps of large areas are generated using an environmental CAT (computer assisted tomography) scanning system that couples the chemical detection technology of open-path Fourier transform infrared (OP-FTIR) spectroscopy with the mapping capabilities of computer assisted tomography. In the proposed system, several OP-FTIR spectrometers transmit beams of infrared light along open beam paths (up to one kilometer, approximately) to simultaneously measure and identify a wide range of multiple contaminants directly in the atmosphere, typically at part per billion or part per million detection levels. The tomographic system uses a mathematical image reconstruction algorithm to process the multiple data into two-dimensional chemical maps. If successful, this method will allow concentrations to be spatially resolved in real-time over large areas with fewer measurements than would be required with conventional point samplers to obtain the same level of detail doc463 none MentorNet pairs undergraduate and graduate women studying engineering, sciences, and mathematics with mentors in industry using 3-mail to improve student retention in SMET fields and careers. This national program s centralized operations provide information, applications, matching training, coaching, and evaluation supported by electronic communications. Electronic mentoring offers a highly cost- and time-effective means of mentoring, transcending typical restraints of time, geography, and synchronous communication, thereby providing mentors to many students who would not otherwise have them. MentorNet s national scope and scale offer potential for strong matches between students and mentors, and significant economies of scale in operations. MentorNet represents an expanding partnership among colleges and universities, corporations, and professional societies. MentorNet extends earlier work to new populations in new settings with new systems and infrastructure and enlarged scale. By Year 3, MentorNet will involve 100 participating campuses, serving 5,000 student mentor pairs doc464 none This US-Brazil award for a planning visit was submitted by Dr. Francis Otuonye of Michigan Technological University requesting support to go to the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) to plan a collaborative research with Professor Maria Jose Gazzi Salum. The topic of this research would be the integrated approach to reducing the environmental impacts of mining through effective mine designs. In addition, they wish to arrange a student exchange program. This support will allow the PIs to gain an understanding of the research capabilities of the faculty and staff at UFMG; to evaluate the research infrastructure available; to evaluate the problems and opportunities related to environmental impacts of mining operations in Brazil; and to develop a collaborative research proposal. The second objective is to finalize arrangements for a student exchange program between the two universities. The problem of environmental damage from mining impacts both countries. New methods for analyzing this damage, mitigating the damage and remediating it are needed doc465 none Sohn This is a collaborative project by Principal Investigators from Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The Principal Investigators will combine autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) and ocean bottom seismometer (OBS) technologies to develop an instrument (AUVOBS) capable of making broadband seismic measurements on the seafloor beneath the Arctic Ocean ice cap. The structure of the instrument will be based on the Odyssey 11 AUV design and the seismometer package will be based on the Webb OBS developed by Spahr Webb at Scripps. These technologies will be integrated into a single instrument capable of being deployed and recovered from an icebreaker, and capable of making broadband seismic measurements over periods of up to one year on the seafloor. The motivation for developing this instrument arises from the pressing need for seismic observations to constrain the nature of melt production in the mantle, crustal structure, and tectonism associated with the ultra-slow spreading Gakkel Ridge. The Gakkel Ridge is essentially unsampled because it lies beneath the Arctic Ocean permanent ice cap. This key piece of the global spreading system puzzle provides an opportunity to image crustal accretion and mantle processes that are masked or hidden in other spreading environments. The logistics and priorities for an international field program to study the Gakkel Ridge have been developed through a series of InterRidge workshops. One of the highest priorities is the acquisition of passive and active source seismic data. It has been impossible to make seismic measurements on the seafloor at the Gakkel Ridge, but with the development of an AUVOBS instrument, the Arctic Ocean Basin could be opened to seismic investigation. The Principal Investigators will solve the first order problems associated with deploying and recovering AUVs from icebreakers in the ice pack and modifying AUVs to make in situ seafloor measurements over long periods of time. In addition to developing an AUVOBS prototype, they will also develop techniques and hardware that will allow the routine deployment of AUVs for a variety of Arctic (and Antarctic) science missions in the future doc466 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Steven Shackley and his collaborators will conduct one season of archaeological excavation at the McEuen Cave site located in the Gila Mountains of East Central Arizona. The site was originally excavated 60 years ago and was later subjected to extensive looting. Dr. Shackley recently returned to the cave and his preliminary work indicates, surprisingly, that a substantial portion of the archaeological deposits remain intact. He will conduct careful stratigraphic excavation with a emphasis on recovery of botanical and other organic material. McEuen Cave is particularly important because it spans a critical period in the Southwest, from ca. 2,000 to years ago, during a time when the hunting and gathering residents of the region began to shift their subsistence mode to focus more intensively on maize agriculture and sedentary aggregated settlement. McEuen Cave can provide unique insight into this change because of the excellent preservation of cultural material which results from the dry nature of the sediments. The remains from the early investigations include intact basketry, cordage, sandals, dart shafts and abundant floral and faunal remains as well as chipped and ground stone artifacts. Although many open air sites dating to this period have recently been investigated in the region, very few dry rock shelters of this critical age have been located. McEuen Cave contains abundant maize remains and these provide insight into the domestication process. The shift from a hunting and gathering mobile lifestyle to a more sedentary mode of existence based on the utilization of domestic plants and animals occurred independently in many parts of the world and anthropologists wish to understand this developmental process. To do this they employ a comparative approach, study individual cases in many parts of the world and then attempt to discern general trends. The Southwest US and Northern Mexico constitute one such instance and thus have been the focus of intensive study. Dr. Shackley s research will provide important data through which to examine an early stage in such change. The information he produces will be of interest to a wide group of scientists doc467 none On-line, Internet voting is the next step in election reform and will be available for the election. While citizen involvement in U.S. elections continues to decline at an alarming rate and previous reform efforts (motor voter, early voting, and mail balloting) have yet to produce higher levels of participation, Arizona is moving forward with an experiment in digital democracy. The Arizona Democratic Party is including an Internet voting option in the Marc primary election. This is the first binding Internet election to occur anywhere in the world. The Principal Investigator for this Small Grant for Exploratory research undertakes an extensive research effort to examine the significance and impact of Internet voting for political participation and election outcomes in the primary in Arizona. Five questions are central to this research: 1) which population subgroups are most interested in Internet voting? 2) which population subgroups actually vote using Internet voting procedures? 3) is there a relationship between Internet voting and voter turnout? 4) how does Internet voting affect election outcomes? 5) Is there evidence of fraud in Internet voting? The researcher s pilot study of registered voters in Arizona conducted in October, , suggests that Internet voting holds great promise for voter turnout. This current project specifically addresses the relationship between the Internet as information technology and its influence upon the quality and level of participation in the election. This primary election in Arizona offers a unique opportunity to assess the relationship between digital democracy, voter participation and election outcomes doc468 none SES 00- - Evelynn M. Hammonds (MIT) -- Race in the Histories of Science and Medicine: A Review Essay and a Research Agenda This grant provides summer support that will allow the Principal Investigator to complete an essay on the historiography of the concept of race in the histories of science and medicine in the United States from to the present. The essay will be in three parts. The first part will examine the historiography of race in the histories of biology and anthropology. The second part of the essay will examine the historiography of race in the history of medicine. The final section of the essay will raise questions that have not been addressed about the history of the race concept in the existing secondary literature in these fields. This essay will be similar in form to Daniel Kevles, Genetics in the United States and Great Britain, - : A Review With Speculations, Isis, , 71 (No.258):441-455. In this essay Kevles reviewed the literature on the history of genetics in the US and Great Britain, summarized the existing scholarship, pointed out the limitations in historical interpretation and raised the important questions that needed to be addressed in future work. The essay will be submitted for publication to Isis and to the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. The editors of both these journals have expressed interest in publishing an essay on this topic doc469 none Modeling microbial processes and dissolved organic matter: a case study at the US-JGOFS time series Station ALOHA The development of coupled physical-biological models of ocean biogeochemistry is hampered by several critical knowledge gaps. Plankton models have attempted to incorporate the microbial loop and dissolved organic substances, but have done so using formulations that are highly uncertain, do not take into consideration a great deal of new information that has emerged over the past decade, and have not been shown to have greater predictive power than simple empirical formulations used in e.g. the Ocean Carbon Cycle Model Intercomparison Project protocols. As these processes play a significant role in biogeochemical cycling in the oceans, the development of more realistic models of this component of the community is critical to the development of global models that have a mechanistic basis for predicting elemental budgets. Of the JGOFS time-series study sites, the Hawaii Ocean Time-Series (HOT) has received the least attention from modelers. Observations at HOT deviate strongly from established paradigms of plankton ecology (seasonal convection, nitrate-based production, metazoan zooplankton as primary consumers) that are to some extent assumed in plankton models. The HOT data base provides an unprecedented opportunity to validate a more realistic model, as observations of dissolved organic substances have been made routinely throughout the HOT project, and significant interannual variability in these has been observed. Although there are significant uncertainties associated with one dimensional (depth-time) simulation, the high computational cost of three dimensional simulations makes extensive validation experiments with biological submodels impractical in such a context. In addition, the HOT data base is itself Eulerian, and significant interannual variability in ocean biogeochemistry has already been observed. To provide a meaningful simulation of such variability requires a mechanistic model not only of plankton population biology, but of the interface between biology and chemistry that is found in the decomposer loop. The PIs will use the HOT database to develop and test such a model doc470 none Data-Based Models of Plankton Community Structure and Export Flux Intensive JGOFS investigations over the past decade have indicated strong links among physical-chemical environmental forcing, plankton community structure, and the fate of carbon production (remineralization or export). However, these relationships are crudely portrayed in existing plankton food web models. It is presently unclear how much information on size and taxonomic composition is needed for adequate model predictions and to what extent community dynamics and biogeochemical fluxes in different water masses are linked by common organizational principles and quantitative relationships. The overall goal of the proposed research is to contribute to the mechanistic understanding of the factors that regulate euphotic zone production and export of carbon and related biologically active substances . To accomplish this, the PIs will develop and evaluate data-based models of plankton community structure and export flux for tropical subtropical open-ocean ecosystems. This project will focus on the tropical and subtropical oceans, areas most strongly represented in JGOFS Process and Time-series studies (EqPac, Arabian Sea, HOT, BATS) and presently most developed in terms of mature databases and supporting experimental studies. The specific objectives are: 1) to develop data-constrained representations of planktonic community structure and trophic interactions; 2) to construct models of temporal plankton community dynamics and associated biogeochemical fluxes at the Hawaii Ocean Time-series (HOT) site and following iron perturbation in the equatorial Pacific (IronEx II); 3) to compare and test simple parameterizations, for lower trophic level interactions and export fluxes for use in 3-D coupled models; 4) to develop a general tropical ocean model that includes appropriate responses to nutrient supply (Arabian Sea) and iron-limitation (Equatorial Pacific); and 5) to examine model structures and strategies for predicting biologically realistic responses in computationally intensive Global Circulation Models (GCMs). Based on observed similarities in the stocks and process rates in diverse tropical oceanic ecosystems, the PIs hypothesize that the data will lend themselves to representation in a general tropical ocean model with common structure and parameters. To investigate the minimum level of complexity required to capture essential biological realities in global models, they will statistically examine an interrelated spectrum of models, all calibrated to common data sets but differing in structural complexity doc471 none PI: Steven W. Van Sciver, Florida State University Proposal Number: This work involves the application of flow visualization and particle image velocimetry (PIV) techniques to studies of heat and mass transfer in He II. The purpose is to obtain the capability to investigate microscopic scale thermal fluid issues in He II, so that the fluid can be better utilized as a coolant in applications. The effort will first focus on techniques to introduce suitable neutral density particles into experiments with a He II counterflow forced flow channel. Neutral particles to be investigated include solid H2 D2 and hollow glass microspheres. Once particle seeding techniques have been developed, PIV experiments will investigate the microscale fluid dynamics of the He II channel. The experiments will be performed in a cryostat equipped with optical access. If successful, this will be the first demonstration of PIV in He II and the only particle imaging study in counterflow or forced flow He II. It will also be a clear indication of the value of PIV for cryogenic thermal fluid studies doc472 none Tharakan This award supports a planning visit for Professor John Tharakan, Howard University, to travel to the Murugappa Chettiar Research Center (MCRC) in Chennai, India to finalize the collaborative research proposal, Investigation and Comparison of Gut Microbial Ecology in Vermicomposting. The investigators will study tropical and temperate vermicomposting systems for the treatment of recalcitrant industrial wastes. The MCRC focuses on conducting sustainable and appropriate scientific and technological research that will improve living conditions and quality of life for Indian rural populations doc473 none This project will use a newly-developed approach for excavating fossils from bogs and other flooded sites. The investigators have found that by placing a large-diameter well in the corner of an excavation pit and pumping groundwater to a different part of the same aquifer with lightweight, high-pressure water pumps, it is possible to extract fossils from sites previously out of reach under the water table. Such sites are especially favorable to fossil preservation, and this method will allow the extraction of bones, soft tissue, ancient DNA, plant microfossils and macrofossils, and many other types of information with a maximum amount of control over the depth and context. There is no impact on the area s water resources, because the water is returned to the aquifer. If this approach works in the ancient lake-beds of southwestern Madagascar, it will permit the scientists to investigate the circumstances surrounding the apparently rapid extinction of the giant lemurs, elephant birds, and other large and unusual animals of prehistoric Madagascar, and to reconstruct the conditions under which they lived. Work of this type will allow the testing of five competing hypotheses for the cause of these extinctions, which many scientists believe were caused in some way by prehistoric humans. Perfecting this technique will open new avenues for research on prehistoric landscapes and facilitate the direct application of paleoecology to the goals of ecological restoration doc474 none Biomass burning is a major source for atmospheric pollution over southern Africa as well as globally. Biomass burning emits a large variety of gaseous and particulate compounds with significant implications to atmospheric and biogeochemical cycles. This collaborative research project with William Keene, University of Virginia, is a laboratory investigation of biomass burning in the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry experimental fire facility. The biofuels to be studied will be collected by collaborating SAFARI- investigators during the dry season of in three regions of southern Africa that are representative for major ecosystem types: The Etosha National Park in northern Namibia, the Kruger National Park in north-east South Africa and woodland sites in Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Mozambique (the Miombo Network). The experiments provide a partially controlled burning environment and will be used to measure major exhaust species (CO2; CO; CH3Cl, CH3Br, CH3I; NOx; N2O; CH4; NH3; HCl, HNO3; SO2, HCOOH, CH3COOH; alkaline-reactive, volatile Cl, Br and I; the ionic composition of particles including chloride, bromide, nitrate, sulfate, formic and acetic acid; and the elemental composition of particles including C, N, Cl, Br, I, S) as well as the elemental content of both biofuels and ash-residues. The results of this study will be integrated with those from other SAFARI- investigators to model regional biomass burning emissions of halogen-, nitrogen-, sulfur-, carbon-containing compounds doc475 none This project will investigate the relationship between gender, alcohol use and spirit possession in Chuuk, Micronesia. As male alcohol abuse increased in the s and became a significant social problem on Chuuk, female spirit possession appeared. The researcher hypothesizes that spirit possession is a moral discourse that may assist women in the control of alcohol related problems with men. An urban and rural community will be compared in order to situate the research in areas where alcohol abuse is relatively more or less of a problem. The study will focus on women s religious lives and how they utilize spirituality to respond to male drinking and abuse. Methods include a community census, archival research, participant observation and intensive interviewing. This study will contribute to our theoretical understanding of the relationship between innovative religious practice and rapid social change, and will also contribute important information on alcohol abuse patterns in this area of the world doc476 none The proposal deals with investigation of multi-stress accelerated aging of polymeric insulators (silicone rubber) and coatings. It concentrates on field lab experiments on aged silicone conductors. This is basically field data acquisition with some post-test material analysis. This proposal nicely outlines research on polymeric insulators to model various aging affects. It builds on previously sponsored NSF work and includes some impressive results from that work. Through various diagrams and tables it lays out the problem and the proposed research approach. Although the proposed work is somewhat incremental and empirical, this is a promising area doc477 none Biologists are in the midst of assimilating a new paradigm. After a generation of characterizing genes one or a few at a time, scientists now have access to the complete genome sequences of many bacterial species and several eukaryotes including the reference plant Arabidopsis. Biologists now envision the day when the complete genome sequence of their favorite organisms, or a proxy thereof, will be available in powerful electronic databases. Access to this information, and new tools that exploit it, will profoundly alter the ways in which we select and approach questions in biology. This, in turn, will directly impact the application of directed genetic methods to the improvement of economically important plants. An important and revolutionary new initiative -to understand the function of all plant genes by the year - has been proposed by the community of plant biologists. Implicit in this mission statement is an endorsement of the allocation of resources to attempts to assign function to genes that have no known function. This represents a significant departure from the common practice of defining and justifying a scientific goal based on the biological phenomena. The rationale for endorsing this radical change is that for the first time it is feasible for plant biologists to envision a whole system approach to study of plant form and function. This whole system approach promises to be orders of magnitude more efficient than the conventional approach. We envision that once the efficiencies of genomics have been realized, within the next decade, there will be a renewed emphasis on problem-oriented approaches and an expanded emphasis on understanding diversity. The aim of this workshop is to further discuss the feasibility of commencing a federally funded project to determine the function(s) of all plant genes by the year . The workshop participants will identify essential features that should be considered in any proposal for the establishment of a national program to initiate a systems approach to the study of gene function. The participants will discuss the role of individual investigator initiated research in an era where multidisciplinary centers are being established to approach complex research problems and the possible roles that individual laboratories and centers may play in this effort. This group will also discuss the possible impact that the project would have on the progress of basic plant research as well as on the strategic interests of the United States as they relate to agriculture, energy and the environment. Finally, the workshop participants will discuss issues of coordination of efforts in the United States with similar programs already underway or being consider by other nations doc478 none With National Science Fountain support Drs. William Walker and James Skibo will conduct three years of archeological investigation at the site of Joyce Well, located in southern New Mexico. The site is part of a larger Chihuahua interaction sphere which was centered on the major town of Casas Grandes and which, in the several centuries preceding the arrival of Spanish in the New World, covered much of the US Southwest and adjacent regions in northern Mexico. Shared similarities across this large region indicate a relatively high degree of social integration but it is unclear the nature of the glue which bound together widely separated communities over this extensive area. Archaeologists originally theorized that trade was responsible and that sites were integrated into a larger system which extended South into central Mexico. Walker and Skibo postulate however that the region forms part of a religious interaction sphere comprised of autonomous groups whose common ritual activities resulted in homogenous assemblages of certain classes of material culture. Rather than uniting into a single economic or political entity, the investigators believe communities in this regional system possessed similar artifacts such as shared polychrome style ceramics, architecture and rock art which is indicative of a reservoir of shared beliefs and ritual practices. The organization of religious interaction in the region however remains murky because until recently the majority of research has focused on the central site of Casas Grandes. Although Casas Grandes is relatively well known, the majority of sites in the complex remain untested or unreported. With NSF support the investigators will conduct research at Joyce Well one of several large son the northwestern periphery of the interaction sphere. Evidence of community and household ritual power at this site and others likely resides in their method of abandonment. Joyce Well like many other sites in the region including Casas Grandes, exhibits evidence of fiery destruction that has consistently been attributed to prehistoric violence. Ongoing southwestern archaeological research however suggests that this burning may have resulted from ritual activities rather than war. The investigators will conduct careful stratigraphic excavation in an attempt to determine the cause of destruction. Researchers wish to understand the factors which led to the rise of complex societies and because they are so readily accessible and document increasing complexity over time, archaeologists have focussed on the US Southwest and adjacent areas in Mexico. Very few however have seriously considered religion and associated ritual as forces strong enough to allow cohesion over such a large sparsely inhabited region and this research is important because it will evaluate what role such a factor may have played doc479 none R. D. Moser-University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Large Eddy Simulation (LES) represents an important bridge between basic turbulence research and computational efforts in engineering (CFD). The basic elements of LES are clearly in an evolutionary stage and the Optimal LES (OLES) of the UIUC research group is a most important component of the broad based effort to develop this methodology. The present award will continue the development of OLES and permit it to be a strategy by which LES can contribute to our fundamental understandings of, as well as our ability to simulate, turbulent flows doc480 none Econometricians have long found it useful to separate inferential problems into statistical and identification components. Studies of identification seek to characterize the conclusions that could be drawn if the researcher had available a sample of unlimited size. Studies of statistical inference seek to characterize the generally weaker conclusions that can be drawn given a sample of positive but finite size. Statistical and identification problems limit in distinct ways the conclusions that may be drawn in empirical research. Statistical problems are most severe when the available sample is small. Identification problems are most severe when the researcher knows little about the population under study and the sampling process yields only weak data on the population. The proposed research will continue the investigator s program of work on identification problems in the social sciences. This program is deliberately conservative in the assumptions that it brings to bear. The investigator believes that it is not sufficient for empirical researchers to know the inferences that can be made if assumptions strong enough to yield identification are imposed. It is also important to characterize the inferences that can be made without imposing such assumptions, which often lack credibility. Conservative analysis allows the establishment of a domain of consensus among researchers who may hold disparate beliefs about what assumptions are appropriate. The investigator will study how empirical analysis of treatment response informs the normative problem of treatment choice in heterogeneous populations. Recent work by the investigator has shown how identification problems generate ambiguity about the identity of optimal treatment rules. The planned research will analyze the complementary statistical problem of induction from finite samples to populations, which generates further ambiguity. The long-run objective is a coherent integrated analysis of identification and statistical inference. The investigator will also study problems of incomplete identification of regressions that arise under empirically relevant sampling processes. One problem to be examined is inference on long regressions using data on short regressions. This research has immediate application to the longstanding ecological inference problem. Another problem to be analyzed is inference on regressions when only interval measures of covariates are available doc481 none Schoenbach This is a one-year renewal to NSF award to support Dr. Karl Schoenbach and a postdoctoral student to collaborate with Klaus Frank of the Physics Departent at the Friedrich Alexander University in Erlangen. The collaboration will study two topics: the physics of multiple, parallel discharges in the steady-state phase, and the discharge ignition process. These studies have application to the development of excimer light sources in direct-current (DC), low-voltage, flat-panel lamps. Experimental and modeling studies on DC discharges will be combined with ignition-phase studies at Erlangen to accelerate research in the area of flat-panel excimer lamps, which provide quasi-monochromatic light sources with a wide range of applications. Overall, the combined effort will provide a better understanding of the physics of hollow-cathode discharge arrays, provide information on the electric breakdown in single hollow-cathode discharges and discharge arrays, and determine the effect of electrode materials and dielectrics on the performance of the microhollow cathode discharges doc482 none WONG The project will plan and conduct a conference among U.S. and Japanese mathematics educators (e.g., teachers, researchers, teacher educators) focused on exploring the similarities and differences in teacher professional development for elementary school mathematics teachers. There will be 40 participants, split evenly between U.S. and Japanese delegations. The conference would be held in August, , immediately following the Ninth International Congress on Mathematics Education (ICME 9). Two products would be developed after the conference. The first is a set of proceedings (available in print and stored on the web) that would include summaries of discussions and activities as well as a series of commissioned papers that would explore issues raised at the conference. The second is an edited video of conference discussions and activities. One of the planned conference activities is a simulation presentation of Japanese study groups that are often part of Japanese teachers professional development. The video will attempt to capture some of the essential features of this demonstration so that U.S. educators who did not attend could gain some insight into the nature of that kind of professional development activity. During and , the project staff will make presentations at a variety of professional conferences to share the proceedings (both print and video) with mathematics educators throughout the U.S doc483 none Kitanidis The accurate quantitative evaluation of transverse dispersion is crucial in hydrogeology, environmental engineering, and other fields because of the way this process affects solute dilution and mixing of reactants. In many cases, the rate of biochemical reactions depends on the transverse dispersion coefficient. The primary objective of this research is to develop and test a new laboratory method for measuring transverse dispersion. Although there are methods for the laboratory measurement of transverse dispersion in porous media they all are based on the concept of measuring this quantity directly, which is very difficult because transverse dispersion coefficients are small. The proposed method is based on the inference of transverse dispersion from measurements of a quantity is inversely proportional to it. This work will develop and test a device for measurement of the transverse dispersion in homogeneous isotopic porous media. We will measure the Taylor dispersion coefficient in a spiral flow field. A small transverse dispersion means a large Taylor dispersion coefficient that is easy to infer with satisfactory accuracy from the breakthrough curve. The flow and transport in the device will be evaluated through experiments and mathematical modeling. Additionally, we will perform experiments with several unconsolidated porous media in order to evaluate the behavior of dispersivity with grain size and distribution, type of packing, and other variable doc484 none The investigators will continue theoretical studies and associated computer simulation and modeling of a range of basic solar wind properties and their interactions with cosmic rays, including energetic solar particles. The research will include studies of the structure of the interplanetary magnetic field and plasma, with particular emphasis on the effect of the field s structure on cosmic ray and energetic particle acceleration, propagation and anisotropies. Previous work on the transport and acceleration of cosmic rays in the heliosphere has led to the creation of a large library of software for the modeling of cosmic ray transport and acceleration. This library will be extended and used to obtain full two- and three-dimensional, time-dependent simulations of cosmic ray transport and acceleration. Mechanisms of particle acceleration in interplanetary space, and the effects of energetic particles on the dynamics of the solar wind and its termination will be studied. The investigators will improve two-dimensional models to include the dynamical effects of galactic and anomalous cosmic rays on the global solar wind, and to study time-dependent, transient effects which are expected to be important during the current solar maximum doc485 none Emperor penguins are a familiar inhabitant of Antarctica yet much of their population biology remains unknown due to their winter breeding behavior and occupation of colonies in remote areas. The major goal of this proposal is to apply a unique method for determining the population status of emperor penguins in the western Ross Sea colonies. This will involve the assessment of the feasibility of satellite imagery for conducting population censuses of emperor penguins; and verification of the accuracy of the satellite images analyses by on site counts (ground truthing). The final outcome of this objective will be essential information necessary to determine the long-term trend in the fledging population of the seven known Ross Sea colonies, as well as the adult breeding population determined from the incubating huddles. Censusing by satellite imagery will reduce the logistic problems of field censuses and the inherent loss of data because of weather or lack of access during critical phases of the life cycle. Remote sensing will accomplish this task with little activity within, and minimal impact on the Antarctic environment. Also, once this method is demonstrated to be financially and technically feasible, then the size of all emperor penguin colonies could be measured in this way. For example, some exceptionally remote colonies discovered in the s and s have not been visited since the initial contact. This procedure may provide the best and least intrusive method for not only determining the present status of those colonies, but for measuring the entire world population of fledged young of the year. Such a direct and comprehensive determination is unique for any marine predator doc486 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Tom Plummer and colleagues will conduct two field seasons of excavation at Kanjera South, southwestern Kenya. The team brings together specialists in archaeology, paleontology, paleoecology and geology to conduct an interdisciplinary investigation of the behavior and paleoecology of hominids forming early archeological (Oldowan) sites. The appearance of Oldowan archeological sites at c. 2.5 million years ago (Ma) reflects a profound adaptive shift in human evolution, the incorporation of large mammal tissue into the diet. The proposed project will be the first to carry out a detailed study of site formation processes at Oldowan sites older than 2.0 Ma, using a wide range of traditional and innovative methodologies. Excavations in and located rich concentrations of artifacts and fossils in c. 2.2 Ma deposits in the Southern Exposures at Kanjera. Over 1,000 stone tools and thousands of fossils were collected in carefully controlled taphonomic excavations. Documentation of relatively high archeological densities in three beds at two of five sites along a 70m transect suggests that hominid activity was spatially focused for a considerable length of time. Preliminary lab analysis has identified hominid marrow processing and carnivore damage to bone, as well as several artifact refits. Stable isotopic chemistry of paleosol carbonates and high equid frequencies indicate Oldowan hominid activities in a novel (open) paleohabitat. A high proportion of small, immature mammals is suggestive of small mammal hunting while medium to very large mammal remains (including a potentially butchered hippopotamus) may have been scavenged. Hominid transport of artifacts and raw material selectivity is suggested by lithic analysis. Expanding the samples of excavated material will allow reconstruction of hominid activities within their paleoecological context at Kanjera and facilitate meaningful comparisons with other large Oldowan site assemblages, particularly those from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania and the Lake Turkana basin, Kenya and Ethiopia. Faunal analysis will provide information on hominid procurement and processing of animals as well as the role of carnivore activity in assemblage formation. Lithic analysis will document local technological characteristics and hominid transport behavior as well as the tasks chert artifacts were used for. Paleoenvironmental information will be obtained using multiple methodologies. Limb element ecomorphic analyses and isotopic analysis of carbonates will provide information on habitat structure. Ecomorphic analysis of mandibles and analysis of carbon isotopes from enamel will provide paleodietary information. Oxygen isotopes in tooth enamel will constrain paleotemperatures and the degree of seasonality during Kanjera Fm (S) deposition. Cementum analysis will be used to assess antelope season of death. Documentation of hominid utilization of open habitats at Kanjera may influence views of early hominid capabilities, including their ability to compete with large carnivores. This project should also contribute to the on-going debate over faunal acquisition strategies, by providing a test of whether small mammals were hunted. As the sample of medium and larger sized mammals increases, it may be possible to assess the timing of access to larger carcasses and thus whether hominids were passively or actively scavenging them. Our attempts to measure the intensity of seasonality through the sequence, as well as the influence of seasonality on hominid foraging for animal tissue, have not been conducted on this scale before and may provide valuable information on the motivation and frequency of Oldowan carnivory doc487 none Engineering - Mechanical (56) This special project is a three day workshop focused on the implementation of case study methodology in engineering education. The objectives of the workshop are for participants to: learn about the use of case study methodology in engineering courses, participate in real-world case studies where engineering decisions have a major impact, use multimedia materials to enhance learning, benefit from collaboration between engineering and business in solving real-world problems, use case studies to address the ABET EC accreditation criteria. In addition, the workshop encourages participants to implement case study methodology at their institutions and points out various ways to support such efforts doc488 none Engineering - Mechanical (56) This is a one-day workshop in Mechatronics Education to be held as part of the Mechatronics Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, in September of . The purpose of the workshop is to bring mechatronics educators and scholars from around the world together to discuss and share their experiences on how to best teach mechatronics, how to design mechatronics laboratories and curricula, and how to integrate mechatronics research and teaching effectively. Part of the information disseminated will come from a previous NSF grant to the PI. Mechatronics scholars who are already attending the conference from the United States, Japan, and Europe will be available to serve as panelists and presenters at the workshop doc489 none This proposal seeks funds to support a study to test how well the isotopic composition of specific lipids track changes in the isotopic composition of water and dissolved inorganic carbon in lakes. The project will use analyses that require new and unproven analytical methods for measuring carbon and hydrogen isotopes on the extremely small samples involved. If successful, the project will provide a valuable new proxy measurement of isotopic compositions for paleoclimatic reconstructions doc490 none This project will investigate the social construction of race, ethnicity, and nationhood in the US Territory of Guam. The researcher will analyze how the indigenous Chamorro incorporate, negotiate, and resist colonial discourses in their current struggles to define their political identity vis a vis the United States. It will also analyze how race figures within this political identity and struggle. The three decolonization task forces that represent major political positions on the island will be the focus of the project. Methods include participant observation, structured interviewing, linguistic analysis of the talk and narrative of political activists, and social network analysis. An analysis of the written material of the activists will be used to reconstruct how identity is negotiated and racialized in this context. This project will contribute to our understanding of identity (including race) construction and political activism in the postcolonial world doc491 none Under the direction of Dr. Katharina Schreiber, MS Melissa Chatfield will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. She will continue fieldwork in highland Peru and conduct archaeological investigation at the site of Aqnapama. Because it is protected by a deep river gorge, it has escaped looting which is common in the region. Excavation will serve both to elucidate architectural forms, which characterize specific regional cultures and to obtain large well dated ceramic samples for detailed analysis. Based on work to date, it appears that five types of structures, distinguished by size and shape are present and a representative of each will be excavated in order to determine function. Laboratory analysis will focus on ceramics and materials will initially be classified into decorative groupings. This will be followed by a simple quantification of paste and temper characteristics. A representative sample will then be set aside for subsequent detailed petrographic analysis. Aqnapama dates to the Late Intermediate Period, ca. 900- AD, a time when highland Peru was dominated by two large empires: Wari centered around Cuzco and Tiwanaku with a capital further South in Bolivia. Archaeologists wish to understand how each of these entities functioned and the relationship between the two. To what extent were these true states which exercised a direct control over outlying regions and which, at their mutual border engaged in hostile or competitive relationships? Although the area of demarcation between the two is fairly clear, Aqnapama is unusual because it appears to combine elements of both. Through analysis of pottery imported to the site as well as that locally produced, MS Chatfield will evaluate a series of hypothesized modes of interaction. Since it is likely that local inhabitants of the region had a tradition which predated the arrival of either Wari or Tiwanaku influences MS Chatfield wishes to determine how they related to both entities and the extent to which they were able to maintain a degree of local autonomy. Through a careful analysis of ceramic materials she will gain insight into these issues. This research is important for several reasons. It will provide data of interest to many South Americanist archaeologists. It will shed new light into how states arise and maintain their integrity and it will contribute to the development of a promising young scientist doc492 none The objective of this project is to determine the dynamical mechanisms responsible for the poleward propagation of zonal mean flow anomalies, where the anomaly is defined as the deviation from the climatological flow. The phenomenon has been identified in both observational and numerical model studies. A recent observational study showed that this phenomenon is ubiquitous, appearing in both the summer and winter seasons of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. There are reasons to suspect this phenomenon may be an important part of well-known low-frequency anomalies or teleconnection patterns, particularly the so-called Arctic Oscillation. Inspired by a recent study on the impact of the Hadley circulation on Rossby wave dynamics, Dr. Lee developed a hypothesis for the mechanism that drives the poleward propagation. The essence of the hypothesis is based on the premise that anomalous baroclinic wave fluxes drive an anomalous Hadley circulation, and this in turn influences the latitude at which subsequent baroclinic wave breaking occurs. The theory of wave-mean flow interaction says that this process must alter the meridional distribution of the zonal mean flow change, which was initially driven by the eddy fluxes. This research will explore how this process can cause the poleward propagation of the zonal mean flow eddies. The investigation will be done through both observational data analysis and numerical modeling experiments doc493 none This project focuses on the use of space among plural forms in American Sign Language (ASL). Many researchers have noted that the pronominal and verb agreement systems of ASL are largely indexic - that is, these signs point to locations established with their referents. This dissertation research will investigate the extent to which plural inflection in ASL is indexic, and the extent to which it is grammaticized. The study focuses on pronouns and agreement verbs, because both are considered highly indexic in their singular forms. Given that the use of singular forms is indexic, the goal for this project is to determine if plural inflection is also highly indexic (in which case, it could be considered an extension of locus marking), or if plural inflection is highly grammaticized (in which case, a separate category is needed for number). The main question is: To what extent is the form of a plural verb affected by the location associated with the referents of its argument? The researchers will collect kinematic data from three Deaf native signers of ASL, using two types of task: an elicitation task and a judgment task. In the elicitation task, informants will be presented with videotaped stimuli consisting of short skits, each one depicting different numbers of actors things either performing or undergoing certain actions. Informants will be videotaped describing what is happening in each skit. The location of nominals will then be compared with the locations of the verbs that agree with them. The results of this study will have implications not only for linguists who work with sign languages, but also for syntacticians, morphologists, and psycholinguists in general doc494 none The award is for a collaborative study involving the Universities of Colorado, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska, aimed at improving the understanding of the characteristics, mechanisms, and feedback processes associated with changes in vegetation, sea level, and standing surface water in Beringia during the last 21,000 years, and to use this understanding to aid in the development of predictive tools for future pan-Arctic climate change. The specific research objectives and tasks are based on refining a modeling strategy for simulating regional paleoclimatic variations and for diagnosing the interactions between different components of the climate system, utilizing global and regional climate models and an equilibrium vegetation simulation model. Simulations will be performed at key times, compared to observational data, and diagnosed to understand potential feedbacks doc495 none The goal of the collaborative research is to distinguish between the impact of climate and land use on ecosystem functioning for eastern Asian steppes. This may be possible because, while contiguous regions of Inner Mongolia and Mongolia have very similar climates, land use practices can different dramatically. The PIs will determine how much of when green-up occurs is a function of climate and how much is a function of land use. The proposed work builds on research recently conducted by the authors. A rich mix of research techniques including remote sensing, modeling, field studies and statistical analyses will be used. The work is important because it will lead to better understanding of land-surface interactions and vegetation feedbacks in East Asia doc496 none Six estuarine biogeochemists will be selected from the scientific community to participate in the Sixth International Symposium of Model Estuaries. The primary purpose of this symposium series is to bring together estuarine biogeochemists from around the world to exchange results of research on disparate system will be to discuss present-day knowledge on the impact of the largest deltas in the world on the coastal invironment, taking into consideration both terrestrial areas and coastal waters. Each participant will present a paper that will be published in a special edition of Marine Chemistry doc497 none Wolff This award provides partial (50%) funding support for the acquisition of a laser ablation inductively coupled plasma source multicollector mass spectrometer (LA-ICP-MCMS) system to be installed and operated in the GeoAnalytical Laboratory at Washington State University. Washington State University is committed to provide the remaining funding required for the acquisition. The new instrument will be used in research and training of graduate students requiring precise microanalysis of elemental and isotopic compositions doc498 none This project will investigate the relationship between recent socioeconomic and environmental changes in South India and changing respiratory health disease patterns; specifically, the prevalence of asthma has increased dramatically in this region. The research will focus on Indians explanatory models of this disease and its presumed causes. It will examine how the experience of, and explanations for, asthma influence health-care seeking and management in a setting of medical pluralism, and how these vary by class, caste, and gender. It will specifically analyze how local models perceptions may be contributing to poor management of the disease. Two south Indian communities that have experienced different kinds of socioeconomic and environmental change-- an industrial town and a rural village -- will be compared. Methods include structured interviews with samples of households, the elicitation of factors causing asthma, an analysis of medications utilized, and a health services study of local pharmacies and drug vendors. This research will contribute to our understanding of the relationship between economic environmental change and deteriorating respiratory health in many parts of the industrialized, developing world doc499 none Pindzola Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Dr. Michael S. Pindzola, Department of Physics, Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama, Dr. Thomas W. Gorczyca, Department of Physics, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan and Dr. Zikry Altun, Department of Physics at Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey. This project represents a continuing effort in the development and application of many-body perturbation theory (MBPT) to the study of atomic photoionization. These investigators plan to develop a theoretical methodology to treat many-body dynamics in the photoionization of open- shell atoms and ions, which is ab-initio, assessable and accurate. Through the inclusion of discrete-state correlations, interchannel coupling and spin-orbit interactions, a theoretical construct will be formulated based upon many-body perturbation theory. The methodology will be used to investigate (i) the photoionization of transition metal atoms and ions, (ii) the photoionizaion plus excitation of ground and excited open-shell atoms and ions, and (iii) the photorecombination of open-shell atoms and ions. Scope: This award will allow collaboration between Turkish and US scientists who have complementary capabilities and experience. The Turkish investigator and Dr. Pindzola are experts on the application of many-body perturbation theory methods in atomic physics. Dr. Gorczyca is knowledgeable in the close coupling approach to treating atomic photoionization and electron scattering processes. The proposed work is at the frontier of the capabilities of computational physics: the systems proposed for study are complex, electron correlations are significant, and relativistic effects may prove to be important. This theoretical work will support experimental efforts at measuring photoprocesses for complex systems, particularly at photon energies high enough to excite core ions. The project is timely as experimentalists using third generation light sources are capable of measuring some of the processes proposed, thus allowing theory and experiment the possibility of progressing hand in hand, with each checking and stimulating the other. The authors propose to check their results using a Dirac-Fock calculation, which would not have the problems that may arise in other methods. This project meets INT objectives of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest doc500 none The ultimate goal of the project proposed here is the delivery of a biology curriculum directed towards students in their roles as laypersons. It will integrate domain content with a consideration of the social and personal issues that arise in the course of learning about evolution. Students will investigate empirical controversies that impact everyday life and related ethical dilemmas. They will learn to go beyond media accounts to determine what information they need to make a sound decision, how to collect this information, and how to use it to make decisions and communicate effectively. Assessments will allow us to examine basic cognitive and social processes that underlie their reasoning, as well as determine the practical effectiveness of the curriculum doc501 none OPP 00- Evenson This award will support the participation of several foreign scientists and U.S. graduate students to attend the inaugural Geological Society of America field conference. This conference is designated to introduce, and generate discussion of an important, new debris entrainment and transport process operating at temperate glaciers. The theory that glaciohydraulic supercooling and the associated ice growth (frazil and anchor ice terraces) and debris entrainment is occurring at the Matanuska Glacier, Alaska has clearly been demonstrated. It has also been demonstrated that thick, debris-laden, stratified basal ice is recent and is directly related to the supercooling, freeze-on process. In addition, both the Malispina and Bering are currently experiencing supercooling and freeze-on. The importance of the freeze-on process is that it provides a significant new debris entrainment and transport mechanism. Unfortunately, only those working in the Principal Investigator s research group have ever witnessed the field evidence for this new mechanism. Therefore, they hope that this field conference will engender discussions on the nature and importance of glaciohydraulic supercooling and the associated debris entrainment processes. They are also confident that after the glaciologists are exposed to the field evidence for this process, that it will be embraced by the community and integrated into models of debris entrainment and transport in the same way that deformable bed theory impacted the field in the last decade doc502 none Prokop This award provides support for the travel of two U.S. graduate students and one speaker as participants in the conference Bioartificial Organs: Tissue Sourcing, Immuniosolation and Clinical Trials to be held at Davos, Switzerland, October 7-11, . The subject matter of the Conference relates directly to two important elements of the Biomedical Engineering Program: research in the increasingly important field of tissue engineering, and the encouragement of students and young professionals to engage in research activities. The meeting will provide the opportunity for the participants to meet and confer with world leaders in research directed to the development of bioartificial organs as is illustrated by the preliminary technical program included in the proposal. The conference is being organized and directed by highly competent individuals who have an enviable track record of successes (most recently Bioartificial Organs II, ). All plenary and invited papers are to be published by the New York Academy of Sciences in a book entitled Bioartificial Organs to be edited by the conference organizing committee doc503 none Burstein, Paul Two related questions have long been central to scholarly and public debate about democratic government. First, is public policy in a democracy influence strongly by the public as a whole? Second, do the organizations created to influence policy in all democracies-political, interest groups, and social movement organizations (SMOs) -help the public influence policy, or do they enable particular groups to get the policies they want even if a majority of the public is opposed? The proponents of democratic theory contend that democratic governments respond to public opinion and that, on balance, political organizations have little direct influence on policy in the face of public opinion. Other theories, however, see public opinion as having little impact on policy, and propose that political organizations have strong, direct impacts on policy. The proposed research will test three hypotheses stemming from this controversy: (1) congressional support for policy change is affected most strongly by the public s policy preferences and its intensity of concern; (2) the party balance is likely to affect congressional support for policy proposals when the public is closely divided or relatively indifferent: as the public s concern about an issue and support for a particular policy proposal increase, the impact of the party balance will decrease; but the party balance is likely to have a greater effect than either interest groups or SMOs; and (3) interest groups and SMOs may affect congressional support for policy proposals when the public is closely divided or relatively indifferent; but as the public s concern about an issue and support for a particular proposal increase, the impact of interest groups and SMOs will decrease. The hypotheses will be tested through an analysis of congressional support for a sample of policy proposals considered since World War II. Support will be gauged in two ways: Congressional sponsorship of bills from the time policy proposals are first introduced until they are either enacted or leave the congressional agenda; and the ultimate outcome of congressional consideration of proposals-whether they were enacted into law, reframed, or allowed to languish and die. To test the hypotheses, the proposed research will collect and analyze data on public opinion and the activities of political organization for the periods during particular policy proposals are under consideration. Data on public opinion and the intensity of the public concern will come from available polls. Data on the activities of intermediary organizations will be drawn from congressional hearing, the mass media, and other publicly available documents doc504 none Herzfeld Objectives of the proposed work are to study the snow surface roughness during late winter and melting season, to relate these changes to weather conditions, and to assess the influence of changes in surface roughness on hydrologic response models. Snow surface roughness is critical to surface - atmosphere exchanges, including the investigation of snowmelt at several scales; surface energy exchange; meltwater flux in the snowpack, and wind transport and erosion of the snow cover in winter. Snow surface roughness also influences Remote Sensing return signals from the snow surface. To date surface roughness has usually been estimated as the roughness length, estimated from flow conditions in the boundary layer. In the proposed work we plan to (1) evaluate snow surface roughness microtopography by direct measurement with an instrument especially designed for this purpose, (2) classify snow surface types geostatistically, (3) relate snow surface roughness parameters to meteorologic and micrometerologic time series data and (4) provide realistic (= measured) roughness characterization as input for hydrologic models: (a) roughness length as input for commonly used models and (b) multidimensional parameters including correlation length, characteristic length, height and spacing of surface features and their anisotropies, which will require an adaptation of snow hydrological models. Snow surface conditions will be measured with the Glacier Roughness Sensor (GRS), and kinematic GPS (Global Positioning System) data will be collected at Niwot Ridge, Colorado Front Range. This is the site of a Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Project. Hydrologic and environmental data collected as part of the LTER and associated programs will provide the empirical evaluation of the importance of measuring surface roughness directly. Geostatistical methods developed especially for surface characterization will be applied and refined in the data analysis. Geostatistical surface characterization utilizes a feature vector where components capture high-resolution-morphologic properties and facilitate a classification of snow surface types doc505 none Suppes - Vessels and tanks interconnected with pipes are the current construction paradigm in the chemical process industries. For many applications, similar processing can be achieved by narrow-gap architecture scaled up through the use of banks and modules. The PI plans to look at the narrow-gap approach, which is a massively parallel and modular approach to chemical process construction. For this method, unit operations, including reactors, separation processes, mixing, and electrochemical processes are designed in architectures comprised of plates and gaskets fastened face-to-face. Mass transport for a unit operation or between unit operations is distributed evenly through the plates and generally in a direction normal to the faces of the plates. Multiple design degrees of freedom are set by the architecture of the plates and gaskets - resolving flow patterns, residence time distributions, heat transfer processes, and disengaging processes. The goals of this Small Grant for Exploratory Research program are to: (1) construct a working module demonstrating the concept and illustrating the narrow-gap approach as superior to traditional process architecture, and (2) evaluate and develop processes unique to the architecture such as porous-media based plug flow reactors, membrane integration, and fluid flow networking. To demonstrate the method, the narrow-gap module architecture will be applied to the water-gas shift reaction doc506 none Nussbaum This two-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research in computational mathematics and control theory involves Roger Nussbaum of Rutgers University, Sophie Bismuth of Leonardo Da Vinci University in Paris, Marianne Akian and Pierre-Alexandre Bliman of the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Engineering (INRIA) in Rocquencourt, France. The research collaboration is aimed at problems in control of oscillations. Certain nonlinear differential delay equations demonstrate oscillatory and even periodic behavior. Numerous examples of such systems may be found in biology, chemistry and mechanics. The investigators propose to consider problems related to analysis and synthesis of multi-dimensional systems with delays and relays. This award represents the U.S. side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Engineering (INRIA). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses of the U.S. investigator. INRIA will support the French researchers visits to the United States. The US investigators are expert in differential delay equations. This is complemented by French expertise in nonlinear control systems and behavior of systems with delays and period oscillations. The project will advance our understanding of the use of differential delay equations in industrial applications, for example, in controlling fuel air ratios in internal combustion engines doc507 none As the economy of India has grown and developed, dowries have increased, weddings have become more lavish, and groups that did not previously pay dowry have adopted the practice. Using techniques from human behavioral ecology and microeconomic theory, this project will investigate the causes of dowry inflation in Bangalore, South India. It will specifically test a number of hypotheses concerning the relationships between economic factors, fertility patterns, parental investment, and marriage systems. Survey data on these variables will be collected from 200 women in four endogamous communities in Bangalore. These communities have different population profiles regarding socioeconomic status, education, and degree of modernity. This will be supplemented with structured interviews on the social and economic history of each community, and the marriage arrangement and negotiation process. This project will contribute to theory in human behavioral ecology, and to our understanding of the factors shaping marriage practices cross-culturally doc508 none The objective of this proposal is to electrospin oligomeric titanium dioxide silicon dioxide precursor solutions to control the formation of catalytic nanorods. Electrospinning is a process by which a charged jet is ejected from a capillary tube. Through an external electric field the jet is elongated and accelerated. The PI has previously demonstrated the ability to electrospin soluble polymers to produce fibers in the 3 nm to sub-micron diameter range. This technique has the potential for cost-effective electromechanical control of catalytic fiber size, shape, molecular orientation, and properties, as well as control of fiber placement for integrated manufacturing of two-and three dimensional nanofiber assemblies. Surface areas of 200 m2 g are feasible. The PIs will synthesize and test several catalyst systems suitable for the catalytic partial oxidation of cyclooctene in the presence of peroxides. If successful, this project has the potential to guide a new manufacturing technique for the production of catalysts on nanofibers doc509 none I. Szleifer Purdue University The adsorption of large and complex particles plays a key role in a large number of important technological processes. For example: 1) The control of protein adsorption is fundamental in the molecular design of biocompatible materials. 2) Preferential adsorption of proteins on surfaces in a given conformation is of primary importance for the design of biosensors. 3) Asphaltene aggregates adsorb on rocks or oil pipes creating serious problems for the recovery and transport of oil. 4) Processes involving adsorption of surfactants and surfactant aggregates are important in the reduction of interfacial tension and the use of surfactants as detergents. The understanding of the molecular factors that determine the adsorption behavior are then necessary for the rational design of materials with desired properties. This is also a very important fundamental problem that requires the development of theoretical approaches that are able to describe at the molecular level complex mixtures of molecules with internal degrees of freedom that are in inhomogeneous environments. The size of the particles implies large energy scales and thus in many cases the process is dominated by its kinetic behavior. Thus, the challenge is to develop reliable theoretical approaches that can describe the equilibrium and kinetic adsorption at the molecular level. Furthermore, these approaches should bridge the gap in time and length scales from atomistic to macroscopic. For example, adsorption processes in that huge time scale keeping maximal possible molecular detail. A recent developed general theoretical approach enables the study of the structural and thermodynamic properties of mixtures of chain molecules and proteins. The predictions of the theory have been shown to be in excellent quantitative agreement for the equilibrium adsorption isotherms of proteins on surfaces with grafted polymers. Here it is proposed to generalize this molecular approach to study multicomponent mixtures, charged systems and systems out of equilibrium. Namely, to extend the approach to study kinetics of adsorption. Further, the plan includes the use of conventional simulations methodologies, Monte Carlo, molecular dynamics and Brownian dynamics in a variety of systems where the computational complexity does not make the calculations prohibitively long, to check the validity of the kinetic molecular approach. In this way a hierarchy of theoretical methods that will enable the study of the equilibrium and dynamic involved in the adsorption process will be obtained. These approaches will serve the dual purpose of: 1) Bridging the gap in time and length scales between atomistic and macroscopic descriptions. This is a major theoretical challenge that will provide fundamental understanding of the behavior of these complex systems. 2) The approaches developed in this work will also be sued to build up a database for the understanding of how to control complex particle adsorption depending on the desired properties of the materials. More explicitly, the ability of tethered polymer layers, including polyelectrolytes, to reduce particle adsorption to selectively adsorb a desired kind of particle will be studied. This understanding will be used in conjunction with experimental collaborators in the rational design of biocompatible materials, drug carriers, biosensors and solubilizers. The findings from this work are also expected to have a major impact on the design of materials for other applications, such as chromatography, oil transport and detergency. Specific problems to be studied: 1) Generalization of the molecular theory to three dimensions and comparisons with full simulation studies. 2) Inclusion of electrostatic interactions and their effect on large particles and protein adsorption. (3) Systematic study of the kinetics of adsorption. (4) Effect of conformational changes on the kinetic and thermodynamic behavior of protein adsorption. (5) Thermodynamic and kinetic behavior on adsorption of proteins mixtures doc510 none Under the direction of Dr. William Ayres, Mr. Scott Fitzpatrick will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will conduct archaeological research on the island of Palau located in the Pacific Western Carolines Islands and couple this with trace element analysis of lithic samples collected. The island of Yap, located ca. 400 nautical miles from Palau is well known to archaeologists for its use of stone money and examples, some weighing many tons, have been discovered on the island. These stones were carved into flattened circular shapes with a single hole cut into the center. Specific value was attributed by a complicated system based in part on the history of each stone and they served as recognized currency. They also brought prestige and power to their owners. Although some stones were carved from local rock, many were fashioned and transported by canoe from the island of Palau and this practice has been ethnographically described since it continued into historic times. At least in the recent past, Yap islanders would travel to Palau and pay, either in the form of goods or labor, for the right to mine and transport the raw material. However it is unclear when this practice originated, how prehistoric mining was conducted and what ties might have existed between specific villages or groups on Yap and Palau. Through a program of archaeological excavation and chemical analysis of raw materials Mr. Fitzpatrick will address these issues. He will conduct excavations at two quarry sites which likely contain pottery, production waste and other cultural materials. Organic samples will be collected for radiocarbon dating. With such data it should be possible to date the probable origin and subsequent development of stone extraction. Through a chemical analysis of both worked and parent material, it should also be possible to determine what types of rocks were most frequently utilized and determine why such was the case. Mr. Fitzpatrick will also evaluate the possibility of tracing individual pieces of money back to a specific quarry source. Through trace element analysis he will establish the range of variability within the single source and the degree of overlap among different sources. If distinctive chemical fingerprints can be distinguished, then sourcing should be possible. At the time of first western contact, many Pacific societies were highly stratified and had complex forms of social organization. Anthropologists wish to understand how these developed over time and believe that control and manipulation of trade played a major role. Yap and Palau provide an excellent situation in which to examine this question. The results of this work will be of interest to many archaeologists. The project will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc511 none The recent advances in computer and network technologies and storage, and the vast increase in data availability from sources such as the Internet and satellites present a new challenge to the ways data and information are used and managed. The objective of the workshop is to bring together the PIs and Co-PIs currently funded by the Information and Data Management Program (IDM) of the National Science Foundation to: (1) cooperatively identify the problems that are fundamental in making progress toward this new challenge, specify areas where major breakthroughs appear possible, identify needed collaborations, and identify research initiatives and facilities needed to meet the challenge; (2) provide demonstrations and interact with each other on the objectives, contributions and challenges of major research activities funded by the IDM; and (3) provide an opportunity to program officers from NSF and other government agencies, and industry representatives to learn more about the current research efforts and successes of projects funded by IDM, and for such officers to share their program highlights and concerns. The workshop will generate a report on all projects currently funded by IDM in both hard copy and electronic form. It will help in formulating future directions of research and will suggest promising modalities of research with an aim to foster innovation and technology transfer. The proceedings will provide project information searchable by different criteria and provide connections between discoveries and their use to society doc512 none This award updates the Correlates of War Project Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data set through . Such an effort is critical for international conflict research, but the enterprise of updating this collection is a monumental one that is beyond the scope or resources of any single researcher. Consequently this is a collaborative effort, linking scholars at eleven different universities to complete the task in a systematic and timely fashion. The MID data set has been at the forefront on international conflict research over the past decade or more. This data set is the most frequently used in conflict research and MID data has been employed to explore a staggering breadth of topics in international relations research, including most of those central to contemporary scholarly debates. Furthermore, MID data are the basis for several other data projects in the discipline as well as highly compatible with a range of other data compilations, thereby facilitating the combination of data sets and the exploration of broader sets of theoretical questions. Updating the Militarized Interstate Dispute data set requires completion of the following major steps: 1) collect and document militarized incidents from a variety of sources. This entails searching global, regional, and national sources for indications of a threat, display, or use of force by one state against another; 2) checking, archiving, and documenting the incidents collected to insure consistency, completeness, and absence of duplication; 3) composing militarized disputes based on the collected incidents and additional research as necessary. Because disputes are conflict episodes, such things as starting and ending dates, secondary participants, stages of escalation, overall fatalities, method of settlement, and general outcome must be determined. A short narrative description of each dispute is also prepared; 4) checking, archiving, and documenting disputes in order to insure such things as conformity with coding rules, compatibility with documentation standards, internal consistency, and absence of duplication; 5) resolving issues that arise concerning coding procedures, documentation requirements, problem cases, and the like; and, 6) preparing a final version (3.0) of the data set for distribution via the world wide web. This requires the resolution of a few problems that have been found in the present version (2.1) before it can be merged with the - data. This is a major infrastructure project for the Political Science program and enables the updating of a data set that will be used by numerous scholars in international relations and comparative politics doc513 none Durham Ocampo-Raeder This project examines the impact of indigenous resource management on the creation and maintenance of rainforest diversity in the Peruvian Amazon. The researcher will analyze the range of variation in agricultural practices among three Ese eja communities, and measure the impact of different types of agricultural practices on tree species diversity in the primary forest. Methods include botanical transects, ecological analysis, and ethnography. The project will document how variation in agricultural practices across communities (the human impact) causes identifiable variability in the number and richness of tree species. The research will contribute to our understanding of the human ecology of rainforest communities doc514 none Hamburger, Michael W. The investigators propose to use recent GPS VLBI SLR observations, Quaternary fault slip rates, the geoid, crustal thickness variations, and topography data to quantify both the strain rate tensor field and the vertically averaged deviatoric stress tensor field within western North America. Results to date indicate that gravitational potential energy (GPE) differences control the large fault-normal compression observed along the California coast as well as the extension at the Wasatch Range. Deformation in the Basin and Range is driven, in part, by gravitational potential energy differences but the extension directions there are strongly modified by plate interaction stresses. The analysis will be extended to investigate the state of stress north to Alaska, and south to include the Rivera Triple Junction. The area of analysis will include the effects of GPE differences out to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. A coupled analysis will investigate the self-consistent kinematics using observations from GPS, VLBI, SLR, and Quaternary fault slip rates. The proposed joint kinematic and dynamic modeling is important because it provides a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between geodetic observations (GPS, VLBI, SLR), lithospheric strain rates, and lithospheric stress. Refined models of the dynamics will be investigated using forward modeling methods with velocity boundary conditions determined from the kinematic modeling. They will also investigate the possible role of basal tractions in affecting the dynamics. This work should provide important input to enhance the planning and implementation of the proposed Plate Boundary Observatory and USArray initiatives doc515 none The PI will investigate cellular automata self-replication programming, to pave the way for more complex studies of this subject in the future. In preliminary work, the PI has been able to construct systems where self-replicating structures emerge in a randomly initialized space, and also systems where self-replicating structures can solve a restricted version of the satisfiability (SAT) problem. Both models take advantage of the massively parallel nature of the underlying cellular automata space within which structures replicate and evolve. This has led the PI to conjecture that self-replication programming may constitute a new paradigm for developing massively parallel algorithms to solve computationally expensive problems. With this long term goal in mind, the PI will study during the coming year two relatively easier subgoals: the design of compact self-replicating structures where more data for computation can be stored in the same size cellular space than currently possible, and new bisexual self-replicating models that incorporate the crossover operator from genetic algorithms. To provide the requisite testbed for this work, the PI will utilize the Java Virtual Machine to extend his high level Trend cellular automata programming language and simulation environment to a variety of computer platforms doc516 none This funding is in support of an HCI research consortium (workshop) of promising doctoral students and distinguished research faculty. The consortium will be held in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ), sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery s Special Interest Group on Human Computer Interaction (SIGCHI). The goals of the workshop include building a cohort group of new researchers who will then have a network of colleagues spread out across the world, guiding the work of new researchers by having experts in the research field give them advice, and making it possible for promising new entrants to the field to attend their research conference. Student participants will make formal presentations of their work during the workshop, and will receive feedback from the faculty panel. The feedback is geared to helping students understand and articulate how their work is positioned relative to other human-computer interaction research, whether their topics are adequately focused for thesis research projects, whether their methods are correctly chosen and applied, and whether their results are appropriately analyzed and presented. Student participants will also present their work during the technical program of the CHI conference. Extended abstracts of the students work will be disseminated via publication in the CHI Extended s, which has wide print and electronic distribution. Evaluation of the consortium will be conducted by ACM SIGCHI s conference management committee, and results of the evaluation will be available to the organizers of future consortia doc517 none This award is for a two-day Pan-American Seminar and Research Needs Workshop for Repair and Rehabilitation of building and bridges. The Inter-American representative will exchange information and concepts, characterize long term solutions, create links and joint projects among the participating institutions and countries. The major themes are: methodologies for evaluating and mointoring deteriorating existing structures and considering new materials and methods for repair and rehabilitation of structures doc518 none The project combines derivations of formal process measurement models with application of the models to substantive empirical research on the universality of the semantic and perceptual domain of color terms and colors. The derivations will extend previous models of cultural consensus theory to two situations for which current models do not exist: (1) continuous response variables, and (2) two or more cultures. Cultural consensus theory is a family of knowledge aggregation models for questionnaire data that permit simultaneous estimates of the culture competence or knowledge of each informant and the consensus correct answer to each question. In addition, the models will incorporate item difficulties as new parameters and provide appropriate estimation procedures. The substantive color experiments will be carried out using the eight basic chromatic colors, and their names, as previously defined by vision researchers. Preliminary results from judged similarities collected in English in the United States and in Chinese in Taiwan showed: (i) robust and reliable individual differences among subjects, (ii) striking similarities between Chinese and English structures, and (iii) the structure of color names is similar to the structure of chromatic colors. Further comparative studies will be carried out in Vietnamese where the linguistic structure for colors is different, e.g., a single color term for English blue and green. Progress in social science requires the measurement of concepts such as cultural beliefs and social norms that are defined by social conventions. Social concepts are unlike most physical and psychophysical measurement because they have no direct outside criteria for comparison. Because of this social measurements must be inferred from the pattern of responses among informants. This research develops sophisticated measurement models for cultural beliefs and social norms. The application of these models to the perception of colors (and how they are named) in different languages and cultures will lead to understanding the relative importance of individual and cultural variations in how humans perceive the world doc519 none Abdelal Description: This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. Ahmed T. Abdelal, Professor of Biology and Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, Georgia State University, Atlanta, and Dr. Taha I. Zaghloul, Department of Biosciences and Technology, Institute of Graduate Studies and Research, Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt. They plan to study the utilization of recombinant DNA technology to enhance the production of proteolytic enzymes, which are required for efficient utilization of a wide range of environmental waste materials. They also plan to develop efficient purification procedures for the proteolytic enzymes, and to characterize the purified enzymes with respect to substrate specificity and optimal conditions. The materials to be tested include keratin-containing materials such as feathers, hair, wool, and nails, which are rich in protein and carbon sources. Scope: The US Investigator, Dr. Abdelal, is recognized for his scientific and academic accomplishments and for his expertise in microbiology and in DNA research. Dr. Zaghloul, the Egyptian collaborator, has major scientific accomplishments and is well connected scientifically with researchers in the field in the USA and also in the United Kingdom where he has done preliminary investigations that will support this project. The two sides have complementary capabilities and laboratory facilities. The project will have significant value to the United States and Egypt both in increasing the scientific knowledge in this area of microbiology and in the environmental treatments of agricultural and industrial wastes. Graduate students at the University of Alexandria will participate in the research, working for short periods at Georgia State University. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc520 none Abdel-Malek Description: This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. Karim Abdel-Malek, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, and Dr. Ahmed Sameh Mohamed, Associate Professor, American University of Cairo, Cairo, Egypt. They plan to utilize existing data and medical images to develop a new method for spinal surgery simulation, including building a volumetric model of spinal movements. The physical model is based on the biomechanics of articulated bodies that approximately links the shape of the spine and the forces and torques associated with its movements. A real-time computation of the motion is possible due to the processing of elementary movements derived from a proposed Articulated Finite Element Method (AFEM). AFEM is an integrated effort at modeling tissue and motion of rigid bodies in an efficient manner (at or near real-time) while maintaining the accuracy inherent in finite element methods. The resulting deformable model will enable researchers, surgeons, and practitioners to better simulate surgical interventions and better visualize intricate spine anatomy, and is a first step towards achieving virtual reality force-feedback (haptic) sensation. Scope: The US investigator, Dr. Abdel-Malek and the Egyptian collaborator, Dr. Mohamed have, extensive experience in the specific aspects of this research, namely in mechanics of deformable bodies and rigid bodies, and in computer techniques. The topic is important and timely and is expected to be of benefit to the US and Egypt. A US graduate student at the University of Iowa is expected to participate in the research, thus gaining international experience. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc521 none Alexopoulos Description: This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. Nicolaos Alexopoulos, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Dean of the School of Engineering, University of California, Irvine, California, and Dr. Esmat Abdel Fattah Abdallah, Professor, the Electronics Research Institute, Cairo, Egypt. The scientists have done work to develop a prototype for 3D interactive device (3D mouse) with significant results. The idea depends on two techniques, first, generate a point source hologram from a transmitting antenna that will be attached to the operator s hand to detect its movements. A receiving microstrip array antenna acts as the mouse s pad to record this point. Secondly constructing and displaying this point is done by computer holography system. This project is seeking to enhance the 3D image time recording process by using array of microstrip antennas and applying electronic scanning, to increase the image accuracy by decreasing the operating wavelength, and to enhance the speed of image retrieval by using high performance computing system to reach real or even reasonable data acquisition time. Scope: The US PI and the Egyptian collaborator have extensive experience in this area of research, that is towards the creation of 3D mouse using holography and microstrip antennae. The present research is a logical extension of their past work. This work is likely to make advances in virtual reality (VR) and machine-human interface. The two teams complement each other. One US graduate student at UC Irvine will participate in this collaboration. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc522 none Ammar Description: This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. Reda Ammar, Professor and Chairman of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, and Dr. Salwa Nassar, Professor and Head of Parallel and Distributed Systems Team, the Electronics Research Institute, Cairo, Egypt. They plan to investigate and develop distributed parallel computing techniques for processing real-time applications with extremely high data rate such as the high-speed ultrasound testing of steel pipes. Because of extreme data rates (e.g. multi-channel data sets arrive every 200-400 microseconds), and real-time response requirements for this class of applications, the processing methodology requires innovative approaches that utilize the capabilities of distributed parallel systems. The work has three major thrusts: Development of a multi-layers performance model for real-time applications; development of a suitable pipelined methodology which can allow different stages of real-time application to be carried out in extreme data rate situations; and generic research in the area of effective application of high performance distributed, real-time technology to extremely high throughput data processing situations. Scope: The US PI and the Egyptian collaborator have extensive experience in this area of research. The US investigator will focus on hierarchical performance modeling approach while the Egyptian PI will, with support from the US PI, investigate the potential mapping of the processing into the architecture. One post-doctorate from Egypt will work on the project at the University of Connecticut. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual scientific interest. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc523 none Ashmawy Description: This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. Alaa Ashmawy, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, and Dr. Ahmed Hosny Abdel-Rahman, Engineering Research division, the National Research Center, Cairo, Egypt. The scientists plan to build a multi-function large-scale testing apparatus to conduct a comprehensive laboratory program on geosynthetically reinforced soils. The goal is to develop the capability to investigate the factors affecting the performance of these reinforced soils and to develop more accurate models for use in numerical simulation of reinforced earth structures. Scope: The US PI and the Egyptian collaborator have extensive experience in this area of research. Theoretical work has been carried out by the Egyptian scientist to develop models for soils reinforced with geosynthetic materials, such as geomembranes, geotextiles and geogrids. The US scientist is investigating the long-term behavior of geosynthetics under funding from the Florida Department of Transportation. The present research is intended to address the implementation of the geosynthetic sheets as earth-reinforcing inclusions to soil masses. The use of such materials is gaining popularity in civil and environmental projects in the United States and is beginning to gain attention in Egypt as an effective means to increase soil strength when building embankments and retaining walls, in fluid filtration and drainage and in waste containment such as in landfills. One US graduate student at USF will participate in this collaboration. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc524 none El Mogahzy Description: This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. Yehia El Mogahzy, Professor of Textile Engineering, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, and Dr. Abdel Aziz Sharrouf, Associate Professor, Textile Department, the National Research Center, Cairo, Egypt. They plan to seek a design scheme for specialty industrial yarns in which cotton fibers and synthetic fibers will be used. They will study several different possibilities of making synthetic-core cotton-sheath yarns using friction spinning. Modification of the spinning system will be made to establish optimum production conditions and to overcome many of the obstacles associated with using this system for a wide range of end products. Specialty yarns will be designed to meet the criteria required by a number of categories of industrial fabrics. Scope: The US and the Egyptian collaborators have significant experience in the area of textile research, especially in the design of yarn-making and fabric production. The production of synthetic core cotton sheath yarn is an objective of manufacturers and users for many specialty applications. The project deals with some of the significant problems that still make the process of production difficult and unpredictable. The two plan to use Egyptian cotton (primary fibers and fiber by-products) and Synthetic fibers mostly provided by US manufacturers. They will collaborate on the design of the system and the analysis of parameters effects. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual scientific interest. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc525 none Saadawi Description: This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. Tarek Saadawi, Department of Electrical Engineering, the City College of the City University of New York, and Dr. M. Nazih El-Derini, Department of Computer Science, Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt. The project is intended to present an architecture that supports Internet Protocol (IP) multicast for hosts using the local registration Mobile-IP protocol over hierarchical organization. The Mobile-IP (M-IP) protocol allows IP hosts to move between different networks without the need to tear down established sessions. The M-IP systems supporting local registration were introduced to reduce the number of times when home registration with the remotely located home agent is needed. Providing an efficient system that supports IP multicast in an environment where the multicast group members frequently change their location is a challenge for system providing mobility support. Also to be presented will be the issues associated with fault tolerance in local registration M-IP systems, as well as suggested approaches to enhance the robustness of such systems against both Home Agent and Foreign Agent failures. Simulation results describing the performance of the suggested fault tolerance mechanisms as well as theoretical analysis will be presented. Scope: The US PI has significant expertise in information networking and telecommunications, and in the area of multimedia networking. The Egyptian PI also has vast experience in the area of multimedia networking and information networking. He has built one of the largest computer networks in the Middle East. The two scientists have distributed tasks and responsibilities according to their capabilities and facilities. It is expected that the collaboration will benefit both researchers and help Egypt s expanding Internet Providers industry. A postdoctoral investigator at CUNY-City College will be involved in this project. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc526 none Seif Description: This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. Mohamed A. Seif, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Northern Illinois University (NIU), Dekalb, Illinois, and Dr. Mohammad R. Shaalan and Dr. Usama Khashaba, both of the Department of Mechanical Power Engineering, Zagazig University, Zagazig, Egypt. The project is intended to develop and demonstrate a novel automated non-destructive evaluation (NDE) technique, that of laser speckle shearing interferometry. The technique should be capable of determining flaws and initial development of microcracking and its subsequent propagation in different materials. The sensitivity of the method and four significant factors in final failure, namely the number and character of the flaws, the load environment, the residual stress level, and the mechanism of failure of the material, will be investigated. Scope: The US PI has special expertise in implementing NDE and using laser measurements in experimental mechanics. Dr. Shaalan and Dr. Khashaba have expertise in experimental design, reliability analysis, and data analysis. The two sides have complementary expertise and facilities at their disposal for this research. The project should lead to simpler, more reliable, and less expensive techniques for determining the integrity of complex structures used in applications requiring high reliability, such as aviation structures and critical components in industrial applications. The project will involve a US graduate student at NIU, providing that person with an international research experience. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc527 none Rieger Description: This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. Neville F. Rieger, President of STI Technologies Inc., Rochester, New York and Dr. Aly El-Shafei, General Manager, RITEC Company, Cairo, Egypt. The project is intended to develop an improved fault diagnosis system for rotor bearings, using neural networks (NN) and fuzzy logic (FL). The NN role is mainly to identify the source of the fault using data provided by vibration measurements. The network is to be trained by data developed from a portable rotor-bearing system in which predefined faults can be inserted. The network classifiers should distinguish among various operating conditions such as: no faults, shaft misalignment, disc unbalance and structure looseness. The role of the FL systems is to investigate the signal spectrum and provide a certainty index to the identified fault. A logical algorithm is to be conducted to predict Time-To-Failure (TTF) for the defective components using the progressive change in the vibration signature characteristics. The work will be in four phases: design and construction of a portable rotor-bearing system; with controllable and measurable fault sources; data acquisition and analysis; neural network design, training and testing; and development of fuzzy logic inference system. Scope: The US PI has special expertise in finite element analysis, applications of neural networks for rotor dynamics, and in estimating TTF for rotating machinery. The Egyptian PI has experience in the design process for specific conditions and for definition of operating range, faults and critical speeds, in data acquisition and analysis, and in fuzzy logic system development. The two sides will collaborate in the various phases of the projects according to their expertise and capabilities. The project should lead to more reliable techniques for determining the integrity, or the time to failure, of rotors. The proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc528 none Reilinger Description: This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. Robert Reilinger, Principal research Scientist, Department of Earth, Atmospheric & Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts and Dr. Salah M. Mahmoud, Associate Professor, the National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics (NRIAG) in Helwan, Egypt. These scientists plan to study present-day motion of the Sinai block, NE Africa and the implications for the earthquake hazards in the region. They plan to use Global Positioning System (GPS) to directly measure the motion of the Sinai block relative to Africa and Arabia. Determining the ongoing motion of the Sinai block and how this motion is accommodated (i.e. location and active faults bounding the block) is fundamental to our understanding of the regional tectonics of North Africa and earthquake hazards in the heavily populated areas of greater Cairo and the Nile Delta. Scope: The US PI and the Egyptian teams have long experience in the study of the tectonics and seismicity of the eastern Mediterranean. Dr. Reilinger is a principal researcher in a multinational effort involving several countries in the Middle East to monitor plate tectonics in the region. This project is an extension of the MIT team s effort to install GPS stations in several countries in the Middle East. The two institutions, MIT and NRIAG, have complementary facilities and capabilities needed for this research. The project will involve a US postdoctoral researcher at MIT, providing that person with an international research experience. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc529 none Gobran Description: This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. Riad Gobran, Materials Engineering Department, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Dr. Altaf H. Basta, Cellulose and Paper Department, the National Research Center, Cairo, Egypt. They plan to study the use of readily available waste agricultural products such as bagasse, rice straw and cotton stalks as non-wood lignocellulosic sources. These would be used in combination with readily available inorganic compounds to form new and environmentally friendly composites. The mechanical, electrical, biological and flame retardant properties will be examined and optimized by varying the type and amount of inorganic compounds used. Studies will be made of the economics of the proposed systems and comparison will be made between the cost of manufacturing using these systems against conventional systems. Scope: The US PI and the Egyptian collaborator have strong records of research and experience in areas directly related to this project, namely the chemistry and technology of cellulose, lignin, and lignocellulosic materials and their applications in paper industries, composite wood, as well as in cellulose derivatives. The two investigators complement each other. Dr. Basta will carry out pretreatment of lignocellulosic raw materials and preparation of new additives to be used as replacement of conventional resins. Dr. Gobran will carry out complimentary experimental work for the evaluation of composites, especially toughness measurements and impact resistance under various conditions. He will conduct studies of the morphology of the composites using electron-scanning microscopy. The two will exchange samples for testing of repeatability of results, and will participate in the analysis of data and conclusions. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc530 none Gertler Description: This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. Janos Gertler, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, and Dr. Alaa Sheta, Computer and Systems Department, the Electronics Research Institute, Cairo, Egypt. Traditional methods for fault detection and isolation rest on the idea of analytical redundancy. In practical applications, these methods have the serious drawback that they are sensitive to modeling error. The ability to build a suitable model with minimum modeling error is a major problem in the modeling process of dynamic systems. The scientists plan to explore the advantages of using Genetic Programming (GP) to solve a number of important engineering problems. They plan to create an appropriate model structure for a chemical engineering process such that the developed model will be suitable for fault detection, isolation and accommodation of the Tennessee Eastman Test Problem. Experiments will be carried out to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed approach. Scope: The US PI and the Egyptian collaborator have worked jointly in this area of research, and have developed a new technique to model system dynamics using genetic algorithms and test this technique on data from an automotive engine. The two investigators complement each other. Dr. Gertler s research interest is in the area of fault detection, isolation and accommodation. His expertise also includes system identification and real-time computer process control. Dr. Sheta s research interests are in the area of system identification, control, optimization and artificial intelligence. His interests also include the design of robust controllers for large-scale uncertain dynamical systems. He will be in charge of developing a suitable model structure for the process under study, and for the adaptation of a simulation program for the process. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc531 none Levin Description: This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. Lori Levin, Senior Research Scientist, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Dr. Khaled Shaalan, Faculty of Computer and Information, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt. The scientists plan to develop a system for computer translation of spoken Arabic into English, French, Italian, German and Korean, and also for translation of these languages into Arabic. Translations will be limited to sentences about travel plans (e.g. hotel and plane reservations). The developed system will conform to the requirements of the C-STAR consortium (Consortium for Speech Translation Advanced Research) a group of research centers collaborating with each other in the United States, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, and Korea. Adding Arabic to the C-STAR system will involve three technological components: development of a Arabic speech recognizer which can automatically transcribe Arabic sentences that are spoken into a microphone; analysis of the meaning of Arabic sentences; generation of Arabic sentences from the meaning of input sentences in English and other languages. Scope: The US PI and the Egyptian teams have extensive experience in this area of research, and have access to major research facilities that are needed for this work. Scientists at CMU have been working on machine translation of written and spoken the language for fifteen years in the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) and the Interactive Systems Laboratory (ISL). Their most notable translation systems are the KANT system for written language and the JANUS system for spoken language. Scientists at Cairo University have been working on natural language processing (NLP) for ten years, and have produced a morphological processor, parser, and grammar for Arabic, and have also worked on English to Arabic machine translation. The two universities have complementary NLP components and other capabilities. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc532 none 00- Pringle SGER: A pre-extirpation study of the role of stream-dwelling frogs Scientists have documented that ~50% of the total frog population has disappeared from three upland sites in Costa Rica and Panama, and that extirpated species are comprised almost exclusively of stream-dwelling frogs. Evidence indicates a north-to-south wave of extinction typical of disease epidemics. There is unanimous agreement among scientists that stream-dwelling frog populations in western Panama are in imminent danger of extirpation. Loss of frog populations is expected to affect both terrestrial and aquatic environments, with impacts on food webs and biogeochemical cycles. We presently have little quantitative knowledge about the roles of stream-dwelling frogs in these ecosystems. The investigators in this project will assess the roles of stream-dwelling frogs in Panama at sites which are expected to be dramatically altered within the upcoming years by the extirpation of frog populations doc533 none Dual systems consisting of R C walls and moment resisting frames are commonly used for moderate and high rise buildings in seismic zones. Openings for doors and windows are typically used in R C walls, splitting them into two or more walls coupled by deep and short elements, known as coupling beams. To avoid severe stiffness and strength degradation in these beams, a diagonal reinforcement detail is used. However, such a detail is difficult to construct and leads to significant bar congestion in coupling beams. The proposed research is aimed at investigating experimentally and analytically the behavior of fiber reinforced coupling beams under earthquake loading. It is expected that the use of fiber reinforced concrete will lead to the elimination of the need for diagonal reinforcement in coupling beams, while improving their seismic performance. Analytical models will be developed to simulate the response of fiber reinforced coupling beams under earthquake loading doc534 none This project is intended to push technologies derived from the human genome project to their current limits, to characterize the genomes of uncultivated marine archaea. These archaea represent 15% or more of all prokaryotic cells in the worlds oceans, yet their biochemistry, physiology, and ecological significance is unknown. The approach involves isolation of extremely large (150-300 kb) genomic fragments from uncultivated planktonic archaea in Bacterial Artificial Chromosome (BAC) clone libraries. A BAC clone library with such extremely large inserts has never before been reported from a mixed natural microbial population. By pushing the current limits of genomic technologies and applying them in mixed populations, the investigators aim to improve the current knowledge of enigmatic but important uncultivated microbes, specifically marine planktonic archaea. The work will also provide improved generic methodologies for the genomic and functional characterization of uncultivated microorganisms and determination of their functional properties doc535 none The investigators will study intense substorm growth phase events using multiple observations. Some intense growth phase events do not lead to well-defined substorms, suggesting a different kind of energy release mechanism. Intense growth phase events will be identified from a database containing solar wind data, auroral imaging data, particle precipitation measurements, and ground-based magnetometer and radar observations. The data will be studied to determine criteria for predicting strong growth phase events. The observations collectively will allow the investigators to identify the cause of intense growth phase events and understand why some do not develop into strong clear substorms. Because strong growth phase events are often assumed to be precursors to strong substorms, this study will help eliminate false alarms in the prediction of space weather effects on technological systems such as communications and power lines doc536 none This project will investigate the construction of Irish Catholic identity among Irish teens, and how it socially maintained in opposition to Protestant and British identities. Focusing on differences between the youth generation and their parents, the researcher will examine two areas of identity construction: personal appearance and social construction of space. The research will test the hypothesis that differences in these aspects of identity expression reflect key differences in how each generation perceives traditional Irish Catholic culture. Youth may be renegotiating Catholic identity by incorporating various elements of pop culture. Methods include participant observation in a Catholic housing estate outside of Belfast, structured interviews with samples of Catholic teens, adults, and youth workers, oral histories, and photo interviews. This project will contribute to our understanding of theories of identity construction in adolescence doc537 none King This award provides three years of funding support to the PI and his team for the purpose of (1) improving the software documentation and user interfaces for earth scientists using Global Positioning System (GPS) data for precise position measurements, (2) providing interactive, Web-based time series data from global analyses that can be used by individual GPS researchers to assess the quality of their own analysis of GPS data, (3) training new and experienced GPS researchers in state-of-the-art processing strategies, and (4) assisting GPS researchers with data analysis problems doc538 none PASTORE The American Association of Botanical Gardens and Arboreta (AABGA) is requesting support for the upcoming World Congress to be held in Ashville, NC, June 25-30, . They intend to develop a theme, Reaching Out: Informal Learning in Botanical Gardens, in order to enhance informal learning in botanical gardens across the nation. The theme will be addressed through plenary addresses, conference sessions, workshops and tours. A conference publication and a web site will extend the impact of this theme beyond the conference doc539 none This proposal seeks funds to organize a workshop and produce a report on new directions of research in solid mechanics. Special attention will be given to critical areas of importance to national economic well being, public health, safety and national security as well as areas of fundamental scientific impact on solid mechanics. The workshop will be held in fall with a pre-workshop information meeting to be held at the ICTAM meeting in Chicago, August . The American Academy of Mechanics will provide the organizational and communication structure. The AAM will invite participation from a wide spectrum of researcher in solid mechanics and related fields. Attempts will be made to involve both younger and senior researchers as well as researchers form diverse backgrounds. A final report will be delivered around late spring and will be published in a journal as well as posted on the AAM web site doc540 none The objective of the research is to define and conduct experiments on thin walled polymer matrix composite (PMC) tubular specimens having continuous reinforcement fibers at methodology for the class of long or continuous fiber PMC. An anisotropic, damaging, non-linear viscoelasticity model proposed earlier by the principal investigators is used to represent the deformation and failure behavior of the PMC composites. The experiments are exploratory and designed to test fundamental features of the macro-mechanical constitutive model, particularly the representation of strong anisotropy, and to guide further theoretical development doc541 none The investigators will study the dependence of polar cap dynamics on solar wind conditions using a magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) code. The model results will be compared with observations of polar cap dynamics obtained using optical data from Eureka, Canada. Particular emphasis will be placed on periods when the interplanetary magnetic field makes pronounced changes in direction and the optical data show distinct auroral behavior. Simulation results will be used to specify the polar cap boundaries which will be compared to the Eureka measurements or satellite images, when available. The research results will form the basis for improved models of the polar magnetic field, for prediction of solar particle entry regions, and for predicting trajectories to satellite and ionospheric altitudes. The results will also enhance understanding of the dynamics and origins of polar cap aurora. MHD models have great potential in helping to mitigate the potential hazards on technological systems due to space weather effects doc542 none The award is for a collaborative study involving the Universities of Colorado, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska, aimed at improving the understanding of the characteristics, mechanisms, and feedback processes associated with changes in vegetation, sea level, and standing surface water in Beringia during the last 21,000 years, and to use this understanding to aid in the development of predictive tools for future pan-Arctic climate change. The specific research objectives and tasks are based on refining a modeling strategy for simulating regional paleoclimatic variations and for diagnosing the interactions between different components of the climate system, utilizing global and regional climate models and an equilibrium vegetation simulation model. Simulations will be performed at key times, compared to observational data, and diagnosed to understand potential feedbacks doc543 none abstract Ng, Cheuk-Yiu A unique high-resolution vacuum ultraviolet facility at the Chemical Dynamics Beamline of the Advanced Light Source synchrotron machine would be used to measure absolute cross sections for charge transfer reactions of O with molecular ions that are of great importance to the modeling of ion-molecular reactions in the thermospheres of the Earth, Venus, and Mars. Single state selection techniques would be employed to measure these cross sections for individual rovibronic states of these ions. The proposed work is challenging but of great importance to the development of aeronomical models of planetary atmospheres and ionospheres doc544 none This research consists of two research projects in financial economics. The first project inves-tigates the role of competition in financial markets. In spite of the general acceptance of the competitive mechanism as an allocation scheme, many observers consider fi-nancial intermediation an exception. Competition is presumed to lead to a race to the bottom, in which financial intermediaries settle for excessively low levels of contractual guarantees in an attempt to increase volume. This project develops the-oretical models of competition among financial intermediaries that design contracts to attract trading volume, while taking into consideration that traders may choose to default, and that traders differ in credit quality. These theoretical models are used to evaluate arguments for regulation of financial markets, and, in particular, whether competition leads to excessively low levels of contractual guarantees. The second project studies the valuation of certain derivative securities when short-selling restrictions are present, such as in executive stock options doc545 none The PI proposes to develop a concept that will improve the possibility of observing the impact of space weather on the magnetosphere-ionosphere system, and that will address fundamental physical processes related to space weather phenomena. This will be done by focusing operations of sensitive ground based equipment to occur during potentially disruptive space weather conditions. By analyzing these observations in conjunction with spacecraft observations, SRI can develop an improved understanding of the coupling between the solar wind and magnetosphere and between the magnetosphere and ionosphere (generally termed space weather geoeffectiveness ). Thus, the overall objective of the proposal is to observe and analyze space weather geoeffectiveness by implementing an operational phase and a basic research phase to the program. The operational phase of the program is designed to provide a space weather alert system that notifies observers of solar and space conditions during times of activity so that appropriate planning of ground-based operations can be established. The development and implementation of such an alert protocol for the incoherent-scatter radar community was established under past NSWP funding. The basic research phase of the program is designed to study the geoeffectiveness of the space weather event by analyzing data in the form of substorms, storms, and convection bays. As the acquired data sets will benefit all of these topics, it is anticipated that the results will contribute to a number of space weather research programs, present and future doc546 none With the support of the National Science Foundation, Dr. Routledge and his colleagues will conduct a program of archaeological excavation and survey in the vicinity Khirbat al-Mudayna al-`Aliya (KMA) on the eastern edge of Jordan s Karak Plateau, ca. 35 kilometers due east of the Dead Sea. KMA is an exceptionally well-preserved village occupied for a brief period of time in the last half of the eleventh century BC (Iron Age Ib). Importantly, this occupation immediately precedes the emergence of territorial states in the region, including the biblical state of Moab into which this part of Jordan was incorporated in the ninth century BC. The founding, and brief occupation, of substantial villages in what is now an agriculturally marginal part of Jordan raises many questions about economic and political developments during this period of significant social change. Dr. Routledge s research aims to address these issues by elucidating the cultural form, political economy, and local ecology of Khirbat al-Mudayna al- Aliya and its surrounding Iron Age settlement system. In particular, evidence will be sought for past environmental change, crop husbandry practices, herding strategies and off-site pastoral activities, household organization, the spatial distribution of activity areas in relation to architectural variation, and exchange paths between households. This evidence will not only shed light on the political economy of local agro-pastoral production strategies, it will also illumine the structuring practices of everyday life that are the social context for these strategies. One key idea to be tested in this research is the suitability of African models of state formation that emphasize social relations over Eurasian models that emphasize control of land doc547 none This project will study the robust estimation of nonlinear errors-in-variables models using the functional modeling approach. The usual statistical inference for statistical and econometric models is derived based on the assumption that data are precisely measured. In real applications, however, it is often the case that data are measured with errors or the variables in a model cannot be observed by the researcher. As is well known, in general, a single measurement (or proxy) is not sufficient for the identification and estimation of a nonlinear errors-in-variables model. This project raises the following fundamental issues: (i): Is the information from the replicate measurements useful in the functional modeling? (ii) If the answer to (i) is yes, which assumptions are needed and which kind of information can be extracted? (iii) How can one use the information extracted from replicate measurements to provide a robust estimator in the estimation of nonlinear errors-in-variables models? To address these issues, this project will first investigate under what kind of conditions and assumptions, replicate measurements can be used to extract information that is useful in robust estimation of nonlinear errors-in-variables models. Then it will study how the information extracted from the replicate measurements can be used in the consistent estimation of nonlinear errors-in-variables models. The methods proposed in this project are robust as they avoid the parametric specifications of the latent distributions. As a result, they can also be used to test whether the functional forms for the latent distributions are correctly specified in the structural modeling approach. Completion of the project will advance the progress in the research of measurement errors in nonlinear models. The methodology studied in the project will also have wide applications in other statistical and econometric models with latent variables doc548 none The investigators will study magnetospheric substorms using data from the Polar, Geotail, IMP 8, and GOES satellites as well as ground-based observations. Specific research topics include (1) the substorm triggering mechanism, (2) the spatial extent and structure of the magnetotail stretching at geosynchronous altitude, (3) substorm onset location as influenced by solar wind conditions, the relationship between the pre-onset magnetotail stretching and substorm intensity, and (5) magnetotail signatures at geosynchronous orbit prior to pseudo-breakups. The study takes advantage of the high-quality data collected during the International Solar Terrestrial Physics Program. The investigators will establish a data base of observations and conduct statistical studies. Substorms play a central role in the dynamics of Earth s magnetosphere. Understanding substorm triggering is one of the key roadblocks in predicting Space Weather doc549 none This project will investigate the factors behind the failure of participatory development programs in Suduwarura Ara Gama, a small, impoverished village in southeastern Sri Lanka. Previous research suggests that villagers, although originally enthusiastic, have become increasingly critical of development efforts (in agriculture, irrigation, handloom factories, schools). At the same time, they are unable to articulate their own development goals. The researcher hypothesizes that specific development agendas are formulated by villagers in their interaction with local, state, and international development agencies, and that this process may result in limited consideration of development alternatives. In this village restudy, the research will focus on the nature of this interaction. Methods include structured interviews, collection of oral histories of development and village improvement, focus groups and formal opinion surveys. This project will contribute to our understanding of how rural populations in the developing world shape their own development agendas and perceptions, a critical factor in the ultimate success or failure of participatory development initiatives doc550 none This project deals with semantic variation in bare nominal constructions. English bare plurals vary between kind, generic and existential readings. Hindi, which has singular and plural bare nominals, differs in two respects. Hindi bare singulars do not admit existential readings in all contexts where English or Hindi bare plurals do. Hindi bare nominals have an additional definite reading, not available to English bare plurals. The research question driving the investigation is the possibility of predicting variations in the interpretation of bare nominals within and across languages. The main claim is that singular kind formation differs from plural kind formation in not allowing predication to its instantiations. This explains differences between Hindi bare singulars and plurals, as well as between English definite (singular) generics and bare plurals. Though kind formation strategies are universal, natural languages differ in having the definite article and in encoding number sensitivity. Semantic operations responsible for various readings interact with each other and lexical options in the two languages to create the observed effects. The project also deals with two other language types, one without number distinction or articles (Korean) and one with number distinction but only one article (Hebrew). Among the theoretical questions addressed are the following: Is reference to kinds an integral part of the semantics of bare nominals or are they simply indefinites? Are null determiners available in natural language or can a theory of type-shifts explain the facts? The general line of approach, consonant with current developments in syntax and phonology, is that semantic variation can be explained if semantic operations are subject to a set of interacting constraints. The results of this research should be of interest to linguists, philosophers, computational linguists and other cognitive scientists as well as to those working on second language acquisition doc551 none Patel This proposal seeks partial funding to support the Hydroinformatics Conference organized by the Iowa Institute of Hydraulic Research during July 23-27, . This is the fourth conference in a bi-annual series, but the first to be held in the United States. As such, it offers the first opportunity to gather a multidisciplinary group of U.S. and international researchers to address a wide range of topics and technologies that impact water resources planning and management. The conference details are given in www.iihr.uiowa.edu hydro . NSF funds will be earmarked to support participation by leading researchers and practitioners from developing countries and countries in Eastern Europe, and participation in associated workshops by graduate students from the United States doc552 none This award will be used to continue a long-term study on the behavioral ecology of the western lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) at the Mondika Research Center, Central African Republic. The primary long-term goal of the study is to determine whether and or how variation in ecological and social factors influences gorilla sociality, in order to evaluate current models of primate socioecology. Specifically, western lowland gorillas consume foods (fruit and aquatic herbs in swamps) that are more difficult to locate in the environment, compared to the abundant terrestrial herbs of mountain gorillas. Current socioecological thought suggests that differences in food availability may lead to differences in competition within and between groups, and that this in turn will influence the nature of social behavior. Currently, these questions cannot be addressed, because although mountain gorillas have been studied extensively, little is known about western lowland gorillas in the wild. In this study, the researchers will initially habituate two gorilla groups to the presence of people at Mondika, in order to conduct studies of their foraging strategy and social behavior, in addition to studies of resource availability (distribution, abundance and density). This information will allow determination of the role of resource availability in shaping social behavior in African apes, which will in turn, be fundamentally important in understanding how differing ecological factors influenced sociality in our earlier human ancestors doc553 none This project will apply phase-space reconstruction techniques to ground-based magnetometer data and data from a number of spacecraft in the solar wind in within the magnetosphere to predict important space weather indices such as AL and Dst. The project will also investigate the possibility of using critical behavior (in particular self-organized criticality) as a complement to current space weather forecasting tools doc554 none The purpose of this project is to produce computer tools for the Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC). It is the development of an enabling technology that will facilitate the use of the CCMC for space weather research. Industry standard message passing techniques will be used to allow different models to be coupled together. Similar tools will provide access to archive and real-time data. In addition, easy-to-use graphical display systems will be developed. This computer architecture will facilitate the transition of research models to operational models, which is one of the main purposes of the CCMC doc555 none Tsunoda, Roland The PI proposes to conduct a three-year research program to develop a short-term forecasting capability that can predict the occurrence of equatorial spread F (ESF). SRI proposes to augment the cluster of sensors at the Pohnpei Radar Observatory (PRO) with an oblique-incidence backscatter (OIB) sounding capability so that the PRO can be used to collect the much-needed simultaneous measurements of electric field and plasma-density distribution. The PRO already houses a 50 MHz backscatter radar, a frequency-agile radar (FAR), and a magnetometer; all are capable of contributing estimates of the equatorial electric field at different (but overlapping) times of the day. The OIB sounder would provide a description of the plasma-density distribution in both hemispheres. With this set of sensors, the PRO would become an ideal prototype for an integrated, ESF space-weather monitoring station. SRI envisions the proposed research to be a synergistic one that will enable physics-based models to be run with critical data sets, and data to be properly interpreted with the assistance of model outputs doc556 none When considering solutions to long-term environmental problems such as climate change, it is important to consider the role that technological change may play. Nonetheless, most economic models of climate change treat technology as exogenous. Since policies adopted to combat climate change are likely to have a large impact on the pace and direction of technological change, these models miss the important link between policy and innovation. The proposed project addresses this concern by making use of empirical results on technological change in the energy industry to incorporate endogenous technological change into the DICE model of climate change. To date, few models of climate change include endogenous technological change that affects carbon emissions. Although these models offer valuable contributions to the efforts of modeling endogenous technological change, they suffer from a lack of empirical estimates on the nature of technological change. Thus, the most important contribution of the proposed research is that it makes use of empirical studies of technological change in the energy sector to more accurately model technological change that may help ameliorate climate change. The proposed research will begin by modifying the DICE model of climate change to include endogenous technological change in a manner consistent with existing empirical studies. In addition, by making use of the DICE model, which explicitly models both the costs and benefits of greenhouse gas reduction, the proposed research aims to provide a better understanding of how consideration of endogenous technological change affects the optimal policy decision. One can imagine two offsetting effects. First, a higher carbon tax may be desired, because the tax leads to increased R&D, which lowers the cost of achieving a given level of abatement. Second, a lower carbon tax may be desired, because the innovation induced by a tax allows a given abatement target to be achieved more easily. The revised DICE model will be used to study which of these two effects dominates. Finally, the proposed research extends previous work of other researchers in this area by modeling the effect of research on a backstop technology on the extraction of an exhaustible supply of fossil fuels. In particular, the project asks whether policies that speed up technological advances in non-carbon backstop technologies also increase the rate at which the stock of fossil fuels is extracted doc557 none Combining information from the , , and censuses of the population with African-American homicide offending data in the United States for the period - , this research examines, empirically, the relative efficacy of two powerful explanatory schemes: One proposed by Wilson suggesting that the most important determinant of the relationship between race and crime is the concentration of African-Americans in structurally disorganized communities. The competing theory, proposed by Massey et al., argues that the interaction of racial residential segregation and poverty is more relevant in causing accelerating rates of African-American homicide and victimization. The analytic method for the research is hierarchical linear growth curve analysis. Data on rates of African-American homicide offending will be nested within counties over the period - . The Level-1 model estimates the changes in African-American homicide offending rates within each county, over time. The parameters of these trajectories (the intercept, slope, and acceleration of the trend lines) describe the nature of change in the homicide offending rates. The Level-2 model estimates differences between counties in these trends. The importance of the research lies in the promise of increased understanding of the forces that foster urban violence, the leading cause of death among young black males doc558 none 00- Hu Diversity and activities of resident soil microorganisms: Effects on soilborne plant pathogenic fungi Soil contains by far the largest biological diversity of all terrestrial ecosystems. However, this diversity is poorly quantified, and its relationship to ecosystem functioning is not well understood. In this project, the investigator proposes to examine the relationships between the diversity and activities of soil microorganisms and stability of soil biological systems. Stability of soil biosystems will be measured by assessing activities of two plant pathogenic fungi, Pythium ultimum and Rhizoctonia solani. Two major questions guide this research: 1) Do high activities and diversity of soil microorganisms reduce activities of root pathogens? 2) Does the increase of diversity and activities of soil microorganisms enhance the resistance of soil biosystems to introduced pathogens? This study will advance our understanding of the relationship between soil diversity and the stability of soil biosystems. Knowledge of the effects of soil microorganisms on plant pathogens will also help us design better practices that reduce crop damage caused by these pathogens in sustainable agricultural systems doc559 none The investigators will study the relationship between Pi2 waves detected by ground-based magnetometers and magnetospheric substorm occurrence. Pi2 waves are routinely detected by ground magnetometers located at low- to mid-latitudes and their general association with substorms is well recognized. However, further analysis of Pi2 waves is required in order to make the phenomenon a more reliable tool for space weather specification and prediction. Physical parameters of Pi2 waves observed at multiple stations can be used to monitor the spatial and temporal development of substorms during the expansion and recovery phases. The investigators will quantitatively evaluate the capability of the Pi2 waves for monitoring substorm activity. They will use auroral images from the Polar satellite to identify the time and location of substorm onsets to compare with Pi2 waves detected on the ground. The results will lead to a better understanding of substorms and to the development of a technique to remotely sense the time and location of substorms doc512 none This award updates the Correlates of War Project Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data set through . Such an effort is critical for international conflict research, but the enterprise of updating this collection is a monumental one that is beyond the scope or resources of any single researcher. Consequently this is a collaborative effort, linking scholars at eleven different universities to complete the task in a systematic and timely fashion. The MID data set has been at the forefront on international conflict research over the past decade or more. This data set is the most frequently used in conflict research and MID data has been employed to explore a staggering breadth of topics in international relations research, including most of those central to contemporary scholarly debates. Furthermore, MID data are the basis for several other data projects in the discipline as well as highly compatible with a range of other data compilations, thereby facilitating the combination of data sets and the exploration of broader sets of theoretical questions. Updating the Militarized Interstate Dispute data set requires completion of the following major steps: 1) collect and document militarized incidents from a variety of sources. This entails searching global, regional, and national sources for indications of a threat, display, or use of force by one state against another; 2) checking, archiving, and documenting the incidents collected to insure consistency, completeness, and absence of duplication; 3) composing militarized disputes based on the collected incidents and additional research as necessary. Because disputes are conflict episodes, such things as starting and ending dates, secondary participants, stages of escalation, overall fatalities, method of settlement, and general outcome must be determined. A short narrative description of each dispute is also prepared; 4) checking, archiving, and documenting disputes in order to insure such things as conformity with coding rules, compatibility with documentation standards, internal consistency, and absence of duplication; 5) resolving issues that arise concerning coding procedures, documentation requirements, problem cases, and the like; and, 6) preparing a final version (3.0) of the data set for distribution via the world wide web. This requires the resolution of a few problems that have been found in the present version (2.1) before it can be merged with the - data. This is a major infrastructure project for the Political Science program and enables the updating of a data set that will be used by numerous scholars in international relations and comparative politics doc561 none This Small Grants for Exploratory Research funding will fund a small conference of scholars and archivists to explore the feasability of creating an in-line archives in the area of activist and public interest science. From the late s through the l970s, a significant element of the American scientific community found itself in a complex relationship with major national institutions. On the one hand, Federal funds were flowing freely, spurred by national security state concerns about the cold war. This largesse expanded the government s research laboratory system and greatly affected the size, scope, and character of science carried out in university and industry settings. On the other hand, many scientists personally objected to certain elements of national policy, both on moral grounds and on technical scientific grounds. Some of these scientists organized their dissent through public interest and activist groups that argued for scientific and political alternatives. Exploring complexities and tensions among these diverse institutional relationships in science is crucial to better understand the interactions of scientific knowledge and social context in post-World War II America. The impact of Cold War policies upon the scientific community and scientific knowledge within more traditional institutions has become a robust area of research. However, relatively few studies exist on the relationships between activist and public interest science and the more mainstream scientific community and institutions. A number of scholars have begun exploring the history and sociology of activist science and scientists and their effect on public and political understandings of scientific knowledge (most explicitly, Moore ; but also Kuznick ; Lewenstein ; Nye ; Wang ). Informal discussions among some scholars have identified a pressing historical need: to locate and, if necessary, preserve existing archival resources of the post-war period related to activist and public interest science. This effort might also include collecting oral histories of prominent scientists active in political issues during the post-war period. While some materials exist, and many interviews have been conducted, they are often scattered, unknown, or not publicly available. Moreover, as the scientists of the postwar generation reach the ends of their lives, their papers are being dispersed and sometimes lost. An urgent project must be undertaken to identify these resources and preserve them. Funding for this project will allow for a small planning meeting in Washington D.C. in conjunction with the February AAAAS Meeting. The purpose of the meeting is to explore systematically whether a more thorough project is worth developing doc562 none The principal investigator will, as Secretary-General of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG), will provide leadership for and assist the IUGG to promote and coordinate physical, chemical, and mathematical studies of the Earth and its environment in space. These studies address a number of important scientific processes related to, inter alia, the dynamics of the Earth as a whole; all aspects of the oceans, the atmosphere and ionosphere; the Earth s internal structure; volcanism and rock formation; and the hydrological cycle. Many of these studies contribute to productive global-scale interdisciplinary research programs, such as the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP); the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP); and the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction. The PI will serve as Secretary-General of the IUGG. She will coordinate activities of the IUGG Bureau which manages all affairs of the Union, including development of guidance for the IUGG s scientific objectives. Specific activities to be supported include development, maintenance, and updating of an IUGG database, especially in electronic format; design, preparation and distribution of IUGG publications; and assistance with IUGG news releases doc563 none The collaborative research will be guided by two notions based on current research on the Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO): (a) mechanisms for air-sea interaction of the MJO depend on the detailed structure of MJO, and (b) oceanic feedback to the MJO should be viewed as a modification of the general role of surface latent sensible heat fluxes in the MJO by SST variation. Following these two guidelines, the proposed research will (i) investigate the oceanic response and feedback to the MJO in the context of two MJO conceptual models based on observations and (ii) explore the oceanic feedback mechanisms within the framework of studying the general role of surface heat fluxes in the MJO. To achieve a thorough understanding of large-scale physical processes of air-sea interaction, the research project will first focus separately on the oceanic response and feedback to the MJO, before any attempt of coupling is made. The work is important because it will yield insights on the interaction between the MJO and ENSO, this will have implications for better seasonal forecasting of ENSO doc564 none Measurements of atmospheric dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and sulfur dioxide (SO2) will be made at Baring Head, New Zealand, using a new isotope dilution GC MS instrument. The scientific goal of this project is to construct a budget for SO2 in the Southern Ocean marine boundary layer. Specifically, atmospheric DMS and SO2 will be measured simultaneously over at least ten diurnal cycles, the DMS to SO2 conversion efficiencies will be determined, as well as the relative magnitude of SO2 loss to clouds, sea salt aerosols and the sea surface. The field data will be interpreted using a photochemical box model. The long term objectives of this project are to investigate the relationship between the photochemical state of the atmosphere and the oxidation rates and pathways of sulfur gases and to improve our understanding of the relationship between sulfur gas precursors and the production and growth of aerosols doc565 none Barlaz The objective of this research is to study factors that control the fate and bioavailability of tetrachloroethene (PCE) and toluene in landfills with a specific focus on contaminant sequestration and biodegradation as influenced by the presence of humic substances in solid matrices, and acidogenic and methanogenic leachate. The specific objectives are to: (1) estimate the distribution of sorbed contaminants in solid waste by measuring the sorptive capacity of the dominant organic waste components in both fresh and biodegraded form, (2) determine whether contaminant sorption is reduced as a result of contaminant binding by dissolved organic macromolecules in landfill leachate, (3) determine the impacts of aging and leachate composition on contaminant desorption rates, (4) identify relationships between chemical and physical changes in the decomposing sorbent matrix and the bioavailability and sequestration of PCE and toluene, (5) compare rates of desorption and biodegradation of fresh and aged contaminants to determine whether desorption limits bioavailability, and (6) identify whether covalent and or noncovalent associations with humic materials are important for the sequestration of PCE and toluene in the solid waste. This research will provide information on how contaminants may be expected to behave in landfills over long periods of time and will support the development of models to predict contaminant fate in landfills doc512 none This award updates the Correlates of War Project Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data set through . Such an effort is critical for international conflict research, but the enterprise of updating this collection is a monumental one that is beyond the scope or resources of any single researcher. Consequently this is a collaborative effort, linking scholars at eleven different universities to complete the task in a systematic and timely fashion. The MID data set has been at the forefront on international conflict research over the past decade or more. This data set is the most frequently used in conflict research and MID data has been employed to explore a staggering breadth of topics in international relations research, including most of those central to contemporary scholarly debates. Furthermore, MID data are the basis for several other data projects in the discipline as well as highly compatible with a range of other data compilations, thereby facilitating the combination of data sets and the exploration of broader sets of theoretical questions. Updating the Militarized Interstate Dispute data set requires completion of the following major steps: 1) collect and document militarized incidents from a variety of sources. This entails searching global, regional, and national sources for indications of a threat, display, or use of force by one state against another; 2) checking, archiving, and documenting the incidents collected to insure consistency, completeness, and absence of duplication; 3) composing militarized disputes based on the collected incidents and additional research as necessary. Because disputes are conflict episodes, such things as starting and ending dates, secondary participants, stages of escalation, overall fatalities, method of settlement, and general outcome must be determined. A short narrative description of each dispute is also prepared; 4) checking, archiving, and documenting disputes in order to insure such things as conformity with coding rules, compatibility with documentation standards, internal consistency, and absence of duplication; 5) resolving issues that arise concerning coding procedures, documentation requirements, problem cases, and the like; and, 6) preparing a final version (3.0) of the data set for distribution via the world wide web. This requires the resolution of a few problems that have been found in the present version (2.1) before it can be merged with the - data. This is a major infrastructure project for the Political Science program and enables the updating of a data set that will be used by numerous scholars in international relations and comparative politics doc567 none This proposal describes research on several new topics and continued research in several areas. First, the PI will consider bias-reduced semiparametric estimation of the long memory parameter d . The most common estimator of this parameter, the Geweke and Porter-Hudak (GPH) estimator, has been found to have substantial finite sample bias. The PI and P. Guggenberger, a graduate student at Yale, will develop an alternative GPH estimator whose bias is reduced by an order of magnitude, whose variance is increased only by a multiplicative constant, and whose rate of convergence is faster than that of the GPH estimator. We plan to establish the optimal rate of convergence of estimators of d when the normalized spectral density is smooth of order s at zero and show that the bias-reduced GPH estimator attains this rate, but, for s 2, the GPH estimator does not. Working with Yixiao Sun, a graduate student at Yale, the PI will develop a local polynomial Whittle estimator that behaves like other local Whittle estimators, but has reduced bias and a faster rate of convergence. The second area of proposed research is on the bootstrap for nonlinear estimators. This research continues work already reported by the PI.. We aim to obtain higher-order improvements for bootstrapping minimum distance and indirect inference estimators, stronger higher-order improvement results for the iid nonparametric bootstrap than those currently available, and new results for residual-based and BCa bootstraps and Lagrange multiplier (LM) and likelihood ratio (LR) tests. The third area of research is to develop some new asymptotic optimality properties of the classical LM, LR, and Wald tests. The idea is to generalize the finding that the LM test for serial correlation against AR(1) errors is the same as that against MA(1) errors. This finding implies that the LM, LR, and Wald tests have Wald-type asymptotic optimality properties for testing against both AR(1) and MA(1) errors. Results of this type hold more generally, both in this model and in many other models. The object of the proposed research is to obtain some general results that determine different classes of alternative models for which a given LM, LR, or Wald test has asymptotic optimality properties. The fourth area of proposed research continues the PI s research on testing problems when a parameter is on the boundary of the maintained hypothesis and a parameter appears under the alternative but not under the null hypothesis. Numerous examples of such problems already exist, and we believe that problems of this sort will become increasingly prevalent as researchers rely more and more on nonlinear models. We aim to show that the LR, LM, and Wald tests are asymptotically admissible, develop new tests that maximize weighted average power for certain weight functions, construct a complete class of tests, and establish the asymptotic null distribution of the LR, LM, and Wald tests in the Markov regime switching model. Finally, we plan to show that the LR, LM, and Wald tests for testing for conditional heteroskedasticity of GARCH(1, 1) form are consistent against any form of serial correlation in the squared errors doc568 none The collaborative and individual empirical research planned in this project will analyze the determinants and effects of monetary policy, taking explicitly into account the fact that policy is made in a data-rich environment in which monetary policymakers can exploit information contained in hundreds or even thousands of macroeconomic data series. Our study contrasts with most previous work, which typically assumes that the Federal Reserve s information set is spanned by ten variables or less. We will also take into account that monetary policy is made in real time; that is, instead of assuming (contrary to fact) that the Fed has final revisions of data at hand, we use only data that were actually available to the Fed at each date. To do this we use a real-time data set constructed by others to which we add non-revised data from various Federal Reserve documents and other federal agencies. Our basic task is to estimate policy reaction functions (PRFs) for the Federal Reserve, which relate the Fed s instrument to measures of the state of the economy. As far as possible, we want to allow the state of the economy to depend on the full range of macroeconomic data available at the time. To make estimation feasible we need a dimension-reduction scheme. We will apply a dynamic factor model approach, to be estimated using methods devised by others in a forecasting context. Besides allowing us to work with data sets in which the number of series exceeds the number of observations, this method permits us to deal systematically with data irregularities, including data of different frequencies and different spans. As already indicated, we are also able to incorporate the fact that at each date the Fed may be looking at a different vintage (revision) of the same underlying data series. We will allow for time variation in the parameters of the PRF, using a method that makes estimation of such models computationally easy in this context. Finally, the Fed s PRF can be estimated jointly with equations describing the rest of the economy, or in an unrestricted manner that leaves the rest of the economy unspecified. We are interested in addressing several questions with the empirical analyses. On the positive side we want to see if information-intensive PRF s provide a better description of the historical conduct of monetary policy than other alternatives. We also want to determine what types of information the Fed has historically responded to and to see if the information that appears to affect Fed decisions can be explained in terms of its predictive content for inflation and real activity. If that latter appear not to matter, then we will explore what can account for the Fed s behavior. If we are able to obtain sharper estimates of both the systematic and non-systematic components of monetary policy, we hope to use these results to refine recent work on the effects of each of these components on the economy. From a normative point of view, we would like to address the question of just how monetary policy should be conducted in a data-rich environment. This is a more complex question than the problem of forecasting with many variables, since the Fed s decision problem is dynamic and its loss function may have very different properties from a standard econometric loss function. We believe that addressing such questions will be of practical value, as well as providing a more realistic description of what the Fed actually does doc569 none Recent investigations have identified microbial communities in various crustal environments down to 3.2 kilometers below the surface (kmbls.). Only a hand full of deep microbial samples from continental crust ( 0.5 kmbls.) exist, however, because coring is expensive. In the fall of , an expedition of scientists from the USA, Canadian, and Swedish universities and U.S. DOE National labs searched the rock strata and groundwater of the ultradeep Au mines of South Africa for microorganisms. The goal of this research was to determine whether these mines, which extend 3 kmbls., offer ready access to indigenous, subsurface microbial communities and whether radiolysis of groundwater provides a nutrient source for the microorganisms. Rock, water and biofilm samples were collected from several of these mines at depths ranging from 0.8 to 3.2 kmbls. Preliminary results indicate that a variety of thermophilic microorganisms are present in the groundwater and rock. Some of these microorganisms represent novel species, radiation tolerant and appear uniquely adapted to the geochemical and hydrological crustal environment from which they were derived. Furthermore, evidence indicates that most of these microorganisms are autochthonous and not simply the result of contamination. PIs plan to establish a 5 year observation and sample acquisition program to analyze the microbial communities in the deep continental lithosphere of South Africa and address the following hypotheses, which are critical to gaining insight into potential exobiological niches and into how microorganisms can adapt and survive in relatively extreme environments. 1. Do autotrophic microbial communities dominate over heterotrophic communities in the deep subsurface? 2. Are there deep subsurface microbial communities that are self-sufficient in terms of their energy and catabolic resources or do they all ultimately rely upon organic constituents supplied from the present surface biosphere or ancient buried fossil fuels? 3. Are the cell lifetimes on the order of centuries as suggested by geochemical estimates of subsurface microbial activity and, if so, are these rates compatible with long term survival under low levels of ionizing radiation? 4. Are microbial communities present in fluid fractures functionally and phylogenetically distinct from those present within the rock matrix. To address the above research hypotheses, PIs will improve enrichment, culturing and isolation technologies, in the detection limits for and rapidity of PLFA and DNA analyses, and develop instruments for quantifying in situ microbial activity within deep boreholes doc570 none This project is concerned with the study of multi-player cooperative games by the means of reducing them to non-cooperative games, that is, the Nash program. It is based on some newer ideas and methods that favor its feasibility. The current approach is partially inspired by that used in evolutionary games, where strategies are selected from a class of types based on their outcomes in actual play. The other important basis for the project is a new approach for providing a means for the elimination of coalitions as such and their replacement by agencies. The usual approach based on formation and dissolution of coalitions is avoided by studying a transformed game, where each player can designate or elect another to act as his her agent. This is very simplifying because a priori there is no limit to the complexity of the relevant interactions of coalitions and their members. In studying the transformed game we allow the players to employ reactive strategies of specific forms. This is directly analogous to the phenotype strategies studied in evolutionary games. Thus how a player will allocate the possible gains in a playing of the game, if he she has become elected to be the effective general agent, can be a function of an allowed form that depends on the previous history of the playing of the game. The fulfilled expectations equilibrium of such strategies is explored. Numerical calculations with two and three players show that the approach can give results interestingly relating to various standard cooperative solution concepts such as the Nash-Zeuthen and the Kalai-Smorodinsky solutions for two-person bargaining and the nucleolus or the Shapley value in three-person games. It is proposed to more carefully study the relatively simple three-person game examples that seem to effectively feature all of the basic difficulties of extending cooperative theory beyond the level of 2-player games. This project is intrinsically theoretical, in relation to economics, but it can be observed that understanding of cooperative games enables applications to many economic and political contexts, where some players do act as agents for others. For example, in mergers and acquisitions one bank or underwriting firm takes the lead role, and international trade negotiations the major countries represent regional blocks doc571 none This dissertation investigates the relationship between civil rights, liberalism and the politics of race in Britain between and , a period that witnessed profound transformations in popular and legal definitions of civil rights, and in anti-racist political mobilization. It will address two questions related to the historical evolution of liberal though and the philosophical bases of Anglo-American legal practice. First, how were the unstable boundaries between state and society demarcated along the lines of race after , when advocates of minority concerns increasingly defined civil rights in terms of the state s responsibility to prevent discrimination in the private sector? Second, how did members of both anti-racist organizations and the legal profession assess the efficacy of working within liberal and egalitarian framework to advance minority concerns? The project focuses largely on the relationship between the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), an organization with a central role in Britain s civil rights history, and numerous organizations mobilized specifically around anti-racism. The data consists of original documents associated with the history of these organizations, including materials associated with discrimination suits, newsletters, and other public records and reports. The questions addressed by this project are relevant to understanding the historical development of current debates in Britain over the possible enactment of a bill of rights modeled on that of the United States and by current debates surrounding affirmative actions in the United States doc572 none This proposal supports travel and lodging at a conference to be held in Honolulu June 23 - 25, . It permits five or six advanced graduate students in Sociology from PI s institutuion (UCLA) to attend the first international conference on mathematical sociology. Co-sponsors are the American Sociological Association s Section on Mathematical Sociology and the Japanese Association for Mathematical Sociology. In addition to the usual intellectual and professional benefits to students from attending a conference, this one presents several unique opportunities. Japanese sociologists have developed a considerable body of theoretical literature in mathematical sociology, published in Japanese journals. Most of that work remainis un-translated and unavailable in the West, so it is only through personal meetings such as conferences that American students can be exposed to this work. The conference also will foster international contacts that we hope will lead to future collaborations, exchanges, and employment opportunities for the students involved doc573 none This dissertation research will investigate how articulatory properties of segments differ and how they are similar with respect to spatio-temporal characteristics, as prosodic conditions change. Recent phonetic studies point to three kinds of prosodically determined locations where segments potentially receive prominence. One is in pitch-accented syllables which encode the interplay of lexical stress and sentential stress, another is in domain-initial positions, and the third is in domain-final positions. One of the specific goals of this study is to understand the nature of such prosodically conditioned articulatory prominence by addressing the following questions: (a) to what extent the articulatory nature of prominence arising with stress differs from that associated with domain-edge effects, and (b) how the stress and edge effects interact with each other. Another major goal of this dissertation is to understand prosodically conditioned articulatory prominence in view of coarticulatory resistance by examining (a) how coarticulation patterns vary depending on prominence-related prosodic conditions, and (b) how the hypothesized coarticulatory variations are related to the prosodically variable strengths of articulation. Finally, this study will attempt to model coarticulatory patterns, developing the idea that the spatio-temporal target of a segment may vary depending on prosodic conditions. Articulatory data will be obtained using the Carstens Electromagnetic Midsagital Articulograph (EMA) in the UCLA Phonetics Lab. A comprehensive corpus will be used in which all the prosodic conditions of interest can be examined at the same time. This will provide a body of coherent articulatory data that will allow the researcher to examine the characteristics of articulation that arise with different prosodic conditions, and to evaluate previously hypothesized accounts of articulatory prominence doc574 none In this research project we are interested in exploring the extent ex post inequalities between nations can arise when countries are ex ante identical. We study a model where imperfectly observable human capital investments are introduced in an otherwise standard neoclassical trade framework. Due to interaction between an informational externality and general equilibrium price effects, inequalities may arise in equilibrium when countries specialize in industries with different intensities in human capital. Citizens in the country specializing as a low human capital country are worse off than citizens in the country specializing as a high human capital country. Because incentives to invest are lower in the low human capital country the situation is self-enforcing. Incentives are bad in the poor country two reasons: 1) with few investors someone who looks good is more likely an individual with low human capital that got a lucky draw ; 2) the possibility to import goods intensive in human capital from the other country makes human capital less valuable compared to a situation where countries don t trade. In our research we will explore how these effects interact and the extent the model provides a rationale for specialization as well as provide a number of testable implications of the model doc575 none PI: Susan K. Tubbesing Institution: Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) Learning From Earthquakes For nearly 30 years, support for the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute s (EERI) Learning from Earthquakes (LFE) program, has been provided by NSF. These funds enable multidisciplinary research teams to carry out field investigations of significant earthquakes throughout the world, and to observe and document effects on the natural and built environment and resulting social, economic and policy impacts. The LFE program will continue to generate new knowledge, leading to changes in practice and stimulating new research in earthquake engineering and related fields. Recent earthquakes have raised concern about the need to improve the coordination of field reconnaissance to reduce duplication of effort, and the need to make better use of new technologies to reduce gaps in damage data collection and analysis, and improve availability and dissemination of information. As the leading organization in post-earthquake investigations, EERI has revised the LFE program to include a much-expanded role in improving the overall coordination of post-earthquake NSF-funded research efforts. EERI will convene an invitational workshop to establish a cooperative protocol to maximize the resources and capabilities of the involved organizations and ensure a more efficient and effective research response to future earthquakes in the U.S. and abroad. EERI will procure necessary equipment, including hand-held GPS units, microtremor devices, and other equipment as may be suggested in the workshop to enhance data collection and dissemination effort. EERI will continue to serve as the U.S. coordinator for earthquake investigations, hold briefings, prepare comprehensive reconnaissance reports, and broadly distribute findings via various media. EERI will create a new program to carry out immediate post-earthquake data gathering and provide training for team members - developing a program to advance the science and practice of earthquake engineering and, in so doing, helping to reduce future earthquake losses doc576 none The proposed research consists of two parts of roughly equal magnitude. The first part is a theoretical econometric project on instrumental variables, or GMM, estimation. The aim is to derive theoretical results on estimators that achieve, or approximately achieve, certain efficiency bounds. Simulations will be used to establish the finite sample performance of the estimators. The second project is an empirical macroeconomic study of interest rates and exchange rates in Asian countries affected by the recent financial crises. A model that includes a monetary policy rule in the form of an interest rate reaction function will be developed and estimated using the empirical techniques developed in the first part of this proposal. A key question is how policy-induced interest rate movements affect exchange rates, risk premia, and, more generally, the economy as a whole doc577 none The increased mobility and expanding networks characterizing the modern U.S. have led language researchers to assess the effect such national dialogue and contact may have on the dialects that have historically separated the U.S. into three broad dialect regions: North, South and West. From recent studies of the changes affecting Northern varieties (labeled the Northern Cities Shift), the emerging picture of regional change suggests both continuity and discontinuity of dialect boundaries. The South and West are characterized by what appear to be unique changes in their vowel systems, and all three regions show intra-regional variation among ethnic groups and sociological categories such as age, gender and class groups. At the same time, changes such as high back vowel fronting and the low-back vowel merger are increasingly found across regional varieties. Such conflicting data suggest that it is important to examine both the social diffusion of the shifts and the functioning of the shifts for speakers within each region and their contribution to the spread of such changes in and across regional speech varieties. Understanding how these incoming changes are distributed and identified within the regions, and whether these changes are serving to further distinguish the dialects spoken in the U.S. or to make them more similar, is one of the key objectives of this research. The linguistic focus is the Southern Vowel Shift, a series of radical changes in the position of the nucleus in both the high and mid front and back vowels in Southern speech. Using a three-phased approach involving data collection and analysis, a matched-guise attitudinal survey and a perceptual dialectology task, the research examines the role of social identity and linguistic factors in predicting whether a shift will become a new norm for the community, and whether it reflects a conscious move away or toward speech norms in other dialects. This project will examine the social embedding and the perceptual salience of each shifted vowel class to local speakers, assessing the regional and national pressures affecting dialect variation in a mid-sized mid-Southern community and the function of incoming norms doc578 none By arriving at self-enforcing agreements, agents in an ongoing strategic situation create surplus that benefits them both. Little is known about how that surplus will be divided. This project concerns the role of reputation formation in such environments. It studies a model in which players entertain the slight possibility that their opponents may be subject to a variety of behavioral biases. Happily, it seems that these informational complications make it easier to predict what will usually happen in the repeated game. There emerges a theory of bargaining in repeated games that strengthens some links between cooperative games and noncooperative game theory. The proposal also addresses dynamic games, in which the different periods of play are con-nected by state variables such as capital stock or inventories. Here one can examine some of the most important problems in industrial organization, including collusion in the face of potential entry. One of the goals is to derive a generalization of the Nash bargaining solution with threats that can be applied in dynamic games doc579 none Scholars of American politics continue to debate whether campaigns and elections really matter. After all, the outcomes of campaigns can be predicted by presidential approval and economic factors a year before the election (Gelman and King, ; Lewis-Beck and Rice, ). Accordingly, it is argued that the influence of campaigns on the polity must be minimal. This doctoral dissertation research project argues that presidential campaigns do matter. They matter not just for the election outcomes, but also for public policy by influencing the public agenda after the election and by establishing the criteria by which presidents are evaluated subsequently. Campaigns influence governing largely through the persistence of campaign messages in the public consciousness. The researcher draws on the literatures on campaign effects, public opinion formation, agenda setting, and presidential evaluation to address the link between democratic elections and public policy. Using newly collected rolling-cross section survey data collected during the presidential campaign and after, the investigator tests three basic hypotheses while allowing for individual variation. The first is the themes emphasized by presidential candidates become increasing important to the public. The second is the winner s themes persist in the public agenda and into his administration. The third is that the campaign themes establish the bases for presidential evaluations. In sum, presidential campaigns do not simply respond to the public agenda; they play an important role in setting it. The public does not merely attend to the campaign agenda; it holds the president accountable after the election doc580 none Tolnay, Stewart E. During the last one-hundred years the level of immigration to the United States has fluctuated, as has the national origins of the immigrants. Throughout this period African Americans have also experienced dramatic changes in their geographic distribution and socioeconomic standing. The possibility of linkages between these two phenomena has occasionally been the subject of concern by social commentators, or of scholarly investigation by social scientists. This project is an in-depth investigation of the relationship between immigrants and African Americans during six historical regimes from through . It has two major component. The first component uses data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) for , , , , , , and to compare the social and economic characteristics of African Americans and immigrants across a broad sweep of U.S. history. The second component combines data from the IPUMS with contextual data form counties and metropolitan areas to determine how the social and economic well-being of African Americans was affected by the sized and growth of immigrant populations (or specific immigrant groups) within their urban areas. The primary objectives of the project s three components are to: (1) describe the relative social and economic positions of African Americans and immigrants or specific immigrant groups) over time; (2) to determine whether immigrants were better able than African Americans to translate one type of socioeconomic advantage (e.g., more education) into other advantages (e.g., higher incomes, home ownership, residence in better neighborhoods); (3) to more thoroughly investigate the potential negative consequences of large and growing immigrant populations on the welfare of African Americans in urban areas; (4) to lean whether certain segments of the African American population were more vulnerable than others to competition from immigrants; and (5) to investigate the possibility that the relative standing of African Americans, or the collective impact of immigration on the well-being of blacks, varied significantly over time, or across space. The protracted time period examined by this project should result in the most comprehensive study, to date, of the complex relationship between African American and immigrants throughout U.S. history doc512 none This award updates the Correlates of War Project Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data set through . Such an effort is critical for international conflict research, but the enterprise of updating this collection is a monumental one that is beyond the scope or resources of any single researcher. Consequently this is a collaborative effort, linking scholars at eleven different universities to complete the task in a systematic and timely fashion. The MID data set has been at the forefront on international conflict research over the past decade or more. This data set is the most frequently used in conflict research and MID data has been employed to explore a staggering breadth of topics in international relations research, including most of those central to contemporary scholarly debates. Furthermore, MID data are the basis for several other data projects in the discipline as well as highly compatible with a range of other data compilations, thereby facilitating the combination of data sets and the exploration of broader sets of theoretical questions. Updating the Militarized Interstate Dispute data set requires completion of the following major steps: 1) collect and document militarized incidents from a variety of sources. This entails searching global, regional, and national sources for indications of a threat, display, or use of force by one state against another; 2) checking, archiving, and documenting the incidents collected to insure consistency, completeness, and absence of duplication; 3) composing militarized disputes based on the collected incidents and additional research as necessary. Because disputes are conflict episodes, such things as starting and ending dates, secondary participants, stages of escalation, overall fatalities, method of settlement, and general outcome must be determined. A short narrative description of each dispute is also prepared; 4) checking, archiving, and documenting disputes in order to insure such things as conformity with coding rules, compatibility with documentation standards, internal consistency, and absence of duplication; 5) resolving issues that arise concerning coding procedures, documentation requirements, problem cases, and the like; and, 6) preparing a final version (3.0) of the data set for distribution via the world wide web. This requires the resolution of a few problems that have been found in the present version (2.1) before it can be merged with the - data. This is a major infrastructure project for the Political Science program and enables the updating of a data set that will be used by numerous scholars in international relations and comparative politics doc582 none This is a study of the efforts of Iranian women to advance the rights of women and children through the legal system. The research explores the ways Iranian women have been able to use principles of Islam and Islamic courts to contest oppression under an Islamic regime. This project focuses specifically on child custody issues through a case study of Iran s Organization for the Defense of Children s Rights (ODOR), a Non-Governmental Organization under the UN. In part this project is a case study of a significant trial which resulted in altering Iran s custody laws in favor of children and mothers in . The tactics used by the reform-oriented litigants are examined through interviews and analysis of important documents. The second phase of this research focuses on participant observation in the organization s current activities. The theory-building objectives of this project include: Adding to knowledge about resistance to legal demands; Increasing understanding of Islamic feminism; and advancing understanding of the globalization of human rights discourse doc583 none The research will assess the way in which positive feedbacks combine in spatial patterns to alter the environment in the neighborhood of existing tree and krummholz plants at alpine treeline in Glacier National Park. The project will develop a cellular automaton, and a stochastic version, that uses genetic programming to uncover the spatial patterns of feedback processes. Genetic programming will be used so that the rules change in response to how well the simulations produce patterns similar to patterns observed in multispectral remote sensing imagery. Both the simulations and the remotely-sensed patterns will be at one-meter resolution. Different patterns of abiotic (pre-feedback) site quality, static patterns of vegetation, changing rates of abiotic site quality, and different scale relations will be examined through the rules created. This research to examine spatial detail at a finer scale will allow exploration of nonlinearities in responses and the potential for the organization of ecotone areas as complex adaptive systems. Linking the biogeographical phenomena of ecotones to the body of work on complexity theory can improve our understanding of the organization of biome boundaries and make a geographical contribution to the theory. In particular, the research will increase our understanding of how a geographic phenomenon may share traits with other spatial systems. This research will also advance the area of geographical modeling by incorporating spatial measures of fitness in genetic algorithms. Spatial pattern will be used as the key parameter in genetic programming, and the spatial dependencies of the rules produced by this programming will be analyzed. Lastly, this research will advance understanding of the mechanisms underlying an important biogeographical concept, the ecotone. It will be germane to the idea of ecotones as indicators of the impacts of climatic change because of the potential nonlinearities induced by positive feedbacks doc584 none The project deals with the study of ex-post efficient multi-object auctions when there are a finite number of possibly heterogeneous goods and agents values are interdependent. The recent spurt of interest in the study of ex-post efficient, multiple-object auctions is largely the result of large-scale privatization of socially held assets by governments. In light of the influence economic theory has had on the recent design of a number of these privatization auctions, it is of some importance to understand which of the results from the one-dimensional symmetric auction literature, on which economists base most of their intuition, are sensitive to dimensionality, heterogeneity, and interdependency. This is especially germane since the multi-object, multi-dimensional case is by far the more common. Recent work by the PI in collaboration with another researcher extended Vickrey s ex-post efficient multiunit auction to environments with interdependent values. (As a by-product of this analysis they also established the ex-post efficiency of the recently designed FCC auction.) However, while the modified version of Vickrey s auction is simple to play in principle, it requires the bidders to submit many bids to the auctioneer. This is rather onerous from a practical point of view. An ascending version of the above auction that allowed simpler equilibrium bidding behavior would be a significant practical advantage. The first project described in the proposal outlines plans to explore this possibility. The second part of the proposal outlines plans to further generalize the auction environment. As in Vickrey, the researcher s modified auction has so far been one in which goods are homogeneous and bidders demands are downward sloping. However, these assumptions are often too restrictive to describe some of the more common environments. The proposal describes plans to extend the modified Vickrey auction to the case of heterogeneous goods and interdependent valuations doc585 none In , Uganda embarked on an innovative constitution-making process that lasted eight years. The novelty of the process centered on the extensive involvement of the general public in the creation of a new constitution. Although there is considerable interest in this model among policy-makers, there is little empirical research investigating the effectiveness of such a process. This project will study the effects of public participation in the constitution-making process on democratic attitudes, political behaviors, and civic knowledge. It will test the hypotheses that participation in the constitution-making activities heightened citizen interest in politics, fostered attachment to democratic principles, led to greater political involvement, and increased knowledge of political issues within the general population. The methodology includes in-depth interviews, surveys of the general public, and evaluation of primary materials from public and private archives in Uganda. The surveys will be conducted using a multi-state area sampling process so the results will amenable to statistical analysis doc586 none For the past twenty years, theories of social choice have emphasized the important effects of institutions. However, the cognitive structures with which individuals represent a decision context are also important. These mental models, or knowledge structures, create categories and relationships among alternatives, thereby influencing the existence and characteristics of an equilibrium. In previous papers it was shown that in both cooperative games such as social choice and non-cooperative games such as coordination problems, the prospects for stability are greatly improved when players have shared mental representations (despite having conflicting preferences). These results are broadly referred to as a knowledge-induced equilibrium. Although a knowledge-induced equilibrium is immune to manipulation by insincere voting, the more interesting question is the extent to which players can manipulate others mental representations--such as through framing, discourse, or persuasion--in order to influence the collective outcome. This second-order strategic behavior is much closer to William Riker s concept of heresthetics. The task of this project is to explore the possibilities and characteristics of manipulation in the knowledge-induced equilibrium framework. More specifically, the investigator constructs a game model where players can send signals to a subset of other players to which they are persuasive in an attempt to alter the mental representations of the decision context and thereby altering the collective outcome. Players strategies include heresthetical tactics such as arguing relationships among alternatives, adding or removing alternatives from the choice set, and influencing the distribution and depth of other players knowledge representations. Results from the project contribute to several topics, including (1) explanations of the endogenous emergence of shared knowledge structures through strategic dialogue, (2) the identification of structural positions or contexts that are lever points in that a player has disproportionate ability to direct the outcome through strategic persuasion, (3) a formalization of a set of heresthetical maneuvers along the lines called for by Riker, (4) applications to bargaining and negotiation theory, and (5) the development of an alternative index of power based on equilibrium opportunities for strategic persuasion rather than on the combinatorics of coalitions doc568 none The collaborative and individual empirical research planned in this project will analyze the determinants and effects of monetary policy, taking explicitly into account the fact that policy is made in a data-rich environment in which monetary policymakers can exploit information contained in hundreds or even thousands of macroeconomic data series. Our study contrasts with most previous work, which typically assumes that the Federal Reserve s information set is spanned by ten variables or less. We will also take into account that monetary policy is made in real time; that is, instead of assuming (contrary to fact) that the Fed has final revisions of data at hand, we use only data that were actually available to the Fed at each date. To do this we use a real-time data set constructed by others to which we add non-revised data from various Federal Reserve documents and other federal agencies. Our basic task is to estimate policy reaction functions (PRFs) for the Federal Reserve, which relate the Fed s instrument to measures of the state of the economy. As far as possible, we want to allow the state of the economy to depend on the full range of macroeconomic data available at the time. To make estimation feasible we need a dimension-reduction scheme. We will apply a dynamic factor model approach, to be estimated using methods devised by others in a forecasting context. Besides allowing us to work with data sets in which the number of series exceeds the number of observations, this method permits us to deal systematically with data irregularities, including data of different frequencies and different spans. As already indicated, we are also able to incorporate the fact that at each date the Fed may be looking at a different vintage (revision) of the same underlying data series. We will allow for time variation in the parameters of the PRF, using a method that makes estimation of such models computationally easy in this context. Finally, the Fed s PRF can be estimated jointly with equations describing the rest of the economy, or in an unrestricted manner that leaves the rest of the economy unspecified. We are interested in addressing several questions with the empirical analyses. On the positive side we want to see if information-intensive PRF s provide a better description of the historical conduct of monetary policy than other alternatives. We also want to determine what types of information the Fed has historically responded to and to see if the information that appears to affect Fed decisions can be explained in terms of its predictive content for inflation and real activity. If that latter appear not to matter, then we will explore what can account for the Fed s behavior. If we are able to obtain sharper estimates of both the systematic and non-systematic components of monetary policy, we hope to use these results to refine recent work on the effects of each of these components on the economy. From a normative point of view, we would like to address the question of just how monetary policy should be conducted in a data-rich environment. This is a more complex question than the problem of forecasting with many variables, since the Fed s decision problem is dynamic and its loss function may have very different properties from a standard econometric loss function. We believe that addressing such questions will be of practical value, as well as providing a more realistic description of what the Fed actually does doc588 none John Hagan It is common for social scientists and public figures to speculate that feelings of social and psychological strain, usually described as despair or depression, are primary sources of youth crime, including elevated violence in ghetto streets and neighborhoods and sporadic violence in the hallways and classrooms of privileged suburban school. Yet there is little research that simultaneously considers problems of delinquency, violence and depression during adolescence. Speculation about unemployment among young discouraged workers similarly lacks a foundation in research that measures depressed feelings during adolescence and early adulthood. Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) and follow-up third wave of this survey that will be used to test a model that considers the causal relationship between delinquency and depression and their linkage through troubled exits from adolescence to early problems in adulthood. The proposed model reverses conventional strain theory in asserting that delinquency acts as a causal antecedent to depression by increasing exposure to violence, counter-productive peer networks, substance abuse and legal stigmatization. The resulting depression leads in turn to deviant role exits from adolescence, including dropping out of school, running away from home, teen pregnancy, and thoughts about and attempts at suicide, all of which anticipate disadvantaged adult outcomes, such as joblessness, homelessness, single parenthood, morbidity and mortality. Preliminary work with the Add Health Survey has focused on measuring and testing the link between delinquency and depression during adolescence, and on the mediating role played by exposure to violence. Findings indicates that this influence is greater in the predicted direction from delinquency to depression than vice versa, with a power curve improving the fit of the relationship between these variables, and exposure to violence acting to mediate the effect of delinquency on depression in both linear and semi-logarithmic models. The first year of the research plan is built around the Wave I and II Add Health data, expanding the individual level analyses to include peer networks, disengagement from school and substance abuse, and advancing to multi-level model that consider the contextual effects of neighborhood, school, social network and aggregated individual level factors. The second year of the research plan focuses on the new Wave III Survey data which will provide crucial information about transitions from adolescence into adulthood. Most respondents will by this time be between 18 and 22 years of age. Those who were destined to make deviant adolescent role exits to adulthood, which are by definition premature, will now have done so. These individuals now will be moving though the initial stages of adulthood and our theory predicts that many will be experiencing resulting early adult disadvantages, which can be analyzed in relation to earlier delinquency and depression and ensuing risks and problematic exits from adolescence. In addition to the previous Wave I and II measures of exposure to mediating risks involving violence, peer, school and substance problems, the new Wave III Survey will retrospectively measure risks of legal labeling and resulting stigmatization. These items track contacts of respondents with the police and courts. The potential stigmatizing consequences of these contacts will be explored net of earlier self-reports of delinquency on subsequent depression, role exits and adult disadvantage doc589 none This project will examine the visual information used by people to perceive and control their locomotion through the environment. The research will evaluate a model in which two different types of visual information are used in locomotion. One type of information is based on specific aspects of motion perception that involve the activation of neural mechanisms responsible for detecting expansion or looming. The second type of information is based on changes in scene position available in static views of the world and uses scene layout information based on landmarks. The experiments will examine a number of issues, including the importance of ordinal depth information in the scene, the information provided by scene landmarks, the temporal characteristics of how the brain encodes information for locomotion, and how the two types of information are integrated by the visual system for the control of locomotion. The results of these experiments will increase our understanding of the visual information used by the human brain to control navigation through the environment. In addition, these results will be of use in the development of robotic vision systems that navigate through the environment doc590 none The project addresses important methodological issues for statistical inference in multistage samples by addressing shortcomings in the current literature on linearization estimators of the variance of parameter estimates in regression models. When the number of primary or first stage sampling units is small or the data contain high leverage clusters, linearization standard errors can be severely biased, resulting in confidence intervals that are too narrow, and tests with Type I error rates that greatly exceed the nominal value of the test. This project will improve on current practice in three ways. First, the study develops appropriate transformations of the residuals that account for the model fitting process and will be used in the formula for the standard linearization estimator to reduce bias in standard error estimates from logistic regression models and models fit to data from stratified multistage samples with unequal sampling weights. Second, the study will explore alternative approaches for choosing the reference distribution for both univariate and joint hypothesis tests that provide Type I error rates that approximate the nominal value of the test. Third, the project will develop diagnostics based on decompositions of the matrix of regressors to allow users to determine when the number of primary sampling units is sufficiently small or the distribution of the predictor variables is sufficiently imbalanced across clusters to result in biased and highly variable standard error estimates. Linearization methods are widely used for estimating the variability of estimates of the parameters of models fit to data from multistage samples that inform important public policy and clinical decisions in diverse areas such as education, health services, criminal justice, and drug abuse treatment and prevention. For some samples, however, the commonly used linearization methods can underestimate the statistical error in parameter estimates and result in undue confidence that parameters such as intervention effects are nonzero. The proposed methods will reduce the bias in estimates of error and improve inferences. Consequently, the proposed improvements should be widely applicable to applied research projects that serve society at large doc591 none In Old English (700 - ) Everyone defended him could be understood as in Modern English with him referring to a contextually given individual, or it could be understood like Everyone defended himself , with him understood as semantically binding the object of the verb to the subject Everyone . The project documents the creation of the reflexive pronouns (c ) and provides a quantitative record of their obligatory use as binders of objects to subjects (the s). Using a database of about 7,500 examples of bindings from 800ad to ad, the study will provide historical explanations for several distributional facts about Modern English: notably, why reflexives do not occur as possessors (we cannot say John lost himself s book , though this is common in languages with Noun Phrase reflexives), and, much more contentiously with regard to current theories of grammar, why bare reflexives can only be locally bound (as objects to their subjects, but not for example to subjects of higher clauses: we do not say John believes that Mary defended himself , with himself understood as bound to John ). Finally, the study presents a new type of historical change and two new principles governing historical change doc592 none The objective of the study is to understand the basic and critical input parameter for the mechanics of subduction zone decollements, the quantitative effect of smectite input. The PI will carry out a study of the DSDP ODP drilling samples to determine their clay mineralogy and how it influences seismic behavior and slip stability. The focus will be on samples from the Cascadia margin, but the results will be compared to and relevant to other seismogenic zones as well doc593 none The prisoners dilemma, the most studied game in economics and the social sciences, captures key features of the problem of cooperation and collective action. Early work in economics used the solution concept of eliminating dominated strategies to make clear-cut predictions of no cooperation by self-interested, rational agents in finitely repeated-prisoners dilemmas. But theory and experiments with the voluntary contributions mechanism showed higher levels of cooperation and provided explanations for it. The explanations focused on the presence of non-standard preferences, and strategic incentives to mimic such preferences by signaling. Current research has begun to document the presence of heterogeneous agents with non-standard preferences. This project further develop this line of research by using experimental methods to study agent heterogeneity in order to: 1. Distinguish between departures from standard predictions attributable to nonstandard preferences and departures attributable to strategic incentives to signaling, and 2. Learn how institutional environments can be modified to increase efficiency in collective action. Specifically, a set of experiments are conducted using the general framework of the voluntary contribution mechanism (VCM) with the option to sanction individual group members by reducing their earnings at a cost to oneself after contribution decisions have been taken and announced. In the VCM, subjects are assigned to a group, given an endowment of funds, and asked to divide the endowment between a group project and an individual account. Combined earnings are highest when all contribute their full endowment to the group project, but there is an incentive to free ride by contributing less and sharing the proceeds from the contributions of their group members. The option to punish non-contributors helps to produce more optimal results. The analysis focuses both upon the effects of varying the treatment conditions, for instance number of repetitions, group size, and punishment cost, and upon differences in the outcomes of different groups facing the same treatment. By identifying differences in the behaviors of individuals which may derive from differences in their preferences or types, the researchers study how differences in the types of individuals composing different groups can account for different group outcomes doc594 none This study focuses on attorneys, both U.S. and non-U.S. nationals, engaged in the overseas practice of American securities law. The research has multiple objectives. One is to develop the study of regulatory lawyering across different types of regulatory agencies. A second objective is to generate new evidence of how American law is understood and practiced by attorney overseas. A third objective is to build on existing literature regarding process of corporate regulatory decisionmaking. Data will be collected through approximately 150 interviews with attorneys in law firms, corporate general counsel, and corporate and government officials. These interviews will include a representative sample of both American and British lawyers practicing law in London. The research also includes a survey of securities practitioners and general counsel in both countries doc595 none This proposal relates to the specification and estimation of spatial models. These models are important tools in economics, regional science and geography in analyzing a wide range of empirical issues. In spatial models, interactions between cross sectional units are typically modeled in terms of some measure of distance between them. These interactions could be due to competition between cross sectional units, copy-cat policies, network issues, spillovers, externalities, regional issues, etc. Spatial distances could relate to geographic space, as well as other spaces such as product space or input space. Spatial models have seen many recent applications including the determinants of productivity, local public expenditures, vote seeking and tax setting behavior, population and employment growth, contagion problems such as bank failures, and the determinants of welfare expenditures. By far the most widely used spatial models are variants of the one suggested by Cliff and Ord for modeling a single spatial relationship. Even in its simplest form, maximum likelihood estimation of these types of models entails substantial, and even forbidding, computational problems if the number of cross sectional units is large. Against this background, we have suggested alternative procedures which are computationally simpler: the Gild estimator and an instrumental variable estimation procedure which is based on a generalized moments (GM) estimator of a parameter in the spatial autoregressive process. The purpose of this proposal is to generalize Cliff-Ord type models in three important directions allowing them to cover a wider range of applications and lessening the danger of model misspecification in applied work. The first extension will allow for estimation of Cliff-Ord type models with heteroskedastic innovations which are quite often encountered in empirical analysis of spatial units of different size. We also plan to relax other restrictive model assumptions, including a typically maintained assumption regarding the parameter space of the spatial autoregressive parameter. As a second generalization we propose an extension of the estimation methodology we have developed to a panel data framework in which the spatial units are observed for multiple time periods. In this framework the disturbances will be assumed to follow a spatial autoregressive process. Motivated by the error components literature, the innovations entering this process will be modeled as the sum of two error components, reflecting unit specific effects and some overall innovation. Taken together, the disturbances entering the regression model would be both spatially and time correlated. Finally, because modeling interactions between spatial units will frequently involve a system of equations, we propose an extension of Cliff-Ord type models to simultaneous equation systems. In such a framework it should be of interest to consider full information estimators. However, to the best of our knowledge, no formal results concerning the large sample distribution of such estimators exist. For each of those generalizations we will introduce estimation methodology which will involve extensions of our earlier work. In all three cases we plan to formally study the large sample properties of our proposed estimators, and to supplement those theoretical results with corresponding Monte Carlo studies doc596 none Anne S. Miner - University of Wisconsin Madison Ji-Yub Kim - University of Wisconsin Madison. # Watching the canary in the mine: The impact of industry-level failure and performance variance on survival-enhancing learning Contemporary management theory, business school curricula, and advice for managers focus heavily on how firms can learn from successful firms. They emphasize trying to copy best practices, of apparent industry winners, for example. We argue that organizations and do also learn from observing the levels of failure and near-failure by others. They also could learn from variation in performance in their industry. We study these ideas by looking at the effect of prior bank failure levels, near failure levels and performance variation on the survival rates for 2,724 FDIC-insured U.S. commercial banks chartered since over a 15-year period ( - ). We use event history analysis to test our ideas. Our first basic idea is that failure and near-failure of others can produce survival enhancing learning in remaining firms. We argue that failure of can serve as a source of learning for others. We argue that the value of such learning is influenced by whether the failures are very visible, and whether the experience of the other firms is actually relevant. These ideas imply that prior industry failure levels (numbers of prior failures) and near-failure levels (numbers of firms that were in trouble but revived) will have different effects on survival enhancing learning. We also predict banks will learn in different ways from failure in local or non-local markets, or by similar or dissimilar organizations. Our second main idea is that firms may also learn from prior industry variation in performance and from extreme success levels. Firms may learn from prior variation in performance by drawing abstract lessons from the prior industry experience. If this is the most powerful form of learning, then performance variation should have greater impact than just failure or success levels by themselves. Our third main idea is that firms learn not only from failure and performance variation levels in their own industry, but also from the experience of other, related industries. We study this idea by looking at the impact of experience in the savings and loan industry on survival enhancing learning by banks. Preliminary results show that industry levels of near failure experience levels enhance the survival of banks, as do the levels of failure and near-failure in the savings and loan industry, even controlling for the additional resources that might be available as a result of these failures. This research will provide valuable insight for managers who seek to learn from the experience of others, and to industry leaders or trade-association officers who seek to enhance the overall survival and prosperity in their industry. It also provides theoretical insight into the links between interorganizational learning and competition, and how firms learn from their own industry experience and from other industries doc597 none Survivability and secure communications are essential in a mobile computing environment. We propose to conduct a series of experiments that will lead to the development of new authentication and key management techniques for wireless communications. We study the implementation of various authentication schemes on the overall system performance. We propose a technique to achieve fault-tolerant mobile node authentication in an efficient way. We plan to identify guidelines for authentication between an upstream domain and a DiffServ ingress router in a QoS enabled network. We will evaluate how various secure group communication and access control techniques fit into the wireless world by conducting scientific experiments in a systematic way. We will solve the problem of providing secure multimedia communication under mobile environments where the resources available to mobile hosts such as CPU power and network bandwidth are very limited. We have developed a series of light-weight video encryption algorithms which encompass video compression and video encryption in one step. This will lead towards an adaptable encryption system doc598 none I am requesting the funds from this starter research grant to first complete the implementation of these course at all three institutions (FAMU, FSU, and TCC). Second, I want to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of this teaching style at each of these settings. Course assessment strategies will include self-evaluations. When selecting the evaluation (by mentors and colleagues), and student evaluations. When selecting the appropriate assessment tools for the student and peer evaluations I will rely heavily upon the advice of my colleagues in science education as well as my other PFSMETE Fellows that have expertise in this area doc599 none This award provides support for a Gordon Research Conference on the theoretical foundations of product design and manufactureability. The conference will be held at Plymouth State College in Plymouth, New Hampshire, June 11-16, . It will bring together experts from the fields of engineering design, manufacturing, mathematics, economics, and decision theory. The conference format consists of morning and evening sessions, with afternoons free for small group discussions and poster sessions. In each of the formal sessions, a few brief position papers will be presented, and these will be followed by open discussion. Topics of discussion will include: the state of the art, the role of creativity in design, the role of decision theory in design, the role of mathematical representation and optimization in design, validation of design methods, implementation of design theory and design tools, integration engineering, and distributed design doc600 none This is funding to subsidize travel and housing expenses of students attending the 6th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Design, to be held June 26-29, , at WPI. Design is an important research topic in engineering and architecture. It is the key to economic competitiveness and the fundamental precursor to manufacturing. However, our understanding of design as a process and our ability to model it are still very limited. This conference series aims to provide an international forum for the presentation and discussion of state-of-the-art, cutting edge research and developments in artificial intelligence in design. Held every two years, this conference is the premier one in the field, attracting about 150 participants from over 10 different countries. The current funding will provide up to 50% travel support for student attendees, and will afford them an important opportunity to present their research, to hear about the latest results and research thrusts, and to interact with peers in the international, interdisciplinary AI-in-Design community doc601 none The proposed PESCA program will amplify the reach of existing IAI projects and programs: the Initial Science Program (ISP) and the Collaborative Research Network (CRN). PESCA will involve countries now not adequately involved in IAI program project activities by involving participating scientists from these countries as full partners in the projects, participating as CoPIs. As determined by the IAI s merit based peer review system, the following potential awardees have been identified (awards to Cuba are subject to pending OFAC licensing): Ricardo Herrera-Peraza, Cuba: The effects of global change on the diversity of vegetation and edaphic microbiota on insular and continental ecosystems Michael Taylor, University of the West Indies-Mona Campus, Jamaica: When oceans conspire: Examining the effect of concurrent SST Anomalies in the Tropical Atlantic and Pacific on Caribbean Rainfall Rodolpho Rodriguez, Antonio Mabres, Ronald Woodman, Universidad de Piura, Peru: Dendrochronological Studies of El Nino and other climatological variations of the South American Tropical Zone Antony Chen, University of the West Indies-Mona Campus, Jamaica Analyzing and understanding climate variability in the Caribbean Islands Pedro Cisneros, A. Amarakoon, ESPOL, Ecuador UWI-Mona, Jamaica: Predicting ENSO effects on sugar cane yields using a weather-generator and mechanistic crop modeling Gabriela Eguren, Claudia Rodriguez, Beatriz Costa, Alice Altesor, Universidad de la Republica,Uruguay: Impact of forestry on Uruguayan grasslands: changes in landuse patterns and ecosystem functioning Lelys Bravo, Bruno Sanso, Universidad Simon Bolivar, Venezuela: Downscaling activities and their applications of studies of climate variability and change in South America Alejandro Leon,FLACSO, Chile: An inventory of Disasters in Chile, ENSO and non-ENSO related: A La Red-Chile Project Juan Carlos Antuna, Instituto de Meteorologia, Cuba: Characterization of stratospheric and upper tropospheric aerosols over Central and South America Oscar Betancourt, Marc Lucotte, Marc Roulet, Ecuador Canada: Mercury in Andean Amazon river catchments - MAARC Project Ida Mitrani, Instituto de Meteorologia, Cuba: High resolution numerical modeling of local and regional atmospheric circulation in the Caribbean doc602 none Tom Shih, Michigan State University The focus of the proposed workshop to be held at Michigan State University is to identify barriers that prevent from CFD from being more useful in the design and analysis of automotive components and systems. Three panels will be invited to speak at the workshop, one academic and two industrial. The academic panel will consists of leading CFD researchers. The industrial panels will consists of CFD experts and managers from the Big Three (DaimlerChrysler, Ford and General Motors) and representatives from the major CFD commercial code companies (Adapco, AEA, ANSYS, AVL and FLUENT). The workshop will be held on June 14-16, at the University Faculty Club in East Lansing, Michigan doc603 none Fredkin, Edward Carnegie Mellon University SGER: The Digital Perspective Project The Digital Perspective Project is an attempt to use discrete models for a wide variety of physical phenomena. In contrast to continuous analytic models, such as differential equations, discrete models offer understanding of phenomena that are discrete, or quantized at the microscopic level. These phenomena include electric charge, light, genetics, and some mechanical phenomena such as vibration. Early work in this field has shown that purely digital models such as cellular automata can conserve the digital values of physical quantities exactly. The work to be done under this project combines a seminar at Carnegie Mellon University with a series of public lectures. Researchers from around the world who have made contributions to discrete models in several areas will participate in both activities. Distinguished Lectures will be presented in both Pittsburgh and Washington, and will be made available on the World Wide Web. The seminar and lectures will provide a spur for the further development of discrete models of physical phenomena doc604 none An integrated multi-institutional effort of multi-scale seismic imaging of the Mariana Subduction Factory (MSF). The PIs will conduct multi-channel seismic reflection profiling, controlled-source wide-angle reflection refraction profiling and passive recording of local and teleseismic earthquakes through OBS deployment to be carried out with Japanese investigators. The data will provide a comprehensive velocity and attenuation, structural and stratigraphic image of the MSF. The principal objectives of the study are to understand: 1) velocity and attenuation structure of the mantle, 2) large-scale flow of the mantle wedge, 3) velocity structure of the subducting oceanic crust, 4) seismic stratigraphy and structure of the forearc, arc and remnant arc, 5) the magma chamber below the volcanoes, 6) a possible double seismic zone, and 7) updip an downdip limits of the seismogenic zone. The study will also help in the planning and eventual drilling in the Mariana island arc system doc605 none The authors will develop a suite of physical and biological models that incorporate data sets collected in the Ross Sea as part of the U.S. Southern Ocean Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS) and data sets from the west Antarctic Peninsula region collected during the Palmer Long?Term Ecological Research program. The modeling effort will be in conjunction with analyses of these data sets as well as analyses of historical data sets from the two regions. The intent of the data analyses and modeling activities is to provide syntheses that allow comparison of similarities and differences in the two systems and thereby allowing fundamental questions on the controls of phytoplankton productivity and growth in these two systems to be addressed. The general focus is on understanding the role of light, macro? and micronutrient limitation, and circulation in producing the observed horizontal and vertical gradients in phytoplankton distribution and production. Thus, the data analyses and model simulations will be used to test specific hypotheses concerning the regulation of phytoplankton growth, production, and species composition in the two regions. This study will directly address several of the major Synthesis and Modeling Project research themes, especially those related to understanding processes controlling primary production and export production. Also, the incorporation of data sets from another region of the Antarctic provides a mechanism for placing the observations obtained during the U.S. JGOFS Southern Ocean program into a broader context. This study will be the first to systematically compare and contrast regions of the Antarctic in this manner. The authors believe that the results of the collaborative research will have a significant impact on development of trophic level models within the Southern Ocean, and also have implications for ecosystem level studies in other regions of the world ocean doc605 none The authors will develop a suite of physical and biological models that incorporate data sets collected in the Ross Sea as part of the U.S. Southern Ocean Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS) and data sets from the west Antarctic Peninsula region collected during the Palmer Long?Term Ecological Research program. The modeling effort will be in conjunction with analyses of these data sets as well as analyses of historical data sets from the two regions. The intent of the data analyses and modeling activities is to provide syntheses that allow comparison of similarities and differences in the two systems and thereby allowing fundamental questions on the controls of phytoplankton productivity and growth in these two systems to be addressed. The general focus is on understanding the role of light, macro? and micronutrient limitation, and circulation in producing the observed horizontal and vertical gradients in phytoplankton distribution and production. Thus, the data analyses and model simulations will be used to test specific hypotheses concerning the regulation of phytoplankton growth, production, and species composition in the two regions. This study will directly address several of the major Synthesis and Modeling Project research themes, especially those related to understanding processes controlling primary production and export production. Also, the incorporation of data sets from another region of the Antarctic provides a mechanism for placing the observations obtained during the U.S. JGOFS Southern Ocean program into a broader context. This study will be the first to systematically compare and contrast regions of the Antarctic in this manner. The authors believe that the results of the collaborative research will have a significant impact on development of trophic level models within the Southern Ocean, and also have implications for ecosystem level studies in other regions of the world ocean doc607 none The word is as central to human communication as the cell is to biology. In developing our understanding of how the brain processes words, researchers have relied heavily on tasks that measure the speed of processing words. These tasks are speeded naming, in which one measures how quickly a person can name a visually presented word aloud, and speeded lexical decision in which people are asked to decide if a letter string is a word or nonword. Unfortunately, research in this area has been somewhat hindered by the limited amount of data available for word processing in these tasks. The current project will fill this void. The English Lexicon Project will amass a large set (over 25 million behavioral estimates) of speeded naming and lexical decision responses for 42,000 words across subjects. This will be accomplished via the coordination of six testing sites at major research institutions across the country. These data will be integrated within a larger database that will include estimates of variables (e.g., frequency of occurrence in the language) that have been central to our understanding of how the brain processes words. A high-speed server will then make this large database available to researchers worldwide via the Internet. Access and search of this data set will be facilitated by a flexible program, which will provide easy and fast access to any items or sets of items with specified constraints. The audience for the English Lexicon Project will include the following researchers: First, computational modelers will now have a large standardized empirical database to provide tests of their models. Second, researchers (including those interested in reading educators) interested in effects of specific variables can easily test these in the database. Third, researchers who use words as their primary stimuli will be able to select better-controlled stimuli. This later targeted audience will include memory researchers, neuropsychologists, and researchers interested in brain imaging. Ultimately, the English Lexicon Project will provide the gold standard for our understanding of how the brain processes words doc512 none This award updates the Correlates of War Project Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data set through . Such an effort is critical for international conflict research, but the enterprise of updating this collection is a monumental one that is beyond the scope or resources of any single researcher. Consequently this is a collaborative effort, linking scholars at eleven different universities to complete the task in a systematic and timely fashion. The MID data set has been at the forefront on international conflict research over the past decade or more. This data set is the most frequently used in conflict research and MID data has been employed to explore a staggering breadth of topics in international relations research, including most of those central to contemporary scholarly debates. Furthermore, MID data are the basis for several other data projects in the discipline as well as highly compatible with a range of other data compilations, thereby facilitating the combination of data sets and the exploration of broader sets of theoretical questions. Updating the Militarized Interstate Dispute data set requires completion of the following major steps: 1) collect and document militarized incidents from a variety of sources. This entails searching global, regional, and national sources for indications of a threat, display, or use of force by one state against another; 2) checking, archiving, and documenting the incidents collected to insure consistency, completeness, and absence of duplication; 3) composing militarized disputes based on the collected incidents and additional research as necessary. Because disputes are conflict episodes, such things as starting and ending dates, secondary participants, stages of escalation, overall fatalities, method of settlement, and general outcome must be determined. A short narrative description of each dispute is also prepared; 4) checking, archiving, and documenting disputes in order to insure such things as conformity with coding rules, compatibility with documentation standards, internal consistency, and absence of duplication; 5) resolving issues that arise concerning coding procedures, documentation requirements, problem cases, and the like; and, 6) preparing a final version (3.0) of the data set for distribution via the world wide web. This requires the resolution of a few problems that have been found in the present version (2.1) before it can be merged with the - data. This is a major infrastructure project for the Political Science program and enables the updating of a data set that will be used by numerous scholars in international relations and comparative politics doc609 none This study seeks to establish and test a theoretical framework for understanding legal change and the relationship between law and development in the emerging economies of Africa. This study asks the following question: Under what conditions will entrepreneurs in developing countries actually avail themselves of the legal framework supplied by the state? Synthesizing theoretical insights from socio-legal studies and the new institutional economics, the study argues that entrepreneurial demand for law is a function of both the level of social distance within business communities and the credibility and capacity of the state-provided legal system. The effectiveness of law in promoting economic development in emerging economies thus depends upon the interaction of informal social institutions and formal state-supplied political institutions. This theory will be tested by analyzing data collected over the course of nine months of field research on commercial law reform initiatives in Tanzania. Data includes a combination of close-ended surveys and open-ended ethnographic interviews of the owners managers of Tanzanian firms in three cities (Dar es Salaam, Mwanza and Mbeya) and independent data on legal institutions, law reform initiatives and institutional capacity in Tansania. The study seeks to make important contributions to three distinct social science disciplines: comparative politics (particularly the comparative study of political institutions in the developing world), law and development (by identifying the conditions under which law reform may contribute to the creation and development of market economies), and comparative law (by analyzing the operation of commercial law and legal systems in developing countries doc610 none What is the effect of redistricting and constituency change on distributive policy making and constituency service in Congress? This Doctoral Dissertation Research project answers this question. Scholars have for some time been interested in both the normative implications of and the empirical effects of racial and other types of redistricting on congressional representation and public policy, though the limitation of nearly every one of these past empirical studies is that only roll-call voting behavior is explained. By looking at representatives roll-call voting, researchers have neglected other important forms of institutional behavior in Congress and behavior that occurs in the district. The dependent variables analyzed in this proposal look at these other forms of congressional participation and activity. The dissertation consists of two main parts. In the first part, the effect of redistricting on pork project allocation is considered. Methodologically, the analysis for this first part relies primarily upon quantitative analysis of all U.S. congressional districts from - , utilizing a data set of federal project allocations. This quantitative analysis is also supplemented with qualitative interviews of congressional staff. In the second part of the study, the effect of redistricting on constituency service in analyzed. This relies on a mix of both quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis, though most heavily on field research in the southern United States. The Dissertation Research Support investigation has its major objective not only to make a contribution to the literature on minority representation, but also to contribute to a greater understanding of the interplay between electoral institutions, congressional representation, and the voting behavior of constituents. The data and information collected will be provided to the scholarly community at large doc611 none Much of our behavior depends upon accurate perception of the three-dimensional spatial layout of the environment. Multiple sources of visual information are available to specify this layout, including stereopsis, motion parallax, shading, and perspective. This raises the question of how the visual system combines these sources of information, which is also referred to as the problem of sensor fusion. This project explores the role of perceptual surfaces in mediating the integration of two kinds of information for space perception: stereopsis and perspective. By integrating the local stereoscopic information relating an object to a surface with the stereoscopic and perspective information operating across the entire extent of the surface, the visual system can potentially greatly enhance the accuracy and precision with which the object s spatial location is perceived. It has already been shown that the perceived slant of a background surface can influence the perceived relative depth of two probes suspended in front of the surface. Our project uses this paradigm to investigate the processes by which local depth signals and surface slant signals are integrated. We use computer generated stereoscopic displays. The first experiments ask what surface characteristics facilitate surface mediated integration of information for probe depths. Does it depend upon the density of surface texture, whether the surface is continuous or interrupted by a gap, and whether the surface is behind or only adjacent to the probes? A second series of experiments investigates what we call the topography of surface mediation . How is surface mediation affected by the probes separation from each other, by their separation from the boundaries of the surface, and by the presence or absence of eye movements? A third series of experiments looks at the relative effects on perceived probe depth of different types of information specifying surface slant. We examine perspective, gradients of stereoscopic discontinuity at surface boundaries, and a closely related form of information produced by gradients of texture discontinuity at surface boundaries. The final experiment examines the perceptual response to inconsistent information about the relative depth of the probes. The importance of the experiments in this project lies in their contributions to two related problems in the contemporary study of visual space perception. The first is the rarely studied question of how objects and extended surfaces interact in the perception of complex spatial layouts. The second is the current debate about the mechanisms underlying the integration of spatial information (sensor fusion doc612 none This award is for an exploratory study of evidence for long-term paleo-ENSO (El Nino-Southern Oscillation) cycles in the central United States, as reflected in evidence for fluctuations the ratio of C3 C4 vegetation types preserved in soils. Stable carbon isotope ratios and soil organic matter will be used as an indicator of the long-term average C3 C4 plant ratios. The stable isotope analyses will be done exclusively on rhizoconcretions (secondary carbonate encrustations on root tubes). Age control will be provided by radiocarbon analyses of soil organic matter and fossil remains doc613 none Increasingly, U.S. antitrust authorities evaluate horizontal mergers in terms of how proposed consolidations may affect the strategic situation in specific oligopoly models. Most prominent is the analysis of horizontal mergers in markets where products are differentiated. In such contexts Department of Justice (DOJ) staff have developed an Antitrust Litigation Model (ALM) merger simulation as a screening device to help determine when competitive problems might arise. The DOJ staff use the ALM to assess the effects of a merger in a two step process. First, staff collect price and market share data, and estimate some demand parameters. Second, these data are inserted into the model to generate imputed cost parameters and post-merger predictions. Despite the convenience of the ALM s predictions, a number of questions critical to the usefulness of this approach remain unanswered. First, the relationship between price predictions generated under model-specific assumptions and outcomes in more general naturally occurring circumstances is not clear. Second, even on the domain of the theory, the incentives that drive predicted unilateral effects are subtle and may have little explanatory power. Third, the model is used to distinguish between relatively subtle differences in market outcomes. Some information about the potential accuracy of pre-merger demand parameter estimates would thus be useful. Laboratory methods provide an ideal medium for examining these important questions. In the laboratory the demand system, the nature of strategic interactions and the underlying equilibrium predictions can be specified a priori. Thus, the relationship between predictions and outcomes can be examined explicitly. This proposal describes three experiments designed to provide some insight into the importance of the assumptions underlying the ALM. First, suppose that the underlying demand system for a model is logit and that sellers are Bertrand competitors, the assumptions of the ALM. An experiment conducted under these best shot circumstances could evaluate the correlation between actual and predicted prices and market shares, as well as the accuracy of the models imputed cost measures. Further, analysis of post-merger performance would allow examination of the capacity of theoretical comparative statics effects to predict behavioral outcomes Second, although a logit demand system offers analytic advantages, there is no a priori reason to believe that many natural demand systems are logit. An experiment would examine the effects of the changes in the underlying demand system. Starting with identical observable pre-merger information, we can evaluate the importance of the underlying demand specification on pre- and post-merger performance by shifting the demand system from logit to linear. A third experiment assesses the importance of assuming that sellers are Bertrand (quantity-setting) competitors. Although economists typically assume that strategic interactions are Bertrand when products are differentiated, there is no good reason for supposing that this assumption reflects the nature of competition in natural contexts. Holding the observable market information fixed, we can evaluate the importance of an assumption about the nature of strategic interactions doc614 none Recommended project is for a study of the volatile flux in the Izu-Bonin-Mariana (IBM) arc system. Water and CO2 analyses will be done using the Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometry (FTIR) method on glassy inclusions from olivines, laser-ablation, inductively-coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICPMS) trace element analysis on these same inclusions, and also will do experimental phase equilibrium studies with IBM basalts at pressures ranging from 100-800 megapascals in water saturated and undersaturated conditions. This work is very important for understanding mass balances in arc systems, addressing key unknowns in volatile flux budgets. The samples to be used are already well characterized. The research will address the relative role of decompression versus flux melting for these samples, determine key phase equilibria relationships under hydrous conditions, and develop melt geohygrometers to estimate water contents in IBM lava compositions doc615 none Recommended project is for a comprehensive geochemical and geochronological examination of Eocene to Miocene volcanism in the southern arc and backarc of the Izu-Bonin-Marianas (IBM) arc system, tracing its older development with time. In doing so, the recommended research will also re-examine well-characterized samples that have been previously investigated using older, obsolescent anayltical techniques. This study will examine the changing nature of volcanism in the IBM system, as it transformed from boninitic volcanism associated with subduction initiation to the more normal tholeitic and cal-clkaline arc volcanism also seen today in the modern volcanic arc and backarc. This study also will examine the changing nature of the mantle sources during this transformation, as well as the implications they carry for tectonic processes during the arc system evolution. Previously sampled lavas and other volcanic rocks will be supplemented by collection of new samples during field work on Guam; all of these samples will be analyzed for major and trace elemental composition, isotopic composition, and geochronological (40 Ar - 39 Ar) dating using the latest analytical techniques doc614 none Recommended project is for a study of the volatile flux in the Izu-Bonin-Mariana (IBM) arc system. Water and CO2 analyses will be done using the Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometry (FTIR) method on glassy inclusions from olivines, laser-ablation, inductively-coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICPMS) trace element analysis on these same inclusions, and also will do experimental phase equilibrium studies with IBM basalts at pressures ranging from 100-800 megapascals in water saturated and undersaturated conditions. This work is very important for understanding mass balances in arc systems, addressing key unknowns in volatile flux budgets. The samples to be used are already well characterized. The research will address the relative role of decompression versus flux melting for these samples, determine key phase equilibria relationships under hydrous conditions, and develop melt geohygrometers to estimate water contents in IBM lava compositions doc615 none Recommended project is for a comprehensive geochemical and geochronological examination of Eocene to Miocene volcanism in the southern arc and backarc of the Izu-Bonin-Marianas (IBM) arc system, tracing its older development with time. In doing so, the recommended research will also re-examine well-characterized samples that have been previously investigated using older, obsolescent anayltical techniques. This study will examine the changing nature of volcanism in the IBM system, as it transformed from boninitic volcanism associated with subduction initiation to the more normal tholeitic and cal-clkaline arc volcanism also seen today in the modern volcanic arc and backarc. This study also will examine the changing nature of the mantle sources during this transformation, as well as the implications they carry for tectonic processes during the arc system evolution. Previously sampled lavas and other volcanic rocks will be supplemented by collection of new samples during field work on Guam; all of these samples will be analyzed for major and trace elemental composition, isotopic composition, and geochronological (40 Ar - 39 Ar) dating using the latest analytical techniques doc618 none The objective of the project is to identify the mantle component in island arc volcanism by performing an across-arc study of magmatism in the southern Mariana Arc. The PIs propose to answer three principal questions using a field and laboratory study of submarine volcanoes in the Southern Seamount Province of the Mariana Arc. 1) Is the pattern of mantle depletion across the arc and the back-arc consistent with sequential melting of the mantle as it moves away from the back-arc spreading axis? 2) What is the inherent heterogeneity of the subarc mantle at scales of 10-60 km? 3) How are melts aggregated in arcs? They will answer these questions using a field program based on a high-resolution survey of two portions of the Southern Seamount Province, from the arc to the back-arc, using the Hawaii MR-1 towed vehicle; through detailed sampling of two traverses of the Province (including lavas and volcaniclastics); through characterization of the sampled materials petrographically and geochemically; and through interpretation of the data to identify the roles of along axis mantle heterogeneity doc619 none The principal investigator s prior NSF-supported research has used disaggregated trade data to identify and quantify the need for travel and the usefulness of business and social networks in overcoming informational barriers to international trade. The PI has also developed theoretical models of the consequences of the existence of informational barriers for the functioning of the world economy. This research has raised (at least) three questions. First, can more direct, microeconomic evidence be found for the relatively greater importance of foreign travel, and of private than publicly available information, in the search for foreign buyers or sellers of differentiated than homogeneous products? Second, can any direct evidence be found on if and how new information technology is affecting the search for foreign buyers or sellers? Third, and most important, does the apparent importance of informational barriers to trade and the usefulness of transnational networks in overcoming them have any implications for policy? A survey of intermediaries such as export management companies, export trading companies, importers, and buying agents, guided by a theory of network intermediation, could help to answer all these questions. The PI will develop such a theory and perform a pilot survey that will determine the feasibility of a full-scale survey. More specifically, the trade-creating impacts of immigrants, foreign direct investment by business groups, and long-settled ethnic minorities that maintain co-ethnic business societies (such as the Overseas Chinese) found by various researchers suggest that existing intermediaries are inadequate means of connecting buyers or sellers to foreign opportunities. The apparent importance of belonging to these transnational business and social networks does not prove that intermediation is undersupplied, however, because the costs of establishing each of these transnational networks were sunk for purposes other than creating trade. It could be that the costs of setting up new intermediaries would outweigh the benefits of the additional trade they would create. A preliminary theoretical model suggests that market failure may indeed exist in provision of network intermediation. Network intermediaries are agents who, in effect, sell access to their networks, which consist of firms of whose capabilities and preferences they have the deep knowledge necessary to match them to appropriate buyers or sellers of differentiated products. It is hypothesized that such agents accumulated their deep knowledge of the firms in their networks by having worked with them in a non-intermediary capacity before entering careers as intermediaries when this became more profitable. This process is unlikely to supply intermediaries whose networks span many product lines, however, which are valuable if for example clients want to buy many components that need to be matched to each other. Moreover, investment in network diversification may fall short of the socially optimal level because the deep knowledge intermediaries need of the members of their networks in order to find the best matches for their clients. The quality of their service is inherently non-contractible, leaving them vulnerable to the hold-up problem given the specificity of each match. One of the policy recommendations of the model (established in a general equilibrium framework with endogenous supply of intermediation) is thus a subsidy to large, diversified intermediaries in particular. Indeed a number of countries (including the United States) have adopted policies to encourage the establishment of such intermediaries. The pilot survey will be designed to test a number of hypotheses drawn from this model doc620 none Schuman, Howard The primary purpose of this research is to determine the extent to which cohort effects of a critical period on memories for public events that were first discovered in a U.S. national sample in (in a NSF funded study) persist fifteen years later in , thus helping to demarcate generations (e.g., a Vietnam generation ). The focus is particularly on cohorts available in both and , but the public memories of cohorts that have entered adulthood (age 18) since are also of importance. The major hypothesis is that each generation receives a distinctive imprint from the major political and social events that occur during its youth and the effects of this imprint persist throughout the life course. A national cross-section telephone survey was used in and will also be used in . Open-ended questions (e.g., Would you mention one or two such events or changes that seem to you to have been especially important?) will be used to obtain information on memories. Interviews will be conducted with a total sample of approximately Americans 18 years of age or over as part of the regular University of Michigan Survey Research Center Monthly Survey. The research is part of a larger program that has also studied memories of public events in five other countries (Germany, Israel, Japan, Lithuania, and Russia), that includes companion work on knowledge of past events, and that considers the effects of memories of the past on attitudes toward new issues arising in the present doc621 none Principal Investigator: Charles N. Arge, University of Colorado The investigators will develop a simplified model to explore issues relating to operational aspects of Sun-Earth space weather models. The main effort is to combine a set of readily modified models in a modular architecture to allow extensive experimentation with ingesting and assimilating real time data, error handling, linkages, verification, display, archiving, and other operational requirements. The set of models will consist of simple physics-based and semi-empirical models, as well as modest magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) models that can be run efficiently on workstations. The model will be made available to the Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) so that may become an operational tool accessible to the space weather community doc622 none The proposed research will examine whether and how variation in judicial decision making affects the psychological and health-related adjustment of families after child custody litigation. This proposed research will be the fourth phase of a longitudinal study (UCI Child Custody Study) that was conducted as part of the author s dissertation research. The study will retain the subject pool (N=117), and the main features of the original research. A longitudinal, repeated-measures design and MANOVA and multiple regression procedures will be used to examine whether procedural and distributive justice are related to measures of family adjustment in the long term. This proposed study will establish a first, direct link between parents subjective courtroom experience and evidence of subsequent long-term adjustment. Findings that families are influenced in their adjustment by their perceptions of the quality of judicial decision-making could have far-reaching implications for the work of research psychologists as well as that of health and legal professionals. Involvement in the research process will also, contribute to the educational development of undergraduate and Master s Degree students doc623 none This dissertation project attempts to identify the acoustic features of Spanish-accented speech that give it the perception of being accented . While considerable information is available on phonological aspects of Spanish-accented English, only a limited amount of research has been conducted on the objective acoustic features. In this study, Spanish speakers of English and native speakers of American English will be recorded, and speech samples will be compared in terms of temporal acoustic measurements, e.g. vowel duration, consonant duration, and stop voice onset time. These measurements will provide descriptive data for the timing of Spanish-accented English. The second part of the study is experimental. Having identified the temporal differences, the researchers will select those features which differ most consistently across the two groups of speakers. These features will be acoustically modified by waveform editing for the Spanish-accented speakers to bring them into accord with the measurements of the native (unaccented) speakers. The modified and unmodified speech of the accented speakers will then be subjected to listener ratings for relative accent judgments. The aim is to determine the extent to which temporal modification makes accented speech less accented and more native-like doc624 none Land use politics dominates modern American local governments. Scholarship suggests that the traditional process of zoning property cultivates a growth machine coalition of developers, businesses, and elected representatives. In recent years, citizens, environmentalists, and other interests have increasingly turned to the institutions of direct democracy, especially voter initiatives, to counter pro-growth interests. Initiatives are laws or ordinances that are proposed and decided directly by citizens. They are institutional alternatives to traditional zoning practices, and are intended to shift the balance of political power over a community s land use decisions. Given the prevalence of land use issues in the day-to-day business of American local governments, and the economic importance of their decisions, political scientists have paid surprisingly little attention to the politics of land use. We know very little about the consequences of the institutional choices made by participants in the land use process. This research advances our understanding of the new politics of land use by constructing and analyzing several new datasets on the dynamics of local land use initiatives and their consequences for development policy. Land use politics also provides a valuable lens through which to better understand a number of other important political science problems. At the heart of land use politics is a conflict over what interests in a community (e.g., landowners, community organizations, current residents, elected representatives) have the right to make decisions about the usage of private property. Understanding how these various interests interact, the effects of political institutions such as ballot initiatives on their interactions and influence, and the ultimate decisions communities make about land use and property rights are key motivations for this study. The research has two major components. The first component is a study of the political dynamics of recent land use initiatives. The methodology involves first constructing a comprehensive list of land use initiatives in medium and large sized US cities since . From this list, a sample of recent initiatives are analyzed to test hypotheses about what types of groups can use initiatives to promote their political interests, and what factors lead to their success. The research also involves several case studies to further explore the contours of the process by which private interest groups negotiate public land use policy. Together, these analyses will allow for the extension and refinement of existing theories of interest group influence. The second component considers the consequences of political institutions on land use policies and outcomes. Building upon a two-stage model of land use policy formation, this component estimates, first, the factors that lead proponents to use land use initiatives, and second, the policy consequences of those initiatives. The analyses compares land use policy and outcomes on a number of dimensions in two sets of communities: those that are likely to regulate property usage primarily through traditional zoning ordinances, and those that are likely to use initiatives. This two-stage analysis assesses both whether policies differ when they are made under each institutional regime, conditional upon a community using the initiative process, and the representational consequences of these differences (i.e., what types of interests do they favor). Together, these two components provide a clearer understanding of when and how interest groups influence public policy outcomes, and the representational consequences of political institutions such as voter initiatives, in the important area of land use policy. This dataset will be of significant value to others interested in this important topic doc625 none The PI proposes to develop a structural model of the subduction thrust from the seaward edge of the subduction zone through the seismogenic zone with the geological conditions at the Nankai Subduction Zone as a constraint. The objective is to understand the progressive fabric development across the aseismic to seismic transition, to provide information that will help interpret geophysical images and guide experimental lab studies and assist in the interpreting of the drill hole data through the seismogenic zone. The PI will use ODP holes at the frontal part of the Nankai subduction zone and uplifted equivalent complexes on land doc542 none The award is for a collaborative study involving the Universities of Colorado, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska, aimed at improving the understanding of the characteristics, mechanisms, and feedback processes associated with changes in vegetation, sea level, and standing surface water in Beringia during the last 21,000 years, and to use this understanding to aid in the development of predictive tools for future pan-Arctic climate change. The specific research objectives and tasks are based on refining a modeling strategy for simulating regional paleoclimatic variations and for diagnosing the interactions between different components of the climate system, utilizing global and regional climate models and an equilibrium vegetation simulation model. Simulations will be performed at key times, compared to observational data, and diagnosed to understand potential feedbacks doc542 none The award is for a collaborative study involving the Universities of Colorado, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska, aimed at improving the understanding of the characteristics, mechanisms, and feedback processes associated with changes in vegetation, sea level, and standing surface water in Beringia during the last 21,000 years, and to use this understanding to aid in the development of predictive tools for future pan-Arctic climate change. The specific research objectives and tasks are based on refining a modeling strategy for simulating regional paleoclimatic variations and for diagnosing the interactions between different components of the climate system, utilizing global and regional climate models and an equilibrium vegetation simulation model. Simulations will be performed at key times, compared to observational data, and diagnosed to understand potential feedbacks doc618 none The objective of the project is to identify the mantle component in island arc volcanism by performing an across-arc study of magmatism in the southern Mariana Arc. The PIs propose to answer three principal questions using a field and laboratory study of submarine volcanoes in the Southern Seamount Province of the Mariana Arc. 1) Is the pattern of mantle depletion across the arc and the back-arc consistent with sequential melting of the mantle as it moves away from the back-arc spreading axis? 2) What is the inherent heterogeneity of the subarc mantle at scales of 10-60 km? 3) How are melts aggregated in arcs? They will answer these questions using a field program based on a high-resolution survey of two portions of the Southern Seamount Province, from the arc to the back-arc, using the Hawaii MR-1 towed vehicle; through detailed sampling of two traverses of the Province (including lavas and volcaniclastics); through characterization of the sampled materials petrographically and geochemically; and through interpretation of the data to identify the roles of along axis mantle heterogeneity doc629 none Gross The goal of the Industry University Cooperative Research Center for Biocatalysis and Bioprocessing of Macromolecules at the Polytechnic University of New York is to conduct research on a wide range of issues applicable to the use of biocatalytic methods in polymer synthesis and materials processing. The research program includes three themes: (1) In-vitro enzyme-catalyzed polymer synthesis and modification; (2) Biocatalytic degradation of polymers; and (3) Biosynthesis of novel polysaccharide copolymers. The Industrial Advisory Board (IAB) consisting of representatives from nine participating companies review the progress of research, and provides guidance to the Center s management and technology transfer activities doc630 none Arizona State University Heydt It is proposed to bring the Arizona State University portion of the Center for the Advanced Control of Energy and Power Systems (ACEPS) into the Power Systems Engineering Research Center (Pserc). Both these efforts focus on research in electric power engineering. The ASU portion of ACEPS will bring expertise to Pserc in the areas of electric power quality, high voltage engineering, and power electronics. These areas are believed to beneficially supplement the existing Pserc power engineering efforts. Additionally, ASU-ACEPS will bring expertise in power system instrumentation and control, and power system analysis. The combined center is expected to be one of the largest power engineering efforts in the world, focusing on questions of power systems, deregulation of the power industry, power quality, transmission and distribution , and the efficient use of power infrastructure. An educational component of the program is proposed in the form of graduate and undergraduate student training and research and bringing advanced concepts in power engineering into the undergraduate classroom doc631 none Welty The principal objective of the proposed work is to document the effects of urbanization on Valley Creek Watershed in a rapidly developing area of suburban Philadelphia. Valley Creek, a tributary of the Schuylkill River, runs through Valley Forge National Historical Park. The limestone-fed stream supports a native brown trout population. In addition to the common effects of development such as increased surface runoff and sediment loading, the watershed has experienced point-source pollution problems from hazardous waste sites and aquifer dewatering from quarrying operations and pumping for municipal water supply. A historical review will determine the changes in the stream caused by development over the last 200 years. The study will then turn to the effect of continuing urbanization. Development-induced geeomorphologic changes are stream flows, channel morphology, bed composition, and suspended sediment concentration. The degree and pattern of heterogeneity of hydraulic conductivity of the fractured rock aquifer will be examined at multiple scales from existing hydrogeologic data and with a 3D groundwater model material to representing contaminant transport in fractured rock We will then evaluate the effect of aquifer heterogeneity and 3D flow pathways on stream subsurface exchange rates, contaminant transports, and chemical loadings to the fish and other biota. Tracer-injection experiments will be used to directly assess stream-subsurface exchange in Valley Creek. We propose to investigate several aspects of the interaction between environmental quality and biota. First, we will collect sediment distribution data to assess impacts of changes in channel characteristics on community structure of macroinvertebrates and fish. Second, we will compare sediment PCB levels and supply rates with PCB levels found in organisms. Third, we will use stable isotope d15 N values to assess positioning of species in the food web in order to measure biomagnification. Fourth, we will measure general stress levels in the organisms using heat shock proteins (hsp 70) and relate this to PCB levels as an independent indicator of environmental impacts on organisms. This work leads to a comprehensive picture of how urbanization-induced changes affect invertebrate and fish communities. Political controversies in this watershed have left a history of the political struggles that develop during urbanization that can be used to gain understanding of the political forces during urbanization. The social science research will be based on the use of three sociological perspectives: (1) The Advocacy Coalition Framework; (2) network analysis; and (3) discourse analysis. These sociological perspectives define a watershed politics that results from the formation of different advocacy coalitions, each with a specific network structure and belief system. The vision definition will give a comprehensive view of the process of urbanization, as well as the influence by social, economic, and political factors doc632 none Lubinski Ohio State University Forman University of Illinois at Chicago This is a collaborative project by Principal Investigators from Ohio State University and University of Illinois at Chicago to clarify the heavily debated northern extent of the Kara Sea Ice Sheet during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) around 20 thousand years ago. Uncertainty in the configuration of this major ice sheet and the adjoining Barents Sea Ice Sheet has made it difficult to create reliable boundary conditions for global climate model simulations. A successful solution to this problem must involve focussed geomorphic, stratigraphic, and geochronologic studies of Severnaya Zemlya. The Principal Investigators will evaluate the limits and timing of glacial and deglacial events and associated changes in relative sea level on Severnaya Zemlya since the LGM. A collaborative American-Russian-Swedish field program will focus on two key areas where earlier researchers found rich deposits of glacial, marine, and terrestrial deposits associated with the last glacial interglacial cycle. The researchers will: 1) determine the magnitude and timing of the LGM glacial-isostatic response; 2) define the age and timing of LGM glaciation and deglaciation; and 3) assess the flow direction of the LGM. They will determine if the LGM was a 10-20 km-scale expansion of existing ice caps, at least one km-thick ice sheet, or an intermediate complex. The Principal Investigators will collaborate with the glaciological and Earth-rheological modeling communities to improve their understanding of climatic, sea-level and intrinsic glaciologic controls on LGM glaciation in the High Arctic. To help reconstruct ice-sheet thickness and thinning rates, they will also provide their glacioisostatic data to the Earth-rheological modeling community doc633 none This project will integrate institutional economics (common property theory) and human evolutionary ecology (decision theory) to investigate sustainable wood use in an agropastoralist system in Tanzania. Focusing on issues of resource sustainability and human environmental impacts, the researcher will identify the behavioral mechanisms that shape differential household wood use, and quantify rates of wood consumption in two ethnic groups of the Rukwa Region. Two hypotheses regarding the factors that shape wood consumption patterns will be tested. Methods include household surveys in three villages, structured interviewing, focus groups, and quantitative measures of wood extraction and tree species growth. This study will contribute to our understanding of the relationship between indigenous values on resource conservation and the actual effects of population resource use on conservation doc634 none This award supports a two-year program of experimental studies comparing several theoretical perspectives on the choice to cooperate or to behave selfishly in a social dilemma situation. (Social dilemmas occur in cases such as public goods, subject to free riding, or taking advantage of payments by others without contributing to the common good.) Previous research has shown that the first decision to cooperate or to defect is very important, usually setting a precedent for subsequent behavior in the situation. Drawing on social psychological theories of context and framing, expected utility theories or rewards, and prospect theories of anticipated benefit, the PI has formulated a set of contrasting hypotheses of principles governing first decisions. The hypotheses will be assessed in laboratory experiments allowing choices between contributing to a public good, withholding contribution, or taking from the public good without contributing. Results will be used to develop a theoretical understanding of factors influencing first choices. The theories should also have practical implications for many public good situations doc635 none The proposed research studies Salvadoran immigrants relationships to the United States and El Salvador from the s to the present. Questions examined include: 1. How unauthorized migrants survive disenfranchisement; 2. Why receiving states sometimes legalize undocumented aliens; and 3. Why sending states sometimes encourage expatriate citizens to remain distant but loyal. To address these questions, the proposed research will examine the rationales for these policy changes, the ways that accounts of policy changes position migrants vis a vis each nation, and the effects of policy changes on migrants themselves. Research will be conducted in three sites: Los Angeles, which is home to approximately half of the U.S. Salvadoran population; Washington, D.C., where Salvadoran activists meet with U.S. immigration policymakers; and San Salvador, the Salvadoran capital, where Salvadoran officials, politicians and activists devise policies regarding expatriate Salvadorans. Research will consist of interviews with U.S. and Salvadoran policymakers, activists who have attempted to influence policymakers, and the Salvadoran immigrants who are the targets of policies. Between 100-150 individuals will be interviewed. Interviews will elicit interviewees accounts of policy changes, focusing on explanations for policy shifts, points of controversy, the strategies and alliances that made changes possible, the limitations of current policies, and the possible effects of policy changes on the United States, El Salvador, and migrants themselves. Analyzing these accounts will reveal how and whether unauthorized migrants strategies for surviving disenfranchisement can in turn lead to some form of enfranchisement in both their countries of origin and of residence doc636 none Fisher Wheat Harris Stein Recommended project is for a multidisciplinary investigation of the thermal state of the subducting lithosphere offshore of the Costa Rica margin. Heat flow measurements will be undertaken in two cruises covering oceanic lithosphere portions offshore of the Nicoya Peninsula that differ in makeup and tectonic style, with the northern portion formed at the East Pacific Rise and the southern portion, separated by an abrupt change in relief, formed at the Cocos-Nazca spreading center. These measurements will be accompanied by seismic and swath bathymmetric study, as well as a coring program that will examine changes in porewater chemistry associated with fluid flow in the sediments overlying the crust. These field programs will be accompanied by two numerical modeling exercises that will examine the thermal state of the subduction zone as these two portions of lithosphere subduct. The goals will be to determine the comparative thermal state of the subducting lithosphere in these regions, the associated heat and fluid fluxes responsible for the subducting slab thermal states, and how these variable affect subduction zone processes, including chemical flux rates doc637 none Our proposed agenda is organized around a simple but provocative idea: order flow matters for exchange-rate determination. The idea is provocative because order flow plays no role in most exchange rate models. For order flow to play no role, however, requires strong assumptions about how market-clearing prices are actually found. On theoretical grounds, these assumptions are difficult to defend. They are difficult to defend on empirical grounds too. There is strong evidence now that order flow plays an important role, a role that traditional models are not designed to capture. By relaxing these strong assumptions, our models provide a vehicle for understanding how price-setters find the clearing price, and what that price is based upon. Empirically, our initial results show that order flow can account for half of daily exchange-rate variation, a far greater share than traditional macro fundamentals such as interest rates. Our project represents a distinctly different research agenda because these results are hard reconcile with either the existing macroeconomic or microstructure approach. Our research agenda borrows liberally from both the macroeconomic and microstructure approaches, but cannot be viewed as encompassed by either. The agenda does not treat exchange rates as decoupled from macro fundamentals, as is typical within the microstructure approach. It is thus firmly anchored in the broader context of asset pricing. Nor does the agenda treat exchange rates as determined in a common-knowledge environment, as is typical within the macroeconomic approach. Departing from common knowledge requires a treatment of information aggregation. We make ample use of tools from the microstructure literature for addressing this aggregation. The project uses two new data sets that cover activity in the spot foreign exchange market over a four-month period, May 1 to August 31, . One data set contains time-stamped, tic-by-tic data on actual transactions for nine currencies. Three features of this data set are noteworthy. First, it provides transaction information for the whole interbank market over the full 24-hour trading day whereas earlier data sets typically cover one dealer, and only part of the day. Second, individual participants do not observe these market-wide data in real time, which allows us to get inside the black box of price determination. Third, multiple currencies and a relatively long time span allow us to address price determination from more of an asset-pricing perspective. The second of our two data sets is much less extensive than the first, but covers a segment of the market that has, until now, remained beyond the reach of empiricists - trading by the public. Until now, all transaction data in foreign exchange have come from interbank trading. This second data set contains all the public trades in DM $ received by a large bank over the same four-month period covered by our first data set. That bank is number one worldwide in terms of foreign exchange market share. This data set allows us, for the first time, to connect dealers trading and prices to the underlying sources of demand in the economy. The questions we will address with the proposed research include: What share of exchange rate variation is attributable to order flow? What components of order flow convey the most information? Are the price effects of macroeconomic announcements uncorrelated with order flow? Does exchange rate determination work from macroeconomic fundamentals, to order flow, to price? How does order flow link to learning, herding, and noise trading in foreign exchange markets? Does feedback trading account for part of the correlation between order flow and price, e.g., Friedman s stabilizing speculators? When is order flow from central banks likely to have the most price impact doc638 none We propose to study the connection between money, interest rates, and exchange rates in a model with endogenously segmented markets. In our model agents must pay a fixed cost to transfer money between the asset market and the goods market. This fixed cost leads agents to trade bonds and money only infrequently. In any given period only a fraction of agents are currently actively trading. Thus the asset market is segmented in the sense that when the government injects money through an open market operation only the currently active agents are on the other side of the transaction and only their marginal utilities determine interest rates and exchange rates. Money injections fall disproportionately on these active agents; they increase their current consumption and, hence, real interest rates fall and the real exchange rate depreciates. We contrast the implications of this model with this segmentation effect to a standard one with no market segmentation. We first use this model to study two features of the data on money, inflation, and interest rates that have been discussed extensively in the literature. First, using indexed and nominal bonds, expected inflation and real interest rates move in opposite directions. Second, there has been a long-held belief that open market operations have liquidity effects: money injections lead initially to a decline in short-term nominal interest rates. These liquidity effects are thought to decay over time, with short-term rates eventually returning to normal levels or even rising. Accordingly, money injections are thought to steepen the yield curve, lowering long-term rates less than short-term rates or even raising long-term rates. The VAR literature has been somewhat successful in confirming this pattern in the data. Our model can produce both of these features while the standard model cannot. We show that with relatively moderate amounts of segmentation the model can produce dynamic responses similar to those found in the VAR literature. Moreover, our model can generate persistent real effects from market segmentation even from anticipated shocks. We then use a two-country version of our model to study the variability of nominal and real exchange rates and the forward rate anomaly. For low inflation countries, real exchange rates are persistent, substantially more variable than inflation and interest rate differentials across countries, and movements in nominal and real exchange rates are very similar. The standard model fails to reproduce these observations. Our model can produce volatile and persistent real and nominal exchange rates. Finally, our model can generate the forward premium anomaly, namely the tendency for high interest rate currencies to appreciate. This tendency is puzzling since intuitively one might expect that investors would demand higher interest rates on currencies that are expected to fall in value. The key to generating this anomaly is to have exchange rate risk vary systematically with the level of inflation and interest rates. In the standard model, risk premia are constant. In contrast, in our model endogenous changes in market segmentation lead to systematic changes in risk premia doc639 none This research project explores the relationship among methamphetamine use and distribution, and incidents of interpersonal violence. The project involves 200 respondents in total, with six subsamples of methamphetamine users and sellers. The specific aims of the project are to: gather data on the contexts and circumstances of events where methamphetamine users and seller use violence; explore the pharmacological relationship between methamphetamine use and violent behavior; probe the association between methamphetamine distribution and violence; determine more about the relationship between methamphetamine use and domestic violence; and develop perspectives on the role the economic, cultural, and social milieu play in the decisions by respondents to participate in violence. Although an important focus of the work is to explore how methamphetamine users and sellers interpret themselves, others, and the criminal situations they experience, the PIs will also use the data to explore, quantitatively, patterns of offending. Using the life event histories, estimates of offenders criminal involvement will be developed, length of criminal careers will be estimated by offense type and other dimensions of criminal involvement doc614 none Recommended project is for a study of the volatile flux in the Izu-Bonin-Mariana (IBM) arc system. Water and CO2 analyses will be done using the Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometry (FTIR) method on glassy inclusions from olivines, laser-ablation, inductively-coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICPMS) trace element analysis on these same inclusions, and also will do experimental phase equilibrium studies with IBM basalts at pressures ranging from 100-800 megapascals in water saturated and undersaturated conditions. This work is very important for understanding mass balances in arc systems, addressing key unknowns in volatile flux budgets. The samples to be used are already well characterized. The research will address the relative role of decompression versus flux melting for these samples, determine key phase equilibria relationships under hydrous conditions, and develop melt geohygrometers to estimate water contents in IBM lava compositions doc641 none The investigators will create a solar wind parameterized global auroral conductance model based on a series of multi-year, multi-season, collaborative experiments between the POLAR satellite ultraviolet imager and the Sondrestrom incoherent scatter radar. Auroral conductance is a critically underdetermined parameter that is central to a broader understanding of the structure of magnetospherically imposed currents, convection potential, and energy deposition in the high latitude ionosphere. The aim is to merge incoherent scatter radar conductance measurements with conductance estimates from ultraviolet images in a single model that takes advantage of the complementary information available from the two techniques. Modern electrodynamics models of the global ionosphere require an accurate specification of auroral energy deposition and the associated electrical conductance at high latitudes. This study addresses the weakness of current conductance models by creating a model tied to properties of the solar wind. The final output of the study will be solar wind parameterized global conductance maps at the best possible spatial resolution doc642 none Logan The objective of this research is to elucidate the physiology of perchlorate reducing microorganisms (PRMs). Perchlorate has been detected in ground waters and it endangers the drinking water supply of more than twelve million people. Perchlorate can be used as an electron acceptor by many newly isolated strains of bacteria. Evidence suggests that in the last step of perchlorate reduction, a chlorite dismutase produces molecular oxygen. This is an interesting biological development because oxygen is a preferred electron acceptor. Under fully aerobic conditions, even capable bacteria do not reduce perchlorate. Nitrates can also interfere with perchlorate reduction. Using respiratory inhibitors, the researchers will probe the transfer of electrons along the respiratory chain in PRMs in order to determine how perchlorate and chlorate are used for cell respiration. Through the use of other chemicals, such as chloramphenicol to inhibit protein synthesis, it will be determined whether different pathways are inducible or constitutive and what conditions are necessary to maintain perchlorate-reducing conditions in bacterial cultures. This research will provide information necessary for the development of drinking water, wastewater and in-situ treatment systems to biologically remove perchlorate doc643 none This study will investigate the role of women s bargaining power (intra-household power dynamics) in shaping access to resources and children s health in Tanzania. The researcher will test two competing hypotheses concerning the factors that influence women s marital bargaining power in a rural community. The study is based on previous research that argues that where women have greater bargaining power (and thus access to resources), child health improves. Using behavioral ecology theory, the research will examine how women s bargaining power shapes maternal work efforts, paternal contributions to the household, and ultimately child health. Methods include a village survey, demographic analysis, time allocation studies, and structured interviews with samples of the population. This study contributes to debates in economics and anthropology concerning how individuals in households, particularly less powerful members such as women and children, achieve and utilize bargaining power to access resources (and thus health doc615 none Recommended project is for a comprehensive geochemical and geochronological examination of Eocene to Miocene volcanism in the southern arc and backarc of the Izu-Bonin-Marianas (IBM) arc system, tracing its older development with time. In doing so, the recommended research will also re-examine well-characterized samples that have been previously investigated using older, obsolescent anayltical techniques. This study will examine the changing nature of volcanism in the IBM system, as it transformed from boninitic volcanism associated with subduction initiation to the more normal tholeitic and cal-clkaline arc volcanism also seen today in the modern volcanic arc and backarc. This study also will examine the changing nature of the mantle sources during this transformation, as well as the implications they carry for tectonic processes during the arc system evolution. Previously sampled lavas and other volcanic rocks will be supplemented by collection of new samples during field work on Guam; all of these samples will be analyzed for major and trace elemental composition, isotopic composition, and geochronological (40 Ar - 39 Ar) dating using the latest analytical techniques doc645 none This research will provide an economic analysis of sequential contracting among vertically related firms. The goal of the research is to develop new theory, integrate existing theory, shed new light on some important contracting strategies, and offer guidance for antitrust policy makers. The agenda is timely in that it addresses some of the major current policy concerns in antitrust, including the use of exclusivity agreements (exclusive dealing and exclusive territories) in monopolization cases, the role of countervailing buyer power in merger analysis, the economic effects of slotting allowances (lump-sum payments from manufacturers to retailers), and whether and why large buyers might negotiate most-favored-customer clauses in their supply contracts. In addition, it will shed new light on when price discrimination in intermediate goods markets may be harmful and, hence, when enforcement of the Robinson-Patman Act may be in the social interest doc646 none This project addresses the intersection of three areas of law and society research: legal consciousness and rights mobilization, law and competing norms, and law and social change. It examines, in the workplace context, the process through which workers think about and mobilized the legal rights specified in the Family and Medical Leave Act. It also examines investigate how beliefs about work, family commitments, disability and the law influence the process of mobilizing rights. The research addresses these questions: What is the process though which workers learn about and exercise their legal rights? How are beliefs about work, family responsibilities, disability and the law related to workers, decisions about claiming their rights, and their perceptions of conflict over leave? How do workers think about the law in relation to their disputes over leave? How do employees think about fairness and justice in workplace practices regarding leave? What determines employees satisfaction with the outcomes of leave disputes? The PI conduct in-depth, qualitative interviews with approximately 40 employees who negotiated leaves without going to court. These interviews will contribute to the field by filling the gap between research about litigated disputes and research about individuals who did not assert their rights doc647 none PI: Braver This research will use behavioral, brain imaging, and computational modelling techniques to investigate the neural bases and mechanisms of human cognitive control. A powerful method for elucidating cognitive mechanisms is to tax cognitive processing to the point at which some aspect of its underlying structure is revealed. Here, we use normal emotion as a methodological technique for challenging cognitive processing. This approach might be especially informative because normal emotion has specific influences on self-regulation and control. In behavioral and brain imaging studies, we will test predictions of the computational model under two related but distinct types of emotional challenge: induced emotional states, and the delivery of unexpected rewards. Human participants will perform various cognitive tasks either while in emotional states or while receiving unexpected rewards. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we will identify areas of the brain that are not only critical for cognitive control but also are sensitive to modulation by emotion and reward. We will then perform computer simulations to test whether the model can capture detailed aspects of the behavioral and brain imaging data. These studies will further scientific knowledge by both testing and extending an existing theory of cognitive control. In particular, it will help refine how our under-standing of specific brain regions (i.e., the prefrontal cortex) might mediate cognitive control, and how normal emotion influences those control systems. This work could enhance our understanding of human performance, and lead to improved techniques for optimizing performance using emotion. In addition, these studies could provide another step toward a detailed understanding of the normal interactions between cognition and emotion. This could be of practical value in helping to understand mental disorders such as depression, anxiety, and drug addiction doc648 none Much of the work that is accomplished in organizations, schools, families, and government settings involves people working together in groups. This project examines how it is that people are able to coordinate their efforts in cooperative, interdependent workgroups operating in multiple task environments. The research is informed by a model of tacit coordination, which suggests that individual group members allocate their efforts to tasks based on expectations about teammates behavior (social knowledge), perceptions of task demands (task knowledge) and assessments of one s own capabilities (self knowledge). Theoretically relevant features of the task environment include group size, the number of tasks to be accomplished and the staffing demands of the tasks. The Tacit Coordination Model incorporates constructs from traditional decision theory and yields normative predictions for task choices based on the assumption that members choose tasks that maximize the marginal expected utility of their actions. Nonnormative heuristics for task choices are also considered. For example, members may avoid tasks for which their contributions are likely to be dispensable (overstaffed tasks) or futile (understaffed tasks). Six studies use a collective problem-solving paradigm and examine the development of coordination over repeated trials. These studies explore the use of normative principles and nonnormative heuristics by members to guide their task choices and the relationships among these rules and the effectiveness of team coordination. Also of interest is the impact of group heterogeneity (diversity of abilities and values) on coordinated action for tasks that have different staffing requirements. The ideas embodied in the model suggest, for example, that heterogeneity facilitates coordinated action when tasks can be staffed by one member but impedes coordination when tasks must be staffed by all members. The empirical work will inform the development of a computational model of tacit coordination, which can facilitate studying the collective implication of individual choices and the emergent properties of using different coordination rules over time doc649 none Indigenous languages now disappear at an increasing rate. Activists and educators in a Yup ik Eskimo village in southwestern Alaska motivate language revitalization efforts by emphasizing the importance of preserving Central Alaskan Yup ik as part of a rich cultural heritage. Yet resulting ideological notions of linguistic purism stigmatize current youth language practices, creating linguistic insecurity in speakers crucial to the language s future. This dissertation focuses on effects of this contradiction by identifying how youth perceive, enact and or reconfigure language ideologies in daily language practices, and how they influence younger children s language use through socialization networks. Ethnographic and sociolinguistic methods will 1) examine assumptions about bilingualism and language revitalization underlying educational and legal policies; 2) demonstrate how these policies constrain definitions of language ability and learn-ability locally and 3) document linguistic practices of 12 bilingual youth (ages 7-20) from four nuclear families as they interact in family and peer clusters over a year. Findings contribute to language ideology research by describing in detail how youth culture affects linguistic norms and ideology s enactment in bilingual communities. Language planners will find useful this case study of how language ideologies are interpreted and deployed by the young people on whom language revitalization efforts depend doc650 none Slingerland This grant provides partial support of the costs of upgrading computational equipment within the Geosciences Department at Penn State University (PSU). High end multi-CPU servers and networked workstations will allow sharing of computational resources by various targeted research groups, postdocs, and graduate and undergraduate students. The equipment will be used for a wide array of compute intensive research in the earth sciences including: seismological research aimed at elucidating the structure of continental crust and volcanic plumbing systems; studies of the geodynamic evolution of active plate margins; modeling of fluvial erosional processes and landscape evolution; modeling basin sedimentation processes; and simulations of chemical reactions and kinetics at mineral-water interfaces doc651 none Walker, Richard J. This is a collaborative (University of Maryland and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory), multidisciplinary project designed to further test the possibility of core-mantle interaction. It will utilize a combination of isotope geochemistry and experimental petrology geophysics. Specific objectives are to: 1) Precisely measure the 186Os-187Os systematics of two carefully chosen plume-derived systems, and assess if there is a positive relation between 186Os and 187Os enrichment. 2) Begin a search for isotopic anomalies in the short lived 107Pd-107Ag, 182Hf-182W, 98Tc-98Ru and 97Tc-97Mo systems in the plume derived rocks for which the 186Os-187Os evidence suggests the presence of a core component. 3) Begin experimental work to examine the metal-silicate partitioning behaviors of Pt, Re, Os, Hf, W, Pd, Ag, Mo, Tc and Ru between silicate and metal at high pressures. The goal of this research is to generate a substrate of data on which to make predictive models of the behaviors of the isotope systems composed of these elements resulting from core segregation in both metal and silicate reservoirs. 4) Measure FeO solubility in liquid Fe alloy at high pressure to evaluate the potential for recovery of core geochemical signals by transferring material from the core to the mantle by exsolution doc652 none Leckie The objective of this research is to elucidate the dominant processes governing the fate of heavy metals in soil and groundwater environments. This research will focus specifically on a well-controlled model biogeochemical system consisting of a chelator (citric acid), a mineral surface (goethite), a pure microbial culture (Pseudomonas fluorescens), the heavy metal uranium U(VI) as the uranyl ion (UO22+), and CO2. First, experiments with four sub-systems will be performed to closely evaluate the mechanisms which may play a role in the fate of uranyl. These sub-systems include: (1) a system of uranyl-citrate-geothite, without bacteria, to determine the effect of citrate on the sorption of uranyl on geothite, (2) a uranyl-citrate-microbe system, without the solid phase, to determine the microbial interactions with the system components, (3) a uranyl-geothite-microbe system to determine behavior in the absence of citrate, (4) a system without the uranyl ion to determine the effect of citrate sorption on its biodegradation. In the second phase, the overall biogeochemical system will be investigated to determine the mechanisms affecting the overall partitioning of uranyl doc653 none Sims Depaolo This CSEDI proposal will focus on developing a coupled geodynamic-geochemical model of the Hawaiian plume that will allow the investigators to address questions relating to the spatial and temporal variations in magma compositions. Chemical data available from studies in the Hawaiian island chain and from the Hawaiian Scientific Drilling Project (HSDP) drill core will provide constraints for this modeling. The project will focus on answering the question: ``Can the petrological, geochemical, and isotopic characteristics observed among the Hawaiian volcanoes be explained in terms of plume derived melts from a self-consistent geodynamic-geochemical model? . In particular, the investigators will determine whether the compositional changes in magmas erupted along the island chain are consistent with our understanding of plume dynamics and mantle melting. During the one-year time frame of this proposal, the goals will be to couple the recently developed 3-D variable viscosity plume model of Ribe and Christensen ( ) with calculations of trace-element chemistry and uranium series disequilibria. They will also develop a new major-element parameterization specifically designed to address melting in the Hawaiian plume. The development of this model will be an ongoing project; the algorithm will be designed to be updated as new experimental data become available. By iteratively refining the plume model and calculations of magma chemistry, and by comparing the model computations to the observed magma compositions and eruption rates, this research will further our understanding of the dynamics of the mantle plume and determine the melting conditions in the mantle beneath the Hawaiian island chain doc654 none This research is based on a new theory of how subjective (Fechnerian) distances among objects that form a continuously parametrized space can be computed from the degree of discriminability of each object from its infinitesimally close neighbors. This theory uses the apparatus of modern differential geometry (generalized Finsler spaces, previously successfully applied to a variety of problems in physics and, more recently, biology) to refine the 150 year-old ideas of G.T. Fechner and generalize them to stimulus spaces of arbitrary dimensionality. The research is aimed at exploring several important theoretical issues stemming from this development, and at empirically testing its applicability to one- and two-dimensional stimulus spaces. The theoretical part of the research includes such issues as (1) the possible ways in which discrimination probabilities may be determined by inter-stimulus distances, and the relationship between these distances and the Fechnerian metric computed from these discrimination probabilities; (2) the constraints imposed on Fechnerian distances by various versions of the perceptual separability and independence assumptions; and (3) the possible ways of generating discrimination probabilities by means of a model in which each stimulus is assumed to be represented by a random variable in a perceptual space, and two stimuli be discriminated in a given trial if and only if their random representations are separated by more than a certain critical distance. The empirical part of the research is aimed at such goals as (A) reconstruction of the vertical and horizontal cross-sections of discrimination probability functions in small vicinities of their minima; (B) testing the invariance of Fechnerian distances computed from discrimination probabilities corresponding to different levels of subjective confidence; and (C) the comparison of the Fechnerian metrics computed from different judgment schemes, such as same-different and two-alternative forced choice. The stimulus space used in all the experiments is formed by varying the distance and direction of instantaneous displacements of a small visual target. A successful completion of this project promises to significantly advance the theoretical foundations of measurement in psychology, as well as in any other domain where the objects being studied can be assigned continuously varying coordinates, either by physical measurements or by other scaling procedures, and where the objects with similar coordinates can be discriminated or confused with determinable probabilities. Thus, although the language of the theory that is used and tested in this research is geared towards sensory perception, its sphere of applicability includes a variety of paradigms in electrophysiology, educational testing, attitudinal surveys, consumer choice analysis, decision making research, etc doc655 none This award is for continued studies of long-term climatic change aimed at developing a predictive theory that can account for the ever-increasing geological proxy evidence for the co-evolution of the climatic variables. These variables can be subdivided into (a) the fast response atmospheric and surface state quantities that equilibrate relatively rapidly, and (b) the slow-response, high-inertia quantities (e.g., ice sheet mass, deep ocean temperature, carbon inventories) that carry the main long-term evolution and comprise the center manifold of the climate system to which the fast response variables are attracted. The studies involve statistical analyses of the relevant time-series records, and theoretical studies based on both general circulation models (governing the fast-response, equilibrium, parts of the climate system) and dynarnical-system models (governing the slow-response, non-equilibrium processes). The goal is to enlarge upon present theories of late Cenozoic climatic evolution in several directions doc656 none The objective of this project is to understand the role of growth factors and bioreactor design on the in vitro culture of hematopoietic tissues, with a goal of producing cells outside of the body for use in bone marrow reconstruction and gene therapy. The Principal Investigators (PIs) propose a technique to increase the expansion (division) of stem cells ex vivo. Stem cells are typically found in the bone marrow, and after differentiation are responsible for creation of mature blood cells (hematopoiesis). The PIs hypothesize that membrane bound stem cell factor (bSCF) will result in enhanced stem cell renewal ex vivo, and that will occur because bSCF (and associated receptor, c-kit) will not be internalized by the stem cells. There are four specific aims to test this hypothesis which include: (1) covalently bind SCF to a non-cell-adhesive polymer support; (2) study the effect of bSCF and soluble SCF (sSCF) on model cells, the human-cytokine-dependent cell line M07e; (3) model the growth of M07e cells (with bSCF and sSCF) to determine growth death rates, and the fraction of c-kit receptors occupied by SCF, and (4) repeat these steps with human stem cells removed from cancer patients doc657 none Under the direction of Dr. Thomas Dillehay Mr. Jose Iriarte will collect data for his doctoral dissertation.. He will conduct archaeological excavation at the site of EMA, located on the Atlantic coastal plain of Uruguay. Preliminary field research has revealed that the site dates to the Early Formative period and encompasses ca. 50 ha bearing more than 70 mounds located on a flat spur which projects into extensive wetlands. The majority of the mounds are low flat and circular, between .5 and 1.5 m in height with a diameter ranging between 15 and 30 m. The accretional nature of these mounds results from the incidental accumulation of midden refuse and does not suggest any intentional construction episodes or deliberate shaping. They are arranged in a semicircular shape around a central open space resembling the village layout characteristic of many ethnographic and prehistoric Amazon groups. Mr. Iriarte will carry out an excavation program with the goal of defining how settlement space is partitioned in mound and off-mound areas. He wishes to discover the nature of activities conducted in different areas and how these relate to the organization of the community. He will examine deep mound deposits by trench transect and conduct systematic interval transect sampling in the shallow deposits which characterize off mound areas. Faunal and floral remains will provide insight into subsistence and ceramic seriation in conjunction with thermoluminescent and radiocarbon dating will allow absolute dating of individual features. The Early Formative period marks the transition from hunting and gathering to a settled village way of life. While long-held assumptions suggest that the prehistoric cultures of southeastern Uruguay remained marginal hunter-gatherers organized in simple, small and highly mobile bands until recent times, EMA and similar sites argue otherwise. The multi-mound sites indicate a decrease in residential mobility and ceremonial mounded architecture suggests community planning. Sites such as EMA are aggregated in highly productive wetland areas and this suggests both intensification and the exploitation of new environments and species. Maize, squash, beans and possibly cultivated tubers were added to the diet. This general type of transition occurred, independently, in many parts of the world and archaeologists wish to understand the processes responsible for this change. Mr. Iriarte argues that the single tightly defined developmental trajectory postulated by many theorists does not exist but rather that significant variation can be observed in the archaeological record. This project helps to define the limits of such variability. It will provide data of interest to many archaeologists and assist in training a promising young scientist doc658 none This project supports the deployment of a Twin Otter aircraft and ground-based measurements as part of ACE-Asia (Aerosol Characterization Experiment). A comprehensive instrument package for the Twin Otter will be available for measurements of aerosol physical, chemical, and optical properties, including size distribution, hygroscopic properties (Tandem Differential Mobility Analyzer), size-segregated chemistry, and a novel single particle spectrometer. The objectives of the research flights are to characterize the aerosol in the Asian outflow region and to perform local and column radiative closure studies. In collaboration with a scientist at HKUST (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), aerosol samples collected by the aircraft and at ground stations in Cheju Island, Korea, and other locations will be analyzed for organic elemental carbon (EC OC) and speciated organics via extraction, derivatization, and GC MS analysis. Modeling studies will be performed in collaboration with Dr. Carmichael (University of Iowa) using a three-dimensional atmospheric chemical transport model which includes gas-phase chemistry, aerosol microphysics, thermodynamics, gas particle conversion and anthropogenic emissions doc659 none Holikachuk is an Athabaskan language spoken in the village of Grayling in southwestern Alaska. It is part of the Northern Athabaskan language continuum and falls between Deg Hit an (Ingalik) and Koyukon. Linguistically, it is closer to Lower Koyukon, although culturally the Holikachuk people are closer to the Deg Hit an. Today Holikachuk is the most endangered Athabaskan language of Alaska and it is in danger of disappearing with the passing of the oldest generation. There are approximately twelve speakers left among an estimated population of 200 ethnic Holikachuk (Krauss, :32). Furthermore, all speakers are over sixty years of age and some are quite elderly. Holikachuk is also an under-documented language. There is no detailed study of the language and no grammatical description goes beyond the basic phonology. The objective of this project is the comprehensive grammatical description of Holikachuk resulting in the publication of a detailed descriptive grammar of the language. This will be achieved through extensive fieldwork and analysis of all data previously recorded on Holikachuk. The grammar will be the result of several phases of analysis following each field season and it will be published by the Alaska Native Language Center. A computer database program will be used to start compiling a Holikachuk dictionary. The resulting field notes and descriptive grammar will be useful to language preservationists, linguists and scholars in related disciplines, and the Holikachuk community. This project will be the first step towards insuring the preservation of Holikachuk by providing a permanent comprehensive record of the language. In doing so, it will contribute directly to the study of comparative Athabaskan and of the Northern Athabaskan language continuum. The textual material is important to Oral History and Anthropology and will contribute to the expansion of the ethnographic record on the Holikachuk people and Northern Athabaskan cultures. The Holikachuk community will gain a permanent record of their ancestral language as well as tools necessary for the production of pedagogical materials for the development of revitalization programs doc604 none An integrated multi-institutional effort of multi-scale seismic imaging of the Mariana Subduction Factory (MSF). The PIs will conduct multi-channel seismic reflection profiling, controlled-source wide-angle reflection refraction profiling and passive recording of local and teleseismic earthquakes through OBS deployment to be carried out with Japanese investigators. The data will provide a comprehensive velocity and attenuation, structural and stratigraphic image of the MSF. The principal objectives of the study are to understand: 1) velocity and attenuation structure of the mantle, 2) large-scale flow of the mantle wedge, 3) velocity structure of the subducting oceanic crust, 4) seismic stratigraphy and structure of the forearc, arc and remnant arc, 5) the magma chamber below the volcanoes, 6) a possible double seismic zone, and 7) updip an downdip limits of the seismogenic zone. The study will also help in the planning and eventual drilling in the Mariana island arc system doc636 none Fisher Wheat Harris Stein Recommended project is for a multidisciplinary investigation of the thermal state of the subducting lithosphere offshore of the Costa Rica margin. Heat flow measurements will be undertaken in two cruises covering oceanic lithosphere portions offshore of the Nicoya Peninsula that differ in makeup and tectonic style, with the northern portion formed at the East Pacific Rise and the southern portion, separated by an abrupt change in relief, formed at the Cocos-Nazca spreading center. These measurements will be accompanied by seismic and swath bathymmetric study, as well as a coring program that will examine changes in porewater chemistry associated with fluid flow in the sediments overlying the crust. These field programs will be accompanied by two numerical modeling exercises that will examine the thermal state of the subduction zone as these two portions of lithosphere subduct. The goals will be to determine the comparative thermal state of the subducting lithosphere in these regions, the associated heat and fluid fluxes responsible for the subducting slab thermal states, and how these variable affect subduction zone processes, including chemical flux rates doc662 none Recommended project is for a multidisciplinary investigation of the thermal state of the subducting lithosphere offshore of the Costa Rica margin. Heat flow measurements will be undertaken in two cruises covering oceanic lithosphere portions offshore of the Nicoya Peninsula that differ in makeup and tectonic style, with the northern portion formed at the East Pacific Rise and the southern portion, separated by an abrupt change in relief, formed at the Cocos-Nazca spreading center. These measurements will be acompanied by seismic and swath bathymmetric study, as well as a coring program that will examine changes in porewater chemistry associated with fluid flow in the sediments overlying the crust. These field programs will be accompanied by two numerical modeling exercises that will examine the thermal state of the subduction zone as these two portions of lithosphere subduct. The goals will be to determine the comparative thermal state of the subducting lithosphere in these regions, the associated heat and fluid fluxes responsible for the subducting slab thermal states, and how these variables affect subduction zone processes, including chemical flux rates doc663 none T. Gasparik, M. J. Drake, J. B. Parise: Collaborative Research of the Origin of Inclusions in Diamonds From the Deep Mantle In this CSEDI collaborative research project, we plan to continue our experimental investigation of the origin of inclusions in diamonds from the deep mantle using the minor and trace element contents of the inclusions. Observed element contents will be matched in high-pressure experiments on phase relations and element partitioning in those assemblages which include phases found as inclusions in diamonds. We will complete our ongoing studies of the origin of inclusions with CaSiO3 and (Mg,Fe)O compositions, and then extend the investigation to the origin of majoritic garnet inclusions. The minor and trace element contents to be matched by experiments are available for all three kinds of inclusions. Partitioning of these elements among phases in various assemblages, which include analogues of the selected inclusions and other phases observed as inclusions, is determined over a range of experimental pressures, temperatures and compositions, until a close match is found between the minor and trace element contents of the inclusions and of the analogue phases. The compositions of the coexisting phases then provide information about the original assemblage, from which the inclusion came, and thus constrain the mineral and chemical composition of the source region and the P-T conditions of origin doc664 none The Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Dictionary project builds on the first phase of research, to (NSF Grant No. ), which produced a compilation of more than 16,000 words and the initial editing and elaboration of entries. During Phase II, the Principal Investigators will complete the entries and the other sections of the dictionary, which include a grammatical sketch, noun and verb paradigms, an index of noun and verb roots, sound-files, and textual and pictorial illustrations. Entries will be added to a dictionary website, and a print edition will be prepared. The Principal Investigators, along with participating linguists and community research assistants, will work closely with speakers in the communities where Passamaquoddy-Maliseet is spoken today to enhance and supplement dictionary entries, and to assure the usefulness and appropriateness of the dictionary, its accessibility, and its pedagogical value. A community survey will document variations in lexicon, usage, verb and noun inflections, pitch stress, and other features of the language, for inclusion in the dictionary. The goal is a dictionary useful to the work of teachers and students, writers and researchers in Passamaquoddy and Maliseet communities and beyond doc665 none This research examines juror reasoning and jury decision-making via two experiments. Each of the studies undertaken here is designed to examine individuals reasoning abilities and how those abilities affect group decision-making. The research builds on Kuhn s finding that there are two levels of general reasoning, one of which involves satisficing - finding a plausible story and sticking with it, despite non-conforming evidence. The other type of reasoning involves systematic evaluation of evidence for the extent to which it fits alternative stories, and selection of the one with the least discordant information. The experiments examine how jury composition (in terms of the distribution of reasoning levels and pre-deliberation verdict choices within the jury) affect the level of reasoning of the jury as a body. The results should lead to more sophisticated predictions of social decision-making that include measures of individual differences in reasoning doc666 none H. J. S. Fernando, Arizona State University The terrain conditions, as well as the strong diurnal heating cooling cycles experienced in the southwest region of the US, can lead to significant pollution concentrations. Understanding the natural atmospheric flows that are associated with the interplay of the terrain and the buoyancy effects is a prerequisite to mitigating the harmful effects of automotive industrial domestic sources of released pollutants. It is expected that this integrated study: laboratory experiments, theoretical modeling, and field experiments, will lead to the enhanced understanding that may permit controlled actions to lessen the effects of the pollutants. It is also expected that this investigation will show the benefits of such a well-coordinated investigation and that future studies will benefit from the evolved methodology doc667 none What are the sources of political trust? Can the political surroundings in which individuals live shape their feelings of trust in government? Although we hear much about the public s low opinion of the government, we understand little about the structure of the attitudes or how political realities work to shape feelings of trust in government. This dissertation examines the attitudinal components of political trust and the linkage between feelings of governmental trust and the political context in which individuals live. These relationships are analyzed by: (1) the collection of original survey data on citizen attitudes toward local governments on information on local political characteristics, and (2) the use of multi-level analytical techniques to investigate how the context created by various governmental structures and political realities affect the political attitudes of residents. The primary objective of this research is to address a basic question: what types of governmental structures serve to enhance public trust in government? This project develops and tests a theory that links local political characteristics to citizen attitudes toward government. Specifically, the political characteristics surrounding residents are posited to affect their assessments of political outcomes, the political decision-making process, and the people in government. These assessments, in turn, are expected to influence attitudes of political trust. By gathering data on local governmental structures (such as election form and direct democratic mechanisms) and political realities (such as council diversity and partisan competition) from a range of localities, and merging this information with measures of citizen attitudes, the dissertation can determine how variation in citizen attitudes relates to differences in political structures and realities. Findings from this research provide information to the debate about the sources of governmental mistrust as well as insight into how contextual variables can contribute to an understanding of individual-level attitudes doc668 none Karato In this collaborative project, the investigators aim at making progress on how to resolve lateral variations in water content between oceans and continents in the upper mantle, an issue of importance for our understanding of evolution and dynamics of the continental lithosphere. To this effect, they will combine seismological and mineral physics tools. On the mineral physics side, they will work on finding a suitable parameterization through which the effect of water on seismic velocity and attenuation is properly accounted for. On the seismology side, they will test possible parameterizations provided by the mineral physics group on a global seismic waveform dataset, which will be assembled during the course of this project and corrected for crustal effects, as compiled from the literature doc604 none An integrated multi-institutional effort of multi-scale seismic imaging of the Mariana Subduction Factory (MSF). The PIs will conduct multi-channel seismic reflection profiling, controlled-source wide-angle reflection refraction profiling and passive recording of local and teleseismic earthquakes through OBS deployment to be carried out with Japanese investigators. The data will provide a comprehensive velocity and attenuation, structural and stratigraphic image of the MSF. The principal objectives of the study are to understand: 1) velocity and attenuation structure of the mantle, 2) large-scale flow of the mantle wedge, 3) velocity structure of the subducting oceanic crust, 4) seismic stratigraphy and structure of the forearc, arc and remnant arc, 5) the magma chamber below the volcanoes, 6) a possible double seismic zone, and 7) updip an downdip limits of the seismogenic zone. The study will also help in the planning and eventual drilling in the Mariana island arc system doc670 none This project investigates the outcome of civil wars: under what conditions do the parties to a civil war choose to end the war by negotiation, and who prevails when negotiations fail. The researcher develops a formal model that holds war termination to be the outcome of rational choices that both sides make by comparing their expected utility from fighting and from negotiation -- including the risk that one s opponent may renege on an agreement. Changes in the military balance, the level of costs suffered by each side, and the level of external intervention determine how a civil war ends. Hypotheses are derived from this game-theoretic model by using a computer program written by the researcher that generates approximate solutions to the game. After further refinement of this formal model, these hypotheses are tested using data from all civil wars fought and terminated from to . Further research and coding are necessary to measure the military balance and relative casualty levels and final war outcome for some of these wars. In addition to increasing significantly our understanding of how civil wars end, the project provides a common data resource with which others may develop and test theories doc671 none This dissertation project investigates specific aspects of the mental computation of verbal morphology in speakers of Spanish as a first language, and speakers of English as a second language. The project is framed within a research program directed by Michael Ullman. The program investigates the computational and neural underpinnings of two capacities that characterize language: the mental lexicon of memorized words, and the mental grammar of rules that specify how lexical forms combine into larger sequences. It tests the dual-system hypothesis that the lexicon is subserved by associative memory, whereas a symbol-manipulation system underlies grammatical combinations. In contrast, single-system theories posit that all words and rules depend upon associative memory. Evidence supporting a dual-system view has come from psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic studies of morphology. These have shown that irregular forms (e.g. dug ) are lexically memorized, while regular forms (e.g. walked ) are computed by grammatical rules. Most studies have examined this distinction in English past-tense inflection, in native English speakers. This project will test the generality of the results in (1) Spanish verbal morphology, which differs substantially from English morphology, in native Spanish speakers; and (2) English past-tense morphology, in Spanish and Chinese native-speaking adult learners of English as a second language doc663 none T. Gasparik, M. J. Drake, J. B. Parise: Collaborative Research of the Origin of Inclusions in Diamonds From the Deep Mantle In this CSEDI collaborative research project, we plan to continue our experimental investigation of the origin of inclusions in diamonds from the deep mantle using the minor and trace element contents of the inclusions. Observed element contents will be matched in high-pressure experiments on phase relations and element partitioning in those assemblages which include phases found as inclusions in diamonds. We will complete our ongoing studies of the origin of inclusions with CaSiO3 and (Mg,Fe)O compositions, and then extend the investigation to the origin of majoritic garnet inclusions. The minor and trace element contents to be matched by experiments are available for all three kinds of inclusions. Partitioning of these elements among phases in various assemblages, which include analogues of the selected inclusions and other phases observed as inclusions, is determined over a range of experimental pressures, temperatures and compositions, until a close match is found between the minor and trace element contents of the inclusions and of the analogue phases. The compositions of the coexisting phases then provide information about the original assemblage, from which the inclusion came, and thus constrain the mineral and chemical composition of the source region and the P-T conditions of origin doc673 none Walker, David This is a collaborative (University of Maryland and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory), multidisciplinary project designed to further test the possibility of core-mantle interaction. It will utilize a combination of isotope geochemistry and experimental petrology geophysics. Specific objectives are to: 1) Precisely measure the 186Os-187Os systematics of two carefully chosen plume-derived systems, and assess if there is a positive relation between 186Os and 187Os enrichment. 2) Begin a search for isotopic anomalies in the short lived 107Pd-107Ag, 182Hf-182W, 98Tc-98Ru and 97Tc-97Mo systems in the plume derived rocks for which the 186Os-187Os evidence suggests the presence of a core component. 3) Begin experimental work to examine the metal-silicate partitioning behaviors of Pt, Re, Os, Hf, W, Pd, Ag, Mo, Tc and Ru between silicate and metal at high pressures. The goal of this research is to generate a substrate of data on which to make predictive models of the behaviors of the isotope systems composed of these elements resulting from core segregation in both metal and silicate reservoirs. 4) Measure FeO solubility in liquid Fe alloy at high pressure to evaluate the potential for recovery of core geochemical signals by transferring material from the core to the mantle by exsolution doc674 none This study documents the interactions between cultural, social, and environmental change in an exurban landscape since the late s. The research uses a case study of Nevada County, California-an area representative of many formerly rural, resource-dependent communities that are increasingly dominated by in-migrants from urban areas seeking cultural and natural amenities. The study will survey a stratified random sample of 150 exurban households. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysis of time-series aerial photography will then be used in combination with the quantitative survey and qualitative ethnographic social research methods and historical data sets to document relationships between cultural, social, and landscape change on these private rural-residential landholdings. Using recent theories of place and landscape from human geography, the study documents relationships between owners images (or ideologies ) of rural places, their land use practices, and environmental changes on their parcels over time. By establishing categories of owner ideology, land use practices, and associated environmental changes, a multifactorial analysis of variance method will be used to verify relationships. An estimated 60 million Americans live in once-rural areas defined as exurban, and this category of land use is expected to increase dramatically in the next decades. Rural sprawl has attracted considerable political concern, in part because the areas most attractive to exurban migrants are often part of important, unique, and fragile ecosystems. Balancing growth and environmental protection in such areas poses a major challenge. Yet there are significant gaps in our current understanding of the processes of exurban growth. In particular, little attention has been given to the heterogeneous character of exurban growth, or the cultural basis of this heterogeneity. Evidence from Nevada County indicates that exurban landowners use a wide range of land use practices and have diverse ideas of the rural landscape-from those who seek to recreate a suburban lifestyle in a rural area, to those who seek a romanticized cowboy lifestyle, to those who seek closeness to nature. Although other research on exurban growth has documented the social forces driving exurban migration, this project focuses on the ways that diverse cultural perceptions shape exurban practices and environmental changes. A better understanding of the cultural dimensions of land use change in exurban areas is recognized as a necessary foundation for more effective policies to address the challenges of exurban growth doc675 none Romanowicz In this collaborative project, the investigators aim at making progress on how to resolve lateral variations in water content between oceans and continents in the upper mantle, an issue of importance for our understanding of evolution and dynamics of the continental lithosphere. To this effect, they will combine seismological and mineral physics tools. On the mineral physics side, they will work on finding a suitable parameterization through which the effect of water on seismic velocity and attenuation is properly accounted for. On the seismology side, they will test possible parameterizations provided by the mineral physics group on a global seismic waveform dataset, which will be assembled during the course of this project and corrected for crustal effects, as compiled from the literature doc676 none Gurnis, Michael This is a renewal of a collaborative project in which a seismologist and a geodynamicist (with their students) work closely together to understand the dynamics and fine structure of the lower mantle. The investigators have focussed on this region of the deep Earth because it plays such an important role in controlling the thermal and chemical state and evolution of the entire planet. In this project, seismological and geodynamical methodologies are tightly integrated. Geodynamical models (some integrated to the geological evolution of surface plates) are used to study: The dynamics of upwelling regions with large variations in viscosity, partial melting, and chemical heterogeneity; strong, cold slabs interacting with thermo-chemical boundary layers; and lateral transition regions between upwellings and downwellings. These thermo-chemical structures are mapped into two- and three-dimensional seismic velocity fields so that dynamic models are directly tested against observed waveforms, differential travel times, and tomography. The dynamic models motivate the collection of new data while also suggesting new ways to interpret seismic models. This approach has lead to an acceleration in our understanding of Earth processes doc677 none The objective of this project is to increase the lifetime of mammalian cells in culture by limiting apoptosis through genetic engineering. Specifically, anti-apoptosis genes will be modified to prevent their degradation in culture. The rationale is that much mammalian cell death in bioreactors is apoptotic and therefore represents a mechanism for increasing culture lifetimes. This would reduce productivity costs and make cell culture processes feasible for a larger number of products. This project will develop stable inhibitors for apoptosis for a wide range of mammalian hosts such as Chinese Hamster Ovary and Baby Hamster Kidney cell lines doc678 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Sciences for FY . The research and training plan is in the area of biophysics and is entitled Protein Engineering of a Model Protein. This study uses a synthetic diiron-oxo protein (DF) as a model for the class of metalloproteins that performs a variety of functions in living systems including dioxygen transport, conversion of ribonucleotides to deoxyribonucleotides, desaturation of fatty acids, and the solubilization and storage of iron. DF has been designed to serve as a minimal model of diiron-oxo proteins and has been shown to contain a metal center that is very similar to the diiron-oxo proteins. The model is interesting because the dinuclear metal centers in all diiron-oxo proteins contain many common structural features, but at the same time contain subtle differences that give rise to different activities. This makes the diiron-oxo system attractive for studying how protein environments can influence active site functions. This projects seeks to refine the first generation DF system into one that is amenable for engineering and designing efforts and for studying diiron-oxo protein function by (1) developing an efficient synthesis of DF which would offer a quick way to generate large numbers of DF variants and (2) by investigating the determinants for the function and structure of the center by systematically altering the atoms near the active site. Completing these goals will guide efforts towards designing pre-defined functions into the diiron-oxo centers doc679 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for . The research and training plan is in the area of Behavioral Neuroscience and is entitled Regulation of Synaptic Plasticity by Subpopulations of NMDA Receptors . Long-term potentiation (LTP), long-term depression (LTD), and depotentiation are persistent and long-lasting changes in synaptic function that may underlie the cellular mechanisms for learning and memory. This research examines the function of the NMDA receptor (a post-synaptic receptor that induces neuronal firing in glutaminergic neurons) in LTP, LTD, and depotentiation. The role of specific NMDA receptor subunits (i.e. components) is assessed in the hippocampus of mice, an area of the brain involved in learning and memory. This is accomplished via use of inhibitory chemicals that have binding affinities to specific subunits, as well as by use of gene-targeted knockout mice (mice whose genes encoding specific receptor subunits have been deleted and therefore do not express them). In addition, to determine if LTD and depotentiation share similar maintenance mechanisms, biochemical assays are performed to ascertain shared properties with respect to protein kinase C. This research will broaden current understanding of the molecular basis of synaptic plasticity doc680 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for . The research and training plan is in the area of Behavioral Neuroscience and is entitled The Role of Neurocalcin and Calcium Binding in Development of the Zebra Finch Telencephalon. Although some masculinization during development is frequently mediated by testicular secretions (testosterone and its metabolite, estradiol), other sexual dimorphisms, or variances between sexes, cannot be explained by the actions of steroids. For example, application of estradiol has been shown to only partially masculinize the brain of the female Zebra finch. In the Zebra finch species, the male telencephalon (the area of the brain that controls song) is markedly larger than that of the female. It is hypothesized that genetic rather than hormonal mechanisms also induce this dimorphism. In particular, this study examines the developing female Zebra Finch brain and the role of neurocalcin (a calcium binding protein) on neuronal development. Expression of neurocalcin in the female brain has been shown via amplification of RNA. Northern blot analysis, which identifies presence of RNA and thus gene expression, is being used to determine the time-course of neurocalcin expression throughout the entire period of sexual differentiation, and in-situ hybridization demonstrates its localized expression. Finally, calcium imaging is used to investigate the potential sex differences as a function of free calcium, which might be induced by increased neurocalcin in females doc681 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for . The research and training plan is in the area of Population Biology and is entitled Genetic Variation Among Populations of Amphibians and Reptiles from the Caribbean Island of Puerto Rico . This research is a phylogeographic study of ten species of reptiles and amphibians endemic to the Carribbean island bank of Puerto Rico. Phylogeography consists of the principles and processes that govern the geographical distribution of genealogical lineages, especially those at the intraspecific level. Comparative mitochondrial DNA phylogeographic studies of the selected reptilian and amphibian species are being conducted in order to determine whether their current genetic structure has been predominantly influenced by older geological events and climatic changes versus more recent phenomena doc682 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for . The research and training plan is in the area of Biomolecular Processes and is entitled Understanding Recombinational DNA Repair Initiation: A Kinetic Analysis of RecA-DNA Complex Formation . This research seeks to provide a complete analysis of the functioning of RecA, a protein involved in recombinational DNA repair. Until now, the molecular mechanisms by which it functions have not been described. Of particular interest is whether or not ATP induces a conformational change of RecA into an active state, prior to DNA binding. Spectroscopic signal changes from fluorescent oligonucleotides (multiple DNA bases linked in series) are used to detect DNA binding (i.e. formation of the RecA-DNA complex), while complex formation is followed in real-time using stopped-flow techniques. The specific molecular steps involved are being characterized doc683 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for . The research and training plan is in the area of Eukaryotic Genetics and is entitled Analysis of the Role of Bulk Chromatin Proteins in Regulating Meiotic Recombination in the Yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae . This research investigates the role of general chromatin configuration in regulating crossover recombination. In particular, the functions of bulk chromatin proteins Bdf1, Hho1, Dot1, and Chd1 in meiosis in yeast S. cerevisiae are being examined via two independent approaches: 1. Various events of meiosis are analyzed in cells whose genes encoding these proteins have been deleted, and 2. Proteins that display significant meiotic function are characterized in wild-type cells at different stages of meiosis. Also, chromosomal localization of relevant proteins are being examined doc684 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for . The research and training plan is in the area of Sensory Systems and is entitled Habitat Light and the Evolution of Visual-Signal Design . Signal diversity in animals may be explained by selection pressures for particular signals and sensory systems based on optimal transmission and detection efficiency, as described by the sensory drive hypothesis (SDH). The SDH may play an important role in genetic isolation of populations and, in turn, speciation. This research examines six allopatric (i.e. occurring in different locations) populations of the lizard Anolis cristatellus found in two distinct habitat types. Habitat light, visual-system response, and signal design are examined. This study provides a greater understanding of the role of sensory drive in the generation of signal diversity and its potential role in the formation of new species doc685 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for . The research and training plan is in the area of Biomolecular Processes and is entitled G-protein Regulation of a Volume-Sensitive Anion Channel . This research examines the ability of cells to sense and respond to changes in cell volume, a vital housekeeping activity that also serves important roles in growth, proliferation, and apoptosis or programmed cell death . Cell volume homeostasis is mediated primarily by ion channels, or Volume-Sensitive Organic Osmolyte Anion Channels (VSOAC), which release chloride and other organic osmolytes in response to swelling. Initial studies have demonstrated that these VSOACs are stimulated by G-protein activiation. This research investigates 1. The role of Rho GTPase and cell swelling on VSOAC activation, and 2. The role of actin cytoskeleton, the cell s skeleton whose structure and function are known to be regulated by Rho GTPase doc686 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for . The research and training plan is in the area of Population Biology and is entitled, Elucidation of Paleobiogeographic Patterns of Late Oligocene Miocene Time Period . This project assesses the effects of large-scale tectonic and climatic perturbations from 30 to 5 million years ago in the western United States on the distributions of fossil and extant mammalian taxa. These effects are determined through the use of a GIS database of fossil taxa, Parsimony Analysis of Endemicity, and biogeographic information on extant taxa. Three hypotheses are tested: 1. Large-scale tectonic changes between thirty and five million years ago restricted gene flow and increased endemism in mammals; 2. Modern biogeographic patterns are more deeply rooted in Earth history rather than being the result of recent climatic events such as Pleistocene glaciation; 3. Mammalian species behave individualistically during times of climate change as opposed to maintaining static species associations. This study will provide a better understanding of the role played by the physical environment on evolution as well as an increased understanding of how future climate and tectonic changes will affect biodiversity doc687 none SES 00- -- Colin Burke (Independent Scholar) SGER: Recovery, Evaluation and Dissemination of New Archive Documents on the History of Computing This Small Grant for Exploratory Research supports the principal investigator s survey of an important collection of newly declassified documents recently released to England s Public Record Office. The newly available documents relate to Allied codebreaking in World War II, and to the path-breaking computer and information management projects tied to those cryptanalytic projects. Through these projects scientists and scientific institutions played a major role in the creation of advanced technology and methods. Among the many important scientists and institutions associated with the efforts were Alan Turing and Vannevar Bush and MIT and Cambridge University. With the support of this grant the PI will secure copies of the more important items and prepare articles to alert the historical community of the importance of the new collection. The PI will also create an Internet site that will contain indexed and annotated copies of the documents doc688 none Surveys conducted in the social sciences depend on the quality of retrospective reports to provide valid estimates of social, economic, and health dynamics. Recall measures based on conventional standardized questionnaire list (Q-list) approaches have shown that response errors in retrospective reports become considerably more pronounced with events that have occurred in the more distant past. An Event History Calendar (EHC) questionnaire methodology has considerable potential toward improving the quality of retrospective reports in comparison to Q-list methods. Specifically, this project will 1) assess the impact of cognitive and communicative processes on the quality of retrospective reports that are obtained by Q-list and EHC interviewing methodologies. These processes will be examined through measures of interviewer and respondent verbal behaviors as coded from 500 audiotaped interviews of paper and pencil Q-list and EHC interviews, with particular attention focusing on the cueing strategies of interviewers and the retrieval strategies of respondents. 2) Partly based on the verbal behavior analyses, develop a 2-year reference period Computer Assisted Interviewing EHC (CAI-EHC) to measure key demographic, health, and economic variables that will be used in production interviews of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). 3) Conduct usability and cognitive tests with CAI-EHC versions to assess and improve the interface between interviewers and the instrument, and the cognitive efficacy of the instrument. 4) Contribute to the cognitive science literature through additional discoveries concerning the structure of autobiographical memory. The dissemination of information is part of the educational goals of this project. Significant findings from the verbal behavior coding and usability tests will be presented in educational settings, at professional meetings, and through publication. The cognitive aspects of EHC interviewing will be introduced into the curricula of courses in survey methodology. Developments of the CAI-EHC interviewing methodology software will be publicly available for a reasonable charge. Ultimately, CAI-EHC interviewing may become the best state-of-the-art choice for the collection of retrospective reports in surveys, improving the ability of social scientists to model the life course and of governmental agencies to initiate sound social policies that are based on survey data doc689 none Aiken, Robert M Shriver, Bruce D Association for Computing Machinery Special Project: U.S. Attendance at the 16th IFIP World Computer Congress (IFIP Congress ) This award provides partial support for 20 representatives from the U.S. to attend the 16th IFIP World Computer Congress, in Beijing, China, August 21 - 25, . The International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) is a multinational federation of technical organizations concerned with information processing. The ACM and the IEEE Computer Society are full members of IFIP and the ACM is administering this project. The participants in the project are selected on a competitive basis by a committee of reviewers, with emphasis given to young researchers doing outstanding work and to applicants who have been accepted to present papers or are otherwise significantly involved in the conference doc690 none Under the direction of Dr. Albert Dekin, MS Laurie Miroff will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. The immediate goal of her project is to coordinate specialist analyses of archaeological materials excavated from the Thomas Luckey site, located in the Town of Ashland, New York. This large open air occurrence dates from 900 - AD and, on the basis of ceramic remains, is attributed to the Owasco culture. The Owasco, archaeologists believe, are directly ancestral to the Iroquois peoples who inhabited a large region of the US Northeast at the time of European contact. The origin of the Iroquois is poorly understood and based on comparisons with adjacent groups, the distinctive Iroquois language appears intrusive. Because early ethnographers studied the Iroquois extensively their prehistory is of considerable interest because it provides a background for understanding colonial period adaptation. Although based on ceramic typologies the Owasco culture appears directly ancestral to the Iroquois, relatively few sites have been excavated and their social organization is poorly known. MS Miroff s research has the potential to remedy this situation. The Thomas Luckey site contains large scatters of archaeological material and beginning in has been excavated over multiple field seasons. Lower soil layers are undisturbed and they preserve traces of house posts. MS Miroff and colleagues have discerned the presence of two large dwellings which, based on ethnographic comparison, likely were occupied by multiple family groups. MS Miroff will conduct a spatial analysis of recovered material to determine spatial clustering, infer whether these represent domestic groups and then compare across groups to examine the extent to which social differentiation or specialization existed. At the time of contact, the Iroquois were organized into chiefdoms and tribes and status differences were clearly present. It is uncertain when these first appeared. With NSF support, MS Miroff will obtain radiocarbon and thermolumenescence dates to determine contemporanity among features. Botanical and use wear analyses of stone tools will also be carried out and the results will be incorporated into cluster characterization. This research is important for several reasons. It will illuminate a poorly understood period of US prehistory and will provide data of interest to many archaeologists. It will shed light on the development of complex societies and contribute to training a promising young scientist doc691 none This Small Grant for Exploratory Research will examine how firms are able to effectively share knowledge across diverse functions and perspectives during enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems implementation. The primary objective of the study is to provide a theoretically grounded assessment of factors that enable firms to articulate and integrate the diversity of knowledge required for effective use of ERP. This includes factors that impact how existing knowledge is shared and how new knowledge is absorbed and transferred to become part of the firm s core knowledge competency. Following a case-study protocol, semi-structured interviews will be conducted with ERP team members in participating firms by telephone and on site.Computer-aided text analysis of the corrected transcripts will be used for within-site and between-site response comparisons, addressing seven propositions in the proposal. Among other variables and issues to be addressed is whether firm cultures that emphasizes group over individual achievement are more process outcome oriented than deadline driven (Proposition 1). The interview protocol will include questions on organization structure, organization culture, process versus deadline orientation, the incorporation of new knowledge into core knowledge competencies, and tacit knowledge sharing doc692 none PI: Joseph Campos Over the past several years, we have discovered a period of extraordinary psychological changes after the infant begins to crawl. These changes are very broad, and involve perception, spatial understanding, positive and negative emotions, and social interactions within the family. These discoveries have come about through the use of a variety of methods, including studies of early and late crawling infants, infants who use walker devices, infants with locomotor handicaps, and infants in different cultures. While yielding findings highly suggestive that locomotor experience in some way causes these changes, it remains possible that the onset of locomotion may serve merely as a maturational forecaster of psychological changes to come, and that there is no intrinsic causal link between locomotor experience and psychological development. The proposed studies are designed to clarify this state of affairs. Only a true experiment involving the random assignment of participants to conditions can ensure confident inference about causation. Consequently, we will conduct such an experimental investigation into the role of locomotor experience on psychological development. To carry out a true experiment, we have devised a Powered Mobility Device (PMD), a small electric-powered cart the movement of which can be controlled by a joystick. Prior studies have shown that prelocomotor infants can, in fact, learn to control such a PMD. Building on these findings, we will now randomly assign infants into conditions in which the infant can voluntarily control the PMD, or passively ride in the PMD in the same way as another matched infant. Funding from this grant will permit preliminary investigation of such an experimental manipulation. To assess outcomes related to PMD experience, we will assess the infants on two tests that have been shown to be robust consequences of locomotor experience in earlier studies. One of these outcomes will determine the extent of infant postural compensation to peripheral optic flow (i.e., visual proprioception), and the other will test wariness of heights (on the so-called visual cliff ). Prior to initiating the outcome testing, we will conduct extensive pilot work using modifications of the visual proprioception and visual cliff tasks that are designed to increase the responsiveness of infants on both tests. In addition, we will conduct other pilot work to explore whether the control by the infant of the PMD will involve goal-directed action (i.e., voluntary stopping at a location where the mother can be found), and whether the infant can learn to steer the PMD around obstacles that prevent the infant from reaching a desired goal. This study has important implications for understanding the processes underlying developmental transitions in infancy. In addition, the research has implications for how self-produced experiences by a child may affect the course and organization of brain growth and development doc693 none Sahu Description: This award supports the US-India Workshop: Elastic Vibrations, Smart Structures and their Solution Technologies, Roorkee, November . Conveners, Atma Sahu, Coppin State College and H.G. Sharma, University of Roorkee will assemble 30 U.S. and Indian researchers for a cross-disciplinary workshop focused on vibrations and smart structures. These areas are of high interest in the U.S. for industry and government applications and for the engineering of advanced technical systems. There are important applications for general engineering reliability and durability problems, as well as for specific applications related to the modification of buildings for improved earthquake survivability and improved understanding of basic vibration mechanics. Scope: The University of Roorkee is hosting this workshop with funds obtained from the Department of Science and Technology (DST). The principals will layout a well-developed plan for future cooperative research in the areas of elastic vibrations and smart structures. They will also establish partnerships for collaborations with India s oldest and most prestigious engineering college. The workshop is expected to stimulate advanced research in areas that are of mutual interest and benefit. The proceedings of the workshop will be published doc694 none The investigators will conduct analytical and high-resolution computational studies of thin current sheets which are formed during the growth phase of magnetospheric substorms. These current sheets are observed in the magnetotail and may play an important role in substorm onset. Previous calculations are in good quantitative accord with multi-satellite observations of the spatial and temporal characteristics of thin current sheets in the slow growth and impulsive pre-onset phases of substorms, and have led to the identification of the pressure-driven ballooning instability as a potential mechanism for substorm trigger. This investigation will use the theoretical framework of Hall magnetohydrodynamics, including a generalized Ohm s law with Hall current and electron pressure gradient terms. Tasks include the development of a more complete theory of reconnection, thin current sheet and magnetotail substorm dynamics, and dynamical coupling between pressure-driven ballooning instabilities with and without velocity shears doc695 none Ganguly Description: This award supports US-India Cooperative Research: Thermo-tectonic Evolution of the Himalayan Metamorphic Rocks, Sikkim. US PI Jibamitra Ganguly, University of Arizona and Somnath Dasgupta, Jadavpur University, Calcutta will study the presence of an inverted metamorphic Barrovian sequence along the -km length of the Himalayas. Studies which consider the Himalayan metamorphism within the framework of the Indian-Eurasian plate collision have not satisfactorily explained the inversion of the Barrovian isograds. The PIs will use an integrated approach in this study that includes field relations, petrographic studies, laboratory studies and numerical modeling. Scope: The international collaboration is highly advantageous to this study. Professor Dasgupta is a distinguished scholar and a preeminent field geologist in India. His recent work that was published in the Journal of Petrology ( ) is a major contribution to understanding tectono-metamorphic processes in the Himalayas. NSF s Division of International Programs and the Government of India s Department of Science and Technology and Geological Survey jointly support this research doc696 none Duebendorfer Fitzgerald Faulds Continental extension is a fundamental geologic process that results in crustal thinning, basin development, and can ultimately lead to continental breakup and development of passive continental margins and ocean basins. This project will utilize a well-studied detachment fault in Arizona and Nevada to investigate several aspects of normal faulting including the uplift and exhumation history of the lower plate relative to displacement and the extent to which upper and lower plate processes are coupled. The work involves an integrated structural, fission track and paleomagnetic study. Results are expected to contribute to a better understanding of how major normal fault systems evolve through time doc697 none Although many linguists argue that all languages share a common universal grammar, superficially languages vary tremendously. For example, some languages such as English allow only one basic word order (fixed word order languages), while languages such as Turkish permit many word orders. In addition, there are isolating languages such as Mandarin in which grammatical relationships are expressed through word order, and not by adding to or changing morphological structure of words, and languages such as Turkish in which grammatical relationships are expressed via sequences of inflectional particles, each of which expresses a specific grammatical meaning. Despite differences which exist among languages, most language acquisition research has concentrated on languages that are fixed word order and either isolating or inflecting. Investigations of agglutinative, free word order languages are necessary if we are to test explanatory and descriptive adequacy of theories of acquisition. In this project we will use data from comprehension, imitation and judgment experiments to study the acquisition of Turkish as a first language by children between 1.5 and 6 years of age. These data will be used to address the following fundamental questions about language acquisition: 1. Are young children predisposed to assume that the language they are acquiring has a fixed word order? 2. Do they know the structural restrictions on a free word order language? 3. When do children start reconciling structural restrictions and discourse considerations in a free word order language? 4. Are young children predisposed to assume that grammatical particles are attached in a fixed order? 5. Do children acquire particles that are putatively part of a universal ordering earlier than particles that are not doc698 none Venture capital is a rapidly developing, new form of financial intermediation. It is commonly believed to have a significant impact on the development of entrepreneurial companies. Yet relatively little is known about how this economic institution works. This empirical line of research seeks to obtain a better understanding of the economic foundations of the venture capital industry. It asks some fundamental questions about the economic role of venture capital, as well as the organization of venture capital industry itself. The research is motivated by a set of theoretically driven questions. The empirical work consists of identifying rich enough data that then allows for a careful empirical analysis of these questions. The proposal includes three closely related research projects on venture capital. The first project is concerned with the question of whether venture capitalists play a role over and above those played by traditional financial intermediaries. It asks whether venture capitalists play a role in professional ization of startup companies, including the development of human resources in startup companies. It examines not only whether venture capitalists can play a supportive role in the development of human resources, it also looks at the control exercised by venture capitalists, especially in terms of replacing the original founders with professional managers as CEOs. The second project examines the structure of venture capital organizations themselves. It asks to what extent existing financial intermediaries, i.e., banks, are well-suited to engage in venture capital. It empirically investigates whether bank-owned venture capital firms have different investment patterns relative to their counterpart private individual venture capital funds. The third project examines the economic determinants of venture capital fund performance. In particular, it will investigate how different investment strategies as well as the intensity of managerial incentives translate into differential performance patterns. Overall, this research contributes to a better economic understanding of venture capital. As such it is important to the fields of corporate finance and financial intermediation. Venture capital is one of the most important new forms of financial intermediation. It differs substantially from traditional financial intermediaries and suggests new paradigms for thinking about financial intermediation. It is also relevant to our understanding of the theory of the firm, examining what roles financiers can play in the development of new companies. Finally, it is of importance to public policy. Policy makers across the world are seeking for ways to promote the venture capital industry. Understanding the role of banks in venture capital, for example, is important, especially since banks are the main financial institutions in many developing and developed countries. Understanding the economic determinants of venture capital fund performance is also critical for a better understanding of what policies are more effective in the promotion of venture capital doc699 none Wurman This work is a collaborative research effort between Princeton University, the University of Washington, and the University of Oklahoma, supported by collaboration with the USDA ARS National Sedimentation Laboratory. The central theme of the proposed research is on the characterization of the variability of rainfall in space and time, how that depends on the storm environment, and how this space-time variability affects our capability to estimate surface rainfall and rainfall kinetic energy. Radar observations at very high spatial (tens of meters) and temporal (tens of seconds) resolution will be made over the dense rain gauge network of the Goodwin Creek research watershed in northern Mississippi. These detailed observations are embedded with the larger-scale NEXRAD WSR-88D radar observations, and measurement of the storm environment. This work entails detailed Lagrangian, radar-based analyses of storm cells, their evolution and motion, and how that results in the observed spatial rainfall distribution.. These space-time analyses of rainfall at the regional scale will be linked to physical properties of the storm environment. At the Goodwin Creek watershed scale, key error sources of the different approaches (i.e., rain gauge, radar, and radar-gauge combined) to estimate rainfall rate and kinetic energy flux in space and time will be investigated. In particular, we seek to determine how much of the variance of radar-estimated versus rain gauge-accumuluated rainfall amount can be explained by the sampling volume difference in combination with the subgrid-scale rainfall variability, which is linked to physical parameters that characterize the atmospheric storm environment. We anticipate that our results will lead to a better understanding of how data obtained at different resolutions in space and time can be compared and merged doc700 none Bass This award supports the development of instrumentation and techniques to enable the measurement of acoustic wave velocities in minerals and other solids at extremely high pressures and temperatures that are characteristic of the Earth s deep interior. The technique will couple the laser heated diamond anvil cell with Brillouin spectroscopy. Development of this technology will yield direct information on the seismic velocities in materials under conditions that have never before been attained. Experiments will be obtained on materials that are thought to be constituents of the Earth s deep interior, and the results will be compared with information on the velocity structure of the Earth as obtained from seismological studies. Results should yield significant new insights on the chemical composition of the Earth at depth, the thermal structure of the Earth, and Earth s evolution through time. The facility will allow measurement of the physical properties of a variety of solid materials (not just minerals) under extreme temperature and pressure conditions, and therefore is poised to make significant contributions to the field of materials science as well as earth science. Brillouin scattering measurements will be attempted to temperatures of up to Kelvin, while the sample is simultaneously held at pressures of up to 50 GPa. Initial experiments will concentrate on careful characterization of the temperature pressure environment (including accounting for thermal pressure), identifying sources of error in the method, and developing techniques for making the most accurate measurements possible doc701 none Loper Description: This award is for support of a joint research project by Dr. David Loper, Director, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Institute, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida and an Omani team led by Dr. Ibrahim Eltayeb, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, College of Science, Sultan Qaboos University, Al-Khodh, Muscat, Sultanate of Oman. The purpose of the research teams is to develop conceptual, mathematical, and laboratory models of transport in karstic aquifers such as found in Florida and Oman. In Florida and Oman fluid flow and containment transport is dominated by the presence of correlated inhomogenities such as karstic conduits and fractures. In Florida conduits predominate, while in Oman both types of inhomogeniety are present. In this project it is intended to extend the Floridan-conduit model to include fractures. While the precise structure of the heterogeneities in the subsurface cannot be known with certitude, and thus an accurate or true prediction is impractical, improvement can be made in risk estimates in a statistical sense. Scope: The research area of flow and transport in a heterogeneous medium is an important topic with societal impact related to toxic waste from agriculture and industry. The problem of analysis and prediction of groundwater flows is important to the study of both water resources and water quality. Good mathematical models of such flows are extremely important to those studies. Both the Florida State University and Omani groups are capable of obtaining useful and important results, and for both Florida and Oman, the issues of water resources and water quality are quite important. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting internatinal scientific collaboration in areas of mutual benefit. Funding for this project is provided by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Earth Sciences doc702 none This project involves the use of numerical chemical transport models to study the processes controlling aerosol and chemical distributions in outflow from Southeastern Asia. This project is a component of the ACE-Asia field program. Specific activities will include: 1) comprehensive, three-dimensional, regional-scale modeling of aerosol chemical interactions, 2) improvement and enhancement of emission inventories of primary aerosol and gaseous precursors needed to conduct detailed chemical aerosol modeling in the region, and 3) providing three-dimensional forecasts of aerosol and trace gas distributions in support of the intensive field operations during ACE-Asia doc703 none The meaning of a word is independent of the sensory origin of the language signal, and comprehension scores for spoken and visual text presentations are nearly identical in college-age readers. The current research examines one specific hypothesis, which we refer to as the universal access hypothesis, according to which a modality-independent sound code is used to retrieve a word s meaning. Our work differs from the vast majority of prior work in this area in content and methodology. The research examines whether a relatively abstract phonemic code is used to retrieve word meaning, which could be obtained by some type of grapheme-to-phoneme conversion process, or whether an acoustically detailed speech-based phonetic code is used. A novel method is used to present a spoken word to the reader while a specific visual target word is viewed. Phonemic and phonetic properties of the spoken word are manipulated and the effects of these manipulations on eye movements during target viewing are recorded. According to our universal access hypothesis, phonetic and phonemic sound properties of the spoken word should influence visual target recognition during reading, in so far as they have been shown to influence spoken word recognition. Results from the proposed work could provide insight into the source of reading impairments which are often accompanied by inadequate phonemic or phonetic skills doc636 none Fisher Wheat Harris Stein Recommended project is for a multidisciplinary investigation of the thermal state of the subducting lithosphere offshore of the Costa Rica margin. Heat flow measurements will be undertaken in two cruises covering oceanic lithosphere portions offshore of the Nicoya Peninsula that differ in makeup and tectonic style, with the northern portion formed at the East Pacific Rise and the southern portion, separated by an abrupt change in relief, formed at the Cocos-Nazca spreading center. These measurements will be accompanied by seismic and swath bathymmetric study, as well as a coring program that will examine changes in porewater chemistry associated with fluid flow in the sediments overlying the crust. These field programs will be accompanied by two numerical modeling exercises that will examine the thermal state of the subduction zone as these two portions of lithosphere subduct. The goals will be to determine the comparative thermal state of the subducting lithosphere in these regions, the associated heat and fluid fluxes responsible for the subducting slab thermal states, and how these variable affect subduction zone processes, including chemical flux rates doc705 none This collaborative research project with Barbara Turpin, Rutgers University, is an investigation of the role of organic species in atmospheric particles. Measurements of aerosol organics in east Asian outflow will be made from shipboard (NOAA R V Brown) and aircraft (NCAR C-130), during the ACE-Asia field program. The measurements include: 1) semi-continuous elemental organic carbon (EC OC) analysis using a thermo-optical detection technique, and 2) time-integrated filter samples for analysis by Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy. The EC OC measurements provide an important indicator for the role of combustion emissions in the air masses sampled. The FTIR organic analyses describe the mass of organic species and classify those species by functional group and solubility in solvents of different polarity. This provides information about the mass fraction of organic compounds that are water-soluble and contribute to enhanced water uptake by particles. The hydrophobic organic fraction that does not dissolve in the particulate aqueous phase will also be quantified doc706 none SES 00- - Ruth Lewin Sime (Independent Scholar) Otto Hahn, Max von Laue, Science in Postwar Germany This project focuses on the activities of Otto Hahn ( - ) and Max von Laue ( - ), two scientists who were prominent in the German scientific community before, during, and after the Third Reich. Beginning in , both men inhabited the same scientific circle in Berlin, both detested the Nazi regime, both emerged from the Third Reich with the credentials of decent Germans, and both took positions of leadership in reorganizing and rehabilitating science in Germany after the war. Because both men were influential in the postwar period, it is of value to study their actions under the Nazi regime; their scientific work during the war and the way they represented it afterward; their work in the postwar period; and the imprint they left on the German scientific community. Hahn assumed the presidency of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft (KWG) (succeeded by the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft [MPG]) in , shortly after being awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of nuclear fission. As a famous scientist and person who had been upright under the Third Reich, Hahn became a hugely admired public figure in postwar Germany. Laue was also influential in the postwar period, first in reorganizing the Max Planck Institute for Physics, and then as the director of the Fritz Haber Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Berlin; among colleagues in the Allied countries he was regarded as a German of rare courage and integrity. Because the moral authority that was accorded to both Laue and Hahn was based on their opposition to the Nazi regime, it is important to develop a more detailed picture of their actions and behavior in these years: their relationships with other scientists and Jewish emitters, the efforts to help Jews who had stayed; the risks and difficulties they incurred. For this, their correspondence and other papers provide a large and valuable resource. By the end of the war, Hahn and Laue distanced themselves from Nazism. They asserted that German scientific excellence was undiminished, that scientists as a group had not given their support to Hitler, that scientific institutions had retained their independence, and that Germans overall were not responsible for the crimes of the Nazi regime. Their views, part of the forgetting of the postwar period, damaged their relations with colleagues abroad for a time, but it fostered cohesiveness at home, and may in part explain Hahn s success as president of the MPG. Hahn portrayed the wartime work in his institute as basic research that was unrelated to the war effort. The project examines the work of Hahn s institute and the extent to which it was connected to military research, relying primarily on institutional documents, scientific publications, and unpublished scientific reports. Finally, this project includes an examination of their public legacy: Hahn s influence on the MPG and his enduring image as one of German science s legendary figures; Laue s friendships with great scientists, his memory, and his sense of history doc707 none This project will review the literature about the impacts of information technologies on scientific publishing. The project report will present an overview of (1) what existing data and research say about these effects and (2) what are the gaps in coverage. Four major themes will be explored: (1) the information technologies being applied in scientific publishing, (2) the effects of information technologies in scientific publishing on the ways that scholars seek, use, collaborate, and create new information, (3) the evolution of intellectual property and legal frameworks in response to the information technologies being applied in scientific publishing, and (4) the evolution of economic and organizational frameworks. For each theme, the project will locate relevant studies, characterize them (e.g., descriptive, case study, theoretical conceptual, statistical, historical), summarize their content, and identify gaps in coverage. Statistical analyses will also be evaluated in terms of their sampling strategy, methodology, and whether there is evidence of standard error of estimate or discussion of the confidence margins. The project approach will be to locate relevant studies, characterize them (e.g., descriptive, case study, theoretical conceptual, statistical, historical), summrize their content, and identify gaps in coverage. Statistical analyses will also be evaluated in terms of their sampling strategy, methodology, and whether there is evidence of standard error of estimate or discussion of the confidence margins doc708 none This proposal covers research on three topics in international trade. The common link among the three parts of this proposal is the focus on policy issues. The first part develops a model of quality, where quality is seen as the probability of being satisfied by the good. This work has implications for a number of issues in international trade and industrial organization. In standard models of quality, consumers choose to buy one product or another. In contrast to this, it is assumed that a consumer purchases a product knowing that it may fail to deliver . If the product delivers, the customer leaves the market with the product. Otherwise, the customer gets nothing and may wish to reenter the market. Higher quality is merely a higher probability that the product delivers. This possibility of re-sampling is the primary innovation in this model. The model has a number of interesting predictions on pricing, profits and market structure. It also suggests directions for research which provide some new insights into the role of trade policy and the role for government regulation. The second part looks at the effects of Rules of Origin (ROOs) in Free Trade Areas (FTAs). A good is eligible for zero tariffs in the FTA only if it originates there. ROOs specify conditions which have to be met for such origin to be granted. In earlier work, joint with Anne Krueger, the author looked at the hidden protection inherent in ROOs and how differences in the way that ROOs are specified affect the outcome. The model used was one with constant returns to scale. As a consequence, the results are best interpreted as long run ones. However, in policy circles, much of the interest is in the short to medium run which is the focus of the work proposed here. The work will shed new light on the effects of FTAs on wages and investment. The third part focuses on how differences in implementation of migration policies affect outcomes and how the implementation procedures of different countries interact. The work will help understand how differences in U.S. immigration policies and those of other countries affect the composition of immigrants to the U.S. as well as how changes in immigration rules in the future could affect the trade and wage patterns in the U.S doc709 none This project will investigate the cognitive and affective meanings of campsites among Australian hunters and foragers (the Pintupi of Kiwirrkura community, Northern Territory). It bridges the fields of Cultural Anthropology and Archaeology, and will contribute to models of hunter forager behavior by adding data on the social constructions of the environment (place campsites) and identity. The goal is to ascertain how Pintupi read the land, perceive significant categories of the environment, construct attitudes towards and uses of material culture, and how social relationships within the camp are expressed spatially. The research will examine how these process vary by gender, as well. Methods include participant observation, structured interviews, travel histories, and mapping of sites, shelters, and storage facilities. This project will contribute to debates in both Archaeology and Cultural Anthropology regarding how hunters foragers structure (and prehistorically structured) their use of resources and the environment doc710 none GLOBEC NEP: Satellite?Observed Ocean Climate Variabili1y The PIs will extend in time and expand in scope the satellite data development and satellite-based analyses of ocean climate variability in the Northeast Pacific (NEP), begun during the GLOBEC Pilot Project phase ( - 00). The overall scientific problem is to characterize and quantify the dominant modes of variability in the NEP as embodied by satellite measurements of surface transports, temperature and chlorophyll patterns. Our analyses address multiple spatial and temporal scales using merged satellite data products over GLOBEC target study regions in both the California Current (CCS) and the coastal Gulf of Alaska (CGOA). GLOBEC NEP field studies require both spatial and temporal context. The primary goal of this project is to quantify the degree of seasonal and interannual variability in small scale and mesoscale circulation patterns in each of the process study sites, and to relate changes in this variability to the seasonal and interannual changes in the strength of forcing by local winds and basin scale circulation. This goal will be accomplished through a systematic analysis of spatial temporal scales utilizing satellite measurements. The PIs will define and quantify a) small event-scale coastal features such as fronts, eddies and convergences (50 m ? 100 km). These features are thought to be critical to local success survival of GLOBEC target species, b) mesoscale circulation seasonal variability over the shelf, upwelling fronts, coastal jets, buoyant plumes and eddies (10 km ? 500 km) - these also affect transport and retention of populations; and c) forcing and processes at basin and interannual scales (100 km ? 10,000 km). A second, related goal is to quantify changes in the timing and strength of seasonal transitions in both study regions. Specific objectives of the project are divided into two aspects of satellite oceanography, with which the three PIs have extensive experience: 1) Acquire, process, subset, QC, and archive satellite data in the NEP region at multiple scales and make these data electronically available to others in the program; 2) analyze these data, in conjunction with ancillary data, to address GLOBEC research goals at basin- meso- and nearshore scales. The core data sets are altimeter fields, NOAA AVHRR and NASA SeaWiFS data at both l km and 4 km resolution and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. These are supplemented with model and buoy winds, tide gauge sea levels and in situ data. Close collaboration with investigators carrying out field measurements will link scales and patterns determined in the satellite data analyses to 3D in situ processes doc711 none PI: Cataliotti The human visual system perceives shades of gray with remarkable accuracy despite large changes in the intensity of the illumination and the brightness of surrounding surfaces. For example, a middle gray piece of paper will generally appear middle gray regardless if it illuminated by a bright light or a dim light. The change in illumination results in retinal images that are also very different, yet in most cases the paper is perceived as middle gray. Lightness contrast and other errors have been studied in an attempt to understand more fully the visual system s design and logic in determining shades of gray. Simultaneous lightness contrast (SLC) has been one of the most widely studied of these errors. SLC is illustrated by placing a gray target on a white background and a physically identical gray target on a black background. The target on the white will appear darker than the target on black. Models attempting to explain SLC can be grouped into two main categories: 1) models that treat SLC as a residual byproduct of low-level retinal processes, namely, lateral inhibition, and 2) models based on perceptual grouping processes that must take place above the retinal level in the visual pathway. Perceptual grouping models are not well defined in terms of physiological structuresand functions. The main goal of the proposed project is to more fully explore the roles perceptual grouping processes play in determining perceived surface color. The research will focus on three novel paradigms recently discovered in the PIs lab. One set of experiments will involve a variation of SLC in which two gray targets appear to move across their respective backgrounds. Another set of experiments will require the observer to fuse gray targets presented to one eye with backgrounds presented to the other eye. In a third set, the observer will judge the lightness of sequentially presented targets in an effort to understand the effect of the perceived gray shade of one surface on the perceived gray of a subsequently viewed surface. Experiments will test whether these recently discovered phenomena are primarily the results of retinal processes or perceptual processes that occur at a higher level in the visual system. The results of these experiments will contribute to a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying these effects, their location, and the interaction between subsystems involved in determining perceived surface color. In short, the search field for neurological mechanisms important for perceived surface color will be narrowed. Models based on perceptual grouping may be better operationally defined in terms of neurobiology. This research will contribute to the fields of perceptual psychology, neuropsychology and artificial intelligence doc712 none Animals face myriad problems in the field. They must find food; they must find shelter; they must survive unfavorable environmental conditions. This research addresses the evolutionary solutions that have been selected in insects to solve these problems at the behavioral and physiological levels. Work to date has examined the behavioral and physiological adaptations that allow the monarch butterfly to avoid its worst problem, namely a harsh northern winter, by heading south in a well-known autumn migration. The butterflies inducible migratory response turns on only in those butterflies that experience autumn conditions. The first goal of this monarch project is elucidating the behavioral and physiological adaptations that have evolved as part of this model insect s long distance migration. The second major goal of this project is to use molecular techniques to address the separateness of the major populations of monarchs described in North America. These populations have been described in the literature as (a) the East Coast population that extends from the Atlantic Ocean to the Rocky Mountains, (b) the tiny South Florida breeding population and (c) the California population seen along the West Coast. Genetic similarity or differences between the different sets of butterflies collected at each of six sites will give us a sense of how closely related they are to each other and how much genetic transfer is occurring between sites. These measures will indirectly give us an understanding of the migratory and mating behaviors that underlie the genetic patterns. These are behaviors that have remained undescribed until now because the traditional ethological techniques have been unable to provide the information doc713 none This project supports the coordination of ground-based measurements during ACE-Asia (Aerosol Characterization Experiment). In particular, the PI will: (1) facilitate and coordinate the activities of the US investigators at the ACE- Asia Supersite at Kosan, Korea; (2) to coordinate and standardize - to the extent possible - measurements of aerosol composition and mass at all network sites; (3) to assist in assuring data quality and developing a data archive for the network, and (4) to develop and implement plans for intercomparing samplers and analytical methods for the aerosol chemical characterizations. IMPROVE samplers will be mad available for comparisons against other types of samplers. The scientific objective of the ground station network is to characterize the spatial and temporal variability of key aerosol properties in near surface air over eastern Asia and the western Pacific. Asian scientists are responsible for site selection, site operations, and analyzing the samples collected doc714 none SES 00- - Nadine Weidman (Independent Scholar) - The Aggression Debate: Human Nature, Science Popularization, and Politics in Late Twentieth-Century America The project is a historical study of the debate over the origins and nature of human aggression that took place in the s and s between the Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz ( - ) and the British-born American anthropologist M. F. Ashley Montagu ( - ). In a series of widely popular books, Lorenz and his followers argued that aggressiveness in humans was an instinct, an innate and unavoidable tendency, while Montagu maintained in writings also aimed at a lay audience that aggression resulted primarily from environmental stimuli. By examining popular writings, television, radio, and film productions, scientific papers, and the archival record, and by conducting interviews with several of the participants, the principal investigator plans to show how the Lorenz-Montagu aggression debate and the public responses to it affected conceptions of human nature, techniques and goals of scientific popularization, and political liberalism in late twentieth-century America. The analysis will consist of four parts: (1) of the Lorenz--Montagu debate; (2) of its relation to its scientific and intellectual contexts; (3) of the audience response to the debate; (4) of the relation of the debate to the biological determinisms of succeeding decades doc715 none Fischer Description: This award supports US-India Cooperative Research: Application of Carbon Nanotubes in Composites -Alignment and Adhesion Problems. US PI John Fischer, University of Pennsylvania and Rakesh B. Mathur, National Physical Laboratory (NPL), New Delhi will conduct research on critical problemsthat need solutions before nanotubes can be successfully used in high strength composites. The objective is to exploit the exceptional mechanical strength of carbon nanotubes for the fabrication of advanced composite materials. Scope: The research groups compliment one another and each group has highly qualified senior researchers with established research records. Their collaboration is expected to produce advances that increase scientific understanding and enhance prospects for technological use of nanotube composites. The project has clear mutual benefits for the US and India, as well as potential for industrial application doc716 none This award helps underwrite participant travel for a workshop on freedom and privacy by design. The workshop is part of an interdisciplinary conference addressing potential effects on society and individual freedom and privacy resulting from the use of computers, data banks, computer networks, and communications systems. The workshop explores the use of technology to bring about strong protections of civil liberties. The exploration of technology includes (a) implemented, fielded systems, and (b) what principles and architectures should be developed, including which open problems must be solved, to implement and field novel systems that can be inherently protective of civil liberties. The workshop will take place on the first day of the conference, and will consist of approximately 30 active participants with a range of backgrounds, and about 50 spectators, including members of the press. The larger conference, of which this workshop is a part, addresses new developments and issues in the politics and intellectual property of domain names; developments in privacy law; security vs privacy vs free speech in broadband communications; the effectiveness of governmental privacy commissioners; ECHELON; the effect of the Internet on intellectual property; free expression versus privacy; the use of humans as research subjects on the net; Internet voting; rating and filtering systems and their effects on privacy and free speech; recent developments in free speech and privacy issues in the Pacific Rim; and the effect of the Internet on campaign finance vs free expression doc717 none Miller This award provides partial funding support for the operation and maintenance of the Pacific Northwest Geodetic Array (PANGA), a network of continuously recording geodetic quality Global Positioning System (GPS) station distributed in the Pacific Northwest. Each station of the network is capable of measuring its position to better than several millimeters and the network is capable of detecting relative motion down to several millimeters per year. Data gathered by the PANGA network will form the basis for interpreting the tectonic framework of the Pacific Northwest, with its active volcanism, subduction of the Juan de Fuca plate under the North American plate, as well as the region s earthquake potential doc718 none This project will measure the microphysical and optical properties of atmospheric aerosols during the Aerosol Characterization Experiment (ACE)-Asia intensive field program. The instrument package that will be placed on board the NCAR C-130 will include measurements of bulk aerosol properties, size distributions, scattering coefficients, and aerosol nucleation and evolution. These measurements along with related satellite data and chemical transport models will help to relate measured aerosol properties to air mass characteristics and to identify sources and source regions doc719 none Kingston Description: This award is to support the collaboration of Dr. David Kingston, Department of Chemistry, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VPI however, studies to date have focused on classical phytochemistry, as opposed to the isolation of bioactive constituents. The proposed study should advance the discovery of potential agents for the treatment of cancer and fungal diseases, with consequent advancement of knowledge and understanding in natural products and medicinal chemistry. The assays selected have proved to be effective in both academic and industrial drug discovery programs, and will be easily adapted to use in the laboratories of the Turkish collaborators. The proposed program includes a substantial training component in terms of use of the bioassays and bioassay-guided fractionation which will have a significant impact on the research and teaching activities, and will ensure that this highly effective approach to drug discovery will be promoted and expanded in Turkey. The project will strengthen the PI s program by providing access to the rich flora of Turkey, and will also benefit young U. S. investigators studying in his group through exposing them to productive international collaboration. The project fits well with the objective of the Division of International Programs for encouraging mutually beneficial collaboration on research in important scientific problems doc720 none Kanaiaupuni, Shawn M This collaborative project (Katharine Donato, ) examines the consequences of social capital and their effects on the health of Mexicans. This project investigates two substantive questions. The first derives from epidemiological and other studies that document how the health status of Mexicans declines--in the short run--as their length of U.S. residence increases, and--in the long run--for subsequent generations of U.S.-born Mexican children. Accruing to both U.S.-and foreign-born Mexican, the finding has led many to the following explanation: that initially, cultural factors reduce the deleterious effects of poor socioeconomic status on Mexican health, but over time as Mexicans adopt U.S. lifestyles, their country-of origin protective behaviors erode and their health worsens. The research also examines whether and how social networks improve migrant and nonimmigrant health by offering individuals and communities access to greater economic and social resources. Familial and compatriot network, for example, may offer Mexican migrants job opportunities and other financial resources in part because these networks are often specially organized to assist newcomers in the United States. In this context, social networks may also provide migrants information about how to obtain inexpensive health services and products form border towns such as Tijuana. Social networks may also benefit nonimmigrant (or prior migrants) living in Mexican communities where migration is well-established because it may alter the structure of social exchange and social support in origins and or add new information about alternate living standards. In addition, social ties may also result in economic and health improvements to Mexican communities in the long run as migrants transfer U.S. dollars back to their origins (Kanaiaupuni and Donato ). Therefore, in this project, the investigators will enrich the theoretical concept of social capital by identifying its consequences with greater specificity than in the past, and by examining their effects on the health of Mexicans. These issues will be addressed using data from the health and Migration Survey, fielded in three waves in Mexico between and , and in the United States in and . The two principal investigators have collected and partially analyzed these data with past support from the Hewlett and Rockefeller Foundations doc721 none Sport Science addresses the needs of urban girls in gaining equitable access to science mathematics education. Through sports, girls will not only develop science mathematics discourse, but will build rapport and trust, thus achieving both an intellectual advancement in science mathematics and a psycho-social-emotional connection. The overall goal of the program is to design, implement, evaluate, and disseminate a field-based program for fostering the resilience of girls in science mathematics through the vehicle of sports. The project is designed as a three-year intervention involving 540 girls from six middle schools over a three-year period, teachers, college students, minority athletes, and mentors. The sport science curriculum will be standards based and have an equitable focus. The entire curriculum will include 40 science mathematics standards driven activities that feature a sport as the vehicle through which the science mathematics is learned. The 10 sports to be featured in the program include: (1) five team sports - volleyball, basketball, soccer, hockey, and softball; and (2) five individual sports - fencing, golf, tennis, track (running and throwing). The project will achieve the goals and objectives through five components: (1) after school programs, (2) Saturday academies, (3) special sport day events, (4) academic and summer internships, and (5) career connections doc722 none This project involves the chemical characterization of organic aerosols collected during the ACE-Asia (Aerosol Characterization Experiment - Asia) intensive field program. ACE-Asia is a multi-investigator, international program designed to characterize the chemical properties and radiative effects of aerosols in the outflow from eastern Asia. Specific organic tracers will be analyzed in samples collected during the field program. These tracers are chosen to indicate sources such as urban, petroleum, biomass burning, microbial, plant waxes, higher plants, lignins, cellulose, etc. The analysis technique is based on extraction and GC MS (gas chromatography mass spectrometry). This information will be used, along with related data, to infer aerosol sources and source regions. Samples will be collected at Kosan, Korea, and possibly other ground sites in Asia, as well as with the Total Aerosol Sampler on the C-130 aircraft in collaboration with Dr. Huebert (University of Hawaii doc723 none Nichols This award supports the participation of American scientists in an U.S.-Japan workshop and study effort to identify opportunities for improving science and technology relations between the U.S. and Japan, to be held in the spring of . The co-organizers are Dr. Rodney W. Nichols, President, New York Academy of Sciences and Professor Imura, Executive Member of the Council for Science and Technology and Chairman of the Committee on Science, Technology and Society in Japan. The meeting will focus on areas of science and technology that will contribute to emerging or growing societal priorities in our nations. In their statement of April 4, l999 President Clinton and Prime Minister Obuchi noted that they considered this area as both urgent and important. The participants will focus on areas in which there is clear, mutual benefit from strengthening the bilateral partnership, with emphasis on the value of collaboration in science and technology. Special emphasis will be placed on areas, which are of particularly high societal concern. These areas will also be discussed at the intergovernmental U.S.-Japan High Level Committee Meeting, chaired by the President s Science Advisor and the Japanese Minister for Science and Technology in May doc724 none This Small Grant for Exploratory Research will establish the feasibility of performing controlled surface hardening of aluminum and its alloys with a novel excimer laser process. Aluminum Alloy 319 is widely used in industrial applications, but does not have the hardness necessary for many wear resistant applications. This alloy cannot be hardened by conventional means. This project will investigate the potential for creating an aluminum nitride surface layer by highly controlled energy input to the surface which is exposed to a nitrogen environment. There are several metallurgical issues that make this a high risk endeavor. Early work in thermal laser glazing provided some of the first evidence of modified forms of aluminum. For the process to be successful, an aluminum nitride layer must form and must be contiguous with the aluminum. This requires thermodynamic balancing of the energy input with the metallurgical events taking place. Other elements in the aluminum alloy could retard the formation of the aluminum nitride, or limit the thickness and or integrity of the hard layer. If the appropriate control of the processing parameters can be identified and maintained, it is expected that the hardness of the aluminum surface could be increased by as much as twelvefold. The surface hardening of aluminum alloys is highly desired for automotive and aerospace applications, and if the feasibility of the process is established, further research would need to be conducted into limits of applicability, durability, and range of alloys appropriate for laser hardening doc725 none This award is to support a Gordon Conference on Processing for Control of Microstucture Evolution and Performance: Modeling, Simulation and Verification, to be held July 23 - 28, , in Plymouth, NH. The topic is directed towards the fundamental understanding of the relationship between various processes, including casting solidification and the subsequent microstructures that evolve during and after the processing. The focus is on predictive modeling for metal netshape processing. Participation will be encouraged from among various disciplines, including metallurgists, materials scientists, alloy and process designers and mathematics modelers. Graduate students, faculty and industrial researchers will be invited to attend. This award, co-sponsored by the Division of Design Manufacture and Industrial InnovationI and the Division of Materials Research, is for the support of participants to this conference doc726 none This dissertation research project will use Peking Union Medical College and Hospital as a site for examining how early 20th century American style scientific medicine functioned in a different cultural environment, that of early 20th century China. Founded in , Peking Union Medical College and Hospital (PUMCH) was the Rockefeller Foundation s single largest project in medical philanthropy anywhere in the world. Its mission was to establish the first (sic) world class institution of scientific medicine, along an American model, in China. Patients accustomed to traditional Chinese medical practices, and staff at PUMCH trained in biomedicine, generally entertained differing assumptions about health, illness and treatment. Situated at the juncture of historical ethnography and medical history, this project will shed light on the problems and politics of health care delivery in the context of contact between two cultures. What role has science played - both objectively and rhetorically - in encounters between cultures? How have rhetorical claims about science structured relations between people and between intellectual traditions? What exactly is scientific medicine, as a social practice, rather than an abstract theory? Is there a culture of biomedicine, and on what terms does it negotiate with other medical cultures and worldviews? Such broad, perennial questions may be explored empirically through the relations between Peking Union Medical College and Hospital and its Chinese patient base. How does an applied science that deals with human beings in social settings operate as a science. By paying close attention to laboratory research and its relation to the hospital setting, the researcher hopes to realistically assess the meaning of scientific medicine as promoted in that era. The researcher will explore records from PUMCH s social work department, which left behind detailed documentation of the negotiations occurring at the interface between the hospital and its patients. The research will also draw on the Rockefeller Archive Center s underutilized collection of reprinted articles to explore the relation of basic medical research conducted at PUMC to the practical art of medicine in a pluralistic medical environment. PUMC s medical and social work case records, located in Beijing, which were not available to previous scholars who studied PUMC, will be central to this work. Combined, the medical and social work portions of the files form a multi-faceted picture of each patient, offering rich information on the doctors , social workers , and patients perspectives. These records will allow the researcher to address questions regarding both the social relations of medicine as an applied science, and the role of science in relations between cultures doc727 none Understanding the dynamics of the atmospheric boundary layer is crucial to better understanding of both weather and climate. A numerical study of the evolution of a stably stratified atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) will be carried out using a large-eddy simulation (LES) technique and a mesoscale model. This study will combine numerical simulations and observations from a recent field program - CASES-99. Numerical simulations will complement observations in providing more detailed information about stable boundary layer (SBL) processes: turbulence transport and mixing of momentum, heat, and moisture. The goals of the research are: 1) to conduct long-term, high-resolution simulations of canonical, strongly stratified nocturnal boundary layers (NBL); 2) to verify the results of these simulations using an extensive observational data base; and 3) to develop and test more accurate parameterizations of SBLs for large-scale simulations. Underlying deficiencies in current atmospheric turbulence and surface layer parameterizations result in their failure to represent accurately global intermittence under strong stably-stratified conditions. The hypothesis that the failures of parameterization arise from their inability to account for nonlinear effects such as breaking gravity waves and Kelvin-Helmholtz billows will be tested. Parallel LES and mesoscale codes will be used on a massively parallel processor to resolve all the dynamically relevant scales of motion from several meters (small inertial range eddies) to several tens of kilometers (energy containing eddies). Special attention will be given to represent accurately interactions between gravity waves and shear associated with low-level jets and conditions under which global intermittence occurs. By resolving a large fraction of turbulence eddies as well as gravity waves it will be possible to reduce uncertainties and biases introduced by turbulence parameterizations in mesoscale models doc728 none Si Despite all the technical advances today in the fields of micro-processors and control system design, one key component is still missing, the design of a generic learning system (which will be referred to as a learner hereafter in the proposal). The learner will have a final product in the form of either software or hardware that learns to improve its performance through interactions with the environment. In addition to the lack of an explicit model for the environment, explicit performance feedbacks are delayed, i.e., they are only available at the end of a long sequence of actions and consequences. A problem of this nature is beyond the scope of classical adaptive control theory. In recent decades, new schools of thinking represented by Reinforcement Learning (RL) based on Neural Dynamic Programming (NDP) have surfaced. In this approach, the learner observes an input state (which can be the current state or a predicted future state) and then produces an action or control signal to apply back to the environment. Consequently, an evaluation signal is created by a critic network to comment on the effectiveness of the action taken . The goal of learning is to generate optimal actions leading to a maximal reward. Layered neural networks are the key implementation blocks for the learner. Neural networks are used to provide both the action signal and the evaluation signal. Learners have demonstrated their effectiveness in a number of difficult tasks. However, learners are usually neural networks performing predictive tasks such as generating action values or action evaluation values. When little is known about the environment or the task, the learner must acquire a system level knowledge to first produce the action and then the evaluation. This requires the components inside the learner to work together. Furthermore, how can one implement a human-machine interface for different applications without cheating by letting the learner truly learn on its own and on-the-fly ? This project will address these basic issues, using problems from semiconductor manufacturing as a testbed. It will seek reliable system designs in the form of mathematical learning algorithms. It will try to achieve more stability and quicker outcomes from the learner, namely higher success rates with fewer learning trials. Attention will be paid to the configuration, algorithm parameterization, system input-output and performance measure specification, and all other issues relevant to the learner design. The learner will develop input releases and queuing policies for an industrial scale semiconductor manufacturing facility. The purpose of this exercise is to examine the scalability, reliability, and generality of the learner design. A successful implementation of this research would represent a significant step toward a truly human-like system that learns on its own and improves its performance over time doc729 none Inkelas Description: This award is for support of a joint research project by Professor Sharon Inkelas, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, California and Professor Kemal Oflazer, Department of Computer Engineering at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. They plan on utilizing the results of their two independent research projects at Berkeley and at Bilkent to develop a grand, unified electronic lexicon of Turkish language that will be greater than the sum of the two independent projects. During this collaboration they will decide on mutual platforms, goals and implementation of the unified lexicon. The result will be a web-accessible database usable by linguists (phonologists, morphologists, syntacticians, semanticists, historical linguists), natural language processing researchers, and teachers and students of Turkish worldwide. Scope: Two expert teams, having produced successful, different but complementary prototypes, will now form a larger team with the goal of integrating their achievements in one large database. Researchers who work on various aspects of language in general and Turkish in particular will be provided with a rich source of data covering phonetic, phonological, morphological, textual and etymological information. The project is expected to integrate, and enhance dissemination, of information that was previously available piecemeal, and to widely scattered experts. The project will serve as a model for participation by other groups, in the preservation and dissemination of information of understudied languages. Two graduate students, one from UC Berkeley and one from Bilkent University will participate in the project. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting US-foreign scientific collaboration in areas of mutual benefit. Funding for this project is provided by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences doc730 none Smith Description: This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. David Smith, Department of Biological Sciences, Florida International University, Miami, Florida, and Dr. Syed Azhar Hasan, Zoological Sciences Division, Pakistan Museum of Natural History, Islamabad, Pakistan. They plan an intensive, comprehensive survey of insect biodiversity and ecology of the Hunza region of the Karakoram in northern Pakistan, with botanical and geological investigation of localities habitats. Emphasis is placed on medium-to-high elevation sites (8,000-18,000 ft) that include a scientifically unexplored traverse along the Sino-Pakistan border. The team, including seven members from the United States and the United Kingdom and seven from Pakistan, in addition to a resident of the Hunza area itself, will conduct field research for five weeks. Material collected, with additional specialist taxonomic work, will include preparation of material for molecular genetic investigation of evolutionary divergence through topographic isolation in extremely mountainous terrain. Scope: The US team leader, Dr. Smith, has done work recently on taxonomy of butterflies in northern Pakistan and is familiar with the region. This project will broaden the study to cover various other insects, and will be a major contribution to the study of Central Asian biodiversity, biogeography and ecology where specimens are scarce to nonexistent. Data on the biotic inventory in this unstudied region will provide significant contribution to 1) general biotic awareness of the region, 2) conservation and biodiversity related decision-making, and 3) broader systematic, evolutionary and biogeographic themes for which information from Karakoram is essential. This experienced multinational team will employ diverse sampling methods to enable them to document a large portion of the insect fauna of the areas visited. The inclusion of a geologist and botanist on the team will enhance the value of the insect collections by providing host plant data and detailed characterization of the sample localities. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest. The Division of International Programs and the Division of Environmental Biology are supporting this project doc731 none Alam Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Dr. Mohammad Alam, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Dr. A. K. Cherri, Electrical Engineering Department, Kuwait University, Kuwait and Dr. M.N. Islam, Electrical Engineering Department, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh. These scientists plan to develop a highly efficient joint transform correlator (JTC) based pattern recognition system for real time applications such as finger print identification, adaptive face recognition and classification of weeds from crops. A JTC is inherently suitable for real-time matching and tracking operations since no complex filter is needed. Among the various JTC techniques proposed, the finger-adjusted JTC, which employs a nonlinear finger-adjusted filter at the Fourier plane, has been found to yield the best correlation output for target (pattern) recognition. However, the problem becomes more challenging if the input scene contains target-like clutter, targets that are rotated and have scale variations with respect to the reference, and are affected by other type of 3D distortions. In this project the PIs plan a novel generalized nonlinear JTC, for distortion invariant detection and identification both single as well as multiple targets. Adaptive learning will be incorporated to update the reference image used in the proposed JTC. Scope: The tasks in this project will be carried out by the scientists in the three countries according to their special expertise and the technical resources and instrumentation available to each. Graduate students from the two foreign countries are expected to participate in this international collaboration. Drs. Alam, Cherri and Islam had previously interacted in dealing with research on optics and on electronics and their applications. The planned research will build upon this linkage and is likely to help the three countries in solving certain problems of personnel identification in banking, customs and immigration and in object identification in remote sensing applications in agriculture. This proposal meets the INT objective of encouraging collaboration by US and foreign scientists in areas of potential mutual benefit doc732 none Desanker This award supports nine US participants in the US-Southern Africa Workshop on Design for an Integrated Regional Model of the Human-Ecosystem-Climate System in Southern Africa, to be held in Maputo, Mozambique, July 24-28, . Four African participants, from Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, are also being supported. Additionally, there will be approximately 15 researchers and policy makers from Mozambique, as well as representatives from governmental and international funding agencies. The co-organizers are Professor Paul V. Desanker, of the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, and Professor Luisa Santos, of the Faculty of Agronomy and Forestry Engineering at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, Mozambique. The overall goal of the workshop is to promote the development of integrated regional models for African systems for analyzing environmental problems at different units of management at local, district, national, or regional levels. The recent flooding in Southern Africa emphasized the need to address the interplay between climate variability, extreme events, vulnerability, and adaptive capacity and responses. At this workshop, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, managers, and policy makers will begin the process of designing a strategy to develop a regional integrated model that will attempt to capture the complexities and interlinkages between the different disciplines. A site visit will also be made to Chokwe, in the Limpopo River basin, Mozambique. The flooding in this area was some of the worst that occurred in Southern Africa, and it further underscored the need for an integrated regional model. Based on a case study of Chokwe that is being developed, participants will begin creation of a regional model which will evaluate all the linkages to be discussed during the workshop. This regional model will emphasize the river basin as a unit of management that encapsulates regional shared issues, such as the impact of land use and land cover change, the consequences of climate variability, the role of governance, and local community management. This workshop represents a significant beginning for a multidisciplinary effort to design and develop integrated models which can then be tested and extended to address specific problems at the local, district, national or regional level. The regional model developed as a result of this workshop is expected to be implemented within two to five years. The workshop results should also contribute important archival data and details about these floods for future use by researchers. This workshop is being jointly funded by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Environmental Biology doc733 none It has been a widespread view that the development of spatial cognition is universal and precedes language development. However, recent crosslinguistic research has shown that children acquire the language-specific spatial semantic lexical distinctions of their language quite early (e.g. Choi Goldin-Meadow, Alibali Ozyurek McNeill & Duncan, in press). Based on this research, this study will investigate children s spontaneous gestures as an index of their mental representations of motion events in typologically different languages - English, Turkish and Japanese - as they learn to encode motion events in their speech. Elicited data will be collected using short animated motion events as stimuli from children aged 3, 5 and 9 years, and from adult speakers. The data will be analyzed in terms of (a) lexical and semantic development of elements of motion events, (b) how these elements of motion events are presented in gestures developmentally, and (c) how the development of gestural representations matches with the acquisition of language-specific semantic distinctions. The results will contribute to a clearer picture of the interaction in development between children s non-linguistic representations of spatial relations and their sensitivity to the lexical semantic categories of their language doc734 none Singh Description: This award supports US-India Cooperative Research: Fundamental Study of Ultrathin Gate Dielectrics for Nanoelectronics. US PI Rajendra Singh, Clemson University and Indian collaborator, Samares Kar, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur will conduct basic research on metal-oxide silicon field-effect transistors (MOSFETs). Their study will focus on two-gate dielectric materials, one of the most important issues facing ultrathin gate dielectrics. The results are expected to add to our understanding of the reliability of ultrathin gate dielectrics and to be useful in developing the technology for future generations of MOSFETs and integrated circuits. Scope: This research is highly relevant to the continued advancement of silicon Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) circuits technology. It should contribute advanced knowledge in the fabrication of ultrathin gate insulator films for nanoscale MOSFETs. Additionally, it supports the aim of the US VLSI industry, which is to produce complex circuits with nanoscale device features by . The PIs are active contributors to journals, conferences and workshops, so the results of their work should receive broad attention. This effort will enhance collaboration between US and Indian scientists and support a linkage with one of India s premier institutes of technology doc735 none Education Development Center, Inc. proposes to refine and offer -- along with WestEd, TERC, IDRA, and Eisenhower Clearinghouse -- the online gender equity course for middle school math and science teachers entitled Engaging Middle School Girls in Math and Science. Utilizing a qualitative methodology, we will research over a two-year period the impact of this training on participants attitudes and practices, among other things, identifying key aspects of course design and delivery that aid in positive impacts. This project will provide vital data on the effectiveness of one type of online gender equity training, as well as the suitability of various aspects of gender equity training to this delivery format. It will also strengthen infrastructure by building a community of math and science teachers trained in gender equity who communicate and support each other as they translate a critical framework into strategies and activities for classroom change. The leadership development aspect of the course will begin a process of wider institutionalization. Finally, the project will build on current networks, working to create new conversations that will evolve over time and make the necessary linkages among math and science, gender equity, and educational technology professionals doc736 none Vajda Description: This award is to support the collaboration of Dr. Sandor Vajda, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts and Dr. Ugur Sezerman, Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering, Sabanci University, Tuzla, Istanbul, Turkey. Their goal is to further develop and apply docking and binding free energy computations to linear molecules interacting with protein targets, with specific emphasis on complex formation between antigenic peptides and major histocompatibility complex (MHC) proteins. They plan a three-step effort: Initially, to develop free energy potentials, by essentially combining molecular mechanics with empirical solvation and entropic terms. These would be used as target functions. The potentials they would obtain are to be tested on a set of protein-peptide docked decoys. In the second step, the (validated) new potentials will be used as a target function for peptide docking. This will be performed both by site mapping and via fragment assembly docking methods. The PIs intend to achieve efficiency in the fragment-docking calculations through utilization of dynamic programming. Finally, they plan to apply this procedure and test it on the MHC type I and II proteins. The research should lead to improved computerized schemes of docking for flexible ligands. This is a difficult problem that needs solutions in order to increase our understanding of protein-protein interactions, drug development and interactions among various biological molecules. Scope: The proposal addresses an important problem in molecular modeling: docking of peptides to protein receptors and calculation of binding free energy. Both structural and energetic aspects of this problem are important. The ability to predict the structural aspects and the binding affinity of ligand-receptor interactions has important implications for molecular biophysics, as well as for the emerging area of structural bioinformatics. The principal investigator has published a number of papers on this and related topics, under current NSF funding. Prof. Sezerman has previously collaborated with Dr. Vajda. This project will promote a natural fit between the PI s group and the group of his collaborator at Sabanci University in Turkey. The areas of expertise and the resources in these two places are highly complementary. The project fits well with the objective of the Division of International Programs for encouraging mutually beneficial collaboration on research in important scientific problems doc737 none Donohue In this project, the PIs will analyze data from Acoustic Doppler Profilers (ADCP) used during the Indian Ocean Survey carried out as part of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE). Shipboard ADCPs provided high resolution sections of velocity in the upper 300 meters along the survey lines. Lowered ADCPs (LADCP) provided full depth profiles at every hydrographic station along the tracks. The central objective is to describe the ocean current field in the Indian Ocean, with emphasis on the deep lowered ADCP data set. The study will also include use of other parameters measured such as temperature, salinity, chemical tracers, float and drifter tracks, satellite altimetric sea level measurements, etc. Observed currents will be compared with numerical general circulation model output to evaluate the models ability to mimic the phenomena and dynamics of the ocean doc738 none Opening the Horizons proposals a significant enhancement in the science education of middle school girls in rural southwest Missouri. This is a geographic region where the education of women in the sciences is greatly undervalued. Opening the Horizon seeks to engage up to 200 middle school girls and their science teachers from 26 Ozarks counties as well as the girls parents, school administrators, and local and regional communities in an active, positive and self-sustaining program of scientific literacy, curiosity, and opportunity. The main components of the program are (1) kick-off and closing conferences each year at Southwest Missouri State University (SMSU) and Drury University (both located in Springfield, Missouri) to include girls, their parents, and teachers; (2) three Saturday workshops over the course of the year to be run simultaneously at five college or university regional sites closer to the girls homes (3) on-going contact for the girls with a college student mentor; (4) on-going contact for the teachers with other science teachers in the region as well as faculty women in the sciences at the regional higher educational institutions; and (5) a distance learning course for middle school teachers available at nine sites. The program will be run by a leadership team of SMSU and Drury women faculty as well as site directors at each of the five other college and university sites doc739 none This project provides radiation measurements and their interpretation during the ACE-Asia (Aerosol Characterization Experiment - Asia) intensive field program. ACE-Asia is a multi-investigator, international program designed to characterize the chemical properties and radiative effects of aerosols in the outflow from eastern Asia. The investigator will collaborate closely with scientists funded by the NASA SIMBIOS (Sensor Intercomparison and Merger for Biological and Interdisciplinary Oceanic Studies) program who will perform a suite of radiation measurements and compile and interpret these data for the purpose of understanding the radiative effect of aerosols in the region. The PI will also deploy additional radiation instruments and perform calculations of radiative forcing. The results will be compared to those from INDOEX (The Indian Ocean Experiment). This research is important because it may lead to improved understanding of the effects of pollutents from East Asia on the climate of that region as well as that of Pacific regions downwind of the East Asian coast doc740 none The focus of this dissertation research is the role of silviculture in political debates over community forest management in Oaxaca, Mexico. Recent ethnographic studies of laboratory science have highlighted the role of laboratory cultures. This study builds upon these approaches to look at forest management in the field, rather than in the research laboratory, using silvicultural science as lens to look at interactions between foresters and non-foresters. In the last 20 years there has been a worldwide shift in forest management responsibility from state forests services to forest communities and private owners. Mexico parallels these trends, and over 80% of forest land is owned by communities and municipalities. Foresters have been trained to work effectively in bureaucracies, but are not used to communicating with private land owners and community members. This research seeks to pinpoint what kinds of rhetorical techniques are most effective in communicating knowledge about the forest and building broad based legitimacy for forest management activities. A particular focus will be the extent to which foresters and non-foresters knowledge about the forest is integrated into management recommendations. This research will tie together a history of Mexican silviculture and state forestry institutions, with a history of local communities, so as to put into context the present-day political debates about forest management. It will trace the connections between the discourses used by foresters, and the creation of technical knowledge, power and legitimacy for foresters. It will also look at how different stakeholders historical experiences and institutional locations affect their knowledge about the forest, how they argue for and support their own forms of knowledge, and their own agendas in the forest doc741 none Quade This award provides partial funding for the support of a technician to oversee operation and maintenance of the gas-source mass spectrometry laboratory in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arizona. The mass spectrometers in the laboratory are essential research tools for several faculty and their students at the University of Arizona. The research dependent on isotopic analyses conducted by this group includes study of hydrothermal fluid-rock interactions, igneous petrogenesis, ground water and low-temperature fluid-rock interactions, ecology and paleoecology, biogeochemistry, and paleontology. The primary responsibilities of the technician include operation and maintenance of two mass spectrometers and gas extraction lines and training and supervision of users of the facility doc742 none This dissertation project proposes research on the origins and development of SETI, a modern scientific field comprised of several highly innovative research programs and organizations. SETI (the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) is a branch of radio astronomy in which researchers utilize large radio telescopes, small satellite dishes, or optical telescopes to search for electromagnetic signals of intelligent origin. Study of this scientific field offers greater understanding of scientific organization, practice, and the relationship between science and the public. Specifically, this project posits that SETI is a unique scientific activity in which researchers are inventing: 1) new organizational forms; 2) new scientific practices infected by feedback from the public; and 3) new ways of engaging and enrolling the public in basic scientific research. SETI is a scientific activity that explicitly addresses issues of deep cultural significance. SETI researchers often point out that demonstrating the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life would have profound effects upon cosmological, religious, and popular conceptions of our place in the universe. In part because of this, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) terminated direct funding for SETI programs in . SETI scientists and researchers have therefore been forced to appeal directly to the public to obtain the funds, expertise, and other resources necessary to carry out search programs. This has resulted in a wide proliferation of innovative organizational forms within the SETI research community. This project will explore: 1) the diversity of organizational forms through which SETI research is carried out; 2) how these organizational contexts affect scientific practice; and 3) how these different organizational structures have cultivated limited public involvement in SETI. This project proposes 11 months of field research to: 1) interview and interact with researchers affiliated with SETI organizations throughout the continental United States; 2) conduct archival research at organizations that have sponsored SETI research work; 3) participate in various public presentations, conventions, and conferences at which SETI scientists interact with members of the general public; and 4) map the ways that SETI is understood by enthusiasts and in popular culture. Primary data for this study will be collected through more than 40 in-depth, focused interviews conducted with SETI researchers, volunteers, and enthusiasts. In order to frame informants perspectives within the larger historical and social context in which SETI research is done, interview data will be supplemented with ethnographic data and archival sources. This research design is built upon site visits and preliminary interviews conducted between March and October of doc743 none Jensen As the field of electromagnetics has matured, it has become evident that the opportunity for significant contributions in this field is concentrated in multidisciplinary and collaborative efforts. Examples of this include recent advances in wireless communications, radio-frequency micro-machining and MEMS technology, low-cost antenna arrays and re-configurable apertures and low-power and high-frequency electronics. It seems likely that future advances in these and similar fields will be fueled if scientists are exposed to relevant work in different disciplines where their own work may be applicable. The funding received in response to this proposal will facilitate organization of special sessions at the IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation and USNC URSI National Radio Science Meeting that foster this interaction. By working with carefully selected organizers for these special sessions, the Technical Program Committee will identify leading researchers in academia, government, and industry as potential keynote speakers and use the funds to cover expenses associated with bringing them to the conference. By providing this opportunity for interaction, researchers and practitioners will be able to better understand new directions that their work may take in order to solve many of the important technological challenges that lie in interdisciplinary research doc744 none SES 00- - Daniel P. Todes (Johns Hopkins University) Ivan Pavlov: A Life in Russian Science The Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov ( - ) is an almost legendary figure. Perhaps second only to Einstein, he (and his salivating dogs) has become a popular symbol of twentieth century science. This award enables the Principal Investigator to complete research and a draft of the first scholarly biography of Pavlov. This project draws upon the extensive archival sources that became available in the s to present a dramatic life story that also illuminates Pavlov s time, place, and preoccupations: the history of Russia and Russian science from the mid-nineteenth century to Stalinist times, the rise of experimental physiology and scientific medicine, the emergence of large-scale laboratory research, and the efforts of early twentieth century scientists to explain human behavior. In the course of the grant period, the Principal Investigator will also complete an intermediate project; entitled The Unknown Pavlov: Reflexes, Revolution, and the Russian Mind, which will use recently discovered archival materials to explore the little-known anthropomorphic dimensions of Pavlov s ideas about higher nervous activity. In view of Pavlov s scientific importance and iconic status in twentieth century culture, the PI hopes that this biography will find an audience, not only among historians of science and Russian historians, but also among physiologists, psychologists, and the educated reading public doc745 none Bilitza This award supports a three-year collaborative research project among Dr. Dieter Bilitza, with the Raytheon Technical Services Company at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD; Professor Jacob Olusegun Adeniyi, of the Department of Physics at the University of Ilorin in Nigeria; and Professor Olivier Obrou, at the Laboratoire de Physique de l Atmosphere at the University of Cocody in the Ivory Coast. The ionosphere is that part of the atmosphere which lies between the mesophere and the exosphere. Its layers are ionized by solar ultraviolet radiation, which facilitates the transmission of certain radio waves over long distances on earth. A good knowledge of ionospheric electron density is essential for any ground or space remote sensing technique that uses the ionospheric radio waves for the transmission of its signals. The most widely used model for determining these densities, the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI), lacks a description of the low latitude regions where the largest electron densities occur, which limits its ability to provide the corrections needed by navigation and communications systems. The three investigators will analyze equatorial observations of the bottom-side ionospheric electron density profiles collected by four ground-based sounders located near the magnetic equator in Burkina Faso, Nigeria, and the Ivory Coast. The results will be used to improve the specification of electron density in the IRI model. This information complements existing measurements in the American, Indian, and Pacific sectors, and completes the collection of electron density data from the longitudinal chain of ground-based sounders near the magnetic equator. These data sets will also enable the researchers to develop a quantitative description of the variability of the equatorial ionosphere in the African sector. This project combines the manual ionogram scaling done at the four stations with modern ionogram reduction techniques. Through this project the principal investigators expect to achieve a better understanding of the processes that shape the equatorial ionosphere, which will lead to improvements in the IRI standard model. An updated IRI model, which includes African measurements, will benefit future researchers, and it will also have broad application in high frequency and ground-to-satellite communications systems. Additionally, the anticipated results should expand the knowledge about ionospheric physics. The Division of International Programs and the Division of Atmospheric Sciences are jointly providing funding for this project doc746 none LOW Volcanic Ocean Films, Inc. is testing the viability of shooting large-format film of volcanic vents on the deep ocean floor. The tests will be carried out during the course of the currently scheduled November, , dives involving the deep sea submersible, Alvin, at the 9 Degree North site on the East Pacific Rise. the expedition plans to shoot approximately 20,000 feet of 15 perforation, 70-mm film resulting in approximately 10 to 20 minutes of footage. The objectives of this research are: o To confirm the feasibility of lighting and filming the deep sea volcanic vents in the large film format from Alvin and o To develop and optimize the deep water, large-format filming capabilities of Alvin. The research effort is proposed on behalf of a consortium of US-based organizations now forming for the production of a 40-minute, large-format film, Volcanoes of the Abyss. Key production personnel involved in this research will be: Stephen Low, Director Producer; Pietro L. Serapiglia, Producer; William W. Reeve, Camera Specialist; and Alexander Low, Project Manager. Scientists working with the proudction crew in this phase are: Richard A. Lutz, biologist from Rutgers University; Fred Grassle, Director, Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University; Dave Gallo, Director, Special Projects, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and Emory Kristof, Deep Sea Imaging Specialist, National Geographic Society doc747 none Cerro, R. U. of Alabama Highly ordered organic films, one molecule in thickness, continue to be one of the fastest growing areas of applied nano-science. A few important areas of applications for nano-technology include nano-biosensors, nano-chemical sensors, nonlinear optic devices, and bio-resistant bio-compatible protective coatings. The oldest method for manufacturing ultra-thin organized chemical layers is the Langmuir-Blodgett technique. The Langmuir-Blodgett technique, however, ahs not been used on an industrial scale for the manufacturing of nano-technology devices due to the apparent inability to control the hydrodynamic variable needed for reliable thin film deposition. Most of the problems associated with the Langmuir-Blogett techniques for thin film deposition can be traced back to the complex dynamics of the gas-liquid -solid moving contact line. We discuss in this proposal how recent experimental and theoretical advances on the dynamics of moving contact lines can be used to develop a fundamental knowledge can be used in turn to provide a physical model of the deposition process that will pave the way for developing faster industrial- scale methods to manufacture ordered thin films. The development of faster, cheaper and reliable L-B deposition processors will impact some of the most active areas in nano-technology, such as the manufacture of MEMS, and the development of extremely sensitive chemical-detecting or bio-detecting devices. This proposal is submitted in similar versions to the NSF by the university of Alabama in Huntsville and to UK s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) by Leeds University. The main strength of this proposal is to collaborative team approach that will be used to analyze the experimental and theoretical aspects of this research and on the collective expertise brought into the proposal by the groups at the USA and UK doc748 none The School District of Superior, Wisconsin will identify and appoint school and community mathematics and science professionals to an Advisory Planing Council to plan Superior Scientists, a comprehensive program targeted at girls in upper elementary, middle and high school, their parents, teachers, and guidance counselors. Over the course of a year the council will plan activities to increase the number of girls enrolling in high school math, science, and technology courses, and therefore, increase the number of women eligible to work in science. Components identified as critical to the success of the project include (1) working with girls at elementary, middle, and high school; (2) developing community resources for internships; (3) developing a professional women s network for mentoring; (4) improving curriculum to raise the mathematics and science achievement of all students; and (5) introducing teaching methods that incorporate experiences that interest girls. An effective Advisory Planning Board and an application to the National Science Foundation s Program for Gender Equity for a Large Collaborative Project are primary outcomes set for this planning grant doc749 none The purpose of this research project is to study the use of microwave radiation in the adsorption desorption process over oxide sorbents .catalysts. Past studies have shown that catalysts prepared with microwave treatment can differ from those prepared by other methods. Other studies suggest that microwave radiation can influence catalytic selectivity in several ways: by heating the catalyst, by exciting the reactants, or by creating a plasma that induces reaction on a surface. The PI will study oxide sorbents including zeolites for removal of hydrocarbons (with and without heteroatoms, e.g., chlorine) from air in the presence of water vapor. The application of these studies is the removal of volatile organic carbons (VOCs) from controlled environments and process effluents. The influence of microwave irradiation on the selectivity of adsorption, and the efficiency of desorption will be studies. Sorption isotherms in the presence of microwave energy will be measured to estimate the effective surface temperature with microwave radiation. In situ infrared will be developed to measure the temperature and to follow the changes in the sorbed and surface species during exposure to microwave energy. Zeolite sorbents with variable hydroxide contents, i.e., from dydrophobic to hydrophillic will also be looked at. The powere delivery will be varied to determine the efficiencies of these processes compared to the microwave absorption spectra of the sorbent and sorbate systems in later parts of this research. The research spans fundamental microwave spectroscopy of the sorbent-sorbate to ad-desorption studies in the presence of microwave energy to microwave reaction studies and involves the collaboration between three departments doc750 none Kadko This award allows David Kadko of the University of Miami to visit Iceland to make preliminary investigations into the crustal residence times of fluids circulating through the geothermal systems there. The objectives of the investigations are to understand the hydrogeologic sampling sites and facilities available, obtain documents and maps available only in Iceland, and work out the unique contributions to be provided by each side. The overall results of the research will make it possible to study the ocean ridge system in entirely new ways, test sampling and analysis methods, and provide for an exchange of information and analytical techniques between experts in Iceland and the U.S doc751 none This dissertation research project examines the diversity of meanings of utility in nineteenth century Britain as exhibited by the producers and readers of the Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK). It will attempt to prove that there was a diversity of ideologies concerning the utility of science held by the SDUK committee members, authors, publishers, provincial members, as well as working class readers. It will also show that the idea of what constituted the utility of science varied depending on the media (magazine, mechanics institutes, and serial publications) used by the SDUK to promote public education. The number and diversity of undertakings of the SDUK from mechanics institutes to almanac publication reflect the various ways in which the SDUK attempted to promote and extend its vision of useful knowledge. Science was a key element of many of the SDUK ventures, thus making the SDUK one of the central agents for the popularization of science in the first half of the nineteenth century. At the heart of science popularization was the idea that science is useful in some way to either the popularizers, the audience or both. How science would be useful for different groups was a controversial issue. Analyzing the unique attributes of the Penny Magazine as the medium for the exchange of ideas about the utility of science forms the most innovative contribution of this dissertation research project. The researcher argues that the concept of utility had different meanings within different media due to both media format and intended audience. Frequency of publication, length of articles, and cost of printing combined with concerns over the potentially unlimited readership to determine the contents of the Penny Magazine. In trying to attract and keep a wide and varied audience, the Penny Magazine had to balance education with entertainment and readers expectations with the SDUK s intentions. The communications circuit of the Penny Magazine - Brougham, Knight, the SDUK publications committee, authors, provincial SDUK distribution outlets, and readers - embodied all of the various, and sometimes conflicting, ideas of the utility of science. By examining this circuit, this dissertation research project will expand historians understanding of utility in the nineteenth century and will show the importance of media in expressing the diversity of ideologies surrounding the utility of science. The main sources for this project will be the SDUK publications, all available in the U.S., and the extensive SDUK archives at the University College of London. This archive contains all financial, editorial and organizational records, as well as all incoming and outgoing correspondence. The researcher will also make use of the Brougham archives, also located at University College of London. In order to understand the meanings of utility for provincial members of the SDUK and to complete her comparison of the Penny Magazine to mechanics institutes, the researcher will make use of the local archives in Manchester, Leeds and possibly other cities doc752 none This project will provide measurements of aerosol number size distribution and hygroscopic properties of aerosols on board the NOAA Ron Brown research vessel during ACE-Asia (Aerosol Characterization Experiment). The specific instruments to be deployed include Condensation Particle Counters, Differential Mobility Particle Sizers, Aerodynamic Particle Sizers, and Differential Mobility Analyzers, providing aerosol size distribution information over the entire relevant size range and hygroscopicity information as a function of particle size, including coarse particles. These measurements are crucial for characterizing the physical properties of the aerosol in the ACE-Asia region, and for closure studies of physical, chemical, and optical properties doc753 none ACE-Asia is a multi-institution, international program to study the chemistry and optical properties of aerosols in outflow from eastern Asia. This project involves the installation of a 20 meter tall air sampling tower with outrigger platform at Kosan, Cheju Island, South Korea. This tower will support the sampling and analysis activities of numerous ACE-Asia ground investigators doc754 none This dissertation research project explores the relationship between science and agriculture in a crosscultural setting, comparing and problematizing the assumptions and goals of agricultural scientists from Mexico and the United States. It examines the extent to which science has a standardizing influence on international agricultural practices and crops. The focus of this dissertation is Mexican agricultural research on corn between - , a period which spans the so-called Green Revolution. During this period the Mexican agricultural research community declared scientific agriculture to be the solution to rural poverty and low agricultural production among subsistence farmers in the land reform sector. Little attention has been paid to how various groups of scientists adapted their research to achieve their different visions of a self sufficient and modern Mexico. Most scholarship and popular commentaries on the Green Revolution contribute to one of two theses. One thesis states that United States agricultural assistance programs inappropriately imposed foreign research and plant varieties on recipient nations. The alternative thesis argues that the advances in agricultural science that were brought to recipient nations, such as high yielding wheat, provided the necessary solution to food problems. This dissertation research contributes to our understanding of the international transfer of agricultural knowledge in three ways: 1) It follows the research and policies of the national agricultural science community at individual and institutional levels, 2) It traces the changes in scientific methodologies and definitions of agricultural science, and 3) It analyzes attempts to develop a scientific agriculture in Mexico and the resulting standardization or diversification of agriculture. This careful study of the research methodologies and the social goals of Mexican and United States agricultural scientists will reveal the changing role that science actually played in attempting to achieve Mexicans national economic, social, and political goals. It will reveal how Mexican and United States scientists negotiated conflicting visions for Mexico s agricultural welfare. The researcher intends to demonstrate that the role of science in agricultural improvement was not strictly one of standardization; rather, the development of scientific agriculture was historically and geographically situated. Through a variety of motivations, agricultural scientists have contributed to the maintenance of genetic and cultural diversity. Through scientists choices of the disciplines and methodologies utilized crop research, scientific agriculture has served a range of social and economic goals, from standardization to the conservation of diversity doc755 none This dissertation research project concerns, at the most general level, changing conceptions of the place of humans in nature, from the point of view of the natural and human sciences. More specifically, the research concerns the fate of the overkill model of Pleistocene extinctions. During the first half of the twentieth century, climatic models dominated explanations for the disappearance of more than 35 genera of American large mammals following the last ice age. Beginning in the s, these models were challenged by the proposal that paleolithic human hunters, entering a continent filled with unsuspecting prey, decimated the local megafauna. The overkill hypothesis challenged natural and social scientists to collaborate across the traditional divide separating human sciences like archaeology and anthropology, and natural sciences like paleoecology, climatology, geology, and paleontology. In connection with the boundary issues and interdisciplinary efforts involved in debates over the place of humans in nature, the dissertation research also addresses the putative environmental implications of early human-caused extinction, and also issues concerning Native American legacies and identities doc756 none The neutral lipids of Emiliania huxleyii include a characteristic set of alkenones and related compounds with degrees of unsaturation influenced by growth temperature. These compounds have attracted considerable interest as indicators of paleotemperature. In this study, researchers at Oregon State University and California State University at Chico will carry out a set of laboratory investigations of these compounds in a variety of E. huxleyii strains. The experiments would be designed to test the hypothesis that these compounds function as energy stores during growth limitation and following shifts in environmental conditions. Additionally, they would test the hypothesis that algae with high levels of these compounds are nutritionally less suitable for protozoan grazers doc757 none Interest and research in the peopling of the Americas and post-colonization population movements of Native Americans have experienced resurgence among anthropologists. This is in part due to advances in molecular biological technology that have allowed many long-standing hypotheses, based on archaeological and linguistic evidence, to be addressed for the first time using genetic evidence. Within the last decade, advances in automation of the Polymerse Chain Reaction (PCR) amplification have complimented the development of methods for the extraction and analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from prehistoric bone, allowing researchers to genetically characterize ancient Native American populations. Archaeological and linguistic evidence suggest that prehistoric population movements in North America were widespread and common. Therefore many contemporary Native American populations occupy a different geographical region from their ancestors. NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) bases repatriation of unearthed Native American bones on cultural affiliation and geographic location. Unfortunately, many Native American prehistoric remains are found with no cultural artifacts and therefore cannot be accurately repatriated. Genetic testing and analysis of modern and ancient Native American populations will allow accurate repatriation of Native American remains, even if a tribe s ancestral population migrated to their current location from a long distance away. Based on linguistic and archaeological evidence, Edward Sapir and Peter Denny argue that the ancestors of the majority of Native Americans in the Eastern U.S. (Algonquian speakers) are located in the Pacific Northwest and migrated to their current location approximately ybp. Native Americans belong to one of five matrilines (haplogropus A,B,C,D,or X) and these matrilines can be identified through restriction or sequence analysis of the mitochondrial genome. The distribution of these matrilines varies among Native American populations but appear to be regionally and temporally stable. The frequency of these matrilines in a population can distinguish among Native American tribes. Native American populations of the Pacific Northwest are almost entirely haplogroups B and D while populations in the Northeast are mainly haplogroups A, C, and X. This project proposes to identify the mtDNA haplogroup distribution of ancient populations ( ybp and ybp) in a region of the Pacific Northwest that has cultural affinities with the Eastern U.S. Because the haplogroup frequency distribution of the populations in the Pacific Northwest and the Eastern U.S. differ so greatly, identification of ancestor descendant relationships among these ancient populations is favorable. This research will also address issues concerning the peopling of the Americas, migration theory, and regional prehistory in western North America doc758 none Luss - The North America Symposium on Chemical Reaction Engineering (NASCRE), to be held in January of , is being planned to provide a forum at which academic and industrial experts, especially young ones, will be exposed to the frontiers of chemical reaction engineering. The topical meeting will focus on six topics and consist of six plenary and six oral presentation sessions. All oral presentations will be limited to these pre-determined six topics; contributions on other topics will be presented in two poster sessions. The six topics will be: Biochemical reaction engineering Combinatorial catalysis Fuel cells for stationary and mobile applications Polyolefin reaction engineering Synthesis gas and chemicals via novel reactors Multi-phase reactors doc166 none This project is a comprehensive field and laboratory program that involves coordinated seismic, petrologic and theoretical modeling studies along an 800-km-long section of the Galapagos spreading center between 91 and 98 degrees west. The objectives of the project are to: (1) determine how the compensation of the Galapagos swell is partitioned between variations in crustal thickness and mangle density by measuring crustal thickness along the swell and the degree of melting inferred from the chemistry of basalts, (2) determine if there is a threshold factor that controls the transition from an axial high to a rift valley, (3) determine how the extent of magmatic differentiation of ridge basalts relates to the presence or absence of a melt lens, and (4) determine why the degree of partial melting appears to be lower near the hotspot doc760 none Southern Africa, and indeed the Southern Hemisphere in general, lacks the paleovegetation and absolute temperature and rainfall data needed for refinement of current biome and General Circulation Model simulations. Namibia presents a unique set of opportunities to develop long records of vegetation, temperature, and rainfall. The abundant caves and speleothems of the country are the key to how this can be achieved, with large waterfall tufas and thick ancient fluvial aeolian sediment sequences playing supportive roles. The proposed research, which involves scientists from Namibia, Botswana, South Africa, and the U.S.A., will study Holocene environmental change in Namibia during the last 130,000 years from cave speleothems, waterfall tufas, and sequences of ancient fluvial aeolian sediments. The project will include extensive field sampling, sample dating, staple isotope and other chemical and element measurements, and regression analysis to link ground water fluctuations with climate conditions. The research will compare the newly collected climatic records with archaeological data for Namibia, and for other parts of southern Africa, to evaluate human-environmental relationships during the Holocene. The new data will also be used to compare with records of El Nino frequency to assess its variations during the Holocene. The sparse coverage of terrestrial data in the Southern Hemisphere restricts the kind of detailed data-model comparisons on which the global climate modeling relies. The research will provide new medium- and high-resolution vegetation, temperature, and rainfall data for southern Africa for the last 130,000 years, thus filling a major gap in the terrestrial paleoenvironment record for southern Africa. This would be the longest such record for the subcontinent and the longest records in the world. The data developed will be crucial to accurate global climate modeling, and the comparison with the records of El Nino frequency will help improve our understanding and modeling of El Nino recurrence and intensity in the present doc761 none Rundell Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Dr. William Rundell, Department of Mathematics, Texas A&M University (TAMU), College Station, Texas and a Tunisian team led by Dr. Mohamed Jaoua, Professor of Applied Mathematics and Director of the Laboratory for Mathematical Modeling at the Ecole Nationale D Ingenieurs De Tunis (ENIT), Tunis, Tunisia. They plan to study inverse and optimal design mathematical problems and several of their applications in various fields. Some of the applications to which these mathematical tools will be applied are: impedance tomography (in medical applications), acoustic scattering, and the design of automobile mufflers. Scope: This award will allow collaboration between Tunisian and US scientists who have complementary capabilities and experience in the field of applied mathematics. The Tunisian team includes senior researchers, postdoctoral investigators and graduate students. Both the US and Tunisian team leaders have strong publishing records in the area of inverse and optimal design problems and in applications in several engineering fields. This TAMU-ENIT interaction is likely to be a productive collaboration, with benefits to both teams. This proposal meets the INT objective of encouraging collaboration by US and foreign scientists in areas of mutual benefit doc762 none Aldebol, Sylvia Inter American University of Puerto Rico CISE Minority Institutions Infrastructure: A CISE Planning Proposal for Inter American University of Puerto Rico The purpose of this project is to prepare a five-year plan that will improve the quality of learning experiences, increase research activities, and attract more students to the computer science program. In this five-year plan, activities will be developed to promote active student learning through inquiry and project-based laboratory and classroom experiences. The strategy used in developing the activities will be to identify and develop focus areas in computer science that will impact course and curriculum, research activities, laboratory improvement, faculty enhancement, and industry partnership. The two main focus areas to be developed are (1) computing on a network and (2) data acquisition doc763 none In this project, aerosol integral light scattering and 180 degree backscattering will be measured from the C-130 aircraft during ACE-Asia (Aerosol Characterization Experiment). In addition, the extinction-to-backscatter ratio (lidar ratio) will be determined, a crucial parameter needed for the quantitative interpretation of lidar data. It is expected to vary with air mass (depending on source of air, aerosol size, and chemical composition) and relative humidity. Airborne measurements will provide data for a large range of conditions. Measurements of aerosol optical properties, such as these are essential for characterizing aerosols and their role in the Earth s radiative balance and thus climate doc764 none Technical standards-those protocols, rules, and codes that specify how a given group of technologies operate and interoperate-play a key role in the development of technology. This dissertation research project will study the design and implementation of technical standards on a global scale. Using a case study approach, the project will trace the evolution of P3P -the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project-a computer standard that is currently being developed for the World Wide Web. The designers of P3P claim it is a policy-neutral standard: an objective solution that can implemented anywhere, independent of local context. The research project will test this claim by examining the extent to which local social, political, and cultural concerns affect the design and implementation of the standard. Through a combination of interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, this project will address three core questions: (1) How do social concerns shape the design of a particular standard? (2) How do social values and assumptions affect its implementation in different cultural environments? (3) How does a given standard, developed within a particular design context, become a global standard ? Informants will be drawn from three levels: the P3P working group; the standards organization that is responsible for developing P3P; and external actors (technologists, policymakers, and privacy advocates) who have contributed to, supported, criticized, or otherwise shaped the development of P3P. Interviews will be conducted in the U.S. and internationally, allowing for comparative analysis across diverse cultural environments. By looking beyond the immediate designers of P3P to the broader organizational and social contexts of standards-making, this project will examine standardization not as the work of a single technical group or standards organization, but rather as a global phenomenon, one that binds geographically distant localities together as a given standard is implemented in multiple sites around the world. By following the development of P3P as it moves across social, political, and cultural boundaries, this project will investigate how local cultures shape global standards and how technical standards are implicated in broader processes of global political-economy. In this way, a study of technical standards offers a lens through which scholars can investigate the evolution of technology and the building of sociotechnical order doc765 none Kalman This U.S.-Hungary project between Gabor Kalman of Boston College and Zoltan Donko of the Research Institute for Solid State Physics and Optics, Budapest, examines Strongly Coupled Coulomb Systems (SCCS) which are characterized by a significant ratio of the Coulomb interparticle potential energy to the kinetic energy of the particles. The strong coupling effects can take place both in the electronic and ionic components and one finds them in settings such as inertially confined plasmas, astrophysics, condensed matter systems, mesoscopic matter, and laser and particle beams for thermonuclear fusion. Specifically, this U.S.-Hungarian team intends to address layered systems (electronic or ionic bilayer, modeled by two quasi two-dimensional layers of charged particles) and dusty plasmas (liquids and crystal). Kalman and his group bring a strong theoretical underpinning to the work while Donko contributes expertise with molecular dynamics (MD) simulations that will be utilized as an experimental check for the theoretical aspects of this study of SCCS. Their collaborative research plan features computation of pair correlation functions, dynamic structure functions, and transport coefficients. The MD simulation work serves two purposes by providing: 1) an independent source of data for quantities obtained through theoretical calculations, making a comparison between theoretical and MD results possible; and 2) information on physical quantities for which a theoretical model is not available. If successful, results should improve our fundamental understanding of SCCS and serve as a check for theoretical predictions related to material properties and phase changes. This project in theoretical physics fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc766 none Flower This U.S.-Eastern Europe workshop on Mantle Dynamic Response to Africa-Eurasia Collision features an active tectonic system encompassing the region of Pannonia, Carpathia, and Dinaride (PANCARDI). Many U.S. and European experts view this system, generated in response to the Mid-to Late-Tertiary Africa-European plate collision, and the PANCARDI region as a natural, transnational laboratory for examining the cause of widespread intro-continental magmatism. The U.S. workshop organizer, Martin F. J. Flower of the University of Illinois at Chicago, and his Romanian counterpart, Victor I. Mocanu of the University of Bucharest, intend to bring together an interdisciplinary group from the United States and Central and Eastern Europe to examine recent research findings that point to collision-induced mantle flow as a driver of lithosphere escape, volcanic arc rollback and basin opening. The workshop will take place north of Bucharest in Covasna, Romania, during June 17-21, . After site visits and workshop discussions, participating junior and senior geologists, geophysicists and modelers from the U.S., Romania, Poland, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Germany and Ukraine will formulate new cross-disciplinary research synergies and refine plans for follow-on cooperative research projects that incorporate seismic shear-wave splitting, geochemical-isotope studies and numerical modeling. Results should clarify next steps for understanding geodynamic evolution and collision-related asthenospheric responses as causes of basaltic volcanism. This workshop on mantel dynamics associated with continental plate collisions fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Eastern Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of mutual interest and competence doc767 none G. Klinzing, University of Pittsburgh Travel support will be provided to fifteen U.S. science and engineering graduate students to participate at an intensive course in Particle Technology especially offered by Prof. K. Leschonski at the University of Clausthal, Germany, July 1-9, . The course will be taught in English using the unique laboratory and pilot facilities for particle technology at the University of Clausthal. It is aimed at providing students with exposure to both basic concepts in particle science and engineering and at instilling an appreciation of the particle technology field, its relevance to industry and international contributions. Development of long-term contacts with researchers abroad is another objective. Students will be selected by competition from the Departments of Chemical, Mechanical, Civil and Materials Science Engineering in U.S. universities and colleges and will require a statement from the student and a letter of recommendation from the student s advisor. Three faculty advisors will help with the selection process and with the guidance of students during the instruction process. DuPont will co-sponsor this activity doc768 none This award provides funding for the support of the National Engineers Week Teleconference for Middle and High School Students. The eleventh annual Discover Engineering! Teleconference entitled, Engineers Turning Ideas into Reality, will be broadcast nationwide during National Engineers Week on Wednesday, February 23, . The purpose of this teleconference is two-fold. First, the program provides U.S. middle and high school students and their teachers with an interesting insight into the work and career opportunities of engineers in a novel teleconference setting. Second, the Discover Engineering! telecast serves as the centerpiece of community open houses at many industrial, government and college locations doc769 none The proposed work will use statistical optimal detection methods to improve the ratio of anthropogenic signal to internal climate variability and allow for an earlier detection of changes. Fingerprints for the expected spatial and temporal evolution of changes in extremes will be derived from climate model simulations. A detection study first applying model data only, will be performed to explore which extreme value indices should show the earliest detectable changes. The PI will also examine which procedure of detection is most promising for an early detection of changes in extremes, as well as which variable or combination of variables can and should be applied. The most promising procedure will be applied to observations. The focus is on temperature extremes, length of wet and dry periods and precipitation extremes, particularly over several days. Daily observations from land stations, mainly from the US, Canada, Europe, Russia, China and Japan will be used. The work is important because it will lead to increased understanding on climate change detection techniques doc770 none This project will provide radiation measurements on board the C-130 aircraft and at the ground site at Cheju Island, Korea, for ACE-Asia (Aerosol Characterization Experiment). Seven airborne spectral and broadband radiometers and five surface radiometers will be deployed. Flight tracks along extended aerosol gradients will be used to investigate the evolution of aerosol effects, in particular aerosol radiative forcing, as aerosol properties change as a function of time distance over the ocean. The data will be integrated with other ACE-Asia measurements and radiative transfer modeling will be performed to estimate the radiative effects of aerosols be comparing observed and calculated radiative fluxes, optical depths, direct and diffuse radiation fields, and tropospheric atmospheric heating doc771 none Like many children in Africa and the rest of the world, Fulbe children in Maroua learn to use more than one language in their daily lives. Their linguistic repertoire comes to include Fulfulde, French, Arabic, and a simplified variety of Fulfulde. Thus, at an age when children are busy consolidating, re-organizing, and expanding their first language skills, Fulbe children encounter three new codes that they must also learn to use according to the linguistic and cultural rules of their families, schools, and peer groups. This project will investigate the development of communicative competence in multiple codes through a language socialization study. Over the course of nine months, or one school year, six children (three girls and three boys) will be observed and recorded as they learn to participate in routine language activities with more knowledgeable persons in home, neighborhood, public school, and koranic school settings. Data collection will be focused on three types of language routines: prompting, question-answer exchanges, and narrative. Annotated transcripts of these recordings will be complemented by participant observation and interviews with family members, teachers, and education officials. The goal of this longitudinal, ethnographic study is to obtain greater understanding of how children growing up in a linguistically heterogeneous setting learn to use multiple languages and varieties thereof in culturally appropriate ways. More specifically, this study will document linguistic variation to which the children are routinely exposed, local language ideologies about languages and language varieties used in the community, and language socialization practices in the homes and schools of these children. Home and school language socialization practices will be compared and their impact on the children s development of communicative competence in Fulfulde, French, and Arabic will be examined doc772 none Hrbek The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Tomas Hrbek with support for twenty-four months to work with Dr. Axel Meyer at the University of Konstanz in Germany on a project entitled Testing the Temporal Assumption of Mayr s Geographic Speciation Model. This project will use the killifish genus Aphanius as a model system to test distributional and speciational hypotheses as impacted by the Plio-Pleistocene Mediterranean Sea level fluctuations, the Messinian salinity crisis, orogenic events associated with closing of the Tethys Sea, and the drying of the central Anatolian plateau. Mayr s model of speciation postulates that the range of a single species must be broken up into discontinuous regions, with little or no gene flow between them, in order for speciation to occur. Dr. Hrbek will use molecular data to generate a phylogeny of Aphanius and will do a population genetic study of the Aphanius anatoliae species complex. A detailed molecular analyses will allow him to test temporal and spatial processes leading to patterns of diversification and speciation which are exemplified in that genus. Such an analysis will also aid conservation efforts of this group of fishes, which appear to be endangered in many areas of their distribution. The host lab is especially well suited for this project, having a very active research group and an extensive professional contact with the European evolutionary community. The lab also has an extensive infrastructure and knowledge base doc773 none Kim, Jung H. North Carolina A&T State University MII: Infrastructure for Intelligent Mobile Information Systems This proposal involves the creation of an infrastructure for research and graduate education in Intelligent Mobile Information Systems (IMIS) at North Carolina A&T State University. The infrastructure will support the efforts by the Department of Computer Science, the Department of Electrical Engineering and t he College of Engineering to enhance the effectiveness of North Carolina A&T State University as a pipeline to graduate study by African-Americans in computer science and computer engineering. The proposal outlines an aggressive mentoring program oriented toward encouraging African-American students to continue to graduate school. This will involve identifying undergraduate students with high academic performance and recruiting them to participate in the IMIS research program doc774 none A consortium of community colleges and universities in Ohio and Kentucky is using an ATE planning grant to formulate strategies for an ATE Center in Net-Centered Enabling Information Technologies (IT). The project institutions are: Lexington Community College; Jefferson Community College, Paducah Community College, and the College of Applied Science in Cincinnati. The project builds on previous projects in both Kentucky and Ohio. The idea is to webify IT using five Internet-centered areas: internet development; application development; networking; e-commerce; and data warehousing mining. Graduates of these technical programs are able to design, develop, and effectively use various information technologies at net-centered businesses and industries doc775 none SES 00- - George A. Reisch, Jr. (Independent Scholar) - Logical Empiricism, the Unity of Science Movement, and the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science This award support research on logical empiricism and the Unity of Science Movement. From the s to the s, logical empiricism was the dominant program under which philosophy of science became established in the U.S. as a branch of academic philosophy. Though their opinions often widely differed, logical empiricists shared a commitment to empiricism, to logical analysis of knowledge, and to science as the most effective project for generating knowledge. One theme of logical empiricism was the unity of science -- the belief that theories in different branches of science were interconnected and would continue to unify as science progressed. This belief was closely associated with logical empiricist critiques of pseudoscience and its goal of reforming academic philosophy as scientific philosophy or logical empiricism. The unity of science was not only a philosophical thesis about the nature of science, however. It also motivated leading logical empiricists to collaborate with scientists to further unification within science and counteract growing specialization within science. This activity took place from s and 40s under the rubric of The Unity of Science Movement led by the Viennese economist and sociologist Otto Neurath, along with the philosophers Rudolf Carnap, Charles Morris. With support from this award, the Principal Investigator is completing research on the Unity of Science Movement by examining the collaboration of Neurath, Carnap, and Morris as editors of their International Encyclopedia of Unified Science and the series of International Congresses for the Unity of Science that they organized. By researching archival holdings pertaining to these and other philosophers, the goals of this research are to understand these philosophers conceptions of the unity of science; the extent to which their Movement succeeded in popularizing unity of science within science and within philosophy of science; and the ways and causes by which their movement declined after World War II. Need for understanding this period in philosophy of science is heightened by contemporary interest in the opposite theme -- the disunity of science. Some philosophers of science today, especially those based in philosophy of biology, reject the logical empiricist s thesis of the unity of science as false without understanding how the thesis operated as part of this constructive, collaborative project. It is also heightened by broader debate about scientific literacy (and the question of what counts as a canon of scientific theory and achievement) and continuing disputes over the teaching of creationism doc776 none Investigators at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will collaborate on a project to tackle a major paradigm in marine ecology: the coupling between a pelagically-derived food supply and the dynamics of deep-sea benthic communities. This coupling has been difficult to establish without appropriate long time-series measurements, which in turn have been limited by data storage capacity, longevity of battery power to operate instrumentation, the inability to collect analyze data and alter sampling frequencies in real time, and the inability to correct or compensate for malfunctions in real time. The PIs will establish a long-term seafloor observing site by tapping into the Hawaii-2 Observatory (H20) at m depth in the central North Pacific. H2O is a prototype seafloor observing system that has made long-term monitoring possible in the deep sea, by providing electrical power from shore with real-time data acquisition and control via an underwater telephone cable. By plugging a suite of sensors into H2O, the PIs will study the short and long-term importance of a temporally-varying food supply on an abyssal benthic community. The following questions will be afddressed: 1) What is the quality and quantity of sinking particulate matter reaching the sea floor at the H20 site as representative of the North Pacific central gyre? 2) What responses are elicited in the epibenthic megafauna, as a proxy for benthic community activity, by the quality and quantity of particulate matter arriving on the sea floor on time scales from hours to years? A monitoring system will be attached consisting of a sedimentation sensor and digital time-lapse cameras, to monitor the flux of particulate matter as well as the activity of epibenthic megafauna in two 20m2 areas of the sea floor at the H20 site in real-time. Temporal changes in particle flux to the sea floor will be compared with the abundance and activity of the mobile epibenthic megafauna in the replicate photographic areas. A one-year test with real-time data acquisition and analyses combined with the ability to alter sampling frequencies from shore will provide the first long-term ecological monitoring of the abyssal sea floor to resolve the importance of food limitation on deep-sea benthic communities doc777 none This research is aimed at developing dating techniques for African archaeological sites that are too old to be dated by radiocarbon ( 45,000 years before present) and which lack appropriate volcanic materials for high-precision argon-argon dating. The methods may also help to resolve problems of chronology and disturbance in archaeological sites. Such chronological resolution is essential if we are to understand such issues as the African origins of modern humans and the origins of modern behavior, both of which may relate back to the time period of the late Middle and upper Pleistocene (40,000-200,000 years before present) and the associated Middle Stone Age culture. The proposed research would improve the precision of amino acid racemization dating of ostrich eggshell (one of the more common materials in archaeological sites), through analysis of patterns of spatial and temporal variation in temperature at six African sites in Tanzania, Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. Knowledge of the Pleistocene temperature histories of these sites will also indicate how each region (tropical vs. temperate zones) reflected global cooling and warming patterns during the late Pleistocene and allow evaluation of human response to these climatic variations doc778 none The research project will study the diffusion of a series of linguistic changes across the Mid-Atlantic region from New York City to Baltimore. The Atlas of North American English shows that this region exhibits many common features and changes in progress: the lexical split of short a and o into tense and lax classes; the raising of long open oh to high and mid position, the lowering of short e and the raising of checked ey , and the vocalization of l . Sociolinguistic studies will be carried out within previously studied urbanized areas to provide real-time confirmation of reports of change in progress. To study geographic diffusion from these centers, the project will use short sociolinguistic interviews in 60 smaller cities and towns. The goal is to discover which patterns of diffusion--hierarchical or contagious transmission-are characteristic of which linguistic variables as changes spread from one community to another. Data on the geographic distribution of these changes, coupled with information on patterns of mobility and migration, will help resolve the question of how social change is coupled with linguistic change doc779 none This project involves the investigation of meteorological factors controlling the outflow of aerosols from Southeastern Asia. The project has two components: 1) a historical analysis of meteorological data, visibility, and dust observations, and 2) operational support for the ACE-Asia intensive field campaign to be carried out during spring . For the historical analysis, the structure, intensity, area of occurrence and interannual variability of meteorological systems, both cyclones and anticyclones will be documented using retrospective analyses of dynamical variables (i.e., meteorological fields obtained in a reanalysis) over a period of at least ten years. The research will include the surface and upper air fields, specifically including the larger-scale dynamical environment to which the surface systems relate and which control their development, motion and eventual decay. The spatial and temporal relationship of the occurrence of mineral dust to the parent meteorological system will be investigated doc780 none Iverson - Iowa State University Cohen - Yale University This is a collaborative proposal with Iowa State, Yale University, and Svartisen Glaciological Observatory in Norway. The influence rates of basal motion are believed to affect the speed of ice masses, but the mechanism is very poorly understood. The sediment, which is entrained in basal ice and sometimes separates glaciers from rock, may be an important factor by causing local friction between basal ice and rock, but the magnitude of this friction or the factors that control it are unknown. Till, in contrast, may lubricate the bed, but its mechanism of flow is also uncertain. This uncertainty looms because there have been few field interpretations. Two types of experiments will be conducted at Engabreen, a hard-bedded, outlet glacier in Norway, where the Svartisen Glaciological Observatory provides access to the bed beneath 210 m of temperate ice. These experiments will be extensions of the Principal Investigators earlier subglacial work on hardbed sliding at Engabreen, borehole work on soft-bedded glaciers elsewhere, and laboratory studies of till deformation. The first experiment will test contrasting models of debris[bed friction. A panel that contains a smooth rock tablet will be installed flush with the bed surface. Friction between the tablet and sliding dirty ice will be studied by measuring the shear stress on the tablet, sliding speed, basal melt rate, ice pressure on the bed, and local basal water pressure. The basal melt rate will be independently varied over a wide range. These experiments will provide a complete characterization of the factors that control local debris bed friction and rates of glacial abrasion. In the second experiment, a prism of till will be placed at the icelbed interface. To evaluate the factors that control the motion distribution in the till, instruments will record the till shear strain, dilation and contraction, and pore-water pressure, while the basal water pressure is varied independently. The final position and orientation of sensors and strain indicators will be measured by dissecting the till prism at the ends of tests. Also, clast fabric development and mixing between tills of contrasting lithology will be studied to develop sedimentological criteria for evaluating bed shear strain. These experiments will be more comprehensive and less ambiguous than borehole studies conducted from the surfaces of glaciers doc781 none FEUER This award will continue the leadership of the Center for Science, Mathematics and Engineering Education in the synthesis and application of research to educational improvement by outlining a series of strategic planning exercises. Beginning with the establishment of a strategic planning advisory group, the Center will conduct a series of activities that include: dialog with various experts; roadmapping exercises designed to bring greater coherence to the National Academy s work in education; and development of a coherent vision and revised mission statement for guiding future work. These activities will conclude in a white paper that will convey the overall vision of the Center. The recent decision to integrate the Board on Testing and Assessment (BOTA), the Board on International Comparative Studies in Education (BICSE), and the Center creates a unique opportunity for leadership. Financial support is necessary to enable the Center to articulate a research and action plan and to build the appropriate infrastructure to carry out this strategic plan doc782 none Baker This grant provides partial support of the costs of acquiring a ground penetrating radar (GPR) system with a set of antennas that operate at frequencies ranging from 25 Mhz to 100 MHz and a field-hardened laptop computer for research in geophysics at the State University of New York - Buffalo. This system will be used together with a multi-channel seismic system for research on the coincident use of seismic and GPR techniques for examining the structure of the ultra-shallow subsurface ( 3 m). The use of complementary geophysical techniques including seismic, which probes the elastic parameters of the subsurface, and GPR, which probes the electromagnetic properties of the subsurface, is a fertile area of research in environmental geophysics and offers promise for delineating and dealing with a variety of environmentally pressing problems including, the fate and transport of hazardous materials, groundwater resource issues, and identification of unmapped buried objects. Near-surface geophysical techniques offer a non-invasive look at the subsurface, have clear applications to societal problems, and are important components of curricula for students of geophysics, particularly in urban environments doc783 none The secretion of heterologous proteins that contain disulfide bonds is not at its full potential. Evidence suggests that the regulation of the redox state of the endoplasmic reticulum may be a bottleneck. A multifaceted approach is proposed to probe and manage the redox state in yeast in order to investigate the bottleneck hypothesis further and to ultimately increase secretion efficiency. The four elements of the proposed work are: (1) amplify the products of the individual genes now thought to be involved redox management to assess the effect, (2) use display methods to uncover possibly missing pathway elements, (3) add redox altering compounds to the growth medium to alter redox state, and (4) develop a tachyplesin I substrate-based diagnostic system doc784 none Heterotrophic bacteria constitute a large biomass, and have a significant impact on ecosystem function, in the sea. Understanding what controls the standing stock abundance and metabolic activity of marine bacterioplankton is a main goal of microbial oceanography. Central to this goal is resolution of the longstanding, and still considerable, controversy concerning what fractions of marine bacterial cells, enumerated by standard epifluorescence staining methods, are a) metabolically active and growing, b) alive but not growing, or c) dead. As a simplification of this controversy, opposing views for how metabolic activity is distributed among cells in marine bacterial communities can be stated as: Scenario I? most bacterioplankton cells are alive and active, with metabolic processes broadly distributed over the community, or Scenario 2 ? only a small fraction of the bacterial assemblage is highly active, and it is these cells that are responsible for the bulk of metabolism and production of new cells in the assemblage. Results of various cell?specific assays have yielded conflicting results, in part because the assays are not very quantitative, and thresholds of detection of activity for the assays are not well known. The main goal of this project is to determine whether Scenario I or Scenario 2 is, in general, a more accurate depiction of the distribution of metabolic activity among bacteria in seawater. A secondary goal is to establish what a number of fluorochrome?based assays mean in terms of bacterial metabolic activity. To do this, we will examine cell?specific activity levels among physiologically distinguishable categories of bacteria. The categories will be based on: DNA content: high?DNA versus low?DNA containing bacteria (SYTO stain); state of the cell membrane: membrane potential (DiBAC stain) and intact membrane versus damaged membrane (BacLight stains); and activity of the electron transport system: highly ETS?active versus less active bacteria (CTC redox reagent). We propose to quantify specific activities by a) incubating bacterial assemblages with radiolabeled substrates, b) staining and flow cytometric sorting of the radiolabeled bacteria, and then c) determining substrate incorporation rates for the various categories of sorted cells. We will compare these results with proportion of sorted radiolabeled cells detected as active via microautoradiography. Bacterial assemblages will be examined in systems over a range of trophic states, from a eutrophic estuary, Chesapeake Bay, to the meso? to oligotrophic Oregon upwelling system. A narrow range of cell?specific metabolic rates among the various categories would support the first scenario, while wide ranges of cell-specific metabolic rates would support the second one. Scenario I is compatible with the traditional way that bacterioplankton are represented in ecosystem models: as a coherent assemblage of living cells with uniform rates of respiration and utilization of organic matter. If, however, Scenario 2 is more accurate, then there would be much that we still need to understand about marine bacteria, e.g. how non?growing cells and dead cells are produced, persist, and are lost. This project will be a step toward resolving the conflicting views of distribution of bacterial activity in the sea, which has significant implications for understanding the dynamics of bacteria in marine ecosystems. Our results will also have broader implications, as this study will put on a quantitative basis a number of cell?specific assays that can be used in many fields of microbiology doc785 none This cooperative agreement award to the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, initially will consist of three major tasks: (1) second-year funding for peer-reviewed Arctic research projects that were initiated in FY with funding from NSF, jointly with NOAA; (2) management and coordination of an international three-year project on Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA); and (3) administrative support for the International Arctic Research Center (IARC). The three activities are closely related in that the research projects are expected to address important gaps in our understanding of global change and as such may provide results for inclusion in the assessment. In addition, many of the Principal Investigators of these projects are likely to be chosen by the ACIA steering group as lead authors and expert participants for assessment activities. The award would also provide operating funds for IARC. Additional tasks may be added in future years in response to proposals doc786 none PI: David J O Brien, Qian Liu This study examines relationships between property rights systems and enterprise productivity in rural China. It compares stock-sharing cooperatives to village-owned collective systems. Productivity in the two different kinds of enterprises will be assessed through a variety of methods, primarily through structured observation of the collectives and interviews with participants. Results will document some social and economic consequences of Chinese experiments with different social forms. They will show how aspects of the experiments affect material well being and perceived quality of life doc787 none This project supports continued laboratory studies of photochemical reactions related to the cycling of HOx in the atmosphere. Laser-based diagnostics techniques, such as REMPI-TOF will be used to measure photolysis yields and reaction rates at temperature and pressure conditions relevant to the atmosphere. Specific tasks include: (1) photochemical studies to determine the quantum yield of O(1D) from the photolysis of ozone, (2) measurements of the rate coefficients for the reactions of oxygen atoms and hydroxyl radical (OH) with HO2 over the over the pressure range 50-750 Torr, (3) measurements of the rate coefficient for the recombination of OH with NO2 over the same pressure range, together with the rates of deactivation of vibrationally excited OH with NO2; and (4) measurements of the heat of formation of the isoprene-OH adduct and the rate coefficients for the reactions of the adduct with O2, NO, and NO2 doc788 none Funds are provided to support the study of the cause of a shift from laminated to bioturbated sediments inferred for several locations in the California Borderland and Gulf of California. The hypothesis is that the shift from laminated to bioturbated conditions is due to changes in the oxygen utilization rate. Previous studies had focussed more at changes in oxygen concentration in the deep waters entering the basins and changes in the ventilation rate of the deep basins as the most probable explanation. A coring cruise is planned to collect multicores along transects in several basins along California Baja margin. Study will be in collaboration with Mexican scientists doc789 none This LTREB project will support data collection on weekly recruitment patterns of a taxonomically diverse assemblage of benthic epifaunal invertebrates common to the southern New England coastal zone. Over the five year study period, data will be added to address (a) whether short-term, week?to?week variability in recruitment is tidally controlled, (b) whether recent invasive species differ in the timing, intensity, or duration of the recruitment period relative to resident species, and (c) whether annual fluctuations in water temperature affecting the timing and intensity of recruitment for a variety of species with different life history types. By collecting new data on larval abundances and additional environmental variables, the following will also be examined: (a) whether larval supply, recruitment and adult abundance are correlated, (b) whether taxa with short?living (lecithotrophic) larvae exhibit a greater degree of local control of recruitment than taxa with longer?lived (planktotrophic) larvae, and (c) whether inter?annual variability in recruitment is correlated with other environmental variables such as salinity, dissolved oxygen or chlorophyll a ( food) levels. Collectively, these measurements will provide a long-term database on the responses of marine organisms to changing environmental conditions (e.g., global temperature warming) and the detection of new species that are introduced into the region. In addition to these more applied benefits, understanding the role of larval supply and recruitment is a widely appreciated step in understanding why and how adult populations of marine organisms fluctuate through space and time. Data will also be available to the research community for use in modeling investigations or meta?analyses doc790 none This grant supports an observational study of the structure and evolution of boundaries between airmasses and other phenomena that indicate wind convergence in the atmospheric layer near the ground. The goal is to improve the understanding of the properties of these boundaries and their relation to the initiation and development of convective clouds. The observing network is situated in northern Alabama within an inhomogeneous region that includes the city of Huntsville and surrounding forests, farmland, and wetlands of the Tennessee River valley. The observing instruments consist of the University of Alabama Mobile Integrated Profiling System (MIPS), three Doppler radars, surface meteorological stations, and a radiosonde facility. The instruments will be employed continuously over a three-year period to document the characteristics of airmass boundaries in a wide variety of weather conditions. Collaboration with the Birmingham office of the National Weather Service is planned, to evaluate the contributions of the fine-scale, continuous observations to short-term weather forecasting doc791 none This dissertation research project uses popular anatomical prints (single sheet woodcuts with superimposed flaps) produced in the late s in Reformation Germany as the starting point for the study of several issues of importance to history of medicine and science studies. This project continues ongoing interdisciplinary research which indicates that these anatomical images cannot be fully understood outside the broader context of changes in visual culture and visual practice around the Reformation. This project is primarily concerned with the implications for early modern science of the way in which these prints made use of and reformulated preReformation devotional viewing practices. The project argues that forms of visual attention considered proper for medieval devotion (but improper for the study of nature) were recast during the Reformation as proper for studies of natural objects and phenomena. After charting this shift from devotional to anatomical images and their association with religious and social changes in the Reformation, the researcher follows its effects in two directions: first, she looks at the influence of these prints on later sixteenth-century presentations of anatomy; second, she uses these prints as the starting point for a discussion of the changing epistemological status of visual experience in the sixteenth century. The understanding of these images in relation to broader changes in visual culture and viewing practices - people s interactions with images and the production of meaning through those interactions - adds to the knowledge of history of medicine and science studies on the following topics and issues: the origins and significance of specific forms of anatomical representations; the ways in which anatomy addressed moral and spiritual concerns, and the relationship of body and soul; the social and intellectual mechanisms of change in anatomy and science (especially, with regard to networks of publishers, scholars, and artisans); the role of images and crafted objects in effecting change in the epistemological status of visual experience, important for seventeenth century empiricism; and, the ways in which aesthetics, affects, sensibilities, and values can play important roles in the production of knowledge (not only in tenns of which objects and phenomena investigators study and how, but also in terms of what constitutes legitimate knowledge itself). This project emphasizes art historical methods of close visual analysis of objects and images, with textual support from primary and secondary sources. Because this research focuses on the importance of the visual and physical relationships between images and viewers, and because many prints and objects for this study are not well-reproduced (if reproduced at all), it is essential for the researcher to work directly with the images and objects. The resources made available by this grant will make it possible for her to travel to European collections which house the research materials she needs. She will base herself primarily in London, Munich and Berlin for three to four months each (ten months total) in order to work in several different libraries, large print collections, and museums of material culture doc792 none The extensive body of information collected during and after the May 3, outbreak of intense tornadoes affords an opportunity to study, for the first time in a single venue, all components of this significant natural disaster. The goals of the Symposium are to document the current state of knowledge in dealing with severe local storms, identify the successes and failures on May 3 in specific areas, specify challenges for the future, and determine how best to proceed as a unified community. The symposium is viewed as a mechanism for joining many traditionally separate communities and disciplines to provide a framework for their future interaction doc793 none EPIC (Eastern Pacific Investigation of Climate processes in the coupled ocean-atmosphere system) is an activity of the US Climate Variability and Predictability (CLIVAR) Program. EPIC consists of four components focussing on (i) intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) warm pool phenomena; (ii) cross-equatorial inflow into the ITCZ; (iii) upper ocean structure and mixing; and (iv) an exploratory study of boundary layer cloud properties in the southeasterly tradewind regime. The field phase of EPIC is scheduled for a 6-week period during the interval Sept 1 to Oct 15, . In addition to the eight awards made by the Division of Atmospheric Sciences, this collaborative research has awards by NSF s Division of Ocean Sciences and NOAA s Office of Global Programs. During the field phase, the PIs will collect data aboard R V Ron Brown, both ship-based soundings and C-Band Doppler radar. These will be used to examine the vertical and horizontal structure of rainfall and ITCZ convection and its variability as a function of synoptic conditions. The requisite data will be collected to examine the diurnal cycle of convection and precipitation. The PIs will also examine the relationship between the boundary layer recharging through latent and sensible heat fluxes as a function of convective organization. The work is important because it will provide new insights about convection in the undersampled eastern tropical Pacific doc794 none This project addresses one of the three central hypotheses of the U.S. GLOBEC Northeast Pacific Study: Spatial and temporal variability in mesoscale circulation constitutes the dominant physical forcing on zooplankton biomass, production, distribution, species interactions and retention and loss in coastal regions. The PIs respond to specific components of the GLOBEC announcement which call for (a) three dimensional mesoscale surveys aimed at determining the distribution and productivity of zooplankton in relation to their physical environment, and (b) process studies focused on understanding zooplankton in situ population dynamics processes and the interaction between physical and biological processes. It is not well understood how mesoscale features in the California Current System impact zooplankton biomass, production, distribution, or retention and loss from coastal regions. These interacting phenomena have been studied rarely off California, and even more rarely off Oregon. Mesoscale physical dynamics are relatively easy to measure, but require a high sampling frequency. Most standard methods of measuring zooplankton are simply not compatible with the sampling frequency required to resolve mesoscale features. This fundamental challenge must be met for GLOBEC to succeed. The group of investigators has invested a decade in the development and application of an integrated methodology for measuring zooplankton biomass, distribution and productivity at the high resolution required for mesoscale studies. They find significant mesoscale interactions between physical forcing and zooplankton productivity in the California Current System off northern California. In a pilot study, they found net decreasing productivity in the central jet of the California Current, and net increasing productivity in adjacent eddy systems. The mesoscale match of physical biological processes was striking - but underlying causes remain obscure. The GLOBEC NEP study offers an unparalleled opportunity to understand these dynamics upstream - off Oregon - and so to shed light on fundamental processes. The investigators will study both physical and biological processes, and their spatio-temporal coupling, by measuring and mathematically deducing individual processes of advection, vertical migration, and rates of productivity. They will use the integrated Sea-Soar-Optical Plankton Counter and ADCP in mesoscale surveys, coupled with critical net sampling, to resolve spatial and temporal distributions of size- and species-structured zooplankton at the mesoscale. Rates pertinent to population dynamics will be determined from the biomass spectral method (Zhou and Huntley, ) in conjunction with certain complementary and independent field measurements. The approach is aimed at producing estimations of biomass and productivity - resolved at the same scale as mesoscale physics - and will clarify factors controlling variations in zooplankton productivity. These results are not only critical to defining the food field of juvenile salmon (a key GLOBEC NEP target species), but can improve our general understanding of interactions between zooplankton populations and their dynamic physical environment, with is the central goal of GLOBEC doc795 none This proposal builds on an ongoing interdisciplinary effort to examine the interrelationship between enzymatic modification of water-soluble polymers and the resulting rheological consequences. The expanded scope of this project has the following objectives: (1) biochemical and biophysical characterization of promising wild-type and mutated hyperthermophilic galactomannanases and galactosidases, with respect to polysaccharide modification; (2) investigation of the mobility and distribution of enzymes within the biopolymer matrix during enzymatic modification along with the concomitant changes in the aggregation pattern of the biopolymer-enzyme system; and (3) correlation of enzyme activity to changes in rheology and galactomannan molecular architecture. Such an effort, based on the collective expertise of this research team, i.e., polysaccharide systems, enzymology at elevated temperatures, and the rheology of gels and solutions, will provide a comprehensive understanding of the fundamental and technological issues governing polymer modification resulting from enzyme action. While the focus here is on galactomannans, the long-term impact of this work will extend to strategic biocatalytic approaches to enhance the efficacy and use of other carbohydrate biopolymers doc796 none This project seeks to determine how the impact of stratospheric changes at the earth s surface is affected by model resolution, improvements in model physics and the nature of the ocean model used (dynamical versus mixed layer ocean). The PIs will examine to what extent any cooling in the North Atlantic is a feature of natural variability or forced (including ocean heat transport changes, changes in atmospheric circulation, increasing greenhouse gases and or aerosol loadings). The PIs will (i) to quantify the importance of including stratospheric dynamics in climate change experiments and the potential for important tropospheric and oceanic feedbacks; (ii) to project (based on given scenarios) future trends in the North Atlantic surface air temperature and examine their dependence on the inclusion of the stratospheric and oceanic components; and (iii) to examine to what extent fingerprints of anthropogenic climate change are robust over all the model configurations used in the study. The NASA GISS model with finer vertical and horizontal resolution will be used. The model will also include on-line ozone chemistry and transport. This will improve the solar cycle heating effects in the stratosphere. Interannual varying SST will be used, this may help generate more realistic summer results than with the low resolution. The work is important because it will increase understanding of the role of the stratosphere in climate doc797 none Near the surface, Pb and Fe show a seasonal cycle related to the development of the seasonal thermocline and seasonal input cycles, and short-term variability related to the atmospheric transport, ocean eddies, and biological blooms. In addition, anthropogenic Pb is entering the thermocline and deep ocean as a time-dependent transient tracer. The temporal evolution of Pb isotopes ratios may provide an age tracer of Northern Source deep water masses in the deep sea of particular utility in portions of the deep South Atlantic, where tritium and CFCs have not yet penetrated. For this reason, the PI will continue collecting samples on a weekly basis using the Moored In-Situ Trace Element Serial Sampler (MITESS, time series and deep seawater samples) and the Automated Trace Element sampler (ATE, samples up to 10 m depths). Results from these sampling efforts will establish monthly means and examine the causes of observed variability for Pb and Fe at Bermuda and Hawaii, as well as determine whether iron pulses are responsible for unexplained blooms at the eastern North Pacific Ocean Station P . In addition, the PI will collect samples along the flow path of the North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) to document the penetration of anthropogenic Pb into the south Atlantic via the NADW, assess whether Pb isotopes can be used as an age-dependent source tracer and establish the partitioning of Fe into dissolved, colloidal and particulate forms doc798 none The accurate estimation of the effects of fine particles on global radiative balance is dependent on an understanding of the chemical composition of fine particles as a function of size. The objective of this study is to determine the contribution of semi-volatile material and other species to the composition of fine particles from biogenic emissions, biomass burning, and anthropogenic sources in the Southern Africa region during the SAFARI program, and the elucidation of any changes in the composition of this fine particulate material as it is transported out over the Atlantic Ocean. Aerosol samples will be collected on the University of Washington Convair-580 aircraft during the SAFARI flights in collaboration with Dr. Hobbs (U. Washington) and Dr. Novakov (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory). A diffusion denuder sampler suitable for airborne deployment will be used and the collected material analyzed for mass, sulfate, nitrate, and carbonaceous material doc799 none This dissertation research project investigates a consortium of genetic scientists as they actively transform DNA labeled with historically specific folk taxonomies of race into substances with biological significance. The consortium under examination includes scientists who have formed an alliance, which is transdisciplinary, transnational, and is comprised of public and private academic, clinical, nongovernmental, biotechnological, and state funded institutions. This investigation is anchored with a subset cluster within The Consortium comprised of scientists from University of Chicago in collaboration with University of Washington, University of Texas Health Sciences, and Decode Genetics, Inc, an Icelandic biotechnology firm. As an ex-officio member of The Consortium, and by following DNA data sets through the pathways of collaborative research back to their points of origin, the researcher will investigate how DNA taken from racially marked populations is transformed into a genetic understanding of Type 2 Diabetes. The genetics of diabetes is a rich area by which to investigate the use and definition of race in biomedical research because its risk factors are said to include diet, lifestyle, socioeconomic status, and membership in various racial and or ethnic groups. The use of DNA from racially identified populations presents a challenge for medical research, however, because the genetic markers and their contributions vary between and within populations. Further, the environmental risk factors for these diseases make the isolation of genetic causes problematic. Still, the parsing of populations by race is the first stage in the genetic epidemiology of diabetes. While the historical record of the advancement of biological differences of race demonstrates brutal consequence, a summary indictment of biological race often overlooks the ways biological and social knowledge is produced. Harrison ( ) points out that the critique of the biological concept of race led to a no race position in favor of ethnicity. However, this does not explain why racial social categories persist in many situations. Drawing upon the social studies of technoscience and medicine as well as critical theories of race, this project consists of interviews and sustained observation of scientists in their places of work, at scientific meetings and of their collective conversations about the power of data sets and experimental results. The heterogeneously positioned researchers in this collaborative venture requires the standardization of race (biological and social) in order to compare results, combine data sets and make generalizable scientific claims. Thus, this project investigates the strategic production of disease-gene carrier-populations, (the stated beneficiaries of the collaborative enterprise), and goes beyond the simple binarisms of biological versus social race. Finally, this examination of the epidemiology (genetic and social environmental) of Type 2 Diabetes evaluates the emerging significance of genetic science for the prevention and cure of complex diseases and assesses the consequences of the collaborative practices of biomedical genetic science doc800 none Increasing attention has been focused in recent years on the tendency for many noxious and potentially hazardous activities to be located in areas where local residents have relatively little political power. Those who find themselves living near such Locally Unwanted Land Uses (LULUs) often are poor with high minority populations. This situation has led many critics to outline a process of environmental racism in the siting of such facilities. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine the political ecology of the process of siting a temporary storage facility for high-level radioactive waste on the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indian Reservation in Tooele County, Utah. The Skull Valley Goshute leadership has chosen to enhance tribal political-economic autonomy by hosting a nuclear-waste facility, and they have expressed resentment against the perceived paternalism of some environmental justice advocates. This project will examine and challenge simplified notions of environmental racism through a nuanced study of environmental justice focused on the historical and political-economic contexts of the changing geography of Skull Valley. The goals of the project are to clarify the theory and practice of environmental justice by incorporating the notion of local autonomy in analysis of locational conflicts; to bridge the scholarly gap between ideas of environmental justice and political ecology; and to examine tribal-identity politics and struggles to retain sovereignty in the process of environmental decision making at and across different geopolitical scales. The project will seek to go beyond the oversimplified conventional discourse of environmental racism, and it will seek to develop a theory of procedural justice to replace the theory of distributive justice, that has dominated the scholarship of environmental justice. The project also will broaden the theoretical discussion of environmental justice to encompass notions of local autonomy, the politics of tribal sovereignty. and the social construction of ethnic and geographic identities. The project will use a case study approach to uncover dynamic social, political and ecological processes and the multiple contexts within which they are embedded, including extensive archival research in Utah, Minnesota, and Washington, D.C., as well as interviews with various participants in this land-use dispute representing disparate political and ideological positions. This project will contribute to the development of theories of procedural environmental justice, local autonomy, and political ecology through systematic analysis of a complex situation focusing on the contested pursuit of self-determination at different political and geographic scales. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc801 none PI: Karen S Cook, Eric Rice This project develops a formal theory of exchange behavior under conditions of uncertainty, and provides a partial test of the theory using laboratory experiments. Behavior in exchange networks has been studied for many years, and several theories have been developed that predict coalitions and point splits quite accurately. Building on that work, this theory predicts different strategies for actors in positions differing in bargaining power. It uses ideas from work on uncertainty by Kahneman and Tversky. New mechanisms in this theory are reference dependence, diminishing sensitivity, and loss aversion. All have been widely used in theories of games, and this project adapts them to the case of network bargaining. Results will be used to further develop theoretical understanding of interrelations of structural power and co-actors behavior in predicting bargaining mechanisms and winnings doc802 none Since passage of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) in the United States, many other countries have implemented similar laws. Administrative procedural openness is important for democratic consolidation because its reduces arbitrariness and increases predictability in government, increases bureaucratic accountability, and allows active citizen participation in agency decision making. The recent passage of APAs in two new democracies, Korea and Taiwan, highlights an apparent paradox that is embedded in the passage of all APAs. APAs limit the power of the executive. So, why would presidents sign APAs that are designed to restrict their powers. In this project, it is argued that a president supports an APA when: (1) her support coalition (either a multi-party coalition or a factionalized ruling party) has heterogeneous preferences; (2) her ability to appoint cabinet ministers is constrained by a constitutional requirement for legislative approval and the legislature does not share her preferences; or (3) she is confronted by bureaucrats with different preferences and she cannot replace them. To test these hypotheses, statistical and case study analyses of countries with APAs (Korea, Taiwan, the United States) and without them (the Philippines) are conducted. Some of the necessary data that support the hypotheses currently exist. The remaining data would be gathered with NSF support doc512 none This award updates the Correlates of War Project Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data set through . Such an effort is critical for international conflict research, but the enterprise of updating this collection is a monumental one that is beyond the scope or resources of any single researcher. Consequently this is a collaborative effort, linking scholars at eleven different universities to complete the task in a systematic and timely fashion. The MID data set has been at the forefront on international conflict research over the past decade or more. This data set is the most frequently used in conflict research and MID data has been employed to explore a staggering breadth of topics in international relations research, including most of those central to contemporary scholarly debates. Furthermore, MID data are the basis for several other data projects in the discipline as well as highly compatible with a range of other data compilations, thereby facilitating the combination of data sets and the exploration of broader sets of theoretical questions. Updating the Militarized Interstate Dispute data set requires completion of the following major steps: 1) collect and document militarized incidents from a variety of sources. This entails searching global, regional, and national sources for indications of a threat, display, or use of force by one state against another; 2) checking, archiving, and documenting the incidents collected to insure consistency, completeness, and absence of duplication; 3) composing militarized disputes based on the collected incidents and additional research as necessary. Because disputes are conflict episodes, such things as starting and ending dates, secondary participants, stages of escalation, overall fatalities, method of settlement, and general outcome must be determined. A short narrative description of each dispute is also prepared; 4) checking, archiving, and documenting disputes in order to insure such things as conformity with coding rules, compatibility with documentation standards, internal consistency, and absence of duplication; 5) resolving issues that arise concerning coding procedures, documentation requirements, problem cases, and the like; and, 6) preparing a final version (3.0) of the data set for distribution via the world wide web. This requires the resolution of a few problems that have been found in the present version (2.1) before it can be merged with the - data. This is a major infrastructure project for the Political Science program and enables the updating of a data set that will be used by numerous scholars in international relations and comparative politics doc804 none PI: Karen Heimer, Thomas D Stucky This project develops and tests a political resource theory of how city policies and practices affect crime rates. Political resource theories focus on how welfare policies result from various actors pursuing their interests, based on the resources available to them. By identifying actors and resources in cities, this study develops a theory of how city politics affects criminal opportunity and social disorganization, primarily through welfare programs and policing. The theory is applied to cities over 25,000 for the years -96. It uses pooled cross-sectional time-series analyses to test hypotheses regarding both crime and poverty control efforts, as well as their effects on social disorganization, criminal opportunity and crime rates doc805 none This ocean science technology development project will develop a fiber-optic index of refraction sensor for ocean microstructure research. The sensor offers improved resolution of the density gradient spectrum of oceanic turbulence over present sensors and will enhance studies involving our understanding and modeling of global oceanic circulation. The project builds on previous work that modified an immunoassay fiber-optic technology to develop a laboratory prototype refractometer, which will be modified and tested as an ocean-deployable sensor. This sensor has the potential to be thirty times more sensitive than previous sensors designed for oceanic microstructure research. If successful, resulting measurements will contribute to a better understanding of ocean mixing doc806 none This project is an attempt to provide a better understanding of (a) processes determining the structure, distribution and scale content of the oceanic mesoscale field and (b) the role of mesoscale eddies in determining the large-scale structure of the ocean, looking in turn at the structure of the thermocline, abyssal flows, and structure of the mid-depth flows below the base of the thermocline. The physical effects that will be considered are broad-ranging and include, wind-forcing, mesoscale instabilities of large scale flows, the response of the ocean to stochastic forcing, adiabatic advection (ventilated thermocline dynamics), and eddy-topography interactions. The approach will be a combination of theory and numerical simulations. Much of the numerical simulation will be with stratified quasi- geostrophic models although some will use a primitive equation model (MOM4). The project will begin by looking at the life-cycles of baroclinic eddies in a broad, baroclinically unstable, wind-driven flow, studying their equilibration and the scaling of the vertical structure of the equilibrated eddies. The effects of inhomogeneity will be studied by stochastically forcing a quasigeostrophic model linearized about a time-mean wind-driven gyre. The project will go on to look at the role of the planetary and topographic vorticity gradients in introducing anisotropies in the nonlinear cascade of eddy energy in wavenumber space, leading to coherent and energetic deep flows. Lastly the role of mesoscale eddies in establishing the vertical structure of the thermocline will be examined using a primitive equation model doc807 none This proposal is for research into hard open questions concerning the power of various complexity classes. The work will focus on two types of questions. The first deals with showing that certain famous problems are not too easy . For example, while it is widely believed that SAT requires exponential time, we cannot even prove that there is no linear time Turing Machine for SAT. Our first work will focus on trying to prove modest lower bounds on problems such as SAT. Second we will also investigate harder questions and attempt to find ways to separate complexity classes. These are, of course, very difficult problems but we have a new approach that seems promising. In any event we should be able to get some conditional results that will at least add additional evidence to our belief that certain classes are distinct. A word in general about this research. We feel that it is in some sense high risk in that the problems are quite hard. However, we feel that unless people work seriously on them they will never be solved. Also we believe that our approaches have enough of a new slant that they may at least partially succeed doc808 none The escape response is a reflexive behavior that allows fish to swim rapidly away from predators. This behavior is believed to be particularly important for larval fishes, which are contstantly preyed upon by other fish and invertebrates. In fact, it is thought that the main reason many species of native fish are currently disappearing from the Colorado River is that their larvae are consumed by introduced fish species. Thus, escape responses performance may be of critical importance in the continued survival of native fish species. This project will examine the development of the the escape response in the larvae of a native fish species, the razorback sucker (Xyrauchen texanus). In addition, escape response performance of another fish with benthic larvae, the rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss), will also be measured during development and compared to the performance of the razorback sucker. Rainbow trout provide an interesting ecological comparison with the razorback sucker for several reasons: (1) they are not native to the Colorado River, but currently live there in large numbers, (2) their larvae can survive in habitats with other predatory fishes, and (3) they are known to prey on young razorback suckers as adults. For both species, the development of the musculoskeletal and the nervous systems will be quantified to determine their potential contributions to escape response performance. Finally, two experimental temperatures will be used in this study to assess the role of recent temperature changes in the Colorado River on escape response performance, and to allow direct comparisons of the data colleted in these studies with data collected previously for other teleosts doc809 none Krebs In mussels, mitochondrial DNA (mDNA) exhibits an unusual form of inheritance. While in most species, mitochondria are inherited strictly through the female gamete, this cell organelle may also be inherited through the male gamete in mussels. Male-inherited mitochondria are passed in sperm and develop only in the production of the male gonal and sperm. The presence of tow mDNA forms allows for the possible use of both maternal and paternal forms concurrently to assess population genetic structure. This study will develop techniques to routinely extract paternal mDNA and determine its usefulness for population studies. This study will focus on three species in the Cuyahoga River watershed, the giant floater (Pyganodon grandis), the fluted shell mussel (Lasmigona costata), and the wabash pigtoe (Fusconaia flava). This work has important implcations both for studies of mussels in general, and for the species in this river system which are threatened because of recent high levels of pollution and the invasion of the zebra mussel into the Great Lakes doc810 none WHITE This project will fund an Albert Einstein Fellow to work in the Division of Elementary, Secondary and Informal Education of the National Science Foundation for eleven months, beginning September 1, . The precise duties and responsibilities of this Fellow will be determined by NSF personnel. However, the majority of her time will be devoted to the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching program. She will assist with the preparation and implementation of the winter conference for state coordinators, the national selection committee meeting, the Award Week ceremonies and activities, as well as involvement in the day-to-day work of the program. Her involvement in other programs of the Division will depend upon her available time, her interests, and the needs of the Division. The Fellow will provide three written reports to the Triangle Coalition, which will describe her responsibilities and on-going activities. These will be used to evaluate the Fellows accomplishments during the Fellowship period and to offer personal perspectives and recommendations on the Fellowship program doc811 none This study will conduct a survey along the Easter Salas-y-Gomex Nazca (ESN) trail tobetter characterize and constrain movement of the hotspot over the last 25 to 30 Ma. The survey will involve geochronologic, geochemical, and geophysical study of seamounts and volcanic ridges. Multibeam bathymetric data and backscatter imagery will be used to define topography and structural features at selected localities and identify targets for dredging. Dredged samples will be dated using 40Ar-39Ar technique and their petrological, chemical and Nd-Pb-Sr isotopic chracteristics will be determined. The new data will be combined with re-analyses of existing samples to test Nazca-hotspot motion and mantle flow models and compare them to Pacific-hotspot models doc812 none Moran Edwards This is a collaborative proposal between Principal Investigators at the Universities of Rhode Island and Minnesota-Twin Cities. The Arctic Ocean is much more dynamic than previously believed, characterized by large spatial and seasonal variations in productivity and associated particle flux, significant estuarine input and lateral intrusions of shelf water extending into the interior basins, and topographically-steered boundary currents along the perimeters of basins that result in regional extremes in water mass age. The Principal Investigators hypothesize that boundary scavenging , controlled by a combination of lateral advection and particle flux, plays a significant role in the removal of particle-reactive chemicals from the water column of the Arctic Ocean. They will evaluate the role of boundary scavenging as it has an important bearing on such key geochemical processes such as the export of carbon to deep waters, the sediment accumulation of reactive chemicals, including contaminants, and the export of these chemicals to the Atlantic. The objective is to constrain these fundamental processes on a basin-wide scale and to develop predictive biogeochemical models for this poorly understood and extreme environment. The Principal Investigators will determine whether that natural radionuclide Protactinium-231 (231Pa) - Thorium -230 (231Th) pair can be used as tracers to provide an integrated picture of water mass age and particle flux on a basin-wide scale in the modem and last glacial Arctic. To provide an increased understanding of the processes that control the redistribution of these tracers in the Arctic Ocean, the Principal Investigators will undertake a comprehensive study that includes paired 231Pa - 231Th analyses in dissolved and particulate samples from the water column, sediment trap material, surface sediments and sediment comes. This should help with a better understanding of the importance of particle composition on 231Pa - 231Th fractionation by quantifying the chemical composition of suspended particulate matter, sediment trap material and surface sediments. Boundary scavenging should be pronounced in the Arctic, due to the combined effects of the high ratio of shelf to open ocean, the regional extremes in water mass age and particle flux, and a dynamic circulation. This environmental setting is markedly different than other ocean regions where Pa and Th tracer studies have been conducted and provides a unique opportunity to investigate boundary scavenging and, in turn, constrain some outstanding questions regarding the paleo-application of 231Pa - 231Th doc813 none Hara Funding is provided to develop a new model of air-sea momentum flux at high sea states including the enhanced drag by breaking waves. The central hypothesis for the work is that the momentum flux is a sum of the contribution by non-breaking waves (estimated by integrating the wave drag due to each sinusoidal component), the contribution from breaking waves (estimated by integrating the drag per unit length of breaking wave crests), as well as skin friction. Both filed and laboratory observations will be used to test the model. The parameters in the model will be adjusted to represent realistic open ocean surface wave spectra and breaking wave statistics doc814 none This project will occur over a five year period to continue and conclude a long-term study that has focused on ecological disturbances, causes, responses and recovery of eastern tropical Pacific (ETP) reef?building coral populations and reef communities in relation to the severe ? El Nino?Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event. With the occurrence of the very strong ? ENSO, two one hundred year events only 15 years apart, an unprecedented opportunity is at hand to study and compare the effects of consecutive major perturbations on community responses and recovery. This study involves strong international collaboration with host?country research teams working at several field sites in Costa Rica, Panam.6, and Ecuador (including the Gal6pagos Islands), all areas that were severely affected during the ENSO disturbances of ?83 and ?98. Several aspects of this study will be continued, namely (a) monitoring the physical and biological conditions of eastern Pacific coral reefs initiated in the early?to?mid s~ (b) investigating the responses of selected zooxanthellate coral species to ENSO stressors (chiefly positive sea temperature anomalies), (c) retrospective climate studies from coral skeletal isotopic signatures, (d) coral reproductive ecology as it relates to recruitment success in disturbed communities, (e) coral community recovery or changes leading to alternate, non?reef building communities, (f) the linking of coral bleaching mortality with local and global-scale sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies, including both high and low temperature extremes, and (g) modeling the size structure of coral populations and coral community dynamics based on mechanistic relationships between temperature, predation, coral growth and survivorship derived from field monitoring and experimental results. Additionally, studies initiated in will also be continued, namely (h) analysis of the molecular genetic structure of zooxanthella taxa symbiotic with eastern Pacific corals to assess the importance of zooxanthella diversity in explaining the variability in patterns of coral bleaching and mortality survivorship of host corals, and (i) assessment of the genetic structure and diversity of recovering and recently stressed coral populations in relation to stress resistance, population size and distance from source populations. New initiatives will include (j) coral?algal?herbivore interactions, and (k) trophodynamic benthic community structure modeling in high SST?stressed upwelling and non-upwelling environments in order to assess the effects of ENSO perturbations and recovery processes on coral reef framework growth doc815 none EPIC (Eastern Pacific Investigation of Climate processes in the coupled ocean-atmosphere system) is an activity of the US CLIVAR Program. EPIC consists of four components focussing on (i) intertropical convergence zone warm pool phenomena; (ii) cross-equatorial inflow into the intertropical convergence zone; (iii) upper ocean structure and mixing and (iv) an exploratory study of boundary layer cloud properties in the southeasterly tradewind regime. The field phase of EPIC is scheduled for a 6-week period during the interval Sept 1 to Oct 15, . In addition to the eight awards made by ATM, this collaborative research has awards made by NSF OCE and NOAA OGP. During the field phase, the PIs will collect data by small robotic aircraft called aerosondes. The aerosonde measurements will describe the evolution of the vertical structure of winds, temperature, relative humidity and pressure in the latitude-height cross sections from 5S to 5N. These data will make it possible to calculate and interpret budgets of mass, heat, water vapor and momentum in the cross equatorial flow, leading to better understanding of local air-sea interaction, boundary layer clouds, and large-scale dynamics in determining the evolution of cross equatorial atmospheric boundary layer structure. The work is important because it will improve understanding and modeling of climate variability over the eastern tropical Pacific doc816 none Corporate philanthropy in the United States has long been highly localized in the communities where firms have headquarters or other significant business operations. Although individuals contribute the largest share of philanthropy, corporations play a central role in the private funding of non-profit causes in the U.S. at the community level through their direct corporate philanthropy programs or corporate sponsored foundations. Two trends may be causing a break with this traditional corporate localism, the globalization of firms and their markets, and the shift to forms of strategic philanthropy that are beneficial to corporate interests rather than philanthropy which meets the needs of a specific community. While there is recognition in the scholarly literature of these shifts, there is no clear evidence that shows how the globalization level of U.S. firms is linked to the changing scales of U.S. corporate philanthropy. This doctoral dissertation research project will bridge this gap by exploring how the local and global philanthropy of U.S. corporations changes as firms become more global. The project will use a quantitative approach to determine whether U.S. corporations that have higher degrees of globalization have a greater or lesser philanthropic commitment to the local places where they have operations or markets than do less globalized firms. The project will measure the degree of globalization for a sample of 200 public corporations that have active corporate foundations for their philanthropy programs, with Data on the charitable contributions of the sampled firms will be drawn from the public tax filings for each corporate foundation. By grouping corporate donations into geographical variables that are also categorized by their place or strategic links, the project will determine whether the break with the traditional localism is confirmed and whether this varies with the level of globalization of a corporation. The project also will use semi-structured, key-informant interviews to compare the global philanthropy of 20 to 25 firms based in Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle in order to ascertain the effects of globalization on the local and global philanthropy practices of U.S. firms over a ten-year period and to determine if there is a causal connection between these processes. Because past studies point to the geographically and historically contingent nature of corporate philanthropy and the theoretical context for the study also points to the embeddedness of corporations in specific networks of power elites in local places, a minimum of three cases is necessary to account for the local specificity of corporate philanthropy in different places and to determine what general factors occur in all of the cities. The project will confirm whether corporate philanthropy is moving away from its historical tradition of localism in the U.S. and if the new trends toward globalization and strategic philanthropy are indeed displacing past practices. In sum, this research will identify how the geographic scale of corporate philanthropy is re-defined in local places as corporations become more global. It will use an empirical methodology to highlight how the process of globalization is operationalized simultaneously at local and global scales and will contribute to emerging theories of scale. It will confirm whether globalization of the firm breaks the traditional localism of U.S. philanthropy and whether there is a level of localism for corporate philanthropy directed to non-U.S. beneficiaries. This research will contribute to our knowledge of the emerging global geography of corporate philanthropy, the changing relationship of corporations to local communities, and will add more generally to our understanding of the processes of globalization. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc817 none This project supports the analysis and interpretation of single particle samples collected during ACE-Asia (Aerosol Characterization Experiment). Samples will be collected by James Anderson and collaborators (supported via ATM- ). This project will focus on samples collected onboard the NOAA R V Ron Brown. Analysis will be performed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Data interpretation will focus on questions of mineral aerosol composition, origin, transport, and chemical transformation processes doc818 none Lien UW The intent of this study is to use a novel instrument, the Electromagnetic Vorticity Meter, to directly measure the flow vorticity which, in combination with the Stokes drift associated with the surface waves, gives rise to the vortex force, identified by theoretical explanations of roll vortices in the mixed layer (Langmuir cells) as the primary cause of these vortices. An additional objective is to determine which component of vorticity, vertical or horizontal, is most critical for Langmuir cell formation and hence distinguish between competing theories. The vorticity measurements will be supplemented with observations of temperature, salinity and turbulence parameters. While theories of Langmuir cells have existed for a long time, direct verification of their central hypotheses with field observations has been lacking because of the difficulty of directly measuring vorticity in the mixed layer. This study holds out the possibility of being able to make such measurements. A better understanding of Langmuir cells will help oceanographers develop a clearer picture of mixing in the upper few meters of the ocean and may lead to improved representations of such mixing in computer models of oceans and climate doc819 none PI: York W Bradshaw, Kathleen M Fallon This project tracks the emergence of non-governmental social movements in a transitional democratic African state. In particular, the research focuses on women and women s organizations in Ghana. While it is known that some such organizations have appeared in Ghana and are working to promote the social positions of women, little is known at present about the outcomes of those efforts. Similarly, it is not known why some non-governmental organizations transform themselves to social advocacy organizations while others do not. Research conclusions will be based on interviews with over 600 members of women s organizations, and multi-variate models of causal chains doc820 none PI: Gary G Hamilton, J Elizabeth Jackson This project studies aircraft accident reports, including both commercial and general aviation. It uses participant observation, content analyses of reports, and interviews with investigators. The overall aim is to assess the effects of institutional culture in shaping the choice of accidents to investigate, factors investigated and, possibly, causes of the accidents that are identified. The study follows in the sociological tradition of institutional factors in normal accidents, the kinds and rates that come to be expected in various industries. Several hypotheses relating institutional culture and structure to the investigations will be assessed doc821 none The research will provide a gendered and holistic understanding of commercial urban agriculture in Gaborone, Botswana, in order to assess the potential of such systems in addressing urban food security. Analysis will link micro-level gender dynamics with macro-level structures that together shape who produces, where they produce and what they are able to produce. Past research suggests that women have different experiences with farming in cities than men. Yet little work has been done on specifically how gender relations influence the productivity of commercial urban agriculture systems. The research will investigate how gender relations of power delineate access to resources, spaces and environments in the city, and in turn influence levels of productivity. The research will use quantitative methods to determine the statistical associations between gender and commercial urban agricultural productivity, and primarily qualitative methods to illuminate their causal links. It will identify those factors that facilitate and or hinder the effectiveness and efficiency of agricultural enterprises in the city. An socio-ecological sampling framework will be used to document the general levels of productivity found on male- and female-led urban agriculture systems in terms of yields, economic value and nutritional content. It is expected that the research will demonstrate varying levels of productivity, as well as quality and composition of crop and livestock species, along gender lines on account of differential access to resources, spatial distribution, and ecological conditions on urban agriculture plots. The research will contribute to academic debate by pursing a theoretical re-conceptualization of urban form to include human-environment interactions and draw explicit links between micro-level production processes and macro-level structures. It will elaborate an explicitly geographical approach that unites social, spatial, and ecological factors as the bases of agricultural productivity. The research will employ a finer disaggregation of data than previous studies in the field of urban agriculture to understand how and why men and women farm differently in cities and the implications of this for urban food production. The research will also contribute to policy formulation. Botswana presents a timely case study for research on urban agriculture for the government is consciously attempting to integrate commercial farming into its national food security strategy and development plans. Urban agriculture is viewed as a means of enhancing the abundance, regularity and affordability of good quality food in African cities. To this end, the research will identify key factors and considerations for the development and implementation of an urban agriculture policy for Botswana. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc822 none This research characterizes and tests hypotheses regarding the bidirectional inter-relationships among individual behavior, social structure, and genetic structure in a natural population of non-human primates. The study population of savannah baboons, Papio cynocephalus, has been under study by PI and colleagues for over two decades. We elucidate the role of behavior in providing the organism s immediate response to variable conditions, and in shaping the future through determining the context within which development and gene expression occur. Behavior thereby determines , to great extent, the phenotype that is subject to selection. Genetic analyses will identify relatedness among pairs of individuals for most of whom behavioral and demographic data are available. These will be integrated with PI s recently developed database, permitting analyses of related forms of behavioral and demographic data. Hypotheses to be tested address (1) the relationships among several types of individual and pairwise behaviors (mating, agonistic, and affiliative), (2) the relationships of these lower-level behavioral processes to group-level behavioral processes (dominance hierarchies, grooming networks), and demographic processes (fission and demographic structure of groups), and (3) the relationships of the pairwise and group-level processes to genetic structure within social groups. These relationships are at the core of models of primate socio-ecology and the evolution of behavior doc823 none PI: Hart Proposal Number: Funds are provided for numerical and rotating tank experiments to investigate thermocline dynamics. The basic set-up is a rotating tank with a differentially rotating upper lid and cooling at the lateral boundaries. The upper lid is maintained hot and the lower lid is maintained cold. (Flux conditions at the bottom and sidewalls can also be prescribed.) The structure of the flow in laboratory simulations will be examined as a function of parameter space over ranges inaccessible to numerical simulation. The stability of a rim current, observed in preliminary experiments, under continuously stratified conditions will be investigated. Response to seasonal forcing, time scales long compared to the rotation time scale, will also be investigated. It is anticipated that these experiments will illuminate the dynamics of upper ocean s response to combined wind and buoyancy forcing, a question which is central to physical oceanography doc824 none The Atlantic forest in southeastern Brazil is one of the most threatened tropical forests in the world. Many aspects concerning the history and ecology of this diverse tropical forest are still unknown, even as it is being cleared at a rapid rate. This project will study the history of vegetation changes in southeastern Brazil since the middle Holocene in the context of climatic changes, fire occurrence, and human disturbance. The ecologically sensitive region in the state of Sao Paulo is occupied mainly by Atlantic seasonal tropical forest, but it also contains the southernmost distribution of cerrado (Brazilian savanna), which occurs as natural patches interspersed within the seasonal forest. The region has been occupied by native Americans for thousands of years, but intensive deforestation over the last 150 years has reduced the Atlantic forest into isolated fragments of various sizes. Three lakes within this broad forest cerrado ecotone and in some of the forest fragments will be cored for palynological study. The sediments will be analyzed for pollen and microscopic charcoal to produce detailed records of vegetational changes and fire history for the last several millennia, especially focusing on the last several hundred years since the European contact. This study will produce paleoecological records on the development of the forest cerrado ecotone in relation to Holocene climatic changes, natural and anthropogenic fires, and human disturbance. It will address questions concerning the loss of biodiversity and ecological degradation due to forest fragmentation in the Atlantic tropical forest, and it will provide insight into key issues in conservation biology and environmental planning in the tropics. This study will also advance the science of palynology in the tropics, especially its application in the study of human impacts on tropical vegetation. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc825 none During recent decades, transnational corporations (TNCs) have rapidly implement new forms of business operation throughout the world. The impact of TNCs has been especially profound in developing nations, where previous locally oriented economies have been transformed by the influx of foreign capital and managerial control. An increasingly important question across many nations is the degree to which TNCs impact on local development and on the livelihoods of the people who inhabit regions where they establish new facilities. This doctoral dissertation research project will evaluate how new transnational corporation business activities are affecting the human, natural, and social resources used by households in the northern Peruvian Andes. The project will evaluate if and how changing access to resources has affected household livelihoods and intra-household access to resources, especially as differential access is based on gender. In order to address these questions, three different sets of intensive, semi-structured interviews and focus groups based on intentional and random sampling procedures will be conducted in three communities over the course of eight months in the Cajamarca region of Peru. In addition, both qualitative text-based of archival material and analyses of data collected in a geographic information system will be used to evaluate the nature of the relationships between TNCs and livelihood transformation. The study will generate new basic data on household livelihood production strategies in the Peruvian Andes and how TNCs are contributing to livelihood transformation. The project also will generate data rgearding how TNC activities are affecting intra-household access to resources based on gender differences. The project will contribute to a framework of analysis that seeks to understand the different dimensions of local resource change and the links between international economic actors and the local scale. The field research will contribute to theoretical development in geographic political ecology and feminist political ecology studies, business and economic development research, and Latin American geographic studies. Furthermore, the project will contribute to academic and policy debates as it will identify and assess the impacts of international corporate mining activities on local capital resources through qualitative and GIS-based methodologies. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc826 none The introduction of exotic species has had significant impacts on a broad range of ecosystems throughout the globe. While ecologists, biogeographers, and other scientists continue to develop and refine broader theories regarding interactions among biotic, physical, and human systems when humans introduce new species to a region, these theoretical developments have been fueled by the careful analyses of the dynamics of ecosystem change in specific locales. This doctoral dissertation project will examine the ecological impacts of Monterey pine (Pinus radiata) plantations in alpine grasslands in the Ecuadorian Andes. The project will address how pine plantations are affecting a high-elevation, equatorial ecosystem that plays an important role in regional and local hydrology and in which soil carbon storage is high. The focus of the research will be on changes in soil properties and in water retention, especially the changes in soil physical and chemical properties associated with exotic pine plantations as compared to adjacent grasslands. Attention also will be given to assessing how these properties change with plantation age. The general hypothesis is that pine plantations will cause changes in chemical, physical, and biological processes in soils, which will be reflected in altered physical and chemical properties of the soil. These changes are anticipated to become more severe as plantations age, possibly leveling off at later stages of stand development. In order to examine these questions, a chronosequence of pine plantation plots will be compared to control plots of native grasses. Random sampling of surface soils will be conducted as well as sampling in soil pits, where zero-tension lysimeters will also be installed. Analyses will made of a range of variables, including total carbon, available phosphorus, total and available nitrogen, pH, bulk density, soil moisture content, and water retention, as well as dissolved carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus in the solution samples. The theoretical context for this research draws on Jenny s state-factor approach, which states that the soil or any soil property is a function of five soil-forming factors: climate, biota, topography, parent material, and time. In order to analyze the role of any one of these factors, the others must be held constant or minimized. The characteristics of the study site allow for an assessment of soil properties as a function of vegetation type (pines vs. grasses) and as a function of time of occupation by the exotic vegetation. Research on the impacts of pine plantations on the carbon and water cycles is particularly necessary in regions like the tropical Andes. These types of studies in these locales are especially important because the fragility of the ecosystems being altered may be much greater than lower-elevation and temperate systems that have been studied more intensively. If carbon losses from these soils are greater than the rates of carbon sequestration following the introduction of tree plantations, policies aimed at decreasing atmospheric carbon concentrations may have the opposite effect. The potential for drying out of these soils under plantations could also have profound impacts for the provision of water to lower elevations. This project will provide a better understanding of impacts of pine plantations at the ecosystem level, information that is important for policy makers and landowners who will make decisions about land uses. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc827 none This collaborative research project is carried out by Leonard Pitt at the University of Illinois and H. V. Jagadish at the University of Michigan, drawing on Professor Pitt s experience in computational learning theory, and Professor Jagadish s expertise in databases. The goal of this research is to develop a theoretical framework for investigating data mining problems, and to adapt existing machine learning algorithms and develop new ones within the framework. Typically, the focus of Machine Learning algorithms is on learning a single classifier that works well for most of the (labeled) data, whereas data mining focuses on learning heuristic rules, typically on unlabeled data, that give insight into the nature of the data. By unifying techniques from the former area with goals of the latter, new clustering algorithms are developed that deal with massive data sets via sampling, yet provide optimality guarantees. The research also provides criteria that data mining practitioners may apply in deciding whether aggregation or sampling is a preferred data reduction technique for the task at hand. Algorithms for new and useful types of data patterns are designed, and algorithms that incorporate the user into the data-mining task are analyzed and developed within the framework doc828 none A three pronged approach is outlined by the PIs to document the input and ultimate fate of organic matter in Cape Lookout Bight, North Carolina. In step one, the PIs will collect suspended matter using plate traps and surficial sediments to quantify the sources of modern, bomb radiocarbon-enriched organic matter, assess whether delivery varies seasonally and determine what percentage of the modern carbon from each source survives degradation in sulfate reducing and methane producing zones and is buried. The second goal of this project entails understanding the factors that control the chemical composition and molecular size distribution in porewater DOC, as well as conduct a pulse-tracer experiment to directly observe the flow of carbon into and through this DOC pool. Lastly, the PIs will focus on fermentation and terminal metabolism by sulfate reducing and methanogenic bacteria to ascertain the processes that consume low molecular weight DOC doc829 none Elias Edwards Berger This is a collaborative proposal with Principal Investigators from the Universities of Colorado, Alaska, and the Desert Research Institute. Large portions of Siberia, Alaska, and northwestern Canada formed an unglaciated land-mass during the late Pleistocene known as Beringia. Previous Beringian paleoclimatic studies have yielded only qualitative temperature estimates. There is a need to develop quantitative estimates to gain a better understanding of the magnitude and regional expression of climate change. The Principal Investigators will attempt to quantify the paleotemperatures through the analysis of fossil insects, pollen, and plant macrofossils using thermoluminescence (TL) dating. They will use the Mutual Climatic Range (MCR) method of fossil beetle analysis and paleobotanical studies to produce estimates of mean temperatures of the warmest (TMAX) and coldest months (TMIN), as well as estimates of mean annual temperature (MAT). They will reconstruct past environments at the five study sites in central and northern Alaska with sediments ranging in age from the end of isotope stage 6 to the Holocene. The Principal Investigators will focus on samples from just before and during the last interglacial interval. They will date sediments from 140-50 thousand years by TL and its newer variant, photon-stimulated-luminescence. Two research themes will be addressed. The first theme is to study the nature of the climatic transition of stage 6 to stage 5 and to determine where the Old Crow tephra fits in this sequence. The second research theme is to determine the nature of climatic amelioration in Beringia during the last interglacial period doc829 none Elias Edwards Berger This is a collaborative proposal with Principal Investigators from the Universities of Colorado, Alaska, and the Desert Research Institute. Large portions of Siberia, Alaska, and northwestern Canada formed an unglaciated land-mass during the late Pleistocene known as Beringia. Previous Beringian paleoclimatic studies have yielded only qualitative temperature estimates. There is a need to develop quantitative estimates to gain a better understanding of the magnitude and regional expression of climate change. The Principal Investigators will attempt to quantify the paleotemperatures through the analysis of fossil insects, pollen, and plant macrofossils using thermoluminescence (TL) dating. They will use the Mutual Climatic Range (MCR) method of fossil beetle analysis and paleobotanical studies to produce estimates of mean temperatures of the warmest (TMAX) and coldest months (TMIN), as well as estimates of mean annual temperature (MAT). They will reconstruct past environments at the five study sites in central and northern Alaska with sediments ranging in age from the end of isotope stage 6 to the Holocene. The Principal Investigators will focus on samples from just before and during the last interglacial interval. They will date sediments from 140-50 thousand years by TL and its newer variant, photon-stimulated-luminescence. Two research themes will be addressed. The first theme is to study the nature of the climatic transition of stage 6 to stage 5 and to determine where the Old Crow tephra fits in this sequence. The second research theme is to determine the nature of climatic amelioration in Beringia during the last interglacial period doc831 none EPIC (Eastern Pacific Investigation of Climate processes in the coupled ocean-atmosphere system) is an activity of the US CLIVAR Program. EPIC consists of four components focussing on (i) intertropical convergence zone warm pool phenomena; (ii) cross-equatorial inflow into the intertropical convergence zone; (iii) upper ocean structure and mixing and (iv) an exploratory study of boundary layer cloud properties in the southeasterly tradewind regime. The field phase of EPIC is scheduled for a 6-week period during the interval Sept 1 to Oct 15, . In addition to the eight awards made by ATM, this collaborative research has awards made by NSF OCE and NOAA OGP. During the field phase, the PIs will collect atmospheric observations at flight levels and from GPS dropsondes, and upper ocean observations from expendable profilers. Flights will be carried out at different phases of atmospheric synoptic-scale disturbances. These data sets will be combined with observations from the TAO moorings and satellite remote sensing to describe concurrent large-scale meridional-vertical structures of the atmospheric temperature, humidity, winds, oceanic temperature, salinity, currents and air-sea fluxes in the cold tongue ITCZ complex. These data will provide a large-scale perspective for other EPIC measurements that provide micro and meso-scale structure of the ocean and atmosphere in the eastern tropical Pacific. The work is important because it will improve understanding and modeling of climate variability over the eastern tropical Pacific doc832 none This project investigates the cognitive learning styles of heterogeneous, distributed software agents to uncover how they best learn, discover how other agents learn and take advantage of the various learning capabilities. The objectives of this research project are to 1) identify the various styles of multi-agent learning, 2) develop a multi-agent learning framework, and 3) conduct experiments on multi-agent learning. This research project will advance our understanding of agent information and knowledge sharing doc833 none The concept that people act as plant managers, actively manipulating their resources instead of just gathering them for use, is becoming a central theme in ethnobotanical studies. Of particular interest to many researchers have been the study of indigenous people in the Amazon Basin, where a series of studies has built a comparative framework for examining how different societies have managed and used different plant resources. For example, with respect to palm resources, many of which are derived from wild stands, researchers have identified at least nine specific plant-management practices. This doctoral dissertation research project will focus on a case study of management and use of the chambira palm (Astrocaryum chambira) by the Waorani (Huaorani) people in the Amazon lowlands of eastern Ecuador. Drawing on previous studies, this project hypothesizes that the Waorani manage their palm resources through both conscious and inadvertent manipulation. The study will address the general premise of economic geography that people will travel farther (although less frequently) to obtain products of relatively high value than they will to obtain products of lesser value that may be needed more frequently. The project will examine the amount of time that Waorani people spend caring for particular palms, relating its productivity with its distance from home, paths, or other places of human activity. Data will be gathered through household surveys as well as through informal interviews with different kinds of plant managers. Ecological data on chambira palms in a series of stratified plots around the Waorani settlement also will collected and analyzed. Plant specimens gathered during this part of the project will remain at the herbariums of the Universidad San Francisco de Quito and the University of Texas at Austin. This project will provide valuable new insights into the use of palms and their significance for the livelihood of an indigenous people who manage and use palms, a plant that provides products in many different locales through the world. The project also will provide insights into the spatial behavior of a group of people who traditionally have been resistant to outside influence. Analyses of the plant-management practices of the Waorani provides a valuable setting for exploring a broader range of policies encouraging or dissuading similar kinds of activities regarding flora manipulation in any country in which people use natural plant materials. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc834 none The project will modify an existing catchment-based Land Surface Model to include the effects of snow and freeze-thaw dynamics on Arctic tundra hydrology. The development of this model will fill a gap in currently available models that do not incorporate the combined effects of snow physics, permafrost dynamics and topography on tundra hydrology. The current deficiency has severely limited efforts aimed at understanding and predicting the effects of climate change on arctic ecosystems. By addressing this problem this project will have a major impact on our understanding of the responsiveness of the Arctic to climate change doc835 none Moore CU The response of the ocean circulation to stochastic wind forcing will be studied in a series of numerical experiments. Wind fields from the operational meteorological models, together with data from some of the reanalysis efforts will be partitioned in frequency space. The higher frequency components will be regarded as stochastic. An additional estimate of the stochastic component of the wind field will be obtained by identifying the part that is uncorrelated with sea surface temperature. Idealised, quasigeostrophic ocean models will be forced with idealized stochastic wind fields derived from the data products previously described. The oceanic response will be compared with that predicted by the leading singular vectors of the oceanic flow. More realistic ocean models will be forced with both idealized wind fields and the data from the operational and reanalyzed products. The behavior of these more realistic runs will be compared with the stochastic optimals of the more realistic flow and with TOPEX POSEIDON altimeter data doc836 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Tina Thurston will conduct three seasons of fieldwork in the Thy region of Denmark. She will focus on the Iron Age period when a state level society first emerged in this area and attempt, through archaeological survey, to gain insight into its organization. `Pristine` states which developed independently have long been a focus of archaeological attention because it is believed that through comparison of such individual cases it is possible to gain insight into the social processes which underlie the emergence of social and political complexity. However most prehistoric states do not develop in this way but result, in fact from contact with and response to other such pre-existing entities. Much less is known about this `secondary` state process and Dr. Thurston s research focuses on this issue. Early Danish states are also unusual because of their `corporate` nature where labor, food production, social groups and even rulership may be controlled through broad integrative ritual and ideological means and extreme differentiation between leaders and followers is suppressed. Centralized or network style government differs dramatically, stressing personal prestige, wealth, power accumulation and highly individualized leadership. Palaces, cities, royal storehouses, temples are absent in Denmark and Dr. Thurston has developed a methodology to reconstruct state organization. This depends on reconstructing the distribution and size of individual settlements and determining the organizational principles which link them. To accomplish this goal Dr. Thurston will rely heavily on surface survey and soil chemical (phosphate) analysis. Prior research in Denmark, as well as other parts of the world indicate a close and direct tie between phosphate level in the soil and human occupation. Building on past NSF supported work, Dr. Thurston will conduct a broad scale survey, collect phosphate data, analyze diagnostic materials exposed on the surface. With these data she will reconstruct the forms and distribution of settlements, determine village social and economic organization and how they changed over time and examine the relationships between these small units and centralized political authority doc837 none Garvine The PIs propose a study of various aspects of shelf circulation in the presence of coastal upwelling. Their approach is to conduct further analysis using data collected and analyzed as part of a prior award. The data are from an experiment on the continental shelf in the Middle Atlantic Bight and included measurements from moored instruments, repeated ship surveys, drifters and coastal radar. The goals are: to examine the cross-shelf pathway of upwelled water; to determine the structure of the mass budget and, in particular, to determine whether it is 2D or 3D; to determine the potential vorticity budget; and to determine the tidally rectified flow doc838 none This project is a combined controlled source electromagnetic and magnetotelluric study designed to resolve unambiguously the strike direction and depth extent of electrical anisotropy from the near-surface through the crust and upper mantle. The data collected will provide depth constraints on and alignment of the strain regime generated during the mid-ocean ridge crust formation, constraints on the extent an alignment of ductile flow during present day plate motion, depth of the thermal boundary layer that denotes the lithosphere, and insight into electrical conduction mechanisms in the mantle, particularly the proposal that hydrogen dissolved in olivine enhances conduction in the a-axis direction doc776 none Investigators at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will collaborate on a project to tackle a major paradigm in marine ecology: the coupling between a pelagically-derived food supply and the dynamics of deep-sea benthic communities. This coupling has been difficult to establish without appropriate long time-series measurements, which in turn have been limited by data storage capacity, longevity of battery power to operate instrumentation, the inability to collect analyze data and alter sampling frequencies in real time, and the inability to correct or compensate for malfunctions in real time. The PIs will establish a long-term seafloor observing site by tapping into the Hawaii-2 Observatory (H20) at m depth in the central North Pacific. H2O is a prototype seafloor observing system that has made long-term monitoring possible in the deep sea, by providing electrical power from shore with real-time data acquisition and control via an underwater telephone cable. By plugging a suite of sensors into H2O, the PIs will study the short and long-term importance of a temporally-varying food supply on an abyssal benthic community. The following questions will be afddressed: 1) What is the quality and quantity of sinking particulate matter reaching the sea floor at the H20 site as representative of the North Pacific central gyre? 2) What responses are elicited in the epibenthic megafauna, as a proxy for benthic community activity, by the quality and quantity of particulate matter arriving on the sea floor on time scales from hours to years? A monitoring system will be attached consisting of a sedimentation sensor and digital time-lapse cameras, to monitor the flux of particulate matter as well as the activity of epibenthic megafauna in two 20m2 areas of the sea floor at the H20 site in real-time. Temporal changes in particle flux to the sea floor will be compared with the abundance and activity of the mobile epibenthic megafauna in the replicate photographic areas. A one-year test with real-time data acquisition and analyses combined with the ability to alter sampling frequencies from shore will provide the first long-term ecological monitoring of the abyssal sea floor to resolve the importance of food limitation on deep-sea benthic communities doc840 none EPIC (Eastern Pacific Investigation of Climate processes in the coupled ocean-atmosphere system) is an activity of the US CLIVAR Program. EPIC consists of four components focussing on (i) intertropical convergence zone warm pool phenomena; (ii) cross-equatorial inflow into the intertropical convergence zone; (iii) upper ocean structure and mixing and (iv) an exploratory study of boundary layer cloud properties in the southeasterly tradewind regime. The field phase of EPIC is scheduled for a 6-week period during the interval Sept 1 to Oct 15, . In addition to the eight awards made by ATM, this collaborative research has awards made by NSF OCE and NOAA OGP. Under this award (collaborative with Zehnder Arizona State Univ ), the PI will examine factors responsible for the fluctuations in the strength and position of the East Pacific ITCZ on weekly time scales. The variations of the ITCZ convection as a function of the diurnal cycle will also be examined. The work is important because it will improve understanding and modeling of climate variability over the Eastern Tropical Pacific doc841 none Houghton The cause for the observed coincidence of enhanced biological activity in the vicinity of shelfbreak fronts will be investigated by a series of field experiments in the Middle Atlantic Bight. The hypotheses to be tested are both physical and biological. First the convergence of buoyancy flux in the bottom boundary layer drives upwelling of nutrient rich Shelf Water along the shoreward side of the shelfbreak front. Second, the biological activity is enhanced due to this large flux nutrient and by optimal optical conditions as the water transitions from turbid shelf water to clear oceanic water, making the front a region with high photosynthetic efficiency. Five new technologies (dye tracer, isopycnal floats, pumped Seasoar with high speed chemical analysis, towed microstructure instrument and use of optical variability to estimate photosynthetic properties of phytoplankton) will used in three 10-dy cruises to track the front in a Lagrangian framework doc842 none In this project, an marine organic geochemist at the University of Washington will continue his long-time program of research into the forms, distributions and preservation of major forms of organic matter in marine sediments. In particular, this present project has three major goals. In its principal initiative, the research team will characterize bulk sedimentary organic material by a combination of solid-state 13C NMR and other techniques. A special effort will be made to investigate the nature of the black carbon and the organic nitrogen abundant in sediments throughout the world ocean; despite their ubiquity, both are notoriously difficult to study. Secondly the team will study the forms and reactions of sedimentary organic matter that react with oxygen. Finally, a new molecular method for measuring tannins in the environment will be finished. Such studies are important for understanding how carbon is cycled in the present day ocean as well as in the longer geological context of burial, uplift, and re-exposure to weathering and exploitation by humans doc843 none Research has thoroughly documented how out-migration of the educated and skilled from rural areas leaves behind a poorer population and creates pockets of rural poverty. Recent studies have recognized that the poor are also highly mobile, playing an important though different role in reinforcing rural poverty concentrations. Rather than leaving depressed rural communities for places with better opportunities, the poor tend to migrate to places with few economic opportunities. In this process, certain rural communities receive a disproportionate share of poverty migrants, which results in a changing population increasingly composed of highly mobile, poor residents. What is unclear is why some rural communities become catchments for poverty migrants while others do not. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine the processes and conditions through which small rural communities become frequent destinations for a highly mobile segment of the rural poor. Using case studies of rural Illinois communities, this project will explore the causal mechanisms that initiate and maintain high rates of poverty migration in these places. It will document a process in which rural communities progress from having a residentially stable, low-poverty population to having a high-poverty population that is extremely mobile. The project s objective is to identify the economic, social, and political conditions that foster poverty in-migration and a change from a low-turnover to a high-turnover community. In working to attain this objective, the interplay between individual migrant decision making and the community and regional context will be explored. One case study community will be selected that is experiencing increasing poverty and population turnover due to the high mobility of those in poverty. Another case study community will be chosen that is experiencing increasing poverty, yet is not experiencing an influx of poverty migrants. These two cases will be compared to discover the underlying mechanisms of community change that lead or prevent communities from becoming poverty migration magnets. The case studies will use multiple data sources, including quantitative data such as surveys and archival documents, and qualitative data, such as in-depth interviews with key community informants and recent migrants. The case study approach will be used to bring together these different data types to uncover how a community changes into a poorer, more mobile place. This project will offer insight into the role of migration of the poor in the processes of community change and poverty concentration in rural areas. The high rates of mobility among the rural poor impact the lives of those in poverty and the communities to which they move. Frequent moves can disrupt social services and children s education. Rural communities that have high rates of poverty migration often struggle to provide adequate housing and employment opportunities, and existing education and social service systems are not equipped to meet the increased need. An understanding of the process of poverty migration into rural communities is needed to develop effective policies that address the needs of these communities and the individuals moving to them. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc844 none Walker An ocean science community workshop will be developed and conducted to determine the need for and interest of the community in establishing an entity that would focus interest, expertise, and resources in ocean science education. A concept paper has been developed for a Center for Ocean Science Education Excellence (COSEE). The workshop will be developed by a broadly represented steering committee that will 1) set the content agenda for a national workshop; 2) implement a three-day workshop attended by approximately 70 ocean science educators and researchers; and 3) prepare a Workshop Report based on discussions and input from the workshop participants. The workshop will facilitate and encourage involvement by diverse participants from a wide variety of institutions undertaking ocean science education and research. The report will be published in an issue of Current, the quarterly journal of the National Marine Educators Association, or other appropriate journal doc845 none Searles The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Edmund Q. S. Searles support for twenty-four to work with Professor Gerard Duhaime at Laval University in Quebec, Canada on a survey of the living conditions of Canadian Inuit. This project is being co-funded by the Arctic Social Sciences Program of the Office of Polar Programs. The Inuit people of northern Canada are in the process of transformation, shifting from small extended family settlements to larger towns. Additionally, there is a trend of Inuit becoming increasingly linked with southern Canadian society. Other groups of indigenous peoples in other parts of the Arctic are undergoing similar changes. There have been no studies available which can identify how living conditions in the north, as defined by a broad range of cultural, social, economic, and cultural factors, are affecting choices the Inuit are making as well as influencing the health and sustainability of remote settlements in the North. An international team of social scientists from the United States, Canada, Greenland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Russian Federation decided to develop an international survey of the living conditions of the indigenous peoples of the Circumpolar Arctic. Dr. Searles will act as assistant to Professor Duhaime, who is the Coordinator of the Canadian portion of this study. Their project will design and implement a questionnaire-based survey that will be used to measure a broad range of indicators affecting the living conditions of 50,000 Canadian Inuit, ensure that this survey instrument is comparable to studies to be conducted in other regions of the Circumpolar North, including those to be used on Inuit living in northern Alaska, Greenland, and far eastern Russia, and with Saami (another indigenous group) living in northern Scandinavia and parts of Russia and they will work with indigenous peoples and organizations not only to ensure that the study reflects their interests and realities, but that it creates a framework for enabling indigenous peoples to design, implement and analyze their own scientific studies. This project will build strong partnerships between indigenous communities and academic researchers. The results of the study will be used to provide a basis for a wide range of scientific studies investigating human-environment interactions, social, economic and political change, and the overall health and sustainability of towns and settlements in the Circumpolar North doc846 none PI: Michael Hout, Melissa J Wilde This project studies forces leading to some of the key reforms of the Second Vatican Council ( -65). Four proposals, two liberal reforms, one conservative reform, and one compromise reform, brought before the Council are treated as outcomes of political forces, compromises, and log-rolling. The project proposes a competition model based on differential resources, political opportunities, and cultural differences. The analyses use archival materials from Italy, Washington DC, and Berkeley CA. Cultural forces appear in content analyses of various drafts of proposals, speeches, diaries, public statements during deliberation, and vote outcomes. The research will assess several hypotheses on how cultural institutions respond to changes in their social environment doc847 none Pecher 00- Trehu 00- Recommended project is for a series of seismic experiments to be conducted from boreholes during Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Leg 198 to map occurrences of gas hydrate and free gas in sediments on Hydrate Ridge offshore Oregon. These experiments will geophysically extend observations from direct core description, direct core measurement, and borehole logging into the surrounding sediments, thereby provide 3-D coverage of inferred gas hydrate and free gas occurrence over a much larger sediment volume. The experiments include: 1) constant-offset vertical seismic profiling (VSP) with a fixed source receiver, coordinated with zero-offset VSP s, which will result in vertically continuous shear-wave velocity (Vs) profiles; 2) walkaway VSP s, acquired by shooting over the borehole with a second ship to a receiver at fixed depth within the borehole, thereby acquiring high-quality Vs and compressional wave (Vp) data to calibrate rock physics models of gas-hydrate bearing sediments; 3) deployment of ocean bottom seismometers in a dense array around one of the boreholes for dense 3-D seismic coverage to examine an area of inferred focused fluid flux and its relationship to a gas hydrate cap; and 4) using the ODP Advanced Piston Corer (APC) as a seismic source during piston deployment for a larger array of measurements using the OBS array. These geophysical results will be directly tied to drilling results to constrain relationships between fluid flux, free gas, and hydrate formation in a convergent margin setting doc848 none Microbes beneath the Earth s surface are now thought to make up a significant amount of life on Earth, and the vast majority of this life is beneath the ocean floor. At underwater volcanoes in the ocean basins (known as the mid-ocean ridges), these microbes are the base of the food chain and they fuel an ecosystem that uses chemical energy from the Earth and not sunlight. Communities of microbes at mid-ocean ridges appear to promote the break down of rocks and alter the composition of sea water that circulates beneath the volcanoes. These microbes are mostly known from circumstantial evidence, so their variety, abundance, and their effect on the physical and chemical properties of the ocean crust are unknown. The PI will investigate the deep-ocean biosphere with a multi-faceted approach that combines chemical analysis of mineral in basalts with characterization of the resident microbial communities. The research objectives are: 1) To verify the presence of microbial communities within rocks from mid-ocean ridges. 2) To describe the minerals associated with the microbial communities. 3) To characterize the microbial communities in terms of overall biomass, physiological state, and genetic diversity. These objectives are important to a number of related fields of science, such as global chemical budgets of carbon and other elements, the origin and history of life, the search for life elsewhere in the solar system, the use of microbes in mining and groundwater mediation, and the search for antibiotics. This interdisciplinary investigation relies on a combination of microscopy, geochemistry, and molecular genetic techniques. Epifluorescence and scanning electron microscopy will be used to locate microorganisms in rocks, and an electron microprobe will be used to identify the minerals associated with the microbes and locate areas within rocks with high concentrations of elements required for life (C, N, and P). Epifluorescence microscopy and stains that bind to nucleic acid will be used to verify microbial DNA is present. Molecular genetic approaches will be used to identify the microbial DNA extracted from the basalts and generate profiles of community composition. Nucleic acid probes specific for organisms of interest will be hybridized in situ and visualized with epifluorescence. The physical association of microbes and minerals will be used to demonstrate ways in which endolithic microorganisms can alter the geochemistry of ridge crest basalts doc849 none This project will investigate the seismic structure of oceanic mantle lithosphere using an active-source seismic refraction experiment along an 800-km-long transect in the Western Atlantic Ocean. The transect extends along a plate kinematic flow line that lies entirely within a single spreading-center segment, on lithosphere ranging from 87 to 145 million years old. The experiment will determine if the lithospheric mantle in the Atlantic is stratified, the magnitude and form of anisotropy over length scales of a few hundred kilometers, the constraints the character of oceanic Pn coda places on the nature of small-scale lateral heterogeneity, and the parameters that maximize the range at which mantle phases can be recorded using airgun source and ocean-bottom receivers doc850 none PI: Ou Proposal Number: Funds are provided for a combination of analytical and numerical modeling studies of three processes involving boundary currents: the branching of a dense throughflow, the branching of a buoyant throughflow, and the generation of eddies as a boundary current encounters a concave curving boundary. The motivations for these studies are the observed branching of the Mediterranean Sea dense outflow plume after it exits the Strait of Gibraltar, the branching of the Tsushima Current after it enters the Sea of Japan through the Tsushima Strait, and the observed generation of eddies consisting of Mediterranean Sea outflow water in the Gulf of Cadiz doc851 none When people hear the term natural disaster, emphasis usually is given to the natural processes that have produced an extreme event like a flood, earthquake, or severe storm. What makes these events disasters, however, often is not simply the physical damage resulting from natural processes but the harm caused to vulnerable social and economic systems. This doctoral dissertation research project examines the role of the environment in the reconfiguration of political and social relations in the U.S. South after the Civil War through an analysis of the experience of flooding from to in the Tensas River Basin of Louisiana. The Tensas Basin consists of all or a portion of six parishes in the northeastern part of the state, and until the early-twentieth century, Mississippi River flooding was a common occurrence there. Today we have a good sense of how flooding shaped and reshaped the physical terrain in the lower Mississippi River valley, but the social and political repercussions of the repeated flooding remain largely unexplored. This study brings environment and politics together by focusing on three interrelated sets of questions. Those questions have to do with the construction and enforcement of social relationships, the restructuring of relations among government institutions, and the local implementation of social policy. This project involves analysis of written texts, a statistical analysis of a small portion of the basin s residents and landowners, and a reading of the physical landscape. The written primary sources consist of government documents, newspapers, manuscript collections, maps, photographs, and published books, scientific reports, and articles. Statistics will be collected from census, tax, conveyance, and plantation records. An underlying assumption of this project is that flooding created another arena for human conflict. Rather than communities being united as they resisted and recovered from floods, this study will show that flood policies (both prevention and relief) divided people, that flooding upset social relations so that people struggled over how to reorder their world, and that how people experienced nature and what they thought about it were affected by race, class, and gender. This project will advance our understanding of the social construction of natural disaster, the process of social categorization through public policy, and the place of environment in U.S. political history. In addition, a study of the Tensas Basin of Louisiana will provide insights that might frame studies in other places, providing valuable new insights into the ways that human actors and institutions anticipate and respond to extreme natural events. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc852 none Urban and agricultural areas significantly modify the surface of the earth and thereby alter the storage and fluxes of water, energy, and nutrients in unplanned experiments. Alterations to ecosystem processes such as above-ground primary productivity (ANPP) and carbon storage comprise an important part of these urbanization experiments. Although studies of land-use and land-cover change explore the consequences of human actions upon ecological processes, rarely do these studies include the kinds of land cover that predominate in urban and suburban areas. In addition to the problems of global environmental change, urbanization presents a unique opportunity to explore the effect of pattern on process and scale dependencies. The connection is important in urban systems because many ecological consequences result from changes in pattern as natural areas are converted into a patchwork of agricultural, built, and landscaped units. This doctoral dissertation research project will explore ecological and biogeographic dimensions of urban and suburban land-use and land-cover change in the Front Range of Colorado. The Front Range constitutes the largest area of human settlement adjacent to the Rocky Mountains and is comprised of a matrix of urban, agricultural, and grassland cover types. The project will focus on the following questions: What are the integrated effects of urban, suburban, and agricultural environments on ANPP? How does the C-storage of urban, suburban, agricultural, and grassland areas compare? How does the spatial arrangement of man-made and natural systems influence these processes at a variety of scales? Cover-type specific values for ANPP and C-storage will be acquired from a combination of field measurements and existing data sets. Extensive data sets exist for grassland, agricultural, and riparian cover types. These will be combined with field data collected in urban and suburban cover types. Measurements include aboveground primary productivity, C storage in vegetation, and C storage in soils. Pre- and post-classification change detection analyses will be performed to calculate the location, amount, and rate of land-cover transformation in the 20th century. The data obtained from field work and archival research will be combined with the classified maps, spectral mixture analysis, and change detection products in order to estimate regional ANPP and C-storage through time. The regional estimations will also be examined for spatial and scale relationships. By studying the productivity and C-storage of vegetation and soil in urban and suburban cover types, this study will allow the quantification of ANPP and C-storage as they vary across natural and anthropogenic cover types. A time series of the regional estimates will illustrate how an increasingly developed landscape modifies ecosystem productivity and C-storage. The spatial analyses will add to the understanding of the proposed ecological principle that pattern affects ecosystem process. An assessment of adjacency effects of man-made environments upon natural systems will demonstrate the extent to which development affects a region. This project will quantify how productivity and carbon storage have been changed in Colorado s Front Range as the prairie has been transformed into a sprawling metropolitan area. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc853 none A major concern of contemporary scientists is distinguishing global environmental changes associated with natural variations in climate from those that resulting from human activities. Land-use and land-cover changes are among the most important changes instigated by humans, but studies of these changes generally have been limited to the last 10 to 30 years, a very short period compared with the history of human activity. An urgent need therefore exists for high-resolution climate data over the last few thousand years and for information on land-use and land-cover changes over the same time period. This doctoral dissertation research project will explore the degree to which cave stalagmites can provide both high-resolution climate and land-use data for the areas near and above caves, thereby allowing a more accurate assessment of the role of humans in environmental change. Working in Guizhou Province of south central China, a region dominated by karst features, including many caves with speleothems. The doctoral candidate will study stalagmites from areas that still have natural vegetation cover and that have not been affected directly by human activities, particularly agriculture. Stalagmite annual layer thickness, gray-scale, stable isotope, and UV laser-induced luminescence proxy measures of climate will be taken and compared with meteorological records drawn from county gazetteers, which provide meteorological information for periods of more than 2,000 years. These comparisons will be used to determine which variables best reflect variations in rainfall and temperature. Appropriate proxy measures then will be compared with gazetteer data dealing with extreme climate events, such as floods and droughts, hail, freezing of rivers and lakes, and snow. Preliminary studies of one stalagmite have identified variations in summer rainfall and shown evidence of major floods back to ca. AD . Investigations also will be made of stalagmites from caves in agricultural areas, particularly locations for which there have been significant changes in land use at a known times in the past, as determined from satellite images, aerial photographs, historical maps, and interviews with local residents. This part of the project will aim at identifying whether information about land use and land cover above the caves can be determined from speleothem records, thereby lengthening the periods over which land uses can be inferred back in time beyond reliable historical records. In addition to providing valuable information about relationships among climate, land-use, and natural vegetative processes over long periods for southern China, the project will make significant methodological contributions by assessing the degree to which cave deposits can be used to provide high-resolution climate and land-use and land-cover data. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc854 none Under the direction of Dr. James Brown, Mr. Robin Beck will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will examine the processes which led to the rise of complex society in Bolivia s Lake Titicaca Basin , home of one of the earliest state level societies in South America. The goal is to evaluate the hypothesis that by Middle Formative period (900-250 BC) a centralized hierarchical form of social organization had emerged. Prior archaeological research demonstrated that by this time villagers at the archaeological site of Chiripa built a large earthern platform that visually dominated their community. Atop this platform they erected a ritual precinct of stone and adobe structures arranged in an octagon around a sunken court. The construction of this precinct at Chiripa has long been recognized as a significant development in the development in social complexity. Follow recent completion of a full scale survey of the region however, archaeologists have discovered similar architecture at several nearby sites. By combining intensive excavation and systematic testing at three of these, Mr. Beck s project will contribute a set of comparative data on the nature of this public ritual architecture. This offers a valuable way to investigate changes in the scale of integrative institutions and to determine the spatial extent of Chiripa s power. If ritual centers at other sites are contemporary with and equal to Chiripa in size, then most likely they did not fall under Chiripa s control. If, on the other hand, they are smaller and less complex they most likely are subordinate to it. Mr. Beck s work will test three models of regional integration: 1. Did a single community serve as this area s ritual and political center throughout the Formative period? 2. Did several different communities alternate as regional center? 3. Were Middle Formative communities in the region ritually and politically autonomous. To test these models the project will use a set of eight variables designed to measure differences in the organization of ritual space: centrality, permanence, accessibility, visibility, scale, ubiquity, function and timing. Mr. Beck will conduct intensive excavation to generate a comparative body of data which will allow intersite comparison. This research is important because it will provide data of interest to many archaeologists. It will increase understanding of how complex societies arose and assist in training a promising young scientist doc855 none Environmental decision-making processes must cope with participants diverse norms and worldviews, including conflicting models of nature and democracy. Outcomes frequently are less than ideal. In response to perceived problems in traditional methods of resource management, new kinds of organizational relationships have emerged. One of these arrangements is co-management, a system that gives increased amounts of decision-making authority to those directly engaged in resource use and extraction but that requires them to work in concerns with other groups that also have interests in the resource. In the Gulf of Maine, lobster co-management has emerged in part as a response to the depletion of other commercial fish stocks in and around the Gulf of Maine as well as in response to the ensuing public criticism of conventional management strategies. Co-management proponents have sought to provide new mechanisms to facilitate the participation of lobster fishermen in decision-making forums, and they have tried to institutionalize links between formal, bureaucratic processes and traditional, local practices. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine the capacity of the institutions involved in lobster co-management institutions to accommodate the multiple ecological and participatory models of fishermen, scientists, and managers, and it will investigate the differential impacts of co-management on participant groups and subgroups. The project will build on traditions of human-environment geography, theories of knowledge and democracy, and fisheries literatures in order to draw both theoretical and applied conclusions. The research design will integrate data acquired through interviews with key informant, participant observation, surveys, and focus groups. In addition to enabling the doctoral candidate to prepare a high-quality doctoral dissertation, the project will result in a report for the study area s fishing, scientific, and management communities including suggestions as to how the co-management process might be improved. This project will result in valuable new insights about the potential for co-management in the Maine lobster industry, and it will provide conclusions that can be tested elsewhere in order to better assess the strengths and limitations of this management strategy as well as its varied impacts on different groups. This kind of study is especially significant given the tendency for other North American fisheries to move toward greater stakeholder participation in decision making. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc856 none When examining the factors that influence the geomorphic structure and dynamics of stream channels, attention tends to focus on interactions between water and sediments. A number of external factors can influence these fluvial dynamics, however, including plant material that falls into and along stream beds. Although increasing attention is being given to the impact of biota on stream dynamics and related channel morphology, most research has been done in locations where fast-moving streams flow through non-urban areas. The overall goal of this doctoral dissertation research project is to advance the understanding of the interactions between large woody debris (LWD) and the geomorphic structure and function of low-gradient meandering streams. The project will explore process-based interactions between LWD storage and transport, organic matter retention, and a variety of fluvial processes, including sediment transport, three-dimensional flow structure, and bar form development, and it will to inform stream naturalization efforts by developing a set of management guidelines about LWD that are consistent with extant biotic-fluvial processes. Specific research questions to be examined in this project include: (1) How is LWD spatially distributed within a meandering stream?, (2) What geomorphic and hydrologic factors affect the dynamics of woody debris in this type of fluvial system?, and (3) How do woody debris obstructions affect bed material characteristics, local patterns of erosion and deposition, three-dimensional flow structure, and organic matter standing stock at the scale of individual meander bends? The project design and methodologies will be informed by research on three-dimensional flow in meander bends, bedform and planform development in meandering streams, and the influences of LWD on stream ecosystems. Field data are will be collected in a 600-meter meandering section of Poplar Creek, a tributary of the Fox River in Kane County in northeastern Illinois. This study site is located directly upstream of a straightened reach that is the focus of a de-channelization project that will attempt to re-establish a naturally functioning meandering system with diverse in-stream morphology and habitats. Among components of the field study are characterization of land-use change within the watershed, GIS-facilitated analysis of historical changes in channel position at the research site, and analysis of available historical hydrologic data. Special attention will be given to process-based field investigations focusing on LWD dynamics and organic matter retention throughout the 600-meter reach and interactions between LWD obstructions and geomorphological processes within three meander bends. This research project will contribute to the general understanding of the geomorphological dynamics of meandering streams, especially process interactions between biotic and abiotic components of these systems. This improved understanding will provide a more reliable framework of knowledge on which to base stream naturalization plans for low-energy meandering streams with abundant LWD. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc857 none This award covers the Space and Atmospheric Sciences (SAS) portion of the research conducted at the Arecibo Observatory. It includes the operation of the 450 MHz radar, lidar instrumentation, other passive optical instruments, and the ionospheric heating facility, planned for construction at the site. Scientific studies conducted by the SAS staff cover the altitude range from the middle atmosphere through the topside ionosphere. The staff will study ionospheric effects of meteor impacts, the chemistry and dynamics of the mesosphere, E-region instabilities, plasma composition and dynamics in the F-region, and minor ion species in the topside ionosphere. The staff also provides support for other atmospheric scientists using the Arecibo observatory as part of experimental campaigns. Scientists using the Arecibo instrumentation study a broad range of atmospheric phenomena relevant to studies of space weather and global change. When completed the ionospheric heating facility will allow study of artificially modified plasma processes, wave excitation, and ion-neutral coupling. With the foot antenna at the observatory, the 430 MHz radar is the most sensitive instrument of its kind in the world and it continues to provide unique observational data for a variety of scientific purposes doc858 none This project will make coupled chemical and temperature measurements in about 20 high temperature vent sites on the East Pacific Rise, 9-10 degrees north, six diffuse flow vents, and the vents at 21 degrees north on the East Pacific Rise. The questions to be addressed include: What controls the composition of vent fluids exiting from a single vent fore time? Do changes in fluid compositions and temperatures correlate with changes in the associated animal communities? What is the relationship between adjacent diffuse and focused hydrothermal fluids? What is the flux of chemical species from hydrothermal vents to the ocean doc859 none A process study called the Eastern Pacific Investigation of Climate Processes in the Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere System (EPIC) is proposed to study the behavior of the atmosphere and ocean in that region. The goals of the oceanographic component of EPIC are to describe, understand and quantify the evolution of the major oceanic structures and processes in the upper ocean under the deep convection region of the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) in order to improve regional models and ultimately gain better prediction of annual and interannual climate variability. Measurements will include mesoscale velocity temperature and salinity using expendable profilers dropped from aircraft, small scale velocity, temperature and salinity fields with a shipboard ADCP and continuous Seasoar sections, velocity microstructure and temperature, salinity and velocity finestructure by continuous microstructure profiling from a ship on station at 10 N, 95 W and radiometric and bio-optical profiles at various locations along 95 W doc860 none Stable carbon isotope data are used widely in ecology and earth sciences. These data on isotope fractionations influence our understandings of processes occurring on molecular to global scales. Hindcasts of past climates, models constraining the fates of present day greenhouse gas emissions, inferences of trophic transfers within complex ecosystems, and elucidation of enzyme and cellular controls on primary productivity have all used stable carbon isotope fractionation data (delta 13C values). Despite the wide applicability of such fractionation information, such data are nearly always interpreted assuming carbon is fixed and its isotopes fractionated as if the ribulose?1,5?bisphosphate?carboxylase oxygenase (RubisCO) of spinach was responsible! This is probably a huge mistake and may substantially invalidate all of the subsequent data interpretations for problems such as those mentioned above. In the few cases that have been studied, the kinetic isotope effects (KIEs) for RubisCOs, the degree to which the delta 13C of the carbon fixed differs from the C02 substrate used, have been demonstrated to vary broadly. Thus, determining the KIEs of different RubisCOs is critical to understanding, delta 13C interpretation, and modeling of delta 13C values in oceanography. As a result, it is a long?term research goal to determine KIEs from all forms of RubisCO in autotrophs. In order to determine the KIEs of Form IA RubisCOs, these carbon-fixing enzymes will be isolated and purified from representative marine picophytoplankton and chemoautotrophic bacteria. Model species Synechococcus WH , Prochlorococcus MED 4, and two sulfur?oxidizing chemoautotrophs, symbionts of the coastal and vent bivalves, Solemya velum and Bathymodiolus thermophilus will be used. The isolated proteins will be characterized with respect to amino acid sequence, composition, Vmax, and Km (CO2). Finally, the kinetic isotope effects will be determined by high precision methods. Determining the KIEs for Form IA RubisCOs will allow us to evaluate a fundamental assumption of delta 13C analyses, and to infer the factors affecting oceanic primary productivity with a substantial improvement in accuracy doc861 none Recommended project is for an integrated marine field and laboratory investigation of the western end of the Galapagos archipelago, with a focus on studying lavas from the submarine western flanks of Fernandina and Cerro Azul volcanoes after mapping them with camera tows and multibeam and side scan sonar. The goal is to define and then sample volcanic products from the leading edge of Galapagos plume, with associated, extensive geochemical and petrological studies that will help define the nature of the Galapagos plume. These samples will be used to test whether magma chemistry from leading-edge plume volcanism indeed best reflects the chemistry of the plume mantle source, whether high 3He 4He does indeed reflect undegassed, deep mantle sources, and also to test whether the unique horseshoe-shaped pattern of Galapagos geochemical variation is due to mantle zonation or is instead related to other geologic processes. The field mapping will determine whether there is a new submarine volcano westward of Fernandina that represents the actual plume leading edge (such as represented by Loihi in the Hawaiian plume volcanism), as suggested by seismic data. This work, on the leading edge of a weak plume, will complement similar studies done at Hawaii, a strong plume, in testing models of plume volcanism and origin doc862 none Two major issues associated with the formation of oceanic crust via upward flow of melt will be investigated. First, three-dimensional imaging and numerical methods will be combined to quantify the permeability of partially molten upper mantle rocks. Second, the spontaneous localization of melt into channels during deformation will be explored through high-strain shear experiments on partially molten upper mantle rocks. The research will provide important constraints on and quantificaiton of melt distribution and permeability beneath a mid-ocean ridge doc863 none Vent fauna is a largely ancient fauna of global distribution in the deep?sea. It has limited taxonomic affinities to most deep?sea communities, and yet it has affinities to the faunas of deep?sea hydrocarbon seeps and other seep environments. Deep?sea hydrothermal vents are one of the major ecosystem types on the earth, but probably the least known. The high biomasses of these communities largely reflect the ability of a few invertebrate bacteria symbioses to oxidize reduced chemical species (sulfide or methane) from the vents using oxygen from the surrounding deep?sea water to power primary production. The allegation that vent communities are highly productive is often seen in the literature based on the high biomasses estimated, the rapid establishment of vent communities and the rapid growth of some vent animals. However, there are currently no well?founded estimates of primary production by the symbioses at any hydrothermal vents. The central objective of this study is to quantify the major vent symbioses chemical interactions with the vent fluids and the abundances of those symbioses in such a way that primary and secondary production and other chemical exchanges can be modeled for entire assemblages of symbiotic animals. This involves determining the range of production and exchange rates of the symbioses and the relations between environmental conditions and those rates. Environmental data will then be used to estimate in situ rates for entire assemblages at single points in time and over the lifetime of vent sites. This consists first of the Childress group expanding its study of the rates of exchanges to a range of sizes of all the major autotrophic symbioses. Complementing this, the Fisher group will characterize and sample sites at 9 50 N on the EPR so that the biomass, organism abundance and organism sizes are documented and size weight relationships are developed. These data will enable the estimating of production in entire symbiotic assemblages and they can also be used with existing photographic datasets to estimate biomasses at other EPR sites which have been photographically documented and for which chemical datasets exist. The results will greatly increase the understanding of the nature of the interactions between the vent animals and their chemical environments and enable the first solid estimates of production and other exchanges by the symbiotic components of vent communities, making a major contribution to the understanding of the functioning of vent and other chemoautotrophically supported ecosystems doc864 none This award is to support a workshop to be held in conjunction with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Annual Congress and Exhibition, to be held in Orlando, Florida, November 7-8, . The objective of the workshop is to invite participants from industry and academia to discuss opportunities for research collaboration in manufacturing of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). While tremendous progress has been made in several critical areas, there are four areas that are critical to the manufacturing of MEMS where the fundamental understanding remains at issue. These are the fundamental phenomena of MEMS, MEMS applications in sensing systems, MEMS applications in actuators, and MEMS reliability and packaging doc865 none This project will deploy 64 wide-band ocean-bottom seismometers and ten portable broad-band seismic island stations in a 15-month-long investigation. The objectives are to: locate and image the plume conduit beneath the Hawaiian hotspot, image the roots of the Hawaiian swell over a sufficient area and with a sufficient resolution to distinguish among competing hypotheses for plume-lithosphere interaction, and relate the findings from the seismic imaging experiments to geodynamical and geochemical, models for mantle plumes doc866 none Aeolian sand streamers, which also are known as sand snakes or windrows, are quasi-linear, streamwise concentrations of wind-blown sand. Streamers commonly are observed in natural aeolian sand-transport environments. Although these features have received minimal research attention, they can have significant consequences for the theoretical underpinnings and predictive powers of contemporary sand-transport models. Contemporary models treat aeolian sand transport as a uniform sheet of sand saltating over the bed surface. This description derives from fundamental assumptions regarding the uniformity and steadiness of the wind flow as well as assumptions regarding the homogeneity of the bed surface. The frequent occurrence of streamers in nature challenges these views and assumptions. The occurrence of streamers in aeolian environments may correspond with phenomena found in fluvial systems, leading some scientists to conclude that the spatial characteristics and temporal behavior of aeolian sand streamers should reflect theories and models of sediment transport in a variety of environments. This doctoral dissertation research project has three main objectives: (1) to quantify the shape and behavior of aeolian sand streamers, (2) to identify their origin, and (3) to determine their consequences for current aeolian transport models. These objectives will be addressed through the conduct of a set of field experiments at Oceano Dunes State Vehicle Recreation Area in central California. A variety of instruments, including cup-anemometers, hot-wire probes, saltiphones, Leatherman-type traps, and video imagery, will be deployed to measure the behavior and dimensions of streamers in conjunction with the wind-flow field and its characteristics. Sediment sampling and microsurveys will capture characteristics of the bed surface, such as micro-relief and moisture-content distribution. The integration and synthesis of experimental data will yield direct information regarding the spatial and temporal characteristics of aeolian sand streamers and will allow testing of the various hypotheses accounting for their origin. Comparison among the different types of data also will generate insights into how the presence of streamers under natural conditions affects contemporary transport models. This project aims to describe and measure a little-studied phenomenon that can have a potentially significant impact on current understandings of aeolian systems. In addition, the innovative research strategy and the use of this combination of instruments should shed a new light on issues of spatial and temporal variability and about the prediction of sediment transport in aeolian geomorphology. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc867 none Schlick, Shulamith This U.S.-Romanian research project involving Shulamith Schlick at the University of Detroit, Ileana Dragutan of the Center for Organic Chemistry, Romanian Academy of Sciences, and Bogdan Simionescu of Asachi Technical University features examination of ionomer systems. This U.S.-Romania team benefits from complementary expertise in ESR spectroscopy (Detroit), Spin probes (Bucharest) and block copolymer synthesis (Yassy). Together, the researchers will seek an explanation for observed yet puzzling characteristics related to macromolecular organization in the membrane material Nafion and the organization in solvents of various polarities of ionic block polymers with strongly hydorphilic segments and strongly hydrophobic segments. To accomplish this, the researchers plan to: 1) use perfluorinated nitroxide spin probes prepared in Bucharest to investigate aggregation of perfluorinated ionomers (Nafion) and 2) apply the methodology of ESR (electron-spin resonance) spectroscopy based on paramagnetic probes and ESR imaging to study self-assembly in and cation binding of block copolymers containing polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) segments. They ll also study polydimethylsiloxane-poly (methyacrylic acid) (PSMS-PMAA) blocks in the presence of toluene as the selective solvent for the PDMS block and water as the selective solvent for the PMAA block. If successful, results should improve our knowledge of the microstructure of ionomers and provide new quantitative information about the dynamics of the different microstructural regions. Findings are expected to have potential industrial applications in areas such as fuel cells and biomemetics. This international project in polymer research fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the Untied States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc868 none A field program is designed to determine the dynamics of the three-dimensional wind driven flow and its impact on the sea surface temperature in the eastern Pacific. The objective is to suggest a revised theory for the North Equatorial Counter Current (NECC) by testing several hypotheses involving a modification to linear Sverdrup theory and the role of the NECC in controlling the location and magnitude of the eastern Pacific warm pool. A two-ship survey will be conducted together with the deployment of surface drifters during the seasonal maximum of the NECC to measure the current, temperature and salinity structure of the upper ocean. The project is contribution to the Climate variability and Predictability Program (CLIVAR) and collaborative with Mexican scientists doc869 none Light, in conjunction with nutrient supply, is the primary abiotic resource structuring life in the sea. With the exception of various behavioral phenomena such as phototaxis and bioluminescence, light has not been thought to directly influence marine zooplankton energetics. In recent research, we have found evidence for the direct use of light energy in the digestion of phytoplankton by three heterotrophic (non?photosynthetic) protists. We hypothesize that light aids in the digestion of phytoplankton prey through the photosensitized formation of reactive oxygen in grazer food vacuoles. This reactive oxygen may then degrade lipids and proteins, supplementing digestion both qualitatively (by yielding smaller, more readily assimilated compounds) and quantitatively (by providing an energy supplement). Our data indicate that light?aided digestion can result in 2? to 10- fold enhancements of ingestion rate, and up to 20?fold enhancements of population growth rates. At very low food levels, light?aided digestion can make the difference between survival and severe mortality for heterotrophic protists feeding on phytoplankton. Because protists are the primary consumers of phytoplankton in the sea, light?aided digestion has profound consequences for the regulation of phytoplankton consumption, nutrient regeneration, trophic transfer efficiency, and prey selection. We propose an investigation of the role of light in regulating protist grazing activities. The proposed research will be conducted across multiple biological levels, from molecular events in grazer food vacuoles to regulation of phytoplankton consumption in whole microplankton communities. The proposed research centers on the exciting notion that light, a fundamental abiotic resource, may regulate the activities of the ocean s primary herbivores on the fundamental level of prey digestion. A direct coupling of protist grazing, growth, and growth efficiency to irradiance means that these rates and efficiencies will vary with depth, latitude, and season in a heretofore-unsuspected manner. In addition, the degree of coupling between populations of phytoplankton and their primary consumers, a fundamental determinant of community structure and function, could be strongly mediated by a single abiotic resource, and thus might be much closer than previously believed doc870 none This goal of this research is to shed light on the origin and evolution of anatomically modern humans through the first ever systematic, comparative study of Late Pleistocene hominid dental morphology from an evolutionary perspective. At the core of the debate over modern human origins is the question of the ancestral relationship between Neandertals and anatomically modern humans. This debate focuses on two competing hypotheses for modern human origins: Multiregional Evolution (modern humans evolved from archaic predecessors in many parts of the Old World) or Recent African Origin (modern humans have a single origin, from which they spread, replacing existing archaic humans in the rest of the world). Much of the controversy is over whether or not Neandertals are too different from modern humans to have played a significant role in their evolution. The ultimate goal of this research is to assess the relationships among archaic and anatomically modern human samples through an analysis of tooth crown characters. To this end, a large sample of Homo erectus, Middle to Late Pleistocene and Recent human teeth will be analyzed using widely accepted dental morphological standards - the Arizona State University Dental Anthropology - as well as analyses of cusp area and crown shape. Results will be based on a combination of univariate and multivariate statistical techniques and phylogenetic analyses. It is hypothesized that if Neandertals played a significant role in the origin of modern humans, this should be reflected in their tooth crown characters. If this is true, the analysis should demonstrate that (1) Neandertals are dentally more similar to early anatomically modern humans (AMH) from the same geographic region than they are to AMH from other geographic regions, (2) there are regionally distinct dental evolutionary paths toward Recent modern human dental patterns, (3) Neandertals lack a significant number dental characters that are unique to them, and (4) Neandertals and AMH more closely related to each other than either are to other archaic human groups. This study uniquely brings together temporal and geographic axes of dental variation in an analysis of the evolutionary relationship between Neandertals and modern humans. In so doing, it will provide an independent evaluation of current biological and archaeological hypotheses concerning Neandertal affinities and modern human origins doc871 none The objective this research is to explore stratospheric variability and stratosphere-troposphere coupling, with an emphasis on how the stratosphere influences the troposphere. The stratosphere appears to be providing early evidence of global (surface) warming, which is observed as stratospheric cooling. Such trends are obfuscated in the stratosphere by interannual variability resulting from influences such as the quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO), solar cycle, volcanic eruptions and internal dynamics. One such mode of variability, the Arctic Oscillation (AO) has climate impacts very similar to the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and shows strong coupling to the stratosphere. Modeling studies with increased greenhouse gases show that stratospheric trends, may through vertical coupling, amplify or induce tropospheric trends. The PIs will (i) use objective analysis techniques with reanalyzed NCEP and TOVS data to understand the process by which stratospheric circulation anomalies tend to propagate downward into the troposphere; (ii) examine the Southern Hemisphere, especially in late spring, to see if the same phenomenon can be seen; (iii) investigate and understand the relationship between observed poleward and downward propagation of zonal wind anomalies (within the stratosphere on a time scale of 2-3 mo) and downward propagation of the AO to the troposphere (~ 3 week time scale); (iv) investigate modes of variability in zonal wind to understand the relationship between tropical upper stratospheric zonal wind anomalies (~30-50 km) and high-latitude circulation anomalies in both hemispheres; (v) examine coupled patterns in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere that explain the flux of wave activity from the troposphere to the stratosphere. The work is important because it will increase our understanding of stratosphere-troposphere coupling mechanisms. This could have implications for climate predictability doc847 none Pecher 00- Trehu 00- Recommended project is for a series of seismic experiments to be conducted from boreholes during Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Leg 198 to map occurrences of gas hydrate and free gas in sediments on Hydrate Ridge offshore Oregon. These experiments will geophysically extend observations from direct core description, direct core measurement, and borehole logging into the surrounding sediments, thereby provide 3-D coverage of inferred gas hydrate and free gas occurrence over a much larger sediment volume. The experiments include: 1) constant-offset vertical seismic profiling (VSP) with a fixed source receiver, coordinated with zero-offset VSP s, which will result in vertically continuous shear-wave velocity (Vs) profiles; 2) walkaway VSP s, acquired by shooting over the borehole with a second ship to a receiver at fixed depth within the borehole, thereby acquiring high-quality Vs and compressional wave (Vp) data to calibrate rock physics models of gas-hydrate bearing sediments; 3) deployment of ocean bottom seismometers in a dense array around one of the boreholes for dense 3-D seismic coverage to examine an area of inferred focused fluid flux and its relationship to a gas hydrate cap; and 4) using the ODP Advanced Piston Corer (APC) as a seismic source during piston deployment for a larger array of measurements using the OBS array. These geophysical results will be directly tied to drilling results to constrain relationships between fluid flux, free gas, and hydrate formation in a convergent margin setting doc873 none This project is an integrated multichannel seismic investigation of the intermediate-spreading Juan de Fuca Ridge. The primary goals are: (1) to determine the location, size and physical properties of crustal magma bodies along the ridge and relate these properties to the recent eruptive history of the ridge, (2) to measure the variation invelocity and thickness of the indicators of magmatic state, and (3) to characterize the alteration history of the upper crust as a function of sedimentation history, crustal age and basement relief doc874 none PI: Pickart Proposal Number: Funds are provided for a hydrographic survey, including lowered ADCP profiles, of the Irminger Sea. Furthermore, two moored profilers will be deployed for periods of three years. One profiler will be deployed in the center of the Irminger Gyre and the other at the edge of the Deep Western Boundary Current. They will be serviced once a year. These profilers will monitor the vertical structure of temperature, salinity, and current. It is anticipated that these instruments will record signals indicative of deep convection. An important water mass involved in the meridional overturning circulation of the North Atlantic is Labrador Sea Water. These waters have recently been observed forming in the Labrador Sea. This program is designed to test the hypothesis that water of similar characteristics is actively formed in the Irminger Sea doc875 none In the world s oceans, understanding how planktonic food webs operate is crucial to predicting the amounts and rates of organic cycling. Among the least understood regulators of plankton dynamics are the soft?bodied zooplankton that reside at midwater depths (30? in). Top?down control via predation by one group, the physonect siphonophores, has been especially difficult to quantify, principally because these polymorphic animals are extremely fragile and readily fragment when collected with plankton nets. This investigation will use a manned submersible (Johnson?Sea?Link) and the tools it carries to quantify the distribution, abundance, behavior, and feeding of the common, but poorly studied, gelatinous colonies of Nanomia cara. Field studies will be conducted in the Gulf of Maine region (Wilkinson Basin, Georges Bank and Oceanographer Canyon) where populations of this physonect siphonophore Nanomia cara are likely to be important regulators of zooplankton prey stocks. Preliminary investigations have indicated that N. cara has the potential to consume a significant portion of the standing stocks of primary consumers, specifically the non?reproducing stages IV?V of the copepod Calanus finmarchicus. High mortality rates of this calanoid species can be detrimental to fisheries on regional and basin scales. Laboratory investigations of carefully collected colonies will determine rates of digestion and respiration (=oxygen consumption and nitrogen excretion) in environments that are similar to in situ conditions (e.g., temperature and darkness). These data in conjunction with field studies will provide a basis for predicting the predatory impact of Nanomia cara. This study of predation mortality at individual and population levels will broaden the work undertaken in the U.S. GLOBEC program in the Gulf of Maine Georges Bank regime. Results from this research are also likely to be useful for NOAA s COP Georges Bank Predation study, especially if N. cara preys on larval fishes doc876 none Relations between Traditional and Scientific Knowledge of the Kotzebue Sound Ecosystem: Exploratory Research This exploratory research by an interdisciplinary team involves visiting with Inupiaq leaders in the Kotzebue Sound area to begin a dialog with local Arctic communities about the possibilities for long-term ecosystem research. Within the framework of the Human Dimensions of the Arctic System (HARC) initiative, researchers will consult with communities as an important preliminary step in a collaborative effort to study environmental change in Northwest Alaska doc877 none This project will develop a suite of geophysical techniques that will improve capabilities to integrate quantitatively the results of seismic and geodynamic modeling. The aproach - called geodynamic tomography - is a new form of constraint tomography that differs from those previously implemented. Geodynamic models will be mapped into their seismic signature and anisotropic tomography will be used to formally test the model against the seismic data. This method will limit the search for acceptable seismic models to a subset that are consistent with geodynamic predictions, and will allow rigorous testing of the differing geodynamic assumptions against actual observations doc878 none This is a standard award. Columbia University Press, the campus computing center, and faculty are collaborating to create new dissemination models for cutting-edge curricular materials, research, and analysis n Earth Sciences. Based upon design and evaluation work already done at Columbia with scholarly online publishing, the goal of this project is to create a fully-integrated, highly selective interactive online resource for educational materials in this field, and to evaluate the ongoing value and economic viability of providing these services on a subscription-based, cost-recovery model to educational institutions, libraries and students. By experimenting with ways to use new developments in digital technology, this project has the potential to transform the way students learn about the Earth and interact with it on every possible level, and it provides models for other disciplines to follow. Discussions with scholars at Columbia University and nationally reveal that internet-accessible, online publishing is a possible solution to the problem in scholarly communication and education of timely access to the latest research results in an interdisciplinary field such as Earth sciences. The project provides access through easy-to-use, cutting edge electronic tools to a moderated, interdisciplinary scholarly online publication of a wide variety of materials being produced in this field. A critical mass of high-quality Earth sciences scholarship and teaching material has been identified as available for electronic distribution with support from its producers. The project is producing models in four critical areas: online content acquisition, review and dissemination; development of a collaborative organization involving scholars, publishers, libraries, and technologists; creation of standardized online technology systems that can be used across projects and disciplines; and editorially selective publication in Earth sciences through use of the online environment. Findings from each model can be applied to the production and evaluation of digital resources in other fields and at other scales, and will address with real data the large questions concerning the usefulness and viability of such projects in the near and long term doc879 none Single-particle analysis methods (scanning electron microscopy, SEM, and manual transmission electron microscopy, TEM) will be used to study aerosols collected during ACE-Asia (Aerosol Characterization Experiment). The primary objectives are to provide detailed information about particle compositions, size distributions, shapes, and state of mixing. Samples will be collected on board the NCAR C-130 aircraft, the R V Ron Brown, and at the ground site at Cheju Island, Korea doc880 none 7Although the extensive use of modern computers and communication systems generally is seen as having profound impacts on the economies of developed nations, but these same technologies also are reshaping opportunities and livelihoods of people in less-developed countries. This doctoral dissertation research project will evaluate a growing yet under-analyzed facet of economic development focusing on the value of information and communication technology, particularly the practice of cybernetworking (using computer-based communications systems to link into a broad range of networks for a variety of purposes). The project will study the gender-based impacts of a transnational cybernetwork of rural development projects throughout Latin America; specifically the material, social, and political opportunities and constraints that exist for local women to access and utilize internet resources in the accomplishment of their local political and development agendas. In order to address this question, research will include archival analysis of existing life histories of over 100 rural women leaders; an electronic forum of these women to assess their priority issues; and online surveys of local project officials and women. Two illustrative case studies will be conducted in nations served by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) Fidamerica project to provide insights into best- and worst-case outcomes for women. These case studies will include the use of intensive semi-structured interviews with local women, key informant interviews, focus-group sessions with local project administrators, and local archival research. This project will evaluate the potential application of information and communication technology for development projects for women by delineating the cultural politics surrounding the material conditionsas well as the social and political relations that support or inhibit women s access to successful cybernetworking. By understanding the details of these politics at the scales of the network administration, the local projects, the local community, and the household, it will be possible to identify key locations for policy influence and expenditures. As such, it will be possible for development organizations, network officials, local projects administrators, and local women to maximize resources to achieve their objectives. This research will benefit not only the study population. It also has potential application to other development cybernetworks concerned with a broad range of sustainable development issues, and it will enhance theoretical understandings of the role of modern information and communication technologies on rural economic development in lesser-developed nations. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc877 none This project will develop a suite of geophysical techniques that will improve capabilities to integrate quantitatively the results of seismic and geodynamic modeling. The aproach - called geodynamic tomography - is a new form of constraint tomography that differs from those previously implemented. Geodynamic models will be mapped into their seismic signature and anisotropic tomography will be used to formally test the model against the seismic data. This method will limit the search for acceptable seismic models to a subset that are consistent with geodynamic predictions, and will allow rigorous testing of the differing geodynamic assumptions against actual observations doc882 none 00- This is an interdisciplinary study to investigate fundamental physical and biological processes in the Estuarine Turbidity Maximum (ETM) of Chesapeake Bay. ETM zones located in the upper reaches of estuaries, near the interface between salt and fresh water, are known to entrap fine sediments and to entrap or aggregate zooplankton and early-life stages of fish. In Chesapeake Bay, a well-defined but poorly understood ETM occurs in the upper Bay. It is hypothesized that the ETM entraps sediment particles and planktonic organisms which in turn support enhanced zooplankton production and growth and survival of young anadrornous fish. This research will characterize constituents and evaluate processes operating in the Chesapeake ETM, including sediments and organisms that are of major ecological significance in the Bay. A key species in the ETM is the copepod, Eurytemora affinis, which is a major food of larvae and juveniles of anadromous fishes (striped bass, white perch, shads, river herrings doc883 none This award provides partial support for An International Workshop on Submerged Coral Drilling . The conference will (1) define and prioritize scientific objectives of submerged coral drilling, (2) identify site survey and technology requirements needed to optimize core recovery, (3) define sample handling, data management, and analytical protocols, and (4) identify groups of investigators that will focus their efforts on specific topics or areas. The workshop will be held in September, , in St. Petersburg, FL, and will be co-funded by JOI, Inc., following review of a separate proposal to them doc884 none This U.S.-Brazil award will support a symposium-workshop on Frugivory and Seed Dispersal in August 6-12, in Pousada do Rio Quente, Brazil. The award includes funding for travel and subsistence for 15 US delegates from 14 different US institutions to the symposium-workshop. This is the third in a series of workshops on this topic, the previous two held in and in Mexico, resulted in a number of publications that shaped the development of the relatively new field. Additionally, Dr. Douglas J. Levey will conduct a planned visit to meet with Drs. Wesley Silva and Mauro Galetti to finalize logistics for the symposium-workshop. Understanding the role of seed dispersers in plant demography and the role of fruit in vertebrate population dynamics is an important component of conservation strategies. In parts of the world, most woody plants produce fruit and depend upon vertebrates to disperse their seeds. Estimates of vertebrate biomass supported by fruit resources are as high as 80%. Aside from its practical importance, fruit-frugivore interactions represent one of the two major plant-animal mutualisms (the other being pollution). Its theoretical development has been influential in shaping views of co evolution, partially because its previous theoretical framework proved incorrect. Its current theoretical framework is in a state of uncertain transition. Thus now is a critical time for people in the field to meet, share ideas, establish collaborations, and settle upon a future course of action. The proceedings of the symposium-workshop will be published. The selected site is known for its biological diversity, and will attract a broad international participation, including a large number of Latin American students doc885 none Marc Spiegelman This proposal requests funds to help support travel costs of U.S. participants to the 23rd International Conference on Mathematical Geophysics. This year s conference is titled Extreme Earth Events. The conference focuses on systems that display sudden transitions from quiescent states to crises, extreme events, catastrophic or disastrous instabilities. Examples range from large natural catastrophes such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes and tornadoes, landslides, avalanches, mass extinctions and catastrophic events of environmental degradation, to the failure of engineering structures, crashes in the stock market, social unrest and economic disruptions on national and global scales, regional power blackouts, traffic gridlock, diseases and epidemics. The purpose of this conference is to provide a forum that allows scientists from a full range of scientific disciplines to interact with each other and with experts in the math and physics community doc886 none This grant provides partial funding for a Material Handling Research Colloquium (MHRC). The goal for MHRC is to bring together researchers with industry participants to address material handling in the context of the National Research Council s report, Visionary Manufacturing Challenges for . St. Onge Company is the host for the Colloquium, and major funding is provided from industry through the Material Handling Industries of America. The impact of the Material Handling Research Colloquium will be felt in several ways. First, by providing a focused, intimate setting for researchers to present and discuss their latest work, the Colloquium will speed the dissemination of state of the art ideas and results within the research community. Second, by providing a forum for industry and the research community to address the challenges of the next twenty years, the Colloquium will significantly impact the direction of future research. The proceedings of the Colloquium will include not only the research papers presented, but also summaries of the breakout sessions addressing future research needs doc887 none The objective of this research is to investigate the use of virtual environments as a medium for the study of human behavior in dynamic environments. The project has two thrusts: a computational component directed at advancing scenario modeling techniques to meet the needs of experiments for replicable experiences that adapt to subject behavior, and an experimental component that investigates children s bicycle riding behavior in a virtual bicycling simulator. Virtual environments present an exciting new medium for the study of human behavior that combines the rigor of controlled laboratory experiments with the ecological validity of natural experiments. They immerse subjects in worlds that appear physically real, but where conditions can be controlled. In addition, they can realistically simulate dangerous circumstances without risking injury to subjects. To exploit the potential of virtual environments as laboratories for studying human behavior, significant advances must be made in techniques for controlling the dynamics of virtual environments populated with vehicles, pedestrians, bicyclists, and traffic lights. In experiments, the right things must happen at the right time and place. Furthermore, the activity should maintain an appearance of spontaneity; subjects should feel that they have freedom of action and that other objects are behaving normally. The research will investigate on-line direction as a means to adaptively coordinate the behaviors of simulated objects during experiments. Psychological studies will serve as a proving ground to test and harden scenario control methodologies. Experiments conducted in virtual environments will be compared to experiments conducted in real environments to validate the use of simulators as laboratories for the study of human behavior. This work integrates research on high-fidelity simulation, control of complex behaviors, human factors, and developmental psychology. The research will advance virtual environment technology, experimental methods, and simulator validation, and increase our understanding of a leading cause of childhood injuries doc888 none Almost all biologically active trace metal cations in seawater are complexed by organic ligands, and complexation is believed to exert an important influence on the geochemistry and biological availability of these elements, many of which are critical micronutrients. However, there is little, if any, information on the structures of these compounds, or any definitive information on sources and sinks, though biological sources have been inferred on the basis of their distributions and binding characteristics. Some researchers have been successful in isolating and identifying chelators produced by cultures of marine bacteria and phytoplankton, namely Fe siderophores and phytochelatins that strongly complex Cu. In this study, the PIs will develop sensitive assays for Fe and Cu chelators using liquid chromatography coupled to a selection of highly promising derivatization schemes to measure these compounds directly in seawater at nanomolar levels. This is a novel approach, based on the observation that many of these ligands contain functional groups that form analytically useful adducts with derivatizing agents that can be separated from other materials. The objective of the research is to determine if these compounds are important ligands in seawater, and the assays will serve as a basis for modified protocols to look for structurally similar compounds. The long term goals of the project is to develop useful analytical protocols that will be used widely in the field to answer questions about the factors that control metal complexation in seawater, and their relationship to ecosystem-scale processes doc889 none Salps are holoplanktonic grazers that have a life history, feeding biology and population dynamic strikingly different from copepods or other crustacean zooplankton. They can occur in very dense populations that cover large areas, and these blooms have been shown to have major impacts due to grazing and production of fast?sinking fecal pellets. However the conditions supporting bloom formation, and the energetics, reproduction and behavior of the bloom?forming salps are still poorly understood. This study will focus on two species of salps that are global in their distribution and representative of two genera that commonly form large blooms. Salpa aspera regularly occurs during the summer in high concentrations in the slope waters of the Mid?Atlantic Bight, while Thalia democratica regularly forms dense populations during the winter spring in the Georgia Bight. The investigators will examine feeding, metabolism, growth, reproduction and population dynamics of these salps. They will use two independent modeling approaches, grounded in experimental and field data, to extend their observations to other time and space scales. interpret ouexperimental and modeling results will be interpreted within the context of the environmental conditions to which the salps are exposed. This integrated approach will provide the best basis for understanding how salp blooms form and persist. Results of this study will extend to other species that occur in high densities in many locations, allowing scientists to better evaluate the importance of salps in biogeochemical cycles and in structuring the pelagic environment doc890 none 00- and 00- This is an interdisciplinary study to investigate fundamental physical and biological processes in the Estuarine Turbidity Maximum (ETM) of Chesapeake Bay. ETM zones located in the upper reaches of estuaries, near the interface between salt and fresh water, are known to entrap fine sediments and to entrap or aggregate zooplankton and early-life stages of fish. In Chesapeake Bay, a well-defined but poorly understood ETM occurs in the upper Bay. It is hypothesized that the ETM entraps sediment particles and planktonic organisms which in turn support enhanced zooplankton production and growth and survival of young anadrornous fish. This research will characterize constituents and evaluate processes operating in the Chesapeake ETM, including sediments and organisms that are of major ecological significance in the Bay. A key species in the ETM is the copepod, Eurytemora affinis, which is a major food of larvae and juveniles of anadromous fishes (striped bass, white perch, shads, river herrings doc891 none The symposium Shaping the Network Society: The Future of the Public Sphere in Cyberspace held on May 20 - 23, at the University of Washington in Seattle was highly successful. Over 350 people from over 20 countries from a wide variety of academic and other disciplines attended the conference. This symposium helped to identify and give voice to a large body of interdisciplinary work. It helped reveal a rich vein of new research topics and a burgeoning community of researchers eager to work on them: organizers received over 100 submissions in response to our call for abstracts. Perhaps most importantly the community was in good measure a younger one; a new generation of researchers is stepping up to address these insurgent issues. The objective of this support is to disseminate the findings of the symposium to a large number of people. Since this was among the first and most notable of conferences devoted to these themes it is particularly important to make the results available to other researchers. At the same time it is equally important to reach out to non-specialists and the general public. Computer technology is rapidly spreading into all sectors of society and ordinary people are intensely interested in how they can shape technology and how technology can shape them. This work will help people understand challenges and opportunities of the Internet and other communication technology and how they might themselves play a part in its ongoing development. The organization plans to build on this work and to further expand the awareness of this new work in many ways. The major tasks covered by this proposal are: (1) to develop a book based on invited panelist papers; (2) to develop a book based on research papers; (3) to develop special sections in journals (particularly the Communications of the ACM); (4) to add current and previous CPSR DIAC submissions to the web site; and (5) to develop material for the CPSR Newsletter and an editorial for print and electronic distribution. This support helps to leverage a strong volunteer effort doc873 none This project is an integrated multichannel seismic investigation of the intermediate-spreading Juan de Fuca Ridge. The primary goals are: (1) to determine the location, size and physical properties of crustal magma bodies along the ridge and relate these properties to the recent eruptive history of the ridge, (2) to measure the variation invelocity and thickness of the indicators of magmatic state, and (3) to characterize the alteration history of the upper crust as a function of sedimentation history, crustal age and basement relief doc865 none This project will deploy 64 wide-band ocean-bottom seismometers and ten portable broad-band seismic island stations in a 15-month-long investigation. The objectives are to: locate and image the plume conduit beneath the Hawaiian hotspot, image the roots of the Hawaiian swell over a sufficient area and with a sufficient resolution to distinguish among competing hypotheses for plume-lithosphere interaction, and relate the findings from the seismic imaging experiments to geodynamical and geochemical, models for mantle plumes doc894 none EIA 00- Mitchell, Helena Clark Atlanta University Special Project: Connecting Minority Educators by Enhancing Minority Participation in NECC This project supports the travel and registration of 115 K-16 educators affiliated with selected Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Minority and Minority Serving Institutions, to the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) to be held in June in Atlanta Georgia. The NECC is one of the largest K-16 educational technology conferences that attracts more than educators and exhibitor personnel. The anticipated outcome of NECC attendance is the formation of a network of educators in K-12 and higher education that would share ideas and knowledge regarding the use of learning technologies in their classrooms. Through coordinated, structured activities, this project will demonstrate increased minority participation in NECC, increased use of technologies in targeted K-16 schools, and increased benefits (e.g. panels, papers, programmatic initiatives) from partnerships between K-12 schools and the selected higher education institutions doc895 none Under the direction of Dr. Henry Wright MS Zoe Crossland will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. Building on her past research in the area she will conduct archaeological survey and excavation in the Andrantsay region in the central highlands of Madagascar. The area provides rich agricultural land for wet rice cultivation and was the locus of an historically documented kingdom observed by early European visitors at the end of the 18th century. Although they occurred relatively late in Madagascar, the processes which led to the rise of early states in other parts of the world also occurred on this island. The kingdom of Andrantsay was one of several which developed in Madagascar at approximately the same time and it was eventually incorporated, in the early 19th century into the Merina state. While written documents provide some detail about the strategies used by the Merina to subjugate this outlying region, they reflect a conqueror s perspective and require on the ground substantiation and (likely) revision. MS Crossland will examine the processes which led first to the development of the Andrantsay kingdom and then the changes which occurred during its incorporation. She will focus on shifts in the organization of settlement and transformations in mortuary architecture as a hierarchically structured and centralized polity developed. She will compare these patterns of landscape occupation and use with later changes. The research includes two components. The first involves a systematic surface survey of archaeological remains which consist mostly of ceramics. The results should provide insight into changes in population distribution and settlement pattern. Secondly MS Crossland will conduct a series of small scale excavations at selected sites. Test trenches will be placed at a minimum of 6 sites with the goal of refining ceramic chronology and providing absolute dates. Archaeologists wish to understand the processes which led over millennia to increasing social complexity and culminated in the rise of states and empires. Normally researchers focus their effort on capitals which represented the apex of the hierarchical structure. MS Crossland s study is unusual because it looks at a periphery and examines state formation within a broader regional perspective, working from the assumption that a regional scale of analysis is most suitable. In comparison to other aspects of state formation, relatively little has been written about polities at the edges of an emergent state. MS Crossland s research will provide a useful counterbalance. It will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc896 none The proponents will make Thellier paleointensity determinations on multiple samples of glassy mid-ocean ridge basalt material from about ten dredges and about 40 wax cores from the East Pacific Rise at 15 to 16 degrees North. Well-defined paleointensit values can be reliably obtained from glassy basalt samples and used to differentiate ages at least in the 0 to 2,000 year interval. Selected samples will also be dated by radioisotopic methods doc897 none This grant will provide partial support for travel of US researchers to the third international university-industry-government relations conference. The conference allows researchers on this topic to report results and develop collaborations for future research on the relations among social, economic, and scientific development. The first conference was held in Amsterdam in January ; the second, in New York in January . The grant will also help to develop a website for post-conference access and interaction, and lead to publication of special journal issues and a book doc512 none This award updates the Correlates of War Project Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data set through . Such an effort is critical for international conflict research, but the enterprise of updating this collection is a monumental one that is beyond the scope or resources of any single researcher. Consequently this is a collaborative effort, linking scholars at eleven different universities to complete the task in a systematic and timely fashion. The MID data set has been at the forefront on international conflict research over the past decade or more. This data set is the most frequently used in conflict research and MID data has been employed to explore a staggering breadth of topics in international relations research, including most of those central to contemporary scholarly debates. Furthermore, MID data are the basis for several other data projects in the discipline as well as highly compatible with a range of other data compilations, thereby facilitating the combination of data sets and the exploration of broader sets of theoretical questions. Updating the Militarized Interstate Dispute data set requires completion of the following major steps: 1) collect and document militarized incidents from a variety of sources. This entails searching global, regional, and national sources for indications of a threat, display, or use of force by one state against another; 2) checking, archiving, and documenting the incidents collected to insure consistency, completeness, and absence of duplication; 3) composing militarized disputes based on the collected incidents and additional research as necessary. Because disputes are conflict episodes, such things as starting and ending dates, secondary participants, stages of escalation, overall fatalities, method of settlement, and general outcome must be determined. A short narrative description of each dispute is also prepared; 4) checking, archiving, and documenting disputes in order to insure such things as conformity with coding rules, compatibility with documentation standards, internal consistency, and absence of duplication; 5) resolving issues that arise concerning coding procedures, documentation requirements, problem cases, and the like; and, 6) preparing a final version (3.0) of the data set for distribution via the world wide web. This requires the resolution of a few problems that have been found in the present version (2.1) before it can be merged with the - data. This is a major infrastructure project for the Political Science program and enables the updating of a data set that will be used by numerous scholars in international relations and comparative politics doc899 none Power in animal societies is typically studied in terms of differences in fighting abilities, or dominance. However, other more economic forms of power, or leverage, may influence an individual s power. Relationships between the sexes are particularly interesting for studying power because mating opportunities and protection services may be exchanged between males and females and often cannot be taken by force. The objective of this research is to examine some power-related factors that can lead to variation in male-female relationships. This study will examine the effects of leverage (based upon female reproductive status and the ratio of males to females) and dominance (based upon fighting ability) on male-female relationships in white sifaka. The white sifaka is an ideal species for studying male-female relationships. First, males and females are not expected to differ in their fighting abilities because they are the same size. Nevertheless, female sifaka have priority of access to resources and often are aggressive towards males. Second, the effects of reproductive status on male-female relationships can be determined without depending upon hormone analysis because sifaka have a very short mating season. Third, services such as watching for predators, alarm calling, and defense against predators may be an important currency for exchange for sifaka. Finally, these lemurs live in social groups where the ratio of males to females varies across groups. These characteristics suggest that the effects of dominance will be reduced and that leverage effects will more easily be observed in this species. Sex ratio, behavioral, and body size data will be collected by 4 observers on 6 focal groups with different sex ratios at Kirindy forest in Madagascar from October -March . Neighborhoods will be censused monthly. To estimate each individual s ability to use force, body size and condition data will be collected 4 times during the study and combined with canine size data. The broader implications of this research include a better understanding of male-female relationships in all mammals, where a broad theoretical framework is lacking outside of mating systems. Moreover, male-female relationships have played a prominent role in hypotheses about human social evolution. The exchange of services, such as parental care and infanticide protection, may have led to some sort of bonding between the sexes. Using economic and political theory, this interdisciplinary project attempts to better understand human social evolution by testing these theories in a species where males and females are the same size, and hence, non-dominance power can best be studied doc900 none Technological Disaster, Resource Loss and Long-Term Social Change in a Subarctic Community In contrast to natural disasters, technological disasters have been found to have long-term community impacts. The present research will identify patterns of social change in a small fishing community twelve years following the Exxon Valdez oil spill. The loss of ecological, social and cultural resources will be related to patterns of community stress and change from survey and ethnographic data collected from through . This research will provide an evaluation of the Conservation of Resources theoretical model of collective stress for understanding the chronic social impacts of technological disasters for renewable resource communities doc901 none PI: Kathleen Gerson, Stephanie Byrd This project explores gender differences in hopes and expectations regarding close relationships. Respondents between the ages of 28 and 35 will be interviewed regarding three dimensions of relationships: practices, ideals, and expectations. Results will be used to test hypotheses regarding how individuals make sense of their relationships, as well as some anticipated differences in the ways women and men structures their beliefs and practices. Life history analyses will capture biographical details and perceptions as women and men account for their views and experiences. Results will add to understanding of communication patterns, experiences, and gender differences in views of what close relationships mean, and what they should be doc902 none Abbamonte The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Peter M. Abbamonte with support for twelve months work with Dr. George A. Sawatzky at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. His project is entitled Novel Resonant Soft X-Ray Scattering from Correlated Electron Systems. This project is co-funded by NSF s Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. The PI and his host propose to use novel x-ray scattering techniques to study charge and spin ordering in correlated electron systems. Initially they plan to measure the incommensurate phases and also the magnetic flux-line lattice in High Tc superconductors using resonant soft x-ray diffraction. This will be done with a unique UHV diffractometer of their design. This is a completely new spectroscopic technique that they believe will someday be standard in synchrotrons around the world. Their hope is to begin a new sub-field of structure determination techniques. Drs. Abbamonte and Swatzky will be working for part of the duration at the European Synchrotron Research Facility in Grenoble, France. Dr. Sawatzky has expertise in core spectroscopy and many-body theory, UHV techniques and x-ray spectroscopy doc903 none Fryer 00- Wheat 00- Recommended project is for an integrated sampling and survey study of four serpentine mud seamount volcanoes on the Mariana forearc, designed to place constraints on the nature of the pressure temperature conditions in the subduction decollement zone and in the overlying mantle wedge. The research will also study mass transfer processes from the decollement and slab to the overlying mantle at slab depths of 15-29 km, including dehydration and other fluid-rock reactions that occur during metamorphic processes. The investigation will center around analysis of entrained metamorphic fluids and high-pressure, low-temperature metamorphic rock samples brought up by buoyant mud upflow in the seamount serpentinite mud. Fluid, mud, and rock samples will be collected by the remotely-operated vehicle (ROV) Jason, providing geological control of sample localities. Sample collection will be set within a framework defined by mapping of the mud volcanoes by the DSL-120 deep-tow, side-scan sonar. These studies will constrain key parameters controlling forearc seismicity doc904 none Hickman This action involves an Interagency transfer from NSF to the USGS of funds to cover expenses associated with an Environmental Assessment (EA), drilling permits and lease costs for the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD). SAFOD is part of the Earthscope Phase 1 Initiative that is included in the MRE Request in NSF s FY Budget now before Congress SAFOD involves drilling a 4 km deep hole penetrating the San Andreas Fault. Such an undertaking involves considerable advance planning, obtaining permits, leasing land, etc. The project involves about 100 scientists from the U.S and abroad and will be conducted in collaboration with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the Department of Energy (DoE) and foreign institutions. The specific items for which funding is being requested from NSF are: 1) $10,000 to extend the lease option on the SAFOD site for another year. The USGS paid the lease option last year, so it is appropriate that NSF pay the lease option in FY . 2) $20,000 for the NSF share of the EA and associated drilling permits. This represents half the total; the USGS will pay the other half doc905 none Orcutt 00- Recommended project is for testing of a broadband, high dynamic range seismic data system in a land-based borehole at Pinon Flat Observatory in California. This work is needed to optimize borehole seismometer installation at about 20 proposed permanent sites in the deep oceans that are needed to fulfill objectives of global seismic coverage as defined by the IRIS Global Seismic Network (GSN), in conjunction with the international Federation of Digital Seismic Networks. This proposal covers a series of experiments to reduce installation noise that was experienced in an earlier seismometer borehole installation at the OSN-1 site near Hawaii doc859 none A process study called the Eastern Pacific Investigation of Climate Processes in the Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere System (EPIC) is proposed to study the behavior of the atmosphere and ocean in that region. The goals of the oceanographic component of EPIC are to describe, understand and quantify the evolution of the major oceanic structures and processes in the upper ocean under the deep convection region of the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) in order to improve regional models and ultimately gain better prediction of annual and interannual climate variability. Measurements will include mesoscale velocity temperature and salinity using expendable profilers dropped from aircraft, small scale velocity, temperature and salinity fields with a shipboard ADCP and continuous Seasoar sections, velocity microstructure and temperature, salinity and velocity finestructure by continuous microstructure profiling from a ship on station at 10 N, 95 W and radiometric and bio-optical profiles at various locations along 95 W doc907 none This project represents a collaboration between Barry Huebert, University of Hawaii ( ), Richard Arimoto, New Mexico State University ( ), and Irina Sokolik, University of Colorado ( ) and is part of the ACE-Asia Project (Aerosol Characterization Experiment). Coordinated measurements of aerosol chemical properties will be carried out by Dr. Huebert and Dr. Arimoto. Other collaborators, supported separately, will provide measurements of aerosol optical properties and radiation (Michael Bergin, Georgia Tech) and single-particle analysis (James Anderson, Arizona State University). The measurements will be carried out at Zhenbeitai, a site near Yulin, Shaanxi Province, China. This site was chosen to represent the dust source regions of China. Detailed in-situ characterization of the aerosols found there will provide important information for the interpretation of measurements of aerosol properties in the airborne intensive of ACE-Asia downwind of the Asian continent. Dr. Sokolik will provide numerical analyses aimed at quantifying the radiative forcing by Asian multicomponent aerosols and their impacts on climate doc873 none This project is an integrated multichannel seismic investigation of the intermediate-spreading Juan de Fuca Ridge. The primary goals are: (1) to determine the location, size and physical properties of crustal magma bodies along the ridge and relate these properties to the recent eruptive history of the ridge, (2) to measure the variation invelocity and thickness of the indicators of magmatic state, and (3) to characterize the alteration history of the upper crust as a function of sedimentation history, crustal age and basement relief doc907 none This project represents a collaboration between Barry Huebert, University of Hawaii ( ), Richard Arimoto, New Mexico State University ( ), and Irina Sokolik, University of Colorado ( ) and is part of the ACE-Asia Project (Aerosol Characterization Experiment). Coordinated measurements of aerosol chemical properties will be carried out by Dr. Huebert and Dr. Arimoto. Other collaborators, supported separately, will provide measurements of aerosol optical properties and radiation (Michael Bergin, Georgia Tech) and single-particle analysis (James Anderson, Arizona State University). The measurements will be carried out at Zhenbeitai, a site near Yulin, Shaanxi Province, China. This site was chosen to represent the dust source regions of China. Detailed in-situ characterization of the aerosols found there will provide important information for the interpretation of measurements of aerosol properties in the airborne intensive of ACE-Asia downwind of the Asian continent. Dr. Sokolik will provide numerical analyses aimed at quantifying the radiative forcing by Asian multicomponent aerosols and their impacts on climate doc910 none Putkonen One of the most provocative - yet largely untested - recent hypotheses concerning orogenic evolution is that regional variations in climate strongly influence spatial variations in the style and magnitude of deformation across an actively deforming orogen. Recent progress in quantifying rates of both tectonic and geomorphic processes and in modeling surface and lithospheric processes sets the stage for an integrated, quantitative, field-and model- based investigation of the interactions and feedbacks between geomorphic, climatic, and tectonic processes. This project involves an examination of these interactions where they are likely to be most clearly expressed: the Nepalese Himalaya. Not only is this the quintessential colloisional orogenic belt, but its topographic growth and erosional history have been suggested as key controls on global climatic changes. The integrated study focuses on a major transverse catchment, stretching from the edge of the Tibetan Plateau to the foreland and traversing some of the highest topography in the world. This transect spans the major structural elements of the Himalaya, as well as monsoon-to-rainshadow climatic conditions. The Principal Investigators bring together expertise in process-based geomorphology, glaciology, climatology, structural geology, thermochronology, cosmogenic radionuclide dating, modeling, and documentary film making for a multi-pronged approach intended to evaluate one overarching, but largely untested hypothesis: Rates of erosion vary spatially as a function of climate and this spatial variability in erosion controls the partitioning of deformation within an orogen doc911 none Bang The proposal project deals with investigation of the fundamentals of microbiological calcite precipitation at the molecular basis. It will involve a close collaboration between Dr. S.S. Bang, Biochemical Microbiologist, and Dr. V. Ramakrishnan, Civil Engineer, at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Rapid City, SD and Dr. J.R. Warmington, Molecular Microbiologist, and Dr. B.V. Rangan, Civil Engineer, at the Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia. The research objectives include 1) biochemical and molecular investigation of urease in calcite precipitation utilizing genetically engineered microorganisms (GEMs), 2) use of immobilized urease and whole cells including GEMs in calcite precipitation, and 3) application of bioremediation technology in in-base and sub-base stabilization as well as remediation of cracks and fissures in various structural formations. Experimental steps will be carried in a coordinated manner to compensate the weaknesses and to complement the strength of each campus. The SDSM&T team has expertise in microbial mineralization and biochemistry, whereas the Australian team has expertise in molecular microbiology. This proposed international collaboration would enable the Australia and the USA. The combined project will result in joining of the complementary skills of the SDSM&T and Australian research teams, exchanging students not only to encourage their participation in the research and but also to train their laboratory research techniques. Combination of these complementary areas of expertise will promote further development and application of the microbial mineralization technology to the future benefits of both countries doc912 none University of Missouri Rolla Anderson The purpose of this initiative is to understand the high field properties of high dielectric constant materials and determine how these properties relate to pulse power applications. Examples of some of the fundamental information which needs to be known are: 1) field distributions within dielectrics - i.e. field modeling 2) basic defect structure of high voltage dielectrics to mitigater ionic conductivity and associated electrical degradation, 3) high field dielectric behavior: losses and dielectric constant, 4) the influence of macroscopic processing on properties 5) resonant behavior under pulsed conditions, 6) charging and discharging behavior under high field conditions 7) the influence of rapid surface discharge on high dielectric constant materials doc913 none Opella, Stanley This is a conference on Understanding Phage Display: Structure, Biology and Applications. Phage display is a rapidly growing and expanding area of biotechnology used to identify peptide ligands. Although there are 4-6 meetings on phage dABisplay per year, none of them address the fundamental biological or structural basis of the technology. However as this technology matures, it is becoming clear that the biology of the phage-host cell system places intrinsic limitations on the technology. Reducing these limitations will be critical for future advancement s in the field. To catalyze research efforts in this area, and to make the community more aware of the biological limits of the technology, this conference will explore the biological basis of phage display technology, and will address strategies for expanding the utility of the system through manipulation of the biological system. Each session will contain talks on the basis sciences of an aspect of phage biology pertinent to phage display as well as talks on its applications in structural biology, biochemistry, or other areas. The plan is to lead the speakers and participants into discussions of biological and structural constraints of phage display and ideas on how to overcome or circumvent them doc914 none Schnepp This award supports the gathering of American and Chinese researchers in technical innovation to explore common interests between the two research communities and to suggest an agenda for future research cooperation Technical innovation is a key element influencing economic growth in post-industrial society. China is currently undergoing one of the most rapid technological transformations in history, while the United States is a leader in the most advanced areas of technology. Unlike most international conferences on technical innovation, this conference will focus on a few topics and on discussing them in depth. These topics are 1) structural change in national innovation systems, 2) innovation networks, 3) international R&D investment, technology flows, and innovation, and 4) innovation and comercial performance within the firm. This conference is jointly supported by the National Science Foundation of the United States and the National Natural Science Foundation of China doc915 none The human visual system perceives shades of gray with remarkable accuracy despite large changes in the intensity of the illumination and the brightness of surrounding surfaces. For example, a middle gray piece of paper will generally appear middle gray regardless if it illuminated by a bright light or a dim light. The change in illumination results in retinal images that are also very different, yet in most cases the paper is perceived as middle gray. Lightness contrast and other errors have been studied in an attempt to understand more fully the visual system s design and logic in determining shades of gray. Simultaneous lightness contrast (SLC) has been one of the most widely studied of these errors. SLC is illustrated by placing a gray target on a white background and a physically identical gray target on a black background. The target on the white will appear darker than the target on black. Models attempting to explain SLC can be grouped into two main categories: 1) models that treat SLC as a residual byproduct of low-level retinal processes, namely, lateral inhibition, and 2) models based on perceptual grouping processes that must take place above the retinal level in the visual pathway. Perceptual grouping models are not well defined in terms of physiological structuresand functions. The main goal of the proposed project is to more fully explore the roles perceptual grouping processes play in determining perceived surface color. The research will focus on three novel paradigms recently discovered in the PIs lab. One set of experiments will involve a variation of SLC in which two gray targets appear to move across their respective backgrounds. Another set of experiments will require the observer to fuse gray targets presented to one eye with backgrounds presented to the other eye. In a third set, the observer will judge the lightness of sequentially presented targets in an effort to understand the effect of the perceived gray shade of one surface on the perceived gray of a subsequently viewed surface. Experiments will test whether these recently discovered phenomena are primarily the results of retinal processes or perceptual processes that occur at a higher level in the visual system. The results of these experiments will contribute to a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying these effects, their location, and the interaction between subsystems involved in determining perceived surface color. In short, the search field for neurological mechanisms important for perceived surface color will be narrowed. Models based on perceptual grouping may be better operationally defined in terms of neurobiology. This research will contribute to the fields of perceptual psychology, neuropsychology and artificial intelligence doc916 none The PIs will extend in time and expand in scope the satellite data development and satellite-based analyses of ocean climate variability in the Northeast Pacific (NEP), begun during the GLOBEC Pilot Project phase ( - 00). The overall scientific problem is to characterize and quantify the dominant modes of variability in the NEP as embodied by satellite measurements of surface transports, temperature and chlorophyll patterns. Our analyses address multiple spatial and temporal scales using merged satellite data products over GLOBEC target study regions in both the California Current (CCS) and the coastal Gulf of Alaska (CGOA). GLOBEC NEP field studies require both spatial and temporal context. The primary goal of this project is to quantify the degree of seasonal and interannual variability in small scale and mesoscale circulation patterns in each of the process study sites, and to relate changes in this variability to the seasonal and interannual changes in the strength of forcing by local winds and basin scale circulation. This goal will be accomplished through a systematic analysis of spatial temporal scales utilizing satellite measurements. The PIs will define and quantify a) small event-scale coastal features such as fronts, eddies and convergences (50 m ? 100 km). These features are thought to be critical to local success survival of GLOBEC target species, b) mesoscale circulation seasonal variability over the shelf, upwelling fronts, coastal jets, buoyant plumes and eddies (10 km ? 500 km) - these also affect transport and retention of populations; and c) forcing and processes at basin and interannual scales (100 km ? 10,000 km). A second, related goal is to quantify changes in the timing and strength of seasonal transitions in both study regions. Specific objectives of the project are divided into two aspects of satellite oceanography, with which the three PIs have extensive experience: 1) Acquire, process, subset, QC, and archive satellite data in the NEP region at multiple scales and make these data electronically available to others in the program; 2) analyze these data, in conjunction with ancillary data, to address GLOBEC research goals at basin- meso- and nearshore scales. The core data sets are altimeter fields, NOAA AVHRR and NASA SeaWiFS data at both l km and 4 km resolution and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. These are supplemented with model and buoy winds, tide gauge sea levels and in situ data. Close collaboration with investigators carrying out field measurements will link scales and patterns determined in the satellite data analyses to 3D in situ processes doc917 none Project Structural Genomics efforts aim to ultimately provide an experimental structure or good theoretical model of every tractable protein encoded by all sequenced genomes. Major efforts in this direction are now beginning, and the PRESAGE database aids coordination among groups and dissemination of results. PRESAGE records experimental structure determination underway (experimental annotations) and structural predictions family neighboring facilities; broader data collection; and flexible query systems with parseable output doc918 none PI: Panagiotis D. Christofides Institution: University of California at Los Angeles Proposal Number: The objective of this research project is to develop a general and practical framework for integrated optimal design and control of distributed chemical processes, able to increase the efficiency, improve the product quality, and reduce the environmental impact of these processes. The motivation for the research is provided by: (a) the many nonlinear distributed chemical processes, including transport reaction (e.g., tubular reactors, chemical vapor deposition (CVD) systems) and particulate (e.g., crystallizers, emulsion polymerization and aerosol reactors) processes; (b) the need for optimal design and operation of these processes in order to minimize energy consumption and cost, achieve tighter performance specifications, and meet environmental and safety regulations; and (c) the lack of an integrated framework for design and control of distributed chemical processes, especially those that will minimize energy use. The research is to provide a fundamental understanding of the nature of the model reduction, optimization and control of distributed chemical processes. Projects to be done include: (a) the development of computationally efficient and accurate algorithms for solving steady-state and dynamic optimization problems for transport reaction and particulate processes based on fundamental models; (b) the selection of optimal locations for control actuators and measurement sensors in transport reaction processes and spatially-inhomogeneous particulate processes; and (c) the use of the developed methods to optimally design and operate tubular reactors, plasma-enhanced CVD processes and aerosol processes doc877 none This project will develop a suite of geophysical techniques that will improve capabilities to integrate quantitatively the results of seismic and geodynamic modeling. The aproach - called geodynamic tomography - is a new form of constraint tomography that differs from those previously implemented. Geodynamic models will be mapped into their seismic signature and anisotropic tomography will be used to formally test the model against the seismic data. This method will limit the search for acceptable seismic models to a subset that are consistent with geodynamic predictions, and will allow rigorous testing of the differing geodynamic assumptions against actual observations doc920 none Donald J. Depaolo This CSEDI proposal will focus on developing a coupled geodynamic-geochemical model of the Hawaiian plume that will allow the investigators to address questions relating to the spatial and temporal variations in magma compositions. Chemical data available from studies in the Hawaiian island chain and from the Hawaiian Scientific Drilling Project (HSDP) drill core will provide constraints for this modeling. The project will focus on answering the question: ``Can the petrological, geochemical, and isotopic characteristics observed among the Hawaiian volcanoes be explained in terms of plume derived melts from a self-consistent geodynamic-geochemical model? . In particular, the investigators will determine whether the compositional changes in magmas erupted along the island chain are consistent with our understanding of plume dynamics and mantle melting. During the one-year time frame of this proposal, the goals will be to couple the recently developed 3-D variable viscosity plume model of Ribe and Christensen ( ) with calculations of trace-element chemistry and uranium series disequilibria. They will also develop a new major-element parameterization specifically designed to address melting in the Hawaiian plume. The development of this model will be an ongoing project; the algorithm will be designed to be updated as new experimental data become available. By iteratively refining the plume model and calculations of magma chemistry, and by comparing the model computations to the observed magma compositions and eruption rates, this research will further our understanding of the dynamics of the mantle plume and determine the melting conditions in the mantle beneath the Hawaiian island chain doc921 none Krause The experimental lab at the University of New Mexico has been an integral part of the research infrastructure in the Department of Economics since installation of the lab in . The department specializes in applied microeconomics, and the experiment lab has supported this research in a variety of substantive areas. A main focus of lab-based research has been to inform policy. This research has addressed issues in the fields of environmental economics, resource valuation, provision of public goods, and the effects of institutional structures on economic behavior. In addition to being a valuable faculty research resource, the lab has provided many graduate students with opportunities to work on large projects as well as to develop their own experimental research agendas. Computer technology has advanced enormously since the original lab was installed. One goal of this proposal is to allow faculty and graduate students in the department to continue the kinds of inquiries that were supported by the original lab. A second goal is to provide the necessary equipment to accommodate new experimental research projects. The equipment described in this proposal would provide an accessible, up-to-date computerized platform from which a variety of economic experiments could be run. Many of the projects described in the proposal are extensions of work performed in the original lab. Some of the projects open entirely new lines of inquiry. An up-dated lab would enhance the value of those projects by enabling the researchers to take advantage of the vast improvements in technology that have occurred in the last seven years. While most of the computer equipment in the lab needs replacing, the room itself and the furnishings are adequate to accommodate new computers. Installation of new computers will not require any new wiring, air conditioning or furnishings. The department has long-established procedures in place for managing experimental lab use. Therefore, the installation described in this proposal would take advantage of significant existing assets to establish a modern facility that would accommodate a wide variety of experimental research projects doc922 none This project will examine the range of mineral assemblages and possible microbial environments present within seafloor hydrothermal vent deposits, and observe how mineral precipitation in hydrothermal systems is affected at near criticl point conditions. Focus will be on 29 selected pairs of vent fluid vent solid samples collected at a diversity of vent microbial habitats within chimneys are affected by differences in the temperature and composition of the vent fluid, map pones in chimneys where different groups of microbes could thrive, document the effects of phase separation near the criticl point of water on mineral deposition doc923 none The main objectives of this proposal are (i) to implement and validate a method of coupling coarse-grid global and regional climate models with a much finer-scale hydrologic model; (ii) to determine the minimum hydrologic model scale needed for realistic simulations of major hydrologic features ( 5 km) and (iii) to investigate the relative roles of surface versus groundwater flows in determining the temporal and spatial behavior of major lakes and wetlands. The work is important because such a coupled system is needed for paleoclimate and future-climate studies doc924 none Keigwin Brigham-Grette The broad region of Beringia is separated by the Bering Strait. North Pacific waters rich in nutrients flow northward along the eastern Bering Sea continental slope, across the shelf and into the Chukchi Sea, sustaining high surface water. The Pacific waters also contribute about 30 percent of the Arctic Ocean s fresh water budget (about half of the river s contribution) which helps maintain the Arctic halocline, Arctic sea ice, and regulates climate in the North Atlantic region. During the last glacial maximum (LGM), sea level was lowered by 125 meters, Beringia was much larger and the Pacific and Arctic Oceans were separated by nearly kilometers. Beringian climate was more uniform because the sea was so distant. The exact role of the ocean in controlling Beringian climate is unknown because of the lack of data on the surrounding seas. The history of relative sea level is poorly known, but is likely to have differed from eustatic sea level because of tectonic and possible glacio-eustatic effects. Sea surface conditions such as ice extent, temperature, and salinity are likely to influence the climate through albedo effects, heat exchange, and humidity, but there are almost no high-resolution proxy data for these properties in the Bering and Chukchi Seas. To link the marine and terrestrial realms in Beringia, the Principal Investigators will participate in a field program of gravity, piston and vibracoring in the Bering and Chukchi Seas to develop high resolution records of 1) intermediate ocean ventilation in the Bering Sea; 2) surface ocean temperature, salinity, sea ice extent, and history of iceberg discharge in both the Bering and Chukchi Seas; and 3) relative sea level in the Bering Strait region since the LGM. These objectives are closely aligned with the theme of the October NSF-sponsored workshop on Assessing Impacts of Arctic Bathymetry Changes and Fresh Water Inputs on Shelf and Ocean Circulation for the Past 20,000 Years doc925 none This project will result in the creation and distribution of a linguistically annotated version of an existing corpus of Japanese telephone conversations, the CallHome Japan (CHJ) corpus. The CHJ corpus, released in by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), consists of digitized speech data and text transcriptions of 120 spontaneous, unscripted telephone conversations in Japanese. While the transcriptions are of high quality, the usefulness of the CHJ corpus for language research is limited by its lack of any syntactic, semantic, prosodic, or discourse annotations, including part-of-speech (POS) tags. This project will address this deficiency by creating a new version of the CHJ corpus that includes useful POS, semantic and acoustic annotations. In particular, the following annotations will be provided for the entire corpus: 1. POS tags, using the LDC s inventory of 60 POS and morphological tags for Japanese; 2. Lexical semantic tags on verbs and nouns, using NTT s 400,000-word Goi-Taikei semantic lexicon and ontology. The annotated corpus will be made available to the general research community through the normal channels of the Linguistic Data Consortium. This annotated corpus will stimulate and benefit research in corpus linguistics, natural language processing, Japanese linguistics, discourse and conversation analysis, variation (crosslinguistic, cross-cultural, and gender), and the prosody syntax semantics interfaces doc926 none Network systems provide the infrastructure and foundation for the functioning of today s societies and economies. They come in many forms and include physical networks such as transportation, communication, and power networks, as well as more abstract networks such as a variety of economic and financial networks and social and knowledge networks. Such network systems are characterized by decentralized decision-making, a large-scale nature, different time scales, and distinct system equilibrium concepts. This project studies complex network systems, consisting of the foundational systems of transportation and communication networks whose interplay is becoming increasingly important in the case of telecommuting, intelligent transportation systems, electronic commerce, and knowledge networks. The project aims to: develop a theory of such complex network systems, which emphasizes the individual behavior of the decision-makers and allows for the treatment of multiple criteria; construct algorithms for the solution of such systems, along with convergence analysis and computer implementation and numerical experimentation; develop visualization techniques to understand and depict the behavior, and apply the theory to complex knowledge networks; and conduct an empirical analysis. The results of the research are expected to have broad cross-disciplinary reach and to significantly add to the understanding of fundamental networks systems underlying our societies and economies for the purpose of both prediction and network management purposes doc927 none Wang This is a one-year cooperative proposal between Dr. Yang WANG of Florida State University, and Drs. Junshe DONG and Tao DENG of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Science. This project is proposed by an U.S. woman scientist at an early stage in her career. This project involves the study of isotopic evidence for late Cenozoic ecosystem and climate changes in Southwest China. Dr. Wang is the first person to apply carbon and oxygen isotope analysis to paleo-material originating from China. This study can provide important data to reduce considerable uncertainty about the evolution of ecosystems and environments in China in the past 10 million years. The Chinese Academy of Science, the Natural Science Foundation of China and the NSF jointly support this project doc928 none This project will analyze the impacts of climate and environmental change on land and marine productivity and sustainability in the North Atlantic region around Iceland. Historical records from Iceland describe fisheries catches and hay and farm stock strategies over the last century. These will be evaluated in conjunction with climate, environmental, and oceanographic records to see if associated changes occur. Socio-economic factors will be evaluated by surveys of farmers and fishers. The project will contribute to our understanding of linkages between climate, ecosystem productivity and socio-economic adaptation and this understanding will allow better prediction of future climate change impacts doc929 none J. I. Siepmann and R. B. Clurg U. of Minnesota The purpose of the Midwest Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics Conference is to bring together researchers in the areas of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics in the Midwest area for the exchange of ideas and most recent research results. It is particularly designed as a platform for young researchers (graduate students and young faculty members) to gain confidence and experience in presenting and discussing their ideas and research accomplishments. The Conference will be held May 15-16, at the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. The four sessions include: Phase Equilibria Adsorption, Macromolecules and Colloids, and Biological Systems. The conference participants will come from the fields of chemical engineering, chemistry, material science and physics doc930 none The twenty-four or so cod species of the Arctic and northern cool-temperate oceans belonging to the family Gadidae include many of the most commercially important cod fishes. Five of these species are known to have an antifreeze glycoprotein (AFGP) that is important for their survival in their various cold-water habitats. Most of the cod AFGP studies were conducted during - , and provided basic information on the protein structure and seasonal changes in AFGP levels in some of the five known AFGP-bearing cods. None of the other cods that may encounter freezing conditions have been examined for possible presence of an antifreeze function, and no information at all on the cod AFGP function at the molecular level was available until when the first AFGP gene sequence and structure from the Arctic cod Boreogadus saida were reported with a high AFGP coding capacity in this most-northerly species. Thus the AFGP systems of the different cod species are far from being thoroughly understood. This project proposes to conduct comprehensive characterizations and analyses of the AFGP system of the different gadids using contemporary techniques. The overall goal is to assess their respective freeze-avoidance capacities at both the protein (AFGP protein structures and production) and molecular (AFGP genes and gene families and their transcription) levels, and how these relate to the differential physiological demands imposed by their diverse habitats which span a range of latitudes and environmental severity. The AFGP systems of the cods will be contrasted among the cod species, and with the constitutive high capacities in their south-polar counterparts, the Antarctic notothenioids, which are unrelated perciform fishes that make a near-identical AFGP to survive in the world s most thermally stable and coldest marine waters at the opposite pole. A key question in the field of antifreeze research is where these novel antifreeze proteins came from. The PIs have previously determined the evolutionary origin and molecular mechanism that produced the Antarctic notothenioid AFGP gene which played a crucial role in the survival and organismal success of these fishes in the frigid Antarctic waters. Through molecular analyses, the second major goal of the project is to decipher the origin and evolutionary history of the cod AFGP gene, that had led to the remarkable bipolar evolutionary convergence of similar AFGPs in two unrelated fish groups. Ten different marine gadid species, one of which includes two genetically distinct populations, will be examined. Specific areas of studies include: (1) comparative analyses of blood AFGP levels, protein structure and heterogeneity between and within cod species from different latitudes and habitats to determine the influence of environmental severity on antifreeze production; (2) determination of the circannual AFGP production cycles (AFGP protein levels and transcription of mRNA) of three high-latitude cods and their relationship to the temporal variations in environmental conditions specific to each of their habitats; (3) determination of the encoded capacity for AFGP production in different cods by analyzing the complexity of their AFGP gene sequences, structures, the organization of these genes in the genome, and the size of the gene family; (4) characterization of the distribution of AFGP expression in different tissues and non-vascular fluid compartments to determine all possible lines of defense against freezing in the cods; (5) determination whether hitherto unexamined gadids (6 different northerly distributed species) have an antifreeze protein through detection for both blood antifreeze activity and presence of AFGP-like sequences in their genome; and (6) deciphering the origin and the evolutionary process of cod AFGP gene doc931 none Measurements of sulfur dioxide (SO2) and dimethyl sulfide (DMS) will be performed on board the C-130 aircraft during ACE-Asia (Aerosol Characterization Experiment). A recently developed instrument will be deployed that is capable of measuring SO2 at a frequency of 1 Hz and a detection limit of 1 ppt. The instrument is based on atmospheric pressure ionization mass spectrometery (APIMS). Isotopically labelled SO2 will be used as an external standard. The fast response time will make it possible to rapidly identify different atmospheric layers. Of particular interest in the ACE-Asia program will be urban pollution layers (high in SO2) and dust layers, and the question of the degree to which dust and SO2 interact chemically doc932 none for Liebermann A CAREER development plan for the integration of research and education in the area of upper atmospheric remote sensing at Duke University is proposed. The research component focuses on the development and implementation of a new broadband radio technique designed to detect radio signals from lightning bolts. The analysis of these observations would examine the frequency dispersion of these signals to study the horizontal and vertical distribution of ionospheric plasma by a tomographic inversion using a three dimensional model of the propagation of broadband signals through the ionospheric waveguide. The educational component is aimed at curriculum development, graduate and undergraduate student training and mentoring, and incorporating elements of the proposed research into classroom and laboratory teaching doc933 none V. Otugen, Polytechnic University of NY Dr. Otugen proposes to extend the technique of measuring velocity gradients that he developed earlier to develop a probe, which can measure one component of the vorticity directly. The technique is laser based and non-intrusive. It is proposed that by mixing scattered light from two closely spaced volumes, the desired velocity gradients can be determined to obtain the vorticity component. Once the probe is developed, it will be applied to study the effect of streamline curvature on an equilibrium turbulent boundary layer doc934 none Ratnayeke Description: This award supports a planning visit by Professor Shyamala Ratnayeke, Department of Biology, Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. She plans to visit Sri Lanka in the summer of to do preliminary field work and to develop plans for future field research with Dr. Charles Santiapillai, Zoology Department at the University of Peradeniya in Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, and with officials of the government of that country. The topic is the inter and intra-specific diversity in animals, with applications for the allocation and management of protected habitats for carnivores, especially for sloth bears. Spelman College is a primarily undergraduate institute, and this award will provide the PI with a unique opportunity to develop a viable collaborative research proposal in an area of interest to the programs of NSF Division of Environmental Biology. The proposal meets INT objectives for supporting planning visits when they are essential for developing international collaboration doc935 none This proposal requests funds to support detailed petrological and geochemical studies of abyssal peridotites recovered by the Ocean Drilling Program from the Hess Deep (Leg 147) and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, south of the Kame Fracture Zone (Leg 153). Extensive abyssal peridotite suites recovered on each drilling leg. Studies by shipboard scientists form the framewrok for this study in which we propose to investigate the following key questions: (1) Are the calculated whole-rock NaxO contents inabyssal peridotites conclsively higher than melting and melt percolation models predict? (2) What are the localized distribution patterns of clinopyroxenes and spinals in abyssal peridotites? (3) What are the minor element and trance element abundances of clinopyroxene, spinal, orthopyroxene, and olivine in these abyssal periootites? What correlations exist in these minor and trace elements at mid-ocean ridges? (5) Is it possible to more accurately quantify melt-rock interactions, such as the particularly well developed examples from the Hess Deep doc936 none This collaborative project between the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the University of New Hampshire addresses an ocean science and fisheries management requirement for improved capabilities for measuring the abundance and distribution of fish and other organisms in the open ocean. Newly available multibeam echo sounders provide the capability to record and analyze acoustic returns on individual beams, which represents a new capability for the ocean research community. A multibeam echo sounder will be tested and calibrated in three venues: fresh-water test tank, sea-well test facility, and in situ on a towed vehicle. The objectives of this calibration exercise are the determination of the on-axis response, sensitivity limits, hence dynamic range, and directivity patterns for each beam. The use of acoustic measurements for fish stock abundance and other research applications has been established, but the potential for measuring the numerical density of fish is difficult without a means of calibrating the system in situ. Results from this sonar calibration project will provide a means for attaining better areal coverage without compromising spatial resolution doc937 none This grant provides funding for the Group Technology (GT) and Cellular Manufacturing (CM) World Symposium - Year which will be held in San Juan, Puerto Rico from March 27-29, . The purpose of the symposium workshop is to provide an environment for productive discussions and exchange of ideas between the GT CM academic and industrial communities. The symposium will bring provide the opportunity for industry-academia interaction and multidisciplinary academic interaction to identify high-impact research areas in GT CM in order to set an agenda for future academic research. The workshop will bring together leading industry practitioners and academic researchers to discuss issues in GT CM. The objectives include: (1) establishment of a dialogue between industry and academia on the subject; (2) identification of important research issues in the area; (3) providing industry perspective on future academic research directions; and, (4) setting of an agenda for future academic research on high impact topics. The success of the workshop will lead to a better understanding of the challenges of GT CM in the information age. It will help foster industry and academic collaboration. The identification of high impact topics will guide future academic research doc938 none Smith This project brings together two NSF I UCRC s to improve accelerated life testing (ALT) of vehicle electronics. The Center for Advanced Vehicle Electronics (CAVE) of Auburn University with partner with the Quality and Reliability Engineering (QRE) Center of Rutgers University and Arizona State University to investigate the relationship between wear, degradation and failure of vehicle controllers as experienced in the field with that expected by the results of ALT conducted in the laboratory. DaimlerChrysler Electronics of Huntsville, Alabama supplies the test bed. Vehicle electronics are subject to stress due to temperature, humidity, cycling and other environmental hazards. The materials that comprise the controllers are susceptible to the effects of corrosion and oxidation. The solder that connects the controller components can crack due to fatigue and creep under high temperature and thermal cycling stresses. These failures affect the performance of the vehicle from slightly to severely. The research of this project will develop a general methodology for specifying accelerated life tests so that they result in an accurate characterization of the degradation and failures that will be experienced in the filed. The failure mechanisms for the assembly materials in field units will be investigated in the development of the accelerated life tests. ALT standards, which new units must pass prior to marketing, will be adequate without being overly conservative, potentially allowing new designs and new materials to be used in vehicle electronics doc903 none Fryer 00- Wheat 00- Recommended project is for an integrated sampling and survey study of four serpentine mud seamount volcanoes on the Mariana forearc, designed to place constraints on the nature of the pressure temperature conditions in the subduction decollement zone and in the overlying mantle wedge. The research will also study mass transfer processes from the decollement and slab to the overlying mantle at slab depths of 15-29 km, including dehydration and other fluid-rock reactions that occur during metamorphic processes. The investigation will center around analysis of entrained metamorphic fluids and high-pressure, low-temperature metamorphic rock samples brought up by buoyant mud upflow in the seamount serpentinite mud. Fluid, mud, and rock samples will be collected by the remotely-operated vehicle (ROV) Jason, providing geological control of sample localities. Sample collection will be set within a framework defined by mapping of the mud volcanoes by the DSL-120 deep-tow, side-scan sonar. These studies will constrain key parameters controlling forearc seismicity doc940 none NSF Funding is requested to conduct a Workshop by assembling a group of practicing engineers, university faculty, and government professionals specializing in cold regions engineering, dividing them into interest groups, and allowing them to collectively identify and elucidate specific research topics and describe needed research work which should be performed at the beginning of this millennium. It is proposed that the Workshop be held at the University of Alaska-Anchorage campus to minimize the costs to conduct the Workshop and mazimize the participation from the cold regions engineering professionals community. The deliverable from the Workshop will be a report to NSF, which will subsequently be distributed to the participants at the Workshop, other cold regions engineering professionals who were not able to attend, and appropriate federal agencies. The report will hopefully guide research efforts in the cold regions engineering community, encourage faculty members to write research proposals to conduct needed research, and direct federal and state agencies to fund research proposals which relate to research needs identified in the report doc849 none This project will investigate the seismic structure of oceanic mantle lithosphere using an active-source seismic refraction experiment along an 800-km-long transect in the Western Atlantic Ocean. The transect extends along a plate kinematic flow line that lies entirely within a single spreading-center segment, on lithosphere ranging from 87 to 145 million years old. The experiment will determine if the lithospheric mantle in the Atlantic is stratified, the magnitude and form of anisotropy over length scales of a few hundred kilometers, the constraints the character of oceanic Pn coda places on the nature of small-scale lateral heterogeneity, and the parameters that maximize the range at which mantle phases can be recorded using airgun source and ocean-bottom receivers doc888 none Almost all biologically active trace metal cations in seawater are complexed by organic ligands, and complexation is believed to exert an important influence on the geochemistry and biological availability of these elements, many of which are critical micronutrients. However, there is little, if any, information on the structures of these compounds, or any definitive information on sources and sinks, though biological sources have been inferred on the basis of their distributions and binding characteristics. Some researchers have been successful in isolating and identifying chelators produced by cultures of marine bacteria and phytoplankton, namely Fe siderophores and phytochelatins that strongly complex Cu. In this study, the PIs will develop sensitive assays for Fe and Cu chelators using liquid chromatography coupled to a selection of highly promising derivatization schemes to measure these compounds directly in seawater at nanomolar levels. This is a novel approach, based on the observation that many of these ligands contain functional groups that form analytically useful adducts with derivatizing agents that can be separated from other materials. The objective of the research is to determine if these compounds are important ligands in seawater, and the assays will serve as a basis for modified protocols to look for structurally similar compounds. The long term goals of the project is to develop useful analytical protocols that will be used widely in the field to answer questions about the factors that control metal complexation in seawater, and their relationship to ecosystem-scale processes doc943 none Zoback This project involves planning and coordination associated with the proposed SAFOD (San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth) Project, to drill and core deeply into the San Andreas fault zone and conduct a broad range of scientific investigations in and around the drillhole and to utilize the hole for long term monitoring of an active plate boundary fault at depth. Such a project will provide fundamental constraints on the structure, composition, mechanical behavior and physical state of an active, major plate-boundary fault. 1. Coordinate and plan the overall scientific 2. Coordinate site selection studies and integrate data into GIS database 3. Convene workshops with SAFOD science team 4. Define engineering needs for drilling and borehole measurements 5. Develop and promote technology development program 6. Initiate (and follow) environmental impact analysis and site permitting 7. Represent project with federall, state and local agencies 8. Coordinate outreach to local governments and the public The SAFOD Project is a component of Phase ! of NSF s EarthScope Initiative which is a component of the MRE request to Congress in the FY budget. These planning activities are crucial to the success of EarthScope doc944 none KENNEDY Planning for Reform in Secondary Science and Math (PRiSSM), a twelve-month planning project, seeks to coordinate activities among local secondary schools, higher education institutions and community partners in southwestern Washington. The project engages participants in (1) an assessment of programs, beliefs, expertise and missions across institutions; (2) building consensus on the alignment of programs from the point of view of both content and pedagogy; and (3) building consensus on core competencies for mathematics, science and technology education of grades 6-20. An important outcome of the work will be an understanding of the local needs for professional development of teachers, leaders of professional development, and teacher mentors in science, mathematics, and technology. The project is managed through the Science and Math Education Resource Center at Educational Service District 112 (Washington), a regional partnership among the district, Washington State University - Vancouver, and the Hewlett Packard Corporation doc945 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Frank Asaro and his colleagues will continue to develop and test the x-ray fluorescence (XRF) technique for ceramic analysis. XRF, in common with several other approaches, determines the abundance of trace elements present in ceramics and such data are extremely important to archaeological researchers. Trace element frequencies are set by both the clay used to manufacture a vessel as well as the tempering material included and through analysis of relative abundances it is often possible to establish the presence of wares - groups of material which share a common fabric and thus should be classed together. It is also sometimes possible to trace specific wares back to their point of origin through comparison with geological collections of clay raw material. Through sourcing studies and analysis of ceramics from large numbers of sites archaeologists can gain insight into the organization of ceramic production and trade. The movement of ceramics also sheds light on economic and political organization. Because ceramics played such a crucial role in many prehistoric societies and because it is well preserved and abundant in many archaeological sites, it provides a central focus of archaeological attention. Although XRF is not widely used for trace element studies, its potential is great. Its cost is relatively low and relatively little sample time is required. Were it developed to the level of accuracy of other techniques it would greatly facilitate archaeologists practical access to trace element data. In this NSF award, Dr. Asaro and his colleagues will pursue several goals. They will work to improve the technique itself and focus on increasing the precision of measurement for a number of elements, especially Fe and lower Z elements. They shall use pottery groups from archaeological sites in the Galilee and Yucatan and raw materials from both areas as test cases and apply both XRA and INAA techniques. Compositional data will be evaluated using a battery of statistical methods. It will be determined if high-precision XRF or INAA, or both methods together are capable of distinguishing closely similar pottery compositional groups from individual sites in these two diverse areas doc946 none Delaney 00- : This award provides funding to continue the REVEL Project , a program initiated at the University of Washington (UW) in , as an outreach and teacher professional development program. The program will include twelve K-12 teachers from a variety of states in a suite of activities related to ongoing research on hydrothermal vent systems of the Endeavour and Juan de Fuca mid-ocean ridge systems. The teachers will participate in cruises aboard the R V THOMPSON or the R V ATLANTIS and will have first-hand experience working on sea-going oceanographic research. They will work with the submersible ALVIN or an autonomous underwater vehicle called ABE. In addition, they will participate in pre and post-cruise workshops to ensure that the experiences they gain at sea can be translated to their students and other classrooms. The overall goal of the project is to encourage collaboration and partnerships between research groups and science educators doc947 none The proposed research takes advantage of recently published fine-grained positional behavior data so that connections between African ape behavior and morphology, even at the subspecific level, can be inferred. Because the earliest human ancestors exhibit some ape-like features, a more complete understanding of African ape long bone morphology (e.g., humeral and femoral shaft shape) is necessary to infer early hominid positional adaptations. Implications of the proposed research extend beyond refining the behavior-morphology link in African apes and hominids by offering avenues of insight into the structure and function of all mammals. The proposed investigation is timely since the existence of a straightforward relationship between positional behaviors and long bone morphology has been debated recently. The PI and student have performed a preliminary analysis using 33 African ape specimens and revealed links between their behavior and morphology. For instance, higher percentages of arboreal locomotor behaviors, such as scrambling, correlated with greater long bone circularity (i.e., ratio of principle moments of area) at several measured locations. In order to complete data collection from 299 additional specimens, access to museum collections and to CT scanning facilities near each of these museum collections has been arranged. In the preliminary analysis, sample trends in shaft morphology differed depending on the measure that was used to estimate body mass. By expanding the sample, as proposed here, such apparent discrepancies between body mass estimators might be resolved and shaft morphology interpreted doc948 none The Atmospheric Angular Momentum (AAM) is a robust and convenient index of the atmosphere s zonal-mean dynamics; diagnostic studies of the behavior of AAM and its attendant zonal-mean zonal wind field u, on climate time scales, in both observations and models, continue to be of widespread interest and relevance. The PIs propose to continue AAM diagnostics using output from various GCMs. The topics are (i) seasonal and interannual variability of AAM in the AMIP2 simulations; (ii) multidecadal variability of simulated AAM (iii) Double CO2 experiments. The work is important because it will increase understanding of the role of AAM in the climate system doc949 none Dalziel This action provides conference support for a Geological Society of America Penrose Conference entitled, The Lapetus Ocean-its Birth, Life and Death: The Wilson Cycle to be held in Edinsburgh, Scotland 16-21 September, doc950 none Torres Dr. Elizabeth Torres, a new faculty member at California State University, Los Angeles, is studying the molecular evolution of bioluminescence in small marine crustaceans of the ostracode family Cypridinidae. Although bioluminescence is now known in numerous groups of organisms, including bacteria, dinoflagellates, coelenterates, annelids, molluscs, fireflies, and crustaceans, it is hypothesized to have evolved independently in all these groups. Cypridinids produce their own unique forms of the enzyme luciferase and the substrate luciferin, the molecules responsible for bioluminescence. Recent phylogenetic analyses of Cypridinidae, based on molecular and morphological data, suggest that bioluminescence evolved just once in the family (but has been lost or altered in various lineages). To analyze the pattern of mutational changes in the luciferase gene throughout the lineages of cypridinids, gene probes are being constructed, based on the known gene sequences from Vargula hilgendorfii and anticipated from clones in hand of Vargula tsujii. These can be used to survey gene-nucleotide differences across numerous cypridinid species. With several such sequences known across many taxa, one can also begin analyses of conserved motifs and other gene characteristics, to test the hypothesis that luciferases have evolved from oxygenase enzymes, in the various groups of bioluminescent organisms doc951 none High speed, high volume cryptographic systems will form the basis for the security of video, wireless, and computer communications of the next decade. This research involves the design and development of such systems, especially that of hardware-based stream ciphers. High speed hardware-based stream ciphers can be easily manufactured, programmed, and implemented. They can be used to encrypt data (such as voice or video) in real time and are used as embedded components in cellular telephones, GPS satellites, radar, and radio systems. Most stream ciphers, however, have been found to be vulnerable to various cryptoanalytic attacks. This research involves the development and analysis of new architectures for stream cipher generators which have all the above advantages but which are much more secure than traditional architectures. Linear feedback shift registers have proven especially useful for the generation of pseudorandom sequences for high speed communications. They have been intensively studied for over forty years and their usefulness does not appear to have any end in sight. Recently a fundamentally new architecture for feedback shift registers was discovered, the so-called feedback-with-carry shift register or FCSR. This architecture shares all the advantages of the linear feedback architecture such as high speed and ease of implementation, but the resulting pseudorandom sequences are also more secure. This research involves a number of implementation issues for the new architecture including (1) the development of parallel circuitry for high speed generation of pseudorandom sequences, (2) the design of combiners and feedforward functions to further increase the security of FCSR sequences, (3) the design of clock-controlled FCSR circuits, and (4) the analysis of the cryptographic security of the FCSR sequences which are generated in this way doc952 none The Astronomical Society of the Pacific, in collaboration with the Astronomical League and Sky and Telescope Magazine, will survey amateur astronomers to determine which informal audiences they serve and what types of support materials would encourage them to do more and better outreach, and to test a prototype set of outreach support materials. Amateur astronomers, estimated to number 300,000 to 500,000, represent a large and mostly untapped source of expertise and enthusiasm for conducting educational outreach activities in the community and in schools doc953 none The rapid transformation of cities and other forms of settlement throughout the world has dramatically altered the ways people live, work, and interact with the human and natural environments. Since , U.S. scientists and engineers supported by NSF and other federal agencies have been working with European counterparts supported by the European Science Foundation (ESF) to identify and begin addressing issues associated with contemporary transportation systems. This award will continue that effort, providing core support to facilitate continued involvement of U.S. researchers in activities underway through the auspices of ESF and the European Community. This effort will follow on the successful conference on Social Change and Sustainable Transport (SCAST) held at the University of California-Berkeley in Spring . This project will create a U.S. thematic network to complement a recently developed Network on European Communication and Transport Activity Research (NECTAR). Working together, the U.S. and European networks will identify salient problems of mutual interest and establish preliminary research designs to undertake research on those problems. Periodic workshops and seminars will be held, with establishment of a program to facilitate exchanges of graduate students being another project thrust. Although the U.S. researchers involved in this next stage initially will be drawn largely from the ranks of those who have participated in past collaborative efforts, the U.S. leaders of the network will actively work to identify additional individuals who can contribute to and benefit from involvement in collaborations with European counterparts doc954 none The Pleasant View Farm Complex (PVFC) has been a major center for research and information exchange for the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study, a long-term ecosystem and biogeographical study of a northern hardwood forest and its associated aquatic ecosystems. The study focuses on large-scale phenomena such as precipitation chemistry, on regional-scale phenomena such as forestry practices, and on demographic shifts in ecologically sensitive populations. The National Science Foundation and the United States Forest Service have supported the study since its inception in . This award for institutional planning support a series of workshops involving academic researchers, Forest Service staff, and facilities experts. The objective of these workshops will be (1) to assess facility needs at the Pleasant View Farm Complex (in the context of strategic planning of science and research), (2) to evaluate facilities options, and (3) to develop an integrated facilities plan. The institutional planning effort will result in clearly defined facilities program goals, site plans, schematics and construction budgeting information. The award also includes a small amount of funds to assist with emergency repairs to the existing buildings to insure that safe working conditions are provided in the interim doc955 none This project supports the deployment of instrumentation to study aerosol chemistry on the C-130 aircraft during ACE-Asia (Aerosol Characterization Experiment). A total aerosol sampler (TAS) will be used to collect aerosols without inlet losses and analyze them for major ions. A micro-orifice impactor will be used to collect size-segregated samples for ion analysis. Samples will be collected on a single stage impactor for analysis of EC OC (organic elemental carbon). Procedures for the analysis of these samples using a new EC OC analyzer will be developed in time for the field deployment. An aerodynamical particle analyzer (APS) will be used to determine particle size distributions in the 0.5 - 10 micron range. In addition, PI Barry Huebert will serve as Lead Scientist for the ACE-Asia experiment doc794 none This project addresses one of the three central hypotheses of the U.S. GLOBEC Northeast Pacific Study: Spatial and temporal variability in mesoscale circulation constitutes the dominant physical forcing on zooplankton biomass, production, distribution, species interactions and retention and loss in coastal regions. The PIs respond to specific components of the GLOBEC announcement which call for (a) three dimensional mesoscale surveys aimed at determining the distribution and productivity of zooplankton in relation to their physical environment, and (b) process studies focused on understanding zooplankton in situ population dynamics processes and the interaction between physical and biological processes. It is not well understood how mesoscale features in the California Current System impact zooplankton biomass, production, distribution, or retention and loss from coastal regions. These interacting phenomena have been studied rarely off California, and even more rarely off Oregon. Mesoscale physical dynamics are relatively easy to measure, but require a high sampling frequency. Most standard methods of measuring zooplankton are simply not compatible with the sampling frequency required to resolve mesoscale features. This fundamental challenge must be met for GLOBEC to succeed. The group of investigators has invested a decade in the development and application of an integrated methodology for measuring zooplankton biomass, distribution and productivity at the high resolution required for mesoscale studies. They find significant mesoscale interactions between physical forcing and zooplankton productivity in the California Current System off northern California. In a pilot study, they found net decreasing productivity in the central jet of the California Current, and net increasing productivity in adjacent eddy systems. The mesoscale match of physical biological processes was striking - but underlying causes remain obscure. The GLOBEC NEP study offers an unparalleled opportunity to understand these dynamics upstream - off Oregon - and so to shed light on fundamental processes. The investigators will study both physical and biological processes, and their spatio-temporal coupling, by measuring and mathematically deducing individual processes of advection, vertical migration, and rates of productivity. They will use the integrated Sea-Soar-Optical Plankton Counter and ADCP in mesoscale surveys, coupled with critical net sampling, to resolve spatial and temporal distributions of size- and species-structured zooplankton at the mesoscale. Rates pertinent to population dynamics will be determined from the biomass spectral method (Zhou and Huntley, ) in conjunction with certain complementary and independent field measurements. The approach is aimed at producing estimations of biomass and productivity - resolved at the same scale as mesoscale physics - and will clarify factors controlling variations in zooplankton productivity. These results are not only critical to defining the food field of juvenile salmon (a key GLOBEC NEP target species), but can improve our general understanding of interactions between zooplankton populations and their dynamic physical environment, with is the central goal of GLOBEC doc957 none Aburaddad The proposed research by Laith J. Aburaddad will examine the processes of meson photo and electroproduction from nucleons and nuclei using fully relativistic formalisms whether in the elementary process or in the nuclear structure. Computational methods will be used to explore the complex the elementary processes of meson photo and electroproduction from free nucleons. These processes are highly complex, and their study is experimentally challenging but theoretically rewarding. At a technical level, this work will address the nature of fundamental forces joining subatomic particles, and of several astrophysical processes such as supernova explosions and neutron star structure. This award supports a two-year Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral Fellowship for Laith J. Aburaddad at the Research Center for Nuclear Physics (RCNP) at Osaka University, Japan. Aburaddad will work with Professor Hiroshi Toki, Chairman of the Nuclear Theory Group, on a project entitled, Collaborative Studies on Meson Photo and Electroproduction from Nuclei. The computational studies in the proposed project will contribute to an understanding of the nature of fundamental forces joining subatomic particles, and of several astrophysical processes such as supernova explosions and neutron star structure. Useful contributions to the field are likely, and the exposure of the awardee to a new research setting will be intellectually stimulating. The proposed work will benefit through collaboration with the Japanese host laboratory, where Aburaddad will have access to the necessary experimental systems, equipment and expertise doc618 none The objective of the project is to identify the mantle component in island arc volcanism by performing an across-arc study of magmatism in the southern Mariana Arc. The PIs propose to answer three principal questions using a field and laboratory study of submarine volcanoes in the Southern Seamount Province of the Mariana Arc. 1) Is the pattern of mantle depletion across the arc and the back-arc consistent with sequential melting of the mantle as it moves away from the back-arc spreading axis? 2) What is the inherent heterogeneity of the subarc mantle at scales of 10-60 km? 3) How are melts aggregated in arcs? They will answer these questions using a field program based on a high-resolution survey of two portions of the Southern Seamount Province, from the arc to the back-arc, using the Hawaii MR-1 towed vehicle; through detailed sampling of two traverses of the Province (including lavas and volcaniclastics); through characterization of the sampled materials petrographically and geochemically; and through interpretation of the data to identify the roles of along axis mantle heterogeneity doc838 none This project is a combined controlled source electromagnetic and magnetotelluric study designed to resolve unambiguously the strike direction and depth extent of electrical anisotropy from the near-surface through the crust and upper mantle. The data collected will provide depth constraints on and alignment of the strain regime generated during the mid-ocean ridge crust formation, constraints on the extent an alignment of ductile flow during present day plate motion, depth of the thermal boundary layer that denotes the lithosphere, and insight into electrical conduction mechanisms in the mantle, particularly the proposal that hydrogen dissolved in olivine enhances conduction in the a-axis direction doc960 none Optimality theory suggests that preferential allocation of resources to one form of defense should occur among a series of alternative defenses resulting in a single prevailing defense strategy. Although this idea has been widely accepted, few studies provide rigorous evidence to support the notion of trade-offs among defense systems, particularly in marine systems. The PI s recent data indicate that, with stinging organelles (nematocysts) and secondary metabolites as likely alternative defenses (Stachowicz (2) the Caribbean (FL); and (3) the temperate (but less seasonal) eastern Pacific (northern CA), allowing biogeographic comparisons of hydroid defenses against predators. The results of this study will provide a conceptual framework for comparing ecological and evolutionary consequences of chemical vs. nematocyst defenses among broader groups of cnidarians that presently seem to rely largely on chemical defenses (e.g., octocorals like gorgonians and soft corals) vs. those such as sea anemones and hard corals that seem to rely on nematocysts for defense doc961 none This award provides support for continued research into the dynamics of intraseasonal variability of the midlatitude atmosphere. Dr. Robinson employs highly idealized models of the atmosphere, in this case a single level barotropic model on a sphere, which allow him to isolate and study fundamental processes of the atmosphere. Under his previous award, Dr. Robinson and his student developed a new version of the barotropic model that incorporates information about the scale-dependent vertical structure of atmospheric eddies. The model now will be tested by doing hindcasts of episodes of low frequency variability. The dynamics of the model will be examined using several different approaches. The role of transient-eddy forcing for low frequency variability will be diagnosed by forcing the model with observed transient-eddy potential vorticity fluxes. Dr. Robinson hopes to demonstrate that, with the vertical structure eddy information, the simple model will agree quantitatively with observations, thus providing confidence that the conceptual insights gained with the idealized model are relevant to the real atmosphere doc962 none Rau Salmon populations in the California Current System (CCS), and coho salmon in particular, have been in severe decline since the s, coinciding with the regime shift, and in contrast to record productivity in the Gulf of Alaska. The specific linkages between oceanographic changes and salmon survival in the marine.enviromnent are not well understood. GLOBEC has chosen to compare two regions of the Northern California Current divided by Cape Blanco, Oregon (43 degrees N) where an upwelling jet moves off the shelf. The regions north and south of Cape Blanco differ in intensity and stability of upwelling, temperature, and offshore transport. Evidence indicates that due to the physical conditions, the distribution and production of biota may differ north and south of Cape Blanco, providing the opportunity to compare and contrast the relationship between specific oceanographic processes and biological productivity. The investigators will use process oriented studies to examine mechanistic linkages between the physical and biological processes that are associated with habitat quality critical to recruitment of juvenile salmon. Juvenile coho (Oncorhynchus kisutch) and chinook (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) salmon will be collected along transects between Eureka, CA to Newport, OR during May June and September of and . Sampling efforts will coincide with mesoscale and fine-scale surveys of physical (e.g., location of eddies, fronts, upwelling, offshore transport import; mixed layer depth, sea surface temperature, mixed layer depth) and biological (areas and density of primary and secondary productivity) features within the same regions conducted by other GLOBEC researchers. The salmon investigators will measure the growth rate, size variability, bioenergetic condition, pathogen prevalence and intensity in juvenile salmon as conditions of survival. By correlating indices in the Northern CCS with the trophic relationship studies, they will test the hypotheses that oceanographic features leading to high productivity of lower trophic levels translates to higher growth rates, condition and greater salmon recruitment through bottom-up forces. Also, the degree of correlation between these indices and variations in isotope natural abundances (14C, 13C, 15N) in juvenile salmon will be used to directly test the hypothesis that diet specificity and vertical ocean advection affect juvenile salmon health and condition. The investigators also will compare juvenile coho and chinook slamon growth and condition from different regions of the Northeast Pacific (e.g., Alaska, British Columbia, Washington and northern Oregon) and to the historical record (prior to the last regime shift) where available and applicable. These results will provide information on the relationships between ocean variability and juvenile salmon survival on temporal (interdecadal) and spatial (basin-wide, mesoscale, and local) scales doc784 none Heterotrophic bacteria constitute a large biomass, and have a significant impact on ecosystem function, in the sea. Understanding what controls the standing stock abundance and metabolic activity of marine bacterioplankton is a main goal of microbial oceanography. Central to this goal is resolution of the longstanding, and still considerable, controversy concerning what fractions of marine bacterial cells, enumerated by standard epifluorescence staining methods, are a) metabolically active and growing, b) alive but not growing, or c) dead. As a simplification of this controversy, opposing views for how metabolic activity is distributed among cells in marine bacterial communities can be stated as: Scenario I? most bacterioplankton cells are alive and active, with metabolic processes broadly distributed over the community, or Scenario 2 ? only a small fraction of the bacterial assemblage is highly active, and it is these cells that are responsible for the bulk of metabolism and production of new cells in the assemblage. Results of various cell?specific assays have yielded conflicting results, in part because the assays are not very quantitative, and thresholds of detection of activity for the assays are not well known. The main goal of this project is to determine whether Scenario I or Scenario 2 is, in general, a more accurate depiction of the distribution of metabolic activity among bacteria in seawater. A secondary goal is to establish what a number of fluorochrome?based assays mean in terms of bacterial metabolic activity. To do this, we will examine cell?specific activity levels among physiologically distinguishable categories of bacteria. The categories will be based on: DNA content: high?DNA versus low?DNA containing bacteria (SYTO stain); state of the cell membrane: membrane potential (DiBAC stain) and intact membrane versus damaged membrane (BacLight stains); and activity of the electron transport system: highly ETS?active versus less active bacteria (CTC redox reagent). We propose to quantify specific activities by a) incubating bacterial assemblages with radiolabeled substrates, b) staining and flow cytometric sorting of the radiolabeled bacteria, and then c) determining substrate incorporation rates for the various categories of sorted cells. We will compare these results with proportion of sorted radiolabeled cells detected as active via microautoradiography. Bacterial assemblages will be examined in systems over a range of trophic states, from a eutrophic estuary, Chesapeake Bay, to the meso? to oligotrophic Oregon upwelling system. A narrow range of cell?specific metabolic rates among the various categories would support the first scenario, while wide ranges of cell-specific metabolic rates would support the second one. Scenario I is compatible with the traditional way that bacterioplankton are represented in ecosystem models: as a coherent assemblage of living cells with uniform rates of respiration and utilization of organic matter. If, however, Scenario 2 is more accurate, then there would be much that we still need to understand about marine bacteria, e.g. how non?growing cells and dead cells are produced, persist, and are lost. This project will be a step toward resolving the conflicting views of distribution of bacterial activity in the sea, which has significant implications for understanding the dynamics of bacteria in marine ecosystems. Our results will also have broader implications, as this study will put on a quantitative basis a number of cell?specific assays that can be used in many fields of microbiology doc863 none Vent fauna is a largely ancient fauna of global distribution in the deep?sea. It has limited taxonomic affinities to most deep?sea communities, and yet it has affinities to the faunas of deep?sea hydrocarbon seeps and other seep environments. Deep?sea hydrothermal vents are one of the major ecosystem types on the earth, but probably the least known. The high biomasses of these communities largely reflect the ability of a few invertebrate bacteria symbioses to oxidize reduced chemical species (sulfide or methane) from the vents using oxygen from the surrounding deep?sea water to power primary production. The allegation that vent communities are highly productive is often seen in the literature based on the high biomasses estimated, the rapid establishment of vent communities and the rapid growth of some vent animals. However, there are currently no well?founded estimates of primary production by the symbioses at any hydrothermal vents. The central objective of this study is to quantify the major vent symbioses chemical interactions with the vent fluids and the abundances of those symbioses in such a way that primary and secondary production and other chemical exchanges can be modeled for entire assemblages of symbiotic animals. This involves determining the range of production and exchange rates of the symbioses and the relations between environmental conditions and those rates. Environmental data will then be used to estimate in situ rates for entire assemblages at single points in time and over the lifetime of vent sites. This consists first of the Childress group expanding its study of the rates of exchanges to a range of sizes of all the major autotrophic symbioses. Complementing this, the Fisher group will characterize and sample sites at 9 50 N on the EPR so that the biomass, organism abundance and organism sizes are documented and size weight relationships are developed. These data will enable the estimating of production in entire symbiotic assemblages and they can also be used with existing photographic datasets to estimate biomasses at other EPR sites which have been photographically documented and for which chemical datasets exist. The results will greatly increase the understanding of the nature of the interactions between the vent animals and their chemical environments and enable the first solid estimates of production and other exchanges by the symbiotic components of vent communities, making a major contribution to the understanding of the functioning of vent and other chemoautotrophically supported ecosystems doc965 none This research focuses on the observational analysis and numerical simulations of multiple shearlines and wakes and the associated potential vorticity (PV) anomalies (banners) downstream of a highly irregular mountain topography. The goal of the study is to quantify different scales and regimes of orographic forcing and to determine effects such forcing has on observed mesoscale weather phenomena in the proximity of a major mountain range. The Principal Investigator will take advantage of the observational data collected during the recently completed Mesoscale Alpine Program (MAP). The extensive data sets collected during the MAP provide the most detailed documentation to date of the spatial and temporal structure of airflow in the vicinity of a major mountain range. In this study, the observational data from selected MAP Intensive Observation Periods (IOPs) will be used to perform analysis of the wind and thermodynamic fields and to reconstruct corresponding PV banners downwind of the Alps. Each analyzed case will be numerically simulated in order to scrutinize mesoscale model s ability to reproduce observations at high temporal and spatial accuracy. The objectives of the modeling work are to (1) reconstruct the observed PV anomalies during the selected MAP IOPs; (2) evaluate existing theories of orographic PV generation and dynamic evolution; and (3) investigate sensitivities of the model simulated PV field to different parameterizations (especially, boundary-layer representation and the subgrid scale orography) in order to recommend the optimal parameterizations. Improved knowledge of climatological positions and strengths of major jets, orographic vortices and downslope windstorms, and the range of conditions under which they develop, will be beneficial in decreasing the negative economic impact of severe weather phenomena. Such knowledge has practical application to problems such as the determination of bridge locations, prevention of road accidents in severe wind zones, avoidance of aviation hazards related to strong cross-runway winds and forecasting of the onset and termination of pollution episodes and convection doc966 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: William C. Conner Institution: University of Massachusetts The 12th International Congress on Catalysis will be held in Granada, Spain during the week of July 9th. The Council of the International Congress on Catalysis oversees these meetings and has representation from approximately 20 countries. These meetings are held every four years, and the attendance has shown large increases due to a renewed world interest in the synthesis of specialty chemicals, petroleum-based products, and catalytic applications for the environment. Attendance at the previous meeting exceeded . Because advances in a large number of catalytic processes, which are crucial to US interests, will be presented at this meeting, it is important to ensure participation from both the academic and industrial sectors. The Congress will focus on the topic of New Frontiers in Catalysis. Priority will be given to the following topics: molecular design of solid catalysts; recent developments in catalytic reactions; new experimental methods, and new industrial applications. The proceedings of all International Congresses are published and constitute a significant contribution to the literature on catalysis. This Congress will promote interchange among the international participants. The purpose of this grant is to help defray costs for those participating in the meeting and for younger faculty doc967 none As a result of the persistent attempt to find out why American education is failing to fulfill many children s potential and many societal needs, many of the elements needed to answer the question have been identified and some of those have been successfully implemented. However, work must continue on identifying remaining pieces of the puzzle and, especially, on how to assemble the pieces into a coherent whole. Succeeding will require the construction of conceptual and structual bridges between scholars working at different distances from educational applications. NSF s draft stategic plan includes the following long term outcomes, under the heading of Ideas : Partnerships connecting discovery to innovation, learning, and societal advancement. Research and education processes that are synergistically coupled. The WPA and APA symposia proposed herein should contribute meaningfully to achieving those ends buy bringing together distinguished scholars with expertise in diverse areas of psychology (evolutionary, social, cognitive, cross-cutural) and education research and policy, to stimulate discussion about how to improve education research and policy, to stimulate discussion about how to improve education by effectively integrating research and policy doc968 none Grove This grant provides two-years partial salary support for the research scientist responsible for the MIT Electron Microprobe Facility. This is a Phase II technician support grant under the Instrumentation and Facilities (IF) Program and follows three years of Phase I support ( ). During the first three years of support from NSF-EAR Instrumentation and Facilities we achieved significant progress in upgrading the facility, developing outreach and training programs for our users and securing the financial stability of the facility. The instrumentation is now near state-of-the-art largely due to the efforts of Dr. Nilanjan Chatterjee, our technical research specialist. Stimulated by the support of the NSF technician program, we have effectively made Dr. Chatterjee s position a permanent one. Should it be necessary, we have identified the funding necessary to support Dr. Chatterjee for a two-year period beyond funding made through this grant. Technical support for this lab facilitates research in a broad array of geoscientific investigations including: studies of hydrous phases in quenched high-pressure experimental run products to better understand the processes of melt generation with subduction zones; geochronologic investigations of orogenic processes; trace element investigations of hot spot volcanics aimed at understanding the physical and chemical evolution of the Earth s mantle and core; and studies of the micro-mechanical properties of rocks which control the movement of fluids deep within the earth. In addition, the MIT microprobe facility supports a large number of student users enrolled in the MIT-WHOI joint Ph.D. program as well as students and faculty from the Departments of Materials Sciences, Chemical Engineering, Chemistry and Archaeology doc969 none Principal Investigator: John A. Lockwood, University of New Hampshire The investigators will study cosmic ray solar modulation near the Earth during the coming solar maximum and consequent reversal of the solar magnetic field. The main effort is to continue operation of the Mount Washington neutron monitor, and to employ the data obtained, together with data from other neutron monitors and spacecraft to compare the onset of the current modulation cycle with previous cosmic ray modulation cycles. Galactic cosmic ray fluxes vary, or are modulated in response to changes in the interplanetary magnetic environment, which in turn derives from the magnetic activity on the surface of the Sun. This magnetic activity is most manifest in the cycle of sunspots and solar flares lasting approximately eleven years. However the polarity of the magnetic field reverses every sunspot cycle, so the true magnetic cycle spans 22 years. Only two magnetic cycles have been observed with high accuracy particle detectors like the neutron monitor on Mount Washington, which has operated continuously from to the present. The investigators will also study solar cosmic ray events in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Bern, Switzerland doc970 none Mahanti Description: This award in materials research is for US-India Cooperative Research: Theoretical Studies on Magnetoresistive Oxides. Professor S.D. Mahanti of Michigan State University and Indian collaborator Arghya Taraphder of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur will study the electronic structure of magnetoresistive oxides. The research will focus on construction of realistic model systems for manganites and double perovskites. They will relate the results of Hartree-Fock calculations to those of more tractable theoretical models. The investigators recognize the strengths and limitations of Hartree-Fock and local spin density approximations in electronic structure work, and plan to use both to learn what might not be learned from either alone. The results are expected to have wide applicability in condensed matter physics. Scope: Oxide materials continue to represent a vigorous area of research in the U.S. The investigators have excellent track records, have made many important contributions to the field, and their collaboration is likely to lead to broadly interesting results. The connection with the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur is excellent and the students at both institutions will benefit from the exchange of scientists. This award is supported jointly with the Government of India s Department of Science and Technology doc907 none This project represents a collaboration between Barry Huebert, University of Hawaii ( ), Richard Arimoto, New Mexico State University ( ), and Irina Sokolik, University of Colorado ( ) and is part of the ACE-Asia Project (Aerosol Characterization Experiment). Coordinated measurements of aerosol chemical properties will be carried out by Dr. Huebert and Dr. Arimoto. Other collaborators, supported separately, will provide measurements of aerosol optical properties and radiation (Michael Bergin, Georgia Tech) and single-particle analysis (James Anderson, Arizona State University). The measurements will be carried out at Zhenbeitai, a site near Yulin, Shaanxi Province, China. This site was chosen to represent the dust source regions of China. Detailed in-situ characterization of the aerosols found there will provide important information for the interpretation of measurements of aerosol properties in the airborne intensive of ACE-Asia downwind of the Asian continent. Dr. Sokolik will provide numerical analyses aimed at quantifying the radiative forcing by Asian multicomponent aerosols and their impacts on climate doc972 none Prater The cause for the observed coincidence of enhanced biological activity in the vicinity of shelfbreak fronts will be investigated by a series of field experiments in the Middle Atlantic Bight. The hypotheses to be tested are both physical and biological. First the convergence of buoyancy flux in the bottom boundary layer drives upwelling of nutrient rich Shelf Water along the shoreward side of the shelfbreak front. Second, the biological activity is enhanced due to this large flux nutrient and by optimal optical conditions as the water transitions from turbid shelf water to clear oceanic water, making the front a region with high photosynthetic efficiency. Five new technologies (dye tracer, isopycnal floats, pumped Seasoar with high speed chemical analysis, towed microstructure instrument and use of optical variability to estimate photosynthetic properties of phytoplankton) will used in three 10-dy cruises to track the front in a Lagrangian framework doc973 none Hales The cause for the observed coincidence of enhanced biological activity in the vicinity of shelfbreak fronts will be investigated by a series of field experiments in the Middle Atlantic Bight. The hypotheses to be tested are both physical and biological. First the convergence of buoyancy flux in the bottom boundary layer drives upwelling of nutrient rich Shelf Water along the shoreward side of the shelfbreak front. Second, the biological activity is enhanced due to this large flux nutrient and by optimal optical conditions as the water transitions from turbid shelf water to clear oceanic water, making the front a region with high photosynthetic efficiency. Five new technologies (dye tracer, isopycnal floats, pumped Seasoar with high speed chemical analysis, towed microstructure instrument and use of optical variability to estimate photosynthetic properties of phytoplankton) will used in three 10-dy cruises to track the front in a Lagrangian framework doc859 none A process study called the Eastern Pacific Investigation of Climate Processes in the Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere System (EPIC) is proposed to study the behavior of the atmosphere and ocean in that region. The goals of the oceanographic component of EPIC are to describe, understand and quantify the evolution of the major oceanic structures and processes in the upper ocean under the deep convection region of the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) in order to improve regional models and ultimately gain better prediction of annual and interannual climate variability. Measurements will include mesoscale velocity temperature and salinity using expendable profilers dropped from aircraft, small scale velocity, temperature and salinity fields with a shipboard ADCP and continuous Seasoar sections, velocity microstructure and temperature, salinity and velocity finestructure by continuous microstructure profiling from a ship on station at 10 N, 95 W and radiometric and bio-optical profiles at various locations along 95 W doc975 none The New Jersey Center for Advanced Technological Education and other NSF Centers of Excellence are investigating activities required to implement change in technician education. The activities are capitalizing on the experience that reformers have had in successfully implementing model programs by providing a forum where people behind successful ATE centers and projects can articulate the pathways to change. A Steering Committee is exploring the most effective means of encouraging and supporting adoption of innovative programs and practices. In addition to ATE principal investigators, the Steering Committee also includes industry representatives, a researcher on two-year college programs, an evaluator, and two external members. Avenues for disseminating results include conferences, mentoring, interactions with professional societies and accreditation boards, and publications doc976 none Establishment of a National Science Foundation Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC) in Coatings at the University of Southern Mississippi and Eastern Michigan University is proposed. The Center s mission will be two-fold: (i) to be a world leading academic organization that develops relevant, pre-competitive scientific knowledge for understanding and advancing the technologies of polymeric coatings and (ii) to enlarge the cadre of scientists and technologists capable of being productive in the field of coatings. With this program the Center will directly address barriers that impede progress in coatings: (1) a shortage of precise polymer synthetic methods, (2) a need to better understand film formation and molecular level processes that control resistance to mechanical and chemical damage, (3) a need to extend and develop systematic understanding of degradation processes in coatings, and (4) a shortage of scientists and technologists who understand coatings science and technology doc977 none PI: Christodoulos A. Floudas Institution: Princeton University Proposal Number: The primary objective of this research is to develop theoretical, algorithmic and computational techniques for global optimization problems that arise in a variety of chemical engineering design and synthesis problems, as well as NMR structure refinement problems that arise in computational chemistry and biology. These methods will complement efforts in the mathematical modeling of chemical process systems and aid the search in the design of molecules, peptides, and proteins. The PI plans to investigate (1) the extension of his global optimization framework, aBB, to differential algebraic models that arise in parameter estimation and control; (2) the development of a new global optimization-based approach for general bilevel and multilevel nonlinear models that arise in the design under uncertainty, and the interaction of process synthesis, desing and operations; (3) the development of novel approaches for convex and nonconvex mixed integer nonlinear optimization models that arise in process synthesis; (4) the structure prediction of peptides with the presence of sparse restraints provided by NMR experiments; and (5) development of global optimization tools and the study of a distributed computing framework for the aBB global optimization approach for (1) - (4) above. These will be applied to several classes of chemical process synthesis, design, control and computational chemistry problems. The innovative features of this work consist of: (a) new global optimization methods for models with differential and algebraic constraints; (b) new global optimization approaches for bilevel and multilevel nonlinear models; (c) new approaches that combine strong cutting planes and branch and bound principles for mixed integer nonlinear optimization problems; (d) new methods for the determination of the structure of peptides and proteins through the NMR restraints that arise in computational chemistry and biology; and (e) sequential and distributed computational tools for all tasks of the planned work doc978 none As part of the TIMSS-R video study, nationally representative videotape samples of eighth-grade science lessons are being collected in five countries--the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Japan, Australia, and the United States. The first three of these were among the highest performing countries on the TIMSS science achievement tests. Collection of the data is already funded by NCES. We are seeking funding to prepare, code, analyze, and interpret the data in order to provide the first cross-national descriptions of science teaching. We further propose to carry out these processes in a way that maximizes usability of the data in future research and improvement efforts doc979 none SPATIAL MODELING, ANALYSIS AND PREDICTION OF NONSTATIONARY ENVIRONMENTAL PROCESSES Montserrat Fuentes, North Carolina State University Richard L. Smith, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Spatial statistics is one of the major methodologies of environmental statistics; its applications include producing spatially smoothed or interpolated representations of air pollution fields, calculating regional average means or regional average trends based on data at a finite number of monitoring stations, and performing regression analyses with spatially correlated errors to assess the agreement between observed data and the predictions of some numerical model. However, the most commonly used spatial statistics methodology, also known as geostatistics or kriging, is essentially based on the assumption of stationary and isotropic random fields. Such assumptions cannot be expected to hold in large heterogeneous fields. The research described here concentrates on nonstationary spatial models. Some new models are introduced, as well as new fitting methods based on spectral analysis. The applications include three real data sets: (i) monitoring data for nitrate fields compared with Models-3 output as part of the process for assessing compliance with the Clean Air Act Amendments of ; (ii) modeling the spatial distribution of particulate matter fields, as one of the components needed for an improved risk assessment of human health effects of particulate matter; (iii) developing statistical models for spatial temperature fields and applying them to the attribution of various signals produced by climate models - in particular, this methodology will permit improved assessment of the extent to which observed global climate change may be attributed to anthropogenic influences. In more detail, the new statistical methodology concentrates on two approaches to nonstationary models: a spatial deformation approach due to Guttorp and Sampson, and an approach where the field is represented locally as a stationary isotropic random field, but the parameters of the stationary random field are allowed to vary continuously across space. Kernel functions are used to ensure that the field is well-defined but also continuous. Some combination of the two approaches may be needed for fields with are neither stationary nor isotropic. New fitting algorithms are developed, using both space domain and spectral approaches; in cases where the data are distributed exactly or approximately on a lattice, it is argued that spectral approaches have potentially enormous computational benefits compared with maximum likelihood. The methods are extended to prediction interpolation questions using approximate Bayesian approaches to account for parameter uncertainty. We develop applications to obtaining the total loading of pollutant concentrations and fluxes over different geo-political boundaries, to risk assessment for particulate matter random fields, and to the attribution of an observed climate record to various components produced by numerical climatic model, the latter forming a new approach to the fingerprint estimation technique developed by climatologists. This program is being jointly funded by the Division of Mathematical Sciences and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities from the Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences doc980 none This project, which is being supported by the Directorate for Biological Sciences and by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities, will fund research on mangrove forests that dominate the world s tropical and subtropical coasts, paralleling the geographical distribution of coral reefs. Ecological processes here are influenced by inputs from the land, sea, and sky, which result in extreme fluctuations of flooding, salinity, temperature, light, and nutrient availability. Mangrove-associated organisms have specialized physiological and structural adaptations that sustain them in this variable environment. Human-caused enrichment is one of the major global threats to these coastal ecosystems. Experiments show that nutrients are not uniformly distributed among or even within mangrove forests. Soil fertility can switch from nitrogen to phosphorus limitation across narrow gradients. This study will explore the relationships among physical and chemical factors, nutrients, microbes, trees, and elemental cycling on off-shore mangrove islands in Belize. We will examine the interactions between the environment and organisms to determine how changes in nutrient inputs from natural, agricultural, or urban sources might alter the delicate balance among these ecosystem components. Mathematical models will help us predict the contribution complexity makes to the ability of mangrove ecosystems to survive both natural and anthropogenic disturbances. The results of the study will help scientists understand how to better manage and conserve mangrove ecosystems and will contribute to our understanding of biocomplexity in other ecosystems doc981 none In prior grant periods, the PI examined properties of the attainable region for the reactor synthesis problem - i.e. for the problem: given a network of chemical reactions and given feed streams of several reactants, how should those reactants be contacted so as to best meet a specified production objective. He showed that classical reactor types, plug flow reactors (PFRs), continuous flow stirred tank reactors (CSTRs), and differential sidestream reactors (DSRs) play special characteristic roles in shaping the attainable region s outer boundary. He also showed that CSTRs and DSRs that provide access to states at the outermost limits of what is achievable are governed by special design equations. These equations derive in a precise way from the underlying kinetics and can be constructed in great detail even when the attainable region s boundary is unknown. In this new grant period, study of those critical design equations will continue, as will computer experiments aimed at evolving the full attainable region. At the same time, there will be a new effort aimed at resolution of certain general reactor-separator questions. Of special interest will be means for assessing sharp kinetic bounds on productivity and selectivity in steady state reactor-separator systems of arbitrary design. Given a kinetics, for example, one might want to know the highest possible steady-state production rate of certain desired species from prescribed feed streams, if there is a specified availability of catalyst, if it is agreed that temperatures and pressures within any reactor component will not exceed levels, and if there are bounds set on the effluent rates of certain toxic side-products. That is one might want to know the highest production rate that can possibly be achieved as one considers all design consistent with the constraints imposed. In broader terms, it is important to know the best that can be hoped for in a stead-state reactor-separator design and to understand when no amount of nonfigurative innovation can produce further gains, so long as certain natural design constraints are respected. Knowledge of this kind provides benchmarks against which existing designs can be measure. The aim is to provide practical tools for designers, managers, and regulators, who faced with a bewildering array of configuration choices, would to well to know, in advance, sharp outer limits on yields and product distributions that can be expected from any constraint-consistent reactor-separator configuration doc982 none The renewed interest into cold cathode emitters is due to their potential applications for a variety of electronic devices, including microwave vacuum transistors and tubes, pressure sensors, thin panel displays, high temperature and radiation tolerant sensors, Hall thrusters, and electrodynamic tethers, among others. Introduction of such emitters would permit an unprecedented compactness and weight reduction in device equipment design doc983 none In the modern power system, reliability assessment and selection of control options will be important to address the uncertainties and evolution of new players. Therefore advance computational tools that will provide a framework for analysis of competitive utility will be one of the research challenges. Typically, the analysis of large-scale infrastructures carries uncertainties such as instability phenomenon or contingencies that may affect system adequacy. Therefore, innovative tools, which feature real-time computational capabilities, decision-making under uncertainty, assessing adequacy, reliability, and stability under new paradigms are needed. The research component of this proposal is focused on the priority topics earlier identified by DOE and IEEE Working Group on Reliability and System Economics. The Proposed integrated scheme sets the framework for developing a value-based reliability control scheme, which incorporates Stability Margins to define new reliability indices with Available Transfer Capability (ATC) as constraints. These new indices will be computed in the assessment of transmission capability and value-based transmission reliability. Also, a multi-objective optimization scheme is proposed to achieve optimum trade-off between reliability, and stability. In addition the feasibility Cost Benefit Analysis and allocation strategy for a distributed power utility environment will be performed. The proposed scheme will be tested using a small benchmark testbed followed by an industry-sized system. Research results will be fully disseminated and industry feedback will be accommodated in enhancing this multi-year project doc984 none Edward H. Egelman University of Virginia Acquisition of 200 KeV FEG Cryo-Electron Microscope Electron microscopy (EM) is an extremely powerful technique for studying the structure of macromolecular complexes, such as protein polymers, protein-DNA complexes and viruses. Significant advances in electron microscopy have been made in specimen preparation, instrumentation and image. These advances make it possible to use an electron microscopic to determine the three-dimensional structure of a protein. In addition, they also allow for lower-resolution studies that are complementary to those obtained by such techniques as x-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance. A 200 KeV Field Emission Gun cryo-electron microscope, manufactured by Philips FEI, will significantly enhance the research programs of a group of six investigators at the University of Virginia Medical School. This microscope will have a highly coherent electron source that will allow for resolutions much higher than obtainable with conventional instruments. The microscope will be equipped for the imaging of frozen-hydrated specimens, maintained in the microscope at liquid nitrogen temperatures. It will also have image acquisition capabilities, using a CCD camera, that will allow for on-line image analysis. The projects that will take advantage of the increased resolution provided by this instrument are: 1) studies of F-actin, and complexes of F-actin with actin-binding proteins; 2) studies of protein-DNA complexes, particularly helical recombination filaments such as RecA Rad51 UvsX, and ring helicases such as rho, DnaB and T7 gp4; 3) studies of the icosahedral Herpes Simplex virus capsid; 4) studies of Ca2+-dependent membrane binding proteins such as annexin, using two dimensional crystals formed on lipid monolayers; 5) studies of Protein Kinase C isozymes using two dimensional crystals formed on lipid monolayers; and 6) studies of ion channels, such as VacA hexamers, using cryo-EM of two-dimensional crystals to complement ongoing studies with Atomic Force Microscopy. Many of the projects have already produced results that are at the limit of reliable resolution obtainable by conventional TEM of negatively stained specimens. The new instrument will not only enhance these individual research programs, but will greatly strengthen the environment for structural biology at the University of Virginia and the training of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows doc985 none Biological functions are dictated by the shapes and movements of macromolecules. Understand and modulating biological systems therefore requires the ability to determine the structures and dynamics of macromolecules in solution. To facilitate such studies, the University of Utah has recently built and staffed a new Center for Biomolecular Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. The Center provides NMR resources for research groups studying structural aspects of HIV assembly, RNA biochemistry, DNA transcription, chromatin organization, natural product chemistry, metalloprotein function, intracellular signaling, protein folding and macromolecular trafficking. NMR Center management is provided by two co-directors, who oversee a lab manager and a service technician. Management polices are evaluated on a semi-annual basis by a faculty advisory committee to ensure that the facility runs efficiently and equitably. This award supports the purchase of a Varian INOVA 600 NMR spectrometer to be housed in the Center. Biomolecular structure determinations currently being performed will benefit greatly from the increased sensitivity and dispersion realized in increasing the available field strength from 500 to 600 MHz, as well as with the new state of the art electronic and hardware capabilities of the INOVA 600. The bulk of the NMR instrument time will be allotted to four major and six minor user groups who are drawn from seven different academic departments at the University of Utah. Thus, in addition to its utility as a research instrument, the INOVA 600 NMR spectrometer will facilitate training in structural biology for a large group of graduate students and postdoctoral associates doing research in many different aspects of the biomedical sciences doc986 none Anderson As a result of two international research conferences held in late in Honolulu, it became the general consensus that the ability to forecast coastal environmental change forced both by human influences and ambient processes needs immediate focus and improvement. It was also agreed that a workshop on Coastal Forecasting should be convened. This proposal is a follow-up on that recommendation. PIs are requesting funds to hold this workshop at Rice University during the late summer or early fall of to identify critical research needed for forecasting coastal response to climate change doc922 none This project will examine the range of mineral assemblages and possible microbial environments present within seafloor hydrothermal vent deposits, and observe how mineral precipitation in hydrothermal systems is affected at near criticl point conditions. Focus will be on 29 selected pairs of vent fluid vent solid samples collected at a diversity of vent microbial habitats within chimneys are affected by differences in the temperature and composition of the vent fluid, map pones in chimneys where different groups of microbes could thrive, document the effects of phase separation near the criticl point of water on mineral deposition doc861 none Recommended project is for an integrated marine field and laboratory investigation of the western end of the Galapagos archipelago, with a focus on studying lavas from the submarine western flanks of Fernandina and Cerro Azul volcanoes after mapping them with camera tows and multibeam and side scan sonar. The goal is to define and then sample volcanic products from the leading edge of Galapagos plume, with associated, extensive geochemical and petrological studies that will help define the nature of the Galapagos plume. These samples will be used to test whether magma chemistry from leading-edge plume volcanism indeed best reflects the chemistry of the plume mantle source, whether high 3He 4He does indeed reflect undegassed, deep mantle sources, and also to test whether the unique horseshoe-shaped pattern of Galapagos geochemical variation is due to mantle zonation or is instead related to other geologic processes. The field mapping will determine whether there is a new submarine volcano westward of Fernandina that represents the actual plume leading edge (such as represented by Loihi in the Hawaiian plume volcanism), as suggested by seismic data. This work, on the leading edge of a weak plume, will complement similar studies done at Hawaii, a strong plume, in testing models of plume volcanism and origin doc989 none This project will deploy 64 wide-band ocean-bottom seismometers and ten portable broad-band seismic island stations in a 15-month-long investigation. The objectives are to: locate and image the plume conduit beneath the Hawaiian hotspot, image the roots of the Hawaiian swell overr a sufficient area and with a sufficient resolution to distinguish among competing hypotheses for plume-lithosphere interaction, and relate the findings from the seismic imaging experiments to geodynamical and geochemical, models for mantle plumes doc990 none Hispanic Association of Colleges and Univesities Gil The Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU) is the recipient of an award for summer internship support. HACU, a national, non-profit organization, has a long and distinguished record of providing summer internship opportunities through the organization s National Internship Program (NIP). Through the NIP academically prepared students throughout the US and Puerto Rico have received quality internship assignments through various federal government agencies. Students who participate in the NIP are exposed to various career options in the Federal sector that serve as a basis in helping them make informed career choices and solidify career objectives. By partnering with the Federal government, HACU has been able to successfully place over 2,200 students, representing 27 states and PR, in summer positions since NIP commenced in . In an effort to continue its collaboration with HACU, the National Science Foundation, a participating government agency for the last few years, will offer challenging assignments that will broaden the exposure of participants pursuing careers in science, mathematics, engineering and technology (SMET). Internship opportunities create an unique opportunity to assist in the fulfillment of two core strategies related the goals of NSF s mission: developing intellectual capital, and integrating research and education. As a result the Foundation actively participates in strengthening the infrastructure to achieve excellence in SMET education doc991 none Fitzgerald This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports an investigation of the uplift history of the Dry Valleys segment of the Transantarctic Mountains. The overall goal is to further constrain the exhumation history of the Transantarctic Mountains by using the newly developed apatite (U-Th) He dating method on samples collected in vertical profiles. This approach, combined with existing apatite fission track information will constrain the rate and patterns of exhumation across the Transantarctic Mountains since their inception as a rift-flank uplift in the early Cenozoic. This project will complement other projects and build on previous interpretations of the exhumation and tectonic history determined using apatite fission track thermochronology. It will bridge the gap between information on erosion rates determined from fission track thermochronology and from cosmogenic surface exposure dating and integrate the exhumation history of the mountains with their landscape evolution. As such, the results from this project will address an outstanding problem in Antarctic science; namely the stability of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, and the timing of the transition from a warm dynamic ice sheet to a cold polar ice sheet. Highly relevant to this issue is the landscape evolution of the Transantarctic Mountains because many diverse lines of evidence for the rate of landscape evolution have been used to argue for a dynamic ice sheet up until either the Pliocene (the dynamic ice sheet model) or the middle Miocene (the stable ice sheet model). Understanding the past stability or dynamic fluctuations of the East Antarctic ice sheet with respect to the climate record is, of course, important for understanding how the present ice sheet may respond to global warming. The specific objective of this project is to determine apatite (U-Th) He age versus elevation trends for a number of vertical profiles from locations within the Transantarctic Mountain front and across the structural grain of the range. Fission track data already exist for all of these profiles, with apatite fission track ages ranging from 150-30 Ma. The greater precision of the (U-Th) He technique and the fact it records information at lower temperatures (closure temperature of ~70 degrees Celsius ; limits of 40-85 degrees Celsius for the He partial retention zone) will allow examination of the exhumation history of the TAM in more detail from ca 130 Ma to ~20 Ma. Another facet is to examine areas where Cretaceous exhumation is recorded and areas where the fission track profiles indicate periods of thermal and tectonic stability and minimal erosion throughout the Cretaceous. The variation of timing of the onset of more rapid exhumation accompanying uplift and formation of the Transantarctic Mountains in the early Cenozoic will also be examined doc992 none On March 16-19, the Fourteenth Annual National Conference of Black Physics Students (NCBPS) will be held in Greensboro, North Carolina hosted by North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (AT&T). The objective of the NCBPS meeting is to assist an encourage African-American students who have shown interest and ability in physics and astronomy to enter and complete Ph.D. programs, and to initiate research, teaching, or technical careers commensurate with their educational achievement in physics and astronomy. This meeting will enable the undergraduate and graduate attendees of the NCBPS (attendance goal, approximately 165-190 students) to interact with each other as well as with successful minority and non-minority scientists in both a formal and informal environment. The National Society of Black Physics will also be meeting at A&T during the time that the NCBPS will be held and will have overlapping activities for one day of the conference, thereby providing another avenue for these students to interact with Black physicists. Additionally, A&T will bring in approximately 100+ minority public school students and their teachers for one day of the conference. The NCBPS tradition on increased importance as we move toward the new millennium with hopes of meeting the growing challenges of an increasingly technology-driven world doc993 none The goal of this project is to improve the performance of cathodic protection systems for reinforcing steel in concrete structures. Existing data and our current understanding of the following processes will be incorporated within a comprehensive three-dimensional model; (i) the electrochemical kinetics of iron oxidation, oxygen reduction, and water reduction at the concrete rebar interface; (ii) the electrochemical kinetics of zinc anode oxidation, and subsequent reactions of Zn (II) at the concrete-zinc interface; (iii) the transport of oxygen and water through concrete; and (iv) the transport of ions, particularly chloride, through concrete. The model will be applied to investigate strategies for (i) controlling cathodic protection systems to protect the structure, while minimizing consumption of power, consumption of the anode, and generation of H2(gas); (ii) circumventing buildup of electrical resistance at the anode-concrete interface; (iii) facilitating electromechanical migration of chloride away from the rebar; (iv) protection of rebar in all three dimensions doc994 none Under the direction of Dr. Don Rice, Mr. Kevin Schwarz will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will conduct archaeological excavation at sites located on the Quexil Islands and the Quexil and Petenxil Basins in the Lake Peten Itza region of Guatemala. The sites date to the Late Classic (600-800 AD) and Early Postclassic ( - AD) and contain a series of small buildings each likely related to individual domestic units. Mr. Schwarz will conduct broad areal excavations to expose the entire plan of each structure and to determine the distribution of ceramics and other cultural material within. Through analysis of these data it will be possible to gain insight into not only specific activities which were conducted but also the basic social organization of the responsible units. Ethnographic studies of recent and current day Mayan peoples as well as ethnohistoric data indicate that domestic organization varies by ethnic group and that it is possible to determine such affiliation through the analysis of material remains. Mr. Schwarz wishes to examine the degree of population continuity over time and whether new peoples entered this region at the end of the Classic or Postclassic periods. Archaeologists believe that the Mayan civilization reached its apex during the Classic period when large impressive temples and other ceremonial structures were constructed. Individual polities incorporated large numbers of people who were hierarchically structured to make available the large amounts of labor needed for such public works. In the Late Classic and Post Classic periods, a collapse occurred. Large centers were abandoned and population disaggregated into smaller units. In the Peten region settlements were located on peninsulas, islands and other easily defensible areas and this indicates considerable social unrest. It is uncertain in this region whether the change was due primarily to internal dynamics or resulted in part from the appearance of new ethnic groups. Through the analysis of settlement type and its change over time Mr. Schwarz will address this issue. This research will produce data of interest to many archaeologists and assist in training a promising young scientist doc995 none The work will examine the climate dynamics of the Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode (SH AM). Previous results based on an analysis of a coarse resolution coupled ocean-atmosphere model integration have shown that the SH AM has a significant impact on ocean circulation, sea ice thickness, and the total area coverage of ice during winter. As a follow up on their previous work, the PIs will: (i) examine the simulated climate dynamics of the SH AM in non-winter seasons. Since the SH AM weakens only slightly during spring, summer and fall, it is expected that its effect on ocean circulation and sea ice will be similar; and (ii) analyze in detail, the simulated interaction between sea ice and the atmospheric circulation. While the SH AM has a large impact on simulated sea ice variability, evidence suggests that sea ice variations may also affect the atmospheric circulation. The work is important because given recent evidence by Thompson et al. of a trend in the SH AM, results of the research could have important consequences for the global warming debate. A better understanding of how the circumpolar ocean responds to AM-induced changes in the surface westerlies could also be important for understanding changes in ocean biology, the carbon cycle, water mass formation doc936 none This collaborative project between the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the University of New Hampshire addresses an ocean science and fisheries management requirement for improved capabilities for measuring the abundance and distribution of fish and other organisms in the open ocean. Newly available multibeam echo sounders provide the capability to record and analyze acoustic returns on individual beams, which represents a new capability for the ocean research community. A multibeam echo sounder will be tested and calibrated in three venues: fresh-water test tank, sea-well test facility, and in situ on a towed vehicle. The objectives of this calibration exercise are the determination of the on-axis response, sensitivity limits, hence dynamic range, and directivity patterns for each beam. The use of acoustic measurements for fish stock abundance and other research applications has been established, but the potential for measuring the numerical density of fish is difficult without a means of calibrating the system in situ. Results from this sonar calibration project will provide a means for attaining better areal coverage without compromising spatial resolution doc997 none Modeling Material Failure in High Strain Rate Problems R. C. Batra Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University An hyperbolic heat equation along with the equations expressing the balance of mass, linear momentum and moment of momentum for thermoviscoplastic materials will be used to delineate the initiation and propagation of adiabatic shear bands (ASBs) during high strain rate deformations of such materials. An ASB is a narrow region of intense plastic deformation that usually precedes the ductile failure of most metals and some polymers deformed at high strain rates. The heat generated due to plastic deformations of the material, heat conduction and thermal stresses induced will be accounted for. The finite element mesh will be refined adaptively and the time increment used to integrate the coupled nonlinear ordinary differential equations obtained by the Galerkin approximation of the governing equations will be adjusted adaptively so as to compute the stable solution within the prescribed accuracy. The energy dissipation rate within the shear banded material, rate of energy conducted out of the edges of the band, and the energy used to raise the temperature of the shear banded material will be computed during the development of the shear band. Its speed will be ascertained by locating its edges at different times. By modeling an ASB as a singular surface, we will determine its speed of propagation and compare it with that computed above numerically. It should be noted that an ASB is not a wave in the classical sense and it propagates edgewise rather than normal to its surface. This speed will be related to the state of deformation of the material within and adjacent to the edge of the ASB doc998 none A conference on Arctic Development, Pollution and Biomarkers of Human Health will be held in Anchorage, Alaska on May 1-3, . The conference is being organized by The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences National Institute of Health (NIEHS NIH) and the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Prgramme (AMAP). Basic environmental health research is important to protect the health of this region and its people. Pollutants mobilized by ocean streams and air currents move globally and settle in the arctic sink where low volatilization and entrapment in ice and cold water raise concerns about increasing exposures. Furthermore, bioconcentration through the food chain of fat-soluble pollutants makes indigenous population diets susceptible to untoward contamination. The objectives of this conference are to raise awareness of the environmental health issues confronting the Arctic regions and to bring advanced scientific techniques to bear on the issues of exposure assessment and health effects of exposures to environmental agents. The ultimate goal is to better the health of arctic populations through scientifically sound studies assessing possible health hazards from environmental contaminants doc999 none This Americas Program award supports a regional workshop entitled Cell and Molecular Aspects of the Birth, Life and Death of the Nervous System. The workshop is organized by Dr. Lester I. Binder, Northwestern University, and Dr. Ricardo Maccioni, University of Chile, and Dr. Alfredo Caceres, University of Cordoba, and will be held October 4-7, in Pucon, Chile. The general topic is cellular and molecular neuroscience with a specific focus on the cytoskeleton and its role in neural polarity, endocytosis and vesicular trafficking, neurite extension, vesicular transport, signalling events, and neurodegeneration. Scientists from the United States, Latin America, and Europe who are members of the American Society for Cell Biology, the AAAS, and of the Ibero-American Molecular Biology organization (IMBO) will be among the attendees. Graduate students and postdoctoral fellows will constitute a significant number of meeting participants and will present their work in poster sessions. Given the variety of topics and the strengths of the speakers, the workshop is expected to enhance U.S.-Latin American collaboration doc1000 none Ortiz- Using in vitro and in vivo biochemical techniques, we will investigate the molecular components of a novel transcriptional control element that suppresses position-effect-variegation in transgenic mice. This element functions in all tissues analyzed and is a sub-element of the locus control region of the T-cell receptor a d gene locus doc1001 none Salmon populations in the California Current System (CCS), and coho salmon in particular, have been in severe decline since the s, coinciding with the regime shift, and in contrast to record productivity in the Gulf of Alaska. The specific linkages between oceanographic changes and salmon survival in the marine.enviromnent are not well understood. GLOBEC has chosen to compare two regions of the Northern California Current divided by Cape Blanco, Oregon (43 degrees N) where an upwelling jet moves off the shelf. The regions north and south of Cape Blanco differ in intensity and stability of upwelling, temperature, and offshore transport. Evidence indicates that due to the physical conditions, the distribution and production of biota may differ north and south of Cape Blanco, providing the opportunity to compare and contrast the relationship between specific oceanographic processes and biological productivity. The investigators will use process oriented studies to examine mechanistic linkages between the physical and biological processes that are associated with habitat quality critical to recruitment of juvenile salmon. Juvenile coho (Oncorhynchus kisutch) and chinook (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) salmon will be collected along transects between Eureka, CA to Newport, OR during May June and September of and . Sampling efforts will coincide with mesoscale and fine-scale surveys of physical (e.g., location of eddies, fronts, upwelling, offshore transport import; mixed layer depth, sea surface temperature, mixed layer depth) and biological (areas and density of primary and secondary productivity) features within the same regions conducted by other GLOBEC researchers. The salmon investigators will measure the growth rate, size variability, bioenergetic condition, pathogen prevalence and intensity in juvenile salmon as conditions of survival. By correlating indices in the Northern CCS with the trophic relationship studies, they will test the hypotheses that oceanographic features leading to high productivity of lower trophic levels translates to higher growth rates, condition and greater salmon recruitment through bottom-up forces. Also, the degree of correlation between these indices and variations in isotope natural abundances (14C, 13C, 15N) in juvenile salmon will be used to directly test the hypothesis that diet specificity and vertical ocean advection affect juvenile salmon health and condition. The investigators also will compare juvenile coho and chinook slamon growth and condition from different regions of the Northeast Pacific (e.g., Alaska, British Columbia, Washington and northern Oregon) and to the historical record (prior to the last regime shift) where available and applicable. These results will provide information on the relationships between ocean variability and juvenile salmon survival on temporal (interdecadal) and spatial (basin-wide, mesoscale, and local) scales doc1002 none Under the direction of Dr. Michael Jochim, MS Susan Harris will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. The goal of her research is to understand changes in population size during the Mesolithic period in Southwestern Germany. Approximately 10,500 years ago, after the northward retreat of the ice sheets Stone Age foragers across most of Europe developed new types of microlithic stone tools and shifted their focus from hunting large animals (which decreased in number as tundra grassland gave way to boreal forests) to smaller species. Archaeologists believe that the specialized adaptations which developed culminated in the Neolithic Revolution in which plants and animals were first domesticated. During the Mesolithic population apparently increased and this put stress on available food sources thus setting the stage for agricultural innovation. Within this broad context Southwestern Germany stands as an anomaly because apparently some areas were abandoned and others evidence decreased population during Late Mesolithic times. MS Harris wishes to determine whether this pattern is, in fact, real. Because most researchers in this region have focused on well excavated assemblages and ignored more abundant surface sites, MS Harris will analyze this under-utilized data class. She notes that relatively little attention has been paid to these materials because of the difficulties in assigning them to time period. The microlithic tool types which characterize the Late Mesolithic normally form only a small percentage of assemblages and thus, she believes, relevant surface sites may go unrecognized. In preliminary work she has studied well dated materials from securely stratified sites and believes that the Early and Late Mesolithic can be distinguished not only by typology but also be the technology used to manufacture tools. These technological criteria can be applied to sites lacking in diagnostic tool types. With National Science Foundation support she will further refine this analytic approach. She will then conduct a survey to complement prior work in the region and classify sites collected by herself as well as others to assign them to time period. With these data she will then plot site distributions by age and microhabitat to determine density and trace changes over time. The Mesolithic sets the stage for the Neolithic Revolution and the rise of complex society. For this reason it is an important area for scientific research and MS Harris work will not only shed light on one anomalous geographic region but also, hopefully, provide an analytic approach of more general use. It will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc1003 none This project is an extension of the PI s earlier NSF INDOEX project (Curry and Liu: Application of airborne passive microwave measurements for INDOEX, ). Because Airborne Imaging Microwave Radiometer (AIMR) was originally designed for sea ice observations in the polar region, their first task was to assess the suitability of using AIMR for cloud retrievals in the hot environment of INDOEX. Their study showed that the data are of good quality and retrieved values of cloud liquid water path are within the expected range. Therefore, they concluded that these data can be used to conduct research on INDOEX related science issues. The purpose of the present study is to analyze the cloud water characteristics in relation to anthropogenic aerosols using AIMR and other ancillary data collected during INDOEX field experiment. This project supports INDOEX primary scientific objectives by providing information on horizontal distributions of liquid water path and characteristic cloud particle size (together with using airborne visible measurements) for low-level clouds, to aid in the interpretation of the indirect effect of aerosols on the radiative fluxes. This work is important because it will contribute to enhanced understanding of the influence of aerosols on climate change doc1004 none Flat continuous strips of sheet metal, paper, polymers and other thin materials (referred to as webs ) are generally transported under tension and at high speed during production. Stages of web processing include thickness reduction in rolling mills, slitting, coating, printing, and laminating. These materials are wound onto, transported, and stored in the form of large multi-ton rolls. Improvements in their production are restricted to a large degree by mechanics problems associated with precisely moving and winding webs without introducing significant defects. This research project focuses on reducing the stress-induced damage associated with wound roll production. In the presence of unfavorable stresses, rolls of material and the cores onto which they are wound can buckle locally or entirely. At best, such defects are viewed by customers as a sign of poor quality, and at worst, they require the entire roll to be scrapped. Failure modes describe complete mechanical instability and are often termed V-buckling, sag collapse, starring, and spoking. A predictive model is being developed for the stress field within wound rolls which accounts for realistic complicating effects that have not previously been studied. The research identifies the roles played by such manufacturing process parameters as tension, speed, roll width, web and core material properties, surface roughness of the web material, core stiffness, and mandrel or core chuck design. The results are being used to guide the development of engineering solutions for controlling and improving the stability and quality of wound rolls during their production doc1005 none This grant provides support for a symposium entitled Environmental Applications of Ionizing Radiation for the purpose of synthesizing the existing knowledge on the application of ionizing radiation, gamma radiation and electron beams, to environmental treatment processes. The symposiun will be held in conjunction with the International Chemical Congress of Pacific Basin Societies (Pacifichem ) in December . The Congress is sponsored jointly by the American Chemical Society, the Canadian Society for Chemistry, the Chemical Society of Japan, the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry and the Royal Australian Chemical Institute. The symposium, a sequel to the successful symposium held during Pacifichem , is being organized by Dr. William J. Cooper, University of North Carolina Wilmington. A major output of the symposium will be the identification of research needs in the field of environmental applications of ionizing radiation. This grant will support transportation, lodging and registration costs of invited participants from the United States doc1006 none It is clear that the technological power of high throughput sequencing has revolutionized our capabilities to examine the biochemical intricacies of organisms at the genomic level. This is best represented by the remarkable achievement of fully sequencing the human genome two years earlier than projected. Projects are now underway to fully sequence the mouse, maize, rice and numerous other biomedically important microbial genomes. In addition, during the last five years we have seen over 25 microbial genomes fully sequences with over 95 currently underway. Most of these organisms are of biomedical importance. Over the past 15 years we have begun to understand more about the diversity, distribution, and evolution of free-living bacteria. Environmental microbiology, like its sister fields, has greatly benefited from the rapid development in molecular biological technology. Numerous microbial phylogenetic studies from a range of environments have revealed that less that 1% of the bacteria have been successfully cultivated. While we now know something about what individuals make up these unique microbial communities, we have very little information about what they are doing or are capable of doing. The recent development of high throughput genomic sequencing technology and microarray expression screening provides us with the opportunity to discover the metabolic capacity of bacteria that have eluded cultivation and to better understand how bacteria interact under the constraints of their environment. The field of marine environmental genomics is in its infancy but has the potential to unleash an unprecedented wave of information critical to understanding microbial systems in the marine environment. Advancements in this area are currently suppressed due to the lack of accessibility to the current technology. The technology required is extremely costly and is certainly out of the range of the individual investigator. Here the scientists will convene a task group of investigators from the marine microbial arena to discuss the direction the community should take in microbial genomics. Inclusion of industrial components to this workshop is essential in hopes that a partnership could be forged that would provide continued access to the developing technology doc811 none This study will conduct a survey along the Easter Salas-y-Gomex Nazca (ESN) trail tobetter characterize and constrain movement of the hotspot over the last 25 to 30 Ma. The survey will involve geochronologic, geochemical, and geophysical study of seamounts and volcanic ridges. Multibeam bathymetric data and backscatter imagery will be used to define topography and structural features at selected localities and identify targets for dredging. Dredged samples will be dated using 40Ar-39Ar technique and their petrological, chemical and Nd-Pb-Sr isotopic chracteristics will be determined. The new data will be combined with re-analyses of existing samples to test Nazca-hotspot motion and mantle flow models and compare them to Pacific-hotspot models doc604 none An integrated multi-institutional effort of multi-scale seismic imaging of the Mariana Subduction Factory (MSF). The PIs will conduct multi-channel seismic reflection profiling, controlled-source wide-angle reflection refraction profiling and passive recording of local and teleseismic earthquakes through OBS deployment to be carried out with Japanese investigators. The data will provide a comprehensive velocity and attenuation, structural and stratigraphic image of the MSF. The principal objectives of the study are to understand: 1) velocity and attenuation structure of the mantle, 2) large-scale flow of the mantle wedge, 3) velocity structure of the subducting oceanic crust, 4) seismic stratigraphy and structure of the forearc, arc and remnant arc, 5) the magma chamber below the volcanoes, 6) a possible double seismic zone, and 7) updip an downdip limits of the seismogenic zone. The study will also help in the planning and eventual drilling in the Mariana island arc system doc1009 none El-Shall Description: This award is for support of a US-Egypt Workshop on Advanced Materials to be held in Cairo, Egypt, September 24-28, . The US organizer is Dr. Samy El-Shall, Professor of Chemistry, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia. The Egyptian co-organizer is Dr. Sherif Eissa, President of the National Research Center in Cairo. The purposes of the workshop are to discuss jointly selected important topics in materials sciences and to identify specific areas where research collaboration will be mutually beneficial. Individual workshop sessions will be dedicated to: nanostructured and nanocomposite materials, smart materials and self-assembly, thin films, and high performance materials (magnetic, photonics, molecular electronics). The final session of the workshop will be devoted to discussions of conclusions and future plans. The proceedings will highlight areas recommended for collaborative research. Scope: This award will support a US-Egypt workshop in an area that is increasing in importance both in the United States and in Egypt. The development of suitable materials for various applications is crucial for developments in industry, environmental management, housing, and in health service delivery. The workshop participants will not only assess the current status of the field of advanced materials, but also will discuss cooperative research and joint projects between American and Egyptian scientists and engineers, and will discuss the technological and economic impacts of these projects. Participants from both countries represent academia, government, and the private sector. The Egyptian coorganizer is the president of the primary government research organization in that country. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting US-foreign scientific collaboration in areas of mutual benefit. Funding for this project is provided by the Division of International Programs, through the US-Egypt Joint Fund program, and by the Division of Materials Research doc1010 none Yankovsky The PIs propose a study of various aspects of shelf circulation in the presence of coastal upwelling. Their approach is to conduct further analysis using data collected and analyzed as part of a prior award. The data are from an experiment on the continental shelf in the Middle Atlantic Bight and included measurements from moored instruments, repeated ship surveys, drifters and coastal radar. The goals are: to examine the cross-shelf pathway of upwelled water; to determine the structure of the mass budget and, in particular, to determine whether it is 2D or 3D; to determine the potential vorticity budget; and to determine the tidally rectified flow doc868 none A field program is designed to determine the dynamics of the three-dimensional wind driven flow and its impact on the sea surface temperature in the eastern Pacific. The objective is to suggest a revised theory for the North Equatorial Counter Current (NECC) by testing several hypotheses involving a modification to linear Sverdrup theory and the role of the NECC in controlling the location and magnitude of the eastern Pacific warm pool. A two-ship survey will be conducted together with the deployment of surface drifters during the seasonal maximum of the NECC to measure the current, temperature and salinity structure of the upper ocean. The project is contribution to the Climate variability and Predictability Program (CLIVAR) and collaborative with Mexican scientists doc1012 none This award is for support of a study of the post-glacial carbon cycle as a non-steady state system, where carbon includes the two stable isotopes 12C and 13C, coupled to the nutrient cycles of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P), in the four major domains of the Earth s surface system: land, atmosphere, coastal zone, and open ocean (including the sediments of these latter two domains). The project is a collaborative one between the University of Hawaii (Mackenzie) and Northwestern University (Lerman). The work will be based on the modeling approach that the principal investigators developed and used with some success in the study of the coupled carbon-nitrogen-phosphorus-sulfur cycles in the past 300 years, when the system was subjected to human environmental forcings and a rise in temperature. A new model of the four domains and coupled C-N-P biogeochemical cycles for the analysis of the longer period since the LGM (last glacial maximum) to the start of the Industrial Age will include past changes and spatial distributions of 13C (effectively separating the carbon cycle into the 12C and 13C cycles), and modifications of the numbers and structure of the reservoirs within the system, and the kinetic parameters. These fundamental feature changes should allow close approximation of the major changes of the Earth s surface system in that period of time doc1013 none This study tests the hypothesis that along a rocky coastline nearshore topographically generated secondary circulation affects the cross-shelf dispersal of the larvae of coastal organisms. Secondary circulation may isolate the waters within a small bay from the more offshore waters and my prevent larvae from dispersing out into the coastal waters. Alternatively, it could prevent larvae that have developed in the coastal waters from returning to settlement sites on the shore. These possibilities will be investigated, as well as the underlying patterns and mechanisms. This study would be the first test of these hypotheses. Physical oceanography and concurrent larval distributions associated with topographically generated secondary circulation will be described at sites along the Oregon coast. CTD transects will be taken extending from the beach through the secondary circulation front and out into the coastal waters. Transects of vertical plankton tows will be made concurrently with the CTD sampling to describe the distribution of meroplankton. By affecting larval dispersal, this small-scale circulation could bring about variations in the settlement and recruitment of larvae to the shore. At Sunset Bay, abundance and settlement of cyprids and mussels will be measured at mooring sites across the front at the mouth of the bay. Following the accumulation of animals on settlement plates and brushes will monitor settlement doc1014 none The California Current System (CCS) owes its high phytoplankton productivity to wind-driven circulation patterns that bring nutrient?rich waters to the surface. These high rates of primary productivity are translated via high zooplankton secondary productivity, into high biomass of epipelagic fishes such as anchovies, hake, and salmon. Further, spatial patterns of high primary and secondary productivity are heterogeneous and appear to be closely linked to mesoscale physical structures (e.g., filaments, jets, and eddies). Using a series of linked physical ecosystern zooplankton models, this study will examine the complex interaction of physical and biological processes (diel vertical migration and growth efficiency) in the CCS on seasonal and interannual time?scales. Major calanoid copepods (e.g., Calanus pacificus and Metridia pacifica) and euphausiid species (e.g., Euphausia pacifica and Thysanoessa spinifera) that represent critical linkages between primary production and salmon populations will be emphasized. In addition, the roles of these processes will be further illuminated through comparative studies with other ecosystems located within both similar and dissimilar dynamical environments. The goal of this study is to address the following questions: How does the circulation field impact the distribution and population success of major CCS zooplankton species such as C. pacificus, M. pacifica, E. pacifica, and T. spinifera? How do the behavioral and bioenergetic differences of these species interact with the circulation field, prey distribution and temperature to influence their relative population success? How does the interannual variability of the local environment (e.g., from large?scale atmospheric or oceanic fluctuations) modify these distributions and relative success of major CCS zooplankton species? How do physical and biological aspects of the CC Zooplankton System compare to other well?studied ecosystems including those of particular interest to GLOBEC (e.g., Georges Bank, Gulf of Alaska, and Southern Ocean)? The results of this study will include the developed ecosystem and zooplankton models, applied within regional and basin?scale circulation models. The coupled systems will be analyzed under seasonal and realistic surface forcing closely tied to CCS process studies. Furthermore, a comparative synthesis of physical and biological coupling within this and other well?studied GLOBEC ecosystems will begin doc1014 none The California Current System (CCS) owes its high phytoplankton productivity to wind-driven circulation patterns that bring nutrient?rich waters to the surface. These high rates of primary productivity are translated via high zooplankton secondary productivity, into high biomass of epipelagic fishes such as anchovies, hake, and salmon. Further, spatial patterns of high primary and secondary productivity are heterogeneous and appear to be closely linked to mesoscale physical structures (e.g., filaments, jets, and eddies). Using a series of linked physical ecosystern zooplankton models, this study will examine the complex interaction of physical and biological processes (diel vertical migration and growth efficiency) in the CCS on seasonal and interannual time?scales. Major calanoid copepods (e.g., Calanus pacificus and Metridia pacifica) and euphausiid species (e.g., Euphausia pacifica and Thysanoessa spinifera) that represent critical linkages between primary production and salmon populations will be emphasized. In addition, the roles of these processes will be further illuminated through comparative studies with other ecosystems located within both similar and dissimilar dynamical environments. The goal of this study is to address the following questions: How does the circulation field impact the distribution and population success of major CCS zooplankton species such as C. pacificus, M. pacifica, E. pacifica, and T. spinifera? How do the behavioral and bioenergetic differences of these species interact with the circulation field, prey distribution and temperature to influence their relative population success? How does the interannual variability of the local environment (e.g., from large?scale atmospheric or oceanic fluctuations) modify these distributions and relative success of major CCS zooplankton species? How do physical and biological aspects of the CC Zooplankton System compare to other well?studied ecosystems including those of particular interest to GLOBEC (e.g., Georges Bank, Gulf of Alaska, and Southern Ocean)? The results of this study will include the developed ecosystem and zooplankton models, applied within regional and basin?scale circulation models. The coupled systems will be analyzed under seasonal and realistic surface forcing closely tied to CCS process studies. Furthermore, a comparative synthesis of physical and biological coupling within this and other well?studied GLOBEC ecosystems will begin doc1016 none The goal of this Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) is to apply utility theory to engineering design, including the consideration of uncertainty. An aim is to address computational complexity using an efficient simulation technique referred to as Optimal Computing Budget Allocation. This algorithm seeks to identify the optimal design under uncertainty through the elimination of undesired designs with minimal information, thereby obviating the need to do extensive computations on all design alternatives. If successful, this method should provide a design framework that is flexible enough to address a wide variety of engineering design situations, and the method should provide a new set of design tools that explicitly incorporate uncertainty, while taking advantage of advancements in modeling and computing technology doc859 none A process study called the Eastern Pacific Investigation of Climate Processes in the Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere System (EPIC) is proposed to study the behavior of the atmosphere and ocean in that region. The goals of the oceanographic component of EPIC are to describe, understand and quantify the evolution of the major oceanic structures and processes in the upper ocean under the deep convection region of the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) in order to improve regional models and ultimately gain better prediction of annual and interannual climate variability. Measurements will include mesoscale velocity temperature and salinity using expendable profilers dropped from aircraft, small scale velocity, temperature and salinity fields with a shipboard ADCP and continuous Seasoar sections, velocity microstructure and temperature, salinity and velocity finestructure by continuous microstructure profiling from a ship on station at 10 N, 95 W and radiometric and bio-optical profiles at various locations along 95 W doc859 none A process study called the Eastern Pacific Investigation of Climate Processes in the Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere System (EPIC) is proposed to study the behavior of the atmosphere and ocean in that region. The goals of the oceanographic component of EPIC are to describe, understand and quantify the evolution of the major oceanic structures and processes in the upper ocean under the deep convection region of the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) in order to improve regional models and ultimately gain better prediction of annual and interannual climate variability. Measurements will include mesoscale velocity temperature and salinity using expendable profilers dropped from aircraft, small scale velocity, temperature and salinity fields with a shipboard ADCP and continuous Seasoar sections, velocity microstructure and temperature, salinity and velocity finestructure by continuous microstructure profiling from a ship on station at 10 N, 95 W and radiometric and bio-optical profiles at various locations along 95 W doc1019 none Under the direction of Dr. William Longacre MS Margaret Beck will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. She will examine ceramic use, discard and post-discard alteration of pottery manufactured by Kalinga speaking peoples of northern Luzon, Philippines. The groups in this region live in villages of 50-90 households and support themselves largely irrigated rice farming. Two such villages continue to produce ceramic vessels for cooking, drinking water and food storage despite the increasing availability and popularity of metal and plastic containers. Thus they offer the opportunity to examine the use of an artifact class which has been employed by humans for over 10,000 years and which constitutes an important category of material excavated from many archaeological sites. MS Beck s work builds on a series of projects conducted in the region by both Dr. Longacre and a series of prior graduate students. The primary goal of her research is to see how well-known patterns of use alteration on modern Kalinga ceramics are altered or disguised during burial within a Kalinga archaeological site. Because ceramics are altered during use, archaeologists can study such characteristics as abrasion on the inside and outside of vessels or charring in an attempt to reconstruct function. However both cultural and natural processes can affect vessels and vessel fragments, potentially altering or obscuring the evidence of use. Post-use alterations must be correctly identified before use alteration can be evaluated. While MS Beck will examine vessel use, her work will focus on the factors which affect ceramics after their discard. She will study the process of trash midden accumulation and excavate discarded ceramics of varying age. Four basic classes of ceramic modification will be studied: 1. Acid leaching or iron leaching; 2. removal of exterior and interior carbon; 3. abrasion; and 4. fragmentation and dispersion. Natural alterations of vessel fragments will be reproduced experimentally to better understand and predict the conditions under which they occur. Because ceramics were widely used prehistorically and preserve well in many archaeological contexts, they constitute a significant class of artifact recovered during archaeological excavation. Some projects yield literally tons of sherds and therefore researchers wish to extract the maximum possible amount of information from them. MS Beck has recognized that post discard processes can significantly complicate and bias this process and her research will provide insights and guidelines of widespread archaeological use. The project will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc1020 none This project aims to research an innovative subsurface sensor capable of simultaneously deep penetration and excellent range and azimuth resolutions for fast, reliable, and accurate assessment of pavement structures, such as measuring layer thickness and depth of bedrock, detecting voids and foreign objects, and inspection of thick concrete pavements. The new sensor will be based on the principles of pulse compression and synthetic array antenna, a unique combination for achieving both deep penetration and fine resolutions. The sensor will be realized using microwave integrated circuits for small size, low cost, and high performance. Three major tasks will be conducted: research and development of an innovative subsurface sensor, fabrication of laboratory test specimens and field test sites, and test and evaluation of the new sensor. Currently, there is no system available to civil engineers that can simultaneously provide very deep penetration and excellent range and azimuth resolution capabilities needed for complete and accurate nondestructive evaluation of pavement structures. The proposed sensor has these capabilities, and hence will provide unprecedented solutions to pavement problems that currently cannot be solved with existing sensors. It will therefore lead to significant performance improvements in the evaluation of pavements - not to mention important cost reduction in pavement monitoring, maintenance, and rehabilitation activities. This research will also pave the way for future research and developments of further advanced sensor technologies for civil engineering research. The research proposed will therefore have a strong impact on a number of current and future applications of civil engineering using sensor technologies doc1021 none Ghaly The proposed research agenda stresses understanding, at the molecular level, the effects of processing on critical quality attributes of pharmaceutical products and on minimizing validation requirements through improved process monitoring. Representative research projects will include improved process monitoring technology, blending of pharmaceutical powders, application of Near-IR to pharmaceutical testing, solid state properties, formulations development, extruder marumerizar technology, compaction process, innovative analytical methods for validation, dissolution and bio-availability, tablets coating and disperse systems doc1022 none Kezunovic This proposal expresses the intent of Texas A&M University (TAMU) to join the Power Systems Engineering Research Center (PSerc). To emphasize this intent, the following issues are discussed: benefits of TAMU s participation in PSerc, benefits of participation of TAMU s industry partners, proposed research areas, proposed research projects, TAMU s support of the proposal, and site director credentials. The main objective of TAMU s participation in PSerc is to enhance research capabilities of both PSerc and TAMU. This will in turn provide the research infrastructure that will serve better PSerc industry partners as well as the public at large as the benefactors of the developments in the industrial base doc1023 none Shoureshi The goal of the Pserc Center at the Colorado School of Mines will be to integrate advances from power systems, control theory, artificial intelligence, diagnostics, new sensor-technologies, etc. to assist the electric utility industry in facing these new challenges. The research, which is complementary to those of the other Pserc sites, will focus on the following topics: Development of Intelligent Substation; Advanced Power Generation Control with Integrated Economics, Variable Demands and Short-Term Load Forecast; Development of Advanced Sensors and Sensory Feedback Systems for Increased Reliability and Lower Maintenance Cost; Predictive Maintenance for Reduction of Operating Cost; Development of Remote Health Assessment Techniques T and EMAT Based Diagnostics of Overhead Transmission Lines doc1024 none An investigation of the Seismic Behavior of Retrofitted Steel Frame-Infill Masonry Walls Using Fiberglass Composite Laminates is underway at Drexel University; this investigation is funded by the National Science Foundation. This investigation includes experimental and analytical work. The funds requested are to purchase a 110-k actuator needed to perform the experimental work. The Structural-testing laboratory at Drexel University houses a newly built test bed and reaction wall, which was built from funds, provided by NSF in . A two channel static and dynamic MTS loading system is available in the laboratory, which was partially funded by NSF in . For efficient testing, an 110,000 lbs. Actuator is needed. It is to be noted that acquiring this medium load actuator will significantly improve our ability to perform static and dynamic testing doc1025 none It is now well recognized that shape-memory materials derive their unusual and inherently nonlinear and anisotropic properties from the fine-scale rearrangements of phases, or ``microstructures, and that the strain produced in the pseudoelasticity effect, as well as that recovered during the shape-memory effect, depends on crystal orientations. Specially oriented single crystals of some shape memory materials can produce sizeable strains (~ 10%) due to phase transformations. Practical shape-memory materials are typically polycrystalline in nature, and because of their thermo-mechanical processing history, they are initially textured. It has recently been recognized that the initial crystallographic texture of sheets, wires and rods of shape-memory alloys is crucial in determining the overall properties of these materials. The pronounced anisotropies caused by the initial texture need to be properly accounted for in developing a robust computational capability for the improved design of geometrically-complex engineering components made from shape memory materials. We shall Experimentally study the effects of initial texture on the thermo-mechanical response of the shape-memory alloy Ti-Ni, in both bulk form, and thin films. This material is finding increased use as a functional smart-material for a variety of applications. Ti-Ni alloys in thin-film form are promising materials for microactuators, because of the enhanced rate of heat transfer in thin films. Develop constitutive equations and computational procedures for modeling and simulation of the important pseudoelasticity and shape-memory effects observed in these materials. The mathematical models and procedures that we plan to develop should be useful in the design of components for enhanced thermo-mechanical performance doc1026 none Vaezy This project will investigate the real-time visualization of high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) therapy, using diagnostic ultrasound imaging. HIFU is a therapeutic energy modality, capable of destroying tissues and cells in a few seconds, providing a method of treatment for benign and malignant tumors. Due to the penetration capability of ultrasound, HIFU can be focused to a deep-seated region of tissue to treat tumors in a non-invasive approach. The intervening tissue layers, where the ultrasound beam is unfocused and thus has low intensity, are spared from treatment. What remains to be integrated with this therapeutic modality is a method of targeting and monitoring to provide guidance and assessment of the treatment. The key component of a successful non-invasive application of HIFU is real-time visualization of the treatment site of HIFU to achieve image-guided therapy. Visualization of HIFU treatment site (focal point of HIFU) can be done in real-time, using commercial medical ultrasound imaging systems. While this system allows the determination that ultrasound imaging is capable of visualizing HIFU focus, a complete integration of HIFU and ultrasound imaging systems is required to investigate the real-time visualization in complex image settings and therapeutic requirements. The integration will be achieved using electronically-controlled HIFU and an ultrasound imaging system with open-architecture structure. First Aim is to develop an ultrasound imaging system for real-time visualization of HIFU treatment. Second Aim is to calibrate and test the integrated system in-vitro (phantom and excised animal tissue). Third Aim is to determine the physical and biological mechanisms involved in visualization of HIFU treatment site. The results of the proposed project will provide the technological knowledge that would permit the development of image-guided HIFU therapy systems. The research proposed here will also provide a knowledge base on the complex interactions of physical mechanisms of high intensity ultrasound with biological media doc1027 none The Nanogate is a mechanism that creates and precisely maintains nano-meter level channel openings. This is accomplished by anchoring a cantilever beam at one end, then pivoting about a fulcrum surface; this creates an opening between the beam and an anvil. As part of an NSF exploratory research grant, a prototype was constructed from simply machined parts. In the prototype, 1 micron edge displacement of a 50mm silicon wafer pivoted abound a 15mm diameter anvil resulted in a 50nm gap opening. A diamond turned Nickel plated aluminum structure with 10nm surface finish is currently made for testing; the resulting small annular gap from the new design will allow control of gas flow rates on the order of 1e-12 moles sec. This research will further develop the Nanogate mechanism and use it to precisely meter molecular flows and study the physics of such flows. This work will result in a new class of instrumentation tools which will enable fundamental experimentation of basic physical phenomena related to fluid flow in very small gaps. Examples of questions that may be answered are: (1)How do molecules behave when a single layer is pulled apart to create force displacement data? and (2) Why does apparent viscosity increase when the gap gets smaller and how does the boundary behave when one fluid pushes another? The answers to these questions and the enabling instrumentation that are proposed to be developed will have profound influence on areas of high technological importance such as the life sciences, in particular biophysics and biochemistry, energy handling systems such as microengines and micropumps, and new, more accurate metrology calibration procedures doc1028 none The main objectives of this two-year project are to build a functioning digital library of reusable instructional and learning materials for undergraduate level science and to use the library as a testbed to address several important research issues in the evolution and use of digital libraries. The project represents a collaboration between the COLLEGIS Research Institute (CRI), the Instructional Management System (IMS) Project, the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (UNCW), the ACM SIGGRAPH Education Committee s Digital Library (SECDL), the institutions that comprise the Computer Science Teaching Center (CSTC), and EDUCAUSE. The library content includes diverse undergraduate science-education resources coming initially from the members of the collaboration. The high quality digital resources provided by these groups range from primary source materials, such as datasets and images, to Java applets and visualization tools, to complex simulations and structured curriculum fragments. They also span a wide range of subjects from Earth sciences to pure mathematics. The library is adopting the IMS standards being created to represent instructional and learning materials in a platform-independent, reusable way. Specifically, library content is being described using IMS metadata to provide a testbed for the IMS standards. The IMS metadata is being extended as necessary to cover the diverse material being tagged. The main tasks of the project are to construct an initial version of the library, called XXDL, to incorporate the diverse content of the project partners into the library, to establish the procedures by which the resources are catalogued and reviewed independently, and to grow the library user community. The main tasks of the second year include a broad evaluation of the effectiveness of the XXDL and a more focused investigation of the roles, costs, and benefits of using the standardized IMS metadata for tagging the data. The expectation is that IMS should provide superior indexing because it has been designed expressly to characterize instructional and learning content and because the use of standards should ensure that all content catalogers apply a uniform descriptive schema to diverse learning resources. It is anticipated that XXDL users will benefit by having powerful and predictable tools with which to find appropriate learning and instructional materials. In addition to providing a stress test of the IMS metadata, the project should have several additional broad impacts. It directly benefits undergraduate science faculty who use the library to develop improved digital course materials. It also helps faculty to create collaborative communities to share and reuse learning resources. The evaluation of XXDL helps library developers understand how to design more effective digital libraries and online communities that encourage reuse of learning materials and collaboration. The XXDL testbed can be used for future focused investigations of digital library issues doc1029 none We present a new approach based upon the flexibility method to solve nonlinear structural problems using a large increment method (LIM). The idea is built upon using a nonlinear material model without the need for linearization and a step-by-step approach. This is accomplished by separating the physical equations from the equilibrium and compatibility equations, and utilizing the theory of the generalized inverse of a matrix. The proposed work consists of four main research initiatives to address the areas of investigation. The first initiative involves formulating the LIM within a finite element framework. Although emphasis will be placed on structural framing elements, formulations for plate and shell elements will also be developed. With this in place, the method will then be extended to incorporate inelastic behavior. Both time-dependent and thermally-dependent constitutive models will be considered. The third initiative relates to the extension of LIM to large displacement and large deformation problems. Finally, the fourth research thrust concerns development of the method for parallel computation. We emphasize that the methodology proposed is inherently suitable for parallel computations. Since this represents a new approach for solving structural problems, there are significant technical challenges that must be met to accomplish the research objectives. However, the potential contribution is significant. One immediate application of LIM in civil engineering would be for analysis of 3-D frame structures undergoing plastic hinge formation at extreme loads doc1030 none The PIs will use a fully coupled atmosphere-ocean-land surface biosphere model to investigate the response of the tropical climate system to an increased concentration of CO2. They will study feedbacks among the atmosphere, ocean and land surface biophysical processes in the tropics and determine how the multi-component interaction affects the structure of the climate trend fingerprint. They will also investigate how global warming affects climate variability, such as El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Tropical Atlantic Oscillation (TAO). They will assess the impact of the change of tropical climate and climate variability on the tropical continents. In the Pacific region, the focus is on ocean-atmosphere interactions, while in the Atlantic region, the focus is on land-ocean-atmosphere interactions. The PIs will couple the NCAR CSM (T31 version) with the Lund-Potsdam-Jena (LPJ) land surface biosphere model. While maintaining the major climatic features of the standard NCAR CSM, the CSM-T31 is much more computationally efficient than the T42 version. The LPJ is an efficient dynamic vegetation model that can be used to simulate climate-biosphere interactions. This computationally efficient atmosphere-ocean-land biosphere model will be used to study the changes of both the climate mean state and climate variability at interannual to interdecadal time scales, as well as the impact of these changes on terrestrial ecosystems. The work is important because it will enhance understanding of the coupled land-atmosphere-ocean climate system on interannual to interdecadal scales doc1031 none The underlying mechanisms that cause low-frequency fluctuations in the skill of El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) forecasts are not fully understood. The PIs will conduct a detailed investigation of the hypothesis that internal variability of the atmosphere acts as a stochastic forcing on the coupled system, and gives rise to decadal modulations of ENSO. They will perform long-term perfect-model scenario forecast experiments, using an intermediate coupled model, forced with a variety of noise realizations in a range of dynamical regimes. The work is important because it will increase understanding of the ENSO system. Improved ability to predict ENSO has major societal benefits doc1032 none Hudetz The goal of this proposal is to determine if the distribution of red blood cell (RBC) flow in the cerebral cortical capillary network is altered during functional activation of the brain cortex and if nitric oxide (NO) from neuronal NO synthase participates in this response. The investigator hypothesis is that a change in distribution of RBC flow rates toward a more homogeneous perfusion in the capillary network occurs during neuronal activation and is significant for the maintenance of tissue oxygen supply. The investigator further hypothesize that nitric oxide (NO) from neuronal (Type I) NOS is critically involved in RBC flow regulation at the single capillary level. These hypotheses will be tested using a cross-disciplinary approach. Experiments will be performed by direct observation of the cerebral cortical capillary circulation in vivo using fluorescence video-microscopy in rodents. RBC velocity, RBC supply rate (RBC flux) will be measured from sequential video images. Three-dimensional architecture of the capillary network will be reconstructed using computer software developed in the investigator s laboratory. Neuronal activation will be performed by physiological stimulation of the whisker barrel cortex and by transcranial electrical stimulation. Changes in distribution of RBC perfusion in the capillary network upon neuronal activation will be assessed. The postulated role of neuronal NO in the regulation of intranetwork RBC flow distribution will be tested using models with pharmacological inhibition of NO synthase (NOS) systems, NO donors and in mice with targeted disruption of the neuronal NOS (nNOS) gene. Mathematical modeling of oxygen transport from capillary segments based on measured RBC flow data will be performed to estimate the significance of capillary flow distribution changes for O2 transport during functional activation. These studies will advance our knowledge of the fundamental cellular mechanism of neuronal activity-blood flow coupling at the microvascular level which is essential to better understand both normal neurobiology and the underlying mechanism of functional brain imaging doc1033 none Lajtha This U.S.-Hungary research project involves a long-term study of controls on soil organic matter formation or Detritus Input and Removal Treatments (DIRT) at three established sites in the United States and one in Hungary. Kate Lajtha of Oregon State University serves as the U.S. principal investigator in cooperation with her Hungarian counterpart, Janos Atilla Toth of Kossuth University in Debrecen. The goal of DIRT is to assess how rates and sources of plant litter inputs control the accumulation and dynamics of organic matter and nutrients in forest soils over decadnal time scales. The U.S.-Hungarian research team intends to examine processes at multiple levels in the soil to explore the chemical and biological interconnections that lead to formation of humic materials over long time spans. Of special interest is the stabilization and retention of soil organic carbon (C) and inorganic and organic nitrogen (N) because soil organic matter decomposition processes appear to influence global carbon sequestration. The Hungarian Sikfokut long-term ecological research site that joins the U.S.-based effort via this project is a temperate deciduous oak forest located in Eger, Hungary. It brings a European site to the effort that has vegetation similar to participating eastern U.S. forest sites, yet one that exhibits significantly higher nitrogen inputs. Thus, cooperative research with Hungarian counterparts at Sikfokut offers a unique opportunity to test hypotheses in a structurally similar system with extreme N input and forest floor chemistry. The planned collaboration has three foci: a) an analysis of the controls on N dynamics and leaching; b) analysis of carbon dynamics due to interacting mechanisms of formation, stabilization, destabilization; and c) field soil respiration measurements. Results are expected to shed new light on the pathways of N and C sequestration and loss, across a large climatic and pollution history gradient. This cross-continental study of soil dynamics fulfills the program objectives of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc1034 none This award provides funding to Ann Becker and Associates, Inc. (ABA) to assist with the planning of the Directorate for Engineering, Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Workshop which will be held at the National Science Foundation on Friday, April 28, doc1035 none Several morphogenetic gradients have been shown to pattern the early Drosophila embryo. Bicoid patterns head, thorax and abdomen through the specific activation of zygotic genes that direct proper development along the antero-posterior axis. However at least two other systems hunchback (hb) and caudal (cad), appear to also play important roles in the embryo. These two genes may represent the ancestral patterning system of insects whose function has been partially taken over by Bicoid in Drosophila. One of the problems in uncovering the role of these genes is the high level of redundancy and of cross-interactions among the different maternal systems. We propose to analyze the morphogenetic properties of each system in an embryo that is fully responsive to patterning by these molecules, but where all potential interactions redundancy with the other maternal systems have been eliminated. Construction of this embryonic test tube requires that we genetically remove all maternal patterning systems (by generating flies whose germline is mutant for bicoid, hunchback, caudal, nanos, the terminal and dorso-ventral pathways). In this background, we will provide artificial gradients for each morphogen to be tested. We will first focus our attention on the role of Bicoid, Hunchback and Caudal. Because of the cross-interactions among these systems, it is still unclear whether Bcd has any role on his own, and what the morphogenetic roles of Hb and Cad are. We will also test the ability of Nanos and the terminal system to pattern the embryo. As an extension of this work, we will test the role other molecules that have been proposed to act as morphogens, in particular the gap genes products as well as secreted molecules such as Dpp, Wg and Hh. The function of these molecules has so far been analyzed in situations where an extensive pre-pattern already exists. This work will provide insights into the direct role of critical patterning molecules on cellular events that lead to the determination of positional values in the embryo or, more generally, in other tissues doc1036 none The pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries play a vital role in maintaining and promoting a healthy population, and constitute a major sector of the US economy. These industries have evolved from the empirical treatment of disease to a sophisticated approach for drug development which requires a deeper understanding of the biochemistry of life processes. As a consequence, the accurate description of biomolecular interactions has become a central element in understanding disease mechanisms, and now is an essential ingredient for devising safe and effective pharmaceuticals. A variety of instruments and methods are used to characterize biomolecular interactions. One group of these technologies, used physical first principles for their analysis. These first principle techniques could be used to address a great many needs in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries than they currently do. Meanwhile, the development of prototype instruments and methods for characterizing molecular interactions is being pursued in the academic world. While some of these developments have been commercialized, others, mostly due to their limited market size, have remained prototypes in academic laboratories. These prototypes, while suitable for addressing academic questions, are not optimized for industrial uses, and are housed in laboratories that do not provide the level of security required by industry. Consequently, a barrier to technology transfer has developed. The formation of an NSF Industry University Cooperative Research Center is an ideal mechanism for overcoming this barrier and advancing the field of molecular interaction science doc1037 none SES 00 - - Lee Chambers-Schiller (University of Colorado) Nuclear Workers, Nuclear Town: Los Alamos, New Mexico, -74 The award supports a series of approximately 100 oral histories to be taken over a year s time. The subjects include Los Alamos weapons scientists of the second generation (that is, those who came to the laboratory during the post-war build-up of -54), their spouses, laboratory administrators and non-scientific workers, community leaders, and those who provided professional services or goods to the community. Many of these latter were Hispanics or Native Americans who lived in surrounding communities and commuted to work in Los Alamos. The interviews will be recorded on audiotape by the primary investigator using a largely open-ended format. The basic question underlying the interviews will be: How did the laboratory and its mission shape your work, community and family life? The purpose of these interviews is to provide primary source material for a book on the history of the laboratory and the community of Los Alamos during the early years of the Cold War. An in-depth community study, the project is nevertheless intended to address questions that go beyond the particularity of the Los Alamos experience in order to contribute to historical understanding of the arms race and the impact of weapons science, militarization and security culture on Cold War America doc1038 none The role of iron (Fe) as a limiting agent of biological productivity in marine systems has been studied extensively. Marine prokaryotic organisms are known to maintain the ability to produce siderophore (or at least siderophore-like compounds) in response to Fe-limiting growth conditions. While research analytical techniques can quantify total Fe at incredibly small concentrations and provide information on Fe speciation, we remain without indicators of the biological availability of this Fe to natural communities. To understand the role that Fe plays in global marine productivity, tools techniques for quantifying truly bioavailable iron are needed. Since organisms in aquatic systems can determine their own Fe status, a tool based on the Fe sensing system of a marine organism would be the best. The investigators have developed a genetically engineered microorganism (GEM) with a luminescent reporter that directly responds to Fe bioavailability using the native ferric-uptake-regulator (Fur) protein of a marine bacterium. The researchers will now attempt integration of the reporter into ten other strains of marine bacteria. Laboratory experiments will establish the relationship between Fe bioavailability and light production. Field testing of the GEMs as Fe bioavailability reporters will be conducted on cruises of opportunity in the Sargasso Sea, Lake Erie, and the Peru upwelling region doc1039 none Scranton A National Science Foundation I UCRC on Fundamentals and Applications of Photopolymerizations that will be housed jointly at the University of Iowa and the University of Colorado. The new center is motivated by the fact that photopolymerizations offer tremendous advantages over traditional thermal processing methods, including low energy requirements, spatial and temporal control of initiation, and high polymerization rates. These advantages have led to tremendous growth in applications of photopolymerizations in areas such a solvent-free processing, biomedical materials, and high-technology devices; however, much of this growth is occurring without a fundamental understanding of the underlying photochemical processes. Hence, there is a critical need to establish an active dialogue between academic and industrial researchers. The objective of the center are 1) to advance the fundamental understanding of the kinetics and mechanisms of photopolymerizations; 2) to establish a venue for active discussions and collaborations among industrial and academic researchers; 3) to explore high-risk, cutting-edge research on photopolymerization processes that could lead to technological innovations; and 4) to promote and or develop novel applications that exploit the unique set of advantages offered by photopolymerizations doc1040 none The Association for Women in Science and the National Science Foundation will co-sponsor the Conference, Forum on Women in Science and Technology , one part of the international Beijing Plus Five Conference, New York, . The forum will be held on June 5 6, . Participants will represent members of the scientific and technical communities, members of the President s Interagency Council on Women, various non-governmental organizations, and official delegates from various foreign countries. The goals of the forum are: 1) To clarify the value and importance of science and technology in relation to the relevant critical areas of concern from the Beijing Platform for Action, and increase the visibility of women in science in the global arena and 2) To foster participation and understanding of the scientific community, including professionals and students, in the role they can play in policy initiatives such as Beijing Plus Five. The agenda focuses on issues of women in science and technology as they relate to education and training, health, the economy, power and decision-making, institutional mechanism, and the environment. The format includes major international speakers, breakout groups that focus on particular areas of concern, and the development of lists of action items. An exhibit that includes displays on women and girls in science, female science mentors, science education, and hands-on science material and resources will accompany the various presentations doc1041 none SCHNEPS The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory is developing SportSmarts, a national education campaign that builds on people s fascination with sports. SportSmarts plans to reach children and adults who are unlikely to turn their attention to science by going to the sport to reach audiences in places where sports are played or watched. During this planning phase, the project will: create proof of concept programming; research appropriate sports science content; build networks, partnerships and coalitions; create plans for outreach, evaluation, public relations and financing; and establish strong potential distribution outlets doc1042 none Bhushan Partial support is provided for US participants in a NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) to be held in Hungary during August 13-25 of . The ASI is on Fundamentals of and Bridging the Gap Between Macro- and Micro Nanoscale Tribology . It is designed to encourage interactions between researchers from Eastern Europe and the West for the purpose of exploring new frontiers of research, exchange information, and discuss potential collaborative efforts. It will also provide an opportunity for new researchers to become aware of research and educational opportunities in a broad spectrum of specialties within the field doc390 none Wernicke Lee The western US is an example of a diffuse plate boundary, where the total strain caused by the Pacific-North American relative plate movement is not entirely accommodated by the boundary transform. This project will continue investigations of late Quaternary strain release across the northern Basin and Range province as part of a large effort to understand how strain is partitioned and accommodated at this diffuse plate boundary. Results are expected to lead to better models of the dynamics of Basin and Range faulting and how they relate to the overall plate boundary organization doc1044 none Mahajan The Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Packaging of Microwave, Optical and Digital Electronics (CAMPmode) is completing it s 5th year of operation as an I UCRC. Since its inception the Center has made significant technical accomplishments in it s current focus areas, namely: area array packaging, RF-microwave design methodologies, RF-MEMS and technologies for high yield manufacture of electronics doc1045 none Mahfuz The PI s proposed to apply both the finite element and experimental methods to study the effect of underfill die or underfill substrate adhesion on the solder joint reliability of flip chip packages. This work will be a collaborative effort between researchers at the Tuskegee University Center for Advanced Materials and Auburn University Center for Advanced Vehicle Electronics. For the finite element methods, two conditions, namely, strongly-bonded and weakly-bonded interfaces will be considered. The weakly-bonded interface will be modeled using a set of gap elements at the interface. For modeling the strong interface, a common set of nodes will be employed at the interface which will be shared by both the constituent materials. Results for the die stresses at the underfill interfaces will be correlated with the test chip sensor measurements. Also, the cycles to failure of the solder joints will be predicted using finite element method due to cyclic thermal loads doc1046 none The Particulate Materials Center (PMC), a National Science Foundation I UCRC , is a focal point for interdisciplinary research, education, and technology transfer of particulate materials processing. Particulate materials processing and manufacture is of vital importance to the advanced materials, ceramics, chemical, cosmetic, electronics, image processing, mineral processing, and pharmaceutical industries. Continual technological developments and improved scientific understanding are required to enhance product quality, to reduce process costs and time, and to minimize pollution during manufacture. Powder formation, powder handling and fabrication, particle dispersion, and sintering of shaped products from powders are disciplines of central interest to PMC members doc1047 none Torgersen Educational research supports the critical importance of creating a realistic context in the classroom that is engaging to students. Theories of situated learning, instructional approaches such as anchored instruction, and successful high school, UG geoscience efforts, all recommend that students be engaged in a macro-context that situates learning in the authentic practices of scientists, politicians, and or citizens. This increases the probability that students will detect the usefulness of geoscience knowledge as a tool for solving problems in their own real world; that is, they will detect the information s raison d etre and be able to transfer learning from the classroom to their own lives. In order to 1) provide opportunities to learn, 2) provide the tools to extrapolate from personal experience (the best learning tool) 3) appreciate the scientific economic couplings and feedback loops that affect their daily lives and 4) appreciate the temporal response of coupled systems, and 5) mindfully engage both undergraduate and high school students in construction of understanding concerning coupled dynamic environments across multiple scales (lab water, pond water, and the waters of Long Island Sound), the PIs will acquire and install an Instrumented Environmental Laboratory (InEnLab) at the University of Connecticut. Commercially available environmental probes will be installed in campus ponds that clearly demonstrate (on a daily timescale) the coupled interactions of chem. bio phys within these small, commonplace ponds. The data streams (T, cond., O2, pH, etc., every 15 minutes) from these in situ probes will be directly connected to the Internet and available in real time through (e.g., www.myPond.uconn.edu) modeled after an existing www.mySound.uconn.edu . An anchored problem involving water issues in and around the University community will serve as a context for students to develop, identify and quantify the dynamics of this coupled system. This web-accessible data stream (with scientist diary comments) will then serve as a context for UG and HS classroom problems examples, demonstrations of coupled system dynamics and independent inquiry as well as create unique opportunities for undergraduate honors theses. Such experiences will afford students an opportunity to inter-relate these experiences with observations they make during controlled laboratory experiments that quantify discrete processes and lead to an appreciation of the magnitude and temporal response of environmental systems over larger time scales and larger space scales. Transfer of knowledge will be stimulated by comparison of the processes and time scales in Mirror Pond to Bridgeport Harbor and Long Island Sound using streamed data from www.mySound.uconn.edu. Project management will take a management-by-objectives approach. Formative evaluation dependent measures will include completion of objectives and timelines, online website statistics, instructor variables (implementation fidelity) and student variables (knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors including interest, self-efficacy, and geoscience content achievement). Formative evaluation methods will include teacher and student surveys, artifacts of student problem solving on the scenario, course grades, teacher interviews and student interviews. The formative evaluation will be conducted by project team members and the summative by an external evaluator doc1048 none Perkins The primary goal of this project is to create a University of North Dakota (UND) Geoscience Digital Image Library (GeoDIL). This library will follow the mission outlined by the Digital Library for Earth System Education ( ): it will serve educators and students of all types, at all grade levels, and in all locations . Users will access the system via a standard point and click Web page interface. GeoDIL will intuitively easy to use, both for the public and librarians. It will contain an archive of 10,000 high-quality, well-documented images after two years. A sophisticated search engine will allow users to browse the library and to load selected images into virtual carousels for viewing at remote locations. Educators and researchers around the globe will have access to a wealth of well-documented visual information that otherwise would most likely be unavailable to them. GeoDIL will be a resource for educators at all levels. It will be a visual learning environment that provides an opportunity for excitement to K-16 students and instructors. They will use it to explore the Earth, to make connections between different processes and materials, and to develop ideas about the Earth system. It will be especially useful for small schools or colleges that do not have well-developed teaching materials. GeoDIL will support research by facilitating virtual field trips and by providing fundamental information and field data to people stuck in a library or laboratory. GeoDIL will also allow the public to explore geology and selected Earth system phenomena in a way not previously available. The library will enhance scientific and technological understanding and permit better understanding of the Earth system s science. GeoDIL will consist of an ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) compliant relational database with a custom-designed World Wide Web interface. The database will be invisible to all users. Much of the initial project activity will be database creation and interface software design. A second goal of this project is to design this Web-based interactive library so that it can serve as a model for others. Technical information about GeoDIL (hardware, software, system requirements, etc.) will be available for people engaged in other digital image projects. GeoDIL will be one of the first rooms in comprehensive federated digital libraries, as they are developed. We will design it to be consistent with guidelines developed by DLESE and other community library efforts. It will connect seamlessly with the Geoscience Digital Library and other comprehensive libraries. This project is a joint project between the UND s Department of Geology, Energy and Environmental Research Center, and the Center for Aerospace Sciences. UND is supporting this effort by providing $75,000 in matching funds doc1049 none Ulmer Very likely some of the world s most outstanding TV footage of Hawaiian volcanology resides in an archive closet at the United State Geological Survey Hawaiian Volcanological Observatory (USGS-HVO). This project will transfer-edit the highlights of this excellent analogue TV footage, as well as many hundreds of hours of geothermal field footage into digital form with as many as ten programmatic editing foci suitable for interactive recitation teaching modules for geoscience curricular use. These produced programs will involve Question Answer segments where the program can be stopped, reviewed, replayed and even used by the audience to make visual-and time measurements necessary to answer the narrative-asked, laboratory-style questions. Thus the digitization makes possible some very exciting interactive teaching and lab modules and digital TV format makes these kinds of interaction possible with far greater ease than older AV TV technologies. The planned interactive modules will use the intrinsic visual excitement of volcanology, not just to teach geology, environmental science and petrology, but also to teach the inter-related basic math, physics and chemistry concepts. This proposal promises the following six major tasks: (1) the digital editing of ten, 30-50 minute long volcanological geothermal programs with interactive audience exercises in each program (2) in-school audience testing of the digitally edited programs with special attention to the interactive segments; field testing with 4th, 10th, and college level audiences will be performed; (3) these field trials will lead to three audience-appropriate levels of interactive segment for each program; (4) these digitally prepared materials (both digital TV and CD) will be presented at NAGT workshops at national GSA meetings; (5) arrangement to guarantee the widest possible royalty-free distribution of finished curricular products will be performed by a website technology, and (6) the technological transfer to a digital data base of hundreds of hours of volcanological and geothermal TV images doc1050 none The award is to conduct the annual National Science Foundation Design, Manufacturing and Industrial Innovation Research Conference. The conference will involve researchers in all program areas within the Division of Design, Manufacture and Industrial Innovation (DMII), the manufacturing researchers in the Divisions of Engineering Education and Centers (EEC), Electrical and Communication Systems (ECS), Civil and Mechanical Structures (CMS), located within the Directorate for Engineering, Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS), located within the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, Materials Research (DMR), located within the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, International Programs (INT), Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research, specifically the Innovation and Organizational Change Program (IOC), located in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences who are in manufacturing related research will present ongoing activities in their current research and attend sessions which will extend beyond their immediate area of research. Ongoing research in manufacturing related research activities are presented by the grantees from the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia (CONACyT), from locations within Mexico, and grantees from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the National Research Council (NRC), from locations within Canada. The conference ensures that the individual researchers are informed about the ongoing activities of their colleagues. An elimination of duplication of their efforts may be achieved and a degree of cooperation may result from this activity. An overall improvement of efficiency of the research activity could be expected. In addition, the conference program organization allows for ample time to discuss manufacturing research in detail with the collective research community at the meeting, with feedback to and input from the National Science Foundation. Finally, personal contacts between the grantees and program directors in the Divisions should contribute to clarify many current issues in their work. The aims of the conference are: (1) to broaden the outlook of all participants; (2) promote transfer of ideas and technology from one area of research to another; (3) to allow those working in a related area of research to get to know their peers so as to avoid duplication of research and to encourage cooperation, and (4) to allow personal contacts from the collective research community, the NSF, CONACyT, NSERC, and NRC program staff to discuss manufacturing research in detail (this should contribute to clarifying many current problems in ongoing projects). Attendees to the conference gain an early access to the information disseminated doc1051 none Chambers Project Objectives: Portland Public Schools (PPS), district No. 1, will partner with college university faculty and other researchers in the geosciences in piloting an intensive and collaborative professional development model targeted to K-12 teachers. The following objectives will be pursued over the 18-month project period: 1) To provide in-depth opportunities for K-12 teachers to increase their knowledge, understanding, and skills concerning key topics in the geosciences, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software, and how to provide developmentally appropriate, inquiry-based, and interdisciplinary instruction. 2) To motivate participating teachers to integrate geoscience content and the use of GIS software into their local classrooms and buildings. 3) To strengthen collaborative linkages among K-12 educators, higher education faculty, and other researchers and professionals in the geosciences. A 15-day geosciences institute for 20 teachers (primarily middle and high school, although elementary teachers will also be encouraged to apply), will be held in summer , covering key topics in the geosciences (climatology, geomorphology, oceanography, volcanology, hydrology and glaciology, plate tectonics, petrology and soil science, natural hazards, and graduation, erosion, and sedimentation) and introducing the ArcView GIS software developed by the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) K-12 Schools and Libraries Program. Institute workshops will be led by faculty and researchers from local colleges universities and agencies organizations such as the National Weather Service, American Meteorological Society, and Oregon Office of Ocean Policy. Five days of the institute will focus on teacher team research using ArcView GIS to examine a particular question or issue in the geosciences. Participating teachers will receive an ArcView GIS site license, and will develop and implement lesson plans and classroom projects that are based on their institute research. Participants will also provide in-service presentations for other teachers in their local schools. The lessons and projects institute participants develop will be reviewed by the principal investigator, district science specialists, the PPS Science Core Team of teachers, and collaborating researchers in terms of developmental appropriateness, geosciences content, alignment with inquiry-based approaches, grade-level achievement benchmarks in science, interdisciplinary connections, and effective use of the GIS technology. Follow-up workshops scheduled at the beginning of the fall school year will allow teachers to refine their plans, share them with colleagues and professional researchers, and continue to improve their skills in using the software as part of high-quality geoscience education. A geosciences lecture series featuring leading researchers will be established. An advisory committee will provide oversight in meeting the project s stated objectives and timeline; foster collaboration among K-12 educators, college university faculty, and other researchers in the geosciences representing government agencies and professional organizations; and plan for ongoing networking among project participants and the collaborative partnership. Results will be shared via presentations at local, regional, and national meetings and conferences; articles and materials posted electronically; and progress reports to the funding agency, and other appropriate audiences doc1052 none Peng The synthesis is proposed of fluorine-containing polymeric (PPF) surfactants for the emulsification of perfluorocarbon chemicals (PFCs) that are useful as intravenous transfusion agents. Such emulsions are of interest as bioacceptable oxygen and carbon dioxide carriers that are less immunologic than is presently the case with the currently used Pluronic F-68 (polyoxyethylene polyoxypropylene block polymer) and egg yolk phospholipids (EYP). The PIs present evidence indicating that phagocytosis of PFC emulsion microparticles in the present of PPF surfactants is reduced compared to that by emulsions mediated by low molecular weight perfluorocarbon surfactants. The synthesis is proposed of two types of biocompatible hydrophilic polymers that have perfluorocarbon (RF) groups at the chain end or as pendent groups. The PIs outline procedures allowing the synthesis of such PPF surfactants with RF groups having between 4 and 12 carbons and hydrocarbon segment that allows varying degreds of hydrophobic lipophilic character. The hydrophlic polymers include polyethylene glycol (PEG), hydroxyethylcellulose (HEC), polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP), and similar polymers. The polymers are synthesized either by chemical derivatization of the polymer end- or pendent group or by copolymerization of the water-soluble vinyl monomer(s) with RF-acrylates, -acrylamides or similar monomers. The polymers may also contain negatively charged groups that are anticipated to affect phagocytosis and or PFC recognition by the immune system. The effect(s) of these PPF surfactants on the phagocytosis process will be investigated by a number of techniques that include optical and electron microscopy as well as fluorine-19 NMR. The PIs will also examine the rate of cytokine (e.g., IL-1b and TNF-a) secretion associated with the PFC emulsion droplets phagocytosed by J774A.1 macrophage cells. The efficiency of oxygen diffusion through the cell-PPF surfactant will be studied by oxygen microsensors doc343 none Tikoff McClelland Tectonic models for orogenic belts rely on various kinematic indicators to determine such things as maximum and minimum stress directions, stretching directions and sense of shear. One fundamental assumption has been that tectonic transport directions parallel mineral or extension lineation directions, however three-dimensional numeric modeling of shear zones indicates that this is not always a valid assumption. This project will address this issue using the western Idaho shear zone that marks the accretion of allochthonous terranes to the west to the north American plate during the Late Cretaceous. The kinematic and geologic data have resulted in several, disparate models for this accretion. This study is an integrated structural, microstructural and U Pb geochronologic project designed to determine the kinematic history of the late Cretaceous western Idaho shear zone that will employ three-dimensional techniques to test the validity of the assumption that tectonic transport is parallel to lineation. Results should help clarify the kinematics of this suture and evaluate one of the important kinematic assumptions used in interpretations of many orogens elsewhere doc1054 none The evolution of many species was facilitated by changes in feeding capacity. Extensive testing has shown modifications in tooth size, shape, and biting forces are critical determinants of feeding capacity. However, changes in the mechanical performance of dental tissues, which may also play an integral role in this process, are little understood. Data regarding material level mechanical capacity is lacking since dental tissues are minute and preclude most testing protocols. In the present research this problem will be overcome using a new engineering technique called nano-indentation (miniaturized mechanical testing) whereby the measurement of strength, hardness, and scratch-resistance of small materials is feasible. The method will be applied to enamel (the primary contact tissue between food items and the dentition) from a diversity of species with a broad range of feeding abilities. The data generated from this study will serve to tie together the current data on dental morphology and biomechanics. Furthermore it will move the field considerably closer to a comprehensive understanding of the form, function, and ecology of animal feeding--past and present--including how and why our own dentitions function as they do doc1055 none The Evaluators Institute provides high-quality short-courses taught by nationally recognized experts in the evaluation field. Courses are scheduled to allow participants to take 2-3 courses over the period of a week. This SGER will test whether SMET professionals can be involved in these courses by offering $ Tuition scholarships. Since the Evaluators Institute is providing courses this summer and a limited set again in the fall, decisions about future planning by the Evaluation Program can be made in a timely manner doc1056 none As the information available to a building s control system is increased, its control can become more sophisticated, and improve the operation of the building. Improvements can be obtained through: reduced energy consumption in lighting, ventilation, and temperature control systems, improved comfort and productivity of occupants, and improved safety. Unfortunately, the cost of adding to a building s sensor network is significant; involving not only the cost of the sensors themselves, but also the expense of running wire between the sensor and the control system. As a result, most buildings are operated with few sensors installed, a situation that contributes to low efficiency, poor indoor environmental quality, and increased operating cost. Recently, sensors based on micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) technology have been developed that offer the potential to run indefinitely without the need for wires for either communication or power. MEEMS technology uses the semi-conductor fabrication techniques traditionally employed in making integrated circuits, to produce many types of devices, including sensors, radios, batteries, and power collecting devices. The technology has the potential to eliminate the wire required for sensors in buildings because the devices can be made extremely small, thus requiring little power. In this research, the building control capabilities of the Center for the Build Environment (CBE) at UC Berkeley are combined with the microfabrication capabilities of the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center (BSAC), also at UC Berkeley. This project is intended to provide the initial funding for a program designed to investigate the potential for applying MEMS technology to building control systems. It is expected that the cost reduction potential and increased information density achievable with MEMS technology will fundamentally change the way that buildings are controlled doc1057 none The Northeast Center for Telecommunications Technology (NCTT) has led the development of work-relevant, industry-validated, competency-based curricula and instructional materials for use in secondary through community college programs in telecommunications technology. NCTT has designed and implemented an innovative instructional delivery system that takes advantage of current electronic technologies and has provided extensive opportunities for professional development of faculty, and for the education both of students and of incumbent workers in the telecommunications industry. These accomplishments are due to extensive and successful partnerships with educational institutions and with industry. The goals for the Center are: (a) to establish the modular curriculum system as one of the key elements that leads to the ongoing success and utility of the technicians in the workplace; (b) to provide faculty with integrated, accessible and relevant professional growth opportunities; (c) to encourage all learners, but especially those under-represented in the workplace, into educational programs that lead to participation in the telecommunications workplace; and (d) to ensure that the quality and relevancy of its goods and services provide resources to maintain the NCTT as a permanent center in telecommunications and related technologies doc1058 none Recent experiments have shown that a transient electrical voltage ( electrochemical effect) and a weak magnetic field ( chemomagnetism) form during self-propagating high-temperature synthesis (SHS). This is a combined experimental and theoretical study of the electrochemical effect and chemomagnetism induced by combustion processes with the goals of elucidating their origin, sign, magnitude, and shape, and providing a means to predict them and their impact. Similar reactions, such as oxidation or nitridation of a metal, are done with metals from a row or group of the periodic table to give possible correlations with electronic structure, oxygen affinity, and oxidation state. Experiments are conducted at various gas pressures, sample compositions, porosities and particle sizes to determine the effects of these factors as well as the relationships between the induced signals and reaction temperature and combustion wave velocity. The small magnetic fields are measured with a high-Tc superconducting quantum interface device (SQUID). A model to predict the electrical potential formation is developed, initially based on the assumption that an electrical change is formed in individual particles due to a gradient of ions across a product layer formed during combustion. The model predicts combustion wave velocity and profiles of voltage, temperature, oxygen concentration, and metal conversion in the combustion and post-combustion zones. The predicted voltage profile is then used to calculate the induced magnetic signal. The model in revised on the basis of the experimental results doc1059 none The reconstruction of the demography and health of past populations has been one of the major endeavors in physical anthropology, not only to understand how specific populations lived and developed, but to better understand the general biological interactions between humans and their environments. Developmental defects within tooth enamel called accentuated striae (AS), which form during periods of physiological stress, have been used in previous studies of skeletons as a measure of the past population s nutrition and disease experience, since studies of living people have shown that tooth defects are associated with periods of nutritional stress and disease. However, the assumption that a higher number of AS in a skeletal sample indicates a population with poorer nutrition and a higher disease load is confounded by two factors. First, it is not clear that the presence of AS in an individual s dentition necessarily means that the individual had a higher risk of death than other individuals, since the individual would have to have survived a stress event in order to acquire the defect. Second, even if AS are associated with a higher risk of death, the fact that individual levels of nutrition and disease vary within a population will result in a skeletal sample that is highly selected for the weakest individuals, thus elevating the apparent levels of nutritional stress and disease in the once-living population. This study uses survival analysis methods to test for a relationship between AS and age at death in skeletons from a medieval Danish village to determine whether those individuals with a higher risk of death (those dying at younger ages) had a higher incidence of AS. Using survival analysis corrects for the selective skeletal sample that results from a population with heterogeneous levels of health. The project may show that the relationship of AS to health is much more complex, but also more informative, than previously thought, and will contribute to a method that continues to be used in paleodemographic research to understand the relationship between skeletal pathology and health and between health and preindustrial population processes doc423 none This proposal seeks support for a study of millennial scale climate events during marine isotope Stage 3 (~25 to 65 ka) from data in a depth transect of cores from the Blake-Bahama Outer Ridges. The project has two main objectives: (1) to test models of paleohydrographic change for Stage 3 events by making depth profiles in a limited geographic area, and (2) to investigate evidence for decade to century scale climate change in a Stage 3 time series from the Bermuda Rise. The first objective will test the model that massive discharges of icebergs, known as Heinrich events reduced production of both shallow and deep components of North Atlantic Deep Water, whereas more typical stadial events suppressed only the deep component. The second objective will investigate evidence for high-frequency oxygen isotopic oscillations in planktonic foraminifer from the Bermuda Rise. To put these results in a climatic context, we will develop the best possible age model for Stage 3 in the open ocean, and compare our new data to both existing alkenone-based temperature series and geochemical proxies for deep ocean ventilation changes doc1061 none Ackerly Hoffman This award will fund a dissertation enhancement grant for Laura Lopez Hoffman, under the direction of Dr. David Ackerly, Stanford University, in collaboration with researchers from the Instituto para la Conservacion del Lago de Maracaibo, in western Venezuela. The researchers will investigate how different environmental conditions can affect plant performance by examining the effects of salinity and light on the carbon gain, growth and demography of two species of neo-tropical mangroves. They will test the hypothesis that the effects of increasing light availability on mangroves are beneficial and detrimental at low and high salinity respectively. The hypothesis will be addressed at three levels of analysis: leaf physiology, whole plant growth, and population dynamics, using a combination of greenhouse experiments at Stanford University and field studies in Venezuela. The results will be integrated through physiological and demographic models and are expected to make significant contributions in the areas of ecological scaling and mangrove restoration and sustainable harvesting doc895 none Under the direction of Dr. Henry Wright MS Zoe Crossland will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. Building on her past research in the area she will conduct archaeological survey and excavation in the Andrantsay region in the central highlands of Madagascar. The area provides rich agricultural land for wet rice cultivation and was the locus of an historically documented kingdom observed by early European visitors at the end of the 18th century. Although they occurred relatively late in Madagascar, the processes which led to the rise of early states in other parts of the world also occurred on this island. The kingdom of Andrantsay was one of several which developed in Madagascar at approximately the same time and it was eventually incorporated, in the early 19th century into the Merina state. While written documents provide some detail about the strategies used by the Merina to subjugate this outlying region, they reflect a conqueror s perspective and require on the ground substantiation and (likely) revision. MS Crossland will examine the processes which led first to the development of the Andrantsay kingdom and then the changes which occurred during its incorporation. She will focus on shifts in the organization of settlement and transformations in mortuary architecture as a hierarchically structured and centralized polity developed. She will compare these patterns of landscape occupation and use with later changes. The research includes two components. The first involves a systematic surface survey of archaeological remains which consist mostly of ceramics. The results should provide insight into changes in population distribution and settlement pattern. Secondly MS Crossland will conduct a series of small scale excavations at selected sites. Test trenches will be placed at a minimum of 6 sites with the goal of refining ceramic chronology and providing absolute dates. Archaeologists wish to understand the processes which led over millennia to increasing social complexity and culminated in the rise of states and empires. Normally researchers focus their effort on capitals which represented the apex of the hierarchical structure. MS Crossland s study is unusual because it looks at a periphery and examines state formation within a broader regional perspective, working from the assumption that a regional scale of analysis is most suitable. In comparison to other aspects of state formation, relatively little has been written about polities at the edges of an emergent state. MS Crossland s research will provide a useful counterbalance. It will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc1063 none This project for six (6) months duration will bring advisors and designers together to plan an environment of interactive touch-screen displays to draw high-school students and their parents into thoughtful consideration of careers in science, mathematics, and technology. Housed at Kennedy Space Center s Visitor Center and in keeping with the theme of space exploration, the visitor will become a crewmember on a future voyage and solve problems encountered on the journey via computer simulations. Veteran astronauts will narrate the scenarios, since they have actually encountered unexpected problems in space. The proposed final exhibit will have six (6) stations, each featuring a different episode and levels of complexity of a common storyline. After solving the problem using math, science, technology and critical thinking skills, a registration mechanism will enable the student to request information on spedific careers and information about post-secondary schools that offer such training doc1064 none Richardson This award supports a scientific workshop and conference to be held for five days beginning July 3, , at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland, on recent advances in the broad area of Orbital and Celestial Mechanics. The Principal Investigator for this workshop is Dr. David Richardson of the University of Cincinnati. The workshop hopes to sow seeds for future collaborative research between newly graduated scientists in the U.S. and in Central and Eastern Europe. The workshop will address broad, diverse aspects of theoretical and applied Orbital and Celestial Mechanics to establish the current status and prospects for future research. The workshop will bring together practical and proven numerical and analytical procedures with the more promising theoretical and academic research now underway worldwide. The workshop will support participants from the U.S., Central and Eastern Europe and the Newly Independent States (NIS). This award fulfills the program objectives of bringing together leading experts in Orbital and Celestial Mechanics in the U.S., Central and Eastern Europe and NIS to combine complementary efforts and capabilities in areas of strong mutual interest and competence on the basis of equality, reciprocity, and mutuality of benefit doc1065 none MILLER Jon Miller of the Northwestern University Medical School is undertaking exploratory research into issues surrounding informing the public about on-going research. The specific activities to be undertaken as part of this Small Grant for Exploratory Research include: o examining the scope and dimensions of the issues in the context of current learning and communications research, o re-conceptualizing the problem in programmatic and research terms, and o developing a general research program to address these issues over the next ten years doc889 none Salps are holoplanktonic grazers that have a life history, feeding biology and population dynamic strikingly different from copepods or other crustacean zooplankton. They can occur in very dense populations that cover large areas, and these blooms have been shown to have major impacts due to grazing and production of fast?sinking fecal pellets. However the conditions supporting bloom formation, and the energetics, reproduction and behavior of the bloom?forming salps are still poorly understood. This study will focus on two species of salps that are global in their distribution and representative of two genera that commonly form large blooms. Salpa aspera regularly occurs during the summer in high concentrations in the slope waters of the Mid?Atlantic Bight, while Thalia democratica regularly forms dense populations during the winter spring in the Georgia Bight. The investigators will examine feeding, metabolism, growth, reproduction and population dynamics of these salps. They will use two independent modeling approaches, grounded in experimental and field data, to extend their observations to other time and space scales. interpret ouexperimental and modeling results will be interpreted within the context of the environmental conditions to which the salps are exposed. This integrated approach will provide the best basis for understanding how salp blooms form and persist. Results of this study will extend to other species that occur in high densities in many locations, allowing scientists to better evaluate the importance of salps in biogeochemical cycles and in structuring the pelagic environment doc1067 none Previous work by the investigator showed that transient predators (schools of jacks) are capable of density-dependent predation on newly-settled coral reef fish (Chromis cyanea). This study will use new telemetry techniques to help answer fundamental questions about how predators can regulate local populations of marine fish, leading to a better understanding of both fish population dynamics and also potential impacts of fishing and other human activities. The investigator will capture, tag, and acoustically track up to 20 small bar jack, following their movement (along with their associated schools) for 5 weeks during August and September . The study area, in the Bahamas, will be a matrix of 32 natural and 16 artificial reefs, where prey density can be experimentally manipulated. The goal is to determine: whether tagged jacks spend more time at reefs with high prey densities, as previously documented using remote video samples; whether jacks move randomly or systematically among reefs; and what the overall range of movement of the predator is. The data should provide new insights on the behavioral mechanisms by which predators cause density-dependent mortality and lead to more detailed studes that separate the relative roles of aggregative vs. functional responses in predator-prey dynamics among marine fishes doc1068 none The Pacific North Atlantic (PNA) and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) teleconnections are known to play a very important role in climate variability and perhaps climate change. Most studies have emphasized their time-averaged (i.e., monthly, interannual, and interdecadal) properties. However, the PIs recently found that both the PNA and NAO undergo full lifecycles of growth and decay within a time period on the order of two weeks, indicating that most PNA and NAO studies are examining data that is time-averaged over several life cycles. The framework for the relationship between climate variability change and these teleconnections can be established only with a knowledge of the very nature of the physical processes involved in these teleconnections. The goal of this grant is to identify physical processes governing the evolution of both the PNA and NAO. The approach adopted combines both diagnostic analyses of observational data and also an examination of data from idealized model calculations. Specific questions that will be addressed are (i) the mechanisms that account for the excitation of the PNA and NAO; (ii) the dynamical processes that account for the saturation i.e. termination of growth of the PNA and NAO; (iii) the role of low-frequency fluxes in the growth and decay of the PNA and NAO; and (iv) how the short timescale properties of the PNA and NAO are related to interannual variability. The work is important because it will further basic understanding of the physical processes governing the life cycle of major teleconnection in the Northern Hemisphere. In addition, these results could impact the accuracy of forecasts on time scales of weeks to seasons doc1069 none Krajewski Flash-flood and urban hydrologic forecast systems required accurate quantitative measurements of precipitation at temporal scales of minutes and spatial scales on the order of one square kilometer. We propose to explore the potential of X-band polarization diversity radar to provide such high-resolution rainfall products. Polarimetric radar measurements add information about rainfall system and have better sensitivity to rainfall rate variability. However, a major drawback of using high frequency radar is that both beam power attenuation and backscattering phase shift can be significant at high rainfall intensities and thus negatively affect the accuracy of rainfall products. The goal of the proposed research is to develop a methodology, which would combine the advantages of X-band radar systems with those of polarization diversity techniques. We aim at demonstrating that such a methodology can lead to reliable quantitative rainfall estimates at spatio-temporal scales suitable for small-scale hydrologic predictions. Our investigation will be facilitated through two field experiments to obtain high-resolution polarimetric radar data at well-instrumented sites. The first experiment will take place in Southeast Iowa at the hydrometeorological monitoring facilities of the Iowa Institute of Hydraulic Research. These facilities include a two-dimensional video disdrometer, optical rain gauges, a mobile vertically pointing Doppler radar, and a very dense network of tipping bucket rain gauges. We will collect the polarimetric radar measurements using the National Observatory of Athens. (NOA) mobile dual-polarization X-band radar (X-POL). We will use the data in the development of a rainfall estimation scheme. We will assess the error structure of the scheme s estimates a various spatial and temporal scales of aggregation using high-resolution rain gauge cluster data. The second experiment will take place at Goodwin Creek basin in Mississippi. A high-density rain gauge and streamflow network there will be complemented with several disdrometers, and the NOA X-POL radar will join another X-band mobile radar (Doppler on Wheels) operated by researchers from Princeton University. Successful completion of this research may provide a new remote sensing tool that, if proven reliable, would be an attractive and economically affordable solution to the problem of monitoring remote basins and urban areas that are poorly covered by the NEXRAD radar network doc1070 none Papelis This project aims to link the revolutionary new National Advanced Driving Simulator (NADS), located at the University of Iowa, with the Virtual Reality Applications Center (VRAC), located at Iowa State University, through the existing Iowa Communications Network (ICN). The two universities us the ICN as part of their participation in the NSF very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS) and related Internet II activity. Both facilities cooperate with Deere & Company which strongly supports the project and will provide industrial-quality test problems and support in the form of personnel that will participate in the design process and assist with demonstrations. Challenges and benefits of linking these facilities will be investigated through two demonstrations. The first will use two operator-in-the-loop simulators. The second demonstration will focus on an engineering tele-presence application doc1071 none Under the direction of Dr. E. Charles Adams Mr. Vincent LaMotta will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. His goal is to understand the factors which permitted effective functioning and coordination of activities of late prehistoric period Pueblo people in the Four Corners region of the Southwestern USA. The period known as the Pueblo III-IV transition, beginning in the mid-13th century AD and continuing through the early s was characterized throughout the northern Southwest by major demographic shifts. The Four Corners region was largely abandoned by , populations having emigrated to a few large settlement clusters with some sites housing over a thousand people. By the mid 14th century, average settlement size had increased by up to 500% or more over levels of just 50-100 years before. Aggregated Pueblo IV communities departed radically from the more typical pattern of dispersed low-density settlements that characterized the prehistory of the region up to that time. While earlier Puebloan experiments with aggregated life were relatively short-lived, Pueblo IV community patterns persisted for centuries into the historic period. These characteristics of such communities have stimulated much debate about the social mechanisms that facilitated aggregation and integration. Several archaeologists have proposed that Puebloan peoples developed rituals which played a central role in effecting and sustaining this pattern. For many years the Arizona State Museum has conducted excavation at a series of Homol ovi sites which span this transitional period and these will form the basis for Mr. LaMotta s research. He believes that ritual sodalities observed in the ethnographic present emerged during the late prehistoric period and served an important integrating function. A ritual sodality is a ceremonial organization whose membership cross-cuts kinship lines and which typically performs public and semi-public rituals. The problem, as Mr. LaMotta notes is how to identify solidalities in the archaeological record and distinguish them from other types of family and kin based ritual groups which also were likely to exist. He has developed a series of criteria which serve this goal and with NSF support will supervise the analysis of excavated faunal and floral remains to determine whether, and when in the archaeological sequence the data conform to the expected pattern. This research is significant for the insight it will provide into how complex societies arise and are maintained. The work will also contribute to training a promising young scientist doc1072 none Anagnostou Flash-flood and urban hydrologic forecast systems required accurate quantitative measurements of precipitation at temporal scales of minutes and spatial scales on the order of one square kilometer. We propose to explore the potential of X-band polarization diversity radar to provide such high-resolution rainfall products. Polarimetric radar measurements add information about rainfall system and have better sensitivity to rainfall rate variability. However, a major drawback of using high frequency radar is that both beam power attenuation and backscattering phase shift can be significant at high rainfall intensities and thus negatively affect the accuracy of rainfall products. The goal of the proposed research is to develop a methodology, which would combine the advantages of X-band radar systems with those of polarization diversity techniques. We aim at demonstrating that such a methodology can lead to reliable quantitative rainfall estimates at spatio-temporal scales suitable for small-scale hydrologic predictions. Our investigation will be facilitated through two field experiments to obtain high-resolution polarimetric radar data at well-instrumented sites. The first experiment will take place in Southeast Iowa at the hydrometeorological monitoring facilities of the Iowa Institute of Hydraulic Research. These facilities include a two-dimensional video disdrometer, optical rain gauges, a mobile vertically pointing Doppler radar, and a very dense network of tipping bucket rain gauges. We will collect the polarimetric radar measurements using the National Observatory of Athens. (NOA) mobile dual-polarization X-band radar (X-POL). We will use the data in the development of a rainfall estimation scheme. We will assess the error structure of the scheme s estimates a various spatial and temporal scales of aggregation using high-resolution rain gauge cluster data. The second experiment will take place at Goodwin Creek basin in Mississippi. A high-density rain gauge and streamflow network there will be complemented with several disdrometers, and the NOA X-POL radar will join another X-band mobile radar (Doppler on Wheels) operated by researchers from Princeton University. Successful completion of this research may provide a new remote sensing tool that, if proven reliable, would be an attractive and economically affordable solution to the problem of monitoring remote basins and urban areas that are poorly covered by the NEXRAD radar network doc1073 none 00- Holland Conference support: Sustainability of wetlands and water resources: How well can riverine wetlands continue to support society into the 21st century The objectives of this conference are to: 1) advance scholarship, research, and teaching focused on sustainability of watershed systems; 2) create public and private-sector partnerships to achieve interdisciplinary solutions to critical environmental and societal issues related to water and wetland resources; and 3) promote effective, strategically targeted conservation activities and public policy development through the transfer of ecological knowledge to non-governmental organizations, educational, scientific, corporate, agricultural, aquacultural, and governmental constituencies. The conference is being hosted by the University of Mississippi and will take place May 23-25, doc1074 none Kirk This award supports the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Women s International Scientific Collaboration (WISC) Program. WISC is a two-year program to encourage U.S. women scientists to develop new international cooperative research projects and partners. WISC will allow U.S. women scientists to travel to Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia and stay up to four weeks in order to develop a formal research proposal to conduct basic research in an international environment. WISC is open to women scientists in the following fields: archeology; anthropology; biology; chemistry; earth sciences; economics; environmental sciences; geography and demography; linguistics; political science; non-clinically oriented psychology; and sociology. WISC especially encourages interdisciplinary research projects. If there is a U.S. research team, up to two female members of that team can apply for WISC grants as long as at least one of them is a principal investigator. The grants, up to a maximum of $4,000, will cover travel and living expenses for the U.S. investigator to go abroad. Any excess funds can also be used for supplies and equipment needed during the planning period for a second visit - either for the U.S. scientist or for her partner to come to the U.S. Three rounds of competition will be offered between October and October for a total of twenty grants. The AAAS WISC Program fulfills the NSF program objectives of bringing together leading experts in the U.S. and Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia to combine complementary efforts and capabilities in areas of strong mutual interest and competence on the basis of equality, reciprocity, and mutuality of benefit doc1075 none Feldmann This US-Mexico award will fund a collaborative project between Dr. Rodney M. Feldmann, Kent State University, Ohio, in collaboration with Dr. Francisco J. Vega, National Autonomous University of Mexico. The researchers aim to study the Cenozoic paleographic history of Mexico and to consider the implications of this history for the evolution and geographic dispersal of fossil decapod crustaceans (shrimps, crabs, and lobsters) and molluscs. The areas to be studied, in the states of Chiapas and Baja California Sur, lie within the southern and Central American region that served both as a barrier to, and an avenue for, dispersal of marine organisms during the Tertiary, and therefore represent a crucial link in the paleobiogeographic story of decapods. The dispersal routes of these organisms are most likely to have crossed Mexico and Central America; however, the fossil record from this region is currently not adequate to test this hypothesis. It is anticipated that the proposed field research will make it possible to resolve and describe the routes of dispersal of decapods, compare those patterns with the patterns of dispersal of molluscs, and provide a basis for evaluating general statements about dispersal histories of other groups of marine organisms doc1076 none Domack This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports project to test and develop approaches for using thermoluminescence techniques to determine the age of Antarctic marine sediments. Quaternary (last 2 million yrs) marine sediments surrounding Antarctica record the waxing and waning of ice shelves and ice sheets, and also other paleoclimatic information, yet accurate chronologies of these sediments are difficult to obtain. Such chronologies provide the essential foundation for study of geological processes in the past. Within the range of radiocarbon (14C) dating (less than 30-40 thousand yrs, note - ka below means yrs) 14C dates can be inaccurate because of a variable 14C reservoir effect, and beyond 30-40 ka few methods are applicable. Photon-stimulated-luminescence sediment dating (photonic dating) of eolian and waterlain deposits in temperate latitudes spans the range from decades to hundreds of ka, but marine sediments in and around Antarctica pose special difficulty because of the potentially restricted exposure to daylight (the clock-zeroing process) of most detrital grains before deposition. This proposal will test the clock-zeroing assumption in representative Antarctic glaciomarine depositional settings, and thereby determine the potential reliability of photonic dating of Antarctic marine sediments. Limited luminescence dating and signal-zeroing tests using glaciomarine and marine deposits have been conducted in the northern temperate and polar latitudes, but the effects on luminescence of the different glaciomarine depositional processes have never been studied in detail. Furthermore, the depositional settings around Antarctica are almost entirely polar, with consequent specific processes operating there. For example, transport of terrigenous suspensions by neutrally buoyant cold-tongue (mid-water) plumes may be common around Antarctica, yet the effect of such transport on luminescence zeroing is unknown. Typical marine cores near Antarctica may contain an unknown fraction of detrital grains from cold-tongue and near-bottom suspensions. Thus the extent to which the polar glaciomarine depositional processes around Antarctica may limit the potential accuracy of photonic dating of marine cores is unknown (age overestimates would result if grains are not exposed to daylight before deposition). This project will collect detrital grains from a variety of zero-age (modern) marine depositional settings within the Antarctic Peninsula, where representative Antarctic depositional processes have been documented and where logistics permit access. Suspensions will be collected from four fjords representing a transect from polar through subpolar conditions. Suspensions will be collected from two stations and from up to 3 depths (surface and 2 deep plumes) at each station. Sediment traps will be deployed at two of these fjord settings. As well, core-top sediments will be collected from several sites. All samples will be shielded from light and transported to Reno, Nevada, for luminescence analyses. Systematic study of the effectiveness of luminescence-clock-zeroing in Antarctic glaciomarine settings will determine if photonic dating can be reliable for future applications to Antarctic marine sediments. Refined sedimentological criteria for the selection of future samples for photonic dating are expected from this project. A photonic-dating capability would provide a numeric geochronometer extending well beyond the age range of 14C dating. Such a capability would permit answering a number of broader questions about the timing and extent of past glaciations near and on the Antarctic shelves doc1077 none McKnight This project requests travel support for 24 participants from U.S. universities in the Student Paper Competition at the IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium (IMS). The IMS is the annual meeting of the Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S) of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The IMS is also the major international symposium in the microwave field and a focus of research results in wireless telecommunications. The IMS will be held in Boston, MA on June 11-16, . Each year, the Microwave Theory and Techniques Society promotes student education in microwave theory and techniques through the number of mechanisms. One of the most important is the Student Paper Competition at the IMS. This selective program brings the world s best students together in an integrated program in which they present their work not only to a technical audience but again to a group of judges. The program helps develop the students technical acumen as well as their communication and presentation skills. It also helps introduce then to the international technical community and helps to build a community students who will lead the next generation of microwave engineers. The IMS provides financial support of various forms but does not reimburse travel expenses. Travel support from NSF will ensure that the program is open to the widest range of interested applicants from U.S. universities doc1078 none The Industry University Cooperative Reseaerch Center (I UCRC) in Ergonomics at Texas A reducing cumulative trauma disorders; reducing costs; increasing productivity; and developing responses and research for regulatory activity doc1079 none The University of Purdue proposes to establish a multi-university National Science Foundation Industry University Cooperative Research Center in Pharmaceutical Processing. Partner universities are the University of Connecticut and the University of Puerto Rico. The purposes of the Center are to explore and develop new technology for pharmaceutical processing, to foster collaborative research projects between industrial and academic scientists, and to promote an interdisciplinary approach to training students in pharmaceutical process research and development. The organizational structure of the Center comprises an Industrial Advisory Board, consisting of one member from each participating company, establishes research priorities and approves all spending by the Center. The Center Director manages day-to-day operation of the Center and acts as liaison with member companies as well as the University administration. The University Policy Committee assures that graduate student research is appropriate for the degree objective, that faculty development is not adversely affected by participation in the Center, and that Center activities are carried out in accordance with University policy. Dr. Ken Hemilich, retired Executive Director of Pharmaceutical Research and Development at Merck, will serve as external evaluator for the Center doc1080 none The preparation of a workforce of scientifically and technologically competent technicians rests on a foundation of mathematical concepts and skills. Technical mathematics is an essential part of science, information, computer, and engineering technology programs offered by associate degree granting colleges; yet, there is a widening disparity between the mathematics used in industry and what is taught. This project is analyzing the role and nature of technical mathematics in advanced technology programs, recognizing successful models, and developing a vision and recommendations for the future. Issues of transferability to four-year institutions are also being considered. Through two regional workshops, mathematics and technical program faculty, together with representatives from business and industry, are addressing content and curriculum issues related to technical mathematics. These issues include the integration of mathematics content with science and technology content, relevance to business and industry needs, pedagogy, and the use of technology. Reports from these workshops are enabling the development of criteria for selecting up to 10 exemplary technical mathematics programs which are being highlighted at a national conference. The focus of the national conference is substantive dialogue on technical mathematics issues and the development of a vision and recommendations for achieving that vision. In addition to representatives from the 10 exemplary programs chosen, participants include mathematics and technical program faculty, industry representatives, professional society representatives, and other national leaders. Project leadership is centered in the Technical Mathematics Committee of the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges (AMATYC). A national Advisory Group, consisting of leaders from all stakeholders in the continued examination and improvement of mathematics for technical mathematics, is serving to guide project development and implementation doc1081 none 00- Wilhelm SGER: Viral Impacts on Fluvial and Limnetic Biogeochemistry Although commonly considered pathogens of animals and plants, viruses are now known to be pervasive in aquatic environments, where their populations are linked to bacteria and other microbes. In pelagic marine systems, the hundreds of thousands of viruses that exist in every drop of water lead to the direct daily destruction of a significant portion (20-30%) of the microbial community. This exploratory study will examine the impact of viruses on microbial communities and nutrient cycles in rivers and lakes in and around the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. Borrowing established techniques from marine viral ecology, the investigators will determine the seasonal abundance and distribution of viruses and estimate the mortality they confer on the resident microbial communities. In addition, the impact of viruses on the recycling of carbon and nutrient elements will be quantified to determine the role of viruses in the biogeochemical cycles of these systems doc1082 none Akmaev This award supports the development of a three dimensional model to further quantify the possible thermal and dynamical response in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere predicted for the global change in the upper atmosphere caused by the increase in greenhouse gas content. The award will build upon the expertise provided by model development support by previous NSF awards. The improved model will included a new parameterization of infrared radiative transfer applicable to a wide range of CO2 concentrations. The improvement will also include feedback mechanisms that modify the radiative, dynamical and chemical environments resulting from the predicted global change perturbations doc1083 none A two-part interdisciplinary workshop will be held in Alaska in conjunction with a field course offered through the Circumpolar Arctic Social Science Ph.D. Network. The field course will involve 18 Ph.D. students from the eight arctic countries and six senior faculty from major circumpolar universities. The first part of the workshop and field course will focus on northern communities and global change. Speakers will include scientists, educators, and Alaska Native and community leaders. The second part will provide an opportunity for international participants to learn from Athabascan elders about local indigenous cultures and ethical issues of conducting research in the arctic. The second part of the workshop and field course will be held at the Old Minto Cultural Heritage Camp on the Tanana River doc1084 none A commitment to diversity in the microbiological sciences at all educational levels is embedded in the programs of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). Since , ASM has awarded 34 fellowships to minority graduate students to support completion of their doctoral research. Fifty-three percent of the graduate fellows completed advanced degrees in the microbiological sciences; the remaining fellows continue their graduate or postdoctoral training. Nine of the doctoral degree recipients entered the professoriate. At the undergraduate level, ASM partnered with the National Institutes of Health to provide summer research fellowships under the supervision of ASM mentors. One hundred eighty-five research fellowships have been awarded since the program s inception in . Thirty former undergraduate fellows completed doctoral degrees, 18 completed master s degrees and 92 completed baccalaureate degrees. ASM pre-college outreach strategies expose middle and high school students to career opportunities and role models while celebrating the contributions of under-represented minority scientists doc1085 none Since its establishment in , the Indian Natural Resource, Science and Engineering Program (INRSEP) at Humboldt State University has trained about 40% of the nation s natural resource professionals of Native American descent. The underlying philosophy at INRSEP is to maintain a strong academic program which is intrinsically linked to Native American cultural perspectives. Services provided include academic advising and advocacy, personal and cultural counseling, tutorials, cooperative education and internships. Students are also provided guidance in balancing Western science with traditional holistic beliefs. Thirty-one INRSEP students graduated in the sciences over the past three years. The program currently enrolls 43 students from 27 tribal entities doc1086 none Three regional higher education organizations, the New England Board of Higher Education, Southern Regional Education Board, and Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education comprise the Compact for Faculty Diversity, an initiative launched in to address the underrepresentation of minorities in the professoriate. The Compact formed partnerships with state higher education agencies and public and private universities, to offer minority doctoral students a package of academic and financial support that helps assure their successful completion of their doctoral degree programs and transition into faculty careers. By the end of , the Compact had served 435 scholars of which 85 had completed their degree programs and 313 remained enrolled and in process. The Compact has a retention rate of 93%, nearly twice that of most doctoral granting science, mathematics and engineering programs. This remarkable accomplishment is largely attributable to the quality of mentoring provided doc1087 none For the past two decades, the University of Michigan (UM) WISE program has developed and implemented a host of programmatic activities to increase the number of women students who successfully pursue majors, advanced degrees and careers in science, mathematics and engineering (SME). Program services range from summer workshops that have served 1,300 middle school girls to a living-learning residential program that has been home for more than 1,000 first- and second- year undergraduate women; from a summer research program aimed at encouraging women to undertake graduate studies in science and engineering to a peer mentoring network for women graduate students. The WISE program has made a significant impact in the recruitment and retention of women in SME fields. For example, UM engineering undergraduate enrollment of women increased from 17% in to 32% in . In , only 18% of the science and mathematics degrees awarded by UM went to women. Today, 42% of the biochemistry majors are women; 46% of the cellular and molecular biology majors; 44% of the mathematics majors; and 45% of the geology majors doc1088 none In , North Carolina State University (NC State) ranked among the nation s leading universities in the number of baccalaureate degrees in engineering and computer science awarded to women. Currently, women comprise about 20% of NC State s undergraduate engineering enrollment of 5,097. More than 700 minority students are enrolled in the undergraduate engineering and computer science program. Programmatic efforts responsible for NC State s success begin with elementary and middle school visits designed to encourage children to view mathematics and science as fun disciplines for which they have ability. These visits continue through high school with more overt recruiting. A weeklong campus residential program exposes high school students to engineering and computer sciences. Summer and early freshman year experiences are offered to bridge high school to college and to foster student acclimation and maturation. Undergraduates are enrolled in a student mentoring program and, as upperclassmen, become eligible to participate in research activities doc1089 none In , The University of Alabama s Office of Minority and Special Programs established the Comprehensive Minority Faculty and Student Development Program, a series of coordinated and integrated approaches to increase the number of ethnic minority students earning doctoral degrees in the science, mathematics, and engineering disciplines. Efforts include summer research experiences for 40 high school students annually; tutoring, faculty mentoring, research experiences and scholarships for 10 undergraduate students per year; and, eight graduate fellowships each year. To date, 146 (66%) of the undergraduate program participants have earned a baccalaureate degree; 12 earned a master s degree; 27 earned the Ph.D.; and, 26 remain enrolled in graduate programs doc1090 none Washington MESA is a statewide partnership of school districts, families and alumni, community organizations, higher education, industry, business, and government. In , MESA served 88 students in four schools; today it serves over 3,000 traditionally under-represented students in 71 schools and 17 school districts across the state. MESA promotes academic achievement by increasing students interest in science, mathematics, and engineering (SME); expanding students career options to include SME fields; and, by developing students habits of high expectations and success. Services provided by MESA include tutoring, mentoring, summer technical camps, internships, and after-school enrichment for students, parents and teachers. Ninety-four percent of the 374 MESA students that were seniors in enrolled in postsecondary institutions. Sixty-eight percent of these students are pursing degrees in SME fields doc1091 none The University of New Mexico s MEMS program was established in to increase minority enrollment and graduation levels in science, mathematics and engineering. The program consists of seven core components: (i) a summer program that bridges the gap between high school and college; (ii) problem-solving workshops for undergraduates; (iii) industry internships; (iv) undergraduate research experiences with faculty mentors; (v) professional development opportunities for K-12 mathematics and science teachers; (vi) a transfer program for community college students; and, (vii) academic enrichment opportunities for local high school students. Over the past six years, the MEMS program has served almost 1,600 minority science, mathematics and engineering undergraduate students. Engineering baccalaureate degrees earned by minority students at The University of New Mexico have increased from 20% of the total in to 40% in doc1092 none Established in , California MESA currently offers an array of academic support and enrichment services to 24,400 mostly under-represented students. One of MESA s pre-college initiatives uses culture-based mathematics activities to reach hundreds of American Indian students in remote rural areas. MESA s community college program offers tutoring and collaborative group learning to help under-represented minority science and mathematics majors successfully transfer to four-year institutions. In , 244 MESA community college students transferred to four-year universities. At the undergraduate level, MESA supports engineering and computer science majors through scholarships, internship opportunities, tutoring and group study. Over 12% of the nation s under-represented engineering baccalaureate recipients are MESA graduates doc1093 none The Summer Research Opportunities Program (SROP) was created in to engage undergraduate minority students in research experiences with faculty members, to accelerate each student s socialization into the discipline, and to foster the sense of a community of scholars among all program participants. To date, 6,212 undergraduate students have participated in the SROP summer experience, including 2,734 science, mathematics and engineering (SME) majors. Students from 373 colleges and universities, including 73 minority-serving institutions, have participated. Of the SME alumni, 58% are women and 87% are from under-represented minority groups. Ninety-seven percent of the SROP alumni have either graduated or are still enrolled. Of those that have received their bachelor s degrees, 77% are pursuing or have pursued advanced study. Eighty-six SROP alumni have already earned their Ph.D. degrees, including 28 majoring in SME fields doc1094 none During his 30 years at New Mexico State University, Dr. Kuehn mentored 49 undergraduate minority students. Eleven of Dr. Kuehn s mentees earned master s degrees in science, eight earned doctoral degrees, nineteen earned medical doctor degrees, and eleven entered the technical workforce. One of Dr. Kuehn s mentees became the first Native American woman to receive a doctorate in chemistry in the United States. In , Dr. Kuehn established a bridge program to facilitate the transfer of Native American students from five New Mexico community colleges to four-year academic programs. Since the inception of this bridge program, 64% (72) of the American Indian participants successfully transferred into baccalaureate degree programs in science. Graduates of the bridge program include two American Indian Ph.D. recipients, seven master s degree recipients, and 23 baccalaureate degree recipients doc1095 none For more than 20 years, Dr. Guthrie has distinguished herself as a Chemistry Professor and mentor of K-12 students. Her accomplishments include the establishment in of the Greensboro Area Mathematics and Science Education Center. The Center s pre-college component serves 450 7th through 12th grade students annually through a school-based academic enrichment program; a Saturday Academy in the sciences and mathematics for minority youth; mentored research experiences during summer; and, a parental involvement program. Ninety-seven percent of the pre-college program graduates have matriculated to college and 75% percent have majored in science, mathematics or engineering. Dr. Guthrie also coordinated the North Carolina State Science Fair for fourteen years. She is presently a member of the faculty at North Carolina A&T State University doc1096 none For more than 20 years, Dr. Villarreal has directed research and mentoring programs that have enhanced the science careers of hundreds of women and minority students at the undergraduate and graduate levels. His contributions include the implementation and management of an international research training program for minority students, now in its 6th year of operation; a laboratory research training program for 40 undergraduates and five graduate students per year; a bridge program that provides research training for community college students; and, a research-based course in writing that imparts communication and critical thinking skills to undergraduate students. During the past eight years, more than 225 students have benefited from Dr. Villarreal s commitment to mentoring. At least 50 of these students earned or are pursuing graduate degrees in science. Dr. Villarreal is presently a member of the faculty of the University of California, Irvine doc1097 none While maintaining a vigorous chemistry research program involving under-graduate and graduate students, Dr. Lopez-Garriga also manages an extensive K-12 outreach agenda. Through the Science on Wheels program, Lopez-Garriga has intrigued and excited thousands of elementary and secondary students by conducting simple experiments at K-12 schools throughout Puerto Rico. His undergraduate and graduate students helped Lopez-Garriga provide training in cooperative and active learning techniques to 500 K-12 teachers during the past eight years. In addition, 103 teachers enhanced their scientific competency through the GLOBE program (Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment). The Puerto Rico GLOBE franchise is headed by Lopez-Garriga. Since , Dr. Lopez-Garriga has mentored 35 graduate students of which eleven are currently pursuing doctoral degrees. Lopez-Garriga is presently a member of the faculty at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez doc1098 none Dr. Summers research in the area of nuclear magnetic resonance studies of complex bio-systems is at the forefront of biomedical research. Each summer approximately 20 undergraduates work in his laboratory. They are given the same responsibilities as graduate students, completing their own projects and becoming co-authors and first authors in major scientific journals. Dr. Summers also directs the Meyerhoff Graduate Program for high-achieving minority graduate students. The program now includes 26 minority students. To date, more than 100 graduate and undergraduate students articles have been published by Dr. Summers mentees. In , nine of Dr. Summers students, including 7 African Americans, graduated and were admitted to Ph.D. or M.D. Ph.D. programs at leading universities. The research facility under the direction of Dr. Summers is a national model for producing large numbers of high-achieving African American students in areas of vital importance to the nation. Dr. Summers is presently a member of the faculty of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County doc1099 none In , Dr. Spaht established the Louisiana Preparatory Program (LaPREP), an enrichment program for high-ability middle school students. The purpose of LaPREP is to motivate and instruct its participants to pursue college studies in science, mathematics, and engineering. LaPREP begins its ninth session in June - six hours a day, seven weeks per summer. Each year, 30 sixth and seventh grade students are selected as first-year participants. Successful first-year students are invited to return for a second year. Laboratory experience, including hands-on academic research activities, is an integral part of LaPREP in that it introduces mathematics and science as active and participatory processes. Dr. Spaht addresses every aspect of the program, including curriculum development, mentoring, training program staff, recruiting participants, and raising funds. More than 225 students have completed at least one year of LaPREP. All former participants who have graduated from high school have enrolled in college with over 90% majoring in science, mathematics or engineering. Dr. Spaht is presently a member of the faculty of Louisiana State University, Shreveport doc1100 none Since joining the faculty at California State University, Northridge in , Dr. Zavala has afforded intensive research experiences to 112 undergraduate students, including 89 under-represented minorities and 81 females, primarily from families with no history of university attendance. Under Dr. Zavala s tutelage, students analyze and present journal articles, and learn to write applications and favorably present themselves. Dr. Zavala accompanies them to national conferences where they present their research in a scientific forum, and meet scientists from different institutions. Under her reassuring guidance, students quickly gain self-confidence as they learn what is expected of them as scientists and how to think like scientists. To date, 70% of Dr. Zavala s mentees have begun graduate studies with 52% of them continuing in doctoral programs. Dr. Zavala also conducts pre-college science teaching outreach. As president-elect of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS), Dr. Zavala further extends her national influence doc1101 none Professor Cotter has dedicated his career to creating an environment that encourages and challenges undergraduate women to pursue careers in the geosciences, a field in which they are seriously under-represented. Since , 66 women have been mentored by Cotter. Over 80% of his mentees have graduated, with 31 continuing into graduate school, 13 entering careers in geology, five becoming educators and two becoming Park Rangers. The foundation of Cotter s success is his vigorous program of undergraduate research in which each student works on an individual research project, gaining valuable understanding and hands-on experience in research design and technique. Beyond the research experience is an emphasis on personal growth in a collegial learning environment which nurtures development and builds confidence. Dr. Cotter is a member of the faculty at the University of Minnesota, Morris Campus doc1102 none Dr. Shabazz began his graduate teaching career at Atlanta University (now a part of Clark Atlanta University) in , where he found only two students pursuing master s degrees in mathematics. During the next six years, he recruited and graduated 109 students with master s degrees in mathematics. Of this group, 30 went on to earn doctoral degrees from some of the Nation s leading universities. In , Dr. Shabazz returned to join the faculty at Clark Atlanta University. Within six years, 155 undergraduate students were majoring in mathematics at Clark Atlanta University. Nineteen former students of Dr. Shabazz are currently doctoral candidates in mathematics. Dr. Shabazz recently returned to his alma mater, Lincoln University, where he continues to teach and mentor doc1103 none Upon arriving at The City College of New York in , Dr. Akins opened his research laboratory to both high school students and undergraduates with a keen interest in science, who were willing to work hard both academically and in the laboratory. With the assistance of a cadre of like-minded faculty, Dr. Akins expanded this model by establishing the Center for Analysis of Structures and Interfaces (CASI), a major research center and training laboratory for high school students in their junior and senior years, high school chemistry and physics teachers, and undergraduate and graduate students. These efforts have led to City College being one of the nation s leaders in providing Ph.Ds. to minority students. During the -98 Academic Year, eleven under-represented minority students obtained their Ph.Ds. at City College in chemistry or engineering doc1104 none The investigators will provide opportunities for undergraduate students to be active participants in solar physics related research in the Laboratory for Astronomy and Space Physics (LASP) at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The main effort is to organize and supervise a summer internship program at Goddard. Each year the investigators will recruit students, beginning in August, for the following year s program. During the months of April and May, the investigators will match the student applicants with mentors and projects available at Goddard. Students will begin to arrive for their twelve-week internships around mid-May. The ten-week period beginning with Memorial Day comprises the core of the program doc1105 none Under this award, Dr. Chang will investigate the dynamics of mid-latitude storm tracks and their relationship with the basic state atmospheric flow. His goal is to understand what drives the seasonal and interannual time variations in the position and intensity of storm tracks. The study builds on his previous work and is motivated by the observed suppression of the of the Pacific storm track in mid-winter. The research consists of four thrusts. The first three focus on how specific mechanisms affect eddy growth in a given basic state; the fourth concentrates on isolating and understanding the effect of storm track eddy fluxes on the basic state. Specifically, the PI wishes to investigate (1) the effect of the basic state shear on the baroclinic sources of storm tracks particularly the effect on upper-level perturbations coming off the Asian continent; (2) the modes of variability due to wave propagation variations; (3) the effect of condensational heating on storm tracks; and (4) the relationship between the amplitude and the location of storm tracks and low-frequency variability of the atmosphere. For this study, the PI will employ a combination of tools including observational data analyses, numerical simulations with General Circulation Models (GCMs), and idealized models. The fourth thrust will involve the coupling of a storm track model and a stationary wave model. This research is important because the location and intensity of storm tracks have direct bearing on regional weather. Further, a better understanding of storm track behavior is needed to anticipate potential changes that might result from climate variations doc1106 none The objective of this project is to study products of the atmospheric oxidation of isoprene, in particular, hydroxy carbonyl compounds. A method to quantify these compounds based on scrubbing, derivatization with PFBHA and BSTFA, and gas chromatography ion trap mass spectrometery, will be further developed. For the purpose of preparing standards, a variety of compounds will be synthesized. The procedure will then be demonstrated for field measurements and deployed at field sites in Northern California doc1107 none Symposium on Adaptive Systems for Signal Processing, Communications and Control (AS-SPCC) sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Canada (Region 7) is seeking a grant toward the cost of conference publications and to partially support graduate student participation. The symposium is the first International Symposium presenting work in Fundamentals of Adaptive and Learning Systems, Pattern Recognition, Adaptive Signal Processing, Radar Signal Processing, Wireless Communications, Adaptive Control, Nonlinear Dynamical Systems and Computational Intelligence in Finance. The Symposium is being held in Lake Louise, Alberta, Canada, October 1-4, . The Symposium site is the Chateau Lake Louise doc1108 none This is a standard award to support the 5th AAAI Doctoral Consortium to be held as a workshop during the 17th AAAI conference in Austin, Texas. The workshop will provide a unique opportunity for a group of PhD students to discuss and explore their research interests and career objectives together with a panel of established researchers. The consortium has the following objectives: To provide a setting for mutual feedback on participants current research, and guidance on future research directions To develop a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research To support a new generation of researchers with information and advice on academic, research, industrial, and non-traditional career paths To contribute to the conference goals through interaction with other researchers and participation in conference events. The Doctoral Consortium will be held concurrently with other workshops preceding the AAAI 00 conference. It is expected that it will attract a diverse group of student participants who reflect a wide range of topic areas and methodologies within artificial intelligence, and who have settled on their thesis directions but who still have significant research left to do. Selection will be based on clarity and completeness of the submission packet, stage of research, advisor s letter, and other evidence of promise such as published papers or technical reports. Participants thesis summaries will be published in the AAAI-00 conference proceedings. NSF funds will be supplemented by a contribution from Microsoft Research to provide student participants with a travel reimbursement of $800. Participants will also receive complimentary conference registration. The organizing committee for the workshop consists of: Marie A. Bienkowski, Chair, SRI International; Janyce M. Wiebe, New Mexico State University; Mary P. Harper, Purdue University; Vibhu O. Mittal, Just Research and Carnegie Mellon University; and Loren Terveen, AT Claire Cardie, Cornell University; Russell Greiner, University of Alberta; Mary P. Harper, Purdue University; Evangelos E. Milios, Dalhousie University; Raymond J. Mooney, University of Texas at Austin; Leora Morgenstern, IBM T.J. Watson Research; and Nils J. Nilsson, Stanford University doc1109 none This doctoral dissertation research project will permit MS Felicitas Wiedermann to conduct a three stage research project to develop an effective protocol to extract climatic information from tooth enamel. Enamel is a dense, low porosity structure which is well preserved in many archaeological situations and is resistant to contamination from burial environment. Because the oxygen and carbon in the organic component of enamel ultimately derives from food and water consumed by the individual (and its mother) they closely reflect the isotopic ratio of the materials from which these derive. The oxygen isotope ratio of both freestanding and food-incorporated water is affected by both temperature and amount of rainfall and these climatic variables are thus reflected in tooth enamel. Carbon isotope ratio varies with the type of plants an animal consumes and enamel carbon ratios provide insight into vegetation cover. Sheep teeth, which constitute the basis for this study grow in increments and through analysis of the individual sections one can examine the degree of seasonal change across the year. Such knowledge provides an environmental context for understanding prehistoric human behavior. In a multistage study MS Wiedermann hopes to develop a robust analytic methodology. In the first stage she will feed laboratory sheep isotopically labeled water as well as timed biogenic markers which will permit her to determine the rate and geometry of tooth growth. With this information she will develop a strategy for sectioning teeth to remove chronologically relevant samples. She will then apply this technique to modern teeth from the Near East. Since the materials will be obtained from specific locales where vegetation, temperature and vegetation are known it will be possible to draw tight links between isotope ratios and these environmental variables. Finally she will apply the technique to samples from the Neolithic archaeological site of Ain Ghazal, Jordan. This will allow her to determine the extent to which such ancient teeth are subject to in ground alteration and to apply the technique directly to a significant archaeological question. This work is important because, if successful, it will develop a technique which will provide valuable data to prehistorians and other scientists who reconstruct the past. I will also help to train a very promising young scientist doc1110 none Tapia This U.S.-Mexico award will support 15 U.S. participants to the Seventh US-Mexico Workshop in Numerical Analysis, that will take place in Merida, Mexico, January . Organizers are Dr. Richard Tapia, Rice University, Houston, Texas, in collaboration with Dr. Jose Luis Morales, of the Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico (ITAM)in Mexico City. Participants will include academics, engineers and students. The main themes of the workshop are nonlinear optimization, semi-definite programming, numerical linear algebra related to optimization, and application of optimization in network design, finance, and chemical engineering. This meeting follows a series of workshops organized during the s and beginning of the 90s, which played an important role in the development of numerical analysis in Mexico. The themes of the workshop reflect emerging research areas with important practical applications. A volume of proceedings will be published thus ensuring dissemination of the results of the workshop doc1111 none Mangel A workshop on quantitative and evolutionary approaches to environmental problem solving will be 22-24 March at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The interdisciplinary group of participants will discuss multiple needs in environmental problem solving and some potential numerical approaches to address these needs. The project fits nicely under the Division of Environmental Biology s nascent initiative on quantitative environmental and integrative biology (QEIB) and with the Ecological Studies Cluster interest in efforts to blend social and ecological sciences. The workshop already has financial support from UC Santa Cruz doc1112 none Because of their photosynthetic lifestyle, plants have naturally developed elaborate mechanisms for controlling their responses to the quality and quantity of incident light. During periods of exposure to high intensity light (HL) the photosynthetic apparatus becomes over-excited and this excess energy can cause serious damage to the cell. Studies suggest that photosynthetic organisms may sense that they are receiving HL, and trigger the expression of factors that help the organism to acclimate to HL stress, by monitoring the redox state of the photosystem or through the activities of one or more blue UV-A light (BL) photoreceptors. The long-term goal of this research is to identify and characterize the sensors and other regulatory elements that control gene expression in response to HL in cyanobacteria. Previous work has identified one such regulatory element. This factor, a histidine sensor kinase designated NblS, controls the expression of a number of important genes during HL stress. NblS is hypothesized to sense the redox stress on the photosystem during HL exposure and appears to also be involved in BL photoperception. An objective of this research is to explore the mechanism of HL sensing by NblS. The presence of a PAS domain within the sequence of NblS strongly suggests that it binds a redox-active cofactor. This possibility will be explored. The presence and nature of a cofactor bound to this domain will be determined by spectral analysis of the PAS region of NblS overexpressed in E. coli. Subsequent alignment-based, site-directed mutagenesis would be used to identify the residues important in binding of the cofactor. This information would serve as an important step towards understanding the sensory mechanism of NblS. Another objective of this research is to identify other regulatory factors involved in controlling gene expression in response to HL stress in cyanobacteria. This will be done by generation and analysis of additional mutants altered in expression of the HL- and BL-activated hliA gene. Mutants will be generated by transposon mutagenesis in the cyanobacterium Synechocystis PCC . Combined use of the tagging mutagenesis method and knowledge of the entire genome sequence that is available for this strain will allow rapid identification of a number of factors involved in the HL-sensing process. It has long been recognized that numerous processes in all forms of life are moderated by light, and more recently it has become evident that a variety of systems can be controlled by intracellular redox or redox potential. The studies described here will provide greater understanding of how these signals are perceived and how they are used to control gene expression doc1113 none This PI received a posdoctoral fellowship in to work on how ecological history affects the strength of trophic cascades in lakes. Dr. Fischer worked with Dr. Nelson Hairston at Cornell University for her fellowship. She is now in a tenure track position at Franklin and Marshall College and proposes to test the hypothesis that direct and indirect effects can be distinguished using simultaneous PRESS and PULSE perturbation experiments. She will do this by assessing the effects of the two types of manipulations on freshwater zooplankton communities and fish predators. She will conduct in situ mesocosm experiments and overall, will assess the breakpoint where a PULSE becomes a PRESS for freshwater zooplankton in the north temperate zone doc1114 none The Northern California Rural Systemic Initiative (NCRSI) is a systemic change effort undertaken by a consortium of universities, school districts, parents, students, nonprofit organizations, government agencies and businesses that addresses the barriers to adequate science, mathematics and technology education in rural Northern California. Grounded in the belief that effective uses of new technologies to enhance student learning require new pedagogical skills and curricular content, the consortium seeks to transform mathematics and science education by introducing comprehensive changes in pedagogy including instruction and curriculum. NCRSI consists of the following three core elements: 1. An in-depth self-study of Modoc and Siskiyou counties including the collection of base-line data on mathematics, science and technology instruction; 2. An innovative preservice and inservice teacher and administrator preparation model, Guiding Partners, which incorporates mathematics, science, technology Training and development of constructivist based pedagogy skills centered Around a concept of project facilitation - the pedagogy will be modeled by Consortium staff developers and university faculty as they teach it to classroom Teachers who will practice it with students in K-12 fieldwork; 3. Development of a five year implementation plan based upon the in-depth study of Mathematics, science and technology instruction - the plan will include specific, Measurable outcomes, timelines, and designate responsibilities doc1115 none Astronomy (11) Approximately 250,000 students (mostly non-science majors) take introductory astronomy courses in colleges, universities, and adult education programs around the country each year. These courses represent one of the most important interfaces between the astronomy space science community and the public. Surveys reveal that about half of these courses are taught at institutions that do not have a significant astronomy research program, often by people whose training is in other fields besides astronomy and space science. Whatever their background, many people teaching these courses have too little initial training or exposure to effective teaching strategies and resources in astronomy. This 2.5-day national symposium at the Annual Meeting of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific is designed to assist instructors at all levels in doing a better job in their teaching of non-science majors. Mentor instructors, innovators in laboratory and on-line teaching, researchers in educational techniques, and creators of the best written and on-line resources are among the presenters. Much of the symposium is in the form of interactive panels and hands-on workshops. The organizers are actively seeking out the participation of three groups who are not normally represented at such meetings: full-time community college instructors, part-time community and small college instructors, and colleagues in other fields who wind up teaching astronomy doc1116 none This award will support a post-doctoral researcher for two years to investigate the temporal evolution of gravity wave ducting the mesosphere and lower thermosphere (MLT) region using a two-dimensional model to perform numerical simulations. The model will include the effects of molecular and eddy diffusion to simulate the wave dissipation. Earlier studies of wave ducting in the lower thermosphere thermal duct show excellent results compared with the observations. However, the earlier results were based on models that assumed the existence of monochromatic waves superimposed on a steady mean-state atmosphere. This approach is oversimplified. The new model will provide the temporal evolution of ducting in a time-dependent atmosphere doc1117 none Adolescent and adult African American English (AAE) is characterized by well-defined syntactic and semantic forms. However, the stages of development in which child AAE speakers acquire these patterns have not been identified. As a result, thorough descriptions of the speech of normally developing AAE speakers are not available, though some researchers have considered the use of a particular feature in the language of five and six year old AAE speakers (Stockman and Vaughn-Cook ; Wyatt , ; Jackson ). The planning activities are designed to lead to the development of a protocol, including elicitation tasks, that will be used in gathering information to write a descriptive analysis of the syntactic and semantic patterns in the grammars of three, four and five year old AAE speakers in Lake Arthur, Louisiana; Austin, Texas; and Dallas, Texas. The research to be conducted following the planning activities will provide data about the overall system of AAE, with a focus on areas such as tense and aspect marking, the system of existential marking, patterns in negation constructions and strategies of question formation. By analyzing AAE within a theoretical framework, it becomes possible to move beyond discussions in which the variety is compared to mainstream English, thus showing how AAE patterns with respect to other languages doc1118 none The informal economy, or the production of licit goods and services outside formal regulatory structures, encompasses a wide range of activities and products, including childcare, street vending, and home-based light industrial work. Most research on the informal economy focuses on demonstrating its size and importance, identifying the causes of its expansion, or understanding its relationship to the formal economy. Research has neglected issues relating to how participation in informal modes of labor affects individuals, and how these effects differ for men and women. This project rectifies these oversights by directly comparing the opportunities, experiences, and identities of men and women who are self-employed in New York City s informal economy. Using snowball sampling methods to recruit respondents with pin-up advertisements, newspaper classifieds, and referrals from other sample participants, the project gathers data from in-depth interviews about informal work histories, typical work days, and work, gender, and personal identities. In addition to describing how men and women go about their informal work on a day-to-day basis, get started in informal work, find clients, and earn income, the data show how informal work affects individual identity and how identity shapes the informal work process doc1119 none for Roesler This award would support analysis and additional measurements of the spectral profile of the geocoronal Balmer emission at 656.1 nm that would be obtained for data obtained in the period between solar minimum and solar maximum by the Wisconsin H-alpha mapper (WHAM) operating at Kitt Peak, AZ. These results would be combined with modeling of Bishop that is represented by the global atomic resonance radiation transport modeling code. These results would enable the extension of the current WHAM data base from a few case studies to a much more comprehensive database. These results would make possible public access to the WHAM web-based database of geocoronal column-integrated Balmer-alpha intensities doc1120 none The investigators will study quasi-periodic (QP) echoes associated with sporadic E layers using the Arecibo Observatory incoherent scatter radar, a high frequency (HF) coherent scatter radar to be located on St. Croix, and the Arecibo sodium lidar. Sporadic E and the QP echoes are the result of complex neutral atmosphere ionization interactions in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere. The goals are (1) to determine the horizontal spatial structure of the ionization and the relationship between that structure and the location of QP echoes observed with the coherent radar, (2) to determine the vertical spatial extent of the ionization structures, and (3) to determine the relationship between the motion of the ionization structures and the Doppler velocities and range rates measured by the coherent scatter radar. To accomplish this, dual-beam azimuth scans will be carried out with the incoherent scatter radar to provide information about the horizontal spatial variations and the vertical extent of the electron density structure and to determine the velocity at which the structures move from one beam to the other. The coherent scatter high frequency radar will be set up in a location on St. Croix so that the beam will be perpendicular to the magnetic field lines in the E region above the Arecibo Observatory so that the two radar have a common volume in the E region. The sodium lidar will be operated in dual-beam mode as well in order to provide information about the horizontal and vertical spatial structure in the lower E region and the motions of the neutral atmosphere. By combining the various measurements, the dataset can be used as a test of the various theories that have been proposed to explain the initiation of the QP echoes doc1121 none She This award will provide for the continuation of mesosphere and lower thermosphere temperature and wind observations from Ft. Collins, CO. The extension of the existing 9 year database over the 5 years of this award to 14 years will make possible a detailed analysis of the long term trends in this atmospheric region, which is largely a result of the solar flux variation. Current analysis shows that there is a possibility of a small temperature change that might be a result of the anthropogenic influence arising from global change. However, at present this conclusion is only tentative as the measurement series is too short compared with the length of the solar cycle (11 years) to put this conclusion on a sound footing. Instrumental improvements will also provide for possible measurements of long terms variations of horizontal wind speed and direction as well as decadal temperature trends doc1122 none The investigators will study the source of variability of the equatorial F-region vertical plasma drift. Two possible sources will be investigated: The day-to-day changes in the amplitude of the tidal modes propagating from the lower atmosphere, and the variability induced by fluctuating magnetospheric sources at high latitudes. The first study will involve forcing the model with realistic hour-to-hour and day-to-day variability in the tidal modes at the base of the thermosphere. This will be based on the measurements from incoherent scatter radar sites, from meteor wind radar, and from satellite observations. The second study will involve forcing the model with realistic hour-to-hour and day-to-day changes in the magnetospheric sources. The study will make use of a coupled global model of the thermosphere, ionosphere, and plasmasphere doc1123 none This award would carry out optical and radar measurements that would be compared with the results of the modeling of the effects of proton precipitation for the region of the equatorward edge of the early evening sector of the auroral oval where protons are known to be a significant energy source. Measurements of the H-alpha and H-beta Doppler profiles would be made with a new high resolution echelle-CCD spectrograph at polar latitudes where the EISCAT incoherent scatter radar would provide concurrent soundings of the proton-auroral ionosphere. The proposed effort is aimed at overcoming several problems that have plagued the proper interpretation of such observations in the past. The use of a high spectral resolution spectrograph would minimize the effect of auroral contamination. The use of the incoherent scatter radar would make possible the acquisition of accurate ionization profiles enabling the accurate determination of the average energy and the energy flux into the region doc1124 none The investigators will measure and study the atmospheric gravity wave structure and flux into the mesosphere at Maui. The structure observed in OH airglow imagery will be used to calculate the vertical flux of horizontal momentum carried by gravity waves with large vertical wavelengths. The instrument to be used consists of a broadband, single filter, OH imager with the large light gathering power. Airglow imagers are uniquely capable of measuring gravity waves with large phase speeds that carry the major portion of the wave momentum flux in the mesosphere. The airglow measurements will be combined with wind measurements from a lidar and meteor radar collocated at the Maui site. A secondary objective is to make measurements of, and study the sign of, the vertical direction these short horizontal scale waves are propagating. Upward propagating momentum may be cancelled by downward propagating waves. These observations will contribute information useful for the study of energy deposition by gravity waves and their effects on global change processes doc1125 none The investigators will deploy a meteor radar system at the Maui Space Surveillance Site near the summit of Haleakala, Hawaii, to study the spectrum of wind and temperature variability in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere. Continuous wind and temperature measurements provided by the meteor radar are crucial for interpreting the simultaneous airglow and lidar observations. In addition, the meteor radar observations of winds and temperatures combined with high resolution lidar measurements of temperatures will make it possible to characterize tidal oscillations in both the wind and temperature field and their seasonal variations. The meteor radar will measure the background wind field necessary to determine the periods of wind-shifted observed waves, and assess the role of instrumental filtering in the presence of variable wind shifting of the wave spectrum when interpreting statistical summaries of wave properties produced by the optical instruments. The effort will take advantage of the unique opportunity provided by the collocation of the sodium Doppler lidar and meteor radar to validate and refine the newly developed meteor radar and temperature measurement technique. This new technique offers the potential for continuous long-term monitoring of temperatures for investigations of the secular, annual, and tidal variations of the temperature field in the mesopause region doc1126 none Rafelski This Pan-American Advanced Institutes award, jointly supported by the NSF and the Department of Energy (DOE), will consist of a series of lectures and research interactions on the production of new states of matter in hadronic interactions at high energy and or temperatures. The course will be held in Sao Paulo, Brazil in the early months of and will involve approximately 40 graduate students in a two-week presentation of introductory material and current research results in this rapidly developing field. It will also include approximately 10 primary lecturers to present the basic material with additional researchers giving seminars on specialized research results. The main goal is to allow advanced graduate students to specialize in this interdisciplinary activity, which brings together physicists from previously separated subfields of high-energy particle physics and nuclear physics. Publication of the proceedings containing the lectures and seminars will produce a useful reference work for the research community, and serve as a resource tool for the students as they advance in their careers. The interactions among students and researchers should be also helpful in laying the groundwork for future collaborations doc1127 none The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, in partnership with Girls, Inc. and the UTC Challenger Center will conduct a program entitled Adventures in Computers, Engineering, and Space (ACES) to encourage girls to consider careers in these fields, and to continue their education in science and mathematics. ACES will include a one-week residential summer workshop for 24 girls entering seventh and eight grades. This workshop will provide space-related activities at the Challenger Center and hands-on activities in computer science and electrical, mechanical, and industrial engineering, as Whole Person activities such as nutrition, professional etiquette, and exercise. Follow-up activities will include small design projects that encourage originally in solving problems with constraints. To widen the influence of the project, an ACES Fair, featuring hands-on engineering, computer, and space activities, will be conducted at selected elementary and middle schools, and community centers. Participants for all activities will be drawn from both economically disadvantaged groups and the general population; each group will be assessed and tracked separately so that the efficacy of ACES in influencing attitudes of each can be measured. ACES will serve as a model for other communities concerned with under-representation of women in technical careers doc1128 none The Chicago Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with the Girl Scouts of Chicago, will expand Science in the City, an innovative science, math and technology program that targets hard-to-reach urban girls living in homeless shelters and housing developments throughout Chicago. This project will offer engaging activities and real-world applications to teach hands-on-science, math, and technology to 120 girls ages nine through fourteen, over a one-year period. In an effort to combat the physical and social isolation that these girls feel, they will be brought together monthly to the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum to participate in a variety of activities, programs, and events. These girls will attend workshops to obtain hard-to-get science badges, have fun with their families at Science for Families Days and educational field trips, learn about science careers during a job shadow day with museum staff, participate in a five-day summer camp, and learn how science affects their everyday lives. Successful women scientists will function as teachers and role models to help build the girls science knowledge, career choices, and self-esteem. As an in-kind match, the Academy will provide each girl with a one-year Family Membership to the Nature Museum, so that they will continue to explore and learn beyond the scope of this program doc1129 none for Milikh, This award addresses the quantitative physics of electron energization in the auroral E region which is known to be highly turbulent during times of vigorous auroral activity with values of the electron temperature reaching high values of K or greater. This electron heating is thought to be generated by waves (Farley-Buneman) or by the two-stream instability. The region where this electron heating occurs is located between 100 and 120 km where the electrons are magnetized (i.e., gyrates around the magnetic field line) and the ions are constrained by collisions to move in the direction of the neutral wind. The rate of electron heating would be calculated as a part of the development of a kinetic model for the electron energization in the auroral E-region caused by a large amplitude turbulent electric field. A numerical model represented by a Fokker-Planck code for the electron distribution function would be modified to include the relevant physical processes that become active by the presence of these turbulent electric fields. The successful execution of this award would provide an understanding and predictive capability for the operation of navigation, communication, and surveillance systems doc1130 none Under the direction of Dr. Keith Kintigh, MS Deborah Huntley will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. Using both chemical and stylistic techniques she will analyze a series of ceramics from prehistoric Zuni sites located in west central New Mexico. Between and AD at least 28 large pueblos were built, occupied and abandoned. These large structures contained up to 400 rooms, were defended from external attack and were of sufficient size to function as independent communities. They were often spaced within 5 - 10 km. of each other. While excavation has provided insight into individual pueblo function, archaeologists do not understand how these communities, which clearly share a wide range of cultural traits, interacted with each other and to what extent the formed an integrated functioning system. Models vary from hypothesized community autonomy, through alliance to ritual complementarily. To examine this question MS Huntley will study ceramics excavated at a series of contemporaneous sites and also conduct similar chemical analyses on localized deposits from which clay was extracted. She will use electron microprobe analysis, Inductively-Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry and Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis to characterize both clay and pottery glaze to reconstruct the Zuni manufacturing and exchange system. Combined with a stylistic analysis she will be able to determine where individual ceramics were made, whether unique local styles exist and the degree and direction finished vessels moved between pueblos. These data will provide insight not only into the overall amount of interaction but the extent to which alliances among different pueblos existed. Anthropologists consider the prehistoric Zuni to represent a Middle Range Society , defined on the basis of settled village agriculture and a local centralized form of social organization. Such entities were widespread during late prehistoric times, in many areas survived into the historic period and originally set the stage for the emergence of civilization. Because of their widespread occurrence and significance, it is important to understand how they functioned and MS Huntley s research will contribute to this process. This work will shed light on an important period of U.S. prehistory and assist in training a promising young scientist doc1131 none The mass balance of tropical cyclones is not well understood, but better understanding is crucial to understanding hurricane dynamics and to understand hurricane precipitation processes. The principal objective of this research is to improve the accuracy of rainfall estimates in landfalling tropical cyclones through improvement in the understanding of the relative importance of different precipitation processes at various locations in hurricanes and their effects upon storm structure. Data to be analyzed is from a new, advanced cloud physics instrument that was deployed during the summer of . Specifically, data will be analyzed to determine cloud particle density under a variety of environmental conditions. This research will be conducted in collaboration with NOAA scientists and success will lead to improved understanding of precipitation processes within hurricanes doc1132 none This grant provides support for travel and subsistence for approximately 15 graduate students, to enable them to attend the 13th International Conference on Clouds and Precipitation, to be held in Reno, Nevada, on 14-18 August . A selection committee chaired by Dr. John Hallett of the Desert Research Institute will screen the applications and allocate the awards. Preference will be given to applicants who will contribute to the conference and for whom there is an element of financial need. Participation is limited to graduate students in U.S. academic institutions registered in graduate programs in meteorology, atmospheric science, or closely related fields doc1133 none Grimes ( ) estimates that there are approximately languages spoken in the world today. LaPolla ( ) and Grimes have run statistical analyses based upon census and population estimate figures that show an alarming number of these, perhaps as many as 50%, are in real danger of extinction. Fifty-two percent of the world s languages are spoken regularly by less than 10,000 people, 28% are spoken by less than 1,000 and 10% by less than 100 (LaPolla ). By contrast, 49% of the world s population speaks one of 10 major languages (Mandarin, English, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese, French, German) as their mother tongue. Linguists have a twofold reason to be concerned about this trend in rapid language loss. First, and most importantly, the death of a language or dialect represents a significant loss in culture. Language serves a unique purpose as the primary means of cultural preservation and cross-generational cultural transmission. The death of a culture s language represents a serious impediment to the survival of that community. Second, the death of a language or dialect represents a serious academic loss (Hale , Woodbuty ). Studies of linguistic diversity and cross linguistic comparisons drive much of linguistic theory. Many (if not most) of the endangered languages have not been well studied or documented. When such a language disappears, then, there are two losses: a loss of valuable linguistic data, and the loss of the culture it represents. As the largest electronic linguistics publication in the world (http: www.linguistlist.org), the LINGUIST List would like to preserve data on minority and endangered languages in a widely-available electronic repository. The repository is a long-term project, which will require substantial funding and partnership with other institutions. But in order to lay the groundwork for this enterprise, preliminary research on database architecture must be done immediately. This Small Grant for Exploratory research will fund the design of an innovative, extensible database and support a pilot project to test the design using data from two disparate languages: Biao Min, a Hmong-Mien language with a complex phonology, and Mocovi, a Waikurean language with a complex morphology doc1134 none The investigators will study middle atmosphere composition, structure and dynamics using sodium lidar measurements. There are two parts to the proposed effort: 1) analysis and interpretation of the wind, temperature, and sodium density data obtained at the Starfire Optical Range in New Mexico between and , and 2) the study of thermal tides and gravity wave momentum, heat, and constituent transport using observations made by a sodium lidar at the Maui Space Surveillance Site (MSSS) beginning in January . The Starfire data will be used to characterize the seasonal variations in wave activity and momentum, heat, and constituent fluxes in the mesopause region at a mid-latitude continental site. A similar set of observations will also be collected at the Maui facility, a low-latitude, mid-ocean site. These observations are made feasible by using the 3.7-meter steerable telescope at Maui as the lidar receiver. Both nighttime and daytime observations will be conducted to study tidal perturbation of winds and temperature and to study gravity wave transport processes and their seasonal variations. The low-latitude tide and flux observations will be compared to similar mid latitude data from previous measurements made at Starfire and Urbana, Illinois. The study will contribute to knowledge about gravity wave dynamics in the middle atmosphere with application to studies of global change doc1135 none Hughes This grant provides partial support for a single crystal x-ray diffractometer with a CCD detector, to be housed in the X-ray crystallography laboratory at Miami University, Ohio. The PIs, John M. Hughes, John Rakovan, and Hailiang Dong, are all from the Department of Geology. The group includes a mid-career researcher with extensive single-crystal x-ray experience, and two early-career researchers with expertise in emerging areas of the Earth Sciences (mineral surface structure and biomineralization). Miami University students will be extensively involved in the studies to be undertaken. The addition of the CCD-detector diffractometer at Miami University will allow the investigation of samples that were previously too small for characterization through x-ray structure analysis. The instrument will be used to investigate material properties of natural materials such as apatite, tourmaline, clay minerals, and biominerals. The studies are of importance in the studies of environmental mineralogy, medical mineralogy, earth science, and the formation of minerals by organisms. The facility will also by used by other researchers on a time-available basis. The instrument will be housed in a newly renovated room in Hughes Hall on the Miami campus, and will complement the existing powder x-ray diffraction equipment, atomic force microscope, and single-crystal x-ray cameras. In addition to support from the Earth Sciences Instrumentation and Facilities Program (EAR IF), matching funds are provided by the State of Ohio and Miami University doc1136 none The Department of Geosciences at the University of Louisiana at Monroe (ULM) is requesting support to replace its current server. ULM plans to purchase a dual-processor Pentium III personal computer. This computer will enable ULM to resume its role as a relay site in the IDD topology, to archive data, and to have a reliable data ingestor for the University. Furthermore, ULM will be able to expand its research opportunities having the capability to ingest satellite and radar data and storing data for longer periods of time doc1137 none The International Council for Science (ICSU) will promote coordination of environment- and global change-related activities of he various ICSU unions, committees and other bodies. ICSU s Advisory Committee on the Environment (ACE), with support from ICSU s environmental sciences officer, will keep under review and will identify and address scientific issues that cut across the four major international global change research programs -- the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP); the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP); the International Human Dimensions (of Global Environmental Change) Program (IHDP) and Diversitas. Such issues already singled out include: carbon, water, food, and fiber cycles; climate and agriculture; and science for sustainability. Efforts will be also be undertaken to improve the flow of data, information and scientific results from scientists to policymakers. Improved linkages between natural and social sciences related to global change will be explored, as will the relationship between health and the environment, including global change. Other issues that ICSU ACE will address include (1) the relationship between the global observing systems and the global research programs and (2) implications for global change and environmental research of the UN general Assembly s resolution on a new science agenda for sustainability. Potential new scientific initiatives will be explored in these areas and scientific workshops and similar scientific planning meetings will be convened. Special attention will be paid to the need to further involve scientists from developing countries in the full range of ICSU activities related to global change. Finally, ICSU will, as a co-sponsor of the WCRP with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), continue its support for the WCRP doc1138 none Large rivers and the valleys through which they flow support a rich array of aquatic and flood-tolerant plants and animals as well as a diverse set of human economic activities. Ecological systems naturally evolved in response to periodic flood pulses, but the construction of large dams along these rivers has disrupted these cycles, as has the conversion of land from natural cover to managed land uses. A challenge facing those involved in management of rivers, floodplains, and other parts of large river valleys is to develop management strategies and practices that sustain ecological systems without disrupting the human economic and settlement systems that have evolved in the same areas. This interdisciplinary project builds on the efforts of a team of hydrologists, ecologists, economists, and regional scientists currently engaged in adapting system-component models to an 80-mile section of the Illinois River between the LaGrange and Peoria dams in west-central Illinois. A hydrological component of this project will involve the calibration of 1-D and 2-D models and the testing of their modeling of high-frequency flood events and strategic management changes. An ecological component will involve the creation of dynamic, hydrology-driven models of floodplain forest and marsh vegetation. Habitat suitability indices and professional judgments will produce estimates of consequent changes in fish and wildlife species mix and population levels. Economic research will estimate changes in regional income and employment and identify sub-county areas that will be particularly affected under different management scenarios. Work on these component models and on linkages among them will be conducted in the high speed computing and advanced data management environment available through the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. This supercomputing environment also will be employed to develop visualization tools for communicating spatially dynamic research findings to stakeholders. This project will develop a suite of interrelated, dynamic models of hydrology and ecology of a river floodplain system and will link them to the local economy. The project focuses on gaps within and linkages among the component models and will create visualization tools to communicate the modeling results. The models will be used to simulate, test, and communicate with stakeholders about alternative restoration strategies related to the general hypothesis that: river hydrology and floodplain lands can be managed in ways that restore ecosystem services while not diminishing the overall economic well-being of the affected region doc1139 none The project will explore and demonstrate the possibilities and advantages of international cooperation for the creation and delivery of complex literary and linguistic documents as encoded XML files. The University of Trier brings strong computer science, lexicographical, and philological expertise to the project. The University of Virginia Library and other departments have a long and successful record of applying SGML and XML encoding to humanities and other textual material, along with considerable capabilities for online delivery for tens of thousands of text. This particular project will bring these strengths to bear on Middle High German Interlinked, a full-text archive and Medieval German Dictionaries collaboratory. Prior efforts at Virginia to interlink the Oxford English Dictionary with texts of Early American fiction have been of value in examining the influence of pre- American fiction on the development of the modern English language and usage. Part of the project will be focussed on evaluation and implementation of web interfaces for multiple user communities doc1140 none The investigators will deploy an all-sky imager to perform mesosphere temperature mapping at the Air Force s high altitude Space Surveillance facility on Maui. The Air Force and the National Science Foundation are jointly funding a campaign to study the Mesosphere and Lower Thermosphere (MALT), referred to as Maui MALT. The investigators will participate in the Maui MALT campaign by (1) providing unique data on gravity wave and tidal characteristics and their induced intensity and temperature perturbations, and (2) providing frequent measurements of mesospheric temperature and intensity variability at two heights. Measurements will be made over a two-year period permitting long-term, seasonal studies of the mesosphere and lower thermosphere. The long-term measurements will complement and enhance the wind and temperature measurements to be made by a coincident lidar instrument coupled to the 3.67m Advanced Electro-Optical System telescope. These studies contribute to knowledge of the dynamics and energetics of the middle atmosphere and its sensitivity to global change doc1141 none The University of Iowa is seeking support to acquire equipment for setting up an IDD feed to the Iowa Institute of Hydraulic Research (IIHR). The equipment consist of a high-end PC with local storage, CD burner, a DVD-RAM burner, and two disks for a Hewlett-Packard file server. With this equipment, IIHR will be able to expand its program in hydrometeorology. This equipment will bring Iowa into the IDD system which provides Level II data that will enhance the institution s overall research capability doc1142 none The University of Northern Iowa seeks funding to replace obsolete equipment. UNI will replace the obsolete equipment with current Unidata systems such as McIDAS and GEMPAK. Currently, UNI is still running the outdated OS 2-McIDAS system. With the new equipment, opportunities will be expanded for student use of real-time atmospheric measurements within existing courses and in research. In addition, meteorology courses will be enhanced to provide greater research opportunities for undergraduate students and faculty in the area of atmospheric sciences doc1143 none The State University of New York College at Brockport is requesting support to upgrade its current computer facilities. The funds will be used to upgrade SUNY current file server and replace existing SUN LX workstations. The present equipment will not satisfy the demands of the faculty or the students due outdated software. With the new equipment, students and faculty can improve their research activities and the Earth Sciences department can improve its role as a Unidata archival and relay site. Furthermore, the upgrades will allow a full integration of Unidata supported meteorological analysis and display software packages into SUNY s meteorology curriculum doc1144 none This project will support measurements of VOCs (volatile organic compounds) from plants under conditions of leaf senescence and frost damage. Compounds include hexenals, hexanal, pentenols, and other C5 and C6 VOCs. The field measurements will be carried out at the PROPOHET (Program for Research on Oxidants: Photochemistry, Emissions, and Transport) site in Michigan during the fall. Ancillary measurements will be available to determine air mass origin etc. These measurements will be carried out using on-line proton transfer reaction mass spectrometry (PTR-MS) in collaboration with the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and adsorbent cartridges and GC MS (gas chromatography mass spectrometry), in collaboration with NCAR. A recently developed relaxed eddy accumulator (REA) cartridge sampler will be used for flux measurements. This work will enhance our understanding of the contribution to tropospheric photochemistry and air quality of organic compounds emitted from plants doc1145 none The proposal is focused on developing an enabling generic technology to make MEMS devices compatible with biological fluids. The specific goal is to use surface modification and analysis strategies to understand protein interactions with the surfaces of modified and unmodified devices under flow and static conditions, and to be able to eventually make any material used for MEMS fabrication biocompatible. We will investigate the adsorption of differently charged proteins on specific surfaces in a variety of channel geometries and at different flow rates. We will examine not only surface modifications that resist protein adsorption, but also modifications that impede denaturization, as protein resistance is not the same as prevention of protein denaturization. The ultimate goal will be the eventual incorporation of a protein(s) in a stable layer that prevents denaturization and protein buildup modeled on capillary systems. The applications of this work span the range of science and technology, and could cause a fundamental change in how the industrial sector deals with the issue of biocompatibility. It also provides educational training for students and postdocs in a multidisciplinary area doc1146 none Under the direction of Dr. Charles Stanish, MS Aimee Plourde will obtain radiocarbon dates to determine the ages of material recovered during the course of fieldwork in the Huancane-Putina Valley in Peru. Over the course of six weeks, MS Plourde excavated at the site of Cachichupa which, based on its strategic location, massive terracing and large scale corporate architecture was the dominant location during the Formative period from ca. BC - AD 400. Based on comparison of Cachichupa s ceramics with those of adjacent regions it is possible with some confidence, to situate the site within this broad year time span, but the necessary more accurate placement requires radiocarbon dates. The goal of the work by MS Plourde and her advisor is to understand the factors which led to the rise to complex state level societies in the Andean region. While many are familiar with the Inca Empire, this in fact was the last in a series of such entities, the first of which developed in the highland Lake Titicaca Basin. While it is unlikely that any single cause can be isolated, many archaeologists believe that trade and control over the movement of essential resources led to the concentration of power and the development of hierarchically organized societies. Plourde and Stanish noted the early expansion of one particular site, Pukara, within the Titicaca Basin and its location adjacent to an important route which leads East towards the lowland Amazon. They postulated that the site controlled trade in important lowland goods and to test this idea they surveyed along the hypothesized route in an attempt to locate Pukara related sites. Cachichupa, they believe constitutes one such occurrence. However without precise knowledge of its age, it is not possible to fit it securely into a broader developmental sequence. This research is important for several reasons. It will provide insight into the rise of state level society in the New World and shed light on the factors which underlie this process. It will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc1147 none Subramaniam, Shankar University of California, San Diego Biology Workbench; A web-based infrastructure for databases, tools and interfaces in Biology. This award focuses on the maintenance and enhancement of the Biology Workbench; an integrated set of tools for sequence analysis, originally created as part of the NPACI NCSA project and recently relocated to UCSD. The project will add additional public domain tools and continue to serve a wide base of molecular biology researchers and educators as a single, integrated data retrieval and analysis resource doc1148 none The Quality Education for Minorities (QEM) Network is requesting two years of support from the National Science foundation (NSF) to provide technical assistance in the Foundation s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU-UP) Program. The goal of the HBCU-UP Program is to strengthen the Nation s workforce by enhancing the quality of undergraduate Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology (SMET) programs at HBCUs. Support from the Foundation will enable the QEM Network to: (1) provide on-site technical assistance to six of the and six of the HBCU-UP awardee institutions with technical assistance linked to critical needs identified within each of the targeted institution s HBCU-UP funded projects; (2) enlarge the pool of potential HBCU-UP grantees through the conduct each year of The Quality Education for Minorities (QEM) Network is requesting two years of support from the National Science foundation (NSF) to provide technical assistance in the Foundation s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU-UP) Program. The goal of the HBCU-UP Program is to strengthen the Nation s workforce by enhancing the quality of undergraduate Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology (SMET) programs at HBCUs. (3) utilize the regional workshops to offer general technical assistance to, and serve as a dissemination vehicle for all current HBCU-UP grantees. Expected outcomes are that each of the six targeted and of the HBCU-UP grantees will successfully achieve their expected accomplishments for the year in which technical assistance is provided. In addition, at lease 20 (67 percent) of the 30 HBCUs participating in the invitational regional workshops in years one and two will submit HBCU-UP proposals, at lease 10 (50 percent) of which will be successful the following year in obtaining HBCU-UP awards. In year two, special workshop sessions will be held for institutions whose proposals were unsuccessful in the previous year s competition. HBCUs that participated in the workshops in year one but did not submit proposals in the next Program competition will be replaced with new HBCUs if they do not demonstrate sufficient commitment to submitting a proposal during the next competition doc1149 none The present study, which continues a postdoctoral research project into the third year, investigates the parental socialization of African-American children, their social behavior and the social judgments of African-American children and early adolescents. There are two studies associated with this project. The first study investigates the relationship between parental socialization, behavioral observation and African-American first and fourth-grade children s disposition, liking disliking, moral and reward judgments. The second study investigates the disposition, liking disliking, moral and cross-situational judgments of African-American preschool, second-, fifth- -and eighth-graders regarding hypothetical black boy and girl actors engaged in prosocial and aggressive behavior. Most of the child interviews for both parts of the project and behavioral observation will be conducted by July . The third year will involve parent interviews, data coding and data analyses. The Fellow anticipates that these activities will be completed by January, doc1150 none NSF has extended its support of the research project African Stellar Navigators and Their Communities for a third year of study. It is a study of one of Africa s astronomy traditions - the tradition of using the stars for navigation. Africa today and in antiquity has been the site of several forms of astronomy including artistic representations, stone circle calendars, and astrology. Stellar navigation was chosen as the focus of study after Dr. Holbrook completed a preliminary field site investigation of Tunisia, North Africa. That investigation revealed that the fishermen living on the Kerkennah Islands use stellar navigation to reach their fisheries at night. The goals of the project include videotaping the fishermen using stellar navigation. The resulting video footage will be included in a planetarium show featuring stellar navigators and the physics, mathematics, and astronomy behind their techniques. Other goals include continuing to study the various aspects of the interaction between stellar navigation and introduced technologies, to learn more about the navigators and their communities, to film stellar navigation in action, and continue to publish articles of the findings in Tunisia and at the other two fieldsites in Fiji and the United States. The extra year of funding is important for making a return trip to Tunisia and completing research in the Annapolis archives doc1151 none ALAN T. WATERMAN AWARD Jennifer A. Doudna ( ) Jennifer A. Doudna, a Professor at Yale University in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry is the recipient of the Alan T. Waterman award. She has conducted innovative research that led to the development of a technique that facilitates crystallization of large RNA molecules, has determined the crystal structure of catalytic RNA molecules and a RNA molecule that forms the ribonucleoprotein core of the signal recognition particle, and has deciphered structural features of those molecules that permit a greater understanding of the mechanistic basis of RNA function in both catalysis and in protein synthesis. Her current research is reshaping basic theories regarding the roles of metal ions in ribozyme function. No longer viewed as strict metalloenzymes, some ribozymes can access alternative catalytic mechanisms depending on the identity and availability of metal ions. Similarly, reaction conditions can allow different folding pathways to predominate, with divalent cations sometimes playing opposing roles doc1152 none This project involves participation in an historic cruise through the Northwest Passage on a Canadian icebreaker accompanying a second ship that is sailing in celebration of the anniversary of several Canadian historical events. A marine biologic sampling program and associated environmental measurements will be conducted in coastal waters of the Northwest Passage, Canada. The samples collected during the cruise will be used to examine biogeographical patterns and the biocomplexity of benthic faunal populations. The baseline information of environmental factors and benthic populations in this area is critical for comparative studies of an area undergoing dramatic warming during the past decade. The warming may be causing significant changes in the quality and quantity of carbon reaching the seafloor. The comparison of these data to future distributions of faunal assemblages will allow examination of long-term ecosystem change in a area that may be undergoing significant climate change driven by anthropological effects on the environment doc1153 none The objective of this study is to investigate the role that social bonds play in the lives of female primates. For primate females, close social bonds may represent an effective response to competitive pressures. When ecological conditions favor joint defense of resources, selection is expected to favor the development of strong social bonds with potential allies. Empirical tests of these linkages have produced equivocal results and little is now known about the long-term effects of social bonds on females lives. This study will produce comprehensive information about the nature of social relationships, coalitionary support, feeding competition, and aggression among adult female baboons in five well-habituated groups in Amboseli National Park, Kenya. Archival data on female relationships and reproductive histories will be used to evaluate whether variation in the quality of female social relationships is consistently linked to variation in longevity or reproductive success. Together, these analyses will provide new evidence about the structure and function of social bonds among nonhuman primate females. The hominid fossil record suggests that hominids have always lived in groups, and the extent of sexual dimorphism suggests that the earliest hominids lived in groups that contained multiple females. Ecological pressures may have shaped the nature of social relationships among hominid females, particularly their capacity for collective action and their propensity to form close social bonds. The data obtained in this study will help us to construct more richly textured models of the lives and social relationships of early hominids and to develop a better understanding of the selective forces that shaped the human capacity for cooperation, establishing alliances, and friendship doc1154 none Geometric methods in the theory of automorphic forms. . This proposal consists of 2 parts. In the first (and main) part we introduce certain functions on the set of isomorphism classes of irreducible representations of a reductive group over a local field. We call them gamma-functions. The existence of such functions is a corollary of the local Langlands conjecture. We formulate some conjectures about explicit construction of these gamma-functions and explain how they can be applied to study the problem of Langlands lifting itself (both locally and globally). In the second part we suggest how to generalize the results of author s joint paper with D.Gaitsgory entitled Geometric Eisenstein series . In particular we plan to study intersection cohomology sheaves on parabolic Drinfelds spaces and also generalize our previous results to the case of tamely ramified Eisenstein series. This proposal is in the part of mathematics known as the Langlands program. The Langlands program is part of number theory. Number theory is the study of the properties of the whole numbers and is the oldest branch of mathematics. From the beginning problems in number theory have furnished a driving force in creating new mathematics in other diverse parts of the discipline. The Langlands program is a general philosophy that connects number theory with calculus; it embodies the modern approach to the study of whole numbers. One aspect of this proposal is to explore the applications of geometric techniques within the Langlands program doc1155 none This study is based on prior research of recruitment in the Caribbean spiny lobster, couched in the theoretical framework of metapopulation and source?sink dynamics, at four widely spaced sites (over 100 s of kms) in Exuma Sound,Bahamas. Those findings, which were based on field sampling, field experiments and a 2?D hydrodynamic model of physical transport, produced a conceptual model describing the collective influence of physical transport, habitat quality and adult abundance upon spiny lobster recruitment. Specifically, spatial patterns in recruitment and adult abundance across the four sites were consistent over three years, adult abundance and recruitment were decoupled spatially, and the spatial patterns in recruitment were explained largely (? 67 % of mesoscale variation) by larval and postlarval transport via gyral currents and geostrophic flow. These suggested that habitat quality and physical transport decoupled recruitment and adult abundance spatially, thereby producing a source?sink network. These findings have major implications for understanding of recruitment processes and placement of marine reserves to enhance recruitment. In particular, the results are novel in their demonstration of direct and strong control of larval supply by fundamental hydrodynamic processes, and in their applicability to the design of marine reserves. For instance, placement of a marine reserve in a sink habitat would lead to a false sense of security and would not prevent local extinction of a heavily exploited population. This investigation tests a key hypothesis derived from the earlier findings: poor habitat quality in some sites reduces recruit survival disproportionately and thereby decouples larval supply and subsequent adult abundance. It includes both mensurative and manipulative experiments, specifically to measure the absolute availability of settlement and nursery habitat, to quantify abundance and survival rates of post?settlement and young juvenile spiny lobster, and to quantify population parameters at the four sites. The study therefore constitutes a unique empirical test of the collective influence of physical transport, habitat quality and adult abundance upon the recruitment dynamics of marine species doc1156 none The GLOBEC NEP Program will continue annual long term observations (2D) in two parts of the California Current System (CCS), along with mesoscale (3D) and process studies in two field years. Through those studies the program aims to achieve a quantitative understanding of how physical and biological processes drive zooplankton and salmon populations, on time scales ranging from multi-decadal to weekly, and spatial scales from the basin to mesoscale. Modeling is required to integrate over the many disciplines involved, scales of variability, and levels of ecological organization, both as a part of the scientific process, and as a prospective tool to predict the effects of future climate change on these populations. As part of the GLOBEC Program the PIs will: (1) add a swimming capability to their bioenergetic model of individual CCS salmon and embed that in GLOBEC and CoOP physical models to explain salmon distribution, growth and survival in early ocean life, (2) describe implications for CCS salmon population dynamics of well known, but poorly understood effects of the ocean environment on salmon size structure, and (3) assess retrospectively relationships between CCS salmon spawner and recruit data and physical data from the CCS from multidecadal scales to the mesoscale. In addition the PIs will use numerical. experiments to test explanations of observed distributions, to see whether they meet bioenergetic and swimming speed constraints, and to evaluate their consequences regarding distributions of food and predators. Individual level analyses and existing data indicate environmental influences on growth affect not just survival, but also maturity schedules, an effect whose consequences for population and metapopulation dynamics and for retrospective are not known. GLOBEC NEP conclusions regarding the response of this ecosystem and salmon populations to climate change will require consistency with past data. The PIs will refine their retrospective results by relating decadal and annual scales to seasonal, mesoscale mechanisms, using recruitment and spawner data (which are less confounded than catch) and accounting for freshwater conditions. As GLOBEC NEP reaches completion 4 or 5 years from now, the modeling and retrospective studies will be integrated to provide a prospective summary doc1157 none The University of Arizona and the University of Maryland are proposing the renewal of their successful joint Industry University Cooperative Research Centers (I UCRC), entitled The Center for Optoelectronic Devices Interconnect and Packaging (COEDIP) under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation. The Center was created five years ago to promote collaborative research between the two Universities and industries based on their strengths in the field of optoelectronics components, packaging and interconnection. The major goals of the Center are: - To promote collaboration and joint projects between the two universities; - To transfer new technology developed within each university to their industrial partners; and - To train highly qualified students and promote their interaction with industries doc1158 none Funding is provided in FY to the University of Colorado at Boulder Optoelectronic Computing Systems Center for the support of a working meeting of ERC Administrative Directors in the summer of at the University of Colorado at Boulder doc1159 none Wiebe Hawkins The goal of this project is to investigate how the injection of mafic magma into a shallow silicic magma chamber affects the chemical and isotopic composition of rocks preserved in granite plutons. The Vinalhaven pluton is an ideal setting for this study because mafic input to a silicic magma chamber is well preserved in feeders and as layered deposits of mafic and hybrid intermediate to silicic rocks. These rocks provide a spatial and temporal framework that will permit us to evaluate the petrographic, geochemical, and isotopic signature of hybridization both proximal and distal to the point of entry of the individual mafic replenishments, as well as in the overlying homogeneous granite. Our work will focus on intragrain trace element and isotopic variations through microanalysis of selected minerals, using laser ablation ICPMS and ID-TIMS. We will also employ high-precision U-Pb geochronology to constrain the active lifetime of the Vinalhaven magma chamber and attempt to link the preserved magmatic record to the preserved eruptive record of genetically related volcanic rocks. In the first year, this project will incorporate a Keck Geology Consortium Project with nine undergraduates who will undertake 4 weeks of field work. This research bears directly on the origin and emplacement of granite. We believe that studies of mineral zoning are likely to show that adjacent crystals have very different histories of crystallization. This information, combined with the common isotopic variability of a granite and field evidence for multiple replenishments of diverse magmas, strongly suggests that the bulk chemical and isotopic compositions of granite are neither the records of a single magma source nor equivalent to volcanic liquids erupted from the chamber doc1160 none This grant provides support for the CC computer science curriculum project, which is a joint undertaking of the Computer Society of the IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM to develop new curricular guidelines for undergraduate programs in computing. The funds are being used to cover the cost of a four-day workshop to provide the opportunity for the working groups associated with CC to engage in face-to-face meetings for the purpose of developing the final report. At the conclusion of the workshop, the steering committee for CC will put the final report together for approval by the IEEE Computer Society and the ACM Executive Council. The final report for CC will be published by the IEEE and widely disseminated nationally to all computer science departments. It will used as the basis for computer science accreditation and curriculum reform doc1161 none This award is for an exploratory operation to investigate mineralogic changes in Holocene and modern speleothems from caves in the Seito River Valley, Nepal, in order to increase understanding of late Holocene Indian summer monsoon variability. In well- vented, dolomitic caves, calcite stalagmites indicate humid conditions while aragonite stalagmites record relatively arid cave conditions and accompanying in-cave evaporation. In many cases, deposition of calcite formed during precipitation-laden summer monsoons alternates with aragonite formed from reduced drip rates at the end or between monsoons. In order to better quantify the relationship between changes in speleothem mineralogy and climate, the project will perform cage fluid chemical studies (elemental and isotopic) and elemental analyses of the speleothems, as well as increase the geographic coverage of sampled caves doc1162 none Under the Direction of Dr. Patricia Crown, MS Valerie King will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. She will analyze a specific type of pottery, Chuskan greyware which is present in large numbers at the prehistoric site of Chaco Canyon located in New Mexico. The canyon is unique in the US Southwest because of its scale of development. Beginning in the 900s AD and reaching an apex in the late s a few sites within the canyon were characterized by the presence of monumental architecture, the presence of rare exotic items which were obtained from long distances and what appear to be an extensive network of constructed roads. In outlying communities a series of great houses exhibit the characteristics of Chacoan construction techniques, thus implying the existence of an areally extensive cultural system. The nature of Chaco Canyon s development, fluorescence and decline has been the focus of intense research and archaeological debate from the early s to the present day. Researchers are uncertain of the level of societal complexity attained and can not agree on the geographic extent of its influence. Some archaeologists argue that Chaco served a center for a broad redistribution system, others that its function was largely ceremonial and yet others that it was in fact a center of agricultural production. Some believe that it was minimally occupied for most of the year and that people aggregated there only for special events. MS King will address the site s function through pottery analysis. She wishes to determine whether Chuskan greyware pottery which was produced in an outlying region was manufactured under tight centralized control. If such were the case this would suggest that Chaco in fact exercised considerable political and economic control over a large region and lay at the core of a centralized highly stratified system. Based on ethnographic and archaeological analogies, a strong correlation exists between such specialist production and stratified social organization. To accomplish her goal MS King will examine a large series of greyware ceramics and determine the extent of standardization in form, decoration and method of manufacture. In addition to recording macroscopic properties she will conduct both petrographic and trace element analysis. Samples drawn from different chronological points will provide the comparative basis necessary to assess changing complexity over time. This work is important for several reasons. It will provide data of interest to many archaeologists. It will shed new light into an important prehistoric US culture and assist in training a promising young scientist doc1163 none The Principal Investigator will consider a variety of problems concerning the asymptotic behavior of finite and infinite dimensional systems containing external parameters such as space and time, as the parameters become large. In particular, the Principal Investigator will consider the long-time behavior of solutions of the perturbed focusing Nonlinear Schrodinger equation, with initial data that is close to a solution. In addition, the Principal Investigator will consider statistical problems arising in the theory of permutations of N numbers as N becomes large, as well as questions concerning the rational approximation of special numbers such as z (5) where z is the Riemann zeta function. The Principal Investigator will also consider the computation of various physical constants arising in integrable models. In all the above problems, a key analytical role will be played by the steepest descent method for Riemann-Hilbert problems introduced by Xin Zhou and the Principal Investigator in . Much of the work proposed by the Principal Investigator has a strong interdisciplinary flavor. For example, the statistical problems mentioned above for permutations of N numbers, are intimately related to a model for the condensation of a supersaturated liquid on a substrate and also to a version of solitaire ( patience sorting ), and also to the problem of re-ordering a library in which books have been improperly shelved. In addition, a key objective of the Principle Investigator will be to prove universality for a variety of physical systems. For example, motivated by earlier work with Xin Zhou, the Principal Investigator plans to show that solutions of the perturbed focusing Non-Linear Schrodinger equation behave just like solutions of the unperturbed focusing Non-linear Schrodinger equation, once the scales of the problem are properly adjusted. This is a key step in the development of models for a wide variety of physical phenomena, in particular for phenomena arising in the transmission of signals along optical fibers doc889 none Salps are holoplanktonic grazers that have a life history, feeding biology and population dynamic strikingly different from copepods or other crustacean zooplankton. They can occur in very dense populations that cover large areas, and these blooms have been shown to have major impacts due to grazing and production of fast?sinking fecal pellets. However the conditions supporting bloom formation, and the energetics, reproduction and behavior of the bloom?forming salps are still poorly understood. This study will focus on two species of salps that are global in their distribution and representative of two genera that commonly form large blooms. Salpa aspera regularly occurs during the summer in high concentrations in the slope waters of the Mid?Atlantic Bight, while Thalia democratica regularly forms dense populations during the winter spring in the Georgia Bight. The investigators will examine feeding, metabolism, growth, reproduction and population dynamics of these salps. They will use two independent modeling approaches, grounded in experimental and field data, to extend their observations to other time and space scales. interpret ouexperimental and modeling results will be interpreted within the context of the environmental conditions to which the salps are exposed. This integrated approach will provide the best basis for understanding how salp blooms form and persist. Results of this study will extend to other species that occur in high densities in many locations, allowing scientists to better evaluate the importance of salps in biogeochemical cycles and in structuring the pelagic environment doc1014 none The California Current System (CCS) owes its high phytoplankton productivity to wind-driven circulation patterns that bring nutrient?rich waters to the surface. These high rates of primary productivity are translated via high zooplankton secondary productivity, into high biomass of epipelagic fishes such as anchovies, hake, and salmon. Further, spatial patterns of high primary and secondary productivity are heterogeneous and appear to be closely linked to mesoscale physical structures (e.g., filaments, jets, and eddies). Using a series of linked physical ecosystern zooplankton models, this study will examine the complex interaction of physical and biological processes (diel vertical migration and growth efficiency) in the CCS on seasonal and interannual time?scales. Major calanoid copepods (e.g., Calanus pacificus and Metridia pacifica) and euphausiid species (e.g., Euphausia pacifica and Thysanoessa spinifera) that represent critical linkages between primary production and salmon populations will be emphasized. In addition, the roles of these processes will be further illuminated through comparative studies with other ecosystems located within both similar and dissimilar dynamical environments. The goal of this study is to address the following questions: How does the circulation field impact the distribution and population success of major CCS zooplankton species such as C. pacificus, M. pacifica, E. pacifica, and T. spinifera? How do the behavioral and bioenergetic differences of these species interact with the circulation field, prey distribution and temperature to influence their relative population success? How does the interannual variability of the local environment (e.g., from large?scale atmospheric or oceanic fluctuations) modify these distributions and relative success of major CCS zooplankton species? How do physical and biological aspects of the CC Zooplankton System compare to other well?studied ecosystems including those of particular interest to GLOBEC (e.g., Georges Bank, Gulf of Alaska, and Southern Ocean)? The results of this study will include the developed ecosystem and zooplankton models, applied within regional and basin?scale circulation models. The coupled systems will be analyzed under seasonal and realistic surface forcing closely tied to CCS process studies. Furthermore, a comparative synthesis of physical and biological coupling within this and other well?studied GLOBEC ecosystems will begin doc1166 none Saad This three-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research involves a US team led by Yousef Saad at the University of Minnesota and French team led by Bernard Philippe of French National Institute for Research in Informatics and Applied Mathematics (INRIA) at Rennes, France. Other participants include Randall Branley, University of Indiana, Maria Sosonkina, University of Minnesota, and Esmond Ng, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. The French team is multi-institutional with researchers from INRIA s campuses in Lyon and Toulouse, from the CNRS and from IFREMER (the French public organization for research on the sea). The project addresses parallel iterative methods for solving large scale engineering and scientific problems on high performance computers. Many scientific and engineering applications give rise to very large linear systems that are ill-conditioned, and often highly indefinite. Existing iterative parallel algorithms developed for solution of large linear systems rarely take these characteristics into account, and as a result they often fail to converge. The project will explore new direct and iterative methods as a means for developing memory efficient and cost effective solutions for very large linear systems on high performance computers. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Institute for Research in Informatics and Applied Mathematics (INRIA). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigators. INRIA will support the visits of French researchers to the United States. The project takes advantage of complementary expertise in solvers in parallel computing. The methods will be applied to problems in geophysical prospecting and in electronic materials doc1167 none PI: Kim Olsen, Institute for Crustal Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara The proposed research is an integrated approach to significantly advance our knowledge in the field of earthquake rupture dynamics. The work consists of three parts. The first part is the development of a method for flexible and efficient modeling of dynamic rupture propagation on curved or multi-segmented fault geometries with radiation in a laterally and vertically heterogeneous three-dimensional medium and accurate boundary conditions. This method will allow fully large-scale dynamic modeling of the statistics of recurrent ruptures on systems of arbitrarily-shaped faults. Here, we will combine the most flexible and efficient features of several numerical methods. The second part is a continuation of ongoing efforts on defining the critical parameters and conditions describing when dynamic rupture start, propagate, and stop. This involves an analysis of the variation of dynamic rupture velocity in a heterogeneous stress field and in particular, deriving expressions for and numerically estimating the parameters generating rupture propagation in agreement with observations. The third part will examine the feasibility of inverting for the friction, stress, or fracture energy, parameters containing key information about the rupture history, for large earthquakes. We will describe the limitations and accuracy of the inversion, and attempt to apply the method to selected large, well-recorded earthquakes. The three parts of the proposed research all lead towards the ultimate goal of the project, namely to better our understanding of why do earthquakes start, propagate and arrest. Such understanding may lead to successful prediction of earthquakes in the future, thereby mitigating the loss of life and property doc1168 none Rumble This project is focused on the area around a 5 km drill hole the Chinese are going to drill in the Sulu ultrahigh-pressure (UHP) metamorphic terrane in east-central China. The goal of the project is to understand the formation and exhumation of UHP rocks through study of ultramafic (mantle) rocks from a forbidden zone of P-T conditions (i.e., very high P, very low T). Some specific questions to be addressed are: o What type of crust-mantle interaction occurs when continents are subducted? o How much of continental mass is recycled in this manner? o Can timing of fluid-rock interactions be constrained? o What do the UHP garnet peridotites tell us about petrotectonic processes? o How were UHP peridotites emplaced into the crust? How did they evolve during exhumation? What mechanisms and rates of ascent are necessary to preserve their high P, low T assemblages? o What roles do slab hydrous phases play in recycling of volatiles into the mantle? o Can we tell the difference between subduction collisional architecture of orogens from younger events using deep-seismic profiles? o In what tectonic settings does UHP metamorphism and subsequent exhumation occur? Is continent-continent collision required? The Principal Investigators will employ a variety of methods in their study: 1) mapping and structural analysis; 2) petrology 3) geochronology; 4) geophysics at the Donghai drill site; and 5) geodynamic modeling doc1169 none The grant provides funding to cover participant costs and support costs for a workshop to identify research issues and opportunities in the area of electronic product realization. In e-product realization, customers participate in the product design process. This workshop will bring together about 50 researchers and practitioners from the field to discuss current issues and impediments to development of the field. The workshop will produce a white paper detailing the workshop findings and presenting a suggested research agenda. E-product realization is an emerging practice in engineering design and product realization that gives customers freedom and access to obtain products that are more suited to them as individuals. This is an emerging area of product design and realization, and one that holds the potential to become a major segment of product realization in the future. This workshop could provide the basis for NSF funding in this area doc1170 none Mitchell This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Aaron Mitchell, Columbia University and Professor Mitsuhiro Shimizu of Meisei University in Tokyo, Japan. The researchers will be undertaking a study of mechanics of chromatin-mediated repression in early meiotic genes in yeast. The objective of the study is to understand how the genetic transcriptional machinery responds to changes in chromatin structure. Chromatin is the complex of protein and DNA that comprises eukaryotic chromosomes. The protein constituents are largely histones, an evolutionarily conserved group of proteins that coat DNA with little sequenced specificity. Chromatin has long been thought to affect the expression of genes, and several biochemical mechanisms by which chromatin may govern gene expression have been explored. Proposed studies examine directly two mechanisms by which chromatin may influence gene expression. The studies focus on two yeast repressors, Rme1p and Ume6p, that function in regulation of meiosis in yeast. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. The researchers hope to learn how a repressor can act over a substantial distance (2Kbp) to affect activity of several transcriptional activators and how does a proximal histone deacetylase inhibit promoter actifity. Results of this research should be applicable to the understanding of transcriptional repression in plants and animals. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of the research in scientific journals and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc1171 none Under the direction of Dr. Heather McKillop, Mr. Terance Winemiller will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will conduct archaeological survey, mapping, excavation, and surface collections at 22 Maya sites located throughout northern Yucatan, Mexico. From the earliest ancient Maya occupation of the Yucatan Peninsula to the development of cities, the scarcity of surface water was a fundamental consideration in locational decisions. Environmental conditions commonly cited as factors that limit dispersal of human populations and stimulate centralization, such as extreme aridity, are not characteristic of the region. Several scholars have related the seasonality and scarcity of water with centralization and the rise of Maya civilization on the peninsula. Mr. Winemiller constructs a spatial predictive tool using existing site reports, maps, satellite imagery, air photos, the latest geographical information systems technology, and locational statistics to test whether Wittfogel s hydraulic society model and Carneiro s circumscription model account for the appearance of centralized elite administrative centers in an environment where other models predict widely dispersed small-scale settlements. By design, the study takes advantage of a large body of published data pertaining to this research. The project, a regional settlement pattern study, includes five operational goals: collection of existing data housed in INAH regional offices; verification of spatial data recorded on existing site maps, and collecting GPS coordinates for principal architecture and water management features at 12 upper-ranked sites; intensive surveys of nine upper-ranked sites one from each of nine physiographic districts in the region including interpretation of air photos, satellite imagery, and geological, topographical, and hydrological maps, and GPS site mapping, and develop intrasite resource access and usage models; survey and GPS mapping of nine third or fourth-ranked sites by physiographic district; test by ground survey whether parts of northern Yucatan having no documented settlements but evidence of potential water catchment areas contain cultural features such as the mounded remains of structures, structures, or water-management features. If population growth precipitated the establishment of organizational hierarchies based on control, development, and distribution of water, this research should document recurrent patterns of clustered elite administrative hierarchies around natural sources of water and evidence of public works to divert or store water within the spatial core of cities. Mr. Winemiller s study will ultimately provide academics with a substantive appraisal of water-resource management systems employed by the ancient Maya of northern Yucatan, Mexico. It will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc1172 none Computationally Efficient Joint Demodulation for Sensor Arrays The objective of the proposed research is to realize order-of-magnitude improvements in the interference mitigation capability of an antenna array with its associated multi-channel digital signal processing algorithms, compared with performance presently attainable using conventional linear processing. The motivating commercial applications include high-capacity cellular telephony, personal communications systems, and wireless local area networks. Such huge increases in interference mitigation capability translate to similar magnitude increases in system capacity. With no end in sight to the accelerating demands on communications capacity, the commercial value of a breakthrough of this type would be tremendous. The signal processing method being investigated is joint demodulation of multiple signals using a multichannel Viterbi algorithm modified to trade signal quality for computational cost. The goals are to 1) characterize the number of interfering signals that can be separated and 2) characterize the degree of reduction in complexity of the Virterbi algorithm that can be realized while maintaining acceptable bit-error-rate, both as functions of the number of antenna elements in the array, and parameterized by signal-to-noise ratio. The interference environments simulated model cellular telephone channels with GSM and or IS-136 signaling doc1173 none Connected Mathematics: Making Sense of Complex Phenomena through Building Object-based Parallel Models The content area of the project is learning about complexity . Complexity is the study of systems in which phenomena or global behaviors arise from the interactions of simpler parts. Many everyday phenomena exhibit complex behavior: the growth of a snowflake crystal, the perimeter pattern of a maple leaf, the dynamics of the Dow Jones or of a fourth grade classroom. These are all systems which can be modeled as composed of many distributed but interacting parts. They all exhibit non-linear or emergent qualities which place them beyond the scope of current K-12 mathematics curricula. The project goal is to make complexity accessible to students through the use of object-based parallel modeling languages (OBPML). Students build models of complex mathematical and scientific phenomena from scratch as well as extending models they are given from a library of extensible models . Through these activities, the researchers seek: To understand how learners make sense of complex phenomena when engaged in buiding object-based parallel models To design computational tools and activities that foster learner s in a) building models of complex phenomena and b) building intuitive conceptions of complexity To investigate the ways in which learners engage in this kind of modeling change their beliefs about and attitude towards the mathematical and scientific enterprises To investigate patterns in the kinds of symbolization developed by learners engaged in object-based parallel modeling. OBPMLs afford a probabilistic and statistical approach to modeling. One outcome of the project is a strengthened and broadened role for probability and statistics in the mathematics and science currucula, combining it with computational techniques such as Monte Carlo simulations -- thus developing a new subject area perhaps better called stochastic. In this respect and others, we expect to develop new mathematical contents areas--content areas which live in an object-based parallel medium doc1174 none Bentley 00- The University of Wisconsin will support the project funded by Office of Polar Programs at NSF that require support taking ice-cores from, or drilling into, glaciers and ice-sheets. This involves maintaining the NSF s current inventory of drill systems and making them available to science projects, or operate them for projects. The projects are expected to be diverse, and to vary from year to year. They will occur at both poles, and at more temperate and high altitude sites. University of Wisconsin will work with the science community to define requirements, scope solutions before formal proposals are submitted to OPP. Additional engineering development that will occur during the first year of the contract will include the development of a drill to rapidly making shot-holes in polar firn, and another system to prepare a 300 meter bore-hole in the ice sheet at the South Pole for a broad-band seismometer array. A longer term activity will be to evaluate the current 5.2 deep drill system to recommend improvement, and make a development plan to implement the improvements doc1175 none Under the direction of Dr. Vincas Steponaitis, Mr Gregory Wilson will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. In and large scale archaeological excavations were conducted at the site of Moundville, located in the Black Warrior Valley of Alabama and Mr Wilson and colleagues will analyze this data to answer a number of specific questions about how his chiefdom was organized. Although no prehistoric North American culture reached a state level of organization, in many cases chiefdoms arose which integrated multiple thousands of individuals into functioning social and political units. As the name implies, the site of Moundville includes a series of large visually impressive mounds which testify to the ability to enlist and organize a large amount of labor over a sustained period of time. Archaeologists wish to understand how such complex societies developed and were maintained. Considerable research has been conducted on the mounds themselves and data indicate that they served both as burial mounds and as platforms on which structures were erected. Exotic items not locally available reflect a well developed system of long distance trade and these symbols likely reinforced a hierarchical system of social organization. Relatively little however is understood about how the majority of Moundville inhabitants lived, the degree of differentiation among them or how they were integrated into the larger social system. Mr. Wilson s research will address these issues. The large scale excavations conducted in the and uncovered remains of many non-mound structures and associated artifacts such as ceramics, stone tools and animal bones. Mr. Wilson and his collaborators will plot their spatial distribution using a geographic information system, identify individual domestic units and reconstruct activities conducted. For example he wishes to determine whether food storage facilities are associated with each since this will provide insight into centralized vs. familial control of an essential resource. He will also examine the degree of differentiation among units to see if status differences are present at this level. This research is important for several reasons. It will provide insight into Native American prehistory and the processes which underlie the development of complex societies. It will provide data of interest to both archaeologists and the general public and assist in training a promising scientist doc1176 none This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) focuses on methodology and procedures to enhance the creation of engineering design alternatives. The creation of design alternatives is often thought of as the creative aspect of engineering design, and current methods hold that creativity is best expressed in a value-free environment. This research takes the opposite view and, in an approach called value-focused thinking, seeks to evoke creativity by focusing specifically on values or preferences relevant to the design. Preferences in the case of engineering design are made explicit by design objectives. Procedures will be developed to aid in the elicitation of a full set of design objectives, and methods will be developed and tested to use these objectives to stimulate the creation of design alternatives. If successful, this research could represent a breakthrough in how creativity is viewed, taught and practiced in engineering design. Creativity is extraordinarily important in engineering design, with the efficacy of the entire design process hanging in the balance. Advances toward a theory of creativity could have enormous impact on all of engineering design and engineering education doc1177 none The Triangle Coalition for Science and Technology Education, through its Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow Program, provides school teachers with an opportunity to bring their knowledge and experience to appropriate branches of the federal government that impact the educational system of the United States. Einstein Fellows bring a wealth of information and experience concerning the teaching and learning of science and mathematics in K-12 schools. This proposal requests funding to support one Albert Einstein Fellow to work in the Division of Graduate Education. This Fellow s expertise would be benefical to the Graduate Teaching Fellows in K-12 (GK-12) program doc1178 none Program Objectives The Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship Program is designed to provide outstanding elementary and secondary mathematics and science teachers the opportunity to bring to Congress and appropriate branches of the federal government the insights, extensive knowledge, and practical experience of classroom teachers. As Fellows, teachers can help to increase the understanding, communication, and cooperation between Congress and Federal agencies, and the mathematics and science education community. Process Ms. Kerry Venegas, a teacher in the Gallup-McKinley County School District was initially identified by the The Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship Program and was subsequently interviewed at the National Science Foundation based on her interest and related experience to the work of the Division of Educational System Reform. The ESR Acting Division Director and two Program Directors interviewed the applicant. They unanimously agreed that it would be mutually beneficial to allow a Fellowship candidate to work with the Rural Systemic Initiative program. The incumbent will have an opportunity to work with program directors to guide the overall RSI program and assist in the assessment of ongoing projects and provide recommendations to strengthen the projects doc1179 none Manga Most erupting lavas have carried bubbles at some point during their ascent and emplacement. The effect of these bubbles on the rheological properties of magma will in turn affect the rate and style of eruption. The goal of the proposed work is thus to determine the effects of bubbles on the rheological properties of magmas and lavas for the ranges of physical parameters that are appropriate for magmatic systems. We will use three different research approaches, namely, numerical calculations, theoretical analysis, and experimental measurements. The numerical simulations will use the boundary integral technique to calculate the interaction and deformation of bubbles. The theoretical work will involve calculating bubble shapes and resulting flow in the limit that bubbles become highly deformed. In both the numerical and theoretical analyses, we will calculate all the components of the volume-averaged stress tensor. We can thus obtain quantities such as the effective shear viscosity and normal stress differences. We will make the experimental measurements in a large-volume, transparent viscometer that we have designed and built. The experimental measurements can be used to verify and extend results, and will allow us to study macroscopic features of the flows that might result from the non-Newtonian behaviour of the bulk suspension. We will also develop closed-form expressions for all our results that should be transferable to other problems and applications, such as models for eruption processes and lava flow models doc1180 none Jiang Tectonic overpressure is an old, fundamental but still controversial problem in geology. Recent work clearly demonstrates that, in non-Andersonian stress regimes, the magnitude of tectonic overpressures is not limited by the rock strength. Ductile high-strain zones are non-Andersonian stress domains. Little is known of overpressures in such important tectonic environments. This investigation uses numerical and analytical modeling techniques to address two questions: (1) Can high overpressures be generated in high-strain zones, given realistic rheology and natural deformation conditions? (2) Can high overpressures,if generated, be dynamically maintained for significant geological times to affect metamorphic reactions? Regardless of whether the answers are positive or negative, the research results will have significant scientific merit. A negative answer to either question would place the now widely-practiced pressure-depth conversion on a rigorous basis. A positive answer to both questions implies that the pressure data from high-strain zone rocks cannot be converted to depths without qualification. Current tectonic interpretation of geothermobarometric data needs to be reconsidered. Since many high-pressure and ultrahigh-pressure rocks show evidence of a high-strain zone origin, a significant overpressure would imply that these rocks may have formed at depths considerably shallower than currently believed. A higher-than-lithostatic pressure gradient as a result of overpressure buildup is a possible driving force to be considered for fluid flow, melt extraction and migration, and pluton emplacement doc1181 none Sager This award to Texas A&M University will provide support for a workshop to evaluate technology required to operate drill systems in the marine environment, and particularly robotic systems that may be operated off of ships in the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System fleet, thus not requiring a separate, large drilling platform. The workshop will include scientists and engineers, and will take place in late , with report to be published in mid- doc1182 none This study will focus on the Rural Systemic Initiatives Program to compile current understandings and identify new issues, resource and strategies of importance to those currently working in rural settings. This exploratory research will involve: 1)an investigation and analysis of the content and use of large-scale databases; 2)interviews with educators, researchers, and reformers working to improve science education in rural settings; and 3)a meeting of key stakeholders to focus on sharing understandings about districts access to and engagement in the rural reform and successful strategies for data collection and analysis doc1183 none Plants are sessile organisms that respond to changing environmental conditions, such as light quality. Research on photomorphogenesis has provided insight into light perception and light signal transduction. Yet, little is known about how light can control cell division patterns. This research will focus on identifying which signaling pathways are involved doc1184 none Iskander With this proposal the PI s respectfully request the NSF funding of this SGER grant to carry out fundamental research towards the design and development of a low-cost antenna array with full 2D beam steering capability. The proposed technology is based on the use of the Continuous Transverse Stub (CTS) array design with the steering capability provided through the use of Ferroelectric material. With the development of the fund understanding that will lead to the reduced losses and increased gain in this low cost CTS technology, the proposed design is expected to have significant impact on wireless communications (Satellite and terrestrial) and in both the commercial and military application sectors. Initial development of this technology which combines the CTS antenna array design and the use of Ferroelectric materials to provide the beam steering capability, is presently being funded in collaboration with Ferroelectric materials research group in the Army Research Office. The intended application in this case is for the low cost, light weight antennas for helmets in the PM Soldier Program. In this case, manufacturability issues are being addressed through participation by the Raytheon Systems Company. The presently funded one-year study is simply intended to demonstrate proof of concept, and conduct simulations that will provide evidence for the possible utilization at frequencies of specific interest to the PM Soldier Program. The requested support, however, is intended to address some fundamental research issues related to understanding the full capability of this technology and its potential utilization in the next generation, broadband, and adaptive wireless communications systems. One of the fundamental limitations of present designs is the high conductor losses and the inability to improve the gain to help increase the range while saving the battery power. Preliminary simulations by our group showed that through the use of multilayer Ferroelectric materials (also produced by ARL), it may be possible to reduce the conductor losses. It is postulated that with multilayer Ferroelectric materials, and with the proper selection of the type and dimensions of the various materials, it may be possible to propagate surface waves near the dielectric interfaces and away from the transmission line conductors feeding and connecting the array elements in the CTS array. This clearly may lead to reducing the losses and hence increasing the antenna gain and realizing the associated benefits in range and battery life. This preliminary observation will be further studied to identify types of propagating modes in the proposed multi-layer CTS design, and the dependence of the characteristics of these modes on the types and dimensions of the Feffoelectric materials in the multiplayer structure. The successful development of this effort and the implementation of its results is expected to have significant impact on antenna array designs for future wireless communications systems. Other research issues that they intend to investigate as part of this SGER grant are related to the use of the coaxial configuration of the CTS technology (invented at the University of Utah) for multiband (frequency hop) communications systems. The new coaxial CTS design is shown to provide significant broadband and improved impedance matching characteristics, and hence its potential use for multi-band wireless communications systems is considered revolutionary. The proposed work thus combines two research components, one in the development of low-loss and multilayer Ferroelectric materials, and the other which involves the full development of the CTS distributed antenna array architecture with a beam steering capability. This effort is expected, therefore, to lead to significant breakthroughs in the traditional and often bulky phased antenna array designs and will have significant impact on the design of low-cost antenna arrays for the next generation wireless communications systems doc1185 none Li, Baosheng This proposal is focused on the study the elastic properties of two unquenchable mantle phases, high pressure phase of clinoenstatite, and calcium silicate perovskite. This project will utilize the DIA-type cubic anvil high pressure apparatus (SAM85) installed at beamline X17B1 of the NSLS at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) using synchrotron X-ray radiography and X-ray diffraction techniques in conjunction with high pressure ultrasonic interferometry. The investigators will use an X-ray radiography technique to record the sample image at the same time as the travel time through the sample is measured, providing the length of the sample needed for the calculation of velocity. When the formation of the unquenchable phase is confirmed by X-ray diffraction, simultaneous measurement of pressure, temperature, volume, Vp, Vs, and the length of the sample (P-V-T-Vp-Vs-L) at subsequent P-T conditions will provide data for both equation of state analysis and the determination of the pressure and temperature derivatives of the elastic bulk and shear moduli. Such data for clinopyroxene and calcium silicate perovskite phases are crucial for interpreting seismic observations to determine the composition and the mineralogy of the mantle doc1186 none The efficiency and profitability of American slavery have been subject to extensive debates in economic history. In comparing the agricultural outputs of free and slave farms, the modern economic history literature has ignored the disparate effects of diseases on different ethnic groups. Yet there is ample evidence, empirical, scientific, and historical, that populations of different ethnic heritages have different responses to many disease pathogens. In particular, people of tropical West African ancestry tend to have much milder reactions to the warm weather diseases that are endemic to tropical West Africa than do most people of European ancestry. These warm weather diseases became endemic to the Americas as a result of the African slave trade. The present study examines the role that the differential ethnic reactions to disease played in American economic history. The study models and estimates the impact of a specific disease, hookworm, on human productivity and its disparate effects on peoples of different ancestry. The disparate ethnic effects of hookworm differentially affect human productivity, and consequently raise questions about the existing analysis of the economics of slavery in Antebellum America. The study examines the interactions of the biological environment with the human economy and society, integrating biological science, history, and economic analysis. Specifically, the study estimates the differences in total factor productivity between white and black farms in the American South that can be attributed to the impact of endemic hookworm on white and black agricultural labor. To accomplish this, it employs data on the prevalence and intensity of hookworm in a specific area in the early twentieth-century South. The data on the hookworm burden of whites and blacks, and agricultural inputs and outputs on white and black farms are employed in the productivity estimates. With the data, estimates are made for the impact that hookworm had on differences in productivity between farms that employed labor of African ancestry and farms that employed labor of European ancestry. The study employs estimation techniques that control for other potential confounding variables. The estimates for the impact of hookworm on black and white productivity in the early twentieth-century agricultural South are used to assess the relative efficiency and productivity of slave and free farms in the Antebellum South doc1187 none Patchett Vervoort We seek to improve the framework for Lu-Hf isotopic studies by redetermination of the Bulk Silicate Earth (BSE) Lu-Hf and Sm-Nd parameters. At present, the array of mantle and crustal samples appears not to contain the BSE point. This may suggest that a very important early differentiation episode is recorded, such that an unseen complementary reservoir exists in the mantle, or was perhaps lost in early Solar System collisions. It may also suggest that the chondritic reference for Lu-Hf is incorrect, or that BSE really differs from chondrites for other reasons. We intend to check the Lu-Hf chondritic parameters by careful analysis of a suite of chondritic meteorites. Sm-Nd characterization will be performed simultaneously, with the goal of ensuring comparability between Lu-Hf and Sm-Nd systems. We will also undertake work to better constrain the decay constant of 176Lu, employing fresh Precambrian dolerites, to obtain internal isochrons and compare ages to those from precise U-Pb dating of baddeleyite or zircon in the mafic intrusions. These investigations should enormously improve the conceptual framework for Lu-Hf isotopic study of Earth differentiation processes doc1188 none This grant supports continuing research on the interpretation of Schumann Resonance observations at several sites around the globe. The surface of the planet Earth and the ionosphere that surrounds it constitute a spherical capacitor, which serves as a resonant cavity for extremely low-frequency electromagnetic waves. The amplitude of the fundamental mode (about 8 Hz) is related to world-wide lightning activity. Observations of the Schumann Resonances (SR) at a given location reveal a background signal on which are superimposed transients caused by intense thunderstorms. The three main regions of global lightning activity are tropical Africa, tropical South America, and Indonesia. This work focuses on lightning in the first of these regions, the African convective or chimney zone. Observations at the SR field station in Rhode Island indicate a four-to-five day periodicity in lightning activity over Africa. Two possible explanations of this periodicity are African easterly waves or the global 5-day wave. One objective of the program is to analyze the SR data and supporting observations from satellites, rainfall observations, and global weather maps, to determine the cause of the periodicity. Another objective is to explain the apparent tendency for lightning to have positive polarity over the African continent and negative polarity offshore over the Atlantic Ocean doc1189 none Nolet, Guust Recent observations of waves preceding the arrival of seismic PKP waves (that traverse the Earth s core) suggest that scattering not only occurs in the D layer at the core-mantle transition, but may occur over a wide depth range in the lower mantle. Determining the location and length scales of inhomogeneities in the mantle has important implications for both geodynamics and geochemistry. The goal of this project is to study the origin of scattering in the Earth s mantle by applying multiple scattering (radiative transfer) theory to PKP precursive waves, rather than with the single scattering (Born) approximation. In this project we aim to: - Develop radiative transfer modeling for realistic variations of the background velocity, such as those in PREM. - Use this realistic formulation to explore the consequences of multiple scattering for the interpretation of scattered waves. - Invert a global collection of PKP precursors for the length scales and depth extent of scattering using the new theoretical tools doc1190 none Under this award, Dr. Frank will develop a climatology of tropical waves by combining diagnostic analyses of satellite-derived data sets with global weather analysis fields. The study will focus on waves with periods of 3-15 days, principally mixed Rossby-gravity waves, equatorial Rossby waves, and synoptic-scale easterly waves. A novel aspect of the study will be the use of precipitable water data, obtained from the NASA Water Vapor Project (NVAP), as the primary tool for identifying and tracking waves. This data set should permit identification of waves in convectively inactive regions of the tropics and complements the use of outgoing long-wave radiation (OLR) for the convectively active regions in the tropics. The study will make use of 10 years of NVAP precipitable water data, OLR data, and global analysis fields from the European Center for Medium Range Forecasts doc1191 none This proposed project consists of four empirical studies of competitive bidding behavior in several different auction markets. We develop a sequence of estimation and testing methods for bidding models, focusing on common value environments where the competing bidders are assumed to be differentially and incompletely informed about the value of the object(s) for which they are vying. The second study involves on-going joint research with Professor Phil Haile in the University of Wisconsin. A distinguishing feature of common value auctions, and a recurring theme in the analysis, is the winner s curse, which arises because the winner in an auction will tend to be the bidder who has overestimated the object s value the most. Rational bidders will avoid this undesirable outcome by bidding less aggressively. In the first project, we use data from procurement auctions run by the New Jersey Department of Transportation in order to address whether equilibrium bidding becomes more or less aggressive as the number of bidders increases and, therefore, whether attracting additional bidders will lower equilibrium procurement costs. In the second project, we formalize a nonparametric statistical test for the presence of common value elements by exploring the variation in the number of bidders which is present in many auction datasets. This test relies on detecting the effects of the winner s curse, which are present only in common value environments. In the first two projects, a symmetric model of competitive bidding has been assumed. In the third project, we extend our estimation method to allow for ex ante bidder asymmetries and use this method to analyze the auctions used by the United States Department of the Interior since the late s to allocate offshore oil and gas drilling rights in the outer continental shelf of the Gulf of Mexico. While the first three studies focus on bidding in single-object common value auctions, the fourth project is an empirical analysis of double auction markets. Using data from milk quota auctions administered in the province of Ontario, Canada, we investigate, first, whether common values are present in these auctions (arising from producer uncertainty and private information about future milk prices) and, if so, whether the implied winner s curse is leading to more conservative bidding for producers who wish to transact large amounts of quota. Second, we measure the extent of market power possessed by large bidders in this market by developing a structural model of bidding behavior. The results of this research have potentially important policy implications given the prevalence of auctions as allocation mechanisms in practice. Government agencies at the municipal, state, and federal levels routinely procure services through a competitive bidding process. Similarly, across many states, there are plans to allow for competitive demand and supply bidding in deregulated electricity markets via uniform-price double auctions. Finally, agricultural subsidies--of which milk production quotas are one example--are a perennial bone of contention amongst the G7 countries. While the fourth project does not directly address the desirability of these subsidies, it does shed light on the efficiency of a competitive bidding environment in allocating these subsidies. More broadly, the ideas of increasing competition and lower prices are often inseparable in competi-tion and regulatory policy, but this research highlights the possibility that when market participants have imperfect information about their environment, increasing competition might be associated with higher prices, if winner s curse effects are strong enough. In short, there appear to be important efficiency and revenue lessons to be learned from the proposed projects doc1192 none Liou This project is focused on the area around a 5 km drill hole the Chinese are going to drill in the Sulu ultrahigh-pressure (UHP) metamorphic terrane in east-central China. The goal of the project is to understand the formation and exhumation of UHP rocks through study of ultramafic (mantle) rocks from a forbidden zone of P-T conditions (i.e., very high P, very low T). Some specific questions to be addressed are: o What type of crust-mantle interaction occurs when continents are subducted? o How much of continental mass is recycled in this manner? o Can timing of fluid-rock interactions be constrained? o What do the UHP garnet peridotites tell us about petrotectonic processes? o How were UHP peridotites emplaced into the crust? How did they evolve during exhumation? What mechanisms and rates of ascent are necessary to preserve their high P, low T assemblages? o What roles do slab hydrous phases play in recycling of volatiles into the mantle? o Can we tell the difference between subduction collisional architecture of orogens from younger events using deep-seismic profiles? o In what tectonic settings does UHP metamorphism and subsequent exhumation occur? Is continent-continent collision required? The Principal Investigators will employ a variety of methods in their study: 1) mapping and structural analysis; 2) petrology 3) geochronology; 4) geophysics at the Donghai drill site; and 5) geodynamic modeling doc1193 none Burbank Fisher Modeling of geologic features is considerably assisted by an extensive data set that quantifies an adequate number of descriptive parameters of the feature in question. Such studies on normal faults have prompted a significant step forward in understanding extensional tectonics, but no such population studies exist for thrust faults, which are common features in convergent tectonic settings. This project will generate an extensive data set quantifying geometric parameters, displacement length scaling, population statistics, displacement transfer and similar items. It is expected that this research will provide a robust statistical foundation for description of the geometric properties of thrust faults, and thus such research should under pin a significantly improved understanding of thrust faults and convergent tectonics doc1194 none Pietruszka Hauri A fundamental goal of geochemical research at mid-ocean ridge and ocean-island volcanoes is to infer the process of basaltic melt generation and transport. The U-series isotope abundances of young lavas (e.g., 226Ra and 230Th) are particularly well suited for this purpose because the half-lives of 226Ra and 230Th ( yr and ~75 kyr, respectively) are thought to be similar to the time scale of magmatic processes. This unique feature of U-series isotopes offers the potential to study both the nature and timing of magma genesis. The goal of this project is to investigate the dynamics of mantle melting within the Reunion plume using the 226Ra-230Th-238U disequilibria of a detailed time series of historical lavas from Piton de la Fournaise Volcano ( - ). This volcano is ideally suited for a U-series isotope study of mantle melting because (1) its historical lavas display systematic temporal fluctuations of incompatible trace element ratios that are thought to result from rapid changes in the degree of partial melting and (2) it is known to tap a homogeneous mantle source region. Thus, we expect to be able to isolate the U-series isotope signatures of mantle melting at Piton de la Fournaise from the complicated effects of source heterogeneity, which is difficult at most mid-ocean ridge and ocean-island volcanoes. We will evaluate a range of melting models with this data set. These model results will be used to explore the basic links between the geochemical and geophysical parameters of mantle melting within the Reunion plume, such as the melt fraction, the fertility of the mantle source region, the rates of mantle melting and upwelling, the melt-zone porosity, and the mechanism of melt generation and transport. Additionally, we will compare our new data and model results for Piton de la Fournaise with previous U-series isotope and other geochemical work from Kilauea and Mauna Loa to test the common assumption that Hawaiian volcanoes serve as models for other ocean-island volcanoes doc1195 none Martin In the majority of well-studied karst aquifers, the matrix rocks have low permeability and flow is dominated by conduits. Few studies have focused on karst aquifers with permeable and porous matrix rocks, although exchange of water between conduits and matrix may occur in these aquifers with important implications for contaminant storage and transportation. The unconfined Floridan Aquifer provides an excellent example of both extensive conduit development and high matrix permeability. A pilot study that focused on an ~5 km section of the Santa Fe River in north-central Florida where it flows underground through a series of conduits found qualitative evidence for exchange of water between the conduit system and matrix. The study also suggested that the extent and direction of exchange varies with the stage of the Santa Fe River. The new study proposed here will use several independent techniques to quantify the exchange and its relationship to river stage. Water level will be continuously measured at 3 critical locations along the flow path, including a contributing conduit that was recently mapped by cave diving exploration. Development of water level-discharge relationships at these locations will provide a continuous water budget for the conduit system, thereby quantifying loss or gain of water. A check on the budget will be provided by measuring changes in Cl` and SO2-4 concentrations caused by mixing of conduit water along the flow path, including a previously unsampled end-member from the contributing conduit. Chloride and SO2-4 provide the most robust measure of mixing because they are conservative and their concentrations differ greatly between the matrix and conduit water. Time-average velocities through the conduits will be measured using a thermal tracer technique developed during the pilot study and will guide water sampling. In conjunction with the fluid budget calculations, detailed time series potentiometric surface maps will be constructed, utilizing numerous karst windows, sinkholes, and a densely spaced piezometer field to be installed as part of the project. These maps will yield the head gradient between the conduits and matrix, and will allow us to estimate the matrix permeability on a field scale. The integrated results will expand current models of flow in karst aquifers by quantifying possible volumes of matrix and conduit flow, thereby refining water management practices in regions with permeable karst. The project will have extensive educational benefits through support of two graduate students, involvement of numerous student volunteers, as well as providing the focus for a newly developed course in hydrologic processes doc1196 none McLaughlin Hydrology is experiencing rapid changes as a result of improved scientific understanding and measurement technology. Advances in global modeling and remote sensing are likely to provide large amounts of new information in the coming decades. There will be an increased need for efficient methods to process and interpret all of this information. Many of the most promising data processing options combine observations with model predictions, a process commonly known as data assimilation. The data assimilation methods which have been most successful in practical applications are based on either variational or recursive estimation concepts. Each of these approaches has distinctive advantages and limitations but neither provides a satisfactory solution for very large applications (e.g., applications that work with large amounts of remote sensing data over continental-scale regions). In this project, we propose to develop a computationally efficient and robust approach to hydrologic data assimilation which combines the best aspects of variational and recursive estimation. This work will be methodical in nature but its overall goal is to advance scientific understanding of large-scale hydrologic processes. The data assimilation methods we develop in this project will be tested on a case study, which will provide insight about scientific questions of hydrologic interest. The testing and application phase of our project will rely on our previous experiences with data assimilation techniques and on methods which have been successfully applied in meteorology and oceanography. The case study will be concerned with the estimation of near-surface soil moisture. Such estimates are especially useful for weather prediction and analyses of climate change. The case study will rely on an existing hydrologic measurement model and will be based on data obtained from SGP97 and SGP99 field experiments in central Oklahoma. The tests carried out in this study will help to demonstrate the benefits of data assimilation in large-scale case studies of particular interest to hydrologists doc1197 none Geochemical Reactions in the Unsaturated Zone of Pyritic Mine Wastes By J. Donald Rimstidt There are over 60 billion tons of mine wastes from non-fuel mineral production in the US today and more are being produced at a rate of about 2 billion tons annually. Although most of these wastes are relatively benign, consisting of common rocks and soils, a significant fraction contains iron sulfide minerals, especially pyrite, that can oxidize to produce an acidic sulfate solution, often containing high concentrations of toxic metals. Discharge of this acid mine drainage (AMD) into nearby streams and lakes is responsible for the ecological impairment of thousands of miles of streams. Furthermore, AMD reduces water quality often making it unfit for human consumption or for use as industrial process water. Thus, AMD is a multi-billion dollar societal problem that can benefit significantly from an organized scientific and engineering research program. We propose to study chemical reactions that occur at the air mineral and air brine mineral interfaces in the unsaturated parts of pyritic waste piles. Specifically, we will measure the rates of oxidation of pyrite in moist air as a function of the partial pressure of oxygen, relative humidity, and temperature. This oxidation produces sulfuric acid and ferrous sulfate and is the primary mode of acid production. Furthermore, we will investigate the evolution of the ferrous sulfate as it evolves via oxidation, dehydration, and neutralization through a series of ferrous ferric hydroxysulfate minerals. These minerals are a secondary source of acid production and are hosts of many of the trace metals that cause environmental degradation. They are of particular concern because they are quite soluble so they dissolve rapidly during rain events to release large amounts of acidity and trace metals to nearby receiving waters. Our goal is to provide details about the thermodynamic stability and rates of transformation of these sulfate minerals so we can predict the evolution of this reservoir of latent acidity and trace metals. We believe that this information will provide valuable guidance to the engineers and geochemists that are designing new waste disposal facilities or who are preparing remediation plans for abandoned mine wastes doc1198 none Geist Whereas many volcanoes erupt magmas of diverse composition over a wide range of temperatures, others erupt magmas of nearly identical composition over a narrow range of temperature. One or more magmatic processes must buffer the compositions in the latter type of system as the magmas ascend through the lithosphere, and determining and quantifying those processes are the objectives of this proposal. Because the processes involved in buffering cause little variability in whole rock compositions, the main means of the study will be electron and ion microprobe analysis of rehomogenized melt inclusions. Much of this study, and many others, depends on the presumption that melt inclusions reliably reflect the compositional evolution of the magma. To test this presumption, a series of experiments has been designed to assess the degree that inclusions compositions are reliable. Growing crystals change the compositions of the liquid in a boundary layer whose thickness depends on the diffusivity of the chemical constituents and the growth rate of the crystal. The effect of a compositional boundary layer on the composition of melt inclusions will be simulated by creating artificial melt inclusions by annealing a pre-fractured crystal in the presence of a melt with which it is in equilibrium. Boundary layers of different thicknesses should be generated by a range of cooling rates and different amounts of total cooling doc1199 none The investigators will study the cosmic ray flux incident upon Earth during the Pleistocene epoch. The main effort is to measure the cosmogenic radionuclide 10Be in samples of sea sediment obtained from the Blake Outer Ridge, together with other relevant physical and chemical properties of the sediments. Prior work by the investigators has demonstrated that the concentration of 10Be varies inversely with measures of the paleo magnetic field (paleointensity) of the sediments, and that it is unlikely that this relationship arises from climate forcing. Extension of the high-resolution record will address several problems raised by the earlier work. Specifically, the investigators will concentrate on understanding the Laschamp geomagnetic excursion (41,000 years ago) and the Blake Event (115,000 years ago doc1200 none This award will fund continued maintainance and updating of numerous paleomagnetic databases. The update of the paleomagnetic databases is in a transitional phase during this two-year period. Dr Michael McElhinny is retiring and has handed over this task to Dr Sergei Pisarevsky at the Tectonics Special Research Centre, University of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia. Although Dr Pisarevsky is well-versed in databases, including their design and operation, Dr McElhinny has agreed to act in a supervisory capacity during this transitional phase. At the present time the databases are set up under either MS Access 97 or MS Access . This will be continued for the present, but the possibility that a more modern database system could be used is being investigated under the new Geoinformatics and other database initiatives being developed in the Geosciences. Until now the databases have been updated annually, but this will now be undertaken every six months. Updates will appear immediately on the web through the web-site at the Geological Survey of Norway as has been available for updates over the past three years. Indeed as far as the Global Paleomagnetic Database (GPMDB) is concerned this web-site is the way in which most users currently access the database. The following databases will be automatically updated: GPMDB - Global Paleomagnetic Database for directions and pole positions MAGST- World-wide Database for magnetostratigraphy. PSVRL - Paleosecular Variation from Lavas for the past 5 Myr. The following databases rely heavily on researchers sending in their data, since the details are often not given in publications. SECVR - Secular Variation from Lake sediments and Holocene deposits. These data are never published in detail (only plots of Declination and Inclination versus Time are given. At present this database has as much data as can currently be obtained. Many researchers have not responded to requests for their data. TRANS - Reversals transitions database. Reversal transitions from lava sequences are published in the literature in full, lava flow by lava flow. However, transitions observed in sedimentary sequences are not given in detail horizon by horizon and again must be obtained from authors. This database is up to date as far as has been possible to get these sedimentary records in detail. The following databases are compiled and updated by others: PINT - Global Paleointensity Database. This is compiled and updated by Dr Mireille Perrin at the University of Montpellier, France. ARCHEO - Archeomagnetic Database. This is compiled and updated by Dr Don Tarling at the University of Southampton, UK doc1201 none Johnson This project will apply selenium (Se) stable isotope ratios as a new tool for understanding the transport and chemical transformations of Se in wetlands. Se contamination poses a threat to wildlife in many wetland areas of the western United States, in fly-ash disposal areas, and in other settings worldwide. The complex chemistry of Se determines the element s mobility and bioavailability, and efforts to understand its long-term cycling and transport in wetlands depend on accurate understanding of chemical transformations there. Previous work by this group suggests that Se isotope ratio measurements can be used as indicators of reduction reactions, which transform Se oxyanions into forms that are less mobile and less bioavailable. The present study will address critical questions arising from that work by performing the first detailed Se isotope field study, at a Se-contaminated wetland at Benton Lake National Wildlife Refuge, Montana. The primary objectives are to determine Se reduction rates using this new technique and constrain the relative importance of reduction by bacteria versus assimilation by plants and algae. The work will involve detailed measurements of Se concentrations, Se isotope ratios, and related geochemical variables in surface water, sediment pore waters, sediment components, and microcosm experiments. Sampling will be timed according to seasonal variations in water management and biogeochemistry. If possible, Se from the various sources will be traced through the system via their isotopic signatures . The study is designed as a Ph.D. project for a graduate student, who will be trained in environmental geochemistry, hydrogeology, isotope geochemistry and geomicrobiology doc1202 none Bass The focus of this project is laboratory measurements of sound velocities and elastic moduli of oxide minerals under the actual pressure and temperature (P and T) conditions of the Earth s deep interior. This project involves several related activities: 1) The development of an apparatus to measure sound velocities at ultra-high P-T conditions. The apparatus will be based on CO2 laser heating of samples while they are pressurized in a diamond anvil cell. Sound velocities will be measured by Brillouin scattering. Our goal is to measure the velocities of minerals up to T= K and P=50 GPa, which spans the P-T conditions to a depth of ~ km. 2) Velocity measurements at high pressure only, at high temperature only, and at simultaneous P-T conditions using a resistively-heated diamond-anvil cell (where the temperature is moderate but accurately known). This will identify the separate effects of P and T on velocities, and help characterize conditions under laser heating. 3) Thermal expansion measurements using synchrotron x-radiation. Initial experiments will involve MgO, a lower mantle constituent. We will assess the precision and accuracy of the measurements, thermal stresses, and deviatoric stresses in the pressure medium. We will then study likely constituents of the Earth s mantle, chosen from: olivine and its high pressure polymorphs beta- and gamma-(Mg,Fe)2SiO4, majorite-garnet solid solutions, pyroxenes, magnesium-silicate perovskites, and hydrous phases. Comparisons of our results with seismologically-determined velocities for the Earth will be used to improve our understanding of the chemical and thermal state of the Earth s interior doc1203 none Winokur The Consortium for Oceanographic Research and Education (CORE) will undertake the formation of a Coordinating Committee for Research at Ocean Observatories with broad interdisciplinary representation from the ocean and earth sciences communities. This group will focus on the utilization of fixed ocean observatories (both cabled observatories and moored ocean buoys) to address basic research questions using sustained time series observations and interactive experiments. A Planning Office will also be established at CORE to assist the Coordinating Committee. The Planning Office will serve as the staff for the Coordinating Committee and will be responsible for day-to-day management of Committee activities. Due to the wide interest in the ocean science community in a program of basic research utilizing ocean observatories it appears appropriate to constitute this committee under the auspices of CORE doc1204 none KIRSCH The Reuben H. Fleet Space Center is developing The Search for Infinity, a large-format film on mathematics and nature. The current concept, based on a film idea developed in collaboration with Sir Arthur C. Clarke, is to center the film on an intelligent computer running an unmanned space probe. By following the actions of the computer, audiences will learn about mathematical fractals and the relationships between fractals and the natural world. A key effect planned for the film will be a prolonged zoom into the endless details of the celebrated Mandelbrot Set fractal. Jeffrey Kirsch, Director of the Reuben H. Fleet Space Center, will be PI and Executive Producer for the film. The Co-Executive Producer will be Christina Schmidlin, Vice-President of XAOS, Inc, one of the world s leading computer graphics studios, and the Producer-Director will be Ronald Fricke. This production team will work with Sir Arthur Clarke to write the treatment for the film. Scientists working directly in the pre-production phase of the project include Ian Stewart, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick, and Rudy Rucker of San Jose State University. Other advisors include: Benoit Mandelbrot, Yale University; Maxine Brown, University of Illinois at Chicago; Bernard Pailthorpe, San Diego Supercomputer Center; and David Brin, Science Fiction author and astrophysicist. During this planning phase the project will: (1) identify subjects that are best suited to illustrate the fractal geometry of nature in large format film; (2) conduct front-end evaluation to assess the potential educational benefits of such a film; (3) write a treatment and develop a storyboard for the film; conduct formative evaluation of the treatment; (4) produce a motion picture sequence to demonstrate the educational power of the large format film medium to convey complicated ideas related to computer processes; and (5) develop interactive web-based activity concepts to exploit the film s distribution in the museum-dominated large format film community doc1205 none Tarduno Theoretical considerations and modeling results suggest a relationship between geomagnetic field intensity and polarity reversal rate. No clear relationship, however, is apparent in available paleointensity data. The investigators address this issue using a new paleointensity measurement approach that uses analyses of single plagioclase crystals. These crystals, which contain magnetic inclusions that retain paleofield values, are less susceptible to alteration during paleointensity experiments than some whole rock samples. Results from Thellier-Thellier experiments on plagioclase crystals separated from basalts that formed during the Cretaceous Normal Polarity Superchron (Rajmahal Traps) suggest a time-averaged paleomagnetic dipole moment three times that thought to have typified times of frequent geomagnetic reversals in the Cenozoic and early Cretaceous late Jurassic. This result leads to their hypothesis that there is a correlation between times of low reversal frequency and high geomagnetic field strength. They propose to test this hypothesis through a study of high- and low-latitude mid-Cretaceous flood basalt sites. These rocks will allow the investigators to examine the spatial (latitudinal) and temporal variation of geomagnetic field intensity during the Cretaceous Normal Polarity Superchron doc1206 none Tauxe Paleomagnetic data tell us that the geomagnetic field changes polarity yet the causes and controls of this astonishing behavior remain a mystery. Furthermore, the frequency with which the field reverses has changed dramatically through time and has been steadily increasing from zero reversals in a 51 million year time interval in the Cretaceous (the Cretaceous Normal Superchron, or CNS) to about four per million in the more recent past. Why the field stopped reversing and why it started again is unknown. Was the geomagnetic field simply too strong to reverse? To address this issue, we require estimates of the average field strength for the recent past and the CNS. Despite major gains in paleointensity research, the average field intensities during these intervals is poorly constrained. Under this grant, the investigators will endeavor to improve the estimate of average paleointensity for the early Brunhes and for the CNS using basaltic glass samples from the Hawaii Drill Core and the Troodos Ophiolite, respectively doc1207 none Furlong Dixon The Eastern California Shear Zone serves as a major component of the Pacific-North American plate boundary, accommodating 20-25% of the total strain along this boundary, with little deformation occurring between the San Andreas system and the shear zone. The San Andreas system is traditionally considered to mark the plate boundary between the Pacific plate and the North American plate, but the nature of the Eastern California Shear Zone is controversial, with hypotheses varying between it being completely analogous to a plate boundary to reflecting local effects within the edge of the North American plate. This project intends to combine new GPS observations and geodynamical modeling to test these various hypotheses. Results are expected to better clarify the role of the Eastern California Shear Zone in Pacific plate - North American plate tectonics doc1208 none Wallace This is a project to study the Caribbean-South American oblique arc-continent collision zone using various geologic (mapping, structure), geochemical (Ar-Ar and U-Pb Geochronology), and seismic (active MCS with onshore offshore recording using OBS instruments, passive array) techniques. There will also be a geodynamic modeling study that, very innovatively, includes the dynamics of crust-mantle interaction. The overall goal of the project is to understand further the geometry and chronology of a world class, arc-continent accretion event. Seosmic geological cross-sections are to be derived for several transects across the orogen at different ages of collision. The group of investigators include highly capable seismologists in both active and passive seismology, as well as geologists familiar with the orogenic developments on land. The cooperation with Venezuelan scientists and students is excellent doc1209 none PI s: Y. Ben-Zion and D. Okaya, University of Southern California This research will conduct a comprehensive high resolution imaging of the Karadere-Duzce branch of the North Anatolia Fault, using near-fault seismic data collected along and around the Karadere-Duzce rupture zone during the 5.5 months following the Mw7.4 August 17, , earthquake by a RAMP PASSCAL seismic network. The study area straddles the structurally important eastern and western ends of the August 17 and November 12, , M 7+ ruptures. Research will include analysis, interpretation, and integration of information from the following categories of studies: (1) regional imaging using earthquake travel time tomography; (2) several possible seismic signatures of damaged fault zone material at depth including anisotropy, non-linear wave propagation, and fault zone trapped and head waves effects; and (3) high-resolution hypocenter locations of recorded seismicity. Goals of the research are: 1) providing high resolution imaging of width, continuity, and seismic properties of the fault zone at depth; and 2) establishing correlations between (a) lithology and fault offsets at the surface, (b) space-time patterns of large earthquake ruptures, (c) microseismicity patterns at depth, and (d) properties of damaged fault zone rock at depth as imaged by various seismic signals. Results of the research will contribute to a better understanding of properties and mechanics of major transform plate-boundary fault zones. The developed integrated methodology will be useful for applications to other fault systems doc1210 none Gaherty-EAR Revenaugh- Garnero- The Canadian Northwest Experiment (CANOE hereafter) will employ a Y-shaped, 48-station broadband seismic array to address two of the great unsolved problems in the evolution of the solid Earth: the assembly and stabilization of the continents, and the importance of the Earth s core-mantle boundary (CMB) as the birthplace of mantle plumes and the graveyard of subducted slabs. Constructed via a sequence of collisional events associated with subduction, continents grow outwards from nuclei that stabilize quickly, experiencing little deformation over the subsequent billions of years. This stability is presumably due to dynamic processes associated with craton construction, but is poorly understood. The best locale in the world for mapping continent construction is the northwestern corner of the Canadian shield, which is characterized by a progression from the 2.5-4 billion-year-old Slave province (home to the oldest known rocks on Earth) to the recently uplifted Northern Cordillera of the great Rocky Mountain system. The investigators will deploy broadband seismometers across this transition, with a western arm following the Alaskan highway from Whitehorse, BC to Edmonton, AB, and an eastern arm reaching from Fort Nelson, BC to Yellowknife, NWT. Using records of local, regional, and distant earthquakes, the investigators will construct detailed images of the mantle and crust associated with this cordillera-to-craton transition. By recording earthquakes from the far reaches of the Pacific basin, the CANOE deployment will also provide unsurpassed sampling of the seismic structure of the lowermost mantle. The 90 s witnessed a parade of new and unusual discoveries about the Earth s lower mantle and CMB, including evidence for compositional heterogeneity, partial melting, and anisotropic mantle fabric that have strong implications for mantle dynamic processes. CANOE, situated within 120o of the vast majority of the world s deep seismicity, provides a remarkable opportunity to examine the lower mantle in greater detail. This includes unsurpassed coverage of the CMB beneath Hawaii, providing an excellent opportunity to test models of the genesis of this hotspot archetype. Following the experiment, all data will be made available to the community through the IRIS Data Management Center (www.iris.washington.edu). Seismic instrumentation will be provided by the IRIS PASSCAL program. A portion of the experiment is funded by the Canadian Lithoprobe program via a grant to the University of British Columbia doc1211 none Torgersen Small ponds are traditional for control of stormwater and chemical runoff. However, events has been observed that result in significant internal loading, hyper-eutrophication and export of nutrients and contaminants from the ponds. We hypothesize that ordinary bacterial processes within the sediments benthic-boundary-layer coupled with aperiodic shallow-pond-specific processes are responsible for this internal loading and downstream contamination. Thus, the coupled interactions of physics chemistry and biology in detention retention ponds control the state of the pond more than any individual processes. This internal loading and coupled dynamics of ponds significantly alters the application of ponds in environmental engineering. We will test hypotheses for internal loading events in ponds with continuous-recording instruments (WEB-addressable) and measure the dynamic responses of ponds to internal loading events (rainfall, spring, accidents, etc.) We will observe and quantify significant bulk processes involved in the removal of nutrients and contaminants from retention ponds as well as the processes that regenerate release nutrients and metals. With monitored pond response, coupled with direct sampling and wet chemical analyses, we will define a coupled dynamic pond model. We will develop a loading history model of ponds building upon CASC2D as a function of land use to predict when the critical lifetime of a pond has been reached and remediation is required. Development of the 1) pond-loading model and 2) pond dynamics model will contribute to the appropriate use and application of ponds as detention retention devices in the environment. We will develop the web-addressable monitoring equipment with the possibility of creating an Instrumented Environmental Systems Laboratory for use in undergraduate teaching, honors theses and extensions to high school.. The pond loading and pond dynamics models developed from this study of two ponds can be tested with simplified studies in other ponds. Continuing projects will evaluate pond dynamics across a variety of climatic zones and land use types. The ultimate product will be a database and models that will significantly improve pond design and management doc1212 none Valentine A dearth of paleomagnetic data from volcanic rocks hampers our understanding of temporal variations of the geomagnetic field, including field reversals, during the last 5 My. Although a number of increasingly sophisticated models for the geodynamo and the reversal process have been proposed in recent years, such models are being tested with a severely limited knowledge of the nature of field variation. One of the greatest problems with regard to paleosecular variation (PSV), time-averaged field (TAF), and reversal modeling is a geographical bias in the paleomagnetic data set. Most of the current data come from sites in the northern hemisphere, and a more uniform distribution of paleomagnetic sites for the last 5 My is critical to improving our understanding. Preliminary paleomagnetic study of Ascension Island rocks by the PI has shown that Ascension Island has the potential to provide quality PSV, TAF, and reversal data. This study will perform a detailed paleomagnetic study of Ascension Island rocks in conjunction with precision 40Ar 39Ar dating and mineralogical analyses, producing high-quality PSV and TAF data. It also has the potential to reveal reversals recorded in the volcanic flows of Ascension Island. In addition, magnetic mineralogy work, including identification of any post-emplacement alteration of mineralogy, and precision radiometric dating of the rocks will certainly help to better define the geologic history of this hot spot island on the flank of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The project will significantly involve undergraduate students, who will participate in exciting, cutting-edge of research doc1213 none Hogan, Lux, and Gibson Granitic plutons of the Coastal Maine Magmatic Province (CMMP) commonly display dramatic field relations that record interaction between magmas of markedly different composition (chemical and isotopic) and physical properties. Silicic magma chambers, derived from the crust, received influxes of denser mafic magma that spread out along the floor of these chambers to produce a compositional stratification know as Mafic and Silicic Layered Intrusions (MASLI). The spectacular field relations and large compositional variation in the vicinity of the interface between contrasting magma types are well document by recent studies. In contrast, the extent of physical and chemical coupling between the base of the chamber, that receives mafic influx, and the overlying silicic magma remains poorly understood. Three known or presumed MASLI plutons in the CMMP, the Vinalhaven, Deer Isle, and Mt. Waldo granites, have been selected for study to address this important issue. Specifically, what processes and other factors determine the extent to which heat and material are exchanged between contrasting magma types? Is heat and mass subsequently distributed to the upper reaches of the chamber? By combining textural, compositional and isotopic studies of zoned plagioclase and accessory minerals (using electron and ion-microprobe techniques), along with data for magmatic enclaves from each of the granites, the relative timing and extent of variation in composition of the magma from with individual minerals crystallized can be assessed. Comparison of internal variations among adjacent mineral grains will be used to constrain the relative extent to which material is redistributed within the chamber. Furthermore, studies such as this will enhance our understanding of magma chamber dynamics and growth, enable recognition of the contribution of mantle and crustal components in granite petrogenesis, and evaluate models for the growth and evolution of continental lithosphere doc1214 none Yeh et al. This award would support the continued development of the technique of computerized ionospheric tomography through application of this technique to the analysis of phase observations of radio signals from the TRANSIT satellites by a network of radio receivers. The results of this analysis would be a collection of 2-dimensional images of the low latitude distribution of ionospheric electron density over a latitudinal swath of about 20 degrees. About 15 such images are available for each 24 hour period. These results would be examined to study the average daily behavior for a typical day in each season to establish a baseline behavior during solar minimum conditions. Images corresponding to atypical behavior relating to special events such as solar eclipses, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions would be examined and interpreted to improve the understanding of ionospheric behavior under these circumstances. All images constructed with applications of this technique would be made available through the means of Web access doc1215 none Farquhar Preliminary sulfur multiple-isotope data point to a fundamental change in the processes controlling the sulfur cycle during the Paleoproterozoic (2.0 to 2.5 Ga). These data suggest that before this time, the sulfur cycle was strongly influenced by atmospheric sulfur chemistry. After this time, the sulfur cycle was more strongly influenced by oxidative weathering and microbial sulfate reduction, and is inferred to be similar to the modern, pre-anthropogenic sulfur cycle. To extend these preliminary conclusions and to understand the role of oxidative weathering and microbial reduction on the Precambrian sulfur cycle, a three part strategy is needed: (1) Additional documentation of the sulfur multiple-isotope geochemistry in sedimentary, metasedimentary and igneous rocks will provide a record of the role of atmospheric sulfur chemistry in the sulfur cycle over time; (2) A deeper examination of the Paleoproterozoic transition period that is evidenced by D33S shifts in our preliminary data, will add new insights into the changes that occurred at 2.0-2.5 Ga and explore possible links to the intensity of oxidatitve weathering and the atmospheric oxidation state; (3) further investigation of the Archean sulfur cycle will constrain the roles of atmospheric reactions, oxidative weathering, and microbial activity in the Earth s earliest sulfur cycle doc1216 none Banerjee Century to millennial scale abrupt changes in summer rainfall and winter dust storms in the loess plateau region of China have been recorded in the varying grain-size, chemical composition and magnetic properties of the wind-borne loess sediments. The investigator will advance the current qualitative understanding of the relative variations in paleoclimate of China by calibrating the paleo-records from sediments in terms of rainfall and temperature variations. From Xining in the north-west to Huanxian in the south-east, a three-site transect with known temperature and rainfall variations will be sampled as a function of time, back to the last 130,000 years. These samples will be studied for their grain-size, chemical composition and magnetic properties, both in the field and in the laboratory, to establish an accurate paleoclimate record doc1217 none The Vermont Center for the Book is developing Mother Goose Cares about Math and Science, an integrated curriculum of science process skills and standards-based mathematics concepts for preschool children. A college credit course will be developed for childcare providers based on this curriculum. The course increases science and math literacy and the ability to incorporate NCTM standards, and science process skills, into daily interactions with children. Participants are also provided with the tools to communicate the importance of these concepts to parents. The course will be delivered to 600 childcare workers in Vermont and inner-city Philadelphia over a three-year period. Recruitment will include providers in center-, home- and school-based settings in both urban and rural communities. Participants will be provided with books, Curriculum Guides, tools and manipulatives needed to implement the course pedagogy. Materials to be developed include a seven-segment training, which will be used to disseminate the project nationally. Participants will receive a comprehensive training package that can be used to train their peers doc1218 none Padman The proposed project is the continuation of an analysis program of data obtained in the course of a multi-institutional integrated study of the outflow of newly formed bottom water from the Weddell Sea and its dispersion into the South Atlantic Ocean. That study was called Deep Ocean Ventilation Through Antarctic Intermediate Layers (DOVETAIL) and included six components involving hydrographic measurements, natural tracer experiments, and modeling studies. It was centered east of the Drake Passage where water masses from the Weddell Sea and the Scotia Sea come together in the Weddell-Scotia Confluence, and was carried out in cooperation with the national antarctic programs of Germany and Spain. The objectives of this continuation are to participate in the international data analysis effort, to construct an integrated regional data base, the organization of a special DOVETAIL journal issue, and the organization of a final scientific workshop. Ventilation of the deep ocean -- the rising of sub-surface water masses to the surface to be recharged with atmospheric gases and to give up heat to the atmosphere -- is a uniquely antarctic phenomenon that has significant consequences for global change by affecting the global reservoir of carbon dioxide, and by modulating the amount and extent of seasonal sea ice in the southern hemisphere doc1219 none PI: A. Nyblade, Penn State In this project, we will critically evaluate models for the origin of rifting, volcanism and uplift in East Africa by imaging the seismic structure of the upper mantle beneath the Kenya rift using broadband seismic data. Although East Africa has long been regarded as a classic area in which to study the early stages of continental breakup, the origin of the Cenozoic rifting, volcanism, and plateau uplift found there is still poorly understood. For a variety of reasons, the rifting, volcanism, and plateau uplift has been commonly attributed to one or more mantle plumes. However, whether a plume exists beneath East Africa is a contentious issue because geochemical and geophysical data from there, until recently, have provided little information on mantle composition and thermal structure beneath the lithosphere where the plume is hypothesized to lie. To further test plume models for East Africa, as well as non-plume models, we will conduct a passive source seismic experiment in Kenya to obtain broadband seismic data. The data will be analyzed using a number of proven modeling techniques for imaging crust and upper mantle structure. The resulting seismic images, combined with geochemical and other geophysical data from East Africa, will let us identify thermal and or compositional structures in the upper mantle that can, in turn, be used to discriminate between models of the structure and development of East Africa doc1220 none Visbeck The proposed work is an attempt to use a modified version of the Princeton Ocean Model (a widely-used numerical model of the ocean developed by the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory) to characterize the vertical structure of tides in the Ross Sea and the Weddell Sea, and to separate the barotropic and baroclinic components. The barotropic tide is uniform from the ocean surface to the bottom, and influences mixing in the water column, benthic dissipation of momentum, and the formation of leads in sea ice. The baroclinic tide varies with depth, and introduces internal waves, benthic jet formation, and can intensify surface divergence. Currently little is known about the vertical structure of antarctic tidal dynamics and their influence continental shelf and slope processes. The focus of this project will be on the semi-diurnal tides, with the expected result a new understanding of generation regions for internal tides, regions of increased benthic velocities and shear, surface divergence, and tidal mixing through the water column doc1221 none Early Evolution of Ligaments and Shell Microstructure in the Bivalvia, with a Comprehensive, Polythetic, Phylogenetic Analysis Dr. Joseph G. Carter, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Although ligaments and shell microstructures are important sources of phylogenetic information for the Bivalvia, these features remain poorly known for most early and middle Paleozoic genera and species. The recent discovery of relict aragonitic ligaments and shell microstructures in Ordovician bivalves from Kentucky and in Silurian bivalves from Gotland suggests that these features may be traceable throughout the Phanerozoic. The funded research will develop an extensive database of Paleozoic bivalvian ligament and shell microstructure, focusing on selected Paleozoic faunas representing localities in the United States, Arctic Canada, Sweden, Sardinia, the Czech Republic, China, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica. These data will then be combined with other paleontological data and limited inferences of soft anatomy to provide a series of taxonomically comprehensive, rigorously phylogenetic analyses of Paleozoic bivalves based on parsimony, likelihood, and distance methods, tested against stratigraphic data, traditional evolutionary systematics, and modern molecular phylogenies. The final phylogenetic synthesis will be used for a revised phylogenetic classification of Paleozoic bivalves. In addition to clarifying the early evolution of ligaments and shell microstructures, this research will help resolve many outstanding questions of bivalve evolution, and will provide a firm foundation for future phylogenetic analyses of post-Paleozoic bivalves doc1222 none Bhushan This award supports a third year of funding for Bharat Bhushan, two graduate students, and a postdoctoral student from Ohio State University in a collaboration with Walter Arnold of the Department of Applied Science at the Fraunhofer Institute for Nondestructive Testing (IZFP) in Saarbruecken, Germany. The research funded by this award will make use of the techniques in dynamic force microscopy developed at the IZFP, also called ultrasonic atomic force microscopy (AFM), which can be used to measure static friction at velocities several orders of magnitude larger than that used in conventional AFM. Localized sensitivity measurements of ceramics and polymer composites can be made to a degree not possible with other techniques. The collaboration will make it possible to transfer the German technology to the Computer Microtribology and Contamination Laboratory at Ohio State. The research plan will develop analytical tools and computer models to gain insight into the elasticity on nonhomogeneous materials, which could ultimately lead to new low-friction materials and useful mechanical property measurement techniques. This joint collaborative research effort also presents junior researchers with the opportunity to work internationally, and the work done on this proposal will help institutionalize the relationship between the German and U.S. research groups doc1223 none The Nankai Trough is formed by the subduction of the Philippine Sea Plate beneath southeast Japan. This thrust zone gives rise to great (M = 8) earthquakes every ~190 years, but the shortest repeat period in more than years was the 90 years after the Ansei earthquake. In addition, the Tonankai earthquake, possibly for the first time, did not extend northeastward into the Suruga Bay as previous great earthquakes in the Nankai Trough. Modeling shows that rather small stresses, when applied over the whole fault surface, are surprisingly effective in inhibiting or triggering large earthquakes in highly stressed regions. It is therefore suggestive that postseismic strain diffusion from the inland Nobi earthquake (M 8) of may have affected the Coulomb failure level on the Tonankai fault consistent with the occurrence, i.e. the western section failed early but the eastern (Tokai) section did not fail. Using a computer simulation of the earthquake process, we propose to model the effect of small stress changes across a fault and investigate whether the level of stress due to strain diffusion from the great Nobi earthquake was indeed sufficient to trigger a size event. In addition, we plan to evaluate whether the inhibiting stress from Nobi earthquake, applied to the eastern part of the fault, is sufficient to temporarily delay the (Tokai) earthquake in excess of the historical repeat time. In more general terms, large earthquakes generate long-term and far-ranging stress perturbations that can influence the timing of large earthquakes on other faults. Therefore, the research proposed here is not strictly limited to large earthquakes in Japan, but rather anywhere doc1224 none Copeland This is a project to study the Caribbean-South American oblique arc-continent collision zone using various geologic (mapping, structure), geochemical (Ar-Ar and U-Pb Geochronology), and seismic (active MCS with onshore offshore recording using OBS instruments, passive array) techniques. There will also be a geodynamic modeling study that, very innovatively, includes the dynamics of crust-mantle interaction. The overall goal of the project is to understand further the geometry and chronology of a world class, arc-continent accretion event. Seosmic geological cross-sections are to be derived for several transects across the orogen at different ages of collision. The group of investigators include highly capable seismologists in both active and passive seismology, as well as geologists familiar with the orogenic developments on land. The cooperation with Venezuelan scientists and students is excellent doc1225 none Lindsley and Nekvasil Rocks of within-plate magmatic suites commonly show a wide range in composition, yet occur together in time and space. These suites fall into alkalic and tholeiitic types, each forming distinctive chemical trends. This work focuses specifically on three of these suite-types: 1. hy-normative alkalic rocks from both continental and ocean-island settings; 2. ocean-island tholeiites and associated rocks, and 3. continental tholeiites and their associated evolved rocks, together with the distinctive suites associated with Proterozoic massif anorthosites, ranging from high-Al gabbro through ferrodiorite (high-Fe; high Fe Mg) to fayalite granite. Much remains unknown about the relationship among the suite-members of these three types or any possible relationship linking these suite-types. We will continue experimental simulation of step-wise fractional crystallization under variable conditions of pressure and water content for the three suite-types in order to provide constraints on their compositional evolution. The least-evolved magmas from each of the three suite-types appear to emanate from a similar tholeiitic basalt. If the three suite-types indeed share a common parentage, then the differences in trends of the more evolved members must have arisen primarily from secondary factors such as differences in pressure of fractionation, decompression history, or volatile content. Experiments will be continued that explore this possibility. The conditions leading to melts that simulate most closely the observed rock compositions within each suite will be applied to the other suite-types in attempt to divert them from their standard path and onto trends subparallel to the path most relevant to the conditions imposed. Success in this would have far-ranging implications about the processes at work in magma generation and evolution in hot-spot and early-rifting settings doc1226 none Harper Miller Accretionary and subduction complexes are commonly difficult to reconstruct due to subsequent structural complexity and lack of distinctive lithologies, fossils or stratigraphic sequences. Ophiolites, either of ocean floor or back-arc origins, provide unusually robust data that can guide structural and stratigraphic correlations and tectonic reconstructions in areas of controversial histories. This collaborative project will examine the Ingalls ophiolite complex of the north Cascades in order to help discriminate between several regionally important assembly possibilities. The work involves geochemical characterization, age dating and provenance analysis of the Ingalls complex and comparison of the results to other ophiolites that extend for km along the western United States margin. These data will help determine whether the Ingalls complex was formed near its present position, was transported long distances laterally as part of Baja-BC, or is exotic with respect to stable North America doc1227 none Freedom Machines is a one-hour special for public television which will highlight the information about the newest technological advances which support over 54 million Americans with disabilities. Through personal narratives, high-impact storytelling, and a comprehensive public education and outreach campaign, the show will inform viewers about assistive technology (AT) being used, and how it is adapted and designed by people with disabilities. The individuals to be profiled, many of them leaders in science and technological fields, will encourage young people with disabilities to pursue careers in the sciences. Many of the devices and approaches to be featured will also show how valuable these technologies are for the able bodied, general public. The sixty-minute documentary is structured around the themes of Pioneers, Partners and Prophets in order to examine the evolving relationship between technology and the disabled, profile emerging technologies and explore the larger societal implications of this growing phenomenon. A companion website and extensive outreach program will continue the informative material, support and create networks, and promote linkages between viewers, either abled or disabled, and the technology that might benefit them. Technological changes have always been influenced by people with needs beyond the ordinary. This dynamic is even more relevant in today s information age. Freedom Machines will dramatically demonstrate that designing a world of inclusion benefits everyone doc1228 none Determining Rates and Patterns of Bedrock Incision by Large Rivers The Potomac and Susquehanna are major rivers draining a large portion of eastern North America. On the banks of both rivers, above today s channels, are series of terraces, flat surfaces that were once the bed of the river. As both rivers cur away rock and eroded their channels, these terraces were left high and dry up to 100 feet above the modern river. The age of these terraces is unknown nor do we know if the terraces might be the result of changing past climate. Our research will use new techniques in chemical and high-energy particle analysis to provide fundamental answers regarding the age and origin of these terraces. Such information is important for our basic understanding of how large rivers work, particularly how they cut into hard rock. But such information is also very important for building a greater public understanding of how prominent landscape features, such as falls, cataracts, and river terraces form, Much of our work will be done in Parks, in particular, The National Park at Great Falls on the Potomac. We will ensure that our results are included in informal science interpretive materials so that the Park s many visitors know more about the geologic processes that formed the landscape they came to view doc1229 none Bilham This is a five-year collaboration with Indian scientists (Bangalore, Bombay and Wadia Institute) to unravel the details of movement and deformation of the Indian plate. The investigators expect to constrain the rotation rate of India, the rate of change of convergence velocity along the Himalayan arc, and some of the details of giant earthquakes that have ruptured there in the past two centuries using Global Positioning System geodesy. Geodetic measurements within India will reveal the rate at which the Indian plate is deforming and provide insights into the rate of occurrence, and possible location, of future mid-plate earthquakes. The recent Bhuj M=7.6 earthquake whose study has been initiated as part of this project, has many similarities to the infrequent great mid-plate earthquakes that afflicted North America in the early 19th century. Seismic hazard findings from India are thus likely not only to benefit mid-21st-century India, when it will be the most populous country in the world, but also the USA, the country that has the most to lose economically from future mid-plate earthquakes. This work also includes measurements of absolute gravity, as well as maintenance and upgrade of the F5 absolute gravimeter. Additionally, startup funds from INT are included for collaboration with Pakistani colleagues at the University of Peshewar for a geodynamic study of the western edge of the Indian Plate doc1230 none Duke Metamorphic processes include the chemical and physical transformations that occur to rocks subjected to elevated temperatures and pressures in the earth s crust. Metamorphic processes are an integral part of the long-term cycles that control the distribution of elements among the solid earth, oceans, and atmosphere. This research examines the application of reflectance spectroscopy in the visible and near infrared wavelength region (350- nm) as an alternative method for characterizing the mineralogy of metamorphic rocks and generating maps of mineral distribution. Spectroscopic methods offer two distinct advantages relative to conventional mapping methods: 1) acquisition of spectra is rapid and inexpensive, and 2) measurements can be made in the field with portable spectrometers or remotely with aircraft or satellite based imaging spectrometers. In this project, methods are being developed to map the distribution of metamorphic minerals using advanced airborne and satellite-based remote sensing data, which are being provided through a unique partnership with NASA. Mapping methods being developed under this research project, however, can be applied to address many other earth science problems and are currently being implemented in studies of mineral deposit exploration, vegetation classification and land cover change, and forestry resource monitoring doc1231 none Bukowinski Although the gross outlines of the mineral composition of the Earth s mantle are reasonably well known, geophysics remains unable to interpret seismic shear properties and tomographic maps of lateral heterogeneity in the lower mantle and transition zone with much confidence. Laboratory measurements of elastic wave velocities are still confined to pressures corresponding to the upper mantle. In addition, little is known about the effects of Al and Ca on the properties of (Mg,Fe)SiO3-perovskite, likely the dominant component of the lower mantle. Recent experiments indicate that a small amounts of Al in silicate perovskite significantly enhances its compressibility, and hence forces a re-examination of compositional models that ignore Al altogether, or assume that it has little effect on the elasticity of silicates. The effect of Al is known to be sensitive to the concurrent presence of Fe3+, but the mechanism is not fully understood. The role of Al and Ca in stabilizing garnets below the 660 km discontinuity also needs to be better understood. Even less is known about the mineralogy of the D zone, whose properties gain in complexity with every new seismic examination. We propose to develop a model of silicate minerals that will allow an accurate examination of elastic properties by combining low pressure data with density functional theory. This semi-empirical model will be based on the Variationally Induced Breathing (VIB) theory of bonding in ionic materials. In addition to the proven density-functional energy, the new model will incorporate parametric covalent contributions, which will compete with inter-ionic charge transfer in response to electronegativity equalization. The parameters will be constrained with low pressure data on elastic velocities and vibrational spectroscopy. Preliminary investigations show this to be a very promising approach. The unique strength of the method lies in its high efficiency relative to fully first-principles approaches. Furthermore, the method promises to effectively bootstrap high quality low pressure elasiticity data into deep Earth conditions, thus greatly enhancing their utility. It will thus be possible to efficiently search for mineral structures and to examine their dependence on various geophysical conditions. The fully developed model will be used to generate phonon spectra, elastic constants and equations of state. It will also be used to examine the effects of coupled Al and Fe3+ substitution into (Mg,Fe)SiO3 perovskites. This will allow the generation of seismic velocities for candidate lower mantle mineral assemblages, and an examination of how they are affected by crystal structure and the presence of relatively low abundance components like Al, Ca and Fe3+. An attempt will also be made to evaluate the temperature dependence of these properties. The minerals to be investigated include silicate perovskites, garnets, various SiO2 phases, and other minerals composed of MgO, SiO2, CaO, Al2O3, and FeO that may be present at lower mantle and D zone conditions doc1232 none Williams The western U.S. is one of the best places in the world to study continental evolution because there is a preserved unique record of the growth, stabilization, maturation, rifting, and incipient dismemberment of a continent. In particular, we can see how older lithospheric structures (in this case Archean and Proterozoic) influenced younger tectonic events, including development of the huge, presently active, orogenic plateau that dominates the western U.S. and the progressive dismemberment and dispersal of continental fragments along its active western margin. Continents are the long-term record keepers of plate interactions before 200 Ma. However, accumulated modification often obscures the previous record. The western U.S. is unique in that this part of the continent was assembled in the Proterozoic around an Archean cratonic core , then was truncated in the Phanerozoic at a high angle so as to create a new continental margin oblique to the Precambrian structures. The result was the creation of a wide region - the western U.S. - where nature caught all stages of structural reactivation and continental modification. The main goal of the CD-ROM (Continental Dynamics of the Rocky Mountains) Project is to understand the processes of formation and modification of continental lithosphere. Phase 1 of the CD-ROM experiment was a three year project to improve our structural and petrologic knowledge of the lithosphere and to test the hypothesis that the lithospheric structure produced during assembly of southwestern North America has profoundly influenced physical and chemical modification of the continental lithosphere during all subsequent magmatic and tectonic events, including those related to the ongoing asthenospheric flow. The principal investigators studied two Proterozoic structures with a range of seismic and geologic methods: the Cheyenne Belt and the Jemez lineament. Reflection, refraction, and teleseismic investigations are providing crustal - and lithospheric - scale images of major structures. A more complete picture of the evolution of the lithosphere has been added by geologic studies of Precambrian shear zones and Phanerozoic structures, xenolith studies, and geomorphologic and exhumation studies of present landforms. Phase 1 brought together 18 investigators from 14 institutions, including collaboration with a German-funded refraction team. With these awards, one year of funding is provided to continue to process, interpret, and integrate the diverse data sets generated in Phase 1 and to begin developing geodynamic models. The Principal Investigators will also explore new methods of data integration towards the goal of developing a master model for lithospheric structure doc1233 none Zeitler This project will use the eastern syntaxis of the Himalayan orogen to address key questions in the geodynamics of continental collisions: how do orogens and associated plateaus come to an end, how do tectonic and surficial processes interact to shape the crust during orogeny, and how is deformation partitioned at various scales? Specific hypotheses to be tested are: 1) rheology controls topography and lithospheric mechanics across plateau indentor margin; 2) erosion controls lithospheric dynamics to the same extent as crustal thickening and lateral accommodation; feedbacks between the two ultimately shape the evolution of the orogen; and 3) there is complete decoupling between upper crustal and lower lithospheric deformation within the syntaxial region. The approach to be used involves tracking the magnitude, rates, and type of mass fluxes through the central region of the eastern Himalayan syntaxis. To do this, the Principal Investigators will use geochronologic, geomorphic, GPS, petrologic, seismic, and structural techniques, fully integrated by three-dimensional modeling doc1234 none Sven Morgan Basil Tikoff This project is designed to understand the three-dimensional fabrics and strain associated with magmatic forceful expansion by comparing simple natural and experimental examples. The project involves data collection using: 1) anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility (AMS), 2) shape preferred orientations (SPO), 3) computed X-ray tomography (X-ray CT), 4) field measurements on the magmatic fabrics and strains associated with sills, laccoliths, and bysmaliths in the Henry Mountains, Utah, and 5) lab measurements on particles within artificial flows. The Henry Mountains intrusives are Oliogocene - Miocene age and intruded the upper crust of the Colorado Plateau, which is a late Paleozoic and Mesozoic section of flat-lying sandstones and shales. The goal is to relate magmatic fabrics to the displacement of the wallrocks caused by magmatic intrusion (inflation), and the intrusives in the Henry Mountains provide the best opportunity to understand this fundamental process. The floors, walls, interiors, and roofs of these intrusions are all very well exposed in the desert plateau of southern Utah. These plutons have raised the overburden by either bending the overburden or faulting the overburden immediately above the intrusion. The shapes of the intrusions represent a complete gradation between sills and laccoliths. By documenting the magmatic fabric in these bodies, the temporal fabric development of the intrusions is being interpreted and related to steps in the evolution of flow in the physical models. The boundary conditions of intrusion are well understood: laccoliths, bysmaliths, and sills intruded into the undeformed, horizontal strata of the Colorado Plateau. The strata act as markers to record the translation, rotation, and internal strain caused by magma intrusion. Moreover, the plutons intruded into a part of the Colorado plateau that has not experienced regional deformation. This setting precludes tectonic forces being involved with emplacement and allows an interpretation that unambiguously describes fabrics in terms of magmatic processes. The project involves a detailed field study to document the foliation and lineation within these intrusions. In addition, the three-dimensional SPO of the phenocrysts is being recorded and the intrusions are being sampled for AMS. The AMS technique will be corroborated by X-ray CT techniques, which will allow the documentation of the orientation and spatial distribution of magnetite on the same samples. The field studies are being conducted in tandem with physical experiments of non-uniform flows. These intrusives are the perfect examples to be modeled since their shapes are simple and known, and the low crystal content of the magmas is well constrained. The flows that are being modeled include decelerating flow and cylindrical flow, which provide a first-order approximation of magma intruding a laccolith and a bysmalith, respectively. Passive, neutrally-buoyant markers are being placed in these experiments in order to obtain quantitative strain associated with various amounts of fluid flow into a chamber. The results are being compared with the fabrics from the Henry Mountains intrusives, which were emplaced with varying amounts of magma. Using this variety of techniques, and the ideal setting provided by the Henry Mountains, the three-dimensional fabric associated with forceful emplacement of magmatic intrusions will be understood doc1235 none Overpressure and Fluid Flow in New Jersey Continental Slope: Implications for Slope Stability and Cold Seeps Principal Investigator: Peter B. Flemings Observations, theory, and experiments will be used to characterize the temporal and spatial evolution of fluid pressure and stress on the continental slope, offshore New Jersey. PI will image the porosity of the slope sediments using core data, well logs, and seismic velocities. Fluid pressures will be predicted using a porosity-effective stress relationship. This approach will provide a regional map of the porosity and fluid pressures. Greg Mountain (Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory) will aid them in correlating the pressure distribution to key Miocene-to-present stratigraphic surfaces. Fluid pressures will also be correlated with exposed submarine canyons to evaluate the impact high pressures have on slope stability. A numerical model that couples consolidation theory and groundwater mechanics will simulate the porosity and pressure evolution. Porewater geochemical data will be used in concert with porosity data to validate the flow model. PI will perform laboratory experiments, at ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company, on samples from ODP Site to determine the compressibility and permeability of slope sediments. The experiments will also provide fluid pressure estimates that can be compared to the pressures predicted from porosity and those simulated in the flow models. After constraining the fluid pressures, their origins, and their distribution, we will evaluate the stress evolution, which is intimately tied to the fluid pressures and to slope stability. The proposed research will provide quantitative insights into how hydrodynamics and state of stress are linked on rapidly deposited margins. This local study has broad application to a variety of geological settings and societal problems. The study has the potential to estimate the location of sea floor seeps and the volume of fluids they expel; fluid flux relates to the size and diversity of biotic communities that use nutrients supplied by seep fluids. The pressure-stress field is important to understand for subsurface exploration and to evaluate slope stability. A definitive understanding of the origin of pressures and the focussed flows they can generate will be easily exportable to industry. The coupling of fluid pressure and stress will define the role excess fluid pressures play in sculpting continental slopes and may serve as a way to evaluate potential submarine landslide hazards doc1236 none Morrissey The objective of this project is to continue investigating the near-field (3-4 km from source) seismic and acoustic response of a volcano to the explosive discharge of ash and gas. We propose to develop a computer model that simulates the motion in the fluid and rock associated with the discharge of a pressurized mixture of ash and gas through the volcano and atmosphere. Discrete, explosive eruptions are commonly accompanied by shallow volcanic earthquakes and initiate atmospheric sound waves. Existing near-field seismic and acoustic models of volcanic eruptions are either formulated for incompressible, steady flowing ash-steam mixture or are one dimensional. The proposed model will simulate the 3 dimensional explosive discharge of an ash-gas mixture through a crater (filled with either air, steam or water) and into the atmosphere. Applications of the computer code will include modeling the acoustic and earthquake signals associated with eruptions at Sakurajima volcano in Japan and Ruapehu volcano in New Zealand. The merit of this project pertains to the improvement of volcano monitoring capabilities by identifying physical processes related to fluid transport from characteristic features of acoustic and seismic signals doc1237 none Karlstrom Seaman Much of the western United States continental lithosphere was assembled from 1.8 to 1.6 Ga, but the tectonic style of assembly is controversial, in particular the blocks or terranes of different precambrian characteristics may have been juxtaposed primarily by orthogonal and sequential subduction or the major mechanism may have been transpressional translation. This project will examine the geochemistry in detail of occurrences of ultramafic rocks that seem to spatially be associated with boundaries of precambrian blocks, thus suggesting subduction. A sea-floor ophiolitic geochemical signature would considerably strengthen this option whereas absence would point to alternatives including strike-slip assembly. Results are expected to influence understanding on how the continental lithosphere of much of the western United States was assembled doc1237 none Karlstrom Seaman Much of the western United States continental lithosphere was assembled from 1.8 to 1.6 Ga, but the tectonic style of assembly is controversial, in particular the blocks or terranes of different precambrian characteristics may have been juxtaposed primarily by orthogonal and sequential subduction or the major mechanism may have been transpressional translation. This project will examine the geochemistry in detail of occurrences of ultramafic rocks that seem to spatially be associated with boundaries of precambrian blocks, thus suggesting subduction. A sea-floor ophiolitic geochemical signature would considerably strengthen this option whereas absence would point to alternatives including strike-slip assembly. Results are expected to influence understanding on how the continental lithosphere of much of the western United States was assembled doc1239 none O Hara A simple new geothermometer for frictionally melted rocks (so called pseudotachylytes) that allows estimate of ambient country rock temperature during melting is being tested on a fossil intracontinental pseudotachylyte-bearing fault zone the (Homestake shear zone, Colorado) and ultradeep pseudotachylytes from western Norway. Temperature (and hence depth) estimates on frictional melting along fault zones give a three dimensional picture of the rupture geometry. Frictional melting appears to be one of the few indicators of ancient seismic activity in the crust and the depth of frictional melting is thought to correspond to the seismic regime. The recognition that some pseudotachylytes are overprinted by ductile fabrics, together with the discovery of ultra-deep pseudotachylytes, suggests that frictional melting is not confined solely to the brittle upper crust. Information on the depth distribution of frictional melting places important constraints on the rheological behavior of the crust and its potential to behave seismically. Frictional melting during faulting can be regarded as an adiabatic heat pump in which the fault does work at the ambient country rock temperature. Some of this work is converted to heat producing a melt at a higher temperature. The efficiency of the conversion process depends solely on temperature difference between the heat reservoirs. If an estimate of efficiency can be made and the temperature of one of the heat reservoirs is assumed, the temperature of the other reservoir can be calculated. It is shown here that the ratio of frictional melt volume to mechanical wear volume in natural pseudotachylytes is a proxy for the ratio of thermal to mechanical energy during faulting, and that this ratio is independent of fault area, displacement, stress and mineralogy. Thermodynamic arguments indicate it depends solely on temperature. Preliminary data from four different pseudotachylyte localities, which are not overprinted by ductile fabrics, yield reasonable ambient temperature estimates of 132-484oC, corresponding to the upper and middle crust. The geothermometer yields a country rock temperature of 627- 827oC for eclogite-facies pseudotachylytes from western Norway, consistent with an independent estimate of 670oC. The geothermometer appears to be applicable throughout the entire crust doc1240 none Miller Characterizing North American continental dynamics critically depends on constraining Pacific Northwest tectonics. The Pacific Northwest provides key constraints that differentiate dynamic models of active deformation in western North America at a plate boundary scale. The San Andreas system, entrainment of the Sierra Nevada block, and the role of modern Basin and Range extension in plate interaction and within-plate tectonics, cannot be accurately understood in ignorance of this region. Moreover, Cascadia is a global class natural laboratory for testing and comparing subduction zone interseismic strain accumulation models, models that are widely applied to other subduction zones where such testing is precluded by natural complexity. Unique paleoseismic constraints on a single, large-magnitude and relatively simple, margin-wide rupture of the A.D. subduction zone event make Cascadia an excellent case study of viscoelastic vs. elastic deformation models 300 years into the interseismic cycle. Rarely is such a simple system, of such vintage, so well known. The proposed continuation of geodetic and geophysical modeling studies will place first order constraints on crustal deformation in the Pacific Northwest, where they have direct implications for subduction zone mechanics and for continental dynamics, as well as for plate driving forces. These studies also directly support seismic risk evaluation in the urban corridor from Puget Sound to Portland, Oregon. The investigators will undertake completion of the PANGA velocity field and completion of dislocation modeling, as well as continued operation of the continuous PANGA GPS network. Meeting these goals requires ongoing observations by the PANGA array, setting these results results in the context of other western U.S. deformation arrays, continuing the regional kinematic and dynamic modeling studies, and refining recent models for subduction zone dynamics. This approach will resolve the superimposed interseismic (elastic and viscoelastic) subduction strain field from the regional secular stain field well enough to address the kinematic and dynamic models doc1241 none This award supports the investigation of the dishcarge variability of Ross Ice Streams over the last millenium, using a combination of numerical simulation and satellite remote sensing of flow features on the Ross Ice Shelf. The proposed collaborative research will use the Ross Ice Shelf record of flow variability to deduce variations in ice stream discharge over the last years. Changes in ice stream discharge disrupt flow of the ice shelf, in both profound and subtle ways, distorting flow features and changing creavasse patterns. The result is an integrated record of many changes over the lifetime of the ice within the shelf. Interpretations of flow-trace and crevasse geometry already made by Fahnestock and others will be used as a template for the design of numerical modeling experiments. The primary objectives are to verify the imagery-derived history and to quantify the volume flux implied by that history. The proposed research will improve existing concepts of ice stream discharge variability and will produce new data sets, both of which will be of use to the Antarctic glaciology community. Landsat-7 imagery will be used to measure velocity in areas of particular interest where existing data are inadequate. MODIS data, which has better radiometric and spatial resolution will be used to improve feature mapping on the ice shelf in sensitive areas doc1242 none The importance of semiconductors in the contemporary industrial society is strikingly evident. Their pivotal role in defense applications is equally manifest. With its beginnings in the Second World War, the rapid post war developments in the science and technology of semiconductors show how basic science leads to revolutionary applications with profound impact on all aspects of life. The symposium proposed will feature internationally known experts in the physics of semiconductors and related materials. Their talks will focus on an exciting range of contemporary issues in the field and how they are being addressed with powerful experimental techniques and theoretical approaches. While underscoring Purdue s role in the history of one of the major industrial revolutions of the 20th Century, it will serve to instruct and inspire the current generation of young and aspiring scientists by exposing them to a broad spectrum of current activities in semiconductors. The symposium is to be held at Purdue University on October 21-22, doc1243 none Karlstrom Connelly Williams Siddoway Proterozoic rocks in central Colorado preserve a transition, from semi-brittle upper crust to pervasively ductile middle crust, that was frozen in at about 1.4 Ga. This rheologic transition is expressed as a regionally significant change in the style of ca. 1.4 Ga intracratonic tectonism. Field observations suggest that a subhorizontal boundary separates a domain in northern and central Colorado (exemplified by the Colorado Mineral Belt), where 1.4 Ga deformation is characterized by discrete mylonite zones, from a domain in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico dominated by penetrative ductile deformation. Geodynamic models developed for intracontinental orogens such as Tibet, Altiplano-Puna, and the Sevier-Laramdie indicate that such mechanical decoupling may be a critical factor in controlling the tectonic evolution of intracontinental deformation. Like some of its younger analogs, the structural transition of central Colorado apparently corresponds with a magma- and fluid-rich, high-strain layer. These deeply exhumed rocks present intriguing opportunities to directly investigate deep-crustal processes that are inaccessible in younger orogens. Issues of general impact include characterization of: (1) the controls on the depth and thickness of the brittle ductile transition (e.g. temperature, lithology, fluids), (2) the kinematics and dynamics of deformation near the rheological transition, (3) mechanisms of accommodating strain incompatibility between different deformation regimes, and (4) the role of granitoid melts and or a widespread melt-fluid layer, in localizing middle crustal flow and structural decoupling of upper and lower crust. In addition to exploiting the deep crustal exposures of central Colorado to study general processes of intracontinental deformation, this study is contributing to the understanding of the Proterozoic tectonic evolution of the southwestern United States. In particular, alternate models for anorogenic (extensional) versus orogenic (transpressional) tectonic settings for 1.4 Ga tectonism can perhaps be reconciled in an orogenic plateau model where regional horizontal contraction is balanced by more localized gravitational collapse. The study uses an integrated data set involving structural, petrologic, and U-Pb geochronologic data to evaluate the kinematics and evolution of this important structural transition. Focus is on a well exposed transect across the structural transition. Specifically, studies of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison and adjacent areas within the Colorado Mineral Belt are characterizing the style, extent, and P-T conditions of mylonite shear zones and emplacement of syn-kinematic 1.4 Ga plutons above the transition. Work in the Wet Mountains and Sangre de Cristo Range is characterizing pervasively ductile deformation and fabric reactivation within and below the transition. The geochronology is emphasizing both U Pb zircon dating of critical syn-kinematic plutons in central Colorado and microprobe monazite dating of high-grade metamorphism along the transect doc1244 none COSI Columbus will develop Speed, a traveling exhibition. Speed is a 6,000-square-foot, interactive traveling exhibition introducing visitors to the science of speed. Visitors experience extreme and slow speeds through a variety of interactives. The exhibition emphasizes the role of speed -- that is, the physical phenomenon of changing motion over time -- in governing biological, geological and electronic processes as well as the central role of mathematics as the language of physical science doc1245 none PI s: S. Gross, University of Colorado The goal of this research is to study the triggering of earthquakes, especially aftershocks. The clear association of aftershocks with their mainshocks suggests that mainshocks trigger their aftershocks, but the mechanisms of that triggering are still debated. Triggering studies have repeatedly shown that aftershocks occur preferentially in fault zones upon which stresses have been concentrated as a result of permanent fault offset. This is surprising because these stress changes can be very small, orders of magnitude smaller than the stress change on an earthquake source. Recent results reveal that the much larger transient stress changes, generated by passing seismic waves, are also a viable triggering model. In order to decide which models are best, I will apply similar statistical measures to each model and apply them to the same data to compare them as fairly as possible. With this aim, I will study both static and dynamic stress transferred in both the Landers and Hector Mine earthquake sequences. I will evaluate the correlation of stress changes with aftershock distributions, using a unified battery of statistical tests so that the most consistent models may be identified and the influence of model errors quantified. In addition to comparing static and dynamic triggering models, I will explore models that include stresses due to postseismic processes, and see if inversions for the background stress state are consistent between the two sequences doc1246 none Fried This one-year award supports the participation of U.S. graduate students in an international conference and workshop on measuring efficiency and productivity to be held at Union College, Schenectady, New York, June 15-21, . An important objective of the workshop is to encourage collaboration between scholars in the U.S. and Western Europe. Papers will be presented on techniques for measuring and explaining technical efficiency, allocative efficiency and productivity. Technical efficiency is the extent to which maximum output is obtained from a given bundle of inputs. Allocative efficiency is the extent to which inputs are combined to produce a bundle of outputs at minimum cost. Productivity is the expansion of production possibilities from given inputs over time as a result of technological advance. These issues underlie individual firm competitiveness and standard of living. The workshop provides an opportunity to discuss issues presented in the formal conference. Senior researchers and graduate students will present seminars on work in progress. Birds of a feather sessions will be organized to link scholars with common interests, especially graduate students from the U.S. and abroad. The conference and workshop is interdisciplinary and will bring together econometricians, statisticians, and representatives from industry, academia and government doc1247 none Zheng Recent studies at the Macrodispersion Experiment (MADE) site in Columbus, Mississippi have indicated that the preferential flow paths resulting from aquifer heterogeneities at decimeter (dm) and smaller scales appear to have a dominant effect on plume-scale solute transport. This collaborative research responds to the general lack of studies on the effect of dm-scale heterogeneities on plume-scale solute transport as observed at the MADE site. Our intent is to systematically study the characteristics of solute transport influenced by dm-scale preferential flow paths, and rigorously test the hypothesis that a dual-domain mass transfer approach can provide an effective representation of such characteristics. Four specific elements are integrated into the proposed research. (1) Generate 3-D geologically plausible networks of dm-scale fluvially deposited channels and simulate detailed transport in such systems. (2) Assess the ability of the dual-domain mass transfer model, and possibly other alternative models, to represent the key characteristics of solute transport. (3) Conduct a series of large-diameter column experiments to measure the mass transfer model parameter values under different heterogeneity configurations and flow rates. (4) Conduct tracer tests at the MADE site to obtain the mass transfer model parameter values, using dye-tracing, soil coring and image analysis aimed at providing direct field evidence of preferential flow paths. We will attempt to relate the lithologic characteristics to the mass transfer model parameters obtained from the tracer tests doc1248 none Zhao Two important problems obstruct understanding of the tectonics of central Asia. The first is the consistent pattern of disturbingly low paleolatitudes derived from a large number of high-quality paleomagnetic studies of Tertiary rocks from sites that reach all the way from eastern China to Kyrgyzstan, 3,000 km to the west. The difference between these paleolatitudes and those expected from paleomagnetic reference poles for Eurasia averages 18o in western China and Kyrgystan, implying northward displacements relative to Siberia in the Tertiary that are much larger than geological estimates of shortening across intervening mountain belts. Many researchers in Asian tectonics have recognized this problem. A significant clue to its solution may lie in the fact that none of the Eurasian reference poles for Tertiary time is from rocks anywhere near Siberia, suggesting that they may not be appropriate for calculating convergence with Siberia. This question must be answered before it will be possible to evaluate how much of the discrepancy is tectonic, geomagnetic, and rock magnetic. The second problem is the history of closure of the Mongol-Okhotsk Ocean. This large ocean used to separate the Mongolia-North China composite block from Siberia. The geologic evidence concerning this subject is interpreted in a wide variety of ways, resulting in controversy over the timing and geometry of closure and when and to which margin accretion of terranes occurred doc1249 none This proposal seeks funding for research into the fractionation of iron and molybdenum isotopes during one of the most fundamental biogeochemical processes: Mineral weathering. We intend to investigate the effects of organic ligands and bacterial on the isotopic composition of Fe and Mo leached from oxides and silicates in a series of controlled laboratory experiments that mimic weathering processes in nature. Recent analytical advances have revealed, for the first time, significant natural variations in the isotopic compositions of both these elements. In the case of Fe in particular, complementary laboratory studies have provided information on fractionation mechanisms, including fractionation during microbially-mediated reduction of FE (111). These studies suggest that the FE isotope system could provide a powerful tool for studying biological activity in ancient sediments, and or research into the Fe biogeochemical cycle. The Mo isotope system offers similar possibilities. Because of the unique biological importance of both these metals, and their extreme sensitivity to environmental conditions, the insights gained from Fe and Mo isotope studies are likely to be of broad utility in the geosciences. The fractionation of neither metal has been studied during weathering, despite the obvious importance of weathering in the environmental geochemistry of these metals. Preliminary data indicate that this could be a particularly important process for Fe isotope fractionation when biological mediation is involved. In addition, while some processes capable of fractionating metal isotopes have been identified, the chemical mechanisms of such fractionation remain poorly understood. This research will be conducted collaboratively between Susan Brantley s group at Pennsylvania State University, and Ariel Anbar s group at the University of Rochester. Brantley has a demonstrated track record studying the effects of organic ligands and bacteria on mineral weathering; Anbar has a demonstrated track record with high-precision isotopic measurements of the type required for this research doc1250 none Small The semiarid American Southwest experienced a dramatic vegetation change during the 20th century-perennial grasslands were invaded by shrubs. Similar transitions have occurred worldwide. As shrubs replace grasses, nutrients become increasingly concentrated in widely spaced islands of fertility around individual plants. In addition, the top layer of soil is eroded from between shrubs, reducing infiltration and enhancing runoff. Both processes may inhibit plant growth between shrubs, enhancing the initial vegetation change. Plant-water interactions may also play an important role in the shrub invasion process, so we will test the following hypothesis. The invasion of semiarid grasslands by shrubs enhances the convergence of overland flow and infiltration beneath plant canopies. The most dramatic effects exist during high-intensity rainfall events and on steep slopes. Compared to grasslands, infiltration is enhanced beneath shrub canopies because runon from upslope interspaces increases-interspaces are larger and the interspace infiltration capacity is reduced. The result is that soil moisture is elevated for longer periods of time beneath shrub canopies. Convergence of overland flow also yields net transport of soil from interspaces to beneath plant canopies. If this hypothesis is correct, then a positive feedback exists between shrub invasion and hydrologic changes. Other ecosystem links may be important. Enhanced convergence of surface water and soil beneath canopies will yield higher concentration of nitrogen and carbon. Deeper and longer-lived infiltration will enhance N mineralization. Both of these mechanisms will intensify the islands of fertility observed beneath shrub canopies. We will test this hypothesis via long-term monitoring and sprinkler experiments carried out in grass, shrub, and mixed environments on both gentle (2%) and steeper (7%) slopes (6 sites total). Runon and runoff from interspace and canopy areas will be collected. We will also measure surface flow convergence, infiltration, and soil moisture via a water balance approach. This requires observations of the effects of vegetation shading and interception. We will identify the causes of the observed changes in two ways: (1) mapping the interspace areas that contribute water to plant canopies, using tracers and photography; and (2) measuring variations in soil hydraulic properties in the field and in the lab. Transport of soil by surface water will be measured in the collected runon and runoff and grain size will be analyzed. We will use erosion bridges to further constrain source and sink areas for soil redistribution. The research proposed here will enhance our understanding of plant-water interactions in semiarid regions. Our results are important for quantifying historical changes in basin-scale water balance and recharge through desert vadose zones. Our data will be useful for ecologists and hydrologists working at the Sevilleta LTER and elsewhere, and therefore it will be distributed on the Sevilleta web site doc1251 none The Children s Museum of Houston, in cooperation with Scholastic Entertainment, the National Weather Service and the American Meteorological Society (AMS), will develop, produce and nationally circulate two (2) copies of a 2,500-sq.ft. interactive exhibit. Using the popular icon of the Magic School Bus, the exhibit will take young children on a journey of discovery to explore the science involved in the Earth s weather. The exhibit, The Magic School Bus Gets Weather Wise, and accompanying educational materials and programs will be bilingual in Spanish and English and will support national and Texas standards for science and mathematics learning for children aged 5-10. It is estimated that the exhibit and programs will serve 2,000,000 children and adults in 36 national venues over six (6) years. Weather Exploration Stations will precede the exhibit to encourage community engagement prior to the exhibit s arrival at the host venue. AMS scientists, local meteorologists and media weathercasters will assist visitor experiences and help museums with strategies for publicity campaigns and development of local programming. The visiting audiences of children and their families will learn meteorology is a study of weather, there are different types of weather, a variety of tools are used in predicting weather and the water cycle plays a role in weather events. Visitors will read data from maps, graphs, thermometers, anemometers, experiment with variables and model weather conditions using interactive exhibit components doc574 none In this research project we are interested in exploring the extent ex post inequalities between nations can arise when countries are ex ante identical. We study a model where imperfectly observable human capital investments are introduced in an otherwise standard neoclassical trade framework. Due to interaction between an informational externality and general equilibrium price effects, inequalities may arise in equilibrium when countries specialize in industries with different intensities in human capital. Citizens in the country specializing as a low human capital country are worse off than citizens in the country specializing as a high human capital country. Because incentives to invest are lower in the low human capital country the situation is self-enforcing. Incentives are bad in the poor country two reasons: 1) with few investors someone who looks good is more likely an individual with low human capital that got a lucky draw ; 2) the possibility to import goods intensive in human capital from the other country makes human capital less valuable compared to a situation where countries don t trade. In our research we will explore how these effects interact and the extent the model provides a rationale for specialization as well as provide a number of testable implications of the model doc1253 none The Developmental Studies Center (DSC) will implement Home, School and Community: AfterSchool Math for Grades 3-5, a program that targets at-risk and low income children in afterschool programs. AfterSchool Math trains youth workers to help students in grades 3-5 better understand measurement and geometry concepts, building on the success of the NSF-funded Home, School and Community mathematics program for grades K-2 (ESI #97- ). The project develops, field-tests and evaluates thirty math games and ten story guides, which support the social and mathematical development of children, while emphasizing cooperative learning. The content for all materials will be aligned with national standards in mathematics. A 12-hour professional development workshop for youth workers and an 18-hour workshop for facilitators or youth worker leaders are also planned. Two training videos and a facilitator manual will be produced to support this aspect of the project. Field testing will occur in Kansas, Louisiana and Missouri. This proposal has been augmented to include a special emphasis on rural communities which doubles the number of field test sites from 50 to 100. A Rural Outreach Specialist will conduct focus group meetings to determine needs unique to rural programs and lead the field testing in these communities. It is anticipated that over 3,200 youth workers will be trained and a national cadre of more than 300 youth worker leaders will be created doc1243 none Karlstrom Connelly Williams Siddoway Proterozoic rocks in central Colorado preserve a transition, from semi-brittle upper crust to pervasively ductile middle crust, that was frozen in at about 1.4 Ga. This rheologic transition is expressed as a regionally significant change in the style of ca. 1.4 Ga intracratonic tectonism. Field observations suggest that a subhorizontal boundary separates a domain in northern and central Colorado (exemplified by the Colorado Mineral Belt), where 1.4 Ga deformation is characterized by discrete mylonite zones, from a domain in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico dominated by penetrative ductile deformation. Geodynamic models developed for intracontinental orogens such as Tibet, Altiplano-Puna, and the Sevier-Laramdie indicate that such mechanical decoupling may be a critical factor in controlling the tectonic evolution of intracontinental deformation. Like some of its younger analogs, the structural transition of central Colorado apparently corresponds with a magma- and fluid-rich, high-strain layer. These deeply exhumed rocks present intriguing opportunities to directly investigate deep-crustal processes that are inaccessible in younger orogens. Issues of general impact include characterization of: (1) the controls on the depth and thickness of the brittle ductile transition (e.g. temperature, lithology, fluids), (2) the kinematics and dynamics of deformation near the rheological transition, (3) mechanisms of accommodating strain incompatibility between different deformation regimes, and (4) the role of granitoid melts and or a widespread melt-fluid layer, in localizing middle crustal flow and structural decoupling of upper and lower crust. In addition to exploiting the deep crustal exposures of central Colorado to study general processes of intracontinental deformation, this study is contributing to the understanding of the Proterozoic tectonic evolution of the southwestern United States. In particular, alternate models for anorogenic (extensional) versus orogenic (transpressional) tectonic settings for 1.4 Ga tectonism can perhaps be reconciled in an orogenic plateau model where regional horizontal contraction is balanced by more localized gravitational collapse. The study uses an integrated data set involving structural, petrologic, and U-Pb geochronologic data to evaluate the kinematics and evolution of this important structural transition. Focus is on a well exposed transect across the structural transition. Specifically, studies of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison and adjacent areas within the Colorado Mineral Belt are characterizing the style, extent, and P-T conditions of mylonite shear zones and emplacement of syn-kinematic 1.4 Ga plutons above the transition. Work in the Wet Mountains and Sangre de Cristo Range is characterizing pervasively ductile deformation and fabric reactivation within and below the transition. The geochronology is emphasizing both U Pb zircon dating of critical syn-kinematic plutons in central Colorado and microprobe monazite dating of high-grade metamorphism along the transect doc1255 none Olsen This grant provides 70% support of the costs of acquiring a modern software-based scanning electron microscope (SEM), energy-dispersive X-ray microanalyzer (EDX), and new sample preparation equipment for Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory to replace the aging analogue units jointly funded by NSF and ONR in - . The combined remaining 30% is contributed by Lamont, Columbia University, and the American Museum of Natural History. The eight Principal Investigators, led by P. Olsen of Lamont and including the Facility Manager (D. Breger), represent a range of multidisciplinary users from the three participating institutions. In addition to providing traditional high vacuum high voltage imaging and analysis of conductive dry samples, the new system will allow low vacuum and low voltage operation, imaging of hydrated and uncoated samples, and X-ray mapping. While primarily dedicated to the earth sciences, the reinvigorated Facility will follow the successful open approach of the current Facility, which is available to academic users from any discipline or institution. The new system will directly benefit numerous current and future research programs of a large number of scientists as well as the education and training of students in the earth sciences, materials sciences, engineering, and other fields. This variety of use will have far-ranging impact for advancing knowledge in a number of intended and unforeseen directions and promote interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaborations. Formal academic coursework utilizing this Facility will be developed, including online. Public outreach and K-12 school programs will continue to expand current activities. The new instrumentation and equipment will be housed in Lamont s existing Electron Optics Laboratory complex under continued management by Breger. This complex has been dedicated to electron microscopy since and is optimized for the purpose. Support for this grant is shared by the Earth Sciences Instrumentation and Facilities Program (EAR IF), the Division of Ocean Sciences Oceanographic Instrumentation and Technical Service Program (OCE ITS) and the Marine Geology and Geophysics Program (OCE MGG doc1256 none Chamberlain This project will use the eastern syntaxis of the Himalayan orogen to address key questions in the geodynamics of continental collisions: how do orogens and associated plateaus come to an end, how do tectonic and surficial processes interact to shape the crust during orogeny, and how is deformation partitioned at various scales? Specific hypotheses to be tested are: 1) rheology controls topography and lithospheric mechanics across plateau indentor margin; 2) erosion controls lithospheric dynamics to the same extent as crustal thickening and lateral accommodation; feedbacks between the two ultimately shape the evolution of the orogen; and 3) there is complete decoupling between upper crustal and lower lithospheric deformation within the syntaxial region. The approach to be used involves tracking the magnitude, rates, and type of mass fluxes through the central region of the eastern Himalayan syntaxis. To do this, the Principal Investigators will use geochronologic, geomorphic, GPS, petrologic, seismic, and structural techniques, fully integrated by three-dimensional modeling doc1257 none Brown Melting of rocks in Earth s crust is an important process during mountain building (orogeny). It can account for the large volume of granite in upper levels of mountain belts, such as are exposed in the geologically active Himalayan mountain belt and in the eroded Appalachian and Variscan orogenic belts, and it is responsible for the chemical differentiation of the continental crust. In addition, the presence of melt and melt movement, in particular the extraction of melt from deep crustal sources and emplacement of melt in shallower crust, influence the rheology of the crust and can greatly affect the style of deformation associated with mountain building. This project aims to constrain the nature of the movement of melt generated by the fusion of rocks in the continental crust. To do this, a number of techniques, some well established and some novel, will be used to constrain the geometry of melt distribution in rocks that once hosted melt. New techniques include quantitative image analysis of melt-related structures in rocks, high-resolution computed X-ray tomography, and scanning electron microscope cathodoluminescence. Constraints thus obtained on the spatial distribution of melt will allow an assessment of the possible melt flow and deformation mechanisms associated with melt movement. This, in turn, will serve to constrain the possible rates of melt accumulation in large volumes, and the rates of melt-attended deformation, providing insight into the physical and chemical evolution of active mountain belts doc1258 none Buseck The goal of this project is to examine chemical and structural deviations from ideality in geologically and environmentally significant minerals. Such deviations can hold important clues to geological processes and to the geological past. Electron diffraction, electron spectroscopy, high-resolution TEM imaging, computer simulation of images, and calculation of structure models will be combined to solve problems of micro- and nanocrystalline minerals. The serpentine minerals are important constituents of ultramafic rocks underlying the oceanic basins. They are likely significant carriers of water into the mantle during subduction; the release of that water promotes partial melting and magmatism in the overlying mantle wedge, leading to volcanism. Subducted serpentines also influence the development of earthquakes at depth. Given their tectonic importance, it is important to obtain as much fundamental knowledge as possible about them. The proposed research will resolve structural problems regarding antigorite and chrysotile serpentine, with potential geophysical implications. Garnets have nominally cubic symmetry, but many display non-cubic properties. Preliminary HRTEM and XRD measurements suggest cation ordering as the source of their lower than cubic symmetry. These data will be refined and, if confirmed, be used to produce a model of chemical ordering to explain their anomalous characteristics. Many minerals that are of great environmental importance form at or near Earth s surface. Knowledge of the structural states of poorly crystallized materials is important for understanding weathering, heavy-metal deposition, and soil formation. These low-temperature assemblages typically occur in intimate, heterogeneous mixtures of fine-grained minerals. Using electron nanodiffraction (END), it is possible to study volumes of a few nm3 - many orders of magnitude less than by any other diffraction method. END will be used to investigate the hydrous ferric oxide minerals that are collectively called ferrihydrite and their biological cousin ferritin and materials such as clays that suffer rapid radiation damage during electron microscopy doc1259 none Smithson The western U.S. is one of the best places in the world to study continental evolution because there is a preserved unique record of the growth, stabilization, maturation, rifting, and incipient dismemberment of a continent. In particular, we can see how older lithospheric structures (in this case Archean and Proterozoic) influenced younger tectonic events, including development of the huge, presently active, orogenic plateau that dominates the western U.S. and the progressive dismemberment and dispersal of continental fragments along its active western margin. Continents are the long-term record keepers of plate interactions before 200 Ma. However, accumulated modification often obscures the previous record. The western U.S. is unique in that this part of the continent was assembled in the Proterozoic around an Archean cratonic core , then was truncated in the Phanerozoic at a high angle so as to create a new continental margin oblique to the Precambrian structures. The result was the creation of a wide region - the western U.S. - where nature caught all stages of structural reactivation and continental modification. The main goal of the CD-ROM (Continental Dynamics of the Rocky Mountains) Project is to understand the processes of formation and modification of continental lithosphere. Phase 1 of the CD-ROM experiment was a three year project to improve our structural and petrologic knowledge of the lithosphere and to test the hypothesis that the lithospheric structure produced during assembly of southwestern North America has profoundly influenced physical and chemical modification of the continental lithosphere during all subsequent magmatic and tectonic events, including those related to the ongoing asthenospheric flow. The principal investigators studied two Proterozoic structures with a range of seismic and geologic methods: the Cheyenne Belt and the Jemez lineament. Reflection, refraction, and teleseismic investigations are providing crustal - and lithospheric - scale images of major structures. A more complete picture of the evolution of the lithosphere has been added by geologic studies of Precambrian shear zones and Phanerozoic structures, xenolith studies, and geomorphologic and exhumation studies of present landforms. Phase 1 brought together 18 investigators from 14 institutions, including collaboration with a German-funded refraction team. With these awards, one year of funding is provided to continue to process, interpret, and integrate the diverse data sets generated in Phase 1 and to begin developing geodynamic models. The Principal Investigators will also explore new methods of data integration towards the goal of developing a master model for lithospheric structure doc1260 none Heizler The western U.S. is one of the best places in the world to study continental evolution because there is a preserved unique record of the growth, stabilization, maturation, rifting, and incipient dismemberment of a continent. In particular, we can see how older lithospheric structures (in this case Archean and Proterozoic) influenced younger tectonic events, including development of the huge, presently active, orogenic plateau that dominates the western U.S. and the progressive dismemberment and dispersal of continental fragments along its active western margin. Continents are the long-term record keepers of plate interactions before 200 Ma. However, accumulated modification often obscures the previous record. The western U.S. is unique in that this part of the continent was assembled in the Proterozoic around an Archean cratonic core , then was truncated in the Phanerozoic at a high angle so as to create a new continental margin oblique to the Precambrian structures. The result was the creation of a wide region - the western U.S. - where nature caught all stages of structural reactivation and continental modification. The main goal of the CD-ROM (Continental Dynamics of the Rocky Mountains) Project is to understand the processes of formation and modification of continental lithosphere. Phase 1 of the CD-ROM experiment was a three year project to improve our structural and petrologic knowledge of the lithosphere and to test the hypothesis that the lithospheric structure produced during assembly of southwestern North America has profoundly influenced physical and chemical modification of the continental lithosphere during all subsequent magmatic and tectonic events, including those related to the ongoing asthenospheric flow. The principal investigators studied two Proterozoic structures with a range of seismic and geologic methods: the Cheyenne Belt and the Jemez lineament. Reflection, refraction, and teleseismic investigations are providing crustal - and lithospheric - scale images of major structures. A more complete picture of the evolution of the lithosphere has been added by geologic studies of Precambrian shear zones and Phanerozoic structures, xenolith studies, and geomorphologic and exhumation studies of present landforms. Phase 1 brought together 18 investigators from 14 institutions, including collaboration with a German-funded refraction team. With these awards, one year of funding is provided to continue to process, interpret, and integrate the diverse data sets generated in Phase 1 and to begin developing geodynamic models. The Principal Investigators will also explore new methods of data integration towards the goal of developing a master model for lithospheric structure doc1261 none Levander The western U.S. is one of the best places in the world to study continental evolution because there is a preserved unique record of the growth, stabilization, maturation, rifting, and incipient dismemberment of a continent. In particular, we can see how older lithospheric structures (in this case Archean and Proterozoic) influenced younger tectonic events, including development of the huge, presently active, orogenic plateau that dominates the western U.S. and the progressive dismemberment and dispersal of continental fragments along its active western margin. Continents are the long-term record keepers of plate interactions before 200 Ma. However, accumulated modification often obscures the previous record. The western U.S. is unique in that this part of the continent was assembled in the Proterozoic around an Archean cratonic core , then was truncated in the Phanerozoic at a high angle so as to create a new continental margin oblique to the Precambrian structures. The result was the creation of a wide region - the western U.S. - where nature caught all stages of structural reactivation and continental modification. The main goal of the CD-ROM (Continental Dynamics of the Rocky Mountains) Project is to understand the processes of formation and modification of continental lithosphere. Phase 1 of the CD-ROM experiment was a three year project to improve our structural and petrologic knowledge of the lithosphere and to test the hypothesis that the lithospheric structure produced during assembly of southwestern North America has profoundly influenced physical and chemical modification of the continental lithosphere during all subsequent magmatic and tectonic events, including those related to the ongoing asthenospheric flow. The principal investigators studied two Proterozoic structures with a range of seismic and geologic methods: the Cheyenne Belt and the Jemez lineament. Reflection, refraction, and teleseismic investigations are providing crustal - and lithospheric - scale images of major structures. A more complete picture of the evolution of the lithosphere has been added by geologic studies of Precambrian shear zones and Phanerozoic structures, xenolith studies, and geomorphologic and exhumation studies of present landforms. Phase 1 brought together 18 investigators from 14 institutions, including collaboration with a German-funded refraction team. With these awards, one year of funding is provided to continue to process, interpret, and integrate the diverse data sets generated in Phase 1 and to begin developing geodynamic models. The Principal Investigators will also explore new methods of data integration towards the goal of developing a master model for lithospheric structure doc1262 none Karlstrom The western U.S. is one of the best places in the world to study continental evolution because there is a preserved unique record of the growth, stabilization, maturation, rifting, and incipient dismemberment of a continent. In particular, we can see how older lithospheric structures (in this case Archean and Proterozoic) influenced younger tectonic events, including development of the huge, presently active, orogenic plateau that dominates the western U.S. and the progressive dismemberment and dispersal of continental fragments along its active western margin. Continents are the long-term record keepers of plate interactions before 200 Ma. However, accumulated modification often obscures the previous record. The western U.S. is unique in that this part of the continent was assembled in the Proterozoic around an Archean cratonic core , then was truncated in the Phanerozoic at a high angle so as to create a new continental margin oblique to the Precambrian structures. The result was the creation of a wide region - the western U.S. - where nature caught all stages of structural reactivation and continental modification. The main goal of the CD-ROM (Continental Dynamics of the Rocky Mountains) Project is to understand the processes of formation and modification of continental lithosphere. Phase 1 of the CD-ROM experiment was a three year project to improve our structural and petrologic knowledge of the lithosphere and to test the hypothesis that the lithospheric structure produced during assembly of southwestern North America has profoundly influenced physical and chemical modification of the continental lithosphere during all subsequent magmatic and tectonic events, including those related to the ongoing asthenospheric flow. The principal investigators studied two Proterozoic structures with a range of seismic and geologic methods: the Cheyenne Belt and the Jemez lineament. Reflection, refraction, and teleseismic investigations are providing crustal - and lithospheric - scale images of major structures. A more complete picture of the evolution of the lithosphere has been added by geologic studies of Precambrian shear zones and Phanerozoic structures, xenolith studies, and geomorphologic and exhumation studies of present landforms. Phase 1 brought together 18 investigators from 14 institutions, including collaboration with a German-funded refraction team. With these awards, one year of funding is provided to continue to process, interpret, and integrate the diverse data sets generated in Phase 1 and to begin developing geodynamic models. The Principal Investigators will also explore new methods of data integration towards the goal of developing a master model for lithospheric structure doc1263 none Amelung The Galapagos shield volcanoes on the islands of Fernandina and Isabela are among the most active volcanoes on Earth with an average of 2-3 eruptions every 10 years. The investigator s previous radar interferometric study demonstrated how actively the Galapagos volcanoes deform, and how well this can be measured with radar interferometry. All but one of the 7 volcanoes show evidence for magma intrusion resulting in uplift of the volcanic edifice at rates between a few mm yr to 0.9 m yr (Amelung et al., ). In this project the investigators will obtain a dense time series of interferograms to map, document and interpret the deformation of Galapagos volcanoes with high temporal resolution (~35-70 days). A dense time series of interferograms will address the following issues: Do subsurface magmatic intrusions occur in pulses or are they continuous in time? If in pulses, how long do they last? Does the intrusion rate increase prior to an eruption? Is the center of magmatic inflation stationary or does it migrate vertically or horizontally prior to an eruption? Do intrusions at different volcanoes occur simultaneously or are they separated in time? Are the volcanoes fed by a common or by different deep magma sources? These questions should be addressed by the dense spatial and time coverage the proposed InSAR observations doc1264 none Terry E. Tullis and David L. Goldsby The investigators propose a systematic study to understand the fundamental processes responsible for the various effects recognized in rock friction. They will conduct experiments aimed at understanding what processes are responsible for the time dependence of interaction between single frictional contacts, multiple contacts, and contacts in gouge, especially on slip surfaces within gouge. The purpose is to understand the frictional behavior observers might expect to find on faults during most parts of the earthquake cycle. The problem is that the well-known empirical rate and state friction description of friction, as determined in the laboratory, cannot presently be extended to faults in the Earth with any confidence, because we do not understand the fundamental processes underlying the behavior. To understand earthquake nucleation it is a fundamental requirement to understand the time dependence that allows faults to strengthen between dynamic events and causes them to weaken as slip accelerates. The investigators will conduct a series of microindentation and friction experiments designed to differentiate between the most likely classes of explanations by variation of fluid chemistry and temperature and through an intensive microstructural study doc1265 none Vernon This is a project to study the Caribbean-South American oblique arc-continent collision zone using various geologic (mapping, structure), geochemical (Ar-Ar and U-Pb Geochronology), and seismic (active MCS with onshore offshore recording using OBS instruments, passive array) techniques. There will also be a geodynamic modeling study that, very innovatively, includes the dynamics of crust-mantle interaction. The overall goal of the project is to understand further the geometry and chronology of a world class, arc-continent accretion event. Seosmic geological cross-sections are to be derived for several transects across the orogen at different ages of collision. The group of investigators include highly capable seismologists in both active and passive seismology, as well as geologists familiar with the orogenic developments on land. The cooperation with Venezuelan scientists and students is excellent doc1266 none DeMets GPS measurements in Jamaica, Honduras, and San Andres island in the western Caribbean will be undertaken, with two principal goals: (1) To improve the still-rudimentary models of present-day Caribbean plate motions to a level capable of testing for hypothesized deformation within the interior of this narrow plate, and (2) To continue a relatively new study of Jamaican neotectonics and seismic hazard in collaboration with Margaret Grandison, the director seismologist of the Jamaican Seismographic Network (JSN). Toward the first goal, recently-installed GPS monuments in southern Jamaica and Honduras will be reoccupied, as will a critical GPS benchmarks on San Andres Island. Improved GPS coverage of the Caribbean plate interior, which presently has only one active GPS benchmark in the western km of the plate interior, will significantly improve the accuracy of the weakly over-determined Caribbean plate angular velocity and will allow more rigorous tests for measurable deformation of the plate interior. Toward the second goal, GPS measurements within a recently installed 14-site Jamaican GPS network will be combined with seismic results from the JSN to model seismic hazard and neotectonics of this poor and densely-populated country, whose two largest cities Kingston and Montego Bay are built near faults that have had large historic earthquakes. Using seismically-constrained fault locations, fault dips, and earthquake slip directions, the investigators will use GPS velocities to solve for bounds on the location and magnitude of elastic strain accumulation on the island doc1267 none Bowring The western U.S. is one of the best places in the world to study continental evolution because there is a preserved unique record of the growth, stabilization, maturation, rifting, and incipient dismemberment of a continent. In particular, we can see how older lithospheric structures (in this case Archean and Proterozoic) influenced younger tectonic events, including development of the huge, presently active, orogenic plateau that dominates the western U.S. and the progressive dismemberment and dispersal of continental fragments along its active western margin. Continents are the long-term record keepers of plate interactions before 200 Ma. However, accumulated modification often obscures the previous record. The western U.S. is unique in that this part of the continent was assembled in the Proterozoic around an Archean cratonic core , then was truncated in the Phanerozoic at a high angle so as to create a new continental margin oblique to the Precambrian structures. The result was the creation of a wide region - the western U.S. - where nature caught all stages of structural reactivation and continental modification. The main goal of the CD-ROM (Continental Dynamics of the Rocky Mountains) Project is to understand the processes of formation and modification of continental lithosphere. Phase 1 of the CD-ROM experiment was a three year project to improve our structural and petrologic knowledge of the lithosphere and to test the hypothesis that the lithospheric structure produced during assembly of southwestern North America has profoundly influenced physical and chemical modification of the continental lithosphere during all subsequent magmatic and tectonic events, including those related to the ongoing asthenospheric flow. The principal investigators studied two Proterozoic structures with a range of seismic and geologic methods: the Cheyenne Belt and the Jemez lineament. Reflection, refraction, and teleseismic investigations are providing crustal - and lithospheric - scale images of major structures. A more complete picture of the evolution of the lithosphere has been added by geologic studies of Precambrian shear zones and Phanerozoic structures, xenolith studies, and geomorphologic and exhumation studies of present landforms. Phase 1 brought together 18 investigators from 14 institutions, including collaboration with a German-funded refraction team. With these awards, one year of funding is provided to continue to process, interpret, and integrate the diverse data sets generated in Phase 1 and to begin developing geodynamic models. The Principal Investigators will also explore new methods of data integration towards the goal of developing a master model for lithospheric structure doc1268 none Richards Geodynamicists have recently crossed a significant threshold by showing that plate tectonic styles of mantle convection arise self-consistently in numerical models that include simple rheological descriptions of lithospheric failure. The investigators propose to further develop 3-D spherical models of mantle convection and plate tectonics to include a more complete physical treatment of lithospheric failure, or plate boundary formation. They will use a tensor extension of scalar damage theory to account for enhanced weakening oriented according to maximum shear strain. A reasonable and significant hypothesis is that alternating ridge-transform geometries arise naturally in such models, and that the one-sidedness of subduction zones may also be related to oriented strain-rate weakening deep within fault zones. An anisotropic formulation of lithospheric failure rheology requires Lagrangian tracking, or advection, of tensor viscosity -- a non-trivial task facilitated by methods they have developed for tracking chemical species in mantle convection. The investigators also propose to continue their focussed investigation into the role of a pronounced sublithospheric low viscosity zone (LVZ) in promoting plate tectonics. Other related work supported by this grant will include ongoing studies of mantle mixing, thermal coupling of the core and mantle, the dynamics of diffuse plate boundaries, and interactions of thermo-chemical plumes with plate-scale flow doc1159 none Wiebe Hawkins The goal of this project is to investigate how the injection of mafic magma into a shallow silicic magma chamber affects the chemical and isotopic composition of rocks preserved in granite plutons. The Vinalhaven pluton is an ideal setting for this study because mafic input to a silicic magma chamber is well preserved in feeders and as layered deposits of mafic and hybrid intermediate to silicic rocks. These rocks provide a spatial and temporal framework that will permit us to evaluate the petrographic, geochemical, and isotopic signature of hybridization both proximal and distal to the point of entry of the individual mafic replenishments, as well as in the overlying homogeneous granite. Our work will focus on intragrain trace element and isotopic variations through microanalysis of selected minerals, using laser ablation ICPMS and ID-TIMS. We will also employ high-precision U-Pb geochronology to constrain the active lifetime of the Vinalhaven magma chamber and attempt to link the preserved magmatic record to the preserved eruptive record of genetically related volcanic rocks. In the first year, this project will incorporate a Keck Geology Consortium Project with nine undergraduates who will undertake 4 weeks of field work. This research bears directly on the origin and emplacement of granite. We believe that studies of mineral zoning are likely to show that adjacent crystals have very different histories of crystallization. This information, combined with the common isotopic variability of a granite and field evidence for multiple replenishments of diverse magmas, strongly suggests that the bulk chemical and isotopic compositions of granite are neither the records of a single magma source nor equivalent to volcanic liquids erupted from the chamber doc1270 none PI: Kenneth C. Creager, University of Washington We propose to apply well developed and new methods to global digital data to examine the anisotropic and isotropic structure of the inner core and lowermost mantle. We plan to analyze waveforms and differential travel times of five distinct compressional waves (PKPAB, PKPBC, PKPCD, PKPDF, and scattered phases) that propagate through the Earth s core to examine the large-scale variability of elastic anisotropy within the inner core and scattering at the base of the mantle. We will also investigate the boundary layers at the top of the inner core and the bottom of the outer core. In addition, we will apply a new, recently developed method to explore azimuthal anisotropy at the base of the mantle. Results to date suggest strong anisotropy beneath southeastern Australia, perhaps associated with the hotspot near Tasmania. Large-scale lateral variations in the inner core seem to be entirely associated with anisotropy, while the mantle exhibits a combination of isotropic and anisotropic variability. Because the viscosity of the inner is many orders of magnitude less than the mantle, it cannot support significant large-scale lateral variations in density. Because the mechanisms that change density (temperature and chemistry) are the same as those that change isotropic wave speeds, isotropic heterogeneity within the inner core should indeed be small. Two other new proposed projects explore the fine structure of the lowermost mantle using ScP and PKP precursors as probes doc1271 none Gurnis This collaborative study will document the evolution of a nascent subduction zone along the Fiordland margin of southwest New Zealand with the objective of constraining the dynamics of subduction initiation. Using the finite element method, the investigators will model the history of vertical motion and gravity in order to determine the classes of dynamic models most consistent with the uplift history and modern structure of the region. (U-Th) He dating by the investigators and exposure dating by New Zealand collaborators will place limits on erosional denudation associated with bedrock uplift. During year 1, the team will obtain helium ages for previously collected bedrock samples. During the Austral summer (year 2), they will collect new samples along the coast of the southernmost fiords with a chartered boat and at high elevations with a helicopter. Helium thermochronometric ages for these samples will be used to test the dynamic models. This is a collaborative project with NZ colleagues R. Sutherland (IGNS) and P. Kamp (Waikato University) who have complementary funding from the Royal Society of NZ doc1272 none Hallet This project will use the eastern syntaxis of the Himalayan orogen to address key questions in the geodynamics of continental collisions: how do orogens and associated plateaus come to an end, how do tectonic and surficial processes interact to shape the crust during orogeny, and how is deformation partitioned at various scales? Specific hypotheses to be tested are: 1) rheology controls topography and lithospheric mechanics across plateau indentor margin; 2) erosion controls lithospheric dynamics to the same extent as crustal thickening and lateral accommodation; feedbacks between the two ultimately shape the evolution of the orogen; and 3) there is complete decoupling between upper crustal and lower lithospheric deformation within the syntaxial region. The approach to be used involves tracking the magnitude, rates, and type of mass fluxes through the central region of the eastern Himalayan syntaxis. To do this, the Principal Investigators will use geochronologic, geomorphic, GPS, petrologic, seismic, and structural techniques, fully integrated by three-dimensional modeling doc1273 none The interaction of HOx radicals with tropospheric aerosol surfaces is believed to be significant, but there is little information regarding the mechanisms and rate of such processes. This project is a laboratory investigation of the interaction of OH and HO2 radicals with tropospheric aerosols. A low-pressure flow tube technique will be used, coupled with chemical ionization mass spectrometry for detection of reactants and products. Various organic and inorganic surfaces will be examined, to simulate reactions occurring on natural and anthropogenically influenced aerosols, including seasalt and sulfates. The influence of radical reactions on water uptake by these surfaces will also be examined using ellipsometry, a non-destructive optical technique doc1249 none This proposal seeks funding for research into the fractionation of iron and molybdenum isotopes during one of the most fundamental biogeochemical processes: Mineral weathering. We intend to investigate the effects of organic ligands and bacterial on the isotopic composition of Fe and Mo leached from oxides and silicates in a series of controlled laboratory experiments that mimic weathering processes in nature. Recent analytical advances have revealed, for the first time, significant natural variations in the isotopic compositions of both these elements. In the case of Fe in particular, complementary laboratory studies have provided information on fractionation mechanisms, including fractionation during microbially-mediated reduction of FE (111). These studies suggest that the FE isotope system could provide a powerful tool for studying biological activity in ancient sediments, and or research into the Fe biogeochemical cycle. The Mo isotope system offers similar possibilities. Because of the unique biological importance of both these metals, and their extreme sensitivity to environmental conditions, the insights gained from Fe and Mo isotope studies are likely to be of broad utility in the geosciences. The fractionation of neither metal has been studied during weathering, despite the obvious importance of weathering in the environmental geochemistry of these metals. Preliminary data indicate that this could be a particularly important process for Fe isotope fractionation when biological mediation is involved. In addition, while some processes capable of fractionating metal isotopes have been identified, the chemical mechanisms of such fractionation remain poorly understood. This research will be conducted collaboratively between Susan Brantley s group at Pennsylvania State University, and Ariel Anbar s group at the University of Rochester. Brantley has a demonstrated track record studying the effects of organic ligands and bacteria on mineral weathering; Anbar has a demonstrated track record with high-precision isotopic measurements of the type required for this research doc1275 none California Paleo-streamflow records from the Last Interglacial B. Lynn Ingram, University of California, Berkeley The goal of this research project is to assess annual average and seasonal salinity and river inflow to San Francisco Bay during the Last Interglacial (ca 130 to 115 ka). The Bay, located at the mouth of the San Joaquin-Sacramento river system, receives river discharge from a drainage basin that integrates precipitation and runoff over a watershed covering 40% of California. Previous work shows that the Last Interglacial was warmer, with a higher sea level, than the present interglacial. This study will examine how these previous changes have impacted a major, now highly urbanized, estuary. This will be accomplished by isotopic analyses of mollusk shells and foraminifers, as well as stratigraphic and paleontological analysis, of estuarine sediments cored in the northern reach of San Francisco Bay (near the delta). In this study we hope to provide data on the natural variability of average intra-annual inflow during the Last Interglacial. We also wish to assess the amplitude and seasonal distribution of inflow during this warmer period, in order to predict what affect future global warming may have on San Francisco Bay estuarine system doc1276 none Hacker This project is focused on the area around a 5 km drill hole the Chinese are going to drill in the Sulu ultrahigh-pressure (UHP) metamorphic terrane in east-central China. The goal of the project is to understand the formation and exhumation of UHP rocks through study of ultramafic (mantle) rocks from a forbidden zone of P-T conditions (i.e., very high P, very low T). Some specific questions to be addressed are: o What type of crust-mantle interaction occurs when continents are subducted? o How much of continental mass is recycled in this manner? o Can timing of fluid-rock interactions be constrained? o What do the UHP garnet peridotites tell us about petrotectonic processes? o How were UHP peridotites emplaced into the crust? How did they evolve during exhumation? What mechanisms and rates of ascent are necessary to preserve their high P, low T assemblages? o What roles do slab hydrous phases play in recycling of volatiles into the mantle? o Can we tell the difference between subduction collisional architecture of orogens from younger events using deep-seismic profiles? o In what tectonic settings does UHP metamorphism and subsequent exhumation occur? Is continent-continent collision required? The Principal Investigators will employ a variety of methods in their study: 1) mapping and structural analysis; 2) petrology 3) geochronology; 4) geophysics at the Donghai drill site; and 5) geodynamic modeling doc1243 none Karlstrom Connelly Williams Siddoway Proterozoic rocks in central Colorado preserve a transition, from semi-brittle upper crust to pervasively ductile middle crust, that was frozen in at about 1.4 Ga. This rheologic transition is expressed as a regionally significant change in the style of ca. 1.4 Ga intracratonic tectonism. Field observations suggest that a subhorizontal boundary separates a domain in northern and central Colorado (exemplified by the Colorado Mineral Belt), where 1.4 Ga deformation is characterized by discrete mylonite zones, from a domain in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico dominated by penetrative ductile deformation. Geodynamic models developed for intracontinental orogens such as Tibet, Altiplano-Puna, and the Sevier-Laramdie indicate that such mechanical decoupling may be a critical factor in controlling the tectonic evolution of intracontinental deformation. Like some of its younger analogs, the structural transition of central Colorado apparently corresponds with a magma- and fluid-rich, high-strain layer. These deeply exhumed rocks present intriguing opportunities to directly investigate deep-crustal processes that are inaccessible in younger orogens. Issues of general impact include characterization of: (1) the controls on the depth and thickness of the brittle ductile transition (e.g. temperature, lithology, fluids), (2) the kinematics and dynamics of deformation near the rheological transition, (3) mechanisms of accommodating strain incompatibility between different deformation regimes, and (4) the role of granitoid melts and or a widespread melt-fluid layer, in localizing middle crustal flow and structural decoupling of upper and lower crust. In addition to exploiting the deep crustal exposures of central Colorado to study general processes of intracontinental deformation, this study is contributing to the understanding of the Proterozoic tectonic evolution of the southwestern United States. In particular, alternate models for anorogenic (extensional) versus orogenic (transpressional) tectonic settings for 1.4 Ga tectonism can perhaps be reconciled in an orogenic plateau model where regional horizontal contraction is balanced by more localized gravitational collapse. The study uses an integrated data set involving structural, petrologic, and U-Pb geochronologic data to evaluate the kinematics and evolution of this important structural transition. Focus is on a well exposed transect across the structural transition. Specifically, studies of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison and adjacent areas within the Colorado Mineral Belt are characterizing the style, extent, and P-T conditions of mylonite shear zones and emplacement of syn-kinematic 1.4 Ga plutons above the transition. Work in the Wet Mountains and Sangre de Cristo Range is characterizing pervasively ductile deformation and fabric reactivation within and below the transition. The geochronology is emphasizing both U Pb zircon dating of critical syn-kinematic plutons in central Colorado and microprobe monazite dating of high-grade metamorphism along the transect doc1278 none Burchfiel This project is a continuation of the Principal Investigator s study of the growth and progression of a continent-scale, active compressional orogen, namely the Eastern Tibetan Plateau. The overarching goal of the research is to understand the kinematics and dynamics of plateau formation and continental deformation. Specifically, the research seeks to answer questions fundamental to crustal deformation in Eastern Tibet: the structure of the crust and upper mantle; the active strain field; the accomodation of strike-slip deformation; the relationship of deformation to India-Asia convergence; and the pattern and timing of plateau uplift. Research tasks include; geologic and geodetic field studies, passive source seismology, geomorphic studies, geochronologic studies, and theoretical and modeling studies of crust mantle deformation doc1279 none Levander This is a project to study the Caribbean-South American oblique arc-continent collision zone using various geologic (mapping, structure), geochemical (Ar-Ar and U-Pb Geochronology), and seismic (active MCS with onshore offshore recording using OBS instruments, passive array) techniques. There will also be a geodynamic modeling study that, very innovatively, includes the dynamics of crust-mantle interaction. The overall goal of the project is to understand further the geometry and chronology of a world class, arc-continent accretion event. Seosmic geological cross-sections are to be derived for several transects across the orogen at different ages of collision. The group of investigators include highly capable seismologists in both active and passive seismology, as well as geologists familiar with the orogenic developments on land. The cooperation with Venezuelan scientists and students is excellent doc1280 none This project is designed to understand the three-dimensional fabrics and strain associated with magmatic forceful expansion by comparing simple natural and experimental examples. The project involves data collection using: 1) anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility (AMS), 2) shape preferred orientations (SPO), 3) computed X-ray tomography (X-ray CT), 4) field measurements on the magmatic fabrics and strains associated with sills, laccoliths, and bysmaliths in the Henry Mountains, Utah, and 5) lab measurements on particles within artificial flows. The Henry Mountains intrusives are Oliogocene - Miocene age and intruded the upper crust of the Colorado Plateau, which is a late Paleozoic and Mesozoic section of flat-lying sandstones and shales. The goal is to relate magmatic fabrics to the displacement of the wallrocks caused by magmatic intrusion (inflation), and the intrusives in the Henry Mountains provide the best opportunity to understand this fundamental process. The floors, walls, interiors, and roofs of these intrusions are all very well exposed in the desert plateau of southern Utah. These plutons have raised the overburden by either bending the overburden or faulting the overburden immediately above the intrusion. The shapes of the intrusions represent a complete gradation between sills and laccoliths. By documenting the magmatic fabric in these bodies, the temporal fabric development of the intrusions is being interpreted and related to steps in the evolution of flow in the physical models. The boundary conditions of intrusion are well understood: laccoliths, bysmaliths, and sills intruded into the undeformed, horizontal strata of the Colorado Plateau. The strata act as markers to record the translation, rotation, and internal strain caused by magma intrusion. Moreover, the plutons intruded into a part of the Colorado plateau that has not experienced regional deformation. This setting precludes tectonic forces being involved with emplacement and allows an interpretation that unambiguously describes fabrics in terms of magmatic processes. The project involves a detailed field study to document the foliation and lineation within these intrusions. In addition, the three-dimensional SPO of the phenocrysts is being recorded and the intrusions are being sampled for AMS. The AMS technique will be corroborated by X-ray CT techniques, which will allow the documentation of the orientation and spatial distribution of magnetite on the same samples. The field studies are being conducted in tandem with physical experiments of non-uniform flows. These intrusives are the perfect examples to be modeled since their shapes are simple and known, and the low crystal content of the magmas is well constrained. The flows that are being modeled include decelerating flow and cylindrical flow, which provide a first-order approximation of magma intruding a laccolith and a bysmalith, respectively. Passive, neutrally-buoyant markers are being placed in these experiments in order to obtain quantitative strain associated with various amounts of fluid flow into a chamber. The results are being compared with the fabrics from the Henry Mountains intrusives, which were emplaced with varying amounts of magma. Using this variety of techniques, and the ideal setting provided by the Henry Mountains, the three-dimensional fabric associated with forceful emplacement of magmatic intrusions will be understood doc1281 none Johnson The western U.S. is one of the best places in the world to study continental evolution because there is a preserved unique record of the growth, stabilization, maturation, rifting, and incipient dismemberment of a continent. In particular, we can see how older lithospheric structures (in this case Archean and Proterozoic) influenced younger tectonic events, including development of the huge, presently active, orogenic plateau that dominates the western U.S. and the progressive dismemberment and dispersal of continental fragments along its active western margin. Continents are the long-term record keepers of plate interactions before 200 Ma. However, accumulated modification often obscures the previous record. The western U.S. is unique in that this part of the continent was assembled in the Proterozoic around an Archean cratonic core , then was truncated in the Phanerozoic at a high angle so as to create a new continental margin oblique to the Precambrian structures. The result was the creation of a wide region - the western U.S. - where nature caught all stages of structural reactivation and continental modification. The main goal of the CD-ROM (Continental Dynamics of the Rocky Mountains) Project is to understand the processes of formation and modification of continental lithosphere. Phase 1 of the CD-ROM experiment was a three year project to improve our structural and petrologic knowledge of the lithosphere and to test the hypothesis that the lithospheric structure produced during assembly of southwestern North America has profoundly influenced physical and chemical modification of the continental lithosphere during all subsequent magmatic and tectonic events, including those related to the ongoing asthenospheric flow. The principal investigators studied two Proterozoic structures with a range of seismic and geologic methods: the Cheyenne Belt and the Jemez lineament. Reflection, refraction, and teleseismic investigations are providing crustal - and lithospheric - scale images of major structures. A more complete picture of the evolution of the lithosphere has been added by geologic studies of Precambrian shear zones and Phanerozoic structures, xenolith studies, and geomorphologic and exhumation studies of present landforms. Phase 1 brought together 18 investigators from 14 institutions, including collaboration with a German-funded refraction team. With these awards, one year of funding is provided to continue to process, interpret, and integrate the diverse data sets generated in Phase 1 and to begin developing geodynamic models. The Principal Investigators will also explore new methods of data integration towards the goal of developing a master model for lithospheric structure doc1282 none Keller The western U.S. is one of the best places in the world to study continental evolution because there is a preserved unique record of the growth, stabilization, maturation, rifting, and incipient dismemberment of a continent. In particular, we can see how older lithospheric structures (in this case Archean and Proterozoic) influenced younger tectonic events, including development of the huge, presently active, orogenic plateau that dominates the western U.S. and the progressive dismemberment and dispersal of continental fragments along its active western margin. Continents are the long-term record keepers of plate interactions before 200 Ma. However, accumulated modification often obscures the previous record. The western U.S. is unique in that this part of the continent was assembled in the Proterozoic around an Archean cratonic core , then was truncated in the Phanerozoic at a high angle so as to create a new continental margin oblique to the Precambrian structures. The result was the creation of a wide region - the western U.S. - where nature caught all stages of structural reactivation and continental modification. The main goal of the CD-ROM (Continental Dynamics of the Rocky Mountains) Project is to understand the processes of formation and modification of continental lithosphere. Phase 1 of the CD-ROM experiment was a three year project to improve our structural and petrologic knowledge of the lithosphere and to test the hypothesis that the lithospheric structure produced during assembly of southwestern North America has profoundly influenced physical and chemical modification of the continental lithosphere during all subsequent magmatic and tectonic events, including those related to the ongoing asthenospheric flow. The principal investigators studied two Proterozoic structures with a range of seismic and geologic methods: the Cheyenne Belt and the Jemez lineament. Reflection, refraction, and teleseismic investigations are providing crustal - and lithospheric - scale images of major structures. A more complete picture of the evolution of the lithosphere has been added by geologic studies of Precambrian shear zones and Phanerozoic structures, xenolith studies, and geomorphologic and exhumation studies of present landforms. Phase 1 brought together 18 investigators from 14 institutions, including collaboration with a German-funded refraction team. With these awards, one year of funding is provided to continue to process, interpret, and integrate the diverse data sets generated in Phase 1 and to begin developing geodynamic models. The Principal Investigators will also explore new methods of data integration towards the goal of developing a master model for lithospheric structure doc1283 none Humphreys The western U.S. is one of the best places in the world to study continental evolution because there is a preserved unique record of the growth, stabilization, maturation, rifting, and incipient dismemberment of a continent. In particular, we can see how older lithospheric structures (in this case Archean and Proterozoic) influenced younger tectonic events, including development of the huge, presently active, orogenic plateau that dominates the western U.S. and the progressive dismemberment and dispersal of continental fragments along its active western margin. Continents are the long-term record keepers of plate interactions before 200 Ma. However, accumulated modification often obscures the previous record. The western U.S. is unique in that this part of the continent was assembled in the Proterozoic around an Archean cratonic core , then was truncated in the Phanerozoic at a high angle so as to create a new continental margin oblique to the Precambrian structures. The result was the creation of a wide region - the western U.S. - where nature caught all stages of structural reactivation and continental modification. The main goal of the CD-ROM (Continental Dynamics of the Rocky Mountains) Project is to understand the processes of formation and modification of continental lithosphere. Phase 1 of the CD-ROM experiment was a three year project to improve our structural and petrologic knowledge of the lithosphere and to test the hypothesis that the lithospheric structure produced during assembly of southwestern North America has profoundly influenced physical and chemical modification of the continental lithosphere during all subsequent magmatic and tectonic events, including those related to the ongoing asthenospheric flow. The principal investigators studied two Proterozoic structures with a range of seismic and geologic methods: the Cheyenne Belt and the Jemez lineament. Reflection, refraction, and teleseismic investigations are providing crustal - and lithospheric - scale images of major structures. A more complete picture of the evolution of the lithosphere has been added by geologic studies of Precambrian shear zones and Phanerozoic structures, xenolith studies, and geomorphologic and exhumation studies of present landforms. Phase 1 brought together 18 investigators from 14 institutions, including collaboration with a German-funded refraction team. With these awards, one year of funding is provided to continue to process, interpret, and integrate the diverse data sets generated in Phase 1 and to begin developing geodynamic models. The Principal Investigators will also explore new methods of data integration towards the goal of developing a master model for lithospheric structure doc1284 none Christensen The western U.S. is one of the best places in the world to study continental evolution because there is a preserved unique record of the growth, stabilization, maturation, rifting, and incipient dismemberment of a continent. In particular, we can see how older lithospheric structures (in this case Archean and Proterozoic) influenced younger tectonic events, including development of the huge, presently active, orogenic plateau that dominates the western U.S. and the progressive dismemberment and dispersal of continental fragments along its active western margin. Continents are the long-term record keepers of plate interactions before 200 Ma. However, accumulated modification often obscures the previous record. The western U.S. is unique in that this part of the continent was assembled in the Proterozoic around an Archean cratonic core , then was truncated in the Phanerozoic at a high angle so as to create a new continental margin oblique to the Precambrian structures. The result was the creation of a wide region - the western U.S. - where nature caught all stages of structural reactivation and continental modification. The main goal of the CD-ROM (Continental Dynamics of the Rocky Mountains) Project is to understand the processes of formation and modification of continental lithosphere. Phase 1 of the CD-ROM experiment was a three year project to improve our structural and petrologic knowledge of the lithosphere and to test the hypothesis that the lithospheric structure produced during assembly of southwestern North America has profoundly influenced physical and chemical modification of the continental lithosphere during all subsequent magmatic and tectonic events, including those related to the ongoing asthenospheric flow. The principal investigators studied two Proterozoic structures with a range of seismic and geologic methods: the Cheyenne Belt and the Jemez lineament. Reflection, refraction, and teleseismic investigations are providing crustal - and lithospheric - scale images of major structures. A more complete picture of the evolution of the lithosphere has been added by geologic studies of Precambrian shear zones and Phanerozoic structures, xenolith studies, and geomorphologic and exhumation studies of present landforms. Phase 1 brought together 18 investigators from 14 institutions, including collaboration with a German-funded refraction team. With these awards, one year of funding is provided to continue to process, interpret, and integrate the diverse data sets generated in Phase 1 and to begin developing geodynamic models. The Principal Investigators will also explore new methods of data integration towards the goal of developing a master model for lithospheric structure doc1285 none Erslev The western U.S. is one of the best places in the world to study continental evolution because there is a preserved unique record of the growth, stabilization, maturation, rifting, and incipient dismemberment of a continent. In particular, we can see how older lithospheric structures (in this case Archean and Proterozoic) influenced younger tectonic events, including development of the huge, presently active, orogenic plateau that dominates the western U.S. and the progressive dismemberment and dispersal of continental fragments along its active western margin. Continents are the long-term record keepers of plate interactions before 200 Ma. However, accumulated modification often obscures the previous record. The western U.S. is unique in that this part of the continent was assembled in the Proterozoic around an Archean cratonic core , then was truncated in the Phanerozoic at a high angle so as to create a new continental margin oblique to the Precambrian structures. The result was the creation of a wide region - the western U.S. - where nature caught all stages of structural reactivation and continental modification. The main goal of the CD-ROM (Continental Dynamics of the Rocky Mountains) Project is to understand the processes of formation and modification of continental lithosphere. Phase 1 of the CD-ROM experiment was a three year project to improve our structural and petrologic knowledge of the lithosphere and to test the hypothesis that the lithospheric structure produced during assembly of southwestern North America has profoundly influenced physical and chemical modification of the continental lithosphere during all subsequent magmatic and tectonic events, including those related to the ongoing asthenospheric flow. The principal investigators studied two Proterozoic structures with a range of seismic and geologic methods: the Cheyenne Belt and the Jemez lineament. Reflection, refraction, and teleseismic investigations are providing crustal - and lithospheric - scale images of major structures. A more complete picture of the evolution of the lithosphere has been added by geologic studies of Precambrian shear zones and Phanerozoic structures, xenolith studies, and geomorphologic and exhumation studies of present landforms. Phase 1 brought together 18 investigators from 14 institutions, including collaboration with a German-funded refraction team. With these awards, one year of funding is provided to continue to process, interpret, and integrate the diverse data sets generated in Phase 1 and to begin developing geodynamic models. The Principal Investigators will also explore new methods of data integration towards the goal of developing a master model for lithospheric structure doc1286 none Pecher This is a project to study the Caribbean-South American oblique arc-continent collision zone using various geologic (mapping, structure), geochemical (Ar-Ar and U-Pb Geochronology), and seismic (active MCS with onshore offshore recording using OBS instruments, passive array) techniques. There will also be a geodynamic modeling study that, very innovatively, includes the dynamics of crust-mantle interaction. The overall goal of the project is to understand further the geometry and chronology of a world class, arc-continent accretion event. Seosmic geological cross-sections are to be derived for several transects across the orogen at different ages of collision. The group of investigators include highly capable seismologists in both active and passive seismology, as well as geologists familiar with the orogenic developments on land. The cooperation with Venezuelan scientists and students is excellent doc1287 none Recent developments provide an opportunity to couple for the first time two methods for estimating Paleozoic continental ice volume: oxygen isotope (18O 16O) paleothermometry and ice sheet-climate models (ISCMs). This proposal requests funds to use oxygen isotopic data for marine fossils and ISCMs to estimate temperature variations, ice volumes, and CO2 levels during a key interval in Earth s past. The study will span late Devonian to mid-Permian time, Earth s last greenhouse-icehouse-greenhouse cycle. As a first step, the model will be tested on more recent end-member climates, those of the late Pleistocene (fully glaciated) and the Early Eocene or Mid-Cretaceous (ice free). This will examine the model s ability to reproduce temperature distributions and permit comparison to existing isotopic data. The model will then be applied to the Paleozoic in two modes. First, CO2 levels will be inputted from the geochemical model of Berner ( , Science 76:544-546), permitting estimates of global temperature variation and ice volume. Using modeled temperatures and oxygen isotopic (d18O) data from brachiopod shells, seawater d18O can be calculated and ice volume redetermined. Different CO2 levels will be entered iteratively in an effort to converge on a solution in which the temperature distribution, CO2 level, and ice volume are mutually consistent with the isotopic data. Much of the data necessary for the study are available from previous studies, especially from those of the first PI and his coworkers. Additional data will be collected for select intervals (e.g., Lower Carboniferous and Early Permian) using samples in hand, provided by Russian and Australian collaborators, and collected in Russia. This will permit development of a reliable d18O record for the Late Paleozoic. This study is the first exploratory step in the development of a new methodology for determining ice volume and CO2 levels, in which the physical dynamics of ice sheets and climate are combined with the precise data available through oxygen isotope analysis. The ultimate goal is to estimate atmospheric CO2 levels for Earth s last 540 million years. This premiere study will be performed using a computer-efficient ISCM, as the areas of parameter space to be examined prohibit the use of more expensive models. Subsequent studies will employ more sophisticated and expensive models to focus on key problems and areas of model data disagreement doc1288 none Licht This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports a collaborative research project to study glacio-marine sediments from the Ross Sea toward an understanding of the history of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). Reliable predictions of the future response of the WAIS to changing climate and rising sea level depend, to a large extent, on improving our knowledge and understanding of its ice dynamics during the last glacial maximum (~18,000 yrs ago). Sediments from the Ross Sea, Antarctica, contain a detailed physical record that can be used to reconstruct past glacier flow patterns. Although significant progress has been made in constraining the extent of ice and the timing of its maximum extent, reconstructions of ice flow paths vary substantially. Studies have predicted that ice streams (regions of fast flowing ice) derived primarily from West Antarctica were dominant features of the Ross Ice Sheet, whereas an ice sheet modeling reconstruction showed roughly equal input from East and West Antarctic ice. Fundamental differences in rock types and ages beneath these source areas should allow the provenance of tills across the Ross Sea to be determined, facilitating the reconstruction of past ice flow paths. Thus the Ross Embayment provides an exciting opportunity to relate modern ice flow dynamics to past ice sheet dynamics and deposits. A detailed provenance study of sediment collected in cores taken from across the Ross Sea floor will be carried out by linking the mineralogical, geochemical, and isotopic characteristics of the sediments from these cores to reference sediments collected from the probable source areas. From these data, the patterns of ice flow across the shelf can be constrained for the last glacial maximum. For this study, existing samples collected from the Ross Sea, and the source areas of East and West Antarctica will be utilized. Composition of the till deposited during the last ice advance will be characterized by examining the sand and pebble size fraction of the sediment, the clay mineralogy, elemental abundance and samarium-neodymium (Sm-Nd) isotopic composition of the silt and clay size fraction. The source of silt and clay fraction may be problematic because of possible mixing of continental and marine sources. This problem will be addressed by determining the composition of modern marine samples which can then be subtracted from the till composition. Samples from the source areas will be analyzed first to determine the compositional fingerprint of each area. Ice flow paths will be determined based on the correspondence between the source areas and the measured values across the Ross Sea. The goal of this project is to characterize both lateral and vertical variations in diagnostic aspects of till mineralogy and isotopic composition in order to make a significant contribution to the understanding of changes in ice sheet dynamics on time scale of the past 30,000 years. Results of this study will allow assessment of the hypothesis that ice streams played a significant role in the most recent disintegration of the WAIS by testing the validity of various ice sheet reconstructions. Additionally, better characterization of the configuration of the Ross Ice Sheet during the last glacial maximum will improve the quality and reliability of models of the past and future characteristics of Antarctic ice sheet behavior doc1289 none Reid We will utilize the unique chronological framework provided by the crystallization history of zircon and allanite to investigate the relative magnitudes of thermal and mass fluxes through evolving rhyolite systems. Four major centers of silicic volcanism will be studied: 1) the Bishop Tuff and Glass Mountain rhyolites of Long Valley, California; 2) the Youngest Toba Tuff of Sumatra, Indonesia; 3) the Central Plateau Member rhyolites of the Yellowstone caldera complex, Wyoming; and 4) Coso volcanic field, California. Ages of individual crystal domains will be obtained by in situ ion microprobe 238U-206Pb and 238U-230Th dating. Guided by the age distributions, the ion microprobe will be used to determine the trace element zoning profiles of the crystals and of the compositions of their melt inclusions. Complementary isotopic analyses will be performed by microdrilling of well-characterized grains. Our goals are: 1) to determine the timing of differentiation and the differentiation memory of crystals in caldera-forming systems (Long Valley, Toba, and Yellowstone calderas); and 2) to investigate the chemical dynamics of evolving rhyolite systems which are relatively phenocryst-rich and poor (Toba and Coso volcanic fields). Collectively, these studies will provide a deeper understanding of the dynamic interplay between secular cooling, magmatic recharge, and crustal assimilation in rhyolite evolution doc1290 none A Geomorphic Framework for Interpreting Continental Interior Mountain Belt Exhumation: The Laramide Example Robert Anderson and Elizabeth Safran Between about 80 and 50 Myr ago, the Laramide orogeny uplifted a series of high, thrust fault-bounded mountain ranges that form some of the most dramatic mountain landscapes of the continental interior. These ranges and the intervening sedimentary basins stretch across much of Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, Utah, and South Dakota. Interpretations of the tectonic and climatic history of the entire western U. S. hinge on assumptions about Laramide landscape evolution, and yet this evolution remains ill-understood. The debate centers on the significance, timing, and cause of two geomorphic episodes, evidence for which is recorded in a suite of distinctive Laramide landforms. Widespread, high-elevation surfaces of low local relief capped by narrow bedrock spines record a period of declining local relief in most of the Laramide ranges. A subsequent period of regional erosion produced canyons in the ranges and broad, deep depressions in the basin fills, punctuated by numerous river terraces. Previous researchers have tried to correlate the development of these landforms with regional episodes of tectonic or climatic forcing. However, the Laramide landforms apparently do not reflect external forcing in a simple way, because limited dating suggests that they vary in age. This finding has hindered the construction of a regionally coherent geologic history, and to date no process-based model has been put forth to explain it. This study will address geomorphic mechanisms by which erosional activity might have been triggered at different times throughout this interior mountain landscape. PIs hypothesize that even a simple forcing event would produce complex erosional patterns, given a set of interlocking ranges and basins linked by an integrated drainage network. They will quantitatively address this hypothesis, focusing on the exhumational episode that shaped the Laramide landscape during the late Cenozoic. Their approach will involve: 1) improving constraints on the timing of Laramide basin exhumation by using cosmogenic radionuclides to date landforms and deposits of fluvial origin within the basins; 2) improving constraints on pre-exhumation range morphology by characterizing the geomorphology of the Granite Mountains, which they view as a modern analogue to the ancient condition of other Laramide ranges; and 3) developing numerical models of both regional and mountain range-scale landscape evolution to provide a mechanistic framework for data interpretation doc1291 none Powell This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for a geophysical site survey of the MacKay Sea Valley that is needed to evaluate the potential of this area to yield important sedimentary records of paleoenvironmental records of ice sheet fluctuations during Quaternary time (approximately the last 1.6 million years of Earth s history). Quaternary geological successions have been a recent focus for providing high-resolution records of past environmental changes on which to base future predictions, and to assist in deciphering natural variability from human-induced changes. This study is aimed at extending the data base of high-resolution marine geological records of environmental change that have been established recently in Antarctica, and to address Quaternary and perhaps older environmental changes. The current phase of the work, to achieve the goals outlined above, is specifically aimed at collecting information in a detailed site survey to be used for precisely locating the best drill sites, and also to provide data to use in an engineering evaluation of drilling and coring systems to meet sampling requirements. The location proposed for this study is Mackay Sea Valley (MSV), which is believed to have been formed by erosion associated with early Cenozoic expansion of Mackay Glacier, a major outlet glacier of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. MSV extends through Granite Harbor and out to the western Ross Sea. Since being eroded, the valley has experienced sediment accumulation, at least in the Quaternary and possibly through earlier times during late Cenozoic. Coring sites in the MSV are excellent targets because: (1) their great water depth and near shore location, as well as the polar climate, appears to have led to the trough being a site of preservation for the highest resolution record of Quaternary marine environmental change known in the Ross Sea sector; (2) the sedimentation regime is one of the most intensely studied coastal settings in Antarctica; (3) there is a preliminary geophysical site survey, and (4) based on previous piston core work, the sediments appear to have the potential for good chronological control. Ultimately, the main goals of the coring study are to: (1) apply multi-proxy techniques to extract a high resolution (decadal(?) to century scale) of the Quaternary in the McMurdo Sound area; (2) establish marine-terrestrial correlations with geological and ice core records both locally and from elsewhere in Antarctica (e.g., Dry Valleys and Antarctic Peninsula Quaternary geological records; Taylor and Siple Dome ice core records); (3) test Antarctic variability with records from the Northern Hemisphere for cross-hemispheric comparisons; (4) determine the age of MSV unconformity that may well reflect glacial cutting within the MSV by Mackay Glacier during past Quaternary expansion(s) and provide constraints on Neogene erosion rates; and (5) characterize older Quaternary and or Neogene(?) sediment below the unconformity that potentially could also provide information on Pliocene history of the area. However, before a proposal to achieve these overarching goals can be properly developed, high quality site survey information is required. This work will provide the site data needed for a full assessment of the potential for acquiring high-resolution records of environmental change in the MSV doc1292 none Takahashi This proposal is for the installation, maintenance, and data analysis of equipment on the R V Laurence M. Gould to measure dissolved carbon dioxide gas (pCO2) along with occasional total carbon dioxide (TCO2) in surface waters on transects of Drake Passage. The proposed work is an extension of similar measurements made aboard R V Nathaniel B. Palmer, and complements similar surface temperature and current data. The Southern Ocean is an important component of the global carbon budget. Low surface temperatures with consequently low vertical stability, ice formation, and high winds produce a very active environment for the exchange of gaseous carbon dioxide between the atmospheric and oceanic reservoirs. The Drake Passage is the narrowest point through which the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and its associated fronts must pass, and is the most efficient location for the measurement of latitudinal gradients of gas exchange. The complementary tempearture and current data, supplemented by satellite imagery will allow not only the quantitative description of the sources of pCO2 variability and the calculation of air-sea CO2 fluxes, but also estimates of the net production and carbon export by the biological community doc1293 none A new, permanent exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Man will reflect the great scientific strides made in unraveling the mysteries of our uniquely human biology. The exhibit of 7,000 sq. ft. will take visitors on a 65-million year journey through time and even go beyond the present with glimpses of current technologies which will shape the future of human evolution. The exhibit development is being guided by a team of renowned scholars, museum professionals and community members in order to insure that the material is scientifically accurate, current and comprehensive. Evaluation and community input combined with engaging exhibitry will further enhance the informal science learner s experience. The exhibit will be about time, genetics and the environment. Dioramas, casts, artifacts and engaging interactives will convey the storyline. As a result of the development of culture, technology is refined and becomes intertwined with the human evolution. The exhibit will unify and draw together other halls in the museum. Further hands-on discovery will be encouraged in an outdoor archaeological site. Associated programming, which will foster the integration of research and education, will include a lecture series, on-line chats and guidebooks, as well as resources for teachers and students doc1294 none The California Science Center Foundation will develop the California Science Center s Air and Space Gallery, a 12,000-square foot exhibit space. The California Science Center will reopen Aerospace Hall (closed in ) with new and re-designed exhibits and offer a full complement of learning experiences. Funding from NSF will support design, fabrication and core program development of the Air and Space Gallery. The Gallery will feature four themed areas that explore the depth and breadth of aeronautics and space exploration: Air and Aircraft; Humans and Their Spacecraft; Mission to the Planets; and Stars and Telescopes. Also featured will be a Discovery Room for young learners and their parents, a changing exhibit gallery and educational programs for the public and for schools doc1295 none Leeman It is widely accepted that chemical compositions of volcanic arc lavas reflect the imprints of subducted components on their primary mantle sources, and that the extent of material transfer in subduction zones [SZs] depends on such factors as subduction geometry, thermal state of the slab, the type and amount of sediments subducted, and age and degree of alteration of the underthrust oceanic crust. To address the effects of progressive heating of a subducting slab and the release of its volatile constituents it is proposed to analyze primitive basaltic lavas from a cross-arc transect of the Quaternary southern Washington Cascades. This SZ is one of the warmest known, and this arc represents an important end member example where slab-derived contributions are minimal and characteristics of the mantle wedge may be more easily discerned. On the other hand, previously measured cross-arc variations in certain geochemical parameters (e.g., B Zr, ?11B, Pb isotopes) indicate small but significant slab inputs below the forearc and volcanic front ranging to negligible contributions below the backarc region. This contrast affords an opportunity for quantitative definition of slab contributions to a well-defined wedge composition. In the proposed study, compositions of melt inclusions (MIs) in olivine phenocrysts will determined; such inclusions are more likely to retain original proportions of volatile components than extruded lavas, and thus more representative compositions of primitive magmas. Analyses will include major and trace element compositions, and volatile (H2O, CO2) contents. Work will focus on a small number of representative lavas, from locations spanning the width of the arc, that have been previously characterized for major and trace element and Sr-Nd-Pb isotopic compositions. This comprehensive body of data will allow us to address the relative retentivity of the analyzed elements in the Cascadia slab, and to evaluate effects on magma compositions due to geochemical fractionations associated with magma ascent through mantle wedge and crust. Our goal is to understand and quantify the spatial variability of volatile and fluid-mobile constituents in primitive magmas, and to evaluate the hypothesis that temperature variations in the slab (as calculated from models of conductive heating and mantle convection) largely dictate the composition and magnitudes of slab-derived contributions to arc magma sources doc1296 none The Great Lakes Story is a 3,000 sq. ft. interactive traveling exhibit based on the highly successful and unique permanent exhibition at the Great Lakes Science Center. Its focus is devoted to highlighting the natural history of the Great Lakes ecosystem. The traveling exhibit will allow even more visitors around the country to understand the beauty, majesty and restoration efforts of this important national resource. Through a planned six-year tour, it is estimated The Great Lakes Story will be experienced by as many as three million people. There will be several components, including hands-on exhibits, organized with a centerpiece of a walk-around model of the Great Lakes region, and other interactive components. The four major areas of the exhibit are physical characteristics of the Lakes, the natural cycles and processes which shaped them over time, changes and threats to the Lakes (especially human-induced), and finally, restoration efforts to bring the Lakes back to being the rich and productive ecosystem they should be. Along with these exhibit areas, other project components are educational and marketing materials to ensure that host science centers are able to provide a complete learning experience to their youth, family, and adult audiences around the country doc1297 none Hughes This award supports a one-year study of the floating part of Byrd Glacier, from its grounding line located halfway up a fjord through the Transantarctic Mountains to the end of its lateral rift zone on the Ross Ice Shelf beyond the fjord. Over this l00 km distance, the side boundary changes from rigid between the fjord sidewalls, to nearly free in the lateral rift zone, to deforming when the rifts are healed and Bryd Glacier becomes fully coupled to the Ross Ice Shelf. The stress field for these changing conditions will be calculated a using a gridpoint finite-element model for the Ross Ice Shelf (Thomas and MacAyeal, l982) and a flowband finite-difference model for smooth transitions from sheet flow to stream flow to shelf flow (Hughes, l998). Results of the two modeling approaches will be compared, using existing ice elevation and velocity data obtained from aerial photogrammetry, our unpublished surface mass balance data, and new velocity data obtained from Landsat imagery by the U. S. Geological Survey. This study will train one graduate student at the Masters level doc1298 none Sprintall This project is a study of the seasonal variability and long term change of the upper ocean structure of the Drake Passage. It consists of high density sections obtained on each crossing by the U.S. Antarctic Program s research vessel Laurence M. Gould, using expendable bathythermographs, supplemented by expendable conductivity-temperature-depth probes. This information will lead to the establishment of a high quality data base with which to study the magnitude and depth of penetration of the seasonal signals, connections to atmospheric forcing, and the effects of interannual variations such as those associated with the Antarctic Circumpolar Wave. These sections will supplement the approximately twenty sections have been obtained since September . The probes are launched by the scientific shipboard personnel on each cruise. The continuing data analysis is carried out in cooperation with the Argentine Antarctic Institute in Buenos Aires doc1299 none Dalziel This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports a collaborative research program to initiate a Global Positioning System (GPS) network to measure crustal motions in the bedrock surrounding and underlying the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). Evaluation of the role of both tectonic and ice-induced crustal motions of the WAIS bedrock is a critical goal for understanding past, present, and future dynamics of WAIS and its potential role in future global change scenarios, as well as improving our understanding of the role of Antarctica in global plate motions. The extent of active tectonism in West Antarctica is largely speculative, as few data exist that constrain its geographic distribution, directions, or rates of deformation. Active tectonism and the influence of bedrock on the WAIS have been highlighted recently by geophysical data indicating active subglacial volcanism and control of ice streaming by the presence of sedimentary basins. The influence of bedrock crustal motion on the WAIS and its future dynamics is a fundamental issue. Existing GPS projects are located only on the fringe of the ice sheet and do not address the regional picture. It is important that baseline GPS measurements on the bedrock around and within the WAIS be started so that a basis is established for detecting change. To measure crustal motions, this project will build a West Antarctica GPS Network (WAGN) of at least 15 GPS sites across the interior of West Antarctica (approximately the size of the contiguous United States from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific coast) over a two-year period beginning in the Antarctic field season - . The planned network is designed using the Multi-modal Occupation Strategy (MOST), in which a small number of independent GPS roving receivers make differential measurements against a network of continuous GPS stations for comparatively short periods at each site. This experimental strategy, successfully implemented by a number of projects in California, S America, the SW Pacific and Central Asia, minimizes logistical requirements, an essential element of application of GPS geodesy in the scattered and remote outcrops of the WAIS bedrock. The WAGN program will be integrated with the GPS network that has been established linking the Antarctic Peninsula with South America through the Scotia arc (Scotia Arc GPS Project (SCARP)). It will also interface with stations currently measuring motion across the Ross Embayment, and with the continent-wide GIANT program of the Working Group on Geodesy and Geographic Information Systems of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR). The GPS network will be based on permanent monuments set in solid rock outcrops that will have near-zero set-up error for roving GPS occupations, and that can be directly converted to a continuous GPS site when future technology makes autonomous operation and satellite data linkage throughout West Antarctica both reliable and economical. The planned network both depends on and complements the existing and planned continuous networks. It is presently not practical, for reasons of cost and logistics, to accomplish the measurements proposed herein with either a network of continuous stations or traditional campaigns. The proposed WAGN will complement existing GPS projects by filling a major gap in coverage among several discrete crustal blocks that make up West Antarctica, a critical area of potential bedrock movements. If crustal motions are relatively slow, meaningful results will only begin to emerge within the five-year maximum period of time for an individual funded project. Hence this proposal is only to initiate the network and test precision and velocities at the most critical sites. Once built, however, the network will yield increasingly meaningful results with the passage of time. Indeed, the slower the rates turn out to be, the more important an early start to measuring. It is anticipated that the results of this project will initiate an iterative process that will gradually resolve into an understanding of the contributions from plate rotations and viscoelastic and elastic motions resulting from deglaciation and ice mass changes. Velocities obtained from initial reoccupation of the most critical sites will dictate the timing of a follow-up proposal for reoccupation of the entire network when detectable motions have occurred doc1300 none Taylor This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports a project to study Permian and Triassic fossil plant material from the Transantarctic Mountains. The overall goal is to achieve a better understanding of Permo-Triassic flora and how this relates to general plant evolution and Permo-Triassic paleoenvironmental conditions. The terrestrial rocks of the central Transantarctic Mountains have been a source of outstanding fossil discoveries over the last 30+ years, including Permian and Triassic permineralized peat with cellular detail preserved, fossil forests silicified in growth position, and compression floras with plant cuticle preservation, as well as megafossils from the Cenozoic age Sirius Group, and the first Jurassic dinosaur from the continent. The rare juxtaposition of sites that include many different types of plant fossil preservation (permineralization, compressed impressed remains, in situ forests, mummified wood), the exceptionally high quality of the preservation, and the richness of the sites make this area unique in the world. It is especially important in that, on a worldwide basis, relatively little is known about plants from the Permian and Triassic (280-210 million years). The proposed research will center on the biodiversity, structure, and paleoclimate of previously collected Permian and Triassic plant fossils from the Beardmore Glacier area in the central Transantarctic Mountains. Specifically the program of investigation will: 1) Provide the opportunity to reconstruct several plants and place them within an evolutionary context, including the reproductive organs of several seed plant groups that have been suggested as precursors of flowering plants. 2) Use Permian and Triassic plants as records of past climates that can be tested against hypothesized physical climate models. This will be accomplished by analyzing tree rings as well as by close examination of the structure and morphology of individual plants. Particular attention will be paid to plant features that allowed them to adapt to growth at high latitudes, including the extreme polar light regime. 3) As a result of the above, it will be possible to more accurately understand these Permian and Triassic communities and their relationships to other ecosystems, i.e., other southern hemisphere (Gondwana) floras of the same age. This multifaceted approach will also provide information about plant animal interactions, based on coprolites (fossil fecal pellets), and the relationships of fungi that functioned as either decomposers or mutualists doc1301 none Dixon Stein The origin of large mountain belts like the Andes at ocean-continent convergent margins remains enigmatic despite centuries of study beginning with Darwin. Various hypotheses have been advanced to explain the Andes, but by themselves none seem capable of explaining the formation of this vast region of elevated, thickened crust. For example, the investigator s preliminary GPS data suggest that the Andes are growing today at roughly their long term average rate despite significant slowing of subduction since the Miocene, problematic for models that call on fast subduction alone to form the Andes. This collaborative team from the University of Miami and Northwestern University proposes a series of GPS measurements that exploit a network first occupied in , coupled with related seismic studies, aimed at understanding the processes forming Andean mountain belts. They will focus on the Central Andes of Peru and Bolivia, where the high, wide Altiplano plateau is best developed, and where an active fold and thrust belt accommodates rapid crustal shortening. To enhance their ability to discriminate models and to conserve resources, the measurements will be densified in two transects that cross the entire plate boundary zone, in regions of flat and normal subduction. The new measurements will span a total of four years to obtain velocity accuracy at the new sites adequate to distinguish among several competing hypotheses doc1302 none The Self-Reliance Foundation (SRF) will implement a comprehensive three-year project that provides Hispanics with greater access to science resources and increases their participation in informal science activities. The Hispanic National Community Science Festivals Project makes optimal use of radio and print media, as well as the Internet, to deliver much-needed services to the families in their homes and communities. First, the SRF will partner with the Hispanic Radio Network (HRN) and the Hispanic Broadcasting Corporation (HBC) to reach major Hispanic markets in Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, Dallas and Yakima, Washington. A community coalition, including members of the radio station, community organizations and science centers, will be created in each of the targeted locales to plan events and support the project. Radio broadcasts will include information on community science festivals organized by science centers in these cities. Daily science radio capsules will also be developed, produced and distributed nationwide. Topics for radio capsules will include parental involvement and participation in informal science activities, and pathways to science careers. The Self-Reliance Foundation will serve as a clearing-house for community science resources by establishing an 800 number-hotline and bilingual Internet site with referral information on science opportunities within the community. It is anticipated that the festivals alone will reach 100,000-200,000 visitors per weekend, while broadcasts have the potential to reach the majority of the U.S. Hispanic population of 32 million people doc1303 none Hilton Walker Fischer This proposal is aimed at producing a volatile mass balance for the Central American subduction zone by quantifying the contributions from the subducting slab, mantle wedge and overlying crust to the overall arc budget. The Central American arc was chosen because it possess a number of unique features which allow explicit linkages to be forged between systematic variations in volcanic output and variations in subduction parameters, specifically slab dip, sediment supply and crustal thickness. Our approach is to couple CO2 and helium measurements (isotopes and relative abundances) which allows for identification and quantitative assessment of the various contributors to the magmatic output. Although a powerful technique, the accuracy of any flux estimates is limited by uncertainties in the effects of magmatic degassing on resultant CO2 3He ratios and on assumptions on the isotopic and abundance characteristics assigned to potential endmember compositions involved in arc magmagenesis. By analyzing and comparing the CO2-He relationships in geothermal fluids with mafic minerals both along and across the Central America arc, we aim to explore the extent of these limitations and to assess approaches with the potential to circumvent any difficulties. Additionally, we will derive present-day CO2 fluxes through combined COSPEC and gas chemistry studies. This offers the further possibility of deriving absolute fluxes for N2 and H2O and for also constraining their provenance in the subduction zone factory doc1304 none The Independence Seaport Museum will create Boat Building: Art and Science, a 3,000-square foot permanent exhibit that is designed to educate visitors about the science of boat building and design. Concepts such as buoyancy, water displacement, turbulence and drag will be explored through interactives, maritime artifacts, models and oral histories of tradesmen. By using the principles identified by the Family Science Learning Research Project of the Philadelphia Camden Informal Science Education Collaborative (PISEC), the exhibit will be user-friendly for families with young children. Visitor workstation topics may include boat building, floating, buoyancy, sails, wind and boat shape. Visitors will use science processes while learning through open-ended play and exploration. Creative programs for families and school groups, as well as curriculum materials will support the exhibit. A website and technical training manual will also be produced. Four phases of evaluation are planned, and include front-end analysis which will incorporate focus groups with children ages 7-12, and formative evaluation using prototypes of interactives. Remedial evaluation will be carried out once the exhibit opens, and summative evaluation will use tracking and exit interviews to assess learning and understanding. The estimated annual audience of over 130,000 visitors will be expanded by replicating and traveling various components to other maritime museums in partnership with the Association of Science and Technology Centers. Evaluation of traveling components will also be undertaken to determine if they present an appropriate model for maritime-based exhibits doc1305 none Green, Harry W. Eclogite is the densest normal rock exposed at the surface of Earth, typically consisting of approximately equal amounts of garnet and omphacite, + - small amounts of quartz, kyanite, zoisite, and or amphibole. Eclogite forms from high-pressure, high-temperature metamorphism of rocks of basaltic composition. This transformation may contribute to the subduction of oceanic crust to great depth, may affect the distribution of intermediate-focus earthquakes, and has been suggested to produce a strong layer that may delaminate from the rest of the lithosphere. The investigators propose a detailed experimental study of the rheology of eclogite and its constituent minerals. They presented preliminary results acquired with their unique, 5 GPa, deformation apparatus showing that it is now technically possible to acquire high-quality data at the pressures required for such studies (2-4 GPa). These preliminary results show that eclogite has a strength comparable to harzburgite, the rock type located immediately below the oceanic crust; this equality is achieved because the great strength of polycrystalline silicate garnet is compensated by the weakness of omphacite. The extraordinary strength of polycrystalline silicate garnet supports previous suggestions that the lower portion of the mantle transition zone (~500-700 km) may be a layer of enhanced viscosity. Toward a better understanding of deep subduction processes, the investigators plan to build on their preliminary results with a three-year expanded study of the rheology of eclogite and its constituent minerals at pressures of 2-4 GPa to map out in detail their flow laws, deformation mechanisms and microstructural characteristics. They will: (a) Elaborate the rheology of 50-50 eclogite over a larger domain of temperature and strain rate at 3 GPa and selected experiments at P = 2.0-4.0 GPa; (b) perform analogous experiments on the monomineralic omphacite and garnet end members to determine their flow parameters;(c) conduct comparable experiments and equivalent analysis of specimens with H2O added; and (d) if time permits, they will synthesize majoritic garnet in our multianvil apparatus and conduct qualitative deformation experiments within the majorite stability field using short cylindrical specimens of majoritic and pyropic garnets, one on top of the other, which will determine the relative strengths of these two phases doc1306 none Ishman This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports a collaborative research project between the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale and the University of New Hampshire. Foraminiferal and stable isotopic analyses of modern sediments and core samples from the Weddell Sea shelf will be used to address the mechanisms underlying the recent collapse of the Larsen Ice Shelf, Antarctica. The Larsen Ice Shelf, located on the northwestern margin of the Weddell Sea along the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula, may be collapsing due to a marked increase in mean annual atmospheric temperature (~+2.5 degrees C) that has resulted in sea-ice free conditions for at least 4 months per year. Alternatively, basal ice shelf melting due to intrusion of relatively warm deepwater may be primarily responsible. From May 6 to June 1, , the Research Vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer (NBP) was used to collect a series of surface sediment grab samples, hydrographic casts, high-resolution seismic data, and gravity cores from a large region of the Weddell Sea shelf formerly covered by the Larsen Ice Shelf-A (LIS-A). Samples collected from surface sediment grabs and gravity cores will be analyzed for foraminiferal distribution (planktonic and benthic; living and dead) data as well as planktonic and benthic foraminiferal oxygen and carbon isotopic analyses (d18O and d13C). Past work has shown a strong correlation between foraminiferal distributions and bottom water masses on the Antarctic continental shelf. Water samples collected from the major water masses in the western Weddell Sea will be measured for their d18O and d13C compositions. The extent of equilibrium d18O and d13C precipitation will be established for selected benthic foraminifers, as well as their d18O and d13C values calibrated to the modern oceanography. The modern foraminiferal distribution and geochemical data will be applied to kasten core and jumbo piston core samples, in addition to other collaborative research, to reconstruct the oceanographic and biotic changes associated with the recent collapse of the LIS-A. The following hypothesis will be tested: That incursions of relatively warm Weddell Deep Water onto the western Weddell Sea shelf has led to the retreat of the LIS-A. The results will contribute to understanding oceanic causal mechanisms for ice shelf collapse and provide a link between Northern Hemisphere climatic and oceanographic change and the Southern Hemisphere. A detailed record of benthic foraminiferal distribution and also planktonic and benthic foraminiferal d18O and d13C will be reconstructed for much of the Holocene in order to determine the natural variability of the LIS and underlying ocean. This work will contribute to detection of anthropogenic forcing of Antarctic ice shelf collapse doc1307 none Under the direction of Dr. Betsy Bryan, Ms Kathlyn Cooney will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. She will utilize extant written records and surviving objects to analyze the economic and social organization of craft production at the ancient Egyptian village of Deir el Medina, located near Thebes. Most habitation sites in ancient Egypt were located in the Nile s alluvial plain and have since been covered with millennia of silt deposits. Deir el Medina, on the other hand represents an extraordinary and rate habitation site preserved in the desert. The remarkable well-preserved mud brick homes and associated living debris belonged to the workmen who built, carved and decorated the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings during the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties. Many of these individuals were literate and, in addition to their official work, functioned as semi-independent craftsmen who fashioned coffins and other ritual and funerary related objects for private sale. It appears that the state supported such private enterprise and provided the necessary wood and other raw materials. Much of such work was arranged on a contractual basis as individual items were made to order and the dry desert environment has preserved thousands of written documents, including many contracts between artisan and purchaser. These provide an unprecedented opportunity to understand the economic and social organization of a craft industry within the context of a centralized state controlled enterprise. Although it is unlikely that specific items and contracts can be matched, many objects produced by Deir el Medina workers have been recovered, are curated in museum collections and available for study. With National Science Foundation support, Ms Cooney will visit archives which contain copies of the documents, study craft objects themselves in several museums and conduct fieldwork at the site of Deir el Medina to gain insight into the spatial organization of craft production. The processes which led to the rise of civilization in Egypt occurred independently in many parts of the world and thus reflect not historic chance but rather an underlying set of principles. To achieve their goal of understanding how complex societies evolve, archaeologists must rely heavily on objects, most often ceramics, recovered through excavation and then use these remains to reconstruct the social and economic systems they indirectly reflect. In recent years scientists have focused on the context within which such items were produced. On this basis further speculation about social organization and degree of political centralization are possible. However because there is rarely an independent control, it is difficult to know whether such an analytical framework and the conclusions which derive from it are correct. Deir el Medina situation offers a unique opportunity to address this issue since it is possible to compare the patterning of material objects with information derived from the written record. Preliminary work, for example, indicates that the distinction between centralized and individualized control may be overly simple since both existed side by side, and likely reinforced each other at the site. This research is important for several reasons. It will provide data of interest to many archaeologists and help to refine an important area of archaeological theory. It will also assist in training a promising young researcher doc1308 none Agrawal This three-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research involves Govind P. Agrawal and Robert W. Boyd of the Institute of Optics, University of Rochester and Albert Le Floch and his group at the Universite de Rennes in Rennes, France. The investigators will cooperate on several topics, all related to nonlinear optics, nonlinear dynamics, and lasers, including nonlinear effects in fiber lasers, nonlinear dynamics of coupled optical systems and nonlinear optical cavities. The US group brings to this collaboration expertise in theory. This is complemented by experimental expertise of the French group. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigators, graduate and undergraduate students. The CNRS will support the visits of French researchers to the United States. The collaboration will advance fundamental understanding of the physical processes that determine nonlinear materials, dynamics of optical systems, and effects in fiber lasers doc1309 none Rapp Despite comprehensive field, petrologic, isotopic, geochemical, and structural studies in a number of well-exposed early- to late-Archean terrains (2.7-3.8 Ga old), some relatively basic issues regarding the origin and early growth of the continental crust remain unresolved. These include the tectonic setting in which early continental growth took place, the ultimate source of the granitoid magmas that helped stabilize continental masses in the Archean, and the nature of the relationship between granitoid magmatism within the evolving Archean continents and the stabilization of deep cratonic roots (keels) in the underlying mantle. The proposal seeks funding to conduct high-pressure experiments in the multi-anvil apparatus aimed at constraining the origin of Archean granitoids, and designed to provide insight into the extent to which the mantle was involved in their origin. Previous experimental studies have shown that low degrees of melting of hydrous basalt at 1-3 GPa produces liquids with the general chemical composition of Archean tonalite-trondhjemite-granodiorite suites (TTG), the dominant granitoid rock in Archean high- and low-grade terrains, but with some minor but perhaps significant discrepancies. Late-Archean (2.6-2.9 Ga old) granite-greenstone terrains in the Superior and Slave Provinces of the Canadian Shield (members of the so-called sanukitoid suite ), possess chemical characteristics (such as high Cr and Ni contents) that are inconsistent with a simple origin by partial melting of metabasalt, and that suggest a mantle lineage. Yet in terms of most geochemical parameters, TTG granitoids, derived from partial melting of mafic crust, appear to be compositionally continuous with presumably mantle-derived granitoids of the sanukitoid suite. A number of explanations, which will be tested experimentally, could account for these observations: (1) assimilation of mantle peridotite by TTG melts, (2) the basaltic source for Archean TTG was more magnesian than the starting materials used in the basalt melting experiments at1-3 GPa, or (3) sanukitoids result from partial melting of mantle that had been previously modified by TTG melts. Possibilities (1) and (3), of course, involve intimate chemical interaction between TTG melts and peridotitic mantle, with potentially profound implications for the chemical evolution of the sub-continental mantle doc1310 none A seasonal study of the dominant agglutinated foraminiferal assemblage in Explorers Cove, McMurdo Sound, Antarctica is the focus of this research. Studies have shown that the agglutinated foraminifera ( forams ) at this locality consume a wide variety of prey, ranging from bacteria through a taxonomically diverse group of metazoans, including juvenile invertebrates. These studies have been restricted to specimens collected in October, November and early December, i. e., immediately following the Austral winter and before the summer burst of under-ice and benthic primary productivity. Little information is available regarding the foraminiferal response to this summer food pulse. The aim of this work is to utilize the planned extention of logistic support in the region. The Specific Aims of this proposal are: To document Austral spring to late- summer changes in relevant abiotic and biotic factors in the Explorers Cove benthos; and to characterize corresponding responses in agglutinated foram community structure (species composition, densities, size distribution). These first aims will be accomplished by traditional sediment coring, biomass determinations, and microscopic sorting methods. Additionally, an -situ approach for documenting fine-scale changes using novel underwater microscopy equipment will be utilized. Molecular tools to examine seasonal foram community dynamics initially focusing on the timing, of reproductive events multiple fission, gametogenesis will be perfected. Additional work will focus on newly refined sediment core embedding methods to explore the fine-scale seasonal changes in foram life position. In related lab experiments, the trophic mechanisms of the key agglutinated species will be analyzed. Time-resolved stable isotope analyses of lipids extracted from freshly collected and snap frozen forams will be used to determine if and how these mechanisms change in response to available food sources. These combined approaches will lead to a more complete understanding of the roles played by larger agglutinated forams in the Explorers Cove benthic food web, and how these roles change with respect to the summer food pulse. Because Explorers Cove and its agglutinated foram assemblage are closely comparable to many bathyal and abyssal deep-sea localities, the results of these studies will have wide significance in the ocean sciences doc1311 none MacGillivray Freeman Films is producing a large format film about the exploration and new scientific research aimed at understanding and responding to changes in coral reef ecosystems. The film will examine the complex behavior and interactions among unique Pacific coral reef animals, illustrate the role of scientific research in addressing the declining health of reefs, and stimulate public interest in pursuing further learning and careers in coral reef and marine science. In five coral reef sites the film will feature science researchers who are each a part of the global effort to understand and protect coral reef ecosystems as they document reef diversity and animal behavior, investigate symptoms of reef degradation, provide information on past environmental change through core sampling, and explore life in extreme ocean environments. Outreach materials will include a Museum Resource Guide, Family Fun Sheet, Activities for Informal Education Groups, Teacher Guide and Poster, Web Site Virtual Field Trip, and Scientist Speaker Series. Greg MacGillivray will be the PI for the project and also will serve as Co-Producer Co-Director Co-Director of Photography. Alec Lorimore is Co-Producer and Howard Hall is Co-Director of Photography Sequence Director and Cameraman. Science Advisors include: Gerald Allen, Conservation International; Richard Aronson, Dauphin Island Sea Lab and University of South Alabama; Gisele Muller-Parker, Shannon Point Marine Center and Western Washington University; Joseph Levine, WGBH and Discovery Magazine; and Richard Pyle, University of Hawaii and Bishop Museum doc1312 none WGBH is producing twenty, new, half-hour programs for the fourth season of ZOOM. Uniquely for, by and about kids, ZOOM gives its viewers a chance to explore, experiment and share their creativity with the world. Targeted at children 8-11 years-old, ZOOM features a diverse cast of seven children who build bridges, solve puzzles, play games, respond to challenges and act out stories, as they bring to life contributions sent in by viewers from across the country. ZOOM currently is carried by 281 public broadcasting stations and is viewed by an average of 5.22 million children per week. The ZOOM website receives 18,000 - 20,000 visits per day with kids averaging 30 minutes per visit. The specific goals for Season IV are to: (1) connect science to kids every day world and every day lives; (2) promote Habits of Mind and an understanding of the basic science and math within three content areas; (3) expand ZOOM s outreach activities, and (4) increase parental involvement in children s ZOOM -related activities. The themes for the new seasons will include Your Biome, Kitchen Chemistry, and Structures. Outreach for the project will include printed materials for kids, families and educators; ZOOM -related activities at community-based organizations, shopping malls and science museums; and a -page web site doc1313 none Huntington Beluga Whales in the Bering and Chukchi Seas Beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas) are found in the tens of thousands in the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort Seas. At least four distinct stocks have been identified by genetic analysis, and satellite tagging has shown that the migratory paths of some stocks link Canadian, American, and Russian waters. Belugas are an important subsistence species for many communities in Alaska and Canada, and are taken opportunistically in Chukotka. While recent studies have expanded our understanding of beluga ecology, many questions remain. For example, are there separate stocks of belugas that remain in Russian waters? Which North American stocks migrate to Russian waters and when? To answer these questions and to promote scientific cooperation throughout the region, especially with Russia, a workshop will be held in November with participants from Russia, Canada, and the United States. This effort is expected to lead to greater interaction among beluga scientists and indigenous experts in the region, and to a better understanding of the ecology of this important arctic species doc1213 none Hogan, Lux, and Gibson Granitic plutons of the Coastal Maine Magmatic Province (CMMP) commonly display dramatic field relations that record interaction between magmas of markedly different composition (chemical and isotopic) and physical properties. Silicic magma chambers, derived from the crust, received influxes of denser mafic magma that spread out along the floor of these chambers to produce a compositional stratification know as Mafic and Silicic Layered Intrusions (MASLI). The spectacular field relations and large compositional variation in the vicinity of the interface between contrasting magma types are well document by recent studies. In contrast, the extent of physical and chemical coupling between the base of the chamber, that receives mafic influx, and the overlying silicic magma remains poorly understood. Three known or presumed MASLI plutons in the CMMP, the Vinalhaven, Deer Isle, and Mt. Waldo granites, have been selected for study to address this important issue. Specifically, what processes and other factors determine the extent to which heat and material are exchanged between contrasting magma types? Is heat and mass subsequently distributed to the upper reaches of the chamber? By combining textural, compositional and isotopic studies of zoned plagioclase and accessory minerals (using electron and ion-microprobe techniques), along with data for magmatic enclaves from each of the granites, the relative timing and extent of variation in composition of the magma from with individual minerals crystallized can be assessed. Comparison of internal variations among adjacent mineral grains will be used to constrain the relative extent to which material is redistributed within the chamber. Furthermore, studies such as this will enhance our understanding of magma chamber dynamics and growth, enable recognition of the contribution of mantle and crustal components in granite petrogenesis, and evaluate models for the growth and evolution of continental lithosphere doc1315 none The investigators will attempt to distinguish the origins of fast and slow solar wind. The main effort is to study several properties of the solar corona at two forthcoming total solar eclipses. The investigators will make simultaneous K-corona, Fe X, XI, XIII and XIV intensity imagery, spectroscopic imaging in Fe XIV, and polarimetric imaging in Fe XIII and XIV. From these, they will deduce electron density, temperature, line-of-sight velocity, abundance of Fe+12 and Fe+13 ions, and the sky plane projection of the magnetic field direction. It is widely accepted that slow wind comes from areas of the corona with closed magnetic fields, and fast wind from regions with open magnetic fields, but this is a classification rather than an understanding. Physical understanding can only come from knowledge of the plasma parameters in the different source regions. The investigators note that discrepancies among current observational techniques currently prevent unambiguous determination of these parameters. Their new measurements of electron density and temperature represent an attempt to resolve these discrepancies doc1303 none Hilton Walker Fischer This proposal is aimed at producing a volatile mass balance for the Central American subduction zone by quantifying the contributions from the subducting slab, mantle wedge and overlying crust to the overall arc budget. The Central American arc was chosen because it possess a number of unique features which allow explicit linkages to be forged between systematic variations in volcanic output and variations in subduction parameters, specifically slab dip, sediment supply and crustal thickness. Our approach is to couple CO2 and helium measurements (isotopes and relative abundances) which allows for identification and quantitative assessment of the various contributors to the magmatic output. Although a powerful technique, the accuracy of any flux estimates is limited by uncertainties in the effects of magmatic degassing on resultant CO2 3He ratios and on assumptions on the isotopic and abundance characteristics assigned to potential endmember compositions involved in arc magmagenesis. By analyzing and comparing the CO2-He relationships in geothermal fluids with mafic minerals both along and across the Central America arc, we aim to explore the extent of these limitations and to assess approaches with the potential to circumvent any difficulties. Additionally, we will derive present-day CO2 fluxes through combined COSPEC and gas chemistry studies. This offers the further possibility of deriving absolute fluxes for N2 and H2O and for also constraining their provenance in the subduction zone factory doc1303 none Hilton Walker Fischer This proposal is aimed at producing a volatile mass balance for the Central American subduction zone by quantifying the contributions from the subducting slab, mantle wedge and overlying crust to the overall arc budget. The Central American arc was chosen because it possess a number of unique features which allow explicit linkages to be forged between systematic variations in volcanic output and variations in subduction parameters, specifically slab dip, sediment supply and crustal thickness. Our approach is to couple CO2 and helium measurements (isotopes and relative abundances) which allows for identification and quantitative assessment of the various contributors to the magmatic output. Although a powerful technique, the accuracy of any flux estimates is limited by uncertainties in the effects of magmatic degassing on resultant CO2 3He ratios and on assumptions on the isotopic and abundance characteristics assigned to potential endmember compositions involved in arc magmagenesis. By analyzing and comparing the CO2-He relationships in geothermal fluids with mafic minerals both along and across the Central America arc, we aim to explore the extent of these limitations and to assess approaches with the potential to circumvent any difficulties. Additionally, we will derive present-day CO2 fluxes through combined COSPEC and gas chemistry studies. This offers the further possibility of deriving absolute fluxes for N2 and H2O and for also constraining their provenance in the subduction zone factory doc1318 none This proposal is for coordination and support activities for the Interagency Digital Libraries Initiative to assist in program planning, meeting sponsoring agency reporting requirements and disseminating program and project information to the larger digital libraries community. The effort is intended to will help facilitate the exchange of ideas, techniques, and procedures necessary to achieve a coordinated and integrated program, provide tools to promote interaction among Digital Libraries researchers and users around the world, and gather performance data for multiple purposes. The funding provides administrative and technical support in several distinct areas: - Maintaining the Digital Libraries Initiative World Wide Web Portal (www.dli2.nsf.gov) -Collecting, organizing and making DLI project intellectual products available to a broad audience. -Providing logistical and program support for the Digital Libraries Initiative All-Projects Meetings held semiannually. -Creating and maintaining access capabilities at NSF and other agency sites for project testbed demonstrations. -Assisting in project coordination and high-level interoperability doc1319 none Kidd This project will use the eastern syntaxis of the Himalayan orogen to address key questions in the geodynamics of continental collisions: how do orogens and associated plateaus come to an end, how do tectonic and surficial processes interact to shape the crust during orogeny, and how is deformation partitioned at various scales? Specific hypotheses to be tested are: 1) rheology controls topography and lithospheric mechanics across plateau indentor margin; 2) erosion controls lithospheric dynamics to the same extent as crustal thickening and lateral accommodation; feedbacks between the two ultimately shape the evolution of the orogen; and 3) there is complete decoupling between upper crustal and lower lithospheric deformation within the syntaxial region. The approach to be used involves tracking the magnitude, rates, and type of mass fluxes through the central region of the eastern Himalayan syntaxis. To do this, the Principal Investigators will use geochronologic, geomorphic, GPS, petrologic, seismic, and structural techniques, fully integrated by three-dimensional modeling doc1320 none Ghiorso and Sack We propose to develop realistic thermodynamic models for solid solutions that will adequately describe short-range ordering utilizing a new version of the Cluster Variation Method (CVM). This version of CVM will afford accurate descriptions for configurational entropy, internal energy and volume of mixed crystals; it will not have the computational difficulties and limitations associated with conventional CVM approaches. These solution models will expand upon the approach developed by Balabin and Sack ( ) wherein the correlation polynomials that are typically employed as configuration variables in CVM are replaced by explicit formulations of linear relations between the probabilities of cluster configurations. This approach will be applied to (Zn,Fe)S sphalerites and (Ca,Na,Mg,Fe2+)(Mg,Al,Fe3+,Fe2+)Si2O6 pyroxenes (omphacites). In the former short-range ordering due to strong interactions within the first nearest neighbor(nn)-triangle appear to result in long-range ordering and formation of ordered compounds with limited compositional ranges (Balabin and Sack, ). In omphacitic pyroxenes strong short-range ordering induced by coupled substitutions (e.g., NaAl - MgCa) results in a reduction of the space group symmetry from C2 c to P2 n. The CVM treatment for Fe-sphalerite will utilize cuboctahedron (13 atoms) and fcc-cube (14 atoms) basis clusters, and it will allow for an arbitrary degree of both short- and long-range ordering subject to the restriction that any edge of the elementary cell of a superstructure does not exceed four times the parameter ao of the initial lattice. Basis clusters containing 8 and 20 atoms will be utilized in the model for omphacitic pyroxenes. Explicit provision will be made for local charge balance in the lattice and nn, next to nearest neighbor (nnn) and madn body interactions. The methods developed in the proposed research will be widely applicable to other mineral systems doc1321 none Cai Freshwater dissolved organic matter (DOM) strongly affects many important processes, particularly in organic-rich systems. Recent reports show that (1) the major term in the proton balance of the highly colored Satilla River is organic alkalinity, and (2) that photoreactions in this water, catalyzed in part by Fe, consume O2, bleach color, and form CO, CO2 (the major product), and Fe(II). We hypothesized that CO2 arises by Fe-catalyzed photodecarboxylation : DOM-COO-H + O2 + hv_______ Fe DOM-H + CO2 a well-known reaction for simple molecules. The implied massive loss of the principal organic ionizable groups should profoundly influence many important properties of photo-altered DOM (hv-DOM): e.g. metal-binding capacity, acid-base properties, hydrophobic binding, adsorption coagulation, bioavailability, optical properties, and perhaps behavior in water purification (e.g. chlorination). However, an initial study determining and modeling Satilla water s whole pH titration curves before vs. after photolysis (solar simulator) falsified the hypothesis above: for every CO2 formed only ~ 0.1 acidic group was lost; pH decreased (stronger acids formed than were consumed). Furthermore, Fe was involved in the changes observed. Objectives: Hence we are proposing (1) better characterizing the relationships among CO2 evolution, proton binding sites (concentrations and affinities), and other variables: [Fe], pH, [O2], light dose, and wavelength; (2) assessing the generality and environmental variability of these effects by studying other riverwaters, sampled in different seasons; (3) examining the effect of these changes on an important physico-chemical property of hv-DOM: its copper binding strength and capacity, and (4) formulating a better heuristic scheme than the hypothesis above to rationalize the results chemically. Clearly to some extent photo-generated CO2 does not originate simply from -COO - groups. Acidic groups, if lost, seem to be replaced by similar but not identical new acids from DOM photo-oxidation. Work Plan and Methods: This is a collaborative effort among a postdoctoral associate and two PIs with experience in organic inorganic alkalinity-pH-CO2 properties, and DOM photochemistry. We are using optimizations of methods demonstrated to apply to this problem, and well-known Cu-binding study methods. The Altamaha, a more typical second river chosen for study, is also DOM-rich. Its DOM is thought to be derived from both allochthonous and autochthonous sources, in contrast to the Satilla s mainly allochthonous, highly colored DOM. Suwannee River water and well-known isolates of its humic and fulvic acids (SRFA, SRHA) are also being studied, since in organic-rich colored waters these fractions comprise a major portion of the DOM, organic alkalinity, and light-absorbing material. Education: This project contributes to training in environmental science by involving an independent-working postdoctoral associate and graduate students at UGA and WHOI. Societal Impacts: This study increases our understanding of processes potentially affecting water transparency, potability and treatment (e.g. chlorination), aquatic biota, and also the binding, transport, and transformations of agrichemicals and pollutants (especially Cu doc1322 none 2 Iliev The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Ilian T. Iliev with support for six months to work with Dr. Alejandro C. Raga at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City, Mexico. This project is being co-funded by NSF s Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. Sometime between the recombination epoch when the universe was only a million years old, and the appearance of the first quasars a billion years or more later, most matter in the universe became ionized again. By using numerical simulations to model this reionization epoch the PIs will work to answer the questions: What kind of objects reionized the universe and when? When and how did the first objects (stars, protogalaxies) form? How did the photoionizing ultraviolet background evolve? What was the impact of this background on the objects forming later? The project calls for development of state-of-the-art three-dimensional cosmological gas dynamics and radiation dynamics code to study in detail these important questions about the origin and evolution of the cosmic structures we see today. They expect to conduct an in-depth study of the processes during the reionization of the universe and the effects of feedback and radiative transfer on the formation of cosmic structures. This area of cosmology is concerned with understanding how all the structures in the universe we see are formed and evolved. Dr. Raga and his collaborators have developed an interstellar gas-and radiation dynamics code, which will be further developed to include the effects of self-gravity, adapting it for cosmological simulations doc1323 none PI: Dr. M. J. Taylor A SGER exploratory investigation of the occurrence and characteristics of noctilucent clouds (NLC) at mid-latitudes will be carried out to investigate the unususal occurrences of these events at mid-latitudes during the summer. These clouds are more typically observed at polar latitudes ( 55 N) and the detection of NLCs during the 99 summer at Logan Utah on the two dates of 22 23 and 23 24 of June was by happenstance. These two events may have been simply a rare occurrence with a low probability of re-occurrence. However, increases in NLC occurrence frequency and or changes in their latitudinal extent have been linked to potentially serious changes taking place in the upper mesospheric climate. This award will support a systematic series of optical observations with high resolution digital photography to determine the properties of these clouds were they to re-occur. This work will be carried out over the summers of the next two years. If the occurrence of mid-latitude NLC displays is indeed established and if they are found to be on the increase, then this study could have a profound influence on future NSF sponsored research efforts as such results may well portend major, long-term, global changes taking place in the upper atmosphere doc1324 none Stanley This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Dr. H. Eugene Stanley of Boston University and Professor Masaki Sasai of Nagoya University in Japan. The researchers will be undertaking a spectroscopic study of cooperative molecular motions in water. The aim of the research is to obtain a unified view of the thermodynamic and dynamic properties of water by analyzing the cooperative motions of water molecules. Water has many strange properties, some of which provide important clues for understanding its behavior. One such remarkable feature is the existence of two amorphous phases at low temperature; low-density amorphous ice (LDA) and high-density amorphous ice (HDA). In order to obtain reliable information on systems with sufficiently large correlation length, MD simulations of significantly larger systems are necessary. By using the Fast Multipole Method, the MD simulation of the system containing up to 10 6 molecules will be performed and the thermal fluctuation in the supercooled region will be analyzed. Metastable phases of various forms of ices and the amorphous phases will be experimentally examined and transformations among them will be investigated. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. By summarizing the data of experiments, MD simulations, and the statistical mechanical models, the phase diagram of water will be studied. Results of the research will help to reveal the physical basis of the singular behavior of water. This research advances international human resources through the participation of a postdoc and graduate students. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of the research in scientific journals and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc1325 none Increasingly, U.S. antitrust authorities evaluate horizontal mergers in terms of how proposed consolidations may affect the strategic situation in specific oligopoly models. Most prominent is the analysis of horizontal mergers in markets where products are differentiated. In such contexts Department of Justice (DOJ) staff have developed an Antitrust Litigation Model (ALM) merger simulation as a screening device to help determine when competitive problems might arise. The DOJ staff use the ALM to assess the effects of a merger in a two step process. First, staff collect price and market share data, and estimate some demand parameters. Second, these data are inserted into the model to generate imputed cost parameters and post-merger predictions. Despite the convenience of the ALM s predictions, a number of questions critical to the usefulness of this approach remain unanswered. First, the relationship between price predictions generated under model-specific assumptions and outcomes in more general naturally occurring circumstances is not clear. Second, even on the domain of the theory, the incentives that drive predicted unilateral effects are subtle and may have little explanatory power. Third, the model is used to distinguish between relatively subtle differences in market outcomes. Some information about the potential accuracy of pre-merger demand parameter estimates would thus be useful. Laboratory methods provide an ideal medium for examining these important questions. In the laboratory the demand system, the nature of strategic interactions and the underlying equilibrium predictions can be specified a priori. Thus, the relationship between predictions and outcomes can be examined explicitly. This proposal describes three experiments designed to provide some insight into the importance of the assumptions underlying the ALM. First, suppose that the underlying demand system for a model is logit and that sellers are Bertrand competitors, the assumptions of the ALM. An experiment conducted under these best shot circumstances could evaluate the correlation between actual and predicted prices and market shares, as well as the accuracy of the models imputed cost measures. Further, analysis of post-merger performance would allow examination of the capacity of theoretical comparative statics effects to predict behavioral outcomes Second, although a logit demand system offers analytic advantages, there is no a priori reason to believe that many natural demand systems are logit. An experiment would examine the effects of the changes in the underlying demand system. Starting with identical observable pre-merger information, we can evaluate the importance of the underlying demand specification on pre- and post-merger performance by shifting the demand system from logit to linear. A third experiment assesses the importance of assuming that sellers are Bertrand (quantity-setting) competitors. Although economists typically assume that strategic interactions are Bertrand when products are differentiated, there is no good reason for supposing that this assumption reflects the nature of competition in natural contexts. Holding the observable market information fixed, we can evaluate the importance of an assumption about the nature of strategic interactions doc1326 none Holroyd This award supports a two-year collaborative research project between Dr. Richard Holroyd of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and Professor Masaru Nishikawa of the Kanagawa Institute of Technology in Japan. The researchers will undertake a study of charged species in supercritical fluids - how clustering affects ionic reactions. Achieving an understanding of how ions are solvated by supercritical solvents such as carbon dioxide and ethane is important in fundamental chemical research. The clustering of supercritical fluid solvent molecules around a neutral solute molecule has been intensively investigated using spectroscopic methods since the s and now almost established. However, the clustering around an ionic molecule has attracted attention in the last ten years. The researchers will extend their measurements and theoretical interpretation to charge transfer reactions. They will produce anionic solvent molecules by electron attachment after picosecond pulse radiolysis and try to follow the electron transfer to solute molecules with both time-dependent fluorescent and conductivity measurements. Such measurements clarify the applicability of the compressible continuum model to ionic reactions in supercritical fluids. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. Results of this research could form the basis for the analysis of ionic organic reactions in supercritical fluids, which are now extensively investigated as a technology for the next century. This research advances international human resources through the participation of a postdoc. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of their research in scientific journals and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc1327 none Bullen This project will apply selenium (Se) stable isotope ratios as a new tool for understanding the transport and chemical transformations of Se in wetlands. Se contamination poses a threat to wildlife in many wetland areas of the western United States, in fly-ash disposal areas, and in other settings worldwide. The complex chemistry of Se determines the element s mobility and bioavailability, and efforts to understand its long-term cycling and transport in wetlands depend on accurate understanding of chemical transformations there. Previous work by this group suggests that Se isotope ratio measurements can be used as indicators of reduction reactions, which transform Se oxyanions into forms that are less mobile and less bioavailable. The present study will address critical questions arising from that work by performing the first detailed Se isotope field study, at a Se-contaminated wetland at Benton Lake National Wildlife Refuge, Montana. The primary objectives are to determine Se reduction rates using this new technique and constrain the relative importance of reduction by bacteria versus assimilation by plants and algae. The work will involve detailed measurements of Se concentrations, Se isotope ratios, and related geochemical variables in surface water, sediment pore waters, sediment components, and microcosm experiments. Sampling will be timed according to seasonal variations in water management and biogeochemistry. If possible, Se from the various sources will be traced through the system via their isotopic signatures . The study is designed as a Ph.D. project for a graduate student, who will be trained in environmental geochemistry, hydrogeology, isotope geochemistry and geomicrobiology doc1328 none Atekwana Introduction of pollutants in the soil environment such as Light Non-Aqueous Phase Liquids (LNAPLs) after the physical, chemical, and biological properties of the soil media. Initially, the alteration of the soil properties is primarily physical as the LNAPL occupies pores of the resident soils. With time, the LNAPL undergoes changes driven by microbial-mediated processes that alter soil properties. Geophysical methods are able to detect freshly released LNAPLs in soils because their higher electrical resistivity readily distinguishes from background pore and groundwater. Nevertheless, many resistivity measurements of aged LNAPL spills reveal a decrease and not the expected increase. Hence, the key hypothesis to be addressed in this study is that shifts in geoelectrical signatures from resistive in fresh spills to conductive in aged or biodegrading spills accompany biogeochemical modifications of LNAPL in the impacted media. The work is driven by the need to gain a basic understanding of the dynamics that interrelate biological, chemical, geological, and hydrological processes in LNAPL-impacted soils and how these interrelations translate into measurable changes in the geoelectrical response. The objective is to experimentally document important soil physical and chemical parameters that result from microbial degradation of LNAPL and their role in controlling the soil s geoelectrical properties. Our experiments use sterilized laboratory columns filled with sands from a field site impacted with LNAPL. Some of the columns are layered with LNAPL and inoculated with microbes from the field site. Positive and negative control columns are maintained. Geoelectrical measuremens are obtained using electrodes implanted in the columns. The experiments are designed to: Verify microbial LNAPL degradation by monitoring changes in microbial types, population and community structure, and changes in the presence of potential electron donors; and Document changes in soil physical (grain) properties and in pore fluid geochemistry. Integrating geophysics, geochemistry, and microbiology will: (i) document how microbial degradation of LNAPLs and subsequent biogeochemical modifications of the impact media influence soil geoelectrical responses; (ii) support development of geoelectrical models necessary to quantify these biogeochemical processes; and (iii) provide a basis for extending laboratory geophysical degradation models to field sites contaminated with organic chemical doc578 none By arriving at self-enforcing agreements, agents in an ongoing strategic situation create surplus that benefits them both. Little is known about how that surplus will be divided. This project concerns the role of reputation formation in such environments. It studies a model in which players entertain the slight possibility that their opponents may be subject to a variety of behavioral biases. Happily, it seems that these informational complications make it easier to predict what will usually happen in the repeated game. There emerges a theory of bargaining in repeated games that strengthens some links between cooperative games and noncooperative game theory. The proposal also addresses dynamic games, in which the different periods of play are con-nected by state variables such as capital stock or inventories. Here one can examine some of the most important problems in industrial organization, including collusion in the face of potential entry. One of the goals is to derive a generalization of the Nash bargaining solution with threats that can be applied in dynamic games doc1213 none Hogan, Lux, and Gibson Granitic plutons of the Coastal Maine Magmatic Province (CMMP) commonly display dramatic field relations that record interaction between magmas of markedly different composition (chemical and isotopic) and physical properties. Silicic magma chambers, derived from the crust, received influxes of denser mafic magma that spread out along the floor of these chambers to produce a compositional stratification know as Mafic and Silicic Layered Intrusions (MASLI). The spectacular field relations and large compositional variation in the vicinity of the interface between contrasting magma types are well document by recent studies. In contrast, the extent of physical and chemical coupling between the base of the chamber, that receives mafic influx, and the overlying silicic magma remains poorly understood. Three known or presumed MASLI plutons in the CMMP, the Vinalhaven, Deer Isle, and Mt. Waldo granites, have been selected for study to address this important issue. Specifically, what processes and other factors determine the extent to which heat and material are exchanged between contrasting magma types? Is heat and mass subsequently distributed to the upper reaches of the chamber? By combining textural, compositional and isotopic studies of zoned plagioclase and accessory minerals (using electron and ion-microprobe techniques), along with data for magmatic enclaves from each of the granites, the relative timing and extent of variation in composition of the magma from with individual minerals crystallized can be assessed. Comparison of internal variations among adjacent mineral grains will be used to constrain the relative extent to which material is redistributed within the chamber. Furthermore, studies such as this will enhance our understanding of magma chamber dynamics and growth, enable recognition of the contribution of mantle and crustal components in granite petrogenesis, and evaluate models for the growth and evolution of continental lithosphere doc1331 none Caldwell 00- This award provides renewed funding for a program called Native Americans in Marine Science or NAMS. The program recruits Native American and Native Alaskan students for undergraduate programs at the University of Oregon. The long-term goal of this program is to increase the number of minority students who complete degrees in science, continue their studies in graduate school, and enter the scientific work force. The program was initiated in and has provided the financial support and mentoring necessary for 87 students to continue their higher education and gain research experience. The program has a student retention rate of 97%, which is remarkable for Native Americans in college. The award provides funding to support 20 students each year for the next five years. The program provides the students with the financial support necessary to remain in school, but also with the networking, mentors, and emotional support necessary to sustain minority students who have no family history of higher education doc1332 none Gross Continuing support is provided for the international oceanographic activities of the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) that are relevant to U.S. interests in marine sciences and the Division of Ocean Sciences. There are currently thirty-seven countries represented in SCOR. The Ocean Studies Board of the National Academy of Sciences serves as the U.S. national committee. Individual ocean scientists participate in SCOR activities through subsidiary bodies such as working groups and scientific steering committees. Funding will support two major SCOR activities: 1) U.S. sponsorship of focused SCOR Working Groups. Presently, there are twelve such Working Groups covering diverse ocean-science related topics. Working Groups are comprised of experts from different countries who meet on a regular basis to discuss and assess the scientific status of their topic area and produce a report that advises and provides recommendations for further research efforts. 2) Science Steering Committee activities of the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS) - a study of the ocean s role in the global carbon cycle and its response to global change; Global Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics (GLOBEC) - an effort to understand the relationships between physical variability in the ocean and the structure and functioning of marine ecosystems and how they may be impacted by global change; and Global Ecology and Oceanography of Harmful Algal Blooms (GEOHAB) - a program to improve our understanding of the processes involved in the development of algal blooms which have enormous consequences for marine resources, the economies which depend upon them and, in some cases, human health. SCOR will also be involved in developing plans for a new program (Surface Ocean-Lower Atmosphere Study, SOLAS) to look at the interactions between the upper ocean and the lower part of the atmosphere where many important exchanges take place, in particular of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases . These major programs have origins in U.S. and have turned to SCOR to provide a forum for international planning and coordination. SCOR s impact has and will continue to be evident in the standardization of measurement protocols, sharing of data, coordination of ship time, and the enlargement of field studies which would be impossible without international coordination. Activities will also include coordination of an international workshop to bring together leading oceanographers to consider future needs and directions in ocean biogeochemistry doc1333 none Bassalleck This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Bernd Bassalleck of the University of New Mexico and Professor Tomokazu Fukuda of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Japan. The researchers will undertake a study of hyperon-hyperon and hyperon-nucleon interaction. This is the most fundamental baryon-baryon interaction involving one and two strange quarks, respectively. The primary focus of the proposal is the approved KEK experiment E452. Its goal is the study of the spin-dependent interaction between the E+ hyperon and the proton, in particular the E+ spin-orbit interaction, which is predicted to be large. What makes this particularly interesting is the sharp contrast to the now firmly established smallness of the A spin-orbit interaction. The actual measurement to be performed is the left-right asymmetry in the elastic scattering of polarized E+ off protons using a novel scintillation detector with Image Intensifier and CCD readout for complete 3-dimensional track reconstruction. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. Results of this research should provide a significant enhancement of our understanding of the fundamental baryon-baryon interaction utilizing the strange quark as a special probe not normally available in conventional nuclear physics. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of their research in scientific journals and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc1334 none Panter This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports an investigation of Cenozoic volcanic rocks from the western flank of the West Antarctic Rift System. Cenozoic (35 million years ago to presently active) volcanism in West Antarctica has been attributed to: 1) mantle melting by passive rifting that has thinned the crust and mantle lithosphere, 2) mantle melting by active rifting associated with a hot, upwelling mantle plume, and 3) a combined active-passive scenario that involves the melting of an ancient mantle plume source by passive rifting. Making sense of the underlying causes of rifting and volcanism in Antarctica has important implications to our understanding of continental breakup. In this regard the proposed work will engage models of rifting and separation of New Zealand from West Antarctica. This project will undertake new geochemical research in an attempt to unravel processes of mantle melting and continental breakup using a suite of basaltic volcanic rocks from the foothills of the Royal Society Range, South Victoria Land. Because the basalts represent near-primary melts of the mantle, they will be used as geochemical tracers of the Earth s interior. Basaltic volcanism in the Royal Society Range offers a unique opportunity to study 14 million years of mantle evolution along a major tectonic boundary separating the West Antarctic rift system from the East Antarctic continental shield. The principal objective of this project is to provide the first detailed isotopic and trace-element investigation of basalts in this area. The new results will be integrated into regional studies to build better models for West Antarctic volcanism and rifting. A preliminary survey of the geochemical data suggests that there has been a change in the degree and depth of melting beneath this portion of the rift. Previous work on basalts in other areas of the rift has shown that variations in the degree and depth of melting correlate with changes in isotopic composition. Because isotopes measured in primary basalts provide a fingerprint of long-lived chemical reservoirs within the Earth s mantle, the variations must indicate that melting of different reservoirs is producing the basalt. A better understanding of the type and origin of distinct mantle reservoirs is critical to models of rifting and volcanism. For instance, previous studies have shown that the isotopic signature of many West Antarctic basalts, as well as some basalts from New Zealand, have a common mantle component; one whose composition is characteristic of a mantle plume source. This has led development of a model for plume-assisted breakup. A complete high-quality geochemical data set for Royal Society Range basalts will allow this project to test theories of mantle plume activity and plume involvement in the breakup of New Zealand from Antarctica. This work is collaborative with investigators at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and at Royal Holloway, University of London doc1335 none Johnston This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Malcolm Johnston of the Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California and Professor Yoshikazu Tanaka at Kyoto University in Japan. The researchers will be undertaking a study of the transient electromagnetic field generation on active volcanoes: a comparison of the response from Long Valley Caldera in California and the Aso volcano in Japan. The generation of electric and magnetic fields on volcanoes and the relation these have to the role of stress, heat, fluids and gases in volcano processes are fundamental questions that have long gone unanswered because little data is available on active volcanoes and there is a poor understanding of the processes involved. They will bring together the observations on Aso, Unzen and Long Valley s active volcanoes with theoretical and laboratory measurements on self potential generation to provide some understanding on what the data means. They will then separate processes that complicate interpretation of these data and investigate the practical implications that these data have for volcano process monitoring. In particular, they hope to identify the physics involved in generation of self-potential anomalies. They expect to show that the primary contribution to self-potential at temperatures high enough to generate a gas phase arises from gas-related charge transport processes. At lower temperatures, the primary contribution is from electrokinetic effects modulated by elevation effects. The researchers will then quantify these last two effects in field experiments at volcanic areas and also in regions where no volcanic activity has occurred, but known subsurface fluid flow occurs. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. Results of the research has implications for the detection of active dikes and sills and, more importantly, for detection of changes in intrusion activity. This research advances international human resources through the participation of graduate students. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of the research in scientific journals and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc1336 none MacDonald This US-Colombia collaborative research project between Dr. William MacDonald, SUNY, Binghampton and Dr. Gloria Maria Sierra, Eafit University, Antioquia, Colombia, proposes to investigate the evolution of the early Cenozoic Amaga Basin at the north end of the Interandean Graben of the northern Andes, with emphasis on magnetic characteristics of the Eocene Amaga formation and their uses in interpreting sedimentary and tectonic processes. The objectives are to improve stratigraphic correlation, to decipher sediment flow directions, and to interpret sources of magnetic components of these clastic continental sediments. In particular, magnetic polarity stratigraphy, variation of magnetic anisotropic susceptibility, and analysis of heavy minerals, will be undertaken from samples from several sections around the basin. These data will be integrated with those from other specialists to interpret sedimentary events in the Amaga Basin that will provide insights into tectonic events in the adjacent Central and Western Cordilleras bounding the basin on either side. They will also be helpful in deciphering movements along the bounding faults along the basin margins. A practical aspect of the study involves the distribution of coal deposits and associated coal-gas: an improved knowledge of the stratigraphy will help in estimating resources and in exploration and recovery of these resources which are important to the local economy doc1337 none With the support of Dr. Steven Kuhn, Ms. Marcy Rockman will collect and analyze data for her doctoral dissertation. Using the example of the resettlement of northwestern Europe at the end of the last Ice Age, she will study how humans come to know and use natural resources when they can only learn about them from the landscape itself. During the last Ice Age, which dates to approximately 20,000 to 14,000 years ago, the ice sheets reached almost to the location of present-day London and human populations were concentrated in southwestern France and in the central Rhine valley. By the time the ice retreated, the region from the Paris Basin northward through the British Isles had been abandoned for at least 6,000 years. The first humans to re- enter this area had to learn the locations and limitations of the region s natural resources anew, using only their knowledge of landscape from which they had come and their own experiences in the unfamiliar environment. While such colonizations with limited information have taken place many times throughout human history, the actual process by which humans learn a new landscape is not yet well understood. Ms. Rockman s research will develop a means of studying this process and focus closely on the very beginnings of the modern human occupation of northwestern Europe. In this study, the landscape learning process will be studied from the perspective of human discovery and early use of outcrops of chert, a fine-grained rock commonly used to make stone tools in prehistory. Ms. Rockman will collect published stone tool sourcing, radiocarbon date, and other artifact assemblage information from sites dating between approximately 14,000 and 9,500 years ago from England, northern France, and eastern Belgium. Selected extant stone tool collections representing this full time range will be studied in regard to the range of rock and particularly chert types represented. Using the stone tool sourcing information as a guide to specific geological features and areas, Ms. Rockman will take field measurements of the topography of the chert sources. All this data will then be combined in geographic information systems (GIS) analyses. Final interpretations will be made from the characteristics and use patterns of individual chert sources and comparison of the overall complexity of land use across the late glacial and early post-glacial time periods. This project will provide help to explain how humans learn to live in a new place. It will provide a base of both data and method against which archaeologists may test other colonizations. It will serve as an example of the potential of combined archaeological, geological, and computer modeling research, and it will contribute to the interdisciplinary training of a promising young scientist doc1338 none Raikh This award supports a third year of funding for Mikhail Raikh and students from University of Utah in a collaboration with Michael Schreiber of the Physics Department at the University of Chemnitz, Germany. The research funded by this award will further our understanding of the integer quantum Hall effect by combining the expertise of the U.S. group in analytical techniques with that of the German group in numerical simulation. Using a novel technique, called the renormalization group approach, the combined German and U.S. groups will be able to carry the understanding of the quantum Hall effect to a new level. In addition, the collaboration will investigate the sensitivity of neutral objects to magnetic flux according to the Aharanov-Bohm theory. The German group has access to excellent super-computing facilities and is world renowned for numerical studies of the physics of disordered systems. The opportunity this joint, collaborative research effort presents junior researchers is substantial, and the work done on this proposal will help institutionalize the relationship between the German and U.S. research groups doc1339 none Caswell This award supports a two-year collaborative research project between Dr. Hal Caswell of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts and Professor Takenori Takada of Hokkaido Tokai University in Japan. The researchers will undertake research on the spatio-temporal variation in plant demography: development and applications. Environments vary in space and time, and among the central problems in ecology are the documentation, analysis, and understanding of the consequences of this variation. Demographic models provide a powerful way to link data on environmental variation in individual rates of birth, survival, growth, and development to the resulting consequences for population growth. This project will combine recent developments in such models with a unique long-term data set documenting both spatial and temporal variation in a population of Erythronium japonicum, a perennial forest understory herb in Japan. They will use linear, nonlinear, and stochastic matrix population models to describe the population dynamics. Extensions of life table response experiment (LTRE) analysis will be used to quantify the contribution of each stage in the life cycle to spatial and temporal variation in (i) population growth rate, (ii) equilibrium population density, and (iii) stochastic population growth rate. The results will be the most complete analysis ever attempted of spatio-temporal variation in plant population dynamics. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of their research in scientific journals and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc1340 none Under the direction of Drs. Wirt Wills and Robert Hard, Mr. Gerry Raymond will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. For many years archaeologists have recognized the presence of cerros de trincheras (terraced hillsides) in the late prehistoric Southwest. Research indicates that they served multiple functions and that people both lived on them and used the terraces as agricultural fields. Recently however similar features have been discovered in the state of Chihuahua Mexico which are significantly earlier than their northern counterparts and which date to the Archaic period, over 3,000 years ago. The discovery of fragments of maize and other domestic plants in the terrace soil demonstrates that the inhabitants were practicing agriculture at a time and place where hunting and gathering had been believed to be the sole source of subsistence. Mr. Raymond will conduct archaeological research at a newly recognized group of cerros de trincheras in Chihuahua to determine how they functioned. Because little is known about this group, he will conduct test excavations to recover cultural material as well as charcoal, faunal and botanical remains. These will permit age determination by radiocarbon dating and also provide information on the range of subsistence resources. Mr. Raymond also wishes to understand why relatively large amounts of labor were expended to build such terraces and why residents did not rely on less labor intensive flat ground farming. Based on analyses from later U.S. counterparts, he postulates that individual terraces create separate microenvironments with unique moisture characteristics based on slight differences in runoff catchment. Some terraces, he believes were better watered than others and in variable semi-arid rainfall conditions, productivity among terraces would vary from year to year based on unpredictable rainfall level. Thus terracing would serve a risk minimizing function. Using a geographic information system to display and correlate data, he will map terraces, measure their slope, catchment area and geological context and determine whether observed variation meets his prediction. He will also set the individual terraced hillsides into a larger geographic context to learn how they functioned in a broader ecological subsistence context. The research is situated within a theoretical framework of optimum foraging theory. This work is important for several reasons. The existence of Archaic cerros de trincheras was completely unexpected and significantly changes archaeologists understanding of the development of agriculture and the shift from hunting and gathering to farming over a wide region in the U.S. Southwest and Mexico. Mr. Raymond s work will add a new set of cases to a very small and inadequate sample. The research will provide new insight into how these features functioned and provide data of interest to many scientists. It will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc1341 none Tromp, Jeroen The investigator has developed and implemented a spectral-element method (SEM) for the simulation of three-dimensional (3D) seismic wave propagation. The method has been benchmarked against discrete-wavenumber reflectivity synthetics for layercake models, and it has been demonstrated that the effects of free surface topography, attenuation, anisotropy, and fluid-solid boundaries can be accurately accommodated. The method will be used to assess seismic risk in the L.A. area based upon a 3D basin model. The main objective of this proposal is to extend the SEM to include global wave propagation. The code has been successfully benchmarked against normal-mode synthetics for a 3D Earth model with a size of 1 6th of the mantle by volume and the isotropic, elastic structure of the Preliminary Reference Earth Model PREM. A conforming mesh that enables the modeling of wave propagation in the entire Earth has been constructed. To accurately model 3D global wave propagation the effects of anisotropy, attenuation, self-gravitation, and a stably stratified fluid core need to be incorporated doc1342 none O Connell The general goals of the project are to continue GPS measurements of deformation in the South American Andes, and to integrate deformation with the earthquake cycle and with coupling on the subduction zone and longer-term tectonic deformation. The importance of the research is that it examines fundamental mechanisms behind how subduction created the modern Andes and deformed this continental margin. Specific research tasks include: obtaining and analyzing GPS data from Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia and coordinating with other GPS efforts in South America; expanding the principal investigator s GPS network; looking at back-arc deformation and at the post-seismic effects of the earthquake; and improving velocity estimates. The P.I.s will model longer term deformation (tectonic deformation) associated with the stress history of subduction and mantle coupling in the wedge. They will model various tractions arising from the edge of the lithosphere, the base of the plate, larger scale mantle flow, plate motions and basal forces. They will examine the distribution and nature of seismic deformation related to subduction in both the lithosphere and crust, especially the earthquake, and the deformation associated with oblique convergence. This combination of the GPS measurements and mantle flow modeling is an attempt to understand the fundamental mantle forces that shape convection at an archetypal convergent continental margin. The multifaceted approach (GPS, seismology, modeling) will integrate the various geodynamic components into a comprehensive model of the mountain building process doc1343 none Smalley The general goals of the project are to continue GPS measurements of deformation in the South American Andes, and to integrate deformation with the earthquake cycle and with coupling on the subduction zone and longer-term tectonic deformation. The importance of the research is that it examines fundamental mechanisms behind how subduction created the modern Andes and deformed this continental margin. Specific research tasks include: obtaining and analyzing GPS data from Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia and coordinating with other GPS efforts in South America; expanding the principal investigator s GPS network; looking at back-arc deformation and at the post-seismic effects of the earthquake; and improving velocity estimates. The P.I.s will model longer term deformation (tectonic deformation) associated with the stress history of subduction and mantle coupling in the wedge. They will model various tractions arising from the edge of the lithosphere, the base of the plate, larger scale mantle flow, plate motions and basal forces. They will examine the distribution and nature of seismic deformation related to subduction in both the lithosphere and crust, especially the earthquake, and the deformation associated with oblique convergence. This combination of the GPS measurements and mantle flow modeling is an attempt to understand the fundamental mantle forces that shape convection at an archetypal convergent continental margin. The multifaceted approach (GPS, seismology, modeling) will integrate the various geodynamic components into a comprehensive model of the mountain building process doc1344 none Liu This award supports Fu-Tong Liu and students from the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology in a collaboration with Hans-Joachim Gabius of the Department of Physiology at the University of Munich, Germany. The research focus is on the analysis of the recognition of glycans by their receptors, such as Galectin. Galectin, only recently described, has been shown to be involved in fundamental biological processes such as growth control, cell adhesion, and cell migration. In order to understand the functions or the galectin family, it is necessary to understand the structures of the proteins and to deign galectin-type-specific inhibitors to interfere with the activity of a certain galectin. This international collaboration will employ complementary expertise and facilities, since the U.S. side has extensive experience in molecular cloning of recombinant galectins and development of mice with targeted deletion of a specific galectin, and the German group has developed experience in a variety of physicochemical measurements. This joint collaborative research effort also presents junior researchers with the opportunity to work internationally, and the work done on this proposal will help institutionalize the relationship between the German and U.S. research groups doc1345 none Sheraga, Harold A. The intellectual goal of this project is not, primarily, to predict protein structure but, rather, to gain an understanding of how inter-residue interactions determine the three-dimensional structure of a globular protein (the protein folding problem). For such an understanding, use is made of an ab initio approach, i.e. one based solely on the global optimization of a potential energy function (including the role of the solvent), without the use of secondary-structure predictions, homology modeling, threading, etc. Such an approach requires both a reliable potential function and an efficient procedure for global optimization; one cannot implement one without the other. Therefore, the specific aims are (i) to improve the potential function, (ii) to improve procedures for global optimization, and (iii) to apply them, first, to globular proteins of known structure and, then, to proteins of unknown structure in the CASP-like blind tests. The potential function is being improved by ab initio calculations plus refinement by the same global optimization procedure that was used for ab initio predictions of crystal structures (an analog of the protein folding problem). The multiple-minima problem (due to the existence of numerous local minima in the multidimensional potential energy surface) is being surmounted by a newly-developed hierarchical method, which incorporates (among other procedures) a united-residue (UNRES) description of the polypeptide chain, a Conformational Space Annealing (CSA) method, and the Monte-Carlo-plus-energy minimization (MCM) method and its descendant [the Conformation-Family Monte Carlo (CFMC) method]; this hierarchical method for global optimization was very successful in the CASP3 blind test, and is being significantly improved for later CASP-like blind tests. With the PI s own PC-Linux cluster, and considerable allocated time on both the NT clusters of the Cornell Theory Center and the supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, sufficient access is available to the necessary resources to carry out this project. The proposed theoretical approach will provide a basic understanding of the conformational and folding properties of proteins, and will provide training, not only for the two research associates carrying out this research, but also for several postdocs and graduate students working together with these research associates doc1346 none Rajeshwar This three-year award for U.S.-France collaboration involves Krishnan Rajeshwar and N.R. de Tacconi of the University of Texas at Arlington, and Daniel Lincot and colleagues at the Ecole Nationale Superieure de Chimie de Paris. The investigators propose to investigate and conduct joint experiments on the mechanics of cathodic electrodeposition of metal oxide films using soluble precursor species and the role of solution additives on cathodic oxide film growth. The Texas and French groups bring to this collaboration complementary expertise in solution chemistry, metal oxide films, and in semiconductor film deposition. The collaboration takes advantage of a cathodic technique developed by the French group. This award represents the U.S. side of a joint proposal to NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the U.S. investigators and graduate students. The CNRS will support the visits of the French researchers to the United States. The collaboration will advance understanding of the electrosynthesis of metal oxide films and their technological applications in optoelectronics, solar cells, electrochromics, batteries, and water treatment doc1347 none Sadowsky This award supports the participation of American scientists in a U.S.-Japan seminar on symbioses between plant and microorganisms for sustainable agriculture and bioremediation, to be held in St. Paul, Minnesota from August 8-12, . The co-organizers are professors Michael Sadowsky of the University of Minnesota and Professor Yoshikatsu Murooka of Osaka University in Japan. Biological nitrogen fixation continues to remain a top priority research area among scientists in the U.S. and abroad. Nitrogen fixation has been targeted for emphasis due to its enormous importance for agriculture, and its ecological significance an sustainability. This is especially true of symbiotic nitrogen fixation, the area to be covered by the seminar. Plant growth and productivity is limited by nitrogen availability. Research efforts directed towards improving the efficiency of symbiotic nitrogen fixation and to extend nitrogen fixation to other major food crops, including rice, wheat, and corn, will have a major impact on food production and population growth. In recent years significant advances have been made in our basic understanding of biological nitrogen fixation, extending far beyond potential crop improvement. The topic areas to be discussed will include information concerning both the plant host and their bacterial counterparts in the symbiotic nitrogen fixing-process. Areas to be discussed in detail are enzymology, molecular genetics, plant cell biology, whole plant physiology, molecular microbial ecology, plant genetics, and genomics. The Seminar will consist of the following topics: 1) genomics of both symbiotic partners in plant-microbe interactions; 2) molecular communications in plant-microbe interactions; and 3) applications of symbioses for sustainable agriculture and bioremediation. Seminar organizers have made a special effort to involve younger researchers and graduate students as both participants and observers. The exchange of ideas and data with Japanese experts in this field will enable U.S. participants to advance their own work, and will set the stage for future collaborative projects. Dissemination of information on the seminar will be available on the World Wide Web doc1348 none The objective of this project is to quantify the metabolic consequences of tryptophan overproduction upon central carbon metabolism and indole alkaloid pathways in Catharanthus roseus hairy root tissue cultures. This research has four objectives which include: (1) the generation of transgenic C. roseus hairy root clones that overexpress anthranilate synthase and tryptophan decarboxylase; (2) the characterization of the above strains in terms of growth, nutrient levels, amino acid pools, and indole alkaloid accumulation; (3) the mathematical analysis of intracellular fluxes; and (4) the measurement of intracellular fluxes using new in vitro 13 C NMR techniques doc1207 none Furlong Dixon The Eastern California Shear Zone serves as a major component of the Pacific-North American plate boundary, accommodating 20-25% of the total strain along this boundary, with little deformation occurring between the San Andreas system and the shear zone. The San Andreas system is traditionally considered to mark the plate boundary between the Pacific plate and the North American plate, but the nature of the Eastern California Shear Zone is controversial, with hypotheses varying between it being completely analogous to a plate boundary to reflecting local effects within the edge of the North American plate. This project intends to combine new GPS observations and geodynamical modeling to test these various hypotheses. Results are expected to better clarify the role of the Eastern California Shear Zone in Pacific plate - North American plate tectonics doc1350 none Lyyra This two-year award for U.S.-France collaboration involves A. Marjatta Lyyra and her group at Temple University and Michel Broyer and Amanda Ross at the University of Lyon I. They propose to conduct experimental and theoretical studies of electronic states of alkali atoms and dimers using a new photoassociation technique and high resolution multiphon spectroscopy. The Temple University group brings to this collaboration experimental expertise in high frequency resolution and triple resonance spectroscopy. This is complemented by the French group s theoretical expertise and their precise techniques in Fourier Transform Spectrometry and ab initio and long-range calculations. This award represents the U.S. side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the U.S. investigator and graduate students. CNRS will support the visits of the French researchers to the United States. The collaboration will advance understanding of the behavior of molecular interactions and future experiments in cold atoms. mechanical properties of magnets and the approach for tailoring sample properties for application in magnetic recording media doc1210 none Gaherty-EAR Revenaugh- Garnero- The Canadian Northwest Experiment (CANOE hereafter) will employ a Y-shaped, 48-station broadband seismic array to address two of the great unsolved problems in the evolution of the solid Earth: the assembly and stabilization of the continents, and the importance of the Earth s core-mantle boundary (CMB) as the birthplace of mantle plumes and the graveyard of subducted slabs. Constructed via a sequence of collisional events associated with subduction, continents grow outwards from nuclei that stabilize quickly, experiencing little deformation over the subsequent billions of years. This stability is presumably due to dynamic processes associated with craton construction, but is poorly understood. The best locale in the world for mapping continent construction is the northwestern corner of the Canadian shield, which is characterized by a progression from the 2.5-4 billion-year-old Slave province (home to the oldest known rocks on Earth) to the recently uplifted Northern Cordillera of the great Rocky Mountain system. The investigators will deploy broadband seismometers across this transition, with a western arm following the Alaskan highway from Whitehorse, BC to Edmonton, AB, and an eastern arm reaching from Fort Nelson, BC to Yellowknife, NWT. Using records of local, regional, and distant earthquakes, the investigators will construct detailed images of the mantle and crust associated with this cordillera-to-craton transition. By recording earthquakes from the far reaches of the Pacific basin, the CANOE deployment will also provide unsurpassed sampling of the seismic structure of the lowermost mantle. The 90 s witnessed a parade of new and unusual discoveries about the Earth s lower mantle and CMB, including evidence for compositional heterogeneity, partial melting, and anisotropic mantle fabric that have strong implications for mantle dynamic processes. CANOE, situated within 120o of the vast majority of the world s deep seismicity, provides a remarkable opportunity to examine the lower mantle in greater detail. This includes unsurpassed coverage of the CMB beneath Hawaii, providing an excellent opportunity to test models of the genesis of this hotspot archetype. Following the experiment, all data will be made available to the community through the IRIS Data Management Center (www.iris.washington.edu). Seismic instrumentation will be provided by the IRIS PASSCAL program. A portion of the experiment is funded by the Canadian Lithoprobe program via a grant to the University of British Columbia doc1210 none Gaherty-EAR Revenaugh- Garnero- The Canadian Northwest Experiment (CANOE hereafter) will employ a Y-shaped, 48-station broadband seismic array to address two of the great unsolved problems in the evolution of the solid Earth: the assembly and stabilization of the continents, and the importance of the Earth s core-mantle boundary (CMB) as the birthplace of mantle plumes and the graveyard of subducted slabs. Constructed via a sequence of collisional events associated with subduction, continents grow outwards from nuclei that stabilize quickly, experiencing little deformation over the subsequent billions of years. This stability is presumably due to dynamic processes associated with craton construction, but is poorly understood. The best locale in the world for mapping continent construction is the northwestern corner of the Canadian shield, which is characterized by a progression from the 2.5-4 billion-year-old Slave province (home to the oldest known rocks on Earth) to the recently uplifted Northern Cordillera of the great Rocky Mountain system. The investigators will deploy broadband seismometers across this transition, with a western arm following the Alaskan highway from Whitehorse, BC to Edmonton, AB, and an eastern arm reaching from Fort Nelson, BC to Yellowknife, NWT. Using records of local, regional, and distant earthquakes, the investigators will construct detailed images of the mantle and crust associated with this cordillera-to-craton transition. By recording earthquakes from the far reaches of the Pacific basin, the CANOE deployment will also provide unsurpassed sampling of the seismic structure of the lowermost mantle. The 90 s witnessed a parade of new and unusual discoveries about the Earth s lower mantle and CMB, including evidence for compositional heterogeneity, partial melting, and anisotropic mantle fabric that have strong implications for mantle dynamic processes. CANOE, situated within 120o of the vast majority of the world s deep seismicity, provides a remarkable opportunity to examine the lower mantle in greater detail. This includes unsurpassed coverage of the CMB beneath Hawaii, providing an excellent opportunity to test models of the genesis of this hotspot archetype. Following the experiment, all data will be made available to the community through the IRIS Data Management Center (www.iris.washington.edu). Seismic instrumentation will be provided by the IRIS PASSCAL program. A portion of the experiment is funded by the Canadian Lithoprobe program via a grant to the University of British Columbia doc1353 none Sheenan The western U.S. is one of the best places in the world to study continental evolution because there is a preserved unique record of the growth, stabilization, maturation, rifting, and incipient dismemberment of a continent. In particular, we can see how older lithospheric structures (in this case Archean and Proterozoic) influenced younger tectonic events, including development of the huge, presently active, orogenic plateau that dominates the western U.S. and the progressive dismemberment and dispersal of continental fragments along its active western margin. Continents are the long-term record keepers of plate interactions before 200 Ma. However, accumulated modification often obscures the previous record. The western U.S. is unique in that this part of the continent was assembled in the Proterozoic around an Archean cratonic core , then was truncated in the Phanerozoic at a high angle so as to create a new continental margin oblique to the Precambrian structures. The result was the creation of a wide region - the western U.S. - where nature caught all stages of structural reactivation and continental modification. The main goal of the CD-ROM (Continental Dynamics of the Rocky Mountains) Project is to understand the processes of formation and modification of continental lithosphere. Phase 1 of the CD-ROM experiment was a three year project to improve our structural and petrologic knowledge of the lithosphere and to test the hypothesis that the lithospheric structure produced during assembly of southwestern North America has profoundly influenced physical and chemical modification of the continental lithosphere during all subsequent magmatic and tectonic events, including those related to the ongoing asthenospheric flow. The principal investigators studied two Proterozoic structures with a range of seismic and geologic methods: the Cheyenne Belt and the Jemez lineament. Reflection, refraction, and teleseismic investigations are providing crustal - and lithospheric - scale images of major structures. A more complete picture of the evolution of the lithosphere has been added by geologic studies of Precambrian shear zones and Phanerozoic structures, xenolith studies, and geomorphologic and exhumation studies of present landforms. Phase 1 brought together 18 investigators from 14 institutions, including collaboration with a German-funded refraction team. With these awards, one year of funding is provided to continue to process, interpret, and integrate the diverse data sets generated in Phase 1 and to begin developing geodynamic models. The Principal Investigators will also explore new methods of data integration towards the goal of developing a master model for lithospheric structure doc1354 none Loos This three-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research in materials research involves Alfred C. Loos, Co-Director of the Science and Technology Center for Composite Materials and Structures at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, David E. Kranbuehl of the College of William and Mary, Gerard Seytre and Gisele Boiteux of the Universite de Lyon I and Henry Sautereau and others at the Institut National des Sciences Appliquees in Lyon, France. The project addresses studies of polymer forming and non-polymer forming systems. The objective is to monitor chemical and physical phenomena in polymers. Specifically the investigators will develop new modes for processing through the application of so-called time of flight techniques to a variety of polymer resins and blends. Changes in polymer resin states will also be monitored. The US group brings to this collaboration expertise on cure processing models of polymer resin transfer molding, resin film, and use of dielectric sensors for in situ monitoring. This is complemented by French expertise in structure-property relationships of polymer materials and synthesis and formulation of polymer blends. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigators and graduate students. The CNRS will support the visits of French researchers to the United States. The collaboration will advance fundamental understanding of the macroscopic processing parameters of polymers. The research has potential commercial applications in composite fabrication, reactive processing, coatings, and curing of polymer materials doc1355 none The investigators hope to show that the otolith chemistry of bluefin tuna, specifically Sr Ca and Ba Ca measured at microscale resolution and with high analytical precision, will be a definitive signal in the recognition of trans-Atlantic migrations, stock mixing, and spawning habitats. The stock structure of Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) is currently one of the most controversial issues in fisheries management. The controversy centers on the management of Atlantic bluefin according to a two-stock model that assumes independent spawning grounds in the Mediterranean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. To date, there is no biological evidence to support this assumption. The investigators propose that the elemental chemistry of bluefin tuna otoliths can be analyzed to test the two-stock hypothesis and yield information about the spawning habits and habitats of individual fish. Microconstituent analysis of otoliths can be used to link individual fish to a particular hydrographic environment assuming that tracers are either incorporated into the otolith in proportion to their concentration in the surrounding seawater or by a temperature-dependent fractionation. Fish that aggregate for any length of time will share a multi-elemental fingerprint independent of genetic identity, which can be used to delineate stocks and determine population structure doc976 none Establishment of a National Science Foundation Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC) in Coatings at the University of Southern Mississippi and Eastern Michigan University is proposed. The Center s mission will be two-fold: (i) to be a world leading academic organization that develops relevant, pre-competitive scientific knowledge for understanding and advancing the technologies of polymeric coatings and (ii) to enlarge the cadre of scientists and technologists capable of being productive in the field of coatings. With this program the Center will directly address barriers that impede progress in coatings: (1) a shortage of precise polymer synthetic methods, (2) a need to better understand film formation and molecular level processes that control resistance to mechanical and chemical damage, (3) a need to extend and develop systematic understanding of degradation processes in coatings, and (4) a shortage of scientists and technologists who understand coatings science and technology doc1357 none Rothschild This award supports a third year of funding for Richard Rothschild and students from the University of California-San Diego in a collaboration with Rudiger Staubert of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Tuebingen, Germany. The research focus is on the analysis and interpretation of X-ray data from the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE). The U.S. team has a strong knowledge of the strengths and limitations of the data obtained from RXTE and the German team is strong in the development and use of advanced interpretive tools. Together, the two teams are in a unique position to use the raw X-ray data to answer current astrophysical questions. Specifically, the two groups will improve our understanding of processes associated with neutron stars and black holes. The opportunity this joint, collaborative research effort presents junior researchers is substantial, and the work done on this proposal will help institutionalize the relationship between the German and U.S. research groups doc1358 none Mirkin This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Michael Mirkin, of CUNY s Queens College in New York and Professor Takashi Kakiuchi of Kyoto University in Japan. The researchers will undertake a study of charge-transfer coupling dynamics in liquid-liquid two-phase microparticles. The goal of this proposal is to combine several unique microelectrochemical and spectroscopic approaches developed by co-PI s for characterization of charge transfer processes at the interface between two immiscible liquid phases. These electrochemical and optical techniques will be used to probe heterogeneous reactions in two-phase microscopic particles. Among such microparticles are microemulsions, biological cells and organelles, and phospholipid vesicles. Although these systems are very different, their common feature is the presence of a micrometer or susbmicrometer-sized liquid-liquid interface either clear or covered with a molecular film of a surfactant (e.g., phospholipid). The main focus will be on experimental and theoretical studies of coupling of electron transfer (ET) and ion transfer (IT) processes at microscopic liquid interfaces. The approaches developed for model liquid interfaces will then be used to probe the dynamics of charge transfer coupling in biological systems. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. Results of this research should significantly improve our understanding of the mechanisms of charge transfer reactions at liquid interfaces with important implications for biological cells, sensors and biomedical systems. This research advances international human resources through the participation of postdocs and graduate students. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of their research in scientific journals and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc1359 none Schopf This award supports William Schopf and students from the University of California-Los Angeles in a collaboration with Wolfgang Heckl of the Center for Nanoscience at the University of Munich, Germany. The project will focus on the development of a new paleontological technique that will be useful in identification of Precambrian cellular microfossils and their remains. Through the use of atomic force microscopy (AFM), the researchers intend to investigate the morphology of microfossils previously located and identified by older methods of microscopy, in order to learn about the nanostructure of the fossil remains. The principal investigator on the German side is a pioneer in the application of AFM to biological and geobiological problems and will contribute unique expertise to the research team. Exchange of junior researchers is emphasized to add an international dimension to their training and to allow them to establish international connections early in their careers doc1360 none The field of Solid Freeform Fabrication (SFF) has developed significantly over the fast 15 years. The ability to make a part quickly with minimal (imitations on geometric shape has spawned applications in the fields of transportation, medicine, the military, microelectronics, and others. With this growth has developed the need for researchers to meet to discuss fundamental and developmental issues of SFF. The annual SFF Symposium was first held in to provide a forum for technical exchange of all aspects of SFF: materials, process development, physical and computational modeling, and applications. It is the oldest continuous meeting in the area and is reputed to be one of the top research meetings in the world. From the beginning, the philosophy of the SFF Symposium Organizing Committee of student involvement has been crucial to the success of the meeting and the field. Student involvement is encouraged by offering a student registration rate that is approximately one-third of the regular rate and which for the last several years has in fact been approximately $150 below the per capita break-even cost. This subsidy has been effective in attracting students. Sixty-six students attended the most recent Symposium, approximately 37% of the entire meeting. Participants represented 51 universities (19 international universities), 26 industries (5 international) and 8 national labs and government agencies. The interaction with the scientific leaders of the field is beneficial to these young scientists and represents an investment in the future of the US scientific infrastructure doc1361 none Vourlitis This U.S.-Brazil award provides support from the Division of International Programs for a cooperative research between Dr. George Vourlitis, California State University, San Marcos, and Dr. Nicolau Priante Filho at Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso, in Cuiaba, Brazil. They will study the land use implications on the net ecosystem production and energy balance of tropical forest ecosystem. This project will build upon an existing collaboration between the two institutions to measure the net ecosystem production (NEP) of Amazonian tropical transitional forest. NEP is the forest assimilation of atmospheric CO2 through gross primary production minus ecosystem CO2 loss to the atmosphere by plant and soil respiration. They have been measuring the NEP of Brazilian cerradao (the tropical seasonal forest) and will now add the measurement of cattle pasture, which is the dominant form of land cover change in southern Amazonia. There is an urgent need to understand the role of tropical terrestrial ecosystems in the global CO2 balance. This research will fill in a gap in our understanding of tropical ecosystem carbon cycling. The PIs will measure the NEP of mature, intact cerradao and cattle pasture of northern Mato Grosso. They will then link measurements of NEP and microclimate to a process-based model to assess the implications of land cover change on the seasonal and interannual rates and patterns of NEP. Besides the benefit to this area of research, this project will include the training of young researchers on both sides, exposing them to new research methods and technology doc1362 none Brockwell This award supports the participation of American scientists in a U.S.-Japan seminar on statistical time series analysis, to be held in Kyoto, Japan from June 18-22, . The co-organizers are professors Peter Brockwell of Colorado State University and Professor Yuzo Hosoya of Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. During the last ten years there has been a very rapid development of new theory and methodology in the field of time series analysis. This has been motivated by the need to develop new and more realistic models for time series occurring in a variety of applied areas, most notably in the rapidly expanding field of financial modeling and in the geophysical and biomedical sciences. The Seminar will consist of the following topics: 1) financial and econometric applications; 2) spatial and related processes; and 3) non-linear and non-Gaussian models. Seminar organizers have made a special effort to involve younger researchers and graduate students as both participants and observers. The exchange of ideas and data with Japanese experts in this field will enable U.S. participants to advance their own work, and will set the stage for future collaborative projects. Dissemination of information on the seminar will be available on the World Wide Web doc1363 none Maatta This three-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research in chemistry involves Eric A. Maatta of Kansas State University and Pierre Gouzerh of the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie. They will collaborate on studies of polyoxometalate clusters, a diverse group of chemical compounds. Nitrogen substituted polyoxometalates will be synthesized and characterized using several different techniques: single-crystal X-ray diffraction, cyclic voltammetry and polarography, IR, Raman and electronic spectroscopies, and multinuclear NMR spectroscopy. The US investigator brings to this collaboration expertise in metal-imido chemistry. This is complemented by the French group s expertise and experience in characterizing polyoxometalates. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator and graduate and undergraduate students. CNRS will support the visits of French researchers to the United States. The collaboration will advance fundamental understanding of a new class of novel materials that have a role in catalysis, medicine and magnetics doc1364 none Zborowski This three-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research involves Maciej Zborowski at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation and Mauricio Hoyos of the Ecole Superieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielle in Paris, France. The project addresses magnetic cell separation in general and magnetic cell sorting processes. The investigators have developed a research scale, open gradient, quadrupole magnetic flow sorter in order to study cell behavior in a magnetic field, in flowing aqueous media. They will further evaluate this system and its separation potential over current, batch-wise magnetic separator systems. The US investigator brings to this collaboration expertise in cell sorting and cell separation equipment. This is complemented by theoretical expertise in fluid dynamics and separation methods (split-flow thin channel separation or SPLITT) developed by the French group. The project will advance understanding of fluid dynamics that contribute to cell separation and sorting and applications in biotechnology and biomedical research. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator and graduate student. The CNRS will support the visits of French researchers to the United States doc1365 none Vogelius This two-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research in applied mathematics involves Michael S. Vogelius and others at Rutgers University and Gregoire Allaire and Eric Bonnetier of the Centre de Mathematiques Appliquees at the Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France. The objective of this project is to study problems related to interfaces in composite material media. The interfaces can be microscopic or macroscopic. In each case the investigators will study the effect of these interfaces on the macroscopic behavior of the composite. The project takes advantage of complementary US and French expertise in analytical and computational aspects of elliptic Partial Differential Equations (PDE) that appear in the context of composite media. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator, members of his group and some graduate students. The CNRS will support the visits of French researchers to the United States. The collaboration will contribute to modeling of inhomogeneous and multiscale materials (composites). Composite materials, due to combined strength and weight, are important to the development of new materials and new technologies doc1366 none Constable This award supports Robert Constable and students from Cornell University in a collaboration with Joerg Siekmann of the Computer Science Department at the University of Saarland, Germany. The research funded by this award will focus on computer-based mathematical proofs. Current automated theorem prove non-trivial theorems, but must search huge spaces in order to do so, requiring a lot of time and computer resources, and a combination of automated tools and user interaction is necessary to solve complex problems. In order to develop a new breed of proof planning systems, this reseach will lead to improvements in knowledge acquisition for computer proof planning, development of techniques to guide searches in computer theorem proving, standards for computer mathematical library functions, and user interfaces Each of these results will have significance for industrial and educational applications. The opportunity this joint, collaborative research effort presents junior researchers is substantial, and the work done on this proposal will help institutionalize the relationship between the German and U.S. research groups doc1367 none Davis This award supports John Davis and a graduate student from the University of Kansas in a collaboration with Jan Harff of the Institute for Baltic Research in Warnemunde, Germany. The research funded by this award will focus on variations in the properties of sediments from the Baltic Sea floor as they reflect variations in climate since the beginning of the last major glacial retreat, which occurred 13,000 years ago. Recent work has demonstrated the utility of applying statistical zonation and correlation techniques to physical properties of sediment cores from the Baltic floor. The work on this proposal, which will extend the analysis of core samples through the Kattegut and Skaggerak and into the North Sea, will elucidate connections between Baltic Sea sediment properties and other paleoclimate indicators. This joint collaborative research effort also presents junior researchers with the opportunity to work internationally, and the work done on this proposal will help institutionalize the relationship between the German and U.S. research groups doc1368 none Prentice et. al: Kurz: This award supports a one year lab-based study which will allow a detailed calibration between ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data and existing drilled sediment sequences from Lower Taylor Valley, which will improve the lithostratigraphy in the region. In addition, exposure-age dating of existing samples from the Hjorth Hill locality in Taylor Valley will also be carried out in order to test the multiple drift-sheet interpretation of the GPR data. All of the goals described in the revised scope of work are consistent with the goal of the original proposal, which was to resolve multiple WAIS glaciations and regional climate change. This work is complementary to studies of the variability of the West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) and will help to improve resolution of alpine and piedmont glacier variability during the latest Pleistocene doc1369 none Kinnally This three-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research in cellular biology involves Kathleen W. Kinnally and her research group at New York University and Stephan Thierry Manon of the Universite de Bordeaux II in Bordeaux, France. The collaboration is aimed at defining the role of bcl-2 proteins in protein translocation across mitochondrial membranes. The bcl-2 family of proteins found in yeast regulate the release of mitochondrial proteins that cause cell death. Experiments are planned to determine the fundamental mechanism by which the bcl-2 family regulates this release and how the proteins are transported across membrane barriers. The US investigator brings to this collaboration expertise in electrophysiology techniques applied to native and reconstituted mitochondria membranes. This is complemented by French expertise in performing protein import experiments and in generating yeast and yeast mitochondrial mutants. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator. The CNRS will support the visits of the French researcher to the United States. The collaboration will advance fundamental understanding into the mechanism by which proteins are translocated across membranes. These processes are important in many cellular functions including signaling, secretion, biogenesis of cell structures, compartmentation, and the mechanisms controlling tissue stability (homeostasis) and organogenesis doc1370 none Ceder This three-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research involves Gerbrand Ceder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Claude Delmas of the Institut de Chimie de la Matiere Condensee de Bordeaux in Bordeaux, France. The collaboration addresses synthesis, characterization, and modeling of electrode materials. In particular, the behavior, electrochemical and structural properties of lithium insertion materials and phase transformation of layered transition-metal oxides will be investigated. Lithium based systems are considered a promising technology for rechargeable batteries as a clean, inexpensive, portable form of power storage. The US group brings to this collaboration theoretical expertise in using first principles computations to predict properties of lithium insertion materials. This is complemented by the experimental capabilities of the French group in phase transitions, in synthesis and NMR studies of lithium based materials. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator and graduate student. The CNRS will support the visits of French researchers to the United States doc1371 none Kukla This three-year award for U.S.-France collaboration involves George Kukla of Columbia University s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory and Denis-Didier Rousseau of the University of Montpellier II. They propose to study abrupt climate shifts during the declining phase of the last interglacial. Between about 120 and 105 thousand years ago the climate of the Earth which was similar to today moved into a glacial state. The mechanism of this transition still remains unknown. The investigators will study in detail how fast the environment changed during that time in Western Europe. They will analyze thin sediment cores from lake beds of La Grande Pile in France. The US and French investigators bring to this collaboration complementary expertise and will conduct joint mineralogical, geochemical and palynological investigations of these cores currently stored in France. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator. CNRS will support the visits of French researchers to the United States. The collaboration will advance fundamental understanding of the causes of climate transition, and provide information on natural climate variability on long-time scales doc1372 none Saltzman The proposed research will result in a high-resolution (meter-scale) d13C stratigraphy for nearly 1.3 km of Carboniferous limestones exposed in the Arrow Canyon Range in southeastern Nevada. The Arrow Canyon Range has served a global reference section for the Carboniferous as a result of nearly 40 years of detailed work by academic, industry and government geologists. However, little geochemistry has been done to this point that can be used to address global processes (e.g., carbon cycling, continental weathering). The Mississippian samples for the carbon isotope curve will come from a section at Tungsten Gap and the Pennsylvanian portion will come from the section at Arrow Canyon. The two sections are essentially unfaulted and separated by less than 10 km along strike. Previous work has produced a detailed biostratigraphic framework for both sections using conodont and foraminifers, which will allow for the placement of the carbon isotope curve within a zonal time scale. Previous carbon isotope study in the Lower Mississippian portion of the Arrow Canyon succession has revealed well-preserved trends that can be correlated on a regional to global scale, indicating that the Arrow Canyon Range is well-suited for a detailed geochemical investigation. Carboniferous formations in the Arrow Canyon Range are almost entirely limestone, and make up an upward-shallowing succession during the Mississippian and at least two transgressive-regressive cycles, including cyclothemic deposition, during the Pennsylvanian. The carbon isotope curve will be integrated with similar data sets generated for the Carboniferous elsewhere in North America and Europe in order to test hypotheses about global changes in organic carbon burial rates and riverine weathering fluxes during a Greenhouse to Icehouse transition doc1373 none The purpose of this workshop is to bring together experts studying ice, evolution, biological preservation, ancient life, and astrobiology to assess our current knowledge of life in ancient ice, and to discuss future research and collaborations that would extend our knowledge in this area. A surprising number and variety of microorganisms have been recovered from the interior of glacial ice cores, dating back beyond 400,000 years. Researchers have performed systematic surveys for bacteria, fungi, algae, vascular plants (as pollen), and viruses in samples of ancient ice cores. Glacial ice is a natural air-sampling and preservation matrix. Through geological epochs wind-transported microorganisms have been trapped within these matrices. Thus, glacial ice provides a unique global source of microorganisms which, in turn, presents a view of both contemporary and ancient fungal, bacterial, and viral diversity. Profiles of successively older ice strata will extend temporal and spatial assessments of microbial biodiversity to geologic time frames. The microorganisms might then be utilized in subsequent studies as bioindicators of global change with respect to climate, geology and human activity. In addition, species detected across a continuous chronological sequence can be utilized to study phylogenic, mechanisms of longevity, dormancy and ecological relevance. Finally, developed and tested protocols may contribute to future searches for microorganisms in extraterrestrial ice (e.g., ice from the Moon, Mars, Europa, comets, etc.). The proposed workshop will engage in active discussion of life in ancient ice and discuss current research trends. The workshop will also serve as a medium for discussion of the methodological approaches needed for microbial detection in these ancient matrices. Various approaches, all involving fungi, bacteria, and viruses, will focus on assessing diversity in both time and space. Workshop presentations and discussions will serve to generate recommendations for future research and for improvements in methodologies. Ultimately all information will be disseminated through a workshop report, workshop summary books, and Internet information sites doc1374 none s of water dimer and trimer spectra. The US group brings to this collaboration experimental capabilities in terahertz VRT and IR spectroscopy. This is complemented by French theoretical expertise in Wigner pseudospectral method and vibrational predissociation. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator and graduate students. The CNRS will support the visits of French researchers to the United States. The collaboration addresses an important scientific question - the accurate determination of water s intermolecular potential. The project will advance fundamental understanding of the water force field doc1375 none Scherrer This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Phillip Scherrer of Stanford University and Professor Hiromoto Shibahashi of the University of Tokyo in Japan. The researchers will undertake a study of local-area helioseismology 118. Local-area helioseismology enables researchers to investigate subsurface flows and small-scale magnetic fields, which have been beyond the reach of traditional helioseismology based on observation of normal modes of solar oscillations. Combined with traditional solar physics and with traditional helioseismology, local-area helioseismology can pave the way to the understanding of the solar activity cycle, and the Sun itself as an astrophysical plasma laboratory. The collaboration aims at advancing local-area helioseismology, with active American solar observation programs (GONG and MDI SOHO) and the Japanese program (Solar-B). The proposed research is focused on developing new methods of data analyses and theoretical interpretations and inferences. First, they will develop methods of data analysis and interpretation for the local-area helioseismology and analyze the data from the currently running projects, to carry out 3D tomography for flow and sound-speed anomaly due to the magnetic field, and to detect the leakage of wave into the chromosphere. If they can detect waves that travel to the backside of the Sun and them come back, through the central region of the Sun, probing the solar core will be possible too. Second, they will investigate the possibility of local-area helioseismology using very high-resolution velocity field data such as is expected from the Solar Optical Telescope (SOT) on-board Solar-B and other future high-resolution ground-based and space projects. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. This research advances international human resources through the participation of graduate students. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of their research in scientific journals and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc1376 none Cheng This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Xiaodong Cheng of Emory University in Georgia and Professor Masahiro Nishibori of Okayama University in Japan. The researchers will be undertaking a study of the structural analysis of histamine N-methyltransferase and the development of specific inhibitors for clinical use. Histamine mediates a variety of physiologic and pathologic responses in different tissues and cells. In addition to being an important chemical mediator of inflammation, histamine is also involved in neurotransmission. In the central nervous system, histamine signaling is terminated by methylation via N.-methyltransferase (HNMT) which converts histamine to methylhistamine. The goal of the proposal is to design specific and potent inhibitors of HNMT to elevate the histamine level in the central nervous system. The researchers will determine the ternary structures of human HNMT in complex with histamine (substrate) and known inhibitors. These structures will illustrate (l) the interaction between the enzyme and histamine and the reason for it s restricted specificity and (2) the interactions between the enzyme and inhibitors, and the origins of potency and selectivity. The combined knowledge could lead to development of more potent and selective inhibitors. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. Since Alzheimer s disease is associated with a decrease of the histamine level in the brain, the results of the research could have a potential therapeutic value for treatment of Alzheimer s disease. This research advances international human resources through the participation of postdocs. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of the research in scientific journals and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc1377 none Zhu Weathering rates for silicate minerals exert important controls on groundwater and surface water quality, nutrient availability, and the global carbon cycling and its impact on global climatic changes over geological time. Yet, weathering rates derived from watersheds and soil profiles are several others of magnitude slower than laboratory measurements. Understanding this large discrepancy remains a fundamental problem in modern geochemistry, hampering our ability to understand and predict surficial processes and environmental changes quantitatively. To provide insights into discrepancy, we propose to study the in situ silicate dissolution and precipitation rates in large aquifer system with relatively simple and well-constrained chemistry and hydrology. The chosen field site is a sandstone aquifer, located in northern Arizona and mostly composed of the Navajo sandstone. Groundwater in this aquifer has an optimal residence time up to approximately 35,000 years. The kinetic rate constants derived from this aquifer first will be much better constrained than in watersheds and soil profiles because of the saturated hydrologic environment and unusually abundant data. A new transmission electron microscope at John Hopkins, with capabilities 0.12nm imaging and 1 nm compositional mapping resolution, will provide atomic scale information of microstructure and fine-scale chemical variations at weather feldspar doc1378 none Begley This award supports the participation of American scientists in a U.S.-Japan seminar on learning nature s strategies for making natural products: pathways, mechanisms, functional genomics and biosynthetic applications, to be held in Girdwood, Alaska, from June 24-29, . The co-organizers are professors Tadhg Begley of Cornell University and Professor Yutaka Ebizuka of Tokyo University in Japan. Under the impact of genomics, the field of biosynthesis is likely to undergo major growth and development over the next decade. Biosynthesis is an important field of study for many reasons: From a fundamental point of view, it is essential to understand the chemical logic used by cells from diverse environments, in order to understand how the cell works. From a practical point of view, many natural products are important in medicine and almost all of the top 25 drugs are either natural products or are based on them. The primary aim of the seminar is to discuss how scientists interested in biosynthesis of natural products can exploit the enormous amount of information being generated from genome sequencing and most effectively contribute to functional genomics. The intellectual interactions among the participants, drawn from a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds, will have a strong influence on how this growth occurs. The Seminar will consist of the following topics: 1) complete genome sequencing for more than 90 bacteria; 2) development of new tools in genomics research with applications in biosynthesis; 3) manipulation of biosynthetic gene clusters to generate new polyketide and polypeptide antibiotics; 4) elucidation of a new terpene biosynthesis pathway; 5) structural studies on biosynthetic enzymes in the terpene, polyketide, vitamin and b-lactam biosynthetic pathways; and 6) new techniques for studying biosynthesis in unculturable soil microorganisms. Seminar organizers have made a special effort to involve younger researchers as both participants and observers. The exchange of ideas and data with Japanese experts in this field will enable U.S. participants to advance their own work, and will set the stage for future collaborative projects. Dissemination of information on the seminar will be available on the World Wide Web doc1379 none This Americas program award will support travel and related expenses for the participation of a group of US graduate students and Central American scientists and students in a 4 day workshop to be held in Central America. The purpose of the workshop is to integrate the land and marine geological and geophysical information that has been, and is being carried out in southern Central America as part of the Margins program. These studies are focused on both the seismogenic zone and subduction factory objectives and aim to advance our understanding of geological, chemical and biological processes within and near the earth s active and passive margins. The presentation of the preliminary results of the research will provide an excellent opportunity for the Central American scientists to contribute their input on the interpretation, and discuss the potential for deep, riser drilling to better answer the most fundamental questions concerning those processes doc1380 none Windham The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twentyfour months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Lisamarie Windham of Lehigh University with support for twenty-four months to work with Dr. Juan Jose Armesto, at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, Chile. Support for this project is through the U.S.-Chile Program. The spread of exotic plant species has become an increasingly important facet of global change when the replacement of native plants with exotic invaders alters community structure and nutrient cycling. A method used by researchers to predict which exotic plants will invade which landscapes is through surveys and models. To this end, the PI has considered how many mature forests of North America have high nitrate deposition rates and large populations of exotic understory plants, whereas Chilean old-growth forests have neither. To determine if nitrate deposits influence exotic plant success, the PI will examine nitrate use by exotic and native understory plants at three field sites and in greenhouse experiments with controlled nitrate deposition. Specifically, she will survey the forests of Chiloe for the presence of exotic plant populations and measure rates of nitrate reductase activity in populations of plants in Chile as well as other sites in the U.S., such as New York. The results will be provided to institutions of conservation and natural resource management. Dr. Armesto is an authority on plant communities of Chilean oldgrowth forests. The Universidad de Chile has been actively involved in the establishment and study of the system of National Parks and Reserves. The proposed research overlaps with current efforts to understand patterns of biodiversity in Chilean forests doc1381 none Bevis The general goals of the project are to continue GPS measurements of deformation in the South American Andes, and to integrate deformation with the earthquake cycle and with coupling on the subduction zone and longer-term tectonic deformation. The importance of the research is that it examines fundamental mechanisms behind how subduction created the modern Andes and deformed this continental margin. Specific research tasks include: obtaining and analyzing GPS data from Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia and coordinating with other GPS efforts in South America; expanding the principal investigator s GPS network; looking at back-arc deformation and at the post-seismic effects of the earthquake; and improving velocity estimates. The P.I.s will model longer term deformation (tectonic deformation) associated with the stress history of subduction and mantle coupling in the wedge. They will model various tractions arising from the edge of the lithosphere, the base of the plate, larger scale mantle flow, plate motions and basal forces. They will examine the distribution and nature of seismic deformation related to subduction in both the lithosphere and crust, especially the earthquake, and the deformation associated with oblique convergence. This combination of the GPS measurements and mantle flow modeling is an attempt to understand the fundamental mantle forces that shape convection at an archetypal convergent continental margin. The multifaceted approach (GPS, seismology, modeling) will integrate the various geodynamic components into a comprehensive model of the mountain building process doc1382 none Warren This project is an experimental study of solar radiation processes near the surface at Dome C, the French-Italian station in East Antarctica. It will be carried out in cooperation with the Labortatoire de Glaciologie et Geophysique de l Environment in Grenoble, France. The emphasis will be on the reflection of sunlight by snow, and the transmission of sunlight through clouds. The observations will have relevance to climate, remote sensing, and the physics of ice and snow. Both spectral (narrow-band) and broadhead transmissions of solar radiation through clouds will be measured, and these measurements will be used to obtain effective cloud optical depths for use in estimating cloud radiative forcing with applications in climate models. A method to obtain this information from pyranometers alone will be developed so that the historical record of solar radiation observations in the antarctic interior can be analyzed for climatological information on clouds. Observations of the angular pattern of solar radiation reflected from the snow surface will allow the validation of satellite-derived atmospheric profile information. The measured surface reflection functions will be reconciled with the empirical functions obtained from Advanced Vidicon High Resolution Radiometers (AVHRR) on the NOAA series of polar orbiting satellites by radiative transfer modeling through the atmosphere. Finally, the spectral peak of snow albedo will be accurately located in order to resolve a discrepancy concerning the spectral absorption of pure ice in the visible to near-ultraviolet range doc1383 none This application seeks partial funding for a FASEB Summer Conference on Signal Transduction in the Immune System to be held from July 8th through 13th, in Saxton s River, Vermont. The major goal of the conference is to provide a comprehensive focus on recent advances in the knowledge of signaling mechanisms of immune cells. An understanding of signal transduction pathways is central to an understanding of the molecular basis of various immune functions. Widespread interest in immune cell signaling exists in universities, research institutes and biotechnology. However, signal transduction at immunology meetings is generally covered as an adjunct subject, with little detailed coverage. An annual meeting with an in-depth focus on the details of signal transduction in the immune system has been missing. Signal Transduction in the Immune System will fill this gap by covering a spectum of topics from tyrosine, serine and lipid kinases to adaptor proteins (SLP-76, LAT, FYB SLAP, 3BP-2 etc) to signaling in thymic differentiation and in response to cytokines. There will be three main objectives of this conference: (1) To provide a critical and intensive overview of the current status of signaling proteins that control various immune functions. The meeting will cover a full range of topics, from an in-depth analysis of specific signaling molecules and networks to the application of this knowledge to immunobiology. (2) To bring together senior scientists and young investigators in a convivial atmosphere of presentations and informal discussions. It is hoped that this environment will help develop the investigative skills and enthusiasm of students and young investigators by interacting with established investigators. (3) To begin an annual forum for investigators interested in a comprehensive focus on signaling events in the immune system doc1384 none The high sensitivity and label-free nature of surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensors make SPR an excellent technology for affinity sensing. SPR sensors are typically built using a prism with one gold coated surface onto which a flow cell is attached. This prism-based SPR sensor design is fairly complex and has several drawbacks, including awkward fluid handling, optical inflexibility, and the need for index matching. To overcome these limitations, a simple, one-piece sensor design based on capillary tubes will be developed. A TM-polarized, collimated beam from a diode laser passes through a converging lens with its focus near the capillary surface. The beam hits the gold-coated internal surface of the capillary at angles greater than the critical angle, and is reflected by this diverging mirror surface. The reflected light exits the capillary and strikes a diode array detector. Since each location on the diode array will correspond to a different angle of incidence, a reflectivity vs. angle measurement results. The capillary design has simple construction, no index matching, an ideal flow geometry, a protected sensor surface, and optical versatility. To further develop this promising sensor concept, research in capillary optics and fabrication techniques will be conducted. In the capillary SPR sensor, information is encoded in the reflectivity vs. angle spectrum of the metal coated capillary interior surface. SPR reflection spectra display a dramatic dip centered at a certain angle, and the sharpness of this dip determines in large part the resolution of the measurement. For this reason, research will focus on elements of sensor design which contribute to this sharpness, including choice of beam divergence, diffraction, plasmon effects, and choice of capillary dimensions and refractive index. With improved understanding of the capillary response, the use of simplified light sources and interference effects may be used to enhance the capillary sensor. To achieve high quality data from a capillary SPR sensor, high quality gold layers must be deposited inside capillaries. The thermal wire deposition method used to date is inadequate: capillary length is limited, capillary ID is constrained, and deposition is nonuniform. As an alternative, a method of wet chemical gold deposition will be investigated. This procedure will be used to internally coat capillaries with gold, using an experimental technique in which the necessary reagents are pumped back and forth through capillaries using air pressure. Since the capillaries have a small internal volume, only a small amount of reagent will be necessary, reducing costs and simplifying waste disposal doc1385 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Evan Peacock and student assistants will collect a series of land snails in the Black Belt zone of Northeastern Alabama and determine their value as ecological indicators. While much research has been conducted on the taxonomy of North American species, relatively little is known about their habitat preferences and it is highly likely that individual species thrive best in, and are closely associated with specific micro habitats. If, as Dr. Peacock hopes, such relationships can be established it is then possible to use ancient land snails recovered in archaeological and other prehistoric contexts to reconstruct temperature, moisture and ground cover. To accomplish this Dr. Peacock will collect modern control samples of land snails from 50 leaf grass soil samples distributed through all niche types in the region. Twenty more samples will be taken from a wide variety of humanly disturbed land surfaces in the same vicinity. Forest Service histories for each niche will be collated with soil chemistry details and all data will be incorporated into a geographic information system. Dr. Peacock will collect associated leaf and grass litter and record the physical features at each collection site. This information will include landform type, slope, aspect, elevation, vegetation type, soil moisture and organic content and soil chemical parameters such as pH and available phosphate. Species identifications will be verified at the Chicago Field Museum and results will be compared with large snail assemblages from several Black Belt sites in the - AD time range. This research is important for several reasons. It will allow archaeologists to address anthropologically significant questions such as the timing of the introduction of maize agriculture to the region and the extent to which prehistoric peoples modified their environment. The resulting data base will be of use to researchers in other disciplines and highlight the potential value of land snails as paleoenvironmental indicators doc1386 none Smalley This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports a collaborative research program to initiate a Global Positioning System (GPS) network to measure crustal motions in the bedrock surrounding and underlying the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). Evaluation of the role of both tectonic and ice-induced crustal motions of the WAIS bedrock is a critical goal for understanding past, present, and future dynamics of WAIS and its potential role in future global change scenarios, as well as improving our understanding of the role of Antarctica in global plate motions. The extent of active tectonism in West Antarctica is largely speculative, as few data exist that constrain its geographic distribution, directions, or rates of deformation. Active tectonism and the influence of bedrock on the WAIS have been highlighted recently by geophysical data indicating active subglacial volcanism and control of ice streaming by the presence of sedimentary basins. The influence of bedrock crustal motion on the WAIS and its future dynamics is a fundamental issue. Existing GPS projects are located only on the fringe of the ice sheet and do not address the regional picture. It is important that baseline GPS measurements on the bedrock around and within the WAIS be started so that a basis is established for detecting change. To measure crustal motions, this project will build a West Antarctica GPS Network (WAGN) of at least 15 GPS sites across the interior of West Antarctica (approximately the size of the contiguous United States from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific coast) over a two-year period beginning in the Antarctic field season - . The planned network is designed using the Multi-modal Occupation Strategy (MOST), in which a small number of independent GPS roving receivers make differential measurements against a network of continuous GPS stations for comparatively short periods at each site. This experimental strategy, successfully implemented by a number of projects in California, S America, the SW Pacific and Central Asia, minimizes logistical requirements, an essential element of application of GPS geodesy in the scattered and remote outcrops of the WAIS bedrock. The WAGN program will be integrated with the GPS network that has been established linking the Antarctic Peninsula with South America through the Scotia arc (Scotia Arc GPS Project (SCARP)). It will also interface with stations currently measuring motion across the Ross Embayment, and with the continent-wide GIANT program of the Working Group on Geodesy and Geographic Information Systems of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR). The GPS network will be based on permanent monuments set in solid rock outcrops that will have near-zero set-up error for roving GPS occupations, and that can be directly converted to a continuous GPS site when future technology makes autonomous operation and satellite data linkage throughout West Antarctica both reliable and economical. The planned network both depends on and complements the existing and planned continuous networks. It is presently not practical, for reasons of cost and logistics, to accomplish the measurements proposed herein with either a network of continuous stations or traditional campaigns. The proposed WAGN will complement existing GPS projects by filling a major gap in coverage among several discrete crustal blocks that make up West Antarctica, a critical area of potential bedrock movements. If crustal motions are relatively slow, meaningful results will only begin to emerge within the five-year maximum period of time for an individual funded project. Hence this proposal is only to initiate the network and test precision and velocities at the most critical sites. Once built, however, the network will yield increasingly meaningful results with the passage of time. Indeed, the slower the rates turn out to be, the more important an early start to measuring. It is anticipated that the results of this project will initiate an iterative process that will gradually resolve into an understanding of the contributions from plate rotations and viscoelastic and elastic motions resulting from deglaciation and ice mass changes. Velocities obtained from initial reoccupation of the most critical sites will dictate the timing of a follow-up proposal for reoccupation of the entire network when detectable motions have occurred doc1387 none This research will generate new methods for studying the behavior of inventories and new insights into the causes and propagation mechanism of business cycles. The particular goals are to devlop appropriate framework for applying the linear-quadratic inventory model to data that exhibit long-run stochastic trends. We also intend to use this method to study different two-digit manufacturing sectors to characterize the response of inventories, production, and final sales to an oil price shock. We will also trace out the intersectoral and interremporal linkages that may be involved in propagating the shock into an economics recession. Finally, we plan to re-examine the empiricial evidence on the role of monetary policy in accounting for the historical correlation between oil price shocks and economic activity doc1388 none Case This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports a collaborative research project between the Saint Mary s College of California, the South Dakota School of Mines and technology, and the Argentine Antarctic Institute (Instituto Antartico Argentino or IAA) to investigate the Late Mesozoic vertebrate paleontology of the James Ross Basin in the Antarctic Peninsula region. The Campanian through the Maastrichtian ages (80 to 65 million years ago) is an important time interval concerning vertebrate biogeography (i.e. dispersals and separations due to moving landmasses) and evolution between Antarctica and other Southern Hemisphere continents (including India, i.e. Gondwana). Moreover, the dispersal of terrestrial vertebrates (i.e. dinosaurs and marsupial mammals) from North America to Antarctica and beyond (e.g. Australia) via Patagonia and the Antarctic Peninsula, as well as the dispersal of modern birds from Antarctica northward are important unresolved questions in paleontology. These dispersal events include vertebrates not only in the terrestrial realms, but also in marine settings. Both widely distributed and localized marine reptile species have been identified in Antarctica, creating questions concerning their dispersal in conjunction with the terrestrial animals. The Antarctic Peninsula and Patagonia represent the western-most portion of the Weddellian Paleobiogeographic Province, a region that extends from Patagonia through the Antarctic Peninsula and western Antarctica to Australia and New Zealand. Within this province lie the dispersal routes for interchanges of vertebrates between South America and: 1) Madagascar and India, and 2) Australia. As the result of previous work by the principal investigators, it is postulated that an isthmus between more northern South America and the Antarctic craton has served to bring typical North American dinosaurs, such as hadrosaurs (duck-billed dinosaurs) and presumably marsupials traveling overland, while marine reptiles swam along coastal waters, to Antarctica in the latest Cretaceous. Finally, this region has served as the cradle for the evolution, if not the origin, for groups of modern birds, and evolution of a suite of typical southern hemisphere plants. In order to confirm and expand upon these hypotheses, investigations into the latest Cretaceous deposits of the James Ross Basin, Antarctica Peninsula must be continued. The Cape Lamb and Sandwich Bluff geological units, of the Lopez de Bertodano Formation in the James Ross Basin along the eastern Antarctic Peninsula, exhibit a mixture of marine and terrestrial deposits. The following vertebrates have been recovered from these sedimentary deposits during previous field seasons: plesiosaur and mosasaur marine reptiles; plant eating dinosaurs; a meat eating dinosaur; and a variety of modern bird groups, including shorebirds, wading birds and lagoonal birds. This project will undertake new fieldwork to recover new specimens in order to test biogeographic and evolutionary hypotheses concerning Late Cretaceous vertebrates in Gondwana. Fieldwork is planned in January and to explore the eastern slopes of Cape Lamb, Sandwich Bluff and False Island Point on Vega Island, and the Santa Marta Cove area of James Ross Island. This research will result in important new insights about the evolution and geographic dispersal of several vertebrate species. The results are important to understanding the development and evolution of life on Earth. This is a collaborative research project with Argentinean scientists from the IAA and it continues a productive collaboration that began in . In addition, collaboration with vertebrate paleontologists from the Museo de La Plata, both in the field and at our respective institutions in Argentina and in the United States, will continue doc1389 none This exploratory research will focus on a set of experiments using the atmospheric component of the NCAR CCSM to test the behavior of the model using different parameterizations of deep convection. Annual integrations of the standard version of CCSM will be carried out, each run using one of the convective schemes: Zhang-McFarlane, Zhang-McFarlane + (includes physical triggers and closure modifications for convection), Arakawa-Schubert, Relaxed Arakawa-Schubert, and Prognostic Arakawa-Schubert. The work is important because it should provide a strong diagnostics underpinning to the CCSM project from a university based group engaged in dynamical diagnosis of observed climate variability. The results from this project will be useful in identifying the convection scheme that will be incorporated in the next version of the model, scheduled for early doc1390 none The National Institute of General Medical Sciences, in cooperation with the National Human Genome Research Institute, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the Fogarty International Center, and the National Science Foundation, is sponsoring a meeting in Bethesda on September 25-26, , entitled Community Consultation for the Responsible Collection and Use of Samples for Genetic Research. The planned community consultation in September will bring together individuals from a broad range of ethnic and racial groups to provide input on the concept of oversight groups, or to propose alternative mechanisms by which protection can be afforded. It is hoped, in addition, that this meeting will begin a process of educating and sensitizing the scientific community about issues related to genetic research involving identified populations. We expect approximately 60-70 attendees from outside government agencies doc1391 none Opella, Stanley J. This award provides partial support for the VIIth Keystone Conference on Frontiers of NMR in Molecular Biology. NMR is playing an increasingly important role in the determination of macromolecular structures and the study of protein and nucleic acid dynamics. This growing importance of NMR in structural biology is powerfully illustrated by the number of novel structures of biological macromolecules determined by this technique over the last few years with approximately 250 new NMR structures deposited in the PDB each year. But NMR is not only a technique for structure determination; it is also able to provide a wealth of information, which is complementary to the structural data. NMR data on dynamics and solvation of proteins and nucleic acids is becoming available as well as NMR characterization of partially folded or unfolded protein and polypeptide states. A major research goal is to increase the size of the protein or macromolecular complex that can be analyzed by NMR. This requires the development of even higher-field spectrometers, which will yield higher sensitivity and better resolution, thereby improving the quality of structures of all sizes. Hand in hand with these instrument developments will be methodological approaches to overcome or minimize the correlation time problem. Despite major advances, NMR data collection still represents a substantial investment in real time and in equipment time and may require several months for one structure. Avenues for increasing the number of NMR structures are sought through high thoughtput approaches or streamlining experiments. NMR is one of very few techniques which will be able to provide structural and dynamical data on partially folded and heterogeneous protein systems, i.e., amyloids. Studies on these will have major implications for pathology and disease. The meeting will be the forum to present the newest structures of important proteins, nucleic acids and complexes thereof, illuminating key functional questions in molecular biology. Methodological and functional discussions will be given equal weight. This award will help to support the participation of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows doc1392 none MILLER Although there is a research base for how students learn many of the concepts in science, there is almost no research on the effectiveness of research-based curricula in classrooms. The project provides the necessary tools and instruments to facilitate future research on how teachers use inquiry-based science curricula in high schools. Developers are interviewed to determine their goals for the materials. Publishers and implementation site personnel are interviewed to determine their view of how materials are implemented in the classroom. Focus groups of teachers help set the issues to be investigated. Instruments are developed and tested in classrooms by observing and interviewing teachers. The preliminary research results and model instruments are published doc1393 none Tromp This award provides one-half support of the costs of building a cluster of networked PC s (so called Beowulf cluster) for research in theoretical and applied seismology at Caltech. Jeroen Tromp and John Shaw have recently joined the faculty at Caltech after serving for several years on the faculty at Harvard University. They will build a 78 dual-CPU node Beowulf cluster with 78 Gb of RAM. The cluster will be used to run Tromp s spectral element code that has been specifically designed to run on multi-processor machines. The spectral element method represents one of the most comprehensive and robust algorithms for modeling seismic wave propagation though deep sedimentary basins (i.e. the Los Angeles basin) and for predicting the amplitude of strong ground motions that result from varying earthquake source parameters. Beowulf clusters represent a cost effective alternative to expensive shared-memory machines for high resolution modeling of large geophysical data sets doc1394 none Bevis This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports a collaborative research program to initiate a Global Positioning System (GPS) network to measure crustal motions in the bedrock surrounding and underlying the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). Evaluation of the role of both tectonic and ice-induced crustal motions of the WAIS bedrock is a critical goal for understanding past, present, and future dynamics of WAIS and its potential role in future global change scenarios, as well as improving our understanding of the role of Antarctica in global plate motions. The extent of active tectonism in West Antarctica is largely speculative, as few data exist that constrain its geographic distribution, directions, or rates of deformation. Active tectonism and the influence of bedrock on the WAIS have been highlighted recently by geophysical data indicating active subglacial volcanism and control of ice streaming by the presence of sedimentary basins. The influence of bedrock crustal motion on the WAIS and its future dynamics is a fundamental issue. Existing GPS projects are located only on the fringe of the ice sheet and do not address the regional picture. It is important that baseline GPS measurements on the bedrock around and within the WAIS be started so that a basis is established for detecting change. To measure crustal motions, this project will build a West Antarctica GPS Network (WAGN) of at least 15 GPS sites across the interior of West Antarctica (approximately the size of the contiguous United States from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific coast) over a two-year period beginning in the Antarctic field season - . The planned network is designed using the Multi-modal Occupation Strategy (MOST), in which a small number of independent GPS roving receivers make differential measurements against a network of continuous GPS stations for comparatively short periods at each site. This experimental strategy, successfully implemented by a number of projects in California, S America, the SW Pacific and Central Asia, minimizes logistical requirements, an essential element of application of GPS geodesy in the scattered and remote outcrops of the WAIS bedrock. The WAGN program will be integrated with the GPS network that has been established linking the Antarctic Peninsula with South America through the Scotia arc (Scotia Arc GPS Project (SCARP)). It will also interface with stations currently measuring motion across the Ross Embayment, and with the continent-wide GIANT program of the Working Group on Geodesy and Geographic Information Systems of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR). The GPS network will be based on permanent monuments set in solid rock outcrops that will have near-zero set-up error for roving GPS occupations, and that can be directly converted to a continuous GPS site when future technology makes autonomous operation and satellite data linkage throughout West Antarctica both reliable and economical. The planned network both depends on and complements the existing and planned continuous networks. It is presently not practical, for reasons of cost and logistics, to accomplish the measurements proposed herein with either a network of continuous stations or traditional campaigns. The proposed WAGN will complement existing GPS projects by filling a major gap in coverage among several discrete crustal blocks that make up West Antarctica, a critical area of potential bedrock movements. If crustal motions are relatively slow, meaningful results will only begin to emerge within the five-year maximum period of time for an individual funded project. Hence this proposal is only to initiate the network and test precision and velocities at the most critical sites. Once built, however, the network will yield increasingly meaningful results with the passage of time. Indeed, the slower the rates turn out to be, the more important an early start to measuring. It is anticipated that the results of this project will initiate an iterative process that will gradually resolve into an understanding of the contributions from plate rotations and viscoelastic and elastic motions resulting from deglaciation and ice mass changes. Velocities obtained from initial reoccupation of the most critical sites will dictate the timing of a follow-up proposal for reoccupation of the entire network when detectable motions have occurred doc1395 none Biomass burning is a major source for atmospheric pollution over southern Africa as well as globally. Biomass burning emits a large variety of gaseous and particulate compounds with significant implications to atmospheric and biogeochemical cycles. This collaborative research project with Paul Crutzen, University of California, San Diego, Scripps, is a laboratory investigation of biomass burning in the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry experimental fire facility. The biofuels to be studied will be collected by collaborating SAFARI- investigators during the dry season of in three regions of southern Africa that are representative for major ecosystem types: The Etosha National Park in northern Namibia, the Kruger National Park in north-east South Africa and woodland sites in Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Mozambique (the Miombo Network). The experiments provide a partially controlled burning environment and will be used to measure major exhaust species (CO2; CO; CH3Cl, CH3Br, CH3I; NOx; N2O; CH4; NH3; HCl, HNO3; SO2, HCOOH, CH3COOH; alkaline-reactive, volatile Cl, Br and I; the ionic composition of particles including chloride, bromide, nitrate, sulfate, formic and acetic acid; and the elemental composition of particles including C, N, Cl, Br, I, S) as well as the elemental content of both biofuels and ash-residues. The results of this study will be integrated with those from other SAFARI- investigators to model regional biomass burning emissions of halogen-, nitrogen-, sulfur-, carbon-containing compounds doc1396 none This project supports an innovative form of the Athabaskan Languages Conference, an annual conference which brings together researchers, teachers and members of Athabaskan-speaking communities to stimulate each other toward continual improvement in linguistic research, Athabaskan language pedagogy, and minority and endangered language retention methods. The Athabaskan language family is spread over a large area of North America, with concentrations in Western Canada, Alaska, the west coast of the United States, and the Southwest. With the possible exception of Navajo, all the Athabaskan languages are both highly endangered and incompletely researched. The Athabaskan Languages Conference will be hosted by the UCLA Department of Linguistics, May 18-20, . Papers are solicited in all areas of Athabaskanist inquiry. Organized sessions will focus on Language and Pedagogy, Language and Theory, New Data, and Community-Academy Relations. A special workshop on the instrumental analysis of voice quality is planned for Sunday, May 20, . Researchers and teachers will learn from experts in acoustic and articulatory phonetics about how to measure subtle effects in their data which may previously have gone undescribed. A formal call for papers will be issued in January, with a submission deadline of March 2, doc1397 none During the Springs of and 95, a field program entitled the Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment (VORTEX) was executed by a combination of NSF and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations sponsored scientists. The primary objective of VORTEX was to evaluate several hypotheses pertaining to low-level mesocyclone intensification, and tornado formation, maintenance, and demise. The observations collected included ground-based (mobile and stationary) and airborne Doppler radars, mobile surface and balloon borne meteorological instruments. Under this award, the Principal Investigators will continue their ongoing research intended to advance state of knowledge of the life cycles of tornadoes. This goal will be accomplished through careful examination of data-rich case studies of the Dimmitt, Friona, and Wheeler (all in Texas) tornadic storms as well as other storms (some tornadic, some not) from the VORTEX and subsequent experiments. As a result of prior research, it has become apparent that future investigations must be expanded to cover a variety of closely related processes to understand tornadogenesis and tornado longevity. Among these are: -factors that govern the amount and type of precipitation that forms descends in rear flank downdrafts (RFD) at the rear of supercell updrafts; -how this precipitation and its type is related to formation of RFDs; -how RFD generate vorticity and or barotropically redistribute it: -how outflow from the RFD can be confined to the region below the updraft; -how RFDs lead to the formation of tornado cyclones, and whether the angular momentum of the tornado cyclone is maintained by the RFD or merely spins down from some initial distribution; -whether the RFD can lead directly to a tornado cyclone through largely barotropic processes; -whether the tornado cyclone forms from upward tilting of helicity-rich inflow air; -whether only one or both of the above processes is required for tornadogenesis; -whether the depth, size and shape of RFDs are relevant to tornadogenesis. Most of these questions can be, or have been, cast in the form of testable, refutable hypotheses. The Principal Investigators will emphasize the development of theories and models for RFD vorticity processes and the effect of precipitation in redistributing angular momentum in a mesocyclone-scale vortex. The Principal Investigators also will investigate the role of hydrometeors and water phase changes in forcing the kinematic structures. Successful completion of this research could lead to a reduction in tornado warning false alarm rate while maintaining adequate lead times doc1398 none The Snow Petrel, Pagadroma nivea, is an abundant seabird species that occurs only in pack-ice covered seas of the Southern Ocean and nests among talus slopes of ice-free nanataks. It has been shown that at some ice-free locations this species has nested for 35,000 years. The proposed project will focus on the isotopic analysis of laminated deposits of Snow Petrel mumiyo (i.e., stomach oil that accumulates around nesting cavities) dating back 10,000 years before present. The samples are in hand and were collected at the Bunger Hills, East Antarctica. These analyses will assess the variation in the structure of certain portions of the upper food web of the Southern Ocean in response to climate variation. Profiles of 18O and 2H will be analyzed to reveal correspondence to long-term fluctuations in marine climate, while 13C and 15N will be used to assess food web fluctuations. The Snow Petrel feeds on either krill, at one trophic level, or fish, at the next highest. Thus results may reveal long-term switches in diet as a function of availability in these two classes of prey. Availability of these prey to Snow Petrels is in turn known to be affected by the variation in sea ice cover. Sea ice cover varies with climate, as revealed in sediment cores of coastal Antarctica. The proposed analyses have the potential to reveal corresponding changes in higher in the food web doc1399 none WARSHEL GTP-binding proteins play an important role in the regulation of cellular functions in virtually all living organisms, and control signal transduction processes. Obtaining detailed molecular pictures of the actions of these proteins is an important challenge to modern molecular biology. The studies of G-proteins underwent a structural revolution where new structures of G-proteins and their complexes with the corresponding accessory proteins and or transition state analogues are rapidly emerging. This offers a unique opportunity for elucidating the detailed molecular mechanisms of the action of these proteins. In the past years, computer simulation approaches that correlate the structures of enzymes with their functions have been developed. These methods were found to be very useful in the studies of the reaction catalyzed by Ras. In particular, the simulations suggested that the GTP, rather than Gln61, is the actual base in the enzymatic mechanism of Ras. This is now widely accepted as the likely mechanism for the action of G-proteins and related systems. The previous studies also led to the finding of a Linear Free Energy Relationship (LFER) between the rate constant of the GTPase reaction and the pKa of the g-phosphate. This LFER has given experimental support to the GTP as a base proposal. The previous studies demonstrated that the GAP operates by combining two effects. First, it acts by a direct electrostatic stabilization of the transition state using primarily Arg789. Second, it acts indirectly by pushing Ras to a catalytic configuration. These simulation studies lead to the current project that exploits the enormous progress in structural studies of G-proteins. In this project, the efforts will be in the following directions. (i) The potential surfaces for phosphate hydrolysis will be validated and refined. The calculated and observed LFER, isotope effects and activation entropies will be compared. The stability of water-assisted transition states, including the corresponding entropic contribution will also be examined. This effort will help in resolving mechanistic problems and in refining EVB surfaces for studies of G-proteins. (ii) The activation of Ras by GAP will be studied, with a focus on the effect of mutations such as Gln61 and Gly12. These studies will examine whether these residues act directly or by stabilizing the catalytic configuration of Ras. (iii) A comparative study of the action of different G-proteins will be conducted, focusing on transducin, EF-Tu, and Ras. The relative rates of the GTPase reaction in these proteins will be reproduced. These studies will determine whether or not they use a common mechanism. (iv) Although the structural information offered by complexes of G-proteins and TS analogues is potentially very useful, its interpretation is not straightforward because the relationship between the charge distribution of these molecules and that of the actual TS is rather unclear. Thus ab initio and EVB calculations will be used to extract the information offered by the available crystal structures of G-proteins with TS analogues doc1368 none Prentice et. al: Kurz: This award supports a one year lab-based study which will allow a detailed calibration between ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data and existing drilled sediment sequences from Lower Taylor Valley, which will improve the lithostratigraphy in the region. In addition, exposure-age dating of existing samples from the Hjorth Hill locality in Taylor Valley will also be carried out in order to test the multiple drift-sheet interpretation of the GPR data. All of the goals described in the revised scope of work are consistent with the goal of the original proposal, which was to resolve multiple WAIS glaciations and regional climate change. This work is complementary to studies of the variability of the West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) and will help to improve resolution of alpine and piedmont glacier variability during the latest Pleistocene doc1401 none The objective of this proposal is to develop consistent methods for determining the acidity functions of solid acid catalysts. Three components are proposed: evaluation of Lewis acidity by complexation of linear ethers, examination of Bronsted sites by adsorption of pyridine derivatives, and exploration of reaction mechanisms associated with conversation of saturated hydrocarbons. One aspect will be the development of a quantitative scale for Lewis acidity using ethers as bases and nuclear magnetic resonance as the probe. The dependence of acid strength on local curvature has been observed and will be investigated. In addition to a calibration of acid strength from equilibrium measurements as higher temperatures, reactions of hydrocarbons on zeolites at lower temperatures, where thermal activation is less important, will be studied. The reactants chosen, paraffins and cycloparaffins, are those that require the greatest strength of catalyst for an acid-catalyzed reaction. This work will help provide a clearer, fundamental understanding of some newer-generation solid acids such as zirconia-supported sulfates and heteropolyacids doc1402 none As the fifth in a series of symposia focusing on the relationship between learning and brain function, this symposium will now focus on the myths and realities which have emerged from recent research data. During the Decade of the Brain, researchers produced significant amounts of new information about the practical application of findings in neuroscience, as reported in newspapers, magazines, and books by a variety of authors. The question is, How much of this information is accurate: Who is interpreting it? Why? We have learned more about the brain during the last 20-30 years than in all of human history. It is now time for the experts to debate the myths and realities associated with learning and the brain research findings. The purpose of this symposium is to present a program in which learning will occur in a public forum among educators, scientists, parents, artists, health professionals, cultural anthropologists, students, and the general public. Through the exploration of the many related issues, the audience will have the opportunity to consider and integrate the material for practical use in daily life and, particularly for the education of children. Lectures and panel discussions will be designed for specialists and students alike. A post-symposium publicaton is planned, as are additional outcome-related news media stories doc1403 none Cushman Model developed to simulate in porous media often consider the dispersive flux of the contaminant species to be proportional to the concentration gradient via a constant, or time-dependent dispersion coefficient. These models are a crude approximation for transport in porous media with evolving scales of heterogeneity on the scale of observation. It is said that a porous medium behaves in a fickian fashion if the dispersion tensor is constant, it is quasi-fickian if the tensor is time dependent, and it is convolution fickian if the flux is a convolution. More general forms of the dispersive flux are possible, and in any case, dispersive fluxes are called anomalous if there is no constant coefficient of proportionality between the dispersive flux and the gradient of concentration. A main purpose of the proposed effect is to use existing models of the mixing process in conjunction with three-dimensional particle tracking velocity (3D-PTV) to study the accuracy of these theories for various types of heterogeneity. In addition, it is proposed to extend these models by using the full intermediate scattering function and concepts from nonlinear dynamics such as finite-size Lyapunov exponents. The specific experimental objectives are: (i) to construct a sequence of matched index, heterogeneous, porous-matrix fluid mixtures; (ii) to use 3D-PTV to reconstruct lagrangian particle trajectories; (iii) to use the trajectories to determine mean square displacements, velocity distributions velocity correlation (single and multiparticle) functions, classical dispersion tensors, self-part and full intermediate scattering functions, generalized wave-vector and frequency dependent dispersion tensors, and finite-size Lyapunov exponents; (iv) to investigate buoyancy driven flow of air in glycerol in matched index formations, both homogeneous and heterogeneous on the lab scale. The specific theoretical objectives are: (i) to examine the adequacy of existing models of transport in heterogeneous media using experimental data: (ii) to develop the relationship between the finite-size Lyapunov exponents and dispersion in heterogeneous media; (iii) to develop a theory of dispersion in porous media with evolving heterogeneity which relies upon multiparticle correlation functions, the full intermediate scattering function, and the finite-size Lyapunov exponents; and (iv) to test the new theory with data obtained experimentally doc1404 none Rosenberg The University of Maryland will continue their studies of the high magnetic latitude ionosphere and magnetosphere using galactic radio noise absorption techniques (riometry). Several years ago, they developed a new imaging riometers are now being operated at Iqaluit, Canada; Sondestromfjord, Greenland; South Pole, McMurdo and in all six of the Automatic Geophysical Observatories (AGO) operated by NSF in Antarctica. Additionally, they are operating broad beam riometers at Iqaluit, McMurdo and South Pole as well as auroral photometers at McMurdo and South Pole. They have also provided imaging riometers for the British Halley Bay and the Australian Davis stations, both in Antaractica, thus considerably extending coverage. In the next few years they will also build imaging riometers systems for some of the British AGOs. The instruments work synergistically with a number of other instruments which are operated at all of these sites by other investigators doc1405 none Ilhan Aksay, Princeton University This proposal aims at clearing the fundamental processes which will permit the design and construction of a new class of microsensors. These will combine piezoelectric microcantilevers, nanostructured coatings (e.g. nanoporous silica), and biological detectors. Their sensitivity should outperform existing piezoactive sensors by a factor of about 100. The PI s have then engaged into an extremely detailed discussion of the key basic questions they felt should be explored before designers could depend on reliable, generic information: 1) the production of arrays of reduced-size microcantilever by sol gel chemistry and soft lithography, as a way to collect from a given sample, many more simultaneous and real time bio-properties (e.g. in blood). The enhancing effect of silica porosity is expected to be a major one (up to 500 m2 gram). One application of special interest would be, among others, the technology of biosensor microarrays for in vivo situations. 2) the bulk of the remainder of the proposal concerns the state of the art and proposed research departures of the key components of these diagnostics techniques: sensor performance (piezoelectric microcantilevers and nanostructures coatings), ceramics vs. quarts, micromanufacturing, modeling and size effects, biomolecules behavior in nanoporous media doc1406 none The World Wide Web is increasingly becoming an integrated extension of users computing environments, with content indexed and retrieved through Web browsers. Web browsers are increasingly being used as a science curriculum delivery mechanism, for both books delivered as local content on CD ROMs as well as server-based material. Traditional science curriculum has often had a static presentation due to having been delivered on printed media. What was printed ahead of time in books or handouts could not be changed. Any changes would have to be attached externally by way of extra handouts or explanations on the board. The Web gives us the technological affordances to change that. In this work we propose implementing an architecture that allows an instructor to modify curriculum as it is presented through a web browser. This would allow a teacher to customize web-based curriculum to fit a particular need. For example: A list of materials could be substituted with a different list Additional examples personalized to the students context could be that Extra notes and explanations could be added where necessary Cross-reference and supplementary bibliographic information could be added. The original page would remain unchanged, with just the users view of it that would change. A working prototype of this approach has already been implemented through the support in part of PFSMETE funding. Additional work is needed to turn it into a tool that is enough to be disseminated doc1407 none An international partnership is proposed to create a zooplankton genomic (ZooGen) database of DNA type sequences for calanoid copepods and euphausiids. The ZooGen database will be designed to include all species of these groups and to allow expansion to additional zooplankton groups. The ZooGen partnership includes four P.I.s and thirteen expert taxonomic consultants from seven countries. Zooplankton samples will be sorted from existing archival collections, obtained in coordination with planned oceanographic research efforts, and collected during National Marine Fisheries Service field surveys. The taxonomic experts will confirm species identifications; DNA sequencing will be done at the University of New Hampshire and, in some cases, in other partners laboratories. For each species, a DNA type sequence will be determined for a portion of the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase I (mtCOI) gene; multiple mtCOI sequences will be included as necessary to reflect intraspecific variation. The ZooGen database will be designed, created, managed, maintained, and distributed as part of the proposed work; the data will be integrated into the Ocean Biogeographical Information System (OBIS). Education and outreach efforts will include: training of graduate students at UNH and UW; a hands?on Molecular Systematics Workshop at UNH during Summer, ; exchanges between the P.Ls, international partners, and their colleagues and students; inclusion of ZooGen molecular and environmental data in the OBIS database, among others; creation and maintenance of a project web site; production of a CD with the ZooGen database and simple search tools; and informal education with the assistance of UNH Sea Grant Educators and Marine Docents doc1408 none This project is implementing a professional development model created to increase the successful participation of community colleges and community college faculty in NSF programs. The Council for Resource Development (CRD) is building in the project upon existing regional conferences to offer a series of three workshops designed to familiarize faculty with NSF programs, showcase regional NSF projects and the faculty conducting those projects, and conduct a workshop on proposal development strategies specific to NSF. In order the achieve the goals, CRD is: (a) providing coordination for workshop development and implementation at the regional level; (b) recruiting faculty to attend the workshops who have not yet received awards from NSF; and (c) evaluating the workshops with particular emphasis on longitudinal outcomes. Evaluation of project outcomes includes looking for increased rates of proposal submissions to NSF as well as an increase in the success of those submitted doc1409 none Burgmann Lin The investigators propose to perform a set of 3-D numerical modeling experiments, focusing on three recent California earthquake sequences: (1) the Landers earthquake, its potential role in triggering the Hector Mine event, and their combined effects on the southern San Andreas fau (2) the Coalinga and Kettleman Hills blind-thrust quakes and their potential effects on delaying seismic rupture on the Parkfield segment of the San Andreas fau and (3) the most recent sequence of historical quakes in the Los Angeles region, including the Long Beach, Kern County, San Fernando, Whittier Narrows, and Northridge events, and their implications on seismic hazard migration in the Los Angeles region. Recently the investigators have successfully developed preliminary 3-D viscoelastic models for a small subset of the above California sequences. This project will allow them to carry out a much more comprehensive investigation through (1) extending the models to include all relevant quakes, (2) verifying the robustness of the model solutions and their sensitivity to assumptions in crustal rheology and fault geometry, and (3) comparing the model results with geodetic observations. Results of this modeling investigation, together with advances in space geodesy and seismic monitoring capabilities, should provide us with a much clearer understanding of the seismic properties of the California crust, the mechanisms of earthquake triggering, and the regularities in seismic hazard migration in California. This is a collaborative project between the UC Berkeley (Andy Freed) and WHOI (Jian Lin). Freed will lead 3-D modeling experiments using the I-deas viscoelastic modeling code, while Lin will lead tasks of comparing the I-deas solutions to independent results from the GENPro boundary-element code and analyzing the geodetic and earthquake data in the study regions to constrain modeling doc1410 none High on the agenda of post-Soviet transformation since is privatization, the creation or recreation of private ownership from the collective property forms created during the socialist period. Western understanding of this phenomenon suffers from ignorance not only of how property in socialism worked but also of the processes by which that property was constituted in the first place, with their devastating effects on social relationships. As a result, privatization programs risk imposing a utopian goal on an insufficiently appreciated reality in much the same way that Bolshevism did earlier in the century. This project examines the earlier of these two property transformations for one property object -- land -- and one post-socialist country in Eastern Europe -- Romania. By means of a collaborative venture involving fifteen anthropologists, sociologists, and historians from the U.S., Great Britain, and Romania, including both senior scholars and graduate students, the project will research the process through which collective property in land was created in Romania between and (when collectivization there was declared complete). Research methods include both oral-history interviews and research in archives; the project is possible because some of those who experienced collectivization are still alive and because newly opened archives will provide information not previously available. The project s goal is to analyze what collectivization reveals about the operations of the socialist state-in-formation and the creation transformation of persons. Collectivization was instrumental in establishing the nature of the new Party-state and of the subjects it would govern; the policy was thus a defining moment both for the peasantry who suffered its consequences and for the apparatus that initiated it. Guiding questions include: What can one learn about how new techniques of rule were created and applied? To the extent that different forms of property entail different understandings of the person and of what it means to be a respectable human being, how did collectivization affect personhood? Are there discernible differences in the course of collectivization according to the ethno-national composition of different villages and regions? Did central directives repeatedly override policies adopted locally in response to local problems? Did local resistance to collectivization substantially modify how collective property was being made, thus affecting the subsequent operations of Romanian communist power and how the parts of the state apparatus related to one another? Was resistance more marked in some parts of the country than in others -- thus, did certain locales disproportionately affect the national outcome? Answers to these kinds of questions will help to show how a policy instigated in obedience to the Stalinist model took specific shape in Romania and helped to form there a particular configuration of inter-bureaucratic and state-subject relations. The result of this work will be an analytic history of property-making relevant to present-day remakings of property -- a topic of increasing interest and practical concern in the contemporary world doc1411 none FLAGG Barbara Flagg is conducting exploratory research to assess the feasibility and viability of presenting to the public an on-going review of new findings or issues in major fields of research. This research on the untested idea of providing the public with information about research on a regular, on-going basis through multiple media will provide information about the American public s current science media habits, their awareness of and interest in broad areas of research, and the presentation formats most likely to appeal to and reach the public on a regular basis doc1412 none KOZAITIS This applied research will capitalize on work that has been done over the past four years and will, by means of a controlled study, explore the factors that contribute to sustainable reform in a Local Systemic Change (LSC) project. The experiment is unique, as the project in the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) is the only one in the entire Teacher Enhancement portfolio which has associated with it an anthropologist-in-residence who will carry out this research. Informed by the conceptual framework outlined in the proposal, the study will reveal factors that encourage or inhibit adoption of constructivist science pedagogy by APS teachers. The context for the research is the Elementary Science Educational Partners (ESEP) project. This is a five-year LSC project which serves approximately 1,600 K-5 teachers in 69 elementary schools in Atlanta. The EXEP project is in its final stages and the study is timely in that there are many important lessons to be learned about the impact of NSF investment in an urban school district. Such research will help provide answers doc1413 none For his doctoral dissertation research the PI will develop an archaeological ceramic sequence for the coastal plain of North Carolina. While excavations indicate that this region has a long history of Native American occupation and document both an earlier hunting and gathering and later agricultural way of life, research has been severely hindered by lack of a cultural chronology. Many sites are contained within loosely consolidated sandy soil which results in vertical movement in material. Thus detailed stratigraphic reconstruction is often difficult. Because of the chemical composition of such soils, organic material is rarely preserved and radiocarbon dating is rarely possible. The PI wishes to remedy this situation through the construction of a detailed ceramic chronology which is anchored in time by thermolumenescence dating. This technique measures time dependent radiation damage within individual potsherds and preliminary analysis has produced internally consistent and archaeologically reasonable results. A series of sherds from stratigraphically secure contexts will be studied. Changes through time in method of manufacture, as determined through petrographic and compositonal analysis, as well as stylistic attributes will be described and the resultant sequence will be anchored with thermolumenescence dates. Once this is accomplished, materials from surface and disturbed sites can be incorporated and the PI can then plot spatial distributions to delineate prehistoric cultural groupings and determine how they changed over time. The coastal North Carolina plain is of archaeological interest because although its inhabitants incorporated maize agriculture into their hunting and gathering way of life when this cultigen became available, in contrast to most other Native American groups they apparantly did not adopt a settled village way of life but continued a highly mobile lifestyle. For the many archaeologist interested in the development of cultural complexity and the sedentization which usually accompanies this, the region provides an important study case. However lack of a securely dated sequence severely limits research. The PI s work should help to remedy this situation doc1398 none The Snow Petrel, Pagadroma nivea, is an abundant seabird species that occurs only in pack-ice covered seas of the Southern Ocean and nests among talus slopes of ice-free nanataks. It has been shown that at some ice-free locations this species has nested for 35,000 years. The proposed project will focus on the isotopic analysis of laminated deposits of Snow Petrel mumiyo (i.e., stomach oil that accumulates around nesting cavities) dating back 10,000 years before present. The samples are in hand and were collected at the Bunger Hills, East Antarctica. These analyses will assess the variation in the structure of certain portions of the upper food web of the Southern Ocean in response to climate variation. Profiles of 18O and 2H will be analyzed to reveal correspondence to long-term fluctuations in marine climate, while 13C and 15N will be used to assess food web fluctuations. The Snow Petrel feeds on either krill, at one trophic level, or fish, at the next highest. Thus results may reveal long-term switches in diet as a function of availability in these two classes of prey. Availability of these prey to Snow Petrels is in turn known to be affected by the variation in sea ice cover. Sea ice cover varies with climate, as revealed in sediment cores of coastal Antarctica. The proposed analyses have the potential to reveal corresponding changes in higher in the food web doc1415 none Little Mahmoud This dissertation research examines social relations of livestock trade in northern Kenya. The project, by a cultural anthropologist from the University of Kentucky, explores how trust operates in the context of economic, environmental and other uncertainties. The role of differential information in trust relationships among traders of different ethnicity, in different types of market trade, and in different sorts of transactions will be studied. The study will focus on livestock markets and will collect both qualitative ethnographic (participant observation, in-depth interviews, case histories) and quantitative survey data of trader households to analyze the complex nature of trader relationships. Hypotheses relating differences in information, type of stock traded, ethnicity, and forms of relationship will be tested. The new data to be generated will advance the theory of personalized economic relationships, will increase our knowledge about this important region of the world, and will help train a young social scientist. The information will also be important for policy makers and planners of arid land and pastoral economic systems doc1416 none Gorelick Recent studies at the Macrodispersion Experiment (MADE) site in Columbus, Mississippi have indicated that the preferential flow paths resulting from aquifer heterogeneities at decimeter (dm) and smaller scales appear to have a dominant effect on plume-scale solute transport. This collaborative research responds to the general lack of studies on the effect of dm-scale heterogeneities on plume-scale solute transport as observed at the MADE site. Our intent is to systematically study the characteristics of solute transport influenced by dm-scale preferential flow paths, and rigorously test the hypothesis that a dual-domain mass transfer approach can provide an effective representation of such characteristics. Four specific elements are integrated into the proposed research. (1) Generate 3-D geologically plausible networks of dm-scale fluvially deposited channels and simulate detailed transport in such systems. (2) Assess the ability of the dual-domain mass transfer model, and possibly other alternative models, to represent the key characteristics of solute transport. (3) Conduct a series of large-diameter column experiments to measure the mass transfer model parameter values under different heterogeneity configurations and flow rates. (4) Conduct tracer tests at the MADE site to obtain the mass transfer model parameter values, using dye-tracing, soil coring and image analysis aimed at providing direct field evidence of preferential flow paths. We will attempt to relate the lithologic characteristics to the mass transfer model parameters obtained from the tracer tests doc1417 none Harrell On the path of modernization most societies go through what demographers call fertility transition , the change from large to small numbers of offspring. In an overpopulated world, few social facts are more important to understand than the local causes of fertility transition. This project by anthropological demographers at the University of Washington enhances our incomplete understanding of the fertility transition in China. It studies how socioeconomic, cultural forces have produced a particular pattern and process of fertility change. The project will establish the late imperial Chinese demographic regime, then examine fertility changes in the 20th century. The project will focus on lineage populations in Xiaoshan county, Zhejiang province. It will select lineage populations representing different local environmental variations, levels of economic development and economic specialization. It will conduct a family demographic history survey of current lineage populations as a means of studying fertility processes in the 20th century. Ethnographic and archival research will also be conducted to provide a sociocultural context as well as data on local customs pertaining to demographic processes. This project, designed to collect a combined set of survey, genealogical, ethnographic and archival data, can contribute to an in-depth understanding of the trajectories and sociocultural mechanisms of Chinese demographic change doc1418 none Humans are primates - animals with a long history of adaptation to life in trees. As the link between animals and their environment, locomotion is one of the most important animal behaviors. Researchers have made hypotheses about the evolution of locomotion in primates by studying fossil limb bones. These ideas have been based on biomechanical analyses and comparative anatomy. Here, the researchers intend to test hypotheses regarding this association by studying a part of primate anatomy that is intimately linked to locomotion but independent from the limbs. Primate semicircular canals, which are part of the inner ear, are tuned to the demands of locomotion. Their sensitivity, surrogates for which can be measured, is increased in fast moving species and decreased in slower ones. In this research the investigators will study the details of the canals in skulls of modern species and a series of fossil primates by using the non-destructive method of ultra-high-resolution computed tomography. This X-ray technique does not harm rare museum specimens of species that are now endangered in the wild nor irreplaceable fossil skulls. The scientists shall make X-ray slices of skulls and reconstruct their details by computer. These computer images then become the raw data for the study. The details of the canals of modern species, in which the locomotion is known from field observations, will be used as a yardstick by which to infer the locomotion of the ancient ancestral and extinct species doc1419 none The investigators will study plasma structure, dynamics, and coupling resulting from the interaction of an inverted-V structure and a typical polar wind plasma during its transit through the auroral region. An important objective in ionosphere-magnetosphere coupling is to trace the flow of mass, energy, and momentum, on both small and large scales. In the auroral region, this coupling can be affected by the interaction of thermal and auroral plasmas, which can lead to plasma energization, and multi-scale plasma structures. A persistent signature in the auroral regions is an inverted-V structure in the precipitating electron spectral distribution. The interaction of the convecting polar wind with the inverted-V structures is likely to result in dramatic departures of the polar wind plasma transport properties, which are a key factor in defining ionosphere-magnetosphere coupling. The study will be based on a generalized, time-dependent, 16-moment, multi-species, multi-scale, field-aligned transport model capable of simulating mesoscale plasma outflow processes. The model will be used to quantify the role of an inverted-V structure in mesoscale plasma dynamics, plasma energization, density structures, and ionospheric plasma outflow. The model results will help to understand the most important physical processes influencing magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling doc1420 none The Principal Investigators (PIs) overall objective is to develop plant cell and tissue culture technology, which will permit rapid evaluation of heterologous gene expression in plants. This work includes the development of rigorous principles for the monitoring, control and operation of bioreactors for plant cell and tissue culture. These bioreactor operational principles will be utilized to correlate performance of transient expression systems using Agrobacterium co-cultivation for DNA transformation and the TMV vector or a single-stranded DNA geminivirus vector capable of DNA amplification for protein production (based on tobacco and corn seed endosperm) while testing expression and accumulation of three therapeutic proteins: a monoclonal antibody (NR-LU-10 MAb), a cytokine (human growth hormone, hGH), and a blood transport protein (human transferrin, hTR). The specific objectives are to: (1) Develop operational and control strategies for bioreactor growth of plant cell and root culture, (2) Develop and optimize techniques conditions for DNA delivery for transient expression, and (3) Utilize bioreactor control strategies and optimized transient therapeutic protein expression systems to evaluate heterologous transgene expression in plant cell and tissue culture, followed by correlation with performance in transgenic plants with the same proteins. This is a collaborative GOALI project involving three PIs with different complementary scientific and technological expertise. Wayne Curtis the primary PI at the Pennsylvania State University is an expert in the area of bioreactor technology, Hugh Mason the second PI at the Boyce Thompson Institute and Cornell University in the area of transgenic plants, and Doug Russell at the Integrated Protein Technologies of Monsanto in the area of production of proteins from transgenic plants doc1421 none Political ecology is an approach that looks at human-environmental interactions as they are influenced by and in turn affect local political processes. This dissertation research by a cultural anthropologist from the University of Minnesota will study development and political ecology in two villages in Papua New Guinea. One village is engaged in ecotourism and conservation while the other is involved with a commercial gold mining corporation. Using ethnographic and archival research methods the student will determine the impact of difference resource strategies on land concentration and social stratification; will study the relation between community identity, values and competing economic processes; and the relation between specific resource regimes and community political activity. Hypotheses will be tested relating levels of compensation and inequality, empowerment, and cultural control of resources. By comparing two culturally similar villages the research will assess the effects of these difference paths to development on the local social systems. This will extend our understanding of how global systems of resource management are engaged locally, and how communities differentiate themselves. The project will add to our knowledge of this important region of the world, and will help train a young social scientist doc1422 none McCarty This award supports Professor Perry L. McCarty, Director of the Western Region Hazardous Substance Research Center, Stanford University, to conduct collaborative research with Dr. Jaeho Bae, Department of Environmental Engineering, Inha University, Korea. The joint study will investigate the process of biological degradation of chlorinated ethenes. Principal objectives of the project include development of a numerical model that integrates the many factors involved in the reductive dechlorination of chlorinated ethenes, and to verify the model using field data. Because of their wide use in industry, chlorinated ethenes have become major contaminants of groundwater and soil. Remediation of groundwater contaminated with chlorinated ethenes is very difficult because they are dense, only partially soluble in water, and relatively resistant to chemical and biological degradation. Nevertheless, biological reductive dechlorination is one of the promising methods for bioremediation of contaminated sites, as it may be cost-effective compared to chemical and physical treatment, and it is also environmentally friendly as contaminants are degraded into non-toxic ethene. The multiple processes involved in reductive dechlorination are highly complex, and our knowledge of this process is still rather limited. This project will combine the complementary expertise and facilities of the American and Korean laboratories to advance our mutual understanding of the process doc1423 none This action provides funds to be transferred from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA). These funds will be used by NIMA to help support a project on Spatio-Temportal Panning and Zooming that has been selected through a NIMA-administered competitive evaluation process as part of the NIMA University Research Initiative (NURI) program. The project will be conducted by Kathleen Hornsby and colleagues at the University of Maine. Spatio-temporal knowledge representation often requires changing from one level of detail to another so that users can carry out a desired task. Although abstraction, or the opposite task of shifting to more detailed views, are routinely and intuitively carried out by humans, formalizing these shifts for integration into information system query languages offers many challenges. Current geographic information systems (GIS), for example, allow for zooms based on geometric properties only. Similarly, GIS users can change only their perspective of data by panning. This project goes beyond graphic zooming or panning by considering another important perspective - time. This project will develop a formal model to support changes in levels of temporal detail. Using the identity-based approach, a set of temporal pan and zoom operators will be introduced. These operators will be embedded into a spatial query language and ultimately integrated with the spatial pan and zoom operators to become a set of spatio-temporal operations. The project will also examine the utility and mathematical properties of using lattices as an underlying structure for organizing views of objects at different levels of temporal detail. Temporal panning and zooming result in either simpler views that are easier to understand or more detailed views that uncover information that is otherwise unknown. The research will advance the theory on temporal abstractions, which is important for users of very large geospatial databases. The findings will be of particular relevance to information management of massive databases, and will be applicable to a variety of phenomena that involves time such as meteorological occurrences and population movements doc1424 none This one-day workshop will be held currently with the ASME Design Engineering Technical Conference. The goal of this workshop is to bring relevant academic, industry, and government experts together, especially including those outside of the ASME community, to discuss research challenges and establish research goals in the general area of human assist devices and automation. The focus will be on task-oriented integration of simple mechanisms, controls and intelligence to provide customized flexibility at an affordable cost. The potential task scopes range from aiding people with disability, microsurgery, health care, industrial automation, material handling, manufacturing, construction, combat, tele-operation, to satellite deployment. Findings of the workshop will comprise the substance of a public report to the NSF, which is also made available on the web for appropriate wider dissemination doc1425 none With funding from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Rebecca Saunders, Gregory Mikell, and their colleagues will explore the relationship between changing coastal landscapes and cultural complexity at two sites above Choctawhatchee Bay, Florida. The sites appear to be part of a relatively large number (16) of middle Archaic sites exploiting the sandy terrace above the Mitchell River floodplain around - years ago. When these two habitation sites were occupied, however, the floodplain environment appears to have been quite different from the freshwater marsh that is present today. Mitchell River sites #1 and #4 contain dense shell midden (trash piles) composed of saltwater shellfish and fish species. The researchers suspect that sea level was higher years ago, and that estuarine conditions prevailed in the floodplain immediately adjacent to the site. Their position on the terrace has preserved the Mitchell River sites and they are among the earliest coastal adaptations yet identified in the southeastern United States. A fall in sea level may have precipitated site abandonment at about the same time that pottery began to appear in the region (ca. years ago). When the site was re-occupied around A.D. , no shellfish-of estuarine, brackish, or freshwater species-were exploited, leading the researchers to speculate that the terrace was not again an attractive habitation spot until horticulture was adopted by Native Americans in the region. The investigators have marshalled an arsenal of investigative techniques to reconstruct the coastal geomorphology and archaeology of the Mitchell River area. One field season of excavation is directed towards a reconstruction of the lifeways of the inhabitants of Mitchell River #1 and #4. Systematic subsurface testing and block excavations will uncover information on: diet, seasons of site occupation(s), time period of occupation, intrasite settlement pattern, degree of sedentism, long distance trade, and, to the extent possible, on social and political organization. Collaborations between the archaeologists and a coastal geomorphologist (Dr. Gregory Stone), a palynologist (Dr. John Wrenn), a diatomist (Dr. William Krebs), a paleobotanist (Katherine Roberts), a zooarchaeologist (Irvy R. Quitmeyer), and specialists in fish otolith (earbone) seasonality (Coastal Fisheries Institute, LSU) will allow the principal investigators to correlate changes in the dynamic coastal environment with changes in flora and fauna. These, in turn, will be used to inform the study of the adaptation of Native Americans to the coast. The investigators believe that their results can be used by researchers worldwide to study early coastal adaptations and the development of cultural complexity. Results will also be of interest to geologists and other researchers interested in sea level rise, coastal dynamics, and paleoenvironmental reconstruction doc1426 none This collaborative research project with Lynn Russell, Princeton University, is an investigation of the role of organic species in atmospheric particles. Measurements of aerosol organics in east Asian outflow will be made from shipboard (NOAA R V Brown) and aircraft (NCAR C-130), during the ACE-Asia field program. The measurements include: 1) semi-continuous elemental organic carbon (EC OC) analysis using a thermo-optical detection technique, and 2) time-integrated filter samples for analysis by Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy. The EC OC measurements provide an important indicator for the role of combustion emissions in the air masses sampled. The FTIR organic analyses describe the mass of organic species and classify those species by functional group and solubility in solvents of different polarity. This provides information about the mass fraction of organic compounds that are water-soluble and contribute to enhanced water uptake by particles. The hydrophobic organic fraction that does not dissolve in the particulate aqueous phase will also be quantified doc1427 none Brettell, Hollifield, & Cordell This project studies the immigrant experience of Asian Indian, Nigerian, Vietnamese, Salvadoran and Mexican immigrants who have established communities in the sunbelt metropolitan area of Dallas, Tarrant, Collin and Denton counties, Texas, since . The researchers, including cultural anthropologists, political scientists, historians and demographers, will document incorporation outcomes for each immigrant group, paying attention to variation by gender, economic status and activity, language use and social mobility, community institutions, intra- and inter-group relations and leisure time activity as well as civil and political incorporation through naturalization and political participation. The project will analyze the effects of variation in human and social capital such as education and social networks and variation in the auspices of immigration such as the conditions of arrival (the existence of family contacts, varieties of legal or unauthorized status) on the process of incorporation among these diverse immigrant populations and individuals. The project will collect qualitative and quantitative data including a demographic analysis of census data from the past 30 years, historical archives, in-depth unstructured and semi-structured interviews with government officials, heads of organizations, employers and immigrant entrepreneurs, a survey of households from each of the five immigrant groups, participant-observation, and a telephone survey of metroplex residents. This research will advance theory in modes of incorporation, globalization, and transnational research. The new knowledge to be gained will be useful to students of international migration and ethnicity, planners, decision makers, and social service deliverers doc1428 none Fox & Smith With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Cynthia Fox and Jane Smith will conduct three years of linguistic research on a unique variety of French. This language was brought to the northeastern part of the United States by French Canadian immigrants from Quebec and Acadians from the Maritimes over a period from the end of the 18th century into the 20th. These Franco-Americans constitute a significant segment of the populations of the northeastern states. Thanks to an ideology that supported the preservation of their ancestral heritage, they represent the second largest concentration of French speakers in the United States. But in the past 40 years, both the number of these French speakers and the frequency of their use of French have declined dramatically. Two goals of this project are to collect a sample of Franco-American French and to study its current vitality. Interviews with Franco-Americans in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island will be recorded. These data will address several interrelated questions: (1) How does this variety of French differ from the French spoken in Canada? (2) How did these differences come about? For example, how has English influenced this variety of French? (3) Does this French vary across communities? (4) What factors have led some Franco-Americans to keep using their French and others to stop using it? Answers to such questions improve scientific understanding of the complex ways that languages and their speakers change over time and geography. This research thus has both historical and linguistic value. The project will also provide training for future researchers by involving students in all phases and in a unique partnership between the State University of New York at Albany and the University of Maine. Of greatest importance, this research project will involve community members in documenting and thus helping to preserve their linguistic heritage doc1429 none Larson Despite the development of an impressive GPS infrastructure for precise orbit determination and many advances in GPS modeling and analysis techniques, significant error sources remain. As continuously operating GPS arrays continue to be deployed throughout the world to study geophysical processes with signals below 1 mm yr, the need to eliminate all systematic errors is critical. Multipath represents one of the largest errors in GPS applications today. There is currently no standard technique to remove multipath errors in high precision GPS software used by the geophysics community. Failure to correct for the multipath environment at a GPS site produces a time-varying systematic error in GPS estimates which degrades the accuracy of the system. Support form this grant will be used to develop an approach for correcting GPS multipath errors that borrows on technologies developed by aerospace engineers for spacecraft attitude determination. The technique uses the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to estimate corrections to the GPS phase observables. Although routinely collected by GPS receivers, SNR data are not currently used in high precision GPS software. This SNR based multipath correction technique can be used both on older datasets as well as new GPS data. And because the technique uses SNR data collected simultaneously with the phase data, it is sensitive to time varying changes at GPS sites doc1430 none Rhee This award supports Dr. G-Yull Rhee, Laboratory of Environmental Biology, Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health, to conduct collaborative research with Dr. Jongseol Kim of the University of Ulsan in Korea. The joint study will investigate cell death among phytoplankton species. Phytoplankton cell death is an important loss process that affects the productivity of aquatic ecosystems. While external factors such as herbivore grazing and viral infection are major causes of cell death, internally-driven physiological death may also play a significant role in phytoplankton mortality. If the physiological death rate varies with species, it will not only affect primary productivity, but also interspecies competition and succession. Since cell death is accompanied by the release of dissolved organic carbon, it can also divert photosynthetically-fixed carbon to the microbial loop. This project will combine the complementary expertise and facilities of the American and Korean laboratories to advance our mutual understanding of the problem doc1431 none The general topic of this dissertation is sonority. Specifically, the following issues will be addressed: (1) What is sonority? (2) What is the articulatory, acoustic, and or auditory basis of sonority? (3) How should sonority be quantified? (4) Is the sonority scale universal or language-specific? and (5) What role should sonority play in formal phonological constraints? It has long been recognized that sonority differences determine the sequencing of sounds within syllables, a pattern observed in all languages. In order to explain this universal effect, many linguists have suggested that sonority derives from differences in how sounds are pronounced or perceived. However, to date a phonetic definition of sonority (in articulatory, acoustic, or perceptual terms) has remained elusive. Consequently, a number of phonologists and phoneticians have questioned the theoretical validity of sonority altogether, claiming that this notion is impossible to characterize in a concrete way. Consequently, the potential contribution of this project is to resolve a long-standing controversy regarding the physical basis of sonority. The goal of this project is to determine which of five physical parameters best characterizes sonority differences: intensity (loudness), peak rate of oral air flow, peak intraoral air pressure, constriction duration, or frequency of the first formant. Each of these characteristics will be systematically studied in the speech of multiple native speakers of both English and Spanish for all language-specific phonemes, consonants and vowels alike. The objective of this research is to demonstrate that sonority can be quantified in a precise, consistent, non-arbitrary, and phonetically-grounded way based on the values of one or more of these physical correlates doc1432 none Smith Kushnick Theorists in behavioral ecology assume that the genetic fitness of an individual can be changed by different strategies. This dissertation research project by a cultural anthropologist from the University of Washington will test hypotheses about parental investment theory with data on mother-child interactions from a rural society in Sumatra, Indonesia. The project will record data on interbirth intervals and breastfeeding behavior of two samples of mothers, one from a relatively well-off and one from a relatively less well off village, through an intensive interview with 200 mothers in each village. Data will also come from behavioral observations of infant behavior, breastfeeding and other interactions done through scan sampling. This data will allow the student to test predictions drawn from theory such as the hypothesis that poor maternal socioeconomic contexts will favor long interbirth intervals; that good maternal socioeconomic conditions will favor less demanding offspring and less attentive parents. The data from this project will allow extensive theory development through hypothesis testing, which should advance our understanding of human parenting behavior. In addition the project will advance our knowledge about this important region of the world and contribute to the training of a young social scientist doc1433 none It is well known that people who have active illnesses assume a special role in society, with different expectations of behavior, known as the sick role . This dissertation research project studies how people diagnosed with diseases of uncertain prognosis that last their lifetime, but are invisible to others, deal with their identity as sick persons. The student, an anthropologist from Case Western Reserve University, will interview a sample of 40 women diagnosed with breast cancer to examine their willingness to claim a sick role status; to describe their health-seeking behaviors and plans; to determine the characteristics of their social networks related to their ability to access information about treatment options; and to compare these issues in women taking ongoing treatment with women not taking therapy during the uncertainty phase of their illness. Participants will be drawn from breast cancer patients involved in a larger study in the Cleveland metropolitan area. The method will be intensive interviews recorded and transcribed. This research will advance our theoretical understanding of the sick role as it applies to a broader disease context, of a potentially fatal disease that is hidden from the uninformed and has an unknowable outcome. It will also advance our understanding of how social networks work to facilitate information in situations of relative personal crisis doc1434 none The U.S. Global Ocean Ecosystems Dynamics (U.S. GLOBEC) program has the goal of understanding and ultimately predicting how populations of marine animal species respond to natural and anthropogenic changes in climate. Research in the Southern Ocean (SO) indicates strong coupling between climatic processes and ecosystem dynamics via the annual formation and destruction of sea ice. The Southern Ocean GLOBEC Program (SO GLOBEC) will investigate the dynamic relationship between physical processes and ecosystem responses through identification of critical parameters that affect the distribution, abundance and population dynamics of target species. The overall goals of the SO GLOBEC program are to elucidate shelf circulation processes and their effect on sea ice formation and krill distribution, and to examine the factors which govern krill survivorship and availability to higher trophic levels, including penguins, seals and whales. The focus of the U.S. contribution to the international SO GLOBEC program will be on winter processes. This component will focus on the distribution and foraging behavior of adult female crabeater seals, using a combination of satellite-linked tracking, specialized diver recorders, and stable isotopic tracers. This research will be coordinated with components focused on prey (krill) distribution and the physical environment. The results will be analyzed using an optimality model. The result of the integrated SO GLOBEC program will be to improve the predictability of living marine resources, especially with respect to local and global climatic shifts doc1435 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Richard Lesure will conduct one field season of archaeological and geomorphological survey in the Mexican state of Tlaxcala which is located ca. 80 km. East of Mexico City. From an archaeological perspective, the region is famous because it acquired a sufficient degree of power and centralized social organization to resist Aztec imperialism and eventually allied itself with the Spanish conquistadors in the Aztec conquest. Thus the area bears testimony to the development of complex highly organized society. Dr. Lesure wishes to understand the early phases of this development and in the process gain insight into the factors which lead to a sedentary existence. Preliminary data suggest that a large prehistoric lake once existed in this region and because lakes can provide significant subsistence resources, it is necessary as a first step to reconstruct the past environment. Dr. Lesure and his colleagues will excavate or extract cores from relevant sediments for this purpose. The team will then survey for archaeological sites and select several for test excavation. The data thus collected should permit them to establish a solid cultural chronology for the region and also, through analysis of faunal and floral remains provide insight into subsistence activities. Humans spent much of prehistory as nomadic hunter-gatherers, but during the last 10,000 years people across the globe have shifted to increasingly sedentary lives. Because this occurred independently in many different areas, scientists assume that it reflects a basic underlying process rather than historical happenstance and they wish to understand the underlying principles involved. For many years it was believed that sedentism was simply a consequence of the adoption of agriculture and sedentary lifeways and the emergence of food production seem often to have been closely related. However the relationship is not a simple one because preagricultural sedentism has been documented both archaeologically and historically. Two models have been proposed to explain the origins of sedentism and they invoke very different causal mechanisms. One is based on subsistence productivity and focuses on changing human-environmental relationships. The other envisions a process of social competition and argues that the process is at least fueled by competition for status among individuals and groups. Dr. Lesure believes that the two models would have clearly different signatures in the Tlaxcala region which thus offers an excellent research venue for such a study. This project is important for several reasons. It will provide data of interest to many archaeologists. It will also shed new light on the processes which led to the rise of complex society doc1436 none Moreno-Black Vallianatos Poor health and nutrition in pregnant women is the beginning of a vicious cycle of faltering growth in childhood and later life. This project involves the dissertation research of a cultural anthropologist from the University of Oregon, studying how the health of women and children is affected by maternal nutritional status, which is in turn affected by cultural dietary proscriptions during pregnancy. The student will examine how social relations of slum-dwellers in New Delhi, India produce inequalities of class, caste and gender which affect food consumption during pregnancy. The project includes ethnographic exploration of relations between cultural diet proscriptions and pregnant women s nutritional status though study of the local cultural explanatory model of appropriate diet; standard diet and anthropometric analysis of nutrient shortages of pregnant women; an ethnographic examination of the relation between a woman s pregnancy history and her current diet; an ethnographic study of the effect of rural-urban migration on family structure and the resulting effect on food consumption by pregnant women; and an analysis of how current health education programs can be improved. The results of this project will be important for health planners in the developing world, will provide valuable information about this region of the world, and will help train a young social scientist doc1437 none Moberg The viability of household-based agriculture in competition with corporate farm commodity producers has been an enduring interest of third-world development studies. This project assesses the effects of free trade policies in farming communities on St. Lucia, which has the largest number of banana farms in the Windward Islands, Caribbean. The research assesses the predictions prevalent in the Caribbean that the World Trade Organization ruling striking down a tariff-quota system of preferential treatment would be severely detrimental to household banana production. However other theorists predict that household commodity producers can use their lower labor and production costs to remain competitive. In addition to testing these hypotheses the project will document the ways growers respond to globalization in the political realm given local traditions of intense rural political activity, as well as illustrate the extent to which neoliberal models of trade are politically sustainable in the Eastern Caribbean. The project will study farms in two nearby locales, testing hypotheses about differentiation, survival in farming and political activity through participant observation, semi-structured interviews of knowledgeable informants, and structured surveys of banana growers in the two regions. The new knowledge to be created will be valuable to development theorists as well as planners doc1438 none This award establishes a coordination office for the U.S. and international Southern Ocean Global Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics (SO-Globec) programs at Old Dominion University. The office will carry out administrative functions for the twenty-five principal investigators that make up the U.S. SO-Globec study. Specifically the office will serve as the single point of contact for the U.S. SO-Globec community; provide contact with the broader international Globec program, the International Whaling Commission, the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, the Scientific Committee for Ocean Research, and other international bodies; coordinate workshops and investigator meetings for the U.S. SO-Globec study; provide visibility through newsletters, popular articles, and other types of publications, and coordinate special sessions on Southern Ocean Globec activities at national and international meetings doc1439 none As part of the Census of Marine Life, we will create a taxonomic database to the Hexacorallia (phylum Cnidaria) that adds to the inventory of sea anemones compiled by Fautin (biocomplexity.nhm.ukans.edu anemones images Version.html), all species of orders Ceriantharia (tube anemones; by Molodtsova), Scleractinia ( stony or true corals; by Cairns and Veron), and Zoantharia (zoanthids; by Ryland). Specimen?based, it will contain three-dimensional distribution data (including geospatial precision of each record) and bibliographic reference to description of each species. In addition to current features, an application by Ardelean will permit retrieval of data by all synonyms of a species, flagging taxonomic and nomenclatural problems. Interacting with this database will be physicochemical and ecological databases important to marine biogeography. The core databases will be those assembled and linked as part of the LJNEP GEF?funded program within the LOICZ (IGBP) Typology effort (www.nioz.ni loicz). We will develop and adapt tools to allow interactive analyses of the biological and environmental data, including by visualization on map displays. This project will: link across spatial scales; greatly augment the minimal biogeographic data available for most benthic marine invertebrates; permit formulation and testing of biogeography and biodiversity models; and support forecasting and hindcasting of distribution changes due to environmental change doc1440 none This project investigates the parental logic, goals and decision making processes behind child welfare outcomes in Thailand from a bio-cultural evolutionary perspective. The dissertation research by a cultural anthropologist from the University of Washington will ascertain the characteristics of children at high risk for potentially hazardous welfare outcomes, and will clarify the causal pathways by which cultural, ecological, and biological factors interact to produce parental decisions. The project will compare patterns of investment in and labor extraction from children from different village and household types, investigate the cultural logic behind parental decision making, and study the implications for child welfare and parental reproductive success. Ethnographic interviewing and focus groups will provide qualitative insights into the motivations and intentions associated with parental strategizing and parental expectations of sons and daughters. Retrospective family history surveys will quantitatively explore household decision making focusing on five specific child welfare outcomes. The new knowledge from this project will be valuable to development policy planners, will advance our understanding of demographic transition theory, will help train a young social scientist, and will advance our knowledge of this important region of the world doc1441 none The goal of this project is to develop an undergraduate curriculum in neuroinformatics at UCLA. Neuroinformatics brings together the methods and concepts of neuroscience, informatics, and computation that are necessary to understand the human brain and all its complexity. Neuroinformatics offers neuroscience new opportunities for extracting understanding from data and meaning from measurements. The new curriculum will prepare a new generation of informatically oriented neuroscientists by specifically introducing them to neuoroinformatic methods and principles while they are still undergraduates. This curriculum will be made freely available to colleges and universities throughout the nation. This program will be empirically evaluated and modified based upon the evaluations and all instructional protocols will be carefully and complete documented. Neuroinformatics, although a young science, holds great promise for deepening our knowledge of the human brain and its function. This research is funded in part by the National Science Foundation through its participation in the Human Brain Project, which is a Federal interagency research initiative, mandated by Congress as part of the Decade of the Brain doc1442 none This grant will be used to support the annual meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM). The mission of the OHBM is to promote the field of structural and functional brain mapping. In particular, OHBM emphasizes non-invasive, image-based investigation of the functional organization of the human brain. The principal activity of the OHBM is to organize an annual, international meeting. For meetings inside the US, funding will be used for 100 student stipends. For international venues, funding will be used to pay the cost of invited US speakers. The meetings are relevant to the Human Brain Project in that the presentations relate to the function and structure of the human brain, one-sixth of the scientific program is devoted to the latest methods for image acquisition, and the entire educational program is devoted exclusively to the methods used to study the brain, with a strong emphasis of image analysis and other aspects of nueroinformatics. This research is funded in part by the National Science Foundation through its participation in the Human Brain Project, which is a Federal interagency research initiative, mandated by Congress as part of the Decade of the Brain doc1443 none NIH NSF Human Brain Project PI: Robert W. Williams Informatics Center for Mouse Neurogenetics The purpose of this project is to develop and exploit a suite of image databases, motorized Internet microscopes, and software to study the genetic basis of structural variation of the mouse CNS. Resources are open to the research community through an integrated web interface at nervenet.org . The focus of this project is to provide collaborative research environments for mapping quantitative trait loci (QTLs). QTL analysis is a burgeoning field that tackles complex biological traits modulated by many genes. Four new resources and technologies will be developed: 1) the Mouse Brain Library, 2) the Internet Microscope System, 3) the NeuroCartographer Project, and 4) the Neurogenetics Tool Box. Achieving the aims of these four projects will catalyze a new era in the structural analysis of the adult mammalian nervous system and will lead to a large number of novel lines of research on the development and aging of the human brain. This research is funded in part by the National Science Foundation through its participation in the Human Brain Project, which is a Federal interagency research initiative, mandated by Congress as part of the Decade of the Brain doc1444 none The overall goal of this Program Project, which embodies three research components, is to capitalize on previous work by this research group, involving SenseLab, to develop a set of neuroinformatics tools for supporting g the analysis of the functional organization of the olfactory system. The underlying rational is that, in the analysis of brain function, the generation of experimental data currently exceeds the means for archiving, analyzing, and integrating these data. The aim of project 1 is to understand the molecular sequences of the neural operations underlying olfactory perception; to this end the project will develop 4 databases. Project 2 will perform the necessary informatics research to support the other two projects and transfer the results to the programming core for practical applications. Project 3 will use data in the developed databases to construct and validate models of interacting neurons in the olfactory system. A main focus will be the understanding of the integrative properties on the mitral cells for the olfactory bulb. The databases and tools will enhance the understanding of neural mechanisms. They will be generalizable to other systems, to provide tools of wider use for integrating and searching neuroscientific data. This research is funded in part by the National Science Foundation through its participation in the Human Brain Project, which is a Federal interagency research initiative, mandated by Congress as part of the Decade of the Brain doc1445 none Jacobs-Young This proposal was submitted under the guidelines for Research Planning Grants and Career Advancement Awards for Minority Scientists and Engineers, NSF 94-147 and is more specifically in response to the Minority Research Planning Grants (MRPG) opportunities of this announcement. The objective of this research is to study the effect of enzyme pretreatment of wood chips in the Kraft pulping process as a means of reducing pulp mill emissions and effluents. Previous work has shown enzyme pretreatment of wood pulp to be effective and has looked at the role of chip thickness, specie and enzyme combinations. The current work will be focused on the topological effects of enzyme pretreatment on delignification in Kraft pulping. This planning grant will afford the PI the opportunity to obtain preliminary results on which to base a full research proposal doc1446 none Meat-sharing with close kin and unrelated adults is believed to be one of the most significant dietary changes to occur in the course of human evolution. Despite its importance there is no consensus on when, why or how sharing emerged among ancestral hominids. The problem lies not only in our inability to confidently identify different sharing behaviors from the archaeological record, but the lack of a theoretical framework for understanding how and why sharing operates. With National Science Foundation support Dr. Karen Lupo and a team of researchers will conduct two seasons of ethnoarchaeological research on meat-sharing among Bofi foragers. The Bofi occupy lush forested regions of the Ngotto Forest Reserve in the Central African Republic and procure most of their food by hunting and gathering. The research is guided by a larger theoretical context which views sharing among family and between unrelated adults as fulfilling very different goals. Provisioning, or sharing among family members, enhances the survivability of close kin. But sharing with unrelated adults is aimed at enhancing a hunters social status. The theory predicts that hunters will vary their choice of prey depending upon their overall goal (provisioning or status enhancement). The research team will use direct observations, informant interviews and animal bone collections from different hunters and their households to test salient aspects of this theory. These techniques will allow the team to collect quantitative data on what hunters procure and how much of it is shared and consumed by close family and unrelated adults. Data collected with these techniques will be used to investigate the following research questions: 1) Does meat-sharing vary predictably by prey type? If so, what characteristics predict which prey will be shared with family and unrelated adults? 2) Do hunters vary their pursuit effort of different types of prey depending on their overall goal (provision family or enhance status)? 3) What is the material link between different sharing behaviors and the archaeological record? The importance of this research is far-reaching. This project will be the first systematic and quantitative study of prey choice and meat-sharing ever conducted among contemporary foragers. This research will also examine and identify the links between different sharing strategies, as reflected by animal bones, and the material record. This latter point is particularly important for archaeological investigations. The project combines ethnoarchaeological research with a theoretical framework that will help explain how and why sharing operates in a contemporary setting. By extension, it will provide important new insights into the evolution of sharing among ancestral hominids. Finally, very little is known about the Bofi foragers. Thus far, only one other study has ever been conducted in this area. This research will expand current understanding of contemporary forager ecology doc1447 none High-Performance Instrumented Airborne Platform for Environmental Research (HIAPER) will be a medium sized jet aircraft capable of operating in the upper troposphere to lower stratosphere, highly modified to carry a substantial scientific research payload. It will be capable of transporting observational scientists over greater rantes and for longer duration than has previously been possible. HIAPER will be designed to serve a broad cross-section of the geosciences community and will fill a major gap in the current U.S. airborne research fleet doc1448 none This is an observational and experimental study of natural and artificially triggered lightning at laboratories in Gainesville and Camp Blanding, Florida. Five projects will be carried out: 1. Study of the electromagnetic field close to lightning. 2. Analysis of the lightning energy balance. 3. Characterization of the initial stage of upward lightning. 4. Analysis and modeling of past data. 5. Documentation and study of the lightning attachment process. Results will advance the understanding of lightning physics and have implications for the physics and chemistry of clouds and the interaction of lightning with the upper atmosphere. In addition, the work provides information needed for effective lightning mitigation and contributes through the popular press and television to public awareness of lightning hazards doc1449 none The Behavioral Husbandry and Research Program (BHRP) at Brookfield Zoo is currently being redeveloping. The purpose of the BHRP is to incorporate behavioral observation, behavioral enrichment, and operant conditioning training into all aspects of captive management. This will require extensive training of staff and a more rigorous, systematic appproach to behavioral observation than has recently been required at the zoo. My responsibilities revolve primarliy around developing and maintaining a zoo-wide observational research program, with several goals: (1) Institute a zoo-wide program of routine behavioral monitoring of all animals in the zoo s collection; (2) Develop training and education programs for volunteers, staff and students to enable them to participate in, or initiate, research studies; (3) Initiate long-term research on the development of reproductive and parental behavior in captive animals, and the possible effects of physical and social environments on these life history traits. This proposal requests funding to initiate the primary components of the BHRP, including staff, student, and volunteer training, establishment of data collection and analysis protocols, and development of the technological infrastructure necessary to make the program a success doc812 none Moran Edwards This is a collaborative proposal between Principal Investigators at the Universities of Rhode Island and Minnesota-Twin Cities. The Arctic Ocean is much more dynamic than previously believed, characterized by large spatial and seasonal variations in productivity and associated particle flux, significant estuarine input and lateral intrusions of shelf water extending into the interior basins, and topographically-steered boundary currents along the perimeters of basins that result in regional extremes in water mass age. The Principal Investigators hypothesize that boundary scavenging , controlled by a combination of lateral advection and particle flux, plays a significant role in the removal of particle-reactive chemicals from the water column of the Arctic Ocean. They will evaluate the role of boundary scavenging as it has an important bearing on such key geochemical processes such as the export of carbon to deep waters, the sediment accumulation of reactive chemicals, including contaminants, and the export of these chemicals to the Atlantic. The objective is to constrain these fundamental processes on a basin-wide scale and to develop predictive biogeochemical models for this poorly understood and extreme environment. The Principal Investigators will determine whether that natural radionuclide Protactinium-231 (231Pa) - Thorium -230 (231Th) pair can be used as tracers to provide an integrated picture of water mass age and particle flux on a basin-wide scale in the modem and last glacial Arctic. To provide an increased understanding of the processes that control the redistribution of these tracers in the Arctic Ocean, the Principal Investigators will undertake a comprehensive study that includes paired 231Pa - 231Th analyses in dissolved and particulate samples from the water column, sediment trap material, surface sediments and sediment comes. This should help with a better understanding of the importance of particle composition on 231Pa - 231Th fractionation by quantifying the chemical composition of suspended particulate matter, sediment trap material and surface sediments. Boundary scavenging should be pronounced in the Arctic, due to the combined effects of the high ratio of shelf to open ocean, the regional extremes in water mass age and particle flux, and a dynamic circulation. This environmental setting is markedly different than other ocean regions where Pa and Th tracer studies have been conducted and provides a unique opportunity to investigate boundary scavenging and, in turn, constrain some outstanding questions regarding the paleo-application of 231Pa - 231Th doc1451 none Whitesides The principal objective in this work is to develop functional microfluidic devices based on PDMS and related materials. The strategic intent is to develop the simplest possible platform (meaning complete system, with components that accomplish sample introduction, preparation, separation, detection, disposal). We will fabricate integrated microanalytical systems using primarily poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) (and other organic polymers). The work will require development of a number of subsystems and components. The objectives of this work will be both to accomplish the task of developing a flexible platform technology, and to demonstrate new concepts. More specifically, the work will include: i) establishing the capability of PDMS to make certain types of functions uniquely possible by virtue of its flexibility and low surface free energies, and ii) expanding the range of components available to designers of microfluidic systems. The focus will be on proteomics rather than geonimcs. The PI will explore these ideas or components: Laminar flow and counterflow as the basis for separations, for patterning and dosing cells and proteins, and for in-channel fabrication. New types of functional components: on-chip equivalents of filters, dialysis chambers, magnetic sorters, ion exchange adsorbers and membranes, and centrifuges (with no moving parts). Components with moving parts: new types of components with moving parts, taking advantage of the ability of PDMS to flex to eliminate hinges and other complex features that are required when using silicon. Systems for separation and analysis of proteins that are amenable to chip-scale realization doc1452 none Dixon Stein The origin of large mountain belts like the Andes at ocean-continent convergent margins remains enigmatic despite centuries of study beginning with Darwin. Various hypotheses have been advanced to explain the Andes, but by themselves none seem capable of explaining the formation of this vast region of elevated, thickened crust. For example, the investigator s preliminary GPS data suggest that the Andes are growing today at roughly their long term average rate despite significant slowing of subduction since the Miocene, problematic for models that call on fast subduction alone to form the Andes. This collaborative team from the University of Miami and Northwestern University proposes a series of GPS measurements that exploit a network first occupied in , coupled with related seismic studies, aimed at understanding the processes forming Andean mountain belts. They will focus on the Central Andes of Peru and Bolivia, where the high, wide Altiplano plateau is best developed, and where an active fold and thrust belt accommodates rapid crustal shortening. To enhance their ability to discriminate models and to conserve resources, the measurements will be densified in two transects that cross the entire plate boundary zone, in regions of flat and normal subduction. The new measurements will span a total of four years to obtain velocity accuracy at the new sites adequate to distinguish among several competing hypotheses doc1453 none Planning for Teacher Leadership to Effect Systemic Change, a twelve-month planning project, seeks to assess the needs for K-8 mathematics teacher-leaders in the Newark Public Schools. The Newark Public Schools, the largest district in New Jersey, serves approximately 45,000 students. In recent years, Newark s educational system has been plagued with chronic underachievement as evidenced by poor student performance on state assessments. The New Jersey State Department of Education has assumed control of the daily operations of the school system and mandated implementation of a model of whole school reform. The goals of the planning project are: Identify needs strengths of current teacher-leaders and classroom teachers with regard to mathematics content, mathematics reform and pedagogy. Investigate and explore models of successful teacher leadership and training programs in urban systems. Select a teacher-leader model and develop a training plan to meet identified needs. Align, coordinate and integrate the proposed plan with other district initiatives to ensure cohesiveness and to foster and support effective instructional practices. The project is managed by the Newark Public Schools doc1454 none D. Boyer, Arizona State University The 3rd International Symposium on Environmental Hydraulics with a special theme in urban fluid dynamics will be held in Tempe, Arizona in December with Dr. Boyer as the Chairperson. The overall theme of the Symposium is the application of basic research to address issues facing policy makers in the management of air and water resources. Several invited speakers will evaluate the present state of knowledge. A number of oral and poster sessions in environmental hydraulics and in urban fluid dynamics have been planned and the session Chairs have been assigned. It will provide researchers in this field an excellent opportunity for open exchange of ideas doc1455 none phonology of Focus is common across these different languages (e.g., a system of phrasal stress prominence). Second, better understanding of how prosodic properties of a sentence influence its semantic interpretation or its appropriateness in a specific discourse would permit a deeper understanding of the interface between phonology and other domains of linguistic competence. In the practical realm, better descriptive generalizations concerning semantically or pragmatically relevant prosody would advance computer-based treatments of spoken language, uses of natural speech in research on human sentence processing, and the assessment of language impairments. The grant will also advance international collaboration, through cooperation with Dr. Abdelkrim Jebbour, a Berber scholar from Morocco. It will also contribute to the training of graduate students in the analysis of prosody and of syntactic, semantic, phonological, and phonetic properties that are relevant to prosody doc1428 none Fox & Smith With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Cynthia Fox and Jane Smith will conduct three years of linguistic research on a unique variety of French. This language was brought to the northeastern part of the United States by French Canadian immigrants from Quebec and Acadians from the Maritimes over a period from the end of the 18th century into the 20th. These Franco-Americans constitute a significant segment of the populations of the northeastern states. Thanks to an ideology that supported the preservation of their ancestral heritage, they represent the second largest concentration of French speakers in the United States. But in the past 40 years, both the number of these French speakers and the frequency of their use of French have declined dramatically. Two goals of this project are to collect a sample of Franco-American French and to study its current vitality. Interviews with Franco-Americans in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island will be recorded. These data will address several interrelated questions: (1) How does this variety of French differ from the French spoken in Canada? (2) How did these differences come about? For example, how has English influenced this variety of French? (3) Does this French vary across communities? (4) What factors have led some Franco-Americans to keep using their French and others to stop using it? Answers to such questions improve scientific understanding of the complex ways that languages and their speakers change over time and geography. This research thus has both historical and linguistic value. The project will also provide training for future researchers by involving students in all phases and in a unique partnership between the State University of New York at Albany and the University of Maine. Of greatest importance, this research project will involve community members in documenting and thus helping to preserve their linguistic heritage doc1457 none Alexander This award to University of Alaska Fairbanks provides funds for a design study for an Alaskan Regional Research Vessel (ARRV). The study will include Concept and Preliminary Design development, and will be carried out in collaboration with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. It is anticipated that the design developed under this award will have applications to both the ARRV, anticipated to replace R V Alpha Helix, and to other intermediate vessel requirements in the UNOLS fleet doc1458 none Lawrence Berkeley National laboratory (LBNL) will host a workshop to promote the formation of research partnerships between faculty at colleges and university in designated EPSCoR states and the scientific staff from DOE national laboratories and facilities. The date will be August 16-17, in the San Francisco Bay Area, near LBNL. Attendance will include up to 200 researchers from the 20 EPSCoR jurisdictions and the Department of Energy (DOE) National Laboratories. The primary objective of the meeting is to provide a forum for research scientists from the EPSCoR states to: 1) report advances in EPSCoR funded research activities; 2) update their knowledge of DOE programs and initiatives; 3) learn about LBNL National User Facilities and research directions; 4) explore opportunities for research with DOE scientists; 5) develop plans for future research projects; and 6) learn about DOE laboratory opportunities for training and hands-on research experience for undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral fellows and new faculty. The workshop will be sponsored by the DOE, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences EPSCoR program and co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) EPSCoR Office. Project leaders and participants in both DOE and NSF EPSCoR are invited to attend and provide technical poster presentations. Workshop participants are requested to submit an abstract of their research activities and or updates on their particular program doc1459 none This research will test the concept that leaf wax abundance in deep sea sediments and ice from Greenland represents a proxy for atmospheric dust and can be used to precisely synchronize climate records from ice cores and deep sea sediments. This project will measure leaf wax abundance in sediments from the Bermuda Rise and Bahama Outer Ridge and in two ice cores from Greenland over the interval of ~ 39,000 to 36,000 years ago. The objective will be determine if abrupt climate events believed to occur during this interval can be identified and correlated between the ice core and sediment records by changes in leaf wax abundance and isotopic proxies doc1460 none Mooney The purpose of this inter-agency transfer to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is to provide support to the U.S. and the International Project Offices for the Climate Variability and Predictability Program of the World Climate Research Program respectively located in Washington, DC and Southampton, U.K doc1461 none Kriegman, David University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Postdoctoral: New Shape and Reflectance Models for Vision and Image-Based Rendering Two areas of computer vision and image-based rendering are to be explored by the postdoctoral associate. The first project will result in methods for more realistically rendering scenes by constructing surface reflectance models from image data. The result could lead to a new way to measure a bi-directional density function under known lighting conditions and to render images under novel lighting conditions. The second project aims to explore the recognition of objects whose shapes are continuously changing. The problem is phrased as an abstract contour shape recognition problem where shape evolves dynamically. Several immediate applications in biology and related fields are expected doc1462 none This project represents the continuation of the activities, I began as a PFSMETE Fellow at Northwestern University. The project has three components: 1) continued curricular materials development, testing, and refinement for geography and environmental science education; 2) developing new tools and materials to facilitate hands-on, inquiry-based learning in the geosciences; and to promote and facilitate the pedagogical use of computer-based geographic visualization and analysis tools at the undergraduate level doc1463 none Kasevich This three-year award for U.S.-France collaboration involves Mark A. Kasevich and his group at Yale University and Philippe Bouyer and his group at the Laboratoire Charles Fabry de l Institut d Optique in Orsay. The aim of the collaboration is the development of techniques and applications of atom interferometric rotation sensors. In particular, the collaboration addresses: comparison studies of US thermal atomic beam gyroscope with CNRS atomic found gyroscope; development of a ground-based program to test General Relativity using atom interferometer gyroscopes; NASA European Space Agency flight experiments relying on atom interferometer gyroscopes; and uses of Bose-Einstein condensed atomic sources for atom interferometry. The US and French groups bring to this collaboration complementary expertise and comparable, high quality and precision instruments. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator and graduate students. CNRS will support the visits of the French researchers to the United States. The collaboration will advance fundamental understanding of the wave nature of matter as well as the use of atom interferometer gyroscopes in space flights and navigation doc1464 none This work will provide a structural health monitoring capability for Fiber-Reinforced Polymer (FRP) composite bridge decks. Three bridge decks are being built by an interdisciplinary team of the University of Missouri-Rolla (UMR) investigators to demonstrate the effectiveness of new FRP composite in enhancing constructability, life span, and performance. Each bridge deck will feature a different construction technology. They are being constructed in the City of St. James, Missouri using funds from the UMR, the City of St. James, and the Missouri Department of Economic Development. The construction contract has been awarded; hence, the funding need was immediate for adding health monitoring. Multiple fiber-optic strain sensors are being incorporated for long-term dynamic and static monitoring of performance and strength in this supplementary program which is being supported as a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER doc1465 none Sen This grant provides partial support for the costs of upgrading the superconducting rock magnetometer (SRM) at Florida International University with direct current (DC) superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs), replacing the cold head and cryocooler compressor, and modifying the helium dewar. The PI has documented that the current SRM at FIU (11 years old) is fraught with problems including, rapid He boil off, frequent ice blocks in the He plumbing lines and a non-functional y-axis radio frequency (Rf) SQUID leaving only two components of the magnetic field measurable with the aging machine. DC SQUIDs offer over an order of magnitude increase in measurement sensitivity over Rf SQUIDs and are now the de facto standard sensors used in state-of-the-art SRMs by leading paleomagnetists. The addition of a new He dewar and cryocooler compressor will also, increase available analysis time on this instrument between fills, decrease the operational costs of the instrument, and increase the useful life of the instrument by reducing the number of thermal cycles required per operating hour. The upgraded magnetometer will allow for continued studies of paleomagnetic field behavior near polarity transitions and will be used to train a racially diverse crop of undergraduate and M.S. students in paleomagnetic research methods doc1466 none This project includes organization of a workshop to be conducted by the National Science Foundation (NSF) with support from the International Technology Research Institute (ITRI). The objective of this workshop, to be held September 13-14, , is to gather facts and opinions from the U. S. research community on how the emerging area of Quantitative Systems Biology should be defined for purposes of a research initiative by the National Science Foundation, Directorate of Engineering (ENG). This will include an overview of U. S. and international research and development that fall within this definition, and to identify areas where enhanced NSF ENG support could make an important contribution. The information presented at the workshop will be distilled into a report for NSF ENG doc1467 none Geist This grant provides partial support to acquire continuously-monitoring GPS units that will be installed on Sierra Negra volcano in the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador. Several technological breakthroughs now enable the deployment of a continuous monitoring, high-precision GPS network in a remote setting at reasonable cost. The network to be developed in this proposal will comprise four single frequency GPS instruments with two dual frequency instruments, one of which will serve as a base station. Data will be continually streamed from the single frequency receivers to the base via radiomodem, where it will then be relayed in near real time via VSAT to UNAVCO in Boulder. The data will then be available via ftp to the principal investigator at the University of Idaho for processing. The network will be deployed on Sierra Negra volcano in the Galapagos archipelago. Sierra Negra has been chosen for a variety of reasons. First, satellite interferometry indicates that Sierra Negra is currently experiencing some of the fastest uplift rates of any volcano on the planet, on order of 50 cm y. Second, the remote location of the Galapagos provides a robust test for deployment and operation of such a system, to demonstrate that it can be used to monitor virtually any volcano in this hemisphere. Although the archipelago is remote, Sierra Negra is relatively accessible, the PI has a great deal of logistical experience there, and the project will be supported by the Charles Darwin Research Station. Third, there are several projects currently being undertaken with the goal of understanding deformation of Sierra Negra s caldera (annual campaign GPS, fracture mapping, and monthly INSAR measurements). These are expected to dramatically increase our understanding of the uplift at Sierra Negra, and the deformation processes leading to caldera formation in general doc1468 none Kirschvink This award supports a collaborative research Project between Caltech ( ) and Vanderbilt University to develop an Ultra High Resolution Scanning Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID) Microscope (UHRSSM) for Paleomagnetic and Rock Studies. The instrument will be based on a small superconducting pickup coil coupled to a SQUID sensor housed in the vacuum space of a cyrostat, suspended behind a thin sapphire window less than 50mm above a room temperature sample. Scanning the sample allows us to map the z-component of the magnetic field above the sample with spatial resolutions as small as 100mm (limited mainly by the pickup coil diameter). The close spacing between sample and pickup coil results in an increase in sensitivity by four orders of magnitude compared to commercial SQUID moment magnetometers. The new instruments will allow for new classes of paleomagnetic analyses: (1) Conglomerate, baked contact, and fold tests on extremely small spatial scales, vastly expanding the utility of of these critical geological field tests of magnetic stability, (2) a suite of rock-magnetic and paleomagnetic experiments on standard petrographic thin sections, allowing the observed magnetic components to be matched with the minerals that are present, (3) Thellier-Thellier paleointensity analyses on individual mineral grains and at very high rates, (4) high resolution magnetic stratigraphy, and (5) spatial correlation of rock magnetic data with SEM, microprobe and other data on thin sections, at submillimeter scales doc1469 none Mayer This grant provides 50% support for acquisition of an ion chromatograph (IC) for water chemistry analysis at the State University of West Georgia (UWG). UWG will provide the remaining funding. The PI , James Mayer, is a hydrogeologist who joined the UWG faculty 5 years ago after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. The IC will also be used by Joe Hendricks, Andy Leavitt, and Curtis Hollabaugh of the UWG Biology, Chemistry, and Geology departments, respectively. The IC will reside in the Geosciences Department where it will complement existing equipment and allow rapid, precise and thorough analysis of major anion, cation and inorganic nutrient concentrations in water. Addition of the IC to laboratory and field equipment already owned by the Geoscience Department will create a state-of-the art inorganic water-chemistry laboratory at UWG that will see extensive use by faculty and undergraduate students. UWG is a predominantly undergraduate institution with a strong tradition of student involvement in research. The IC will greatly improve opportunities for students to learn modern, fundamental analytical techniques and produce scientifically valuable research results. The IC will be used primarily for groundwater and surface water geochemical studies in the Piedmont, Valley-and-Ridge and Appalachian Plateau physiographic provinces of the southeastern U.S. It will also be used in studies assessing net primary production implications of different forest management techniques doc1470 none Levels of learning and school performance among children in and near poverty in the United States continue to be of national import at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The public, policy makers, and researchers agree that concerted efforts to improve the educational outcomes of children in low-income families are required to further develop their potential to become productive citizens. Concern is particularly warranted for the achievement levels of racial ethnic minority children in poverty. National studies show that differences in family income account for over half of the differences among Black and White children in IQ scores. Black and Latino children are exposed to particularly high levels of economic disadvantage, as well as differential treatment in school and other settings. Issues of race, poverty, income and school performance take on a special urgency due to rapidly changing federal, state and local policy climates for low-income families. Welfare reform policies, following passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of (P.L. 104-193), have produced profound changes in government incentives to move low -income parents off welfare and into work. The federal Children s Initiative has urged researchers to examine effects of variation in welfare reform policies on children (Office of Science and Technology Policy, ). The current study examines how changes in income and employment might affect children s school performance differently for Black, Latino, and White families. The study aims to explore multiple mediating pathways through which changes in income and employment may affect children s school performance. The samples are drawn from 5 experimental welfare reform and anti-poverty policy programs, which have demonstrated short-term rises in income and employment, and which incorporate follow-up assessments of child school performance. The data will afford a rare opportunity to examine changes in income and employment which have been experimentally manipulated, rather than determined primarily by prior family selection factors. The objectives of this study are threefold. First, it aims to answer the question: Do changes in income and employment in early childhood affect middle-childhood school performance differently for Black, Latino, and White single-parent families on welfare? Second, the study aims to explore differences among these groups in multiple mediating pathways through which effects of changes in income and employment on school performance may occur. Areas included are informed by psychosocial, lifespan, ecological, and human capital theories of child development, and encompass two principal microsystems, or proximal settings, of development (the home and child care settings). The mediators encompass child care use, including quantity and type; marriage; parenting practices, including authoritative parenting and cognitive stimulation; and parent aspirations for their children s school success. Differences in kind and strength of mediated relationships are hypothesized, depending on racial ethnic group. Third, the question of how dimensions in current welfare and anti-poverty policy moderate these direct and mediated effects will be explored. Three primary dimensions across which current welfare reform programs differ are chosen for investigation: time limits, generosity of financial incentives (earnings disregards and supplements), and mandated employment-related activities. The study utilizes data sets from programs which test approaches to encouraging employment and raising family income through anti-poverty and welfare reform policy. The programs differ considerably on the three policy dimensions, and reflect the current range of TANF programs. They cover a wide geographic range, including samples from four state policy contexts (Minnesota, California, Florida, and Connecticut). Moreover, the data sets incorporate subgroups of Black, Latino and White families of large enough size to enable comparisons of mediating pathways. The analyses proposed are distinct from the overall experimental impacts which have been and will be reported in the main evaluation reports for these programs. The study thus presents a unique opportunity to examine race ethnicity-specific developmental effects of income and employment in the contexts of experimental designs, and variation in welfare and anti-poverty policy doc1471 none Williams This award provides partial funding support for the development of a new, high-resolution, geochronological electron microprobe X-ray analyzer to be installed and operated in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The project involves development of new X-ray spectrometer systems, electron gun and column elements, new automated sample stage hardware, as well as new software for X-ray mapping and quantitative analysis aimed at improved trace element analytical precision and spatial resolution. The new instrumentation package will enable application of a new age-dating technique capable of resolving the complex thermochronology of metamorphic provinces. Development of the new electron microprobe will be a collaboration between the University of Massachusetts and a manufacturer of electron beam instruments, with both parties contributing cost sharing doc1472 none Manning This grant provides partial support to the Department of Earth & Space Sciences at UCLA for the acquisition of a state-of-the-art electron microprobe (EMP) equipped with five wavelength dispersive spectrometers and capabilities for the analysis of light elements (Z 9) and digital imaging of backscattered electrons. The new EMP will replace the current but antiquated (vintage ) Camebax EMP that is beginning to show signs of instrument failure (i.e. stage positioning drift, frequent computer control crashes and failing vacuum pumps). This state-of-the-art instrument will serve a large number of faculty including Craig Manning, Paul Warren, Frank Kyte, John Wasson, Mary Reid, Mark Harrison, Kevin McKeegan, Anne Yin and Alan Rubin for studies ranging from Himalayan tectonics to subduction zone metasomatism to chemical processes in the early solar system. Support for this acquisition is shared roughly equally between NSF, NASA and UCLA doc1473 none Yurok is an endangered language of northwestern California with no more than a dozen fluent speakers, and possibly as few as five or six, all of them elders. The language is known to linguists via the grammar by R. H. Robins and a dozen or so other publications, but the majority of past work on Yurok remains unpublished, in the form of fieldnotes and recordings of linguists from the early 20th century (mostly archived at Berkeley). The goal of this project is to provide a comprehensive grammatical description of Yurok while at the same time contributing to the Yurok Tribe s language revitalization project. Data collection and consolidation will involve two primary components over the duration of the grant: fieldwork with the remaining speakers of the language to record as much grammatical, lexical, and text material as possible; and archival work on the unpublished fieldnotes and accompanying recordings of Kroeber and Haas, as well as the fieldnotes of Sapir and others. From this enriched and consolidated database three main publications are envisaged: a teaching grammar of Yurok for use by language teachers and learners in the schools; a Yurok-English English-Yurok dictionary for use by Yurok speakers and language learners; and a more complete reference grammar which includes information on the sound structure, word structure, sentence structure, dialect differences, speech styles, and the history of the language doc1474 none Carlson This grant provides three years of continued partial support for the operation and maintenance of the University of Texas Computed X-ray Tomography (CT) Facility as a national multi-user facility for the geosciences and ancillary fields. This facility has been supported for the last two-years by the IF program ( ) to allow geoscientists subsidized access to the capabilities of CT for non-destructive imaging of the interiors of geological samples. Continued support will foster further use of the CT scanner at UT for investigations in a multitude of sub-fields of the geosciences including, vertebrate paleontology, igneous and metamorphic petrology, volcanology, sedimentology and stratigraphy. High resolution CT imagery will aid our understanding of, the physiology and evolution of both mammalian and non-mammalian species, crystallization processes in metamorphic environments, the paleoelevation of ancient eruptions, subsurface fluid flow, and basic materials properties. In many cases, CT imagery offers unprecedented 3-D views of geologic structures and skeletal remains that otherwise would have remained obscured to human observation doc1475 none Mao This award provides funding support for the development and maintenance of the High-Pressure X-Ray Facility (HPXF). The HPXF maintains two branches of superconducting wiggler beamline X17 at the National Synchrotron Light Source located at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The beamline offers high brilliance X-radiation for use mainly by the high-pressure mineral physics research community. The HPXF facility also maintains supporting high-pressure equipment and provides technical assistance for visitors using the synchrotron radiation. Scientific research applications by users include studies of earth and planetary materials properties (for example, equations of state, elasticity, rheology, and phase relations) at high pressures and temperatures representative of conditions in the earth s deep interior doc1476 none Swanson This award supports Eric Swanson and students from the University of Pittsburgh in a collaboration with David Blaschke of the Department of Physics at the University of Rostock, Germany. The research focus is on the dependence of hadronic and astrophysical observables as these relate to the search for a quark-gluon plasma (QGP). The collaboration combines complementary expertise because the German side has experience in exploring evidence for QGP formation in heavy-ion collisions and is now pioneering the search for astrophysical signals, whereas the U.S. side has developed a systematic approach to analyzing constituent-interchange processes from the lightest interactions of pi-mesons to the heaviest B-meson exchanges. This joint collaborative research effort also presents junior researchers with the opportunity to work internationally, and the work done on this proposal will help institutionalize the relationship between the German and U.S. research groups doc1477 none McDonough This grant provides partial support for the acquisition of a magnetic sector-based inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (HR-ICP-MS) and an ultraviolet laser to be housed in the Geology Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. Laser-assisted and solution-based ICP-MS analysis will aid the research of the PI s and numerous other departmental faculty in studies of the geochemical evolution of the crust and mantle, cosmochemical research, U-Pb geochronology of accessory phases, carbonate petrology, experimental petrology and the biogeochemistry of surface and groundwaters. This instrument will complement existing geochemical instrumentation in the department including stable isotope ratio mass spectrometers, thermal ionization mass spectrometers, a multi-collector ICP-MS, and electron beam instrumentation. The critical mass of faculty trained in geochemistry (many newly appointed) and the arsenal of state-of-the-art geochemical instrumentation leave UMD-CP well poised to be leaders in both research and the training of undergraduate and graduate students in the geological sciences for many years to come doc1478 none Haptic perception refers to the perception one has of one s body, and of attachments to it, by means of the body. The term incorporates what is commonly meant by touch, and more besides. For example, without benefit of vision, one is obviously aware of the directions of one s limbs and one can be aware of the spatial properties of objects that are wielded and hefted. These perceptual abilities are expressions of a form of haptic perception referred to as dynamic touch. It is so called because of its basis in the deformation of muscles and tendons, and the consequent activation of their receptors, by forces. The forces arise from either the muscles or the environment or both. Because of the ways in which limbs move around joints, the forces are largely rotational. This research will address the perceptual achievements of dynamic touch and their relation to the rotational dynamics of limb movements. The focus will be on the relation of these achievements to mechanical and rotational quantities, in particular the inertia tensor and attitude spinor. The tensor quantifies an object s resistance to being rotated. The spinor quantifies an object s orientation relative to some reference frame (for example, the hand) in a manner consistent with the special physical rules for combining three-dimensional rotations. A major thesis is that, in the nonvisible perception of an object s spatial dimensions by wielding or hefting, the hand-related haptic subsystem behaves as a smart instrument. It cleverly capitalizes on physical laws and on physical quantities that do not change as an object is wielded and hefted. In some of the basic methodologies, the participants will wield an unseen object to perceive its weight, length, width, or shape. Participants will respond by assigning numbers relative to a standard object or by adjusting (visible) movable surfaces or pointers to quantify the perceived properties. Often, the unseen object will be a configuration of rods that can be manipulated through the precise placement of attached metal rings to produce any desired inertia tensor. In other basic methodologies, the participants will attempt to orient a nonvisible upper limb or limb segment to another nonvisible limb. Most methodologies will involve, additionally, the acquisition of motion data on the wielded objects and limb movements and analysis by nonlinear phase-space reconstruction procedures. The major objectives will be the determination of (1) the dynamical variables governing the perception of heaviness; (2) the achievements and limits of shape perception without vision; (3) the tuning of dynamic touch, overtly and covertly, by specific experience; and (4) the basis for perceived constancy of postures. Understanding the principles governing dynamic touch should enrich our appreciation of the physical constraints that must be respected in computational and neural modeling of perceptual systems. It will provide a source of new hypotheses about somatosensory disorders and about designs for prosthetic and robot limbs. Such understanding might also be expected to motivate more intensive study of the physical principles formative of biological perception-action systems and of the cognitive and neural constraints that exploit them doc1479 none Kirchner This grant provides partial support to equip a cosmogenic nuclide sample preparation facility at the University of California, Berkeley. Professors James Kirchner and William Dietrich will be the principal users of this facility. The Department of Earth and Planetary Science has recently renovated and upgraded a 46 square meter (500 square foot) laboratory for cosmogenic nuclide sample preparation. This grant provides funds to outfit this laboratory for efficient preparation of 10Be and 26Al samples from geological materials. Equipment to be purchased under this grant includes an atomic absorption spectrophotometer, a high-throughput magnetic separator, an ultrapure water supply, ultrasonic baths, precision balances, and a centrifuge. A dedicated cosmogenic nuclide sample preparation facility will permit more efficient sample preparation, and thus higher sample throughput rates. This, in turn, will greatly aid ongoing research in several areas, including measurements of river bed erosion and debris flow incision, determination of catchment-scale chemical weathering rates, comparisons of long-term and present-day landscape erosion rates, and assessments of how climatic, topographic, and tectonic factors affect long-term rates of weathering and erosion doc1480 none Baudenbacher This award supports a collaborative research Project between Caltech ( ) and Vanderbilt University to develop an Ultra High Resolution Scanning Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID) Microscope (UHRSSM) for Paleomagnetic and Rock Studies. The instrument will be based on a small superconducting pickup coil coupled to a SQUID sensor housed in the vacuum space of a cyrostat, suspended behind a thin sapphire window less than 50mm above a room temperature sample. Scanning the sample allows us to map the z-component of the magnetic field above the sample with spatial resolutions as small as 100mm (limited mainly by the pickup coil diameter). The close spacing between sample and pickup coil results in an increase in sensitivity by four orders of magnitude compared to commercial SQUID moment magnetometers. The new instruments will allow for new classes of paleomagnetic analyses: (1) Conglomerate, baked contact, and fold tests on extremely small spatial scales, vastly expanding the utility of of these critical geological field tests of magnetic stability, (2) a suite of rock-magnetic and paleomagnetic experiments on standard petrographic thin sections, allowing the observed magnetic components to be matched with the minerals that are present, (3) Thellier-Thellier paleointensity analyses on individual mineral grains and at very high rates, (4) high resolution magnetic stratigraphy, and (5) spatial correlation of rock magnetic data with SEM, microprobe and other data on thin sections, at submillimeter scales doc1481 none The roots of our species appear to be in Africa. Some of the earliest and most exciting traces of our distant ancestry have been unearthed in Ethiopia. Here the PIs propose to pursue further paleoanthropological and archaeological investigations in a very promising area of the West Central Afar region of Ethiopia, or the Gona. The Gona Project has three major research goals for the fieldwork planned in . These include detailed geological studies and archaeological excavations at 1) DAN1, a new 2.6 million year old (my) archaeological site with evidence of the earliest known in situ stone artifacts and fossilized animal bones, 2) BSN12, a site which yielded a partial skull of a Homo erectus and associated Oldowan and Early Acheulian stone artifacts estimated between 1.5-1.0 my, and 3) DAN5 where a nearly complete skull of an early Homo estimated between 2,0-1.5 my was discovered in association with surface Oldowan and Early Acheulian artifacts. DAN1and BSN12 were identified in and DAN5 was discovered in . Previous research at Gona has resulted in the discovery of thousands of stone tools dated to 2.5 my, but fossilized animal bones were absent from the excavations. Bones with evidence of stone tool cut-marks dated to 2.5 my were recently discovered at Bouri, in the Middle Awash study area, but there were no excavated artifacts found in direct association with the bones. Despite the lack of artifacts in direct association with cut-marked bones, it was argued that ancestral humans began making artifacts for processing carcasses for meat. Thus far, the earliest evidence for associated artifacts and bones comes from Hadar in deposits dated to 2.3 my. The only known 2.6 my old in situ stone artifacts and associated animal bones are those discovered in the year from Gona (at DAN1). This new site promises to yield critical evidence for understanding early human diet, for studying the function of the earliest stone tools and for providing important clues regarding the factors that triggered early human flaked stone production. The BSN12 and DAN5 sites have yielded important hominids, stone artifacts and well-preserved fauna. However, further archaeological and paleontological test-excavations, and detailed geological studies are needed 1) to firmly determine the age of the sites and 2) to ascertain the stratigraphic relationships of the hominids, the artifacts and the fossil bones. A major component of the geological study will involve sampling of sediments for paleomagnetic analyses and tuffs for geochemical correlations for resolving the age of these important discoveries doc1482 none Mora This grant will provide three years partial salary support for a laboratory technician in the stable isotope laboratory at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. This is a Phase I technician support grant under the Instrumentation and Facilities (IF) Program. The stable isotope technician will provide routine maintenance and operation of the isotope ratio mass spectrometers and vacuum extraction lines, help to develop and maintain proper analytical technique, and provide quality instruction to laboratory users, including undergraduate and graduate students and researchers from other universities. Support of this technician will permit more active research engagement of the P.I. and other UTK faculty in their research on soils and paleosols, plant-soil interaction, Precambrian carbonates, fluid-rock interaction, and bat ecology, enhancing research and educational activities within the geological sciences and across several disciplines. This will ultimately broaden the base of operational support for the lab and increase the institutional value of a permanent, state (i.e., University)-funded position in the lab doc1483 none The planning project, Is Global Warming Just a Lot of Hot Air?, is a consortium of twenty (20) research institutions, science centers and environmental organizations which will plan exhibits and outreach programs to address climate change and its affect on communities and ecosystems of northern New England. Research scientists will work with informal science educators to develop innovative approaches to presenting what is known about climate change. The planning project will investigate strategies for helping the 1.85 million visitors in the region understand the issues in relation to the landscape and social environment. There is a wide-ranging group of advisors drawn from science, research, classrooms and informal learning centers to guide the 18-month planning project doc1484 none To provide student travel support to enable graduate students to attend the Integrated Photonics Research Topical Metting July 12-15, , Quebec City, Canada. This is a premier meeting for research in integrated and guided-wave photonics, which is a topic of considerable importance especially in the area of current fiber optical systems. Most students attending this meeting present papers, and others attend for information. In both cases, and to encourage student attendance at this and future IPR meetings, this application is to provide student travel grants, to some maximum value of $200 per student doc1485 none We propose to use atomic scale features in the dynamic contact between carbon nanotube (CNT) electrical leads to create a voltage to frequency converter, a GHz frequency mixer, and an atomic resolution linear encoder in an integrated sub-micron device. While many of the constituent capabilities required to accomplish our ecperimental goal have been demonstrated in our previous research, several challenges remain. Although electrostatic deflections and induced mechanical resonance of carbon nanotubes have been demonstrated, an integrated CNT oscillator has yet to be constructed. Over the coming year we propose to observe modulations inthe current across CNT CNT junctions due to atomic corrugation, build suspended nanotube resonators with 100MHz - 10 GHz response in an integrated device, and combine these effects into the devices proposed above. These devices will introduce the ultimate length scale and atomic lattice spacings into integrated actuating devices doc1486 none Three-dimensional model simulations will be performed of storms during STERAO-A (Stratosphere-Troposphere Experiments: Radiation, Aerosols, and Ozone, ). The objectives of this field project were to examine trace gas transport, lightning production of nitrogen oxides (NOx), and photochemistry in convective storms. Events from the EULINOX (European Lightning NOx) project will also be simulated. The Goddard Cumulus Ensemble (GCE) model will be modified to allow nonuniform initial conditions and consideration of terrain. A 3-D cloud-scale chemical transport model will be constructed, to be driven by data fields generated by the 3-D cloud model. The CTM will include an advection scheme, a photochemistry solver and mechanism, a cloud-perturbed photolysis scheme, a lightning NOx parameterization algorithm, and a wet scavenging scheme. The characteristics of the observed cloud dynamics and microphysics will be replicated as closely as possible using the 3-D GCE model. Simulations will be conducted of the convective redistribution of trace gases within the thunderstorms. For lightning NOx, the approach observed flash rates and locations in the model will be used. The goal of the lightning analysis will be to better determine the amounts of NO produced per flash. This project is a collaboration with Kenneth Pickering, University of Maryland, College Park doc1487 none The marine bacterium Pseudoalteromonas atlantica switches between an extracellular polysaccharide (eps)-producing and an eps non-producing state. The switch is mediated by a precise insertion and excision of the transposon I S492. The proposed research will characterize transposition of the insertion element and determine how reversible insertion of IS492 at the eps locus regulates extracellular polysaccharide (EPS) synthesis. The precise insertion of IS492 at its target site within the eps gene eliminates extracellular polysaccharide production and excision of the transposon from eps restores eps expression. The transposition process is novel in that it is responsive to growth conditions, such as cell density. Because of this, the regulation of transposition is likely to be novel. The research will first define the essential steps in transposition using PCR-based assays and genetic selections screens for IS492 insertion excision at the eps locus in P. atlantica and on a plasmid in E. coli (Balding-Perkins et al., J. Bacteriol. 181(16), ). As these steps are determined, the regulation of transposition and the impact on eps expression will be assayed by measuring the frequency of transposition of IS492 in response to various environmental signals. Primer extension assays for eps mRNA and genetic fusions for eps expression will be used to identify the regulatory link between IS492 transposition and EPS production. Studying the regulation of EPS production by marine bacteria is extremely important to our understanding of the establishment of many types of marine ecosystems. It has been shown that the EPS produced by marine bacteria, including P. atlantica, facilitates the development of microbial biofilms. P. atlantica is an excellent organism for both basic research and research on marine microbial communities because it is culturable and amenable to genetic and biochemical characterization, whereas many of the other marine bacteria are not. The proposed research aimed at understanding the regulation of transposition and the role of this transposition in extracellular polysaccharide synthesis, therefore, is essential to our understanding of the broader picture of marine microbial communities doc1488 none The focus of the project is to sequence the genome of the Archaea Halobacterium sp. NRC-1, which contains a stable 2.0 Mbp circular chromosome and two large unstable plasmids, pNRC 100 and pNRC200, 191 and 300 kb, respectively. The NRC-1 chromosome and plasmid pNRC200 have been mapped at low resolution and two BAC (bacterial artificial chromosomal) libraries, each with over 15-fold representation, have been constructed. The plasmid pNRC100 has been sequenced in its entirety. The BAC-end sequence strategy developed for more complex genomes will be used to complete the NRC-1 genome sequencing. This will circumvent sequence assembly problems resulting from the presence of a large number of repeated sequences in the Halobacterium genome. The complete genome sequence will be analyzed using sequence-analysis programs from NCBI, the University of Washington and Genetics Computer Group software packages. Genes with homologues in other organisms will be analyzed by multiple sequence alignments and phylogenetic analysis, as well as through primary literature searches. Genomic analysis will focus on the relationship of halophiles to other Archaea, as well as to eubacteria and eukaryotes, the mechanism of adaptation to high salinity, and the acquisition of new metabolic capabilities such as aerobic respiration, by an Archaeon. This research has the potential to have a significant impact in the area of biotechnology, stress biology - specifically in the area of salt tolerance, and systematic biology doc1489 none Das This award supports a planning visit for Tara Prasad Das of the State University of New York at Albany to discuss collaborative research with faculty members of the Physics Department at the Tribhuvan University (TU), Kathmandu. Proposed topics include electronic structures and associated properties of a number of condensed matter, biophysical, atomic and molecular systems. The projects will be mutually beneficial and working collaboratively is expected to enhance the abilities of both groups to carry out investigations more effectively than would have been possible had they worked separately doc1490 none This workshop is intended to provide a select group of teachers with an increased understanding of program evaluation in general as well as the emerging dicussion about the relevance of culture in program evaluation research and practices. Participants will be provided with an increased awareness of program evaluation, its importance for improving the educational success of minority students in urban school settings, and how program evaluation could be more culturally responsive. The workshop will involve minority and female teachers with 3-5 years experience in culturally diverse classrooms. In addition, teachers will receive 5-8 CE credits for their attendance at the workshop doc1491 none Rudnick This grant provides two years of partial salary support for a technician to work in the ICP-MS lab in the Department of Geology, University of Maryland. This is a Phase II technician support award under the Instrumentation and Facilities program and follows three years of Phase I support (EAR- ) that was awarded when the PI s were at Harvard University. The PI s Rudnick and McDonough recently joined the faculty at Maryland (8 ) after a long stint at Harvard University where they, together with technician Dr. Ingo Horn, were responsible for much of the early development of laser-based ICP-MS trace element analyses of geological materials. Since arrival at the University, the PI s have also been successful in garnering NSF funds for a new magnetic sector ICP-MS and UV laser for in situ trace element and isotopic analyses of deep crustal and mantle rocks and phases. Continued support of an ICP-MS technician for this team at the University of Maryland will also serve a large and active faculty and a strong graduate and undergraduate program in the geosciences for research in igneous, metamorphic and carbonate petrology, surface and groundwater geochemistry, economic geology, experimental petrology, and radiogenic isotope geochemistry. The University has committed to full support of this position for a minimum of two years beyond expiration of this grant doc1492 none Farquhar This grant provides partial support for the costs of acquiring a large sector gas-source mass spectrometer for the Isotope Geochemistry Lab at the University of Maryland. The PI, James Farquhar recently joined the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center and Department of Geology at the University of Maryland as an Assistant Professor. The instrument will be the primary tool for Farquhar s research program in multiple isotope geochemistry of sulfur and oxygen (meant to imply measurement of 17O 16O in addition to 18O 16O, and 33S 32S and 36S 32S in addition to 34S 32S). The information provided by a knowledge of isotope ratios involving these less abundant oxygen and sulfur isotopes allows us to gain important new insights into chemical and physical processes and provides the potential to address a whole new class of geological and biogeochemical questions. The applications of the multiple isotope approach include the study of biological fractionation processes, the study of atmosphere-surface interactions, the study of the evolution of the atmosphere, studies of meteorites, and studies of crustal and mantle geochemistry. The facility will complement present and planned research capabilities of the University of Maryland geochemistry group (Becker, Candela, Kaufman, McDaniel, McDonough, Morgan, Ondov, Prestegaard, Rudnick, Tomascak, Walker) and will be accessible to researchers at the University of Maryland and in the wider geological and geochemical community doc1493 none This proposal builds on a previous NSF sponsored project , awarded to Duke University. It involves development of statistical concepts, theories and methods for multiresolution models and analyses of measurements and structures in atmospheric turbulence. It draws on recent developments in Bayesian multiscale modeling to understand the time-scale aspects of turbulence where the notions of scale and hierarchy are intrinsic. Multiresolution statistical modeling approaches are applied to vast geophysical measurements arising from air quality field experiments and simulations in order to identify key structural properties of atmospheric turbulence responsible for the transport of scalars, such as ozone. To achieve these objectives a team of researchers with expertise in statistical modeling and multiscale methods (M. Pensky and B. Vidakovic) and measurement and modeling of atmospheric turbulence (G. Katul) is assembled. The aplicability of this project is improved fundamental understanding of atmospheric transport via novel statistical techniques. Atmospheric transport, key to describing air-quality, is a complex phenomena involving modeling of turbulence which is responsible for the dispersion of polutants. The applicability of the proposed methodology will be directly tested on high frequency velocity, temperature, and ozone concentration measurements collected at Duke Forest, Durham, North Carolina. Partial support for this award is provided by the Physical Meterology Program in the Division of Atmospheric Sciences doc1494 none Spanish speakers in New York City (NYC) are experiencing language and dialect contact on an unusually large scale. This project investigates the consequences of such contact through a sociolinguistic study of the alternation between presence and absence of subject personal pronouns (SPPs) with finite verbs in Spanish. We ask whether Spanish dialects are undergoing leveling or hyperdifferentiation and or whether they are converging with English. Leveling may indicate the rise of a NYC Spanish, suggestive of a new NYC Latino identity; hyperdifferentiation may suggest the emergence of transnational identities that tie immigrants and language minorities to their distant communities of origin more than to speakers of other dialects in the immigrant setting. The data come from interviews with informants from the six largest Spanish-speaking communities in NYC. Our informants have resided in NYC for varying numbers of years, have arrived in NYC at different ages, have varied levels of English and Spanish proficiency, and diverse educational and socioeconomic backgrounds. The study is conducted within the variationist sociolinguistic paradigm, and provides a detailed, explicit quantitative model of leveling, hyperdifferentiation, and English contact. We compare recently arrived Latinos whose activities are mostly within their own communities with more established Latinos who interact frequently with members of other dialect groups, distinguishing in the latter those who know little English from those that speak it well. We study the predictive power of membership in a particular dialect on the occurrence of overt SPPs in speakers with these different profiles, and ask how they differ in rates of overt SPPs, in the constraints that condition their use, and in the strengths of the constraints doc1495 none This dissertation project investigates the language socialization of children in a Lanna Thai bilingual community into the use of two codes -- Kam Myang and Standard Thai. Before entering school, children are exposed to Kam Myang in the home and community settings, and they develop some competence in the speech styles and levels appropriate to those settings. When they enter public school, they encounter formal and literary varieties of Standard Thai, the language of the government and media in Thailand, for the first time. This project proposes to investigate how children are socialized into social and culturally appropriate uses of speech styles in these two languages in the educational settings of the family household and the public school. Through an ethnographic, discourse-analytic study of four Myang children s language development in naturalistic settings over the course of one year, the study will explore the following questions: (a) How do children move from competence in the situational varieties of their home language to competence in the varieties of a second language that they must master at school? (b) What strategies are employed by community members in socializing children to use these languages appropriately? (c) What are the local language ideologies regarding the cultural significance of, and the differences between, these various codes and varieties? By studying the children s participation in cultural routines in which they are expected to use honorific registers including status particles, person reference and address, and honorific vocabulary in ways which indicate an awareness of the cultural norms of use as well as the expressive potentiality of these forms in spoken discourse, this study will contribute to our understanding of how children are socialized to use the situational varieties of these two languages appropriately, and how they are socialized into the cultural norms, values and ideologies surrounding their use. This project will contribute to studies of language socialization and language development, sociolinguistic studies of situational variation, the study of honorifics, and studies of children s moral and social development. More broadly, the study will contribute to our understanding of language development and language socialization in multilingual societies, and how this development is interlinked with cultural values, social organization, and historical change doc1496 none The last decade has seen an explosion in the introduction and use of interactive media. Yet, little is known about the impact of such media on child development. The American Psychological Association (APA), the National Communication Association (NCA), and the Society for Research on Child Development (SRCD) have developed a partnership to set a collaborative research agenda on the effects of interactive media on child development. This conference will bring together scholars, funders, policy-makers, and members of the press to hear about what is already known and to discuss future research needs doc1497 none One of the findings from the NSF and DOE-supported Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX) is that unusually large black soot concentrations over the Indian Ocean produce low-level atmospheric column warming, a new finding with possibly profound implications for future climate change. Heretofore, atmospheric aerosols were thought to cool. This is still the case, however, we now know that in addition to aerosols that reflect sunlight back to space, e.g., white sulfates, soot - containing aerosols warm, and can potentially impact the climate and hydrological cycle. During INDOEX, the PI and his students and colleagues documented the presence of high concentrations of large black soot aerosols over the Indian Ocean downwind (South-south west) of the Indian subcontinent. Knowledge of the sources that contribute to these aerosols is currently lacking. The PI will work with colleagues in India to produce: This one year research initiation project, we hope to produce: 1. Source profiles for five or more biomass source types and one or more local coals that document the size and chemical composition distribution of primary particle emissions from those sources; 2. An improved (but still preliminary) overall particulate matter emissions inventory for India; 3. A research plan that identifies the major remaining gaps in the inventory and explains how those gaps can and should be filled through further experiments and data analyses. This work is important because of its potential to increase knowledge about sources of man-made atmospheric pollution and its effect on climate doc1498 none Under this award, the Civil Engineering Research Foundation (CERF) will work closely with the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other government agencies, academia, and industry including designated representatives from different basic construction materials groups to enhance and continue implementation of a program to identify and develop key research initiatives in high-performance construction materials and systems. The effort aims to expedite the commercialization of those initiatives that are essential for the revitalization of the nation s infrastructure and the enhancement of our global competitiveness. This commercialization effort reinforces and complements the Construction Technology Goals initiative developed under the Construction and Building (C&B) Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC). The emphasis will be on the dissemination of key research findings and demonstration opportunities as well as the promoting and development of promising collaborative partnerships doc1499 none The insect neurohormone bursicon is essential for formation of the insect hard outer cuticle. Although discovered in , bursicon and its action have remained poorly understood. The primary aim of this collaborative project is the characterization of the gene sequence coding for this ubiquitous insect neurohormone. Degenerate primers derived from several partial amino acid sequences of cockroach bursicon will be used to amplify bursicon cDNA from messenger RNA by reverse transcription and PCR. In addition, existing cDNA libraries from other insects will be used for screening with probes derived from PCR. Knowledge of the full sequence of bursicon will facilitate identification of the bursicon active site and its receptor. Because insects wear their skeletons on the outside, they must periodically shed them as they grow or metamorphose. During each molt cycle, new cuticle must be synthesized. The hormone bursicon, triggers the hardening of the new cuticle once the old cuticle has been shed. Cuticular hardening provides not only protection, but also a framework for muscle attachment enabling locomotion. Clearly, interference with bursicon release or its actions will result in the death of the animal. This investigation will provide a basis for new methods of biological pest management by disrupting the function of bursicon doc1500 none This proposal funds a set of interactions, in particular a workshop next month, between humanists and computer researchers to expand on the possible uses of new technology in humanities research and teaching. The proposal comes from the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage. It supplements Rockefeller Foundation funding. The major purpose of the workshop and the related activities is to prepare a research agenda for the area of computational humanities and define problems and needs for new technology, both to help the humanists in their scholarship and educational activities, and to help explore the new challenges and opportunities for information technology presented by these areas doc1501 none metaphors in order to integrate cognitive, behavioral and linguistic expressions of moral values and practices. Subject ages for the study range from 11-14; activities include movement as well as speech. Data collection focuses on the videotaping of naturally occurring classroom and rehearsal activities. Video data will be digitized, transcribed and micro-analyzed for movement as well as speech. Linguistic analysis will examine what modal and metaphorical forms are used, how they are used together to form a highly complex semiotic system, and how the linguistic socialization of this modal system is related to the socialization of social and moral concepts and practices among members of the same community doc1502 none Interdisciplinary (99) This project is a supplement to the NSF supported project: Peer-Led Team Learning: National Dissemination by the Workshop Project. It is designed to address more directly the barriers that confront fully effective implementation of this approach by two-year (community) colleges. It is important to address these barriers and achieve maximally effective implementation of this project in two-year colleges because nearly 40% of U.S undergraduates enrolled in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology courses are attending these institutions, and many will take their basic science in this academic sector before transferring to 4-year colleges and universities to complete baccalaureate degrees. Given the size and diversity of the community college population, national dissemination of the workshop model of peer-led team learning can be greatly enhanced by successful implementation at the community college level. Some of the barriers faced by two year colleges are idiosyncratic to 2-year colleges, while others derive from the characteristics of students attending 2-year colleges. The barriers that will be addressed in this project are the high turnover of student leaders due to shorter spells of education, the high incidence of part-time (or full-time) employment among students, higher levels of family responsibilities which conflict with academic scheduling, the often weaker academic backgrounds of entering students which reduces the pool of potential team leaders, the lack of capability to carry out effective workshop leader training in many colleges, heavier teaching loads of faculty leaving less time to engage in adaptation and implementation activities, a lack of resources to pay student workshop leaders and less opportunity to offer academic credit to student workshop leaders, and difficulties faced by community college faculty in attending professional conferences. This project is supporting a variety of workshop activities for community college faculty, including a series of 12 one-day drive-in workshops at different sites around the U.S. specially tailored and shortened for faculty in two-year colleges. These 12 workshops will be managed by 2 teams of faculty, one East Coast and the other West Coast based, and are being held on the campuses of 2-year institutions across the nation. This project is also supporting special breakout sessions for community college faculty attending the longer workshops of the parent project and supporting the education of at least 25 WPAs (Workshop Project Associates). WPAs are a cadre of faculty who are prepared to engage in further dissemination activities doc1503 none Miller Successful drilling onshore in the New Jersey Coastal Plain and offshore on the NJ shelf and slope has provided: 1) ages for major Late Cretaceous - Cenozoic sequence boundaries; 2) causal links between the formation of sequence boundaries and the growth of ice sheets between 42 and 10 Ma, and hints that such a link exists in the older, supposedly ice-free world; 3) preliminary estimates of the amplitudes of global sea - level changes; 4) evaluation of links among sequence stratigraphic architecture, global sea-level variations, and margin evolution; and 5) constraints on the causes of major global events in Earth history, including the middle Eocene-earliest Oligocene global cooling, the late Paleocene thermal maximum, the K T boundary, early and late Maastrichtian events, and the Cenomanian Turonian carbon extraction event. Drilling onshore in New Jersey has met fundamental goals, but has also raised fundamental questions that can be answered by drilling in the Delmarva peninsula. Drilling near Bethany Beach, DE will provide: 1) the first detailed record of upper Miocene-Pliocene (10 - 2) Ma sequences in this region; 2) downdip late Eocene to Pliocene sequences needed for eustatic estimates; 3) a stratigraphic reference section for the late Eocene Chesapeake Bay impact. This project will take advantage of an opportunity for joint funding and collaboration with the USGS by drilling a borehole on the coast near Bethany Beach, DE that will not only yield a late Eocene-Pliocene record of marine sequences, but also will provide a critical test of tectonic changes in subsidence on the Atlantic margin. The USGS Eastern Regional Mapping Team (ERMT) drillers will continuously core a - ft. borehole as part of a developing cooperative project with Rutgers, NSF, and allied partners (New Jersey Geological Survey, LDEO, USGS Water Resources, CNRS (France), WHOI, Delaware and Maryland Geological Surveys). Most direct drilling costs are already secured (USGS NJGS DGS); this award only provides science support costs and minimal drilling costs to deepen the hole for the P.I.s purposes doc1504 none This collaborative proposal involves development of statistical concepts, theories and methods for multiresolution models and analyses of measurements and structures in atmospheric turbulence. It draws on recent developments in Bayesian multiscale modeling to understand the time-scale aspects of turbulence where the notions of scale and hierarchy are intrinsic. Multiresolution statistical modeling approaches are applied to vast geophysical measurements arising from air quality field experiments and simulations in order to identify key structural properties of atmospheric turbulence responsible for the transport of scalars, such as ozone. To achieve these objectives a team of researchers with expertise in statistical modeling and multiscale methods (M. Pensky and B. Vidakovic) and measurement and modeling of atmospheric turbulence (G. Katul) are jointly collaborating together. The aplicability of this project is improved fundamental understanding of atmospheric transport via novel statistical techniques. Atmospheric transport, key to describing air-quality, is a complex phenomena involving modeling of turbulence which is responsible for the dispersion of polutants. The applicability of the proposed methodology will be directly tested on high frequency velocity, temperature, and ozone concentration measurements collected at Duke Forest, Durham, North Carolina. Partial support for this award is provided by the Physical Meteorology Program in the Division of Atmospheric Sciences doc1505 none This project supports the activities of the Construction and Building subcommittee of the National Science Foundation and Technology council. Thirteen federal agencies including, NSF participates in the subcommittee meetings. The subcommittee holds meeting monthly at the White House Conference Center in Washington, D.C. The subcommittee secretariat coordinates federal participation in the presidential initiative-partnership for the Advancement of Technology in housing (a partnership between the public sector, industry, and academia). A strategic plan for the Construction and Building Subcommittee is under development by the subcommittee. The plan identifies a number of options under the following four strategic directions: Focus and prioritize federal R&D and coordinate with private R&D to accelerate technical development in construction and building Develop multiagency support for specific research projects of interest to the public and private sectors Provide vehicles for information exchange that support and promote acceptance of new technology in construction and building Demonstrate actions that will lead to achieving the National Construction Goals. NSF has supported the activities of the Construction and Building Subcommittee since doc1506 none The American Statistical Association will administer a research program under this grant with the objective of fostering collaborative and interdisciplinary research efforts that will continue to stimulate the development and advancement of the methodology and research relevant to a wide range of statistical programs. The results of research conducted under the ASA SRS-NSF Research Program will be made available to the scientific community through articles that the researchers will submit to scientific journals; papers prepared for the ASA and other professional society meetings that may be published in proceedings; and papers and other publications that agencies disseminate in working papers, statistical notes, or technical report series. The ASA SRS-NSF Research Program will benefit the academic researchers who participate and the larger scientific and statistical communities. The researchers will benefit from the opportunity to work on important problems in a non-academic setting and exposure to the environment of Federal statistical agencies. The larger scientific and statistical communities will be enriched by the addition to scientific knowledge that results from the research conducted under the auspices of the program doc1507 none The evolution of our genus during the Middle Pleistocene is a point of contention. Some view geographically dispersed, morphologically differentiated populations as members of a single species. Others interpret morphological variation among groups as signifying species level differences. The frontal bone is an element that can provide significant data in attempting to decide between these two models as it provides data regarding alterations in two regions of the skull: the neurocranium and the splanchnocranium. Additionally, traits of the frontal are used to distinguish Homo erectus and Homo sapiens. This research will utilize a morphometric procedure, Elliptical Fourier Function Analysis to quantify the morphology of the frontal bone in a sample of archaic Homo specimens (including Neanderthals) dated to the Middle Pleistocene. Boundary outline data of coronal, mid-sagittal and parasagittal slices of the frontal bone will be collected and quantified. To establish temporal trends neighboring Early and Late Pleistocene frontal bones will be quantified. Geographic variation will also be ascertained in twenty modern humans from each of nine populations coincident with the fossils. Analysis of the hypotheses will clarify how features of the frontal bone are interrelated as character complexes and how these characters reflect potential sources of variation such as gender and size. This research will contribute to more informed inferences about hominid evolution in the Middle Pleistocene doc1508 none Although it is commonly assumed that the American political system is the epitome of a popular or democratic regime, Americans, from the late eighteenth century to the present, have had difficulty determining exactly what kind of political society they had created and what form of government they possessed -- or by which they were possessed. This situation has inspired many attempts both to give an account of democracy and to judge the extent to which the United States conforms to such an account. From the time of the debates about the ratification of the Constitution to the present, Americans have imagined and imaged the American polity. The discipline of American political science from its conception and inception, has been a central and unique part of this dialogue, and its representations have profoundly influenced the accounts of, and assumptions about, American government and democracy at various levels of education and in the media. This project is devoted to reconstructing certain central dimensions of the evolution of the discourse of democracy in American political science, as well as to contributing, both substantively and methodologically, to the study of the history of political science and the history of the social sciences in general. Most generically construed, this an exercise in the history of social science. Since such research is still a less than clearly defined scholarly genre, and since the relevance of these studies to practices such as political science is still a contentious issue, this project involves extensive reflection on the general character and purpose of disciplinary history as well as on issues peculiar to the study of the history of political science. More specifically, the PI will examine past literature devoted to recounting the history of American political science, and will explore the manner in which this literature raises certain methodological problems pertaining to the study of the history of the social sciences as well as to the practice of intellectual history in general. Against this background, the PI will elaborate a particular approach to disciplinary history and to the study of conceptual change. The substantive core of the project, however, is an examination of the vision of democracy as it has evolved in the literature of American political science from approximately the beginning of the second third of the nineteenth century to end of the second third of the twentieth century. This study of the discourse of democracy in political science is organized around three pivotal concepts: state, pluralism, and liberalism. These concepts represent successive paradigms of democracy, and this project is devoted to reconstructing those paradigms and the processes of conceptual change involved in the transitions between them doc1509 none Decentralization of political authority to municipal governments has become a very common, if not dominating, policy strategy for addressing governance problems associated with environmental degradation in developing countries. Yet, the scientific understanding of the environmental impacts of decentralization reform remains very limited. This Doctoral Dissertation Research project investigates under what conditions one can expect local governments in decentralized developing countries to construct adequate regimes for land use planning. To this end, the project undertakes a comparative study of municipal governments performance in the environmental sector in the tropical lowlands of Bolivia. To assess the linkages between observed patterns of biophysical change and municipal government policies and practices, the project uses of a wide array of complementary field methods. These include (1) a survey instrument administered to 35 randomly selected municipal governments; (2) qualitative institutional analysis of four selected municipalities, and (3) a time-series analysis of land use and land cover changes -using remotely sensed satellite imagery from , and . In the final stages of the research project, resource user groups along with municipal and central government representatives are invited to a workshop to discuss preliminary findings and viable policy options doc1510 none Many scientific autobiographies and biographies, as well as many learned and popular histories written about science situate themselves, consciously or not, within the horizon of the modern myth that the extraordinary scientist is a mad one, either an eccentric or an evil genius. In popular mentalities, moreover, such attributes tend to be projected onto scientists per se. This project seeks to illuminate the origins of this myth or metanarrative about the modern scientist. The origins of the mad scientist are traced from the 17th through the 19th centuries. Methodologically, the project connects to cultural studies and the history of mentalities, and it makes a contribution to a rather new research field, the history of scientific personae. The PI reconstructs how various sorts and cases of normal and extraordinary scientists - for example, mechanical philosophers, anatomists, galvanists, and individuals including Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Anton Mesmer, Charles Babbage, Thomas Edison - were conceived, imagined, fashioned, and presented as scientists or natural philosophers, themselves, by their colleagues and by the public. As a contribution to the history of mentalities and of scientific personae, the research also examines fictional or literary mad scientists. The popularity of Frankenstein and Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, for examples, illuminate extant mentalities about scientists; moreover, such works may alter popular and even learned mentalities about the persona or figure of the scientist. Tracing the early origins of the myth, the project attends to certain figures, such as the Philosopher and the Sorcerer, that were important in the period before the emergence of the modern scientist. The PI is investigating the extent to which such figures played a role in shaping the image of the eccentric or evil genius. The research for the project is being conducted at the Max-Planck-Institut fiir Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin, as well as at libraries in and around Berlin. At the end of two years of research, the PI intends to have produced an academic monograph that will contribute to the new field of research on the history of scientific personae. This study also should advance better understandings of both extraordinary and normal scientists by illuminating the deep-seated historical context and socio-cultural public fears suggested by pervasive notions of scientist as eccentric or evil genius doc1511 none This grant will support a Faculty Workshop on Teaching of First Courses on Power Electronics and Electric Drives in March . This workshop will promote the following objectives: 1. Provide the highest quality undergraduate education in this field, 2. Motivate and attract talented students, 3. Minimize lecture-preparation time for the instructors, and 4. Facilitate teaching of these courses by EE faculty specializing in other fields. Power electronics and electric drives have the potential to improve industrial productivity by means of robotics and factory automation, and of making the United States become a nation that uses electricity most efficiently. There is a looming crisis in the undergraduate education of power electronics and electric drives which, if not addressed, will leave the nation with far too few engineers to take advantage of these opportunities. Power electronics will also be crucial to transitrtren, in the motor vehicle sector allowing more efficient use of energy. The University of Minnesota has studied the restructuring of these courses since . This effort received a strong impetus from funding by NSF, EPRI, and the local utilities in May when a three-year project Innovations in Power Engineering Education there, including prior workshops on Teaching of Electric Drives and Teaching of Power Electronics . Both of these workshops were highly successful, each attended by nearly one hundred participants. The new workshop will build on the new experience resulting from this prior activity and also attempt to develop integration of the two areas. The new workshop will build on the new experience resulting from this prior activity and also attempt to develop integration of the two areas. As a part of the workshop proceedings, copies of completed lecture notes, lecture transparencies, and the simulation exercises discussed during the workshop will be distributed. Ways of tightly coupling lecture material to simulations and hardware laboratory will be discussed doc1512 none An observational study is an empiric investigation of the effects of a treatment, policy, intervention or exposure which was not randomly assigned to subjects, as it would be in a randomized experiment. Observational studies are common in most fields that study people, because harmful or unwanted treatments cannot be imposed on human subjects for experimental purposes. The central difficulty in an observational study is that, because treatments were not randomly assigned, the subjects receiving different treatments may not be comparable, so differing outcomes after treatment may not be effects caused by the treatment. If the treatment groups differ before treatment in ways that have been measured, there is an overt bias that often can be removed by adjustments, such as matching. Often there is concern that treatment groups differed before treatment in ways that were not measured, that is, concern about hidden biases. Hidden biases cannot generally be removed by adjustments and must be addressed by other means. Statistical methodology for observational studies concerns adjustments for overt biases and methods of design and analysis to address hidden biases. The current project will develop and extend statistical methods for overt and hidden biases. In many fields, including health services research, epidemiology, public program evaluation, and economics, most studies of treatment effects are observational studies. Observational studies are also common in several fields that perform experiments, including clinical medicine and psychology. Statistical methods for observational studies are useful and are used in these fields doc1513 none PROJECT : SES 00- Andre Goddu Copernicus and the Aristotelian Tradition The Copernican theory rejected and reformed the geocentric view of the universe. The main philosophical support for geocentricism derived from Aristotle supported by over a thousand years of commentary. Copernicus was educated in the fundamentals of Aristotelian philosophy at the University of Cracow between and . Late medieval Aristotelianism encountered by Copernicus had departed from Aristotle on a number of issues for a variety of reasons. Consequently, the late medieval Aristotelianism Copernicus encountered in Cracow was eclectic and flexible. Although Copernicus recognized his departure from the tradition, the arguments that he presented in his major work were dependent on late medieval commentaries. Copernicus offered no new physics to account for the motions of the earth. Copernicus hoped to persuade Aristotelians to open their minds to consider adapting Aristotelian principles to the heliocentric system. The PI proposes to examine relevant documents in Poland and in Uppsala Sweden related to the university education of Copernicus. The PI also will gain access to laregely unrecognized Polish scholarship on these issues, and begin to build bridges between Polish historians of science and those in the West. The PI is seeking to document how Copernicus education helped him frame arguments in the Aristotelian tradition. This research is part of a larger project by the PI that aims toward a revisionist account of Aristotelian reactions, Copernican defenses, and the scientific revolution doc1514 none The goal of this project is to investigate the influence of stratospheric quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO) on regional convection and precipitation in the tropics, including hurricane genesis. The PI and his collaborators will analyze various data sets (Outgoing Longwave Radiation, Highly Reflective Cloud, and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) reanalysis data sets) to document the QBO impact on tropical upper-tropospheric wind, temperature, and radiation fields. The impacts will be determined using several techniques, including straightforward compositing of fields during the easterly and westerly QBO phases. Since QBO is a fairly regular low-frequency oscillation, its impact on tropopause environment is potentially predictable. Dr. Hitchman argues that the QBO impacts are also significant, and that the project will advance long-range forecasting of tropical climate. The Large-scale Dynamic Meteorology and Climate Dynamics programs are co-funding this award doc1515 none Charles Hauer This is an individual travel grant to allow the traveler to attend the International Conference on Energy Systems held in Amman, Jordan on September 25-30, . Standard coach airfare and government per diem rates will be provided. Dr. Hauer will make a presentation at the conference on areas of his research and teaching at George Washington University: conventional and alternative electric power systems. He will also represent the NSF in very preliminary discussions relate to a future US Jordanian conference on Energy and Materials Processing. A final verbal and written Fastlane report is required doc1516 none COLLABORATIVE LEXEN RESEARCH: DIRECT SAMPLING OF THE OCEANIC SUB-SURFACE BIOSPHERE AT OLD AND YOUNG SEAMOUNTS Oceanic crust is a plausible but unproven habitat for a microbial biosphere of planetary proportions. The upper 500 meters of igneous basement is warm, porous and permeable, forming a global-scale aquifer hosting the circulation of nutrient-rich hydrothermal fluids. Heat from the lower intrusive crustal rocks drives fluid convection cells within this aquifer, even in crust many tens of millions of years old. This thermal convection is strongly modulated by tidal forces, increasing fluid velocities and stirring the sub-surface incubator more vigorously than previously believed. Two unique methods will be used for sampling uncompromised crustal fluids from two contrasting hydrothermal areas on the Juan de Fuca Ridge. Axial Seamount is currently forming directly on the ridge axis, with recent eruptions on the summit and flanks, and has considerable geological and surface biological variability with periods of less than a year. At Axial caldera a sampling facility with a re-entry cone was cemented directly to the seafloor in , providing uncontaminated access to a 50 degrees C diffuse vent. In contrast, Baby Bare (BB) Seamount sits on 3.5 My crust east of the ridge axis, with a small exposed summit of altered rock completely surrounded by low permeability sediments. This project will sample Baby Bare fluids (40 degrees C) below the water rock interface, using a newly developed break-away coring instrument to insert a 3-meter long titanium tube into the sub-surface, below the biologically active surface zone. The samples obtained from both Axial and Baby Bare will be studied for the entire spectrum of bacteria and archea populations, the fluids will be analyzed for their inorganic and organic chemistry, and the data placed in their full environmental context using temperature and fluid flow measurements. This project attempts to integrate for the first time inorganic and organic chemistry with geophysical parameters including porosity and fluid flow rates, so as to better understand the microbial ecology of these sub-surface biotopes. By examining the chemical and microbial ecology and energetics of the sub-surface, and particularly the sub-surface associated with hydrothermal systems, a framework for studying the prospects of extraterrestrial life may be developed doc1517 none This project examines the implementation of immigration laws recently passed in Italy and Spain that include expansive legalization programs and greater access for immigrants to social services. These laws seem inconsistent with the economic benefits that previous studies have observed from the marginalization of immigrant workers. Several hypotheses will be tested. First, it is expected that these laws, despite the change in policy, will have little substantial impact on the numbers of illegal immigrants or their access to social services. Second, it is hypothesized that there will be a convergence of outcomes in Spain and Italy. Third, it is anticipated that the limited impacts of these laws will be primarily the consequence of economic-structural, not political, forces. The project will draw from a wide range of data sources, including government documents, secondary sources, and interviews. This project will make several theoretical contributions. Most notably, it will contribute to the legal impact literature, which focuses on the ability of law to affect real social change; the literature on immigration law and policy as it relates to the failure of immigration law to achieve its stated objectives; and the literature addressing the symbolic aspects of law. At the broadest level, the project will enhance our understanding of the relative importance of economic and political variables in the implementation of immigration law and, by extrapolation, legal change more generally doc1518 none This three-year award supports research and writing of a book and related articles analyzing alternative systems of broadcasting in the United States that developed in opposition to the dominant commercial model based on advertising and private industry support. Historians of technology have emphasized that the commercialization of broadcasting in the United States was not inevitable but depended on contingent circumstances, yet nearly all major studies of the broadcast industry and broadcast technology in the United States have analyzed the dominant commercial systems, obscuring the historical importance of alternative systems of broadcasting. Dr. Slotten intends to examine the historical development of the most important form of noncommercial broadcasting in the United States, those with a primary public service commitment to education. This educational tradition dates from the s, when large-scale broadcasting first developed. The federal government decided that because the radio spectrum was a public resource, broadcasters should demonstrate that they served the public interest in order to retain a license. Partly because some of the first radio stations in the United States were developed by land-grant universities, a commitment to education became a central means of defining the public interest standard. But the idea that a great technology should be used for great purposes --including educating, informing, and uplifting citizens-has been an essential historical theme that has existed alongside and in opposition to dominant commercial developments throughout the entire history of broadcasting in the United States. Promoters of the educational role of broadcasting emphasized the ability of radio and television to reach a mass audience and the potential to provide even the weakest or poorest schools with the best teachers and a high-quality education. Dr. Slotten draws upon extensive archival research to analyze both educational broadcasting and the early development of public broadcasting, a term developed by U.S. policymakers during the late s who established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as a way to support noncommercial forms of broadcasting. These policymakers sought to replace the traditional term educational in order to broaden political support, drawing upon arguments concerning cultural uplift and citizenship training through public affairs programming. But by examining the history of educational and public broadcasting from approximately to the early s, the project analyzes the different-and often contested--meanings of education, especially in relation to programming aimed at entertaining, uplifting, and informing different groups in different regions of the country, both urban and rural. The resulting publications are intended to provide an historical perspective for debates about high-tech innovations and education. Contemporary visions of the internet as a commercial product serving a mass culture or as a public service educational resource suggest that this is a central theme in the history of communications technology in the United States doc1519 none In the Carolingian Renaissance (ninth-tenth centuries) was there any place for natural science, especially astronomy and cosmology, and did any notable innovation occur? Answering yes to this question, the project expands the cultural and institutional motivations of that renaissance and accords importance to the study of the natural world order. The revival and use of a set of four texts on astronomy and cosmology from the Roman Empire by Carolingian scholars, teachers, and students initiated a new stage in scientific awareness, advancing well beyond the focus of the previous three centuries upon time-keeping and the construction of calendars. New concepts of celestial order were more elaborated when using numbers and were distinctly novel and inventive in their attention to space. Routine studies of the heavens came to include diagrams, both for clarity and for instruction in new themes, during the ninth century. Both commentary and diagrams added to the four Roman texts provided not only explanations but also questions and alternatives to their contents. Diagrams especially were used to clarify, question, and redirect doctrines in these texts. Diagrams were a tool for the creation of hypotheses and models in Carolingian astronomy. Teaching and research on astronomy and cosmology was enabled by the lending, copying, excerpting, and glossing of the ancient texts. Many Carolingian institutions participated, making the activity an essential part of the renaissance. Each of the texts stimulated a somewhat different set of interests and questions. Study of the many Latin manuscripts from the period shows attention to the following few among a large group of topics: planetary order, circumsolar planets, the different lengths of the four seasons, retrograde motion of planets, eccentric and epicyclic models of planetary motion, and the force of the sun as a planetary influence. These topics received discussion and diagrams by Carolingian scholars. Over the course of the ninth and early tenth centuries a tremendous body of new knowledge was created, a body of knowledge characterized primarily by qualitative models and complemented by subordinate quantitative data. The Carolingian Renaissance created anew an awareness of forms of planetary order and motion that had disappeared in late Antiquity. This understanding was an essential basis for further inquiry and development in the eleventh and twelfth centuries as Greco-Arabic astronomy was encountered and then actively sought. The project is a library research topic, designed to study of medieval Latin manuscripts. Among the many copies of each text the variations in text, scholarly comments in margins, and varying diagrams added as explanations or questions reveal the different understandings of these texts by different Carolingian scholars at different times. As a result, the project will significantly advance knowledge in the history of science, the philosophy of science, the study of knowledge-transfer across cultures, and the historical study of the Carolingian Renaissance doc1520 none The ability to perform machining operations in a comprehensive simulation environment and to obtain realistic predictions of its outcome in terms of workpiece attributes (dimensional tolerance, form, and surface finish) and process capabflities is the vision motivating this proposal. An initial framework for the realization of this capability, epitomized by the designation Virtual Machine Tool (VMT), will be defined. The envisioned VMT environment will ultimately allow machine tool builders to evaluate alternative machine designs and configurations, and will assist machine tool users to predict the achievable workpiece attributes during planning, selection, and use of metal cutting machine tools. The underlying assumptions, interrelation between the necessary functions, and the envisioned methods and approaches to the computational simulation of the functional elements of the VMT will be addressed. The principal emphasis will be on fundamental issues related to the integration of machine and process related funttions, and on the development of predictive models for workpiece attributes and process capability measures that are essential missing ingredients of the VMT concept. The outcome, consisting of prototype code for the characterization, visualization, and mapping of workpiece attribute deviations from the nominal, will be experimentally verified on the example of end milling, drilling, and tapping operations doc1521 none Dissemination and assessment opportunities are established for current and potential NSF grantees in CCLI, CRCD, ATE, and Action Agenda programs at the and ASEE Annual Conferences. Events include a poster session and two NSF Showcases at each conference for grantees in each of the four programs. Selected presentations are published in the conference proceedings. Impact of this dissemination on promoting awareness of NSF programs and on stimulating new proposal submittals are assessed through a series of surveys directed at both presenters and attendees doc1522 none This dissertation research project, Storied Shores: Environment, Society and Culture in Monterey, California, explores the role of science and technology in the shaping of nature and society in Monterey from the late nineteenth century to the s. Storied Shores charts how the individuals who converged on Monterey used their particular social and cultural values to evaluate, envision, and mold the natural environment. The research explores how material changes to Monterey reflected and shaped how people used and understood nature. Contests over shaping nature sharpened existing social divisions while affecting how individuals physically changed their natural surroundings. Scientific ideas and technological systems, moreover, helped to moderate these changes in the land. Working, playing, and studying in nature became the most prominent activities on the Monterey coastline. Labor, recreation, science, and technology, therefore, intersected in the shaping of Monterey s nature and society. This project proposes to add to a growing synthesis of environmental history and science and technology studies by examining the social construction of nature, science, and technology and exploring their effects on and implications for Monterey society and its coastline. The project will also make a more immediate contribution by assisting scientists and planners interested in the marine environment. The political, social, and economic activities of humans and developments in science and technology affect the natural world. This research intends to bring these impacts to light and provide important information for future research by creating a historical baseline for measuring human impact on the coastline doc1523 none Andrews The late Quaternary extent and thickness of ice and the deglacial chronology of the Northwest Peninsula of Iceland are poorly constrained. The Principal Investigators will conduct a collaborative research project on the glacial and deglacial history of the western coastline and uplands of western Hunafloi, NW Iceland, and the adjacent marine trough, Hunafloaall. The proposal builds on marine cruises in , and , and on a pilot field program conducted in the summer of . The purpose of the project is to resolve the late Quaternary glacial history of part of NW Iceland and to correlate the terrestrial record with the marine record. This research will add new insight into the glacial history of marine arctic margins and a very old debate on biological refugia. At least two models for the reconstruction of glacial extent during the Lower Glacial Maximum (LGM) and subsequent retreat have been suggested for Iceland, but these are based on only limited radiocarbon dates. In the NW Peninsula, the glacial reconstructions vary from an extensive ice cover model with no ice free areas to a refugia model in which ice free areas existed on the high plateaus with vascular plants surviving glaciation. These studies are based entirely on terrestrial glacial evidence and interpretations, but this must be intimately linked to the offshore sedimentary record of glacial and marine sediments. High-resolution 3.5 kHz acoustic stratigraphy and marine cores from the Hunafloaall trough suggest that the LGM extent may have been relatively restricted. In Hunafloaall, a basal dimicton containing foraminifera, is overlain by a thin ( 2 m) sequence of IRD-rich glacial-marine and marine sediments. Basal dates on the IRD-rich muds indicate deglaciation occurred by 13 thousand years ago (ka). Dates from the dimictons are finite and 20 ka. Such a thin deglacial sequence provides a major contrast with SW Iceland where the deglacial sediments reach thickness of 10-40+ m. The virtual absence of deglacial sediments in Hunafloaall is perplexing and raises serious questions of ice extent and chronology on the adjacent NW Peninsula. Cosmogenic isotope exposure dating techniques will be used to constrain maximum and minimum models of glacial extent. Specifically, 3He and 36CI isotopes will be used to date the basaltic upland surfaces, end and lateral moraines, and glacial erratics. Tephrachronology and physical properties of the sediment samples will be used to link the terrestrial and marine records. The Principal Investigators will continue their field and laboratory investigations on: 1) the vertical and lateral extent of glaciation along this coastline, including collection of samples for cosmogenic isotope exposure dating; 2) the pattern and timing of deglaciation and any subsequent glacier expansion; 3) investigation of the marine cores with the view toward discriminating between tills and glacial marine dimictons, and with a focus on more accurately dating the onset of deglaciation; and 4) changes in relative sea level as a measure of ice load and history. The field work will continue and expand a pilot program that began in summer of , involving the Universities of Colorado, Iceland, Goteborg, and Edinburgh doc1524 none The research investigates how human infants represent numerical concepts and the relationship between learning to count verbally and pre-linguistic number representations. Specifically, the objective is to determine if there are two representations of number in infants, one for small numbers (1, 2, 3, and perhaps 4) and one for large numbers (numbers larger than 3 or 4). Furthermore, we take the first step in investigating how learning the integer list of English (i.e., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.) may change children s later numerical concepts. Previous studies on number representations in infants and preschool children have shown that there may be a major developmental change in infants number representations when they have acquired the meaning of the number words at around 3 to 3.5 years of age. Young infants may begin with two systems of number representations, one for small number (1, 2, and 3) and one for large numbers (e.g., 8, 16, etc.). The proposed study tests the hypothesis these two representations are distinct and that verbal counting allows the child to combine these two representations to yield adult-like numerical representations. In other words, because the verbal counting list (1, 2, 3, etc.) imposes certain constraints on conceptual representations, the child has to use both the small number and the large number representations in order to make sense of the counting list. These hypotheses will be investigated with several methods, including a violation of expectancy looking time method with infants, a training-then-transfer method with toddlers, and the how-many and give-a-number tasks widely used in assessing children s understanding of number words. The results of these experiments should lead to a more detailed and deeper understanding of the relationship between pre-linguistic representations of number and children s learning to count. The proposed research will shed basic light on the relationship between language and cognition in the domain of number representations doc1525 none After more than a decade of active, coordinated effort, researchers from a diverse set of disciplines as well as private-, semi-private-, and public-sector officials seeking to obtain insights regarding how to deal with global environmental change have begun examining the relative efficacy of different research approaches and strategies. This project seeks to design and evaluate strategies with which the next generation of national and international global environmental change programs might more effectively integrate and support its research, assessment and decision-support activities. In particular, an interdisciplinary team of investigators intends to catalyze and contribute to three interrelated lines of work: (1) Broadening the global change agenda to engage more directly the agenda of the other big new environmental idea of the last twenty years: sustainability. The team s goal is to promote a reframing of the global change agenda in terms that will help to keep its research broadly but strategically engaged with a wide range of the world s most pressing development challenges. (2) Developing a place-based, integrated understanding of global change effects and vulnerabilities. The team s goal is to combine natural and social science perspectives to develop and test common conceptual frameworks and analytic approaches for the integrated regional study of multiple, cumulative, interactive stress effects and multiple time scale responses related to global change. (3) Designing, supporting, and managing systems that can better integrate research, assessment and decision support activities on problems of global change. The team s goal is to evaluate alternative models for such integration, with special emphasis on the trade-offs and tensions between centralized and distributed systems, stability versus adaptability of design, curiosity-driven versus problem-driven priority setting, and governmental versus nongovernmental and hybrid institutional settings. The investigators will contribute to the evolution of strategies for meeting these challenges through an international collaboration among a small set of leading scholars and program managers involved in the production, assessment, and application of knowledge relating to global change. These include natural scientists, social scientists, and policy analysts as well as individuals from several countries with substantial experience in running or advising research and assessment programs. Using a group of collaborators and shared postdoctoral students supported through the project, the team will conduct research on each of the main themes noted above providing a series of critical reviews and state of the science papers. Work in progress will be reviewed at a monthly electronic colloquium, which will experiment with different approaches for bringing together program principals and invited guests in an intense, collaborative, and cumulative dialog without requiring extensive travel for all participants. In addition, ad hoc workshops and an extended summer study will be used to assure interaction and integration across program components. Products of this project, including reviews, papers, work in progress and summaries of the colloquium sessions, will be posted on an open-forum web site to encourage and facilitate a wider discussion of the program s issues. This project is jointly supported by NSF and by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA doc1520 none The ability to perform machining operations in a comprehensive simulation environment and to obtain realistic predictions of its outcome in terms of workpiece attributes (dimensional tolerance, form, and surface finish) and process capabflities is the vision motivating this proposal. An initial framework for the realization of this capability, epitomized by the designation Virtual Machine Tool (VMT), will be defined. The envisioned VMT environment will ultimately allow machine tool builders to evaluate alternative machine designs and configurations, and will assist machine tool users to predict the achievable workpiece attributes during planning, selection, and use of metal cutting machine tools. The underlying assumptions, interrelation between the necessary functions, and the envisioned methods and approaches to the computational simulation of the functional elements of the VMT will be addressed. The principal emphasis will be on fundamental issues related to the integration of machine and process related funttions, and on the development of predictive models for workpiece attributes and process capability measures that are essential missing ingredients of the VMT concept. The outcome, consisting of prototype code for the characterization, visualization, and mapping of workpiece attribute deviations from the nominal, will be experimentally verified on the example of end milling, drilling, and tapping operations doc1527 none Eltahir The Seventh International Conference on Precipitation is being held in Rockport, Maine, June 30 - July 3, . Following the tradition of the previous six conferences, this meeting aims at fostering interdisciplinary interactions between atmospheric scientists, hydrologists, mathematicians, and statisticians. The central theme of the conference will be research issues related to observations, estimation, and prediction of precipitation variability. Particular emphasis is placed on the following topics: (i) application of modern observational techniques, including remote sensing, for precipitation estimation and prediction, (ii) dynamical modeling of clouds and precipitation, and (iii) limits of predictability doc1528 none This dissertation research project focuses the evolution over half a century of the Washington, DC metro system with the intent to better understand the role of urban rail systems in the postwar age. The study draws on two bodies of scholarly literature. The first is a long-running debate over the wisdom of investments in new urban rail systems since the s. Many planners applaud these systems as the best hope for combating the ills of automobile dominated sprawl, with its attendant problems of pollution, energy wastefulness, and social isolation. But many economists deride rail as a shiny toy that consumes public funds better used for bus transit. Neither side of this debate has examined the detailed, qualitative history of a rail system. This research project hopes to show that in the real world, decisionmaking and the settings of goals are more complicated than the factors considered by economic models. The second body of scholarship is the study of the history of technology, especially the myth-and-symbol approach of Leo Marx and his followers and the study of the social construction of technology. Applying these approaches to postwar rail transit can explain how one intensely public technology accumulates functions as it evolves doc1529 none The goal of this project is to contribute to the further development of the concept and practice of virtual community by addressing three interrelated questions: (1) What technical features and designs of computer networks need to be introduced, modified, or eliminated in order to support and facilitate community activities and values? (2) What norms and forms of social organization are required by robust virtual communities? (3) What are the offline conditions necessary for online community to prosper? The project understands community in the strong sense as a scene of long-term interactions on which a large share of human development occurs. As such it is a fundamental human value and deserves a prominent place in the field of computer ethics. The practice of virtual community is also relevant to the prospects for democracy in the information age. The democratization of the Internet involves not merely the economics of participation, but also the ability of ordinary people to express themselves and pursue meaningful experiences in the virtual worlds created by computer communication. Community applications on the Internet have arisen spontaneously for the most part and there has been little study of how different types of software impact online community life. But adequacy of software support for network communities will be among the decisive factors determining whether they will succeed in becoming a widely accepted means to reliable and consequential relationships and cooperative action with others. As commercial interest in online community begins to emerge, groupware intended for community building proliferates on different platforms and in different formats. A new field of software development - groupware for community - is starting to take shape. This research addresses issues central for the development of this field. It will evaluate the technical features and functions offered by the most widely used types of groupware for community against a set of ethical values and norms definitive for community. It will carry out case studies involving particular online groups with different groupware formats, namely: a mailing list, a newsgroup, a web-based community-building application, and a virtual world. The goal will be to uncover whether the existing software reinforces or frustrates the attempt to realize the ethical principles of community life. The project will also investigate the real-life contexts in which these groups have emerged and established themselves as sustainable entities. Presentations, publications, and the final report will propose guidelines for effective technical (hardware and software) and organizational support for online community-building. Findings will enrich the theoretical understanding of the relationship between software design and user agency and, generally, between information technology and society doc1530 none This award provides funding to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to organize a national workshop to define the information technology requirements of the earthquake engineering research community for the NSF program entitled Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation. This workshop will seek input from the earthquake engineering research community in the following areas: (1) access to shared use earthquake engineering research equipment, (2) supporting telecollaboration and teleoperation of the shared use equipment, (3) shared use of distributed heterogeneous data sets, (4) definition of new data types and metadata schemes, (5) use and sharing of simulation models, and (6) use of advanced visualization technologies and tools. The results of this workshop will be disseminated on the World Wide Web and in printed form doc1531 none This project seeks to investigate control systems for a human-machine shared locomotion platform to assist the human in pedestrian mobility. The project is specifically motivated by the need of the elderly. The elderly are often restricted in their mobility and must rely on canes, walkers, and ultimately, wheelchairs for indoor mobility. Restrictions in mobility lead to a loss of independence for the elderly, often resulting in nursing home admission. This research will develop a control system for a semi-autonomous, wheeled walker (c.f. a lightweight frame used in the aid of walking) in which the user provides the locomotive force and the user and the walker collaborate on the steering. Specific investigation includes developing shared control techniques that assists the ambulatory elderly in guidance in known environments, providing basic safety measures in known and unknown environments (i.e. curb detection and automatic braking), implementing a hardware prototype and empirically testing the performance of the system using a variety of discrete situations developed in concert with geriatrics professionals.The essence of this research is to explore new control techniques appropriate for shared control with elderly operators doc1532 none The objective of this project is to create a new paradigm in bioremediation of chlorinated solvents by metabolically engineering microorganisms for the rapid, long-term, aerobic biodegradation of perchloroethylene (PCE), trichloroethylene (TCE), and mixtures of these and other solvents. No organisms are known to have these abilities, and development of such a strain would provide a new, cost-effective option for solving some of the world s most pervasive soil and groundwater pollution problems. This research has four specific objectives: (1) use DNA shuffling to create an optimized monooxygenase that degrades PCE, TCE, and mixtures of chlorinated solvents; (2) clone this monooxygenase and epoxide hydrolase into two host strains; (3) evaluate the effects of this genetic engineering on host cell physiology using 2-dimensional protein electrophoresis; and (4) evaluate the fate of modified cells and introduced genes in soil and bioreactor settings doc1533 none The UC-AGEP, comprised of all nine UC System campuses, is working in partnership with federal and state sponsored preparation programs for under-represented minorities in SMET. The programs that are formally linked to the UC-AGEP include: LSAMP, MESA-MEP, Ronald McNair Scholars, MARC, MBRS, and UCLEADS. Additionally, each UC campus has developed links to undergraduate institutions that graduate large numbers of minority students with bachelor s degrees in SMET. In this proposal, the UC Office of the President assumes responsibility for routine coordination, data management, and communication with NSF regarding funding and reporting requirements. To facilitate communication and collaboration among the campuses, two working groups (one in Northern California and one in Southern California) have been formed, and will meet at least twice each year doc1534 none The San Diego Natural History Museum is committed to the research and interpretation of the Southern California and Baja California area. New permanent exhibits to convey the excitement and relevance of natural history study is the focus of this planning grant. The planning project has three goals. First, it will devise a master plan that establishes a philosophical foundation and the organizing framework for exhibit development. Second, a schematic design that articulates content, space allocation and exhibit techniques will be made. Finally, a plan for related materials and programs that will fund, enhance and expand the exhibit effort will be constructed. The twelve-month planning proceess will be evaluated and the results disseminated and added to the field of museum learning research doc1535 none The Potomac Institute for Policy Studies will convene a conference in June to address two broad questions of importance to US Armed Forces: what opportunities do advances in science offer to US forces and how do scientific advances change the type of threats to US forces. The workshop will bring together representatives of the military, Congress, and scientific communities to present their views of changes pertinent to these questions. Specific areas addressed at the workshop include military perspectives on maneuver and power projection and protection, firepower and precision targeting, air warfare, space warfare, information and networking, and intelligence and threat assessment. Science perspectives on topics such as energy, human factors and neuroscience, nanoscale technologies, information and knowledge, biomedical advances, and advanced materials will also be provided. The workshop organizers will prepare a report that summarizes the presentations and conclusions doc1536 none Planktonic communities comprise an incredibly wide diversity of organisms that form the basis of marine food webs. We propose a multi?species inventory of zooplankton and micronekton at the Bermuda Atlantic Time?series Study (BATS) station, an 11 ?year, ongoing oceanographic time series situated in the western North Atlantic subtropical gyre or Sargasso Sea. The program will provide high?resolution species data that covers diel, seasonal, interannual, and decadal time scales. Detailed accompanying environmental data already available from BATS cruises (e.g., water column temperature, oxygen, nutrients, and plant pigment concentration) add additional value to the data set. Both species and environmental metadata will be formatted using techniques already well developed and in use at BATS for compilation and provision of data of interest into OBIS. Our proposed project will involve participation from both academia (Bermuda Biological Station for Research, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Russian Academy of Sciences Zoological Institute) and government (the Smithsonian Institution s National Museum of Natural History). We have developed a partnership with significant collective experience in the study of the subtropical North Atlantic system and expertise in the identification (and ecology of) all major taxa of zooplankton and micronekton. This project will provide a high quality time series of zooplankton and micronekton species composition enabling us to dissect the difference between natural variability and real change in the diversity of plankton communities. This will be critical for testing and validation of ecosystem models, and for understanding the effects of long term climate change on ecosystems doc1536 none Planktonic communities comprise an incredibly wide diversity of organisms that form the basis of marine food webs. We propose a multi?species inventory of zooplankton and micronekton at the Bermuda Atlantic Time?series Study (BATS) station, an 11 ?year, ongoing oceanographic time series situated in the western North Atlantic subtropical gyre or Sargasso Sea. The program will provide high?resolution species data that covers diel, seasonal, interannual, and decadal time scales. Detailed accompanying environmental data already available from BATS cruises (e.g., water column temperature, oxygen, nutrients, and plant pigment concentration) add additional value to the data set. Both species and environmental metadata will be formatted using techniques already well developed and in use at BATS for compilation and provision of data of interest into OBIS. Our proposed project will involve participation from both academia (Bermuda Biological Station for Research, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Russian Academy of Sciences Zoological Institute) and government (the Smithsonian Institution s National Museum of Natural History). We have developed a partnership with significant collective experience in the study of the subtropical North Atlantic system and expertise in the identification (and ecology of) all major taxa of zooplankton and micronekton. This project will provide a high quality time series of zooplankton and micronekton species composition enabling us to dissect the difference between natural variability and real change in the diversity of plankton communities. This will be critical for testing and validation of ecosystem models, and for understanding the effects of long term climate change on ecosystems doc172 none The objective of this project is to focus on enzymes of technical importance from two key organisms, Pyrococcus furiosus and Thermotoga maritima. Both of these have been well characterized by the Principal Investigators and are suitable models for this project. Basic and applied objectives are to be pursued. The project is divided into five main areas. Areas one to four focus on answering specific biochemical questions on four enzymes: chitinases, glycosyl transferases, prolidases, and aminoacylases. The fifth area addresses the optimization of the hyperthermophile gene expression in E. coli doc1539 none The proposed project will perform and analyze uncoupled Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP-2) type integrations of the Climate Community Model (CCM) at T 42, T85 and T170 resolutions. The PIs will test if biases in simulated sea level pressure(SLP) are caused by (i) insufficient resolution of flow over orography, especially Greenland, (ii) insufficient resolution of transient circulations including surface effects on cyclogenesis and cyclone evolution in the storm tracks of high northern latitutes, (iii) poor simulation of clouds and atmospheric radiation due to model physics and (iv) over-simplification in the prescribed surface boundary conditions over sea ice. Improving GCM simulations of arctic surface winds and SLP is a prerequisite to obtaining useful coupled simulations of the arctic climate. The work is important because it will provide strong diagnostics underpinning to the CSM project from a university based group engaged in dynamical diagnosis of observed climate variability at high latitudes doc1540 none Biology Success! is an innovative project proposed by Landmark College to demonstrate that students with learning disabilities can succeed in high school and college introductory biology courses when the curriculum has been designed to respond to their learning needs. The heterogeneous classes in America s schools parallel the national average for the presence of students with learning disabilities. Between 10% and 20% of the population is estimated to have dyslexia, attention-deficit disorder or other specific learning disabilities. These students can learn along side traditional learners in the biology classroom and laboratory, if faculty are aware of strategies designed to present information and reinforce it in a way that benefits the learning styles of those with learning differences, while serving traditional learners. Landmark College is uniquely qualified to undertake the preparation of a biology Teaching Manual. Landmark is the only fully accredited college in the nation that restricts admission to students with a diagnosed learning disorder. For the past sixteen years the College has worked to develop a specialized environment tailored to individual learning styles. The College s External Program has been instrumental in providing other educators across the country with proven methodologies that foster success for those with learning disabilities. The institution is eager to extend this work beyond the more traditional areas of reading, writing and communication and apply Landmark s six Educational Principle s to the four major components of the introductory biology curriculum, ecology, genetics. evolution and cell biology. To accomplish this goal, the project will work with faculty from Landmark College and four collaborating institutions: Marlboro College, Austine High School for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing, Bellows Falls Union High School, and Community High School of Vermont. The collaborating institutions will develop curriculum, provide in-service sessions for faculty, field test teaching modules, assess available CD-ROM and on-line products and provide access to the Teaching Manual through Landmark s web site and in print. The impact of this project will be felt in science instruction throughout the country. It will provide faculty on the secondary and post-secondary levels with the methodology to apply proven teaching strategies to classroom and laboratory instruction advancing the success of those with learning disabilities in science by removing barriers to learning doc1541 none The hypothesis of this research is that anthropogenic aerosols increase the concentration of cloud droplets but decrease their average size, thus reducing the snowfall rate by decreasing the efficiency with which falling ice crystals sweep out the supercooled droplets. The approach is to monitor the chemical and physical properties of clouds and aerosols and the snowfall rate at the Storm Peak Observatory, a laboratory operated by the Desert Research Institute at an elevation of meters near Steamboat Springs, Colorado. At this altitude, the Observatory is frequently above cloud base during snow. The measured quantities include the size distributions of cloud droplets, ice crystals, and aerosol particles, the chemical composition of cloud water and snow, and the snowfall rate. A radar wind profiler and balloon sounding system complement the measurements at the ground by providing vertical profiles of wind, temperature, humidity, radar reflectivity, and Doppler spectra. This work has significant economic and demographic implications. If pollution aerosols are significantly reducing snowfall rates, this will decrease the amount of water available from snow pack, which in the West is an important source doc1542 none This is a planning grant to Independent Broadcasting Associates, Inc. to enable them to obtain and evaluate scientific data about the ecological condition of the Ganges river in South Asia in preparation for a series of documentaries for National Public Radio. The series would combine both science and humanities to consider the meaning of the river in terms of the broad continuum of the Ganges ecosystem. During the planning stage, the PI will: review published literature and determine whether relevant unpublished information is obtainable; screen the obtainable information on the ecological condition of the Ganges Padma river and identify major causes of the degradation of the river; contact relevant government related bodies within India in order to locate suitable experts and written reports; establish relationships with and conduct interviews amongst relevant non-governmental parties including scientists, industrialists and agriculturalists in order to facilitate future interactions for the purpose of producing the series ; and assess the suggestion that one of the problems with initiatives such as the Ganga Action Plan has been its reliance upon Western models -- both technological and conceptual -- which are often inappropriate to local conditions and realities doc1543 none The Setting A Research Agenda: Parents as Informal Mathematics Educators conference will convene parents, researchers in parent child learning, a methodological research design expert, a developmental psychologist, and representatives from mathematics professional organizations. The goals of the conference include: 1) summarizing the goals, methods and findings of the leading research in parent child mathematics learning; 2) establishing the agenda for future research in this area; and 3) charting a short- and long-term plan of action to accomplish these research goals doc1544 none This research focuses on two important mesoscale phenomena: mesoscale gravity waves and heavy snowbands in the northwest quadrant of cyclones. Better understanding of both of these will allow better forecasts of various wintertime weather events. Mesoscale gravity waves are wave disturbances with wavelengths that range from about 30 to 250 km, periods between 0.5 and 4 hours, and amplitudes that can exceed several millibars. While a number of studies have documented the occurrence of mesoscale gravity waves, there is considerable debate on how these waves form. The Principal Investigators present a hypothesis developed under prior support that addresses the genesis of these waves. The Principal Investigators will test and refine this hypothesis and address key questions concerning mesoscale gravity wave genesis via two distinct but complementary modeling methodologies. Heavy snowbands typically occur in narrow regions in the northwest quadrant in cyclones where frontal structures and associated frontal circulations are modified by strong deformation flow. Many of these processes occur on scales smaller than can be observed with operational resources. The Snowband Dynamics Project, carried out in the winter of -98 near Lake Michigan, collected unprecedented data to document and understand the structure of these heavy snow bands. The researchers will use these observations and complementary modeling studies to: 1) examine the dynamic and thermodynamic structure of heavy precipitation bands in the northwest quadrant of cyclones and in the reverse lake-effect regions west of Lake Michigan, 2) determine the relative roles of isentropic ascent, transverse ageostrophic circulations associated with frontogenesis, gravity waves and boundary layer processes in forcing vertical motion to create the snowbands, and 3) evaluate the importance of convective and conditional symmetric instability in band organization and intensification. An additional goal is to determine how boundary layer fluxes of heat and moisture from the lake modify frontal structure, stability and precipitation hand dynamics in the vicinity of the lake doc1545 none This research develops a theory of large policy change, with specific application to conflict resolution of international rivalries. The theory of large policy change is itself part of the punctuated equilibrium approach to policy. The model will first address two key concepts in the conflict resolution and policy literature namely ripeness and window of opportunity. The research formalizes and tests models that incorporate window of opportunity variables and uses the window of opportunity concept to conceptualize ripeness. From the general policy model, the investigators derive a sub-model that applies to the resolution of long-standing interstate conflicts which yields testable propositions that can be examined in the context of enduring rivalries and a representative sample of lesser state rivalries. Specific outcomes of the project include: 1) a formal theory of punctuated equilibrium models; 2) a specific model of large policy change; 3) rigorous specification of the window of opportunity and ripeness concepts; 4) a punctuated equilibrium model of international rivalry resolution; 5) new data on conflict resolution compatible with the most widely used data set on interstate rivalries; and, 6) a series of empirical analyses on the conditions associated with conflict resolution in rivalries over the period - . This investigation promises to enhance substantially our understanding of the topic and to provide a database for use by a large number of scholars interested in the topic doc1546 none van Dam, Andries Brown University Special Projects: Workshop to Establish a Research Agenda in Learning Science and Technology This award supports a workshop to define major research areas in learning science and technology, in particular at large scale, identifying the most pressing research needs and suggest ways of combining these topics into themes. This is a timely and very important project, as universities and other deliveries of training and education struggle to re-define their teaching methods given the extraordinary changes just beginning due to ubiquitous high-performance computing and networking. This workshop is related to an overall effort by NSF and others to foster the development of the Learning Federation (LF), a fledgling research organization designed to undertake research in this area. As envisioned by the organizers, the Learning Federation will model itself after consortia such as Sematech in the semiconductor industry; it will support pre-competitive, not-for-profit research among a consortium of industry, government, foundations and universities and will be managed and governed by the consortium members. The LF goal is to achieve a critical mass of projects by providing long-term, stable, large-grain funding for interdisciplinary research teams. The LF will fund basis learning science and technology as well as appropriate uses of technology and experimental content such as libraries of learning objects and courses. The focus will initially be on undergraduate, graduate, and life-long learning. The result will be a next generation of learning environments suited to a network context doc1547 none The globalization of business activity is a central feature of the contemporary world economy; it is a significant force in the production and re-production of national and local economies. Academic inquires concerning the causes and consequences of globalization of business activity have generally focused on meta-narratives of capitalistic mode of production or macro-explanations of global-local relations. Systematic establishment-level studies pertaining to the local business organization and relations of foreign ventures in host economies with respect to their global local constraints and opportunities are lacking. This study aims to examine the ways foreign firms articulate their networks in China and the corresponding impacts on venture performance and local economic development. Based upon a detailed investigation of the local business organization and relations of foreign manufacturing ventures in four cities in the Yangtze Delta region (Shanghai, Suzhou, Nanjing, and Hanzhou), the study also examines the differences in local business organization and relations of ventures with respect to major structural characteristics of the investments and the socioeconomic and institutional environments of the four cities. The study will employ both postal survey and personal interview methods for gathering data, and a range of quantitative and qualitative methods will be used for analysis. The underlying hypotheses are that the marketing material technology networks of the ventures are spatially more dispersed than the production networks, and that their extent of interaction with indigenous enterprises is limited. It is further hypothesized that foreign ventures are active in securing cooperative local relations, and that the existence of harmonious local inter-firm and venture-authority relationships has positive impacts on venture performance and local development. The study will provide a better understanding of how foreign firms articulate their business networks in host economies with respect to their global local constraints and opportunities. It will lead to the development of a more comprehensive and integrated theoretical and empirical framework for the studies of globalization, business organization, economic networks, and global-local relations. At a practical level, the study will provide important empirical information regarding the foreign investment environments in the Yangtze Delta region, which can serve as a basis for foreign firms to establish a set of criteria for successful ventures and business relationships in China doc1548 none Over the past decade knowledge management has become a subject of keen interest among academics and practitioners alike. Book publications on the topic have increased dramatically as managers and executives from a broad spectrum of organizations have recognized the importance of creating, retaining, and transferring knowledge for firm survival and competitive advantage. Academic journals have also published more on knowledge management by scholars from a variety of research traditions. Areas of inquiry span levels of analysis (group, organization, network, population), substantive topics of interest (e.g., technology transfer, innovation and creativity), and intellectual traditions (e.g., organizational behavior and theory, strategic management, economics, psychology, and sociology). As a result, we now have an eclectic mix of findings on knowledge management in organizations. Because research has tended to accumulate within focused areas of inquiry, there has been relatively little consideration for how developments in one area relate to another. Consequently, important tensions exist between areas of inquiry and opportunities to leverage insights across areas remain unexploited. The study of knowledge management is at a point where future research stands to benefit greatly from surveying existing research in particular areas and from integrating findings across those areas. To this end, a two-day conference on Creating, Retaining, and Transferring Knowledge in Organizations will be organized at Carnegie Mellon University on September 7-9, . The goals of the conference are to: (1) synthesize what is known about managing knowledge in organizations, (2) identify gaps and inconsistencies in our understanding of the management of organizational knowledge, (3) define future research directions on the management of knowledge in organizations, and (4) disseminate research findings about knowledge creation, retention, and transfer. The conference is being coordinated with a special issue of Management Science. Authors of the most promising manuscripts after the first round of reviews will be invited to present their work at the Carnegie Mellon Conference. The best papers from the conference will be published in the Management Science special issue. The conference will play a critical role in synthesizing existing knowledge and developing new knowledge about the creation, retention, and transfer of knowledge in organizations. The conference will provide contributors with feedback about their work and thereby improve the quality of research in the area. The interactions at the conference will also facilitate connections among researchers from different areas of inquiry and thereby stimulate future research on knowledge management doc1549 none This award is for post-doctoral research on sporadic micrometeor mass influx into the upper atmosphere. The study makes use of data from the Arecibo Radar in Puerto Rico and the European Incoherent Scatter (EISCAT) radar in Norway. The micrometeor velocities will be deduced from Doppler measurements made by the radars. The comparison between the Arecibo and EISCAT results will reveal summer and winter differences at the two locations. The differential in flux may play a major role in the formation of noctilucent clouds and related summer upper atmosphere phenomena that may be harbingers of global change. Meteoroid destruction mechanisms and deposition of meteoric mass will also be investigated. This is critical to elucidating the origins of metal layers above the meteor zone and the observed low atmospheric abundance of calcium relative to that expected from meteorite composition doc1550 none In 7 the National Science Foundation awarded funds to Drs. George Cowgill and Susan Evans to construct an archaeological research center in Teotihuacan, Mexico. The northern basin of Mexico contains many large archaeological sites - of which Teotihuacan is the most famous - which document the rise of complex Mesoamerican cultures and these have been the focus of decades of NSF supported research. Because the Mexican government lacks adequate resources to store excavated materials and to provide work space for scientists, an NSF grant allowed the construction of a center which includes storage, work and living space. In over a decade of existence the center has provided base for many NSF supported projects. As a result, storage space is now filled to capacity with well over a million objects. The main storage work unit was solidly built in the expectation that a second story would eventually be added and this award provides funds for this and other related improvements. The enlarged center will provide the infrastructure for archaeological and related research in this strategic region for many decades to come and will provide for the curation of materials that would otherwise be lost. Arizona State University has donated matching funds and Dr. Cowgill will continue to oversee center administration doc1551 none This project examines law s indeterminacy and the process of making and remaking law in the appellate courts, as seen in judicial decision-making in custody cases involving gay and lesbian parents. While there are records of such cases beginning in the s, the explosion of homosexual parenting as both a legal issue and a site of public debate is most evident in the s and s. In deciding these cases, reliance on the best interest of the child standard is common if not universal; however, judges determinations of what constitutes the best interest is anything but static. This project addresses three questions: 1) to what extent are judicial rationales and outcomes indeterminate in custody cases involving homosexual parents? 2) what are the specific discourses invoked in these rationales and decisions and how do they help to shape the meaning of the judicial decisions and legal rationales? and 3) what patterns of judicial language and legal meaning can be revealed over time in these decisions? Using archival data spanning a fifty-year time period, the project will investigate the patterns of reasoning and meaning-making apparent in judicial decisions in homosexual parents custody cases. More specifically, the project will examine discourses related to social movements, psychology and psychiatry, criminality, family structure, morality, and sexuality. This project will shed light on the processes of legal change and institutionalization of meaning over time in the appellate courts doc1552 none This project will establish a Web-based archive of international trade data. The archive will be of use to economic policy makers needing both recent data on international trade, and comparable data for past years. While the U.S. federal government now distributes current data through the National Trade Databank (NTDB), this data can be difficult to use and does not provide the comparable data for previous years; thus, the NTDB does not allow policy makers to make decisions based on longer-term trends. Our archive will provide data on both U.S. and worldwide trade, and also on trade barriers, over a wide range of years. In addition to its usefulness for policy, the archive will be of particular help to dissertation writers and other young scholars doing empirical research in international economics. The principal investigators will work in conjunction with a number of other researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER, Cambridge, MA and New York). At the heart of this archive is a comprehensive database of U.S. import and export data. In addition, the archive will include: Historical data, U.S. exports and imports: prices, quantities, and values, quarterly for - ; values, matched with U.S. production, at ten year intervals from - State-level agricultural exports and imports for the United States Detailed annual export and domestic price data for manufactures from the U.S., U.K., Germany, Japan, France, Sweden, Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore Outward foreign direct investment data for the U.S., Japan, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and some developing countries, as well as inward foreign direct investment data for many countries World trade data, as available from the United Nations and Statistics Canada Trade flows to and from China, computed from several sources Data on congressional voting in the U.S. on trade issues, related to characteristics of the congressional districts Data on U.S. antidumping cases U.S. and worldwide tariff data This data will be useful for addressing a wide range of issues, such as: the impact of international trade on domestic employment and wages; the responsiveness of trade flows to exchange rate fluctuations; how international trade flows change as production moves to lower-wage countries; and how growing exports from newly-industrialized countries has impacted specific industries doc1553 none The focus of the Universal Virtual Laboratory (UVL) project is finding new ways to accommodate people with severe motor impairments to an electrical engineering laboratory. Any participants who are deaf or hard-of-hearing will also be accommodated. The major goals of the project are to: 1) Develop a simulated, but realistic, laboratory that will enable students to name, place and interconnect various circuit elements, electronic devices, electrical systems, signal generators and measuring instruments. 2) Enable users to manipulate virtual instruments, elements and devices either by direct manipulation, with a mouse or a headpointer, or by discrete actions with switches, keyboard, or speech recognition. The system will maximize the speed with which the student can interact with the system by using rule-based algorithms. 3) Develop novel input output devices that will accommodate various disabled students. 4) Permit the student to connect in any physically feasible way the elements, instruments available in a typical laboratory storeroom, and obtain the same responses, including failures, that would be experienced in the laboratory. 5) Simulate the performance of the interconnected elements and objects by integrating them seamlessly with software application packages. These packages will produce a data stream representing current, voltages, frequencies, power, etc. The data stream will be used as inputs to the various simulated measuring instruments. 6) Provide the student with an intelligent laboratory assistant that will answer the student s questions in a way that simulates the role of an expert laboratory assistant who is expert in both the subject matter and accommodation of disabilities. 7) Place the resultant UVL modules on CD ROMS and make these modules completely functional on the World Wide Web. 8) Disseminate the results over the World Wide Web, in appropriate journals and through presentation at notable conferences. The framework developed in this project could be used as a template for the design and implementation of realistic virtual laboratories in other engineering courses as well as in the physical sciences doc1554 none This study will examine the role of science in the formation of United States endangered species policy. In particular, the project will use the West Indian manatee as a longitudinal case study. The project will accomplish three major goals. First, it will examine when and how scientific knowledge is incorporated into policy. Second, it will explore the role that scientists play in the process of creating biodiversity policy. Finally, it will identify what, when, and why social, cultural, political and economic factors preempt the use of science in the process of policy formation and implementation. Using the West Indian manatee as a longitudinal case study, multiple research methods will be used to achieve these goals. Specifically, researchers will use content analysis of scientific literature published on the manatee, content analysis of documents establishing policy directed at manatee recovery and protection, and personal interviews of key persons responsible for the creation of policy regarding manatee recovery and protection. The research findings will be useful to scientists, natural resource managers, and legislators by documenting and analyzing the process through which linkages are made between science and endangered species policy. The research will also contribute new knowledge about the sociological significance of science in the policymaking process doc1555 none The idea that economic policy is determined not by a benign government acting in isolation but rather by continual interactions between politicians and organized special interest groups is by now well understood and accepted. In formal studies of this phenomenon, economists and political scientists have mostly emphasized the link between domestic lobbies and the government. Recent events, however, have shifted the focus in popular perception (as well as in the consequent policy discussions related to campaign finance reform) to foreign lobbies and to the extent of their involvement in the political process, the presumption being that this interaction has a deleterious effect on the home economy. In a trade policy context, however, it is easily seen that bending policy in a direction that would suit foreigners may not in fact be harmful: If the policy outcome absent any lobbying by foreigners is characterized by welfare-reducing (or sub-optimal) trade barriers, lobbying by foreigners for reductions in such barriers may move policy in a direction that improves home and US consumer welfare. But, is it so? Do foreign lobbies have impact on US trade policy? If so, is this welfare improving? These are the questions that this project investigates theoretically and empirically. The empirical study we conduct, of studying foreign lobbying activity and its impact -- in the context of a rigorously specified economic model - is the first of its kind. A substantial component of the research effort involves the collection of data on foreign lobbying activity which are available from U.S. Government s annual Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) reports. Our econometric analysis yields estimates of the impact of foreign lobbying on trade policy and thus provide indications of the welfare impact of the presence of foreign lobbies doc1556 none This research examines the dynamic evolution of the effect of income distribution on the process of development. It develops unified growth models that encompass the transition between distinct regimes that have characterized the relationship between income inequality and the process of development. The unified modeling of this long transition process is a significant research challenge facing economists interested in the understanding of the role of income inequality in the process of development and in the determination of long-run economic growth. Imposing the constraint that a single model would account for the entire evolution of the relationship between inequality and the process of development is a discipline that would improve the understanding of the underlying phenomena and would generate superior testable predictions and policy implications. The research provides an intertemporal reconciliation between conflicting viewpoints about the effect of inequality on economic growth. It argues that the replacement of physical capital accumulation by human capital accumulation as a prime engine of economic growth has changed the qualitative impact of inequality on the process of development. In early stages of industrialization as physical capital accumulation is a prime source of economic growth, inequality enhances the process of development by channeling resources towards individuals whose marginal propensity to save is higher. In later stages of development, however, as the return to human capital increases due to capital-skill complementarity, human capital becomes the prime engine of economic growth and equality, in the presence of credit constraints, stimulates investment in human capital and promotes economic growth. As wages increase, however, credit constraints become less binding, the adverse effect of inequality on human capital accumulation and growth subsides, and the overall effect of inequality becomes less significant. The research hypothesizes that changes in class structure that have taken place in Europe since the 19th century reflect a deliberate transformation of society orchestrated by the Capitalists. Based on a careful examination of historical evidence, the proposed research will argue that contrary to conventional wisdom, the changes of this class structure could have been an outcome of a cooperative rather than a purely divisive process. The process of capital accumulation has gradually intensified the relative scarcity of labor and has generated an incentive to augment labor via human capital accumulation. Due to the complementarity between physical and human capital in production, the Capitalists were among the prime beneficiaries of the potential accumulation of human capital by the masses. They had therefore the incentive to financially support public education that would sustain their profit rates and would improve their economic well being, The research develops the hypothesis that in land abundant societies with a high degree of polarization education reforms would be delayed, due to the low degree of complementarity between human capital and land. Thus the research argues that, in contrast to a capital abundant society, in a land abundant society the process of development would be slower and polarization would persist longer. Hence, initial differences in land abundance may be the cause of persistence differences in the structure of society, institutions and economic performance across countries doc1557 none This project investigates the agent who estimates a model that fits the observed data well, although he may never learn the true equilibrium because his model is misspecified in the sense that it misses one or more key parameters of the environment. Even with a misspecified model, the decision-maker s belief can be self-fulfilled and he may end up using the model to choose a policy. Although the idea of self-fulfilling belief is closely related to rational expectations studied under equilibrium paradigm, it is called a self-confirming equilibrium to emphasize that the two different models interact to generate the observed outcomes: the agent s model, which is misspecified but used to select the action, and the true model that generates the actual data. The interaction between the true and the perceived models is the central part of this research that differentiates this project from the existing learning models and the equilibrium models of economy. In an earlier collaboration with Thomas J. Sargent, the principal investigator examined the monetary policy model of Kydland and Prescott in which the government chooses a target inflation rate based on the estimated short-term Phillips curve. A high inflation rate is realized and remains stable under various conditions. Although widely used in making monetary policy in real world, the short-term Phillips curve is a misspecified model of an economy, because it does not recognize the fact that the expectations of A private agent changes in response to the government s policy. The key finding is that any slight suspicion of the government about the stationarity of the underlying economy can generate an abrupt and significant drop of the target inflation rate, which the existing literature has proven stable under various conditions. This apparently paradoxical result can be explained through an endogenous switching mechanism of two fundamentally different dynamics within the same model: namely, the mean dynamics that dictates the stability of the self-confirming equilibrium, and the escape dynamics that pushes the economy away from the equilibrium. While the existing literature has concentrated mainly on the mean dynamics, the proposed research project investigates the escape dynamics, which has been overlooked but can influence the dynamics of an economy significantly. The project generalizes the endogenous switching mechanism to a wider class of learning models in order to apply this idea to important economic problems. The project examines a class of misspecified learning models that have a stable self-confirming equilibrium that is different from true equilibrium. This research starts by building a general theory that can be applied to a different class of models. Applications include a monetary policy known as the Taylor rule that has attracted considerable interest from policymakers as well as economists. An active Taylor rule changes the nominal interest rate more than one to one in order to control inflation. Although the active Taylor rule is known to implement the inflation target under general conditions, a recent study indicated that the same policy might unintentionally lead to a liquidity trap equilibrium, in which the government can no longer stimulate the economy by lowering the nominal interest rate as was the case in the recent episode of Japanese economy. The proposed approach can offer a simpler, yet more realistic, model to explain the potential limit of the active Taylor rule. The key idea is that even though the government is fully committed to a policy, a slight suspicion by the private sector about the government s commitment will prompt the agent to learn about the government s policy rule, and this learning process alone could lead the economy to the liquidity trap. The second application uses the idea of escape dynamics to capture abrupt, and possibly recurrent departures from the normal exchange rate in financial crises while maintaining the stability of the economy. The monetary policy model is used as the foundation, while incorporating foreign investors who might have a misspecified model about the government s policy rule doc1558 none Because the economics of climate change is so complicated, even the simplest multi-sector computer models that have been created to analyze the subject have themselves been relatively complicated. This research proposal is targeted at what is perceived to be a shortage of decent super-simplified analytical models of global warming. This project constructs a series of two- to three-sector sector referent models that will give simple sharp insights into the global warming problem and that a graduate student in economics would recognize and understand. In its essence, the global warming problem is a problem in capital theory. The core architecture of these new models is that of a dynamic optimal-growth production-stock externality having a special structure. This project answers such questions as: What is this special structure? Does it correspond to any standard off-the-shelf model of existing capital theory? What solution concepts does this special structure give rise to? And are such solution concepts useful for giving insights into the behavior of the more-complicated, more-realistic, multi-sector numerical models? More particularly, the project centers analytical attention on the key reduced-form relation between the private and social rates of return generated by a global-warming-type dynamic externality. The project shows that what looks like some fairly complicated models of economic dynamics describing, very roughly, the global warming problem, reduce down to a particular kind of capital-theoretic structure, which permits an unexpectedly simple way of thinking about the relationship between social and private rates of return on capital. Understanding the relation between social and private rates of return may be important here because, as the proposed project shows, the problem of the dynamic global-warming externality and its solution can both be conceptualized readily when presented in this characteristic form. Social and private rates of return are important summary statistics, compressing down into two numbers a lot of information concerning levels of consumption or investment, concerning rates of growth, and concerning desirable government policy on emissions-abatement standards. So, if we understand or intuit well the relationship between social and private rates of return, we understand a lot, even if not everything, about the basic underlying problem and its solution. The proposed research shows when, how, and why a global-warming-type dynamic externality may collapse down to a relatively simple reduced- form relationship between social and private rates of return doc1559 none The grant provides funding to open a Research Data Center (RDC) within the Survey Research Center of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. The RDC would provide researchers access to source data collected by the Census Bureau and other agencies. These confidential data are placed within a secure facility at the Survey Research Center. To gain access to these data, researchers with approved projects would obtain special sworn status within the Census Bureau. Researchers can publish results of analysis carried out within the RDC subject to a rigorous protocol for protecting the confidentiality of the underlying data. The purpose of this access would be to conduct academic research using data on individuals and firms. The ability to analyze the source data has enormous scientific benefits. These include the ability to make full use of the information collected by government agencies; to analyze the behavior of individuals and firms taking into account the heterogeneity of behavior and characteristics; and to combine sources of data at the individual level to study relationships obscured by more aggregate data. This RDC promotes productive interaction between the data collection agencies and the research community. Typically, researchers using government statistics are passive consumers of the data, which is usually collected for a purpose other than academic research. By providing a vehicle for working with the source data in collaboration with the Census Bureau, the RDC allows the research community to participate effectively in improving Census data. A Research Data Center would build on the University of Michigan s long-standing strength in social science research and in the processing and analysis of large-scale databases. The Institute of Social Research and its Survey Center and Population Studies Center house substantial expertise in the management of such databases and for maintaining the confidentiality of information on individuals. The University, the Institute, and the Centers have an established record in providing wide access to data and in improving quality data doc1560 none This project develops a symbolic interactionist theory of role-taking, deterrence, and delinquency. This perspective is used to integrate recent research on deterrence -- the ability of threats of punishment such as arrest and incarceration to deter individuals from crime -- and research on informal social control -- the ability of institutions, such as families, schools, and communities to prevent crime through informal controls. According to the symbolic interactionist theory of delinquency, organized groups control the behavior of members through role-taking. When ongoing lines of activity are blocked or interrupted, individuals engage in cognitive behavior, in which they consider the anticipated reactions of other to lines of action and most importantly views of self from the standpoint of others. This project, more specifically, will address the following issues. First, do individuals learn perceived costs and returns to crime based on a Bayesian learning model, in which prior beliefs about costs and returns influence behavior, but are then modified based on the consequences of that behavior? Second, do delinquent decisions follow a model of limited rationality, in which actors satisfice, rather than optimize? And can a symbolic interactionist model of decision-making specify the conditions under which delinquent decisions tend toward rationality? Third, are there specific conditions under which deterrent effects appear, and can a symbolic interactionist learning model identify those conditions? Fourth, by examining both future self-reported delinquency and present delinquent intentions, can we reconcile divergent findings in the literature? The project will employ two data sets. The National Youth Survey and the Denver Youth Study. The project will make important contributions to our understanding of delinquent decision-making, and the way in which informal social control and formal sanctioning operate to affect delinquent behavior. Moreover, the research will have implications for basic research on rational decision-making, and public policies intended to reduce crime by strengthening institutions versus investing in police, courts, and prisons doc1561 none This project examines the intersection of race, neighborhood social organization, and crime and violence in Seattle neighborhoods. Building on recent theoretical developments, the investigators will specify an integrated theory of racial heterogeneity, social disorganization, informal social control, and sub-cultures. This theoretical perspective specifies a causal mechanism in which community structure influ-ences neighborhood crime and violence through informal social control, neighborhood cultural codes and scripts, and routine activities. The project will field a new household telephone survey of neighborhoods and victimization in Seattle. The survey will include neigh-borhood measures included in two earlier household surveys of Seattle neighborhoods on victimization and community attachment. The survey will be augmented with personal interviews of nonresponding households and households with no phone or unlisted numbers. In addition, focus groups will be used to refine the quantitative measures of street codes, as well as neighborhood ties and informal control. Analyses will be carried out in several steps. First, exploratory analyses and confirmatory factor analyses will identify dimensions underlying neighborhood concepts such as informal control and cultural codes of violence. Second, neighborhood-level models of community attachment and social control will examine the effects of racial heterogeneity and community structure on neighborhood attachment and social control. Third, neighborhood-level models of crime and violence will examine the effects of racial heterogeneity and community structure on violence, and test whether these effects are mediated by informal social control and neighborhood cultural codes and scripts. Fourth, multi-level models will capitalize on the nested sampling design of households within census tracts, estimating random effects at the household-level, and then modeling neighborhood variation in those ef-fects. Fifth, change models will examine changes in racial heterogeneity, neighborhood organization and violence. Results will increase the understanding of the dynamics of neighborhoods and violence, provide refined measures of key concepts, allow comparisons between Seattle and other major cities, and provide baseline data for neighborhood interventions, such as community policing or neighborhood block watches doc1562 none Proposal # Institution: Springfield Technical Community College Principal Investigators: Mary Moriarity, Jack Barocas, and James Masi Springfield Technical Community College plans to leverage its extensive experience with technical education and with assistive adaptive technology to increase participation of students with disabilities in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) education. The primary goal of the project is to demonstrate and disseminate a professional development model to engage SMET faculty in the Universal Design of Curricula to support the learning of students with disabilities. The institution and its project staff will rely on their experience acquired in the Advanced Technical Education (ATE) Center in the design of specialized technical simulation, courseware, and laboratory-based components of SMET curricula. A cohort of 30 disabled students, half of whom experience sensory disabilities, will be the principal target population upon which the materials are piloted and tested. Evaluation will include an examination of outcomes of a train-the-trainer model of professional development, wherein a cohort of SMET faculty are trained and serve as mentors to other faculty within their academic divisions to expand and accelerate the diffusion of Universal Curriculum Design of SMET courses. The Springfield Technical Community College actively participates in extensive Northeast and national networks of ATE institutions (including both high schools and community colleges) that will permit broad dissemination of the project s results and products doc1563 none This grant supports an initial five-week field trip to the Santa Cruz Islands in the Solomon Islands of the Western Pacific, to investigate the possibilities of conducting more extensive fieldwork on one of the non-Austronesian ( Papuan ) languages spoken there. Three of these languages, which have not yet been described, are of considerable interest. First, they are the easternmost Papuan languages, separated by over 250 miles from the closest Papuan languages, and are at best only remotely related to other languages. Second, while they are generally classified as non-Austronesian, they are also appropriately classified as mixed languages: half of their basic vocabulary and many of the grammatical morphemes are Austronesian. Finally, these languages have a small number of speakers and may be considered endangered. The long-range goal is to conduct fieldwork on these languages doc1564 none Decisions about a contaminated waste site can lead to significant social conflict and can have enduring psychological impacts within nearby communities. The risk situation and its potential to affect the quality of life can evoke hypervigilance, outrage, fear, apathy and a decreased sense of efficacy or control. Productive relationships between communities and regulatory agencies are essential for timely, fair and effective remediation decisions. However, risk management is particularly difficult when the public questions the reliability of risk estimates, remains skeptical about assurances of no association between health and exposures, and asserts that traditional analyses largely overlook concerns of affected populations. Early and meaningful public involvement in risk management is advocated as the best plan for minimizing conflict and improving decisions. But early stages of the process traditionally have been viewed as strictly in the realm of experts, or science-based activities. The integration of scientific principles and public values to profile a community risk situation rarely has been attempted in this country. The feasibility and effects of this strategy on the well-being of communities and the resolution of disputes about risk remain to be demonstrated. This project implements and evaluates an innovative strategy for participatory risk characterization proposed by the National Research Council. The model suggests that scientific analysis, as well as the perspectives and values of affected populations, should be incorporated into the process of profiling and characterizing risks. Within selected lower income and ethnically diverse communities, this longitudinal field experiment examines public responses to risk characterization and communications with officials from an involved federal agency. Several communities in close proximity to a site on the Environmental Protection Agency s National Priority List are matched on specific sociodemographic and other variables, and then randomly selected for participatory risk characterization or standard procedures. Long-term consequences of the new process are measured through telephone surveys and repeated in-person interviews with residents. The project offers an in depth study of change and stability over time in communities risk judgments, coping strategies, framing of the decision problem, emotional responses, interpretation of and memory for risk information, perceived goals of risk management and trust in relevant parties. Archival records of communication between the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) and communities near prioritized sites also are used to document social conflict and public responses in the presence or absence of participatory risk characterization. Implementation of a well-controlled experiment is possible through extensive collaboration with the ATSDR. The ATSDR is the federal agency primarily responsible for communicating with public audiences about the human health risks presented by prioritized toxic waste sites. The study is expected to yield useful information about the feasibility and effects of increased community involvement early in the management process when risks are initially characterized doc1565 none Political philosopher Immanuel Kant asserted that democracies are fundamentally different domestically from non-democracies. Accordingly, democracies behave differently than do other types of states in the international arena. In particular, he argued that democracies are more pacific at the dyadic and systemic level than other governmental forms. This theory is known alternatively as the Pacific Union and the Democratic Peace. This project explores one component of the Kantian theory, that is, the contention that the cultural norms of citizens in democracies are favorable to increased cooperation and harmony among formerly hostile neighboring states. Since the time of Kant s initial formulation of the theory, scholars have written extensively about reasons for the existence of a Democratic Peace. Numerous authors have made four specific arguments about why democracies are more likely to cooperate with other democracies and why they do not go to war with other democracies. These arguments center on democracratic institutions that favor compromise, high levels of trade among democracies, disproportionately high levels of democratic membership in international institutions which lead to a complex interdependence, and domestic cultural norms of trust and tolerance which become internationalized. The first three sets of arguments have been tested carefully and repeatedly in the scholarly literature. However, the assertions about the connection between domestic democratic norms and international behavior have not been demonstrated robustly. This project assesses the link between domestic political cultural values of democracies and international cooperation and peace. Scholars of international relations have relied on proxy measures for domestic norms favorable to democracy and, in turn, they have argued that these same values affect international behaviors. This project directly measures both domestic political cultural values and how those values translate into feelings towards neighboring countries through scientific survey research. The research consists of surveying scientific samples of citizens of two democratizing neighboring countries to assess two groups of ideas: first, the prevalence and depth of values associated typically with democracy and, second, the degree to which democratic political culture translates into an extension of the same values to citizens of a neighboring democracy. The project is conducted in El Salvador and Honduras, two democratizing countries that have a prior history of animosity and distrust of each other. The two cases also are appropriate venues for this project in that I am fluent in Spanish and have extensive experience conducting survey research in El Salvador. If the Kantian argument regarding democratic political culture holds true, then citizens of these two Central American neighbors should express both pro-democratic responses to survey questions regarding their norms and values as well as feelings of trust and cooperation across the border. Their feelings of trust and cooperation should be stronger still regarding more established democracies, but considerably weaker toward non-democratic states. This research fills a gap in the existing literature regarding the relationship between democracy domestically and peace and cooperation internationally. By directly asking citizens about their norms and values through survey research, this projects offers an important test of the extent to which democratization contributes to changes in international attitudes and behaviors doc1566 none In , Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed employment discrimination, but did not outline specific means of compliance. Employers experimented with dozens of different compliance measures. Many were largely symbolic, such as anti-discrimination policies, while others offered procedural guarantees of equal treatment, such as in dealing with sexual harassment and formal promotion. Still others were more substantive in that they involved positive steps to increase diversity, such as special management training for women and minority mentoring programs. Which of these measures have worked? How did the law matter, and through what kinds of changes in employment practices did it have influence? This project builds on institutional theories of organizational action to address these questions. It distinguishes between symbolic, procedural, and substantive anti-discrimination activities, and specifies hypotheses about the relative effectiveness of each strategy. The project tests the hypotheses using employment data from the annual reports that 412 large employers submitted to the government from through . These publicly available reports detail employment by race, ethnicity, and gender in nine occupational categories. It also surveys these companies to chart the history of their personnel practices, and merges the survey data with the annual reports. It then analyzes how particular employment practices of the companies (obtained from the survey data) affect the gender, racial, and ethnic composition of their workforce (obtained from the annual reports). The project represents the first sustained effort to sort out the effects of employment practices on workforce composition, and to measure the effectiveness of activities designed to satisfy anti-discrimination laws in making the workforce more diverse doc1567 none This project will examines how adolescents are prosecuted and sentenced for delinquent acts in criminal courts compared to juvenile courts. In particular, different stages of case processing - pretrial detention, waiver, adjudication, and sentencing - will be compared between three different juvenile courts in New Jersey and three different criminal courts in New York. The project will examine several hypothesized sources of differences between these courts. Namely, whether the organization and structural arrangements of the forums shape the actions of each court. These arrangements include the physical and architectural layout of the court, the goals and normative frameworks adopted by the court actors, the rules of operation and organization of the courts, and the formal organizational structures of legal institutions. The project will also explore the hypothesis that the qualities of the individual cases or defendants will affect the processing and outcome of a case. The project will utilize ethnographic and interview data to test these hypotheses. A comparative study of adolescents processed in juvenile and criminal courts is important because it bears on both sociological and policy questions. It adds to the organizational literature by testing its applicability to the prosecution of adolescents in juvenile and criminal courts doc1568 none The U.S. Bureau of the Census enters into a partnership with a Consortium. The new data center is called The Chicago Research Data Center (Chicago RDC) and would be housed in a secure site at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, in downtown Chicago. The member institutions of the Consortium have pledged space, administrative support, and funding of $1,063,000 for the first three years of the Center conditional on support from the National Science Foundation (NSF). We propose that NSF provide an additional $300,000 over three years to cover the remaining costs of establishing and operating the Center. This award helps cover the costs of establishing and operating The Chicago Research Data Center (Chicago RDC). The Chicago RDC was established through a partnership between the U.S. Bureau of Census and a Consortium consisting of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), the University of Chicago, and Northwestern University to establish a Research Data Center in Chicago. The Chicago RDC is housed in a secure site at the Federal Reserve Bank in downtown Chicago. The member institutions of the Consortium have pledged space, and administrative support and most of the funding necessary to establish and run the center. The extremely large and accomplished research community that is within easy commuting distance of the proposed location ensures the Center s high quality research output and long-term viability. In addition to important substantive results, the projects undertaken by these researchers should make substantial improvements in Census Bureau data programs. Furthermore, the Chicago Fed and other member institutions have a long track record in dealing with confidential data. The Chicago RDC is positioned to attract large numbers of high-quality projects while adhering to the strict standards of confidentiality required of an RDC. These projects include research on energy and the environment; corporate finance; labor markets; crime; health and childcare; and survey methods doc1569 none Western This study examines the impact of incarceration on the family relationships of disadvantaged parents. Although the penal population now totals around 1.9 million inmates and an estimated 1.5 million children have a parent currently in custody, no national survey data are available to study the effects of incarceration on families and children. Under the auspices of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, the investigators will complete a new data collection to examine the effects of incarceration. The Fragile Families survey is a national panel study of new parents that collects rich data on patterns of family formation, child wellbeing, and parental resources. The first follow-up survey - in the field in most sites until summer - includes a criminal justice module that obtains a detailed incarceration history from male and female respondents. Funds will support an update of this information in the third and fourth waves of the survey. In addition, the investigators will administer special modules for employment history, reasoning ability, and impulsivity. These modules are intended to measure stable propensities to criminal behavior that will help control for the nonrandom selection of offenders into the penal system. Data will be analyzed to examine the effects of incarceration on men s employment and earnings, and the direct effect of incarceration on family formation. It is hypothesized that incarceration negatively influences men s employment opportunities making ex-inmates unattractive partners for marriage or cohabitation. Regardless of their economic status, the stigma of incarceration signals unreliability, further diminishing the marriage prospects of men with prison records. While the study focuses on the link between incarceration and family formation, the data will be of broad interest to researchers interested in the economic position of criminal offenders, their mental health, involvement in parenting, propensity to violence or abuse and a wide range of other topics doc1570 none This actions funds a Minority Graduate Student Travel Award for a short visit to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones of the Institute Cajal in Madrid, Spain in November, . The recipient will present a seminar on his studies on brain plasticity and will investigate the possibility of conducting postdoctoral research in this laboratory doc1571 none This research investigates comparative institutions of corporate governance and financial regulation around the world. The organizing theme is the difference in legal traditions among countries, and their implications for the structure of the economy. The research is divided into three broad areas: 1) empirical investigation of investor protection in financial markets, especially in the context of securities laws, 2) theoretical research on the structure of laws and their enforcement, and 3) broader empirical investigation of legal institutions in different countries, particularly as related to their legal traditions. The ultimate goal of this research is to have an integrated view of the differences in legal and regulatory frameworks, and more generally in the relationship between the government and the private sector, among market economies. We would like to understand the systematic and measurable differences in how market economies are organized doc1547 none The globalization of business activity is a central feature of the contemporary world economy; it is a significant force in the production and re-production of national and local economies. Academic inquires concerning the causes and consequences of globalization of business activity have generally focused on meta-narratives of capitalistic mode of production or macro-explanations of global-local relations. Systematic establishment-level studies pertaining to the local business organization and relations of foreign ventures in host economies with respect to their global local constraints and opportunities are lacking. This study aims to examine the ways foreign firms articulate their networks in China and the corresponding impacts on venture performance and local economic development. Based upon a detailed investigation of the local business organization and relations of foreign manufacturing ventures in four cities in the Yangtze Delta region (Shanghai, Suzhou, Nanjing, and Hanzhou), the study also examines the differences in local business organization and relations of ventures with respect to major structural characteristics of the investments and the socioeconomic and institutional environments of the four cities. The study will employ both postal survey and personal interview methods for gathering data, and a range of quantitative and qualitative methods will be used for analysis. The underlying hypotheses are that the marketing material technology networks of the ventures are spatially more dispersed than the production networks, and that their extent of interaction with indigenous enterprises is limited. It is further hypothesized that foreign ventures are active in securing cooperative local relations, and that the existence of harmonious local inter-firm and venture-authority relationships has positive impacts on venture performance and local development. The study will provide a better understanding of how foreign firms articulate their business networks in host economies with respect to their global local constraints and opportunities. It will lead to the development of a more comprehensive and integrated theoretical and empirical framework for the studies of globalization, business organization, economic networks, and global-local relations. At a practical level, the study will provide important empirical information regarding the foreign investment environments in the Yangtze Delta region, which can serve as a basis for foreign firms to establish a set of criteria for successful ventures and business relationships in China doc1573 none This project will study the use and implementation of an environmental management system standard developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Public concern for the environment has spread across the globe, with national policy responses resulting in an increasingly complex web of diverse and often contradictory non-tariff barriers to trade. The growing number of incompatible environmental import restrictions has resulted in decreased efficiency and profit for corporations that export to multiple developed countries. In response, ISO , is an attempt on the part of the International Standards Organization, to create common environmental management systems that will assist firms in their efforts to meet these increasingly stringent environmental laws, while simplifying the process of product export through the evolution of uniform requirements. This study, in particular, will explore several questions: 1) will ISO produce deglobalization and continued wealth inequalities in less developed regions, 2) will the ISO regime be biased in the interest of the wealthier countries and leave less developed countries will fewer benefits from participation, and 3) will implementation be shaped by firms and governments efforts to achieve their goals. In sum, the project will investigate the impact that public policies have on firm s decisions to opt-in to the ISO regime, while shedding light on the impact that ISO will have on international trade and the environment. Data will be gathered from a large-scale mail survey of ISO certified firms in developing countries, along with personal interviews with industry and government officials. This project will provide an understanding of the varying public policy responses to the globalization of environmental management, while also providing policy makers with information about the costs and benefits of various policy options juncture doc1574 none Proposal #: PI: Darryll Pines Institution: University of Maryland : A workshop focused on health monitoring of long span bridges is to be held in conjunction with the joint 8th annual Smart Structures and Materials Conference and the 6th annual Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) for Health Monitoring and Diagnostics Conference. Workshop topics include discussion of large long-span bridge systems including financial, environmental, design, construction, and jurisdiction issues and current operational and maintenance practices. Research and development needs to be discussed include new and emerging technologies in NDE, smart materials and structures, intelligent transportation systems and health monitoring. Focused discussions will be held on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge Technology Demonstration Project. In particular, the workshop will permit formation of a cross-disciplinary expert panel to address critical issues associated with this opportunity for the development, integration and operation of civil infrastructure systems health monitoring in conjunction with this major transportation test-bed doc1575 none The investigators will study the role played by quasi-steady magnetotail reconnection in magnetospheric dynamics. Time-of-flight effects can produce distinctive particle signatures during reconnection, when plasma is introduced onto previously unpopulated field lines. Such indications of reconnection in the magnetotail are seen as velocity dispersed ion structures in data obtained by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program satellites in low Earth orbit. There are three goals to the study. The first goal is to learn what controls quasi-steady reconnection in the magnetotail. The second goal is to examine the magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling associated with velocity dispersed ion structures by characterizing their association with field-aligned currents. The third goal is to ascertain any correlation with bursty bulk flows in the magnetotail. The study will lead to a better understanding of how plasma enters the magnetosphere and how the entry process is manifested in ionospheric signatures doc1576 none This project examines false memory, that is, why one remembers events that have not occurred. In particular, the study will investigate the conditions under which children and adults reject the occurrence of false events due to a strategic use of event memorability. It has previously been suggested that individuals evaluations of event memorability are used heuristically as a basis for decision making about whether events occurred. This heuristic is termed the metacognitive strategy. The objective of the project is to examine the conditions under which children and adults utilize event memorability heuristically, that is use the metacognitive strategy, to reject false events. Specifically, the proposed research attempts to answer the following questions: 1) Do developmental differences exist in the rate of correct rejection of memorable and non-memorable items, and, if so, what are the implications of age differences for understanding metacognitive strategy utilization? 2) How do encoding and retrieval conditions affect rejection of memorable versus non-memorable events? 3) Can the use of the memorability heuristic be detected in the rejection of false autobiographical events? The findings will have theoretical relevance because they will shed light on strategies used to reject false events. This will inform the legal system about conditions under which witnesses are less likely to create false memories, preventing inaccurate testimony and miscarriage of justice doc1577 none Simpson The Earth s interior remains a major scientific frontier holding the key to understanding the origin of the planet, its evolution through geologic time to its present structural state, as well as the internal forces driving plate dynamics, earthquakes, volcanism, and the geomagnetic field. Inaccessible to direct observation below a few kilometers (the limit of drilling and exposure by erosion) the Earth s crust, mantle, and core are primarily studied through their interaction with seismic waves. Recent developments in seismic sensor design, and the acquisition, transmission and storage of data have resulted in dramatic improvements in the resolving power of seismic imaging of the interior. Earthquake research, including rapid and accurate location and characterization of the earthquake source, its magnitude and a better understanding of the physical process involved, has also benefitted greatly from recent technical advances. In parallel with these advances, the science of seismology has also increased its ability to contribute to the monitoring of a ban on underground nuclear testing. The Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) is a consortium of 96 U.S. universities and not-for-profit institutions with research and teaching programs in seismology. IRIS operates a national facility for the development, deployment, and operational support of modern digital seismic instrumentation to serve national goals in basic research in the earth sciences, in earthquake research, and in nuclear test ban monitoring. IRIS is organized in four major program elements: (1) The Global Seismographic Network (GSN) currently consists of a global deployment of 136 permanently installed very-broad-band, wide dynamic range digital seismic stations; (2) The Program for Array Seismic Studies of the Continental Lithosphere (PASSCAL) manages a pool of portable seismometers which are made available to the seismology research community for scheduled regional and local scale studies and rapid response for earthquake aftershock studies; (3) The IRIS Data Management System (DMS) provides the national and international seismic research community with timely access to data from the GSN and PASSCAL. It archives and distributes the data from these programs and facilitates the standardization of data formats and data exchange protocols. The IRIS DMS is also a founding member of the international Federation of Digital Seismographic Networks and is designated as the FDSN s official data repository; and (4) The IRIS Education and Outreach (E&O) Program which enables audiences beyond seismologists to access and use seismological data and research for educational purposes, including teacher workshops, student internships, museum exhibits, educational materials, and programs for under-resourced schools. This award will provide support for the operation of the IRIS facility during the period - doc1578 none A cloud-to-ground lightning flash consists of a leader that progresses in steps from the cloud to the ground followed by three or four successive return strokes. The total time for the process is several tenths of a second. Currents measured in return strokes at the ground rise to a maximum of typically 20 kA in a few microseconds and decline more slowly. These currents are responsible for much of the lightning damage to structures. The rise times and peak currents in lightning strokes as a function of the height above the ground have never been measured directly and are not quantitatively known, though the information is needed for understanding the lightning hazards faced by aircraft and for basic research on the physics of lightning. These properties of lightning return strokes will be inferred from data collected on triggered lightning in Florida in . The data consist of the current and the electric field measured at the ground and stereo photographs of the flashes, from which the three-dimensional geometry of the lightning channels can be reconstructed with high spatial and temporal resolution. The geometry of the lightning path is important in determining the time history of the electric field measured at the ground near the flash. Given the channel configuration and the measured electric field, it is not possible to solve uniquely for the current distribution. Instead, the approach is to assume a current distribution, to use the known path geometry, and to compute the electric field. The results are compared with the observed field and iterated until acceptable agreement is reached. It is anticipated that this will enable the determination of the main features of the return stroke currents, namely the variation with altitude of the peak amplitude, rise time, and propagation velocity. This information is needed for the efficient design of lightning protection for flying aircraft and spacecraft doc1579 none Philosophical analysis of the nature of space traditionally starts by considering mechanics theories of matter in motion in space - and so contrasts space with matter. Opinion then crudely divides into those -substantivalists - who take space to be a distinct substance from matter and those - relationists - who deny that space has any existence separate from matter. Historically, the dialectic between these two positions has been a fruitful source of innovation in physics; conversely, arguably all the most important thought in the field has paid careful attention to the role played by space in mechanical theories. Contemporary historiography in philosophy of physics holds that central to such thought is the analysis of absolute quantities and structures: e.g., Aristotle s theory held a crucial role for absolute place (namely the center of the universe) and Newtonian mechanics requires an absolute standard of constant motion. Further, many contemporary philosophers hold that theories which demand such absolute structures commit one to substantivalism. While agreeing with the importance of absolute structures, Dr. Huggett has argued that such an inference to substantivalism is unjustified in Newtonian mechanics - where it is most explicitly articulated - and in mirror symmetry violating quantum theories. He has also written on the nature of absolute structures in Aristotelian physics. This project extends his work to two areas under-investigated in this way. First, Kant argued that the distinction between left and right required absolute space; a modernized argument claims that the topological properties of space are absolute, and exceed the reach of relationism. This project will construct and investigate concrete relationist theories of topology, and consider whether they meet Kant s challenge. Second, contemporary theories of quantum gravity will be studied in the same framework. What absolute structures - if any - do string theory and canonical quantization require, and how do they bear on the substantival-relational issue? The Dr. Huggett proposes to study further theories of topology and quantum gravity and to investigate the role and meaning of the absolute structures they entail. He intends to write a chapter (or paper) on each for a book on the topic currently in progress - his prior work on Newtonian mechanics, mirror symmetry breaking and Aristotle constitute the remainder of this work. The research leave brings the project close to conclusion. The primary goal of the project is to increase understanding in the philosophical and historical community of the nature of space according to physical theories, ancient and modern. More generally, as that understanding is disseminated by the community, the work increases appreciation for the world discovered by physics, ancient and modern, and the role of philosophical considerations in science doc1580 none This research investigates the macroeconomic and welfare implications of social security reform in models with aggregate shocks. It is motivated by the observation that the great depression in the U.S. led to an introduction of an unfunded social security system, yet the role of an unfunded social security system for the allocation of intergenerational aggregate risk are not well understood theoretically or quantitatively. A primary goal of this research is to quantitatively evaluate the aggregate economic and welfare effects of a social security reform from a pay-as-you-go to a fully funded system within an overlapping generations model with stochastic production, idiosyncratic uncertainty, and a large number of generations. Given the current debates about reform of the social security system, another goal of this research is to inform policy makers about the trade-offs involved in moving from an unfunded to a funded system of social security in the presence of aggregate economic fluctuations doc1581 none Ichiki This dissertation enhancement award supports Ms. Noel Day, a graduate student with Dr. Albert Ichiki of the University of Tennessee Medical Center, to conduct research with Dr. Kazunori Yokoyama of the DNA Bank of the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) in Tsukuba, Japan. The joint study will investigate gene regulation in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). The importance of MHC molecules to the immune response has made them a leading topic in the field of immunology research, and the role of transcription factors, such as the class II transactivator (CIITA), in the induction of the immune response has become a central focus. The objectives of this project are to use an MHC class II deficient cell line to demonstrate the requirement of the CIITA for class II expression, and to characterize the important binding domains and enzymatic activities associated with other transcription factors. This project offers the potential for broad application of the results in the fields of immunology and medicine. The U.S. graduate student will have access to expertise and facilities at RIKEN s DNA Bank that will greatly facilitate the research doc1582 none This research is to study and model the variability of F region plasma and neutral atmospheric transport processes from equatorial to upper mid-latitudes using incoherent scatter radar and nighttime Fabry-Perot interferometer measurements from Peru, Arecibo and Millstone Hill. The PI s earlier experimental ionospheric disturbance electric field studies will be complemented by numerical simulations using the recently upgraded Rice Convection Model. The basic objective is the understanding and self-consistent empirical modeling of the short-term and spatial variability and effects of ionospheric electric fields and neutral winds, as well as the testing of global convection and circulation models. Large new databases of incoherent scatter radar drift measurements will be used to model the variability of mid- and low-latitude ionospheric disturbance plasma drifts, and their time constants, as a function of magnetospheric and high latitude ionospheric parameters. A storm-time dependent model of the nighttime thermospheric neutral winds to high latitude forcing using very extensive Fabry-Perot data from Arequipa, Arecibo, and Millstone Hill will be developed. These global plasma drift and neutral wind studies will also examine the effects of long and short duration high latitude forcing, UT and very large storm effects, and also storm time dependent coupling of disturbance winds and plasma drifts. The equatorial studies will include the variability of the quiet time daytime plasma drifts using JULIA data, and the study and empirical modeling of nighttime F-region neutral temperatures doc1583 none The Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) survey, ( to present) is the only long- term and ocean basin wide operational survey of plankton in the world. There has been an increasing recognition of the value of this multi-decadal time series as a barometer against which to assess environmental change. There is a growing awareness that the quality of marine ecosystems is subject to a wide range of anthropogenic impacts from pollution stress, eutrophication, and loss of biodiversity, to over exploitation of fishing resources. Evaluating and quantifying the scale and effects of such issues is becoming increasingly important as an ecosystem approach is applied to environmental management. Superimposed on the above issues are the potential effects of climate change on oceanic ecosystems that appear to be linked to increases in anthropogenic greenhouse gases and global temperature. Operated by the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science (SAHFOS) in the North Atlantic, this survey is supported by an international consortium of funding. . The USA as a member of this consortium has played a key role in helping to underpin the survey since SAHFOS was established in . As a long term program, the main objective is to maintain the spatial and temporal integrity of the survey and to continue to add further years to the time series. The Survey already comprises close to 200,000 samples analyzed into ~400 different taxa of zoo- and phytoplankton. This resource provides opportunities for study of pelagic ecosystems at a wide range of temporal and spatial scales. As the survey expands into other regional seas and oceans comparative ecological studies between different Large Marine Ecosystems will be possible. High potential exists for calibration with multispectral satellite products. The results have already demonstrated highly significant relationships with hydroclimatic variability represented by the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and hold considerable promise as input to a new generation of ecosystem based fishery models. Other objectives include: the development of an improved understanding of mechanisms behind observed decadal and shorter period spatial and temporal variability and the interpretation of hydrobiological variability and biodiversity within the context of global and climate change in marine ecosystems. Central to the aims of SAHFOS is the promotion of the CPR approach within international programs such as GOOS, GLOBEC and LMEs doc1584 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Brian Byrd and his colleagues will conduct two seasons of archaeological and paleonenvironmental research in the San Elijo Reserve County Park situated 20 miles north of San Diego in one of the regions largest and best preserved coastal wetlands. The rich natural resources include tidal channels and mud flats, six plant communities and a wide range of vertebrates, invertebrates and bird species. A pilot program of sediment coring which permits reconstruction of past environments indicates estuary deposits dating back to almost years ago. Archeological research has revealed a rich archaeological heritage in this region and although many sites which lie outside the san Elijo Reserve have been destroyed by urban development, sixteen prehistoric shell midden sites recorded within the park document occupation in almost every millennium from almost 8,000 to 900 years ago. The goal of Dr. Byrd s research is to build up a comprehensive picture of environmental change within this wetland over an eight millennium period, and plot against this changing human settlement patterns and subsistence strategies over time. During the first year of the project independent environmental data will be collected and test excavations will be conducted at 12 shell midden sites to refine occupation time ranges and determine which sites can provide the richest sources of subsistence data. In a second phase, large-scale excavation will be conducted at appropriate sites. Special emphasis will be placed on the collection of large representative samples of animal, plant and shell remains to reconstruct foraging patterns. Preliminary data indicates that over time resource rich estuaries gradually became silted up and impoverished as sea level rose. Formerly aggregated human populations remained in the region but spread more thinly over the landscape to make use of foods more costly in effort and more difficult to procure. Against this background the research team will flesh out the tentative archaeological record and use the data collected to test a variety of theories derived from optimum foraging theory. From this theoretical base a number of predictions can be made and these center on the most energy efficient approaches to resource utilization. They suggest how, in the face of decreasing resources, people can most effectively move between and utilize food patches and how the breadth of their diet may change. In recent years archaeologists have come to realize that resource rich coastal regions provided an important niche for hunting and gathering peoples and that in such areas in many parts of the world, relatively sedentary societies emerged. This research will shed new light on how such coastal dwellers responded to often rapid and extreme environmental change and the basic strategies they employed. The project will be conducted in the context of a summer field school which includes 14 to 16 students and thus will also serve a valuable educational function doc1585 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Lynne Goldstein and her students will continue their archaeological research at the site of Aztalan. Situated on the Crawfish River between Madison and Milwaukee Wisconsin, this large and unusual site covers approximately 21 acres. It was surrounded by a stockade or palisade with individual posts set into the ground and covered with clay plaster. Bastions or watchtowers were constructed at regular intervals and in addition to this outer wall, several inner palisade walls have also been identified. Excellent preservation of houses within the site has permitted identification of individual activity areas. Dating from the late prehistoric period, ca. 800- AD Aztalan is unusual because it is associated with the Middle Mississipean culture which has its geographical focus in the southern Mississippi Valley. No other occurrences are known this far North and the site is an anomalous outlying frontier community. Dr. Goldstein wishes to understand the range of variability within the Middle Mississipean, how Aztalan was organized and how it interacted with other local communities. While clearly Middle Mississippean, preliminary data demonstrate that Aztalan s spatial organization differs significantly from its Southern counterparts. To address these questions three approaches will be employed. First, selective test excavations in four areas of the site will provide additional information on site structure. Secondly, abundant botanical and faunal remains will be analyzed. A pilot study demonstrates that such data will provide important information on the nature of food production and plant an animal use for ritual purposes. Finally a geographic information system will be expanded to include basic site data such as topography and modern features as well an information on individual features and houses excavated by Dr. Goldstein as well as past researchers. This research will provide data of interest to many archaeologists. It will shed light on an important and poorly understood aspect of U.S. prehistory and increase scientific understanding of chiefdom organization. It will also assist in training both undergraduate and graduate students doc1586 none Omland Migratory behavior is one of the more fascinating aspects of the biology of birds, but little is known with certainty about the evolution of migration in genera and families of birds with contrasting migratory and non-migratory species. Dr. Kevin Omland is studying this problem in the oriole genus Icterus, focusing on three pairs of closely related species, each with a migratory and non-migratory representative. Molecular DNA data are to be collected from numerous individuals sampled from populations in the U.S. and Mexico; field work in Mexico has already been completed with assistance from ornithologists at the National University of Mexico City. The data will be used to construct fine-scale genealogies of the species pairs, in comparison with all other species in the genus (ca. 25 species total) in turn to test whether the direction of evolution has been from ancestral migratory behavior to non-migratory, or the reverse. In addition, the geographic spread of sampling will allow some preliminary prediction of the likely geographic course of evolution in these three species pairs, which range from tropical to temperate zones across Central and North America. Longer term, the research will help to assess how malleable or adaptable is migratory behavior in birds, in response to ecological conditions, or how constrained it may be by genetic heritage doc1587 none This award supports a three-year Cooperative Agreement between the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium (BASC) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) that allows BASC to provide a variety of support services to the NSF s Office of Polar Programs. These are: 1. Provide logistical support and coordination to NSF funded science projects working in the Barrow area. 2. Management of the Barrow Environmental Observatory, a 7,644 acre section of land just to the north-east of Barrow reserved for scientific studies. BASC will also continue to recapture unpublished data associated with BEO and other North Slope and northern research. 3. Outreach and Education - providing strong links between the science community and the local community of the North Slope. 4. Work towards implementation of the recommendations of the report The Future of an Arctic Resource: Recommendations from the Barrow Area Research Support Workshop (ARCUS ) to the degree that NSF accepts them. 5. developing a mechanism to provide improved logistical and permitting support for U.S. scientists working in Chukotka (Russia). The agreement expires on 29 August, doc1588 none This project examines the cause of political and electoral violence in Mexico s democratization and the efficacy of the emergent strategies of legal control designed to diminish it. Over 600 opposition political party members have fallen as victims of political-electoral homicide between and . Many of these homicides occurred while an individual was engaged in legal activities, such as organizing political meetings, attending a post-election fraud protest, and conducting a get out the vote campaign. The project will test three hypotheses explaining the use of violence: 1) the peasant-landlord conflict thesis posits that violence against peasants is a manifestation of underlying agrarian struggles over land and wages; 2) the violence as a political strategy thesis asserts that political-electoral homicide is a response of the authorities to the violent tactics of a political party; and 3) the lack of juridical uncertainty thesis maintains that political-electoral homicide is the result of insufficient legal clarity surrounding election outcomes. The study will examine both qualitative data (biographical accounts of approximately 650 homicide victims) and quantitative data (survey data on the attitudes about political violence of 1,000 party members as well as prosecution rates for electoral crimes). The project s contributions include assessing the effectiveness of control over electoral crimes and linking violence with the study of the evolution of the rule of law and democratization doc1589 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Lisa Lucero will conduct one season of archaeological excavation at the site of Saturday Creek, located in the Belize lowlands. Because riverine areas were the loci of earliest Mayan settlement they often contain long occupational records and thus offer excellent venues to examine directional change over time. Based on prior work, Dr. Lucero has uncovered an approximately 1,700 year sequence from ca. 800 BC to 890 AD at Saturday Creek. The goal of her work is to understand how centralized political authority developed, as Mayan culture moved from egalitarian to stratified and increasingly large numbers of individuals were integrated into regional units. It is unclear how ruling elite gained and were able to maintain power. Both archaeological and ethnographic data indicate that ritual and ceremonial activities played an important role in Mayan society and Dr. Lucero will focus on this. Ceremonies serve to unify people, can legitimize political agendas and increase the prestige of sponsors. Based on preliminary data it is hypothesized that rituals involving death, dedication and ancestor veneration originated at a family level and were later appropriated and transformed by emerging elites to serve broader integrative functions. Eventually, she believes they became closely associated with royal families and served, in community eyes, to link them with the divine. The Mayan archaeological record is rich in materials such as ritual caches of ceramics and other objects which served ceremonial functions and these have been discovered in a wide variety of contexts. At the Saturday Creek site Dr. Lucero will excavate a series of structures including solitary structures, an elite compound and a palace which span a range of social statuses and time. She will determine whether the earliest ritual remains occurred in family associations and later expanded beyond this immediate context. Through analysis of cache contents she will also gain insight into how rituals changed over time. This research is important for several reasons. It will provide data of interest to many archaeologists and shed new light on the forces which served to integrate early large scale societies. Approximately 10 -12 students will participate in the field research and thus the project will also serve an important educational function doc1590 none Ostrom This dissertation enhancement grant supports a US graduate student, Ms. Esther Mwangi, working under the guidance of Professor Elinor Ostrom, of the Department of Political Science at Indiana University at Bloomington, to conduct a study of the underlying forces in the movement to privatize commonly held land in areas inhabited by Maasai pastoralists in Kenya. The transformation of land property rights from communal rights, which are often based on indigenous systems, to more formal and legally enforced individual rights is occurring throughout much of Subsaharan Africa. Privatization enables modern methods of land management to be applied with the expectations that: 1) land productivity will increase; and 2) environmental degradation that resulted from the communal systems will be controlled or reduced. But assigning rights to a single holder disenfranchises many individuals who formerly had customary rights to the resources in that area. Furthermore, it can result in a highly politicized system for determining land access. Maasailand is a climatically diverse and often harsh environment, and the Maasai had traditionally relied on herd mobility to maximize the variability of the food and water resources for their livestock. But starting with the land privatization movement in Maasailand in the s, many Maasai banded together to form group ranches, and many of these ranches are now being separated into individually owned units. The fragmentation of their range should increase the Maasai s vulnerability to environmental variability, so why are they choosing a land management system that is inconsistent with their survival strategies and cultural traditions? Mwangi will conduct studies to determine: 1) Why property rights in Maasailand are changing from group-owned parcels to individual units; 2) What the environmental consequences of this transition are; and 3) Whether this transition represents an appropriate model for the environmental and socio-cultural conditions of the Maasai. She will analyze how the incentives of particular actors (such as group ranch members, individual ranch owners, and policy makers) are oriented towards a particular property rights system, and the institutional mechanisms they use to make their preferences a reality. To accomplish this, she will conduct interviews with a variety of individuals, and carry out archival research at the Kenya National Archives and Kajidao District Archives. The environmental health of a land area may be another important consideration in the transformation of property rights. Mwangi also hypothesizes that the greatest amount of range degradation will occur in the individual units due to their higher concentrations of livestock. To test this hypothesis, she will conduct vegetation analyses and collect data on rainfall patterns in order to develop an environmental assessment of range conditions and health between group-held and individually-owned parcels of land. Project results should help establish a theory of property rights transitions for Maasailand which takes into account the mix of political, socio-economic, and environmental conditions under which transition occurs. Dr. Patricia Kameri-Mbote and others at the African Center for Technology Studies will provide guidance to Ms. Mwangi on this project. The results should advance the theory of common property rights, contribute valuable information about land management policy, and also increase the current knowledge about the political economy of pastoral Africa. This grant will also support an international research experience very early in the career of an outstanding graduate student. This project is being jointly funded by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Social and Economic Sciences doc1591 none Students of democratic institutions have long worried about the reach of private power into public affairs. Private inequalities inevitably get captured in the practice of interest group politics, giving rise to what Grant McConnell once called the most serious and perplexing problems of American democracy. In political discourse today, assertions about the corrupting influence of special interests are commonplace. Social scientific studies of interest group influence, however, are noteworthy for the non-cumulative, frequently inconsistent nature of their findings. What effect does lobbying have on the behavior of legislators? And to what extent does it magnify or otherwise contaminate the practice of representation. One of the means by which interest groups achieve influence is by lobbying elected officials. A second is donating to candidates campaigns. A third is mobilizing constituents at the grass roots. This study examines the effects of all three on the behavior of legislators, but the cornerstone of the project is a new theory of lobbying. The large literature on lobbying characterizes it as a strategy intended to change legislators preferences, but this approach is undermined by several empirical puzzles. The principal investigator models lobbying as a form of legislative subsidy - a grant of staff time, policy expertise, political intelligence, and other legislative assets - selectively given to congressional allies so that they can more effectively pursue policy objectives that they share with the group. PAC contributions and grass-roots campaigns are recast in light of this theory. The model is simple in form, realistic in its assumptions, and counterintuitive in its implications. One of the main implications is that lobbyists should lobby those who already agree with them. A second is that they should lobby most those allies who are least likely to change their mind. The model also helps to clarify the conditions under which preference-centered lobbying should work. The PI investigates the theory empirically, testing its main hypotheses and alternative hypotheses using data from the U.S. Congress. The main dependent variables are legislators activity levels on specific bills and their interventions in specific agency decisions, which are modeled as a function of legislator expertise and capacity, constituency interests, and the interaction of group lobbying and member-group agreement. The nature of these data suggest that the models be estimated using zero-inflated poisson regression. Legislators voting decisions, groups lobbying choices, and group PAC contributions are analyzed using conventional maximum likelihood estimators for limited dependent variables. The data on lobbying and grass-roots campaign activity come from responses to a structured survey instrument, administered in face-to-face interviews with group lobbyists. Other data come from government documents, FEC databases, district-level census data, and various online sources. The study promises to improve our understanding of lobbying and the factors that affect its behavioral impact, such as PAC contributions and grass-roots mobilization campaigns. But it also will have practical implications for the design of lobbying reforms and the development of standards of legislative ethics. Subsidizing already committed legislators is, in effect, helping them to do their job, which looks very different than buying off uncommitted ones. Accepting lobbyists help thus poses no ethical dilemma for the representative. However, the inequality among groups in lobbying resources will nonetheless distort representation in favor of moneyed interests. Indeed, this may contribute more to the legislative advantages of such groups than their contributions to congressional campaigns doc1592 none Donnellan This award, provided by the Office of Polar Programs of the National Science Foundation, provides support for a special conference, sponsored jointly with NASA, on building and deploying autonomous systems in extreme environments. Autonomous Systems are defined as permanent geophysical or astrophysical installations that are self-sustaining over periods of months and years. They acquire data on a regular time interval or upon a triggering event and either store that data or transmit it to a data center. Many investigators conduct research in polar, sea floor, or other extreme environments that require autonomous systems. Because of the burgeoning scientific potential for such systems, the present is a good time to bring the community together during a workshop in order to discuss the special challenges associated with developing these systems for extreme environments so that past mistakes can be minimized and past successes can be built upon toward better scientific output. The conference venue was the Von Karman Auditorium at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and the conference was held in September, . The goals of the workshop were to promote dialogue on autonomous system design, make recommendations on power, thermal, data, communications, and packaging systems, and to decide on standardization for future systems. The workshop also included discussion of, and recommendations for, testing criteria that should be met before systems could deployed in extreme environments. These funds are to prepare, publish, and disseminate the results of the workshop doc1593 none The advent and spread of managed care, beginning in the s, has significantly increased product market competition in the health care industry. At the same time, the gains in relative earnings of female physicians over the last two decades have been remarkable. How might these two trends be related? Economic theory predicts that increased competition in the product market makes it more costly for consumers, colleagues, and employers to discriminate. Increased competition in the market for medical services, associated with the advent and spread of managed care, would be expected to lead to improvements in the relative earnings of discriminated groups such as women. This dissertation research examines this theory by comparing the change in earnings of women physicians to that of male physicians in states with high managed care growth to that in states with low managed care growth. Preliminary findings indicate that women physicians in states with high managed care growth narrowed the gender gap in hourly earnings by ten percentage points between and relative to women physicians in low managed care growth states. This nearly eliminates the gender gap in hourly earnings and reduces the gap in annual earnings by about a third. The preliminary findings yield only a snapshot of how changes in the market for medical services affect the gender gap among physicians. To sufficiently explore this topic in detail, this project utilizes data on a large sample: proprietary data collected by the American Medical Association on an annual basis since . The AMA data allows one to track the supply and geographic distribution of the physician population, follow general trends that physicians face in the market for medical services, and note important changes in resource utilization and practice arrangements. In short, the AMA data will allow the principal investigator to build on the preliminary results already generated using less suitable sources of data doc1594 none Bradley This dissertation enhancement award supports a U.S. graduate student, Pratigya J. Polissar, working under the guidance of Raymond S. Bradley, Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts, who will spend six months in the laboratory of Aldo Shemesh at The Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. The research will focus on the technique for measuring the oxygen isotope composition of diatom silica and applying it to Holocene lake sediments from Venezuela. The analysis of isotopes in diatom silica is difficult and Dr. Shemesh s lab is one of the best sites in the world for these measurements. Understanding the natural variability of the climate system is essential for prediction and interpretation of current and future climate change. In tropical regions, the balance between precipitation and evaporation is a key climatic parameter and analysis of the oxygen isotopic composition of diatoms preserved in lake sediments is a relatively new and exciting method for reconstructing it. This research will make an important contribution to our understanding of climate by providing a detailed paleoclimate record of changes in tropical South America during the last 10,000 years doc1595 none This award provides funding to Michigan State University, Percy A. Pierre, Principal Investigator, for the support of a project entitled, Planning a Program to Enhance the Infrastructure of NSF s ERC s to Graduate More U.S. Students--Especially Women and Minorities. This planning grant will provide support to Dr. Pierre for the planning of a program to strengthen the engineering workforce for research and development by strengthening the infrastructure of the NSF ERC s to significantly increase the number of domestic engineering graduates--especially women and under-represented minorities doc1596 none LIfschitz Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Professor Vladimir Lifschitz, Department of Computer Science, the University of Texas, Austin, Texas, Drs. Ferda Nur Alpaslan and Ismail Hakki Totoslu, Computer Engineering Department, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, and Dr. Varol Akman, Department of Computer Engineering, Bilkent University, Ankara Turkey. These scientists plan to study the application of artificial intelligence to workflow management. Action languages are formal models of parts of natural language that are used for talking about the effects of actions. The Causal Calculator is a software system that allows the user to automate planning and reasoning about actions in domains described in an expressive action language called C. The scientists plan to develop a translation tool that will translate from a workflow specification language into Action Language, C. This will allow permit the automation of the process of workflow management. They will also design a tool for the graphical representation of C programs that will help the users to visualize the entire workflow. Scope: In this project the collaborators plan to combine their expertise in an important area of scientific research. The expertise of the US scientist and his team has been in the design, implementation and use of the Causal Calculator. The Turkish researchers have been working on workflow management and its relation to action languages. Two US graduate students from Dr. Lifschitz department will participate in the project and will work in Turkey with their foreign counterparts, thus gaining an international research experience early in their careers. The project meets INT criteria for support of cooperative projects that are mutually beneficial, and which help give international experiences to young scientists and graduate students doc1597 none Widner This dissertation enhancement grant supports a US graduate student, Mr. David Backer, working under the guidance of Professor Jennifer Widner, of the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan, to conduct a case study to assess how and under what conditions the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has influenced support for South Africa s transition to a democracy. Truth and reconciliation commissions are commonly being used by countries undergoing a democratic transition. Do these commissions have any direct and substantial effects, either positive or negative, on individuals loyalty to the institutions and practices of a new democracy? Currently many scholars and practitioners are in disagreement about the effectiveness of these commissions. Backer will conduct a case study of South Africa s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to determine whether or not the opportunities for participation and engagement in its processes generated support for the newly emerging democratic institutions in South Africa. The TRC stressed neutrality (exemplified by the equal status accorded to abuses by the apartheid regime and the opposition), openness, and transparency, and its proceedings were made public through media offerings and official reports. Thus a large segment of South African adults either participated in or knew about the TRC process. Through ethnographic research, a community study, focus groups, testimony evaluation, and surveys, Backer will evaluate two models of political support, one that focuses on public perceptions of the legitimacy of the TRC process, and the second which embeds the first model within the broader context of a commitment to South Africa s emerging democracy. Each of these has models four explanatory variables: 1) mitigating factors, such as awareness, participation, and projected images about political relations and procedures; 2) the level of policy satisfaction; 3) alternative explanations; and 4) control variables, such as age and gender. Subjects will have been participants in the TRC process, followed media reports of the proceedings, and or read the official documents released by the TRC. The results should provide important knowledge on how successful these commissions are likely to be in performing their assigned functions. Dr. Hugo van der Merwe and others at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (affiliated with the University of Witwatersrand) will provide guidance on this project to Mr. Backer. The results are expected to provide valuable information for the study of democratization and transitional justice. Researchers and government officials will also gain important knowledge about the impact that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has had on South Africa s democratic transition. The project will also support an international research experience very early in the career of an outstanding graduate student. This grant is being jointly funded by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Social and Economic Sciences doc1598 none This SGER grant will permit exploratory investigations into the roots of crosslinguistic similarities and divergences in the linguistic encoding of events. This project takes as its starting point the hypothesis that chains of happenings in the real world are construed by all languages as events in the same way(s). If so, crosslinguistic differences in the ways that events are expressed are superficial : they should be traceable to differences in the morphosyntactic and lexical resources available to languages to encode particular event representations. That is, in general crosslinguistic differences should not arise due to differences in how languages construe the underlying happenings in the world as events, as has sometimes been proposed. However, if a language lacks the morphosyntactic device needed to permit a particular event representation to surface, it might avail itself of a different construal, if one is available, to express the same happening. The full-scale exploration of these ideas comprises a two-part research program. First, it requires determining which kinds of chains of happenings in the world may be construed as events and determining the appropriate linguistic representation of these events; this topic is the purview of a theory of event structure. Second, it requires uncovering the range of morphosyntactic and lexical resources used to encode events crosslinguistically and then correlating them with the typological traits of the languages manifesting them. These correlations are essential to the identification of the interactions between the type of event being encoded, the typological traits of the language it is being encoded in, and the morphosyntactic devices the language makes available for encoding the components of such an event. Together these determine how particular event structures are expressed or, possibly, prevented from surfacing in a given language. The formulation of a comprehensive crosslinguistically viable theory of event encoding, then, can build on previous work in lexical semantics and morphosyntactic typology. In so doing, this research program will bring together two lines of largely independent research. The morphosyntactic basis of event encoding constitutes a large but underexplored area. A two-pronged approach will be pursued in this exploratory project. First, a small workshop will be held to explore foundational issues and discuss effective paths for further research. Second, we plan to extend an earlier pilot case study of directed motion events in order to more accurately delineate the morphosyntactic and lexical factors that affect event encoding. As part of this study, a database of properties will be designed that can be used in hypothesis exploration and can serve as a model for future research. The larger research program set out here should lead to the deepening of existing typological generalizations and the discovery of new ones. It will allow a more refined understanding of the representation of events and the semantic determinants of grammatical structure. By clarifying and systematizing similarities and differences between languages, the research results should have practical applications to second language pedagogy and machine translation, both of which rely on the best available theoretical work on the relationships between languages doc1599 none Bagherzadeh Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Professor Nader Bagherzadeh, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the University of California, Irvine, California and Dr. Hesham Eldeeb, Computer and Systems Department, Electronics Research Institute, Cairo, Egypt. In applications requiring high computing power, one approach is to put together many processors in the same computer. The utilization of all the available computational power involves a tremendous programming effort, which creates a need for compiler and run-time support. Software developers face the challenge of how to exploit application parallelism without rewriting and redesigning current sequential programs and algorithms from scratch. One approach is to isolate programmers from parallelism by adopting optimizing compilers for parallelism detection, named as implicit parallelism. This frees programmers from the details of controlling concurrency, thus concentrate on the application. The work of the two scientists is aimed at fully automating the parallelization process of computer program applications to transform the sequential source code into parallel source code. They will introduce an Automatic Parallel Detection Layer (APDL) which accepts as input a sequential source code C program and produces as output an equivalent source case program in parallel form which is then executed on a distributed memory multicomputer machine. Scope: This collaborative project brings Dr. Eldeeb s experience in high performance computing, parallel virtual machines, parallel logic programming and virtual reality to work in the PI s laboratory at UC, Irvine. Dr. Bagherzadeh s research interest is in the area of high performance computing, superscalar design, multithreading and virtual reality. His expertise also includes star-connected cycles interconnection networks and real-time computer processing. His theoretical and computational background will significantly help in the successful completion of this research. He will be responsible for providing the expertise to formulate the structure of the automatic layer, and will provide the applied cases for the project according to certain required applications in his research laboratory. The project meets INT criteria for support of cooperative projects that are mutually beneficial. Funding for this project is provided by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Computer-Communications Research doc1600 none This grant supports the deployment of a fast-response, airborne instrument for measuring the concentration of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) during the DYCOMS-II project in July (Dynamics and Chemistry of Marine Stratocumulus). DMS is an atmospheric trace gas which is an effective indicator of mixing between the marine boundary layer and the free atmosphere. Its main source is the ocean surface and its lifetime in the atmosphere is about one day. It therefore has relatively high concentration in the boundary layer and low concentration in the free atmosphere. Fluctuations in the concentration at the top of the boundary are an indication of the strength of mixing and the rate of mass transfer between the boundary layer and the air above. The instrument is a fast-response ionization mass spectrometer capable of yielding data with a time resolution of 50 ms. In combination with other aircraft instruments that measure temperature, vertical air velocity, humidity, cloud droplet concentration and sizes, and aerosol sizes and composition, it will provide information on entrainment processes at cloud top. The data will be used in the testing and evaluation of large eddy simulations of mixing in marine stratocumulus clouds doc1601 none Antifreeze Proteins (AFPs), which lower the freezing point of water by an unusual non-colligative mechanism, have been identified in marine fish, insects and other terrestrial arthropods, plants, fungi and bacteria. There is tremendous variation in the structures of AFPs both between and within these groups of organisms. The most active known AFPs are found in insects, where they typically assist freeze-susceptible insects to avoid freezing by inhibiting inoculative freezing initiated by external ice across the cuticle, and by promoting supercooling by inhibiting potential internal ice nucleators. A few AFP-producing insects are freeze-tolerant, able to survive freezing, and in these the AFPs apparently function as a cryoprotectant to protect from freeze damage, however the mechanism is unknown. Two types of insect AFPs have been characterized. One is found in the beetles Dendroides and Tenebrio. The other is from the spruce budworm caterpillar. Interestingly, although AFPs have been found in many insects, they have not previously been described in Alaskan or Arctic insects until recently when AFPs were found in 7 of 12 insects screened from near Fairbanks, Alaska. This presents an opportunity to study AFPs in insects that are exposed to extremely cold winter temperatures. There are four aspects to the proposed study. One of these will concentrate on the role of AFPs in the cold tolerance of overwintering larvae of the beetle Cucujus clavipes. Previous studies on populations of this species from Indiana showed the presence of AFPs in these larvae which have a lower lethal temperature of -20 to -25 C. In the late s this species from near Fairbanks, Alaska was shown to have a lower lethal temperature of -55 C or less . Both the Indiana and Alaskan populations produce the Dendroides Tenebrio-type AFPs. In this study, comparisons of the role of AFPs in populations from Indiana and Alaska (from near Fairbanks, just south of the Arctic Circle, and from near Wiseman, above the Arctic Circle and near the limit of treeline). Thus, one can study this species over a tremendous latitudinal range, from a temperate climate to the interior of Alaska, one of the coldest climates in North America. A second component of the study aims to purify and characterize a new type of AFP. The stinkbug Elasmostethus interstinctus is an AFP-producing insect common in interior Alaska. Molecular probes have demonstrated that the bug s AFP is different from either the Dendroides Tenebrio-type or the spruce budworm-type AEPs. The abundance, ease of collection, large size and exposure to very cold temperatures in this insect make it an excellent system in which to identify a new insect AFP. The third aspect of this study is to screen the hemolymph of insects for thermal hysteresis activity characteristic of AFPs. This will identify which species have AFPs. Insects will be collected from two sites in the taiga of interior Alaska, near Fairbanks and near Wiseman, and especially from a true tundra site in the vicinity of the Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Toolik Field Station. These sites provide a wide diversity of insects. AFPs have not been previously investigated in insects from these regions, and no aspect of the cold tolerance of insects from Toolik has previously been studied. This screen should identify new species of AFP-producing insects from very cold environments, some of which may provide excellent model systems for future study. In addition, microhabitat temperatures and overwintering survival of selected insect species will be determined. These are important to collaborate laboratory determinations of various physiological parameters. Thus this study will integrate classical physiological ecology with biochemistry and molecular studies of antifreeze proteins in insects from these severe arctic and subarctic environments. Since their initial discovery in Antarctic fish the study of AFPs in both animals and plants has burgeoned, and today scores of laboratories study these proteins. In particular insect AFPs have tremendous potential for both basic and applied work since they are the most active AFPs known. Numerous possible uses of AFPs exist, especially in cryopreservation of biomedical materials, food preservation and agriculture. Therefore, the study of AFPs from such highly cold adapted insects may yield information of great value doc1602 none This study will document the development and impact of an after-school program for elementary students in school district in California. This after-school program will also serve as a pedagogical laboratory and professional development site for new teachers. The specific goals of the study are two-fold: 1) to document and examine the processes of learning among children who are enrolled in the after-school pedagogical laboratory and 2)to document and analyze the process of teachers learning to teach in the pedagogical laboratory. Consequently, this study will directly and simultaneously address the underachievement of African American students and other students of color and the preparation of their teachers doc1603 none John Logan Elena Vesselinova SUNY Albany This Doctoral Dissertation Improvement project examines spatial segregation in a post-socialist city. The study will take place in Sofia, Bulgaria, which provides the opportunity to examine the issue within the contemporary process of transition towards a market economy and its related increasing social differentiation. The investigators prior research shows that Sofia resembles other former socialist capital cities in that there is a widening gap in urban inequality. The PIs hypothesize that the economic and political changes that have occurred since , together with the regional processes in Europe, are shaping an urban environment of sharper social polarization. This research will contribute to the literature on post-socialist cities in transition and allow us to better understand (1) how people make decisions about housing in a capitalist system as opposed to a communist one; and (2) how residential and mobility patterns correspond to household family structure, employment structure, education, ethnic background and income in a post-socialist system doc1604 none Valladares Description: This award supports the International Workshop on Space Weather Effects on Communications and Navigation Signals, Boston, Massachusetts, June 7-8, . The principal organizer is Professor Cesar Valladares of Boston College. The two-day workshop, which immediately follows the International Beacon Satellite Symposium of the International Union of Radio Scientists (URSI), will promote discussion among researchers from the United States, Canada, Europe, South America, China, Taiwan, India, and Africa. The prime topic for discussion is the ionospheric effects on space-based communication and navigation systems. Following the plenary presentations, workshop and poster sessions will provide the opportunity to exchange information on worldwide and regional ionospheric problems and on current research activities aimed to assess and understand ionospheric effects on space-based systems. Scope: The Global Positioning System (GPS), which originally was developed by the Department of Defense as a military system, has become a global utility. Conversion of the GPS has resulted in dramatic improvement in its accuracy for civilian users worldwide. Applications include air, road, marine, and rail navigation, telecommunications, emergency response, oil exploration, mining, and many more. The workshop will provide a forum for the exchange of knowledge developed in the United States and Europe on utilizing the GPS for space-based navigation and communication systems. Likewise, colleagues from various equatorial countries will be able to share their knowledge of local ionospheric conditions and current research activities. The workshop offers a unique opportunity for international colleagues to develop a research agenda for understanding ionospheric effects on space-based systems. This award is jointly supported by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Atmospheric Sciences doc1605 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Robert Hard and Mr. Jeffrey Francis will coordinate the chemical analysis of a large series of prehistoric human skeletons excavated in a ca. 150,000 sq. km area of the coastal plain of Texas. Their goal is to use these data first to reconstruct diet and then to determine the relationship between subsistence strategy and settlement pattern. As the researchers note, the prehistory of the region is highly anomalous. In most portions of the world, hunting and gathering peoples lived in small mobile groups and buried their dead in individual locations, presumably because their territories were so large that they could not quickly transport the newly deceased to a central location. When domestic plants and animals were introduced, population size increased, sedentary villages emerged and groups began to bury their dead in central locations. In this region of Texas however beginning about years ago organized cemeteries began to be utilized along the major drainages and bays by native American mobile hunters and gatherers. Cemetery use continued through the last millennium of the prehistoric period. The cemeteries are paradoxical as their emergence suggests increased population, reduced mobility, aggregation and increased territoriality. Despite these changes however archaeological evidence indicates a band-level, mobile hunting and gathering adaptation. Prehistorically, domesticated plants were not used despite the existence of farming economies in adjacent areas and a climate which would have supported dry-farming. This pattern is in contrast to the North American Southeast and Southwest where agriculture was quickly adopted. Several theories have been proposed to explain this phenomenon and they share a belief that rich local wild food resources allowed for reduced mobility and territory size. They differ however in just what mix of foods might be involved, some focusing on fish and other marine resources, and others on abundant wild plants such as pecans. Because bone is remodeled over the human lifetime and the carbon and nitrogen in bone derives from dietary sources, bone chemical composition indirectly reflects the type of foods consumed. The researchers will analyze carbon and nitrogen isotope values from a large series of skeletons drawn from different subregions within the area. They will also examine strontium isotopes because these reflect individual movement over a lifetime. This research is important for several reasons. It will provide data of interest to many archaeologists and shed new light on a relatively unknown aspect of United States prehistory. It will also provide insight into the processes which shape social organization in relatively uncompelled societies doc1606 none Miller OPP- This is a collaborative proposal with the Universities of Vermont and Colorado and Bentley College. Our view of the Laurentide Ice Sheet has changed from a thick monolithic dome with a relatively stable central core to a thinner, multi-domed and more dynamic ice system with inherent instabilities. The role of the ice sheet in the climate system includes perturbations to atmospheric flow as its height increased, and altering the planetary energy balance due to albedo changes. In addition, through massive ice-berg and meltwater discharges, the ice sheet was a determinant on North Atlantic thermo-haline circulation. Primary information on the timing and style of continental glaciation has played a key role in this conceptual evolution. Along the northeastern margin of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, extensive series of moraines provide a direct record of past ice-sheet behavior. Early studies were limited by an inability to date these deposits directly. Consequently, arguments were advanced for both a similar timing and magnitude of glacial advances along all margins of the ice sheet, and for fundamentally asynchronous responses between different sectors of the former ice sheet. With the development of cosmogenic exposure dating, it is now possible to date the moraines directly and resolve much of this debate. Recent studies by the Principal Investigators have established the utility of the method by dating glacial features on southern Baffin Island and demonstrated that this region was completely glaciated at the last glacial maximum. However, they also have evidence that the northeastern coast was less intensively glaciated and preserves a much longer glacial history. The Principal Investigators will conduct a one-year study in the Clyde region which is the type site for the NE Laurentide Ice Sheet. Building on the extensive Baffin Island field experience of Miller and Davis, and the cosmogenic expertise of Bierman and Steig, they will map glacial deposits, ice-flow characteristics, and systematic changes in the glacial geomorphology, and collect samples for cosmogenic and radiocarbon dating. Their results will establish the suitability of cosmogenic exposure dating in this region, the optimum sample type, and address the first-order question: are the extensive moraines preserved on the forelands of last glacial maximum age or do they represent much older glaciations? The cosmogenic and radiocarbon data, linked to direct mapping of glacial deposits in the field and on aerial photographs, will allow them to better define the style and timing of glaciation, and the nature of the inception phase of a glacial cycle doc1607 none Pinker Description: This award supports a US-India cooperative research project on Aerosol Optical Characterization and Investigation of Aerosol Radiative Forcing at the Surface and Top of the Atmosphere. The collaborators are Professor Rachel Pinker, University of Maryland and Professors G. Pandithurai and P.C.S. Devara, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune. The effect of radiative forcing by anthropogenic aerosols is one of the largest sources of uncertainty in climate prediction, particularly for poorly understood tropical aerosols. The PIs propose to add to the knowledge of aerosol optical characteristics through direct observation of the forcing at a tropical site. A radiometer from the US PI s home institution for characterizing aerosol optical properties will be deployed in India to augment existing IITM instrumentation for both active and passive remote sensing of aerosols. Scope: This research further enhances current collaborative efforts between the University of Maryland and the IITM on radiative effects of aerosols. Dr. Pandithurai spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland and worked in the areas pertinent to this research. The proposed activity will provide a coherent set of observations on aerosol optical properties, their vertical distribution, and their radiative effects. It will also help extend the results obtained from the Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX) to other continental regions. This award is jointly supported by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Atmospheric Sciences doc1608 none The major objective in this Doctoral Dissertation Research Support project is to fill a gap in the political science literature created by the difference in the definition and operationalization of democracy in the empirical literature. Definitions of democracy stress the importance of participation and suffrage for all. However, when operationalized, suffrage, with the exception of gender, as it applies to groups separated from the dominant civic community by race ethnicity, and conquest has been either slighted or ignored. This has meant that while the move from nondemocratic forms of government to elite democracy has been studied, the move from exclusive democracy to more inclusive democracy that allow most adults to vote has been ignored. This dissertation research creates a database tracking the achievement of suffrage for different groups in democracies from to . The database is used to test a theory that explains the move from exclusion to inclusion in democracies through the interaction of material, political and normative power. This will help to integrate theoretically the interaction of these different types of power that are usually dealt with separately in the literature. The database also serves as an important resource beyond the current research to those who would explore the causes and impacts of the expansion of the basic right to participate that suffrage represents. This dissertation research project promises to enhance substantially our understanding of the topic doc1609 none The Center for Mathematics, Science, and Computer Education (CMSCE) at Rutgers University proposes the expansion, refinement, and institutionalization of Special Science Teams (SST), a model professional development program for teachers of students with special needs. Previously, SST developed as a model project that integrates exciting hands-on environmental science activities, equity-focused cooperative learning strategies, and physical and pedagogical modifications in an effort to provide teachers with the skills and knowledge necessary to encourage all children in science, regardless of disability. SST currently targets grades 3-5 teachers (general education teachers, science teachers, and special education teachers), and exists as a self-contained summer institute. Future activities include creation of a model, for-credit course in environmental science for teachers of students with disabilities, while expanding the curriculum to include extensions for teachers of grades K-6. The first step in insuring that all students have ample opportunities to enjoy science is ensuring that all teachers have the confidence and competence in science themselves. Unfortunately, elementary school general education and special education teachers rarely have strong science backgrounds. Traditional college science courses lack the pedagogical strategies needed by teachers, and science education courses lack solid core content. To fill this gap, SST Continues will provide practicing teachers, as well as prospective teachers, a strong college level environmental science course taught by college faculty, using the newly-developed SST curriculum, that incorporates modifications for students with disabilities as the laboratory experience. By providing general and special education teachers and future teachers with strong core science content, specific strategies for modifying hands-on activities, and standards-based environmental science curriculum, SST Continues will ensure that students and teachers realize the many possibilities for persons with disabilities. During Year 1of this three-year award, the current SST professional development model will be expanded from grades 3-5 to grades K-6 in order to serve larger audiences. During Year 2, a credited, one semester course at Rutgers University that combines extensive core content in environmental science with the curriculum and strategies developed in the SST program will be offered. SST Summer Institute alumni will serve as laboratory instructors for the course. During Year 3, a course guide which includes lectures, overheads, and assessments for the college-level course in environmental science, in combination with the revised SST laboratory component, will be prepared so that it can be readily disseminated to both community and four-year colleges throughout the nation doc1610 none Accurate and objective methods for diagnosis of surface frontal features is important to meteorological education, research and operations. The goal of this project is to develop and validate a technique of surface map analysis that differs from present practice. Current analysis practice places excessive reliance on the polar front theory. This project plans to show that many, if not most, fronts now routinely shown on maps and used as the basis for understanding the weather pattern are lacking evidence for a quasi-discontinuity of density that is required for relevance to polar front concepts. Instead, the Principal Investigator proposes: (1) to restrict identification of fronts to the occasional structures that do adhere closely to the theory; (2) to establish the importance of zones of pronounced horizontal temperature gradient lacking a sharp frontal wind shift at the warm edge, which are not now recognized in current practice; (3) to encourage denoting many of the structures now falsely designated as fronts instead as troughs of low pressure. It is expected that the project will lead to improved understanding of processes in the surface boundary layer as well as in the free atmosphere above. The research will rely on the database of routine surface observations. Issues to be addressed are the relationships between the boundary-layer structures and synoptic-scale cyclogenesis, and the process of frontogenesis. The research will develop the idea of frontogenesis as a two-stage process in which first a zone of relatively strong horizontal temperature gradient is created, and then this zone is acted upon by short-lived exposure to deformation and or convergence. Successful completion of this research will result in changing the way surface map analysis is done and in providing a physically realistic way of explaining weather phenomena of various types doc1611 none The PI will continue her investigations on interannual and interdecadal climate variability over tropical Africa. The focus is on west Africa, both the Sahel and Guinea Coast regions, and on equatorial Central Africa, a region where meteorological processes contributing to climatic variability are poorly understood. The study has an observational component, relying on past experience in observational analysis and the compilation of extensive data sets for West Africa, as well as a modeling component limited mainly to linear dynamical models. The PI suggests a new paradigm for understanding interannual and interdecadal variability in Sahelian Africa involving the latitudinal position of the African Easterly Jet (AEJ) and the role of the equatorial westerlies in displacing the jet northward into the Sahel region. Some of the key related questions to be addressed are (i) reasons for the shift in the AEJ; (ii) reasons for the development of deep equatorial Westerly jet in the monsoon flow over west Africa; and (iii) contrasts in the dynamics and energetics in the two stable modes of the jet. The role of the Tropical Easterly Jet, the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone, the moist layer and Easterly wave activity in interannual rainfall variability will also be studied. The work is important because better understanding of climate variability over this region will lead to better predictability of rainfall, and this has important societal benefits doc1612 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator:Robert Hicks Institution: University of California Los Angeles The objective of this project is to understand the surface reactions involved in the growth, doping, and passivation of indium phosphide (InP), indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs), and indium gallium arsenide nitride (InGaAsN) by metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD). The research combines experimental studies of the surface structure using scanning tunneling microscopy, infrared spectroscopy, reflectance-difference spectroscopy, and x-ray photoemission spectroscopy with ab initio quantum chemistry calculations to provide insights into the surface processes that control MOCVD growth. The research plan encompasses a study of three different topics: the decomposition reactions of group V sources on InP, the surface chemistry of intentional dopants, and the surface passivation by organic monolayers. The surface reaction chemistry of phosphine, arsine, ammonia, dimethylhydrazine, silane, tetrasilylmethane, and cyclopentene on InP will be determined. To help identify adsorbed species, infrared bands will be compared with results from quantum chemistry calculations. The work has application in the fabrication of heterojunction bipolar transistors used in wireless and optical communications systems doc1613 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Michael Heckenberger and his colleagues will conduct two seasons (eight months) of archaeological research in the Upper Xingu region, Brazil, situated near the southern peripheries of the forested lowlands of the Amazon basin. The project aims to accurately characterize the regional distribution, variability, and articulation of late prehistoric (c. AD - ) habitation sites within a 900 km study area and to improve the overall chronology of prehistoric human occupation in the region. Building on the results of previous NSF funded research, specific questions to be addressed include: (1) the initial appearance of circular plaza villages in the region, suggested to be c. AD 800-900; (2) the timing of major structural elaboration of the plaza villages, through earthwork construction, thought to have occurred c. AD - ; (3) the variability, in terms of size, configuration, and structural features, of these terminal prehistoric sites and their integration within the study area; (4) the degree of population nucleation, measured in terms of village growth, coincident with major earthwork construction; and (5) the overall environmental impacts of the large prehistoric villages on the surrounding landscape, in collaboration with specialists in paleoecology, pedology, and ethnobotany. The project will include the expansion of a geographic (GIS) database for this portion of the southern Amazon, utilizing satellite images and aerial-photos, as well as ground-based data recovery. The research addresses pressing issues in regional anthropology, most notably debates regarding the nature and distribution of complex societies (chiefdoms) in late prehistoric times. Although long felt to be inimical to the development of large, settled populations, recent research indicates that such societies did exist prehistorically in Amazonia. Thus, the Amazon is one of the last major hearths for the emergence of chiefdoms to be recognized worldwide. This research is particularly timely since, to date, very few systematic regional-level archaeological studies have been conducted in the Brazilian Amazon. More broadly, scientific investigation of past settlement and land-use in different parts of the Amazon is critical to debates regarding pre-industrial adaptations to tropical forest environments and issues of contemporary economic sustainability and development in this ecologically sensitive region. The project, sponsored by the Museu Nacional and Museu Goeldi in Brazil and composed of a team of Brazilian and American researchers and students, will strengthen scientific cooperation between Brazil and the United States and also promote cooperation between scientists and indigenous peoples doc1614 none This project continues the partnership between the American Sociological Association and the National Science Foundation in supporting a highly successful program known as the Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline (FAD). The program nurtures the development of scientific knowledge by supporting small, groundbreaking research initiatives and other important scientific activities such as conferences. The awards made under this program provide seed money or venture capital for substantive and methodological breakthroughs that challenge the discipline or stimulate new lines of scientific inquiry, especially by scholars at the early stages of their careers. In addition to investing in important research, these awards broaden the dissemination of scientific knowledge, facilitate new networks of scientific collaboration, provide leverage for acquisition of additional research funds, and enhance the discipline s data and bibiographic infrastructure. FAS is a collaborative program in the sense that ASA and NSF contribute equally to the pool of resources that funds the small grants. The program itself is led and administered by the ASA, with ASA assuming all direct administrative costs. Through dollar by dollar match, the ASA and NSF double their investment in new science under the auspices of the FAD program. Previous FAD grants resulted in strong publications, many presentations, significant student training, curriculum modification and development, improvements to disciplinary infrastructure, and innovative inquiry in the discipline doc1615 none Cohen This three-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research in computer vision involves Isaac Cohen of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems at the University of Southern California (USC), Roberto Manduchi of USC and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Isabelle Herlin, Director of the Projet Air at the Institute for Research in Informatics and Applied Mathematics (INRIA) at Rocquencourt, France. The US and French research teams will address the problem of detection and characterization of temporal change in environmental image sequences obtained through satellite remote sensing. The environmental problems in question involve vegetation and forestry monitoring, and ocean atmospheric sciences. Computer vision techniques are widely used for detecting and characterizing temporal changes in images. This proposal extends this work to the characterization of image properties for texture change detection as found in vegetation and forest images, and to the determination of physical properties for non rigid motion phenomena such as clouds, and ocean-atmosphere exchanges. The US investigators bring to this collaboration expertise in optical flow, variational methods and texture modeling. This is complemented by the French team s expertise in non rigid motion in general and the motion of clouds in particular. The project also takes advantage of access to Landsat remote sensing images and ground truth measures provided by the French team. The project will advance understanding of methods and techniques for automatic analysis of satellite images and lead to development of new computer vision tools for use in earth systems science research This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Institute for Research in Informatics and Applied Mathematics (INRIA). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigators and graduate student. INRIA will support the visits of French researchers to the United States doc1616 none and vita plus a letter of recommendation from the student s advisor. They expect to make 30-40 awards of approximately $500 apiece. The mentoring work will be distributed among the members of the program committee. The poster session will provide students with invaluable exposure to outside perspectives on their work at a critical time in their research. This is an inexpensive yet highly effective means of encouraging young and upcoming researchers in machine learning doc811 none This study will conduct a survey along the Easter Salas-y-Gomex Nazca (ESN) trail tobetter characterize and constrain movement of the hotspot over the last 25 to 30 Ma. The survey will involve geochronologic, geochemical, and geophysical study of seamounts and volcanic ridges. Multibeam bathymetric data and backscatter imagery will be used to define topography and structural features at selected localities and identify targets for dredging. Dredged samples will be dated using 40Ar-39Ar technique and their petrological, chemical and Nd-Pb-Sr isotopic chracteristics will be determined. The new data will be combined with re-analyses of existing samples to test Nazca-hotspot motion and mantle flow models and compare them to Pacific-hotspot models doc1618 none C. Montemagno, Cornell University As current technology permits the production of nanostructures smaller than typical cell dimensions, it has become possible to consider useful applications based on their non-destructive, orderly injection inside the cells. In this fashion, cells could be repaired or functionally modified. Of special interest would be the possibility to inject biomolecular motors which could energize the self-assembly of nanostructures inside living cells. This could be accomplished by developing arrays of nanosyringes, each of which to deliver chosen structures on preplanned location and time. The proposed effort will unfold in three steps: 1. The fabrication of individual ( standalone ) syringes with dimensions suitable for the injection of biomolecular rotary motors (e.g. flagella ATP), capable of initiating a variety of modifications inside a cell. Silicon wafers will be shaped by existing etching processes, yielding a 10nm diameter for the tips and a 1-micron diameter for the shaft. Testing will be done with green fluorescence protein measurements. 2. Since many useful cell modifications may involve a number of different injections, it is desirable to produce, as a first step, a set of self-aligned syringe arrays. These will allow, given a line-up of cells, for simultaneous (and possibly different) injections, followed by other injection patterns if so desired. Testing will be similar to the standalone case. 3. The syringes concepts discussed above will be refined: a suspension mechanism will make possible both vertical and horizontal controlled displacements of the syringe. The motion will be tracked with the help of an optical microscope doc1619 none T. Theofaneous, University of California Santa Barbara The current use of magnetic resonance imaging is mostly found in static medical situations where proton nuclear spin polarization is exposed to an applied magnetic field. The resulting changes in polarization yield, through reconstruction analysis, a mapping of the surrounding state properties, especially density and velocity fields. Limitations of this technique appear in the case of large, low density media, where signal to noise ratios become excessively low (e.g. gases, multiphase). This proposal means to substitute to the protons (1H) a hyperpolarized noble gas (such as 129Xe), which will yield much stronger signals, and therefore better accuracy. Similarly, increased pressures (and therefore, densities) will help make gas-phase imaging a possibility. It is noted that strong applied magnetic fields are less critical in the hyperpolarized cases since their polarization is externally supplied. Thus the practicality of low field imaging would be another opportunity for large dimension systems. The PI proposes to explore the potential of this hyperpolarization approach, as applied to multiphase, large size flows. The experimental effort will aim at establishing the broad limits of this technique. It will include in particular the design of a laser enhanced device for the optical pumping of highly polarized gases. There exists now, in the PI s lab, an extensive experimental apparatus, directly usable in the proposed research. The quality of the team under Dr. Theofanous is outstanding. It is expected that such work will lead to a clear definition of desirable directions for multiphase diagnostics research doc1620 none The main objective of the proposed research is to develop novel Software-Implemented Fault Tolerance (SIFT) techniques for increasing the dependability of the distributed and networked environments based on COTS. The issues of dependability will be addressed by the design and implementation of (SIFT), dynamic reconfiguration in distributed systems and high-speed computer networks. Novel fast dynamic reconfiguration techniques for various irregular network topologies will be developed and analyzed. An analytical method is proposed for evaluating the reliability improvement by using SIFT for any size of distributed systems . The goal of this research is to identify and develop new key building blocks for reliable distributed systems built with inexpensive off-the shelf components. The platform consists of computing nodes connected via multiple interfaces to networks configured in fault-tolerant topologies. Thus, the research community and a large number of users will have the opportunity to build reliable distributed systems based on COTS in a user transparent way.The goal will be to achieve a high reconfiguration rate and a small recomputation overhead in the presence of faults in the distributed systems and high-speed computer networks in a way transparent to the user, which will provide a high dependability. This research project will have a positive impact on a large community implementing applications in distributed and network environments such as : e-commerce, telepresence, telemedicine, Internet data centers, distributed applications running concurrently across doc1621 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Selim Senkan Institution: University of California Los Angeles The objective of this proposal is to apply combinatorial catalysis to the selective catalytic reduction (SCR) of the oxides of nitrogen (NOx) by hydrocarbons. The proposed research entails the generation and screening of large libraries of supported catalyst materials for NOx SCR activity. Initial compositions will be based on catalysts and supports known to have some amount of activity. Catalyst testing will be conducted by placing the catalyst materials into wells of array channel microreactors over which simulated exhaust gases will be passed. Each array microreactor system will allow the parallel testing of 80 different catalytic materials. Screening will be accomplished by analyzing the reactor effluents using mass spectrometry or resonance enhanced multiphoton ionization (REMPI) spectroscopy. Algorithms used in genetic research will be applied to this problem. This work will help develop the methodology for combinatorial catalysis coupled with an informatics approach for guiding optimization. Application of the techniques to an important environmental problem will demonstrate their utility doc1622 none Archer There is a long-standing need for engineering materials that are in one way or another self lubricating. These materials are promising for a variety of applications where conventional lubricants either cannot be used (e.g., joint replacement surgery in humans), or where their use is too costly (e.g. deployed space vehicles, such as satellites, space-based observatories, and permanently deployed space exploration equipment). Self-lubricated components also hold promise for preventing premature failure of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS). To design an effective self-lubricated material from the molecular, nano-scale, it is necessary that lubricant molecules possess high surface mobility even when chemically grafted to a rigid substrate. The objective of the proposed research is two-fold: First, to fundamentally understand dynamics of uncharged polymeric and oligomeric species tethered to solid substrates; and Second, to develop high-mobility oligomer and polymer lubricating coatings using tethered molecules, as a design of lubricating surfaces from the nano-scale up. The suitability of these coatings for self-lubricated MEMS fabrication will be evaluated in collaboration with researchers at the Cornell Nanofabrication facility doc1623 none This U.S.-Hungary ecological research project involves Debra Peters of New Mexico State University, James Gosz of the University of New Mexico, and partner Edit Kovacs-Lang from the Institute of Ecology and Botany of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Their goal is to study the influence of disturbance and climate on the biodiversity of arid and semiarid grasslands. Multiple grassland sites in both countries will be examined that have varying species, composition, climate gradients, land use history, and soils. Experimental manipulations, field studies, and simulation models will be used to evaluate effects of small-scale disturbances and climate on plant biodiversity, species composition, and dominance through time. Specifically, the US-Hungary team intends to test their hypothesis that small-scale disturbances and climate interact to generate and maintain biodiversity at multiple spatial scales with disproportionate effects compared to the total amount of area disturbed. Their research plan features three components: 1) evaluation of the effects of small, animal-created disturbances on patterns in species dominance and biodiversity at patch and landscape scale; 2) identification of the key recruitment processes limiting recovery of vegetation following disturbance; and 3) prediction of long-term responses of vegetation to small disturbances in the presence of climatic fluctuations and directional changes in climate. Results should improve our basic ability to predict changes in grassland structure using model simulations. If successful, the generalizations developed may be applicable to dry grasslands located in other parts of the world. Understanding such grassland structures and functions may help us manage these large and potentially fragile systems in the face of global climate change. This ecological research project fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc1624 none This is a planning grant to Timothy Ferris to develop a PBS documentary film about amateur astronomy and stargazing. The film will bring viewers into direct contact with the night sky, introducing them to the constellations and showing how even a small telescope can open a window onto the cosmos. Ferris has previously produced two highly regarded science documentaries, The Creation of the Universe and Life Beyond Earth. The director for the Seeing In the Dark program will be Thomas Levenson who most recently served as producer director writer for the Dome program in Building Big. Andrew Fraknoi, Chair of the Astronomy Department at Foothill College and Educational consultant for the Astronomical Society of the Pacific will be the Science and Outreach Consultant for the project. Activities during the planning stage include: Developing preliminary storyboarding, determining locations and people to appear in the film and working out special effects sequences Acquiring and digitizing images for use in the film Planning educational and public outreach efforts Identifying and consulting with potential creative contributors to the film Shooting and editing a test night scene at a star party to establish which techniques can produce the best results in these conditions doc1625 none This project will conduct a hydrothermal plume survey along a portion of the South West Indian Ridge to establish distribution of hydrothermal activity. In addition an initial description of rocks recovered from dredges along the rift valley wall and ridge axis will be done to assess potential for further study doc1626 none The communication discipline has grown at a steady pace over the past fifty years. It has begun to take its place among the other social science disciplines in terms of theory development and building a knowledge base. Communication as a discipline is not well understood, however. It has, therefore, been slow to be included in interdisciplinary science research projects, despite the fact that communication research would improve the quality of these projects and would, in some cases, prove to be a crucial element affecting the research results. To provide a means of informing the scientific community and federal funding agencies of the value of communication research to development of scientific knowledge, the National Communication Association will sponsor a working conference to review the significant scientific findings in communication and to develop a document that will inform others about the value of communication to science. The conference will be held March 1-4, , in Tucson, Arizona, with preliminary work already completed at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association, November 9-12, , in Seattle, Washington. The work of the conference will be facilitated by the use of a Group Decision Support System laboratory at the University of Arizona. Following the meeting, one or two individuals will edit the work into a paper, which will then be printed as a booklet suitable for wide distribution doc1627 none Douglas R. Lloyd University of Texas Polymeric membranes in flat sheet and hollow fiber form are the basis of many industrial separation processes. The advantages of the hollow fiber geometry in membrane processes are well documented in the literature. Traditionally, phase inversion techniques have been used to make the hollow fibers from glassy polymers. In , the thermally induced phase separation (TIPS) method for making flat sheet membranes was introduced. TIPS allows the production of high performance membranes from a broader range of polymeric materials that offer performance advantages over phase inversion membranes for certain applications because of greater thermal and chemical stability. For example, potential applications include separations involving of strong organic solvents and high concentrations other harsh chemicals, separations involving elevated temperatures, purification of etching solutions in the micro-electronics industry, lactic acid recovery in the food industry, and separation of toxic pollutants, pharmaceutics, and fermentation products, as well as membrane distillation. In many of these membrane applications, it is essential to have an anisotropic membrane with well controlled pore structure. The objective of the proposed research is to provide the requisite fundamental knowledge necessary to control porous structure in anisotropic, microporous, hollow fiber membranes produced via TIPS. This research project constitutes a systematic and fundamental study to characterize and model the impact of system physical properties and processing parameters on the processability, microscopic and macroscopic structure, and performance of hollow fiber membranes formed via the TIPS process. Through a balance of modeling and experiments, this research is generating the fundamental knowledge needed to control the concentration and temperature gradients in the homogeneous solution and to develop the process for the formation of anisotropic hollow fibers on a laboratory scale. A fully coupled heat-, mass-, and momentum-transfer model for predicting the temperature, concentration and velocity profiles within the nascent membrane at the time of phase separation and surface pore size after quenching is being devised doc1628 none International Travel Award: The 7th Internatonal Conference on Fundmentals of Adsorption This award supports partially the participation by 30 American researchers in the 7th International Conference on Fundamentals of Adsorption (FOA7) to be held in Nagasaki, Japan, 20-25 May . This conference provides a unique forum for dialog among international researchers in the field. It will bring together about 300 researchers from 35 countries. Both academic and industrial researchers will participate in sessions on adsorption relating to gas separation processes, gas storage, energy-efficient refrigeration, and environmental protection. Adsorption is a key phenomenon in many separation and catalytic processes as well as in nature, and the current research activity is dynamic, stimulated by new developments in materials synthesis, molecular modeling, and specific applications. Much of the important new work is being done abroad, so it is vital that U.S. researchers maintain contact and collaboration with their foreign counterparts. This conference provides an opportunity to promote such contact doc1629 none The investigators will develop an undergraduate course for non-science majors that uses the real-life effects of space weather as a motivation for teaching the basic concepts of electricity and magnetism. The effort builds on the successful development of the Solar System Collaboratory that uses Java applets running on personal computers. The applets present to the user a familiar button-and-slider interface that hides calculations, allowing non-science majors with limited math skills to engage in precise quantitative reasoning. One of the most troubling tendencies that science departments face today is an increase in the number of students that become disenfranchised with science. This course is designed to increase interest of non-majors in science by putting the grammar of science in the background, so students can concentrate on the prose . The course will be tailored for both high school science classes and for college non-science majors, and will go through extensive classroom testing at three Colorado schools doc1630 none Under the direction of Dr. Michelle Hegmon, Mr. Wesley Bernardini will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. His research focuses on the late prehistoric period in the US Southwest (ca. to AD) and will test a theory of Hopi people s migration. Both archaeological and ethnographic data indicate that during this time interval extensive migration and population shifts occurred in the Hopi region of northern Arizona and that the present distribution of Hopi villages and people was determined during this period. Mr. Bernardini wishes to understand the mechanisms which underlie this process. The dominant archaeological view is that such population movements likely occurred at a macro scale in which all individuals in an entire village moved together in mass to a new location and most analytical units which researchers employ are defined at this scale. Hopi tradition itself paints a different picture and describes a more piecemeal process in which a very small group within a donor village would migrate to one host location while another group (clan) from the same point of origin would move elsewhere. As a result host villages were highly heterogeneous and villages in close proximity may have shared share fewer ties to each other than to villages further away. This issue is important to anthropologists who wish to understand historic, and present day, Hopi social organization. Mr. Bernardini will focus on the chemical analysis of ceramics recovered from donor population villages. Prior research has indicated that a particular kind of pottery, Jeddito Yellow Ware was manufactured only by Hopi but then traded widely. Significant amounts have been recovered from sites in regions outside the immediate Hopi area and Mr. Bernardini hypothesizes that these trading ties established in pre-migration times provided the pathways along which migrants later moved. The analysis takes advantage of the geological variability within the Hopi region. Clay and temper sources are distinct between different Hopi subregions and often allow one to match a sherd recovered tens of miles away with the individual village at which it was produced. By examining chemical variability among Jeditto Yellow Ware sherds within individual donor villages and with specific Hopi regions, a network of linkages can be established. This in turn very likely set the template for movement of people as well. This research is important for several reasons. It will provide insight into the basic process of migration. It will provide data of interest to many anthropologists, increase our understanding of the prehistoric US Southwest and assist in training a promising young scientist doc1631 none Competitive Ion-Exchange Adsorption of Proteins Richard Willson University of Houston This study applies a unique set of test proteins, which are identical in size and shape but which differ in color and adsorption behavior, for use as probes of competitive adsorption phenomena. These proteins are derived from the recombinant soluble core of cytochrome b5, expressed in E. coli from a synthetic gene. The adsorption behavior of these proteins is tailored by conservative mutations of surface glutamic-acid and aspartic-acid residues. The work explores the competitive equilibrium adsorption behavior of mixtures of these proteins of similar size but differing adsorption affinities. Nonporous adsorbents are used for the initial equilibrium work to avoid complications from dynamical transport effects which are investigated separately. A shallow-bed, rapid-filtration technique is used to observe adsorption, desorption, and displacement dynamics on a short time scale. Specific topics being addressed include the effects of competitors on adsorption heterogeneity and adsorbent selectivity among proteins. Recombinant pharmaceutical proteins now make a substantial contribution to health care. Examples include insulin for treatment of diabetes, tPA for unblocking coronary arteries in heart attacks, and new, effective medicines for anemia, hemophilia, and breast cancer. The production of recombinant proteins generally consists of two stages, cultivation of bacteria or mammalian cells and then purification of the desired product from the complex mixture produced by the cells. Protein purification is the more expensive stage and is the subject of intense research interest and commercial development. This work addresses the fundamental behavior underlying the performance of the most widely-used purification method, selective adsorption of contaminants onto charged particles in ion-exchange chromatography. The particular focus is the competitive adsorption of proteins - how the presence of contaminants can alter the adsorption behavior of a desired product. This competition among proteins, which is essential to separating the mixture, is relatively little-investigated and poorly understood. Better understanding of these mechanisms will lead to better separation technologies and thus to higher-quality, lower-cost medical products doc1632 none In post-war data real exchange rates have been highly volatile and have deviated widely and systematically from their purchasing power parity values. Since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, real and nominal exchange rates are highly positively correlated. This fact is widely cited as (indirect) evidence of nominal price rigidities, such that real exchange rates are driven entirely by shocks to the nominal exchange rate, while relative national price levels are relatively smooth. Partly as a result of this evidence, the predominant theoretical frameworks for analyzing exchange rates are characterized by nominal rigidities. Such frameworks have been successful in replicating many features of international business cycle and exchange rate facts. The investigator and Caroline Betts have obtained preliminary results that are difficult to reconcile with the idea that real exchange rates are driven solely by shocks to the nominal exchange rate. They have shown that real exchange rates are also very highly correlated with the relative prices of nontraded to traded goods, however, suggesting that real factors are key determinants of real exchange rates. Furthermore, they show that a multicountry, multisector real business cycle model is capable of generating relative price behavior at both the sectoral and aggregate level that matches Mexico-US data. They develop a class of business cycle models that can address these puzzling empirical features of exchange rate behavior. The research would extend this work through the introduction of a role for national monies. A key goal is to reconcile the evidence of high correlations between real and nominal exchange rates with that of high correlations of real exchange rates and the relative price of nontraded to traded goods across countries. Another goal is to replicate other key features of international business cycle data. Much this research would be joint work with Caroline M. Betts of the University of Southern California. The research would extend the empirical analysis of Betts and Kehoe on the relationship between the Mexico-US real exchange rate and the relative prices of traded to nontraded goods. The analysis to date has used annual gross output deflators to measure sectoral relative prices, and we propose to investigate other sources and frequencies of price data. It would also extend the analysis to the other countries and to explore the empirical behavior of nominal exchange rates and nominal prices for this group of countries. The proposed, multicountry, multisector, business cycle models depart from traditional theories of real exchange rate determination in that the outputs of different sectors, rather than being either tradable or nontradable, have differing degrees of tradability. The degree of tradability is determined by the sort of trade costs emphasized by Obstfeld and Rogoff . The models incorporate considerable sectoral detail, and some allow roles for national monies. Real and monetary shocks drive international fluctuations. Preliminary results for a model without money are encouraging: One does not need nominal rigidities to account for the size or even most of the persistence of real exchange rate fluctuations. Country-specific demand shocks calibrated to match the variability and persistence of aggregate output are sufficient to capture international relative price movements by sector. Further, the model can account for the high volatility of the real exchange rate compared to the relative price of nontraded to traded goods across countries, despite the absence of monetary features in the model. Despite these successes, nonmonetary versions of the model are silent on the relationship between real and nominal exchange rates and the role of nominal shocks. Proposed research would introduce the simplest possible quantity equation model in which the real side of the economy is unaffected by money. In addition, we propose a cash-in-advance variant in which money can give rise to a distortion in the leisure-labor choice. Key features of the data that we would want any monetary model to replicate is the high correlation of real and nominal exchange rates and the behavior of relative prices shown in our empirical work doc1633 none Shen This is a three-year cooperative project between Dr. Dashan Shen, the University of Alabama and Professor Yu Yuehui, the Shanghai Institute of Metallurgy, Chinese Academy Science, to study novel Silicon-On-Insulator substrates using Amorphous Aluminum Nitride and Amorphous Diamond as Insulating Layers. This project will experiment using Amorphous Aluminum Nitride and Amorphous Diamond as an insulating layer on Silicon-on-insulator substrates to improve the thermal conductivity of integrated circuits (IC). This is important research in high power IC applications. Success in developing this technology can overcome the self-heating effect of the circuit due to the poor thermal conductivity and heat diffusion of the insulating layer. This proposal also provides an opportunity for a U.S. graduate student from an EPSCoR institute to work with one of the best Chinese research institutes in metallurgy. This proposal addresses an important scientific question and meets the NSF objective of human resource development. The Chinese Academy of Science and the NSF jointly support this project doc1634 none This RUI project focuses on the study of fundamental problems in strong field coherent control, particularly as applied to ladder systems in Rydberg atoms. Four specific areas are targeted: 1) extensions of stimulated Raman adiabatic passage techniques to three-level systems; 2) the use of chirped pulses for climbing anharmonic ladders; 3) the exploration of the use of feedback-control systems applied to the ladder climbing problem, in particular the robustness of various learning algorithms; and 4) the creation of arbitrary Stark wavepacket states using radiofrequency pulses doc1635 none The overall objective of this project is to understand the lubrication and friction conditions in Tube Hydroforming processes. By achieving the project objectives it will be possible to evaluate various candidate lubricants regarding their suitability and application in tube hydroforming. The lubricants to be evaluated must be environmentally friendly and non polluting while providing adequate lubricity and a low coefficient of friction. Thus, it will be possible to improve process conditions and part quality. Tube Hydroforming is a relatively new process that is being used increasingly in manufacturing automotive components. The process offers advantages in reducing part weight and assembly operations, and in increasing part stiffness and properties. In tube hydroforming a tubular preform is placed between two die halves, the preform is internally pressurized while the tube ends are fed or pushed axially towards the die center. Thus, the tubular preform is expanded to achieve the internal geometry of the dies, hopefully without defects, i.e. fracture or wrinkles. The results of this project will improve lubrication conditions in tube hydroforming and will make the process more reliable, robust, cost effective and more widely used doc1636 none The proposed work addresses the problem of reliable robotic assembly. The project seeks to develop powerful computer techniques to ensure proper assembly of 3D polyhedral parts undergoing 6d spatial motions. The work will culminate in custom-aided-design software capable of 1) assessment of whether two parts can be reliably assembled using only contact forces as environmental input, and 2) producing a description of the best admittance behavior for the specified task doc1637 none This award provides funds to aid in purchase of an oligonucleotide microarray system together with computer equipment and software that will aid in analysis of data obtained with microarrays. Equipment of this type can be used to determine the rate of expression of selected genes in an organism, or even that of all genes if the sequence of the organism s genome is known. The equipment will be shared by seven faculty and by their students and research associates. Of the seven, five will use the GeneChip technology to study plant development and pathogenesis using the arabidopsis model, one will use it for studies of the mouse, and one will develop improved informatics tools for analysis of microarray data. The equipment will be placed in a core facility that will allow its use by faculty other than the seven mentioned in the proposal, as well as its use in advanced courses for students. The analysis of global patterns of gene expression made possible by use of microarrays can be used to identify genes associated with developmental stages, different tissues, response to environmental stimuli or to infection. Such studies facilitate the assignment of function to uncharacterized genes, and will lead to the identification of the regulatory networks responsible for normal and altered control of growth and differentiation doc1638 none This proposal supports participation of the PI and undergraduate students in research conducted at the Low Energy Nuclear Accelerator laboratory (LENA). The main focus of these measurements will be low energy p-gamma reactions of astrophysical interest. Since many measurements of astrophysical interest involve very low counting rates and large backgrounds, computational routines will be used to aid in the design of a detector for LENA which maximizes efficiency and minimizes background. The proposal will also support participation of the PI and undergraduate students in data collection and analysis for experiments done at LENA. The first proposed experiments after completion of the laboratory are, 14-Nitrogen (p-gamma) 15-Oxygen with results expected to reduce the uncertainty in S(0), and 25-Magnesim (p-gamma) 26-Aluminum addressing reaction rates for low-lying resonances corresponding to lower stellar temperatures doc1639 none Phase distortions due to inhomogeneities in the optical path severely limit the perforinancc of a large class of optical systems for ground-to-ground and space communications, imaging through the atmosphere, medical laser beam focusing, among others. Demands on increased spatial resolutions and larger bandwidths call for an integrated approach to adaptive optics that modulates the wavefront in parallel at microscopic scale. This collaborative effort combines expertise in adaptive optics, analog parallel very-large scale integrated (VLSI) niicrosys-tems, microfabrication and liquid-crystal molecular systems to create a new generation of adaptive micro-optical systems for high-resolution wavefront correction, with over 10,000 fully autonomous control elements integrated on a single, hybrid opti-cal electronic chip. Autonomy is essential for high-bandwidth operation, and is obtained by integrating all adaptive functions directly on-chip. At the architectural level, model-free adaptive control is implemented using parallel perturbation stochastic gradient descent optimization of an arbitrary, externally provided metric of system performance. At the physical level, high-speed wavefront control at micro-scale resolution is obtained by integrating a new type of fast nematic liquid-crystal (LC), operating at kilohertz- range bandwidths, onto the adaptive control chip. Silicon-on-sapphire (SoS) technology with ultra-thin silicon (UTSi) transis-tors provides a high-quality, low-noise, transparent active medium for high-density optical and electronic integration. We will investigate microscale structures of LC material sandwiched in between two transparent SoS wafers, implementing arrays of phase modulators with active electrodes implementing the adaptive algorithms in parallel. directly interfacing with the wave- front. The architectural and technological innovations combine to yield a projected system performance in excess of 108 control updates sec. at least a factor 1,000 better than presently existing adaptive optics systems in speed, density and cost. This program integrates research and education in a sequence of project-intensive courses, where teams of graduate and undergraduate students learn to design. prototype and test adaptive optics co-processors, implemented in analog VLSI and fabricated through MOSIS. The adaptive co-processors will be configured to externally control a variety of fast LC and other spatial light phase modulators, available for experimentation at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL). In addition, we will make use of full-size UTSi SoS wafers provided by Peregrine Semiconductor, custom-fabricated in a special arrangement with Hopkins, to prototype a fully integrated version of consistent optical quality. The already polished SoS wafers will be post-processed at the JHU Microfabrication Laboratory and at Boulder Nonlinear Systems. Inc.. to pattern and deposit fast nematic LC in contact with SoS for fast spatial light phase modulation. The prototyped adaptive micro-optical systems will be experimentally demonstrated on various adaptive optics and imaging tasks including laser beam focusing and stabilization for optical communications doc1640 none This Collaborative Grant Opportunity for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) project will study strategic capacity planning decisions and their impact on the supply chain in a make-to-order environment. The project will construct analytical models and develop analytical, numerical, and simulation methods that will be tested in General Motors environment to guide the research direction and ensure their practicality and ease of implementation. To provide their customers with customized products within reasonable lead-times at competitive prices, firms need to shift to make-to-order production where adequate capacity decisions are even more important than in the past. For a make-to-order strategy to be successful, supply and demand need to be reasonably balanced. This can be achieved through: (1) manufacturing flexibility, so that capacity can be shared among different products, (2) price flexibility, so that demand can be managed, and (3) delivery-time flexibility, so that demand coming from time-sensitive customers can be shifted in exchange for a price break. The project will study the effect of each of these levers on supply chain performance and on capacity requirements to offer guidance to companies on the design and management of their make-to-order production systems. In addition, the plan is to integrate the capacity investment decisions for products and additional features or options (e.g., vehicles and leather seats). Several issues need to be considered in the capacity analysis for these options: (1) The option and vehicle model capacity decisions are interdependent. (2) Demand for the various options might be correlated. (3) Customers have a different attitude towards different options. For example, they might not buy a car without an automatic transmission, but may accept other missing options, such as a vanity mirror. This leads to very different risks of over- and under-capacitizing for each particular option. Thus, the project will develop models that address capacity-pricing decisions considering customers preferences. The research will provide: (1) Analytical results and insights for better capacity planning in a make-to-order environment, and (2) Tools for vehicle and option capacity planning that consider uncertainty, demand management techniques, and the impact on operational supply chain costs. Also, the projected outcome is to develop general models that can be used in a wide range of industries and demonstrate their practical impact by implementing testing them at General Motors doc1641 none The Impact Project: Determining the Impact of Software Engineering Research upon Practice The goal of the Impact Project, an international collaboration among U.S. and European Union software engineers, is to study the impact that software engineering research has had upon software development practice. The reasons for doing this include: identifying contributions that have had substantial impact, determining research modalities that have been relatively more successful, and anticipating the directions that software engineering research might most effectively pursue, based upon its history and positioning. Impact Project research will be useful to the software engineering research and development communities, as well as to other academic disciplines, government funding agencies, and the public at large in helping with the objective assessment of the software engineering community s record of achievement. The project is to be carried out as a special initiative of ACM SIGSOFT, which will provide partial support. The research work is to be coordinated by steering committee, led by an Executive Committee. The work itself will have two organizational thrusts: 1) to seek on a technology-by-technology basis, the source of the ideas, designs, and working prototypes of widely used software technologies, and 2) to examine the ways in which software engineering research directions and areas have stimulated or been amalgamated into commonly used technologies. The output of the project will be series of documents and briefings targeted to different audiences doc1642 none This proposal centers on research challenges arising from the realization of Pervasive Location-Aware Computing Environments (PLACE). In PLACE, mobile objects are aware of their own locations as well as those of surrounding objects. Such an environment enables (i) the navigation of moving objects, (ii) the execution of continuous queries about moving objects, and (iii) services for groups of moving objects. The pervasive nature of location-aware objects, the need for timely responses to numerous concurrent continuous queries dependent upon continuously arriving data pose new challenges for scalable query processing. The proposed research investigates query processing, data management, and broadcasting techniques for the efficient execution of continuous queries. The proposed techniques include (i) the use of data filters and indexing techniques to reduce the amount of data the queries need to analyze, and (ii) the development of techniques for executing continuous queries in an environment characterized by differences in bandwidth, communication costs, and computational capabilities of the objects. The proposal includes building a prototype system to validate and evaluate the proposed techniques and solutions doc1643 none This research program is a theoretical and experimental interdisciplinary effort that will lead to the design of a new generation of ultrafast and high-accuracy photodetectors. The program will focus on the widely-used class of photodetectors known as thin avalanche photodiodes (APDs). This program is motivated by the need to meet the increasing demand for bandwidth in next-generation optical core networks, where there is a need to develop a new generation of low-noise and high responsivity photodetectors with gain-bandwidth products that are far beyond the current state-of-the-art. Moreover, since the capability of a lightwave network is ultimately limited by its architecture and the performance of its components, a thorough understanding of the fundamental performance limits of applicable photodetectors significantly impacts the design of future communication networks. In addition, with the emerging int~rest in using wide-bandgap-material technology in various high- accuracy and ultrafast sensing applications, there is a need for the development of high-performance photodetectors using wide-bandgap materials such as CaN. The first goal of this project is to develop and validate a rigorous renewal-theory-based model for the joint statistics of the gain and the response time of APDs. The model will be applicable to APDS with various structures and materials with special emphasis on thin APDs, which exhibit low multiplication noise and high bandwidth. The theory will specifically capture the important effect of dead space, which plays a principal role in the performance of thin APDs and significantly affects the performance of both ultrafast (intersymbol-interference limited) and lot-power (gain-fluctuation limited) applications. Significant improvements in the noise and bandwidth characteristics is to be achieved by reducing the thickness of the APD s multiplication layer, which is responsible for the device gain. To date, the fundamental limits of the statistics of the gain-bandwidth product for thin APDs, and more notably, the effect of reducing the thickness of the multiplication layer on the fluctuations in the response time remain unknown. These questions will be thoroughly addressed in this research and the fundamental limits of APD performance will be established. The second goal of this project is to utilize the developed model to design and develop next- generation high-performance APD s. Device fabrication and characterization will be carried out at the existing facilities at the Microelectronics Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin. The role played by the thickness of the avalanche multiplication layer of the device will be thoroughly investigated in an effort to design devices with application-specific optimal charac-teristics. Low-noise devices with gain-bandwidth products well beyond 500 CHz (bandwidths of 50-100 GHz) are to be developed in this program. Optimization criteria will include a) maximizing the data transmission rate subject to a fixed bit-error rate, which is applicable to intersymbol-interference-limited communication systems, and B) maximizing the receiver signal-to-noise ratio in power-limited sensing applications. As a tool in accomplishing the above objectives, a CAD tool will be designed consisting of custom-made parallel-computing algorithms intended for the high-performance implementation of the model and the optimization process. The synergy between the investigators in this project, who have a demonstrated record in opto-electronic device modeling and fabrication, can lead to the development of devices with superb per-formance characteristics. The devices developed in this program will be useful for next-generation lightwave systems operating at 40 0Hz (per channel) and beyond doc1644 none Stevens This proposal will develop and establish a new course at the Salish Kootenai College (SKC), a tribal college located in northwestern Montana. This new course will be one in a series of three needed upper level courses covering the topic of Environmental Chemistry. This is an area of weakness in the current SKC Environmental Sciences Program. The subject of the course will be the source, fate, effects, etc. of organic pollutants in the environment. This will compliment another course dealing with similar issues as they pertain to inorganic pollutants. This new course also has a laboratory component that will serve as a vehicle to familiarize tribal students with the basic concepts of organic, analytical chemistry. Therefore, included in this project is the purchase a gas chromatography and a liquid chromatography system. These instruments are necessary for the analysis of the typically encountered organic pollutants: volatilizable organic compounds, such as pesticides, fuels and fuel additives (MTBE) and plant constituents, and non-volatilizable compounds such as herbicides, polyaromatic hydrocarbons and plant constituents The instrumentation is integral to the new course to achieve one of the major goals: training tribal students in the analysis of environmental samples for organic pollutants. Additionally, the instrumentation will provide a valuable, needed resource that will vastly improve the on-going, successful senior research projects at SKC. These activities will also add substantially to the preparedness and, hopefully the enthusiasm, of SKC graduates in Environmental Science for both the workplace and graduate school. Overall, this proposal addresses the need to integrate state-of-the-art technology and education to provide for a complete student experience while supporting the development of Native American scientists, which are the most under-represented population group in the scientific arena doc1645 none Schlaf The proposed three-year research collaboration between Lucent Technologies and the PI focuses on the further development of a recently demonstrated new technique for laterally resolved 2D dopant profiling. This new technique uses standard tapping mode atomic force microscopy (TMAFM) with an applied direct current (DC) bias between cantilever and sample. Using the TMAFM phase signal, bias induced dopant density related variations in Coulomb forces are detected, yielding a dopant density map of the investigated surface. Since TMAFM is used to scan the surface, only very weak mechanical interaction with the surface occurs resulting in a potentially more stable operation than in to date used methods such as scanning capacitance microscopy (SCM) or nano-spreading resistance profiling (nano-SRP) where the probe presses down on the investigated surface during the measurement resulting in short probe life. While offering the benefits of reproducibility and long probe life, the spatial and doping density resolution limits of the TMAFM method are potentially similar to the existing methods. In this context the proposed program aims at the further exploration of the basic physical mechanisms of the method, finding and optimizing its maximum lateral and dopant density resolutions, calibrating it using industry standards and testing its application to real life industrial state-of-the-art integrated circuit samples. In summary, these efforts focus on developing the PI s method into a cutting edge metrology tool for integrated circuit research, development and production doc1646 none This project is part of an ongoing effort by a large number of researchers to develop a quantum gravity theory, which fully incorporates quantum principles into general relativity and gravitation. Many approaches have been proposed over the years; currently, the two that are widely regarded as the most promising ones are superstring theory, which emphasizes the relation of other forces with gravitation, and quantum geometry, which emphasizes the need to understand the fundamental structure of space and time. These two approaches may be related to each other and lead to complementary views of the same theory, but at present they are being independently pursued. This project will contribute to the quantum geometry approach, which uses the Ashtekar variables for general relativity and weaves or networks of points to replace smooth space. The goal is to use statistical techniques and computer simulations to study in detail (i) which combinations of such networks are the ones we ordinarily observe as smooth space, and (ii) how large the uncertainties or fluctuations of space are as a result. While calculations by other researchers have given approximate, preliminary results on the first part, the techniques that will be used in this project are unique in enabling us to address the second one. From the point of view of our basic understanding of nature, the quantum gravity program is often listed as one of the top outstanding problems today. Both quantum theory and general relativity are supposedly applicable to all physical phenomena, and this can only be true if they are compatible with each other. We have reason to believe that, once we understand their connection well, quantum gravity will have applications in many different areas, similarly to what happened with quantum theory almost 100 years ago. The suggestion has been made, for example, that quantum gravity sets the ultimate limits for information storage and computation capabilities. For the time being, however, we need to test the theory with simpler predictions that can be verified, such as the effect of these fluctuating weaves on particles and radiation that reach us from distant galaxies across billions of light years. Successfully predicting effects such as this one will lead to progress in quantum gravity, and will also give us a new tool for the analysis of information from the most distant parts of the universe. This project at the University of Mississippi will contribute by helping develop a reliable working model for the fluctuating weaves that make up space, as well as using the excellent computational facilities of the University and helping train students in the use of computational techniques doc1647 none This combined experimental and computational effort investigates novel properties of stable intergranular films. Stable films have nanoscale structures and compositions which would not be stable as a bulk phase and, therefore, can have physical properties that are not found in bulk phases. For instance, the dielectric constant and the observed atomic structure of the intergranular films cannot be extrapolated from bulk behavior. Furthermore, some physical attributes that are normally tailored by engineering processes, such as film width, become equilibrium quantities that are naturally uniform and highly tunable with composition. Their stability is assumed to be associated with remnant order induced into their molecular structure from the crystalline materials proximate to them; we seek to characterize experimentally these films in silicate and titanate systems and find theoretical and computational models to categorize their behavior. The thin films will be processed with controlled composition and characterized by combined experimental techniques (EXAFS, EXELFS, ELNES, VEELS and VUV spectroscopies, and HREM). Models will be developed and correlated with experiments by combined ab-initio, density functional theory, OLCAO, molecular dynamics, and interface thermodynamics. %%% The production of new technological devices often depends on the development of a novel material or a new way to process materials that generate novel properties. With ever smaller devices, there is an increased demand on precise material properties---as well as an increased technological reward. In some materials, such as the silicates and titanates we investigate, the properties of materials undergo acute changes as the size of the material system (i.e. the materials and their architecture within a device) shrinks. These changes can have profound effects on our ability to enhance and control properties. For instance, the electronic properties of very thin films may be modified for particular devices and our ability to engineer them may be enhanced due to the physical effects of their small size. We will attempt to characterize and understand these effects with an integrated experimental, theoretical, and computational approach. We expect that our results may used directly to enhance the properties of existing electronic devices and that our research may illuminate specific material properties that result in the production of new technologies. This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Proposals for Cooperative Activities in Materials Sciences between the National Science Foundation and the European Commission: NSF (00-18 doc1648 none This project emphasizes the principles of problem solving and program design using Scheme. Students learn to solve problems in a systematic manner and are able to use those skills in many domains, not just computing. The pedagogical approach is based on the belief that the conventional approach to computer science in high school is inappropriate, and, with an emphasis on code generation and successive modification by steps, is more consistent with computer science from the early s. The emphasis on grammar rules is inconsistent with current methods. The results-dated methodologies have been that secondary schools have small computer science enrollments and encounter diminishing interest even by the more mathematically inclined students. The project is based on the introductory computer science curriculum developed at Rice University, and the PIs have tested these methods in high schools and found the students to be more receptive and to learn more about computational problem solving. The approximately 310 participating teachers learn a dramatically different and more applicable approach through workshops at Northeastern University, Adelphi University, Brown University, the University of Utah, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Teachers are introduced to the new content, approaches and software. A central Web repository is maintained for distribution and exchange. The teachers receive forty contact hours and extensive follow-up activities and supports plus 3 graduate credits doc1649 none This small grant for preliminary research provides funding for analysis and synthesis of self-aligning grippers and fixtures, with an emphasis on demonstrating how 2D methods extend to 3D. Small variations in initial part position and orientation can lead to jamming, slippage, and damage as industrial parts are grasped or inserted into fixtures. Although manufacturing engineers have designed self-aligning grippers based on intuition, the goal is to define optimal solutions that depend on detailed part geometry and the mechanics of pushing, toppling, jamming, and accessibility. Algorithms will be developed that take as input a CAD model of the part and generate as output specifications for self-aligning grippers and fixtures. The investigator and one Ph.D. student will implement such grippers and perform mechanical experiments using the industrial robot in the lab to study part mechanics and performance in terms of Mean Time Between Failure. This project should produce new theoretical models of the mechanics of part acquisition, new data structures, and new hardware configurations that will improve the reliability of automated industrial manufacturing systems. The gripper hardware will be inexpensive and have near-term applicability. Self-aligning grippers can simplify assembly, increase reliability, decrease implementation cost, and facilitate setup for a broad range of manufacturing applications doc1650 none Wu This theoretical study addresses the formation of quantum dots and wires by self assembly. The study will address the effect of several fabrication parameters on the stability, growth and restructuring of thin multi-component solid films on single-component substrates. Surface and bulk diffusions appear to be two major mechanisms. The effort will begin with a re-derivation of the governing equations for thermochemical responses of multiphase solids under stress. The objective is to recapture the factors that have been heretofore thought to be negligible. More specifically, the theory will be reexamined for completeness and generality in chemical potential, with particular emphasis on the role of mismatch parameter. Analytical considerations will include, but not limited to, the morphological and compositional instabilities of multi-component solids, and the effect of substrate pattern generated by non-lithographic methods, such as the periodic strain field of a buried misfit dislocation network or a compliant substrate, on self-organization. The proposed investigation is expected to have a significant impact on the ongoing effort in producing nano-scale semiconductor islands of uniform size and distribution. Such self-organized small structures are thought to be the future of new electronic devices in just 15 or 20 years when conventional transistors and circuits can not be miniaturized further. In this way, the project will have contributed to the advance of another milestone technology, as well as to the understanding of a new phenomenon in the micron-to-nano range doc1651 none This award provides funds to aid in the purchase of a laser confocal microscope and related imaging equipment for use by faculty and students at the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois. The instrument will be placed in separate room where students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty will have ready access. Among the research areas that will benefit from availability of the instrument are studies of calcium channels in muscle, cardiac myofilament responsiveness to calcium, microtubule translocation in growing axons, and G protein signaling by tubulin. The instrument will also be used to train students at all levels in use of confocal microscopy, a key technology in modern cell biology. Over the last decade, the availability of the confocal microscope has revolutionized study of three-dimensional structure in living tissues and, together with a variety of injectable reporter molecules, of the intracellular location of calcium and other molecules important in the regulation of cellular function. The planned uses for the instrument are typical of the types of studies that have been made possible by the development of the confocal microscopy doc1652 none As the requirements for machines, structures, vehicles, and other mechanical systems become more ambitious and more demanding, the order and complexity of the mathematical models that must be confronted for analysis and design increases. Physical insight and analytical methods become less effective. Yet as the system dimension increases, so does the likelihood of multiple time-scales. The presence of two or more widely separated time-scales offers the opportunity for system decomposition and consequent simplified analysis and design. For a linear time-invariant system, both time and frequency domain methods are available to exploit this opportunity. For a nonlinear system, the analytical singular perturbation method is available. But this method is only applicable to a mathematical model in singularly perturbed form, and this form is not generally obtainable without a priori knowledge of the multiple time-scale structure. The research objective is thus to develop a methodology for time-scale identification and reduced-order model development for application to finite dimensional nonlinear dynamical systems. Under previous NSF funding, the foundations of the methodology, which is based on finite-time Lyapunov exponents and vectors, have been developed. In the current project the methodology is used to investigate the time-scale structure in nonlinear dynamical systems that model mechanical systems. Exemplary systems that have yielded to the analytical singular perturbation method, and thus are known to have two or more time-scales, are investigated first to further refine the methodology. Next systems either known or suspected to have multiple time-scale behavior are investigated. An approach is then developed for using the time-scale information to construct a state transformation that will bring the system model into a form amenable to reduced-order analysis and control design. The research will establish a significant new capability for nonlinear system analysis and design. The order reduction, better conditioning, and physical understanding -- previously obtainable only for low-order systems by clever analysts applying the analytical singular perturbation method -- will be obtainable for general nonlinear dynamical systems doc1653 none This award provides support for purchase of a phosphor-imager to be placed in the University s Plant Biotechnology Center. There are already several items of genomics-related equipment in the Center, but there is no shared-use imager, a workhorse instrument in modern molecular biology. Among the uses planned are research on the structure and function of expressed genes, functional and comparative genomics, gene mapping, plant cell-cycle studies, investigation of non-host disease resistance mechanisms, and regulation and function of lipid-based signaling. In addition to advancing research, the instrument will broaden the training of students, post-doctoral fellows, and visiting scientists by providing greater access to the latest and most up-to-date equipment. Imagers of this type replace the use of film in many research procedures that require localization of radioactively-labelled proteins and nucleic acids after polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. Use of the imager speeds up detection and measurement, as well as avoiding the need for chemicals and equipment used in film processing doc1654 none This proposal proposes a three year program of studies on nonlinear dynamics in diode lasers that arise from filtered optical feedback (FOF). FOF differs from conventional feedback (COF) in that the feedback light is spectrally filtered by an optical element that is external to the laser, before coupling back into the laser. The alterations in the dynamics due to FOF, when compared to COF are quite dramatic; more significantly, the proposal provides clear evidence of how FOF can be used to control the dynamics of the laser. Such control can be used to force the laser into regions of the dynamical phase space where it exhibits a desired dynamical response. In addition to the fundamental scientific issues that are inherent to FOF in diode lasers, the application of the control capability towards two ends will be explored. These are chaotic encryption and signal routing. In case of the former, the emphasis will be on making the wavelength of the laser light chaotic, and then controlling the bandwidth of the chaotic fluctuations. The direct impact of the work will be on telecom systems, and the infrastructure that is critical to all-optical communication systems. A successful completion of the project may spur the telecommunications industry to view FOF as a possible control mechanism for tailoring the dynamical response of diode lasers. The broader impact will be on the laser dynamics community, and especially those that are studying issues like COF, optical injection, and bifurcations in diode lasers. In addition, because FOF is a prototypical laboratory example of logistic maps, and a test bed for mathematical models that rely on time-delayed equations, it s anticipated that the applied mathematics and nonlinear dynamics community will be influenced by this work doc1655 none This award addresses the issue of inter-story drift and failure mechanisms that control the design of a structural system by carrying out a detailed and comprehensive study of both existing and evolving pushover methods. There have been several recent efforts to enhance FEMA-273 ( ) type procedures by indirectly incorporating high-mode effects in the evaluation process. While these new procedures have been shown to work in selective studies, a comprehensive evaluation of such techniques which identify their scope and limitations has yet to be conducted. The proposed evaluation will be carried out on a selected group of six existing buildings for which instrumented data from recent earthquakes is available. The six instrumented buildings will cover a practical range of building periods. The building models to be used in the analyses will be calibrated to measured response thereby ensuring the reliability of the ensuing evaluation exercises. These evaluations tasks will be conducted in two phases: the first phase will focus on the three FEMA-273 procedures, and the second phase will deal with improved multi-mode and adaptive pushover techniques. The importance of this project is to be recognized in light of the fact that the current state-of-practice in seismic engineering has begun to accept pushover analyses as a possible next step in the advancement of performance-based seismic engineering (PBSE). Until such time that routine nonlinear time-history analyses can be carried out in a design office, the need to develop simplified yet reliable static procedures is critical to the advancement of PBSE doc1656 none This award provides support for acquisition of a modern light microscope for shared use by faculty, graduate and undergraduate students investigating problems in microbial ecology, vertebrate neurobiology, and plant physiology.. Recent technical advances in microscopy have revolutionized understanding of the biological world by permitting, among others, the tracing of functional consequences of trace gene expression and the inference of subcellular and genetic structure. The funds provided will aid in purchase of a research-grade, inverted light microscope with flexible fluorescence and digital imaging capabilities. The instrument will enable research in three specific areas: microbial behavioral ecology and genetic diversity in environmental samples, mammalian neuronal synaptogenesis, and plant cellular morphogenesis. The instrument will also be used to improve laboratory course experiences for undergraduate and graduate students, and to introduce students to modern techniques for the quantitative visualization of cellular information doc1657 none The project develops nitride-based cold cathode electron emitters capable of operating under near-atmospheric pressure and in chemically active environments, and works out commercially feasible fabrication techniques for these devices. Efforts will be concentrated on nanocrystalline boron carbon nitride (BN CN) materials. These are excellent candidates for field emitter devices, with low turn-on field strengths and high emission currents, even in relatively high-pressure regimes. Both show excellent chemical, thermal, and mechanical stability, high sputtering resistance, and, therefore, longer cathode lifetimes. They are compatible with conventional silicon substrates, allowing straightforward device integration with excitation circuitry, amplifiers, and signal conditioners. They are superior alternatives to diamond and other carbon-based thin films, being easier to deposit and pattern, and more resistant to attack by oxygen and water vapor. Some of the critical electronic properties will be optimized by post-growth modification techniques. Ion implantation and irradiation with x-rays and excimer lasers will be used to lower the threshold voltage, without detrimental changes to emission stability. We will also model the electron emission process in these films. Our model will cover electron injection from the substrate to the emitting layer, electron transport through the material, and finally emission into the vacuum. Naturally, we expect the modeling and characterization phases of the study to feedback to each other, ultimately resulting in an effective tool for device design. The final stage of the project will be development of a nitride-based pressure sensor. In contrast to current technologies, these microsensors should allow precise, accurate and reproducible pressure measurements over many decades of pressure. They also have the potential for integration in corrosive and high temperature environments. Finally, the drive and sensing electronics, which could be integrated on the same chip, can be significantly simpler than what is currently needed by conventional capacitive and piezoelectric sensors doc1658 none The central object of study are Schrodinger operators with potentials displaying aperiodic order. In one dimension there have been recent advances in the understanding of their spectral and quantum dynamical properties, particularly in the case of the Fibonacci potential and related models, so-called Sturmian potentials, which are the standard models of one-dimensional quasicrystals. It is the goal of the proposed research to extend the theory to larger classes of potentials in one dimension and to tackle the higher dimensional case. A crucial tool in one dimension is the trace map, an energy-indexed dynamical system which can be used to characterize and study the spectrum of the operators. Along with combinatorial partition results and Gordon-type criteria one can obtain good bounds on generalized eigenfunctions from which one can deduce spectral and quantum dynamical consequences. It appears feasible that this approach is applicable to potentials beyond the class of Sturmian potentials -- sufficiently low complexity should suffice to induce partitions and trace maps. In higher dimensions the main goal is to find an analog of Gordon s criterion which can serve as a link between combinatorics and spectral theory. The mathematics of aperiodic order is a young emerging field that has sparked a lot of research activity since the mid-nineties. Researchers from disciplines as diverse as spectral theory, group theory, dynamical systems, combinatorics, and algebraic topology have found a common ground that was motivated by the discovery of quasicrystals in and the subsequent reconsideration of the nature of order and ordered structures. By now, quite a number of structural models for quasicrystals have been proposed. Joint efforts are being undertaken to investigate their properties and shed light on why quasicrystals exist, how they form, why they are stable. Regarding their electronic transport properties, it is expected that quasicrystals may exhibit anomalous behavior. It is therefore planned to study transport properties of Sturmian and related models from this perspective doc1659 none Professor David E. Bergbreiter, of the Department of Chemistry at Texas A&M University, is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his studies of new roles for soluble polymers in homogeneous catalysis. By designing polymer supports with tunable solubility, Professor Bergbreiter will develop schemes permitting the facile separation, recovery, and reuse of the polymer-bound catalysts for various metal-catalyzed reactions, including the Heck reaction, Suzuki coupling, and alkene isomerization. Polyvalent interpolymer hydrogen-bonding will be examined as an approach to the formation of insoluble, recoverable polymer gels. The conditions for minimal interpolymer interaction of two different supported catalysts or metal complexes will be defined by variable temperature 31P NMR spectroscopy, studies which will also provide insight into intrapolymer complexation. The results of these studies, coupled with the solubility control afforded by soluble polymers, will be used to develop new combinatorial approaches to catalyst testing. While soluble catalysts offer many advantages over their insoluble counterparts, they are often difficult to separate from the desired products of their reactions, a problem with regards to both contamination of the products and difficulty in recovery or reuse of the catalyst. By exploring polymeric supports for catalysts which are soluble under desired reaction conditions but are rendered insoluble or easily separable under appropriate conditions by their detailed structures, and with the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor David E. Bergbreiter, of the Department of Chemistry at Texas A&M University, is developing schemes permitting the facile separation, recovery, and reuse of polymer-bound catalysts for a variety of metal-catalyzed reactions doc1660 none A conference in honor of Ernie Shult will be held at Kansas State University, from March 22 through March 25, . The conference will involve approximately thirty talks on those parts of algebra and geometry to which Professor Shult has made significant contributions in a long and distinguished career. Thus, the conference will be concerned with developments in the theory of finite simple groups, with geometries related to those groups, and with generalizations of such geometries. Group theory can be described as the algebra associated with symmetry, and finite groups in particular afford a rich mathematical structure and wealth of applications. The finite simple groups may be viewed as the atoms of which all finite groups are composed, and for this reason, the announcement, twenty years ago, of the classification of the finite simple groups was a milestone in mathematics. The conference will focus on developments which promise to provide, perhaps for the first time, a satisfactory treatment of this fundamental result. The interplay between geometry and group theory has always been enriching for both subjects and will provide a second focus for this conference doc1661 none INT Schriver This U.S.-Czech research project between David Schriver of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Petr Hellinger of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Prague, examines the physical characteristics of wave processes in space plasmas through use of numerical simulations and advanced data analysis. The Czech participants who have strengths in numerical plasma simulation methods also belong to the European Wave Experimental Consortium and bring a source of new experimental data to this effort from CLUSTER II (a four satellite project of the European Space Agency). The U.S. team contributes expertise in analytical theory and other numerical simulations, including particle-in-cell and Vlasov codes. The researchers expect to draw upon their comparisons of experimental and simulation data to explain observed phenomena in key regions including solar wind, bow shock, magnetotail and magnetopause, polar cusp and auroral zone. Results of their collaboration should contribute to our fundamental understanding of waves and wave-particle interactions in the Earth s magnetosphere. This atmospheric sciences project featuring magnetospheric physics fulfils the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc1662 none Buildings for Performance-Based Seismic Engineering : This is a collaborative research project, with separate awards requested, between research teams at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of California at Los Angeles. The purpose of this research is to develop and implement the general methodology and to test it on a set of benchmark RC frames. The awarded project will merge state-of-the-art techniques in nonlinear frame analysis with state-of-the-art methods in sensitivity and reliability analysis to develop a general methodology for assessing the effects of propagation of uncertainties in nonlinear dynamic analyses of reinforced concrete buildings for performance-based engineering. The following sources of inherent and epistemic uncertainties will be considered in the study: (a) intrinsic variabilities randomness in the material properties; (b) inherent and epistemic uncertainties in the global seismological variables (earthquake magnitude M, site-to-source distance R, and local site condition S); (c) intrinsic variabilities randomness in the earthquake loading history; and (d) modeling uncertainties associated with the nonlinear RC frame models and the stochastic earthquake excitation model doc1663 none Hans Andersen of Stanford University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to continue development of theoretical methods to calculate dynamical properties of liquids, supercooled liquids, and glasses at the molecular level. The basic strategy is to use a formally exact theory to create approximate kinetic theories of liquids, and then perform molecular dynamics computer simulations to test the accuracy of these approximations. Practical and accurate approximations capable of describing important physical processes that take place in low temperature liquids will be developed through this research. The specific objectives of this project include: (1) understanding and describing quantitatively the change that occurs in the dynamics of molecules as a liquid material is cooled and molecules become trapped for an extended period of time in a cage formed by its neighbors, (2) developing an understanding of how structural changes that take place in supercooled liquids can affect the dynamics, (3) understanding the variety of relaxation processes that take place and the relationships among them, and ultimately (4) understanding the very slow relaxation processes at very low temperature that lead to the formation of a glass at the glass transition. Glasses are technologically important materials made from a variety of components, both organic and inorganic, both low molecular weights substances and polymers. Examples include ordinary materials such as window glass and food containers, as well as advanced materials such as fiber optics for telecommunications, optical electronics, and solid electrolytes. The properties of these materials depend on how they are made, using methods that usually involves preparation of a high temperature liquids followed by various cooling and processing steps. The creation of optimal performance materials is currently guided largely by empirical observations. Design of rational processing procedures is expected to be enhanced by the increased understanding of dynamics of these materials and their corresponding liquids that will emerge from this research effort doc1664 none This Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) award supports the development of a framework, comprised of models and efficient solution algorithms, for two different problem domains. One that is characterized as multi-stage, sequence-dependent group scheduling problem with carry-over setups, and the other with no carry-over setups. Applications of the former exist in printed circuit board (PCB) assembly, while the latter is applicable in hardware (discrete parts) manufacturing such as those supported by cellular manufacturing. The emphasis is on the development of scheduling models that truly reflect real operational constraints. In a two-stage PCB assembly process, these include performing the setup required on either stage based on a surrogate board group representing all board types, and performing the setup on the second stage in anticipation of the arriving board group. The impact of carry-over sequence dependency is assessed by recognizing that the setup time required of a surrogate board group on either stage is dependent upon the entire set of preceding surrogate board groups that have so far been processed. A variety of performance measures including the minimization of total completion time, mean flow time, and weighted tardiness will be considered in order for the producer to be highly responsive to a variety of customer needs. Recognizing that both problems belong to a class of notoriously difficult NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems, the structure of the problems will be exploited to develop efficient lower bounds. For the minimization of mean flow time, special cases will be investigated to identify those that can be optimally solved in polynomial time. For completely solving problem instances that have industrial merit, computationally efficient solution techniques that combine the underlying concepts of branch-and-bound aided by filtered-beam search, and tabu search will be developed and tested. The lower-bounding mechanisms will be embedded in these techniques to not only seek solutions with guaranteed quality, but also use them advantageously to terminate the search to enhance computational efficiency. For the total completion time minimization problem with no carry-over setups, an approach based on an equivalent formulation of the asymmetric generalized traveling salesman problem will be investigated. Finally, the solution techniques developed will be tested with data obtained from industrial collaborators to validate their computational efficiency and ability to obtain solutions with guaranteed quality. The successful completion of this project will provide both electronics and hardware manufacturing companies with methodological frameworks for rapidly generating schedules with guaranteed quantifiable performance. The insightful research findings so obtained will also enhance the existing graduate courses in scheduling at Oregon State University and University of Texas at Dallas doc1665 none The deformation of soils in the field and laboratory are commonly observed to concentrate into shear bands formed during strain localization. While this mechanism is widely appreciated by engineers and researchers, it remains difficult to model, predict and analyze. The main difficulty can be attributed to the fact that while classical continuum mechanics models that do not include microstructure length scales can predict the onset of instability, they cannot predict the size and evolution of the shear bands. In particular, the classical theories of plasticity break down in the post-bifurcation regime. The main objective of this study is to develop a microstructure based continuum model to study deformation and localization in granular materials. The model is based on crystal plasticity but includes two microstructure length scales; one associated with the plastic curvature (orientation re-distribution) and the other related to the porosity re-distribution, both of which can be directly quantified by experiments. The study is unique in that the microstructure model parameters are determined directly from measurements. Granular specimens are hardened by impregnation with resin and their microstructure captured by means of non-invasive x-ray computer tomography. Evolution of the microstructure model parameters is monitored at various stages of shear deformation. The model will be implemented into a 3-D finite element code and used to identify deformation patterning, softening, and instabilities (shear banding and liquefaction) in boundary value problems. The experimental and analytical program will lead to a better understanding of the phenomenon of bifurcation and localization and to analytical methods for analyzing strain localization not only in laboratory specimens, but also in practical boundary value problems in geotechnical engineering. The outcome of this work would also have implications to the modeling of other type of materials such as metals and composites that exhibit deformation instabilities and shear banding doc1666 none Use of FRP composites for strengthening of existing structures have rapidly increased in the last decade. However, in applications, some fundamental aspects are still not well understood, specifically those related to performance and behavior of FRP-retrofitted members under cyclic loading and the role of environmental effects on this behavior. The proposed research, through rigorous experimental, analytical, and numerical studies, will contribute to better understanding of retrofitted systems behavior under monotonic and cyclic loads combined with environmental effects. This will form a basis for development of an integrated design methodology for safe applications and for better assessment of durability of such systems, which are becoming widespread around the world doc1667 none This grant provides funding for the development of an intrinsic watermark technique for solids bounded by free-form surfaces. This technique will extract intrinsic properties of solids, which are not affected by coordinate transformations, random noise and malicious action of the user. This watermark can be destroyed only if the digital model describing the shape is changed so much that the newly represented object cannot be considered any more approximately identical to the original solid in the database. The developed computational methods will allow us to check if the two solids are equal within a certain accuracy. Furthermore, the method will provide a stronger test, which relies on intrinsic surface properties of the models. Recently copyright issues for digital contents are becoming a serious problem. Especially when the copyrighted digital contents are exposed to the internet, they are an easy target for malicious parties to produce pirate digital contents for unauthorized sales. If successful, the results of this research will lead to a method which will help identify whether the suspicious solid model is copied from an original solid model. Hence, one would be in a position to settle legal disputes in some cases that appear to be beyond the scope of currently available methods. The proposed work will also contribute to computational tools for digital solid shape identification. For example, in an electronic commerce environment through the internet, a 3D digital catalog could allow customers to search for merchandise similar to a specific design doc1668 none Professor George Majetich in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Georgia is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his research on the efficient syntheses of four triterpene natural products. The natural products will be synthesized from a common intermediate using a biomimetic cascade strategy to form three rings and several carbon-carbon bonds and asymmetric centers in one step. The stereochemistry of one of the triterpene natural products, peradione, has been previously determined by NMR analysis and is possibly incorrect. New insight into the correct stereochemistry of peradione will be achieved by the total synthesis of the preferred stereoisomer. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor George Majetich is developing new, more efficient ways to synthesize four structurally-related natural products. The synthetic pathways of these four organic compounds proceed through a common intermediate. In these natural products were isolated from a plant found in Central Asia which is used for treating liver disorders. There is a question as to whether the three-dimensional structure of one of these organic compounds has been correctly assigned. Professor Majetich s research should resolve this ambiguity doc1669 none PI: William Schucany This award provides funds to partially support the conference Nonparametrics in Large, Multidimensional Data Mining. The money is used to support junior researchers and Ph.D. students who will attend the conference. Women and minority young investigators and Ph.D. students will be actively recruited and encouraged to apply. The two-day conference will be held at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, on January 12-13, , and will bring together a group of experts from industry, computer science and statistics to discuss cutting-edge research activities in the areas of data mining and knowledge discovery in databases. This holistic approach is necessary to push the research frontiers in these important disciplines. Leading researchers will present new nonparametric developments in an environment that is conducive to the development of new human resources doc1662 none Buildings for Performance-Based Seismic Engineering : This is a collaborative research project, with separate awards requested, between research teams at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of California at Los Angeles. The purpose of this research is to develop and implement the general methodology and to test it on a set of benchmark RC frames. The awarded project will merge state-of-the-art techniques in nonlinear frame analysis with state-of-the-art methods in sensitivity and reliability analysis to develop a general methodology for assessing the effects of propagation of uncertainties in nonlinear dynamic analyses of reinforced concrete buildings for performance-based engineering. The following sources of inherent and epistemic uncertainties will be considered in the study: (a) intrinsic variabilities randomness in the material properties; (b) inherent and epistemic uncertainties in the global seismological variables (earthquake magnitude M, site-to-source distance R, and local site condition S); (c) intrinsic variabilities randomness in the earthquake loading history; and (d) modeling uncertainties associated with the nonlinear RC frame models and the stochastic earthquake excitation model doc1671 none This project will examine mistaken eyewitness identifications as a principal source of erroneous convictions. Although a growing body of empirical research by psychologists provides insights into the factors contributing to mistaken identifications, and with increasing frequency, psychologists are called upon to provide courtroom testimony about those factors. Such expert testimony, however, is often criticized as unreliable. This project will examine the empirical questions of reliability and generalization of findings using a meta-analysis of existing studies of face recognition, in both the eyewitness and laboratory research paradigms. In particular, the project will examine the strength and reliability of research findings concerning a large number of factors thought to influence identification accuracy and the relationships among research methods and the magnitude of effects produced by manipulations of substantive variables. Factors to be addressed include stable (e.g., sex, race) and malleable characteristics (e.g., stress, disguise) of both participants and targets, as well as situational (e.g., exposure duration) and procedural (e.g., lineup presentation) variables. Careful attention will be given in the meta-analysis to the different types of study characteristics, independent variables, and their operationalization employed in the research. The project, as a result, will identify research and theoretical domains where findings are on the strongest and weakest footings and, most importantly, will test a series of hypotheses about methodological and substantive factors that enhance or limit the generalizability and theoretical implications of research results doc1672 none Chemistry (12) The contributions that chemical laboratory technicians make in modern workplaces cannot be overstated. They have a unique ability to make sense of subtle differences in the appearance of materials and the behavior of techniques and instruments. The challenge for chemical technology educators is to provide students with meaningful experiences that prepare them for these responsibilities. In , the NSF awarded a grant to our institute to develop a model for a contextually-driven, laboratory-based curriculum in chemical technology. Three modules are being fully developed: the chemistry of aqueous systems, the chemistry of terrestrial systems, and the chemistry of polymer systems. A fourth module, the synthesis of modern drug release systems, is being outlined as well. The project team is preparing to launch its final stage of development and alpha testing based upon promising feedback from students and faculty. This renewal proposal captures this momentum by: (1) fully developing and testing module 4, the synthesis of modern drug release systems; (2) developing two advanced-level modules focused on petroleum refining and computer-based data analysis; (3) beta testing modules 1,2,and 3; and (4) engaging in strategic dissemination. The previously assembled team (materials developer, project manager and Principal Investigator are continuing and a new partner (leading the beta testing) has been added. Both alpha and beta testing of the various modules developed are continuing. Beta testing is being carried out in a Chemical Technology program at a trade technical college. This activity is providing feedback as to the effectiveness of the modules. As a result of this renewal, the contextually-based, laboratory-driven curriculum will be completed. Discussions with commercial publishers have begun, ensuring that the curriculum will be disseminated and revised on an ongoing basis doc1673 none Through this project, the Advanced Technology Environmental Education Center (ATEEC) is building upon its strong national position by providing expanded services and innovative leadership to a growing number of constituents including 4-year institutions, environmental practitioners, and the general public. The ATEEC project is structured around the following goals and objectives: Goal 1: Strengthen science, math and technical curriculum, and instructional materials supporting advanced technology environmental education. Objectives include producing, updating, and revising environmental technology resources, assessment instruments, a best practices manual, training and curriculum models, and environmental technology core knowledge and skill list; identifying secondary and community college faculty support needs; and conducting the annual Fellows Institute for secondary and community college teachers. Goal 2: Strengthen the nation s environmental technician programs through professional development opportunities. Objectives include participating in or conducting annual professional development instructor conferences, a national conference with a professional association of environmental technology practitioners, a national Defining Environmental Technology Forum , and a national satellite on-line teleconference; and developing a national model for business industry education faculty internships. Goal 3: Strengthen education through support services for program improvement. Objectives include acting as a clearinghouse and resource center to evaluate and disseminate best practice instructional materials, activities, and products; updating and revising the environmental technology defining chart and report; and expanding the use of the national electronic job database. This project is directly impacting hundreds of environmental educators and improving the education of thousands of students throughout the nation doc1674 none Through a partnership between one of the ATE Centers of excellence and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a research university, the nation s community college and high school classrooms have access to knowledge of emerging environmental technologies and of on-going environmental research. This effort allows environmental technology education programs to not simply react to the changing demands of the workplace, but rather positions students and faculty to anticipate and prepare for emerging developments in the field. The project is defined by two broad goals: (1) to develop curriculum and educational materials that focus upon emerging knowledge and technologies in the environmental field; and (2) to establish a faculty exchange and professional development program to broaden understanding of the connectedness of research to applied education and the workplace. Outcomes of the project include: (1) the development of a series of learning modules focused upon Emerging Environmental Technologies and Environmental Health Impacts ; (2) community college and high school environmental educators involvement with MIT scientists in a variety of venues; and (3) a Critical Issues Conference and published report focused upon strengthening the linkage between environmental researchers, educators, and practitioners doc1675 none Recent changes in the global business environment dictate the need for engineering technicians to obtain new skills in design-for-manufacturability, computer-aided design, teamwork, and communication. In addition, there is a significant workforce shortage of engineering technicians across the U.S. and particularly within the areas of Iowa and South Dakota served by this project. This project focuses on improving the way that the above topics are taught in community college manufacturing education programs. It also focuses on increasing the pool of qualified applicants to these programs. Four, flexible course modules and instructor-training materials are being developed that may be infused into a wide range of existing curricula. The modules integrate design for manufacturability, teamwork skills and computer aided-design content to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of instruction. Summative evaluation tools are being used to assess the impacts of the modules on student skills. Women who are completing an internship in a baccalaureate program in technical training are delivering a program designed to recruit female students into manufacturing-related programs at three Midwestern community colleges. In addition, these interns are supporting community college technical instruction to supplement release time for community college instructors who are involved in this project. An outcome of this project is larger numbers of better prepared workers that will lead to a more competitive U.S. manufacturing industry. The eventual impact on students is a heightened awareness of the interaction between design and manufacturing, and the skills to effectively operate in a team environment doc1676 none The future of chemistry-based technician education depends upon building a world-class, national network that connects local activities and nurtures sustainability. The American Chemical Society (ACS) provides leadership in these technician activities, by building on existing chemistry-based technician education activities at ACS, communicating with other chemistry-based technician education activities, and establishing a foundation upon which new activities that support excellence in two-year college chemistry education can be developed. To accomplish this goal, the project (1) develops a web-based system to update, validate, maintain and disseminate performance-based voluntary, industry, skill standards; (2) establishes a network of consultants to build and maintain local partnerships as a basis for meeting technician education needs; (3) develops an on-line national clearinghouse for information in chemistry-based technician education; (4) provides professional development for two-year college faculty; and (5) provides career information to attract students to become technicians in chemistry-related industry doc1677 none There is an urgent need to increase the number of optical technicians in U.S. industry to maintain a vital competitive advantage in international markets. This project is developing new educational resources that will both emphasize the appeal of this career path to students and support continuing education. These tools are based upon exploration of real data to develop the necessary technical skills. This is being accomplished by a new synergistic effort that builds upon existing resources and the demonstrated expertise of the team. New educational tools are being developed for testing in the two-year college curriculum in optics technology and the communications department at Monroe Community College in Rochester, NY. These new tools include instructional materials co-developed by the academic partners and based upon previous ATE grant work developed by the Center for Image Processing in Education. The materials are also being developed for use in pre-college settings in collaboration with high school teachers. Faculty of the colleges are conducting workshops for K-12 teachers that demonstrate the use of imaging technologies for science and technology education. Particular emphasis is being placed on those schools that have a large minority population and those who deal with students who have difficulty in learning in a typical secondary school setting. A lending library of imaging tools is being established for K-12 education for those institutions that do not have the necessary resources. In order to meet the pressing need for continuing education for established optical imaging technicians, portions of the programs are being adapted for use in the industrial environments under the guidance of members of the Advanced Precision Optics Manufacturing Association (APOMA) and the Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T). These industrial members are also participating in recruitment and dissemination efforts of this project doc1678 none Thomas Nelson Community College (TNCC) and its educational and private industrial partners in the Virginia Peninsula Workforce Development Center are establishing a Manufacturing Excellence Consortium (MEC). The project s three goals are to: 1) adapt and implement Sinclair Community College s ATE-funded module clusters in Principles of Mathematics, Principles of Science, Design for Manufacturing, Manufacturing Processes and Materials, and Manufacturing Systems and Automation; 2) strengthen and expand TNCC s existing cooperative education program by training faculty in co-op development, preparing faculty for co-op supervisory roles, adopting a labor exchange database compatible with that currently in use by Old Dominion University, and providing release time for faculty industrial internships; and 3) equip a laboratory modeled after Sinclair s Advanced Manufacturing Center. TNCC is disseminating its results to the two other Manufacturing Excellence Consortia in the Virginia Community College System for eventual dissemination to state and regional partners doc1679 none This project involves a network of six community colleges, university experts, and industry leaders. During the project, they establish, pilot, assess, and document a contextual, collaborative process to better prepare technical workers for the information technologies service industry. Goals include alleviating the shortage of IT workers, improving technical and business skills and abilities of IT specialists, increasing entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial skills, and creating learning networks of faculty. The structure for contextual and systemic skills is learning through a simulated information technology enterprise (L-SITE), a realistic but fictitious enterprise that operates under varied conditions in each of the community colleges and represents the complexities and uncertainties of the real business world. The collaborative plans to design two different information technology service enterprises as templates for systemic learning for students in IT and other technical curricula. Using the two L-SITEs as templates, student teams simulate business operations in a high performance context under the rapidly changing, global, and challenging transactional, technical, and market circumstances facing IT and other industries. Thus, students learn by experiencing various challenges and problems they may face in the real workplace. Each L-SITE is to be incorporated into the curriculum in each college in two basic formats: a year two practicum for IT degree students and experiential learning modules to be integrated into other courses and programs. In addition to the design network, five field test colleges prepare for subsequent adoption, and four international colleges provide global connections and experiences for the U.S. students and faculty doc1680 none Project The Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University is performing case studies on four centers and six projects funded by the Advanced Technological Education (ATE) Program to develop recommendations to strengthen both the ATE centers and projects and the colleges at which they are housed. The ATE program encourages change in the education of technicians particularly at two year colleges. For this change to be sustained and replicated, it must extend beyond the grant period and achieve institutionalization at the community college. Using primarily qualitative methodologies, the study documents the extent to which the ATE projects have become integrated into the broader activities of the community colleges, and the effects of the program on the underlying barriers known to frustrate initiatives aimed at reforming and improving technician education. Questions to be addressed include how the projects affect the pedagogy of technicians and others in the two year college; how the partnerships with industry and business affect the relationship between those institutions and the college; how the projects affect the development of articulation agreements with four year colleges and relations with secondary schools; and how the projects influence the relation between technical and academic faculty at the institution. The study identifies mechanisms by which activities and improvements generated in the projects are embedded in the missions of the schools, and how they engage faculty in professional development and the activities used to educate students doc1681 none 34 Meeting the critical need identified by state industry partners, this project focuses on the development of technician training program components that prepare process technicians or operators where employment demand far exceeds supply and continuously incorporates advances in the technologies of operation. The partnership of five community colleges, industry partners, a state agency, and a university, represents a unique set of capacities, technological expertise and demographic diversity by adapting science, mathematics and communication courses developed by other ATE projects. The project through the development of a continuously adaptive set of advanced process technology operations modules addresses (1) unit operations, (2) process safety operations, and (3) systematic preventative maintenance quality (including troubleshooting in emergency and malfunction events) for the technician operator. The modules are web-based, multimedia presentations of new content topics with interactive simulation models doc1682 none This project is being conducted by a consortium of two-year and four-year institutions including Finger Lakes Community College, Fulton Montgomery Community College, New York City Technical College, and Hofstra University in cooperation with the New York State Education Department to systemically reform Advanced Technological Education (ATE) curriculum in New York State. The three-year New York State Curriculum for Advanced Technological Education Project (NYS CATE) is developing, field testing, and institutionalizing 14 articulated, state-sanctioned grade 9-14 Advanced Technological Education curriculum modules within three overarching areas of technology: Bio Chemical Technology, Information Technology, and Physical Technology (materials and manufacturing). NYSCATE is engaging community college, university, and high school faculty; industrialists; state-level policy makers; and NSF ATE Centers of Excellence as collaborators in developing exemplary materials and in unifying secondary and postsecondary segments of the New York State ATE delivery system. In its third year, the Project will expand the field test of its products to additional sites in New York and three other states to bring a standards-driven, academically integrative, pedagogically contemporary perspective to ATE curriculum and instruction doc1683 none PROJECT SUMMARY This project is a collaboration among Rockford s public middle and high schools, NIU s Colleges of Engineering and Engineering Technology and Liberal Arts and Sciences, Rock Valley Community College, and local businesses and industries. It builds on the success of a pilot study undertaken in five Rockford high schools. The goal is to improve math, science, technology and English education for all students in grades 7-12 in the Rockford School system, but with a special emphasis on the needs of those who do not traditionally take higher level science, mathematics and technology classes, including minorities, females, and a range of average students. A multi-disciplined project staff will work with teams of teachers from all middle and high schools in the district. During the first year, the project will train teachers in interdisciplinary problem- and project-based learning; integrated curricula; new assessment procedures, including improved traditional strategies and procedures and non-traditional (authentic) ones; national and state standards; and a broader variety and repertoire of teaching techniques. During the second and third years, the project staff will act as mentors and coaches, providing in-classroom support for teachers as they fieldtest new methods, techniques and procedures in the classroom. Teachers will also be taught how to network constructively across disciplines and the operational design of the project will ensure that all teachers from all schools hear the same message, thereby eliminating confusion. This project will be the key implementation element in Rockford s education reform initiative and will form the basis for a fundamental and ongoing change in teaching philosophy and methods. It is designed to motivate and inspire students by helping them to acquire the necessary skills to solve real-world science, math and technology problems and to feel connected to their community. In addition to improving the teaching and learning environment one tangible product of this project willbe the design and production of multidisciplinary curriculum modules that can be used throughout the district and beyond doc1684 none Through this project, West Virginia is instituting, statewide, a new degree, the Associate of Applied Science in Technical Studies, which has two major tracks: (1) network communications and (2) computer applications. The degree is being offered at all 12 of the state s community and technical colleges, and courses are being delivered both through on-campus study and through the Web. The degree program is supported by the state s information technology (IT) industry through the advice and assistance of an industrial advisory board. The program provides students with an opportunity to work at a participating business or other organization, and provides courses that lead to vendor certifications in networking and computer applications. As part of the project, courses are being developed, evaluated, and redesigned; faculty are developing or adapting material into Web-based courses; students are participating in internships; and the program is being disseminated on a national level. The new statewide program aims to (1) offer students promising careers in IT, (2) provide the IT industry a greater number of skilled workers to support the industry s growth and development, and (3) increase the number of students with the skills and interests needed to pursue study toward the completion of an undergraduate degree in computer science and related disciplines doc1685 none The transportation industry faces a growing skills gap in its existing workforce and lacks a qualified workforce for emerging occupational positions. The primary objective of this project is to increase the supply of new and existing workers who possess the requisite core academic knowledge and technical skills needed to compete in the area of advanced transportation technologies. The four major activities which are producing programs and products are: (1) Curriculum (2) Faculty and Teacher Professional Development; (3) Recruitment and Retention of Minorities and other Nontraditional and Under-served Populations; and (4) Internship Experiences for Students and Instructors. The expected outcome is a Tech Prep Associate Degree Program for Grades 11-14 and for adults re-entering the workforce. Notable collaborations include the California Advanced Transportation Technology Initiative, College of Engineering Center for Environmental Research and Technology at the University of California Riverside, West Virginia University s National Alternative Fuels Training Center, Schatz Energy Research Center at Humboldt State University, Georgetown University Fuel Cell Program, SunLineTransit Agency, National Automotive Center, John Deere, DOE Clean Cities, Service Technicians Society (STS), and the Coachella Valley Economic Partnership doc1686 none Despite the tremendous growth in the demand for trained photonics technicians, estimated nationally to grow from 35,000 in to 740,000 in , only two community-technical colleges in New England offer associate degree programs in photonics education. If New England is going to be able to maintain its competitive position in the global marketplace, the number of educational institutions offering instruction in photonics technology must be increased, strong programs must be implemented, and students must be better prepared to enter the programs. PHOTON is a teacher faculty enhancement and laboratory improvement project. It is designed to provide middle school, secondary, postsecondary faculty, and guidance and career counselors from more than 40 educational institutions throughout New England with the skills to introduce photonics technology and laser applications into their classrooms. Although the project is being developed regionally, the model and instructional materials developed are being nationally disseminated. The project is conducting a series of workshops that develop a foundation in basic optics and laser principles. The first workshop, held in the fall of , introduces 60 teachers, faculty and their respective career and guidance counselors to the applications and career opportunities in the field of photonics. Participants are being encouraged to form alliances across educational levels that facilitate building educational pathways for students. Through a competitive application process, 40 teachers, faculty, and career and guidance counselors are being selected to attend one-week workshops in the summers of . During the workshops, educators are provided with a comprehensive optics laboratory kit to teach laser technology principles in their home institutions. Participants also receive technical assistance to implement new curricula, and a final two-day workshop will be conducted to share implementation models and strategies doc1687 none Building upon successful employer-educator partnerships, Valencia Community College, in partnership with the University of Central Florida and Rollins College, is creating a comprehensive Information Technology Workforce Development System aimed at increasing the number of skilled computer programming technicians with maximized advanced education and career options. Objectives include (1) demonstrating significant increases in the enrollment, persistence, retention, completion, and placement (into employment or the next level of education) of community college students pursuing an A.S. degree in Computer Programming and Analysis by enhancing relevant curriculum and instructional approaches; (2) maximizing and coordinating shared fiscal and human resources among higher education entities; (3) strengthening the ability of education to meet regional workforce demands; (4) enhancing the relationship among educators at the secondary, community college, and four-year institutional levels; and (5) designing and delivering new and revised curriculum and instructional strategies that incorporate industry-certified content and competencies and that address local and regional economic and workforce development needs. Activities include (1) establishing an A.S.-to-B.S. articulation agreement model; (2) enhancing recruitment, academic support, retention, and developmental advisement strategies specifically directed at A.S. computer programming students; and (3) reviewing and updating the computer programming curriculum to better meet the needs of industry and students and to better prepare students for upper division study. Expected outcomes are more rigorous academic content for courses and an increase in the number of students who are recruited into and who complete the A.S. degree in computer programming (which also means an increase in the number who are able to continue their education in four-year programs doc1688 none Project Project COMPACT is continuing to develop, test, and disseminate a new type of application-oriented, integrated curriculum software for SMET education. The project materials employ a learning situation-focused approach rather than a conventional domain-centered approach to involve students of various backgrounds and abilities in learning physics, science and technology. The goal is to engage students in exploring learning situations associated with their career objectives. COMPACT S open-ended software includes an Active Shell, Modeling Activities, Interactive Applets, Problem Solving Tutor, scriptable Instructor s Agent, Interactive Lessons and a tool to design them, Tools for Assessing student progress, and more. The Simulation module is based upon a real-life situation. It enables students to actively participate in modeling and virtual experimentation and observe the physical processes from macroscopic to microscopic levels. The package includes tools that help teachers assemble a single computer based learning environment from heterogeneous educational resources and the WWW. COMPACT s materials are designed to address a wide audience including: (1) two-year college students enrolled in science, technology and engineering programs, (2) non-science majors seeking scientific and technology literacy in anticipation of workplace demands, and (3) high school students taking physics - in particular those in Tech Prep, School to Career or vocational education programs. The software has a multilevel structure and flexible format to accommodate students with poor backgrounds in science and mathematics, those with some knowledge of algebra and geometry, as well as advanced students. The software may be used in classrooms equipped with stand-alone computers, a local network, or over the Internet for distance learning doc1689 none Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Community College, (Hayward, WI) and the University of Wisconsin-Superior are forming a partnership to build an asynchronous learning environment in which a complete four-year degree in Information Technology is being offered by both institutions simultaneously as well as two-year programs in the community college. By collaborating in this partnership, and working with businesses and industrial partners, the unique needs of underserved populations are being addressed. The Information Technology program is a shared offering that provides online specializations ranging from certificates in basic computer and Intenet skills to a complete four-year degree. The courses in this program are being mirrored, credit for credit, by each institution so that whatever a student earns at one college transfers to the other college. Faculty and staff of both institutions are developing program content in a collaborative effort where new online courses are being developed and existing synchronous courses are being adapted and made available. A virtual private network is being implemented between the partners in order to allow the development of systems integration of support services. Business and industry are partnering with the higher education institutions to help create the skilled information technology workforce needed to meet their needs and strengthen the economies of the Native American and rural communities served by the colleges. Full accreditation for the program is being sought from the North Central Association of Schools and Colleges. Evaluation and assessment of the development of online content is an ongoing, dynamic process from conceptualization to implementation of curricula that is being documented and published as a model for the development of learning in an asynchronous environment doc1690 none This project aims to enhance communication between the community college, university, high schools, industry, and local government in Tucson, Arizona through collaborative multi-level internships, curriculum development and summer high school math and science teacher conferences. Curriculum development includes creation of a Design for the Environment general education course for freshman university students and entering technician students. This course is also being offered in local high schools for community college or university credit through co-enrollment programs. It is available on the WEB. A second new course is being developed entitled a Capstone Technician course in which community college students work on team laboratory projects, are mentored by local industry, and perform classroom activities that stress ethics and safety. Industrial internships are being offered to teams of engineering and technician students in local industries such as Tucson Electric Power and Raytheon, where they work on real world projects. High school teachers shadow and participate in these internships during a three-week institute to learn about current environmental issues. In addition, the high school teachers are developing new science and math modules that can be incorporated into existing math and science courses. These fresh ideas vitalize the teachers and interest students in environmental science and engineering. Furthermore, the student intern teams are visiting the high school classrooms to follow up with the teachers and to perform hands on demonstrations with high school students. The new high school materials are being disseminated locally at a three-day high school teacher conference. The community college and university course materials are being disseminated via CD-ROM and video at national meetings and via the WEB. Program evaluation is occurring internally by the evaluation group at the University of Arizona, and externally by NSF sponsored groups such as Project MTS at Western Michigan University doc1691 none This southwestern project addresses the growing employment demand for trained Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technicians and analysts. This project also focuses on state-of-the-art GIS curriculum development incorporating work-based SCANS competencies and career-pathways into GIS degree programs. Research-based findings in technology education and minority student success, career pathways and project-based laboratory experiences form the basis for the further development of national skill standards. The objectives for the project include the: 1) Development of a series of work-based laboratory exercises that are employer-driven exposing students to the problems associated with the design and collection of reliable and accurate data sets using GPS and GIS programs; 2) Training of area secondary school faculty in the application of GIS and GPS as they apply to a variety of occupations that incorporate GIS components into current Technical Preparation agreements; 3) Increasing the number of rurally-isolated, minority secondary students who choose to participate in post-secondary GIS GPS training for employment in currently unfilled GIS positions; 4) Working with the leading GIS and GPS software companies in the development of industry-based skill standards; and 5) Sharing the curriculum developed with other colleges and NSF doc1692 none Project This project is improving the instructional capabilities of community colleges in genomic technologies. The products of this project, through the efforts of and collaborations with community college instructors, are easily accessible and readily updated instructional materials as well as community college instructors who are prepared to use them. Previous efforts were extremely successful in helping to educate community college instructors on the basic technologies that impact biotechnology-related research and in helping them to integrate appropriate courses and laboratories into their curricula. This project is facilitating expansion of the work begun under the current program that established a regional coalition among community colleges and UC Davis focused on the development of educational activities in molecular biology, genomics, and related scientific disciplines. The program is developing core curriculum material for community college faculty in the areas of modern biotechnology, genomics, functional genomics, and bioinformatics. The program offers week-long summer institutes in Molecular Biology and Molecular Diagnostics in which the principles of molecular biology and molecular diagnostics and their application in biotechnology are introduced. A new institute titled Functional Genomics and bioinformatics is being initiated. Bioinformatics is a very timely and appropriate topic for community colleges as it builds on the present and expanding skills in molecular biology, which our previous efforts have helped to foster, and on the computer science emphasis already in place at most community colleges. It is clear that there will be many career opportunities for graduates with bioinformatics training in the new millenium. Texts, manuals, laboratory kits, and other instructional materials are being made available for community college and high school instructors. Where possible, material is downloadable from the program web site to allow easy acess and rapid dissemination. http: universityextension.ucdavis.edu molbio biotech,htin doc1693 none This project expands the work begun in a previous NSF supported project to create a curriculum that integrates academic and technical education and that meets both national academic and industry skill standards. In an earlier project Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC), Baltimore City Community College (BCCC) and Southern High School in Baltimore partnered to create an integrated biology biotechnology high school curriculum unit, and pilot tested it in biology and biotechnology classes. The unit weaves together readings, activities, discussions and analyses, emphasizing a conceptual understanding of scientific principles with laboratories that stress biotechnology skills, the ability to perform technical procedures, and an understanding of the scientific basis of experiments. The curriculum relates learning to careers and real-life work. The goal of that project was to broaden the learning of both academic and technical students. Academic students conduct laboratory experiments, develop technical skills and learn about real life uses of these in occupations, careers and work places. Technical students learn more about the concepts, theories and history underlying the technical skills they develop. This new project extends these goals by field testing this first unit (to obtain more empirical data about student outcomes). The project is also developing a second unit covering topics related to those of the first unit, and following the same format of the first unit. The two units are being pilot-tested together in several high schools (in biology and biotechnology courses) in the greater Baltimore area. Consultants from industry, 2-year colleges, and 4-year colleges are validating the units in terms of their suitability in preparing students for college level work, and providing skills required in the high-skilled workforce. Teacher guides, student books, videos of practitioner role models in workplaces, and scenarios for instruction and assessment, are being produced. High school teachers are being trained in the new curriculum and in related pedagogy doc1694 none PROJECT SUMMARY This project trains teachers and puts a biotechnology course in each of the high school campuses of Austin Independent School District, expanding into the suburban and rural school districts nearby. The first step is the establishment of an Advisory Committee composed of academic and industry representatives, and the establishment of a Curriculum Review Committee. This Committee reviews the Introduction to Biotechnology course taught at Austin Community College (ACC), and makes recommendations for its revision so it can be successfully adapted to the high schools. High school teachers are presenting a pilot biotechnology course in four Austin high schools. A Summer Institute expands the pool of qualified teachers. This Institute is a three week experience with three points of entry depending on the teacher s experience. Pre-service teachers from area universities, entering the first week with novice teachers, are matched with in-service teachers. This training prepares inservice teachers to teach biotechnology on their home campuses throughout Austin. The teachers are supported by the establishment of a Biotechnology Center, a lending library of equipment and reagents in the form of kits. These kits are maintained by biotechnology interns from ACC and delivered to the campuses at the teacher s request. Pre-service teachers from the Summer Institute travel with kits to their matched teachers classrooms. As the network expands, school districts unable to establish Centers are being shown how to use materials-at-hand to teach project-based curricula. An important result of this project is a pipeline of students entering biotechnology programs and industry doc1695 none The Portland Community College Materials-Joining: Advanced Technologies for Tomorrow s Manufacturing Workforce project is an innovative means to prepare two-year technology and high schools students and their faculty for the more sophisticated and highly automated workplace environments of the near future. Specifically, the intent is to expose community college and high school students to advanced concepts in metals joining technology by integrating the newest joining processes in manufacturing with classroom studies in mathematics, physics, materials science, and computer science. To achieve this goal, several new courses are being developed, to be capped by a laboratory experience entitled Advances in Joining Science. This capstone experience is familiarizing students with fundamental metal joining principles and practices. The project employs a flexible delivery system, with emphasis on contextualized learning. A hands-on approach to investigating new technology with a concrete science platform is thus being offered students as a unique way of exploring re-engineering concepts doc1696 none Northwest Indian College, in collaboration with three other post secondary institutions, three Tribes, three ATE Centers, three professional societies and the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, is pursuing a three-year Adaptation and Implementation project to adapt and expand its highly successful NSF funded Tribal Environmental and Natural Resources Management pilot project for a two year AAS degree program. This new project provides a launching pad for Native American students to pursue a four year degree in enviromnental sciences at one of the several participating four- year institutions, or to access environmental technician and management positions at the 40 Tribes within the region. The pilot project was one of a very few in the country to teach Environmental Technology from a Native perspective, and the only one to focus on Marine science. It developed and pilot tested cohort-based integrated curriculum, infused with Native examples and Native American traditional perspectives, deeply infusing into the curriculum Native environmental issues that are vitally important to Tribes. Addressing the Tribes expressed needs, and with the continuous input of Tribal communities and representatives on the Advisory Committee are the foundation of this project. The TENRM pilot project produced student retention rates over two years of over 71 % -- the highest of any program ever developed by Northwest Indian College. This new project expands the successful pilot effort to meet Tribal needs for Natural Resources Managers and technicians who are well-grounded in the natural sciences of their field, comfortable with emerging technologies, and cognizant and respectful of the Native worldview doc1697 none Mt. San Antonio College is developing a histologic technician program designed to educate and train students to efficiently prepare tissue samples for microscopic examination by a pathologist or research scientist. The project is developing this program as an alternate path for students enrolled in the Biology curriculum for university transfer or technical programs. Existing supporting curricula include Anatomy, Physiology and Microbiology from the Biology Department and Introductory and General Chemistry from the Chemistry Department 1-4 . Histology, Laboratory Basics for Histotechnicians, and Histotechniques 1-4 are being developed as new curricula through the Department of Biological Sciences. Histochemistry and Immunohistochemistryly curricula are being developed in collaboration with the Department of Chemistry. A program of this type does not currently exist in California and supports a variety of disciplines. Local employers express a critical need for this program and are participating in its development. Employers are donating equipment, forming partnerships, and recruiting students. Mt. San Antonio College is providing funds for the purchase of half of the equipment required for the program, funds for supplies, and faculty salaries. National and California Societies of Histotechnology, and directors from programs across the US have guided development of this program which is being evaluated by The National Accrediting Agency for Clinical Laboratory Standards and The American Society of Clinical Pathologists (ASCP) Board of Registry doc1698 none Project Gadsden State Community College (GSCC), in partnership with Auburn University, is expanding its NSF-funded, one-year pilot program in order to improve aquatic science education at GSCC and in high schools located in rural East and West Alabama. The project: (1) allows existing educational resources to be used more efficiently; (2) increases the quality of aquatic science education in rural high schools; (3) increases the technical proficiency of secondary school teachers; (4) improves the technical quality and reputation of GSCC s Aquatic Sciences Program; and (5) increases recruitment, retention, and placement of students in technical careers in the aquatic sciences, especially the aquaculture industry. These goals are being achieved, in part, by installing recirculating systems in high schools. A core group of secondary teachers are participating in technical workshops. Self-sufficiency among teachers and their classes is being accelerated by the establishment of an electronic network with the focus on the improvement of aquatic science education and career preparation through distance education and locating intern positions for students within the private sector. Six high schools have a tilapia recirculating system and 20 secondary teachers have increased their technical knowledge and teaching capacity. GSCC has developed a 2-year terminal associate degree program and a transfer associate degree program in aquaculture technology doc1699 none The University of Alaska Southeast-Sitka Campus (UAS) two-year project to Enhance Rural Access to Advanced Technology Education in Alaska builds on a just completed DUE ATE funded Rural Alaska Environmental Education Project. The project is creating specific comprehensive teaching learning materials in environmental technology education for rural high schools; developing and supporting active, hands-on teaming in rural settings; and, enhancing distributive teaming in support of the post-secondary environmental technology curriculum at the University of Alaska Southeast. The project provides a Rural Technical Educator to develop, supervise, and support job-shadowing, mentoring and on-site technical experiences at local facilities(water and wastewater treatment). The project is also enhancing access to technical resources by developing an interactive CD-ROM for high school students addressing the technology of sanitation and environmental issues. The Rural Technical Educator supports associate degree distance students in the remote villages. The Rural Educator is also supporting rural high school teachers in the use of the newly developed instructional materials and conducting summer institutes for the teachers doc1700 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses a major ancillary service, that of optimizing generator reactive power in support of system voltage profile. The rated reactive power of generators are based on their field, stator, and end-iron heating limits. Their operating ranges are further limited by the max min voltage limits of generator terminal, plant auxiliary motors, the system bus, and generator s protective and control systems. These voltage limits are interrelated by the tap positions on the transformers directly connected to the generator. The objective is to integrate an optimal power flow model with the generator reactive capability model for optimal selections of generator transformer taps. It is anticipated that the research would result in an analytical tool which would help the industry achieve the desired lag lead reactive powers in support of system voltage profile. The proposed research leads to development of a power flow program that would include the actual generator reactive capability limits. Such a model would determine optimal tap settings to allow an increased supply of reactive power during transfer of large blocks of power and an increased absorption of reactive power during light-load condition, both in support of system voltage profile doc1701 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project from Reifer Consultants, Inc. develops mathematical models to be used to size multi-media applications and estimate costs and schedules for web-enabled software development projects. As the business world moves to electronic commerce, more and more organizations are being powered by a web-enabled economy. Success in such an economy relies on the ability to accurately estimate and control costs and schedules. Accurate estimates enable returns on investment to be quantified and economic benefits to be computed. Unfortunately, existing software estimating tools do not provide the needed capability. The reason for this is simple; they fail to address the unique characteristics of web-based development projects. The research of Reifer Consultants, Inc, would fill the gap by collecting the data needed to calibrate and validate proposed size and estimating models that can be used to address the need for innovation in this area. The products of this research will be a validated mathematical model, prototype software estimating tool, and user test results that could serve as the basis of future product development and commercialization. This project will also investigate the market for aligned products and services and prepare a business plan for future developments. The commercial applications of this research are software tools that managers and estimators can employ to accurately estimate the costs and schedules for web-enabled applications doc1702 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project from Decision Science Associates (DSA) has the goal of developing a decision support tool that combines methods from software measurement, Bayesian statistics, and multiattribute utility theory (MAU). This tool will support a software manager s assessment and evaluation of risks and assist in making tradeoffs and decisions under uncertainty. Descision Scienct Associates innovation addresses the following needs: software risk assessment methods; measures of the effectiveness of software development techniques and processes; and automated tools to support managing and developing software systems. The three technical objectives of Phase I are to: (1) develop methodologies to support a software manager s assessment and evaluation of risks and to assist him in making tradeoffs and decisions under uncertainty; (2) obtain preliminary evaluations of the methodologies from prospective customers; and (3) encode the methodologies in a Phase I prototype tool. These objectives will be pursued by conducting four tasks: (1) develop prototype user interfaces for the tool, MAUS-R (MultiAttribute Utility for Software, Risk); (2) seek feedback from prospective customers; (3) revise methods in response to the feedback from prospective customers; and (4) develop a revised Phase I prototype. The full-scale development and demonstration of the tool will occur in the next phase of the research. Decison Science Associates proffered technology, MAUS-R, is directed at any industry with an information technology (IT). It is particularly suited for industries with larger percentages of IT to total workers including: financial businesses like banks, investment companies, insurance companies; telecommunications businesses; transportation businesses, food and consumer goods companies; Point-of-Sale equipment manufacturers; pharmaceuticals; and the power and energy industry. Government agencies are also prospective customers; approximately 50% of the top US spenders on IT are state governments. The target market consists of software professionals at the group leader, supervisor, manager, or CIO level; software process standards professionals-those performing metrics collection, benchmarking, and the like; and software systems buyers. DSA has established a strategic alliance with PRICE Systems, the world-wide leader in Computer-Aided Parametric Estimating (CAPE) tools, to facilitate the commercialization of this proposed R&D doc1703 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses the incorporation of a carbon dioxide hydrogen separating membrane unit into steam reformer pressure-swing adsorption (PSA) hydrogen plants. This membrane unit will increase the amount of hydrogen produced by a reformer PSA plant by 10-20%. The goals of the project are to optimize and produce a new type of composite membrane in bench-scale quantities and to fabricate bench-scale modules containing this membrane. The modules will be evaluated with model feed gas mixtures representative of those generated in reformer PSA plants. The experimental data obtained will be incorporated into a computer simulation of the process to determine the technical and commercial potential of the process. Based on this work, the overall feasibility and advantages of applying the technology to reformer PSA operations will be assessed. The initial target of the carbon dioxide hydrogen membrane process to be developed is PSA tail gas. More than 300 large steam reformer PSA plants are operating in U.S. refineries and petrochemical plants. All of these plants can potentially be retrofitted with this new membrane technology. Longer-term, several other large potential applications such as hydrogen production for fuel cells exist doc1704 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will combine electron beam curing and dynamic beam control technology to create equipment for electron beam rapid prototyping manufacturing. The unique advantage of this technique is that it offers ultra-high speeds in the range of 5 - 20 cc second. If successful, the resulting technology can produce one liter sized, large, complex plastic parts in times of order 1 minute. This increase in speed will dramatically reduce the cost of rapid prototyping so that this technique can be used in small and medium production run manufacturing. In addition to increasing speed, electron beam curing can use a much wider range of materials than optical curing because the electrons stimulate polymerization directly, without requiring photoinitiators as part of the cured compound . Electron beams can also be used to integrate metals and carbon fibers into the rapid prototyped part. In Phase I, crude parts will be produced using this technique, and develop plans for a complete Phase II system that will focus on the large variety of available electron beam curable plastics. Applications for the technology include production of parts for small lot production such as electronic enclosures, custom mechanical equipment or medical equipment doc1705 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project demonstrates a new approach for fabrication of microscale combustors for hydrocarbon fuels. Novel technology for microchannel products will be combined with a microreactor concept to fabricate a highly efficient microscale integrated superalloy combustor evaporator, which uses methane combustion for heating and or boiling working fluid. The innovative fabrication technique enables dramatic cost reduction in comparison with the existing technologies. The technical objective is to demonstrate that the proposed combustors can produce at least 30 watts of thermal energy per square centimeter of heat transfer area and efficiently transfer that energy to a cooling fluid. This is approximately 20 times higher than the heat transfer rate of conventional water heaters. The proposed approach provides solutions to many materials problems as well as the opportunity to miniaturize numerous components and devices that are currently in existence. Potential commercial applications of the research include lightweight, safe and high performance microcombustors for microturbines, man-portable microheaters for cold climates, man portable cooling microsystems for hot climates, on-board fuel processors for hydrogen generation, distributed space conditioning of buildings, etc doc1706 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is a chemical solution to stop the formation of Nitrogen Dioxide in the surface coal mining industry where cast blasting is used. The creation of Nitrogen Dioxide is the result of deflagration or burning of the Ammonium Nitrate in the Ammonium Nitrate Fuel Oil (ANFO) blasting agent. This chemical pollution avoidance technology prevents deflagration by utilizing a technique known as shaped charge detonation. The shaped charge produces a jet of supersonic heat and pressure that initiates the reaction between the Ammonium Nitrate and the fuel oil to achieve near-instantaneous hydrodynamic velocity. The economic advantages of employing the new CastMax detonation system are two fold: the primary purpose is to eliminate NOx emissions and the attendant regulatory costs (monitoring, reporting, etc.) that would be applied; the secondary purpose is to maximize the energy efficiency of the blast. Ceasing the NOx formation will result in the recovery of $25,000,000 of lost blasting efficiency in US surface coal mining for . Not only will energy costs be recovered, but also the use of this technology will forestall the costs associated with litigation, legislation and regulation about how to solve the Nitrogen Dioxide problem doc1707 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses the validation and feasibility of a new technology for the mitigation and correction of local scour damage at bridge foundations caused by periodic floods, tidal flows, or sustained stream flows. The technology involves a flow control device that mitigates the enhanced turbulent mixing and local scour at the streambed and is applicable to thousands of bridges nationwide. An extensive survey of the nation s bridges has recently been completed by the Department of Transportation and the U.S. Geological Survey; and twenty to thirty percent of the existing bridges have been found to be scour critical. Phase I research will formulate a suitable test matrix to evaluate the feasibility and performance for the technology. Scaled flume tests will be performed at Colorado State s Hydraulics Laboratory and evaluations for a Phase II follow-on R R&D and commercial applications study will be made. If successful, the potential for savings by the State and Federal Governments through the use of this technology can be conservatively estimated to be over 10 million a year doc1708 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will investigate the feasibility of a novel hybrid three dimensional (3D) imaging and animation technique for custom-design and custom-fit eyeglass frames, based on the 3D imaging technology recently developed by Genex Technologies, Inc (GTI). The 3D camera is able to acquire both 2D and 3D face images of a customer in a snapshot. The digital 3D face model is then converted and immersed into a virtual simulation environment, dubbed as the VirtualFit(TM) , that allows customers to select a large number of eyeglass frames in a variety of styles, sizes and colors to try them on the realistic 3D face model of themselves. The VirtualFit(TM) also performs digital measurement of all critical dimensions from the 3D-face model and offers recommendations to assist the custom-fitting process. The 3D model can also be transferred over Internet to frame manufacturers for custom-made frames. Low-cost 3D-camera hardware prototype and virtual simulation software will be developed and tested in Phase 1. The fully functional prototype system will be developed in Phase 2 and field tests will be performed in retail store to obtain feedback for improvement. Enormous commercial potential virtually guarantees the deployment of the VirtualFit system as a widespread E-Commerce tool for optical spectacle industry. The VirtualFit technology can be applied to many other applications, such as apparel fitting, shoe fitting, hairstyle selection, furniture selection, and ergonomic product design doc1709 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a novel mechanical means of reducing the skin friction of surfaces immersed in water. The concept to be analyzed and tested shows promise of reducing skin friction by 30 percent. The passive device would be fabricated in sheets and installed on existing immersed surfaces. While the concept is straightforward and conceptually simple, a major portion of the Phase I effort will be devoted to a proof of performance test using a simple gravity powered test rig, which will measure skin friction reductions achieved with the proposed device. If successful, the technology would be capable of reducing skin friction drag of moving objects significantly. Reducing the skin friction by 30 percent on a typical tanker crossing a 5,000 mile ocean at 20 knots would save over 156,000 gallons of fuel (one way). Other potential applications include pump inlets and pipes, long-haul tractor trailer trucks, and high-speed trains. Military applications are multifold and include torpedoes and vehicles where high speed is a requirement doc1710 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a process for growing ferroelectric, polycrystalline barium titinate (BaTiO3) thin-films, by anodic oxidation of polycrystalline titanium, in a barium hydroxide (BaOH2) electrolyte. By utilizing this novel, low-cost method of ferroelectric formation, it will be possible to obtain thin, uniform ferroelectric films at relatively low temperatures (less than 100C) that exhibit dielectric constants around 200. Though films of this nature find applications in various other electrical devices, the company will utilize this novel technology, if successful, for integral thin-film decoupling capacitors due to the significant advantages offered over traditional discrete decoupling capacitors. Another potential application is optical waveguides. Ferroelectric thin films have applications in thin-film passive components as well as optical waveguides doc1711 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a low-cost composite proton exchange membrane (PEM) capable of high temperature operation ( 150 degrees C) with excellent chemical resistance and good thermal and dimensional stability suitable for advanced fuel cells in next generation vehicles (NGV). The key to this new composite membrane is a high temperature, high strength, chemically resistant membrane support structure fabricated from Foster-Miller s patented porous single crystal alumina material. Tailored porosity structures have been fabricated with interconnected passages suitable for infusion with a suitable ion conducting polymer (ICP) for high strength PEM s. This new PEM will address the serious cost performance problems associated with current perfluorinated membranes. Fuel cells based on this new technology will achieve power density greater than 0.2 W cm2. Membrane cost should eventually approach the $80 m2 level necessary to promote development of the NGV. Commercial scale up of the porous single crystal alumina manufacturing is already underway with a commercial processor of ceramics. During Phase I small composite Membrane Electrode Assemblies (MEA s) will be fabricated, characterized and electrically tested for high temperature conditions (150 degrees C) and peroxide stability. Phase II will optimize the composite PEM with fabrication and testing of MEA fuel cell stacks. Commercial applications for the proposed advanced composite PEM include cost efficient fuel cells for automotive, utility and space military applications. As a potentially key enabling technology for the automotive (NGV) application, the market potential is very large. Utility uses include communications, computers (laptop) and remote power generation. Space and military include manned space missions (space station), shipboard power, battery replacements and portable mobile field generating units doc1712 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is aimed at developing cryogenic magnetostrictors that have high mechanical strength and can be fabricated more cost-effectively than existing materials. The potential for the use of cryogenic magnetostrictive materials for a variety of applications such as adaptive optics, robotics, automation and linear motors is great. Several cryogenic magnetostrictive materials have been discovered recently exhibiting high strain and excellent mechanical properties. These materials, consisting of an alloy of terbium dysprosium and zinc, are not commercially available but can be fabricated in small quantities. The process is complex and expensive because of the mismatches in the melting temperatures of the constituents. The focus of this research effort is to develop compounds of alloying materials that more closely match each other thereby eliminating a time consuming and costly step of the fabrication. The result of this work will be a low-cost scalable manufacturing process for magnetostrictive materials. If successful, this project will make low-cost cryogenic magnetostrictive materials and devices available in the marketplace for precision positioning of optics, vibration control, semiconductor fabrication, valves and pumps, etc doc1713 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is concerned with consumer preference for product sound, with the goal of establishing a mapping or set of tools that product designers can use to achieve a preferred sound. The P. I. completed a NSF-supported SGER study that related product design choices and user reactions to the sound of the product. This study has used a panel of expert listeners to develop sensory profiles (SPs) for a limited range of product sounds, and a consumer jury to judge the same sounds in terms of product acceptability. Preliminary relationships have been established between the product SPs and physical metrics for these sounds, and between the product SPs and consumer judgements. This project seeks to determine the feasibility of extending the methodology developed to an expanded range of product sounds. Three major issues are addressed that will affect the utility of the concept as far as industry is concerned. One issue is the ability of metrics to anticipate user reactions to product sound because of their correlation with the product SPs. The second issue relates to the breadth of a product class that can be represented by a SPs. Variations on the sounds of particular vacuum cleaners and washing machines have been used as a way to develop the ideas, but this set needs to be expanded further. The third issue is concerned with products with different function but which are used in the same physical environment. While there is widespread commercial interest in product sound quality, there is at present no structured way for manufacturers to relate the preference for sound to design goals. By developing methods that are broadly applicable and as easy to use as possible, the research can provide sound quality measurement procedures that can be applied to any product for which sound is an issue doc1714 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop user-friendly component software for classical econometric estimation and inference based on simulation methods. In the last decade, different simulation-based methods have been developed to tackle complex economic statistical models which cannot be estimated by conventional methods such as maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) and generalized method of moments (GMM). Although these simulation-based estimators have desirable theoretical properties, they have remained as research topics in academia and have not become useful tools for practitioners because of the lack of user-friendly software. This project provides a plan to study three leading applications for simulation-based methods: multinomial probit model for cross-sectional data, multiperiod multinomial probit model for panel data, and stochastic volatility models for time series data. MathSoft will use extensive Monte Carlo experiments to explore finite sample properties of various aspects of estimation and inference, with an aim of improving and stabilizing the current algorithms. The user-friendly component software will be developed using the state-of-art JavaBean technology and provide intuitive graphical user interface. The JavaBeans will also be supplied as S-PLUS functions to gain a broad user base. The software will help worldwide economists and practitioners in other fields such as financial industry, social sciences, and biotechnology to conduct flexible and extensible model estimation and inference doc1715 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)Phase I project will combine the Internet, electronic libraries, and a new machine learning technique that simulates human understanding of text to produce an independent learning and problem solving environment for individuals and groups. Using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), Auto-autodidact (autodidact: a self taught person) first learns the vocabulary and concepts of a topic by automatic training on textbooks. Then, as students study and write, and groups discuss and plan, it will continuously evaluate what they know and what they do not know, find relevant information anywhere in the electronic library, and connect participants with complementary needs and knowledge. Auto autodidact capitalize s on the motivational power of peer interaction, the instant availability of enormous textual resources, and the possibility of sharing individual knowledge over time and space. Auto autodidact will integrate LSA with Knowledge Forum, a state-of-the-art facilitator for distributed knowledge-building discussion, and newly available electronic libraries, to provide continuous embedded assessment, tutorial dialogue, and meaning-based information insertion. It will be unique in its ability to construct a learning environment for a new domain in a matter of days. Knowledge Analysis Technologies proffers a learning environment technology that has potential value for science and engineering education throughout the life cycle and for research and design organizations. The firm plans to commercialize the technology directly and through publishers, distance education providers, and educational testing organizations doc1716 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will support the current trend in developing nanophase materials. This is spirited by an increasing need for nanometer-scale structures in a variety of applications. It is clear that to achieve unique mechanical, physical, chemical, and biomedical properties, it is necessary to develop novel synthesis routes by which an entirely new nanostructure can be developed. When the thickness of the metal down to nano-meters, the metal dielectric multilayer coating exhibits metallic conductivity and dielectric transparency. The periodic nature of the metal dielectric lattice causes the light to propagate through the metal layers with extremely low loss. The most unique feature of the metallic optical filter is the ability to have a single pass band and block all other radiation from static fields to soft X-rays. This remarkable property is a result of the highly dispersive nature of metals. This research program will develop a nano-engineered powder: bilayer coated nanopowder. This powder composses three functionalities: highly transparent, highly conductive and a broad band radiation blocking from static fields to soft X-rays. Development of such unique nanostructures would not only benefit the specific industrial applications, such as panel displace and anti-static anti-reflection (ASAR) coating for lenses and CRT, but also the electronic industry, in general doc1717 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to save semiconductor wafers from being deeply scratched by unchecked large errant particles in chemical mechanical planarizing or polishing (CMP) slurries. CMP has become the method of choice for restoring the surface trueness of wafers at all stages of its manufacture. No method currently exists that can implement a CMP-safe slurry at the point of use. The proposed novel technology of acoustic coaxing induced microcavitation (ACIM) is a means to constructively control acoustic microcavitation and direct its high intensity energy implosions at specific particle sites. ACIM will achieve both the detection and destruction of the stray large particles and render the entire slurry CMP-safe at the point of use. The ACIM slurry monitor-comminuter would be the first fully in-line, real-time, point of use method for detecting stray large particles and agglomerates and for reducing them to a nano-fine state. The rapidly growing CMP industry presents a well-developed market for this environmentally friendly ACIM tool doc1718 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a low temperature joining compound for structural alumina. The paste will rely on the low melting point of alumina preceramic materials to effectively wet the joining surfaces and alumina filler, thus forming a dense joint with characteristics similar to the joined ceramics. The program will investigate three different filled paste preparations: a) a dissolved processor paste, b) a suspended precursor paste, and c) a precursor salt mix with a lowered melting point paste. This technology will make possible the production of complex alumina structures from simple geometric alumina pieces, which have been previously densified. Innovations in this area will make the realization of complicated structural ceramics more cost effective in production. The paste will decompose to alumina, and will be densified at temperatures lower than that needed to sinter alumina. The technology to be developed under this project will find wide application in the structural ceramics market. Low temperature joining technologies are needed to increase the complexity of structures that can be economically produced from these materials doc1719 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will demonstrate the feasibility of an innovative process for copper metallization and planarization of semiconductor scale features. In contrast to geometric leveling or true leveling in the presence of levelers and brighteners, the proposed electrochemical deposition process is based on charge or Faradaic mediated leveling. The current copper metallization process utilizes a difficult to control plating bath containing levelers and brighteners and generates between 30 and 50 liters of waste slurry for each 8-inch wafer processed. The proposed charge modulated electrochemical deposition process will operate in a simple, easily controlled plating bath and will eliminate or substantially reduce the waste and cost of the current chemical mechanical-processing step. During the Phase I program, the theoretical basis for the Faradaic mediated leveling process will be established and validated using state-of-the-art ULSI wafers. It is anticipated that the Faradaic mediated leveling process will eliminate or substantially reduce (i.e., by greater than 85%) the copper waste slurry and provide substantial cost savings relevant to the state-of-the-art copper metallization processes in the semiconductor industry doc1720 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project involves the synthesis of soluble, monodisperse copper nanocrystals as precursors in the formation of microelectronic copper seed layers and interconnects. The proposed synthetic component builds on existing nanoparticles syntheses to obtain soluble, monodisperse copper nanocrystals. Copper nanocrystals are to be applied by spin coating, thereby eliminating the current need for vacuum deposition. A passivating agent will be used to control average particle size and impart particle solubility in conventional spin coating solvents such as amyl acetate, cyclohexanone and ethyl lactate. Unlike conventional electrochemical and vapor deposition techniques, seed layer and interconnect formation occurs preferentially in wafer trenches and vias by taking advantage of the slower rates of nanocrystal solvent volatilization in these regions, as compared to substrate plateaus. Chemical mechanical polishing, associated with existing deposition techniques should be eliminated along with the undesired scouring of copper to form a nonlinear interface. Nanocrystals not adhering to a trenched substrate are readily redissolved, purified and reapplied to further lessen waste. The nanocrystals stranded in trenches are melted at a reduced, size-dependent melting temperature; to form bulk copper seed layer or interconnect structures. Nanocrystal melting temperatures will be tailored to remain below 350 degrees Celsius. This project has immediate commercial application in the production of microelectronic seed layers and interconnects through the elimination of vacuum vapor deposition, chemical mechanical polishing and reduction of waste streams. Longer-term value is created through the formation of narrower and higher aspect ratio interconnects which are necessary for the continuing increases in computational speed demanded by the microelectronics industry doc1721 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is designed to demonstrate the feasibility of exploiting novel nanocomposite materials for significantly improved magnetic performance in high frequency applications, using the exchange coupling concept between nanoparticles. To date, the exchange-coupling concept has not been realized in bulk form magnetic nanocomposites in high frequency magnetic applications. The improved properties will include a combination of higher permeability, higher electrical resistivity, and lower core loss than those for the conventional ferrites. In this project, ceramic coated Fe nanoparticles with various Fe volume fractions will be manufactured using a wet-chemical technique. The performance of the end product will be tested and compared with conventional ferrites. This innovation is expected to have a major impact on the electrical and electronic industries by enabling the manufacture of low cost shaped magnetic structures doc1722 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop and evaluate a new class of mixed proton and electron conducting materials which are capable of operating at intermediate temperatures (400-700C). These materials could be used as membranes in a wide variety of hydrogen separation applications resulting in an efficient, economic, and selective process. The composite materials of interest will be based on a proton conducting oxyacid salt and a metallic or ceramic electronically conducting component. Composite powders of different components and compositions will be fabricated using various preparation techniques. These will then be fabricated into dense membrane disks, which will subsequently be tested for their structural, electrical, and transport properties with the proton and electronic conductivity being of particular interest. The composite materials showing the most promise will then be incorporated into laboratory scale membrane separation configurations and evaluated for their ability to mediate hydrogen. The development of a new membrane-based hydrogen separation process will have multiple applications for use in industry. It would allow for the separation and purification of hydrogen in one step. Furthermore, these membrane systems could act as novel reactors for carrying out different chemistries such as hydrogenation and dehydrogenation reactions at potentially lower costs and higher yields doc1723 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to develop a new means of caring for patina-covered copper and bronze outdoor statues, sculptures, and other structures, by developing Electrochemical Brush Patination (EBP). If successful, this technique will allow conservators and others responsible for the care of patinized objects to repair small localized areas of damage to the patina layer without damaging the surrounding intact layer. Stripping away large sections of patina, as is commonly done now when repairs to damaged areas are effected, followed by repatination through non-electrochemical means, can be time-consuming, expensive, and potentially damaging to the object to be restored. The proposed technique will use controlled electrochemistry to grow a new patina layer only in the damaged area. The new patina shall share the visual appearance (e.g., color, texture, thickness) of the original patina layer, and shall provide equivalent protection against corrosion of the substrate metal. The proposed EBP technique will provide a new and improved means of repairing localized areas of damage to patina layers on copper and bronze. While the initial inspiration for this work was the desire to repair outdoor art objects, the commercial applications may extend to any patinized commercial or private structures, including but not limited to statuary, sculptures, building details, bridge details, etc. Repair of damaged patina on such structures is important not only for visual appearance, but also for protection of the underlying substrate metal from ongoing corrosive attack doc1724 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will synthesize novel diquaternary amines with a high selectivity towards platinum group metals (PGMs) from acidic chloride media. State-of-the-art molecular modeling techniques will be utilized to predict structures likely to have a high affinity for the anions of interest. The diquaternary amines are predicted to have a much greater selectivity than comparable monoquaternary amines due to increased steric interactions between the two nitrogens and the polyvalent ion of interest. These compounds will facilitate the separation and purification of high value metals, such as platinum, palladium and rhodium, from base metals using solvent extraction techniques. The diquaternary amines will be synthesized, characterized and then evaluated in comparison with an existing monoquaternary amine (Aliquat 336) that has already been used in PGMs separation. Improved separation of PGMs will lead to a reduction in metal costs, facilitate recycling (e.g. auto exhaust catalysts) and thus minimize the dependence of the United States on imported PGM supplies. These novel diquaternary amines will primarily have applications in precious metal refining. Additionally, they could also be used in the separation and purification of actinides, such as plutonium, and in the preconcentration of trace levels of certain anions (e.g. chromate, arsenate) to aid in environmental analysis doc1725 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project would develop membrane electrode assemblies (MEAs) utilizing alternative polymer electrolyte membranes (PEMs) for high-temperature fuel cell operation. Under this project, GESC, LLC will develop and test MEAs utilizing polymer films. Polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) have received increased attention for supplying power for Next Generation Vehicles due to their high power densities, high efficiency, low environmental impact, ease of assembly and quiet operation. A barrier to PEMFC technology is poisoning of the anode catalyst by CO, a by-product of the reformer. CO poisoning is disfavored at temperatures above 100 degrees C, however current PEMs are prohibited from operating at these temperatures as the membrane loses water necessary for ion conductivity. Phosphoric Acid Fuel Cells (PAFCs) can operate at elevated temperatures (140-200 degrees C) but are limited due to difficulty in retaining the phosphoric acid. A great need then, exists for a PEMFC membrane that can operate at high temperatures. The goal of this project would be to develop MEAs that incorporate proton transporting phosphoric acid functionalities directly into the PEM through covalent bonds, greatly extending the life of the PEMFC by eliminating the loss of electrolyte. Fuel cells that operate on reformate feed are being developed for both Next Generation Vehicles and stationary power applications. The potential market for a PEMFC that can operate with increased tolerance to CO concentrations in the anode feed is very large. Such a system would not only capture a large sector of this emerging market, but would increase the range of applications for fuel cell systems doc1726 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to develop a new class of low-cost glass fiber composites that are compatible with the highly alkaline environment of concrete. The polymer matrix in these composites incorporates a fine dispersion of ion-exchange polymers for reducing the alkalinity of diffusing concrete pore water. Ion-exchange polymers are prepared by attaching polar groups to polymeric matrices; they are now produced at relatively low cost for use in filters and conditioners. The matrix incorporating ion-exchange polymers can feasibly act as a molecular sieve that removes alkali metal ions from the pore solution, and thus protects glass fibers against alkali attack. Preliminary analyses suggest that ion-exchange polymers possess the capacity, in the context of composite reinforcement in concrete, to lower the alkalinity of concrete pore water to levels that are not aggressive against glass fibers. Blending of conventional thermoset matrices of glass fiber composites with ion-exchange polymers promises to alter the favorable economics of glass fiber composites. This would facilitate large-scale introduction of composites as corrosion-proof and truly durable replacement for steel in concrete, noting that the relatively high cost of carbon and aramid fiber composites limit their potential for use as reinforcing bars in concrete. The resulting composites should meet the demands on concrete reinforcement in terms of mechanical performance, bond strength to concrete and cost, and should also be chemically and dimensionally stable in the alkaline environment of concrete under diverse exposure conditions. Potential commercial applications of the technology cover reinforced concrete systems subjected to corrosive environments, including bridge structures, parking ramps and offshore structures doc1727 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project tests feasibility of a novel cost-efficient process for manufacture of monodispersed spherical micron-sized metal powders. Whereas there exist today various methods for making uniform sized particles, they are either unsuited to high -melting point materials, unperfected at sizes below 100 gm, slow or very expensive. Commercial spherical gas-atomized powders are available, but have wide size distributions. We propose to demonstrate liquid metal pressurization and perturbation of flow through a plate containing multiple high-speed drop-forming nozzles by means of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). The objective is a system suitable for use at high temperatures ( = C) permitting continuous feed (vs. batch processing), no moving parts, no high-pressure reservoir of liquid metal and high productivity. The research includes analysis, design, construction, and testing of MHD pressurization and perturbation equipment and the nozzle plate. The Phase I goal is production of uniform drops of low melting point metals using MHD and a multiple nozzle array. In Phase II, the process will be extended to accommodate high temperature and increased throughput in a complete bench-top system producing monospheres of cobalt and iron. This technology offers a means of producing significant quantities of desirable monospheres at commodity prices. The primary customers for powders manufactured by the process innovated herein are Powder Metal parts producers, initially by Metal Injection Molding and Hot Isostatic Pressing. By serving as uniform substrates for coating, the uniform particles will improve the ability to produce consistently alloyed and dense parts cost-competitively. Among many other markets are filters, catalysts, new magnetorheological fluids and biomedical uses. Initial markets exceed $15 million and the potential market in ten years exceeds $100 million doc1728 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project addresses the problem of recovery and recycle of strategic and critical metals. This project will determine the performance benefits of a nanocluster ion exchange media over traditional ion exchange resin, when used to recover strategic and critical metals, such as chromium, nickel and mercury. The basic innovation is the deposition of an extremely thin film (2 nm) on nanoparticles, coupled with low-temperature consolidation of nanoparticles to form nanoclusters, and the use of chemically reactive coatings to remove metal ions from industrial process and waste streams. The integrated ion exchange (IIX) electrochemical process reactor, will allow a close coupling of the nanostructured clusters with charge modulated electric fields for enhanced treatment of industrial process and waste streams, and for in-situ regeneration of the nanostructured clusters. The proposed process will facilitate cost-effective and selective separations assisted by electric fields, for cost-effective recovery and recycle of strategic and critical metals from aqueous based processes, such as in-process recycling in metal finishing operations, process and waste streams from chlor-alkali operations, and waste from dental and medical operations doc1729 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to demonstrate the proof-of-concept of innovative switchable holographic devices through material research. The new holographic device, made from a novel liquid crystal and polymer composite material, consists of alternating polymer and liquid crystal planes without liquid crystal droplets and is expected to exhibit a higher performance than the prior technologies in terms of reflection efficiency, switching voltage, spectrum tuning flexibility, polarization flexibility, switching speed, and switching mode. The Phase I effort will be focused on a special liquid crystal composite material development that leads to the construction of demo devices. In addition to the switchable Bragg reflection, the demonstration devices will exhibit tunable Bragg wavelength and multiple switching modes. The new holographic technology can be used to build polarizer, spectrum dispersion element, spectrum tunable mirror, optical switch, spectrum filter, beam splitter and combiner for optical telecommunication, display and photonics instrument such as spectrophotometer, lasers, optical imaging and detection systems doc1730 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I from MicoBrightField, Inc provides a plan for creating a bioinformatics system that will allow users to acquire images of complete microscopic specimens at the highest magnification of a light microscope, to store these very large images in a web-enabled database, and to share them with students and researchers over the Internet. For conceptual purposes, these very large images will be virtual slides that can be viewed at any magnification. An innovative viewer technology will, in effect, provide the capabilities of a virtual microscope , one which will also provide additional capabilities, including dynamic zooming and panning for viewing the virtual slides. A demonstration web site will be set up to test the feasibility of the bioinformatics system. Although the general definition of informatics may vary, this system is comprised of three main functions: image acquisition, database storage, and visualization. The system will help bridge the current gap between computer technology and biology by providing an architecture that will decentralize data distribution so that virtual slides can be routinely shared throughout the educational and scientific communities. This bioinformatics system, consisting of software and hardware, will be marketed to educational and research institutions, providing them with the means to produce and view virtual slides on their own web sites. The software for creating the virtual slides will be sold with all components needed to set up a computer microscopy system. Among the longer-term opportunities for consideration are as follows: an Internet system for archiving and comparing images for clinical pathology, a service to create and maintain the virtual slides and database for a customer s web site, and creation of large-scale images for on-line text books and stereotaxic atlases in conjunction with an author and or publisher doc1731 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project focuses on the development of a Solvated Metal Atom Dispersion (SMAD) synthesizer for high rate production and eventual commercial adoption of metal nanoparticle materials. Several high value applications (from magnetic tapes to highly reactive catalytic materials) have been identified with corresponding significant commercial interest expressed, yet development of innovative, scalable processes has been a sizeable barrier for commercialization of these important nanotechnologies. During Phase I, several key technical parameters will be optimized including vaporization of multiple precursors, solvent recovery and recycling, as well as nanoparticle formation, separation and purification technologies. At the completion of the Phase I Research, a conceptual design for a continuous scalable synthesizer will be developed. Metallic, bimetallic, organometallic and encapsulated nanoparticles produced by the SMAD process meet a wide range of high value critical needs. Specifically, initial applications of the technology include superior catalysts, magnetic materials including information storage, improved transformer cores, radiation shield and coatings, and ferrofluids, as well as tracers for advanced systems doc1732 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I investigates the feasibility of Thermal Forming Combustion Synthesis (TFCS) of coatings. TFCS will combine two established materials processing techniques - thermal spray forming and Self-propagating High-temperature Synthesis (SHS) -as a novel method for synthesizing advanced coating materials in-situ to produce structural, wear and or corrosion resistant coatings on the surfaces of substrates using simple, low-cost, starting materials. The technique is also applicable for the production of thin-walled freestanding structures. Layered deposits of Ni-Al and MoO3-AlxSi materials will be thermally sprayed onto model steel and graphite substrates in both flat coupon and cylindrical configurations. The microstructures of the as-sprayed layers will be characterized to determine porosity, contact area etc., prior to initiation of an SHS combustion synthesis within the layers and studies of the reaction mechanisms during combustion. The composition, microstructure, porosity level, and basic mechanical properties of the resulting deposits will be characterized using metallography, X-ray diffraction, SEM and microhardness testing. The critical sprayed layer thicknesses required for both the Ni-Al and MoO3-AlxSi material systems will be determined and compared to theoretical predictions. Economic (thermal spray forming + SHS reaction) production of coatings would have significant commercial applications, particularly for the in-situ coating of parts where cost is the primary concern, such that conventional approaches, including the thermal spraying of more costly engineered composite powders is not an option. In addition, the SHS component of the investigation will enable compositional and microstructural variations to be achieved within reacted coatings, which could not be readily obtained by other methods. The approach may enable thin-walled tubes of novel structures and compositions to be produced, for use as catalyst supports, filters and in fuel cells etc. Once proven, the thermal spray forming + in-situ SHS synthesis of coatings promises to be a new, economical, coating process doc1733 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project focuses on the development of nanocomposite materials that are capable of producing photostimulated luminescence (PSL) and the demonstration of their ability to do so at room temperature for durations that would support practical applications. Successful production of PSL with such materials would suggest that this technology could be used to create optical storage media for X-ray and other imaging techniques. Nanoparticle-based PSL optical storage systems would provide images with higher resolution at lower levels of production energy. Because of the extensive use of X-ray and similar technologies in the medical industry, manufacturing, security field, inspection and non-destructive testing processes, and many other applications, the proposed approach would offer substantial reductions in costs, complexity, hazards, and other negative aspects of the use of these processes. This technology will be applicable to virtually all X-ray processes and many other imaging and information storage techniques doc1734 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I Project will develop new methods for continuous synthesis and purification of important carbon-based nanostructured materials, including fullerenes and endohedral metallofullerenes. Due to their unique properties, structured carbon nanomaterials including fullerenes and nanotubes have become a large field of research that extends from chemistry, to physics and materials science. Intense effort is directed in increasing the fabrication yield of these materials, since current synthesis methods have typical yields of less than 0.5% for the more exotic and revolutionary nanomaterials. Low yields, coupled with the current high cost of fabrication, has limited the development and commercialization of these important new materials. Luna Innovations will develop new methods for continuous synthesis and purification of fullerenes and endohedral metallofullerenes based on recent advancements developed through joint research with our university research partners. This approach will not only increase the quantity of these critical nanomaterials, but will in addition reduce manufacturing costs and usage of associated hazardous solvent materials. Applications of these carbon nanostructures are predicted to revolutionize many areas of technology, including optical communications, high-strength composites, thermally-tailored structures for microelectronic and space applications, quantum computing, advanced medical diagnostics and treatments, and others doc1735 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will demonstrate the feasibility of a novel method, Combined Atomization and Reaction Technique (CART), for mass producing nanometer-sized ceramic powders. The SBIR Phase-I research is aimed at designing and building a bench-top CART apparatus to demonstrate the general technical and commercial feasibility of this method as applied to the synthesis of nano-sized oxides, carbides, and nitrides of both low- and higher-melting metals (e.g., Al, Fe, Si, and Ti). Nano-grained materials can be employed to replace various load-bearing and non-structural parts in automobiles, infrastructures, off-shore structures, pipings, containers, and electronic equipment housings, etc. this could be commercial attractive to many industries. Transparent nano-grained ceramics can be utilized in a broad array of applications including transparent ceramic appliance components, clear glassware and artistic artifacts. Transparent ceramics may be used as ballistic protection armors by law enforcement, security police and armored car personnel doc1736 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a novel microchip chemical analyzer that incorporates a new nanomaterial that performs both separation and detection of small quantities of chemicals and biochemicals. This will be accomplished by developing the required chemistry and processing to coat microchannels (20 x 50 microns) with a proprietary material that contains silver nanoparticles capable of supporting plasmon surface modes and generating surface-enhanced Raman (SER) spectra. Preliminary studies suggest this new nanomaterial will provide continuous, reproducible, quantitative, reversible, and rapid chemical analysis to part per trillion concentrations in nanoliter sample volumes. Phase I will prove feasibility by preparing microchip chemical analyzers and testing their SER-activity. Testing will include several test chemicals (p-aminobenzoic acid, phenyl acetylene, etc.), pharmaceuticals (amobarbital, barbital, and phenylbarbital), and the four DNA bases (adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine). The commercial market applications for this technology include biotechnology (DNA sequencing, protein analysis), medicine (metabolite analysis), and pharmaceutical (high-throughput molecular structure identification doc1737 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project studies a new coding technique for high-speed, high-density optical disk data storage. It is well known that conventional optical disk storage is based on recording and readout binary data pits in an optical disk such as compact disk and DVD. The size of these pits that can be recorded and readout optically due to diffraction limitation thus limit the data storage density. The proposed research explores a new coding concept that can facilitate recording and readout many bits of data in a single pit. The data storage density can thus be significantly increased using the same diffraction limited focusing spot size as DVD. The proposed concept is supported by commercially available data recording material to result in a read-only super high-density optical disk. The concept is also supported by a new ion-exchanged photochromic glass to result in an erasable and rewritable disk with excellent room environmental stability and non-processing after data recording. Fast data code recognition using table lookup can improve the data access rate as well. Phase I research will demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed disk storage concept. Phase II will realize a complete disk data storage system. This project will demonstrate the feasibility of a new coding concept for high-speed, high-density optical disk data storage. Using such a coding concept can significantly increase the disk storage density for commercial and military, e.g. on-line storage, library archival applications, image storage and processing for medical applications and military target identification, and fast access to large intelligent databases doc1738 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to investigate the physical and mechanical properties of Polymer Silicate Layered Nanocomposites (PSLN) as applied to dental materials. A specific material system is chosen that optimizes key properties including compressive, flexural and tensile strength, hardness and reduction of polymerization shrinkage while maintaining the critical working and handling characteristics of the material. The quantum effects realized through the novel mechanistic dispersion of the nano-sized and geometrically ideal filler will lead to dramatic property enhancement of the composite affecting the durability and longevity of the dental restoration. Feasibility of this application of PSLN technology will be investigated through a series of experiments with subsequent characterization by x-ray diffraction and TEM analysis. Due to a high failure rate attributed to lack of strength, marginal leakage and technique sensitivity, methacrylate based dental composites have not been universally accepted as a replacement for amalgams. Preliminary findings and data from other industrial applications support the idea that PSLN technology provides superior property enhancement enabling remarkable potential for further acceptance of dental composites. This research project addresses the development of an enhanced dental composite specifically for use as core build-up material and provides future avenues for improvements to all dental composites, including anterior, posterior and flowable composites doc1739 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop state-of-the-art computational models to accurately simulate the next generation of plasma-etch tools for SiO2 and low-k dielectric materials. Modeling tools necessary to address these challenges are not currently available, and will be developed by two companies specializing in chamber scale multi-dimensional and surface reaction chemistry simulations. The Phase I effort will focus on plasma sheath model (unified plasma sheath model of Riley Bose) implementation, software integration and development of new ion assisted reaction formalism. Feasibility of the proposed integrated simulator will be demonstrated utilizing simple C2F6 plasma mechanism of CFDRC and complex C2F6 plasma etch mechanism developed by SEMATECH. The commercial availability of the proposed capability will allow process engineers to design better processes and identify equipment process deficiencies before they are performed on a R&D or production scale. Implementation of the proposed computational innovation will produce major impact on technology readiness, and affordability through better process chamber designs and higher throughput doc1740 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project proposes to develop a new class of UV-transmitting, electrically conductive coatings by using filtered cathodic arc plasma deposition (FCAPD). Cathodic arc plasmas are characterized by relatively high ion energy (20-150 eV) that lead to denser films. Macroparticles which typically contaminate such plasmas can be filtered using curved magnetic filters that have been developed by Berkeley s Plasma Application Group. Filtered cathodic arc coatings are not only dense but may be grown in a vacuum or reactive environments. The window of partial pressure for stochiometric compound films is wider than for evaporation or sputtering methods. Moreover, sputtered coatings (and more so beam-evaporated films) are characterized by porosity, which increases the thickness for the required electrical conductivity, with reduced optical transmission. The primary objective of Phase I is to demonstrate that a thin coating can be produced which is highly conductive and transmits between 80- 90% of the incident UV radiation. Once the feasibility of using FCAPD for producing high density coatings that show high electrical conductivity and high light transparency have been answered, Phase II will optimize the process for larger areas. Engineering development, marketing and sales of coating units is the province of Phase III. Commercial applications for FCAPD films include: electrochromic automotive and aircraft windows; heat mirrors; optoelectronic devices such as UV triggered diamond high voltage switches; solar cell surfaces for space applications Cathodic arc deposition of TiN coatings is a well established technology which supports tens of millions of dollars of business annually worldwide in coating equipment sales and hundreds of millions of dollars annually for the coatings generated by that equipment doc1741 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I study is aimed toward demonstrating the feasibility of using the correlated k-distribution approach, in conjunction with the control-angle discrete ordinates method (CA-DOM), for accurate and fast simulation of non-gray radiative transport in large-scale fires and combustion systems. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has been used in the combustion industry with considerable success during the past decade. Currently, however, there exist no CFD package, which treats non-gray radiation in combustion gases with the desired level of accuracy and computational efficiency. With a trend towards cleaner combustion, radiation from molecular gases is assuming a major role in the determination of combustor performance, and NOx emissions in particular. Under this Phase I study, a novel approach to predict radiative transport in combustion gases, based on the correlated k-distribution approach, will be developed. The correlated k-distribution approach has recently been used with great success, and has the potential of improving computational efficiency by orders of magnitude. This is as opposed to other models, which promise only marginal improvements. The proposed development will be conducted within the framework of the commercial CFD code, CFD-ACE+. The model will be evaluated by comparing its predictions against experimental and analytical data. Special attention will be paid towards computational efficiency. The proposed radiation model will be the first commercial tool of its kind. Its uniqueness lies in its ability to predict radiative transport both accurately and fast. It is expected to have significant impact on the gas turbine, furnace building, and automotive industry, where CFD design and optimization is already standard practice. In addition, the tool could be used effectively for the simulation of large-scale fires and for atmospheric radiation calculations doc1742 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a new type of corrosion resistant undercoating for application to metal substrates prior to the deposition of a hard decorative top coat applied by physical vapor deposition (PVD). PVD metal nitride coatings such as TiN and ZrN are extremely hard, and thus provide excellent scratch and wear resistance. However, they do not provide adequate corrosion resistance because of micron-scale flaws that act as corrosion sites, and thus a corrosion-resistant underlayer is needed. This undercoat must be smooth, sufficiently hard to support the hard PVD coating, and provide good adhesion to both the substrate and to the PVD coating. Ideally, the undercoat would provide a leveling effect to minimize polishing of the metal substrate. Recently, a new method for coating metal with a thin layer of glass has been developed. This coating, which is being optimized as a protective outer coating for polished aluminum, has many of the attributes of a successful PVD undercoating including corrosion resistance, hardness, and leveling. The key technological step will be to develop good adhesion between this glass coating and a PVD coating, and that will be the main focus of the proposed research. PVD coatings are widely used for applications that require both durability and an attractive appearance; for example, metal-nitride coatings can be made to closely resemble polished metals including brass, gold, and chrome. Current applications include personal items (pens, glasses, watches, jewelry, etc.), door hardware, plumbing fixtures, decorative trim on automobiles, and architectural detailing. All these PVD applications require an undercoating to improve corrosion resistance, but current undercoating options are inadequate for a number of reasons such as cost and environmental impact. Electroplating, the most widely used undercoating, uses significant amounts of toxic chemicals. A new type of undercoating which could meet performance and cost requirements while being environmentally friendly would thus have significant and immediate market potential doc1743 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project seeks to develop an innovative wireless network infrastructure for residential homes that can integrate Internet, data communication, telephony, home automation, audio, and video. This infrastructure is called Universal Home Network (UHN). The backbone of UHN is the emerging Time-Modulated Ultrawide Band (TM-UWB) radio technology. TM-UWB is a radio communication method that sends pulses of RF energy instead of sine waves. These pulses that enable precise ranging, operate in multi-path environments, and more easily penetrate indoor obstructions. The average RF transmit power of these pulses is below the noise floor, allowing UHN to perform tracking and data communication while coexisting with existing RF systems. TM-UWB radios only transmit pulses with 0.1% duty cycle, so they consume very little power. Pulses in the time domain have a bandwidth of more than 2 GHz, so TM-UWB signal is very difficult to intercept and jam. UHN may achieve a bandwidth of more than 100Mbps using multiple channels. The brain of HUN is the HUN Home Server, which is a dedicated real-time computer managing, sharing, routing, storage, and processing voice, video, data, and control commands coming in and out of the house. The Home Networking market is growing rapidly, because of the declining price of computers, increasing number of homes with multiple PCs, and Internet access. There are also an increasing number of digital devices used in the home, with a prevalence of multimedia content. Park Associates anticipates that computer-and entertainment-based networks alone will exceed $4 billions in five years. Existing home network technologies can only meet parts of the interconnection needs of homeowners. The proposed UHN is designed to carry data, voice, audio video, and home automation messages in a unified infrastructure. Intelligent Automation Inc. s near term commercialization plan is to provide interfaces between UHN and other existing protocols to speed up the acceptance of UHN by consumers and industries. The long term plan is to partner with consumer electronics, appliance, and home automation manufactures to design and sell products with native UHN interface doc1744 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop an innovative particle transport and dispersion model called the Probability Density Function Propagation (PDFP) models, and implements the model into a commercial code. The PDFP model tracks the Probability Density Function (PDF) of particle position as a function of space and time. Only one trajectory for each class of particle size or type needs to be calculated, as compared to the to trajectories needed in current state-of-the-art particulate models. This makes the PDFP model very computationally efficient, which is important for simulations with large numbers of particles where the particle calculations take a significant percentage of the CPU time. From the particle PDF s calculated in the model, the properties of the dispersed phase (solid or liquid) can be calculated anywhere in the model, providing a complete statistical representation of the particle behavior. The combination of computational speed and capability to completely describe the particles (solid or liquid) will make the PDFP model a valuable tool for engineers analyzing two-phase flows. In Phase I, the feasibility of the model will be demonstrated by comparing predictions with published data. The Probability Density Function Propagation (PDFP) model will be developed and implemented in a commercial code. The capability will be implemented in an existing commercial code and will provide the capability to easily simulate two-phase flows that are difficult or very time consuming using current state-of-the-art particle models. Examples of applications where the PDFP model can be used include characterizing nonreacting sprays for ignition calculations, atmospheric dispersion, pneumatic transport, spray cooling, and any other application where large number of particles must be modeled doc1745 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to develop a new class of engineered zeolite catalysts for the petrochemical and refining industry. A looming reformulated gasoline boom is driving the development of solid-acid catalysts routes to alkylates. The intent is to replace sulfuric and hydrofluoric acids with safer and more environmentally benign solid-acid catalysts in the 60-million tons year alkylates market. Although zeolites have been tried as a potential candidate, they deactivate rapidly on stream. The deactivation is mainly due to the formation of coke deposits that plug up pore mouth openings and block the active sites. The novel zeolite catalyst uses smart structure-directing agents to create highly ordered micro and macro-pores. The larger pores provide efficient access and quick diffusion of reagents to the micro-porous system, while the smaller pores can offer high-surface area and size selectivity; thus specific catalytic and sieving functions. Engineered zeolite catalysts will be synthesized, characterized and tested for activity and stability as part of the Phase I research. It is expected that the unique pore architecture will reduce intra-pore diffusive barriers leading to higher product selectivity and a significantly longer catalyst life compared to conventional zeolitic systems. This new class of engineered zeolites can be used effectively as a solid-acid catalyst for fast liquid phase reactions such as the production of iso-octanes, cumene and EB doc1746 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop materials to help science learners use mathematics more effectively. The project provides a plan for creating new curriculum materials for the science classroom. These materials will use Fathom tm, a new data analysis software package originally developed for mathematics. Also, enhancements for the software to make it more appropriate in science will be designed and implemented. Too often, science students use less-sophisticated mathematics--for example, computing means or proportions--than they use in parallel math classes. Fathom software, coupled with data sources such as the web and probeware, can be used-to help students bring the mathematics they are learning to bear on science. Students understanding of science concepts will improve, and they will see more connections between their science and mathematics learning. With three successful sample lessons, Epistemological Engineering will be poised to create additional materials and to implement further software enhancements. The proposed research will lead to significant enhancements to Fathom software and open the door to creating curriculum materials in science education using tools previously available only to math educators. Epistemological Engineering will benefit both from opening the science market for Fathom and from the sale of the science curriculum materials that the firm will publish doc1747 none This Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) Phase I project builds upon the technology and success of the company s software product, one of the industry s first embroidery design automation systems. It provides the textile industry with simplified mechanisms for converting scanned artwork into high quality embroidery design data. This data is then utilized by commercial sewing equipment to produce the embroidered artwork that has become quite common on all types of garments and woven goods. Unfortunately, embroidered artwork is often quite expensive to produce. In many cases, it may substantially exceed the costs of the actual garments being imprinted. These costs arise from a variety of factors including an embroidered design s size, layout, and complexity. Well-designed embroidered artwork permits efficient production with high yields (i.e. causing very few defective items to be produced). Automating this design creation process provides additional benefits by eliminating the time consuming manual process that must otherwise be undertaken by a human expert. With these factors as the primary motivation, this research will investigate advanced artificial intelligence and machine vision mechanisms, such as neural nets and structural indexes, to substantially improve capabilities and performance. The advantages of a robust automation system to the textile industry are quite substantial. Creating sophisticated embroidery designs is a tedious, time-consuming activity requiring the skills of a human expert (called a digitizer). Even after this process has been completed, any miscalculations by the digitizer could substantially impede production on machinery. A well-designed expert system could inevitably eliminate these costs and perhaps even provide a level of quality that is not achievable by its human counterparts. Additionally, this research may also have broad application within other fields such as document processing or other areas where image understanding and interpretation is important doc1748 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposal focuses on providing a feasibility demonstration of producing electrospun nanowebs of nanofibers, and combining them with conventional filter media to form novel NanoFilter media for specific filtration applications. These applications are well suited to address the problems of removal of particles smaller than 3 microns from effluent streams -where superior efficiency of nanowebs in capturing sub-micron particles is very attractive for cost considerations as well. Initially, the nanofibers will be electrospun from a solution of Nylon 6 in formic acid and laid directly on to a conventional support filter media as a nanoweb. The web architecture will be easily tailored to achieve the desired composite filter performance by varying fiber diameter, fiber orientation, fiber packing fraction within the nanoweb, and the nanoweb thickness. This project will be carried out collaboratively by eSpin Technologies, a small, high-technology start-up company based in Chattanooga, TN, and specializing in providing custom-made electrospun nanofibers, with academic centers and major corporations as its partners. Together they possess the skills and facilities needed to successfully carry out the work under this grant. Nanotechnologies developed in the coming years will form the foundation of significant commercial platforms. This business will be a key supplier of nanofiber technology which have the potential for commercial applications in a variety of fields including, filtration: industrial filters, biological separations, ultra pure air and water systems, next generation clean rooms, agriculture and food industries, and microelectronic industries doc1749 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a new high pressure high temperature (HPHT) cell for conventional hot pressing units, which will be capable of achieving very high static pressures and temperatures in relatively large working volumes. This new unit, which is called a supercell , will enable pressures up to 30 GPa and temperatures up to ~ C in a working volume of 1 mm3. In contrast, a conventional diamond anvil cell can attain pressures of ~30 GPa in a working volume of only ~1 mm3, with temperatures limited to about 400C. Thus, the supercell will have capabilities for processing materials that reach beyond those of today s systems. Utilizing the significant pressure temperature volume range of the supercell, it should be possible to obtain the very high pressure and very high temperature needed for crystallization of diamond from liquid carbon, and make possible the study of unknown regions of the carbon state (phase) diagram. HPHT crystallization of diamond from liquid carbon provides an opportunity to produce nanocrystalline, microcrystalline, or monocrystalline diamond, depending on the cooling rate from the liquid state, as well as opening new possibilities for doping diamond with boron and or nitrogen. This project, if successful, will enable manufacture of pure and doped nanocrystalline, microcrystalline and monocrystalline diamonds, and will facilitate the production of advanced anvils for the diamond industry as well as for production of inserts for drill bits. The technology also has important potential for university laboratories doc1750 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will synthesize boron nitride nanotubes by a continuous pyrolysis method that can be readily scaled to produce industrial quantities at reasonable costs. Intensive research is being conducted on single-walled carbon nanotubes (C-SWNTs) to take advantage of their incredibly high specific strength in composite material reinforcements, and their unusual electron transport properties in nanoscale electronic devices. Their properties and applications stem from the defect-free arrangement of carbon atoms into a filament with extremely high aspect ratio (length diameter), currently around 10,000. However, the high aspect ratio, tubular geometry, and atomic perfection are not unique to carbon; nanotubes (NTs) can be formed from many other layered materials, including boron nitride. BN-NTs, while also exhibiting high strength, have commercially attractive properties that are complementary to the C-SWNTs, based on the chemical differences between BN and graphite. The most prominent characteristics unique to BN-NTs are oxidation resistance, optical transparency, and uniformity. BN-NTs are currently made in benchtop reactors by arc evaporation of boron rods, a low-throughput, uneconomical batch process. By developing an improved synthetic method, BN-NTs will become available for materials research and applications. Boron nitride nanotubes will have applications as reinforcements in high-end composite materials. The best uses of BN nanotubes are complementary to those of C-SWNTs. For example, the BN-NTs have the potential to form high strength, high temperature, form metal carbides. As another example, BN-NT reinforcement of a polymer matrix will maintain the electrically insulating and optical transmission properties of the matrix, whereas C-SWNTs impart electrical conductivity and opacity to the polymer matrix. Also, the improved chemical resistance, particularly to oxygen attack, will improve the BN-NT stability at elevated temperatures and other severe service conditions doc1751 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will demonstrate an innovative photo-curable cure on demand room temperature preceramic polymer approach for the fabrication of high yield silicon nitride (Si3N4) and Si3N4 SiC ceramics. No photo-curable preceramic polymer to silicon nitride or any other nitride ceramic has ever been previously demonstrated. The proof of concept will be demonstrated by synthesizing and subsequently photo-cross-linking poly(ethynyl)silizane (PESZ) prior to pyrolysis. This is expected to result in a low-dielectric, low creep, high ceramic yield matrix or coating with wide applications. This represents a new core enabling technology with potential for microelectronics, thermal management, and high temperature structural applications. Specifically, the unique combination of high strength, high temperature stability, high thermal conductivity, and unusual dielectric properties of silicon nitride lend themselves to unique applications that include hybrid circuit substrates for microwave electronics, hypersonic interceptor nose cones, and antennas. The photo-curability permits the eventual photolithographic patterning of both carbide and nitride ceramics doc1752 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project from PowerWorld Corporation addresses the problem faced by the electric power industry in visualizing vast quantities of power system data. The entry of new players into the electricity industry has resulted in a large new demand for tools to help them understand and analyze power systems. Areas such as system operations that have traditionally been the domain of highly trained engineers now need to be understood by a broader spectrum of professionals. The restructuring of the industry has resulted in new terms, transaction methods, and technical calculations to facilitate the many different types of transactions needed to realize promised economies and profits. The purpose of the proposed work is the development of an interactive 3D environment tailored to the needs of power system analysts. This work will include development of a prototype interactive environment and methods for visualizing power system data. The market niche that PowerWorld Corporation is attempting to exploit is the development of high-quality, yet extremely user-friendly power system visualization software to meet the expanded needs for power system visualization that are a result of industry restructuring doc1753 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop a scanning automultiscopic 3-D visualization system. Visual information gathering and interpretation can be significantly improved by presenting information in three dimensions. Current 3-D systems have very limited field-of-view or require intrusive headgear with head tracking to emulate look-around, and suffer from inconsistencies between binocular convergence and eye accommodation. Physical Optics Corporation (POC) proposes a new class of 3-D displays based on proprietary liquid crystal scanner panels that time-sequentially project a large number of perspective images over a wide field-of-view into the view space in front of the display. POC will investigate the feasibility of the proposed concept through simulation, analysis, design, and experimentation, culminating in a proof-of-concept demonstration. The proposed automultiscopic 3-D visualization system, without glasses or head tracking equipment, will produce a correct 3-D image without convergence and accommodation inconsistencies, thus eliminating eye strain that has recently been identified as a potential cause of eye damage. The proposed research effort will result in a novel kind of high performance 3-D visualization system that overcomes the limitations of current stereoscopic display technologies. The 3-D system will be used for visualization of multidimensional scientific and medical data, for 3-D design, training and education of government and civilian personnel in a cooperative 3-D environment, and for telepresence and teleoperation doc1754 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop, deploy, and evaluate a virtual reality-based modeling kit that will enable students to collaboratively build, cohabit, and present virtual models of the solar system within a web-based inquiry framework. This system will enable students to explore fundamental questions of planetary motion; independently or collaboratively construct models of the solar system; share and cohabit these virtual models with other local and remote students, mentors or teachers through the web; and present these models to large audiences. This general instructional approach has been tested and validated through pilot projects using limited off-the-shelf virtual reality tools. Cybernet Systems Corporation believes that this instructional approach and base technology will open up an entirely new mode of instruction that will be extendable to many other mathematics, science, and technology domains. The market for the project for this immediate version of the software will be middle school earth science, high school physics, and university freshman-level astronomy survey courses. It is important to realize that the underlying technology and instructional approach will be applicable in a wide range of domains (weather, ecology, mathematics, geometric, etc.) and Cybernet Systems Corporation intends to explore and develop these potentials in the next phase of the research. In the near term, the research team believes that there is a significant impact to be made at all levels with the initial domain of planetary motion doc1755 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project plans to develop a novel technology for polymer encapsulation of nanopowders. Nanoparticles, because of their unique properties and advantages, are fast gaining acceptance by all sectors of the industry. Currently, the use of nanoparticles is restricted by either its unavailability or lack of technology for its processing. One such technology is for the coating of nanopowders with a polymeric material. Polymer coated iron nanoparticles (size range of 5-15 nm), because of their super-paramagnetic properties, have extensive applications in the area of bio-separation, detection of toxins in water, immunoassays, DNA probes, and magnetic resonance imaging. The super-paramagnetic nature of these beads means a lower magnetic field (about 1 10 to 1 20) is required for their separation and this translates to significant cost reduction. It should be emphasized that currently there is no technique for coating nanopowders with a polymer. During this Phase I effort, a novel technology for coating of iron nanopowders with a polymer-polystyrene will be developed doc1756 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will produce a network application programmer s interface (API) specification and related implementation, referred to as the Autonomous Undersea Systems Network (AUSNET), for the distributed control of robotic and or sensor systems in a low bandwidth, dynamic network environment. AUSNET will allow expanded networking services specifically tailored to the unique acoustic environment. The proposed effort builds upon emerging ad-hoc (self-forming, self-maintaining) network protocols. Specifically, platform applications will gain access to network generated and propagated data, as well as enhanced control of the actual networking protocols. This will provide significant improvement both locally and network wide in the use of the acoustic band. It will also enable great adaptability to the harsh underwater environment. The AUSNET effort will examine and demonstrate the potential to greatly enhance application level functionality by exploiting network capability and infrastructure in previously unexplored ways. Phase I will result in a feasibility demonstration. The Phase I development environment will be a simulation testbed, with a transition to a live operational environment planned for Phase II. The market for tools that maximize the potential of flexible next-generation computer networks is significant and extends beyond the immediate oceanographic application into other domains doc1757 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will investigate and evaluate a new class of video compression algorithms specifically designed for digital CCTV (closed circuit TV) systems. As the market for surveillance video systems has been increasingly becoming digital, compression has become a critical enabling technology. Current systems employ conservative, standard, and generic compression algorithms that often result in jerky object motion and waste of memory and network bandwidth. This project will investigate a new class of compression algorithm that can significantly improve picture quality at bit-rates lower than or comparable to those in current systems products. This is done by exploiting the special characteristics of surveillance video and by adopting a segmentation model. The result will be a prototype software module that can be installed in digital CCTV systems as their compression units. This technology can be used in video surveillance systems for monitoring banks, airports, government and corporate buildings doc1758 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to develop a diamond coating technology for steel that has the chipping and spalling resistance needed for commercial applications. Friction and wear between rolling, sliding, and cutting surfaces causes lost efficiency, reduced service life, and lost capital. For example, the loss of a bearing while drilling a deep oil well can cost $40,000 an hour in lost production. Diamond, which has a hardness that is twice that of cubic boron nitride (CBN) and four times that of silicon carbide (SiC), cannot be used in these commercial applications due to its poor spalling resistance. The innovation set forth in this proposal seeks to develop interfaces between the steel and diamond that will resist spalling of the film. Advanced computing techniques will be used to identify and evaluate the best prospects for a revolutionary substrate(steel)-interface-coating(diamond) system (Phase I deliverables). The commercialization of a chip-resistant diamond coating will facilitate the development of various advanced bearing and wear products including rolling and sliding bearings, engine parts, cutting tools, and biomedical devices doc1759 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project from Future of Technology and Health, (FUTH), LC, will develop video-based gesture recognition technology to provide an effective new type of computer access for people who have difficulty using a standard keyboard or mouse due to disabilities including cerebral palsy, Lou Gerhig s disease (ALS), stroke, spinal cord injury, or repetitive stress injury. This technology is also expected to provide the capability for hands-free control of computers and other electronic equipment for all users who may be using their hands for other tasks (such as typing, driving a motor vehicle, operating test equipment, etc.). This project focuses on recognition of multiple head and face gestures using standard low cost digital video cameras (under $100) and standard personal computers. The system may also be implemented on pocket computers for mobile and in-vehicle applications. Face and head gestures are used to generate mouse or keyboard actions to control a computer or to control signals that in turn control other types of electronic devices. For example, one application is the capability to surf the web hands-free using head gestures to navigate web pages, including selecting and activating desired links. Gesture recognition can be used to replace or augment existing switch interfaces or expensive eye head tracking systems for people with disabilities, and it has a number of advantages over voice recognition in many applications. Early customers for this technology include computer users with mobility impairments who cannot effectively use a standard keyboard or mouse. Other commercial applications include hands-free control of desktop computer software such as web browsers or text-to-speech, and hands-free control of in-vehicle information systems and personal digital assistants (PDA s). The technology may also be applied for highly reliable hands-free control of industrial, scientific, or military equipment doc1760 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project from Idea Works, Inc. tests the feasibility of using intelligent programming strategies to improve the quality, timeliness, and cost effectiveness of qualitative research. A prototype computer program for qualitative data analysis, currently in initial stages of development, will be further developed and assessed. This program uses artificial intelligence strategies of natural language understanding, machine learning, rule-based expert systems, semantic networks, and case-based reasoning to actively assist researchers in coding data. Two related experiments will compare experienced and inexperienced coders performing with and performing without the aid of the program in order to assess the program s ability to help in coding, to enhance reliability and validity, and to increase the speed of coding. Ease of use and user acceptance of the program will also be examined. The program is expected to improve the quality of research while dramatically reducing cost, time, and training requirements. This will make it feasible to apply rigorous qualitative research techniques to a vast range of problems, from coding transcripts or field notes, to examining the content of Internet sites, to conducting literature reviews. The program proffered by Idea Works, which marks a significant improvement over existing qualitative analysis programs by offering suggestions for code assignments to the users, has commercial potential in both research and business applications. Not only can the computer program be used to assist trained social scientists in coding a wide range of data from field notes to interviews to documents, but, because the program is not limited to any specific coding scheme, it can also be applied in areas as divergent as doctor-patient interaction, studies of man machine interfaces, content analysis of Internet documents, and literature reviews. The project has the potential to dramatically improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of qualitative coding of a broad range of data. It has the potential for achieving cost effectiveness; not only by reducing the time required to code, but also by making it possible for less experienced coders to code with higher levels of reliability and validity doc1761 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is aimed at advancing the state-of-the-art in chemistry education software in a critically important respect demanded by students and teachers. The primary research objective is the development of meaningful interactive tutoring capabilities for problem solving. This area has been repeatedly identified as that where existing offerings are weakest. This project offers a new and different approach, adapting and incorporating certain concepts from artificial intelligence that have not previously been applied in chemistry education. A program will be constructed that not only solves problems, but also can explain its work to the student coherently and respond to various questions. The program will dynamically create detailed explanations of worked-out solutions for problems entered by the student or teacher, and provide the connections to the underlying fundamental chemical concepts. This technology will be implemented as a sophisticated tutoring engine that can be easily interfaced to add interactive tutoring capabilities to any existing educational program or curriculum, such as those dealing with practical real-world applications of chemistry. The chemistry education software has broad commercial implications, creating opportunities for tremendous synergy in use with other packages and curricula. In addition, the improvement to be developed is of a fundamental nature, is portable and scalable, and can be deployed equally well on CD-ROM, on the desktop, or on the Internet doc1762 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project from JBliss Imaging Systems will determine feasibility of specialized software that enables people with low vision to quickly read and process information from many sources, and to write and send information to many locations. The research objective is to combine optical character recognition (OCR), speech synthesis and recognition technologies, together with displays based on the latest vision research to provide an integrated system with a consistent, easy to learn, command structure. Customizable displays are needed to accommodate a variety of visual impairments. The user interface should not require viewing the screen, yet it should present visual displays useful to a low vision person and be intuitive to fully sighted teachers experienced with graphical user interfaces (GUIs). System functions should include the following: reading printed documents; enlarging pictures; writing and word processing documents; receiving, reading, and writing e-mail; accessing and interacting with the Internet; using an address database; saving and retrieving documents; printing; performing calculations; tracking financial accounts; and using a video camera for magnification while hand writing and viewing 3D objects. Commercial applications are in schools, libraries, businesses, and homes. Since approximately 5% of individuals over age 15 have difficulty reading newsprint, even when wearing corrective lens, the potential market is large doc1763 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is designed to develop an ultra-fast data retrieval method for multi-layered optical memory technology. The memory technology uses 3-D stacking of N paired chiral films with unique optical properties. The chiral stack can provide very high areal data storage densities of 100 Mb cm 2 per layer with an equivalent volumetric density of 0.5 Tb cm 3 . The data retrieval method uses image capture and pattern recognition techniques instead of the usual bit-by-bit read out technique to retrieve a large block of data in a single step. The proposed technique can retrieve 2NB bits per readout operation, where the block size B can be 100 MB or higher. Retrieval rates of more than6N Gb s are feasible or 6 G s for a single pair of films. The retrieval method utilizes massive parallelism and is readily achievable thanks to recent progress in digital signal processing and CMOS imager chip technologies. Phase I will demonstrate block readout from a pair of stacked chiral storage films (N=1) and will develop optimal data organization schemes for both block reading and writing. Phase II will develop, build and demonstrate prototypes. Phase III will develop product prototypes that lead to commercialization. The proposed data retrieval method provides orders-of-magnitude increases in throughput that will benefit all areas of computing performance. The improvements will benefit scientific, engineering, business and home computing, in addition to the military C3I doc1764 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop an entirely new form of machine vision technology for process control during the manufacture of precision metal components. The technology will be based on a two-dimensional array of giant magnetoresistance (GMR) sensor elements capable of providing high resolution three-dimensional images of metallic components in real-time. Previous research with individual GMR sensor elements with dimensions of 10 microns has demonstrated detection capabilities with sensitivities up to 60 dB better than conventional eddy-current sensors at a lower per unit cost A densely packed, two-dimensional GMR sensor array, combined with a variable frequency, uniform magnetic field generator, will produce high resolution, three-dimensional spatial information for complex metallic parts as they are produced using a rugged, non-contacting sensor system. The data from these images will provide on-line feedback information for process control, quality assurance, and safety protocols during the manufacturing process. The data will also be valuable for the design of more effective manufacturing processes. The successful development of GMR material fabrication techniques and sensors will provide the unique capabilities required to develop a magnetic field sensor array for machine vision and automated manufacturing. The proposed technology will find markets in manufacturing, quality assurance (QA), and process development. It will be used for rapid imaging and on-line analysis of parts used in aerospace, automotive, transportation, construction, and other industries doc1765 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will lead to an economical wet chemical method for depositing hard and scratch resistant coatings on transparent polymer substrates. The proposed program, when successfully carried out, will solve the ubiquitous problem of transparent polymer surfaces being scratched and worn. Solution methods, which are easily scalable, have been used to develop polymer-oxide nanoparticle (hybrid) transparent coatings on transparent polymers. Such materials lack high hardness values, which can be dramatically increased by incorporating coarse oxide ceramic particles in the hybrid matrix. Based on this innovative approach to maintain transparency even with addition of a significant volume fraction of coarse particles ( 0.25 microns) to a hybrid matrix, transparent coatings will be developed on polycarbonate and acrylic substrates with excellent wear and chemical resistance. Solution methods of forming polymer nanocomposites coatings are far more economical compared to vacuum gas phase processing (e.g., plasma polymerization), but its use has been restricted because of the poor abrasion resistance of these coatings. This novel approach will lead to exceptional wear, scratch and chemical resistance coatings, which will have a wide range of applications in the automotive, aerospace and other industries doc1766 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks the development of highly selective, energy efficient H2 separation technologies. The research addresses the development of low cost, high-performance zeolite membrane modules for high-temperature H2 separation from CO and or light hydrocarbons such as CH4. The availability of such membrane modules for high-temperature hydrogen separation in industrial processes would: (1) improve the cost efficiency and or energy efficiency of hydrogen separation processes currently performed; and (2) provide an enabling technology to make hydrogen separation economically viable in a number of processes. Such processes include many with very large potential volumes and are predominant in the petroleum refining and petrochemicals industrials, such as synthesis gas H2 CO ratio adjustment, H2 recovery from hydroprocessing purge streams, fuel cell H2 purification, membrane reactors for dehydrogenation etc. However, to date, such membrane-based high-temperature H2 separation methods do not exist on a commercial scale due to lack of low-cost, high-performance membranes. Large-scale commercial use of membranes for gas separations currently is limited to organic polymeric membrane modules in low-temperature service. This program is aimed to develop low cost, high-performance zeolite membrane modules for high-temperature H2 separation from CO and or light hydrocarbons such as CH4. The membrane modules which will be developed will consist of a highly selective zeolite top layer, in situ synthesized on high-surface-area honeycomb ceramic monoliths with appropriate underlying membrane structures. Because of the unique structural properties of the zeolite material used, the membrane modules fabricated are expected to have high selectivity and permeance for high temperature H2 separation doc1767 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses the need for a non-vacuum deposition approach for contact layers in CdTe solar cells. While sputtering is at present successfully employed, the objective of this project is the development of a nanoparticle ink that could be used to print submicron thick Te thin films. To date, Te inks produce non-uniform coatings owing to particle agglomeration. The research objective of this project is the formulation of a Te ink composed of dispersed, nonagglomerated Te particles with diameter less than 50 nm. The efficacy of this ink will be demonstrated by fabrication of CdTe solar cells as follows. First, the Te ink will be sprayed onto the CdTe layer of a solar cell heterostructure. Then, this green body will be subjected to a thermal treatment. Finally, the solar cell will be finished by deposition of an opaque electrode. Characterization will be performed on the ink, the sprayed layers, and the finished CdTe devices. If successfully developed, it is anticipated that this research would be translated to a production-sized (i.e., 100 megawatt) CdTe solar cell facility through the industrial subcontractor of this project doc1768 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to develop nanometer scale photocathode structures for use in miniature high-speed photodetectors. The innovation is to use material property based self-assembling techniques to engineer nanostructures for use in optoelectronic devices. NanoSciences proposes to prototype nanowire array photocathode structures for potential photomultiplier applications. The technique employed is to electroplate Sb into a porous Al2O3 matrix of nanochannels. The Al2O3 matrix is partially removed exposing a uniform ordered array of Sb nanowires that are exposed to cesium to form Cs3Sb. As a result of the reduced dimensionality of the nanostructures, the proposed nanowire photocathode has an increased surface area, a tunable refractive index, and a decreased electron affinity. These qualities result in enhanced quantum efficiency over conventional architectures. This research seeks to develop components for miniature high-speed photomultipliers that have applications in optical communications, medical imaging, night vision systems, robotic and machine vision systems, mass spectroscopy, missile defense systems, and basic scientific research doc1769 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project describes the development of an instrument that will quantitatively measure the dimensional change, i.e. swelling behavior, of crosslinked polymer samples as they are exposed to changing environments, such as solvent conditions, pH, and temperature. The wide prevalence of radiation and chemically-crosslinked polymers in industries including biomedical, wire and cable, and packaging has led to the need for a reliable measurement technique to quantify the degree of crosslinking, obtainable from swelling measurements, for process development and quality control. Additionally, end-users would like to know the environmental response of these materials a priori. Currently, researchers rely on weighing techniques to monitor the swell ratio as a sample is placed in a solvent. Solvent evaporation and technician procedure make this technique prone to error and transient measurements difficult to obtain. In the instrument proposed here, a micrometer system will monitor the change in one dimension of a sample as it swells or de-swells in controlled environment with a resolution far better than gravimetric means. These transient measurements will provide the steady state swell ratio, degree of crosslinking anisotropy, and the kinetics of swelling, the latter information valuable for drug release systems, hydrogels, and smart materials. There are currently no commercial instruments designed specifically to measure the swell ratio of crosslinked polymers. The orthopedic industry, in conjunction with the ASTM, is developing a new guideline for these measurements that requires dimensional measurements made while the sample is in the swelling solvent. In addition to providing material parameter information, this instrument will allow quantitative prediction of material behavior when exposed to changing environments. This technology has applications to hydrogels, smart materials, films, granular material, and the wire and cable industry doc1770 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project will significantly increase the energy density and reduce the manufacturing cost of ultracapacitors for NGV applications. Cell voltage constraints presently limit the energy density and increase the number of cells required for high voltage ultracapacitors. The composition of porous carbon electrode materials will be modified to adjust the open circuit potential, thereby increasing the cell voltage. Anodically stable electrolytes will be investigated to further increase cell voltage. The objective is to increase cell voltage to 3.6 V versus 2.5 V typical for present commercial carbon-based ultracapacitors. Since energy density scales with 2 V, 3.6 V cells would more than double the energy density. This increase would also reduce manufacturing cost by reducing the number of cells in high voltage devices by 30%. Prototype capacitor cells will be prepared and evaluated to determine the cell voltage window. Extended charge discharge and constant potential measurements will be made to assure that the increased cell voltage is sustained. Ultracapacitors complement or replace batteries in applications where weight, peak power, and battery life are key factors. Commercial applications include cellular phones, power conditioning (UPS), electromechanical actuators, and conventional or next generation vehicles doc1771 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project describes a unique instrument capable of quantifying the extensional rheological behavior of solutions, pastes and melts. In this instrument a small quantity of fluid is rapidly stretched between two plates to form a liquid bridge, and the diameter decrease is subsequently monitored as the fluid drains under gravity and surface tension. Comparison of rheological models with the data allows one to extract viscosity, surface tension, elasticity and other parameters relating to extensional flows. Currently, researchers rely purely on simple shear characterization or capillary rheometry, neither of which can provide unambiguous quantitative information about extensional flow behavior. The integration of hardware and analysis software will make the instrument both versatile and unique. The instrument will be invaluable to industry where all processing flows (such as extrusion, filling, pumping, blow molding, spraying etc.) involve extensional flow fields. It will find utility in industry as both a quality control tool and a research grade device. Additionally it will be of use to academia, where no simple quantitative analytical device exists for examining the draining (and filament forming) behavior of fluids. In addition the instrument described has a number of intrinsic advantages that make it ideal for a shop floor installation. It is compact (our envisioned design will have a footprint smaller than 0.1 m 2 ) and robust (with few moving parts it will be tolerant of dust and vibration). It should also be easy to use, especially in an indexing mode for intra-lab comparisons (or floor level quality control). The removable plates will allow easy cleaning and the ability to change plate surface chemistry. Finally the sample volumes will be small doc1772 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project proposes to use giant magnetoresistance (GMR) magnetic sensors and eddy current techniques to detect flaws in metallic components under insulative coatings. Innovations and improvements in surface treatments such as coatings and sprayings including thermal barrier coatings are useless unless degradation, wear, corrosion and oxidization due to thermal and mechanical stresses can be monitored under these surface treatments. Conditional monitoring using GMR sensors has the following advantages: (1) Refinement of present sensor technology will enable the manufacture of eddy current sensors of very high sensitivity thereby increasing the permissible lift-off. (2) Unlike ultrasonic methods, magnetic fields are not significantly affected by the presence of electrical insulating coatings. (3) The directional sensitivity of GMR based sensors allows detection of flaws near edges where cracks are more likely to initiate. This project will prove the feasibility of using GMR sensors and eddy current techniques to detect flaws under coatings. High sensitivity GMR sensors will allow the design of small, easily maneuvered, portable NDE units which can be used for structure monitoring, surveillance, critical component monitoring and equipment preparedness doc1773 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop an enabling innovation that directly converts infrared (IR) radiation from heated sources using nanowire antennas and nanometer scale monolithically integrated diodes. This program will create IR-collecting modules using very inexpensive metal materials and electrochemical processing. The low efficiency, expensive materials, and the need to chemically tailor compositions to efficiently couple to different emitters have substantially limited commercialization of thermophotovoltaic modules to niche applications. The feasibility of electrochemically formed IR-collecting modules will be demonstrated. Once demonstrated, antennas will be engineered for maximum collection efficiency. The applications vary from low temperature portable power packs to the generation of electricity from high temperature nuclear and conventional heat sources. In addition, the creation of a non-biased, room temperature, quantum confinement structure has the potential to revolutionize IR detector technology doc1774 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop new automatic methods for designing, configuring, and reconfiguring communications networks. New communications technologies, like Wave Division Multiplexing, or fully mobile wireless networks and new communications services with Quality of Service requirements all require fast, reliable methods for reconfiguring network topologies, defining fixed and mobile equipment locations, selecting from available media, and providing and configuring required interface equipment. The resulting networks must be able to recover from temporary traffic congestion, equipment outages, or interference. This project uses innovative Genetic Algorithm (GA) techniques to solve these problems and provide end users with reliable cost-effective methods for network design, management, and reconfiguration. The GA based decision aid will shorten planning cycles and increase reliability in designing, managing, expanding, and adding new services on current multi-site commercial and military networks. It will also provide reliable, effective support for configuring military, commercial, or disaster relief wireless networks using mobile switching equipment. It will also shorten the time and expense required for Internet Service Providers to upgrade their networks for new users and services. The methods will also apply to fault diagnosis, network expansion, vulnerability analysis, and performance tuning in existing networks and extend the capabilities of current network management tools. These application areas represent growing multi-billion dollar markets doc1775 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop and demonstrate a pultrusion-based continuous, automated, near net shape manufacturing technology. The technology may be able to reduce the finished cost of constant cross section carbon carbon composite structures by an order of magnitude or more. The resulting change to accepted cost performance paradigms arising from this revolutionary reduction in carbon carbon price will open a wide range of new commercial markets that until now have been constrained by cost to using much lower-performance pyrolytic graphite. The research includes design and fabrication of a lab-scale, automated production line, plus process optimization runs and analytical characterization of the resulting carbon carbon test samples. Key technologies to be demonstrated include the continuous matrix impregnation of moving dry carbon fiber preforms as they pass through the wet-out portion of the processing equipment, plus continuous in-line rigidization of a high char yield matrix. The resulting green composite is expected to be developable into a commercially viable high-density carbon carbon part after a single carbonization cycle. Mechanical and thermal properties of the low cost carbon carbon will be many times better than the current commercial materials this product will replace. Carbon carbon has unique high temperature thermal and mechanical properties. A few large dollar-value markets that will eagerly accept and apply commercially-priced carbon carbon components include heat treating furnace structures, steel-making electric arc furnace electrodes, fuel cell components, heat exchangers, thermal radiators and crucibles doc1776 none In this Small Business Innovation Research Phase I research project, Mission Research Corporation proposes to develop algorithms and implementation techniques for detecting steganography (i.e., hidden information) in digital imagery files. Although considerable research has been performed on developing novel steganographic methods, very little work has been performed on the important topic of detecting the presence of steganography in digital images. The fundamental goal of this SBIR research is to develop and refine techniques for detecting steganography and implement these techniques into user friendly software products. The proposed Phase 1 research will consist of identifying the most commonly used steganography techniques, determining image characteristics statistical measures that can be calculated and used to identify the presence of steganography in various image formats (including lossless, lossy, and palette formats), developing an artificial neural network decision model, and implementation testing of the results using a prototype Matlab algorithm. This research will provide valuable tools and methodologies that would enable system administrators to monitor files that may be leaving (or entering) a site on the Internet or from a secure facility, with the objective of determining the probability that such files contain hidden information. There are a wide variety of potential users of steganography detection techniques. Computer systems administrators at US government installations would likely be among the first to benefit from development of these steganography detection techniques. Due to the sensitivity of tremendous amounts of data handled by the US government, tools that would ensure security of electronic traffic through their many worldwide sites would be a valuable asset. In addition, are many other establishments including private businesses, law enforcement agencies, and health care facilities that are also very concerned with ensuring that unauthorized transfer of information does not occur to or from their facilities doc1777 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will investigate the viability of a new manufacturing Supply Chain Management System (SCMS) representing an innovation in enterprise resources planning (ERP) supply chain management that: (1) Is more effective than existing supply-chain management software paradigms; (2) Incorporates many of the lean manufacturing principles; and (3) Is more available to smaller manufacturing companies than existing systems in that it can be delivered via the worldwide Web. The result would be more effective inventory management, production planning, and production control resulting in greater customer responsiveness, lower inventory levels, and higher utilization of critical resources. By delivering over the worldwide web with a free trial period followed by a pay-per-use protocol, smaller companies can make use of the same powerful scheduling tools that are used by large companies. The concept is a considered to be a better fit for real manufacturing systems than existing ERP approaches. If successful, the results would enable U.S. manufacturing companies to be better suited to compete in the new web-based marketplace that takes low cost and high quality as given, leaving customer service as the key aspect for distinction. Such companies will be able to deliver customized products to customers with almost zero lead-time, thereby enhancing their position in an increasingly competitive global environment doc1778 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will conduct research to replace current environmentally damaging metal pretreatment processes with an environmentally benign process. In the approach the metal surface is etched then coated with a sub-micron film of plasma polymerized SiO2. Current metal pretreatment processes for painting and adhesive bonding perform well, but generate tremendous volumes of wastes, including hexavalent chromium and various inorganic acids. To obtain performance superior to the current state-of-the-art wet chemical surface treatments, the surface chemistry and morphology of the plasma polymerized films need to be tailored for specific interactions with the adhesive. Effects of variables including substrate chemistry, monomer chemistry, and ion kinetic energy on surface chemistry and morphology of plasma polymers will be determined. Then, the effect of the resulting structure on the strength and durability of adhesive joints will be determined. By combining in-situ analytical techniques with accelerated aging and mechanical testing of adhesive specimens, a superior, environmentally benign process based on plasma polymerization will be developed and commercialized. These primers will have well understood morphologies and surface compositions tailored to the adhesive chemistry through control of the deposition conditions and or chemical derivitization of the plasma polymer surface doc1779 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses the demand for structurally efficient damage-tolerant engineering materials. New and ingenious methods are required to generate novel, application-specific materials, particularly for the service temperatures between 400C and 650C. Metal matrix composites (MMCs), characterized by a metallic alloy matrix (typically aluminum or titanium) reinforced with a second phase ceramic (typically carbides or borides) have emerged as promising candidates offering increased specific strength and modulus, at ambient and elevated temperature at the expense of ductility. The opportunity exists to create novel Non-Equilibrium Metallic Composites (NMCs) using metallic second phase reinforcing constituents, thereby combining the load sharing advantages of MMCs while maintaining the practical service advantages of a totally metallic material. This new class of materials can be created by powder metallurgy, using solid-state diffusion to generate the non- equilibrium structures. Based upon promising preliminary investigations with the titanium- tungsten system, tungsten particle reinforced titanium alloy test bars will be produced for critical microstructural, physical and mechanical property evaluation in this program. It is anticipated that increased specific strength for intermediate service temperature can be achieved without sacrifice in toughness. The Non-Equilibrium Metallic Composite materials being investigated in this program could be applied to four major market areas: industrial transportation (engine automotive), biomedical and aerospace defense where tailored compositions could offer significant competitive advantage doc1780 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks make high performance vapor-grown carbon fiber (VGCF) into a commercially viable product by using improved catalysis to increase the growth yield by an order of magnitude. This material has been used to create composites with record setting thermal properties in a variety of matrix materials, while reducing weight. However, the cost of this material is high and the quantities that can be produced are far too low to allow its widespread commercial exploitation. The production rate is limited by a very low efficiency of the catalyst that nucleates fiber growth. Work under this program will improve the method of catalyst dispersion, thereby optimizing the size distribution of catalyst particles, and leading to an increased nucleation rate. Improved catalyst efficiency will result in proportionate increases in production rates and decreases in costs. Markets for VGCF reinforced composites include fields that need improved, lighter weight, thermal management systems, such as space and aviation, high power electronics, consumer electronics, and power generation. For many applications, the thermal performance of VGCF reinforced composites will be enabling. For others, it will allow passive cooling to replace active systems, thereby reducing cost and increasing reliability doc1781 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I program will develop a rapid cure, high strength epoxy adhesive that can be disbonded by application of low amperage direct current, is proposed. This adhesive will allow both the rapid assembly and disassembly of manufactured goods. Used as a replacement for conventional fasteners, nuts and bolts or welds, this adhesive will provide reduced machining costs and increased production rates. In addition, the disbonding feature of the epoxy will permit repair and refurbishment of these manufactured items and will allow the rapid end of life disassembly of the items greatly facilitating recycling procedures. The disbonding feature will also allow manufacturing errors to be corrected. Currently, the use of aluminum in automobile manufacturing is limited by the fact that aluminum cannot be easily stretched or bent to compensate for misjoining during welding or other fastening operations. The proposed research will involve the development of rapid cure chemistries for the electrically disbonding adhesives. Chemical and microstructural analyses will be used to gain insight into the disbonding mechanism and allow advancement of the technology. Formulations suitable for high volume manufacturing will be developed. The commercial opportunities are wide ranging in manufacturing applications involving automotive, electronics doc1782 none This Small Business Innovation (SBIR) Phase I Research project addresses the environmental issues confronting the emerging photovoltaic technology based on copper indium diselenide. This technology has just entered the commercial market. As it expands into high volume production the industry faces rising raw material costs, escalating waste disposal costs and future liabilities. This project develops an electrochemical method specifically tailored to recycle photovoltaic modules which contain extremely low quantities of hazardous material relative to large bulk stream. It uses an innovative closed-loop approach to remove, separate and regenerate the semiconductor films in a single compact system with minimum waste. Phase I will develop the method for copper indium diselenide. The research will lead to unique a prototype recycling capability that is safe, fast, cost-effective, non-destructive, simple to operate and easy to maintain and that could be readily integrated into the manufacturing line. Converting defective panels into efficient modules will lead to rapid turn-around and higher production yield. The innovation will provide the photovoltaic industry with a timely and expedient solution to manage hazardous waste disposal and improve module production yield. Its implementation would increase productivity, save over 80% on disposal costs, recover scarce raw materials and ensure the commercial success of thin-film photovoltaic technology. The approach can be applied to recycle other thin-film products, e.g. infrared detectors, flat panel displays, mirror scrap doc1783 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is for the development of a neutral, high flux fluence nitrogen atom beam source for application to the high rate growth of III-V nitride semiconducting materials over large areas. The proposed source is based on Physical Sciences Inc. s (PSI s) proprietary MID-JET technology. This technology employs an electrode-less discharge contained by vortex flow, rather than a dielectric tube commonly used in traditional sources. The discharge is formed at 1 atm which results in efficient Ion recombination and a charge-free beam. Previously, high flux, high fluence oxygen and fluorine atom beams have been demonstrated using a MID-JET with a gas temperature of ~ K. However, to produce a nitrogen atom beam, the basic configuration of the MID-JET must be changed to obtain the K temperatures required to dissociate nitrogen. In Phase I, PSI will examine at least two new configurations via modeling, select one, and fabricate and test an experimental source for nitrogen. Techniques for combining the nitrogen beam with a gallium source will be examined via detailed numerical modeling. If successful, PSI will demonstrate a charge-free nitrogen atom source with a fluence of about 10 21 atoms s, 2 to 3 orders of magnitude higher than that generated by currently available sources. This project will develop a charge-free, high flux fluence nitrogen atom beam for the growth of III-V nitride materials which can replace existing plasma-based tools. The source can allow higher growth rates over larger areas of high quality material with application to the fabrication of high power high temperature semiconductor devices and blue illumination sources (including those for flat panel displays doc1784 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop technologies to generate curved meshes over general three-dimensional domains that are appropriate for high-order finite element analysis. A current stumbling block to the wide adoption of high-order finite element techniques is the lack of automatic means to generate appropriate curved meshes. This project will develop a new and innovative procedure for the effective generation of these types of meshes. The commercial application of this research is the integration of CAD technologies with advanced automated simulation techniques to be used within engineering design processes. These tools will reduce the time and costs associated with performing engineering analysis during design and increase the accuracy of the predictions obtained doc1785 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop full waveform models and minimal sensor algorithms for the GDATS eddy current sensor (ECS), recently chosen for the EMD phase of the JSF development. These algorithms will enable the practical real-time high performance health monitoring for turbine engines. Current processing techniques could require four or more sensors; however, these approaches do not make use of all the information made available by the ECS. Using the full ECS signature, it is possible, in theory, to estimate integral vibration frequency, phase and amplitude using only a single sensor. The reduction of the number of sensors required in each engine stage could potentially save millions of dollars. There are no systems commercially available today for continuous health monitoring of aircraft gas turbine engines. The minimal sensor algorithms for continuous health monitoring have a large market. The customers are USAF, USN and UK MOD. Not only are such systems expected to be put on all new turbine engines such as for the JSF, but they will be retrofitted to the older aircraft as well doc1786 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project involves developing highly active oxygen reduction catalysts for Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cells. Most of the technologies and subsystems for PEM fuel cells are currently well established via vigorous efforts by both the government and private industries. However, the electrochemical reduction of O2 to H2O in acid at potentials close to the thermodynamically permitted value remains a daunting challenge. The primary technical barrier to achieving higher operating voltages is the large cathode overvoltage due to the low activity of the oxygen reduction catalyst. Therefore, improvements are necessary in oxygen reduction catalysts to meet PNGV performance and cost targets. In this SBIR Phase I program, highly active oxygen reduction catalyst will be synthesized by supporting cofacial metal complexes on nanostructured carbon aerogels. Electrode structures will be designed for fuel cell catalysts. The aerogel support will be designed to stabilize the cofacial structure of the metal complexes and optimized for both reactivity and facile molecular access. The catalysts will have significantly higher activities and utilization efficiencies than current state-of-the-art Pt catalysts and lead to reduced catalyst loadings. The catalyst activity in PEM fuel cells is too low to make these cells attractive power plants for transportation applications. If the proposed research is successful the resulting catalysts that are more active than the Pt C catalyst would make PEM fuel cells commercially viable power sources doc1787 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will demonstrate a new approach to optimize thin film photovoltaic device fabrication. The requirements for the efficient conversion of solar radiation to light are a challenge to modern solid state physics and engineering. The task is to provide conversion elements, which are efficient, cheap, and long-lived in order to compete with sources of electric energy which exploit non-regenerative resources of our planet. Organic solid state devices offer several advantages which make them highly interesting for this area of scientific research and commercial development: (1) tunability of the absorption properties, (2) low cost of production due to the ease of fabrication and low costs for the raw materials, (3) mechanical flexibility. One could produce 10,000 m2 of active solar panels with a film thickness of the organic active layer of 100 nm using only 1 kg of organic material. Luna proposes to use an interdiffusion process to fabricate thin film, organic photovoltaic devices that are characterized electrically and optically during the fabrication step. This unprecedented, new approach allows one to optimize device performance during fabrication and to resolve the kinetics of the chemical and physical processes which take place during the interdiffusion of two species of organic molecules. Thin film photodiodes and solar cells have immediate application in various commercial areas for inexpensive, large area, flexible optical detection and energy conversion devices in optical communications, household appliances, and commercial electronics doc1788 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project, proposes to synthesize and consolidate nanocrystalline powders of yttrium aluminum garnet (YAG) for optical window applications. Optical window materials must meet extreme service requirements because they control the beam effectiveness and power output characteristics of laser optical devices. Single crystal YAG is an ideal material for laser optics because of its excellent opto-mechanical properties. It is optically transparent in the wavelength region 200 to nm (from ultraviolet to near-infrared) and from 2.5 to 6.0um (infrared). Unfortunately, single crystal YAG is costly and technically difficult to produce because of its high melting point ( oC). One economically viable alternative is to fabricate transparent YAG ceramics using fine-grained polycrystalline powders. The field of nanomaterials offers excellent opportunities to fabricate optically transparent materials from polycrystalline powder, with opto-mechanical properties similar to single crystals. The use of polycrystalline YAG as a window material will revolutionize the laser industry by significantly reducing window cost. Transparent YAG has many applications in the laser and optics industries. It can be used as a window in high performance laser modules, wavefront analysis systems, beam collimation testers, spectrometers, laser power energy meters, industrial turnkey laser systems for coding, 3D optical surface mapping, micro-machining, laser Doppler anemometers and imaging spectrographs. Lower cost laser systems will find more applications, especially in personal computers CD-ROMs with laser diodes, laser printers, and modems, which require optical isolation doc1789 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to develop a new class of low threshold, high efficiency laser array for telecommunication and optical integration applications using nanomaterial fabrication technology. By incorporating photonic crystals into nanochannel-hosted dye lasers, a novel microlaser array will be developed. Laser active dye materials have been proven to emit coherently in microcavities of nanopore host microcrystals. By incorporating the photonic crystal concept in the microlaser cavity design, more efficient lasing is anticipated for the embedded dye microlasers. Success in developing a microlaser array will lead to flexible and novel products for telecommunication and optical circuits. The Phase I program will investigate the fabrication of nanochannel materials, characterize the nanochannel materials, and determine how to incorporate the photonic crystal into the nanochannel materials. Since microlaser arrays can be readily incorporated into silicon-based photonic devices, there are immediate commercial applications to the telecommunication industry. There is also long term potential for microlaser arrays in display, laser printing and all optical integrated circuits doc1790 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will spin off NSF-sponsored basic research on knowledge discovery at Carnegie Mellon University computer science department. The result will be commercial software that can convey the contents of hundreds or thousands of documents on one computer screen with minimal clicking and scrolling. This capability will enhance information needs as diverse as search, overviewing, and browsing, and alleviate the problem of information overload, which today confronts all retrievers of computer-based textual information. The basic approach is a new form of conceptual clustering that emphasizes the human describability of the resulting document clusters. The techniques combine classical hierarchical clustering with results from the PI s research on data-driven knowledge discovery, which focused on generating very concise and contrastive descriptions of a large number of classes (here, document clusters). The overall goal is to replace the tedious long ranked list display of matching documents, which is nearly universal, but which forces users into repeated and inefficient clicking, backtracking, and scrolling. The potential market opportunities include any domain where more than a few dozen relevant matches are returned for typical information queries, such as web searches, news, patents, scientific research abstracts, proprietary corporate information, and, generally the content delivered by the numerous vendors of specialized information services doc1791 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project deals with the science of fermentation which to date has not been integrated into teaching laboratory activities. While molecular biology is an important aspect of biotechnology, thus far other aspects of biotechnology such as fermentation technology have not been incorporated into science curricula. The following are the main objectives of this project: (1) to research and design classroom laboratory bioreactors; (2) to interface bioinformatics and fermentation technology; (3) to develop problem-based fermentation experiments; and (4) to assess the pedagogy of fermentation resources to be researched. The intention is not to duplicate existing microbiology activities, but rather to develop fermentation experiments that fit the proposed bioreactor strategy. Equally important, the experiments to be researched will provide real world beginning to end biological problems instead of reagents out of bottles. There is a significant business opportunity since currently no equivalent commercially available fermentation bioreactors are available for science education. There is research grade equipment, but such equipment is not affordable for the education market. The company s customers are high school teachers and undergraduate college faculty. These customers are also potential customers for fermentation bioreactors and related products. The proposed fermentation product would broaden the current offerings and increase sales doc1792 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop low friction, wear resistant coatings of the Al-Cu-Fe quasicrystalline (QC) phase. QC coatings appear to be especially suited for anti-seize, anti-fretting applications for both fixed interfaces subjected to vibration or long duration exposures to hostile ambients that include intermittent vibration. These qualities of QC films are believed to be a result of the unusually low surface energies for these structures. The overall program objective is to demonstrate the low friction and wear resistive properties of dense, high quality, magnetron sputtered Al-Cu-Fe icosahedral, quasicrystalline thin films. Magnetron sputtering of QC films will be conducted from thermal shock resistant targets, manufactured from a new proprietary technique developed by TA&T. Coefficient of Friction, wear resistance, surface energy, phase content, and stoichiometry of the films will be measured and correlated with DSC measurements and sputtering and annealing parameters. The ability of QC coatings to resist chemical changes, fretting and sliding wear while maintaining low surface energy (non-adhesive) characteristics could make them ideal coatings for a variety of commercial and military applications doc1793 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project explores the feasibility of using a newly invented novel materials joining process based on electromagnetic theory as a reliable and economic method to weld tubular structures. The project will conduct research and engineering that will address the following critical technical hurdles for the commercial implementation and dissemination of the new welding technology: (1) A comprehensive understanding and characterization of the process; (2) An effective methodology for design and optimization of the system apparatus and welding procedure; (3) Special weld head design and manufacturing to allow for quick loading and unloading the workpiece in the production environment; (4) Industrial system prototyping for an automated welding system that can be integrated in automotive assembly line, and (5) Process and performance specifications. The successful development of such technology would revolutionize the assembly process of the hydroformed tubular structures in automotive chassis and space frame applications. It will also promote the hybrid automotive body structure design that uses both aluminums and steels, and enable joining of different materials such as titanium to superalloys for aerospace and electronic applications. A new multi-million dollar year specialty tube joining process is expected in about 5 years doc1794 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will create nanofiber reinforced thermoplastics as an economical composite for use in structural components. Carbon nanofibers have superior and highly touted intrinsic mechanical properties to contribute to reinforcement of composites. However, their extremely small size, and thus high surface to volume ratio, makes attainment of a strong interface crucial to transferring the intrinsic nanofiber properties to the composite as a whole. Starting from a knowledge base developed under a prior NIST ATP program, this project will further develop methods of nanofiber surface modification and characterization to solve the interface problem, promote solid adhesion between the nanofibers and thermoplastic matrix materials, and create and test the first practical nanofiber reinforced composits for structural materials. Nanofiber reinforced thermoplastics will result in lighter, less expensive structural composites for applications in automobiles, sporting goods and aerospace vehicles. The use of thermoplastics will reduce material costs relative to thermoset composites, and permit economical injection molding processes to be used. Also, electrostatic painting processes will be enabled, reducing the emission of solvents and other unwanted effluents doc1795 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project from Fourth Wave Imaging Corporation concerns the processing and analysis of time-lapse seismic data on parallel computers, using the internet to control the processing flow and visualize the results. In recent years, there has been exponential growth in time-lapse seismic project activity. Time-lapse seismic analysis facilitates the management of oil and gas reservoirs by imaging fluid movement in the reservoir over time. The results are used to guide reservoir management decisions--such as where to place a new well or where to inject water, gas, or steam to stimulate hydrocarbon movement--and help maximize the life of both new and existing fields while minimizing recovery costs. The computer algorithms needed to process time-lapse seismic data are complex and require advanced computational hardware--typically multiprocessor Unix workstations or clusters of personal computers--that can execute instructions in parallel. There is little standardization in parallel hardware. Customers typically have no parallel machines at all or machines whose architecture is fundamentally different from that of the software vendor--hindering the marketing and deployment of this software. The proposed innovation will allow customers to process their data on a centralized PC cluster, using the internet to control the processing and visualize the results. It will also improve the links between the components of the time-lapse seismic workflow, leading to greater understanding and more widespread commercial acceptance of the technology. Potential applications of the proposed research include petroleum industry mapping of bypassed oil, monitoring of costly injected fluids, and imaging flow compartmentalization and the hydraulic properties of faults and fractures. Non-petroleum applicatons include monitoring groundwater reserves, subsurface monitoring of contaminant plumes and environmental clean-up projects. The internet-based parallel software system developed for this project could be applied to other compute-intensive fields suchas medical and satellite imaging, weather forecasting, and finance doc1796 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project prepares the ground-work for the development of the first commercially available Computational Fluid Dynamics package for a truly grid-free Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of turbulent incompressible vortex dominated flow in complex time-varying geometries. The computational engine is based on the parallel, fast multi-pole implementation of a Lagrangian vortex-boundary element method. Turbulence is accounted for via LES, using a Lagrangian dynamic Smagorinsky sub-grid scale model. The method is: (1) fully grid-free in the fluid domain, (2) free of numerical diffusion, (3) inherently solution-adaptive, and (4) capable of modeling inhomogeneous unsteady wall-bounded turbulent flow. To this end, two new ideas will be developed during Phase I: A grid-free method for predicting diffusion with variable-viscosity, which is a pre-requisite for LES modeling; and a non-diffusive vortex merging strategy to curb the proliferation of particles and maintain long-time accuracy. These will then be incorporated into the Lagrangian vortex element method to demonstrate the salient features of grid-free vortex-based LES modeling of turbulent flows, using the prototypical example of the evolution of an initially perturbed infinite-Reynolds-number vortex ring in free space. The software is ideal for simulation and analysis of complex turbulent flow phenomena. This includes vortex breakdown, (massive) flow separation, vortex shedding, transient jets in cross-stream, wake-body interaction, high-swirl flow, etc. All are associated with the design of advanced flow control mechanisms used, for example, to reduce flow-induced noise and vibration, and to improve lift drag performance at reduced energy consumption rates. Examples are flow over bluff bodies such as ground or under-water vehicles; in engines; in around rotating machinery such as pumps and fans; helicopters; or in data storage units with rotating and moving parts doc1797 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses the development of Advanced Carbon Composite Transmission Conductors for application in high voltage transmission grid systems. This technology will enable greater electric power transmission capacity to be realized by facilitating operation at higher temperatures as compared with conventional metallic conductors. The demand for electric power in North America and Europe has risen in proportion with economic growth. Utilities worldwide are seeking new methods to transport more power though overhead transmission corridors. This demand is not anticipated to diminish as the technological age advances. Environmental, regulatory and economic constraints have constrained the installation of new transmission line corridors that are needed to meet this demand. An alternative is to upgrade existing transmission corridors to accommodate increased power flow. In order to address the increasing power demands of industrialized nations advanced conductors offer the potential to enable distribution grids the capacity to meet this challenge. This project will address the requirements for utilities worldwide to facilitate increased power flow through existing overhead high voltage transmission corridors doc1798 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project leads to increased productivity at environmental restoration sites through an innovative integrated application of geographic information systems (GIS), databases, simulation modeling, optimization, and artificial neural networks. The project begins with the understanding that environmental decisions involve many stakeholders, each with different priorities among several objectives. The research goals for this environmental information technology project are to: (1) identify and develop a hierarchy of neural networks that efficiently estimate uncertainty in data and predict the uncertainty as a result of monitoring and remediation decisions; (2) integrate such estimates and data into methods to optimize monitoring and remediation operations, which are coupled with large-scale simulation models used for environmental fate, transport, and risk analysis; (3) store sets of optimized results, which can include different stakeholders objectives and constraints, in databases; and (4) present results to decision making end-users through a GIS interface. The commercial application of this research, presenting results to decision making end-users through a GIS focuses on subsurface (groundwater and soil) remediation at thousands of sites nationwide, and will be realized by licensing to firms for sales to remediation contractors. The research has near-term applications in climate, weather, air pollution, water, forest, and mineral resources, and emergency planning doc1799 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I proposal will enable the development of commercial products baced on the advanced technology of Language Computer Corporation (LCC). The technology involves Question Answering (Q A). Several research objectives are identified to make this work. The first one is to develop a viable commercial product out of the technology by redesigning the key components of the system: indexing, search engine, and the answer extraction module. The second objective is to study and design a scalable, distributed Q A system architecture capable of serving a large number of users simultaneously. The third objective is to extract user profile information for the purpose of increasing the service quality and revenues. The final objective is to evaluate the performance of the products in the laboratory environment, as well as in a small scale Application Service Provider (ASP) model with real users of two beta customers. The proposed suite of three products is based on leading edge research on question answering performed by the LCC management team. The significance of this work is that by developing robust, scalable question answering products, it takes the search engine technology a step closer to providing users with quality information that is accurate and concise doc1800 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project lays the foundation for developing and implementing an in-situ feedback control instrument for Metal Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition (MOCVD) of complex oxides. If successful, the project will result in real time in-situ feedback monitors addressing the quality of the actual film being deposited by a complex oxide MOCVD tool for process development and for production. The program is specifically focused on lead zirconium titanate (PZT) for non-volatile ferroelectric random access memory (FRAM) fabrication, but the resulting technology will be applicable to other oxides. This project will develop a real-time in-situ Spectral Ellipsometry film analysis tool that can feedback into process control. Specifically, the developed technology will monitor the optical constants, thickness, composition and surface interface morphology. Phase I will focus on development of ex-situ sample-data libraries (calibrated to physical measurements) and refine the tool design. In Phase II, a film analysis unit will be mated to an existing pilot production reactor. The unit will be implemented, data libraries refined, and feedback control software and hardware developed. Phase III commercialization will consist of marketing complete oxide MOCVD systems with Spectral Ellipsometer based in-situ process monitors that enable real time feedback for quality control of deposited films. This will enable high yield economical manufacture of complex material based devices such as non-volatile memories and infrared detectors, among others, at levels far above those now possible doc1801 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will investigate a method for making nanocrystalline strontium ruthenate (SrRuO3) using new coordination compounds. Strontium ruthenate has been identified as a replacement for pure metal electrodes in dielectric and ferroelectric thin-film devices. For these devices, there will be a need for high-density SrRuO3. Strontium ruthenate powder made by traditional solid-state synthetic techniques does not sinter sufficiently owing to the powder s large particle size. To achieve higher densities, nanocrystalline SrRuO3 is needed. Reducing the particle size generally reduces the densification temperature making it easier to achieve a high-density material. Chemical routes to produce nanocrystalline SrRuO3 will be used. Coordination compounds will be identified for use as precursors. At the conclusion of Phase I, a precursor will be identified that allows for the production of nanocrystalline SrRuO3. Nanocrystalline SrRuO3 will be needed to make high-density sputtering targets that will be used to make thin-film electrodes in the next generation of high capacity stack storage capacitors memory devices doc1802 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to develop new reagents subject to thermal activation for bonding water-soluble microbicidal polymers and surfactants to the lumen surface of a variety of opaque tubing materials at temperatures compatible with the plastics. Materials have been developed with bulk physical properties needed for transport of water and aqueous mixtures; however, the development of biofilm on the wet surfaces is a continuing serious problem in the dental, pharmaceutical, food processing, and marine transport industries. Surface modification of water lines could decrease the formation of biofilm while retaining the desired bulk properties of the tubing. Photochemistry has been proven commercially successful in enhancing the surface properties of medical devices with radical-based surface modification initiated by RF plasma or ultraviolet light. However, these energy sources are not effective for modification the inner surfaces of opaque tubes such as water lines used with dental units and plastic plumbing in pharmaceutical plants. This project is designed to develop latent-reactive radical generators activatible with external source energy that penetrates these opaque devices. This innovative approach to scheduled activation of radical generators is expected to facilitate the coupling to many inert surfaces that cannot be activated with external light or plasma sources. Microbial colonization and biofilm formation remain a major cost and threat to human health and product quality for dental and pharmaceutical industries, health care and public lodging, and marine vessel utilization. Successful development of microbicidal and antifouling coating technology for the luminal surface of opaque transport and storage vessels for aqueous liquid ingestible products, constitute a significant market doc1803 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will investigate the synthesis and production of a new thermoplastic hydrogel (TPH). The TPH will be made by the modification of poly-2-ethyloxazoline, a commercially available polymer. The new TPH will have the properties of a crosslinked system when cold but will flow when heated. This property is unique for hydrogels, typically covalently crosslinked systems, which are limited in their use due to process restrictions. The TPH will have the ability to be extruded or molded by the end user into virtually any form, allowing the manufacture of new products that cannot be made today. The water soluble polymer is an ideal candidate due to its high thermal stability. This project will describe two routes for attaching graft polymers onto the polymer backbone. Both routes are viable from a high volume production standpoint. Applications of the TPH would include: medical products (catheters, contact lenses, and synthetic wound dressings), adhesives, recyclable super absorbents, ink jet printer media, and a variety of agricultural materials doc1804 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project from GrammaTech aims to conduct research that will address fundamental problems facing developers of the software systems that comprise the Internet. Problems with Internet systems such as software faults, security vulnerabilities and inefficiencies can lead to a lack of confidence in the medium and hinder its further development. The tools used to construct these systems have so far mostly failed to help mitigate these problems because they were generally designed for more traditionally-constructed systems-- those that are mostly static and mostly single-threaded. In contrast, Internet systems are typically highly dynamic and often involve concurrency. A new breed of tools based on techniques that use static-semantic analysis of programs has recently emerged for static and sequential systems. The research objective of this proposal is to extend and apply these techniques to the analysis of highly-dynamic concurrent systems. The key technical challenges are to devise representations and methods that make these enhanced analyses accurate and tractable and to invent mechanisms for querying and organizing the results of the analyses. The target will be the Java programming language. The potential applications of this research include tools for program understanding, restructuring, parallelization, debugging, and testing. The results of this research have commercial application in Interactive Development Environments (IDEs) for software construction, and in tools for all other phases of the software development process doc1805 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project will develop improved monolithic carbon electrodes for capacitive deionization. Capacitive deionization is a new technology being developed for the purification of ocean and brackish well water. A constant voltage is applied and soluble salts are collected on the surface of porous carbon electrodes, thus purifying the water for human consumption or industrial processes. Unfortunately, the current carbon aerogel electrodes are very expensive and their ion storage capacity is relatively low. The problem is that the carbon aerogel electrodes only have small pores, which prevents complete and rapid ion transport through the material. A route to monolithic carbon electrodes with a combination of large (mesopores) and small pores (micropores) that is much easier and less expensive than the carbon aerogel electrode production process has been developed. The benefit of the mesopores is that they allow the liquid to penetrate the carbon for easy access to the high surface area micropores. This greatly increases the rate of salt uptake and the useful capacity of the electrodes. In Phase I TDA will develop monolithic porous carbon electrodes with the correct pore size distribution for use in capacitive deionization. In Phase II the production will be scaled up and the carbon electrodes will be tested in commercial capacitive deionization systems. Commercial Applications: Inexpensive mesoporous carbon electrodes could be used in capacitive deionization to purify water for human consumption and for industrial processes such as boiler feed. These carbon electrodes may also be useful in electrical energy storage, such as in capacitive energy storage doc1806 none ion (e.g., control motor speed , monitor bearing , monitor pump ). In addition they must be provided with tools that take a system description at this high level and map it onto a specific set of hardware. The development of a mapping tool is critical to the success of this, as the typical application developer (e.g., an industrial engineer or process control engineer) will not have all of the specific expertise needed to perform this manually. They will not be able to answer questions like: How many processors should I have? Which sensors should be connected to which processors? Mapping algorithms onto sensor networks involves expertise in programming and software, knowledge of the algorithms needed to analyze the, and an understanding of the distributed nature of the sensor network. The goal of this research is to develop a set of tools to allow application experts to customize the behavior of smart sensor arrays to solve their real world problems. Sensors that are being used in industry are transitioning from analog to digital interfaces. While the digital interface can be exceptionally powerful, the lack of a standard communication protocol has allowed for 60 proprietary busses to appear in this market. To remedy this, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) has created a standard for these sensors, the IEEE smart sensor standard. By defining a standard interface, the IEEE will allow easier networking of industrial sensors from a variety of manufacturers. The reasons are compelling for industry to adopt this standard, however, a high-level software interface, like the one proposed here, is critical doc1807 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to produce high-quality and creative educational activities that are based on project-based contextual inquiry. Student inquiry is an essential part of the learning process and is front and center in the American Association for the Advancement of Science Benchmarks (AAAS, ). The project entails the development of Palm-based applications that support inquiry-based learning activities as part of an integrated system of personal digital assistant (PDA), plug-in sensor(s), Internet-enabled desktop analysis tools, and (optionally) wireless networking. This combination will support a new generation of learning activities centered either on changes-in-space (e.g., varying temperatures across a playground or school, varying observations by different observers) or changes-in-time (e.g., changes in tree-girth between years, variations in stream pH over time, etc.). Coupling PDA-made observations with database systems in the classroom and globally will allow the construction of new student inquiry activities. A part of the data interpretation can occur immediately as students collect their observations, some can occur upon return to the classroom, and another set of tasks can center around collaborative explorations with students elsewhere. Hence the system to be developed supports both inquiry-based learning and collaborative investigations. The evaluation of this project will be based on feedback from teachers in a testbed and on feedback from potential publishers interested in participating in Phase II and beyond. Given the growth of investment in instructional technology and the concurrent growth in availability of ubiquitous computing, as illustrated by the growing popularity of PDA s, it is anticipated that the market for the integrated system will grow dramatically doc1808 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses the problem of imparting intrinsic oxidation resistance to a carbon-carbon composite when the matrix is derived from a carbonaceous precursor via pyrolysis. The overall goal of the project is to assess the feasibility of using blends of pitch and pre-ceramic polymers as matrix precursors for carbon-carbon produced with a commercial processing cycle. The research objectives are two-fold: (1) Determine the relationship between blend formulation and the resultant microstructure following processing, and (2) Compare the oxidation kinetics and room temperature mechanical behavior of composite samples produced in this manner. Matrix precursors will be formulated by solution-blending pitches with silicon-containing compounds and then subjecting the blends to a conventional carbon-carbon processing cycle. The resultant chars are expected to exhibit unique two-phase microstructures with intriguing micro- and nano-scale features, and to impart oxidation resistance without deleterious impact on mechanical properties. The first commercial application of this method is expected to be used in lieu of baked coatings in carbon-carbon aircraft brakes. If successful, the technique may become an enabling technology for the use of carbon-carbon composites in a broad range of high temperature structural applications doc1809 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project describes an innovative approach to automating the integration of geographical data from multiple resources. This process is commonly referred to as conflation. The most important aspect of the conflation process is feature matching. Feature matching is the process of merging corresponding geographical features from various datasets. Previous attempts at automatically solving this problem have only focused on the geometrical characteristics of geographical data; yet, there are other aspects of geographical data that should be considered: topological, nonspatial, and spatial. An improved approach to automating the feature matching process that utilizes these other aspects of geographical data is presented. In the context of the growing use of geographical information systems (GIS), the need for tools to process, analyze and conflate geographical data is increasing. Such tools will find application in the Department of Defense, in the drilling and mining industry, in the agriculture industry, and by urban planners and GIS developers doc1810 none This Small Business Innovative Research Program (SBIR) Phase I involving Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cells offers a unique opportunity to create zero and ultra-low emission vehicles. While current nickel or noble metal catalysts used in the reformer of PEM fuel cells are effective for the steam reforming, they are very sensitive to sulfur poisoning and also deactivate by coke deposition. This research will effort will develop a new, sulfur-tolerant catalyst with low coking and low cost for gasoline steam reforming. TDA Research, Inc. (TDA) has identified a novel sulfur-tolerant catalyst for gasoline steam reforming to generate hydrogen for PEM fuel cells. In this program TDA will prepare and evaluate this catalyst, using an existing automated steam reforming reaction system to test our catalyst. The Phase I work will include an engineering analysis to assess the effect of the catalyst on sulfur poisoning, coke deposition and processing costs as well as the cost of producing the catalyst. The catalytic activity of TDA s catalyst will be measured in the presence and absence of H2S. A successful project will result in the production of sulfur tolerant and coking resistant catalysts for the fuel processor of PEM fuel cells. PEM fuel cells are suited for automobiles applications where quick startup is required, and are the primary candidates for use in light-duty vehicles. They will create zero and ultra-low emission vehicles doc1811 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will investigate the feasibility of high-risk, high-return research toward creating general-purpose de-duplication software. De-duplication software identifies multiple database records that refer to one entity (such as a person), thereby enabling the merger of fragmented data. ChoiceMaker markets a research-derived de-duplication system called MEDD. Many fundamental social services, including child immunization, require accurate de-duplication. New York City currently uses MEDD to de-duplicate its immunization records, thereby successfully improving children s public health. However, smaller public health organizations cannot benefit from MEDD because they cannot afford the 6 weeks of computer consulting that are required to customize MEDD for their data. ChoiceMaker s proposed research would decrease the adaptation time by an order-of-magnitude-making de-duplication affordable for most public health organizations and nearly every business with mission-critical databases. MEDD employs an important emerging information-theoretic statistical technique (called maximum entropy) to mimic the decisions made by people evaluating whether to merge similar records. Maximum entropy technology supports software that can understand each individual database s idiosyncratic information semantics and structure. In the proposed research, ChoiceMaker will investigate significant, innovative extensions to maximum entropy technology that will dramatically increase MEDD s convenience and flexibility. This research has applications to enhancing the data quality of any database which might contain multiple entries for the same entity due to the lack of a reliable identifying key. Specifically, there are applications to the management of master patient indices by health care providers and lists of clients and vendors at large institutions. The system is equally useful for matching and linking records in two different databases, such as for merging mailing lists for direct marketing, linking medical records for epidemiological research, and matching buy and sell orders for securities transa doc1812 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is focused on developing an efficient and cost-effective electrochemical capacitor for use in Next-Generation Vehicles (NGV s). This new capacitor will be designed to significantly advance the state of the art in this area, and to fully meet the specifications identified for NGV applications. No current technology meets those specifications. The key innovation here is the development of new electrode materials based on recently identified composites. The Phase I program will demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach by preparing candidate electrode materials, fabricating laboratory-scale capacitors, and demonstrating that the prototype capacitors already meet or have the clear potential to meet the target specifications. The capacitors will be evaluated in terms of: (1) specific capacitance (farads g); (2) specific energy (Whr kg); (3) equivalent series resistance; (4) specific power (W kg); (5) energy density (Whr L); (6) leakage current; (7) cycle lifetime; (8) ease of manufacturing; and (9) cost. Successful development of this enabling technology will represent an important advance in the state of the art and will provide a key innovation for the commercial development of next-generation vehicles. Other important potential commercial applications include consumer electronics, communications, and computer technology doc1813 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a Newton-Krylov based Computational Fluid Dynamics flow solver for simulating reacting flows that must account for finite rate chemistry. Sub-models will be included for describing the finite rate chemistry with global, skeletal and reduced mechanisms. The non-linear solver strategy will use a matrix-free Newton-Krylov method and will include high quality preconditioners constructed from application specific data, adaptive forcing terms and mesh sequencing for problem initialization. The Phase I project will demonstrate proof of concept for the non-linear solver strategy. Simulations of NOx formation in a furnace will be used to evaluate the improved computational efficiency. The Phase II project will focus on creating a solver for production level use. The Phase II product will use the best techniques developed in Phase I and in addition will include capabilities for local adaptive grid refinement and parallel computing. The final product will find commercial application by engineers and scientists in the combustion, chemical process and waste incineration industries that need to perform detailed analysis of complex chemically reacting flows in a cost effective manner doc1814 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop high throughput metal ion-selective separation composites for the extraction and purification of critical metals in production, and water and metal recycling environments. The problem this research addresses is the high cost and inefficiency of existing metal separation resins. Ion exchange processes operate by passing the metal-containing solution through a bed of porous particles with functional chemistry inside the pores. Since the solution prefers to flow around the particle, the diffusion of metal ions into the pores is slow and rate limiting. This research literally turns the pore diffusion problem inside out by synthesizing composite column matrices composed of solid nonporous particles. The composite materials are assembled by formation of thinly crosslinked, functional polymers that are covalently tethered in the interstitial volumes between solid particles. The polymer networks can be visualized as an array of spider webs suspended in the micron-scale interparticle volumes of the composite columns. The strands of the nano spider webs are functionalized with metal-selective chelating reagents. The research objectives are to synthesize and test transition metal-selective extraction composites. The project is expected to produce prototype high throughput columns that are manufacturable at an extremely low cost. The commercial applications of the research involve most fields of water and metal separations. The uses include extraction of toxic metals from water, water deionization and recycling, semiconductor wastewater recycling, and the mining of copper, gold, platinum, nickel, and cobalt doc1815 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project focuses on the development of a new, pulsed laser deposition based method to the combinatorial approach for generating nanoscale heterostructures. Nanoscale heterostructures, or superlattices , have previously been shown to exhibit properties that are not expected from the known characteristics of the constituent materials. However, a systematic study of such structures has been impossible due to the lack of a high-throughput synthesis method. The proposed approach is based on a newly introduced, patented continuous-compositional spread technique and will be applicable to a wide variety of materials, including magnetic materials, piezoelectric materials, and optical materials. The direct result of this program will be the availability of an automated apparatus for the growth of a rich variety of nanoscale heterostructures. Since such an instrument is not currently available on the market, the company anticipates strong sales to university and industrial research laboratories doc1816 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project focuses on rapid prototyping processes involving organic materials that are among the most advanced of such techniques due to the ready processability of resins and polymers. Unfortunately, organic polymers typically do not offer mechanical performance competitive with materials such as metals or ceramics and, therefore, cannot be utilized to directly fabricate high-integrity components. The company has developed unique thermoplastic, self-reinforced polymers (SRPs) with exceptional mechanical strength and stiffness rivaling that of metals and composites. Development of suitable SRP formulations will enable fabrication of low-density, high-integrity components by rapid-prototyping techniques for a variety of relatively low-volume applications including launch vehicles, spacecraft, aircraft, custom commercial products, etc. The focus will be on the development of SRP powders that can be processed by laser sintering techniques into such components. The research will entail preliminary optimization of resin composition (e.g., molecular weight and distribution, melt rheology, additives, etc.) and powder characteristics (e.g., particle size and distribution, bulk density, etc.) to enable effective sintering with high retention of mechanical properties. Initial test coupons will be fabricated at the University of Texas at Austin for evaluation and verification of the proposed innovation. High-performance polymeric powder materials will enable fabrication of low-density, high-integrity components by cost-effective rapid-prototyping techniques for a variety of relatively low-volume applications including launch vehicles, spacecraft, aircraft, custom commercial products, etc. The same resin materials, albeit in pellet rather than powder form, can also be utilized to fabricate similar parts in higher volumes by more conventional extrusion or injection molding techniques doc1817 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will utilize known chemistry and economical materials to create imide-based anions containing greater charge delocalization and ligands for anion solvation. The solvent levels needed for high conductivity for safe, high rate (10 degree C) operation of lithium ion cells will be determined. Acceptable densities in small cells create safety concerns in large capacity batteries, particularly at high load levels, because solvent-lithium reactivity, heat, and solvent volatility can generate explosive or pyrotechnic mixtures. Better electrolyte conductivity and stability are needed for safe high power operation. The lithium prototypical salt is not as stable or conductive as desired and is less stable than imide-based anions. Solid-polymer-based electrolytes reduce the danger of catastrophic battery failure, but they have lower power densities due to lower conductivity compared to liquid electrolytes. A new class of imide-based lithium salts containing covalently attached ligands to solvate anions and enable Li+ (lithium ion) dissociation and conductivity, using little or no molecular solvent will be developed. Large, safe, high rate, rechargeable lithium ion batteries are needed for a variety of applications, including electric vehicle propulsion, aircraft and space vehicles, and communications equipment. Improved consumer electronic products, such as portable telephones, computers, cameras, and power tools, could also be a market for this proposed technology doc1818 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to research ways to increase accessibility and utilization of census microdata in secondary school mathematics classrooms. Historically, microdata published by the Census Bureau as part of each decennial census has rarely been used in schools for lack of access and lack of software tools to handle it. The Internet and the availability of software tools such as KCP Technologies Fathom tm change this situation dramatically. In collaboration with the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) project at the University of Minnesota, this project will develop streamlined interfaces with which students can use the World Wide Web to gather data from one or more Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMAs) in the country from any of the census back through . Research into modifications to the Fathom software will aim to develop new and better ways to gather data from the Internet, to create enriched data structures, and to design other functionality particularly well-suited to working with microdata. New curriculum and professional development materials created in this project will provide a means for teachers to begin using census microdata in mathematics and statistics classrooms. The proposed research will lead to licensing opportunities for the software technology already embodied in Fathom software, web-based technology for gathering and analyzing microdata, curriculum products to be sold to schools, and an increased market for Fathom in education doc1819 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will develop metal matrix composite (MMC) and ceramic matrix composite (CMC) materials with tailorable properties (thermal expansion, conductivity, stiffness, ductility, etc.). An increase in properties for high volume reinforced (25-65 wt% SiC) aluminum materials using chemical vapor deposition (CVD) fluid bed coated powders and low cost consolidation techniques has been achieved. Dramatic increases in flexure strength (30%) and modulus (40%) have been achieved with Al coated SiC powder and using low cost consolidation techniques. A greater understanding of the effect of CVD coated powder and consolidation processing is required to fully understand the nano-engineered material being produced, and to develop even greater and distinctly different physical and mechanical properties. In this Phase I project, this fundamental understanding will be developed. The family of composites to be developed will be applied as cost-effective substitutes for titanium and beryllium materials for applications in electronic packaging, lightweight structures, aircraft engine and airframe components, and sporting goods doc1820 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will establish the electron emission behavior of aligned nanotubes coated conformal coating of nanocrystalline diamond. Carbon nanotubes and nanocrystalline diamond has recently attracted attention due to their promising electronic and structure properties. Due to the aligned structure and electrical properties of nanotubes and the negative electron affinity of the wide band gap of diamond it is expected that diamond coated aligned nanotubes could be ideal materials for highly efficient electron sources. It is proposed to produce aligned nanotubes with varied growth density, develop and coat with conformal coating of nanocrystalline diamond, and to characterize these novel materials for electron emission behavior. These results will be compared to existing and developmental emitters. The proposed approach if successful can be applied to produce large flat panel displays economically. Flat panel displays are becoming increasingly important in today s society. With the demand for portability in such applications as laptop computers, automobiles navigation system, cellular telephones, pagers, etc., the market for flat panel displays is growing rapidly. A low cost scaleable technology of efficient emitter urgently needed. Aligned nanotubes coated with diamond can the breakthrough needed doc1821 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will investigate the feasibility of developing an innovative manufacturing process for prototyping and batch manufacturing high-aspect ratio microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and related microparts and microstructures. The goal is to replace an electrodeposition-based micromachining technique, requiring the use of a $10-20 million synchrotron (the so-called LIGA process) with an innovative extrusion-like process performed in an automated desktop machine selling for $250,000 or less. By supplying the MEMS industry with capital equipment for the manufacture of LIGA-type microstructures at a cost two orders of magnitude lower, this project could greatly accelerate the commercialization of MEMS and other microscale devices, and make the U.S. more competitive in this rapidly-growing global industry. If successful, the resulting technology could also significantly reduce time-to market for new products, fabricate much taller structures than are possible with LIGA, and provide better control over the uniformity of material properties. Commerical applications cover many highly-miniaturized sensors and actuators in a variety of industries, allowing reduced cost, weight, size, and power consumption doc1822 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will address central problems of information retrieval(IR) and the human computer interface. QuantumFind wishes to develop a dynamic, graphically presented information space in which users can immediately visualize multiple aspects of large information sets. QuantumFind will build a pioneering new IR platform that contains the following: (1) A collaborative filtering systems based on analysis of users search paths through data, which will allow users to benefit from other s experience; (2) Integrated Ostensive Modeling systems which will match the results of collaborative path analysis and other relevancy measures to user s current information needs; and (3) A dynamic user interface which integrates these measures, allowing users to immediately see and explore multiple relevance paths . QuantumFind s product will dramatically reduce the time spent in locating, retrieving and browsing documents, and significantly increase users recall of document contents. The need for better information search tools is widely recognized, and the potential market covers almost every industry doc1823 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project investigates the use of a new and unique hypervelocity acceleration technique to deposit powder particles for the creation of superior wear and corrosion resistant coatings. The research objective is to determine if metallic powders, at temperatures below their melting point, can be accelerated to high velocities, impact a substrate and adhere, to produce a high quality coating. The coating device that will be used is an experimental Pulsed High Acceleration Spray Technique (PHAST) Gun. The PHAST coating technique can be described as a high velocity cold spray type process that utilizes a pulsed capillary discharge. Screening experiments will be performed in Phase I to determine if various alloys can be deposited by the PHAST Gun. The PHAST process is expected to result in plastic deformation of the feed particles upon impact with the substrate, thus forming coatings characterized by good adhesion, high density, and low oxide content. Measured properties will be compared with existing thermal spray coating properties to determine the improvement attributed to the PHAST Gun. There are numerous commercial applications for dense corrosion and wear resistant coatings in the chemical process industry, industrial machinery, and aircraft industries. Some of these applications are for the replacement of hard chrome plate and others will be new applications for previously unprotected parts. PHAST coatings are expected to protect and extend the life of components such as, pump shafts, die gates, linings for process vessels, housings, nozzles, ball and roller bearing surfaces, and hydraulic cylinder shafts doc1824 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will investigate a new technique to economically synthesize rapidly solidified magnetic (Nd-Fe-B) powders with diameters in the 1-10 m range. In preliminary experiments using pulsed plasma jets to atomize metal melt streams, the company has produced spherical copper powders down to several hundred nanometers. These pulsed plasma jets produce momentum fluxes 2 to 3 orders of magnitude higher than conventional gas atomization, thus allowing production of fine powders. The objective of this project is to use a fundamentally different configuration, which is more amenable to the production of rapidly solidified hard magnetic nanophase powders. This will be accomplished by coupling the pulsed plasma jet to a pulsed wire arc metal source instead of the more conventional melt stream source. This has the anticipated advantage of eliminating material incompatibilities during processing and avoids the need for large induction melt systems. It can also provide controllable coupling to a repetitively pulsed plasma jet, allow production of refractory metal powders, and provide easier access to the atomization zone for enhancing the cooling rate of the atomized powders. The project will be carried out in cooperation with the University of Utah, which will provide expertise in processing-microstructure-property relationships in hard magnetic materials. Commercial applications of permanent magnets reach virtually every corner of technology, including automobiles, computers, medical technology, power generation equipment, aerospace, and telecommunication industries. These magnets are used in compact powerful electric motors for computer disk drives and fly-by-wire aircraft. They are also find applications as high precision actuators used to focus the laser in a compact disk player and in miniature loudspeakers of personal stereos. Automotive applications include starters, small motors, alternators, sensors, meters, and electric and hybrid vehicle propulsion systems doc1825 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will investigate the feasibility of using electromagnetic force to actuate a Venturi Off-Set Technology VOST(TM) valve. Traditional valve actuator stems and packing are significant sources of harmful emissions and provide opportunities for fluid contamination. The actuator innovation to be developed in this project would eliminate stems and packing, thereby eliminating this source of emissions. The VOST(TM) axial design provides the platform to accomplish this task, but only if actuated electromagnetically. This investigation will utilize design modeling (numerical models) and actuator testing to determine torque, speed and displacement properties needed to configure an electromagnetic actuator. First the work plan will evaluate the VOST(TM) design for torque, speed and rotational displacement specifications. Information obtained will be used to rank three potential actuator configurations. The most promising configuration will be prototyped and tested for performance. In addition, commercial feasibility of this configuration will be assessed using component cost, complexity, and serviceability. It is anticipated that the selected electromagnetic configuration will meet desired operational parameters. VOST(TM) designed valves incorporating this actuation concept will eliminate sources of emissions. If successful, the research will result in an electromagnetic actuator configuration that can facilitate a hermetically sealed valve. The actuator concepts developed can be extended to any application requiring an axial rotation of 180 degrees or less. This will apply to control systems beyond valves doc1826 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will demonstrate the feasibility of an advanced technology for the direct formation and deposition of nanocomposite polymer coatings and films. The technology encompasses the use of novel thermal spray techniques that are solventless and that may also be developed for use in directly forming functionally-graded nanocomposite materials and near-net-shape thermoplastic nanocomposites. The objective is to demonstrate the feasibility of using an advanced thermal spray process to directly melt-blend and form nanocomposite coatings and films. Experimental work will be conducted to spray coat nanomaterials onto a substrate, followed by an evaluation of the sprayed material properties for suitability as an advanced nanocomposite coating material. The proposed technology addresses the global interest in nanostructured polymeric materials that have significantly improved performance properties over conventional polymeric materials. This technology has direct application in the powder coating industry, where thermoset and thermoplastic materials are sprayed for a broad range of applications, which include coatings on automobiles, appliance coatings, architectural coatings to a broad range of general metal finishing uses doc1827 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop compact Water Gas Shift Reactors (WGSR) with rapid startup and load following through the use of a novel catalyst substrate design consisting of multiple Ultra Short Channel Length (USCL), high cell density metal monoliths in series. These USCL monoliths have very high heat and mass transfer coefficients due to the absence of fully developed boundary layers; this increases bulk mass transfer on the order of 20 fold over conventional honeycomb monolith supports. The high cell density, up to cells per square inch, results in a considerably higher Geometric Surface area (GSA) per unit volume compared to honeycomb monoliths. The improved transport properties and increased GSA translates into much smaller reactor size and weight compared to pellet bed or conventional honeycomb substrates and more efficient catalyst utilization under mass transfer controlled operation, which can lead to significant cost reductions, especially when using precious metal catalyst. The very low thermal mass of the individual USCL catalyst substrate elements combined with the high heat transfer coefficient gives improved transient response and fast startup. The proposed WGSR catalyst technology is primarily intended as part of an integrated fuel processor system to produce hydrogen for Proton exchange Membrane fuel cells in automotive applications. The proposed technology provides a very high potential benefit to cost opportunity, offering significant improvements in the WGSR component of volume, weight and potentially cost, as well as provides spin-off applications to other catalytic reactors (including other fuel processor components doc1828 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is designed to contribute to better and more efficient management of a part of our natural resources. Current analyses of fish stocks (by National Marine Fisheries Service and several state departments of fish & game) are unnecessarily expensive, time-consuming and inaccurate. Ultimately, this contributes to compromised Government resource management policy-making. The result is the risk of over fishing and considerable economic damage. Via research and development this project will produce a prototype integrated plug & play system to automate these analyses. The developed system will be marketed first to the several dozens of U. S. federal and state agencies having a need for it, and thereby will help to establish more precise measurement standards that will be accepted by the worldwide community. The subsequent result of worldwide marketing activity will benefit the fish management and research activities in more than 20 countries, and solidify the U. S. developed and promulgated standards and measurement techniques doc1829 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is focused on developing a method to adapt the use of a novel electro-mechanical micro-vibratory transducer to enhance convective heat transfer rates in heat exchangers while minimizing any added flow pressure drop. The transducer is composed of a very thin, light weight composite sheet that contains the combination sensors and vibratory actuators that are used to detect boundary layer flow conditions and to excite the viscous wall layer to control boundary layer transition and separation. The innovative approach uses localized sub-micron level wall vibrations to increase the wall skin friction while attenuating the overall turbulence level in the flow. This is expected to lower the flow pressure drop increase compared to traditional forms of heat transfer enhancement through turbulence enhancement. The power consumption of the transducer is also about three orders of magnitude smaller than the best competing active flow control devices and is expected to be insignificant in comparison to the heat transfer rates. The transducer can be easily integrated to plates, fins or tubes on the airside of a heat exchanger. The commercial viability is that it can improve waste heat recovery and utilization for manufacturing and processes industries involving gaseous phase drying. It can also make stationary and vehicle mounted heating ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) and power generation systems more compact and efficient. It can allow denser packaging of electronic components by facilitating heat dissipation in a smaller space doc1830 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will generate an Internet based system that will connect large groups of users with similar agricultural commodity interest. ISCA Tech will start with a system that will allow growers to easily collect and manage pest-monitoring data for rapid and precise decision-making. ISCA Tech proposes to integrate into this single user-friendly system many nascent and some established techniques that facilitate monitoring and rapid data management. Handheld-collected data will be incorporated into an Internet hosted database where the tools of data management and query reside. Internet access will connect users into area-wide monitoring programs that are independent of location. It will also greatly increase the speed of data processing and report generation, and democratize the access of data management tools, such as GIS, to a broad base of users. This system will allow growers to be self-sufficient in their data analyses, and to procure extension and scientific advice in the e-community. If successful, this system will catalyze the generation and spread of knowledge about pests dynamics, cultural practices and management through the different layers of agricultural systems. The proposed integrated system will create the basis for a full development of agricultural practices, such as precision farming and integrated pest management doc1831 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will investigate a new class of highly disordered materials that possess unique chemical, physical, and high temperature properties. The disorder appears to be stable over a range of temperatures, raising the possibility of use as high temperature ceramic materials with unique properties. Based on preliminary evaluation, it appears that the materials may be useful as coatings for many applications. The materials are synthesized using specially prepared precursor solutions that allow for intimate molecular mixing. The decomposition behavior of the precursor to form this class of inorganic materials appears to be important. The proposed work involves determination of some basic properties of the materials, processing of the material in bulk and coating forms, and modeling simulation experiments to understand the nature and stability of the disorder. High temperature applications including ceramic matrix composites, protective coatings on metals and ceramics, and thermal insulation doc1832 none Raj Singh The primary objectives of this proposal are to synthesize and characterize thin films of high resistivity (undoped), and p- and n -doped polycrystalline diamond (PCD) and cubic-boron nitride (c-BN) suitable for the fabrication of high temperature electronic devices, and application demonstration of these films for the fabrication of high temperature microelectronic devices. The thin film processing activities is expected to develop a fundamental understanding for synthesizing and in situ doping of diamond and cubic-boron nitride (c-BN) films predictably and reproducibly by ECR (Electron Cyclotron Resonance) plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (ECR-PECVD) on semiconducting substrates. This way of processing creates non-equilibrium (activated) conditions in which novel metastable materials like diamond and c-BN can be synthesized at relatively low temperatures and pressures. The influence of different process parameters (e.g. substrate bias, plasma gas composition, substrate temperature, pressure, and plasma density) on the composition, crystal quality, and properties of the PCD and c-BN films will be studied. Special attention will be given to substrate strategy, precursor selection, catalytic activation, and in situ doping, in order to obtain high quality films suitable for device fabrication. The films will be characterized by IR and Raman Spectroscopy, XRD, SEM, TEM, AFM, AES XPS, SIMS and Electron Diffraction techniques. In addition, electrical properties of the films will be determined by resistivity, carrier concentration, and dielectric measurements. Both electrical and optical devices based on the PCD , and to the limited extent using c-BN, will be investigated and fabrication techniques will be developed for the production of high-temperature electronic components. In particular, the following two basic circuits are proposed for investigation: (1) a voltage multiplier stack (VMS) which requires the integration of MSM Schottky diodes with MSM interdigitated capacitors, and (2) an optical bridge of four MSM detectors for DC-to-AC conversion and for driving the voltage multiplier stacks. Most of the devices will be fabricated using PCD with a limited scope for fabricating c-BN based devices in the revised program doc1833 none Characterization of the thickness and mechanical properties of thin films and hard coatings is of vital importance in a wide range of areas such as microelectronic devices, machine tools, and engine components. While conventional contact methods such as mechanical indentation are currently in vogue, laser ultrasonic (LU) methods offer several benefits including non-contact rapid operation, couplant independence, high fidelity, and the ability to perform in hostile environments. This project aims to: 1. Develop theoretical models for laser generated ultrasound in multi-layered structures allowing for the calculation of time domain surface displacements; 2. Devise experimental procedures for efficient generation of ultrasound and implement an adaptive optical detection system capable of working with good sensitivity on rough and smooth coatings; and 3. Validate the theoretical models with LU experiments on a range of technologically relevant multi-layered structures with a focus on transition metal nitrides and carbides (ie. TiN, TiC, ZrN, CrN); The goal of the project is to develop the next generation methodologies necessary for laser ultrasonic characterization of thickness and elastic moduli of thin films and coatings doc1834 none Hansell The Bermuda Biological Station for Research, Inc. (BBSR) will operate the R V Weatherbird II during as a general oceanographic research vessel in support of NSF-supported research projects. The Weatherbird II is a 115 ft. vessel, constructed in and converted in , and is owned and operated by BBSR. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 132 operational days during , of which all days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The projects scheduled on the vessel represent several oceanographic disciplines and will fully utilize the capabilities of the vessel. The Weatherbird II continues to support such programs as the JGOFS sponsored BATS Program, the Hydrostation S time series, deep sediment trap work and atmospheric lead work. Operations will take place around Bermuda, most approximately within 6 hour transit time. New main engines, installed during shipyard visit in , are operating satisfactorily. The Weatherbird II is part of a fleet of ships used by the National Science Foundation in support of marine science research. Most oceanographic projects require highly specialized equipment to be permanently installed on the vessel, thus the necessity for specialized ships. These vessels do not operate in the same mode as general cargo fishing vessels. As a result, NSF supports the operation of a variety of ships specifically dedicated to oceanographic research that are operated by universities and institutions around the country doc1835 none This project, conducted by Dr. Thomas J. Wenzel and undergraduate students at Bates College, is supported in the Analytical and Surface Chemistry program. The research, which is a part of NSF s Research in Undergraduate Institutions (RUI) initiative, develops and utilizes combinations of chiral NMR shift reagents to resolve mixtures of enantiomeric substrates. The chiral component of the shift reagents includes calixarenes, calixresorcarenes, crown ethers, cyclodexrins and amino acid derivatives. Paramagnetic lanthanide ions are coupled to the chiral solvating agents to achieve improved enantiomeric resolution in NMR applications. Information from 2D NMR, computational, x-ray crystallographic, and lanthanide shift and relaxation studies are used to determine if the mechanism that leads to enantiodistinction is specific enough to allow absolute configurations to be assigned. As new pharmaceuticals are being more quickly developed, improved techniques for differentiation of optical isomers become increasingly important . This research develops techniques to improve such differentiation. As a result it will help assure the efficacy and safety of many new pharmaceuticals doc1836 none This is a Small Grants for Exploratory Research project to support travel and some transcription in support of oral interviews of approximately 50 people who were active in the early years of modern investigation of polar regions. The United States will soon lose a generation of pioneering scientists and explorers who led the way for scientific advances in polar regions. The people who participated in the expeditions of the s, s and s and those who were the first scientists of the IGY established the modus operandi for field operations in use today. They possess a wealth of information and perspectives about the development and history of polar investigation that was not recorded; they are also in the final years of their lives. The interviewees, most of whom have been contacted and have agreed to participate, live in many places across the United States. A working list of more than one hundred people has been developed by using the membership list of the American Polar Society and expeditionary rosters from this era. An advisory board will help to set priorities and provide guidance. Priorities will be based on such factors as age, state of health, and prominence of the interviewees. Funding from this project will send trained and experienced interviewers to meet with the scientists and to create the historic documents, i.e. the tapes, that will be a continuing resource for scientists and historians. Ohio State University will preserve the tapes and make them available. From the experience of this project, the principal investigators expect to develop a continuing oral history program for polar science. This proposal is based on imminent need (the age and state of health of this generation of explorers and scientists) and on collaboration. Captain Brian Shoemaker, as Secretary of the American Polar Society, and Dr. Raimund Goerler, as Chief Archivist of Ohio State University s Byrd Polar Research Center Archival Program, will work with an Advisory Board of persons prominent in science and in oral history, with staff of the Byrd Polar Research Center Archival Program, and with volunteers of the American Polar Society, an organization that began in to provide polar information for explorers and scientists doc1837 none Analytic number theory is the branch of pure mathematics in which one applies tools from analysis to study the distribution of the prime numbers and other interesting sequences such as the sequence of squarefree numbers. Tools from analysis include Fourier analysis, Fourier and Laplace transforms, automorphic forms and spectral theory, sieve methods, and character theory and exponential sums. A Kloosterman sum is a particular exponential sum that is frequently encountered in multiplicative number theory. While individual Kloosterman sums are known to satisfy general upper bounds, Kuznetsov proved a trace formula for GL_2 and used it to show that weighted sums of Kloosterman sums satisfy much sharper bounds. In , Deshouillers and Iwaniec published a groundbreaking paper extending Kuznetsov s trace formula and combining it with the large sieve. Their resulting bounds on sums of Kloosterman sums is now know as Kloostermania and has had a large number of applications to multiplicative number theory during the past decade. This is a proposal to re-examine the Kuznetsov trace formula and the Deshouillers-Iwaniec paper, with the goal of improving the Deshouillers-Iwaniec results doc1838 none A compact infrared tunable room-temperature optically-pumped semiconductor laser source using epitaxially-grown transition metal-doped II-VI materials is proposed. Chromium-doped II-VI lasers have already been demonstrated using ZnS, ZnSe, CdTe, CdMnTe, and CdSe with other semiconductor hosts under investigation. Current Cr2+ lasers are relatively simple structures, presently Cr-doped bulk crystals, that operate at room temperature and are tunable over a large wavelength range (~ 2.1mm-2.8mm) with relatively temperature-insensitive operating characteristics. To achieve better performance, we propose the use of epitaxial II-VI heterostructures that will be composed of alloys of Zn1-xMgxSe and Zn1-xCdxSe grown by MBE, rather than homostructures. The II-VI waveguide laser structure with Cr-doped active layer will be grown on a GaAs substrate. Such heterostructures will confine the radiation emitted by Cr2+ to the active region, increasing the optical confinement factor. The waveguide structure may also be used to increase the optical overlap of the pump source and the optically-active Cr2+. These heterostructures will have a greatly reduced lasing threshold and increased overall efficiency as compared to the homostructures. The epitaxial structures will be characterized via photoluminescence and electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy. An optically-pumped Cr-doped heterostructure laser will be demonstrated using a commercially-available semiconductor laser pump doc1839 none Future networked multimedia information systems will carry a wide variety of applications including digital libraries, video, audio and image services, distance learning and collaboration, networked virtual environments, and entertainment. The main characteristics of multimedia applications that lead to difficulties in end-to-end systems design are that they have very large bandwidth and storage requirements, with vastly different performance and reliability requirements, often coupled with real-time constraints. Along with these characteristics, the highly interreliability requirements, often coupled with real-time constraints. Along with these characteristics, the highly interactive nature of a variety of multimedia applications, resulting in fairly unpredictable workloads, makes the design and evaluation of networked multimedia information systems an exceptionally challenging problem. In this proposal, we outline research on three aspects of this problem: (1) the design and evaluation of server resource allocation algorithms for CM servers in order to retrieve information efficiently and according to the QoS demanded by the application; (2) the development of performance evaluation techniques for evaluating new server designs. (3) the participants of this project bring expertise from a wide variety of areas: databases, distance learning, multi-media, networking, and performance evaluation to bear on problems in these areas. Another important feature of this proposal is that the participants have available four prototypes of state of the art multimedia systems: the Virtual World Data Server (VWDS) developed at UCLA: the prototype of a Video-on-Demand server developed in Brazil as part cooperative research project among Brazilian institutions; and the Multimedia Asynchronous Networked Individualized Courseware (MANIC) and the Internet Multimedia Proxy (IMP) both developed at UMass. These applications will be used to motivate the development of new algorithms for retrieving information and for maintaining the desired quality of service after sending the data over a wide area network. They will also form the basis of the many experimental and analytical studies that will be performed to evaluate these new algorithms. To aid in this evaluation, our group also developed three performance evaluation and modeling tools: a state-of-the-art tool for constructing performance and reliability models (Tangram-II) developed in Brazil jointly with UCLA; a symbolic model checking tool (VERUS): and a tool which facilitates design, development, and subsequent performance evaluation of designs of multimedia storage hierarchies (ViPEr-HiSS) under development at UMD. Thus, the environment of our labs as well the long distance among them will provide a unique testbed for this type of an evaluation due to the drastically different connectivities available to our applications, from gigabit low utilized links to intercontinental congested links. The proposed research represents a fundamentally important step in the design and performance evaluation of next generation information servers and the networked applications that will operate on top of them. As a result of our research we expect to have a better understanding of how storage server resource management policies, channel allocation policies, and network adaptation policies interact to satisfy the required QoS of CM applications, despite the fairly unpredictable network delays doc1840 none This project will study the collective behavior of coupled two-dimensional lateral superlattices of highly ordered nanostructures, in both theory and experiment. Due to significant flexibility in the choice of nanostructure materials, these systems collective behavior could be of either electronic or magnetic nature. These unique nanolattices have potential technological implications for new optoelectronic, nanoelectronic and computational devices. Over the past year, a new non-lithographic template fabrication method has been developed to produce highly ordered arrays or two-dimensional lateral superlattices of nanostructures-metal and semiconductor wires, and carbon nanotubes. Building on this capability, new experimental and theoretical investigations are needed to assess the scientific and technological opportunities which this new fabrication capability provides; additionally, the fabrication technology itself needs refinement. The main focus in this project is to understand the collective behaviors and interactions which take place within these nanolattices. This project will advance the goals of NSF Electronics, Photonics, and Device Technologies program by exploring device functions of individual nanostructures; extracting system functions from the collective behaviors of a large ensemble of nanoelements; extending the capabilities of our fabrication techniques; and advancing the frontier of this enabling technology for a new generation of electronics. In the fabrication area, the methods of non-lithographic template fabrication of nanostructure lattices will be improved, extending the range of nanostructure sizes and spacings, and hence the couplings between adjacent nanoelements. Engineering and even lithographic steps will be introduced into this otherwise completely natural, self-organized nanofabrication process to enable better observation and or use of the collective behaviors in the system. Experimental exploration of the properties of these nanostructure lattices will be performed using a variety of approaches, including scanning probe microscopy and spectroscopy (topographical, electronic, magnetic and optical), and broad-area electronic, magnetic and optical measurements. In these experiments, the physical properties of the nanostructures will be characterized in order to help understand the ways in which their collective electronic and magnetic behaviors are manifested. More advanced experiments will attempt to observe the collective behavior directly. On the theoretical front, the electronic behavior of Coulomb-coupled nanostructure arrays, and the domain ordering behavior of magnetic nanostructures coupled via dipole interactions will be studied. In each case, the focus and ultimate objective will be to study the collective behavior arising from the short-ranged interactions, and the implications which this behavior has on the device applications of these structures. An exciting long-term possibility is the prospect of using the collective behavior of the lattices for useful applications-memory devices, signal processing, and possibly even as a testbed for new computation concepts. The theoretical work to be performed will lay a foundation for these new potential applications, and will guide, inform and enable understanding of experimental results. In conclusion, this is an ambitious project designed to lay the foundations for long-term work. While the ultimate goals are extremely far-reaching, the process of investigation has been designed to generate scientifically valuable and technologically useful results beginning immediately, and continuing through the duration of the project doc1841 none The use of ultra ductile, strain-hardening Engineered Cementitious Composites (ECC), instead of brittle concrete, can overcome limitations in brittle shear and reinforcement buckling of standard R C members. The advantage of combining ECC and reinforcement is that the deformation of the structural member can be distributed along its length, and therefore require less localized deformation of the longitudinal reinforcement. The present research focuses on the enhancement of seismic response of R C structures by exploiting the unusual behavior of ECC and its interaction with reinforcement. Novel design concepts are introduced. Specifically, detailed investigations and analyses will be performed on the interaction of candidate reinforcement materials and ECC. Subsequently, column and beam members will be designed and tested. Finally, R ECC column and beam elements will be assembled into moment resisting frames and tested. The overall objective is to develop a structural frame system with superior seismic resistance with an intrinsic, materials-based safety mechanism doc1842 none Knox The University of California-San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography (UCSD-SIO) will operate the R Vs Roger Revelle, Melville, New Horizon, and the Robert Gordon Sproul during as general oceanographic research vessels in support of NSF-supported research projects. The R V Revelle is a 275 ft. vessel, constructed in , owned by the U.S. Navy and operated by UCSD-SIO. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 313 operational days during , of which 206 days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The remaining cruises will support Navy projects. The projects scheduled on the Revelle represent several oceanographic disciplines and include projects such as ASIAEX, borehole instrument testing, and the HOME Project. The scheduled projects will fully utilize the capabilities of the vessel. Operations will take place off the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Honolulu, San Diego and will end the year off of South America in preparation for NSF cruises. The Revelle underwent a shipyard period in late to complete the installation of a deep profiling doppler sonar system to be used for the NSF HOME project. The R V Melville is a 279 ft. vessel, constructed in and refitted in and , and is owned by the U.S. Navy and operated by UCSD-SIO. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 266 operational days during , of which 244 days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The remaining cruises will support other private and Federal agency projects. The projects scheduled on the Melville represent several oceanographic disciplines that will fully utilize the capabilities of the vessel, including LexEn microbiology research, OBS recoveries, SEA BEAM surveys, and use of DSL-120 and ARGO II vehicles. The Melville will undergo an overhaul period in the beginning of . Operations later in the year will take place near the northern Eastern Pacific Rise, South America and the South Pacific. The R V New Horizon is a 170 ft. vessel, constructed in and refitted in - , and is owned and operated by UCSD-SIO. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 145 operational days during , of which 54 days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The remaining cruises will support Navy, NOAA and other private projects. The projects scheduled on the New Horizon represent several oceanographic disciplines and will fully utilize the capabilities of the vessel. Several operations will take place in central California, the rest will take place around San Diego. There are two significant non-operating periods in the New Horizon s schedule. The R V Sproul is a 125 ft. vessel, constructed in , and owned and operated by UCSD-SIO. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 95 operational days during , of which 36 days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The remaining cruises will support Navy, USGS, MMS, NOPP, and other private projects. The projects on the Sproul represent several oceanographic disciplines including biological oceanography, instrumentation testing, and MOCNESS projects, and will fully utilize the capabilities of the vessel. Operations will take place around San Diego. The R Vs Revelle, Melville, New Horizon, and Sproul are part of a fleet of ships used by the National Science Foundation in support of marine science research. Most oceanographic projects require highly specialized equipment to be permanently installed on the vessels, thus the necessity for specialized ships. These vessels do not operate in the same mode as general cargo fishing vessels. As a result, NSF supports the operation of a variety of ships specifically dedicated to oceanographic research that are operated by universities and institutions around the country doc1843 none Annaswamy The use of neural networks in identification and control of engineering systems has been intensely debated over the past decade. Despite the fact that several stability results have been derived in the literature concerning neural networks in identification and control, most of them are local in nature and or include fairly restrictive conditions under which the stability is valid. In contrast to these analytical results, the actual demonstration in applications and numerical simulations reports just the contrary: Neural networks indeed serve as powerful numerical computational units that are capable of very good approximations of nonlinear maps and provide complex functionalities of estimation, control, and optimization over a large region of operation. The goal of this project is to address this gap and develop global stability tools that are capable of explaining the true scope of operation of a neural network when used for nonlinear control. The main idea here is to directly address and exploit the distinguishing feature of nonlinear regression in neural networks and derive the underlying convergence and stability properties. Preliminary results in [I] show that it is possible to derive conditions under which global convergence takes place in identification problems using neural networks. The P.I. plans to derive training algorithms as well as conditions under which global system identification using neural networks as well as global stability using neural controllers can be derived. Various neural network structures including multi-layered perceptrons and radial basis functions will be examined. The applicability as well as limitations of gradient-like algorithms in these problems will be studied. All theoretical derivations will be complemented by simulation studies. The results from the proposed research will lead to fundamental advances in the analysis and design of complex dynamic systems in various engineering problems doc1844 none PI: Don Leo Institution: Virginia Tech Proposal Number Proposal Title Electroactive Polymer Membranes for In-Situ Dynamic Mechanical Analysis The objective of this research is to develop materials and techniques for in-situ dynamic mechanical analysis of polymer materials. In-situ techniques for analyzing polymer degradation will have applications in polymer storage systems for chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and bioproducts, as well as the development of advanced energy storage systems such as polymer batteries and fuel cells. The techniques will be based on the development of a new class of polymers that have both electrochemical and electromechanical coupling. The polymers will be fabricated with a Selective Laser Sintering technique that allows us to manufacture polymer membranes with alternating layers of electrochemically active and electromechanically active material. The hypothesis of this research is that electrochemical properties of polymer materials can be inferred from measurements of critical electromechanical parameters, such as the glass transition temperature. The work plans include (1) Developing electromechanical and electrochemical models of the polymer membranes, (2) Empirically correlating the time-temperature dependence of polymers to critical electrochemical properties such as proton conduction,(3) Developing an in-situ dynamic mechanical analysis technique using stress-strain measurements of the polymer material, and (4) Manufacturing electroactive polymer membranes using a modified Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) technique. We will apply this technique to the development of a fuel cell proton exchange membrane that incorporates electromechanical coupling. The diagnostic technique will be tested in a 1 kWe fuel cell test system. The significance of this research is the development of new materials and techniques for nondestructive, in-situ diagnostics of polymer systems. This development of safe and reliable polymer storage systems will have impact in chemical, pharmaceutical, and bioproducts industry. Advanced transportation systems that utilize efficient and low emission fuel cells will also benefit. This research will be a collaborative effort between the Mechanical Engineering Department and the Materials Science Engineering Department at Virginia Tech doc1845 none Professor Berenstein intends to continue his research in several problems of complex analysis, commutative algebra, and integral geometry. For instance, the membership problem, which consists of deciding whether a polynomial belongs to a given ideal, appears in robotics, control theory and computational geometry. For that reason, it is of great interest to estimate its complexity and obtain a priori knowledge about its solvability. Using methods from complex analysis (multidimensional residues, integral representation formulas), Berenstein, in collaboration with Yger, has already obtained important results in this area. For instance, sharp estimates about the degrees and sizes of the coefficients of n-variable polynomials solving Hilbert s Nullstellensatz for fields of arbitrary characteristics. Berenstein plans to continue working on these problems and solve related questions in trancedental number theory. Several problems in tomography will also be investigated by Prof. Berenstein. For instance, an algorithm that allows a significant reduction in the radiation dosage for CAT scans was obtained by Berenstein with Walnut et al. (A patent will be awarded to this invention). Continuation of this work, with possible applications to lung cancer detection is envisioned. Electrical impedance tomography is another kind of non-intrusive medical imaging and also used in the detection of cracks in materials. The geodesic Radon transform in the hyperbolic plane plays a role in the algorithms. Another imaging problem lies at the heart of the Pompeiu transform, which models a homogeneous detector of arbitrary geometrical shape. Earlier work on this problem, done jointly with Gay, has lead both to the consideration of problems of complex analysis in the Heisenberg group, as well as several other questions of non-destructive evaluation of materials doc1846 none Six faculty members and their students in the Biology Departments at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges will use a Nikon laser scanning confocal microscope for studies in cell and molecular biology. This system includes a Nikon Eclipse E800 Upright Research Microscope, a Nikon PCM- ML scanning confocal with two multi-lines lasers, an argon ion laser (457 nm, 488 nm and 514 nm) and a HeNe green laser (543 nm), a transmitted light detector, and a quantitative 2D 3D software package. The Nikon scanning confocal microscope will greatly facilitate and broaden the scope of research performed by the Biology faculty at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges by providing a state-of-the-art system for detailed image acquisition and analysis. Each investigator will incorporate the scanning laser confocal microscope into their independent research programs. These programs address a variety of molecular, cellular and developmental questions, including calcium imaging of plateau potentials in leech neurons; assembly of synaptic proteins in developing rat sympathetic neurons; cell proliferation in chick embryonic neuromeres; control of meiosis in C. elegans; molecular basis of programmed cell death in T lymphocytes, and biogenesis and regulation of microtubule containing structures in Chlamydomonas. The acquisition of the Nikon scanning confocal microscope will also enrich the research experience of undergraduate biology majors at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges, which is a major component of science education at both institutions. It will also benefit the graduate program in Biology at Bryn Mawr College by providing a high quality research tool for developing investigative skills doc1847 none Geometric measure theory, harmonic analysis, and calculus of variations This proposal is focused on three problems in three somewhat overlapping areas, namely geometric measure theory, harmonic analysis, and the calculus of variations. The first problem is Besicovitch s 1 2- conjecture regarding the sharpest bound for the (a.e.) lower spherical density for purely unrectifiable 1-sets in Euclidean space (or more general spaces as well). The second is the Harmonic Lip_1-Capacity problem (Mattila s conjecture and the related David-Semmes problem), regarding the characterization (in terms of rectifiability) of sets of co-dimension one which allow a Lipschitz harmonic function defined off the set to be extended to all of Euclidean space. This is precisely the higher dimensional analogue of the analytic capacity problem. The third problem is regarding the question of regularity of minimizers of the relaxed energy functional (introduced by Bethuel, Brezis, and Coron) which is basically the usual Dirichlet energy plus a cost function on singularities. On all three problems the PI has done a good deal of work (the third problem is joint with R. Hardt) advancing the state of knowledge. Our program on the first problem has met significant progress in the recent months exceeding the PI s expectations and appears close to completion. Our work on the other two appears to also be heading in direction of further progress as well. The first problem addresses one of the most fundamental questions regarding the geometrical properties of purely unrectifiable sets going back to Besicovitch s two classic papers which established the foundation of the subject ( , ). These sets are fractal-like, appearing in several contexts in the physical world and hence the sciences (e.g. dynamical systems, number theory etc.). Our work on the problem has required finding new algorithms dealing with very general closed sets, and we expect it to have an impact on the understanding of other related geometrical questions of densities and rectifiability not to mention our understanding of the properties of these natural sets.. Our second problem combines geometry and harmonic analysis in a natural way, having impact on several areas of analysis and also to Physics, where harmonic functions have a special role (e.g. in electrostatics). Our third problem overlaps geometry, topology, partial differential equations, and geometric measure theory. It addresses deep questions in its area. It is of special importance in the theory of liquid crystals since the quantities being minimized are similar to the energies of such physical systems doc1848 none The aim of this research is to develop a rigorous numerical model (primarily based on nonlinear fracture mechanics) to study the deterioration of reinforced concrete structures (such as bridge decks) due to the corrosion of rebars, atmospheric pollution, frost and mechanical load. Coupling between these various effects with cracking will be considered. This in turn, will lead to the better understanding of the deterioration process, and improved predictive capabilities.Rather than focusing on the causes of the deteriorations (such as chloridediffusion, carbonation), we will focus on the end effect which is concrete cracking and its interaction coupling with the mechanisms which lead to deterioration doc1849 none This grant funds research seeking to further the development of a high-speed droplet-based net-form manufacturing technology for the fabrication of high-precision three-dimensional aluminum and aluminum alloy components. Successful development relies the knowledge base acquired from previous NSF and industry supported work. In the NSFsupported work, highly uniform molten aluminum alloy droplet streams were reliably generated from capillary stream break-up in a custom fabricated state-of-the-art droplet generator and deposition facility, and preliminary three-dimensional componets were fabricated. In the industry supported work, molten solder droplets were charged and deflected in a manner similar to ink-jet printing and targeted onto a circuit board with an accuracy of 12.5 micrometer. Hence, the union of these efforts forms the knowledge base for the proposed net-form manufacturing technology. The crux of the this research is the determination of the inter-relationships between processing parameters, structure and properties. To this end, a research plan that consists of experimentation coupled with numerical modeling and materials characterization is proposed, with information gained from the experimental and characterization studies serving as feedback into the modeling effort. A novel extension will be explored in droplet-based manufacturing and to investigate the fabrication of photonic bandgap (PBG) materials. The extent to which the processing parameters for PGB materials fabrication can be extrapolated from the relationships governing aluminum alloy structural component fabrication will be ascertained as a first step towards the fabrication of PBG and other multimaterial components doc1850 none Sound propagation in granular beds, such as in soil, has been studied for more than a century. However, little is known about the propagation impulses and of large amplitude, low frequency (less than 1 kHz) sound waves in granular beds. The propagation of impulses and of low frequency sound waves can only be described by taking into account the strongly nonlinear Hertzian forces, which make the grains repel nonlinearly upon intimate contact. The mathematical difficulties associated with such studies have hindered progress in studying impulse and low frequency wave propagation in granular beds. The proposed research will exploit recently developed theoretical advances and particle dynamics simulations to focus upon studying the dynamics of impulse and low frequency sound propagation in polydisperse granular assemblies. The possibility of exploiting backscattered impulses and low frequency acoustic waves to detect buried objects in granular beds will be addressed in this study. The effects of the presence of water in the inter-granular space on impulse propagation will also be analyzed. The studies will lead to the development of an algorithm to reconstruct a computer image of a buried object using surface based analyses of the backscattered acoustic impulses from such an object. An important application of the study will be for purposes of detecting buried antipersonnel landmines in nominally dry soils that are buried at depths of less than a foot in soil and kills nearly civilians each year doc1851 none A study will be made of stress-induced surface roughening caused by shallow chemical surface etching. The results will be adapted to residual-stress measurement. Previous work has shown that a simple spectrum analysis of nanometer-scale height changes in surface roughness caused by chemical etching permits determination of residual-stress components in solids. The principle of the analysis is that etching triggers stress-induced surface instability, resulting in a roughening of the surface controlled by the magnitude of the residual stresses and their direction. The experimental method is called surface roughness-evolution spectroscopy (SRES), and it measures residual stress components in solids with high spatial resolution. The study will include modeling and experimental studies of surface roughening caused by various etchants in shallow chemical etching; this research is expected to provide fundamental understanding of the roughening process of stressed solid surfaces, while etched chemically. In addition, the understanding will be applied to measuring microscopic residual stresses in technologically important solid structures, e.g. manufacturing-induced residual stresses in optical fibers and intra-granular residual stresses in polycrystalline solids. The resulting experimental method of skin test for residual-stress measurement is expected to make a significant impact in assessing manufacturability, reliability and residual life of solid components, which is essential in developing and maintaining proper infrastructures of civil and mechanical systems doc1852 none The investigator studies two areas in graph theory: (1) Graphic Ramsey Theory, and (2) Structural Graph Theory. The basic goal of this proposal is to work on problems surrounding three conjectures: the Moon-Moser conjecture on circumferences of a 3-connected planar graph, the Chvatal Toughness conjecture, and the Burr-Erdos Ramsey Linear Bound conjecture. Graph theory is a relative new branch of mathematics that has applications in many areas, such as computer science, telecommunications, and transportation. The problems described are major problems in graph theory. In addition to their theoretic significance, many of the questions addressed here are of interest for computer scientists doc1853 none Characteristic Length of Quasi-Brittle Materials PI: Joseph Labuz University of Minnesota-Twin Cities : Field and laboratory observations of rock failure indicate behavior quite different for structures of various size and shape. Due to the existence of a localized zone of microcracking, which seems to be a characteristic of the material, the nominal strength and the global response of a given geometry and load configuration of a rock structure are dependent on size. For many problems in geotechnical engineering (for instance, breakouts in tunneling, comminution and drilling, pullout of reinforcement), the characteristics of a localized zone are important in predicting failure. The objective of this research is to measure the characteristic length of various rocks. The localized zone of microcracking prior to failure will be mapped with locations of acoustic emission, and space-time clustering analyses will help to define the dimensions. As a complementary method, electronic speckle pattern interferometry will be used to measure surface deformation, providing a high resolution visual image of the displacement field. Numerical modeling with a distinct element code will provide a basis for the extension of the experimental results to other materials and conditions. By performing simulations designed to mimic the experimental measurements, the necessary constitutive behavior can be established, and the investigation of boundary value problems can be realized doc1854 none Future networked multimedia information systems will carry a wide variety of applications including digital libraries, video, audio and image services, distance learning and collaboration, networked virtual environments, and entertainment. The main characteristics of multimedia applications that lead to difficulties in end-to-end systems design are that they have very large bandwidth and storage requirements, with vastly different performance and reliability requirements, often coupled with real-time constraints. Along with these characteristics, the highly interreliability requirements, often coupled with real-time constraints. Along with these characteristics, the highly interactive nature of a variety of multimedia applications, resulting in fairly unpredictable workloads, makes the design and evaluation of networked multimedia information systems an exceptionally challenging problem. In this proposal, we outline research on three aspects of this problem: (1) the design and evaluation of server resource allocation algorithms for CM servers in order to retrieve information efficiently and according to the QoS demanded by the application; (2)the development of performance evaluation techniques for evaluating new server designs. (3) the participants of this project bring expertise from a wide variety of areas: databases, distance learning, multi-media, networking, and performance evaluation to bear on problems in these areas. Another important feature of this proposal is that the participants have available four prototypes of state of the art multimedia systems: the Virtual World Data Server (VWDS) developed at UCLA: the prototype of a Video-on-Demand server developed in Brazil as part cooperative research project among Brazilian institutions; and the Multimedia Asynchronous Networked Individualized Courseware (MANIC) and the Internet Multimedia Proxy (IMP) both developed at UMass. These applications will be used to motivate the development of new algorithms for retrieving information and for maintaining the desired quality of service after sending the data over a wide area network. They will also form the basis of the many experimental and analytical studies that will be performed to evaluate these new algorithms. To aid in this evaluation, our group also developed three performance evaluation and modeling tools: a state-of-the-art tool for constructing performance and reliability models (Tangram-II) developed in Brazil jointly with UCLA; a symbolic model checking tool (VERUS): and a tool which facilitates design, development, and subsequent performance evaluation of designs of multimedia storage hierarchies (ViPEr-HiSS) under development at UMD. Thus, the environment of our labs as well the long distance among them will provide a unique testbed for this type of an evaluation due to the drastically different connectivities available to our applications, from gigabit low utilized links to intercontinental congested links. The proposed research represents a fundamentally important step in the design and performance evaluation of next generation information servers and the networked applications that will operate on top of them. As a result of our research we expect to have a better understanding of how storage server resource management policies, channel allocation policies, and network adaptation policies interact to satisfy the required QoS of CM applications, despite the fairly unpredictable network delays doc1855 none This research focuses on the fabrication and investigation of a novel class of semiconductor electro-optical devices. These devices will enable the study of quantum dynamics of many-body systems driven by strong periodic fields. They also form a cornerstone of a novel approach to utilizing the full 400 Terabit s communications bandwidth of optical fibers. The devices will use antennas to couple THz fields with frequency f(THz) into a small region containing semiconductor quantum wells or superlattices. Near-Infrared (NIR) radiation with frequency f(NIR), near the semiconductor band-gap, will probe the response of the active region. Absorption, and the emission of sidebands at frequencies f(sideband) = f(NIR) + - nf(THz), where n=integer, will be monitored. One expects at high THz fields large shifts in interband absorption resonances, and sideband intensities, which oscillate with THz field strength. In doped quantum wells, efficient sideband emission is expected when THz radiation is resonant with the transition between the ground and first excited sub-bands. At higher THz intensities, nonlinear phenomena like period-doubling bifurcations to chaos have been predicted. This research offers graduate and undergraduate students broad training in semiconductor physics, device fabrication, and optics, which will prepare them for future careers in government, industry, or academe. %%% One of today s outstanding technological problems is the rapid communication of digital information. The threads of the Internet are optical fibers, each of which has the potential to carry information at the rate of 40 trillion bits per second. Existing technology is capable of using only 1% of this bandwidth, by sending 10 gigabits per second on several dozen optical frequencies simultaneously. This research focuses on fabricating and testing a new class of nonlinear optical devices, which are capable of selectively shifting information carried on one optical frequency to another one several Terahertz away. The proposed devices are also expected to exhibit a variety of surprising phenomena, which test our understanding of quantum-mechanical systems driven very far from equilibrium. This research offers graduate and undergraduate students broad training in semiconductor physics, device fabrication, and optics, which will prepare them for future careers in government, industry, or academic science doc1856 none This grant provides funding for the investigation of effective and cost-efficient methods to reduce the levels of cutting fluid mist present in machining environments. Experimental and analytical efforts will result in the development of a mist baseline, and a computational model to predict the mist motion. The mist baseline, derived from experimental data, will contain detailed information concerning the mass concentration and partial size spatial distribution of the mist over time. The computational fluid dynamics code, including a coagulation model, will be capable of simulating laminar or turbulent multi-phase flows by using a combined Lagranian Eulerian method to explicitly track the fluid mist in the air. Using these tools, an investigation of the utilization of kinematic coagulation, the capture of mist particles through the introduction of a spray of larger cutting fluid droplets into the machining environment, will be performed. Experiments will be conducted to validate the developed analytical coagulation model and to investigate the performance of the kinematic coagulation system based on its environmental and health impact. Cost analysis for the implementation of this system will be performed and compared to systems currently in use. If successful, this project will result in the development of new strategies that will substantially reduce or eliminate the airborne mist present in current machining environments. This will be accomplished, in part, by using the mist baseline to identify the most hazardous machining process conditions. More importantly, implementation of the proposed analytical work will lead to the development of cutting fluid mist removal systems that are cost-efficient, provide healthier industrial environments, and serve as solutions to the air quality problem until such time as other processes, such as dry machining, are feasible and can be affordably implemented by all industries. The final result will be a significant reduction in the acute and chronic effects of mist on workers doc1857 none The goal of this work is to develop a novel technique for measuring low liquid permeabilities in heterogeneous materials, particularly including high-performance concrete. In contrast to conventional methods, the new method does not require high pressure apparatus and it yields results in a few hours, rather than days or weeks moreover, it is easiest to perform on samples of low permeability, which are the most difficult to measure by other methods. The principle of the new method is that the thermal expansion kinetics of a saturated porous body involves flow of the pore liquid, so the permeability can be determined by measuring the dilatation during a thermal cycle. When a saturated porous material is heated, the pore liquid expands much more that the solid phase, so the liquid tends to flow out of the pores. Our objective is to design and build a dilatometer to perform the measurement on cylinders of the kind typically used for strength measurements. The resulting permeability values will be compared to those obtained by conventional methods. Test will be performed on cement, mortar, and concrete to explore the range of measurable permeabilities. A numerical analysis of the experiment will be performed to explore the limits of the analytical calculation, which involves some simplifying assumptions However, the low permeability of the body prevents the liquid from escaping as fast as it expands, so is forced to expand within the pores, stretching the porous body like a spring. If the body is heated and then held at a constant temperature, the initial expansion is caused in part by the liquid; during the isothermal hold, the liquid drains from the pores and the body contracts to the dimension determined by the thermal expansion coefficient of the solid. The magnitude of the dilatation contributed by the liquid can be calculated, so fitting the measured expansion to the theory provides the permeability as a parameter doc1858 none A Laser Scanning Confocal Microscope for Biological Imaging Laser Scanning Confocal Microscopy (LSCM) is an essential tool for cell, developmental and neurobiology. The Department of Biological Sciences will use LSCM to meet the biological imaging needs of several independent research programs within the department . Dr. Lisa Elferink will examine if the GTPase protein rab15 regulates the endocytic recycling of synaptic vesicles during signal transmission at synaptic junctions. Dr. Markus Friedrich will analyze the cellular dynamics of pattern formation during grasshopper eye development in real time and assess the effects of perturbing wingless and decapentaplegic signaling during this process. Drs. Balsamo and Lilien will examine the structure of the intact developing embryonic neural retina in the presence of cell permeable probes, which disrupt the function of specific adhesion molecules, unraveling their relative roles in development. Dr. Aleksandar Popadic will explore the cellular dynamics of myriapod embryogenesis and investigate the expression patterns of homeotic genes in early myriapod embryos. Dr. Mark Van Berkum will investigate the functional relationships between calmodulin and the signal transduction mediator molecules, son-of-sevenless and abelson tyrosine kinase, during Drosophila neural development, and analyze the pathfinding behaviour of Drosophila motorneurons in real time. These studies will contribute significantly to our understanding of the molecular mechanisms regulating several pathways critical for normal neural and developmental function and to the molecular analysis of developmental evolution in animals doc1859 none Barto Reinforcement learning is a summary term for a collection of methods for approximating solutions to stochastic optimal control problems. RL methods leave been successfully applied to a large array of such problems in a diversity of domains, including finance, logistics, telecommunications, and robot control. Although similar problems have been studied intensively for many years in control engineering and operations research, the methods developed by RL researchers have added new elements to the classical solution methods. RL methods offer novel ways to approximate solutions to problems that are too large or ill-defined for the classical solution methods to be feasible. A significant part of RL research is directed at increasing on-line performance and speed of convergence by providing RL systems with domain knowledge. This project is concerned with knowledge related to the design of stabilizing controllers for complex dynamical systems. It will try to develop a general theory for incorporating this knowledge into RL systems. The basic idea is to mathematically define policy subspaces that have certain known stability and safety properties and to focus exploration on control laws that lie within these policy subspaces. The means by which this is achieved are based on the theory of Lyapunov stability and the associated methods of Lyapunov control design doc1860 none This research program is focused on the development of a micro-fluidic control device, based on the phenomenon of acoustic streaming. Acoustic streaming is a steady fluid motion created when high amplitude acoustic waves propagate through a dissipative fluid. The dissipation of energy through viscous effects, combined with nonlinear hydrodynamic coupling, results in a steady momentum being imparted to the fluid. The primary function of this device (and the primary focus of the research) is pumping, although the device will be capable of performing a variety of other tasks critical to micro-fluidic control including metering, valving, mixing, fluid property monitoring and suspended particle manipulation. The research program consists of simultaneous computational and experimental investigations. The computational investigation is focused on the development of nonlinear fluid dynamic models used to reveal effects of fundamental system parameters on acoustic streaming. The experimental investigation is focused on prototype development and experimental verification of the computational results. This work promises to have a significant technological impact at many levels. First, the understanding of the fundamental physics surrounding acoustic streaming will be enhanced. Secondly, this approach to micro-fluidic control has many advantages over anything yet postulated. These advantages include the development of a solid state micro-fluidic pump possessing superior manufacturability and reliability as well as a micro-fluidic control device capable of performing multiple fluid handling functions. Finally, the creation of an effective, reliable micro-fluidic control device promises to open many other possible applications for MEMS technology such as microprocessor design, pharmaceutical products and security defense capabilities doc1861 none Kutter, Bruce L. The assessment the post-liquefaction shear resistance behavior of soil is widely recognized as a controlling factor in many large remediation projects throughout the country and world. Decisions on whether to proceed with costly ground improvement projects to mitigate liquefaction hazards often hinge on highly uncertain estimations of post-liquefaction shear resistance of the soil. The objective of these research projects is to better understand the sources of uncertainty. One likely source of uncertainty is the lack of procedures to evaluate the effects of void redistribution on the post-liquefaction shear strength. Void redistribution may be associated with accumulation of earthquake induced pore pressures near interfaces between permeable and impermeable soil and by particle intermixing. A program of dynamic centrifuge modeling tests and laboratory triaxial tests are proposed, in collaboration with a proposed program of l-g shaking table tests conducted by Professor Kokusho at Chuo University, Japan, to study this problem. The centrifuge tests, to be conducted on the 9 m centrifuge at UC Davis will include models with multiple layers of contracting permeability. Professor Kokusho of Chuo University, Japan has observed flow failures and the formation of water interlayers beneath impermeable layers even in steeply sloping ground. Water interlayers, an extreme form of void redistribution raise serious questions regarding validity of typical stability calculations. Collaboration with Professor Kokusho will greatly enhance the benefits of this research by allowing comparisons between shaking table and centrifuge tests over a range of testing conditions. The proposed work includes funding to support, train, and provide valuable experience to graduate and undergraduate students. The MESA, MORE and WIE programs at UC Davis have agreed to help recruit a diverse pool of applicants for the undergraduate positions. The opportunities for students to design, conduct and analyze the large-scale experiments and to meet renowned experts from the US and Japan will be an extremely valuable. This project is supported under the 3rd-year competition under NSF 98-36. US Japan Cooperative Research in Urban Earthquake Disaster Mitigation doc1862 none Knudson studies the homology of linear groups over various rings of interest in algebraic K-theory. In this project he focuses attention on the low-dimensional homology groups of the general linear group over the coordinate ring of an elliptic curve over a number field with the goal of proving that the second K-group of such a curve has finite rank. This extends Knudson s previous work on the homology of rank one groups over such rings. In addition, a new homology theory based on algebraic cycles in the product of a scheme with the simplicial classifying scheme of an algebraic group is constructed and its properties investigated. The hope is that this construction will lead to a proof of the Friedlander-Milnor conjecture concerning the homology of algebraic groups made discrete. Also, the investigator s previous work on the structure of special linear groups over integral Laurent polynomial rings is used in the study of the Burau representation of the braid groups. This representation is known to be faithful for three strings and unfaithful for five or more strings; the remaining case of four strings is singled out for study in this project. Finally, Knudson studies the completion of a discrete group relative to a Zariski dense representation in a reductive group over a field of positive characteristic. This generalizes the classical unipotent completion of a group and extends to positive characteristic R. Hain s work in characteristic zero. A scheme is a geometric object constructed from solution sets of polynomial equations. Algebraic K-theory associates to a scheme a sequence of groups which encode information about the scheme. One aspect of this project is the study of the K-groups of an elliptic curve. Such curves have remarkably rich structure and appear in various branches of mathematics such as algebraic geometry and coding theory. A seemingly unrelated part of this project concerns the so-called Burau representation of the braid groups which is intimately connected with knot theory. These diverse topics are unified by studying the structure of groups of matrices with entries in various rings (the coordinate ring of the elliptic curve in the first case and the ring of integral Laurent polynomials in the second). The hope is to solve several outstanding conjectures about these objects doc1863 none The research project entitled Surface Photochemistry and Interfacial Charge Transfer will be conducted by Dr. J. Michael White from the University of Texas, Austin and is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry program. The research is focused in two areas. (1)The study of photodissociation dynamics of adsorbed alkyl nitrite species on metals, and (2) the study of charge transfer reactions of organic systems which function as light emitting diodes (OLEDs). Dr. White has found that there are 3 pathways associated with the photodissociations. Each pathway is affected by the surface substrate (metal), the adlayer structure, energy and method of excitation and the presence of coadsorbed species. The first part of the research program will focus on elucidating the effects and separating the pathways. The second part of the research program seeks to characterize the structure and electronic properties of adsorbed OLEDs and correlating these properties to luminescent characteristics. Both of these projects will be carried out using state of the art surface characterization techniques. Both projects will provide an important and fundamental understanding of photodissociation mechanisms and OLEDs. The results of this research will have an impact on the area of fundamental photochemistry of adsorbed species on metals and on the understanding of luminescence and how it is affected by structure and electronic properties. The OLED studies could potentially have a broad impact on the development of new materials and devices doc1864 none 1.3-mm vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) is an enabling device for future optical 10Gbit Ethernet and local area network. In the present proposal, we propose a novel approach to make 1.3 mm VCSELs on GaAs substrates with a single step epitaxial growth. The basic idea is to use an InxGa1-xAs GaPyAszSb1-y-z InxGa1-xAs type-II quantum well (QW) structure as the active region. Our preliminary theoretical and experimental studies of the proposed type-II QW structure have shown that the idea is feasible. A detailed theoretical model has been used to calculate the transition energies, overlaps between electron and hole wavefunctions, and gain spectra for the type-II QW structures. The results show that a gain of cm-1 can be reached under an electric injection of 10. cm-3. Based on the theoretical design, several test samples for photoluminescence and LED structures have been grown by a specially configured molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) machine. TEM images clearly show well-defined QW structures. Strong room temperature photoluminescence from the QW samples and electroluminescence from the LEDs have been clearly observed. In the present proposed program, we will focus on three major tasks: 1) Further detailed theoretical modeling of gain spectra and optimized device structures of different variation of the proposed InGaAs GaPAsSb type-II QWs; 2) MBE growth and materials characterization of the new QW structures to understand various growth related issues and find the optimized growth conditions for the VCSELs; 3) Detailed physics study of the carrier life time and optical properties of the InGaAs GaPAsSb type-II QWs using low temperature cw and time resolved photoluminescence spectroscopy; 4) Device demonstration of cw VCSELs. In the proposed program, 2 PhD students will be supported. There will be also several undergraduate students to be involved in part of the program through their senior design projects doc1865 none This grant provides funding for the development of effective and efficient methodologies for solving large-scale capacitated logistics network design and routing problems. A major obstacle in solving network design and routing problems is that the bounds from the linear relaxations of their mixed-integer programming models are quite weak. In order to strengthen these bounds, strong cutting planes will be developed through rigorous analysis of generic network design polyhedra. The approach taken will be to exploit common substructures that exist in large classes of logistics network design and routing problems without making any assumptions on the topology of the network and the specific characteristics of the capacities. Generic primal heuristics that make use of these network substructures will be developed. Extensive computational experiments will be performed on a large class of logistics problems to test the viability of the approach. One of the most important outcomes of the project will be the development of an intelligent next-generation mixed-integer solver that will automatically identify the network design and routing substructures of mixed-integer programming problems and employ the methods developed in this project to exploit these substructures. If successful, this research project will significantly advance our capabilities in solving large classes of mixed-integer programming problems that have capacitated network design problem as a substructure. Since many telecommunication and transportation network planning, vehicle crew routing and scheduling, production and distribution, facility location and capacity allocation problems are variations of capacitated network design and routing problems, the results of the project are expected to have a significant impact on many industries doc1866 none In this joint project between Arizona State University and University of California at Berkeley, a set of metrics and methods will be developed to evaluate and optimize design for manufacturing through all phases of product development. The first phase of the project will involve investigation of Design-for-Manufacturing (DfM) metrics and methods using several criteria, such as theoretical soundness and computational complexity. A novel DfM approach based on Benefit Cost analysis will be developed to consider trade-offs between the quality of a design and its manufacturing cost, while taking into account market factors and a Company s strategic goals. Key performance or utility factors of each design alternative or competing product will be used for computing a Design Benefit Rating, and similarly relevant manufacturing factors will be used for computing a Manufacturability Rating. Then techniques of value engineering will be used to explore design changes to improve the overall value of the design and or to choose between alternatives. In the final year of the project, a DfM Shell will be implemented to serve as a domain independent testbed to verify, refine, and compare DN methodologies. Domain-specific design and manufacturing agents will be linked to the testbed. The particular focus will be on three processes: CNC machining, injection molding, and fuse deposition. Six industrial partners will provide the part designs and process knowledge for several manufacturability case studies. The primary benefits from the project are: (1) tools for manufacturing companies to improve rapidly the quality of their products to meet changing market conditions; (2) sound theoretical foundations for manufacturability analysis; and (3) a framework to evaluate the reliability of current and future commercial software for DfM doc1867 none Bipolar transistors that operate at a lower voltage than existing devices would have a big impact on wireless communications and other battery-powered applications. The operating voltage of a bipolar transistor is determined by the bandgap of the constituent semiconductor, thus bipolar transistors in low bandgap semiconductors are needed. The only viable semiconductor family with lower bandgaps than those already used for bipolar transistors is the so-called 6.1 material family, named after the value of their lattice constant. The heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) is the prevalent bipolar transistor design in III-V semiconductor material families. It would seem natural to develop HBT s in the low bandgap 6.1 materials, but this cannot be done. The HBT is incompatible with the 6.1 materials, so an alternate type of bipolar transistor is sought. Such a transistor is the tunneling emitter bipolar transistor (TEBT). This program will study the TEBT s in the low bandgap 6.1 semiconductors. The effort will be along three lines: physics, materials and device engineering. The physics involves certain tunneling processes required by the TEBT. The materials work is the development of the epitaxial structures for the TEBT in the 6.1 materials. The device engineering (and fabrication and testing) of TEBT s will initially aim at a transistor exhibiting a substantial ( 40) dc current gain, and follow up with engineering the device for rf performance doc1868 none An explosive growth in scale and complexity of information services is stretching data base technology beyond its limits. In particular, while the state-of-the-art data base management systems (DBMSs) provide extensibility through user-defined functions (UDFs) and data types, they are ineffective in many critical applications areas, e.g., data mining. Therefore, the project s goal is developing powerful extensibility mechanisms to enable DBMSs to support effectively new application domains and advanced information systems. To realize this goal, the new approach is based on User-Defined Aggregates (UDAs) expressed in a new SQL-based language. Since SQL is the standard language for DBMSs, this approach ensures ease of use and compatibility -- overcoming a problem besetting UDF-based approaches. The project s expected accomplishments are: (1) Design and implementation of an SQL-based language for UDAs, and of a system for supporting their efficient execution; development of compilation and optimization techniques that ensure UDAs performance and scalability on large DBMS-resident databases, as well as on large file-resident data; (2) Development of advanced application testbeds to demonstrate the power of the UDA system, and to evaluate and tune its performance; in most applications, such as datamining functions, spatio-temporal queries, and time series data blades, the system will be used as a DBMS extender; but in applications, such as analysis of computational data or WEB data, the system will be used as a stand-alone query processor; and (3) Delivery of the software to the public, with a dedicated website providing documentation, tutorials, application testbeds, and online demos. http: www.cs.ucla.edu ~edu udahome.html doc1869 none (Automated DNA Sequencer for Microbial Ecology Studies) Gunderson A LICOR L2 automated DNA sequencer will be used for microbial ecology studies being conducted at TennesseeTechnological University. An interdisciplinary nucleus of faculty and students interested in molecular microbial ecology has developed here, with representatives from the Department of Biology, the Center for the Management, Utilization and Protection of Water Resources, and the Department of Civil Engineering engaged in funded research in the area of microbial ecology. The research activities have grown beyond a level which can be supported by our manual sequencing facilities. The research projects that would immediately employ an automated sequencer include an rRNA-based survey of the distribution of parasitic dinoflagellates in Chesapeake Bay, the analysis of protistan food vacuole contents, the determination of the identity of prokaryotic symbionts of termite flagellates, the screening of natural and man-made habitats for the presence of Legionella-like amoebal pathogens, and the determination of the effects of pesticides on prokaryotic communities living in constructed wetlands. Although microbial ecologists would be the primary users of the machine, other faculty members would also use an automated sequencer if one were available. An automated DNA sequencer would facilitate the ongoing research of faculty members at TTU, help provide necessary infrastructural support to a new Ph.D. program in environmental sciences, and allow both graduate and undergraduate students to be involved in DNA sequencing projects. It s presence would also eliminate the risk and inconvenience of radioisotope use doc1870 none Glazier This six-month award will provide support for Douglas Glazier of Juniata College and an undergraduate student to plan a cooperative research project with Dr. Alberto Basset and his students at the University of Bologna, Italy. The objective of the project is to examine the ecological, bioenergetic, and life-history consequences of invasion of land and freshwater by marine isopod crustaceans; the Italian site provides several common species of marine, freshwater and terrestrial isopods. At the planning stage, Drs. Glazier and Basset will prepare for future field and laboratory experiments and observations that will test several hypotheses concerning potential physiological, bioenergetic and ecological causes of the life-history differences observed, and their population consequences. The long-term goal of the collaboration is to demonstrate that isopods are excellent model systems for studying the macroevolutionary ecology of major habitat shifts, and to increase understanding doc1871 none Relationships and interactions between the two disciplines of system identification and model-based control design are the prime milieu of the proposed research. The unanswered question, What is a good model for control design?, will be examined from a constructive viewpoint by considering a range of design choices within the methods of iterative identification and control, which deals with the recently developed techniques for successively generating controllers and models based on closed-loop data. In this context of iteration, each choice of design variable is informed (or prejudiced) by the previous model and controller plus experimental data. The design parameters which we study are connected with modeling in a framework where undermodeling and approximation are the norm, as opposed to the unrealistic aim of seeking exact descriptions. Both theoretical and practical areas will be studied, since each is an important guide and adjunct to the other in this field, where successful applications appear to be running ahead of the prevailing available theoretical support. The research has high scientific and practical merit, as it deals with fundamental problems of understanding the nature of modeling for a purpose and with issues of applied industrial control. Outcomes should be expected in both arenas. High performance control systems are regarded as a major enabling technology for many industrial applications. Since the provision of a dynamic model is the starting point for most high-performance control design, an understanding of the methodology for deriving this model from closed-loop operating data is critical to realizing this potential. The research areas addressed here are core issues whose resolution will provide the theoretical comprehension and guidance to yield useful practical techniques doc1872 none MICRO-MECHANICS ASSOCIATED WITH FRACTURE IN INTEGRATED MICROELECTRONICS The research addresses two contemporary micro-mechanics issues concerning fracture in microelectronic devices. One is the mechanics of dielectric fracture produced by electromigration in constrained interconnect structures. The other is how stresses accumulate in packaged devices, particularly under thermal cycling conditions, with particular emphasis on conditions of mechanical shakedown and ratcheting (a condition favoring cracking). The principal experimental tool used in the proposed research will be optical piezospectroscopy, using Raman spectroscopy and photostimulated luminescence. Piezospectroscopy is a developing, non-destructive and non-contact method of strain measurement with a spatial resolution of ~ 1micron when implemented using an optical microprobe doc1873 none Balantekin The proposed area of research is in the area of theoretical physics with an emphasis on understanding results from the ongoing experimental activity in the United States and abroad. A number of different projects will be carried out with the participation of younger scientists who recently received their doctorates and those who are currently working on their doctoral dissertations in the research activity of the senior scientists. The projects will include efforts i) To understand energy-producing activity in the core of the Sun and other stars; ii) To explore the origin and formation of heavy elements in different sites around the universe; iii) To study the properties of tiny particles called neutrinos that are produced both in the laboratory and astrophysical settings; iv) To develop mathematical techniques to model nuclei and similar complex systems; v) To understand how heavy nuclei break up when they collide in laboratory experiments; vi) To explore properties of unstable nuclei that are produced in the laboratories. These projects are chosen not only to contribute to our knowledge of fundamental physics but also to the training of the young people involved doc1874 none Ricketts The University of Minnesota Duluth will operate the R V Blue Heron during as a general oceanographic research vessel in support of NSF-supported research projects. The Blue Heron is an 86 ft. vessel, constructed in and converted in , and is owned by the Regents of the University of Minnesota and operated by Large Lakes Observatory. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 96 operational days during , of which 59 days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The remaining cruises will support NOAA, State and other private projects. The projects scheduled on the Blue Heron span a variety of oceanographic disciplines, such as biological, geological, chemical and physical oceanography, and will fully utilize the capabilities of the vessel. Operations will take place on Lake Superior. The Blue Heron is part of a fleet of ships used by the National Science Foundation in support of marine science research. Most oceanographic projects require highly specialized equipment to be permanently installed on the vessel, thus the necessity for specialized ships. These vessels do not operate in the same mode as general cargo fishing vessels. As a result, NSF supports the operation of a variety of ships specifically dedicated to oceanographic research that are operated by universities and institutions around the country doc1875 none Circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy is an important tool for studying the structure of proteins and peptides in solution. The technique has been extensively used to probe the structure of proteins after specific amino acids in the proteins have been altered. This technique has also been used as a guide in the preparation of protein and peptide samples for subsequent structural studies. A CD spectropolarimeter with a temperature controller will be used to probe whether a change in the structure of proteins occurs when important amino acids are changed. The proteins under study are (1) metallo-beta-lactamase (which confers antibiotic resistance to bacteria), (2) 3-ketoacyl-ACP synthase III (which is involved in fatty acid synthesis in plants and can be potentially used to generate commercially-interesting oils), (3) glyoxylase II, and (4) DEX1 (which is involved in meiosis). The CD instrument will also be used to guide the preparation of samples to be studied with NMR spectroscopy. These studies involve the characterization of the membrane spanning proteins, phospholamban and plant desaturase acetylenases, when embedded in micelles. Undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral associates and faculty researchers will use the circular dichroism spectrometer. Specific use by undergraduates includes use by students supported under an NSF-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, in a biochemistry laboratory course, and in a physical chemistry lab course. The instrument will be housed in a common-use, departmental instrumentation lab and will be accessible to all researchers at Miami University. The circular dichroism spectrometer will contribute significantly to the training of future scientists by providing access to important instrumentation for solving research problems in biochemistry and biophysics doc1876 none Lynne Billard The International Biometrics Conference is planned for July 2-7, , at San Francisco. The meeting will focus on the active areas of research in biostatistics. Areas of emphasis are advancement of biological science through the development of quantitative theories and the application, development, and dissemination of effective mathematical and statistical techniques . The conference participants are concerned with cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary interface of the theoretical and application oriented real-world problems. In addition to the invited talks, ample time will be given for small group discussions in which junior participants will meet with senior mentors and other participants. The NSF monies requested are to support about fifteen U.S.-based participants and five non-U.S.-based researchers with emphasis on young researchers and traditionally under-represented groups. Support will be limited to individuals at academic institutions and non-profit organizations doc1877 none Pillay plans to carry out research on stable and simple theories, especially the structure of supersimple fields, on differential fields and their Galois groups, and on groups over o- minimal structures. Simple theories are a class of first order theories, including both stable theories and typically the theories of ifgeneric structuresll. Their models support a notion of ioindependencel. which specialises to ioalgebraic freenessli in the case of algebraically closed fields. The study of simple theories has thrown up some new ideas in model theory involving generalized notions of definability and Galois theory. Pillay plans to investigate several open questions in both the general theory and fine structure theory. Pseudo algebraically closed fields with small Galois group are examples of supersimple fields. Pillay will investigate the reverse problem: is a supersimple field pseudoalgebraically closed, namely does every irreducible variety over F have an F- rational point. Differential rings and fields are objects developed as part of the algebraic study of differential equations. The model theoretic study of such rings and fields, using tools of stability theory, has had an impact in differential algebraic geometry as well as diophantine geometry. Pillay will investigate inverse problems with respect to differential Galois theory, as well as the fine structure of solutions of certain algebraic differential equations (those of Painleve). The category of groups definable in an o-minimal structure resembles the category of real Lie groups. The relationship is very tight in the case of ifsemisimplel. groups. Pillay will try to extend this to wider classes of groups (abelian, definably compact, definable subgroups of algebraic groups doc1878 none This GOALI award is to develop the fundamental understanding of an environmentally benign manufacturing process modification for metal casting. During metal casting, the molten metal solidifies within a mold and takes on a complex shape. Green sand molds include some coal and adhesives; and when these experience the high temperatures of molten metal, they can emit volatile organic compounds (VOCs). A novel advanced oxidation (AO) process has been installed at five full-scale foundries, and has successfully decreased these emissions by 30-75%. Moreover, this process has also diminished by 10-30% the amount of clay, coal, and sand required; and it has decreased casting defects by 10%. The research objectives are to (a) better understand the fundamental engineering kinetics that underlie advanced oxidation processing; (b) at the bench and pilot scale, build on these fundamentals to yet further diminish emissions and enhance green sand performance with the AO process. The potential impact and success of this research could be to advance the understanding of this AO process to where it will diminish total U. S. air pollution by 0.1 to 1% (relative to all air pollution sources). At the same time, enhancement of these features will save money, prevent pollution, reduce waste to landfills, broaden foundries opportunities, and create U. S. jobs in the vital foundry industry. Tests will measure VOC emissions and green sand performance in a manner that facilitates enhanced behavior while also advancing basic process understanding and engineering understanding. Bench scale tests will also mimic key features of the thermal exposure that foundry green sands experience, in order to acquire fundamental insight via well-controlled experiments doc1879 none This grant provides funding for the development and application of signal-processing and neural network methods that address monitoring and diagnostic issues commonly encountered in a variety of industries. In the first phase of the research, generic algorithms and methods for addressing several high-impact problems will be developed. A representative set of problems includes: (1) the recognition of recurring patterns of arbitrary shape in time-domain sensor data, (2) the extraction of robust features from the wavelet representation of sensor data, (3) the identification of blurred or smeared surface defects in harsh environments, (4) the acceleration of the training process of a multilayer neural network without adversely affecting its natural course of learning, and (5) stopping criteria for neural network training to strike a balance between computational efforts and accuracy. An important objective of the present research is to develop methods that are amenable to broad applicability, so that several crosscutting issues in a wide spectrum of industries can be addressed. In the second phase of the research, the methods developed in the first phase will be applied to problems in industries collaborating with the project team. The information and data collected from the industrial applications will be used for validating the knowledge generated through research and also for building living cases for classroom instruction. The outcome of this research will significantly contribute to building self-guiding, self-correcting, and self-protecting products, processes, and electro-mechanical systems ubiquitous in a broad spectrum of industries including manufacturing, aerospace, automotive, defense, and health care. The monitoring and diagnostic methods developed during this project have a good potential to increase production yields by minimizing defective workpieces, preventing damage to machines, and avoiding idle times on machines. These methods will also substantially improve work safety and provide better mechanisms for human-machine interfacing doc1880 none From the most abstract concepts of theoretical physics to the cryptosystems used by millions of people every day (often without realizing it) , algebraic geometry and number theory have a genuine and vital presence in twenty-first century life. This proposal seeks to develop tools of algebraic geometry with a view toward number theoretic applications. Of central importance is the problem of finding rational or whole number solutions to polynomial equations, the most famous example of which is Fermat s Last Theorem recently established by Wiles. The new geometric techniques developed under this proposal will be applied to limit the number of rational solutions of a more general polynomial equation. Many situations in diophantine approximation produce a linear series on a smooth projective variety. Often there are arguments employing vanishing theorems and intersection theory that force the series to move, showing the base locus to be empty. On the other hand, varous hypothetical assumptions-for example, assuming that there are infinitely many rational points on a curve of genus at least two, or assuming that there are good rational approximations of an algebraic irrational number-- force the linear series in question to have a non-empty base locus. The resulting contradiction shows the hypothetical assumption to be false. This line or reasoning has been used to establish Mordell s conjecture and Roth s theorem respectively, and will be applied in this project to study higher dimensional problems, such as the Schmidt subspace theorem and Faltings theorem on rational points of subvarieties of abelian varieties, with a long term goal of extending and or strengthening these theorems. The key algebro-geometric background required in these arguments is a detailed study of numerical properties of the base locus of a linear series. In particular, a key question is whether or not Seshadri constants control the existence of global sections of a line bundle even when the bundle is not positive doc1881 none This projects aims at providing financial assistance for 12 leading American specialists in the mechanics and technology of brittle matrix composites for their participation at the next International Brittle Matrix Composites 6 symposium in Poland, October 9-11, . The participation of a representative group of American scientists will considerably enhance the role of the Symposium BMC 6, and stimulate international cooperation. It will also benefit the American research community in keeping a breast of European research and development in ceramic and cementitious composites, and their manufacturing and industrial applications doc1882 none With this renewal award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the work of Dr. Gary B. Schuster at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. The research aims to extend earlier work on electron conduction in DNA, with the idea of understanding the details of the conduction process. Oxidation of DNA, with removal of an electron as a first step, followed by electron migration to the initial radical cation to give a guanine (G) radical cation, and eventual DNA strand cleavage at a G site, is a major source of genetic damage, and can lead in some cases to cancer causing mutations or cell death. The proposed research will focus on testing various aspects of the phonon-assisted polaron-hopping mechanism of electron motion. In this model, the oxidation of a base in the DNA initiates a structural distortion as the chain contorts to delocalize the initial radical cation over adjacent base pairs. The delocalized radical cation is called a polaron. Polarons are thought to migrate along the DNA like a compression moves through a spring, as base pairs adjacent to the polaron join it and others leave as a consequence of thermal motion (phonons), while electrons hop from base to base. Trapping of the polaron by water leads to the chemical damage of the DNA. Students who participate in this research will learn a number of experimental techniques; the learning will be enhanced by collaborations with other scientists with special instrumentation and expertise doc1883 none Rolf Texas A&M University (TAMU) will operate the R V Gyre during as a general oceanographic research vessel in support of NSF-supported research projects. The Gyre is a 182 ft. vessel, constructed in and modified in and , and owned and operated by TAMU. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 175 operational days during , of which 10 days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The remaining cruises will support State, Navy, Minerals Management Service, and other Federal and private projects. The projects scheduled on the Gyre include several oceanographic disciplines and will fully utilize the capabilities of the vessel. The Gyre will begin the year in the shipyard for annual ABS inspection and certification. All operations will take place regionally in the Gulf of Mexico. The Gyre is part of a fleet of ships used by the National Science Foundation in support of marine science research. Most oceanographic projects require highly specialized equipment to be permanently installed on the vessel, thus the necessity for specialized ships. These vessels do not operate in the same mode as general cargo fishing vessels. As a result, NSF supports the operation of a variety of ships specifically dedicated to oceanographic research that are operated by universities and institutions around the country doc1884 none The primary objective of the proposed research is to measure crack bridging fiber stress profile directly in a transparent fiber reinforced ceramic matrix composite (FRCMC) using a new technique of Debond Length Measurement (DLM) in conjunction with the optical fluorescence spectroscopy as a fingerprint for local state of stress. This objective is being accomplished by fabricating transparent and hybrid FRCMCs comprising of a glass matrix reinforced with reinforcing continuous SiC fibers and sensor sapphire fibers, performing in situ crack propagation studies using an optical microscopy, measuring crack bridging fiber stresses in situ using a new approach of DLM and fluorescence spectroscopy, and incorporating these results into analytical models to describe fracture resistance behavior of FRCMCs doc1885 none The proposed goal is to produce nanostructured aerosols by room temperature synthesis. Unlike the aerosol flame synthesis procedure, it should produce non-oxidized powders with reasonably large specific surface areas. Such a technique was demonstrated earlier by the PI in the formation of nanostructured titania and silica from mixed vapor streams devoid of the traditional solvents. This aero-sol-gel reactor can produce continuously meso- and microporous metal oxides, with tunable specific surface areas ranging from 100 to 700 m2 g , for a very limited invested cost. Parallel organic processes are also considered, with a view to produce nanostructured hybrids of organic and metal oxides. Rapid removal of volatile byproducts is expected to accelerate the chemical process and prevent the collapse of the nanopowders pores. A number of applications could replace existing technologies, with better qualities and at lower cost. Two target applications are proposed: one is the organic elastomer reinforcement with tuned nanostructured silica; the other one is the creation of ultra-violet absorbing nanostructured titania for such chemicals as polymers or paint. The precision in the design and manufacture of such aggregates is essential to their effectiveness; this part of the proposed research will be accomplished in coordination with several important high technology industries doc1886 none The research described in this proposal is on a class of linear and nonlinear partial differential equations (PDE)which share the property that they can be written in the form of a Hamiltonian system with infinitely many degrees of freedom. Principal examples include nonlinear wave equations, nonlinear Schroedinger equations and Euler s equations for water waves. The analogy with dynamical systems motivates a number of basic questions. (1) The existence of invariant tori for the nonlinear partial differential equations involves extensions of KAM theory to infinite dimensional settings. Implications of these results include the existence of solutions of nonlinear evolution equations which exist for all time and are recurrent. Techniques that have been developed for PDE also have bearing on several open problems in classical dynamical systems concerning the persistence of resonant tori. (2) A normal forms transformation of a Hamiltonian PDE gives details of its essential nonlinearities, and it has applications to Nekhoroshev stability results and to a proof of the Arnold condition of genuine nonlinearity. (3) Starting from a normal forms transformation, long time existence results for nonlinear PDE are important in a mathematically rigorous analysis of the classical asymptotic regimes of mathematical physics. In addition the proposer will address a number of related questions in the theory of PDE. (4) Estimates of dispersive smoothing for linear and nonlinear Schroeinger equations depend upon the scattering properties of bicharacteristics, and estimates of this form play a role in the study of the initial value problem for data of low smoothness. (5) The classical problems of standing waves in two dimensional water waves and traveling waves in three dimensional water waves are instances of problems in PDE which exhibit small divisors, and analytic results involve delicate questions of convergence. Celestial mechanics, the problem of describing the motion of planetary bodies, has always intrigued mathematicians and motivated their discoveries. At the beginning of this century, the French mathematician H. Poincar and his American contemporaries G.D. Birkhoff and G.W. Hill, essentially revolutionized the subject with their work, bringing it conceptual clarity and introducing powerful new analytic techniques. This work gave rise to a new paradigm in its field, and contributed to the birth of many modern branches of mathematics. An important question was and remains the n-body problem; the problem of stability of the motion of n planets in their mutual gravitational attraction. Indeed in the s, 50 years after the death of Poincar e, the development of a theory by three mathematicians, A.N. Kolmogorov, V.I. Arnold and J. Moser (it is now called KAM theory) made a significant contribution to the field. At the time of its development there were physical applications to the stability of high energy particles in a cyclotron, as well as to the classical questions of the stability of our solar system or to other important systems in mechanics. The equations which describe the motion of n bodies are examples of ordinary differential equations. It was a question at the time of the development of KAM theory whether such stability results could be extended to partial differential equations. These describe the evolution in time of a continuous medium such as a fluid, a gas, and electromagnetic field or an elastic solid. The analogy between mechanics and the motion of a continuum is mathematically quite elegant. However the n-body problem is a finite dimensional one, while problems of partial differential equations viewed with this analogy in mind are inherently infinite dimensional, and this summarizes the essential mathematical difficulty of extending the methods. The principal content of this research program is the extension of some aspects of the analytic techniques of Hamiltonian mechanics to physically important partial differential equations. These results will have some significant consequences in a variety of diverse physical applications, including the study of ocean waves, the propagation of signal pulses in optical fibers, and in the doc1887 none A laser-based multiphoton and fluorescence lifetime spectroscopy system will be purchased for research into the mode of action of cardiac muscle fibers, the proliferation of malignant cells, protein-DNA interactions, the imaging of visual cell constituents, and the generation of improved optical techniques to microscopically image cellular components in real tissues. The laser will be broadly variable in wavelength and intensity, allowing excitation of many biological samples. This sophisticated equipment will allow many in the research community at the University of Alabama to actively acquire data. Immediate research goals include (i) determination of distances of movement in molecular motor proteins, (ii) measurement of DNA structural changes induced by UV light and cellular processes, and (iii) determination of optimal conditions for laser excitation of dyes and cells for microscopic imaging. Ultimately, the requested instrumentation will be used to discover how subcellular components move and use energy in their activity as biological nanomachines. A titanium:sapphire laser (Mira 900D V10 XW) with wide-band optics and dual picosecond femtosecond pulsewidth capabilities, pumped by a 10-watt diode-pumped Nd:vanadate laser (Verdi V10), with needed harmonic generator (Model ) and Pulse Picker (Model ) will be purchased from Coherent Laser Group. This equipment will allow reliable picosecond time-resolved fluorescence measurements and multiphoton excitation spectroscopy and spectroscopic imaging. A vibration-free optics table (Newport RPR-410-12 I- -428) and ultrafast photomultiplier (Hamamatsu R U-50) with associated electronics will be added to support the laser and detection capabilities. The educational program supported by this award will develop new research ideas, train personnel in laser and biotechnology, attract top-flight students and faculty, and train regional scientists. Personnel from professors to promising high school scientists are presently involved in research and training at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Credit and non-credit research training courses introduce undergraduates and graduate students to principles of new laser technologies and applications in biophysics and imaging. Biomedical faculty supervise physics graduate doctoral dissertations in biology and biophysics. The number of major American universities offering such educational programs, especially at the level of training and recruitment of future physical scientists from high school, is small. Through its strong reputation in mainstream biomedical research and its rapidly-developing reputation in laser technology and biophysics, the University of Alabama at Birmingham has the opportunity to lead in the production of scientists with documented expertise in laser-based spectroscopic and imaging research in biological systems doc1888 none A continuous-wave mode-locked semiconductor laser, widely tunable in the terahertz frequency range, and with power and spectral density sufficient for applications, will be developed, based on the p-Ge active medium working on intra-valence-band transitions of hot holes. Continuous wave operation, which is inaccessible for traditional hot-hole pGe lasers, will be achieved in the mode-locked regime using a new traveling wave excitation scheme and an open cavity design in combination with gain optimization by uniaxial stress. Traveling wave excitation will decrease the intrinsic heating of the active medium by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude. Application of uniaxial stress will increase the gain by splitting the light-and heavy-hole subbands. The laser will generate a continuous train of ~ 10 ps pulses of THz radiation with ~1 GHz repetition rate. This continuous wave mode-locked operation will make this laser attractive for applications that include far-infrared molecular and solid-state spectroscopy, TRz radioastronomy, and satellite near-earth THz communications. The knowledge gained will suggest future thin-flim epi-layer schemes for THz lasers based on p-Ge population inversion mechanisms. Graduate and undergraduate research assistants will gain experience in semiconductor physics and processing, THz technology, laser principles, spectroscopic techniques, and rf microwave electronics doc1889 none Magneto-electronic devices, which exploit the spin-dependent transport in ferromagnetic materials, have a tremendous technological potential as sensors or memory elements. The performance of such devices is determined by structure, chemistry and magnetic properties of the interfaces. Growth of these materials should thus be controlled at the atomic scale, in order to reliably obtain structurally and magnetically well-defined interfaces. Current processes often fail to satisfy these requirements. Electrochemical methods are potentially able to control and monitor nucleation, growth and film modification at very small film thickness. Furthermore, the growth is highly selective, allowing formation of patterned structures and localized conditioning etching. First, we will develop electrochemical techniques for the synthesis of defined ferromagnet insulator and ferromagnet semiconductor interfaces. Tunneling barriers of magnetic tunnel junctions will be synthesized through anodization of aluminum films. Direct electrodeposition onto semiconductors for the formation of ferromagnet semiconductor interfaces is expected to yield sharper interfaces. Successively, electrochemical self-organization will be employed to synthesize arrays of nanometer-scale tunnel junctions. Fabrication of self-aligned patterned magnetic films on semiconductors will allow studies of spin-dependent transport in ferromagnet semiconductor devices. The advanced training of the graduate students will provide them with the skills required for competitiveness on the job market, and companies with highly skilled workforce doc1890 none Larochelle Modern imaging facilities are essential for biological research in cell and developmental biology. The Department of Biology at Clark University is upgrading their imaging facility with a high quality research-grade compound microscope with phase contrast, differential interference contrast, and epifluorescence optics. In addition, a cooled CCD camera, a computer, and software for capturing, processing, and storing images, will be part of the system. Together these constitute a complete system for the generation and analysis of photomicrographs. Specific research to be carried out with this system will include the microscopic analysis of cells defective in cell division, the examination of nuclear behavior of certain fungi as a means of gaining insights into fungal evolutionary relationships as well as fungal developmental evolution on a cellular level, the analysis of proteins required in the synthesis and regulation of membrane organelles, and the examination of the role of receptor tyrosine kinase signaling pathways in the growth and development of the Drosophila eye. Six new faculty members (out of nine total) have joined the Department of Biology within the last seven years. With this turnover also comes an updating and improvement of the current facilities. Although the four co-PIs and their associated lab personnel will be the primary users of the facility, this imaging system will be available for research use by all faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students in the department. The addition of a research-grade microscopy imaging facility will become a cornerstone for the department. Despite its small size, the Department of Biology has been very successful in involving undergraduate students in research and in preparing them for advanced studies. Since over 350 students that have received their baccalaureate degrees in the sciences from Clark University have gone on to obtain advance degrees in biology or health-related disciplines. This imaging system will contribute greatly to the ability to train students and will be an integral part of the research programs of the four co-PIs doc1891 none The purpose of this work is to demonstrate and evaluate two device concepts incorporating ferroelectric polymer Langmuir-Blodgett films: high-performance capacitors and nonvolatile data storage elements. Both device concepts take advantage of unique dielectric and ferroelectric properties of Langmuir-Blodgett films of polyvinylidene fluoride and its copolymers. The high-performance capacitors benefit from the record dielectric strength of over 3 GV m in the highly uniform films as thin as 1 nm. The energy storage density of multilayer capacitors made from the ferroelectric polymer LB films is expected to reach 200 to Joules per cubic centimeter. The fast switch speed of 2 microseconds and the ability to deposit the films on a variety of substrates permits the fabrication of inexpensive of hybrid nonvolatile data storage devices composed of a ferroelectric polymer LB film deposited directly on an array of planar field-effect transistor. Though each device concept may independently prove suitable for practical application, they may prove particularly useful together in combination with conventional integrated circuits for the production of nonvolatile random-access memories, caches, and archival storage. This project is a natural spin-off of five years of study and development of the only reported two-dimensional ferroelectrics, research conducted jointly by the PI s group in collaboration with two groups at the Institute of Crystallography in Moscow doc1892 none Future networked multimedia information systems will carry a wide variety of applications including digital libraries, video, audio and image services, distance learning and collaboration, networked virtual environments, and entertainment. The main characteristics of multimedia applications that lead to difficulties in end-to-end systems design are that they have very large bandwidth and storage requirements, with vastly different performance and reliability requirements, often coupled with real-time constraints. Along with these characteristics, the highly interreliability requirements, often coupled with real-time constraints. Along with these characteristics, the highly interactive nature of a variety of multimedia applications, resulting in fairly unpredictable workloads, makes the design and evaluation of networked multimedia information systems an exceptionally challenging problem. In this proposal, we outline research on three aspects of this problem: (1) the design and evaluation of server resource allocation algorithms for CM servers in order to retrieve information efficiently and according to the QoS demanded by the application; (2) the development of performance evaluation techniques for evaluating new server designs. (3) the participants of this project bring expertise from a wide variety of areas: databases, distance learning, multi-media, networking, and performance evaluation to bear on problems in these areas. Another important feature of this proposal is that the participants have available four prototypes of state of the art multimedia systems: the Virtual World Data Server (VWDS) developed at UCLA: the prototype of a Video-on-Demand server developed in Brazil as part cooperative research project among Brazilian institutions; and the Multimedia Asynchronous Networked Individualized Courseware (MANIC) and the Internet Multimedia Proxy (IMP) both developed at UMass. These applications will be used to motivate the development of new algorithms for retrieving information and for maintaining the desired quality of service after sending the data over a wide area network. They will also form the basis of the many experimental and analytical studies that will be performed to evaluate these new algorithms. To aid in this evaluation, our group also developed three performance evaluation and modeling tools: a state-of-the-art tool for constructing performance and reliability models (Tangram-II) developed in Brazil jointly with UCLA; a symbolic model checking tool (VERUS): and a tool which facilitates design, development, and subsequent performance evaluation of designs of multimedia storage hierarchies (ViPEr-HiSS) under development at UMD. Thus, the environment of our labs as well the long distance among them will provide a unique testbed for this type of an evaluation due to the drastically different connectivities available to our applications, from gigabit low utilized links to intercontinental congested links. The proposed research represents a fundamentally important step in the design and performance evaluation of next generation information servers and the networked applications that will operate on top of them. As a result of our research we expect to have a better understanding of how storage server resource management policies, channel allocation policies, and network adaptation policies interact to satisfy the required QoS of CM applications, despite the fairly unpredictable network delays doc1893 none Soil reinforcement using geosynthetics is a very attractive alternative for highway embankment and retaining wall projects because of the economic benefits it offers in relation to cenventional retaining structures. Desigh of reinforced soil slopes is typically performed using software-based techniques (limit equilibrium), which require significant assumptions regarding the distribution of strains within the reinforcement elements. However, to date, the assumed strain distributions have not been fully validated against monitored results. One consequence of this is a perceived overconservatism in design. The overall objective of this research initiative is to generate and integrate (via centrifuge modeling, digital image analysis, and finite element analysis) data that will provide a definite answer regarding the strain distribution to be adopted in reinforced soil slope design. Specificaly, this project will integrate results from the following five phases: (i) a centrifuge modeling investigation undertaken to generate experimental data on the performance fo geosynthetic reinforced soil slopes under working stress conditions; (ii) a digital image processing and analysis effort performed to collect and evaluate strain information from inflight-captured images of videotaped centrifuge models; (iii) a numerical (finite element) study performed to compile parametric evaluations of reinforced soil slope behavior, after having calibrated numerical procedures against data collected in the previous experimental phase; (iv) an evaluation effort to incorporate findings on reinforcement strain distribution into current reinforced soil guidelines; and (v) an educational component to integrate digital video clips of centrifuge geotechnical models into multimedia presentations to be used for undergraduate and graduate geotechnical instructions as well as for recruitment of under-represented minority high school students into engineering programs. In addition to the specific goal of refining design guidelines for geosynthetic reinforced soil slopes by gaining better understanding of the pattern of strain distributions, the proposed research is the cornerstone of larger, ongoing agendas under active development on reinforced soil research by the PI and on geotechnical modeling at the PI s institution. In fact, the proposed investigation will initiate implementation of innovative procedures invilving digital image analysis in geotechnical centrifuge testing at the University of Colorado, will contribute to ongoing efforts of cross-validation between physical and numerical modeling of geotechnical systems, and will foster integration of research into engineering education doc1894 none This research project concerns some fundamental theoretical work in engineering design and manufacturing. A mathematical structure for the design space for homogeneous geometric objects will be defined and studied. Using this work, manufacturability will be examined and the classes of geometric objects that can be manufactured or that can be approximated by manufacturable artifacts will be characterized for material removal processes. If successful, this research will provide a sound foundation for design optimization and design spate exploration. It may lead to improved Computer Aided Design systems and better selections of algorithms for design optimization and design space exploration. A further result will be a complexity concept for manufacturing as well as a rigorous measure of agility. Finally, technology management will benefit from better information to use in making decisions about particular pieces of manufacturing equipment and the choice of whether to invest in dedicated or flexible machines doc1895 none This project will focus on resolving primary picosecond and femtosecond dynamics under conditions of controlled size, density and distance, and to learn about structure-dynamics correlations and forces governing the transition to the condensed phase limit for various materials systems. Ultrafast laser spectroscopy will be used to probe real-time molecular dynamics of nanostructures in the condensed phase, studies of the photophysical and photochemical dynamics of polymers and materials under high pressure, and the use of novel and non-linear laser techniques will be used to examine and control selective processes in inhomogeneous systems. The potential for nanoscale materials and processes and their novel uses in various nanoscale device are just beginning to be realized for technologies such as communications, biotechnology, and various microelectromechanical systems. Students trained in science and engineering areas that explore the physical, chemical, and biological properties of materials intermediate in size between isolated atoms molecules and bulk materials, where phenomena length scales become comparable to the size of the structure, will be among those future scientists and engineers most relevant to advancing the emerging global economy doc1896 none The investigator will work on some questions in the theory of commutative rings that arise from tight closure theory, the theory of intersection multiplicities, a study of local cohomology modules, and from the homological conjectures for local rings. In tight closure theory, there is a substantial focus on understanding the class of F-regular rings and on developing theorems for this class of rings. The study of local cohomology modules addresses finiteness issues of these modules over regular rings of mixed characteristic, and another question that is related to the theory of solid closure. Research on Hilbert-Kunz multiplicities and on the rigidity of the Tor functor will be carried out in continued collaboration with Claudia Miller. Commutative algebra is a field closely related to algebraic geometry: while algebraic geometry focuses on the geometry of solutions sets of polynomial equations, in commutative algebra the main objects of study are certain functions on these solution sets. The connections between algebra and geometry are largely due to the revolutionary work of Grothendieck, Serre and Zariski. An active area of research in commutative algebra today is the theory of tight closure developed by Hochster and Huneke. This theory provides stronger formulations of existing theorems, and brings together many seemingly unrelated problems. It also has strong connections with the study of singularities of geometric objects. The theory of local cohomology was developed by Grothendieck who used it to obtain several striking results. Local cohomology has applications to basic, and yet deep, questions such as determining the minimal number of polynomial equations needed to define an algebraic set. It continues to develop a fascinating interaction with several other branches of mathematics doc1897 none Sitar Liquefaction-induced foundation displacement during earthquakes is a major cause of damage to all types of structures. However, evidence from historical events show that improved sites suffer less ground deformation and subsidence than adjacent, unimproved areas. However, as earthquake-engineering moves in the direction of performance based design, the ability to adequately and accurately predict the performance of the foundation elements, including improved ground becomes paramount. The ultimate objective of this research project is to develop a suite of empirical, experimental, and analytical data on the parameters that control seismically induced deformations of improved ground to serve as a rational basis for performance based design. A 2-year program of research incorporating 8 centrifuge experiments at UC Davis National Geotechnical Centrifuge will be conducted. This program of experimental work is aimed at providing some of the much-needed high quality quantitative experimental data. However, since similar work aimed specifically at marine structure and embankments is currently being planned at the Public Works Research Institute (PWRI) and Port and Harbour Research Institute (PHRI) in Japan, there exists a unique opportunity to integrate the parallel studies and obtain the benefits of comparing and evaluating several independent data sets. This project is supported under the 3rd-year competition under NSF 98-36. US Japan Cooperative Research in Urban Earthquake Disaster Mitigation doc1898 none Kosko This project will explore how noise can improve signal processing and computation both in theory and in select information and physical systems. The launching point for this project is the principal investigator s recent publication that shows that many nonlinear dynamical systems can adoptively achieve a noise-based stochastic resonance where external noise improves the system s signal-to-noise ratio or other performance measure (such as measures of cross-correlation, mutual information, or probability of detection). The project will more generally explore noise processing and how it affects many feedback and some feedforward systems. The central focus will be the study of adaptive stochastic resonance (ASR). ASR uses sample data and as few statistical assumptions as possible to find the optimal type or amount of noise to add to a nonlinear system to improve some system performance measure such as the system s spectral signal-to-noise ratio. One may view noise simply as an unwanted signal. But noise itself is a free and local source of energy. So noise can sometimes help computation as well as interfere with it. A key part of the initial effort will focus on how to achieve ASR in feedback systems that try to detect broadband forcing signals. This problem has so far defied solution. The Project Description lists five core problems with subproblems that this research effort will try to solve. The work plan presents the PI s current best estimates of how to tackle these problems. The effort will involve a constant search for real-world applications of this emerging field of adaptive noise processing doc1899 none Moses The carrier dynamics in conjugated polymers in the sub-picosecond time scale are generally unknown. Recent developments in terahertz (THz) spectroscopy have opened a new window to the carrier transport in this time regime. This technique has so far been applied mostly to conventional semiconductors. In this project advantage will be taken of this powerful experimental probe in using it to study the carrier dynamics in various conjugated polymers. The goals of this exploratory research are focused on a selected few currently open questions. Three studies will be undertaken. Firstly, the charge transport promptly following photoexcitations will be studied while the carriers occupy extended states, and before significant carrier trapping and recombination can occur. Secondly, a study will be performed on how the strength of the inter-chain coupling modifies the carrier transport by exploring the transport in PPV and its various derivatives, and thirdly, the soliton dynamics in polyacetylene at high bias fields will be studied. In this case the soliton velocity is predicted theoretically to reach a plateau, a prediction that has yet not been verified. The transport measurement is based on the fundamental process of electromagnetic radiation, typically in the THz range, emitted by the induced transient photocurrent. Monitoring the time-evolution of the THz signal provides information regarding the transient photoconductivity in the 0.1 to 10 ps time scale. This research employs state-of-the-art experimental techniques. Graduate students and post doctoral research associates will participate in this research and thereby acquire up-to-date- knowledge and skills in a forefront area of contemporary condensed matter physics and materials science. %%% Following the discovery of semiconductor polymers as promising materials for light emitting diodes (LEDs) and lasers, an active research effort has emerged worldwide in pursuit of the goal of realizing plastic lasers, LEDs, and fast photo-detector devices based on conjugated polymers. This project is concerned with the investigation of several unsolved questions concerning the nature of the light emission process in quasi-one dimensional polymer semiconductors promptly following photoexcitation. These processes occur at ultrafast time scales and their studies are now made possible by new developments in experimental ultrafast spectroscopy. This project is concerned with using these new techniques in the quantitative study of the nature of the processes that underlie the ultrafast emission of light following photoexcitation of various polymer materials. This research will be conducted with the assistance of students and post doctoral research associates who will thereby acquire skills and knowledge in a contemporary forefront area of condensed matter physics and materials science doc1900 none This award in the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research on inorganic fullerene chemistry by Professor Alan Balch of the Department of Chemistry at the University of California-Davis. A number of fullerene derivatives, both endohedral and dimeric, will be synthesized. The x-ray structures of fullerenes which are co-crystallized with transition metal complexes will be determined. These new supramolecular compounds will also be examined for interesting physical properties, particularly magnetism and redox activity. New, redox active films which consist of fullerenes covalently bonded to transition metal centers, metal-ligand complexes or metal clusters will be prepared by means of an electrochemical reduction process. The films will subsequently be investigated by a variety of physical measurements to determine their charge transport and storage characteristics and nanostructural features. The goal of this research is to explore the inorganic chemistry of fullerenes, a new form of carbon discovered a little over a decade ago. The combination of fullerenes with metal ions and complexes will lead to new crystalline compounds and films with potentially important applications. These materials may find use as battery and microelectronic components, chemical sensors, and catalysts. Students at all levels, undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral, will be provided with both broad scientific training and good communication skills through their involvement with this project doc1901 none Lindquist This FASEB Conference on Amyloid and other Abnormal Protein Assembly Processes, aims to bring together cell biologists and clinicians familiar with the biology of abnormal protein deposition, with geneticists, molecular biologist and biophysicists to work toward an understanding of the molecular basis of this phenomenon. This conference will provide a forum to promote increased awareness of protein deposition as a process of biological importance which exhibits significant molecular structure and specificity. The focus is on the molecular basis of protein aggregation and other manifestatons of protein-protein interactions. The speakers will include leaders in these fields as well as young investigators. The format of the FASEB summer conferences enables free exchange of ideas and interaction of participants doc1902 none Jacobson Automated capillary electrophoresis system for the analysis of DNA demands relatively little training to use and involves minimum risk of exposure to radioactive or toxic substances. The automated DNA sequencing and fragment sizing (for analysis of DNA polymorphisms) capabilities of the requested instrument will make investigations more efficient, less expensive and more effective learning tools for students. This is central to the institutional goal of integrating research and education of undergraduates Four of the eight faculty in the Biology Department will use the instrument on a regular basis to explore research questions that span the breadth of the discipline. The immediate goals for instrument use are: - to explore questions relating to the nature of speciation; specifically to develop mitochondrial DNA markers suitable for phylogeographic and population analyses of host races and subspecies of the goldenrod ball-gallmaker; and to generate a DNA sequence-based phylogeny of all extant taxa of Hawaiian tephritid flies. - to examine the causes of correlated evolution in plant breeding systems, life history and morphology; specifically to use DNA polymorphisms to resolve relationships among populations of Clarkia xantiana, and search for markers that correlate with quantitative trait expression. - to further elucidate the molecular basis of DNA repair in response to DNA damage in Acinetobacter; specifically to sequence critical genes involved in this process. - to explore questions relating to community structure of subterranean fungi; specifically to use DNA polymorphisms to quantify genetic variation within and between global populations of desert macrofungi; to continue an ongoing study of the spatial and temporal distribution of variation amongst morel populations; and to explore the spatial distribution of ectomycorrhizal fungal communities associated with bur oak. Genetic analyses will be used to answer questions that reflect the respective disciplines of the investigators, namely microbiology, organismal biology, ecology and evolution. An important goal of the anticipated research will be to provide students with authentic experiences that allow them to understand both principles and applications of DNA techniques. The automated sequencing and sizing capabilities of the requested instrument will also facilitate inclusion of exercises involving DNA sequencing and multilocus fingerprinting in upper-level courses currently being developed as part of a new NSF CCLI-funded biology curriculum at Grinnell College doc1903 none The goal of the research is to study potential theoretic problems arising in the following areas. (1) Symmetric stable processes are discontinuous and nonlocal versions of Brownian motions. The jumps of the processes impose many technical complications, at the same time making the roughness of the boundary invisible; consequently they produce many unexpected properties and interesting questions. Harmonic measures, Martin boundaries and a certain version of boundary Harnack principle will be investigated. (2) On trees of nonregular branching, or on a random Galton-Watson tree, problems on sizes of Fatou sets of bounded p-harmonic functions will be studied. These are discrete analoge of the usual p-harmonic functions. (3) For a quasiregular mapping on the unit ball, the relation between the volume growth of the mapping and size of the set on the unit sphere where the function has asymptotic values will be analyzed. This constitutes a first step towards a very difficult problem of Fatou sets for bounded quasiregular mappings. Brownian motion has been studied at least since Norbert Wiener and has played a central role in probability and potential theory, which in turn are very important in the study of differential equations, heat conductivity, electrostatic potential and fluid dynamics. Recently, there are many problems in physics and mathematical finance and risk estimation which have been modelled and studied successfully with the use of symmetric stable processes -- discontinuous counterpart of the Brownian motions. A symmetric stable process has discontinuous sample paths and heavy tails, while Brownian motion has continuous sample paths and exponentially decaying tails. Therefore many techniques from Brownian motions can not be routinely adapted to these processes. Wide range applications and challenging behaviors of the processes are the motivation behind the proposed research. Wu hopes that knowledge derived from a theoretical study of these processes from an analytical point of view, will give new tools for applications in physics and finance doc1904 none Levitan New equipment and software will enhance the productivity and extend the capabilities of the Florida State University Sequencing Facility, a core facility that services the research needs of 33-plus users from diverse disciplines in the biological sciences. An Applied Biosystems (ABI) PRISM 377 Automated DNA Sequencer will supplement the current instrument, a ten-year old ABI Model 373A. The new sequencer will not only permit a larger number of samples to be sequenced and processed in less time and with greater accuracy, but it will also permit DNA fragment (e.g., RAPD, AFLP, and microsatellite) analysis, an operation that is presently unavailable with the configuration of our current machine. Additional sequencing-related instrumentation and software is as follows: (1) upgrades in the form of equipment and software that will extend the capabilities of both old and new ABI DNA sequencers; (2) a Mastercycler gradient thermal cycler that will permit simultaneous cycle-sequencing of DNA templates requiring different primer annealing temperatures; (3) a Macintosh G4 PowerPC server to store DNA sequence and fragment output, and software that will permit remote access to data and sequence-analysis programs by multiple users; (4) Macintosh- and PC-format licenses for simultaneous access to the Sequencher Sequence Analysis Program by up to 12 users; (5) color printers and CD read write ROMs to support computers in the FSU Sequencing Facility and the Macintosh G4 server; (6) a digital gel-imaging and documentation system that is more sensitive and versatile than our current system and one that will facilitate the detection of low-yield DNA samples for subsequent analysis on the ABI 377 Sequencer. This equipment will positively impact a remarkably diverse body of research conducted by seven major users, 26 additional faculty users, and their graduate students by more than doubling the present sequencing capacity of the core facility and for the first time permitting automated DNA fragment analysis. Current sequencing projects address questions in evolutionary biology and systematics, structural biology, cellular biology, microbial ecology, muscle physiology, neurobiology and genetics. The major benefits to be gained from this instrumentation are: (1) an increase in the timely acquisition of data at lower cost (e.g., more DNA samples per gel, more nucleotides read per sample, more accurate gel-tracking, more sensitive sample detection, and shorter electrophoresis times); (2) a faster and more efficient means of data handling, storage and retrieval; (3) a more flexible, efficient and user-friendly sequence-analysis platform; (4) the capability to perform new research methodologies (e.g., automated DNA fragment analysis) on-site; and (5) better quantification and quality-assessment of PCR-amplification products and sequencing templates. FSU is committed to upscale its research mission and a substantial number of new biology faculty will be hired in the near future. The instrumentation upgrade is necessary to attract high-quality faculty applicants, to provide graduate students the experience of working with state-of-the-art technology, and to accommodate the present demand and anticipated increase in automated DNA sequencing-related research doc1905 none A key aspect of biochemical research involves the definition of the interactions of complex biomolecules, such as proteins and nucleic acids, in solutions that represent their native environments in living cells. To this end, this award will establish a multi-user facility with state-of-the-art instrumentation for the study of complex macromolecular biological systems. Researchers who will use this facility are working at the interface between chemistry and biology at MIT. The new instrumentation will afford powerful new capabilities to probe the structure, dynamics, and interactions of complex biomolecules and therefore to derive valuable information concerning complex biological systems. This information will then form the foundation for working hypotheses for understanding the function of these systems at the molecular level. The specific instrumentation that will be purchased includes a Beckman Optima XL-I analytical ultracentrifuge and MicroCal Inc. VP isothermal and differential scanning calorimeters. The analytical ultracentrifuge provides a powerful method for the rapid and accurate determination of association behavior of complex macromolecules and the determination of molecular weight and shape. The acquisition of an XL-I instrument with UV and RI detection capabilities allows the study of diverse macromolecules over a broad concentration range. The calorimeters are exceptionally sensitive and powerful tools for studying the heat generated or absorbed in diverse biochemical processes. Calorimetry is particularly valuable in the study of complex biomolecules because it permits the assessment of molecular interactions and conformational energetics using native materials. The new instrumentation will greatly advance the training and scientific development of the many researchers in the groups of five primary and nine secondary users. These groups are involved in the training of approximately 90 graduate students and 55 postdoctoral associates. The researchers in these groups work in a variety of disciplines at the interface of chemistry and biology. Seven visiting scientists are associated with the groups of the users and there is excellent synergy amongst many of the groups. The facility will be housed in newly renovated space on the MIT campus and will be strategically placed to best serve the groups with research interests at the chemistry biology interface. The facility is part of a major renovation project that will have a significant impact on interdisciplinary research at MIT doc1906 none James D. Forney Purdue Research Foundation Quantitative Data Analysis and Graphics Facility: Storm 860 and Alpha Imagers This award will fund the development of an interdepartmental facility for documentation and quantification of biochemical and molecular biological data. This facility will provide equipment and software to digitize data derived from most gel electrophoresis experiments and allows analysis of the resulting data. The procedures and techniques that can be analyzed will include: DNA and RNA sequencing and structure analysis, PCR-based assays including quantitative PCR and RFLP analysis, quantitative northern and Western blotting, Southern hybridizations, non-radioactive detection for research and teaching laboratories, colony counting and kinetic analyses of enzymatic reactions. The goal is to maximize use by making the facility as flexible and as accessible as possible. Equipment to be purchased includes two imagers capable of quantifying data imaged using autoradiography, fluorescent stains or labels, visible stains or labels, or simply using white lighting. These two components are the Storm 860 Imager (Molecular Dynamics) and the AlphaImager (AlphaInnotech). Sufficient computational equipment will be purchased to perform image and data analysis. The facility will be installed on the first floor of the centrally located Biochemistry building, which will provide easy access to researchers in several departments. The facility will be used for undergraduate and graduate level training in quantifying and analyzing data collected from biological assays doc1907 none This experimental condensed matter physics project will investigate the dynamics of granular flows that exhibit on off intermittency. Such behavior is very common, but traditional measurement techniques do not have sufficient resolution and dynamic range to capture the very rapid grain-grain collisions and the slow on off switching of the flows. A new approach will be employed in which this information is extracted from the second- and fourth-order intensity correlation functions for temporal fluctuations in the intensity of light multiply-scattered by the sample. Data will be obtained for intermittent surface flows (avalanches), Couette flows (stick-slip), and vibrated flows (periodic). Particular interest is in the crossover between smooth and intermittent flows as a function of forcing rate. This should aid in testing and developing theories, which are currently limited to either quasi-static or fully-fluidized regimes. This should be useful in a wide variety of industries, where transport and processing of granular materials is now accomplished only with great inefficiency. Insight may also be gained into closely related geophysical events such as landslides, erosion, and earthquakes. The project provides excellent training for graduate students in state-of-the art experimental methods and for introducing them to materials and topics at the forefront of modern condensed matter physics. %%% This experimental condensed matter physics project investigates the microscopic dynamics of granular flows that are slow and, hence, intermittent. Such behavior is familiar to anyone who has slowly poured a small amount of sand from a bucket, or rice from a bag, or tried to shake out one pill from a bottle. These flows are all smooth, like a liquid, only if very fast; if slow, they are intermittent via a series of avalanches. This behavior is important in a wide variety of industries, where foods, pharmaceutical and ceramic powders, building materials, raw ores, etc. need to be -but are often not- processed and transported efficiently without jamming. This behavior is also important in geophysical events such as landslides, erosion, and earthquakes. In spite of their ubiquity and importance, slow flows and the crossover to smooth fast flows are not yet understood. Current engineering theories are applicable only to smooth flows, and current physics theories are applicable only to very infrequent flows; none can capture the full range of behavior. The usual experimental methods are also incapable of simultaneously capturing the rapid grain motion during flow along with the slow on-off switching of the flow itself. This project will do so, for the first time, by state-of-the-art techniques involving photon correlations from laser light bounced off a sample. In addition to practical impact on industry and geophysics, this project will provide excellent training for students in new experimental methods and will introduce them to materials and topics at the forefront of modern condensed matter physics doc1908 none Joan E. Strassmann Rice University An Automated DNA Sequencer for Microsatellite Genotyping of Social Insects and Sequencing in Molecular Biology Social insects like the bee or the ant provide one of the chief model systems for studying the evolution of cooperation and conflict. Understanding the evolution of such traits requires estimates of relatedness between individuals and estimates of who reproduces how much. The ideal tool for making these estimates is an automated DNA sequencer. An automated sequencer makes it possible to study new mutations in genes and to characterize those genes. In addition, genotyping individuals in the society makes it possible to understand the dynamics of genes in families and in populations. Automated approaches to sequencing and genotyping are much faster and more accurate than the manual methods they replace. With support from the National Science Foundation, an ABI 377 automated DNA sequencer with upgrades and software will be purchased. Peripheral equipment essential to the efficient operation of the sequencer including a spectrophotometer, a centrifuge, and a gel loader will also be purchased. The acquisition of an automated sequencer will be beneficial at a number of levels. It will give students at Rice hands-on training on an important piece of equipment for understanding genetics and its applications. Students will more easily enter advanced programs and positions in genetics from biotechnology companies to basic research institutions. In addition, the sequencer will be used to understanding what makes a better artificial hemoglobin, the key component in artificial blood. Finally, the sequencer will be used to understanding the dynamics of DNA microsatellites that are implicated in an important class of neurological diseases doc1909 none Theoretical investigations into the effects of strong confining potentials on the interactions of cold atoms are studied using many-body Green s function techniques. The objective is to define the theory in terms of renormalized, two body scattering matrices which can be obtained from the interactions of free atoms doc1910 none Bullerjahn To enhance ongoing research activities in the departments of Biological Sciences and Chemistry at Bowling Green State University, a molecular imaging system, and a multifunction plate reader will be placed in common lab facilities shared by the two departments. The laboratories of seven major users will use the instruments. Molecular imagers analyze radioactive, fluorescent and luminescent samples, yielding linear data over a wide dynamic range. The imager will be used to visualize and quantify electrophoretic mobility shift assays, western blots, RNase protection assays, northern blots, sequencing gels, and DNA footprints. A multifunction plate reader capable of photometric, fluorescence and luminescence modes with adequate software for data analysis and storage will be used on similar projects. The molecular imaging system will be used in several very diverse projects, such as quantitation of ferredoxin and flavodoxin levels in metal-limited phytoplankton by western blotting; functional analyses of Fur-type repressor-operator interactions; northern western analyses of mRNA and protein levels in brain cells comprising the circadian pacemaker; quantitiation of western blots of hybrid Nif proteins involved in nitrogenase expression and assembly; assessing protein phosphorylation of ErbB3 receptors in; characterizing transcription of genes involved in crayfish monoamine synthesis; and quantifying by gel electrophoresis RNA-RNA interactions in model systems optimized for determining binding constants. The projects employing the plate reader are studies parallel to those employing the molecular imager, and such work includes screening cyanobacterial promoter fusions by luciferase-dependent luminescence; using such promoter fusions in a cyanobacterial-based metal biosensor assay; determining phosphate nutrient status in phytoplankton by assaying alkaline phosphatase activity; measuring interacting Nif proteins by a beta-galactosidase assay; and quantifying cAMP and cGMP levels following activation of oocytes bearing the AT2 receptor by angiotensin II. Given the diversity of the research projects described above, the award will provide direct benefits to the widest possible spectrum of research projects at BGSU. The instrumentation will provide analytical tools currently not available on campus, thus the immediate impact will be Improved data acquisition for the PI, co-PIs and major users. Such benefits will allow these faculty to make more rapid progress on their funded research projects. The instrumentation will also be available to other scientists on campus, thus yielding an improved environment for research and training of graduate and undergraduate students doc1911 none The specific work described in this proposal consists of three projects. Part I is a joint project with Juha Heinonen: A celebrated result by Hayman and Wu says that the level sets of any Riemann mapping can not be arbitrarily long. The PI and Heinonen are analyzing the exact conditions under which this result extends to the more general case of covering maps from the unit disk onto multiply connected domains. To this end, we explore the uniform thickness of boundaries of domains in the complex plane, a condition that is measurably stronger than uniform perfectness. Part II is a project that consists of generalizing Jorgensen s inequality to discrete quasiconformal groups acting on the n-dimensional unit sphere. Such a generalized Jorgensen inequality would make it possible to extend fundamental aspects of the rich theory known in the Kleinian case to the setting of quasiconformal groups. A natural question (with Gaven Martin) for example is: Under what assumptions is a discrete quasiconformal group isomorphic to a Kleinian group? In part III, the PI is working on questions concerning the dynamical action of a discrete quasiconformal group acting on the n-dimensional unit ball. A portion of this project is joint with Edward Taylor. We are exploring local properties of the Hausdorff dimension of limit sets of discrete quasiconformal groups. One of our questions is, for example, to find the relation between the local Hausdorff dimension of the limit set and the local Poincare exponent of the group. Another question involves limit sets of infinite index subgroups of discrete groups. The theory of discrete groups of Mobius transformations is especially beautiful as it intertwines geometry, analysis, and topology. This proposal is part of an ongoing program to study the interaction of geometry and analysis in the setting of discrete quasiconformal groups and more generally, in geometric function theory. The study of Kleinian groups (discrete groups of Mobius transformations) goes back to the 18th century, when it was developed by such mathematicians as Gauss, Lobachevsky, Klein, and Poincare. One of our goals is to analyze the thickness of the set of chaotic behavior of a Kleinian group (and more general sets) and to investigate under what assumptions such sets are uniformly thick. Another goal is to explore how certain analytically and geometrically defined properties change as one enlarges the class of Kleinian groups. The enlarged class of groups that we are mainly interested in is the class of discrete quasiconformal groups. One objective is to analyze how one can quantify the concept of discreteness in the class of quasiconformal groups. Another goal is to relate the conformal action of a quasiconformal group on the boundary of hyperbolic space to its action on hyperbolic space. Much of our work is inspired by analogous conjectures and developments in the field of hyperbolic geometry doc1912 none Dr. Ferbel proposes to hold an Advanced Study Institute on Technology and Concepts of High Energy Physics. The subjects to be covered are Symmetry breaking, quantum chromodynamics, neutrino mass and oscillations, cosmological parameters and baryon asymmetry. The goals of this Institute are: to advance the training and instruction of exceptional young physicists in particle physics, and to extend contacts among outstanding scholars from different countries doc1913 none Pittenger Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) will operate R Vs Atlantis, Knorr and Oceanus during as a general oceanographic research vessel in support of NSF-supported research projects. The R V Atlantis is a 274 ft. vessel, constructed in , and is owned by the U.S. Navy and operated by WHOI. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 303 operational days during , of which 262 days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The remaining cruises will support NOAA and other private projects. The projects scheduled on the Atlantis represent several oceanographic disciplines and will fully utilize the capabilities of the vessel. Operations will take place in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans in support of submersible operations of the National Deep Submergence Facility utilizing DSV Alvin, ARGO II, Jason, and DSL-120. Cruises will take place in the Gulf of California, Northern East Pacific Rise, Juan de Fuca Ridge, Gulf of Mexico, and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The ship will return to Woods Hole in December for the overhaul of the DSV Alvin. Scheduled maintenance on the Atlantis will take place in part of February and March. The R V Knorr is a 279 ft. vessel, constructed in and refitted from to , and owned by the U.S. Navy and operated by WHOI. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 311 operational days during , of which 221 days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The remaining cruises will support Navy projects. The projects scheduled on the Knorr represent several oceanographic disciplines, utilizing full capabilities of the vessel. Projects scheduled include LWAD, Prod Drill testing, mooring deployments, and use of Jason. The vessel will operate in the North and South Atlantic Ocean: Caribbean, Mid-Atlantic Ridge, Brazil Basin, and Sargasso Sea; the Mediterranean; and off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. A maintenance period is planned for mid-October to mid-November. The R V Oceanus is a 177 ft. vessel, constructed in , and owned by NSF and operated by UCSD-SIO. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 140 operational days during , of which 69 days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The remaining cruises will support Navy, NOAA, and USGS projects. The projects scheduled on the Oceanus support several oceanographic disciplines and will fully utilize the capabilities of the vessel. Scheduled cruises are in support of the ECOHAB Program, seismic OBH work, mooring deployments and Navy acoustic programs. Operations will take place off the North Atlantic Coast on the U.S. Continental Shelf and the Grand Banks. The ship will be out of service the first three months and last two months of the year. The R Vs Atlantis, Knorr, and Oceanus are part of a fleet of ships used by the National Science Foundation in support of marine science research. Most oceanographic projects require highly specialized equipment to be permanently installed on the vessels, thus the necessity for specialized ships. These vessels do not operate in the same mode as general cargo fishing vessels. As a result, NSF supports the operation of a variety of ships specifically dedicated to oceanographic research that are operated by universities and institutions around the country doc1914 none Research will be done to establish the phenomenon of localization for physically relevant models of disordered media where existing methods have widely failed in the most relevant case of dimension three. Particular models to be investigated are the Bernoulli-Anderson model, the Poisson model, and the Random Displacement model. The main obstacle to overcome is the lack of monotonicity properties for these models, which causes significant differences to the more successfully studied Anderson model. In previous work, the PI and his collaborators have shown that methods from scattering theory can be used to establish localization for one-dimensional non-monotonic models. These methods will lead to further results in one dimension and provide new tools in higher dimension such as using the total scattering cross section of single sites to identify energies where extended states exist. Some related goals are to establish Wegner estimates for the eigenvalues of finite box hamiltonians and Lifshitz tail asymptotics for the integrated density of states in the above models, as well as to understand the effects of correlations arising from long range single site scatterers. The mathematical theory of disordered media aims at understanding the spectral and scattering theoretic properties of irregular solids such as, for example, crystals with impurities, alloys, materials with lattice deviations and amorphous media. Different models of random operators are used to describe the various types of disorder. This provides a mathematical framework to decide on conductivity properties: If localization of states can be shown, then the solid is electrically insulating, while the existence of extended states characterizes a conducting material. The PI s research aims at establishing these properties for models of high physical relevance, which have so far resisted a rigorous mathematical treatment. For example, localization properties are not yet understood for realistic models of alloys. Ideas from statistical physics and solid state physics will be combined with methods from scattering theory, spectral theory and harmonic analysis to make progress doc1915 none The purpose of this research is to extend knowledge about automated capture environments to better support long-term use. In earlier work, the goal was to make capture a ubiquitous service at any point in time and over a short period of time. However, as more live events are captured and views of the captured experiences are automatically prepared, having too much information available becomes a problem. The objective of this project is to find information access solutions that scale over time, increasing the benefit of captured memories for the human as time passes and more information is captured, rather than increasing the burden of foraging through a morass of memories to find ones of importance. Two approaches to this problem will be used. The first approach is to create an application-specific information model for a captured experience. This leads to captured experiences being contained in a searchable repository of experiences. The second approach is to view capture as only one part of the knowledge acquisition process in any given application. Specifically, a general infrastructure for building capture and access applications, and storing, retrieving and visualizing large repositories of captured experiences that evolve over time will be built. Capture and access in the educational domain as well as in distributed collaborative meetings will be explored. The major contribution is general support for the construction of capture and access applications as well as deeper evaluation of long-term use of capture and access in educational and meeting environments doc1916 none Galbraith During the last few years, the analysis of entire genomes has been made possible by technological breakthroughs, such that gene isolation and characterization and functional analyses have become dramatically faster and more efficient than previously possible. Genomics is broadly defined as research toward understanding the structure of genomes, the genes present in these genomes and their expression, and the functions of the proteins encoded by these genes. Essential to genome-wide gene expression and function studies is the use of recently developed robotic methods for the high-throughput manipulation of genes and the analysis of sequences. Equipment for colony and plaque picking (a robotic workstation), for DNA sequence amplification (PCR instruments), for high-throughput DNA sequencing (a capillary DNA sequencer), and for analysis of DNA microarrays (a microarray scanner) will be used for high-throughput genomics analysis at the University of Arizona. The colony and plaque-picking robot will be used for the high-throughput isolation of individual colonies and plaques from cDNA, EST, and genomic libraries produced for different eukaryotic and prokaryotic organisms and tissues. cDNA EST libraries will be produced under a variety of conditions designed to induce different expression patterns, thereby identifying new genes. The PCR amplification instruments will be employed for the high-throughput production of amplified DNA molecules suitable for DNA sequencing and DNA microarraying. The capillary sequencer will be employed for the sequencing of the DNA molecules that have been amplified from the various library inserts. The array scanner will be employed for the analysis of microarrays following hybridization using fluorescent target molecules prepared from eukaryotic cells and tissues subjected to different environmental conditions. The impact of the instrumentation on the field of research will be particularly profound in the area of the Plant Sciences. Four major NSF-funded Plant Genomics grants provide research funding for the University of Arizona. Given the availability of high-throughput instrumentation provided by this funding, a considerable increase in the progress of these projects is anticipated. Specifically, the instrumentation will permit the production and sequencing of many more cDNA and EST libraries than originally envisaged by these proposals. This should lead to greater numbers of discovered genes for different organisms, as well as a more profound understanding of how gene expression is regulated. The instrumentation will also alleviate bottlenecks in PCR-based microarray production and microarray analysis, and this in turn will accelerate understanding of the coordination of gene expression through functional genomics. These research and training groups represent ones at the University of Arizona that are already involved in genomics analyses. Other U.A. groups are poised to start such work as a logical extension of their ongoing, federally funded activities. Availability of the proposed equipment will directly assist their programs, and also increase the numbers of faculty groups considering a high-throughput genomics approach to their specific research problems. In terms of education and outreach, the U.A. has a defined mission in educating the future work force of Arizona and the Nation. The availability of the proposed equipment will provide an invaluable teaching and training resource doc1917 none Award abstract - An Automated DNA Sequencer for the Department of Biological Sciences, The University of Alabama Accumulating genomic data provides an opportunity to examine evolutionary relationships within a wide variety of aquatic species. On going phylogenetic studies of snails, bivalves, sunfishes, basses, and zoosporic fungi provide a wealth of information on the ecology, biogeography, and evolution of morphological and life-history features of these diverse groups. An automated DNA sequencer will be used to conduct genomic studies more efficiently and accurately on vertebrates, invertebrates, and microorganisms. The specific equipment to be used is the LI-COR S-2 Gene ReadIR DNA Analysis System. The LI-COR system produces high quality raw image data by electrophoretically separating labeled DNA and automatically scanning gels for fluorescence at two infrared (IR) wavelengths. LI-COR produces high accuracy reads and eliminates the need for radioactive labeling. In addition to DNA sequencing, the LI-COR system has hardware and software capabilities for microsatellite DNA research. In addition to increasing research productivity and output, this equipment will provide excellent training opportunities for students with an interest in biotechnology and genomic research. Virtually all DNA sequencing is conducted today with an automated sequencer. Having the equipment in the Biology Department will provide valuable hands-on training and increase the competitiveness and knowledge base of graduate and undergraduate biology students at the University of Alabama doc1918 none Naegele A Confocal Microscope for Research and Teaching in Biology and Neuroscience A Zeiss 510 Confocal Microscope will be used for research and training in developmental biology and neuroscience at Wesleyan University. This new confocal microscope will enable the three primary faculty users and members of their research laboratories to study the dynamic movements of cells and proteins in living embryos and to identify intercellular junctions between cells in thick sections of brain tissue. In addition, training on the confocal microscope will be an important component of a Biology department graduate-level course in advanced microscopy, including confocal, immunofluorescence, and electron microscopy. The confocal microscope facility is part of an Advanced Instrumentation Facility in the Science Center at Wesleyan University. This facility already contains scanning and transmission electron microscopes, an adjacent wet laboratory, a room for tissue sectioning, and a computer room with associated digital scanners and other image processing equipment. The projects to be carried out by major users of this confocal microscope, Drs. Devoto, Kirn, and Naegele, and members of their laboratories, each focus on vertebrate development. The Devoto laboratory will focus on the genetic and molecular guidance cues used by migrating muscle cells in living zebrafish embryos. The Kirn laboratory will address the mechanisms of neuronal replacement and neurogenesis in the brains of adult birds. The Naegele laboratory will study cellular and molecular signals regulating programmed cell death and engulfment of dying neurons in the rodent cerebral cortex and visual system. Occasional use of the confocal is also planned by five additional faculty in the Biology and Molecular Biology and Biochemistry Departments who study a variety of biological problems ranging from the role of transcription factors in embryo development to the cell cycle regulation in yeast. Additional minor use by one extramural group Pfizer, Inc. is planned for 2 days month. Funds from this extramural group will be a significant source of revenue for long-term maintenance of the confocal, including service contracts. We anticipate that this confocal microscope and the associated research programs will have a significant impact on research and training at Wesleyan University in the fields of developmental biology and neurobiology. The objective of our science training programs at Wesleyan University is to provide high-quality research experiences for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as postdoctoral fellows and visiting scientists. This hands-on training is of fundamental importance for careers in scientific research, technology, and education. Special initiatives at Wesleyan University advance women and minorities in science, as well as providing access for students with disabilities. It is anticipated that the new confocal microscope will contribute significantly to a basic understanding of how cells in the developing embryo migrate, form connections, and how some undergo programmed cell death as part of their normal developmental plan. These studies will ultimately lead to a better understanding of how the vertebrate brain and body are constructed during development and maintained throughout the life of the organism doc1919 none A confocal microscope system will be housed in the Waksman Institute at Rutgers University as a shared resource for ten different laboratories. A confocal microscope is needed in many studies to optically section through thick specimens with high resolution and sensitivity, and to simultaneously detect the signals from multiple targets, each labeled with a different fluorescent dye. The entire system includes a compound microscope equipped for fluorescence and DIC optics, a laser scanning and confocal detection system, a computer and software to operate the instrument and analyze the data collected, and a vibration-free table and workbench for the instrument. This system will replace an older confocal microscope, which has become obsolete and is no longer supported by its original manufacturer. The technological improvements of the new confocal microscope system are numerous and will allow many kinds of experiments that could not be performed previously to be done. This instrument will be used for fluorescence microscopy of animal (Drosophila, C. elegans), fungal (S. cerevisiae) and plant (Arabidopsis, Tobacco) tissues. These studies address a wide range of scientific questions in developmental and cell biology. These include investigations of signal transduction pathways, regulation of tissue growth, regulation of gene expression, meiotic recombination, mechanisms that regulate the subcellular localization of different proteins, and synapse formation. These studies primarily involve the localization of proteins using fluorescently-tagged antibodies or other dyes. In addition, intrinsically fluorescent proteins, such as the Green Fluorescent Protein, are also employed. A confocal microscope that can optically capture sections through thick sections is absolutely essential for these experiments. In addition, numerous experiments will specifically take advantage of the many advanced capabilities of the new confocal microscopes, especially the higher resolution and sensitivity that will allow smaller and fainter signals to be observed. Other important improvements multiple lasers and detectors that provide the possibility to simultaneously observe multiple signals. The users are addressing a range of scientific questions of critical importance in cell and developmental biology, and this instrument will enable them to make major contributions to their respective fields. These studies will provide many new insights into basic cellular processes that occur in plants and animals. In addition, the instrument will be made available to qualified users from outside of the Institute, and will play an important role in keeping Rutgers at the leading edge of studies in cell and developmental biology doc1920 none Integrated AFM-optical microscope (BioScope) for molecular and cell biology PI: Y. L. Lyubchenko, Arizona State University. AFM is a novel technique that offers unique advantages with the potential for very high resolution imaging of macromolecules, their complexes and cells in the absence of stains, shadows, and labels. AFM can be performed in air at ambient conditions or in aqueous solutions the latter being particularly important for resolving fully hydrated structures. Recently, instruments which integrate AFM technology with an optical light microscope has permitted cells, microorganisms macromolecular complexes to be imaged with a resolution much greater than the ~200 nm resolution of the best optical microscopes. A BioScope AFM, an integrated Atomic Force Microscope Optical Microscope will be used to study the structure of living cells and macromolecular assemblies and to follow biochemical processes in living as well as fixed cells, tissues, and developing organisms. This is one of the most powerful instruments used in cellular and structural biology and material science today. Specifically, this integrated optical AFM microscope will be able to locate with the optical microscope the area of interest; to obtain high resolution topographic images of cells, their components and macromolecular complexes; to combine optical and topographic characteristics of the samples; to follow the dynamics of living cells and their components. These new capabilities will allow more detailed structural and functional studies of a wide range of biological systems including a) the molecular structure of DNA during recombination, b) the structure and spectral properties of photosynthetic complexes in bacteria, c) surface reorganization of sperm just before fertilization of amphibian and mammalian eggs, d) the surface structure of pathogenic fungi, e) the mechanisms of viral interactions with cell surfaces, and f) surface characterization of biomimetic materials used in artificial organs and tissues. In each case, this new imaging technique is expected to provide new insights into how cells interact with both biological and nonbiological surfaces. The BioScope will be housed in the W. M. Keck Bioimaging Laboratory at Arizona State University and will be accessible to any interested party at the University, including faculty, postdoctoral researchers as well as graduate and undergraduate students doc1921 none Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy has developed into a powerful means of determining the structure and motions of proteins and nucleic acids in solution. Such molecules form the machinery and blueprints of life. NMR is a powerful method for studying how these biomolecules recognize and interact with their molecular partners from the cell. NMR is also a crucial technique for investigating atomic-resolution details of how protein chains fold up into their 3-dimensional, functional shape. Research using this 600 MHz NMR system will emphasize determination of atomic-resolution 3D protein structures. Other work will include study of the motions and molecular interactions of these proteins and study of peptide and nucleic acid structures. The new 600 MHz system will be used to study cancer and arthritis progression, hearing in the inner ear, communication within cells, development and differentiation of plants, certain RNA-catalyzed reactions in protein synthesis, protein interactions with cell membranes, and protein stability. The state-of-the art 600 MHz NMR system features a 14.1 Tesla magnetic field that is actively shielded to minimize its space requirement. It features four channels for simultaneous radiofrequency excitation of four kinds of atomic nuclei, particularly the proton, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, and deuterium widely important in biomolecules. To ensure clean spectra with few artifacts and to enable measurement of biomolecular diffusion, the system includes pulsed field gradients. Two probes triply tuned to proton, carbon, and nitrogen frequencies will enable characterization of proteins and nucleic acids. The small volume of one probe accommodates concentrated samples, while the large volume of the second probe accommodates samples that can only be studied in more dilute solution. The 600 MHz NMR spectrometer will be used by five Ph.D. students and five postdoctoral fellows in biomolecular NMR from four participating laboratories and three departments. Students with training in protein structure determination in solution are currently in demand, and this demand is expected to continue for many years. The 600 MHz system features improved resolution and 1.5-fold greater sensitivity than the 500 MHz spectrometer on campus, facilitating more difficult projects. This new spectrometer, in the campus-wide NMR facility at the University of Missouri-Columbia, will help structural biology contribute to the expansion of research in life sciences, with relevance ranging from medicine to agriculture doc1922 none The atomic force microscope (AFM) can image samples with a resolution of 2 nanometers laterally and 0.2 nanometers vertically, and can also measure extremely small forces (from 100 piconewtons up to 1 micronewton). Laser tweezers extend this force range below 1 piconewton and also allow manipulation of objects on length scales of 50 nanometers. A fluorescence microscope permits imaging of fluorescent tagging molecules, which, in addition to their typical applications, will be used to insure that the objects being studied with AFM and laser tweezers are indeed those of interest, rather than artifacts or contamination. This instrument cluster will be used for a variety of experiments including: 1) the study of novel self-assembling biomaterials based on the coiled-coil protein folding motif 2) the response of both mature and immature T lymphocyte cells to infected cells 3) the effect of naturally-occurring modifications of the microtubule surface on motor protein traction 4) basic experiments to characterize electron transfer in DNA. With support from the National Science Foundation, an atomic force microscope, a fluorescence optical microscope, and a laser tweezers workstation will be purchased and combined into a single instrument with powerful imaging, manipulation, and force measurement capabilities. The instrument will be the first to integrate these three technologies using commercial components, and should pave the way for other researchers. Auxiliary equipment for vibration isolation, temperature regulation, and the formation of micropipettes, all of which are required for optimal performance and for the force measurements, will also be purchased. Haverford College has a strong commitment to excellence in the education of undergraduates. At least four graduating students per year will use this instrument cluster for a senior research project. The interdisciplinary nature of the work will spark exciting interactions between the students and also between their mentors doc1923 none Hormiga A variable pressure scanning electron microscope (SEM), a critical point dryer and a sputter coater will be used for research in the systematic biology of various groups of organisms. This SEM will be used to collect morphological data of a wide variety of living and extinct organisms. This equipment, together with existing dissecting and light microscopes, a CCD digital camera for microscopy, scanners and computer workstations will be used to establish a core microscopy and image analysis facility in the Department of Biological Sciences at George Washington University. Access to SEM is essential to accomplish the goals of six research groups (four of them with active projects currently funded by NSF) in the departments of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at The George Washington University. At present at least seven faculty, two postdocs, and 17 graduate students will be using this instrument. The following research projects will use the SEM facility described in the proposal: Systematics of araneoid spiders; Evolutionary history of flowering plants; SEM analysis of skeletal tissue growth; Systematics of Ciliated Protista; Anatomy and phylogeny of dinosaurs and other mesozoic reptiles; and SEM analysis of spermatozoa, spermatozeugmata, and secondary sex organs of inseminating ostariophysan fishes. Over the next three years these researchers and their collaborators and students will have to take an estimated 21,000 SEM micrographs in the course of the research projects described in this proposal doc1924 none Londergan There are two major topics to be studied in this proposal. The first deals with the quark sub-structure of protons and neutrons, and related baryons. We are studying the validity of charge symmetry, which states that up quarks in the proton and down quarks in the neutron should behave in identical ways. This approximate symmetry is very well preserved in nuclear physics, but we showed that previous experiments appeared to require significant deviations from charge symmetry at the quark level. A re-analysis of the experimental data suggests that charge symmetry is valid to a high degree of precision in high energy physics. We also propose to investigate the process by which quarks produced at high energies ``fragment into baryons. We want to see whether these processes depend on the type, or ``flavor, of quark which produces the baryon. We are developing a model for this process, and looking at the production of Lambda hyperons. The simplest model for the Lambda particle consists of an up, down and strange quark. It is customary to assume that up, down and strange quarks contribute equally to the fragmentation leading to a Lambda particle. Our preliminary investigations suggest significant differences from this simple ``flavor symmetric model. We can explain in simple qualitative terms why this model should be wrong, and we predict where large flavor symmetry violation should occur. We also propose to investigate bound state and scattering properties for particles in two dimensional systems. We are particularly interested in systems whose transverse dimensions are of the same order as the particle wavelength. In these cases, binding and scattering are dominated by wave effects. We have recently published a book on this subject ( Binding and Scattering in Two-Dimensional Systems , Londergan, Carini and Murdock, Springer-Verlag, ). We have shown that our work is relevant to the properties of electrons in quantum wires, confined electromagnetic modes in waveguides, and confined and propagating states in optical systems called ``photonic crystals. In this proposal we will focus on the properties of ``defect states, which are found when one starts with a finite periodic system, and then changes the properties of one or more of the cells producing the periodic system. The principal investigator is Director of the Indiana University Nuclear Theory Center doc1925 none The need for genetic diversity, increased productivity, and improved food and fiber quality in the improvement of crop plants to offset a narrow germplasm base, yield plateaus and rising production costs has never been greater. Geneticists have been hard at work developing the tools and resources to improve crop plants using molecular approaches to augment traditional breeding programs and implement strategies for bioengineering elite cultivars. The introduction of innovative instrumentation that mechanizes labor-intensive procedures using robotics has revolutionized the study of genomes. The impact of such high-throughput processing on the study of large, complex genomes as those found in crop species is enormous, leading to an unprecedented investment in Plant Genome Initiatives by government agencies. Robotic equipment pivotal to high-throughput processing will nucleate the formation of a genomics facility that provides core services in support of genome projects. The equipment includes Genetix s Q-Bot, a unique multi-tasking, fully automated robot that specializes in high speed, high accuracy picking and spotting of clones in microtiter plates onto filters (macroarrays) and microarrays in high density gridded arrays. The high capacity HiGro orbital shaker optimizes the growth of bacterial cultures in microtiter plates in support of Q-Bot operations and high-throughput sequencing efforts. Studies on the structure and function of crop genomes that hinge on Q-Bot-mediated tasks encompass two major areas of endeavor related to physical mapping and analysis of gene function. BAC libraries, both existing and soon-to-be constructed, will be picked and arrayed on high density filters for distribution to the research community. BAC filters serve to fingerprint BAC clones and assemble BAC contigs for the purpose of preparing a sequence-ready physical map for beans, cotton, lettuce, rice, and diploid and tetraploid wheat. Such filters will also facilitate map-based cloning of important agronomic genes, including submergence tolerance in rice, vernalization in wheat, and cotton fiber genes. The Q-Bot will also speed up the gene discovery process in EST projects and facilitate the study of gene function. Macro- and microarrays will be used to study differential gene expression in response to a host of environmental, physiological and developmental stimuli to identify key gene functions in crop productivity, including nutritional seed quality (walnuts), stress (rice and wheat) and disease (Arabidopsis and lettuce) responses, and yield and fiber quality (cotton). The crop genomics consortium will develop tools and resources in service of the scientific community for global distribution, and in so doing, evolve as a major center and focal point for activities to harness genomics in the development of novel germplasm with enhanced food and fiber quality in major crop species. Training of students and postdoctoral fellows in high-throughput technology will be an integral part of research and teaching activities offered by the group doc1926 none The American Power Conference (APC) sponsored by the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) , is an annual national forum for the discussion of the broad technical aspects of generation, transmission, distribution, and utilization of electric power. APC has significant educational value particularly for undergraduate students who aim to learn more about the electric power industry. In recognition of this fact, IIT has been conducting a special program for faculty and students, called the Ben Elliot Sponsored Student Faculty (SSF) Program. The program features special breakfast seminars and other events(e.g., plant tours, cracker barrel) expressly for students in addition to the regular APC technical sessions. The proposed participant support grants will significantly aid the Ben Elliott SSF Program in its mission of encouraging more students (especially undergraduates to pursue careers in power engineering doc1927 none Paulsen Blecher Papadakis The Principal Investigators propose several main lines of research on topics related to the theory and applications of operator algebras, operator spaces, and frames. Blecher will be studying the general theory of operator algebras and modules over operator algebras, Hilbert C -modules, and questions relating to noncommutative Choquet theory. Paulsen will continue to study injective operator spaces and modules, the weak expectation property, function theoretic operator theory, interpolation theory from an operator algebra point of view. With Papadakis he will also be studying and frames and reconstructions with a view to applying reproducing kernel Hilbert space methods and symmetric orthogonalization results. The study of operator algebras originally grew out of quantum mechanics. It is often important to see how formulas involving numerical variables behave when these variables are allowed to be operator variables. It is out of such a process that the theory of operator spaces and completely bounded maps emerged. Blecher and Paulsen s research focuses mainly on questions of how various theories behave under this `quantization . On the other hand, interpolation theory started as a purely mathematical exercise, and only in the past 20 years has it been found to have important applications in engineering. For example, in electrical circuit design, one starts with a desired frequency response, for a few given frequencies, and wishes to design the simplest circuit with that given response. Mathematically, this problem becomes one of finding the simplest function of a given type that achieves certain given values at given points. This last problem is what we call an interpolation problem. Already the demands of electrical engineering take us beyond the known interpolation theories. Surprisingly, interpolation theory and the study of operator algebras is interwoven, and this interplay has lead to some new interpolation results. We have found that a better understanding of the quantized , i.e., matrix-valued, interpolation is what is needed to answer many ordinary interpolation questions. Frame theory can be applied to the study of how we extract information out of streams of data, and how we reconstruct the original data from the derived information. A typical example of a situation where this arises is the CAT scan, where from a large quantity of data, one is trying to reconstruct a picture of the inside of a body. Our work is not focused on particular examples, but on how one analyzes how good is a particular frame doc1928 none Elizabeth A. Friar Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Gardens An Automated DNA Sequencer for the Claremont Colleges This award will allow Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden (RSABG) to purchase an ABI Prism 377 DNA sequencer (with an XL-C upgrade) for use in the core sequencing laboratory that it provides for use by biologists at the Claremont Colleges. A highly reliable and accurate instrument, the ABI 377 will be used in a core sequencing lab to support research by six major users and a number of minor users at RSABG, Pomona College and Harvey Mudd College. Added to an existing ABI 373 currently operated by RSABG, the ABI 377 will increase overall lab productivity by at least ten-fold, allowing the laboratory to meet a rapidly growing demand for additional sequencing capability for a number of projects. The primary research projects are 1) population and conservation genetics of the endangered and endemic Hawaiian silversword alliance; 2) examination of reticulate patterns of diversification within Polemoniaceae; 3) evolution and classification of North American chloridoid grasses; 4) determinants of homing endonuclease I-Cre I function; 5) molecular phylogeny of hydra and construction of a molecular phylogeny of terrestrial Isopods; and 6) use of DNA sequence data to infer evolutionary relationships among Alcyonacean soft corals. The sequencer will also significantly strengthen education and training activities for graduate and undergraduate students in systematics, evolution, and molecular biology doc1929 none of a series of data points. Sums of independent random variables and empirical processes can be thought of as single integrals of functions of one variable with respect to this measure, and $U$-statistics and $U$-processes, as multiple integrals with respect to the empirical measure of functions of several variables. First order asymptotic statistics is often based on limit theorems for sums of independent random variables and processes, but more refined second order properties require limit theory for $U$-statistics and processes (in a way, in analogy with the use of higher order derivatives versus only the first derivative when studying functions in Calculus). Although $U$-statistics were introduced in the forties, their asymptotic theory has not been close to reaching its final form until recently, in part due to previous efforts by this P.I. and collaborators; the proposed research aims at completing this chapter of Classical Probability for $U$-statistics, and at advancing the theory of $U$-processes, by obtaining best possible distributional and moment inequalities and laws of the iterated logarithm. This research will also include applications in survival analysis. In another direction, it is accepted wisdom that normalizing sums of independent random variables by certain quantities that depend on themselves rather than numerical constants improves the convergence properties (in particular, then, statistical procedures based on such selfnormalized quantities may have good properties, the leading and oldest example of this being the famous Student t-statistic and test). But this must be shown at each instance. The P.I. would like to study some questions related to selfnormalized sums, particularly in connection with the bootstrap. Empirical process theory vigorously developed during the last two decades (with substantial contributions by this P.I.) and, since then, its impact on different fields of stochastics has not ceased to increase (in classical asymptotic statistics, information theory, neural networks, machine learning, model selection, statistical mechanics, etc.), and the P.I. would like to continue applying it to different statistics and probability problems of current interest doc1930 none Principal Investigator: S. T. Wu, University of Alabama, Huntsville The investigators will work to understand several large scale features of the solar corona, including bi-modal magnetic fields, solar wind structure, and the interplay between coronal mass ejections (CME), solar prominences and solar flares. The main effort is to employ two-dimensional (2D) axisymmetric and three-dimensional (3D) magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) numerical codes to model these observed features of coronal activity. One unique aspect of the work is the approach adopted by the investigators to the interplay between various mesoscale and large-scale features of the corona. Specific topics of the research include CME dynamics in a bi-modal wind and study of Moreton waves as an interaction between coronal activity and the denser chromosphere beneath doc1931 none Fawley Modern instrumentation in support of research in plant cellular and molecular biology will be housed in the Department of Botany Biology, North Dakota State University, Fargo. Specifically, a research microscope, a high-speed centrifuge, an ultracentrifuge, rotors, a scintillation counter, and culture equipment will be used in a variety of botanical studies. Four researchers will be the primary users of this equipment. Dr. Marvin Fawley is investigating the phylogeny of green algae and the molecular diversity of coccoid green algae. The equipment will support efforts to describe new species of coccoid green algae, and continuing investigations of coccoid green algal diversity. Dr. Karen Phillips is studying phytoplankton communities and population dynamics using molecular techniques and light microscopy. For this project, her work will focus primarily on winter phytoplankton communities and population dynamics of freshwater coccoid green algae. Dr. Marc Anderson is studying the influence of environmental stress on metabolic processes in plants. Dr. Anderson will investigate the response of maize seedlings to chilling-induced oxidative stress, specifically focusing on processes in the mitochondria. Dr. Alan White is investigating the biosynthesis of cell wall polysaccharides in plant Golgi membranes. This equipment will support his efforts to purify enzymes involved in the synthesis of xylogulcans in the Golgi, specifically xyloglucan glucosyltransferase and xyloglucan xylosyltransferase. The results of this work will have significant impact on several areas of plant biology. Work on coccoid algae and phytoplankton population dynamics will help revise old dogmas on the diversity of coccoid algae and the dynamics of phytoplankton under the ice in winter. Research will also lead to an understanding of the mechanism(s) (e.g. induced transcription, protein modification, etc.) by which enzyme activities are enhanced during chilling stress. Finally, an increased understanding of xyloglucan biosynthesis will add significantly to our understanding of cell wall polysaccharides, the process of cell wall synthesis, and the structure and functional organization of the plant Golgi apparatus. Biology students and other investigators will have full access to this equipment for their research and training doc1932 none Munakata Marr An automated research microscope with state-of-the-art digital imaging capabilities will be used to support a wide variety of biological research at the Colorado School of Mines (CSM), research that is currently performed off-campus or not at all. Immediate use of the microscope will encompass a broad spectrum of environmental biological research. One major application will be the use of fluorescent genetic probes to identify specific microorganisms in natural soils, in wastewater treatment systems, in biological systems that produce or consume greenhouse gases, and in bioremediation systems. These microbes, for example, remove nitrogen from wastewater, transform chlorinated solvents or arsenic in groundwater, or produce methane or carbon dioxide. In addition, fluorescent bacteria will be used to monitor the treatment of acid mine drainage and the removal of pathogens from drinking water and wastewater. Finally, the microscope will be used to develop new methods of bacterial analyses for public health and food safety applications. This microscope will allow CSM to more closely integrate microbiology with engineering and other sciences. Because the projects described above are conducted primarily by engineers and chemists in collaboration with microbiologists, the ability to perform sophisticated microscopic analyses will provide new insights into microbial influences and interactions in engineered and human-impacted systems. These insights are expected to have far-reaching implications in diverse fields ranging from drinking water safety to global warming. In addition, the microscope will have a significant impact within the university. The Colorado School of Mines has traditionally focused on the beneficial utilization of natural resources, excelling in such fields as mining, geological engineering and petroleum engineering. CSM has recently recognized the importance of biological sciences, and this microscope will provide valuable support toward establishment of a viable, formal biology program doc1933 none A confocal microscope imaging facility will be established for six developmental biologists investigating cellular structures, events, and gene expression patterns in early Xenopus laevis embryos, in developing Manduca sexta nervous systems, and in mammalian endothelial cell-culture preparations. The confocal system will be configured with 3 sensitive photomultipliers and two lasers producing four visible-light lines, and with a compound upright microscope equipped with long-working distance water-immersion objectives to facilitate in vivo experiments involving microinjection or micromanipulation. The PI (Danilchik) has used a confocal system with an inverted microscope for several years to study the development of early Xenopus embryos, particularly on the vegetal (underside) surface of the fertilized egg, where localized molecules are relocalized via interactions with a complex and dynamic cytoskeleton. Recent work has turned to cytoskeleton-membrane interactions on the animal (upper) surface of the egg during cytokinesis. Current research plans are to follow particle motions, membrane fusion events, and cytoskeletal reorganization in the animal surface of living embryos. Because amphibian embryos cannot develop normally when turned upside down, an upright confocal system will be vital for these studies. Three other users (Copenhaver, Kent, Morton) study aspects of neural development and neuronal signalling in the tobacco hornworm Manduca sexta: Copenhaver studies the guidance of neuronal migration in Manduca, and has developed a live preparation in which neurons migrate in plain view along the dorsal surface of the gut. Kent uses Manduca as a model system to study developmental changes in motor terminals and dendrites in large whole-mount preparations and to examine synaptic specializations and growth cone morphology of identified motor neurons in vitro. Morton is examining the regulation of cyclic GMP (cGMP) production by neuropeptides in Manduca and C. elegans, and will require confocal microscopy with multiple laser lines to demonstrate colocalization of two or more antigens in wholemount preparations. Christian will use the confocal system to study the subcellular localization of components of the TGFBeta signal transduction pathway in developing Xenopus early embryos. Farrell studies the role of extracellular matrix components in the process of angiogenesis, and is interested in developing confocal methods to screen cell lines transfected with regulators of integrin receptor expression. Acquisition of a state-of-the-art confocal system with multiple laser lines and enhanced photon detection will greatly enhance and expand our individual research efforts, and will give us the ability to develop crucial live-cell imaging techniques. The instrumentation will be available for graduate students throughout the year and undergraduates in summer programs doc1934 none Stable isotope ratio mass spectrometry is a fundamental tool used to study energy and nutrient flow, metabolism, and physiology in natural and human-dominated ecosystems. Stable isotopes of the light elements (C, H, N, O, and S) occur naturally at different abundances among organic and inorganic molecules cycling within the biosphere. Isotopes within these molecules tend to separate between product and reactant in biochemical reactions and during diffusional flux across concentration gradients, leaving a characteristic fingerprint of these processes on ecosystems. Thus, stable isotopes contain information on physical, biophysical, and biological processes that govern the fate of materials in Earth s ecosystems. Stable isotope measurements offer unique insights into physiological variation, integrating processes at different spatial and temporal scales. Measurements of stable isotope ratios in soils and plant samples are used to reconstruct past climates and vegetation distribution, evaluate physiological responses of wild and domesticated plants and animals to environmental stress, characterize patterns of material transfers and transformations among plant, animal, and microbial components of ecosystems, and understand atmosphere-biosphere interactions. Stable isotope measurements offer great promise for evaluating responses of Earth s ecosystems to human activities at the global level. A continuous-flow isotope ratio mass spectrometer equipped with automated peripherals for sample-preparation and analysis from Finnigan MAT will be used for studies in ecosystem ecology, plant and animal physiological ecology, evolutionary ecology and global change biology. The new mass spectrometer system will greatly enhance undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral education at the University of Arizona. The five major users collectively advise 13 graduate students, 16 undergraduate students, and 4 post-docs, all of whom will use the mass spectrometer. At least six formal University of Arizona courses cover stable isotope theory and or methodology. This new mass spectrometer system will ensure that the University of Arizona has the technological capability to meet research and teaching challenges well into the future doc1935 none Thompson A confocal laser scanning imaging system will be used by faculty, graduate students, undergraduates and visitors to Stanford University s Hopkins Marine Station. The equipment includes a Zeiss Axiovert SI00 inverted microscope and a Noran Oz confocal scanning system.This equipment will: I) Enhance ongoing faculty research, 2) Promote new research activities, 3) Promote the training of graduate and post-doctoral students in modern methods of optical microscopy in a way that will enhance their research and career development, and 4) Strengthen ongoing efforts to permit undergraduate students access to the lasted research techniques. The confocal imaging system will be used by four principle investigators to address a number of cell biological questions using methods ranging from ion imaging, sophisticated fluorescence microscopy, high resolution Nomarski DIC, to morphometry. One group is investigating the spatial and temporal aspects of second messenger signaling in neurons following the activation of surface receptors by neurotransmitters, including the dynamics of Ca2+ and NO signals. A second group is investigating the development and biophysical properties of motor systems in the squid using neuroanatomical and immunocytochemical methods. A third study focuses on the specializations of fish heater organs and cardiac cells using immunocytochemistry and antibodies specific for different isoforms of Ca pumps and myosin ATPase. The fourth group uses fluorescence imaging techniques to investigate the time course and spatial pattern of NO and Ca2+ during fertilization of the sea urchin egg. The principle investigators are addressing questions at the leading edge of their disciplines. This shared confocal microscopy center adds substantially to their ability to further their science, enhances their teaching efforts, and increases collaboration with Stanford colleagues and visitors from other institutions. This is in keeping with the role of the Hopkins Marine Station as a regional center for marine biology research doc1936 none Russel Meints A Multi-User Server for Bioinformatics Data Storage, Distribution and Analysis With this award, Oregon State University (OSU) will obtain a multi-user computer server to support bioinformatics data storage, distribution, and analysis for the Biological Computing Consortium (BCC) network. This Consortium is comprised of seven research units: The Center for Gene Research phylogenetic, biogeographic and revisionary studies of insects and construction of web-based specimen and insect collection databases; studies of auxin and cytokinin interactions in tomato and identifying the diageotropica (dgt) mutant of tomato; researching population genetics of ectomycorrhizal fungi; and studying poplars as a model system for tree genetic engineering, which focuses on how to control flowering in order to develop a reliable system to contain transgenic material. There are more than 100 principal investigators associated with the Consortium who will benefit from this new server doc1937 none Luying Xun Washington State University An LC MS Instrumentation for Biological Research A liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC MS) instrument is especially useful for the detection and identification of small organic compounds of biological interests, such as metabolic intermediates, organic hormones, antibiotics, and natural organic compounds. The instrument can also determine the molecular weights of proteins and can be used to assess post-translational modifications. Several research areas will benefit from this instrument. The area that will benefit the most is the study of biodegradation of environmental pollutants. The LC MS will help elucidate biodegradation pathways of organic pollutants by detecting and identifying the metabolic intermediates. There are many pollutants and it is important to know how they are degraded so that effective methods can be designed for bioremediation. Another research area that will immediately benefit is plant biochemistry. The LC MS will help in the areas of biosynthetic pathways of plant organic compounds that have high economic values, protein production in plant cells, and nitrogen fixation by plant microorganism symbionts. This award will allow Washington State University to purchase a Waters LC MS instrument. The LC component, which is the basic component in any high-performance LC instrument, is proposed to be the Waters (Waters Corp., Milford, MA) XE separation module consisting of two pumps and an autosampler. The MS detector is proposed to be Waters ZMD [ ] detector. This detector operates in either electrospray mode or atmospheric pressure chemical ionization mode and detects a mass range from 50 to 4,000 Daltons. LC MS instruments are essential for biological researchers. This award allows the College of Science and the College of Engineering and Architecture at Washington State University to purchase the first LC MS for the college. It is expected that approximately 17 undergraduate students, 24 graduate students, and 5 postdoctoral associates will be trained to use LC MS. Moreover, the instrument will be used by students participating in training programs at Washington State University, including those students participating in the NSF IGERT program in the Center for Multiphase Environmental Research doc1938 none Hitt The first step toward understanding any biological system is to identify and quantify its components. The second step is to determine the interactions between the components of a system. A fluorescence phosphorimager can provide the technology needed to begin to accomplish these steps. The STORM 860 Fluorescence Phosphorimager will be used to aid in the identification and quantification of molecules, e.g., proteins, DNA, RNA, of interest. In addition, it will be used to visualize and analyze molecular interactions between well-characterized molecules and previously uncharacterized molecules. The imager will be used to address fundamental questions in biology including - investigations into protein structure and function, regulation of fatty acid biosynthesis, regulation of RNA polymerase assembly, analysis of recombinant protein expression by RNAse protection assays, and gene expression analysis by screening cDNA microarrays. Because the fluorescence phosphorimager imaging and analysis technology is very robust with wide-ranging applications for cellular, molecular and biochemical research programs, it will strengthen and expand active research programs at Oakland University. Furthermore, the imager will strengthen and expand the training and education of university students, teachers, and other working professionals in biochemistry, cell and molecular biology doc1939 none Muhly will study a variety of problems in operator algebra that may be divided into three groups: General Operator Algebras, Groupoids, and Toeplitz and Related Operators. Under the first heading are found a number of problems pertaining to the structure and representation theory of non-self-adjoint operator algebras. The theory of these algebras has been reinvigorated in recent years through advances in what has come to be known as quantized functional analysis, i.e., the theory of operator spaces. This subject coupled with the recent work of Muhly and Solel that identifies the C -envelopes of various very general operator algebras allows one to make good progress on the program proposed more than thirty years ago by Wm. Arveson as a generalization of the Sz.-Nagy - Foias model theory of contraction operators on Hilbert space: study the representations of an operator algebra in terms of the C -representations of its C -envelope. In the area of groupoids, emphasis will be placed on the study of Fell bundles over groupoids. The impetus for this study comes from the representation theory of groupoids and from efforts to understand co-actions of groupoids. Further, these bundles (more accurately, generalizations of them) occur in the theory of product systems and the structure of non-self-adjoint operator algebras just mentioned. Toeplitz operators have long been a subject of intense interest in operator algebra theory. In recent years Muhly and Xia have identified the automorphisms of the C -algebra generated by all Toeplitz operators. The identification is described in terms of constructs that have played important roles in function theory and harmonic analysis on the disc. A particular importance is played by commutator singular integrals. Muhly proposes to extend these results, to the extent possible, to multivariable settings. Again, commutator singular integrals should play a decisive role, but the jump to dimensions greater than one presents difficult challenges. Muhly s work on non-self-adjoint operator algebras, while inspired primarily by developments in pure mathematics, has connections with problems of an applied nature, most particularly, mathematical systems theory - the theory of so-called H-infinity control. This, basically, is a body of knowledge dedicated to the problem of building machines, such as cars and airplanes, so that they meet certain performance criteria. Among these are such things as the responsiveness of the steering wheel, in the case of cars, or the rudder, in the case of airplanes. In short, Muhly s work will contribute to theoretical underpinnings of design problems ensuring the safety of all sorts of conveyances. Much of Muhly s work on tensor algebras over C -correspondences, which has been inspired by the operator theory that underwrites this kind of control theory, seems to be usable in multivariable control problems. Indeed, quite serendipitously, it appears to be ready-made for multivariable problems. Muhly expects his research to provide a theoretical underpinning of multivariable control problems that here-to-fore have been handled by essentially ad hoc methods. Muhly s work in non-self-adjoint algebras and the theory of groupoids has made unexpected connections with quantum Markov processes - the theory of so-called open systems that arise in a variety of places such as the theory of lasers and materials science devoted to super conductivity. They also arise naturally in quantum field theory through the constructs known as sectors. It is anticipated that Muhly s work will help to provide the mathematical underpinnings of quantum field theory and advances in laser and materials science. Finally, Muhly s work on Toeplitz operators has made connections with perturbation theories that arise in areas of relativistic quantum theory and in quantum chemistry. It is anticipated that his projects on higher dimensional Toeplitz operators will have an increased impact in this arena doc1940 none It adds infinitely large numbers into our number system. A non-expert may be surprised that the study of the elusive infinitely large numbers has an interesting impact on the study of ordinary numbers. The principal investigator has already achieved some success in this direction. By furthering his efforts, the principal investigator will contribute more innovative ideas and results to additive number theory doc1941 none In this project the investigator studies the intersection of two cycles whose dimensions do not add up to the dimension of the ambient space. In previous studies of intersection theory this is the case that has been ignored, since in general these cycles do not meet (thus we call them non-intersectional cycles). The space of cycles is a big puzzle to us, and this non-intersectional case is a piece that is still missing from the puzzle. So in order to have a complete picture of space of cycles, one should also include non-intersectional cycles. The first case studied by the investigator was the linking case where the dimensions of cycles add up to the number that is one less than the dimension of the ambient space. The fundamental approach is that such an intersection theory should not only include the cycles that meet, but also those that do not meet. To accomplish this the investigator borrows a tool-Archimedean height pairing from Arakelov geometry (or to be precise, the Arithmetic intersection theory developed by Gillet and Soule), which is only defined for pairs of linking cycles that do not meet. In this direction the investigator has made significant progress: (1) He obtained formulas for the leading term of the asymptotics of Archimedean height pairing. (2) Investigating Mazur s incidence structure, he constructed an incidence divisor on the Chow variety. (3) Based on above two results, he gave a proof of Clemens conjecture: generic quintic three folds admit only finitely many smooth rational curves of each degree. The plan is to further the understanding of this intersection theory that includes general non-intersectional cycles. The project is concentrated in (1) the study of incidence divisors, (2) the relation between the incidence equivalence and the Abel-Jacobi equivalence, (3) the application to a study of the relation between the Chow group and the Chow variety, (4) the application to a construction of Beilinson-Bloch filtration on the Chow group. One of the most fundamental problems in mathematics is the solving of algebraic equations. Once people it was realized that one could not always explicitly write down the solutions of equations, the paradigm changed into the mode of examining different types of questions such as: does a solution exist, if so, how many solutions are there, do the solution sets have additional structure? These are the fundamental questions in algebraic geometry. In order to answer them, mathematicians have developed varied techniques, one of which-intersection theory--studies he intersection of solution sets of two or more systems of equations. In this project, the investigator plans to develop a new method in intersection theory. The significance of this project is to investigate material that is less studied or completely untouched by the current techniques of intersection theory doc1942 none The main goal of this project is to describe equilibrium solutions to boundary value problems for linear and nonlinear elliptic partial differential equations. The PI intends to prove existence and regularity theorems for two-phase free boundary problems. The PI will also describe level sets of eigenfunctions, especially nodal sets, maxima, and minima, and find optimal bounds on the shape of level sets for convex domains even if the domain becomes long and thin. Another goal is to solve a problem in mathematical economics of finding all possible functional forms of a price-independent social welfare function (using methods of exterior algebra and overdetermined systems). A third goal is to characterize the camera image of a building using the Fourier transform, that is, to characterize the distortion of the periodic pattern on the face of the building if the building is not exactly parallel to the camera. The PI plans to describe the equilibrium between two phases in several problems arising in physics and engineering. The focus will be on the boundary between two materials such as ice and water. Other examples include the boundary between two liquids and the profile of the wake of a boat. In another direction, the PI will attempt to confirm a principle first proposed by J. Rauch that the point of maximum temperature in an insulated room tends towards a wall as time increases. More generally, the PI will examine how the geometry of a fixed boundary (as in the walls of a room) affects the shape of surfaces of equal temperature at or near the equilibrium steady state temperature. In a third direction, the PI will try to find all possible price-independent social welfare functions. This is of current interest because such functions are used to compare countries and to describe the trend towards greater income inequality in the s in the U. S. as well as earlier trends in the opposite direction. The problem is that prices cannot be held fixed in such comparisons. The PI expects that price independence puts serious limits on the functional forms allowed, which in turn puts limits on the way comparisons can be made. Finally, the PI proposes a project intended to help solve the problem in computer vision of recognizing the orientation of a building from a photograph doc1943 none This proposal requests support for a group at the University of Cincinnati to participate in two neutrino experiments at Fermilab: NuTeV,where data taking was recently completed in the high energy neutrino line, and BooNe, the new booster neutrino experiment currently under construction. NuTeV was designed to measure sin2qW and r, two essential parameters of the Standard Model of electroweak interactions, whereqW is the weak mixing angle and r is related to the ratio of neutrino to anti-neutrino interactions. This group developed a sign-selected quadrupole train to eliminate neutrinos from wrong-sign or neutral parents. NuTeV exceeded its goal of recording 1.5 million neutrino interaction events. During the period of this award, analysis of the data will continue and results will be published. BooNe is a new experiment designed to study neutrino oscillations. Recent results from the LSND experiment at Los Alamos suggested that nm s could oscillate into ne s. BooNe is designed to either confirm or refute this result at the ten standard deviation level, and at an energy ten times higher than at Los Alamos. During the period of this award, design and construction of the experiment will be done doc1944 none A conference on solid films and surfaces will be held at Princeton University on July 9-13, . Solid films and surfaces, and interfaces are a common feature of technologically important materials and activities, including the fabrication of electronic and optoelectronic devices, and sensors. This conference provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of the latest experimental and theoretical advances in the field. It is organized as a multiple session conference lasting four days, with plenary talks summarizing recent work in various sub-fields. In addition, invited talks, contributed talks and poster sessions are organized. The program emphasizes the topics: Structural, electronic and optical properties of thin films and surfaces; Thin film growth and related topics, such as epitaxy and roughening; Organic monolayers and films; Wide band gap semiconductor surfaces and interfaces; Nanostructured thin films; Oxidation, oxide films and surfaces; New characterization techniques; Thin films for solar cells; Theory of films and surfaces. %%% An evaluation of the progress and status of solid films and surfaces, and interfaces along with current assessments of the most important developments in this field will be of great value to the understanding of surface chemistry and enhanced utilization of electronic photonic materials in computing, data processing, and communications. The conference is co-supported by the CHE ASC propram doc1945 none Agard This conference Protein Folding and Assembly in the Cell is the sixth in a series of FASEB conferences, and aims to bring together cell biologists, geneticists, biophysicists and biochemists to look at protein folding and misfolding. Interdisciplinary approaches are important since biological constraints are critical in formulating theory and interpreting in vitro data. The setting of the conference at the Vermont Academy in Saxton River, permits informal discussion as well as formal presentations doc1946 none The investigator studies the connections among representation theory of infinite dimensional Lie algebras, finite groups and geometry. Influenced by the works of Nakajima, Grojnowski, Segal and others, theinvestigator in his recent works established connections among Hilbert schemes of points on surfaces, wreath product (orbifolds) and vertex representations of Heisenberg and affine Lie algebras. He proposes to investigate the deeper connections among these subjects. A new approach to the McKay correspondence first observed by the investigator has been developed in his work with his collaborators. Here vertex representations of (quantum) affine and toroidal Lie algebras of ADE type are constructed by using wreath products. The investigator proposes to realize other (quantum) vertex representations studied algebraically in the literature by means of wreath products and their variations. In another direction, he proposes to give a group theoretic interpretation of certain vertex algebras in the framework of wreath products. The investigator studies symmetries. There are different types of symmetries, discrete and continuous, finite and infinite. They are of fundamental importance to understanding of the laws of physics and have practical applications such as to coding theory. It turns out that if one puts certain classes of discrete and finite symmetry together in a clever way one observes continuous and infinite symmetry. The investigator studies the interactions between these different types of symmetries which bring new insights of these subjects which can not be obtained by studying them separately doc1947 none This is a study of fundamental properties of turbulent jet diffusion flames. New strategies are applied for using both particle image velocimetry (PIV) and plasma laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF), separately or simultaneously, to provide measurements useful for understanding flame phenomena or for validating numerical computations. Flame stabilization measurements are made from lift-off condition to near-blowout conditions to investigate the applicability of the recent discovery of low-speed stabilization of edge flames to blowout conditions. A novel PIV method is used for the measurements of entrainment into a jet in coflow that eliminates the uncertainties that occur when reaction takes place and can provide the entrainment coefficient as a function of the jet Reynolds number, Froude number, and axial distance downstream. Measurements of CH are made to examine the nature of the actual flame surface over a number of variables including jet velocity, coflow speeds, and the influence of buoyancy. This effort is coordinated with the NASA Stanford Center for Turbulence Research which is attempting to apply large-eddy simulation (LES) to coflow flames doc1948 none Storm Electrodeposition has been an important materials preparation technique since the turn of the century. The history of the Read Conference, and now the Electrodeposition GRC, has involved the formation of metals: Cu, Ag, Au, Cr and Ni, for car bumpers, contacts, electroforming, etc. The present organizers seek to change the focus of the conference from what is, to what could be. That is, the organizers feel the conference will have more impact if we can open up electrodeposition and investigate new, frontier, areas instead of discussing better ways to do what is already being done. Understanding of electrodeposition at the atomic scale has increased dramatically in recent years, as new analytical methods like scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) have been developed. This has resulted in improved control over processes, and the ability to use electrodeposition in areas where control over the nanometer scale is required. The present topic areas for the conference include copper electrodeposition in VLSI, magnetic materials, micro electromechanical systems (MEMS), semiconductors, surface characterization, and nanostructures. Under these headings, fundamental aspects of electrocrystallization, the effects of additives on morphological evolution of electrodeposited films, autocatalytic processes, and functional coatings which show promising wear and or corrosion behavior will be discussed. The conference has seen dramatic growth from the first to the second, and we would like to develop it into a premier materials conference. The NSF funds are used to subsidize the travel and fixed fees of students and young faculty who would not be able to participate without financial support. %%% The Electrodeposition Gordon Research Conference (GRC) is relatively new, having started in . It grew out of the Read Conference, one of the primary scientific forums for the electrodeposition community since the early 50 s. Electrodeposition is becoming accepted as a standard thin film synthesis methodology in new areas. A clear example is the adoption of electrodeposition by the electronics industries to form Cu interconnects in VLSI. In addition, it is gaining importance in the formation of magnetic materials, alloys, and the formation of micromachined parts. New areas where it may play a roll include nanofabrication and the formation of compound semiconductor thin films doc1949 none abstract The investigator and his colleagues study small rank vector bundles on projective spaces. New and simplified constructions are obtained both in finite and in zero characteristics. In the case of rank two bundles, these constructions on projective four space are valid only in positive characteristics. The investigator and his colleagues work on the question of extending these constructions to characteristic zero. This is related to the deformation theory of these bundles. They investigate whether these bundles can be deformed from positive to zero characteristic. The deformation theory of such bundles also has applications to questions regarding degenerating sums of line bundles and the existence of exotic components of the Hilbert scheme. The investigator and his colleagues give explicit constructions of objects called vector bundles. Vector bundles are devices which encode algebraic information about huge numbers of geometric figures like curves and surfaces. With their explicit knowledge of vector bundles, the investigator and his colleagues can then construct geometric figures with desired properties. The work is done using matrices which are easily implemented on computer algebra systems. Much of the work is done over finite fields which allows the use of computers to give exact answers. Problems involving geometric modeling in the real world require approximating the answers, one method being the use of such finite fields. The project studies the interplay between geometric objects existing in the real world (over fields of characteristic zero) and their approximations over finite fields doc1950 none The goal of the research is to identify process-structure-property relationships and conduct process planning in order to permit efficient operation of the newly developed laser-jet chemical vapor deposition (LCVD) rapid prototyping (RP) system and demonstrate the usefulness of this system by fabricating advanced electronic devices and structural materials. The LCVD-RP system, which began operation in August , was specifically designed by this research team to permit rapid prototyping and manufacture of complex shaped, 3-D, composite electronic photonic devices and structural material components. Visualize a laser and gas jet positioned above a substrate whose movement is computer-controlled. At any instant, the laser heats a spot on the substrate, which is simultaneously flooded by a localized jet of CVD reagent gases. Only the spot heated by the laser becomes coated as a result of the thermally activated CVD reaction. The combination of laser CVD with gas jets offers significant advantages in terms of facilitating the deposition of multiple materials, maximizing deposition rate, and conserving reagent. Prior research has focused on producing simple structures such as fiber arrays and solenoids because the process control utilized was not sophisticated. The LCVD-RP system utilizes hardware, computer control, and on-line dimensional equipment that will permit growth of intricate, useful composite devices and components. The LCVD-RP system possesses the following novel features: (1) three modes of operation, two of which utilize a high velocity gas jet that increases the deposition rate, (2) a rotating translating stage that facilitates rapid movement of the stage relative to the laser and or gas-jet, (3) an on-line dimensional control system, and (4) on-line temperature monitoring and control. The system enables fabrication of novel devices and material microstructures that are impossible to fabricate by conventional methods. For example, the research will demonstrate the fabrication of an advanced electron beam source, and either a g-sensor or fiber-reinforced nanolaminate composite materials doc1951 none mathematical models of networks. In the modern world, the study of communication and transportation networks is becoming ever more important. In particular, many real-world networks are planar, meaning that they can be drawn on a piece of paper without any links crossing. How close a network is to being planar is related to many of its useful properties, and mathematicians study this by looking at so called embeddings of graphs on surfaces. The useful properties examined by this research include traversability (how can we travel around a network, visiting each node, in a more or less efficient way - this is the motivation for such problems as the Traveling Salesman Problem), how well a network works as a traffic network (this involves a number known as the spectral radius, which has been of interest to geographers), and connectivity (resistance to disruption by attack). Besides studying the useful properties of networks, this research also develops new tools for studying such properties. Networks drawn on a surface are easier to work with if none of the regions into which the drawing divides the surface touch themselves, and the investigators are interested in the question of whether networks can always be drawn in this nice way. The investigators are also interested in the question of whether networks drawn on a surface can be cut apart in a natural way to give networks drawn on less complicated surfaces. Both of these questions should lead to better understanding of networks drawn on surfaces, and hence to ways to examine useful properties of such networks doc1952 none The principal investigator will apply tools from arithmetic geometry to study invariants attached to the actions of finite groups on schemes. These invariants are Euler characteristics associated to different kinds of cohomology. Methods of computing these Euler characteristics will be studied, along with their connection to L-series, Arakelov theory and the theory of motives. The principal investigator will also work on two other projects. These are to complete earlier research relating capacity theory to arithmetic intersections theory, and to study the universal deformation rings of representations of finite groups and their applications to Galois theory. This proposal concerns using geometric ideas to study the solutions of systems of algebraic equations. In geometry, it is often useful to consider the symmetries of an object, which are the ways the object can be rotated or flipped back onto itself. Another geometric idea, which goes back to the mathematician Euler, is that one can attach certain numbers ( Euler characteristics ) to objects. These numbers provide a measure of complexity, and in simple cases they count various natural features, such as the number of holes in the object. The current proposal has to do with studying the symmetries of systems of equations, and how one can assign natural Euler characteristic numbers to them. The goal of this is to carry over to algebra some of the insights gained in geometry from considering symmetries and Euler characteristics. Systems of equations arise from many different mathematical applications. Euler numbers and symmetries can in many cases be used to either rule out or count the number of particular kinds of solutions to such equations doc1953 none This proposal is concerned with research on singular integrals, the theory of weights, with applications to linear elliptic partial differential equations of second and of higher order. There are three main areas of current focus. First, we study the elliptic measure associated to a second order elliptic operator - both divergence and nondivergence form. Second, we are studying the boundary values of solutions to certain higher order elliptic operators in non-smooth domains. The third part of this proposal concerns the maximal functions and singular integrals associated to certain product domains - such operators involve nonisotropic dilations and results require a study of the geometry of families of rectangles arising from this dilation structure. In the middle of this century, revolutionary ideas in analysis were being forged on two fronts: the theory of singular integrals in harmonic analysis (the Calderon-Zygmund school of analysis) and the theory of elliptic equations (Di Giorgi, J. Nash). Each of these subjects has provided fascinating applications - the first in such areas as applied harmonic analysis wavelets Fourier analysis, and the second in the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations, of tremendous value in applications. But at the beginning of these studies, and for a period of twenty or so years, the development of each of these subjects proceeded independently, and with little interaction. However, since the early s, the connections between these areas have been increasingly exploited and understood, to the great benefit of the fields of harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. This proposer s research is in this field of harmonic analysis, with an emphasis on its connection to and inspiration from partial differential equations doc1949 none abstract The investigator and his colleagues study small rank vector bundles on projective spaces. New and simplified constructions are obtained both in finite and in zero characteristics. In the case of rank two bundles, these constructions on projective four space are valid only in positive characteristics. The investigator and his colleagues work on the question of extending these constructions to characteristic zero. This is related to the deformation theory of these bundles. They investigate whether these bundles can be deformed from positive to zero characteristic. The deformation theory of such bundles also has applications to questions regarding degenerating sums of line bundles and the existence of exotic components of the Hilbert scheme. The investigator and his colleagues give explicit constructions of objects called vector bundles. Vector bundles are devices which encode algebraic information about huge numbers of geometric figures like curves and surfaces. With their explicit knowledge of vector bundles, the investigator and his colleagues can then construct geometric figures with desired properties. The work is done using matrices which are easily implemented on computer algebra systems. Much of the work is done over finite fields which allows the use of computers to give exact answers. Problems involving geometric modeling in the real world require approximating the answers, one method being the use of such finite fields. The project studies the interplay between geometric objects existing in the real world (over fields of characteristic zero) and their approximations over finite fields doc1955 none Research in theoretical elementary particle physics will include analyses of Quantum ChromoDynamics (QCD - the strong force which binds quarks and gluons to form ordinary protons and neutrons), possible top quark and Higgs boson signals at future colliders, studies of the interactions between photons and neutrinos in situations of astrophysical interest, and the role of gravity in particle physics. The detailed interactions of QCD are very complex. Therefore, in order to gain insight into this theory it is essential to study its effects in specific processes. New techniques will be used to investigate the production of heavy quarks at colliders over a range of energy scales and also to study the QCD scattering of particles at very high energies. In addition, the effects of QCD on the production and analyses of top quarks and Higgs bosons at colliders will be investigated. The number of Higgs bosons as well as their masses and charges must be determined in order to fully understand the origin of mass and the underlying symmetry of elementary particle theory. Photon-neutrino interactions are only appreciable under extreme conditions such as those found in the early universe or in compact astrophysical objects. Understanding these interactions may alter our view of the relic neutrino sea or the way in which heavy objects lose energy. Ordinary gravity is too weak to affect elementary particle interactions, but recent developments in string theory suggest that some gravitational effects could be observable in high energy collisions doc1956 none Yoo The PI proposes to investigate a wavelength interchanging cross-connect geared towards applications in the Next Generation Networks. In particular, he will pursue a parametric wavelength interchanging cross-connect incorporating difference-frequency wavelength converters with integrated pump sources. The resulting wavelength interchanging cross-connect has the following unique properties: accommodates signals of any protocol and format, crossconnects subcarrier multiplexed optical header and baseband data payload, offers scalability of Benes architecture, utilizes multichannel wavelength conversion for reduced architecture, achieves polarization insensitivity and wavelength independent filtering. The proposed effort makes comprehensive studies of the Wavelength Interchanging Cross-Connect covering architecture, simulation, design, fabrication and systems integration issues. Specifically, he will pursue an integrated effort of the following research activities: 1. Wavelength Interchanging Cross-connect Architecture Studies, which will pursue a transparent and scalable architecture suited for Next Generation Network applications, 2. Wavelength Conversion Technology Studies, which will design, fabricate, and prototype wavelength converters supporting transparent multichannel wavelength conversion, and 3. Cross-connect Integration, which will bring space switches and wavelength converters together to form a wavelength interchanging cross-connect. The designed architecture and network elements will be put to test at this step and the simulation results will be experimentally verified doc1957 none The investigator will study a number of different questions concerning the arithmetic of abelian varieties and special values of L-functions. His methods will involve developing new approaches that have their origins in arithmetic Galois module theory. The topics of investigation include: Iwasawa theory of abelian varieties, elliptic units and anticyclotomic Euler systems, and Tamagawa number conjectures arising via certain L-functions. He will also study some problems concerned with equivariant algebraic geometry and the K-theory of varieties over finite fields. The research described in this proposal lies in the field of arithmetic geometry. This is a subject that blends two of the oldest branches of mathematics--number theory and geometry-- and which has blossomed to the point where it has solved problems that have stood for centuries. It finds applications in fields of science as diverse as physics, robotics, data processing and information theory doc1958 none Richter Sundberg Richter and Sundberg will continue their study of linear operators on Hilbert spaces modelled by multiplication operators on spaces of analytic functions, in both one and several variables. The study of such operators has a long history and has led to much progress in operator theory and complex analysis. For instance the unilateral shift, which is modelled by multiplication by z on the Hardy space of the unit disc, has been used to enhance our knowledge of contraction operators. Other classes of operators characterized by operator inequalities may be studied using operators modelled by multiplication by z on other Hilbert spaces of analytic functions. Such spaces have associated with them evaluation functionals called reproducing kernels, and there is an intimate connection between properties of such a kernel and properties of the multiplication operators on the corresponding space. An important classical example where this correspondence has been exploited is Nevanlinna-Pick interpolation. Recent work of several researchers has extended the applicability of the ideas behind Nevanlinna-Pick interpolation and introduced other types of inequalities on operators and reproducing kernels that seem to be very fruitful. Richter and Sundberg will investigate the connection between operator inequalities, reproducing kernels, and the structure of the lattice of invariant subspaces of multiplication operators. The proposed work involves ideas and problems from several areas of pure and applied mathematics. Operator Theory, which may be thought of as an infinite dimensional version of linear algebra, grew out of ideas used to study certain partial differential equations arising in physics in the s, and became increasingly important with the advent of Quantum Mechanics in the twentieth century. Complex Analysis is a subject with a long and distinguished history, and remains a very active and broad area of research. These two areas have had a very fruitful interaction throughout this century, owing to the fact that some interesting and useful operators can be modelled by natural operations on spaces of analytic functions. At least since the s it has been realized that a series of related results concerning certain of these operators are of importance in the study of Control Theory, an area of importance in electrical engineering and other practical applications. Among these results are the Beurling-Lax Theorem on invariant subspaces, the Nevanlinna-Pick Interpolation Theorem, and its close relative the Commutant Lifting Theorem. Work by a number of researchers since the s has shown that the circle of ideas concerned with these results are applicable to a much wider class of objects than had previously been realized. This has resulted in a much improved understanding of the underlying mathematical systems doc1959 none This proposal contains several open problems in Geometrical Functional Analysis. Furthermore it is intended to applyconcepts of Functional Analysis to solve questions in Financial Mathematics, in particularin the theory of option pricing. A long standing open question in Operator Theory asks whether or not there exist Banach spaces on which every operator has an invariant subspace. In order to solve this problem the author intends to use and to extend methods which led to the construction of spaces on which every operator is a singular perturbation of a multiple of the identity. In recent years the notion of asymptotic properties of Banach spaces and their connection to isomorphic properties gained increasing attention. Such properties are for example the recently introduced notion of uniform asymptotic convexity and uniform asymptotic smoothness. The author of this proposal intends to find sufficient and necessary isomorphic properties admitting uniform asymptotic convex and smooth renormings. In a joint work with R. Gardner and A. Koldobsky the author applied concepts of Harmonic Analysis to find connections between certain extremal properties of convex bodies and higher derivatives of their section functions. The author intends to explore this path further to get more inside on other extremal problems. A central question in Finance is to find fair prices of options contingent to an underlying security. Many results in this area rely on tools developed in Stochastic Calculus as well as Functional Analysis. The author intends to investigate the problem of robustness of option pricing, i.e. the continuous dependence of the option price on the underlying stock model. Banach spaces and their geometry are studied since they provide the natural framework for studying dynamical systems, differential equations, and, as discovered recently, the pricing of financial assets. The proposed projects deal with problems on the geometry of Banach spaces, operators between them, and applications to the mathematical understanding of finance doc1960 none Kanfer, Alaina University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign Digital Government: Social Processes and Content in Intelink On-Line Chat Data This grant will develop a proof of concept that chat server logs can map distributed knowledge content to underlying social processes. Intelink is a cross-agency office in the intelligence community which has been maintaining complete records of chat sessions for several years. For this seed grant, only a subset of records will be used and methodologies will be explored but not fully applied, including social network analysis and content clustering and visualization. Also supported will be a workshop to introduce various Federal agencies to the techniques used and the results of the work doc1961 none The PI plans to study metric spaces and convex bodies using the methods of Probability. For many problems of Convex Geometry, like finding sections of a convex body with certain nice properties or approximating a convex body by another body, having a better structure, the explicit constructions are unknown. In these cases random constructions were proved to be very effective. It is often possible to define a random section or approximation and to show that it has the desired property with high probability. This approach combined with advanced probabilistic tools, like measure concentration, led to major discoveries in Convex geometry and Functional Analysis, including Dvoretzky s Theorem and inverse Santalo Inequality. The PI intends to apply the probabilistic method to study embeddings of different metric spaces, such as groups, graphs etc., into Banach spaces. These metric spaces are often equipped with a probability measure, which has strong concentration properties. Then it is possible to obtain significant information about the embedding of such metric space into a Banach space by studying the distribution of the image of a random point. Another direction of the proposed research is related to the study of convex bodies, which are not necessary symmetric. The results obtained in the last 3 years by several researchers, including the PI, show that many properties, previously known only for convex symmetric bodies, hold without the assumption of symmetry. The PI plans to continue his work in this area with the aim of constructing a theory of general convex bodies, which would be parallel to the existing theory of convex symmetric bodies. The proposed research will provide new connections between Functional Analysis, Convex Geometry and Probability. The results on embedding graphs into Banach spaces will be useful for finding small separators of graphs. This can lead to construction of more effective algorithms in several Computer Science problems, in particular in numerical solution of partial differential equations. The non-symmetric convex sets, which are one of the main objects of the proposed research, arise naturally in a broad class of optimization problems. So, better understanding of the structure of such bodies will result in constructing more effective optimization algorithms. The stochastic processes related to a convex body are also of considerable interest for the Control Theory doc1962 none The proposed research involves the study of operators and their invariant subspaces, and some problems arising in the theory of free random variables. The problems on invariant subspaces will focus on the structure and classification results which can in special cases be inferred from the combinatorics of Young tableaux. Problems in free probability will concern the weak laws for arbitrary arrays, and the study of multiplicative stability. The finer harmonic analysis of free convolutions will also be studied. The work proposed here is mostly of a theoretical nature, and it is intended to clarify some (sometimes unexpected) connections between objects studied in different areas (such as operator theory, complex analysis, and combinatorial analysis). This kind of work does often have connections with more applied areas. The one specific applied area closely related to the operator theory is control theory and optimization where operators have indeed found rather striking applications doc1963 none A B S T R A C T of the NSF proposal Reflection Principle in Higher Dimensions: Geometric, Analytic and Algebraic Approaches Principal Investigator - Sergey Pinchuk The proposal is focused on the following problems of analytic continuation: (i) Continuation of proper holomorphic mappings between domains with real analytic boundaries; (ii) Analyticity of continuous CR mappings between real analytic manifolds; (iii) Propagation of holomorphic and CR mappings along manifolds. The existence of biholomorphic and or proper holomorphic mappings between certain domains ( or CR mappings between manifolds) imposes significant restrictions on these domains ( manifolds ) as well as on the mappings. These restrictions give rise to various, sometimes unexpected, phenomena of analytic continuation in several complex variables. The goal of the proposed research is to solve some concrete old problems and to provide a further progress in the study of analytic continuation and related areas. The main method of investigation is the reflection principle, which will be combined with other methods from analysis, geometry, algebra and differential equations. Complex analysis has been used as a powerful tool in mathematics and its applications for a long time and has a tendency to a larger role in certain areas. For example, the famous edge of the wedge theorem, which is now one of the main ingredients of the reflection principle, was discovered by a physicist N. Bogolyubov with respect to his research in quantum field theory. Another important object in theoretical physics - the Heisenberg group - is closely connected with the group of holomorphic automorphisms of the unit ball in the 2-dimensional complex space. I believe that this research program will be useful not only for complex analysis but also for the strengthening its ties with other areas of mathematics and sciences by means of potential applications. It will also influence mathematical education at Indiana University via involvement of graduate students doc1964 none Sensing actions, which when executed change the state of an agent s knowledge without changing the world. are necessary when planning in the presence of incomplete knowledge about the world. The initial aim of this research is to develop a formal characterization of reasoning and planning with sensing actions. Questions to be addressed include: What kind of plans are necessary when planning with incomplete information? When is such a plan correct? What is the state-space in this case? How do we compactly represent states? How do we characterize noise in sensing? How do we specify goals? What is the complexity of planning with sensing? The answers to these questions will be used to develop planning algorithms and planners that are more tractable, and which use a sound (but not necessarily complete) reasoning about sensing actions. Another thrust of this research is to use sensing actions for diagnostic problem solving in dynamic domains. The PI will formulate the notion of a diagnosis, given a set of observations about different time points. Since a particular set of observations may lead to multiple diagnoses, the PI will develop the notion of a diagnostic plan which when executed will lead the reasoner to a unique (or a smaller set of) diagnoses. He will then study the complexity of finding a diagnosis and constructing diagnostic plans, and develop and implement corresponding algorithms for tractable subclasses. This project will lead to a theory of actions that allows sensing actions, which will allow us to: develop sound and complete planners as well as sound, but incomplete, but more tractable planners. It will extend applications such as agent control and diagnosis to the incomplete world, impacting diverse areas of computer science including the high-level control aspects of mobile robots, active databases, and program verification doc1965 none The proposer intends to study the local structure of p-adic Galois representations attached to modular forms. This study will be done via the theory of Fontaine. The results of this study are needed in order to prove formulas relating the central values of the derivatives of the anticyclotomic p-adic L-functions attached to modular forms, defined previously by the proposer and his collaborators, to global objects namely the image under the p-adic Abel-Jacobi map of the suitable Heegner cycle. Galois representations have proven to be extraordinarily powerful tools for the study of Diophantine equations and their connections with geometry. The most striking example of this power is to be seen in the recent work of Andrew Wiles, namely his proof of ``Fermat s Last Theorem . The study and understanding of Diophantine equations is essential for applications in cryptography, computer science and other areas of general interest doc1966 none This research addresses several problems in the area known as interacting particle systems, and deals primarily with the exclusion process and spin systems. The first problem involves relationships between symmetric exclusion processes and negative correlation inequalities. This would be analogous to the important known connections between positive correlations and spin systems. The second attempts to understand the way in which local changes in the dynamics of the asymmetric exclusion process can have global effects. The third problem is to determine whether (and when) adding a large amount of a symmetric exclusion interaction to an ergodic one dimensional spin system can render the combined process nonergodic. The final one is to study reversible stochastic infection models on random or inhomogeneous trees. Interacting particle systems is a branch of probability theory that studies random models for situations in which there is a large number of individuals (or particles, cars, molecules, cells, bacteria, messages in a computer network,...) that interact in various ways. Models of this type arise in many different areas of science, as indicated in the parenthetical list above. The exclusion process has been used to model particle motion, computer networks, traffic flow, and issues related to DNA-RNA. Spin systems have been used to model magnetism, spread of infection, and economic systems among others. The main issue in this area of research is to understand how the local evolution rules affect the long time global behavior of the system. This project will contribute to this understanding in a number of ways doc1967 none Researchers know very little about the tasks engineers perform, the ways in which they employ technology, how their knowledge and tasks are embodied in technology, and what skills are likely to be required in the years ahead. In this project, the role of technology in the work of modern engineers will be assessed. Using ethnographic techniques of observation and interviewing, two types of engineers will be studied: structural engineers who design buildings and electrical engineers who design computer chips. In the course of this research, what engineers do, what technologies they employ, the extent to which, and the manner in which, these technologies embody, augment, and alter engineering knowledge and tasks will be investigated. This study augments current knowledge about engineering work and will have significant implications for organizations as they consider how to manage and support their engineering workforce. In addition, the answers to these research questions will inform the education and training of engineers, as well as their broader study in the social sciences. Our results will lend insight into the design of engineering workspaces, tools, and supporting technologies. More generally, they will further add to our understanding of how technologies are employed in the workplace doc1968 none This award will provide funds to support a program of travel awards to logic students to assist them in attending the two main annual meetings of the Association for Symbolic Logic (ASL). These meetings are the ASL Annual Meeting, normally a four day meeting held during the Spring on a university campus in North America, and the ASL European Summer Meeting (Logic Colloquium), normally a week to ten day long meeting held during the Summer on a university campus in Europe. These two meetings are arguably the most important meetings in the field of logic. The ASL works to ensure that these meetings cover logic comprehensively and that they represent the highest quality work which is being done in this field. For students in logic, attendance at one or both of these ASL meetings is a necessary component of serious participation in the profession. This will permit continuation of a successful program that has been administered by the Association since and partly funded by NSF since doc1969 none The investigator studies the module theory of the algebra of invariant differential operators on a simple complex Lie algebra, in particular, he studies finite dimensional modules. He is currently considering the case of rank two Lie algebras, with success in the case of the Lie algebra of type A. The investigator and a colleague study commuting involutions on reductive algebraic groups, and the corresponding double coset spaces by the fixed groups of the involutions. We determine the structure of the double coset spaces, and their relations to quotient spaces of special kinds of split tori by appropriate Weyl groups. Symmetry groups, such as the collection of all rotations of a sphere, play a fundamental role in mathematics and physics. Understanding these groups and the ways they can act is basic to our knowledge of the physical and mathematical universes. Research on symmetry groups has been very active and productive for the last 75 years. The investigator and colleagues study these symmetry groups, related mathematical objects, and the different ways they can act and interact doc1970 none The purpose of this research in the area of theoretical particle physics is to study aspects of supersymmetry and supergravity, which are main ingredients in the description and analysis of superstring theory. Superstring theory is the major candidate theory for the study of the fundamental constituents of matter as well as the unification of all the forces between them, including gravity. The viability of superstring theory depends crucially on the existence of supersymmetry, a concept that tells us that at some fundamental level elementary particles, though superficially distinct in their properties, share an underlying identity which allows them to be considered as different facets of a single entity. By studying supersymmetric theories, of which supergravity is the one relevant for string theory, we learn how to analyze it and how to perform calculations and gain information which ultimately will allow us to confirm that with this beautiful theory we have indeed reached the goal of understanding how Nature works at the most basic level doc1971 none The investigator will try to generalize the well-known Kronecker s first limit formula to `holomorphic Eisenstein series with characters and study the tangent line of the Eisenstein series. He will then apply the results to study the central derivative of automorphic L-functions. In the second project, He, Kudla, and Rapoport will continue Kudla s fundamental work on the the central derivative of incoherent Eisenstein series. In particular, they will prove that the central derivative of certain incoherent Eisenstein series is the generating function of zero cycles on an arithmetic Shimura surface. He is also working with M. Stoll on the arithmetic nature of a very nice genus two curve in relation with the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. Finally, he is studying the exterior cube automorphic L-series of GU(3, 3) in relation with the associated Shimura variety. Number theory has been one of the most amazing subjects to study for more than two thousand years and will continue to be so. Even more so is its surprising and beautiful applications to communications and cryptography discovered during last 20 years. Automorphic forms and Eisenstein series the investigator is working on is at the heart of the modern number theory. Its advances would not only further our understanding of the deep and beautiful subject of number theory but also find its way to improve our daily life in the e-world doc1972 none The investigator will study the cohomology theory and K-theory of partial flag varieties and quiver varieties. In particular he will look for K-theory parallels of known results in cohomology. A first target is the cohomology and Grothendieck rings of a partial flag variety. Since any partial flag variety has a cell decomposition into Schubert cells, its cohomology ring has a basis consisting of the cohomology classes of Schubert varieties. Likewise the Grothendieck ring of algebraic vector bundles has a basis of structure sheaves of Schubert varieties. The investigator will study the structure constants for these rings with respect to their bases indexed by Schubert varieties. The main goal is to find explicit formula for these constants, but also positivity questions are of interest. In cohomology the structure constants are known to be positive for geometric reasons, but no combinatorial proof of this fact is known. In K-theory the investigator has conjectured that the structure constants have alternating signs, i.e. they are non-negative in even degrees and non-positive in odd degrees. Finding a proof of this would be very interesting. An additional goal is to find efficient computer algorithms for calculating these structure constants. The investigator will also try to find a formula for the K-theory class of the structure sheaf of a general quiver variety. Such a formula will generalize a formula for the cohomology class of a quiver variety, which the investigator has proved earlier with Fulton. The investigator hopes that proving such a formula will be of help for constructing an explicit resolution of the structure sheaf of a quiver variety. This would generalize classical constructions such as the Koszul complex, which is of fundamental importance in homological algebra. The development of cohomology theory was motivated in part by the problem of classifying topological spaces. This is important for addressing questions such as what is the shape of our universe? . Cohomology theory is also an important tool for solving problems in enumerative geometry, in which one seeks to determine and count all the solutions to a geometric problem. For example, if the geometric problem is to find lines which intersect or are tangent to a given collection of fixed geometric figures, then the number of such lines is desired. A very powerful technique for solving this type of problems is to construct a space consisting of all objects which could potentially be a solution. Counting the number of solutions to a problem is often equivalent to performing a calculation in the cohomology ring of this space of potential solutions. The objects to be counted can in many situations be identified with flags of subspaces in a given vector space. Flag varieties, whose points correspond to such flags of subspaces, are therefore typical candidates to act as the space of potential solutions. This makes it important to be able to do efficient computations within the cohomology ring of a flag variety, and gives the reason why the structure constants for this ring has been wanted by geometers and combinatorialists for decades. The K-theory or Grothendieck ring of a variety can be seen as a generalization of the cohomology ring. A good understanding of K-theory will therefore give a more complete picture of cohomology theory. At the same time K-theory is important for the study of vector bundles on a variety and for homological algebra. This makes it very natural to try to generalize the known results about cohomology theory to K-theory doc1973 none Evans I will continue my ongoing research in nonlinear PDE, with emphasis on these topics: (i) PDE methods for Hamiltonian dynamics: The goal here is to use the (nonsmooth) solution of the appropriate cell PDE to study Hamiltonian dynamics on the Aubry-Mather set, for problems with many degrees of freedom. (ii) Regularity for optimal Lipschitz extensions: The boundary value problem for the ``infinity-Laplacian is a highly degenerate nonlinear PDE, which is extremely interesting since it is a sort of Euler-Lagrange equation for a calculus of variations problem ``in the sup-norm . I intend to study carefully the possible regularity of weak solutions. (iii) Relaxation approximations for Hamilton-Jacobi equations: Formal asymptotics strongly suggest that perturbing a Hamilton-Jacobi PDE by a wave operator, with large enough wave speed, should in the limit produce a viscosity solution. A proof of this would dramatically extend the applicability of viscosity solution methods, to cover approximations with no maximum principle. (iv) Mass transfer problems: I continue to be interested in PDE methods for Monge-Kantorovich mass transfer problems, especially those occurring on fast time scales, coupled with slower dynamics. Partial differential equations (PDE) occur as mathematical descriptions of an extremely wide variety of physical and other phenomena, and nonlinear PDE are especially difficult, since they do not permit us to decompose complicated solutions into a superposition of simpler solutions. Many important nonlinear PDE do however have a variational structure, meaning that they correspond to a sort of optimization principle. The overall goal of the calculus of varitations is finding ways to exploit these variational principles, to help us understand the nature of solutions to the corresponding nonlinear PDE. In this project I will (mostly) continue to study several important classes of variational problems, to understand more about (i) certain nondissipative dynamical systems, (ii) optimal extension problems, (iii) wave-like approximations to dissipative phenomena, and (iv) optimal mass reallocation problems doc1974 none This project is focused on documenting the diversity of small mammals, amphibians and reptiles in the northern forests and fringing islands of Madagascar. Surveys will be made on 21 forested areas on mainland Madagascar and 108 nearby islands, in order to document the distribution and abundance of species of terrestrial vertebrates and their external parasites. This 5-year project will provide new information for about 71% of the vertebrate species of Madagascar, which is vitally needed for establishing conservation priorities for both the mainland environments and the islands. Many species of Madagascarene amphibians and reptiles are known from only a few specimens collected 50-150 years ago. Some of these lost species were rediscovered during recent surveys of the mainland, and it is likely that others still surviv in unexplored forest refugia on the mainland and fringing islands. In addition to documenting the biodiversity of terrestrial vertebrates and facilitating conservation initiatives, this project will provide vast amounts of new information about the external parasites of the sampled vertebrates. Preliminary information from our previous surveys revealed eight families of parasitic mites unknown for Madagascar and more than 400 species. This vast new realm of biodiversity information promises to have a major impact on our understanding of the historical biogeography of Madagascar s fauna doc1975 none The proposer plans to continue his work on inverse boundary problems. For the case of Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) he plans to consider the problem in which one makes electrical measurements only on part of the boundary. In EIT he also plans to consider the case of conductivities having jump type singularities as well as the identifiability problem for anisotropic conductors. Another inverse boundary problem that the proposer plans to consider is whether the geodesic distance (travel times) between points on the boundary of a domain or Riemannian manifold with boundary, satisfying certain conditions, determines uniquely the metric in the interior up to an isometry which is the identity on the boundary. The third inverse problem is the problem of Reflection Seismology. In particular the proposer plans to consider the problem of seismic migration when caustics are present and the case in which the Earth is modeled as an anisotropic elastic medium instead of an acoustic medium. Inverse boundary problems are a class of problems in which one seeks to determine the internal properties of a medium by performing measurements along the boundary of the medium. These inverse problems arise in many important physical situations, ranging from geophysics to medical imaging to the non-destructive evaluation of materials. The proposer plans to consider the case of Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT). The measurements in this case are voltage and current measurements from which one attempts to infer the internal conductivity of the medium. EIT has been proposed as a diagnostic tool in medicine since organs and tissues have quite different conductivities. Another important inverse boundary value problem arising in geophysics that the proposer plans to consider is Reflection Seismology. In this case one attempts to determine the substructure of the Earth by measuring the response at the surface produced by impulses located also on the surface. One of the main applications of this inverse problem is in locating hydrocarbons.Other potential applications are to improving ultrasound and sonar doc1976 none Walsh The purpose of the project is to develop a device which is defined by the term grating coupled oscillator (GCO) [1,2]. The GCO is a tunable source of coherent radiation that, we anticipate, can provide power for spectroscopic investigations and function as a local oscillator over the entire THz-FIR range of the spectrum (0.3-30 THz). For nearly a century the FIR spectral regime has been relatively under-exploited, largely due to the lack of tunable, coherent sources. Despite this difficulty, the importance of a broad range of scientific questions extending from biophysics and condensed matter to plasma physics and radio astronomy have motivated research in the FIR spectral region. The unique characteristics of the GCO will add a powerful new tool to the arsenal of techniques used in these investigations. The GCO is a novel adaptation of an old idea. The essential components are a very bright electron beam and a diffraction grating. Smith and Purcell [3] first described experiments with electron beams moving over a grating nearly fifty years ago. A single electron passing over a grating induces a surface current footprint which in turn produces a radiative wake. The response of the grating to the passage of the electron is coherent in the same sense that a dielectric material will respond coherently to the passage of a fast particle. A diffuse beam of electrons passing over a grating will generate a total signal that is an incoherent superposition of the contributions from each electron. In this limit, the radiated power scales only linearly with beam current and the total power produced is modest. When the beam current density exceeds a critical value, distributed feedback on the grating will cause individual electron contributions to also add coherently. The power available increases dramatically. In experiments to date, this start-oscillation threshold has been crossed at frequencies up to 1.5 THz. The GCO is superior to the other available FIR sources in several respects. First, the use of a free electron beam avoids the bulk material response which limits the spectral range of solid state devices. Second, contrary to conventional microwave tube engineering, the use of bright, low current electron beams with a suitably low loss open resonator (grating) structure surmounts all four impediments that limit the tuning range of conventional electron tubes to less than 1 THz. As early as fifty years ago [4-6], these impediments had been identified as: (1) limits set by the need for precision in fabrication, (2) thermal stability, (3) circuit losses, and (4) the rapid increase of the start current density with the operating frequency. Lastly, a complete GCO will be smaller than a briefcase, without cryogenics or intricate supporting hardware. Theoretical estimates of the GCO output power are 10 s of mW (CW) with efficiency exceeding 0.01. The operating frequency range is limited only by the quality of the electron beam. Current GCO output power and efficiency below 1 THz are 100 nW and 10-7 respectively. The proposed course of research aims to lower the start current, thereby increasing the power and operating frequency, through improved electron beam quality and grating coupling efficiency. This goal requires extensive theoretical and experimental studies to achieve the anticipated increase in radiated and resolving powers. In current experiments, a modified scanning electron microscope (SEM) generates the driving beam. This SEM system will be improved to produce a much brighter electron beam. The signal collection optics and instrumentation will be developed in order to facilitate more precise monitoring of the experimental conditions. The grating resonator design will be investigated experimentally and theoretically to reduce losses, in order to lower the start oscillation threshold, and enhance the output coupling efficiency. The theory of GCO operation will be developed further to understand the dependence of output power on current. The final goal of the project is to operate the SEM with compact dc-dc converter based high voltage supplies and a single tip field emission cathode, thus providing proof of principle operation of a miniature GCO doc1977 none This proposal is concerned with two main projects. The former focuses on various questions in sub-Riemannian geometry and in the closely connected analysis of sub-elliptic pde s and systems. The PI proposes to investigate the classification of non-negative entire solutions to non-linear equations in groups of Heisenberg type, and compute the best constants in the Folland-Stein Sobolev embedding. This program is instrumental to a possible attack of the compact CR Yamabe problem in the open case of CR manifolds of co-dimension higher than one. The geometric case of such embedding will also be investigated along with the relative isoperimetric inequalities. The PI also proposes to study the regularity of minimal surfaces, the question of traces on lower dimensinal sub-manifolds of functions having integrable horizontal derivatives. The basic boundary value problems, such as the Dirichlet and the Neumann problem will also be investigated, and a theory of variational inequalities and regularity of free boundaries will be developed. The second project is concerned with various problems in which symmetry plays an important role. One of them is concerned with the determination of the extremal functions in the Tomas-Stein restriction theorem for the Fourier transform. Other problems are connected with symmetry in the exterior obstacle problem, a conjecture of De Giorgi connected to minimal surfaces, and symmetry in the evolution of surfaces driven by mean curvature. Partial differential equations and systems formed by the latter are the basic laws which describe most natural phenomena. An understanding of the physical world also requires grasping the underlying geometric structure of the latter in its various forms. The present proposal belongs to that mainstream of research which sits at the confluence of the theory of partial differential equations and systems, both linear and non-linear, and their connections with an emerging type of geometry, called sub-Riemannian geometry. Both theories have witnessed an explosion of interest in the last decade and they continue to attract the interest of various schools of mathematicians both nationwide and abroad. Another main part of this proposal is devoted to the study of physical and mathematical problems in which symmetry plays an important role. Symmetry is present everywhere in nature, a remarkable instance being the fundamental laws of gravitation and electrostatic attraction. The study of conditions under which a given natural phenomenon develops symmetries is both important for its practical consequences (the presence of symmetries drastically reduces the human effort) and for its implications in the furthering of our knowledge doc1978 none This project studies the related areas of real and effective algebraic geometry, particularly enumerative problems, and combinatorial problems arising from enumerative algebraic geometry. A focus is the real number solutions to classical geometric problems arising from the Schubert calculus, work that is informed by substantial computer experimentation. These effective and computational techniques rely upon the combinatorics of Schubert varieties, Bruhat orders, and the cohomology rings of flag varieties, which Sottile also studies. An important part of this project is to write a book, Applicable Algebraic Geometry jointly with Jaochim Rosenthal and Alex Wang, on application-driven uses of algebraic geometry, providing a useful and motivated introduction to algebraic geometry for applied scientists. Algebraic geometry, which is the study of solutions to systems of polynomial equations, is important for its potential applications-- polynomial equations are ubiquitous in mathematics and the applied sciences. Computational and real aspects of algebraic geometry are of particular interest, as applications often demand explicit, real-number answers to mathematical questions. Techniques to obtain such explicit answers often exploit special combinatorial structures of particular problems, and hence rely upon a good understanding of these structures. This project increases the applicability of algebraic geometry by studying computational and real aspects of algebraic geometry, by deepening the understanding of related combinatorial structures, and lastly by Sottile writing an application-driven algebraic geometry text for applied scientists with Rosenthal and Wang doc1979 none Harmonic Analysis is to be enhanced with combinatorial ideas and applied to develop representations by products and quotients evaluated at the primes. Immediate aims include the complete multiplicative generation of the positive rationals by shifted primes, and the solution of a thirty year old problem of Katai concerning sums of additive functions on arithmetic progressions. An ultimate aim is the celebrated problem of Goldbach and the infinitude of twin primes. The value distribution of primitive roots is also to be studied. The project aims to develop in number theory a flexible general theory of arithmetic functions strong enough to attack certain classically difficult problems. All three of the topics to be considered directly or indirectly involve the multiplicative generation of rationals by given rationals of a restricted form. Positive results have immediate relevance to the construction of algorithms to factorise integers and to the theoretical study of encryption based upon the difficulties of factorising large numbers doc1980 none The PI intends to pursue and amplify his investigations of the relationships between spectral and fractal geometry. We plan to study the vibrations of fractal drums , both drums with fractal boundary (Laplacians on open sets with very irregular boundary) and drums with fractal membrane (Laplacians on fractals themselves). The proposed problems are closely connected to Kac s question Can one hear the shape of a drum? and to its beautiful extensions from the smooth to the fractal domain by the physicist Michael Berry. Although the proposed theory is mathematically rigorous, it is also naturally physically motivated (with, for example, applications to the scattering of waves by fractal surfaces and the study of porous media), and has recently drawn some of its impetus from the use of computer graphics. Moreover, we propose to use and extend the theory of complex dimensions of fractal strings (one-dimensional drums with fractal boundary)-recently developed extensively by the PI and Machiel van Frankenhuysen in the research monograph [La-vF2] on Fractal Geometry and Number Theory and motivated in part by the PI s earlier joint work with Carl Pomerance [LaPo] and Helmut Maier [LaMa] on (direct and) inverse spectral problems for fractal strings and the Riemann hypothesis-in order to study the fascinating oscillatory phenomena occurring in the geometry and in the spectrum of drums with fractal boundary and of drums with fractal membrane . ( Complex dimensions are defined as the poles of a suitable geometric zeta function. Further, in [La-vF], a detailed study of their structure is given, for example, in the case of self-similar fractal strings.) We plan to further develop analysis and spectral theory on fractals and on regions with fractal boundary, as well as to investigate problems of a dynamical nature , of physical significance in condensed matter and solid state physics; for example, in the study of mechanical or electrical transport in porous or in random media, as well as of heat diffusions on fractals and in disordered systems. We also intend to pursue our mathematical and computer graphics-aided study ([LaPa], [LaNRG]) of partial differential equations (PDEs)-such as the Laplace, heat and (linear or nonlinear) wave equations-on regions with fractal boundary or on fractals themselves. According to appealing experiments and interpretations by the physicist Bernard Sapoval, this work may help understand the formation of fractal structures (for example, coastlines, trees and blood vessels) in nature. In the long term, it is hoped that the tools and results developed in this project (and in the PI s earlier investigations) will help us to probe more deeply than has been so far possible the fine geometric structure of fractals and of related objects occurring in mathematics and in physics doc1981 none The objective of the cooperative research project is to apply categorical methods of modern representation theory to classification problems of linear algebra. Professors V.V. Sergeichuk (Ukraine) and R.A. Horn (Utah) will develop a universal method for reducing the problem of classifying systems of forms and linear mappings to the problem of classifying systems of linear mappings, and will apply this new method to known canonical form problems. They will also give miniversal deformations of the canonical matrices that they obtain; that is, they will find a simplest possible normal form, to which not only a given matrix, but also an arbitrary family of matrices close to it, can be reduced by means of an admissible transformation that depends smoothly on the entries of the matrix entries. Elaboration of general methods for solving classification problems of linear algebra is of great practical importance since matrix problems underlie most methods of modern computational mathematics. Students in science and engineering first meet matrix problems when they study systems of linear equations. An investigation of miniversal deformations of matrices is important for applications in which one has matrices that arise from physical measurements, which means that their entries are known only approximately. Thus, one is compelled to study the structure, not only of a given matrix, but also of all matrices close to it doc1982 none The investigator s main theme is to explore the representation theory of wild finite dimensional algebras by analyzing specific classes of representations and the homomorphisms among them with an array of methods, ranging from geometric through combinatorial to homological. Roughly, these classes can be grouped under the following headings: (1) Classes of modules having fixed sequence of radical layers and, more generally, classes of modules with fixed top and fixed vector space dimension. (2) Classes of modules forming contravariantly finite or covariantly finite subcategories within the full category of finitely generated modules. (3) Classes of infinite direct sums (mainly of generic and finitely generated modules) enjoying finiteness conditions over their endomorphism rings. A related investigation aims at the geometry of finite complexes of modules and derived categories as an alternate setting for the study of maps among representations. There are methodological interconnections among these lines, as well as strong links in terms of the overall strategy of gaining a better understanding of algebras that have wild representation type. Under a wider angle, the project should be seen in the following framework: The majority of our physical models for the universe are placed within finite dimensional vector spaces. Frequently, such spaces carry additional structure, such as a Lie or associative algebra structure, for example. Associative finite dimensional algebras are the objects of the investigator s research. One approach towards understanding them is to explore their representations, which can be thought of as linearized photographs within sets of square matrices, both coarse-grained and fine-grained pictures containing valuable information. The representation type of the considered algebra is called tame if the representations of any fixed matrix size can be subdivided into finitely many manageable series (these series themselves may be infinite), otherwise it is called wild . The wild case being the one predominantly encountered in mathematical nature, this is the case which the investigator is presently tackling. Her idea is to thoroughly understand important subclasses of the full class of representations of algebras of wild type, and to thus establish an interlinked mosaic of analyzed territory. Attention is being paid to choosing lines that optimally connect with the needs of adjacent fields (such as the theory of algebraic or quantum groups) and with the body of insights already established doc1983 none Exponential uses have many uses in mathematics. Historically, they arose in problems in number theory. More recently, they have found applications in cryptology and coding theory. The main question that arises is to find sharp upper bounds for the absolute value of an exponential sum. The standard approach, based on P. Deligne s fundamental work on the Weil conjectures, is to compute the l-adic cohomology groups associated to the exponential sum. Recently, the investigator and his collaborator computed the p-adic cohomology of some new classes of exponential sums. The calculations indicate that these classes of exponential sums should have good upper bounds. The investigator plans to search for more such classes of exponential sums and try to compute their l-adic cohomology, thus obtaining the desired upper bounds. Exponential sums originally arose in basic problems in number theory, such as trying to find the number of integer solutions to a given equation. Usually it is very difficult to find the exact number of such solutions, so the next best thing is to approximate that number. It was discovered that this question could often be reduced to the problem of estimating the size of certain sums of complex numbers, called exponential sums. A substantial theory has developed over the years to deal with this subject, and it has found modern applications in the fields of cryptology and coding theory. The investigator has discovered new classes of exponential sums which he believes it should be possible to estimate. He will try to extend the existing theory to cover these new classes doc1984 none nature, one of the first such controlled distortions (called f-bar) was brought over from genetics where it was used as a measure of evolutionary relatedness among DNA molecules. What is proposed here are a variety of applications of methods involving controlled distortion of such labeled arrays to understand such random phenomena more deeply doc1985 none The research to be conducted includes the analysis of operators associated with multilinear singular integrals and the study of discrete functions spaces. The investigations will be based on techniques related to Littlewood-Paley theory, molecular decompositions, and time-frequency analysis tools. Specific aspects proposed in the analysis of operators are to continue collaborations in the development of a multilinear counterpart of the linear Calderon-Zygmund theory, and to study various classes of multilinear pseudodifferential operators. Problems in the analysis of discrete function spaces include issues about the sampling of functions with controlled mean oscillations and the approximation of band limited signals. The proposal also contains an interdisciplinary component. In particular, theoretical problems arising in the analytic formulation of the scattering of light by structurally colored tissues of living organisms will be considered. The spectral resolution and mathematical properties of quasi-ordered geometries will be investigated. The last part of the research will be assisted by numerical computation and data visualization. Operators associated with singular integrals arise as technical tools in analysis and also as transformations encountered in the mathematical modeling of certain physical phenomena. Such transformations can be used to describe the changes in the properties of a function or the transition from the input to the output of a system. Properties of functions or signals often need to be understood from the information encoded in samples of the data. Such information can be quantified by function spaces and decoded by Fourier analysis and related time-frequency techniques. Fourier analysis is the mathematical version of a diffracting physical prism. It resolves a signal into a spectrum of waves of different amplitudes and oscillations in a similar way that a prism diffracts a ray of light into a rainbow of colors of different wavelengths. Modern decomposition techniques in analysis provide a universal language for the processing of complicated information. Progress in this area of analysis always produces important advances in scientific problems where large and complicated sets of data need to be analyzed to search for ordered patterns, reduce unnecessary information, or visualize intricate structures doc1986 none The project is to investigate the following problems in complex manifold theory. (1) Invariance of plurigenera for manifolds not of general type. (2) Fujita conjecture type problems and the sharpening of known bounds. (3) Finite generation of canonical rings for manifolds of general type. (4) Global regularity of the complex Neumann problem and nonexistence problem for Levi-flat sets with small singularities. (5) Hyperbolicity of generic high-degree hypersurfaces in the complex projective space and their complements. The investigation will use and further develop the method of multiplier ideal sheaf which has already produced very good results. Many problems in geometry and related fields, such as mathematical physics, are reduced to questions about the existence and the properties, such as regularity, of global solutions of partial differential equations. A priori estimates have for a long time been the dominant tool for globally solving partial differential equations. Such a priori estimates are usually derived from pointwise properties of the partial differential equations. In many important global geometric problems, some of which are listed above, pointwise arguments are insufficient. To solve such problems, this project uses and further develops the method of mulitplier ideal sheaf . What is to be estimated is multiplied by a multiplier before estimation so that the a priori estimates hold. The set of all such multipliers forms the multiplier ideal sheaf . Global properties of the multiplier ideal sheaf , such as closedness under certain kinds of differentiation, for certain problems force to be a multiplier the function which is identically 1, thus giving the desired global solutions of the partial differential equations. Some long outstanding problems in algebraic geometry have already been solved by this method. With further development this new method of using the multiplier ideal sheaf to solve global partial differential equations should be a very powerful tool with broad applications and deep impact doc1987 none One of the main problem in arithmetic geometry is the determination of the set of rational solutions of a system of polynomial equations with rational coefficients. One of the most successful technique in the study of such a set of solutions is to reduce the equations modulo a prime p and to study first the set of solutions of the latter system of equations. It turns out that in many situations, it is possible to describe a canonical way of reducing the equations modulo p. For instance, the canonical reduction of an abelian variety is called its Neron model, and is the object of study in Lorenzini s first research project. The canonical reduction of a curve is called its regular minimal model, and is the object of study in Lorenzini s second research project. For all but finitely many prime p, the canonical reduction is `good and, as the name suggests, such a reduction type can be better understood than the reduction at the finitely many remaining primes. Our present understanding of the information encoded in the canonical reductions that are not good (and not semistable) is far from complete. Some very difficult problems arise when studying reductions modulo small primes. One such difficulty can be stated as follows. A famous theorem due to Grothendieck and others states that there exists a finite field extension L K such that the reduction of the initial equations viewed as equations over L is either good or semistable. In other words, it is possible to improve the reduction by extending the initial field. When p is large, the extension L K is totally understood once its degree is known: it is the unique cyclic extension of that degree. When p is small and divides the degree of L K, there are infinitely many extensions of that given degree, and almost nothing is known about the specific extension L K needed to improve the reduction of the initial equations. Lorenzini s proposed research will shed more light on this and other special phenomena that arise when the reduction modulo a small prime p is not `good . For centuries, human beings have been fascinated with solving diophantine equations, named after the Greek mathematician Diophantus who lived in the third century AD. The field of diophantine equations has taken on added significance in the modern world as it finds applications in a variety of areas including, for example, encryption. A diophantine equation is a mathematical expression in several variables, say x and y. The central problem in the field is to find all possible solutions where x and y are both whole numbers or both fractions. For instance, the equation xy-10=0 has many solutions (e.g., x = y = square root of 10) but the solutions in whole positive numbers are in this case the divisors of 10, namely (x,y) = (1,10), (2,5), (5,2), and (10,1). While such an equation is very simple, a slight modification, such as replacing 10 by a very large number (for instance, one having 150 digits) renders the new equation extremely hard to solve in practice. It is this fact, that it is so hard to solve such equations, that is the key to many of the safest current military codes and data encryption systems. The complexity of the determination of all solutions in whole numbers or fractions of an equation increases with the power at which the variables appear in the equation. For instance, the equation `x to the power n plus y to the power n equals 1 was conjectured in the 17th century to have only two solutions when n is any odd number greater than 1. (Those two solutions are (x,y)=(1,0) and (x,y)= (0,1). This conjecture is called Fermat s Last Theorem and was proved only in . Since the time of the Greeks, mathematicians have developed sophisticated tools to aid in solving equations. This investigator has developed some such mathematical tools and is currently working on further contributions to this field doc1988 none for Granville s proposal. This award will support the research of the investigator and several graduate students on various topics in number theory. In the last few years the investigator, in collaboration with Soundararajan, has been revisiting the central topic of mean values of multiplicative functions, and strengthening known results as well as adding several new perspectives. In particular they have shown that such questions are in some sense equivalent to problems about integral delay equations. Granville proposes continuing this work, particularly looking at the range of values taken and to solve some thorny optimization problems. This, in turn, should give new results on known problems about values of (Dirichlet and Hasse-Weil) L-functions at 1, bounds on least mth power residues, and perhaps even distribution of zeros of L-functions. The investigator also proposes continuing his work, with Stark, on the connection between the abc-conjecture and Siegel zeros: On the one hand, looking further at Diophantine equations satisfied by modular functions; on the other hand, with Tucker, looking at whether the unproved abc-conjecture can be replaced by a weaker but feasibly provable hypothesis. The investigator, with collaborators, is looking at the finer aspects of the distribution of multiplicative functions. The functions turn up in many different areas in mathematics, physics and cryptography. The investigator recently showed how an understanding of such questions is closely related to the seemingly unrelated area of `integral delay equations which are analyzed extensively in understanding how various biological mechanisms work. Thus results and conjectures about mean values of multiplicative functions can be ``translated into results and conjectures about integral delay equations, so that the perspectives of one field can be brought to bear on the other, and vice-versa. This has already led to some new results and fresh questions in integral-delay equations, and the investigator has been asked to present his ideas in a series of lectures at a major conference in that area, to stimulate further interaction. In addition the investigator has been working with students, particularly from the Deep South, to get their PhDs, and obtain good positions in research, education, industry and government, with a training that will help them bring a fresh perspective to their future professions. This group was recently ranked tenth in the US doc1989 none The proposed research focuses on the bound state properties and transition rates of isolated atomic systems and atoms in electromagnetic fields. Some of the topics to be explored include improved approximations to wavefunctions of an atom in a laser field, calculating transition rates for atomic scattering in the presence of a laser field, threshold effects for long-range potentials and Casimir forces doc1990 none The main theme of the project is to develop the theory of fourth order equations arising from conformal geometric considerations. The first part of the project seeks to apply the fourth order equation as regularizing equations of the more natural but more difficult fully nonlinear partial differential equations in conformal geometry. The first consequence will be natural conformal criteria for the existence of a conformal metric of positive Ricci curvature. The second part of the project seeks to widen the set of conformal classes to which our theory of fourth order equations may be applied. A concrete problem would be to find saddle point solutions of the fourth order equations on a large class of four dimensional conformal structures of negative scalar curvature. The third part of the proposed project is to develop the theory of biharmonic maps in four dimension. It is proposed to develop a classification of biharmonic maps of special conformal structures. The several parts of this proposal share a common novel feature to consider a fourth order nonlinear differential equation that relates fourth order term of a scalar quantity to the scalar quantity itself. The equation came from geometric considerations for a four dimensional space that are natural from topological perspective. The project will have an impact on the development of higher order differential equations in several ways. First it will introduce new techniques to study the solutions of such equations. Secondly, it will yield new methods to solve the more traditional second order equations of geometric interest. Thirdly, the results have aleady yield application to the geometry of four dimensional space doc1991 none Research in theoretical physics will be concerned with the fundamental properties of neutrinos. There are lots of neutrinos around, for example there are estimated to be 10 billion neutrinos for every atom of `normal matter. However despite this the fundamental properties of neutrinos are poorly known. This is because neutrinos interact only weakly with `normal matter and so are difficult to study. After several decades of effort, experiments have only recently begun to reveal their properties. Many new experiments are planned, some using particle accelerators such as the one at Fermilab to send neutrinos hundreds of miles through the Earth. Calculations will be performed to clarify the implications of the present and upcoming observations. Also, calculations will be performed to find the implications of the revealed neutrino properties for the evolution of the early universe. These studies are important because how the universe formed is sensitive to the properties of neutrinos, and also because neutrino properties provide a unique insight into the fundamental nature of all particles and forces doc1992 none Kenneth H. Coale This project will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessel Pt. Sur operated by the San Jose State University Foundation, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories and dedicated to use in support of ocean science research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. This Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Kenneth H. Coale is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire a Single Side Band Radio doc1993 none This project addresses several fundamental questions in algebraic geometry and number theory. The first part concerns the geometry of solutions to algebraic equations. Let X be a variety defined over a number field K. Does there exist a finite extension L K such that X(L) is dense? One seeks criteria for when this occurs in terms of the geometry of X. It is still not clear what form such criteria should take. The second part concerns the geometry of plane curves. When is an abstract curve a degeneration of smooth plane curves? What geometric properties do such limiting plane curves have in common? The third part involves the classification of surface singularities. Given a family of projective normal surfaces, when are the invariants of such a family constant? Specifically, how does one tell whether the self-intersection of the canonical divisor is constant? The last part involves finding explicit parametrizations for the curves of a fixed small genus. Algebraic geometers study the structure of solutions to polynomial equations. From ancient times, geometric figures like circles and ellipses have fascinated architects, scientists, and artists. The most compact way to represent such a figure is to describe it as the solutions to an equation. One basic question is to classify the abstract figures that may be represented by equations of a given form. Another is to understand the common geometric properties of the solutions to all the equations of a given form. This project seeks to answer these questions for special types of curves and surfaces doc1994 none This proposal deals with various aspects of discrete Schroedinger equations on the one dimensional lattice with deterministic potentials. So far, in collaboration with Jean Bourgain and Michael Goldstein, the author has considered quasi-periodic potentials given by ergodic shifts on tori, potentials obtained by means of the skew-shift on the two torus, as well as potentials defined in terms of strongly mixing dynamics, such as the doubling map on the circle or hyperbolic automorphisms on the two torus. In each of these cases, positivity of the Lyapunov exponent, regularity of the integrated density of states, and Anderson localization were studied. At this point, we are planning to address several remaining questions, including the following ones: 1) Is the Lyapunov exponent positive in case of skew-shift potentials for small disorder ? 2) Is it possible to obtained detailed information on the nature of the eigenfunctions in the quasi-periodic case assuming only positivity of the Lyapunov exponent ? In fact, do the non perturbative techniques allow the definition of the essential support as described in the perturbative regime by Sinai and Froehlich, Spencer, Wittwer ? These questions are intimately linked with Y. G. Sinai s recent work on anomalous transport in quasi-periodic media , and would provide better and more precise information on the subdiffusive behavior of the random walk considered by Sinai. 3) Is it possible to extend the nonperturbative methods to strips, or the two-dimensional plane ? 4) Is the integrated density of states Holder continuous in the case of several frequencies or the skew-shift ? 5) What can be said about the statistics of the level-spacings of the eigen values for the case of the skew-shift ? Historically, the study of random Schroedinger operators started with Phil Anderson s work in the late s, for which he received the Nobel prize. Before his work it was believed that small random impurities in a crystal would not significantly change its conductance. Anderson, however, showed that this is not the case: Arbitrarily small random impurities occurring independently at each lattice site turn a conductor into an insulator. Since his work, which was not mathematically rigorous, the development of a precise theory of Anderson localization has been pursued by many mathematicians. It turned out that there were connections with deep results from several areas of mathematics. For example, Fuerstenberg s theorem on products of random matrices was a crucial tool in the development of the theory. These works attracted the attention of physicists, particularly experts in statistical mechanics. To this day, there is an active and fruitful exchange of ideas between mathematicians and physicists in this subject. In fact, the interest in random phenomena and methods has intensified quite notably in physics in recent years, as many important problems posed by statistical mechanics have proved to be rather deep mathematical challenges whose solution has lead to significant advances of probabilistic techniques. It is our hope that the projects set forth in this proposal will further advance our insight into the models of statistical mechanics as well as providing useful tools for mathematicians working in ergodic theory, analysis, and mathematical physics doc1995 none Ricketts This award to University of Minnesota provides shipboard technical support, shore-based support, instrument maintenance and instrument calibration for researchers using R V Blue Heron, a research vessel operated by University s Large Lakes Observatory as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The technical support awarded here will assist NSF-funded researchers conduct lacustrine studies in the Great Lakes in CY and beyond doc1996 none Chang proposes to continue her study of problems in conformal geometry involving higher order elliptic operators and systems. The main theme is to study the integrand of the Gauss-Bonnet formula on 4-manifolds via a fourth order elliptic operator with leading term the bi-Laplace operator called the Paneitz operator. Three research projects are proposed. The first one connects the study of the integrand to the study of Monge-Ampere equations. The second one is to extend her earlier work on the regularity of bi-harmonic maps to a general setting. The third one is to generalize the classical work of Cohn-Vossen and Huber relating the growth of the Gaussian curvature to the Euler characteristic from complete surfaces to complete 4-manifolds. The main motivation of the project is to study the geometric and topological structure of manifolds via analytic methods--mainly via the study of the partial differential equations satisfied by the curvature of the manifold doc1997 none Oh The proposed project mainly deals with understanding of the structure, classification and description of semisimple Lie groups as well as their discrete subgroups. We are investigating problems arising in connection with number theory and geometry. The techniques we have used involve the theories of algebraic groups, arithmetic groups, dynamical properties of flows on homogeneous spaces and infinite dimensional unitary representations. A semisimple Lie group and its lattices are special collections of symmetries of a geometric or arithmetic object. This research aims to contribute to understanding of the symmetries whose study has proven to be one of the central themes in mathematics and physics. Some of these has found remarkable applications in such fields as computer science and quantum mechanics doc1998 none Design of equipment for high-temperature thermal processes is very complex when multiple modes of heat transfer (radiation, convection and or conduction) are present. When the modes are present and coupled, the equations describing energy transfer are very nonlinear, and may be integro-differential in form. Very sophisticated programs have been developed to model such systems. These programs are expensive to run and require large memory and storage capacity . They are based on forward design; that is, the geometry and boundary conditions are specified, and the resulting temperatures and rates of heat transfer are computed. If these are unsatisfactory, then the geometry or other conditions are altered, and the program is rerun. This process is repeated until the desired outcome is reached and the design is then fixed. An inverse design method specifies the desired outcome, and directly finds the conditions necessary to achieve this outcome without iteration. However, the mathematics of inverse techniques is less developed than is the case for forward problems, because the equations describing inverse design are ill-behaved (near-singular). Based on successful methods we have previously applied to inverse design of radiating systems, we propose to extend inverse design techniques to the much more complex case of multimode heat transfer with significant radiative transfer including combustion sources, where the mathematics becomes not only inverse, but non-linear. The results, if successful, will lead to much more efficient practical design of high-temperature equipment such as turbine engines and industrial utility furnaces and boilers doc1999 none This proposal deals with problems concerning the isomorphic structure of classical Banach spaces and their quantized analogues, operator spaces. The problems to be studied lie in the following four areas: I. The complementation problem for ideals in C algebras. II. Certain extension properties for separable operator spaces. III. The structure of complemented subspaces of nuclear C -algebras. IV. The structure of non-commutative L^p-spaces. Specific problems include the following: Area I: Let J be an ideal (closed, 2-sided) in a C -algebra A with A J separable. Is J Banach complemented in A? An important special case is where J = K, the ideal of compact operators on separable infinite-dimensional Hilbert space; this is related to the uniform approximation property in classical Banach space theory. Area II: Does every separable operator space X with the CSCP completely embed in K? X is said to have the CSCP if it is locally reflexive and completely complemented in every separable locally reflexive superspace. Area III: Is every complemented subspace of a separable nuclear C -algebra completely isomorphic to a nuclear operator space? Is the converse true? Area IV: Let N be a von Neumann algebra and X be a subspace (infinite- dimensional, linear, and closed) of the predual of N. Does l^p embed in X for some 1 or = p or = 2? If M is another von Neumann algebra, and the preduals of M and N are Banach isomorphic, do M and N have the same type? The study of operator spaces involves mathematics underlying the foundation of quantum mechanics. Important quantized Banach spaces include C -algebras such as the Fermion algebra and the algebra of compact operators on Hilbert space, and the preduals of von Neumann algebras, i.e., non-commutative L^1-spaces. The problems concerning the structure of these spaces will be approached from the perspective of classical Banach space theory. This approach has already had considerable success, yielding basic properties of the space of compact operators, and the Banach distinction between the preduals of finite and infinite von Neumann algebras doc2000 none This award, to Dr. Georges A. Guiochon and his group at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, is supported in the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program. The research conducts studies to better understand nonideal, nonlinear chromatography. The project concentrates on developing predictive models for preparative chromatography and confirming them by experimental studies. The research builds upon and extends previous work by Dr. Guiochon and his group on fundamental properties such as thermodynamics and kinetics. Techniques that are improved as a result of this project include overloaded elution, gradient elution, and simulated moving bed separations. This research emphasizes separation of pairs of enantiomers and protein mixtures. These types of separations are of critical importance in preparation of pharmaceuticals and certain food products doc2001 none The investigator proposes a program of research in axiomatic set theory. The program involves looking at a number of different questions, all of which involve combinatorial set theory and are related to large cardinals and forcing; among the areas to be studied are mutual stationarity, identity crises for large cardinals, and combinatorial principles. The techniques to be used include Radin forcing, iterated forcing and PCF theory. Combinatorial set theory is a discipline whose goal is to take familiar ideas about finite sets (such as counting, ordering and permuting) and extend them to the context of infinite sets. The theory is highly developed and has found applications in several mathematical areas where infinite sets are used, including topology and analysis. Progress on the problems which are proposed by the investigator should increase our understanding of infinite sets, and help forge tools which will be useful to set theorists and workers in other areas doc2002 none The relation between representation theory of certain infinite-dimensional Lie algebras such as affine LIe algebras, Virasoro algebra, etc. and 2-dimensional conformal field theory was actively developed in the past 20 years. It has led to unprecedented synthesis of different areas of mathematics and mathematical physics that include integrable Hamiltonian systems, theory of Riemann surfaces and vector bundles, theory of knots and three dimensional manifolds, representations of the Monster group and other sporadic groups, Brownian motion on compact groups and more general path integration, theory of modular functions, commutative systems of differential and difference equations and theory of generalized hypergeometric functions, integrable models of statistical mechanics, string theory and others. One part of the proposal contains further steps extending this relation. The author proposes an approach to q-deformation of a class of vertex operator algebras and the related problem of elliptic deformation of certain braided tensor categories. There is a strong evidence that the resulting algebraic structures will provide an algebraic foundation of 2-dimensional quantum field theory, which does not possess the conformal invariance. The main part of the proposal is dedicated to the first substantial representation theoretic approach to 4-dimensional quantum field theory. The principal investigator plans to develop the theory of vertex representations, which played the key role in 2-dimensional conformal field theory, using representation theory of families of finite groups called wreath products and associated quadratic algebras. In this algebraic approach, which has also a deep geometric counterpart, various structures of vertex representations studied by the proposer and other mathematicians in the last 20 years can be realized as Grothendieck rings and operations between them. Since the Grothendieck rings are always tips of icebergs of the full representation categories underlying these rings, one of the main objectives is to extend this realization to a level of representation categories and functors between these categories. This is the long range goal of the present proposal. It is expected that in the same way as theory of vertex representations is an algebraic foundation of 2-dimensional conformal field theory, the new theory will provide an appropriate algebraic structure for the 4-dimensional generalization, which will lead in the next 20 years (or longer!) to a synthesis of practically all areas of pure mathematics and mathematical physics doc2003 none Novel experiments involving relative humidity-jumps (RH-jump) and carbon dioxide pressure-jumps (PCO2-jump) will be performed to investigate the structural recovery and physical aging responses of polymers subjected to rapid changes in plasticizing environment and chemical activity. The effects of PH or PCO2-jumps will be compared quantitatively to those induced by temperature-jumps. The comparisons will test the underlying hypothesis that changes in plasticizer content are quantitatively similar to changes in temperature for glass-changes in plasticizer content are quantitatively similar to changes in temperature for glass-forming systems. The classic TNM-KAHR models of aging and structural recovery will be extended to include plasticizer effects and compared quantitatively with the experimental data. Modern uses of plastics demand that they show dimensional stability and moisture resistance for both short and long time durations. Electronic, automotive and infrastructure applications demand increasingly sophisticated data and model of the impact of plasticizing molecules such as water and carbon dioxide on the performance of polymers. The proposed work may provide unique and fundamental data that tests the validity of models used to describe the mechanical and dimensional behavior of plastics in such environments doc2004 none Research will be performed on theoretical astrophysics and particle physics, focusing on physical processes that took place early in the history of the Universe. According to the Big-Bang model, the early history of the Universe was characterized by extremely high temperatures and densities. In such an environment, matter was broken down to its smallest constituents, i.e., elementary particles. In order to reconstruct the physical processes that took place during such times and to examine possible consequences observable today, we must obtain a description of how these particles interacted at high temperatures. In this research we will examine these processes, focusing on how the fields describing such particles arrived at their states of lowest energy, where they are today doc2005 none Carignan This award to Skidaway Institute of Oceanography in Savannah, Georgia provides shipboard technical support, shore-based support, instrument maintenance and instrument calibration for researchers using R V Blue Fin, a research vessel operated by University of Georgia System s Skidaway Institute of Oceanography as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The technical support awarded here will assist NSF-funded researchers conduct oceanographic studies in the waters along the southeast coast of the United States in CY and beyond doc2006 none Technical description: The project involves study certain von Neumann algebras and C -algebras using the techniques of free probability theory. Some of the problems on von Neumann algebras to be considered are the isomorphism problem for free group factors, as well as related classification problems for amalgamated free products of von Neumannn algebras and for type III von Neumann algebras arising as free products with respect to non-tracial states. Regarding C -algebras related to free products, the project is to study properties like simplicity, stable rank and pure infiniteness, and to attempt to find Voiculescu s topological entropy of certain automorphisms of them. In a different direction, the project involves the study of commutators of elements from ideals of infinite type II von Neumann algebra factors; in particular, to characterize which elements are commutators in terms of, for instance, generalized singular numbers. Non-technical description: In the mid s, Voiculescu discovered (or created, depending on your perspective), a new sort of probbility theory which is quite analogous to usual probability theory, except that the usual notion of independence is replaced by freeness, which is exhibited by certain noncommuting random variables. In fact, freeness is related to and inspired by the combinatorics of free groups, which are groups with maximal noncommutativity. In the last decade and a half, free probability has been shown to be a fundamental new theory, which touches on diverse areas of mathematics and physics, including random matrices, combinatorics and operator theory. For example, freeness provides a deep and satisfying explanation of the appearance of Wigner s semicircle law in random matrices, and has proven very useful for the further study of random matrices. The natural context for free probability theory is noncommutative von Neumann algebras and C -algebras, because the full power of spectral analysis can be brought to bear. The project is to elucidate the structure of C -algebras and von Neumann algebras related to free probability theory. Successful completion of this research will be both and application and an elucidation of free probability theory and will deepen our understanding of C -algebras and von Neumann algebras. Von Neumann algebras and C -algebras were first considered by von Neumann and, respectively, Gel fand and Naimark, in the s and s. They are natural contexts for noncommutative analogues of classical analysis, and they thus arise naturally in the mathematical theory of quantum mechanics. Moreover, noncommutative methods are increasingly being used to study classically commutative problems in mathematics --- witness the Jones polynomial used to distinguish knots, and Connes noncommutative geometric methods used to study fractals doc2007 none methods are developed and are applied to specific important classes such as quantum ruled surfaces, and blowups of non-commutative analogues of the projective plane. The positive cone of curves on these surfaces is studied, with the goal of better understanding the intersection theory and using the Picard group as an invariant. The possibility of using cyclic homology as a new invariant is also under examination. Non-commutative algebraic geometry extends the fruitful interaction of algebra and geometry that lies at the root of modern algebraic geometry. The modern origin dates from Descarte s introduction of coordinate axes, but until recently the geometric perspective on algebra has been restricted to commutative algebra. However, modern physics shows that nature behaves non-commutatively at the quantum level (Heisenberg s uncertainty priciple says that the measurement of momentum and position do not commute -that is, the order in which one measures them affects the values obtained). Other fundamental mathematical tools that appear in physics,like Lie groups and differential operators, are also non-commutative. Thus, development of non-commutative geometry is part of understanding the geometry underlying the mathematical structures of modern physics doc2008 none The project concentrates on multiple recurrence and convergence in dynamical systems with a focus on polynomial actions of abelian and nilpotent groups. The problems considered lead to diverse applications of ergodic theory to combinatorics, number theory and algebra which are inaccessible so far by conventional methods. The polynomial Szemeredi and Hales-Jewett theorems proved by the proposers in the recent years have since been extended by the proposers and their colleagues in different directions, each providing a better understanding of the phenomenon of multiple recurrence along polynomials and offering new vistas of research. The directions of study touched upon in this proposal include (but are not limited to) the deeper study of multiple recurrence for nilpotent group actions and the investigation of polynomial multiple recurrence in the framework of IP-systems. Another interesting area considered in this proposal has to do with convergence of ergodic averages naturally appearing in the theory of multiple recurrence and its applications. The results recently obtained by the proposers indicate a dichotomy between the behavior of ergodic averages depending on whether the acting groups have polynomial or exponential growth. The related conjectures formulated in the last section of the proposal are shedding new light on these questions. The theory of multiple recurrence that we focus on in this project uses the ideas from several diverse areas of mathematics and aims to advance our knowledge about the intrinsic properties of dynamical systems which are related to their long range behavior. An example of a highly nontrivial fact stemming from our investigations is the regularity of the behavior of dynamical systems along polynomial time measurements. This fact, in its turn, has strong applications to seemingly distant areas of number theory and combinatorics doc2009 none Moll The problem of integration of rational functions was considered by J. Bernoulli in the 18th century. He completed Leibniz s original attempt at a general partial fraction decomposition of the function. The main difficulty associated with this procedure is to obtain a complete factorization of the denominator. In the middle of the 19th century Hermite and Ostrogradsky developed algorithms to compute the rational part of the primitive for the function without factoring its denominator. More recently Horowitz rediscovered this method and discussed its complexity. The problem of computing the transcendental part of the primitive was finally solved by Lazard and Rioboo. This algorithm has been implemented in the current versions of the most widely used symbolic integrators such as MATLAB, Maple V and Mathematica 4.0. Modern developments in the theory of integration of rational functions have been concentrated in the development of algorithms that reduce the cost of operations, thereby extending the range of problems that can be solved using realistic amounts of machine time. In spite of the fact that the problem of integration of rational functions appears to be solved both from a theoretical and symbolic point of view, the reality is that much more work remains to be done. Among the difficulties encountered in the use of symbolic integration packages is that the performance is dependent upon the way the rational function is entered into the algorithm. The immediate goal of this project is twofold: to develop and implement an efficient and robust symbolic algorithm for the evaluation of definite integrals of rational functions; and to investigate the dynamical and geometrical properties of the rational Landen transformations. The long term goal of this project is to develop a complete solution to the problem of definite integration in finite terms. This will complement the work done by Lazard-Rioboo, Rioboo, Risch, and Trager in the case of indefinite integration. Implementation of this solution will have a profound impact on the current symbolic integrators. Many problems in physics and engineering require the exact evaluation of integrals in terms of the parameters appearing in those integrals. These integrals come up in the study of particle physics and classical mechanics. While it is not always possible to find such an expression, an efficient and robust symbolic software package should give the result in closed form, or decide whether such an expression is achievable. The goal of this project is to develop algorithms that will expand upon the capabilities of existing software packages that are widely used in industry and universities doc2010 none This is a proposal to develop general methods to study nonlinear, hyperbolic and parabolic elliptic partial differential equations. More precisely using techniques from analysis, partial differential equations and probability, the PI plans to continue his program working in the following four general areas: A. Fully nonlinear stochastic partial differential equations of first-and second- order . B. Phase Transitions. C. Turbulent reaction-diffusion equations and combustion. D. First- and second-order fully nonlinear, degenerate, elliptic and parabolic equations. Most of the partial differential equations considered in this proposal arise as models in continuum and statistical physics. These models appear in a variety of topics ranging from material sciences and phase transitions (motion of fronts, mesoscopic and macroscopic scales, homogenization), in fluid flows (turbulent reaction-diffusion and combustion), and in stochastic analysis (interacting particle systems, flows in random environments and with random velocities, and stochastic control). The qualitative analysis of these models contributes to the better understanding of the actual physical problems, and provides, in many cases, the foundation for the development of efficient numerical algorithms doc2011 none The investigator and colleagues study various objects involving the combinatorics of geometric intersections. These include the characteristic classes of oriented matroid bundles as defined by Gelfand and MacPherson, the configuration spaces of simplices first studied by Schubert and an application related to work of Sarkaria to extensions of Tverberg s theorem proposed by Kalai. Oriented matroid bundles are a combinatorial analog of vector bundles for which a classifying space is known. The cohomology of this classifying space is studied. The spaces of simplices are singular moduli spaces which arise in geometric ennumeration problems as well as in the study of generalized Schur modules. A combinatorially defined resolution of singularities is defined and its intersection properties studied. Tverberg s theorem has conjectured extensions by Kalai involving the dimensions of the Tverberg points. The relationship to the deleted join of simplices with the symmetric group action is studied. This work relates several previously studied approaches to the intersections of geometric objects to finite mathematical problems. This will provides a better understanding of both the finite objects in question, as for instance in the third case above, and of the geometric objects, as in the second case above. These finite objects arise frequently in both computer science and physics, and further understanding the relationships to geometric objects could have an impact on these fields doc2012 none Enumerative Combinatorics and Probabilistic Method Catherine Huafei Yan PROJECT SUMMARY The Principal Investigator (PI) will study a series of interrelated problems in enumerative combinatorics and probabilistic method. In recent years deep and unexpected connections have been found between algebraic enumeration and stochastic processes, in particular in the empirical process and in Brownian motion. The primary objective of this research is to explore this connection. The starting point is the probabilistic model of branching processes. On one hand, branching processes encode various combinatorial structures such as rooted trees, parking functions, and multi-colored structures. On the other hand, random graph evolution in the \double jump can be described by branching processes with the expected family size near one. From the algebraic standpoint, the PI plans to address the combi- natorial applications in branching processes and probabilistic results in combinatorics. She will investigate the behavior of branching processes with near critical offspring distributions by applying well-developed techniques in algebraic enumeration. She will also study the asymptotic properties of certain random structures from the probability theory of branching processes. From the stochastic standpoint, the PI plans to develop stochastic models for the theory of random graphs and random generated trees via branching processes, and to relate such models to the theory of Brownian motion. The emphasis is a combinatorial under- standing of the techniques and results of stochastic processes and calculus. The PI expects to apply the model to graph enumeration, and to investigate the distributive asymptotics of random graphs and other random structures. In addition to the core research program outlined above, the PI intends to pursue three algebraic problems arising from the probabilistic method and extremal combinatorics. The first is a recurrence associated with Turan problems; the second is on discrepancy theory, and the third is on balancing vectors. The objective here is to extend our knowledge of algebraic structures on discrete systems and to develop new approaches in combinatorics doc2013 none This proposal concerns several interrelated areas of mathematics: self-affine tiles and reptiles, refinable functions and wavelets, spectral sets, and mathematical quasicrystals. Although the subjects may appear to be rather distant from each other, the proposal actually has a very coherent central theme, which is self-similarity and tiling, and using analytical techniques to study them. The theme occurs naturally in self-affine tiles and reptiles, and in the branch of quasicrystal questions the PI proposes here. It occurs, although less obviously, in refinable functions and in spectral sets. The refinement equation satisfied by a refinable function is a generalized self-similarity, and it is closely related to self-affine tiles and self-similar measures. Spectral sets, on the other hand, are closely tied with tiling, as it is conjectured that a set is a spectral set if and only if it tiles by translation. A self-similar tile is one that can be disected into several pieces such that all pieces are identical in shape and are similar to the original tile. The simplest example of such a tile is the square, which can be disected into 4 identical squares half in dimension of the original square. By repeated inflation and disecting of a self-similar tile we can cover a larger and larger area, and this results a self-similar tiling. Self-similar tilings are fascinating, and many of the aperiodic tiles discovered in recent years, such as the Penrose aperiodic tiles, can be viewed as generalized self-similar tiles. Furthermore, self-similar tilings have been linked to quasicrystals, materials whose atomic structures are aperiodic rather than the usual periodic structures. It is not clear how these types of atomic structure are formed, but models have been conceived by physicists using aperiodic tiles doc2014 none This project is to try to obtain a better understanding of the structure of bounded linear operators acting on a complex, separable, infinite dimensional Hilbert space. The principal investigator plans to continue her research on the theory of commutant lifting theorem, including the numerical aspect and the generalization to the multioperator setting. At the same time, the principal investigator will continue her research on sums of eigenvalues of self-adjoint operators, and its connections with intersection theory in algebraic geometry, Young tableaux, and representation theory. This project is to try to obtain a better understanding of the theory of linear operators acting on Hilbert space (``operator theory ). There are two main research areas that this proposal will focus on. One is in the area of the theory of commutant lifting thorem, which has proven to be useful in control theory in engineering. The other one is on a problem about eigenvalues of sums of (self- adjoint) operators. This problem originated in a celebrated paper of Weyl in while he was studying partial differential equations. Only recently that there was a significant break through and the solution depends on some very deep theorems in algebraic geometry. It is our hope that this project will bring some insight into the problem from the operator theory point of view. Furthermore we want to extend the existing theory to a setting that can be applied to quantum physics doc2015 none This research is devoted to problems in mathematical analysis arising from questions in physics. There are six main areas: (1) The ultraviolet problem in quantum electrodynamics, (2) analysis of the precise rate of approach to equilibrium on models of Kac type for kinetic theory, (3) problems of interface motion arising from phase separation problems in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, (4) sharp Lieb-Thirring inequalities, and (5) the search for patterns in minimizers of simple energy functionals. Our proposed research into these various problems in each case centers on a strategy in which geometric and dynamical analysis of problems in the calculus of variations plays a key role. We expect, as in our past research, that this strategy will lead us to discover new results and methods in pure analysis, as well as to improve the understanding of the physical phenomena in question. This research is devoted to problems in mathematical analysis arising from questions in physics. There are five main research areas concerning a range of problems from mathematically rigorous quantum electrodynamics to hydrodynamics. Our proposed strategies for researching these topics in each case centers on a geometric and dynamical analysis of problems in the calculus of variations. We expect, as in our past research, that this strategy will lead us to discover useful new results and methods in pure mathematical analysis, as well as to improve the understanding of the physical phenomena in question doc2016 none T. Shinbrot and B.J. Glasser, Rutgers University - New Brunswick It is proposed to investigate the flow microstructure and instabilities in rapid flow of two particle streams past a splitter plate. This is a simple flow geometry where fundamental aspects can be studied, such as the type of instability, typical velocity and vorticity flow structures, the shape of the interface among streams, dimensionless numbers governing the transition, and the role of interparticle stick-slip phenomenon on instabilities. The research was triggered by observations made on a small-scale experiment where unexpected indications of Kelvin-Helmholtz type instabilities have been noticed. The main experiment is based on flow visualization of a quasi-two-dimensional flow using colored and tracer particles at the confluence of two particulate streams. The effect of particle size on various shear flow patterns, including collective behavior of particle motion in large vortices and rollers, will be experimentally determined. This exploratory research aims to establish the flow pattern in a relatively simple shear flow and to derive conclusions for the basic flow mechanisms in particle systems of various particle sizes from micron to nanosize. If successful, this proof of concept projects may have applications in mixing, in chemical and pharmaceutical processing industry, in polymer and ceramics processing doc2017 none A compact right topological semigroup is a set S which is a semigroup and a topological space and has the property that multiplication on the right by any fixed element of S is continuous. Compact right topological semigroups are guaranteed to have some well known algebraic properties, principal among which is the existence of a smallest two sided ideal which is the union of (usually infinitely many) pairwise isomorphic groups. Given an infinite semigroup S, such as the set N of positive integers under addition, the largest possible compactification of S, its Stone-Cech compactification, has a natural semigroup operation extending that of S which makes it a compact right topological semigroup. In most reasonable semigroups, including all of the (right or left) cancellative semigroups, the smallest ideal of the Stone-Cech compactification is contained in the Stone-Cech remainder. Also, one usually finds most, or all, of the idempotents of the Stone-Cech compactification lying in this remainder. The algebraic structure of the Stone-Cech remainder is the algebra at infinity of the title of this proposal. While much is known about the algebra at infinity of infinite semigroups, many fascinating and very natural questions remain open. Another reason for interest in the algebra at infinity of infinite semigroups is the significant consequences in Ramsey theory that are (usually quite easily) obtainable there. Ramsey Theory is that part of combinatorics that deals with the question of what sort of homogeneous structures one can expect to find in some one cell of a finite partition of specified sets (or sometimes in any suitably large subset). Ramsey Theory may be thought of as a generalization of one of the simplest mathematical statements, the pigeonhole principle . This principle says that if letters are being distributed among pigeonholes and there are more letters than pigeonholes, then some pigeonhole will get more than one letter. The simplest statement in Ramsey Theory says that, if six people are at a party, then either there will be some three, none of whom have met before, or there will be some three, each pair of which have met each other. In spite of (or maybe because of) the simplicity of some of its basic statements, Ramsey Theory has had widespread applications throughout many areas of mathematics: number theory, logic, algebra, and Banach space theory to name a few. The principal investigator and his students study ways to apply the algebra at infinity of semigroups to obtain new results in Ramsey Theory. They investigate the algebraic structure of the Stone-Cech compactification of discrete semigroups, deriving new understandings of this structure itself, and obtaining new applications doc2018 none Parshall This award will partially support a conference to be held at the University of Virginia, May 21-25, . The conference will focus on the interaction between infinite dimensional Lie theory in mathematics and conformal field theory in physics. There has been considerable activity in this area in the past two decades that has been enriching for both sciences. The conference will be structured around three mini-courses delivered by three international leaders in their respective areas, and complemented by additional one hour talks. This is an important area, and the conference will allow many graduate students and young investigators to gain first hand knowledge from the areas leaders doc2019 none The principal research initiative results from a theory of Hilbert spaces of entire functions produced in the postdoctoral years -- and from a related theory of Hilbert spaces of analytic functions then produced in joint work with James Rovnyak. A striking application was made in to a proof of the Bieberbach conjecture. Another research initiative results from a proof obtained in of the Stone--Weierstrass theorem. An application to the invariant subspace problem was made in by Victor Lomonosov. Existence theorems for invariant subspaces are currently pursued by methods of the Stone--Weierstrass theorem and of Hilbert--spaces of analytic functions. Hilbert spaces of entire functions are being applied to a proof of the Riemann hypothesis. The significance of the present work lies in its effective combination of two research concepts, a classical concept whose aim is to solve difficult problems, and a modern concept whose aim is to introduce innovative techniques. The test of success is measured by the successful application of new methods to old problems. The Riemann hypothesis has been a consistent aim of the present work since the doctoral thesis. A successful conclusion of this longstanding project would be a major contribution to mathematics doc2020 none Proposal Harmonic Analysis on Lie Groups and Spectral Symmetry PI: G. Olafsson, LSU Tis project deals with a variety of problems in modern analysis and science relating the interplay between geometry, symmetries in the form of group actions, and harmonic analysis on Lie groups and symmetric spaces. The program is motivated in part by questions in mathematical physics and quantum field theory involving generalized causality and reflection positivity. The proposal combines different branches of mathematics. This includes complex analysis through Hardy spaces, analytic continuation of representations, and the generalized Bargmann-Segal transform; geometry in form of symmetric spaces, duality and compactification; integral transforms and representations of Lie groups. Several parts of the program are to be done collaboratively with colleagues in the USA and Europe doc2021 none Problems of Complex Analysis Arising in Complex Dynamics The research of this proposal applies the methods of complex analysis to several problems of dynamical systems in the complex domain. The dynamics of a polynomial map of the complex plane C has been studied in depth and has produced a theory which is both a beautiful and compelling model for many systems in nature. The dynamics of polynomial mappings of two-dimensional complex space C^2 should produce a theory with equal beauty and utility. The work of this project includes three parts: 1. The first objective is to study mappings which are quasi-hyperbolic, a condition which is more general and will be more easily verified than the more traditional condition of (uniform) hyperbolicity. At the same time, the quasi-hyperbolic mappings have expansion contraction properties which makes them understandable in a way similar to hyperbolic mappings. The corresponding dynamical sets will be shown to have bounded geometry. 2. A second objective is to apply these complex methods to the study of polynomial difffeomorphisms of the real plane. This will give a new approach that will give results not easily obtained with purely real methods. 3. The third objective is to understand the nature of parameter space, the space of all mappings. A particular focus will be on the connectedness locus, which is a higher-dimensional analogue of the Mandelbrot set. In each of these cases, the methodology involves the further development of mathematical techniques from complex analysis: analytic functions and varieties, harmonic measure, pluri-potential theory, and the geometric theory of currents doc2022 none Non Abelian difference sets, Williamson-like Hadamard Matrices, integral Hecke algebras of diagram geometries and cyclotomic association schemes will be studied using and developing a representation theory of finitely based algebras over number rings. Typical problems include explicit constructions for small parameter cases that are now open, computation of the arithmetic invariants (Smith normal form) of classical incidence maps, and enumeration of fusion schemes within a classical Hecke algebra. By moving from fields to number rings this work builds a broader bridge between pure mathematics (number theory, abstract algebra) and combinatorial constructions (finite geometry, algebraic combinatorics). This work will lead to more penetrating mathematical tools to study known combinatorial objects and the possibility to better design and build combinatorial objects to meet specific spectral specifications. These kinds of ombinatorial constructions have had great value in cryptography and digital communication system design (e.g. high speed modems and digital cellular telephony). This grant also supports guest speakers at a long running regional Algebraic Combinatorics Seminar that includes and benefits faculty from The University of Wyoming, The University of Colorado at Denver and Colorado State University (http: www.math.cudenver.edu ~wcherowi algcomb.html doc2023 none The project is in the realm of Number Theory. More specifically, it is in the area of automorphic forms and representation theory. The most ambitious enterprise in automorphic forms is the Langlands program, and, especially, the issue of functorial lifting. Loosely speaking, it postulates the formation of automorphic forms on a bigger group from those on a smaller group. This bounds together some of the most outstanding open problems in Number Theory, such as the Artin s Conjecture and the Ramanujan Hypothesis. So far, the advance in the Langlands program was accomplished along three major themes which are inter-related: explicit constructions of automorphic forms (e.g. using theta-kernels or Fourier coefficients of residues of Eisenstein series), the theory of L-functions combined with converse theorems, and the trace formula in its various guises. The focus in this project is on the trace formula approach. All trace formulas have their origin in expressing the kernel function in two different ways -- geometrically and spectrally. The application to functoriality comes about when trace formulas of two different groups are compared. The project deals with analytical aspects of the spectral expansion of a trace formula for {\em symmetric spaces} (also called a relative trace formula), inaugurated by Jacquet. This is a major step in establishing functoriality in such instances as quadratic base change, and characterizing cusp forms having a non-zero period integral over certain period subgroups. The project has 3 parts and it is a collaboration with Jonathan Rogawski from UCLA (first 2 parts), and Steve Rallis and Herve Jacquet (third part). The project is a basic research in the realm of Number Theory. The more specific area is called automorphic forms and representation theory. The most ambitious enterprise in this field is the Langlands program. In a nutshell, the goal is to establish relationships between various objects which live on completely different worlds, and seemingly have little in common. Such relations are extremely deep. A spectacular and relatively recent example is a correspondence between modular forms and elliptic curves, which was a keystone in Wiles proof of Fermat s Last Theorem. Roughly speaking, an elliptic curve is a doughnut which is described as the locus of two equations of degree 3 in 4 variables. A modular form on the other hand can be thought of, in the simplest cases, as a sequence which is obtained by assigning to each integer the sum of all its divisors (or powers of them). Beside their inherent significance in many branches of mathematics, modular forms and their related objects have found applications in physics, cryptography and communication systems doc1951 none mathematical models of networks. In the modern world, the study of communication and transportation networks is becoming ever more important. In particular, many real-world networks are planar, meaning that they can be drawn on a piece of paper without any links crossing. How close a network is to being planar is related to many of its useful properties, and mathematicians study this by looking at so called embeddings of graphs on surfaces. The useful properties examined by this research include traversability (how can we travel around a network, visiting each node, in a more or less efficient way - this is the motivation for such problems as the Traveling Salesman Problem), how well a network works as a traffic network (this involves a number known as the spectral radius, which has been of interest to geographers), and connectivity (resistance to disruption by attack). Besides studying the useful properties of networks, this research also develops new tools for studying such properties. Networks drawn on a surface are easier to work with if none of the regions into which the drawing divides the surface touch themselves, and the investigators are interested in the question of whether networks can always be drawn in this nice way. The investigators are also interested in the question of whether networks drawn on a surface can be cut apart in a natural way to give networks drawn on less complicated surfaces. Both of these questions should lead to better understanding of networks drawn on surfaces, and hence to ways to examine useful properties of such networks doc2025 none The investigator will continue three projects in multiplicative number theory. The first involves extending a famous conjecture of R. L. Graham on the maximum of a gcd(a,b) over a,b lying in a finite set of integers. In turn this problem has an application to a combinatorial problem on configurations of intersecting arithmetic progressions, on which the investigator has made substantial recent progress. The second project deals with questions in comparative prime number theory , the theory of subtle inequities in the distribution of prime numbers in arithmetic progressions. The third investigation is an extension of the investigator s work on the distribution of shifted primes (sets {p+a: a prime} for fixed nonzero a) and related questions about arithmetic functions such as Euler s totient function and the sum of divisors function. This project concerns several problems in the the area of number theory, the study of mathematical problems involving whole numbers (equations, inequalities, distributions, etc). In recent years numerous applications of number theory to information theory have been discovered, such as unbreakable cryptosystems (RSA), data compression and digital data error detection (important in Internet and satellite communications). Questions about how the prime numbers are distributed form one of the central topics in number theory, and play important roles in the aforementioned applications. The investigator and his colleagues will study several questions concerning the distribution of primes. One set of problems concerns subtle inequities in the distribution of primes in different arithmetic progressions, while another set involves questions about important arithmetic functions (functions f(n) defined on the positive integers which depend on the prime factorization of n). The investigator has already made substantial progress on such questions, and further advances will contribute significantly to the theory of prime numbers doc2026 none The principal investigators propose to study quantum dots (QDs) in the group III-nitride materials system. The objectives are three-fold: 1) to improve the quality of the material by using the dot layers to decouple the active layers of structure from the substrate; 2) to produce a QD laser that has a lower threshold and is more efficient than present nitride lasers; and 3) to produce efficient nitride light emitting diodes (LEDs) that span the electromagnetic spectrum from the blue to the red and that can be made to emit white light. Both of the PIs are carrying out extensive research in the nitrides, and this project will be integral part of their programs. The activity will be largely crystal growth in nature, but work on structure and device processing and materials characterization will also be carried out. Both molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) and metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) will be used. This is one of the few projects in the world where both techniques are employed by one research group for the nitrides and will give the researchers the flexibility to choose to best method for each part of the growth process. The PIs propose to produce the dots by two novel techniques which they expect will produce more uniform dots. The first is a crystal growth technique whereby the dot layer is grown pseudomorphically on a nitride layer of smaller lattice constant at low enough temperature so that two dimensional growth occurs. The layer is then annealed to form a layer of self-assembled dots. In the second technique, the growth is stopped just below the dot-forming layer. The sample is then removed from the growth apparatus. It is patterned on a nanoscale with a uniformly spaced array of dimples or hillocks. The sample is then returned to the growth apparatus, and the growth is continued. The pattern serves as a template to form the dots and helps make them more uniform. Partial laser structures will be fabricated from samples made by both methods that will permit the determination of whether the dot size is uniform enough to produce a narrower spontaneous linewidth and, hence, a lower threshold, improved laser. Other characterization measurements, including photoluminescence, cathodoluminescence, atomic force microscopy (AFM), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) will be carried out. Single color LEDs from blue to red and white LEDs will fabricated and characterized doc2027 none This is a request for support for the 42nd Maize Genetics Meeting to be held March 18-21, at Coeur d Alene, Idaho. This meeting includes all members of the maize community and provides an opportunity for graduate students to meet and interact with senior scientists in the field of genetics and biology in a setting conducive to such interaction. The students are given the opportunity to discuss their research ideas at poster sessions and or talks and to begin to establish the scientific networks that will prove invaluable throughout their careers. The NSF has supported this meeting for all of the years that support has been requested. The reports from scientists who have attended the meetings have been uniformly enthusiastic. Moreover, all knowledgeable scientists would be expected to be attending the meeting and would therefore be in conflict. Thus, as allowed by 122.1-C3(b) in the GPG the proposal was not peer reviewed prior to this recommendation for support. It should be noted that several Programs have contributed to the overall support of this conference: Plant Genomics (DBI), Genetics (MCB), Population Biology (DEB), Developmental Biology (IBN) and Integrative Plant Biology (IBN). Support is enthusiastically recommended doc2028 none The proposed research is concerned with the investigation of certain classes of nonlinear partial differential and integral equations, and related weighted norm inequalities. A systematic use will be made of function spaces intrinsically connected with the problems involved, dyadic linear and nonlinear models, nonlinear potential theory, quasimetrics on spaces of homogeneous and nonhomogeneous type (without the doubling property), and other means of modern analysis. The main goal is to characterize completely the solvability problem (i.e., find necessary and matching sufficient conditions), and obtain sharp estimates for solutions of nonlinear elliptic and parabolic PDEs with very general coefficients at the lower order terms and data, as well as for nonlinear integral operators with general kernels. Linear problems for operators of Schrodinger type with general potentials (possibly complex valued distributions) will be considered as well. A good control of the constants involved is an essential part of this study. In particular, a special attention will be paid to best constant inequalities which appear in related problems of harmonic analysis and operator theory. Many questions considered in the proposed research are motivated by studies in mathematical physics, control theory, and stochastic processes. As a result, sharp inequalities and criteria of solvability will be found for equations and operators which describe important phenomena with linear and nonlinear sources appearing in quantum physics, fluid flow, heat transfer, and electromagnetism problems doc2029 none The project evolves around the goal of improving the applicability of general relativity (the Einstein equations and the equations of motion) to astrophysical issues, from gravitational lensing to gravitational radiation. Both these fields are currently emerging as new astrophysical tools for the study of the structure and evolution of the universe. Regarding the former, the project would focus on the theoretical aspects of gravitational lensing from a rigorously relativistic perspective. Specifically, the proposer would concentrate on the lens equation and on the distortion of images by strong gravitational fields, topics normally treated by means of approximation techniques. With respect to gravitational radiation, the project would focus on the theoretical aspects involved in the prediction of gravitational waveforms via numerical simulations. Specifically, the project looks at the evolution of the Einstein equations in normal time and in retarded time, with the aim of finding configurations of equations, gauge, initial data and boundary conditions well suited for numerical evolution. The project, in part, would concentrate on scenarios with well defined Newtonian limits as the speed of light approaches infinity doc2030 none William D. Banks This research will focus on two somewhat distinct areas of number theory. First, the investigator will continue to study the Whittaker-Fourier coefficients of metaplectic forms, with a view to seeking new arithmetical and analytical applications in number theory, such as improved average value results for L-series attached to n-th order Hecke characters, and generalizations of the Bump-Hoffstein conjectures for L-functions on GL(n). Second, the investigator and his colleagues will continue their joint research in number of areas of cryptography, including the development of efficient identification schemes, new techniques of encryption, and further results in the theory of pseudorandom functions. Automorphic forms (such as those associated to elliptic curves) play an important and central role in modern number theory, allowing the powerful tools of complex analysis to come to bear on arithmetical questions. Metaplectic forms are a natural (though more mysterious) generalization of automorphic forms whose construction intimately depends on very deep results of class field theory (in particular, the higher order reciprocity laws). While the study of metaplectic forms in still in its infancy, the results of this proposed research will prove to be very exciting. The second part of this proposal focuses on cryptography, the rapidly developing field of mathematics computer science that deals primarily with information security. The investigator and his colleagues plan to continue their work on identification schemes for use with credit smart cards, encryption algorithms, and questions related to the theory of pseudorandom functions doc2031 none for R. Boltje s NSF Proposal 1. The principal investigator is doing research in the field of representation theory of finite groups. More precisely, he works on questions related to the conjectures of Alperin, Dade, and Broue. These conjectures state that certain invariants of a finite group and a fixed prime number can be determined by the same invariants of subgroups which are again related to that prime. The first conjectures are concerned with invariants that are integers, whereas the third conjecture predicts equivalences of categories. The first two conjectures and consequences of the third have been verified for a convincing number of examples. It is likely that these three conjectures are consequences of a single feature which is still hidden behind the scene. Probably more important than solving these particular conjectures would be the discovery of this feature. The principal investigator works on general ideas of how to approach these conjectures, partially in collaboration with B. K ulshammer. A graduate student is involved in this effort by writing computer programs which will either discard or give more evidence to the applicability of one of the suggested approaches. 2. The principal investigator studies mysterious coincidences in the representation theory of groups which have been discovered about fifteen years ago but could not be explained so far. This research is not aimed at immediate applications outside mathematics. However, in the history of the interplay between mathematics and other sciences, in particular physics, it is a repeated pattern that theories and results which were considered as important within the edifice of mathematics became precisely what was needed in the other sciences in order to describe our real world. For example, group representations which have been studied a century ago became the right tool to describe particles in nuclear physics doc2032 none Differential operators on von Neumann algebras Nikolai Weaver Project Differential operators on operator algebras have been studied extensively as a model for the infinitesimal time development of a quantum-mechanical system, either isolated or interacting with a macroscopic system. The proposed research involves a study of differential operators on von Neumann algebras building on the investigator s prior work on the special case of first-order differential operators. Operators on a Hilbert space are infinite analogs of finite matrices. They have applications throughout mathematics, but the proposed research relates specifically to mathematical physics. Von Neumann algebras of operators have been used to model certain quantum mechanical systems, particularly those arising in quantum statistical mechanics. The proposal involves using ideas of Fields medalist Alain Connes to study the time-evolution of these algebras, with the double aim of clarifying the general theory and giving insight into specific examples doc2033 none Rabalais Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON) will operate the R V Pelican during as a general oceanographic research vessel in support of NSF-supported research projects. The Pelican is a 105 ft. vessel, constructed in , and owned and operated by LUMCON. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 244 operational days during , of which 56 days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The remaining cruises will support NOAA, Navy, other federal agency and private projects. The projects scheduled on the Pelican represent several oceanographic disciplines, such as biological and physical oceanography, and will fully utilize the capabilities of the vessel. Operations will take place regionally in the Gulf of Mexico. Changes in personnel in late seem to be working well. rollover funds were available as a result of scientists needing fewer number of cruise days. The major refit plan for the pelican will be postponed since funds from Louisiana State were not allocated. The refit will either take place in late or more likely . In -99 the majority of the MOSA account was spent, however no major overhaul costs are planned for . The University is instituting in indirect cost rate on TDC. The Pelican is part of a fleet of ships used by the National Science Foundation in support of marine science research. Most oceanographic projects require highly specialized equipment to be permanently installed on the vessel, thus the necessity for specialized ships. These vessels do not operate in the same mode as general cargo fishing vessels. As a result, NSF supports the operation of a variety of ships specifically dedicated to oceanographic research that are operated by universities and institutions around the country doc2034 none McCarthy Pick interpolation has, for the last 30 years, been a very successful blend of functional analysis, operator theory and function theory. The proposer intends to study it in the context of complex geometry. The more specific goals are to understand interpolating sequences in many algebras - not just the algebra of bounded analytic functions on some domain, but multiplier algebras of more general function spaces. More generally, viewing interpolation problems as questions about curvature, the proposer seeks to understand the geometry of the maximal ideal spaces. Feedback mechanisms have been used in engineering for a long time to stabilize systems. The design of such systems is difficult, not least because the system that one wants to stabilize is, in practice, not known exactly, but only approximately. Many ad hoc approaches were used, but about 20 years ago an idea surfaced that enabled the problem to be confronted directly. This was a form of control theory that allowed robust stabilization. It relied on a mathematical technique called interpolation - finding a nice function that takes certain values. The aim of the current proposal is to greatly increase the class of interpolation problems that can be solved, so that systems that must operate under two qualitatively different constraints simultaneously can be stabilized doc2035 none The principal investigator will continue his research program in the numerical solution of large systems of nonlinear equations and noisy optimization problems. In the area of nonlinear equations the PI will continue his research program on pseudo-transient continuation methods for nonlinear equations to the partial differential algebraic equation (PDAE) setting and design and analyze multilevel methods for fully iterative algorithms for parameter-dependent families of compact fixed point problems. In the area of optimization, the principal investigator will extend his work on sampling methods to problems with ``hidden constraints , i.e. constraints whose violation can only be detected by failure of the objective function to return a value, continue his development of the implicit filtering with the design of a Levenberg-Marquardt form of the algorithm, and investigate the performance of the DIRECT method both from the theoretical viewpoint and as a way to identify hidden constraints. This aspect of the PI s research involves undergraduates in a significant way. Many processes and models in engineering and science are expressed as nonlinear equations. Numerical simulation of these processes requires the rapid and accurate solution of these equations and a clear understanding of the methods and their limitations. With a high-quality simulator in hand, optimization can be used in design. The optimization problems that arise in industrial design are often noisy because of measurement or simulation error. The principal investigator will continue his work on the computational solution of nonlinear equations and optimization problems. The work will consist of study of algorithms, needed to ensure robustness and reliability of simulations, implementation on distributed memory computers, which is important for for rapid turnaround, and applying the methods in collaborations with scientists and engineers in industry, national laboratories, and academia. The work will be used in (a) environmental modeling, measurement, and remediation, (b) simulation, optimal design, and control in the aerospace industry, and in (c) optimization of gas pipeline networks doc2036 none The applicant proposes to work on several related problems in function theoretic operator theory and in Euclidean harmonic analysis. He plans to use his recent work with Arcozzi and Sawyer as a basis for the study of interpolating sequences in Besov spaces. He proposes to use phase space methods to study eigenvectors of pseudodifferential operators and as well as solutions to other extremal problems. He also plans to use his recent work with Holland on the asymptotic behavior of Bergman kernel functions as a starting point to investigate whether generalized Segal-Bargmann spaces can be used to give quantum deformations of the plane. Finally, he plans to investigate whether certain techniques that arose in recent work on higher order Hankel operators have broader application in operator theory. The work proposed will advance the understanding of the function theoretic operator theory on spaces of holomorphic functions and of operators arising in Euclidean harmonic analysis. It will also develop new viewpoints and techniques that will have general applicability in those areas. More generally, the proposed work is at the interface of operator theory, function theory, and harmonic analysis. The unifying theme of the work is the systematic use of phase space methods, both as a technical tool and, more importantly, as a unifying conceptual structure. Those tools and that viewpoint have been very productive, both historically and recently, of important new techniques in theoretical mathematics and of major new applications of mathematics to science and engineering. The recent work Lacey and Thiele on bilinear operators is an example of the first and the impact of wavelet and related methods on signal processing is a spectacular example of the second. One certainly expects that further research in these areas will continue to produce important additional contributions inside and outside of mathematics doc2037 none This proposal ties together several areas of mathematics: finite groups of Lie type, integral lattices and linear codes, and finite permutation groups. The main unifying ingredient is the representation theory. The PI continues his investigation on some problems on representation theory of finite groups of Lie type; progress on these problem will lead to important applications in the integral lattice theory and in the theory of finite primitive permutation groups. The PI proposes to determine the complex representations of a finite group of Lie type, which are irreducible modulo the defining characteristic. He also intends to classify cross-characteristic representations of finite groups of Lie type of low dimension. The PI then applies the results on these two projects to achieve significant progress on a number of applications: the Thompson-Gross problem on classifying globally irreducible lattices, the problem of finding the minimum of Euclidean integral lattices, the ``lifting problem, and the problem on maximality of certain quasi-simple subgroups of finite classical groups. The main area of research in this proposal is group theory and the representation theory of groups of Lie type. Groups in mathematics grew out of the notion of symmetry. The symmetries of an object in physics, chemistry, or mathematics, are encoded by a group, and this group carries a lot of important information about the structure of the object itself. The representation theory allows one to study groups via their action on vector spaces. It has fascinated mathematicians for a century and had many important applications in physics and chemistry. Thus, the representation theory of Lie groups played a vital role in quantum mechanics and in the theory of elementary particles. The finite analogs of Lie groups - finite groups of Lie type - and their representations have already proved valuable in coding theory and cryptography, and are expected to play an important role in the new era of computers and communications. The PI s research is and will be mostly focused on the representation theory of this important class of groups and its applications doc2038 none of the behavior of transmission of heat or electricity in materials with periodic structure such us polymers, crystals and layered media. In particular, we are interested in obtaining accurate approximations of the solutions that describe these phenomena doc2039 none Technical Description: Let G be a connected reductive p-adic group, and let L(G) be its Lie algebra. The proposal is to study the G-invariant distributions on L(G) which are Fourier transforms of invariant distributions with compactly generated support. This class of distributions includes the Fourier transforms of orbital integrals, which are important for the theory of characters on the group G. Harish-Chandra proved that these distributions are given by functions which are locally constant on the set of regular elements of L(G), and can be normalized to be locally bounded on L(G). When G is a real Lie group, the restrictions of these functions to Cartan subalgebras have simple formulas because they satisfy differential equations. In the p-adic case, there are analogous formulas for the Fourier transforms of orbital integrals restricted to Cartan subalgebras of L(G), but they are only valid for large enough sufficiently regular elements in the Cartan subalgebra. These formulas can be used to develop a theory of the constant term analogous to that for the real case. One goal of this proposal is to use these formulas at infinity to prove global bounds for the restrictions of Fourier transforms of orbital integrals to Cartan subalgebras. In order to do this it is necessary to control behavior at infinity uniformly as regular elements approach singular hyperplanes. A further goal of this proposal is to suitably generalize this work to the class of distributions obtained as Fourier transforms of invariant distributions with compactly generated support. Non-technical Description: The theory of Fourier series and Fourier transforms was developed, starting in the 18th century, to study functions of a real variable. The idea is to write an arbitrary function as a sum or integral of the well-understood trigonometric functions. This theory today has many applications in the sciences, in engineering, and in mathematics. Many of the basic ideas involved in Fourier analysis can be extended to analyze functions on any space with sufficient symmetry. One class of spaces of special interest in physics and many areas of mathematics is linear algebraic groups and their Lie algebras, the analysis on the Lie algebra being a linearization of the analysis on the group. These groups and algebras can be realized as matrices. Classically, the entries of the matrices are real or complex numbers. However there is also an interesting theory when the entries come from other fields, in particular the fields of p-adic numbers. These fields are important in number theory, and the study of p-adic groups has many applications to number theory. In the classical situation, much of the analysis involves the use of differential equations. This tool is not available in the p-adic case. The goal of this proposal is to analyze the behavior at infinity of certain important distributions on p-adic Lie algebras. The classical results are available as motivation, but the techniques of proof are necessarily completely different doc2040 none Quantization of the gravitational field remains an outstanding problem in theoretical physics. Recent developments in identifying an appropriate set of basic variables and in handling the technical problems known as first- and second-class constraints allow new methods to be used to attack this problem. These new tools will be further developed, and their application to study quantum gravity will be continued. All the basic forces of nature known at present have been successfully reconciled with quantum theory, except for the gravitational force. A successful union of gravity and quantum theory, would complete our picture regarding the fundamental properties of nature doc2041 none Working with his colleagues, the investigator will develop the formalism of Derived Deformation Theory. This theory aims to resolve in a systematic fashion many of the difficulties arising from the fact that moduli spaces in algebraic geometry related to higher dimensional varieties are typically singular. The basic idea is that the correct object to consider for a moduli problem is some ``derived moduli space which should be manifestly smooth in an appropriate sense and should carry a differential-graded structure sheaf. The usual moduli space is obtained from the derived version as the degree-zero truncation, and this explains its singular nature. In recent work, Ciocan-Fontanine and Kapranov defined and studied the ``right derived category of schemes , whose objects are differential-graded schemes, and they have constructed the derived version of Grothendieck s Quot scheme. The investigator will extend the formalism to a larger category of differential-graded stacks, and use it to construct derived versions of some other important moduli spaces in algebraic geometry (such as moduli of vector bundles, stable maps, etc.). As a first application of the theory, it is proposed to give a simpler and more general construction of the virtual fundamental classes of Behrend-Fantechi and Li-Tian. This new construction is expected to be better suited to investigate the properties of virtual fundamental classes in the case of moduli of stable maps of higher genus to a hypersurface in a Fano manifold and to understand mathematically mirror symmetry at higher genus. The project has also a part dealing with some explicit calculations of genus zero Gromov-Witten invariants of flag manifolds, and applications to mirror symmetry. This is research in the field of algebraic geometry, which is one of the oldest branches of modern mathematics. In recent years, the methods and ideas of algebraic geometry, especially the study of moduli spaces, have been employed in string theory, a very active part of theoretical physics. Developments in string theory have sparked a fruitful interaction between the two communities of researchers and have led to the discovery and study of many striking new phenomena. Mirror symmetry is one example. It is expected that a better understanding of moduli spaces in algebraic geometry will lead to more applications to string theory doc2042 none This proposal is concerned with interactions between the representations of quivers, geometry and representation theory. The investigator will study the rings of semi-invariants of quivers and the combinatorial invariants they define. Special attention will be paid to the cone of weights of such rings and its relation to representation theory. In the special case of triple flag quivers this amounts to studying the cone defined by Klyachko inequalities. The principal investigator will also study the generalized quivers associated to reductive groups and their semi-invariants as well as the products of homogeneous spaces with finitely many orbits. Quivers are just oriented graphs. Their representations provide a convenient coding scheme allowing to study classification of objects arising in various areas of mathematics. The classification of matrices by their ranks and Jordan classificaton of endomorphisms of a vector space are the simplest examples. The more complicated ones include representations of classical groups and their generalizations to infinite dimensional algebras. Studying such classification problems, and conditions under which they can be explicitly solved is central in mathematical research. The investigator and his collaborators found that new interesting results can be obtained by using methods of invariant theory which were neglected before doc2043 none The proposer will investigate connections between Galois representations and modular forms in the context of two fundamental problems in algebraic number theory. The first of these problems is to determine which Galois representations are associated to automorphic representations. The second problem is to relate special values of L-functions of varieties or motives to associated algebraic quantities (such as orders of Selmer groups). In the direction of the first problem the proposer intends to pursue extensions of his recent work on the modularity of various families of two-dimensional p-adic Galois representations. In particular, the proposer intends to explore possible extensions to representations of higher dimension. In the direction of the second problem, the proposer will investigate the influence of divisibility properties of constant terms of Eisenstein series on higher-rank groups (which often involve special values of L-functions) on congruences between the Hecke eigenvalues of these Eisenstein series and those of cusp forms. Both of these problems fall under the rubric Arithmetic Geometry, a branch of mathematics which attempts to apply sophisticated mathematics to the often easy-to-state, but-hard-to-solve problems of number theory. The problems most readily tackled by arithmetic geometry include 1) counting the number of integer solutions to systems of polynomials and 2) understanding L-functions (functions attached to systems of polynomials and which encode information about their solutions). These problems are of increasing importance in applications. Recent advances in computing, cryptography, and coding theory have depended on solutions to these problems as do many proposed advances in these areas doc2044 none This individual investigator award is to a young faculty member at Clemson University, with a sub-award to a researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic University. This project will systematically and quantitatively study the changes in local electronic structure of carbon nanotubes as a function of topological symmetry breaking and correlate it to long-range transport behavior, as well as to the modification of their interactions with their surroundings (i.e. contacts). Recently developed techniques of synthesis, manipulation, and chemical modification, will be coupled with atomic scale electronic characterization, based on scanning probe microscopies and spectroscopies, to yield a direct visualization of topological effects in low-dimensional solids. Several forms of nanotube structures, both ordered aggregate clusters and individual single walled nanotubes, will be synthesized at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute using electric arc discharge and chemical vapor deposition. The topological characterization experiments will be performed using the low temperature scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy at Clemson University. This project will provide a number of basic insights into the electronic nature of nanotubes when they become imperfect. This should be extremely useful for device applications based on nanotubes, since symmetry breaking will strongly influence the electronic properties of these low dimensional systems. Students and post-doctoral associates involved in the program will receive interdisciplinary training in physics and materials science and in some of the basic experimental tools in nanotechnology. %%% Carbon nanotubes are fascinating structures with remarkable physical properties. They are seamless cylinders of graphite sheets, with diameters in the nanometer size and large aspect ratios. The electronic structure of these objects, which can vary from metallic to semiconductor-like, depends on lattice helicity and the presence of local defects, the latter of which changes topology and composition. It is important to study the effect of defects (or more generally symmetry breaking) in these structures on their electronic properties, for applications as electronic devices. This is an individual investigator award to a young faculty member at Clemson University, with a sub-award to a researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic University. The project that will systematically and quantitatively study the changes in local electronic structure as a function of symmetry breaking and correlate it to long-range transport behavior. Several forms of nanotube structures will be fabricated using electric arc discharge and chemical vapor deposition. Low temperature scanning tunneling microscopy will be used for the characterization of these structures to quantify the effects of symmetry breaking. The project is an interdisciplinary effort between the physics department at Clemson University and the materials science and engineering department at Renssleaer Polytechnic Institute and the students and post-doctoral associates who will be trained on this project will receive training in both disciplines. In addition the students will train on the basic experimental techniques that are important in nanotechnology, which is becoming an important area in future condensed matter physics and materials science doc2045 none Zarhin The investigator and his colleagues study Hodge and Tate classes on abelian varieties of low dimension with special reference to the possibility of obtaining all these classes from divisor classes and Weil classes by means of linear algebra. They study isogeny classes of abelian varieties over number fields without principal polarizations with special reference to explicit constructions of such isogeny classes that carry only polarizations whose degree is divisible by a given positive integer. The investigator studies the endomorphism rings of hyperelliptic and trigonal jacobians. The project deals with various symmetries associated with so-called abelian integrals. These integrals and their hidden symmetries may be of help in constructing more efficient codes, as well as in writing down explicit solutions to important equations. The aim of this project is to control certain hidden symmetries when the dimension is small, and in arbitrary dimensions, to provide explicit constructions with just a few additional symmetries doc2046 none The main objective of the proposed work is to investigate the following problem. Let p be a prime. Is the center, Cp, of the division ring of p x p generic matrices stably rational over the base field? This is an old problem which has been studied extensively over several decades, in particular for its connections to important problems in other fields, such as geometric invariant theory and Brauer groups. If G is a finite group, and M is a ZG-lattice, then F(M) denotes the quotient field of the group algebra of the abelian group M written multiplicatively. Procesi and Formanek have shown that Cn is isomorphic to the fixed field under the action of Sn of F(M) for a specific ZSn-lattice M. The findings of the investigator can be briefly described as two reduction steps. Let p be a prime. First, the investigator has shown that under certain conditions induction-restriction from Sp to the normalizer N, of a p-sylow subgroup H of Sp, does not affect the stable type of the field.. Second, the investigator has proved that if we twist the Sp-action by a 1-cocycle a in Ext1SP(J(A), L ), then Cp is stably isomorphic to La(J(A))Sp, where A is the root lattice, L=F(ZG H) and, J represents induction-restriction from Sp to H. Note that now we are inducing from H which is a cyclic group of order p. The cocycle a corresponds to an element of the relative Brauer group of L over LH. The importance of this result lies in the connection, described by Saltman., between fixed fields under twisted H-actions and corresponding fixed fields under twisted Sp-actions. The above results naturally lead to the study of a-twisted actions on fields, and this is also an area the investigator will study; more precisely actions induced from subgroups. The investigator will be also working on Noether s problem which is naturally related to the above question. In particular the investigator will study its connections with monomial and a-twisted group actions and on fields. The focus of this project is to investigate the following problem. Let p be a prime number. Is the center of the division ring of p x p generic matrices stably rational over the base field? Generic matrices over a field F are n x n matrices whose entries are independent variables. This problem has been studied extensively over several decades. Its importance lies in part, in its connections to problems in many other fields such as, geometric invariant theory, representation theory of algebras, and Brauer groups. Invariant theory and representation theory are classical mathematical fields whose results are also used in applied mathematics and physics. Brauer groups are a fundamental structure in the study of central simple algebras. The importance of this problem also lies in the fact that matrices, which are rectangular arrays of elements, are an essential tool for storing data. Little is known about this problem. Positive results have been proved for the primes 2, 3,5 and 7, the first of which was found in by Sylvester doc2047 none algebraic geometry. One of the latests achievements is an algorithm for the resolution of singularities of systems of algebraic equations. The results can be applied to such practical problems as visualisation, robotics, and the coding theory. The complexity of computer codes performing these operations becomes a practically important problem. This complexity usually grows fast with the degree of polynomials. The Pfaffian theory allows one to significantly reduce the computational complexity of operations on fewnomials - polynomials of high degree with few non-zero terms. The goal of the proposed research is to combine the Pfaffian theory with the algorithmic resolution of singularities, in order to develop efficient computational procedures for fewnomial systems doc2048 none The investigator (Gross) and his colleagues (Kazhdan and Sommers) are working on an assortment of problems in number theory, representation theory, and algebraic geometry. Gross will study Fourier coefficients for modular forms on quaternionic real groups (with N. Wallach), the exceptional theta correspondences in the style of Siegel (with W.T. Gan), and various theories of modular forms modulo a prime. He will also investigate subvarieties of Shimura varieties in the middle dimension and motives with a fixed Galois group (with G. Savin). Kazhdan will work on Langlands lifting and the theory of unipotent crystals, perverse sheaves on loop spaces, and the theory of algebraic integration. Sommers will study representations arising from covers of nilpotent orbits and attempt to resolve the normality question for the closure of nilpotent orbits in a complex Lie algebra. He will also study connections with unitary representations of complex Lie groups. The proposal deals with several questions in the subfields of mathematics known as number theory, representation theory, and algebraic geometry. Many of these questions are motivated by the philosophy that algebraic information can be obtained by geometric methods. At the center of the work is the use of a symmetry group, or algebraic group, which is an object that is both algebraic and geometric in nature. These symmetry groups arise naturally in physics and chemistry. It is not too ambitious to say that the solution to the problems in this proposal will one day affect research in cryptography, theoretical physics, and quantum computing doc2049 none In broad terms, the purpose of this project is to increase our knowledge about linear operators acting on a complex, separable, infinite dimensional Hilbert space. The proposer plans to continue work that was done under prior NSF grants, using results and techniques that were obtained in the recent past by the proposer, his coauthors, and his students, to accomplish this. In particular, the proposer will work on the invariant subspace problem for various classes of operators such as the Lomonosov-amenable operators, the sub-n-normal operators, the contractions with spectral radius one, and the power bounded operators. These classes are more general than some others in which the proposer has been instrumental in the solution of the invariant subspace problem. Operators on Hilbert space may be thought of as the natural generalization of finite complex matrices, and such matrices play an important role presently in the solution of many problems in the real world such as signal processing, populationstudies, various types of optimization procedures, etc. But the natural mathematical setting in which to cast certain problems in computing, quantum physics, nuclear fuel processing, etc. is in the more general setting of operators on Hilbert space. And there is ample evidence to show that knowledge about such operators, obtained from a purely mathematical investigation, very frequently is useful in resolving real-world problems of the sort mentioned above. This project aims to increase such basic knowledge about operators doc2050 none The main goal of the proposed project is to study the strong factorization conjecture for birational morphisms: every proper birational morphism between nonsingular complex varieties can be factored as a composition of smooth blowups followed by a composition of smooth blowdowns. The conjecture follows from the more fundamental problem of making a morphism toroidal by smooth blowups. There are several approaches to solving the toroidalization problem, for example, reducing it to a problem about resolution of singularities of a differential form with logarithmic poles, or using a composition of several constructions in lower dimensions to achieve toroidalization in higher dimension. The main theme of the proposed research is to study the classification of algebraic varieties. More precisely, given two varieties that are the same generically (they are the same after removing some small subsets), can one transform one variety to another by some elementary operations? The simplest elementary operations are blowups and blowdowns of subvarieties: replacing a subvariety by another subvariety of larger (resp. smaller) dimension. The blowup-blowdown conjecture states that one can always get from the first variety to the second by blowing up several times and then blowing down doc2051 none OF THE NSF PROJECT OF SHRAWAN KUMAR Shrawan Kumar intends to continue work in the general area of Lie Theory and Geometry . He has proposed to work on five projects requiring diverse and extensive mathematical tools from Algebraic Geometry, Classical and Quantum Representation Theory, and Topology. Briefly described, these projects are as follows: In an attempt to understand the Kostka-Macdonald coefficients, Garsia and Haiman proposed a remarkable conjecture, known as the n! conjecture. This asserts that the dimension of a certain space of polynomials in 2n variables is exactly n!. The validity of the conjecture will imply that the coefficients of the Kostka-Macdonald polynomials are non-negative integers which remains an open challenging problem. The first project aims at proving this conjecture (jointly with Prof. J. Thomsen from Aarhus) by using the geometry of Hilbert schemes. The second project involves proving the non-existence of non-constant holomorphic maps between certain homogeneous compact complex manifolds. Kumar already has a precise conjecture in this direction. Lusztig has defined a certain Frobenius morphism for quantized enveloping algebras at roots of unity and also a certain splitting of this morphism defined on the positive parts of the algebras involved. On the other hand, any algebraic variety defined over a field of positive characteristic admits a Frobenius morphism. Mehta-Ramanathan introduced the concept of Frobenius splitting of such a variety and showed that the flag varieties associated to any semisimple algebraic group do admit Frobenius splitting. This leads to some important results on the geometry of flag varieties. Now Kumar-Littelmann have obtained a very precise connection between these two (quantum and geometric) notions of Frobenius morphisms and Frobenius splittings and the third project involves completing this ongoing work. The fourth project involves proving a conjecture given by Kumar himself on the cohomology of thick flag varieties associated to affine Kac-Moody groups with coefficients in homogeneous vector bundles. A direct proof of this conjecture will lead to uniform proofs of several important results related to the Moduli of Vector Bundles and Verlinde Formula. The fifth is a long continuing project which is due for completion by the end of this summer. It involves writing the book Kac-Moody Groups, their Flag Varieties and Representation Theory, to be submitted to the Graduate Texts in Mathematics series of Springer-Verlag. To explain these to a general scientific community, the main underlying theme behind Kumar s projects is to exploit symmetry or in more technical terms invariance in problems arising in mathematics and mathematical physics. Several natural phenomena exhibit symmetry, from crystals to the surface of the earth we live on (where the latter of course is invariant under any rotation). Now consider a mathematical or a physical problem, say studying the geometric properties of an object (from a cell to the universe), or solving some complex equations arising in diverse situations in mathematics and other sciences. An effective method has been to study the collection of all the symmetries of the problem under consideration (called a Group) and use the properties of the Group to shed light on the original problem. This method has been very successfully employed in a wide variety of problems leading to some pioneering works since the nineteenth century doc2052 none The project will study the mirror-symmetry conjecture in the framework of Frobenius manifolds. his conjecture has many levels, from a purely topological statement about Hodge numbers to the most advanced formulation in terms of equivalences of A-infinity categories. There is an intermediate level described by Frobenius manifolds, where the structures which are supposed to be related by this symmetry are richer than the topological picture, but also do not have the full not easily handleable categorical structure. In the physical framework there is a way to construct mirror-symmetric partners by using elementary building blocks and the two operations of tensor product and orbifolding. One of the two operations, the tensor product has been the object of previous research of R. Kaufmann and is fully understood within the theory Frobenius manifolds. The equivalent of the elementary building blocks will be a version of the miniversal unfoldings of singularities of functions with isolated critical points. The last step, however, remains to be completed; i.e. the definition of orbifolding. This amounts to studying finite group actions and defining the correct quotient in the category. In the past few years a fruitful interaction between the mathematics and physics communities has developed driven by the subject of string theory. This has for instance united algebraic geometers and physicists in looking into questions about mirror symmetry. This is a conjectural symmetry based on physical arguments, which has striking implications for algebraic and enumerative geometry doc2053 none A major goal of this proposal is to understand the role of fixed and free boundaries in rigorous nonlinear geometric optics. The central importance of boundaries is indicated, for example, by the fact that multidimensional shock and vortex sheet problems can be formulated as nonlinear hyperbolic free boundary problems. The author proposes to continue his work on geometric optics for quasilinear boundary problems and multidimensional strong shocks, and to extend it to weak shocks; to study the evolution of boundary layers in quasilinear fixed and free boundary problems, especially the role of glancing boundary layers in a new mechanism for shock instability; to construct Rayleigh waves in nonlinear elasticity as propagating elliptic boundary layers and to investigate their nonlinear (resonant) interactions with other waves. The construction of formal, asymptotic solutions to nonlinear PDEs (nonlinear geometric optics) has long been an important tool of applied mathematics. Formal solutions yield qualititive information about many complex wave phenomena such as resonance, shocks, Mach stems, and vortex sheets, and can be used to predict and explain the results of physical or numerical experiments. An important task for pure mathematicians is to rigorously justify such expansions, that is, to show that they are close to genuine exact solutions. Rigorous analysis also leads to the discovery of unexpected phenomena, such as new blow-up mechanisms, for example doc2054 none The Principal Investigators are conducting research connecting combinatorics with various topics in algebra, representation theory, and algebraic geometry. The specific areas include: the theory of total positivity; combinatorial aspects of representation theory of semisimple Lie algebras; combinatorics of Coxeter Weyl groups; and Schubert calculus. In addition, the proposers are developing free software to assist research in these areas. This research is in the general area of combinatorics, the study of discrete structures. One of the goals of combinatorics is to find efficient methods for the manipulation and enumeration of discrete collections of objects. The behavior of discrete systems is extremely important to modern communications, and is an essential part of the mathematical foundations of computer science. Combinatorial techniques are also of increasing value in older branches of mathematics such as algebra, geometry, probability and mathematical physics, since explicit computations often require a better understanding of the underlying discrete structures doc2055 none The investigator main topic is number theory. He is using Arakelov theory with a special eye on modular forms and automorphic forms. He is studying equidistribution phenomenas for sequences of algebraic points on varieties over number fields. His main result is the discreteness of the set of algebraic points of a curve of genus greater than one embedded in his Jacobian for the Neron-Tate topology. He tries to have results in the direction of the Andre-Oort conjecture concerning the possible Zariski closures of a set of points with complex multiplication in the moduli space of abelian varieties. Equidistribution of Hecke (obtained by the author and Clozel) is a step towards equidistribution of Galois orbits of points with complex multiplication. In an other direction, the investigator studies the arithmetic invariants of modular curve from the Arakelov view-point. Diophantine geometry is one of the most aesthetic subject of mathematics. Even if the questions are phrased in a very elementary way: Find all the rational or algebraic solutions of a system of polynomial equations; the solution to this type of problems requires in general the most advanced techniques of mathematics. This work explains that the set of algebraic points of a curve (which is infinite) is not very big: We can think about it as a discrete set in a natural arithmetic set doc2056 none The investigator wants to study two topics in Several Complex Variables. The first is on holomorphic embeddings. By constructing holomorphic functions,one seeks to embed complex manifolds as closed submanifolds of some complex Euclidean space of as low dimension as possible. The second is on envelopes of holomorphy. In constructions of holomorphic functions, one is faced with the restriction that sometimes they all extend past certain boundary points, for example, in higher dimensions no holomorphic function can have an isolated singularity. Isolated boundary points belong to the envelope of holomorphy.The investigator will study, more generally, envelopes of holomorphy. In particular, there is a great need for investigation of a large variety of examples. Complex analysis is a basic tool in many fields of mathematics and in other sciences. Even problems described with real numbers are often dealt with more naturally after extending into the complex domain. A foundational problem of the subject is how to construct holomorphic functions with required properties. This basic problem has motivated much of the work of the proposer in the past and is also the motivation for this proposal. For example how can one find a holomorphic function tending to infinity at a certain boundary point, or has some other singularity there doc2057 none A detailed mathematical study will be undertaken of so-called Sigma-Delta conversion schemes, which use simple and easily implementable algorithms to represent bandlimited functions by one-bit sequences; convolving such a one-bit sequence with an appropriately chosen filter leads to an approximation of the original bandlimited function. Different schemes, corresponding to different approximation orders, will be studied in detail; we expect the mathematical insights gained will lead to new variants that have better mathematical properties, and to generalizations to other settings than the approximation of bandlimited functions. Analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion, present in a wide range of applications, some familiar to all of us (e.g., CD players), others more confined to the field of scientific instrumentation, makes use of schemes that start by taking highly redundant information, and then replacing it by one-bit or few-bit sequences, from which the original information can be reconstituted with good precision. Because of the physical constraints in these conversions, the schemes used in practice have very interesting mathematical properties, quite different from the standard representation of numbers by a decimal or binary notation. It is proposed to study these properties in more detail, with the goal of proposing variants on the schemes, and to identify a wider range of applications for these conversion schemes doc2058 none It is proposed to use microlocal techniques (including Fourier integral operators with complex phase) to study the following topics in global analysis: (A) The Toda PDE, a large N limit of the Toda lattice, in the periodic and non-periodic cases. Topics to be researched include large N estimates relating Toda lattice solutions and solutions to the Toda PDE, and shock formation. (B) Spectral problems for the Laplacian, including the semi-classical asymptotics of the scattering matrix in manifolds with cylindrical ends. (C) Symplectic geometry, via generalized Szego kernels. Specifically, the asymptotics of Kodaira-type embeddings and the relationship between symplectic capacities and geometric quantization will be researched. The quantum-classical correspondence is a deep feature of Nature, admitting a variety of mathematical manifestations. In general terms, these manifestations take the form of relationships between dynamical systems (systems of ordinary differential equations) and partial differential equations, in suitable asymptotic regimes (the semi-classical limit). The proposed research will investigate some such relationships, in the general areas of completely-integrable dynamical systems, the geometry of the Laplace operator, and differential geometry. A particularly novel aspect of the proposed research is to the Toda PDE, a large N limit of the Toda lattice. The proposed research will result in a deeper understanding of certain non-linear partial differential equations, and of the geometry of phase spaces (symplectic manifolds doc2059 none Fefferman and Stein will study problems in harmonic analysis, including the decay of multilinear-operator-valued oscillatory integrals, the domination of pseudodifferential operators, ergodic theory on semisimple Lie groups, multi-parameter harmonic analysis and its applications to several complex variables, constructive methods in fluid mechanics, discrete versions of singular Radon transforms, scaling laws for mechanical systems, and applications of harmonic analysis to atoms. Harmonic analysis began with the work of Fourier in the early 19th century. Its theme is to analyze complex behavior (heat flow, vibration,...) by writing it as a sum of basic pieces behaving in the simplest way. Harmonic analysis is crucial in many parts of science and technology. Fefferman and Stein are pursuing ideas in harmonic analysis and relating them to problems in mathematics and physics doc2060 none The main goal of the proposal is to develop new analytic methods to deal with the fundamental issue of global regularity for Nonlinear Wave Equations such as Wave Maps, Yang-Mills and the Einstein Vacuum Equations. We propose two specific problems to investigate. The first concerns the critical global well-posedness for Wave Maps and the second is to establish local well posedness in $H^2$ for the Einstein Vacuum equations. Nonlinear Wave equations are at the heart of some of our basic physical theory such as General Relativity, Electrodynamics, Elasticity etc. Despite a lot of progress made throughout last century our knowledge of nonlinear waves remains rudimentary. The proposal outlines some directions in which we expect to make considerable progress. The main one concerns the Einstein field equations. It is well known that these equations can develop black holes and singularities. This fact makes it imperative to develop a theory for rough solutions for these equations. The Wave Maps equations can be viewed as a simplified model problem for the Einstein equations. We hope that a better understanding of rough solutions of these equations will help us make progress in connection to the former equations also doc2061 none A basic problem in several complex variables is to understand the interplay between the analytic and geometric natures of a domain. The principal investigator plans to address this problem by studying the d-bar-Neumann problem, invariant metrics, and automorphism groups. More specifically, the principal investigator plans to study compactness and eigenvalue spectrum of the d-bar-Neumann operator. He will investigate necessary and sufficient conditions for compactness of the d-bar-Neumann problem in geometric and potential theoretic terms. He will also study eigenvalue spectrum of the d-bar-Neumann problem by investigating, among other problems, the several complex variables analog of Mark Kac s question: ``Can one hear the shape of a drum? . In addition, the principal investigator plans to study invariant metrics, in particularly, the Bergman and Kobayashi metrics. He will consider boundary behavior and the zero set of the Bergman kernel function, as well as completeness of the Kobayashi metric. Another problem to be studied is the theory of automorphism groups and its relationship with the regularity of the d-bar-Neumann problem. Complex analysis is a key tool in many areas of sciences and engineering. For example, the Laplace transform is essential in the study of mechanical vibrations and electric circuits. The Laplace equation has important applications to hydrodynamics, electrostatics, and heat conduction. The problems under investigation in this project are not only intrinsically interesting, but also have implications in areas such as complex geometry, operator theory, potential theory, mathematical physics, and quantum mechanics. Many tools to be used in this project come from other branches of mathematics and sciences. Some problems may even rely on computer programming. The investigator will also contribute to the development of human resources by supervising a graduate student doc2062 none One of the main problems in the Differential Dynamics is the analysis of dynamical systems with non-uniform hyperbolic behaviour. In this connection D. Kosygin and I work on the construction of standard maps without KAM-islands. Another problem which is an essential part of the proposal is to study Navier-stokes equations with random forcing and to investigate properties of their stationary distributions. One of the main problems in the theory of chaos and differential dynamics is to study dynamical systems with the mixture of regular and chaotic behaviour. One part of the proposal is devoted to the study of a big class of such systems which includes the famous standard map. I am also planning to work on various problems of mathematical and statistical hydrodynamics doc2063 none This proposal is for partial funding to support an international conference on geometric and combinatorial methods in group theory and semigroup theory. The aim of the conference is to bring together several of the world s leading researchers with research interests in groups and semigroups and their connections with topology, geometry, symbolic dynamics and symbolic computation. Emphasis will be on asymptotic properties and algorithmic problems. This conference is in a field that is at the interface between group theory and semigroup theory (the mathematical study of global and local symmetry) and computation. The study of algorithmic problems in these settings is closely related to the understanding of complexity of computation . The conference will be held on the campus of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln during the period May 15 - May 19, . There will be around 20 invited one hour lectures and several contributed talks. Special efforts will be made to support participation by graduate students and post-doctoral fellows doc2064 none Melott This project has as its goal the development of a novel technique for measuring the mass density of the universe. Knowledge of the mass density (called Omega_m) is critical for understanding the fate of the universe (whether open or closed) in most contemporary cosmological models. Several methods are currently in use for measuring this very important cosmological parameter but all give slightly different results. The technique to be used in this research is completely independent of the other techniques in use. It will be based on a series of computer simulations, each using a different mass density, of the observed spatial distribution of galaxies. The results of these simulations will then be compared with the true galaxy distributions as measured in new, large-scale surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Las Campanas Redshift Survey. This new technique should provide a good, independent check on our current knowledge of the universe and its evolution. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc2065 none This collaborative project will be undertaken with Dr. Brian Mapes of CIRES and involves an investigation into the observed bimodal distribution of water vapor in the tropical upper troposphere. The principal investigators will seek to identify the origins of the bimodality and the implications for the large-scale tropical circulations. Water vapor can play a major role in the dynamics of the atmosphere, even in the driest parts of the atmosphere, through radiative effects. At the same time, moisture transported through convective clouds is a source of moisture, accompanied by latent heat release, in the upper troposphere. The impact of water vapor on the circulation differs substantially between cloudy, convective regions of the tropics and unsaturated regions. The principal investigators will pursue both observational and modeling studies. The first will include a survey on the scale, location, and time dependence of the water vapor bimodality and analysis of potential mechanisms responsible for the observed distribution. In the modeling work, both a simple mechanistic model and an atmospheric general circulation model will be used to assess the impact on the tropical circulation doc2066 none This proposal consists of two parts. The first is concerned with the study of residual intersections and linkage of ideals. The second is the investigation of the various associated blowing-up rings. The underlying theme is to explore connections between the two areas. The investigator studies the Cohen-Macaulayness of symmetric algebras, and the normality and the nature of the defining equations of Rees algebras, by utilizing the methods of residual intersections. This project in commutative algebra is motivated by closely related problems in algebraic geometry. The process of blowing-up being a fundamental tool in study of the singularities of algebraic varieties, our research of the corresponding algebraic problems will hopefully yield more insight into the geometry doc2067 none This proposal concerns questions related to intersection multiplicities and the study of divisor class groups. The intersection multiplicities studied by the investigator include Serre s multiplicity, Dutta s limit multiplicity and the Hilbert-Kunz multiplicity, all intimately related, most notably via the theory of localized Chern characters of Baum, Fulton, and MacPherson. Of particular interest are the following: the connection between characteristic p and characteristic zero situations, the possible misbehavior of Serre s multiplicity when both modules have finite projective dimension, and the question of the rigidity of Tor. Some of these projects will be joint work with Anurag Singh. The second project involves the study of how the divisor class group changes between a variety and a hypersurface inside that variety. The third project involves determining the divisor class groups of symmetric mixed ladder determinantal varieties. Commutative algebra is a crucial tool in developing the foundations of algebraic geometry. Together with number theory, these fields were in the center of the revolutionary new approaches and ways of thinking about classical problems which were eventually responsible for the modernization of much of mathematics in the middle of this last century. Noether, Krull, Weil, Grothendieck, Serre and Zariski were among those who brought about this revolution. Especially central was the modern development of intersection theory and it continues to be an especially exciting and important area of research. In the same time period, the importance of divisor class groups was realized and the connection between those of a variety and a hypersurface in the variety has been a question of interest since then. Eventually these studies lead to applications, such as the recent example of algebro-geometric codes in coding theory doc2068 none for Emerton- In this project the investigator and his collaborator intend to develop an analogue in the p-adic setting of the Riemann-Hilbert correspondence between perverse sheaves and D-modules on algebraic varieties over the complex numbers. The Hilbert correspondence generalizes De Rham theory, and establishes a deep connection between the topology of a given complex algebraic variety (as encoded in the category of perverse sheaves on the variety) and the behavior of systems of differential operators defined on the variety (which are encoded as D-modules on the variety; that is, as sheaves of modules over the sheaf of rings of differential operators on the variety). The proposed p-adic analogue would perform a similar function for varieties over the p-adic numbers. It would yield an equivalence between the (currently conjectural) category of ``crystalline perverse sheaves on such a variety, and the (again conjectural) category of weakly admissible filtered D-modules equipped with a Frobenius operator. The category of crystalline perverse sheaves is believed to carry both geometric and also arithmetic information about the variety to which it is attached, and would for example be a natural ingredient in a p-adic analogue of Beilinson s theory of regulators. This gives some hint of the important role that such a category of sheaves can be expected to play in the local analysis at p of systems of Diophantine equations. The problem of solving equations is one of the most basic in mathematics, going back at least to the mathematicians of ancient Greece, such as Diophantus. He studied the problem of solving equations in whole numbers; such equations are now known as Diophantine equations. Since the work of Descartes and Fermat, it has been understood that geometry provides a powerful tool for analyzing systems of equations, even if one is at first more interested in the equations from an arithmetic point of view. For this reason, the development of powerful geometric tools is important for progress in the theory of Diophantine equations. In this project, the investigator and his collaborator intend to develop such tools, by extending known techniques in the usual so-called archimedean geometry to the context of non-archimedean, or p-adic, geometry. This geometry, which has a strong arithmetic flavor, provides a crucial geometric setting for the analysis of Diophantine equations, and these techniques are expected to yield several new developments in that analysis. Such developments are important not only because they enrich what continues to be one of the center pieces of the mathematical tradition, but because the theory of Diophantine equations has deep interconnections with the theory of discrete processes, and especially with the theory of codes, so that progress in theory of Diophantine equations can be expected to yield progress in these fields doc2069 none This award is for the partial support of a series of conferences in the field of Dynamical Systems in the Spring of , and . The goals of the conferences are to facilitate interaction and progress in dynamical systems and related fields ... and to contribute to the training of graduate students and recent Ph.D. recipients . The strength of the group of organizers at the University of Maryland and past successes of the conferences held there suggest that the planned conferences will be successful as well. I strongly recommend the award doc2070 none In earlier work, I observed that the functional equation for L-functions attached to Maass modular forms can be derived by taking the Mellin transform of their (distribution) boundary values along the real axis, rather than the traditional way of integrating the modular forms along the imaginary axis. My method appears likely to apply also to higher rank groups which, until now, have resisted the usual arguments. I intend to extend the idea to higher rank cases. This involves a number of representation theoretic sub-problems, several of which are interesting in their own right. I also plan to continue my joint work with Vilonen, on characteristic cycles of representations of real reductive groups. Such representations are attached to constructible sheaves on the flag variety, via the Beilinson-Bernstein construction and the Riemann-Hilbert correspondence. These sheaves, in turn, have characteristic cycles which encode deep information about the representations. By studying the characteristic cycles, we intend to obtain geometric invariants of representations which clarify the meaning of unipotence, and possibly point to ways of constructing unipotent representations geometrically. The overall theme of the proposal is representation theory. Felix Klein, late in the eighteenth century, enunciated the principle that the notions of a group and group action formalize the idea of symmetry. The laws of classical mechanics, for example, are invariant under rotations and translations, which together form the symmetry group of Newtonian mechanics. Special relativity -- discovered after Klein -- has a different symmetry group, and this difference explains the fundamentally different behavior relativistic mechanics; indeed, the difference in symmetry groups was well understood even in the infancy of the theory of relativity. The symmetries of mechanics lie very much on the surface. Less obvious -- sometimes deeply hidden -- symmetries arise in many contexts, not only physics, but also geometry, number theory, and differential equations. Representations are the atoms , i.e., the most basic ingredients, of group actions. Representation theory studies both the representations themselves, and applications of the idea of symmetry where the less obvious properties of certain representations lead to new insights. The second part of my proposal is of the former type, and the first part, of the latter doc2071 none A new type of integration, called motivic integration, has been proposed by M. Konsevitch and developed by Denef and Loeser. They show that many of the classical properties of p-adic integration can be extended to to the motivic context. The research of this proposal will adapt motivic integration to the representation theory and the harmonic analysis of reductive groups over fields of formal Laurent series in characteristic zero. This new theory will be developed from first principles, starting with the existence of motivic Haar measures. The starting point of much of modern mathematics is the theory of integration, as developed by Isaac Newton, and generations of mathematicians that have followed him. An unexpected development came in , when the mathematician M. Kontsevich developed an entirely new way to integrate. This new tool will allow mathematicians to significantly enlarge the scope of mathematics. The research of this grant will accomplish part of this project, by using this new tool to enlarge the scope of representation theory, a branch of modern algebra doc2072 none The investigator and his colleagues are going to study operations on deformation complexes of various algebraic structures: in particular, operations on Hochschild cochains and chains of an associative algebra, and the deformation complex of d-algebras. The knowledge of operations on Hochschild (co) chains should be useful for Index theory on a (degenerate) Poisson manifold, which is of great importance for Poisson geometry. Also, the investigator is trying to find a general simple construction of an operad acting on a deformation complex of a general algebraic structure. This can be helpful in studying deformations of such objects as Hopf algebras doc2073 none The investigator believes that mathematical logic needs to return to its roots in Foundations of Mathematics, in the great tradition of Frege, Russell, Hilbert, Turing, and G del. A basic question in Foundations of Mathematics is: Which set-existence axioms are needed to prove specific theorems of core mathematics? Here ``core mathematics comprises standard topics in analysis, algebra, topology geometry, etc. The investigator and his colleagues study this question in terms of Subsystems of Second Order Arithmetic, as exposited in the investigator s recently published research monograph of that title. An extensive series of case studies reveals that (i) many core mathematical theorems are logically equivalent to the set-existence axioms needed to prove them, (ii) only a handful of set-existence axioms arise in this way, (iii) the corresponding subsystems are linearly ordered by logical implication. This gives a far-reaching classification of hundreds of core mathematical theorems into a small number of classes, the classes being defined in terms of logical equivalence over a weak base system. This ongoing classification project is known as Reverse Mathematics. It has many implications for philosophically motivated foundational programs such as constructivism (Bishop), computable mathematics (Pour-El Richards), finitistic reductionism (Hilbert), predicativism (Weyl Feferman), and predicative reductionism. The Reverse Mathematics classification project is also a rich source of challenging technical problems. The investigator and his colleagues are pursuing several of these, with emphasis on analysis, geometry, and countable combinatorics. A direction for the future is to weaken the base system, in order to greatly broaden the scope of the classification project, providing significant points of contact with other parts of mathematics such as number theory and computational complexity. Foundations of Mathematics is the study of the most basic concepts and logical structure of mathematics, with an eye to the unity of human knowledge. This line of research deals fruitfully with fundamental questions such as: What is the nature of mathematical proof? What is the logical structure of mathematics? What are the appropriate axioms for mathematics? Foundations of Mathematics is a rich subject with a long history, going back to Aristotle and Euclid and continuing in the hands of outstanding modern figures such Frege, Russell, Hilbert, Turing, and G del. The investigator and his colleagues continue in this foundational tradition by pursuing a far-reaching classification project known as Reverse Mathematics. Specific mathematical theorems are classified according to the axioms needed to prove them. This reveals a remarkably simple logical structure within mathematics. The existence of such a structure has many profound implications. The ongoing research contributes to clarification of the role of the infinite in mathematics, the nature of mathematical constructions, the role of impredicative definitions in mathematics, and related issues doc2074 none One of the most enduring problems of prime number theory is to determine how many elements remain when a set of numbers is sieved. There is a large literature on this topic, originating in seminal papers of Viggo Brun in , but even today the best known bounds are either not optimal or not proved to be optimal. By starting with a simple sieving situation and then moving incrementally to more complicated configurations, it is hoped that optimal bounds can be found, accompanied by proofs of optimality. The past work on the PI on the pair correlation of the zeros of the Riemann zeta function has been interpreted as providing evidence that the zeros are spectral in nature. The Pair Correlation Conjecture itself is equivalent to an assertion concerning the mean square distribution of primes in short intervals. In new work with k. Soundararajan, it is proposed to extend the second moment heuristics to other moments, and hence develop heuristics concerning the distribution function of primes in short intervals. It is hope that this new information, when interpreted in terms of zeros of the zeta function, will provide further insights concerning the distribution of the zeros, including the Riemann Hypothesis. The seemingly irregular distribution of prime numbers has been a puzzle to mathematicians for many centuries. In the early 20th century, new ideas were introduced, which allowed one to deal with sieving for primes as a problem of linear programming. This led to many new results, but even today the linear programming extremals remain to be found in most situations. By starting with a simple situation and moving incrementally to more complicated ones, it is hoped that it will at last be possible to locate the extremal configurations. Heuristics concerning the distribution of primes in short intervals can be developed from the Hardy--Littlewood prime k-tuple conjecture, and the insights gained from such reasoning has an impact on other aspects of prime number theory, including the famous Riemann Hypothesis which dates from doc2075 none The main goal of the proposed project is to study the strong factorization conjecture for birational morphisms: every proper birational morphism between nonsingular complex varieties can be factored as a composition of smooth blowups followed by a composition of smooth blowdowns. The conjecture follows from the more fundamental problem of making a morphism toroidal by smooth blowups. There are several approaches to solving the toroidalization problem, for example, reducing it to a problem about resolution of singularities of a differential form with logarithmic poles, or using a composition of several constructions in lower dimensions to achieve toroidalization in higher dimension. The main theme of the proposed research is to study the classification of algebraic varieties. More precisely, given two varieties that are the same generically (they are the same after removing some small subsets), can one transform one variety to another by some elementary operations? The simplest elementary operations are blowups and blowdowns of subvarieties: replacing a subvariety by another subvariety of larger (resp. smaller) dimension. The blowup-blowdown conjecture states that one can always get from the first variety to the second by blowing up several times and then blowing down doc2076 none Recent work in the theory of cardinal characteristics of the continuum has indicated that one can get more detailed information by working, not with the cardinal characteristics themselves, but with certain relations associated with them. This applies especially in cases where these relations are Borel sets. Part of the planned research concerns the question Which cardinal characteristics are associated with Borel relations? For many characteristics the answer is known to be positive; for others it appears to be negative, but it isn t yet known to be negative for any particular characteristic. The investigator hopes to close this gap by proving that certain specific characteristics are not associated with Borel relations. A second aspect of the planned research concerns the sequential composition of relations, which occurs in many theorems and proofs about cardinal characteristics. A priori, sequential compositions cannot be Borel relations, but the investigator intends to extend the theory of Borel relations, using tools from topos theory, so as to cover sequential composition. The research also includes questions relating computability theory to cardinal characteristics. Finally, the investigator also plans to study the use of the groupwise density number (a characteristic introduced some years ago by Laflamme and the investigator) in partition theorems. Cardinal characteristics of the continuum constitute a significant area of contemporary research in set theory. Not only are they of interest for their own sake, but for the last two decades they have played a role in applications of set-theoretic methods to general topology. More recently, there have been applications (including some due to the investigator) to other parts of mathematics, particularly algebra. The investigator and graduate students will extend this theory in several directions. One direction concerns connections with classical descriptive set theory, dealing with relatively easily definable relations involving real numbers. A second direction connects this theory with recursion theory, the study of what is (and what is not) computable in principle. A third direction establishes connections with combinatorial information about infinite sets and structures doc2077 none Lipshitz and Robinson propose to continue their collaborative investigation into the model theory of valued fields with analytic structure. Classical rigid analytic geometry is based on rings of strictly convergent power series, i.e., power series convergent on products of closed discs. The proposers have introduced new rings of power series convergent on products of closed and open discs. These rings of separated power series share many of the desirable algebraic properties of the smaller rings of strictly convergent power series. In addition they are particularly well suited for model theoretic applications. Lipshitz and Robinson propose to continue to develop the commutative algebra of rings of separated power series and the corresponding rigid geometry in analogy to the classical case. On the model theory side they propose to broaden their investigation to consider the model theory of non-algebraically-closed valued fields with analytic structure and also to consider questions of uniformity over different fields in the theory of rigid subanalytic sets. The methods to be employed come from model theory, commutative algebra and algebraic geometry. The sets of points in Euclidean space over the field of real numbers defined by systems of equations and inequalities among analytic functions are called semi-analytic sets. This class of sets is basic to analytic geometry. The projection (i.e. the shadow) of a semi-analytic set on a lower dimensional subspace is called subanalytic. There are more subanalytic sets than semi-analytic sets, and their behavior is more complicated. There is a natural interest in subanalytic sets. These are exactly the sets that can be mathematically defined from the semi-analytic sets, in the sense of formal logic. Furthermore, real subanalytic sets arise in several branches of mathematics such as differential equations and geometry. Similar classes of sets arise naturally, for example in number theory, over fields different from the real numbers, where the notion of distance has rather different properties. Such fields are called non-Archimedean. The corresponding subanalytic sets, however, share many of the nice properties of their real cousins. Lipshitz and Robinson will continue their investigation of the properties of these non-Archimedean subanalytic sets, using methods from mathematical logic, commutative algebra and algebraic geometry. Having developed key elements of theory in the Non-Archimedean case, they propose to apply their ideas to extend the classes of fields to which these results apply. In particular, they plan to apply ideas developed in the non-Archimedean setting to the real case, thereby enlarging the class of real sets whose nice geometric properties can be established by these means. Since many of the procedures used to extract geometric information about these sets do not vary from field to field, the also plan a careful study of the nature of this uniformity doc2078 none The classical Phragmen-Lindelof theorem extends the maximum principle to unbounded analytic functions by showing that an analytic function that satisfies an asymptotic exponential bound in the upper half plane and a uniform bound on the real axis in fact satisfies a uniform exponential bound in the upper half plane. Research of the past three decades has shown that the validity of estimates of a similar character for analytic functions on algebraic varieties in n-dimensional complex Euclidean space are in fact equivalent to certain properties of linear constant coefficient partial differential operators. Some such properties of the operators are surjectivity on the space of real analytic functions or Gevrey classes, the existence of lacuna in fundamental solutions, the existence of linear solution operators, and continuation properties of solutions of the homogeneous equation(s). While there are different sets of these estimates associated to the different properties of the operator, they all are similar in spirit. The aim of this work is to develop methods that give a geometric characterization of the algebraic varieties for which a given Phragmen-Lindelof condition is satisfied. If successful, the work should also give insight into questions about the partial differential equations such as the existence of fundamental solutions with cone-shaped lacuna. This work is focused on developing tools in complex analysis that can be used to answer basic questions about linear partial differential equations. In the s, Laurent Schwartz formulated such fundamental problems for general linear partial differential equations. Are they always solvable? If so, can the solution be chosen as smooth as the data in the problem? Do fundamental solutions exist? Can the equations be solved with a formula , so that the answer depends linearly on the data of the problem? Most of these questions were answered in the s by Ehrenpreis and Malgrange. However, the question of whether the solution could be chosen to be real analytic when the data is real analytic was open until the late s when the first counter examples were given. In , Hormander gave a characterization of the equations with this property in terms of the validity of certain inequalities for analytic functions on the zero set of the polynomial giving the differential equation. In , Taylor, Meise, and Vogt answered the question about the existence of formulas for the solution and showed they were also characterized in terms of some similar inequalities. The aim of this project is to develop tools that allow one to decide whether or not the required estimates are valid for a given partial differential equation. We believe that it is possible to develop an algorithm that will make the verification, and further, will explain the geometry of the zero set of the associated polynomial that is necessary for the inequalities to be satisfied doc2079 none A gain graph is a graph together with a gain function that assigns to each edge an element of a group. If the group has order 2, the gain graph is a signed graph . A gain graph has associated matroids, whose structure is more accessible than that of general matroids due to the relative simplicity of graphs. For this reason gain graphs have been helpful in a variety of geometry problems, for instance several related to root systems (since the classical root systems are described by signed graphs), as well as in optimization on generalized networks (also called networks with gains ). The investigator plans to study what can be achieved in deeper understanding and application of gain graphs by thickening the edges. One way to do this is to replace each edge by its product with the boundary of a simplex of sufficiently high dimension to realize the action of the gain group, and then apply topology to the resulting thickened graph, for instance, calculating (co)homology and group actions on it. It is hoped that this will reveal striking new phenomena, perhaps analogously to the way the complexification of a real arrangement of hyperplanes has revealed phenomena sometimes entirely new and sometimes refining what was previously known. Think of a network, consisting of nodes connected by lines, in which each line has a twist . In previous investigations of networks with twist (technical name: gain graphs ), the lines were infinitely thin so the twists were purely theoretical. The investigator hopes to learn more about networks with twist by thickening the lines so the twists can have a real physical existence like the stripes on a barber pole and some candy canes or (more complexly) the strands of a braid. Then a whole new range of mathematical methods will become applicable so one can hope for new discoveries. The original reason for looking at twists was that they simplify some problems in geometry; they also turned out to be related to an economic optimization method. A detailed understanding of twisted networks is needed to find good solutions to problems like these. The hope for the thickening method is both to apply existing knowledge about twisted networks to simplify more mathematical problems and to find new techniques that reveal more about the twisted networks themselves. Like most mathematics, this is not aimed at immediate applications but at exciting new knowledge whose usefulness may become apparent years later doc2080 none The investigator and his students study capacity theory and its applications to arithmetic geometry. Capacity is a measure of size for sets, which arises in potential theory and has applications in probability, complex analysis, and number theory. The chief goal of this project is to prove a very strong version of the Fekete-Szego theorem on algebraic curves, which asserts that if an adelic set on a curve has large enough capacity, then there exist algebraic points with all their conjugates near it, in an adelic sense. The new theorem will be a basic existence theorem producing algebraic points which are subject to real and p-adic rationality conditions, as well as topological constraints. To fix ideas, for sets in the complex plane, the capacity of a circle turns out to equal its radius, and the capacity of a line segment is a quarter of its length. In analysis, the primary distinction is between sets of capacity 0 and sets of positive capacity: sets of capacity 0 are invisible to holomorphic functions. In number theory, the main distinction is between sets of capacity greater than 1, and less than 1. The classical theorem of Fekete and Szego says that for a set in the complex plane stable under complex conjugation, if the capacity of the set is greater than 1, then every neighborhood of the set contains infinitely many Galois orbits of algebraic integers. David Cantor generalized the theorem to adelic sets on the projective line, and subsequently the investigator generalized it to adelic sets on algebraic curves. As an application, the investigator proved an existence theorem for algebraic integer points on affine algebraic varieties, which has been the object of considerable work by Moret-Bailly and Szpiro and their students. Earlier, Raphael Robinson had extended the Fekete-Szego theorem in another direction, showing that if a set of capacity greater than 1 were contained in the real line, then every real neighborhood contained infinitely many Galois orbits of totally real algebraic integers. Recently the investigator proved an adelic version of Robinson s theorem, proving the existence of algebraic numbers which were totally real and totally p-adic at a finite number of places. The goal of the project is to generalize this theorem to algebraic curves. The methods used will involve p-adic analysis, potential theory, and approximation theory for algebraic functions. The study of diophantine equations (looking for integer solutions to polynomial equations in several variables) is a very old and very difficult subject, going back to the Greeks. It is only within the last half-century that much progress has been made, using methods of modern number theory. Two famous results were a negative solution to Hilbert s Tenth problem (by Matiyasevich in ), which asks if there is an algorithm for determining whether or not a given equation has integer solutions; and the negative resolution of Fermat s Last Theorem (by Wiles in ), which asks if sums of n-th powers of integers can be n-th powers. The investigator s work pursues a different direction, showing that for much larger arithmetic domains than the integers, under appropriate conditions there do exist solutions; and moreover there exist algorithms for telling whether or not they exist. The current work will considerably reduce the size of the domains where solutions are known to exist doc2081 none With the advent of third and fourth generation wireless infrastructure, and the simultaneous emergence of pervasive connectivity for all devices based on bluetooth like systems and ad-hoc networks, a new vista is open for research in the area. We propose ideas for a research program aimed at realizing ubiquitous computing systems) which are located in vicinity of one another. These systems will be composed of a collection of independently designed components that automatically become aware of each other, establish basic (wireless) communication, exchange information about their capabilities and requirements, discover and exchange APIs, and learn to cooperate effectively to accomplish their individual and collective goals. The proposed work will enable a new class of applications that effectively use mobility and pervasive computing. We address several research problems that span the fields of distributed computing, data management, and dynamic collaboration between components. The team of researchers is located at UMBC and UI-Chicago, and plans to interact closely with collaborators at industrial labs (IBM, Hughs, Sun doc2082 none One of the themes visible in recent developments in mathematics is the cross-fertilization of ideas across different mathematical disciplines. As an example I mention interplay between topology and analysis in the computation of topological properties of a manifold. Another example involving number theory and topology and analysis can be found in the explanation of the leading analytic behavior of L-functions from number theory in terms of topological information from periods of topological cycles computed using harmonic analysis. Similar interdisciplinary research has been the main focus of recent research of the PI. Several projects have been concerned with the evaluation or determination of topological geometrical properties of locally symmetric manifolds either with harmonic analysis techniques or through leading behaviour of geometric zeta functions. This theme continues in the present proposal. Joint projects have been begun to extend from Hermitian locally symmetric spaces to their real forms the construction of geometric zeta functions, and the identification of their leading behaviour in geometric terms. Part of this work involves developing refined information concerning various compatifications of symmetric spaces and then encapsulating it in a generating function of geometric origins. It is expected that torsion-like invariants will appear in this investigation but it is hoped that a better understanding of subtle characteristic classes like the R-class may result. A new direction taken by the PI is toward nilpotent orbits in semisimple Lie algebras. An approach to an algebraic proof of the existence of hyperKahler metrics on these orbits is underway. Also a realization of the quantization of the minimal orbit by means of Dirac operators has been started. The use of techniques from twistor theory play an important role in these investigations doc2083 none The project deals with questions concerning o-minimality, extensions of o-minimality, and classes of finite structures. Some of the problems having to do with o-minimality relate to expansions of archetypal o-minimal structures and structures whose domain has as its order type that of the real numbers. Other have as their focus abelian groups definable in o-minimal structures or the development of o-minimal analogues of differential and algebraic topological methods and tools. Problems concerning extensions of o-minimality have to do in particular with weak o-minimality, local o-minimality, and, in analogy with Morley rank, the development of a model theory for ordered structures of finite rank. The third main topic of the project involves classes of finite structures with dimension and measure. This work has as its aim the development of a model theory for classes of finite structures that is in analogy with mainstream model theory for infinite structures. The results obtained to date and the examples that have been found suggest that there is much to be done. The research outlined above concerns model theory, one of the principal subfields of mathematical logic. Model theorists study properties of familiar mathematical structures that can be expressed in a formal mathematical language such as predicate logic. This distinctive point of view can provide insights and understanding into such structures that otherwise might prove elusive. One aspect of this project focuses on structures that include and behave in important ways like the ordered field of real numbers, that is, the real numbers together with the polynomial and algebraic functions that are studied in first-year calculus and describe many phenomena. Model theory has played a key role in many of the significant advances that have been made in the last ten years. These have deepened our understanding of familiar mathematical systems in such diverse areas of the mathematical sciences as the analysis and geometry of real functions, neural nets, and relational database theory. Applications also have been made in economics. A second principal aspect of the project deals with classes of finite structures. Finite structures in general are central to computer science: any database can be construed as a finite structure in the sense in which they are studied in here, and a particular class of finite structures called finite fields are especially important in cryptology doc2084 none This proposal concerns problems in number theory and algebraic geometry in four specific areas. First, in joint work with Avner Ash and Mark McConnell, Gunnells is exploring conjectures in automorphic forms by studying the action of the Hecke operators on the cohomology of arithmetic groups in different contexts. Second, jointly with Robert Sczech, Gunnells is studying the connections between special values of L-functions and group cocycles for the unimodular group. Third, jointly with Lev Borisov, Gunnells is investigating the construction of modular forms using toric varieties. Finally, jointly with Eric Babson and Richard Scott, Gunnells is studying the geometry of certain configuration varieties naturally arising in representation theory. This proposal deals with number theory and algebraic geometry. Number theory is the study of the properties of the whole numbers and is the oldest branch of mathematics. Algebraic geometry studies geometric figures that can be defined by the simplest of equations, namely polynomials. The questions and phenomena which arise from combining these two subjects serve as driving forces in much of contemporary mathematics research. Moreover, the combination of these subjects has contributed many applications in such diverse areas as codes and data transmission, robotics, and theoretical computer science doc2085 none This project will investigate (1) liftings and deformations of representations of finitely generated groups; and (2) the structure of the antiderivative closure of the field of rational complex functions, and its extensions and their groups of differential automorphisms. Regarding (1), a simple complex matrix representation of a finitely generated group is deformable if it extends to a representation in matrices over complex formal power series. Such an extension exists if there is a compatible family of liftings of the representation to the finite dimensional quotients of formal power series. Thus the extension problem can be viewed as a sequence of (relative) lifting problems. Each such lifting problem is obstructed by an element in a certain cohomology group of a module constructed from the original simple representation. The proposed research will investigate the lifting problem by studying these cohomological elements. Regarding (2), the antiderivative closure of the field of rational functions is the maximal extension obtained by adjoining full sets of solutions of linear homogeneous ordinary differential equations whose solutions can be obtained by repeated antiderivatives. The group of differential automorphisms of such an extension is free prounipotent. The research will exploit this structure to describe the antiderivative closure directly in terms of the functions in the coordinate ring of the free prounipotent group. Antiderivative closures may not be antiderivative closed, so a tower of such closures may result. The research will analyze the differential Galois groups of the steps in this tower over the base field of rational functions. These groups have a normal series with free prounipotent sections. However, they are not known to be free prounipotent themselves. Groups are objects that mathematically encode the concept of symmetry, and have been a mainstay in mathematics, chemistry, and elsewhere for over a century. Representations of groups are realizations of groups as transformations of space. A given group usually has infinitely many representations. These can be organized into a geometrical set. Representations which are not just isolated points of the set are called deformable. This research is aimed at understanding deformable representations and their applications to group representations in mathematics, chemistry, and elsewhere. Integral calculus deals with reconstructing a function, such as one describing the position of an object, from the instantaneous rates of change of the function; the reconstructed function is called an antiderivative. The planned research can be viewed as a method to solve, in principle, and all at once, all the repeated integral calculus problems arising from polynomial functions. This would have many applications in calculus doc2086 none This research involves localization type effects for ergodic Schrodinger operators, the general study of spectra and wave functions of multidimensional Schrodinger operators, and also of the transport phenomena of quasiperiodic operators and two-dimensional magnetic operators in the integer quantum Hall regime. An important objective is to develop nonperturbative methods of proving localization type effects for Schrodinger operators with deterministic potentials. The other goal is to study the relation between spectral and quantum-dynamical properties and behavior of the generalized eigenfunctions, particularly outside the localization range and in the multidimensional case. Another goal of the proposed research is to study singular continuous spectrum that exhibits critical behavior and or anomalous transport, particularly for models where it appears for critical values (or intervals) of the parameters. The proposed research is centered around the fundamental properties of disordered systems that serve as models of systems with impurities. Deterministic, particularly quasiperiodic, potentials are most often used to model quasicrystals. In order to be able to understand much of the experimental data on quasicrystals, it is particularly important to investigate the transport coefficients like the electrical and heat conductivities of the microscopic models. Such an understanding is most helpful for finding new materials with desired physical properties. This may lead to various industrial applications (the first one nowadays being the covering of pans replacing the conventional Tefal film). Disordered systems are also used in modeling many other micro and macro effects: from quantum localization to earthquakes. Our research concerns the anomalous spectral and diffusive properties of quasiperiodic and other deterministic structures. The quantum Hall effect is since used by the National Bureau of Standards to define the Fine Structure Constant (and hence the electrical charge of an electron). It is still not well understood why the experiment can be reproduced with a relative error of only $10^{-8}$. Our research is concerned with a microscopic theory of the quantum Hall effect that is aimed at getting deeper insights of this phenomena doc2087 none The investigator studies combinatorial problems which arise in various areas of mathematics. In joint work with R. Guralnick, the investigator examines branched coverings of Riemann surfaces whose monodromy groups are the symmetric and alternating groups S_n and A_n acting on subsets of a fixed size from the n-set. The main goals of this project are 1) to show that with a small and known list of exceptions, the genus of the covering surface must grow with both the number of sheets of the covering and the number of branch points, and 2) to determine all such coverings for which the genus of the covering space is at most one. This project is one of the final steps in a program initiated by Guralnick and J. Thompson. In addition, the investigator continues his study of monotone graph and hypergraph properties which arise in V. Vassiliev s theory of finite type invariants of knots and ornaments. Finally, the investigator continues his examination of order complexes of subgroup lattices of finite groups. He attempts to use topological methods to distinguish intervals in subgroup lattices of finite groups from arbitrary finite lattices. With V. Welker, he investigates the topology of the order complexes of subgroup lattices of finite simple groups. The investigator s main interests are in combinatorics, which is the study of discrete, usually finite mathematical objects. Combinatorial objects arise in various areas of applied mathematics and computer science, including communications and the theory of algorithmic complexity. Also, there are complicated nondiscrete mathematical objects which can be better understood by examining associated combinatorial objects. The investigator studies combinatorial objects which arise in this manner doc2088 none Cosmic rays have been observed up to energies in excess of 10^20 eV. It is not at all clear how these particles are accelerated up to such energies, since standard acceleration scenarios have difficulties above about 10^15 eV or so. It is clear, though, that the sources of these extremely high-energy cosmic rays must be nearby. Otherwise interactions with the microwave background will degrade the particle energies, and thereby prevent them from getting to us from distant sources. The Auger experiment is designed to study these highest energy particles. Auger would be the first air shower array large enough ( km^2-sr) to detect a reasonable number of 10^20 eV events, and it may have sufficient angular resolution to trace them back to their sources in the sky. This proposal will aid in the Auger project development through simulations, prototype installation and necessary activities leading to formation of the international collaboration doc2089 none The investigator and his collaborators study several problems in the representation theory of reductive groups and its applications to number theory. The first problem is to prove the Kirillov conjecture which states that every irreducible unitary representation of Gl(n,R) or GL(n,C) remains irreducible when restricted to a certain subgroup. The second problem is to find a formula relating fourier coefficients of half integral weight modular forms with special values of L-functions of integral weight modular forms. This formula generalizes a classical formula of Kohnen and Zagier and is different from a formula given by Waldspurger. Other problems which are considered are the study of Bessel distributions and Bessel functions for quasi-split groups and the study of Fourier Jacobi models for representations of symplectic and unitary groups. The line of attack on these problems is to study certain invariant distributions and the spherical functions associated to them via regularity theorems. Unitary representations of semisimple Lie groups were studied by the famous physicists Wigner and Dirac among others in an attempt to understand and develop the theory of quantum mechanics. Later, mathematicians such as Gelfand and Harish Chandra developed and rigorized this beautiful theory. Many applications were found to physics, geometry, number theory and other fields. The purpose of the current proposal is to advance the understanding of representation theory and to continue to explore the connections between representation theory and number theory doc2090 none Blackadar Blackadar will study a range of questions concerning the structure of various classes of operator algebras and their relation to noncommutative topology. Topics will include generalized inductive limits of finite-dimensional C -algebras and the structure of nuclear C -algebras, semiprojectivity, nonstable K-theory and the Universal Coefficient Theorem, and bivariant cohomology theories on C -algebras and their dense subalgebras. An idea which has revolutionized the study of operator algebras in recent years, and which has led to some spectacular applications throughout mathematics and mathematical physics, is to view operator algebras as generalizations of topological spaces, or more precisely the set of continuous functions on a topological space; the principal new feature is that the multiplication of functions is no longer assumed to be commutative. It has long been recognized that operator algebras provide the right framework for the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, and it has been increasingly recognized recently that noncommutative function spaces (operator algebras) arise naturally in problems in subjects as diverse as knot theory (with applications to the structure of DNA and other molecules, as well as mathematical physics), dynamical systems, and even mathematical logic. It has become apparent that it will be possible to give an explicit description of all operator algebras in large classes, including most algebras arising in applications, far beyond what was thought possible only a few years ago. This project concerns some of the central remaining problems in the classification of one particularly important class, the nuclear C -algebras. Understanding the mathematical structures that can occur will give great insight into the nature and behavior of the associated applied problems doc2091 none A broad program of research in elementary particle physics and an associated education and outreach program are proposed by a research group from the University of Chicago Physics Department with Henry Frisch as the P.I. Their program includes: the ATLAS detector construction project, which will be at the energy frontier at CERN s Large Hadron Collider; the CDF collaboration that shared in the discovery of the top quark at the Fermilab proton-antiproton collider and is operating at the current energy frontier; the OPAL collaboration, operating at LEP, the highest energy electron-positron collider, which is performing stringent tests of theoretical models; and the KTeV experiment, investigating the asymmetry of matter and antimatter in the universe. This group has an exemplary education diversity outreach portfolio comprising five projects: the Teachers Academy for Math and Science (TAMS); the Lecture Demonstration Spectacular, associated with the TAMS project; an REU activity that targets women and under-represented minorities; participation in the Compton Lecture Program; and a new node in the Quarknet project, a web-based project involving high-school students and teachers working with particle physicists at Fermilab and CERN doc2092 none The principal investigator proposes several projects concerning multi-dimensional stability of flows in compressible, viscous, and reacting media. These include both shear flows of classical hydrodynamic stability and compressive flows of shock wave and combustion theory, the former exhibiting local symmetry parallel to and the latter normal to the flow. The unifying mathematical theme in these problems is the appearance of multiple length scales corresponding to small-scale transport and large-scale convective effects, with associated ``stiffness in the linearized perturbation problem. This leads to interesting, nonstandard issues in spectral and semigroup theory. At the same time, the inclusion of small-scale transport effects is highly desirable from the point of view of physical applications, which often occur at scales where these effects might be expected to be significant. The stability of regular flow patterns is an old and central topic in fluid, gas, and plasma dynamics, deciding which (stable) patterns will typically be observed, and which (unstable) are only mathematical and not physically observable solutions. The transition from stability to instability is of particular importance, since it usually signals the arisal of alternative, more complicated flow patterns close to the original (now unstable) one- this is a way to understand complicated flows by the study of simpler and better-understood ones. Despite a large and well-known body of theory on this subject, dating back to the late s, there are still many aspects that are poorly understood, particularly for compressive, viscous, or reacting flows. Here, we propose to study several of these issues arising in compressible gas and plasma dynamics, and in combustion, applications in which such usually-neglected effects are of considerable practical importance. Our goal is, by including these mathematically problematic terms, to move existing theory from the qualitative to the quantitative regime, obtaining new information of use to practitioners at the same time that we advance the mathematical theory doc2093 none The goal of the project is to establish the singularity of harmonic measure and of Hausdorff measure on some totally disconnected, uniformly perfect sets (subsets of the real line or Julia sets of rational functions). The results rely on estimates of logarithmic capacities, Green s function and harmonic functions near the boundary of plane domains. It combines potential theoretic arguments with ergodic theory and dynamical systems,and uses techniques introduced by Carleson, Jones and Wolff, Makarov and Bourgain. The fractal sets I will study represent the chaotic part of a dynamical system. Almost all the phenomenon in life are dynamical systems: complex ones like weather, earthquakes and spreading of disease, and simple ones, like the game of billiard. Harmonic functions and potential theory were first of interest to physicists and engineers, particularly in the fields of thermodynamics and electro-magnetics. All the successes in waves today stem from this theory. The transmission of signals electro-magnetically between antennas, the design of antennas and their placement in arrays is one of the current problems that apply potential theory doc2094 none Macdonald polynomials, diagonal harmonics, and the geometry of Hilbert schemes. Professor Haiman is working to complete the proof of a series of conjectures involving Macdonald polynomials, the so-called n-factorial conjecture, and the character formula for diagonal harmonics. The methods involve a detailed algebraic geometrical study of the Hilbert scheme of points in the plane and related algebraic varieties. In earlier work Professor Haiman showed that certain hypotheses on the singularities and sheaf cohomology of these varieties would imply the desired algebraic results (and with Garsia, showed that the latter imply related combinatorial results). The current work is to establish these geometric hypotheses. Macdonald polynomials are a new family of symmetric functions. Their discovery by Macdonald in was a surprising development in the theory of symmetric functions, which is a fundamental and classical part of mathematics with roots in the work of Euler, Jacobi, and Cauchy over a century ago. Macdonald polynomials have since been found to have important applications in a wide range of areas including geometry, representation theory, and even theoretical physics. At the time of their discovery, Macdonald conjectured that certain coefficients associated with his polynomials should be positive integers, the proof of which remains the most important unsolved problem in this area. The successful completion of this project will solve this problem, proving the Macdonald positivity conjecture, along with a related representation-theoretic conjecture of Garsia and the investigator known as the n-factorial conjecture, some related combinatorial conjectures, and strong new geometric properties of Hilbert schemes, which are likely to have further applications in geometry and representation theory doc2095 none Steidel This work involves the detailed study of the physical properties, large-scale distribution, and star forming characteristics of high redshift galaxies. The PI will use wide-field imaging to map out the large scale structure of the luminous material and combine this with quasar absorption line studies to map out and identify the associated intermediate redshift (z=1.3 to 2.5) gas. The star formation rates for these intermediate redshift objects, their chemical composition, and their association with the gas will then be analyzed using near IR spectroscopy. These studies focus on the properties of galaxies and their large--scale spatial distribution during an interval of cosmic time when the universe was between 10% and 40% of its current age. This time interval is believed to be the epoch when when the galaxy formation activity that produced the galaxies of the present-day universe was at its peak and when most of the stars in the present day universe formed. In the last few years, facilities and techniques have become available, which allow us to gather extensive empirical data on galaxies at these early cosmic epochs. The studies proposed here will use the facilities of the Palomar and Keck observatories to: 1) ``map the large-scale structure traced by early galaxies over volumes of space comparable to the most ambitious galaxy surveys of the local universe 2) compare the galaxy distribution at early epochs to the properties of the diffuse intergalactic gas in the same volumes (observed using complementary techniques) 3) explore new techniques for finding and studying large samples of galaxies in the time interval that is currently least accessible to observation-- when the universe was ``middle aged and 4) measure the chemical content and masses of significant samples of these early galaxies. All of these studies are intended to make significant progress toward a physical understanding of the galaxy formation process, in the context of cosmological models in which galaxy formation and evolution is the observable manifestation of the changing distribution of matter in the universe as a function of time. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc2096 none Nachtergaele will work on a variety of problems in quantum statistical mechanics. In a first group of problems he will study quantum spin systems as models for magnetic materials. The main focus here is on equilibrium and non-equilibrium properties of domain walls and other structures such as droplets. With Messager, he proposes a new quantum solid-on-solid model for the 111 interface in the Heisenberg XXZ ferromagnet. For this model the stability of the interface at strictly positive temperatures will be studied. The universality of fluctuations of interfaces will be investigated in a class of one-dimensional models. Another goal is to prove the existence of droplets in quantum spin models at zero temperature and to make first steps towards the study of their dynamics. In continuum quantum statistical mechanics Nachtergaele will work on the derivation of the Euler equations from the Schroedinger dynamics of interacting fermions, and on a characterization of the various types of Bose condensation. The latter is a project in collaboration with Zagrebnov and Bru. The first is work already begun with HT Yau. Quantum statistical mechanics is an area of growing interest because many of the phenomena that are being discovered and studied today in condensed matter physics and material science are intrinsically quantum mechanical: Bose condensation, superfluidity, superconductivity, quantum optics, quantum computation, and many of the most interesting aspects of magnetism at the microscopic scale. In addition to the implications in material science, this work will provide new insights in fundamental problems of quantum statistical mechanics and lead to analytical methods for their solution. The mathematical models of quantum statistical mechanics, though related to problems in partial differential equations, representation theory, spectral theory of operators, and probability theory, pose new mathematical challenges of their own. Many fascinating questions have so far resisted existing analytical and numerical methods. The results of this project will contribute to our understanding of the fundamental mathematical structures of quantum mechanical models and, in the long run, may lead to innovations in numerical work on quantum mechanical models, which is increasingly needed in pure and applied science doc2097 none Phillips The Principal Investigator has recently proved that crossed products of compact manifolds by minimal diffeomorphisms can be represented as direct limits of systems of recursive subhomogeneous C -algebras with no dimension growth. He proposes to attempt to generalize this result, by relaxing the differentiability assumptions (many interesting minimal homeomorphisms are not smooth, or not even on manifolds), and by considering more general groups (such as the real numbers or the direct sum of several copies of the integers). He also proposes to apply the direct limit decomposition, by attempting to prove a classification theorem for such direct limits, and by using the results it implies about K-theory to investigate the connections between dynamics and C -algebras for interesting minimal homeomorphisms. The Principal Investigator further proposes to use methods of free probability to study isomorphism questions for C -algebras related to the reduced C -algebras of free groups. This project concerns the classification of simple C -algebras. C -algebras are a fascinating and beautiful part of mathematics in their own right, and moreover they have surprising applications to other parts of mathematics (such as geometry and topology) and even to parts of physics (such as quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics). For these reasons, and others, one wants to identify and describe all C -algebras. Without some limitations, this task is presently hopeless, and my project focuses on C -algebras which are simple (that is, the usual way of taking them apart into smaller pieces doesn t work), and also not too large in several other technical senses. Under these limitations, some classification theorems have been proved. That is, one can identify, label, and describe the objects in certain classes of C -algebras, sort of like the periodic table of the elements or like the naming of the species of living things. In one particular case of interest (the stably finite case), the classification results have been proved for simple C -algebras arising from one particular construction ( direct limits ), but the most interesting source of examples is a different construction ( crossed products ). In a sense, the wrong algebras have been classified. The aim of this project is to show that some algebras of the more interesting kind are actually the same as some of the ones already classified, or are at least close enough that the old classification methods from direct limits might still be applied; and to extend those methods far enough to actually classify the algebras of the more interesting type doc2098 none Many questions on primes can be addressed by the use of short divisor sum approximations. These sums arise in the circle method, but they can be used independently of the circle method. They may also be viewed as truncations of Ramanujan expansions. The main terms in many asymptotic formulas for primes result from summing these short divisor sums into a singular series. These singular series therefore also reflect the properties of primes, and it is often an interesting and non-trivial problem to evaluate formulas involving singular series. Starting in , the principal investigator has been working on obtaining lower bounds for problems involving primes. Up to now all this work has been on the binary correlation of short divisor sum approximations for primes. The investigator and C. Yildirim intend to extend this earlier work to higher correlations, and apply the results to obtain unconditional lower bounds for higher moments of primes in short intervals. The method also has application to other problems in analytic number theory. In addition, some questions on power sums and other problems will be examined in collaboration with undergraduate and graduate students at San Jose State University. The distribution of prime numbers was first studied by the Greeks over two thousand years ago. Many significant results have been proved, but many difficult problems remain to be solved. With computers one can verify many conjectures about the distribution of primes with startling precision, and yet proofs of these conjectures are beyond our current state of knowledge. The principal investigator has focused his research on the problem of proving that the gap between consecutive primes will frequently be much smaller than the average gap size, and will infinitely often be smaller than any fraction of this average gap size. The techniques used to study this problem come from many areas of mathematics, statistics, and physics. Because of the fundamental role primes play in mathematics, it is to be expected that progress in this area will have applications in other areas doc2099 none TECHNICAL The relative trace formula (RTF) is used to study automorphic representations of a reductive group G that are distinguished by a subgroup H obtained as the fixed-point set of an involution. One hopes to characterize distinguished generic representations as functorial transfers from a third group G (which can be specified conjecturally in terms of the involution) by comparing RTF with the Kuznetzov trace formula on G . To this end, it is important to obtain a fine spectral expansion of the RTF and, in particular, to write the spectral expansion in terms of relative Bessel distributions. Progress towards this goal was made in prior joint work by the PI, Jacquet and Lapid for the case of the standard Galois involution on GL(n). They developed a procedure for defining regularized periods of Eisenstein series, which turns out to be key ingredients in the fine spectral expansion. In some cases, it has been possible to express the regularized periods in terms of certain integrals analagous to intertwining operators which have been called intertwining periods. The PI intends, in collaboration with E. Lapid, to extend this previous work to the general case. This will involve analytic problems related to Eisenstein series and combinatorial problems related to the structure of the orbits of the Borel subgroup on G H. It will also be necessary to develop a suitable truncation operator. One would like to express the regularized periods of cuspidal Eisenstein series in terms of L-functions. In general, however, the regularized period will be equal to an infinite sum of intertwining periods. To deal with this problem, the PI and Lapid intend to develop a formalism for forming linear combinations of the intertwining periods, in analogy with the linear combinations of characters that occur in the endoscopic theory of Langlands-Shelstad. Closely related is the problem of establishing identities between relative Bessel distributions for the pair (G,H) and Bessel distributions on G . In a related project to be carried out with D. Ramakrishnan, the PI will investigate certain limit formulas connected with relative trace formulas. This will lead to a new method of proof and more precise versions of previously known results of W. Duke and others on the distribution of certain special values of GL(2) L-functions. The distribution results will involve certain measures on the spherical dual. Higher rank cases will be investigated and a general context in which to place the results will be sought. NON-TECHNICAL The history of mathematics has shown that the simplest phenomena are sometimes the hardest to understand deeply. The correct explanation may emerge only after the right theoretical framework has been found. The reciprocity laws of number theory fall into this category of mathematical phenomena. The simplest law of this type, the so-called law of quadratic reciprocity, is a beautiful and mysterious fact about ordinary whole numbers. It can be explained to a curious high school student, but its true structural meaning can only be understood within the context of a sophisticated and advanced part of number theory called class field theory. One of the great challenges of modern number theory is to fully explore the most general reciprocity laws. A framework for formulating such laws was developed 30 years ago by R. Langlands, and as a result, we know that there must exist a vast web of interrelated reciprocity laws. As a totality, these conjectural laws are called the functoriality principle. The functoriality principle seeks to explain the reciprocity laws within the context of a theory that originated in theoretical physics, the so-called representation theory of semisimple groups. In addition to ties with advanced theoretical physics, the theory of functoriality has found applications in diverse areas of combinatorics, coding theory, and cryptography. Enormous progess in the theory of functoriality has been made during the last thirty years which in turn has motivated much outstanding research, including the solution of the famous Fermat s Last Theorem. Despite this, our understanding of functoriality remains rudimentary in many respects. When a fully developed theory of functoriality is eventually developed, we can expect it to have a profound influence on mathematics and some areas of its applications. The goal of the project supported by this grant is to advance our understanding of the Relative Trace Formula, which is one of a handful of valuable tools that we have for studying functoriality. The results of this study will make it possible to study the functoriality principle from the point of view of period integrals . Hopefully, this will play a role in advancing our knowledge of the general functoriality principle doc2100 none Garnett will work on several problems in classical one dimensional complex analysis. The first problem is to approximate any Blaschke product uniformly on the open disc by Blaschke products whose zeros are sufficiently spread apart and thin that the corresponding Riesz mass is bounded in all holomorphic coordinate systems (i. e. is a Carleson measure) The approximation should be effected using explicit constructions. The second problem is to exhibit large compact sets whose complements do not support nonconstant bounded analytic functions. The third problem is a corona problem for infinitely connected plane domains whose boundaries lie on rectifiable Jordan curves. It too requires some new explicit constructions. The fourth problem is to show that a Jordan curve depends continuously on its welding map, which is the correspondence on the unit circle that connects the conformal mapping of the inside of the disc to one side of the curve and the outside of the disc to the other side of the curve. The methods to be used on these problems will be constructive so that they can be give explicit computer aided constructions of analytic functions and conformal mappings. Analytic functions and conformal mappings have broad applications in fluid dynamics, acoustics, and electrical engineering, and in these applications constructions are more useful than general existence theorems doc2101 none Research in theoretical physics will focus on questions in elementary particle physics and astrophysics. The physical, astrophysical, and cosmological consequences of theories in which space has more than three dimensions will be explored. Ramifications of duality relations demonstrating that seemingly different string theories are actually different forms of the same theory will be studied. Small effects that will test our present understanding of the forces between the elementary particles and possibly signal the presence of new physics beyond our present understanding will be theoretically analyzed. The possibility that space has more than three dimensions is extremely interesting, and the exploration of its consequences is very important. String theory is the leading candidate for a theory that unifies our understanding of all the basic forces of nature, so further progress in this theory is important as well. Finally, small effects have been a fruitful testing ground for our understanding of physics in the recent past, so new analyses of such effects is very timely doc2102 none The proposal is for a 3-day conference at the Royal Academy of Sciences, Amsterdam in September, on the topic of Eye movements and vision in natural tasks . The findings of research over the past few years have shown that even apparently simple behaviors, such as looking, reaching, or remembering the contents of a visual scene, are done differently and often better when performed under conditions designed to re-create the demands of natural tasks. The goal of this conference is to bring together researchers who are doing the most innovative work in understanding eye movements and vision under demanding, natural conditions. Natural conditions can be established by allowing freedom of head motion, by providing richly-structured 3-dimensional visual scenes, and by studying eye movements used to accomplish purposeful cognitive or motor tasks. The participants will be charged with the task of both presenting their latest original findings and outlining a vision for the future in a forum that will promote discussion and debate doc2103 none Vary This U.S.-Romania research project between James Vary of Iowa State University and Sabin Stoica of the Romanian National Institute for Physics and Nuclear Engineering will work toward development of a precise theoretical framework for weak interaction processes in nuclei by combining the theory of effective operators with advanced many-body techniques. The goal is to improve shell-model (Sh.M) and quasiparticle random phase approximation (QRPA) calculations and apply them to studies of weak interactions occurring in the nuclei, including double-beta decay, conventional beta decay, and hadronic parity-violation. To do this the U.S.-Romanian team will employ both proton-neutron QRPA and Sh.M methods with realistic, microscopic, effective Hamiltonians and then analyze the resulting nuclear matrix elements (NME). Results are expected to improve our understanding of nuclear structure and benefit fundamental research related to astrophysics and cosmology. This research in theoretical physics fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc2104 none Smith This award to University of Alaska Fairbanks provides shipboard technical support, shore-based support, instrument maintenance and instrument calibration for researchers using R V Alpha Helix, a research vessel operated by the university s Seward Marine Center as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The technical support awarded here will assist NSF-funded researchers conduct oceanographic studies in the Gulf of Alaska, Bering Sea and adjacent regions in CY and beyond doc2105 none Smith University of Alaska Fairbanks (Institute of Marine Science) will operate the R V Alpha Helix during as a general oceanographic research vessel in support of NSF-supported research projects. The Alpha Helix is a 133 ft. vessel, constructed in , and owned by NSF and operated by UAF. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 124 operational days during , of which 34 days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The remaining cruises will support NOAA, State of Alaska, and the North Pacific Marine Research Program. The projects scheduled on the Alpha Helix represent several oceanographic disciplines, including physical, chemical and biological oceanography, geology, benthic ecology and marine mammal behavior, and will fully utilize the capabilities of the vessel. The vessel will be used for a variety of projects such as maintaining moored arrays, providing a platform for instructional training and curriculum support, and supporting collaborative interagency research. Operations will take place in and around the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea. The Alpha Helix is part of a fleet of ships used by the National Science Foundation in support of marine science research. Most oceanographic projects require highly specialized equipment to be permanently installed on the vessel, thus the necessity for specialized ships. These vessels do not operate in the same mode as general cargo fishing vessels. As a result, NSF supports the operation of a variety of ships specifically dedicated to oceanographic research that are operated by universities and institutions around the country doc2106 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Nonlinear Wave Motion Ablowitz Investigation of a new class of solutions to certain physically significant multidimensional nonlinear wave equations and associated linear scattering problems will continue. This work follows the discovery by the principal investigator that these solutions can be associated with an integer, referred to as the charge. Solutions and properties of a class of nonlinear differential-difference equations which arise in the study of fiber optic arrays will be obtained by employing analytical, computational and approximation asymptotic techniques. Recent joint experimental-theoretical investigations of water waves by the principal investigator and collaborators has demonstrated that infinite dimensional chaotic dynamics can eventually result from the well known modulational instability of the classical Stokes water wave. The underlying mechanism governing this phenomenon has recently been uncovered. Further experiments and analysis are planned. Preliminary analysis has indicated that this dynamical scenario can also be observed in fiber optics. The dynamics of wave systems with large amplitude is often referred to as nonlinear wave motion. In contrast to the substantial theory available to understand small amplitude phenomena, the mathematical description of nonlinear wave motion is still in an early stage of development. Applications range from the study of large amplitude ocean waves to the propagation of pulses of light in fiber optics. Extremely stable, localized nonlinear waves, called solitons, are closely related to the investigations in this project. Solitons are being investigated worldwide due their potential use in high data rate communications over fiber-optic cables. The mathematical discoveries made in the field of nonlinear waves only a few years ago are now at the cusp of commercial doc2107 none The plan of this proposal is to utilize operator-algebraic methods to solve several problems in the mathematical theory of wavelets, and in the related area of frame theory, including Weyl-Heisenberg and Gabor theory. We have a new lead on the well-known wavelet connectivity problem, which we perceive to be a basic issue in the subject. Another wavelet problem of a basic issue nature concerns the question of when a Riesz wavelet which is known to be a linear combination of MRA wavelets is itself an MRA wavelet. Others problems we propose to work on concern norm-density of the wavelet frames, operator-theoretic interpolation of wavelets, superframes and superwavelets, and Weyl-Heisenberg frames. We will also work on two projects in a different direction concerning operator spaces, reflexivity and optimization. The first concerns an axiomatic description of a ranking-function for an abstract operator space. There is a natural definition of a concrete ranking-function for a concretely given operator space, but an abstract description of this is elusive and seems to be a basic issue. The second concerns the question of which matrix completion problems are well-posed in the sense of optimization theory. This proposal represents work of an interdisciplinary nature on the mathematics of wavelet and frame theory. Work in this direction that was previously supported by NSF has settled some open questions and has impacted the work of others in harmonic analysis and applications-oriented wavelet theory. Continuing in this direction is the main thrust of the present proposal. Numerous papers have been written in the past dozen years dealing with applications of wavelets to signal and image processing. So far, most of the published work has dealt directly with applications, and relatively little has been accomplished concerning the basic mathematical underpinnings of the subject. This proposal is concerned with this mathematics. There have been some surprises that have come up in our work in the past two years, and these discoveries have led to some potential areas of applications of a previously unsuspected nature. There are several outstanding problems we emphasize in this proposal and plan to work on. Under prior NSF support we also accomplished research with several co-authors on some basic problems in operator theory, operator spaces, operator algebras and matrix optimization, and this leads to some further open problems and directions we plan to pursue. Several graduate and undergraduate students arinvolved in this project. This grant also contains the NSF partial support of the annual Great Plains Operator Theory Symposium, a major mathematics research conference which rotates among a number of universities in the USA doc2108 none The project to be undertaken is a research of quotients of structures based on the set of real numbers. Certain categories of such quotients exhibit a strong permanence property: a structure reducible to another one is either very simple, or it inherits characteristic properties of the more complex structure. Via a theory of liftings previously developed by the investigator, this phenomenon is now well understood for some classes of groups and Boolean algebras, in the contexts of both decriptive and combinatorial set theory. (The former corresponding to the situation in which we study only the simply definable sets of real numbers and the latter corresponding to the situation in which we accept the Axiom of Choice and study arbitrary sets of reals in an appropriate ambient theory.) The investigator plans to further this research into the realm of Borel equivalence relations induced by Polish group actions. An example of an important problem that may yield to such a technique is an isolation of a simple basis for turbulent orbit equivalence relations. Quotient of a mathematical structure is formed by identifying its elements that differ in an inessential way. Different applications require different understanding of what is inessential, and therefore single structure gives rise to a multitude of quotients with rather diverse properties. Some of them are reducible to the original structure, but the resulting quotient is frequently, yet somewhat paradoxically, much more complex than the underlying space. One of the goals of this project is in finding a simple basis for a class of quotients corresponding to the new notion of magnitude introduced in order to study difficulties of classification problems in mathematics and extensively studied during the last decade. Basis is a set, typically small, of objects from a given class that are critical in the sense that every object reduces one from the basis. Canonical objects consisting the basis are easier to understand than the arbitrary generic objects, yet the intrinsic properties of the latter are reflected in the former. Therefore the basic objects provide a paradigm for studying the whole class doc2109 none for - Lepowsky Huang The investigators study a range of problems related to vertex operator algebra theory and conformal field theory, and their relations with and applications to a variety of areas of mathematics and physics. Vertex operator algebra theory arose naturally in the representation theory of infinite-dimensional Lie algebras and in the construction of the infinite-dimensional moonshine module for the Monster finite simple group, and vertex operator algebras are basic ingredients in the mathematical construction of conformal field theories, which arose in both condensed matter physics and in string theory. The investigators use algebraic, geometric and analytic methods and ideas. Huang develops an analytic and geometric theory underlying conformal field theory and applies the results obtained to the study of geometry and topology. Lepowsky continues his investigations into the relations between vertex operator algebra theory and number theory and other topics. The investigators also study algebraic problems underlying geometric uniformization. The various topics studied are in fact deeply connected with one another, and the solution of certain of these problems is expected to be useful in the analysis and solution of other problems. The long-term goal of the investigators is to contribute to the deeper development of a mathematical theory that will enhance the conceptual understanding of many known and still-unknown connections among many branches of mathematics. The theory of vertex operator algebras arose naturally in the study of both continuous symmetries and a very special large finite group of symmetries called the Monster. This theory is fundamental to a wide range of problems in many branches of mathematics and in theoretical physics. Some years ago, it was very surprising to mathematicians that the Monster appeared to be deeply connected to number theory. Equally remarkably, this purely mathematical connection, at first only speculative, was considerably clarified by the introduction of new mathematical ideas related to a completely different theory---a physical theory called string theory, which aims at unifying all the fundamental forces in nature, including gravity, electricity and magnetism, and nuclear forces. One result of this mathematical progress has been a richly developed theory of vertex operator algebras, a theory that continues to find new and surprising applications at a rapid rate. A very important theme is that vertex operator algebras are basic ingredients of the mathematical construction of physical theories called conformal quantum field theories, which arose both in the study of the properties of solids and fluids and in string theory. Conformal field theory is in the process of being rapidly developed into a rich and beautiful mathematical theory. This development is expected to continue to yield solutions to many mathematical problems, involving symmetry, geometry, topology, algebra and number theory, and to yield further applications to the deeper understanding of nature and, it is hoped, the development of technology involving solids and fluids. The proposed project uses a variety of mathematical ideas to deepen the understanding of vertex operator algebra theory and of conformal field theory, and to develop a range of new applications doc2110 none mathematical structures. Each such object possesses a group called its ``symmetry group which captures the symmetry properties of the object and which makes possible certain kinds of useful calculations based on symmetry. For example, the recognition and exploitation of symmetry groups is decisive in many complex counting schemes, in many algorithms for coding and decoding, in X-ray crystallography and in quantum physics. The most fundamental groups are the so-called ``simple groups; for example, all the finite groups (those corresponding to objects possessing a finite number of symmetries) are built out of finite ``simple groups. Indeed many finite groups which arise in important applications are simple or nearly simple. For these reasons, the problem of determining all the finite simple groups is of paramount importance from both the theoretical and applied perspectives. The intensive investigation of this problem began in the early s, and is nearing fruition through the work of the investigator and his colleague, as well as other researchers doc2111 none With the advent of third and fourth generation wireless infrastructure, and the simultaneous emergency of pervasive connectivity for all devices based on bluetooth like systems and ad-hoc networks, a new vista is open for research in the area. We propose ideas for a research program aimed at realizing ubiquitous computing systems based on the cooperation of autonomous, dynamic and adaptive components (hardware as well as software) which are located in vicinity of one another. These systems will be composed of a collection of independently designed components that automatically become aware of each other, establish basic (wireless) communication, exchange information about their capabilities and requirements, discover and exchange APIs, and learn to cooperate effectively to accomplish their individual and collective goals. The proposed work will enable a new class of applications that effectively use mobility and pervasive computing. We address several research problems that span the fields of distributed computing, data management, and dynamic collaboration between components. The team of researchers is located at UMBC and UI-Chicago, and plans to interact closely with collaborators at industrial labs (IBM, Hughes, Sun doc2112 none ANALYTICAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE GEOMETRIC FUNCTION THEORY; VARIATIONAL INTEGRALS AND NONLINEAR ELASTICITY Tadeusz Iwaniec One of the major recent advances in the higher dimensional geometric function theory is based on finding new differential equations analogous to the Cauchy-Riemann system in the complex plane. Hodge theory of differential forms has come to play a central role in this rather modern approach. The Jacobian determinants and the wedge products of the exact differential forms are subjected to a great deal of investigation, as they provide the means of achieving continuity, compactness, or normal family type results. It is important to realize that the higher integrability properties of the Jacobians can only be observed for mapping in the Orlicz-Sobolev classes. More recent developments have emphasized the connection between quasiconformal mappings and the theory of nonlinear elasticity already formulated by S.S. Antman and J. Ball in -77. This connection is an important aspect of the proposal. And that is why we depart from the usual quasiconformal theory quite far towards mappings (deformations of elastic bodies) with unbounded distortion. However, some control, such as BMO-bounds, of the distortion tensor will be necessary to achieve concreate results. The governing equations for mappings of finite distortion are non-linear first order systems of PDEs. There are also related second order systems which arrise naturally as the Euler- Lagrange equations of the associated variational integrals (stored energy of the deformation). An analogy between the analytic aspects of the holomorphic functions and mappings of finite distortion is particularly pronounced in even dimensions. A fruitful idea when studying these mappings is to view them as conformal with respect to certain measurable metric or conformal structures. Many of these notions extend to Riemannian manifolds, and accordingly, while we do not develop this aspect in full all the machinery we set up is ready and willing for these generalizations. The reader interested in developments along these lines and a comprehensive account of the geometric function theory is warmly referred to the forthcoming monograph of G. Martin and PI doc2113 none Leisure In this project Resonant Ultrasonic Spectroscopy (RUS) will be used to study the properties of materials usually shaped into spheres, cylinders or parallelopipeds. RUS is based on the measurement of the vibrational eigenmodes of such samples. The RUS spectrum yields the full set of elastic constants as well as the ultrasonic attenuation of the material composing the sample. Very small size samples can be studied with this tecnique. A major thrust of this work will be the study of hydrogen-metal systems including quasicrystalline, Laves-phase and rare-earth materials. Experiments on the quasicrystalline systems Ti-Zr-Ni, Al-Pd-Mn and Zn-Hg-Ho will attempt to obtain information about H diffusion in a non-periodic potential and use hydrogen as a probe of the local symmetry. RUS will be expected to contribute to the clarification of the hydrogen hopping phenomenon by providing data complementary to those obtained by conventional NMR and neutron scattering experiments. Experiments in the millikelvin range on the hcp rare-earth type metals and Laves-phase materials will search for the resonant and relaxation effects of hydrogen transitions on the low-temperature acoustic properties. The results will be correlated with modern theories of dissipative tunneling in a double-well potential. RUS will also be applied to the study of phase transitions. Elastic constant data for Ce-based magnetic compounds near their magnetic transition temperatures (2-30K) should provide valuable thermodynamic information related to the volume dependence of the competing Kondo and RKKY interactions. The moduli of Mg2NiH4 will be studied to gain insight into the nature of the change to an apparent conducting state. This research is facilitated by the involvement of graduate and undergraduate students. Their training in a contemporary area of condensed matter physics and materials science will prepare them to enter the workforce during the next few decades of this Century. %%% A technique called Resonant Ultrasound Spectroscopy (RUS) will be employed to study the elastic vibrations of solids. These measurements provide data about the rigidity stiffness of the material. Only small samples are required, their small size implying that the vibrational frequencies are in the ultrasound, i.e., inaudible range of frequencies. The method will be applied to the study of hydrogen in metals. Hydrogen in metals is of both fundamental and practical interest. Practical uses of hydrogen-in-metal systems include their employment in batteries and their use for hydrogen storage. High mobility of the hydrogen within the metal is usually required for successful applications. The addition of hydrogen to metals affects the elasticity of these materials. These changes in the elastic properties of the hydrogen containing metals are studied by the RUS technique. Graduate and undergraduate students will participate in this research. They will thereby acquire knowledge and skills in experimental and theoretical condensed matter physics and materials science that will prepare them to be productive members of the workforce during the next few decades of this Century doc2114 none Kandrup, Henry E. Structure and Stability of Cuspy Triaxial Galaxies The goal of this project is to construct triaxial distribution functions (DFs) for cuspy elliptical galaxies and early-type bulges. This will involve the integration of techniques from classical celestial mechanics, modern nonlinear dynamics and statistical mechanics, as well as numerical algorithms, such as modifications to Schwartzschild s technique for DF construction. It aims to answer the question: What is the connection between the DF and the surface density profiles in triaxial galaxies, and what is the influence of chaos in this connection or are the surface density profiles relics of initial conditions? Recent high resolution observations indicate that many (perhaps most) elliptical galaxies have a pronounced density cusp, possibly associated with the presence of a supermassive black hole; in addition, for galaxies where the cusp is not too steep, there is often evidence for moderate deviations from axisymmetry. However, theoretical arguments, corroborated by numerical investigations, suggest strongly that many of the stars in a cuspy, nonaxisymetric galaxy will exhibit chaotic motions. Until very recently, almost all work in this area has completely ignored the possible effects of this chaos. This project will explore the physical implications of this chaos on the structure and evolution of galaxies, with particular focus on determining potentially observable signatures. Questions to be addressed include the following: 1. Is it reasonable to model such galaxies as being in a time-independent statistical equilibrium, or would one anticipate that cuspy nonaxisymmetric galaxies should exhibit systematic evolutionary effects over astronomically interesting time scales? 2. How susceptible are such galaxies towards low amplitude gravitational irregularities associated with the presence of other comparatively nearby galaxies? 3. How will such a galaxy respond to a collision or close encounter with a very nearby galaxy? Much of this work involves applications of ideas which have been developed by physicists and applied mathematicians over the past thirty years and which have been confirmed repeatedly in the laboratory. However, an important new feature arising in the context of galaxies is that the chaos is generated self-consistently: In most laboratory experiments, chaos is triggered by some external stimulus acting on the system being probed. When considering a galaxy one is confronted with a situation where the chaos is induced by the gravity associated with the matter in the galaxy itself. Funding for this project is provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc2115 none The proposal is in the area of the theory of hypergeometric functions associated to root systems, and their q-deformations. A number of key results have been obtained by the investigator in the course of previous NSF supported research. These results have led to the resolution of various conjectures of Dunkl, Macdonald, Koornwinder and others. It is proposed to examine some of the outstanding problems in this area, which have to do with certain positivity conjectures of Macdonald, Stanley, and the proposer. The research described above should lead to a better understanding of several different areas of mathematics including algebra, representation theory, combinatorics, analysis, and multivariate statistics doc2116 none Gindikin The focus of the proposal is the development of a method of complex horospheras for real affine symmetric spaces, including real semisimple Lie groups. We anticipate to apply this method to the construction of the models of series of representations and to the decomposition of the regular representations on series on the language of Hardy spaces of cohomology. As one of application we hope to give an integral geometrical proof of the product-formula for c-function of Harishi-Chandra. Another direction of my research is the investigation of geometrical and analytic properties of the crowns of Riemann symmetric spaces - their canonical Stein neighborhoods. Integral geometry is a branch of geometrical analysis which investigates integral transforms associated with different geometrical structures. The principal challenge is to find a geometrical setting, more general than the group one, where it is possible to develop a non-abelian harmonic analysis. Another direction considers complex constructions responsible for the geometry of real affine symmetric spaces. Such phenomena have roots in classical geometry of Poncelet and Pluecker doc2117 none Pratt Two important experimental nuclear physics facilities are becoming operational in the next two years. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory will collide heavy nuclei at extremely high energy. Within the reaction volume, conditions should exist to temporarily alter the structure of matter, liberating quarks from their usual confinement within hadrons and melting the non-perturbative structure of the QCD vacuum. The second facility is the Coupled Cyclotron Project (CCP) at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory. The CCP upgrade will provide beams of nuclei with exceptionally high neutron-to-proton ratios, which can be used to perform experiments before the nuclei undergo beta decay to the usual isotopes. By colliding such nuclei and observing the outgoing nuclear fragments, we hope to infer information about the equation of state of neutron-rich matter and to better understand the process of nuclear fragmentation. The principal aim of our work is to provide theoretical interpretations of the measurements in these facilities. Since the questions regarding bulk-matter properties are addressed only indirectly through detailed analyses of such experiments, theory plays an especially integral role in the analyses of such experimental results doc2118 none Positronium is an ideal laboratory to study bound state quantum field theory. The present work focuses on the calculation of the energies and decay rates of the low-lying levels of positronium. Theory and older experiments are in disagreement on the spin-triplet decay rate. A more recent experimental measurement of this rate is in much better agreement with theory. The calculation of the O(a2) correction to the orthopositronium decay rate will check the earlier result and help resolve the current diagreement between experiment and theory doc2119 none approach to obtaining conditional stability estimates will be also studied and the PI plans to find sufficient conditions that would guarantee that one can derive a stability estimate (and therefore uniqueness) directly from the injectivity of the linearized problem. The PI will also conduct research in the area of resonances (scattering poles). The PI plans to study some physical systems where one can construct non-real quasimodes and to show that those quasimodes are close to resonances not converging to the real axis. Two such systems are the transmission problem and scattering by a strictly convex obstacle. The motivation for this project comes from its possible applications. Inverse Problems have numerous applications to geology, medicine, non-destructive evaluation of materials, etc. The anisotropic inverse problems are related to recovering parameters of media with properties (conductivity, wave speed, etc.) depending not only on the position but also on the direction. Conditional stability estimates show that small changes of the parameters of the system lead to small changes in the measured data under additional assumptions usually requiring sufficient smoothness of the coefficients. This demonstrates that the corresponding inverse problem is conditionally well-posed. Resonances arise naturally as resonance frequencies for systems in unbounded domains. They correspond to peaks in the measured data. For some systems, we plan to describe the asymptotic distribution of the resonances in some neighborhood of the real axis, which provides computational and qualitative tools for understanding those systems doc2120 none Polynomials pervade mathematics. Virtually every branch of mathematics, from algebraic number theory and algebraic geometry to applied analysis, Fourier analysis, and computer science, has its corpus of theory arising from the study of polynomials. This project intends to study polynomial inequalities and their applications in classical analysis, approximation theory, orthogonal polynomials, and number theory. The proposed research is about polynomials in a general sense, so it includes Chebyshev spaces, Markov spaces, Descartes systems, Muntz polynomials, rational function spaces, as well as polynomials with various constraints such as restricted zeros, integer coefficients, and nonnegative coefficients in various bases. The project continues several years of successful work on a variety of topics and describes various new directions. The polynomial is one of the most basic concepts of mathematics. Throughout history people have found problems concerning polynomials especially fascinating. Each of the ``three famous problems in the ``Heroic Age dealt with zeros of polynomials: squaring the circle, duplicating the cube, and trisecting an angle. Historically, questions relating to polynomials, for example, the solution of polynomial equations, gave rise to some of the most important problems of the day. Besides the natural intellectual interest in them, polynomials, and in particular extremal problems involving polynomials, arise not only in almost every field of mathematics, but also in other sciences, especially in engineering. However, it is often the case that polynomials related to a practical problem belong to a restricted class. Depending on the nature of the problem, some additional pieces of information on the polynomial may be known. For filter design, polynomials with coefficients from {-1,0,1} are very useful, because, if they are used, then the filter can be implemented without the use of multiplications; their implementation requires only additions and subtractions. This reduces the cost of implementation. The problem is to find such polynomials which have a ``lowpass behavior on the unit circle of the complex plane. Roughly, that is, they approximate 1 in a neighborhood of 1 and approximate 0 in a neighborhood of -1. The project plans to study extremal properties of polynomials with coefficients from {-1,0,1} {0,1}, and {-1,1}. Unimodular polynomials (when the coefficients are complex numbers of modulus 1) are also important in engineering. In some other problems related to physics, in particular electrostatics, information about the distribution of the zeros of the polynomial is known. ``Gaped polynomials (polynomials with a large number of zero coefficients) are used to analyze, for example, the time-optimal boundary controls for the one-dimensional heat equation. The proposal intends to explore further applications of polynomial inequalities as well as to offer a systematic study of naturally arising questions regarding polynomials subject to various constraints doc2121 none Kohler This proposal concerns the properties of dense matter and in particular that of nuclear matter and nuclei. It is a theoretical study for example related to experiments involving collisions between heavy ions performed at laboratories around the world. The main object of my research is to obtain an understanding of these many-particle systems in a state of non-equilibrium as well as equilibrium and especially the processes leading to equilibration. The interactions and collisions between the constituent particles are of utmost important in this study and are also a subject of my study. The study involves modern quantum-mechanical methods using a Green s function formulation of the problem. So-called transport equations were developped based on these techniques in the 60 s but it is not until in the last few years that they have been the subject of numerical study. The availability of high-speed and large memory computers have made it possible to obtain exact solutions of these equations for some particular cases. I have developped efficient computer-programs and have been in the forefront of these applications with publications related not only to nuclear problems but also to semiconductor and plasma physics problems. The study of non-equilibrium phenomena is not new in physics. They have in fact been the subject of intense study within the realm of Statistical Mechanics for over one-hundred years especially since the work of Boltzmann who gave us the H-theorem and the famous Boltzmann transport equation. An enormous amount of discussions regarding extensions and also critique of this equation has ensued. It has played an undisputed role in the development of both equilibrium and non-equlibrium statistical mechanics and for quantative microscopic calculations of matter properties like conduction of heat and viscosity. It has been used in analyzing experiments with collisions between heavy ions. Even so it is however a classical equation with limited applicability to quantum systems like nuclei. The quantum-mechanical methods used in my study supersedes the Boltzman equation which on the other hand can be derived as a classical limit. Memory and correlation effects are included. Collective, pionic and relativistic effects are also within reach by these new methods. The quark-gluon plasma is another system that lies within reach doc2122 none The principal investigator will study questions related to so-called nonlinear functional differential equations and, separately, to questions concerning iterates of maps which do not increase distance in some metric. Roughly speaking, a functional differential equation is one in which the rate of change of an unknown function x(t) depends not just on the value of x(t) itself but on the value of x at certain earlier times. Such equations arise naturally in models from physiology and nonlinear optics. Mappings which do not increase distance with respect to a norm on a finite dimensional vector space come up in many contexts, e.g., scheduling problems (the so-called sup norm ) and nonlinear generalizations of the theory of column-stochastic matrices (the so-called ell-one norm ). The principal investigator will study questions concerning certain classes of nonlinear functional differential equations. An example of interest is the the equation ax (t)=f(x(t),x(t-r)), r:=r(x(t)), where f and r are given functions and one is interested in the limiting shape of periodic solutions of such equations as a approaches zero. In a different direction the principal investigator will study iterates of maps which are nonexpansive , i.e., do not increase distance with respect to a given metric. If the metric is the ell-one norm on a finite dimensional vector space, one is led to a variety of generalizations of the classical theory of column stochastic matrices. The case that the metric comes from the sup norm arises in many applications and has led to intriguing and apparently difficult conjectures concerning the maximal cardinality of a periodic orbit for a map which is nonexpansive in the sup norm on a finite dimensional vector space doc2123 none The Principal Investigators are organizing a conference on combinatorics to be held at Texas A&M University in late March, . The intent is to establish an annual combinatorics conference to be held each spring at a university in the South-Central United States. There are currently several regional combinatorics graph theory conferences held annually, including the Southeastern Combinatorics Conference, the Midwest Graph Theory Conference, the Cumberland Conference in the Ohio River Valley, and the Smith Conference in Massachusetts. No similar series of meetings are currently being held in Texas or any of the surrounding states. At the same time, the number of combinatorialists in the region has been rising steadily in recent years, creating a need for a regular vehicle for communication. The conference series will strive to bring in speakers from diverse subfields of combinatorics, at varying career stages, and from different universities within the region, as well as a small number of distinguished speakers from outside the region. Speakers for the first talk include two international speakers (Guenter Ziegler of the Technische Universitaet Berlin and Dominic Welsh of Oxford University) as well as five speakers from the region (Margaret Bayer of the University of Kansas, Joseph Kung of the University of North Texas, James Oxley of Louisiana State University,William Trotter of Arizona State University, and Catherine Yan of Texas A&M University). The funds provided by the NSF will enable the proposers to offer stipends to graduate students and postdocs from other institutions to allow them to attend the conference as well as to provide domestic travel expenses and modest honoraria for the seven primary speakers. The growth of the combinatorics community in the region is reflective of the growth in the activity and importance of combinatorics in the last few decades. The proliferation of computer technology has only accelerated this trend, since combinatorics and discrete mathematics provide the foundations on which the theories and practices of computation are based. The speed of this growth and the breadth of the field s application increases the need for regular communication between researchers. This is especially true in this part of the country, in which the geographical distances between researchers impedes more impromptu communication. The format of the conference addresses these needs, encouraging broad-based talks from diverse subfields and including a poster session and other occasions for informal discussions doc2124 none Materials technology and science are an integral part of the manufacturing process and a key area of technician education. However, many academic and vocational instructors do not have experience in new materials technologies. To meet the materials training and curriculum requirements of high school and community college technology instructors, a curriculum and training center for Enhancement of Materials Technology for manufacturing (EMTECH) is being established at Edmonds Community College (EdCC), in Lynnwood, Washington. The project builds upon prior work in the areas of curriculum development, teacher training and student programs in Materials Technology, and upon participants input from related NSF ATE Projects. In addition to a permanent facility at EdCC, EMTECH is utilizing facilities at high schools, community colleges, universities, professional organizations, and industry located throughout the nation as required for training and special workshops. Teacher training workshops are being held at three partner community colleges: Metropolitan Community Colleges, Kansas City, Missouri, Sinclair Community College, Dayton, Ohio; and Hudson Valley Community College, Troy, New York. The proposed project includes a clearinghouse to provide instructors nationally with the resources needed to help their students make better design and manufacturing process choices. These resources are being provided through workshops, field trips, curriculum development and materials, professional society and industry contacts, and Internet web pages doc2125 none Research in theoretical elementary particle physics will explore and clarify the internal structure of the particles, known as hadrons, which interact with each other by means of the strong nuclear force. The research will use numerical techniques in which the continuum of space is replaced by a discrete lattice of points. The numerical calculations will be carried out on the supercomputers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Computer algorithms will be investigated for the extraction of subtle new physics effects caused by the admixture of strange quarks in the proton. This can lead to a better understanding of the internal structure of hadrons and to better techniques for similar calculations. In addition, an important new algorithm for simulating quark dynamics will be thoroughly investigated. This algorithm has the potential to increase the efficiency of such simulations and to more directly simulate the underlying physics doc2126 none Dr. Ulmer proposes three projects in arithmetical algebraic geometry, related to Galois representations, modular forms, and elliptic curves, both over number fields and over function fields. The first project proposed is to study the reduction modulo a prime p of certain representations of the Galois group of the p-adic numbers, using the recent work of Colmez and Fontaine on p-adic Hodge theory. In the second project, Dr. Ulmer has constructed a subgroup of the local points at suitable places on an elliptic curve over a function field; this subgroup contains the global points. He proposes to use these local points to study the conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer for elliptic curves over function fields. The third project Dr. Ulmer proposes is to study a new class of problems in the cohomology of varieties which are inspired by classical non-vanishing results for L-series. The new questions come by reinterpreting vanishing results using Grothendieck s analysis of L-functions and lead to purely geometric questions. In some instances these questions can be treated using monodromy results of Katz and Sarnak. This proposal falls into the general area of arithmetical algebraic geometry - a subject that blends two of the oldest areas of mathematics: number theory and geometry. This combination has proved extraordinarily fruitful, having recently solved problems that withstood the efforts of generations. Among its many consequences are new error correcting codes which are used in computer storage devices like compact disks and hard drives and secure information transmission schemes which are used for financial transactions on the internet doc2127 none In the real world, the identity of an object is often ambiguous due to noise or lack of information. This ambiguity can sometimes be reduced by utilizing extra information, referred to as context, provided by surrounding objects. Unfortunately, existing approaches that utilize context collapse when the number of context-bearing objects is large. Furthermore, there has been no attempt to separate relevant context from irrelevant context. In this project PI will develop algorithms that can reliably identify relevant context and then exploit it in a decision making process for pattern classification that is computationally tractable. The approach employs a Bayesian framework that incorporates partial context represented as the derivative of the identities of surrounding objects. The criteria for evaluation of context relevancy include information-theoretic measures such as mutual information and expected relative entropy , as well as complete factorization of Bayesian networks. The development of the algorithms was initially motivated by and will be ultimately tested on two related yet different medical diagnostic applications: white blood cell differentiation and microscopic urinalysis image classification. The resulting classification will provide diagnostic information about real patients. Although the testbed applications relate to medical diagnosis, the results of this research will be general and can find an abundance of uses in other areas, so this work will impact the broader scope of knowledge discovery, data mining, machine learning, and pattern recognition where context plays a role doc2128 none The project addresses the need for non-contact temperature monitoring and mapping techniques during Rapid Thermal Processing (RTP) of silicon wafers that have improved accuracy, sensitivity and range as compared to conventional pyrometric methods. The computational and experimental work already in place provides the foundation for development of a physical system which uses Thermal-Acousto-Photonic Non-Destructive Evaluation (TAP-NDE) to generate and detect thermally-dependent, ultrasonic, guided (Lamb) waves. These interrogate the silicon wafer and provide information about the thermal state of the wafer. This study is expected to establish the necessary knowledge base for a better understanding of: surface layer effects; high-temperature dissipative mechanisms; extraction of thermal information in real-time; optimization of thermoelastic generation and optical sensing techniques in severe temperature environments; and adaptation and integration of the method into an algorithm implementable into dedicated Digital Signal Processor (DSP) hardware. Development of the technique has far-reaching impact in other fields as well. For example, high-resolution thermal measurement at high temperatures is needed in manufacturing of high-performance jet engine turbine blades, determination of residual stresses induced by localized high thermal gradient heating, and nano-technology based deposition of thin films layers in micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS doc2129 none This project is directed at understanding the role of ion-induced nucleation as a mechanism for new particle formation in the troposphere. This effort involves the development of a unique microphysics code that simulates a size-resolved multicomponent aerosol system via a unified collisional mechanism involving both neutral and charged particles down to molecular sizes. The model will be used to provide new analyses of existing field measurements, through case studies, sensitivity tests, and model data intercomparisons. These studies will involve the use of air mobility spectra, which are introduced in this context for the first time. These data are useful for studying the initial stages of aerosol formation under tropospheric conditions. This work will elucidate the pathways to particle nucleation over a range of environmental conditions, and will identify mechanisms that are in accord with a variety of field measurements. We will use these results to formulate empirical relationships between nucleation rates and ambient conditions (precursor gas concentrations, background particle surface areas, local ionization rates, temperature, relative humidity, etc doc2130 none Wenzl is continuing his study of tensor categories related to quantum groups and conformal field theory, with a particular emphasis on their connection with subfactors. Braided tensor categories related to classical Lie groups can be conveniently studied via Hecke algebras and q-versions of Brauer algebras, also called BMW algebras. Wenzl plans to study the question whether categories related to exceptional Lie groups can similarly be described via suitable braid representations. Moreover, a detailed knowledge of such braid representations, combined with additional categorical constructions, such as the double construction, might also be useful for understanding various exotic subfactors. Physical systems usually have symmetries which can be expressed via groups and their representations. In recent years, one has encountered new situations in confomal field theory with a highly nontrivial tensor product operation called fusion. Unlike the group case, it is no longer symmetric, but only braided. Moreover, the numbers which naturally occur as dimensions of representations of the symmetries are no longer integers. This is a situation very familiar in the theory of von Neumann algebras. Wenzl plans to study the above mentioned symmetries in the context of von Neumann algebras. He will mainly consider algebras generated by unitary representations of braid groups. Such representations are comparatively rare, and hence provide a good tool for classifying models of the type mentioned above doc2131 none for --Raskind, Geisser, and Scharaschkin The investigators will study the arithmetic and K-theory of algebraic varieties over fields of arithmetic type, such as algebraic number fields. They will introduce methods to describe the rational points on a wide class of algebraic varieties over number fields. One of the basic tools used to study these questions is motivic cohomology, which Geisser and Raskind will continue to develop. The theory of systems of polynomial equations with rational coefficients is important for questions in cryptography and coding theory. Knowing a lot about the solvability of such a system of equations, or lack thereof, can play a big role in developing or breaking cryptosystems and codes. The proposers will use the latest techniques in number theory and algebraic geometry to study these questions. Although these are very old subjects, they have found spectacular applications in recent times, which has helped spur their theoretical development doc2132 none This group will conduct a multi-faceted program of advanced research and development for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). The program will concentrate on four main areas related to the development of improvements to the LIGO detection system and to the analysis of LIGO data. First, the group will determine control strategies and assess problems associated with suspended interferometers for the next LIGO upgrade through the study of a suspended signal-recycled interferometer. Second, they will asses the effects of high laser power, in excess of 100 W, on critical optical components (such as modulators, Faraday isolators, and other transmissive optics). Strategies will be developed for minimizing exposure levels to optical elements that cannot tolerate high powers. Third, the group will develop data analysis methods based on wavelet transforms for transient signal detection, continue to develop components for the LIGO end-to-end model, and undertake a critical study of noise characterization. Fourth, they will explore white light cavities as a way of reaching broadband quantum limited sensitivity for future generations of gravitational wave detectors. In the course of this research, the University of Florida LIGO group will collaborate with the LIGO Laboratory, Glasgow University, Stanford University, and the Australian National University doc2133 none Barrett Our goal is to understand the structure of atomic nuclei from first principles---namely, in terms of the free nucleon-nucleon (strong) interaction and many-body quantum mechanics. Toward this end, we havedeveloped a new ab initio shell-model approach, in which we treat all. A nucleons as active particles in an extremely large basis (model) space. We now have computer codes, which allow us to perform such calculations for nuclei up to A=16, i.e., 16 active nucleons, and have obtained reasonable and encouraging results for the light nuclei studied so far. We are presently performing detailed calculations for A=6 and 7 to study the rate of convergence of the binding energies, spectra, radii, etc., as the size of the model space is increased. A new computer code is now being tested to do calculations for 12C up to 10 million configuration space states, so that we can perform similar calculations for A=12 as we are now doing for A=6 and 7. One of our major accomplishments, to date, is the development of a technique for computing exactly the effective two-body shell-model interaction, which we have employed to solve the A=3 and 4 nucleon systems. From these exact solutions for A=3 and 4, we can extract the effective three-body and four-body interactions. We plan to utilize these effective three- and four-body interactions to construct an expansion for the effective A-nucleon shell-model interaction, which will greatly improve the convergence rate for our calculations. In the near future we will also include a real three-body interaction in our shell-model investigations doc2134 none The fourth Gordon Research Conference on the Biology of Spirochetes is the only ongoing international meeting devoted to basic research on spirochetes, which comprise a separate phylum of the Bacteria. These organisms have a unique but common structure and mode of motility. There are free-living spirochetes, whereas others are parasitic for arthropod hosts including termites. Several other species cause disease in humans and animals. Recently, termite gut spirochetes have for the first time been cultured and were found to augment degradation of polymers such as cellulose. As a group, these organisms are difficult to study because of the lack of a system for continuous in vitro culture (in some cases) and adequate genetic systems. However, the recent publication of the genomic sequences for two spirochete species provide a wealth of information that is now being incorporated into studies on the biology of these bacteria. Furthermore, significant progress has recently been made in developing genetic exchange systems that should be applicable to both free living and pathogenic spirochetes. Additionally, the new developments of devising methods to cultivate termite gut spirochetes has broad application, as this basic knowledge is now being translated into cultivating spirochetes associated certain human diseases. The first three Biology of Spirochetes Gordon Conferences were well-received. For the conference, 150 faculty, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and industrial scientists are anticipated. Special attention will be made to obtain adequate representation of young investigators. The planned oral presentations and poster sessions will provide a forum for discussion and exchange of ideas. The past conferences have led to important collaborations between laboratories doc2135 none Goad The University of Michigan Ann Arbor will operate the R V Laurentian during as a general oceanographic research vessel in support of NSF-supported research projects. The Laurentian is a 80 ft. vessel, constructed in , and is owned and operated by The Regents of the University of Michigan. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 199 operational days during , of which 199 days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The projects scheduled on the Laurentian represent several oceanographic disciplines, including geological and physical oceanography, and will fully utilize the capabilities of the vessel. Operations in will take place on Lake Michigan and Lake Superior. The Laurentian is part of a fleet of ships used by the National Science Foundation in support of marine science research. Most oceanographic projects require highly specialized equipment to be permanently installed on the vessel, thus the necessity for specialized ships. These vessels do not operate in the same mode as general cargo fishing vessels. As a result, NSF supports the operation of a variety of ships specifically dedicated to oceanographic research that are operated by universities and institutions around the country doc2136 none 6 Fu This three-year award for U.S.-France collaboration in operations research involves Michael Fu of the University of Maryland, Xiaolan Xie and Nidhal Rezg of the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Engineering (INRIA) in Metz (Lorraine Province). The research collaboration is aimed at the development of analytical and simulation-based models that address the reliability and operational performance of certain types of manufacturing systems, in particular, semiconductor fabrication facilities. Unlike other types of manufacturing systems, the main sources of operational uncertainty in semiconductor facilities are the downtimes of machines. Thus, preventive maintenance is crucial for efficient operations. The investigators will develop theoretical models that take into account information from the state of the system in terms of production planning data or process control data. The goal is to improve operational performance and find good maintenance policy by integrating these data. This award represents the U.S. side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Engineering (INRIA). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses of the U.S. investigator and graduate student. INRIA will support the French researchers visits to the United States. The collaboration is interdisciplinary. U.S. and French teams represent expertise in manufacturing facility design, production planning, operations and systems research, and in both analytical and simulation-based models. The U.S. investigator has expertise in stochastic optimization. This is complemented by French expertise in modeling and analysis of manufacturing systems. The project could provide new models for improving profitability and reliability of semiconductor fabrication facilities doc2137 none This project investigates a number of issues and problems in classical and quantum gravity and, in particular, Einstein s general theory of relativity. The goal of work on these topics is to improve the state of knowledge regarding general relativity, gravitation and quantum mechanics, as well as the interaction of these branches of physics doc2138 none This award continues an extremely productive program in the theoretical treatment of electron collisions with atoms. The project involves the use of perturbative, non-perturbative and time-dependent techniques to treat electron collisions with atoms containing two active electrons. The PI has been extremely successful in training undergraduates in atomic physics doc2139 none The principal investigator intends to explore common trends in representation theory of reductive algebraic groups over local non-Archimedian fields and representation theory of affine Kac-Moody algebras. In particular, he is interested in finding a unified description of the Whittaker functionals in these two representation theories using geometry. Understanding the underlying geometry of the Whittaker functions should provide new insights into the Langlands correspondence over the field of rational functions on an algebraic curve, either over a finite field or over the field of complex numbers. A closely related project is to prove the geometric Langlands conjecture using the theory of ``Whittaker sheaves on the Drinfeld moduli spaces. On the other hand, the investigator intends to continue his study of deformed W-algebras and their connections with representation theory of quantum affine algebras. It is expected that this study will lead to better understanding of the nature of the Langlands duality. In summary, the main idea of the proposed research is that seemingly disparate areas of mathematics, such as representations theory and geometry contain various hidden common trends. Recently, several deep phenomena have been observed, such as the Langlands duality. The investigator believes that these phenomena are so fundamental that they should manifest themselves in one way or another in many different areas of mathematics. The goal is to uncover them where they are still unknown, and this way understand the precise nature of the phenomenon. This may also reveal new and unexpected connections between different fields, through which new insights may be gained into fundamental problems of mathematics doc2140 none This award in the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research on the mechanism(s) of iron uptake and release by the iron storage protein ferritin by Professor Donald C. Zapien of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Colorado-Denver. The way in which the protein shell responds to changes in oxidation state of the iron in the core will be determined, as well as how the differences in protein structure affect the electrochemical reactivity of the ferritin. The principal methodology to be employed is cyclic voltammetry of a single layer of ferritin adsorbed on the surface of a tin-doped indium oxide electrode. Changes in composition of the core before and after iron reduction will be determined by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and changes in protein conformation by immunoassay. Both native and recombinant ferritins will be examined in order to elucidate the role of the H and L-chain subunits with regard to iron sequestration and discharge. The goal of this research is to understand how the protein ferritin carries out its functions. The principal functions are to take up excess iron in biological cells, store the iron and supply it when needed. In addition to obtaining fundamental information on this important protein, the results will provide a basis for non-biological applications such as electrochemical assays. This Research at an Undergraduate Institution project, employing an integrated chemical and biochemical approach, provides an excellent training vehicle for a diverse group of undergraduate students. They will be well-prepared for either industrial employment or advanced study doc2141 none The subject of multibubble sonoluminescence, where numerous bubbles created by transient cavitation grow and then collapse emitting light and also causing chemical reaction, is modeled using smooth particle hydrodynamics and including 19 chemical reactions of 9 chemical constituents doc2142 none higher dimensional spaces in few-body quantum problems, the so-called ``geometrical methods. Such methods have been a very active area of mathematics in recent years and are well known in certain areas of physics. They have not, however, been exploited much in few-body quantum mechanics, although they are vital for understanding the nature of the ``internal spaces of few-body problems. Finally, this work will take the corpus of methods which are in current use in atomic, molecular and nuclear physics for basis set selection, compare them, integrate them, search for generalizations and improvements, and apply them doc2143 none Crotts The principal investigator and colleagues propose to study micolensing events in M31, using the background stars in that galaxy to identify microlenses in both M31 itself and in our own galaxy. The rate of lensing events is expected to be higher in M31 than in our galaxy or the LMC because the inclination of M31 allows us to see through a greater column density of stars. In addition to lensing objects, the surveys will also find intrinsically variable stars (such as Mira variables). A key question today in astrophysics is what composes the dark matter known to exist in galaxies. A crucial clue comes from observations which indicate that a large fraction of the mass of our Galaxy may be due to Massive, Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs), an interpretation which is highly controversial and difficult to understand. This proposal is to fund a three-year observational program, involving our nearest neighboring, large galaxy, M31 in Andromeda, which will settle the question of whether a large part of galaxy dark matter is composed of stellar massed objects in the halo. These results can be obtained well in advance of competing, proposed approaches, and settle the current quandary within the context of a galaxy separate from our own, indicating whether the MACHO halo is a universal phenomenon. The proposed study can address unsettled questions from Galactic surveys about the structure and content of the central Bulge, as well as produce a comprehensive assay of variable stars in M31, which can be used for several, new astronomical studies. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc2144 none Quantum Chromodynamics or QCD is the currently accepted and well-tested theory which sums up our knowledge, to date, of quarks, which are the fundamental constituents of nuclear matter, and of gluons, the particles responsible for nuclear forces. The collisions of heavy atomic nuclei at the relativistic heavy ion collider (RHIC) in Brookhaven is expected to produce a new state of matter, the so-called quark-gluon plasma, which will provide an important new testing ground for QCD, with extreme conditions for various physical parameters such as pressure and temperature, and thus potentially leading to further elucidation, confirmation or extension of the theory. The expected weakening of interparticle forces under such conditions, the so-called screening effects, will be an important ingredient in the interpretation of data from RHIC. In this project, theoretical investigations of different types of screening effects in the quark-gluon plasma, as well as a number of related questions, will be carried out. The basic mathematical strategy, which is an extension of previously used techniques, will be to relate QCD to suitable theories in lower and higher number of spacetime dimensions, an approach which has provided significant new insights recently. Wherever appropriate, results obtained will be correlated with numerical computer-based analysis of such theories doc2145 none The investigator develops efficient algorithms, as well as additional techniques and methodologies, that can be used to solve the noncommutative algebraic components of problems in analysis and engineering. The noncommutative algebraic component of such a problem consists of solving a collection of equations where each of the variables represents a matrix or bounded linear transformation. Solving such problems involves manipulating this collection of equations until it is amenable to numerical solution or until the manipulated collection has some desirable property. Methodologies based on noncommutative Groebner basis were developed in a paper by J. William Helton and the investigator in and these techniques are effective for solving a short list of problems. Several directions of study for the current project include removing the need for additional invertibility assumptions, removing redundant equations, and finding appropriate changes of variables. The new approaches should widen the range of problems that can be solved. Ordinary arithmetic is commutative: 2 times 5 is the same as 5 times 2, and in fact A times B is the same as B times A for any numbers A and B. The arithmetic of matrices -- rectangular arrays of numbers that can represent, for example, the forces on diferent parts of a bridge or airplane -- is not commutative: A times B is not always the same as B times A. The development and implementation of algorithms for solving collections of polynomial equations spurred a great amount of activity in commutative algebra. In an analogous way, the development of algorithms and methodologies for solving collections of matrix equations can have a dramatic impact on solving engineering and analysis problems that have noncommutative algebraic components, where the order in which components of the calculation are arranged can change the answers. With currently developed techniques, some computations that arise commonly in engineering require a considerable amount of time to perform by hand, but can be done very quickly on a computer. The development of new methods for noncommutative algebra should significantly increase the number and types of problems that can be solved efficiently with the assistance of computers doc2146 none Nurmikko In this project, Nurmikko, his graduate students, and collaborators aim to study, design, and develop optoelectronic device and optical physics concepts that will lead to the realization of blue and ultraviolet vertical cavity light emitters, based on wide band gap nitride semiconductor heterostructures. In particular, the specific goals of the three year program are the demonstration and fabrication of (a) a resonant cavity light emitting diode (RCLED), and (b) a vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL). Although closely interconnected, the technical challenges facing the development of these new, compact short wavelength devices can be logistically grouped into into two broad areas: (i) the approach and implementation of the optical microresonator structure and (ii) the design and realization of a pn-junction based injector structure. To achieve high Q-factor vertical cavities for InGaN and AlGaN heterostructures, Nurmikko and co-workers aim is to create processing techniques that will create optical structures reaching Q-factors in the - range for reducing the laser threshold requirements. The approach is based on monolithic integration of two dielectric DBRs and also focus on hybrid structures with one dielectric and one as-grown DBR. Study of the optical gain spectra of the VCSEL structures forms another key project area, to detail the gain spectra of the InGaN and AlGaN active media for optimizing these for low threshold VCSELS. Nurmikko and co-workers will study fundamental microcavity physics to enhance light emission from InGaN and AlGaN VCSELs and RCLEDS. Excitonic enhancement to oscillator strength can concentrate optical gain so as to significantly reduce a nitride VCSEL threshold. Similarly, spontaneous emission properties for an RCLED are expected to be dramatically enhanced. For achieving a diode vertical cavity emitter, Nurmikko and co-workers will study lateral p-injection in two types of experiments: (i) the use of near field imaging techniques to study lateral diffusion, and (ii) the design of LED microstructures where current spreading can be obtained from electroluminescence spatial imaging. For the blue and NUV VCSEL work they will also concentrate on the incorporation of p-GaN AlGaN modulation doped heterostructures for enhancing the p-side conductivity. One of the specific features that they will address concerns the tailoring of the electronic structure so that interface scattering can be reduced (hence the hole mobility enhanced). They propose to use the very large built-in piezoelectric and spontaneous dielectric polarization effects to electrostatically design the heterojunction confinement profile. They will also study the use of epitaxial lateral overgrowth (ELOG) to facilitate both the incorporation of buried DBR mirrors as well as to define current apertures for channeling hole transport to the active device region (as defined by the vertical resonator). A specific characteristic of the ongoing research is a close collaboration with Hewlett-Packard (both HP Labs and the Optoelectronic Division, now renamed Agilent Technologies), as well as Sandia National Laboratories. This industry government laboratory connection will be an integral part of the project work doc2147 none Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is the theory of strong interactons, with quarks confined by gluonic forces to form protons and other baryons of nuclear physics, as well as quark-antiquark particles, the mesons. It is also possible for the gluons to form particles, called glueballs, without quark constituents. The discovery and study of glueballs is one of the most important areas of nuclear particle physics. Using QCD, we are investigating possible states of mesons and glueballs with emphasis on identifying experiments to test our theoretical picture. Of particular importance is our recent prediction of a low-mass glueball which we feel is strongly coupled to a two-pion resonance, called the Sigma. We are investigating decay rates of particles which will provide tests of this theory of the glueball sigma. It is possible to carry out some of these experimental tests at Jefferson Laboratory. We are also carrying out investigations of the Pomeron, whose exchange has long been known to dominate high energy elastic and diffractive processes. It is almost certain that the Pomeron is composed largely of glue, and recently our group has given strong evidence that the Pomeron is closely related to glueballs, including our proposed glueball sigma. We shall calculate cross sections for sigma production to test the nature of the Pomeron. Experiments could be carried out at the 50 GeV accelerators proposed at Los Alamos Laboratory and in Japan. The proton-proton collider, using the RHIC facility at Brookhaven Laboratory, would be excellent for experimental measurements of the cross sections. Properties of hadrons at finite densities and temperatures are also being investigated. We have completed a preliminary study for hadronic matter at temperatures below the chiral phase transition, which occurs at the temperature of the universe about a millionth of a second after the so-called big bang. We shall study the effect of instantons, certain gluonic modes, on the properties of matter both below and above this phase transition, and propose tests at the RHIC accelarator. We shall also investigate possible evidence for this early-universe phase transition in observational studies of the cosmic microwave background. These interdisciplinary investigations of relationships between nuclear particle physics and cosmology use field theoretic methods developed in studies of condensed matter physics doc2148 none This US-Brazil award provides support for Dr. Akif Baha Balantekin, University of Wisconsin, to collaborate with Dr. L. Felipe Canto at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro in Brazil on fusion reactions and neutrino astrophysics. This program is in the area of theoretical physics. The emphasis is on low-energy fusion reactions taking place in stellar and other astronomical environments and problems in neutrino astrophysics. In the former area, the research will concentrate on radiative capture reactions and related electromagnetic probes. In the latter area, the research will focus on solar and supernova neutrinos. Theoretical research in these areas is chosen to have a close coupling with the ongoing experimental programs in the US and Brazil doc2149 none This is a condensed matter physics experimental project aimed at improving our understanding of the collective behavior of two-dimensional electron systems in advanced semiconductor heterostructures. Attention will be focused on electrical transport, quantum tunneling, and Coulomb drag measurements at high magnetic field and very low temperature. These probes will be applied to the newly discovered many-electron states in highly excited Landau levels and to the remarkable ferromagnetic configurations that two-dimensional electrons in double layer systems exhibit. The results of these experiments will help to elucidate the underlying structure (e.g. correlated liquid, charge density wave, etc.) of these unusual phases of matter. As the quantum many-body problem is at the heart of modern condensed matter physics, the planned research will have broad significance. A positive impact on the materials science of advanced crystal growth can also be expected since only the very purest semiconductor samples are suitable for this research. The research provides excellent educational opportunities for graduate students and post-doctoral associates who be trained for careers in academe, industry or government. Their work involves fundamental physics and exposure to cutting edge materials and instrumentation. %%% This experimental condensed matter physics project is aimed at improving the basic understanding of how large groups of electrons behave in technologically important semiconductor materials. The planned research will have several outcomes: First, the fundamental properties of the electron systems themselves will be elucidated. Attention will be focussed on those aspects that depend critically on the repulsive forces the electrons exert upon one another. This many-body problem is at the core of modern condensed matter science. Second, this research will advance the frontiers of materials science. The samples needed for this work require the most advanced methods of crystal growth for their fabrication and, in the end, must be of the very highest purity and complexity. These same growth methods are used to fabricate a wide variety of technologically important devices, ranging from fast transistors for cellular telephones to lasers for compact disk players. This research has a strong educational component and will contribute to the Nation s technological competitiveness doc2150 none Two problems in gravitational physics will be studied, each of vital importance for the current efforts to detect gravitational waves and characterize gravitational wave sources. First, gravitational waves from core-collapse supernovae will be analyzed using a three--dimensional computer code based on the Newtonian quadrupole approximation. This work will determine whether dynamical instabilities succeed in producing a highly elongated or fragmented inner core, with a correspondingly large gravitational-wave signal. Second, the ``Einstein--Christoffel hyperbolic formulation of general relativity will be analyzed with particular emphasis on developing a stable, accurate numerical algorithm. Progress will be made toward developing a numerical relativity code that encorporates a high-resolution shock capturing scheme. Such codes will be needed to investigate the role that gravitational shocks might play in astrophysical systems. Also, these simulations constitute an important step toward determining whether gravitational waves from supernovae can be detected by receivers such as LIGO doc2151 none This grant is to search for a unified theory of the fundamental laws that apply universally to all physical systems, which has been a longstanding challenge and goal for physics. A current view is that there are two parts to any final theory of these basic laws. The basic dynamical law (for example string theory) is one part; a theory of the initial quantum state of the universe is the other. The dynamical law predicts regularities in time; the initial condition predicts regularities in space, in particular the regularities that occur on large, cosmological scales. The research that will be supported by this grant thus bears directly on these longstanding, basic physical questions. The recent remarkable progress in both string theory and cosmology makes this research especially timely doc2152 none Dimock The goal of this project is to study quantum field theory models with full mathematical rigor. This is useful to clarify the structure of quantum field theory, and to enhance its predictive power. Quantum field theory is primarily a theory of elementary particle physics, but it also has an important role to play in classical statistical mechanics. Specific goals are as follows. (1.) A construction of quantum electrodynamics on a three dimensional torus. This is a step toward control of quantum electrodynamics and or quantum chromodynamics in four dimensions, both of central importance in physics. (2.) The construction of a non-Gaussian fixed point for the renormalization group for an N-component scalar field in three dimensions. This would be progress toward understanding a wide range of critical phenomena. (3.) A study of the Higgs mechanism for non-Abelian gauge fields on a lattice. The Higgs mechanism is an important feature of theories of the weak interactions doc2153 none Project The goal of this project is to enrich a vital yet historically neglected segment of the science and technology education community. Rooted in a collaborative effort among Alfred State College, Jamestown Community College, Corning Incorporated, and Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), the intent is to create an accessible, self-perpetuating, real world capstone experience for students in isolated, rural two-year colleges. The four institutions will partner to develop lead teams composed of student and faculty collaborators who will participate in two consecutive summer internships at BNL. The various teams, drawn from the participating colleges, will work on problems selected by staff members at both Corning and BNL. Problems will span the gamut from computer science to biotechnology and will take advantage of capabilities unique to BNL or Corning: notably a scientific visualization facility, advanced scientific instruments, and cutting edge material science. Following internship, the lead teams will transmit and transport these projects to their home campuses, and will involve other faculty and students. This project will represent a next step in distance education. It creates an extended learning community which emphasizes campus-based, real time interactions among participants at different sites. The early projects will involve construction of scientific visualization facilities at the two campuses and mastery of selected measurement techniques at BNL. Later projects win focus on problems for which a combination of measurement capabilities and visualization technology are uniquely helpful. The project addresses the DUE themes of technical experiences for students and faculty in a real world setting, faculty development, and integration of technology in education doc2154 none Zelevinsky The most important problems for nuclear physics in the new century are related to the boundaries of the existence of nuclei, properties of very short-lived isotopes and the clarification of the path of the synthesis of chemical elements in stars in the process of the evolution of the Universe. Recent developments in accelerators and experimental technology now make it possible to produce thousands of new isotopes and study their physics. Along this road it will be possible to study what is the origin of the elements of the cosmos, what are the features of nuclear matter with unusual proton-neutron composition, what are sizes, shapes and excitation modes of exotic nuclei. The large discovery potential of nuclear physics in this vast terra incognita was already demonstrated by observation of nuclear halos, new types of radioactivity, superheavy elements and so on. Nuclear theory must meet a great challenge and find a consistent way of describing new phenomena and making reliable predictions for the future. The proposal is directed toward achieving that goal. We hope to address a few important issues such as the limits of nuclear stability, nuclear reactions of astrophysical interest, the description of loosely bound nuclear systems, new cluster effects, new modes of collective behavior, weak interactions in exotic systems,the coexistence of chaotic and regular dynamics far from the line of nuclear stability. As happened in the past, the new theoretical approaches and computational methods are expected to cross-fertilize other areas of physics - mainly astrophysics and physics of mesoscopic systems doc2155 none This is a grant for support for a graduate student only. The investigator works on two main topics - Hadwiger s conjecture, and extensions of the graph minors project. (a) Hadwiger s conjecture (proposed in ) states that any graph not contractible to the n-node complete graph should be colourable with n-1 colours. For small n it is true - eg for n = 5 and n = 6 it is equivalent to the 4-colour theorem. For all larger n it is open. (b) The graph minors project, by Neil Robertson and the investigator, was a major piece of work, spanning 23 long papers, which used graph structure theory to settle several open questions. One of the most difficult steps of this was proving that all graphs with large tree-width have large grid minors, and recently Diestel et al have found a short, simple proof of this vital fact. As a consequence, several conjectured extensions of the graph minors project now appear feasible. This work is in graph theory. A graph is a network of nodes, some pairs of which are joined by links - such as, for instance, a telephone network, or a network of plane connections. To design fast algorithms on graphs it is often important to make use of special properties of the graph - for instance, perhaps it can be drawn without crossings, or perhaps it can be built from very small graphs by piecing them together in a tree-structure. Having such a useful, global structure is closely related with with NOT containing certain substructures. The first problem above asks whether the graphs with ANY given substructure excluded are in some sense like those that can be drawn without crossings. The second studies the theorem that all graphs not containing a grid-like substructure can be expressed as a tree-structure of small graphs doc2156 none The proposed project aims at the preparation and characterization of low-dimensional materials containing octahedral metal clusters. A systematic study of niobium oxochlorides containing octahedral Nb6L18 (L = C1, O) clusters will be performed to advance fundamental understanding for the correlation between cluster configuration and framework dimensionality. The long-term goal is to identify and understand the structure determining factors, and ultimately make these types of materials by design. The proposal describes in detail a creative and original approach to prepare cluster-based, low-dimensional materials. The methodology to be explored is the modification of octahedral metal clusters to form building blocks with well-defined anisotropic bonding preferences. To achieve this goal a combination of oxide and chloride ligands is used to create anisotropic charge distribution around the octahedral (Nb6) cluster core. A combination of counterions with large difference in their charge-to-radius ratios and, thus, different coordination preferences is used to enhance anisotropic ligand distribution. The proposed work will teach art in its field, and support the education of young scientists who participate in this exciting area of the preparation and characterization of materials. Results and knowledge will be disseminated broadly through the literature and in presentations at regional, national, and international conferences. The work addresses strongly the broad scientific and educational mission of the National Science Foundation doc2157 none The work proposed is to study the connection between mixing properties of dynamical systems and their statistical properties. The goal is to develop a general approach that will enable us to obtain results on the distribution of normalised return times in a wide variety of settings including non-uniformly hyperbolic dynamical systems. This extends to the return time distributions for the canonical invariant measure interval maps with parabolic points or for equilibrium states for rational maps which have critical points in the Julia set. We expect to obtain explicit error terms for the distribution of higher order returns of any order. Ultimately we hope to extend our approach to L-S Young s `tower construction which originally was introduced to obtain rates on the decay of correlations. This area of research is of interest to a wide variety of scientist. For instance experimentalists who want to do numerical simulations will benefit from the proposed problems which will assist them in developing more reliable ways to numerically analyse time series of chaotic dynamical systems. The proposed research can also serve to develop more efficient data compression algorithms since it quantifies the error in the number of times with which a newly coded sequence of symbols occurs from its predicted average value doc2158 none Theoretical calculations of coalescing compact binaries (mergers of two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole) will be performed using 3-D hydrodynamic techniques on parallel supercomputers. These calculations will include, for the first time ever, a complete treatment of all lowest-order post-Newtonian effects (i.e., the most important corrections to Newtonian gravity imposed by Einstein s general theory of relativity). In particular, the dissipative effects due to the emission of gravitational waves will be included in the hydrodynamics. These calculations will provide us with a much more accurate description of the binary coalescence process, including more accurate theoretical predictions for the gravitational radiation signals that may soon become detectable by laser interferometer detectors such as LIGO. They will also help us understand the mechanisms that may be important for producing the most powerful gamma-ray bursts observed by astronomers throughout the visible Universe doc2159 none Theoretical research into the the detailed dynamics of ultracold atom-atom and atom-molecule interactions are studied using quantum chemistry techniques to generate the required potential energy surfaces and close-coupling and algebraic variational methods for the dynamics. There are strong links to ongoing experiments and there is a high priority placed on undergraduate training in atomic and molecular theory doc2160 none The project is devoted to the following topics of noncommutative geometry: a) Theory of D-modules and differential operators on noncommutative locally affine spaces and schemes. b) Noncommutative local algebra and its applications to representation theory of quantum enveloping algebras and related algebras of mathematical physics. c) Noncommutative smooth locally affine spaces and related structures. Main purposes of the project: Studying D-modules on noncommutative spaces, in particular on quantum flag varieties and noncommutative smooth spaces. Developing an analogue of the crystallin approach to D-modules in the case of noncommutative spaces and schemes. Combining methods of D-module theory and noncommutative local algebra, study the spectrum and representations of quantum enveloping algebras and other important algebras of mathematical physics. Studying properties and important examples of noncommutative smooth spaces and their applications. Results should have impacts on noncommutative geometry, noncommutative algebra, representation theory, deformation theory and some other topics of mathematical physics. Noncommutative geometry is a relatively new field of mathematics which is now becoming one of important tools, or ruther ways of thinking, in many areas of mathematics and theoretical physics. It takes roots in quantum mechanics and representation theory. But the main motivations come from recent amazing developments in mathematical physics (quantum groups and related quantized spaces ) and from physics. In the recently proposed M-theory (which is nowadays regarded as a candidate for the theory describing all interactions existing in the Nature), the geometry of physical space-time is noncommutative. A considerable part of the project, the one concerned with smooth noncommutative spaces (which the investigator studies together with M. Kontsevich), is naturally related to M-theory on curved spaces. The inverstigator and his collegues expect that the language and new intuition of noncommutative spaces will be used not only in pure mathematics, but also in modern physical theories doc2161 none Jennings The relationships between composition and structure of calcium silicate hydrate (C-S-H) will be established. C-S-H will be treated as a colloidal material that has been successfully modeled for one composition as being made up of particles with about 1 NM radius. They are clustered together to make a structure exhibiting particular surface areas and densities that depend on the size of the sample, i.e. the resolution of probe. Neutron scattering and gas sorption provide two powerful techniques for investigating the structure. The model will be extended to include C-S-H with a range of compositions, produced through the control of chemistry doc2162 none Professor Coyne proposes to: 1. Take part in the operation of the Milagro Detector. 2. Take part in the Milagro scientific program. The scientific goals of Milagro include searching for gamma bursts, monitoring AGNs for TeV gamma emissions, search for other transient gamma sources, search for antiprotons with the aide of the shadow of the moon and of the sun, and search for evidence of evaporating black holes. Works toward sharing Milagro s finding with other members of the scientific community and with the public doc2163 none A broad program of research in theoretical physics and astrophysics will be carried out by John Bahcall and Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study and by a large number of postdoctoral fellows and more senior visitors. Topics to be pursued include the behavior of neutrinos from the sun, the possibility that neutrinos have mass, the relations between apparently different string theories of the fundamental forces, basic questions in quantum field theory, and various topics in cosmology. These are all areas in which exciting progress is being made, and further research is expected to be very fruitful. Neutrinos are among the most abundant elementary particles in the universe, and string theory is a very promising candidate for a theory which can unify all of the basic forces of nature doc2164 none The investigator will study applications of group theory to algebraic geometry. More specifically, he will study those moduli spaces of algebraic-geometric objects that can be understood in terms of discrete groups acting on Hermitian symmetric spaces. His tools will include the arithmetic properties of the groups and the construction of automorphic forms on the symmetric spaces. Group theory is the study of symmetry, and examples of discrete groups are the symmetries of a chemical or mineral crystal structure. Moduli spaces arise when one considers some geometric objects (say, surfaces in space), and considers two of them to be the same if they differ only in some minor way, such as a change in point of view. It is surprising and deep that discrete groups can help one understand moduli spaces, but many beautiful connections have been discovered by many different people. The investigator will look for more of these connections and try to better understand the ones already known doc2165 none Among the specific problems, which this proposal addresses, is the description of finite dimensional representations of quantized affine Lie algebras in terms of the geometry of the symplectic leaves of the corresponding Poisson Lie group. When completed, this project should substantially clarify the structure of most known integrable systems. Another problem is the investigation of Weyl-type dualities for quantum affine algebras in the limit when the number of factors in the tensor product goes to infinity. Reshetikhin wants to investigate new infinite dimensional algebras that will appear in this limit and how they are related to the thermodynamics of the corresponding integrable quantum field theory. Some of the other problems he is planning to investigate are the asymptotic expansion of Witten-Reshetikhin-Turaev invariants for large levels, the deformation quantization of generic integrable systems (not necessarly regular, for which the Lagrangian fibration is a fiber bundle). He also intends to investigate characteristic classical and quantum systems and classical and quantum integrable systems related to Kac-Moody Lie algebras and Lie groups. Quantum groups appeared as an algebraic object (Hopf algebras) describing the symmetries of a wide class of quantum integrable systems. In the last decade there has been a fascinating development in structural theory of quantum groups and their representation theory. This development was stimulated by (and stimulated) various applications to integrable systems topology and geometry. Their representation theory is far more sophisticated than the representation theory of Lie groups. Quantum groups and their representation theory were instrumental in several path-breaking results: the invariants of links in 3 manifolds, integrable systems, crystal bases, and just recently, some of the ideas from the borderline between quantum groups and non-commutative geometry were used in string theory. One may say that the conceptual goal of this direction is to understand most sophisticated symmetries which may appear (and some of them appear) as symmetries of interactions of elementary particles (or strings, if they are really there instead of particles doc2166 none The PI proposes to: Take part in the operation of the Milagro Detector. Take part in the Milagro scientific program. The scientific goals of Milagro include searching for gamma bursts, monitoring AGNs for TeV gamma emissions, search for other transient gamma sources, search for antiprotons with the aide of the shadow of the moon and of the sun, and search for evidence of evaporating black holes doc2167 none The Severe Thunderstorm Electrification and Precipitation Study field program (STEPS), planned for the early summer of in western Kansas, will provide a wide range of observations in and around thunderstorms using aircraft, radar, and other observing systems. As part of STEPS, an instrument will be flown on the T-28 storm-penetration aircraft that provides images of graupel and hail particles and simultaneously measures their electrical charges. Dr. Winn will maintain this instrument during the field program and collaborate in the analysis of the data afterwards. The data will be used to assess the so-called noninductive charging hypothesis of lightning generation, which attempts to explain the creation of strong electric fields in thunderstorms by the systematic transfer of charges between ice particles of different sizes as they collide. This project also includes the development and deployment during STEPS of a new, balloon-borne instrument for measuring vertical profiles of the electric field. Used in connection with the New Mexico Tech lightning-mapping array, its position is determined by GPS navigation and the data on electric field strength are transmitted to the array by a pulse-modulated signal. STEPS provides the opportunity to evaluate this instrument by comparing the measurements with those using conventional equipment. Analysis of the data will be coordinated with other NSF-supported STEPS projects, including the New Mexico Tech lightning mapper ( ), the CHILL radar ( and - ), and other balloon soundings of the electric field doc2168 none This research will analyze the evolution of those rapidly rotating neutron stars that could be sources of persistent quasi-periodic gravitational radiation. The initial focus will be on those neutron stars that have been spun up via continued accretion from a stellar companion. X-ray observations of such binary sources (such as those carried out by the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellite) will be employed in order to identify promising targets. A parametrized model of the system, which describes the evolution of those properties that determine the gravitational wave frequency and amplitude, will be developed. The Stanford group has been identified by the Astrophysical Source Identification and Signatures Subgroup of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration to lead the effort to develop robust algorithms for detection of such sources. Such algorithms produce parametrized predictions of the time dependence of the gravitational radiation, which greatly facilitate its detection by LIGO and other laser interferometer detectors. This research is the first step toward this goal doc2169 none A new computational approach to three-body breakup in an external field is developed and used to examine the H- and He atoms. The approach avoids explicit considerations of the (unknown) boundary conditions on the wavefunction for three particles in the coulomb continuum doc2170 none Coon This project will continue theoretical research on models of the strong interaction between nucleons. The motivation lies in applications to few-body physics where predictions of realistic models can be accurately computed and the results compared to complete experimental measurements. We will continue to concentrate on meson exchange as the useful and economic model of three-nucleon interactions and of the small but interesting breaking of charge symmetry in the two-nucleon interaction. We will explore the theoretical similarities between this approach to three-nucleon forces and the production of mesons from the collision of two nucleons. Some new experiments study charge symmetry breaking in meson production; the similarities proposed and explored in this project might help our understanding of these experiments. Although our models and methods utilize meson exchange, the ultimate source of charge symmetry breaking lies in the different masses of the subunits of the nucleons called quarks. We will continue field theoretical calculations at the quark level of meson properties due to quark mass differences, and compare with new experimental information on meson mixing to provide a firmer basis for our models of charge asymmetry in both the nucleon-nucleon interaction but also the less well known lambda-nucleon interaction. We also will continue our studies of the neutron which are guided by the Dirac equation doc2171 none Research in cosmology and particle physics will focus on the nature and distribution of dark matter in the universe. Using very high resolution simulations and other methods, the project will investigate all the issues that have been raised concerning the hypothesis that cold dark matter (CDM) makes up most of the dark matter in the halos of galaxies. If any of these issues actually turn out to be serious problems, it may mean that the main component of dark matter in galaxy halos and on larger scales is not CDM, and it may give us clues regarding the properties of the dark matter. The project will also study the implications of the simulations and data for dark matter detection via the detection of the mutual annihilation of particles that make up the dark matter. The research will also study the constraints on cosmological parameters, including neutrino mass, from cosmological structure formation, in particular the formation of far away galaxies. This work is very important, since it will clarify the nature of most of the matter in the universe doc2172 none Alberg This research program in nuclear theory addresses several problems related to the structure of the proton and its interactions with other hadrons. We focus on problems in which the description of the proton in terms of its constituent quarks, antiquarks, and gluons can be tested by experiment. One objective is to understand, in terms of a meson cloud model,the measured asymmetry in the number of up antiquarks and down antiquarks in the proton sea. A second objective is to determine how proton structure is manifest in the interactions between antiprotons and protons which produce strangeness. Experimental data will be used to test effective interactions for quark-antiquark annihilation and creation and to test our model of polarized, intrinsic strangeness in the nucleon. A third objective is to develop an optical potential which describes the interaction of antiprotons with the proton and other nucleons in a bound state, i.e. an antiprotonic atom. Experimental energy level shifts and widths will be used to learn about nucleon density distributions and the elementary antiproton-nucleon interaction. A major focus of this program is the participation of undergraduate students as research assistants. This experience will be complementary to their coursework, and provide training in research methods and scientific communication that will better prepare them for graduate study, teaching, or work in industry5 doc2173 none Quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is a basic component of the Standard Model of fundamental forces. It is the force that binds the atomic nucleus, forming protons and neutrons from their more elementary constituent particles called quarks and gluons. The theory of QCD is indispensable in the search for novel physical laws at high-energy accelerator laboratories in the U.S. such as Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford Linear Accelerator Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and at others elsewhere in the world. This grant will fund an intensive, week-long school in high energy physics which will familiarize advanced graduate students and postdoctoral fellows with a broad spectrum of topics in QCD. In-depth presentations by well-known experts, both experimentalists and theorists, will be complemented by extensive discussions between students and lecturers doc2174 none The PI proposes to finish building the astrophysical gamma ray detector, STACEE (Solar Tower Atmospheric Cherenkov Effect Experiment) this year and to operate it for a duration of three years. STACEE will be used to study astronomical sources that emit photons at GeV energies. The sources are AGN, gamma bursts, pulsars, and supernova remnants doc2175 none This project from an established professor at the University of Maryland consists of infrared (IR) and microwave magneto-optical studies of strongly correlated transition metal oxide metals, concentrating on the cuprate high temperature superconductors. Systematic investigations of the infrared Hall effect in thin film samples will be made using recently developed highly sensitive polarization modulation techniques to detect the small magneto-optical signals. The complex frequency-dependent magnetoconductivity tensor will be determined. In the studies in the normal state of high temperature superconductors the objectives are to expand on preliminary IR Hall data and past magneto-transport work that shows that the zero field response and the Hall response of these materials are governed by different relaxation processes. In the superconducting state the main goal is to provide the phenomenology that will allow an understanding of vortex dynamics in high Tc superconductors. The proposed studies break new ground in superconductivity research and they hold the promise of opening new paths for the science and technology of superconductors. They represent studies of the carrier dynamics in these materials which show anomalous non-Fermi liquid behavior. They cover the frequency range that corresponds to the important interaction energies in these materials. The results may provide important new insights into the mechanisms of high temperature superconductivity. The program involves the training of undergraduates, graduate students and post-docs in IR materials physics. %%% This project from an established professor at the University of Maryland consists of magneto-optical studies of materials with strongly interacting electrons, concentrating on the cuprate high temperature superconductors. The measurements will be made at high magnetic fields and cryogenic temperatures. The infrared (IR) Hall effect will be measured in thin film samples using recently developed highly sensitive infrared polarization modulation techniques. The studies probe the electrical properties of these materials that appear highly anomalous in comparison with traditional metals and superconductors. They break new ground in high temperature superconductivity research and they hold the promise of opening new paths for the science and technology of these materials. They cover the frequency range corresponding to the important interaction energies of the electrons in these materials. The results may provide important new insights into the mechanisms of high temperature superconductivity and in the understanding of materials with strongly interacting electrons in general. The program involves the training of undergraduates, graduate students and post-docs in IR materials physics doc2176 none This research focuses on the calculation of three-body recombination processes in alkali atoms using a hyperspherical basis set expansion. The problem is of importance in understanding few body collision phenomena and in cold collisions of atoms in traps doc2177 none Research in theoretical particle physics will proceed in two main directions. For a number of years now, theorists have been deeply interested in the role that gravity plays in the interaction of the many microscopic particles of high energy physics and how one may unify all the forces of nature with gravity. A leading theory to understand this is string theory. Strings are extended objects whose different oscillations describe the different particles. Strings are one dimensional objects, and two dimensional objects such as membranes and even higher dimensional objects called branes can exist and are believed to play a fundamental role in unifying the forces. This framework for describing the forces of nature will be developed further and the important issue of seeing how Einstein s theory of general relativity emerges from the general unification will be investigated. It is generally believed that the laws of physics will be modified at higher energies from the currently known laws that hold at low energies. Over the next five years, high energy accelerators, experiments to detect the dark matter in the universe, and satellite experiments on cosmology will be able to test this. There are now several leading proposals as to what the nature of these new laws might be, and research will be carried out to determine the signals that might show up at these experiments that will allow us to infer from the experiments the new fundamental laws of nature doc2178 none Homological mirror symmetry is a conjecture, formulated by M.Kontsevich, which asserts the equivalence of certain categories associated to complex and symplectic structures on mirror dual Calabi-Yau manifolds. The investigator proposes to work on this conjecture in the case of elliptic curves. His previous results obtained in collaboration with E.Zaslow and D.Arinkin justify some part of this conjecture. He proposes to apply these results to the study of indefinite theta series. Another direction of research proposed here is related to a new class of functional equations associated to prehomogeneous vector spaces over local fields. Prehomogeneous vector spaces and their zeta-functions were studied extensively by M.Sato and his school. The investigator proposes to work on certain ``diagonalization of functional equations for Sato s zeta-functions. The next stage of this research would be to relate the constants in these functional equations to local L-factors. This would allow to find a new class of integrals for which the stationary phase approximation is exact. The first part of this project is aimed at proving a conjecture which originated from mathematical physics. This conjecture, which was proposed by M.Kontsevich in , is expected to explain the phenomenon of mirror symmetry discovered by physicists about a decade ago. This discovery (along with other similar dualities in string theory) is an example of recent developments in theoretical physics which still lack solid mathematical foundation. The present work should be considered as a contribution to laying such a foundation. The second part of this project is devoted to some problems arising from number theory. It was known already in the 19-th century that some deep properties of numbers are encoded in certain functions of complex variable called zeta-functions. The proposed work is devoted to the study of a new class of functional equations satisfied by zeta-functions which arise in representation theory doc2179 none This proposal requests funding for allowing the Maryland group to analyze data from the Milagro Detector, to partake in the operation of the detector, and to take care of certain aspects of centralized data management. Milagro s scientific goals are: Perform the first all-year monitoring of TeV emission from the known flaring sources Markarian 421 and Markarian 501. Perform the first surrey of the northern sky for steady and episodic sources. Perform the first sensitive search for emission from GRBs from -100 GeV to many TeV. Detect VHE emission from the Crab and measure its energy spectrum with a new, independent technique. Detect the shadow of the moon with high significance and use it to calibrate the energy response of the detector and to perform a search for high-energy cosmic antiprotons. Detect the shadow of the sun with high significance and use it to continuously monitor the strength of the transverse component of the solar magnetic field. Perform the most sensitive search for evaporating primordial black holes. Measure ground-level proton events produced by solar coronal mass ejections in a higher energy regime and over shorter time scales than ever before possible doc2180 none This proposal requests support for the Berkeley Particle Data Center. This center is a valuable resource for particle physicists, educators and students. It is the headquarters of the international Particle Data Group whose primary task is to provide particle physicists with up-to-date compiled and evaluated particle-properties data, reviews and other information they most frequently need. This information is made available to about 28,000 researchers, teachers and students thru the biennial publication of the Review of Particle Physics and the Particle Physics Booklet and through the annual publication on the World Wide Web. The Center an its collaborators also produce the compilations Current Experiments in Particle Physics and Guide to Experimental Particle Physics Literature . The Center provides World Wide Web access to the information in its publications and databases doc2181 none Jose The goal of this research program is to unravel specific hallmarks of quantum phenomena of model systems that are chaotic or have unpredictable behavior in the classical limit. Progress has been made in understanding this problem, mostly for single particle systems. We propose to consider the many-body billiard problem in terms of an interacting gas of electrons subjected to time-periodic magnetic fields. Our initial results indicate that for a noninteracting electron gas the Pauli exclusion ``force significantly modifies its magnetic properties depending if the dynamics is integrable or chaotic. We will next make this problem more realistic and include the Coulomb interactions, both classically and quantum mechanically. We will also study billiards with broken rotational invariance that have ``fractional angular momentum with or without constant external magnetic fields. The PI also proposes to study single particle chaotic scattering in time-dependent multiple potential billiards. We will also explore the connections between friction and chaos, in the context of simple time-dependent classical and quantum models. This is an important problem since it addresses the basic physical and conceptual question of energy dissipation, classical chaos, and decoherence, of importance in the field of quantum computation doc2182 none Hawley, John Magnetohydrodynamical Simulations of Black Hole Accretion Hawley and Balbus are conducting a detailed theoretical and computational study of orbiting gas around gravitating compact objects. Their approach will include both numerical simulations and analytic solutions for black hole accretion disks in a 3-dimensional magnetohydrodynamical framework. The latter is essential because of the overwhelming influence of magnetic fields and relativistic forces on the accretion disks to be studied. The principle focus of this project will be on developing a grid of realistic models for black hole accretion disks to which ground- and space-based observations can ultimately be compared. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF programs for Stellar Astronomy & Astrophysics (AST SAA) and Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc2183 none This award focuses on the use of strong electromagnetic fields to achieve control over processes involving the interaction of intense laser light with atoms and negative ions. Control of high-order harmonic generation, energies, intensities, and angular distributions are considered using hallf-cycle pulses doc2184 none Prof. Anderson is going to work on several projects studying quantum effects as they relate to both black holes and cosmology. For black holes he will study the question of how quantum fields alter the temperatures and entropies of black holes, as well as what happens at the end ofthe black hole evaporation process. In cosmology he will investigate whether quantum effects can cause a very rapidly expanding universe to become unstable and expand in a different way than it otherwise would, as well as study particle production in the universe after it underwent an extremely rapid period of expansion called inflation early in its history. By studying the details of how quantum fields affect black holes one can address such questions as what is left after a black hole finishes evaporating and is there any new physics that is required to describe the evaporation process. By studying particle production in the early universe one can investigate exactly how the matter and radiation in the universe were created doc2185 none This project provides retraining workshops to deaf and hard-of-hearing adults in the information technology (IT) field, clusters these workshops into a certificate program, and modifies the workshops into undergraduate courses. A critical national need exists for individuals trained in IT and for constant upgrading of their skills. Deaf and hard-of-hearing IT professionals have difficulty in obtaining training and skills development that meets their communication and learning style needs, even with an interpreter. The sponsoring institution is a two-year technical college for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. It was established to reverse the long history of underemployment and unemployment among our nation s deaf and hard-of-hearing citizens. The project provides funds for professional development for the entire faculty. This time is used to enhance IT skills, develop curricula and offer IT workshops to deaf and hard-of-hearing adults already in the national workforce or preparing for IT employment. The project establishes a new computer laboratory to support workshop activities, and to allow faculty to incorporate new information technology material into the full-time undergraduate curriculum doc2186 none Tammy Smecker-Hane The goals of this proposal are to: a) Obtain spectra (in the wavelength region of the -Angstrom calcium triplet) of 10 to 20 red giant stars in 11 Galactic clusters and determine (using stellar atmospheres ) the calibration of the CaII triplet as a metallicity indicator. b) Obtain spectra of ~110 Red Giants in each of 3 regions in LMC and apply the calibration from the Galactic cluster giants to determine the LMC giant s metallicity and thus determine the star formation history in the LMC . The LMC observations will aid in understanding how local variations in star-formation history are distributed. This, in turn, will help us to understand star-formation in intermediate redshift galaxies. One of the fundamental goals of modern astrophysics is to understand how galaxies have evolved. A galaxy s evolution can be determined by measuring the chemical compositions and ages of its stars. In this project, Professor Smecker-Hane and collaborators will accomplish two goals. First, they will calibrate the depth of calcium absorption lines in the near-infrared spectra of stars as a function of age and chemical composition. They will extend the current calibration to younger and more metal-rich stars so the calcium lines can be used to investigate other galaxies which have stars with ages from 2 to 15 billion years and chemical compositions from one to one-thousandth of the Sun. Second, these investigators will use this new calibration to determine the chemical composition of stars as a function of radius in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) using Cerro Tololo InterAmerican 4 meter Telescope in Chile. The LMC is a gas-rich, intermediate-mass galaxy with a distance of only 160,000 light years, which makes it one of the Milky Way s nearest neighbors. They will combine the chemical compositions with data from the Hubble Space Telescope in order to accurately measure the LMC s star-formation history. Existing data hints that the LMC experienced a significant burst of star formation approximately 3 to 5 billion years ago, and understanding the details of the burst -- its strength, duration, and cause - can give us valuable clues about the nature of star bursts frequently seen in faint blue galaxies at intermediate redshifts. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc2187 none Incera This three-year research project will continue the investigations of the PIs on the area of Quantum Field Theories in the presence of external magnetic fields, helping them to widen their international scientific collaboration, and maintaining their commitment to undergraduate research. Quantum Field Theories in the presence of external fields has long been a topic of intensive study in theoretical physics with applications to condensed matter physics, astrophysics and cosmology. In the present project, the PI s will use non-perturbative techniques to study the influence of external magnetic fields on various physical situations: (1) the generation of the baryon asymmetry (the fact that there are more particles than antiparticles in the universe) within the so called Standard Model of Elementary Particles, (2) the behavior of the thermal conductivity in high -T superconductors as a function of the applied magnetic field, and (3) the propagation of neutrinos in neutron stars and during the early universe evolution doc2188 none Research will focus on systematic understanding and characterization of the instrumentation of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO). In addition to providing leadership of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration s (LSC) Detector Characterization Group, the Michigan group will carry out research in the following areas: quantitative interferometer performance characterization, analysis of instrumental transient signatures, development and implementation of alternative interferometer control schemes, and discrimination of instrumental artifacts from true periodic sources of gravitational radiation. Systematic detector characterization is necessary to the success of the LIGO Project, a search for gravitational radiation from astrophysical sources. The discovery of gravitational waves will open up an entirely new and unique window complementary to the electromagnetic spectrum for studying the most violent processes in the universe. It will be possible to use this new spectrum to study the formation of black holes from neutron star collisions, supernovae explosions, and the rotational dynamics of neutron stars. In order to carry out these studies and to exclude false signals, it is necessary to understand the sensitivity and noise levels of the interferometer detectors in fine detail. The research to be carried out under this award in the next three years will be important at this critical development phase of gravitational wave astrophysics doc2189 none Research is proposed covering a broad range of activities in theoretical atomic, molecular and optical physics at JILA. The primary focus of is the study of ultracold gases, including the production and manipulation of Bose condensates (BEC), the creation of quantum vortices in a BEC, the study of multicomponent BEC s and atomic recombination at ultracold temperatures. There are strong interactions between this group and the corresponding experimental groups at JILA and the University of Colorado doc2190 none Research in nuclear and particle astrophysics will investigate microscopical issues concerning neutrinos in dense matter and their role in supernovae, including their explosion and synthesis of heavy elements. A major goal is to more accurately calculate observable signatures of neutrinos in terrestrial detectors. This will be accomplished by the creation of an improved code to study neutrino flows within proto-neutron stars and emerging neutrino spectra for all neutrino flavors. Among the important theoretical issues to be addressed are the possible mixing of neutrinos from one flavor to another and fundamental calculations of neutrino-matter interactions. The net production of supernova neutrinos over cosmological times will be investigated to determine if these relics are observable doc2191 none This proposal requests support for a research program in experimental elementary particle physics at the highest laboratory energies. The two hadron collider experiments are CDF at the Fermilab Tevatron and CMS at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) currently being built at the CERN laboratory in Geneva Switzerland. The CDF collaboration is now finishing a major upgrade of the detector for high-luminosity data taking (Run II) with the Main Injector, currently scheduled to begin on 1 March . The Tevatron energy will increase from 1.8 GeV to 2.0 GeV, and the luminosity is expected to increase by an order of magnitude. Johns Hopkins University physicists are analyzing the present data set (from which the discovery of the top quark was made) while also playing crucial roles in upgrading the silicon vertex detector (SVX II) section of the CDF particle tracking system. This vertex detector is important for all charged particle tracking but is essential to find and measure secondary vertices close to the primary vertex that are characteristic of b-quark decays. Physics research in CDF by this group is concentrated on heavy quark physics and searches for new particles, especially mixing and CP-violation in b-quark decays and Higgs and supersymmetry searches. The CMS experiment will be one of two comprehensive experiments at the LHC. It will open a new energy frontier in the search for physics beyond the Standard Model, in particular the Higgs boson and supersymmetric partners of the known particles. Many of the new processes involve states with b-quarks. This group is working to develop the b-quark vertex detector capabilities of CMS. The vertex detector will use small silicon pixels to provide exceptional position resolution near the pp interaction region. This group has over a decade of experience on silicon detectors from many experiments (Mark II, SDC, CDF, and L3). The group intends its physics analysis efforts to be concentrated on using b-quark decays to study bottom and top physics and to search for phenomena on electroweak symmetry breaking, Higgs bosons, and supersymmetry. The L3 experiment is now taking LEP II data above the W+W- threshold, allowing precise measurement of W boson properties, most notably in mass and couplings, and allowing searches for new particles, especially the Higgs boson in both the Standard Model and supersymmetry. The group intends to continue to participate in L3 data taking through the end of LEP running (expected to be fall ) and intends to complete L3 analysis work in mid to late . This group will concentrate on the search for the Higgs boson, exploring both Standard Model and supersymmetric signatures doc2192 none Daniel S. Silver and Susan G. Williams Knot theory applications from a newly emerging area of dynamics, the study of dynamical systems of algebraic origin, will be developed. The set of representations into a compact group of the derived group of a link group will be studied as a dynamical system. New results about knot symmetries and branched covers of links are expected. A recently discovered relationship between symbolic dynamical systems and topological quantum field theory will be explored. The research will address open questions in knot theory and dynamics and expand on previous results in these fields. It will continue a new program of research in knot theory that incorporates ideas from symbolic dynamical systems. The investigation of knots and links has attracted great attention not only in the mathematical world but also in the larger scientific community. Knotting and linking phenomena are found in molecular biology and plasma physics, for example, while striking similarites in computational methods arise frequently in theoretical physics. The proposed research will provide new understanding of knots and links by using techniques from symbolic dynamical systems, a mathematical branch of information theory. The research will also strengthen interaction between researchers in the fields of topology and dynamics doc2193 none A broad class of transport processes in matter at high densities and temperatures will be studied. One of the main objectives of this research is to study elementary processes associated with the evolution of neutron stars. The study will focus on examining how various factors affect the evolution, to facilitate comparison with the existing and future observational data. The outcome of this study will contribute to the understanding of basic interactions among elementary constituents of matter under extreme conditions. In addition, the properties of the nonrelativistic electron-positron plasma will be studied. The understanding gained will help guide the experimental efforts to create the electron-positron plasma in the laboratory and interpret the recent experimental data doc2194 none This proposal provides support for the research group in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry at the University of Nebraska---Lincoln. R. Wiegand and S. Wiegand will study local rings of finite Cohen-Macaulay type. R. Wiegand and Marley will consider homological questions in the theory of local rings. S. Wiegand will study prime ideal structure in Noetherian rings and constructions involving a homomorphic image of a completion of a Noetherian domain. Harbourne will investigate resolutions of ideals corresponding to finite sets of points (with multiplicities) in projective space, and related questions. J. Walker will work on coding theory, including codes over commutative local Artinian rings. M. Walker will investigate connections between algebraic K-theory and motivic cohomology. Often, real life problems involve many unknown parameters which may be related by equations which are impossible to solve exactly. Nonetheless, using the methods of commutative algebra and algebraic geometry, much valuable descriptive information can be gotten about the sets of solutions, if not the exact solutions themselves. The investigations discussed in this project concern central problems in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry. Just as importantly, many of them are continuations of successful collaborations with researchers at other institutions. Funds provided under this proposal will allow the UNL research group in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry to continue its active involvement in collaborative research, its success in the professional development of graduate students and its maintenance as a leading research group in these areas doc2195 none In previous work, the PI introduced the study of algebraic geometric codes over local Artinian rings, and the first main goal of this project is to further the understanding of these objects. In particular, the investigator studies the minimum squared Euclidean weight of these codes. This quantity is closely related to an exponential sum, where the sum is over points on the curve (defined over the ring) used in the construction of the code. Thus, the question of the error-correcting capability of these codes is reduced to a question in number theory. Results have already been obtained by the investigator and a colleague in the two special cases where the curve involved is either the Serre-Tate canonical lift of an ordinary elliptic curve or a plane curve with a single point at infinity. The PI is continuing this work with the goal of studying the squared Euclidean weight and associated exponential sum for more general curves. Additionally, the PI is working towards the development of a decoding algorithm for these codes, with respect to the squared Euclidean weight. The second main goal of the project involves the search for a structure theory of codes, a topic which has been around almost from the beginning of the study of codes. This search was largely unsuccessful until the introduction of so-called critical indecomposable codes in a recent paper of Assmus. The PI is developing this theory further and demonstrating its power by revisiting the classification of self-dual codes. Whenever data is transmitted across a channel, errors are bound to occur. The goal of coding theory is to find efficient ways of adding redundancy so that errors can be detected, or even corrected. Two basic questions must be asked about every code: What is the error-correcting capability of this code? and If an error occurs in transmission while using this code, is there an efficient way of recovering the original codeword? In the case that code is defined over the ring of integers modulo a power of a prime, the error-correcting capability of the code is measured in terms of the code s minimum squared Euclidean weight and the investigator studies this property in the case of algebraic geometric codes. The problem of recovering the original codeword is equivalent to finding a decoding algorithm for the code, which has important connections to cryptography also. Finally, a structure theory for codes allows the study of codes from a systematic point of view. In particular, self-dual codes often achieve a good balance between error-correcting capability and efficiency, and a structure theory allows a new attack for the study of these objects doc2196 none This project is developing and testing a virtual laboratory via the Internet to enhance the comprehension of the interdisciplinary nature of machine tool building and maintenance technology, to reduce costs by maximizing the adaptiveness of the curriculum, to enhance learning efficiency in a multimedia and multi-intelligence approach (Gardner, ), and to improve laboratory safety with minimized environmental hazards. A coalition of a two-year college, a four-year university, a community-based technology center, professional associations, and partners from the multimedia software and machine tool industry are working together on the project. The expected outcomes are three simulation modules, each targeting a particular aspect of machine tool building and maintenance technologies that will supplement and complement the existing machine technology curriculum in the nation s two-year associate degree programs. A comprehensive and independent evaluation is being conducted prior to national dissemination via both the Internet and CD-ROM to two-year colleges, high schools and other community based training centers throughout the nation. Pre- and post-tests are being used to evaluate the effect of the proposed multimedia modules on students attitudes and learning. A diverse cohort of two-year college students, including women and minorities, are participating in the field tests as control and test groups. A national workshop is being developed to help faculty members learn how to use the modules and to develop customized modules for themselves doc2197 none Continuing research in theoretical physics will examine elementary particles through their long-range interactions. Applications include quantum chromodynamics, the increasingly confirmed but still not fully-analyzed theory of the strong nuclear interactions, and solitons, objects critical to elementary-particle theory, string theory, and condensed-matter physics. The work is important because of the fundamental systems studied, and productive because long-range interactions give strong constraints on microscopic structure doc2198 none Loeb The goals of this research are to simulate the history of cosmic structure formation from the first generation to the highest redshifts where galaxies and the intergalactic medium are observed. This will be done using hydrodynamic simulations (developed by the CO-I) to improve semi-analytic models (developed by the PI). The work requires very powerful computational facilities which are available to the PI. Following the Big Bang, the universe started its expansion from a nearly smooth initial state. As the universe aged, small variations in the density of matter grew due to the effect of gravity. Eventually, regions denser than average collapsed and formed bound objects. This project will develop computer models with which to study the nature of the first generation of stars and galaxies that formed as a result of this process. These computer models will be tested over the coming decade with the next generation of telescopes, both from the ground and from space doc2199 none Under this grant Prof. Charles Misner of the University of Maryland with the assistance of graduate students will develop simplified computer models of idealized systems of binary neutron stars emitting gravitational waves. These models should allow the testing of novel methods for simplifying the computation of the gravitational wave signals from such exotic systems. After development and testing using a simplified gravitational theory, these methods are intended to be introduced into large multi-institutional computational efforts where the full Einstein gravitational theory is being modelled numerically. This theoretical and computational effort is being done in support of the NSF s gravitational wave observatory LIGO whose shakedown is expected to end, and science runs to begin, in . Improvements in the accuracy of the computational models of expected sources of gravitational radiation will result in improved sensitivity for the LIGO facility in observing the corresponding gravitational waves. There is hope that this new (gravitational) eye on the cosmos will produce results as exciting as those given in the past by radio astronomy, X-ray astronomy, and gamma ray astronomy doc2200 none A joint research project in theoretical elementary particle physics involving US institutions (Iowa State and SUNY at Stony Brook) and two institutions of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute and Institute for Nuclear Research, Moscow) will address the production of J Psi particles in high-energy collisions. Precision calculations of the rate for production of these particles predicted by Quantum Chromodynamics, the theory of the strong nuclear force, will be performed. Our ability to measure the J Psi production rate in both low momentum and high momentum regions makes the J Psi a unique probe for exploring the strong nuclear force in physical situations where it is neither weak nor extremely strong. The calculations to be carried out are important to the improvement of our understanding of Quantum Chromodynamics and our confidence in it, and to the furthering of our understanding of the strong nuclear force doc2201 none This project will carry out LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) research activities related to the analysis of data from the NSF-funded Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO). This includes the development and testing of algorithms and data analysis techniques to search for gravitational waves from known astrophysical sources. Since these will produce extremely weak signals, the data analysis problem is to find these signals in a noisy data stream, where the statistical properties of the noise are not straightforward to characterize. The UWM group is developing and testing data analysis strategies and algorithms which are not adversely affected by instrumental anomalies. This work includes the writing of both prototype and production codes, which are then tested and compared with other techniques. The best methods are then migrated into the LIGO Data Analysis System where they can be run on very large data sets. This work is crucial to the success of LIGO, which is an NSF-funded project to detect gravitational waves of astrophysical origin. Such waves are emitted by astrophysical sources such as coalescing pairs of binary neutron stars, supernovae, and pulsars, but are very weak and have never been directly observed. This is why new and specialized types of data analysis methods are needed. Direct observation would confirm a fundamental prediction of physics -- the existence of gravitational waves -- and provide a unique tool for observing exotic astrophysical phenomena. The two LIGO observatories are located in Hanford, WA and Livingston, LA, and have been under construction since ; they will be completed and operating sometime during doc2202 none Experiments will be conducted to test Newtons law of gravitation at inter-mass separations of less than one centimeter. For separations between one centimeter and one tenth of a millimeter, the experiments will be sensitive enough to detect gravity and to test for deviations from Newtons inverse-square law. For smaller separations the experiments could detect proposed new short-range forces stronger than gravity but still many orders of magnitude weaker than other known forces. The investigators will first complete on-going experiments with an existing room temperature apparatus, and then construct a new cryogenic instrument with greater sensitivity. A planar tungsten torsional oscillator is used as the sensitive force detector. There is currently intense interest among theoretical physicists in the possibility that there may exist new feeble forces at length scales below one centimeter. String theory, which seeks to encompass all known physics including gravitation, generally predicts light fields called moduli. When these acquire mass through certain mechanisms, they may mediate forces with a range of about one millimeter. Detecting such forces would provide dramatic evidence for string theory. Theorists have also proposed that there may exist several new compact spatial dimensions beyond the usual three, and that gravity is weak because it is able to spread out in the extra dimensions. When the number of extra dimensions is two, this view leads to large deviations from Newtons law of gravitation at about one millimeter. Experimental evidence of the predicted deviations would be a dramatic step forward for our understanding of fundamental physics doc2203 none This research focuses on two theoretical aspects of electron-molecule collisions; dissociative attachment in small linear and non-linear molecules and vibrational excitation of the hydrogen molecule. The former problem will be treated using density functional methods. The latter problem has been undertaken to resolve a long-standing controversy between the experimentalists performing swarm measurements and those using molecular beams doc2204 none This US-Argentina award funded by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Chemistry provides support for Dr. Julio C. Facelli of the University of Utah to work with Dr. Marta Ferraro at the Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina. They will focus on modeling 13C and 15N chemical shifts in periodic systems, such as crystals, with particular emphasis on including intermolecular effects. This project will accelerate an ongoing collaboration between the two research groups in developing computational tools to model the intermolecular effects observed on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) chemical shieldings in crystalline systems. The Utah group has expertise in measuring, analyzing and calculating NMR chemical shifts tensors. The group in Argentina has substantial theoretical and programming expertise in calculating chemical shifts. Combined resources between the two groups will speed up the process of developing the necessary software to take full advantage of the vast solid state NMR data that are available. The results are applicable to a wide range of organic, biological macromolecular and inorganic materials, such as polymers and pharmaceutical chemicals doc2205 none for Hermiller s proposal Geometric group theory and rewriting systems This project involves three main areas of exploration in the field of geometric group theory, using both computational techniques (in particular, rewriting systems) and geometric methods to study groups. The first area is the extension and application of geometric group theory techniques to groups, monoids, and algebras. The second topic is a study of polyfree groups, including algorithmic problems for these groups and connections to braid groups and Artin groups. The third area is a study of well-founded and admissible orderings, including constructions of rewriting systems which have applications to noncommutative Groebner bases. Groups are a useful mathematical tool which originated in the study of symmetry, including symmetries of naturally occurring objects such as crystals and molecules. For example, the reflections and rotations of the plane that map a square back to itself form a group. This project is in a field which is at the interface between group theory, geometry, and computer science. The principal investigator s work focuses on the interplay between these areas, and in particular on the pursuit of computationally effective and efficient algorithms for working with groups that are associated with certain geometric structures. This project also includes applications of these techniques to other areas of algebra doc2206 none A Workshop on the Interface of Probability and Number Theory will be held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on May 19-20, . The workshop will provide a unique and unprecedented opportunity for researchers from the number theory and the probability communities to meet and exchange ideas. This workshop is expected to stimulate collaboration between number theorists and probabilists and foster research in areas of common interest. Topics to be covered in this workshop include probabilistic number theory, uniform distribution and discrepancy, probabilistic models in prime number theory, probabilistic methods in additive number theory, and probability theory on random combinatorial structures doc2207 none Dr. Wiseman will conduct research applicable to the detection of gravitational waves. The research will have two distinct components: (1) participation in practical software implementations of searches for signals from astrophysical sources (about 60%), and (2) theoretical calculations of expected gravitational-wave signals from highly relativistic orbiting binary star systems (about 40%). The first is highly collaborative research and will include taking on the duties of ``Software Coordinator for LIGO Scientific collaboration (LSC), as well conducting Mock Data Challenges to test the software and algorithms being implemented. The second part is largely an independent effort to study the nature of radiation reaction effects in curved space time. This, in turn leads to better theoretical understanding of the astrophysical sources that produce the radiation. Together these form a healthy mix of practical and theoretical research, as well as collaborative and independent work. Over the past ten years Wiseman has participated in a broad collaboration to use post-Newtonian techniques to calculate the chirp waveform produced by binary star systems (e.g. pairs of neutron stars or black holes). In recent years, he has broadened his efforts to to study the problem of radiation in curved spacetime. Continuation of these efforts will improve our quantitative understanding of the signals produced by highly relativistic inspiralling coalescing binaries. This, in turn, improves our ability to find these signal buried in detector noise doc2208 none The PI proposed to use a balloon borne instrument to measure the flux of muons at different depth in the atmosphere. The muon flux data will be used to crosscheck and refine models that deal with the neutrinos produced by cosmic rays in the atmosphere. Such work is essential to understand the neutrino mass studies at SuperK, AMANDA, and IceCube doc2209 none The main areas of research will be in general-relativistic astrophysics and cosmology. In the former area, the nonlinear evolution of the unstable r-modes of rotating neutron starts will be investigated. In addition, general-relativistic models of binary neutron stars and of neutron-star-black-hole pairs will be constructed, as part of an iterative procedure to obtain accurate initial data for binary inspiral. In the area of cosmology a new model will be investigated, in which nonperturbative vacuum energy of a quantized field causes an acceleration of the recent expansion of the universe. In relativistic astrophysics, recent surprises have dramatically improved the likelihood that the spin of rapidly rotating, newly formed neutron stars is limited by an instability driven by gravitational waves - and that the emitted waves may be detectable. Developing an accurate numerical solution for binary coalescence is crucial to maximize events that gravitational-wave detectors (LIGO and LISA, in particular) will see and to extract from observed events the physics of the coalescing objects. In cosmology, the most exciting and least understood recent observational discovery is that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, not slowing down doc2210 none The Southeast Center for Networking and Information Technology Education (the Center) is promoting the development of curricula, processes, and infrastructure to improve programs and create a statewide delivery system to educate and train technicians to meet workforce shortages in computer networking and information technology (IT). The Center involves a statewide partnership of educational institutions (two community colleges, three school systems and two state universities) and industry participants. The Center is jointly managed by Daytona Community College and Seminole Community College. The Center is working to achieve the following objectives and outcomes: (a) Incorporate best-of-breed IT workforce curricula with current industry certification requirements to develop integrated networking and IT curricula that provide seamless K-1 6 articulation with multiple occupational exit points and incumbent worker education opportunities. (b) Develop and conduct Teach the Teacher (T3) in-service and faculty development in a technologically-integrated format to disseminate IT instructional resources and facilitate curricula adaptation and course delivery. (c) Leverage industry partnerships to provide ongoing support to the Center, determine training requirements, create and validate curricula, and provide student and faculty internships. (d) Encourage diversity in the workforce by developing marketing collateral to be used by educational institutions to generate IT career awareness and recruit students from under-represented populations, i.e. women, minorities, and non-traditional students doc2211 none Davis This is a collaborative research project with Sandra Faber and colleagues at University of California, Santa Cruz (AST ). The goal of this research is to conduct a large, systematic survey of galaxies with redshifts Z 0.7. This survey (Deep Extragalactic Evolutionary Probe - DEEP) is designed to measure both the properties of distant galaxies and their distribution in space. It consists of two parts: a 1-hour survey (1HS), to map the spatial locations of ~50,000 galaxies with Z 0.7, and a 3-hour survey (3HS), on a sub sample of the 1HS targets, to measure redshifts, line widths, and structure for ~5,000 galaxies, using HST imaging data, and going ~ 1 magnitude deeper into the luminosity function than the 1HS. Faber, Davis, and collaborators will use the data to determine fundamental properties of galaxies at Z~1 such as: number densities, the galaxy correlation function, and clustering statistics as a function of galaxy type. They will also use the data from the 3HS to determine the dark halo masses and underlying dark matter distribution at this redshift, as well as the biasing function. This collaborative project supports a 120 night observing program on the Keck telescope in Hawaii that will garner spectroscopic data on approximately 60,000 faint galaxies, with the goal of elucidating the properties of faint, distant galaxies, as well as the statistics of their spatial distribution. The DEEP survey will provide an unprecedented, detailed look at the universe at cosmologically significant lookback times. The survey will generate information on high redshift galaxies and their environment that is comparable in quality to data currently available for nearby galaxies. This dataset, which will be made Web accessible to the broader community, will enable powerful tests of the evolutionary predictions of alternative cosmological models. By counting the abundance of galaxies versus measured redshift, one can precisely determine the acceleration rate of the expansion of the Universe, a test of fundamental physics. The DEEP survey will take full advantage of a new spectrograph being prepared for the Keck telescope, DEIMOS, which has a large field of view, high spectral resolution, and wide spectral coverage. The scientific program of the DEEP survey cannot be replicated efficiently on any other instrument or telescope worldwide. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC) and the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities doc2212 none The inspiral and merger of black holes and neutron stars are the most promising sources of gravitational wave signals for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), expected to become operational in . Inspiral signals take the form of chirps, i.e. signals with monotonically increasing frequency. Methods will be developed for the detection of chirped signals. Specifically, a new approach, the Fast Chirp Transform (FCT), will be implemented. The FCT provides a simple and elegant formalism for detecting a broad class of variable frequency signals, and is is a generalization of the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to non-linear phase evolution such as that exhibited by chirped signals. Development of Fast Chirp Transform techniques will allow fast on-the-fly realization of matched filter detection techniques without the need for generation of large families of binary inspiral signal templates. FCT techniques will also allow enhanced tests for detector confidence by measuring the false event rate for chirp signals. Finally, FCT techniques will be applicable to the detection of binary black hole inspiral by allowing searches over a wider range of black hole spins doc2213 none Research in theoretical high-energy physics will focus on the exploration of novel ideas for physics beyond the Standard Model of the elementary particles particularly those new ideas that arise from the interplay between string theory and traditional particle physics. In recent years, this interplay has had a dramatic effect in reshaping our understanding of the theoretical (and indeed the experimental) possibilities for physics beyond the Standard Model. Such new ideas span a very broad range of energies, and include the possibility of large extra spatial dimensions. The exploration of the new ideas is important to the expansion of our intellectual horizons, and to the planning of future experiments doc2214 none During the next three years, the Oregon Experimental Relativity Group will collaborate with the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, on the search for gravitational radiation with LIGO. Specifically, the Oregon group will play a large role in the development of an understanding of the environmental noise sources which would otherwise limit the sensitivity of LIGO. Environmental noise includes subtle effects such as stray magnetic field and cosmic ray interactions with detector elements which may limit LIGO s sensitivity after the initial phase of operation. The Oregon group will develop the environmental monitoring capabilities of LIGO in the the areas of weather monitoring, magnetic fields, seismic characterization, cosmic ray studies, and gravity-gradient noise. They will develop analysis techniques, analyze interferometer data sets, and investigate the influence of these environmental factors on data. They will search for gravity wave signals, including signals correlated with gamma ray bursts. With the construction of LIGO, a new era of sensitivity to gravitational radiation will begin. After LIGO commissioning, the first experiments attempting detection of the effects of gravity waves on the strain measurements in the LIGO interferometers will need careful analysis of noise-dominated data streams. This will require a careful characterization of the noise, including the many sources of environmental noise, and the correlation of these noise sources among interferometers doc2215 none Dykman Large fluctuations give rise to many important physical phenomena, from radioactive decay to nucleation in phase transitions and to protein folding. The goal of the proposed research is to develop appropriate mathematical tools and investigate large quantum and classical fluctuations in systems which lack time-reversal symmetry. The problems of specific interest are single- and many-electron tunneling in a magnetic field, including tunneling from correlated two-dimensional electron systems, and escape from a metastable state of nonequilibrium classical and quantum systems, including systems driven by periodic fields. Breaking of time-reversal symmetry results in the occurrence of singularities in the pattern of optimal fluctuational paths. The singularities are expected to have common features in classical and quantum systems. Revealing these features is necessary for evaluating fluctuation probabilities and finding efficient ways of controlling them by external fields. Theoretical results will be compared with experimental data. The goal of the research is to develop theoretical methods of the analysis of large fluctuations in quantum and classical systems lacking time-reversal symmetry, and to investigate related new physical effects. Although the research is fundamental, its results bear on several applications. It is immediately related to using large fluctuations as a diagnostic tool and controlling fluctuation probabilities. Concurrent interest and growing body of experimental work on large fluctuations in different areas of physics, chemistry, and biology make the project particularly timely doc2216 none The planned research lies at the junction of three areas, modular representations of finite groups, finite projective geometry and the theory of designs and their codes. Under this project, Sin will continue to develop a general framework in which techniques of representation theory and group cohomology can be applied to attack combinatorial problems about codes and geometries, at the same time studying how the latter areas may provide a more geometric viewpoint in representation theory. The successful outcome of this research should lead to further new methods and results in all three theories and speed the circulation of ideas among them doc2217 none Dickinson. Preservation of Geoscience Data and Collections With budget cuts and the downsizing of the U.S. oil industry and some federal agencies, combined with the lack of space in private and public museums, the preservation of geoscience data (e.g., cores, cuttings, maps, paper reports, digital data) is becoming a critical issue for federal agencies, academic researchers, museums, institutes and industry. This study, by the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources at the National Research Council, will (1) develop a strategy for determining what geoscience, paleontological, petrophysical and engineering data to preserve; (2) examine options for long-term archival of these data; (3) examine 3-5 accession and repository case studies as examples of successes and failures; and (4) distinguish the roles of the public and private sectors in data preservation. The overall goal of the study is to develop a comprehensive strategy for managing geoscience data in the United States doc2218 none The object of this project is to educate biotechnologists who not only understand how to perform sophisticated techniques, but who also can more quickly provide their employers with improved productivity because they understand the molecular theory behind these laboratory procedures. Two major concerns being addressed by the project are insufficient scientific preparedness of high school graduates entering two-year technical programs and the need for structured involvement of industrial and academic laboratories in the education of these technicians. To address these concerns, the project is: a. aligning the secondary school requirements with post-secondary education biotechnology curriculum; b. familiarizing secondary teachers with current techniques in the field as they pertain to the high school curriculum; c. providing opportunities for high school classes to conduct laboratory exercises using materials and or equipment unavailable in high school laboratories; d. developing summer courses for potential biotechnology students; e. involving academic and industrial partners in student training and curricula development; and f. ensuring access for groups under-represented in this field. The methods are improving science education at the secondary level, helping to satisfy the needs of industry and academic laboratories for qualified technicians, and broadening the participation of under-represented groups in this field including women, persons with disabilities, and students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds in rural New England doc2219 none LADD It is abundantly clear that stars must form from the aggregation of diffuse interstellar material. However, how this process occurs, and specifically which mechanisms play a dominant role in the evolution, are still poorly understood. Stars in the process of formation do not accrete all of the material energetically available to them, but instead reject some fraction of their surrounding dense cores during the formation process. While the rejection process is not well understood, it is suspected that jets and bipolar outflows from the forming star play a major role. The goal of this research program is to understand the time evolution of stars and their placental cores during the critical phase when the mass of a forming star is determined. This phase is dominated by the gravitational infall of material from the core onto the star, and the ballistic ejection of material from the immediate vicinity of the star in the form of bipolar jets and outflows. Both processes have substantial impacts on the core - the former removes mass, while the latter injects energy. The complicated interplay between these two processes strongly affects the evolution of the core, and, since the core is the mass reservoir out of which the star will form, may even set the star s final mass. While the mass of a forming star is impossible to measure directly, the mass of the circumstellar core can be inferred from observations of the rotational transitions of its molecular constituents. Furthermore, the energetics of the core material can be measured from the velocity structure of this spectral line emission. This research activity seeks to track the evolution of circumstellar core material through the main mass accreting phase of star formation, via studies of populations of forming stars. An initial study of sources in the Taurus molecular cloud indicates that the circumstel-lar core is emptied on about a hundred million year time scale, with the most rapid decrease taking place at the earliest times. The rate of mass loss from the circumstellar core is consistent with that expected from standard models of accreting protostars; except during these earliest phases when the mass loss rate is larger than that expected from these models. The analysis of the velocity structure of these cores suggests that bipolar outflows from the forming star couple to core material more efficiently during the earliest times, during which outflows may inject substantial energy into the core. In addition, maps of the spatial distribution of the stirred-up core material indicate that this interaction takes place in the inner core, near the forming star. This research program will apply the methodology proved for modeling core forming stars in the Taurus region to all very young stars in large complexes nearer than 350 parsec. The survey observations will be conducted such that the linear spatial resolution will be constant, producing a data set free of distance-dependent effects, and facilitating comparisons between star forming complexes. The new observations will build on the results from the Taurus survey by increasing the sample size by at least a factor of five, and will constrain models of the time-evolution of forming stars during the critical phase in which they accrete most of their mass. This project is funded by the Division of Astronomical Sciences doc2220 none Arithmetic of L-values PI: Glenn Stevens Proposal The principal investigator proposes to continue his work on special values of L-functions and their relation to arithmetic geometry. The proposed research would improve our understanding of both automorphic forms and p-adic cohomology by providing new tools for studying the former and by providing concrete examples of the latter. Specifically, the research would extend the applicability of Explicit Reciprocity Laws to include p-adic analytic families of galois representations. This, in turn, would provide a new tool for studying the arithmetic properties of two-variable p-adic L-functions. It would also clarify how analytic families of galois representations degenerate at semistable non-crystalline points and would describe monodromy at such points in terms of a deformation in the weight direction, thus enlarging the standard picture of monodromy in potentially useful ways. This research would also complement Kato s recent work on values of L-functions and K-theory of modular curves by providing tools for deforming Kato s theory in p-adic analytic families. In related work, the PI hopes to develop a p-adic Eichler-Shimura correspondence that would relate his theory of overconvergent modular symbols to Katz s theory of overconvergent modular forms and to construct analytic families of non-ordinary half-integral weight modular forms by generalizing a p-adic theta lifting developed in earlier work of the PI. Finally, the PI intends to generalize these ideas to automorphic forms on other reductive algebraic groups. This research offers promising tools for the construction of p-adic analytic families of non-ordinary automorphic representations together with natural deformation spaces of Galois representations, and multivariable p-adic L-functions. This is connected with a number of investigations, including p-adic monodromy, Jochnowitz s conjectures on the square root of the theta operator, and the p-adic deformation theory of Galois representations. The investigations of this proposal belong to the general mathematical area of Arithmetic Geometry. This ultramodern research area combines two of the oldest branches of mathematics: number theory and geometry. New insights arising out of this combination are producing increasingly powerful tools to solve longstanding problems like Fermat s Last Theorem, which have resisted the strongest efforts of over three centuries of mathematicians. In addition, though Arithmetic Geometry is sometimes regarded as the purest of pure mathematics, it has also been developing insightful new techniques leading to dramatic progress in such applied areas as error-correcting codes and cryptography doc2221 none PROJECT SUMMARY This project demonstrates methods to accelerate the preparation of computing professionals for upward mobility in the fields of computer and information technology through vendor certifications and college degree completion. The methodology also has the potential to level the playing field for access to technology education opportunity and associated employment opportunities by making delivery of affordable technical education neutral to the diversity of the client base. The project focuses on demonstrating that access to and proficiency in post-secondary computer and information technology education can be enhanced significantly through distance education via computer, specifically the World Wide Web, and outcomes-based assessment via computer based testing. Project activities culminate with the award of the Regents College Associate in Science degree in Computer Information Systems. Project participants earn general education credits through examinations offered by Regents College and technical credits by examinations such as those offered by the Institute for the Certification of Computer Professionals (ICCP). Students also are able to apply credits earned by examinations for various IT vendor certifications, e.g., Microsoft, CompTIA, Novell. All examinations are administered through a national network of examination delivery centers. Examination preparation is available on line through specially developed guided learning modules in self-paced and facilitated modes. The primary strategy is to use the Regents College model of the virtual university that stresses assessment versus instructional approaches for degree programs at the associate and baccalaureate levels in computer and information technology. As computer platforms and the Internet s World Wide Web become more prevalent as vehicles for educational delivery and assessment, these innovative programs of educational delivery at virtual universities will offer solutions to the looming crisis in engineering and technology employment. This project relies on the increasing access to personal computers and the Internet now documented. With that, the proposed approach offers opportunities that are particularly vital to training displace workers and those historically underserved and under-represented in technical higher education. The project seeks to create a replicable model of use to other distance learning based programs and institutions doc2222 none This award will support the 2-3 day assembly of students and professionals to celebrate the achievements of atmospheric scientist from traditionally under-represented groups (primarily Hispanic Native and African Americans) in the atmospheric sciences during the 20th Century. This conference will be held at Howard University (in Washington, DC) during the week of March 19th, . The conference has components that include: (1) a historical perspective of traditionally under-represented groups in the atmospheric sciences. (2) A plenary session devoted to several outstanding atmospheric scientists meteorologists who served as pioneers or as current role models. (3) Panel sessions addressing important themes. (4) A short but special afternoon session devoted to undergraduate and graduate students called Free zone . (5) A poster session with contributions from students and professionals. (6) A career fair with vendors from industry and professional schools for graduate students or professionals in the field of atmospheric sciences. (7) A banquet with a short awards ceremony will close out the workshop. This workshop will be announced in EOS, BAMS, on the Howard Web site and announcements will be sent to the meteorology departments We expect that this workshop will produce a volume summarizing the important contributions of the workshop that will be distributed to each participant, interested administrators and mangers at government labs, private industry and the university setting doc2223 none This group proposes a research program involving collaboration with the HiRes cosmic ray project in Utah, and the ASPIRE K-12 outreach program which will expand to Montana. The HiRes experiment is designed to study high-energy enigmatic cosmic rays. The observation of these cosmic rays whose energy exceeded the Greisen-Zetsepin-Kuz min cut-off led many to postulate that some fundamental processes may be responsible for particles of extraordinary energy. Fly s Eye, supported by NSF, made the first and the most convincing observation of the highest energy of the enigmatic cosmic rays. HiRes, the successor of Fly s Eye, is now in operation. The Aspire Project (Astrophysics Science Project Integrating Research and Education) is an NSF supported outreach project involving HiRes scientists, K-12 teachers, state education administrators, education specialists, and programmers. The goal of this project is to infuse recent discoveries made in fundamental astrophysics research into everyday science lessons and laboratories by utilizing interactive, inquiry-oriented, web-based technology. This project is an example of the NSF initiative of integrating research and education doc2224 none DelVecchio Good In the hope of gaining a competitive edge, various hospitals have responded with mergers, organized delivery systems, and other reorganization strategies to challenges posed by managed care. While some of these strategies prove financially prudent, we know very little about the consequences of reorganization strategies for hospital workers and for patient care. This dissertation research addresses this knowledge gap through an examination of the impact of hospital reorganization on staff registered nurses. This research explores the impact of these changes on hospital nurses and nursing care. It uses a combination of official hospital documentation, interviews, focus groups, surveys, and observation to explore nurses perceptions and daily experience of these changes. The questions it seeks to answer are: What changes have been introduced that affect nurses everyday work? How have these new arrangements affected the official role that nurses play in the hospital as a whole as well as within their individual departments? How have nurses and other hospital employees reacted to these changes, and how have these responses affected the working relationships between different professional groups in the hospital? Most importantly, how have the altered organizational arrangements influenced nurses ability to care for patients in a professional and responsible manner doc2225 none This project is centered on connections between long range dependence and heavy tails. The primary application areas are data networks, finance, actuarial research and industrial engineering. The project includes a consideration of statistical issues related to detection of long range dependence, self-similarity and multifractality as well as fundamental issues of basic concepts being inadequately defined. For instance, long range dependence is often defined in terms of correlations but these may be either undefined due to the presence of heavy tails or for non-Gaussian processes rather uninformative. Our society is a fast moving and changing one, with ever increasing amounts of information being moved from one end of the country to the other. Dramatic technological and scientific advances are, often, day-to-day phenomena. The stock market is very volatile. The Internet and other communication networks are susceptible to overloads and delays and because of their crucial role in our economic and public life, one needs to be concerned with their performance. Appropriate models are required to make sense of these wildly oscillating processes. This project is centered on models appropriate to understanding and controlling these phenomena-- models with heavy tails and or long range dependence doc2226 none The general goals of the proposed research are to optimize a novel new genetic transformation technique. A model organism the evolutionarily ancient and commercially valuable, edible red seaweed Porphyra, commonly known as nori has been selected for experimentation. The specific goals of this SGER are: 1) to test an homologous promoter for stable gene expression of GUS and GFP reporter genes, and 2) to test and evaluate a number of genes for antibiotic resistance as selectable markers. Over the past decade, genetic transformation techniques have made immeasurable contributions to agriculture and to an understanding of gene structure and function in land plants. By comparison, the application of genetic transformation techniques to marine plants is in its infancy. Despite the considerable commercial value of seaweed aquaculture, to date only a handful of unicellular marine algae and not a single macroscopic marine alga (or seaweed) have been transformed successfully. The development of a genetic transformation procedure that is broadly applicable to marine algae would be extremely beneficial for developing new commercial uses for marine algae, as well as for furthering investigations of their molecular biology and biochemistry doc2227 none This project addresses the need to produce a highly skilled, technically competent workforce to meet the technological, communication, and teamwork requirements that local, regional, national, and global economies are demanding. The objective is to complete the final 39 modules of a curriculum begun in that will be a model modularized curriculum for the Associate in Applied Science degree in Manufacturing Engineering Technology. The advantage of the modular structure is that students benefit from learning by hands-on experience, solving problems, using communication skills, and practicing teamwork as they learn technical skills. Activities focus on creating and pilot testing modules in nine cluster areas-Science; Math; Humanities, Communication, and Teamwork; and six manufacturing oriented clusters. To develop the modules and reach the target audiences, Sinclair Community College, a public two-year college in Dayton, Ohio, is partnering with the University of Dayton, a private, four-year institution doc2228 none Kruse, John A. Cochran, Patricia A. University of Alaska Anchorage Part of an international effort involving a partnership of researchers and indigenous organizations in Greenland, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Russia, and the United States, this project seeks to understand the relationships between economic development and Native-state arrangements and their effects on living conditions among Inuit, Saami, and Chukotkan peoples. Results of the study are intended to provide circumpolar Native organizations and local governments with information to help make policy decisions. The key research question is how are the rapid social, political, economic and environmental changes occurring in the Arctic today affecting the people there? This portion of the international study will address this question as a formal pretest of the research design (questionnaire and field methods) in Alaska doc2229 none This project is creating a partnership to develop curriculum concurrently with emerging technology for Fieldbus and Process Control Systems (PCS) Maintenance Education. This partnership of higher education institutions and national industries is writing curriculum modules that interrelate the technical programs of computer maintenance and networking, electrical, instrumentation, and process technologies because these programs are affected by industries that focus on process and computer network technologies. Faculty enhancement activities are assuring that faculty and teachers in the consortium are prepared to teach the courses. Another important aspect of the Center is the creation of laboratories that duplicate the working arrangements for technicians. These laboratories serve students and industry as applied research facilities that emulate an actual working site rather than an academic laboratory. The educational partners represent both school districts and institutions of higher education. Some of them are Lamar University, College of the Mainland, and Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas. Some of the 21 industry partners supporting the Center are Bayer Corporation, DuPont, Exxon USA, Fisher-Rosemont, Kellogg Brown & Root, and Siemens Energy & Automation doc2230 none AST- Strauss The goals of this proposal are to use the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) photometric data to identify high redshift quasars (Z ~5) and conduct a follow up analysis of these objects. The initial SDSS commissioning data have already been used to develop and prove the discovery technique and the final sample size is expected to be ~ 100 objects. These data open up a new regime and will allow the PI-CO-I s to study quasar demographics with redshift; the relationship between galaxy formation and quasar activity at high redshifts; and studies of intervening gas at high redshifts. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is an ambitious project involving a consortium of universities and institutions around the country and around the world, to develop an accurate and complete census of the heavens in three dimensions. Using a dedicated 2.5m telescope at Apache Point Observatory, New Mexico, it will survey the sky over the next five years, compiling detailed data on 100 million galaxies, stars, and quasars. Early results from the survey have shown its potential on many fronts, including the search for the most distant objects in the universe. Quasars, which appear as unresolved, exceedingly luminous points of light in the sky, are believed to be the result of the radiation given off as material falls into a black hole one billion times more massive than the sun. Their extreme luminosity allow them to be detected at very great distances. The Sloan Survey has allowed us to discover a great number of the most distant quasars yet known. We plan to do a number of investigations of these enigmatic objects over the next few years: a). Compile complete samples of distant quasars, to study their tendency to cluster together and to understand their evolution with time. b). Study the physical properties of these systems with telescopes sensitive to a large range of wavelengths, to understand the processes by which they formed and how they generate their tremendous luminosities. c). Study the immediate environment of these quasars to learn about their effect on neighboring galaxies, and the diffuse gas which permeates the space between quasars. d). Discover new classes of quasars and other phenomena which our complete survey should bring to light. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc2231 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This project is enhancing the two-year mathematics curriculum by providing teachers with classroom ready materials that demonstrate real applications of mathematics and inform teachers and students about jobs in industry and the mathematical skills used in those jobs. The principal investigators are conducting four summer workshops (two each summer) for secondary and community college mathematics faculty. During these workshops faculty teams, consisting of investigators and workshop participants, are visiting industries to see first hand how graduates of two-year AAS programs are using mathematics. The graduates are interviewed and videotaped as they explain and demonstrate how mathematical concepts and methodologies are used and how problems are resolved in their jobs. Based on the visit and the mathematical topics discussed, a series of snapshots, video clips, and accompanying worksheets are being developed and packaged both on a CD and for distribution via the Internet. Information about the project is being presented at local, state and national conferences doc2232 none STRUCTURE THEORY OF GRAPHS AND MATROIDS The investigator intends to pursue research with several colleagues in the areas of graph coloring, matroid representation, surface embeddings and graph structure. The main graph coloring project involves aspects of the Hadwiger graph coloring conjecture, that any graph that needs k colors to properly color its vertices can be contracted to the complete graph on k vertices. The main matroid theory project involves a plan to settle Rota s conjecture that matroids representable over a fixed finite field have finite obstacle sets. In contrast to these two well known open problems, there are many concrete questions on surface embeddings and other graph structures, and these are important to settle for the orderly development of the subject. Two problems which provide a focus in these areas are the Seymour-Szekeres cycle-double-cover conjecture and Hajos conjecture that graphs that need 5 colors must contain K_5 topologically. The proposed research studies several problems, closely related to these, but perhaps more accessible. The most promising part f this project, and mathematically the most interesting, is the Rota conjecture and the related conjecture that finite matroids representable by matrices over a fixed finite field are well-quasi-ordered. This is an area with several very strong mathematicians currently active, as well as the investigators usual collaborators. The investigator feels that this topic should be strongly pursued on a wide front. About 20 years ago the investigator and his colleague, Paul Seymour, began a project concerned with the structural properties of graphs which are preserved under the elementary operations of deleting or contracting the edges of the graph. The outcome was to show that these properties are finitely based, in the sense that the list of graphs, which are minimal amongst those for which a given property fails, is always finite. This shows there is always a finite list of graphs explaining why the property fails to hold. Moreover, the dual problem was solved of characterizing the inherent structure of graphs which possess any such property (at least to a close and useful approximation). Over the years since this was done the investigator, Seymour and an expanding group of colleagues and students, have been vigorously developing the consequences of this main theory, and striving to apply the techniques to their natural scope. This has been important mathematically, and for the subject of graph theory, but also has contributed extensively to computer science and combinatorial optimization through the algorithms arising naturally from the finiteness conditions. There is real hope to extend the subject into its natural context in linear algebra known as matroid theory, where also there are finiteness conjectures when the matroids arise from matrices over a finite field. There are also still many long standing problems, open to the graph theory techniques of this area, which provide a focus for the more general development of the theory, and which are an important part of this proposal doc2233 none This proposal requests support for the research program of the high energy physics group at the University of Washington to continue their hadron collider work on [1] the D0 detector at Fermilab and [2] on construction of the ATLAS detector for the LHC program to be run at the CERN laboratory in Geneva Switzerland. On the D0 experiment, the Washington group has major responsibility for the D0 detector upgrade currently under way; specifically, the Level 3 Trigger Data Acquisition System and forward muon system. The group is also committed to full participation in the installation and commissioning of the upgraded detector. In March the D0 detector is scheduled to resume data taking, and this group will have an ongoing major responsibility for operation of both the L3 Trigger DAQ and forward muon systems. They are also committed to D0 s Run 2 physics program and will work in the top and Higgs physics groups. On the ATLAS experiment, this group has central responsibility for the design of the critical support structure and kinematic mounts for the ATLAS forward muon chambers. They will fabricate a total of 96 forward chambers, of which about 48 will be complete in the period - . This group has assumed the lead responsibility for the design of the control system for all of the ATLAS muon detectors. This work will start with the design and implementation of a control system for the muon test beam doc2234 none Merritt The proposed research will use sophisticated N-body simulations to study the galaxy--supermassive black hole connection in galactic dynamics. The HST-STIS spectrograph can be used to measure velocity dispersions and velocity gradients in galaxy nuclei which can be used to test the predictions resulting from these simulations. Virtually all galaxies appear to contain supermassive black holes at their very centers, which are almost certainly relics of the quasar era when the black holes accreted gas and generated enormous luminosities. These black holes are now nearly quiescent and comprise on average only ~0.3% of the mass of their host galaxies. There is a growing body of work suggesting that the gravitational influence of the relic black holes can extend far beyond the center of a galaxy. Moreover, the formation and growth of black holes may be intimately connected with the evolution of galaxies on larger scales. For instance, mergers between galaxies containing nuclear black holes would produce supermassive black-hole binaries which would eventually coalesce while emitting gravitational radiation. The proposed research would address these questions by studying the link between black holes and their host galaxies. A major component of the work would be a study of supermassive black hole binaries. The formation and decay of these binaries may be relevant to a wide range of phenomena. Another goal is to understand how black holes affect the dynamical state of their host galaxies by influencing the motions of individual stars. The work would be heavily computational, relying on state-of-the-art N-body codes and massively parallel supercomputers doc2235 none Project Agriculture remains an economic juggernaut in the Lower Mississippi River Delta region. This region has traditionally been one of America s most prolific producers of cotton, rice, soybeans, and other major agricultural products. In the 90 s, agricultural producers have faced one of the most severe depressions in American history. However, recent developments in plant pathology and availability of advanced technologies such as remote sensing, global positioning systems (GPS) and geographic information systems (GIS) have the potential to greatly improve agricultural productivity and enhance crop yields. The rapid application of science and information technology have dramatically changed the way producers, including farmers, bring their products to the marketplace. However, farmers remain reluctant to invest heavily in precision farming without knowing that they will have a steady stream of highly qualified, technically proficient workers capable of utilizing the technology to make decisions. Mississippi Delta Community College in collaboration with industry leaders, Mississippi State University, NASA, and the Delta Research Experiment Center are developing and implementing a curriculum in Spatial Information Systems (SIS) leading to the Associate degree. Through input from the training partners, the curriculum is being developed around short-term and long-term industry needs for an Advanced Agricultural Specialist. The SIS program is developing students basic competencies, workplace values, and technological awareness, and competency through faculty and instructor enhancement internships, classroom experiences, and student internships. Articulation of curricula from two-year to four-year levels is also a project component. The curriculum is transferable to other community colleges with similar needs doc2236 none This project is implementing the image and marketing recommendations from A National Agenda for the Future of Engineering Technician Education published January by Sinclair Community College. The goal is to create a strong, positive image of engineering technology education, to market that image to prospective students, and ultimately encourage more students to enter the profession. The objectives are to: (1) identify components of a strong, positive image of engineering technology education, (2) develop a comprehensive marketing plan to convey this image to prospective students (3) produce appropriate marketing materials to improve the nationwide image of engineering technology careers, and (4) disseminate products on a national basis. In this project, Sinclair Community College is partnering with the American Society for Engineering Education Engineering Technology Council, Middlesex County College, Motorola University (a division of the Motorola Corporation), the University of Central Florida, and the University of Dayton, Engineering Technology Department. Additional community colleges across the country are pilot testing and disseminating the materials produced doc2237 none Halpern This project has as its objective the rapid follow-up of gamma-ray burst (GRB) afterglows using ground-based, optical IR photometry and spectroscopy on the Michigan-Dartmouth-MIT (MDM) 2.4m telescope on Kitt Peak. The PI has been one of the important players in this type of research since and has the good, prompt access to the telescope which is necessary for this type of follow-up work. Using the approximately 6 to 8 bursts per year in the northern hemisphere that are located within hours by the BeppoSAX and or RXTE satellites, this project will continue a successful program of discovering and characterizing the optical afterglows of gamma-ray bursts with the two telescopes of the MDM Observatory. Starting with the year launch of the HETE-II satellite, it will become possible to make optical identifications within minutes of a GRB event, which affords the opportunity to obtain multicolor optical light curves on small telescopes such as the MDM 1.3m, and absorption-line redshifts on medium-sized telescopes such as the MDM 2.4m. These data can be used to study the temporal decay and spectral evolution of the afterglow in order to diagnose the energetics of the fireball, and to model the circumstellar environments in which these explosions occur, e.g., uniform interstellar medium vs. stellar wind. HETE-II will also be sensitive to the class of short-duration gamma-ray bursts, which have heretofore not been identified, and are distinct in their gamma-ray spectral properties and flux distribution from the long-duration bursts which have triggered all previous after- glow detections. This work has the goal of revealing a distinct population of GRB progenitor, for example, old ones that have traveled outside their galaxy s interstellar medium, versus those that end their short lives while still embedded in dense, star-forming regions. Infrared photometry is of utmost importance for this distinction. Prompt IR photometry, particularly in the K band, offers the opportunity to identify the highest redshift and or most obscured GRBs. The MDM 2.4m and ONIS IR camera, can easily detect a moderately obscured GRB to z = 10 within an hour of the event. On longer time scales, the light curves can be followed for several days in order to discover the predicted (and occasionally detected) temporal steepening which is the signature of jet-like afterglows. Measuring such breaks is crucial to quantifying the effects of beaming on the energetics of the fireball and on the global statistics of GRBs and their afterglows. Finally, the afterglows of the brighter and closer events can be monitored for several weeks in order to search for the signatures of underlying supernovae in their late-time optical light curves. The possible association of at least some GRBs with supernovae of massive stars promises to be the long-sought handle on the physics of the GRB itself. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc2238 none Salzer The goals of this project are to identify and analyze a volume limited sample of emission-line galaxies using the KPNO 0.6m Schmidt with an objective prism and a large-format CCD to find and measure the H-alpha emission from these objects. The stated objective is to locate ~ emission-line galaxies in 300 sq.deg. with B 20-21. The survey is on-going; the analysis software has been developed and tested, and over 127 square deg. have already been analyzed. Once complete, the KISS sample of galaxies will have numerous additional applications which cut across many areas of research in astronomy, including chemical evolution in galaxies, the large-scale distribution of galaxies, and the determination of the abundance of helium produced in the Big Bang. Galaxies with active nuclei or intense starbursts represent the most energetic phenomena known in the universe. Galaxian activity is very common and occurs on all scales, from the super-luminous quasars down to extremely active star formation in dwarf galaxies. Much of our knowledge of active galaxies and starbursts has come about by studying galaxies cataloged in objective-prism surveys that used Schmidt telescopes and photographic plates. The recent opportunity to use more sensitive digital detectors has prompted the present program to discover much fainter active galaxies than were previously accessible. The KISS project (KPNO International Spectroscopic Survey), is designed to discover faint, distant galaxies which possess strong emission lines, a clear signature of galaxian activity. The survey technique used is extremely successful, discovering new active galaxies at a rate 180 times higher than the most well known previous survey of this type (the Markarian survey). To date a few thousand active and starbursting galaxies have been cataloged. The project will be continued by extending the observations to new areas of the sky. In addition, the large, deep samples will be used to study galaxian activity of all types, in order to better understand this activity in the context of galaxy formation and evolution. Once the survey observations are complete, the KISS sample of galaxies will have numerous additional applications which cut across many areas of research in astronomy, including chemical evolution in galaxies, the large-scale distribution of galaxies, and the determination of the abundance of helium produced in the Big Bang. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc2239 none Bruce A. Wooley The IEEE Solid-States Circuits Society is sponsoring the IEEE International Solid-State Circuit Conference (ISSCC will be held in San Francisco, CA from 7 to 9 February . The central conference theme is ICS for the 21st Century Systems. This project requests travel support to defray the travel expenses for students whose papers have been selected for presentation at the Conference, but who lack funds and might not be able to attend without travel support. The total amount requested is $4,000 on the basis of an average travel grant of $500 for 8 participants. ISSCC will be matching the funds awarded doc2240 none Trout This project is designed to investigate and deepen the relationship between the operator algebraic E-theory of Alain Connes and Nigel Higson, the index theory of elliptic differential operators on manifolds, and quantum physics. First, we will investigate the correspondence between (positive) asymptotic morphisms (which form the basic cycles in E-theory) and asymptotic projection-valued measures. This will help to understand the fundamental use of E-theory groups as receptacles for invariants of strict (physical) quantization schemes. This should also give novel formulas for writing asymptotic morphisms as operator-valued integrals, and for computing the pairing between K-homology and K-theory, e.g., in computing the index of a Dirac type operator coupled to a gauge connection. The second part deals with extending the work of Erik Guentner in using E-theory groups to understand the relationship between elliptic differential operators and strict quantization schemes, e.g., the relationship between the (E-theory elements of) the Dolbeault operator on a Kahler manifold and the Berezin-Toeplitz quantization on the associated Bergmann-Fock space. The third part is a long-term project to develop an E-theoretic classification method for strict quantization schemes that parallels the cohomological classification in the formally algebraic (nonphysical) deformation quantization of star products. The purpose of this project is to more thoroughly investigate the relationship between quantum physics and the operator algebraic E-theory of the Fields medalist Alain Connes and Nigel Higson. This mathematical theory associates classifying groups to pairs of operator algebras. Group elements are determined by objects called asymptotic morphisms between the two operator algebras. The relationship to quantum theory is as follows. Different types of structures are used in quantum theory to model subatomic and atomic systems, for example, Dirac operators coupled to a gauge field in quantum field theory, and operator-valued measures in operational quantum physics and quantum computing, etc. Under appropriate conditions, these structures have asymptotic morphisms associated to them (between the algebras of the classical observables and quantum observables, respectively). Hence, they define elements in an E-theory group. By fully understanding this correspondence, we want to show that computing these E-theory invariants provides a natural procedure for classifying, and defining obstructions for, diverse types of quantum-mechanical systems doc2241 none The investigator and his graduate research students study correlation and sorting problems for finite partially ordered sets and graphs. Specific goals of this research include (1) finding combinatorial arguments for correlation inequalities with attention to error estimates and structural information, (2) bijective proofs of log-concavity results and proportional transitivity problems, (3) continued investigation of balancing pairs and the cross product conjecture, and (4) understanding the boundary effects and the distinction between finite and infinite posets in correlation and sorting problems. A major fraction of all scientific and business computing deals with the issue of sorting. Data must be aggregated according to some specified order, such as an alphabetical listing or a listing according to social security numbers. Updating records, locating files, and understanding the interplay between events which influence the speed at which files can be manipulated are fundamentally important research topics where advances will have immediate impact on a broad range of applications in business, industry and government. The investigator and his students are studying both the theoretical basis for research involving correlation and sorting and the practical implementation of algorithms derived from this research doc2242 none PI: James P Lynch, Caterina P Gouvis This project uses extensive Census data to study variations in crimes against school children throughout the day. The area of study will be a large county (about 750,000 residents) in Maryland. Crime victimization rates come from all incidents of person crimes reported to the police from through June . The overall goal of the research is to assess hypotheses derived from an established perspective in criminology, called routine activity. According to this view, crime rates are importantly influenced by opportunities, surveillance, and the mix of actors in a setting. To date, studies to assess this perspective have been hampered by inadequate data bases; the number of people who are potential crime victims has not been known, so it is difficult to assess crime rates. Using children enrolled in schools and focusing on crimes that take place at the school should solve that problem, leading to cleaner tests of the hypotheses than have previously been conducted. The main benefit of this research will be to produce a good test of this perspective in the sociology of deviance. This view is considerably more structural than individualistic perspectives, which focus, for instance, on characteristics of perpetrators rather than on properties of social situations doc2243 none Nass, Clifford Stanford University Digital Government: Information Technology Accommodation Research: Open a Door to Universal Access This proposal describes a collaborative research project involving: Stanford University, Social Security Administration, Census Bureau, and General Services Administration (GSA). The goal of this research is to enable the partner agencies to better accommodate blind and visually impaired computer users, and to permit development of newer, smaller accessor systems for use with the Total Access System, a technology under development at Stanford. The long-term goal of this project is to create enabling technology that supports disabled members of the workforce at the Census Bureau and other Federal agencies and to transfer these technologies to the private sector. The research will be conducted over a three-year period. Year one will focus on the research to select and evaluate appropriate technologies and develop a prototype access system for the blind and to document its usability. During year two, the prototype will be improved based on usability test results and the Total Access System technology will be upgraded. Key technologies necessary for development (multi-modal input and miniaturization) will be developed and prototyped. The third year will bring these technologies together in a kiosk prototype doc2244 none Moore The purpose of this grant is to explore the interface between physics and computer science. Recently there has been an increased amount of interaction between these two fields, in which methods and metaphors from one field are being successfully applied to the other. These include quantum computation (the idea that quantum mechanics can help us compute in new ways), and phase transitions in search problems from computer science (a sharp jump from solvability to unsolvability, not unlike the physical jump from water to ice). Specifically, Prof. Moore will use this grant to study parallel quantum algorithms, where many operations are carried out at once, and phase transitions in optimization problems, where we are trying to find solutions to a problem that satisfy many constraints at a minimum cost. He will also continue to study how much computational effort is needed to solve problems in statistical physics, or to predict the outcome of a simulation doc2245 none This project is developing, implementing, and disseminating an enhanced two-year curriculum leading to a Certificate in Agroforestry and Forest Ecosystem Management Technician (A.S.) at Hawaii Community College. A need exists in Hawaii for workers with a two-year Technician Certificate in agroforestry and forest ecosystem management. These include jobs with government agencies, private industry and small mixed forestry and agricultural operations. The curriculum is focusing on Hawaii, but is transferable to other areas in the tropical Pacific. Products include publishable course materials that are being disseminated statewide and nationally. A significant part of the Certificate program is internships with partners in government agencies and the private industry. Women, Hawaiians and other minority students make up a significant proportion of the enrollment, and specific efforts are being made to attract these students into the program through high school recruitment and publicity aimed at the target population. The program collaborates with the State of Hawaii s Forestry and Communities Initiative, the Workforce Development Council of the State Department of Labor and Industrial Relations, Hawaii School-to-Work Program, University of Hawaii Hilo College of Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resource Management, the University of Hawaii Hilo Ecology and Evolution program, and University of Hawaii College of Agriculture and Human Resources at the Manoa campus in Honolulu. The project is working in synergy with the Northwest Center for Sustainable Resources to collaborate on materials, share information and disseminate results nationally doc2246 none WEST The genesis of galaxies is one of the great outstanding problems in modern astrophysics. How and when did galaxies form? How have the galaxies evolved over time? How does environment influence galaxy properties? One way to unravel the secrets of galaxy formation is by studying their globular cluster systems. Globular clusters are dense aggregates of up to a million stars that are found in the halos of most galaxies. They are believed to be among the oldest stellar ensembles in the universe, most likely predating the formation of their parent galaxies. As such, these fossil remains from the early universe may provide important clues about the birth of galaxies. Once galaxies have formed, they are subject to collisions, mergers, and partial or even total destruction from interactions with other galaxies. For example, large galaxies may grow by devouring smaller galaxy companions in an act of galactic cannibalism. Furthermore, material torn from galaxies during collisions may eventually be incorporated into other new or existing galaxies, a sort of recycling on cosmic scales. The birth and death of galaxies thus appear to be interwoven. Over the past few years, astronomers have been pursuing a number of original lines of research, both observational and theoretical, to understand the construction and destruction of galaxies. The goals of this research project are to continue and expand upon previous successes. Specific goals of this research project are: To analyze the globular cluster metallicity distributions in a large sample of galaxies in order to place quantitative constraints on the previous merger histories of these galaxies. Using a recently adapted modeling technique, it is now possible to determine what fraction of the present-day luminosity of a galaxy has been inherited from other galaxies via mergers and or accretion of tidally stripped material. It is now possible to determine more precisely how of this sort of merging has occurred, using globular clusters as a diagnostic. To search for an expected population of intergalactic globular clusters which do not belong to any particular galaxy, but rather roam freely throughout the cores of rich galaxy clusters such as Virgo and Coma. Such a population of intergalactic globular clusters must surely exist, a consequence of galaxy tidal interactions, which remove stars and globular clusters and spread them throughout intergalactic space. This goal of the project is to search for this expected population of intergalactic globular clusters using data from major ground-based observatories and upcoming Hubble Space Telescope observations. An ongoing wide-field, multi-color imaging survey of the Coma cluster of galaxies, the most ambitious cluster survey ever undertaken, will be continued. Among the goals are to provide a definitive measurement of the luminosity function of the Coma cluster galaxies, and to search for the faint remains of galaxies, which have been tidally disrupted by their passage through Coma s core. This survey will provide an extremely rich database that can be used for many years. The research program will involve a number of collaborators at different universities and will include undergraduate astronomy students at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. This project is funded by the Division of Astronomical Sciences doc2247 none Ultramicrotomy for Petrographic Thin Sections Cheryl Young: This project will address the need for standardized sample preparation of rock specimens for study by transmission electron microscopy (TEM); presently there is no universal method of sample preparation. Ultramicrotomy (UM) is widely used for sectioning biological materials and a similar procedure may be applied to geological thin sections. There are several advantages in being able to thin section petrographic slides. Two of these concern preservation of overall particle structure and uniformity of specimen thickness. The former makes it possible to examine textural properties of grain boundaries and interfaces with minimal disturbance to their microstructures and petrography. Using methods of UM it is possible to section a single 10-mm particle into 200 slices with almost complete preservation of internal microstructure in three dimensions. This project will result in the development of ultramictomy methods capable of producing ultrathin sections from petrographic slides. This will broaden the use the use of TEM in petrologic studies doc2248 none Cen This is a collaborative research project with Michael S Vogeley at Drexel University (AST ). The goal of this research is to construct detailed models (using an Adaptive Mesh Refinement code which allows for finer spatial resolution than previous models) of voids and their constituent galaxies and compare these models with data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). These comparisons will then be used to set constraints on different cosmological models, the structure and dynamics of voids, and to investigate how galaxies form and evolve in a low density environment. The investigators propose to study the lowest density regions of the universe (called Voids). Voids play a critical role in the evolution of large scale structure and galaxy formation in the universe, yet they are poorly understood and poorly studied. The proposors will conduct theoretical computer modeling of void formation and test these models by comparing them with observations of galaxy densities and spatial distributions obtained from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Since these computer models will each depend on input parameters which are different for different types of cosmology, the comparison will help identify which cosmological models are correct. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc2249 none LOMBARDI The formation and evolution of blue straggler stars in glob-ular clusters will be modeled by using hydrodynamic simulations to determine the remnants of stellar mergers. These models of remnants will then be used to initiate stellar evolution calculations. By combining the theoretical evolutionary tracks with dynamical models of globular clusters, it will be possible to predict the observable characteristics of blue stragglers, including their numbers, luminosities, colors, and radial distribution in the globular cluster. These hydrodynamic simulations will be the first to use realistic models for the main sequence parent stars in single-single star collisions, single-binary collisions, binary-binary collisions, and binary coa-lescences. Based on these results, a set of simple algorithms will be developed that can be used to generate the structure of merger remnants without actually running large-scale hydrodynamic simulations. These subsequent stellar evolution cal-culations will be the first to treat rotating merger remnants and the first to examine chemical mixing in blue stragglers due to meridional circulation. Detailed comparisons with observations will be made and the results of the comparisons will place interesting limits on cluster mass functions and binary fractions. In this way, the results of the research will enable one to probe the nature of stellar populations in the dense environments of globular clusters. This project is funded by the Division of Astronomical Sciences doc2250 none Jones This proposal is to use both theoretical 3-D MHD modeling constrained by X-ray observations and low-frequency radio imaging to study the deposition and diffusion of energy in the jets and lobes of radio galaxies. The goal is to relate the magnetic field and cosmic rays to the jet dynamics and radio-galaxy evolution. The proposed work aims to add fundamental insights to the understanding of interactions between the enormously energetic phenomena originating in the central cores of some galaxies and the vast, gaseous environments around those galaxies. Energetic streams of hot plasma appear to be expelled from the galactic cores at speeds approaching the speed of light. When those streams plow into the diffuse plasma surrounding the galaxy the interacting regions produce relativistic electrons and become illuminated. Those structures are known as Radio Galaxies and they not only emit radiation at radio wavelengths but also in the optical and x-ray regions. For the first time, new observational capabilities will enable us to directly compare radio and X-ray emissions produced by the same electron populations. The radio emissions are a consequence of weak magnetic fields pervading the interaction regions, while the signature X-rays result from collisions between those electrons and photons in the Cosmic Microwave Background. Simultaneous measurements of both is necessary to find measures of the strengths of the magnetic fields and the properties of the electron populations. That information, in turn is crucial input into efforts to infer the dynamical events leading to the radio structures. The investigators are in position to carry out highly sophisticated numerical simulations of these objects, studying both the relationships between the energetics of the plasma flows and the emissions that can be observed from earth. Those studies will be followed by more general exploration of the evolution of these vast dynamical structures, so as to understand better the ways in which radio galaxies contribute to the properties of the gaseous media that fill clusters of galaxies. That topic is currently of broad interest in the study of cosmic structure formation. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc2251 none Teja, Amyn S. Georgia Tech. This proposal requests funds to support the participation of young investigators (primarily graduate students) in the 5th Symposium of Supercritical Fluids to be held in Atlanta on April 8-12, . The Symposium has a unique focus: the importance of supercritical fluids in meeting the challenges of sustainable development. No previous meeting of this kind has been devoted exclusively to this important field. In addition, the meeting will cut across many areas, and will bring together people from the separations, thermodynamics, analytical chemistry, environmental sciences, and process engineering communities. Past Symposia were held in: Nice (France) in , Boston (USA) in , Strasbourg (Germany) in , and Sendai (Japan) in . The Symposium will therefore return to the USA after nine years. As mentioned above, the meeting, in keeping with the advent of the new millennium, will differ from previous meetings and will focus on challenges associated with sustainability and the environment. It will also have a greater interdisciplinary focus, brining together engineers and scientists with diverse backgrounds but complementary interests. Yet another innovation will be the inclusion of scientists working in analytical applications of the technology doc2252 none Ferland In this project, PI Ferland will implement major improvements in the plasma simulation code CLOUDY. This computer model of a low density, hot plasma is a mainstay of the astronomical community. It is freely available on the web ( http: nimbus.pa.uky.edu cloudy c90.htm ) and is used to generate theoretical emission line spectra which are used in the analysis of a wide variety of astrophysical objects, with special emphasis on the spectra of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs). The proposed improvements to CLOUDY will make use of the recent advances in computer technology which allow it to use faster processors. The goal is to render a more physically realistic spectrum both in the Infrared as well as the multi level hydrogen emission line spectrum of Quasars. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc2253 none Hewitt The goal of this proposal is to use gravitational lensing of high redshift radio sources to study cosmology and the mass distribution within galaxies which act as lenses. The program has several aspects: (1) Use of the VLA to identify ~ 10 additional strong lenses in the south. 2) use of the VLA and VLBA to monitor several lenses to measure time delays, and thus constrain Ho (and with statistics on 10 or more sources) also constrain lambda (3) modeling of galaxy mass distributions, using new modeling techniques based on Taylor expansions of the gravitational potential and (4) searching for supermassive black holes in the centers of lensing galaxies intermediate z galaxies by imaging the expected faint second images of extended background radio galaxies with the VLBA. The lensing technique provides a method for determining Ho and lambda which is independent of the more classical magnitude distance methods. Gravitational lensing occurs when radiation from a background astrophysical source passes by a foreground massive object. A special case is strong lensing where more than one image of the background source is produced. Strong lensing provides a unique laboratory for probing mass distributions, the geometry of the space between the source and the observer (cosmology) This work will carry out studies of gravitational lensing with the goal of measuring the distance scale and probing the geometry of the universe, investigating the mass distribution in galaxies, and determining whether intermediate-redshift galaxies harbor supermassive black holes at their centers. To do this we need a large, well understood, sample of lenses. A large radio survey of the southern sky, aimed at identifying new gravitational lens systems, we expect to identify between 5 and 10 new lens systems. Applying lens systems to the astrophysics problems listed above requires several related observational and theoretical programs. With the goal of measuring time delays, monitoring observations of newly identified lens systems, and of some known systems for which time delays have not yet been measured, will be carried out. These time delay measurements provide distance estimates, which in turn provide information on the distance scale in the universe and constrain cosmological models. In particular, gravitational lens distance measurements may be used to test the recent claim, based on Type Ia Supernova measurements, that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Mass distributions in lensing galaxies will be studied by applying a recently developed multipole-Taylor expansion of the gravitational potential to all lens systems, and by searching for faint second images of background sources that should be present if there are supermassive black holes at the galaxies centers. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc2254 none The Internet has burst onto the American technological scene rather suddenly. But its rapid growth has come with some critical and well-publicized performance problems. To a large degree, much of the difficulty results from the inability of telecommunications planners to use traditional modeling paradigms to study and thus effectively manage Internet congestion. The objective of this grant, then, is to support research into the development of new types of analysis tools for Internet traffic engineering. Recent studies have shown that the statistics that seem to best describe Internet packet arrival patterns and service requirements come from the class known as power-tailed (fat-tailed, heavy-tailed) distributions, for example, including the well-known Pareto distribution of economic theory. The key problem is that the use of such heavy-tailed distributions does not permit the derivation of reasonable congestion formulas in the standard analysis methods of queueing theory, the major modeling technique of telecommunications engineering. Even resorting to computer simulation is fraught with difficulty because of the unusual behavior inherent in using this sort of statistics. This grant provides funding to study alternative methods for modeling long-tailed queueing systems. One major portion of study would be the application of a new method for probability distribution approximation to generate complete analyses of queues with power-tail interarrival and or service times. Extensive numerical and simulation experiments are planned to measure the appropriateness of our approaches. A further objective of the research planned under this grant is to attempt to apply a variety of other numerical methods to the class of congestion problems seen in the Internet. Altogether, it is hoped that the research supported under this grant will result in the development of useful computational formulas for Internet traffic engineering. These formulas could then be used as a foundation for Internet sizing, control, optimization, performance monitoring, and delivery of quality of service guarantees doc2255 none PARTRIDGE Where and how do large structures in the Universe first form and begin to emit starlight? Observations at radio wavelengths, since they are unaffected by obscuration by dust, can be used answer such questions. A series of deep centimeter-wavelength surveys of a region of the sky will be made. These observations will complement excellent optical, IR and X-ray data available. These surveys will enable us to determine the nature and abundance of faint, high-redshift, radio sources and to determine the mechanism responsible for their radio emission. The star formation history of the Universe may thus be calculated without the need to correct for dust extinction as in observing at optical wavelengths. This will enable the improvement of the predictions of the fluctuations, which Extragalactic radio sources will introduce, in current and planned searches for small-scale anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation. In addition, radio observations of the cores of X-ray bright galactic nuclei will be used to estimate the masses of the supermassive black holes that reside there. Included in the planned research are several closely related research projects that are designed to have the right scope for undergraduate students. These projects include improving the counts of radio sources at 8.4 GHz; archival searching of deep radio surveys for variable sources; improving statistics on GHz peaked spectrum sources; and archival searching for high resolution radio (and X-ray) observational data on galactic nuclei. An important part of the planned activities is to repeat a successful experiment funded by a previous NSF grant. There is support for a postdoctoral position, which combines both participation in some of the research activities above and a carefully mentored involvement in undergraduate teaching. The postdoctoral associate will design and teach one astronomy course each year under the close supervision of the principal investigator and the co-principal investigator. The postdoctoral associate will also review the pedagogical techniques. Haverford College will provide support for the teaching activities. This project is funded by the Division of Astronomical Sciences doc2256 none Olinto, Angela V. The Origin of the Highest Energy Particles The goal of this project is to conduct theoretical investigations into the origin of the highest energy cosmic rays (UHE cosmic rays, with E 5x eV). Using plausible scenarios for the production and propagation of these energetic particles (ranging from young neutron star winds to AGNs), Olinto and co workers will study several types of acceleration models and also model the propagation of different types of particles which may make up the UHE cosmic rays. Using these different models, they will generate predictions (of for example energy spectrum and relative isotropy) for comparison with the data obtained by such experiments as the Pierre Auger Project, the High Resolution Fly s Eye, the Japanese Telescope Array, and the OWL-Airwatch experiment. Occasionally a subatomic particle enters the atmosphere with so much energy that it produces a giant cascade of many tens of billions of secondary particles which can be observed by very large detectors on Earth. The particles that produce these giant air showers have been accelerated to far greater energies than can be achieved with terrestrial machines indicating incredibly powerful astronomical accelerators previously unforeseen. The explanation for the origin of these highest energy particles remains unclear with a number of possibilities being proposed and constrained as the observations accumulate. The possibility that these particles come from the edge of the observable Universe is limited by the presence of the microwave background that fills all of space and degrades the energy of such high energy particles. The microwave background limits the location of these fantastic cosmic accelerators to relatively nearby in cosmological terms. The most plausible proposals range from supermassive black holes in centers of nearby galaxies to decaying particles left over from the Big Bang. The goal of this project is to try and find the answer by studying most plausible proposals in detail and model aspects of the propagation from source to Earth. Propagation studies will be intimately related to the knowledge of magnetic fields in the largest scales presently observed and particle physics models of interactions at the highest energies. Among plausible sources, we will investigate many models ranging from the most nearby possibility that these particles are iron accelerated in young neutron stars in the disk of our own Galaxy to the possible effects of large extra-dimensions on the physics of ultra-high energy cosmic rays. Funding for this project is provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc2257 none Faber This is a collaborative research project with Marc Davis at University of California, Berkeley (AST ). The goal of this research is to conduct a large, systematic survey of galaxies with redshifts Z 0.7. This survey (Deep Extragalactic Evolutionary Probe - DEEP) is designed to measure both the properties of distant galaxies and their distribution in space. It consists of two parts: a 1-hour survey (1HS), to map the spatial locations of ~50,000 galaxies with Z 0.7, and a 3-hour survey (3HS), on a sub sample of the 1HS targets, to measure redshifts, line widths, and structure for ~5,000 galaxies, using HST imaging data, and going ~ 1 magnitude deeper into the luminosity function than the 1HS. Faber, Davis, and collaborators will use the data to determine fundamental properties of galaxies at Z~1 such as: number densities, the galaxy correlation function, and clustering statistics as a function of galaxy type. They will also use the data from the 3HS to determine the dark halo masses and underlying dark matter distribution at this redshift, as well as the biasing function. This collaborative project supports a 120 night observing program on the Keck telescope in Hawaii that will garner spectroscopic data on approximately 60,000 faint galaxies, with the goal of elucidating the properties of faint, distant galaxies, as well as the statistics of their spatial distribution. The DEEP survey will provide an unprecedented, detailed look at the universe at cosmologically significant lookback times. The survey will generate information on high redshift galaxies and their environment that is comparable in quality to data currently available for nearby galaxies. This dataset, which will be made Web accessible to the broader community, will enable powerful tests of the evolutionary predictions of alternative cosmological models. By counting the abundance of galaxies versus measured redshift, one can precisely determine the acceleration rate of the expansion of the Universe, a test of fundamental physics. The DEEP survey will take full advantage of a new spectrograph being prepared for the Keck telescope, DEIMOS, which has a large field of view, high spectral resolution, and wide spectral coverage. The scientific program of the DEEP survey cannot be replicated efficiently on any other instrument or telescope worldwide. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC) and the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities doc2258 none Vogeley This is a collaborative research project with Renyue Cen at Princeton University (AST ). The goal of this research is to construct detailed models (using an Adaptive Mesh Refinement code which allows for finer spatial resolution than previous models) of voids and their constituent galaxies and compare these models with data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). These comparisons will then be used to set constraints on different cosmological models, the structure and dynamics of voids, and to investigate how galaxies form and evolve in a low density environment. The investigators propose to study the lowest density regions of the universe (called Voids). Voids play a critical role in the evolution of large scale structure and galaxy formation in the universe, yet they are poorly understood and poorly studied. The proposors will conduct theoretical computer modeling of void formation and test these models by comparing them with observations of galaxy densities and spatial distributions obtained from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Since these computer models will each depend on input parameters which are different for different types of cosmology, the comparison will help identify which cosmological models are correct. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc2259 none Julius L. Shaneson Most of the proposal concerns applications of relations between continuous and discrete summation in higher dimensions. Such a relation is called an Euler-MacLaurin formula, and describes how to sum a function over a set of lattice points in a geometric region in terms of integrals of the function and its derivatives on the region and parts of the boundary. For polynomial functions summed on lattice points of a polytope with lattice point vertices, there are exact, closed formulae for doing this, due to the proposer and S. Cappell, obtained as consequences of their results on characteristic classes of singular varieties. For general (transcendental) functions, there are approximate formulae of given length, together with remainder terms involving differential operators whose coefficients are related to generalizations of the classical Bernoulli polynomials on the real line. The capability to handle trascendental functions makes possible the use Euler-MacLaurin formulae the study the growth of the number of lattice points in smooth regions, such as circles or the regions under a hyperboloid, as the figure expands. A lattice point can be thought of as a vertex point in a multidimensional grid or lattice-work. Results relating summation over such points to some continuous summation process, i.e. some type of integration method, can impact numerous applied mathematics problems, including rapid integration schemes, problems in network capacity, and optimization issues in shipping and communications. In addition, questions concerning the number of lattice points in smooth regions, especially certain very symmetric ones like circles or parts of hyperboloids, are well-known to arise in central parts of number theory, and good estimates on these could lead to new results on the distribution of prime numbers and other important questions. Finally, these counting methods might be good test cases for the problems ( P = NP ) of logic computer science concerning the miminum time needed to perform certain kinds of computations doc2260 none Hu, Esther M. Exploration of the High Redshift Universe with Lyman-Alpha Emitting Galaxies The goals of this project are to study the history of star formation, structure formation, and possible evolution of the universe at the highest accessible redshifts using the emission-line properties of high-redshift objects. The approach is to use the Suprime-Cam on the Subaru telescope with narrow-band interference filters centered on redshifted Lyman-alpha emission in the range 4 z 7 and multi-color deep imaging to search for high redshift galaxies in that range. Candidates identified in this way will then be followed up with slit spectroscopy using the Keck, and Gemini telescopes with the DEIMOS spectrograph on the Keck telescope, and the near-infrared spectrographs NIRSPEC and IRCS. The nature of the earliest galaxies -- their properties and evolution -- is a topic of intense interest which has been placed within our reach by the new generation of large telescopes. The present program is intended to explore the very earliest (z=4-7) galaxy formation and the properties of these very high redshift galaxies using the capabilities of the new 8- and 10-m class telescopes. An extensive faint emission-line, faint galaxy survey conducted with deep narrowband imaging searches will be combined with extremely deep imaging in multiple colors to identify distant galaxies in early stages of active star formation. This technique has already been successfully pioneered on the Keck telescope to identify some of the most distant galaxies currently known. This project applies these techniques on the Keck, Gemini, and Subaru telescopes, where very wide field cameras, such as the 0.5 degree X 0.5 degree wide SuprimeCam on the Subaru 8.3-m telescope, and new wide-area spectrographs will be coming on line over the next two years. International cooperation in using these complementary facilities will provide large samples of these most distant galaxies, to explore the global star formation history of the Universe, and the evolution in the numbers and properties of galaxies at very early times. Such galaxies will also be targets for internationally planned future space missions to investigate the early Universe. Funding for this project is provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc2261 none Tegmark Progress in detector, space and computer technology has triggered an avalanche of high-quality cosmological data from ongoing and upcoming experiments. However, the accuracy of present and upcoming measurements of cosmological parameters is limited by real-world headaches such as parameter degeneracies, microwave foregrounds, galaxy bias, and a long list of possible systematic errors. To take full advantage of the avalanche of great new data, the new higher level of ambition for precision cosmology must therefore be matched by a corresponding improvement in our understanding of these murky and often unpleasant issues. This is the purpose of the present proposal: to apply a number of recently developed techniques to currently available data sets to address a range of such real-world issues. The proposed work has the following main objectives: using the results of measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation field, Large Scale Structure surveys, and the recent SNIa surveys,: 1. To compute joint constraints of all relevant cosmological constraints on the following ten cosmological parameters : Baryon density, Cold dark matter density , Massive neutrino density , Contribution from vacuum energy , Reionization optical depth, Spatial curvature k , Spectral index of scalar fluctuations, Spectral index of gravity waves, Primordial fluctuation amplitude, and the Relative amplitude of gravity waves, and to study the robustness of these results with respect to problems with the various input data sets. 2. To compare overlapping CMB experiments to assess the levels of systematic problems, relative calibration errors and frequency-dependent foreground contamination, to combine consistent data sets into a single larger foreground-cleaned map and to compute its power spectrum with uncorrelated error bars. 3. To reanalyze a number of key galaxy redshift surveys in a uniform way using the new Schlegel, Davis & Finkbeiner extinction maps and a matrix-based analysis technique that allows an exact calculation of window functions, including the so-called integral constraint, as well as the production of a power spectrum with uncorrelated error bars. This analysis will also include the complications of scale-dependent stochastic bias, using redshift-space distortions. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc2262 none This is a standard award. Automated systems that interact with human users in spoken and written communication will greatly enhance productivity and program usability. These systems will allow friendly access to information services and are essential for people with disabilities, or for accessing databases while performing intricate tasks. Unfortunately, current technology is inadequate for the tasks at hand, and there is a need to make progress. The number of available personnel trained in the field must be vastly increased and solutions to long standing problems must be found. At this time, relatively few universities educate students capable of performing the required tasks. Leading professionals are scattered in various industrial, academic, and governmental institutions, often duplicating each other s work. This award will allow a summer workshop on language engineering to be conducted where mixed teams of leading professionals and students can cooperate to advance the state of the art. The professionals will normally be university professors and industrial and government researchers working in widely dispersed locations. Graduate and undergraduate students will join these teams. The participation of undergraduate students is intended not only as an educational opportunity, but also to broaden the appeal of the language engineering field amongst students considering graduate studies doc2263 none Jane Charlton The aim of this proposal is to conduct a detailed investigation of 838 dwarf galaxy candidates in 34 Hickson Compact groups. The plan is to obtain spectroscopy (to derive metalicities), multiband imaging (to investigate stellar populations and ages) and HI observations (to identify tidal tails). These observations will be used to try and distinguish between dwarf galaxies which have been formed in the debris left behind when larger galaxies were tidally disrupted and those which were formed primordially. Tidal dwarf galaxies have long been recognized as occasional interlopers in the debris of galaxy interactions. The proposers have recently conducted a census of the dwarf galaxy population in Hickson compact groups, and the results strongly suggest that tidal dwarf galaxy formation is quite common. Depending on the survivability of the population, this process may be quite significant, even as compared to primordial formation of dwarfs. The proposed project incorporates spectra obtained with the 8-m Hobby-Eberly Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope images, and Very Large array radio maps of the neutral Hydrogen from which the dwarfs form. With these data, we will compare properties of tidal dwarf galaxies to the galaxies at large in the groups, look for HI bridges connecting departing dwarfs to their parents, and assess the survivability of the dwarfs in the compact group environment. If the results of this study are extrapolated to consider other environments, it will be possible to evaluate if tidal dwarf formation is merely one of the occasional curiosities of the universe, or if it is important to our overall understanding of galaxy formation. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc2264 none Hansell This award to Bermuda Biological Station for Research (BBSR) provides shipboard technical support, shore-based support, instrument maintenance and instrument calibration for researchers using R V Weatherbird II, a research vessel operated by BBSR as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The technical support awarded here will assist NSF-funded researchers conduct oceanographic studies in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean, and particularly the Sargasso Sea region, in CY and beyond doc2265 none This RUI (Research in Undergraduate Institutions) award supports the acquisition of atmospheric chemistry and aerosol instrumentation. The package will consist of an air sampler to collect particulate matter; a microbalance, and ion chromatograph, and an instrument to quantify aerosol carbonaceous matter; instruments to measure the gas phase concentrations of ozone, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and dioxide; and a portable meteorological tower to measure the temperature, humidity, pressure and wind speed and direction. The principal investigator will use this instrumentation for undergraduate instruction, including field projects at San Jose, California, and in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park doc2266 none Olinto, Angela V. The Origin of the Highest Energy Particles The goal of this project is to conduct theoretical investigations into the origin of the highest energy cosmic rays (UHE cosmic rays, with E 5x eV). Using plausible scenarios for the production and propagation of these energetic particles (ranging from young neutron star winds to AGNs), Olinto and co workers will study several types of acceleration models and also model the propagation of different types of particles which may make up the UHE cosmic rays. Using these different models, they will generate predictions (of for example energy spectrum and relative isotropy) for comparison with the data obtained by such experiments as the Pierre Auger Project, the High Resolution Fly s Eye, the Japanese Telescope Array, and the OWL-Airwatch experiment. Occasionally a subatomic particle enters the atmosphere with so much energy that it produces a giant cascade of many tens of billions of secondary particles which can be observed by very large detectors on Earth. The particles that produce these giant air showers have been accelerated to far greater energies than can be achieved with terrestrial machines indicating incredibly powerful astronomical accelerators previously unforeseen. The explanation for the origin of these highestenergy particles remains unclear with a number of possibilities being proposed and constrained as the observations accumulate. The possibility that these particles come from the edge of the observable Universe is limited by the presence of the microwave background that fills all of space and degrades the energy of such high energy particles. The microwave background limits the location of these fantastic cosmic accelerators to relatively nearby in cosmological terms. The most plausible proposals range from supermassive black holes in centers of nearby galaxies to decaying particles left over from the Big Bang. The goal of this project is to try and find the answer by studying most plausible proposals in detail and model aspects of the propagation from source to Earth. Propagation studies will be intimately related to the knowledge of magnetic fields in the largest scales presently observed and particle physics models of interactions at the highest energies. Among plausible sources, we will investigate many models ranging from the most nearby possibility that these particles are iron accelerated in young neutron stars in the disk of our own Galaxy to the possible effects of large extra-dimensions on the physics of ultra-high energy cosmic rays. Funding for this project is provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC) and the Division of Physics Theoretical Physics Program doc2267 none Ciardullo The goals of this project are to use redshifted [O III]- filters to imagie and identify planetary nebulae (PNe) associated with the nearby galaxies: M31, NGC 720, , , , and and the intracluster stars (associated with PNe) found in nearby galaxy clusters. These PNe will then be studied spectroscopically (using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory) to obtain their kinematics and abundances which can be used to study the distances, gravitational potential, and evolutionary history of their surroundings. Stars like the Sun do not live forever. Eventually, they expand to tremendous size, throw off their atmosphere, and die. In the process, the stars become planetary nebulae (PN), beautiful formations of glowing gas that are lit up by the stars last embers. When viewed at great distances, one cannot see the details of these nebulae. However one can use the PN s distinctive emission to investigate a host of problems in astrophysics and cosmology. Specifically, PN can be use to a) better define the extragalactic distance scale and Hubble Constant, b) study post-asymptotic giant branch evolution in old stellar populations, c) probe the stellar motions dark matter content of elliptical galaxies, d) measure the chemical composition and chemical evolution of nearby galaxies, and e) study the structure and evolution of galaxy clusters via their intracluster stars. We are proposing to continue our successful program of using planetary nebulae to probe these topics. Our immediate goals will be to measure the chemical and star formation history of our nearest spiral galaxy, M31, explore the mass distributions of the large elliptical galaxies of Virgo, and learn about the formation and dynamical evolution of galaxy clusters. Our observations will lead directly to improved constraints on the formation and evolution of galaxies, and the nature of dark matter halos doc2268 none One response to the growing world-wide attention to environmental issues has been the establishment of an international network of biosphere reserves, which have been established to protect areas of high biological and cultural diversity. A special challenge of managing these reserves is determining how to preserve the natural ecological characteristics of places at the same time opportunities are provided for indigenous peoples residing in and near the reserves to engage in traditional and new forms of sustainable economic activity. Analysis of the interrelationships between indigenous resource use and protected-area management is crucial to assessing the long-term viability of conservation initiatives in these locales. This doctoral dissertation research will analyze the sustainability of indigenous Miskito slash-and-burn agriculture within the context of proposed conservation management guidelines for the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve of eastern Honduras. The project will focus on the land-use practices of Wampusirpi, an indigenous Miskito community along the southeastern boundary of the reserve. For the purposes of this project, sustainability is defined as the length of time that agriculture in the reserve will be able to supply village subsistence and cash needs given current forest clearance, population growth, and the proposed biosphere land-use restrictions. Participant observation and other ethnographic research techniques will be used to collect socioeconomic, demographic, and agricultural data from each household in the community. These data will be used to construct a predictive model that simulates future population growth and land-use expansion for the community, thereby facilitating an assessment of the sustainability of slash-and-burn agriculture in the biosphere. The project will document current land-use patterns of an indigenous Miskito community in Rio Platano, and it will provide a range of possible scenarios for future land-use practices, thereby identifying the pressures that subsistence and economic needs of biosphere residents might place on management of the reserve in the future. By analyzing the sustainability of agriculture within the context of the Rio Platano management plan, this project will contribute to current debates on the role of indigenous people in conservation and the viability of protected areas as models to conserve biological diversity and provide for indigenous land and resource rights. Project results therefore will valuable for the formulation of future conservation policy in Rio Platano and other inhabited protected areas in Latin America. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc2269 none Kenney, Jeffrey D. P. The goal of this research is to study the effects of the Virgo cluster environment on spiral and peculiar galaxies. Using deep imaging, spectroscopic data, and HI observations, the investigators will obtain data on the kinematics and distributions of stars and gas in a sample of 25 galaxies. They will then generate computer simulations of models for intercluster material (ICM) - interstellar material stripping (ISM), ICM pressure-induced star formation, HI accretion, low and high speed tidal interactions, low velocity mergers, and high-speed collisions. They will compare their data with these models to try to determine which interaction processes are at work in peculiar galaxies in Virgo. The Virgo Cluster of galaxies is one of the closest clusters to our own galaxy. Many of the spiral galaxies in the Virgo Cluster are small galaxies with less active star formation than is seen in our own galaxy. This reduced star formation seems to occur only in the outer parts of these galaxies and the investigators doing this research hypothesize that this truncation of starformation is the result of environmental effects related to the proximity of other galaxies within the cluster. This research will conduct several types of observations and compare them with computer simulations to try and identify just which environmental effects are important for the inhibition of star formation. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc2270 none This experimental condensed matter physics project employs neutron and x-ray scattering techniques to investigate three classes of materials: (a) Sr-and excess Oxygen doped La2CuO4 high temperature superconductors (b) 1D and 2D quantum magnets (c) model materials with disorder and or competing interactions. The research in La2-xSrxCuO4 and La2CuO4+y will focus on the incommensurate magnetic and charge ordering and the concomitant low energy spin dynamics, most especially in the under-doped regime. The data will be analyzed in the so-called stripe picture. Research areas (b) and (c) come together beautifully in the diluted spin-Peierls material Cu1-xMgxGeO3 where magnetic and structural superlattice order compete. This system will be studied as a function of x using both neutron and synchrotron x-ray scattering techniques. Experiments will be carried out both at zero field and at high fields where the structural order is respectively commensurate and incommensurate. The order from disorder phenomenon in the 2D material Sr2Cu3O4Cl2, including the novel effects expected from doping-induced disorder, will be explored. Finally, quantum Monte Carlo techniques will be used to model the 1D and 2D quantum spin systems. The materials studied have many practical applications varying from superconducting electronic devices to read heads in magnetic recorders. The students educated in this program will play a leadership role at our large national facilities. %%% This research program investigates the microscopic physics of materials that fall in the technical category of highly correlated electronic materials The best known examples are high temperature superconductors. The most important microscopic signature of such materials is that the way any electron in the material behaves depends in detail on what the electrons surrounding it are doing. This turns out to be a surprisingly difficult problem of fundamental interest but with many practical ramifications. The general strategy here is to begin at the atomic level and to look at how the properties evolve as the length scale is increased progressively from the microscopic to the macroscopic. As a specific example, materials such as La2CuO4 as a function of doping evolve continuously from two dimensional magnets to high temperature superconductors to normal metals. The research goal is to understand the nature of this evolution with emphasis on materials which are in the transition region between different states. As a result of this and related work by others we hope to arrive at a complete understanding of the various phases and their transitions in copper oxide superconducting materials. This will in turn enable the community to design better materials and to create new devices. Indeed, devices based on highly correlated electronic materials are already appearing in the marketplace. Students involved in this project typically pursue careers at research universities, national laboratories, technology-based industries and in management consulting and thereby contribute significantly to both U.S. science and the economy doc2271 none AST- Wolfe The goals of this proposal are to study the properties and implications of the damped Lyman-alpha absorption systems seen in quasar spectra. The PI s earlier work suggests that Ly-alpha systems are the gaseous progenitors of most normal galaxies with kinematics and ionization levels which indicate absorption in moving, presumably merging, clumps rather than smooth disks. The PI has started a numerically-intensive simulation program to examine consistency between the observations and cosmological parameters. The object of this proposal is to find and observe the ancestors of typical current galaxies; i.e., protogalaxies. Current theories, (for example, cold dark matter cosmologies (CDM)), predict that most protogalaxies were much less massive than current galaxies. Thus, the starlight emitted by exceedingly distant protogalaxies is too faint to detect by conventional techniques. By contrast the surveys for neutral gas discussed in this proposal are capable of detecting low-mass objects. Since stars in current galaxies have formed out of interstellar gas for the past 10 billion years, most of the ordinary matter in protogalaxies must have been gas. We detect the gas in absorption against the bright light emitted by even more distant quasars. The principal signature of gaseous protogalaxies is strong absorption in the hydrogen Lyman - alpha line. In principle we can detect low-mass objects since the absorption strength of the gas is insensitive to variations of the mass of the protogalaxy. In this work, the PIs will use the two Keck 10 m telescopes to test predictions of CDM, studying the velocity structure of the neutral and ionized gas to determine whether gas motions are generated by rotating disks or some other mechanism. and measuring the abundance of heavy elements in order to trace chemical enrichment of galaxies over cosmic time scales. and searching for emission of starlight from galaxies associated with the absorbing gas. These observations will be compared with numerical simulations of the formation of damped Lyman - alpha systems in CDM cosmologies. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc2272 none DUKES This is a group award which will allow approximately eight scientists, at four primarily undergraduate institutions, to continue to work on a series of problems requiring extensive photometric observations of stars without requiring time away from their teaching duties. Since the observations will be done remotely, undergraduate students will be able to participate directly in valuable astronomical research. This will be accomplished by the use of a 0.75-m telescope, at a remote location, which operates under computer control. This type of telescope, known as an Automatic Photometric Telescope or APT yields data that is as good or better than that obtained by most manual observers. Telescopes of this type are revolutionizing the observations of certain types of objects that require extensive, long-term, series of measurements. These objects have traditionally been neglected since most astronomers have not had the time or facilities required to go and observe them properly. The schools involved in the Four College Consortium are The College of Charleston, The Citadel, the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, and Villanova University. The projects to be carried out are those in which both science and non-science undergraduates and occasional high school students have been and will be involved. In the past three years various astronomical research projects at the four schools have involved at least twenty-two undergraduate students and three high school students. Some of the projects are solely dependent on the APT data. In other projects, the APT data provides crucial observational data that complements observations carried out on orbiting observatories such as the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), as well as radio wavelength observations made with instruments such as the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope. The major long term monitoring projects usually involve studying stars on and near the stellar main sequence. Stars lying on the main sequence are those which are fusing hydrogen into helium in their central regions. These stars (the Sun is an example) are considered normal stars. The projects are often studies of peculiar properties of these normal stars. These peculiar properties are also found in the Sun but are enhanced in stars which are on the main sequence and are cooler than or hotter than the Sun. Specific projects to be carried out range from observations of hot, massive stars to those of cool, low mass stars. In order of decreasing mass these projects include: o Mass Determination of Massive Binaries o Stellar Seismology of type A and B Stars (from the main sequence to supergiants) o Hot, Chemically Peculiar Stars with Strong Magnetic Fields o The Sun in Time Project: A Coordinated Optical APT, UV, and X-ray Study for stars similar to the Sun but of a different age. o Eclipsing Binary Stars as Astrophysical Laboratories o APT Observations of Very Young, Active Red Dwarfs o Search for Starspot Variability among Strong X-ray emitting Cool Stars This project is funded by the Division of Astronomical Sciences doc2273 none The probabilistic method pioneered and chiefly developed by Paul Erdos has become one of the most powerful tools in combinatorics. Extensive research has been carried out in the study of random graphs and other combinatorial structures, often motivated by applications requiring the proof of existence of certain combinatorial objects. This project is oriented to this vigorously developing area in which probabilistic reasoning plays a crucial role in the proof of deterministic statements. One of the most notable examples is the Regularity Lemma of Szemeredi. This lemma allows one to decompose any graph into components whose quasi-randomness ensures the existence of certain substructures, as though they were random objects. Proof methods based on the Regularity Lemma already have numerous applications in graph theory and theoretical computer science. Recently, some of these techniques have been extended to sparse graphs (to which the original regularity lemma could not be applied) as well as to some set systems. The Principal Investigator plans systematic study of such techniques doc2274 none This project will perform a systematic investigation of the entry of solar wind ions into the magnetosphere. Particles will be followed from the solar wind, through the magnetopause, and then into the various regions of the magnetosphere. It will determine whether there are mechanisms other than magnetic reconnection that allow a significant number of ions access to the magnetosphere and will also address the question of what contribution the ionosphere makes to the ion population. The project will utilize the results from prior MHD modeling of the magnetosphere to define the state of the magnetosphere and then will utilize a test-particle tracing technique to follow ions from the solar wind into the magnetosphere doc2275 none AST- Turner The goal of this project is to obtain IR Brackett-line spectroscopy, 10-micron and 20-micron observations using the Keck telescope, and VLA synthesis images at 1 and 2cm for between 6 and 12 nearby galaxies which have bright radio continuum emission at 1 cm. These will be used to study the emission from star-forming regions in these objects. The data will provide a substantive base for the interpretation of future ground-based (the Atacama Large Millimeter Array and inferred observations from the South Pole) and deep, space-based (SOFIA SIRTF ) surveys where the 10 micron region will be redshifted to100 microns. A dramatic mode of star formation is the starburst, in which star formation appears to proceed via large clusters rather than the sparse open clusters that currently form in the Milky Way. These super star clusters are likely precursors to globular clusters. Globular clusters in the Milky are all old, and there are indications that the early universe may have preferred to form these large clusters. The formation of super star clusters can be studied by observing the very youngest large star-forming regions, which are closest to their birth conditions. These regions are usually visually obscured by dust and gas clouds. The goal of this project is the detection of star formation in nearby galaxies in the infrared and radio wavelengths where star clusters and nebulae are not as affected by extinction as they are in the visible. Free-free radio continuum observations with the Very Large Array radio telescope will be used to map out radio nebulae surrounding young stars. Hidden nebulae can also be revealed by the mid-infrared emission from dust warmed by intense starlight from these clusters. With the Keck Telescope, nearby starbursts will be imaged in the mid-infrared at resolutions sufficient to distinguish gaseous nebulae from young star clusters. The first step is to locate the youngest super star clusters in nearby galaxies, where they are relatively easy to study. This is the major goal of this research. Eventually, once the locations of these clusters and their nebulae have been established, the imaging of gas clouds near the nebulae will show the relation of the clusters to their natal gas, which may reveal the trigger for the star formation. This is a topic that can be fruitfully explored with the future Atacama Large Millimeter Array telescope. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc2276 none The NCSU Industrial Mathematics Modeling Workshop for graduate students (IMMW ) is designed to expose students in mathematics, statistics, and engineering to problems from industry and government laboratories, and introduce them to a team approach to problem solving. The workshop is scheduled for the time period July 24, to August 1, and is organized by Pierre Gremaud, Zhilin Li, Ralph Smith, and Hien Tran. The workshop accommodates approximately 36 graduate students (for a total of 6 teams) from national and international institutions. Scientists from industry or government laboratories will be invited to present current research problems and lead teams of 5-6 students through model formulation and at least partial solution of the problems. This enriches the traditional graduate experience and provides valuable training for both students considering academic careers and those students preparing for nonacademic careers. For students preparing for an academic career, the workshop provides experience which will significantly broaden their perspective in the classroom and may provide a catalyst for later research. The experience is even more significant for students pursuing nonacademic careers since it provides them with an exposure to important ``real life problems and gives them some initial experience at addressing such problems doc2277 none This GOALI award, co-funded by the Division of Materials Research and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities of the Directorate for Mathematical & Physical Sciences, involves a collaboration between the University of Rochester and the Eastman Kodak Company. A new concept for photoresponsive polymers is described based on a process called Quantum Amplified Isomerization (QAI). QAI materials are defined as polymers that undergo electron transfer-initiated ion radical chain isomerization reactions upon absorption of light. QAI materials have the potential to overcome many of the known problems associated with existing photoresponsive polymers, while still retaining their primary advantages. Specifically, QAI materials are designed to produce many chemical tranformations per photon absorbed, with little or no accompanying dimensional changes. The primary research goals of this proposal are: (1) to obtain a predictive understanding of the fundamental ion radical chain reaction chemistry that forms the basis of QAI processes, (2) to test sensitization strategies for the efficient inititaion of QAI processes, (3) to use the insights from (1) and (2) to design and synthesize functionalized QAI polymers, and (3) to characterize key optical properties of new QAI materials. This collaboration is in the fields of photochemistry and optical materials for communications, and involves a number of educational experiences, including on-site industrial research for the students and weekly group meetings among the academic and industrial co-PI s doc2278 none This is a proposal to support graduate students to attend the Third International Workshop on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control, to be held March 23-25, , in Pittsburgh, PA. The goal of this workshop is to provide an international forum for presenting novel results, methodologies, and tools for the design of hybrid dynamic systems. The term hybrid systems has emerged over the past few years to describe the increasing number of computer-controlled systems that require a mixture of continuous and discrete state variables to be modeled effectively. The lack of a satisfactory, cost-effective methodologies for designing reliable and efficient hybrid systems is widely acknowledged. It is the purpose of the workshops on hybrid systems to develop a scientific community and a body of knowledge that synthesizes discrete and continuous technologies. The meeting will include four invited plenary speakers and more than 30 contributed presentations selected by a program committee from submitted extended abstracts. Attendance of approximately 100 researchers is expected. This proposal asks for financial support for approximately 20 graduate students to attend the workshop doc2279 none This award provides infrastructure and research funding for the Center for Ultracold Atoms, a joint effort between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University designed to take advantage of the recent dramatic progress in atom optics on the one hand and in methods for creating coherent atoms on the other to explore opportunities for scientific advances and new technologies that would be difficult to implement within the context of individual investigators working in isolation. The goals of the Center include developing coherent atom sources of unprecedented intensity, devising techniques for manipulating the atoms for scientific and technological applications, developing methods for trapping and cooling new species of atoms, studying surface interactions with coherent atoms, loading atoms into surface waveguide structures, and developing methods for new types of spectroscopy. The Center will reach out to the scientific community with a substantial visitors program that will encourage senior and junior scientists to participate in the research and carry the Center s expertise elsewhere. A companion educational project is also being undertaken with the Museum of Science in Boston and Wellesley College. This project is jointly supported by the Atomic, Molecular, Optical, and Plasma Physics Program, the Condensed Matter Physics Program, and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate doc2280 none Research in theoretical physics will include work on supersymmetric field theories and superstring theory. Supersymmetric field theories hypothesize that for every elementary particle known, there is another particle with very closely related properties. These theories are important because they may be the correct explanation of why the weak nuclear force is not very much weaker than we observe it to be. Superstring theory is important because it is the most promising unified theory of all the fundamental forces, including gravity; it is also leading to the development of new tools for performing calculations in other theories, such as the one which describes the strong nuclear force doc2281 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: RUI: Combinatorial Control of Chaos, Symbolic Dynamics, Optimal Control and Inverse Frobenius-Perron Problem Bollt This project addresses global control strategies for chaotic dynamical systems, based on transfer operator representations of dynamics on an invariant subspace. Emphasis is on developing techniques useful to experimentalists. During the last decade, much research has been focused on the realization that sensitive dependence on initial conditions and parameters allows flexible and efficient control of a chaotic dynamical system. Major difficulties have been connected with representing the action of the dynamical system on its phase space. In contrast, a complete global representation of a dynamical system is available in terms of its symbolic dynamics, and a graph approximation of the symbolic grammar is a highly efficient way to completely encode coarse-grained control strategies. This project reduces the difficult problems of developing a global control strategy to much easier problems, concerning linear algebra if targeting invariant density, or combinatorics of path searching if targeting optimal trajectories. In this coarse-grained approximation, paths through graphs model trajectories of the dynamical system. Local feedback control and small parameter variations are used to realize paths through the graph as true trajectories. Questions under study are closely related to Ulam s method in the theory of Frobenius-Perron operators and also to the concept of partition in information theory and in symbolic dynamics. This project develops techniques for targeting, finding optimal trajectories, and highlighting desirable states. Potential engineering applications include Navy ship-to-ship transfer by cargo crane, space mission design, design of electronic circuits that stay within desirable operating regimes, and perhaps someday preemptive control of epileptic seizures. The work involves collaboration with experimentalists to pursue real world applications. In addition, the project investigates applications of controlling symbolic dynamics to encode information in chaotic oscillations doc2282 none A recently appointed Assistant Professor at Louisiana University (LSU) and Principal Investigator of this award, together with two senior faculty members, is leading a new research effort with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). LIGO is designed to be the world s most sensitive detector for gravitational radiation and is just coming into operation. LIGO is located at two widely separated sites, one in Livingston Louisiana, the other in Hanford Washington. The Livingston site is located about 35 miles from the LSU campus. This group intends to use the close proximity of the Livingston site to the LSU campus to develop diagnostic tools necessary to improve and sustain of the sensitivity of LIGO. The project will be directed along three lines of investigation: The on-line diagnostics of the LIGO interferometers at Livingston. This group will use LIGO s global diagnostic system as LIGO is brought into operation in order to gain an intimate knowledge of the LIGO detector components. The goal of the group is to gain the information about the behavior of LIGO that will enable LIGO to be used as a reliable instrument. Transient noise identification. LIGO performance is limited by stray signals, or noise, that either hide or mimic a gravitational wave signal from astrophysical sources. The investigators will build a facility to measure the transient noise originating from various of the mechanical components of LIGO. Advanced LIGO seismic isolation system. The group will test prototypes of the seismic isolation systems being developed for the next generation of LIGO detectors. The group will involve undergraduates and graduate students in the research, both at Louisiana State University campus and at the LIGO site doc2283 none The principal investigator will continue his research to investigate new techniques to improve the sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors. The thrust of the effort is to explore isolation systems with low frequency performance superior to those currently in use. These developments have application in the NSF supported Laser Interferometer Gravitational- Wave Observatory. Three areas will be pursued: the magnetic levitation of test masses, the suspension point interferometer, and the use of paramagnetic materials for test masses. These developments may be expected to mature five to ten years from now and could have important applications in future versions of LIGO doc2284 none McAvoy - Plantwide control involves the issue of which variables should be measured, controlled, and manipulated, and how these variables should be linked together. For some plants a decentralized proportional-integral-derivative (PID) approach produces acceptable results, while in others it does not. At present there is no systematic methodology that allows a designer to determine how well a particular plantwide control architecture can be expected to perform. The basic question addressed in this research is: given a dynamic process model and expected set point changes disturbances, is a decentralized architecture sufficient for acceptable performance, or should an interacting model predictive control (MPC) architecture be used for all or part of the plant? The PI has developed two optimization-based approaches to answering this question. One involves optimal control (OC) and it is the focus of the research planned here, while the other makes use of a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation. The approach to be studied assumes that a dynamic process model is available, since such models are becoming more and more common in practice. The objective of the approach is to extract information from the process model about what type of architecture is required to control the plant that the model represents. The PI s OC research used initial state forcing, full state feedback, and it required tuning PID feedback and P feedforward controllers for each candidate decentralized architecture. This OC approach was applied successfully to two DuPont examples. The research to be done under this grant uses output feedback, step forcing for either set points or loads, and no PID tuning is required during the architecture screening process. The PI plans to apply the new methodology to the two DuPont examples, as well as to several other, larger plantwide examples. These other examples include the Tennessee Eastman process, a vinyl acetate process, and possibly an HAD process. Dynamic simulation software has been provided by DuPont and by Aspen Technology and will be used in this research. The DuPont collaborators will provide assistance in developing model predictive controllers for the processes studied doc2285 none Cirrus clouds are a widespread atmospheric constituent with major importance for radiative transfer, yet the mechanism of their formation is not well understood. The ice crystals of which they are composed form by nucleation of the solid phase from liquid water droplets or water vapor. Homogeneous nucleation of droplets containing sulfate solutes is thought to be the dominant process, but there is not yet a consistent explanation for the range and variability of thermodynamic conditions at which ice forms in this way. For example, nucleation of ice in droplets containing a mixture of solutes evidently occurs at warmer temperatures than required to freeze single-solute droplets. Therefore the temperature, and hence the altitude, at which cirrus clouds form may be determined by the chemical composition of aerosols dissolved within the droplets. This project is a laboratory study of the freezing of droplets composed of various aqueous solutions thought to be typical of those found in the upper troposphere. To be investigated are (1) the homogeneous freezing of solution droplets having different chemical compositions at temperatures between -35 and -65 degrees C and relative humidities between 70 and 100%, and (2) the heterogeneous freezing of solution droplets containing insoluble particles of the kind that might be present in the upper troposphere. The approach involves generation of well-characterized aerosol particles of various types, determining their ice-nucleating properties, and performing numerical modeling calculations to relate the laboratory measurements to existing theories of homogeneous and heterogeneous ice nucleation. The study will provide the data needed for predicting cirrus cloud formation in large-scale atmospheric models doc2286 none This research uses laser light scattering and other modern experimental methods to study the shape and dynamics of the large-scale velocity structures, spatial and temporal correlations between the velocity and temperature fields, and the surface roughness effect on the heat transport in turbulent convection driven by a large temperature gradient across a fluid layer. The proposed experiments involve investigation of universal features of turbulence, such as intermittency, coherent structure, and anomalous scaling, and also include exploration and characterization of special behaviors of turbulent convection in a closed cell under different boundary conditions. Emphasis will be placed on the understanding of the dynamic process and the physical mechanism of the characteristic features of convective turbulence. The study of turbulent convection over a rough surface is directly related to the convection in the atmosphere and oceans, where the underlying surfaces are almost always rough. This research contains a combination of exploring new physics and instrumentation development. Students involved in the project will receive a broad training in physics and optics, which will prepare them for a range of careers in academe, industry or government. The development of a novel fiber-optic vorticity probe will provide a powerful tool, which can be used widely in the general area of fluid dynamics. %%% This work uses laser light scattering and other modern experimental techniques to study turbulent fluid motion driven by a large temperature gradient across a fluid layer. The proposed experiments involve investigation of the shape and dynamics of the large-scale velocity structures, spatial and temporal correlations between the velocity and temperature fields, and the surface roughness effect on the heat transport in turbulent thermal convection. These experiments are of fundamental interest for the physical understanding of convective turbulence, and they are also relevant to many practical applications. The study of turbulent convection over a rough surface is directly related to the convection in the atmosphere and oceans, where the underlying surfaces are almost always rough. Understanding the heat transport in turbulent convection will shed new light on technological improvements for more efficient heat transfer in various industrial applications ranging from heat exchangers to reentry vehicles in the space flight. This research contains a combination of exploring new physics and instrumentation development. Students involved in the project will receive a broad training in physics and optics, which will prepare them for a range of careers in academic or industrial science. The development of a novel fiber-optic vorticity probe will provide a powerful tool, which can be used widely in the general area of fluid dynamics doc2287 none Cooper - The foundation for the research planned are discoveries in the PI s group that resulted in a predictive dynamic reaction model for the float-glass process. In traditional float glass (flat glass prepared from floating a soda-lime silicate melt on pure molten tin, highest temperature of ~ oC), the large driving-force (energy) of reaction is dissipated most rapidly by a redox dynamic that is dominated by the diffusive motions of electron holes and network-modifying cations. The PI s model explains many idiosyncratic features of the chemical profile in float glass. Combined with solution thermodynamics for float-alloy design, the model was used to extrapolate the float-glass process to temperatures in excess of oC, opening the possibility of float-processing flat glass of distinctly refractory compositions (e.g., for application as substrates in high-end flat-panel displays). The model also suggests a framework of understanding in which glass composition and float-medium composition can be engineered together so as to create high-value-added flat glass with unique physiochemical properties and performance. The research planned represents the first steps to designer -flat-glass of unique properties. The PI plans to conduct an experimental and theoretical study of the reaction(s) between molten aluminosilicate solutions with molten metal solutions, specifically: (1) the driving force and chemical species involved in the redox couple at the silicate-metal interface, (2) the physical mechanism(s) of chemical diffusion in the reacting aluminosilicate glassmelt in response to the chemical diffusion accompanying the overall reaction. In addition, the physical properties characteristics of the reacted glassmelt via its reaction with the liquid metal alloy allows for creation of a surface with perhaps unique catalytic, photonic or thermochemical (e.g., crystalline nucleation) responses. Specifically, there will be two experimental thrusts: (a) time temperature distance (i.e., into the glassmelt) analyses of reactions between Cu-37Ge (at.%) and both iron-free and ferric-iron-doped sodium aluminoborosilicate (NABS which is similar to Pyrex) and magnesium aluminosilicate glassmelts, and (b) structural and chemical (radial distribution function and electron loss spectroscopy) analyses of reacted glassmelts as functions of chemical-diffusion-affected composition, at an anticipated lateral resolution of 5-10 nm, using energy-filtered transmission electron microscopy. This project is being co-funded by the Ceramics Program in the Division of Materials Research (Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate) and the Process and Reaction Engineering Program in the Division of Chemical and Transport Systems (Engineering Directorate doc2288 none The principal investigator will conduct research with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). The effort will be based at Carlton College, an undergraduate institution. The LIGO construction is nearly complete and the facility is being commissioned for operations. A first science run is scheduled for . The focus of this research will be the analysis of data from LIGO. The project involves a new strategy for the statistical analysis of data recorded by LIGO. Over the last decade there has been a revolution in the computational methods for treating Bayesian statistics. Without these new methods the multidimensional integrals over the parameter space make a Bayesian analysis computationally prohibitive. With the new technique known as Markov Chain Monte Carlo the integrals are evaluated by a controlled random walk through the parameter space. This research will apply the techniques of Markov Chain Monte Carlo to LIGO data in an attempt to identify the signature of gravitational radiation and to estimate the parameters of the astrophysical source of the gravitational radiation doc2289 none This experimental condensed matter physics project deals with nonlinear pattern formation in fluids and liquid crystals. Convection occurs in normal fluids when temperature gradients exceed a critical value. Electroconvection occurs in liquid crystals when the electric field gradient exceeds a critical value. Thermodynamic properties such as density become spatially and temporarily varying, a variation known as a pattern . The appearance of a nonequilibrium driven pattern is known as a bifurcation, which can be characterized by its amplitude, wavenumber, correlation length, and correlation time. The latter parameters amount to a generalized order parameter e. This project will study bifurcations very close to the critical gradients in the fluids. In analogy to equilibrium critical phenomena, nonlinear interactions between the fluctuations should renormalize the order parameter exponents sufficiently close to the bifurcation where the fluctuation amplitudes become large. Experimentally, this bifurcation critical behavior has not yet been observed in nonequilibrium systems. Theoretical predictions based on renormalization-group methods exist and will be tested by these experiments. In addition to fluctuation renormalization, a subset of the project will measure heat transport Rayleigh-Bernard convection. These experiments will be of interest in the context of recent turbulence measurements in a range of fluids, including cryogenic helium near its critical point. The experiments provide excellent training for undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral associates in sophisticated measurement techniques that will prepare them for a range of careers in academe, industry or government. %%% This experimental condensed matter physics project will investigate patterns that develop in fluids and liquid crystals, as the former are exposed to thermal gradients and the latter are exposed to an electric field gradient. The time and space varying patterns are analogous to those that can be seen in a pan that is heated from below. At a certain temperature, density fluctuations in the water cause swirling patterns to develop. This project will characterize these patterns, or bifurcations as they are known, in a carefully chosen liquid crystal that is exposed to an electric field gradient. Because of the great experimental difficulty in controlling temperature and monitoring the bifurcation pattern, these will be the first experiments of their kind. The results will test predictions of an important theoretical technique known as the renormalization-group method (the invention of which merited a Nobel Prize). The experiments provide excellent training for undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral associates in sophisticated measurement techniques that will prepare them for a range of careers in academe, industry or government doc2290 none This award in the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic program supports research on the synthesis and study of small molecule magnets (SMMs) by Professor George Christou of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Indiana-Bloomington. These molecules behave macroscopically as magnets at low temperature but exhibit quantum tunnelling of magnetization (QTM) which is responsible for loss of magnetic behavior at increasing temperature. A series of new SMMs will be produced from carboxylic acid derivatives of polynuclear manganese complexes as well as from some iron compounds. Supramolecular aggregates of SMMs will be synthesized in order to raise the barrier to QTM and allow them to operate as magnets at temperatures higher than a few degrees Kelvin. The goal of this research is to develop molecular magnets which ultimately can operate at practical temperatures, analogous to the development of higher-temperature superconductors. The results of this research will lead to an enhanced understanding of the factors which produce magnetic behavior in these molecules, as well as to the factors controlling its loss at higher temperatures. The students involved in this multidisciplinary project will receive broad training which will prepare them for careers in both industry and academia doc2291 none This project focuses on investigations of cooled and trapped atomic vapors composed of multiple atomic species. The work will begin with laser cooled and trapped atomic mixtures prepared in a novel multi-species magneto-optical trap. Four areas are emphasized: 1) photoassociation to create a source of ultracold heteronuclear molecules; 2) an investigation of different trap designs for trapping ultracold heteronuclear molecules; 3) a measurement of atom-atom, atom-molecule, and molecule-molecule scattering parameters; and 4) an investigation of the properties of Bose-Einstein condensates of complex systems. The experiments will be accompanied by theoretical investigations doc2292 none Losos and Schulte The lizard genus Liolaemus (in the family Iguanidae) contains over 160 species, exhibiting great diversity in ecology, morphology, and life-history. Species are widely distributed throughout the southern half of South America and are the most prominent component of the reptile communities in many areas. In this project, graduate student James Schulte, under the direction of Drs. Jonathan Losos and Allan Larson, proposes to investigate whether species of Liolaemus living in different geographic regions but with similar ecological conditions evolve similar body shapes. More specifically, groups of species in Argentina and Chile living in ecologically similar areas (semi-arid zone and rocky transition zone) will be compared to identify whether the body sizes and habitat occupation of species in one group match the body sizes and habitat occupation of the species in the corresponding group from the other area. Observations on ecology for the several sympatric species in each of the four study sites, combined with morphometric analyses of body size and shape, provide the evidence for adaptation to local habitats. Also, the genealogy among species will have to be taken into account to exclude the possibility that similar body shape and habitat use are the result of species being closely related phylogenetically, and not the result of adaptive convergence to similar environmental conditions. The genealogy will be inferred from DNA sequences of the mitochondrial genome spanning over base pairs and 12 gene regions. Results from this project will greatly improve our understanding of the phylogenetic relationships within the second-largest lizard genus in the world, serve as an excellent comparison to previous work on other biological assemblages, and explore the reasons why animals and plants living in ecologically similar areas evolve similar features doc2293 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: The Nonlinear Dynamical Foundations of Transition State Theory in Systems with Three or More Degrees of Freedom Wiggins This research project is concerned with understanding the nonlinear dynamical foundations of transition state theory in systems with three or more degrees of freedom. While there has been much progress along these lines for two degree-of-freedom systems, there has been little progress of a similar nature for systems with three or more degrees-of-freedom. The geometrical point of view of dynamical systems theory offers a framework for discovering the types of higher dimensional phase space structures that govern reaction rates and energy flow in molecules. We will apply this approach to several problems: three dimensional Rydberg atoms in crossed electric and magnetic fields, the London-Eyring-Polanti-Sato potential, rotation-vibration interaction in formaldehyde, and a study of energy flow through resonances in carbonyl sulphide (OCS). In each case we will show that there are higher dimensional phase space structures that act as a transition state. Indeed, it may even be possible to generalize the very useful idea of a periodic orbit dividing surface to systems with three or more degrees of freedom. Our research will also focus on developing computational approaches to realize these geometric structures in these specific problems. We will also develop a wavelet-based frequency map analysis tool for studying energy flow in resonances. This work will be carried out in collaboration with chemists and physicists, as well as computational scientists. This project investigates fundamental questions concerning chemical reactions. The underlying mathematical questions involve the nonlinear dynamical foundations of transition state theory in systems with three or more degrees of freedom. This is the fundamental theory that allows predictions concerning chemical reaction dynamics. While there is a fairly complete understanding of this theory for simple, low dimensional, systems, there is as yet no analogous theoretical framework for more physically realistic high dimensional systems. Such a theory will involve mathematical description of surfaces in dimensions larger than four and will require development of computational tools for realizing and visualizing such surfaces. This will result in a detailed understanding of the dynamics of how molecules break up and of how atoms combine to form molecules. The research is interdisciplinary, involving the collaboration of chemists, physicists, and computational scientists doc2294 none The project primarily deals with rigidity phenomena in dynamical systems. One aspect of rigidity concerns situations when a weaker structure (i.e. measurable) determines a stronger one (i.e. differentiable) within certain classes of systems. Another aspect deals with preservation of the differentiable orbit structure or some of its important elements under small perturbations (local differentiable rigidity) or within certain classes of systems (global differentiable rigidity). Yet another type of rigidity appears when a certain property (such as a relation between invariants, or a regularity of an invariant structure) forces the system to belong to a specialized narrow class. A part of the research program deals with the identification of various rigidity phenomena in classical dynamical systems. An essential characteristic of proposed work is a synthetic approach which looks simultaneously into all three principal classes of behavior which appear in dynamics: elliptic, parabolic and hyperbolic exploring both similarities and contrasts among these three paradigms. Among the major goals is the identification of new situations where measurable orbit structure determines differentiable orbit structure. Another part of the program builds upon PI s earler successes in identifying and classifying rigidity phenomena for actions of higher--rank abelian groups, i.e. dynamical systems with multidimensional ``time which displays behavior essentially different from the classical case. Among other goals of the program is the development of new techniques for construction of real--analytic dynamical systems with uniform ergodic behavior including solution of the long--standing problems of existence of such systems near elements of periodic flows on some simple low--dimensional manifolds based on recent advances in that direction . Mathematical concept of rigidity has many facets. Its simplest and most basic manifestations can be seen at the level just above high school algebra: a small number of equations or inequalities of a special type may imply much larger number of equation. For example, if the arithmetic mean on n numbers coincides with the geometric mean (one equation) than the numbers are all equal ( n-1 equations). An example from the PI s earlier research is conceptually similar albeit technically much more sophisticated: a compact surface of negative curvature, i.e. a bounded geometric shape where any geodesic triangle has the sum of its angles less than 180 degrees, for which two numbers characterizing global and statistical volume growth (topological and metric entropy) coincide has constant negative curvature, i.e. the sum of the angles of a geodesic triangle is uniquely determined by the area. Various aspects of rigidity appear at the junction of several major mathematical disciplines, including differential geometry, the theory of Lie groups and the theory of dynamical systems. The research program under the present grant aims at identifying various rigidity phenomena both in classical dynamics when time is one--dimensional and for dynamical systems with multidimensional time where such phenomena are more pronounced and prevalent. Another central theme of the proposed research is a general classification of dynamical phenomena into hyperbolic and partially hyperbolic (roughly chaotic in lay parlance) elliptic (stable behavior) and parabolic (intermediate complexity accompanied by peculiar special features doc2295 none The objectives of the proposed work are to (i) demonstrate that the techniques to determine and to understand the relaibility of dynamical predictions of ENSO, work in a representative cross section of current state of the art coupled ocean-atmosphere model forecast system; (ii) determine the physical basis for the variation in the skill amongst forecasts; (iii) investigate the usefulness of a collection of forecasts from different models in producing both a better forecast and an indication of forecast robustness; and (iv) develop a general theory of linear prediction in order to extend and refine the methodology developed to date. The PI proposes an investigation of the predictability of ENSO in a range of numerical models. The work is important because it will lead to better understanding of ENSO predictability and physical processes involved in tropical Pacific variability. Improvement in understanding is likely to lead to more accurate ENSO forecasts doc2296 none The long-term goal of this project is to develop improved general circulation models (GCMs) of the global weather and climate system. Under this award the principal investigators will construct and test new parameterizations for physical processes that can be used in atmospheric GCMs. These are : (1) a multi-layer bulk parameterization of planetary boundary layer (PBL) processes, (2) a parameterization of the thermal effects of mesoscale orographic variability, and (3) a unified cloud parameterization. The PBL parameterization combines the local and nonlocal effects of turbulent eddies in a way that incorporates the positive aspects of bulk formulation used in the current UCLA atmospheric GCM. The thermal effects parameterization will be a new contribution in that current models do not account for this effect. The unified cloud parameterization abandons the artificial separation between grid- and sub-grid scales, and develops a unified logical framework that can be used for both stratiform clouds and cumulus clouds. The products from this effort will not be model-specific, although they will be tested first in the framework of the UCLA GCM doc2297 none Coale San Jose State University Foundation (Moss Landing Marine Laboratories- MLML) will operate the R V Point Sur during as a general oceanographic research vessel in support of NSF-supported research projects. The Point Sur is a 135 ft. vessel, constructed in , and owned by NSF and operated by MLML. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 162 operational days during , of which 65 days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The remaining cruises will support Navy, USCOE, NOPP, and other Federal and private projects. The projects scheduled on the Point Sur represent several oceanographic disciplines, including physical and biological oceanography, geology, ichthyology, benthic ecology and marine mammal behavior, and will fully utilize the capabilities of the vessel. The vessel will be used for a variety of projects such as maintaining moored arrays, providing a platform for instructional training and curriculum support, and supporting collaborative interagency research. Operations will take place regionally around Moss Landing. The Point Sur is part of a fleet of ships used by the National Science Foundation in support of marine science research. Most oceanographic projects require highly specialized equipment to be permanently installed on the vessel, thus the necessity for specialized ships. These vessels do not operate in the same mode as general cargo fishing vessels. As a result, NSF supports the operation of a variety of ships specifically dedicated to oceanographic research that are operated by universities and institutions around the country doc2298 none Coale This award to San Jose State University provides shipboard technical support, shore-based support, instrument maintenance and instrument calibration for researchers using R V Point Sur, a research vessel operated by Moss Landing Marine Laboratories as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The technical support awarded here will assist NSF-funded researchers conduct oceanographic studies in the waters along the central California margin and adjacent regions in CY and beyond doc2299 none Bruce Locke and Ronald Clarke Florida State University Gas phase pulsed corona reactors have been used for the degradation and removal of air pollutants such as nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and volatile organic compounds from combustion gases and other gaseous waste streams. A pulsed streamer corona discharge creates streamer channels that propagate from one electrode to the other and that typically have relatively small diameter. These streamers lead to the formation of chemically reactive degradation of conversion to less harmful byproducts of many pollutants. The PI s are working on reticulated vitreous carbon as high voltage and ground electrodes in pulsed corona reactors. The major advantage of using reticulated vitreous carbon electrodes for this application is that it allows for the gas to flow through the electrode region where the plasma has the highest intensity, thereby facilitating good contact between the waste components in the gas and the plasma region. In addition, preliminary work has indicated possible interactions between nitrogen dioxide and the surface of the electrodes. This project is to explore the possibility of improving the reactor operation for nitrogen oxide removal through the coating of the reticulated carbon electrodes with platinum and other materials in order to promote reductive reactions doc2300 none This grant provides funds to support approximately 150 travel awards to US mathematicians within six years of receipt of their doctoral degree to attend the special AMS meeting in August, , The Mathematical Challenges of the 21st Century, to be held on the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles. The program for this meeting includes lectures by thirty world-renowned mathematicians. The phenomenal advances in mathematical research during the past half-century has involved both the solution of centuries-old celebrated mathematical problems as well as major applications of sophisticated mathematical concepts and tools to the other sciences and in applications. The U.S. mathematical community has played a central role in this development, as has the cadre of brilliant young mathematicians fostered by that community. The turn of the century (and the new millennium) will undoubtedly see an intensification and acceleration of these trends. In particular, developments of the last two decades indicate a deeper and closer relation between research mathematics and other front-line areas in the sciences than was the case in earlier decades. At this point of transition between centuries, it is natural that the vital and diverse community of mathematicians take stock of recent mathematical advancements and look forward to the mathematical themes that will form the core of research developments in the coming century. These travel grants will enable many of the US s young mathematicians to be an integral part of this process doc2301 none Reid This project seeks to develop combinatorial methods to determine the manifold dimension of causal set representations of curved spacetimes. The purpose of this study is to help forward the effort to construct a theory of discrete quantum gravity via the causal set approach. An analysis of the failure of currently existing, coarse-graining invariant, methods for flat spacetime dimension determination will be employed to facilitate this work. The ability to perform curved spacetime dimension determination on causal sets will provide a major step forward in the ability to identify those causal sets that are good candidates for a physically viable model of the small-scale structure of spacetime doc2302 none Findley This award to University of Miami will provide instrumentation for oceanographic research for use on four research vessels operated by both the university s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and by the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, all four operated as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. Specific instrumentation to be acquired includes an acoustic doppler current profiler for use from R V Walton Smith, a new vessel operated by RSMAS beginning in , and a suite of sensors and water sampling system that will be used from both R V Smith and from the three vessels operated by HBOI, R Vs Johnson, Link and Sea Diver. The shared-use instrumentation supported here will assist marine scientists conduct studies, particularly in the North Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea, during and future years doc2303 none Award: Principal Investigator: Steve Zelditch We propose to apply quantum dynamical notions to problems in geometry, inverse spectral theory and mathematical physics. First is the well-known problem, `Can you hear the shape of an analytic drum? We have constructed a `quantum Birkhoff normal form of the Laplacian around a bouncing ball orbit and have proved that it is a spectral invariant. We will investigate the extent to which a bounded simply connected analytic plane domain is determined by its normal forms at one or more bouncing ball orbits. We will also investigate a new connection between the spectrum and X-ray tomography of the domain. The second group of problems involves applications of a recently developed probabalistic theory of holomorphic sections of line bundles over Kahler manifolds. We have at this time determined much of the local statistics of sections over small balls. We have also generalized the results to symplectic manifolds. We now aim to apply these results to determine hole probabilities, probabilities of transversality, and other matters which arise in complex and symplectic geometry. The third group of problems belongs to Quantum Chaos. We have introduced a new model of random quantum maps, obtained by quantizing stochastic Hamiltonian flows. We propose to investigate the main problems of Quantum Chaos for this model. Much of physics of the twentieth century has revolved around the quantum mechanics of particles and fields, in particular around the Schrodinger equation, and the physics and engineering of the future will be even more quantum mechanical. Quantum systems are quite un-intuitive and one of the best ways to understand what they do is to compare them to the classical systems which they quantize. For instance, a hydrogen atom in a strong magnetic field can be thought of as a small particle moving in a force field. As the magnetic field gets stronger, the particle s motion becomes more complex and chaotic. What does this say about the quantum particle? According to twenty years of numerical studies, the behaviour of a chaotic quantum particle should be random, with statistics similar to those for random matrices. Why should solutions of the Schrodinger equation know anything about random matrices? Our approach is to introduce a new model of chaotic quantum systems which allows one to consider large families of systems at once. In a sense, we are trying to show that a `random quantum system behaves similarly to a `random matrix, despite the differences in these systems. Such a model should be able to explain observations ranging from nuclear resonance levels to chemical reaction rates doc2304 none Tandy Theoretical investigations of hadron properties and interactions will be carried out through a non-perturbative modeling of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the strong interaction field theory of quarks and gluons. Specific topics to be addressed include: meson decays and meson interaction coupling constants and form factors, the mass and important decay modes of an exotic meson (rho-hat( ) that is beyond the reach of the constituent quark model, issues beyond the ladder Bethe-Salpeter approximation and relevant for the masses and flavor mixing of eta and eta-prime mesons as well as the 3P0 scalar meson nonet, CP violating decays of hadrons, and hadron properties at finite temperature and baryon density. The work is aimed at providing a bridge between quark-gluon dynamics and effective hadron dynamics that will be necessary as experimental programs, such those at JLab and RHIC, probe nuclear interactions at a distance scale within the size of hadrons. The approach being followed is fully covariant, incorporates absolute quark confinement and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking, and implements solutions of the quark-antiquark Bethe-Salpeter equation directly in 4-space. The models of continuum QCD are guided by, and developed from, the truncated Dyson-Schwinger equations for the dressed propagators and vertex functions. Phenomenology enters through the modeling of the infrared form of the gluon two-point function. In the ultraviolet region, care is taken to preserve the one-loop renormalization group behavior of the running coupling. Parameters are fit to the low mass pseudoscalar meson properties. This produces a description of hadron observables in terms of quarks dressed with nonperturbative gluon effects. The distributed space-time extent of the meson modes is retained. Integral equation and eigenmode techniques are used in numerical investigations doc2305 none of some short-range (e.g., screened), yet sufficiently strong, forces acting between electrons. The effects of singular interactions become even more pronounced in the presence of disorder as well as in low dimensions and or restricted geometries, the situation often encountered in nanostructures. The research will apply a number of powerful analytical and numerical methods to deal with this general class of problems and its manisfestations in the cuprate superconductors, quantum Hall and heavy fermion systems. While much of this work is of a fundamental nature, the results may well have long-range impacts on future technologies doc2306 none for proposal of Jorgenson Jay Jorgenson proposes to continue ongoing research with his co-authors into applications of heat kernel analysis to number theory. Jorgenson and Serge Lang will study spectral theory on finite volume quotients of symmetric spaces using generalizations of Eisenstein series defined using heat kernels, as opposed to classical Eisenstein series which are defined using automorphic forms. Jorgenson and Lang plan to investigate questions involving analytic continuation, functional equations, and special values of their heat Eisenstein series. Upon completion of this component of their work, Jorgenson and Lang then will investigate applications of heat Eisenstein series to Weyl s law as well as to constructions of zeta functions which will yield higher rank generalizations of Selberg zeta functions. In collaboration with Jurg Kramer, Jorgenson will study analytic aspects of Arakelov theory. In recent work, Jorgenson and Kramer study bounds on special values of Selberg s zeta function and asymptotic bounds through covers. Jorgenson and Kramer propose to extend these results to study asymptotic behavior of Faltings s delta function through covers, thus extending results first obtained by Jorgenson in his Stanford Ph.D. thesis. In collaboration with Jozek Dodziuk, Jorgenson plans to use Lang s definition of degenerating number fields (from Lang s Inventiones paper) to study spectral theory on the corresponding sequence of degenerating Hilbert modular varieties. The proposed methods to employ involve generalizations of research previously obtained by Jorgenson with Dodziuk and with Huntley and Lundelius. As time permits, Jorgenson plans to study proposed additional research problems with Carol Fan, Edward Jenvey and Peter Grabner. Classically, the heat kernel is a function defined for positive values of time t and points x and y in a domain D, and the heat kernel measures the amount of heat at point x in D at time t when a unit burst of heat is introduced at point y in D at time zero. Although the origin of the heat kernel lies in physics, the mathematics surrounding the function known as the heat kernel manifests itself in virtually every area of pure and applied mathematics. In addition, the heat kernel is present in the theoretical foundations of many fields of statistics as well as econometrics and, more specifically, financial mathematics. Part of the research undertaken by Jay Jorgenson and his collaborators involves understanding various ways in which the heat kernel appears in one area of mathematics and then translate the questions, theorems and techniques to other areas of mathematics, statistics, and economics. Going beyond mathematical research, Jay Jorgenson proposes to extend his research endeavors to incluce applications of heat kernels to practical problems of financial mathematics and economics, which naturally includes developing ways in which one can program constructions of heat kernels in order to obtain precise, numerical evaluations doc2307 none Askew Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, Inc. will operate the R Vs Seward Johnson, Edwin Link, and Sea Diver during as general oceanographic research vessels in support of NSF-supported research projects. The Seward Johnson is a 204 ft. vessel, constructed in and converted in , and is owned and operated by Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, Inc. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 269 operational days during , of which 177 days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The remaining cruises will support Navy, NOAA, and DOE projects. The projects scheduled on the Seward Johnson represent several oceanographic disciplines, including physical and chemical oceanography, and will fully utilize the capabilities of the vessel. Operations in will mainly take place in the South Atlantic, subtropical North Atlantic, and the western Equatorial Atlantic Ocean. The Edwin Link is a 168 ft. vessel, constructed in 84, and is owned and operated by Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, Inc. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 160 operational days during , of which 53 days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The remaining cruises will support Navy and other private projects. The projects scheduled on the Edwin Link represent several oceanographic disciplines, including biological and chemical oceanography, and will fully utilize the capabilities of the vessel. The vessel will support several cruises which will use submersibles. Operations in will mainly take place in the North Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean, and off the coast of Venezuela. The Sea Diver is a 113 ft. vessel, constructed in and converted in , and is owned and operated by Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, Inc. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 88 operational days during , of which 26 days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The remaining cruises will support Navy projects. The projects scheduled on the Sea Diver represent several oceanographic disciplines, mainly biological oceanography, and will fully utilize the capabilities of the vessel. Operations in will take place mostly in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean. The R Vs Seward Johnson, Edwin Link, and Sea Diver are part of a fleet of ships used by the National Science Foundation in support of marine science research. Most oceanographic projects require highly specialized equipment to be permanently installed on the vessels, thus the necessity for specialized ships. These vessels do not operate in the same mode as general cargo fishing vessels. As a result, NSF supports the operation of a variety of ships specifically dedicated to oceanographic research that are operated by universities and institutions around the country doc2308 none Switzer In this project, epitaxial films of semiconducting metal oxides will be electrodeposited from solution precursors onto single-crystal substrates. The emphasis will be on epitaxial systems with high lattice mismatch, and on the synthesis of technologically-important semiconducting metal oxides that cannot by processed by traditional thermal methods. Epitaxial films are usually deposited by vapor deposition methods, such as chemical vapor deposition, at elevated temperatures onto a single crystal substrate chosen to have a lattice parameter as close as possible to that of the film. The project breaks with these traditions by using a simple low-temperature process, electrodeposition, to produce epitaxial systems with large lattice mismatch. The research project will consist of three phases: (i) Epitaxial electrodeposition and characterization of metal oxide semiconductors, (ii) Mechanistic studies of epitaxial electrodeposition, and (iii) Study of the transition from thermodynamic to kinetic control in epitaxial electrodeposition. The goals of the first phase of the research will be to establish the generality of epitaxial electrodeposition of semiconducting metal oxides and to determine both the out-of-plane and in-plane orientation of the epitaxial films relative to the single-crystal substrates. The second phase of the work will focus on the mechanism of epitaxial electrodeposition. The final phase of the work will explore the transition from thermodynamic to kinetic control of orientation. In this project, epitaxial films of oxide materials will be deposited onto single-crystal substrates using a low temperature process, electrodeposition. This low temperature technique allows the growth of films that cannot be obtained by the standard high-temperature techniques. Thin film materials are important in high tech applications such as information technology and telecommunications doc2309 none Little This proposal requests partial support for the Technical Activities Program of the Federal Facilities Council (FFC). The program supports: completing two information studies: Performance Measures for Facilities Management-Related Activities; and, Integrating Sustainable Design, Life-Cycle Costing, and Value Engineering into Facilities Acquisition; redesigning and substantially upgrading the FFC Internet home page to significantly enhance the FFC s networking and information-sharing capabilities; allow sponsoring agencies field offices to participate more fully in FFC activities and networking; and to expand outreach efforts to other public and private sector organizations involved with facilities design, operations, and management; convening a Government Industry Forum on Best Practices in Design Review Processes; a workshop on Building Commissioning: Developing Electronic Operation and Maintenance Manuals for Computerized Maintenance Management Systems; a workshop series on The Changing Nature of the Workplace: Planning for Office and Administrative Facilities in the 21st Century, and a workshop on facilities condition assessment practices. publishing and distributing six technical reports containing the findings of the information studies and summarizing the proceedings of the forums and workshops; and providing administrative support and technical expertise for approximately 45 standing committee meetings of the member organizations doc2310 none of more realistic and complicated processes. The successful completion of the planned research will allow engineers and scientists to design more efficient sintering and joining processes for ceramics which will allow them to produce higher quality materials. It will also help in the design and implementation of microwave assisted vapor deposition processes which are highly promising in the construction of composite ceramic materials doc2311 none Dr. Gray and his colleagues will continue their investigations into the basic structure and dynamics of tropical cyclones, focusing on the mechanisms responsible for intensity change. A particularly challenging and intriguing part of the work will be an exploration of the nature of the inner core of the hurricane and the evolution of the region known as the eye wall . A relatively new source of observations, the GPS dropwindsondes, will be examined and should provide far more detailed information than has been available previously. Other topics to be pursued include studies of processes responsible for variations in the tropical cyclone s outer region, factors that influence the maximum potential intensity of these storms, and improving methods for predicting changes in hurricane structure and intensity. In addition to the dropwindsondes, the reseachers will employ satellite data, particularly satellite-derived winds; surface, and aircraft flight level data. Although there have been significant improvements in recent years in the forecasting of tropical cyclone tracks, the same is not true with respect to the forecasting tropical cyclone intensity. The results of this research could have significant impact for improving our understanding and, ultimately, forecasting storm intensity. This project is jointly supported by the Mesoscale Dynamic Meteorology and Large-scale Dynamic Meteorology Programs doc2312 none Mesoscale convective systems (MCS s) consist of a collection of thunderstorms that organize themselves into distinct patterns. MCS s have been shown to be the source of both beneficial Spring-time rainfall and severe weather. Building on previous research, the Principal Investigator will continue research directed towards improved understanding of mid-latitude MCSs with a focus on their organization, longevity, embedded mesoscale circulations (especially mesoscale convective vortices, MCV s) and coupling with the atmospheric boundary layer. The Principal Investigator has two objectives: 1. To investigate the mechanisms for organization, growth, maintenance and dissipation of mid-latitude MCS s. 2. To conduct a climatological study of MCV s and to study how MCV s initiate convection that regenerates or sustains MCS s. MCV s are mid-level, stable, weak vortices that appear to form from the remnants of MCS s. They are believed to be important for they often appear to be the source of initiation of new convection many hours after the demise of the original MCS. That is, after MCS s have dissipated, they appear to spawn weak MCV s which may be the trigger for the next day s round of MCS s. If so, a complete understanding of these phenomena holds the promise of improved predictability of thunderstorms doc2313 none Award: Principal Investigator: Xiaobo Liu This research program addresses problems in two areas. The Virasoro conjecture in symplectic geometry asserts that the generating function of the Gromov-Witten invariants for a compact symplectic manifold must be annihilated by a sequence of differential operators in the Virasoro algebra. The principal investigator will study whether the genus-one Virasoro conjecture and perhaps more general constraints hold for all projective varieties. It is even possible that the generating function of genus-one primary Gromov-Witten invariants can be computed explicitly from the genus-zero invariants, although this is more than the Virasoro conjecture implies. The second area to be addressed is submanifold geometry, especially the properties of isoparametric submanifolds, including infinite dimensional submanifolds. We know some good constructions of isoparametric submanifolds, but important aspects of the classification theory are in early stages of development. Geometric descriptions of classical or quantum mechanical systems are based in symplectic geometry, which takes as its basic measurement the area of two-dimensional surfaces. The Gromov-Witten invariants of a symplectic manifold can be described as a family of number that count the number of surfaces of a nice sort that satisfy certain constraints, such as intersecting specified subsets of the manifold. Enumerative invariants of this kind are an ancient concern in algebraic geometry, where we count the number of solutions to a system of equations, and the subject was recently found to be connected to high energy physical theory, where the partition functions of certain quantum systems on a manifold have been found to be related to generating functions that collect families of Gromov-Witten invariants into a manageable form. The Virasoro conjecture proposed by a group of physicists and mathematicians asserts that these generating functions satisfy a family of constraints that simplify computations and connect the Gromov-Witten invariants to the mathematics of completely different problems. A different kind of geometry arises in the study of submanifolds as curved objects, where we use several measurements of bending to capture the intuitive sense that a sphere in three-space is more curved if its radius is small than if its radius is large. An isoparametric submanifold is an imbedded object which has particularly simple curvature properties with respect to the larger space, and the character of this specialty is driven by the fact that this local condition frequently imposes strong symmetry properties the whole submanifold doc2314 none This project is an investigation of the nighttime chemistry of isoprene (2-methyl-1,3-butadiene) in a rural forested area. Previous studies have observed surprisingly rapid nighttime decay of this reactive biogenic hydrocarbon. Recent observations suggest that the rapid decay is caused by unexpectedly large nighttime concentrations of OH radicals. This study will examine the reactivity of nighttime air using tower and airborne measurements of isoprene and several anthropogenic alkenes. This research will be conducted as part of the Program for Research on Oxidants, Photochemistry, Emissions, and Transport (PROPHET) at Pellston, Michigan doc2315 none Turbulence accounts for the transport of heat, water vapor, CO2 and other quantities between the surface of the earth and the lower atmosphere. Plant and forest canopies have a strong effect on the wind flowing through them and hence modify the exchange processes. This project is a continuation of work on the distinctive flow patterns (coherent structures) that make a substantial contribution to the exchanges that take place between canopies and the surface layer. The strong velocity gradient at the interface between the canopy and the overlying layer of air induces a relatively high degree of organization to the turbulence, evidenced by strong velocity correlations, high velocity skewness, intermittency, and consistent and repeated flow patterns. Using the computational method of large-eddy simulation (LES), the main objectives of the work are: - Develop methods to visualize and examine the coherent patterns found in computed canopy flow fields. - Create descriptions of coherent structures by constructing a framework of the various elements of which the structures are composed. -Examine the vortex-like nature of the flow structures. - Perform simulations to examine the effects of inhomogeneous conditions, for example at forest edges. - Examine the statistical properties of the flow fields in such transition zones, and also the forces exerted on individual trees, to asses the potential for wind damage. By analyzing the physics of interactions between elements of the plant canopy (foliage, branches, and tree trunks) with the wind, the work provides a basis for explaining transport processes in the canopy doc2316 none With this renewal award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program continues its support for the work of Drs. Martin Saunders and James R. Cross of the Department of Chemistry at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The work builds on the seminal discovery that noble gas atoms, and small molecules like N2 and CO, can be trapped inside the carbon atom cages of fullerenes. The trapped atoms and molecules perturb the cages, and in some cases provide valuable spectroscopic handles for monitoring chemical reactions occuring on the outside faces of the cages. Particularly useful in this regard has been trapped 3He, since this isotope of helium has a nuclear spin of 1 2 and can be readily detected by NMR. These endohedral fullerenes are of the type 3He@Cn, where n=60, 70, and 84. Work during the next period will focus on using 3He nuclear magnetic resonance to follow the separation and purification of the isomers of 3He@C70 and 3He@C84. Methods for removal of the helium atom from the carbon cages will also be investigated, potentially providing a way to supply pure isomers of the C70 and C84 fullerenes for further chemical studies. The PIs have initiated a large number of collaborative research efforts with others who are using the new compounds to investigate their chemistry and potential applications, which range from geochemistry to medicine doc2317 none To characterize the solid state molecular interactions within binary and multicomponent polymethylene chain arrays, electron diffraction data from oriented single microcrystals will be employed to elucidate their crystal structures. This will provide a unique opportunity to uncover information (e.g. packing symmetry, unit cell dimensions, co-existence of similar crystalline polymorphs or alternate crystal structures, accommodation of non-overlap molecular volumes) previously hidden to powder diffraction investigations due to reflection overlap. Techniques developed in this laboratory will provide reliable intensity data from the most informative projections of the unit cell, in order to carry out quantitative direct structure analyses. Low dose electron microscopic lattice imaging will also depict interfaces at phase boundaries. Factors influencing the stabilization of solid solutions (chain length differences and length distribution, heterogroup and branch inclusions) will be studied, both for stable lamellae as well as incompletely separated lamellae that include long bridging molecules . The progress of phase separation for two- and three-component metastable solid solutions within a miscibility gap will be characterized by electron crystallography to define the crystal packing of the final solids, in order to discern common features that would suggest a diffusion path. Crystallographic characterizations of eutectic solids will identify interfacial interactions across phase boundaries, testing the general occurrence of epitaxial interactions between these contacting domains. %%% The molecular and structural characterization of these polymeric materials is important in understanding and optimizing their properties doc2318 none Goad This award to University of Michigan provides shipboard technical support, shore-based support, instrument maintenance and instrument calibration for researchers using R V Laurentian, a research vessel operated by University of Michigan as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The technical support awarded here will assist NSF-funded researchers conduct lacustrine studies in Lake Michigan and the other Great Lakes in CY and beyond doc2319 none Robert B. Lund Periodic ARMA Modeling, Periodicities naturally arise in data involving tides, climatology, ecology, sociology, astronomy, economics, hydrology, etc.. This research studies general periodic time series modeling methods along with some applications to climatological problems. The specific questions examined here include efficient computation of the autocovariance structure of periodic time series models, parsimonious periodic time series model development, changepoint and homogeneity methods, and trend properties in monthly average and extreme temperatures. The mathematical and statistical methods center on periodic autoregressive moving average models (PARMA) time series models - the fundamental modeling vehicle for periodic series. An efficient algorithm to compute the autocovariance structure of a PARMA model will be explored. Changepoint and homogeneity methods for periodic series, an issue that arises when weather recording stations move, will also be investigated. The developed mathematical and statistical results are used to settle some climatological problems. A study of the trends in monthly temperature means and extremes from United States stations will be conducted. This detailed study will enhance our understanding of climate change and global warming. The changepoint aspect is perhaps the data s most important feature. Periodicities in the autocovariances in the data need to be parsimoniously modeled to compute accurate standard errors. Standard errors are needed to gauge the reliability of the computed trends. The methods also yield improved forecasts of periodic series as a byproduct doc2320 none RUI: Acquisition of Automated DNA Sequencing Equipment for East Carolina University. This award, combined with matching funds from East Carolina University, will be used to purchase an Applied Biosystems 377 automated DNA sequencer, a Silicon Graphics parallel processing computer system, a gradient programmable thermal cycler and an automated plasmid DNA purification system for revitalization and expansion of the centralized DNA sequencing facility. Seven principal and several minor investigators, as well as their students, will use the centralized facility for sequencing intensive research covering diverse aspects of the biological sciences. In specific, this DNA sequencing intensive research includes molecular phylogenetics and biogeography, character evolution, evolution and function of the teleost immune system, vertebrate evolutionary developmental biology, organellar-nuclear genome gene regulation, gene regulation of stress response in plants and structural organization of photosynthetic membrane protein complexes. The Department of Biology at East Carolina has a strong research program that places a heavy emphasis on training undergraduate and Master s level graduate students in research. The department offers Bachelor s degrees in Biology and Biochemistry and Master s degrees in Biology and Molecular Biology and Biotechnology. The number of undergraduates electing the molecular biology and biotechnology areas of concentration and the number of Master s degrees in Molecular Genetic and Biotechnology has increased significantly. The University is adding courses in bioinformatics, molecular biology, molecular genetics, and protein purification and structure analysis. This award will facilitate these course offerings by allowing the Center to provide access to state-of-the-art equipment in these courses doc2321 none This research project, carried out in the laboratory of Professor Robert Hamers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is concerned with the organic functionalization of group IV semiconductor surfaces, specifically the (001) surfaces of Si, Ge, and diamond. With the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, Hamers and his coworkers are investigating the reaction of various organic molecules with the double bonded dimer species present on the (001) surfaces of these semiconductors. This is a route to the modification of these surfaces with organic overlayers, and the use of this chemistry for the subsequent functionalization of these materials. Applications of this chemistry to the construction of molecular electronic devices, and the developing gene chip technologies are clear. The ability to attach organic molecules to semiconductor substrates in a controlled and reproducible fashion is the focus of this research program. If a reliable route to the attachment of organic molecules to these surfaces can be developed, the synthetic power and diversity of organic chemistry becomes available for the functionalization of these materials for applications in electronic device fabrication and in bioanalytical chemistry. A range of scanning probe methods coupled with ultra high vacuum spectroscopic probes is used to characterize and understand this interfacial chemistry doc2322 none Award: Principal Investigator: Thomas E. Cecil The principal investigator and his collaborators, Quo-Shin Chi and Gary Jensen, will study submanifolds of Euclidean space and the sphere within the context of Lie sphere geometry. Of particular interest are submanifolds with special curvature properties. These include isoparametric hypersurfaces, which have constant principal curvatures, and Dupin hypersurfaces, which have the property that each principal curvature is constant along each of its corresponding curvature surfaces. The main problems to be studied are the classification of isoparametric hypersurfaces of the sphere with four principal curvatures, and the classification of locally irreducible Dupin hypersurfaces with four or six principal curvatures. This research is primarily local in nature, using the method of moving frames in Lie sphere geometry. This project focuses on an important class of surfaces, Dupin surfaces, which have very special curvature properties. Examples of Dupin surfaces are planes, spheres, circular cylinders and the cyclides of Dupin, which have been useful in recent years in advanced computer-aided design. Dupin surfaces have higher dimensional analogues which were first studied by the great French mathematician Elie Cartan in the s and which have been researched extensively by many mathematicians over the past thirty years. The goal of the proposed research is to classify these higher dimensional Dupin surfaces. Another important aspect of the proposal is the principal investigator s mentoring work with undergraduate students. Over the period of the grant, three undergraduate students will be supported by the grant for a summer of directed independent study in an area related to the principal investigator s own research. Each of these students will then write an honors thesis based on this study. In the past ten years, most of the students who have written honors theses under the principal investigator s supervision have then pursued graduate study in mathematics. In this way, the principal investigator s previous grants have played a significant role in the education of some of the next generation of scientists doc2323 none Award: Principal Investigator: Eleny-Nicoleta Ionel The goal of the first project is to obtain new relations in the cohomology of the moduli space of complex structures on a marked Riemann surface. Using techniques developed in her earlier work, the PI found several interesting relations, one of which could prove the Faber conjecture about the generators of the tautological ring. The second project seeks to find relations between the relative and absolute Gromov-Witten invariants. Such relations appear to be useful in mirror conjecture computations, as well as in several other open problems in enumerative geometry. The final project suggests two ways of extending the Gromov-type invariants to `nongeneric situations. This would provide more refined information about the symplectic manifold. Most of the problems in enumerative algebraic geometry are more than a hundred years old. The questions are easy to ask, but the progress in solving them using classical methods has been quite slow. Recently, the same kind of questions arised in two dimensional topological quantuum field theories from high energy physics. Inspired by these theories, new methods lead in the past couple of years to amazing progress in the field. The proposal explores two new ways of approaching these old problems that would further clarify the structure of the two dimensional topological quantuum field theories doc2324 none Robert Silbey has submitted a renewal proposal to continue his theoretical studies of the time dependent spectroscopy of chromophores in glasses and liquids. This research will explore the connection between single molecule spectroscopy and the spectrum of distributions of molecules in experiments such as photon echo, hole burning, and ultrafast pump-probe studies. Various molecular processes that are caused by the interaction of the chromophores with modes of the condensed phase and evidenced in the spectrum will be examined. Specific topics that will be explored are exciton and excitation energy transfer, spectral diffusion, and energy transfer induced spectral diffusion. All of this work will be carried out in collaboration with interested experimental groups. Laser spectroscopic studies of molecules embedded in glasses and liquids have enabled improved understanding of interactions and relaxation processes in condensed phase systems including biologically relevant photosynthetic reaction centers and proteins. In most studies, many molecules are monitored at once, so their averaged behavior is measured. Now methods are evolving that permit measurements on a single molecule where one can measure line shapes and watch the molecule diffuse in real time. Silbey is developing new theoretical interpretations that connect experimental results on single molecules with the studies on distributions of molecules. The insights resulting from this effort will lead to a better appreciation of chemical dynamics in condensed phase systems, both experimentally and theoretically doc2325 none The project contains five research problems: 1. Analytic properties for scattering inverse scattering transforms. 2. Perturbation on NLS. 3. Perturbation for Toda lattice. 4. Random matrices. 5. Multiple orthogonal polynomials. All these problems will be studied via the Riemann--Hilbert problem approach, which has shown tremendous potential in solving various integrable problems in broad sense. This project analyzes several mathematical problems ranging from partial differential equations, random matrices, to the approximation theory. Some of these problems have pure mathematical interest and others have applications in physics and engineering. One of such applications is the soliton solutions of the perturbed nonlinear Schrodinger equation. These soliton solutions are used in the fiber optical transmission doc2326 none Research in theoretical physics will include work on superstring theory, including studies of underlying unifying structure and its applications for deeper understanding of quantum field theories. Superstring theory is the only known candidate for unifying all known forces of nature. Moreover, the insights and tools it provides for understanding quantum chromodyamics, the theory of the strong nuclear force, are invaluable doc2327 none Guentner The proposed research comprises two distinct projects; the relationship between the Novikov and exactness conjectures for discrete groups, and the use of global analytic techniques to study quantum mechanical systems. The first is motivated by the observation that the classes of groups for which the Novikov and exactness conjectures are known coincide to a large degree; both classes contain amenable groups, hyperbolic groups and Coxeter groups, for example. This project is joint with J. Kaminker. The second is based on the idea that the Berezin-Toeplitz quantization can be analyzed using spectral properties of family of Dirac-type operators. This project is joint with J. Trout. The Novikov conjecture, one of the most important problems in topology, has stimulated a tremendous amount of mathematical research over the last thirty years. The exactness conjecture is purely analytic. That there could exist a connection between these two conjectures from entirely different branches of mathematics is somewhat surprising, but nevertheless is supported by empirical evidence. We plan to develop more fully the relationship between these conjectures. This research has bearing on a number of important outstanding problems including the Baum-Connes Conjecture. At the heart of the connection between mathematics and physics is the theory of quantum mechanics. We propose a new method to analyze quantum mechanical systems based on geometric properties of certain systems of differential equations. This work should lead to a better understanding of a number of quantum mechanical systems from mathematical physics doc2328 none Shimura varieties, the trace formula, congruences and Galois representations Stephen S. Kudla (University of Maryland) Freydoon Shahidi (Purdue University) This project will provide support allowing young researchers from the US mathematical community to benefit from participation in the special program at the Institute Henri Poincare (IHP) in Paris in the spring semester . This program focuses on two topics: (i) Shimura varieties and the trace formula and (ii) congruences and Galois representations. These topics, and particularly their interaction, will certainly be at the center of much of the research activity in automorphic forms and number theory in the opening decades of the 21st century. The activity at IHP will bring together the world leaders in these areas. The program will center around a series of lecture `courses covering the latest developments concering the trace formula, endoscopy, the fundamental lemma, L functions for Shimura varieties, global and local Langlands functoriality, Galois representations, p-adic Hecke algebras, p-adic modular forms, rigid analysis, the local Langlands correspondence and the geometric Langlands correspondence. The scope of the program encourages new directions for research at the interface of the two major fields and participation will provide young researchers a unique opportunity to develop expertise in this important area at an early stage in their careers. Two major developments in mathematics in the later part of the 20th century are the Langlands program in automorphic forms representation theory and the Wiles and Taylor-Wiles proof of Fermat s Last Theorem and the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture. These advances, relating number theory and geometry, are in fact very closely linked, and a vigorous development of the union of the techniques from the two areas is currently taking place. The resulting field will be one of the main arenas of research activity in mathematics in the first decades of the 21st century. The research program taking place at the Institute Henri Poincare in Paris in the spring semester and centered around lecture courses by the world leaders provides an unparalleled level of vision and insight. This NSF Grant award will provide funding for young researchers from the US mathematical commmunity to participate in the IHP program, and hence will help to ensure a strong level of US expertise in these new developments in number theory. This award is being supported by the Division of Mathematical Sciences (Algebra and Number Theort program), the Divison of International Programs (Western Europe Program), and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate doc2329 none This is an award proposed by Dr. Peter Chen, Louisiana State University. Dr. Chen requests funds for 5 to 7 U. S. Scientists to travel to Paris to participate in a workshop on the Internet, Conceptual Modeling, and Operating Systems on Nov. 17-18, . The focus of the workshop is on the development of a conceptual framework for web-based Operating System software development. For example, one of the issues of interest to the workshop participants is the design methodology useful to those working in the operating systems, software engineering, and data engineering areas. The workshop has other invited participants from Europe, Asia, Brazil and other countries doc2330 none The aim of this project is to study mathematical problems associated with the control and performance analysis of stochastic networks. The network models being considered are heterogeneous, may have complex feedback mechanisms, and allow for stochastic variability in arrivals, service times and routing. Buffers in the network enable jobs to be stored that cannot be served immediately. In addition, the models with control allow for dynamic sequencing and alternate routing of jobs. Since the complexity of these network models usually precludes exact analysis, the focus is on approximate models. Two levels of approximation are being considered, namely fluid models (first order approximations) and diffusion models (second order approximations). Investigating the interplay between these models is an important feature of the research. The two main topics are (i) dynamic control through sequencing and alternate routing, and (ii) performance analysis for processor sharing networks. With regard to topic (i), some authors have successfully used diffusion control problems as formal tools for generating good control policies for some specific network models. However, there are few rigorous analyses of the performance of such policies. The PI is developing a systematic approach to finding and interpreting solutions of diffusion control problems and to analyzing the performance of the policies generated in this manner. Regarding topic (ii), the processor sharing discipline is an example of a service discipline for which a natural state descriptor involves a measure-valued process (to keep track of the residual service times of all jobs in the network). The PI is studying fluid and diffusion approximations of processor sharing networks with the aims of understanding the dynamics of such networks, obtaining measures of performance, and developing general tools for studying measure-valued processes associated with network models. Stochastic networks are used as models for complex manufacturing, telecommunications and computer systems. A challenging problem for such networks is to design controls that are simple to implement and yet are near optimal in an appropriate sense. Motivated by such problems, a number of mathematical questions associated with controlling and analyzing the performance of stochastic networks are being studied under this grant. Since the complexity of stochastic network models usually precludes exact analysis, the focus is on approximate models with a hierarchical structure. As with recent work on the performance analysis of some networks, the interplay between the levels in this hierarchy is an important feature of the research doc2331 none for NSF Proposal Number (Schatz and Wahlbin). Our work deals with the fundamental behavior of the finite element method. We propose to study the the general question of a posteriori error estimation. Here we aim to develop a sharp theory which will predict with precision the error on a single element. Fundamental technical tools have to be created for this. The work will first be done in the context of second order elliptic problems. We will also consider extensions to time-dependent problems involving a second order elliptic operator, such as parabolic, hyperbolic and partial integro-differential equations. The mathematical field called Numerical Analysis is at the heart of high-performance computing (which then applies to almost all scientific and technological endeavours). Our work has, basically, two interrelated aims: i) we try to gain a detailed and fundamental understanding of the behavior of existing high-performance methods. ii) we try to devise even better (more reliable and or faster) new methods. The second step in this program is fundamentally dependent on the insight gained in the first step doc2332 none This award will provide travel funds to enable 15 U.S. scientists to attend MG IX (the ninth triennial Marcel Grossman Meeting on Recent Developments in Theoretical and Experimental General Relativity, Gravitation, and Relativistic Field Theories. This meeting will be held in Rome, Italy from July 2 to July 8, . Availability of funds will be announced, and then applications by prospective conference participants will be reviewed by a panel of experienced U.S. scientists doc2333 none combinatorial object sheds light on a model in population genetics; (b) geometry and algebra have led to new results about Markov chains, which are used for simulations in many areas of science and applied mathematics; and (c) a probabilistic question about groups, which are algebraic objects used in the study of symmetry, leads to a new topological tool for investigating these groups doc2334 none McCammon The objectives of this research are (1) to develop theoretical and computational methods that can be used to interpret or predict the behavior of biological molecules or supramolecular assemblies, (2) to apply these methods to help explain the activity of several specific systems of biophysical interest, and (3) to train students who will go on to have productive research careers in theoretical molecular biophysics and related areas. Key results of the methods development work are expected to include faster and more accurate methods for describing electrostatic interactions in computer simulations of biomolecular dynamics. Other new methods should allow for improved descriptions of the relative stabilities (free energies) of biomolecules and their complexes. The scientific significance of the work lies in the deepening of our understanding of the activity of biological molecules and supramolecular assemblies. There will be practical benefits of this work in the creation of new tools for designing new proteins, and other useful molecules and devices. The educational and infrastructure significance includes the mentoring of students and postdoctoral fellows who will move into faculty positions and other scientific occupations, and the free distribution of new software to laboratories around the world doc2335 none 3 Edward Turner This award provides partial support for the featured speakers and for some graduate students to attend the Albany Group Theory Conference. The conference will be the eleventh in a series of conferences dedicated to the interplay between group theory and topology. There will be seven main speakers, each of whom will give a one hour talk. In addition, there will be 20 - 25 short talks by participants. The conference will be held at the Rensselaerville Conference Center in October of . Further information is available at http: nyjm.albany.edu ~ted 00conf.html doc2336 none Kaminker The researcher will work on three projects. Investigation will be continued on the connection between hyperbolic dynamical systems and K-theory of C -algebras. In particular, the zeta function of a Smale space will be expressed in terms of the K-theory of the stable algebra and the induced homomorphisms. This leads to a general program to use the K-theory of these C -algebras as a replacement for ordinary homology groups which were used in the past to study hyperbolic systems. The second direction involves the study of the relation between the Exactness conjecture and the Novikov conjecture for finitely presented groups. If a group acts amenably on a compact space then both of these conjectures hold. The relation between the existence of such an action and approximation properties for the reduced C -algebra will be studied and precise relations between the two conjectures will be established. In a third direction, work will be done on obtaining a higher index formula for regular Lie groupoids. This will provide a formula for the pairing of certain cyclic cocycle on the smooth convolution algebra of the groupoid with the class in K-theory representing the analytic index of an elliptic operator. These projects are part of a general program to see how symmetry, in its various forms, effects different parts of mathematics. It is often the case that unexpected symmetry has important implications. Solutions to important equations in physics and engineering have been discovered and studied by using the fact that their form must be unchanged under certain transformations. It is hoped that the results of the present project will have similar applications doc2337 none The principal investigator studies the impact of large cardinals on the methodology of mathematics. All results stated below use large cardinal assumptions, and some such assumptions are necessary. One line of research for the funded project is the investigation of classes of objects with the same properties, so-called terminal classes. A typical result states that the Ramsey ultrafilters are a terminal class: roughly, they share all properties invariant under the Rudin-Keisler equivalence of filters. Open questions under investigation involve finding further such terminal classes, and more importantly, the quantification of theproliferation of such classes throughout mathematics. Another line of research pursued is the construction of models in which the behavior of cardinal invariants of the continuum is optimal. A typical result is that the Miller model is the optimal way of increasing the dominating number d: roughly, all projectively defined invariants which are consistently less than d, are less than d in this model. The dual result states that there is an optimal Pmax model in which the bounding number is small. Open problems involve finding further cardinal invariants which have canonical models associated with them. More challenging is the investigation of the notion of duality mentioned above, and the investigation of the limits of the method of forcing with simply definable partial orders. Set theorists have for a long time studied certain additional axioms for mathematics, called large cardinal axioms. While they are largely irrelevant for solving specific problems in most traditional fields of mathematics, they do have a strong influence on the methodology used. Typically the large cardinal axioms allow the mathematician to select an optimal approach to answering a question only by considering the syntactical form of the question. Frequently this information can serve to discover the core of a seemingly complex problem. Three examples are in order. As the first example, it has been known for twenty years that sets of reals with simple definitions are well behaved from the point of view of mathematical analysis. Second, the PI has identified several classes of objects in mathematical practice that are terminal : all objects in such a class have the same properties. Such classes have great methodological significance, and the PI plans to isolate more of them. In still another development, the PI found that for certain mathematically important classes of theories, there is an optimal approach to answering the question of whether the theories contain no contradictions. Again, the PI continues to isolate further such classes. Generally, the funded project serves to show that such seemingly esoteric hypotheses as large cardinal axioms have direct impact on mathematical practice, thus promoting the interaction between logic, set theory and other branches of mathematics doc2338 none Cheng, Ching-Shui Minimum aberration has been a well accepted criterion for choosing good fractional factorial designs. This research studies variants of the minimum aberration criterion in several different settings including block designs in which the experimental units are grouped into more homogeneous blocks to improve the precision, and split-plot designs in which some factors are held constant within each block. Split plots arise when some factors require larger experimental units than others, or when the effects of certain factors are not of major interest, but they are included in the experiment to study their interactions with other factors. The latter has a very important application to robust parameter designs in quality improvement. These settings have their own special features that call for different optimality criteria. Existing work did not address the issue that there are two different errors in split-plot structures. The ultimate goal of this research is to obtain general results on the structures of optimal designs in various settings, and to develop useful algorithms for constructing designs which can incorporate user-supplied prior knowledge and requirements. For the former, the Principal Investigator uses tools from coding theory and finite projective geometry. Finally, nonregular designs, including supersaturated designs, are studied under a newly introduced criterion of generalized minimum aberration. Experimental design is used extensively in a wide range of scientific and industrial investigations. In industrial experiments, often a large number of factors have to be studied, but the experiments are expensive to conduct. In this case, the so called fractional factorial designs, in which only a small fraction of all the possible combinations are observed, are particularly useful. In recent years, factorial designs have received considerable attention, mainly due to the success in applying them to conduct experiments for improving quality and productivity in industrial manufacturing. This research is to study the construction of efficient designs to extract more information, especially when systematic sources of variation (such as heterogeneity of experimental material or day-to-day environmental variations) need to be eliminated to improve the precision doc2339 none Pitman and Yor are continuing their work on explicit descriptions of the distribution of various functionals of Brownian motion and related processes such as Brownian and Bessel bridges, meanders and excursions, and the development of novel methods for obtaining such descriptions. Stimulus for obtaining the exact distributions of ever more complicated Brownian functionals, and understanding various identities, has been provided by applications of Brownian excursion and Brownian bridge to the asymptotics of random combinatorial objects such as trees and mappings, connections with the theory of random partitions and random discrete distributions, and the applications of Brownian motion in mathematical finance. While a great number of explicit formulae are now known there remain many mysterious distributional coincidences of the kind which have in the past provided stimulus for the development of novel techniques and deeper understanding through such devices as path transformations and decompositions. This award will continue present lines of research into stochastic processes, particularly Brownian motion, random partitions, and coalescent processes. Brownian motion provides the foundation of the modern theory of continuous time random processes with continuous paths, and has applications in fields as diverse as physics and mathematical finance. Random partitions find applications to combinatorics, physics and genetics. Coalescent processes model random phenomena involving irreversible clustering or aggregation in a wide variety of contexts. This is fundamental research into the mathematical structure of stochastic processes. Progress in this direction enhances our understanding of these processes, and has potential for application in numerous fields of knowledge doc2340 none Proposal: PI: Wojciech Chacholski This project is concerned with the study of the localization process and its dual, the colocalization process, in homotopy theory. One of the goals is to develop tools to analyze the colocalization functors analogous to those developed by Bousfield and Kan to study completion and localization. Another aspect of the project is to find geometric applications and interpretations of results on localization. This is related to certain geometric relations between spaces. The key idea is to use a fixed space as a basic building block and use operations like push-outs and wedges to construct more complicated spaces (in a similar way as spheres are used to build CW-complexes). For this purpose the P.I. has been working on understanding an invariant called complication. It roughly gives the minimal number of steps needed to build a new space out of a given one. There is a close relation between this invariant and the so called Bousfield lattice, the lattice of the localization functors on spaces. Understanding this relation has been one of the purposes of the P.I. s work. Homotopy theory can be perceived as a study of the localization process. The idea is to ignore information which is of less interest to us. In this way homotopy theory works as a simplifying tool. For example, in order to simplify spaces, we can think about the unit interval as the point. In this way we ignore all the consequences caused by the difference between these two spaces. By doing so we identify for example the letter A and the letter O. This gives the standard homotopy theory. The P.I. s research has been about understanding what happens if we treat other spaces as points doc2341 none Jim Weisshaar of the University of Wisconsin at Madison is supported by a grant from the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program to study the reactions of transition metal ions, atoms and ligated species with organic alkanes and alkenes in the gas phase. The studies will be carried out in flow tube and crossed beam apparatuses, with laser induced fluorescence, photoionization mass spectrometry, mass spectrometry and a special emphasis on a new technique of velocity mapping. These studies will be paralleled by ab initio electronic structure calculations. Information on how metal atoms and ions insert into CC and CH bonds will be obtained. Reactions will be studied which involve organometallic species containing transition metal atoms. These reactions have important applications to the catalysis reactions used to breakdown hydrocarbons and synthesize polymers. The new technique of mapping the speed distributions of the products will be used to take snapshots of the products as they depart from the reaction. This will enable theoretical models of the reactions to be evaluated doc2342 none for Space Decomposition Methods in Nonsmooth Optimization The proposed research concerns developing theory and methods for combining polyhedral and quadratic approximation to produce a rapidly convergent algorithm for minimizing a nonsmooth function of many variables. The idea is to use a bundle method to determine a so-called VU-space decomposition such that on V-space the cutting-plane aspect of bundling works fast and on U-space a quasi-Newton approximation of a Hessian of a U-Lagrangian can be employed. Such methods can be used to solve large or complicated optimization models via separation of variables or constraints. For example, a water pressure control problem of finding values for flow rates and pump pressure gaps to minimize pumping cost subject to maintaining water pressures in allowable ranges at all points in a pipe network can be solved via separation of the variables. If the flow rates are fixed then the subproblem of finding optimal values for the pressure gaps is an easy-to-solve linear minimization problem. With this approach the outer problem of finding optimal values for the flow variables is a nonsmooth problem whose solution can be found efficiently via the techniques to be developed. The theoretical research is concerned with properly defining a class of functions which is special enough for the members to have U-Hessians and general enough to include functions from many applications. The computational methods proposed for development are significant because they can be applied in many practical decision-making situations. These include the determination of values of parameters for fitting models to data such as in topographic or geophysical modeling. They also include application of decomposition techniques to large or complicated models such as those occurring in allocation of scarce resources, traffic assignment, manufacturing, structural engineering, logistics and strategic planning. The pipe network problem in the first paragraph is an important example occurring in civil infrastructure design. It illustrates the need to make trade-off decisions when considering conflicting design criteria such as simultaneously having high reliability and low cost. Another area of application is in power system planning subject to environmental protection constraints. These decision models will increase in importance as deregulation of the energy supply sector takes effect. These problems naturally decompose into higher level problems of deciding which types and sizes of power generation plants to build and lower level problems of deciding how best to operate the various units to meet daily energy demand. Additionally, this research fits in well with on-going efforts in high-performance computing, because its methods will utilize parallel processing for solving very large and or very complex decision-making problems doc2343 none A workshop on the physics - cosmology interface will be held at the Aspen Center for Physics, Aspen, Colorado, January 30- February 6, . This workshop will consider physics that is far beyond what is presently understood, and try to identify signatures of this new physics that could be sought experimentally. Thus, the workshop is very important to the long-term future of research at the physics - astrophysics interface doc2344 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Research on Plasma Sheaths: An Interdisciplinary Mathematical-Experimental Program Slemrod The Euler-Poisson equations describe a plasma consisting of ions and electrons. A universal property of these equations in a bounded domain is the existence of a bulk quasi-neutral plasma domain and a thin space charge sheath near the boundary. This project studies various aspects of sheath formation: rigorous justification of the quasi-neutral limit for two- and also multi-species plasmas, rigorous derivation of limit equations, rigorous derivation of rules for defining the sheath boundary, connections with kinetic theory, and development of relaxation schemes for solving the Euler-Poisson equations on the various scales to be found in sheath formation problems. Confined plasmas form space charge sheaths, relatively thin zones where the ion density is greater than the electron density. The phenomenon is important in various technological applications (plasma etching, microelectronics, gaseous lasers). This project is an interdisciplinary mathematical-experimental program for studying space charge sheaths. The objectives of the research are to: (1) develop new tools, including mathematical models, numerical methods, and analytical techniques, for prediction of plasma sheath formation and dynamics; (2) perform new laboratory experiments to examine the formation, behavior, and various properties of plasma sheaths; (3) integrate the results of (1) and (2) to provide input for both the mathematical and experimental aspects of the research. The research will bring to the attention of the U.S. mathematical community the myriad of open problems surrounding the analysis of plasma sheaths doc2345 none Evans The principal investigator studies stochastic models for evolving biological populations in which individuals interact with each other and their environment. He investigates coalescing tree processes that arise in both physical and chemical models of polymerisation, coagulation, and condensation, and in the study of stepping-stone models in population genetics. He suggests a new approach using the theory of symmetric Markov processes to the study of large random matrices that appear in particle physics and certain conjectures in number theory. He proposes a family of models originating in stochastic differential geometry for the evolution of genetic types in biological populations. The various strands of the principal investigator s work lead to a greater understanding of: the dynamics of evolving genetic profiles in large populations, general physical processes in which units clump together over time to form larger units, and a class of models in particle physics that have not only successfully explained a wide array of experimental results but also have deep connections with a number of other seemingly unrelated areas of mathematics doc2346 none Amos This award to University of Texas at Austin provides shipboard technical support, shore-based support, instrument maintenance and instrument calibration for researchers using R V Longhorn, a research vessel operated by University of Texas Marine Science Institute as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The technical support awarded here will assist NSF-funded ocean researchers conduct oceanographic studies in the Gulf of Mexico in CY doc2347 none Mountford Professor Mountford will continue investigating interacting particle systems. Working in conjunction with Professor M. Bramson, he hopes to show the existence of blocking measures for the exclusion processes where the underlying random walk is finite range and possesses non-zero mean. If successful, they intend to examine the question of characterizing the extremal invariant measures for these processes. The key tool, the laws of large numbers of Rezakhanlou, will, it is to be hoped, also play a role in establishing convergence results for tandems of complicated Jackson networks. Professor Mountford will also continue his research with Professor R. Dalang into path properties of the Brownian sheet. In particular it is hoped to address how many distinct bubbles at a fixed (or a random level) can meet at a point. Professor Mountford will continue to work in the field of interacting particle systems. These are random systems consisting of an infinite array of connected values which evolve according to simple rules governed by the current state of neighboring values. What makes these processes interesting, both mathematically and scientifically, is that often there exist multiple, qualitatively different, equilibria for the same process. A major task is finding or characterizing all possible equilibria. Currently Professor Mountford is working on this question for the exclusion process. This is a process where particles try to move independently in a random fashion. The (interesting) interacting part of the process comes from the rule that no two particles can occupy the same position and so moves by particles that would result in multiple occupancy are suppressed doc2348 none Pandharipande will study problems in the Gromov-Witten theory of algebraic varieties. In the first two parts, recently developed methods in Gromov-Witten theory will be used to study the geometry of the moduli space of curves. In particular, Hodge integrals and tautological rings will be studied. The third part of the project is an investigation of the Toda equation for the potential of the projective line. The fourth part is a study of degenerate and multiple cover calculations for threefolds and their relationship to M-theory. In this project, Pandharipande will study basic questions in the geometry of Riemann surfaces using new ideas from topological string theory. The research undertaken will involve computations of basic integral series that play a central role in Gromov-Witten theory. Also, the current perspective leads to many fundamental new lines of inquiry that will be pursued. The whole subject lies on the boundary of several fields of mathematics and string theory doc2349 none This award supports a coherent research program of modeling, analysis and numerical simulation of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). The mathematical investigation of such devices forces the researcher to understand the behavior and coupling of fluid, electromagnetic, thermal and mechanical forces on the micron length scale. The focus of this project is the coupling of electrostatic and mechanical forces in MEMS devices. Due to their favorable scaling with device size, electrostatic forces are often used to actuate mechanical members of such devices. The mathematical modeling of this effect requires an understanding of coupled nonlinear elliptic systems of partial differential equations. The system consists of the equations of electrostatics coupled to the Navier equations of elasticity. Generally, the equations are coupled in two ways. First, the electrostatic potential appears as a source of mechanical force in the Navier equations. Second, the boundaries of the domain for the electrostatic problem depend upon mechanical deflections and hence the solution to the Navier equations. This two way nonlinear coupling is often additionally complicated by the appearance of nonlocal terms when the device is embedded in a circuit. In this work, a sequence of mathematical models of such devices will be designed to explain phenomena associated with MEMS devices, improve existing or suggest new numerical simulation methods and ultimately aid in the design of existing and future MEMS devices. The field of microelectromechanical systems has undergone a startling revolution in recent years. It is now possible to produce functioning motors that can only be seen with the aid of a microscope, gears smaller than a grain of pollen, and needles so tiny they can deliver an injection without stimulating nerve cells. The use of existing integrated circuit technology in the design and production of MEMS devices allows these devices to be batch processed, hence made in quantity, inexpensively. This in turn is igniting a revolution in areas such as biotechnology, where devices that once could only be dreamed about have suddenly been made possible. In order to realize the full potential of MEMS, a theoretical understanding of their function is necessary. This requires the construction and analysis of mathematical models of such devices. Of particular interest are devices which utilize electrostatic forces to provide locomotion. This class of devices will be modeled and analyzed in this project. This analysis will yield insight into the operation and future design of MEMS devices. Further, by developing an understanding of electrostatically actuated MEMS on a fundamental level, the research will suggest techniques for efficient numerical simulation of more complicated structures doc2350 none This proposal seeks support to develop a curation facility for land-based sediment cores at the Limnological Research Center (LRC), UofMN, in close collaboration with the Large Lakes Observatory (LLO) UofMN-Duluth. Unlike the long-established successful curation of marine cores, no curation is currently available for terrestrial material. This facility will serve the paleorecords community by providing access to consistent management including logging sampling systems, data management, and archiving. The strategy for the proposed curation facility is long-term, keeping pace with projected expanding needs. Phase I calls for construction of a prefabricated cold room for 17,500 core sections and establishment of organizational infrastructure, database, and protocols. As the International Continental Drilling Programme becomes a reality bringing increased needs for core documentation and archiving, Phase II will be implemented, including evaluation of the facility, response to drilling initiatives, and likely expansion to 100,000+ capacity. The facility will be operated as a cooperative agreement with NSF using an appointed External Advisory Group (EAG) reflecting the wide spectrum of Earth System History (ESH) interests doc2351 none Proposal: PI: Nikolai Saveliev A major obstruction to using the Floer homology to study 3-dimensional manifolds is the lack of clear understanding of its behavior with respect to the standard constructions of 3-dimensional topology, such as Dehn surgery, connected sums etc. The known results in this direction have not made much of headway in Floer homology computations or applications. The main thesis of the investigator is that the operation with respect to which the Floer homology behaves most naturally is the branched covering. Therefore, the investigator studies gauge theory on 3-manifolds with group actions and relates gauge-theoretical invariants to the classical invariants of the branch set. As an example, his previous study of equivariant gauge theory on the links of quasi-homogeneous surface singularities has led to a closed form formula expressing their Floer homology in terms of classical invariants. The investigator introduces and studies an equivariant Casson invariant for an integral homology sphere with a cyclic group action and relates it to the classical Casson invariant and the knot signatures. The definition makes use of the equivariant gauge theory and, in particular, of the equivariant Floer index. The latter is closely related, in the case of anti-holomorphic involutions, to the topology of Stein surfaces and the non-compact Kaehler geometry. The investigator also continues his study of the links of complete intersection singularities, and the relevance of the equivariant Casson invariant to homology cobordisms and the triangulation conjecture for topological manifolds in dimensions five and higher. The research is a study of 3- and 4-dimensional manifolds by the methods of gauge theory, coming from theoretical physics. In the last two decades, these methods brought new life into the classical low dimensional topology, leading to many spectacular developments and to the solutions of many difficult problems. The area was revolutionized to the point that the state of knowledge of two decades ago looks now, in many aspects, like a desert of nearly complete ignorance. Manifolds of dimension four were the ones that benefited the most: gauge theory methods worked very efficiently in this setting. At the same time, their analogue in dimension three, which is known as the Floer homology, is yet to reveal its full potential. The Floer homology is in the focus of investigator s research efforts doc2352 none Randy McCarthy (PI) Matthew Ando (co-PI) A fundamental idea in algebraic topology is to study topological spaces by attaching to them algebraic structures which are invariant under deformations. A good structure will often produce profound relationships with other areas of mathematics. Ando and McCarthy propose to investigate problems involving three such structures, elliptic cohomology, algebraic K-theory, and the calculus of functors. Ando proposes several projects involving elliptic cohomology, which provides a relationship between topology, algebraic geometry, and string theory. For example, he proposes a new approach to the rigidity theorems for elliptic genera, based on the algebraic theory of theta functions. McCarthy plans to further pursue his already successful program of using the calculus of functors to better understand algebraic K-theory. For example, he hopes that ideas from the calculus of functors will clarify Neeman s K-theory of triangluated categories. Ando and McCarthy also plan a joint project to investigate the role of the calculus of functors in the new homotopy theory of schemes of Voevodsky and others doc2353 none Soboyejo The project aims to develop a fundamental understanding of environmentally-assisted crack initiation and propagation mechanisms in well characterized Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) structures fabricated from single crystal and polycrystalline silicon. Following an initial phase in which the microstructure of the MEMS structures will be studied via scanning and transmission electron microscopy, the surface topography of the specimens will be examined with atomic force microscopy techniques. The initial micro-textures in the polycrystalline silicon structures will then be measured using orientation imagining microscopy, before conducting micro-tensile experiments on single and polycrystalline structures to determine their constitutive behavior under monotonic or cyclic loading. The second phase of the program will focus on the characterization of environmentally-assisted crack initiation mechanisms in the silica layer that is formed on the surfaces of the silicon MEMS structures upon exposure to air. The program will explore the hypothesis that crack nucleation occurs by stress-assisted dissolution or rupture processes that are induced as a result of surface reactions with water vapor. To test this hypothesis, natural crack initiation experiments will be performed in laboratory air, and environments with controlled partial pressures of water vapor. The changes in surface topography of the silica layer will be monitored as a function of time and stress using atomic force microscopy techniques. The onset of crack initiation will be detected from changes in the resonance conditions of the micro-tester specimen configuration, and high magnification scanning electron microscopy. The measured initiation conditions will then be compared with predictions from stress-assisted dissolution and crack nucleation models. The mechanisms of environmentally-assisted crack growth will also be studied in Phase II using specimens containing nano- or micro-notches, or indentation cracks. As in the crack initiation experiments, crack growth will be investigated in laboratory air, and environments with controlled relative humidities. The increments of crack growth will be detected from changes in the resonance conditions of the micro-tester specimen assembly. The increments of crack growth and the crack microstructure interactions will be determined using a combination of in-situ and ex-situ scanning electron microscopy techniques. The crystallographic directions of crack growth will also be characterized via orientation imaging microscopy before performing scanning electron microscopy analyses to identify the fracture modes. Mechanism-based mechanics models will then be developed for the prediction of crack initiation and propagation. The models will be developed in collaboration with Prof. Jean Prevost and Dr. Tim Baker in a separately funded NSF program at Princeton. The two NSF programs will, therefore, operate as a mini-center that will involve close interactions with Prof. Zhigang Suo and Prof. Anthony Evans of Princeton University. The program will also provide the Principal Investigator with the funds to continue outreach and teaching programs initiated with NSF financial support over the past five years. At the senior high school level, the PI will interact with a local high school teacher who will spend the summer working on MEMS-based teaching and research materials to take back to the classroom. The teacher will be funded through an NSF Minority Award for high school teachers. The PI will also employ two minority engineering students to work on aspects of the proposed MEMS project during the summer. The students summer salaries will be provided by an ongoing program that is organized by the Office of the Dean of Graduate Studies at Princeton University. The program is designed to stimulate the interest of high quality minority undergraduate students in graduate studies and future academic careers. The PI will thus try to mentor the students, and encourage them to pursue graduate studies in mechanics and materials. At the graduate level, the PI will use some of the NSF funds to develop web-based instructional materials for a new course on Advanced Structural Materials that will be co-taught with Prof. Anthony Evans. The instructional materials that will be developed, include, web-based overheads for every class, and case studies that illustrate the application of mechanics and materials to the design of structural materials. Figure 1 - Schematic of the Three Stages of the Program doc2354 none This research centers around some problems in the technique of model reduction known as stochastic averaging. Although stochastic averaging has been around for at least 30 years, recent developments in stochastic analysis suggest a new look at it. In particular, it is now clear that the reduced model can take values in a stratified space. This proposal outlines a number of questions, with the goal of a better understanding of both stochastic averaging and Markov processes on stratified spaces. Roughly, the proposed research attempts to better understand the effects of small noise upon oscillations. As many mechanical, manufacturing, and biological systems have oscillatory behavior affected by small noise, the proposed research can inform our understanding and design of a host of systems. The more particular goal of this research is to find accurate methods of simplifying more complicated models. These simplified models could then be used in control and design procedures doc2355 none The PIs study several problems in stochastic analysis. The first problem involves reflected Brownian motion in time-dependent domains and the corresponding heat equation with the Neumann boundary conditions. The main emphasis is on the existence and uniqueness of the solutions to the heat equation and the reflected Brownian motion, and on the singularities of the heat equation solutions close to the moving boundary. The second part of the project is concerned with stochastic flows related to singular stochastic differential equations. Flows of this type have interesting combinatorial properties not present in flows corresponding to equations with smooth coefficients. The hot spot conjecture states that hottest point in an insulated body lies on its boundary. While this is not true in general, it is a widespread belief that the conjecture holds in convex domains. The PIs are currently studying symmetric convex domains. Finally, stable processes and related processes are studied from the point of view of potential theory. Stochastic analysis was one of the most important developments on the borderline of probability and analysis in the twentieth century. It now provides the basis of studying fundamental properties of real life phenomena which are random by nature. One of the most spectacular recent successes of the theory is the so-called financial mathematics. This theory provides a solid theoretical basis for trading securities - its founding fathers were recently recognized by a Nobel Prize in Economics. Stable processes, one of the topics of the project, are more and more often applied in financial mathematics and other applied sciences because the traditional continuous models are not always adequate. The study of a singular flow was directly inspired by a collaboration of one of the PIs (Burdzy) with economists, published in a leading journal Econometrics. The study of reflected Brownian motion in time dependent domains is reminiscent of the Stefan problem concerned with melting ice. Similar physical models are of great interest to scientists who model real life environmental changes doc2356 none This research program addresses functionally graded thin film shape memory material (nickel titanium) being produced at UCLA. Shape memory alloys have the property that they return to a memorized shape when heated. The material developed at UCLA has the unique capability of two-way actuation, that is it returns to a second shape when cooled. This project will develop a thermomechanical model for this new material, consisting of a thermal model, a mechanical model, a constitutive relation, and a phase transformation model. This research will enable the design of shape memory alloy devices. For example, it may make it possible to produce small devices on the surfaces of aircraft to reduce drag or control flight. It will enable the development of new MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems) devices. This advancement may be especially valuable in biomedical applications since nickel titanium is biocompatible doc2357 none Schlenoff Funding is provided to defray the travel costs of junior faculty, postdoctoral associates and graduate students attending an ACS Symposium on Polyelectrolyte Multilayers, hosted by the Division of Colloid and Surface Science, at the American Chemical Society National Meeting in San Francisco, CA, March . NSF DMR is currently supporting this field with a number of active grants doc2358 none Dr. Meyer will work on a variety of problems involving the $N$-body problem, Hamiltonian systems and dynamical systems. Building on his recent work with Dr. McCord on the integral manifolds of the spatial three body problem he will study the geometry and homology of the {\it regularized} (compactified) integral manifolds of the spatial three-body problem. These are eight-dimensional algebraic sets which vary with the masses, energy and angular momentum of the particles. These computations should refute Birkhoff conjecture, yield information on the existence of cross sections, and answer the Birkhoff question on cross sections in the negative as they did in the non-regularized problem. As another application of the rich topology found in the integral manifolds of the three-body problem, he will use variational arguments to establish new classes of periodic solutions. Dr. Meyer will also work on (i) simplifying the proof of the existence of Xia diffusion in the three-body problem; (ii) the existence of comet-like periodic orbits in the N-body problem; (iii) establishing the stability of an equilibrium point of a Hamiltonian system in the case of 1:1 resonance; and (iv) the evolution and bifurcation of invariant manifolds of a Hamiltonian system which depend on a parameter. Dr. Meyer will work on a number of problems in the qualitative theory of the equations which describe the motion of mechanical systems and celestial bodies, namely Hamiltonian systems. One of the important equations of this type is the N-body problem which describes the motion of N masses -- the planets. Systems of this type typically conserve energy and momentum and these conservation laws place global restrictions on the possible motion of the bodies. Dr. Meyer has an ongoing research program studying the ramifications of these conserved quantities on the nature of the motion. Dr. Meyer will also investigate the existence of regular and chaotic motions in these systems and how these types of motions depend of various physical parameters. One type of regular motion he will establish is periodic motions in the N-body problem and one type of chaotic motion he will try to establish is known as Xia diffusion. Dr. Meyer will also study the evolution of the stable manifold of equilibrium solutions i.e. the evolution of the set of solutions which tend to an equilibrium (the stable manifold doc2359 none Par Kurlberg : In this project, the Co-Principal Investigator will study some number theoretical questions related to mathematical physics. Quantum Chaos is concerned with how chaos in classical systems manifests itself in terms of quantum mechanics. For instance, can chaos, or lack thereof, be detected in the statistical behavior of the energy levels when a classical system is quantized? Pursuing this question for the ``boxed harmonic oscillator , a simple system whose energy levels show interesting spacing behavior, led the co-P.I. to consider spacings between squares modulo highly composite integers. The first goal of this project is to generalize the results on spacings of squares to spacings between values of more general polynomials, both modulo highly composite integers, as well as modulo primes. In this context it is also interesting to study the distribution of the cardinality of the images of these polynomial maps. Another aspect of Quantum Chaos is the quantum mechanical analogue of classical ergodicity. The ``cat map is a simple model of a chaotic system, and its quantization has strong arithmetical features. Using these special features, it is possible to express Quantum Ergodicity for the cat map in terms of exponential sums. A second goal of this proposal is to prove quantum unique ergodicity for the quantized cat map using equidistribution results for exponential sums. The main objective of this project is to explore the connection between Quantum Chaos and Number Theory. Quantum Chaos tries to answer important questions in Physics regarding quantum mechanical analogues of classical chaos. The subject has applications to microelectronics, and is hence of interest to the computer and communications industry. Number Theory is concerned with properties of whole numbers and is one of the oldest branches of mathematics. For a long time it was studied mostly because of aesthetic reasons, but in the last few decades the field has been of fundamental importance to cryptography doc2360 none The goal of this research is to investigate the fluctuation behaviors in two types of systems: Mass conservative particle systems, and Brownian trapping models. The first type includes the exclusion and zero-range processes, while the second type covers variants of the Wiener Sausage model. Three categories of problems are focused upon in these systems: Tagged particle problems in conservative particle systems, current fluctuations at a fixed location in the exclusion model, and localization structure of long time surviving Brownian paths in trap settings. Stochastic dynamical systems following the motion of a collection of particles have been successful in the modeling of diverse physical phenomena such as fluid and traffic flow, queuing, chemical trapping behavior, etc. Several theoretical studies have been made on first-order calculations, which describe the dominant modes of objects of interest, for instance, average velocities or trap survival probabilities. The intent of this project is to supply the second-order characteristics in these fluid and traffic models. The significance of second-order calculations is that they provide a measure of the robustness of the first-order approximations in applications. Aside from this general notion, the computations involved in this project would shed light on the intrinsic physics of the random media models studied. Also, from the mathematical view, the solution techniques of these challenging problems would be of great value themselves for future endeavors doc2361 none This award supported by the Division of International Programs allows Marianthi Ierapetritou of Rutgers University to collaborate with Prof. Anna S. Hauksdottir of the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. The project will develop methods and solutions for the control of multiple-input multiple-output systems by simultaneous decoupling and pole placement with canceling the invariant zeros that arise in classical methods. In contrast to other methods, this procedure will give the system feedback robustness. This project will combine classical control theory with state-of-the-art advances in optimization and process systems engineering. The method should alleviate problems that exist with other modern techniques and can have an impact in better understanding the fundamental limitations, constraints, and trade-offs in feedback control systems. The results should impact the application of the method to chemical engineering problems as well as to multiple-input multiple-output problems in general doc2362 none The Andean Cordillera extends the length of western South America, and the combination of high elevations and latitudinal range give rise to several types of specialized alpine environments. Jalco formations are essentially confiend to habitats between and meters and are usually considered intermediate in moisture regimes. This proposal seeks funding to conduct a three-year specimen-based floristic inventory for the jalca formations of northern Peru. Collecting will consist of appropriate vouchers of vascular plants, ferns and fern allies, bryophytes, lichens and fungi. The project will yield a robust specimen database documenting the biodiversity of the jalca formations in northern Peru, and produce an annotated checklist detailing the flora of the formations. Collaroborators include Peruvian researchers and students; vouchers will be distributed in the host country and other institutions doc2363 none This is an experimental condensed matter physics project whose goal is to understand how bubbles are formed in liquid helium when the liquid is in a state of tension. When an electron is introduced into liquid helium, it forces open a small cavity in the liquid. This electron bubble has a radius of approximately 20 A. Application of a negative pressure to the liquid causes this bubble to grow, and at a critical pressure the bubble becomes unstable and explodes. It is planned to study how the pressure required to cause the explosion of the bubble changes when the electron is optically excited to different quantum states. The results of these measurements will be compared with theoretical calculations already completed. As part of the experimental study it is planned to also measure the lifetime of the different excited states of the electron. In a second project the effect of quantized vortices on the nucleation of bubbles in superfluid helium will be investigated. The research provides excellent training for graduate students who utilize state-of-the-art instrumentation to study fundamental physics problems which have implications for a number practical circumstances where bubble formation is important. %%% Bubbles form in liquid as a result of a number of different processes. They can be produced when the pressure on a liquid that contains gas is reduced, when a can of Coca Cola is opened, for example. Bubbles also form in the turbulence around the propeller of a ship, and when a liquid is heated above its boiling point. In some situations bubble production has undesirable effects. For example, over the course of time the bubbles produced near to the propeller of a ship damage the propeller. On the other hand, bubble generation can also be very useful, as in an ultrasonic cleaner. The long range goal of this research is the study of how bubbles are formed and how to control the formation for technological advantage. Experiments will be performed to investigate bubble production in liquid helium under a number of different conditions. Liquid helium is chosen for these experiments because it can be produced with exceptional purity, and so effects that might arise from impurities in the liquid can be controlled or eliminated. In the next stage of this research, the effect of electrons and vortices on bubble formation will be studied. The research provides excellent training for graduate students who utilize state-of-the-art instrumentation to study fundamental physics problems which have implications for a number practical circumstances where bubble formation is important doc2364 none The main part in this proposal concerns the relationship between mean-values of L-functions, the distribution of zeros of L-functions, and the distribution of the prime numbers. The investigator and his colleagues study mean-values of L-functions times a mollifier, in order to prove an equivalence between the mean-value and the distribution of zeros of the L-function predicted by random matrix theory. The investigator and his colleagues also study the connection between the distribution of zeros and variations in the distribution of primes in short intervals. In a separate project the investigator develops computer programs to construct Maass forms on Hecke congruence subgroups. The resulting data confirms the predictions of random matrix theory. The work in this proposal is motivated by recently discovered connections between number theory and physics. These connections reveal a relationship between classical number theory (mathematics) and quantum chaos (physics). The main tool used to exhibit the connection is Random Matrix Theory, a subject which arose as an explanation for certain experimental results in nuclear physics. Random Matrix Theory has since been found to be related to other physical phenomena, as well as several areas of purely theoretical mathematics. By exploiting this connection with Random Matrix Theory it is possible to use mathematics to explain phenomena observed in physical experiments, and to use the underlying physics as motivation for discovering new mathematics. In this way, more progress is possible by combining the two approaches than could be achieved separately. The majority of projects in this grant will be carried out with the assistance of undergraduate research students doc2365 none Martin The University of Texas (UT) will operate the R V Longhorn during as a general oceanographic research vessel in support of NSF-supported research projects. The Longhorn is a 103 ft. vessel, constructed in and rebuilt stretched in , and is owned and operated by UT. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 78 operational days during , of which 19 days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The remaining cruises will support University, State, Navy, and private projects. The projects scheduled on the Longhorn include several oceanographic disciplines and will fully utilize the capabilities of the vessel. Operations will take place regionally in the Gulf of Mexico. The Longhorn is part of a fleet of ships used by the National Science Foundation in support of marine science research. Most oceanographic projects require highly specialized equipment to be permanently installed on the vessel, thus the necessity for specialized ships. These vessels do not operate in the same mode as general cargo fishing vessels. As a result, NSF supports the operation of a variety of ships specifically dedicated to oceanographic research that are operated by universities and institutions around the country doc2366 none Research in theoretical physics will cover a broad spectrum of topics focussed on string and M theory, and on cosmology. String and M theory are our best candidates for a theory that can unify all the basic forces of nature, including gravity. Efforts will be made to make progress towards a fundamental formulation of string and M theory, and to sharpen our ability to calculate in these theories, so as to ultimately be able to make contact with experimental data. In cosmology, research will include attempts to understand the cosmological constant, whose apparent presence in nature is resulting in the acceleration of the expansion of the universe. The presence and nature of the cosmological constant is one of the outstanding puzzles in cosmology doc2367 none The proposed research involves the study of higher-order Hankel forms, related analytic function theory on product domains, operator space structures on algebras of analytic multipliers and related similarity dilation problems. One of the main goals in the study of higher-order Hankel forms is to provide a unified framework in which to understand the structure theory and, at the same time, fully exploit the interface with cohomology, algebraic geometry, analytic function theory and multivariable operator theory. A main goal of the proposed operator space theory is to determine necessary and sufficient conditions on a multiplier algebra to be completely isomorphic to the minimal operator space structure in terms of the underlying reproducing kernel and the canonical model associated to the algebra. The study of Hankel forms (or operators) arises in prediction theory, systems theory, interpolation and control theory. Higher-order analogues of these forms arose in a purely mathematical framework, namely, group representations. However, non-commutative analogues of these forms live on weighted Fock space and are closely connected to the model theory of theleft and right creation operators from particle physics. The theory of operator algebras is the mathematical framework of quantum mechanics while the study of operator space structures on operator algebras is the quantization of this theory doc1949 none abstract The investigator and his colleagues study small rank vector bundles on projective spaces. New and simplified constructions are obtained both in finite and in zero characteristics. In the case of rank two bundles, these constructions on projective four space are valid only in positive characteristics. The investigator and his colleagues work on the question of extending these constructions to characteristic zero. This is related to the deformation theory of these bundles. They investigate whether these bundles can be deformed from positive to zero characteristic. The deformation theory of such bundles also has applications to questions regarding degenerating sums of line bundles and the existence of exotic components of the Hilbert scheme. The investigator and his colleagues give explicit constructions of objects called vector bundles. Vector bundles are devices which encode algebraic information about huge numbers of geometric figures like curves and surfaces. With their explicit knowledge of vector bundles, the investigator and his colleagues can then construct geometric figures with desired properties. The work is done using matrices which are easily implemented on computer algebra systems. Much of the work is done over finite fields which allows the use of computers to give exact answers. Problems involving geometric modeling in the real world require approximating the answers, one method being the use of such finite fields. The project studies the interplay between geometric objects existing in the real world (over fields of characteristic zero) and their approximations over finite fields doc2369 none Sullivan The investigator, with his collaborators, studies geometric optimization problems like finding minimum-energy shapes for surfaces and knots in space. They extend their recent classification of embedded constant-mean-curvature surfaces with three ends to the more general case of surfaces with any number of coplanar ends, and also investigate in detail surfaces with truncated ends. In addition, the investigator computes these surfaces numerically, in order, for instance, to create interactive computer graphics. This project uses Willmore s elastic bending energy, and its gradient flow, to discover new minimal surfaces in euclidean and spherical space. The Willmore flow has been recently shown to have short-time solutions, but the investigator considers whether it can fail to have long-time solutions. This project also studies configurations for knots which minimize ropelength, giving new lower bounds for the ropelength of small knots, and new asymptotic bounds on the growth of ropelength with crossing number. Finally, the investigator uses his experience with numerical modeling of curves and surfaces to give new understanding of geometrically natural discretizations for quantities related to curvature. Many real-world problems can be cast in the form of optimizing some feature of a shape; mathematically, these become variational problems for geometric energies. For instance, thin films, like those in foams, usually minimize their area and thus are constant-mean curvature surfaces. Cell membranes are more complicated bilayer surfaces which minimize an elastic bending energy known mathematically as the Willmore energy. Knotted curves achieve an optimal shape when a rope is pulled tight, or if a charged knotted wire repels itself electrostatically; understanding such configurations helps explain the behavior of biological molecules like DNA. This project explores such phsically natural problems, which remain challenging from both theoretical and computational standpoints doc2370 none Luis Casian This project concerns the topology (integral homology, cohomology and cell decompositions) of certain real toric varieties that arise when isospectral manifolds of a (signed) Toda lattice are compactified. The Toda lattice can be solved explicitly as an integrable hamiltonian system, but the geometrical feature of the solutions has not been clarified. In Lie-theoretic terms, these toric varieties consist of closures of generic orbits of a split Cartan Subgroup acting on a real flag manifold of a semisimple Lie algebra. An interesting problem is then to describe, in detail, their structure, which has some similarities with the structure of real flag manifolds. The topology of these varieties is well-known in the complex case; however the real case poses new difficulties which have not been tackled before. Extensions of this main problem are also considered which include some Kac-Moody versions of the original problem, the full Kostant-Toda lattice and, in general, the structure of real flag manifolds. The study of these toric varieties is physically motivated by the appearance of the indefinite (signed) Toda lattices in the context of symmetry reduction of the Wess-Zumino-Novikow-Witten (WZNW) model which is one of the most important model equation for conformal field theory. The toric varieties under Study can then be seen to give a concrete description of (an expected) regularization of the integral manifolds of these indefinite Toda lattices, where infinities (i.e. blow up points) of the solutions of these Toda systems glue everything into a smooth compact manifold. Also the study of isospectral manifolds of the Toda lattices is useful to understand the geometry of matrix eigenvalue algorithm based on QR or LU factorization. The present project will clarify a global aspect of the integrable systems doc2371 none Murthy This is a grant to support theoretical research on the physics of correlated electrons. The quintessential example of strongly correlated physics is the fractional quantum Hall effect. In very strong magnetic fields the kinetic energy is completely degenerate, and the dynamics is determined by interactions alone. The focus of the research is to investigate quantum phase transitions between possible phases of electrons in strong magnetic fields as various external tunable parameters (such as Landau-level mixing, sample thickness, disorder, and the Zeeman energy) are varied. A new approach developed by the PI with Shankar will be used, supplemented by standard techniques. The states to be studied include: fractional quantum Hall liquid; Wigner crystal; Hall crystal; p-wave superconducting composite fermion states and their inhomogeneous generalizations. %%% This is grant to support theoretical research on the physics of correlated electrons. The quintessential example of strongly correlated physics is the fractional quantum Hall effect. In very strong magnetic fields the kinetic energy is completely degenerate, and the dynamics is determined by interactions alone. The research will study a variety of configurations of these systems. The results will be of fundamental importance and will possibly provide insight into device applications doc2372 none PROJECT : In physical sciences, economics, and finance many realizations of discrete time series exhibit long memory, i.e., their autocovariances as a function of lag decrease to zero at a hyperbolic rate as the lag approaches to infinity. Such processes have unbounded spectral densities at the origin. A part of this proposal is concerned with developing asymptotically optimal and robust estimators for heteroscedastic, non-smooth, non-linear time series models in the presence of regression or explanatory covariates that may have long memory, in a semi-parametric setting. In particular, it is planned to obtain the limits of the experiments generated by the non-smooth autoregressive models when there are long memory explanatory variables present in these models and when the error distributions are unknown. In the second part, the PI Co-PI propose to develop asymptotically distribution free tests for fitting a parametric autoregressive mean and or quantile function to a heteroscedastic stationary ergodic time series. These tests are expected to be functions of certain martingale transforms of a partial sum processes that do notinvolve nonparametric curve estimation. PI Co-PI also plan to carry out a comparative study with some of the existing tests. The results obtained will be used to estimate parameters of interest and test theories relevant to problems in financial economics. A data set is said to have long memory if an association between distant observations is slowly decaying but persistent, as the distance between observations increases. A data set observed over a period of time is called a time series. A heteroscedastic time series is one where the conditional variability of an observation at the current time, given the past, depends on the past. Such data often arises in economics, finance, and physical sciences. In particular, an important example of long memory heteroscedastic time series is the volatility process in spot returns. It is also known that this volatility increases with bank interventions in currency markets. This intervention process is highly non-smooth time series since it is zero most of the times with certain bursts over some times. Part of the emphasis of the proposal is on developing optimal inferential procedures in a class of non-smooth non-linear heteroscedastic time series models. Another part emphasizes application of the results obtained to develop new tests of market efficiency and estimates of time dependent risk premium in financial economics and high frequency data mentioned in the proposal pertaining to German Mark and Swiss Frank vs. US Dollar exchange rates and commodity prices doc2373 none This individual investigator award is to an established scientist for a project focused on the investigation of electrons supported by a liquid helium surface and confined to one or two dimensions. It is directed towards understanding the fundamental properties of low-dimensional systems. The research consists of two parts; 1) a systematic study of electron localization induced by quantized surface waves called ripplons and 2) the transport and plasma excitations in surface electrons confined in helium-filled channels. In the first part, it is predicted that a change in the conduction from metallic to weak localization to strong localization will occur as the electric field pressing the electrons toward the surface is varied. Dephasing times in the weakly-localized regime will be measured. An understanding of the electron-ripplon interaction is important because of its potential relevance to the field of quantum computing. The study of one-dimensional surface electron systems is in its infancy, and studies have been confined to dc transport. Studies will probe the normal-mode frequencies of longitudinal (plasmons) and transverse sound modes as well as dc transport properties including localization. The undergraduate and graduate students involved in this research will learn experimental and problem solving skills that will be of use to them in their future careers. %%% This individual investigator award is to an established scientist for a fundamental study of properties of electrons confined to one and two dimensions. At low temperatures, electrons are confined to two dimensions on the surface of liquid helium. They can be further confined to one dimension by locating the helium in narrow grooves of micron-sized width. These systems are of interest because they are the simplest and cleanest examples of a one or two dimensional system. Various properties of these low dimensional electron systems have analogues in three dimensional solids, where they are more difficult to study. It is possible to vary parameters of the low dimension systems through a wider range and with more control than in the three dimensional solids. The project comprises the first attempt to probe the collective properties of one-dimensional electron systems. This study will examine localization of electrons by back scattering from quantized capillary waves (ripplons) on the helium surface. When the scattering from ripplons is made sufficiently strong by forcing an electron against the helium surface with an electric field, the electron should become localized. That is, it should become confined to a small region of micron-sized lateral dimensions. The surface will then deform to create a ripplonic polaron, an electron trapped in a small dimple in the helium surface. This interesting entity has been extensively studied by theorists. The understanding of the scattering of electrons by ripplons is particularly important, since it introduces decoherence into a new design of a quantum computer under study. The undergraduate and graduate students involved in this research will learn experimental and problem solving skills that will be of use to them in their future careers doc2374 none Award: Principal Investigator: Reyer Sjamaar The principal investigator plans to study invariants of Hamiltonian Lie group actions using methods from differential topology, Lie theory and geometric invariant theory. Expected applications include: extensions and stronger versions of classical inequalities in matrix analysis, and new results on moduli spaces of parabolic vector bundles. The tools to be used include methods for handling the singularities that inevitably arise from Hamiltonian actions (desingularization, quantization), which were developed in a previous NSF-funded project. This project involves graduate student participation and collaboration with researchers at other US and Canadian institutions. The type of question I seek to answer is: given the singular values of two matrices (of the same size), what are the possible singular values of their sum? In this form the question goes back at least to H. Weyl, who early in the last century found a partial answer and from this obtained his famous estimates for the eigenvalues of a Laplacian. The question is not only related to such classical spectral problems, but also to mechanics (classical and quantum) and to the representation theory of Lie groups. Two ramifications of the problem which I particularly wish to pursue are versions for noncompact groups and for the infinite-dimensional groups known as Kac-Moody groups doc2375 none Hawkins The University of Delaware will operate the R V Cape Henlopen during as a general oceanographic research vessel in support of NSF-supported research projects. The Cape Henlopen is a 120 ft. vessel, constructed in , and is owned and operated by University of Delaware. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 178 operational days during , of which 143.5 days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The remaining cruises will support Navy and other private projects. The projects scheduled on the Cape Henlopen represent several oceanographic disciplines, including biological and chemical oceanography and benthic ecology, and will fully utilize the capabilities of the vessel. Cape Henlopen is a regional vessel that typically operates in the coastal water from Long Island to Cape Hatteras, as well as the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays, but occaionally sails as far north as the Gulf of Maine, as far south as Florida and as far offshore as Bermuda. Operations in will mainly take place around the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays and off the New York and New Jersey coasts. The Cape Henlopen will have a ship yard period in February. The Henlopen is part of a fleet of ships used by the National Science Foundation in support of marine science research. Most oceanographic projects require highly specialized equipment to be permanently installed on the vessel, thus the necessity for specialized ships. These vessels do not operate in the same mode as general cargo fishing vessels. As a result, NSF supports the operation of a variety of ships specifically dedicated to oceanographic research that are operated by universities and institutions around the country doc2376 none This research is focused on the investigation of the properties of superfluid 3He in Aerogel. New areas of the phase diagram of superfluid 3He in aerogel will be explored. The Aerogel may potentially offer the possibility of introducing controlled disorder into the liquid to create new physical systems. One project at Cornell will measure the specific heat of 3He in aerogel near the superfluid transition. Another Cornell project will study coherent spin precession in pure 3He under specific field gradient conditions that yield a long-lived homogenous precession mode. A collaboration at the Kapitza Institute in Moscow will examine the feasibility of stabilizing the B phase of 3He in Aerogel, as well as explore the spin dynamics in the presence of disorder. At Delaware, the collaboration will focus on exploring the feasibility of new tailor made aerogels, having correlations that are different from those grown under basic conditions. The Delaware group will also examine the feasibility of subjecting the aerogel to uniaxial compression to alter the density and provide a preferred direction into the aerogel. Theoretical support for these activities will be provided by the group at the Ohio State University and by researchers at the Kapitza Institute. Graduate students and post-doctoral associates involved in this project will be exposed to sensitive signal detection and recovery technology, large scale project design and management as well as a thorough exposure to data acquisition and management. Our substantial involvement in research with colleagues in Russia will provide International perspectives and establish long-term collaborations that are important for the scientific community as a whole. Our training will prepare students and post-docs for academic, technical, and management careers. This work is directed at the study of the superfluid 3He in the presence of disorder. While ordinarily, superfluid 3He is the purest material on earth and supports no disorder or impurities, we have found that the introduction of a dilute nanometer scale structured silica glass allows the properties of the superfluid to be altered in a well-defined way. The changes to the phase diagram, including the ability to support new types of magnetic (spin) transport mechanisms will be explored in this project which is to be carried out at Cornell University in Ithaca, the University of Delaware, the Ohio State University, and at the Kapitza Institute in Moscow. The group will develop and use new magnetic imaging and sonic techniques, and carry out sensitive measurements at ultra-low temperatures. The research should provide information on a potentially new class of three dimensional quantum phase transitions (a quantum phase transition is one in which the fluctuations near the critical point are quantum and not thermal in nature, and quantum phase transitions are thought to be related to the early universe) as well as the transport of spins across interfaces in disordered materials, a problem of considerable technological importance. Students and Post-Doctoral Associates in this program receive rigorous training in physics, signal recovery, data acquisition and management as well as project integration, and can pursue careers in either academic or industrial science. The International aspect of our collaboration also offers unique potential for human resources doc2377 none This experimental condensed matter physics project deals with nanofabrication techniques that will enable electronic devices that operate by means of physical mechanisms different from existing technology. By incorporating a single metal particle less than 10 nm in diameter into a tunneling device, it becomes possible to manipulate the flow of electrons via individual electron-in-a-box energy levels within the particle, and to measure the spectrum of these quantum-mechanical states. This research will study the processes which affect electron transport in this new regime-at the level of single energy levels-for magnetic, superconducting, and normal-metal particles. In addition, the ability to measure the spectrum of quantum levels in a nanoparticle will be used as a tool in investigations of other fundamental questions of nm-scale physics. Topics of primary interest include spin-polarized electron tunneling into single quantum states, the mechanisms of energy and spin relaxation between energy levels, the effects of electronic interactions on the level spectra, the mechanisms of magnetization reversal in nm-scale ferromagnetic particles, and the effects of impurities on quantized energy levels. The research provides exceptional opportunities for graduate students and research associates to be trained in frontier science areas that will prepare them for a range of careers in industry, academe, and government. %%% When a piece of metal is made less than about 10 nanometers in diameter, so that it contains about 10,000 atoms or less, electrons cannot flow through the metal particle with an arbitrary energy- they can flow only with only one of a restricted range of so-called quantized energies. This means that very small electrical devices are entering a new regime, where electrons can be manipulated to flow via individual energy states, in contrast to existing devices where the energy levels are effectively a continuum of states. This experimental condensed matter physics project is aimed at characterizing and understanding all the processes which affect electron flow in this new regime-at the level of single energy levels- for magnetic, superconducting, and normal-metal particles. In addition, the ability to measure the spectrum of electronic levels in a nano-particle will be used as a tool in investigations of other fundamental questions of nanometer-scale physics, such as the behavior of the electron s spin when an electron hops onto a small magnetic particle, the rate at which an electron may relax from a higher-energy to low-energy state within a particle, and the effects of impurities on the quantized levels. The research provides exceptional opportunities for graduate students and research associates to be trained in frontier science areas that will prepare them for a range of careers in industry, academe, and government doc2378 none This project has as its long-term goal the development of chemosensing molecules that bind metal ions and signal specific metal ion binding. The specific aims of this study are to design and synthesize peptide derived macrocyclic ligands with an intrinsic fluorescent signal to indicate metal ion binding. The strategy is to employ peptide based macrocycles incorporating intrinsic signalling molecules that display a fluorescence response. The ion binding selectivities will be comparatively studied by NMR, CD, potentiometry and fluorescence techniques. Ground state properties of these macrocycles, in the solid state as well as in solution, will be investigated by X-ray diffraction methods, NMR and conformational analysis. With this Award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program s Organic Dynamics Program supports the research of Professor Maria Ngu-Schwemlein of Southern University. Professor Ngu-Schwemlein proposes to study the interactions between metal ions and small molecules that are modeled on proteins. With a detectable interaction between these molecules and specific ions, applications toward ion selective sensors, ion chromatography, and metal ion detoxification will be possible doc2379 none of deep penetration near the critical threshold. This research will focus on three areas: percolation model, first passage percolation model, and percolative process. In particular, the project will investigate mathematically rigorous exact solutions for the percolation process. The research makes use of probability theory, graph theory, combinatorics and functional analysis. The project will use these mathematical tools to advance in a rigorous understanding of the critical phenomena doc2380 none s of extra-curricular activities, employment, and reasons for choosing CSEMS programs will assist assessment of their motivation and potential. Assigned counselors will monitor progress and use of academic and student services and submit reports at the end of each semester to PIs who will certify continuing eligibility. Expected outcomes: increased enrollments of low income, academically talented students in CSEMS fields; enhanced persistence and performance; successful degree completion and direct application of learned skills in employment or through transfer; and ensured program continuation, will be measured by graduation rates, overall grade point averages, and success in obtaining employment in their field or transferring to four year institutions doc2381 none Bayes and frequentist approaches are the two main paradigms for statistical inference. Of late, likelihood-based methods are also being proposed in many inferential problems. The proposed research falls in the interface and considers asymptotic inference in these paradigms. Higher order asymptotic expansions play an important role in Bayes, frequentist and likelihood approaches to inference. This proposal considers developing such expansions and using them in specific applications such as Bayesian experimental design, small area estimation and contingency tables. Small area estimation is becoming increasingly popular in many federal and local government programs. Both hierarchical Bayes and empirical Bayes approaches are receiving favorable attention from the users of small area statistics. Hierarchical Bayes procedures rely to a great extent on the use of noninformative priors. Indeed, the wider acceptance of Bayesian techniques in recent years both in the theory and in the practice of statistics is partly due to various noninformative priors. Higher order asymptotics have been used by the PI in his past research to (i) develop second order accurate approximations to measure of uncertainty in small area estimation, (ii) calibrate naive EB confidence intervals, (iii) compare various adjustments to profile likelihoods in likelihood-based inference, and (iv) obtain frequentist validation of various noninformative priors. Specifically, the following problems will be investigated: (a) Asymptotic comparison of adjusted likelihoods via expected volumes of confidence sets, mean squared errors of point estimates and other criteria; (b) Optimal Bayesian designs in variance components problem; (c) EB interval estimation with applications in small area estimation; (d) Frequentist validation of noninformative priors in the context of small area estimation; (e) Higher order expansion of null distribution of score tests in two-way contingency tables; (f) Robust estimation in small area estimation using survey weights. Research on small area estimation has received considerable attention in recent years due to growing demand for reliable small area statistics by federal and local government agencies (e.g., the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Statistics Canada, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Central Statistical Office of U.K.). A small area usually refers to a subgroup of a population from which samples are drawn. The subgroup may be a geographical region (e.g., county) or a group obtained by cross-classification of demographic factors. Reliable small area statistics are needed in regional planning and fund allocation in many federal and local government programs. Currently, the Census Bureau is engaged in developing small area estimates of number of poor children in school-going age at the county level, and developing adjustment factors to the census counts for various geographic and demographic classes. Experimental designs play an important role in agriculture and industrial productions. Optimal designs allow experimenters to derive maximum utility for a given budget. Categorical data, which occur abundantly in every fields of quantitative study, especially in social sciences, consist of frequency of counts in various categories of interest to an experimenter. Statistical solutions to be developed here are expected to lead to new and useful methodolgies on the research problems considered in this proposal doc2382 none A class of tilings of Euclidean spaces, the best known being the Penrose tilings of the plane, have proven to be a fertile subject of research with impact in a broad range of directions. The investigator continues his interdisciplinary research of these tilings, emphasizing consequences of the statistical rotational symmetry of the tilings, in particular the full rotational symmetry of tilings such as the pinwheel tilings of the plane. The methods are a combination of ergodic theory, ring theory and algebraic topology. Tilings of space have been an important tool to understand the geometric relationships that are possible between many small components within a larger whole. In particular tilings help us understand geometric symmetries. In recent years tilings with unexpected symmetries have been discovered, and used successfully in modeling the atomic structure of new types of physical materials. The investigator studies these new symmetries, and, making use of the way tilings interface with various parts of mathematics, uses the symmetries as a tool to investigate structures in diverse parts of mathematics doc2383 none This research project will develop patternable, 3-D photonic band gap (PBG) materials. Such systems will be templated from hard-sphere colloidal crystals assembled epitaxially from depletion-stabilized silica suspensions of varying chemistry, functionality, and size. Through photopolymerization of functional groups grafted onto the silica particle surfaces or of the surrounding aqueous matrix, the assemblies will be patterned to embed critical features (e.g., waveguides) needed for device applications. Formation of PBG structures with the desired optical contrast will be created by infilling as-grown colloidal crystals with a high refractive index material followed by removal of the colloidal template. Finally, the photonic properties of these novel PBG materials will be measured experimentally and compared to theoretically predicted behavior. Engineering patternable 3-D PBG structures requires an interdisciplinary effort that brings together researchers in the fields of colloid science, materials synthesis, PBG fabrication, and photonic properties. Hard-sphere colloidal crystals that serve as templates for PBG structures will be assembled from depletion-stabilized suspensions of bare, uncharged silica spheres of varying functionality. Colloidal epitaxy will be implemented to achieve the desired fcc crystal structure. The assemblies will then be gelled in situ by a photopolymerization process induced via confocal lithography. The patterned assemblies will be infitrated with rare earth doped chalcogenide glasses. The photonic properties of the resulting inverse fcc structures will be characterized with respect to their PBG structure, wave guiding nature, and luminescence. Successful implementation of this multidisciplinary research project will lead to new scientific understanding in several key areas. Fundamental knowledge of depletion-enhanced colloidal crystallization, the mechanical and rheological properties of colloidal assemblies, and important discoveries in the patterning, drying, and infiltration behavior of colloidal crystals, and their photonic properties are expected. These results should have broad impact on colloidal processing of ceramics, fabrication of porous materials for related applications including catalysts, membranes and biostructures, and on the technologically significant area of photonic band gap materials needed for the next generation of information technology doc2384 none This project will conduct the initial, first-year phase of detailed biotic survey and inventory of the Russian island of Sakhalin. A team of Russian, Japanese, and American scientists will conduct a survey and inventory of the plants, insects, spiders, freshwater and terrestrial mollusks, freshwater fishes, amphibians, and reptiles. This work is a logical and much needed extension to the previous seven years of similar work by the investigators in the Russian Kuril Archipelago. As one of four primary source biotas for the colonization of the Kuril Islands--the others being Hokkaido, the Kamchatka Peninsula, and the Asian mainland--Sakhalin is by far the least known biologically and in the greatest danger of over exploitation. Narrowly separated from the continent for nearly 1,000 km and almost touching Hokkaido, Japan, at its southern tip, it forms a natural filter or barrier to dispersal of plants and animals from the Asian mainland to the Kurils. Although considerable information is available for wide-ranging, commercially important species, such as king crab, salmon, cod, and various marine mammals, the flora and fauna of Sakhalin as a whole are poorly known. At the same time, a steep rise in commercial exploitation of natural resources poses a serious environmental threat to the island. Using standardized survey methods, modern computer-based inventory procedures, and dissemination of information through the Internet, the results of the survey will provide important baseline data on patterns of species diversity that can be compared accurately with the Kuril Islands and other regions sampled in similar ways. Working cooperatively with universities and the national and local governments of the host country, the project will provide training for faculty, students, and government biologists. Finally, the work will provide a foundation of information that will promote long-term future research as well as conservation of the unique island biotas of the entire Sakhalin-Kuril administrative district doc2385 none Benesh Determination of the distributions of quarks and gluons inside of the proton and there hadronic particles is one f the central topics in high energy nuclear and particle physics. The form of these distributions impacts not only our understanding of the structure of the proton, but lso affects the interpretation of experiments at higher energies which require these distributions as input. The primary focus of this proposal is the calculation of the harge asymmetric contribution to the proton sea within a variety of distinct models of the nucleon sea. A secondary focus of this proposal is the study of nuclear effects on quark distributions using phenomenological descriptions of light nuclei. Such nuclei are sufficiently tightly bound to exhibit significant nuclear modifications to their quark distributions and yet are simple enough to be modeled phenomenologically. We propose to apply models and methods that have previously been used to calculate the quark distributions of single nucleons to light nuclei in order to test the viability of these models as alternative explanations of the observed modification of quark distributions in nuclei doc2386 none This project from a female assistant scientist at Florida State University and the Natioanl High Magnetic Field Laboratory will focus on the study of low-temperature transport in Si metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs). The two-dimensional electron system in Si MOSFETs exhibits a metal-insulator transition that is still unexplained. The experiments will lead to a deeper characterization of the insulator, the metal, and the transition. The project will include measurements of long-time relaxation of electronic states in the insulating phase, studies of the role of the spin degrees of freedom in the metallic behavior, studies of the effects of the variation in the screening length on all different regimes, and the effects of different types of disorder. The experiments will be carried out in both large and mesoscopic MOSFETs. The studies will be compared to the proposed theoretical models. The results of this research are expected to further stimulate and constrain theories of the metal-insulator transition, and greatly improve understanding of highly correlated systems in general. Graduate students involved in the project will receive training in a variety of experimental techniques. This training will prepare them for a wide range of careers in the areas of science and technology. %%% Many of the novel materials with potentially great technological importance, find themselves close to the metal-insulator transition. In all of the relevant examples, ranging from the long-known doped semiconductors to recently discovered high temperature superconductors, the metallic state is created by chemically doping an otherwise insulating material. Understanding the nature of the metal-insulator transition thus represents an important issue for materials science and technology. It also presents a fundamental problem in condensed matter physics. This project from a female assistant scientist at Florida State University and the Natioanl High Magnetic Field Laboratory will focus on the study of the metal-insulator transition in a two-dimensional electron system. The measurements will lead to a deeper characterization of the insulator, the metal, and the transition, and they will provide an experimental test of the numerous competing theories. The results of this research are expected to further stimulate and constrain theories of the metal-insulator transition. Graduate students involved in the project will receive training in a variety of experimental techniques. This training will prepare them for a wide range of careers in the areas of science and technology doc2387 none This project is aimed at providing Native American undergraduate chemistry and physics majors opportunities to carry out research on the synthesis, characterization, and applications of composite materials formed from solventless reactions of layered silicates with organic monomers and biomolecules. Three specific research topics will be addressed: synthesis of novel layered silicate clay polymer composite materials as the active components in chemical sensors; the interaction of biological molecules with layered silicate clay materials. The educational goals of this project are to train up to five Native American chemistry or physics majors by providing one-on-one faculty mentoring (up through graduation) on research experiences that include all aspects of the research process from project inception to the final reporting of results. New inorganic-organic hybrid composite materials are increasing viewed as important technological materials because of uses that include coatings for chemical sensors, and for biomedical applications such as bone cement and optial implants. These are excellent areas in which to train students because of the strong job markets due to high industrial relevance doc2388 none Professor Rice proposes research on statistical problems arising in two large astronomical projects: the variable star database of the MACHO project (a search for dark matter in the halo of our galaxy) and Taiwanese American Occultation Survey (TAOS), a search for comets in the Kuiper belt. The first involves statistical characterization and modeling of tens of thousands of light curves from variable stars. He proposes to approach these problems from the viewpoint of functional data analysis, further developing and extending the methodology of this rapidly growing area of statistical research. The TAOS project will monitor star fields for occultations by objects in the Kuiper belt, using dedicated telescopes in the interior mountains of Taiwan. The primary statistical problems center around designing image processing and signal detection procedures that will operate in real time at high sampling rates to detect rare and faint signals. Both projects are anticipated to make valuable contributions to both advancement of knowledge in astronomy and to the development of statistical methodology. This is an interdisciplinary proposal involving mathematical statistics and astronomy, centering around two projects in astronomy: (1) The analysis of a large database of variable stars. These are stars whose light is not constant, but changes in a periodic fashion. Better understanding of this population of stars is important for models of stellar evolution and also for determining distances to remote objects in the universe. (2) The TAOS project will probe our solar system in the remote region beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is thought that there may well be hundreds of millions of objects such as comets there, but because of their relatively small size and remoteness, they are very difficult to detect. Computationally intensive statistical methodology will play a key role in detecting these objects. Partial funding for this project was provided by the Stellar Astronomy and Astrophysics (SAA) Program doc2389 none The major goal of this project is to explore two types of environmentally responsive nanocomposite materials. The first materials are synthesized by reacting block (or graft) copolymers, containing ionic and nonionic segments, with oppositely charged surfactants. The second materials are synthesized by reacting cross-linked networks containing ionic and nonionic segments, with oppositely charged surfactants. The resulting materials combine two major elements. First, they contain ionic polymer segments, which are neutralized with oppositely charged surfactant ions to form water insoluble domains. Second, they contain nonionic polymer segments linked to ionic chains, which provide for dispersion or swelling of a whole composite in appropriate solvents. For these block ionomer complexes (BIC), the PI will characterize the relationships between the structural parameters of the components and physicochemical properties of the resulting BIC, as well as examines the routes and extent of control of structure formation in such systems. For this purpose the molecular architecture of the copolymers (i.e. linear vs. branched, block vs. graft, length of the segment etc.) as well as the structure of surfactants (i.e., hydro- vs. fluorocarbon tails, number of tails and their lengths) will be varied. The response of these materials to pH, ionic strength, solvents and temperature variations will be examined. The second part of this project will extend the family of BIC using cross-linked polymer networks from ionic and nonionic hydrophilic poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) chains. It is expected that upon reacting with oppositely charged surfactants, a partially swollen microheterogeneous bulk material will form in which the hydrophobic clusters, from polyion-bound surfactant arrays, are joined by hydrophilic PEO chains. The size and the structure of hydrophobic clusters as well as swollen hydrophilic zones, their percolation and degree of swelling should be strongly dependent on the overall complex composition as well as the characteristics of the original block ionomer network. It is possible that such sensitivity will be a key to effective control of the properties of BIC networks allowing their use as environmentally responsive materials. These studies will advance the understanding of the principles involved in designing polymer-surfactant dispersions and networks with controllable properties. Complexes from polymer networks and surfactants might be useful as versatile environmentally responsive materials in a variety of applications, including resins for bioseparation, biocatalysis, drug delivery and drug release systems. Therefore, if this research is successful, it might have broader impact in various fields where nanocomposite materials are needed doc2390 none Proposal: Project title: Foliations, flows and 3-manifolds: Topology and geometry PI: Sergio R. Fenley : Reebless foliations are a basic and fundamental object in the study of 3-manifolds. They yield deep results on 3-manifold topology and are also related to the geometrization conjecture for 3-manifolds. An important tool is the universal circle associated to a foliation with hyperbolic leaves (the generic case). Using this tool, the PI has recently proved that in the case of R-covered foliations, then either the manifold is toroidal or there is a pseudo-Anosov flow transverse to the foliation. Such a flow has excellent dynamical properties and this gives a strong relationship with the topology of the manifold. One objective of this project is to analyze the universal circle construction for various families of foliations and to search for transverse pseudo-Anosov flows. A second goal is to study foliation and transverse flows as dual objects and to understand the deep consequences of their joint dynamical structure. The project aims to study general pseudo-Anosov flows and the additional structure imposed by a transverse foliation. A third goal of the project is to understand geometric behavior of foliations and transverse flows in hyperbolic 3-manifolds - the generic case. The focus will be on the large scale geometric behavior in the universal cover. An important question to be analyzed is whether the pseudo-Anosov flows transverse to foliations are quasigeodesic - that is, whether they measure distances well. This property has been proved by the PI (and Lee Mosher) in the case of a flow transverse to a Reebless finite depth foliation. One objective of this study is to use the quasigeodesic property for flows to derive information about the asymptotic geometric behavior of the foliation transverse to the flow. This is specially promising in the case of general finite depth foliations. A 3-manifold is an object that locally has 3-dimensions, like 3-dimensional Euclidean space. A 2-dimensional foliation of a3-manifold is a decomposition of the manifold into 2-dimensional objects, much like the pages of a book. Good foliations exist in large classes of 3-manifolds and they yield very useful information about the manifold. The goal of the project is to understand the relationship of the foliation with geometric and topological structures of the manifold. Geometry measures distance and roughly topology measures the structures of holes in the manifold. It is best to look at the universal cover of the manifold: for example the universal cover of a cylinder is obtained by unrolling it into an infinite carpet. Universal covers are unbounded objects but they carry a lot of information about the manifold, contained in the folding allowed to recover the manifold. One important goal of the project is to analyse the foliation in the universal cover. Of particular interest is the large scale properties of the leaves of the foliation. We will concentrate in the case where the manifold is hyperbolic -this is the generic situation. Finally there is a dual object to a foliation which is a transverse flow to the leaves of the foliation. The flow and foliation jointly produce a rich dynamical structure in the manifold with many deep consequences. There are many cases when there is a tightest amongst all possible transverse flows. The tightest flow should give information about the structure of the foliation and connections with the manifold. The tightest flow is called a pseudo-Anosov flow doc2391 none The research program entitled Molecule Liftoff from Surfaces will be performed by Dr. Barbara Garrison of Pennsylvania State University and is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry program. This computational research program will focus on modeling the behavior of solid organic surfaces under impact by fast particles or during laser ablation. These basic calculations will provide a fundamental framework which will lead to a better understanding of analytical techniques such as Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS) and Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization Mass Spectrometry (MALDI). The calculations are based on experimental data provided by collaborators which is a significant component of this project. The goals of the project include developing simulations to better understand the desorption of large organic molecules from surfaces, the enhanced desorption efficiency when using polyatomic projectiles, and the experimentally observed differences between UV-MALDI and IR-MALDI. The analytical techniques of SIMS and MALDI have applications in biochemistry, surface chemistry, polymer chemistry and many others. They are widely used techniques in the pharmaceutical industry, electronics industry, and chemical industry. The fundamental research to be performed in this project will lead to improved interpretation of the data obtained and more effective use of these techniques in problem solving applications doc2392 none This project concentrates primarily on the investigation of mathematical problems that arise in the study of molecular quantum mechanics. The nuclei in a molecule have large masses. Consequently, their motion is approximately described by classical mechanics. By comparison, electron masses are very small, and electrons adjust their quantum mechanical states rapidly in response to the much slower motion of the nuclei. This intuition is the basis for Born-Oppenheimer approximations. Professor Hagedorn, his graduate students, and his collaborators will study situations where Born-Oppenheimer approximations are not sufficiently accurate to describe all the phenomena of interest. For example, they plan to develop accurate surface hopping models to include the possibility of electrons making quantum mechanical transitions. Models of this type have been proposed in the chemistry and physics literature, but they have not been derived from first principles. The main goal of this project is rigorously to derive and implement such a model. Motion of electrons and nuclei in molecules are well described by solutions to the Schrodinger equation. No one has ever solved the Schrodinger equation for a molecule, and our theoretical knowledge of chemistry and molecular physics has come from approximations to solutions. The principal goals of this project are to study the several commonly used approximations and to develop improved approximations that will be useful to chemists and physicists. In addition to theoretical understanding, potential uses of this basic research are the synthesis of new chemical compounds, the design of new catalysts, or the design of new drugs doc2393 none Washington Mio and John Bryant Topological n-manifolds are spaces locally homeomorphic to Euclidean n-space. The simple local structure of manifolds lends them a very special role in mathematics since phenomena modeled on these spaces are amenable to a vast array of methods and tools. The study of the structure of manifolds has been an important theme in geometric topology for many decades. More recently, spaces called generalized manifolds, with the large-scale properties of topological manifolds but very intricate local structure, were discovered by the proposers in joint work with S. Ferry and S. Weinberger. Previously conjectured not to exist, the first theoretical evidence that they might exist appeared in the work of F. Quinn. This project proposes to continue the investigation of the topology of generalized manifolds. This study is intimately related to important structural properties of manifolds, such as the conjectural rigidity of aspherical manifolds and the Siebenmann periodicity phenomenon. Other indications of the relevance of these spaces are present in areas as diverse as Dynamical Systems, Geometric Group Theory and C-star-algebras. The long-term goal of this project is to probe the local structure of generalized manifolds and establish a deeper parallel between generalized manifolds and topological manifolds by showing that these exotic spaces satisfy most of the fundamental properties of manifolds, such as topological homogeneity, the s-cobordism theorem, and the alpha-approximation theorem. More immediate goals of the proposed investigation include the study of control improvement problems, submanifold and map transversality questions, normal bundle and embedding problems for generalized manifolds. These are elements that arise naturally in the study of the core problems, and they also represent important ramifications of independent interest. The main technique to be employed is controlled topology, including controlled homotopy theory, controlled K-theory, and controlled surgery applied to patch representations of generalized manifolds and, ultimately, to generalized manifolds themselves doc2394 none Applications of probability in modern science frequently involve the study of random quantities with many components (dimensions), or perhaps even of a geometric nature. Thus they require probability estimates and limit theorems which are applicable to random sets, or which are dimension free (hence, in essence, infinite dimensional). A major theme in the investigator s previous work, and in much of the current research, addresses both of these issues in a variety of settings. As a first example consider the link between small ball probabilities and metric entropy problems, which showed certain probability estimates are equivalent to problems in approximation theory. This link led to the solution of a long standing problem in approximation theory, and portions of the proposed research involve important unsolved analogues of this problem. Another example is the study of the Gibbs conditioning principle of statistical mechanics for statistics with infinitely many components. To begin to handle this type of problem one needs non-logarithmic estimates of large deviation probabilities which are dimension free. These estimates depend critically on dominating points and a suitable representation formula for the probabilities. A variety of conditional limit theorems are to be considered. Additional problems exhibiting these general features are also proposed, and connect with classical geometry, analysis, and statistics. This work includes further non-logarithmic large deviation probabilities for partial sums of independent random vectors, an investigation of dominating points in a more general setting, and the application of these results to conditional limit theorems for infinite dimensional statistics. Limit sets for random samples of stochastic processes, as well as related coverage problems will be examined, and a primary focus will be to further examine the link between small ball probabilities and non-classical functional laws of the iterated logarithm applicable to occupation measures. Problems concerning vector valued partial sums, cluster sets, small ball probabilities, self-normalized partial sums, and limit theorems for convex hulls of Brownian motion paths are also to be considered doc2395 none This project will bring to conclusion 12 years of field and herbarium work on the flora of the region of Parque Nacional Amboro in the department of Santa Cruz, Bolivia. The Park and surrounding areas constitute one of the most species-rich national park areas in the world, with species of vascular plants documented at this time and a total of over expected for this flora. This will be the only floristic treatment for an area of this size in Bolivia, the poorest-known floristically of tropical American countries, and will be indispensable for making natural resource and conservation decisions. This project will finish the processing and identification of over collections previously made by the PI and collaborators in the area of Parque Nacional Amboro. Dissemination of results will include production of a book to be printed in Bolivia, and construction of a fully web-searchable database on species treatments doc2396 none This award supported by the Division of International Programs allows Mary J. Roth of Lafayette College to collaborate with research staff members of the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute in Oslo, Norway. The project will apply Roth s expertise with multi-electrode earth resistivity testing into investigations of slope stability, leakage in dams and tunnels, and the study of frozen soils in Norway and other locations in Europe. Earth resistivity testing is being rapidly incorporated into geotechnical engineering investigations for a wide range of projects. The results of this research will be a better understanding of the uses, reliability, and limitations associated with earth resistivity testing as well as a better assessment of the applicability of this technique in new engineering applications doc2397 none Ragan This is an RUI award to support numerical and analytical approaches to study the spin dynamics of paramagnetic quantum fluids and solids. The research consists of two parts: analysis of spin-wave instabilities in spin-echo experiments, and computer simulation of spin diffusion in solid helium-3. The first part involves the detailed computer simulation and analysis of NMR experiments currently being planned at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory to detect the long predicted, and recently disputed, zero temperature attenuation of transverse spin currents in spin-polarized Fermi liquids. This effort builds on previous progress and the results should be key in assessing the validity of data obtained in future experiments at ultra-low temperatures and high magnetic fields. The second project will lend computational support to recent attempts by Cowan and Mullin to use linear response theory to calculate spin diffusion coefficients in spin-polarized solid helium-3. In the calculation, a method originated by Kubo is used to relate the long-time diffusive behavior of the spin-correlation function to the local interactions at microscopic time scales. The goal of this project is to assess the validity of this method by calculating the spin correlation function using molecular dynamics simulations from initial conditions generated with Monte Carlo techniques. The bulk of the computations will be performed on the IBM SP at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Undergraduates will participate in these calculations as part of the university commitment to undergraduate research participation and as part of the Computational Physics Emphasis. %%% This is an RUI award to support numerical and analytical approaches to study the spin dynamics of paramagnetic quantum fluids and solids. The research consists of two parts: analysis of spin-wave instabilities in spin-echo experiments, and computer simulation of spin diffusion in solid helium-3. Undergraduates will participate in these calculations as part of the university commitment to undergraduate research participation and as part of the Computational Physics Emphasis doc2398 none The proposal is for supporting US scientists to attend the XXV Rencontres de Moriond Conference on: 1. Electroweak interactions and unified theories 2. QCD and high-energy hadron interactions The conference will be a weeklong doc2399 none This project, funded by the Chemistry Division, supports Dr. Kathy Rowlen and other members of the Chemistry Department at the University of Colorado in establishing and conducting a new Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site in chemistry. For the period - , 36 undergraduate students will spend ten weeks each conducting summer research under the supervision of Chemistry faculty. The theme of the project is interfacial chemistry examples of which include atmospheric aerosols and self assembly of molecules on solid surfaces. Participating students will interact with faculty, post-doctoral associates, graduate students and other undergraduates in weekly meetings in which research progress is discussed as well as in the laboratory doc2400 none Kowalski The Conference on the Intersections of Particle and Nuclear Physics has served as an excellent forum for the exchange of results and ideas of common interest to the two fields, notably the fundamental implications of the strong interaction (quantum chromodynamics) and the use of strongly interacting systems to study other fundamental symmetries and interactions. As such, this conference represents a very good opportunity for graduate students and junior investigators (support for whom is the sole purpose of this award) to gain exposure to a broad but unified set of research areas doc2401 none The objective of this study is to investigate the in-situ and real-time enzymatic biodegradation of the surface microstructure in thin films of polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), and correlate these changes with the degradation mechanism. In-situ surface microstructural changes will be monitored using the liquid cell capability of the atomic force microscope (AFM) and will be performed at elevated temperatures to maximize the enzymatic activity of the depolymerase. Literature has suggested that biodegradation preferentially occurs in amorphous regions of bulk copolymers opposed to crystalline regions. However, this postulate has never been analytically confirmed. This theory will be evaluated using the phase imaging capability of the AFM and confirmed with surface analytical spectroscopy. A secondary objective of this project is to better understand the role of surface chemistry in the microfabrication of biomaterials surfaces Through control of surface chemistry via hydrophobic and hydrophilic modifications to the substrate, novel patterning techniques for PHAs using microcontact printing (m-CP) of alkanethiol self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) to gold surfaces will be studied. This will be used to produce a self-aligned thin film internal height standard for the in-situ surface microstructural changes and bulk mechanical properties will initiated. A final objective of this project is the scientific training of undergraduate research students and high school science teachers in an interdisciplinary research project. This project will provide a new insight into the breakdown mechanism in an important class biodegradable plastics. It is an interdisciplinary project for undergraduate research students and high school teachers at the interface between the biological and materials sciences. Future scientists and present secondary school teachers in chemistry, biology and materials science need to be trained in the complex interactions of these disciplines as this project highlights doc2402 none This project will explore mechanisms, line dimensions, and acid diffusion rates in acid catalyzed, chemically amplified deep ultraviolet (UV) photoresists using infrared near field scanning optical microscopy(IR NSOM). The objectives are to (1)develop a higher resolution variant of tunable laser infrared near field scanning optical microscopy, (2)push the limits of spatial resolution to 10 nm, (3)use the method to study state-of-the-art samples of photolithographically generated lines in deep-UV chemically amplified polymer photoresists, and (4) to probe the diffusion properties of the acid species. IR NSOM is a chemically band-specific optical characterization technique that offers an adaptable method to study features and line dimensions. It can be applied in many situations and as new chemical components are introduced into polymer chemistries for deep-UV lithographic applications for smaller line dimensions. The basis for the contrast mechanism is that the absorption features in the polymer films before and after UV exposure and post exposure bake show dramatic wavelength-specific changes in infrared vibrational bands. When the contrast is properly accounted for with regard to both absorption and index of refraction changes, the method provides a highly sensitive way of detecting chemical transformations on a nanoscopic scale. Wavelength-specific IR NSOM is expected to provide an important new route to characterize line dimensions and to study acid diffusion rates quantitatively. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. New experimental tools are now becoming available to allow high resolution of elementary chemical and diffusion processes which when better understood allow advances in fundamental materials science and technology. The basic knowledge and understanding gained from the research is expected to contribute to improving the ability to lithographically define smaller and higher resolution components for advanced devices and circuits. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area doc2403 none Peter McCullagh will investigate a number of issues, all bearing directly or indirectly on generalized linear models. The main theme of the proposal is the development of a framework for constructing logically consistent statistical models, whose hallmark is extendability or scope. Every sensible linear model for a two-way layout with 4 treatments and 7 blocks must ordinarily be one element, or vector space, in a sequence of logically related vector spaces, one such subspace for each layout. Logical consistency demands that the restriction of one subspace to a subset of the blocks or treatments must coincide with the subspace associated with this subset. In mathematical terms, not only must the model be invariant under permutation of treatments and permutation of blocks, but the sequence of vector spaces must be closed under restriction to subsets. In algebraic terminology, such a sequence of vector spaces constitutes a representation of the category of injective maps on finite sets. The standard factorial models (hierarchical interaction models) coincide precisely with the regular sub-representations of the product category. The PI has developed this notion of extendability for designs, common in genetic studies of plant and animal breeding, in which two or more factors have the same set of levels. In order to accommodate these new models, it is found necessary to extend the factorial model formulae by the inclusion of several new operators that are relevant only for homologous factors. The aim is to develop a succinct way of specifying category-invariant subspaces, i.e.~models, in a way that is unambiguous and can be understood by the computer. This proposal aims to study statistical models from the viewpoint of their logical structure, and to develop new models where appropriate. In each new area of application, whether it be genetics, biology or social science, new considerations relevant to the application emerge. For example, in experiments connected with plant breeding, the same set of plants may occur as males contributing pollen and as females contributing ova. Likewise, in citation studies, a given journal may occur as a citing journal or as a cited journal. Homologous factors of this sort rarely arise in agricultural field trials where factorial models were first developed. As a result, standard statistical models are not well suited to such applications. It is the aim of this proposal to study such structures from a logical viewpoint and to develop new statistical models where needed doc2404 none This is a Focused Research Group project aimed at the synthesis and possible novel applications of new p-type transparent conductive oxides (TCOs) with superior properties. The three primary thrusts of the proposed program are: Selection and evaluation of new p-type TCOs exhibiting superior performance; Thin-film synthesis of new p-type TCOs; Demonstration of new p-type TCOs in novel applications. The exploratory synthesis of bulk p-type oxides will be guided by mobility trends. The properties of the bulk form will be evaluated, and substitutional doping and oxygen intercalation will be explored. The most promising materials will be identified and transferred to thin-film research. Thin films will be synthesized by a variety of physical vapor deposition methods including sputtering, activated thermal coevaporation and electron-beam evaporation. The films will be extensively characterized in an effort to understand the optimization of conductivity and transparency. The availability of both n-and p-type transparent devices suggests novel opto-electronic devices are possible. Simple devices will be demonstrated using the best materials generated from the thin-film studies. Transparent conductive oxides (TCOs) constitute an unusual class of materials with high transparency and high electrical conductivity, materials properties necessary for the design of novel opto-electronic devices. The program exhibits a strong integration of research and education and is inherently multidisciplinary in nature and scope. The research environment will provide an enriched educational experience for students who will be exposed to multidisciplinary perspective and will need to communicate and collaborate across traditional discipline boundaries. This Focused Research Group project is a multidisciplinary activity jointly supported by the Division of Materials Research, The Chemistry Division, and The Office of Multidisciplinary Activities within the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate doc2405 none Award: Principal Investigator: Brian Smyth This proposal is predominantly concerned with qualitative aspects of the theory of surfaces as well as its application to the construction of a complete theory of equilibria for the general elastic membrane. The work on surface theory is uncovering previously unsuspected qualitative behavior of the principal foliations near an isolated singularity (umbilic) in a smooth surface in space, which strikingly distinguishes them from general foliations. This behavior explains the Caratheodory conjecture and, in many cases, proves the conjecture as a mere numerical consequence. The work on elastic membranes establishes the equilibrium equation of the most general stretched elastic membrane in equilibrium under an applied force field --- a far-reaching generalization of the classical Young-Laplace equation which was only valid for isotropic membranes. The context for this work is the unit circle bundle of the membrane surface equipped with the canonical lift (Sasaki metric) of the induced metric on the membrane surface; the key idea is the construction of a vector-valued 1-form on this bundle which completely encodes the responding forces of surface tension set up within the membrane. Surfaces are mathematical entities which are fundamental to the understanding of the structure of matter in physics, chemistry and biology. The surface at the interface of two different types of matter is frequently modeled by an elastic membrane. An observer of an elastic membrane in equilibrium can see the shape of the membrane, understand the forces that are being applied and even measure the average surface tension but has no idea of the responding forces of surface tension set up within the membrane. This work reveals the precise relationship between these observables and the internal surface tension forces for the general membrane. It follows that the response is never entirely predictable from the observables (membrane geometry, applied force, average surface tension) but that a certain core behavior is determined --- except for a very remarkable family of membranes (whose exceptional nature is defined solely by their geometry and not their physics) which live by a different set of rules. By example, it is shown that the common ad hoc assumptions of isotropy are seriously flawed. The authors work on the principal foliations of surfaces has already provided a key result which has been applied by Rozoy to settle a long-standing problem on the symmetry of a liquid ball in general relativity, as well as relating streamlines of a plane fluid flow to surface theory doc2406 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Jochen Lauterbach Institution: Purdue University The goal of this proposal is to develop techniques for the rapid analysis of heterogeneous catalysts. The underlying principle of the combinatorial approach is to systematically synthesize large numbers of catalyst compounds and screen them quickly. This approach enables researchers to make well-informed decisions in the discovery process, find unexpected trends, and gather a large amount of data about the underlying reaction mechanisms. A novel spectral imaging system, which permits the simultaneous measurement of the IR spectra of many products, permits in situ parallel investigation of chemical reactions. A number of preparation techniques can be used to establish proper conditions; the methodology of testing a large number of samples lends itself to combinatorial methods. The reaction systems proposed for the study include several important surface-catalyzed processes such as NO reduction and solid-phase supported organic reactions. The PI has developed a unique instrument for FTIR analysis of compounds immobilized on surfaces or within organic polymer matrices. This project may establish the principles for rapid advances in the development of new heterogeneous catalysts doc2407 none Near field scanning optical microscopy is used in this research project supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program to obtain information on the relationship between the morphology of organic thin films and their physical properties. Professor Barbara and his colleagues at the University of Texas-Austin address issues of charge injection, charge migration, and energy migration in organic thin film materials with applications in organic light emitting diodes and related devices. Method development carried out in the previous award period resulted in approaches which are now focussed on understanding the spatial extent of energy migration in these materials, and the nature of energetic interactions in the layers. Information obtained from these studies is useful in the design and fabrication of state of the art optoelectronic devices. In order to understand the operation of organic thin film light emitting devices, and related optoelectronic materials, high resolution spatial information about physical processes and morphology in the films must be obtained. This research project uses near field scanning probe microscopic methods developed by the P.I. to examine these questions. Information from this research is clearly applicable in electronic and photonic device fabrication problems doc2408 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Symmetry, Bifurcations, and Dynamics Golubitsky This project will investigate the theory and applications of equivariant dynamical systems. In particular, using the symmetries of differential equations and models, we will study patterns that occur both in space and in time. We will explore locomotor central pattern generators for bipeds and quadrupeds, a classification of bursting types, hypermeander of spiral waves, and magnetic dynamos. We will also study a combination of Euclidean symmetry and chaotic dynamics that leads to a deterministic mechanism for stochastic Brownian motion, and Ginzburg-Landau theory for spatially-extended systems. Patterns appear in physical, chemical, and biological systems in both space and time and are striking and reproducible. Often these patterns result from symmetries, and our research will study pattern formation by further developing the theory and application of symmetric dynamical systems. Applications that will be investigated range from the study of muscle rhythms in animal gaits and intermittency in magnetic dynamos to the complicated ways in which bursting signals are produced and spiral waves move doc2409 none This project involves studies of the mechanisms of carbon nanotube formation using selected precursors. Two approaches will be taken: the solid-state synthesis and the vapor phase processing. In both cases the project will involve the study and the identification of parameters that are important to the synthesis of high quality nanotube formation. From these investigations, new ways to produce large quantities of carbon nanotubes will be developed. In the area of application, design and construction of a proto-type triode flat panel display will take place. In addition, copper composites using nanotubes will be formed and their properties studied. Education will be emphasized as a research program. Graduate students, postdocs, undergraduates college teachers, and high school teachers will participate in this project. %%% Carbon nanotubes offer significant advantages to various potential applications areas due to their superior mechanical, electronic, and chemical properties. This research area is viewed as excellent for the integration of education goals with research goals that focus on one of the most interesting new materials being investigated by the materials research community doc2410 none The quantum-classical correspondence of non-linear dynamical systems is investigated using signal-processing methods. This approach has been shown to be capable of extracting long-time quantum information from short-time periodic orbits. The theory is applied to a number of problems of current interest. In addition, a small amount of effort is devoted to looking at Pade summation techniques to accomplish the needed summations doc2411 none Theoretical work over the last years has shown that the dynamics of two-dimensional viscous fluids is a richer phenomenon than hitherto believed and described theoretically. Depending on the hydrodynamic and diffusive time scales, the scaling invariance of phase coarsening can break down and jagged domains can form. In preliminary experiments, the various viscosity regimes considered in the theoretical simulations have been experimentally observed. A detailed quantitative comparison to theory will be made and the phase separation of viscous fluids, such as polymer melts, will be experimentally determined for fluid pairs ranging from highly immiscible to weakly incompatible. The primary model systems will be poly(methylmethacrylate) polystyrene (PS), PS brominated PS, and PS poly(vinyl methyl ether) above their glass transition temperature. It is expected that data is acquired outside the applicability of the present simulations, most notably fluids with asymmetric composition and volume fractions as well as asymmetric viscosities. An interesting extension to binary viscous liquids will be the investigation of systems that contain small particles or beads in one of the phases. Recent theory shows that the addition of hard particles significantly changes both the kinetics and the morphology of the phase separation. In order to generate truly two-dimensional fluids, a special sample preparation method that will sandwich the polymer films between Si3N4 membranes will be developed. The surfaces will be treated to make them neutral or near neutral for the polymers utilized. In the process, control over confinement effects such as changes of viscosity in thin polymer films will be achieved. Near Edge X-ray Absorption Fine Structure (NEXAFS) microscopy will be an important characterization tool, complemented by other microscopies (AMF, VLM, SEM). - Improvements in the theoretical understanding of NEXAFS spectra will be pursued. The accuracy of compositional quantitation will be improved. Students will be trained in executing interdisciplinary research projects situated at the interface of Physics, Chemistry, Materials and Polymer Science. Fundamental understanding of polymer thin films will be advanced, which might improve applications such as coating, adhesives, lubricants, inks and a variety of thin films applications in the semiconductor industry. Part of the effort continues a longstanding collaboration with Dow Chemical doc2412 none Principal Investigator Project Director: Jean-Pierre Fouque Technical Description: Pricing and hedging derivatives in financial markets with fast mean-reverting stochastic volatility lead to singular perturbations of parabolic partial differential equations such as Black-Scholes equation in the case of stock markets. This research consists in developing the mathematical tools necessary to implement this new methodology in various situations such as American and exotic options in equity markets or term-structures of interest rates in fixed income markets. The first step in this method requires an identification of the time scales present in the hidden stochastic volatility processes. This has been done for S&P500 by using variograms and spectral analysis methods. Other tools and markets will be investigated The second step consists in modeling the evolution of the price process by means of stochastic differential equations with volatility coefficients driven by additional general ergodic processes running on faster time-scales. Risk-neutral probabilities are parameterized by market prices of volatility risk. In the Markovian case, derivative prices are obtained as solutions of partial differential equations, which are singular perturbations of the corresponding classical constant volatility equations. Asymptotic expansions are performed. The zero-order terms correspond to classical constant volatility situations. The first-order terms are shown to depend only on current prices and they are computed either explicitly or through the resolution of a partial differential equation. The case of American options leads to singular perturbations of free-boundary value problems that will be studied in detail. The hedging problem will be treated by a martingale decomposition approach also used in non-Markovian cases or infinite dimensional situations arising in fixed income markets. The next step consists in the calibration of the few parameters revealed in the first correction obtained in the expansion. This is done by using observed derivative prices in liquid markets and used for pricing other exotic derivatives. This new methodology to handle incomplete stochastic volatility markets gives rise to model independent pricing and hedging formulas easy to calibrate and to compute. Its mathematical analysis, the heart of this proposal, touches various fields of applied mathematics and leads to far reaching new tools and results. Non-Technical Description: This project addresses problems in financial mathematics of pricing and hedging derivative securities in an environment of uncertain and changing market volatility. These risk management problems are important to investors from large trading institutions to pension funds and to regulators of financial markets and economic activity such as the federal reserve. It is widely recognized that the simplicity of the famous Black-Scholes model which relates derivative prices to current stock prices and quantifies risk through a constant volatility parameter is no longer sufficient to capture modern market phenomena, especially since the crash. This research consists in the investigation of a new method for modeling, analysis and estimation that exploits the random nature and fast intrinsic time scale of the volatility. These observed volatility properties are used to derive corrections to the classical constant volatility formulas. These corrections reveal important groupings of market parameters, which otherwise are not obvious, and it turns out that estimation of these composites from market data is extremely efficient and stable. Much attention will be devoted to the more mathematically involved cases of American options, which can be exercised at any time before maturity, or other increasingly popular exotic options, which depend on the history of the underlying asset. New and original methods, based on the fundamental concept of martingale in probability theory, are developed to handle complex fixed income markets, for which the understanding of the time evolution of yield curves of interest rates is a real challenge. The goal of this research is to produce sophisticated mathematical results, which can be efficiently implemented and used by practitioners in quantitative finance doc2413 none Laskowski is continuing his research on three projects within the realm of model theory. First, in collaboration with Hart and Hrushovski, the investigator is seeking to determine the `fine structure of models of classifiable theories. This amounts to determining the amount of flexibility one has in choosing a decomposition tree for a model of such a theory. Recently, Laskowski has discovered that any shallow, strictly stable theory that does not have the dimensional order property interprets an infinite group. In collaboration with Shelah, Laskowski is seeking to understand the extent to which this group determines the dependence relation of dividing. Finally, in collaboration with Dolich, Laskowski is seeking to identify a class of theories that contains the simple theories, yet also a satisfactory notion of independence. Model theory is concerned with the interplay between theories (i.e., sets of sentences in a very formal language) and the classes of algebraic structures (models) that satisfy these sentences. Most of Laskowski s research to date concerns broad classes of theories, as opposed to concentrating on a specific theory or structure. Because of the breadth of the context, applications have been found in other areas of mathematics and in computer science, specifically in the analysis of structured data bases. These classes of theories are described in terms of the embeddability or non-embeddability of certain configurations of elements into models of the theory. Laskowski is continuing to analyze three classes of theories. In all three cases, the combinatorial assumptions on the class of theories imply that the models of such theories contain some algebraic content. The investigator is studying the extent to which this algebraic component determines the behavior of a model of the theory doc2414 none This project requests funds for a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER). In the wake of the recent conflict and vote for independence from Indonesia by the people of East Timor, East Timorese refugees have been relocated to various parts of Indonesia. This project will analyze the case of one group of refugees to Flores Island, assessing the impact of conflicts over land and other resources on resource allocation patterns and social organization. This initial project will generate an ethnographic base for further, long-term research. It specifically addresses the consequences of population displacements resulting from ethnic conflict and warfare, and thus has relevance to many other parts of the world. It also addresses issues of minority populations interactions with state military governments in the developing world. The researcher will be able to capture these processes as they unfold. Methods include community surveys and detailed interviewing with villagers, leaders, church officials, and government military officials doc2415 none This is an experimental condensed matter physics project that will investigate the dynamical properties of colloids, polymers and related fluids, commonly termed soft mattes. While the static structure of soft matter has been extensively examined, the dynamical properties on the most relevant length scales (10-100 nm) have been much more difficult to study. This project will yield new insight into the collective dynamics of soft materials, with particular emphasis on concentrated and entangled systems. To achieve the scattering wave vectors required, the emerging technique of x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (XPCS) will be employed. The role of hydrodynamic interactions and entanglements in the dynamics of isotropic suspensions of colloidal rods will also be studied. Dynam-ical critical behavior near the colloidal liquid-colloidal gas critical point in colloid polymer mixtures is another topic of interest. Understanding how a divergent viscosity, predicted for this dynamic universality class, affects the dynamics on length scales comparable to the inter-particle separation will improve our understanding of protein crystallization. The dynamics of entangled polymer systems will be investigated and compared to relevant theories. Importantly, these investigations will provide quantitative tests of the reptation model of polymer dynamics in the previously-inaccessible regime of long times, short distances, and flexible poly-mers. Students trained under this project will contribute to the pool of talent needed to fully utilize this nation s major investment in synchrotron-radiation-based research. In addition, the further development of x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy under this program will contribute to the scientific case for a new generation of even-more-powerful x-ray sources. %%% Complex fluids, such as fine dispersions of solid particles within a fluid (colloidal dispersions), blends of long-chain polymers, and mixtures of oil, water and soap are an important class of materials, commonly termed soft matter . While the static structure of such soft materials has been studied extensively, the molecular motions of complex fluids have been much more difficult to study. In this project, a novel synchrotron-based x-ray scatter-ing method - x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy - will be used to examine very slow motions on small distances, and should yield new insight into the thermal movements within colloidal and polymeric systems. Comparisons between the results obtained and available theories will provide a critical test of the theories. The insights gained may be practically important for improved understanding and control of such diverse phenomena as protein crystallization or the flow of polymeric fluids. Students trained to carry out cutting-edge x-ray scattering research under this program will contribute to the pool of talent needed to make use of this nation s major investment in synchrotron-radiation-based research. The graduates will be well-prepared to carry out academic, industrial, or governmental research. The further development of x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy under this program will contribute to the scientific case for a new generation of even-more-powerful x-ray sources doc2416 none The is a renewal individual investigator award to two professors at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The primary objective of this project is to carry out an experimental investigation of charge transport through precisely-engineered, self-assembled molecular-scale electronic devices. The recently identified phenomenon of electromechanical charge shuttling is expected to play a significant role in these nanodevices -- in particular, because these devices have parts that can move and vibrate. This project utilizes a device fabrication approach that integrates recently developed molecular recognition assembly techniques used in chemical research with electron-beam lithographic methods used in microelectronics research. Thymine diaminotriazine molecular recognition pairs will be used to position a nanometer-scale particle midway between closely-spaced lithographic electrodes. To explore the interplay of charge shuttling and single-electron charging effects, transport characteristics will be compared for devices using hard-spring and soft-spring organic bridging molecules. Single-electron transistor behavior will be investigated with the use of a capacitive gate electrode. The project also includes investigations on shuttle dynamics at the macroscopic scale, since much fundamental understanding can be revealed through experiments on larger-sized shuttle devices. This research is likely to impact the development and understanding of a variety of systems: nanodevices made of soft hard composites, flexible nanosystems, microelectromechanical (MEMS) devices, specific biological systems, and even particular macroscopic devices. This research project will provide training for graduate students and post docs in state-of-the-art techniques and concepts in this interdisciplinary field involving condensed matter physics and chemistry. This training will prepare the students for careers in academe, industry, or government laboratories. %%% Miniaturization technology has resulted in smaller, more powerful computers, smarter handheld devices, and gadgets of increased functionality. However, we are rapidly approaching the limit where the continued miniaturization of microelectronic devices by standard techniques will proceed no further. As a consequence it is crucial to develop reliable methods to create a class of devices at the molecular-size scale. This is a renewal award to two investigators at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst to follow the robust example set by nature itself - to construct nanometer-scale structures by exploiting self-assembly based on molecular recognition. In this project, novel single-electron transistor devices are self-fabricated in a fashion that mimics the way in which biological molecules are able to recognize other specific molecules. These devices are expected to carry electricity by an unusual means that involves electrons which are shuttled from one place to another. This research is likely to impact the development and understanding of a variety of systems: hybrid nanodevices made of molecules and nanoparticles, flexible nanosystems, microelectromechanical (MEMS) devices, specific biological systems, and even particular macroscopic devices. This research project will provide training for graduate students and post docs in state-of-the-art techniques and concepts in this interdisciplinary field involving condensed matter physics and chemistry. This training will prepare the students for careers in academe, industry, or government doc2417 none The project explores two areas that utilize ranked data. The first aims to develop statistical procedures that are robust to violations of assumptions while still working close to optimally when the assumption holds. There is a long history of such robust procedures based on ranking the data, that is, replacing the observed values in the data with the values ranks. This process helps to ameliorate the effects of unusually wild observations that can ruin an analysis. A number of multivariate situations in which there has previously been little work using rank procedures will be the main focus of this project. These include certain structural models defining the relationship of variables, testing for runs in multivariate data observed over time, estimating variances and covariances, and testing whether certain variables are conditionally independent given some other variables. A proposed method for defining multivariate ranks ( iterated ranks ) so that their distribution is independent of the distribution of the underlying observations will be explored. The second area looks at modeling rank data directly, where the data arise from judges ranking particular objects based on their preferences. One popular model posits that judges and objects can be arrayed along a line, where a judge is located nearest the judge s most preferred object, next closest to the second most preferred object, etc. A new model that also allows judges to locate themselves nearest the objects they prefer least will be considered. An extension of these models in which there is provision for a small percentage of judges to act not at all according to the model will also be considered doc2418 none Proposal A square partial sum of a double trigonometric series is the sum of all the terms with both indices less than or equal to a fixed value. Our first goal is to study square uniqueness for double trigonometric series. By this we mean that if the sequence of square partial sums of a double trigonometric series converges to zero everywhere, then the series is necessarily the trivial series. If this is true, we will then try to generalize this result to higher dimensions. The corresponding statements for circular spherical convergence have been shown by Shapiro in dimension 2 and by Bourgain in higher dimensions; and by Ash-Freiling-Rinne and, independently, Tetunashvili for the unrestrictedly rectangular convergence case in any dimension. There is some evidence that square uniqueness may actually be false. For example, there is an everywhere square convergent double trigonometric series with coefficients having faster than polynomial growth rate. Our second goal is to study a related question: uniqueness for multiple Walsh series under different types of summation modes. The new approach we will take is to use classical harmonic analysis methods. By combining the traditional martingale approach with the new techniques developed from recent progress made in the area of multiple trigonometric series, we expect much progress can be made here. This in turn may give insights into the square uniqueness question for trigonometric series. The third goal is to study the long standing open question about the pointwise circular convergence for Fourier series of square integrable functions. We will try to shed some light on this by studying the corresponding question for double Walsh series, which are special form of tree-index and two parameter martingales. Almost any surface is composed of simpler ones by a process called multiple Fourier analysis. A major long standing problem in pure mathematics is to show that this construction can be accomplished in only one way. This is called the problem of uniqueness. There are about a half dozen main varieties of this problem depending on just how the simpler surfaces are combined to make the general surface. Gathering the simple surfaces in different orders may lead to different resultant surfaces. For certain gathering procedures, uniqueness has been proved. That is, for such gathering, there is only one way to produce the resultant surface. The most important gathering procedure for which the uniqueness remains an open question is called square convergence. We will try to determine if uniqueness holds for this procedure. Another way to construct a surface is to build it up as a combination of two dimensional oscillating square waves. Such a process is called a multiple Walsh series. We will consider the uniqueness question in this context also. We hope that understanding one of the two methods of construction may lead to insights about the other doc2419 none Rabalais This award to Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON) provides shipboard technical support, shore-based support, instrument maintenance and instrument calibration for researchers using R V Pelican, a research vessel operated by LUMCON as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The technical support awarded here will assist NSF-funded researchers conduct oceanographic studies, primarily in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, in CY and beyond doc2420 none This work is centered on the phase behavior, structure and governing interactions in a general class of biomolecular self-assembled systems, where condensed arrangements of charged biopolymers are formed through their interactions with oppositely charged micro-ions or macro-ions of varying complexity. Intuitively, two like-charged objects in aqueous solution are expected to repel one another. .In the presence of multivalent macro-ions or micro-ions, however, many biopolymers can attract one another and condense into compact ordered states. Examples include DNA condensation by charged histone proteins in chromosome: and the hierarchical organization of the actin cytoskeleton. The origin of this attraction is at present poorly understood. This project aims to delineate the physical mechanisms responsible for these complex molecular organizations. Various forms of counterion correlations have been proposed as possible mechanisms for the observed anomalous attraction. These ideas will be tested for tile first time, along with an investigation of the global biopolymer phase behavior, using a combination of synchrotron x-ray scattering, epifluorescence microscopy, and electron microscopy. These entropically modulated electrostatic interactions will be exploited to develop new self-assembled Systems with a wide range of applications, including drug or gene delivery vehicles, templates for protein crystallization, and biosensors. The multi-disciplinary nature of this work will provide unique educational opportunities for the new kind of hybrid scientists necessary in this emerging field. The students will be prepared for a range of careers in academia, industry, or government %%% This work is directed at the structure and governing interactions of a general class of biomolecular self-assembled materials, where condensed arrangements of charged biological polymers are formed through their interactions with oppositely charged micro-ions or macro-ions of varying complexity. Intuitively, two like-charged objects in aqueous solution are expected to repel one another. In the presence of multivalent macro-ions or micro-ions, however, many biological polymers can attract one another and condense into compact ordered states. Examples include DNA condensation by charged proteins in chromosomes and the hierarchical organization of the actin cytoskeleton. The origin of this attraction has been the recent subject of intense theoretical debate, but no consensus has emerged. Further, there exists no quantitative empirical evidence to discriminate among the many suggested explanations. Using a range of advanced experimental techniques, including synchrotron x-ray scattering, fluorescence microscopy, and electron microscopy, this program aims to delineate the physical mechanisms responsible for the formation of these complex self-assembled biomolecular systems, and to develop new materials based on their novel governing interactions. These material systems have a wide range of applications, including drug or gene delivery systems, templates for protein crystallization, mid biosensors. The multidisciplinary nature of this work will provide unique educational opportunities for the new kind of hybrid scientists required for this emerging field. The students will be prepared for a range of careers in academia, industry, or government doc2421 none The principal investigator will convene a workshop of approximately 40 participants to assess current scientific needs in ocean carbon cycle research and to discuss the possibilities of proposing a new research initiative aimed at addressing those needs. The workshop on Ocean Carbon Transport, Exchanges, and Transformations (OCTET) would be designed to fit within the framework of the Carbon Cycle Science Plan (CCSP) prepared for consideration for consideration by the federal agencies and addopted by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. As its point of departure, the primary goal of OCTET will be to characterized physical, geochemical, and biological controls governing the regional and vertical partitioning of inorganic and organic carbon pools in the world ocean, including the spatial and temporal variations in the partial pressure of carbon dioxide in the surface ocean. The principal investigator will manage workshop preparations, execution, and distribution of its scientific findings doc2422 none Schonmann Schonmann plans to work on various projects in the areas of interacting particle systems, statistical mechanics, percolation, and other related subjects in Probability Theory. The main objects of interest in this research are the ergodic behavior and the relaxation patterns of several interacting particle systems, including Ising models, contact processes and other lattice spin systems. Percolation theory is also a major object of concern in this proposal, because of its strong relations to these processes and its simplicity, which makes it a paradigm in the study of probabilistic models with many components. A substantial part of the proposal refers to the study of the above mentioned processes on arbitrary graphs -- an important current trend in the area. Several of the proposed problems have their motivation in phenomena observed in nature as, for example, phase transitions, critical behavior, metastable behavior of systems in the vicinity of phase transition regions and domain formation and growth. On a more informal and broad level one can see the objects of interest in this research in the following fashion. A system contains a large number of similar components and each component interacts in a simple way with a few other ones, which are near to it in some sense. For instance one can think of the atoms in a crystal interacting when they are close enough, or individuals in a large population which may suffer or not from some infection with contamination occurring between neighbors. The local interaction may involve a substantial amount of randomness, but since the system as a whole is large, one expects and indeed observes a much more predictable behavior at the global level. A great deal of interest in such systems stems from the fact that the qualitative behavior of the whole system may depend in non-trivial ways on parameters which are built into the local interactions, but which only affect those in a smooth way (e.g., the rate of infection between neighboring individuals in our second example above). The general issues of interest are then the understanding of which sort of equilibria can be reached by such types of stochastic dynamics, how an equilibrium state is reached, and how the parameters which affect the local rules may affect the answers to these questions doc2423 none This grant supports further work on some recently discovered algorithms for numerical work in quantum magnetism and on the properties of strongly correlated electrons. The two methods, originally discovered by the PI and collaborators, are diagrammatic Monte Carlo (DMC) and Worm-algorithm. The former involves direct simulation of diagrammatic expansions while the latter is a novel simulation strategy involving extended configuration space. The two strategies make it possible to address various problems which have remained unsolved so far. They are also an improvement in efficiency, in both speed and accuracy for problems which have been studied by other means. Finally, these techniques are associated with either new representation (momentum instead of coordinate, grand canonical instead of canonical ensemble) or simulation of new entities (e.g. Green functions, which allow on to extract elementary excitation spectrum or even kinetic coefficients). The specific problems where these techniques will be applied, include, polarons and exciton-polaron interaction in semiconductors, holes in quantum Antiferromagnets and quantum gases at ultra low temperatures. %%% This grant is being awarded for further development of two new numerical techniques developed by this PI. These are diagrammatic-Monte-Carlo methods and Worm algorithm. These techniques can allow one to numerically attack problems which have so far resisted a solution or even a partial understanding. The techniques are believed to be both accurate and extremely fast. They will be used to study a variety of so far unsolved problems in the properties of novel materials doc2424 none This individual investigator award is to a professor at Brown University for a project that will explore the physics of magnetoelectronic microstructures. For four decades, the operation of semiconductors has been based on the charge properties of electrons. Now, a new type of electronics- magnetoelectronics - has emerged, which utilizes both the electron spin and charge to enable devices performing novel functions. The objective of this project is to understand and solve some outstanding problems in magnetoelectronic microstructures. The research will focus on systems that are composed of a few magnetic domains. In particular the project will include investigations of magnetization reversal processes, and studies of the origins of magnetically induced electric noise and along with the development of methods to suppress this noise. This research will lead to a more comprehensive understanding of magnetism in microstructures. The results should contribute to the technological development of magnetoelectronics, and to the development of the human resources needed in this critical technology. %%% This individual investigator award is to a professor at Brown University for a project that will explore the physics of magnetoelectronic microstructures. This is an important field for the high-tech industries in the new millenium. For four decades, the operation of semiconductors has been based on the charge properties of electrons. Now, a new type of electronics- magnetoelectronics - has emerged, which utilizes both the electron spin and charge to enable devices performing novel functions. Magnetoelectronic devices are increasingly used in areas such as computer information storage, magnetic sensing, communication, and automobiles. The objective of this project is to understand and solve some outstanding problems in magnetoelectronic microstructures. The research will focus on systems that are composed of a few magnetic domains. In particular the project will include investigations of magnetization reversal processes, and studies of the origins of magnetically induced electric noise and along with the development of methods to suppress this noise. This project will lead to a more comprehensive understanding of magnetism in microstructures. The results should contribute to the technological development of magnetoelectronics, which is a critical technology for our Nation s economy. The project will support graduate students, human resources needed for the high-tech industries doc2425 none This condensed matter physics project concentrates on the effects of Lagrangian chaos (chaotic particle motion and fluid mixing) on multiphase processes: phase separation and coalescence; droplet break-up, and aggregation of suspended particles. There is significant interest in these processes, both from fundamental and practical perspectives. Previous research has studied the effects of simple shearing flows on multiphase processes; however, those studies did not consider advection of drops between regions with varying shear. Advection is particularly important in light of recent discoveries that Lagrangian chaos occurs for flows that are not chaotic or turbulent themselves; rather, chaotic trajectories occur even in well-ordered, laminar flows. This research will generalize previous measures used to characterize multiphase processes (e.g., the Capillary number) to account for advection in general and Lagrangian chaos in particular. A series of experiments and numerical simulations are proposed in simple two- and three-dimensional fluid flows composed of chains of alternating vortices. The studies are done entirely with undergraduates; the research provides them with an opportunity to experience novel research at a time when they must make important career decisions. Furthermore, the techniques that they learn help prepare them for graduate school and or careers in academics, industry or government. %%% Lagrangian chaos is the process by which impurities in a fluid flow can follow trajectories that are chaotic, even if the flow itself is very simple and well-ordered. Experiments are proposed to study the effects of Lagrangian chaos on multiphase processes, which involve fluids containing either a second, immiscible fluid (such as oil in water) or suspended particles. Studies will be done in both two- and three-dimensional flows, and the experiments will be complemented by numerical simulations. The research is applicable to a wide range of industrial processes, since many applications employ multiphase fluid systems. Previous research focused on how simple shearing flows break up immiscible fluids into smaller droplets or prevent them from coalescing into larger drops. However, those studies did not consider chaotic motion of drops between regions of varying shear. The proposed research will fill the gap in this understanding. The studies are done entirely with undergraduates; the research provides them with opportunities to experience novel research at a time when they must make important career decisions. F Furthermore, the techniques that they learn help prepare them for graduate school and or careers in academics, industry or government doc2426 none This project, which is supported in the Analytical and Surface Chemistry program develops new electrochemical methods for studying membrane-bound enzymes in complex media. Conducted by Dr. Albert Sneden and his group at Virginia Commonwealth University, the project prepares and characterizes stable assemblies of cytochrome c oxidase (CCO) adsorbed on a lipid bilayer that is anchored into a silver-coated gold electrode. A quartz crystal microbabance is used to coat the electrode with an optimum layer of silver. The electrode is then covered with octadectyl mercaptan to form an anchor for the bilayer. Atomic Force Microscopy is used to confirm the structure of the membrane. Electrochemical experiments have confirmed that such a bilayer mimics the in vivo reactivities of CCO. The known reaction between cyanide and CCO forms the basis for these studies. The electron transfer reaction between reduced cytochrome under flow conditions, CCO in the bilayer, and the electrode is characterized as a function of cyanide concentration, steady state turnover rate, and oxygen concentration. This research develops new electrochemical methods for studying membrane-bound enzymes in complex media. Results from this research will be useful for assessing the potential efficacy of compounds as enzyme inhibitors and will be important in areas such as drug testing doc2427 none An international conference on functionally-graded materials (FGM) will be held September 10-14, in Estes Park, Colorado. This conference will bring together scientists and engineers on a commonality of themes related to spatial variations of material properties. With a continuing emphasis on mechanics, the FGM concept has been extended into nearly all applications of materials as well as into other types of materials, such as polymers and bio-materials. Holding this meeting in the United States affords an opportunity for many domestic researchers to become more familiar with this highly interdisciplinary topic in North America. Approximately 200 people will participate in this conference. They will come from 22 countries around the world and be have industrial, national laboratory, and academic backgrounds. Support for this conference will be used to enable students of participating faculty to attend the meeting. Functionally gradient materials are of increasing importance since today s devices and those of the future will increasingly use materials integrated with another material. This conference will expand the boundaries of the knowledge on FGMs doc2428 none This project, which is supported in the Analytical and Surface Chemistry program, continues research that focuses on developing a thorough understanding of multi-electron reactions with emphasis on the energetics and kinetics of the processes. Conducted by Dr. Dennis Evans and his group at the University of Delaware, the project includes several parts. One part uses the behavior of certain molecules to study potential inversion, the phenomenon where the insertion or removal of the second electron in a two electron process occurs more easily than does removal of the first electron. Fast scan cyclic voltammetry is then used to identify the point at which the structural changes associated with potential inversion occurs. Another part of the project develops an improved fundamental understanding of the mechanism of electrode reactions. This improved understanding is used to investigate and improve procedures for the electrochemical generation of acids. Using a novel electric-field promoted hydrolysis, protic acids are produced by oxidation of hydrogen and a palladium membrane-based cell for acid generation is constructed and tested. The fundamental understanding of multi-electron-transfer reactions that this research develops will help demonstrate the efficacy of electrochemical synthesis, which in turn could lead to more environmentally friendly processes in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries doc2429 none A lacuna of a linear hyperbolic differential operator is a domain inside the propagation cone where its fundamental solution vanishes identically. The study of lacunas for general hyperbolic equations was initiated by I.G.Petrovsky ( ). Extending and clarifying his results, Atiyah, Bott and Garding ( -73) developed a profound and complete theory for hyperbolic operators with constant coefficients. In contrast, much less is known about lacunas for operators with variable coefficients. The investigation of this classical problem with a view of generalizing the Petrovsky-Atiyah-Bott-Garding theory is one of the primary purposes of my project. In particular, the efforts will be aimed at resolving the old question of J.Hadamard on explicit determination of second order analytic wave operators satisfying Huygens principle on Minkowski spaces. Some new conjectures and problems (mostly from Analysis and Algebraic Geometry) arising in connection with the theory of lacunas will be also explored. The study of propagation of waves in continuous media is one of the fundamental problems in Mathematical Physics with many important applications in natural sciences and engineering. Of special interest (both from practical and theoretical point of view) is the question of when the waves may propagate without diffusion to allow the possibility of transmitting `clean-cut (sharp) signals. Well-studied in homogeneous spaces this question remains largely open in general. My project aims to develop new mathematical tools and techniques to investigate this difficult problem in the case of inhomogeneous and anisotropic media. The results sought are of fundamental interest and significance in mathematical theory of wave propagation and may have applications in related physical disciplines including the theory of electromagnetic and acoustic waves, space communication technologies, magnetohydrodynamics, crystal optics, etc doc2430 none Elham Izadi The purpose of E. Izadi s research is to better understand principally polarized abelian varieties and their moduli spaces, the moduli spaces of curves and their relation with the moduli spaces of principally polarized abelian varieties to which they map. Her project has two main parts. In the first part she relates the Hodge conjectures for an abelian variety to those for its theta divisor. In particular, one of the steps involved in proving the Hodge conjectures for an abelian variety is to prove them for the primitive cohomology of its theta divisor. For this, she needs to find appropriate curves in the theta divisor. These also have applications to the theory of Prym-Tjurin varieties. In the second part she reduces the Hodge conjecture for abelian fourfolds to proving a specific result about a particular family of curves in the abelian variety: she also works on this. This research is in the field of algebraic geometry, whose main objects of study are algebraic varieties. These are classically defined as the sets of simultaneous zeros of polynomials. Curves and abelian varieties are special algebraic varieties which classically appear in the work of Abel, Jacobi and Riemann among others, who developed the theory of modular forms. They have applications in many areas of mathematics including number theory; in particular, they were used in Faltings proof of the Mordell Conjecture and in Wiles proof of the Semistable Shimura Taniyama Weil Conjecture. Abelian varieties make ideal testing grounds for important conjectures in algebraic geometry such as the Hodge Conjectures. These are deep conjectures which concern the analytic structure of algebraic varieties. They were originally formulated in the form of questions by Hodge, then reformulated and corrected by others including some of the greatest mathematicians of this century such as Grothendieck. They are central to the field of algebraic geometry, one of the oldest parts of modern mathematics, but one which has blossomed to the point where it has, in the past 20 years, solved problems that have stood for centuries. Today, the field uses methods not only from algebra, but also from analysis and topology, and conversely it is extensively used in those fields. Moreover, it has proved itself useful in fields as diverse as physics, computer science, cryptography, coding theory and robotics doc2431 none This condensed matter physics project utilizes time-resolved spectroscopies, and high spatial- and energy-resolved spectroscopies to probe the static and dynamic character of electronic states of individual CdSe ZnSe self-assembled quantum dots. The excited state structure of the electronic levels will be probed by resonant, Raman and photoluminescence spectroscopies. Polarized photoluminescence and magnetic field effects will be used to identify the symmetry properties of the states. Dynamics of transitions among the quantum dot electronic states are studied by time-resolved photoluminescence or pump-probe picosecond femtosecond excitations. Of particular interest is the physics of interactions between closely associated quantum dots as well as interactions of excitations with optic and acoustic photons. The undergraduate and graduate students involved in this research will be trained in modern state-of-the-art techniques for synthesizing and characterizing nanostructured materials. %%% This condensed matter physics project use optical methods to electrons and holes which are confined to nanostructures where the length scale is comparable to the wave nature of the particles. Such quantum dots can be made by utilizing the tendency of nature to self organize itself. Just as dew does not continuously wet a leaf but often organizes into a layer of droplets, cadmium sulfide when deposited on a zinc selenide surfaces forms small nanoscale solid particles which are know as quantum dots because of their small size. Extensive experiments in recent years have shown that these structures confine electrons to states that are reminiscent of the electron states in atoms or molecules. The electronic states in the quantum dots are not as well understood as the molecular electronic states, ant the quantum dot states can potentially be tuned by varying the size and composition of the dots. This project will largely use high resolution optical techniques to probe the energy structure and dynamics of electrons in the quantum dots. Graduate students and undergraduate students associated with the project will be trained in state-of-the-art techniques for making and characterizing nanostructured materials doc2432 none Spano This grant supports the theoretical work of this mid-career PI on light absorption and emission from conjugated polymer films. The work here is focussed on the absorption and emission of light by aggregates of the model compounds, oligo- (p-phenylenevinylene) and oligo-thiophene and their derivatives. The analysis is broadly divided between two aggregate packing motifs: (i) edge-to-face packing, which leads to cyclic tetramers (pinwheels) as well as the large herringbone lattices, and (ii) cofacial packing, which leads to p stacks. The aggregate eigenstates are vibrationally dressed excitons, determined primarily by the competition between the delocalizing influence of intermolecular energy (and or charge) transfer and the localizing influence of intramolecular excited state nuclear relaxation. The primary objective is to understand how exciton-vibrational coupling and the degree of charge separation influence photophysical properties. %%% This grant supports the work of this midcareer theoretical chemist in a comprehensive study of the phenomena of light emission and absorption in conjugated polymer films. It is expected that soon the light-emitting diodes and other optoelectronic devices will be made out of conjugated polymer films. This will show up, most likely, in flat panel displays. Polymer films can be made to lase via optical pumping although there is hope that they may lase electrically as well. Despite the many experiments designed to uncover the mechanism, by which they produce light, a fundamental understanding of light emission in polymer films is far from complete largely because of the complicating presence of strong intermolecular interactions. The research here will attempt to address these and other related issues doc2433 none Augspurger This project addresses aspects of island biogeography theory in relation to ecological restoration. The research will evaluate whether larger island size and or shorter distance from seed source increase the rate of seed recruitment, seedling establishment, and subsequent island expansion of woody species in a sea of abandoned pasture. Artificial tree islands will be created by planting woody cuttings of two species (one that fixes nitrogen and one that does not fix nitrogen). The two species will be evaluated for their relative ability to serve as island regeneration foci . In addition, to evaluate the efficacy of the two artificial island treatments on regeneration processes, comparisons will be made to three other habitats: open pasture, remnant islands, and secondary forest. This study will contribute a test of a theoretically based and possibly universally applicable model for accelerating succession in degraded pastures that have become widespread in tropical regions doc2434 none Perlman Andersson Statistical models based on acyclic directed graphs (ADGs) (also called directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), Bayesian networks, or influence diagrams) are particularly well behaved, easily interpretable, and computationally convenient. In the late s, ADG models were generalized to adicyclic graphs or chain graphs, which include both directed and undirected edges, hence can simultaneously represent dependences some of which are directional and some associative. The investigators will study the Markov and statistical properties of a new class of chain graph models that retains many of the desirable properties of ADG models. Problems to be investigated include the completeness and faithfulness of these new models, determination of their local Markov property, and characterization of their Markov equivalence classes by means of an appropriate essential graph. The investigators will also study a very general class of Wishart distributions on homogeneous cones, in which transitive acyclic directed graphs (TADGs) play a central role. E. B. Vinberg s classical characterization of homogeneous cones has been found to reveal a fundamental relationship between normal models satisfying TADG Markov conditions and this general class of Wishart distributions. This class includes all Wishart distributions previously known in multivariate statistical analysis, including the hyper-Wishart distributions and Wishart distributions associated with normal lattice conditional independence (LCI) models, as well as a great many new ones. Additional topics to be investigated include the limitations of the Neyman-Pearson, likelihood ratio, and maximum likelihood criteria for multiparameter hypothesis-testing and estimation problems, and the efficacy of the likelihood ratio test for testing order-restricted and multivariate one-sided alternatives. One of the most central ideas of statistical science is the assessment of dependences among a set of stochastic variables. The familiar concepts of correlation, regression, and prediction are manifestations of this idea, and many aspects of causal relationships ultimately rest on representations of multivariate dependence. Graphical Markov models (GMM) use graphs i.e. networks, either undirected, directed, or mixed, to represent multivariate dependencies in a visual and computationally efficient manner. A GMM is usually constructed by specifying local dependences for each variable, i.e. node of the graph, in terms of its immediate neighbors, parents, or both, yet can represent a highly varied and complex system of multivariate dependences by means of the global structure of the graph. The local specification permits efficiencies in modeling, inference, and probabilistic calculations. Among their many applications, GMMs have become prevalent in statistical science for the analysis of categorical data in contingency tables, for the modeling of spatially-dependent processes such as the spread of epidemics in human and animal populations, and for the development of early warning systems for severe weather conditions; in computer science (as Bayesian networks) for information processing and retrieval, for robotics, computer vision, and pattern recognition, for the debugging of complex programs (such as Windows 98), and for the representation of expert systems for medical diagnosis; and in decision science (as influence diagrams) as models for information flow and control and for combining the opinions of many decision-makers. A crucial feature of these models is that they are designed for fast computational implementation, thereby facilitating the development of software that can reason about real world problems doc2435 none Proposal Principal Investigator: Liviu I. Nicolaescu This project involves topological and geometric aspects of the theory of three-dimensional Seiberg-Witten monopoles and it addresses two general guiding questions. The first question is about the topological significance of the monopole count. Meng and Taubes have shown that on a three-manifold with nontrivial homology this count is given by Reidemeister-Turaev torsion. In the case of rational homology spheres numerical experiments with Seifert manifolds suggest that a suitably altered monopole count determine in a very elegant fashion both the Casson-Walker invariant and the Reidemeister-Turaev torsion. The first part of the project is devoted to proving this. The second question is about the geometric meaning of three-dimensional monopoles. The link of a complex surface singularity is endowed with a natural CR geometry and it is natural to ask how much of it does a monopole capture. More precisely we address the following fundamental question: how do monopoles look like as the link of the singularity collapses onto the exceptional divisor of a resolution of the singularity? The three-dimensional world has been a source of inspiration for many important developments in algebraic topology. It is within the reach of our physical intuition so some visualization is possible (think of a cube) yet there is plenty of room for surprises (think of gluing in pairs the opposite faces of the cube). One modern point of view is that, if presented in a favorable light, the three-dimensional world will reveal its mysteries. The mathematicians phrase this in a more sober way. If one can find a nice geometry on a three-manifold then one can unlock some of its topological features. The monopoles are geometric objects introduced to the mathematical world by physicists. One could think of them as signals produced by a three-dimensional space. These ``signals depend on how we look at the manifold. Since they appeared on the mathematical scene they have provided us with surprising insights about the structure of low-dimensional worlds. This project is about counting these signals in a meaningful way and then understanding the significance of each one of them individually when observed under a favorable light doc2436 none Petukhov This theoretical research award supports work to explore spin-dependent tunneling and hopping conduction in semiconductor-based magnetic nanocomposites and heterostructures. If successful, the research will facilitate the development of novel quantum devices which merge magnetism with semiconductor technologies. Three projects will be done: (1) theoretical studies of non-coherent spin-dependent transport in nanocomposites of GaAs Rare-Earth-Group-V and GaAs Mn-based compounds, as well as III-V and IV-VI-based dilute magnetic semiconductors with a random and clustered distribution of magnetic ions; (2) a theoretical study of coherent spin-dependent transport in confined magnetic structures such as magnetic quantum wells and quantum dots, e.g., ErAs or GaMnAs quantum wells in GaAs, and ErAs, MnAs or MnGa quantum dots in GaAs; first-principles electronic structure calculations of bulk and confined magnetic materials and their interfaces with III-V semiconductors. %%% This theoretical research will explore properties of magnetic materials and behavior integrated with semiconductors in the form of quantum dots and heterostructures. While providing a rich field of fundamental phenomena, these materials hold great promise for device applications doc2437 none One of the great outstanding problems and challenges to condensed matter physics is a determination and understanding of the phases and properties of solid hydrogen at high density. A number of phases have been predicted, in particular the Wigner-Huntington transition to the atomic metallic state, which may be a High-Tc superconductor. In addition, detailed electronic band structure calculations predict that the high-density molecular phase should be metallic and exhibit high temperature superconductivity. Currently there are three phases known to exist experimentally, the low-pressure phase, the broken symmetry phase at a pressure of 110 GPa, and the A-phase at 150 GPa. This research program will pursue the study of solid hydrogen and its isotopes, deuterium and HD, to multi-megabar pressures. An effort will be dedicated to extend the pressure to the 400 GPa range in the search for the metallic phases of hydrogen. The DC electrical conductivity of the A-phase will be measured as function of temperature and pressure in order to determine whether hydrogen is metallic at these pressures or, if not, will determine the band gap as a function of pressure. Newly developed diamond anvil cells (DACs) with high quality, flaw-free and very low impurity synthetic diamonds will be use in these studies. These improved DACs are expected to overcome the limitations inherent in conventional designs. Spectroscopic techniques will be used to search for and explore new phase lines. The conductive properties will be investigated either by DC conductivity measurements or optical spectroscopy, characterized by a Drude free-electron spectrum. A determination of the high-pressure phases and their properties will be a major accomplishment for theory and experiment. Graduate students and post doctoral research associates will participate in this research and will thereby acquire knowledge and skills that prepare them for employment in industry, academia, or government. %%% One of the great outstanding problems and challenges to condensed matter physics is the determination and understanding of the atom structure and properties of solid hydrogen at high density. Hydrogen freezes at -260 degrees centigrade. The solid has low density and is transparent to the eye. At high density the molecules are closer and the solid is predicted to become a metal and possibly become a high-temperature superconductor. At still higher densities the molecules are predicted to dissociate so that the solid is made up of atoms, rather than molecules, at the lattice sites. This transition to atomic-metallic hydrogen with its accompanying superconductivity was predicted over 65 years ago but has so far eluded detection. It is now believed that pressures in the range of 3 to 4 million atmospheres are required to achieve the densities needed to produce atomic-metallic hydrogen. It is the goal of this research to generate such pressures with so-called Diamond Anvil Cells (DACs) that are specially designed to overcome the limitations of conventional DACs. Electrical and optical spectroscopic methods will be used to search for evidence of the atomic-metallic state of hydrogen. The production of atomic-metallic hydrogen would be a major accomplishment, not only scientifically, but very likely also for technological reasons, for the same theory that predicts its existence also predicts that it will be a superconductor at room temperature, even after the pressure is released. These predictions are at the center of current debate about the properties of hydrogen under extreme conditions. A successful outcome of this project will not only settle one of the outstanding problems of contemporary condensed matter physics but will also open up new avenues for scientific discoveries and applications. This research is conducted with the assistance of graduate students and postdoctoral research associates. They will thereby acquire knowledge and skills in a contemporary area of condensed matter physics that will prepare them for productive employment in industry, academia, or government doc2438 none This proposal considers fundamental statistical research into the theories governing clustering of multivariate objects and variables, and the interrelation of classification and probability in prediction and explanation. The emphases will be on classification probabilities, probability matching, probability searching algorithms, topological and block clustering, and multimodality. Applications of these techniques include grouping and ultimate identification of biological entities, the analysis of block voting behavior and the determination of multimodal collections in large databases doc2439 none The proposal focuses on problems in Combinatorial Algebra related to The Burnside Problem and to Lie algebras of finite growth. The three main problems are (i) the version of the restricted Burnside problem with periodic primitive elements, (ii) tau-property of Golod - Shafarevich groups and (iii) classification of conformal algebras of Gelfand-Kirillov dimension one. These problems are motivated by deep applications in Geometry, Topology and Mathematical Physics doc2440 none Mendillo, Michael A renewal of a 3-year grant to operate the CEDAR Optical Tomographic Imaging Facility (COTIF) and for the scientific analysis of the results obtained is proposed in which COTIF capabilities will be applied to several aspects of sub-auroral physics related to sources of stable red auroral (SAR) arcs. Now that solar maximum is approaching, the re-appearance of SAR arcs in late offers the first ever opportunity to study the latitude-altitude dependence of volume emission rates for SAR arcs, the only possible way to access the height-dependent excitation physics. Issues of thermal excitation, high speed convection excitation, and augmentation of emission by proton precipitation can now be addressed. To conduct the latter study, the PI proposes to field a CEDAR funded high-throughput-imaging-Eschell-spectrograph (HITIES). Modeling expertise for SAR arc mechanisms is in place, and a leading expert on proton modeling will join the group as part of another program. New to this effort is the application of imaging science capabilities from COTIF and HITIES to the study of mesospheric gravity waves. A CEDAR Post-doctoral award to Dr. Steven Smith will allow for the study of wave sources and dissipation mechanisms from these datasets. With new FPI and LIDAR instruments being installed at Millstone Hill for the CEDAR-TIMED collaboration, a truly robust set of optical diagnostics will finally be in place for the first comprehensive study of wave activity at a sub-auroral site. Mendillo, Michael A renewal of a 3-year grant to operate the CEDAR Optical Tomographic Imaging Facility (COTIF) and for the scientific analysis of the results obtained is proposed in which COTIF capabilities will be applied to several aspects of sub-auroral physics related to sources of stable red auroral (SAR) arcs. Now that solar maximum is approaching, the re-appearance of SAR arcs in late offers the first ever opportunity to study the latitude-altitude dependence of volume emission rates for SAR arcs, the only possible way to access the height-dependent excitation physics. Issues of thermal excitation, high speed convection excitation, and augmentation of emission by proton precipitation can now be addressed. To conduct the latter study, the PI proposes to field a CEDAR funded high-throughput-imaging-Eschell-spectrograph (HITIES). Modeling expertise for SAR arc mechanisms is in place, and a leading expert on proton modeling will join the group as part of another program. New to this effort is the application of imaging science capabilities from COTIF and HITIES to the study of mesospheric gravity waves. A CEDAR Post-doctoral award to Dr. Steven Smith will allow for the study of wave sources and dissipation mechanisms from these datasets. With new FPI and LIDAR instruments being installed at Millstone Hill for the CEDAR-TIMED collaboration, a truly robust set of optical diagnostics will finally be in place for the first comprehensive study of wave activity at a sub-auroral site doc2441 none Wright Magnetic resonance micro-imaging (u-MRI) has become an invaluable tool for the microscopic characterization of materials due to its non-destructive, non-invasive nature and the rich variety of available contrast mechanisms, although many of the techniques for generating contrast suffer from low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). A technological innovation of recent years, however, has been the use of high-Tc superconductor (HTS) materials to construct radio frequency (RF) detector coils of extremely high fidelity for greatly increased SNR in u-MRI of biological tissues. While the rewards of cryogenically cooling the RF coil can be great, as recently demonstrated for conventional coils made of copper, the coils are typically cooled to about 40 K and must be maintained in close proximity to the (body-temperature) tissue being imaged. Their implementation thus has posed significant challenges to existing cryogenic technology, with current solutions raising concern over the hazards of liquid cryogens. Very recently, however, a new type of two-stage Joule-Thomson micro-refrigerator has been developed, capable of sustained operation at 35 K. This work proposes a new approach to cryogenic probe design, applicable to coils made from both conventional and HTS materials, that involves precision cooling by means of such micro-miniature Joule-Thomson refrigerators. This new approach to be explored and developed represents a substantial change in the existing technology important to u-MRI as well as an innovation in cryogenic engineering specific to this field and is likely to have broad implications for biomedical research. It also contains an element of risk in that it seeks to apply novel Joule-Thomson micro-refrigeration technology to advance the emerging sub-field of u-MRI cryogenics, yet it has potential to admit imaging and spectroscopy techniques previously precluded by the limits of SNR. The micro-cryo-probes to be developed in this work will have application as new tools for u-MRI and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy of normal and pathological tissues and biological structures of medical significance. Applications may include in vivo imaging of trabecular bone structure and spinal cord injuries, ex vivo imaging of the mouse brain, and in vitro high-field NMR spectroscopy of biologically relevant cells and fluids. It is envisioned that such tools will permit more accurate quantitative analyses of tissue microstructure and composition, with impact on the understanding, diagnosis and treatment of metabolic bone diseases, spinal cord injury and repair, genetic expression in the developing brain, and cancer doc2442 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Stability Theory of Nonlinear Waves Strauss This project studies mathematical models of various kinds of waves that occur in the theories of plasmas, of semiconductors, of fluids, of mechanical vibrations and of other branches of physical science. The rigorous mathematics makes it possible both to make stable numerical computations in, and to understand the qualitative features of, such physical phenomena. Stability and instability phenomena are investigated, particularly in the kinetic theory of charged particles. Numerical simulation of semiconducting materials provides the rationale for a study of hybrid quantum-kinetic modeling. Stability problems for a variety of other kinds of waves, such as solitary waves in fluids and equilibria in solids, are also explored. Energy conserving waves of marginal stability, which occur in many of these scientific theories, are emphasized. Methods of mathematical analysis are the primary tool employed in the investigations. One purpose of this project is to analyze the structure of semiconducting materials that are used to manufacture computer chips. As chips become smaller, quantum effects become increasingly important. Since simulation of the quantum mechanics of an entire device is computationally infeasible, this project investigates hybrid models combining macroscopic kinetic theory for the bulk of a device with quantum descriptions in localized regions. Another goal of the project is to study the stability of physical plasmas, important in the shielding effect of the earth s ionosphere as well as in fusion reactors. The development of personnel, including graduate and undergraduate students, who are trained in the precise mathematical analysis of applied scientific problems, is an important outgrowth of the project doc2443 none This proposal is concerned with the design and development of completely new kinds of ion exchange materials with greatly improved properties. Two distinct families of materials are proposed, namely 1) ion exchange resins coated on glass fibers and 2) activated carbon fibers where the surfaces of the micropores are functionalized with acidic or basic groups. The use of a fiber form is expected to provide a 10x improvement in kinetics of exchange and regeneration as compared to the commercially available ion exchange beads. With respect to ion exchange fibers, research will focus on two types of systems. The first family consists of cationic and anionic exchange resins coated on glass fiber substrates. Problems that should be overcome with respect to currently available ion exchange beads include minimizing osmotic shock effects, elimination of environmentally unfriendly solvents used in bead manufacture, and reducing the costs associated with the use of expensive containment systems. The second family of ion exchange fibers to be explored is activated carbon fibers and substrates functionalized with cationic or anionic exchange groups. Potential benefits of an activated carbon system for ion exchange are high chemical and thermal stability, which cannot be attained by polymeric resin systems. Activated carbon also has a continuous microporous network which can be tailored from dimensions of 6 A to 28 A. This provides the potential for designing ion exchange chelating systems with even more selective properties. An interesting study will be a comparison of the diffusional processes of swollen polymeric networks versus a non-swelling microporous carbon structure. These new fibers should permit removal of metal contaminants to below 1ppb. Areas of particular emphasis include eliminating heavy metals such as lead and mercury, radioactive wastes such as cesium and strontium, and arsenate(ite) ground water contaminants doc2444 none Amarasighe, Saman P. MIT CISE Experimental Partnerships: Partnerships: MIT Raw Machine Rapidly evolving technology places a billion transistors on a chip within reach of the computer architect. Several approaches to utilizing the large amount of silicon resources have been put forth, with the single important goal of obtaining the most performance out of approximately one square inch of silicon. These approaches exploit more parallelism in one or more instruction streams. Examples include more aggressive superscalars, multiscalars, processor-coupled designs, simultaneous multi-threading processors, multiprocessors on a chip and VLIWs. The goal of this project is to discover, implement and evaluate simple architectural mechanisms that scale with increasing VLSI clock speed, and software techniques that orchestrate high-level computations on the low-level architectural resources for maximum efficiency doc2445 none Proposal: PI: David Gabai : During the last 100 years there has been tremendous interest in understanding the topology and geometry of 3-dimensional manifolds. In part, because a 3-manifold is (roughly speaking) a mathematical object modeled on our familiar 3-dimensional environment. A 3-manifold has the property that sufficiently small subsets can be parametrized by 3 coordinates. The problem of characterizing the geometry and topology of surfaces, i.e., manifolds of dimension 2, was completely answered nearly a century ago. It was determined that the only closed orientable connected surfaces are the sphere, torus, and the multi-holed tori. Furthermore, such surfaces can be given geometries of constant curvature, +1 for the sphere, 0 for the torus, and -1 for the other surfaces. Although great progress has been made during the last century, the situation for dimension-3 is not nearly so well understood. Nevertheless a conjectural picture for the structure of 3-manifolds emerged almost 25 years ago (by Thurston) and there has been much theoretical and experimental evidence supporting his conjecture. The hyperbolic 3-manifolds, i.e. the manifolds of constant -1 curvature, play a central role in this picture. In this proposal the PI in collaboration with various other mathematicians, plan to investigate the structure of hyperbolic manifolds and the structure of manifolds which are conjecturally hyperbolic. In particular they will study the structure of the diffeomorphism group of hyperbolic 3-manifolds, and the structure of hyperbolic 3-manifolds of low volume. They will also address whether or not a closed aspherical, atoroidal, 3-manifold has a Gromov negatively curved fundamental group. A positive resolution would imply that a 3-manifold which is conjecturally hyperbolic, has at least the coarse algebraic structure of a hyperbolic 3-manifold doc2446 none McKeown This program includes experimental and theoretical research in a variety of areas in nuclear physics. The projects are focussed on fundamental understanding of the structure and interactions of nucleons and the use of nuclear physics to perform precision tests the standard electroweak theory. A substantial part of the experimental program involves studies of parity violation in electron scattering from nucleons, nuclei, and electrons. A program to exploit a new intense source of ultra-cold neutrons in Los Alamos will study the beta asymmetry in neutron decay with unprecedented precision as well as other fundamental properties of neutrons. The education and training of students and postdoctoral scholars is a key aspect of this research program doc2447 none Zheng It is proposed to study some nonlinear partial differential equations from fluid dynamics and liquid crystal physics. These equations are the laws of motion of their respective physics. The turbulent nature and or defects in the materials make the solutions of the equations singular, unstable, and hard to calculate. It is planned to use advanced analytical tools to study the structures of the singular solutions. In the case of the liquid crystal wave equation, for example, the plan is to study it as one of the simplest examples of nonlinear generalizations of the basic linear wave equation. It can be seen from its elegant form that there will be many applications of the equation in the future. Singularities of its solutions have been shown to exist recently by the principal investigator and his collaborators. It is these singularities that block the establishment of a general theory of existence, uniqueness, and stability of solutions. It is planned to do detailed estimates and analysis on the singularities and improve current compactness arguments to form an existence theory of solutions. The result of the investigation will be a clear understanding of the worst possible solutions, and thereby quantify our knowledge of the physics and offer guidance in numerical computations of general solutions. The research will involve the study of some applied mathematical problems in the fields of fluid dynamics (which includes motion of the air and water) and liquid crystal physics in material science. Scientists and engineers have used mathematical equations, called partial differential equations, to model the motions. The turbulent nature and or defects in the materials show up in the form of singularities and instabilities in the solutions of the equations. It is these singularities and instabilities that often spoil accurate numerical computations of the solutions. It is planned to use the state of the art analytical tools to study the structures of the singular solutions. In the case of a compressible gas such as air, for example, the principal investigator plans to isolate typical singularities (hurricanes, tornadoes, shocks, etc.) and investigate their individual structures. The result of the investigation will be a clear understanding of the worst possible solutions, and thereby quantify our knowledge of the physics and offer guidance in high-performance numerical computations of general solutions doc2448 none The project is an investigation of the interplay of topology and nonlinear dynamics from both applied and theoretical viewpoints. Complicated topology arises naturally in nonlinear dynamical systems and frequently carries the dynamics of the system. Understanding this topology is essential to understanding the dynamics and the long-term behavior of the system. Planned are (i) further theoretical study of the topology present in most (i.e., generic) dynamical systems with a given property, (ii) applied study of stirring and turbulence (with chemical engineers at Rutgers), (iii) theoretical and applied study of area-preserving systems, (iv) an investigation of how topology and invariant measures are related in one-dimesional dynamical systems, and (v) further study of topological horseshoes (with J. A. Yorke and others from the Maryland group). The project builds on work already done by the investigator both alone and in collaboration with other mathematicians and scientists. The tools of both topology and dynamical systems are needed and will be used to carry out the project. Theoretical results concerning stirring will be backed up by actual experiment and observation in the lab. Whenever a nonlinear dynamical system, such as the weather, or the motion of different fluids as they are stirred, or the solar system, is operating , interesting topology arises as sets are mapped back across themselves. Understanding these sets is crucial to understanding the complicated behavior of nonlinear systems. Sometimes the complicated topology can be observed as it forms, and is a marker for certain kinds of complicated dynamics. Can this be made precise? Can it be quantified ? Consider stirring, a phenomenon of special interest to the investigator, for example. Stirring occurs in every kitchen, and seems to be a simple process. But this is far from the case: Stirring occurs in industrial settings and in nature in many different contexts as chemicals or medicines, or hot and cold air, or hot and cold water, are mixed. Most often in industry achieving homogeneity of the mixed substance efficiently is the goal. Experimental and simulated results by chemical engineers demonstrate that those processes used today do not result in homogeneity. How can those processes be improved? That is one of the problems to which the results of this project should be applicable. More generally, the project planned is a study of the topology of complicated dynamical systems, and both the implications of the presence of complicated topology for nonlinear systems and vice versa doc2449 none This award by the Chemistry Division supports Dr. Donald R. Bobbitt and other members of the Chemistry Department at the University of Arkansas in a continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site in chemistry. For the period - , 30 undergraduate students will spend ten weeks each conducting summer research under the supervision of Chemistry faculty. The activities of the participants are planned to promote student independence and to develop professional skills and judgement. Each participant will be given the opportunity to present her his research at a departmental meeting. Participants will also visit industrial and national research laboratories and attend a meeting of a chemistry or biochemistry professional organization. The participants will be given hands-on experience with state of the art instrumental techniques, obtain a realistic experience of modern chemical research and learn what is expected of students in post graduate education in chemistry doc2450 none Award: Principal Investigator: Sumio Yamada The two main subjects of the proposed research are Teichmueller spaces of compact Riemann surfaces of genus greater than one and the universal Teichmueller space, which can be identified with the diffeomorphism group of the circle. There is a natural Riemannian metric on both classical and universal Teichmueller spaces, called the Weil-Petersson metric. Although those spaces are not symmetric spaces, and there are no classical Lie groups acting on them isometrically (unlike the hyperbolic spaces with the special linear group), one notes that on the classical Teichmueller spaces the mapping class group of the Riemann surfaces acts isometrically, and that on the universal Teichmueller space the diffeomorphism group of the circle acts isometrically. These group actions on Teichmueller spaces can be utilized to construct flat bundles over various manifolds with its fibers being copies of Teichmueller spaces, which leads to the questions of strong super rigidity. It is in this context that the investigator intends to use the Weil-Petersson geometry of Teichmueller spaces. The subject of Riemann surfaces has been one of the central themes of modern mathematics over the last two centuries. In recent years, it has received renewed attention due to the interest created by the so-called super-string theory, with which physicists hope to construct the grand unifying theory (GMT) of graviation and quantum physics. The Teichmueller space, which is the subject of this investigation, plays an important role since it is known to parametrizes the shapes of the string. Interactions between mathematics and theoretical physics have proved to be fruitful for both sides, and it is the investigator s belief that the proposed research may offer some new way of understanding the outstanding issues in the relevant scientific fields doc2451 none This individual investigator award is to a senior professor at the University of California in Santa Cruz. The project involves a series of local structure (XAFS) measurements on systems which have large, open unit cells. Such materials have a rich array of vibrational motions, many of which are not observed in simple structures. In particular, there can be a large number of low energy optical phonon modes, some of which involve rotations of nearly rigid atomic. Such rigid unit vibrational modes have been proposed explain the novel negative thermal expansion coefficient of ZrW2O8 and other open structures. Another set of open structure materials are the partially filled skutterudite compounds. Here rare earth atoms can be incorporated into a void in the unit cell and strongly suppress the thermal conductivity. The XAFS measurements will clarify whether the proposed structural models are correct and provide a basis for developing better thermoelectric compounds and low thermal expansion materials. The work will provide educational opportunities for both graduate and undergraduate students to work as a team under the PI. Students will gain experience working at a national facility as well as learn experimental design and data analysis at the home institution, UCSC. %%% A number of complex materials, containing open spaces within the crystal structure, exhibit unusual thermal properties. They are potentially important for a variety of practical applications, including better thermoelectric coolers and materials that do not shrink when cooled. The voids in such materials allow the atoms to vibrate in new ways and many of the unusual and enhanced thermal properties are attributed to such motions. In one set of materials, clusters of atoms are thought to vibrate nearly as a single unit; in others it has been proposed that each added impurity atom rattles around inside a void in the structure. This is an individual investigator award to a senior professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz to fund the detailed experimental measurements of these types of motion crucial for developing an understanding of these unusual thermal properties. The work will provide educational opportunities for both graduate and undergraduate students to work as a team under the PI. Students will gain experience working at a national facility as well as learn experimental design and data analysis at the home institution, UCSC doc2452 none Schlick The investigator and her colleagues organize a multidisciplinary workshop on methods for macromolecular modeling. The aim is to bring together both developers of computational tools for biomolecular simulations and those biological and chemical scientists who use computer modeling to study macromolecular problems. The workshop highlights recent advances in simulation techniques, most notably in the areas of conformational sampling, fast electrostatics, molecular dynamics integration, and quantum-mechanical calculations, that are having significant impact on structural biology. It surveys developments in algorithmic approaches, hierarchical spatial representations, and improved computing platforms that continue to enhance the reliability of macromolecular simulations and increase their applicability and relevance to biomolecular research. The topics highlighted are: (1) new methods for long-term molecular dynamics simulations; (2) conformational sampling: equilibrium and nonequilibrium processes; (3) multiscale modeling; (4) quantum classical mechanics; (5) fast electrostatics; and (6) applications to enzyme catalysis, DNA modeling, and DNA protein systems. The workshop is held at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University on October 12-14 and co-sponsored by SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics), as part of SIAM s new Activity Group in the Life Sciences, as well as by National Science Foundation programs in Applied Mathematics, Computational Mathematics, Theoretical and Computational Chemistry, and Molecular Biophysics. Computational methods are increasingly being recognized as valuable tools for the study of biomolecular structure and function. The interdisciplinary nature of biomolecular computational approaches is largely driven by the many important practical applications in the field, such as drug design, biomedical engineering, and food chemistry. The workshop program provides a timely and unique opportunity for close interaction and scientific exchange among biomolecular researchers, computer scientists, and applied mathematicians. In the era of integrative science, such synergy kindles new ideas and helps educate young scientists for cross-disciplinary research at the interface of computational science and biology. The meeting brings researchers abreast of current developments in algorithms and computational methods. It also highlights critical problems in structural biology and new application areas, and it fosters interdisciplinary collaborations. The results of the workshop are disseminated through the collected scientific articles by the invited speakers, which will be published in Springer Verlag s Lecture Notes series in Computational Science and Engineering (LNCSE). These tangible records, in addition to a carefully designed program, are expected to serve the community by educating junior scientists at disciplinary interfaces, stimulating new ideas in computational techniques for macromolecular modeling, and identifying key areas for future research doc2453 none This individual investigator award is to a young professor at the University of Delaware for a project that investigates the fundamental aspects of how electrode-insulator interfaces affect spin-dependent electron tunneling and the magnetic properties of magnetic tunnel junctions. These systems are promising candidates for new generations of highly magnetoresistive devices and for advancing our understanding of spin transport. Significant issues, such the strong temperature and bias voltage dependence of the tunneling magnetoresistance, are attributed to the interfacial spins, but remain unresolved. A series of electrical transport and structural investigations are proposed to correlate interface characteristics with spin-dependent transport properties and test competing theories that have been developed. An important feature of this work is using samples with a wedged-shaped aluminum metal layer. This allows junctions with under-, completely-, and over-oxidized tunnel barriers to be readily obtained. Phenomena to be investigated include: charge and magnetization accumulations at the electrode-insulator interfaces, a spin-dependent electric field distribution in the magnetic electrodes, and a chemical potential splitting between spin-up and spin-down electronic bands due to electron-electron interactions. The proposed research has relevance to semiconductor research involving gated dielectric materials, hybrid ferromagnet-semiconductor heterostructures, and spin-injection into semiconductors or metals. Graduate students involved in this project will receive training in physics, nanostructured materials, and device fabrication that is currently at the forefront scientific and technical areas. This training will prepare them for a range of careers in industry, government, or academe. %%% Thin film magnetic multilayer structures are driving a new approach to electronics that is based on the spin state (up or down) of the carriers rather than on its charge as in conventional semiconductor electronics. Magnetic tunnel junctions, for example, are promising candidates for new generations of magnetoresistive devices and for understanding fundamental aspects of spin transport. In these systems, interfaces between metal and insulating layers play a critical role in determining the electrical and magnetic properties. This individual investigator award to a young professor at the University of Delaware is for a project consisting of a series of electrical measurements and structural investigations directed at correlating interface structure with spin-dependent transport properties, a problem of technological importance. Fundamental aspects of electrode-insulator interfaces will be studied such as: charge and magnetization accumulation at the interface, a spin-dependent electric field distribution in the magnetic electrodes, and the role of electron-electron interactions. Knowledge gained is anticipated to benefit new research fields involving hybrid magnetic-semiconductor heterostructures and spin-injection devices. This project offers excellent research and education opportunities for students within an interdisciplinary program focused on physics and materials that is currently at the forefront scientific and technical areas. The students will acquire rigorous training and skills in nanostructured materials and device fabrication that will prepare them for a range of careers in industry, government, or academe doc2454 none This US-Argentina proposal requests support for Dr. Peter Sternberg of Indiana University on Bloomington to collaborate with Drs. Manuel Del Pino and Patricio Felmer at the University of Chile in Santiago on the onset of superconductivity in large magnetic fields. This project is a continuation of an investigation of the nucleation of superconductivity in the presence of large applied magnetic fields. The Principal Investigators will use the Ginzburg-Landau energy as a model to focus on their goal of describing the behavior of the (non-zero) order parameter whose emergence signals the loss of stability of the so-called normal state once the temperature decreases beyond a critical value. They seek precise information about the critical temperature magnetic field curve in order to provide a theory to support the many experimental efforts underway in recent years to capture this relationship. The project will describe states possessing vortex lattice structure (unbounded samples) and states localized about high-curvature sections of the sample boundary (bounded samples doc2455 none This award in the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research by Professor Chad Mirkin of the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University on the use of redox-active hemilabile ligands (RHLs) to control the coordination sites at transition metal centers. A series of compounds, including polyterthienyl RHL complexes of Ru, will be synthesized and their properties studied. A complimentary approach involving metal rather than ligand-centered redox reactions will be investigated. In addition, a new high yield strategy for preparing macrocyclic multimetallic compounds with synthetically programmable structures and properties will be implemented. Once optimized, this strategy should be useful for virtually any transition metal. The goal of this research is to prepare metal complexes which can be electrochemically changed from one state to another with the concurrent release or uptake of small molecules. The utility of these compounds for separations, particularly of chiral molecules important to the pharmaceutical industry, will be determined, and their application as molecular switches explored. Although not a direct objective of this research, the results could also lead to a rational design of materials for catalysts and sensors. The students involved in this project will receive training in both inorganic and analytical methodology, and undergraduate participation will be achieved by leveraging an existing REU program at Northwestern doc2456 none Dr. Smoot request funding for studying neutrino physics with AMANDA II detector. Dr. Smoot will develop tools to handle complex data sets, distribute many levels (raw, filtered, reconstructed, ...) of the data, monitor the instrumental performance (extensive studies will be carried out to evaluate the performance of the digital modules developed by Dr. Smoot and his LBNL co-workers), and provide data bases critical to the scientific analysis of these data. He will also produce simulations to improve the understanding of the instrumental performance and capabilities doc2457 none The focus of this research is the use of transition metals to assemble highly energetic alkyne precursors which are then subjected to oligocyclizations and subsequent transformations which result in the preparation of phenylenes. The phenylenes have linear, angular, C3-symmetric, circular, bent and zigzag topologies and, thus, remarkable physical and chemical properties. The goals of the current project include the investigation of the chemistry of the phenylenes, in particular: to dissect pi and sigma electronic contributions to strain; to establish redox, charge transfer and self assembly behavior to discover the potential of phenylenes for use as building blocks for magnetic and electronic devices; to investigate fundamental organometallic reactions and unimolecular thermal isomerizations; to prepare novel members in the series and to progress towards larger unique carbon networks; to construct theoretically important hydrocarbons; and to expand the series to include heterocyclic analogs. With this renewal award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. K. Peter C. Vollhardt of the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Vollhardt will focus his work on the use of transition metal mediated transformations for the synthesis of a number of highly energetic and topologically interesting benzenoid hydrocarbons. The research has the potential to exert an impact on the area of magnetic and conducting materials and it also serves as an excellent training ground for the education of graduate students and postdoctoral participants doc2458 none This experimental project explores collective and coherent spin behavior of electrons, local moments and nuclear spins in low dimensional systems ranging from 2D electron gases to 0D quantum dots. The experiments focus on model nanostructures fabricated from II-VI magnetic semiconductors which can be systematically tailored to modulate spin interactions between confined electronic states, magnetic ions and nuclei. The project combines development of sophisticated nanostructures and state-of-the-art spin probes having high temporal (~100 fs) and spatial (~100 nm) resolution, and high magnetic moment sensitivity (~105 Bohr magnetons). Microfabricated cantilevers will be used to search for collective spin effects in magnetic semiconductor nanostructures. Dynamical spin organization in these nanostructures will be studied using an all-optical magnetic resonance technique, encompassing spin precession of electrons, local moments and nuclear spins. Coherent optical spectroscopy coupled with time-resolved transport will probe dynamical spin transport in mesoscopic systems (wires) wherein the nuclear polarization is systematically varied using optical pumping. Finally, near field scanning optical resonance techniques will be developed to achieve spatially resolved magnetic resonance imaging of 2D electron spin systems. Knowledge of the collective spin response in nanostructures gained from this project may be important for coherent control of spin processes in future generations of magneto-electronic devices. Advanced technical training in solid state physics, materials science, and advanced instrumentation will prepare students for careers in academic and industrial environments. %%% This experimental condensed matter physics project explores the complex quantum mechanical behavior of electrons, magnetic atoms and nuclei in low dimensional systems ranging from electron sheets (2D electron gases) to electron boxes (0D quantum dots). The experiments use model nanostructures fabricated from a family of materials (II-VI magnetic semiconductors) in which the quantum mechanical property known as spin can be systematically varied. A fundamental understanding of spin transport in nanostructures may enable new technologies based on quantum mechanical interactions in the solid state. The project is comprised of a collaborative effort that combines development of sophisticated nanostructures with state-of-the-art spin probes having high temporal (~100 femtoseconds) and spatial (~100 nanometer) resolution, and high spin sensitivity (~ 105 magnetic atoms). Experiments range from ultrasensitive magnetometry, to all-optical spin resonance microscopy, to dynamical studies of electron spin transport. While the principal focus is on fundamental physics, knowledge gained will be important for developing concepts in the coherent control of spin processes in future generations of high speed magneto-electronic devices, with potential applications ranging from ultrafast switching to quantum computation. This research involves advanced technical training in materials physics and advanced instrumentation, and prepares students to make immediate contributions both in academic and industrial environments doc2459 none This project, funded by the Chemistry Division, supports Dr. Gary Sulikowski and other members of the Chemistry Department at the Texas A & M University in establishing and conducting a new Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site in chemistry. For the period - , 30 undergraduate students will spend ten weeks each conducting summer research under the supervision of Chemistry faculty. Participants will be involved in research projects along with graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, research staff, other undergraduates and their faculty mentors. Students will achieve a realistic understanding of the demands of independent chemical research and gain self confidence in pursuing such studies doc2460 none theorems, a systematic search to interpret them can only lead to strong uniformity results on the number and properties of solutions to algebraic, differential, and difference equations not readily perceived from an elementary perspective doc2461 none This project addresses effects of quantum confinement on epitaxial growth of metal semiconductor thin films and nanostructures. The approach is a combined theory experiment collaborative activity among researchers at U. Tx Austin and ORNL, and is aimed at greater understanding and utilization of an electronic growth concept. To date, the main findings of the electronic growth model are that a competition between quantum confinement, charge spilling, and interface-induced electron density os-cillations can make a flat ultrathin metal film critically, magically, marginally stable, or totally unstable against morphological roughening. For Ag on GaAs and other III-V semiconductor substrates, the electronic growth mechanism leads to the existence of a critical thickness for the formation of an atomically flat film. Theoretical studies also showed the existence of magic thicknesses for other metal semiconductor systems, and the possibility of oscillatory metal-nonmetal transitions. The theo-retical and experimental scope of this project will include quantum effects in both the vertical and lat-eral directions and the interplay between thermodynamic and kinetic factors. The goal is to gain a deeper understanding of the pathways of the electronic mechanism for film growth, and to achieve controlled formation of lower-dimensional structures. The possibility of using electronic energetics as-sociated with quantum states and charge quantization to influence geometric ordering and size selec-tion of quantum dot arrays will also be explored. Theoretical predictions of critical magic thicknesses and oscillatory metal-nonmetal transitions in a variety of systems will be studied experimentally. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technologi-cal relevance. The basic knowledge and understanding gained from the research is expected to contrib-ute to next generation electronic photonic materials. An important feature of the program is the inte-gration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologi-cally significant area. The project is co-supported by the DMR EM and DMR MET programs doc2462 none This individual investigator award is to a professor at Stanford University for a project using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) to study complex materials with strongly interacting electrons. These materials have many remarkable properties, such as high temperature superconductivity. In addition, they provide the opportunity to discover and study novel fundamental phenomena and phases. ARPES has emerged as a major tool in advancing the understanding of these strongly interacting electron systems at the microscopic level. With the recent significant improvement in resolution and detection efficiency, ARPES has the promise to make greater contributions to the understanding of strongly interacting electron systems, in particular the oxides with novel properties from coupled charge, spin, orbital and lattice degrees of freedom. The objective of this project is to bring the experimental sophistication to a qualitatively higher level in order to address the most critical issues in the field, especially the issues related to high-temperature superconductivity. At the same time, the project will also function as an effective tool to educate and train graduate students and thus enlarge the scientific talent pool. %%% This individual investigator award is to a professor at Stanford University for a project concerned with the understanding of complex oxides that contain many novel phases and properties, including unconventional dielectric insulators and high-temperature superconductors that may lead to important applications. By directly measuring the motion of individual electrons using a sophisticated spectroscopy, this project tries to reveal the underlying microscopic principles that govern the fascinating properties manifested in these materials. This process will also train and educate graduate students and thus enlarge the scientific talent pool doc2463 none This is a renewal award to a senior professor at Oregon State University for a project that will exploit the local, chemically specific properties of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to investigate the microscopic properties of optically active impurities in semiconductors and insulators. Solid-state NMR techniques will be combined with in situ illumination to examine the effects of optical excitation on the electronic structure and local atomic arrangements associated with specific impurities. Particular attention will be given to bistable impurities such as Ga or In in CdTe and other II-VI compounds as well as CdF2. Optically enhanced host (113Cd, 125Te, and 19F) nuclear spin-lattice relaxation will be used as an indicator of conversion of the bistable impurities to conventional effective mass donors. Impurity species NMR, especially 69Ga, will be used in combination with in situ illumination to search for direct evidence of structural rearrangements in the impurity ground state. Impurity species NMR (69Ga and 63Cu) will also be used to study the local environments of active centers in phosphors such as SrS(Cu,M) and ZnS(Mn, Ga). The goal is to elucidate a microscopic understanding of these impurities that will facilitate the engineering of this class of material for specific electronic and optical applications. The proposed experiments will provide a venue for Ph.D. and M.S. graduate education and undergraduate research opportunities; they will also be exploited for enrichment of undergraduate courses in Modern Physics and Solid State Physics in the form of projects and demonstrations. %%% The controlled introduction of specific impurities is critical in determining the properties of technologically important electronic and optical materials. This renewal award to a senior professor at Oregon State University is for research that will focus on a class of impurities that are optically-active. Such impurities change their atomic-scale properties when illuminated or emit light when subject to illumination or electric currents in the host material. The applications of these materials include light emitting elements for flat panel displays and optical data storage. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a spectroscopy that reveals atomic-scale details of the environments of specific chemical elements in a material. In this research, NMR will be used to probe the effects of illumination on host atom environments, say Cd in CdTe or CdF2, or impurities such as Ga in these materials and in phosphors being developed for flat panel displays. The goal of this and related research is to reach a level of microscopic understanding that will facilitate the engineering of this class of material for specific electronic and optical applications. The proposed research will be integrated into undergraduate and graduate education. Ph.D. and thesis research will train graduates for entry into U.S. high technology industry. Undergraduates will participate in undergraduate research and through enrichment (projects and demonstrations) of formal courses in Modern Physics and Solid State Physics at Oregon State University doc2464 none This GOALI project is a collaborative effort between researchers at Oregon State University and Planar Systems, Inc., Beaverton, OR. Primary goals are to increase basic understanding of luminescent materials, and to exploit their properties to achieve bright, efficient, and manufacturable red, green, and blue (RGB) phosphors for use in flat-panel displays. The approach involves three basic routes: (i) Luminescent impurity and defect engineering of conventional sulfide phosphors, ZnS, SrS, and CaS., (ii) Exploratory development of novel, low-temperature sulfide, selenide, and telluride phosphors-BaS and MX (M=Mg, Ca, Sr; X=Se, Te.), (iii) Optimization of oxide phosphors. A variety of conventional and unconventional luminescent impurities will be investigated. Defect engineering will involve compensation, color-shifting, and or vacancy scavenging considerations. The viability of oxides, e.g., Zn2GeO4:Mn and Zn2SixGe1-xO4:Mn, as phosphors will be assessed by identifying the physical mechanisms that limit device performance and then developing performance-improvement strategies. Phosphor studies will be conducted using a rapid-throughput process. New phosphor, luminescent impurity, co-activator materials systems will be synthesized as powders, and their performance assessed and optimized through photoluminescence characterization. In this manner, luminescent impurity incorporation, defect engineering, and alloying studies will be integrated with thin film processing and characterization which will be carried out with promising powder phosphors. Thin-film evaporation source material and sputter targets will be synthesized using solid-state synthesis processing methods. Two techniques will be investigated to incorporate luminescent impurities and co-activators into phosphor thin films, conventional in situ doping during thin-film deposition and flux doping. Finally, alternating current thin film EL (ACTFEL) devices will be fabricated and tested to appraise the viability of a given phosphor system for applications. This research procedure involving powder synthesis, processing and characterization, followed by luminescence assessment, thin film flux doping , and ACTFEL performance represents a general methodology-additional basic materials studies to identify and gain understanding of fundamental mechanisms will be carried out as well. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. The basic knowledge and understanding gained from the research is expected to contribute to improving US competitiveness in the international display technology market. The availability of low-temperature phosphors would result in superior products at reduced cost and improved manufacturability. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area. The multidisciplinary (chemistry, electrical engineering, physics) and industrially-connected nature of this GOALI program offers unique educational opportunities for students to experience a teamwork-oriented research environment from both academic and industrial perspectives. The project is co-supported by the DMR EM, DMR CER, and DMR SSC programs, and the MPS OMA(Office of Multidisciplinary Activities doc2465 none The optical characteristics of fractal microcavity composites will be investigated in this project. The composites are formed from nanometer-size metal fractal aggregates of approximate size 1.8 micrometers, embedded in a dielectric cavity of characteristic size several hundred micrometers in diameter. A variety of nonlinear emissions from the composites will be investigated including lasing, multiphoton absorption, and hyper-Raman scattering. Previous experiments have shown that the spectral emissions from these systems exhibit enormous enhancement factors (defined as the ratio of the optical intensity with and without the presence of the composite), which can be greater than 10 15 and, for certain special cases, greater than 10 21. Students will participate in this research. They will thereby acquire skills and knowledge that prepares them for future employment in industry, government or academe. %%% A device capable of increasing the intensity of a light signal, i.e., an optical amplifier, will have many uses in science and technology. This project concerns the study of the optical properties of a remarkable class of optical materials, so-called fractal microcavity composites, which amplify light by enormous factors. Each of the two components contributes to the amplification. In the composite these contributions combine multiplicatively so that the resulting amplification can be truly enormous. In previous experiments amplification factors in excess of 1 quadrillion (1 followed by 15 zeroes) were observed. The ultimate amplification of light signals is expected to be even greater and it is towards this end that the studies supported by this grant are undertaken. This research will engage the participation of students who will thereby acquire skills and knowledge in preparation for advanced studies and employment in industry, government laboratories, and academe doc2466 none Rapid technological changes over the past three decades have had profound and challenging impacts on the cluster of disciplines that focus on the production, dissemination, and use of geographic information and related technologies, i.e., the geographic information sciences. This 18-month study will assess the geographic information sciences via examination of their intellectual bases and associated research agendas, sources of research funding, organization within educational institutions, and links with other more broadly-based disciplines such as computer and information science. The study will also assess the current and future demand for professionals in the geographic information sciences and future competitive prospects for U.S. industries based on the geographic information sciences. The significance of this research lies in its ability to describe, predict, and explain current and future gaps between societal need and demand for geographic information sciences and a workforce skilled in this knowledge and these techniques. As the technology evolves, the agencies, public and private, that provide data to decision-makers and stakeholders must also evolve. To chart a future direction, we need a better understanding of the trajectory of change in the geographic information sciences over the past 30 years doc2467 none This project will develop prototype quantitative indicators that measure access to information technologies (IT) in the United States. These indicators will measure access to IT in terms of point of access (i.e., work, home, and libraries), demographics (i.e., income, education, race and ethnicity), and technological capability (i.e., computer and modem speed, internet access, software and media). The PI will utilize data from government, commercial, and non-profit sources. These indicators will help in the evaluation of the so-called digital divide --the social and economic disadvantages of lacking access to information in a knowledge-based economy. These indicators are of particular significance to the National Science Board, the Divsion of Science Resources Studies, the broader U. S. policy community, and scholars. The project will aim to synthesize the theory and empirical evidence regarding the impacts of information inequalities on information and society, develop prototype indicators of IT equity in the United States, and evaluate the potential for an IT equity indicators program. The key expected outcomes are a set of prototype IT equity indicators and detailed instructions about the construction of the measures, the data available to calculate the measures, and the institutional and data collection requirements for an on-going effort in this area doc2434 none Perlman Andersson Statistical models based on acyclic directed graphs (ADGs) (also called directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), Bayesian networks, or influence diagrams) are particularly well behaved, easily interpretable, and computationally convenient. In the late s, ADG models were generalized to adicyclic graphs or chain graphs, which include both directed and undirected edges, hence can simultaneously represent dependences some of which are directional and some associative. The investigators will study the Markov and statistical properties of a new class of chain graph models that retains many of the desirable properties of ADG models. Problems to be investigated include the completeness and faithfulness of these new models, determination of their local Markov property, and characterization of their Markov equivalence classes by means of an appropriate essential graph. The investigators will also study a very general class of Wishart distributions on homogeneous cones, in which transitive acyclic directed graphs (TADGs) play a central role. E. B. Vinberg s classical characterization of homogeneous cones has been found to reveal a fundamental relationship between normal models satisfying TADG Markov conditions and this general class of Wishart distributions. This class includes all Wishart distributions previously known in multivariate statistical analysis, including the hyper-Wishart distributions and Wishart distributions associated with normal lattice conditional independence (LCI) models, as well as a great many new ones. Additional topics to be investigated include the limitations of the Neyman-Pearson, likelihood ratio, and maximum likelihood criteria for multiparameter hypothesis-testing and estimation problems, and the efficacy of the likelihood ratio test for testing order-restricted and multivariate one-sided alternatives. One of the most central ideas of statistical science is the assessment of dependences among a set of stochastic variables. The familiar concepts of correlation, regression, and prediction are manifestations of this idea, and many aspects of causal relationships ultimately rest on representations of multivariate dependence. Graphical Markov models (GMM) use graphs i.e. networks, either undirected, directed, or mixed, to represent multivariate dependencies in a visual and computationally efficient manner. A GMM is usually constructed by specifying local dependences for each variable, i.e. node of the graph, in terms of its immediate neighbors, parents, or both, yet can represent a highly varied and complex system of multivariate dependences by means of the global structure of the graph. The local specification permits efficiencies in modeling, inference, and probabilistic calculations. Among their many applications, GMMs have become prevalent in statistical science for the analysis of categorical data in contingency tables, for the modeling of spatially-dependent processes such as the spread of epidemics in human and animal populations, and for the development of early warning systems for severe weather conditions; in computer science (as Bayesian networks) for information processing and retrieval, for robotics, computer vision, and pattern recognition, for the debugging of complex programs (such as Windows 98), and for the representation of expert systems for medical diagnosis; and in decision science (as influence diagrams) as models for information flow and control and for combining the opinions of many decision-makers. A crucial feature of these models is that they are designed for fast computational implementation, thereby facilitating the development of software that can reason about real world problems doc2469 none for - Szpiro Technical description: This is a project in the arithmetic algebraic geometry of diophantine problems. The PI is continuing his work which was successfully used by Faltings in the solution of the Mordell Conjecture and by E. Ullmo, S. Zhang and the PI in the solution of the Bogomolov Conjecture. The use of the modern theory of heights has been very effective. The PI views the Equidistribution Theorem as the solution to the problem of finding lower bounds for solutions of algebraic equations. The question of finding effective upper bounds for solutions of algebraic equations leads to many conjectures. Some are very well known and may be unattainable (the abc conjecture, or the discriminant conjecture for elliptic curves) but the PI has always believed that attacking difficult problems is the secret of success in doing high-level mathematics. The project will concentrate on: a) The study of the degree of Belyi maps (these are coverings of the Riemann sphere ramified in only 3 points and they characterize curves defined over the field of algebraic numbers). b) The study of the Zariski closure of the non-zero p-division points (for p big enough) in an abelian variety as a finite scheme. c) The consequences for the Tate-Shafarevich group of recent results of the PI and J. Pesenti on the discriminant inequality for potential good reduction. d) Dynamical Systems (first on the Sphere then on towers of Shimura varieties): The canonical height associated to these objects should lead to equidistribution statements, for example for CM points (cf the work of Duke). Non technical description: The PI and his collaborators are studying a subject first investigated by Diophantus in ancient Greece: find the solutions in integers of algebraic equations. The modern attack uses algebraic geometry, analysis, and geometry. Many problems in the natural world (asking: How many times? How to decipher?) require a solution in integers. This no doubt explains why number theory, like physics, has been a constant motivation for the development of mathematics doc2470 none Gurindar S. Sohi University of Wisconsin-Madison Experimental Partnership-Experimental Research in Speculative Multithreading Speculative threads do not depend on conservative guarantees of safe data communications among threads. Rather, threads are dispatched speculatively, and data can be communicated speculatively. i.e. by assuming that it is correct. Incorrect speculations are detected later, and whenever they occur, recovery is under taken to assure correctness. This less conservative approach to defining and dispatching threads find parallelism in ways that conservative methods cannot. In this research, the principal investigators will build a comprehensive, integrated experimental infrastructure and use it to carry out an investigation of issues related to the design of speculative multithreaded processors. Along with their graduate students the principal investigators will conduct experimental research in speculative multithreaded processors. Modern parallel processing systems decompose a program into multiple threads that execute in parallel to provide high performance. The convention method is to specify parallel threads where all communication of data is carefully synchronized to guarantee correctness a priori. This approach often means that a conservative approach must be used to provide the necessary guarantees, there by constraining parallelism. Using this infrastructure, the investigators will conduct experimental research in three primary areas. (1) Speculative Thread Identification and Usage. This will include conventional control-driven threads where the focus will be on new opportunities provided by object-oriented programs and commercial workloads. It will also include data-driven threads, a new form of speculative thread, which promises to open new opportunities for extracting parallelism from conventional programs. (2) Software Hardware Interaction. Dynamic program characteristics of threads are likely to be critical for managing their identification, scheduling, and data communication. Dynamic linking will be done as well, in many large network-based applications and will very much limit the static compiler s view. The investigators will research new methods by which hardware and software can interact to compile and execute speculative multithreaded programs. This will include architecture features to permit efficient communication and the use of dynamic profiling and re-compilation techniques. (3) Hybrid Mixed Thread Processing. In future processors and systems, it is likely that several thread types will co-exist. This includes the speculative threads that are the central focus of the proposed research. It also includes the traditional non-speculative threads, which may be either explicitly programmed or implicitly extracted b software compilation tools and or hardware. Consequently, processors and systems that integrate the complementary thread types into a cohesive mixed thread processing model will be developed and studied doc2471 none The allelic association between disease genes and marker alleles allows predicting which marker allele is in coupling with the disease. There are novel statistical testing procedures proposed recently. For example, the Transmission Disequilibrium Testing ( TDT ) has been both a popular and powerful method to evaluate the linkage association between the candidate genes with disease and the markers. This approach combines the information of association and linkage to yield greater power than conventional tests for detecting linkage when the association is present. It also has great potential to play a major role in future gene mapping of human disorder, by carrying out genomewide TDT screens. Recent literature has seen an increasing trend in the number of studies that have applied TDT or its generalizations to a variety of complex family-based data, but these methods are ad hoc. There is a great need for a systematic and sensible optimal analysis of these methods. This work sets up a general statistical framework that can incorporate all procedures, different data sets and other related knowledge such as disease information, sampling designs and population information. We develop a general statistical theory, useful as a guideline for future investigators, who can design and develop their own statistical procedures (following the framework) to meet their needs in incorporating different environments. The research provides a likelihood-based approach by introducing a useful 3x2 table which applies to each nuclear family. It is natural to adopt the conditionality principle to derive and to evaluate a variety of TDT type procedures and linkage tests, using Locally Most Powerful Testing (LMPT ) as a central optimality criteria. This research outlines the likelihood approach and demonstrates how the method works in some special cases. The research provides the derivations and findings from the examples,which should shed light on a better understanding of the more challenging and broader problems arising from these data sets. In training doctoral students working on this increasingly important area, the research provides the basis to develop a new research level course. The proposed research intends to lead ultimately to routine guidelines for future investigators and to offer a theoretical basis for family-based studies doc2472 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Geometric Singular Perturbations with Turning Points and Synchronization of Coupled Oscillators Liu This project in the area of dynamical systems concerns two main areas of investigation. First, it investigates singularly perturbed systems with turning points, a class of dynamical systems that occur in applications involving multi-scale physical phenomena. The presence of turning points, where some eigenvalues of linearization along the slow variables change sign, indicates stability loss of the slow dynamic and complicates dynamical behavior. This project extends geometric singular perturbation theory to classes of problems to which current theory cannot be applied directly. Second, the project investigates the phenomenon of synchronization in systems of non-identical coupled oscillators. The main focus is on the effects of diffusive couplings and individual dissipations on synchronizations and their stabilities. The theory of dynamical systems has application to a wide array of natural systems that change in time, from the transmission of disease to the motion of planets and spacecraft. This project investigates two open problems in dynamical systems whose solution will advance the theory and as a result allow prediction and control of important natural systems. Results of the project will have significant impact on the understanding of multi-scale phenomena in biology, fluid dynamics, electrical circuit design, and other areas doc2473 none This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) provides funding for the development of a taxonomy of contingency logistics systems, formulate a general model of such systems, develop approaches for characterizing contingency logistics system decision support systems and exploration of empirical data to suggest how such decisions are structured in practice. The contingencies faced by such systems may be due to (1) a change in the system performance objective, (2) changes in available system resources or (3) changes in system demands. System objectives may change from efficiency as a goal, to timely delivery. System resources may change due to catastrophic events; technology changes etc., and system demands may change due to the product life cycle evolving from ramp up stage to operational stage to the ramp down stage. The requirements for a contingency logistics system to have an effective list of alternate control parameters are as follows. (1) selection apriori of a finite number of possible styles of operation, (2) repeated investments to preserve the viability of these possible styles of operation, and (3) adjustment of the mode of operation in response to changes in the environment. The investment in maintenance of possible alternatives thus takes away from the available resources when contingent actions are not required, but provides effectiveness when contingencies do in fact surface. Results of this research will offer an environment to examine alternate ways to organize prototype systems; use of control rules and switching schemes between rules in the presence of contingencies; and their impact on system response as well as other performance objectives. These results will prove useful in the organization and planning for contingency rich logistics environments doc2474 none Smith The investigator studies the mechanisms responsible for the generation of slow, large-scale motions from fast, small-scale motions in stratified turbulence and rotating, stratified turbulence. Because the earth s atmosphere and oceans are stratified fluids in a rotating frame, the work is highly relevant to geophysical applications. Many aspects of wave-turbulence interactions are yet to be understood. For example, it is not clear if, when and how small-scale 3D turbulence in the presence of waves can organize into large-scale coherent structures (as in 2D flows). In purely rotating flow, the investigator previously showed that white-noise forcing at small scales leads to the generation of slow, large-scale, cyclonic vortical columns, if the Rossby number is below a critical value of order one. This is surprising because recent work using multiple scales analysis shows, at first order, decoupling between fast, small-scale motions and slow, large-scale motions for a variety of wave-turbulence systems including rotating flow. Several second-order mechanisms may be responsible for the upscale energy transfer to slow modes in rotating turbulence. This project goes a step further towards understanding the large-scale dynamics in geophysical flows, by investigation of upscale energy transfer in 3D stratified and rotating, stratified turbulence. The investigator explores the necessary conditions leading to such upscale transfer and seeks to identify the underlying mechanisms. Simplified systems of dispersive wave turbulence are used to test understanding and for the development of statistical models. To complement numerical simulations and analysis, she has also planned laboratory experiments in a rotating tank, where the turbulence is driven by differentially-rotating, rough top and bottom plates. Over relatively short time periods in rotating and or stratified flows, there is both experimental evidence and mathematical support for the decoupling of slow, large-scale motions from fast, small-scale motions. This means that, on time scales of perhaps days in the atmosphere and weeks in the oceans, large-scale eddies and currents evolve independently from small-scale turbulence. Another implication is that short-term climate change is independent from rapid fluctuations of the conditions in the atmosphere and oceans. Our numerical simulations for longer times, however, show the generation of large-scale, coherent structures from small-scale turbulence, and this coupling may be important for long-term weather prediction, ocean circulaton and climate change. In the context of the atmosphere, one might ask, can small-scale cumulus convection at length scales of about ten kilometers generate large-scale eddies of several thousand kilometers in extent? The transfer of energy from fast, small-scale motions to slow, large-scale motions in three-dimensional, wave-turbulence systems such as rotating and stratified flows has only recently been discovered, even though such transfer has been studied for decades in two-dimensional flows. The present study involves numerical simulations, modeling and analysis, and laboratory experiments in a rotating tank. The goals are to deepen our understanding and improve our capability to predict geophysical phenomena doc2475 none Milewski The project will consist of the study of three problems in fluid mechanics and nonlinear waves. The first project involves understanding certain aspects of dispersive wave turbulence, that is, the statistical description of a large number of interacting dispersive waves, such as those on the ocean surface. First, a reduced model will be used which contains the fundamental nonlinear processes and can yield the scaling for the energy transfer mechanisms. Second, spectra of two-- and three--dimensional ocean waves with a reduced equation valid for finite depth and deep water will be computed and compared with results from the reduced model. The second project involves the study of three-dimensional solitary waves in regimes where surface tension is an important part of the dynamics. These are waves that can be generated, for example, by flow of a thin fluid layer over a small obstacle. Here, it is proposed to use solutions that have already been computed to find additional solutions in regimes of physical interest, such as increasing depth. The third project is to study the dynamics of reaction-diffusion equations in the presence of spatial inhomogeneities, as for example, in models of certain chemical reactions where the reactant concentration is not uniform in space. In the spatially homogeneous case, one obtains various coherent patterns in the reaction. How these patterns and their boundaries are modified by the inhomogeneities will be studied. The goal of this research is to understand several aspects of wave dynamics in fluids using a combination of theory and advanced computation. There are three distinct phenomena that will be studied. First, the evolution of wave turbulence will be studied: the physical situation in which many waves of different wavelengths and traveling in different directions are superposed. The simplest example is the apparent random mix of waves on the surface of the ocean. The goal is to predict the relative energy in the different waves and the mechanisms by which waves of different sizes exchange energy. These are important predictions whose applications range from understanding satellite remote sensing data to climate dynamics. Second, a class of water waves called lump solitons will be studied: localized coherent waves that travel in a particular direction. The goal is to obtain the range of physical situations in which these waves can exist. This work has implications in a variety of thin film and coating applications. Lastly, the dynamics of the components of biological and chemical reacting systems where the concentration of the reactants vary in space will be studied. The particular case where a catalyst for the reaction is not distributed uniformly and therefore the reaction proceeds differently in different places will be studied. The goal is to understand how the reaction varies from place to place and what happens at the boundaries where the reactions change character doc2476 none This research program will develop and investigate the fundamental physics of the operation of two classes of novel modelocked semiconductor lasers: 1) a compact, high average power femtosecond modelocked diode laser, and 2) a multi-wavelength modelocked semiconductor diode laser. The salient feature of these new modelocked diode lasers is that it has the potential to exploit intracavity filtering techniques, to control both the spectral amplitude and phase of the output, and as a result, precisely control the output temporal electric field characteristics of the laser. The successful completion of this program may allow for controllable output optical pulse shapes directly from a modelocked diode laser, and may potentially realize an arbitrary optical waveform generator . Novel applications of the laser system will be developed with interactions from industrial participants, in order to facilitate technology transfer. Applications will be focused on photonic network and instrumentation applications using a hybrid WDM-TDM technology architecture, such as terabit optical links, THz analog optical links, 100 Gsps optical analog to digital converters, and arbitrary optical waveform generation, real time nonlinear multi-wavelength signal processing, and real-time recording and retrieval of high density, massively parallel, multilayer-multiwavelength compact disc optical memories. The success of this type of opto-electronics and photonics program will enable the training of students in technically vital areas of optics, communications, and signal processing. In addition to outstanding academic training, fundamental processing, packaging and manufacturing skills will be obtained by participating graduate students, thus enabling students to provide timely impact to prospective employers upon their graduation doc2477 none This is a renewal proposal from a PI at an undergraduate institution for research exploring the relationship between superconductivity and magnetism in the nickel borocarbide family of materials. The overall goal is to identify and characterize the ground states of these materials. Specifically, a dilatometer will be used to measure the thermal expansion and magnetostriction of the magnetic material YbNi2B2C and the magnetic superconductor TmNi2B2C. In addition magnetization and critical field measurements of the Tm compound will be carried out. The intent is to characterize the heavy fermion state in the former material and the magnetic states in the latter. Furthermore, undergraduate students will participate in this research. Most of the work will be done on the campus of Occidental College, with the remainder at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. The undergraduate students will fully engage in this project and gain first hand experience to do research and interact with scientists in a major research environment. %%% This research project will be conducted with undergraduate students at Occidental College and at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. The research focuses on the experimental determination of certain magnetic and superconducting properties of two members of a family of nickel-boron-carbon compounds. The results will contribute to the understanding of superconductivity. Moreover, this project has a very strong educational component. The undergraduate participants will gain experience in one of the current forefront areas of condensed matter physics. In addition to their work done at Occidental College their presence at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory will give them experience in research conducted in a major research environment, where they will interact with experienced scientists as research colleagues doc2478 none This condensed matter physics project focuses on the use of infrared and optical spectroscopy to study the dynamics of strongly correlated electron systems. From infrared reflectivity measurements one can obtain conductivity as a function of frequency and temperature, which relates to the two-particle electronic correlation function and provides fundamental input to the characterization of novel electronic systems. As industry moves toward higher speeds, smaller sizes and solutions incorporating novel materials, the relevance of strongly correlated systems to technology increases. Compound classes to be studied include ruthenium oxides in the Ruddlesden-Popper series, ytterbium compounds that exhibit or are close to an electronic phase transition, and doped Kondo semiconductors. By studying ruthenates, which are related to both cuprate and manganate transition-metal oxides, one can investigate the relationship between magnetism and unconventional charge transport (e.g. bad metal behavior ). The Yb compounds in our research exhibit a phase diagram that includes heavy-fermion and mixed-valence phenomena, as well as an isostructural electronic phase transition. Research on these materials can help forge a link between the moment compensation physics of the periodic Anderson model and the phase transition dynamics of Mott-Hubbard systems. Undergraduate and graduate students involved in this work learn to carry out careful measurements utilizing modern equipment and receive valuable preparation for graduate school and employment in academic, industrial or government research. %%% This condensed matter physics project involves the characterization of strongly correlated electron systems. In such materials, interactions between electrons are very powerful and can induce electronic phenomena which are not yet understood. Strong electronic interactions can also induce new phases of matter and can lead scientists to new concepts of electron transport. These materials will play an increasingly significant role in emerging technologies: as industry moves toward higher speeds and smaller sizes and seeks solutions incorporating novel materials, the knowledge base from studies of strongly correlated systems becomes increasingly relevant. In this research, spectroscopic measurements of infrared, optical and ultra-violet reflectivity will be used to obtain conductivity as a function of frequency. Such measurements can reveal the fundamental electronic excitations in systems, including ruthenium oxides, which exhibit novel transport and magnetic phases; Ytterbium compounds, which manifest a phase transition at which the electronic valence changes from integer to non-integer values; and iron silicide, a small energy gap Kondo semiconductor with a very high dielectric coefficient at low frequency. Students involved in this research learn to think critically and to carry out careful measurements on modern equipment. For undergraduates this experience provides valuable preparation for graduate school; for graduate students, this training enhances their preparation for a career in teaching, industry or government research. In outreach efforts at K-12 schools with substantial under-represented populations, the PI uses demonstrations of the phenomena of strongly correlated systems (e.g. magnetism and superconductivity) to embellish presentations on research and education and careers in science doc2479 none This is an individual investigator award to a young professor at Montana State University for research into the ground-state properties of a variety of low dimensional conductors and superconductors. The project focuses on organic charge transfer salts and inorganic layered oxides. The three main parts of the project are 1) to study the fermiology of these quasi 1- and 2-d materials using a cyclotron resonance technique ; 2) to study the collective modes in the Sr2RuO4 system, a potential triplet pairing superconductor; and 3) to study the Josephson plasma resonance in the organic and layered superconductors. A GHz cavity perturbation method will be used for all of the measurements. The unifying goal of the studies is to probe how the various ground states of these unusual materials evolve from their respective metallic states, whether conventional or unconventional. The students working on the project will develop skills that will help them find jobs in academia, government or industrial laboratories. %%% Low dimensional materials possess a variety of interesting characteristics, some of which hold a potential for use in future technologies. These materials also form an interesting laboratory in which studies of novel physical phenomena can be made. This is an individual investigator award to a young professor at Montana State University for a project to study the ground state properties of low dimensional conductors and superconductors. In particular molecular conductors and layered superconductors will be studied using a high frequency technique. The goal of the project is to probe how the various ground states in these materials evolve from their respective metallic states. The research will increase our understanding of these interesting materials. The students working on the project will develop skills that will help them find jobs in academia, government or industrial laboratories doc2480 none John R. Kender Columbia University TITLE: Experimental Partnership: Adaptive Interactive Team Video This project will create a collaborative virtual environment for group work and or group study, in which semantically structured videos concerned with instruction, design, or prior discussion of a team effort are delivered over heterogeneous Internet links to heterogeneous platforms in an efficient and adaptive manner. The proposed system will enable: the measurement of the effectiveness of semantic summarization and indexing on the access and use of video resources, the measurement of the effectiveness of semantic summarization and indexing on the access and use of video resources, the measurement of the quality of service effects which heuristic forecasting and monitoring of team work actions will have on video delivery, and the measurement of the degree of success of system resource management algorithms for the perfecting and progressive refining of video segments into the caches of clients with varying capabilities from a server cluster subject to resource contention under varying loads. Additionally, this project will provide an efficient distributed environment useful for collaborative and educational purpose in its own right-one that will be tested in the PI s own courses doc2481 none This project investigates a new type of two-dimensional (2D) system, the sheath of edge-states that emerges in the quantum Hall regime of semiconductor multilayers. The edge-state sheath forms from coupling of the edge states at the perimeters of modulation-doped GaAs quantum wells in GaAs AlGaAs multilayers. Theory predicts that the highly anisotropic transport on the edge-state sheath (chiral flow around the layer planes, coupled with diffusion perpendicular to the layers) should make the interplay of disorder and interactions qualitatively different than in conventional, all-diffusive 2D systems. Low-temperature, high-magnetic-field measurements of electrical transport in multilayer samples of different sizes, shapes, and interlayer coupling strengths will test these predictions, which include distinctive changes in edge-state sheath properties with sample geometry. These studies of a new class of two-dimensional system can advance understanding of a central problem in condensed matter physics: electrical transport in disordered, low-dimensional and anisotropic materials, such as Bechgaard salts and chiral phases of carbon nanotubes. The graduate and undergraduate students who work on these experiments will be trained in state-of-the-art experimental techniques in cryogenics, low-noise electronic measurements, and modern semiconductor processing. This knowledge base will prepare them for science and engineering careers in academia, industry, and government. %%% In conventional two-dimensional (2D) conducting sheets, electrons move randomly in both directions. This project investigates a new type of 2D system, in which electrons move randomly in one direction, but travel only one way, with uniform velocity, in the other direction. This edge-state sheath is a 2D skin that runs around the sides of multi-layered GaAs AlGaAs semiconductor structures, in the regime of the quantum Hall effect. Theory predicts that the anisotropic flow of electrons on the edge-state sheath should make effects of imperfections, and of interactions between electrons, qualitatively different than in conventional 2D materials. Low-temperature, high-magnetic-field measurements of how electricity flows through edge-state sheaths on GaAs AlGaAs samples of different sizes and shapes will test predictions for distinctive, geometry-dependent effects. It is important to study such anisotropy-induced phenomena, because imperfections and interactions have large, complex effects in anisotropic, low-dimensional materials of emerging technological importance, such as high temperature superconductors and carbon nanotubes. The graduate and undergraduate students who work on these experiments will be trained in state-of-the-art experimental techniques in cryogenics, low-noise electronic measurements, and modern semiconductor processing. This knowledge base will prepare them for science and engineering careers in academia, industry, and government doc2482 none Previous results of the investigator and collaborators establish a relation between coherent sheaves on a Steinberg variety of a complex simple algebraic group, and perverse sheaves on the affine flag variety of the Langlands dual group. Since the latter are known, by the work of Kazhdan and Lusztig, to be related to representations of quantum groups at a root of unity, and hence also to representations of algebraic groups in prime characteristic, our results have implications for that theories. They also indicate that there should be a relation between the geometry of perverse sheaves on affine flag varieties, and non-restricted representations of quantum groups or Lie algebras in prime characteristics. The principal goal of the present project is to develop this kind of relationship, thus providing a new tool for the theory of non-restricted representations. It is expected, in particular, to yield a proof and a conceptual explanation for recent numerical conjectures by Lusztig. The methods and ideology of the present work are partly based on the geometric approach to the Langlands program, due to Drinfeld. Another goal of the project is to investigate consequences of the above mentioned results to that theory. A key to new developments, and a source of inspiration in mathematics often lie in discovery of parallelism (equivalence) between seemingly unrelated objects or theories. Representation theory is a rich source of examples of that kind: though formally being a branch of algebra, the modern theory relies heavily on geometric disciplines, such as topology and algebraic geometry. The principle goal of the present project is to develop geometric language for a branch of representation theory where it has been lacking so far, namely the so called theory of non-restricted modular representations. In the corresponding algebraic constructions divisibility properties of integral numbers by a particular prime number are relevant. The geometry apparently related to this deals with particular infinite dimensional objects, encountered also in mathematical physics (conformal field theory), and in number theory (Langlands duality theory). This construction is expected to provide new tools for the above mentioned branch of representation theory; in particular, it is expected to yield a proof of certain conjectures by leading experts in the field doc2483 none This individual investigator award is to a senior professor for a project dedicated to a comprehensive study of the phenomenon of exchange bias. The project consists of state of the art growth, structural, chemical and magnetic characterization, and measurement of physical properties using a broad range of techniques. The aim is to develop an increased understanding of the phenomenon that occurs when two dissimilar magnetic materials are placed in contact with each other. The exchange bias forms the basis for a number of applications that use the so called spin valve technology for magnetic storage and sensors. Although the phenomenon is used in many applications, a basic understanding is lacking. Issues that will be addressed by this research include, the influence of structural and magnetic parameters, and the effect of interfacial parameters such as roughness and interdiffusion. Through a thorough experimental attack, a better understanding of the phenomenon should be obtained. This will have a direct impact on related technologies. Students and postdocs working on this project will acquire technical and fundamental knowledge and skills that can be lead to careers in basic or applied research in academia, industry, or government laboratories. %%% This individual investigator award is to a senior professor for a project dedicated to the study of a phenomenon known as exchange bias , which occurs when two dissimilar magnetic materials are in contact with each other. This phenomenon appears in a variety of material configurations (i.e. thin films, small particles, etc.) and is an important ingredient in a number of sensor applications. Although the phenomenon is used in a 55 billion dollars industry, there is little basic understanding of its origin. Basic research along these lines may have an important effect on the development of novel sensors and improved magnetic storage. Graduate students and postdoctoral fellows are essential collaborators in this work. They will not only help in advancing our understanding of this important phenomenon, but will also acquire a broad range of technical skills that will serve them whether they are interested in careers in academia or the sensor and storage industries. This is an ideal area of research in which basic research can have a direct, relevant impact on industries and technology of crucial importance to the nation doc2484 none Jiang This research is focused on the thermodynamic measurements of interacting disordered semiconductor heterostructures. The problem of strong correlations, in low-dimensional quantum systems, is made more difficult by the presence of disorder. Particularly, the thermodynamic properties of interacting disordered quantum Hall devices is still poorly understood. A high density GaAs AlGaAs quantum well structure with two populated subbands as well as a p-type single-heterostructure with highly correlated holes will be used for the investigations. Compressibility will be measured by using a field-penetration technique to probe the internal interaction energy. Magnetization will be measured by a torsional magnetometer to determine the spin polarization at different electronic phases. Various physical regimes will be explored following the road-maps obtained from early transport studies. Electrically controlled gates will be used to vary the density, to alter the screening properties, and to change the spatial correlation of the disorder. Contemporary issues, such as the nature of the zero-field 2D metal-insulator transition, its relation to quantum Hall effect, and consequences of Landau level interactions in two-component systems, will be addressed. This project will also provide an excellent training for graduate and undergraduate students in this program for solid state electronics field. In fact, the semiconductor device fabrication and characterization aspects of the work overlaps closely with what is going on right now in semiconductor electronics industry. %%% This project is concentrated on the study of thermal properties of thin-layered semiconductor structures in the presence of both disorder and carrier interaction. Similar structures are currently used for high-speed electronics and opto-electronics technologies. Due to the intricate interplay of disorder and interaction, the properties of these advanced devices are less predictable, and sometimes even appear to be mysterious. The proposed experiments study the thermal properties of several poorly understood quantum electronic phases by using several high-sensitivity measurement techniques. The main objective is to establish a better understanding on the underlying physical principle of these phases and the wealth of effects exhibited. The better understandings can, in turn, provide a basis for designing the next generation of electronics. The concepts obtained from the proposed experiments can be applied to some of the more complex condensed matter systems. The work concerning electron spins could potentially have impact on the development of future quantum information processing systems for quantum computing and quantum communications. This project will also provide an excellent training for graduate and undergraduate students in this program for solid state electronics field. In fact, the semiconductor device fabrication and characterization aspects of the work overlaps closely with what is going on right now in semiconductor electronics industry doc2485 none Lalley Research will be conducted in two distinct areas: (1) stochastic processes, especially stochastic growth models, on graphs with hyperbolic geometries; and (2) filtering and inference for time series produced by chaotic dynamical systems. In the first area, the primary objective is an understanding of how hyperbolicity influences the behavior of certain fundamental stochastic processes, including random walks, branching random walks, contact processes, and percolation, and to elucidate the nature of the different phase transitions that occur in such processes. In the second area, the goal is to develop statistical procedures for analyzing time series data produced by systems governed by chaotic dynamics. In particular, situations where data from deterministic, but chaotic, systems is corrupted by external noise will be studied. The goals of the research will be (a) to determine when, and how, chaotic signals can be extracted from noisy time series; and (b) to develop procedures for inference about the governing dynamical laws based on raw time series data. Stochastic growth processes are crude mathematical models for the growth and spread of populations in time and space. Understanding of the mathematical laws governing the evolution of such processes may also contribute to our understanding of how epidemics develop, how favorable genes are disseminated in large populations, and how information makes its way through large communications networks. The notion of a phase transition , a drastic change in the qualitative behavior of a system precipitated by a small change in the parameters governing it, is especially important, because understanding the nature of such transitions may have ramifications for the development of intervention strategies doc2486 none The investigator proposes to study a number of interrelated topics having to do with representation theory and harmonic analysis for reductive groups over local fields. There are four general topics, some of which are divided up further. The first topic concerns a strange new formula involving characters of discrete series representations of real groups in the Hermitian symmetric case, a formula that will no doubt be needed in order to compare the Lefschetz formula with the Arthur-Selberg trace formula. The second topic concerns transfer factors in various settings: inner forms, Shimura varieties, descent for twisted transfer factors. The third topic concerns bad reduction of Shimura varieties. Currently this has lower priority but that could change in the course of the next three years. The fourth topic consists of five distinct but related questions about orbital integrals for reductive groups over non-archimedean local fields. In less technical language the investigator proposes to study a number of topics that belong to the theory of automorphic forms, a beautiful area of mathematics with ties to all three main branches of mathematics: algebra, analysis and geometry. The last several decades have been exciting times for workers in this area, one of the highlights being the essential use of automorphic forms in Wiles s spectacular proof of Fermat s Last Theorem. The coming decades promise many further exciting developments, and the investigator hopes to contribute to these directly, by solving some of the questions raised in the proposal, as well as indirectly, by helping to train young workers in this technically demanding field doc2487 none TITLE: Finite Sample Performance of Multivariate Location and Scatter Estimators : This research develops new methodology and theory in the performance evaluation of multivariate location and scatter estimators. The research is to propose finite sample performance criteria of multivariate location and scatter estimators based on their ``tail behavior , to investigate and assess the performance of existing and new multivariate location and scatter estimators with respect to the proposed criteria, and to provide guides to statistical practices in applications. Given an estimator of some unknown parameter, a natural question is -- how good is the estimator? or how should one measure its performance? These questions are fundamental in statistical estimation and inference. To answer these questions, various performance criteria have been proposed and studied. Among the existing performance criteria, asymptotic approaches including Fisher consistency and large sample normality are the most prevalent ones. These approaches have been based on the behavior of the estimator as the sample size approaches infinity. This, however, raises some serious concern about the relevancy of the asymptotic results in practice, where the sample size is always fixed and finite. The study of the finite sample performance of multivariate location and scatter estimators thus is not only practically significant but also theoretically interesting. In sharp contrast with the asymptotic approaches, in this research the performance of multivariate location and scatter estimators is studied for fixed and finite sample size. The research develops new methodology and valuable insights into the comparison of estimator performance particularly from robustness standpoint. Inherent connections of our finite sample performance measures with two most crucial and promising notions in the robust and nonparametric statistical analysis and inference, the finite sample breakdown point and the data depth (especially Tukey-Donoho halfspace depth), are to be explored and illuminated. It is to be shown that the estimators with high breakdown point or halfspace depth possess remarkable finite sample tail performance. Findings like this in the research offer new insights into and deepen our understanding of the notions of breakdown point and halfspace depth, and establish the important role of the finite sample tail behavior as a quantitative assessment of robustness of estimators. The research has profound impact on statistical applications in various disciplines of sciences such as social, behavior and life sciences, environmental and biology sciences, industry, and economics. The research suggests, for example, that location estimators with appealing tail performance (e.g. depth-based multivariate medians) should be preferred in practice to traditional least-squares estimators (e.g. the multivariate mean) for robustness against the influence of extremities of observations in multivariate data analysis. The research also benefits education through the training of graduate students and the incorporation of the developed methodology in statistics courses doc2458 none This experimental project explores collective and coherent spin behavior of electrons, local moments and nuclear spins in low dimensional systems ranging from 2D electron gases to 0D quantum dots. The experiments focus on model nanostructures fabricated from II-VI magnetic semiconductors which can be systematically tailored to modulate spin interactions between confined electronic states, magnetic ions and nuclei. The project combines development of sophisticated nanostructures and state-of-the-art spin probes having high temporal (~100 fs) and spatial (~100 nm) resolution, and high magnetic moment sensitivity (~105 Bohr magnetons). Microfabricated cantilevers will be used to search for collective spin effects in magnetic semiconductor nanostructures. Dynamical spin organization in these nanostructures will be studied using an all-optical magnetic resonance technique, encompassing spin precession of electrons, local moments and nuclear spins. Coherent optical spectroscopy coupled with time-resolved transport will probe dynamical spin transport in mesoscopic systems (wires) wherein the nuclear polarization is systematically varied using optical pumping. Finally, near field scanning optical resonance techniques will be developed to achieve spatially resolved magnetic resonance imaging of 2D electron spin systems. Knowledge of the collective spin response in nanostructures gained from this project may be important for coherent control of spin processes in future generations of magneto-electronic devices. Advanced technical training in solid state physics, materials science, and advanced instrumentation will prepare students for careers in academic and industrial environments. %%% This experimental condensed matter physics project explores the complex quantum mechanical behavior of electrons, magnetic atoms and nuclei in low dimensional systems ranging from electron sheets (2D electron gases) to electron boxes (0D quantum dots). The experiments use model nanostructures fabricated from a family of materials (II-VI magnetic semiconductors) in which the quantum mechanical property known as spin can be systematically varied. A fundamental understanding of spin transport in nanostructures may enable new technologies based on quantum mechanical interactions in the solid state. The project is comprised of a collaborative effort that combines development of sophisticated nanostructures with state-of-the-art spin probes having high temporal (~100 femtoseconds) and spatial (~100 nanometer) resolution, and high spin sensitivity (~ 105 magnetic atoms). Experiments range from ultrasensitive magnetometry, to all-optical spin resonance microscopy, to dynamical studies of electron spin transport. While the principal focus is on fundamental physics, knowledge gained will be important for developing concepts in the coherent control of spin processes in future generations of high speed magneto-electronic devices, with potential applications ranging from ultrafast switching to quantum computation. This research involves advanced technical training in materials physics and advanced instrumentation, and prepares students to make immediate contributions both in academic and industrial environments doc2489 none MATRIX ANALYSIS IN ENGINEERING AND SCIENCE Roy Mathias and Chi-Kwong Li College of William and Mary Matrix analysis finds applications in many fields including control theory, differential equations, economics, electrical engineering, graph theory, numerical analysis, operations research and optimization, psychology, quantum physics, and statistics. However, many researchers in these areas may not be able to use the existing results and proof techniques in matrix analysis to develop their theory effectively because their expertise is not in matrix theory and there is a lack of communication between them and researchers in matrix theory. We have considerable experience in matrix analysis and have developed, adapted, or borrowed many techniques to study the subject. In this project, they plan to develop and apply matrix methods to different problems that arise from applications. In addition to proving the necessary results we will put them in more general and accessible settings, so that the new results and techniques can be readily used by non-specialists. Matrix analysis is a basic tool in the physical and social sciences, applied mathematics, statistics and engineering. Matrices are a way of organizing and analyzing data. Sometimes simple results in matrix analysis are all that are needed, however, often one needs rather subtle results. Most scientists and engineers receive an only an introduction to matrices. We will develop and apply matrix methods to a variety of applied problems and will disseminate our results and techniques to researchers in these applied areas. Our goal is to advance the boundaries in matrix analysis and equip applied researchers doc2490 none This award will support a U.S.-Brazil collaboration between Dr. Franz-Josef Ulm of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Professor Nelson Ebecken of the School of Graduate Studies (COPPE) at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in Brazil. These researchers will develop a simulation platform for high performance computing for the prediction of the durability performance of concrete dams. The simulation-based prediction, repair, and retrofitting of gravity dams with regard to the deleterious effects of expansive reactions such as the alkali-silica reaction is another focus of the research. Computation modeling will be performed at MIT, while experiments will be conducted in Brazil. This research will make it possible to predict and limit the risk of early-age concrete cracking during dam construction, induced by the exothermal nature of the hydration reaction. The application to gravity dams is expected to have a lasting impact on sound planning for the repair and retrofitting of critical infrastructure doc2491 none Deering This award to University of Delaware provides shipboard technical support, shore-based support, instrument maintenance and instrument calibration for researchers using R V Cape Henlopen, a research vessel operated by University of Delaware s College of Marine Studies as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The technical support awarded here will assist NSF-funded researchers conduct oceanographic studies in the Chesapeake Bay and along the east coast of the United States in CY and beyond doc2492 none Award: Principal Investigator: Xianghong Gong The long term goal of this project is to study holomorphic mappings and real submanifolds arising in the field of several complex variables. One topic of proposed research is on the existence of periodic points of reversible and symplectic holomorphic mappings near an elliptic fixed point of general type and on the integrability property of holomorphic symplectic mappings via meromorphic eigenfunctions. Another topic is on the topological and analytic structure of singular Levi-flat real hypersurfaces in connections with singular complex hypersurfaces. Other topics include the structure of non-reversible conformal mappings and their connections with the non-reversibility of real analytic Hamiltonian systems. The differential equations dealing with the motion of N masspoints (a model of the solar system) in the three-dimensional space attracting each other according to Newton s law form a Hamiltonian system. The periodic orbits of certain area-preserving mappings corresponds to the periodic motion in the Hamiltonian system of the restricted three body problem, and the study of the existence of such periodic orbits goes back at least to the work of Poincare and Birkhoff about a century ago. Holomorphic symplectic mappings are natural extensions of area-preserving ones. Such an extension might allow one to apply methods in complex variables to the study of real Hamiltonian systems. Indeed, recent work on the existence of non-reversible area-preserving mappings depends on some deep knowledge of conformal mappings studied extensively in complex analysis doc2493 none For stochastic networks with a fixed service routing policy it is often difficult to uniquely characterize limits under standard law of large numbers and diffusion approximation scalings. Related difficulties appear in other methods of analysis, such as large deviation approximations. An alternative approach is to allow the routing service decisions to be control variables. When properly formulated, the analogous approximations to these controlled stochastic networks frequently possess better qualitative properties than their fixed policy counterparts. In addition, many approximate models are simple enough that closed form (or nearly closed form) solutions are possible. The investigator will carry out research on several closely related areas that can take advantage of these features: risk-sensitive control and the control of rare events in queueing networks; robust optimal control of law of large number approximations (also known as fluid models); higher order corrections to the control of fluid models. At the heart of each of these topics is a variational problem for processes with constrained dynamics (calculus of variations or optimal control problems for large deviations and control of fluid models, differential games for the problems of robust control of fluid models or control of rare events). The investigator has recently shown how in certain cases one can convert a variational problem involving constrained and controlled dynamics and a relatively simple cost structure into an equivalent problem involving unconstrained dynamics and a different cost. The latter problem is then solved explicitly. The proposed research includes extending this technique to include problems of buffer overflow in large deviations and constrained differential games. One of the main concerns of applied probability today is the development of tractable approximations for stochastic networks. Stochastic networks are ubiquitous in modern computer, communication and manufacturing systems, but owing to their complexity and detail are very difficult to analyze. As a consequence, much effort is being put into the development of mathematical models that are faithful enough to real life that conclusions drawn from them can be used with confidence, and yet which can be solved by either analytical or numerical means. The purpose of this project is to develop such methods of approximation and also the techniques for their solution. A new feature is to allow decisions on routing and service (e.g., which data class should be served in a communication network and where the processed data should be sent) to be control variables that can be optimized. Two particular classes of network problems will be given special attention. The first is the control of rare events. In many networks there are events that do not occur very often, and yet which are nonetheless the main concern. An example is data loss in a communication network. The second class is the robust control of networks, which means the control of a network in which some aspects of the network are poorly modeled or otherwise imperfectly known doc2494 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Derivation and Simulation in Radiative Transfer Theory Bal This project studies the propagation of high frequency waves in highly heterogeneous media. Radiative transport theory provides an accurate macroscopic description of the microscopic interactions between the propagating waves and the rapidly-fluctuating underlying medium. The objectives of the research are threefold. First, extend radiative transport theory to include boundary conditions and surface and volume wave interaction. Second, solve the volume and surface equations numerically using a Monte Carlo method based on a probabilistic representation of radiative transfer with polarization. Finally, assess the domain of validity of radiative transfer by setting up suitable inverse problems that allow determination of statistical parameters characterizing the underlying medium from boundary measurements. A major recent success of radiative transport theory is the modeling of the propagation of seismic waves in the earth s crust. Numerical study of seismic wave propagation over hundreds of kilometers remains prohibitive with a microscopic model, but simulations are now accessible using radiative transfer theory and suitable statistical methods. Results promise to yield better understanding and prediction of earthquakes. Another application of radiative transport and its diffusion approximation is near-infrared spectroscopy. This novel method is increasingly used in medical imaging for monitoring properties of human tissues. Numerical simulation of forward and inverse transport problems remains an active field of research. The project provides the mathematical and numerical analysis to address these issues doc2495 none In this research the synthesis, structure, structur-formation and dynamic mechanical behavior of block-copolymer-based, nano-structured organic-inorganic hybrid materials from organically modified ceramic (ORMOCER) precursors will be studied. To this end first a whole range of poly(isoprene-block ethyleneoxide) (PI-b-PEO) diblock copolymers with varying PEO volume fraction and narrow molecular weight distribution will be synthesized by anionic polymerization. These will be used as structure directing agents in the sol-gel process of a mixture of two metal alkoxides, added to the block copolymers in different amounts. In this way the full phase space for the mixture of PI-b-PEO diblock copolymers of various compositions with the inorganic materials will be explored. Special emphasis will be put on the synthesis of organic-inorganic hybrid materials with the bicontinuous gyroid morphology, a particularly interesting structure in block copolymers. The resulting structures will be analysed by small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) measurements. Results of this part will lead to a phase diagram comparable to that of diblock copolymer homopolymer mixtures. Analysis of details of the phase diagram will be facilitated by the possibility to look at frozen-in, local transition domains in biphasic regions of the phase diagram simply by dissolution of block copolymer rich bulk samples. Furthermore, the large variability in the polymer as well as the sol-gel chemistry will be explored to synthesize hybrid materials with unknown property profiles. For particular compositions of the mixtures of organic and inorganic precursors the structure formation process during evaporation of the solvent under heating will be investigated using in-situ SAXS. By correlating these results with solid-state NMR measurements on silicon and aluminum, insights into the interplay between sol-gel chemistry and phase separation as well as into the pathways towards the final morphologies will be obtained. Finally, the present study will allow for a systematic investigation of the dynamic mechanical behavior of the resulting organic-inorganic hybrid materials. These materials can be looked at as model systems for the understanding of the mechanical behavior of commercially important polymer-clay nanocomposites. It is expected that this program will lead to advances in the fundamental understanding of the mechanisms of formation and behavior of structured block copolymer-silica hybrid materials. At the same time it will provide student training and learning at the interface between polymer science and inorganic chemistry doc2496 none Anderson This effort involves a close research interaction between dislocation mechanics modeling and novel processing and transmission electron microscrope experiments that will lead to a fundamental understanding of deformation mechanisms in layered nanomaterials. A principal goal of this research is to understand the limiting strength of such materials to plastic deformation, as the thickness of individual layers in the structure are decreased to the nanometer scale. To do so, the investigators will observe directly the generation, motion, and interaction of dislocations in layered nanomaterials over a range of individual layer thickness. Particular attention will be given to the critical conditions for which interfaces are no longer able to confine dislocation motion to individual layers. These observations will couple closely with theoretical treatments of the nucleation and motion of dislocations in confined layer geometries, and the critical stress to transmit slip across grain boundaries and interfaces. This research will extend our knowledge of how to develop ultra-high strength two-phase layered nanomaterials through the choice of phases, the scale at which they are employed, and the structure of the interfaces and grain boundaries which serve to confine dislocation motion doc2497 none Slavin This RUI grant is a continuation of support of the research of this mid-career PI at a predominantly undergraduate institution. This grant contains a collaboration with G. A. Melkov, Ukraine, and has been co-funded by the INT division. The PI has an illustrious record in the study of nonlinear spin-wave phenomena in thin magnetic films. In general his interests lie in the study of nonlinear wave dynamics in dispersive, diffractive and weakly dissipative media. This renewal grant focuses on 1-d and 2-d nonlinear spin waves, including (1) generation of bright spin wave envelope solitons by a linear source, (2) non-adiabatic interaction of a propagating wave packet with strongly localized parametric pumping and (3) Use of non stationary parametric pumping to amplify or turn around envelope solitons or 2-d spin wave bullets using 3-wave interaction. In addition there will be further study of collisions between solitons and bullets and of size dependent quantization of spin wave spectrum in an array of micron size magnetic dots. %%% This RUI grant for research in an undergraduate institution also contains support for a strong international collaboration. It has been co-funded by the INT division. The grant supports a continuation of the PI s research program on non-linear spin waves. These are large amplitude magnetization waves in a magnet, which occasionally have extraordinary properties and the waves then (similar to a wall of magnetization) are called solitons. In another circumstances, the waves also resemble bullets. The research here concerns the properties of solitons and bullets, how they can be created, how there motion can be affected by small and slow changes in the environment, how they bump into each other and what happens afterwards. The work will be carried out in collaboration with colleagues in Ukraine and Russia doc2498 none This experimental condensed matter physics project will explore the dynamics at high frequencies, 10-100 GHz, of electrons in mesoscopic conductors and superconductors. The studies will focus on noise, dephasing due to microwave photons, photon-stimulated energy distributions and enhanced super currents in superconducting normal superconducting structures. The project will also explore the effect of a superconducting phase difference on the quantum statistics of the noise, via cross-correlation measurements. The goal is to understand the dynamical behavior of these mixed superconductor-normal systems. The project will provide students with training in state-of-the art measurement techniques, and will prepare them for careers in academe, industry and government. %%% An important fundamental and technical issue connected with quantum mechanical systems, such as superconductors, is how fast they respond to external electric and magnetic fields. These problems become more difficult when the quantum systems are very small in size. Thus the continual downsizing of microelectronic device structures to smaller and smaller sizes presents substantial measurement challenges, particularly at high frequencies, in the microwave region. This experimental condensed matter physics project will explore the dynamics at high frequencies, 10-100 GHz, of electrons in mesoscopic conductors and superconductors. The project will explore current flows in superconducting loops and across barriers through which electrons tunnel via quantum mechanical motion. The goal is to understand the dynamical behavior of these mixed superconductor-normal systems. New measurement techniques are being developed to reach these goals. The project will provide excellent training for students and post-docs in state-or-the are measurement methods. It will prepare them for careers in academe, industry and government doc2499 none Tasayco This three-year award, which supports U.S. Spain cooperative research in molecular biology, involves Maria Tasayco of the City University of New York s City College and Jose Sanchez-Ruiz of the University of Granada and Angeles Jimenez of the Center for the Structure of Materials in Madrid, Spain. The objective of their research is to map out which regions from a family of complementary protein fragments are essential for their reassembly. Specifically, they will change the interface surface between folded complementary fragments while maintaining the overall architecture to produce a flat or intertwined interface with the Thioredoxin (Trx) model system. They will clarify how the interface affects the stability and the rate constant of dissociation unfolding of the artificially generated heterodimers derived from Trx. The U. S. investigator brings to this collaboration expertise in designing, engineering, and generating protein fragments and conducting kinetic studies of folding binding processes between protein fragments. This is complemented by the Spanish investigators strengths in thermodynamic studies of protein folding and stability using calorimetry, and in NMR studies of proteins, protein fragments and their complexes. The research will advance our understanding of protein interactions occurring within living organisms and to design ways to modulate the affinity and specificity in protein folding binding doc2500 none The late s marked the advent of a renewed interest in fundamental areas of tribology, sparked by a number of new experimental and theoretical techniques capable of studying the force of friction in geometries which were well defined at the nanometer scale. This is an individual investigator award to a female PI at the North Carolina State University at Raleigh. The research project involves the use of one such new technique, namely the quartz crystal microbalance, to probe critical issues of importance to this field, including (1) understanding the chemical and tribochemical reactions which occur in a sliding contact, and (2) understanding the energy dissipation mechanisms associated with friction at atomic length and time scales. If successful, the project will yield the first atomic-scale images of tribochemical reactions (obtained by combining the microbalance with a scanning tunneling microscope), and will also provide an understanding of the basic energy dissipative mechanisms associated with the recently discovered phenomena of superconductivity-dependent friction. A complimentary educational component includes (1) ongoing participation of undergraduates in the research, and (2) direct dissemination of state-of-the-art information on friction to instructors developing curriculum on the topic, as well as to more general audiences through lectures and written reviews. %%% By most recent estimates, improved attention to friction and wear would save developed countries up to 1.6% of their gross national product, or over $100 billion annually in the U.S. alone. It is thus not surprising that the field of tribology (the study of friction and wear) has long inspired interest in the engineering and materials communities. The late s particularly marked a renaissance in fundamental areas of tribology, sparked by a number of new experimental and theoretical techniques capable of studying the force of friction in geometries that were well defined at the nanometer scale. This is an individual investigator award to a female PI at the North Carolina State University at Raleigh. The reseach project involves the use of one such new technique, namely the quartz crystal microbalance, to probe critical issues of importance to this field. If successful, the project will yield the first atomic-scale images of tribochemical reactions and will also provide a basic understanding of the recently discovered phenomenon of superconductivity-dependent friction. A complimentary educational component includes (1) ongoing participation of undergraduates in the research, and (2) direct dissemination of state-of-the-art information on friction to instructors developing curriculum on the topic, as well as to more general audiences through lectures and written reviews doc2501 none While metal clusters, metal colloidal particles and semiconductor nanocrystals have been very attractive subjects of research work for several decades, the last few years have witnessed a clear upsurge of interest in metal and semiconductor particles with nanometer dimensions. The rapidly increasing number of research publications in this field correlates with the recent development of methodology to chemically modify the surface of these particles with organic monolayers, which can stabilize and modulate the physical and chemical properties of the nanoparticles. This research project concentrates on the preparation and characterization of metal (gold, platinum and palladium) nanoparticles modified with monolayers of molecular receptors. The key concept driving this research work is that the molecular recognition properties of the surface-immobilized hosts may be combined with the intrinsic properties of the nanoparticles to yield materials with novel and interesting properties. For instance, the catalytic ability of platinum and palladium surfaces may be modulated by the binding properties of the hosts to produce new catalysts with enhanced or modified selectivity. Surface modified nanoparticles can also be utilized for the preparation of novel composite materials and for the development of new types of sensors. %%% The proposed research work will increase our fundamental knowledge of these inorganic organic composite materials. The initial stages of the work will focus on the characterization of gold nanospheres prepared by methods already developed in the P.I. s laboratory. As this work moves forward, efforts will gradually turn to the preparation of platinum and palladium nanoparticles modified with molecular hosts, their characterization and their use as new catalysts. In addition to the scientific significance of the proposed work, funding of this proposal will allow the continued training and development of under-represented scientists in the P.I. s group. During the s, five out of a total of eight Ph.D. graduates from the group were of Hispanic origin. The only two students obtaining a M.S. degree for the group were also Hispanic. Currently, four out of a total of nine graduate students in the group are also Hispanic doc2502 none The authors propose to perform exploratory research into the requirement parameters for developing an interactive, personalized, question answer learning environment for K-6 students using digital virtual museums. New technologies in computer and computational science can be synthesized with effective museum science techniques to provide a learning environment to combat the loss of decline in achievement, and loss of interest in science in elementary school students. A key question to be resolved is the identification of the needs to develop such a computer program. This research will then form the basis of a subsequent proposal to further develop this concept doc2503 none Banuelos Firstly, ideas from martingales theory will be used to investigate sharp inequalities for certain singular integrals which have played a fundamental role in several different areas of harmonic analysis, partial differential equations and the calculus of variations. These investigations lead to connections of probability to a conjecture of Morrey which asserts that rank--one convexity does not imply quasiconvexity in dimensions larger than 2. Secondly, extremal problems for the hyperbolic metric will be investigated. These problems arise from the conformal invariance of Brownian motion and conditioned Brownian motion in simply connected domains in the plane. These investigations in turn lead to new problems for martingales and Brownian motion. These problems will also be explored. Morrey s conjecture is important because of its implications in constructing minimizers in several problems in the calculus of variations describing various physical systems. The connection of these problems to probability was discovered by the PI and his collaborator, G. Wang and A.J. Lindeman, while investigating sharp inequalities for stochastic integrals and more general martingales. These connections lead to several questions which if false prove Morrey s s conjecture, a long standing open problem, and if true prove a conjecture concerning the norm of certain singular integrals, another long standing open problem. The solution to the proposed problems on the hyperbolic metric will yield a deeper understanding of various isoperimetric (extremal) inequalities for Brownian motion and conditioned Brownian motion. As with previous research projects of the PI, graduate students will be (are already) involved doc2504 none Jack Davidson University of Virginia Jack Davidson University of Virginia Embedded computer systems have become key building blocks of our nation s vital infrastructures. Embedded computers are components in a large number of other automated devices and consumer appliances. Examples of automated devices include air conditioning systems, elevators, fire control systems, security systems, lighting systems, etc. Consumer appliances with embedded computers include VCRs, facsimile machines, set-top boxes, modems, cellular telephones, pagers, printers, photocopiers, etc. This project seeks to address the embedded software development problem by developing algorithm tools, and techniques to support embedded system software development using high-level languages. Initially, our research will focus on algorithms and tools targeted at digital signal processors and the embedded applications they support. This project will build on and extend the Zephyr compiler infrastructure being developed at the University of Virginia and Princeton University. The goal of the Zephyr project is to build compiler infrastructure that enables and supports cutting-edge computing systems research doc2505 none The proposed research activity that would be supported by this grant includes research in four broad areas. First, there is the program of parity-nonconserving electron scattering at the JLab accelerator that will try to measure the contribution of strange quarks to the structure of protons and neutrons. Second, there are two experiments to measure fundamental properties of the muon. One experiment at BNL to measure the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon in order to test the so-called Standard Model of electroweak interactions and set important limits on new physics beyond that model. The other is a measurement at PSI to measure the lifetime of the muon in order to place stringent limits on the universal Fermi coupling constant. Third, there is the experiment at HERA to determine the contribution of quarks and gluons to the intrinsic angular momentum of the proton and neutron by measuring the scattering of polarized electrons on polarized targets. Fourth, there is the program of real Compton scattering at JLab that seeks to test certain aspects of the theory of Quantum Chromodynamics and to measure new features of the quark structure of the proton Lastly, all research activities are closely integrated with education at the undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels, and contribute to important outreach aimed at K-12 students doc2506 none Proposal: : Professor Bromberg plans to study spaces of hyperbolic metrics on a fixed 3-manifold. Two types of questions will be investigated. The first of these is a study of hyperbolic cone-manifolds. Finite volume cone-manifolds arise naturally as a link between cusped hyperbolic 3-manifolds and closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds. Bromberg s goal is to parameterize spaces of infinite volume hyperbolic cone-manifolds and use this parameterization to understand non-singular hyperbolic structures. The second question involves the topology of deformation spaces of complete, infinite volume metrics on open 3-manifolds. Anderson and Canary have shown that the space of such metrics on a manifold of fixed homotopy type has a very complicated topology akin to that of the Mandelbrot set studied in complex dynamics. In joint work with J. Holt, Bromberg has shown that this complicated behavior persists even if the deformation space is restricted to metrics on a 3-manifold of fixed homeomorphism type generalizing work of McMullen. Complex projective structures naturally appear in both of these topics. Bromberg also plans to study projective structures with a given discrete holonomy representation. This project lies in the field of low dimensional topology and geometry. The main objects studied are three-manifolds which are spaces with one more dimension than a surface (a 2-manifold). Three-manifolds, such as the space that we live in, are some of the most basic objects in mathematics yet there are many simple questions about them that we cannot answer. A metric is a way of measuring distance on a 3-manifold and a hyperbolic metric is one of a special class of metrics such that at every point and in every direction the geometry locally looks the same. The work of W. Thurston has shown that most 3-manifolds carry a hyperbolic metric and earlier work of Ahlfors, Bers and others has shown that an open 3-manifold that has an infinite volume hyperbolic metric will in fact have many hyperbolic metrics. There is a vast program to understand all such metrics of which this project is a piece doc2507 none Rodl This US-Brazil award provides support for cooperative research among Dr. Vojtech Rodl, Dwight A. Duffus, and Jozef Skokan of Emory University, Dr. Brendan Nagle of Georgia Tech, Dr. Lubos Thoma of Carnegie Mellon and Professor Associado Yoshiharu Kohayakawa of the Universidade de Sao Paulo. The U.S. researchers will be provided with travel support to work with Dr. Kohayakawa in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Dr. Kohayakawa has visited Emory University frequently, but this award will permit the U.S. researchers to continue the collaboration by going to Brazil. They will work on two sets of problems: the first group center on the recently developed methodology involving Szemeredi s Regularity Lemma, a sparse regularity lemma, and versions of the Blow-up Lemma. The second group deals with external properties for finite set systems doc2508 none In recent years, the PI has identified a new class of ceramic material best described as polycrystalline nanolaminates. These solids are ternary layered hexagonal carbides and nitrides with the general formula, M n+1 AX n , where n = 1 to 3, M is an early transition metal, A is an A-group element and X is either carbon and or nitrogen. To date 15 of the roughly 50 phases known to exist have been synthesized and characterized. These phases share many of the advantageous attributes of their respective stoichiometric binary metal carbides or nitrides: they are elastically stiff, electrically and thermally conductive. Mechanically, however, they cannot be more different: they are readily machinable, relatively soft, resistant to thermal shock and unusually damage tolerant. They combine ease of machinability with good mechanical properties, especially at T degrees C. Furthermore, they couple thermal isotropy with mechanical anisotropy. This unusual combination of properties is traceable to their layered structure, the metallic-covalent nature of the MX bonds that are exceptionally strong, together with M-A bonds that are relatively weak, especially in shear. The best-characterized ternary to date is Ti3 SiC2. Despite clear progress in understanding these solids several fundamental issues remain unresolved. Primary amongst them are: i) the physical origin of the brittle-to-plastic transition that occurs at approximately degrees C in many of these systems; ii) the nature of a solid-solution softening effect observed at higher temperatures in Ti 2 AlN0.5C0.5 ; iii) the relationship between the bonding and the single crystal elastic constants and the electrical and thermal properties. This research project will synthesize and characterize most of the 35 or so ternaries that have never been synthesized before in an attempt to understand their structure-properties-bonding relationships. The fabrication and characterization will take place in the PI s laboratory at Drexel. To carry out the theoretical modeling of the structure, the PI has teamed with the Russian team headed by Dr. Nadia Medvedeva who recently published an excellent paper on the full potential linear-muffin-tin orbital calculations of Ti3 SiC2 and its solid solutions. The ultimate goal is to refine the theoretical model to allow for the prediction of the elastic, thermal and electrical properties. A new class of ceramic material that can be classified as nano-laminates has been explored by the PI. These materials combine some of the better thermal, chemical, electrical and elastic characteristics of ceramics, with few of their drawbacks, such as brittleness. Because of these unusual properties, these ceramic materials are likely to have a broad technological impact doc2509 none Steven B. Bradlow Holomorphic bundles arise naturally in many different areas of geometry - indeed they lie at the intersection of algebraic, symplectic, and complex differential geometry. At the center of this intersection are sets of partial differential equations, such as the so-called Hermitian-Einstein and Vortex equations, which place constraints on the geometric features of the bundles. Their solutions carry information not only about the geometry of the bundles on which they are defined, but also about their topological and algebraic structure. In recent year it has been discovered how by adding certain extra structure to a holomorphic bundle, interesting new phenomena are revealed and important applications can result. The primary goals of this proposal include a fuller understanding of these `augmented bundles , the equations defined on them, their moduli spaces, and their applications. Holomorphic bundles fall within the class of geometric objects known as fiber bundles. In addition to their prominent place in modern geometry, fiber bundles play an important role within modern theoretical physics, where the influence of geometry can hardly be overstated. General relativity, electromagnetism and its extensions (known as gauge field theories), and string theory could not be formulated without sophisticated geometric tools such as vector and principal bundles doc2510 none This experimental condensed matter physics project deals with non-linear phenomena and patterns appearing in gases and fluids. The research is focused on the influence of broken symmetries on spatio-temporal chaos in dissipative pattern forming systems. As a prototype system the convection of a fluid layer with large lateral extent will be studied experimentally. First the coexistence region between thermal and shear driven instability will be investigated. Special attention will be given to the localized turbulent bursts and their relation to shear flow driven turbulence. Second the influence of spatial forcing on spatio-temporal chaos for convection in inclined and horizontal layers will be studied. Graduate students involved in the project receive training in fundamental experimental techniques, like high resolution digital image capture, digital image processing, precision temperature measurement and control techniques. In addition the graduate students will participate in the Cornell s interdisciplinary NSF IGERT program on Nonlinear Systems. This training will prepare them especially well for the challenging interdisciplinary workplace of the 21st century. %%% This experimental condensed matter physics project deals with non-linear phenomena and patterns appearing in gases and fluids. Ordered patterns are ubiquitous in nature. We can observe them on scales from a few centimeters in the ripples of the windblown sand to kilometers in cloud streets. In both cases the patterns are fueled by wind or by hot air rising from the earth s surface. Indeed such patterns occur in many driven systems. Usually those patterns are disordered in space and are changing constantly. We call such a behavior spatio-temporal chaotic. To date a unifying understanding of spatio-temporal chaos does not exist. However, an understanding of spatio-temporal chaos is very important since it may lead to the control of systems as complex as cardiac fibrillation and the generation of turbulence. We will investigate, how external modulations alter spatio-temporal chaos and turbulent bursts in convection of fluids. Graduate students involved in the project receive training in fundamental experimental techniques and cutting edge technologies. In addition the graduate students will participate in Cornell s interdisciplinary NSF IGERT program on Nonlinear Systems. This training will prepare them especially well for the challenging interdisciplinary workplace of the 21st century doc2511 none Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) are the basic mathematical description for a wide variety of important application areas. In particular, this project will consider PDEs that arise in fluid dynamics, biology, and radiation diffusion. Because of their complexity, these equations can only be solved numerically by computers, and because of their particular properties (shock waves, sharp fronts, and local singularities) they are difficult to solve even then. This project will design, analyze, and implement software for a class of iterative methods to numerically solve nonlinear PDEs. The software will be provided in two forms - Matlab codes and a package interoperating with the PETSc library - for other researchers to apply the methods. Technically, the project will study a class of nonlinear elimination algorithms for solving algebraic nonlinear equations with unbalanced nonlinearities. The elimination methods avoid traditional methods slow convergence when local singularities appear by identifying misscaled nonlinear components and replacing them with a function of the remaining more uniformly scaled components. The family of algorithms thus devised will obtain parallelism from domain decomposition, scalability (with respect to problem size) from multilevel methods, and robustness (against local singularities) from incomplete elimination. The methods will be tested on three important classes of applications: transonic compressible flows (CFD), electric wave problems in the heart (computational biology), and Marshak wave problems (radiation transport). The proposed algorithm and software development will have a great impact on the three applications, and will also have substantial influence on other areas of computational science where large nonlinear equations need to be solved doc2512 none Thorpe This award for dissertation enhancement in intelligent and information systems involves Charles Thorpe and his graduate student, Terrence Fong, of Carnegie Mellon University and the research group of Charles Bauer of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Ecole Polytechnique Federale) in Lausanne, Switzerland. The project, which addresses research and applications in vehicle operation (remote driving) in general, focuses on advanced teleoperation operator interfaces. In collaboration with the Swiss group, Terence Fong s dissertation research will (1) investigate peer-to-peer human-computer interaction and adjustable autonomy; (2) create web-based user interfaces to enable teleoperation by novices without instruction or training; and (3) develop techniques for creating sensor fusion displays suitable for vehicle teleoperation. This award will support the incremental costs of the international collaboration; that is, Fong s travel to Lausanne, Switzerland and his living expenses. The project takes advantage of Swiss expertise in interfaces, which take an active role in human-computer interaction, flexible adaptation, unique facilities at the Lausanne campus. The project will advance fundamental understanding of collaborative human-robot control and remotely operated vehicles and systems doc2513 none Yau The Euler equations were derived from microscopic Newtonian dynamics heuristically by Morrey in the sixties and rigorously by Olla-Varadhan-Yau recently (assuming the Boltzmann hypothesis). The first part of the project proposes to change the underlying dynamics to quantum mechanics. The aim is to show that the Euler equations obtained in the quantum case are similar to the classical ones except all physical quantities should be computed quantum mechanically. The approach will be based on the relative entropy method and certain extension of large deviation theory to the quantum case. The second part of the project concerns the dynamics of an electron interacting with a lattice structure, modeled by a phonon field. Therefore, its dynamics is governed by a Schrodinger equation of an electron coupled to a scalar quantum field. The goal is to prove that the phase space density of the electron converges to a Boltzmann equation in the weak coupling limit. The underlying dynamics for electrons in a material are governed by quantum mechanics, or more precisely the Schrodinger equations. Since the Schrodinger equations are difficult to solve no matter analytically or numerically, most models in use nowadays for transport behavior of electrons are semi-classical ones based on classical particles and diffusions. Although these semi-classical models are valid approximations for large distance behavior, they neglect crucial quantum effects in small scales. The aim of this project is to study the transport behavior starting from the first principle---the Schrodinger equations. In particular, the validity of the Euler and Boltzmann equations will be established from the Schrodinger equations. This is the first step toward understanding the quantum effects in transport behavior. The long term goal is to understand quantum corrections to these equations doc2514 none Larson Following the introduction in of de Gennes reptation theory of polymer diffusion and relaxation in entangled polymers, gradual progress has been made in quantitatively predicting the relaxation of simple polymers by recognizing the importance of the additional mechanisms of primative path fluctuations and constraint release. Theoretical concepts introduced by McLeish and co-workers suggest that these same basic mechanisms can allow prediction of the viscoelastic properties of more complex molecular systems, such as melts of molecules with multiple branch points. Heretofore, however, theories have been specialized to particular systems, such as purely linear molecules, or monodisperse or bidisperse stars. Furthermore, the concept of constraint release has taken on two different simplified descriptions, one called tube reorganization and the other tube dilation. In the special case of polydisperse linear polymers, a version of tube reorganization called double reptation appears to successfully describe relaxation data, while for star polymers, constraint release must be manifested in terms of a tube dilation model known as dynamic dilution. In the present grant, a theoretical framework will be developed that is general in scope, which can account for all known mechanisms of slow relaxation in entangled polymers, and unify the concepts of tube reorganization and tube dilution. To develop such a model, the so-far successful notion will be exploited that in many cases entanglements in concentrated polymeric systems can be viewed as a set of pair-wise interactions between two chains. Each entanglement disappears when either chain in the pair moves its chain end through the entanglement position. Thus, the hypothesis is that qualitative and perhaps quantitative predictions of polymer relaxation can be made even for complex mixtures of different topology, by keeping track only of chain ends, chain branch points, and discrete entanglements or slip links that couple pair-wise the relaxation of different chains. A computational algorithm, called the dual slip link algorithm, will be developed that can in principle describe relaxation of any molecular mixture of linear or arbitrarily branched polymers. In preliminary work, for linear polymers, the model reduces to the double reptation theory, which is known to be accurate for many polydisperse linear polymers, while for star polymers, it predicts behavior similar to that of the Ball-McLeish dynamic dilution theory. This preliminary work will be extended by allowing motion of branch points which will then permit simulation of polymer mixtures of arbitrary topolgy and composition. Predictions of this model will be compared with analytic theories and with experimental data for linear molecules, stars and pom-poms, and mixtures thereof, and with simulation results to gain deeper insights into relaxation processes in both simple and complex polymer systems. %%% This grant supports theoretical research on fundamental relaxational properties of mixtures of polymers. Using a newly developed computational algorithm, various other theories of these systems will unified. Besides being of fundamental interest, understanding relaxation in polymer mixtures has wide ranging industrial applications doc2515 none Josep Torrellas Univ. of Illinois-Champaign TITLE: Experimental Partnership: FlexRAM: An Advanced Intelligent Memory System Dramatic increases in the number of transistors that can be integrated on a single chip have enabled both microprocessor performance and memory chip capacity to rise spectacularly. However, they have also led to an increasingly constraining data transfer bottleneck between processor and memory system. Recognizing the need for new architectural approaches that alleviate this bottleneck, researchers have proposed the integration of processor and DRAM in a single chip. This architecture is popularly known as intelligent memory (IRAM) or processor-in-memory (PIM). Unfortunately, simple integration of current microprocessors and DRAM on a single chip often delivers only modest performance improvements-it moves an off-chip bottleneck on chip. Furthermore, the resulting system is often very hard to program. Finally, Little effort has been invested trying to identify a wide range of applications that can exploit this architecture effectively doc2516 none Menendez This three-year award will provide support for Jose Menendez of Arizona State University to work with Jose Calleja at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain. The primary goal of their research is to perform inelastic light scattering studies of carbon nanotubes under high magnetic fields, in the expectation of characterizing nanotube samples, which always contain a heterogeneous distribution of nanotube sizes and structures. In addition, they plan to investigate some unusual magnetic field effects - ranging from a metal-insulator transition to an enhancement of the predicted Peierls distortion in 1D-metals -- that have been predicted theoretically. The two laboratories are complementary. The US laboratory is equipped with Raman instrumentation with extremely high resolution and contrast. The Spanish laboratory is one of the few in the world where Raman measurements with fields as high as 12T and temperatures as low as 0.3 K can be performed routinely. Carbon nanotubes have been proposed as the ideal tip materials for scanning probe microscopies, as an alternative to composite doc2517 none Solvers for Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) are the backbone of much of scientific computing. In particular, they are the basis of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), the modeling of liquid and gas flows. This project studies new, efficient methods for solving PDEs and implements those methods on modern high-performance parallel computers. These solvers are useful in areas other than their original CFD home - in particular, surprising applications to diverse areas such as image restoration and VLSI placement will be studied as well. Technically, this project will investigate efficient algebraic multiscale algorithms for elliptic and non-elliptic PDE and CFD problems on arbitrary unstructured meshes which are suitable for distributed and shared memory parallel computing architectures. In addition, it will study how these algorithms can be extended to other large scale non-PDE problems, including image restoration and VLSI placement problems. Three aspects of these multiscale algorithms will be emphasized in this work: (1) Issues arising from making these algorithms more algebraic (for ease of use) including robustness to anisotropy, jumps and oscillations in coefficients, homogenization, etc. (2) Extension of these algorithms from their normal elliptic setting to non-elliptic and more generally non-PDE, graph-based settings. (3) Performance on modern high performance computer architectures with particular attention paid to communication and cache memory latency. Particular attention will be placed on algorithms appropriate for solving discretization matrices arising from a variety of large scale scientific computing problems such as CFD for advection dominated problems, VLSI placement an image processing. The non-elliptic behavior of these practical problems renders the known multilevel theory inadequate and serves to motivate a balanced effort consisting of algorithmic development, theoretical analysis, and practical application doc2518 none Theoretical studies will be conducted on the fundamental physics of various low-dimensional systems. Systems to be considered include heterogeneous magneto-conducting and magneto-superconducting systems, and ensembles of nano-scale magnetic clusters. These systems are presently being produced in forefront physics and chemistry laboratories, but their physical properties have not been studied extensively. One can expect new topological defects, a rich spectrum of ordered and disordered states, and new transport and dynamical phenomena. Also, a host of applications are suggested, including very dense and reliable memory, sensors, magnetic transistors and other magneto-transport devices, as well as quantum generators. Collaborations have been established with experimental and theoretical groups in the US and Europe. %%% Theoretical studies will be conducted on the fundamental physics of various low-dimensional systems. Systems to be considered include heterogeneous magneto-conducting and magneto-superconducting systems, and ensembles of nano-scale magnetic clusters. These systems are presently being produced in forefront physics and chemistry laboratories, but their physical properties have not been studied extensively. One can expect new topological defects, a rich spectrum of ordered and disordered states, and new transport and dynamical phenomena. Also, a host of applications are suggested, including very dense and reliable memory, sensors, magnetic transistors and other magneto-transport devices, as well as quantum generators. Collaborations have been established with experimental and theoretical groups in the US and Europe doc2519 none This proposal is designed to analyze and critique current measurements and benchmarks for information technology (IT). In addition, it proposes to develop and test new measurements and benchmarks aimed at providing a more accurate understanding of infrastructure, access, and use of information technologies and telecommunications systems. As part of this process, the proposal will develop an inventory of existing internationally-comparable data and benchmarks of global IT that will highlight the type of measurement, source, the time period, and any data limitations. It will also aim to develop new approaches to the analysis and presentation of data indicators, with particular focus on effective methods of presenting complex information as indicators in IT. While international data does exist, these providers currently employ measures and benchmarks that do provide information on IT systems and structures, the ability of these data and standards to fully convey the complexity of IT is open to question. For example, current measurements and benchmarks take into the account the build-out of copper-wire and fiber optic landlines, but do not fully account for the transformation of networks to digital capacity. The audience for the results of this project include both scholars and policy practitioners engaged in IT and national development, particularly for nations and regions of the developed world. The project team consists of individuals from Northwestern University and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS doc2520 none Solving many important problems in science and engineering depends on efficiently solving sparse linear systems, that is, sets of equations with many zero entries in the coefficients. This project will study techniques for creating sparse linear solvers that make efficient use of the memory hierarcy on single processor computers. It will concentrate on methods that reformulate the original system as a blocked system, with careful choices of the blocks to speed up convergence. Performance programming techniques will reduce the costs of the extra matrix-vector operations needed by the blocked version. There are three technical goals of this work. The first is to contribute to the understanding of the numerical behavior of memory-efficient sparse linear solvers through analysis and experiment. The second is to identify at least one robust, memory-efficient sparse linear solver for inclusion in the Portable Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc) library. The final goal is to develop a memory-centric performance metric for evaluating the memory traffic requirements of linear algebra algorithms doc2521 none This renewal individual investigator award is to a senior professor at the University of California, San Diego for a project to study novel electronic states and phenomena produced by strong electronic correlations in rare earth and actinide intermetallic compounds. These states and phenomena include non-Fermi liquid behavior; a heavy fermion state; an insulating state with an energy gap of only a few meV; and an exotic superconducting state in which the pairing of superconducting electrons may be mediated by antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations. There are several objectives of this project: to characterize the novel electronic states and phenomena, determine the conditions under which they occur, identify the underlying microscopic mechanisms, and test relevant theories. The project will involve the preparation of a wide variety of rare earth and actinide compounds, and the measurement of their fundamental electrical, thermal, and magnetic properties. Information gained from the measurements will be used to modify material parameters that will greatly facilitate the exploration of electronic phase diagrams and the search for new phenomena and f-electron materials. While these studies are of fundamental scientific interest, the materials and the electronic properties that will be investigated may have technological applications, such as thermoelectric cooling, magnetic information storage, and ferroelectric devices. An important mission of this project is the training of postdoctoral associates and graduate students at UCSD and the institutions of collaborators. The collaborations with other research groups within UCSD and at other university, national, and industrial laboratories will instill in the young investigators interdisciplinary approaches to the study of materials. %%% This renewal individual investigator award is to a senior professor at the University of California, San Diego for a project that focuses on rare earth and actinide intermetallic compounds that have unusual physical properties. These unusual properties can be traced to partially filled f-electron shells of these elements. The objective of this program is to study the novel phenomena which arise in these compounds including superconductivity, magnetism and so-called non-Fermi liquid behavior in which the physical properties at very low temperatures are profoundly different from classical metals. The project will involve preparing these materials and characterizing their electrical, thermal, and magnetic properties. The preparation of certain materials and the performance of specialized measurements will be performed in collaboration with researchers at UCSD and other institutions. Although this research program is directed towards answering fundamental scientific questions, technological applications, such as thermoelectric cooling, magnetic information storage, and ferroelectric devices, may be found for the materials. The training of postdoctoral associates and graduate students at UCSD and the institutions of collaborators is a significant goal of this program. These young investigators will be instilled with interdisciplinary approaches to the study of materials as a result of these collaborations with other research groups within UCSD and at other university, national, and industrial laboratories doc2522 none Raleigh This award to University of Hawaii at Manoa provides shipboard technical support, shore-based support, instrument maintenance and instrument calibration for researchers using R V Ka imikai-O-Kanaloa to support the Hawaii Ocean Time Series program. The vessel is operated by the UHM School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. The technical support awarded here will assist NSF-funded researchers conduct oceanographic studies central North Pacific in the vicinity of Hawaii in CY and beyond doc2523 none Proposal: : This project consists of research programs in a broad range of topics in Algebraic and Geometric Topology. The principal investigators, Professors R.L. Cohen, S.P. Kerckhoff, and R.J. Milgram are senior topologists whose research interests cover a large number of areas of topology and related fields. The postdoctoral researchers on this grant also represent a broad range of research interests. J. Brock works in low dimensional topology and dynamics, and C. Schlictkrull works in homotopy theory and algebraic K-theory. Included in these projects are the study of core topological questions such as the study of 3 - dimensional geometry, the study of the topology of complex and related structures on manifolds, and topological invariants of finite groups. In addition it includes applications of topological methods to engineering questions in the field of Robotics. The topology of 3-dimensional manifolds is intimately connected to differential geometry, particularly to homogeneous structures like Euclidean, spherical, and hyperbolic geometry. Of these, hyperbolic geometry is the most prevalent. On a closed 3-manifold a hyperbolic structure, if it exists, is unique by the Mostow Rigidity Theorem. Thus, any geometric invariant is a topological invariant and can be used to distinguish different 3-manifolds. When the 3-manifold has boundary, it can have a large parameter space of hyperbolic structures; in this case, the qualitative properties of the structures as one varies over the parameter space are of particular interest. Kerckhoff and Brock are studying hyperbolic structures on 3-manifolds, trying to describe the behavior of these geometric structures under a topological procedure, called Dehn surgery. For manifolds with boundary, they are also trying to understand the limiting behavior of the structures as one moves to the limits of the parameter space. R.L. Cohen is pursuing several projects that involve studying algebraic topological aspects of questons stemming from geometry. These projects lie under the following general headings. 1. The topology of moduli spaces of holomorphic curves in complex and symplectic manifolds. 2. The homotopy type of the stable mapping class group and the Mumford Conjecture. 3. Properties and applications of holomorphic K-theory. C. Schlichtkrull s project involves studying the topology of the stable diffeomorphism groups Diff(X), when X is either a point or the circle. To do this he will use techniques from Algebraic K - theory and homotopy theory. R.J. Milgram will pursue questions involving the cohomology of finite simple groups, as well as applications of the topology of configuration spaces to questions in the design and behavior of robotic arms doc2524 none This FRG GOALI project is a collaborative effort between researchers at Stanford U., Lehigh U., and Applied Materials, Santa Clara, CA. The project addresses microstructural stability, micromechanics, and electrical properties of materials used in the fabrication of on-chip capacitors incorporating dielectrics such as BaxSr1-xTiO3 (BST) and PbZrxTi1-xO3 (PZT). The aim is to improve understanding of thin film micromechanics, on-chip capacitor electrical performance, and how both electrical and mechanical properties may be modified through thin film microstructural control. Emphasis is on development of a mechanistic understanding of stress relaxation, surface roughening, and film debonding processes occurring during processing of thin film electrodes and diffusion barriers for high-K capacitor applications. Degradation of interfacial contact resistivity and dielectric reliability using patterned capacitor test structures will also be studied. Thermal stress relaxation of electrodes, which affects both adhesion and roughness, will be modified by alloying electrode layers and producing two phase microstructures through internal oxidation. It is anticipated that the research will lead to new strategies for improving the reliability and processing stability of on-chip capacitors that use perovskite-structure high permittivity dielectrics. Research will be performed by a multi-disciplinary, multi-investigator team at Stanford University and Lehigh University. Students and faculty will collaborate with materials researchers and process-integration specialists at Applied Materials, Inc. Joint research activities with AMAT will include sharing of research resources and samples, joint planning of experiments and regular meetings to review progress, visits by students to Applied Materials laboratories, and mentorship of students by AMAT personnel. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. The basic knowledge and understanding gained from the research is expected to contribute to improving electronic materials performance in current and future device and circuit applications. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area. The multidisciplinary (materials science, electrical engineering) and industrially-connected nature of this FRG GOALI program offers unique educational opportunities for students to experience a teamwork-oriented research environment from both academic and industrial perspectives. The project is co-funded by the Electronic Materials(EM) and Metals(MET) programs in DMR, the Mechanics And Structures of Materials program in ENG CMS, and the ENG GOALI office doc2525 none Oeschel This U.S. Mexico award will support a research collaboration between Drs. Walter Oeschel, Douglas Deutschman, and Paul Ganster of San Diego State University and Dr. Arturo Muhlia Melo and his group at the Centro de Investigaciones Biologicas del Noroeste (CIBNOR) in La Paz, Baja California, Mexico. The overall objective of the research is to develop the capability to predict current and future patterns of vegetation and ecosystem function in the arid and semi-arid ecosystems of the La Paz and San Diego regions. Specific objectives include determining the inter- and intra annual pattern of ecosystem carbon dioxide flux and water use in Southern California and Baja California, using ecosystem landscape models to predict current and future carbon and water flux of the region and validating them with field sampling and aircraft measurement of regional gas and water fluxes and remote sensing. Semi-arid ecosystems are often centers of bio-diversity, of rare and endangered species, and are particularly sensitive to the impacts of global change. The proposed collaboration will integrate current activities on each side of the border, building on the complementary expertise at SDSU and CIBNOR, and linking results of scientific research to the socio-economic context, local, national, and international policy doc2526 none This individual investigator award is to a professor at an undergraduate institution, Oakland University. The project is directed toward fabrication and analysis of multilayer magnetoelectric (ME) composites that are potential candidates for use as smart sensors, actuators, information storage media and high frequency signal processing devices. In composites consisting of magnetostrictive and piezoelectric phases, it is possible to accomplish magnetic field-to-electric field conversion with a two step process: magnetostriction (MS) induced mechanical deformation and piezoelectric (PE) effect induced electric fields. The work is motivated by theoretical predictions of a very large ME coefficient in multilayer composites of MS and PE phases, in part due to enhanced piezoelectric effects. Efforts will focus on composites consisting of alternate layers of the perovskite oxides: (i) ferromagnetic lanthanum manganites that are magnetostrictive and (ii) ferroelectric lead zirconate titanates that are piezoelectric. Thick film composites will be synthesized by doctor blade techniques and characterized in terms of their electrical, magnetic and ME properties. The proposed studies will to lead to an understanding of ME effects in multilayers. Undergraduate students in this project will acquire (i) knowledge in the theory of materials and (ii) training in preparation and characterization of magnetic and dielectric materials and will be well prepared for entry to graduate education or a career in industry. %%% This individual investigator award is to a professor at an undergraduate institution, Oakland University. It will support research into the preparation and characterization of a new class of materials that will facilitate the conversion of an electric field into a magnetic field or vice versa. Magnetoelectric (ME) composites consisting of alternate layers of lanthanum manganites that deform in a magnetic field and lead zirconate titanates that generate electricity when deformed will be studied. Thick film composites will be made and characterized in terms of their structural, magnetic, electrical and ME properties. The proposed studies are likely to lead to materials for smart sensors, signal processing, and memory devices. Undergraduate student participants will receive hands-on experience in the synthesis and characterization of materials of fundamental and technological importance, the skills that will allow them to be successful in graduate education or for employment in research and development positions in industry doc2527 none Akylas A common mechanism by which internal gravity waves are generated in nature is flow over topography. The goal of the proposed work is to improve our theoretical understanding of this generation mechanism with particular emphasis on three-dimensional nonlinear disturbances. To this end, an asymptotic theory will be developed to describe the generation of finite-amplitude disturbances by nearly uniformly stratified flow over three-dimensional topography that is more elongated in the spanwise than in the streamwise direction. The proposed theory makes it possible to explore certain features of fully nonlinear waves --- for instance, how wave breaking is influenced by three-dimensional effects --- that, although of primary geophysical interest, so far have defied theoretical treatment. Moreover, the mathematical approach taken here is distinct from prior studies and promises to advance our understanding of nonlinear internal wave propagation from a mathematical standpoint as well. Internal gravity waves are common features in oceans, lakes and in the atmosphere. They owe their existence to the density stratification present in these natural fluid bodies due to variations in temperature and changes in the salinity (in the case of oceans) and pressure (in the case of the atmosphere). Geophysical internal waves are known to possess enormous scales, on the order of kilometers to hundreds of kilometers, so it is not surprising that they are important factors in determining local weather patterns and climate dynamics. The proposed work will provide a mathematical description of the generation of internal waves by flow over topography, modeling the action of wind over mountain ranges in the atmosphere or the flow of currents over a sill in the ocean bottom. Emphasis is placed on particular flow conditions under which internal- wave generation is most violent and is expected to play an important part in geophysical applications (e.g., the development of thunderstorms doc2528 none The Gordon Research Conferences on a number of scientific topics, are held every summer to discuss recent findings and current thinking in various areas of science. Although participation is limited, the attendees usually consist of established scientists, young investigators who are making important contributions in these areas, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. The meetings are usually held in small isolated New England towns away from other distractions, and are conducive to the free exchange of ideas. Recently some conferences have also been held in Europe. These conferences have a recognized value for presenting the latest advances in research and also for indicating the future trends in research which are likely to be most productive doc2529 none In this project a new tunneling configuration will be used to study the vibrational spectra of molecules adsorbed on metal surfaces and to perform experiments to understand the physical origin of the zero-bias feature (ZBF) that appears to be a universal aspect of the technique. The technique uses inelastic electron tunneling spectroscopy (IETS) adapted to a new configuration, the self-assembling tunnel junction (SATJ), consisting of two metal wires in a cross geometry. In SATJ, a rare-gas barrier film replaces the oxide layer of the metal-oxide-metal junctions normally used in IETS. Preliminary experiments have demonstrated that with this technique it is possible to distinguish between acetylene molecules chemisorbed on the metal electrodes and those that are either physisorbed or incorporated in the rare-gas film. Regardless of the composition of the tunnel barrier film, all data show a region around zero-bias voltage where the junction conductance is significantly reduced, the ZBF. In this project isotope substitution experiments will be performed to measure the ultimate sensitivity of the technique. The goal is to observe and study the spectra of single molecules in order to understand the adsorption and tunneling electron-molecule interaction. The ZBF will be examined as a function of the temperature, barrier film composition, electrode composition, and varying junction conductance with the aim to determine the mechanism behind this poorly understood effect. This research will be performed in an undergraduate institution. Undergraduate students will participate in this project and will learn skills in a research area that will prepare them for graduate school and future employment. %%% In this project a new approach will be used to study the chemical and physical properties of molecules adsorbed on metal surfaces, and to determine a poorly understood effect that is present in these and other experiments, the so-called Zero-Bias Feature (ZBF). With the new experimental approach isotopes of acetylene and of carbon monoxide will be measured to determine the ultimate sensitivity of the technique. The goal is to observe and study individual molecules and thereby obtain a better understanding of the adsorption of molecules on surfaces. The behavior of the ZBF will be studied in detail in order to bring about a better understanding of this phenomenon. This project will be pursued in an undergraduate institution and undergraduate students will participate in the research. They will thereby acquire skills in a field of research that will prepare them for advanced training in graduate school and for future employment doc2530 none Rohrer When illuminated with ultraviolet light, some ceramic oxides can dissociate water to form hydrogen and oxygen. In principle, it is therefore possible to directly convert solar energy to a clean burning, replenishable fuel. This goal has not been realized because the efficiency with which the best photocatalytic materials convert light and water to hydrogen and oxygen is too low for practical, large-scale energy conversion. Therefore, the central challenge for a materials researcher in this area is to identify compounds that will catalyze the dissociation of water more efficiently. The search has been hindered by the absence of a surface structure-property relationship that could be used to identify potentially useful compounds. However, in June of , a publication from a group in Korea demonstrated that certain ternary niobates and titanates photocatalytically dissociate water with an efficiency that is one to two orders of magnitude greater than conventional materials. These observations provide us with a unique opportunity to develop a surface structure-property relationship that can be used in the search of oxides with higher photochemical activities. All of the materials with high photochemical activity (including Sr2 Nb2 O7 and La2 Ti2 O7 promoted with Ni) can be visualized as being built from layers of the perovskite structure sliced along (110) planes. Based on this observation, it is hypothesized that there are specific structural components, common to these phases, that are mechanistically linked to the high photochemical activity. Furthermore, the presence of these components on certain surface planes will lead to anisotropic reactivity. It is the objective of this research project to test this hypothesis. The orientation dependence of the photochemical reactivity of Sr2 Nb2 O7, La2 Ti2 O7, and Ba Ti4 O9 will be measured to determine the most reactive surfaces. The location of the Ni promoter will also be determined by direct microscopic inspection using transmission electron and atomic force microscopy. To confirm that the structure-property relationship resulting from these characterization experiments applies to particulate materials in the environment of interest, H2 and O2 evolution rates will be measured from Sr2 Nb2 O7 particles with different habits and aspect ratios. These samples will expose different fractional areas of specific facets. If the hypothesis is correct, these experiments will make it possible to identify the surfaces and structural components responsible for the high photochemical activity. With knowledge of the functional structural components, it will be possible to select candidate materials that can be tested for high photochemical activity. Further, based on knowledge of the most reactive surface planes, photochemically active ceramics can be textured to have high reactivity microstructures. As part of the proposed project, a new undergraduate lab unit will be developed for a course on defects in materials. The lab s goal will be to estimate relative surface energies from measurements of surface facet orientation and geometry using atomic force microscopy and back scattered electron diffraction patterns. When illuminated with ultraviolet light, some ceramic oxides can dissociate water to form hydrogen and oxygen. In principle, it is therefore possible to directly convert solar energy to a clean burning, replenishable fuel. This goal has not been realized because the efficiency with which the best photocatalytic materials convert light and water to hydrogen and oxygen is too low for practical, large-scale energy conversion. If the project is successful, it will provide the information necessary to design and produce materials that will enable the commercial production of a clean burning fuel, thus having an immense impact on society and the environment doc2531 none Award: Principal Investigator: Michael Rudnev Global dynamics in near-integrable Hamiltonian systems with several degrees of freedom will be studied. The research aims to progress towards proving the conjecture about the existence of a generic topological instability in such systems, known as Arnold s diffusion , effected via resonances. The first goal is to obtain an adequate local description of various geometric objects that the perturbation causes to appear. These objects can be characterized by their rotation vectors. First, they are lower-dimensional partially hyperbolic (whiskered) tori and the Lagrangian manifolds (whiskers) asymptotic to these tori. Generally, the collection of all the rotation vectors yielding whiskered tori form a set of the first category. Rotation numbers in the gaps in it describe so-called Aubry-Mather sets . Yet the latter term is somewhat obscure beyond the case of two degrees of freedom. Incorporating many of the above mentioned objects of all types into a single global geometric framework effected as an atlas over the phase space, is the second, and the main goal. Apropos of Aubry-Mather sets , this will require mutual interpretation of the results obtained via variational methods of Lagrangian mechanics and geometric implicit function theorems, such as KAM, of Hamiltonian approach. The proposed research focuses on instability as a generic feature of complex mechanical systems, be it the Solar system, or a polyatomic molecule. In order to describe such, one needs to know the present state of the system, and the equations of its future evolution. Typically, due to their complexity, one cannot obtain the solutions of these equations with the initial conditions incorporated. Otherwise, and this is an exceptional case, the system is called integrable. Such would be the Solar system if one considers only the interaction of each individual planet with the Sun, disregarding in particular the mutual gravitational attraction between the planets, etc. Yet the laws of motion are known exactly, the initial state of a system has to be measured, which leads to errors, however small. The hypothesis of instability, alias Arnold s diffusion, suggests that two infinitesimally different initial conditions may result in two qualitatively different scenarios ad infinitum. In particular, this is believed to be true for small perturbations of integrable systems, e.g. if one takes into account the influence of the Moon or Jupiter on the orbital motion of the Earth. The suitable mathematical enviroment to model the systems in question is provided by geometrical mechanics. The technological motivation for this research comes from molecular chemistry and biology where billions of years it would take the instability to develop itself on a cosmic scale, translate into fractions of a second doc2532 none John W. Lott Riemannian geometry is the study of curved spaces. Examples of such spaces are curves and surfaces in three-dimensional flat space. Riemann showed how to make precise the notion of curvature for a space of arbitrary dimension. Spectral analysis can be roughly characterized as the study of how a space vibrates. More precisely, to a curved space is associated a certain partial differential operator, the Laplacian. Spectral analysis is the study of how the eigenvalues of the Laplacian depend on the underlying geometry of the space. In previous work, the principal investigator obtained relationships between the spectrum of the differential form Laplacian and the geometry of the underlying space, the latter being constrained by upper bounds on its diameter and upper and lower bounds on its curvature. In particular, he characterized when there are uniform upper bounds on the j-th eigenvalue of the p-form Laplacian, and when there are small positive eigenvalues of the p-form Laplacian. He proposes to extend this work in several directions. One direction is to just assume that there is a lower bound on the curvature of the space. New issues arise in this case, as under the assumed geometric constraints, the space can ``collapse to a highly singular space of lower dimension. The principal investigator s previous work, in the case of upper and lower curvature bounds, also dealt with the singular spaces that arise in a collapsing limit. However, with just a lower curvature bound, the singular spaces that arise are of a different nature. He also proposes to extend the previous work in the direction of analyzing the spectrum of the Dirac operator, under the geometric assumptions of an upper bound on the diameter of the space and upper and lower bounds on its curvature doc2533 none Award: Principal Investigator: Bong H. Lian This project addresses problems in three closely related areas in the context of mirror symmetry and duality. As a continuation of current joint work with K. Liu and S.T. Yau, Lian proposes to both generalize and specialize their theory ( mirror principle ) for studying characteristic classes of vector bundles on a stable map moduli space. First, this work has thus far considered convex projective manifolds. Dropping the convexity assumption is important if one wishes to consider general Calabi-Yau manifolds. Part I of this proposal outlines an approach which is expected to lead to the full generalization of mirror principle in in genus zero. The main new input here is a way to combine the difficult machinery of virtual cycles and the many ingredients of the mirror principle. Second, the mirror principle can be specialized to surfaces and many new questions which have recently arisen in local mirror symmetry, as well as enumerative geometry on surfaces. In the former case partition functions of a given genus are related to modular forms whenever the underlying surface is elliptic. In the latter case, enumerating curves of a given genus with suitable incidence in a surface also yields modular forms. This project seeks to understand modularity from the point of view of characteristic classes of vector bundles on stable map moduli spaces. For positive genus, the mirror principle requires yet another generalization. In Part II of this project, Hosono, Lian, Liu and Yau will examine these new questions. In recent joint work of Hosono, Lian and Yau, they have settled the problem of constructing the ubiquitous large radius limit for the universal family of Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces in a toric manifold. In Part III Lian, Todorov and Yau will study this limit for more general families. String physics is an ambitious effort to unify all the fundamental forces of nature. A remarkable prediction of String Theory is that nature apparently allows for many different versions of spacetimes. A major current problem in string physics is to understand how a plethora of apparently different spacetimes are related, often in an unexpected and remarkable ways, under the rubric of ``String Duality . Mirror symmetry is a special yet nontrivial case of String Duality. Though they come in vast variety, the spacetimes in questions are still highly restricted. They turn out to be a class of geometrical objects, known as Calabi-Yau manifolds, which have been studied by mathematicians for over 100 years. Physicists have discovered that string theories associated to certain pairs of Calabi-Yau manifolds ( mirror pairs ) are equivalent. This project aims at understanding the geometry of these mirror manifolds from the mathematical point of view. A constant exchange of insights and feedback between physicists and mathematicians on mirror symmetry and other issues has been a hallmark of String Theory in its last 20 years of development doc2534 none NSF proposal Asymptotic Equivalence of Statistical Experiments Principal Investigator: M. Nussbaum, Department of Mathematics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY The concept of asymptotic equivalence of experiments serves to compare properties of statistical models. An experiment is a family of probability measures; a distance is defined between these objects such that the informational content of experiments with respect to the parameter is similar if this distance is small. This basic deficiency pseudodistance (or Delta-distance) has been introduced by L. Le Cam, generalizing the concept of sufficiency. If experiments are equivalent via sufficiency then their Delta-distance is 0; here equivalence via sufficiency means that one experiment results from application of a sufficient statistic to the data of the other. Based on the idea of the Delta-distance, a theory of local asymptotic normality (LAN-theory) of experiments has been developed which has found widespread application in statistics. The idea of data reduction which is at the heart of the sufficiency concept could thus be combined with limit theorems of probability, resulting in approximation of general statistical models by Gaussian shift families. These Gaussian shift or translation families allow explicit expression for risk bounds in many instances, and these risk bound then become valid in an asymptotic sense in the approximated models. The limitation of the LAN-theory consists in its restriction to a local setting, in which the rate of localization is tied to the normalization rate in the central limit theorem (the classical root-n in most cases). This setting precludes application of the resulting risk bounds to the class of ill-posed function estimation problems. The emphasis of the current project is on the treatment of this problem class (which includes nonparametric density estimation) by methods involving the Delta-distance. The restriction to a local setting (or alternatively, a finite dimensional setting) which is inherent in the LAN-theory has been overcome in recent years, by efforts of Brown and Low ( ) and by various results of the P.I. and collaborators, starting also in (asymptotic equivalence of density estimation and Gaussian white noise). The main tool has been approximation of general likelihood processes by Gaussian ones, using coupling methodology. The present project focuses on elaboration and extension of these results, with two main directions: (i) constructive realization of equivalence in nonparametric models, enabling explicit equivalence mappings (direct transfer of decision functions) (ii) equivalences in nonparametric models for dependent data (time series and diffusion process models doc2535 none Some of the most impressive recent work in dynamical systems has been an outgrowth of the study of dynamics in one complex variable. The fundamental assumption motivating this proposal is that complex methods have an important role to play in dynamics when the number of dimensions is greater than one as well. The subject of this proposal is a particular model family of dynamical systems, the polynomial diffeomorphisms in two complex dimensions. The complex Henon diffeomorphisms which are a notable special case. These are perhaps the simplest invertible holomorphic dynamical system with interesting dynamics. One of the lessons of dynamics in one variable is that there is a range of dynamical behaviors starting with expanding maps and continuing with Misurewicz maps, semi-hyperbolic and Collet-Eckmann maps. The two variable analog of the expanding property is hyperbolicity. This proposal is focused on understanding the two variable analog of the semi-hyperbolic condition which we call quasi-hyperbolicity. In one variable these conditions are related to the recurrence properties of critical points. In two variables the notion of critical point needs to be replaced by other concepts such as regularity of stable and unstable manifolds. An interesting example of quasi-hyperbolic diffeomorphisms are real polynomial diffeomorphisms of maximal entropy such as limits of horseshoes in the real Henon case. Though several questions about the behavior of such diffeomorphisms have been answered in previous work a number of open questions remain. The introduction of the computer has increased the usefulness of simple deterministic mathematical models in a number of sciences. An illustrative example is the logistic map which can be used to describe the behavior of a single insect population in successive years. When the mathematical model is linear there is a well developed underlying theory. When the model is non-linear there are important theoretical questions which we have not yet been able to address. Recently mathematicians have made important breakthroughs in understanding the logistic map. One technique which proved essential was the consideration of an associated complex dynamical system. My proposal addresses some of the problems of using similar complex techniques when the system involved has dimension greater than one (for example when there are two interacting populations doc2536 none Award: Principal Investigator: Jose F. Escobar Professor Escobar proposes to work in three different variational problems: The first one is on conformal deformation of metrics. He proposes to work on the scalar curvature problem on scalar flat manifolds of dimension five or more. In addition, he will study the prescribed scalar curvature and prescribed mean curvature problem on manifolds with boundary; particular attention will be given to this problem when the manifold is the Euclidean ball and the dimension is three. Earlier investigations indicate that the problem in three dimensions is special. The second topic he proposes to study is estimates for the first non-zero Steklov eigenvalue on compact manifolds with boundary. Escobar proposes to study relations between the geometry of the space and the first non-zero eigenvalue and apply this information to problems in conformal geometry, heat flow problems, and to the study of eigenvalues of minimal surfaces. The third topic is to study Einstein metrics on manifolds with boundary. There are three different kinds of equations that arise naturally as a variational problem of a functional introduced by the proposer; they are Einstein metrics satisfying that the boundary is totally geodesic or, more generally, that the boundary is umbilic, and Ricci flat metrics with umbilic boundary. The three problems above have their roots in Riemannian geometry as well as in physics. The Steklov problem initially appeared in physics, then in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, conformal geometry, and minimal surfaces. In physics, it describes the temperature of a body where the flux through out the boundary is proportional to the temperature. We will investigate how the geometry of the space influence the first non-zero eigenvalue, that is, the smallest nonzero constant of proportionality. The Einstein equation proposed in this project is the generalization of the Einstein s equation in boundaryless spaces studied by Hilbert and Einstein in general relativity to the case of spaces with boundary. The boundary conditions we will imposed are the natural ones if one studies this problem from the point of view of the calculus of variations. The scalar curvature equations that we will investigate are the average version of the Einstein equation on manifolds with boundary. Nowadays they are known as the Yamabe type equations. These equations appear in relativity and in other branches of physics doc2537 none Proposal: PI Scot Adams The study of Lorentz manifolds may be motivated by physical considerations, since the Einstein field equations determine Lorentz metrics on space-time. Following F.~Klein s Erlanger program, one method of approaching a geometric object is to study its group of isometries, and it has long been known that the isometry group of a Lorentz manifold is a Lie group. Moreover, any Lie group acts on itself (by left translation) preserving any left-invariant Lorentz metric. However, as originally noticed by R.~Zimmer, M.~Gromov, and N.~Kowalsky, if one requires even a small amount of complication to the dynamics, then the list of Lie groups admitting a Lorentz action becomes quite restricted. My work over the last few years has focused on quantifying exactly which connected Lie groups admit a complicated action by isometries of a connected Lorentz manifold. As the definition of ``complicated varies, the answer varies, and I intend to look at a few more of these variations over the coming years. In particular, I would like to determine the collection of connected, noncompact, simple Lie groups admitting a locally faithful, nontame, isometric action on a connected Lorentz manifold. I believe it should be true that any such group either has infinite center or is locally isomorphic to the Lie group of 2 by 2 real unimodular matrices. A Lorentz manifold, or ``space-time is one of the basic object of general relativity. Some of these objects have many symmetries, while most have none at all. Fix a space-time having a large collection of symmetries. For any point in this space-time, if we move it around by all the symmetries under consideration, the collection of image points so obtained is called the ``orbit of the point. A number of researchers have noticed that it is difficult to construct a space-time with chaotic orbits, by which we mean, broadly speaking, that some orbits repeatedly return (or nearly return) to the same place. There are, in fact, many ways to define precisely the word chaotic, and this means that a number of different theorems have been obtained. I intend to continue developing results along these lines doc2538 none Ping Xu This project involves the study of Poisson structures using the theory of Lie groupoids and Lie algebroids, in particular, Poisson groupoids and Lie bialgebroids. The theory of Poisson groupoids was developed as a unification of both Drinfel d s Poisson group theory and the theory of symplectic groupoids of Karasev-Weinstein. The investigator aims to apply this theory to study integrable systems such as Calogero-Moser systems. He will also continue his study on Courant algebroids and Dirac structures from the viewpoint of Dirac generating operators, as applied to objects in Poisson geometry such as moment maps and equivariant cohomology. This project also involves the study of deformation quantization, in particular on quantum groupoids. More specifically, it includes the study of universal enveloping algebras of Courant algebroids, Kontsevich s formality type conjecture for Lie algebroids, and cohomology theory of deformation of Hopf algebroids, all of which are components in quantization of Lie bialgebroids. An important application is to study quantization of classical dynamical r-matrices. Poisson geometry is largely motivated by physics, which is in fact a mathematical tool used to give a theoretical framework encompassing large parts of classical mechanics. Quantization is developed in order to gain a better understanding between classical mechanics and quantum mechanics. At present, Poisson geometry finds various applications including control theory, machining automation and robotic manipulation doc2539 none Frederick R. Cohen The projects outlined in this proposal are directed toward the interplay between homotopy theory, group theory, and the topology of function spaces. Artin s braid group plays a central role. The main projects are as follows: (1) continuation of a program to finish Barratt s finite exponent conjecture, (2) computations of the group cohomology for certain discrete groups with varying choices of representations, (3) a further investigation of the connections between the cohomology of function spaces, group cohomology, as well as the connections with the topology of function spaces, configuration spaces, and hyperplane arrangements, (4) an analysis of the overlap of properties of homotopy groups with other structures such as the Lie algebra attached to the descending central series for Artin s pure braid group, and the Lie algebra obtained from the higher homotopy groups of configuration spaces, and (5) a detailed analysis of certain groups of coalgebra morphisms as well as their connections to braid groups, and homotopy theory. The main goals of the projects here involve geometry of circles moving through space. These circles can be thought of as the motions of planetary objects in orbit around each other. The interplay between the geometry of these orbits occurs in mathematics as well as in mathematical physics. Precise information concerning these orbits has provided fruitful mathematical applications to several subjects. The ultimate goal of this project is to measure different quantities in the subject as well as analyzing concrete useful answers, and computations doc2540 none Semiparametric models play a major role in many fields and have been extensively studied over the last two decades. Great emphasis has been placed on models with independent (and identically) distributed observations and quite some progress has been made in this case. Models with dependent observations, however, been mainly neglected up to now from an efficiency point of view. The proposed research will tackle open issues in the construction of efficient estimates and tests in semiparametric models with an emphasis on models with dependent observations. Such models include stationary and ergodic Markov chains and other time series models which are plentiful in many fields such as econometrics and financial mathematics. Efficient estimation of the finite-dimensional component as well as aspects of the infinite-dimensional component will be addressed. The latter include innovation distributions in time series models, invariant distributions of ergodic Markov chains, and stationary distributions of several consecutive observations. The main emphasis of the proposed research will be to develop a methodology for the construction of efficient estimates in semiparametric models with dependent observations. In the process the proposed research will have to develop methods that deal with the difficulties associated with an efficient score function that cannot be calculated explicitly, a problem that is also of great interest for models with independent observations. Finally, the proposed research will continue the work of the principal investigator in semiparametric regression models with an emphasis on improving existing methods of constructing root-n consistent and efficient estimates doc2541 none James Lisy of the University of Illinois; Urbana-Champaign is supported by a grant from the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program to continue his studies of non-covalent interactions of chemical and biochemical importance. These studies are on mass selected cluster ions produced in an upgraded thermionic source and a recently constructed electrospray source, using infrared photodissociation and collision induced dissociation (CID). Particular systems to be studied are: (1) hydrated complexes of alkali cations with crown ethers and peptides to establish whether the ion is ligated by the solvent or the peptide ionophore; (2) cation-ligand systems such as phenol, where the ligand has two binding sites, to establish where binding preferentially occurs and (3) anion (Cl- and Br-) with model receptors such as perfluorobenzene and amines to determine relative bond strengths. The studies will lead to a greater understanding of the bonding between ions and solvent molecules. This will improve our knowledge at the fundamental molecular level and show how the solvation, in situations including those where there are multiple binding sites, can be either cooperative or competitive. The information obtained will have relevance to the condensed phase and, in particular, to biological systems where the solvent molecules sometimes have to be removed before a molecule can pass through a cell membrane doc2542 none 1. The proposed research mainly deals with developing the first-order generalized differential theory of variational analysis in broad classes of infinite-dimensional spaces, with some basic aspects of the second-order variational analysis in finite dimensions, and with their applications to important problems arising in optimization, control, mechanics, and economics. The main tools of the generalized differentiation in the proposed research are based on the normal cones, subdifferentials, and coderivatives of nonsmooth objects, in the study of which the PI has been involved for a long time. The project will pay a particular attention to the second-order subdifferential theory and its applications to the Lipschitzian stability of variational systems, mathematical programs with equilibrium constraints, and to some problems of continuum mechanics. It will contain new development and applications in the area of dynamic optimization for control systems governed by differential, delay-differential, and partial differential equations inclusions. It also aims to develop new applications of variational analysis to the study of Pareto optimality in equilibrium models of welfare economics. 2. Variational analysis has been recognized as a fruitful area in the modern Applied Mathematics that, on one hand, is concerned with finding the best solutions in large-scale mathematical models with complicated ``nonsmooth constraints and, on the other hand, develops optimization strategies and technologies to solve a broad spectrum of real-life problems arising in various areas of applied science, control, economics, engineering, mechanics, etc. The proposed research aims to develop new methods of variational analysis and its application to some important problems in optimal control, economics, and mechanics. In particular, the proposed methods of minimax control design are largely motivated by applications to environmental systems. The proposed study of variational stability for optimization problems with equilibrium constraints is motivated by applications to practical problems of material design in continuum mechanics. New applications of variational analysis will be developed to multiobjective models of welfare economics doc2543 none Jiaping Wang In this project, the principal investigator proposes to study the interactions between the symmetries of a complete manifold and the behaviors of various analytical objects on it. More specifically, he proposes to link the structure and the size of the covering group with the polynomial growth harmonic functions and the spectral data on the covering space. The main objectives of this project include deriving topological information about a (noncompact) manifold via analytical approaches and furthering the understanding of how the symmetries of the space affect the behavior of solutions to various geometric differential equations, which is one of the main themes of the geometric analysis. This project is intended to study how the behavior of the solutions to differential equations is related to the global structure and shape of the underlying space with partial symmetries. It is expected to both enhance our understanding of the geometric-analytic structure and have direct implications to various fields including possible applications in industry doc2544 none Award: Principal Investigator: Kefeng Liu My project will focus on the understanding of the geometry and topology of mirror symmetry, in particular the aspect of counting curves in projective manifolds. More precisely there are three outstanding and closely related problems that I would like to work on and hope to solve. The first is to prove the most general mirror principle for counting rational curves in any projective manifold and its Calabi-Yau submanifolds; the second is to understand the geometry and algebra of the local mirror symmetry, in particular, of the surprising role played by the elliptic curves appeared in our computation by applying mirror principle; the third is to develop a mirror principle for counting curves of higher genus in projective manifolds. I hope to solve these problems by further extending the techniques we developed to prove the mirror principle for balloon manifolds. These three problems are the different aspects of a single problem: to prove and understand the mirror principle in its most general form. Superstring theory, one of the most ambitious theory in sciences, is proposed for the grand unification of the laws of the nature. Based on this theory, string theorists have made many remarkable mathematical conjectures. Mirror symmetry is among one of them. The proofs of these conjectures will not only give beautiful mathematical results, but also help gain confidence in the physical theory. The mirror principle we developed has partially verified some of these conjectures. It has many interesting mathematical consequences and is remarkably compatible with the physical theory doc2545 none John Zhang of New York University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to develop practical computational methods to study reaction dynamics of polyatomic molecules with an emphasis on gas-surface reaction. A reduced dimensionality strategy is used to eliminate unimportant degrees of freedom, while preserving important dynamical effects and the quantitative treatment. The theoretical method uses the semi-rigid vibrating rotor target (SVRT) model as a general, practical, and quantitative dynamics approach to study reaction dynamics involving complex or polyatomic molecules. The basic SVRT model will be improved by including adiabatic correction for neglected degrees of freedom and additional vibrational coordinates. These theoretical methods will be applied to the study of chemisorption dynamics of polyatomic molecules, focusing on methane and other hydrocarbons that are important in catalysis. The development of quantitative computational methods to study polyatomic reaction dynamics is of enormous importance in enabling the understanding and prediction of complex chemical and biological phenomena using computer simulations. Despite the success of several reactive scattering approaches in treating chemical reactions, these approaches currently cannot handle large scale scattering calculations because of intensive computational requirements. This effort aims to develop methodology that can be realistically applied to study complex chemical reactions using currently available computational resources. Applications will be geared toward improved understanding of systems that are important in understanding chemical catalysis, such as the reaction of methane and other hydrocarbons on metal surfaces doc2546 none COMBINATORICS WITH APPLICATIONS Jerrold R. Griggs and Laszlo A. Szekely The proposers seek results in extremal combinatorics that exhibit structures which are key to applications, or which provide bounds on what can be achieved by any algorithm. The proposers will search for a profitable crossover of ideas and methods, including applications of algebraic and analytic tools. The particular problems include improving current bounds on the maximum concentration of subset sums of vectors, especially for problems arising from models of database security finding better algorithms for graph drawing, developing the theory of crossing numbers of graphs, and working out further applications of of the theory to geometric problems developing robust algorithms for reconstructing very large phylogenetic trees, and analyzing conditions necessary for reconstruction, with attention to models where the i.i.d. property fails completing the solution of maximum non-spanning sets in finite abelian groups advancing the study of algorithms for large independent sets in graphs of given maximum degree and clique size classifying graph subdivision problems which admit small threshold function leading the development of the theory of graph labellings spawned by the problem of optimal channel assignments with multiple levels of interference Research in combinatorics and graph theory is proposed in a wide variety of areas, including those that arise in such rapidly developing fields as computer science, computational biology, and number theory. Problems arise at the very core of our understanding of how discrete structures work and how to use them optimally. Among the questions they will study are these: How can one optimize public access to a statistical database (containing, say, salaries of a department s employees) by maximizing the number of queries, each one asking for the average salary of some collection of the employees, that can be answered without compromising the salary of any individual? Given corresponding aligned segments of the DNA sequences of many biological taxa (or species), how does one build large phylogenetic trees reflecting their true evolutionary relationship? How can one draw a very large network such that the viewer can grasp it from a clear drawing? How can the frequency spectrum span alloted to a network of transmitters (radio stations, mobile phones, etc.) be minimized, such that channels assigned to nearby transmitters must avoid interference? What is an efficient method to select a large number of transmitters, no two close together, given a network and information bounding the complexity of the network? Fundamental problems of this kind arise in many settings. Involvement of graduate students in research on these problems will enable the investigators to continue their successful training program for careers in industry, government, and academia doc2547 none Birnir In a program of analytical and computational investigations, the investigator will develop control theory to make jet engines lighter, more efficient and safer. Surge and stall are instabilities in the flow of air through the engines; flutter is an oscillation of the blades compressing the air. These instabilities decrease the efficiency of the engine and can be dangerous. The control theory aims at controlling all of these instabilities. If lighter, more fuel efficient and safer aircraft engines are to be made the current technology needs to be improved. This research tries to accomplishes this goal by first developing a mathematical model for the jet engine, then simulating this model of the engine on a computer and using the results to figure out how to design a much more efficient and safer jet engine. Then this design is implemented and checked in the laboratory. Similar technology is also used to compress rocket fuel before combustion and an optimization of the technology as a whole may lead to cheaper space travel doc2548 none Hughes The physics program funded by this grant is directed at the study of the electroweak and strong interactions. Technically, the program focuses on the use of polarized electron beams scattering off polarized and unpolarized targets. The experiments take place at the Jefferson Laboratory in Viriginia and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California. At SLAC, the fixed target program is presently devoted to a precision test of the electroweak theory. By scattering polarized electrons at high energies off unpolarized electrons in a liquid hydrogen target, we are able to perform a precision test of the electroweak mixing angle in a new energy range. The results from this experiment will be sensitive to the existence of new particles and new interactions. At Jefferson Lab, the fixed target program is focused on the scattering of polarized electrons by polarized helium-3 in order to learn information on the internal spin structure of the neutron. Measurements of the neutron spin structure function over a wide range of energies allows for tests of fundamental strong interaction sum rules and provides details on the quark contribution to the neutron s spin doc2549 none The objective of this proposal is to investigate the mechanism of enhanced catalyst activity when electrical current is used to pretreat the catalyst. In preliminary work the PI discovered that the activity of an indium tin oxide catalyst for the selective oxidation of methanol to hydrogen is enhanced relative to thermal pretreatment when an electrical current is passed through the catalyst. This reaction of is particular interest for portable fuel-cell applications, where hydrogen could be generated from methanol, which is more easily stored than hydrogen. The combination of electrical current and temperature required to maintain enhanced activation will be studied. Catalyst particle size will be studied by using both nanoparticles and larger catalyst particles. Effects of reaction local temperature gradients will be measured to determine whether local temperature on the particles is elevated. Other organic reactions will be studied to determine whether this novel effect is more general. If successful, this work could contribute to improved fuel-cell performance and more broadly to an understanding of an effect potentially useful for the improvement of catalyst activity doc2550 none Mesoscale is a term intended to convey an intermediate level description of a physical system. Its function is to capture the interactions of the system at finer scales with interactions or influences from larger coarser scales, and the mesoscale level itself. Such systems, active across disparate length and time scales, are inherently metastable. This feature is often revealed by hysteretic behavior or by a reluctance to evolve quickly to equilibrium. The focus in this proposal is on several prototypes of these systems that occur in materials sceince. One is the role of interfaces, or grain boundaries, in determining or limiting the behavior of polycrystalline materials. The energy and mobility of grain boundaries depends on crystallography and geometry, according to established thermodynamic principles. Innovative new ways to determine these functions explicitly for important materials are the objective of the Mesoscale Interface Mapping Project. This involves developing automated microscopy to harvest large amounts of data from samples and then formulating and solving a complex inverse problem. One way to approach determination of mobility consists in the development of large scale simulations of grain boundary evolution. The second focus is the coarse grained descriptions of mesoscale systems, the functional analytic limit processes in the microstructure of solids or the averaging to distribution functions in systems with stochastic behavior. The new methods allow study of situations where kinetics arise directly in terms of thermodynamic state functions and naturally carry with them an appropriate topology. The issue of metastability has been under investigation in this context. There is now the opportunity to improve understanding, for example, of microstructural evolution in shape-memory materials and diffusion mediated transport in certain liquid crystal systems and in protein motors. This will include diagnostics for these systems. The challenge of the mesoscale in materials science is to understand how it constrains finer scale systems (at the molecular scale) and determines larger scale systems (at the scale of entire devices). This is accomplished through coarse graining procedures. For example, many technologically useful materials are polycrystalline, or granular, in nature. The aluminum skin of an aircraft and the copper or copper-aluminum interconnects in computer chips are but two examples at vastly different size scales of such granular materials. It is widely understood that many aspects of these materials depend on the interfaces they contain, or their grain boundaries. Properties of grain boundaries determine the reliability as well as the mechanical strength. This project will exploit the exciting opportunities and challenges for mathematical science in this field and beyond. Specifically, coarse graining methods will be developed in order to better understand phenomena that occur in protein motors and in liquid crystals. A related problem of coarse graining arises when information is to be extracted from the immense amounts of data that can be produced with simulations of complex systems, such as polycrystalline materials. This problem of coarse graining at an information scale rather than a physical scale will also be addressed in this project doc2551 none Inelastic behavior of polymers under multiaxial compression The objective of this program is to investigate the inelastic response of polymeric materials under multiaxial compression, with pressures in the range of 1 GPa. Polycarbonate, polymethylmethacrylate and polyethylene are take to be examples to be examined. These polymers exhibit significant pressure sensitivity in their elastic, inelastic and viscoelastic response. These are also technically very important polymers, very much in commercial use. The main innovation presented in this proposal is a new experimental scheme of confined compression, where all the strain and stress components are carefully measured. The resulting deformation is macroscopically homogeneous and geometrically stable. Preliminary experiments have shown that the configuration works as expected. With this configuration, it is proposed to examine the pressure dependence of the initial modulus, yielding and inelastic behavior under multiaxial loading, and linear viscoelastic behavior of the three polymers listed above. It should be noted that the proposed experiments are clean experiments in the sense that no assumptions regarding the material behavior are embedded in interpreting the experimental results. Thus, the results can be used to provide checks on the many mechanistic as well as phenomenological theories of polymer behavior doc2552 none Award: Principal Investigator: Steven R. Bell Prof. Bell has shown that the Bergman, Szego, and Poisson kernels associated to a finitely connected region in the plane are elementary combinations of only three, and sometimes even two, analytic functions of one complex variable related to geometric constructions associated to the domain. Bell will study deeper questions about complexity in potential theory posed by his recent findings and he will extend these results to finite Riemann surfaces. Bell has also formulated a unique continuation property for the inhomogeneous Cauchy-Riemann equations that he has shown yields information about the behavior of holomorphic mappings between domains in complex space. He will attempt to verify the property on important classes of domains such as the strictly pseudoconvex domains. The mathematical objects of potential theory and conformal mapping are ubiquitous in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering. They carry encoded within them a vast amount of information about geometric properties of regions in the plane. Although these objects are familiar and well studied, they continue to be a source of interesting and applicable new mathematics. Professor Bell will express the classical objects of potential theory associated to a two dimensional region with holes in terms of much simpler analytic objects. These results will give rise to new and practical methods for understanding the solutions to many classical problems in differential equations, conformal mapping, and potential theory that should be of interest to scientists and engineers. Bell will explore applications of his ideas to more complicated constructions in the subject and he and his students will test the efficacy of the numerical methods stemming from the work. Because humans best perceive higher dimensional objects by taking a series of two dimensional slices, the tools developed by Bell could find many applications doc2553 none These research projects fall within the areas of mathematical population genetics and interacting particle systems. The unifying thrust is the study of mathematical models of biological systems at the population level. The interplay between various genetic influences such as mutation, selection, and population structure can sometimes confound one s ability to draw valid inference. The first goal is to develop methods of estimation and inference for complex molecular genetic data arising from populations with various kinds of structure. The investigators explore sampling distributions and likelihood methods in the presence of these confounding effects. The second goal involves the study of genealogical processes (i.e., coalescent theory) for populations which are subject to various selective forces, geographical segregation, or other hierarchical structuring. Both sampling theory and coalescent methods provide a framework for computational methods such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo and Importance Sampling. The third goal is to study spatial interactions which arise in ecology and epidemiology using interacting particle systems. The problems addressed include several new nonlinear voter models with a cluster-breaking feature and new work on the two-stage contact process, with applications to metapopulation models. Previous models of the ecology and genetics of natural populations have been based on many simplifying assumptions. It is now important to produce more realistic models to address ecological and evolutionary problems that impact society. In addition to the inherent randomness in real biological systems, spatial structure is often of critical importance. Examples of these problems include the evolution and spread of infectious diseases, invasions of exotic species, and survival of species in fragmented habitats. Furthermore, the technical revolution in gene sequencing is producing huge data sets that can only be deciphered in a sophisticated mathematical framework. The new field of bioinformatics relies heavily on an evolutionary perspective. This interdisciplinary work is part of an ongoing effort to develop and employ new mathematical methods for the purpose of addressing these complex biological problems at the population level doc2554 none Gorringe Quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is the accepted theory of the strong interactions of quarks and gluons. At low energies the quarks and gluons are confined in baryons (three quarks) and mesons (quark--antiquark pairs), and understanding the properties and interactions of baryons and mesons in terms of QCD is of fundamental importance. QCD possess a number of elementary symmetries. They include isospin symmetry, whereby the interactions are unaltered by u,d quark flavor rotations, and chiral symmetry, whereby the interactions are unaltered by separate flavor rotations for left, right handed quarks. The realization of these symmetries is rich and varied, involving so-called spontaneous, explicit and anomalous symmetry breaking effects. Understanding their realization is central to understanding the low energy interactions of baryons and mesons. This experimental research addresses the manifestation of symmetries in low energy processes. At the TRIUMF Laboratory in Vancouver, Canada we are investigating chiral and isospin symmetries with beams of muons and pions. For example the weak interaction between muons and protons is a key test of chiral symmetry breaking and the strong interaction between pions and protons is central to understanding the breaking of isospin. In addition, at the Jefferson Laboratory in Newport News, Virginia we are collaborating on a precision measurement of the decay rate of the neutral pion - a unique test of anomalous symmetry breaking in QCD doc2555 none Viktor L. Ginzburg The present proposal focuses on several long-term projects and continues principal investigator s previous work funded by an NSF grant. The first question addressed in the proposal is the Hamiltonian Seifert conjecture or, more specifically, the existence problem for Hamiltonian dynamical systems without periodic orbits on a sequence of regular energy levels. The Hamiltonian Seifert conjecture is closely related to the next group of questions considered in the proposal. These questions lie in the area of symplectic topology and concern the existence of periodic orbits for Hamiltonian systems describing the motion of a charge in a magnetic field. The second part of the proposal includes a series of problems in Poisson geometry. Among these problems are, for example, the existence questions for equivariant Poisson moment maps and the construction of Poisson traces corresponding to the leaves of the symplectic foliation. A general program relying on applications of equivariant cobordisms to the study of Hamiltonian actions of compact groups is the subject of the concluding part of the proposal. Hamiltonian dynamical systems describe many classes of physical processes in which dissipation of energy can be neglected. For example, planetary motion in celestial mechanics and some electro- or magneto-dynamical processes can be, and usually are, treated as Hamiltonian dynamical systems. One of the classical subjects in the theory of dynamical systems is the study of periodic orbits (i.e. cyclic motions). Periodic motion is the simplest and most common type of motion after equilibrium. It is believed that a vast majority of Hamiltonian systems have periodic orbits. The first problem addressed in the proposal is the construction of Hamiltonian systems without periodic orbits. This is a question of considerable importance for the theory of Hamiltonian dynamical systems because examples of such systems would further advance our understanding of Hamiltonian dynamics. The next problem concerns the existence of periodic orbits for Hamiltonian systems describing the motion of a charge in a magnetic field. This class of Hamiltonian systems naturally arises in applications in physics and mechanics. However, few of the extremely powerful general methods that have been recently developed in symplectic geometry are applicable to this class of systems. The investigation of these systems should extend the limits of existing methods and result in the development of novel ones. Other problems considered in the proposal concern the study of connections between geometrical properties of classical-mechanical systems and certain quantum-mechanical phenomena doc2556 none This project aims at extending our understanding of nonlinear physical phenomena, especially those involving granular materials and fluids, using small scale laboratory experiments and involving undergraduate students. For granular materials, both macroscopic stress and microscopic motion will be determined utilizing sensitive force measurements and rapid tracking of large numbers of particles. Specific experiments include: (a) A study of rotationally sheared and air-fluidized granular material, to determine how momentum and energy are transported; (b) Studies of frictional dynamics of planar layers, e.g. of the influence of particle properties on static strength and motion; (c) Experiments on avalanching and flows in inclined layers. The behavior of granular materials will be compared with that of conventional solids and liquids. Some of these experiments have applications to understanding geophysical phenomena. A second focus is the study of fluid mixing phenomena, especially the dramatic differences between mixing in chaotic and turbulent flows. Precise imaging methods will allow a determination of the factors controlling efficiency in mixing and transport, with and without chemical reaction. The project involves both undergraduate students and a postdoctoral trainee, who will be well prepared for a career in which both undergraduate teaching and research are important. %%% This project aims at extending our understanding of nonlinear physical phenomena, especially those involving granular materials and fluids, using small scale laboratory experiments and involving undergraduate students. Granular materials exhibit a transition between solid and fluid states that has important consequences for understanding earthquakes and avalanches, and for the industrial processing of materials such as pharmaceuticals. In the experiments to be conducted, the granular material will be sheared or excited in various ways, and both the internal forces and particle motion will be studied quantitatively. Tests of recent theories will be made in order to understand and predict how these materials flow, and the internal forces they can sustain. A second focus is the study of fluid mixing phenomena, where an impurity is gradually dispersed in a fluid. Understanding the dramatic differences between mixing in chaotic and turbulent flows is an important goal. Precise imaging methods will allow a determination of the factors controlling efficiency in mixing and transport, with and without chemical reaction. The project involves both undergraduate students and a postdoctoral trainee, who will be well prepared for a career in which both undergraduate teaching and research are important doc2557 none Wolfs This grant provides operating funds for the relativistic heavy-ion group at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester. During the three years covered by this grant we will complete the analysis of the data collected by E917 at the AGS and start taking data using the PHOBOS detector at RHIC. PHOBOS is one of the four approved experiments ready to run at the turn-on of RHIC. PHOBOS will have the first look at the extreme energy densities that will be created when gold nuclei collide at RHIC. It is believed that a new state of matter, the so-called quark-gluon plasma (QGP), will be formed in these collisions. PHOBOS will study this new state of matter, and its properties will provide important and new information about the state of the very early universe (a few microseconds after the Big Bang). PHOBOS is designed to study as many collisions as possible, in an unbiased way, and to search for significant differences between p-p, p-A, and A-A collisions. Due to its inherent simplicity, PHOBOS has the potential of a major scientific discovery during the initial running period of RHIC. The time-of-flight array designed and constructed by the Rochester group will significantly enhance the physics capabilities of PHOBOS, by roughly doubling its acceptance doc2558 none This individual investigator award is to a young PI at Boston College. The experimental project is to study many-body interactions in novel two-dimensional electronic materials by using high-resolution angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy (ARPES). More specifically, systematic ARPES studies of many-body interactions will be conducted in four different but related two-dimensional superconductors - Tl(2)Ba(2)CuO(6+x) thin films with different doping levels (Tc about 85K for optimally doped samples), ruthenate (i.e., Sr(2)RuO(4), Tc about 1K), ferromagnetic superconductor RuSr(2)GdCu(2)O(8), and layered hafnium nitride (i.e., Li(x)(THF)(y)HfNCl, Tc=25.5K). Such studies will not only answer many questions directly related to these materials, but will also advance the understanding of the high temperature superconductivity. The results will provide important information on the understanding of the influence of dimensionality on many-body interactions and superconductivity. This research project will also provide good training for both undergraduate and graduate students by introducing them some exciting new materials, cutting-edge techniques and fundamental condensed matter physics. This training will prepare them for a range of careers in academe, industry or government. %%% This individual investigator award is to a young PI at Boston College. The experimental project is to study many-body interactions in some newly discovered two-dimensional electronic materials by using high-resolution angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy (ARPES). Those materials display some novel properties, such as high temperature superconductivity - conducting electric current with any loss. Fundamental understanding of these materials is important given their great application potential. ARPES is a powerful technique to probe many-body interactions, which are often responsible for novel properties of these materials. Results from this proposal will provide important information on the understanding of high temperature superconductivity and other interesting phenomena. This research project will also provide good training for both undergraduate and graduate students by introducing them some exciting new materials, cutting-edge techniques and fundamental condensed matter physics. This training will prepare them for a range of careers in academe, industry or government doc2559 none The question is addressed of when the bathtub shape of a failure rate function is preserved by various functions used to describe optimal behavior. A second issue is when do mixtures have specified shapes such as a bathtub shape. A third topic introduces isotonic logistic discrimination, which is developed as a nonparametric generalization of linear logistic discrimination taking into account order restrictions. The fourth question addresses finding simultaneous confidence bands for isotonic response surfaces and the fifth topic develops an ordinal extension of the Pearson chi-squared for testing 2(k ordered tables. A new metric on permutations is proposed and developed as the sixth topic. Failure rates are a method used to describe the propensity of a system, either engineering or biological, to fail. They are a function of time and typically at an early age they are high (more likely to fail), at middle age they are low, and then at an old age they tend to increase (called wearout). This gives rise to the bathtub shaped failure rate. For mechanical or electrical systems, which have a bathtub failure rate, there are many early failures. Consequently, a product should not be released until this period of early failures is past. A method of insuring this is called burn-in. Typically this means testing such products for a length of time until this critical period is over. An important consideration is how to optimally determine such a period and this is one question studied by the researchers. Another research area deals with a common phenomenon in many scientific problems where the experimental responses tend to get larger as various underlying experimental parameters are increased. For example, an individual s likelihood of heart attacks within a five-year period will increases as baseline systolic blood pressure increases and as cholesterol levels increase. In order to properly analyze the data arising from such phenomena, new and more general statistical methods need to be developed. The researchers are considering several major new statistical methods to model and analyze such data doc2560 none PI: Ronald Fintushel Award: : The theory of smooth 4-manifolds gains its importance both from its central location between low and high-dimensional topology and from its close interaction with high energy physics. The major problem in this field is the classification of smooth simply connected 4-manifolds. The interaction between topology and physics has stimulated the construction of invariants - at first Donaldson s invariant, and then the invariant of Seiberg and Witten - which are useful in distinguishing the diffeomorphism types of 4-manifolds. These have led to major advances, and they have allowed workers to study new constructions of 4-manifolds. These have confused the issue of classification, but also have invigorated the theory and reinforced its richness. The theory is now left without even a conjectural classification. It seems that still further examples are needed to identify a suitable classification scheme, and the proposer intends to work on such constructions. One class of 4-manifolds which have exceptionally close ties to theoretical physics are those with a symplectic structure, and the last few years have also seen progress in the theory of symplectic 4-manifolds; especially new constructions, and most notably, Donaldson s work on Lefschetz fibrations. The proposer intends to continue work on the explicit constructions of Lefschetz fibrations and related questions on symplectic submanifolds. The ultimate goal of the proposer is to develop new constructions of smooth 4 manifolds in the hope that a general picture will begin to emerge. The focus of this project will be to construct new types of examples of smooth and symplectic 4-manifolds and to study the diversity of embedded symplectic submanifolds (up to smooth isotopy) in a given homology class. In particular, is every symplectic surface in the complex projective plane smoothly isotopic to a holomorphic curve? If one allows enough blowups, this is not true. Another issue is the geography problem for simply connected irreducible 4-manifolds. Each such manifold can be assigned a lattice point in the plane corresponding to its characteristic numbers. The problem is to study which points are realized. There has been notable progress, but much work still remains, and the principal investigator plans to seek new methods for constructing irreducible simply connected 4-manifolds of positive signature. These techniques are related to a kind of theory of minimal genus surfaces with constraints. Also he, along with R. Stern, conjectures a replacement for the Noether inequality for symplectic 4-manifolds, and they have a promising technique for its proof, which they plan to pursue doc2561 none Pisztora The investigator proposes a number of inter-related projects to study spatial random systems which are of interest both in probability theory and statistical physics. The projects are concerned with regular, invasion and FK percolation, Ising-Potts models and network flows. In percolation and invasion percolation certain structural properties of large clusters will be studied at or near the critical point in two or higher dimensions. In a further project the relation between characteristic length and renormalization will be investigated. A project focuses on phase coexistence in Ising-Potts models and it is concerned with the microscopic properties of the Wulff droplet and of other interfaces, and with the analysis of phase coexistence in the presence of several phases. Decay of correlations and the relaxation of boundary effects in FK percolation (and indirectly in Potts models) is the target of two further projects. The study of capacitated networks is proposed by using sophisticated large deviation methods which have proven to be decisive in other context. The aim of this project is to gain insight and achieve understanding of certain fundamental systems having their origin in statistical and condensed matter physics, materials science, chemistry and earth sciences. Success in solving some of the proposed problems would lead to some of the following benefits: 1) the derivation of rigorous knowledge about fundamental physical systems of theoretical and practical relevance, 2) a deeper insight into the mechanisms responsible for the behavior of such systems, 3) the development of new mathematical methods and tools which, apart from yielding answers to questions raised in other fields, might benefit and enrich probability theory itself doc2562 none Hicks The general goal of our research is to study the structure of the nucleon and the nucleon resonances in terms of quarks and gluons. The fundamental interaction between quarks and gluons is the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which is generally accepted to be the correct underlying theory of the strong force. However, practical calculations using QCD are extremely difficult at energies near the mass of the nucleon. Hence, experimental data is needed to guide theoretical models of nucleon structure. In addition, we are interested in experimental tests of charge symmetry in the strong interaction between two nucleons. Our research is centered on experimental work at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF) and the Laser-Electron Gamma Source (LEGS) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Both of these facilities provide electron or photon beams of sufficient energy to excite the nucleon into intermediate resonances which then decay. In Hall B at TJNAF, our group is focussed on measurements of kaons which are largely due to decay of various nucleon resonances. In Hall C at TJNAF, one member of our group is working on a measurement of the electric and magnetic form factor of the neutron. At LEGS, two members of our group are working on measurements of pions produced with polarized beams and targets, which test theoretical sum rules (related to static properties of the nucleon). All three experiments will provide guidance to QCD-inspired theoretical work doc2563 none Kovash Two topics in pion-nucleon physics will be experimentally investigated at the TRIUMF meson facility. In one, we will make a complete kinematical study of electron-positron pair production following capture of negative pions by the proton. At the low energies of this experiment, the virtual photon produced by pion capture probes the axial currents of the nucleon. By measuring the electron and positron momenta, the complete kinematics of the virtual photon are determined. This allows the cross section to be decomposed into the longitudinal, transverse, and various interference response functions characteristic of pion electroproduction experiments. In the present experiment, however, the axial structure of the nucleon is uniquely determined at small time-like momenta from the measured response functions. Recent claims of a violation of isospin symmetry in the low energy pion-nucleon interaction will be investigated experimentally. Under isospin symmetry, the amplitude for elastic pion-nucleon scattering determines the pion charge-exchange cross section. We will make new low energy measurements of the forward-angle neutral pion yield following negative pion interactions in liquid hydrogen. The pion yield and angular distribution are determined from the measured decay gamma-ray energy spectrum, which will be measured in a new high resolution sodium-iodide spectrometer doc2564 none Papageorgiou This work addresses computationally and analytically two classes of fluid dynamics problems. The motion of bubbles through fluids containing soluble surfactants is considered first. Experiments show that even trace amounts of surfactants can increase the drag on moving bubbles significantly. Through careful modeling, asymptotic analysis and direct numerical simulations of the Navier-Stokes equations coupled with the surfactant equations in the bulk and on the interface, we address both the steady and unsteady problems and in particular evaluate the effect of surfactants on wake size and control. Such controls are desirable in enhanced interphase mass transfer systems. In parallel, we will also study a class of exact Navier-Stokes solutions which emerges in models of lubrication bearing flows. We have found that such exact solutions can describe the viscous flow between two plates when one or both of the plates move normal to themselves. When this boundary motion is periodic, chaotic solutions can emerge at sufficiently high but order one Reynolds numbers. These flows are underlying flows whose stability to wavelike disturbances is highly complicated since the baseflow is chaotic to begin with. We consider such local flows when they are embedded into finite geometries. Direct Navier-Stokes computations will be performed in many geometries and high frequency limits analyzed asymptotically, in order to predict transitions to chaos. This work studies mathematical problems in fluid dynamics leading to scientific computations and analytical problems. The models arise from applications concerned with enhancing technological processes such as materials processing in microgravity, environmental and chemical processes, biomedical applications and lubrication technologies. We use a combination of mathematical and computational tools and intensive computations to elucidate and identify regimes and mechanisms that can enhance the efficiency of the applications mentioned above. For example, we identify, using simulations, situations where flow in squeeze bearings can stay laminar rather than become chaotic. Chaotic flows can cause the equipment to fail with disastrous effects on machinery. Modeling and simulations have the advantage, over experiments, of allowing wide parameter studies and hence help identify critical experiments and design strategies. The research is valuable in both benchmarking large scale simulations as well as providing direct comparisons with experiments doc2565 none ADAPTED WAVELET ALGORITHMS NSF Mladen Victor Wickerhauser Department of Mathematics Washington University in St. Louis Using wavelet packets and other signal-adapted waveforms, we build cheap and efficient `best basis representations for complicated digital signals and images. Used on very large datasets, these reduce the complexity of processing, transmitting, and storing data. Some near-term applications suggested by our prior work are: - fast approximate singular value decomposition, and fast approximate discrete Hilbert transforms; - signal segmentation through local spectrum change detection; - fast discrete atomic decomposition for feature detection and adapted data compression. The long-term goals of this research program are: - understanding, controlling, and constructing signal-adapted waveforms; - high-performance computing with adapted waveforms. We can achieve these goals through a deeper understanding of some discoveries from our prior supported research. We must know, using certain signal-adapted representations, - can we measure information content more accurately, and thus reduce the storage size of a signal or image? -can we lower the fundamental limit of automatic detection of signal features? - what algorithm modifications are needed to obtain adapted waveforms with additional desirable properties? Our work is used to automate or improve tasks such as: segmentation of continuous speech into syllables for speech recognition; analysis and compression of seismic petroleum exploration data; fingerprint image compression that preserves features needed for automatic identification; de-noising and preconditioning of radar signals before automatic feature detection and classification; and speedups of certain basic matrix computations. Our methods include: devising new high-performance algorithms to compute certain quantities; running numerical experiments and simulations to evaluate their range of usefulness; and proving mathematical guarantees for these algorithms such as maximums for running times with minimums for accuracy doc2566 none Award: Principal Investigator: David E. Barrett Professor Barrett will investigate various topics in complex analysis. One topic to be studied is the behavior of two different systems of partial differential equations implementing deformation of a real hypersurface in two-dimensional complex euclidean space by the Levi-form of the hypersurface. The systems are analogous, respectively, to harmonic-mapping heat flow and to the Ricci-flow on the space of conformal metrics, but these particular systems have special features (the role of Lorentzian geometry in the target space and the inclusion of lower-order terms which are not conjugation invariant in the source space) that introduce new phenomena and difficulties. The associated steady-state system has known applications to function theory and engineering, and the study of the time-dependent versions given above may lead to new insights into analytic continuation. A second topic to be studied is the boundary behavior of the Bergman kernel function (off the diagonal) and Bergman representative coordinates on domains with corners, with particular interest in the case of generic intersections of strictly pseudoconvex domains (the case of intersecting balls serving as a key model problem). Professor Barrett will investigate various problems involving multiple parameters (the parameters are understood to lie in the so-called complex number system, a widely-used extension of the standard number system). One topic involves the study of systems of partial differential equations which serve to flatten a surface in the parameter space; sometimes the equations push the surface to an equilibrium configuration (the situation is somewhat analogous to that of a soap film attached to a fixed wire boundary), but sometimes the surface breaks before reaching equilibrium (for example, this will happen if there is no available equilibrium configuration). The computation of equilibrium configurations for these problems (or the documentation that no equilibrium exists) is important in classical function theory, and is also a central topic in the engineering discipline known as H-infinity control theory. A second topic to be studied is based on Stefan Bergman s method of finding a sort of ideal form for a region in complex multiparameter space. In the one-parameter setting Bergman s method tells us how to perform the useful task of smoothing out corners appearing in the boundary of the region (such smoothing is of fundamental importance for example in classical aerodynamics); the proposed research will examine what happens to corners in the multi-parameter setting doc2567 none Anderson This project is centered around the study of the structure of the nucleon, primarily by the measurement of the electric form factor of the neutron. This group will play a pivotal role in an approved experiment at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) designed to measure the electric form factor of the neutron as a function of momentum transfer. Because the neutron is overall neutral, the electric form factor is very sensitive to the details of the constituents and their motions. This measurement provides one of the best experimental tests available for any model of the nucleon and is generally considered to be one of the most important measurements to be performed in intermediate-energy nuclear physics. The experiment will be performed by the scattering of longitudinally polarized electrons from a liquid deuterium target and detecting the knock-out neutron in coincidence with the scattered electron. The Kent State group has the responsibility for providing the neutron detector array for this experiment. The array consists of thirty-six separate neutron detectors arranged so as to both detect the neutron and determine its spin. The transfer of the spin from the electron beam to the neutron is directly related to the charge form factor of the neutron. The detector array is called a neutron polarimeter. The Kent State group has used a similar polarimeter in experiments at other accelerator facilities and will have the responsibility for the installation, operation, and maintenance of this detector array for the experiment. This project will be part of the Ph.D. dissertation research of two Kent State graduate students. Support from this award will also enable this group to finish the analysis of experiments performed at the Indiana University Cyclotron Facility to study the spin dependence of the nuclear force, to search for three-body contributions to the nuclear force, and also to analyze measurements of baryon resonances using the Crystal Ball Spectrometer at the Brookhaven AGS accelerator. These measurements were performed with earlier support from the National Science Foundation and are part of the dissertation projects of three Kent State graduate students doc2568 none Award: Principal Investigator: Elizabeth Werner The PI s research deals with questions in affine geometry and geometric probability of convex bodies as well as with applications. A tool of considerable importance in the area of isoperimetric inequalities is the affine surface area from affine differential geometry whose classical definition goes back to Blaschke and involves the curvature function of a smooth convex body. An important problem in convex geometry was to extend the notion of affine surface area to all convex bodies. The solution of this problem has only been completed within the last decade. At present, many extensions of the affine surface area exist, several of them discovered by the PI. The new techniques and ideas developed in the process of these extensions should be beneficial for other problems, and the PI proposes to apply these techniques to problems of approximation of convex bodies by polytopes. These approximation problems have been studied extensively and find application in many areas of mathematics and computer science. In one paper, for instance, the PI and her collaborator proved the surprising result that random approximation by polytopes (choosing the vertices of the approximating polytope randomly on the boundary of the body) is as good as best approximation. The Gaussian correlation conjecture in probability and statistics asserts that origin-symmetric convex sets are positively correlated under the standard Gaussian measure. In spite of several partial results obtained by many researchers within the last years, including the PI, the conjecture remains undecided. Optimal estimates for the tail of the Gaussian distribution obtained in this context by the PI and her collaborators are also relevant for problems in mathematical physics (see e.g.Differential Equations and Mathematical Physics, International Press , p.43-51). The PI wants to get an understanding of the structure of convex sets. To do so she uses techniques from different areas of mathematics: analysis, differential geometry, convexity theory. One wants to understand the structure of such sets as they appear naturally not only in other branches of mathematics and mathematical physics, but also in applied areas, like tomography and image analysis, and computer sciences. The PI and her collaborators plan to continue working on problems where convexity and other areas of more applied mathematics interact. Currently she is involved in a project related to quantum computing which uses -among other things- tools from convexity theory doc2569 none Award: Principal Investigator: Joel Spruck The principal investigator proposes to study a number of classical problems in Riemannian geometry that are related in that they may be described by, or have a strong connection with, fully nonlinear elliptic equations such as Monge-Ampere equations or mean curvature equations in some novel way. These include extensions of the classical sharp isoperimetric inequality to negatively curved Riemannian manifolds, hypersurfaces of constant mean curvature in hyperbolic space with prescribed boundary at infinity, and the problem of deciding if any local Riemannian metric can be realized by an embedding into Euclidean three dimensional space. This last problem is interesting not only for its geometric content but also for important concrete problems in computer vision. Our research is motivated by concrete geometric and physical problems that are of basic interest to pure and applied scientists. What are the basic geometric design principles (variational principles) that govern the structure of the protein in our genes and can we find a fast computational algorithm to predict this structure. How can we make better color computer screens and smart cameras. These questions and numerous others depend upon a deep understanding of the geometry of surfaces and the complicated nonlinear equations that describe how they twist and turn and move about in space. The effective solution of these problems involves the study of geometry, partial differential equations and high speed computation doc2570 none Haeberli Funding provided for the research under the title Medium-Energy Physics and Fundamental Interactions will support one graduate student for seven months for a study of the nuclear polarization of hydrogen molecules resulting from recombination of polarized atoms. Data so far obtained show that in a strong magnetic guide field, about 40% of the polarization is retained doc2571 none Shubov The primary goal of this proposal is to develop the spectral, asymptotic, and stability analysis for three increasingly more complete and complicated models of an aircraft wing in a surrounding airflow. The first two of these models (1-dimensional and 2-dimensional respectively) have been developed in the Flight Systems Research Center (FSRC) at UCLA in collaboration with NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, CA. The designing of the 3-dimensional model is in progress. Among the wing models existing in the extensive modern literature on aeroelasticity, the aforementioned ones are most physically complete. In November , the 1-dimensional model was tested in a series of four flight experiments at Edwards Airforce Base, CA. The experimental results are in excellent agreement with the theoretical predictions of the model at least for low - energy aeroelastic modes. Currently, the collaboration is supported by NSF Grant (Interdisciplinary Grants in the Mathematical Sciences). This grant provides the support for a one year visit (Fall - Spring ) of the principal investigator to the Center in order to study in depth the engineering and physical principles of aircraft wing modeling and to continue work on the joint project with the researchers of the Center. During recent years, the investigator s research has been focused on two main directions: (a) spectral and asymptotic analysis of non-self-adjoint operators in a Hilbert space, operators which are the dynamics generators of hyperbolic equations and systems containing damping terms and subject to dissipative boundary conditions; (b) applications of the results of this analysis to the control of distributed parameter systems governed by those equations and systems. The series of results and methods, developed in this research, has now culminated in the work on the aforementioned 1-dimensional model of a vibrating aircraft wing. Substantial progress has been made: the PI was able to obtain first in the literature explicit asymptotic formulas for the high-frequency aeroelastic modes and mode shapes. The objectives of this project include: (a) obtaining space-time domain representations for the solutions of the 1- dimensional model; (b) obtaining spectral asymptotics and representations for the solutions of most recent 2-dimensional model; (c) applying asymptotic and spectral results to the flutter suppression problem; (d) participating in the designing of a 3-dimensional model of a wing and extending the above analysis to this model. The present project can be considered as a theoretical part of the broad wing modeling project conducted by the researchers at the aforementioned Centers. The ultimate goal of the entire project is to give specific practical recommendations to aircraft industry engineers working on flutter suppression in aircraft wings and tails. Flutter is a dynamic instability occurring in an aircraft in flight at a specific speed which is called a flutter speed. Damage inflicted by flutter results in significant cost to the aircraft industry. The objective of this project is to carry out a rigorous mathematical analysis of the aircraft wing model and to apply the results of this analysis to the problem of flutter control. It has been recognized in the engineering community that the results of such an analysis can provide new insights which are not available from experiments or from numerical simulations. In addition to the above technical objectives of the project, the principal investigator is planning to develop a new graduate program on mathematical methods in aircraft engineering for both mathematics and engineering students doc2572 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Band-Gap Materials, Mesoscopic Structures, and Related Topics Kuchment The aim of the project is to develop and advance analytic and numerical methods for studying wave propagation in a band-gap or mesoscopic medium. Issues under study include graph models for mesoscopic band-gap materials and circuits of quantum wires, unusual spectral properties of such materials discovered previously, effects of localized impurities in a periodic medium, waveguiding properties of linear defects, and spectral properties of periodic materials. BAND-GAP MATERIALS have attracted considerable attention since the idea was suggested in . A photonic crystal is a low-loss dielectric material, consisting of a periodic structure of regions with different values of the dielectric constant (for example, air bubbles placed periodically into an optically dense dielectric). Under appropriate conditions such a material can exhibit band gaps, that is, ranges of frequencies in which electromagnetic waves cannot propagate through the material. Acoustic, elastic, metallic, and magnetic analogs of photonic crystals are also important, although much less studied. Band-gap materials have impressive applications to high efficiency light sources, antennas, low threshold lasers, mirrors, optical information transmission lines, quantum computers, sound attenuation, heat insulation, and in many other areas. MESOSCOPIC SYSTEMS are extremely thin (as narrow as 2nm) surfaces (quantum walls), wires (quantum wires) or dots (quantum dots) carved out of semi-conductors or super-conductors. These objects enjoy a wealth of applications even more striking than the ones of band-gap materials. This project is an investigation of the intricate mathematical problems, in many cases similar for the two types of media, that arise in modeling the creation of these materials and in studying their properties doc2573 none Kieffer There is increasing evidence that the glassy and liquid states are structurally and thermodynamically distinct, although both amorphous. This implies that the glass transition is a polyamorphic transformation. Furthermore, a tendency of the substance to undergo structural transitions in the glassy state could affect materials properties such as non-linear optical responses and mechanical behaviors. This project comprises the investigation of the structural evolution in glass-forming materials as a function of pressure and temperature. The extent to which structural relaxation during glass formation involves polyamorphic structural transitions, as opposed to a viscous slowing within an invariant structure, will be determined. Structural characterization in supercooled melts will be accomplished using a combination of Brillouin and Raman light scattering and molecular dynamics simulations, which will allow one to identify the mechanical response of the structure and the nature of structural building blocks. Brillouin light scattering will be used to determine the high-frequency complex mechanical modulus of glass-forming melts at the molecular scale. The real component, or storage modulus, provides information on the structural integrity and network connectivity, while the imaginary component corresponds to the energy dissipated in aperiodic motions of small structural constituents (e.g., atomic hopping). Simultaneous Raman scattering will allow one to establish a direct correlation between this visco-elastic behavior and the symmetries and abundance of molecular building blocks. Molecular dynamic simulations will be used to reconcile the experimentally determined Raman spectra and visco-elastic properties with a detailed geometric description of the molecular structure. The manifestation of polyamorphism will be revealed by examining a series of glass-forming systems, chosen to systematically sample a wide range of glass-forming attributes, such as the valences, bonding types of the network elements, and melt fragility. Systems will include germanates, phosphates, tellurites, and chalcogenides. The relationship between the nature of the network former and the mechanisms of transitions between different non-crystalline polymorphs will be established by studying the effects of simultaneous pressure and temperature on the transition processes using heated diamond anvil cells. The objective of this project is to clarify the concept and manifestations of polyamorphism. With this clarification, our understanding of important issues in glass science will be advanced, since a tendency of a material to undergo structural transitions in the glassy state could affect its properties, such as non-linear optical responses and mechanical behaviors, which are important for high tech applications. Expanding the range of applicability of glasses will enable new technologies, including photonics, optical telecommunication and computing, drug and radiation delivery, bio-medical implants, sensors, energy storage and generation, nuclear waste containment, and light-weight metallic alloys doc2574 none An International Conference, Homogenization and Materials Science , in honor of the late Professor Ulrich Hornung of Bundeswehr University Munich, Germany, will take place at the University of Akron, Akron, Ohio, during September 15 - 17, . The purpose of this interdisciplinary conference is to bring together researchers from interacting areas of Materials Science. In particular special focus will be paid to the latest scientific and industrial developments concerning homogenization theory and methods. Homogenization is a powerful mathematical tool for solving, both static (effective properties) and dynamic (wave propagation, transport equations) problems in inhomogeneous materials with periodic and random microstructure. This includes prediction of mechanical and dielectrical properties of composites, shape memory materials, materials undergoing phase transitions, and polymeric composites. Solutions of these problems provide guidance in the design of new materials possessing the specific properties required by modern technological needs. The conference shall address both modeling and computational aspects of these problems. This conference will bring together the leading scientists from Europe and the U.S. who are working on homogenization problems and applications in materials science. Modern electronic and mechanical devices require materials with specific properties in their design. For example, the automotive industry seeks lightweight yet very strong materials. Such materials do not necessarily occur naturally. Hence, these materials must be engineered from existing resources. One approach is to form a composite material. A composite material is made from a blend of other materials. Fundamental questions in the design of composites are (1) what materials should be used to form the composite, (2) how much of each material should be used in the composite, and (3) how should the materials be combined to form the composite? In the latter case the geometric patterns of the combined materials (think of plywood) play an important role. Materials scientists and engineers try to answer the above keeping in mind the specific properties required from the resulting composite. Practical experience and trial and error approaches are common means of obtaining answers. Within the past two decades many new tools have been developed by the applied mathematics community to help answer these questions. These tools fall under the heading of what is called homogenization theory. One reason for holding this conference will be to highlight the use of these new tools. A second purpose of the proposed conference will be to highlight the formulation and solution of new homogenization problems arising in materials design. For example, one area that may further benefit from the utilization of homogenization tools is polymer-based composites. Hence, the conference should help answer two questions: (1) what should be the future directions in homogenization theory based upon the current needs of modern technology (in short, which problems should be solved), and (2) what is the best way of utilizing newly developed mathematical tools to solve these problems in order to enhance the use of homogenization methods in materials design? These questions will be answered through both speaker presentations and a panel discussion, which will summarize the current state of the subject and future trends doc2575 none Neuhauser This research of Dr. Neuhauser covers three areas: (1) community ecology, (2) evolutionary ecology, and (3) population genetics. Mathematical tools will be developed to address questions of (i) the causes and effects of spatial structure on plant communities, in particular the question of how explicit space affects diversity and stability of plant communities; (ii) the evolution of resistance to insecticide and the spread of resistant alleles, in particular for a genetically engineered crop that expresses chemicals that are toxic to its insect pests; (iii) how mating structure affects spatial structuring in gynodioecious plants; and (iv) how temporal variability affects genealogies. The spatial processes will be modeled using the framework of interacting particle systems, which are continuous time Markov processes on the infinite D dimensional lattice, characterized by local interactions between sites. The genealogical processes will be investigated using the ancestral selection graph as a modeling framework. The motivation for the proposed research is to gain a better understanding of how spatial and temporal factors affect the outcome of interactions in plant communities. Most of ecological and agricultural modeling traditionally did not take into account effects of explicit space due to the difficulties encountered in the analysis of such models. More recently, tools have been developed that allow rigorous analysis of spatial models. This research of Dr. Neuhauser is intended to shed light on how space affects plant communities; this is important in understanding the structure of both natural and managed (agricultural) communities. Her results should help devise management strategies for maintaining biodiversity in natural communities and for slowing the spread of resistance genes in crop systems of genetically engineered crop doc2576 none Terry Fuller Recent results in 4-dimensional topology have shown that symplectic 4-dimensional manifolds can be characterized topologically by the property of admitting a Lefschetz fibration. This proposal concerns constructions of Lefschetz fibrations, and in particular focuses on constructions involving branched coverings. We propose to develop and investigate applications for a procedure that compares the Lefschetz fibrations obtained as branched covers of deformations and resolutions of singular branch loci. A 4-dimensional manifold is an object that on a small scale looks like Euclidean 4-dimensional space (such as our physical world, with time included). A fundamental open problem in mathematics is to classify the large scale shapes of 4-dimensional manifolds. A particular variety of 4-dimensional manifold, originally appearing in classical physics but now a central object in pure mathematics, is known as a symplectic manifold. Recent techniques for studying symplectic 4-dimensional manifolds involve viewing them as Lefschetz fibrations, that is by particular sorts of cross-sections by 2-dimensional surfaces. This project seeks to generalize previous work of the applicant involving constructions of Lefschetz fibrations on symplectic 4-dimensional manifolds doc2577 none Kai Cieliebak The focus of this project is the investigation of a new system of nonlinear partial differential equations. These equations arise naturally in the study of J-holomorphic curves in symplectic manifolds with a Hamiltonian group action. Instances of these equations include the vortex equations, the anti-self-dual Yang-Mills equations, and the Seiberg-Witten equations. Solutions of the equations give rise to invariants of Hamiltonian group actions. These invariants are related via an adiabatic limit to the Gromov-Witten invariants of the symplectic quotient by the group action. This project pursues the following goals: (1) achieving a deeper understanding of known connections between invariants; (2) establishing new correspondences between invariants; (3) using the correspondences between invariants to compute invariants. Invariants that can be addressed in this way include: Donaldson invariants and Seiberg-Witten invariants of certain smooth 4-manifolds; instanton Floer homology and Seiberg-Witten Floer homology of certain smooth 3-manifolds; Gromov-Witten invariants, quantum cohomology and Floer homology of symplectic manifolds. A symplectic manifold is a generalisation of the phase space in classical mechanics. Geometric properties of this space influence the behavior of mechanical systems. For example, compactness of the space forces mechanical systems to admit periodic motions. This project focuses on geometric properties of symplectic manifolds with symmetries. Symmetries of a mechanical system lead to conserved quantities represented by a moment map. Classical examples of moment maps are linear and angular momentum. This project lies in the intersection between two large branches of symplectic geometry: the study of J-holomorphic curves, and the study of Hamiltonian group actions. These branches have traditionally had little overlap. Moreover, the project touches several areas adjacent to symplectic geometry: Hamiltonian dynamics, quantum field theory, low-dimensional topology, and algebraic geometry doc2578 none spaces rest on complicated set-theoreti combinatorics and often cannot be solved assuming only the standard axioms of set theory. Thus began a fruitful interaction between the set theory and general topology which continues today. The principle investigator s proposed problems lie within the scope of this interesting interaction. Proposed methods of solutions to the problems involve an interweaving of topological methods with sophisticated set theoretic tools. Solutions to these problems would deepen our understanding of fundamental topological properties and relationships, and would likely require new set-theoretical and topological techniques applicable to a variety of other problems doc2579 none The Gordon Research Conference on Polymers (East) will take place June 10-15, at Connecticut College and will be devoted to the range of subjects in polymer science that are seen to project developments in the future century. The entire conference can be found on the web at [http: www.grc.uri.edu programs polyeast.htm]. As a bridge between the 20th and 21st centuries there will be a program titled Stories from the 20th Century, to offer a context for the lectures on cutting-edge developments in polymer science. Distinguished contributors to polymer science in the 20th century have been invited to this program and many of them will also act as discussion leaders for the regular program. The NSF contributions will allow graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to attend the conference and present their work in the form of posters. These young people will act as an interesting counterpoint to the senior investigators from the Stories section. A committee of speakers and discussion leaders from he program will choose the best of these poster presentations and these presenters will be asked to give oral presentations before the whole conference doc2580 none This individual investigator award is to a young professor at the University of Miami for an experimental research project that focuses on the phenomenon of electronic phase separation in charge-carrier-doped antiferromagnetic (AF) manganites and cuprates. Electron-doped manganites, for example Ca(1-x)La(x)MnO(3) (x = 0.2), have been shown through preliminary data to be model systems for testing theoretical predictions of phase separation and are targeted for further study. The research on cuprates is motivated by a hypothesis that attributes anomalous phonon damping in AF YBa(2)Cu(3)O(6+x) to local lattice distortions induced by charge-stripe dynamics in the phase-separated CuO(2) planes. Of particular interest for the proposed work are compositions near the insulator-superconductor phase boundary (x~0.3-0.4), where the development of charge-stripe order competes with long-range Neel order. Complementing these investigations of inhomogeneous materials will be parallel studies of the layered superconductor Sr(2)RuO(4). Experiments are proposed to test the limits of applicability of Fermi-Liquid theory to this highly correlated, anisotropic system. The proposed work is expected to significantly enhance the understanding of the interplay between spin, charge, and lattice excitations that determine the novel physical properties of transition-metal oxides. The young scientists involved with this project, undergraduate students through postdocs, will receive training that will enable them to compete for future positions in academia, government, or industrial laboratories. %%% This individual investigator award is to a young professor at the University of Miami for an experimental research project that focused on the investigation of transport (electrical and heat conduction, thermoelectric effects) and magnetism in transition-metal oxide compounds that are of significant intellectual and technological interest. Three classes of compounds (manganites, cuprates, and ruthenates), that exhibit magnetism and or unconventional superconductivity, have been targeted for study. The manganites and cuprates are systems where the physical properties can be controllably altered by adding charge carriers (doping) via chemical substitution. An important theme for this program is the phenomenon of electronic phase separation (PS), wherein the charges doped into insulating antiferromagnetic compounds segregate into nano-scale clusters. This small-scale inhomogeneity appears to be intrinsic to these materials and may prove significant for technological development, given that recent experiments and theory suggest PS is an important ingredient in the mechanisms for colossal magnetoresistance and high-temperature superconductivity. The young scientists involved with this project, undergraduate students through postdocs, will receive training that will enable them to compete for future positions in academia, government, or industrial laboratories doc2581 none PI: Yiider Tseng Institution: Johns Hopkins University Proposal Number: The control of the molecular weight of macromolecules is important in pharmaceutical applications, biotechnology, and polymer processing. The PIs plan to use DNA molecules with cohesive ends ( sticky ends ) as a model system to study the physics of shear-induced polymerization. Using mechanical rheometry, molecular combing, shear-flow fluorescence microscopy, molecular sequencing, and gel electrophoresis, they plan to uncover and quantify the fundamental mechanism of shear-induced polymer assembly. In particular, they will investigate: 1. the shear-rate dependence of polymer-length distribution, 2. the reversibility of shear-induced polymerization, 3. the influence of ion charge and concentration in solution, and 4. the effects of polymer length and of 5. polymer-end stickiness and temperature on shear-induced polymer assembly. They plan to verify that the shear flow, which favors inter-chain interactions via connection of the cohesive ends of the polymers, induces the assembly. These results will be used to study the behavior of associating polymers under shear and may form the basis of an approach to control polymer assembly in recombitant DNA technology and polymer science doc2582 none Proposal: : Quantum cohomology can be thought of as an algebraic invariant structure of geometric objects called symplectic manifolds. A birational transformation can be thought of as a transformation of a symplectic manifold that is an isomorphism outside of a tiny region where discontinuity can happen. The motivation of this project is the following question: What is the canonical transformation of quantum cohomology? Namely, what kind of transformation of symplectic manifolds will preserve quantum cohomology? The principal investigator s early results indicate that birational transformations may play the role of canonical transformation. This project is devoted to the systematic study of this phenomenon doc2583 none Johnston Understanding the structure of the nucleon at the quark level is of fundamental importance in particle and nuclear physics. An observable identified as being directly sensitive to quark degrees of freedom is the cross section difference between the elastic scattering of electrons with polarizations parallel and antiparallel to the incident electron momentum from unpolarized protons. This parity violating asymmetry results from the interference between the process in which an incident electron exchanges a photon and the one in which it exchanges a neutral weak boson. Specifically, parity violating elastic electron proton scattering allows determination of the nucleon strange charge and magnetic form factors, which describe the contributions from strange quarks to the nucleon, along with their momentum transfer dependence. If parity violating electron nucleon scattering experiments are extended beyond the elastic channel into particular inelastic channels, additional information about the quark currents inside the nucleon can clearly be obtained. Understanding the Delta resonance, the first excited nucleon state, has always been considered an important test of nucleon structure models. The parity violating asymmetry in electroproduction of this resonance can isolate the isovector contributions to the quark currents. The Delta resonance can also be produced in electron scattering via the exchange of the neutral weak boson. Thus, weak transition form factors also contribute to the N-to-Delta transition. Included in the research efforts of the Louisiana Tech Center for Applied Physics Studies (CAPS) is the study of parity violating electron scattering in both elastic and inelastic reactions. CAPS has significant involvement in the G0 experiment at Jefferson Lab (E00-006), which will investigate the elastic channel, and are spokespersons for experiment E97-104, ``Measurement of the Parity Violating Asymmetry in the N-to-Delta transition doc2584 none PROJECT Problems in Statistical Model Building. Grace Wahba, PI. This research is to further the development of Smoothing Spline ANOVA and related variational methods for multivariate function estimation and statistical model building, so that these methods may be used in analyses of very large complex heterogenous data sets as occur in demographic medical studies, environmental and climatic data analyses and classification problems in a variety of areas. These methods are flexible nonparametric methods, but generally contain commonly used parametric families as special cases. The general approach proceeds in the following steps: (i)propose families of models that are appropriate for specific areas of application, (ii) develop new numerical algorithms as required for fitting the models, (ii) develop further methods for tuning the models and providing accuracy estimates, (iii) develop information concerning the properties of the methods, including testing on realistic simulated observations where the `truth is known, (iv) and applying the resulting methods to important data sets, with the expectation of extracting information from these data that is not obtainable by standard parametric methods. The goal of this project is provide to scientists in medical, environmental and atmospheric sciences and supervised machine learning, new and useful tools to more efficiently analyze their data. Tasks are proposed to develop new methods that are appropriate for more efficient data analysis in complex demographic studies which follow populations over time, collecting information useful for understanding relationships between possible risk factors and the incidence and progression of various diseases. Tasks are also proposed for the development of new methods that are appropriate for understanding relationships among various factors of interest in large environmental and atmospheric data sets with `non-standard indirect observational data; and for exploiting some new methods in classification that have wide applicability for building classification algorithms based on learning from large data sets in very high dimensional spaces doc2585 none Tsukruk This Conference on Scanning Probe Microscopy in Polymer Science at the August Meeting of the American Chemical Society will introduce the latest developments in this rapidly growing field. It will include a large number of speakers from all over the world. Funding is provided to enable young investigators (new PI s, students) to attend doc2586 none Lorenzon Research will be carried out in high energy electron scattering with The goal of determining the spin and flavour structure of nucleons. The main emphasis will be on studying the strange sea quark polarization, the gluon polarization, and transverse polarization effects in nucleons. The research will advance our understanding of the nucleons in terms of constituent quarks and sea quarks and how they interact with each other to form the protons and the neutrons doc2587 none Lizhen Ji Symmetric and locally symmetric spaces are important objects in mathematics and arise from many different subjects such as Lie group theory, representation theory, number theory, differential geometry, algebraic geometry, and dynamics. Many natural such spaces are noncompact. For example, the space of positive definite matrices of determinant one is a noncompact symmetric space, and the moduli space of all elliptic curves is a noncompact locally symmetric space of finite volume which is one example of Shimura curves and plays an important role in the recent solution of the last Fermat s theorem. To understand the geometry and analysis of such noncompact spaces, an important problem is to study their compactifications. One of the common themes of the four projects in this proposal is to understand refined structures of the compactifications and their relations to the spectral theory of the spaces. For example, for locally symmetric spaces, geodesics which are eventually distance minimizing can be used to study the compactifications and also to understand the generalized eigenfunctions of the continuous spectrum, specifically, the scattering matrices. Compactifications of symmetric spaces play an important role in understanding behaviors at infinity of the joint eigenfunctions of the invariant differential operators and the matrix coefficients of representations. The compactifications of globally and locally symmetric spaces have mainly be studied separately before, and an important feature of this proposal is to study compactifications of both types of spaces using a similar approach. Mathematicians study geometric shapes and their structures. One such collection of shapes consists of objects called manifolds. If a drum is pictured as a particular type of manifold then the tones produced by the drum can be thought of as mathematical objects associated to the manifold. For a particularly important collection of drums there are two kinds of tones: the discrete (or isolated) ones and the continuous families. The PI intends to investigate a variety of mathematical structures on these drums or manifolds doc2588 none Igor Kriz The aim of the present project is to study certain connections between mathematics and mathematical physics. The area of mathematics concerned is Algebraic topology, which employs methods of algebra to investigate properties of topological spaces (shapes) which remain unchanged (invariant) under continuous deformation. Among such properties or invariants, a distinguished role is played by certain invariants of linear nature, known as generalized cohomology theories. The main goal of this project is studying interpretations and interactions of such cohomology theories with certain areas of physics, geometry and algebraic geometry (spaces of solutions of algebraic equations). Concretely, the investigator focuses on two areas. The first object is finding a geometric (or physical) model of elliptic cohomology. It is conjectured that elliptic cohomology can be recovered by infinite loop space theory from a category of holomorphic conformal field theories. The other area concerns the study of Morava K-theories in a homotopy category of algebraic varieties introduced by Voevodsky doc2589 none ly by an algorithmic description (generators and relations). In the second approach, the investigators choose some basic symmetries (generators) so that all other symmetries are compositions (words) of the basic symmetries, and describe certain relations between the basic symmetries such that all other relations follow from the chosen relations. One of the main problems about a group given by generators and relations and relations is the word problem: when are two compositions of generators the same? In some exotic cases this problem can be undecidable, that is there are groups for which there are no automatic procedures to recognize if two words of generators are equal. but even in cases when this problem is decidable, the automatic procedure can be very complicated. In recent years the investigators discovered a deep relationship between the word problem of a group and the global geometry of the group. The geometry of a group is described in terms of certain asymptotic invariants. The invariants have been known since the pioneering works of M. Dehn at the beginning of the 20th century but the investigators discovered deep relationship between these invariants and algorithmic problems. The investigators are developing their geometric method solving old mathematical problems of algorithmic nature and corresponding algebraic problems about groups doc2590 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Nonlinear Dynamics in Heterogeneous and Random Systems Kuske The project covers four areas of research, which all use a combination of asymptotics and computation. The first goal is to understand how small noise alters transitions in nonlinear dynamics, focusing on interface dynamics, transitions in bursters, and oscillations in lasers with delayed feedback. This research also contributes to a broad characterization of the effects of noise in nonlinear systems, useful for effective modeling. The second objective is to predict and understand localized behavior in coupled oscillators, coupled laser arrays, calcium oscillations, and structural dynamics. The strength of the localization can depend on competing effects in a non-uniform way. The third objective is to understand the effects of heterogeneity on the dynamics of patterns in reaction-diffusion problems, using both envelope equation approximations and computations of the full model. The fourth goal is developing new methods for pricing financial derivatives. To price a variety of options, we combine methods for moving boundaries in partial differential equations with singular perturbation methods. The overall goal of the project is to develop asymptotic theory and methods for mathematical models of heterogeneous complex systems. Such methods are often combined with computations in order to completely analyze these models. When including disorder or inhomogeneities in a mathematical model, we try to answer the following questions: Does the heterogeneity cause qualitative changes in the behavior of the system? Is the model highly sensitive to physical variations or computational inaccuracies? Is the model realistic, and can similar models be used as accurate descriptions or predictors for the real world system? What are the deficiencies of the model, and how might it be improved? In this project we focus on mathematical models in which heterogeneity plays a significant role, including models of laser dynamics, chemical reactions, calcium concentrations in cells, neuronal dynamics, engineering structures, and financial products doc2591 none The term conformal dynamics has recently gained some currency and is meant to cover real and complex dynamics. This merging of sub-areas makes sense because their methods are showing more overlap than ever. The project suggests a variety of goals. The first is the study of boundaries of connectedness loci for families of polynomials. This generalizes the study of the boundary of the Mandelbrot set. Problems include the metric structure of the boundary, including the boundary behavior of the Riemann map of the complement and the distribution of the harmonic measure. This part of the problem continues the on-going work by J. Graczyk and the proposer. The second goal is the study of boundaries of Siegel disks. The main problem in this area is deciding whether such boundaries are Jordan curves. The proposed approach is based on gaining information on the Riemann map of the Siegel disk by means of a cohomological equation. The third problem is in real dynamics and concerns the existence of wild attractors with additional properties. The forth goal is to estimate the measure and Hausdorff dimension of sets invariant under certain iterated function systems. To understand the meaning of this research in the broad perspective of science, one has first to realize the role played by one-dimensional, or conformal, dynamics. Systems which appear as models in natural sciences, such as physics, astronomy, meteorology, economics or ecology, involve multiple parameters. However, frequently one dominant parameter emerges which controls long time-behavior of the system. In such a way the logistic family appears in the study of many complicated systems. The logistic maps are quadratic polynomials. It is useful to study them on the complex plane, and thus complex quadratic polynomials enter the picture. This is the first object of our study. In other situations the system begins to show quasi-periodic or ``rotational behavior. This is situation is modeled by Siegel disks which are another subject of our proposed study. Wild attractors, which are our third subject, refer to a very unusual chaotic regime for a system in which two completely different limiting modes of long-term behavior co-exist side by side. The attractor for an iterated function system which we will also investigate appears as a projection of a certain fractal set. This kind of problem appears in applications where one often has a multi-dimensional fractal set which can be studied by projections onto lower-dimensional spaces doc2592 none Hinnefeld This grant supports the involvement of the PI and undergraduate students in a program of research in experimental nuclear physics. The proposed experiments include measurements of nuclear properties, including lifetimes and decay branching ratios, that are important for understanding the synthesis of elements heavier than oxygen in explosive stellar environments, as well as investigations of the effect on nuclear reaction dynamics of the exotic structure of the nucleus helium-6, a neutron skin nucleus. Experiments will be carried out at the University of Notre Dame, using the FN Tandem Van de Graaff accelerator and TwinSol radioactive beam facility, and at the CYCLONE radioactive beam facility in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. In addition to contributing to an improved understanding of nucleosynthesis and of the reactions dynamics of neutron-skin nuclei, this project will provide an opportunity for undergraduate students at Indiana University South Bend to become actively involved in exciting and important research. Support is also provided in this grant for these undergraduates to attend regional scientific meetings, where they will present their results doc2593 none Problems in model selection, mixtures and weighted likelihood We study problems in model selection, mixtures and weighted likelihood. In particular, we first discuss extensions of the weighted likelihood methodology introduced by Markatou et al ( , ) in the context of regression models and its connection to model selection issues with emphasis in the mixture model context. We then generalize these ideas to study general model selection problems. The role of the disparity measures that are associated with weighted likelihood, and several others, is studied in detail in connection with goodness of fit approach to model selection. The point of view we take here is that parametric models can provide informative, parsimonious descriptions of the data. Then, the test statistics for testing the model adequacy are constructed and the asymptotic distributions under the null hypothesis and under contiguous alternatives are studied. The theory here is based on empirical processes. To practically implement the methods we propose to bootstrap the test statistics to obtain appropriate p-values. We consider bootstrapping from a hybrid between the model distribution stipulated by the null hypothesis and the data and study the consistency of it. When the model is false we prefer nonparametric bootstrap. The performance of Bickel s m out of n bootstrap will be examined doc2594 none Water is a limiting resource in most natural and managed ecosystems. A better understanding of plant water use is needed for informed management of the integrity and productivity these systems. The symposium and resultant review paper will summarize the recent advances in ecological plant water relations and identify essential areas for future research. At the individual plant level, the PIs will address root-to-leaf water transport mechanisms, the role hydraulic and chemical signalling in responses to water limitation, and damage repair mechanisms. Additionally the PIs will discuss the impact of individual plant water use on the larger scales of community and ecosystem responses. The symposium will serve a broad audience of scientists in research areas ranging from plant physiology to ecosystem biology doc2595 none Award: Principal Investigator: Wenxiong Chen Professor Wenxiong Chen will work on a series of nonlinear problems in differential geometry. One of his main subjects is prescribing Gaussian and scalar curvature: given a function on a Riemannian manifold, can it be realized as the curvature of some pointwise conformal metric? This is equivalent to solving certain semi-linear elliptic partial differential equations. He will also work on uniformization theorems on singular surfaces and the existence of harmonic maps between complete, noncompact manifolds, which are closely related to the study of fourth order nonlinear elliptic equations, nonlinear elliptic systems, and nonlinear parabolic systems. According to Einstein, the Universe we live in is a curved space, in which gravity is realized as a distortion or bending of space-time in the neighborhood of a massive object and this change of shape is measured by the curvature tensor. Chen s research is focused on understanding when a given function can become a curvature. This is a challenging problem in Riemannian geometry and the analysis of partial differential equations, to which many researchers have contributed. The nonlinear partial differential equations and systems studied in this project have various applications in physics, chemistry, and biology, such as in fluid dynamics, combustion theory, and river pollution doc2596 none Dembo This research is in the area of large deviations and its applications. In particular, the PI will study situations where the rare behavior conditioned on a fixed (= quenched) realization of one element of randomness is the key to determine and understand the typical phenomena. One unifying theme is that the evaluation of probabilities of rare events leads to an understanding of the mechanisms by which they can occur, and when many different rare events are possible, it leads to the identification of the mechanism causing one of them to actually occur. Two specific lines of research are planned: (i) Mathematical study and understanding of aging phenomenon in the large time behavior of dynamical systems for statistical physics models out of equilibrium; and (ii) Study of exceptional points on the sample path of stochastic processes such as Brownian motion, random walks and stable processes. Emphasis is put on points defined by means of the corresponding occupation measures of sets of shrinking diameters. Other directions of proposed research involving these ingredients are applicable among other things to universal lossy coding, a problem of relevance and much interest for communication theory and to biomolecular data analysis. The theory of large deviations is mainly concerned with rare events or tail estimates on an exponential scale. This theory has proven to be successful as a tool for deriving almost sure asymptotic limits when two levels of randomness are present. Of particular interest are problems in which large deviations estimates and ideas play a decisive role in determining a limit law that holds with probability one doc2597 none Award: Principal Investigator: Richard W. Montgomery The principal investigator will search for new solutions to the Newtonian N-body problem using a combination of the direct method of the calculus of variations, a detailed knowledge of ``shape space , and a careful investigation of the action functional near collisions of the bodies. By the ``shape space we mean the space of either similarity classes or congruence classes of N-gons. In recent joint work with Alain Chenciner, this three-pronged approach proved its utility by yielding a hitherto unknown orbit for the three-body problem. In our new orbit all three masses chase each other around the same figure eight shaped curve in the plane. Our orbit turns out to be dynamically (actually KAM) stable. The chief technical difficulty to be overcome in successfully applying the method is that of avoiding collisions between the masses. Unlike the action in problems with strong-force potentials, the action with the Newtonian potential admits finite-action solutions with collision. One knows very little about minimizers with collision. In particular they need not be regularized in any of the various senses. The proposer will focus on the collisions. If an action minimizing sequence tends to a curve with collisions, under what circumstance are those collisions Levi-Civita regularized? Are there blow-up techniques which will enable us to better understand such sequences tending toward collision? These are some of the questions we will consider. The three-body problem is the problem of understanding the long term behaviour of three masses (planets, stars, satellites) attracting each other according to Newton s laws of physics. It is one of the oldest problems in mathematics,dating back to Newton. About 100 years ago the French mathematician Poincare made fundamental progress. He showed that chaos exists in the three-body problem, in contrast to the the two-body problem, where the motions are very regular (and well-approximated by that of the earth around the sun). He also pointed out the central importance of periodic orbits to the problem. Periodic orbits are motions of the masses which repeat the same pattern indefinitely like a point going around a circle. We propose to find new periodic solutions to the three-body problem and the N-body (N is four, five, six,...) problem by using a combination of methods. The methods themselves are not new, but their combination is. This approach has already proved successful in one instance -- by yielding a new solution in which three equal masses chase each around a figure eight curve, never catching each other. Our work could lead to further significant advances in the understanding of the N-body problem. The techniques may prove to be useful in other dynamical situations. There is some possibility that our orbits might be found to exist somewhere in the universe, or used in space missions someday doc2598 none Giovanetti This project is designed to integrate important contributions to the ongoing research at Jefferson Lab with an educational experience for promising undergraduate students. A team of undergraduate students and one full time faculty member, Dr. Kevin Giovanetti, will carry out this work both at Jefferson Lab and in the James Madison University detector development laboratory. One of our goals is to extend the operational capabilities and to improve the CLAS detector for performance at the higher anticipated beam energies of CEBAF. Several types of calorimeters have been proposed as possible new components for CLAS. Their design, performance and geometry need to be assessed. The JMU group is studying these issues and will develop readout mechanisms and methods for calibrating the proposed calorimeters. The CLAS detector has been operational since December and has been making important contributions to many outstanding questions in Nuclear and Particle physics. The central physics interest for the JMU group is the three-quark system and a program to enhance our fundamental understanding of this structure is now underway. The proton and the neutron are the best known of the particles that are described as a bound state of three valence quarks. The JMU group will support this exploration and plans to continue to perform shift work and to provide an acceptable level of general service toward the overall CLAS effort for the duration of this proposal. This is important. It helps maintain a high level of productivity for the CLAS detector. In addition to the CLAS project, a small portion of the requested funds will support a contribution to a new effort. The JMU research group plans to build a calibration and monitoring system for a newly approved mu+ Lifetime experiment at PSI and to participate in data-taking and initial beam tests. The work overlaps the ongoing detector development at JMU. The measurement is of fundamental importance because it can be used to determine the strength of a fundamental interaction, the weak coupling constant GF doc2599 none Proposal: PI: Greg Kuperberg The purpose of the project is to study the properties and applications of quantum groups, the Yang-Baxter equation, graph homology, and similar constructions in algebra with geometric formalism. In particular the role of these constructions will be considered in two areas: In 3-dimensional topology, they arise in the guise of of perturbative and non-perturbative invariants of Chern-Simons field theory. There is a good chance that such invariants are related to the Thurston Geometrization Program, at least for hyperbolic manifolds. In quantum computation, the same non-perturbative Chern-Simons field theory produces an interesting method for fault tolerance, one which needs to be developed further. The purpose of the project is to develop and apply certain areas of algebra in which formulas have a geometric structure. Two famous examples of this are a linear algebra, in which matrices have some geometry, and Feynman diagrams, whose geometry is physically meaningful. Geometrization of algebraic formulas has been influential in enumerative combinatorics, in non-commutative algebra, and in geometric topology in the last 15 years. One of the first and most important representatives of this recent trend is the Jones polynomial, an invariant of knots. Although the Jones polynomial arose in algebra and mathematical, it and its generalization are at least as important in topology, and recently also in quantum computation. These applications of the new trend in algebra will be investigated doc2600 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Nonlinear Wave Propagation Hunter This project studies a number of problems in nonlinear wave propagation. The first problem is the reflection of weak shock waves, where there have been longstanding discrepancies between theory and experiment. There are close relationships between this problem and transonic aerodynamics. The second problem is the study of nonlinear effects on gravitational waves in the Einstein field equations of general relativity, an issue of fundamental scientific significance. The third problem is the study of nonlocal, nonlinear equations for hyperbolic surface waves in elasticity and magnetohydrodynamics. Such waves arise, for example, in surface acoustic wave devices used in signal processing. The fourth problem is the study of the interaction of high frequency vorticity waves and mean flows in incompressible fluids. This research will describe the nonlinear development of vorticity instabilities, and is relevant to the closure problem for turbulent flows. The fifth problem is the propagation of fronts in a bistable oscillatory system of reaction-diffusion equation that provides a simplified model of the collective behavior of beta-cells in the pancreas, which produce insulin. The sixth problem is the study of surfactant deposition by a spreading liquid drop. This problem has industrial applications in the use of droplets for the deposition of surface films. Waves, such as sound waves, elastic waves, and gravitational waves, are an important feature of many physical and biological systems. Large amplitude waves may behave nonlinearly, and this leads to new effects not seen in linear waves: for example, the generation of shock waves by an aircraft traveling at speeds close to or above the speed of sound. A detailed analysis of the equations that describe nonlinear waves is often very difficult. The aim of this research is an increased understanding of nonlinear waves in the context of a variety of applications that involve qualitatively interesting and poorly understood phenomena, and that are related to problems of current scientific and technological interest doc2601 none for NSF proposal Low Dimensional Manifolds and Computation This project concerns problems in low-dimensional topology and geometry, with an emphasis on computational aspects. Manifolds in two and three dimensions provide the geometric models for many physical phenomena. Computational issues are playing an increasing role in mathematical investigations in these areas. Research in low-dimensional manifolds in turn is making contributions to computational geometry and topology. It also impacts computational complexity theory, which studies questions such as how long it takes a computer to solve a problem. Techniques of computational topology have already led to improvements in algorithms in computer graphics, visualization, medical and molecular modeling and image recognition. Several problems on the theme of computational topology will be investigated in this project. The computational complexity of many important problems in topology and geometry is unknown, even when explicit algorithms exist. Recent results have revealed intriguing connections between complexity theory, minimal surface theory, normal surface theory and isoperimetric problems. The project will pursue research in this direction, examining the complexity of Knot Recognition, Knot Genus, Homology Genus and related topological problems. The project also includes plans to investigate the generalized theory of normal surfaces. Normal surfaces are particularly simple surfaces relative to a fixed triangulation of a 3-manifold. They are the analogs of minimal surfaces in the PL Category. The collection of such surfaces is discrete and well suited to computation, leading to applications in classification, complexity, enumeration and algorithmic recognition. Index-one, or almost normal surfaces, were applied with spectacular success in recent work on manifold recognition. A third focus of the project concerns multi-region isoperimetric problems, which ask what are the shortest boundaries enclosing multiple regions of a given size. The goal is to give a mathematical proof that the configurations assumed by soap bubbles are optimal. Questions such as finding the shortest curve enclosing three given areas in the plane remain open. Also missing is an understanding of general properties of stable soap-bubble-like configurations, such as whether the minimizing configurations always have connected regions. Finally, the project examines questions of curve and surface evolution, using ideas based on normal surfaces. Such evolution methods have the potential for practical applications in many areas, similar to the many applications of mean curvature evolution doc2602 none Lowell E. Jones Let G be an arbitrary discrete group. Jones and Farrell have conjectured ( Isomorphism Conjectures ) that the surgery L-groups of G, L(G), and the algebraic K-groups of the integral group ring Z(G), K(Z(G)), should be computable in a simple way from the collections of all the groups L(H), K(Z(H)) where H is any cyclic by finite subgroup of G. The truth of these conjecutures would imply rigidity results for aspherical manifolds ( Borel Conjecture ) and also would yield much information about the spaces of homeomorphisms and diffeomorphisms of aspherical manifolds. Jones,in collaboration with Farrell, is trying to verify the isomorphism conjectures for any group G which acts properly discontinuously via isometries on a complete Riemannian manifold having non-positive curvature. Modern day geometers and topologists are concerned with spaces and what they look like. The surface of a donut, the sphere and the plane are examples of 2-dimensional spaces which are all different from one another from both the perspective of geometry and topology. One way that topologists study spaces (not just of dimension 2 but of higher dimension also) is to associate to each space some algebraic gadgets. It is conjectured that for many interesting spaces these algebraic gadgets act like a genetic code for the space, in that they tell us most everything we want to know about the space. Thus there are two fundamental problems here: to verify this genetic code conjecture ; and to decifer the genetic code for the spaces which are of interest to geometers and topologists doc2603 none This project will further our understanding of a broad class of materials of considerable interest and importance to a wide range of scientific disciplines including quantum fluids and materials physics. The main goal is to develop new acoustic techniques based on the discovery of the Acoustic Faraday Effect, a discovery made last year of an effect strictly analogous to the important magneto-optic effect discovered by Michael Faraday in . The proposed research will improve the spectroscopy of order parameter modes in superfluid 3He by several orders of magnitude using the techniques based on these acoustic principles. These experiments will give new and important information on the nature of the superfluid itself as well as on the pairing mechanisms that give rise to it. New collective modes of the superfluid will be sought which have been predicted theoretically and which can be identified from the new experimental methods. A second goal of the proposed work is to study impurity scattering effects which can suppress superfluidity in 3He. This will give important insight into the unusual superfluid behavior in 3He and suggest how to control the superfluid suppression. New phases and unusual properties have recently been discovered but which are not consistent with present theoretical understanding. To pave the way for better use of superconductivity as well as superfluidity it is very important to gain this understanding in 3He using impurities introduced into 3He in a controlled manner by means of very porous silica aerogel. Undergraduate students, graduate students, and some high school projects will be part of this research. Two local high school students are planning to prepare projects for the national Intel competition based on their experience in this low temperature laboratory. The integration of supervision from faculty, postdoctoral associates, and graduate students with these projects is a unique and mutually beneficial experience. %%% The proposed research will develop understanding of an important class of materials holding significant promise for applications to our society and for basic scientific knowledge. They are called unconventional quantum systems. This class includes superconducting materials for which their successful application requires development of new measurement tools. The main goal of the project is to develop a new acoustic spectroscopy using techniques similar to optical techniques that have been so important in the past 50 years in the semiconductor-materials field. The proposed research will improve the spectroscopy of order parameter collective modes in superfluid 3He by several orders of magnitude using the new acoustic principles. The experiments will reveal the nature of the superfluid and the physical mechanisms responsible for it. Since this material is an excellent representative of all materials in this important class it can be expected that there will be broad impact on their applications resulting from the proposed work. A second goal is to determine the sensitivity to impurities of the superconducting and superfluid behaviors. The results will pave the way for better use of superconductivity. Undergraduate students, graduate students, and some high school projects will be part of this research. Two local high school students are planning to prepare projects for the national Intel competition based on their experience in the university laboratory. The integration of research activity from faculty, postdoctoral associates, and graduate students with these high school projects will be a unique and mutually beneficial experience doc2604 none Proposal: PI: Jerzy Dydak The principal investigator plans to work on a general theory of dimension called the extension dimension. In this theory, dim(X) is not a natural number. Instead, dim(X) is a CW complex and dim(X) being at most K means that K is an absolute extensor of X. In particular, dim(X) being at most the n-sphere is equivalent to the covering dimension of X being at most n. dim(X)=K means that K is minimal with respect to all L such that dim(X) is at most L. It turns out that infinite symmetric products play a crucial role in the whole theory. Their properties lead to a natural algebra with self-duality. That self-duality is an algebraic manifestation of the geometric duality between compact spaces and CW complexes. All infinite symmetric products equivalent to compact or finite-dimensional CW complexes are classified. In classical dimension theory one tries to attach a natural number n (or infinity) to every space. It turns out that the natural number n is simply a substitute for the n-sphere and saying that dim(X) is at most n reflects a certain relationship between the space X and the n-sphere. One can generalize the notion of dimension by considering the same relationship between the space X and a polyhedron K and that is stated as dimension of X is at most K . For example, one can investigate if the dimension of X is at most the projective plane. It turns out that the dimension theory constructed that way is much closely connected to the mainstream of topology. In particular, one gets links to homological algebra and algebraic topology. One of the most interesting aspects of that theory is duality, a fundamental idea in the whole of mathematics. At the simplest level it means that not only are we trying to attach dimension (a polyhedron) to a space, but also we attach a space to a dimension doc2605 none Entanglement of quantum states has emerged as an important theme in physics. The current proposal focusses on ways to quantify, control and measure entanglement using the Schmidt decomposition doc2606 none This project aims to develop theoretical ideas in mathematical statistics and probability that will be of genuine use to scientific practitioners. The current proposal concerns five major projects: a detailed look at Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, in particular the eigenvalue theory that determines rates of convergence; the application of MCMC theory to truncated data; inferential theory for scatterplot smoothers, including the relative efficiencies of competing criteria adaptively selecting the window width of the smoother, and also the cost of adaptation on the accuracy of the smoother; random matrix theory and its connection with the zeros of Riemann s zeta function; and finally conversion curve methods for improving the accuracy of bootstrap confidence intervals. The connecting theme for the five projects is the combination of mathematical theory with computer-intensive algorithms doc2607 none Whisnant The focus of the South Carolina Intermediate Energy Group is the study of nucleon and meson interactions using unpolarized and polarized photon beams. Our experimental photonuclear physics program is conducted at the Laser Electron Gamma Source (LEGS) located at Brookhaven National Laboratory and with the Large Acceptance Spectrometer (CLAS) at the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) located at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab). The proposed activities significantly impact three overlapping areas: the spin structure of the nucleon, the study of the nucleon-nucleon interaction, and meson production. Central to these investigations is the Strongly Polarized Hydrogen deuteride ICE (SPHICE) target. This novel polarized HD target permits measurement of asymmetries and, for the first time, absolute cross sections on the polarized proton, neutron, and deuteron. With SPHICE at LEGS, and at JLab (E94-117), a direct determination of the forward spin-polarizability and the Gerasimov-Drell-Hearn sum rule integrals for both the proton and neutron will be made. The photodisintegration of vector and tensor polarized deuterium at LEGS with linearly and circularly polarized photons will examine the nucleon-nucleon interaction in the region of the delta resonance in unprecedented detail. Our meson production program investigates the photon-nucleon and meson-nucleon interactions. From LEGS data we will be able to make the first model-independent determination of the pionphotoproduction multipoles. At JLab, phi meson production in the threshold region will be performed with unpolarized and linearly polarized (E98-109) photons. The photoproduction of vector mesons will be used to measure the mass of vector mesons embedded in nuclear matter by observing their dilepton decay (E94-002 doc2608 none Cline This research program exploits the most powerful heavy-ion accelerator facilities available to probe the structure of nuclei. Coulomb excitation is used to study the dominant collective modes of motion in nuclei and double-photon decay. Heavy-ion induced transfer is used to probe single-particle and pairing degrees of freedom as well as to populate neutron-rich nuclei. Fission-fragment spectroscopy is used to populate highly neutron-rich nuclei. The research is centered primarily on the DOE-supported Gammasphere facility; the world s premier 4-pi (full angular coverage) gamma-ray array facility for nuclear structure research. The Rochester 4-pi heavy-ion detector, CHICO (Compact Heavy Ion Counter), significantly expands the research capabilities of Gammasphere making it an important component of this national facility. The combination of CHICO and Gammasphere makes it viable to utilize coincidences of high-fold gamma-rays to provide an enormous advance in selectivity and sensitivity. The development of CHICO, contributions to Gammasphere and the techniques of Coulomb excitation, heavy-ion induced transfer, and fission, are the culmination of many years of effort at Rochester. They open exciting new research opportunities for making significant scientific advances in nuclear structure physics. In addition, the Yale-Rochester 4-pi gamma-ray array, YRAST, which is coupled to the Yale 20MV tandem accelerator, is a powerful facility that is used to complement the research program at the oversubscribed Gammasphere facility doc2609 none Thin films synthesized by electron-beam evaporation will be used to explore and exploit the remarkable optical switching properties of certain recently-discovered metal-hydride thin films, whereby some thin films (e.g., yttrium) can quickly and reversibly transform from a metallic mirror to a transparent insulator, by inducing a relatively small change in the hydrogen content of the thin film. The objectives of this project include: 1) to gain an understanding of the mechanism responsible for the optical switching (electron correlation, interstitial site occupancy, and other mechanisms have been proposed); 2) to achieve an improvement in switching times; 3) to understand the stability and strain effects in the films; and 4) to provide a demonstration of pixel switching in an array of micro-mirrors. Control of hydrogen content using gas pressure, electrochemical charge-transfer, and a novel electrotransport technique will be explored. Switching speed and the diffusivity of hydrogen will be explored by investigating specific thin film alloys, substrate-film strain effects, and overlayer thickness and composition. The first arrays of micro-mirrors with driving electrodes will be patterned by photo-lithographic techniques. Various characterizational and analytical techniques, including the new capabilities offered by nuclear magnetic resonance force microscopy, as well as conventional Hall effect, x-ray diffraction, and atomic force microscopy, will be employed to delineate systematics in diffusion coefficients, transport properties, optical transmission, and surface and film morphology. Students and post doctoral research associates will participate in this research. %%% This work will explore and exploit the remarkable properties of certain thin films. These films (typically, these would be metallic coatings on windows and mirrors, or would make up the small dots ( pixels ) on video displays) can be made to quickly switch from being a mirror to being transparent. This on-off mirror behavior is controlled by changing the amount of hydrogen that the film is allowed to contain. Such materials have immediate potential for applications, from smart windows and other energy-saving large-scale products, to switchable micro-mirrors for flat-panel displays. This project represents a multifaceted program to optimize and develop such materials. Objectives include: 1) understanding why the optical switching occurs; 2) making the switching times faster, in order to make the materials useful for video devices; 3) understanding the structure of the films; and 4) demonstrating pixel switching in an array of micro-mirrors. The work will study the ways that the hydrogen content can be changed; in particular, a new technique whereby the hydrogen is swept along with an electrical current will be examined. The structure of the films and variations in the speed of hydrogen motion in the material will be investigated. The first arrays of micro-mirrors with driving electrodes will be patterned to demonstrate the utility of these switchable optical materials for video displays. This research will be conducted with the assistance of graduate and undergraduate students as well as postdoctoral research associates. They will thereby receive training in one of the current forefront areas of condensed matter physics and materials science. This will facilitate their entry into the scientific technological workforce during the coming decades of this century doc2610 none Kawski This project builds on the formalism of chronological algebras to study the geometric foundations of nonlinear control systems. Geometrically, the chronological product encodes the interaction of the components of controlled nonlinear dynamics. Algebraically it is the fundamental structure that underlies effective series expansion and formal solution algorithms. Areas of special focus are interconnections of systems, and systems that exhibit full nonlinear dependence on the control. In either case, specific objectives are to develop normal forms and to find effective series (or product) representations (using tools from algebraic combinatorics). Possible applications include algorithms for path planning, feedback stabilization, optimal control and even numerical integration. A complementary second thread develops interactive visualization tools for research (simulation and experimentation) and for communication. This research is motivated and driven by the desire to understand the fundamental, common principles that govern the interactions of dynamical systems on any scale, from molecular levels to astronomical dimensions. The diversity of possible outcomes is a consequence of nonlinear effects that permeate our environment: When combining two subsystems, the result is generally different from just the sum of the parts. This research focuses on further developing the algebra which captures such nonlinear interaction, where the effect of a+b is more than just the sum of the effects of a and b. The chronological algebra provides the formal language to model such interactions where even the order in which pieces are put together matters, where a b is generally different from b a. The control perspective is distinguished from the basic study of dynamical systems as it aims beyond just descriptive understanding: The objective of control theory is to exploit the subtle nature of the interactions in order to shape complex systems -- often via only minute interference with how the parts interact. While this mathematical research applies to virtually any kind of dynamical system, including even social, medical and financial environments, this project will focus on mechanical systems (like large satellites with several moving parts) in efforts to demonstrate the general principles. An important component of this project is the development of interactive visualization tools. These are used for research, and for communicating the geometry of the nonlinear interactions, to demonstrate how the profound understanding of the fundamental mathematical structures leads to effective means of controlling complex systems. This visualization effort also provides a rich environment for undergraduate students to connect with advanced theoretical research. It may prove to be an effective means to expand the pipeline bringing new talents into mathematical research doc2611 none Jon Pitts Huai-Dong Cao This award provides partial support for graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, junior faculty, and persons from under-represented groups to attend the semi-annual Texas Geometry and Topology Conference. The conference is designed to enhance the research and educational atmosphere of the community of geometers and topologists in Texas and the surrounding states. The conference has three specific goals. First the conference is committed to bring researchers of national and international stature to the area to discuss their research and to interact with mathematicians from this geographic region. Second the conference makes it possible for the community of geometers and topologists from Texas and surrounding states (a huge geographic region) to meet and share mathematics on a regular basis, which both stimulates individual research and generates productive cooperative efforts between schools. Third the conference is committed to the strengthening and enrichment of the mathematics personnel base. There will be six conferences over three years, hosted by major universities in Texas: - : Rice University (fall), Texas Christian University (spring) - : University of Texas (fall), Texas Tech University (spring) - : Texas A&M University (fall), University of Houston (spring) In addition, two universities (University of Texas at Arlington, University of Texas at Dallas) will assist in the conference at Texas Christian University. The Texas Geometry and Topology Conference has been held spring and fall since its founding in , a total of 23 times to date. The roster of mathematicians who have participated in the conference includes many of the most influential geometers and topologists in the world. Each conference specifically tailors its program to reflect recent developments in important areas of geometry and topology. Information about upcoming conferences as well as the mission and history of the conference is always available at http: www.math.tamu.edu research workshops TGTC index.html doc2612 none Mathematical Sciences: Research on Hyperbolic Problems Jin This research project is concerned with design and analysis of numerical methods for hyperbolic systems arising from fluid dynamics, chemically reacting flows, and rarefied gas dynamics. Work will be done on three main projects: study of hyperbolic systems with supercharacteristic relaxations, development of random projection methods for reacting flows, and study of the relaxed Burnett equations for rarefied gas dynamics. These projects will significantly enhance understanding of a variety of important physical systems and will provide effective numerical methods for their simulation. With the development of modern computers, high performance scientific computation has been playing a central role in scientific investigation. The physical and industrial problems under study here concern the behavior of flowing liquids and gasses and are not amenable to solution by traditional methods. Nevertheless, numerical computation is an effective tool to obtain very good approximations to the solutions of these problems. This project will advance the ability to utilize high performance computers to solve these and other problems of importance doc2613 none Rosenthal Mathematically, convolutional codes can be viewed as linear systems over a finite field. The study of these codes requires a good understanding of the algebraic representation of linear systems. The proposed project therefore addresses a number of issues in mathematical systems theory and in coding theory. The main objectives of the proposal are: 1. New methods for constructing convolutional codes with a large free distance and a relatively small degree. 2. New techniques to tackle the decoding problem of convolutional codes in an algebraic manner. 3. An investigation of the class of low density parity check convolutional codes which constitutes a natural generalization of the class of low density parity check codes. For this project it is the ultimate goal to algebraically construct low density parity check convolutional codes whose encoding and decoding complexity is `near linear and whose performance is `near capacity . Convolutional codes are used in the data transmission of many communication systems. Applications range from airborne satellite transmission systems to terrestrial telephone lines. Most pictures transmitted from deep space involve in one way or another some encoding with a convolutional code. It is the goal of the proposed research to construct new powerful convolutional codes which can be efficiently encoded and decoded. Having such new codes would have several benefits. First and for all it would allow the construction of smaller and more energy efficient transmission devices which are still capable of doing reliable data communication. The research project will necessitate a mathematical investigation into the algebraic structure of convolutional codes. As it was outlined in the proposal this mathematical research could also lead to a new cryptographic protocol doc2614 none Petratos This is a proposal to investigate the internal structure and dynamics of the neutron and of the lightest nuclei in nature, deuterium and helium. The investigation will be based on experimental studies of high energy electrons scattering off hydrogen and helium isotopes. The proposed research will use the electron beam of the Jefferson Lab accelerator to bombard cryogenic deuterium and helium targets and to study the nuclear reaction products with superconducting magnetic spectrometers. The results are expected to provide fundamental information on the distributions of the three quark constituents of the neutron, the wave functions of deuterium and helium and the interaction of the proton and neutron constituents of the two light nuclei doc2615 none The proposed research falls into the following broad areas of stochastic analysis: stochastic dynamical systems on manifold, the geometry of stochastic flows and Hormander type second order differential operators, analysis on path spaces, and the interplay between the dynamical behavior of stochastic dynamical systems and the geometry and topology of the underlying spaces. The investigator shall concentrate on (1) L^2 theory for differential forms on path and loop spaces; (2) linear connections associated to Hormander type second order elliptic operators; (3) stochastic flows and in particular stochastic differential equations associated to Hamiltonian systems. The study of lattice models with spin variable in a manifold is also included, as is the study of bounded and L^2 harmonic forms on finite dimensional manifolds. The investigator will study these problems using techniques from stochastic differential equations. This work would lead to a better understanding of random perturbation of dynamical systems and geometric analysis of infinite dimensional spaces. The proposed project concentrates in the areas of stochastic dynamical systems and analysis on path spaces. Path spaces are the spaces of trajectories of particles or other physical objects. Methods from stochastic analysis, especially the techniques arising from the study of stochastic differential equations, shall be employed. Stochastic differential equations are themselves very important objects to study as they arise naturally from physics, engineering, biology, and finance, to model the influence of white noise. The study of such equations on a variety of geometric objects such as spheres in connection with the curvature of such spaces arises naturally from the mathematics and also in applications, for example in the computation of recovering data by filtering out the white noise in the transmission doc2616 none SINGULAR CONTROL OF DIFFUSION PROCESSES AND ITS APPLICATIONS TO THE MODELS OF ECONOMIC DYNAMICS The proposed research lies within the area of optimal stochastic control. It deals with optimal control of diffusion processes by means of singular with respect to time functionals. This type of control naturally appears in the problems in which there is no natural restriction on the rates of control and as a result the optimal control rate is infinite. The optimal policy in these types of problems is to reflect the process from an a priori unknown boundary. Such type of action also arises in problems with additive control, as an approximation for a bang-bang optimal policy. The proposed research consists of developing the theory of the related Partial Differential Equations with gradient constraints, studying optimal reflecting barriers and optimal policies in one dimensional and multidimensional cases. Applications include stochastic control models of flexible manufacturing systems as well as dividend optimization and multidimensional portfolio optimization models. It is also intended to consider application of the singular stochastic control theory to optimization problems in insurance. We will also study stochastic control models of large economies and analysis of the relationship between the general framework of the no arbitrage asset pricing in mathematical finance and the equilibrium paths in those models. In addition to developing new stochastic control and stochastic processes theory, the applications of this research would include devising better models for optimization of the manufacturing processes and outputs. In addition our research would also result in developing new optimization models in mathematical finance and insurance. While perceived by many nonspecialists as a tool for making a fast profit, mathematical finance in fact is a technology for risk reduction. In this regard its merge with insurance is only too natural. The issues of controlling the risk as well as insurance aspects of the financial risk has loomed large recently in both financial markets as well as in the insurance industry. The importance of optimization in devise of the policies employed by insurance and financial institutions is hard to overestimate. Exposure to unnecessary economic and financial risks and failure to employ the optimal procedures may have serious economic and social impacts. Our research deals with development of mathematical models of optimal risk control techniques for financial and insurance corporations. This will also enable one to get a better insight into the nature of the optimal risk reduction techniques a publicly traded financial corporation should adhere to, as well as the optimal dividend distribution policy it should follow doc2617 none Vlahovid In many research facilities such as JLAB, LEGS, GRAAL, DESY, SAL, MAMI, and INS, which have scheduled experiments with polarized photon beam, there is a need for accurate polarization measurements in short time periods. Unfortunately at present, no adequate method is available at the higher energies characteristic of such facilities. At energies above ~ 600 MeV all known method have small analyzing power, and significant amount of time is required for polarization measurements. At the lower energies the pair production method off nuclei is known to be the most promising. However, because the opening angle between the electron-positron pair decreases as the energy of the photon increases, this method has not been applied to higher energies. We propose to improve the pair production method at lower energies, and to extend it to higher energies, by taking advantage of new development in microstrip detectors technologies. The proposed polarimeter will have an analyzing power of the ~ 1.7 for a broad energy range, from few MeV up to several GeV. The proposed polarimeter is simple in construction and its costs will be lower than for polarimeters built on any of the other available methods doc2618 none The potential utility of arrays of magnetic nanoparticles as dense magnetic storage media as well as their integration in semiconducting and metallic spintronic devices is the basis for the proposed work. The effort concentrates on the production and characterization of magnetic particles either individually or arranged in small groups, or large arrays. Micro-metal-organic vapor deposition using scanning tunneling microscopy (STM-MOCVD) and high-resolution e-beam lithography will be used to fabricate these systems on III-V semiconductor heterostructures. Fe, Co, and Ni particles, with diameters as low as 10 nm will be fabricated. Their magnetic behavior will be probed indirectly by sensing the magnetic fields of the particles through Hall crosses fabricated from the semiconductor heterostructures. Measurements in a gradiometer configuration will be extended beyond their present limitations to arrays and low temperature to single particles and to room temperature. Moreover, complementary direct observations at room temperature will be made using a magnetic force microscope (MFM) with variable field capability. Interparticle interactions will be investigated experimentally as well as by numerical simulations. The combination of magnetic and electronic measurements on well-characterized structures will be used to formulate a physical picture of magnetic dynamics within reduced length scales and the influence of such magnetic structures on semiconductor electronics will be explored. %%% Modern technology relies heavily on micro-fabrication and specifically on microelectronics. The goal of the proposed work is to fabricate regularly arranged magnetic particles of the size of nanometers (nm); (the diameter of an atom is about 0.3 nm) onto semiconductor structures and to study their magnetic properties as well as their influence on the electrical conductivity of the semiconductor. Such integration of magnetic and electronic properties is believed to lead to the next generation of microelectronic, so-called spintronic , devices. In the proposed work magnetic particles, either individually or arranged in small groups, or in large arrays will be fabricated and studied. The experimental techniques that have been used in such investigations have so far been limited to arrays and to very low temperatures. One of the goals of the present research is to go beyond these limits and extend the studies to single particles and to room temperature. The combination of magnetic and electronic measurements on well-characterized structures will be used to formulate a physical picture of magnetic dynamics within reduced length scales and the influence of such magnetic structures on semiconductor electronics. Undergraduate and graduate students, as well as post doctoral research associates will participate in this research. They will thereby acquire skills and knowledge in a forefront area of condensed matter physics and materials science. These will enable them to be productive members of the scientific technological workforce for the next few decades of this century doc2619 none Award: Principal Investigator: John M. Lee The Pacific Northwest Geometry Seminar for to provides opportunities for communication between researchers and dissemination of results and problems in areas such as differential geometry, algebraic geometry, mathematical physics, topology, partial differential equations, complex analysis, and geometric representation theory. Universities based in the northwestern United States and British Columbia sponsor these biannual conferences, and local participants are augmented by speakers from outside the region. Modern geometry involves techniques and ideas drawn from all of mathematics and much of physics. Notions distinctive to the field include curvature, which deduces from measurements of length and angle the extent to which a geometric space differs from the simplest, flattest models; symplectic structures, which are the geometric underpinnings for the Hamiltonian formulation of mechanics, and our understanding of their geometry has been opened up dramatically by ideas borrowed from physics and complex analysis; and symmetry, since spaces with large groups of symmetries often give our best access to algebraic aspects of those symmetry groups, and since geometry and analysis at the space level can yield linear representations of a group or explain properties of these representations doc2620 none Dr Holroyd is working on several natural extensions of the percolation model in mathematical probability. These are: entanglement, rigidity, random surfaces, and percolation on transitive graphs. In the areas of entanglement and rigidity, Holroyd s previous work provided the first rigorous mathematical treatment of the subjects, and Holroyd is now pursuing some of the remaining unsolved problems. For entanglement, Holroyd hopes to answer questions about the sizes of finite entangled graphs, the effect of boundary conditions, and the value of the critical probability. For rigidity, Holroyd is investigating the effect of boundary conditions, and the continuity of the percolation probability. Also, Holroyd is investigating the appearance of random surfaces in the so-called plaquette percolation model (which has mathematical connections with entanglement). Holroyd hopes to answer questions about the values of the critical probabilities for the appearance of infinite surfaces, and about the geometry of such surfaces. Finally, Holroyd is studying the percolation model on general graphs, such as transitive graphs. There has been much recent progress in this field, but many fundamental questions remain unanswered. Holroyd is focusing on proving strict inequalities between critical probabilities for different graphs, and between the critical points for uniqueness and for percolation. Percolation is a branch of probability theory concerned with the large-scale properties of infinite collections of independent random objects. The original motivation for the subject was the study of fluid flow in porous materials, but the mathematical models which arise have many other applications, for example in material science, statistical physics, biology and epidemiology. The models are relatively simple to describe, yet lead to challenging mathematical problems. Percolation is a well-developed and active area of mathematical research, boasting hundreds of papers and several books, yet several of the most fundamental questions remain unanswered. Holroyd s work focuses on several relatively new extensions of percolation. Two of these, entanglement and rigidity, have particularly close connections with physical applications in the science of materials, and have been studied previously by physicists. Some of Holroyd s earlier work provided the first mathematical treatment of these two subjects, and Holroyd is now pursuing some of the remaining unsolved problems in these and other areas doc2621 none This project covers a variety of methodological developments and foundational research. In particular, the object of this research is to develop some new nonparametric model building and identication procedures for high-dimensional nonlinear time series data. The investiga- tor studies both the varying-coefficient regression models and nonlinear additive regression models for nonlinear time series data and makes the models practically applicable. The first objectiveis to develop nonparametric estimation procedures for nonlinear time series. In particular, for varying-coefficient regression models, local polynomial regression techniques are used to estimate the coefficient functions and the asymptotic properties of the resulting estimators are studied. This procedure differs from the classical local linear regression for curve fitting where the response surface is of interest. Here, of interest is to estimate the coefficient functions. For nonlinear additive regression models, the investigator uses partial residual method to estimate unknown additive functions coupled with projection method and local polynomial fitting. The approach is divided into two steps. In the first step, the initial estimated values for all components are obtained by using the projection method. In the second step, a local polynomial technique is employed to estimate any one of compo- nents by using the initial estimated values of the rest of components. The second objective of this research is concerned with the model identification. For both models, a new goodness- of-fit test technique is proposed, based on the comparison of the residual sum of squares under the null and alternative models, to detect whether certain coefficient functions in the varying-coefficient models are constant or whether certain components in the additive mod- els are linear or whether any covariates are significant in the models. The null distribution of the test is estimated by a nonparametric bootstrap method. Also, the investigator studies the practical implementation of the methods, particularly the automatic bandwidth selection method based on a modified generalized cross-validation. A nonparametric version of Akaike information criterion is proposed for choosing the smoothing variable in varying-coefficient models and determining an appropriate model for given data. This research is concerned with model estimation and identification procedures in non- linear time series analysis. A time series is a set of data observed over a period of time. For example, daily ozone and pollutant levels from environmental study, quarterly earnings for a company or daily currency exchange rate from economical study, wild animals popula- tion observed over years from ecological study, number of in uenza cases observed over time from epidemiology, and noisy telecommunication signals. The investigator has been active in this research area. Furthermore, the investigator has conducted preliminary work on the described problem area which has led to encouraging results. There are sufficient reasons to believe that by pursuing the topics outlined in this proposal, the results of this research should have significant contributions in nonlinear time series analysis, which has many impor- tant applications in the fields of economics, social science, medicine, epidemiology, biology, environment, physical sciences, engineering, and many others doc2622 none Margaziotis In the proposed work we will study the fundamental structure of the nucleus of the atom and the nature of the constituent parts of the nucleus, the neutrons and protons. Measurements will be made using the very precise, intense, and energetic electron beam produced by the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. Most of the experiments will study atoms whose nucleus has no more than two protons and two neutrons. When electrons are used to probe such relatively simple systems one can compare the results to very accurate theoretical predictions. Experiments will be performed on helium nuclei to investigate the structure of these systems under extreme conditions including those in which the protons and neutrons are very close to each other. Other experiments will bombard the hydrogen nucleus, which consists of a single proton, to study particular features of the proton structure. One experiment will study the structure of a the complex lead nucleus. In support of these measurements we will continue our work in developing and building the target devices used to contain the materials that are being bombarded by the electron beam. This work involves building structures that can contain high pressure gases at temperatures a few degrees above absolute zero. We will also build a cooled lead target that will allow us to use the high power electron beam without melting the lead. In all these efforts we will continue to place particular emphasis on working with students, particularly undergraduate students and selected high school students and teachers. This effort is being coordinated with an outreach program that we are leading directed towards high schools in the local area that have large populations of minority students doc2623 none The focus of the research supported by this award is the mathematical analysis of certain significant material failures in solids. The goal of this endeavor is the qualitative prediction of the formation and growth of voids. Toward this end the principal investigator will continue his studies of the relevant nonlinear partial differential equations, which constitute the mathematical model, in order to determine conditions under which these problems have singular solutions. The underlying equations are those that arise in elasticity and viscoelasticity and the desired singularities are point discontinuities. Problems that will be considered include: the existence of singular solutions to quasilinear elliptic systems; the existence of, and admissibility criteria for, singular solutions to hyperbolic systems; the existence of singular solutions to certain parabolic systems; the existence of minimizers with singularities for problems in the calculus of variations; regularity, fine properties, and the asymptotic behavior of singular minimizers; the optimal location for an isolated singularity; and, the determination of whether known singular solutions to a quasilinear elliptic system are indeed minimizers of the corresponding problem in the calculus of variations. The research area of this grant is the mathematical analysis of equations that arise in Materials Science. The most common way to determine when a material will fail under the influence of external forces is to subject a piece of the actual material to tensile loads until failure occurs, i.e., pull on it until it breaks . This is fine if one is interested only in the gross properties of the material. However, if one wants to understand the reasons for material failure then one must have recourse to mathematical models of the material. Experiments on certain rubbery polymers, called elastomers, have shown that when one pulls on an elastomer small holes appear in the material. These holes then grow in size and combine to form cracks. A similar phenomenon has been observed in optical fibers. Catastrophic failure, due to a series of holes that cascade down the core of the fiber, can occur when excessive power is applied. These holes seriously degrade the ability of the fiber to transmit information. In this grant, the principal investigator will uncover the mechanisms that cause the creation and growth of holes in polymers and glasses by examining systems of partial differential equations from the theory of elasticity and viscoelasticity doc2624 none s of reachable sets of quantum systems, will also be studied. The second part of the project stems from the fact that the extant non-linear control schemes are rarely directly applicable in singular situations such as a varying rank decoupling matrix and a change in relative degree. Tools from singularity theory, the theory of foliations, nonsmooth analysis and Lie groups will be developed to address this problem. A key feature will be the use of differential forms instead of vector fields for studying such issues. This should also have payoffs for singular exterior differential systems. Applications to techniques such as the method of intermediate integrals for partial differential equations and equations that change type will be studied from this vantage point. It is worth remarking that both components of the project call for similar mathematics. Successful completion of this project should yield benefits for several current and future technologies. For instance, the fabrication of a quantum computer calls for solutions to precisely the type of problems being studied in the project. Similarly, obtaining a snapshot of chemical reactions at the molecular level also requires the control of quantum processes. Active control of quantum phenomena would also lead to the control of chemical reactions via tuned lasers. This should enhance product specificity in chemical reactions, thereby minimizing the presence of products that are not desired. The control of quantum phenomena is still in its infancy. The project aims to move it along further by linking it concretely to traditional control theory. Conversely, the results of the project should shed light on the control of macroworld systems. This will also have benefits for traditional technologies such as robotics, consumer electronics and electrical networks, since the underlying mathematics is quite similar. From a didactic point of view, the project s contribution will be to show to undergraduates and graduate students alike that advanced mathematics is not an arid field, but is in fact a lively process with palpable connections to real life situations. This should enhance the likelihood of students, especially from under represented groups, to pursue higher education in mathematics, science and technology doc2625 none Jones This award supports research in connection with experiments at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF). The primary effort is directed at the RadPhi experiment, which measures radiative decays of the phi( ) meson to scalar states a0(980) and f0(980). The relative rates of these decay modes hold an important clue that is need to resolve a long-standing puzzle surrounding the quark-gluon structure of these states. A second line of research is directed toward the proposed Hall D facility at TJNAF, which has the potential to provide qualitative new insights into the nature of confinement in mesons. UConn will play a major role by taking freponsibility for the design of a new coherent photon source and beamline doc2626 none An experiment will be carried out at the NIST reactor cold neutron facility aimed at improving the current limits on time reversal invariance of particle interactions. The experiment is based on the beta-decay of polarized neutrons. Time reversal violation is a very important topic and of great current interest because it impacts, centrally, the question of how the universe evolved to contain a huge preponderance of matter over anti-matter. A second experiment will be carried out at Los Alamos using a cold, polarized neutron beam to study the weak interaction between neutrons and protons in the capture process leading to deuterium. This measurement will place limits on the parity violating parts of the nucleon-nucleon force. In addition, this apparatus will be used in a neutron-electron scattering experiment designed to measure the neutron charge radius. Other development work will be carried out in laser optical pumping as connected with the production of polarized neutrons and nuclei, including radioactive species. Graduate student and postdocs are integral to the proposed research activities doc2627 none Vinogradov The project concerns acquisition of enhanced instrumentation for experimental studies of polymeric systems, including bulk polymers, polymer matrix composites, thin films, foams, gels, and pastes. The set of three complementary instruments, manufactured by the TA Instruments, Inc., comprises: Dynamic Mechanical Analyzer DMA Rheometer AR N Dielectric Analyzer DEA . These instruments provide unparalleled experimental capabilities in terms of high precision measurements over a broad range of loading and temperature conditions. The instruments will enhance the ongoing fundamental research at Montana State University in the area of advanced materials. Integration of this instrumentation into course curricula will enhance student learning and will provide exciting opportunities for graduate and undergraduate research. In addition, this instrumentation will serve as a catalyst for interdisciplinary collaborative research initiatives between Montana State University, other universities, government laboratories and private sector doc2628 none Loge The objective of this research is to develop a method of assessing the penetration of selected chemical disinfectants into particles developed during water treatment using scanning confocal laser microscopy. Findings from the experimental approach will be coupled with a mathematical model to generate a set of guidelines directly applicable to the water industry for assessing the biological quality of post-disinfected waters. This research is motivated by the desire to shift the focus from evaluating the survival of selected pathogens and indicator organisms as a measure of disinfection to a particle-based standard. With this approach, the dose of the applied disinfectant would be based on the frequency and distribution of particles in suspension. All particles greater than a critical particle size (defined as the smallest particle capable of shielding an associated organism from the applied disinfectant) would be treated as being equally capable of harboring one of more targeted organisms of interest. The dose would be modified to insure a specified level of penetration of the applied disinfectant doc2629 none Proposal: PI: Robert Myers. :: Over the years a nice conjectural picture has emerged of the structure of closed 3-manifolds. It has been shaped by the geometrization and virtual bundle conjectures of Thurston and the compactification conjectures of Simon and of Marden. These imply certain consequences for covering spaces of such 3-manifolds. Closed, orientable, irreducible 3-manifolds with infinite fundamental group ought to have universal covering space homeomorphic to Euclidean 3-space. Professor Myers will continue his work on this problem by ruling out classes of possible counterexamples through an analysis of group actions on Whitehead manifolds; he will use a new result which promises to extend his work on Whitehead manifolds which contain non-trivial planes to those which do not. More generally, covering spaces with finitely generated fundamental group ought to be homeomorphic to interiors of compact 3-manifolds. He will continue his work on this problem and on the closely related problem of showing that the same conclusion holds for hyperbolic 3-manifolds with finitely generated fundamental group. Freedman has reduced the latter problem to a purely topological problem which seems accessible. Hyperbolic 3-manifolds of finite volume ought to be finitely covered by surface bundles over the circle, although very few non-trivial examples of this phenomenon are known. Myers will attempt to construct more such examples and will explore the extent to which the desired conclusion is implied by the failure of the finitely generated intersection property in the fundamental group. 3-manifolds with cubings of negative curvature ought to be hyperbolic; Myers will investigate a method for trying to build hyperbolic structures, trying to determine both its scope and limitations. Finally, he will attempt to construct small knots in non-Haken 3-manifolds. Manifolds are spaces which generalize the familiar curves and surfaces that live in ordinary 3-dimensional space. An n-manifold locally looks like n-dimensional space; thus a curve is a 1-manifold, and a surface is a 2-manifold. 3-manifolds are difficult to visualize but can be described mathematically. Such spaces arise as models of the universe in general relativity; in this role they come equipped with geometries, i.e. ways of measuring distances, angles, and curvature. Conjectures of Thurston, Simon, and Marden suggest that the members of a large class of 3-manifolds have particularly nice geometries and can be constructed from the members of a small set of standard 3-manifolds by identifying their points in certain ways. Professor Myers will attempt to verify various important special cases of this conjectural picture doc2630 none This project is focused on the production of the Moss Flora of Central America, which will comprise taxonomic and revisionary treatments of 19 families, 70 genera, and 210 species native to the entire Central American region. Publication in hardcopy and electronic versions will be in Spanish and English, and available on-line, with high-resolution line illustrations. The moss flora of Central America will involve then aming of large numbers of unnamed collections that have accumulated over the last twenty-five years. Duplicate material from these collections will be treturned to their country of origin where as a primary reference collection it will greatly enhance the ability of Latin American bryologists to name their specimens and collections. The naming of Central American mosses in a revisionary context will allow msses to be meaningfully incorporated into other interdisciplinary studies, most notably ecological studies doc2631 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Obstructions in Quantization Theory Gotay The process of constructing a quantum formulation of a system from a knowledge of a classical approximation to it is called quantization, and over the years many different quantization schemes have been developed. Unfortunately, quantization is not a straightforward proposition, as evidenced by the discovery, over fifty years ago, by Groenewold and Van Hove of an obstruction to quantization. Their no-go theorem asserts that in principle it is impossible to consistently quantize every classical observable on a Euclidean phase space, regardless of which quantization procedure is employed. Similar results hold under a wide variety of circumstances. But no-go theorems are not universal; the principal investigator and collaborators have recently constructed examples of phase spaces which admit consistent full quantizations. The goals of this project are to delineate the circumstances under which such obstructions will appear and to study the underlying mechanisms that produce them. Another problem, when an obstruction does exist, is to determine the maximal subalgebras of observables that can be consistently quantized. Solutions to these problems will be used to refine extant quantization procedures, or design new ones, to adapt to the obstruction and quantize these maximal subalgebras. From a mathematical standpoint, this research will lead to structural insights into the Poisson algebras of classical systems and their representations. Physically, this research will aid in clarifying the correspondence between classical and quantum mechanics in general, and in particular will enhance our understanding of quantizations of specific classical systems. Although the universe is quantum mechanical in nature, our perceptions of it are rooted in classical physics. Thus it is often desirable to construct a quantum formulation of a system from knowledge of a classical approximation to it. This process is called quantization, and many different quantization schemes have been developed. Unfortunately, quantization is not a straightforward proposition, as evidenced by the discovery, over fifty years ago, of an obstruction to quantization: in principle it is impossible to consistently quantize a (nonrelativistic) particle. But it is now known that no-go theorems are not universal; there are classical systems which admit consistent quantizations. The goals of this project are to delineate the circumstances under which such obstructions appear and to study the mechanisms which produce them. This research will aid in clarifying the correspondence between classical and quantum mechanics doc2632 none This US-Brazil award supports Dr. Marleigh Sheaff, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Dr. John P. Cumalat, University of Colorado, to work with Professors Joao Anjos, Ignacio Bediaga, Jussara Miranda, and Alberto Reis of Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Fisicas (CBPF) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in the field of elementary particle physics. They will work together on analysis projects, such as the FOCUS experiment (Fotoproduction of Charm in an Upgraded Spectrometer), that concern decays of charm mesons and baryons and the production of charm particles by photons on nuclear targets. This collaborative project will allow U.S. students to travel to Brazil to join an on-going collaboration, FOCUS, which is a fixed target charm-quark experiment based at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. Our counterpart agency in Brazil, CNPq, will provide support for a Brazilian student to be based at Fermilab. Through this award researchers from both the U.S. and Brazil collaborate on large-science projects of mutual interest, and younger physicists from both countries have the experience of working in an international setting early in their careers doc2633 none Lisa G. Stanley Department of Mathematics Univeristy of Montana Engineers, mathematicians and other scientists who use mathematical models to describe physical systems often need to answer the question: ``How does the system response change as system parameters change? For example, how does the airflow around an airplane wing change as the shape of the wing changes, and how does this affect drag? Sensitivity analysis seeks to answer such questions. The sensitivity provides quantitative information which can be useful as a mathematical tool to gain insight into the behavior of a system. This proposal deals with the analysis and design of computational methods for approximating sensitivities for a very specific class of problems. The research focuses on shape sensitivity calculations for interface problems. These problems arise in the analysis of a variety of physical systems such as groundwater flow through different types of sediment as well as manufacturing processes such as die casting problems and alloy solifidification problems. In die casting, for example, there is an interface between the solidifying part and the mold itself. When analyzing such a process, the mold and the part may be considered as one composite material, and in order to optimize the casting process, the designer needs to determine the sensitivity of the temperature throughout the composite material to small changes in the thickness of the respective component materials. Since the mold and the manufactured part consist of different materials which have different heat conductivity properties, the mathematical equation governing the cooling process has a solution which lacks smoothness at the interface. For these types of problems, computing the sensitivity requires a different, and more clever, approximation scheme than that which is typically used to determine the temperature. The current research attempts to analyze and exploit the mathematical structure of these problems and to modify existing numerical methods in order to develop a computational algorithm which is accurate, efficient and reasonable to implement. Estimates regarding inclusion of such techniques in the design of rocket engines show that design cycle time could be reduced from one year to one month. Results of this magnitude make the development of such computational tools critical for the national interest both in cost savings during the design stage and in remaining on the forefront of new technology. This project investigates the use of domain decomposition techniques for the development of accurate and efficient computational algorithms for shape sensitivity calculations. Specifically, the work involves the implementation of Continuous Sensitivity Equation Methods (C-SEMs) in order to derive infinite dimensional sensitivity equations which usually take the form of partial differential equations. The research focuses on elliptic interface problems containing parameters which determine the spatial location or the shape of the interface. The resulting shape sensitivities exhibit discontinuities across the interface. Efficient computational algorithms for this class of problems rely on two essential components. The first is the mathematical analysis needed to establish fundamental properties such as existence, uniqueness and regularity. The second component is the clever choice of a numerical method which is suitable for solving the equations. The theoretical analysis guides the construction of a computational method which exploits the problem structure. Specifically, an iterative, nonoverlapping domain decomposition algorithm is used to accurately capture discontinuities in the sensitivity variable doc2634 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Modeling and Optimal Design of Photonic Structures Dobson This project focuses on the investigation and development of new computational methods and analytical techniques for the modeling and optimal design of photonic crystals and related structures. The objectives of the project are to extend methods developed for two-dimensional photonic crystals to the case of three-dimensional structures, to develop methods for the optimization of defect modes in photonic band gap structures, and to model and analyze the effects of dispersive media on wave propagation in periodic structures and study associated optimal design problems. The final objective is to model truncated photonic crystals in planar geometries and develop methods to optimize the scattering and resonance properties of such structures. The structures studied in this project are periodic arrangements of optical materials, designed to exhibit useful properties with respect to electromagnetic wave propagation. Making use of such structures is a fundamental technology, expected to have a significant impact in applications including lasers, sensors, optical storage, optical communications, and high-density optical interconnects. This project aims to develop modeling and design capabilities, which will improve understanding of the properties of these structures and facilitate their incorporation into useful devices doc2635 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Patterns in Continuous Systems Knobloch This project studies bifurcations and pattern formation in systems with symmetry. Such systems arise naturally in a variety of applications. The project focuses on the dynamical consequences of weak forced symmetry-breaking perturbations, and seeks thereby to identify those aspects of equivariant dynamics that are (i) insensitive to such perturbations, and (ii) due to them. In many cases such perturbations are responsible for the creation of global bifurcations, and these in turn may introduce chaotic dynamics into the system. Applications to a number of continuum systems will be worked out, focusing on the generation of burst-like behavior in hydrodynamical systems such as convection and the Faraday instability, and the dynamics of acoustically driven shape oscillations of drops and bubbles. This project investigates how the patterns set up in various physical systems change as the parameters specifying the system vary, with emphasis on systems having various spatial and temporal symmetries. The approach can identify new types of complex behavior and the mechanisms responsible for it. Applications include, for example, the behavior of water waves in regions of different shapes. The project investigates the effects of slight changes in the shape of the region, and seeks to identify which aspects of the behavior are insensitive to such perturbations, and which are due to them. In many cases such perturbations are responsible for the introduction of chaotic dynamics into systems that would otherwise behave in a simple manner. A number of additional applications will be worked out, including burst-like behavior in hydrodynamical systems and oscillations of drops and bubbles doc2636 none Owen The focus of this project is the application of statistical ideas to high dimensional numerical problems, such as approximation and noisy or nonsmooth optimization. This work follows on earlier successes in integration. Standard Monte Carlo sampling integrates with a slowly decreasing error. Deterministic quasi-Monte Carlo sampling can achieve a much more accurate answer, but without a practical error estimate. Re-injecting some randomness allows one to estimate the error, and gave rise to a surprising further large improvement in the quality of the answer. The first problem is to use integration methods on approximation problems. One expands the function in a basis (polynomials, Fourier functions, or wavelets), and finds that the coefficients are high dimensional integrals. Estimates of these coefficients, with statistical uncertainty attached, can be used to give approximations with error estimates. It is also possible to address qualitative issues such as: effective dimension of the function, smoothness of the function, number of important inputs, and so on. The second problem is to optimize the expected value of a function over some variables in the face of randomness in some others. An example is how to design an experiment for a nonlinear model. The third problem is to predict binary functions learned from data. An example is whether to hold or exercise an American type option. Computer codes that depend on a great many inputs are becoming ubiquitous. They are used in the design of semiconductors, airplanes and automobiles, in climate models, and in financial risk management. On any given task, it can be a great challenge to extract the relevant knowledge buried within this software. It is also necessary to attach uncertainty estimates to the findings. For even a few dozen input factors, it becomes necessary to employ statistical methods, of the type being researched in this project. This project also considers functions that depend on one million or more input factors. Advances in computer power will bring more attention to such functions, and new methods, such as those investigated in this project, will be required doc2637 none Piatetski-Shapiro The basic question described in the proposal is the problem of Langlands lifting. The definition of Langlands lifting can be done the following way. First one can define the local lifting. For an archimedean place one can define Langlands lifting in the following way. By Langlands theorem any irreducible admissible representation of a classical group one can attach a homomorphism of the Weil group to the L-group of this classical group. After that, for any classical group there is a natural embedding to the L-group of a general linear group. In this way one can attach a representation of the Weil group over a archimedean field a representation of the general linear group over that field. Similarly one can attach to any unramified representation of a classical group over a non-archimedean field we attach a semisimple conjugacy class of the L-group of the given classical group. The image of this conjugacy class in the corresponding general linear group L-group determines an unramified representation of the general linear group over the non-archimedean field. In this way to an automorphic representation of the classical group one can attach a collection of local representations of the general linear group defined at all archimedean places and at all unramified places. It is a well know statement that if a cuspidal automorphic representation of the general linear group exists with this data then it is unique. So the proposal is devoted to the study of Langlands lifting. Langlands lifting is a part of Langlands philosophy. I was asked by the program director for algebra and number theory to explain what the Langlands program is. I have thought about this a lot of time and I can say the following. Langlands philosophy gives a connection between automorphic forms and Dirichlet series. The most important example of a Dirichlet series is the famous Riemann zeta function. The automorphic form is the classical theta function of Jacobi. A second example the automorphic function is the so called Delta function which is a modular form of weight twelve. The corresponding Dirichlet series was studied first by Mordell who showed it had an Euler product. The coefficients of the Delta function are usually called the Ramanujan numbers. The basic properties of these numbers is that they are multiplicative. So the corresponding L-function has an Euler product and similar properties to the Riemann zeta function, namely holomorphic continuation the the whole complex plane and satisfies a functional equation. This connection can be extended to any algebraic reductive group. Let me explain it for the general linear group. Let s consider the space of functions which consists on all functions on the group of adeles invariant on the left side with respect to the group of principal adeles. Any smooth function of this type will be called an automorphic form. There is a way how one can attach to any automorphic form on the general linear group a Dirichlet series which has an Euler product and nice analytic properties, a nice functional equation, and holomorphic continuation to the whole complex plane doc2638 none The subject of this proposal is the development (both numerical and analytical) of a new class of perturbative methods for estimating solutions of boundary value problems (BVP) and free boundary problems (FBP) arising in mathematical physics. Oscar Bruno and Fernando Reitich recently proposed a new class of perturbation methods for approximating solutions of BVP and FBP which are based on the ideas of classical perturbation theory applied to domains which are small deviations from exactly solvable geometries. These methods are interesting because they are fast, easy to implement, and translate into three and higher dimensions without major modification. Of course, such schemes are limited by the extent of their domain of convergence, which may be quite small, and the fact that in many BVP and FBP of interest, the domain is a large perturbation of a simple geometry. This obstacle has been effectively overcome in recent work of Bruno & Reitich in the setting of acoustic and electromagnetic scattering via the introduction of analytic continuation techniques, in particular the use of Pade approximants. A second challenge faced by the current class of perturbative methods is that they suffer from problems of numerical ill-conditioning due to subtle cancellations which take place in their evaluation. This drawback has been overcome by the PI & Reitich, for the problem of computing Dirichlet-Neumann operators (DNO) for Laplace s equation, via a straightforward change of variables which simply flattens the domain. The PI proposes to extend the above results by developing a general purpose perturbative method for solving BVP and FBP which incorporates both analytic continuation and domain flattening techniques. To date, the techniques have only been applied independently to BVP. The first objective is to first implement them simultaneously for the BVP of computing DNO (for Laplace s equation), and then extend these methods to the case of a genuine FBP (modeling the motion of the interface of an ideal fluid) dimensions. An investigation of the effects of bottom topography and multiple fluid layers on the methods will follow, and considerations will be made of other classical FBP (e.g. Hele-Shaw flows, Stefan problems, etc.) whose geometries will pose their own challenges. Subsequently a thorough re-investigation of the problems of electromagnetic and acoustic scattering will be completed with domain flattening techniques implemented to overcome numerical ill-conditioning problems. Finally, the problem of implementing transparent boundary conditions in scattering problems via DNO will be considered. Many important scientific problems are defined on complicated domains that may or may not evolve in time. These problems, such as the scattering of electromagnetic radiation from a rough surface or the evolution of surface waves on a fluid, pose severe theoretical and computational difficulties for applied mathematicians and engineers. When the domain of the problem is simple (rectangular, circular, etc.) the problem can usually be solved explicitly by classical methods. One approach to the estimation of more general problems is to first consider domains which are small deviations from simple geometries. Many approaches along these lines have been proposed, but unless great care is taken, they can result in approximations that actually degrade as the approximation is refined. A new technique, developed by the PI & Fernando Reitich, avoids such difficulties and provides an exciting new method for the estimation of problems on complicated geometries. However, challenges still remain and these are the subject of this proposal. One challenge is to extend our new methods for small domain deviations to problems which are large deviations from a simple geometry. Another challenge is the fast and efficient implementation of these new methods on high performance serial and parallel computers doc2639 none Danagoulian This proposal requests support for development and interpretation of two experimental programs at Jefferson Lab: neutral pi-meson lifetime precise measurement, experiment PrimEx and measurement of the electric and magnetic form factors of the neutron, experiments Gen . The experiment PrimEx will perform a high precision measurement of the lifetime of the neutral pi-meson. The theoretical description of the process of meson decay results in one of the most accurate predictions in QCD, the quantum field theory that describes the properties of the strong interaction between quarks. The present experiment will measure the lifetime with an accuracy of ~1.4% which is consistent with the theoretical uncertainties. It is one of the fundamental experiments in nuclear physics. The neutron is an electrically neutral particle. Nevertheless it possesses an electromagnetic structure. The Gen experiments address the fundamental issue of the electromagnetic structure of the neutron by performing precise measurements of the neutron electric and magnetic form factors, Gen and Gmn. The knowledge of the internal structure of the neutron is needed for benchmark calculations in nuclear structure and QCD. Despite its fundamental importance, Gen is still poorly known, and stands as a significant challenge for the experimentalists. Besides its scientific importance the proposed research program will provide our students with unique research opportunities in experimental nuclear physics, and therefore will have a very strong impact on their training and education doc2640 none This project addresses a suite of structural optimization problems unified by their mathematical formulation. The problems treated in this project come from several application areas including the design of gradient coils used in magnetic resonance imaging, catalysis design, the design of damage tolerant bridges, and nonlinear optics. Presently there is no systematic design methodology that addresses these problems. The first goal of this project is to extend the mathematical theory of homogenization so that one can systematically describe minimizing sequences of designs. The second goal is to use the homogenization theory to develop numerical methods for the systematic solution of these design problems. This research project focuses on areas of technological interest that require new mathematical and computational techniques for the simultaneous optimization of material properties and structural form. The problems treated in this project come from several application areas including the design of gradient coils used in magnetic resonance imaging, catalysis design, the design of damage tolerant bridges, and nonlinear optics. These problems, although diverse in nature, can be formulated along similar mathematical lines. The goal of this project is to develop a mathematical and computational tool box for the systematic solution of problems requiring the simultaneous design of material and structure doc2641 none s in epitaxial thin film growths. These films have great applications in electronic materials. The second is to investigate the effects of noise (that is, random perturbative effects) in the modeling of the motion in interfaces in materials, such as the interface between different components in alloys. Even though such noise is known to be present in materials growths, its consequences still have not been understood completely. Both topics will involve mathematical analysis and physical intuition doc2642 none Dear Jong-Shi: I was very pleased to receive your email saying that you plan to recommend funding of my NSF proposal as a 36 month standard award of $150,710. As you requested, here is an abstract of the project. Please let me know if this is acceptable. Regards, Rick Falk : Finite Element Approximation of Problems in Solid Mechanics The finite element approximation of mathematical models of thin plates and shells is studied. For the Reissner-Mindlin plate model, there are many proven locking-free methods (i.e., no accuracy loss for smaller thickness) using triangular and rectangular elements. It is proposed to analyze quadrilateral elements for this problem and study important but unresolved issues about these elements in more general contexts. In addition to the shear locking which causes problems in the approximation of plate models, shells also suffer from the problem of membrane locking. The goal is to improve on the shell elements so far proposed and provide a rigorous analysis of convergence. Variational methods used previously for the derivation and analysis of plate models will be extended to the derivation and analysis of shell models. Discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods are promising candidates for a robust approximation method for both convection-dominated and diffusion-dominated convection-diffusion problems. Further analysis is proposed to demonstrate their effectiveness more conclusively. Computational and analytical techniques are proposed to understand the predictions of 2-D mathematical models concerned with stress driven instability, expanding on previous grant work done on a simpler 1-D model. This proposal is concerned with the use of mathematical models to study several problems in solid mechanics. The use of mathematical models offers a cost-effective way to make quantitative predictions about how mechanical systems will change when external forces are applied and serves as an alternative to the use of costly or difficult experiments. Typically, when realistic mathematical models are formulated, they are in terms of equations whose solutions, which represent physical quantities of interest to engineers and scientists, are not able to be determined analytically, i.e., in a simple form one can easily write down. However, by employing numerical methods, good approximations to the physical quantities which are described by the mathematical models may still be found. Typically, high performance computing is needed to do the large number of calculations involved. This project is concerned with the design and analysis of numerical approximation schemes for a number of important mathematical models used in mechanics. These include models of elastic plates and shells (used for example to design the roof of a building to avoid collapse) and models of nano-scale solid crystals (which can be used to study instabilities in certain materials doc2643 none Chikako Mese The principal investigator proposes to study geometric variational problems, with particular emphasis on harmonic maps in spaces with singularities. Motivated by questions in geometry and algebra, the study of harmonic maps to singular targets, particularly metric spaces of curvature bounded from above, has attracted the attention of many mathematicians. In particular, many remarkable results have been obtained by Gromov-Schoen, Korevaar-Schoen, and Jost. The PI proposes to develop the minimal surface theory as a continuation of the study of the harmonic map theory. The PI has shown that minimal surfaces in metric spaces of curvature bounded from above generalize several important properties of the classical minimal surfaces. We are interested in the development of a higher dimensional analogue of the theory advanced thus far. The PI will also investigate harmonic maps between surfaces when the target is given a metric of curvature bounded from above. We are particularly interested in understanding the behavior of harmonic maps when the target metric has singularities associated with curvature concentrations. Furthermore, we hope to gain an understanding of the behavior of harmonic maps when we vary the target metrics in a certain class. This in turn will be used to study Teichmuller spaces. The mathematical study of harmonic maps is natural and physically significant. This is because physics dictates that most natural actions occur in a way to minimize certain quantities. For instance, it is well known that the path of light in space is affected by gravity, and this path can be realized by a curve which minimizes arclength with respect to a certain metric. A thin film (such as a soap film formed on a closed wire frame) will come to a configuration which minimizes the surface area. Both these configurations can also be represented by energy minimizing maps. As critical points of the energy functional, harmonic maps are mathematical models of natural phenomena and provide an interesting mathematical study doc2644 none Award: Principal Investigator: Robert M. Hardt This project lies in the area of geometric variational calculus, treating the behavior of singularities and energy concentration for various optimal or stationary functions, fields, or geometric structures subject to geometric or analytic constraints. Specific investigations focus on the relation between energy and topological obstruction in mappings between manifolds, ferromagnetic and liquid crystal materials, improper slicing of polynomial varieties, compactness of currents in Carnot groups, and the regularity of relaxed energy minimizers. We will investigate the energy concentration along area-minimizing sets for limits of singularities of p-energy minimizing maps as p approaches a critical power. In various higher dimensional cases, energy concentration of limits of smooth mappings may occur along sets of infinite measure and is related to homotopically nontrivial mappings of spheres. Singularities in ferromagnetic and liquid crystal materials will be also studied in both stationary and dynamic contexts. The theories of improper intersections of polynomial zero sets from algebraic geometry will be investigated to understand related behavior in analysis and partial differential equations. A theory of currents in Carnot groups will be studied with an eye on applications to variational problems. Underlying many physical phenomena is a least-energy principle whereby certain configurations or fields or geometric shapes are distinguished by their property of having less energy or area than competing objects. The external constraints often lead to singularities, which are special points characterized by rapid changes of structure occurring in very small spatial regions. For example, one observes dislocation faults in solids under stress, domain walls in magnetized materials, vortices in superconducting materials, liquid edges and corners in soap films, and point, curve, and surface defects in various liquid crystal materials. We deal with new mathematical structures and theories necessary to explain and predict such phenomena. In these problems, the theoretical studies of pure mathematics, the numerical computational studies of applied mathematics, and the phenomenological studies from physics all benefit each other and all have a crucial scientific role doc2645 none The goal of this proposal is to study three important aspects of experimentation: screening, optimization and robustness. Section I proposes a novel approach to factor screening and response surface exploration by using a single design and experiment to achieve both objectives. This differs from the standard response surface methodology, which employs separate designs for factor screening and for response surface exploration. New concepts, theory and analysis are proposed, which include a two-stage analysis and a projection-efficiency criterion. Four problems are to be studied: (i) a theory for eligible projections in regular designs, (ii) combinatorial and algorithmic construction of optimal nonregular designs, (iii) connection with the maximum estimation capacity criterion, (iv) sensitivity of response surface exploration to errors in factor screening and a Bayesian alternative to the two-stage analysis. Section II addresses a fundamental and practically important issue of optimal assignment of factors to columns of a design matrix. Existing work can only be applied to regular fractional factorial designs and nonregular designs with two-level factors. By defining a B-contamination criterion and employing the Kronecker calculus, we propose an approach that can handle very general designs. Three problems are to be studied: (i) Finding expressions for the contamination terms, (ii) characterization in terms of complementary designs, (iii) extensions to blocked designs. Section III addresses the issue of optimal selection of experimental plans for robust parameter design. When the experimental cost is proportional to the total run size, the cross array format can be quite costly and the single array format becomes an attractive option. An important question is how to select single arrays optimally and according to what criteria? By using an effect ordering principle, we propose to define new criteria and use them to select optimal single arrays. Statistical design and analysis of experiments is an effective and commonly used tool in scientific and engineering investigation. It has made significant impact in many areas of research and development such as manufacturing, electronics, materials, agriculture and energy. It will continue to make important contributions by innovation in methodological and theoretical development and applications in new areas such as biotechnology, drug discovery, and information technology. Potential gains from using the proposed new methods include savings in experimental runs, experimentation time, and discovery of new better engineering designs and products. The results on factor assignment will provide clear guidelines on the assignment of factors and a substantial improvement over the prevailing practice of making arbitrary and often suboptimal assignment. Parameter design has become a major tool for variation reduction and product and process improvement. The proposed work will develop new and more economical and efficient techniques for conducting such experiments doc2646 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Nonlinear Dynamics and Pattern Formation in Combustion Matkowsky This research involves a synergism of analytical and numerical studies of problems in combustion and flame propagation. This approach is highly successful in elucidating behavior of solutions to the highly nonlinear systems of partial differential equations under study. Interest centers on problems exhibiting complex spatio-temporal dynamics in gaseous combustion as well as in solid fuel combustion and in heterogeneous combustion (solid plus gas), which arise in the self-propagating high-temperature synthesis process for advanced materials. The goal of the research is to describe transitions to, and the structure of, complex solution behavior. The project addresses gaseous combustion problems in the areas of flames with sequential reactions and flames in gas filled tubes. These systems exhibit transitions to states with greater degrees of spatio-temporal complexity as parameters are varied. The project also analyzes problems in solid fuel combustion, in which high temperature combustion waves, referred to as solid flames, are used to synthesize advanced materials. Research centers on the areas of solid flames and filtration combustion, which involves heterogeneous combustion, with reaction between gas and solid phases. The analytical studies are based on bifurcation and nonlinear stability theories, which employ asymptotic analysis and singular perturbation theory in the neighborhood of bifurcation or other transition points to yield a local description of the solution. An adaptive pseudo-spectral method is employed for large scale scientific computations, with which the local description is globally extended. The solutions exhibit layers, localized regions in which the solution varies rapidly. The adaptive pseudo-spectral method successfully meets the challenge of accurately and efficiently resolving such layer type behavior. This project is concerned with understanding processes that occur in energy conversion and materials synthesis, two areas of national importance. The research in energy conversion is focused on flame structure and dynamics, which involve interactions among many physical mechanisms. To determine cause and effect relations among the various mechanisms, this work explores parameter dependencies. The research in materials synthesis studies the use of combustion waves to produce materials having desired properties, for example, extreme hardness or imperviousness to temperature extremes. In this innovative technological process, which appears to enjoy advantages over conventional technology, the combustion wave propagates through the sample, converting an unreacted solid powder mixture to solid product. When so synthesized, materials can have superior properties doc2647 none Award: Principal Investigator: Jim A. Bryan This project is primarily concerned with Gromov-Witten invariants. The investigator will study the Gromov-Witten invariants of a 3-fold X by determining the local contributions of a suitably rigid curve C in X. In particular, the investigator will study the integrality properties of such contributions and their relationship to the number of certain BPS states in M-theory as defined via the formula of Gopakumar and Vafa. For nodal curves C, the investigator will continue his work with Katz and Leung; for smooth higher genus curves C, the investigator will continue work begun with R. Pandharipande. In collaborations with Leung, the investigator will also seek to define a new invariant of symplectic 4-manifolds which would specialize to the modified Gromov-Witten invariants defined by Behrend and Fantechi for algebraic surfaces with positive geometric genus (which in turn generalized the modified invariants defined by the investigator and Leung for K3 and Abelian surfaces). Such an invariant would be better suited to study the enumerative geometry of irrational surfaces than the ordinary Gromov-Witten invariants. In the physics of string theory, particles are replaced with one-dimensional objects (``strings ) and so the path that a particle traces out over time becomes a surface in space-time (a ``world-sheet ). The equations of string theory then tell us that the surface should be a holomorphic surface (a Riemann surface) mapped into space-time in a holomorphic manner. This has led to the purely mathematical notion of Gromov-Witten invariants. Gromov-Witten invariants study holomorphic mappings of Riemann surfaces into higher dimensional geometric objects (for example, projective manifolds). They have become important invariants in geometry, topology, and algebraic geometry as well as being central in string theory. Bryan s project specifically addresses the problem of how the algebraic geometry of a projective manifold is encoded in the Gromov-Witten invariants and how they are tied to string theory. Algebraic geometry is a classical subject in pure mathematics that has recently found application in such diverse subjects as robotics and coding theory; string theory is the leading candidate for a theory of everything , i.e. a single physical theory that describes all known physical phenomenon doc2648 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Hyperbolic Systems of Conservation Laws - Viscous Conservation Laws - Applications Trivisa This research deals with the general areas of hyperbolic conservation laws and viscous conservation laws. The first set of questions concerns the well-posedness of solutions to hyperbolic systems of conservation laws with large initial data, the uniqueness and regularity of solutions, and the study of some hyperbolic systems of conservation laws in several space dimensions. The second set of questions lies in the area of viscous conservation laws and deals with the study of the compressible Navier-Stokes equations with applications in fluid dynamics and combustion theory. The main objective of this research project is to initiate a systematic investigation of the qualitative behavior of solutions to general multidimensional Navier-Stokes equations with large initial data. This is interdisciplinary research, lying on the interface between continuum physics and the theory of hyperbolic (and viscous) conservation laws. The investigator studies partial differential equations arising in continuum physics with the expectation that the underlying physical structure will direct the analysis, while in return the mathematical analysis of some nonlinear partial differential equations will further the understanding of continuum physics doc2649 none Award: Principal Investigator: Eric Zaslow Zaslow proposes research directed towards a unified understanding of mirror symmetry. Current ideas -- including ``classical mirror symmetry; Kontsevich s conjecture; the work of Vafa; and the conjecture of Strominger, Yau, and Zaslow -- are only loosely connected and involve both perturbative and non-perturbative string reasoning. An understanding of how non-perturbative string theory relates to the classical mirror symmetry picture and Gromov-Witten invariants will be an important step towards unification. Five projects are proposed towards achieving this goal: 1) Developing a mathematical formulation of the new invariants obtained by Gopakumar and Vafa from BPS state counting. 2) Understanding the multiple-cover formulas which yield integers from higher-genus Gromov-Witten invariants. 3) Resolving the holomorphic ambiguity by determining it from the structure of singularities of Calabi-Yau moduli space. 4) Developing a physical understanding of Kontsevich s enlargement of Calabi-Yau moduli space to include A-infinity structures. 5) Defining a geometric Fourier-Mukai-like functor relating special-Lagrangian cycles of one manifold to Hermitian-Yang-Mills connections on bundles over the mirror. This functor could lead to a geometric proof of Kontsevich s formulation of mirror symmetry. All these projects aim to unify our still disparate approaches to mirror symmetry. This project is directed towards unifying our mathematical and physical understanding of the phenomenon of mirror symmetry, discovered by theoretical physicists working in string theory. String theory is a proposed physical theory with the promise of incorporating Einstein s understanding of space and gravity into the quantum theory. Mirror symmetry is a duality symmetry in string theory, whereby two very different physical theories are actually equivalent. When one of the theories is easily computable and the other hard, this leads to predictions of answers to difficult calculations. From the mathematical point of view, this can lead to conjectures relating parallel structures -- the structures involved in describing the different, but equivalent, mathematical models of physical theories. The relationships unearthed by mirror symmetry are deep and novel. A unified understanding of them may join not only fields of research but different disciplines -- math and physics -- as well. This award is partially funded by the program in Mathematical Physics of the Division of Physics doc2650 none spaces; (3) the structure of positive solutions of nonlinear boundary value problems; and (4) problems related to singular dynamical equations on a measure chain. In scientific investigation of natural phenomena, mathematical models are used to give quantitative descriptions and to furnish predictions. One form such models can take is a dynamic equation on a measure chain. This project provides new insight into the relationship between continuous and discrete descriptions of phenomena, and has application to many fields, including mathematical biology and economics. In one application, a study of population growth, we will give conditions that ensure survival of a population, in particular for the case in which parents die before offspring are hatched. Two well-known examples of this are the seventeen-year cicada and the common mayfly doc2651 none Ezra Getzler The Gromov-Witten invariants of a compact symplectic manifold are the correlation functions of a two-dimensional topological gravity with background V. These invariants generalize such enumerative invariants of algebraic geometry as the number of curves of genus g and degree d through 3d+g-1 points in the plane. For each genus g, the genus g Gromov-Witten potential of V is the generating function of the genus g Gromov-Witten invariants. This project intends to study the differential equations satisfied by these potentials and their geometric significance. The genus zero Gromov-Witten potential satisfies the Witten-Dijkgraaf-Verlinde-Verlinde equation, which finds its geometric form in Dubrovin s theory of Frobenius manifolds. Previous work of the PI has shown that the genus one Gromov-Witten potential satisfies a differential equation defined on any Frobenius manifold. Moreover, Dubrovin and Zhang have shown that this equation has a unique solution for any semisimple Frobenius manifold. The PI proposes to investigate analogous situation for genus g greater than one and its manifold consequences. It is well known that there is one line through two points in the plane. Similarly, there is one quadratic curve through three points in the plane. The theory of Gromov-Witten invariants is a tremendous generalization of this: one generalizes from lines to general algebraic curves, and from the plane to more general spaces. The resulting counting problems are related to the theory of such integrable systems as the Kortweg-de Vrijs equation describing waves in shallow water. In this project, following ideas of Dubrovin and Zhang, we attempt to understand this link better. Thus, this project investigates significant and surprising developments in enumerative geometry that were originally motivated physics, and potentially should cast light on a number of questions of relevance to modern physics doc2652 none This proposal is a comprehensive research plan for establishing a general framework for measuring available statistical information in gene mapping studies. The key methodological challenge is to find a measure that (1) is a reliable index of the relative information specific to the purpose of a study, (2) conditions on particular data sets, (3) is robust in the sense of general applicability, including to small data sets, (4) is easy to compute, and (5) is subject to sensible combination axioms. Dealing with all these criteria simultaneously requires a careful combination of Bayesian and frequentist methods, especially for small samples. The PIs propose to investigate a large-sample framework involving likelihood functions only, and a small-sample framework from a robust Bayesian perspective. The robust Bayesian approach takes full advantage of the Bayesian formulation in deriving information measures with desirable coherence properties, and at the same time it seeks measures that are robust to various specifications and thus are more generally applicable. The PIs also propose to investigate several specific measures at two levels. At the more general level, the PIs will study and compare these measures in terms of their general behaviors and applicability, which are not restricted to the genetic setting. At the more specific level, the PIs plan to evaluate and apply these measures in specific genetic applications, including allele-sharing methods, methods for fine-scale genetic mapping (e.g., haplotype-sharing methods), map comparisons (e.g., SNPs verses microsatellites), gene-gene interaction and gene-environmental interaction studies. Due to the huge potential benefit to the public health, geneticists and analytical researchers, including statisticians, have focused their efforts on finding genes affecting susceptibility to common, complex disorders such as diabetes, asthma, hypertension, cardiovascular and psychiatric diseases. The transmission of these disorders is complex, the etiologic complexity being increased by the action and interaction of multiple genes and environmental factors. There are other complications such as sporadic cases, incomplete penetrance (i.e., genetically predisposed individuals might not exhibit the disorder) and late age of onset. All these factors increase the difficulty of identifying the genetic components of the trait of interest. Genetic linkage studies are often the first step in finding and cloning a disease gene. Their goal is to locate and, if possible, shorten regions on the genome that are very likely to contain disease susceptibility genes. In many studies, difficulty arises because most genetic data sets are incomplete and investigators want to know how much information in the data is available for the study relative to the amount of information that would have been available if the data were complete. This relative information directly guides the investigator s follow-up strategies (e.g., using more genetic markers with existing DNA samples versus collecting DNA samples from more families), and a misleading measure can lead to a serious waste of human and financial resources as well as a delay in the progress of the underlying genetic studies. The goal of this proposal is to provide reliable measures of such relative information by using the current start-of-the-art statistical techniques doc2653 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Asymptotic Expansions, Inverse Problems, and Homogenization of Boundary Conditions Moskow We will use the technique of asymptotic expansions to solve two types of problems. The first is the accurate detection of the location and shapes of small inhomogeneities from boundary measurements. Asymptotic expansions of the solution with respect to the size of the inhomogeneity will be developed where they are not yet known. A new procedure will be introduced which uses these expansions to find information about the holes. The procedure will be tested for different types of equations and shapes of inhomogeneities. The second problem involves the homogenization of boundary values for equations where the medium has an underlying periodic structure. Asymptotic analysis will aid in finding the limiting or effective equations. This analysis requires examining boundary layer functions which are solutions on a half space with periodic or almost periodic boundary conditions. Many equations that arise from material science and electromagnetics involve some small parameter. This parameter could represent, for example, the diameter of a small imperfection inside an airplane wing. We will analyze mathematically the effects of such imperfections on electric potentials. From this analysis we will develop and test numerically a new method to find the sizes and locations of imperfections. In practice, this method would require inducing electrical currents and measuring the resulting electric potential only on the exterior of the object. We will also analyze the macroscopic behavior of two materials mixed together at the microscopic level. The small parameter in this case represents the size of the microscopic scale. We will use our analysis to model more accurately the propagation of waves through mixed media, for use in oil exploration and materials science doc2654 none Dusa McDuff McDuff will continue studying the structure of symplectic manifolds and of the group G(M) of diffeomorphisms that preserve the symplectic structure on a given manifold M. Working together with Francois Lalonde, she recently discovered that these diffeomorphisms do not twist the manifold topologically very much. Indeed, using ideas from quantum homology, they have shown that the homotopy groups of the Hamiltonian subgroup H of G(M) act trivially on the rational homology of the underlying manifold M. The conjecture is that any fiber bundle with structural group H is a product as far as its rational cohomology is concerned. She also plans to study other topological implications of the existence of quantum homology, in particular its consequences for the Flux conjecture. A symplectic structure is a very basic structure on space that underlies the equations of classical physics. They have become very prominent recently because of their appearance in modern theories of duality, especially in the mirror symmetry phenomena of high energy physics. Mathematically, they are very interesting and help in understanding 4 dimensional spaces (curved space-times). Recently McDuff has focussed her attention on studying the different ways that the points of a space can move while still preserving this structure. Working with a collaborator, she has found that some ideas coming from string theory (known in the field as quantum homology ) show that spaces with symplectic structures are much more rigid than ones without, and cannot be moved and twisted up very much. She intends to pursue this line of questioning during the period of the grant. Many very interesting symplectic rigidity phenomena have been discovered, but there are still plenty of open questions doc2655 none T. Healey and P. Rosakis plan to study various problems from solid continuum mechanics governed by nonlinear partial differential equations. A major thrust of the proposed work will be on the static morphology and dynamic evolution of microstructure due to phase transitions in two-dimensional models of shape-memory alloys. In contrast to well-known absolute, minimum-energy approaches to the statics problem, we plan to employ modern techniques of symmetry-breaking, bifurcation theory. The latter enables systematic determination of metastable states, which we believe our ensuing dynamical studies will show to be associated with hysteresis. Another aspect of the work will involve applications of a generalized topological degree (developed previously by Healey & Simpson) to global bifurcation problems of nonlinear elasticity - these will be the first such results in three-dimensional elasticity. The overall goals of the work are to detect new nonlinear phenomena, obtain constitutive restrictions that are both physically and mathematically reasonable for general classes of materials, and to develop new tools approaches to such nonlinear problems - both analytical and computational. The proposed approach comprises a blend of solid continuum mechanics, materials science, nonlinear analysis, symmetry and group-theoretic methods and computation. The analysis of models of nonlinear materials at a very general level is fundamental to the understanding of shape-memory effects in certain advanced engineering alloys as well as more traditional engineering materials structures. The proposed investigation is strongly interdisciplinary, combining models and techniques from mechanics, materials science and modern mathematics. Broadly speaking the work will provide new mathematical approaches to difficult nonlinear problems arising in structural mechanical engineering and materials sciences. This has the potentia of leading to a better understanding of material behavior and design - including the design of smart structures doc2656 none Proposal: PI: Anneke Bart and Kevin Scannell The proposers are interested in geometric and topological properties of hyperbolic 3-manifolds arising from the Bianchi groups, and more generally in the properties of arithmetically-defined 3-manifolds. The proposers intend to unify two of the main themes of research in this area, namely, the cuspidal cohomology problem with non-trivial coefficients, and the enumeration and description of immersed totally geodesic surfaces. The proposers intend to explore possible connections between non-vanishing results in cuspidal cohomology and generalized bending deformations supported on totally geodesic surfaces. The Bianchi groups are particularly interesting mathematical objects as they lie at the crossroads of several distinct area of pure mathematics: number theory, infinite group theory, geometry, and topology. They have been studies from these diverse points of view for more than one hundred years. Certain three-dimensional spaces arise in a natural way from the Bianchi groups; these spaces come equipped with a hyperbolic geometry . This, in a nutshell, means that pairs of straight lines generically diverge from one another unlike Euclidean geometry. Three-dimensional spaces with a hyperbolic geometry are central to the study of general three-dimensional spaces as they represent, in a certain sense, the generic examples. Hyperbolic spaces are among the most difficult to understand, and therefore the proposers aim to elucidate the geometry of these important examples mentioned above doc2657 none Philip Foth The PI will study the topology of certain algebraic varieties by methods of Poisson geometry. Many interesting varieties admit Poisson structures such that the closures of the symplectic leaves for such structures additively generate the homology. Moreover, one can ask for certain quite strong invariance and asymptotic properties of those Poisson structures so that the complete information about the (equivariant) cohomology of these varieties may be obtained by studying the corresponding Poisson harmonic forms. In addition, if the algebraic variety in question is smooth and has an invariant Kaehler structure such that the Kaehler form is compatible in a certain sense with the Poisson structure, then one can hope to find such Poisson structures on the GIT quotients of the variety using the correspondence between the symplectic and GIT quotients. In addition, one can hope to study the Chow quotients by similar methods. One also hopes to obtain new integrable systems in this context or throw a new light on already known ones. The varieties which fall into the scope of interest of this project include (partial) flag manifolds, the moduli spaces of parabolic bundles, toric varieties, and others. There is also a connection between these topics and formal geometry and deformation quantization. The PI would like to understand the topology (underlying structure) of certain spaces that appear in different branches of science such as geometry and theoretical physics. The results that PI intends to obtain are likely to have applications to topological, conformal, and quantum field theories, as well as strings and mirror symmetry. In these endeavors the PI plans to apply methods of algebraic and differential geometry and the formal algebraic apparatus. The spaces under investigation come naturally equipped with rich algebraic and geometric structures. Some of these spaces appear as quite classical objects (like grassmannians) and some of them are more sophisticated (like moduli spaces). The PI is looking forward to further unveiling these structures and relating them to known phenomena sometimes crossing interdisciplinary borders doc2658 none Balmforth Lava domes are a common geological formation, and their geometry sets them apart as one of the more simple types of lava flow. Moreover, domes often have a relatively low aspect ratio and evolve slowly. These observations can be used as ingredients in building simple mathematical models of expanding and cooling fluid domes; this proposal surrounds the development of such models. In particular, lava is considered as a solidifying, non-Newtonian fluid with strongly temperature-dependent material qualities and an intrinsic yield stress. The wide array of physical ingredients to the problem make the mathematical modelling especially challenging. The project exploits the simple geometry, slow evolution and low aspect ratio of the dome to asymptotically reduce the governing equations to a simpler form. The reduction furnishes shallow-lava equations, in much the same way that the shallow-ice equations are derived and extensively used to model ice sheets and glaciers. Differences arise because of the viscoplastic nature of silicic lava, and because solidification creates a solid crust overlying the dome that can contribute significantly to the balance of forces, especially at the disk s edge. The mathematical approach are complemented with an experimental one in which laboratory fluids are used as analogue models of the lava. Both approaches are used to explore the structure and evolution of the dome, partly with the aim of learning more about how lava behaves as a fluid. For example, some domes lose axisymmetry in what might be an intrinsic morphological instability; this pattern formation process is explored in that light. Lava domes occur in many geological settings both on Earth and on many other planets and moons of the solar system. These structures form when crystal-rich silicic magma is pushed up through vents onto roughly horizontal surfaces, and often occur inside the craters created by volcanic eruptions. The shape of a lava dome is especially simple in comparison to most other lava flows. Hence, a first step in understanding lava flows in general is to explore those domes. Moreover, despite their slow growth, domes are natural hazards because they can be the setting of violent and dangerous events: domes can rupture and release confined gas in a pyroclastic outflow (an extremely hot and fast-moving current of air and ash), or collapse at their peripheries to create landslides and debris flows. The proposal outlines a mathematical and experimental approach to the modelling of lava domes. The purpose is to build models of the dome s structure and evolution, and compare these models with the real geological structures. By modelling the domes in this way, more will be learned about how lava flows, and ultimately this may provide insight into the hazards associated with them doc2659 none Statistical Problems in Quality control, Stochastic Systems and Genetic Analysis This project will address a number of related statistical problems having applications in (i) industrial quality control and complex engineering systems, (ii) in molecular biology and genetics, and (iii) in financial economics. (i) One objective of the proposed research is to develop a unified methodology of sequential change-point detection in industrial quality control and of automated fault detection in complex engineering systems. Relatively simple algorithms that are not too demanding in computational and memory requirements for on-line implementation and yet are nearly optimal from a statistical viewpoint will be developed for a variety of practical applications. This methodology will not only address the recognized discrepancies between the assumptions underlying conventional control charts and today s industrial processes, but it will also provide methodological advances for on-line detection and diagnosis of faults and potential failures of automated engineering systems. In this connection, estimation and forecasting problems in time series models and stochastic dynamical systems having parameters that may change with time will also be investigated. Although in practice abrupt parameter changes usually occur infrequently, the unknown times of their occurrence have led to detection algorithms of prohibitive complexity. By using parallel recursive algorithms and combining new ideas in change-point detection with empirical Bayes methodology, it is anticipated that asymptotically efficient estimation and prediction schemes of manageable complexity will be developed. (ii) Another direction of research involves fixed sample change-point problems and their applications to biomolecular sequence analysis and other problems of signal detection. A comprehensive statistical methodology will be developed for genome scanning to map anonymous genes using data based on crosses of pure strains in experimental genetics or based on regions of identity by descent of related individuals in human genetics. Related mathematical problems in boundary crossing probabilities of random fields will be investigated. (iii) A third direction of research is financial time series and stochastic control problems of financial economics. New statistical models, computational algorithms, and methods for data analysis and forecasting will be developed to address a variety of sequential decision, portfolio selection, and pricing problems in investments and financial markets. The interdisciplinary research in financial economics and molecular biology not only leads to the development of new stochastic models and statistical methods, but it also provides valuable research opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students in these rapidly developing fields doc2660 none This individual investigator award is to a senior faculty member for experimental investigations using NMR to measure the microscopic static and dynamic properties of the electrons that govern the key properties of superconductors, density wave materials, and conducting polymers. The project includes electrical transport and ESR measurements, often concurrently with the NMR. The measurements will be performed at extremes of temperature, pressure, and magnetic field. The studies in superconductivity include rf-induced flux lattice annealing using NMR spin echoes and measurements of apparently p-wave superconductivity in the organic conductor (TMTSF)(2)PF(6) under pressure. Experiments on density wave materials will include the study of the magnetic field-induced spin-density wave (SDW) phase of (TMTSF)(2)PF(6) under pressure, investigation of thermal SDW phasons below 4 K in (TMTSF)(2)P(1-x)As(x)F(6) to resolve the conflict in interpreting the SDW, and measurement of repinning dynamics. NMR and ESR will be used to investigate the mechanisms for electron charge propagation and the role of disorder in metallic and metal-insulating polypyrrole-PF(6). High frequency NMR instrumentation that benefits this research and the larger user community will be developed. This mix of instrumentation techniques and challenging research problems will provide valuable preparation of the participating students and postdocs for their future academic or industrial careers. %%% This individual investigator award is to a senior faculty member for a project that uses nuclear magnetic resonance, electron spin resonance, and electrical transport to study the properties of electrons in several materials, such as superconductors, density wave systems, and an electrically conducting polymer. Many of the measurements involve extremes of high field, high frequency, high pressure, and low temperatures, along with some development of the instrumentation to carry them out. One of the major goals of this project is to investigate the response of collective electron states, such as vortices in superconductors and pinned density waves in quasi one-dimensional materials, to an external driving force. Other goals are to explore the unusual superconducting state of an organic superconductor under pressure and to determine the microscopic mechanisms of electrical conduction in a conducting polymer. Results gained from this work should contribute to knowledge of the basic physics that forms the underpinning for using superconductivity and conducting polymers in technical applications. The advances of magnetic resonance instrumentation into extremes of parameter space will benefit other groups exploiting these methods. This mix of instrumentation techniques and challenging research problems will provide valuable preparation of the participating students and postdocs for their future academic or industrial careers doc2661 none Nonparametric Bayesian Modelling Nonparametric Bayesian models are motivated by the desire to more realistically model data. They provide a means of escaping the strictures of parametric models, while, with their Bayesian nature, they allow the incorporation of some information about the process under investigation. These philosophical advantages translate directly into superior performance for the models, which have had a particularly strong showing wherever random effects are involved. When these models are used in conjunction with the hierarchical model, they constitute a powerful modelling tool. The current state of the art in nonparametric Bayesian modelling allows one to propose and fit models, and a limited amount of work has been done on selection of a model from some small set of candidate models. The greater field of data analysis in this context is almost untouched. The reason for this is that the current set of models do not allow for a sophisticated data analysis: the iterative process of proposing a model, assessing its fit, developing a modification of the model to improve its fit, and reducing the model if no substantial improvement in fit is found. The main focus of this work is to formulate and implement sophisticated nonparametric Bayesian data analysis. To accomplish the above goal, this research proposal identifies five areas where nonparametric Bayesian models currently either perform poorly or cannot be used in a satisfactory, general fashion. These areas are (i) examination of the relationship between covariates and response (ii) assessment of the fit of a model (iii) combination of information from related experiments (iv) modelling distributions with outliers and (v) working with small to moderate sample sizes. In the proposed research, the author will develop models that will show strong performance for each of the above problems. The first class of models, dependent nonparametric processes, move beyond current models which are aimed at providing a description of a single random distribution. They provide a means of modelling a collection of random distributions which exhibit strong local dependence and long-range independence. This feature of the model makes it ideal for (i) - (iii) above. The second class of models, contaminated models, directly targets the departure from a parametric model in a clear, easily interpretable fashion. This type of model is ideal for describing distributions that contain outliers, and its close proximity to a parametric form will yield small sample performance that is nearly equivalent to the parametric model, providing an approach to problems (iv) and (v). Additionally, the two types of models may be freely combined, resulting in a single, coherent approach to all five problems. The basic theoretical properties of the models will be investigated, the computational strategies needed to fit the models will be devised, and the models will be applied in a variety of settings. Throughout, the emphasis of the research will be on the development of sound data analytic strategies so that the theoretical and practical advantages of nonparametric Bayesian modelling can be realized doc2662 none Strained solid films are an important component of newly-developed electronic devices such as the quantum-well semiconductor and the bipolar heterojunction transistor. The strain in the film is essential to these devices because it modifies the electronic band gap in the device to generate the desired electronic properties. The strain in the film, however, is also responsible for the generation of instabilities during growth, resulting in nonplanar films with inhomogeneous microstructure, such as quantum dots and quantum wires . Because of the strain localization associated with the inhomogeneous microstructure, the resulting electronic properties can be enhanced due to quantum electronic effects. Thus, there has been intense interest in natural self-assembly of quantum dot and quantum wire morphologies during the growth process. The research of the PI will focus on the analysis of mathematical models for the development of such inhomogeneous microstructures in strained alloy films. The theoretical description of morphological development in strained films is difficult because of the major role that elastic strain plays in the development of the morphology; the generic case is that of a free boundary or moving boundary elasticity problem. While there has been a significant amount of progress made on the mathematical modeling of the growth of single-component strained films, models for the growth of alloy strained films are still in their infancy. The proposed research will examine the microstructure generated from the new alloy film models as nonlinear solutions to the moving boundary elasticity problem using a combination of both analytical and numerical techniques. The research will focus on three areas relating to the formation of microstructure in strained alloy films. First, the possibility of generating a new type of microstructure based on self-assembled compositional modulations in thick films will be investigated by a bifurcation analysis of the nonlinear free boundary problem. Second the growth of inhomogeneous alloy quantum dots will be described using a hybrid asymptotic and numerical approach, and the theoretical predictions will be compared to experiments carried out in parallel by a collaborator. Finally the appropriate mathematical modeling of facet corners in strained alloy crystals will be examined through a model which incorporates atomic-scale behavior in a macroscopic model for film growth. The overall goal of the research is to develop mathematical approaches that enable a comprehensive theoretical description of nanostructure formation in strained alloy films. In nanoscale electronic devices, strained solid layers play an important role because of the improved electronic properties of the strained material. While flat, planar strained films have been used successfully, they can be susceptible to instabilities during the growth process and develop nanoscale bumps ( dots ). These nanoscale quantum dots have been found to give superior electronic behavior because of quantum-physics electronic effects. There is thus interest in growing quantum dots with a controlled size and spacing to give a material with specified or optimum electronic properties. The research supported by this grant focuses on the development of mathematical models for describing the formation of quantum dots and other nanostructures from detailed modeling of the physics of the growth process. In particular, the work will focus on the growth of alloy films, for which theoretical understanding not well developed. The goal of the theoretical work will be to evaluate the effect of different growth parameters to guide the development of optimum quantum dot structures. To solve the mathematical problem, advanced mathematical techniques will be developed and applied to determine the characteristics of the solutions and how they depend on the material properties and growth conditions. In addition, the research will also address the difficult question of how to incorporate atomic-level behavior into a large scale model for strained film growth. The theoretical predictions will be compared to experiments conducted in parallel by a collaborator here at the University at Buffalo. The results of the work will be twofold. The understanding of how to treat the mathematical issues of strained alloy film growth well will be improved. Also, a useful parameter map describing the important physical processes that influence the development of nanostructures will be developed. This parameter map can be used as a guide to the design of strained alloy nanostructures with specified or optimum properties doc2663 none Award: Principal Investigator: Carolyn S. Gordon Inverse spectral geometry is the study of the extent to which the geometry of a surface or, more generally, of a Riemannian manifold can be extracted from spectral data. The primary spectral data associated to a compact Riemannian manifold are the eigenvalues of the Laplace-Beltrami operator. The investigators propose to apply recently developed methods to study the extent to which the eigenvalue spectrum determines the local geometry of a compact Riemannian manifold. They will also ask the extent to which additional spectral data such as the spectrum of the Laplacian acting on differential forms of various degrees determines the geometry of the manifold. Inverse spectral problems will be considered on Riemannian orbifolds as well as on manifolds; orbifolds are the most tractable singular spaces. For the Schrodinger operator Laplacian plus potential , the problem of recovering the potential from spectral data will be studied in the case of line bundles over tori. In analogy to the case of planar domains, the lowest eigenvalue of the Laplacian on a compact Riemannian manifold may be viewed as the fundamental tone. The question of whether random Riemann surfaces have large first eigenvalue will be studied using connections between spectra of Riemann surfaces and spectra of graphs. For noncompact Riemannian manifolds, the primary spectral data are the scattering poles; the investigators expect to exhibit continuous families of isopolar metrics. In spectroscopy, one attempts to recover the chemical composition or the shape of an object from the characteristic frequencies of light or sound emitted. In the case of a vibrating membrane such as a drumhead, viewed mathematically as a bounded region in the plane, the spectrum of characteristic frequencies corresponds to the mathematical notion of the Laplace spectrum. The Laplace spectrum is also defined for other geometric objects called manifolds which arise in mathematics and physics. The investigators, along with Scott Wolpert, earlier constructed the first examples of differently shaped drumheads (planar regions) with the same spectrum. Planar regions can differ in their global shape but locally are identical; i.e., if you look at a small piece cut out from one of the regions, you can not tell which region it came from. Recently, the principal investigator developed methods for constructing geometric objects with the same Laplace spectrum but which differ in their local as well as global shape. These methods will be used to investigate which local geometric properties of manifolds are not spectrally determined. Additional spectral problems will also be considered such as the construction of surfaces of arbitrarily large volume but having bounded fundamental tone doc2664 none Proposal: PI: William Thurston : A variety of structures on three-manifolds have contributed significantly to our understanding: notably, geometric structures, incompressible surfaces, foliations, laminations, contact structures, automatic structures on fundamental groups of three-manifolds, and the lattice of finite-sheeted coverings of three-manifolds. There are many connections among these structures, but nevertheless the known connections are sporadic and often only loose, although suggestive of deeper connections remaining to be discovered. The PI will investigate these various structures and their interrelationships, with an emphasis on analyzing computability, and developing techniques for actually constructing and computing examples. For example, is there a construction to go from a taut foliation or an essential lamination to a geometric decomposition? And conversely, does every hyperbolic 3-manifold admit a foliation or at least a genuine lamination? Three-manifolds are the mathematical descriptions of the possible ways for 3-dimensional space to be topologically interconnected. They are important because they arise through geometric models in every corner of mathematics. A central theme in modern three-manifold topology is the Geometrization conjecture, which is the conjecture that all three-manifolds are made up of locally homogeneous pieces, that is, three-manifolds that have a geometry in which a neighborhood of any one point is completely identical to a neighborhood of any other point, up to some fixed radius. This conjecture, proposed by the PI about 20 years ago is now supported by a great deal of theoretical and empirical evidence. Nonetheless, many basic questions remain unknown, including the famous Poincare conjecture a special case of the Geometrization conjecture which asserts that there is only one possible topology for a three-manifold in which every loop can be contracted to fit inside a small ball. Besides geometric structures for 3-manifolds, there are a number of other interesting structures that have important implications for topology, but only loose connections among them are understood. Among these structures are incompressible surfaces, foliations (a kind of layered structure), laminations (layered structures that only exist on part of the manifold), contact structures (related to Hamiltonian mechanics), and various combinatorial structures from group theory. The PI will investigate connections among these various structures, with an emphasis on computability and techniques of making actual computations of examples The project is supported by both the Topology Program in the Division of Mathematical Sciences and the Numeric, Symbolic, and Geometric Computation Program in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate doc2665 none This award focuses on the development of a new family of polymer electrolytes with extraordinary mechanical properties and high ionic conductivities. This plan has two distinct components. (1) a series of fundamental studies of simple, precursor polymer electrolytes that focus on the critical factors controlling ionic conductivity, and (2) the development of a commercializable polymer electrolyte with optimized mechanical and electrical properties. The fundamental studies address a serious problem in the field of ion-conducting polymers, namely that the mechanism of ion transport in these system is as yet poorly understood at the molecular level. The polymer electrolytes proposed for study are based on poly(ethylenimine), PEI. In the fundamental phase of work, attention will be restricted to electrolytes prepared with simple linear PEI and alkyl-substituted PEI, examining the important factors underlying ionic transport such as cation-anion interaction, ion-polymer interactions, and polymer interactions, and polymer segmental motion. These materials will be studied by a variety of techniques, primarily Raman and infrared vibrational spectroscopy, complemented by measurements of ionic conductivity using impedance methods. In addition, thermal characterization with DSC and structural characterization with x-ray diffraction techniques will also be used. The right synthetic versatility available with PEI-based systems allows an extraordinary range of possibilities for the optimization of desirable mechanical and conductivity properties. The results of these studies may lead to the development of a new family of ion-conducting polymers for application as electrolytes in next generation high energy density lithium rechargeable batteries doc2666 none Yuan-Pin Lee Quantum cohomology is a deformation of usual cup product of ordinary cohomology ring of a smooth projective variety X. Similarly quantum K-theory is a deformation of ordinary K-ring of X. In their study of Gromov--Witten K-theory, Professor Lee and his collaborators have found some interesting relations to other fields in mathematics and physics including algebraic geometry, integrable systems, representation theory and quantum geometry. These investigations also naturally lead to further investigations of Gromov--Witten theory itself. The main focus of this project will be on quantum cohomology, quantum K-theory and their relations to discrete KdV hierarchies, Toda lattices, and enumerative geometry. Gromov-Witten theory is a new subject that lies within the intersection of many traditional branches of mathematics and theoretical physics. This theory was originally discovered within string theory. Shortly thereafter people found many new applications to mathematics. Some of these applications solved problems that, based on traditional methods, were considered to be very difficult. The tools used to study Gromov--Witten theory also involves many fields, including algebraic geometry, topology and analysis. Thus, this is a growing new field which exhibits many rich structures and deserves further investigation doc2667 none Marcus Banagl Complexes of sheaves which are self-dual in the sense of Verdier have become indispensable tools in studying the topology of singular spaces, a prime example being the Goresky-MacPherson-Deligne intersection chain sheaf on a stratified space with only even-codimensional strata. On spaces that include strata of odd codimension as well, self-duality of the latter sheaf fails to hold in general. In recent research, we have shown that Lagrangian structures can be employed to construct self-dual intersection homology on such spaces. We propose to study the variance of the associated characteristic classes as the Lagrangian structure changes. In many situations, the effective manipulation of self-dual sheaves places heavy demands on the stratification of the underlying space. We propose to investigate the potential existence of a good sheaf package on weakly stratified spaces (the homotopically stratified sets of Quinn), using the technology of teardrop neighborhoods and manifold stratified approximate fibrations. Further, in collaboration with Sylvain Cappell, we are interested in developing characteristic class formulae for the signature of singular spaces in the presence of non-trivial monodromy, via a synthesis of Atiyah s formula for manifolds and the Cappell-Shaneson signature formula. Topology is the study of geometrical objects focusing on the neighborhood relations between points rather than on measurement of distances. In the last century, considerable effort has been directed towards studying manifolds -- spaces that locally look uniform, at each point and in each direction. This effort has been immensely successful; a central insight was that crucial information about a manifold is carried by one number: its signature, measuring intersections of geometric sub-objects within the manifold. In the last two decades, topologists have studied singular spaces with increasing interest, due to their numerous occurrences and applications within pure mathematics (algebraic geometry, number theory) and outside pure mathematics (mathematical physics). In contrast to a manifold, a singular space may locally look different from point to point. The proposed research tries to define, understand, and compute topological invariants for singular spaces doc2668 none Matthias Lesch Dirac type operators are symmetric first order elliptic differential operators arising naturally in Riemannian geometry. They are of considerable interest in theoretical physics. Given such an operator on a compact manifold with boundary it is possible to characterize those boundary conditions which lead to a self--adjoint elliptic problem. These so--called well--posed boundary value problems were introduced by R. T. Seeley. A recent account from a functional analytic perspective was given by the researcher in collaboration with J. Br\ uning. This is the starting point of the current project in which the researcher wants to investigate spectral invariants associated to Dirac operators on manifolds with boundary. More specifically, we want to present an analytic proof of the gluing formula for the analytic torsion in the presence of an arbitrary flat bundle. As a consequence one obtains an alternative approach to Cheeger--Muller type theorems on the relation between analytical and topological torsion in the most general setting, including manifolds with boundary. An invariant related to the analytic torsion is the zeta-regularized determinant. We want to study this determinant as a function of the boundary condition, generalizing earlier work of Burghelea-Friedlander--Kappeler and Scott-Wojciechowski. The third subproject, jointly with J. Bruening, deals with a functional analytic approach to boundary value problems for Dirac type operators. The ultimate goal is to find a simple functional analytic model for a Dirac type operator on a manifold with boundary which allows to derive basic results like heat trace expansions, index theorems and the spectral flow theorem. Such a model would hopefully lead to such theorems for manifolds with corners. Dirac type operators are symmetric first order elliptic differential operators arising naturally in Riemannian geometry. They are of considerable interest in theoretical physics. There are interesting relations between the spectrum of the operator (the measurable quantities of the physical system) and the underlying geometry. In general the spectrum of the operator is hard to compute. However, it is possible to extract certain spectral invariants which are intimately related to the geometry. If the underlying geometry is a manifold with boundary then, at first, one has to impose boundary conditions in order to get a self--adjoint problem and hence a well--defined spectrum. In the current project the author wants to investigate certain spectral invariants (analytic torsion, determinant) for such boundary value problems. A special issue is the dependence of the invariants on the choice of the boundary condition doc2669 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Mathematical Descriptions of Anisotropic Fluids and Optical Pulse Propagation Forest The research project on anisotropic fluids investigates critical mathematical problems arising in the flow of macromolecular fluids such as liquid crystal polymers. We analyze the tensorial partial differential equations that describe the flows of macromolecules to construct orientation patterns and determine their stability. These analyses yield information about flow-induced phase transitions and models for orientation patterns routinely observed in experiments and manufacturing processes. The research project on optical pulse propagation employs methods of integrable systems in the analysis of pulse propagation in nonlinear optical fibers. The governing model equations are perturbations of scalar or coupled nonlinear Schrodinger equations with small dispersion. The research extends previous results on scalar equations to systems, studies new instability phenomena that arise from the coupling, constructs explicit solutions that serve as models for pulse propagation, and predicts the onset and fate of pulse degradation as a function of fiber properties and of pulse shape and power. The proposed research focuses on mathematical issues central to two important technologies: high-performance materials and optical fiber communications. Many super-strong materials are produced from liquids comprised of large molecules whose shape and dynamics constrain manufacturing processes and are responsible for material properties. This research develops mathematical models for the interaction of flow and microstructure, applies these models to explain observed patterns and their relation to material properties, and analyzes other phenomena that affect processing behavior and properties of materials. Long-haul optical fiber communications systems are well-described by special nonlinear differential equations that are amenable to analysis with recently-developed mathematical methods. Observations show that light pulses in optical fibers degrade through ripples that emerge on the pulse, and this phenomenon is also seen in computer simulations. This project develops rigorous mathematical understanding of why ripples form and an explicit algorithm that predicts pulse degradation given the properties of the fiber and the input pulse. This tool will be useful to design optimal pulse shapes for given optical fibers doc2670 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Analytical and Computational Studies of Boundary Value Problems for Partial Differential Equations: Direct and Inverse Problems Vogelius This project uses a mixture of analytical and computational techniques to carry out modeling and nondestructive inspection for various problems of continuum mechanics. The research investigates the use of magnetic as well as electric data to identify small objects (or defects) inside an otherwise known medium. The qualitative and quantitative behavior of solutions to nonlinear boundary value problems that arise in connection with corrosion modeling is also investigated. The goal is to develop imaging techniques that permit effective assessment of (inaccessible) corrosion damage. Optimization of the imposed currents for electrodeposition is also under study. The work on inverse problems includes a study of the identifiability of nonlinear current densities that appear in semilinear boundary value problems related to magnetohydrodynamics. Work will continue on characterization of the (effective) boundary layer behavior encountered in composite materials; the focus will first be on polygonal domains with irrational slopes, but it is expected that the techniques developed there will ultimately lead to a deeper understanding of boundary layers for arbitrary domains. Another important activity will be the study of the qualitative and quantitative behavior of stresses in (laminated or fiber-reinforced) composites with extremely close interfaces. One goal of this research is to significantly increase the effectiveness of electric and electromagnetic imaging techniques by incorporating into the mathematical algorithms information about the behavior of the associated fields in the presence of various defects and inhomogeneities. Examples of such defects and inhomogeneities range from cracks in a mechanical component, or corrosion spots inside a pipe, all the way to anti-personnel mines buried in a field. The second main area of research is study of composite materials, which, through its emphasis on stress concentrations and boundary layers, is expected to lead to a better understanding of the relationship between microscopic phenomena and macroscopic failures doc2671 none The first direction of the research will be an investigation of the ordinary partition relation and the polarized partition with exponents 2 and 1,1 respectively. The second direction will be the continuation of a long and fruitful collaboration with Peter Komjath. The investigators will work on the following topics: Square bracket partition relations for order types, the simultaneous chromatic number and splitting of graphs, and the obligatory finite subsystems of large chromatic set systems. The PI will collaborate on compact scattered spaces with Istvan Juhasz: The award will also contain Visitor Support, which the continues a very successfull visitor program. Pofessor Saharon Shelah regularly spends the months September and October at the Rutgers Mathematics Department. Many logicians come to work with him on their problems doc2672 none Pratap This one-year award for U.S.-Germany cooperative research in biochemistry involves Promod Pratap of the University of North Carolina in Greensboro and Uli Nienhaus of the University of Ulm in Germany. Dr. Pratap will spend seven months at the University of Ulm, conducting experiments on substrate binding to sodium potassium ATPase (Na+ K+-ATPase), an enzymatic equivalent of a sodium pump. The pump couples energy released from ATPase hydrolysis with transport of sodium and potassium into the cell. It is regulated in vivo by insulin and thyroid hormone and serves as a receptor for digital glycoside drugs. The objective of the project is to understand the energy requirements for transport mediated by this sodium pump. The investigators will examine the interaction between the enzyme and ATP and probe changes in protein structure associated with ATP substrate binding. Two techniques will be employed; fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy and single-molecule fluorescence energy transfer (FRET). The U.S. investigator brings to this collaboration expertise in the proposed enzymatic system (sodium potassium ATPase). This is complemented by similar German expertise. The project also takes advantage of specialized equipment (time-resolved visible infrared spectroscopy) available at the University of Ulm. Detailed molecular understanding of sodium potassium ATPase will provide information about regulating cellular metabolism and energy balance doc2591 none The term conformal dynamics has recently gained some currency and is meant to cover real and complex dynamics. This merging of sub-areas makes sense because their methods are showing more overlap than ever. The project suggests a variety of goals. The first is the study of boundaries of connectedness loci for families of polynomials. This generalizes the study of the boundary of the Mandelbrot set. Problems include the metric structure of the boundary, including the boundary behavior of the Riemann map of the complement and the distribution of the harmonic measure. This part of the problem continues the on-going work by J. Graczyk and the proposer. The second goal is the study of boundaries of Siegel disks. The main problem in this area is deciding whether such boundaries are Jordan curves. The proposed approach is based on gaining information on the Riemann map of the Siegel disk by means of a cohomological equation. The third problem is in real dynamics and concerns the existence of wild attractors with additional properties. The forth goal is to estimate the measure and Hausdorff dimension of sets invariant under certain iterated function systems. To understand the meaning of this research in the broad perspective of science, one has first to realize the role played by one-dimensional, or conformal, dynamics. Systems which appear as models in natural sciences, such as physics, astronomy, meteorology, economics or ecology, involve multiple parameters. However, frequently one dominant parameter emerges which controls long time-behavior of the system. In such a way the logistic family appears in the study of many complicated systems. The logistic maps are quadratic polynomials. It is useful to study them on the complex plane, and thus complex quadratic polynomials enter the picture. This is the first object of our study. In other situations the system begins to show quasi-periodic or ``rotational behavior. This is situation is modeled by Siegel disks which are another subject of our proposed study. Wild attractors, which are our third subject, refer to a very unusual chaotic regime for a system in which two completely different limiting modes of long-term behavior co-exist side by side. The attractor for an iterated function system which we will also investigate appears as a projection of a certain fractal set. This kind of problem appears in applications where one often has a multi-dimensional fractal set which can be studied by projections onto lower-dimensional spaces doc2674 none The problems that are to be addressed in this project involve, on one hand, dynamics of flows on homogeneous spaces of Lie groups, and, on the other hand, the multi-dimensional theory of Diophantine approximations. Various connections between these two fields have been found in the last two decades, which significantly stimulated progress in both fields. During recent years, the proposer s research has been centered on developing new links between homogeneous dynamics and number theory, which has resulted in solving many important problems, as well as in creating new directions for further research. The investigator is to continue his work on bounded trajectories, growth rate of orbits, Diophantine approximation with weights and Khintchine-type theorems on manifolds. This project deals with algebraic dynamical systems and their applications to number theory. Many problems concerning simultaneous approximation of real numbers by rational numbers can be cast in terms of the behavior of certain orbits. Dynamical systems in the present context deal with how points in a system move over time, given a set of differential equations (or laws of nature) governing the system. It turns out that various numerical approximations used in the theory of integer equations can be better calculated once they are phrased in dynamical systems language doc2675 none This research proposal uses geometry and statistics to build meaningful confidence regions for tree structured parameters. Binary trees appear as parameters in: (1) Hierarchical clustering problems, for instance for micro-array data from contemporary genetics; (2) Methods that use decision trees such as the Classification and Regression trees (CART); (3) Estimation of phylogenetic trees built from DNA data for the taxonomy of species, but also for building `gene trees . The embedding of tree estimation in a statistical framework allows one to see trees as a special type of parameter to be estimated. However the estimation procedures have been developed without the ability to construct confidence regions for these paramters or ways of comparing various estimators of these parameters. Currently biologists validate the tree estimated by perturbing the data through a simple bootstrap of the DNA sequences and then summarizing the collection of trees obtained by associating p-values to the branches of a consensus tree. This reduces the problem to a collection of binomial simulations, losing much of the multivariate information of which groups appear simultaneously. This new constructive geometrical approach uses the tools available from topology and algebraic combinatorics. Collaboration with a combinatorialist, Louis Billera, and a topologist, Karen Vogtmann, on a more mathematical understanding of tree space allows a more natural definition of distances between points in the `tree polytope . This topological study of tree space is crucial in the definition of a notion of neighborhood that then allows a definition of continuity of the estimation function. The space of trees is a space with negative curvature. It is also possible to define geodesics on this space and convex hulls. The notion of confidence region can be defined, and it is possible to combine trees from built from different datasets or to combine trees obtained from different genes or even compare trees with other data (biogeographic, for instance). Understanding the geometry of tree space helps understand how to combine and compare trees. Whether they are hierarchical clustering trees built for micro-array DNA data or family trees built from DNA sequences, binary tree data are abundant in today s genome era. The current proposal aims to consider trees as a whole, instead of breaking them down into just sibling relationships as is done currently. This problem uses recent results from topology and the geometry of spaces with negative curvature, like the surface of a hyperboloid. In these spaces notions of average and distance have to be redefined, the hardest being ways of representing what is not naturally representable in our usual euclidean space. The challenges are both computational and geometric doc2676 none The project consists of two parts, viz., (1) Developing a class bootstrap methods, called the Transform Based Bootstrap , for long-range dependent data and studying their properties; and (2) Developing a class resampling methods, called the Varying Probability Spatial Block Bootstrap and Varying Probability Spatial Subsampling for spatial data under some (nonstandard) spatial sampling designs. Although a number of resampling methods have been proposed and shown to be effective in dealing with weak dependence in time series data, an earlier work of the PI reveals that these methods have only limited success under long range dependence. Since long-range dependent data appear naturally and frequently in many scientific studies (cf. Kuensch, H.R., Beran, J., and Hampel, F. ( ; Annals of Statistics)), developing effective resampling methods for such data is important. The transform-based-bootstrap, proposed here, holds some promise. The other part of the project deals with spatial data. Unlike the time-series case where the random process evolves only in one direction, processes with a continuous spatial index allow for more than one evolution pattern. This leads to different types of (often nonstandard) asymptotics for spatial data. The proposed project seeks to develop new resampling methods for spatial data in such cases, particularly for irregularly spaced data-sites. The emphasis of the proposed project is on development of suitable resampling methods for time-series and spatial data having a complex structure and on investigating their properties. Current statistical methodology for dependent data are predominantly parametric model based and are sensitive to model misspecification. The proposed research seeks to address this need and is aimed at removing some of the limitations of the current methodology doc2677 none Award: Principal Investigator: Chaim Goodman-Strauss For nearly 40 years, beginning with work by H. Wang and R. Berger, the undecidability of certain questions regarding tilings and aperiodic tilings have been studied. But as we extend our horizons and consider tilings in more general contexts than the Euclidean Plane, we see that many foundational questions are still open. In any particular, reasonably well-defined setting (e.g., tilings in the hyperbolic plane by polygonal tiles, moved about by orientation-preserving isometries ), there are several intertwined questions that may be asked: 1) Is there a general method to determine whether a given set of prototiles admits a tiling that includes a specified configuration? (Is the Completion Problem decidable?; 2) Is there a general method to determine whether a given set of prototiles can tile the space at all? (Is the Domino Problem decidable?) 3) Is there a weakly aperiodic protoset? (Such a protoset admits no tiling with a compact fundamental domain.); 4) Is there a strongly aperiodic protoset? (Such a protoset admits no tiling that is invariant under an infinite-cyclic symmetry); 5) Is there a computable bound on the Heesch number of protosets?; Is there a computable bound on the isohedral number of protosets?; 7) Is the period problem decidable? We consider conjectures concerning some of these questions in two settings that have been thought about for 20 years: protosets in the hyperbolic plane and monotiles in the Euclidean plane; and we sketch a number of proposed approaches to these problems. We feel these techniques should generalize and shed light on many foundation al issues in discrete geometry. We hope the project will be significant in several ways. First, these problems, which have largely been seen as isolated from each other, can all be seen as tightly connected. It is anticipated that techniques will arise that will shed light on several aspects of this problem. But moreover, the techniques under consideration may link these questions in several topics in low-dimensional geometric topology and combinatorial algebra. Finally, questions of decidability and tractability are one of the central concerns of theoretical computer science; form one point of view, we are simply exploring a particular example, but hope that the techniques we develop will be of more general use doc2678 none This research studies two interrelated function estimation problems, nonparametric regression and linear inverse problems, using wavelet methods via the approach of block thresholding and ideal adaptation with oracle. The goals are to build a bridge between the traditional multivariate normal decision theory and the adaptive wavelet function estimation, and to develop a family of estimators that achieve simultaneously three objectives: adaptivity, spatial adaptivity, and computational efficiency. A major innovation and a consistent theme throughout the research is the use of block shrinkage methods which include the standard term-by-term thresholding as a special case. Block thresholding is studied via the approach of ideal adaptation with oracle. It will be demonstrated that block thresholding serves as a bridge between the classical normal decision theory and adaptive wavelet function estimation. This leads to a systematic way of developing a coherent set of rate-optimal estimators with good empirical performance, all of which may be useful in different estimation problems. To fully understand why block thresholding works ``better than the standard term-by-term thresholding, and more generally, separable rules, I will explore the connection between adaptability and information-pooling in general orthogonal series estimation, of which wavelets are a special case. Preliminary results show that separable rules lack adaptability; they are necessarily not fully rate-adaptive. A key to adaptively achieve the exact minimax rate is information-pooling. I will further carry out research in this topic and will derive a lower bound on the amount of information-pooling required for achieving full global adaptivity. These results together will offer a deeper understanding of the benefit of information-pooling in nonparametric function estimation, and also serve as a guide for the construction of fully adaptive estimators. Besides theoretical investigation, I am also interested in applications of the wavelet methods. I am collaborating with colleagues on using wavelet methods for archiving and retrieval of medical images from tomographic databases doc2679 none THE GEOMETRY FESTIVAL The annual Geometry Festival has been held since at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Maryland, the University of North Carolina, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Duke University and New York University s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. This three day conference focuses on the major recent results in geometry and related fields. There are typically seven invited one-hour talks, no parallel sessions, and ample opportunity and space for groups to get together for discussion. The award provides partial support for graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, invited speakers and persons from under-represented groups to attend the conference. Facilities at the Geometry Festival are handicapped-accessible. In several recent Geometry Festivals, there have been special activities for women mathematicians. The Geometry Festival was held April 2-5, at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, April 16-18, at the University of Pennsylvania, and will be held April 14-16, at the University of Maryland. Future sites are decided approximately one year in advance. Further information is available at the Geometry Festival websites for last year s conference, http: www.math.upenn.edu geometryfestival.html , and at the site for the upcoming conference, http: www.math.umd.edu research geomfest . Each Geometry Festival website contains a link to the website for the next Festival, as soon as this is known doc1493 none This proposal builds on a previous NSF sponsored project , awarded to Duke University. It involves development of statistical concepts, theories and methods for multiresolution models and analyses of measurements and structures in atmospheric turbulence. It draws on recent developments in Bayesian multiscale modeling to understand the time-scale aspects of turbulence where the notions of scale and hierarchy are intrinsic. Multiresolution statistical modeling approaches are applied to vast geophysical measurements arising from air quality field experiments and simulations in order to identify key structural properties of atmospheric turbulence responsible for the transport of scalars, such as ozone. To achieve these objectives a team of researchers with expertise in statistical modeling and multiscale methods (M. Pensky and B. Vidakovic) and measurement and modeling of atmospheric turbulence (G. Katul) is assembled. The aplicability of this project is improved fundamental understanding of atmospheric transport via novel statistical techniques. Atmospheric transport, key to describing air-quality, is a complex phenomena involving modeling of turbulence which is responsible for the dispersion of polutants. The applicability of the proposed methodology will be directly tested on high frequency velocity, temperature, and ozone concentration measurements collected at Duke Forest, Durham, North Carolina. Partial support for this award is provided by the Physical Meterology Program in the Division of Atmospheric Sciences doc2681 none Matalon The objective of the proposed work is to derive and analyze mathematical models that describe the dynamics of flames. The models will be derived systematically from the conservation laws of mass, momentum and energy by means of asymptotic methods and analyzed using analytical and numerical methods. It is proposed to identify mathematical models that contain enough details of the real combustion systems and analyze these models in order to gain basic understanding on how the physical and chemical processes interact in the simpler circumstances. Comparison with the experimental record will be performed in order to test the models and their predictions. The mathematical problems involve nonlinear evolution equations and nonlinear aspects of flame instabilities. The objective of the proposed work is to gain fundamental understanding in the complex processes occurring in combustion problems, problems that are encountered in various engineering applications. Improving our fundamental understanding of combustion phenomena could suggest new directions for applied research and lead to a better design of combustion systems. The problems that will be investigated are related to phenomena that have been observed in the laboratory but are not yet completely understood. The proposed work will address three classes of problems: The first class is concerned with the evolution of premixed flames in open space and in confined environments, where the coupled effects between the flame and the hydrodynamic field is of primary interest. Studies of premixed flames have significant technological importance and are directly applicable to internal combustion engines processes. The second class of problems is concerned with instabilities in non-premixed combustion, or diffusion flames, for which theoretical studies are only now emerging. Non-premixed conditions are favored in furnaces for safety reasons and in diesel engines here the liquid fuel evaporates in the combustion chamber providing the necessary fuel vapor that burns with air. The third class of problems is concerned with flame spread over flammable liquids, where the combined behaviors in the liquid and gas phases determine the flame dynamics. Flame spread over an accidental spillage of a flammable liquid, or a running liquid fire encountered in petrochemical industries, can become a fire hazard doc2682 none Award: Principal Investigator: Michael T. Anderson Anderson and LeBrun both plan to study the global Riemannian geometry of low-dimensional manifolds, with an eye towards the ramifications of these results for smooth topology, algebraic geometry, and theoretical physics. Anderson will continue work on Thurston s geometrization conjecture, and study relations of this conjecture with global existence and singularity formation for vacuum space-times in general relativity. LeBrun will study relations between properties of the total scalar curvature functional and smooth topology, as well as related problems concerning quadratic curvature functionals. In addition, Anderson and LeBrun both plan to investigate topics in the geometry of asymptotically hyperbolic manifolds, and relations with current issues in string theory and the AdS CFT correspondence. Anderson s investigations are directly related to questions regarding the physics of black holes and the shape and long-term evolution of the universe. LeBrun s work studies fundamental questions arising from Hawking s quantum gravity program, and relates the Seiberg-Witten equations of high-energy physics to the study of gravitational phenomena doc2683 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Applied Dynamical Systems and Singular Perturbation Theory for Patterns, Bubbles, and Chemical Reactions Kaper This research project encompasses problems in chemical pattern formation, chemical kinetics, and nonlinear dynamics of gas bubbles. Self-replicating pulses have recently been discovered as new chemical patterns, and a central role in self-replication is played by strong, nonlinear pulse interactions. Pulses, such as bumps, annular rings, and circular spots in one and two dimensions, are localized large-amplitude perturbations of globally stable homogeneous states in the governing coupled reaction-diffusion equations. Specific aims include locating the hierarchies of saddle-node (disappearance) bifurcations that govern splitting, for example, when a ring solution splits into two rings, two rings into four, etc., and determining the underlying splitting mechanisms in two dimensions. Another aspect of this research focuses on stability of these patterns. Control over the stabilization of pulses in physically important systems of coupled reaction-diffusion equations is achieved by varying the strength of the coupling of the slow inhibitor field to the faster activator field, and by exploiting a recently discovered zero-pole cancellation in the nonlocal eigenvalue problems. In chemical reaction theory, this project focuses on large-scale systems involving many species and reactions and on the development of reduction methods that decrease the number of effective species and reactions that need to be modeled. The project investigates iterative numerical methods to find low dimensional manifolds in systems of reaction-diffusion equations using geometric singular perturbation theory. Finally, the project develops and analyzes a fully nonlinear model of the interactions of gas bubbles in liquids. The fields of chemistry and fluid mechanics have long had a strong influence on the development of mathematics; and in turn, mathematics has led to many useful developments in both chemistry and fluid mechanics. This research project uses mathematical theory, specifically applied nonlinear dynamical systems theory, to gain new insights and make quantitative predictions for fundamental problems in pattern formation and large-scale reaction systems in chemistry and for nonlinear interactions between gas bubbles in fluid mechanics. A nonlinear control mechanism for stabilizing patterns in which the concentrations of the reacting compounds are maintained at desirable levels in localized regions is under development. In addition, the project designs, implements, and tests reduction methods, known to be essential for modeling the large-scale systems of chemical reactions that arise in combustion, reacting flows, and other technologically important problems. Finally, the project carries out fundamental theoretical research on the nonlinear interaction of gas bubbles in liquids. Over the long term, this work will lead to deeper understanding of the complex problems of bubble clouds that generate noise behind submarines and damage turbine blades doc2684 none VARIATIONAL ANALYSIS AND DYNAMIC OPTIMIZATION : The aim of this proposal is to make an essential contribution to the mathematical progress of three classes of such problems by actually producing different optimality criteria and furnishing stability analysis results. The three classes are under three main headings: the generalized problem of Bolza, the continuous-time optimal control, and the discrete-time optimal control. The first class, the generalized problem of Bolza, falls in the heart of nonsmooth analysis where the regularity of the integrand is lacking but compensated for by the relative regularity of its Hamiltonian. Despite the fact that under certain hypotheses the second class can be viewed as a subclass of the first, it is quite beneficial to study this class directly on its own to obtain results that take into account the special and rich structure of the problem. This direction of research produces for the optimal control problems, results that are, in general, distinct from those obtained by applying the results of the generalized problem of Bolza. Furthermore, these two sets of results hold for the optimal control setting under different sets of hypotheses. The third class of problems is important for numerically solving the continuous-time optimal control problem via discretization. For the three classes, second-order necessary and sufficient conditions would be derived in terms of a quadratical functional, conjugate point theory, and a Riccati equation. Furthermore, results on the stability and sensitivity of solutions to perturbations would be investigated. The Hamilton-Jacobi theory would be employed, as well as the latest techniques from variational and nonsmooth analysis. Optimization problems with dynamical structure have become prominent in a variety of disciplines as mathematical models of systems with time evolution. In particular, optimal control theory is a subject that was developed in the s mainly to deal with applications arising from several disciplines. This includes engineering, operations management and economics. Most problem formulation were initially derived from engineering considerations which lead to the presence of control and state constraints. This is the case with the soft moon landing problem and the rocket car problem . Most recently, the formulation of the optimal control problem has been adapted to include considerations from other areas like management and economics. This accounts for the increased interest in optimal control problems with constraints containing both the state and the control variable. Therefore, providing new tools and better techniques to tackle these problems and to help in computing their solutions would have an important impact on the applications emanating from those disciplines. This is exactly the goal of the present proposal. In fact, the intent is to derive optimality criteria for control problems with different types of constraints. Furthermore, the stability of these criteria under small perturbations is analysed. This latter is crucial for applications, due to the error in measurements doc2685 none The American Chemical Society Symposium on New Synthetic Methods in Solid-State Chemistry will be held in San Francisco, CA March 26-31, . The goal of the conference is to facilitate multidisciplinary interactions and information exchange within a broad spectrum of researchers, to include CAREER grantees, and top post doctoral scholars and graduate students working in priority areas of the broad field of solid-state chemistry. The NSF funds will be used to support the attendance of young Pi s, graduate students and post doctoral scholars. %%% The Solid State Chemistry community continues to have direct impact on important technological areas that are crucial to advancing society through the design, synthesis and application new materials. Examples include porous solids for catalysis, thin films for electronics and electrooptic devices, and nanostructured materials for high-strength composite structural materials. Since these technical areas are of very high priority to industry, students educated and trained in these multidisciplinary areas involving solid-state chemistry compete very well in the job market and go on to contribute in many significant ways to the global economy doc2686 none Proposal: PI: Richard Schwartz : Schwartz proposes to continue his research in the following general areas: Complex Hyperbolic Geometry, Dynamics in Projective Geometry, and Computer-Aided Mathematics. The first topic can be described informally as follows. Suppose one suspends a finite number of mirrors in space, and places an object in the vicinity of the mirrors. Looking at the object through the mirrors, one might see an infinite, regular pattern, like trees in an orange grove. On the other hand, one might see a confused and chaotic pattern, full of partial and overlapping images. The first case corresponds roughly to what s called a discrete group and the second corresponds roughly to what is called an indiscrete group. The basic question one would like to study is: which positions of the mirrors lead to the discrete alternative? In the case of Schwartz s research, the space in which the mirrors are suspended is a curved 4-dimensionaluniverse called complex hyperbolic space. This space is an exotic cousin of the famous non-Euclidean spaces constructed by Gauss and Lobachevsky more than a hundred years ago. The second topic involves simple constructions in straight-line geometry. The classical theorems in projective geometry, such as Pappus s theorem and Desargues theorem, can sometimes be applied over and over again, rather than just once. The result is a kind of dynamical system, involving an infinite family of points and lines. The mathematics behind the dynamical system usually transcends the mathematics behind the original result. For instance, one example studied by Schwartz leads to connections with integrable partial differential equations, determinental identities, and alternating sign matrices. Schwartz proposes to continue investigating these dynamical systems. The third topic involves computer aided mathematics. One frequently encounters a situation where the computer says that a certain result is true, but a proof is nowhere insight. Schwartz plans to investigate several situations where it might be possible to use the output of the computer directly as the basis of a proof that the result is true. In other words, the computation itself becomes the justification of the result. More concretely, Schwartz would like to try to deduce the entire orbit structure of certain kinds of dynamical systems based on a finite amount of information on the orbit. Obviously such a goal would only work in special situations doc2687 none The aim of this work is to understand significant aspects of wave phenomena through developing and applying the methods of nonlinear dynamics --- the mathematics of systems that change in time and space. A main goal is to explain the robustness or stability of solitons, an important class of waves which exhibit particle-like properties and are capable of a remarkably deep and explicit mathematical description. The mathematics of wave dynamics is also unexpectedly important for prograss concerning a fundamental problem in materials science. To understand how an alloy s microscopic structure coarsens in time, the investigator is developing a new mathematical understanding of wave-like transport for singular mass distributions. This work seeks to explain mathematically a number of poorly understood characteristics of waves of various kinds, surface waves on fluids being a prime example. Such characteristics include: the extraordinary stability of solitons (waves that persist in isolation); the tsunami-like qualities of wakes produced in certain conditions by modern fast car ferries; and the nature of the powerful forces created when waves focus and break simultaneously. The common thread that runs through these investigations is the effective understanding of physical phenomena through the development of new mathematical methods for analyzing dynamic change doc2688 none Wang The investigator studies the structure, its robustness and stability, and the transitions of large scale geophysical fluid flows, to arrive at a better understanding of the prediction and predictability of these flows relevant to the typical sources of low frequency variabilities in climate. The work studies specific topics in two areas: 1) theoretical issues of the primitive equations, and 2) the presence, sensitivity and robustness of interannual variability characteristics to changes in model parameters in the underlying physical space. In Area 1, the investigator studies the primitive equations of large scale ocean atmosphere flows. Specific problems include stability and bifurcation issues of the primitive equations and related simpler models, especially in connection to climate low frequency variabilities. The main objectives in Area 2 are to classify typical large scale atmosphere ocean circulation flow patterns associated with boundary layer phenomena, and to study their structural bifurcations. Part of the work in this area is based on a new geometric theory developed recently by the investigator and T. Ma. The investigator uses a combination of physical modelling, asymptotic methods, rigorous mathematical theory, and large scale computing to yield new insights into physical phenomena. The work involves specific collaborations with atmosphere ocean scientists. The primary goal of this project is to document, through careful theoretical studies, the presence of regular interannual and interdecadal variability in the ocean basins adjacent to the North American continent, to verify the robustness of this variability s characteristics to changes in model parameters, and to help explain its physical mechanisms. The thorough understanding of this variability is of the essence in determining the climate system s predictability and prediction on subcontinental and smaller spatial scales, for time scales that equal and exceed a few years. The associated phenomena include the double-gyre wind-driven ocean circulation and the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon, which dominates inter-annual climate variability over much of the Pacific Ocean, and hence the world. The studies could lead to improved predictions of weather, climate, and environmental phenomena doc2689 none This individual investigator award is to a senior professor at Harvard University for research that will probe the electrical properties of normal and superconducting structures fabricated at the nanometer length scale, at which quantum mechanical effects may modify behavior in a crucial way. Such structures are of interest because they may make possible the further miniaturization of digital circuits. Specific attention will be paid to the following structures: (1) Superconducting nanowires fabricated by sputtering a superconducting metal onto a carbon nanotube template; here the basic issue is to understand the fundamental principles which limit how long and thin such wires can be made without losing the essential superconducting properties. (2) Carbon nanotubes themselves; these can be either metallic or semiconducting, and the planned research will study possible nanoscale devices made by manipulation of individual single-walled nanotubes. (3) Metallic nanoparticles, which make possible experimental probes of the interactions and quantum states of electrons inside a metal, and may have applications in compact memory structures. This project will provide training for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in a field that is critical for maintaining national technical leadership. %%% One of the most urgent technical problems facing our high-tech economy is finding a way to continue the miniaturization of electronic components, as described by Moore s Law , beyond the limit projected on the basis of foreseeable improvements of current technology. This will presumably require invention and testing of new concepts and new physical structures which take account of the crossover from classical to quantum physics as things are made smaller. This individual investigator award is to a senior professor at Harvard University for research that will focus on three such ultrasmall systems: superconducting nanowires, carbon nanotubes, and metallic nanoparticles. All have potential importance for devices, and the work will provide training for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in this field, where the availability of trained personnel is crucial for maintaining our national technical leadership doc2690 none Wang This proposal outlines a research program aimed at understanding the behavior of systems with regard to external inputs such as disturbances and track signals. Specifically, two types of stability properties will be examined: input-to-output stability and incremental stability. Roughly speaking, input-to-output stability requires that the output signals eventually become small if the external input signals are small, and in particular, the output signals should converge to zero when there is no input acting on the system. Incremental stability properties require nearby trajectories with nearby inputs stay nearby, and eventually converge to each other. These properties are nonlinear generalizations of some frequently used ones in the study of linear systems. To understand the properties in the nonlinear case well, it is crucial to explore their equivalent characterizations, among which the Lyapunov-like functions provide the most intrinsic insight. The main objective of the project is to investigate the equivalent characterizations and to develop the theory of Lyapunov-like functions for the nonlinear stability properties. One of the main issues in systems and control theory concerns with the study of system sensitivity to disturbances, and more generally, of the dependence of outputs on actuator and measurement errors, magnitudes of tracking signals, and the like. For linear systems, the frequency domain approach has led great success in the study of such problems. Yet for nonlinear systems, the situation is much more complicated. A key issue in the nonlinear case is to identify the most desired features and to formulate them into suitable mathematical notions. During the last 10 years or so, the notion of input-to-state stability was formulated and it quickly became a fundamental concept upon which much of modern nonlinear feedback analysis and design rest. In this project it is proposed to investigate a wide variety of extensions of the notion of input-to-state stability. The goal is to build a theoretical foundation for the study of stability-like properties for nonlinear systems, thereby providing a set of sound theoretical tools for nonlinear systems design doc2691 none Proposal: PI: Igor Rivin : I propose to concentrate on constructive (and, if possible, efficient) methods for finding and characterizing OPTIMAL geometric representations for combinatorial, topological, or geometric objects in low dimensions. In one dimension we will study graphs, in two dimensions, Riemann surfaces, in three dimensions -- compact manifolds. We will study direct geometric invariants (volume, curvature integrals, diameter) as well as less tractable but in many ways attractive spectral invariants (individual eigenvalues or determinants (regularized or not) of elliptic operators). In all cases, our goal is find the nicest geometric representation of a topological object. An obvious example is that of the round metric on the sphere. People have been lucky to discover this metric early, because the natural processes of weather work stones into approximately round shapes. Unfortunately, nature is not there to help us with more complicated mathematical objects, so we have to invent artificial processes which will work them into canonical shapes, so we can better understand the underlying structure doc2692 none Dmitry Dolgopyat. Ergodic theory of weakly hyperbolic dynamical systems. Smooth ergodic theory deals with long time asymptotic of autonomous systems which can be described by finite number of parameters. An amazing fact is that even though the evolution of such systems is completely deterministic sensitive dependence on initial conditions (that is exponential divergence of nearby trajectories)often leads the random behavior in the sense that there is asymptotic measure (equilibrium state) such that most orbits become distributed in the phase space according to this measure. During past decades powerful methods for proving the existence of the asymptotic measure have been developed. This theory already has found spectacular applications in many areas of pure mathematics most notably number theory and Lie theory. It is less clear if it can be applied to real life problems because in practise the assumption that the system can be described by a finite number of parameters is merely an idealization which is harmless in short time range but may be crucial in the long run. The aim of this project is to combine recent advances in the fields of non-uniformly hyperbolic and partially systems in order to develop effective and reliable tools for solving the following problems. (1) Determining the rate of convergence to equilibrium; (2) Describing the change of equilibrium under various perturbations of the system. At first the theory developed in this project would be of perturbative nature describing small perturbations of well understood systems in particular of transversely hyperbolic systems with compact symmetry group but eventually it should be applicable to a large class of dynamical systems. This research will be of interest in any field of science where ordinary differential equations are used doc2693 none Proposal: . This proposal is concerned with mappings of the plane which keep certain subcontinua invariant. Historically the first significant results for maps of the plane were obtained for orientation preserving homeomorphisms. All homeomorphisms of the plane are either orientation preserving or orientation reversing. In this proposal we will introduce a new class of oriented mappings. Every oriented map is either positively or negatively oriented. We expect to show that all compositions of open and monotone (proper and onto) mappings of the plane are oriented. We have generalized known results on the existence of fixed points in non-separating invariant plane continua for homeomorphisms of the plane to the class of positively oriented maps. We expect this to be true for all oriented maps. We will establish connections between these problems and the structure of invariant continua of branched covering maps of the plane including the structure of the boundary of invariant simply connected domains. We will make use of prime end techniques as well as results from continuum theory and dynamical systems doc2694 none King This goal of this project is to develop a framework that can be used to design spatially distributed control systems. Specifically, the outcome of this project is to provide a methodology to optimally place sensors and actuators and to construct practical reduced order controllers. The approach is based on a unique combination of computational mathematics and distributed parameter control theory. The framework is based on an integral representation of the optimal feedback control that arises from the solution of the infinite dimensional control problem. Computation of the kernel of the integral (feedback functional gain) may be accomplished by solving a numerical approximation of the infinite dimensional algebraic Riccati equation. However, this approach is intractable for even the two dimensional heat equation on a fairly coarse grid. The approach proposed herein is based on the use of computational methods to directly solve Chandrasekhar partial integro-differential equations for functional gains. Recent results on the smoothness and support of these functional gains can then be exploited to optimally place sensors and actuators. Moreover, initial studies show how the gains can also be used to design robust low- order compensators. The motivation for this work comes from the need to have efficient, practical controllers for complicated physical systems. The focus of the proposal is the development of an approach that is applicable to a wide variety of areas ranging from materials processing to flow control. In applications from such areas, there are several issues of primary importance that must be addressed. Among these are where to place sensors to obtain accurate measurements to be used by the controller, what to measure, where to place actuators (which implement the control), and how to design the controller so that the system is controller in real-time. Typically, the issues with respect to sensors and actuators are solved through engineering intuition. However, the mathematical framework that we propose gives specific answers to these questions. Moreover, it provides motivation for real-time control which is nearly optimal (in the sense that the design comes from the solution to a mathematical optimization problem) and is robust, which means that it is effective in the presence of disturbances, or dynamics which may have been neglected in designing the controller. The potential benefits of this work are enormous. It would be applicable to complicated (and varied) problems such as stabilizing vibrations arising from shuttle docking at the space station, reduction of drag in aerospace vehicles, and optimal control of semiconductor manufacturing. It would provide a systematic approach to reduced order controller design, eliminating much of the guesswork that currently takes place doc2695 none Semiparametric and nonparametric inferences Most scientific problems involving data and many medical research problems can be viewed as an investigation into the association between a response variable and a number of potential explanatory variables. Regression analysis, wavelet techniques, hierarchical Bayesian analysis, and neural networks are included in the set of tools that can be brought to bear on such problems. Recent advances in computer technology make it easier to collect large data sets, which in turn demand more complex scientific theories. Hence high-dimensional semiparametric and nonparametric techniques become powerful tools for analyzing data. This research concerns several related statistical problems ranging from processing signals to analyzing survival data. The research includes the further development of methodologies and computational tools for model fitting and inference in two areas. In the first area, the research develops new techniques of random-sieve methodology and deterministic sieve methodology, each of which expands existing techniques in novel ways. In the second area, the research studies foundational issues of the connection between semiparametric and nonparametric Bayesian and maximum likelihood inference, and constructs confidence bands andintervals for function inference. The areas of application include survival analysis and signal processing. The knowledge gained in this investigation is expected to bring great benefit to many other statistical areas and will be useful in a variety of complex scientific problems doc2696 none Sherrill The nuclear astrophysics and astronomy groups at Notre Dame University and Michigan State University have formed a collaboration for developing and promoting a wide scale experimental and theoretical nuclear astrophysics program. The Grant to support the resulting Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics, JINA, will provide funds for a visitors program. The visitors program will be administered by Michigan State University and will allow a number of short term (one to two week) and a few long term (one to two month) visits from researchers from the astrophysical model community. The goal of the program will be to identify key nuclear reaction rates that can be measured with current experimental facilities. In particular, rates that relate to recent abundance observations now possible with large aperture and spaced based observatories will be emphasized doc2697 none Proposal: PI: Boris Okun Okun proposes to calculate l_2-homology of right-angled Coxeter groups. In a recent joint work (still in preparation) with M. Davis (the Ohio State University) we calculated l_2-homology of some right-angled Coxeter groups and, in particular, proved Singer s vanishing conjecture for right-angled Coxeter group manifolds of dimension 5. As a corollary we get that Hopf s conjecture about the sign of Euler characteristic of aspherical manifolds is true for non-positively curved (in the sense of Aleksandrov) 4-dimensional cubical manifolds. Our calculations in higher dimensions are consistent with Singer s vanishing conjecture. Several conjectures, related to Singer s vanishing conjecture are discussed. Coxeter groups, also known as reflection groups, play an important role in various branches of mathematics. The simplest examples of such groups come from Escher type tilings - tilings of the hyperbolic plane by convex polygons. The higher dimensional analogs of these give a large class of examples in topology and geometry of manifolds. The proposed research concentrates on several longstanding conjectures, as applied to these examples. A surprising corollary of this research is an explicit estimate for the genus of a graph - the minimal genus of the surface in which the graph can be embedded doc2698 none China has about 2,500 species of mosses, about 20% of all the mosses known in the world, and has the richest and most diverse moss flora in the Northern Temperate Zone. Despite its size and diversity, there is little information about this flora available outside China. The Moss Flora of China is a collaborative international program organized by the Missouri Botanical Garden and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The project will continue to publish the remaining volumes dealing with the basic, authoritative, and up to date information on the names, relationships, characteristics, and the geographical distribution of species. The project will eventually produce eight printed volumes, a hypertext version on CD-ROM, and a variety of on line computerized information services on the web doc2699 none Award: Principal Investigator: Alexandre B. Givental In Symplectic Topology, the properties in question are usually formalized in the language of Floer homology theory and Gromov- Witten invariants. The proposed project is to extend and intertwine these two formalisms in the context of Contact Topology. The generalization exhibits natural relationships with the string theory and, moreover, shows how the structures of classical and quantum field theory emerge form the stringy properties of contact Floer homology. The project is conceived as a joint work of the P.I. with Ya. Eliashberg (Stanford University) and H. Hofer (Courant Institute) and is a part of the larger project Symplectic Field Theory started by the latter two authors several years ago. The project originates from Symplectic and Contact Topology launched in the beginning of the twentieth century by A. Hurwitz and H. Poincare and studying profound geometrical properties of classical mechanical systems. The mechanical notions of position and momentum coordinates lead to the geometric notion of a symplectic structure, in which the Hamiltonian formulation of mechanics becomes extremely natural. Contact structures are the odd-dimensional counterparts to symplectic structures. In addition to their appearances in the study of subspaces of symplectic manifolds, contact structures have been of particular interest in dimension three, where geometric ideas are illuminating some difficult questions in topology doc2700 none NEW STATISTICAL CHALLENGES POSED BY MULTISCALE AND ADAPTIVE REPRESENTATIONS D.L. Donoho many newer ideas have been proposed recently, such as independent components analysis. The proposers have been active in both domains, creating new image and signal representations and developing statistical theory to underpin adaptive signal representations. The current project will (a) pursue two opportunities arising from the recent introduction of curvelets, (b) address two active applied research areas, computational vision and geometry driven diffusions, and (c) attack some issues which are argued to be at the core of new developments in statistical decision theory. Topic (a) may have implications for applied work in tomography, image and signal processing, and (c) may impact applied uses of principal components in domains such as climate and global change studies doc2701 none Kukavica This project will address definition, interplay, and rigorous estimates of various natural small scales arising in a viscous incompressible flow. In particular, we will consider those lengths that can be derived directly from solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations, which is the main model for a fluid flow. Examples of such scales are the those resulting from the Fourier spectrum of solutions, such as the inverse of the wave number at which the Fourier spectrum is cut off exponentially, and the length scales measuring complexity of level sets of solutions. Related problems will be addressed also for other dissipative partial differential equations arising in fluid dynamics, such as the Ginzburg-Landau and the Kuramoto- Sivashinsky equations. Navier-Stokes equations are perhaps the most widely studied system of nonlinear partial differential equations. They are generally believed to contain necessary ingredients to explain much of turbulence phenomena. This project will address properties of solutions which would have implications in understanding creation and properties of fine structures in a flow. Potential applications include quantifying complexity of a fluid flow, establishment of spectral properties of solutions, estimation of the size of the mesh needed to resolve a flow numerically, and information on locating observables for the flow s monitoring doc2702 none An outstanding and long studied problem in statistical mechanics is to establish the connection between the microscopic world and its macroscopic behavior. The investigator s research concerns stochastic models associated with the evolution of dilute gases and the formation of solids. As the first step, one derives a partial differential equation for the macroscopic evolution of such stochastic models. Roughly speaking, one shows that after a suitable scaling, the particle density of a dilute gas (respectively, the boundary surface of a solid) converges to a solution of the Boltzmann equation (respectively, Hamilton-Jacobi equation). Probabilistically, such a convergence is a law of large numbers and its corresponding central limit theorem provides us with some vital information about the microscopic model under the study. Solids form through growth processes which take place at the surface. Imagine an already formed nucleus to which further material sticks from the ambient atmosphere. The process of the attachment is a function of a huge variety of growth mechanisms depending on the materials involved, their temperature, composition, etc. Following the tradition of statistical mechanics, one studies simplified models which nevertheless captures some of the essential physics. Such simplified models are proved to be useful in understanding the intricate formation of solids. It turns out that these models describe other phenomena such as the spread of infected cells in a tissue, the effect of impurity in the evolution of a fluid, etc. The investigator s research concerns the interplay between the microscopic growth rules and the macroscopic shape of the surface of a solid doc2703 none Allen I. Knutson Allen Knutson s proposed work is about Schubert calculus on flag manifolds, which combinatorially is about counting the (obviously nonnegative) number of flags satisfying a list of intersection conditions with other flags, and is computable as a (not obviously nonnegative) integral over a flag manifold. The main question in the field concerns finding a totally-positive combinatorial formula rather than the alternating sum. His work with Dr. Terence Tao on the case of single subspaces, refining totally-positive formulae already known and solving long-standing conjectures in that relatively simple case, has suggested new lines of attack on the general problem. Given four straight lines (picture them as blue) drawn in space, in generic directions, how many other straight lines (picture them as red) touch all four? In special cases there are many, but generically there are exactly two such red lines. This is the first interesting case of a general problem counting the number of flat subspaces (in this case one-dimensional) intersecting a number of other subspaces (which can even be curved). Computers can determine this obviously nonnegative number in any given case, but do so by adding many large positive and negative numbers together -- in particular it is difficult to determine easily if the number is zero. Also many interesting cases in engineering are beyond the reach of computers. Dr. Knutson s work concerns the search for a manifestly positive formula for these (no cancelation), which in particular would make it much more straightforward to determine which such problems have any solutions at all. Under previous NSF support he and Dr. Terence Tao already determined this positivity criterion in a famous subcase of the general problem doc2704 none This GOALI program teams the University of Florida and Pratt & Whitney Corp., with additional inputs from the NASA-Glenn Research Center and NIST, to develop a scientific database for the phase equilibria and mechanical behavior of both model and commercial nickel-base single crystals. This microstructural stability database will build upon the NIST database created for solidification of Ni-base alloys. The improved database will allow material engineers to know more accurately which alloys are prone to the deleterious topological close packed (TCP) phase and how its formation affects the mechanical properties of in-service components. Simple empirical statistical models exist to predict TCP phases in simple compositions, but the models have poor predictive accuracy in complex alloys. A more accurate model based on firm metallurgical principles is needed to predict microstructural stability as a function of alloy composition and temperature ranges. The improved database can ultimately be used to optimize existing alloys to more stable compositions, assess sensitivity to alloy segregation, and define optimum thermo-mechanical processing windows. P&W provides support for the graduate students and the PI for extended visits to the P&W facility each year of the program to conduct in-house experiments. The students will interact with the program advisors and contribute to electronic status reports and annual program review. The project is supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities and the DMR Metals Research Program. %%% The need to achieve greater performance, higher efficiency, and reduced emissions has resulted in higher turbine inlet temperatures. A most critical component in the turbine section is the turbine blade, which experiences high temperature, high stress, high-cycle fatigue, and a corrosive environment. Single crystal Ni-base superalloys were developed to meet the extreme service requirements in the turbine section. The high temperatures typically encountered by turbine blades and vanes can result in the potential for both microstructural and mechanical property changes doc2705 none Award: Principal Investigator: Daniel S. Freed The geometry group at the University of Texas proposes to carry out a variety of research projects, most of which are related to physics. Dan Freed s current research focuses on questions in geometry and topology arising from string theory. These include the construction of determinant line bundles on manifolds with boundary and the understanding of anomalies of actions which arise in quantizing lagrangian field theories. Karen Uhlenbeck s current research involves the geometric theory of integrable systems, as well as a non-linear Schroedinger equation arising in macroscopic theories of a ferro-magnetic continuum. These two researchers are starting a project aimed at understanding the appearance of integrable systems in conformal field theories. Bob Williams is applying his expertise on attractors to the construction of tiling spaces. Constantin Teleman is pursuing several projects in the cohomology of infinite dimensional Lie Algebras. He and his coworkers are making progress on the MacDonald conjectures, and are also giving geometric interpretations in terms of the Hodge cohomology of flag varieties of loop groups. He is also interested in homotopy equivalences between holomorphic and continuous mapping spaces. Postdoctoral members of the group are Nurit Krausz, who is working on direct computations for quantum field theory in Minkowski space, and Adrian Vajiac who uses equivariant localization techniques to study topological quantum field theories. At this point in time, geometry is a rapidly developing area of mathematics. While research in geometry, like most of pure mathematics, consists of the construction and development of abstract concepts, the origins and ultimate applications for these constructions are invariably examples and applications in more applied fields. The influence of theoretical physics on geometry is strong. For example, large numbers of geometers are currently working on questions related to quantum groups, mirror symmetry and quantum cohomology. Our group attempts not to work on problems which have already been identified by mathematicians as central, but in contrast we look at current ideas in physics of all sorts and then find, clarify, and work on the mathematically interesting questions more directly. Dan Freed s work on string theory connects the physics ideas of quantization with the mathematical subject of algebraic topology. His joint project with Karen Uhlenbeck on the appearance of integrable systems in certain quantum field theories requires an understanding of field theory, integrable systems, and the very important and basic ideas of symmetry. Constantin Teleman s work deeply involves fundamental ideas of symmetry, as well as delving into the question of how closely very messy functions can be approximated qualitatively by polynomial-like objects. Some of the geometric ideas come from other branches of physics, such as the ferro-magnetic equations studied by Uhlenbeck. The tiling spaces of William s come from beautiful examples such as those constructed by Roger Penrose. Our efforts bring new ideas and techniques into mathematics, rather than concentrating on projects which are already popular doc2706 none Theorems and algorithms for Cooperative and Dynamic Games: T.E.S. Raghavan, University of Illinois at Chicago One of the main problems of the proposal in cooperative game theory is to find efficient algorithms to solve for the nucleolus of combinatorial TU games, based on the successful algorithms for assignment and interval games. A second problem is to study games with stable cores. In particular to study core stability for combinatorial games such as assignment games. In coalitional bargaining we will look for subgame perfect stationary Nash equilibria of perfect information games which approximate in its payoff the nucleolus payoff. In the area of dynamic games, we would like to extend the policy improvement algorithm for undiscounted stochastic games of perfect information. We would formulate models of tax evasion as dynamic games and study their equilibria. The problems in cooperative games posed above are physically motivated by the following questions. Federal and state governments undertake costly construction facilities like bridges, freeways, water and sewer pipes, railroads and airports. Often the critical decision facing the government is to distribute the total cost among the users in an equitable way. The algorithms to be developed will help to arrive at such equitable costs after properly modeling the problems as cooperative games. Tax offices are flooded with tax returns; Indutrial corporations are flooded with vouchers for payment approval; automobile manufacturers are supplied with large consignment of automobile parts for quick acceptance. Auditors are few in number to audit all tax returns; accountants are few to check all vouchers; laborataries and manpower are limited to test for all defective items. One can classify the tax returns or vouchers or suppliers into various categories and make decisions on which items in the tax return or voucher to audit; what percent of defective items in a sample require acceptance or more testing. Depending on the outcome of auditing, or sequential sampling one can make new decisions on how frequently one should audit the future returns and vouchers from the specific class of violators. In polluting the environment, the violators are often big manufacturers. If the pollutants are distinct, then polluters are some what identifiable and the cost of cleaning can be decentralized. If the pollutants are of a few type, then one knows roughly which groups of polluters could have contributed to which type. The levels of violation would require sporadic or systematic inspection. In a way the total cost has to be collected by suitable taxing policies that could vary depending on the levels of pollution. For an ordinary home owner sewer charges are simply tied to the water usage. When the polluters are confounded one has to identify polluters by sending inspectors now and then to make spot check for environmental violations and punish violators by various penalties. In such problems the algorithms to be developed will show the formal ways of arriving at cost figures or inspection strategies that are both intuitively and scientifically defendable doc2707 none The Flora of China is a collaborative international project to publish the first modern English-language account of more than 30,000 species of vascular plants of China. It marks a new stage in the promotion of international botanical interchange. All taxonomic treatments are jointly co-authored by Chinese and non-Chinese botanists. Nearly 150 Chinese botanists and 500 non-Chinese botanists are involved in the project. The project will eventually result in publication of 25 volumes of text and illustrations. Family accounts will be made available on the web, and a fully searchable database of species accounts, distribution maps, and other data will enable browsing. This authoritative information will be used worldwide by scientists in basic and applied research, as well as by those working in conservation, land management, horticulture, and medicine doc2708 none This project will survey the pyrenomycete fungi of Costa Rica. These fungi are small and inconspicuous, but are an integral part of all forests and other ecosystems since they are intimately involved with such basic processes as nutrient cycling and decomposition of organic matter. Information on the diversity, systematics, and biogeography of pyrenomycetes is fragmentary, and surveys in most areas of the world are critically needed. Five areas within Costa Rica will be surveyed (Amistad Caribe, Amistad Pacifico, Arenal, Osa, Tempisque), and ecompass most of the ecosystems in Costa Rica. US and Costa Rican researchers and students will be trained by the principal investigators, and an on-line specimen-based database will be made available through the web doc2709 none ATLAS (A Toroidal Large Angle Spectrometer) is a general-purpose detector that is designed to exploit the potential of the LHC proton-proton collider. It is an international collaboration of scientists, from 145 institutes in 31 countries, including 250 physicists from 28 US institutions. Hampton University is participating in the construction of this detector with responsibilities for assembling the Transition Radiation Tracker . The LHC will provide 10 times higher center-of-mass energy and 10-100 times higher proton-proton collision rates than previous colliders, thus opening up a new frontier of physics. Discovery of the mass-generating mechanism (via spontaneous symmetry breaking involving the Higgs boson) is a primary objective of ATLAS. In addition, theoretical developments indicate the possible existence of a more general framework (called supersymmetry ) for the building blocks of matter and the fundamental interactions, which predicts the existence of a new class of fundamental particles. The discovery of such supersymmetric particles is another goal. This project is funded by the OMA MPS and EPP PHY doc2710 none A magnitude 7.6 earthquake occurred on September 21, , near Chi-Chi in Nantou county, Taiwan, about 90 miles south of Taipei, resulting in extensive damage, injuries and loss of life. Extensive damage occurred to bridges and dams and, due to the mountainous nature of the terrain, there were hundreds of s landslides, including several very large catastrophic landslides. A very important feature of this earthquake was the reverse fault rupture with vertical displacements ranging from 2 meters along the southern section to as much as 8 meters along the northern terminus. The fault rupture extends through heavily developed areas and is responsible for much of the damage to major transportation and river control structures. Since much of northern and southern California has extensive infrastructure development along active fault traces, observing and documenting the direct impact of large fault displacement in the Taiwan earthquake is of obvious practical and research interest to the US earthquake engineering community. This action provides partial support for a coordinated industry-academia reconnaissance team to document the geotechnical and engineering geology seismology features of this earthquake in as much detail as possible. Of particular interest is the impact of large seismic fault offset on urban infrastructure. As with all post-earthquake reconnaissance investigations, it is expected that vital records and data will become available as a result of this earthquake in Taiwan. From a scientific viewpoint, these large earthquakes act as full scale experiments that cannot be duplicated via controlled experiments in the laboratory or in the field. It is through quick response reconnaissance efforts that the mostly-ephemeral data from these events can be recovered and used to further advances in earthquake hazard mitigation. The results from this investigation are expected to yield information and data that will help the profession to understand the impact of large seismic fault offset on urban infrastructure. This is a multi-institutional award involving the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Southern California doc2711 none Photorealistic image synthesis is one of the most fundamental problems in computer graphics, with a wide variety of applications. In recent years, tremendous progress has been made in the simulation of light transport and the resulting lighting effects. Unfortunately, the underlying material models are, by comparison, primitive and assume that the materials are both pristine and immutable, even though real materials are neither. This severely limits the range of appearances that can be produced. This research program will focus on the development of computer graphics models for materials, which will be suitable for the requirements of image synthesis. During the award period, the research will address two key aspects of this problem: (1) Taxonomy of materials: a study of a wide variety of materials will be conducted in order to devise a classification of materials that is appropriate for computer graphics. (2) A measurement device: a portable device for measuring surface appearance properties in the field will be designed, simulated, and eventually constructed. The research program will be integrated with a training plan that will afford the postdoctoral associate a variety of opportunities for professional development doc2712 none This award to the University of California at Berkeley supports the work of Professor Jeffrey R. Long, Department of Chemistry, aimed at the synthesis of high-nuclearity transition-metal cyanide clusters that can function as single-molecule magnets. The project is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry program in the Chemistry Division and by the Solid State Chemistry program in the Division of Materials Science. A series of cubic clusters with varying metal constituents will be prepared. The cluster geometry is based on a single cage excised from a Prussian Blue type structure and consists of a cube of metal atoms with each edge spanned by a linear cyanide bridge and each corner capped by a tridentate tacn (1,4,7-triazacyclononane) ligand. Two variants of the cluster are presently known, one with eight cobalt atoms, and one with four chromium and four cobalt atoms. Paramagnetic metal centers will be used to prepare additional members of the series, giving rise to a series of compounds with total ground state spin states ranging from S=0 to S=10, in even integral values. Larger clusters will also be synthesized in order to achieve higher total spin states. This can be accomplished by removing the capping ligand from one of the reactant molecules to promote cluster growth. A related series of compounds with an edge-bridged cubic structure will be prepared; total spin values as high as S=26 are expected. Some less symmetric prolate double-cube clusters will also be pursued, as well as a ferromagnetically coupled pentagonal bipyramidal cluster with an S=18 ground state. The clusters synthesized in this research will exhibit axial magnetic anisotropy as well as overall magnetic anisotropy. Magnetic behavior will be examined using variable temperature susceptibility measurements and, when warranted, physical parameters relevant to data storage. Cluster magnets have potential applications in high-density data storage and for investigation of phenomena such as quantum tunneling of magnetization. These compounds have somewhat simpler structures and magnetic exchange pathways than some systems that have been studied previously, and so it is anticipated that determining important design features will be more straightforward. Students involved in this project will learn advanced synthesis methods and have an interdisciplinary experience in chemistry, materials, and physics relevant to nanoscience and engineering doc2713 none New, comprehensive collections of marine macrofauna will be made at hydrothermal vents on Gorda Ridge, a geographically isolated Northeast Pacific ridge that has been subject to local extinctions, and at deep cold seeps on the Monterey Fan Valley system. Collections of invertebrates from the Gorda Ridge vents and from cold seeps, chemically similar areas where taxa depend on reduced fluids released independent of hydrothermal vents to sustain chemosynthesis, will document the species present, their level of habitat restriction and assess how physical differences among these habitats affect species diversity. The isolation of Gorda Ridge vents from other North Pacific vents by a 350 km offset suggests that their fauna may be distinct; the contrast between the sedimented southern and the rocky northern vents on this ridge heightens the scientific benefit to be derived from these collections. A guide to the identification of North Pacific vent and seep taxa will be made available on the web and on a CD-ROM doc2714 none Sergey Novikov The main objective of the principal investigator s research program is the unification of topology and geometry with analysis. He is especially interesing in specific results describing some phenomena in real world physics where topological features play a key role. In particular, such phenomena were found by the principal investigators s group in the conductivity of single crystal metals in the presence of strong magnetic field, in the theory of nonlinear waves (solitons), and in the theory of quantum wires (quantum mechanics on graphs). This award will support visitors and graduate students in the principal investigator s school of mathematics which is primarily concerned with the unification of topology and geometry with analysis. In this way young mathematicians can interact with a variety of outstanding scientists. These interactions include scientific meetings with visitors in miniseminars and attendance at short series of lectures by specially invited outstanding scientists. These interactions will help attract graduate students to the subject and improve the quality of their training at the beginning of their careers doc2715 none This project will continue inventory of selected arthropod (insects and arachnid) taxa along an elecational transect at the La Selva Biological Station, Costa Rica. This work builds on the achievements of Project ALAS, an ongoing inventory of tropical rainforest arthropods at La Selva, a biotically rich and scientifically active research station situated in the Atlantic lowlands of Costa Rica. ALAS is a collaborative project of the Organization for Tropical Studies and the Insituto Nacional de Biodiversidad (INBio, Costa Rica). In this work, the biogeographic scope of ALAS is expanded to include the adjacent forested slopes of Volcan Barva, which extend from 30 m elevation rainforest at La Selva to m montane forest at the summit (the Barva Transect). Because species turnover is dramatic along trpical elevational gradients, this project promises to yield specimens of many new taxa, while increasing scientific understanding of earlier inventory results from La Selva and revealing much about the bioclimatic distribution of tropical arthropod biodiversity. The proposal calls for intensive sampling at three sites and less intensive sampling at an additional seven sites. The ten sites will be distributed at 250 m elevation intervals from La Selva to the summit of the Barva Transect. At all ten sites, a Malaise trap will be maintained for the full three years of the proejct, and a pair of Winkler samplers will be taken. Intensive sampling will take place at 500m, m, and m elevations, with a pulse sample representing all taxons at the m site. The primary goals of Project ALAS are arthropod inventory, species discovery, and scientific support of the advancement of systematics doc2716 none This grant supports theoretical research on the cohesive and conducting properties of atomic-scale metal structures, with a particular emphasis on understanding the interrelation of electrical conduction and metallic cohesion. Motivation is provided by recent advances in scanning tunneling and atomic force microscopy, which have made it possible to fabricate and manipulate metallic structures atom by atom, as well as to measure the electrical and mechanical properties of spontaneously occuring atomic-scale structures. A phenomenon of fundamental interest is conductance quantization: it has been found that the electrical resistance of atomic-scale contacts formed in many metals is nearly equal to the resistance quantum h e2 divided by an even integer. The mechanical analogue of conductance quantization has also been observed in gold nanocontacts: the cohesive force of the contact was found to exhibit quantum jumps on the scale of a nano-Newton, which were synchronized with the quantized steps in the resistance. A unified theoretical treatment of the cohesive and conducting properties of metallic nanostructures in terms of the electronic scattering matrix, which gave quantitative agreement with the experiments in gold, has been developed. The goal of the proposed research is to further elaborate this theoretical framework and to explore its implications for possible applications in nanomachines and nanoelectronics. %%% This grant supports theoretical research on the cohesive and conducting properties of atomic-scale metal structures, with a particular emphasis on understanding the interrelation of electrical conduction and metallic cohesion. Motivation is provided by recent advances in scanning tunneling and atomic force microscopy, which have made it possible to fabricate and manipulate metallic structures atom by atom, as well as to measure the electrical and mechanical properties of spontaneously occuring atomic-scale structures. A phenomenon of fundamental interest is conductance quantization: it has been found that the electrical resistance of atomic-scale contacts formed in many metals is nearly equal to the resistance quantum h e2 divided by an even integer. The mechanical analogue of conductance quantization has also been observed in gold nanocontacts: the cohesive force of the contact was found to exhibit quantum jumps on the scale of a nano-Newton, which were synchronized with the quantized steps in the resistance. A unified theoretical treatment of the cohesive and conducting properties of metallic nanostructures in terms of the electronic scattering matrix, which gave quantitative agreement with the experiments in gold, has been developed. The goal of the proposed research is to further elaborate this theoretical framework and to explore its implications for possible applications in nanomachines and nanoelectronics doc2717 none This research program is concerned with the spin dependent scattering of low-energy electrons from magnetic surfaces, and with the magnetic structure at interfaces of ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic materials. The role of magnons in low-energy electron scattering in magnetic materials is largely unexplored. A high-resolution electron energy loss spectrometer (EELS ) will be built and combined with a spin polarized electron source to measure these spin dependent excitations. The exchange coupling at ferromagnetic antiferromagnetic interfaces is of current interest in a range of contexts. For example, atomic scale roughness can lead to frustration and can drive magnetic reorientation transitions of the ferromagnetic film. This project will study the temperature dependent microscopic magnetic structures in ultrathin ferromagnetic films by magnetic microscopy and complementary structural characterization by STM and AFM. Graduate students will be trained in state of the art sample preparation and characterization techniques that prepare them for research positions in academic, government or industry laboratories. %%% A new field of electronic devices based on spin dependent transport in magnetic nanostructures is currently emerging under the name of spintronics . In these devices the electrical properties depend on the magnetic structure of magnetic materials with layer thickness of nanometers. In these magnetic materials, electrons can lose energy by exciting spin waves (magnons) in the material. These processes, currently largely unexplored experimentally, are potentially very important in determining the materials electrical properties. In this project, electrons will be scattered off magnetic surfaces and their energy losses studied. Use of a spin polarized electron beam allows one to distinguish between magnetic and non-magnetic excitations. At interfaces of different magnetic materials the magnetism can be dominated by the magnetic coupling between the materials. This can lead to unusual magnetic properties of ultrathin magnetic films. These effects depend sensitively on the interface quality, e.g. atomic scale roughness. This program will combine magnetic microscopy and STM to study the interplay between topography and micro-magnetic structure in magnetic thin films in contact with antiferromagnetic substrates. Students will be trained in cutting-edge materials preparation and advanced measurement techniques that prepare them for academic or industrial research in Materials and Applied Physics doc2718 none The proposal aims as part of the JINA collaboration at the improved experimental study of nuclear reactions, relevant for the nucleosynthesis in stellar hydrogen and helium burning scenarios. The measurements are performed at the KN&JN high current accelerators at the University of Notre Dame. One ocus of the measurements will be the study of reactions in the NeNa cycle which is of importance for hydrogen shell burning during late stellar evolution and also for explosive hydrogen burning in novae. For helium burning, the experiments will concentrate on the measurement of stellar neutron sources during the red giant phase of stellar evolution and in supernovae shockfronts. The experiments are designed for using forward and inverse kinematics in a complementary manner. The measurements will be performed using a re-circulating gas-target system which can be operated with different light and heavy target gas material (H,He,Ne). The reaction products will be measured with a set of Ge-clover detectors for gamma-radiation and a dedicated Si-strip detector array for particles doc2719 none Arthropods constitute more than 75% of the terrestrial world s biodiversity and deserve increased attention in regions of the world, such as Madagascar, where species-rich habitats are under threat. This project will provide data on patterns of species richness, turnover, and endemism of arthropods in Madagascar, one of the major conservation priorities and one of the least explored biogeographic regions for arthropods on earth. The proposed inventories are critical for efforts to understand the origin and evolution of the arthropods of Madagascar and are essential for developing conservation priorities on the island that preserve the most diversity, an effort seriously impeded by a lack of collections and trained biologists. In collaboration with the Tsimbazaza Botanical and Zoological Park (PBZT) in Madagascar, the project has the following primary goals: (1) conduct intensive inventories of terrestrial arthropods in 15 localities in western and southern Madagascar; (2) provide conservation agencies in Madagascar with baseline biodiversity data for sound conservation planning; (3) establish a digital database consisting of keys, check lists, catalogues, and specimen data on line; (4) assist in developing a national arthropod collection in Madagascar; (5) promote Malagasy understanding of entomology through training of parataxonmists and graduate students doc2720 none The proposal studies optimal structured materials. These problems require non-standard methods of calculus of variations that are developed. The first project deals with materials or structures with inner instabilities. Under ballistic impact, these materials dissipate and radiate the energy in an abnormal high rate; the effect can be used in various protective devices. The second project aims to find the optimal structures for multi-component composites. This problem is not solved even for the simplest cases; the optimal structures are significantly different from optimal two-material structures. The third project deals with specific problem of ``inverse optimization . It aims on understanding of optimality of natural structures, as trunks of trees or human bones. Here we want to determine the goal functional of the structural optimization from the known structure and external conditions. The three chapters of the proposal treat novel problem in theoretical material science that require development of new mathematical methods. All problems originate in science and engineering. The first projects is concerned with new structures with a very high ability to resist shocks. Such materials can be used in various protective devices or containers. The second project addresses optimal structures of composites that are made of three or more components. The study of such structures is demanded by many engineering applications because the majority of natural or artificial composites are made of more than two materials. The last project aims to develop mathematical methods for evaluating the optimality of biological structures. The goal here is to understand in what sense biology is optimizing its structures and to use biological solutions to evolutionary challenge in engineering applications doc2721 none Aindow This research develops a fundamental understanding of the effects of interfacial structure on the evolution of the lamellar microstructure in TiAl-based alloys and on the subsequent mechanical behavior of alloys that exhibit this microstructure. The lamellar gamma alpha2 interfaces have been studied in great detail both by conventional transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and by high-resolution electron microscopy (HREM). In a recent HREM study of a low-misfit lamellar alloy, this investigator has shown that the steps on these interfaces can exhibit a greater diversity of heights and Burgers vectors than has been reported previously. Moreover, he found that the Burgers vectors exhibited by the steps varied with both the height and sense of the step. In each case these Burgers vectors were consistent with the steps being perfect interfacial disconnections as described by Pond s topological theory of interfacial defects, not Shockley partial dislocations as proposed previously. These observations have wide-ranging consequences for any defect-mediated interfacial processes in such alloys since one would expect the behavior of perfect disconnections to be radically different from that of Shockley partials in the same interface. In this research, defect-mediated interfacial processes in lamellar TiAl-based alloys are investigated by measuring changes in the interfacial defect configurations as a function of thermomechanical history. The character of the defects are determined by using the topological theory of interfacial defects to interpret detailed TEM and or HREM observations, and the associated flux analysis are used to identify the factors controlling line defect motion. This approach addresses four key topics: (1) The mechanism for the formation of gamma lamellae; (2) The interaction of interfacial step defects; (3) Slip transmission through gamma alpha2 interfaces; and (4) Introduction of misfit dislocations at gamma alpha2 interfaces. %%% It is anticipated that by elucidating the mechanisms for the defect-mediated interfacial processes in TiAl intermetallic alloys the program will have broad technological impact for high temperature structural applications, particularly in the aerospace sector. This understanding is essential in determining alloy development strategy for the next generation of lamellar TiAl-based alloys. This program is the first instance where the topological theory is used to interpret detailed TEM HREM data from engineering alloys. Thus, it is anticipated that the work will have broader scientific impact in that it will constitute a model study to demonstrate the efficacy of the approach. This program provides integrated training for two graduate students and combines the fundamental rigor of crystallographic analyses with transferable experimental skills. It also provides the students with the opportunity to participate in an international collaboration with scientists in England doc2722 none Proposal: : This project is centered around the classification theory of topological 4-dimensional manifolds. One goal is to find sufficient algebraic conditions for splitting of a 4-manifold as a connected sum, up to an s-cobordism, in terms of the fundamental group and the intersection pairing. The main techniques for classification of manifolds, surgery and s-cobordism conjectures, remain open for 4-manifolds with large fundamental groups. This project will focus on a new approach to the problem, searching for involutions on certain canonical examples, and for possible obstructions from gauge theory. The classification of possible large-scale structures in dimension 4, which locally look like the 4-dimensional space-time, turned out to be a much more subtle problem than in higher dimensions. This area of research lies at the intersection of topology, geometry, analysis and physics. This project is aimed at a better understanding of 4-dimensional objects with large fundamental groups, which contain many loops that cannot be contracted. In particular, one goal is to analyze when a given object may be decomposed into more elementary building blocks doc2723 none This project will inventory all species of macrocaterpillars living in the 110,000 ha of tropical dry forest and its contiguous rain forest and cloud forest in the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste in northwestern Costa Rica. Research will be focused on identification and classification of caterpillar speciesand their associated adult life forms, their food plant relationships, their species of parasitoids (tachinid flies, parasitic wasps, nematodes, entomopathogenic fungi), their gut microbiota, and the creation of on-line databanks of images and data associated with species and collecting localities. The project is designed to discover, rear, photograph, and characterize caterpillars of at least another species of currently unknown macrocaterpillars (Lepidoptera exclusive of leaf miners) to yield approximately 3,000 species known and yet undiscovered for the region. In addition, the project will maintain and enlarge the collection of caterpillar and parasitoid voucher material, publish by web-based and traditional methods identification keys, species descriptions, and natural history information. This project is designed as a Long-term Large-scale Inventory and is jointly sponsored by the Division of Environmental Biology and the Division of International Programs doc2724 none The focus of this research is the preparation and study of the properties of an array of highly strained fluorocarbons and fluorocarbons incorporating interesting conjugated systems. The project includes synthesis of a building block for use in the construction of perfluoroannulenes and valence isomers, as well as synthesis of a new photochemical source of difluorcarbene. With this renewal award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. David M. Lemal of the Department of Chemistry at Dartmouth College. Professor Lemal will focus his work on extending current knowledge of fluorocarbon structure, reactivity, and synthesis, and on gaining a deeper understanding of those features that distinguish fluorocarbons from hydrocarbon analogs. Fluorocarbons and derived materials have found a tremendous range of applications in our society ranging from high-temperature, chemically inert polymers to surfactants to refrigerants to blood substitutes to inhalation anaesthetics. The project will provide training in synthetic and physical organic methods for a number of undergraduates and graduate students doc2725 none This study will provide baseline knowledge on newly discovered endosymbiotic associations between saccharomycetalean yeasts and basidiocarp-dwelling beetles. Preliminary data suggests that these beetles use fungus to eat fungi. Basidiocarps to be examined are the spore-containing structures of agarics and polypores. The project will focus on collecting and characterizing species of yeasts and associated fungus-feeding beetles from along an east-west transect along the gulf coastal plain of the US, Pacific coastal regions of Mexico, and Barro Colorado, Panama. Yeasts will be cultured and DNA extracted for identification. Beetles will be examined for the site of endosymbiont localization and identified. Basidocarp specimens will serve as vouchers for the insect collections and yeast isolations doc2726 none Professor Veronica Vaida of the University of Colorado and a senior research associate, Dr. Roberto Bianco, are funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry and Atmospheric Chemistry programs to perform experimental and theoretical studies on atmospheric aerosols containing organic compounds. Organic aerosols are known to be important in problems related to the interaction of solar radiation and Earth s climate and to the human respiratory system. Structures, properties and dynamics of the particles are not well understood. This proposal seeks to combine new experimental methods including micelles electrosprayed into the gas phase with a wide array of theoretical methods to characterize aqueous particles of varying pH coated with amphiphiles. Three aspects are to be studied: the detailed molecular morphology of the aerosols by light scattering, followed by spectroscopic studies of non-reactive interactions of gas phase molecules with the aerosols, and finally, reactions on aerosol surfaces. Theoretical work by Dr. Bianco using molecular dynamics, stochastic kinetic modeling and quantum mechanics will parallel the experimental studies. Using the acquired data and physical models, the PIs will interact with atmospheric chemists at NOAA in Boulder to evaluate the effect of organic atmospheric aerosols on the absorption of solar radiation in the atmosphere. This information is required for accurate modeling and prediction of global climate changes. Professor Vaida s educational efforts include outreach to Hispanic students in the Denver area doc2727 none Kavraki, Lydia Rice University CISE Postdoctoral Associates in Experimental Computer Science: Manipulation of Rigid and Deformable Objects with Applications in Manufacturing and Computer-Aided Surgery Object manipulation has been a central theme in robotics over the last decade. Efficient techniques have been proposed for positioning, orienting, sorting, etc., rigid objects under a variety of constraints and sensory input. Although several problems concerning rigid parts deserve further attention, recent advances in manufacturing also require the manipulation of deformable objects such as cables, pipes, paper, etc., needed for producing compact assemblies. Building on the theory of manipulation of rigid objects, the postdoctoral associate will investigate the manipulation of deformable objects and selected problems involving rigid object manipulation. The goal is for the associate to assist in (a) developing appropriate computational models for deformable objects, (b) studying fundamental notions such as stable grasping and fixturing of deformable objects, and (c) providing efficient procedures to compute the expected deformations of objects under manipulation constraints. One important and challenging application of the proposed work is the simulation of deformable human tissues. Such a simulation can lead to the development of virtual training environments for surgical procedures doc2728 none Bohringer, Karl University of Washington CISE Postdoctoral Associates in Experimental Computer Science: Probing Neural Substrates of Behavior The focus of our multi-disciplinary research program is the development of tools and techniques for multisite intracellular recording in freely behaving animals. More specifically, we are involved in a multi-investigator effort to implant a microcomputer into the brain of a marine mollusk, for the purpose of recording neuronal signals. This effort comprises three main thrusts: (1) to develop silicon microcomputers that can record from, and communicate with, multiple neurons in an intact animal; (2) to develop multi-site intracellular probe arrays, and the techniques for attaching these arrays to nervous tissue without damaging either probes or tissue; and (3) to develop neurophysiological preparations and techniques for surgically implanting both microchips and probe arrays in live, freely behaving animals, and for recording from these animals in their natural environment for several hours doc2729 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Year International Conference on Dynamical Systems and Differential Equations Du The award will partially support U.S. participants in the Year International Conference on Dynamical Systems and Differential Equations held at Kennesaw State University 18 - 21 May . The International Conferences on Dynamical Systems and Differential Equations have been during their five-year history an excellent platform for worldwide communication and interchange of ideas in the fields of Dynamical Systems and Differential Equations. This year, ten well-known mathematicians from six countries will give plenary lectures. Fifteen top mathematicians have organized thirteen special sessions with more than 120 speakers. It is anticipated that more than two hundred mathematicians from more than thirty countries will participate in this conference, which also includes many contributed talks. The lectures will highlight current areas of research, and the participants will identify important problems for future investigation. The subject of this conference is an area that has seen rapid expansion in the last two decades, partly due to the advancement of computational technology. Differential equations provide the fundamental paradigm for mathematical models of motion, from weather phenomena and ariplane flight to the flow of blood through the human heart. The theory of dynamical systems provides means to formulate and to understand the implications of models of such systems. Together, the theories of dynamical systems and differential equations form the language of mathematics that is used to describe changes in the world around us. This meeting will bring together leading established workers, junior researchers, and advanced graduate students to discuss the state of the art and to assess approaches to open problems doc2730 none Messner The rapid increase in the complexity and size of software in business, science and engineering, and the need to store increasingly large amounts of information in data bases for commercial, government, and medical applications has propelled the growing demand for data storage devices that have higher date transfers rates, have higher capacity, and are physically smaller. In future years this trend is expected to rise dramatically as the use of disk drives in portable and wireless devices becomes widespread. To respond to this demand, the current annual rate of increase in data storage density is 100% per year. The majority of this increase comes from increases in track density, because of physical limitations on magnetic recording media and read and write heads. This places disproportionate burden on the servo system to keep the head near the data track center for good read write performance of the drive. Reduced latency times to reach data on different data tracks also requires higher performance servo systems. To improve the performance of disk drive servo systems to support the rate of increase in data storage density, new and advanced analytical techniques must be developed that specifically address the complex dynamics of the disk drive mechanics. Furthermore, there are many issues concerning the hybrid nature of the control system which must simultaneously respond to both discrete-time and continuous-time signal, since the controllers for disk drives are inherently discrete-time. The construction of such methods requires a spectrum of research effort ranging from the development of fundamental theory to the creation of domain specific computational algorithms to the implementation of these algorithms on appropriate test facilities. The broad objectives of this research proposal are (1) to develop high performance design methods for control of disk drives, which have further general use; and (2) to demonstrate and apply these methods successfully to testbed disk drive systems. Two major features of the work proposed here are that the PI s will directly address the hybrid nature of disk drive control where both continuous and discrete signals must be directly confronted and that the PI s will unify the approach to control for the two separate functions of the disk servo, namely track following and track-to-track seeking. The proposed methods and approach will assist the competitiveness of the US dominated $60 billion data storage industry by providing systematic methods for control design for current and future disk drives. Furthermore, many of the analytical tools developed will be applicable to alternative mechanical applications, and insights gained from this complete treatment and evaluation of disk drive control design will be parlayed into other related technologies doc2731 none The Bryophyte Flora of North America is a biotic survey by North America bryologists intended to provide an authoritative, re-evaluated summary, both as electronic Web-accessible databases and in hardcopy printed volumes, of the names, taxonomy, and geographic distributions of the nearly species of mosses, hornworts, and hepatics found north of Mexico through Canada and including Greenland. The Flora will result in a floristic digital library to be maintained in perpetuity and providing an environment that promotes and facilitates future research in biodiversity, floristics, ecology, conservation, taxonomy, and phylogenetics. Additional research products include a three-volume illustrated printed edition with distribution maps, online multiple access electronic keys, GIS-based floristic data, and other informational electronic databases. The work will be an essential tool for the identification of mosses, liverworts, and hornworts in its printed and updateable, long-term electronic form doc2732 none The objective of this proposed research is to discover the diversity of Costa Rican fungi that attack and consume nematodes. The nematode-destroying fungi are an ecologically and potentially economically important group of fungi that regulate numbers of free-living, plant-parasitic, and animal-parasitic nematodes in nature. At present, approximately 300 species of nematode-destroying fungi have been described world-wide. The only published study for Costa Rica, however, lists only 3 species from two soil samples. The project will be focused on sampling and isolating nematode-destroying fungi from soils collected from a diverse array of natural and cultivated habitats in Costa Rica in conjunction with the Costa Rican National Biodiversity Institute (INBio). Much of the sampling and isolation will be conducted by Costa Rican researchers following training by the principal investigators. Products of the proposed research will include a published and web-based descriptive manual and interactive identification system to all taxa encountered in the study doc2733 none Launchbury, John Oregon Graduate Institute CISE Postdoctoral Associates in Experimental Computer Science: Verifying Implementations of Model Checking Algorithms Model checkers are starting to have a profound impact on the design of computer systems, both hardware and software. They have demonstrated an ability not only of discovering deep bugs in systems that traditional testing methods could not discover, but also of demonstrating the correctness of designs and implementations. However, in order to be increasingly effective, model checkers have been increasing in complexity, and now are themselves becoming susceptible to buggy implementations, and hence contain serious soundness defects. The postdoctoral associate will develop methods for ensuring that complex implementations of model checkers are sound, and hence able to be used with confidence. He or she will analyze the key implementation techniques that underlie modern model checking algorithms, such as those used to implement Binary Decision Diagram (BDD) algorithms, and develop a formal (machine-checked) theory of these implementation strategies. The theory will be used to verify the correctness of the corresponding BDD algorithms doc2734 none Richard Kieurtz Oregon Grad Institute This is a grant to support the 13th annual Conference on Theorem Proving in Higher Order Logics (TPHOLs ) to be held at the Oregon Graduate Institute during August . This conference will bring together top researchers from around the world to discuss higher-order logic theorem provers. A conference allows new ideas to be disseminated more rapidly than is possible through the literature. Applications of this subject include, among others, hardware verification & synthesis, and verification of security & communications protocols. NSF is giving $10,000 for scholarships to subsidize up to 20 students who would otherwise be unable to attend doc2735 none This project is designed to conduct a terrestrial Annelid and land snail biodiversity survey of the northern and western Philippines that will provide information on that nation s rapidly vanishing unique biota. The work will contribute new information towards revisionary systematics of the perichaetine megascolecid earthworms, and provide new knowledge of terrestrial leeches, Enchytraied oligochaetes, and terrestrial gastropods of the Phillipine island archipelago. Field work will consist of numerous collecting trips to the remaining small areas of old-growth lowland and montane rainforest in the northern and western parts of the country. The electronic products of the research will include a web-searchable database on the Philippine Annelida, a large archive of images, identification and study aids, and an interactive key to the earthworms of the archipelago, including common exotic species doc2736 none Although prokaryotes are ubiquitous and immensely important in numerous biological processes, the diversity of naturally-occurring marine populations is poorly known. The reasons for this include a general lack of recognizable morphological differences, difficulties in culturability required for standard identification, and questions about proper classification. This project will survey marine planktonic prokaryotes in diverse ocean habitats, including Great Barrier Reef sediments, California kelp beds, marine suspended particles, and a coral reef in Australia. All of the work will classify these microbes by means of 16S rRna gene sequences, where previous study has identified new major groups of archaea, phylum or class-level bacterial groups, and other prokaryotes. New sequences will be compared against a large database of existing sequences representing major lineages of prokaryotes doc2737 none Proposal: PI: Peter Teichner This project studies the topology of 4-dimensional manifolds. The most prominent problems are the characterization of good fundamental groups for the 4-dimensional s-cobordism theorem, the formulation of a 4-dimensional (homology) surgery theory, and the understanding of the topological knot concordance group. The existing techniques from nilpotent solvable group theory and higher order intersection numbers of 2-spheres and Whitney towers in 4-manifolds are to be combined with methods from L2-homology and von Neumann algebras. One of the most exciting mathematical discoveries in the last decades is the fact that Euclidean space behaves very differently depending on whether the dimension equals or doesn t equal four (which is the dimension we live in, allowing time as the fourth dimension). More precisely, there is a unique way to do calculus in Euclidean n-space except for n=4 where there are uncountably many such theories. These are the exotic structures on Euclidean 4-space, discovered by Donaldson, Freedman and others around . This project deals with similar questions on more complicated 4-dimensional manifolds. For example, these may have nontrivial fundamental group, so they are possibly more similar to our universe than Euclidean 4-space. In this case the fundamental questions are still wide open and there seems to be a deep relation to the continuous dimension introduced by von Neumann in his work on quantum mechanics doc2738 none This research is an experimental study of dynamic mesoscopic transport phenomena in semiconductor microstructures and hybrid metals superconductor systems. The unifying theme is the interplay between three elements: quantum coherence, disorder or chaos, and dynamics in the form of a time-dependent potential. The proposed experiments also have in common the theme of dc pumping of charge using cyclic oscillating potentials, extending recent work on adiabatic quantum pumping to include the role of decoherence, dissipation, and nonadiabatic time dependence. Besides shape-deformable quantum dots, two novel pumping devices are proposed: a pump that operates in the fractional quantum Hall regime, allowing a pumping of fractionally charged quasiparticles, and a hybrid metal-superconductor that uses the ac Josephson effect to produce a cycling time evolution of boundary conditions. This research will be carried out in a new laboratory at Harvard University. The project will support a graduate student as well as materials and supplies needed for the experiments. Other students on these projects will be supported by independent fellowships. The students will be trained in state-of-the-art nanoelectronics techniques and will be well prepared for careers in academe, industry or government. %%% Trends in microelectronics have two clear directions, smaller and faster. The study of quantum mechanical effects in electronic devices-particularly disorder or chaotic systems-is known as mesoscopic physics, where meso indicates intermediate in size between atoms (where quantum physics is well understood) and the realm of large, classical electronics, governed by Ohm s law and other familiar classical laws. Mesoscopic physics has seen rapid development in the last decade, predominantly as a result of advances in the fabrication of clean semiconductors devices. By comparison, little work has been done on the high-speed side, and most of what is known about quantum-coherent devices is restricted to dc. The proposed experimental work aims to investigate quantum coherent electronic devices fabricated from semiconductors and hybrid metal superconductor devices, at high frequencies, when effects of time evolution can lead to the destruction of quantum coherence effects, but can also lead to new effects such as the pumping of electrons due to cyclic, periodic changes in the effective shape of the device. These results will impact our understanding and development of high-speed nanoelectronics. The project will support one graduate student as well as provide materials and supplies for the project. Other students working on these experiments will have outside funding from the NSF and other sources. The students will be trained in state-of-the-art nanoelectronics techniques and will be well prepared for careers in academe, industry or government doc2739 none Dahmen This grant supports theoretical research in condensed matter and materials physics. An increased interest in real materials has brought much attention to disordered systems. Disorder changes the free-energy landscape of a system and can lead to large energy barriers between metastable states, resulting in extremely slow approaches to equilibrium, as seen in many experiments. There has been much progress made recently in the study of distinctly nonequilibrium effects, such as collective response to an external driving force (avalanches) and internal history dependence of the system (hysteresis). This project deals with different effects of disorder on long length-scale behavior in hysteretic systems. On long length-scales, where local fluctuations in the amount of disorder are averaged out, systems driven far from equilibrium can often be usefully described by simple laws, and universal, i.e., detail independent, critical behavior has been detected. Examples range from collective dynamics of advancing domain walls in magnetic tapes to event size distributions of earthquakes. The methods applied include ideas from dynamical systems and chaos, critical phenomena, hydrodynamics and disordered systems theory. Hysteresis loops are often seen in experiments at first-order phase transformations when the systems goes out of equilibrium. They may have a macroscopic jump, roughly as seen in the supercooling of liquids, or they may be smoothly varying, as seen in most magnets. In a recent collaboration with the Sethna group at Cornell, we have studied the non-equilibrium zero-temperature random-field Ising model as a model for hysteretic behavior at first-order transformations. As disorder is added, one finds a transition where the jump in the magnetization (corresponding to an infinite avalanche) decreases to zero. At this transition, the model exhibits power law distributions of noise (avalanches), universal behavior and a diverging length-scale. The effect of adding temperature fluctuations and finite field sweep rate to the system will be studied. Tuning the sweep frequency allows the entire experimetally relevant crossover regime to be studied between the two extreme cases that are found in the literature (far from and close to equilibrium). The results will be used to interpret experiments in magnetic systems and to pursue related questions relevant to industrial applications. %%% This grant supports theoretical research in condensed matter and materials physics. An increased interest in real materials has brought much attention to disordered systems. Disorder changes the free-energy landscape of a system and can lead to large energy barriers between metastable states, resulting in extremely slow approaches to equilibrium, as seen in many experiments. There has been much progress made recently in the study of distinctly nonequilibrium effects, such as collective response to an external driving force (avalanches) and internal history dependence of the system (hysteresis). This project deals with different effects of disorder on long length-scale behavior in hysteretic systems such as magnets doc2740 none Parsons - Continued scaling of metal oxide semiconductor transistors to sub-100 nm gate lengths will require new metal oxide gate insulators with higher dielectric constants to maintain large capacitances (i.e., equivalent to 1nm of SiO2) and minimize gate tunneling currents. Typical low temperature chemical vapor deposition (CVD) processes for metal oxides on silicon result in an unwanted thin (1 to 2 nm) SiO2 or metal silicate layer at the Si metal oxide interface. The interface structure is determined by the kinetics of individual deposition reaction steps that favor consumption of the silicon substrate, even when the deposited bulk oxide is thermodynamically stable on silicon which indicates a problem for non-native metal oxide silicon interfaces not encountered in the native SiO2 Si system. Specifically, how does one control the first few angstroms of non-native dielectric deposition on silicon to achieve the required bond structure, composition, and electronic quality at the interface? This problem extends to other heterojunction applications, such as optical interconnects, magnetoresistive devices, bio-functional systems, etc., where atomic-scale control of interface structure is important for device performance. In this project the kinetics of interface layer formation during deposition of yttrium oxide, yttrium silicate, and other metal oxides on silicon will be studied. This will include studies of surface treatment on substrate consumption and interface oxide formation, and electrical performance of silicon yttrium oxide and silicon yttrium silicate interfaces. The work will involve direct measurement of deposition reaction kinetics in plasma and thermal CVD, using in-situ infrared spectroscopy and on-line Auger electron spectroscopy. The project will be done in collaboration with Roy Gordon at Harvard University, who will provide various reactants, to determine the effect of metal-organic precursor structure on interface reactions. Atomic layer deposition methods will be used to demonstrate controlled interface abruptness and improved electronic performance. These experiments will help establish new links between surface reactions, process temperature, and electrical performance of deposited thin film dielectrics, and will have implications for controlling interface structures in other sub-nm electronic, optical, and magnetic devices doc2741 none Craig R. Guilbault For the sake of simplicity and convenience, topologists often focus on compact spaces. Nevertheless, non-compact spaces---with all of their associated complications---are frequently unavoidable. For example, the complement of a compact subset of a closed manifold is not compact. Hence, a topologist studying embeddings is quickly forced to consider non-compact manifolds. In fact, much of the foundational work in the area of non-compact manifold topology was motivated by questions about embeddings. While non-compact manifolds and complexes continue to play a central role in topology, an important new source of examples has entered the picture. Increasingly, the examples of widespread interest arise as covering spaces of compact manifolds and cell complexes. In fact, progress on some of the most fundamental questions in geometric topology and geometric group theory demand a better understanding of these types of spaces---most of which are non-compact. With these examples in mind, this project aims to generalize and expand our understanding of non-compact manifolds and cell complexes. Of particular interest are Z-compactifications, structure theorems for ends of non-compact manifolds, and existence and uniqueness questions for boundaries of groups. Many objects encountered in geometry and topology---like the real line and the Euclidean plane---are unbounded or open in nature. These spaces are fundamentally different from bounded or compact spaces, such as a line segment, a circle, or the surface of the earth. The extra flexibility permitted by unboundedness opens the door to exotic behavior near infinity . There are many examples of unbounded spaces that---although they are constructed from simple bounded pieces---have quite complicated geometry and topology near infinity. One strategy for investigating such a space is to compactify it by adding a boundary at infinity---much as an artist mentally creates a horizon of vanishing points to help him draw in perspective. When this is possible, properties of the boundary can reveal important characteristics of the original space. In some sense, the boundary represents a crystallization of the topology at infinity . Another strategy for studying an unbounded space involves breaking it into a manageable collection of bounded pieces. Ideally, one would like to choose pieces that capture key properties of the space, thus allowing one to study the non-compact space---one compact piece at a time doc2742 none Kelton This research explores the formation and structure of titanium-zirconium based quasicrystals. There are several facets to the program: (1) elastic neutron scattering and NMR studies of quasicrystals that are partially loaded with hydrogen and deuterium; (2) examination of the Ti-Zr-Ni phase diagram; (3) the transformation mechanisms of transition phases; and (4) the nucleation and growth characteristics of the crystal metal hydride phases that form during hydrogen cycling. An attempt is made to model and measure quantitatively the time-dependent nucleation rates in selected Ti-Zr glasses that crystallize to nanostructured quasicrystals and crystals. In addition H and D are used as structural probes for stable AlPdMn and MgZn-rare earth quasicrystals to test proposed structural models. %%% The results of these studies are of value to the quasicrystal scientific community and the broader materials community. Insight gained from the crystallization studies leads to refinements of new models for nucleation and improved processing capabilities for the production of nanostructured materials doc2743 none he focus of this research is the development of asymmetric methods for synthesis using boronic acid chemistry and, as an example, the stereocontrolled synthesis of small rings via cyclization of chloro boronic esters to enolates will be probed. The borosilicate glass surface catalyzed ligand exchange that converts stable boronic esters to alkylboron chloride amine complexes plus diol sulfites will also be studied in order to affect the recovery of valuable chiral directors. Further, this reaction also has potential for converting highly hindered asymmetric boronic esters into more reactive borane derivatives. With this renewal award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Donald S. Matteson of the Department of Chemistry at Washington State University. Professor Matteson will focus his work on developing asymmetric synthesis methodology using boronic ester chemistry. The area of research is excellent for the training of graduate students and the results of the research could have implications for the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries doc2744 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Wave Turbulence -- Open Challenges and New Opportunities Zakharov Wave turbulence, the turbulence of a sea of weakly-coupled dispersive wave trains driven far from equilibrium by sources and sinks, is ripe for renewed investigation. First, there are many open challenges which need to be addressed: the effect of discreteness in impeding spectral energy redistribution; the general nature of anisotropic finite flux spectra in wind-driven oceans, in magnetohydrodynamics in the presence of strong magnetic field, and in sound waves; the role of hidden constants of the motion; the surprising manner in which finite capacity Kolmogorov spectra are realized; the modification of Fermi-Dirac (and Bose-Einstein) spectra in contexts such as semiconductor lasing where finite flux effects are important. Second, the subject is important because it provides tractable models which can be exploited to gain insight into the phenomenon of intermittency. Because the approximations which underlie the applications of wave turbulence theory are generally not valid uniformly in wave number, there are windows of intermittency at both high and low wave number values. At these scales, the system is fully nonlinear and exhibits intermittent bursts of activity associated with coherent but almost singular structures. Our aim is to build a comprehensive theory which combines and connects wave turbulence with the random occurrence of coherent events. This project investigates the long-time statistical behavior of complex solutions to nonlinear field equations arising in a broad family of physical systems. Applications of the research include modeling of: wind-driven ocean waves, weather, laser beams in transparent materials, sound waves, solar wind and stellar atmospheres, and motion of charges in semiconductor lasers. All these systems exhibit turbulent behavior with common features, and the project develops the theory of this common structure. The goal is to gain understanding of the behavior of this family of physical systems as well as to study the general statistical behavior of nonlinear systems in which large fluctuations doc2745 none Susan P. Harrison U of California - Davis The 40,000-acre wildfire in Northern California that occurred 16 October presents a very valuable scientific opportunity to address new questions about aquatic ecosystem and terrestrial plant community responses to perturbation. Aquatic studies will examine (1) whether nutrient enrichment cascades up alternating trophic levels (as sometimes found in simple experimental systems) or increases abundances at all trophic levels (as typically found in complex natural systems); (2) the speed of recovery of the simpler invertebrate faunas of intermittent streams in comparison to more complex faunas of permanent streams; and (3) whether nutrient enrichment leads to higher biological uptake of mercury in this system. Terrestrial studies will examine how spatial isolation from seed sources influences the recovery of the grassland plant community and whether the effects of fire on the plant community (including its dominance by alien species) depends on substrate and grazing history. The results of this project coupled with a multi-year pre-fire database will provide new insights into how large infrequent fires influence patterns of diversity at the watershed scale doc2746 none Students who are supported solely by industry are typically so involved with solving the company s daily problems that they do not have opportunities for conducting research to aid their understanding of the basic problems encountered. This project provides funding for two students so that half their time will be devoted to research on new opportunities identified through company projects and the remaining time will be devoted to working on the company s daily problems. The company identified for this project is Glaxo Wellcome (GW), with Dr. S. Stanley Young serving as industry mentor. Specific goals include developing methods for: (a) variable selection in the context of pooled data on compound potency; (b) using pooled data for elucidating the relationship between the chemical structural features of individual compounds and the probabilities that the compound will be biologically potent or will restrict biological potency; and (c) predicting the potency of an individual compound solely based on its chemical structural features. Students will gain experience in formulating research problems, evaluating project impacts on the company s operation and on scientific research, and making oral and written presentations to individuals from different disciplines. This proposal will also impact GW s operations. Because company scientists are involved in the program, the procedures developed will be more suitable for their applications and there is a potential for the company to invent profitable products resulting from these studies. This GOALI project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc2747 none This project will examine the origin and dynamics of turbulence in the interplanetary medium. Turbulence will be incorporated into mean-field models of the solar wind and the role of turbulence on shock waves and the acceleration of particles at shocks will be investigated. The role of turbulence in the modulation of cosmic rays will also be investigated. The coupling of turbulence to the mean-field models of the solar wind will be accomplished by introducing source terms for the dissipation of turbulence into the large-scale solar wind model. To investigate the role of turbulence in shocks, coupled microscopic and macroscopic models of the shock waves will be used to generalize the Rankine-Hugoniot conditions. The influence of turbulence on cosmic ray modulation will be accomplished by adding turbulent scattering to existing cosmic ray transport codes doc2748 none Satija This grant supports the work of a female condensed matter theorist from a non-Ph.D. granting department and is a co-funding decision with the PHY division. The research program concerns the behavior of energy eigenvalues and wavefunctions of a particle moving in a 1-dimensional aperiodic quasiperiodic potential, especially one where the departure from periodicity arises as a result of more than one competing length scales. The focus is on the change of character of wavefunctions. In a strictly periodic system, the wavefunctions are all extended delocalized. In a random system, they are localized. There must be a changeover, which can be studied by looking at these a quasi periodic structures. There are several projects on a variety of lattices, which consider the effects of many competing length scales as well as of quantum interference. Further there are plans to generalize and study these effects in two dimensions. %%% This mid-career female member of the faculty at a non-Ph.D. granting department has been well known for her work on the motion of a particle in 1-dimension in an aperiodic or quasiperiodic potential well. The main objective here is to connect the two extremes: In a periodic system we know that the particle motion is largely periodic and log-range. In a random system, the particle motion is not long range. The objective here is to consider how the changeover occurs. There are also projects to study quantum effects and possible extensions to 2-dimensions, e.g. in thin films doc2648 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Hyperbolic Systems of Conservation Laws - Viscous Conservation Laws - Applications Trivisa This research deals with the general areas of hyperbolic conservation laws and viscous conservation laws. The first set of questions concerns the well-posedness of solutions to hyperbolic systems of conservation laws with large initial data, the uniqueness and regularity of solutions, and the study of some hyperbolic systems of conservation laws in several space dimensions. The second set of questions lies in the area of viscous conservation laws and deals with the study of the compressible Navier-Stokes equations with applications in fluid dynamics and combustion theory. The main objective of this research project is to initiate a systematic investigation of the qualitative behavior of solutions to general multidimensional Navier-Stokes equations with large initial data. This is interdisciplinary research, lying on the interface between continuum physics and the theory of hyperbolic (and viscous) conservation laws. The investigator studies partial differential equations arising in continuum physics with the expectation that the underlying physical structure will direct the analysis, while in return the mathematical analysis of some nonlinear partial differential equations will further the understanding of continuum physics doc2750 none Mizel The goal of the part of the present proposal involving unorthodox materials is to develop an understanding of step structure and step motion in the limit of small step free energy for crystals with surface defects consisting of monatomic height steps separated by terraces. Such defects are fundamental structures since steps--as sinks and sources for atoms-- influence mass transport at surfaces and therefore influence fundamental multidimensional surface processes such as nucleation and growth, facet formation and thermal roughening in crystals and their applications. Consequently these defects have been studied since the s and fairly successful macroscopic models to describe behavior in most materials have been developed. These models express the energy of an isothermally wandering step as the integral of the (generally orientation dependent) step energy per unit length. However in the limit of vanishing step free energy, new physics [e.g. higher-order elastic interactions and step-to-step interactions] enters the picture. These higher-order effects can lead to the spontaneous development of highly periodic step structures. Such novel step morphologies are members of an increasingly important class of self- organizing systems: systems that spontaneously form atomic scale periodic patterns. A recent ( ) pathbreaking experiment on Boron- doped Silicon in which the isothermal wanderings in question, contrary to the simple models cited, are periodic and increase with a decrease of the steady state temperature in an interval presents a significant challenge to the development of appropriate macroscopic models for this branch of crystal theory. It reveals that there is a major gap in the current technical understanding of defects in crystals of this nature, since detailed analysis of the dynamics of these fluctuating step edges is incompatible with current theories of step energetics. Resolving this issue is important for near term attainment of non-routine applications involving crystals with small step free energy, since it has direct impact on understanding the atomic-scale structures they develop. In turn, this understanding is needed for the development of materials with uniformly closely spaced and nearly congruent self-organized [quantum dot] defects--such self-organizing materials being crucial to the development of monochromatic lasers and quantum wires, for example, as device scales shrink. The goal of that part of the present proposal involving orthodox materials is focussed on clarifying an as yet unresolved issue in the theory of nonlinearly elastic materials. Equilibria for such materials subjected to specified boundary displacements correspond to deformations which minimize a stored energy integral whose integrand associates to each deformation a nonnegative real valued function. Such stored energy integrands are subject to various constraints in order to correctly represent possible physical materials. In the last decade a previously unnoticed issue has been raised. Namely in view of a little known one-dimensional variational phenomenon (originally established in ) that for certain variational integrands the minimizing functions can differ depending on the smoothness of the class of deformations under consideration -- even though the smoother class of functions is dense in the larger class. In fact there can be a nonzero difference between the infima of the integrals associated with such classes [Lavrentiev s gap phenomenon]. A corresponding gap between classes of continuous deformations in three dimensional nonlinear elasticity would imply that the global equilibrium deformation in the larger class would be energy minimizing and more singular than the energy minimizing global deformation in the smaller class--whereby structures devised on the basis of the less singular deformations could develop flaws [fractures], contrary to the evidence provided by calculations based on standard methods. To summarize, the PI proposes in the case of the unorthodox type of crystalline material exemplified by Boron doped Silicon to devise variational models that will shed light on the entirely nonstandard physical behavior of such materials. Such models will involve devising what are known as Landau-de Gennes type order parameter terms for the free energy of such materials to reflect the particularly delicate atomic interactions governing the nanatomic structure of such crystals. On the other hand, in the case of orthodox materials the PI intends to clarify whether in the well-established theory of nonlinear elasticity there can occur materials which for certain classes of boundary conditions can exhibit an energy gap between the minimum energy on one class of continuous smooth deformations and the minimum energy on a smaller class. The occurrence of such an energy gap could lead to cases in which structures devised on the basis of computations associated with the smaller class could develop flaws because the actual energy minimizing deformation is more singular than the computations suggest doc2751 none Dr. John Arnold, Chemistry Department, University of California - Berkeley, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division for the development of new monoanionic ligands to support catalytic and stoichiometric reactions. The major thrust is to prepare a new series of monoanion ligands that will be capable of supporting chemistry related to that presently dominated by Cp based systems. Specifically new functionalized amidines and derivatized 1,4,7-triazacyclononanes will be developed, their complexes with trivalent metals prepared, and their stoichiometric and catalytic reactivity investigated. Reactions mediated by transition metal and lanthanide element compounds are important on an industrial scale and provide ever increasing fundamental knowledge regarding the nature of the chemical bond. In recent years, there has been considerable effort in developing ligands (groups that are attached to a metal) that will tailor the chemical reactivity and properties of the metal. In this study new ligands will be designed to facilitate reactions at metal ions with a 3+ charge. This is an important goal since many important processes that are known to take place at 4+ ions have not yet been efficiently developed for 3+ counterparts doc2752 none The Polar Research Board (PRB), a unit of the National Research Council, was established in to advise the government on polar issues. The PRB strives to make research in the polar regions more productive and responsive to the needs of the United States, to maintain U.S. awareness of, and representation in, international science programs, and to enhance understanding of issues in polar regions. The Board provides national and international scientific and technical information to U.S. government policy makers and the polar community, represents U.S. interests in international nongovernmental polar scientific organizations and conducts focused studies in areas of polar science, technology and resource management. The PRB facilitates participation of U.S. scientists in two critical international committees dedicated to planning and coordination research in the Arctic and Antarctic [i.e., the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) and the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR)]. PRB activities are conducted by a group of volunteer experts, supported by a small staff, selected from academic institutions, industry and national laboratories. The PRB will continue to serve as an information center for distributing materials on IASC and SCAR to U.S. government agencies and the polar community. Other federal agencies and foundations also provide support to the PRB doc2753 none This proposal concerns parameter estimation methodology for an important class of statistical models. These models, which we refer to as ``generalized hierarchical models (GHMs), have proven to be extremely useful in a wide range of scientific endeavors. Specific examples of applications that have appeared in the scientific literature include: the impact of passive smoking, changes in voting behavior, clinical trials for a treatment for epilepsy, social surveys of households in rural China, sheep cloning experiments, the estimation of animal abundance and the analysis of multivariate survival data. A general purpose algorithm for estimation called EM (expectation-maximization) is particularly suited to the GHM setting. However, implementation the algorithm is complicated because it often involves the calculation of intractable multi-dimensional integrals. Two methods for dealing with these integrals that have received some attention recently are Monte Carlo EM (MCEM) and Stochastic Approximation EM (SAEM). Both methods involve replacing intractable integrals by Monte Carlo approximations. Unfortunately, applications of the these Monte Carlo fitting algorithms to GHMs can often take hours or even days to converge. This has limited their widespread use so far. The situation will no doubt improve with the availability of faster computers. However, the development of much faster algorithms would accelerate this process tremendously. Hence, the proposed research concerns a detailed comparison of the MCEM and SAEM algorithms with a view towards substantially improving their performance doc2754 none This project is focused on the designed construction of metal-halide open framework materials out of building blocks that are disposed toward reactivity with small molecules and or electron transfer. In previous work we have demonstrated the utility of a halide for oxide substitution strategy to design novel metal-halide materials patterned after known oxide and chalcogenide phases. The present proposal will build on this success and target the complementary investigation of the synthetic design of specific structures, and the design and characterization of the reactivity of novel metal-halide materials. Synthetic investigations will extend principles that we have developed for the construction of metal halides by investigating template framework interactions; and by constructions with new metal-halide building blocks. Reactivity studies will probe the reversible sorption of small molecules and electron transfer reactions, and their respective influence on framework distortion and reconstruction. Specific efforts will include: 1. The designed templating of framework structures to understand the role of the template in framework formation and control of the construction of specific architectures; 2. The construction of novel materials with redox active templates such that framework to template charge transfer can be utilized to design magnetic, optical and electronic properties; and 3. The synthesis of halozeotypes from tetrahedral transition-metal halides to create redox tunable frameworks with coordinative unsaturaturation at the metal centers to create active sites in a size and shape selective environment. This is a fertile area of solid-state synthesis that is leading to promising areas of applications in materials technology s such as liquid crystals, phosphors and chemical sensors doc2755 none In this project a two-tip scanning tunneling microscope (STM) of a new design, never considered before, will be developed. In this design the two tips probe a very thin sample from opposite sides. In addition, another two-tip STM will be designed in which the two tips probe the sample in a more conventional geometry, with both tips on the same side of the sample. Nanotube tips recently developed by the investigator enable these designs. Nanotube tips may be ideal for spin-polarized tunneling, as well as for a host of scientific and practical applications that can benefit from a coherent point source of spin-polarized electrons. The two-tip STM will make possible new experiments that will probe the Green function of the sample material, so that one can get detailed information on semiconducting or metallic samples such as mean free path, the phase and energy dependence of scattering from impurities, details of the band structure, and the transition from the ballistic to diffusive transport. This instrument can also probe the symmetry of the order parameter in a superconductor, so that refinements of the current d-wave picture can be obtained for high temperature superconductivity. Graduate and undergraduate students will participate in this project. They will benefit from training in advanced instrumentation and techniques, in the development of the novel STM instrument, and from using it to probe the behavior of electrons in the most detailed fashion yet available. %%% Microscopes with ever increasing ability to probe small details have been major instruments in advancing our understanding of the microscopic structures and behaviors of materials. Scanning tunneling microscopes (STMs) are the latest types of such instruments that now allow the probing of materials at the atomic level of dimensions. In this project, a new type of STM, based on the use of two, rather than one, probe tips will be developed. One version will have the two tips on opposite sides of a very thin sample, a geometry that has never before been even contemplated. A second version of the two-tip STM will be of a more conventional geometry, in which the two tips are on the same side of the sample. Both versions can be realized on the basis of probe tips, which are atomically sharp needles (carbon nanotubes), that were recently developed in the investigator s laboratory. Such two-tip STMs will allow a new set of investigations of the properties of materials, including high temperature superconducting compounds that will result in a better understanding of their structure and behavior. These results will ultimately be of use and benefit to technology. This project will involve the participation of graduate and undergraduate students. They will thereby acquire knowledge and skills in a very active contemporary area of condensed matter physics and materials science. These will enable them to be productive members of the scientific technological workforce of the next few decades of this century doc2756 none Robles will use this SGER award to assemble a workgroup of colleagues to use innovative modeling techniques and progressive empirical approaches to model spatially structured dynamics in marine communities. The workgroup will consist of Hal Batchelder (UC Berkeley), Doug Donalson (UC Santa Barbara), Roger Nisbet (UC Santa Barbara), Robert Desharnais (California State at Los Angeles), Mark Denny (Stanford University), and Carlos Robles along with his students and Post Docs. The workgroup will utilize the NCEAS format. The paradigm that governed the thoughts of many researchers for a generation - and which therefore underlay explanations of such diverse phenomena as intertidal zonation, maintenance of diversity, and stable coexistence of predators and prey - has begun to be questioned as new observations and experiments have been made. The original paradigm consists of the keystone predator hypothesis and the refugia hypothesis, which emphasize the role of predation in determining prey population structure. In this study, the researchers will examine the alternative paradigm of Spatially Structured Dynamics, in which new spatially explicit population models (SEPMs) must consider shifts in the relative levels of predation and prey recruitment over environmental gradients, rather than hiatuses in predation caused by physical stresses alone. Prior attempts at such spatial modeling of intertidal communities have been limited in focus or else have been based on hypothetical conditions with no empirically based parameterizations. Robles and the workgroup will construct SEPMs based on twenty years of experimental data that Robles has collected on mussel population structure at rocky shores along Pacific coast. Two alternative modeling approaches will be used, a stochastic arena model using cellular-automata, and an individual-based model. The dual thrust will allow the researchers to take advantage of the strengths of each approach. The workgroup will validate the models in several ways including the comparison of predicted maps with observed GIS maps, thus pushing modeling practice to greater levels of realism. This project will be a unique opportunity to bring together a group of PIs with strong ecological modeling expertise. The incorporation of strong field data into new spatially explicit population models may have substantial implications doc2757 none The main aim of the project is to describe, classify, enumerate and name the interesting discrete groups in low dimensional spaces, in as uniform a manner as possible. My orbifold symbol does this very effectively for those that act in 2-dimensional spherical, Euclidean or hyperbolic spaces, and as part of the project I am writing a book on this theory with Heidi Burgiel and Chaim Goodman-Strauss. This has been extended to the 3-dimensional spacegroups in a paper soon to be published by Conway, Delgado, Huson and Thurston. A book on quaternions and octonions that I am writing with Derek Smith will contain chapters on the subgroups of GO(4), and joint works with Marc LaFortune and Frank Swenton will be concerned with the classification and enumeration of knots and 3-manifolds via the associated discrete groups in hyperbolic 3-space. The symmetries that objects can have are of great interest to many different communities both inside mathematics (number theorists, geometers, group theorists, Lie algebraists and topologists) and out (physicists, crystallographers, and artists). This has had the unfortunate effect that often the same object is known under different names to different people. Moreover, the standard treatments are ignorant of the recent great developments in the mathematical theory. I aim to change all this by producing definitive classifications and systematic names for all the symmetry types of low-dimensional objects, and writing books and papers on the theory, addressed to wide audiences. I believe this will have a great educational effect, and as evidence can point to that of my previous books Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups (with Neil Sloane) and An Atlas of Finite Groups (with several co-authors) that have become standard works by performing similar services for other structures doc2758 none This project focuses on three research areas related to complex data. The first research area is on high dimensional graphics, data analysis and related topics. The second research area is on mixture models and bump hunting problems. The third area is on models and inferential procedures for data with biases. Several variants of likelihood, semi-parametric and iterative procedures are sought for modeling and making inferences about the data. We live in the information age. Information often hides in data sets with different appearances. Mining and modeling (massive) data sets include the discovery of patterns, subcomponents, bumps, or special events, and development of models that explain the data and predict the future. This research is aimed at providing solutions to some interesting problems arising from the data which are either high dimension, or complicated, or with a sampling bias. Theories, methods, and efficient computing algorithms are explored for extracting useful information from the complex data. Application areas include astronomy, neurosciences, quality control, and some (other) observational studies doc2759 none The Institute of International Education (IIE) seeks funding to assess its Global E3 program, a network of more than 75 universities in 14 countries that has explored barriers that have prevented US undergraduate engineering students from going abroad during their academic careers. During its first five years, more than 160 students and over 200 international students have participated in the program through academic study abroad and overseas internships. The number of participants continues to almost double annually. IIE is proposing a follow-up study to track Global E3 US alumni to learn what added value their experience abroad has brought to their careers and to their employers. The resulting outcomes data will enable IIE to document the program s impact on its alumni that will encourage private sector partnership and participation in the Global E3 program and provide partial scholarships for US students who engage in research or internships overseas. This effort will maximize the value of NSF s earlier investment in Global E3 and contribute to the program s long-term sustainability doc2760 none This experimental condensed matter physics project addresses the transport properties of quantum wires (i.e. wires with diameter smaller than the Fermi wavelength). While the theory of such wires is relatively well developed, the experimental situation is less explored, due to the difficulty of fabricating and characterizing such materials. The project focuses on quantum wires of the semimetal bismuth, which is unique because its extremely small effective mass leads to an unusually long Fermi wavelength, 25 nm. Consequently, quantum confinement effects should be readily observed in nanowires whose diameter are below about 25 nm. High-pressure, high-temperature melt injection templates will be used to make arrays and networks of bismuth wires of diameters down to 6 nm. The semimetal-to-semiconductor transition, doping effects, localization, and mesoscopic phenomena will be probed via optical measurements and low-temperature magnetic-field-dependent electronic transport measurements. An important feature of the work is the use of a scanning force microscope with electric force capability for visualization and testing of the nanowires. The research will be carried out by undergraduates from Howard University, Boston College, and Georgetown University. These students will receive scientific training in cutting edge experimental techniques that will prepare them for careers in academe, industry and government. %%% This project is directed at developing a more complete understanding of the properties of ultra-fine nanowires, which are expected to have many applications as electronic circuitry becomes more compact. While several theories of these nanowires have been developed, experimental studies are lacking due to the difficulty of fabricating wires in this so-called quantum regime. In this work, closely packed nanowire arrays and networks will be fabricated by injecting molten bismuth metal under high pressures into porous template materials, where it is subsequently cooled and solidified. Wire diameters down to 6 nm can be achieved with this technique. The optical and electronic transport properties will be measured and comparisons to the various theoretical predictions will be carried out. An important feature of the work is the utilization of a scanning force microscope with electric force capability for visualization and testing of the nanowires. This collaboration between a historically-black university and two collaborating universities will directly impact over 15 undergraduate students who will receive rigorous training in Physics, Chemistry and Materials. Through the interdisciplinary and inter-university character of this program, students will gain a fuller understanding of the scientific enterprise doc2761 none Proposal: The investigators propose to explore 3-dimensional topology via contact structures, based on new techniques in the classification of tight contact structures on various 3-dimensional manifolds. Our main goal is to develop the 3-dimensional cut-and-paste techniques involving convex surfaces and ``bypasses into a largely combinatorial one. The investigators propose to import ideas and constructions from the theory of foliations and laminations (in joint work with J. Etnyre and W. Kazez). Convex surfaces and bypasses aid the decomposition of a tight contact manifold (eventually) into balls, similar to the `` sutured manifold decomposition , due to Gabai. The ``dividing curves on the surfaces along which the cuttings take place determine the tight contact structure. A project which is currently under way is to carefully follow the sutured manifold decompositions of Gabai in constructing taut foliations on most 3-manifolds, and to construct tight contact structures by gluing in much the same way as Gabai s construction. We hope to produce an effective gluing theorem for tight contact structures. Another direction of research is Legendrian knot theory. Using the classification of tight contact structures on solid tori, Etnyre and Honda propose to classify Legendrian torus knots and Legendrian figure eight knots. The investigators propose a study of 3-dimensional spaces. The 3-dimensional spaces we study will locally be similar to the standard Euclidean 3-dimensional space. These objects may be very complicated globally, but a local observer cannot tell the difference, just as an ant cannot tell whether it is sitting on a flat plane or a very large sphere. `Finite 2-dimensional spaces have been classified and understood for a long time - they are the 2-dimensional sphere, the doughnut, the doughnut with 2 holes, the doughnut with 3 holes, etc., and are distinguished by the number of holes. However, in spite of work by numerous mathematicians this century, a complete classification of 3-dimensional spaces is far from understood. In our work we seek to better understand 3-dimensional spaces by imposing an additional structure, called a contact structure, which, very loosely speaking, amounts to choosing a preferred direction (or a spinning axis) at every point in the 3-dimensional space. Contact structures have intimate connections with 4-dimensional geometry, quantum physics, and dynamics (such as fluid dynamics), and we hope to gain better understanding of 3-dimensional spaces through contact structures doc2762 none This project uses analytical methods and numerical simulations to understand the near-collisionless electron transport in inductively coupled plasmas (ICPs) at low pressures - below 10 mTorr. Collisionless heating and the anomalous skin effect are studied with emphasis on the influence of the oscillatory magnetic field induced by the RF current and an externally applied static magnetic field. Since the efficiency of power deposition profiles are important issues in the use of ICP discharges, particular attention is paid to resonances between the applied discharge frequency and the bounce frequency of electrons in the self-generated potential well, or the cyclotron frequency in the case of the applied static magnetic field. In the latter case, low-intensity static magnetic fields are studied in an effort to contour the power deposition profiles. The non-local approach, a powerful method for analyzing low-pressure plasmas, is extended to cover the near-collisionless regime in both electropositive (argon) and electronegative (chlorine) plasmas. The insight from these studies of electron kinetics and transport are incorporated into self-consistent simulations of ICPs at very low pressures. The models and simulations are tested experimentally by measurement of electromagnetic fields and electron distribution functions in well-characterized ICP reactors. Methodology is stressed so that the approach can be extended to other high-density, low-pressure plasmas such as electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) and helicon plasma tools. Low-pressure, high-density plasmas, including inductively coupled plasmas (ICPs) are necessary to maintain uniformity when processing large-area surfaces, a paramount goal of the microelectronics industry. They also have relevance for materials processing, fluorescent lighting, and other plasma applications. This project includes collaborations with Osram Sylvania, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and the University of Saskatchewan doc2763 none Proposal: An important problem of the 3d topology is how to establish a relation between the old classical invariants of 3-manifold and knots such as the Casson-Walker invariant and the Alexander polynomial, and the new quantum invariants such as the Reshetikhin-Turaev invariant and the Jones polynomial. The existing evidence suggests that quantum invariants can be disassembled into simpler pieces, the first of which are known classical invariants, whereas the others are their close cousins which may also have a nice direct interpretation in the framework of classical topology. The invariants that appear in the decomposition of quantum invariants, are the so-called Vassiliev or finite type invariants. Therefore it turns out that Vassiliev invariants are a link between the quantum and classical invariants. I propose to study the properties of Vassiliev invariants appearing in the decomposition of quantum invariants and especially their relation to classical topology. In particular, I propose to study the new polynomial Vassiliev invariants that are hidden inside the colored Jones polynomials. These new polynomial invariants of knots and links seem to be the descendants of the Alexander polynomial and therefore, similarly to their ancestor, they may have a direct topological interpretation. The first direct descendant of the Alexander polynomial is a 2-variable polynomial with integer coefficients. Path integral arguments suggest that it is a knot analog of the Casson-Walker invariant of rational homology spheres. The topological classification of 3-manifolds and knots is still an open problem. A natural way to approach it is to construct as many invariants of knots and 3-manifolds as one would need in order to distinguish between any non-equivalent objects. In recent years we witnessed an outburst of new quantum invariants (Jones polynomial and Reshetikhin-Turaev invariant in particular). These invariants are more powerful than the old Alexander polynomial, yet they are relatively easy to compute. However, their application towards the solution of topological problems is impeded by the fact that their definition is purely combinatorial and has no obvious connection to the well-established methods of classical topology. Existing evidence suggests that quantum invariants are packed up with an infinite number of simpler invariants the first of which are well-known classical invariants. Therefore a study of quantum invariants (especially in the semi-classical approximation when they unpack) may produce an infinite number of new classical invariants which may be enough to distinguish all 3-manifolds and knots. I propose to study the properties of new simple invariants that come from the quantum ones. In particular, I will study the decomposition of the colored Jones polynomial into an infinite sequence of simpler polynomials which seem to be the descendants of the Alexander polynomial doc2764 none The methods of cognitive neuroscience will be used to examine a social psychological theory of self-regulation. According to the strength model, self-regulation is governed by a limited resource that allows people to control impulses and desires. Self-regulatory resources can be depleted or fatigued by self-regulatory demands. Hence, the active effort required to control behavior in one domain leads to diminished capacity for self-regulation in other domains. Because people have a limited reservoir of self-regulatory resources, they can be overwhelmed by both self-initiated and situational demands, thereby resulting in self-regulation failure. Preliminary studies using social psychological methods have found consistent support for the strength model. The new studies use methods from cognitive neuroscience to more fully elucidate the underlying brain mechanisms involved in self-regulation. A first project examines whether performing an initial self-regulatory task leads to alterations in performance on a subsequent test of frontal lobe functioning. Tasks such as the Tower of London, Stroop Task, and negative priming have been shown to reflect frontal lobe activity. A second project uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to assess brain activity correlated with self-regulatory effort. Together these studies should provide substantial evidence about the neural correlates of self-regulation. In addition, this research allows for an examination of the strength model of self-regulation that is not possible using traditional social psychological methods. More generally, this research will demonstrate the usefulness of cognitive neuroscience methods for examining social psychological phenomena doc2765 none Chan This three-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research in advanced computational research involves Tony Chan of the University of California at Los Angeles, Tim Barth of the Information Sciences Directorate, NASA Ames, Herve Guillard of the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Engineering (INRIA) in Sophia Antipolis and Remi Abgrall of the University of Bordeaux. The research collaboration is aimed at the development and analysis of discretization methods and solvers based on multiscale and multiresolution algorithms; efficient implementation of the new discretization and solvers on advanced computing architectures; and applications to computational fluid dynamics and structural mechanics. This award represents the U.S. side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Engineering (INRIA). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses of the U.S. investigators, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students. INRIA will support the French researchers visits to the United States. The collaboration is interdisciplinary. The US investigators are expert in the theory and analysis of multigrid methods for both elliptic and hyperbolic problems. This is complemented by French expertise in computational fluid dynamics and on multiresolutional algorithms for hyperbolic problems. The project will advance understanding of the proposed methods and algorithms and their applications to problems in particle physics, fluid dynamics, and cosmology doc2766 none The objective of this project is to investigate processes that control surface-air exchange of carbon dioxide, heat and water vapor over forest vegetation in non-ideal conditions (hilly terrain, patchy canopy, free convection, rain and stable stratification) through critical analysis of existing data and data from ongoing field experiments. The primary motivation for this research is that there is considerable interest among the scientific community in long-term, micrometeorological studies to understand the role of forest ecosystems in atmospheric carbon, energy and water cycles. Quantitative knowledge of atmospheric processes in these non-ideal conditions is needed. The ultimate goal of this project is to advance micrometeorological theory beyond the traditional focus on ideal conditions. Data will be acquired through collaborations with various researchers. They will come from the and BOREAS (Boreal Ecosystem-Atmosphere Studies) experiments and from ongoing experiments at two other forest sites, an AmeriFlux site on flat terrain near Toronto, Canada, and a new site on moderate topography in Connecticut. The data include tower-based flux observation, meteorology, soil chamber, soil carbon and physical property, and biometric monitoring doc2767 none Wake and Kuchta Contact zones, where biological lineages once geographically separated come back together, are windows to the evolutionary process that enable the study of diverse evolutionary phenomena. Graduate student Shawn Kuchta, under the direction of Dr. David Wake, will use molecular techniques and field experiments to study two cryptic contact zones in two unrelated salamander taxa. In the Ensatina eschscholtzii (Caudata: Plethodontidae) complex, two distinct subspecies (oregonensis and xanthoptica) contact in northern California. An earlier detailed analysis of color pattern characterized the interaction as broad intergradation, but new molecular data suggest a tight genetic border. The hypothesis under test is that the intergradation of color pattern is introgression across a hybrid zone because the xanthoptica color pattern is a potential mimic of the extremely toxic newts of the genus Taricha. The contact zone between oregonensis and xanthoptica will be characterized genetically using mitochondrial (mt) DNA molecular sequence data, allozymes, and Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphisms (RFLPs) of nuclear DNA. Tests of bird predation will employ clay models in field experiments designed to test the possibility of a mimicry system between xanthoptica and Taricha. The second contact zone is located in the southern Sierra Nevada, where two clades of the California Newt, Taricha torosa, contact. This border is truly cryptic: it appears that T. torosa from the coast ranges colonized the southern Sierra Nevada, then acquired the phenotypic characteristics of Sierra Nevada populations. The causes of this phenotypic shift are unclear. Nuclear and mtDNA markers will be used to characterize the contact zone, and to investigate the cause of the phenotypic evolution of the southern Sierra Nevada populations. Both of these studies are grounded in population-level phylogenetics and an empirical approach to the study of species formation and differentiation doc2768 none Modern processors improve instruction level parallelism by speculation. The outcome of data and control decisions is predicted, and the operations are speculatively executed and only committed if the original predictions were correct. There are a number of other ways that processor resources could be used, such as threading or eager execution. As the use of speculation increases, more processors will need some form of speculation control to balance the benefits of speculation against other possible activities. This research examines a set of microarchitectural features that can benefit from speculation control, including trace formation; instruction fetch management, execution resource management and memory access prioritization. The research also explores how out-of-order processor designs can use multi-voltage levels to reduce energy, and how the processor can provide feedback to an operating system that further controls energy use via dynamic voltage scaling. This work is done using a microarchitectural model that supports multithreading and multiprocessor simulations. This work is part of a broader effort that includes experimentation with existing computers, design and modification of operating systems for energy efficiency and the adoption of microarchitectural models designed for comparing energy efficient processor designs doc2769 none Schupp Tropical forests may remain species-rich due to the limited regenerative capacity of individual species. If, in general, tree seeds establish sparsely, or in locations unsuitable for long-term growth, such limited regeneration precludes individual species dominance. Studies of seed dispersal and survival patterns can identify factors that limit tree regeneration. In particular, this project will experimentally test how seed density and desirability affect seed eating by rodents. Most tropical tree seeds are dispersed in varying densities by animals, and seeds of different species differ strongly in desirability. Marked seeds of a test species will be placed in different densities and in seed mixes of two species differing in desirability. To determine the effect of density and desirability on seed fate, these marked seeds will be censused over time and compared to seeds protected from rodents. This project will contribute to an ecological understanding of seed plant diversity in general by testing a broad hypothesis in a diverse plant community. Results will help determine if limited individual regenerative capacities can explain the maintenance of species diversity in a variety of ecosystems. In addition, investigations of seed mortality can be applied to managing composition of tree species in remnant as well as natural forests doc2770 none The principal investigator and his colleagues use an experiment-based computational approach to model blood flow in large stenotic arteries and investigate critical flow and artery wall behaviors that may lead to artery compression, plaque cap rupture, stroke and heart attack. Dynamic properties of the stenotic arteries with plaque stiffness and geometry variations are determined experimentally using hydrogel tubes whose mechanical properties are close to those of bovine carotid arteries. This leads to a series of 3-D nonlinear computational models with fluid-wall interactions based on the experimental measurements. Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian formulation is used to deal with free moving boundaries. Implicit methods including the SIMPLER algorithm and fully coupled methods based on mesh-free generalized finite differences with staggered grids, upwind techniques, and a consistent physical interpolation technique are used to solve the fluid model. A sequence of experiment-based thin- and thick-wall models are introduced to model the dynamic nonlinear properties of the stenotic tube wall with large strain, deformation, compression and collapse. An incremental boundary iteration method and an under-relaxation technique are used to handle the fluid-wall interactions. Validated by experimental data, results obtained are physiologically relevant and may provide information helpful for early detection, diagnosis and prevention of related cardiovascular diseases. The models and numerical methods developed are applicable to a wide range of problems with fluid-structure interactions and can be extended to include mass transfer, structures of arteries and plaques, endothelial responses, and arterial remodeling. Stenosis, a constriction in blood vessels, is one of the leading causes of death in the western world. The investigators and their colleagues couple experiments with computations to model blood flow in large stenotic arteries and investigate critical flow and artery wall behaviors that may lead to artery compression, plaque cap rupture, stroke and heart attack. The problem is difficult because of the high complexity of artery structure and its nonlinear mechanical properties, strong blood and artery interactions, and critical flow conditions caused by severe stenosis. Dynamic properties of the stenotic arteries are determined experimentally using bovine carotid arteries and hydrogel tubes, whose properties are close to those of bovine carotid arteries. A series of 3-D nonlinear computational models with fluid-wall interactions, based on the experimental measurements, are solved by a novel numerical method to quantify conditions under which artery compression and plaque cap rupture may occur. Validated by experimental data, these results can be helpful for early detection, diagnosis and prevention of related cardiovascular diseases. The models and numerical methods developed are applicable to a wide range of problems with fluid-structure interactions and complex geometries. The models can be extended to include mass transfer, structures of arteries and plaques, grafts and stents, endothelial responses and arterial remodeling. As applications of biotechnology, the results obtained can be used to improve the design of medical devices such as grafts and stents doc2771 none Rotaxantated polymers will be examined with a variety of analytical techniques to establish structure mobility property relationships for this class of materials. Two types of polyrotaxanes are described based on very different macrocyclic components: (1) crown ethers, and (2) cyclodextrins. In crown-ether-based rotaxanated polymers, the macrocycle is typically more mobile than the host backbone. In cyclodextrin-based rotaxanated polymers, the macrocycles form rigid hydrogen-bonded tunnels inside which the linear polymer backbones can exhibit greater mobility than when not threaded. The consequences of these dynamic architectures on bulk physical properties will be explored and compared. In particular, impact strength and microphase separation will be investigated for a series of crown-ether-based rotaxanated polymers as a function of macrocycle loading. Two novel constructions will be prepared and evaluated from the rotaxanation of linear polymers with cyclodextrins: (1) articulated structures of rotaxanated and nonrotaxanated chain segments, and (2) threaded crosslinking. Thermal and mechanical properties will be correlated with information on solid-state dynamics and phase structures obtained through solid-state NMR, x-ray scattering, and electron microscopy. This research is in the area of characterization of novel polymeric and organic materials doc2710 none A magnitude 7.6 earthquake occurred on September 21, , near Chi-Chi in Nantou county, Taiwan, about 90 miles south of Taipei, resulting in extensive damage, injuries and loss of life. Extensive damage occurred to bridges and dams and, due to the mountainous nature of the terrain, there were hundreds of s landslides, including several very large catastrophic landslides. A very important feature of this earthquake was the reverse fault rupture with vertical displacements ranging from 2 meters along the southern section to as much as 8 meters along the northern terminus. The fault rupture extends through heavily developed areas and is responsible for much of the damage to major transportation and river control structures. Since much of northern and southern California has extensive infrastructure development along active fault traces, observing and documenting the direct impact of large fault displacement in the Taiwan earthquake is of obvious practical and research interest to the US earthquake engineering community. This action provides partial support for a coordinated industry-academia reconnaissance team to document the geotechnical and engineering geology seismology features of this earthquake in as much detail as possible. Of particular interest is the impact of large seismic fault offset on urban infrastructure. As with all post-earthquake reconnaissance investigations, it is expected that vital records and data will become available as a result of this earthquake in Taiwan. From a scientific viewpoint, these large earthquakes act as full scale experiments that cannot be duplicated via controlled experiments in the laboratory or in the field. It is through quick response reconnaissance efforts that the mostly-ephemeral data from these events can be recovered and used to further advances in earthquake hazard mitigation. The results from this investigation are expected to yield information and data that will help the profession to understand the impact of large seismic fault offset on urban infrastructure. This is a multi-institutional award involving the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Southern California doc2773 none This individual investigator award is to a young female professor at Western Michigan University for a project that focuses on manipulating the defect content in high temperature superconductors to resolve the role of disorder in determining the phase diagram of the vortex matter. In these materials, the vortex lattice undergoes a melting transition to a vortex liquid state that occupies a large portion of the phase diagram. This melting transition is a serious impediment to many technological applications because vortices in the liquid state are much more difficult to pin. Any understanding of the role of defects in reducing the vortex liquid regime will help facilitate the technological viability of these materials. The vortex matter phase diagram is also of fundamental interest, and it remains an amazingly rich and complex area of study. The main reason for this complexity is the abundance of parameters that define the system, such as the temperature, the magnetic field, the anisotropy, and the disorder. These parameters can be systematically varied in a controlled manner, making these systems a powerful medium in which to study phase transitions. The graduate students involved in this project will receive training in a wide range of experimental techniques. They will also gain valuable international professional experience early in their careers, increasing their adaptability and placing them in an excellent position to pursue careers in industry, national laboratories, or academia. %%% This individual investigator award is to a young, female professor at Western Michigan University for an experimental research project that focuses on understanding the role of disorder in determining the phase diagram of the vortex matter in high temperature superconductors. Vortices are quantized bundles of magnetic flux which penetrate a Type-II superconductor in the presence of high magnetic fields. The interaction of these vortices with defects is of great technological importance because defects can greatly increase the amount of current these materials can carry without energy losses. Since most applications of superconductors rely on zero-resistance, developing optimized pinning sites to prevent the vortex motion is crucial to advancing their technological impact. These systems are also a powerful medium in which to study phase transitions, an area of fundamental interest. The vortex matter phase diagram is a rich area of study because of the abundance of parameters that define the system, for example the temperature, magnetic field, anisotropy, and disorder. These parameters can be varied in a controlled manner over a much greater range than in typical solids. The collaborative nature of this project will train graduate students in both academic and national lab research settings, teaching them in a variety of state-of-the art-techniques. The international experience the students gain will enhance their ability to compete in the increasingly global market place doc2774 none Gopnik The National Academy of Sciences, through the Ocean Studies Board (OSB) of the Commission on Geosciences, Environment, and Resources will continue providing guidance on major ocean science and policy issues to the National Science Foundation and other government agencies. The Ocean Studies Board monitors the status and needs of ocean science community and assists NSF in developing and maintaining strong programs of ocean research responsive to scientific opportunities and national interests. OSB will: 1) contribute to the advancement of scientific understanding of the ocean by maintaining continuous oversight of the health of ocean sciences and stimulating their progress; 2) foster the application of scientific knowledge to the use of the ocean and its resources; 3)provide leadership for the formulation of national and international marine policy and to clarify scientific issues that affect ocean policy; and 4)address scientific issues involved in cooperative international oceanographic research, and to improve technical assistance. The OSB also serves as the U.S. National Committee for the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR). In this role, it assists in the development of U.S. positions on international ocean-related questions. Several other agencies also contribute to these activities and provide support for focused studies undertaken by the OSB doc2775 none This research project studies the generation and investigation of a variety of new organic reactive intermediates centered around carbenes and nitrenes. For instance, heteroaryl substituted carbenes are described that promise unconventional electronic properties. They also offer the possibility for unusual rearrangements to other previously uncharacterized reactive intermediates. The proposed systems will be investigated primarily by low-temperature matrix isolation methods, probed by IR and UV vis spectroscopy. Characterization will be aided by DFT and ab initio electronic structure modeling. With this Award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program (Organic Dynamics) supports the research of Professor Robert S. Sheridan of the University of Nevada Reno. Professor Sheridan studies reactive molecules called carbenes and nitrenes, which have fewer than the usual number of chemical bonds and unusual electronic structures. Carbenes, for example, have been implicated in such diverse settings as interstellar chemistry, combustion, soot formation, and fullerene production. The high reactivity of carbenes and nitrenes have proven of value in photoaffinity labelling of biological molecules, and their interesting electronic properties are of interest in the quest for organic magnetic materials doc2776 none The project consists of three parts, all of them involving semiconductor heterostructures whose properties are determined almost entirely by electron spin. (1) Fabricate, and carry out optical studies of self-assembled magnetic semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) achieved by introducing Mn into the CdSe ZnSe QD system. This effort will focus on the understanding and control of the self-assembly process, with emphasis on the morphology, uniformity of composition, and control of Mn incorporation. Optical studies will concentrate on the exchange interaction in zero-dimensional systems, on the effect of a reduced number of magnetic nearest-neighbors in the QD geometry, and on determining the (expectedly very long) spin lifetimes in such systems. (2) Fabricate and perform optical studies of ferromagnetic semiconductors and their multilayers. The discovery of ferromagnetism in III-Mn-V alloys is a major breakthrough that holds out possibilities of integrating giant spin-related effects into III-V-based electronics and optoelectronics. The problem of the large density of defects that form when Mn is introduced into the III-V lattice will be addressed by a series of strategies for MBE growth of III-V based ferromagnetics. Optical tests of these systems will focus specifically on improving the optical quality of these materials via defect reduction and optimization of p-type doping. (3) Bragg-confining systems based on diluted magnetic semiconductor (DMS) multilayers will be investigated. These systems offer the possibility of tuning (via an applied magnetic field) the relative band alignment between the constituent layer materials. This tunability can be used for controlling the de Broglie wavelength of electrons and or holes within the structure, and thus for tuning their Bragg localization. Since in DMS-based systems the tunability of Bragg localization is spin-specific, the structures developed in the program will serve as prototypes for spin-filtering devices that may find important application in spin-based electronics. This research will provide training for graduate students in areas of nanoscience and spin-based electronics, thus meeting U.S. manpower needs in two important and rapidly developing areas of technology. %%% Traditional semiconductor electronics is based entirely on the electron charge and its response to applied electric signals. The electron, however, is also characterized by another property: the spin. Recent experiments have demonstrated that this latter property holds out certain advantages which make spin-based nanostructures attractive as candidates for the next generation of electronic devices. Although one can already envision future applications of spin-based electronics ( spintronics ) in detector systems, ultra-fast switches and quantum computing, many fundamental issues need to be resolved before such devices can become reality. This research deals with three inter-related areas involving semiconductor heterostructures whose properties are determined almost entirely by electron spin: Controlled fabrication of spintronics materials, optical characterization of these materials, and development of techniques for the effective identification of different spin states from one another. Successful completion of these tasks will be major contributions to the scientific understanding of spintronics processes and their incorporation in practical technological devices. This research will be performed with graduate students and postdoctoral research associates. They will receive training in areas of nanoscience and spin-based electronics in preparation for their entry into the scientific and technological workforce doc2777 none In thin polymer films, effects due to confinement and to interfacial interactions are responsible for different physical phenomena not generally encountered in bulk materials. These effects include changes in the glass transition temperatures of polymers with decreasing film thickness and changes in the critical phase separation temperatures of A B polymer blends with film thickness. This proposal has two general goals. In the first, an understanding of the nature of the interactions between polymers and surfaces and the manner in which these interactions affect properties such as local friction, viscosity and translational dynamics of chains is developed. Long and short-range intermolecular forces can have a destabilizing effect on polymer thin films and these effects, together with enthalpic and entropic interactions, influence the stability of thin film polymer blends in ways that are not well understood. The second part of this proposal examines these effects in homopolymer homopolymer blends and in copolymer homopolymer blends. In the future, polymer thin films will play an increasingly important role in technologies that, historically, have not involved the use of soft materials. Technologies include organic light emitting diodes, sensors, such as electronic noses, and whole cell adhesion sensors. In each of these technologies, specific properties of the polymer are critical. For example, in organic light emitting diodes the electronic and optical properties of the polymer are important whereas for the whole cell adhesion sensors the ability to tune adhesive properties of the polymer is critical. The advantage of using polymer thin films over non-polymeric materials in some technologies is that polymers are cheap and easy to fabricate. Moreover, it is potentially easier to tailor properties of polymers because of the wide range of molecules that can be synthesized. A fundamental understanding of the properties of polymer thin films will be necessary for the overall success of the use of soft materials in many future technologies doc2778 none This is an experimental condensed matter physics project that will investigate fluid instabilities that are induced in magnetic fluids by temperature gradients and external magnetic fields. The instabilities are expressed by changes in the surface topology, magnetic density and convection processes in the fluids. The primary approach is to use a new technique based on laser heating of thin films of the magnetic fluid. This produces a temperature gradient which, together with a magnetic field, gives rises to body forces in the fluid and leads to instabilities similar to buoyancy driven Rayleigh-Bernard convection instabilities in binary fluids. The resulting deformations of the fluid lead to diffraction of the laser beam traversing the fluid. The resulting diffraction patterns can be analyzed to follow the temporal and spatial development of the fluid instabilities. The project includes a theoretical collaboration with Professor Jie Huang of Michigan State University. The research provides excellent training for graduate students. The magnetic and electric field induced spatio-temporal patterns and instabilities in the fluids will be videotaped and used as part of general education activities in schools and museums. %%% This is an experimental condensed matter physics project the deals with the time-varying and space-varying changes in ferrofluids. Ferrofluids are colloidal suspensions of microscopic magnetic particles that distort in complex fashion when exposed to a magnetic or electric field. The experiments use thin ferrofluid films exposed to a magnetic field. A laser beam shines on the fluid, creates a concentration gradient in the magnetic particle density and leads to diffraction patterns in the transmitted laser light. The diffraction patterns will be analyzed theoretically to obtain information about the complex temporal and spatial instabilities in the fluids. The research provides excellent training for graduate students. The magnetic and electric field induced spatio-temporal patterns in the fluids will be videotaped and used as part of general education activities in schools and museums doc2779 none This project supports the PI s sabbatical year at The Boeing Company. The research involves investigations of the chatter instability in high-speed machining. Chatter is a self-excited oscillation between the machining tool and the workpiece that limits productivity of machining operations, reduces the quality of the product and shortens machine tool life. Up until recently all models of chatter have been linear, with delay effects in the case of regenerative chatter. These models only partially explain the instabilities observed in the machining process. Nonlinear models are currently being developed, and have had some success in predicting behavior that may be described in part by low dimensional systems. In the aircraft industry this problem has received intense scrutiny, and the work of the P.I. s collaborator at Boeing (Dr. E. Askari) has been in the development of finite element models for metal cutting. A union of two techniques, large scale numerical simulation and low dimensional models, is the goal of the research. This project should be viewed as part of the department s efforts to build an industrial math program, and support its newly created Master of Science in Industrial Mathematics. The lynch pin of the new degree is an industry project and summer internship, where students are brought into existing industry faculty collaborations. The development of such collaborations will be enhanced by the PI s involvement with the scientists at The Boeing Company. This project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences doc2780 none 00- Reichman NCEAS: National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) was established to promote interactions between scientists and facilitate the use of existing information to address important ecological questions. The center supports several types of activities involving Working Groups (20 or fewer scientists meeting for several days, multiple times a year), Center Fellows (sabbatical visitors), Postdoctoral Associates, and graduate and undergraduate students. The vision for NCEAS has been to catalyze a new culture of synthesis. The NCEAS model for collaboration has been particularly successful with 1) interdisciplinary syntheses that bring together people who have not collaborated before to focus on novel questions and approaches and 2) intensive, sustained investigations to make progress in core areas of ecology. This award will support NCEAS operations for an additional six years, enabling it to serve the ecological community by cultivating a new generation of ecologists who merge interdisciplinary interactions, intensive analysis or modeling, and the technology and culture of information management with their inherent intellectual curiosity and commitment to yield important, scholarly research doc2781 none This project involves interdisciplinary research in which algorithmic approaches are developed to design and analyze adaptive experiments. An adaptive (sequential) design is one whose characteristics change in accordance with information arising from the ongoing experiment, as opposed to classical statistical designs where such characteristics are set in advance and remain fixed throughout. Adaptive designs have a wide range of application in clinical trials, destructive testing, behavioral ecology, computer performance prediction, adaptive control, etc., where they have the potential to reduce the expenditure of experimental ``resources such as time, money, or quality of life. Unfortunately, adaptive designs are difficult to analyze and optimize. Exact analytic solutions are rarely available, and thus, historically, such designs have been predominantly approached via asymptotic methods and ad hoc approximations. Computationally, adaptive designs require significant time and space that has often made exact calculations infeasible. This project will expand the size and scope of solvable problems by developing new computational approaches for creating and evaluating designs and utilizing state of the art computational facilities. Attention is directed to problems that are important in applications, with a major emphasis on supplying researchers greater flexibility in modeling their statistical and cost objectives. For many of these problems, exact optimality will be unattainable, and thus techniques for producing near-optimal designs will also be pursued. Several of these techniques are based on optimizing smaller or simpler problems and extrapolating their solution structure to larger or more complex problems. This compliments analytical, asymptotic work and provides new insights into the structure of solutions. In other cases, a shift from serial algorithms to parallel ones will be used to address the additional complexity doc2782 none This project addresses research centered on III-V nitride heterostructures and spin-dependent transport in magnetic materials. The approach employs proximal probes(scanning capacitance and tunneling microscopies), as well as a conducting proximal probe tip to perform local photoconductivity measurements for characterization of local electronic structure and charge transport properties in semiconductor and magnetic materials. The aim is to increase understanding of the nature and influence of defects and other structural features on material properties and device performance, serving to inform strategies for optimization of material quality and epitaxial layer design for a variety of device applications. Investigation of magnetic thin-film materials will focus on the development and application of spin-polarized current-voltage and conductance spectroscopy in combination with atomic and magnetic force microscopy to characterize spin-polarized current injection and spin-dependent carrier transport in magnetic thin-film materials. The approach allows studies at lengths scales as small as a few tens of nm of phenomena such as spin-polarized current injection into a variety of magnetic and magnetoresistive thin-film materials, spin-dependent carrier transport across single magnetic domain walls, and the detailed nature of spin-dependent tunneling processes in ferromagnet-insulator-ferromagnet tunnel junctions. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in topical areas of materials science with high technological relevance. High priority will be placed on training of graduate students in advanced nano-characterization techniques of increasing importance in modern materials and device engineering. In addition, the connection between studies of basic material properties and their role in device engineering and applications will be emphasized, thereby affording students opportunities for interaction with other university and industrial researchers working in related areas doc2783 none Rogers This experimental program, involving undergraduate student participation as an integral component, investigates nuclear structure through the measurement of ground and excited state magnetic moments. A major goal of this program is better understanding of the roles of single particle and collective behavior in determination of nuclear magnetism. Ground state moments of beta-unstable nuclei are measured using the beta-NMR and beta-LMR techniques. The experiments are conducted primarily at NSCL (Michigan State University) and secondarily at GANIL in France, with colleagues from MSU and the University of Leuven, Belgium. Excited state moments of deformed nuclei in isotopic chains are measured using the Transient Field technique, and the experiments are conducted at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with colleagues from Rutgers University. Participation of undergraduate students is a key element in this experimental program doc2784 none ALLEN The Exploratorium will conduct a controlled, two-year research project, titled Finding Significance, to study how different exhibit presentation techniques affect visitors abilities to make meaning -- or find significance -- and how such techniques impact learning. The techniques will be applied to a varied sample of five exhibits commonly found in science and children s museums. The exhibit design techniques include a) sharing scientist and exhibit developer stories, b) sharing visitor stories, and c) modeling inquiry. Although each technique shows promise at eliciting personal significance, they have yet to be rigorously tested and applied to the same set of exhibits to compare relative strengths and weaknesses. Five baseline exhibits, plus four variations of each, will be tested on groups of visitors, including adults, children and mixed groups of both doc2785 none This proposal is for computational methods in material science, in particular for Monte Carlo simulation of atomistic models for epitaxial growth of thin films. The project is multi-disciplinary, involving both mathematics and materials science, and multi-institutional, involving both academia and industry. Kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) simulation of simple atomistic models such as simple cubic Solid-On-Solid (SOS) models, has been successful in describing many basic properties of epitaxial growth, accurately predicting quantities such as island size distribution and step edge density. Other quantities, however, including detailed surface morphology and surface reconstructions, are not accounted for and have important effects on growth of device-quality semiconductor materials. Moreover, since the description of the crystal structure is only schematic in the model, its interaction rates are effective rates and cannot be easily related to atomistic quantities. We propose to develop high-fidelity KMC methods that will realistically include the main features of epitaxial growth, including non-cubic lattice structure, multiple species, and surface reconstructions. This work will be performed by a postdoctoral scholar who will work in the Computational Physics Group at HRL Laboratories and the Computational and Applied Mathematics (CAM) group at UCLA. Russel Caflisch at UCLA will supervise the mathematical aspects of the research including mathematical modeling, algorithm development and Monte Carlo acceleration; Mark Gyure at HRL will supervise the materials aspects including physical modeling, implementation and validation by comparison to experimental data. This postdoctoral scholar will have extensive interactions with Gyure and Caflisch, as well as with other members of their research group, from which the postdoc should learn a lot that is new and exciting. Development of the postdoc s individual research perspective will be strongly encouraged. For example, part of the postdoc s research will be an individual project based on the postdoc s research interests and for which the postdoc is primarily responsible. This project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences doc2786 none ABRAHAM The Natural History of Museum of Los Angeles County will mount and administer a five (5) year tour of an exhibition, Dogs: Our Canine Companions, which explores the evolution, behavior, diversity and cultural significance of dogs. Visitors to the 6,000 sq. ft. exhibit will gain a better knowledge of these familiar animals through a variety of componenets including hands-on displays, videos, graphic panels, computer-generated images, dioramas, fossil skeletons and educational curriculum materials. The exhibit will be divided into eight (8) sections. Throughout the sections there are recurring themes to unify the educational messages of the adaptive diversity of canids, the relationship between wild and domestic dogs, and the relationship between dogs and humans -- especially service dogs. The dissemination of DOGS will include presentations to groups and conferences, with particular emphasis on the exhibit s treatment of accessibility issues. There will be an extensive web site with animation, movies, sound and interactive elements to further enhance the effectiveness of the exhibit and the availability of educational materials. the final ancillary materials to accompany the traveling exhibition will be a theater production, a free-standing, self-contained learning center, an exhibit guide, and a CD-Rom. Formal education providers will benefit from workshops, curriculum guides, and teaching kits doc2787 none Chazdon This dissertation research is a multiscale analysis of vascular epiphyte communities in tropical wet forests of northeastern Costa Rica. This study will examine distribution and abundance of vascular epiphytes in relation to their environment at three scales: (1) within individual tree crowns, focusing on the effects of variation in canopy microclimate, (2) among tree species, focusing on the effects of microclimate and tree species characteristics, and (3) among an elevation gradient, focusing on the effects of tree species characteristics and macroclimatic variation. The study will occur in lowland tropical rainforest at La Selva Biological Station and along the adjacent forested elevation gradient in Braulio Carrillo National Park. At La Selva, this work will examine the effects of microenvironmental factors and host tree characteristics on total vascular epiphyte diversity, species composition, and abundance within and among three common canopy tree species. Along the elevation gradient from 30 to meters, this study will examine macroenvironmental factors that may be linked to species composition in two major epiphyte groups: Bromleiaceae and Pteridophytes. This research will contribute substantially to our knowledge of vascular epiphyte communities, epiphyte diversity in relation to host trees, and ecological distributions of epiphytes with respect to canopy microenvironment and tree characteristics doc2788 none This project addresses new techniques to break pure dependencies for horizontal (EPIC, VLIW) microarchitectures. The ultimate limit to schedule length is the longest chain through the computation. The research presents techniques for dependence chain splitting, which attack pure dependence chains using methods presented earlier for superscalar microarchitectures. The techniques for superscalar processors are not directly applicable to VLIW or EPIC architectures, since such architectures have no or little dynamic speculation mechanisms. Essentially, they execute code that is statically speculated by the compiler. The core idea of this work is to break a chain at a beneficial split point, and then speculatively execute the second half of the chain. This project develops techniques to find the best split point(s) of a region of code, develop hardware-based very low overhead value profiling, study VLIW EPIC-specific value predictor designs, investigate heuristics to address the penalty branches to patch-up code, look into methods for adding confidence prediction for VLIW EPIC value speculation, and study the potential of software-only value speculation. Issues such as register pressure impact and branch insertion for value speculation across control flow are also being explored doc2789 none A workflow is a collection of cooperating, coordinated activities designed to carry out a well-defined complex process, such as trip planning, graduate student registration procedure, or a business process in a large enterprise. A human, a device, or a program might perform an activity in a workflow. Workflow management systems (WfMS) provide a framework for capturing the interaction among the activities in a workflow and are recognized as a new paradigm for integrating disparate systems, including legacy systems. Automated workflow management is becoming increasingly important, as it is one of the enabling technologies for business-to-business e-commerce. Ideally, a WfMS should be able to help the user in analyzing and reasoning about complex business processes. Unfortunately, present-day systems do not provide sufficient support for this activity and the virtual lack of analysis and reasoning facilities in current workflow management systems is considered a serious problem. To tackle this problem, a formal specification model with a well-defined semantics is needed. The objective of this project is to conduct research in workflow management and to develop a robust and expressive model for dynamic workflows (i.e., workflows where tasks and their interrelationships change over time) as well as a technological infrastructure (prototypes) for implementing verifiable workflow management systems. The techniques will be validated in the area of supply chain management in collaboration with industry partners. The research is expected to result in the development and distribution of an open source tool for building and managing dynamic workflows. Relevant links: http: xsb.sourceforge.net http: www.cs.sunysb.edu ~lmc http: www.cs.sunysb.edu ~workflow doc2790 none Jack Pladziewicz of the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program for research in an undergraduate institution dealing with self-exchange electron-transfer rate constants and related reorganization energies. Particular attention will be devoted to: a) measurements to make possible comparison of self-exchange rate constants in the gas phase and in solvents (hydrazines in acetonitrile, etc.); b) couples with high redox potential; c) new systems of fundamental importance. Electron-transfer reactions are of crucial significance in chemical areas of great practical importance (industrial catalysis, biological respiration, neural functioning, for example). Although substantial progress has been made in recent decades in theoretical understanding of such processes, major unsolved problems remain. Further scientific advance in this important area will depend on the availability of extensive data-sets based on careful measurements of judiciously selected systems. Measurement of such data provides an excellent introduction to scientific research for undergraduate students doc2791 none Malin This workshop award supports twenty junior researchers from the U.S. to participate in a German-American Frontiers of Chemistry workshop in Kloster Seeon near Munich, Germany. The purpose of the workshop is to bring together junior scientists in the area of chemical technologies. The meeting intends to establish a strong foundation for future research and to develop German-American scientific relations. This type of workshop is particularly important because relative to the 60s and 70s, fewer U.S. junior scientists are visiting German laboratories. Yet it remains important to share in the latest research practiced in Germany, particularly since Germany is at the cutting edge in certain subfields such as chemical synthesis, catalysis, molecular self-assembly, nanomaterials, functional polymers, and genomics doc2792 none Taylor The tendency of molecules of liquid crystal to adopt a particular orientation at a surface is known as anchoring. This phenomenon is at the heart of liquid crystal display devices. The research objective of this grant is to explore the physical conditions necessary for a specific orientation of the adsorbed liquid crystal molecule. Atomistic molecular dynamics simulation will be used to study the anchoring of a liquid crystal (initially nematogen 5 CB) at various polymer surfaces. The outcome of these simulations will be compared with some analytical theories of the dynamics of tethered molecules. In particular, the studies will try to answer: (1) What is the relative importance of the microscopic chain orientation of the polymer molecules in the substrate surface, in comparison to the macroscopic surface morphology? (2) What role do the thermal vibrations of the substrate play ion the anchoring? (3) What is the effect of the electric dipoles in determining the molecular orientation at the surface, and, finally (4) What role does the flexible part of the mesogen play in anchoring. %%% In the liquid crystal display devices, an important physical phenomenon is anchoring. This refers to the tendency of the liquid crystal molecule, while adsorbed on a surface, to select a specific orientation depending on its physical environment. This grant supports research to study the factors which influence the selection of this orientation. The work in carried out using molecular dynamics simulations using high-speed computers doc2793 none Hahn The University of Rhode Island will operate the R V Endeavor during as a general oceanographic research vessel in support of NSF-supported research projects. The Endeavor is a 184 ft. vessel, constructed in with a midlife in , and is owned by the National Science Foundation and operated by the University of Rhode Island. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 211 operational days during , of which 100 days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The remaining cruises will support Navy, NOAA, and USGS projects. The projects scheduled on the Endeavor represent several oceanographic disciplines, and includes instrument testing, mooring deployments and recoveries, plankton studies, and chemical oceanography, and will fully utilize the capabilities of the vessel. Operations in will mainly take place in the North Atlantic, from the Gulf of Maine to as far south as the coast off of Atlantic City. The Endeavor is part of a fleet of ships used by the National Science Foundation in support of marine science research. Most oceanographic projects require highly specialized equipment to be permanently installed on the vessel, thus the necessity for specialized ships. These vessels do not operate in the same mode as general cargo fishing vessels. As a result, NSF supports the operation of a variety of ships specifically dedicated to oceanographic research that are operated by universities and institutions around the country doc2794 none 00- Donovan West DDIG: Redundancy of belowground ecosystem function among native C4 perennial bunchgrass species of Pinus palustris savannas Plant species have been shown to dramatically affect belowground ecosystem functions such as nutrient pool sizes, nutrient cycling and water availability. Most of these studies have used exotic (non-native) species. The degree to which native species drive belowground ecological processes and the amount of redundancy within a given ecosystem is less well understood. In this project, the investigators will assess key parameters of the nitrogen cycle and water availability as well as plant traits above and below ground as they relate to belowground ecosystem functions. Specifically, the PIs will use field and glasshouse studies to examine the redundancy in belowground functioning of several bunchgrasses native to fire-driven southeastern savannas. The research is expected to provide valuable information for ongoing conservation and restoration of this and similar ecosystem types doc2795 none The focus of this research is the design and evaluation of hardware assists and software profiling techniques that allow better utilization and performance of the memory hierarchy of high-performance systems. The overall goal is to lessen the impact of the increasing speed discrepency between processors and the various levels of the memory hierarchy. The research methodology will compare the results of offline, optimal algorithms with algorithms that can be feasibly implemented in a memory system, to guage the performance increase possible from prediction triggering, indexing, prediction mechanisms, and feedback. This methodology will be applied to three specific problems: Dynamic line size choice, replacement algorithms for caches with large associativities, and prefetching in lower levels of the memory hierarchy doc2796 none Rathcke Although we know that plants can respond to selection by pollinators and that for many plants pollinators are critical to successful reproduction, it is not clear a) how high spatio-temporal variation in the pollinators to a given plant in nature can lead to selection of the diversity of floral traits we see today, nor b) how plants will respond to the current pollination crisis. The purpose of the proposed research is to provide clarification of how plants may be affected in terms of success and evolution by pollinators under a natural situation of pollinator change. This will be achieved by testing the assumed and hypothesized consequences of island colonization for plants from the mainland, using a novel study site, system and combination of research approaches. The pollination biology of plant populations will be compared between mainland and island sits, and it will be determined how patterns in reproductive success depend on the composition and frequency of pollinators and floral and reproductive-assurance traits of study populations. This will be done for each of two hummingbird-pollinated plant species - a native (Epilobium canum) and a widespread invasive (Nicotiana glauca) - that have colonized the California Channel Islands doc2797 none Shatz This award supports Sol Shatz of the University of Illinois-Chicago and several junior researchers chosen from a broad group within the United States to attend a European Workshop on Software Engineering in Aarhus, Denmark. The workshop is being organized on the European side by Mario Pezze of the Polytechnic University in Milan, Italy. US researchers will join with scientists from all over Europe to discuss the use of Petri nets and other formal methods for the construction of software systems. Petri nets are a well-established method for modeling concurrent systems, and they are widely taught. The organizers are taking a broader view, though, and will focus attention on the application of their formal models to the building of real software systems. The workshop is being held in conjunction with the 21st International Conference on Application and theory of Petri Nets doc2798 none This project addresses fundamental research issues in formation mechanisms of structural defects in ultra-thin SIMOX-SOI (Separation by IMplanted OXygen-Silicon On Insulator) materials and into the correlation between these structural defects and processing conditions. Finding the cause of defect formation and providing effective solutions to minimize defect density in ultra-thin layers are significant challenges, being approached by integrated structural, chemical, and electrical characterization with modeling of diffusional, growth, and ripening processes of precipitates to gain greater fundamental un-derstanding. This involves (1) microstructural and chemical analysis of newly designed ultra-thin SIMOX samples, by employing transmission electron microscopy (TEM), field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) and Auger electron spectros-copy (AES); (2) determination of the buried oxide integrity by C-V and I-V measurements; (3) in-depth understanding of the formation and growth mechanisms of the defects; (4) systematic evaluation of the formation of defects as a function of growth conditions by identifying the factors that control defect formation and incorporation; (5) comparison of the samples before and after annealing to study the dif-fusion properties of Si interstitials; and (6) modeling of the precipitate growth and coarsening. An-nealing effects including temperature variations, annealing times, and ramping and cooling rates will be investigated. In situ experiments will be conducted in TEM by using a heating holder (up to C) to investigate the dynamic structural evolution in real-time. This research project is collaborative be-tween the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Arizona. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technologi-cal relevance. Advanced characterization techniques allow greater understanding and control of ele-mentary processes involved in SOI (silicon on insulator) technology which will allow advances in fun-damental materials science and technology. The basic knowledge and understanding gained from the research is expected to contribute to next generation microelectronic materials. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a funda-mentally and technologically significant area doc2799 none This project concerns the modeling, simulation, and analysis of a variety of microscopic processes and macroscopic behaviors of materials that in common involve phase transitions, multiple components and multiple scales, and moving interfaces. They include the epitaxial growth of semiconductor thin films, microstructural evolution of elastically stressed solids, and macroscopic properties of martensitic microstructures. The proposer will first continue and extend his work initiated during his participation in a DARPA NSF VIP project to develop and improve continuum models for the epitaxial growth of thin films. In particular, he will carefully examine the effect of edge diffusion and kink convection as well as that of crystalline asymmetry and anisotropy to the thin film morphology and growth scaling laws. He will then develop hybrid numerical techniques that incorporate finite element methods and multigrid algorithms into level set formulations to simulate the three-dimensional evolution of stressed microstructures. He will finally expand his previous research to further investigate complex martensitic microstructures with an emphasis on the effect of applied stress to their formation, evolution, and stability. The design of innovative, intelligent, and high quality materials such as those to be studied in this project is essential to the advance of modern technologies. The success in such design demands greatly a deep understanding of the fundamental principles and basic mechanisms of the underlying physical processes and material behaviors. It is therefore the goal of this research to systematically develop rational scientific concepts and novel research techniques to accomplish such an understanding. The fulfillment of such a goal will potentially provide experimentalists with detailed information on controllable physical data, making possible the development of new and improved materials for applications in many modern technologies and industrials ranging from communication to aerospace to medicine. Highlighted by its nature of scientific integrity, on the other hand, this project will naturally foster and promote an interdisciplinary research that involves materials science, physics, applied mathematics, and high-performance computing doc2800 none The goal of this university-industry cooperative research project is to create an environment for training students with experience of solving real-life application problems. The proposed technical projects have potentials to make a broad impact in analyzing large volumes of (non-standard) data in many engineering applications. Both NSF and Siemens provide half of the three student research assistantships, and Siemens also provides engineering expertise, process data and facility for experimentation. Half of the student time will be spent on understanding the product, process, problem and data encountered at Siemens and the other half of the student time will be involved in developing general methodologies that solve problems similar to what Siemens encountered. With more advanced tools developed in automating the data collection process, many companies like Siemens have an opportunity to explore ways to extract knowledge from this data for improving their decision-making quality. The challenges in synthesizing data collected from Siemens printed circuits board assembly processes are the large sizes of data and the numerous numbers of zero-defect counts. This proposal formulates several specific tasks outlined as follows to solve these problems: (1) Extract mean and variance change-point features (using data segmentation and wavelet procedures), (2) Formulate multi-layer process improvement rules, (3) Research automatic data modeling procedures, (4) Conduct Bayesian analysis of zero-inflated data for improving production quality. There are many opportunities for developing statistical theory to understand the proposed methods, and all tasks involve heavy computing and data analysis. Siemens has located trial-out data for students to gain hands-on experience in their research training programs. This proposal first formulated a task-force team consisting of university faculty members, students and company managers for organizing our resources and efforts to develop mathematical tools in the proposed technical projects. The committee will then identify short- and long-term goals and formulate specific problems for student thesis research training. Finally, students will conduct hands-on projects, document study results and present findings in meetings. This project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences doc2801 none E. Anderson, Utah State University The measurement of wall static pressure values is one of the foundational elements of experimental fluid dynamics. This data provide useful diagnostic information for a complex flow field and they provide a most important link between CFD and experimental observations. Awarding this equipment grant will make it far easier for Utah State University research instructional faculty to acquire static pressure data in their current: i) wing tip vortex studies from a lifting body and ii) a transverse curvature channel flow, and their long term efforts on experimental work in air flows. It is expected that this equipment will benefit the thesis work and the laboratory instruction of a large number of Utah State University students doc2802 none D. Papamoschou, University of California, Irvine A converging diverging nozzle, with an adequate ratio: upstream stagnation pressure receiver pressure , will deliver a fully expanded supersonic flow. For pressure ratios above the value for a completely subsonic flow, but below the adequate level noted above, a subsonic flow will be delivered from the diverging passage. The PI notes that a properly contoured diverging passage can provide a strongly unsteady flow and that this exiting flow can be used for the benefit of a number of applications. The present bridging grant (one-year) is to permit the PI to better document the basis for this unsteady flow and to define, if appropriate, a focussed research effort to more thoroughly investigate it doc2803 none This is a study of the relationship between fuel injection as a controlling parameter and emissions from diesel engines. Specifically, the study addresses the relationships between formation of nitric oxide and high-pressure dense-spray combustion dynamics, pulsed injections and spray transients. Experimental tools include a custom-built diesel engine simulator capable of producing conditions similar to those in a diesel immediately prior to injection, infrared scattering measurements to quantify fuel droplet size and liquid volume fraction in the dense-spray region, and line Raman measurements to quantify fuel air ratio and temperature. Post-combustion gas analysis by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy allows measurement of nitric oxide as functions of operating parameters and fuel injected. Modeling includes microscale (single droplet), mesoscale (multiple droplet), and macroscale systems. Models are used to predict emission trends in engines as a function of injection parameters. Continuous interaction between the modeling and experimental efforts are necessary to make the physical and numerical systems as nearly identical as possible doc2804 none The PI proposes a study of the influence of above and belowground herbivores on their host plants. Natural enemies may shape interactions between these herbivores and their hosts and this work will also investigate that aspect. PI Hunt will study weed biological control systems with an assemblage of specialized herbivorous insects and their host plants and natural enemies. In field experiments, root herbivores, leaf herbivores, or both will be released into caged plots of purple loosestrife dominated wetlands. The response of the plant community will be tracked and the PI will add a third trophic level interaction by looking at the effect of generalist predators on the herbivores doc2805 none Ljunggren Columbia University-Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory (CU-LDEO) will operate the R V Ewing during as a general oceanographic research vessel in support of NSF-supported research projects. The Ewing is a 230 ft. vessel, constructed in and was modified in , and is owned by NSF and operated by CU-LDEO. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 267 operational days during , of which all days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The projects scheduled on the Ewing represent several oceanographic disciplines, mainly MG Papua, New Guinea; and then the Pacific Coast off of Central America. The Ewing will then transit through the Panama Canal to New Foundland to conduct a two ship operation with the R V Oceanus, and to the Florida coast. During the period from October-December, the vessel will be in lay-up to commence Phase I of a mid-life refit. The Ewing is part of a fleet of ships used by the National Science Foundation in support of marine science research. Most oceanographic projects require highly specialized equipment to be permanently installed on the vessel, thus the necessity for specialized ships. These vessels do not operate in the same mode as general cargo fishing vessels. As a result, NSF supports the operation of a variety of ships specifically dedicated to oceanographic research that are operated by universities and institutions around the country doc2806 none A systematic investigation into tethered block copolymer brushes is proposed. The impetus for this work stems from preliminary results where a polystyrene-block-poly(methyl methacrylate) polymer was created by the grafting-from approach on a silicate substrate. Treatment with block-selective solvents effected reversible contact changes that were interpreted in terms a model that placed either polystyrene or PMMA at the air interface. The purpose of the proposed research is to confirm the speculative models for this system. The 1st goal is to better characterize the PS-b-PMMA bush by correlating film thickness with Mp, determination of chain length dispersity, determination of percent PS homopolymer and a more complete characterization of nanostructure composition. The 2nd goal is to study the dynamics of surface reorganization by a systematic variation in temperature and solvent. The 3rd goal is to develop alternative polymerization methods for block copolymer brushes. A 4th goal is to expand the composition of the tethered block copolymers by including new monomers (e.g., fluorinated and water-soluble monomers) and the preparation of tethered triblock copolymers. The 5th goal is to control the distribution of tethered block copolymers by using mixed self-assembled monolayers, microcontact printing or stereolithography. Successful completion of this proposed research will have several potential benefits to society. The synthesis and characterization of polymer brushes will have a large impact on colloidal stabilization, which is critical for stable emulsion and latex formulations. Other applications include new adhesives, protein-resistance biosurfaces, chromatographic separation of biomolecules, lubricants and polymer blend compatibilization doc2807 none 00- Hamilton Whitmire DDIG: Anaerobic microbial metabolism and the biogeochemical functioning of wetlands Microbial decomposition of organic matter plays a central role in the functioning of wetlands, and much of this decomposition occurs in the absence of oxygen (e.g., anaerobic conditions). Anaerobic microorganisms mediate chemical transformations that alter downstream water quality, and emit greenhouse gases such as methane to the atmosphere, thereby affecting climate. By understanding how the nature and rates of microbial processes vary across a broad suite of wetland ecosystems, we can better predict the impacts of disturbance on the functions of wetlands. This research will evaluate these microbial processes in a variety of Michigan wetlands. Techniques developed for marine and groundwater studies will be employed to determine the dominant microbial processes. Substances to be measured will include dissolved hydrogen gas, a universal intermediary in decomposition, as well as chemical byproducts of anaerobic metabolism. Specific process rates, including acetate turnover and sulfate reduction, will be measured to corroborate the findings doc2808 none This award is for the partial support of a conference in two areas of Nonlinear Analysis: Calculus of Variations and Bifurcation and Degree Theory. The conference will concentrate on the discussion of application of classical methods of the calculus of variations to new problems and on further development of relatively new methods such as Floer theory or Leray-Shauder degree for non-continuous maps. The conference will have a significant impact on the development of the field and will be beneficial to the mathematical community. I strongly recommend the award doc2809 none This proposal addresses fundamental physical issues impacting the growing area of integration of high-frequency electronics with optoelectronics and photonics. Our focus is the optical properties of semiconductors (quantum wells, wires, and dots) in the presence of strong dc and high-frequency (GHz-THz) electric fields. In particular, we will concentrate on cases where the high-frequency field is applied capacitively, i.e., it does not introduce additional carriers. The particular phenomena we will consider involve an interplay of ultrafast carrier dynamics in high-frequency fields, screening of the field by the spatial motions of the carrier distributions, propagation effects of the high-frequency field, and the interaction of the carrier distributions with light. Thus, the work will unite both micro and macroscopic length scales as well as dynamics on the femto to nanosecond timescales. Our effort will be primarily theoretical and computational. Together with our experimental collaborators, we will study the spatio-dynamics of carriers in photoconductors, semiconductor optical amplifier, and VCSEL s in the presence of the high-frequency fields. In the phenomena we will explore, the spatial aspects play a key role; on the one hand, we will be concerned with how such high-frequency fields adversely perturb the operation of optoelectronics and photonics, while on the other, we will explore potential phenomena for device applications. Potential applications include ultrahigh-bandwidth optical switching, enhanced photoconductive THz generation, ultrahigh-speed optical modulators, lateral mode control from semiconductor light emitters, and ultrahigh-speed beem steering doc2810 none This project is aimed at the study and potential of freely suspended liquid crystal films. Freely suspended films are structures of fundamental interest in condensed matter science. They are the thinnest known stable condensed phase structures and have the largest surface-to-volume ratio of any condensed phase preparation, making them ideal for studies of dimensionality, fluctuation, and interface effects. The focus will be on (i) studies of the polarization structure of tilted smectic films including effects of longitudinal polarization (ferroelectric ordering in the tilt plane) and transverse polarization (ferroelectric ordering normal to the tilt plane); (ii) investigation of films and filaments of smectic phases formed from banana or bow-shaped molecules; (iii) study of topological defect annihilation and orientational dynamics in 2D XY systems; (iv) orientation dynamics in tilted smectic films; (v) electron microscopy of films transferred to solid substrates. In addition the structure of smectic liquid crystals will also be studied by probing the structure and interactions of smectic. A focal defects in a novel three dimensional geometry, and by investigating the x-ray diffraction and video microscopic of the tubules formed by the diacetylenic lipids, pursuing recent findings that the tubules formed by the diacetylenic lipids, pursuing recent findings that the tubule formation process is achiral. %%% The topics explored in this project will have a significant scientific and technological imput on new technologies such as flat panel display, liquid crystal composites, and photonic band gap structures doc2811 none Walden This award to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts provides shipboard technical support, shore-based support, as well as maintenance and calibration of shared-use scientific instrumentation, for researchers using three oceanographic research vessels, R Vs Atlantis, Knorr and Oceanus, operated by the institution as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The technical support awarded here will assist NSF-funded researchers conduct a diverse suite of oceanographic studies from these three vessels throughout the world oceans, beginning in doc2812 none Females of many species are selective when choosing a mate, possibly in an attempt to obtain the best genes for their offspring. In support of this idea, recent studies have found that the offspring of more attractive fathers are generally in better condition. Although this appears to support the notion that attractiveness signals an inheritable paternal quality, another possibility exists. A growing body of theoretical and empirical evidence indicates that mothers may increase investment in reproduction when mated to an attractive male. Therefore, the offspring of an attractive male could be in better condition because its mother, responding to the attractiveness of her mate, provided extra investment. Using artificial insemination, this study experimentally separates paternal genetic effects from maternal investment effects to assess the relative roles of these two factors in determining offspring condition in red junglefowl. Many patterns of mate selection and attraction are found throughout the animal kingdom, and the study of animals is not complete without consideration of these important phenomena. In recent years, great strides have been made in understanding when and why animals are selective in their mate choice. This project seeks to add important components to this understanding by filling gaps in our knowledge of the benefits to females in being choosy doc2813 none This research project addresses the challenges and opportunities associated with the physics of broken symmetry in layered transition-metal oxides (TMOs), specifically at surfaces and interfaces. In TMOs, the strong mutual coupling between charge and spin of the electrons and the lattice degrees of freedom results in dramatic effects such as charge-, orbital-, and spin-ordering, colossal magnetoresistance, and unconventional superconductivity. Conceptually, creating a surface or interface is a controlled way to perturb the coupled system. This unique environment will produce new phenomena, while providing a fresh approach to the study of the spin-charge-lattice coupling in these complex materials. Large single crystals of naturally layered TMOs will be grown using a newly acquired NEC optical floating zone furnace, and artificially layered structures will be fabricated using laser molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). Variable-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) will be used to render spatial images of the atomic and electronic distributions at the surface. Surface structure and lattice dynamics will be determined with elastic and inelastic electron scattering. Surface magnetism will be determined both at a macroscopic and microscopic level by a combination of magneto-optical Kerr effect and variable-temperature magnetic force microscopy, with non-linear Kerr rotation used to observe buried interfaces. Synchrotron-based x-ray scattering will be utilized to measure interfacial structure. The theoretical program will use state-of-the-art first-principles computer codes, running on parallel machines, to calculate the surface structure and the electronic and magnetic properties, including stoichiometry effects. This research will be performed with graduate and undergraduate students, with the participation of postdoctoral research associates. %%% Advances in materials physics have dramatically improved our lives over the past fifty years. From the computer chip to the development of highly transparent optical fibers, from defense applications to better skis, tennis rackets, and bicycles, the availability of new materials has enabled progress in science and technology. This project, a partnership between The University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), is aimed at the development of a world-class synthesis, characterization, and educational facility for a family of materials known as transition-metal oxides (TMOs). Interest in this general class of materials stems from the richness of their physical properties (e.g., including unusual superconducting magnetic and optical properties, high temperature superconductivity, colossal magnetoresistance), complexity of their underlying physics, and the promise of technological applications. Large single crystals as well as artificially layered structures will be synthesized and studied using an extraordinary set of experimental tools (including neutron scattering at ORNL) and state-of-the-art first-principles theoretical techniques. The emphasis will be on surface and interface phenomena because of the importance of thin films in technological applications and the prospect on new emergent phenomena. The objectives are twofold: (1) to learn to tailor the electronic, magnetic, and structural surface (or interface) phase transitions in these complex TMOs for applications as sensors and transducers, and (2) to create a new, interdisciplinary curriculum and perspective on the importance of synthesis and fabrication of new materials for the advance of materials physics. The research will be conducted with graduate and undergraduate students as well as with postdoctoral research associates. They will thereby receive training in forefront research areas and be prepared to enter the scientific- technological workforce of the 21st century doc2814 none This US-Brazil award supported by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Mathematical Sciences provides funding for a workshop to be held in conjunction with the International Symposium on Dynamical Systems to be held at the Instituto de Matematica Pura e Aplicada (IMPA) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July, . The U.S. organizer is Dr. Sheldon E. Newhouse of Michigan State University; the Brazilian coordinator is Dr. Marcelo Viana of IMPA. This award will fund participation of U.S. mathematicians in both activities, as well as cover expenses for the organization of the workshop. The workshop will bring together researchers in the area of dynamical systems from all over the world. The field of dynamical systems impacts many areas, such as physics, biology, economics and chemistry. Some of the topics to be discussed are homoclinic bifurcations and the structure of general smooth dynamical systems; dynamics of rational maps of the Riemann sphere and polynomial diffeomorphisms in n-dimensional real and complex spaces; and strange attractors for smooth systems doc2815 none Comfort The fundamental particles and interactions in nature are currently described by the Standard Model, with the sector of strong interactions described by QCD. The open and difficult challenge is to understand in detail how these theories describe the properties of matter. The empirical knowledge of the subnucleonic (quark and gluon) degrees of freedom in the structure of baryons and mesons and their interactions is essential for understanding the nature and dynamics of the fundamental nuclear interactions. A program in medium-energy nuclear physics is being planned that will bring new and important information for these issues. The properties of baryons can be explored by bringing pion and kaon beams onto proton targets. Critical tests of the Standard Model can also be made by studying specific decays of kaons. Because the experimental work will be carried out at large accelerator facilities in the U.S. and Europe, the planning activities will include travel to these facilities or other institutions for detailed discussions with collaborators, as well as computer simulations and calculations for the experiments that are anticipated doc2816 none This research is a continuation and redirection of an existing project on the electronic and structural properties of disordered semiconductors. One major emphasis is the photodarkening effect, which is a metastable shift of the optical absorption edge to lower energies after optical excitation at energies greater than the energy of the optical band gap. The primary goal of this project is to develop a detailed microscopic description of the changes that occur at arsenic and chalcogen sites on photodarkening. A second thrust concerns the decay of optically excited electrons and holes in amorphous semiconductors that occurs at low temperatures and at long times after cessation of the optical excitation. These problems will be attacked by means of melt quenching, sputtering and PECVD growth techniques, magnetic resonance spectroscopy (ESR, NMR, and NQR) optical spectroscopies, various combinations of optical and magnetic resonance techniques, electrical and acoustic measurements applied to specifically selected chalcogenide glass systems. The specific tasks of this work are: to develop an understanding of the details of the local structural order before and after photodarkening in chalcogenide glasses; to ascertain the influence of chalcogen atoms on the decay of photo-excited electrons and holes that appears to be universal in the tetrahedrally-coordinated amorphous semiconductors; to examine partially crystallized and anisotropic chalcogenide glasses on a nanometer scale; to investigate the rigidity percolation threshold using sound velocity and attenuation methods; to study the intrinsic defects in chalcogenide glasses as the structure goes from low average to high average coordination number; and to study the role played by molecular hydrogen and the possible relationship with metastabilities in group IV-chalcogenide glasses. This work will be performed with students and postdoctoral research associates. %%% Amorphous, microcrystalline and nanocrystalline semiconductors are currently used, or are contemplated for use, in many applications, including flatpanel displays, infrared optical fibers and detectors, and solar cells. In spite of these successful applications there are very few universal properties to provide a general theoretical understanding of these materials. This research is focused on the investigation of how electrical and optical excitations of certain types of glasses decay over a long period of time. The goal of these studies is the development of an atomic molecular level of understanding of these and related processes. This research will be performed with students and postdoctoral research associates who will thereby be prepared for employment in industry, government and academe doc2817 none Sylvain Cappell Among the range of problems to be investigated in topology and geometry in low and high dimensions, some concern the study of transformation groups, that is the symmetries of manifolds and of more general spaces. New methods of classifying such group actions will be developed with a view to making good connections with methods of equivariant homotopy theory; basic naturality questions for the set of group actions on a manifold will be studied. Another set of problems concerns a variety of both topological and algebraic invariants of varieties, e.g. theories of characteristic classes, and new methods of explicitly computing them. A related series of questions to be investigated concerns the relations between the global topology of divisors and the local geometry of their singularities which must, in general, be regarded as singular knots. The natural actions of mapping class groups and their Torelli subgroups on the moduli spaces of representations (which are foundational in algebraic geometry, in gauge theory, in 3-manifold topology, and in string theory) will be investigated with a view to applications in three dimensional topology. Decomposition methods for studying analytic and geometric invariants of manifolds and the relations between them will be investigated, again with a view of applying such relation to three manifolds. Computations of generalized characteristic classes of toric varieties will be combined with other topological, geometric, and analytical methods to obtain results in geometrical combinatorics and applications to problems concerning lattice sums. This research project involves several investigations in a range of problems in topology and geometry in low and high dimensions and studies of some new applications of these in other areas of mathematics. Some of the research work will involve invariants of manifolds and of more general spaces, such as singular varieties. Effective methods of computing such natural invariants will be sought. The moduli spaces and three manifold invariants to be investigated also arise in geometrical approaches to theoretical physics. A combination of geometrical, algebraic and analytical methods will be used to study possible applications of singular varieties to problems concerning comparisons of lattice sums with integrals. Such comparisons are of interest in many areas of the mathematical sciences doc2818 none Powell The University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine geological and swath bathymetry work in the Florida Straits and Florida Keys; chemistry and ocean optics work in the Bahamas, Florida Keys, and Florida Bay; physical oceanography in the Florida Keys and Florida Bay; and equipment instrumentation testing in Florida Bay and the Bahamas. The R V Catamaran is part of a fleet of ships used by the National Science Foundation in support of marine science research. Most oceanographic projects require highly specialized equipment to be permanently installed on the vessel, thus the necessity for specialized ships. These vessels do not operate in the same mode as general cargo fishing vessels. As a result, NSF supports the operation of a variety of ships specifically dedicated to oceanographic research that are operated by universities and institutions around the country doc2819 none This study integrates the biomechanics and physiology of animal locomotion. The link between the mechanics and metabolic cost of walking is poorly understood, particularly in quadrupedal animals. The overall objective is to understand the biomechanical basis for the metabolic cost of quadrupedal walking. Specifically, what are the mechanical and metabolic bases for the preferred walking speed and the walk-trot transition speed? This study will focus on one species, the domestic horse, because it provides a 13-fold adult size range with excellent experimental controls. The mechanical work and metabolic cost of locomotion will be measured in different sized horses (70 kg to 900 kg) over a range of walking and slow trotting speeds. Studying an extreme size range of horses will provide unique insight into general mechanisms governing animal locomotion. Understanding the relationship between body size, preferred speed, and the metabolic cost of walking has important implications for determining the energy budgets of migratory animals and other animals where habitats are reduced and resources are becoming increasingly fragmented. Furthermore, the biomechanical analyses would provide valuable insight into the neuromuscular control of locomotion and may aid in the design and control of walking robots. The proposed research will allow for more informed diagnosis and treatment of horses with musculo-skeletal injuries and could improve horse health by providing a broader database to understand the effects of body size on the daily energy requirements in exercising horses doc796 none This project seeks to determine how the impact of stratospheric changes at the earth s surface is affected by model resolution, improvements in model physics and the nature of the ocean model used (dynamical versus mixed layer ocean). The PIs will examine to what extent any cooling in the North Atlantic is a feature of natural variability or forced (including ocean heat transport changes, changes in atmospheric circulation, increasing greenhouse gases and or aerosol loadings). The PIs will (i) to quantify the importance of including stratospheric dynamics in climate change experiments and the potential for important tropospheric and oceanic feedbacks; (ii) to project (based on given scenarios) future trends in the North Atlantic surface air temperature and examine their dependence on the inclusion of the stratospheric and oceanic components; and (iii) to examine to what extent fingerprints of anthropogenic climate change are robust over all the model configurations used in the study. The NASA GISS model with finer vertical and horizontal resolution will be used. The model will also include on-line ozone chemistry and transport. This will improve the solar cycle heating effects in the stratosphere. Interannual varying SST will be used, this may help generate more realistic summer results than with the low resolution. The work is important because it will increase understanding of the role of the stratosphere in climate doc2821 none William Kazez Kazez proposes to study genuine laminations of 3-manifolds. He and his collaborator, D. Gabai, are interested in understanding the geometry of the universal cover of a manifold containing a genuine lamination, and in particular how it is related to the geometry of the leaves of the lamination. He also proposes to study representations of order trees. Kazez along with K. Honda and G. Matic seek to understand the construction of tight contact structures from the point of view of a sutured manifold decomposition. For fibred knots with pseudo-Anosov monodromy, the sutured manifold decompositions are quite simple, and they propose to study the classification problem in this setting. Kazez, along with his collaborators, proposes to study the interaction and relationships between foliations and contact structures. Both structures are a study of a family of two planes in a 3-dimensional space, but these families appear to be extremely different. One is everywhere integrable, that is tangent to an embedded surface, the other is nowhere integrable. In spite of this, as the ambient space is split along surfaces, deep relationships start to become apparent. It is these relationships that we intend to develop and exploit doc2822 none The purpose of this project is to provide travel and living expenses for some students and faculty to participatein the 17th International Symposium on Mathematical Programming (ISMP ) to be held at the Georgia Institute of Technology, August 7 - August 11, . The support will be provided only to those who otherwise could not afford to attend. The project is split funded by the Division of Mathematical Sciences, the Division of International Programs and the Division of Design, Manufacturing and Industrial Innovation and will fund participants in two categories: 1.Domestic 2.International scientists from Eastern Europe. In the first category, preference will be given to students, junior collegues, women and minorities. The term mathematical programming is synonymous with optimization. In a mathematical programming or optimization problem, one seeks to maximize or minimize an objective function, subject to constraints on the variables. Research in the field covers a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from the theoretical analysis of the structural properties of optimization problems and the development and implementation of algorithms for their solution, to practical work in areas such as telecommunications, logistics, manufacturing, structural engineering, economics, finance, biology and even pure mathematics. Recent successful applications include the design of survivable telecommunication networks, crew scheduling, vehicle routing, production and inventory control, VLSI layout, the design of lightweight, durable engineering structures, portfolio planning and DNA string matching. The symposium covers the latest research results in the field with plenary presentations given by leading international experts and many other talks (more than ) given by scientists from more than 40 countries. The symposium is held every three years and is considered to be the major event in the field doc2823 none This award provides partial support for a Gordon Conference on the subject of Correlated Electrons . The conference will be held in Plymouth, NH, June 25-30, . The conference seeks to bring a wide variety of systems and intellectual issues into the mainstream of correlated electron physics and to introduce the techniques and concepts of the correlated electron field to a wider range of physicists. Support for the conference will enable the participation of under-funded junior researchers and members of historically under-represented groups. This award provides partial support for a Gordon Conference on the subject of Correlated Electrons . The conference will be held in Plymouth, NH, June 25-30, . The correlated electron problem underlies several major problems in solid state physics, including high temperature superconductivity and the so-called quantum Hall effects. Support for the conference will enable the participation of under-funded junior researchers and members of historically under-represented groups doc2824 none Research in theoretical elementary particle physics will include a study of an incomplete phase transition in a hidden sector of space-time as the cause of the apparent accelerated expansion of the universe; work on the relation between recently observed neutrino masses and the dominance of matter over antimatter; and an investigation of the significance of clustering of high energy cosmic rays as a clue to their elementary particle content. Increasingly, research at the intersection of elementary particle physics and cosmology has provided important clues to the structure of the universe and the laws of physics which govern it doc2825 none Schmid, Smith, and Cranfill Graduate student Raymond Cranfill, under the direction of Drs. Rudolf Schmid and Alan Smith, proposes to study the evolutionary history of derived leptosporangiate ferns, the Polypodiales, through use of both molecular sequence data and morphology. The Polypodiales comprise most of the ferns living today and number about 8,000-10,000 species. They are a conspicuous and diverse element of almost every ecosystem in the wetter tropics and subtropics, as well as some temperate ecosystems. Although we now know that this group is monophyletic (that is, with a single presumed ancestry), our understanding of interrelationships within the Polypodiales is poor and unreliable. This is particularly true for the least specialized or basal groups that were the first to evolve. The evolutionary radiation of the Polypodiales probably occurred over a very short time in the Cretaceous Period, which occurred 140-65 million years ago. Because the diversification apparently was rapid at a relatively distant geological time, we will need to examine several different genes from the chloroplast, mitochondrion, and nucleus, as well as morphological features, in order to define the deeper relationships between these ferns. An understanding of the explicit evolutionary relationships of the Polypodiales is important for several reasons. (1) Because this is the most diverse group of extant ferns, an understanding of these relationships promises to shed light on a range of different and interesting topics in evolutionary and structural biology, from macroevolutionary processes to evolutionary transformations in morphological characters. (2) A fresh understanding of the latter is particularly important to developmental biologists who are interested in the genetic control of developmental processes in plants. (3) This research is also important to our understanding of the evolution of modern terrestrial and epiphytic (non-terrestrial) ecosystems. It appears that the Polypodiales may have radiated contemporaneously with the flowering plants and perhaps in response to habitat diversification that occurred as the flowering plants radiated into a wide variety of habitats and began to form communities of greater ecological complexity than may have existed before. Comparable processes appear to be shaping similar patterns of diversity. Therefore, what we learn from ferns may contribute significantly to an understanding of the early evolution and development of plant communities that we see today doc2826 none Mason This award supports the conceptual design of a Long Wavelength Target Station at the Spallation Neutron Source as well as design development and R&D to support construction. A second, long wavelength target station would make use of the SNS accelerator to increase the performance of neutron scattering instruments making use of neutrons with wavelengths greater than two angstroms (compared to the High Power Target Station being built by the SNS Project). This will significantly enhance the capabilities of SNS for the academic user community in magnetism, polymers science, biomaterials and structural biology, liquids and amorphous materials, and other fields where characteristic lengths are greater than ten angstroms and characteristic energies are less than 1 meV. Instrument designs and the science they will enable will be developed by the scientific community and coordinated with the design of the target and moderator systems that produce the neutrons. . %%% Neutrons are a powerful tool for the study of the structure and dynamics of materials. Instruments that measure the patterns produced by neutrons scattered from materials can be used to determine where the atoms are and how they move. This proposal will fund work to develop a design for an experimental hall and associated instruments to be built at the Spallation Neutron Source, a new neutron scattering laboratory being built in Oak Ridge. The same accelerator being built for SNS can also be used to produce neutrons at this second, Long Wavelength Target Station. Adding such a target station to SNS will greatly enhance its scientific capacity for academic researchers in physics, chemistry, biology, engineering materials, and nanomaterials. The proposal will involve researchers from many institutions in the design and development of a facility and its instrumentation with a full proposal for the Long Wavelength Target Station to be completed in the first year doc2827 none Potter and Oh Many plant groups distributed only in eastern Asia and temperate North America have long attracted the interest of botanists and have been the subject of numerous taxonomic, biogeographic, and evolutionary studies over the past two centuries. Despite this long history of interest and several recent phylogenetic studies of such plant groups, their biogeographic history has not yet been well established. Tribe Neillieae, comprising three taxonomically difficult genera, Neillia, Physocarpus, and Stephanandra, is distributed in eastern Asia and both eastern and western North America, usually in mountainous regions. Tribe Neillieae possesses ideal characteristics for studying historical biogeography of eastern Asia and temperate North America: the tribe is a strongly supported natural group, its distribution can be dissected into many areas in each continent, and its small number of species (ca. 25) facilitiates the analysis of a variety of data using a range of modern phylogenetic methods. However, no comprehensive systematic study of the group has yet been undertaken. Graduate student Sang-Hun Oh, under the direction of Dr. Daniel Potter at University of California, Davis, is studying phylogenetic relationships of the tribe Neillieae using morphological and molecular data. Four DNA regions, encompassing both nuclear and chloroplast genomes, for all species in tribe Neillieae will be analyzed along with morphological characters to estimate a maximally robust phylogenetic framework. Biogeographic history of the tribe Neillieae will be evaluated using this phylogenetic framework in conjunction with current distribution patterns and fossil records. A taxonomic revision with a sound classification system that reflects evolutionary relationships of the members of tribe Neillieae will also be provided. The historical biogeography of tribe Neillieae will provide important information relevant to understanding how and when the eastern Asian-North American disjunct distribution pattern developed. In addition, considering that plants of Neillieae are horticulturally useful, this study will provide valuable information for screening germplasm and developing new ornamental cultivars. Finally, by integrating several close relatives of the tribe Neillieae, data produced in this project will contribute to illuminating the evolutionary relationships within Rosaceae, an evolutionarily complex and economically important plant family doc2828 none This research aims to develop new statistical methods, inference and theory for regression modeling of ordinal and bounded data. Recent work indicates a strong possiblility of unifying the most commonly used ordinal models and extending them to a broader class of models. A unified approach will lead to comprehensive and flexible ordinal regression modeling. Further this line of research is directed at developing improved methods for temporally and spatially correlated ordinal data. Bounded response data are common in many applications. The second part of this project will extend general regression methods and inference methods for bounded response data. Parametric and semi-parametric methods will be developed to model correlations among bounded responses. Modern computing algorithms such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo provide the means for developing software for correlated ordinal and bounded response data. Ordinal modeling has widespread applicability in the social sciences and medical studies. Moreover ordinal modeling has recently emerged as an important tool for risk assessment in environmental toxicology and in civil engineering applications where the probabilities of events of different severity need to be modeled. Bounded response data are common in infrastructure studies, which use bounded condition scores, e.g., 0-100 scale. The data may be correlated over time (e.g., the history of a road section) and space (e.g., neighboring road sections are correlated). The methods being developed will improve modeling and uncertainty assessments and will have applications in many fields such as environmental risk assessment, infrastructure management, transportation risk modeling and the assessment of treatments for depression and other social functioning disorders doc2829 none The focus of this Focused Research Group proposal will develop the molecular science of fullerene nanotubes. These new materials have been hailed for their materials properties and the applications that these properties promise. The single greatest impediment to realizing this promise is the current poverty of chemical approaches for manipulating the tubes as individual molecules. Single-walled nanotubes (swnts) are truly molecular entities, owing to their high degree of structural perfection, but the molecular science of manipulating them in the sense that chemists manipulate other molecules is still quite embryonic. These manipulations include solubilization, covalent derivatization of tube ends and sides, sorting by length, electrical type, and diameter, assembly, cutting, and synthesis of tubes of specific helicity. These are the tasks that comprise the basis of nanotube manipulation, and are central technologies in the realization of the promise of swnt. One particular aim will be to develop a variety of strategies to solubilizing nanotubes in various solvents, including water, by supramolecular routes. Associations of swnts with other molecules will be designed - e.g., polymers or large macrocyclic compounds - both for solubilizing the tubes and for assembling them without making any covalent attachment to their sides, thus preserving fully their intrinsic materials properties. Sorting tubes by length, type, and diameter will be crucial to fulfilling hopes of using nanotubes as wires in molecular electronics. Crude separations by length and diameter have begun, but cleaner, scalable chromatographic and electrophoretic methods are needed. Sorting by electrical type will be approached by exploiting their different electrical and magnetic properties(e.g., using electrophoresis, electrochemistry, and electric or magnetic field gradients), as well as their structural differences to derivatize selectively by type. A grand challenge is to synthesize tubes of a given electrical type. The plan is to utilize seed crystals of a particular type, (separated by methods developed as part of the proposed work), and use covalent chemistry at the end to assemble a catalyst for growth there. This challenge will make demands on several of the other goals, providing both a rich driving force, and, if successful, a remarkable new materials science with far-reaching technological impact. %%% This Focused Research Group project will have a major impact in a fast-breaking area focused on the development of the molecular science of fullerene nanotubes. The research is highly synergistic, multidisciplinary, high-risk and high-impact, with a significant probability for technological payoff in areas that include molecular electronics and high performance composites. This team of intrnationally renown experts is being jointly supported by The Office of Mulitdisciplinary Affairs, The Division of Materials Research and The Chemistry Division of The Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate, and by the Division of Chemical and Transport Systems of The Engineering Directorate doc2830 none This project addresses several topics at the interface between mathematics, physics, and materials science. One theme is epitaxial growth, particularly the task of linking microscopic and macroscopic descriptions of growth. A second theme is the interaction of bulk and surface energies, which determine the structure of defects and the selection of patterns in diverse systems such as stressed films and dielectric fluids. A third theme is the analysis of composite microstructure, where methods developed for image processing seem to offer fresh opportunities. Materials have structure on many length scales. The tasks of (a) predicting this structure, and (b) understanding its consequences, are among the major challenges of modern materials science. Mathematical methods such as homogenization, asymptotic analysis, and multiresolution methods can help. This project will develop and apply such methods in the context of specific material systems, leading to enhanced understanding of those systems and improvement of the mathematical methods themselves doc2831 none Pseudospectral (PS) methods are high-accuracy alternatives to finite difference (FD) and finite element methods (FEM) for the numerical solution of PDEs. They are particularly effective for solving convection-dominated equations over long times and in relatively simple geometries. Both the algorithms themselves and the analysis of them have traditionally been closely tied to expansions in different classes of orthogonal functions. The recent book A Practical Guide to Pseudospectral Methods (by the present investigator) notes that a large body of generalizations, enhancements and insights can be gained by viewing PS methods instead as special cases of FD methods. Several such opportunities were explored under the grant . Building on these experiences, we will now introduce radial basis functions (RBFs) as an additional component to be integrated with PS schemes. Although computationally quite costly, the spectral accuracy of RBFs, combined with their extreme geometric flexibility, would seem to make them ideally suited to complement PS methods in the vicinity of irregular boundaries. To realize this requires much research regarding the basic features of RBF approximations, as well as research on issues related to interfacing them with PS and FD methods. Pseudospectral (PS) methods were first proposed in the early s (in connection with meteorology and turbulence modeling). They have since been shown to be extraordinary effective for high-accuracy calculations in numerous other fields, such as computational electromagnetics and nonlinear waves. Strategically important application areas include simulating the radar scattering from airplanes, the electrical interference between components on computer chips, and the transmissions of signals in optical fibres. The main weakness with PS methods has been the difficulty to apply them in complex geometries. Some of this has been overcome in recent years (usually by splitting a complicated domain in simpler parts, and then applying some suitable computational means for coupling of the subdomains). A quite different and highly promising approach will be introduced and then explored under this grant. This involves combining classical PS methods with the geometrically extremely flexible approach known as radial basis functions (RBFs). This has never been attempted, and the research falls in the high risk, high gain category. Success is by no means certain, but if it happens, it could have a major impact, particularly on computational electromagnetics in applications such as simulation of radar scattering stealth properties of objects doc2832 none The research is concerned with techniques from statistical signal processing and information theory as they apply to communication systems with multiple goals. Such systems arise in multimedia communications networks like the Internet. The decomposition of data streams into different types is critical to finding information desired by a user among vast available sources, and it can also provide methods for displaying, rendering, printing, or playing the received signal that take advantage of its particular structure. Signal processing and coding theory have provided powerful mathematical models of information sources and algorithms by which these sources can be communicated and processed. Typically systems are designed as a collection of separate, unrelated, components. This can result in much less than optimal overall performance. Furthermore, it can hamper theoretical understanding of the fundamental limits on achievable performance.We treat the simultaneous design of mathematical models that account at once for information sources, data compression, and signal processing and apply to extracting information from the received data. Our emphasis is on image communication and processing. Because, the techniques draw heavily from demonstrably successful methods in speech coding and recognition they are natural for both signal types, individually or together. The research involves a unified approach to data compression, statistical classification and regression, and density estimation. It is based on a novel combination of vector quantization, Gauss mixture models, measures of minimum discrimination information (relative entropy), and universal coding. Vector quantization provides both a theoretical framework and a method for implementation. Gauss mixture models are a flexible class by which to describe information sources. They can be fit to real data by clustering with respect to a minimum discrimination information measure of distortion. A primary objective is the development and application of conditional versions of rate-distortion extremal properties of Gaussian models in order to design robust algorithms for compression, classification, modeling, and combinations thereof. There are many open questions about relations among modeling, compression, and classification regression. Our goal is to provide answers to as many of them as possible and in so doing to contribute to understanding the interplay of modeling, signal processing, and coding. We describe optimized and implementable robust codes for compression and classification for a variety of information sources, especially for multimodal imagery. Part of our efforts are devoted to purely mathematical aspects of tree-structured regression, which is related to martingale theory and to the differentiation of integrals doc2833 none Kellogg This project will investigate the classification, history, and biogeography of Bignonieae, a group of woody vines in the catalpa family (Bignoniaceae). Bignonieae, with 350 species and 47 genera, is the largest and most important group of woody vines in tropical regions of the Americas. In some areas, they make up 20-25% of the species. They are known for their strikingly ornamental flowers (such as the the trumpet-creeper, which occurs in the U.S.), their timber, and their medicinal value. Despite their importance, Bignonieae are hard to identify, in part because we do not understand the relationships of the species. The first goal of this project is to determine the phylogeny (i.e., genealogy) of Bignonieae using morphological and DNA data. From this phylogeny, the classification of Bignonieae will be revised, and patterns of morphological, ecological and biogeographical variation will be re-evaluated. A better classification of Bignonieae will help in identification of this dominant component of neotropical forests. The history of the Bignonieae mirrors the history of tropical regions in this hemisphere. In an era when the increase in botanical knowledge cannot keep up with loss of diversity, allocation of resources to major components of tropical forests is a priority doc2834 none Thomson & Mather The genome wide pattern of nonrandom association between different alleles of two genes, called linkage disequilibrium (LD), is not well understood. Recent work in a Caucasian population revealed a heterogeneous distribution of LD, a pattern consistent with the action of natural selection on genes in some regions. This study will determine whether LD is distributed similarly in ethnically diverse human populations and will evaluate the effects of demography on the distribution of LD by characterizing LD nine genomic regions in three diverse human populations. To measure LD, allelic associations will be determined for 103 genetic markers, chosen using the data available from the Human Genome Project. This study is a comparative characterization of LD in several human populations that will aid in understanding genomic evolution. Regions of the human genome that show high levels of LD in several ethnically diverse populations are likely to contain genes experiencing selection in the human species. Discovering genes which have experienced selection is relevant to the study of disease and aids in understanding human biological history. Knowledge about how LD depends on demography will aid in deciding which populations are appropriate to use for LD mapping of genes responsible for complex diseases and traits doc2835 none Taylor Evidence of strong direct effects of predators ( top-down ) and resources ( bottom-up ) are emerging from mathematical models and simplified assemblages. Data from natural communities are necessary to improve our understanding of their combined effects over multiple scales. Using large-scale surveys combined with manipulative field experiments at a single site, this project examines the trophic interactions of avian predators and arthropod assemblages of the Hawaiian myrtaceous tree Metrosideros polymorpha. Across a four million-year gradient of volcanic substrate age, nutrient availability varies in a unimodal fashion. Arthropod densities on Metrosideros track this relationship across the island chain, suggesting a strong influence of resources to the system. Species diversity accumulates with geological age and is independent of density. These relationships will be evaluated on a young basaltic lava flow ( 120 y.o.) where Metrosideros plant communities are nutrient limited and respond to fertilization with a tenfold increase in productivity. Vertebrate predators (birds) are to be excluded and large plots will be fertilized in a completely crossed well-replicated design. The proposed research program combines the scales and perspectives of observational data on natural patterns with controlled field experiments, thereby expanding the scope of inference from either approach alone doc2836 none The inverse problem of matrix construction arises in many areas of important applications. Matrices under construction are supposed to satisfy certain specific constraints. The constraints could be inherited intrinsically from the physical feasibility of a certain mechanical structure or could be driven extrinsically by the desirable property of a certain design parameter. This proposal intends to extend the investigation that the PI has been conducting in the past years with emphasis on the the development of numerical algorithms for application to challenging inverse problems. Four specific inverse problems of matrix construction will be studied via three possible numerical approaches. Techniques to be used involves computer experiments, high resolution graphics and symbolic manipulation, in conjunction with mathematical analysis. This project is expected to find important applications ranging from new development of numerical algorithms to theoretic solution of difficult problems. Since matrix reconstruction with specified properties arises from a remarkably wide area of disciplines, the resulting technology would have substantial impact on the progress in scientific and engineering fields. In the era of information and digital technologies, massive data processing becomes an imperative task at almost every level of applications. In many situations the digitized information is gathered and stored as a data matrix. Nonetheless, because most of the information gathering devices or methods have only finite bandwidth, one cannot avoid the fact that the data collected often are not exact. Signals received by antenna arrays often are contaminated by instrumental noises; astronomical images acquired by telescopes often are blurred by atmospheric turbulence; and even empirical data obtained in laboratories often do not satisfy intrinsic physical constraints. Before any forward analysis technique can be applied, it is important to first reconstruct the data matrices so that the inexactness is reduced while certain feasibility conditions are satisfied. The general objective of this proposal is to develop numerical algorithms to carry out this kind of data reconstruction task. The work in this proposal concerns the mathematical theory and the numerical implementation of three algorithms for four specific inverse construction problems. This investigation could lead to improved techniques for use in several national strategic areas, including ground-based astro-imaging processing, medicine, communications, and laser technology doc2837 none This proposal requests support for a research program in experimental high energy physics based at Rutgers University. The major focus of the group for the next three years is on: Preparation and operation of theCDF detector at the Fermilab Tevatron to study proton-antiproton interactions at 2 TeV, Preparation of the CMS experiment for future operation at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) currently being built at the CERN laboratory in Geneva Switzerland to study proton-proton interactions at 14 TeV, Observation of the highest energy cosmic rays, of order eV, with the Fly s Eye detector in Utah, and the upgrade of that detector (HiRes), and R&D work on chemical-vapor-deposition diamonds for use as particle detectors in intense radiation envorinments where corresponding silicon-based detectors cannot survive. This work is supported separately, but is included in the proposal for completeness. In addition, the group is completing analysis work and expects to publish results on two earlier experiments: KTeV at Fermilab and SLD at SLAC doc2838 none McCoy This grant is supported by the Divisions of Materials Research, Physics and Mathematical Sciences. The focus of the grant is the exact study of statistical mechanics of strongly interacting many-body systems and their connection with pure mathematics and condensed matter physics. The strongly interacting systems of greatest interest are the XXZ spin-1 2 chain, lattice models for generalized exclusion statistics and integrable perturbations, and Ising and dimer models particularly on higher genus lattices. %%% This grant is supported by the Divisions of Materials Research, Physics and Mathematical Sciences. The focus of the grant is the exact study of statistical mechanics of strongly interacting many-body systems and their connection with pure mathematics and condensed matter physics doc2839 none Cannatella and Yeh Miniaturization is the evolution of unusually small body size within a lineage of animals. It has broad implications for features of ecology and physiology, as well as morphology. It has evolved in a taxonomically diverse array of animals, including all the major groups of vertebrates. Miniaturization offers unique opportunities for investigating the evolution of morphology. In miniaturization, there is an area of contact between morphological evolution and the patterns and mechanisms of development. This results from the observation that miniaturization is often achieved via a precocious truncation of development, resulting in paedomorphosis, the retention of juvenile features of an ancestral species in the adult of the descendant species. Because miniaturization has evolved numerous times in frogs, and has also reached impressive extremes in the group, with certain frog species included among the tiniest extant vertebrates, frogs make an ideal group in which to study the effects of miniaturization on morphological evolution. Graduate student Jennifer Yeh, under the direction of Dr. David Cannatella, is making a comparison of miniaturization across numerous lineages of frogs, in the context of their phylogenetic affinities. First, the skeletons of miniaturized species will be compared to those of closely related larger species in order to document general patterns of morphological change, both from standard measurements and from computer-assisted thin-plate spline analyses. Preliminary data suggest that miniaturized frogs occasionally lose bones which ossify late in development. In addition, analyses of skull shape indicate that many miniaturized species show specific differences compared to their larger relatives, such as relatively larger braincases and sensory capsules. These patterns suggest that functional requirements constrain the response of morphology to size reduction. Second, the extent to which developmental truncation explains morphological patterns in miniaturized frogs will be investigated. Evolutionary patterns associated with miniaturization will be compared to the within-species morphological changes that characterize development and growth. Finally, variation in the degree to which morphology has responded to the evolution of small body size in different frog lineages will be assessed doc2840 none of explicit logging operations to assure consistency and preserve incremental improvements in the face of possible system failures at any node of the parallel system. Collaboration with industry is part of the project. Ms. Xiaowei Sun, a supported Ph.D. student on the project, has completed an internship at Clustra, Inc., whose product is a parallel replicated DBMS designed for high availability. She is also doing an internship with IBM Toronto on online reorganization for IBM s DBMS, DB2. The close contact with industry and the current importance of the problem of online reorganization will strengthen the impact of this project s results, including the expected technology transfer. http: www.ccs.neu.edu home salzberg nsfproj .html doc2841 none Bemis and Hilton With over 24,000 living fish species, Teleostei includes over half of all living vertebrate animals. Such a large diversity offers outstanding chances for discoveries in evolutionary biology. However, we still lack much information about teleostean anatomy and there is little consensus about such basic questions as the evolutionary origin and diversification of teleosts. To address these issues, graduate student Eric Hilton, under the direction of Dr. William Bemis, proposes a two-part study. First, he will describe in detail (for the first time) the skeletons of two North American teleosts known as mooneyes and goldeyes (genus Hiodon) on the basis of extensive series of specimens both geographic (to assess variability) and ontogenetic (to assess developmental changes from juvenile to adult form). The mooneyes and goldeyes belong to an early evolutionary radiation of teleosts that also contains such familiar species as knife fishes, elephant nose fishes, and arowanas. This group is believed to have split from all other teleosts approximately 150 million years ago, and the skeleton of mooneyes and goldeyes has remained largely unchanged since this time. For this reason, they can be used to represent early teleosts in studies of teleostean evolution. Second, the student will use the new anatomical information generated by the study for a broad analysis of teleostean phylogeny. A focused comparative survey of skeletal characteristics in more than thirty living and fossil teleostean species will build upon the first-hand observations of specimens used in the study. The reconstructed patterns of teleostean evolutionary diversification can then be compared with patterns developed by other researchers, including molecular systematists. Ultimately the morphological and molecular data on fishes can be synthesized to yield a reliable account of the origins and diversity of living teleosts doc2842 none D Antonio Invasions by wood shrubs (particularly those that fix nitrogen) into grasslands have received much attention, yet we do not understand the role that N-fixation plays in the invasion process. In particular, we do not know what constraints may be imposed by soil-borne mutualists on fixation efficiency, nor the degree to which nutrient limitation of the resident community contributes to the competitive advantage of N-fixation. This research will investigate three questions that address constraints on a nitrogen-fixing shrub s ability to invade a coastal California grassland habitat, and the consequences of that fixation for resident species interactions: (1) How does the success of colonization by broom into grassland habitat change with nutrient limitation of the resident species? (2) How does availability or quality of Rhizobium innoculum affect this species ability to invade and fix nitrogen? (3) How does enrichment of soil by N-fixation affect species interactions? Coastal California grasslands offer an ideal opportunity to perform this research because they lack a significant native N-fixing component, are themselves nitrogen limited, and are currently experiencing dramatic invasions by several introduced N-fixing shrubs doc2843 none The project is a continuation of which was entitled Renormalization and Global Bifurcation. Tresser and co-worker P.Coullet introduced the notion of renormalization in the theory of dynamical systems and conjectured universality of the transition to chaos in a variety of natural systems. The corresponding renormalization theory deals with the small scale geometrical structure of one-dimensional dynamical systems. Tresser used renormalization concepts to describe the bifurcation diagram of a large class of families of dynamical systems. The renormalization phenomena are observed in a wide range of applications. One would like to have a renormalization theory which is widely applicable. For This reason Martens initiated a real one-dimensional renormalization theory for unimodal maps. This work uses as less as possible underlying structure. The aim of this project is to locate more examples of renormalization, explore the corresponding bifurcation phenomena and continue the development of the above mentioned real one-dimensional renormalization theory doc2844 none Object-oriented programs contain many class invariants : propositions that are true of all objects of a given class, and remain true even as the objects change. These class invariants are the focus of this research. There are two broad areas of applications for class invariants. First, class invariants can enable compiler optimizations, allowing programs to run faster. Second, information about class invariants can be of direct use to programmers, reducing the number of software defects. Research goals include building a categorization of class invariants that are tractable for static analysis, developing static analysis algorithms for class invariants, implementing systems that apply class invariants in compiler-style optimization and in verification of user-supplied invariants, and empirically evaluating the techniques as implemented, with particular attention to their speed and the usefulness of the results for standard compiler optimizations doc2845 none The PI s will study how predation by stream fish will affect survivorship antipredator behavior, and larval growth of salamander larvae. The will investigate how predation as a spatially explicity and variable selective agent may be differentiating sub-populations of the salamander Desmognathus quadramaculatus. This species co-exists with stream fish in southern Appalachian streams and this work will provide a unique test case to ask if predation influences life history traits in animals with complex life cycles doc2846 none Nuzhdin Microorganisms play an important role in the biology of many insects, with effects ranging from mutualistic to pathogenic. Bacteria of several types are found in some but not other individual aphids sampled from natural populations. These bacteria are transmitted from mother to daughter, and thus--if they affect the host phenotype--are a source of heritable variation between aphids. The goal of this research is to assess: (a) the transmission of these bacteria, (b) their fitness effects, and (c) their role in aphid adaptation. Specifically, this work will measure variation in the presence of symbionts across aphid populations, their rate of transmission, the heritability of symbiont abundance, and the relationship between symbiont abundance and aphid fitness. A long-term selection experiment will be conducted to investigate the role of symbionts in host plant adaptation. Although heritable microorganisms are commonly found in insects, their effects on host fitness are generally unknown. This study will contribute to understanding the role of such organisms in the biology of aphids, an important insect pest. Additionally, this study is significant and unique in that it uses the aphid-symbiont community as a model for understanding interactions between selection acting at different levels: among aphids with different symbiont communities, and among bacteria within individual aphids doc2847 none Herbivores must combat the chemical arsenal of their host plants in order to feed. Our understanding of such resistance is incomplete. In North Carolina, a small (1cm) marine herbivore (the shrimp-like Ampithoe) performs well on Dictyota, a brown seaweed containing alcohols toxic to other herbivores. Ampithoe s geographic range is larger than the plants , and previous work shows populations which are outside Dictyota s range do not perform as well as populations within Dictyota s range. The proposed research will identify plant compounds responsible for mediating these differences in performance. This will allow the identification of biochemical resistance mechanisms that respond to the toxins. These known host use patterns will be placed into a within-species phylogenetic framework using DNA sequence data. The work will serve as an example for other plant-herbivore systems whose host-use is known and recent evolutionary history is unknown. One can test theory largely developed for terrestrial insect pests using an ecologically similar herbivore from a very different environment (i.e., marine vs. terrestrial) and evolutionary history (i.e., Crustacea vs. Insecta). Such tests can lead to alternatives to current theory and a more complete understanding of how herbivores may respond to plants over ecological and evolutionary timescales doc2848 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Nonlinear Waves Goodman This work consists of several projects in applied and computational mathematics. One project focuses on anisotropic adaptive finite element methods. It has been demonstrated that anisotropic refinement leads to more efficient computations in thin layers, such as boundary layers. These methods will be extended to three dimensional problems and encoded in general-purpose software. Another project involves mathematical techniques for understanding the value of stock options and other derivative securities. We will examine how more desirable, sophisticated pricing models differ from those in use today. If the extra sources of uncertainty introduced in multi-factor models are not too large, we can estimate their effect on pricing and hedging strategies using perturbation methods rather than the large scale computation that they seem to require. A third project concerns numerical methods for solving stochastic differential equations. The goal is to develop a method as accurate as Milstein s method that does not require sampling repeated Ito integrals or explicitly evaluating derivatives of noise coefficients. Computation of quantities of practical interest, such as stresses in structures, fluid or heat flows, etc., are often limited by computer memory and speed, so techniques that reduce computational cost have immediate practical application. One part of this project concerns development of a more efficient finite-element algorithm, a central tool of engineering computation. Currently, adaptive computations automatically determine the resolution appropriate to a region, so that the computation will not waste high resolution where it is not needed (e.g. far from the source of a stress). Anisotropic refinement, the topic of this work, goes one step further, seeking directions in which high resolution is not needed (e.g. parallel to a long crack). A second part of this project focuses on mathematical methods used in the banking industry. The finance industry has been transformed by computers, communications, and instant access to information. A liquidity revolution has occurred through use of sophisticated quantitative methods. Investors, businesses and bankers can now understand risk much better, and, through derivative instruments and markets, sell the risk to those who wish to assume it. The New York financial community has an edge on other foreign banking centers through the use of more sophisticated quantitative market models, which pose analytical and computational challenges for finance professionals and applied mathematicians. This project examines ways to make complicated financial models amenable to analysis doc2849 none 00- Megonigal Weiss DDIG: Investigations of a dynamic microbially-mediated iron cycle in the rhizosphere of wetland plants Wetlands naturally filter pollutants from streams, rivers, lakes and groundwater. The investigators have found iron-oxidizing bacteria living on plant root surfaces that can use dissolved iron -a pollutant at high concentrations- as an energy source, thus removing it from water. Other forms of bacteria consume the rust coating on roots and release it back into the water. This creates a cycle of iron being trapped and released in the wetland system. The investigators will study the types of bacteria present and their role in the wetland iron cycle to determine if wetlands remove and store iron in wetland soils over long time periods. The research will also examine the effects of the iron cycle in the wetland plant rhizosphere on methanogenesis doc2850 none PI: Gary Benson Proposal Number: Institution: Mt. Sinai School of Medicine Project This project is an investigation of computational problems that arise for a new type of discrete pattern in DNA sequences, the composition pattern. Composition is a vector quantity describing the frequency of occurrence of each alphabet letter in a particular string. Let S be a string over E.Then, C (S) =(f1; f2; pH j _ j) is the composition of S, wherefore 2 _, fi is the fraction of the characters in S that are i. A composition pattern is a string P = r1r2 _ _ _ rp, where RI represents a composition region i.e. a substring of homogenous composition which differs from that of its surrounding regions. Note that the order of letters in RI is irrelevant, as it has no effect on the composition of RI. To date, algorithms which characterize DNA functional sites have concentrated primarily on identifying what this proposal terms position-specific patterns, such as the consensus sequence or the more flexible, but less specific weight matrix based pattern profile. Unfortunately, position-specific patterns are usually not selective enough to distinguish actual occurrences of a feature from false positives. Too often, when these patterns are used to search for unknown matches, one to several orders of magnitude more false positives than true positives are obtained. The composition pattern is a new approach which embraces an important physical property, the potential for variation in structural conformation (shape) of the DNA double helix, yet does so in the context of a type of discrete pattern which has apparently not been previously explored by the algorithmic community. DNA crystallization studies support the idea that certain dinucleotides base-steps confer specific types of flexibility. Further evidence is provided by studies of intrinsically curved and `kinkable DNA. Based on these observations, it is suggested here that for conformational flexibility, the order of nucleotides in a sequence may be less important than the effect, which certain nucleotide or dinucleotide base-step biases impart on the sequence as a whole. In support of this assertion is an accumulating body of evidence of important DNA features whose unifying characteristic is composition bias rather than position-specific information. This research project encompasses algorithm development for three related problem areas which form the basis for understanding the functional importance of composition variation in nucleotide sequences and the detection of composition patterns. These areas are: Pattern matching. A composition pattern and sequence are given. Find all occurrences of the pattern in the sequence. Occurrences may be exact or approximate. Pattern detection. A sequence or set of sequences is given. Find all recurring composition patterns. Occurrences may be exact or approximate. The patterns are not specified or only partially specified Sequence segmentation. A sequence is given. Partition it into statistically distinct regions of homogenous composition. These problems have theoretical interest in their own right, independent of biology and have received almost no attention from the algorithmic community doc2851 none Schaal & Caicedo Plant disease resistance genes, involved in the recognition of invading pathogens, have been a subject of intense research in the past decade. This has culminated in the identification of a handful of resistance genes, mostly in crop plants. However, little is known about the evolution of resistance genes in natural populations. This project will focus on the evolution of Cf-2, one of the few resistance genes to have been identified in a noncrop species. Allelic diversity of the Cf-2 gene in wild populations of Lycopersicon pimpinellifolium, a close relative of the tomato, will be surveyed to establish levels of within- and between-population diversity. This genetic variation will be analyzed with respect to the geneological relationships among Cf-2 alleles, geographical location, resistance phenotype, and the effects of natural selection. These analyses will reveal the microevolutionary processes that have shaped Cf-2 s evolution. Plant resistance genes offer a unique opportunity to study how selection and other population-level processes affect an ecologically important trait at the molecular level. The study of adaptation at this level has traditionally been hindered by lack of knowledge of specific genes and their functions. Resistance genes thus emerge as ideal candidates to elucidate the evolutionary dynamics of molecular adaptation. Furthermore, knowledge of the mechanisms underlying resistance gene function and evolution is important for the continuing management of crop systems and the pests which threaten them doc2852 none PI: Yuanyuan Yang Multicast involves transmitting information from a source to multiple destinations, and is a requirement in high-performance networks. It is projected that multicast will be increasingly used to support various interactive applications such as video-on-demand, teleconferencing, web servers and E-commerce on the Internet. Many of these applications require not only multicast capability but also predictable performance, such as guaranteed multicast latency and bandwidth, called quality-of-service (QoS). The objective of this research is to design a QoS capable multicast architecture based on multicast networks with built-in QoS functions to support multicast communication. Specially, the research focuses on: (1) design of basic building-block multicast networks with better QoS functions and lower network cost; (2) establishing analytical models on performance metrics of statistical QoS-capable multicast architectures; (3) study of efficient schemes to schedule multicast for different QoS requirements; (4) building simulation tools for validating theoretical results, and making them available to research community and system designers. This research combines algorithmic, probabilistic, combinatorial, and simulation techniques to conduct comprehensive studies. The proposed research has a significant impact on scalable and high-performance parallel distributed computing as efficient support for multicast communication can significantly reduce the communication latency and simplify the design and implementation of numerous parallel distributed applications doc2853 none Wheeler and Miller Graduate student Kelly Miller, under the direction of Dr. Quentin Wheeler, is studying the systematics and natural history of beetles of the subfamily Dytiscinae. The result of this project will be an understanding of the phylogeny of dytiscine beetles (Coleoptera: family Dytiscidae), an important group of large, aquatic predators. These diving beetles occur in lakes and ponds throughout the world and are important predators of aquatic insects, such as mosquitoes, as well as a variety of other prey items including small vertebrates such as tadpoles and fish fry. Members of the group have interesting ecological properties as dominant predators as well as interesting behavioral properties, such as complex mating behaviors. This project will focus on discovering the phylogenetic relationships between the higher taxonomic groups in this subfamily including the currently recognized five tribes and 25 or so genera. It will also include members of the other major subfamilies of diving beetles as outgroup taxa which will help establish a phylogeny for the entire family. The classification based on this analysis will be one of the first for any group of dytiscids that is based upon an explicit and comprehensive phylogenetic analysis. The project will be based on morphological characters observed from adult and immature forms, and on molecular sequence data for the nuclear gene wingless and the mitochondrial gene for cytochrome-B, sampled from as many lineages as possible within Dytiscinae and relevant outgroup taxa. Newly collected material from South America and Australia will augment North American collections and museum specimens. These data will be analyzed in a variety of ways, but eventually all available data will be combined to discover the best-supported hypothesis of the evolutionary history of the group. The resulting phylogenetic hypothesis for the subfamily will form the basis for a revised classification that is stable and optimally informative. As a result of this project, biologists using dytiscine beetles to answer questions about ecology, behavior, biogeography, etc., will be able to make informed decisions about suitable study taxa based on phylogenetic criteria. This will, in turn, provide greater insight into generalizations about the process of evolution doc2854 none Loren E. Babcock Reconnaissance field work in Esmeralda County, Nevada, during resulted in the discovery of a new Lower Cambrian Burgess Shale-type deposit. The new deposit contains a variety of organisms similar in preservational quality to those from the celebrated Burgess Shale (Middle Cambrian of British Columbia) and the Chengjiang Lagerstatte (Lower Cambrian of Yunnan, China). The new site is of importance because it is the oldest Burgess Shale-type deposit known from North America, and one of the oldest such deposits globally. Exploratory investigation of the western Nevada site is proposed in order to secure available fossils for science before the public becomes aware of its existence. The primary purposes of this work are: 1, to investigate the paleontological potential of the new locality; 2, to conduct preliminary studies on the paleoenvironmental circumstances (both depositional and taphonomic) under which the biota was fossilized; and 3, to accurately assess the age of the new site. The new deposit is expected to add important new information to our understanding of the Cambian explosion, and particularly the early fossil record of the event as recorded in the North America-Greenland paleocontinent doc2855 none Nachman & Payseur The genetic basis of the formation of new species is a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology. In this study, a European hybrid zone between two closely related species of house mice (Mus domesticus and M. musculus) will be used to locate genomic regions potentially involved in reproductive isolation. Fifteen DNA markers, equally spaced along the X chromosome, will be genotyped in 254 individuals. Patterns of variation at these markers will be used to identify chromosomal regions that cause reproductive isolation. The house mouse system features all the genetic tools of a model organism and provides one of the first opportunities to identify genes that may play a role in speciation using naturally hybridizing populations. This project promises to increase our understanding of the genetics of the speciation process. This goal is important for two reasons. First, speciation is a topic of intense theoretical and empirical interest among biologists. Because the reproductive isolation between natural populations must be genetic for speciation to occur, discovering the number and kind of genes involved is crucial. Second, speciation studies contribute to an understanding of the overall genesis of biodiversity. The genetic details of the speciation process provide information on the characteristics and timing of biological diversification doc2856 none This proposal explores how plants respond to injury by leaf-feeding insects by increasing defenses in new tissue. The black mustard, Brassica nigra, has two principal leaf-damaging insects in nature: the mustard flea beetle and caterpillar of the cabbage white butterfly. A preliminary study showed that feeding by the caterpillar caused the black mustard to double the density of protective hairs on new leaves, whereas feeding by flea beetles did not. The new experiments test whether this doubling of leaf hair density protects new leaves from subsequent damage by either herbivore and will show whether greater initial damage stimulates even greater protection of new leaves by the plant. The experiments will also test whether a plant s ability to protect itself declines with age. There are three significant aspects to this research. First, researchers have primarily concentrated on responses of plant chemistry to insect damage and often ignored leaf hairs. Second, little is known about whether there is competition among leaf-damaging insects in nature. This research may demonstrate that competition between insects occurs indirectly through their effects on plant resistance. Third, the research may indicate how crop scientists can manipulate intrinsic defenses of agricultural crops to more effectively combat insect pests doc2857 none Power Understanding the impacts of large disturbances on natural communities is a major goal for community ecologists and is important for successful tropical forest conservation. Hurricanes can have profound effects on the structuring of tropical forests. Although there are studies investigating the response of plant communities to hurricanes, few studies have investigated the response of faunal communities. This proposed research will investigate the effects of a hurricane on an ecologically important animal group, the ants. Ants are the most abundant animals in many tropical systems and they have many effects on ecosystem functioning. Despite their importance, little is known about their response to hurricanes. The proposed research will consist of field monitoring and a field experiment in a series of sub-tropical forest habitats. The habitats fall on a continuum of agricultural disturbance and recovery. The plots range from pastures abandoned in to mature forest with no record of disturbance. Two primary goals are to document the community response to the hurricane and agricultural disturbances and to investigate a mechanism by which the hurricane may act on the ant community. Research results will increase our understanding of faunal community response to compounded large disturbances and their potential for long term recovery doc2858 none Larkin Habitat critical to birds during migration has received little conservation and research attention. This research project investigates the spatial scales at which the distribution of stopover habitat influences patterns of migrating bird density. A national network of Doppler surveillance radar will be used to estimate bird density and examine habitat-migrant associations within continental, regional, and landscape scales. Using hierarchical analysis, patterns of variation in migrant density observed at one scale will allow verifiable predictions about patterns at adjacent scales. Field radar studies will be used to relate bird density aloft and the amount of radar echo returned by those birds. This hierarchical approach can provide an appropriately scaled basis for identifying conservation areas for migratory birds doc2859 none DDIG: Controls on carbon cycling in freshwater pelagic ecosystems: New insights using natural abundance oxygen isotopes While our understanding of net ecosystem production (photosynthesis minus respiration) is robust, scientists have been unable to measure rates of photosynthesis and respiration directly. The investigators performing this research have developed a way to measure these rates more accurately. This research will employ a mesocosm experiment and a lake survey to examine rates of photosynthesis, respiration, and carbon cycling in lakes. In particular, the researchers will examine the relative importance of phosphorus enrichment, light availability, and dissolved organic carbon supply in regulating these rates. This research will improve our understanding of controls on the functioning of freshwater pelagic ecosystems as well as provide insight into the future management of these important resources doc2860 none Rodents are more diverse and abundant than any other mammal group. Although their success has been linked to an upper and lower pair of ever-growing incisors, little is known about the evolutionary relationship between incisor shape and behavior (ex. diet) in these animals. This study will examine incisor shape in fossil and living beavers with respect to the evolution of wood-cutting. Wood-cutting is of particular interest because wood is extremely tough and it might be expected that rodents that frequently cut wood should exhibit incisors specialized for that behavior. Both living species of beaver are similar in appearance and cut wood extensively. Fossil beavers, however, are a more diverse group. For example, they ranged in size from squirrel to black-bear size. Some used their incisor for digging. They also possessed a diversity of incisor shapes. In fact, one beaver that is known to have cut wood has incisors that differ in shape from those of the living beaver. What is the behavioral and evolutionary significance of these differently shaped incisors with respect to the evolution of wood-cutting? This question will be answered by reconstructing the evolutionary relationships among beavers, studying the relationship between incisor-shape, behavior and body-size in living rodents. The PI will also examine microscopic tooth-wear features as these might help determine how rodents incisors function. This research will serve to further our understanding of the evolutionary relationship between animal form and environment. Beavers are of particular interest in this regard because they have an unusually large impact on the structure and possibly the evolution of ecosystems doc2861 none Milne The function of the biosphere can no longer be understood without addressing the human population. With nearly 50% of the human population in urban areas, it is imperative to understand what determines the location and size of human settlements (cities and towns). This project will document the global pattern of human settlements and explore the possible causes of pattern. A combination of satellite imagery and census data will be analyzed to quantify the spatial distribution of settlements and the relative frequencies of settlements of different sizes. To investigate possible ecological causes of these patterns, a computer simulation will then be developed that incorporates essential components of modern global human behavior (urbanization, reproduction, food and water consumption, and trade) and ecological factors (arable land and fresh water availability, climate, and accessibility). Results of this study should identify basic, worldwide patterns of human settlement that are indicative of both fundamental human behaviors and ecological factors that limit and facilitate urbanization. Determination of the human and ecological controls of urbanization should inform public and economic policy. This research will be crucial for understanding and managing urban growth and ecological resources in an era of increasing globalization and urbanization doc2862 none This research project concerns the use of coherent optical and terahertz (THz) fields to control the phase and population of electrons, holes, and excitons in semiconductor quantum structures, including quantum wells and normal-mode microcavities. Coherent optical and single-cycle terahertz (THz) pulses will be generated by means of femtosecond lasers. The combined use of optical and THz pulses opens up new possibilities for the generation and control of electron-hole wavepackets in semiconductors. Three general areas of research will be explored: (1) Coherent Control of Microcavities and Optical Analogies to Quantum Transport, (2) THz Emission from Excitonic Wavepackets, and (3) THz probes of Exciton and Polariton Dynamics. These experiments will allow us to explore the semiconductor optical analogies to processes of great interest in other fields of physics, namely single-particle transport of electrons in quantum systems, and the generation of high harmonics in the ionization of atoms by short intense laser pulses. Graduate and undergraduate students as well as post doctoral research associates will participate in this research. %%% When light shines on a semiconductor material, electrons which are tightly bound to the atoms in the material are freed up to move throughout the semiconductor. If the wavelength (color) of the optical excitation is chosen properly, these form states called excitons which behave in many ways analogously to a hydrogen atom. Over the past few decades, many optical experiments were performed to study the properties of these excitons. With the recent advent of femtosecond laser technology, it has become possible to not only generate excitons, but to control them as well. Our program will take a novel approach to the control of excitons, by using simultaneous optical and far-infrared (terahertz frequency) pulses to manipulate the electrons in the semiconductor. The basic science being investigated is important from a technological point of view, because the interface between high-speed (terahertz) electronics and optics is one of the fundamental problems which must be addressed for the further development of high-speed communications and computers. This research will engage the collaboration of graduate and advanced undergraduate students and post doctoral research associates. They will receive training in a contemporary forefront area of science and technology and thereby prepare them for entry into the scientific technological workforce doc2863 none As the thumb (digit I) is vital for grasping in humans, digit I (like the human big toe) in birds is critical for both their perching and holding prey. Despite the importance of digit I to birds, its anatomy, evolution, and function have not been studied. This study will address two primary questions, which will lead to a more complete understanding of the avian foot. First, the early evolution of the avian hallux will be investigated through comparisons of known avian fossils. Second, a study of foot function among living birds will compare muscle function and force output to lend insights into functional factors that may have shaped the evolution of bird feet. The evolution of the perching foot of birds appears to exemplify a relatively common phenomenon in biology, the differentiation of a structural copy. Having an extra copy of a structure allows the organism to explore a new functional or behavioral realm with one copy while maintaining the primitive function with another. Thus, a better understanding of avian foot evolution will contribute to understanding the evolution of other structures as diverse as the human thumb, redundant jaw musculature and fish feeding, and gene duplications, all of which are examples of this phenomenon doc2864 none Soltis and Gitzendanner Recent estimates indicate that over 33,000 plant species (approx. 1 8 of the Earth s flora) are rare, and this number will certainly increase as human activities continue to erode habitat. In the U.S., one quarter of all plant species are considered rare. Most conservation efforts treat rare species similarly, assuming similar genetic and ecological characteristics. This view of rarity masks biological differences among rare species, prevents the emergence of general principles about rarity, and may hinder conservation efforts. Some researchers have instead recognized different forms of rarity, based on geographic range, population size in each location, and specific habitat requirements. For example, a species that occurs on a rare soil type scattered infrequently from Washington to California may be considered rare , despite the fact that its range spans more than miles; in contrast, a species that occurs at five sites along a ridge top in central Oregon, with thousands of individuals at each site, is also considered rare. This research is a study of the genetic differences among different forms of rare species, using both computer simulations and data from the plant genus Lomatium (desert parsley), of the parsley and carrot family. Leaf samples of different types of rare species and of related widespread species will be collected from natural habitats. These samples will be analyzed using a variety of genetic markers and statistical analyses. The research addresses the immediate conservation needs of several State- and Federally-listed rare plant species and will provide genetic data for use in managing these species. More importantly, the work will improve biologists understanding of rare species, formulate generalizations about the genetic features of different types of rare species, make conservation biology more predictive, and contribute to improved conservation and management plans for other rare species doc2865 none Milne Understanding ecosystem responses to global climate change requires knowledge of both climatic constraints on the distribution of vegetation physiognomies and the demographic processes that drive plant migration. Using semiarid pinon-juniper woodlands as a study system, this dissertation research will examine the constraints and drivers of woodland dynamics in the context of long-term climatic variation. The research focuses specifically on climatic water balance as a constraint on woodland tree distribution, and seed production and bird-mediated dispersal as processes driving tree migration. The investigators will use remotely sensed tree cover estimates with a spatially explicit water balance model to test the hypothesis that climatic water balance constrains tree distributions. Using tree-ring data, the research will test whether seed production in a dominant woodland tree, Pinus edulis, is triggered by climatic fluctuations associated with the El Nino Southern Oscillation. Finally, the links between pinon seedling establishment and caching behavior of its primary disperser, the Pinon Jay, will be investigated. Together, these studies will inform the development of a model of woodland dynamics. This research will increase our understanding of the complex spatio-temporal dynamics of ecosystems and potential responses to climate change doc2866 none This project is about problems related to integral closures of ideals, specifically on generalizations of the Briancon-Skoda theorem, on joint reductions, on divisor intersection theory, and on F-rationality of Rees algebras. The Pi will spend a year at the University of Kansas colaborating with Craig Huneke and Daniel Katz. A part of the project is to write a book on integral closures of ideals together with Huneke and to teach a graduate level course based on the book during the second semester. This POWRE project is supported by the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) and the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA doc2867 none Bats are critical for the pollination of hundreds of different plant species in environments from arid deserts to tropical rainforests. Some New World bats exist entirely on nectar and pollen, while others visit flowers to supplement their regular diets of fruit or insects. The shape of the skull is associated with the relative reliance on nectar in the diet. This study investigates nectar-feeding ability (performance) among six species of bats that range from occasional flower visitors to nectar specialists. Feeding performance is measured by filming captive bats feeding at artificial flowers that differ in both shape and nectar availability. These experiments evaluate the impact of flower shape on feeding performance, the maximum distance bats can extend the tongue, and how well bats can extract small amounts of nectar. The feeding experiments are coupled with a detailed analysis of skull and tongue structure to establish associations between anatomy and feeding performance. This research contributes to our understanding of the biological and functional importance of anatomical diversity, and adds to the picture of how these bats function within their ecosystems. By constraining behavioral capabilities, anatomical differences ultimately help sculpt ecological patterns of resource use and mediate the interactions between bats and flowers. This combination of anatomical and behavioral data will provide new insights into the diversity, evolution, and ecology of these important pollinators doc2868 none Maternal effects occur when a female modifies her offspring in a manner not attributable solely to the offspring s genes. Often these effects are influenced by the ecological environment of the mother, but how ecological conditions are transmitted through the mother to her offspring are poorly understood. This proposal involves the investigation of the hormonal mechanisms by which mother birds modify the avian embryo s hormonal milieu according to food availability in the maternal environment. Preliminary findings in the American kestrel indicate that food availability influences the laying female s blood-plasma levels of the hormone prolactin, that her plasma prolactin influences how much androgen hormone she deposits in her egg yolks, and that yolk androgens affect offspring survival. However, it is not known if food affects yolk androgen levels. In this proposal, food availability will be manipulated to determine how it affects yolk androgen levels. Maternal effects are ubiquitous in nature, occurring in numerous plant species, insects, and all classes of vertebrates. This study may reveal a mechanism by which ecological conditions such as food availability may be transduced to the avian embryo. A mechanistic link from the environment, through the mother, and to the offspring has been described in few if any organisms doc2869 none Brawn Why tropical birds lay a small, usually 2-egg, clutch is a persistent enigma. Many suggested hypotheses assume selective pressures influencing nestling mortality or adult survival explain clutch size, but supporting data are lacking. The ability of parents to care for juveniles after they have left the nest may be an important factor in the evolution of small clutch size in tropical birds and has never been investigated. This hypothesis will be tested by manipulating clutch size and parental effort per juvenile in the Spotted Antbird, a small passerine endemic to Central America. Preliminary data indicate that juveniles from smaller clutches (i.e. one egg) have enhanced post-fledging survival probability and receive proportionately greater post-fledging parental care than do juveniles from normal 2-egg clutches. A possible explanation for this result is optimal brood size may be less than two juveniles; the second egg may provide insurance against hatching failure. This experiment will provide new insights to the ecological factors that influence the life histories of tropical birds. Birds are important components of biodiversity in tropical ecosystems; understanding their life histories is important for conservation decisions. Since tropical birds produce so few eggs per nesting attempt, any increase in juvenile mortality caused by habitat loss or forest fragmentation may be extremely detrimental to the persistence of those species doc2870 none Crandall and Posada A fundamental assumption in molecular-phylogenetic reconstruction is that there is only one history underlying the set of DNA sequences under study. However, different regions of the gene under study can have different evolutionary histories due to reticulate evolution caused by recombination between chromosomes, gene conversion or horizontal transfer. Traditional methods of phylogenetic reconstruction simply ignore recombination, and the impact of recombination on the different phylogenetic estimation algorithms is unknown. Graduate student David Posada, under the direction of Dr. Keith Crandall, proposes to characterize, using computer simulations, the performance of different phylogenetic methods when recombination has occurred. A related problem is the establishment of the presence of recombination in real data sets. Numerous methods have been developed to test for the occurrence of reticulate evolution from a set of aligned DNA sequences, and to determine the bounds of these events. Unfortunately, very little is known about the relative strengths and weaknesses of these methods. Computer simulation will be used to characterize the performance of different methods for detecting recombination. The effects of different rates of recombination, of the size of the recombination unit and position of the recombinational event, of mutation rate, of population size, and of sequence length, will all be studied. The different detection algorithms will also be applied to empirical data sets where recombination has been identified and described, and to mitochondrial data sets, where recombination is supposedly absent. This characterization will help indicate the appropriate tools for detecting recombination and for understanding phylogenies of potentially recombining sequences. Given the increasing number of nuclear genes being sequenced, recombination can no longer be ignored in phylogenetic reconstruction methods doc2871 none Crandall There are several phenomena that can lead to currently observed genetic patterns in natural populations. One powerful method that has been developed to choose among these various phenomena is the nested-analysis procedure. While this method has been utilized successfully in several organisms it has only been applied to land dwelling organisms. Certain modifications to the methodology may be needed when it is applied to organisms occupying aquatic habitats. The goals of this study are to examine the nested-analysis procedure for the case of aquatic organisms and outline the most appropriate ways to analyze data from these types of populations. This study will utilize DNA sequences from 60 different crayfish populations collected from throughout Missouri to test the appropriateness of modifying the procedure for aquatic organisms. Two variations of the procedure will be conducted: 1) the standard methodology (geographic coordinates) and 2) a modification for use with aquatic organisms (in-river distances). Results of the two methods will then be compared for significant deviations in the inferred phenomena. This study will allow for the proper extension of the nested-analysis procedure to aquatic organisms. Without such a study, the inferences made about the genetic structure of aquatic organisms using standard methodologies may be misleading doc2872 none Page This research examines patterns of body size in North American freshwater fishes at evolutionary, and regional and local community levels. Ecological and other factors related to observed patterns will be identified. Preliminary results contradict patterns commonly seen in paleontological studies by describing an evolutionarily decreasing trend in body size in seven of nine families of fishes. Preliminary analyses of regional communities indicate that body size increases with latitude. Results of this research will lead to a much better understanding of the factors responsible for variation in body size and are likely to be applicable to other groups of organisms doc2873 none Motley and Conard The genus Artocarpus is a member of the fig and mulberry family (Moraceae). It consists of approximately 50 tree species all native to the tropics of Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Many of the species are cultivated on a local level for their timber, fruit, or seeds. Two species, breadfruit, A. altilis and jackfruit, A. heterophyllus, are important crops throughout the tropics. Despite the economic and subsistence significance of this group of plants, the evolutionary relationships among them remain unclear. Graduate student Nyree Conard, under the direction of Dr. Timothy Motley, is investigating these relationships, including morphological features as well as DNA sequences from all of the species, to create a phylogeny or family tree of the genus. The phylogeny will be useful for identifying close relatives of the cultivated species in the genus and for setting an evolutionary framework for more detailed species level studies such as conservation and germplasm work on breadfruit. Breadfruit is a traditional staple crop in the Pacific Islands where it has been cultivated and improved upon by human selection for millennia so that today hundreds of seedless and seeded varieties exist. Although the entire tree has uses, it is primarily harvested for either its starchy fruit or proteinaceous seeds. In the late 16th century European explorers began travelling to the Pacific Islands and wrote accounts of breadfruit. At this point in time, it was already being widely cultivated throughout Oceania (Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia) and the Europeans soon realized how useful the tree was and began distributing it to colonies throughout the tropics. Although its native region is known to be somewhere in Oceania, its precise center of origin and its subsequent human-facilitated dispersal route through the Pacific is unclear. Additionally, the taxonomy of breadfruit is controversial with one to three different species of breadfruit being recognized and possible hybrids existing. By using DNA fingerprinting techniques, relationships among varieties from different Pacific Island groups will be assessed to address the issues of origin, human-facilitated dispersal routes, and taxonomy. In addition to providing insight into human migrations in the Pacific, the fingerprinting data will also be used to help manage living breadfruit germplasm collections so that their genetic diversity can be most effectively utilized and conserved doc2874 none This project addresses atomic-scale characterization and control of interface structure and composition in type-II quantum wells and superlattices grown by molecular-beam (MBE), and migration-enhanced (MEE), epitaxy. The approach emphasizes cross-sectional scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), examining limitations to interfacial perfection imposed by anion and cation segregation, incomplete bond type selectivity, and kinetically limited surface roughness, under a variety of growth conditions. Complete deconvolution of the respective roles of interface morphology (due to islanding in the growth plane) and inhomogeneous composition (due to mixed interface bond types, cross incorporation, or segregation) on interface roughness is expected. Characterization will be used to identify and understand growth conditions and associated phenomena which afford maximal control over interface bonding and planarity. Accordingly it is anticipated that structural and composition perfection needed for optimal type-II quantum well devices may be better understood, controlled and realized. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. Experimental tools are now available to allow atomic level observation of elementary surface processes which when better understood allow advances in fundamental science and technology. The basic knowledge and understanding gained from the research is expected to contribute to improving the perform-ance and stability of advanced devices by providing a fundamental understanding and a basis for designing and producing improved materials, and materials combinations. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area doc2875 none Waaland and Hayden Despite numerous DNA-based systematic and phylogenetic studies of land plants in the past decade, some major green plant lineages await exploration. The green algal division Chlorophyta contains many such groups, including the Ulvaceae (Ulvales, Ulvophyceae). Ulvaceae are morphologically simple cosmopolitan, macroscopic algae of marine and freshwater environments. Two members of the family, Ulva and Enteromorpha, are among the most familiar green seaweed genera. Common as ship fouling algae, they also are often implicated in green tides which result from excessive accumulations of their biomass following a bloom event. In addition to direct smothering of marine fauna, hydrogen sulfide released from the decaying biomass of green tides can present major health concerns for humans and marine communities. Morphological simplicity and phenotypic plasticity have thwarted past attempts by systematists to diagnose natural groupings within the species-rich genera Ulva and Enteromorpha as well as among these and other genera in the family. Graduate student Hillary Hayden, directed by Dr. J. Robert Waaland, will be studying the taxonomic affinities and systematic relationships of these genera, with an emphasis on new DNA-sequence data from both nuclear and chloroplast genes, for comparative analyses of mutational differences among the species. An improved understanding of Ulvaceae systematics is necessary for interpreting green tide phenomena and recognizing non-indigenous species. Further, biologists will benefit from a better understanding of phylogenetic relationships among these taxa and the complexity of phenotypic changes exhibited among a very closely related group of algae doc2876 none Clark The range expansion by forest trees following rapid climatic warming during the early Holocene provides a useful analog for predicting the ability of trees to respond to future climate change. Currently, however, early Holocene migration rates determined from fossil pollen records can not be easily reconciled with models of seed dispersal. This dissertation research is an attempt to reconcile the historical record and the dispersal biology of common eastern deciduous forest trees. First, migration routes and glacial refugia based on the distribution of molecular markers (cpDNA haplotypes) throughout the modern range of Fagus grandifolia, Acer rubrum, and Quercus rubra will be reconstructed. Maps of Holocene range expansion based on molecular and pollen data will provide improved estimates of climate driven migration rates. This study will then evaluate the ability of seed dispersal models to account for these migration rates using a dispersal model developed by this research group. The model will be parameterized using the distribution of seedlings established in old-fields and closed forests. By integrating fossil pollen and molecular data, this study will develop a more complete record of historical change. Explaining that change in terms of dispersal biology will allow a mechanistic basis for evaluating future change doc2877 none Rausher While physical and chemical defenses provide plants with immunity from nearly all of the potential natural enemies in their environment, most plants are still attacked by a community of herbivores that are able to overcome these defenses. A major question in evolutionary ecology is what prevents plants from evolving improved resistance to herbivory. The thesis of this research is that there are potential constraints on the evolution of resistance that are revealed only by examining the entire community of herbivores that feed on a host plant. Through a series of field experiments using the insect herbivore community of horsenettle (Solanum carolinense), this research will investigate these constraints by assessing genetic variation for resistance, characterizing natural selection acting on resistance, and investigating the ecological interactions among the insects and their host plant. This research addresses basic scientific questions regarding plant-herbivore coevolution and the nature of potential competition among plant-eating insects. In addition, horsenettle is an economically important weed, and its close kinship with a number of crop species enables it to act as a reservoir for a number of crop pests. Therefore, this research will also provide information that is of interest to weed control and pest management programs doc2878 none Fleischer only a few drops of blood or one feather from each bird is sufficient. An understanding of the effects of bottleneck events on small populations may be critical to their long-term survival. Genetic variation is necessary for future evolutionary potential and population persistence. This study will directly compare the genetic effects of population fluctuations to population stability using the penguin genus Spheniscus. The results may be of direct value to the conservation of many endangered species doc2879 none Shaw and Jost Crickets have always interested biologists for their calling songs used in courtship. In most species, male crickets produce a song which is heard and recognized by potential female mates. There are thousands of cricket species worldwide, each of which has a unique type of song. Previous studies have looked for ecological or adaptive reasons that cricket calling songs are so diverse. However, few evolutionary studies have looked at cricket song from a morphological perspective, by examining the structures which produce and receive the sounds. In crickets, these acoustic structures are specialized front wings in males, and hearing organs on the front legs of both sexes. These structures are extremely diverse in crickets (there are ca. 3,500 described species in the world), but in many species are completely absent. Developmental studies have found that acoustic body parts are strictly adult structures which do not appear until the final life stage. In addition, many other structures -- such as hind flight wings, eyes, antennae, and genitalia -- are often reduced or absent in non-acoustic cricket species. The simplest way that many adult traits could be reduced or absent in a species is by changing the timing of overall growth. In other words, many non-acoustic cricket species may simply be morphologically immature forms of closely related acoustic species. This project will test the hypothesis that morphological diversity in acoustic structures can be explained by changes in the timing of growth and metamorphosis, a process known as heterochrony. Graduate student Manda Jost, with guidance from faculty adviser Dr. Kerry Shaw, is studying the phylogenetic relationships of exemplar species of crickets and their acoustic evolution. The first step to testing the heterochrony hypothesis will be a broad, detailed survey of cricket morphology for hundreds of species. A diverse sample of species will then be selected from regions around the world, and a phylogeny will be produced using DNA sequence from the mitochondrial gene CO-I. Statistical and comparative tests will then determine whether morphological maturity of acoustic structures is significantly correlated with the maturity of other morphological structures which are functionally unrelated. Demonstrating that many functionally unrelated traits show simultaneous change would support the hypothesis that these traits are all under control of a basic growth schedule. This idea is not an alternative to ecological or adaptive hypotheses, but provides a physical mechanism which could produce the diversity we observe. This study will result in the most detailed phylogeny to date of the crickets, while using new ideas and methods to study the diversity of cricket acoustic characters doc2880 none DDIG: Grassland Response to Precipitation Manipulation Across the Great Plains region of North America, water availability is a primary determinant of plant productivity. However, the importance of water availability to plant production varies across the different plant communities that span this region. In the semi-arid western region, the shortgrass steppe community is primarily water limited, but in the sub-humid eastern tallgrass prairie, water, nitrogen, and light co-limit plant production. Current climate change scenarios predict decreased summer precipitation, increased summer temperatures, and increased variability in both the amounts and timing of rainfall for this region. This project will explore the capability of the short-, mixed, and tallgrass prairies to respond to changes in precipitation amounts. Specifically, the investigators will measure how varying precipitation affects carbon and nitrogen cycling within these communities doc2881 none Moore This research examines the behavioral ecology and reproductive performance of intercontinental landbird migrants arriving at high latitude breeding grounds. The connection between migration and reproduction is being assessed by examining the role body condition plays as migrants arrive and begin to breed in northern Michigan. Birds are captured on arrival, condition assessed, and then released and subsequently relocated in order to examine the influence of arrival condition on both behavior and reproductive performance. The life history of many organisms is characterized by an annual cycle: breeding season, migration, nonbreeding season, migration and so on. Although researchers acknowledge that events during one phase of this cycle influence survival and or reproductive success during subsequent phases, seldom is the relationship between phases studied. This work is unique in its explicit focus on this linkage. Moreover, while both winter and breeding seasons are argued to be major periods of population limitation, the influence of migration remains unknown. Results of this work have implications in understanding the relative importance of this period as a factor in limiting populations of migrating organisms. Finally, these results will provide insight into what constitutes suitable stopover habitat and how a bird s ability to locate en route habitat impacts future reproductive performance. This knowledge is critical given the recent declines in many populations of these birds doc2882 none The premise of this work is that the electrical impedance response of composites with discontinuous, highly-conductive fibers can be employed to characterize their microstructure (fiber bonding, orientation, number density, etc.) and to monitor important changes upon loading, including strain and permanent damage effects (e.g., matrix cracking and fiber debonding, fracture and pullout). Such capabilities are needed for the controlled fabrication and deployment of smart , self-monitoring structural composites. Since the necessary requirements for such an impedance response-highly conductive fibers, a moderately conductive matrix, and a frequency-switchable interfacial impedance-have been identified, this project will study the impedance response of cementitious matrix (steel or carbon fibers in cement) and ceramic matrix (SiC in silicon nitride) composites. A combination of laboratory physical simulations (e.g., single wire fiber in a dielectric medium), pixel-based computer modeling (in collaboration with NIST), and actual composite studies (single fiber pullout, bulk compressive, and notched-beam tensile tests) will be carried out, with the latter appropriately instrumented for simultaneous impedance measurements. %%% This project will study the microstructure and microstructural changes during loading of composite materials using impedance spectroscopy. The results obtained should be applicable to a broad range of composites, including cement-matrix, ceramic-matrix, and even polymer-matrix systems (if the above-mentioned conditions are met) and are an important first step in the development of novel self-monitoring composite materials and methodology. As well as improving our understanding of these composites, the impedance spectroscopy technique will be developed into a reliable characterization tool for microstructural analysis. In addition to the training of two graduate students and several undergraduates in materials science and engineering, the materials and experiences from the project will be incorporated in a course teaching science and engineering principles to non-science undergraduates doc2883 none Cannatella and Brown Asian and Melanesian forest frogs provide an excellent model system for studying the effects of body size, ecological habitat, and evolutionary history on diversity of acoustic communication systems. Frogs of the subfamily Platymantinae, including the large genus Platymantis (with an estimated 45-65 species), show a range of advertisement calls (often for mating) differing widely in spectral character (call frequencies) and temporal structure (rates of call delivery). Factors that may have influenced the evolution of this acoustic diversity are under study by graduate student Rafe Brown, with guidance from faculty adviser Dr. David Cannatella at the University of Texas. A phylogenetic study of platymantine frogs will be conducted using both morphological and molecular (DNA sequences) data to provide the historical framework for establishing the likely direction of character change among the sublineages of the genus. In turn, this phylogenetic framework will be employed to study variation among species in morphology-related and physiology-related classes of call characters. Because species of Platymantis exhibit a range of habitat preferences, from forest floor to the canopy, the genus constitutes an ideal system for studying the effects of constraints posed by different forest habitats on signal transmission and evolution. Also, the study will explore biomechanic features of vocal sac functioning and relate these to temporal and spectral characters of the advertisement calls in the field doc2884 none Kjer and Swigonova The diversity of beetles, grouped under the insect order Coleoptera, far exceeds the diversity of any other animal or plant group. Because more than half of all known beetles are herbivorous, studies of mechanisms of speciation in relation to host plant utilization, and potential coordinated evolution of beetles and their host plants (coevolution), should provide insights to understanding the evident evolutionary success of beetles. Hypotheses of evolutionary relations (phylogeny) provide a foundation for the study of such mechanisms. The leaf beetles (Chrysomelidae) belong to the fourth largest family of beetles, making them among the most successful organisms on the earth. Graduate student Zuzana Swigonova, advised by Dr. Karl Kjer, is studying the chrysomelid genus Trirhabda, in order to determine evolutionary relationships among the species, determine whether closely related species feed on closely related plants, reveal the history of host plant preference and host plant shifts among the species, disclose any pattern between species relatedness and geographic distribution, and identify the area that is the most probable biogeographical origin of the genus. The dissertation focuses on leaf beetles of the genus Trirhabda (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae) which contains 26 species from America north of Mexico ( northern species ) and 8 species from Mexico and Central America ( southern species ). The northern species have been studied in many ecological aspects and much is known about their host plant preference and life cycle. In contrast, there is no information about host plant association or ecology of the southern species. Six out of the eight southern species are found in Mexico. Beetles of the northern species feed on a narrow range of plants in the families Asteraceae and Hydrophyllaceae. Unlike other species from the family Chrysomelidae, they overwinter in the egg stage. Larvae and adults feed on leaves and inflorescence of the host plant. Pupation takes place in the soil below the host plant. The life history of each of the Trirhabda species is strongly influenced by the life history of their host plant. Several northern species of the genus have been used as biological agents in control of weeds in fields undergoing secondary succession. Despite the fact that Trirhabda species have been used in many ecological studies and despite the economic importance of some of the species, there has been no systematic study proposing evolutionary relationships within this genus. Phylogenetic relationships will be inferred from three independent data sets: one morphological and two molecular. Morphological data will include carefully examined and reevaluated characters described in the literature. New characters, including sensillae of the mouth parts, are to be examined using scanning electron microscopy. Molecular data will include DNA sequences of mitochondrial small subunit ribosomal RNA, the first subunit of mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase, and nuclear ribosomal ITS (internal transcribed spacer) sequences doc2885 none During aggression males often behaviorally advertise signaling traits. Aggression and the structures used in signaling aggression usually are correlated evolutionarily, but among Sceloporus lizard species they can be decoupled. This study will determine how sex steroid hormones control the development of two such male-specific traits: 1) patches of abdominal color, and 2) stereotyped aggressive behavior used to display the patches to opponents. Work will study two Sceloporus sister-species, one with male patches and one in which males have evolutionarily lost the patches. Hatchling hormone levels will be manipulated, and both patch expression and aggression will be scored in adults to test the hypothesis that decoupling of the male patches trait and aggression arises from species differences in hormonal control of the two. Assays of hatchling blood samples will verify that the altered hatchling hormone levels are within natural levels. In many vertebrates, sex hormones (testosterone, estradiol) act during development and adulthood to produce differences between the sexes. Testosterone can be converted to estrogen, which influences development of brain regions involved in aggression. Testosterone also can be converted to 5a-dihydrotestosterone, which often affects development of male traits elsewhere in the body. Decoupling could occur if species vary in these hormonal levels. For example, males of these species may vary in the enzymes needed for these conversions of testosterone. Relatively little is known about the variation in the hormonal mechanisms controlling differences in aggression and in signaling structures in natural populations, as most research focuses on inbred laboratory strains of rodents and domesticated animal breeds doc2886 none Sytsma & Hall This project explores evolution of floral morphology in the plant family Capparaceae from two different perspectives: (1) genealogy or phylogenetic relationships and (2) developmental biology. Using differences in DNA sequences and morphology, genealogical relationships within this family and its close relative Brassicaceae (mustard family) will be analyzed. This analysis will provide the framework for more detailed studies of two African genera, entailing intensive field work and developmental studies of floral buds. Patterns of development will lead to formulation of explicit hypotheses of possible genes that may be responsible for smaller scale changes in floral form, utlizing the wealth of knowledge gleaned from the model organism, Arabidopsis (Brassicaceae). Pollination field studies will also be conducted to evaluate roles that pollinators may have in changes in floral form. There have been great advances made in our knowledge of phylogenetic relationships of plants and on developmental genetics of flowers. In general, these fields have evolved independently of one another. Phylogenies are powerful tools for exploring evolution of floral form and, at the same time, developmental studies provide a genetic model for changes in floral forms of model organisms. Combination of these fields permits exploration of underlying genetic mechanisms for evolution of morphological variation doc2887 none This collaborative project will be undertaken with Dr. Chidong Zhang of the University of Miami and involves an investigation into the observed bimodal distribution of water vapor in the tropical upper troposphere. The principal investigators will seek to identify the origins of the bimodality and the implications for the large-scale tropical circulations. Water vapor can play a major role in the dynamics of the atmosphere, even in the driest parts of the atmosphere, through radiative effects. At the same time, moisture transported through convective clouds is a source of moisture, accompanied by latent heat release, in the upper troposphere. The impact of water vapor on the circulation differs substantially between cloudy, convective regions of the tropics and unsaturated regions. The principal investigators will pursue both observational and modeling studies. The first will include a survey on the scale, location, and time dependence of the water vapor bimodality and analysis of potential mechanisms responsible for the observed distribution. In the modeling work, both a simple mechanistic model and an atmospheric general circulation model will be used to assess the impact on the tropical circulation doc2888 none PI: Funk Institution: Smithsonian Institution This project supports a symposium to be held on 23 - 27 June, , in Bloomington, Indiana, titled Biodiversity: the Interface between Systematics and Conservation. The workshop-symposium will be held in conjunction with the joint meetings of the Society of Systematic Biologists, Society for the Study of Evolution, the American Soceity of Naturalists, and the Association for Tropical Biology. The symposium is designed to bring together for the first time researchers from a wide variety of fields related biodiversity and conservation to discuss the relevance of systematics to their research and to evaluate various techniquest that make use of systematic and taxonomic data. The topic is timely because of the increasing recognition of the importance of systematic data in conservation biology, and the wealth of new methods available. The participants will explore various aspects of biodiversity studies in light of how systematics and conservation can work together to explore biodiversity issues. The symposium will also highlight recent developments in computer software that utilize systematic data for assesment of geographically based conservation activities doc2889 none This research focuses on new mathematical algorithms for improved synchronization and detection of direct-sequence code-division multiple access (DS-CDMA) signals. In DS-CDMA applications such as cellular telephony, multiple signals from user handsets are received simultaneously at a base station. In order to accommodate the maximum number of users, the times-of-arrival (delays) and channel distortions of all received signals must be simultaneously tracked. In this project, the channel delay parameters are tracked using a modified extended Kalman filtering (EKF) algorithm. More sophisticated EKF algorithms are also evaluated that perform forward error correction decoding (Turbo-CDMA) jointly with channel delay estimation. The resulting algorithms provide reduced symbol error rates and hence increased system capacity. The results of the research are applicable to a broad range of DS-CDMA systems, including third-generation mobile telephony, wireless local-area networks, and ad-hoc networks doc2890 none Male birds participate in parental care more than males of any other vertebrate group. Thus, birds represent an extraordinary model to untangle the various factors that affect care of young. When breeding begins, males experience a rise in the hormone testosterone (T) that declines by the time young hatch. This pattern may represent a trade-off between T levels and expression of paternal care: experimentally, high levels of T are associated with reduced paternal care in favor of enhanced sexual behavior. In chestnut-collared longspurs (CCLO), experimentally increased T enhances sexual behavior before eggs hatch, but surprisingly, does not reduce care of nestlings. This study will test the hypothesis that this unusual insensitivity to T during the parental phase occurs because males are critical for nestling survival. By manipulating environmental and hormonal variables, this study will determine (1) if male care is essential, (2) if the environment drives male care, and (3) if elevated T affects nest defense in CCLO. Male care, though generally rare in nature, is prevalent in birds. Whether paternal care is driven by environmental factors or by internal cues, however, is unknown. This study will help to unravel the relative roles of hormones and environmental cues on the expression of paternal care. Determining the role of environmental factors in the apparent trade-off between T and paternal care is particularly important, because it can be applied to additional systems in which paternal care is critical for survival of young doc2891 none Females of many species receive no tangible benefits from their mates, other than inseminations. Although a single mating usually is sufficient to fertilize all of a female s eggs, some females will mate many times, even when mating may be costly (e.g., increased risk of predation). Although earlier studies failed to identify particular benefits, this earlier work did not address events that may occur during a critical period. This period occurs after insemination but before the sperm is used to fertilize eggs. The proposed study will use a combination of laboratory and field investigations to examine why female multiple mating occurs in a terrestrial amphibian (a woodland salamander, Desmognathus ocoee). In this species, the physiological mechanisms that act just prior to fertilization include sperm precedence, sperm competition, and female sperm choice. These mechanisms are likely to mediate female benefits and therefore mating propensity. Mating strategies adopted by females can have important consequences for reproductive success, and therefore for conservation efforts. Although conservation research has largely focused on aquatic-breeding amphibians (especially frogs), terrestrial amphibians also are important study systems. The proposed investigations will provide a unique opportunity to gain insight into what may be common fundamental processes affecting female multiple mating doc2892 none Professor John Fourkas of Boston College is funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry program to conduct experimental and theoretical studies on the dynamics and structure of bulk and confined liquids. While decades of ultrafast laser studies have revealed much about bulk liquid structure and solvation phenomena, the more complex problem of liquids in nanoporous structures is a new horizon in this field. Pools of liquids consisting of 100 molecules or less are typical. This proposal seeks to make measurements on liquids in sol-gel glasses, with the specific goals of determining how molecular shape influences liquid dynamics, how extreme confinement affects the behavior of liquids and how confinement affects phase-transition temperatures. The PI then proposes to conduct theoretical studies on liquids, adding the effects of anharmonicity of the intermolecular potential of a liquid into the computation of correlation functions using instantaneous normal mode theory. A successful outcome of this proposal would be new models of confined liquids that could predict phenomena relevant to geochemistry and biochemistry. Solvation has extremely important industrial applications, and a more complete theoretical understanding of this phenomenon could have an important impact. Practical examples of liquids in confined spaces include hydrocarbons in porous rocks, and water structured by biological molecules. There are also environmental implications of this work, in addressing the issue of flow of water and dissolved species in porous rock doc2893 none Wild animals are often well-equipped to handle variable, harsh environments. Interestingly, most wild animals also will acquire parasites during their lives. Some parasites kill their host, but others cause a chronic, sub-lethal infection. The PIs goal is to determine if chronic, sub-lethal parasite infection affects host physiology and consequently host reproduction. The PIs will examine 1) host intestinal physiology and energy allocation (glucose absorption, fat and lean masses), 2) host reproduction (litter production, offspring masses), and 3) growth and survival of host offspring (linear growth measures, body mass). The broader significance of this project spans several research areas. First, this project has implications for the field of life-history evolution because it will determine if an infected host s reproduction is constrained by its ability to acquire or process energy. Second, because this research uses wild, rather than laboratory, mice it will aid in the understanding of how wild animals cope with chronic infections that may alter multiple aspects of reproduction. Third, this research will provide much needed empirical data for mathematical models of how sub-lethal parasites affect host reproduction. Finally, because chronic parasite infection of humans is common in third world countries, this research may help understand the effects of sub-lethal parasites on human reproduction doc2894 none Platt Biological invasions are governed by processes that affect establishment of colonizers and growth of populations. The investigators are currently examining invasions by graminoids in the Everglades region of south Florida by 1) using functional groups to develop hypotheses about invasiveness and the role of certain life history characteristics, and 2) following established populations of certain species, including one exotic invader, to better understand factors influencing growth and survival of established plants in this system. The proposed dissertation research will investigate factors that may be important in determining early invasion success of these graminoids. Work will occur in upland pine savannas of the Everglades National Park with species of Cyperaceae and Poaceae. Propagule and rhizome addition experiments will examine germination, establishment, survival and growth of individuals from species with a range of life history strategies, morphologies, growth forms, and invasive tendencies in four distinct microsites. The main objective of the study is to determine the role of early life cycle stages in limiting colonization of different savanna microsites by native and exotics. This study, together with the rest of the dissertation research, will be used to make habitat-specific invasion predictions doc2895 none Springer and Hamilton Limia is a genus of Caribbean freshwater fishes related to the guppies and sailfin mollies (Poecilia) and swordtails (Xiphophorus). Poeciliid fish are important model organisms for studying the effects of sexual selection (especially female choice) on the behavior and appearance of animals. The 20 species of Limias are very diverse in sexual behaviors and coloration, but have rarely been studied until recently. Some species have elaborate male courtship displays while others do not; in some species males have colorful fin and body markings while in others males and females both appear plain. There are hypotheses for why such differences between species would arise, and it is thought that behavior and coloration may each influence the evolution of the other. To assess these ideas, it is necessary to find out how the different species of Limia are related to each other phylogenetically (or genealogically). Knowing the phylogeny of the genus will help determine the sequence and directionality of evolution of these characteristics. Graduate student Aaron Hamilton, under the direction of Drs. Mark Springer and David Reznick, is evaluating the relationships of the twenty species in the genus Limia using DNA sequencing of two genes, one nuclear and one mitochondrial. The results can then be applied to two different fields of research, sexual selection theory and biogeography. A comparative analysis of the courtship behavior and coloration of Limia species will seek to determine if there is a correlation between the presence of a display and the elaboration of male color patterns, whether display behaviors are ancestral or evolved within Limia, and whether any traits evolved more than once in the genus. The phylogenetic tree can also be compared to those of other Caribbean animals to look for common biogeographic patterns, which may match hypotheses for the geologic history of the Caribbean islands. The Caribbean islands have been a focus of biogeographers debating whether the distribution of animal species on these islands has been influenced primarily by vicariant events (such as plate tectonics) or by over-seas dispersal of the organisms. A robust phylogenetic tree for the 20 freshwater Limia species will contribute to the ongoing synthesis of knowledge bearing on this problem doc2896 none 00- Peet Fridley DDIG: Relationships among species diversity, site fertility, resource heterogeneity, and ecosystem productivity in plant communities Ecosystem productivity, the rate at which organisms produce biomass, is the basic currency for all of humanity s food, fiber, and fuel. Recently, ecosystem productivity has been shown to be influenced by the number of species an ecosystem contains. However, productivity is also influenced by environmental factors such as soil fertility, and the influence of species diversity on productivity within the context of a range of environmental conditions is unknown. This issue is particularly important because in many ecosystems, both species diversity and the underlying environment are changing rapidly in response to human influence. In this research, the investigators will conduct a set of field experiments to assess the relative influences of plant species diversity and soil fertility on ecosystem productivity. In addition, the work includes experiments to manipulate environmental heterogeneity (specifically, the patchiness of soil resources) to examine whether the influence of species diversity on ecosystem productivity is enhanced by environmental complexity doc2897 none In many animals, parents produce more and better offspring as they get older. Two different explanations have been suggested for this improvement. The first is that as parents near the end of their lives, offspring become increasingly valuable. Older parents therefore expend more effort on those offspring. The second explanation is that older animals have accumulated experience and skills with age that allow them to be more efficient with their time and energy. Thus older individuals would be able to produce more offspring than younger individuals for the same effort. This research will explore these two mechanisms in a population of house sparrows, common birds found in backyards and on farms. Older and younger parent birds will be observed to compare how often they return to the nest to feed young and how long they search for food for their chicks. Parental ability will be tested by changing the number of young the parent birds have to feed, and by measuring learning ability at various ages. This research contributes to our understanding of changes in reproduction with age and examines potential behavioral causes of these changes. This will improve our understanding of the ecology of parental behavior and how life patterns of behavior affect reproduction doc2898 none The Internet Satellite Project will develop and deploy advanced Internet services and technologies over satellite infrastructure for purposes of enhancing research, instruction and learning in a diverse set of institutions of higher education. A combined effort by the American Distance Education Consortium (ADEC) and Tachyon, Inc. will extend the benefits of Internet2 to a broader set of institutions and provide experience with advanced satellite-based Internet technology. The project will be managed by ADEC and led by a core set of ADEC member institutions engaged in the Internet2 project. ADEC bridges the Internet2 community to an extended set of diverse institutions of higher education. Tachyon provides technology capable of connecting the Internet2 community to institutions unable to access the Internet2 backbone network because of geographical disadvantage. This project focuses on bringing advanced networking applications to geographically remote campuses. These capabilities will be applied to the areas of research, instruction and learning. By engaging previously unreachable campuses or parts of campuses and remote learning centers, this will enable a broader community of scholars to engage in research; greater access by scholars both at Internet1 institutions as well as at the previously unreachable institutions to remote instruments and data sources; the increased availability of instructional and learning resources shared among a more diverse student population; and access by the research university community to cultural and human resources from otherwise inaccessible institutions and extension offices doc2899 none Sork Gene movement is a critical process for the long-term survival of natural populations. For temperate tree species, pollen movement is the most important vector of gene movement within and between populations. The physical structure of the forest determines the distance of pollen movement and the distribution of conspecific trees affects the amount of inbred matings. The major goal of this project is to test the hypothesis that modification of forest structure, through the application of alternate forest management techniques (even-aged, uneven-aged, and no management treatments), influences pollen movement in a common forest tree species, short leaf pine (Pinus echinata). Using allozymes as genetic markers, two specific objectives are addressed. First, the investigators will compare patterns of pollen movement across each treatment using a recently developed statistical model that allows hypothesis testing on a landscape scale. Second, they will compare mating patterns within populations (proportion of self- and inbred matings and number of pollen donors) across the three treatments. Increasingly, forests are becoming managed for resource extraction and ecosystem conservation. Understanding how forest modification influences the patterns of gene movement will provide needed insight about environmental impact on population-level changes in gene frequencies. Such insight facilitates the development of effective strategies for species conservation doc2900 none 00- Ducklow McCallister DDIG: Identifying the sources and ages of organic matter supporting estuarine bacterial production: A novel multiple isotope approach The effects of long-term changes in land use patterns are focused in the coastal zone. These changes have fundamentally altered both the magnitude and composition of riverine organic matter exported to the estuary. This, in turn, has the potential to shift the metabolic balance between production and respiration in the water column. This study will help to determine the role of bacteria in regulating estuarine metabolic balance by examining the size fractions, sources, and ages of estuarine dissolved organic matter (DOM) incorporated into bacterial biomass in the York River Estuary (a sub-estuary of the Chesapeake Bay). In addition, the PIs will experimentally investigate the fraction of DOM which can be metabolized on the time scale of estuarine residence times. The investigators will employ a novel approach, involving a multiple isotope, to overcome the traditional methodological limitations of research in this area doc2901 none Begun Speciation is the process whereby a single reproductively unified group of organisms diverges into two such groups. Little is known about the types of genes that generate reproductive isolation. The experiments outlined in this proposal aim to identify candidate genes contributing to reproductive isolation between two fruit fly species, Drososphila simulans and D. mauritiana. Although these species can hybridize, postmating reproductive isolation still exists due to the preferential fertilization of eggs by sperm of conspecific males. The chromosomal regions of genes that influence both male and female components of this sperm competition trait will be localized through genetic mapping. By pondering a mechanism to explain the origin of species, Charles Darwin elucidated the theory of evolution via natural selection. Much progress in the field of evolutionary biology has been made since the introduction of this seminal theory. However, the process of speciation is still a mystery, particularly at the genetic level. The results of this study will help identify speciation genes that can be subjected to various analyses, and ultimately contribute to a general understanding of mechanisms of speciation doc2902 none Blackwell Plant species that are rare where they are native often become abundant and widespread where they are introduced. Field experiments and greenhouse studies have been initiated to determine whether the observed differences in the abundance and habitat distribution of the invasive shrub Clidemia hirta (Melastomataceae) in its native area (Costa Rica) and area of introduction (Hawaii) result from environmental or genetic differences. This research will be enhanced by conducting a broad-scale survey of the genetic structure of native and introduced populations of C. hirta to determine whether those in Hawaii are similar or depauperate in genetic variation to those in the native range. This study will determine whether shifts in the breeding system or genetic structure have occurred that would affect the invasiveness of C. hirta. The historical process of the invasion (numbers of introductions, presence of founder effects, adaptation after introduction) and the resulting distribution of different genotypes among the Hawaiian Islands will also be examined. This study is the first comparison of genetic variation and breeding system of a woody plant between its native and introduced areas. Information about the genetic diversity of this species in Hawaii will be valuable for devising effective biological control programs that match locally adapted genotype-natural enemy pairs doc2903 none Jablonski and Price Although evolutionary biologists have formalized the study of adaptation, few studies explain both why a trait is adaptive and ho--w it affects a lineage s history. Graduate student Rebecca Price, assisted by her adviser Dr. David Jablonski, addresses this issue in a study of fossil and living species of a group of gastropod molluscs of the Fasciolariidae. The neogastropods are an ideal focal taxon because they have high modern diversity, permitting the use of living animals to determine the functional significance of the character in question, and a rich fossil record directly to observe morphological changes through geologic time. The hypotheses under test concern the columellar folds, or plications on a gastropod shell s aperture, that traditionally are used as taxonomic characters, and that may function as adaptations, for example in body retraction to avoid predators, or in muscle attachment to increase speed of movement. Such functional adaptations may have affected rates and patterns of species diversification in different sublineages within the Fasciolariidae (Neogastropoda: Mollusca). This family has a rich fossil record, a range of fold morphologies, and, according to a preliminary phylogeny, has lost and added folds repeatedly. The student will use computed tomography (facilities made available at Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago) to depict in 3-dimensions and quantify a series of characters that describe columellar fold morphology in ca. 100 samples in this family. To test that columellar folds are adaptive, and to evaluate some hypothetical functions, the student will (1) map each aspect of fold morphology onto an evolutionary tree to determine when it evolved, and (2) conduct a series of functional experiments at a marine station on shells with and without folds. The experiments are designed to improve our understanding of correlations between morphology and function, with the results extrapolated back on the phylogeny to track the 130 million years of fasciolariid history in functional terms doc2904 none The 9th International Conference on the Cell and Molecular Biology of Chlamydomonas will be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands on May 21-26, . The biennial Chlamydomonas meetings bring together a highly interactive and collaborative community of ~200 researchers from Europe, Asia, Australia and North America. The international nature of this relatively small group of scientists has proven invaluable in the development of Chlamydomonas as the model organism of choice for many fundamental biological problems including cell motility and behavior, flagellar structure, function and assembly, basal body architecture and duplication, organelle heredity, gametic differentiation, cell-cell adhesion, signal transduction, cell fusion, metabolism and photosynthesis. Because nearly half of the scientists in this community are from Europe, every second meeting is now held on that continent. This means that every four years U.S. scientists are faced with the challenge of funding travel to a meeting in Europe. This project solicits funds to support invited speakers from the U.S., as well as U.S. postdoctoral fellows and students doc2905 none Clay & Pan Symbioses are intimate partnerships between organisms of different species, where one partner often lives within the other. Symbiosis is one of the most pervasive of all species interactions, yet one of the least understood. Changes in population dynamics from symbiosis may lead to cascading effects on other species interactions and community structure. In order to better understand how population dynamics are affected by symbiosis, the proposed research will focus on how a symbiotic microbe, Epichloe glyceriae, alters clonal growth characteristics of its host grass, Glyceria striata. The consequences of symbiosis on patterns of clonal growth, resource transport within host clones, and spatial pattern of infected vs uninfected plants in natural populations will be examined. Symbiosis is important in both natural and managed systems, as both positive and negative symbioses are widespread in all communities. Understanding the effects of fungal symbiosis on the grwoth form of host plants has important implications for the diversity of natural communities, productivity of agricultural systems, and management practices for conservation. Awareness of the extensive influences of symbiosis will also provide a new perspective on community structure, links between species, and the importance of biological diversity doc2906 none Technological and architectural innovations have enabled development of powerful microprocessors that can issue several instructions concurrently at a very high clock rate. In future processors with aggressive speculation techniques, an even larger number of instruction issues per cycle are expected. Efficient handling of memory references for data access is one of the keys to achieving high performance in future processors. This research addresses methods to provide sufficient bandwidth at fast latency for data access in wide-issue processors issuing tens of instructions per cycle. The methods are based on the concept of data decoupling . Data decoupling divides the memory reference instructions into multiple independent streams before the actual addresses of the data they access are known. Partitioned memory reference instructions are then fed into a separate memory pipeline. This research investigates the issues in effective and efficient hardware and software support for multiple memory pipelines based on data decoupling. The data decoupling approach of providing multiple memory pipelines can provide two crucial advantages over a conventional design. First, the cost and the complexity of building a large cache with many ports are reduced. Second, partitioning memory references can facilitate more specialized handling of each partitioned stream doc2907 none Cushman The plan is to conduct 3D particle tracking velocimetry experiments in porous media with imbedded heterogeneities by using a world-class apparatus to extend previous work to study velocity fields and dispersion in homogeneous porous media to simple heterogeneous systems with varied sizes and shapes of particles. The exeriments to observe two-particle correlations are being conducted at a world-class facility in Italy by a post-doc. The PI is working out a strategy to develop (non-local) dispersion theories applicable to heterogeneous media. This funding is to augment and sustain work at a facility that would otherwise be closed down soon doc2908 none Aviles In nature, male and female interests over reproduction are usually in conflict. Females tend to invest more heavily in each offspring than do males. As a result, females must carefully choose the best father for their offspring while males may increase their reproductive success by inseminating many females. Conflicts over paternity become particularly intriguing when females mate multiply and the conflict must be resolved within the female reproductive tract. In a group of spiders with diverse reproductive morphologies, this study will explore how behavior and reproductive tract morphology may bias paternity. Light and scanning electron microscopy will be used to accurately describe female reproductive morphology in four focal taxa. Behavioral analysis will be used to uncover how males and females may influence paternity by manipulating the timing, duration, and frequency of copulation, re-mating interval, oviposition timing, etc. Molecular markers will be used to assess paternity when females have been experimentally mated with multiple males. These studies will shed light on the interplay between the constraints imposed by history and the adaptations that females and males may evolve. This is an area of growing interest in evolutionary biology doc2909 none Chernoff and Thomas Current studies of the morphology of organisms emphasize the idea that changes in developmental processes are fundamental to differences in the shape, size, and form of related species. A relatively simple shift in the timing of a developmental event can potentially result in striking morphological divergence between two related lineages. This project, by graduate student Katherine Thomas under the direction of Dr. Barry Chernoff, seeks to investigate the relationship between developmental timing and morphological change by comparing skeletal development in four lineages of freshwater fishes. The fish skeleton is composed of numerous spatially and functionally related bony elements, and an important event in the growth of each element is the time at which the bone begins to ossify (or take up calcium salts). Thus, changes in the timing of ossification events may strongly influence adult morphology. This study will document patterns of skeletal development in four fish species representing the major lineages within the superorder Ostariophysi, an assemblage of primarily freshwater fishes including catfishes, tetras, and their relatives. The developmental times at which bones ossify will be recorded, and this information will be used to address the following three questions. 1) How variable is the relative timing of bone ossification among related species? 2) Do any sets of bones appear to be highly correlated among species in the time at which they ossify, suggesting strong functional or developmental associations among the elements of the set? 3) Is there a relationship between the developmental time at which a bone ossifies and its variation in size and shape? Answering these questions will strengthen our knowledge of how changes in developmental patterns and processes mediate morphological diversification doc2910 none Differences in population density are often reflected in social behavior yet the pathways and mechanisms remain to be elucidated, particularly in natural populations. This research on a wild population of the prosimian, Lemur catta, uses endocrine responses to identify the relative contributions of several ecological and social stressors to density-dependent changes in behavior, physiology, and reproductive success. The study benefits from unique field conditions in which six habituated primate groups are studied across a well-documented population-density gradient, and research methods have been established for obtaining individual-level data on survival, reproduction, foraging efficiency, aggressive behavior, and levels of stress response as measured by excreted steroids sampled without intervention. The data for approximately 80 animals over a two-year period permit testing the hypotheses that food scarcity, conflicts within groups, and conflicts between groups are reflected to varying degrees in cortisol levels and that the magnitude of this stress response predicts individual health and short-term reproductive success doc2911 none Grant & Gee This study will investigate the causes and consequences of hybridization, the interbreeding of different species, in Gambel s and California Quail (the California State Bird). The consequences of hybridization range from extinction of one hybridizing species, when one species genetically swmps out the other, to the formation of an entirely new species. The outcome of hybridization depends on two factors, 1) the frequency of interbreeding between individuals, and 2) the survival and successful reproduction of hybrid offspring. This study will therefore explore what conditions lead to interbreeding between Gambel s and California Quail. Further, this study will compare the number of young born to interbreeding quail versus the number born to same-species pairs, and it will compare the survival of those hybrid and pure-species offspring. This current picture of hybrid survival will be paired with an investigation of the historical pattern of gene exchange between quail types, which will be accomplished by examining DNA sampled extensively through each quail range. Although low rates of hybridization are widespread in nature, its incidence may be increasing due to human landuse patterns. This human-caused increase in hybridization may be contributing to species extinction, making further research of hybridization increasingly important. This study will strengthen our understanding of the factors responsible for interbreeding between individuals, gene flow between species, and ultimately, speciation and extinction through hybridization doc2912 none Surprisingly little is known about the hormonal basis of species differences in avian parental care. Of particular interest is how parental males integrate song and territorial behavior with parental behavior, since time spent on one activity usually precludes time spent on the other. The objective of the proposed research is to determine whether circulating levels of the hormones testosterone and prolactin are responsible for the difference in paternal behaviors of two related species of songbird, the blue-headed vireo (BHV) and the red-eyed vireo (REV). Male BHVs incubate eggs, while male REVs are far more typical among songbirds in that they do not. Thus the species differ greatly in the degree to which males contribute to parental care. Using hormone manipulations in free-living males of both species, this research will test whether alterations in an individual s circulating hormone levels will lead to corresponding alterations in its song and parental behaviors. The mechanisms of parental care in Passeriformes, the largest order of birds, have not been examined as closely as those in other avian orders. The proposed research provides a strong test of the predicted functions of testosterone and prolactin in parental males doc2913 none Maddison and Ober The diversity of many groups of living organisms is related to the evolution of novel features that contribute to an explosive increase in the number of species. Adaptations acquired during such a radiation posses specialized functions and a unique evolutionary history. An example of increasing diversification of species and progressive specialization can be found in carabid beetles, commonly known as ground beetles, that have adapted an arboreal lifestyle. Graduate student Karen Ober, under the direction of Dr. David Maddison, is studying the evolution of arboreal adaptations in carabid beetles by surveying representative taxa across the 10 or so tribes of the large group Lebiomorpha. New collections from Malaysia and from Madagascar (the latter supplied by colleagues) will augment museum holdings and provide materials for molecular and morphological studies. Morphological features include tarsal and claw structures (independent of those associated with mating), leg length, and prorhorax shape, which may be involved in adaptive changes to arboreal life. To investigate the origin and evolution of arboreal carabids, an evolutionary tree of lebiomorphs and their relatives will be reconstructed using molecular sequence data from minimally two genes, the 28S ribosomal RNA gene and the nuclear gene wingless. Both show promise of providing mutational differences that would allow discrimination among lineages of lebiomorphs. With the evolutionary history of relationships in hand, one can study the number and direction of habitat shifts from ground-dwelling to arboreality and explore patterns of changes in ecological and morphological features presumed to be associated with arboreal life doc2914 none Wray (2) how the patterning, growth, and differentiation of wings in wingless non-reproductive ants is interrupted; and (3) whether the process of interruption in wingless non-reproductive ants has evolved. Understanding the genetic basis of this phenomenon will provide insights into the relationship between an organism s genes, the environment, and anatomy doc2915 none Prum and Bostwick The Neotropical manakins are a family of ca. 40 species of birds located in Central and South America. Male manakins are strikingly colored, and perform elaborate courtship displays for females. One unusual aspect of manakin behavior is the propensity of males to use wing sounds in their displays. Relative to vocal sounds, these mechanical sounds are rare among birds. However, in manakins the hypothesized relationships between the species (the phylogeny), together with details about the mechanical sounds themselves (when they are produced during displays, and with which part of the wing, etc.) indicate wing sounds have evolved multiple times within the family. In fact, at least three lineages, Manacini, Ilicurini, and Piprini, independently evolved the ability to produce distinct mechanical wing sounds in courtship displays. Graduate student Kimberly Bostwick, with direction from adviser Dr. Richard Prum, is studying morphological and behavioral features of this mechanical sound production and its evolution in Pipridae birds. Specifically, the project will consider: (1) how the morphology of the wing (the form of the bones, muscles, and feathers) has evolved relative to non-mechanical sound producing birds, and whether it varies between the three mechanical sound-producing lineages, (2) how, behaviorally and physically, the modified morphology is functioning in living birds to produce the wing sounds, and (3) how the morphology, functioning of the wing, and acoustics of the mechanical sounds have evolved through time within the three different lineages. Classical anatomical description will be combined with field video-recording and modern comparative phylogenetic methods to shed light on these questions. Given that the wing sounds are used in courtship displays in which males compete with one another to mate with females, the resultant character evolution (behavioral, morphological, and functional) is likely to be in response to the selection of male displays by females. Thus, the research addresses how sexual selection via female choice has led to morphological diversity in the manakins doc2916 none Farrell This project investigates the consequences of wing loss in longhorn beetles over a variety of temporal and spatial scales. DNA variation will be examined in longhorn beetles (Cerambycidae) in order to compare population structure, biogeography, and diversification rates between winged and flightless insects. Gene flow will be measured between populations on a variety of spatial scales, and mitochondrial DNA will be examined to resolve the genealogical history of these groups. This information will then used to examine how climate changes during the Pleistocene Epoch, immediately following the last ice age, may have differentially affected the distribution of winged and flightless insects. Information from nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA will be used to establish species limits, contrast levels of endemism between winged and flightless insects, and identify cryptic and or endangered species or populations. Finally, these genetic data will be compared with information about geologic history to examine the extent to which extrinsic geologic events have played a role in promoting diversification in these two groups. This will in turn improve our understanding of how species are formed and differentiated from one another. In addition to its scientific benefits, this project will improve our understanding of past climate change, which will allow us to make better predictions about the consequences of contemporary climate change due to man-made atmospheric gases doc2917 none Kreitman & Toomajian This project studies the broad question of why certain DNA mutations that lead to inherited diseases are so common in the present human population. The study focuses on one particular disease, hereditary hemochromatosis, which is caused primarily by the mutation of a single DNA base carried by about 1 in 10 individuals of Northern European descent. The collection of the DNA differences that exist within and between human populations for a region of DNA surrounding the hemochromatosis mutation allows the inference of details about the history of this mutation and the gene in which it occurs. The goal of this work is to compare competing models for hemochromatosis prevalence that take into account the role of natural selection and demographic history to the actual genetic variation found at this locus to determine which models best fit the data. Because mutations that affect the function of genes and lead to inherited disease make up an appreciable proportion of human genetic variation, the study of the factors affecting their prevalence is relevant for understanding both human genetic diversity and health. These detrimental mutations affect all other forms of life, but their study in humans is powerful because modern medicine excels at detecting the minor effects of these naturally occurring mutations doc2918 none Baum, Donoghue, and Davis Malpighiaceae are a family of flowering plants that are an important element of forests and savannas in the Old and New World tropics. New World Malpighiaceae are pollinated by specialized oil-collecting bees (anthophorid females) and exhibit a highly conserved floral morphology despite tremendous diversity in fruit morphology and habit. These oil-collecting bees are absent from the Old World. Some Old World clades, like Acridocarpus, are presumed to be derived from New World lineages and they exhibit a combination of features associated with oil-bee pollination and with buzz pollination. These groups provide an opportunity to examine the consequences of the loss of specialized pollinators. The goals of this study by graduate student Charles Davis, under the direction of Drs. David Baum and Michael Donoghue, are (1) to infer the phylogenetic relationships within Malpighiaceae using chloroplast and nuclear DNA sequences, (2) to infer the phylogeny or genealogy of Acridocarpus species in order to examine patterns of floral morphological evolution associated with pollinator shifts, and (3) to document the pollination of Acridocarpus in African habitats. Preliminary molecular data indicate that Old World genera of Malpighiaceae belong to several separate lineages, suggesting that morphologies associated with buzz pollination have evolved more than once independently. However, several areas of the phylogeny remain poorly resolved. Furthermore, several additional Old World lineages need to be added to existing datasets. Analyses of Acridocarpus using ribosomal DNA sequences reveal two major clades, one including species endemic to Madagascar and New Caledonia and the other consisting of species distributed across Africa. Oil glands appear to be entirely absent in species from Madagascar and New Caledonia, but appear in some African species. Fieldwork in Africa indicates that species of Acridocarpus are pollinated by large xylocopine bees that buzz the anthers, and the floral glands produce sugars rather than oils. Resolving the phylogeny of Malpighiaceae with additional chloroplast DNA sequences, along with sequences of a nuclear phytochrome gene, will clarify the origin and relationships of the Old World species. Further phylogenetic work will allow an evaluation of whether Old World species with similar morphologies have evolved independently, and whether such floral evolution is associated with the loss of oil-collecting pollinators. This study will shed light on the patterns and mechanisms of morphological change following a shift in pollination system doc2919 none The objectives of this project are to develop novel, specialized analytical tools for analysis and design of control systems that are robust with respect to disturbance model uncertainty, and to demonstrate their applicability in industrial situations. Disturbance rejection is a pervasive problem in control systems engineering, and our previous work has highlighted the importance of uncertainty in disturbance models. Among others, the following problems will be addressed: 1. Rejection of disturbances with uncertain spectra in systems with saturated actuators. 2. Investigation of performance measures other than variance (e.g., l-infinity norm) and disturbance models other than colored noise (e.g., a train of delta-functions with uncertain inter-arrival time). 3. Application of the results obtained to analysis and design of controllers in the aerospace (in co-operation with Boeing) and automotive (in co-operation with Ford) industries. The approach of the research is based on (a) a functional equation, that could be viewed as converse of the standard spectral factorization Lemma and (b) the method of stochastic linearization, that allows analysis and design of nonlinear systems driven by random inputs. The work is planned as follows: Problem 1 will be addressed the first year, problem 2 during the second and third year, and problem 3 will be underlying our work throughout. The impact of the research is in providing the control engineer with an analytical methodology for analysis and design of controllers that are robust with respect to uncertainties in the disturbance model. While such analysis is typically carried out today by simulations, the availability of the analytical tools to be developed will provide a useful alternative doc2920 none Jarrell This grant supports theoretical research on strongly correlated electronic systems. Such systems include the high temperature superconductors, heavy Fermion materials, non-Fermi liquid metals and magnetic materials. Models of these systems will be solved using finite-sized and dynamical mean field calculations and a novel tecnique which systematically incorporates non-local corrections to the dynamical mean field theory by mapping the lattice problem onto a finite-sized self-consistently embedded cluster. This Dynamical Cluster Approximation (DCA) is fully causal and systematic in the inverse cluster size which sets the maximum length of the dynamical intersite correlations. The effective cluster problem may be solved with conventional techniques such as perturbation theory or quantum Monte Carlo. However, as in calculations employing the dynamical mean field theory, the DCA calculations remain in the thermodynamic limit. Thus results from the DCA and finite-size calculations are complementary. Results from quantum Monte Carlo simulations are analytically continued to real frequencies using the maximum entropy method. These results will be compared to analytic and numerical approximations and experiment. To obtain results more directly relevant to experiment, a technique which combines LDA and DCA will also be developed. This study has two main objectives. The first is to calculate experimentally and theoretically relevant properties of model systems more accurately than heretofore possible. The second is to explore the non-perturabative regions of these models in order to predict new physical phenomena. The results of this study should lead to a better understanding of strongly correlated electronic systems. %%% This grant supports theoretical research on the properties of strongly correlated electronic systems. The techniques to be used are both analytical and numerical, and new methods to study these systems will be developed. Strongly correlated electronic systems include the high temperature superconductors, the heavy Fermion materials, the non-Fermi liquid metals and magnetic materials. Thus, while the issues to be addressed are of great fundamental importance, they also encompass many materials of practical importance doc2921 none Knoll and Okusu Graduate student Akiko Okusu, under the direction of Dr. Andrew Knoll, Harvard University, is studying the phylogenetic relationships and the evolution of calcareous hard parts of aplacophoran and polyplacophoran molluscs using integrated data from DNA sequences, morphology, and embryology. Aplacophorans are worm-like deep-sea molluscs that have no shells but are covered by spicules made of the calcium carbonate mineral aragonite. Polyplacophorans (chitons) are flat elongate molluscs with eight dorsal shell-plates imbricated within a spicule-embedded mantle girdle. It has been postulated that aplacophorans are closely related to polyplacophorans, that the two groups represent the most basal groups of molluscs (based on their relatively simple features), and that their aragonite spicules reflect a more primitive type of calcium carbonate deposition than that found in other molluscs. However, the evolutionary relationships of the Aplacophora and the Polyplacophora are unresolved. The lack of a well-supported phylogeny calls into question hypotheses of evolutionary changes in molluscan form and mineral deposition. Molecular sequence data from highly conserved nuclear coding genes, EF1-alpha and POL-II, will be used to construct a phylogenetic framework for 40 taxa including representative species from major molluscan classes and outgroup species from the Sipuncula and Annelida. Spicule development and morphology in these groups will be analyzed within the phylogenetic framework in order to assess homology and pattern of evolutionary change. The results will have a major impact on our understanding of the origin and evolution of molluscs doc2922 none Simon and Jordan Hawaii s active and colorful Megalagrion damselflies (pinao ula) have always been among the most beautiful and conspicuous insects in the islands. The roughly 23 species are unusual in that they are thought to be descended from a single colonizing ancestor that has given rise to descendants that now occupy as many different kinds of larval habitats as all other damselflies in the world put together, from swift streams, upland bogs, ponds and brackish pools, to plant leaf bases and damp leaf litter beneath fern banks. During this century, many species of Megalagrion have become locally scarce due to human disturbance. Some lowland species are no longer found on certain islands. Six species or subspecies are currently candidates for listing as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act. The genealogical relationships of the species of Megalagrion have long been debated and are problematic because of their highly variable morphological features and probable ongoing speciation. Graduate student Stephen Jordan, under the direction of Dr. Christine Simon, is studying the phylogenetic relationships of species of Megalagrion and its closest presumed relatives in the Pacific region, in relation to island geography and larval habitats. In this study, he will gather nuclear and mitochondrial DNA sequence data for comparative measures of mutational differences among these and other Pacific area damselflies. A large body of work has accumulated concerning the use of molecular and systematic data in conservation biology. This literature and the new results will provide a basis for recommendations to resource managers working to conserve these important and vulnerable members of Hawaii s freshwater ecosystems doc2923 none Loew The principle investigators will study the risk of local extinction for Illinois populations of American ginseng, Panax quinquefolium, a commercially valuable, heavily harvested plant species. American ginseng suffers severe reductions in population size due to destruction of its forest habitat and harvesting pressure. Population biology theory predicts decreased survival probability for small populations of organisms due to potential genetic problems (i.e., decreased genetic diversity) and demographic problems (i.e., low reproductive success). Consequently, the goals of this project are (1) to identify the location and size of remaining populations of American ginseng in Illinois, (2) to monitor demographic and fitness parameters, such as number of seedlings and seeds in a subset of eight populations, (3) to determine the genetic diversity within and between a subset of twenty populations, and (4) predict survival probabilities for populations of different sizes. Genetic diversity will be assessed for proteins and DNA. Despite predictions that small populations suffer increased extinction risks, native species of economic value, such as ginseng and Echinacea are regulated without vital genetic and demographic information on natural populations. Life history characteristics of P. quinquefolium, such as self-pollination and limited seed dispersal, make it vulnerable to loss of genetic diversity and decreased fitness. Therefore, P. quinquefolium is an important species for which to combine basic genetic and demographic information to assess viability of natural populations doc2924 none Galloway Populations frequently adapt to their local environment, and this adaptation may be diminished by the influx of genes from different, non-local populations of the same species. The movement of genes from horticultural and restoration plantings into wild plant populations requires three successive stages. First, pollinators must not discriminate against the non-local individuals and therefore move pollen from ornamental and restoration plantings into local populations. Secondly, the pollen of non-local plants must be able to fertilize the ovules of the wild population even in the presence of local pollen. Finally, the hybrid progeny resulting from a cross between wild and horticultural plants must establish and maintain themselves in the field. This study investigates each of these stages using the native cardinal flower, Lobelia cardinalis. Experimental manipulation will measure the distance of pollen movement, the relative efficiency of local and non-local pollen at fertilization, and the performance of successive generations of hybrids. This doctoral dissertation study addresses all steps of hybridization between non-local and wild populations in an experimental setting. The results of this work have implications for conservation, specifically for the potential for interactions between restoration and horticultural plantings of native species with wild populations doc2925 none Male animals may use several different behaviors to obtain mates. In the case of the green treefrog, some males remain silently positioned next to a calling male and attempt to intercept females attracted to that caller (satellite mating tactic). Using multiple speaker playbacks of frog calls to simulate and control a socially complex environment, investigations of how a male s ability to compete with other individuals for access to mates influences his use of different mating behaviors will be conducted. It will also be determined whether males adopting the satellite mating behavior take advantage of female call preferences for mates by becoming satellites of attractive males, thereby maximizing the benefits of the behavior. Behavioral differences among individuals may have a purely genetic basis; however, individuals in many species are flexible in their behavioral choices and adopt the tactic that best fits their current needs. Scientists have a relatively poor understanding why individual behavioral variation exists and how the animal s social environment may mediate this behavioral variation. This study will contribute to our understanding of how male-male competition and female mate choice shape a behaviorally complex mating system doc2926 none Larson and Townsend The distribution of animal and plant species over the earth has long puzzled biologists, as it often appears that closely related species are found in geographically separated areas while intervening regions are devoid of members of the same group. With the advent of plate tectonic theory, new ideas about species distributions based on continental drift could be formulated, and these hypotheses could ideally be tested if a reliably supported phylogeny (evolutionary genealogy) of the group in question were available. With the modern tools of DNA sequencing now available to systematists, well supported phylogenies can be obtained for numerous groups of animals and plants, providing opportunities to test proposed patterns of distribution resulting from plate tectonic events. The primary goal of work by graduate student Ted Townsend, with guidance from faculty adviser Allan Larson, is to construct a phylogenetic hypothesis for the lizard family Chamaeleonidae using DNA sequence data, and then to use this phylogeny to test various biogeographic hypotheses about the group. Chamaeleons include about 130 species of easily recognizable lizards, distributed in Africa, Madagascar, and India, with a few species ranging into southernmost Europe. The first three landmasses are remnants of the southern supercontinent of Gondwana which, according to plate tectonic theory, began its breakup about 140 million years ago. A reliable phylogeny of chamaeleons would allow tests of historical patterns of migration and of lineage splitting, which has so far not been possible on the basis of morphological studies of traditional taxonomic characters. New evidence from mitochondrial gene sequences and from two potential nuclear genes will help construct a phylogenetic framework for the group, based on field collected materials from Africa and Madagascar and from samples provided by colleagues and museum holdings doc2927 none This research focuses on how the complex chorus environment influences communication in two closely related species of gray treefrogs. Specific objectives are to determine if there are differences between the species in the frequency with which receivers (females) commit errors under less than ideal communication conditions, and to investigate whether male signaling strategies differ between the species in ways predictable by receiver behavior. These objectives will be addressed by (1) monitoring calling behavior of males and mate choice by females in natural and artificial choruses, (2) exposing females to multiple synthetic call sources presented to mimic chorus complexity, and (3) investigating male signaling interactions with artificial signals varied to represent differing social conditions. How the signals of animals are designed to transfer information to receivers has been of interest to investigators of behavior for some time, but environmental influences on uncertainty in communication have often been ignored. To understand how a communication system may have been evolved, it is necessary to determine how signalers and receivers interact under realistic conditions. Because of their readily observable and stereotyped communication behavior, frogs are ideal for investigating interactions between signalers, receivers and the environment doc2928 none Farrell and Morse Most herbivorous insects feed on only one or very few kinds of hostplants, despite the apparent advantages of being able to use multiple hosts when foodplants are scarce in space or time. Ecological research has generated considerable insight into the generation and maintenance of this specialization, but the long term persistence and consequences of variation in diet breadth are poorly understood. For example, is specialization a dead end? There is less evidence on how or even whether the process of specialization within populations of generalist species is connected to speciation and specialist species. Research by graduate student Geoffrey Morse, under the direction of Dr. Brian Farrell, will use DNA sequence data to: (1) reconstruct the phylogeny of the seed beetle genus Stator (family Bruchidae); and (2) examine the genetic relationships of populations of the sister species S. limbatus Horn (a generalist seed predator) and S. beali Johnson (a specialist feeder). The first aspect will test hypotheses concerning the evolutionary consequences of changes in resource specialization. The second aspect will test hypotheses concerning both the nature of speciation in phytophagous insects, and the population genetic correlates of divergence in diet breadth. Insights into how insects become specialists or generalists, as well as into the evolutionary consequences of these different habits, have implications for fields as diverse as evolutionary biology, conservation biology, and agricultural entomology. By providing an explicit historical perspective on the evolutionary ecology of host use in Stator, this research will contribute to the synthesis between ecological and evolutionary explanations of diversity and resource use doc2929 none Female carpenter bees often reproduce alone, but some individuals form pairs and reproduce cooperatively. A puzzling division of labor occurs in these pairs: one female does all the foraging and lays most or all of the eggs, while the other female guards the nest. Why does a guard help another female to reproduce, while forgoing her own reproduction? And why does a reproductive forager allow an apparently unrelated female to live in her nest? This study will use field observations, behavioral experiments, and genetic analyses to address these questions. Carpenter-bee nests are excavated in solid wood; they are expensive, but durable. A female who inherits a nest (rather than building one) may save valuable time and energy. This study will ask whether guards preferentially join nests that they seem likely to inherit. The question is of general interest because resource inheritance has been shown to favor the formation of social groups in birds and mammals; this study may produce the first convincing evidence that resource inheritance has similar effects on the social systems of insects. More generally, this study will increase basic factual knowledge of North American carpenter bees which remain poorly known despite their large size and striking beauty doc2930 none Kern This award provides support for Symposia at the AAAS meeting on 17-22 February in Washington D.C. The meeting, entitled Science in an Uncertain Millennium , is expected to draw over scientists, engineers, educators, and policymakers. The symposia are to be conducted as two separate parts of the meeting program: 1. Session 151: Health Care, Economics, and Technology: An evolving balance, and 2. Session 171: Children and Chronic Diseases: Incentives for solutions to lifelong problems. The two sessions are to describe results from the investigators experience with the NSF Whitaker Foundation activity in a Cost Reducing Health Care Technology (CRCHT) research project Personal Sensors for the Diagnosis and Management of Metabolic Disorders. Issues to be addressed in session 151 are the impacts that economics and policy have on the particular cost reducing technology under development. The second symposium, session 171, will give specific examples of issues pertaining to the development of technology for children s health, which is related to the particular CRHCT project. The symposia are designed to raise awareness of these issues in both the scientific and policy communities and provide a forum for communicating these issues to a broad audience. Proceedings of the AAAS Symposia are to be published jointly with those of the Symposium Balancing Costs with Benefits of Health Care Technologies in the New Millennium: A Global Perspective ( ) to be held at the World Congress on Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, July 23-28, , Chicago, IL doc2931 none This research will determine the mechanisms and processes underlying the evolution, maintenance, and enhancement of reproductive isolation. Mimulus guttatus and M. nasutus (Scrophulariaceae) two naturally hybridizing species of wildflowers, are used as a model system for studying reproductive isolation. Studies of this nature are important in determining the causes and consequences for gene flow between closely related taxa, and are therefore ultimately important in understanding early processes of speciation. To date, major reproductive isolating mechanisms have been identified in these two species: differences in flowering phenology, a predominantly selfing mating system of M. nasutus, and preliminary evidence of hybrid breakdown in the form of pollen inviability. This study will determine the fitness of hybrids relative to both parent species in a common garden setting. One experiment will place hybrid and parental organisms in a naturally occurring hybrid zone, and measure fitness, phenological overlap, and selfing rates for hybrid individuals relative to the parentals. This experiment will allow examination of the nature of reproductive isolation, and prediction of the consequences to gene flow this breakdown causes doc2932 none In geography as in all other scientific disciplines, advances in research and education increasingly rely on the development of international collaborations that bring together skilled scholars and educators from many different nations. International contacts and collaborations develop through many different means, but one of the most successful has been periodic meetings of the International Geographical Union (IGU) . The IGU has functioned since , conducting major congresses every four years, more focused meetings as needed, and facilitating collaborative inquiries among geographers from dozens of countries through the operation of committees, commissions, and study groups. Over recent decades, the IGU has emerged as one of the most active and successful unions participating in the International Council for Science (ICSU). Throughout its history, the U.S. has played an active role in the IGU, and American geographers have assumed critical leadership roles, especially over the last half century. To facilitate the continued involvement of U.S. scientists in IGU affairs and to facilitate the involvement of more Americans in international networks at early stages of their careers, this award will provide group-travel support for two upcoming IGU meetings. T he first meeting will be the 29th International Geographical Congress in Seoul, Republic of Korea, in August . The second meeting will be an IGU Regional Conference in Durban, South Africa, in August . Funds will be distributed to American geographers whose applications are evaluated using a number of criteria associated with active participation in the meeting. Larger travel grants will be given to more junior scientists in order to encourage their participation in international discussions and communications. This award will foster greater participation by U.S. scientists in the truly global fora of the International Geographical Union. As has been demonstrated in follow-up reports from Americans who have been supported with previous travel grants to IGU meetings, opportunities abound for meeting professional colleagues from many other nations, for hearing ideas and information from a broad range of different perspectives, and for participating in discussions that frequently result in successful research collaborations doc2933 none This proposal is for a project to develop advanced multidimensional nuclear magnet resonance (NMR) experiments, and to apply these methods to the characterization of commercially important polymers. For the past decade, triple resonance three dimensional (3D) NMR methods have been enormously valuable for studying the structures of biological macromolecules. The use of these methods in polymer science is relatively new. Recently, triple resonance 3D-NMR correlation experiments relating the shifts of 1-H, 13-C and a third NMR active nucleus X (where W is 19-F, 31-P, 29-Si, or 119-Sn) have been described. However, many commercially important polymeric materials are hydrocarbon based (i.e., they contain only 1-H and 13-C NMR active nuclei). The need for NMR methodology to study these materials is clear. The purpose of this project is to develop a site of multidimensional NMR experiments tailored to the characterization of hydrocarbon-based synthetic polymers. These experiments will be applied to the characterization of the microstructures in commercially important copolymers and terpolymers of ethylene with a-olefins methyl methacrylate, methacrylic acid, butyl methacrylate and or carbon monoxide. This structure information will be used to gain insight into the nature of initiation, termination, rearrangement and branch-forming reactions in the polymer. The project involves the combined use of existing unique resources, worth more than $15 million, at the academic and industrial partner institutions. It will provide new analytical methods which will be valuable to polymer researchers who must characterize the structures of new materials. The information obtained from the analysis of the specific polymers in this project will be useful to polymer engineers who will use the structure information to develop engineering models for plant processes. This knowledge will aid in the development of new materials, help to improve the properties of existing manufactured materials, and contribute to the development of improvement polymer manufacturing processes. In the long-term, the information and methodology obtained from this proposal will be of general use in the materials science industry doc2934 none Proposal number: Proposal type: Investigator Initiated for International Group Travel Principal investigator: Mietek Jaroniec Affiliation: Kent State University International Travel Award: The 2nd Pacific Basin Conference on Adsorption Science and Technology This award supports partially the participation by 16 American researchers in the 2nd Pacific Basin Conference on Adsorption Science and Technology, to be held in Brisbane, Australia, from May 14-8, . This conference is the successor to the first such conference, held in Japan three years ago. It brings together about 200 researchers from Asia and the US, as well as Europe. Both academic and industrial researchers will participate in sessions on materials, characterization, simulation, theoretical models, equilibrium, kinetics, applications, and processes. Adsorption is a key phenomenon in many separation and catalytic processes as well as in nature, and the current research activity is dynamic, stimulated by new developments in materials synthesis, molecular modeling, and specific applications. Much of the important new work is being done abroad, especially in Japan, so it is vital that U.S. researchers maintain contact and collaboration with their foreign counterparts. This conference provides an opportunity to promote such contact doc2935 none Recently, there has been growing interest in the development of medical imaging modalities based on light, as opposed to more conventional modalities based on ultrasound, X-ray computed tomography (CT), or magnetic resonance (MRI). Imaging based on light has the advantages of being non-invasive, safe, and requiring only inexpensive instrumentation. Conventional wisdom holds that light can not pass through tissue, but in fact, near infra-red light does pass through tissue and can therefore, in principle, be used to form images of the interior of the tissue. However, light passing through tissue is highly scattered, so that an image can not be calculated using conventional methods. This research is concerned with the development of new computational algorithms that can be used to form three-dimensional images from measurements of scattered light. These methods, known collectively as optical diffusion tomography, have the potential to provide safe, inexpensive, and portable imaging instruments. Practical realization of optical diffusion imaging requires that a difficult non-linear inverse problem be solved in a computationally tractable manner to yield accurate images. In this research, new multigrid optimization methods are developed which have the potential to dramatically speed reconstruction. These new methods are applied in a Bayesian framework and use novel techniques to model the regions containing voids, opaque tissue, or fluorescence imaging agents. Moreover, optical diffusion tomography is representative of a broader class of important inverse problems; so that the methods developed in this research have application in problems ranging from image registration and motion estimation to environmental sensing and non-destructive evaluation doc2936 none Bandwidth management and pricing of elastic services is key to the efficient and profitable running of emerging high-speed networks. Elastic traffic or traffic which can alter its rate characteristics to adapt to the congestion state of the network, such as TCP IP traffic, already forms a major part of the traffic carried by today s networks, the Internet being the current paradigm. In networks where the basic bandwidth availability and user characteristics are not efficiently priced as well as managed, profitability or efficiency is reduced since pricing and consequent user satisfaction are going to determine demand and useful throughput (\goodput ). While the ideas of dynamic optimal resource allocation and pricing based on user resource requests and budgets are very attractive they cannot be implemented in a large network for scalability reasons. This is due to both communication as well as computational overheads. Hence, there is a need for creating a hierarchical structure and to perform aggregation in order to make the concept implementable and useful. However, the researchers believe that there is a need for a well-defined framework so that they can understand and quantify the trade-offs that have been made in terms of efficiency, overhead, fairness, complexity, responsiveness (especially if the propagation delays are large) and robustness. Other issues very much related to implementation are linked to measurement of congestion and to convergence and stability of efficient and computationally feasible distributed algorithms. The proposed research will: (1) Further develop and refine a game theoretic framework proposed by the PIs for bandwidth allocation for elastic traffic. The allocation maximizes the efficiency (in terms of network revenue) of network utilization and incorporates the crucial notion of fairness. The main thrust will be the development of appropriate solution concepts in non-static environments. (2) Use the above framework to develop pricing structures which will lead to network efficiency while providing user level satisfaction. (3) Develop distributed algorithms which enable the proper allocation of bandwidth as defined through game theory above based on users willingness to pay and bandwidth demands. In particular, the issues of network measurements and local information will be addressed. This can be seen as either a solution for a small network or as a benchmark to which the researchers proposed solutions incorporating hierarchy and aggregation will be compared. (4) Design of scalable solutions incorporating aggregation and an appropriate hierarchical structure of the network, i.e., user level, groups of users, etc. Particular attention will be paid to trade-offs in terms of performance and complexity. Both the pure bandwidth allocation based on performance as well as pricing based cases will be considered. (5) Study in the implementation of these solutions in the context of network protocols such as TCP IP. This will involve issues related to stability, convergence, and adaptivity to changing conditions. (6) Develop notions of network bandwidth derivatives or option pricing for booking or provisioning of bandwidth resources based on a Black-Scholes paradigm. This is another example of the techniques that the researchers plan to use. This one will be used at an intermediate level of the researchers network hierarchy, namely between a service provider and a network operator. The researchers expect that the proposed work will involve: advances in applications of game theory; contributions to the notions of aggregation and fairness; development of an approach to bandwidth options; optimal pricing structures; development of feasible real-time algorithms for bandwidth allocation; and contributions to implementation issues based on available information. The techniques will be drawn from game theory, Lyapunov theory, convergence of stochastic algorithms, nonlinear constrained optimization, mathematics of finance, and stochastic analysis doc2937 none Fiebig Research in theoretical nuclear physics will study excitations of the nucleon, exotic mesons and baryons containing excited gluons, bound states of gluons known as glueballs, and the interactions in two hadron systems using computer simulations of quarks and gluons. These systems should provide vital clues about quark confinement which is of central importance in our attempt to understand the strong nuclear force. The project goals relate in large part to the scientific mission of the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility doc2938 none Citrin This research grant focuses on the optical properties of semiconductor heterostructures, including quantum wells (QW s), quantum wires (QWR s), quantum dots (QD s) and microcavities (MC s), in the presence of terahertz (THz) electromagnetic fields. This research area, in addition to being of fundamental interest, has received a two-fold impetus from high-speed electronics and from high-bandwidth optical communications. Of particular interest to this research is the regime of low carrier density in which few electrons or holes are excited by the optical beam; the coherence properties of the carriers play an essential role. Previous reseach considered the dynamics of electron-hole (e-h) pairs excited by ultrafast optical pulses in the presence of THz fields. Because the bandwidth of a sub-ps optical pulse can be in excess of 10 meV, e-h pairs with varying degrees of excess energy (or excitons in different states of their internal motion) are excited by the optical pulse forming a wavepacket. Such studies provide an analogy to several atomic physics phenomena, including the dynamics of Rydberg wavepackets, above-threshold ionization, and high-field harmonic generation. The focus of the proposed work is to explore this analogy further, but more so to push into the domain where intrinsic solid state effects, such as many-body effects and carrier-phonon scattering, begin to make their presence felt by leading to dephasing of the optically excited e-h pairs. Thus, the first optical nonlinearities that kick in as the optical intensity is increased beyond the linear optical regime will be studied. Specifically, how do carrier-carrier and carrier-phonon scattering lead to dephasing of the optically excited electronic excitations, and how does this dephasing modify the spatial motion of e-h wavepackets excited by short optical pulses and driven by THz fields? What is the nature of phonons emitted by such wavepackets; can coherent wavepackets of phonons be launched by THz-driven e-h wavepackets? Can scattering rates themselves be modified by the dynamics of the THz-driven e-h wavepackets? In addition to being an untapped area of fundamental importance in the spectroscopy of semiconductors, light propagation through THz-modulated quantum wells povides an optical analog for a class of time-domain single-particle quantum tranport phenomena that are otherwise infeasible to study. In particular, tracking the temporal evolution of coherent wavepackets during the tunneling process is of fundamental interest and yet difficult, if not in practice impossible, to access in quantum transport experiments. Fortuitously, there is a close analogy between the scalar classical electromagnetic wave equation and the single-particle Schroedinger equation. This means that in a certain regime one can model by correspondence the quantum mechanical dynamics of a particle by an appropriate light-propagation experiment. This correspondence extends to the phase, i.e., quantum mechanical phase maps to optical phase. Clearly, interferometric experiments are routine in optics but require a tour de force effort in quantum transport. A particularly interesting class of phenomena involves quantum tunneling through a time-modulated potential. The connections between the same type of processes that are associated with the formation of THz sidebands on optical spectra of THz illuminated semiconductors with quantum transport phenomena. The theoretical research will focus on regimes where neither the QW atom or optical transport analogies entirely hold, such as the nonlinear optical regime - where THz-modulated semiconductor heterostructures present new possibilities. Specifically, the propagation of cw and ultrafast optical pulses through heterostructures subjected to pulsed or narrow-band THz fields will be studied. %%% This research grant focuses on the optical properties of semiconductor heterostructures, including quantum wells (QW s), quantum wires (QWR s), quantum dots (QD s) and microcavities (MC s), in the presence of terahertz (THz) electromagnetic fields. This research area, in addition to being of fundamental interest, has received a two-fold impetus from high-speed electronics and from high-bandwidth optical communications. Of particular interest to this research is the regime of low carrier density in which few electrons or holes are excited by the optical beam; the coherence properties of the carriers play an essential role doc2939 none This individual investigator award is to several professors at the University of Rochester for a project aimed at an improved understanding of the vortex dynamics and pinning effects in high-temperature superconductors (HTS). This project will make use of modern femtosecond laser techniques and both electro-optic (EO) and magneto-optic (MO) imaging methods to provide time-resolved two-dimensional images of intrinsic vortex dynamics in HTS thin films, single crystals, and wires. Specific problems to be addressed include vortex nucleation and motion in the presence of random and periodic pinning, dynamical phase transitions of vortex matter induced by transport current, and vortex velocity distributions in flux-flow channels above the critical current. This research should have important implications for high-power applications of HTS materials. This is a highly interdisciplinary research project, which will involve graduate and undergraduate students and faculty members in physics, materials science, and electrical and computer engineering at the University of Rochester, as well as researchers at Argonne National Laboratory. The students will gain skills to enable them to compete in the future market place. %%% Superconductors are of great importance because they can carry very large electrical currents with zero resistance. These currents in turn produce very large magnetic fields. However, for currents above a certain critical current , the material will no longer be a superconductor since magnetic vortices suddenly penetrate the superconductor, producing resistive loss and sometimes catastrophic heating in the material. In order to make superconductors that can carry ever higher currents, it is essential to understand this breakdown mechanism in more detail. This individual investigator award is to several professors at the University of Rochester for a project that will make use of femtosecond lasers arranged as ultrafast two-dimensional imaging cameras to take a series of snapshots of a superconductor while this breakdown is taking place, resulting in a slow-motion movie of the rapid dynamics of the magnetic vortices as they enter the superconductor. The results of this study should provide clues to making higher-quality High-temperature superconducting wires, tapes, and thin films for a variety of electronic and energy-related applications. This is a highly interdisciplinary research project, which will involve graduate and undergraduate students and faculty members in physics, materials science, and electrical and computer engineering at the University of Rochester, as well as researchers at Argonne National Laboratory. The students will gain skills to enable them to compete in the future market place doc2940 none Marder This award provides partial support for the Nonlinear Dynamics and Pattern Formation Conference in Austin, Texas, June 4-6, . The Conference will feature topics covering many fields in nonlinear dynamics, ranging from fluid and geotrophic flows, to chemical patterns, to biophysics, fracture, and dynamics of granular media. Speakers will discuss both theoretical and experimental aspects of their research, and provide an overview of the profound changes in understanding the dynamics of non-equilibrium systems that have taken place as a result of research pursued by Professsor Harry L. Swinney and his associates, beginning in the s. %%% This award provides partial support for the Nonlinear Dynamics and Pattern Formation Conference in Austin, Texas, June 4-6, . The Conference will discuss research related to the work of Professor Harry L. Swinney, who has recently celebrated his 60th birthday. Dr. Swinney pioneered the study of complex dynamics and chaos in physical and chemical systems far from equilibrium in the early 70 s and has been director of the award-winning, internationally-recognized Center for Nonlinear Dynamics at the University of Texas for more than 20 years. Invited speakers at the conference are leading researchers from the many fields of physics that Dr. Swinney has influenced doc2941 none With this renewal award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the work of Dr. Maitland Jones in the Department of Chemistry at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. The aim of the work is to investigate the chemistry of reactive organic intermediates including carbenes, cycloalkynes, and diradicals. Examples are trans-2,3-dimethylcyclopropylcarbene, cyclopentyne, and 1,4-diradicals from the photolysis of naphthocarboranes. The study of reactive intermediates is expected to lead to improved syntheses of organic molecules. The photolysis of naphthocarborane in the presence of supercoiled cyclic DNA caused efficient single strand cleavage, suggesting that the work could lead to biomedical applications. The PI is known to be an outstanding educator, and we would expect that to continue under the continuing grant doc2942 none The objective of this project is to investigate the design, implementation, and performance evaluation of a new architecture for storage area networks. The architecture under investigation, Distributed RAID and Locatin Independent Caching (DRALIC) will implement distributed RAID and global caching at the device level, using the embedded controllers in storage devices to perform complex functions. A preliminary study has shown that this architecture has significant performance and reliability advantages in web server applications. The present project includes detailed simulation studies and a proof-of-concept implementation on a network of general-purpose computers doc2943 none This research develops a novel framework for the design and better understanding of data compression algorithms. This framework facilitates the use of ideas and techniques from statistics in order to: (a) Design efficient practical algorithms for specific applications; (b) Precisely characterize the performance of such algorithms. These algorithms provide easily implementable, high-compression methods. Their construction is done in three stages: A precise correspondence is first established between data compression algorithms and statistical models. In the second stage, statistical techniques are applied to identify a suitable model for the data, and in the third stage the selected model is turned into a practical algorithm. Virtually all of the algorithms that are currently used in compression applications can be incorporated into this framework. In view of the tremendous practical importance of the basic problem (lossy data compression), especially in the area of multimedia, even modest advances can have a strong impact. Using ideas and techniques from the area of adaptive statistical model- selection, this study develops practical algorithms and attempts to advance theoretical understanding of the fundamental issues involved in lossy data compression, by investigating the following basic questions: 1. What are the fundamental limits of performance (in terms of redundancy and complexity), for compression with finite amounts of data? What is the best achievable rate at which optimality can be reached using reasonable computational resources? 2. How can the trade-off between implementation complexity and compression performance be balanced in practice? 3. What is the natural _lossy_ analog of the well-known correspondence between algorithms and codebooks in lossless compression, and how can model-selection be employed to construct practical algorithms? On the side of applications, the primary emphasis is on adaptive methods that can be implemented in real-time systems, and which are based on concrete theoretical guidelines. These will provide low-complexity, universal algorithms. In terms of the theory, the focus is on determining the natural mathematical framework, within which the above issues can be analyzed. This development builds on recent work in information theory, centered around a natural lossy generalization of the Asymptotic Equipartition Property and its refinements doc2944 none Craig Chambers Higher-level programming languages, such as Smalltalk, ML, and Java, can make programming easier, more reliable, and more flexible than lower-level programming languages, such as C and C++. Unfortunately, these software engineering benefits often come at significant cost to run-time efficiency. One important obstacle to achieving good performance for higher-level languages is the relatively inefficient approach to the representation and layout of data structures, where data structures are represented uniformly as heap-allocated structures referenced indirectly via pointers. This research aims to reduce the performance costs of this high-level data model while retaining its software engineering benefits for programmers. Declarative techniques will be developed for specifying the layout of data structures and for specifying optimizations to data structure layouts. Techniques will be developed for deciding which layout optimizations to apply, based on a mix of programmer suggestions, automatic static analyses, and dynamic profile feedback. A flexible, language-independent compiler intermediate representation will be designed that explicitly maintains, checks, and optimizes representations. The techniques will be implemented in an optimizing compiler, and their effectiveness measured on a range of large benchmark programs in a variety of object-oriented programming languages doc2945 none A large class of important problems concerning the symmetries of super=AD string theories and non=ADcommutative geometry will be studied. Superstring theory is a promising model proposed to unify all the forces in Nature. The model possesses remarkable symmetries, called dualities, and suggests an exciting new understanding of the structure of space in terms of newly discovered non=ADcommutative geometries. A non-commutative geometry is one for which a measurement of one coordinate (say x) introduces an uncertainty in another seemingly independent coordinate (say y). This is similar to but quite distinct from the usual situation in quantum physics for which measurement of a particle s location introduces an uncertainty in the particle s speed. Evidently, quantum gravity requires the use of non-commutative geometry for a complete understanding. It is very important to properly include time evolution in this framework. Our research will do this doc2946 none This research involves coded modulation, the combination of a convolutional code and a higher order digital modulation. The typical application is for a wireless communications system operating over fading channels. The design typically trades off performance versus complexity. More complex systems are larger in size and consume more power. High performance means high spectral efficiency (in bits per second per Hz), low error rate (probability of bit error) at minimum transmitted power. Modern systems basically achieve this with sophisticated receivers; decoders that are now feasible due to the advances in microelectronics. In this research, the goal is to improve the performance of bit interleaved coded modulation (BICM) by incorporating iterative decoding (BICM-ID). Systems using BICM-ID achieve high performance but are less complex than those incorporating turbo codes. More specifically, the investigator studies fundamental advances both the design and the performance evaluation of BICM-ID systems. This is done is several ways. The research optimize the codes, signal labels, bit interleaver in the encoder. Iterative decoding is improved by better matching with the specific channel type, and quality of the channel state information (CSI). Performance evaluation will be based on a more fundamental understanding of the error-free feedback bound for iterative decoding. The performance for channels with imperfect CSI and more general fading statistics is studied. Diversity will be improved in several ways: through explicit use of multiple channels and through constellation rotation. In all of these situations, design optimization and performance evaluation is investigated doc2947 none The goal of this project is to develop techniques to reduce the memory footprint of executable code, so as to allow more and more sophisticated applications to be executed on limited-memory devices, such as hand-held computers, personal digital assistants, and embedded processors. Recent years have seen the incorporation of computers and computational devices into many aspects of our everyday lives. In many cases, the amount of memory available for such processors is limited by considerations such as space, weight, and power consumption. At the same time, there is a desire to run more and more sophisticated applications on such processors. Since an application that occupies more memory than is available on such a processor will not be able to run on that processor, it is desirable to develop techniques to reduce the memory footprint of applications. Moreover, it is necessary that the compressed applications remain executable, since for the application domains under consideration it is not feasible to decompress the executable in order to execute it. This project investigates the construction of tools and techniques for code compression in a manner that preserves executability doc2948 none The goal of this work is to improve the ability to simulate airflow over complex terrain using large-eddy simulation (LES). The approach is to apply to meteorology some of the recent advances that have been made in the modeling of engineering flows. Specifically, the objectives are (1) to develop and test several approximations for surface boundary conditions and models for characterizing the scales of motion that are unresolved by LES; and (2) to investigate the physics of atmospheric flows by applying the new models to data from several field studies. The approach employs highly parallel computing to achieve a grid resolution of about 10 m in the horizontal and 100 levels in the vertical. Examples of the kinds of complex situations to be investigated include inversion layers within a deep valley, steep orography, and valley winds doc2949 none Olmstead Convolvulaceae, the Morning-glory Family, with some - species are a large group of flowering plants. The members of this family present a rich diversity of morphological characteristics and ecological habitats. Although the family is best known in temperate regions by its weedy representatives (e.g., binding weed) many tropical species are valuable ornamentals and sources of hallucinogenic drugs and purgatives. The sweet potato is the World s second most important root crop ( 128 M metric tones per year). Furthermore, many species are used as experimental model organisms in evolutionary and molecular genetics studies (e.g., comparative study of pollination syndromes, research on resistance and tolerance to herbivory and pathogens, biochemical pathways research). Despite this interest, little is certain about the historical relationships among members of the Convolvulaceae. Large plant groups present challenges to systematists interested in understanding the evolution of these groups. Molecular data from chloroplast and nuclear DNA sequences, supplemented with floral and vegetative morphological data, will be used to obtain accurate reconstruction of the relationships within this family. Once resolved, the inferred relationships will be used for following purposes: 1) to assist investigators who seek a historical context for the appearance of particular significant traits among these plants; 2) to analyze the agreement between DNA data and morphological data, with the aim of obtaining a natural classification for this family based on both kinds of information; and 3) to test a series of hypotheses on molecular processes of chloroplast genome evolution in this family, one of the few flowering plant families exhibiting substantial chloroplast genome rearrangements. This investigation will complement other studies being performed in closely related families and will impact the fields of molecular evolution, population genetics, taxonomy, and systematics doc2950 none Dramatic advances in the technologies, coupled with economic factors, have given rise to a new modality of parallel computing wherein workstations are connected together to act cooperatively as a single parallel computer - a Network of Workstations (NOW). Many algorithmic devices that ensured efficient interprocessor communication and coordination in a tightly coupled parallel computing environment no longer guarantee efficiency within a NOW. This project derives theoretical understanding of factors that enhance - and detract from - efficiency of parallel computing in NOWs. It also develops algorithmic techniques that translate such understanding into practically efficient scheduling strategies. The scheduling algorithms that emerge from research will provide provably predictable performance for large, significant classes of computations, such as those that arise in many scientific applications doc2951 none This proposal is for the continuation of the PI s research toward the development, implementation, and application of efficient numerical methods for interface problems especially with moving interfaces and or free boundaries. Specific projects include development of the immersed interface method for the Navier Stokes equations modeling incompressible viscous two phase flow with fixed or moving interfaces. Related to this topic, some important projects include development of new projection and or gauge methods so that the second order accuracy can be preserved even with the presence of interfaces; second order elliptic solvers that can satisfy the maximum principle for interface problems in two and three dimensions; the finite element methods using Cartesian and or adaptive Cartesian grids for interface problems. Another application which will be studied in depth is the simulation of electro-migration of voids in integrated circuits with the presence of grain boundaries. This proposal is about developing efficient (fast, accurate, and in real time) methods to simulate some important moving interface free boundary problems. Applications include the simulation of the interface between water and oil in petroleum industry; simulation of contaminated bubbles in water for environmental science; simulation of crystal growth of pattern formulation in material science; simulation of cell deformation and motion of biofilm in medical and biology sciences; and simulation of electro-migration of voids in an integrated circuit in semi-conductor industry. Over the years, we have developed advanced methods for solving these interface problems and we believe we are the leaders in this area. Therefore we are very confident in the success of the proposal and can maintain the edge in this area over other countries. Economically, the success of this proposal can save millions of dollars that are needed to carry out real experiments doc2952 none Embedded systems comprising many interconnected microprocessor-based controllers play an increasingly important role in daily life. They are typically systems-on-a-chip (SOCs), which are customized for complex applications, and are required to be inexpensive, available and safe. A key characteristic of SOCs is their extensive use and reuse of standard hardware and software modules referred to as intellectual property (IP). This project investigates the basic properties and design requirements of IP-based embedded systems that have stringent safety and availability goals. It focuses on the problems of low-cost monitoring of system operation in real time to ensure that prescribed design objectives are met doc2953 none Mobile ad hoc networks consisting of mobile hosts that communicate via wireless radio channels are being increasingly used for local area networks, law enforcement, military operations and myriad of other applications. Most of these applications, if not all, involves sending messages from one host (source) to a specified group of hosts and there can be a large number of such groups in the network for diverse kinds of applications. Multi-cast involves sending messages to a restricted group of processes and forms the basis for efficient implementation of group based applications on a distributed system. Many protocols for efficiently performing multi-cast in static networks are available while at this time, a number of critical technical issues in designing such protocols for ad hoc networks remain unresolved, including elegant solutions to issues of power limitations and high speed data, effective methods of assurance for losslessness of the messages during transition period due to host mobility and the ability to contain the effect of any topology change locally. In mobile ad hoc networks the topology of the network changes with node movements, variations in the radio propagation conditions, and depletion of battery power of the nodes. The rate of topological changes can be different at different times, as well as in different regions of the network. The network can experience frequent network partitioning and may require reconfiguration of the partitioned subnetworks. The proposed research will take a combined theoretical and experimental approach and will apply this to emerging distributed applications. In this proposal the researchers with combined expertise in the fields of group based communications in networks and stabilization of protocols in asynchronous distributed computing systems are proposing an innovative integrated research project in fault-tolerant multi-cast protocol design for mobile ad hoc networks. The proposed design intends to demonstrate a variety of impressive benefits including: (1) The protocol will support mixed traffic of variable rates with the ability to adapt fast with ease to sudden changes in traffic via a dynamic link cost estimator (that depends on channel bandwidth, quality-of-service (QoS) to the applications, battery power of the hosts, etc.) (2) The protocol is self-stabilizing in that any topological change due to mobility of nodes will trigger the protocol and the optimal multicast tree will be for the new topology and quickly reconstructed. (3) The self-stabilizing protocols are augmented with features that guarantees that the service remains available while the multi-cast tree is being adapted to the new topology (i.e., multicast messages present in the system during the recovery period are not lost). (4) The self-stabilization features of the protocol are triggered in a controlled manner so as to not overwhelm the system in presence of high mobility by using efficient fault-containment strategies. (5) The research intends to develop a new execution model for the self-stabilizing algorithms in a distributed system based on the real-life conditions of an ad hoc network as opposed to the traditional adversarial oracle model for such algorithms. The researchers expect that this will lead to the use of the concept of self-stabilization to solving other real life problems involving recovery from a transient behavior. Efficient solutions for performing multi-casting in mobile ad hoc networks with the above benefits will rely on what support underlying data link layer can provide and how the network layer multi-cast protocol can exploit these facilities to intelligently control the overheads while providing desirable QoS. This proposal will take a synergistic approach in designing the multi-cast protocols so as to make them compatible with the underlying networking layers. The developed protocols will be extensivaly evaluated through simulation. Further a prototype protocol stack will be implemented on the top of IEEE 802.11 MAC layer to evaluate the improvement in QoS to distributed media distribution and collaboration applications doc2954 none The lithium ion battery is a promising technology for electric energy storage. Several materials-related issues are the subjects of intense research. These issues include the design and synthesis of electrolytes with enhanced conductivity, and the interaction between charge carriers and electrode materials. Detailed and accurate materials characterization is key to understanding the processes that underlie these phenomena. To inform the scientific community of the current issues that control the progress of battery technology, to provide a platform for the exchange of ideas, and to stimulate new directions of research in this field, a symposium dedicated to battery materials will be held at the Annual Meeting of the American Crystallographic Association, July 22-27, , in St. Paul, MN. An outcome of the conference we expect to develop a vision and important directions for research in lithium ion battery technology doc2955 none The early Eocene biota of Meridian, Mississippi, includes a diverse biota from plants, molluscs, fishes, snakes, birds, and mammals that were deposited in estuarine channels and swamps. All sites yielding this unique early Eocene biota occur on privately-owned lland that is scheduled for imminent development. This proposal will salvage as much of the ancient biota of this region and associated contextual data as is possible prior to its permanent loss to science because of commercial development. Two weeks of field work on site will concentrate on screen-washing large volumes of fossiliferous sediment, in order to sample the vertebrates of the Tuscahoma and Bashi formations. Further sorting in the laboratory will identify useful fossil specimens and fragments doc2956 none The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is the corner stone of Java technology, and its efficiency in executing the portable Java bytecodes is crucial for the success of this technology. Interpretation, Just-In-Time compilation, and hardware realization are well known solutions for implementing the JVM, and previous research has proposed optimizations for each of these techniques. However, each technique has its pros and cons and may not be uniformly attractive for all hardware platforms. Instead, an understanding of the architectural implications of JVM implementations with real applications can be crucial to the development of enabling technologies for efficient Java runtime system development on a wide range of platforms (from resource-rich servers to resource-constrained embedded systems). Towards this goal, this proposal examines architectural issues, from both the hardware and JVM implementation perspectives. The key to an efficient Java virtual machine implementation is the synergy between well-designed software, an optimizing compiler, supportive architecture, and efficient runtime libraries. This research will essentially provide an insight into this hardware -software interaction and contribute a set of tools, software and hardware methodologies, and architectural features that will be vital for supporting efficient JVM implementations over a spectrum of devices. The results from this research will also be useful for providing efficient implementations in other object-based and dynamically compiled languages and environments doc2957 none This Americas Program award will support travel and related expenses for US scientists to participate in an international workshop on Global Change Modeling to be held in Brasilia, Brazil July 9-21, . The US organizer is Dork Sahagian of the University of New Hampshire, and his Brazilian co-organizer is Carlos Nobre from INPE in Brazil. The workshop will help to develop modeling capabilities of the research community working in Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiments in Amazonia (LBA), train participants in ecological modeling using hands-on experience, and foster collaboration between Amazonian scientists and US and other researchers for joint international projects. Participants will be selected from early to mid-career researchers who are in the strongest position to contribute regional data and understanding to the workshop and disseminate the capabilities obtained to their colleagues and students. The workshop takes an Amazonian focus within a global context and is oriented toward education and outreach rather than actual model development. The issues addressed in this workshop are central to the activities of the Task Force on Global Analysis, Interpretation, and Modeling (GAIM), an element of the International Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP doc2958 none Run-time reconfiguration (RTR) is a method of computing in which the hardware, usually field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), changes structure from one phase to the next of a computation. It has applications in image processing, signal processing, encryption, networking, and other areas. The research develops the necessary foundations to open up RTR to wider usage. The research addresses directions: (1) Development of a layered model of FPGAs suitable for broad exploration of RTR solution approaches, and porting of reconfiguration techniques developed by the investigators and others in the study of reconfigurable meshes to the RTR arena. (2) Design of fault tolerant RTR solutions in both an algorithm-specific context and in a general computational context. (3) Development of ``hardware operating system support for users to distance themselves from FPGA details. The research leads to benefits of less hardware, because of reuse of reconfigurable hardware, and faster computation, because of specialization to input. It develops a fundamental understanding of RTR, its power and limitations, and to establish a framework for using it efficiently doc2959 none With this renewal award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program continues support for the work of Dr. Miguel A. Garcia-Garibay in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles. The research aims at understanding chemical dynamics in highly constrained environments - crystalline organic solids at temperatures approaching absolute zero. Reactions are initiated by laser flash photolysis and studied by a variety of methods including x-ray diffraction, differential scanning calorimetry, solid state 13C NMR, and infrared and Raman spectroscopy. Quantum mechanical tunneling will be studied by means of deuterium isotope effects, anomalous Arrhenius plots of rate constants, and by theoretical and computational chemistry. The proposed work involves the changes in reactivity of highly reactive organic intermediates, generated photochemically, when these intermediates are formed not in liquid solution where there is considerable freedom of motion, but in highly constrained crystalline solids at low temperatures. Unusual products can form under these circumstances at rates that are much higher than would be expected based on rates near room temperature. Studies of this type can give insight into the detailed dynamics of the reactions involved. The work provides excellent training for students in organic synthesis, spectroscopy, kinetics, and computational chemistry. The PI actively recruits under-represented minority students, especially Hispanics, to do research in his laboratory doc2960 none Kirsch Forensic DNA analysis has revolutionized our ability to identify individuals based on small amounts of genetic material. Similar technology offers a valuable new tool for studying the genetics of wild populations with an unprecedented degree of precision. A novel technique developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will be used to determine the parentage and dispersal of offspring in a tropical forest bird (Manacus manacus). By comparing the DNA fingerprints of this species in different environments, geographic influences on dispersal of these birds can be ascertained, thus realizing the goals of this study. These goals are: to determine (1) relatedness among the birds, (2) how far they and their offspring disperse, and (3) to what extent populations have diverged from each other. This investigation addresses directly the fundamental questions of whether topography limits dispersal and if so, whether more variable landscapes lead to genetically more distinct populations. The methodology of the study is applicable to any species, including humans, and provides information crucial to recognizing and meeting threats to species that arise from habitat alteration. Therefore, the project outcome will serve as a model for the recognition of species-at-risk and for the subsequent design of protected areas doc2961 none Prewitt The density of the Earth s core is about 10% less than that of pure nickel-iron at core pressures and temperatures. Several elements have been proposed to account for the low density of the core, including sulfur, silicon, carbon, potassium, hydrogen, and oxygen. Because potassium and phosphorous are depleted in the Earth s mantle, it has been proposed that this depletion may result from incorporation of these elements in Earth s core. However, phases with compositions including these elements are known only from syntheses at relatively low pressures and from meteorites, and there has been little or no experimental work at higher pressures and temperatures, especially those approaching core conditions. Therefore, we will investigate the high-pressure, high-temperature chemistry and structures of two different classes of phases that could be present under core conditions, potassium-iron sulfides and iron-nickel phosphides. From these experiments, we expect to provide information on the synthesis of these materials, their phase relations, and their structural characteristics. We also will investigate the partitioning of K and P between bulk silicate earth and metallic liquids in the presence or absence of S and or C. Experimental techniques will include synthesis of appropriate materials under controlled vapor pressures, temperature, and overall pressure, characterization of products with electron and ion microprobes, and in-situ structural measurements at high-pressures and temperatures using x-ray diffraction in our laboratory and at national synchrotron sources, and by a variety of spectroscopic techniques doc2962 none Value locality, a recently discovered program attribute that describes the likelihood of the recurrence of previously seen program values, has been studied enthusiastically in the published literature. This project investigates a new domain for the exploitation of value locality, namely shared-memory multiprocessor (SMP) systems running commercial workloads. Initial results from a recent study of store value locality indicate that significant potential exists for reducing multiprocessor data and address bus traffic by identifying and squashing silent and stochastically silent stores. This project describes and evaluates exact mechanisms for store squashing techniques, investigates alternative approaches for exploiting value locality, and finally, develops focused mechanisms for attacking the specific problem of read write data sharing and synchronization in SMP systems. The project demonstrates that overcoming the performance bottlenecks caused by data sharing requires speculative techniques based on value locality, since other more conventional approaches to speculative execution are guaranteed to fail. This research realizes the potential of speculative techniques that exploit value locality to improve performance and or reduce implementation cost and complexity in future generation shared-memory multiprocessor systems that are designed to run commercial workloads doc2963 none Elliot Stellar occultations can probe ring systems and atmospheres in the outer solar system with spatial resolutions of a few kilometers-several orders of magnitude better than the resolution of any other Earth-based method. Dr. Elliot and his co-researchers will observe the highest quality occultations by the giant planet systems occurring during the - period and then use these data to investigate several physical aspects of rings and atmospheres. The program emphasizes a combination of the highest temporal resolution multi-wavelength observations possible using today s and tomorrow s state-of-the-art instrumentation, along with further analyses of the highest quality archived occultation observations. In addition to observations of Uranus and several Jovian events (particularly those sampling auroral regions), a strong observational emphasis is being placed on Titan and Saturn leading up to the arrival of the Cassini spacecraft and the deployment of the Huygens probe into Titan s atmosphere. The occultation studies will include an investigation of the temperature, pressure, and number density profiles in the upper atmospheres of Uranus, Jupiter, and Saturn. This project is funded by the Planetary Astronomy Program in the Division of Astronomical Sciences doc2964 none This project investigates electron correlations in a class of materials where the strong effective interaction leads to unique physical effects. The research is primarily experimental and exploits intense magnetic fields which have recently become available in the United States. The materials are primarily in single crystal form and include UPt3, URu2Si2, U2Pt2In and LiV2O4. The project uses ultrasound, magnetometry, transport and thermodynamic measurements in intense magnetic fields, at low temperatures and high pressures. Strongly correlated systems possess a rich phase diagram with a number of different possible electronic states existing in close proximity to each other. An external perturbation can drive the system from one part of the phase diagram to a neighboring one. Intense magnetic fields are one such perturbation which can have a marked impact on the electrons and thus provide a window to examine the strong correlations between them. The proposed measurements present challenges due to the extreme environment of high magnetic fields, low temperatures and high pressures. The results experiments may lead to an increased understanding technologically important materials such as high temperature superconductors and giant magnetoresistive alloys. The knowledge and information obtained through this research is disseminated through an on-line resource center for strongly correlated materials maintained on the University of Virginia physics server. Post and pre-doctoral students involved in this project will receive training in advanced instrumentation, materials handling and analysis that will prepare them for careers in academia and industry. %%% This research will examine the nature of the interactions between electrons in a class of materials where these interactions are strong enough to lead to unique and novel physical effects. These materials are formed primarily from elements with unpaired f and d - electrons in their outer shells. The research is experimental and involves the use of the most intense man made magnetic fields which have recently become available in the United States. The materials that will be studied are in perfect crystalline form so that high quality measurements using techniques such as ultrasound, magnetometry, electrical transport and thermodynamics can be performed. Intense magnetic fields can have several effects on materials. The most commonly observed effect in metals is the increase of resistance. A strong enough magnetic field can turn a metal into an insulator. Such effects in the materials chosen for the proposed research are particularly dramatic. The application of a magnetic field thus provides a window to examine the nature of the interactions between electrons in the chosen materials. The electronic properties of these materials bear many similarities to those of several other technologically important systems such as high temperature superconductors and giant magnetoresistive alloys. For the measurements chosen the extreme environment of high magnetic fields presents many challenges. New experimental techniques are being developed to surmount these challenges and by themselves may offer technological pay-offs. An on-line resource center to disseminate the knowledge and information obtained through the proposed research will be maintained on the University of Virginia physics server. Graduate and undergraduate students involved in the project will receive training in advanced instrumentation, materials handling and analysis that will prepare them for wide ranging careers in academia, industry and the government doc2965 none For Parallel and Reconfigurable Computations PI: Rong Lin This research investigates several basic parallel and reconfigurable arithmetic and elementary functional unit designs, architectures and algorithms. Recently developed non-binary VLSI shift switch logic schemes and low-power high-performance circuits are used for the study. A set of application specific processors, using the novel logic and the building-block circuits, has demonstrated superiority in VLSI design, which includes high-speed large-size array multipliers, reconfigurable inner product processors and reconfigurable matrix multipliers. Development of a dynamically reconfigurable platform for all of these computations is a major target of this project. The new logic schemes primarily employ shift switch parallel counter units as logic operators, and 4-bit digital signals, representing values ranging from 0 to 3, as logic operands, where only 2-out-of-4 signal bits are subject to value-change at any logic stage in the worst case. This is used to simplify the circuit designs and to reduce the power-dissipation. The main focus of this research is to further explore the properties and advantages of the logic schemes and circuits, and to develop superior applications for parallel and reconfigurable computations. A significant impact on the next generation of microprocessors and SOC designs is expected doc2966 none The objective of this project is to investigate and evaluate innovative hardware-based approaches to reducing misses in multiprocessor caches due to interference. Interference between cache lines in a multiprocessor can cause lines to be involuntarily relinquished while they are still in the working set of a computation. The problem is especially serious for modified lines, which not only account for a large percentage of cache misses, but also incur a high miss penalty. The fundamental idea in this research is to record the lines that a cache has given up involuntarily, and use them as prefetching targets. Simulation studies based on transaction processing and scientific workloads will be carried out to evaluate several algorithms for prefetch selection. These algorithms include intuitive approaches that take advantage of coherence transactions, as well as more aggressive approaches in which processes that modify a cache line notify other processes to prefetch that line doc2967 none Coherent pulse-Doppler radar systems typically transmit pulse-trains made up of identical pulses. While these pulses may contain complex modulation that enhances their ability to separate closely spaced scatterers in delay (range) or Doppler (radial velocity), the fact remains that the pulses making up the pulse-train are usually identical. The aim of this research is to investigate the advantages of pulse-trains made up of pulses that are distinctly different from pulse-to-pulse. This research involves the design of waveform sets and associated signal processing that yield enhanced ability to separate closely spaced scatterers and increase the accuracy of pulse-echo measurements. The problems of diversity waveform measurement (using a fixed set of different pulse-waveforms) as well as adaptive selection of pulse waveforms based on past measurements of the scattering scenario will be considered. The significance of this work lies in the fact that it allows for higher resolution imaging or discrimination of radar scatterers than is possible using a single waveform. Applications that could benefit from this enhanced resolution include synthetic aperture radar imaging, earth based radar astronomy, Doppler weather radar, ionospheric radio sounding, active sonar imaging systems, and monostatic and multistatic radar and sonar tracking systems doc2968 none This project investigates the compiled communication technique on commodity networks. In compiled communication, high performance communication is achieved by using the compiler to analyze the communication requirement of a program and to manage network resources statically to support the communications. As a result, runtime communication overheads, such as buffer management, are reduced and or amortized over a number of communications, and the communication performance is improved. Compiled communication is more powerful than traditional communication optimization techniques in that it performs communication optimizations in both the compiler and the hardware operating system runtime system. The outcome of the proposed research is an extension of the MPI library that supports the compiled communication model, a SUIF based restructure compiler that can generate communication code using the compiled communication model, an experimental demonstration of how much performance improvement can be achieved by using the compiled communication model, and a clear identification of the advantages and limitations of the compiled communication model doc2969 none Christian Collberg This research investigates four techniques for the intellectual property protection of software: watermarking, fingerprinting, obfuscation, and tamper-proofing. Watermarking and fingerprinting defend against software piracy by embedding a copyright notice or identification number into a program. This asserts ownership and allows tracking of copyright violators. Effective watermarks are unobtrusive, have high data-rates, and are resilient to de-watermarking attacks. Obfuscation defends against malicious reverse engineering by transforming a program into an equivalent one that is harder to analyze. Effective obfuscating transformations are semantics-preserving, have low computational overhead, and are based on intractable problems that prevent them from being undone. Tamper-proofing causes a program to malfunction when it detects that it has been modified. Tamper-proofing code can be added to an application to protect a watermark from being removed, to prevent a virus from being added, or to ensure that the security-sensitive code of an e-commerce application has not been altered. The goal of this research is to implement many of the currently known algorithms for software protection and to construct benchmarks against which these techniques can be evaluated. An additional objective is to build theoretical models that help to gain a deeper understanding of the limits of intellectual property protection of software doc2970 none This project studies the theory of multidimensional channels and investigates effective coding techniques for such channels. The coding techniques are of three types: error-correction channel coding, constrained coding, and joint source-channel coding. Emphasis is placed on applications to two-dimensional magnetic and optical recording as well as three-dimensional holographic storage. These are the storage devices of the future. An important application of this research within the next few years is the storage of massive amounts of still imagery and video on two-dimensional media. This will likely extend to three-dimensional and four-dimensional (the fourth dimension is wavelength) devices over the next 5 to 10 years. Such multidimensional devices will require a shift in paradigm, since most of the existing theory for error-correcting codes, constrained codes, and source-channel codes was developed in the context of one-dimensional applications. There is much to be gained by coding for multidimensional channels, but the problems associated with such channels are considerably more challenging than their one-dimensional counterparts. Interesting technical problems arise due to the spatially dependent nature of errors in multidimensional storage media. New error-correcting codes and interleaving techniques are needed to effectively protect data stored on such media. The physical properties of optical and holographic recording channels call for a new theory of constrained coding in multiple dimensions. New joint source-channel coding techniques and theory are needed to maximize the recovered source fidelity for images and video stored on multidimensional devices while keeping the storage density as high as possible. Inparticular, the storage capacity of multidimensional devices can be greatly increased at the expense of a less reliable recovery of the stored imagery video than is current practice for the storage of data. This project studies the tradeoff between increased storage capacity and quantitative loss in fidelity of the reproduced source signal. The main topics being investigated for multidimensional channels are: (1) Error-correcting codes, (2) Interleaving techniques, (3) Soft-decision decoding, (4) Capacity computation for constrained channels, (5)~Encoders and decoders for specific constraints, (6) Joint source-channel coder design doc2971 none This research will improve the decoding of error-control codes, in particular, Reed-Solomon codes, which are essential in most advanced modern communication and storage systems, ranging from deep space communication to optical and magnetic storage systems, such as the compact disk and CD-ROM. By developing decoders that operate at lower signal to noise ratios, this research will allow the recovery of data and records that currently are unreadable. This research will develop an efficient soft decoding algorithm that will significantly outperform GMD-based decoding algorithms. The algorithm is based on Sudan s list decoding technique that produces a list of tentative codewords and it shows a number of very interesting features. Among the most intriguing characteristics of the algorithm is a complexity and performance that can be traded freely within certain fundamental limits. Hence, the coding gain provided by the Reed-Solomon code can be traded on the fly for complexity in any application with the maximal list size changing accordingly doc2972 none Two problems that constrain big computations appear to relax in the face of a different representation for matrices and their constituent blocks. Morton (or Z) order represents the elements of a matrix in computer memory consecutively by larger and larger blocks. This locality contrasts with row-major (or column-major) order, which stores only elements in the same row (column) close to one another. This project explores compilers for Morton order as the default representation for arrays in higher-level programming languages. It develops techniques to recompile existing programs to code that uses Morton-order internally and respects modern memory hierarchies and superscalar processors. These will interface cleanly to future programs that use Ahnentafel indices, a generalization of Morton order, to control divide-and-conquer algorithms to descend blocks of a matrix recursively. So, it also supports the design of parallel algorithms that decompose a computation into disjoint, memory-local processes. Morton order, and block algorithms that use it, implicitly improve access patterns into hierarchical memory: from registers, through caches, to RAM, to swapping disk. That is, Morton order enhances locality of reference of one process, while it helps to schedule multiple processes that don t interfere with each other doc2973 none Kesseli & Gerwein The landscape of New England has been drastically altered over the last 300 years, most obviously by the shrinking and recent reemergence of the forest cover. While forest cover has increased from a low of less than 30% in a highly fragmented distribution during the mid s to the current 65%, nothing is known of the affect of this bottleneck on the genetic diversity and structure of the species of these communities. Records of Massachusetts forest cover in the s provide an opportunity to examine these effects. These records are used to determine historic deforestation patterns in four areas of Massachusetts. DNA markers will be used to characterize the genetic diversity and population structure of Red Oak (Quercus rubra), a dominant tree of both old-growth and secondary forests. Thi study will describe the genetic structure of old-growth populations, determine whether secondary-growth populations have lower genetic diversity, and characterize the patterns of recruitment, dispersal and structure associated with historical deforestation records. Results will be useful in planning the conservation of New England forests and regional development and will provide the first data showing the long-term consequences of deforestation and forest degradation. The historical perspective of New England could be used as baseline data characterizing these long-term affects. These data will identify critical refugia of genetic diversity and characterize dispersal patterns and population structure, all important parameters for conservation management doc2974 none PI: Trevor Mudge, University of Michigan The research examines the problem of reducing the size of programs. This is termed code compression. The size of programs can adversely affect the performance of a computer in several ways, but until recently, code compression has been targeted at low cost systems, where chip size and thus cost is at a premium. Reducing chip size suggests that the code compression techniques may also reduce power consumption, because the power consumed by a chip is related, among other things to its area. Furthermore, earlier studies by the Principal Investigator have shown that compression can improve the memory system efficiency and, as a result improve system performance. There are three directions being pursued in this research: 1) to explore the use of code compression to reduce chip size and cost; 2) to explore the use of code compression to reduce power; and 3) to explore the use of code compression to improve performance. The impact of this work is expected to be reduced chip size and power consumption for the same or better performance. The research leverages tools that were created by the Principal Investigator in prior code compression work doc2975 none Space-Time Coding for Wireless Communications Michael P. Fitz and Urbashi Mitra Proposal , The Ohio State University This research will extend the state of the art in channel coding for multi-antenna communication systems. It has recently been shown that the capacity of a wireless communications system can be greatly increased if multiple antennae are used both at the transmitter and the receiver. Furthermore, a method for achieving such gains is to introduce controlled redundancy (coding) in the transmitted data sequence spatially as well as temporally, which is the conventional scheme. This area of research is still quite new and several key problem areas need to be addressed. For example, computationally efficient methods for finding space-time codes are necessary. Typically, the wireless channel is time-varying and it is not always possible to achieve good estimates of the channel conditions; thus evaluating the robustness of space-time codes is of value. A related project is to consider the interplay of space-time coding and decoding methods with algorithms designed to estimate the channel and other key communication parameters. Turbo codes have recently emerged as powerful codes for achieving near Shannon capacity, thus space-time generalizations of such codes will be studied. Finally, much of the current work on space-time coding is for narrowband time division multiple access systems, thus we shall consider space-time code design and decoder design for wideband code-division multiple-access systems as well. The first research thrust will focus on the development and analysis of improved search techniques for space-time trellis codes. Current methods for searching the distance spectrum of space-time trellis codes can be computationally expensive. Methods for reducing the size of the error state trellis coupled with reduced complexity trellis search schemes will be explored. The next focus is on evaluating the robustness of space-time codes under realistic channel conditions. In addition, space-time coding for parametric channels will be considered. Thus, constrained channel uncertainty will exist and code designs for such scenarios will be developed. The third research focus will be on space-time turbo codes as one method to achieve robustness to a variety of channel conditions. The random--like structure of turbo coded schemes hold some promise of mitigating the possible interactions between the code structure and the channel characteristics. Space-time code designs for CDMA channels will be investigated in the fourth research thrust. CDMA signals have a larger dimensionality and thus the space-time code design is different from that for single-user systems. In addition, CDMA signals in a multipath channel will result in different optimal code designs. The final research topic will consider receiver designs in the context of space-time coding. That is, channel estimation and synchronization for space-time coding and modulation will be investigated. Algorithms which exploit the properties of space-time codes will be designed. In addition, the performance dependence on accurate channel estimates and synchronization will be analyzed doc2976 none As the twenty-first century unfolds, new wireless services are being deployed and several more are envisioned. In order to provide these services, future wireless systems should be capable of handling much higher data rates than today s systems. The limited spectrum available for these services implies that the spectral efficiency of future systems will have to be significantly higher. In addition to being spectrally efficient, next-generation wireless systems will have to be power efficient. Lower transmit powers means lesser interference to other users, better reuse of the spectrum and, hence, higher efficiency for the overall network. Wireless channels offer several impairments to the transmitted signals, deteriorating the quality of the communication link. Increasing the power and spectral efficiency in the presence of such an unreliable link is a challenging task which can be greatly facilitated by the use of efficient coding and signal processing techniques. This research investigates the design of powerful coding techniques such as turbo codes and low density parity check codes for increasing the power and spectral efficiency of wireless systems. This research involves a detailed study of the design and performance analysis of turbo-like codes with low decoding complexity, and low density parity check codes (LDPC) for use in a wireless environment. Specific areas covered in detail are the design of coding schemes for use with multipath channels and turbo equalization, the design of LDPC codes for spectrally efficient modulation, and the design of incremental redundancy schemes using LDPC codes for use in a non-stationary environment. This work differs from the existing work in that it studies several novel coding techniques and concentrates on the design of codes matched to the iterative decoding algorithm being used, rather than the design of codes based on hypothetical maximum-likelihood decoding doc2977 none The storage density of rotating magnetic recording is approaching its theoretical maximum. Magnetic probe-based technology avoids these limitations by using techniques such as orthogonal recording which promise very high density storage within the next five to ten years. Probe-based storage devices promise improved access times, enormous potential parallelism gains, and remarkable storage densities. However, because of the unique characteristics of these devices there is a high probability that existing file system architectures and algorithms will be suboptimal. By reexamining these basic structures in the context of probe-based storage, it is likely that significant performance gains can be achieved. The proposed work comprises fundamental research in four areas: simulation of probe-based storage devices, architectural issues such as parallelism and caching, storage allocation and file layout, and request scheduling. In reexamining these basic issues for this new technology, this research creates a body of work that will lead the way in the development of secondary storage systems for such devices. This research is likely to result in a better understanding of the implementation details associated with probe-based storage devices to provide a set of algorithms and structures that can be used in systems implementations employing them doc2978 none Current microprocessors, which have much wider data-paths than 8 or 16 bit data-words required by multimedia workloads, are attempting to take advantage of this by offering special multimedia instructions. These extensions are a set of short SIMD or superword operations. It has been shown that short SIMD operations are well suited to exploit a fundamentally different type of parallelism than the vector parallelism associated with traditional vector supercomputers. This parallelism is denoted as Superword Level Parallelism (SLP) since parallelism comes in the form of superwords containing packed data. In this project, compiler algorithms for detection and exploitation of superword level parallelism are investigated. The compiler is extended in many directions, from dataword prediction to SLP aware register allocation, to take advantage of superword level parallelism and an extensive evaluation of these techniques is performed. Architectures that can take full advantage of SLP are also investigated in this research. Scaling the data-paths is a simple and straightforward use of the available silicon area. However, there are novel architectural features that can take full advantage of superword level parallelism doc2979 none Embedded systems are widely used in a variety of applications which involve ubiquitous computing. Due to small form factors (such as in hand-held devices) and other application needs, embedded systems are characterized by limited resources such as the computing power and memory. In addition the application needs demand real time performance requirements and low power consumption. High-level languages such as C, C++ or Embedded Java are replacing assembly language in programming embedded systems due to the complexity of modern application domains that need to be mapped. This can however incur a code size and performance penalty due to the semantic gap between the high level languages and the underlying embedded instruction set architecture. This is where the role of compiler optimizations becomes critical.These optimizations are a must (and not optional) since available resources on embedded systems are quite limited and unless applications are optimized they may not even fit the available resources (such as the memory). The focus of this proposal is to devise compiler optimizations for embedded systems to maximally use the limited resources such as the available amount of on-chip and off-chip memory. We first propose compiler optimizations for data and code segments of embedded software for size and speed given the constraints on limited on-chip memory and addressing modes. Since local resources are very limited on these processors and since the embedded devices typically form a part of bigger systems in the form of sensors, actuators etc., they are often networked. In such a networked environment, data and code are down-loaded on an embedded device just-in-time from a server and then executed. A very important issue is then how to dynamically optimize codes that are down-loaded on to an embedded device just-in-time. Since local resources are very scarce, such dynamic optimizations prove immensely useful. This is the second set of topics we address in the proposal. We anticipate that these optimizations could not only improve performance of existing applications mapped on these systems but could also allow mapping new application domains on them by satisfying their resource constraints doc2980 none This research investigates compiler techniques for improving the performance and scalability of Internet server programs. Servers have a different set of characteristics from the computations that compiler writers have focused on in the past. Instead of executing a compute-bound computation with a modest number of long-lived threads, servers typically use many short-lived threads to manage I O bound connections from multiple clients. These new characteristics place a premium on previously less relevant aspects of the system such as the thread creation overhead and thread stack overhead. They also provide opportunities that the compiler can exploit to improve the memory management. The research will attack thread overhead by automatically transforming multithreaded code to event-driven form. Code in event-driven form contains an event loop that repeatedly blocks waiting for the next event from any of the current connections. It then invokes a handler that executes the appropriate action, then returns to the event loop. This transformation will eliminate thread creation and management overhead. The compiler will attack memory management overhead by analyzing the program to identify objects whose lifetimes are tied to individual threads, then using specialized memory management algorithms for these objects doc2981 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Adam Smith and his colleagues will conduct one season of archaeological research in the Tsakahovit plain, an elevated plateau in western Armenia. Approximately 133 square km. in extent and containing a series of fortresses and citadels dating to the second millennium BC, it provides an ideal setting for examining the factors which led to the rise and maintenance of archaic states. Bound by mountains on all sides, the Tsakahovit plain presents a geographically circumscribed region for analysis that includes a significant amount of geological and archaeological diversity within a manageable region. Archaeological investigation conducted in by Dr. Smith and colleagues indicate an intensive and extensive occupation during the Bronze and Iron Ages. Six fortresses which include both components have been documented to date and the most extensive and best preserved, the Tsakahovit fortress will provide the focus for this project. During this first season in what is envisioned as a long term effort the team will conduct a surface survey over a broad portion of the Tsakahovit plain to reconstruct large scale settlement pattern. While large fortresses are easy to locate, remains of smaller population aggregations are more elusive. The team will also record and sample clay sources from the survey areas in order to measure background geochemical variability. This will lay the groundwork for potential sourcing of ceramics and the reconstruction of trade networks. The team will also conduct subsurface survey and test excavations at three fortress sites. Chronology will be refined through continued ceramic analysis and radiocarbon dating. While anthropologists have long recognized the role of archaic states in the development of complex political systems and have ordered them into typological systems, relatively little is understood about how these entities actually functioned. How did rulers maintain their sovereignty? How did institutions create discrete spheres of administration? How was political authority constructed? Dr. Smith s research will examine these issues. The proposed investigations will take advantage of a unique opportunity for collaborative research offered by the republic of Armenia. Long a crossroads of continents, Transcaucasis offers a rich setting for forging new anthropological approaches to the study of early states doc2982 none A Research Project on Theory and Algorithms for Robust Information Embedding Principal Investigator: Prof. Gregory W. Wornell Research Laboratory of Electronics Massachusetts Institute of Technology A consequence of the widespread dissemination of digital computing and communication is the increasing ease and flexibility with which multimedia content in electronic formats---such as audio, video, and still imagery---can be distributed, exchanged, manipulated and otherwise processed. These capabilities open up a broad array of new applications, from digital restoration of photographs and recordings, to convenient and instantaneous sharing of such content via networks. At the same time, these changes have far-reaching societal implications, making it easier for individuals to, e.g., circumvent copyright laws, or circumvent security systems based on photo IDs, or doctor voice recording evidence in legal trials. Information embedding is an important emerging signal processing technology for managing such multimedia content issues. Information embedding refers to the embedding of information in the form of a digital signature or fingerprint or other sequence of bits into a multimedia ``host signal or image in such a way that the embedding is both effectively imperceptible and resistant to the effects of benign forms of perturbation and noise, as well as to explicit attempts to remove or modify the embedded information. While a variety of heuristic approaches to embedding have been introduced within the research community, these existing approaches have many shortcomings. This research project is investigating the fundamental limits of information embedding systems, and exploring new methods for approaching these limits, for a wide range of applications. These applications range from copyright protection of digital multimedia content, to automated monitoring of broadcasting, to authentication of documents and identification. An emphasis in the research is on robust quantization-based embedding methods, which lend themselves well to practical implementations. And as one particular focus, the research is developing a class of such methods referred to as quantization index modulation (QIM). Part of the research involves the development of optimized implementations of QIM, and an evaluation of its performance characteristics relative to alternative approaches doc2983 none Most modern single processor architectures focus on exploiting instruction-level parallelism. However, despite continued performance improvements, there is increasing doubt that aggressive ILP architecture techniques would continue bringing the desired improvements and that there will come about a diminishing return in the performance of single-chip architectures. Multithreaded execution models promise to exploit thread-level parallelism (TLP) beyond a pure ILP approach. Multithreading can be applied directly at the level of uniprocessor instruction-set architectures. For example, Simultaneous MultiThreading (SMT) is a promising approach, which is attracting the attention of a number of academic and industrial research groups. This technique allows the various pipelines of a superscalar processor to be efficiently utilized by scheduling from several coarse-grain threads of one (or several) program(s). Although exploiting both ILP and TLP is attractive, the following questions are investigated in the project: - Can an architecture model, which integrates fine-grain multithreading support with a coarse-grain multithreaded architecture model such as SMT, be developed? - What are the design trade-off when mapping these architecture features to single-chip implementations? - What compiling methodology for the proposed architecture model would exploit thread-level parallelism at both coarse and fine-grain levels doc2984 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Anthony Marks and collaborators will conduct two field seasons of research at the archaeological site of Galeria Pesada, located in the Estremadura region of Portugal. The Galeria is one of a number of infilled cavities located in a fault structured southeast-facing cliff. Examination of a series of underground tunnels revealed the presence of Paleolithic artifacts and with NSF support Dr. Marks conducted trial excavations in several infilled areas in an attempt to locate in situ material. A test pit in the Galeria Pesada revealed a series of superimposed strata rich in both lithic and anthropogenically modified faunal remains. Typological analysis as well as preliminary electron spin resonance dating indicates that the site can be assigned to the late Middle Pleistocene and therefore documents the shift from Lower to Middle Paleolithic cultures. Because only a small area has been excavated and relatively few artifacts recovered, Dr. Marks will, over the course of two field seasons open a larger area. Increased lithic sample size will allow him to: provide an accurate and comprehensive description of the assemblages and their constituent parts; measure the nature and degree of technological and typological continuity and change throughout the assemblages; and test the proposition that different raw materials are responsible for differences in lithic manufacture techniques. Remains of both large and small animals are represented and through their analysis Dr. Marks will attempt to reconstruct subsistence strategies and determine the extent to which purposeful hunting, as opposed to scavenging was practiced. Western Europe was first inhabited by hominids (early humans) ca. 500,000 years ago and although archaeologists have traced in broad outline major stages of culture change significant gaps in understanding remain. Early inhabitants produced an industry which included large bifacially worked hand axes similar to those found in other regions of the Old World. At some later date distinct flake based industries appeared and these developed into the industry associated with Neanderthal peoples. Archaeologists however do not understand how this transition took place - whether it was gradual or abrupt and whether it involved replacement or in situ development. Lively disagreement exists on the capabilities of Neanderthals and their predecessors, especially their ability to hunt large animals. The deposits at the Galeria Pesada span this crucial period and Dr. Mark s research, has the potential to shed new light on this important period of human development doc2985 none PI: Sally McKee, University of Utah Microprocessor speed is increasing much faster than memory system speed: both speed-growth curves are exponential, but they represent diverging exponentials. This proposed research strives to develop a comprehensive approach to bridging the processor memory performance gap by developing better measures of performance, better tools for observing memory system behavior and understanding memory usage patterns, and combined compiler and architectural schemes to exploit these patterns. The first component of this research investigates methods and tools by which to better measure and interpret complex system behavior in the cache and memory hierarchy. The PI and others are developing a new framework for the analysis of caching systems; this new caches as filters framework focuses on properties of a memory trace rather than artifacts of a particular memory organization. This research will support the development of the tools and technology necessary to apply the new framework to real problems and systems. The second component of this research investigates combined compiler and architectural approaches to improving memory system performance in modern microprocessors via smarter scheduling of memory activity and hardware support for streaming doc2986 none Like other sunfish, male pumpkinseeds invest substantially in parental care. However, because eggs are fertilized externally, a window of opportunity is open for males adopting an alternative reproductive tactic. These sneaker males do not provide parental care; instead they sneak fertilizations in the nest of parental males. Because parental males are cuckolded and their parental behavior is parasitized, the question of how paternity affects parental care is of substantial interest. Using behavioral observations, experimental manipulations, and molecular analyses of paternity in a wild population of pumpkinseed sunfish, this study investigates the success of sneaker males and explores how paternal care is affected by paternity in this species. Intuitively, paternity should be related to parental care, since reproduction is costly and investment in unrelated offspring may be wasted. However, theoretical models suggest that males may adjust their parental care in response to low levels of paternity within their brood under certain conditions but not others. Most of the empirical work testing this theory has been conducted with birds and has produced mixed results. Data and experiments using fish may prove more manageable to studies involving experimental manipulation. This study will be among the first to use molecular techniques to investigate the relationship between paternity and paternal care in a fish, and will also examine the four factors thought to be critical to such a relationship. This study is expected to provide not only valuable information regarding paternal care and alternative reproductive strategies in fishes, but also a different system that may clarify our understanding of paternal effort and paternity doc2987 none Waaland & Whitmer This project focuses on the population dynamics and genetics of an annual marine plant species, a kelp commonly known as the Sea Palm (Postelsia palmaeformis). The Sea Palm is an annual alga that grows in the Pacific Northwest. It appears in the early spring and dies off each fall. Population locations and sizes vary dramatically from year to year. This research studies how these populations are related along the coast and through time. Individuals locations have been mapped using computerized surveying equipment over the last two years. Concurrently, tissue samples have been collected for genetic analysis. DNA markers will be used to reveal the relationship of individuals found in a single year within a population, between two or more populations, and between populations from one year to the next. Studying population dynamics through space and time allows us to understand how populations are interconnected. This understanding provides insight into what is otherwise unknowable for many organisms, namely where individuals come from and how they interact with each other. DNA markers allow us to estimate the genetic diversity of populations (i.e., the genetic health of a species). Results of such studies are of fundamental scientific interest and may be applied in managing and conserving living resources in coastal regions doc2988 none Eric Heller of Harvard University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program and the Atomic, Molecular, Optical, and Plasma Physics Program to continue his investigations of long wavelength, ultracold scattering phenomena including proximity resonances and cold collisions. Studies of semiclassical approaches and tunneling phenomena with relevance to molecular physics will be undertaken. Also, new explorations of mesoscopic systems will be initiated, in particular scattering in confined geometries relevant to atomic waveguides, Kondo scattering and resonances in STM quantum corrals, and molecular STM spectroscopy and dynamics of small molecules on surfaces. Fundamental exploration of phase space localization of eigenfunctions, with emphasis on statistics of unimolecular decay lifetimes, will be pursued. Heller is also supported by the Science Literacy Program to produce a public exhibition of work inspired by quantum chaos investigations. Each of the projects here is related by common threads, including scattering theory, semiclassical theory, and chaos theory. They are also related by common approaches, including fundamental mathematical theory as well as computer modeling and computer experimentation. The outcomes of this research will enable improved understanding of the way molecules and small devices work, and to make possible the design, prediction, and control of their behavior. The informal science education project will demonstrate that discovery and knowledge can result from visualization doc2989 none This award supports theoretical and computational research on a variety of topics relating to the electronic structure of magnetic materials. Neutron scattering cannot distinguish between a spiral spin density wave (SSDW) and ordinary transverse spin density wave s (SDW) polarized in different directions in different domains. It is relatively easy to calculate noncommensurate SSDW s but not SDW s. This research will attempt to verify the widely held belief that Cr has a SDW ground state by calculating the energy versus wave vector SSDW curves and comparing the energies of the commensurate SSDW and SDW ground states. The SSDW ground state of rare earth europium will also be calculated. Also, full potential frozen spin wave calculations will be done for Fe and Ni. A larger spin stiffness correction is expected to be required to obtain magnon dispersion curves in agreement with experiment in the case of Fe because its spins are more itinerant than those of Ni. Also to be calculated are the magnon dispersion curves of rare earth gadolinium. Calculations indicate FeRh is an itinerant antiferromagnet. Although the frozen spin wave scheme will work for antiferromagnets in principle, it is not obvious that it will work in practice. Assuming that FeRh is not found to have a SSDW ground state, the scheme will be tested for calculating magnon dispersion curves on it. The spin stiffness used is a somewhat ad hoc gradient term added to the LSDA (local spin density approximation), but the LSDA as currently applied to SSDW s is stretched beyond its range of validity. Furthermore, the spin stiffness correction contains an arbitrary multiplicative parameter. Ideas will be pursued for obtaining further improvements in density functional approximations fo rnoncollinear magnetic systems. If successful, some of the calculations made for the spin stiffness density functional will be repeated. Other calculations will be done. For example, and in agreement with experiment, the GGA (generalized gradient approximation) yields a magnetic surface for V(001) whereas the LSDA does not. One experiment finds that a monlayer of V on Ag(001) has no net magnetization whereas another finds it to be ferromagnetic. An LSDA calculation finds an antiferromagnetic ground state. GGA calculations will be performed in the belief that they will result in the ferromagnetic state lying below the antiferromagnetic one, and inspire additional experimental work. %%% This award supports theoretical and computational research on a variety of topics relating to the electronic structure of magnetic materials. Calculations will be done using density functional theory to determine the magnetic properties of a variety of materials. These calculations will be compared with experiment and will assist in resolving issues relating to these important magnetic materials doc2990 none Weller & Barr The appearance of females in hermaphroditic plant populations has been a puzzling evolutionary phenomenon because females would appear to suffer in gene transmission compared with hermaphrodites. Another puzzle is that female frequencies can vary considerably over short distances and time scales. In many species, sex is determined by an interaction between nuclear and cytoplasmic genes. One mechanism that has been proposed to explain female frequency variation is repeated gene flow of cytoplasmic male sterility (female-causing) and nuclear male fertility restoring (hermaphrodite-causing) genes and a conflict of interest between these two genomic subsets. This gene flow model will be tested with an annual plant, Nemophila menziesii, which shows considerable variation in female frequency. An alternative hypothesis to gene flow, the effect of females on hermaphrodite fitness and how that affects female frequency dynamics, will also be investigated. A third experiment is proposed to determine transmission genetics of nuclear restorer alleles. Finally, the role of hybridization leading to the appearance of females on a large geographic scale will be examined. Theoretical work has shown that genomic conflicts may be the cause of a large array of evolutionary phenomena. Cytoplasmic male sterility is one of the best studied genomic conflicts largely because of its use in agricultural hybrid seed production. However, outside of work on few model systems, the dynamics of genomic conflicts affecting sex ratios in natural systems has not been established. This study of Nemophila menziesii will test new models and tie in previous work with genomic conflict theory. The genetics of cytoplasmic male sterility will also be investigated. Finally, the regional sex ratio variation seen in N. menziesii is a unique feature that allows for an examination of large-scale sex ratio processes doc2991 none Predicated execution is a feature used in the Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) architecture for achieving the instruction level parallelism (ILP) needed to keep increasing future processor performance. The IA-64 processor being developed at Intel with Hewlett Packard is an example of an EPIC architecture. An advantage of predicated execution is the elimination of hard-to-predict branches by combining both paths of a branch into a single path, thereby obtaining additional opportunities for ILP. However, this merging of several paths into one has disadvantages, as it complicates optimizations and scheduling in both software and hardware. This research develops a comprehensive framework for new compiler and hardware analysis whose projected impact is to realize the performance of predicated execution. Underlying our framework is the efficient maintenance and use of predicate relationships and precise information about predicated regions. This proposal builds on our prior work by (1) incorporating critical path and resource constraints into a compiler intermediate form for predicated compilation, (2) developing hardware structures to allow predicate speculation and out-of-order execution, (3) developing software and hardware dynamic predication and (4) developing predicate-sensitive compiler optimizations, especially those based on value prediction or profiling doc2992 none The purpose of this research is to extend the present performance limits of pipelined analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) through the development of a digital signal processing technique that corrects for analog circuit mismatches. With recent trends toward software reconfigurability and digital signal processing, pipelined ADCs have become widely used in applications such as cellular telephone base-stations and wideband wireline modems. However, analog component mismatches have limited the accuracy achieved by present fabricated pipelined ADCs to levels below those desirable in many communications applications. For example, the accuracy ceiling imposed by analog component mismatches in present pipelined ADCs with conversion rates at or above 10MHz is approximately 75dB peak signal-to-noise-and-distortion (SINAD). Several distinct mismatch calibration techniques have been proposed in recent years to address the mismatch problem, but so far they have not made it possible to break through the above-mentioned 75dB SINAD ceiling. The problem is that the calibration techniques proposed to date are ultimately limited by the precision of their analog components, which tends to decrease as the conversion rate is increased. This research involves the development of a new pipelined ADC mismatch calibration technique that avoids this problem. The new technique differs from other mismatch calibration schemes in that it continuously measures and cancels noise in the ADC output arising from component mismatches during normal operation of the ADC; no special calibration signals or auto-calibration phase are required prior to A D conversion. Both the measurement and cancellation of mismatch noise are performed entirely using digital logic, but unlike previously proposed digital calibration techniques the technique does not require additional pipeline stages or bits per stage. The objectives of the research are to 1) refine the technique, 2) quantify its performance limits through simulation and theoretical analyses, and 3) develop a CMOS pipelined ADC prototype that achieves record-setting performance enabled by the technique as a proof-of-principle doc2993 none In this project, algebraic techniques are in use two to tackle two classes of problems related to improving the throughput and or reliability of a communication link are under study. The first class of problems under study is the design of long and efficient error-correcting codes. Such codes are of interest as longer error-correcting codes tend to ``average out the noise and hence provide better performance. The second class of problems relates to the design and analysis of families of signature sequences that are used to distinguish between the signals of different users in a multi-user environment. Examples of multi-user environments include Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) cellular and personal communication systems. More details on example problems drawn from each class are provided below. Since the early 80 s, the promise of algebraic geometric (AG) codes has been the delivery of a sequence of error-correcting codes of increasing length whose asymptotic performance exceeds the Gilbert-Varshamov bound and for which efficient and practical encoding and decoding algorithms are available. Computationally efficient decoding algorithms for AG codes are now available and there now exist explicit descriptions of algebraic curves of the type required to construct these long codes. Construction of good codes on these curves requires the determination of a basis for a certain type of vector space of functions defined on these curves. The investigators study efficient methods of generating such bases. The use of novel algebraic geometry techniques to generate pseudo-random sequences is an example of the type of problem belonging to the second class. The investigators examine methods of generating sequences having pseudo-random properties such as low correlation and large linear span. Also under investigation are more efficient means of assessing the performance of pseudo-random sequences in a multi-user setting, for example, more efficient means of determining the minimum Euclidean distance between adjacent multi-user signals. The performance in a multi-user setting, of a a specific sequence family, known as family S(2) and previously co-designed by the PI is also under study doc2994 none Weis The proposed research will use greenhouse and field experiments with the wild mustard Brassica rapa and three of its natural enemies to determine 1) genetic correlations between resistance to enemies, 2) genetic correlations between tolerance of enemies, 3) genetic correlations between tolerance and resistance to a particular enemy, and 4) ecological interactions between natural enemies. A greenhouse component of the research will provide the controlled conditions necessary for determination of genetic correlations, and a field component will allow for determination of the impacts of herbivores in the field. Groups of plants from half-sib families will be exposed to different treatments, each consisting of exposure to one natural enemy or a combination of natural enemies. Resistance and tolerance of each plant family to their natural enemies will be determined from treatments exposed to single enemies. Comparison of the impact of attack by multiple enemies with the impact of each of those enemies alone will determine whether there are ecological interactions. If there are interactions, then the impact of a group of natural enemies will differ from the sum of their independent impacts. This research will provide important insights into the genetic structure of plant defense against their natural enemies. Plants can cope with attack by natural enemies by either avoiding or minimizing damage by the enemies (resistance) or by regrowing after damage has occurred (tolerance). In order to understand how these interact to form an integrated defense system, two potential constraints need to be understood: 1) genetic correlations between resistance or tolerance traits and 2) ecological interactions between enemies. When resistance is genetically correlated to tolerance, then any selection program to improve the one will cause the other to decline. When enemies interact, their effects on plant performance can be synergistic, thus the value of resistance to one enemy in isolation may not predict the total value of resistance to both. Investigating these two constraints can help increase our understanding of the contribution of plant defense on herbivore diversity, and aid in the structuring of plant breeding programs for crops that face multiple harmful pests doc2995 none This proposal is a continuation of the research on Reduced-rank Adaptive Subspace Filtering for Spread Spectrum Communications, Array Signal Processing and Detection, a research grant funded by the National Science Foundation under Contract No. . During the current grant, the theoretical foundations of the cross-spectral metric (CSM) for reduced-rank were studied. The practical processing algorithms to apply the CSM to several related research areas are developed. Our research shows that the CSM method results in a better rank reduction than the principal components method in the sense of the minimum mean square error for filtering. The remaining problem with the CSM method is that the eigenvectors of the data covariance matrix, that are used to span the full-rank space, are unknown and have to be estimated from the observation data in most applications. The expensive computation needed for obtaining these eigenvectors will hinder the use of the CSM method in real-time processing. In addition, the strategy used by the CSM method for searching a desired rank-reducing subspace is not efficient: one has to compute all of the eigenvectors and their corresponding eigenvalues in order to rank order the cross-spectral items, but only a certain number of them are needed for the subspace filtering. A new framework for reduced rank subspace filtering, built on a non-eigenvector-based subspace representation, is now proposed to address these issues. In this new framework, a set of orthonormal vectors, which tridiagonalizes, rather than diagonalizes, the covariance matrix, is used to replace a set of eigenvectors as a basis of the full-rank space. Advantages of this replacement are (1) the computation of the tridiagonalization has a much lower complexity as compared to that of the diagonalization; (2) the rank reduction from the full-rank N to the lower rank K only requires computing K or less desired orthonormal basis vectors, instead of computing all N of them, and (3) the resulting subspace remains optimal in the sense of maximum signal-to-interference plus noise ratio. The proposed effort for this non-eigenvector-based subspace filtering framework includes studying the theoretical foundations, developing adaptive processing algorithms and their computation architectures, deriving a rank reduction optimization metric, and evaluating theoretical and implementation performances as compared to the eigenvector based approaches. New results in rank reduced adaptive filtering will be directly applicable to several new research areas currently under consideration such as space and time wireless systems and code addressed multiple access signaling. In these applications, and similar extensions, low dimension addressing signals are superimposed in larger 2-dimensional(frequency time or space time) signal spaces. Signal crosstalk in the form of address overlap must be removed by processing over the entire 2-D observation space. The ability to rank reduce data for efficient crosstalk rejection will be a major step in the development of practical processing algorithms. In addition, overlap interference will be time varying due to continual data modulation (in the multiple accessing case) and due to the spatial fading (in the space time case). Hence adaptive updating processors will be necessary for maximum efficiency. The research developed in the newer study proposed here will significantly influence practical filtering solutions for these two dimensional cases doc2996 none Suh Articular cartilage, consisting of proteoglycan (PG) molecules and collagen fibrils as well as interstitial fluid, is a soft tissue covering the articulating surfaces of bones in diarthrodial joints. It plays a vital role in joint articulation by providing a nearly frictionless bearing mechanism with excellent mechanical durability, which can be attributed to the tissue s viscoelastic characteristics. It has been well documented that abnormal mechanical stresses in diarthrodial joints can cause mechanical damage in the structural integrity of articular cartilage. Once mechanically damaged, the cartilage usually fails to heal and recover its mechanical function due to a lack of a primary spontaneous repair mechanism, thus leading to degenerative joint disease or osteoarthritis (OA). An indication of such degenerative disease is usually manifested by a rupture of the dense collagen meshwork, a decrease in PG content of the tissue, and an increase in interstitial water content. As a result, articular cartilage becomes softer and loses its normal mechanical properties, resulting in further deterioration. Understanding the mechanical characteristics of articular cartilage is critically important in order to improve our knowledge about the normal and abnormal behaviors of articular cartilage as well as the treatment of disabilities caused by damaged cartilage. Therefore, the long-term objective of this research is to understand the mechanical characteristics of articular cartilage using an experimentally validated mathematical model. The mechanical characteristics of articular cartilage depend upon the structural integrity of its molecular constituents and their interactions. There have been significant efforts in mathematical modeling of articular cartilage reported in the literature, which accounted for such interactions between the constituents of the tissue. The current paradigm in cartilage biomechanics is based on the model assumption that articular cartilage is a binary mixture of a porous, purely elastic solid matrix (PG and collagen) and an inviscid interstitial fluid. This assumption postulates that the viscoelastic behavior of articular cartilage is solely governed by a diffusive friction caused by the relative motion between the fluid and solid phases, which is termed the fluid flow-dependent viscoelastic mechanism . However, there has recently been strong evidence that articular cartilage exhibits significant viscoelastic behaviors in the absence of the apparent flow of interstitial fluid within the tissue matrix, which is termed the fluid- flow-independent viscoelastic mechanism . Furthermore, the investigator s recent preliminary studies have indicated that the overall mechanical behavior of articular cartilage is largely governed by complex coupling phenomena of the fluid flow-dependent and fluid flow-independent viscoelastic mechanisms. Despite its strong evidence, however, the role of such coupled viscoelastic mechanism has not been fully explored, nor appreciated. Therefore, the short-term objective of the present proposal is to understand the two distinct viscoelastic mechanisms - i.e., the fluid flow-dependent and fluid flow-independent viscoelastic mechanisms - of articular cartilage under various loading conditions using extensive mathematical computational modeling and its experimental validation. Understanding the relative contribution of each (fluid flow-dependent or fluid flow-independent) viscoelastic mechanism is essential in developing a fundamental mechanical theory of articular cartilage, which will eventually help to develop various analytical tools for normal and pathological articular cartilage. The outcome of the proposed research will also be useful for accurate understanding of mechanical behaviors and damage tolerance of normal and pathological cartilage. This information will improve our knowledge about the underlying mechanisms resulting in the degeneration of articular cartilage and lead us toward an improved treatment for damaged cartilage. Furthermore, the proposed study will help to advance current knowledge of the biomechanics of other soft tissues including tendon, ligament, muscle, brain, etc., since most of the soft tissues in the animal body share a similar structural composition. They are composed of cells, porous viscoelastic ground substance (extracellular matrix or EMC) and interstitial fluid doc2997 none Reiners Recent resurgence of interest in (U-Th) He dating has been made possible by interpretational advances combined with careful diffusion studies and apparently successful tectonic applications and calibrations against other thermochronometers. Nevertheless, many exciting aspects of He dating remain unexplored. This work comprises a series of experimental studies to develop, extend, and calibrate new (U-Th) He thermochronologic methods. One objective is to extend He dating to new phases, including zircon, fluorite, and garnet. This is motivated by the potential benefits of low-T thermal constraints in rocks that lack these phases in abundance such as many sedimentary and hydrothermally mineralized rocks, as well as the unique diffusion properties and closure temperatures (Tc) of other phases. A second objective is to exploit the property that the diffusion domain for He is equivalent to the crystal or grain itself. We will attempt to use this to constrain not only cooling ages, but thermal histories of crystals, by examining the potential uses of 1) core-to-rim He concentration and age zonation within individual crystals using abrasion techniques, and 2) age-grain size correlations that reflect specific thermal histories of partially reset crystals. A final objective is to rigorously compare (U-Th) He thermochronometry with other methods, primarily multi-domain K-feldspar 40Ar 39Ar dating to provide intermethod calibrations and unprecedentedly dense time-temperature sampling and thermal constraints. The (U-Th) He lab at W.S.U. is set to begin measuring ages and performing diffusion experiments in May of , and this funding will provide support for graduate students working on experimental development of these methods, in collaboration with with regional fission-track and 40Ar 39Ar thermochronologic labs, the economic geology programs at W.S.U. and the nearby U.I doc2998 none Baru, Chaitanya University of California, San Diego Digital Government: SGER: Evaluating Information Integration Architectures for a National Statistical Data Infrastructure This grant will evaluate alternative information integration architectures, using as a testbed the Federal Electronic Research and Review Tool (FERRET). FERRET has been developed by the US Bureau of the Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Centers for Disease Control to support dataset extraction and cross-tabulation of data collected by the Census Current Population Survey. An additional partner will be the San Diego Association of Governments. The goals are to evaluate the scalability of the FERRET architecture and consider how emerging technologies such XML may be applied within that architecture doc2999 none The main objective of this project is to develop new routes to important materials by designing rapid solid-state methasis (exchanged) reactions that use appropriate additives such as ammonium chloride to control temperature and pressure. Systems to be synthesized include indium nitride and its solid solutions with gallium nitride and aluminum nitride, which are expected to luminesce across the entire visible range form red to violet and beyond. Also, cubic molybdenum nitride, a hydrodesulfurizaiton catalyst, will be synthesized, and new routes of carbon nanotubes will be explored and optimized through the control of reaction temperature where a computer program will be developed to determine maximum reaction temperatures based on thermodynamic data. %%% This project is aimed at the control of pressure and temperature in metathesis reactions for the synthesis of a number of industrially relevant materials such as carbon nanotubes, encapsulated metals, silicon nitride, cubic boron nitride and molybdenum nitride that are difficult to prepare. These materials all have interesting optical, mechanical or catalytic properties. The students involved in this research will learn synthetic and characterization techniques, and they will have an opportunity to collaborate with national laboratory and industrial scientists. This unique integration of research and education will help to make these students highly competitive in the job market doc3000 none The primary objective of the project is to investigate techniques to utilize control independence and compiler-directed multi-threading to exploit instruction-level and thread-level parallelism from ordinary programs. The first step involves investigating the science of ILP that is present when utilizing control independence and multi-threading. Some of the questions that are addressed are: what is required to exploit parallelism, how much of the parallelism can be exploited by simple techniques such as predicated execution or data value prediction, how far should instructions be moved (statically or dynamically) to exploit it how is it impacted by practical considerations, how can it be enhanced by software transformations, on which portions of the code should software transformations be carried out and what should the nature of these transformations be, and what are the characteristics of the storage needed to exploit the available parallelism? The second step involves investigating hardware and software techniques to exploit the benefits of control independence and data speculation in a multi-threading environment. In particular, the use of novel methods to represent specify control independence (and data independence) is investigated. Issues relevant to multi-threading, such as tradeoffs between the number of speculative paths and performance are also studied using detailed simulation models doc3001 none The proposal focuses on the fundamental aspects of synthesizing polymer ceramic composites with a well-characterized interface. Three routes are proposed representing a controlled increase in the expected level of interaction between the polymer and the ceramic: 1. Physical or chemical adsorption, 2. In situ precipitation of hydroxyapatite (HA), within the polymer backbone and, 3. Chemically bonding HA with the polymer network. In case 1, the HA will be mechanically mixed in a solution of the dissolved polymer followed by evaporation of the solvent. The polymers selected for this study will be polycaprolactone (PCL), and poly (lactic-co-gylcolic acid) (PLGA), as well blends of these polymers. Additionally, commercial HA as well as synthesized HA will be incorporated to study the effect of the morphology of HA on mechanical strength. In case 2, HA will be chemically synthesized in the presence of the polymer in a solvent medium suitable for solvation of the polymer. This particular synthetic protocol will provide a better molecular mixing of HA in comparison to case 1 and lead to chemisorbed species. Polycaprolactone will be examined as preliminary results with PCL and HA indicate an in situ formaiton is viable. In case 3, novel dendrimers will be synthesized and a chemical reaction will be initiated between the calcium and phosphorous between the polymer and HA. Dendrimers with terminal amino groups such as poly(L-lysine) can be derivatized by amide formation with glycolates giving terminal alcohols. These terminal functional groups attached to the dendrimer can serve as bridging sites for attachment of reactive calcium and phosphate alkoxy groups that can polymerize to form HA. This process will provide a unique way to covalently bond HA to a polymer. The above three methods provide a novel way of synthesizing polymer ceramic composites with controlled interfacial polymer ceramic interface using spectorscopy, x-ray, high-resolution electron microscopy, thermal analyses and mechanical testing. The results from the present studies should have an impact on the synthesis, control of interface structure, and design of polymer ceramic composites. If successful, this project will enhance the understanding of the in situ synthesis within a polymeric Or dendrimeric network. Thus the synthetic processes developed here will form the basis of generating new composite materials that could be used for a number of engineering applications, including tissue engineering doc3002 none This project will focus on new intermetallic compound discovery, structure determination and property measurement, effectively coupled with quantitative computational methods and qualitative theory to develop experimentally productive structural and bonding models. The focus is on intermetallic systems where it is not clear whether main group element-metal, metal-metal, or element- element bonding dominates structures and properties. This class of materials has been chosen because they are difficult to understand and because these materials possess an unusual balance of bonding trends that could very well lead to materials with novel properties such as matter occupation waves and sublattice shear patterns. A focus of the synthetic efforts is substructure-superstructure relations. Crystalline superstructures provide intrinsic clues as to the bonding. If a range of superstructures appears for a class of materials, that is often a clue that the structures are in some careful (and easily perturbed) balance of determining physical forces. Phases will be studied in which transition metal -main group interactions dominated the structure (Nowotny chimney ladder phases), metal alloys involving both electronegative and electropositive atoms (Copper-Zinc) and square net systems with reduced energy gaps between the composing elements (ternary rare earths and a variety of ternary compounds with alternating transition metal and main group elements in the lattice). These systems do more than just force one to go beyond the Zintl concept, they also bear structural features in common. All these systems exhibit matter occupation wave superstructures, a type of ordering which can not in general be treated by the traditional charge density wave arguments. There are also connections to problems of crystal growth, of ionic conductivity and a possible new phenomenon of sublattices moving or shearing through each other. New theoretical ways at looking at such superstructures will be developed. The goal is to full couple experimental and theoretical work. [The graduate students supported by this research may be reasonably expected to have elements of synthesis, property characterization and theoretical computation in their theses.] %%% Structure, composition, property correlations of these new classes of materials may exhibit interesting magnetic, superconductivity, and ionic conducting behavior. Students will be trained in solid state synthesis, property characterization and theoretical computation and modeling, all of which are areas of high relevance to current academic and industrial job opportunities doc3003 none Clark & Dermitzakis Gene regulation during early stages of development entails a complex set of interactions. In the fruit fly (Drosophila), these steps are determined by the maternal contributions of both proteins and messenger RNA (mRNA) to the oocyte as well as by transcriptional and translational regulation of zygotic and maternal genes. The orchestration of anterior-posterior (A-P) patterning in the Drosophila embryo is one of the best-studied systems. The complexity of this system and the dual nature of control (maternal and zygotic) provide an attractive model for microevolutionary studies of gene regulation and maternal effect dynamics. This study uses experimental and theoretical approaches to model and interpret the pattern of genetic variation in regulatory sequences and the evolutionary potential within and between species for genes involved in this process (bicoid, nanos, caudal, hunchback, pumilio). Embryonic phenotypes will be scored, including the distribution and quantities of morphogen mRNA and proteins in third-chromosome-homozygous lines of Drosophila melanogaster and related species. The upstream regulatory DNA sequences (promoters) of these genes will be sequenced and correlated with phenotypic variation. The goals are to identify natural existing variation in the genes involved in the dosage-dependent process of A-P patterning, to test the hypothesis of compensatory mutations, and to parameterize models of evolutionary change in regulatory regions doc3004 none This experimental condensed matter physics project focuses on the development of ion beam processing techniques to fabricate nanoscale structures in a controlled way. Nanoscale atomic scale flows of material will controlled by exposure to MeV heavy ion bombardment. New feedback controlled ion bombardment methods are used to control the size of nanopores in silicon nitride. The detailed atomic scale mechanism responsible for the observed modification of these nanopores is not understood and is an objective of this project. The tunneling based feedback control concept will be generalized to surface structures being exposed to high-energy ion fluxes. A goal is to fabricate lateral nanoscale electronic devices like tunnel junctions and room temperature single electron transistors. A potential application would be to electronically read DNA base sequences of a single molecule at kilo to megabase second as the molecule moves through a nanopore structure. The project will train graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the art and science of nanofabrication. These cutting-edge skills will prepare the participants for modern careers in industry, academe, and government. %%% This condensed matter physics project will study of the influence of energetic ion beams on the atomic scale structure of materials. Of interest are fundamental processes responsible for ion beam induced motions of atoms of an exposed material. Control over these motions can ultimately be used to fabricate electronic and mechanical devices of unprecedented small size and sensitivity. This could lead to fabrication of extremely small and sensitive electronic devices, capable of amplification, computation, or chemical sensing on the atomic scale. An exciting example of the latter would be a DNA Transistor , capable of electronically reading the sequence of a single DNA molecule on a very short time scale. This will require the ability to fabricate solid state structures with articulated features on the length scale of 15 Angstroms. This research program will provide training of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in an important area of nanoscience and technology, prepare them for careers in industry, government, and academe doc3005 none Pachavis The Materials Research Society organizes a symposium titled Materials Science and Engineering Education in the New Millennium at its April meeting in San Francisco. The symposium focus is undergraduate materials science and engineering education, including both materials science and engineering degree programs and the role of materials courses and experiences in other undergraduate degree programs. There is also an international perspective to this symposium. The symposium reaches an audience of education professionals beyond the Materials Research Society s membership, and especially seeks to bring in faculty from community colleges, undergraduate institutions and engineering technology programs doc3006 none Clark & Lazzaro Insects face a diverse array of pathogens, which they combat with a generalized immune response. There is extensive genetic variation in immune responsiveness among Drosophila lines derived from a wild population, with differences between lines in mortality rate following infection and in internal pathogen load sustained during infection. A substantial component of the Drosophila immune response is provided by antibacterial peptides which are synthesized in response to septic injury. Preliminary results also show significant variation among Drosophila lines in the transcriptional inducibility of one antibacterial peptide. While previous and ongoing surveys of DNA sequence variation have uncovered coding variants in Drosophila antibacterial peptides, variation in the speed and strength of transcriptional induction of these genes following an infection may also be important. This study will thoroughly quantify the amount of phenotypic variation in immune efficacy segregating in a natural population of Drosophila melanogaster. Mortality rate following infection, suppression of internal pathogen growth, and the transcriptional inducibility of six antibacterial genes will be examined in 150 2nd-chromosome replacement lines of D. melanogaster. Correlations between induction kinetics and immunity will be explored. Several immune system genes will be completely sequenced in a subset of these lines, and molecular markers will be scored in all lines. Statistical associations between nucleotide polymorphisms in antibacterial gene promoters, the transcriptional intensity of those genes, and whole organism phenotypes will be tested. This work will provide a first look at the structure of natural genetic variation in innate immune responsiveness, and will address fundamental question of how natural selection drives the evolution of transcriptional control and innate immunity doc3007 none Collaborative Research: Sequential Monte Carlo Methods and Their Applications Jun Liu, Harvard University Rong Chen, Univ. Illinois at Chicago Xiaodong Wang, Texas A investigate roles of resampling which is critical to the effectiveness of SMC; and propose system reconfiguration strategies for more efficient SMC algorithms. In the application part, they plan to design novel signal processing and network control algorithms for wireless multimedia communications; develop better multiple sequence alignment models and SMC-based optimization method for protein structures; and build SMC-based modeling and analysis tools for business data. It is anticipated that the proposed research will culminate in the formulation of novel SMC methodologies and will bring the promise of the SMC paradigm into the practical arena of many emerging applications. Stochastic dynamic systems are routinely used in many application fields such as automatic control, engineering, and finance. The statistical analyses of these systems are crucial. However, except for a few special cases, quantitative analyses of these systems still present major challenges to researchers. Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) technique recently emerged in the field of statistics and engineering shows a great promise on solving a wide class of nonlinear filtering, prediction, and optimization problems, providing us with many exciting new research opportunities. The name Monte Carlo was coined in s by scientists involved in designing atomic bombs and it refers to a technique in which computer is used to simulate and study a complex stochastic system. The technique was named after the famed gambling resort because its procedures incorporate the element of chance. A distinctive feature of SMC is its ability to sequentially simulate the system by considering one variable at a time. The general use of SMC appeared recently and its invasion into many fields of science and engineering has just begun. Researchers including people in this research group have demonstrated that SMC can be successfully adapted to solve chemistry, engineering, and statistical problems. Understanding its theoretical properties and extending the use of SMC to other fields are the main focuses of this project. More specifically, this research group will focuse on three major theoretical issues regarding the design of effective SMC-based computational tools and three important application areas including wireless communications, computational biology, and business data analysis. These applications are not only important by their own merits, but also essential as the test ground for the new theories being developed and as the sources of stimulation for new research directions for SMC. It is anticipated that this research will culminate in the formulation of novel SMC methodologies and will bring the promise of the SMC paradigm into the practical arena of many emerging applications. In particular, this research will bear fruits in the following areas: novel designs of signal processing and network control algorithms for wireless multimedia communications; developments of better algorithms analyzing biological sequence and structure data; and a SMC-based tool for business data analysis and prediction doc3008 none Mattinson This proposal requests support for investigation of a newly recognized behavior of Pb and U isotopes in the mineral zircon. The U-Pb system in zircon is widely used to determine the ages of geologic events, and fully understanding the system s behavior is required for accurate interpretation of measured ages. Loss of Pb from zircons produces discordant ages which can be accurately extrapolated to the true age only if the Pb loss mechanism is fully understood. Recent experiments reveal that loss of Pb related to low-temperature fluid leaching of naturally radiation-damaged zircon can be accompanied by isotopic fractionation of the Pb and also U isotopes. The isotopic fractionation of Pb is contrary to previously accepted ideas about Pb loss from zircons, and calls into question some important assumptions used in interpreting U-Pb age data. Understanding of this fractionation and Pb loss behavior is important in obtaining accurate ages from discordant zircon U-Pb data. The proposed research will combine zircon analysis by a series of partial dissolution steps, with annealing of the zircons at a range of temperatures prior to dissolution. The annealing partially to totally repairs the natural radiation damage, allowing detailed understanding of the exact role of the radiation damage in the loss of Pb from the system. Detailed study (electron microprobe and scanning electron microscope) of the chemical zoning within individual zircon grains, and of the possible pathways by which fluids gain access to the interiors of zircon grains, will help us better understand interactions of fluids with zircons on the intra-grain level, and the role of these fluids in U-Pb discordance doc3009 none Bosh Uranus collection of 10 narrow rings has been studied extensively with the stellar occultation method. This method yields high spatial resolution data for observers at Earth and therefore allows long time baseline observations of the rings. Some occultations occur near a planet s stationary point, when the planet s apparent motion on the sky-plane approaches zero. By virtue of their slow velocity, these events can yield higher signal-to-noise data. One such event for Uranus occurred in ; the occultation of the star U36 took place over 4 days with sky-plane velocities between 0.3 and 1.5 km sec. Dr. Amanda Bosh will utilize these unusual data to search for small-amplitude distortions on ring edges that are detectable only with slow-velocity earth-based data or in situ imaging or stellar occultations. She will analyze the occultation data by modeling occultation light curves as diffraction profiles of semi-opaque square wells. She will also employ occultation geometry and ring kinematics modeling techniques that have been successfully used for investigations of Saturn s ring structure. The ring-edge distortions, if identified, may aid in refining global kinematic models for the Uranian rings. In addition, through analysis of the wavelength and amplitude of the distortion, one can infer the existence of one or more nearby shepherding satellites. Both improved kinematics and satellite detection are waypoints toward better understanding of the confinement mechanisms for narrow rings. This award is made through the Planetary Astronomy Program doc3010 none Ducea One of the remotely sensed properties of the upper mantle is its electrical conductivity. Surface geophysical measurements, often magnetotelluric soundings, are used to infer this property. Interpretation of the resulting electrical conductivity cross sections must rely on laboratory measurements, however. The investigators propose a unique integration of magnetotelluric measurements, xenolith studies, and laboratory experiments in order to determine the present physical state of the upper mantle beneath the Sierra Nevada and California Basin and Range. Further, they outline a series of deformation experiments that will provide constraints on the amount and type of deformation in the mantle that accompanied the late Cenozoic extension of the western margin of the Basin and Range province. A particularly important part of this project is to examine the separate and possibly synergistic roles played by solid silicate components and immiscible sulfide and silicate melts. A key component of this study will be to quantify the amount of electrical anisotropy induced at various amounts of deformation and melting doc3011 none PI: David Feary Institution: National Academy of Sciences U.S. National Committee for Rock Mechanics : The U.S. National Committee for Rock Mechanics (USNC RM) is the focal point for rock mechanics and other geotechnical activities within the National Research Council (NRC). The USNC RM provides (1) scientific and technical input to programs within the federal agencies and (2) U.S. participation and adherence to the International Society for Rock Mechanics (ISRM). The USNC RM operates under the auspices of the NRC s Board on Earth Sciences and Resources. Research and engineering developments in rock mechanics are driven by concerns for the natural and built environment (including radioactive and hazardous waste isolation and remediation and mitigation), mitigation of natural hazards such as earthquakes and landslides, environmentally sound recovery of natural resources, and interest in defense structures in rock. The technological, economic, social, and political impact of these issues engage the attention of many government agencies, business corporations, and public interest groups and posits the need for the USNC RM. The expertise, judgement, and strategic perspective of the USNC RM serves to define and help initiate sponsored studies and other activities with respect to major areas of national interest or concern in which rock mechanics problems represent critical or limiting factors. In this regard, the committee offers a forum for meetings with federal agency liaison representative and other interested organizations to exchange ideas and information on important topics that may merit inquiry through the National Research Council. The USNC RM is the official representative of the United States on the International Society for Rock Mechanics. This role of the committee is particularly important in today s global technical and economic environment for close scientific and technical interaction with the international rock mechanics community doc3012 none This Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP) study on Accountability of Federally-Funded Research will assist federal agencies in crafting plans and reports that are responsive to the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA), Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Guidance, and agency missions. The study will undertake independent assessments via case studies of the strategic and performance plans federal agencies have developed and of the responsiveness of their performance reports to GPRA. This case study approach of agency responses to GPRA from strategic plan through performance plan and performance report will be valuable to agencies in providing a bridge between congressional expectations and agency capabilities. The case study approach will allow for the special circumstances of individual agencies-both their missions and how they implement them doc3013 none Wanamaker One of the remotely sensed properties of the upper mantle is its electrical conductivity. Surface geophysical measurements, often magnetotelluric soundings, are used to infer this property. Interpretation of the resulting electrical conductivity cross sections must rely on laboratory measurements, however. The investigators propose a unique integration of magnetotelluric measurements, xenolith studies, and laboratory experiments in order to determine the present physical state of the upper mantle beneath the Sierra Nevada and California Basin and Range. Further, they outline a series of deformation experiments that will provide constraints on the amount and type of deformation in the mantle that accompanied the late Cenozoic extension of the western margin of the Basin and Range province. A particularly important part of this project is to examine the separate and possibly synergistic roles played by solid silicate components and immiscible sulfide and silicate melts. A key component of this study will be to quantify the amount of electrical anisotropy induced at various amounts of deformation and melting doc3014 none Central schemes may serve as universal finite-difference methods for numerically solving hyperbolic conservation laws, Hamilton-Jacobi equations and closely related convection-diffusion equations. Such schemes are not tied to the specific eigen-structure of the problem, and hence can be implemented in a straightforward manner as black-box solvers for a wide variety of nonlinear equations governing the spontaneous evolution of large gradient phenomena. The first-order Lax-Friedrichs scheme is the forerunner for suchcentral schemes. The second-order Nessyahu-Tadmor scheme offers high resolution while retaining the simplicity of Riemann-solver-free approach. In the convective regime the improved resolution of the Nessyahu-Tadmor scheme and its generalizations is achieved by using high-order piecewise polynomial reconstructions and high-order quadrature formulas for computing the flux integrals. At the same time, this family of staggered central schemes suffers from excessive numerical viscosity when a sufficiently small time step is enforced, e.g., due to the presence of (degenerate) diffusive term. Recently Kurganov and Tadmor introduced a new family of central schemes, which retain the simplicity of staggered central schemes, yet they enjoy a smaller numerical viscosity. In particular, these schemes admit a simple semi-discrete formulation. This project aims to develop new, minimally dissipative fully- and semi-discrete central schemes for conservation laws. The main ideas behind the construction of these new schemes is the use of more precise information of the local propagation speed, and realizing the (non-smooth part of the) approximate solution in terms of its cell averages integrated over the nonsymmetric Riemann fans of varying size. Hyperbolic conservation laws, Hamilton-Jacobi equations and convection- diffusion equations are of great practical importance. They govern a variety of physical phenomena that appear in fluid mechanics, gas dynamics, magnetohydrodynamics, astrophysics, groundwater flow, meteorology, semiconductors, reactive flows, two-phase flow in oil reservoirs, non-Newtonian flows, front propagation and several other areas. Financial modeling, traffic flow, differential games, optimal control and image enhancement are among the most recent applications of the above models.Genuinely multidimensional high-resolution semi-discrete central schemes provide a rather simple and universal method for solving these problems. At the same time, the computational efficiency of central schemes is extremely high. For example, recent numerical experiments in three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamics demonstrate that using central schemes allows to achieve the desired resolution about 25 times faster in comparison with other methods. In general, the advantage of the new semi-discrete central schemes over alternative upwind methods is particularly amplified when they are used to solve complicated multidimensional systems arising in practice. The proposed schemes will be also applied to such important problems as compressible and incompressible Euler and Navier-Stokes equations, multi-phase model of geometric optics, multicomponent flow and compressible bubbles models, moving boundaries problems, shock reflection problem for the unsteady transonic small disturbance equation and others doc3015 none An extension of a meshless method for the numerical solution of partial differential equations based on radial basis functions is proposed. In particular, the combination of (1) radial basis functions, (2) compact support, and (3) multilevel algorithms is suggested for the collocation solution of nonlinear partial differential equations. In this manner accurate and computationally efficient algorithms can be designed. The research focuses on the implementation of these algorithms, as well as the investigation of some related theoretical issues such as convergence rates and well-posedness. Partial differential equations play an important role in many areas of science and engineering. They are at the core of many mathematical models used, e.g., meteorological models, molecular simulations in chemistry and physics, simulations in such areas as semiconductor modeling, study of materials, fluid dynamics, etc.. In this project we focus on the design of algorithms potentially applicable to any of these areas. Algorithms for high-performance parallel hardware are also considered. The tools employed (radial basis functions) are of fairly recent origin ( s), but are slowly being accepted by a growing number of scientists and engineers. Their main advantage is that no complicated (and expensive) underlying mesh structure is required as is for the standard finite element or finite volume techniques doc3016 none Gibbs Research will be undertaken to advance the understanding of the mechanisms and properties of bonded interactions in earth materials and representative molecules and to locate, at the atomic level, the surface and internal sites that are susceptible to electrophilic and nucleophilic attack. These goals will be accomplished by evaluating the bond critical point properties of the calculated electron density distributions for a wide variety of minerals and by determining the properties and locating the local maxima and minima in the Laplacian distributions for the valence shell electrons of the bonded atoms. A knowledge of the location and structure of the internal and surface sites that are susceptible to attack by Lewis acids and bases will clarify the mechanisms, the structural details and the properties of the reactions involved in weathering and other important geochemical processes. The resulting information should provide a theoretical basis for modeling surface and internal reactions of earth materials, leading to a better understanding of processes involving mineral surfaces doc3017 none Foster Classical orogenic belts have relatively narrow bands of varied rock types that can be related to various environments, such as foreland etc., however several major orogens significantly diverge from this pattern. The Lachlan Orogen of southeastern Australia, correlatives in Antarctica, parts of the Pan African in northeast Africa and others have an extremely wide expanse of monotonously similar oceanic assemblages, and effectively no foreland. The cause of this extreme width and how deformation patterns and ages relate to the tectonic settings of these orogens is controversial. This project will attempt to discriminate between several hypotheses and will involve considerable age dating of the deformation. The oceanic style of orogeny represented by the Lachlan orogen appears to be an unrecognized continental growth mechanism that has been important throughout earth history, therefore results of this study are expected to be applicable in a number of other orogens doc3018 none ICME is a new multimedia conference slated to be the major Institute of Electrical & Electronic Engineer s (IEEE) conference on the subject of Multimedia technologies and is to take place in New York City in July-August . The conference is meant to deal with the emerging discipline of multimedia processing under the sponsorship of several IEEE technical societies. This multidisciplinary conference is expected to deal with confluence of several areas ranging from wireless video, internet, universal access of computing devices, joint audio-video and multimodal processing, computer animation, perceptual human computer interfaces including newly emerging standards technologies. The funding involves student support by providing opportunity for disssemination of technical information in this evolving field for training and education of graduate students, who are the potential leaders of technlogy workforce of the nearterm as well as longterm future. Specific engineering disciplines addreesed are signal processing, communications and networking, database systems, hardware and system integration for multimedia procesing etc doc3019 none Grand, Stephen This project will conduct a joint study of seismic structure, composition and dynamics of the mantle, with a strategic focus on Africa. Combining seismic forward waveform modeling and travel time inversion, we will attempt to map the geometry, magnitude and sharpness of seismic anomalies throughout the mantle beneath Africa. With improved seismic models of the lower and upper mantle, we will also study the geodynamical and compositional aspects of mantle anomalies using other geophysical constraints, including geoid, topography at the Earth s surface and the core-mantle boundary, intra-plate stress, plate motions, and experimental results from mineral physics doc3020 none The Meaning of Morphology: Source Hierarchy of Phenotypic Variation of Skeletal Hard Parts (Bryozoa) Steven J. Hageman Criteria for the recognition of fossil species are based largely on preservable hard parts of the ancient organism. This is in contrast to the classification of living species, which in addition to skeletal hard parts, may include data from their soft tissue, behavior, biochemical and genetic composition. Uncertainty about the relationships between genetic characteristics of an organism relative to its morphological characteristics can raise questions about the biological significance of fossil species. Because paleontology had the ability to document change through deep time, it has a significant contribution to make toward answering fundamental questions of evolutionary biology. These can not be addressed with confidence however, until we can document the relative importance of the genetic versus environmental components of variation in the skeletal hard parts of organisms. In addition, little is known about how differences in the scale and magnitude of environmental variation may affect skeletal hard part morphologies (i.e., microscale spatial variation within an environmental setting could induce more morphological change than between two similar settings many kilometers apart, or vice versa). By measuring features on the skeleton of modern colonial marine invertebrate organisms (Bryozoa) that are grown as clonal replicates in controlled laboratory experiments, the variation in the skeletal hard parts can be separated mathematically into their genetic and environmental sources. This is a natural system analogous to cloning hundreds of sheep and growing sets of identical clones in different environments to determine the environment s influence on their final morphology. Researchers at Gatty Marine Laboratory, Scotland have already grown clonal replicates of genetically different colonies of the intertidal bryozoan Electra pilosa under several controlled environmental conditions. This project will separate genetic from environmental variation in these specimens. In the second part of this study, specimens will be collected from the wild from environments that have been hierarchically subdivided in order to determine whether signals can be differentiated in a real world example. Results from this study will have broader applicability to the fields of evolutionary biology, biostratigraphy, biogeography, and relationships among fossil lineages doc3007 none Collaborative Research: Sequential Monte Carlo Methods and Their Applications Jun Liu, Harvard University Rong Chen, Univ. Illinois at Chicago Xiaodong Wang, Texas A investigate roles of resampling which is critical to the effectiveness of SMC; and propose system reconfiguration strategies for more efficient SMC algorithms. In the application part, they plan to design novel signal processing and network control algorithms for wireless multimedia communications; develop better multiple sequence alignment models and SMC-based optimization method for protein structures; and build SMC-based modeling and analysis tools for business data. It is anticipated that the proposed research will culminate in the formulation of novel SMC methodologies and will bring the promise of the SMC paradigm into the practical arena of many emerging applications. Stochastic dynamic systems are routinely used in many application fields such as automatic control, engineering, and finance. The statistical analyses of these systems are crucial. However, except for a few special cases, quantitative analyses of these systems still present major challenges to researchers. Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) technique recently emerged in the field of statistics and engineering shows a great promise on solving a wide class of nonlinear filtering, prediction, and optimization problems, providing us with many exciting new research opportunities. The name Monte Carlo was coined in s by scientists involved in designing atomic bombs and it refers to a technique in which computer is used to simulate and study a complex stochastic system. The technique was named after the famed gambling resort because its procedures incorporate the element of chance. A distinctive feature of SMC is its ability to sequentially simulate the system by considering one variable at a time. The general use of SMC appeared recently and its invasion into many fields of science and engineering has just begun. Researchers including people in this research group have demonstrated that SMC can be successfully adapted to solve chemistry, engineering, and statistical problems. Understanding its theoretical properties and extending the use of SMC to other fields are the main focuses of this project. More specifically, this research group will focuse on three major theoretical issues regarding the design of effective SMC-based computational tools and three important application areas including wireless communications, computational biology, and business data analysis. These applications are not only important by their own merits, but also essential as the test ground for the new theories being developed and as the sources of stimulation for new research directions for SMC. It is anticipated that this research will culminate in the formulation of novel SMC methodologies and will bring the promise of the SMC paradigm into the practical arena of many emerging applications. In particular, this research will bear fruits in the following areas: novel designs of signal processing and network control algorithms for wireless multimedia communications; developments of better algorithms analyzing biological sequence and structure data; and a SMC-based tool for business data analysis and prediction doc3022 none 00- Kinzig Workshop: Developing a research agenda for linking biogeophysical and socioeconomic systems Humans have become a global biogeochemical force, with a large and growing influence on the dynamics and functioning of the Earth s biosphere. At the same time, there is an increasing recognition of the extent to which environmental goods and services (e.g., water purification, pollination, pathogen control) have fueled economic growth and benefited humans. Many of the most compelling interdisciplinary questions on environmental systems lie at the interface of ecological sciences and human sciences. This grant will support an extensive cross-disciplinary dialog among natural and socioeconomic scientists in order to develop a prioritized research agenda for this emerging field of inquiry doc3023 none Award: Principal Investigator: Sheldon Katz This research project assembles a team at two campuses to work on string theory and related geometry. The project is led by two mathematicians and a physicist, and the award supports postdoctoral research fellows, graduate students, and the collaborations and communications of a broadly based research network. The research program supported by this award concentrates on dualities in string theory and M theory, a topic in which a broad range of geometric and physical concepts come together. The best known of these dualities is mirror symmetry, which has had dramatic consequences for algebraic and symplectic geometry, and this project intends to explore new dualities and constraints along with mirror symmetry. String theory is a promising candidate for a unifying theory of the universe at its most fundamental levels. The basic idea is simple - elementary particles should be modeled as mathematical loops of string rather than as points - but working out the details of this theory has involved and inspired some sophisticated mathematical tools and ideas. Constraints and observations from physics, sometimes posed as a claim that two distinct geometries must generate the same physical theory, can have large numbers of consequences for geometry since quantities of physical interest are often expressed as the average value of an observable quantity over space, or as a way of counting the number of times two objects meet. The program in Algebra, Number Theory, and Combinatorics is cofunding this award doc3024 none Pados Adaptive antenna arrays and DS CDMA communication systems are two subjects with their own individual challenges that have separately generated significant research interest over the past several years. When brought together at the integrated antenna-array CDMA-receiver system level, these challenges are magnified and new problems of both theoretical and practical interest arise. This proposed research on antenna array DS CDMA communications is characterized by the following three attributes: (i) The principle of joint space-time processing is maintained. (ii) Low optimization complexity is sought, therefore matrix inversions and or eigen-decompositions are viewed as undesirable operations. (iii) Superior adaptive system performance on short data records, as opposed to ideal asymptotics, is the objective. In terms of projected contributions to science and engineering principles, this proposed research is intended to build on past work of the PIs during the last four years -supported by seed funding by the National Science Foundation- that led to initial understanding and preliminary development of new linear filter optimization criteria and procedures. The focus is on low bias and low short-data-record variance adaptive optimization procedures that the investigators of this proposal have developed and termed ``auxiliary-vector (AV) filtering. AV filtering may touch many aspects of multidisciplinary engineering that are presently hampered by the ``curse of dimensionality and could benefit from adaptive filtering and or adaptive system optimization through limited input data. Variations of AV filtering schemes are currently considered in diversified areas that include temporal-only processing of CDMA signals, synchronization, adaptive robust spread-spectrum receiver designs, adaptive array radars, Direction-Of-Arrival estimation problems, and jam-resistant GPS. This present research plan covers aspects varying from basic algorithmic developments and theoretical analysis to DSP and FPGA hardware prototyping and testing through the use of the SPW (R) block-level communications systems simulator, a programmable antenna array testbed with 12 complete receive chains, an anechoic chamber with range in excess of 7 meters, and a DSP FPGA board-level implementation testbed doc3025 none Slater This award supports research on the low frequency (0.1- Hz) electrical properties of unconsolidated, under-saturated sediments. Previous research has identified the value of complex resistivity (CR) measurements for predicting grain size distribution, hydraulic conductivity and hydrocarbon contaminants in saturated media. However, the influence of under-saturation on polarization mechanisms occurring at the grain-fluid interface is not well understood. This work will investigate the CR dependence on degree of saturation and will hence determine its application in hydrogeological and agricultural assessments of the vadose zone. Ground penetrating radar and electrical resistivity methods can provide information on moisture content. The use of CR for providing additional hydrological information, such as capillary potential, pore fluid distribution and hysteresis effects in a drying-wetting cycle, will be determined. This work initiates research in applied electrical geophysics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. The PI will make measurements of complex resistivity, degree of saturation and capillary potential on a range of unconsolidated sediments during a cycle of drainage and wetting. Important structural parameters, including grain size distribution, specific surface area, porosity, true formation factor and mineralogy will be evaluated for all samples. As structural properties control the surface area over which polarization acts, the CR response to saturation is expected to vary considerably for the range of unconsolidated sediments investigated doc3026 none This project seeks to gain a better theoretical understanding of the role of gender stereotypes in promoting and sustaining the gender gap in negotiations. The theoretical and methodological bases for this research are closely derived from research programs in social and cognitive psychology that have been developed by prominent researchers. By adapting these theoretical arguments to the negotiation domain, a promising and relatively unexplored area of investigation is revealed. The project will involve a series of controlled, experimental studies examining bargaining behavior between men and women. The applied or practical aspect of this research is to develop negotiating strategies that level the playing field upon which male-female negotiations are conducted. This research is important and timely because a significant gender gap exists in terms of work pay and advancement across all income brackets. For example, female professors earned on average 87.5 cents for every dollar earned by male professors in . In addition, women comprised 43% of assistant professors at major research universities, but less than 14% of full professors. In many fields, this salary and advancement differential is even wider. Why does this gap exist? One place to start examining its roots is at the bargaining table, where many critical, career-related issues are decided. It may be the case that a woman and a man experience negotiations very differently based on a commonly shared awareness of what it takes to succeed at the bargaining table. One widely held stereotype about women is that they are less effective negotiators than men. For example, a typical negotiation scenario involves buying a new car. Popular wisdom suggests that women bring a man with them to the dealership so that they are taken seriously and given a fair shake. Indeed, evidence from one audit of new car dealerships reveals that salespeople quoted women significantly higher prices than men who used exactly the same scripted bargaining strategies as the women. But over and above any bias on the part of the dealer, does the woman carry an additional burden with her into the dealership, which is the fear that anything she says or does will be interpreted in light of this negative stereotype about her gender s negotiating ability? If so, is it this burden that ultimately affects her bargaining success? How can this burden be lifted to create gender equality at the bargaining table? Funding for this project under the POWRE guidelines is justified because the project goals are so closely aligned with goal of the POWRE program, which is to increase the prominence and influence of women in scientific fields in which they are currently under-represented. Because the vast majority of tenured professors in business schools are white men (94%, according to one recent survey), and the investigator is just embarking on her tenure-track journey, facilitating her tenure pursuit will help to achieve this stated goal of the POWRE program doc3027 none This research is concerned with algorithmic, performance, and hardware issues related to reduced-rank adaptive filtering. Reduced-rank filters project the incoming received signal onto a lower dimensional subspace, which reduces the amount of training data needed relative to a conventional full-rank algorithm. Algorithmic techniques will be studied initially within the context of interference suppression for Direct Sequence (DS)-Code-Division Multiple Access (CDMA), although they can be applied to any adaptive linear filter. The focus of the research is on a recently developed class of reduced-rank adaptive algorithms based on the multi-stage Wiener filter of Goldstein and Reed. This technique can achieve full-rank performance with a very low filter rank, which enables rapid convergence and tracking. Furthermore, these algorithms do not rely on an explicit estimate of the signal subspace. The project is multi-disciplinary in that it combines the expertise of the two co-PIs in the areas of adaptive signal processing and low power VLSI design. The main objective of the research is to build a low-power special purpose hardware prototype, which can serve as the computational engine for reduced-rank filtering in a variety of applications. Algorithmic issues to be studied include selection of filter rank, performance in different adaptive filtering applications, such as equalization, and numerical stability and dynamic range problems doc3028 none Housen Johnson The mesozoic and tertiary accretion and transport history of terranes along the western plate margin of North America has received considerable study, however work to date has been unable to resolve between the two major hypotheses that have emerged. These models differ mainly in the timing of accretion and particularly in the subsequent northward terrane translation along the continental margin. This project will take a new tack and focus on a innovative detrital provenance analysis of basin sediments that were deposited along the margin during this time period is the hopes of pinning the source terranes and therefore the locations of terranes at various times. Results should help break the impasse in understanding the tectonic history of terrane accretion along the pacific margin of North America during mesozoic and tertiary time doc3029 none This project is directed towards the development, analysis and numerical validation of new finite element methods for fluid flows and electromagnetics. The research in methods for fluid flows will focus on applications of nonstandard least-squares principles in the construction of the numerical algorithms. While for incompressible viscous flows conventional least-squares principles have established themselves as a viable alternative to mixed Galerkin methods, such principles are not completely satisfactory in the context of high Re or transonic flows. To circumvent existing computational defects of L2-norm methods such as sensitivity to singularities, lack of norm equivalence and etc., the new algorithms will be based on mesh-dependent and negative-norm least-squares principles. The emphasis of the second research direction will be on eddy current computations in three dimensions. To address computational complexity of 3D simulations algorithms will use equivalent potential formulations of the governing equations. The issue of proper gauge selection for the potentials will receive a thorough and systematic examination so as to ensure well-posed sets of differential equations. Algorithmic development will pay special attention to the efficient implementation of the relevant boundary and interface conditions where least-squares terms will be used to enforce these conditions weakly. The common thread which links the two principal research directions of this project is the focus on new computational algorithms for partial differential equations. Such equations arise in virtually every field of science and engineering and their efficient numerical solution is critical for our ability to conduct computer simulations of physical processes ranging from atmospheric motions to flows of current in superconductors. As a result, development of high performance computational tools which enable realistic simulations will play an increasingly important role for the future advances in science and technology. The impact of such computational algorithms will be felt not only in terms of tremendous cost and or time savings made possible by replacing field experiments by virtual, computer experiments, but also by the fact that in some instances computer models may be the only feasible design approach. In the focus of this project is the development of such tools for differential equations arising in modeling of fluid flows and electromagnetic fields. Two specific applications that we have in mind are computation of three-dimensional eddy currents and simulations of transonic and high Reynolds number flows. One motivation for our research is the practical relevance of these problems. For instance, solution of the eddy current equations arises in such varied areas as development of toroidal field magnets for fusion power, modeling of plasma physics phenomena, and design of tape heads, while transonic and high Re flows are relevant to design of aircraft and modeling of dispersion of pollutants. At the same time numerical solution of these problems in realistic three-dimensional settings continues to be an outstanding and challenging computational task. Thus, our research is also motivated by the real and existing need to develop efficient and robust computational tools for electromagnetics and fluid flow applications which can be used in such realistic settings doc3030 none Ad hoc networking involves computers, typically wireless mobile nodes, that cooperatively form a network without specific user administration or configuration. In other words, ad hoc networking allows an arbitrary collection of mobile nodes to create a network on demand. This capability has numerous applications in tactical missions and rescue operations, as well as for educational and commercial use. Due to the number of applications desiring the formation of an ad hoc network infrastructure, development of this technology is currently a research priority at NSF. The work in this proposal concerns the development and performance evaluation of protocols that offer geocast communication in an ad hoc network. The goal of a geocasting protocol is to deliver a packet to a set of nodes within a specified geographical area, i.e., the geocast region. The researchers will develop and evaluate protocols that offer geocast communication to both explicityly defined groups (i.e., geocast to those mobile nodes in the geocast region that have registered with the group) and implicitly defined groups (i.e., geocast to all mobile nodes in the geocast region). The researchers will also consider both fixed geocast regions (i.e., defined by a specific geographical location) and dynamic geocast regions (i.e., defined by a dangerous moving target). The researchers will develop and evaluate (via simulation) three different approaches to geocasting: a directed flooding approach, a tree-based approach, and a mesh-based approach. They also propose to develop a hybrid approach that is based on the nature of the message to be transmitted and or performance considerations (e.g., if the mobile nodes have been moving slowly in the recent past, then the redundancy offered by a mesh-based approach may not be needed). Lastly, the researchers plan to incorporate predictable and controllable end-to-end quality of service when a shared tree or shared mesh approach is used. Throughout the project, they will conduct extensive simulations to determine the conditions under which each of the geocast algorithms is most effective. The researchers will vary the essential parameters in the simulations to avoid biased results, e.g., network size, connectivity, topological rate of change, and various movement calling patterns. In addition, the simulations will take into account some realistic limitations that have not always been addressed in prior performance evaluations, e.g., location errors that exist in widely available consumer Global Positioning Systems. The proposed project is a collaboration between two investigators who have the experience and capability necessary to complete the project successfully. The expertise of one investigator is in the mobile computing and networking area. The expertise of the other investigator is in the development of simulation models and the evaluation fo a protocol s performance. Throughout the investigation, the approach will be from a practical sense. The researchers will attend Internet Engineering Task Force meetings to obtain the current status of ad hoc protocols and to share the results doc3031 none Collaborative research: Chemical Fingerprinting of Ash Beds in the Terminal Proterozoic Nama Group, Namibia Beverly Saylor. Warren Huff. The terminal Proterozoic to Cambrian Nama Group of Namibia is one of the most comprehensive records of end Proterozoic events. The Schwarzrand Subgroup of the Nama Group contains 15 stratigraphically distinct volcanic ash beds, which are constrained by U-Pb geochronology to a time span of at most 6 m.y. These event beds have tremendous chronostratigraphic value as high-resolution, widespread, time-parallel layers. This feasibility study will evaluate the potential for using geochemical fingerprinting techniques to uniquely identify and correlate ash beds in the Schwarzrand Suybgroup. Correlations of some widespread ash beds are already well established based on the physical stratigraphy. Whole rock and fluid inclusion studies of samples from these beds will control for within bed variability of chemical signature. Three widely separated, complete sections of the Schwarzrand Subgroup preserve nearly all the ash beds in replicate. Comprehensive analyses of ash bed samples from these sections ill compare between bed vs. within bed compositional differences and will test the resolution of the fingerprinting method doc3032 none Park One of the remotely sensed properties of the upper mantle is its electrical conductivity. Surface geophysical measurements, often magnetotelluric soundings, are used to infer this property. Interpretation of the resulting electrical conductivity cross sections must rely on laboratory measurements, however. The investigators propose a unique integration of magnetotelluric measurements, xenolith studies, and laboratory experiments in order to determine the present physical state of the upper mantle beneath the Sierra Nevada and California Basin and Range. Further, they outline a series of deformation experiments that will provide constraints on the amount and type of deformation in the mantle that accompanied the late Cenozoic extension of the western margin of the Basin and Range province. A particularly important part of this project is to examine the separate and possibly synergistic roles played by solid silicate components and immiscible sulfide and silicate melts. A key component of this study will be to quantify the amount of electrical anisotropy induced at various amounts of deformation and melting doc3033 none A growing interest in using silicon isotopes to study the global silicon cycle in both aquatic and terrestrial environments has emerged. Rare heavy isotopes of silicon have been used as tracers to study silica production and dissolution rates in the sea for over two decades. More recently, natural variations in isotopes of silicon have been developed as a tool for examining silica cycling in both marine and terrestrial systems. Progress in the use of isotopes of silicon as tools to better understand the global silica cycle has been slow due to the small number of investigators who have access to a mass spectrometer capable of analyzing isotopes of silicon. For this reason, the PI, a renowned leader in the development of silicon isotope capabilities, plans to establish a state-of-the-art facility for the analysis of silicon isotopes through the acquisition of a magnet-sector ratio mass spectrometer with a custom dual triple-collector and dual sample inlet system. Availability of this facility will allow the scientific community to make high precision measurements on silica dissolution rates and determine the natural abundance levels doc3034 none Under the direction of Dr. Douglas Price, Mr. R.Bentley will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will participate in the excavation of an early agricultural site in the Rhine Valley, Germany. He will then conduct strontium and lead isotope analyses on human skeletal material recovered from this and other archaeological occurrences which date to the same time period and culture. The goal of the research is to understand the process which led to the appearance of domesticated crops, animals and a settled way of life in Western Europe. While scientists recognize that crops such as wheat and barley and domesticated cattle sheep and goats first appeared in the Near East and at some later date spread westwards into Europe, the mechanism which underlies this movement is unclear. In many regions such domesticates appear suddenly - possibly within the span of a single generation and are accompanied by a distinctive pottery type termed linear band ceramic (LBK) A lively debate exists concerning whether it was technology itself or actual populations which moved. Many archaeologists believe that the LBK phenomenon reflects the actual movement of people - a group of pioneers who spread rapidly across much of Western Europe. Other researchers note that this area was already inhabited by hunting and gathering populations and thus far from devoid of a human presence. They argue that it was not people themselves who moved but rather objects and an understanding of how to use them. According to this model local hunters and gathers learned how to plant crops, herd livestock and make pottery. The observed changes in settlement pattern were thus the result of new technology and subsistence practices. To help resolve this issue, Mr. Bentley will examine a series of skeletons from LBK sites in the Rhine valley and conduct both strontium and lead isotope analyses of bone and teeth. The human body absorbs both elements from food and the proportions of strontium and likely lead isotopes reflects their abundance in the food itself. This in turn is strongly affected by the underlying bedrock geology. Because teeth form early in an individual s life and do not remodel over time, they reflect the ratio in the region where one s early years were spent. Bone however remodels over time and bone isotope ratios reflect a later period in an individual s life. Mr. Bentley has noted that strontium isotopic values in the Rhine floodplain where LBK sites are found, differ significantly from those in the surrounding highlands where pre-existing hunting and gathering populations were located. Through analyses of these ratios, it should be possible to determine whether LBK people lived their entire lives within this area or whether they came from elsewhere. Analysis of results by sex should also provide insight into possible marriage patterns. This research is important for several reasons. It will shed light on cultural dynamics in prehistoric Europe. It will help to develop the application strontium isotope analysis tool to archaeological questions. It will also explore the possibility of using lead isotope analysis in the same way. Finally, it will contribute to training a promising young scientist doc3035 none Kubicki Lvov Experiments and molecular simulations will be performed in parallel to examine the behavior of mineral surface charge, zeta potential and adsorption in aqueous solutions at elevated temperatures. Numerous research groups are currently working on these phenomena; however, almost no data exists for these parameters at elevated temperatures up to 300 degrees C. The method to be employed is microelectrophoresis for determination of electrical mobilities of oxide particles. The minerals chosen for this study are corundum and zircon. Water flow through the crust near radioactive waste storage facilities and in hydrothermal areas occurs in the temperature range of this study. Knowledge of the surface charge and zeta potential with temperature are critical for predicting adsorption behavior of ions because a change in sign can signal a shift from adsorption to desorption. Understanding adsorption behavior is in turn key to the ability to predict the migration of contaminants in the subsurface. Due to difficulties in assessing the positions of ions near a mineral surface in situ under high temperature conditions, molecular simulations are a valuable companion to the experimental component of this research. Both quantum and classic mechanical simulations of surfaces, water and counterions are planned. By linking experiment and theory via the measured and simulated points-of-zero charge and zeta potentials, the structure of counter-ions near a surface may be reliably modeled. Molecular simulations provide insight into the amount of adsorption likely to take place and the mechanisms of adsorption that control the kinetics of ions near surfaces doc3036 none The researchers have observed an explosive growth in transporting continuous media applications to multiple recipients on the Internet. Examples include continuous media servers, digital libraries, remote medical diagnosis, and distance learning. As most Internet continuous media based multicast applications do not support end-to-end congestion control, wide deployment of these applications have severe negative impact, ranging from starvation of self-controlled TCP flows to the potential for congestion collapse. The main intent of this proposal is thus to design, implement, analytically validate, and empirically evaluate a class of congestion control schemes for multicasts with the following design objectives: scalability, capability to adjust source sending rates to achieve TCP-friendliness and (weighted) fairness in an analytically provable manner, capability to handle independent losses of the same packet, capability to deal with dynamic traffic membership changes, and minimal router support. Specifically, the researchers will lay out an analytical framework for rate-based multicast congestion control. In particular, T1. The researchers propose a novel approach for ACK aggregation so as to provide the sender with a simple but comprehensive view of congestion conditions in the multicast tree. T2. The researchers characterize the congestion status with three phases: congestion free, congestion alert, and congestion avoidance, and will devise a simple, yet effective mechanism for a sender to diagnose, based on the parameters in the aggregated acknowledgment received and parameters locally kept, which congestion phase its connection is in and whether or not independent losses of the same packet has occurred. T3. The researchers will devise, based on robust feedback control theory, a class of rate adjustment schemes that are (i) TCP-friendly, (ii) robustly stable, and (iii) achieve (weighted) fairness among competing multicast sessions, feature (ii) is especially important for systems with feedback loops, but has not been extensively addressed in most of the multicast congestion control work perhaps except [10]. The proposed control theoretic work will hence center around robust stability and disturbance attenuation problems that appear in rate-based flow control for multicasts. T4. To promote the wide deployment of proposed schemes, the researchers will investigate whether or not, and how, the operations (perhaps except acknowledgment aggregation) can be realized at end hosts. If some of the operations cannot be accomplished without router support, the researchers will look into possible light-weight implementation methods. T5. To empirically evaluate the performance of proposed multicast congestion control schemes, the researchers will conduct extensive simulation in ns-2 [81] to test their TCP-friendliness, fairness, and scalability properties and compare them against existing work. With the help of OARnet (the Ohio GigaPOP manager of Internet2) personnel,the researchers will also implement the proposed schemes in FreeBSD, and use a database server centered on large amounts of patient images acquired from MR and CT as a representative multicast application to empirically measure the key functional, scalable, and adaptive characteristics of the prototype software over the Internet2 doc3037 none Over the past decade the growth in the use and capabilities of communication networks has transformed the way we live and work. As we progress further into the information age, the reliance on networking will increase. With the expected explosive growth in data traffic, networks will be strained in terms of both transport and processing requirements. Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) is emerging as a dominant technology for use in backbone and access networks. With WDM, the capacity of a fiber is significantly increased by allowing simultaneous transmission on multiple wavelengths (channels), each operating at the maximum electronic rate. Systems with between 40 and 80 wavelengths are presently being deployed for point-to-point transmission. With tens of wavelengths per fiber and transmission rates of up to 10 Gbps per wavelength, capacities that approach a Tera-bit per second can be achieved. While these WDM systems are likely to meet future transport demands, electronically processing all of this traffic at network nodes will present a significant bottleneck. Fortunately, it is not necessary to electronically process all traffic entering and leaving each node. For example, much of the traffic passing through a node is neither sourced at that node nor destined to that node. To reduce the amount of traffic that must be electronically processed at ntermediate nodes, future WDM systems will employ WDM Add Drop multiplexers (WADMs) and cross-connects, that allow each wavelength to either be dropped and electronically processed at the node or to optically bypass the node s electronics. This project will develop mechanisms for providing optical bypass to the electronic layer thereby reducing the size and cost of electronic switches and routers in the network. A number of techniques will be explored, each of which is appropriate for different traffic scenarios. For the case of low rate stream traffic, grooming algorithms will be developed to selectively multiplex multiple low rate traffic streams onto wavelengths such that the number of wavelengths that must be processed at each node is minimized. For bursty packet traffic, topology reconfiguration algorithms will be developed to reduce the load on the electronic switches and routers via dynamic load balancing. Lastly, for large data transfers, Optical Flow Switching protocols that bypass all of the electronics in the network using all-optical end-to-end connections will be developed. The combination of the above mechanisms will reduce the size, cost and complexity of electronic switches and routers and will lead to a dramatic increase in the traffic capacity that can be supported by the Next Generation Internet (NGI doc3038 none Lager A significant portion of our planet s water may be held within the atomic structures of minerals in the mantle. The presence of structurally-bound water in the form of hydroxyl ion (OH-) or molecular water (H2O) can lower the melting temperatures of rocks, affect the character of volcanic activity and may even generate the forces that cause earthquakes. Therefore, it is important to understand how water (hydrogen) affects the properties of hydrous minerals at pressure-temperature conditions representative of the mantle. With the recent development of high-pressure, neutron facilities, atomic-level information on the behavior of hydrogen at mantle pressures can be obtained from small-volume (90 mm3), powdered samples. The majority of minerals that have been studied using this technique have relatively simple atomic structures. In this project, high-pressure data will be obtained for the first time on structurally-complex minerals (humites) using both neutron and X-ray data collected for the same sample. X-rays will give the precision required for the heavier atoms (metals and oxygen) in these structures. Neutrons can then be used to determine the hydrogen-atom positions. Using these complementary measurements, it should be possible to improve both the accuracy and precision of the experiments and learn more about how changes in the hydrogen-atom environment at high pressure affect the compression of these minerals. In a related experiment, infrared spectra will be collected for humite minerals and correlated to neutron data on the hydrogen-atom environment. The objective is use the atomic structure of humite as a model to understand the mode of incorporation of trace amounts of hydrogen in olivine, the predominant mineral in the mantle doc3039 none Recent advances in technology have provided portable computers with wireless interfaces that allow networked communication among mobile users. The resulting computing environment, which is often referred to as mobile computing, no longer requires users to maintain a fixed and universally known position in the network and enables almost unrestricted mobility. An ad hoc wireless network is a special type of wireless mobile network in which a collection of mobile hosts with wireless network interfaces may form a temporary network, without the aid of any established infrastructure or centralized administration. Efficient routing among a set of mobile hosts (also called nodes) is one of the most important functions in ad hoc wireless networks. Routing based on a connected dominating set is a promising approach, where the search space for a route is reduced to the nodes in the set. A set is dominating if all the nodes in the system are either in the set or are neighbors of nodes in the set. In this proposal, the researchers study a simple and efficient distributed algorithm for calculating a connected dominating set in an ad hoc wireless network, where connections of nodes are determined by their geographical distances and the corresponding graph is called a unit graph. A reduced graph is then induced from the connected dominating set and the routing process is restricted to this reduced graph. The researcher s preliminary results on random unit graphs are very promising in generating a small reduced graph in a way faster than existing methods. The goals of the proposed research are: (1) Enhance the process (also called the marking process) of determining a connected dominating set of a unit graph. (2) Complete the update re- calculation algorithm for the connected dominating set when the topology of the ad hoc wireless network changes dynamically. (3) Extend the proposed approach to a hierarchical structure, where the marking process is applied on the reduced graph to generate a reduced graph of the reduced graph. The hierarchical structure is obtained by applying the marking process iteratively. (4) Select an appropriate routing protocol for the reduced graph. This scheme could be a proactive routing (such as various extended link state and distance vector routing protocols), a reactive routing (also called on demand), or a combination of both. (5) Explore the possibility of combining dominating set information and location information provided by a Global Positioning System (GPS) to derive a better routing scheme. (6) Integrate different components and fine tune the system through an empirical study based on a set of well-defined quantitative performance metrics doc3040 none Cheney Spear New England has long been studied geologically, and the evolution of Central New England during the Devonian Acadian Orogeny is broadly understood as an early Devonian collisional event. However, there are a number of questions about the timing of metamorphism, assembly and exhumation of this terrane that are of fundamental significance in the development of this and any compressional orogen. This project will employ powerful new techniques of age dating to provide the detailed age control that was not available during the classic Acadian studies. Results are expected to help place the timing of peak metamorphism in a tectonic framework, to assess the possibility of time - transgressive metamorphism along strike and to evaluate scenarios for producing inverted metamorphic sequences. While focused on their classic orogen, knowledge of these relationships is applicable to developing models for the evolutions of all orogenic belts doc3041 none Watson This research program involves experimental investigations at high pressures and temperatures that address the properties and behavior of rare-element minerals (i.e., ac-cessory minerals) in the Earth s crust. Accessory minerals - for example, zircon (ZrSiO4), apatite (Ca5[PO4]3F), monazite (CePO4), xenotime (YPO4), titanite (CaTiSiO5), and rutile (TiO2)-are the principal hosts of radioactive isotopes (e.g., of U, Th, Lu, Sm) and their decay products (e.g., isotopes of Pb, Hf, Nd) and also of trace elements such as the rare earths that are useful in deciphering geochemical processes. The research con-ducted under this grant is aimed at learning how these minerals participate in melting processes and metamorphic reactions, and how effectively they retain radiometric age in-formation and stable isotope ratios. Several types of experiments and measurements are conducted in order to characterize: 1) ionic diffusion in accessory minerals (e.g., of oxy-gen, Pb, Th and REE); and 2) solubility of zircon in silicic magmas and pelagic sediment-derived melts in subduction environments. We are also exploring cathodoluminescence (CL) as a means of semi-quantitative mapping of trace-element distribution in experi-mental samples. The intended long-range impact of the work is to enhance the ability of geochemists to understand and model the processes that redistribute the chemical elements in the Earth s crust doc3040 none Cheney Spear New England has long been studied geologically, and the evolution of Central New England during the Devonian Acadian Orogeny is broadly understood as an early Devonian collisional event. However, there are a number of questions about the timing of metamorphism, assembly and exhumation of this terrane that are of fundamental significance in the development of this and any compressional orogen. This project will employ powerful new techniques of age dating to provide the detailed age control that was not available during the classic Acadian studies. Results are expected to help place the timing of peak metamorphism in a tectonic framework, to assess the possibility of time - transgressive metamorphism along strike and to evaluate scenarios for producing inverted metamorphic sequences. While focused on their classic orogen, knowledge of these relationships is applicable to developing models for the evolutions of all orogenic belts doc3043 none Suppe The Tian Shan intracontinental mountain range related to the Indian-Eurasian collision has been studied to understand the dynamic processes responsible for this type of orogenesis. However, the timing and short-term versus long-term rates of deformation are controversial, leading to models in which deformation in Tian Shan may have accelerated significantly in the last few millions of years. A goal of this study is to test these models by providing new constraints derived from growth strata analysis on the rate of deformation in Tian Shan over different timescales. Results will be applicable to understanding the Indian-Eurasian collision and should contribute to models of such collisions generally doc3044 none The PI continues her current research in algebraic combinatorics, focusing on topological and algebraic aspects of partially ordered sets and graph complexes. This involves further development of powerful tools such as shellability and fiber theorems. Such tools have been used and enhanced by the PI and her collaborators for the purpose of studying some important examples which include partially ordered sets related to the partition lattice and graph complexes related to the matching complex. The study of topological aspects of partially ordered sets grew out of the famous paper of Rota on the Moebius function of a partially ordered set. It provides a deep and fundamental link between combinatorics and other branches of mathematics such as topology, algebra and geometry. It also has applications in computer science. Research in complexity theory, knot theory, group theory and discrete geometry has inspired interest in studying the topology of graph complexes, a subject closely related to the topology of partially ordered sets. This research is in the general area of combinatorics. One of the goals of combinatorics is to find efficient methods for arranging, enumerating and manipulating discrete collections of objects. The behavior of discrete systems is extremely important to modern communications and computer systems. For example, the design of large networks, such as those occurring in telephone systems, and the design of algorithms in computer science deal with discrete sets of objects, and this makes use of combinatorial research doc3045 none Voight Numerous short-duration explosions occurred during August, September and October , at the Soufriere Hills Volcano, Montserrat, West Indies. These eruptions were accompanied by gravity collapse of heavy parts of the eruption column, that produced pumice and ash flows (pyroclastic flows) and ash hurricanes that moved sideways, into adjacent farmlands and formerly populated areas. Many of these eruptions were predicted, and we and other staff of Montserrat Volcano Observatory closely documented the eruptions by continuous seismic monitoring, measured surveys of the eruption clouds, photography, and video. Such data are rare, and in this project, we aim to quantify these eruptions, including the speed and trajectory of the explosion clouds, and then to compare these field-based data to sophisticated models of the eruptions. In our modeling, we will attempt to identify the magma and gas ratios in the eruption conduit before the explosion, and the pressure distribution. Then we will use this information as the starting condition for a multi-phase explosion model, in which separated solid and gas phases are allowed to expand dynamically upon release from the conduit tube. We can track the speeds and trajectories of the particles emitted from the conduit, and the particle densities of the erupting particle-and-gas cloud. We hope from this study to establish the main conditions in the conduit that control whether the clouds will continue to rise vertically, or will collapse to form dangerous pyroclastic flows. Pyroclastic flows are the major cause of loss of life in explosive eruptions worldwide, and the improved understanding obtained from this project should help to reduce hazards at a number of locations in this country and abroad doc3046 none Hitzman & Nelson Understanding the geometry and nature of fluid flow in the earth s upper crust is critically important to a number of geoscience disciplines related to societal and industrial activities, including petroleum geology, ore deposit geology, hydrogeology, geothermal energy, and seismic hazard analysis. Crustal fluid flow is commonly controlled by structural permeability of fault and fracture networks. Although fault-fracture flow networks have been studied extensively through modeling and 2-D field studies, few 3-D field studies have been undertaken on ancient flow networks. Zn-Pb deposits in the Canning basin of Western Australia provide a unique natural laboratory to investigate crustal fluid flow in 3-D. Metalliferous basinal brines flowed along fault-fracture networks as the basin compacted and dewatered, and deposited metal sulfide minerals when the fluids reached permeable, reactive carbonate formations. The area was unaffected by deformation following mineralization. We propose to build a 3-D model of the paleo-flow network by mapping the distribution of sulfide minerals, deposited along faults and fractures, using superb 2-D surface exposure, 3-D underground exposures, 500+ kilometers of diamond drill core, and extensive seismic reflection, aeromagnetic, and gravity data. Cross-cutting vein relationships and petrographically determined sulfide parageneses will be used to determine the relative timing of mineralizing events, thus extending the model to 4-D (time doc3047 none Grove The research will investigate the processes that lead to the generation of magmas in the earth s upper mantle. The methods of experimental petrology will be used and melting experiments will be performed at elevated temperature ( - oC) and pressure (2 - 5 GPa) under anhydrous and H2O-undersaturated conditions. Samples used for the experiments will be metasomatized mantle analog compositions and natural basalt compositions. Two types of experiments will be performed. The first set of experiments will produce melts saturated with mantle minerals (olivine, orthopyroxene, clinopyroxene and garnet) and the variation in composition of the melt will be used to develop predictive analytic models for the conditions of melt generation in the subcontinental mantle. The second set of experiments will use selected naturally occurring basaltic magmas from a range of continental tectonic settings (the Tibetan Plateau, Sierra Nevada and Mexican back arc) and will determine the conditions of melt generation in these settings. From these results models will be developed that evaluate the controls of pressure, temperature, H2O and variations in mantle bulk composition on mantle melting reactions. The experiments and models will provide constraints on the processes of stabilization of sub-continental lithosphere, mantle flow and melting beneath continents and the influence of the flux of volatiles through the mantle doc3048 none Rob McCaffrey The Bird s Head region at the northern edge of the Australian continent contains the world s fastest slipping continental strike-slip system. Preliminary evidence indicates that block rotation accompanies the shear. The investigators propose to improve our understanding of the mechanics of distributed shear in continents and of block rotations by densifying GPS measurements across the Irian Jaya shear zone. They will install about 40 new GPS sites and measure them twice over a 2.5 year interval. These data will allow the investigators to test whether or not the distribution of deformation within the Irian Jaya shear zone is consistent with floating block models in which crustal blocks are moved by tractions on their bases imparted by a flowing mantle doc3049 none Many stochastic programming problems can be formulated as problems of optimization of an expected value function. Quite often the corresponding expected value function cannot be computed exactly and should be approximated, say by Monte Carlo methods. In fact, in many interesting examples, Monte Carlo simulation is the only reasonable way of estimating the expected value function. It turns out that if the underline probability distribution is discrete and the approximating problems are piecewise linear and convex, then with probability approaching one exponentially fast, with increase of the sample size, an optimal solution of the Monte Carlo approximation problem provides an exact optimal solution of the expected value problem. This gives a theoretical justification for the following approach to a numerical solution of such problems. Construct and solve a Monte Carlo approximation problem based on a relatively small sample. Repeat this procedure several times and validate calculated solutions until a stopping criterion is satisfied. The goal of this project is to develop this method. The method is ideally suited for parallel computations and some preliminary experiments showed good results. Optimization of real world systems almost always involves randomness which can come in various conceptual forms such as uncertainty, lack of information, natural variability of the data, etc. One may think, for example, about optimizing a manufacturing process when the demand for produced goods is uncertain. It turns out that solving stochastic optimization problems involving randomness is much more difficult than solving deterministic problems, both conceptually and numerically. However, there is obvious practical need for developing a methodology for dealing with stochastic problems and in recent years this was a very active area of scientific research. This proposal is aimed at developing numerical techniques for solving a particular class of stochastic problems. If successful, it will allow numerical solutions of considerably larger problems, which in turn may result in bigger variety of applications. Alexander Shapiro , Tel. 404- ; Fax: 404- , E-mail : ashapiro@isye.gatech.edu http: www.isye.gatech.edu ~ashapiro ISyE, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA - doc3050 none Rutherford This proposal involves three projects, all directed at developing a more complete understanding of how the magmatic processes such as magma mixing, crystallization, crystal-melt separation, and degassing occur in gas-rich, subduction zone volcanic systems. The tasks involve a range of analytical work (i.e., electron microprobe, ion-probe, F.T.I.R spectroscopy) on samples collected during field study, and on samples prepared experimentally under controlled P, T, and fO2, conditions. The first project is an investigation of the eruption of Mt. Katmai where three compositionally distinct magmas were erupted in a single event. The study is simultaneously an investigation of magma mixing processes, and a test of the zoned magma storage region hypothesis proposed by Hildreth. The second task is one in which fundamental data will be obtained on the composition of volcanic gases as a function of P, T, fO2, and the composition of coexisting crystals and melt. This study will consider CO2-H2O-S composition gas phases. The third project is a study of the volcanic eruptions which occurred almost simultaneously at Black Butte and adjacent Mount Shasta in California. The objective of this work is to determine the pre-eruption magma condition for the two eruptions, and to develop an expression relating magmatic conditions and the compositions of coexisting plagioclase and hornblende which are prominent phases in these eruptions doc3051 none Yellowstone National Park (YNP) represents a unique setting wherein significant geothermal activity occurs. These thermal areas include aquatic systems as well as soils, and vary significantly with respect to temperature, chemistry, and physical properties. There is an exceptional opportunity to observe, follow, and quantify changes in a soil microbial population that occur in response to elevated temperature. Typically, environments that are the focus of thermophile investigations are mature, established geothermal features (relative to the human experience and known records). This preemptive study will take advantage of naturally occurring temperature gradients that have recently surfaced across the landscape at one specific location in YNP. These recent changes provide a rare opportunity, whereby thermophiles and or the development of thermophile communities can be studied in real time. As opposed to other neothermal environments such as deep sea vents which are logistically difficult to access, the research site is easily accessible and sampled. Using a combination of molecular and culturing techniques, the microbial community in this evolving thermal environment is being studied over time, with apparent alterations in community structure being correlated with changes in soil temperature and chemical properties doc3052 none Hanlon The investigator designs effective algorithms to identify epistatic effects that contribute to a complex quantitative phenotype. The algorithms apply to datasets that, for each individual in a sample, identifies alleles at a fixed set of markers along with the value of the quanitative trait. The algorithms seek an optimum fit for the phenotype as a sum of epistatic effects. The approach is to perform repeated searches for an optimum fit in the space of all possible combinations of effects. The search utilizes random walk hill-climbing techniques. These hill-climbs are adaptive in the sense that certain parameters, which control the choice of steps in the random walks, evolve based on the outcomes of previous walks. It is widely accepted that the genetic components of most interesting quantitative traits (eg. blood pressure, height) involve interactions between many genes. So, computational methods to infer the genetic basis of quantitative traits must include an analysis of epistatic effects, i.e., instances where the choice of allele at two or more genetic markers influences the value of the quantitative trait in ways that are different from the sum of the effects of the individual alleles. In this project the investigator develops computational methods to identify these epistatic effects by a process of doing repeated searches through the space of possible effects looking for ones that explain a significant amount of the variation of the trait. These searches are self-educating in the sense that later searches learn from earlier searches. As the number of searches increases, the adaptive mechanism focuses the search on particularly strong epistatic effects doc3053 none Jagannathan Ramanujam, Louisiana State University The performance of programs on modern processors depends critically on how their memory access characteristics can be matched to the multi-level memory hierarchy commonly used in these processor architectures. The goal of this project is derive compiler transformations to improve the memory performance of scientific computations. In particular, a combination of program restructuring and memory layout transformations of data will be derived to handle a larger class of programming constructs than perfect nests and regular memory accesses. This project will study several important problems, including: (a) strategies to integrate tiling and data shackling in order to effectively orchestrate the movement of data through memory hierarchies; (b) issues in the design of a sophisticated locality-enhancing compiler for regular and irregular codes; (c) extensive experimental evaluation of locality-enhancing transformations; (d) insights on the interaction between techniques for exploiting instruction-level parallelism and register-level reuse; and (e) possible insights on improvements in the design of memory systems for applications, including the design of application-specific cache architectures. Most importantly, these compiler techniques will allow users to easily exploit the enormous computation power in modern processor architectures doc3054 none The PIs form a research group whose work emphasizes the connections between model theory (a branch of mathematical logic) and other parts of mathematics. They have established a successful, coordinated research program and an excellent environment for postdocs, graduate students, and visitors. They plan to build on that current level of activity by adding one postdoc and by providing research support for three graduate students, as well as by bringing in some more established researchers for shorter periods of time and by organizing meetings for dissemination of new developments. The general aim of the PIs and the group working around them is to increase the effectiveness of model theory as a tool in mathematics, and to use feedback from these interactions to guide the further development of model theory itself. The work that would be supported by this grant covers most areas of model theory and its applications doc3055 none Internet traffic has increased at an exponential rate over the past decade. Much of recent explosion in Internet data can be attributed to the phenomenal growth in the number of new users, the migration of corporate data to the Internet, and a surge in usage of multimedia as a content delivery medium. As a result, Internet traffic has doubled every few months and shows no signs of slowing down. Another development is the ever increasing demand for multimedia applications such as ReadAudio, Windows Media and others. These applications would benefit greatly if the underlying network infrastructure provided some form of Quality of Service (QoS) guarantee. Attempting to keep pace with the bandwidth and other QoS requirements for multimedia applications, network equipment vendors and Internet service providers have continuously developed and deployed faster routers and higher speed links at the edges of backbone networks. Yet current demand for QoS guarantees within the routers still far exceed the supply. Recent development of Internet differentiated services (DiffServ) aims to provide services such as premium and assured services in addition to the existing best-effort service within routers in order to satisfy the demand for bandwidth and other QoS requirements. However several routing problems with respect to QoS guarantees are still open. The researchers will investigate the limitations of the current IP routers and their routing algorithms leading to the development of a high-performance QoS routing framework. The researchers will apply two major ideas: differentiated routing, deploying different types of routing protocols for different service classes in an integrated fashion, and parallel algorithms and structures within the routers to decrease the routing overhead. Hence, primary objectives of the proposed framework are to implement and theoretically support two innovative elements: (1) differentiated routing services and protocols to provide differentiation in routing decisions depending on QoS requirements, and (2) a QoS-aware router architecture with parallel computation on multiple general purpose processors to achieve cost effective, scalable and high-throughput routing. The first objective, exploration of differentiated routing, will allow the researchers to provide QoS-aware routing decision solutions within DiffServ networks. The second objective, investigation of parallel algorithms and structures within a QoS-aware router architecture, will allow the researchers to provide fast solutions, hence low per-packet routing overhead, to three major problems within DiffServ routers: routing table computation, packet forwarding and packet scheduling. To achieve these two objectives, the researchers will investigate concepts and theoretical framework for high-performance QoS routing, and verify concepts and theoretical framework via simulations and prototype implementation. What makes this research feasible and promising are recent developments in QoS-aware systems, parallel algorithms and end-to-end QoS routing algorithms. These components make it possible to support flexible and generic high-performance QoS routing framework, accessible to any distributed multimedia applications doc3056 none Kohn The Himalaya are the product of collision between India and Asia, and the Main Central Thrust (MCT) is a major fault that has accommodated Indo-Asian convergence. A longstanding problem in understanding the dynamics of the MCT is explaining its inverted metamorphic sequence: ordinarily pressure (P) and temperature (T) increase downward, yet across the MCT, structurally higher rocks preserve higher metamorphic P s and T s than rocks below. Different explanations for formation and preservation of inverted metamorphism imply different pressure-temperature-time (P-T-t) histories for each rock. The purpose of this study is to characterize P-T-t paths in a transect across the MCT and evaluate competing hypotheses. This work is important for understanding both the Indo-Asian collision and the tectonic significance of inverted metamorphic sequences in general doc3057 none This project will test Greenberg s cognitive-linguistic theory of kinship universals, an extension of Hage and Harary s research on lattice structures in the evolution of kinship systems. The objective is to discover, using models from graph theory, cross-cultural and historical marking relations in systems of kinship classification. The researchers will show that lexical universals are found in the domain of kinship just as they are in the domains of color and ethnobiology. The research will demonstrate the necessity of using comparative linguistic data to determine the direction of change in kinship terminologies and the value of such data in elucidating, through controlled comparison, their sociological determinants. The discovery of convergent developments in kinship systems belonging to different linguistic families can then be used to evaluate theories concerning the evolution of kinship systems in general. The discovery of marking asymmetries in kinship terminologies will have important implications for problems of typology and for the reconstruction of prehistoric kinship systems. This project will contribute scientific knowledge in cultural anthropology through the discovery and explanation of lawful regularities in kinship, the most basic of all human classification systems doc3058 none The Novikov conjecture is one of the fundamental unsolved problems of manifold theory. Its history is a fascinating journey through a remarkably varied mathematical landscape. The conjecture has provoked vigorous exchanges of ideas between widely separated subjects, and (like other famous unsolved problems) it has generated lively new mathematics of its own. The Baum Connes conjecture transports the fundamental aspects of the Novikov conjecture to operator algebra theory, and makes new contacts with representation theory, spin geometry and other areas. Very recently, striking progress has been made on the both conjectures. Methods and ideas involving dimension theory, amenable actions of groups, Banach space geometry and combinatorics have played essential roles. An unusually exciting opportunity has arisen to spark interaction among some quite widely separated fields. Some of the core questions are so basic that one can even expect important exchanges at the student level. The issues are so broad that the ordinary mathematical scheme of small, two or three person, collaborative efforts will not give the most rapid and efficient progress. The key objectives of the proposed program are as follows: Marshall forces from topology, analysis and from several less apparent areas for a general attack on the Novikov and Baum Connes conjectures. Create a rapid and effcient means of providing the essential tools for continuing research in this broad area. Broaden the communication and cooperation between US and foreign mathematicians through a coordinated program of visits. Offer effective training opportunities for graduate students, giving them exposure to an unusual breadth of mathematical ideas and expertise doc3059 none Boles The objective of this project is to develop a quantitative model to explain geologic examples of clay-quartz and clay-carbonate surface interactions. In a general way this work will lead to a fundamental understanding of the interaction of dissimilar mineral surfaces separated by water films. We plan experiments to measure surface forces between micas and silica separated by water films. From these experiments we will develop a model predicting short-range adhesion forces and long-range hydration and colloidal forces, and diffusion in molecularly thin aqueous fluid films trapped between two dissimilar mineral surfaces. The effects of temperature and pressure on these interactions will also be investigated. The experiments will be guided by the composition of natural materials exhibiting clay-mineral interaction which are found over a wide range of geologic conditions doc3060 none De Loera The investigator studies the combinatorial and algebraic properties of optimal subdivisions, coverings, and triangulations of convex polytopes. He develops algorithms for the computation of such optimal objects. Criteria of optimality that are explored include minimization of the number of simplices, of the total sum of lengths or areas of simplices, and of the average volume of the simplices. He also develops software for counting all lattice points inside a low-dimensional polytope and for computing their integer hulls. The technique also allows the fast computation of volumes. Specific problems are considered to assess efficiency of the software, for example the optimal arrangements of n points, in a sphere of fixed radius, that maximize the number of lattice points inside their convex hull. Algorithms for the software are adaptations of new techniques, due to Barvinok, that are based on covering polyhedra with unimodular simplices. This project also includes methods from convexity, combinatorics, integer and linear programming, commutative algebra, complexity, and intensive computer experimentation. The results of this work should be of interest in integer programming, combinatorics, and symbolic-algebraic computing. Informally speaking, the first part of this project can be thought of as an attempt to understand how to break or decompose objects, such as cubes and polygons, into elementary blocks or pieces efficiently. This is perhaps reminiscent of creating jigsaw puzzles. The blocks used in the decomposition are, for instance, tetrahedra, triangles, or smaller cubes. An example of efficient decomposition is to use the smallest number of pieces. The second part of the project involves establishing practical computer software for counting regularly distributed points within regular boundaries. Examples of regularly distributed points are arrangements of atoms or crystals. Many of the theoretical questions under study are motivated by problems in computer graphics and computer visualization (via the design of economic meshes for modeling figures), data security and computation (in the context of RSA encryption, which is used in internet transactions), and operations research (via certain techniques for solving integer programs when levels of uncertainty are expected). The training of students is an important component of the project doc3061 none Quality-of-Service (QoS) routing is an important traffic engineering mechanism for providing requisite services for many emerging applications on the Internet. In QoS routing, paths for flows are selected based upon knowledge of the resource availability (referred to as QoS State) at network nodes (i.e., routers) and the QoS requirements of the flows. It is expected that QoS routing will choose, among the many possible choices, a path that has sufficient resources to accommodate the QoS requirement of a given flow. Because of its awareness of the network QoS state, QoS routing, if done appropriately, can significantly improve network throughput. In this proposal, the researchers present a novel approach to QoS routing -the localized QoS routing approach. Unlike the conventional global QoS routing approach that requires network-wide exchange of QoS states among routers, the proposed localized routing approach attempts to infer the network QoS state from locally collected flow statistics such as flow arrival departure rates and flow blocking probabilities, and performs path selection based on this local information. As a result, the proposed localized QoS routing approach avoids the drawbacks of the conventional global QoS approach such as degraded performance in the presence of inaccurate routing information. Furthermore, it has the advantage of minimal communication overhead, no processing overhead at core routers, and easy deployability. The researchers propose to study and develop localized QoS routing algorithms using a novel adaptive proportional routing framework. Adaptive proportional routing exploits the inherent randomness in path selection by proportioning flows among multiple paths between a source and a destination. Flow proportions are determined based on the perceived quality of these paths, and are dynamically adjusted in response to the changing network conditions. Using adaptive proportional routing framework, the researchers will focus on the following aspects of their localized QoS routing approach. Theoretical Foundations: The researchers plan to develop theoretical models under which the behavior of localized QoS routing can be studied and analyzed. Their insights will then be used to guide the design of practical schemes. Proportional Source Routing: The researchers will develop proportional source routing schemes using local flow statistics collected either at route-level or link-level. Through theoretical analysis and simulations, the researchers will study the adaptivity and stability of these schemes. Proportional Next-hop Routing: The researchers also will explore applicability of localized adaptive proportional routing to hop-by-hop path selection and will develop proportional next-hop flow routing schemes using locally gathered aggregate flow statistics. Hierarchical Proportional Routing: The researchers plan to study methods for topology and QoS state aggregation using the localized adaptive proportional routing framework, and to develop hierarchical proportional routing schemes using a combination of proportional source routing and proportional next-hop routing. Proportional Hybrid Routing: The researchers will develop hybrid QoS routing schemes that 1) combine infrequent global QoS update mechanisms and localized flow proportioning methods, and 2) integrate on-line path selection with off-line traffic engineering flow placement. The fundamental trade-off between the system overhead, the time scale of control and the system performance will be investigated in these contexts. Implementation: The researchers plan to implement the proposed localized QoS routing schemes in a testbed. They will measure the performance and processing overhead of these schemes under real traffic settings. The deliverables from the research effort will include journal and conference publications, technical reports and memorandums, Internet Drafts, and software prototype implementation doc3062 none Mogilner Three mechanisms - protrusion of the lamellipodial actin network, graded adhesion of the cytoskeleton to the surface, and cytoskeletal contraction - acting in concert are both necessary and sufficient to produce highly effective cell movement. Actual rates and forces of protrusion depend on local concentrations of actin monomers and polymers and a host of actin capping, nucleation, polymerization and adhesion proteins near the cell s leading edge. The investigator derives partial differential equations that couple the chemical kinetics of all these protein concentrations to the model of cytoskeletal mechanics. These equations are solved analytically and quantify molecular mechanisms of protrusion localization at the cell s leading edge and regulation of protrusion rates and forces. Experiments suggest that the force of the cytoskeletal contraction is myosin powered. The investigator models the dynamics of actin filaments and myosin clusters in physical and angular space and describes the actomyosin dynamic contraction mechanism quantitatively. Using this description, the investigator analyzes mechanochemical feedback loops between systems of traction, protrusion and graded adhesion within the frameworks of interactive computer models varying in complexity. These models are applied to migration of fish keratocyte and nematode amoeboid sperm. Comparison of theoretical results with experiment clarify the roles of cytoskeletal, adhesion and membrane systems in cellular movements and concepts of motility, polarizability and directionality. The models allow testing of plausible scenarios of cell movements. Migration of animal cells is a fundamentally important process underlying the phenomena of wound healing, morphogenesis and cancer. Current experimental research is aimed at dissecting the complex processes of migration into simpler phenomena that can be more easily analyzed. The investigator models these motility phenomena theoretically, which will allow biologists to test quantitatively the existing qualitative ideas. Specifically, the investigator examines mathematically the molecular basis and the principles of self-organization of cell mechanics and develops computer models that reproduce the observed patterns of cell locomotion. Results of the modelling will provide a new interdisciplinary level of understanding cell movements and new methods of predicting cell behavior in important medical and technological situations doc3063 none The late Archean (ca. 2.7 Ga) is characterized by widespread occurrence of 13 C-depleted kerogens which suggests microbial methane recycling was a dominant process in the global carbon cycle. In addition, available molecular and isotopic observations for this time suggest that aerobic organisms were present, possibly supported by oxygenated microenvironments within a variety of depositional systems. We propose to evaluate relationships among depositional environments and biogeocheniical signatures recorded in late Archean organic matter for core and outcrop samples of the Tumbiana and Jeerinah Formation and equivalent units in the Pilbara Craton in Western Australia. Our approach integrates sedimentological and stratigraphic observations with analyses of molecular and kerogen isotopic and chemical properties. We will provide observations linking depositional environmental conditions with molecular and isotopic signatures of ancient life and will attempt to test the importance of environmental control on microbial ecosystems and carbon and oxygen cycling on the early Earth doc3064 none This proposal was jointly assessed with the EPDT Program Director Dr. James Mink as truly Integrative Systems in nature. It draws on the ideas from the electromechanical wave propagation for a novel approach to the transient stability analysis problem in large-scale electric power systems. The proposal deals with development of a macro-scale analytical tool for electromechanical wave propagation phenomena in electric networks. The proposal and the activity proposed are based on the assumption that their previous research on the wave propagation theory is valid and accepted for power system transient analysis. The problem addressed in these proposals is that of developing efficient models for the study of electromechanical wave propagation on very large scale, extensive networks. This phenomenon is poorly understood, but could have significant harmful effects on the national power system in the future. The PIs draw on their extensive relevant experience to outline a comprehensive novel approach to modeling and studying of the problem. The proposal is to study the network as a continuum in which sources and sinks with their pertinent; physical characteristics are located at specific points. Tools developed in other fields, such as wave propagation in plasmas, are utilized, along with the availability of data from synchronized satellite-based simultaneous measurement of rotor angles over wide areas. Work on this project has been underway for several years, in which time techniques have been developed for obtaining the continuum model from real time system data. The proposed methodology could turn out to be widely applicable and of significant usefulness as restructuring advances toward much more complex operation than has ever been envisioned in the past doc3031 none Collaborative research: Chemical Fingerprinting of Ash Beds in the Terminal Proterozoic Nama Group, Namibia Beverly Saylor. Warren Huff. The terminal Proterozoic to Cambrian Nama Group of Namibia is one of the most comprehensive records of end Proterozoic events. The Schwarzrand Subgroup of the Nama Group contains 15 stratigraphically distinct volcanic ash beds, which are constrained by U-Pb geochronology to a time span of at most 6 m.y. These event beds have tremendous chronostratigraphic value as high-resolution, widespread, time-parallel layers. This feasibility study will evaluate the potential for using geochemical fingerprinting techniques to uniquely identify and correlate ash beds in the Schwarzrand Suybgroup. Correlations of some widespread ash beds are already well established based on the physical stratigraphy. Whole rock and fluid inclusion studies of samples from these beds will control for within bed variability of chemical signature. Three widely separated, complete sections of the Schwarzrand Subgroup preserve nearly all the ash beds in replicate. Comprehensive analyses of ash bed samples from these sections ill compare between bed vs. within bed compositional differences and will test the resolution of the fingerprinting method doc3066 none Liu The Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State University develops an integrated computational approach in core subjects of the graduate and upper-undergraduate curricula. The approach is based on new courses on computational thermodynamics, computational kinetics and integrated systems materials design, that integrate fundamental principles and advanced computational tools. Computer-based educational tools will help students connect abstract thermodynamic concepts with the properties of real world materials and mathematical kinetics with practical materials processing procedures, and thus remove the common perception among students that thermodynamics and kinetics are problematical to learn and difficult to apply in practice doc3067 none Tedesco Dr. Tedesco will develop a three-dimensional model of the asteroid belt consisting of orbital elements, diameters, and albedos for all asteroids that can become brighter than apparent visual magnitude 25. This model will then be improved using extant and contemporaneous observations at visual through infrared wavelengths. The improved model will be used to refine our knowledge of the current asteroid size-frequency distribution and to aid in planning future observations at those wavelengths that address this issue. Measured albedos for approximately 2,400 asteroids will be used to estimate the albedos and diameters for real asteroids lacking them and to generate albedos and absolute magnitudes for the statistical asteroids. This work is funded through the Planetary Astronomy Program in the Division of Astronomical Sciences doc3068 none Napoli, Joseph L. The tenth biannual FASEB Summer Research Conference on Retinoids will be held June 25-30, , at the Copper Mountain Conference Center in Colorado. The study of retinoids (vitamin A and its metabolites and analogs) promises to provide fundamental insights into the mechanisms of diverse basic cellular processes, including apoptosis, vertebrate development, and transcriptional regulation. This FASEB conference provides the home base for a rapidly growing and diversifying international community of scientists who work with retinoids. The interdisciplinary, topically diverse program of this meeting is planned to highlight major developments, foment new ideas, facilitate in-depth collegial interactions, reinforce existing collaborations, and kindle new ones. Through its length and structure, the conference provides ample opportunities for more junior investigators to interact with senior scientists from this country and abroad. All attendees, including speakers, are encouraged to present a poster. Outstanding posters by junior investigators will be selected by a committee; these investigators will be invited to present their research in talks to the conference. The conference will begin with a plenary lecture by Professor Pierre Chambon. There will be nine sessions consisting of 49 invited speakers participants and approximately 10 oral presenters of posters. Each session chairperson will provide a brief overview. Speakers will be encouraged to present their most recent unpublished work-indeed, one criterion in the selection of speakers was the likelihood of significant unpublished advances at the time of the meeting. Previous conferences have been very successful, judging by the turnout and feedback of the attendees. Thus, this series has an excellent record on which to base theYear conference. This series of well-attended research meetings has been the sole national and the major international forum that address the full spectrum of retinoid biology. This award will be used to defray the meeting expenses of junior investigators doc3069 none Shearer A combined experimental, analytical, and computational study of fundamental problems in the dynamics of thin viscous films and fluid interfaces is proposed. The recent discovery of stable undercompressive waves in driven films has created the opportunity for a unique collaboration between experiments and mathematical theory. This research program will include related studies of solid-liquid-vapor interfaces, moving contact lines, and surface tension effects. Analytical and computational studies will be integrated with a series of experiments that includes a search for undercompressive waves in a spin coating geometry, motion of contact lines near room- temperature critical points, and high- speed video imaging of the dynamics of singularity formation in finite- time rupture of fluid interfaces. Mathematical analysis will include models for film rupture, stability of driven contact lines, and numerical analysis of schemes for computing these problems. Liquid films and moving contact lines arise in problems ranging from industrial design of paints and microchip fabrication to medical applications including contact lenses and the lining of the lung. All of these problems involve interactions across widely different length-scales in which the physical laws are not clearly understood. This is a collaboration between researchers from the Mathematics (Bertozzi, Witelski) and Physics (Behringer) Departments at Duke University and the Mathematics Department at North Carolina State University (Shearer). This effort combines mathematical modeling, analysis, and numerical simulation with new laboratory experiments to study fundamental problems in driven films and moving contact lines. Computational and mathematical models will direct the design of experiments investigating new phenomena in spin coating processes and dewetting films. The program will involve undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral associates, and visiting scientists from other institutions. This research will foster curriculum developments in the Departments of Mathematics, Physics and the Center for Nonlinear and Complex Systems at Duke University doc3070 none With the shrinking size of tetherless computing devices and increasing diversity in capabilities, the value of ubiquitous computing is rapidly becoming real. As these devices proliferate in number, their configuration, management, and organization as ad-hoc networking environments proves to be a challenging research domain. In most scenarios the interaction of these devices enables a broad range of applications. A group of such devices can communicate with each other to achieve a goal specific to the application, i.e., they perform a higher-level task or service by communicating intelligently with each other. This proposal is to investigate and develop a distributed framework for executing complex tasks not by using pre-configured devices but by selecting suitable computing elements based on task requirements and device characteristics. A prerequisite and enabling component for this work is the creation of a set of self-organization protocols for connecting and managing these computing elements with minimal application intervention during the lifetime of the task. Such protocols are referred to as smart protocols. Existing protocols for organizing devices are constrained by their dependence on available infrastructure primarily because of the use of directory-based service discovery and are therefore less valuable for a truly ad-hoc computing environment. A key premise of this proposal is that the nature of the task can be exploited to organize ubiquitous computing devices into logical task based groups. Tasks are then represented by dependency or task graphs that describe how devices interact with each other. A distributed mechanism is proposed for constructing and embedding a task graph on a network of computing elements for \smart task execution. Additionally, a task-aware routing protocol for reducing routing delays is proposed. An expected outcome of this approach is the ease with which larger, more complex services can be composed from smaller services. These protocols can thus be rapidly deployed in ad-hoc environments enabling new applications in diverse areas such as smart homes and offices, distributed robotics, sensor networks, large scale distributed computing, smart battlefields, crisis management, etc. Specific tasks of this research are: (1) the development of efficient distributed algorithms for discovery of suitable devices that can together perform a distributed task from within a sea of tethered or tetherless devices, and protocols for execution of those distributed tasks; (2) the development of task aware routing protocols using key link-state information; (3) specification for the use of state augmentation techniques for handling nomadicity of users and devices as seamlessly as possible; (4) the simulation of the above protocols using public domain network simulators; and (5) the implementation of a proof-of-concept prototype using commodity hardware and software doc3071 none Alcock The exploration of the outer Solar System has developed rapidly in the past decade, with the discovery of large numbers of small, solid objects in the trans-Neptunian region. These objects have been found with CCD cameras on medium and large sized telescopes, which to date have surveyed ~100 square degrees of sky. This new project, led by Dr. Charles Alcock of the University of Pennsylvania, is intended to provide an important complement to recent, very successful surveys of the outer Solar System. Specifically, Dr. Alcock s survey will cover ~ square degrees with high sensitivity to objects in the size range between Pluto and recently discovered trans-Neptunian objects (TNO). A powerful observing system developed for the MACHO project (a project to detect massive objects via the technique of gravitational lensing) will be utilized for the survey. This award is made through the Planetary Astronomy Program doc3072 none Hilbish & Gilg In Southwest England two mussel species, Mytilus edulis and M. galloprovincialis, interbreed and produce fertile hybrid offspring. Within this region individuals that are more closely related to M. galloprovincialis have better survival as adults than individuals that are more closely related to M. edulis. While you would predict that this advantage would result in M. galloprovincialis out-competing M. edulis and taking over the region, this hybrid zone has remained in the same location with the same proportions of the two species for at least 20 years. This study will determine what evolutionary factors are stabilizing the hybrid zone and offsetting the directional selection favoring M. galloprovincialis. Two potential factors are gene flow and natural selection favoring Mytilus edulis in the larval stage. It is possible that larvae that settle in the hybrid zone are predominantly coming from pure M. edulis populations and that this influx could offset natural selection. Larvae that settle in this region will be collected and their probable population of origin will be determined using genetic markers. This information will determine how far mussel larvae generally travel and in what direction. It is also possible that natural selection favoring M. edulis is occurring in the larval stage. This can be determined by raising larval mussels in the laboratory and determining changes in the genetic composition of the larvae doc3073 none McCollom The proposed research is an experimental investigation of the reactivity of organic acids at conditions pertinent to geologic environments. Organic acids are frequently the most abundant dissolved organic compounds in geologic fluids, and have been implicated to play a significant role in a number of geologic processes including the generation and migration of oil and natural gas, transportation of metals in ore-forming solutions, evolution of porosity in sedimentary basins, weathering, and subsurface geomicrobial activities. Previous attempts to evaluate decomposition rates of acetic acid and other organic acids have left large uncertainties in the behavior of these compounds under geologic conditions. These uncertainties will be addressed in the proposed research through a new experimental approach that involves a better reaction apparatus and a more comprehensive analysis of reaction products. Specific issues to be addressed include: (1) the relative contributions of decarboxylation and oxidation to the thermal decomposition of acetate and longer chain carboxylic acids, (2) the impact of chemical environment (oxidation state, pH, presence of dissolved sulfur compounds) on which decomposition pathway predominates, (3) whether CO2 and acetate can attain a state of metastable thermodynamic equilibrium under some circumstances, (4) whether condensation of organic acids or their reaction products can lead to synthesis of longer chain hydrocarbons in aqueous solutions. We expect these experiments to resolve the outstanding uncertainties in the reactivity of organic acids and allow quantitative evaluations to be made of the role of organic acids in geologic processes doc3074 none Wang Phosphorus plays a decisive role in the biological world and is a limiting-nutrient in many fresh water ecosystems. However, the widespread use of synthetic fertilizers over the past decades has disrupted that balance. The high phosphorus loading due to human activities has been blamed for upsetting ecosystems by causing harmful algal blooms in lakes and rivers as well as in coastal waters. An increased phosphorus influx has also been linked to changes in native flora and fauna in many wetland ecosystems. Determining the source of phosphorus can help in understanding the cycling and transformation of phosphorus in aquatic environments. The goal of this research is to explore whether the oxygen isotope O-18 can be used as a tracer to distinguish fertilizer phosphate from natural phosphate. This will involve (1) analyzing the stable oxygen isotopic composition of fertilizers, and (2) sampling and analyzing the delta O-18 values of dissolved phosphate in unpolluted aquatic systems. The working hypothesis of this study is that phosphate in fertilizers is primarily derived from marine phosphate and should have delta O-18 values reflecting the marine environment. Because fresh water (in general) is depleted in O-18 relative to seawater, phosphate from the natural phosphorus cycling in fresh water ecosystems is expected to carry delta O-18 signature distinct from the phosphate in fertilizers. This project represents a new research direction for the principle investigator (PI). The support from a POWRE award will allow the PI to develop the necessary preliminary results for a promising avenue of research in the biogeochemical cycling of phosphorus. Since the PI is a tenure-earning assistant professor, the POWRE support will help her establish an active research program on campus that will involve students, assist in her academic advancement and strengthen her case for promotion to associate professor. Also, it will allow her to play a key role in the multi-departmental efforts involving the Departments of Geological Sciences, Oceanography, Chemistry and Biology at Florida State University (FSU) and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory to develop a strong graduate program in Molecular Ecology and Environmental Science at FSU doc373 none Simpson Gromet Argentina contains basement rocks that are key to understanding Paleozoic evolution of the paleo-Pacific margin of Gondwana and the possible relationship of events there to the development of the Appalachian margin of Laurentia. Recent work in the structurally complex rocks of Eastern Sierras Pampeanas has produced data in conflict with predictions of existing models of the evolution of this margin by a continental collision. This project will test and further investigate the possibility that the structures and metamorphic signatures are the result of a continental margin accretionary prism that underwent ridge subduction instead. Results have considerable implications to attempts to reassemble the Gondwana supercontinent doc3076 none Smith The Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite database will be used to develop Near-Infrared (NIR), Mid-Infrared (MIR), and Far-Infrared (FIR) light curves of carbon and oxygen-rich Mira stars. These new light curves will be compared to visual light curves. This will provide, for the first time, the link between photospheric variations and circumstellar shell variations. At present, MIR or FIR variability has been observed in a handful of stars. Generally, only a small fraction of the visual light curve has been sampled. The COBE DIRBE instrument data will be used to provide information to increase the sample size dramatically, generally with better sampling of the light curve. This data will be used to search for phase lags between the optical and infrared light curves and to search for differences in the amplitude of the variations at different wavelengths. The result of the research will be an atlas of infrared light curves of Mira variable stars. The atlas will contain the photometric data as well as estimates of the circumstellar parameters. These results will provide strong constraints on current models of dust formation, destruction, and heating in circumstellar envelopes. This project is funded by the Division of Astronomical Sciences and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate doc3077 none With National Science Foundation support Drs. Harold Dibble and Shannon McPherron will conduct four seasons of archaeological excavation and analysis at the site of Pech de l Aze IV located in the Dordogne region of France. First excavated by the (now deceased) French archaeologist, Francois Bordes, the site has played a major role in controversies surrounding the development of human culture in Western Europe. The site contains multiple levels of Mousterian materials which include abundant lithic and faunal remains. Attributable to Neanderthal people, the site documents behavioral variation over a significant period of the Upper Pleistocene and numerous researchers have attempted to interpret this variability in terms of tribal movement, activity differentiation and directional change over time. This debate is important because of divergent scientific views on the basic cognitive abilities, the social organization and ultimately the fate of European Neanderthal peoples. While the Bordes excavated material is massive in amount and well documented - an excavation of similar scale today would likely be prohibitively expensive today - relevant stratigraphic and environmental data were not collected. Drs. Dibble and McPherron have analyzed the excavated materials and shall now return to the site to collect the necessary remaining information. Through carefully controlled excavations, they will collect fresh dating samples, undertake full sedimentological and geophysical studies, asses site formation processes and possible post-depositional disturbances and also evaluate the nature and degree of possible excavator bias during recovery. They will use the information collected not only to provide a richer contextual setting for the original materials but also to answer specific research questions: what is the nature of Mousterian assemblage variability and what factors explain the changes observed over time? What is the role of raw materials on Mousterian assemblage variability? What is the nature of Mousterian subsistence economy? This research will provide data of interest to many archaeologists and shed light on the early prehistory of Europe doc3078 none International Symposium on Advanced Control of Chemical Processes (ADCHEM), organized under the auspices of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), is a continuing series of international meetings which have traditionally focused on advances in methods for control and estimation and are part of a three year rotation of IFAC meetings in process control. ADCHEM , to be held in Pisa, Italy, aims to bring together researchers and developers of new methodologies in the area of process control as well as users of these techniques. ADCHEM will focus the development and application in six subareas: - Modeling and Simulation - Model Based Control - Realtime Optimization - Process and Control Monitoring - Process Identification doc3079 none Heaney Vicenzi Scientists have described carbonados as the most enigmatic of all diamonds. They occur as pea-sized black nodules of fused diamond crystallites with relatively large void spaces that can account for more than 15% of the total volume. Some scientists have proposed a host of theories to account for their formation, some of which would dramatically influence our perception of the history and chemistry of the Earth if proved true. For example, some scientists believe that carbonados formed by a single massive meteorite impact in the late Archean, whereas others postulate that carbonados are an exotic style of diamond from the Earth s upper mantle. We intend to test these hypotheses by comparing carbonado textures and mineral inclusions with those in polycrystalline diamonds that crystallized deep within the earth and by meteorite impact. In addition, we will perform state-of-the-art imaging and geochemical analyses to explore for indicators that will unambiguously demonstrate the formation mechanisms of these unusual diamonds doc3080 none This project will develop the theory of the motion of fluids as embodied by the Navier-Stokes equations using new probabilistic methods that exploit the power of stochastic calculus and probabilistic limit theory. Although the Navier-Stokes equations are essentially deterministic, the approach used in this work will build on a representation of the equations as a functional of an underlying branching random walk. This representation, which was recently discovered by LeJan and Sznitman in France, is clearly intrinsic to the structure of the Navier-Stokes equations. While this is not the first attempt to use stochastic methods in connection with the flows associated with the Navier-Stokes equations, it does represent an entirely new direction which has the potential to transcend much of existing theory. Specific problems considered in this proposal seek to provide a better understanding of the role of spatial dimensions, boundary conditions, multi-scaling exponents and singularities, viscosity, homogeneity, isotropy and rotational accelerations, stationary flows and long-time evolution. The Navier-Stokes equations describe the basic physics governing the motion of fluid in its various forms of air, water, oil, etc. As such these equations play a fundamental role in science and engineering through the modeling of all varieties of fluid flow, from atmospheric and oceanic circulation to the flow of water beneath the earth s surface. Improved understanding of these equations and their solutions is essential to applications which range from tracking climate change and dispersion of contaminants in the Earth s environment, to more stable aerospace and sea vessel designs. The nonlinearity inherent in these equations makes explicit solutions possible only for the simplest of flows. Consequently the development of a more complete understanding of these equations at all physical length scales ranks among the most important outstanding problems of contemporary mathematical physics doc3081 none Past DNA studies have suggested that chimpanzee population history has been surprisingly different from humans, although chimpanzees are our nearest relatives. Unfortunately the fossil record for chimpanzees is virtually nonexistent and, thus, genetic investigation of present populations is the best method to examine this history. Chimpanzees are, however, highly endangered and the window of opportunity to sample their genetic diversity may be rapidly closing. To date, genetic investigations have been limited, and they have focused primarily on the maternally-inherited mitochondrial DNA. The goal of this project is to search for variation on the Y chromosomes of chimpanzees, including Pan troglodytes, (the chimpanzee) and Pan paniscus (the pygmy chimpanzee or bonobo). This will provide a new perspective to test hypotheses about population history both within and between chimpanzee species. In addition, it will allow the comparison of chimpanzee and human demographic histories and, thus, can shed light on our own evolutionary history. We are also investigating Y chromosome evolutionary history in the great apes and humans. Because the chimpanzee Y chromosome is 25% smaller than the human Y and may have been subject to structural rearrangement, it is evident that the chimpanzee Y chromosome has undergone interesting changes since diverging from the ancestral human-chimpanzee Y chromosome. Finally, we hope to identify subspecies specific Y chromosome markers within Pan troglodytes that, when combined with mitochondrial DNA data, will allow the origins of the captive population to be clarified doc3082 none MARK The Education Development Center is continuing the work of its K-12 Mathematics Curriculum Center (MCC), first funded under NSF grant . The center continues to offer a regular schedule of workshops for teams from schools and school districts interested in upgrading their mathematics program. The center also continues to support and disseminate the materials already developed and to develop additional materials that support the implementation of the supported instructional materials. The purpose of the seminars and the workshops is to assist schools and school districts in becoming familiar with the 13 sets of comprehensive instructional materials in mathematics developed with NSF support and to understand the issues related to the implementation of these materials. Specifically, the goals of the center are to: Increase awareness of NSF-funded comprehensive instructional materials among school districts interested in improving their mathematics program. Increase understanding of the challenges involved in the selection and implementation of mathematics curricula developed in response to the NCTM Standards. Provide assistance to schools and districts reviewing and using standards-based curricula, paying special attention to issues of transition and articulation across grades K-12. Provide needed resources for school systems, including a seminar series and related publications focused on standards-based curriculum selection and implementation. Build capacity within districts for making informed choices and decisions regarding selection and use of standards-based mathematics materials doc3083 none Bohrson Existing tools that model the geochemical evolution of open-system magma bodies suffer from several limitations, the most critical of which are lack of accounting of energy-conservation and lack of inclusion of the consequences of wallrock partial melting. A new tool will be developed, called Energy-Constrained Recharge Assimilation Fractional Crystallization (EC-RAFC), that models the geochemical evolution of a magma body-wallrock system. A user-friendly EC-RAFC computer code, written in Visual Basic, will be developed in which energy, mass and species are conserved as magma undergoes, fractional crystallization, magma recharge, and assimilation of partially melted wallrock. Input parameters include thermal and chemical characteristics of the magma body, wallrock, and replenishment magma. The EC-RAFC model will couple phase equilibria and thermochemical constraints by incorporating information from melt productivity functions fa (Ta) and fm(Tm) for user-defined compositions of initial magma, wallrock and replenishment magma. The EC-RAFC computer code will also allow for the development and maintenance of compositionally distinct melt reservoirs within an EC-RAFC magma body, thus enabling application of EC-RAFC to zoned ignimbrites. A critical component of this project is development of code capability that can model melt extraction efficiency that is less than unity so that mass and energy addition can be decoupled. Application of the EC-RAFC simulator to a number of well-documented magmatic systems spanning a range of geologic environments will allow exploration of the potential systematics that exist in the relative roles of fractional crystallization, recharge and assimilation in magma bodies from particular tectonic-magmatic settings (e.g., MOR, continental arcs). This research has the potential to impact the work of the large number of geoscientists who generate and interpret geochemical, geochronological, petrographic and petrologic data from extant and ancient magmatic systems and will parallel the dramatic improvement in the amount and quality of geochemical data describing magmatic systems doc3084 none Bohrson The process of magma recharge, which is intrusion of hotter magma into the base of a magma reservoir, is thought to be a catalyst for some volcanic eruptions. Newly intruded and standing magma may mix, and by one of a number of mechanisms, vesiculation may occur. Vesiculation leads to increased pressure in the magma reservoir, which, in turn, may lead to eruption. Previous work suggests that the degree of explosivity of the eruption may be critically dependent on the rate of intrusion and volume of recharge magma: slow intrusion of relatively small volumes of recharge magma may lead to gentle eruption whereas rapid intrusion of relatively large volumes of recharge magma may cause explosive eruption. These contrasting scenarios predict that the associated volcanic deposits may record differences in the extent and style of magma mixing and in the timing of recharge relative to eruption. The eruption of Lassen, a volcanic center located in northeastern California, is an extremely well-documented eruption in which recharge is hypothesized as the eruption catalyst. For volcanic products of this eruption, the chemical fingerprint of magma mixing will be determined using in situ laser-ablation ICP-MS, and the location of formation, crystallization history, and residence times of crystals will be determined from crystal size distribution analysis. Together, these data will reveal the timing of the recharge event relative to eruption and will also permit a description of the fluid dynamics of mixing in this reservoir. Through studies such as this one, quantitative constraints on the timing between recharge and eruption and on the relationships among recharge rate, recharge volume and explosivity will emerge. Such information will lead to enhanced understanding of dynamics and timing of volcanic eruptions doc3028 none Housen Johnson The mesozoic and tertiary accretion and transport history of terranes along the western plate margin of North America has received considerable study, however work to date has been unable to resolve between the two major hypotheses that have emerged. These models differ mainly in the timing of accretion and particularly in the subsequent northward terrane translation along the continental margin. This project will take a new tack and focus on a innovative detrital provenance analysis of basin sediments that were deposited along the margin during this time period is the hopes of pinning the source terranes and therefore the locations of terranes at various times. Results should help break the impasse in understanding the tectonic history of terrane accretion along the pacific margin of North America during mesozoic and tertiary time doc3086 none Housen North America experienced tectonism on both east and west margins during the Mesozoic, and paleomagnetic data have been instrumental in working out past relative plate positions and relative motion. However, the apparent polar wunder path for North America, on which accurate reconstruction rely, is basically unresolved for the middle and upper Jurassic. Data from New England suggests that the APWP lies at high latitudes, but data from the Colorado Plateau indicates a significantly lower latitude APWP. This discrepancy is important, and remains unresolved because flaws exist in both data sets. This project will attempt to define the APWP for this time interval for North America by study of the Sundance and Morrison formations in the Black Hills of Wyoming and South Dakota that may have escaped the rotations and overprints affecting other regions. Results will help anchor poles of middle to upper Jurassic age for cratonic North America so that several tectonic questions can be better addressed doc3087 none Travis This project will discern the evolutionary lability of the visual system in the bluefin killifish. Males exhibit one of several different color patterns. Lighting conditions (e.g. water clarity, tree cover) are good predictors of the relative abundance of male color morphs within a population. Because these color patterns are used in signaling females, the visual system might vary among populations so that it mitigates the color schemes used by males in each population. This project will quantify the pattern of variation in vision physiology across populations with different lighting regimes and the amount of variation within populations attributable to genetics, environment, and their interactions. Experiments will be performed which examine the effect of male color patterns on animal behavior and the response of vision physiology to artificial selection. The ultimate objective of this study is to determine whether natural selection can act on sensory systems or whether sensory systems are invariant (and, therefore acts as a constraint to natural selection). This question is central to many debates in biology (e.g. evolution of senescence, genome size, plasticity). If physiology can readily respond to selection, predictions can be made as to what should happen to populations over time with models involving few constraints due to a lack of genetic variation. If, however, physiology is invariant, then these constraints must be incorporated into our models - potentially resulting in drastically different predictions doc3088 none Archuleta, Ralph The major focus of this proposal is to determine the kinematics of the earthquake rupture process on a finite fault by investing seismic waveforms that include 3D earth structure. The rupture process on the fault is deduced by iteratively fitting the synthetic ground motions to the data. The Green s functions play a critical role in the calculation. Finite difference methods can be used to calculate the Green s functions for a complex, 3D earth structure. Including these 3D Green s functions in inversions for the kinematic source parameters on a finite fault is a natural extension of current methods for determining the parameters of earthquake rupture. To further improve the inversions special functions (cubic B-spline) can be used to discretize the spatial distribution of the kinematic parameters on a finite fault. The 3D Green s functions and the cubic B-spline functions will be combined with a newly developed nonlinear inversion method that is necessary for a global search of the kinematic parameters needed to describe the rupture. Data from the California earthquakes, M 5.9 Coyote Lake, M 7.1 Loma Prieta, M 6.7 Northridge, and the M 7.7 Chi Chi, Taiwan earthquake will be analyzed doc3089 none This is a planning visit proposal for Professor Wesley M. Shrum, of the Department of Sociology at Louisiana State University, to travel to Ghana, Kenya, and India, to meet with his counterparts for the purpose of finalizing plans for a collaborative project on the development and assessment of the Web-based research capacity in each of these countries. Professor Shrum will meet with Professor J. Opare, at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana; Mr. J. de Smedt at MSF-Spain (an NGO) in Kenya; and Professor R. Sooryamoorthy, at the Loyola College of Social Sciences in India. Web communications are being introduced or expanded in many developing countries, including Ghana, Kenya, and India. Data will be collected and analyzed on the interpersonal networking patterns and information search behaviors of soil scientists in selected governmental and academic research institutions. The results will be used to assess the current and future impact of the Web on scientific and technological capacity in developing countries doc3090 none Thompson This project will investigate how coevolution shapes the interactions between insects and plants across broad geographic landscapes. A major current challenge in ecological research is to understand how ongoing coevolution proceeds as interacting species experience different selection pressures in different communities (co-evolutionary hotspots). The combined ecological, geographic, and phylogenetic evidence allows the opportunity to use the interactions between the moth Greya politella and its host plants to address these central questions on co-evolutionary processes. The moths are locally host specific pollinating seed parasites, and the interaction between the moths and their host plants occurs across a wide range of habitats in western North America. Three objectives will be addressed in this study. The first objective is to determine whether the differences in outcome among communities are stable over time, and the second objective will assess whether the geographic patterns in outcome result from gene flow among populations in different communities. The third objective will be to evaluate how the differences in the interaction between the mutualistic and antagonistic hotspots identified during previous work contribute to the different ecological outcomes. Together, the results of these three objectives will aid in the development of the theory of coevolution and the organization of biodiversity. They will address how selection mosaics and co-evolutionary hotspots shape species interactions across geographic landscapes under different ecological conditions. Overall, the results will therefore contribute to our understanding of the geographic scale at which interspecific interactions diversity and the ways in which coevolution links taxa among communities doc3091 none Abrajano The molecular and stable isotopic compositions (C and H) of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and other particle-associated organic contaminants in riverine sediments reflect the combined effects of the (1) nature of contaminant sources, (2) biotic and abiotic transformation during transport, (3) dynamics of particle association and source mixing, (4) depositional history and (5) post-depositional diagenetic reactions. This multiplicity of possible sources and processes affecting particle-associated organic contaminants in large river systems requires a complete understanding of specific processes or sources on the molecular and isotopic chemistry of the contaminant. This in turn requires the availability of multiple hydrogeochemical vectors that are able to uniquely identify or seriously constrain specific contaminant sources and or pathways. Our primary goal is to enhance existing approaches to evaluating the sources and fate of particle-associated organic contaminants in surface water systems. We will focus on the development of compound-specific 13C 12C and molecular organic measurements. The proposed work will examine the source discrimination potential of D H ratios as well as D H-specific transformation reactions involving hydrocarbons. Specifically, the impact of volatilization, photodegradation, sorption, and biodegradation on the D H ratios of individual PAH compounds will be examined under a range of expected near-surface conditions. The proposed research will also examine the utility of the D H technique for elucidating the sources and fate of PAH in the sediments of the St. Lawrence River (SLR) and Hudson River (HR) basins. These systems exemplify the multiplicity of natural and anthropogenic hydrocarbon sources in this region and elsewhere, and the long history of human use of these two rivers offers some of the most extensive records of anthropogenic hydrocarbon deposition and storage in river sediments doc3092 none Subject: NSF proposal: Principal Investigator: Thomas Y. Hou : We propose to develop an innovative numerical coarse grid model for two-phase flows in strongly heterogeneous media. The development of this coarse grid model consists of two steps. The first one is to develop a PDE-based adaptive mesh strategy to capture the dominating flow features using an adaptive coarse grid mesh. Using the adaptive mesh, the dominating flow features such as high velocity flow and strong shear flow can be accurately captured. The second step is to use the multiscale finite element method to model the effect of small scale components. The main idea of our multiple scale finite element method consists of the construction of finite element base functions which contain the small scale information within each element. In fact, we construct the base functions from the leading order differential operator of the governing equation. An important feature of the multiscale finite element method is that they can be used to reconstruct locally the small scale velocity within each coarse grid block. Since the dominating flow structures are already well captured by the adaptive coarse grid solution, the remaining small scale components are relatively small in amplitude. And we can effectively model the effect of these small scales by incorporating averages of high order moments. This gives rise to a robust coarse grid model for two-phase flows in strongly heterogeneous media. Generalization of this idea to the Navier-Stokes equations will also be considered. Many problems of fundamental and practical importance contain multiple scale solutions. The direct numerical solution of the above multiple scale problems is difficult even with the advent of modern super computers. The major difficulty of direct solutions is due to the scale of computation. To get an accurate solution, all scales contained in the problem need to be resolved. Therefore, tremendous amount of computer memory and CPU time are required. The requirement can easily exceed the limit of today s computing resources. On the other hand, from an engineering perspective, it is often sufficient to predict the macroscopic properties of the physical systems and to capture the averaged effect of small (and random) scales on the large ones. Therefore, it is desirable to develop a method that can capture the small scale effect on the large scales using a relatively coarse grid. If this can be done, this can lead to enormous economy saving. The factor of saving could be as high as ten thousands. This would enable us to perform many simulations very efficiently. The proposed research is to develop such a coarse grid model by incorporating the small scale features in the underlying physical problem to construct multiscale building blocks (bases). These multiscale building blocks (bases) capture the effect of small scales on the large scales locally. In order to increase the robustness of the multiscale modeling, we propose to introduce an automatic (PDE-based) adaptive mesh generator to generate the underlying coarse grid. The adaptivity is controlled by the local flow rate, using a finer mesh in high flow region. The idea of combining adaptivity with multiscale modeling may have a significant impact on a number of applications which go beyond the scope of this proposed study doc3093 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Collaborative Research on High Bit-Rate Communication - From Mathematical Development to Fiber Design Jones This project will focus on the development of mathematical and computational techniques for addressing the critical issues of optical fiber communication technology. The modeling and methods will be aimed at the more efficient use of fiber bandwidth. It will include both single channel and Wavelength Division Multiplexing techniques. The group will develop methods for the investigation of theoretical models of the main fiber optics technologies. This includes the emerging techniques of dispersion compensation, distributed amplification, wavelength division multiplexing, and uses of the newly developed dispersion-profiled fiber. Also to be investigated will be the influence of dispersion management on four-wave interactions and therefore on the stability of bit-patterns in multi-channel systems. Each of these methods involves, in some way, the spatial management of dispersion and other physical effects. In general, this leads to an inhomogeneous evolutionary partial differential equation with rapidly varying coefficients. Much of the mathematical and computational theory will be aimed at a deeper understanding of these equations and their properties within the specific context of optical transmission. An emphasis will be placed on the averaging theory, stabilization of pulses and pulse interactions. Increasing the bit-rate in optical fiber communications is a challenge that is both scientifically exciting and technologically imperative. An objective of this project will be to take the involvement of mathematical investigations in improving the efficacy of optical communications to a new level. We shall intertwine the development of the underlying mathematics, numerical techniques and the practical, experimental implementation of new scenarios through a group effort that involves representatives from academia, government laboratories and industry. The development of new mathematical and computational techniques is crucial for the both the formulation of new strategies and their initial evaluation. This effort will take the methods of modern applied mathematics into the fiber optics engineering community. It will pave the road for further interactions between applied mathematicians and electrical engineers and promises to make the field of optical communications even more vigorous. At the same time, the work will stimulate new areas of applied mathematics, such as the study of averaging methods for strongly inhomogeneous partial differential equations, stability and interaction of pulses, and development of effective computational methods for rapidly varying systems doc3094 none Spera Existing tools that model the geochemical evolution of open-system magma bodies suffer from several limitations, the most critical of which are lack of accounting of energy-conservation and lack of inclusion of the consequences of wallrock partial melting. A new tool will be developed, called Energy-Constrained Recharge Assimilation Fractional Crystallization (EC-RAFC), that models the geochemical evolution of a magma body-wallrock system. A user-friendly EC-RAFC computer code, written in Visual Basic, will be developed in which energy, mass and species are conserved as magma undergoes, fractional crystallization, magma recharge, and assimilation of partially melted wallrock. Input parameters include thermal and chemical characteristics of the magma body, wallrock, and replenishment magma. The EC-RAFC model will couple phase equilibria and thermochemical constraints by incorporating information from melt productivity functions fa (Ta) and fm(Tm) for user-defined compositions of initial magma, wallrock and replenishment magma. The EC-RAFC computer code will also allow for the development and maintenance of compositionally distinct melt reservoirs within an EC-RAFC magma body, thus enabling application of EC-RAFC to zoned ignimbrites. A critical component of this project is development of code capability that can model melt extraction efficiency that is less than unity so that mass and energy addition can be decoupled. Application of the EC-RAFC simulator to a number of well-documented magmatic systems spanning a range of geologic environments will allow exploration of the potential systematics that exist in the relative roles of fractional crystallization, recharge and assimilation in magma bodies from particular tectonic-magmatic settings (e.g., MOR, continental arcs). This research has the potential to impact the work of the large number of geoscientists who generate and interpret geochemical, geochronological, petrographic and petrologic data from extant and ancient magmatic systems and will parallel the dramatic improvement in the amount and quality of geochemical data describing magmatic systems doc3095 none Owen, Susan E. Long Valley caldera, California, is an ideal natural laboratory for the study of interaction between volcanism and tectonics. The Hilton Block - the area in the Sierra Nevada located south of Long Valley caldera - has been one of the most seismically active regions in California. However, patterns of recent seismicity are difficult to reconcile with the observed regional strain or with stress transfer calculated from simple elastic models of volcanic inflation. Understanding the connections between volcanism and tectonics in this region will require a better understanding of both the kinematics of the Hilton Block and the mechanics of stress transfer within the caldera system. The investigators will use detailed GPS observations and simple elastic models to determine the nature and distribution of deformation in the Hilton Block. They will develop finite element models that address time- and temperature-dependent viscoelastic effects to further explore how deformation within the seismically active Hilton Block is linked to Long Valley volcanism doc3096 none This Topical Conference will be focused on optical properties of conjugated polymers and photonic crystals. The organizers expect some 200 attendees about half of whom will be students and would like to use the funds to reimburse junior research scientists for travel and registration expenses. Among the areas to be covered are forefront research topics such as photonic band-gap materials, photonic applications of organic materials optics of photonic crystals, and others doc3097 none Paterson, Scott R Miller, Robert B. Exactly how plutonism, especially high volume plutons in continental magmatic arcs, fits in with active continental margin tectonics is controversial. Needed parameters include understanding magma chamber processes, how fabrics relate to the magma chamber and rates of processes during emplacement. This project will utilize excellent exposures in the Tuolumne Intrusive Complex to address several of these issues by a comprehensive integrated study of several transects across the complex. Results are expected to place greater constraints on the coupling of magmatic and host rock processes during chamber growth, on processes (mixing mingling, collapse) occurring along internal margins during emplacement of subsequent magma pulses, the connections to a volcanic feeder system and the relationship between magmatic fabrics and all the operative processes doc3098 none Modern mechanical assembly techniques are currently used to manufacture integrated hybrid electronic structures and composite materials. Limitations such as the trade-off between precision and speed in these systems and the inadvertent development of static charge on dielectric surfaces limit the feasible component size to hundreds of microns. Faster motion results in misplacement due to increased vibration. Static charge causes parts to be moved from the desired location in an uncontrolled manner. Self-assembly techniques have been used to assemble composite materials on the micron or nanometer scale, but are limited to close-packed structures. The current drive in the microelectronics industry toward increased integration and decreasing component size, and the development of micron scale composite materials require new assembly techniques. This research project seeks to develop techniques for such ultralevel assembly. Ultralevel assembly refers to the surface mount of discrete micron and submicron scale components directly on active substrates such as silicon chips. The proposed method is a hybrid assembly process, utilizing electrostatic and electrophoretic forces in conjunction with light pressure to guide, or even fly components into position. This sort of hybrid assembly process is also promising for the development of composite materials made up of micron scale particles arranged in non-close-packed arrays. The proposed method for utilizing electrostatic forces to aid in assembly is based on controlling the local surface charge density on the substrate and component. A corona discharge device will be used to deposit a uniform surface charge on the component, and a charge of opposite polarity onto the substrate target area. The Coulombic force between the component and the oppositely charged target area will attract the component to the target. A corona discharge device utilizes a point electrode at high voltage over a planar ground to cause local ionization of the surrounding gas. The ionized gas molecules are accelerated toward the ground, and deposited on a dielectric surface. Electrophoretic positioning in an electrolyte solution will be used to place parts smaller than 10 micrometers in diameter. The surfaces of the components will adopt a charge in an electrolyte due to the specific absorption of potential determining ions. Small patterned electrodes on the substrate surface will be used to create an electric field and attract the charged parts to the substrate surface. The accuracy of the proposed process will be dictated by the highly controlled Coulombic forces and radiation pressure and not by the positioning errors and vibration of the mechanical placement system. The simultaneous use of these forces will allow the efficient assembly of discreet components and will introduce the exciting possibility of forming new composite materials on the micron scale. %%% Electrophoretic deposition of particulate coatings with no control over microstructure has been used industrially for many years. This research project seeks to use this technique to place micro-components in a specific location on a substrate surface. The use of a focused laser beam in addition to these Coulombic forces will allow more accurate control over the position and orientation of the component. The application of such non-contact techniques offers the potential for vast improvements over traditional mechanical assembly. This technique might have broad impacts in the microelectronics industry doc3099 none Though inherently a statistical issue, model evaluation lacks a unifying statistical framework; this project supplies such. The foundation of the framework is the use of Bayesian techniques to quantify the degree to which a model captures an underlying reality; develop theory and methods that allow dual use of data in both estimation of model inputs and evaluation of outputs; select evaluation functions, by which a model and reality are compared and through which flaws (causes of invalidity ) are found; and to design the collection of field and computer simulation data. The building of the framework relies on specific formulations of problems, motivated by testbed examples such as subsurface fluid flow models - where the computer model is deterministic but uncertainties are present in the model inputs and specifications - and traffic simulators - where the model is intrinsically stochastic, in addition to having uncertain inputs. Computer models are everywhere and evaluating their fidelity to reality is central to assessing their effectiveness in understanding real phenomena (such as flow of pollutants through soil and into groundwater) and predicting results of innovative technologies (such as new signal timing strategies to relieve traffic congestion in urban networks). This project develops a statistical structure and basis for such evaluations applicable across the scientific and technological landscape. In the process, the project creates the ingredients for a virtual laboratory to disseminate results, broaden involvement of other researchers (and users), and establish a unique educational and training environment doc3100 none Veblen This proposal is a renewal of a previous research program that involved applications of transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and ancillary techniques to problems important to the fields of mineralogy, petrology, and geochemistry. In this renewal, several diverse projects are proposed with an underlying thread of trying to understand the crystal chemistry of minerals and their reactions at the sub-nanometer scale. These projects will make use of a new NSF-supported, 300-kV TEM with a field-emission gun, an instrument that has excellent resolution for normal high-resolution TEM experiments and has revolutionized our chemical capabilities. The primary emphasis of the work proposed will be the exploration of how these new analytical capabilities can be applied to mineralogy and geology, as applications of this technique to the earth sciences so far have been largely unexplored. It is proposed to attempt direct chemical analysis of a number of mineral microstructures that are in the size range of less than one to a few unit cells. These include stacking faults, twin planes, and antiphase boundaries in pyroxenes and other minerals; the C domains in calcian dolomite; the fine-scale chemical modulations associated with spinodal decompositions in pyroxenes and feldspars; and Guinier-Preston zones that form during kinetically arrested exsolution in chain silicates. In addition, efforts to achieve quantification using these new analytical methods will be continued. Other projects to be pursued include explorations of structural disorder and chemical variation in newly synthesized, Na- and K-bearing, high-pressure pyriboles that contain alternating single and double silicate chains; of possible relationships between chemical composition and superstructures in the sulfides bornite and digenite; of order-disorder relationships in hibonite and other minerals of the magnetoplumbite group doc3101 none Waymire This project will develop the theory of the motion of fluids as embodied by the Navier-Stokes equations using new probabilistic methods that exploit the power of stochastic calculus and probabilistic limit theory. Although the Navier-Stokes equations are essentially deterministic, the approach used in this work will build on a representation of the equations as a functional of an underlying branching random walk. This representation, which was recently discovered by LeJan and Sznitman in France, is clearly intrinsic to the structure of the Navier-Stokes equations. While this is not the first attempt to use stochastic methods in connection with the flows associated with the Navier-Stokes equations, it does represent an entirely new direction which has the potential to transcend much of existing theory. Specific problems considered in this proposal seek to provide a better understanding of the role of spatial dimensions, boundary conditions, multi-scaling exponents and singularities, viscosity, homogeneity, isotropy and rotational accelerations, stationary flows and long-time evolution. The Navier-Stokes equations describe the basic physics governing the motion of fluid in its various forms of air, water, oil, etc. As such these equations play a fundamental role in science and engineering through the modeling of all varieties of fluid flow, from atmospheric and oceanic circulation to the flow of water beneath the earth s surface. Improved understanding of these equations and their solutions is essential to applications which range from tracking climate change and dispersion of contaminants in the Earth s environment, to more stable aerospace and sea vessel designs. The nonlinearity inherent in these equations makes explicit solutions possible only for the simplest of flows. Consequently the development of a more complete understanding of these equations at all physical length scales ranks among the most important outstanding problems of contemporary mathematical physics doc3102 none Schoonen Hot springs are environments characterized by thermal and chemical disequilibrium. The purpose of the proposed study is to determine the rates and mechanisms of abiotic processes by which the thermal and chemical disequilibrium is dissipated. The objective of this study is to obtain these rates through field studies of hot springs in Yellowstone National Park and possibly Lassen Volcanic National Park, complemented by a few laboratory experiments. As water flows away from the orifice or pool of hot spring, four types of interrelated abiotic processes take place. These are a) fluid flow b) cooling, c) gas transfer (e.g., O2 in gassing, H2, CO2 and H2S outgassing) , and d) chemical reactions in the water (e.g., travetine deposition, and hydrogen sulfide oxidation). A research strategy has been developed to obtain rates of these processes through detailed measurements of flow regimes (linear velocity and a measure of turbulence) in the drainages coupled with detailed temperature measurements to obtain cooling rates and chemical analyses to obtain the chemical evolution of the water as it flows away. The chemical analyses involve a determination of the concentration of dissolved gases (He, H2, Ar, O2, CO2, and H2S) and dissolved major ionic species. From the temperature profiles and concentration profiles the heat transfer coefficients and gas transfer coefficients can be derived. Because the determination of the gas transfer coefficients is crucial, a series of laboratory experiments is proposed in which the gas exchange coefficient of CO2 is derived by conducting a degassing experiment in a simple artificial channel with a flow regime similar to the drainages studied in Yellowstone. To keep these experiments simple they will be conducted at room temperature, but gas transfer theory is sufficiently well developed to allow extrapolation to higher temperature. The laboratory experiments will be conducted by undergraduate students doc3103 none Collaborative Investigation: Tectonogenesis of the Khoy ophiolite, NW. Iran Ghazi and Pessagno This proposal is a collaborative investigation that focuses on the planktonic foraminiferal biostratigraphy, radiolarian biostratigraphy, choronostratigraphy and microfacies analysis of sedimentary rocks occurring within and above the extrusive member of the Khoy ophiolite. The Khoy ophiolite of northwestern Iran is one of the largest and least studied Iranian ophiolites. Moreover, it is superbly exposed with most geologic elements representing pre-, syn-, and post emplacement events (units) well preserved. The Khoy ophiolite is located at a junction where the Iranian and other Middle Eastern ophiolites are connected to the Turkish and Mediterranean ophiolites. The integration of the data resulting from the proposed collaborative effort coupled with geochemical, Pb-Nd-Sr isotopic and 40Ar-39Ar results generated by the Co-Principle investigator A. Mohamad Ghazi ( ) should lead to a better understanding of the tectonogenesis of the Khoy ophiolite and to determine whether it is indeed a part of the Tethyan oceanic crust and is a part of the postulated ridge-transform fault system spreading axis that existed in Cretaceous southern Tethys ocean. The project is funded with participation from the Division of International Programs doc3104 none In this study, the researchers propose to develop a mobility-based framework for adaptive clustering and routing in wireless ad-hoc networks-an emerging class of network architecture that is characterized by its highly dynamic topology and its limited resources. Within this framework, the researchers will address several key, as yet unanswered questions, which have been raised with respect to the routing problem in ad-hoc networks. Specifically, it has been argued that to achieve acceptable routing performance, multiple routing strategies may need to act cooperatively in the same network. However, this raises the question as to what those strategies should be, and how to effectively toggle between them. Furthermore, it has been proposed that mobility information can be used to select longer-lived routes, and to improve the efficiency of route creation and maintenance. However, no well-defined mobility based metric has been proposed that reflects a quantitative measure of path stability. In this study, the researchers explore novel and significant ideas which address each of the shortcomings described above, and builds them into a unified routing framework. Specifically, the researchers propose to develop a well-defined mobility based routing metric, referred to as path availability. This metric is used for adaptive cluster characterization and routing in ad-hoc networks. The mobility-based cluster characterization provides the basis for an efficient distributed clustering algorithm which adaptively maintains a cluster organization-the size and membership in each cluster is determined dynamically by the mobility characteristics of the local nodes. Using this metric, the researchers propose to investigate pro-active intra-cluster and inter-cluster routing strategies: intra-cluster routing will be based on table-driven routing protocols that maintain up-to-date routing information regarding all cluster destinations, whereas inter-cluster routing is managed on a demand-basis by constructing routes in a dynamic hierarchical fashion as a sequence of relatively stable clusters between the source and the destination. More efficient route search is enabled by the proactive maintenance of routes within each cluster, and reactive route repair is only needed if the source or destination depart their original clusters, or if the next cluster along a route becomes unreachable. Most of the reaction to node mobility is handled locally within the clusters, hence, the far-reaching effects of topological changes are minimized. By adapting the characteristics of the cluster organization to localized node mobility patterns, the strategy is expected to perform well over a wide range of conditions. Furthermore, this framework can be extended to address the need to support QoS requirements for mutlimedia communications. Very few clustering strategies have defined either an adaptive clustering technique, or have factored mobility information into the clustering decision process. Hence, this work represents a significant, and sustainable contribution to the field doc3105 none O Day Chemical transformations of arsenic in the environment control its mobility, bioavailability, and toxicity. These processes include inorganic or biological oxidation and reduction, biologically mediated methylation, adsorption to and desorption from mineral surfaces, and mineral precipitation, co-precipitation, and dissolution. Arsenic is a well-known toxin at elevated concentrations and a known carcinogen in chronic exposure. Because arsenic is commonly found in streams and groundwaters of the arid and simi-arid western U.S., understanding of retention mechanisms by stream subsurface sediments is important for evaluating arsenic mobility and migration into drinking water sources. We are using synchrotron X-ray absorption spectroscopy and supporting characterization methods to determine the primary modes of arsenic speciation in hyporheic zone sediments from two streams, one receiving As(III) from geothermal sources, and one with elevated arsenic and metal concentrations from mining and weathering of sulfide tailings. We will identify speciation in sediments at the molecular level, document changes in oxidation state and ligand environment as a function of sediment depth, and assess the importance of biological mediation. We will use a combination of X-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES) and extended X-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) analyses, and appropriate arsenic reference compounds, to quantitatively determine arsenic speciation. Complementary characterization methods will include laboratory and synchrotron powder X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy and microprobe, and selective extraction methods. Secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) of sulfur isotope ratios will be used to identify biologically precipitated sulfur compounds. This molecular information will be evaluated with thermodynamic calculations of surface and hyporheic zone water chemistry measured in the field to determine stable and metastable species and the chemical affinity of arsenic transformation reactions. Molecular speciation identified in field samples will be linked to reaction rates of arsenic oxidation or reduction measured in simplified laboratory systems. We will develop a windowed flow-through cell for real-time, in situ X-ray aborption measurements of arsenic redox reaction in simplified systems. The outcome will be a quantitative understanding at the molecular scale of biotic and abiotic speciation reactions that control arsenic partitioning in stream hyporheic zones. This level of understanding is important for development of general rate expressions for arsenic oxidation and reduction reactions that are transferable among different geochemical environments doc3106 none NSF PI: James A. Tyburczy, Arizona State University Magnetotellurics and geomagnetic depth sounding have revealed zones of anomalously high electrical conductivity in a variety of crustal and mantle environments. Crustal and shallow mantle high conductivity zones are observed beneath continental collision zones, mid ocean ridges and the ocean floor, and continental shields, among other areas, and mantle transition zone high-conductivity zones are generally observed at depths of 300-400 km. A variety of explanations for these high conductivity features have been invoked including the presence of partial melt, hydrogen in minerals, aqueous fluids, and the presence of interconnected or oriented metals or other highly conducting minerals (with different explanations for different areas). In order to properly invert and interpret magnetotelluric response functions, the electrical response of Earth materials in the low frequency range must be determined. This proposal outlines an experimental effort to determine the electrical conductivity and the complex electrical impedance of relevant geological materials at elevated temperatures and pressures over the frequency range 0. to 100,000 Hz. In particular, 1) the influence of melt composition and texture at low melt fraction on the bulk electrical properties of partially molten systems and 2) the influence of hydrogen in hydrous minerals (amphibole, serpentine) and nominally anhydrous minerals (olivine and pyroxene) on electrical properties will be examined. The electrical properties of texturally equilibrated partially molten olivine-basalt systems will be studied at one bar total pressure and at elevated temperatures and pressures (up to degrees C and 20 GPa) in a multiple anvil device. The electrical properties of hydrous minerals and hydrogen-containing nominally anhydrous minerals will be examined at temperatures up to degrees C and .8 - 1 GPa in an internally heated device under appropriate water fugacity conditions. The results will be interpreted in terms of equivalent electrical circuits that can be related to models of ionic processes. The results of this study will be important for the interpretation and modeling of magnetotelluric data and will also shed new light on physical transport processes in a variety of geological environments. The ultimate benefits will be more detailed understanding of the temperature profile and physical state of matter at depth in the Earth s interior doc3107 none Bloxham EAR - Investigations of the geodynamo process that is responsible for generation of the Earth s magnetic field are proposed. The following areas will be addressed: 1. Investigation of the basic underlying mechanisms of magnetic field generation in recent numerical models of the geodynamo. 2. Investigation of the parameter regime of numerical dynamo models, seeking in particular to further our understanding of the role of inertial and viscous effects on the geodynamo. 3. Investigation of thermal core-mantle interactions and their role in controlling the morphology of the main field and its secular variation. 4. Investigation of the effect of inner core gravitational coupling on the geodynamo. 5. Analysis of features observed in maps of the magnetic at the core-mantle boundary using a numerical dynamo model. 6. Analysis of the frozen-flux approximation. 7. Dynamo code development, including development of a distributed memory version of the code suitable for running on a network of Intel x86 based machines, and initial development of a community dynamo model doc3108 none Isaak Understanding the mineralogy of Earth s upper mantle requires that the elastic properties of all candidate minerals are known. There are, however, virtual gaps in the elasticity database at elevated pressure and temperature for orthopyroxene and especially clinopyroxene. The primary objective of this work is to measure the temperature dependencies of the elastic moduli of single-crystal clinopyroxene using resonant ultrasound spectroscopy (RUS). This objective requires completing the following intermediate goals: 1) developing the RUS theory and computer code appropriate for monoclinic crystal symmetry; 2) making mode identification when comparing calculated and measured spectra at room temperature; 3) obtaining resonance spectra at high temperature for three clinopyroxenes of varying Mg, Fe, Ca compositions; and 4) reducing the clinopyroxene resonance data at elevated temperature to appropriate Cij vs. T. The secondary objective of this work is to measure the high temperature elasticity of two orthopyroxene minerals using the orthorhombic RUS scheme that was developed earlier and applied to olivine elasticity measurements. Successful completion of these objective will provide needed data on pyroxenes at high temperature, new constraints for the mineralogy of Earth s upper mantle, and new applications of RUS for measuring elasticity of low symmetry monoclinic crystals doc3109 none EAR- Michael W. Hamburger, Indiana University The investigators from three collaborating institutions (Indiana University, UNAVCO UCAR, and Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology) will continue an ongoing study of deformation associated with tectonic and magmatic activity at Taal volcano, Philippines. The project involves operation of a state-of-the-art, continous volcano monitoring network, consisting of three dual-frequency Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers, and a newly developed 12-station single-frequency GPS volcanic monitoring system. The project promises to improve understanding of the magmatic system associated with active volcanic processes at an active, subduction-related volcano; to provide refined spatial control on magma movement via continuous observation of crustal motion from a dense GPS volcanic monitoring system; to identify spatial and temporal interactions between tectonic structures and volcanic systems; and to provide testing and further development of a new, state-of-the-art volcanic monitoring system doc3110 none Saini-Eidukat This US-Argentina project funded by the Division of International Programs in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences and the Petrology and Geochemistry Program of the Directorate for Geosciences supports Dr. Bernhardt Saini-Eidukat of North Dakota State University, Fargo, to work with Drs. Daniel A. Gregori and Ernesto Bjerg at Universidad Nacional Del Sur in Argentina on a study of silicic magmatism in Northern Patagonia. This project is a geochronological, geochemical and radiogenic isotope study of silicic magmatism in Somoncura region of Northern Patagonia in Argentina. Its primary objective is to place the silicic rocks of Somoncura Magmatic Belt in a modern plate tectonic geologic context. This study of the origin of the silicic rocks in southern South America will help link these rocks with structural and tectonic studies and is important for testing models having a bearing on the break-up of the supercontinent of Gondwana. In addition to the PIs, undergraduate students from North Dakota State will be involved as well as a graduate student from Argentina. Facilities used will be those at Fargo State, Universidad Nacional del Sur in Bahia Blanca, Argentina, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Macalester College in Minnesota doc3111 none Schieber Most of recorded earth history is contained in mudstones and shales, fine-grained sediments derived from weathering and erosion of continental landmasses. Yet, mudstones are the least understood sedimentary rock type, and extracting information from them is difficult. A basic task in the study of sediments is the determination of provenance, meaning how the constituents of a rock originated and got to their site of deposition. Whereas we have quite sophisticated ways of doing this for sandstones, the fine grain size of mudstones has long defied efforts to decipher their history in detail. Clay minerals, the dominant constituent of mudstones, are unfortunately chemically labile and altered substantially during burial and diagenesis. As a consequence, it is very difficult to determine after the fact what the original clay minerals were and where they came from. Detrital quartz grains are second in abundance, and are chemically and mechanically very resistant. In principle they would be the ideal component to examine for a well-preserved provenance record, but in the past they only showed limited promise for provenance studies. The recent development of scanning cathodoluminescence (SEM-CL) allows us to observe previously unrecognized textural features in quartz grains. Its application to principal source rocks (plutonic, volcanic, metamorphic) of sediments strongly suggests that quartz grains that originate under different conditions can be differentiated through textural features visible under SEMCL. This has created new opportunities for the in depth examination of sedimentary particles. Because it allows the examination of small particles, such as quartz silt grains, it has potential for the provenance study of mudstones. Examination of quartz silt in Late Devonian mudstones by SEM-CL shows that textures related to metamorphic, plutonic, and volcanic quartz are still recognizable, and that it is very likely that SEM-CL could become an important tool in the study of mudstones. This study is the first step in a systematic study of source rock related SEM-CL features. We want to developing criteria by which to differentiate metamorphic, plutonic, and volcanic quartz grains on the basis of SEM-CL features, and then examine how reliably these features are retained trough soil forming and sedimentary processes. There is very good potential that once there is a solid foundation for the application of this technique, SEM-CL will become a very important tool in the study of all kinds of quartz bearing sedimentary rocks. Because the sedimentary record is so strongly dominated by mudstones, understanding where its quartz component originates will contribute greatly to a sensible interpretation of the geologic record. Our catalog of SEM-CL features in metamorphic, plutonic, and volcanic quartz should also stimulate research by igneous and metamorphic petrologists into processes and causes behind these features, and lead to new insights into the origin of igneous and metamorphic rocks. Because the observed SEM-CL features reflect fundamental processes that occur during the formation of igneous and metamorphic rocks, the results from this study should also be applicable to the study of rocks from other worlds. Specifically, they may provide new ways of interpreting quartz grains that will in all likelihood be retrieved from Mars in the near future doc3112 none In order to assess and predict the impact microorganisms have on processes such as mineral dissolution and precipitation over a wide range of environments, we need first information on where cells occur. It is well known that microbial biomass in the environment is highly heterogeneous, and that cells are generally found attached to surfaces rather than free living. Yet what controls cell distribution - in effect what surfaces they attach to - is poorly understood. Microbial attachment to surfaces has been widely studied but rarely in context that can be used to understand to natural systems. Studies to date have largely been based on simplified models that neglect certain factors that may be key in determining the natural distribution of cells. The proposed research focuses on determining the microbial mechanisms and surface forces that govern microbial attachment to mineral surfaces. Specific goals include: 1) determining the importance of microbial metabolism in determining substrate specificity for attachment, and 2) determining what role crystal chemistry, crystal structure, and surface microtopography (steric effects) play in attachment. To achieve these goals, two primary lines of experiments will be conducted. To determine the role of microbial metabolism, attachment assays will be conducted with microorganisms selected for specific metabolic capabilities, with the aim of quantitatively determining the role chemotaxis plays in substrate selectivity. To determine how steric effects impact attachment, experiments will be conducted in concert with theoretical calculations that account for factors such as cell type, cell wall thickness, cell size, etc. Specific surface forces between microbial cells and mineral substrata will be quantified by Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM doc3113 none James H. Knapp Upper mantle reflections beneath the northwestern British Isles are some of the best-known and most-studied examples of fine-scale heterogeneity within the mantle. First observed on BIRPS marine deep seismic reflection profiles, these reflectors have subsequently been imaged and correlated on additional reflection and refraction profiles in the offshore area of northern and western Scotland, but have not been reliably traced beneath the mainland, although analysis of existing wide-angle reflection data suggest these reflectors do project beneath mainland Scotland. The present study will address both the scientific potential of broadband imaging of fine-scale upper mantle structure as well as the tectonic significance of major mantle reflectors beneath the British Isles. The project will support a 2-year deployment of a 25-station broadband seismic network in Scotland to perform the following tasks. 1) Correlate the seismic signature of upper mantle reflectors on passive- and active-source records. 2) Determine the regional extent of mantle reflectors beneath the Scottish mainland. 3) Examine the geometric relationship of upper mantle reflectors with lithosphere-scale structures of Paleozoic age. 4) Estimate the physical properties, including anisotropy, of these reflectors and their surrounding lithospheric mantle. 5) Test the hypothesis that upper mantle structure is largely Cenozoic in age. This effort will leverage NSF funds with existing support from the British NERC to the University of Bristol for phase I of the RUSH experiment doc3114 none Network protocols lookup state using a number of data structures for functions such as IP lookups (e.g., tries), bridge lookups (e.g., hash tables), and packet filtering (e.g., Pathfinder). Network lookups are a key bottleneck for Internet routers today. As Internet link speeds move to 10 Gbps (OC-192) and 40 Gbps (OC-768), state lookups must complete in tens of nanoseconds. The researcher argues in this proposal that solutions to such next generation lookup problems must span a number of areas from algorithms to computer architecture. The proposal is devoted to investigating such crosscutting issues that arise in the context of next generation network lookups. Current lookup technology that uses external DRAM (Dynamic RAM) cannot scale to this speeds; thus Terabit lookups will require the use of on-chip or off-chip SRAM (Static RAM). Such memory is limited by either expense or manufacturing process | e.g., on-chip SRAM of 16 Mbits is considered optimistic. In this proposal, the researcher considers the issues involved in dealing with such state lookups at Terabit speeds using limited fast memory while providing provable guarantees. An important issue considered in this proposal is SRAM memory utilization: if the lookup chip is to provide guarantees about the amount of state (e.g., number of IP prefixes) it can handle, the resarcher shows that the lookup chip must use a memory allocator which can guarantee a provable memory utilization ratio. However, all conventional memory allocation algorithms (e.g., First Fit, Best Fit, Buddy System) only guarantee poor worst case utilizations: for example, for requests of size 32 standard allocators can only guarantee a utilization ratio of 1 log2 32 = 20% because of possible fragmention. The proposal introduces new problem-specific memory allocation schemes that can be tuned to provide worst-case memory utilization ratios close to 100%. For example, a chip that does IP lookups using the researcher s new allocation schemes can guarantee to handle almost 5 times the number of prefixes that can be handled by a conventional allocator, and yet can allow insert delete times of around 100 microseconds. The researcher s schemes use new algorithms; optimal versions of the researcher s schemes also require new SRAM memory designs that allow shifted access in addition to normal word access. The research also proposes to investigate other issues including the interaction of memory allocation with pipelining (i.e., dynamically allocating memory to stages), and the introduction of new lookup primitives that can support accounting and Quality of Service. For example, the researcher wishes to investigate a novel paradigm for pipelining a trie based on depth rather than height which appears to have a more bounded use of memory. As a second example,the researcher wishes to investigate the possibility of doing prefix lookups that contain a cost field; such a lookup can be used to update a accumulated cost field per input link. The proposal seeks to investigate these and other issues that arise when designing Terabit lookups, to search for new mechanisms, and implement, evaluate, and fine-tune the researcher s new ideas doc3115 none Transmitting multimedia over shared network paths calls for end-to-end flow control because of expected growth of multimedia data transmitted over the Internet. However, Internet and its access technologies are diverse ranging over high-speed optical networks, satellite networks, cable, low-speed modem, and wireless networks. Flow control over diverse network environments is difficult because assumptions commonly made for traditional networks, such as symmetry, do not hold. Asymmetry in the bandwidth and delays of forward and return paths over the range of :1 to :1 can be observed in most home access networks such as cable or ADSL lines, and satellites. Multicast also do not guarantee symmetry in forward multicast and return unicast routes. In these asymmetric networks, packet losses and delays occurring in return paths severely degrade the performance of existing round trip based protocols, such as TCP, resulting in loss in bandwidth utilization, fairness, and scalability. The objective of the proposed work is to develop, verify analytically and experimentally, and implement a suite of end-to-end flow control protocols for real-time streaming applications. The researchers will study both unicast and multicast flow control. The developed protocols are evaluated based on fairness, TCP-friendliness, stability and scalability. These properties must hold regardless of the types of networks, or specifically, whether networks are symmetric or asymmetric in bandwidth and delays. The researchers consider only end-to-end transport-level flow control in which flow control decisions are made based on the traffic characteristics observed only at the end points. The researchers view that the performance problem of round-trip based flow control mainly originates from the tight coupling of forward and reverse path conditions into flow control of both forward (i.e., data) and reverse (i.e., feedback) path traffic. This notion does not hold when the two paths exhibit severe asymmetry. The researchers propose a complementary approach to the problem. Their approach is to completely decouple the conditions of both paths (e.g., congestion and delays) from the end-to-end considerations of flow control, and to apply separate flow control for each path. They rationalize this approach by noting that most multimedia transmissions are strictly one directional, and open-loop due to their real-time and loss-tolerant natures. Thus, conditions on return paths should not affect the performance of multimedia transmission. To achieve TCP-friendliness with little use of return paths, the researchers propose a technique called TCP emulation at receivers (TEAR). TEAR allows receivers to detect every TCP congestion signal, such as packet losses and timeouts, as if it happens in a TCP sender with the perfect reverse path (no delay and congestion on the return path). Using the signal, receivers emulate TCP s flow control to estimate the throughput of TCP under the same operating conditions present in forward paths. The advantages of TEAR are that it can estimate TCP throughput at any environment (of forward paths) where TCP can run, and that it inherits the fairness and stability of TCP while filtering out its undesirable traits. Estimated TCP throughput values at receivers are used to control the receiving rates of receivers in unicast and multicast. The following three major research agendas are proposed. 1. The researchers plan to develop unicast flow control techniques using TEAR. A notion of bounded fairness to uni-directional TCP is proposed. The goal is to develop a rate adjustment scheme that is provably stable and TCP-friendly under various network environments. 2. The researchers plan to develop flow control for receiver-driven layered multicast (RLM). RLMensures scalability and inter-receiver fairness by allowing receivers to determine their own receiving rates independently. However, its stability and TCP friendliness have not been proven. Using TEAR, the researchers will investigate ways to improve these properties under heterogeneous network environments. 3. For multimedia data transmission that is not amenable to layering, the researchers plan to develop flow control techniques for sender-driven single rate multicast. They will study the stable and fair flow control mechanisms for this type of flow control, and investigate tradeoffs among scalability, bandwidth utilization, and responsiveness to emerging congestion doc3116 none Roberts The magnetic field of the Earth is created by electric currents flowing in the Earth s molten-iron core. These currents are generated by self-excited dynamo action. As in a power station, the motion of the conductor in the presence of the magnetic field produces the currents that create the magnetic field itself. The energy source for the fluid motions in the Earth s core is commonly supposed to be the thermal and compositional buoyancy of material released at the surface of the solid inner core as the Earth cools, and successful geodynamo simulations have been based on this idea. There is also a second possible energy source, the luni-solar precession of the Earth s axis of rotation. This has never been evaluated as a possible source of the Earth s magnetism. It is the object of this investigation to determine whether precession can maintain a geodynamo that creates an Earth-like field. If it fails to do so, the aim will be to find how precessional forces alter the fields produced by the successful buoyancy-driven geodynamo doc3117 none Trace Fossils, Ichnofabrics, and Problematic Sedimentary Structures at the Proterozoic-Cambrian Transition: Implications for the Early Evolution of Animals and Their Habitats Mary Droser The Cambrian radiation was the most significant event in the history of complex animals. Critical to this understanding this event is the record of the burrows, tracks and trails made by soft-bodied animals and preserved in the fossil record; these are known as trace fossils. Additionally, animals mix or churn the sediment and produce a mottled fabric known as ichnofabric. The importance of the ichnological record is exemplified by the fact that the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary is defined on the basis of trace fossils (Narbonne et al., ). This research project will be the first detailed systematic field analysis of the correlation of changes in ichnofabrics, discrete trace fossils and mat-related sedimentary structures across the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary. For the proposed project PI has selected four sections located in Newfoundland, Namibia, South Australia and western United States. These sections provide a complete range of shallow-water siliciclastic facies. Examination of terminal Proterozoic trace fossils has applications to questions of the appearance of bilaterian animals. In addition, the rise in bioturbation (sediment mixing) at the terminal Proterozoic-Cambrian boundary interval profoundly and irreversibly changed the benthic habitat. One consequence was the reduction in microbial binding of siliciclastic sediments, which seem to have occurred in fully marine settings. These microbial mats may have been responsible for the unusual style of preservation of the soft-bodied Ediacara-type faunas. It is also likely that unusual sedimentary structures owe their formation and preservation to these mats. To date there has been no detailed examination of the changes in ichnofabric and discrete trace fossils to constrain the notion of the disappearance of a taphonomic window doc3118 none This project concerns the connection between fundamental problems in number theory, zeros of arithmetic L-functions, and random matrix theory. Recent developments have placed the confluence of these fields at the center of a great deal of important work that combines activity and interest from researchers previously working in completely different areas. The study of zeros of arithmetic Dirichlet series, or L-functions, occupies a central position in number theory and includes within its realm both the Riemann Hypothesis and the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. The theory of eigenvalues of random matrices is a subject begun nearly 50 years ago by physicists interested in the statistics of energy levels of excited particles. The connection between these two fields was revealed for the first time in in the paper ``The pair correlation of the zeros of the zeta-function by H. L. Montgomery. This project will involve both number theorists and mathematical physicists to develop a comprehensive new model for families of L-functions in order to gain insights into a number of fundamental open problems about L-functions. For example, by combining random matrix theory and number theory appropriately, the principal investigator and his colleagues intend to (i) find all of the terms in asymptotic formulae for moments of families of L-functions, (ii) determine precisely how large the extreme-most values of L-functions can be, and (iii) analyze the vanishing at the central critical point for families of L-functions. In Bernhard Riemann made a conjecture about an important function known as the zeta-function. Riemann s hypothesis is still unproven and is widely regarded as the most important unsolved problem in mathematics. It has long been known that the solution of this problem would have significant applications to cryptography, coding theory, and the study of prime numbers. Recently, it has also been realized that the zeta-function and the closely related L-functions provide models for the behavior of fundamental particles in physics. The project `L-functions: symmetry and zeros will bring mathematicians and physicists together to explore this amazing connection more deeply through the use of a statistical tool called `random matrix theory doc3119 none Drake This project proposes an experimental program to continue an investigation of the solubility and mineral melt partitioning behavior of highly siderophile elements. The proposed work bears directly on the use of Re-Os, Pt-Os isotopes and platinum-group elements (PGEs) as petrogenetic tracers of Earth evolution and igneous processes as well as thermodynamics and economic geology of the noble metals. The major scientific goals of this continuing program are to quantify the geochemistry of the elements Re, Pt, Os, and other PGEs with respect to their siderophile and lithophile behavior. An understanding of the geochemical systematics of noble metal parent-daugther isotope pairs is essential in interpreting these systems in terms of major active Earth processes as well as in the accretion and primordial differentiation of the early Earth doc3120 none Optimal Transportation: Its Geometry and Applications This project focuses on the analysis of a collection of variational optimization and dynamical evolution problems centered around the theme of optimal transportation --- which enters the dynamical setting whenever the evolution conserves a scalar locally. The central problem can be sketched as follows: Given a distribution of iron mines throughout the countryside, and a distribution of factories which require iron ore, decide which mines should supply ore to each factory in order to minimize the total transportation costs. Here the cost per ton of ore transported from the mine at x to factory at y is specified by a function c(x,y) --- so the problem can be formulated as a linear program. However, when the mines and factories are distributed continuously throughout Euclidean space or a curved landscape with obstacles --- and the cost is related to the distance on this landscape, then the problem has a rich structure and deep connections to geometry and non-linear PDE which have only begun to be explored. Incarnations of this problem embed in current models for surprisingly diverse phenomena. Along with basic questions concerning the structure and qualitative features of optimal mappings, the proposed research addresses models for front formation in the atmosphere, dissipative equilibration in kinetic theory, fluid flow, elastic crystals, and granular materials, geometric and dynamical inequalities, and microeconomic decision problems formulated in the principal-agent framework which involve designing price systems, tax structures, or contracts in the face of informational asymmetry. After half a century of mathematical neglect, the past decade witnessed a revival of interest in optimal transportation, and watched as it blossomed into a fertile field of investigation as well as a vibrant tool for exploring diverse applications within and beyond mathematics.The transformation occurred partly because long-standing issues could finally be resolved, but also because unexpected connections were discovered which linked these questions to problems in physics, geometry, computer vision, partial differential equations, earth science and economics. The time is ripe for a collaborative effort on an international scale to explore existing connections and unearth new ones, while simultaneously developing the basic theory of optimal maps and introducing students and colleagues to the challenges and promise of the field --- thus for the formation of a focused research group with these goals. The core of our plan is to arrange sustained interactions between and around members of the group, who in addition to collaborating scientifically, will work together over the next several years to create the research environment and manpower necessary for transportation research to flourish. To achieve this goal, we plan to organize a series of three semester long periods of emphasis and two workshops on different aspects of the subject in several of our home institutions. Furthermore, we plan to share the responsibilities of training graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, by using funds from the grant to support young researchers while allowing them to divide their time between their home institutions and the semesters of emphasis. This unique arrangement will give participants access to an unusually broad assortment of perspectives and expertise. Moreover, we believe a three-year nurturing window for young researchers to learn the subject and become involved --- if established now - will ultimately advance progress in the field by more than a decade doc3121 none The Investigator and his colleagues study new active materials and their possible use in micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) for biomedical applications. The research project is motivated by the biomedical revolution based on the use of emerging materials and emerging mathematical methods of analysis and simulation for applications to noninvasive surgery and drug delivery at nanoscale to milliscale. The work concerns the use of small scale actuators based on smart materials, especially shape-memory and magnetostrictive materials. They study the growth of tissue on materials and the interactions with surrounding tissue and biological fluids, as well as novel designs of actuator systems. They consider remote actuation based on the use of a magnetic field applied external to the body, and they explore the possible use of MRI. New active materials --- materials that can change shape under moderate stimuli, for example --- hold great promise for building MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems) for a variety of applications. Opportunities in biomedical applications are particularly intriguing; they include noninvasive surgery and drug delivery at nanoscale to milliscale lengths. This project is aimed at biomedical MEMS based on the use of new active materials. The investigators study the properties of active materials, the behaviors of MEMS that could be built with them, and the interactions between the materials and surrounding biological tissues and fluids. The work requires new mathematical methods of analysis and simulation. Investigators focus on the use of small scale actuators based on shape-memory and emerging ferromagnetic shape-memory materials, energized by a remotely applied magnetic field. They study the growth of tissue on the materials and materials interactions with the elastoviscous surrounding tissue, as well as novel designs of actuator systems based on molecular beam epitaxial growth of films. The use of MRI for simultaneous imaging and actuation is explored doc3122 none Salvucci Many questions in hydrology have as a common theme the inter-relation of water fluxes and storage at large scales. The issue arises for simple reasons: Transport processes may be reasonably well understood and predictable at small scales, but the scales at which transports become most relevant (either as resources hazards or with respect to atmosphere interaction) are much larger. At large scales critical parameters (soil, vegetation, and topography) and forcings (radiation, precipitation, wind) are spatially heterogeneous, and transport mechanisms are not only vertical, but lateral (e.g., groundwater redistribution, boundary layer advection). Thus even the simplest question, i.e. what controls the partitioning of precipitation into evapotranspiration, runoff, drainage and storage change , becomes difficult to answer at large scale. Here we propose a new and simple approach for using direct measurement to address the related question: how does the sensitivity of water balance to soil moisture change with scale? The novelty of the proposed approach is the use of monthly precipitation (P) measurements as a surrogate measure of total outflow from the root zone (evapotranspiration (ET), drainage (D), and runoff (R)). The basis of the method is that the changes in root zone moisture storage (S) over an interval, which make up the difference P-ET-D-R, are themselves uncorrelated with the mean storage over that interval. This lack of correlation is a direct result of the statistical stationary of root zone moisture. The utility of this property is that all of the covariance of ET, D and R with S can be estimated by measuring the covariance of P with S (or by calculating the precipitation rate conditionally averaged at given moisture levels, and taking derivatives). The stationarity condition thus imparts on conditionally averaged precipitation utility as a diagnostic measure of the sensitivity of combined evaporation and drainage runoff fluxes to soil moisture. Because this simple methodology is based only on mass balance and conditional averaging, it can be applied at any area scale through simple aggregation of P and S data, and thus can be used to directly estimate both the form and the scale-dependence of moisture-water balance sensitivity. As such it can be used to quantify how variability in moisture due to lateral surface and groundwater redistribution processes and land cover soil meteorological forcing heterogeneity influence the large-scale sensitivity of water balance to soil moisture doc3123 none Bertozzi A combined experimental, analytical, and computational study of fundamental problems in the dynamics of thin viscous films and fluid interfaces is proposed. The recent discovery of stable undercompressive waves in driven films has created the opportunity for a unique collaboration between experiments and mathematical theory. This research program will include related studies of solid-liquid-vapor interfaces, moving contact lines, and surface tension effects. Analytical and computational studies will be integrated with a series of experiments that includes a search for undercompressive waves in a spin coating geometry, motion of contact lines near room- temperature critical points, and high- speed video imaging of the dynamics of singularity formation in finite- time rupture of fluid interfaces. Mathematical analysis will include models for film rupture, stability of driven contact lines, and numerical analysis of schemes for computing these problems. Liquid films and moving contact lines arise in problems ranging from industrial design of paints and microchip fabrication to medical applications including contact lenses and the lining of the lung. All of these problems involve interactions across widely different length-scales in which the physical laws are not clearly understood. This is a collaboration between researchers from the Mathematics (Bertozzi, Witelski) and Physics (Behringer) Departments at Duke University and the Mathematics Department at North Carolina State University (Shearer). This effort combines mathematical modeling, analysis, and numerical simulation with new laboratory experiments to study fundamental problems in driven films and moving contact lines. Computational and mathematical models will direct the design of experiments investigating new phenomena in spin coating processes and dewetting films. The program will involve undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral associates, and visiting scientists from other institutions. This research will foster curriculum developments in the Departments of Mathematics, Physics and the Center for Nonlinear and Complex Systems at Duke University doc3124 none Saxena, Surendra K. This project is to study the melting and physical properties of iron in the pressure range of 30 to 300 GPa. The new data will consist of melting of iron to the pressure of Earth s core, pressure-volume-temperature measurements (thermal expansion and compressibility as a function of temperature) and phase transformations of iron. The investigators will use laser-heating (double-sided) and external heating of diamond-anvil cells to achieve the pressure and temperature. The study will provide important experimental data to be used in understanding the thermal and dynamic aspects of Earth s core and assessing the thermodynamic database for modeling the temperature-density profiles in the core and at the core-mantle boundary doc3125 none This project will investigate material and symbolic aspects of domestic food distribution among Samburu (Kenya) pastoralists under conditions of chronic scarcity. Seasonal and cyclical scarcity have shaped many aspects of Samburu life, including key aspects of gender and age-based roles and identities; in recent years scarcity has increased with decline of the pastoral economy and population growth. Previous research has suggested that women and junior males suffer disproportionately during famines in pastoral societies dominated by senior males. This research hypothesizes, however, that various aspects of Samburu society, in particular the manner in which the domestic domain is female centered and the nature of Samburu gender roles and identities, mitigate the power of elders to have differential access to nutritional resources. Methods include the collection of nutritional data in collaboration with a Kenyan nutritionist, as well as a demographic economic survey of the community, structured interviews, and the analysis of household food distribution patterns. This project will contribute to our understanding of gendered dynamics within pastoral societies and to development policy planning directed towards famine relief in various parts of the world doc3058 none The Novikov conjecture is one of the fundamental unsolved problems of manifold theory. Its history is a fascinating journey through a remarkably varied mathematical landscape. The conjecture has provoked vigorous exchanges of ideas between widely separated subjects, and (like other famous unsolved problems) it has generated lively new mathematics of its own. The Baum Connes conjecture transports the fundamental aspects of the Novikov conjecture to operator algebra theory, and makes new contacts with representation theory, spin geometry and other areas. Very recently, striking progress has been made on the both conjectures. Methods and ideas involving dimension theory, amenable actions of groups, Banach space geometry and combinatorics have played essential roles. An unusually exciting opportunity has arisen to spark interaction among some quite widely separated fields. Some of the core questions are so basic that one can even expect important exchanges at the student level. The issues are so broad that the ordinary mathematical scheme of small, two or three person, collaborative efforts will not give the most rapid and efficient progress. The key objectives of the proposed program are as follows: Marshall forces from topology, analysis and from several less apparent areas for a general attack on the Novikov and Baum Connes conjectures. Create a rapid and effcient means of providing the essential tools for continuing research in this broad area. Broaden the communication and cooperation between US and foreign mathematicians through a coordinated program of visits. Offer effective training opportunities for graduate students, giving them exposure to an unusual breadth of mathematical ideas and expertise doc3127 none Rates of Holocene Relative Sea-level Rise and Differential Crustal Movements in the Mississippi Delta Torbjorn Tornqvist Accelerated sea level rise due to global warming is expected to become a huge problem in the Mississippi Delta, where dramatic loss of coastal wetlands at rates of ~100 km2 per year is already taking place. To facilitate future wetland management strategies, a proper understanding of natural rates of sea-level rise and its spatial variability due to differential tectonic subsidence rates is indispensable. Recent studies in other major deltaic plains have shown that spatially nonuniform crustal movements can be considerable. Presently available sea-level data from the Mississippi Delta do not resolve differential tectonic subsidence rates, whereas most Holocene relative sea-level curves for the Gulf Coast exhibit a conspicuous, but commonly mutually conflicting, stair-step pattern of alternating sea-level stillstands and rapid rises. The scale of these phenomena is an order of magnitude larger that the subtle ( 1 m), supposedly climate-related sea-level fluctuations that have been inferred elsewhere, and they are difficult to reconcile with widely accepted global sea-level data. Furthermore, recent work on the Texas Gulf Coast has proposed a middle Holocene sea-level highstand of 2 m above present sea level. This study will collect new sea-level indicators from the eastern and western margins of the Mississippi Delta for the last ~ years, using techniques that have so far not been applied to the Gulf Coast. The approach is based on the use of basal peats that overlie a compaction-free Pleistocene basement and can be related to mean sea level. Ecologically indicative plant macrofossils that can be related to mean sea level will be selected from basal-peat samples and 14C dated by accelerator mass spectrometry. In addition, stable carbon isotope ratios will be measured to preferentially select samples indicative of brackish or saline conditions. The premier outcome of this project will constitute new relative sea-level curves for the Mississippi Delta that will (1) assess the vertical resolution of basal peats as sea-level indicators and their potential for reconstructing subtle, climate-related sea-level rise; (2) test the validity of the inferred stair-step pattern of Holocene sea-level rise; (3) determine the occurrence and magnitude of differential tectonic subsidence rates; and (4) establish whether a middle Holocene sea-level highstand is likely to have occurred on the Gulf Coast (if so, represented in this subsiding area by a distinct reduction in the rate of sea-level rise). The results will be important for future projections of coastal wetland loss in the Mississippi Delta doc3128 none The Novikov conjecture is one of the fundamental unsolved problems of manifold theory. Its history is a fascinating journey through a remarkably varied mathematical landscape. The conjecture has provoked vigorous exchanges of ideas between widely separated subjects, and (like other famous unsolved problems) it has generated lively new mathematics of its own. The Baum Connes conjecture transports the fundamental aspects of the Novikov conjecture to operator algebra theory, and makes new contacts with representation theory, spin geometry and other areas. Very recently, striking progress has been made on the both conjectures. Methods and ideas involving dimension theory, amenable actions of groups, Banach space geometry and combinatorics have played essential roles. An unusually exciting opportunity has arisen to spark interaction among some quite widely separated fields. Some of the core questions are so basic that one can even expect important exchanges at the student level. The issues are so broad that the ordinary mathematical scheme of small, two or three person, collaborative efforts will not give the most rapid and efficient progress. The key objectives of the proposed program are as follows: Marshall forces from topology, analysis and from several less apparent areas for a general attack on the Novikov and Baum Connes conjectures. Create a rapid and effcient means of providing the essential tools for continuing research in this broad area. Broaden the communication and cooperation between US and foreign mathematicians through a coordinated program of visits. Offer effective training opportunities for graduate students, giving them exposure to an unusual breadth of mathematical ideas and expertise doc3129 none Koenig, Elissa Long Valley caldera, California, is an ideal natural laboratory for the study of interaction between volcanism and tectonics. The Hilton Block - the area in the Sierra Nevada located south of Long Valley caldera - has been one of the most seismically active regions in California. However, patterns of recent seismicity are difficult to reconcile with the observed regional strain or with stress transfer calculated from simple elastic models of volcanic inflation. Understanding the connections between volcanism and tectonics in this region will require a better understanding of both the kinematics of the Hilton Block and the mechanics of stress transfer within the caldera system. The investigators will use detailed GPS observations and simple elastic models to determine the nature and distribution of deformation in the Hilton Block. They will develop finite element models that address time- and temperature-dependent viscoelastic effects to further explore how deformation within the seismically active Hilton Block is linked to Long Valley volcanism doc3130 none Award: Principal Investigator: David R. Morrison This research project brings together a team of mathematicians and physicists based at three campuses to work together on string theory. Specific research tasks include the study of the quantum corrections to the mypermultiplet moduli spaces in theories with eight supercharges, the structure of the moduli spaces of heterotic string compactifications, M-theory models compactified on seven-dimensional spaces whose global holonomy group lies in the exceptional Lie group G2, M-theory models on Calabi-Yau fourfolds, and a study of the AdS CFT correspondence for branes at singularities. String theory is a promising candidate for a unifying theory of the universe at its most fundamental levels. Although the basic idea is simple - elementary particles should be modeled as mathematical loops of stgring rather than as points - working out the details of this theory has involved and inspired some sophisticated mathematical tools and ideas. The task is by no means complete, even in an area where the synergy between mathematics and physics has been particularly productive, the study of the Calabi-Yau spaces that appear as solutions of the classical string equations of motion. This is one of three linked awards to a research group that includes mathematicians and physicists at Duke University, Columbia University, and Rutgers University. Funds in this award provide core support for the researchers at Duke and are supporting this interdisciplinary group s collaborations through videoconferencing and travel doc3131 none Jaron This award provides support for the Symposium Balancing Costs with Benefits of Health Care Technologies in the New Millennium: A Global Perspective. The Symposium is being held in conjunction with the World Congress on Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering (July 23-28, ), an activity organized by the International Union for Physics and Engineering in Medicine and six major domestic U.S. and international professional societies in the field of biomedical engineering. The Congress is a major international meeting with 19 international organizations cooperating to make it a success. The Symposium program includes three sessions, each with a plenary address, presentations and a panel discussion. The sessions are: 1. Cost-Reducing Health Care Technologie--the NSF Whitaker Foundation experiment 2. Cost Versus Benefits: A National Perspective 3. Technology Transfer: A Global Perspective Proceedings of the World Congress Symposium are to be published jointly with those of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Symposia to be held at the AAAS meeting Science in an Uncertain Millennium (Washington, DC, 17-22 February ): (1) Healthcare Technology, Economics, and Policy: an Evolving Balance, and (2) Cost-Reducing Health Care Technology doc3132 none Wasson Our main goal is to use the O-isotopes to better understand the evolution of solar nebula and the first generations of chondrite parent bodies. We use ion-probe studies of oxygen isotopes in the phases of the most-primitive chondritic meteorites in order (1) to evaluate the isotopic compositions of oxygen reservoirs in the solar nebula and to gather evidence relating to the spatial and temporal variations in these reservoirs, and (2) to better understand the nature of aqueous alteration processes (that mainly occurred in asteroids) and the nebular source(s) of the asteroidal water. Our work is carried out thin sections, thus we have precise information about the petrographic setting of each probed spot. We examine the O-isotopic evidence regarding changes in the composition of the nebular gas recorded in the chondrules of carbonaceous chondrites and possible models to account for the differences in the O-isotopic composition of chondrules and refractory inclusions. In our studies of aqueous alteration in chondritic asteroids a key phase is magnetite produced by the oxidation of Fe metal, during which all O comes from the oxidant, probably H2O. Thus, the magnetite is a proxy for asteroidal water. We also study chondrule olivine and other alteration phases such as fayalite in order to obtain enough petrographic information to evaluate possible models doc3133 none This Focused Research Group project involves two faculty members and several industrial collaborators who will study ultrafast, spin dependent processes that reflect nonequilibrium magnetization dynamics in ferromagnetic thin films and heterostructures on a picosecond time scale and below. A core question relates to the ultimate speed limits of magnetization reversal, which will be approached experimentally by employing all-optical, ultrashort pulse laser techniques. Unlike conventional approaches, which use pulsed magnetic fields to study magnetization switching in storage media, the physics in this research focuses on selective optical excitations of spins within the ordered magnetic medium, so as to modulate the exchange interaction and related electronic correlations by light in an nonthermal manner. In addition to studying optically activated magnetoelectronic processes in laterally uniform magnetic multilayers and exchange biased bi- and multilayers, the project includes the study the dynamics of collective micromagnetic effects in high density planar arrays where the individual submicron magnetic particles are coupled via dipolar (or possibly exchange bias) forces. Thin films of conventional transition metals (Co, NiFe) form the starting materials base for the project work, but a significant component of the research emphasizes selected transition metal oxides, most notably the half metallic ferromagnet CrO2. The research involves students and postdocs in cutting-edge fundamental research that has immediate relevance to current technology. The training prepares student for a variety of careers in academe, industry or government. %%% The slowest part of a typical computer is the magnetic hard drive. While there are several steps involved in storing and retrieving data from the thin film disk medium, the process of encoding information into magnetically aligned atoms is reaching its practical limits of speed. In this project work we aim to use ultrashort laser pulses to influence the disk material s magnetic properties and to achieve the reversing the magnetic alignment of groups of atoms in as little as a few trillionth of a second-approximately a hundred times faster than the speed of the process in today s disk drives. The all-optical technique allows the team to investigate the fundamental interactions involved in such fast magnetic switching, and it may lead to extremely fast data storage devices in the future. One specific approach focuses on aiming the laser pulses at a sandwich of two magnetically coupled thin film magnetic films, whose collective interaction determines the overall magnetic properties of the bilayer which is efficient in resisting an externally applied magnetic field. By selectively absorbing the laser radiation at the interface, only a few atomic layers thick, the magnetic coupling between the two materials is abruptly interrupted, freeing one of the layers (the free ferromagnet) to be rapidly reversed by an oppositely-directed static magnetic field, applied from the outside. While the concept could some day be used in fast data storage, the team will be using it mostly to study the basic processes of flipping ultrasmall compass needles at unprecedented speeds. Many physicists have studied the reversal of a single atom s magnetic moment, but the collective process of flipping the moments of many thousands of atoms at once is not well understood at a fundamental level. The research involves students and postdocs in cutting-edge fundamental research that has immediate relevance to current technology. The training prepares student for a variety of careers in academe, industry or government doc3134 none Beroza, Gregory This research measures precise differential arrival times between similar earthquakes earthquakes using waveform cross-correlation. These precise measurements are used to estimate accurate relative event locations. Rather than estimate absolute hypocentral location, the method solves for the vector position difference between earthquake hypocenters. In doing so one is able to reduce dramatically errors in earthquake locations. The technique is currently being extended to work with much larger data sets, up to ~100,000 earthquakes, using both a hierarchical inversion scheme. This capability to address a number of research issues, including: what is the origin of recently discovered seismicity streaks in fault zones? What is the state of stress in close proximity to major faults? What constraints can be placed on strain localization as a fault zone matures? What can we learn about the time-dependent nature of friction on faults at depth? How is seismicity related to regions of aseismic versus seismic slip doc3135 none Stern The history of soil erosion in central Texas and many other regions is poorly known, yet understanding this history is important for studies of environmental change and efforts in soil conservation. We propose to quantify the temporal evolution of soil thickness in the vicinity of Hall s Cave, which is located in the regionally-extensive Edwards Plateau in Kerr Co., TX. Soil evolution will be quantified through application of a novel technique the uses the strontium isotope composition (87Sr 86Sr of mammalian fossils preserved in the cave-filling sediment. A trenched sediment sequence at Hall s Cave contains a rich paleontologic record, and a high resolution chronology was constructed for the past 16,000 years of deposition in the cave. As soils were eroded from the Edwards Plateau beginning around 8,000 years ago, the relative contribution to the exchangeable strontium pool of Sr derived from the limestone bedrock (low 87Sr 86Sr values) should have increased with respect to the silicates (high 87Sr 86Sr values) in the soil. Therefore, the strontium isotope ratio of biota living on the landscape will change through time and reflect the 87Sr 86Sr value of the exchangeable Sr pool in the soil, and thus the soil thickness. WE will construct a history of soil thickness, which we will then compare to independent chemical and biotic proxies for changing temperature, moisture, and soil character. Specific proxies included: (1) the mineralogy and elemental chemistry of the cave sediments as a constraint on the soil erosion history; (2) the oxygen isotope ratio of fossils (backberries, snails and speleothems as a record of precipitation patterns in the past; (3) the carbon isotope ratio of tooth enamel and humus as a proxy for the proportion of C4 grass in the paleoecosystem; (4) the palynology of the strata; and (5) the paleoecology indicated by the rich vertebrate fauna. Temporal correlation of these environmental proxies with the soil erosion timing and rate, as indicated by the Sr isotope variations, will provide essential evidence to evaluate the causes of the profound soil erosion that denuded the central Texas landscape of its once thick soil doc3136 none Leinenweber High pressure silicate and titanate crystals are being grown using a multianvil apparatus at pressures from 5 GPa to over 20 GPa, and the structures solved using single-crystal x-ray diffraction, in order to understand more about how the atomic structures of rock-forming minerals change during high pressure phase transitions in the Earth s mantle. The targets in this study include magnesium- and calcium-bearing silicates and titanates with H2O and or fluorine, and so the basic idea is to extend the understanding of minerals under pressure to include more diverse compositions than are currently understood. The study takes advantage of the multianvil facility at Arizona State University for high pressure synthesis, along with a new single-crystal x-ray diffractometer installed in the Chemistry Department. New methods of crystal growth, in particular the growth of large crystals using unusual high pressure liquids such as molten Ca(OH)2 as a growth medium, are being used to produce the samples. Also, in some cases the samples must be recovered in liquid nitrogen (-196 degrees Centigrade), because they will not survive decompression at room temperature. Materials such as CaSiO3 perovskite behave this way, and this material in particular will be targeted for this type of treatment. The crystals will be transferred over to the diffractometer cold, and the diffractometer has a liquid nitrogen attachment so the sample stays cold while it is studied. The knowledge of the existence of these high pressure silicates and their atomic structures will be used to help understand what happens to elements in the Earth s mantle; what kind of structures they can occur in, and how they might be transported during dynamic processes doc3137 none his proposal is a request for funds for participant support costs related to a workshop on Biome and Latin American Pollen Database. This is a meeting of pollen experts to facilitate inclusion of Latin American scientists in a component of a global pollen database effort. It is crucial for the Latin American Pollen Database in particular, and the Global Pollen Database in general, that Latin American scientists be involved in the compilation efforts doc3138 none The proposal deals with development of a macro-scale analytical tool for electromechanical wave propagation phenomena in electric networks. The proposal and the activity proposed are based on the assumption that their previous research on the wave propagation theory is valid and accepted for power system transient analysis. The problem addressed in this proposal is that of developing efficient models for the study of electromechanical wave propagation on very large scale, extensive networks. This phenomenon is poorly understood, but could have significant harmful effects on the national power system in the future. The PIs draw on their extensive relevant experience to outline a comprehensive novel approach to modeling and studying of the problem. The proposal is to study the network as a continuum in which sources and sinks with their pertinent; physical characteristics are located at specific points. Tools developed in other fields, such as wave propagation in plasmas, are utilized, along with the availability of data from synchronized satellite-based simultaneous measurement of rotor angles over wide areas. Work on this project has been underway for several years, in which time techniques have been developed for obtaining the continuum model from real time system data. The proposed methodology could turn out to be widely applicable and of significant usefulness as restructuring advances toward much more complex operation than has ever been envisioned in the past.Investigators possess necessary skills, facilities and expertise required to successfully perform the proposed research effort doc3097 none Paterson, Scott R Miller, Robert B. Exactly how plutonism, especially high volume plutons in continental magmatic arcs, fits in with active continental margin tectonics is controversial. Needed parameters include understanding magma chamber processes, how fabrics relate to the magma chamber and rates of processes during emplacement. This project will utilize excellent exposures in the Tuolumne Intrusive Complex to address several of these issues by a comprehensive integrated study of several transects across the complex. Results are expected to place greater constraints on the coupling of magmatic and host rock processes during chamber growth, on processes (mixing mingling, collapse) occurring along internal margins during emplacement of subsequent magma pulses, the connections to a volcanic feeder system and the relationship between magmatic fabrics and all the operative processes doc3140 none Jurassic(?) emplacement of the Golconda Allochthon, west-central Nevada: Implications for the Late Paleozoic - Mesozoic tectonic development of western North America Walter S. Snyder Clyde J. Northrup : From a north-south line that bifrucates Nevada to the present-day coast, the continental crust of western North America has been constructed by the repeated accretion of tectonic terrains. One of those events was the emplacement of the Golconda Allochthon (GA) which is widely regarded as the principal structural expression of the Late Permian to earliest Triassic (approx. 240 million years ago) Sonoma Orogeny. A critical evaluation of available timing constraints, however, indicates that east-directed emplacement of the GA may have occurred as late as the Middle Jurassic - perhaps 75 My after the Sonoma event. Confident interpretation of the role of the GA in the late Paleozoic to Mesozoic history of western North America awaits clarification of key field relationships and more precise age control of igneous plutons and volcano-sedimentary rocks that constrain the age of the Golconda Thrust. Proposed research will evaluate this hypothesis through a combination of: 1) targeted field mapping to clarify critical field relations; 2) structural kinematic analysis to establish the transport direction of the Golconda Thrust; 3) U-Pb geochronology to precisely date Mesozoic plutons that either cut, or are cut by the Golconda Thrust; and 4) whole-rock isotope geochemistry to compare initial isotopic ratios of Mesozoic plutons within the GA to those of plutons in the adjacent structural basement. If valid, a Jurassic age of Golconda thrusting would significantly impact current interpretations of the late Paleozoic and Mesozoic tectonic evolution of western North America doc3103 none Collaborative Investigation: Tectonogenesis of the Khoy ophiolite, NW. Iran Ghazi and Pessagno This proposal is a collaborative investigation that focuses on the planktonic foraminiferal biostratigraphy, radiolarian biostratigraphy, choronostratigraphy and microfacies analysis of sedimentary rocks occurring within and above the extrusive member of the Khoy ophiolite. The Khoy ophiolite of northwestern Iran is one of the largest and least studied Iranian ophiolites. Moreover, it is superbly exposed with most geologic elements representing pre-, syn-, and post emplacement events (units) well preserved. The Khoy ophiolite is located at a junction where the Iranian and other Middle Eastern ophiolites are connected to the Turkish and Mediterranean ophiolites. The integration of the data resulting from the proposed collaborative effort coupled with geochemical, Pb-Nd-Sr isotopic and 40Ar-39Ar results generated by the Co-Principle investigator A. Mohamad Ghazi ( ) should lead to a better understanding of the tectonogenesis of the Khoy ophiolite and to determine whether it is indeed a part of the Tethyan oceanic crust and is a part of the postulated ridge-transform fault system spreading axis that existed in Cretaceous southern Tethys ocean. The project is funded with participation from the Division of International Programs doc3142 none The unprecedented growth in the number of networked users and the emergence of high-bandwidth end-user applications impose new challenges in the design of architectures for next-generation computer networks. Optical networks, employing Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM), transcend the bandwidth limitations of electronic networks by utilizing the enormous capacity of the optical fiber. Though this technology looks extremely promising, large-scale deployment of such optical networks in the future depends on a rapid convergence of communication network requirements and physical network realities. The focus of the proposed research in optical networks is to facilitate this process, by tackling several system-level challenges while acknowledging the limitations of existing devices. Wavelength Division Multiplexing of numerous multi-gigabit sec channels is being deployed right now on existing and new fiber infrastructure in respones to explosive growth in both local and long-haul digital traffic. WDM deployment is surging because capacity may be economically provisioned by activating additional wavelength channels on existing fiber plant. However, as the fiber capacity grows, increasing strain is placed on the capacity of costly electronic switches at network nodes and access points. A reconfigurable transparent optical network seeks to provide a low-cost alternative by ensuring that the signal leaves the optical domain only at the source and destination, thereby avoiding unnecessary opto-electronic conversion. There are, however, fundamental limits imposed by physical-layer impairments that limit the length of end-to-end connections in transparent optical networks. Connections that span several nodes and large distances may acumulate severe impairments imposed by fundametal physical constraints such as fiber dispersion and nonlinearties, spontaneous emission noise, and device imperfections such as crosstalk. Since the physics of point-to-point communications performance is well understood experimentally and theoretically, it has been argued that nation-scale networks will avoid physical-layer impairments by deploying point-to-point WDM with electronic regeneration at each node. Such a network is called an opaque optical network. Unlike the case of point-to-point links and physical-layer optical devices, the analysis and simulation of complex all-optical or hybrid optical-electronic networks is still in its infancy and well-tested tools are only now being developed. The goals of this project are to propose, evaluate and study designs for the next-generation high-bandwidth WDM-based optical networks, which are compatible with the physical-layer characteristics of optical devices. In particular, the researcher plans to investigate the following research topics: Sparse Regeneration and Translucent Optical Networks: There has been a great deal of discussion regarding transparency vs. opacity in (national-scale) optical wavelength devision multiplexed (WDM) networks [11]. In [22], the researcher introduced the notion of a translucent optical network - a network which supports selective regeneration of optical signals within the network. The researcher s study showed that, for medium-scale networks translucency can help to improve the overall network performance. For larger-scale networks, where impairments introduced by fiber nonlinearities and dispersion cannot be ignored, the researcher anticipates that a higher degree of opacity may be needed to combat signal degradations, but this is an open problem for further research. The researcher also plans to investigate the effect of a few signal regenerators at select locations in a nation-wide WDM network. Routing and Wavelength Assignment with Power Considerations: Routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) is an important problem that arises in wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) optical networks. Previous studies have solved many variations of this problem under the assumption of perfect conditions regarding the power of a signal. The researcher propose to investigate this problem while allowing for degradation of routed signals by components such as taps, multiplexers, switching elements, fiber links, etc. The researcher plans to include novel amplifier and other device models to characterize the performance of the networks doc3143 none Everett Controlled-source electromagnetic induction (CSEM) imaging is one of the few scientific tools available for rapid, non-invasive, and inexpensive characterization of near-surface, environmentally sensitive sites. This award will support the development of three-dimensional CSEM finite element code to forward model the effect of topography, soil and rock electrical conductivity, and buried subsurface heterogeneities such as buried pipelines, metal fences and building structures. The resulting code will enable geophysicists to better understand electromagnetic responses in areas with complex geological structures, rugged terrain and cultural noise doc3144 none Award: Principal Investigator: Brian R. Greene This research project brings together a team of mathematicians and physicists based at three campuses to work together on string theory. Specific research tasks include the study of the quantum corrections to the mypermultiplet moduli spaces in theories with eight supercharges, the structure of the moduli spaces of heterotic string compactifications, M-theory models compactified on seven-dimensional spaces whose global holonomy group lies in the exceptional Lie group G2, M-theory models on Calabi-Yau fourfolds, and a study of the AdS CFT correspondence for branes at singularities. String theory is a promising candidate for a unifying theory of the universe at its most fundamental levels. Although the basic idea is simple - elementary particles should be modeled as mathematical loops of stgring rather than as points - working out the details of this theory has involved and inspired some sophisticated mathematical tools and ideas. The task is by no means complete, even in an area where the synergy between mathematics and physics has been particularly productive, the study of the Calabi-Yau spaces that appear as solutions of the classical string equations of motion. This is one of three linked awards to a research group that includes mathematicians and physicists at Duke University, Columbia University, and Rutgers University, and NSF funds are supporting this interdisciplinary group s collaborations through videoconferencing and travel doc3145 none Faust Larsen It is critical to understand the evolution of bubble size distributions (BSD) during magmatic ascent in order to determine what the textural information from quenched pumice clasts tells us about the processes of magmatic degassing during explosive eruptions. Processes such as coalescence, Ostwald ripening, the effects of concentration gradients in the melt, and multiple nucleation events are all possible ways by which an initially uniform bubble size distribution derived from a single nucleation event may evolve into polymodal distributions more like that observed in pumice clasts. We propose here to experimentally quantify the rates and conditions under which these processes affect BSD s in rhyolitic and phonolitic melts at decompression rates, pressures, temperatures, and water contents applicable to magmatic ascent prior to the fragmentation limit. Our study will address the role that melt viscosity plays in the production of pumice vesicle size distributions by comparing results for natural high-silica rhyolite and phonolite compositions (h ~109 and 105 respectively). Our goal is to use these experiments to constrain pre-fragmentation effects at applicable conditions in order to better constrain how BSD modification may occur during eruptions to produce the VSD s present in quenched pumice. Our goal for this proposed work is an experimentally constrained model of the evolution of BSD s in ascending magma prior to fragmentation, and provide better constraints on the processes that contribute to vesicle size distributions observed in pumice doc3146 none Smith Recent observations from the Infrared Space Observatory have provided the first measurements of the mixing ratio of the methyl radical, CH 3 , in the atmospheres of Saturn and Neptune. CH 3 is produced by photolysis of CH 4 and is the key photochemical intermediate leading to complex organic molecules on the giant planets and moons. However, the observed CH 3 infrared emissions are much weaker than predicted by current photochemical models. Several modelers favor using a rate coefficient for CH 3 + CH 3 +M-- C 2 H 6 + M for the temperature range 140-190 K that is at least 10 times larger than the value at 296 K, the lowest temperature at which laboratory measurements are available. Reliable experimental and theoretical pressure-dependent rate constants are required for this reaction and for others at low temperatures and pressures to model hydrocarbon, methyl, nitrile, and CO concentrations and to derive atmospheric transport rates. Dr. Smith and his colleagues will combine a theoretical approach with selected low temperature-low pressure recombination rate measurements in the laboratory to solve this modeling problem. The theoretical computations will provide consistent rate parameters to describe the data and potential energy surfaces and will cover a wider temperature range (30- K) than the current expressions, which were designed for combustion modeling purposes and extrapolate unreliably to low temperatures. Experiments will be conducted at 200K and lower, using a laser photolysis, resonance-enhanced multiphoton ionization (REMPI) technique in a low-pressure cell to provide key missing low-temperature data. A three-year program of research will be conducted to improve low-temperature hydrocarbon kinetics parameters in models of planetary atmospheres, emphasizing (1) examination of mechanisms in existing photochemical models with sensitivity analysis to identify important uncertainties, (2) theoretical parameterization of the temperature-dependent rates of CH 3 + CH 3 + M -- C 2 H 6 + M and other key steps, and (3) low temperature and pressure measurements of these reaction rates for input to the parameterizations. Reliable values for these rates must be made available to accurately model outer planet atmospheric photochemistry and to properly interpret old and new planetary data, including the derivation of transport rates. This award is funded through the Planetary Astronomy Program doc3147 none Jaenike The proposed research will examine the evolution of associations between Drosophila and nematode parasites, encompassing time scales of evolutionary change from of millions of years down to changes ongoing within present-day populations. Experimental infections will be conducted with 8 nematode species and 24 Drosophila species. These experiments, in conjunction with molecular phylogenetic analyses, will allow a determination of the extent to which a parasite s host range is determined by host phylogeny, as well as determination of how host range evolves in these parasites. Closely related Drosophila species will be crossed to uncover the genetic basis of interspecific differences in resistance to parasites. These hybridization experiments will also reveal whether resistance to one parasite species is genetically correlated with resistance to others. Parasites are ubiquitous - but generally overlooked - components of natural communities, often having major effects on the individuals and populations of their host species. The potential host range of a parasite is relevant to the issue of emerging diseases, the use of parasites in biological control programs, and the effect of invading parasites on endangered species. The proposed studies of the evolutionary determinants of parasite host range will contribute to the development of a comprehensive theory of host-parasite interactions doc3148 none Efficient and Accurate Methods for the Computation of Lyapunov Characteristic Exponents for n-Dimensional Dynamical Systems This proposal aims to develop computational methods for the efficient and accurate determination of the Lyapunov characteristic exponents of discrete and continuous dynamical systems. Since current methods are inadequate, our goal is to develop new computational techniques that can be used for general, n-dimensional systems. Thus, the development of new techniques for solving the variational equation of a system of nonlinear differential equations will be undertaken. The methods to be employed will be underpinned by mathematical analysis so that the algorithms developed will be both efficient and accurate. Several different methods will be investigated and compared with one another. Error analysis will be undertaken. Dissemination of the information will include the development of computer codes that are directly downloadable from the internet. The methods developed in this research effort will have applications in numerous areas of applied science and engineering. Nonlinear dynamics is a key feature in many structural systems, such as long span suspension bridges; in biomechanical systems, such as Central Pattern Generators for locomotion; and in the rapidly developing field of secure communication systems. Hence, the results of this research will have a considerable and direct impact on several real-life areas of application doc3149 none Caflisch This project will apply mathematical modeling and computational simulation to epitaxial growth of thin films, in particular semiconductor materials grown by MBE (molecular beam epitaxy). The research topics are characterized by complex geometry and a hierarchy of length scales, requiring significantly new mathematical and numerical approaches. Specific topics include strain in thin films, accelerated numerical methods, coarse-graining and the dynamics of interacting defect lines. This project will apply mathematical modeling and computational simulation to material science, in particular to semiconductor materials grown by MBE (molecular beam epitaxy). Although MBE is just one of many possible growth techniques, it is the growth method for many of the most demanding applications, such as high-performance, low-power systems for wireless communications. Modeling and simulation are not generally well developed for MBE growth, and current computational methods are not sufficient to address many of the important problems of epitaxy. The goal is to develop new mathematical models and computational methods that will significantly advance the state of the art. This project is multi-disciplinary, involving mathematics (both applied and core) and materials science, as well as participation from both industry and university. The distinguishing feature of this collaboration is that it combines expertise in modeling, simulation and experimentation in one cohesive group doc3150 none Arnold The evolution of reproductive isolation is critically important in the speciation process, because it is cessation of gene flow that definitively places diverging lineages onto separate evolutionary paths towards becoming new species. How speciation and reproductive isolation occur depends on the number of genes conferring isolation and the relative importance of pre- vs. post-zygotic reproductive barriers. Identifying the number and magnitude of genes involved can also elucidate both the time and strength of natural selection needed for speciation. We will study the genetic basis of reproductive isolation in the Louisiana Irises, a species complex has been a focus of ecological, genetic and evolutionary studies for almost a century. We will construct a QTL (quantitative trait loci) map of reproductive isolating mechanisms separating two species, Iris fulva and I. brevicaulis. Our analysis will locate QTLs that have the largest effect on the expression of both pre-mating and post-mating barriers to reproduction. The traits associated with the pre-mating barriers include floral differences that cause bumblebees to preferentially visit I. brevicaulis and hummingbirds to preferentially visit I. fulva (e.g., flowering time, flower color, nectar guide shape, nectar sugar concentration). The traits associated with post-mating barriers include (i) gamete competition (i.e., conspecific pollen tubes grow more quickly and thus fertilize ovules more efficiently than do pollen tubes from the alternate species) and (ii) pollen fertility of hybrids formed between the two species doc3151 none OF PROJECT The goal of this project is to formulate, analyze and numerically test new computational algorithms geared towards solving problems of deformation and failure in structures and materials. We use the p hp finite element methods, where the degree p of polynomials used can be increased to achieve accuracy. The first topic is the investigation of a linearized algorithm for the buckling of three-dimensional objects, recently implemented in the commercial hp code STRESS CHECK. Spurious predictions are unavoidable due to the non-compactness of an underlying eigenvalue problem. We develop a mathematical theory which analyzes the algorithm, helps in ensuring the reliability of the computations, and leads to useful extensions. The second topic is the development of a p finite element method for woven composite materials. An algorithm will be developed whereby each periodic cell is identified with a specialized p-type element, which can incorporate the various geometric and material properties. The periodicity is exploited since no mesh sub-division is used, but accuracy achieved by increasing the degree in the local elements. It is well known that when a thin vertical beam is loaded too much, it will eventually buckle. This project mathematically develops a new engineering method for predicting such maximum buckling loads for complicated three-dimensional structures. The goal is to ensure that the results predicted by the engineering method (already in use in the commercial software STRESS CHECK, which has been used e.g. to study the buckling of space shuttle panels) are reliable. The second part of this project develops a new method to computationally study woven composite materials. These materials, which are composed of fibers that are woven together and imbedded in a surrounding matrix are often both very strong and lightweight, and have several useful industrial applications (e.g. aeronautical components). Due to their complicated structure, their analysis by conventional methods can be quite cumbersome and expensive. Our new method overcomes several difficulties by exploiting the repeating nature of the material, and will lead to useful materials science applications, such as the design of new composites with specific properties doc3152 none Dones This research project of Dr. Henry Dones, at the Southwest Research Institute, deals with the origin and evolution of the small satellites of the giant planets. It concentrates on those objects that are believed to be collisional shards and those classified as irregular satellites. These objects are not well understood, and yet the understanding of their origin and evolution will provide vital clues to the formation of the planets themselves. In particular, the study of these small satellites could supply important insights into the accretion physics of icy bodies. In addition, they could provide important constraints on the current and historical distribution of small bodies throughout the outer solar system. These constraints can be used to better understand the ages of the surfaces of the major regular satellites, as well as the history of the Kuiper Belt and the scattered disk of comets beyond Neptune. This award is made through the Planetary Astronomy Program doc3153 none With this renewal award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the work of Dr. Edward L. Clennan in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, Wyoming. The work involves detailed studies of the reactions of singlet oxygen with organosulfur compounds in solution and with organosulfur compounds and olefins inside NaY zeolite containing methylene blue sensitizer. The solution studies include examinations of the Foote reaction surface, intramolecular electron transfer in the hydroperoxy sulfonium ylide, its Pummerer rearrangement, and singlet oxygen induced epimerization of 1,3-dithianes. The zeolite work will include experiments to explore the extent of positive charge buildup on the carbon framework of the substrate, and the mechanism of intrazeolite oxidation. Sensitizers, such as methylene blue, in the presence of light, are able to convert normal triplet O2 into the excited singlet state, which is much more reactive toward organosulfur compounds and olefins. Different products of these reactions are observed in zeolites - microporous aluminum silicate solids - because of steric constraints and the presence of positively charged ions inside the structure. These studies are expected to improve our mechanistic understanding of oxidation reactions, lead to potentially improved synthetic methods for making useful compounds, and provide state-of-the-art training for developing scientists doc3154 none The investigators develop very efficient adaptive discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for transient hyperbolic and singularly perturbed convection-diffusion problems. These methods use discontinuous bases and thus are very effective at capturing discontinuities. In addition, they simplify adaptive h-, p-, and hp-refinement, are simple to implement on unstructured meshes with irregular boundaries, parallelize very well, and satisfy local (element level) conservation principles. Adaptive enrichment by h-, p-, and r-refinement or combinations thereof has typically been guided by a posteriori estimates of discretization errors. The investigators study asymptotically correct error estimates of discretization errors under h- or p-refinement that provide very reliable measures of solution accuracy. A posteriori error estimates are developed for linear and nonlinear hyperbolic and singularly perturbed convection-diffusion problems. The investigators implement these DG methods for large-scale problems on modern parallel systems ranging from advanced supercomputers to clusters of workstations. Parallel procedures must address heterogeneity at the processor, memory, and communications levels as adaptivity greatly complicates matters. A balanced parallel computation may cease to remain so under adaptive h- or p-refinement. Computational loads must dynamically be redistributed during the solution process to restore and maintain balance. Procedures to migrate work between the processors so as to minimize the computational time have hardly been addressed in such a heterogeneous environment. Complex realistic computer simulations of physical problems like the flow about a vehicle, weather prediction, and materials processing require long times on the fastest supercomputers. The investigators develop very efficient and reliable computational techniques based on the discontinuous Galerkin method that should have advantages for parallel and network computation. Accuracy and reliability of the results are guided by estimates of solution errors that are automatically obtained as part of the computation. These are used to create adaptive procedures that assign computational resources to regions where they are needed most. The efficiency provided by adaptivity leads to more accurate computer simulations, better products, and shorter design cycles doc3155 none A joint project (Parameterization of the Aerosol Climatic Effect, PACE) between experimentalists and modelers who have expertise in aerosol chemistry, cloud microphysics, radiative transfer and climate modeling has recently been initiated to address the issue of aerosol interaction with clouds, referred to the aerosol indirect effect. The PI proposes to compare ACE-2 field campaign data with cloud properties and radiative fluxes simulated by the NASA GISS SCM along with that simulated by other models. The objectives are to rigorously assess the models and develop and test more realistic schemes for representing aerosol-cloud-radiation interactions in climate models. The work is important because it will contribute to narrowing the large range of uncertainty in model simulations of the indirect effects of anthropogenic aerosols, thereby facilitating more reliable predictions of global and regional climatic change doc3156 none Award: Principal Investigator: Michael R. Douglas This research project brings together a team of mathematicians and physicists based at three campuses to work together on string theory. Specific research tasks include the study of the quantum corrections to the mypermultiplet moduli spaces in theories with eight supercharges, the structure of the moduli spaces of heterotic string compactifications, M-theory models compactified on seven-dimensional spaces whose global holonomy group lies in the exceptional Lie group G2, M-theory models on Calabi-Yau fourfolds, and a study of the AdS CFT correspondence for branes at singularities. String theory is a promising candidate for a unifying theory of the universe at its most fundamental levels. Although the basic idea is simple - elementary particles should be modeled as mathematical loops of stgring rather than as points - working out the details of this theory has involved and inspired some sophisticated mathematical tools and ideas. The task is by no means complete, even in an area where the synergy between mathematics and physics has been particularly productive, the study of the Calabi-Yau spaces that appear as solutions of the classical string equations of motion. This is one of three linked awards to a research group that includes mathematicians and physicists at Duke University, Columbia University, and Rutgers University, and NSF funds are supporting this interdisciplinary group s collaborations through videoconferencing and travel doc3157 none Systematic work will be carried out to elucidate how the component dynamics of A and B in a miscible A B blend depend differently on temperature and composition, i.e., to uncover how friction factors associated with A and B each vary with the temperature and composition, and to determine whether A and B experience glass transition at significantly different temperatures. The concept of polymer plasticization is yet to proven as the origin of the negative intrinsic viscosity observed in solutions where the polymer component has a significantly different temperatures. It remains a fundamental question whether dynamics of polymer A in a solution or blend depend are completely determined by inter-chain (extrinsic) interactions or are further influenced by intra-chain (intrinsic) interaction so that they are from those of B and whether A undergoes the glass transition at a different temperature from that where B experiences its glass transition.. A novel Solution Rheology Approach (SRA) will be applied to probe these topics. To depict the separate component dynamics operative in miscible blends (e.g., made of species A and B), corresponding object and mirror solutions (e.g., made of polymeric A in oligomeric B and polymeric B in oligomeric A) will be investigated respectively to resolve the component dynamics of A and B. The protocol studying solution dynamics to gain explicit information about the component dynamics of corresponding blends represents a new attractive approach to the subject, to which few experimental techniques have been successfully and effectively applied. This SRA has the advantage of being able to determine the component dynamics with minimal concentration fluctuations as well as to probe component dynamics in immiscible blends. %%% The objective of the proposed research is to achieve new understanding of polymer dynamics in solutions and blends that are pertinent to rheology and processing of polymeric materials. The subject of the proposed work is at the heart of polymer science and engineering and is a very active area of polymer materials research. One central question is how to predict the overall viscoelasticity and individual component dynamics of a molecularly mixed polymer blend knowing the glass transition and viscoelastic properties of each component doc3158 none McGuire The thrust interface between the subducting Phillipine Sea plate and the overriding Eurasian plate, which lies underneath Tokyo, is one of the most dangerous faults on earth. Due to low seismicity levels, the location of this fault has been inferred only indirectly from the locations of earthquakes occurring within the subducted oceanic plate that have uncertainties of about 3-5 km. The PI will use recent improvements in earthquake relocation techniques, as well as a larger dataset to map out the location and shape of the trust interface with relocated earthquakes of potential accuracy on the order of ~100 m. The catalog of extremely accurate relative earthquake locations will provide the basis for studies of the mechanical properties of the fault, involving repeating earthquakes, space-time rupture inversions of moderate size events, and possibly geodetic imaging of slip transients in the region. This combination of studies should improve estimates of the seismic hazard in the Kanto-Tokai region as well as our understanding of earthquake rupture and fault mechanics doc3159 none Ku The project involves measuring the Li isotopic composition of clays and oxyhydroxides to evaluate the significance of a proposed oceanic Mg+2 sink in nearshore marine sediments. The project has obvious links with studies using Li as a groundwater tracer and determining the Li isotope fractionation on clay minerals. The PIs advisor has considerable expertise in Sr isotope applications to terrestrial chemical weathering as well as major element and clay mineral generation studies of soils. These topics are key components in this project. This project will not only answer an outstanding geochemical question, but will also fill a void in the PIs current geochemical background doc3160 none Van Orman This is a project to investigate diffusional mass transport in MgSiO3 perovskite and MgO periclase under high pressure ( 23 Gpa). The study is aimed at placing rigorous experimental constraints on the plastic rheologies of these important high-pressure phases under temperature and pressure conditions of the lower mantle. Perovskite and periclase are generally agreed to be the most abundant minerals in the lower mantle, and their plastic flow properties are thus expected to control the viscosity of the mantle below 670 km. It will be possible using the results of this experimental investigation to directly estimate the viscosity of a perovskite-periclase lower mantle deforming by diffusion creep, as well as the dependence of the viscosity on temperature, pressure, and grain size. The study will thus provide a much-needed constraint on geophysical models of viscosity stratification in the mantle, and in doing so is expected to significantly improve our understanding of the dynamics of the Earth s deep interior doc3161 none The investigator and his colleague study ways to break intractability of algorithms for high-dimensional problems. They focus on high-dimensional integration, explore breaking intractability either by settling for a stochastic assurance of small error or by using additional domain knowledge, and further develop FinDer, a software package for high-dimensional integration. The computational complexity of an algorithm is a measure of the amount of work the algorithm must perform to produce a solution for given inputs. Usually the complexity is measured in the size of the problem being solved. For example, finding the solution of a linear matrix equation in N unknowns --- an N-dimsional problem --- generally takes on the order of N times N times N arithmetic operations; the computational complexity of such an algorithm is N cubed. There is huge interest in solving high-dimensional problems. Many applications involve functions of hundreds, thousands, and even an infinite number of variables. Examples occur in physics, chemistry, mathematical science, and economics. These problems must usually be solved numerically and one has to settle for an approximate numerical solution to within an error epsilon. If a worst case deterministic assurance of an epsilon approximation is desired, then the computational complexity usually depends exponentially on the number of variables; the problem is said to be intractible. The investigators study breaking intractability either by settling for a stochastic assurance of small error or by using additional domain knowledge. The use of formalizing additional domain knowledge is a powerful new idea. In particular, the investigators study under what conditions a double win is achievable for the important problem of high-dimensional integration: when does an algorithm to compute the value of a high-dimensional integral both converge faster than a Monte Carlo algorithm and do so with a worst case deterministic assurance? They apply the theoretical results to improve the FinDer software system for computing high-dimensional integrals. This new paradigm is applied to other problems of computational mathematics doc3162 none The investigator continues to develop adaptive moving mesh methods for the numerical solution of time dependent, multi-dimensional partial differential equations. The research work will be focused on a new moving mesh method, the moving mesh partial differential equation approach proposed by the investigator and his collaborators. The approach has been implemented in one and two dimensions for generating non-singular structured and unstructured adaptive meshes and successfully applied to a number of problems. Moreover, the approach has led to a unifying framework describing previous methods, providing a new theoretical underpinning, and building reliable new methods. The objectives of the proposal are to further improve the efficiency and robustness of the two dimensional method, to apply it to practical problems, and to implement the three dimensional method. This project is concerned with the development of new computational methods which are essential to enhance the ability of scientists and engineers to solve large scale computational problems that are crucial to our economy, environment, and security. The research is focused on development of adaptive numerical techniques or mesh adaptation methods, where the special moving features of the particular problem being solved are adapted to. Mesh adaptation has recently played an indispensable role in the numerical simulation of many large-scale problems arising from science, engineering, and industry, such as those involving shock waves, boundary layers, ignition propagation fronts, and multi-material interface. These problems have a distinct common feature, that is, their solution changes significantly only in a small portion of the physical domain and the resolution of the solution in this portion dominates the quality of the whole simulation. Standard (non-adaptive) techniques often fail to solve these problems because they spend effort evenly on the entire domain and thus require formidable resources of computer CPU time and memory to obtain a reasonable degree of resolution. On the other hand, adaptive mesh methods gain significant economies by paying most attention to the small portion of the physical domain where the solution changes most. The moving mesh method under study is a natural type of adaptive mesh methods which are designed to capture the moving features of the physical solution. The method is suitable for parallel computing and has proven to be an indispensable tool for use in the simulation of many industrial manufacturing problems. As an important part of the proposed research project, two specific applications will be focused on. The first will be the numerical simulation of chemical transport in groundwater aquifers. Groundwater supplies much of the water use in the United States. The wide spread degradation of groundwater quality from chemical contamination has recently prompted extensive research for simulating and predicting chemical behaviors in the subsurface. The application of the moving mesh methods will provide accurate, efficient, and robust numerical algorithms for simulating chemical transport in groundwater and therefore for effectively protecting and managing the groundwater resources. The other application will be on the analysis of dynamic stall of airfoil for better understanding the physical mechanisms which cause the unsteady flow behavior in the high-angle-of-attack flight condition found common with modern fighter and civil transport aircrafts doc3163 none The ultimate goal of this project is to understand that interfacial behavior and microstructure of monodendrons in order to immobilize these molecules on an interface. The PI is going to screen various molecular parameters including a generation number of monodendrons, type of terminal groups, spacer length, nature of anchoring groups, and type of functionalized substrates in a search for stable organized interfacial assemblies. These dendrimer macromolecules could be capable of forming organized and stable supramolecular structures at interfaces with the focal anchoring group used for chemical binding to functionally modified surfaces. Interfacial ordering and surface behavior at air-liquid, air-solid, and liquid-solid interfaces will be studied by Langmuir techniques, chemical and electrostatic self-assembly in conjunction with comprehensive characterization with ellipsometry, X-ray scattering, UV spectroscopy, and scanning probe microscopy. This project focuses on the nanotechnology for fabrication of nanocomposite films with molecularly tailored surface properties from dendrimers. Dendrimer polymers with a tree-like architecture are promising candidates for functional supramolecular materials with prospective applications in the fields of drug delivery, molecular coatings, nanochemistry, molecular composites, and light harvesting. A critical step in the development of such applications is the understanding of how these macromolecules can be anchored to solid substrates in a controllable manner doc3164 none The proposal is motivated by the current need to better understand those industrial processes dominated by the flow of gas-solid mixtures .The attendant property measurement of these unsteady, three-dimensional flows precludes their sampling, since solid probes would disturb the phenomena of interest (the formation or destruction of clusters, for instance). There has been some success, however, in using remote sensing tomography: in such a technique, the cumulative interference of many beams with the matter inside a flow container, can be reconstructed mathematically into a three-dimensional time-resolved map of local properties. The PI proposes the electrical impedance tomography , in which a number of electrodes are mounted around the volume of interest, and a prescribed current is applied to them. It is then possible to infer from the exiting voltages the spatial distribution of impedance inside the volume. The phase distribution map (liquid-gas, solid-gas) can be extracted from this data by classical electromagnetic theory. Specifically, the PI proposes to develop and test a solid-gas tomographic technique, where both space and time resolution will be achieved. The field covered by 48 electrodes will be strongly three dimensional ( independent projections), and the resolution will be boosted by using multiple frequency excitation, where 12 lock-in amplifiers will collect an order of magnitude more data in the same time interval. The goal is to collect a complete data set within 10 milliseconds . In this fashion, the PI is confident that he will be able to examine cluster formation and bulk flow dynamics, and near wall particle dynamics doc3165 none There are three areas of research in the project ``Theory and Applications of Multigrid and Domain Decomposition Methods . The first area concerns the additive multigrid convergence theory, which is effective in analyzing the asymptotic behavior of the contraction numbers of multigrid algorithms with respect to the number of smoothing steps for boundary value problems with less than full elliptic regularity. The seminal result obtained by the PI for V-cycle algorithm with Richardson relaxation as the smoother will be extended to general smoothers, nonconforming finite elements, the mixed formulation and the F-cycle algorithm. The second area involves multigrid methods for stress intensity factors and singular solutions. These are methods that can take advantage of the form of the solution of the boundary value problem in the regions where it does not have full elliptic regularity. Using this approach, usual quasi-optimal convergence rates have been obtained for simple finite elements on simple grids for boundary value problems on two-dimensional domains with reentrant corners or cracks. The technically more challenging interface problems and three dimensional problems will be investigated in this project. The third area is the analysis of the Finite Element Tearing and Interconnecting (FETI) method, a nonoverlapping domain decomposition method in which the (pseudo) inverse of the Schur complement matrix has to be preconditioned. The goal of this part of the project is to carry out an analysis of the FETI method and some of its variants within the framework of additive Schwarz preconditioners, and to investigate new mechanisms for the global communication among the subdomains. The methods analyzed in this project are efficient algorithms for the numerical solution of partial differential equations. Such equations are extremely important in science and engineering since they are the governing equations for most physical phenomena. Part of the research involves the fast computation of stress intensity factors, which are essential indicators in fracture mechanics. The FETI method to be studied in this project has already been implemented for large scale engineering problems using parallel supercomputers with up to a thousand processors. The advances resulting from this project will therefore have an impact on many areas of science and technology, such as aerospace engineering, fracture prediction and fluid flow problems doc3166 none We propose to develop a new family of stable high-order finite difference methods suitable for the solution of wave problems involving many interfaces and significant geometric complexity. These complications are addressed by embedding the computational problem into a Cartesian grid and formulating methods such that the position of the material interfaces as well as the physical properties of the solution across the interface is accounted for properly to the order of the scheme. Staggered grid as well as non-staggered grid methods will be explored with the emphasis on the development of a rigorous mathematical foundation for these schemes to ensure robustness and uniform stability for all grid sizes and embedded geometries. Appealing properties of embedding methods such as the ability to model moving interfaces and the introduction of virtual interfaces to enhance parallel performance will be exploited to model a variety of wave problems in electromagnetics, acoustics, seismology, and elasticity. The increasing interest in the accurate and efficient solution of wave-dominated problems, e.g. problems in acoustic and electromagnetics, over very long periods of time has spawned an interest in the formulation of high-order accurate computational methods for such problems. In this effort we propose to develop a new class of computational techniques, specifically aimed at the reliable and robust modeling of problems of a realistic size and complexity, e.g., the modeling of the propagation of electromagnetic and acoustic noise and its environmental impact, and the modeling of underground waves of interest to the oil industry. The proposed methods are unique in maintaining a very simple computational structure without sacrificing the accuracy, hence overcoming a number of well known difficulties associated with existing methods which require some kind of automated generation of the computational grid on which the solution is computed. These proposed developments will enable the modeling of very complex and realistic scenarios and will, in combination with high-performance computing facilities for which the methods are well suited, allow for the modeling and analysis of complex wave dominated problems in a variety of areas of interest to engineers and scientists doc3167 none Chou The investigator studies the convergence, stability, and superconvergence of finite volume element type methods, and implements algorithms in software. A general framework is developed for mixed control volume methods on irregular grids. Furthermore, nonlinear covolume methods applied to parabolic differential and integro-differential equations are studied. Fluid flow problems such as chemical or radioactive contaminant transport in subsurface reservoir flow, displacement of oil in the oil recovery process, and bioremediation of aquifers, are complex and difficult to simulate computationally. Yet they are important for the environment and for managing energy resources. The investigator develops, analyzes, and implements a class of computational methods called finite volume element methods that seem to have some advantages over other methods but that have not been rigorously analyzed yet. The analysis undertaken in the project should establish a firm theoretical footing for the methods. This is important for the reliability and validity of computations performed with the methods doc3168 none This research will study the processes and determinants of marriage migration in China. Marriage is the most important reason for female migration in that nation, where large proportions of women move over long distances to join their husbands households upon marriage. This study will investigate macro-level structures, such as sociocultural traditions and legacies of socialist institutions, and micro-level strategies, responses, and processes of decision making, in order to understand the origins and nature of marriage migration. The research will involve analysis of census-type data, as well as in-depth field surveys and interviews, in two villages in western Guangdong and southern Beijing. The research will examine in what ways marriage is transactional and pragmatic, the varied opportunities, constraints, and considerations of men and women, the formation and evolution of social networks that facilitate and encourage marriage migration, and the implications of the above for women s mobility. Much of our knowledge about human migration is drawn from Western market economies. But Asian societies are increasingly mobile and are subject to sociocultural and institutional traditions that are poorly understood and seldom the subject of theory. Existing work on the internal migration of China focuses primarily on work-related migration and rarely differentiates between the movements of men and women. A better understanding of marriage migration in China will help advance our knowledge about the heterogeneity and complexities of human movements. Empirical evidence from this study will demonstrate the importance of integrating migration theory with perspectives on gender, culture, social hierarchy, inequality, and the status, constraints, and strategies of women. Findings from this study will yield insights for the relationships between socialist transition and spatial and social processes, and for hypothesis testing concerning marriage migration and women s mobility in other parts of the world. This research will further Fan s career goal to develop new research areas and methodologies and to prepare to play major leadership roles in the profession. Through this study, she will evaluate if gender, women and feminist perspectives should be central to her future research agenda. She will gain experience in using new qualitative methods such as focus group interviews, and will assess whether these methodologies should constitute new directions in her future research. These career developments may enable her to advance from middle to senior rank in the profession, increase her visibility through international collaborations, and support her goals of promoting diversity in education including studies of under-represented populations and training of under-represented students to become prominent scholars doc3169 none This project is aimed at greater understanding of fundamental mechanisms of high temperature deformation and microstructural evolution in titanium alloy friction stir welds. Two alloys have been selected, pure(CP) titanium and Ti-6Al-4V, a + b alloy. CP titanium, used for its corrosion resistance especially in the chemical process industry, was chosen for its good formability. Ti-6Al-4V is widely used in a variety of aerospace and marine applications in welded and unwelded conditions. In addition to normal welds, interrupted welds, where the tool is retracted before reaching the end of the two plates to be joined, will also be evaluated. In this way, the micro-structures of the thermomechanically-affected and heat-affected zones will be compared with material just ahead of the weld. These in turn will be compared with microstructures of the stir zone (the actual dynamically recrystallized weld) and the base material. Samples will be obtained for metallographic examination in both the transverse and longitudinal directions to reveal each distinct microstructural zone and serve as a map for the eventual location of TEM foils. A dual beam (electron beam + ion beam) Focused Ion Beam (FIB) will be used to remove TEM foils at precisely designated locations within the welds. This will greatly improve the chances of obtain-ing a foil with the desired microstructural information. Diffraction contrast techniques will be used on a Philips CM 200 and CM 300 Field Emission Gun TEMs to determine the details of the deformation processes, i.e., the development of deformation substructure (e.g., sub-grains and sub-bands), the occurrence of dynamic recovery and recrystallization, annealing effects, and phase transformations. Scanning electron microscopy will be performed on a Philips XL-30 FEG instrument using Orientation Imaging Microscopy to reveal possible microtexture that may be residual from the base material. The results of these microstructural studies will be used to complement process optimization and mechanical property data. %%% This is a research enhancement grant made under the Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education (POWRE) program. The PI plans to realign her career after a four-year hiatus in an administrative capacity. Prior to working as Aerospace Team Leader at Edison Welding Institute and Associate Director for the Center for the Accelerated Maturation of Mate-rials (CAMM) at the Ohio State University, she led an active technical career for 15 years. The research is expected to contribute basic materials science knowledge at a fundamental level of special relevance to the behavior of metals. The project is co-supported by the Division of Mate-rials Research, and the MPS OMA(Office of Multidisciplinary Activities doc3170 none Diebold This award to Columbia University in the City of New York provides shipboard technical support, shore-based support, as well as maintenance and calibration of shared-use scientific instrumentation, for researchers using R V Maurice Ewing, a research vessel operated by the university s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The award also provides support for research using portable seismic reflection instrumentation on other UNOLS vessels. The technical support awarded here will assist NSF-funded researchers conduct a diverse suite of marine geological and geophysical studies throughout the world ocean beginning in doc3171 none Keblinski This is a new GOALI award funded jointly by the Division of Materials Research and the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. Keblinski does materials modeling and is collaborating with Treacy, a microscopist at NEC, to study paracrystallites (regions with medium range order) in amorphous Si and Ge using modeling and fluctuation microscopy. Both graduate and undergraduate students will be involved in this project. A recent observation of medium range order in fluctuation spectroscopy has shown the need of a structural model for an amorphous solid in place of the continuous random network which shows no medium range order. This grant will facilitate a collaborative exploration: experimentally of the conditions which induce, sustain and remove medium range order and theoretically, atomic scale models with characteristics which are particularly conducive to the existence of medium range order. This work will lead to a better understanding of the structural details of glasses as well as the thermodynamics and kinetics of their formation. %%% This is a new GOALI award funded jointly by the Division of Materials Research and the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. Keblinski at RPI and Treacy at NEC will conduct research in collaboration. Both graduate and undergraduate students will be involved. The theoretical, atomic scale modeling and simulation will be carried out at RPI with frequent exchange of results and ideas with the experimental work conducted at NEC. The newly discovered application of fluctuation microscopy has raised several questions, perhaps the most prominent is the question of medium range order. The best-known model for the structure of glass, the continuous random network model shows no medium range order. One needs an atomic level model to explore the characteristics necessary for such order to exist. Other questions might be, what are the thermodynamic consequences, what are the consequences for the kinetic processes in these glasses doc3172 none The POWRE grant will serve as an opportunity to extend and develop her research at a critical time in her career. This proposal adddresses the fundamental theoretical question of the origins of mass. The PI s research involves the causes of electroweak symmetry breaking and the mechanisms responsible for the diverse masses of the quarks and leptons, the elementary constituents of matter. While the standard model of particle physics can accommodate massive particles, it does not explain the dynamics through which mass arises. This proposal seeks to advance the understanding of the origins of mass by exploring physics that lies outside the Standard Model. The PI will employ techniques ranging from field theory to model building to computer simulation. The award is funded by the NSF POWRE program, the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the MPS Directorate, and the Physics Division doc3173 none The investigator and his colleagues study mathematical, statistical, and computational questions motivated by the problem in computer vision of defining and computing structural scene description, descriptions of the objects in a scene and their relations to each other. The first goal is to obtain a theoretical understanding of the problem of inferring objects and their compositional structure, both in standard optical images and in laser range imagery and motion images. The second goal is to test this understanding by developing effective algorithmsfor the statistical inference of this structure, algorithms that work with real data at reasonable speed on current computers. The general approach is to formulate mathematical representations of patterns, typically compositional with a hierarchy of structures, to encode the variability of these structures in stochastic models, and to use the models to infer information about the image. Standard stochastic models are rarely adequate, prompting the development of new classes of probability measures or completely new directions for traditional models. Additionally, in the context of this application the team aims to develop mathematical, statistical, and computational ideas that are of broader use. For example, compositional issues in vision are similar to ones in the grammars of language. One aspect of the project studies this connection. The investigator and his five colleagues continue their mathematical, statistical, and computational investigations of a range of problems motivated by image processing and computer vision. The underlying question is simple enough: Here s an image, what is it an image of? Despite its simplicity, this is a hard question to answer. The approach taken here is to decompose the image into different components in some hierarchical structure and to use statistical analysis to infer information about the image from the relationships of the components within the structure. There are similarities with the grammatical structure of language, which the project explores. Recognition of objects in an image is a fundamental problem for both computer systems and biological systems. Advances are important for engineers developing computer vision applications, computer scientists seeking efficient algorithms in problems related to intelligent behavior of machines, and cognitive scientists studying human vision and language skills. Results of the project are published on CD-ROM, allowing demonstration of the dynamic behavior of algorithms in ways impossible through traditional publication modes and offering new ways to exploit multi-media communications for both education and research purposes doc3174 none Despite very strong economic incentives to approach the information theoretic limits of wireless channels, the state-of-the-art (typified by second generation cellular wireless)remains far from an efficient utilization of spectrum and power resources. Wireless channels are known to be particularly challenging from the standpoint of analysis of fundamental limits. Fading, multiuser interference, and the space-distributed nature of wireless pose considerable difficulties. Relevant simple canonical models and the appreciation of the right mathematical tools are only emerging recently. The focus of this work is the investigation and application of a rich body of mathematical results that play a pivotal role in the analysis of wireless communication channels of contemporary interest. Random matrices are ubiquitous in the study of wireless systems. For example, fading makes channel coefficients random and time-varying, spreading waveforms in nonorthogonal code-division multiple access systems are accurately modeled as being randomly selected, multiantenna transmitters receivers in scattering environments give rise to channels described by random matrices. Both coded (Shannon capacity) and uncoded (bit-error-rate) performance turn out to be determined (in most cases) by the eigenvalues of certain random matrices. Frequently, those matrices are quite large as their dimensions grow linearly with parameters such as the number of users and signaling degrees of freedom. Many information theoretic problems for which numerical simulation is the only alternative with finite size matrices find elegant deterministic solutions in the infinite-size limit. This project is a systematic study of the spectrum of random matrices arising in single- and multiuser communication and information theory. Its results should influence the choice of both multiaccess techniques and receiver designs, as well as guide the development of asymptotic random matrix theory with technologically relevant problems doc3175 none We will develop new algorithms, mathematical foundations, and a new programming methodology for the fast parallel solution of elliptic problems with aspects that are crucial in practice but present serious difficulties to existing methods. We will investigate new robust iterative substructuring methods that perform well even in the presence of interface roughness on element scale. The performance of existing methods deteriorates in this case, but smooth decompositions are typically not available in practice. We also propose to investigate fast methods for the discretization and iterative solution of high frequency wave propagation and scattering problems by representing the solution locally as a combination of waves on a coarse mesh and exploiting connections with the fast multipole method. Finally, we propose to develop new programming approaches and prototype tools for latency tolerant implementation on parallel machines, transforming a high level program with new directives into multiple independent tasks queued on processors. The project will advance the state of the art in modeling complicated problems in Mechanical Engineering with irregular geometries on high-performance computers with high accuracy and efficiency, improve the technology underlying radar, sonar, and ultrasound imaging, and create a new highly efficient methodology and prototype tools for High-Performance Computing. Potential applications include computational analysis and modeling of automobiles and aircrafts and accurate high resolution ultrasound imaging. It is expected that the new methodology for High-Performance Computing will be important for futuristic technologies, where the speed of light is the limiting factor of communication between the processors, as well as for more immediate distributed computing on networks of computers doc3176 none Fatehi In the electric utility industry, a significant change is occurring with the move towards deregulation and an increase in competition. This development in the industry will have a profound impact on the way power transmission systems are designed. One of the most significant effects of this change is that the transmission systems are being much more heavily used to transfer electric energy from one region of the country to another. The motivating reason for the increased usage is purely economic, i.e., large wholesale energy buyers are able to satisfy their electric energy needs by purchasing less expensive energy from geographically distant regions and subsequently using the transmission system to move it to the place of consumption. In this way, marketplace pressure is allowed to drive down the price of electric energy. This will result in electric transmission systems being significantly more stressed as larger quantities of energy are transported over much longer distances. Consequently, the future of the electric power industry requires a mechanism that allows for a competitive environment while ensuring that power system operating conditions are secure. The goals of the proposed project are: 1) To study the total transfer capability and transient stability limit of western North American power system using large-scale simulation models 2) To investigate application of Flexible AC Transmission Systems (FACT) devices to enhance the power transfer capability and transient stability limits of the power systems. 3) To develop robust control strategies to improve maximum loadability of the transmission lines in a high order model of western North American power system. The results of this research are expected to be of substantial value in the development of power systems in future and in providing more economic and secure electricity in the deregulated environment. The funding of this project will result in an increase in the number of competent professional women with advanced knowledge of power systems and control theory doc3177 none The PI will develop and analyze fast and accurate numerical schemes for liquid crystal flows and for PDEs in unbounded domains, and produce a publicly available high performance software package of fast spectral elliptic solvers which will be a valuable tool for computational scientists and engineers. The PI will also implement the proposed numerical schemes to investigate several important problems of current interest, including in particular the coupling and defect motion of liquid crystal flows, and the dynamic control and parametric resonance in rotating flows. The accuracy and efficiency of the proposed schemes will allow us to simulate these three-dimensional time-dependent flows with a reasonable turn-over time. Computer simulations are playing an ever increasing role in many branches of science and engineering and are rapidly replacing much of the expensive prototyping and testing phase required before any product is brought to market. Consequently, fast and reliable numerical methods software are becoming an indispensable tool for many scientists and engineers, especially for computational scientists in fluid dynamics and materials science. It is expected that our numerical simulations will contribute towards better understandings of the complex physical and mathematical problems, and provide valuable information for the design of advanced materials and of turbo-machinery doc3178 none Manghnani The elastic properties of silicate melt and its structure provides insight into not only magmatic processes in the Earth but also into the possible origin of the planet s primordial stratification. This project will study the elastic and structural properties of simple (binary) alkali silicate and germanate melts under in-situ high pressure and temperature conditions in the externally heated diamond-anvil cell. The elastic properties will be investigated by Brillouin spectroscopy (light-scattering technique); a newly developed modified platelet scattering geometry will be employed. In conjunction with the Brillouin measurements, Raman studies will be conducted to correlate the measured elastic properties with the structure of the melt. The Brillouin and Raman studies will be conducted on alkali silicates and germinates with a range of cation sizes and different degrees of melt polymerization. As such, the investigators anticipate that their data will constrain the structural systematics of the melt elasticity and pressure, and this will in turn provide insight into the role of pressure-induced changes in melt structure in altering melt compressibility at depth in the Earth s interior doc3179 none This project will allow the principal investigator, Elaine Terry, the opportunity to spend the -01 academic year as a Visiting Professor at the University of Memphis in Tennessee. The POWRE award will give her ample opportunity to enhance her research efforts. The award is unique in that it will give the PI the opportunity to develop an undergraduate mathematics course in her field of research, Ramsey theory. During the one year leave of absence, the PI will facilitate her professional advancement in three ways: (1) enable her to conduct research for publication, (2) establish research ties with prominent researchers, and (3) develop a seminar course in Ramsey theory for undergraduates. It will allow the PI time to pursue her research objectives in an environment supportive of significant interactions with other researchers in Ramsey theory. This opportunity for informal exchange of ideas with colleagues in the same field, and for exposure through seminars in other areas within the field will foster creative approaches to her research. This POWRE project is supported by the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) and the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA doc3180 none This proposal has two parts. Mather s part concerns using variational methods to prove the existence of wandering orbits in Hamiltonian systems. The sort of thing he hopes to prove are illustrated by the conjectures which go under the name Arnold diffusion . Forni s part concerns area preserving flows on surfaces. He intends to study two conjectures: an extension of the KAM theorem, where Kronecker flows are replaced by area preserving flows on surfaces of higher genus; and a conjecture that would imply that the convergence in Birkhoff s ergodic theorem takes place with polynomial-like decay. Both parts of this proposal concern generalized KAM theory, which has important applications to questions of stability and randomness in conservative physical systems. For example, the long-term dynamics of the solar system is far from being understood, and this proposal could contribute to mathematician s understanding doc3181 none Manchester This is a three cooperative year proposal between Dr. Steven Manchester and Dr. David Dicher of the University of Florida and Dr. Zhiduan Xhen and Dr. Lu Anming of the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences. This project will study the origins and evolution of major characteristic elements and key taxa in East Asian Flora. Both the U.S. and Chinese researchers are outstanding in the field of paleobotany. This project includes training opportunities for both U.S. and Chinese students, and can advance our understanding of the origins and direction of migration of many groups of once widespread plants that are now restricted to eastern Asia. The Chinese Academy of Science, the Natural Science Foundation of China and the NSF jointly support this project doc3182 none NSF proposal: , PI: Jinchao Xu) The proposed project is on the study of advanced solution methods for partial differential equations that arise from scientific and engineering applications. The theme of research is on the development, application and analysis of multigrid methods. The multigrid method is among the most powerful techniques for solving large scale linear and nonlinear systems arising from the discretization of partial differential equations. But the method has not been used in practice as often as they should be (because it is often not easy to code and to use), nor as efficiently as they could be (because it is often not easy to get the method work correctly). Our research is, on one hand, to develop special type of multigrid methods that are relatively easier to use for general users for some standard applications and is, on the other hand, to develop multigrid methods that are carefully tailored for some special class of practically interesting problems. One major component of the proposed research is a systematical investigation on various fundamental theoretical issues related to multigrid methods in general and also theoretical questions related to the algorithms to be developed for several specific problems of practical interests. The multigrid methods we propose to develop and study are expected to be applicable to a large class of practical problems including numerical simulations for electrochemical power devices (batteries) and advanced materials such as lattice block materials and liquid crystalline materials. These multigrid methods are expected to make a major impact in these and related applications and in particular to make it possible to simulate these problems in three dimensions in such a way that other traditional approaches may not be feasible. For example, the proposed study of advanced numerical methods for simulating electrochemical batteries has been and will be making a significant contribution to advanced battery technologies and manufactures that are vitally important in our everyday life, from the watch and the camera flash to electromobilies, modern space vehicles and wireless communications in information technology. Because of the practical backgrounds of these problems, the proposers and their research associates and graduate students are expected to actively interact and collaborate with physicists, engineers, computational scientists and practitioners from industries doc3183 none Proposal ID Number: The objective of this project is the finite element superconvergence. The research efforts will be devoted (1) to develop general theory of finite element superconvergence and its recovery with emphases on triangular elements, irregular grids, and harmonic functions; (2) to develop superconvergent theory for those successful numerical methods in handling boundary layers and locking. Some recent mathematical theory in finite element superconvergence, asymptotic regularity, as well as improved interior analysis will be employed in the roject. The superconvergence study is of great importance for adaptive design of computational algorithms. Therefore, the proposed research has a direct application in high-performance computing, computational mechanics, computational fluid dynamics, financial mathematics, mathematical biology, manufacturing, and other scientific fields. The research will widen the knowledge in scientific community on both mathematical theory and practical algorithm design doc3184 none The main objective of this proposal is to investigate processes fundamental to the behavior of multicomponent fluids and multiphase materials. We will do this by (1) developing and applying state-of-the-art numerical methods to large scale computation and (2) analytical, numerical and modelling studies of important constituent processes. More specifically, our focus will be on developing, implementing and analyzing successively more realistic models of the diffusional evolution of microstructure in solid solid phase transitions. Our investigation of multiphase fluids includes a study of ternary fluid flow where only two of the components are immiscible. These projects involve fundamental physical processes whose phenomenology is basic to understanding the behavior of real fluids and the material properties of solids. Both are characterized by the presence of multiple constitutive components, complex pattern formation and or singularities (i.e. spatial complexity). Although these processes arise in very different physical phenomena (fluids versus solids), both involve free boundary problems where the motion of a bounding interface, separating the different components, is driven by a competition between surface energy and either an instability or multi-body interactions. As such, they can be treated using a common set of analytical and computational tools. The highly nonlinear nature of these problems makes fast, accurate and robust numerical methods essential to their study. In this proposal, we bring together mathematical and numerical analysis, modelling, and large-scale scientific computation to study certain fundamental problems in fluid dynamics and materials science. Our focus will be on developing, implementing and analyzing successively more realistic models of the diffusional evolution of microstructure in solid solid phase transitions. These transformations are an important method of processing multicomponent metallic alloys such such as steels. The result of this process is the formation of a multiphase microstructure, which is a key variable in setting the macroscopic mechanical properties (i.e. stiffness, strength and toughness) of the alloy. The microstructure is characterized by regions of different metallic components separated from one another by interfaces. The goal of our research is to accurately model and simulate the formation of microstructure in alloys in order to provide metallurgists with a recipe for generating new alloys with desirable material properties. Our investigation of multiphase fluids involves modelling liquid liquid extraction processes that are widely used in chemical production and waste processing. In these processes, two (or more) fluids are placed in contact and a contaminant in one of the fluids diffuses preferentially into another. The first fluid thus is cleaned and is then extracted. In these processes, two (or more) fluids are placed in contact and a contaminant in one of the fluids diffuses preferentially into another. The first fluid thus is cleaned and is then extracted. If the contaminated fluid is broken up into small droplets, the interfacial area and hence mass transfer is increased. We will use analysis, modeling and large scale scientific computation to study reaction and mixing rates within these systems. The ultimate goal of this work is to provide a theoretical foundation for improving the performance of liquid liquid extractors. Although the two problems described above arise from very different physical processes (fluids versus solids), they are similar in the sense that the relevant phenomena is strongly influenced by surface tension at the respective interfaces. Consequently, they can be studied using common analytical and computational tools. The highly complex nature of these problems makes fast, accurate and robust numerical methods essential to their study doc3185 none Arbogast Sedimentary rocks sometimes contain void regions called vugs that are much larger than the usual intergranular pores. Vugular heterogeneities raise both practical and theoretical problems for understanding fluid flow through such rocks at the field scale. For example, standard sampling methods are at a scale too small to resolve these heterogeneities. Moreover it is nontrivial to identify the correct physical formalism for modeling flow or interpreting flow measurements, and it is not clear that traditional homogenization approaches are applicable. In this project, the investigators tie microscopic (CT scan) and macroscopic measurements of a large sample (about 17,000 cubic cm) of Cretaceous carbonate rock containing centimeter-scale vugs directly to high-resolution computation of flow fields. This framework allows the testing of different physical models for flow in the geometry of the sample. The specific objectives are to: (1) Map CT scan pixels of the sample to permeability and porosity; (2) Simulate flow in the micro-scale system; (3) Determine the macro-scale governing relations for single phase flow; and (4) Determine the macroscopic model parameters in terms of the microscale characterization. Research in algorithms and upscaling procedures is conducted to achieve the second and third objectives. Subsequent numerical experiments determine the influence of alternative depositional environments and diagenetic histories by changing the connectivity of the vugs and the permeability distribution of the matrix material. This results finally in the ability to more confidently predict flow in vugular media in full-field simulations. The flow of fluids through porous rock is of economic and environmental interest. Examples include oil and gas production, obtaining adequate water supplies (groundwater accounts for about one third of the water used in the US, with many cities depending exclusively on wells), and remediating subsurface contamination at Superfund sites and many Department of Energy facilities. The sedimentary rocks through which these flows occur sometimes contain relatively large holes or void regions called vugs. The dissolution of fossil fragments is a common mechanism for creating vugs in carbonate rocks, which contain more than half the world s oil reserves and comprise many of the biggest aquifers in the US. Vugs are more conducive to fluid flow than the much smaller pore space between the rock grains, and this raises both both practical and theoretical problems for understanding large-scale flows. This project aims to construct models for this type of rock that predict the effective flow properties over hundreds of yards to several miles. Because direct experimentation over these distances is not feasible, an essential component of the research is the integration of intermediate-scale physical and large-scale computational experiments. This effort also relies on basic research in numerical algorithms and modeling techniques. Establishing the correct relations governing the flow of fluids in such rocks enables more confident predictions from full-field simulations doc3186 none Don Kouri of the University of Houston is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program for formal and computational studies focusing on the time-independent wave packet reactant-product decoupling (TIW-RPD) approach to reactive scattering and on the exploration of the use of distributed approximating functionals (DAFs). TIW-RPD methods will be used to develop and test approximations for enlarging the range of reactive systems for which reliable cross sections can be computed. DAFs will be explored for use in multi-resolution analysis with likely applications in digital signal processing. Development and applications of an algorithm for constructing sufficiently accurate quantum potentials to enable the direct solution of the Bohmian dynamics equations will be pursued, with the goal of enabling the method to be applied to three-dimensional reactive atom-diatom scattering calculations. The development and application of new mathematical and computational methods for formulating and solving fundamental quantum mechanical equations is relevant to molecular collision dynamics, and consequently to all chemical reactions. Research in such a highly specialized area can lead to more general impacts. For example, data compression arises in all areas of science, engineering, and medicine. It is especially important in chemical problems such as reducing the amount of data needed to fit potential energy surfaces, and reducing the number of grid points needed to solve differential equations. Tools developed for treating reactive scattering are now showing promise for medical and geophysical imaging, and digitization in communications doc3187 none The investigator studies connections between knot complexity and polygonal knot spaces, and develops effective methods to quantify and and characterize knots. The project involves computation and software development as well as analysis and experiments. With colleagues and students, the investigator explores relationships between various experimental measurements of complexity of knots in physical materials, such as DNA and polymers, and mathematical characterizations of knot complexity. Previously defined functions, such as energies and rope-length, are compared to new quantities, such as measurements of the convex hull and of a smallest box containing the knot, to capture various spatial characteristics. These quantities predict the types of knots that are encountered as one moves through knot space. They also are used to understand changes that occur in small and large-scale knotting in polygonal knot space as a result of perturbations. From DNA replication to unraveling one s garden hose, knotting and tangling are a part of many physical systems. Some knots are easier to tie (i.e. less complex), and thus more likely to occur in these situations. How does one quantify the complexity of a knot? What measurable attributes fully explain the complexity of a mathematical knot (i.e. a closed loop in space)? Mathematicians have defined several functions, called knot energies that quantify the tangledness of knots. Simultaneously, scientists have completed physical experiments on knots made of real materials, such as DNA and polymers, that determine other measures of complexity. To what extent are the theoretical and experimental quantities related? Are the quantities delivering the same information or does each number reveal something different about the knot? In particular, can one use these functions to create more realistic physical models of DNA? In this project, the investigator, colleagues, and students explore the quantification of knot complexity and its relation to spaces of polygonal knots by integrating theory with computer simulation. Previously defined theoretical measures, such as energies and rope-length, are compared to new quantities, such as the surface area and volume of the convex hull, to capture various spatial characteristics related to the knot. Physical experiments and computer simulations are performed and statistical analysis applied to understand their interrelations. These quantities also predict the types of knots that are encountered as one moves through polygonal knot space and explains changes that occur in small and large-scale knotting as a result of perturbations. This provides scientists with a better understanding of the mathematical models that are currently employed and suggest refinements to improve these models doc3188 none The method of optimal prediction has been developed recently. It gives the best approximation to non-linear equations assuming that the higher modes are random. It is suited for computing complicated flows, when the information about the initial data is incomplete. The proposer will study the convergence of the optimal prediction method applied to the cubic Schrodinger equation. Such equations occur in quantum mechanics. In addition the method will be used to study the flow of incompressible and inviscid fluids in three dimensions. The complicated behavior of such fluids is part of the problem of turbulence. Turbulent flows typically consist of a slow, large scale motion, and a lot of small, but fast, eddies. Instead of computing the flow by a single numerical algorithm, the investigator will treat the small scale motion as a random component, and incorporate its influence on the large scale motion approximately. The goal is to develope faster and more robust computational schemes for turbulent flows doc3189 none This award from Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division supports research of Professor Kenneth N. Raymond, Department of Chemistry, University of California at Berkeley into superamolecular clusters assembled by mean of metal-ligand coordinate bonds. The project will focus on the synthesis of expanded host-volume clusters, the formation and rearrangement of supramolecular clusters, the control of guest molecule reactivity by supramolecular hosts. It is the goal of the research to precisely define what can be programmed into a ligand in terms of predetermined symmetry based linkages and to exploit this to develop new chemistry based on supramolecular self-assembly. Large, supramolecular structures of tetrahedra, cubes and dodecahedra will be synthesized with metal ions at the vertices and organic linkers along the edges. Symmetry-based principles developed in this work will be generally applicable to the preparation of other nanostructures. The ability to systematically prepare very large molecules with controlled shapes and pore cavities will be exploited to catalyze chemical reactions doc3190 none The objective of this research in to understand complex flame-flow interactions that occur in laminar flames but have direct implications to premixed turbulent combustion, particularly in the flamelet regime. Models simulating these systems are investigated using both asymptotic techniques and numerical methods. In this work, two problems are considered. In the first, the structure, dynamics, and extinction of premixed edge flames in mixtures containing gradients of temperature or concentration are investigated. Because enthalpy variations affect the flame temperature and hence the rates of thermally sensitive chemical reactions, they influence fuel consumption, flame quenching, and emission of chemical pollutants; effects due to Lewis number, stoichiometry, and thermal expansion are also examined. The second issue concerns flame propagation in Poiseuille flow in which flame propagation depends on the intensity and scale of the underlying flow field. Total burning rate, flame shape, and propagation speed are parameters of interest, especially under conditions in which flashback is suppressed in the absence or presence of heat losses doc3191 none Tin-Lead (Sn-Pb) solders are widely used as soldering materials in semiconductor devices. The as-solidified structure can naturally change over time; however, the evolution can also be driven by thermal or mechanical loads. Changes in microstructure, in particular, locally coarsened regions, have been observed as precursors to the formation of cracks, and ultimately of failure. Time-dependent, microstructural changes, coupled to mechanical straining and damage evolution, must be considered for realistic mathematical models and numerical simulations. The investigator and her colleague study, through mathematical modeling and numerical simulation, the fundamentals of microstructure evolution and its influence on material failure in Sn-Pb solder joints. In the process, they develop the mathematical model and numerical capability more generally to treat the many coupled processes that influence the overall strength and integrity of a binary alloy. Microelectronic components are generally attached to printed circuit boards using solder. The solder joint can serve as the mechanical as well as the electrical connection. It has been estimated that on the order of 10,000,000,000,000 solder joints are produced each year. Damage to solder joints is a primary failure mechanism in electronic components. Even on the shelf, daily or yearly temperature cycles, physical handling, occasional bumps, chemical reactions or radiation can cause damage. Under operating conditions, thermal fluctuations or mechanical vibration can be even more severe. For expensive devices, in critical applications, improved joint integrity can have enormously beneficial consequences, both economically and in terms of reliability of components. The modeling undertaken here can play a crucial role in providing guidance for maintenance of critical components because it is practically impossible to examine microscopically individual, in-service joints for potential failure. The theoretical framework developed here will also be readily applicable to analyzing self-assembling behavior and degradation in some nano-scale materials and devices doc3192 none The proposed research primarily concerns finding, describing, and approximating solutions to semilinear elliptic zero-Dirichlet boundary value problems. While the Principal Investigator s first priority has been to prove existence and nodal structure theorems, his current efforts center on computational investigations. The PI will advance the numerical techniques used in the study of nonlinear differential equations in general and elliptic boundary value problems in particular. The PI s experiments support conjectures and reveal underlying structure as well as provide approximations. Secondary objectives include involving his students in the implementation of software solutions and refinement of algorithms. Lastly, the PI will prove convergence results relating to steepest descent, Newton s method, and Galerkin-type approximations. That these results may lead to analytical existence and nodal structure theorems is an additional source of motivation to the PI. The techniques to be used rely on the variational method, whereby solutions to the PDE are characterized as critical points of an associated nonlinear functional. The PI is currently in the process of decomposing function space into Newton flow-invariant manifolds and basins of attraction. These subsets of function space will be important to both numerical and analytical investigations. The proposed research is relevant to important areas of mathematics and science. Almost any scientific area concerns rates of change, hence differential equations. Many of these areas rely on the class of differential equations known as elliptic, and most of the difficult and physically significant problems are nonlinear. The PI s work is on the boundary of the computational and the analytical. An exciting new use of computational mathematics is in the investigation of nonlinear functional analysis. The PI has new techniques in nonlinear functional analysis for studying the underlying structure of this class of problem and believes that the techniques may generalize to an even wider class. Thus, funding this line of inquiry will benefit a large area of mathematics, soften or solve some long standing open problems in nonlinear elliptic differential equations, and be of use to many physical scientists doc3193 none Award: Principal Investigator: Cumrun Vafa This research project assembles a team at two campuses to work on string theory and related geometry. The project is led by two mathematicians and a physicist, and the award supports postdoctoral research fellows, graduate students, and the collaborations and communications of a broadly based research network. The research program supported by this award concentrates on dualities in string theory and M theory, a topic in which a broad range of geometric and physical concepts come together. The best known of these dualities is mirror symmetry, which has had dramatic consequences for algebraic and symplectic geometry, and this project intends to explore new dualities and constraints along with mirror symmetry. String theory is a promising candidate for a unifying theory of the universe at its most fundamental levels. The basic idea is simple - elementary particles should be modeled as mathematical loops of string rather than as points - but working out the details of this theory has involved and inspired some sophisticated mathematical tools and ideas. Constraints and observations from physics, sometimes posed as a claim that two distinct geometries must generate the same physical theory, can have large numbers of consequences for geometry since quantities of physical interest are often expressed as the average value of an observable quantity over space, or as a way of counting the number of times two objects meet doc3194 none Prasad Tectonics and dynamics of accretionary prisms in subduction zones, earthquake source mechanics and faulting processes, kerogen maturation and oil migration during maturation of organic rich shales, and nucleation and crystallization processes are some major questions in geophysics today. The composition, state of materials, and interactions between the constituents in such areas are important to understand the driving forces and to facilitate their prediction. Since direct observations, for example in boreholes, are not always feasible, seismic information is often our only source of information. To make inversions from seismic to rock materials properties more reliable, our focus should be on characterizing the dependencies between seismic and rock physical properties. This study is aimed at providing the geoscience community with a method to quantify microstructure and rock properties in terms of elastic impedance. Microstructural characterizations made with Acoustic Mapping (AM) are based on quantifiable impedance variations. These quantitative measurements will allow us to directly relate impedance microstructure to seismic wave propagation in rocks. Main impact areas of the study will be to develop a new method to express microstructure in terms of elastic impedance, measure, possibly for the first time, elastic properties of clay minerals and elastic impedance changes associated with cementation and crystallization, and understand and model the correlation between seismic and rock physics properties. The eighteen-month project is divided into two parts. Research in the first part will be to calibrate the acoustic imaging techniques with earth science relevant materials. Although seismic properties and acoustic mapping of rocks have a common working principal, potential applications of AM to rock physics remain to be exploited. Currently, AM is used almost entirely for non-destructive evaluation of defects in man-made and in biomedical materials. The second part will be devoted t analyzing representative samples and comparing impedance microstructures with seismic signatures. This project will allow the investigator to develop acoustic mapping techniques. Professionally, it will broaden her analyses and modeling skills and enhance prospects for progress, for example towards a faculty or senior research position. The project is a joint collaboration between German (Dr. Burkhard, Prof. Arnold) and US research scientists (Dr. Meike, Dr. Thomas) that will allow the PI to define a long-term project. Research associates at Stanford University are not granted PI status. This proposal gives the PI an opportunity to apply for research funds to develop a project in an area of tremendous potential doc3195 none Temam The investigator and his colleagues study nonlinear problems from meteorology, oceanography, and fluid mechanics, using the mathematical tools offered by analysis, the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations, dynamical systems theory, and computation. The part of this project related to meteorology and oceanography focuses on the following areas: (1) Open boundary conditions for limited domain simulations and well posedness issues for meteorology and oceanography problems. (2) Balanced and unbalanced models in atmosphere sciences. (3) Well-posedness and stability problems in oceanography. The fluid mechanics topics focus on several aspects of turbulence theory, including the connection between the conventional theory of turbulence, the dynamical systems approach, and the Navier-Stokes equations. The investigators intend also to complete a research monograph on some of these aspects of turbulence. Central problems in meteorology and oceanography are concerned with understanding and predicting the behavior of the atmosphere and the ocean --- in what patterns do these fluids, air and water, move? The mathematical equations that describe the motions are difficult to analyze, and computations are also difficult because the physical phenomena are complex and nonlinear. In fluid mechanics, understanding fluid flows generally and turbulence in particular, and developing efficient numerical methods to compute these flows, are major themes. The investigators study several problems related to the behavior of atmosphere and ocean fluid flows and to their effective computation. They also study and develop computational methods for turbulent fluid flows of importance for industrial processes doc3196 none Compared to our understanding of the principles of persuasion, very little is known about the processes that motivate and enable resistance to persuasion. This research will test the thesis that resistance is motivated, in part, by the need to protect the self-concept. This thesis will be tested using the logic and methodology of self-affirmation theory. This theory argues that if a given behavior (e.g., resisting persuasion) is motivated by the need to protect the self-concept, then affirming the self will reduce the need to engage in that behavior. In three studies, individuals will or will not be given the opportunity to affirm their self-concept before being exposed to a persuasive message. Study 1 will examine the influence of topic-relevance (i.e., whether or not the affirmation concerns the same topic as the persuasive message) on the resistance process. Study 2 will examine the role of attitude strength in moderating the effects of self-affirmations on resistance. Study 3 will examine a vital methodological question concerning the timing of the self-affirmation opportunity (i.e., whether it occurs before or after exposure to a persuasive message). This research will contribute to our basic understanding of the processes that motivate and enable resistance to persuasion. In addition, it will contribute to the development of a comprehensive theory of persuasion dynamics that is capable of explaining both yielding to and resisting persuasion. The need for such a theory is critical not only for advancing basic science but also for practical reasons. We must be able to teach ourselves and our children how to resist changing the things we should not change, how to change the things we should, and wisdom to know the difference. This POWRE research program represents an innovative line of research that is different from Jacks graduate training. In addition, as a non-tenured assistant professor, she is at a critical stage in her career. The release from teaching obligations enabled by this POWRE award will allow more time for research and thus will be vital to her ability to achieve her career objectives doc3197 none This POWRE award by the Chemistry Division will support Dr. Elena Galoppini in establishing a collaboration with professor Gerald Meyer of Johns Hopkins to synthesize a new class of coordination compounds and use them to study the dynamics of electron injection at the interface of Titantium Dioxide nanoparticles. The results obtained are expected to contribute to better understanding of the photophysics of semiconducting nanoparticles and dye-sensitized regenerative solar cells as well as contribute to knowledge of the materials chemistry of polymeric light emitting diodes, sensors and other information storage devices. Both graduate and undergraduate students will receive interdisciplinary training in both organic synthesis and photophysical and photoelectrochemical methods for study of semiconductors and Dr. Galoppini will integrate the subject matter into an undergraduate course. This award will permit Dr. Galoppini to access new techniques and facilities such as surface attachment of complexes, preparation of sol-gel Titantium Dioxide films and electrochemical cells, steady state and time-resolved spectroscopic studies, etc. and to implement them at her home institution doc3198 none Freitag This award to University of Rhode Island provides shipboard technical support, shore-based support, as well as maintenance and calibration of shared-use scientific instrumentation, for researchers using R V Endeavor, a research vessel operated by the university s Graduate School of Oceanography as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The award also provides support for research using a portable undulating tow vehicle for physical, chemical and biological measurements, which will be used in CY on another UNOLS vessel, operated by URI personnel. The technical support awarded here will assist NSF-funded researchers conduct a diverse suite of oceanographic research studies, primarily in the western North Atlantic Ocean, beginning in doc3199 none Knox The Lobeliaceae are a medium-sized plant family comprising 31 genera, with just under1,200 species distributed worldwide, and the Cyphiaceae sensu stricto comprise the genus Cyphia with 74 species in Africa. These families are classified in the order Campanulales, along with the Campanulaceae sensu stricto and four New World cyphioid genera. Molecular and morphological data support the monophyly of the Lobeliaceae, with Cyphia identified as the most closely related genus. The Lobeliaceae were monographed as part of Das Pflanzenreich, but this classification is largely artificial, in part because Lobelia constitutes the paraphyletic core genus of the family, from which the segregate genera evolved. This investigation is generating chloroplast DNA sequence data from the genes atpB, rbcL, and the intergenic spacer for 120 representative species. The resulting phylogenetic estimate is being used to (1) produce a phylogenetically-based classification of these plants, (2) reconstruct the morphological evolution responsible for the origin of the segregate genera, and (3) reconstruct the major events in the biogeographic history of these plants. The Campanulales are also of interest because of the large number of rearrangements that have occurred in their chloroplast DNA. Previous work indicates that these rearrangements are not simply rare, random events. A genetic element is present that causes the rearrangements, and there is evidence of high-level functional constraint in chloroplast DNA evolution that favors preservation of the ancestral genome organization. This work uses (1) Southern blot analysis to produce detailed maps of the chloroplast DNA arrangements, (2) PCR-based confirmation of the rearrangements, and (3) DNA sequencing of the rearrangement regions to differentiate independent rearrangements that have occurred in a given region of the DNA molecule. These rearrangements provide additional evidence of phylogenetic relationships, and these relationships simultaneously provide a framework for understanding chloroplast genome evolution, with broad implications for plant biology. The results of this research are being compared with similar studies conducted by other investigators of the Campanulaceae and the New World cyphioids doc3200 none The PI will use her POWRE award to spend a year at Rutgers University to collaborate with Prof. Wolmer V. Vasconcelos. The PI will introduce computational methods in research projects on one--dimensional local rings and Rees algebras of modules. She will also develop research projects suitable for exploration by undergraduate students. This POWRE project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc3201 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Microbial Biology for . The research and training plan is in the area of Microbial Genetics and is entitled The Use of Benzoyl-CoA Reductase Genes in the Benzoate Pathway as an Indicator of Anaerobic Bacterial Degradation of Monoaromatic Hydrocarbon Pollutants . A key feature of monoaromatic compound metabolism by anaerobic bacteria is the enzyme benzoyl-CoA reductase, a protein previously thought to be highly conserved among anaerobes. This research examines the diveristy of this important enzyme. Then, the mechanisms by which benzoate degradation takes place are being characterized 1. Via biochemical analysis and 2. Mutagenesis-to determine which genes are involved in the process. Finally, Terminal Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism analysis is being used to determine the abundance and diversity of these genes in the environment. This study will help assess the appropriateness of reductase genes as indicators of a bacterial community s capacity for bioremediation of aromatic hydrocarbons in polluted environments doc3202 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The research and training plan is in the area of Metabolic Biochemistry and is entitled Experimental Studies of Hydrogen-producing Bacteria. Hydrogen is a key intermediate in anaerobic environments and is maintained at low concentration by microbial competition. This research uses a novel hydrogen-removal system to study the physiology and bioenergetics of obligately hydrogen-producing bacteria in pure culture. Studies focus on metabolism of important substrates, i.e., acetate, benzoate, amino acids, and glycolate. Enrichment and isolation procedures for anaerobic bacteria are also being developed. Hydrogen metabolism in bacteria is not well-understood but plays an important role in microbial diversity in the environment doc3203 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Microbial Biology for . The research and training plan is in the area of Systematic Biology and is entitled Study of Ancyromonas as a Possible Ancestor to All Metazoa, Fungi, and Choanoflagellates . Preliminary analysis of 18S rDNA sequences from the flagellate genus Ancyromonas suggests it is descended from the specific common ancestor of multicellular metazoa and fungi. Additional phylogenetically-informative genes from species of Ancyromonas are being sequenced and analyzed to determine if there is an extant unicellular ancestor to this group. Morphology and ultrastructure of Ancyromonas species also are being studied and compared with metazoan and fungal species to determine the extent of shared characteristics suggestive of common ancestry. Fluorescent in-situ probe hybridization (FISH) technology is used to look for undiscovered species of this globally-distributed genus in an effort to find and culture unique species for this and future study doc3204 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The research and training plan is in the area of ecosystem studies and is entitled Microbial linkages among ecocystem components in the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica. These valleys provide a unique environment to study biocomplexity in extreme environments. This research links microbial community structure and function with physical and biogeochemical processes in the lakes, streams, and terrestrial systems using a suite of biochemical and molecular biological techniques doc3205 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Microbial Biology for . The research and training plan is in the area of Regulation of Gene Expression and is entitled Identification of Novel Pseudomonas aeruginosa Quorum Sensing Genes . Monitoring of surroundings by quorum sensing in P. aeruginosa, a gram-negative bacterium, plays an important role in its ability to grow in a wide variety of conditions. The two best studied quorum-sensing systems are the las and rhl systems. This research utilizes a fluorescence activated cell sorter (FACS)-based approach to identify novel genes positively and negatively regulated by the las and or rhl system. Temporal induction or repression of the identified genes is examined during the growth cycle, and regulatory factors dictating the induction and or repression of these genes are identified. In addition, the functions of these genes are examined via insertional activation and observation of the phenotypic changes doc3206 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Microbial Biology for . The research and training plan is in the area of Plant and Microbial Developmental Mechanisms and is entitled Evolution of Morphological Variation Across Dictyostelid Social Amoebae . While most microbes live solitary lives, a few groups have evolved more complex multicellular strategies. The multicellular structures of one such group, the Dictyostelids, are extremely variable both in size and overall morphology. This work examines the evolution of morphological diversity across Dictyostelid species using a comparative approach. Three questions are addressed: To what extent are mechanisms that affect size and pattern conserved across solitary amoebas (SA s)? What specific molecular changes underlie the divergent morphologies observed across SA species? What is the molecular evolutionary history of genes involved in SA fruiting body size and pattern formation? This research provides insight into the evolutionary origins of their morphological variation and begins to address the evolution of these social organisms from solitary ones doc3207 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Microbial Biology for . The research and training plan is in the area of Microbial Genetics and is entitled Mechanism of Homologous Recombination in Archaea . This research examines general recombination mechanisms in the hyperthermophilic archaeal microbe Solfolobus solfataricus. Functional homologues to eukaryotic recombination proteins are being heterologously produced and are used to reconstitute archaeal recombination in-vitro. In-vivo gene disruption and mutant rescue studies will complement the in-vitro data and demonstrate functional homology of proteins produced by S. solfataricus to those produced in yeasts. Homologous recombination is a universal process in which genetic information is exchanged between separate strands of DNA, introducing new linkages and genetic sequences doc3208 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The research and training plan is in the area of population biology and is entitled Evolution of Life History Characters in a Arbovirus. Vesicular Stomatitis Virus (VSV) has been chosen for this study not only because it is similar to important human pathogens, e.g., measles, influenza, poliovirus, HIV, hepatitis A, B and C, but its genomic information is stored in RNA instead of DNA. RNA replication is error-prone, and therefore many mutations are constantly produced that allow extremely rapid evolution and offer an opportunity to study specific aspects of virus evolution and general issues of population genetics. A combination of comparative, mathematical, experimental, and molecular studies are being used to ask how the life histories of parasites adapt to different hosts and how these life history traits and trade-offs between the traits change in response to natural selection in the laboratory. The answers will significantly enhance our understanding of the patterns and diversity of life cycles in parasites doc3209 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Microbial Biology for . The research and training plan is in the area of Ecological and Evolutionary Physiology and is entitled Motility-related Symbiotic Determinants in Vibro fischeri . The interaction between microbe and host is a dynamic process that requires phenotypic changes by both partners and likely the coordinated regulation of specific genes for the success of this association. The symbiotic interaction between the luminous bacterium Vibrio fischeri and the bobtail squid Euprymna scolopes is a model system for investigating the role of bacterial motility in the colonization of animal tissue. While V. fischeri cells present in seawater must be motile to migrate to the initial site of colonization in the juvenile squid, a role for motility in the colonization of specific locations within the animal has not been investigated. This research 1. Experimentally identifies colonization stage-specific regulation of motility genes and 2. Explores, via two approaches, the ability of V. fischeri to coordinately regulate motility genes with other colonization factors. The first approach is to examine symbiotic capacity of V. fischeri mutants that exhibit an altered motility phenotype, while the second approach is to experimentally investigate the role of the bacterium s polar flagellum, which is thought to play a role in gene regulation within the bacteria. The results of the proposed work will likely serve as a model that provides an improved understanding of the role of motility and co-regulated symbiotic factors in bacterial host interactions doc3210 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Microbial Biology for . The research and training plan is in the area of Microbial Genetics and is entitled Characterization of a Second Circadian Oscillator in Synechococcus sp. Strain PCC . The single-celled cyanobacterium, Synechococcus sp. Strain PCC has a circadian pacemaker or clock consisting of at least three genes (kaiA, kaiB, and kaiC) that has an endogenous period of 25 hours. A second, mutant clock with a 27.5-hour period has been shown in the sigC mutant of Synechococcus. While experiments have shown kaiA in this mutant to oscillate with the 27.5 hour period, kaiB exhibits the wild-type 25 hour periodicity, leading to the hypothesis that there is an unforeseen oscillator (UFO) present that is overruled under wild-type (i.e. normal) conditions by the master Kai oscillator. This research physiologically characterizes the 27.5-hour oscillation of strain PCC by examining its temperature compensation and ability to phase reset. In addition, the molecular basis of the 27.5-hour UFO and its effects on synechococcal circadian gene expression is investigated doc3211 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Microbial Biology for . The research and training plan is in the area of Microbial Genetics and is entitled Molecular Biology of Anaerobic Ethylbenzene Oxidation . The goal of this research is to advance the understanding of the processes involved in the microbial metabolism of aromatic hydrocarbons under anaerobic conditions. Recent biochemical investigation of anaerobic ethylbenzene degradation with the denitrifying bacterium Azoarcus sp. strain EB1 has led to a proposed pathway for ethylbenzene mineralization. DNA microarray analysis and 2-dimensional gel electrophoresis experiments are used to identify genes differentially expressed during anaerobic growth of Azoarcus. These experiments will lead to identification and functional analysis of genes involved in ethylbenzene mineralization, with special consideration of the gene associated with ethylbenzene dehydrogenase (a novel enzyme found within Azoarcus which catalyzes the removal of a hydride from an aromatic hydrocarbon, initiating anaerobic ethylbenzene oxidation). The genetic tools developed here, in addition to furthering knowledge of hydrocarbon metabolism, will also be helpful in identifying environmental factors involved in regulation of ethylbenzene degradation and will help to maximize the potential use of these organisms for bioremediation applications doc3212 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Microbial Biology for . The research and training plan is in the area of Biomolecular Processes and is entitled Elements Required for Protein Synthesis in Archaea . This research focuses on post-transcriptional modifications of the archaeon Methanococcus jannaschii. This research provides an understanding of the role of tRNA modifications in the archaeal adaptation to extreme environments. A variety of approaches are used to identify modifications that are important for tRNAs in protein synthesis. The archaeal mechanism of protein synthesis and its differentiation from those of Eubacteria and Eukarya will be investigated doc3213 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Microbial Biology for . The research and training plan is in the area of Biomolecular Processes and is entitled Understanding Bacterial Injection of DNA into Other Cells . The bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens injects DNA into plant cells via a type IV transporter syringe , transforming the plant and creating a more favorable habitat for itself. Type IV transporters are multi-protein, bacterial membrane-associated complexes that attach to the recipient cell and bring it into close proximity with the host. They have not been well studied. This research examines the protein-protein interactions involved in type IV transporters using yeast two-hybrid assays and will construct a high-resolution protein map and determine the specific amino acid residues required for interaction. The functional significance of the peptide interactions will be confirmed in-vivo, and conservation of the peptide functions in other transporter systems will be examined. This research may be valuable to genetic engineering for industrial and agricultural uses, as well as identification of targets for disease intervention doc3214 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Microbial Biology for . The research and training plan is in the area of Ecological and Evolutionary Physiology and is entitled Diversity and Physiology of Extemely Small Algae. This research addresses the question of what role differences in niche adaptation play in the existence of different clades of marine cyanobacteria. Two free-living strains of the marine cyanobacterium Synechococcus, one representing a coastal clade and the other an open ocean clade, are being compared to assess physiological differences and adaptive capacities to nitrogen starvation. Subtraction cDNA libraries are being produced and the sequences analyzed to identify protein sequence and motifs of nitrate transporting proteins. Generated sequence is used to produce a microarray, and chip experiments are designed to examine and compare the magnitude and kinetics of the two strains to nitrogen deprivation. This data will help answer the question of whether different strains differ in expressional patterns in ways that indicate niche adaptation or resource partitioning, both of which are frequent evolutionary responses to competition doc3215 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Microbial Biology for . The research and training plan is in the area of Population Biology and is entitled Evolution of Wolbachia pipientis Substitution Rates and Phenotypic Variants . This research seeks to measure the rate and mode of evolutionary change in Wolbachia, a bacterium that lives intracellularly in multiple tissues of various arthropods, and identify the selective forces that mediate persistence of different Wolbachia phenotypic variants in populations. Specifically, the aims are to address 1. Whether or not modification and rescue variants of Wolbachia are maintained in populations as part of an evolutionary cycling scenario, and 2. If the rate and pattern of Wolbachia evolution suggest a small effective population size for the symbiont doc3216 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Microbial Biology for . The research and training plan is in the area of Microbial Genetics and is entitled Role of Gene Control Mechanisms in Microbial Methane Production. The primary goal of this study is to identify and characterize the mechanism for genetic regulatory control of methanogenesis, which has a pivotal role in the global carbon cycle. A combination of physiological and genetic approaches is being used to investigate the control networks that mediate expression of a catabolic gene encoding carbon monoxide dehydrogenase in the methanogen Methanosarcina actevorans doc3217 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Microbial Biology for . The research and training plan is in the area of Metabolic Biochemistry and is entitled Integrated Studies of Biodegradation in Rhodococcus and Acinetobacter . This research studies aerobic biodegradation of aromatic hydrocarbons in Rhodococcus sp. strain and Acinetobacter sp. strain ADP1 and may facilitate the development of effective bioremediation strategies. Rhodococcus is an environmentally important microorganism but is difficult to study because genetic techniques are not well developed for it; however, Acinetobacter can be used to overcome this difficulty. Since the first step in environmental degradation of many pollutants is the cleavage of a benzene ring, the primary focus of this research is the purification and characterization of the enzyme benzoate dioxygenase from Rhodococcus. The biodegradative pathway is being elucidated using mutants and complementation studies doc3218 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Microbial Biology for . The research and training plan is in the area of Animal Developmental Mechanisms and is entitled The role of the GacA S Sensory System of the Marine Bacterium Vibrio fischeri During Symbiotic Association of the Bacterium with its Animal Host, the Hawaiian Bobtail Squid . This research explores how the symbiotic bacterium, V. fischeri, regulates association with its squid host, Euprymna scolopes. A sensory system, GacA S which is involved in the virulence of pathogens, is experimentally mutated and the resulting symbiotic traits of the bacterium are assessed. The mutant bacterium is evaluated for its ability to associate with and influence normal development of the squid doc3219 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Microbial Biology for . The research and training plan is in the area of Metabolic Biochemistry and is entitled Anaerobic Methane Oxidizers in Marine Microbial Mats . Anaerobic methane oxidation (AMOX), a sink for greenhouse gas methane, is a microbially-mediated process of global ecological significance. This research investigates the biology of microorganisms responsible for AMOX in marine microbial mats by using microelectrodes in conjunction with 16S rRNA-based techniques to monitor the organisms as they occur in their natural environments. The data acquired from this research helps to determine if AMOX is mediated by a syntropic relationship between two microbial groups or by a single microbial group possessing an unknown biochemical pathway doc3220 none With this renewal award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the work of Dr. Vernon D. Parker at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. The work will extend earlier studies looking into the details of the mechanism of hydrogen transfer reactions from radical cations, positively charged organic compounds with an unpaired electron spin. Intermediates of this type are involved in a number of important biological oxidations by enzymes and industrial oxidation and polymerization reactions. The kinetics of C-H bond cleavage in various radical cations - by either proton or hydride transfer - will be studied by electrochemical and spectrophotometric methods (including stopped-flow) to determine how kinetic isotope effects depend on structure and extent of reaction. The hypothesis that many of these apparently simple bimolecular hydrogen transfer reactions actually take place by two steps with kinetically significant intermediates will be tested by experiments. The work is expected to provide valuable experience to graduate and postdoctoral students, as well as providing fundamental information of use to the organic chemical community doc3221 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Patrick Williams and his collaborators will conduct two seasons of archaeological research at the site of Cerro Baul in highland Peru. The site, located in the Moquegua sierra of Southern Peru dates to approximately 600-1,000 AD and represents a complete administrative center set on top of the most imposing natural feature in the region. Two phases of monumental architecture have been identified on the summit and these include administrative architecture, religious temples, elite domestic contexts and craft production and artisan habitation facilities. On the slopes of the mountain mesa domestic terraces inhabited by lower status people are present. The site is particularly interesting because it lies at the boundary between two prehistoric empires, Wari, with a capital in Ayacucho to the North and Tiwanaku with its capital in Bolivia. Wari which has been characterized as secular and militant, governed most of highland and coastal Peru while Tiwanaku, portrayed as ecclesiastical and mercantile held sway over Bolivia, southern Peru and Northern Chile. Economically Wari generated agricultural revenue by constructing irrigated terraces on steep mountain slopes where maize and other crops could grow. Occupying the higher Altiplano plains, Tiwanaku reclaimed flat terrain for farming potatoes and other high-altitude crops while also herding camelids and using llama caravans to secure distant resources. Luckily for archaeologists the empires employed different styles of imperial architecture and much of their ceramics and iconography are also distinct. It is only in the Moquegua region of Peru that both Tiwanaku and Wari settlements are found in close proximity and the site of Cerro Baul itself contains evidence of both groups. Dr. Williams wishes to understand the nature of the interaction between them. Therefore he will conduct extensive excavation at the site and carry out a regional survey to reconstruct the agricultural systems. With these data he will determine the extent to which integration took place and the types of complementary strategies employed. Analyses of excavated materials will focus on subsistence production systems, domestic activity patterns, craft production systems, elite exchange and iconographic relationships. The case of Wari-Tiwanaku interaction provides one of the few examples in prehistory in which the influence of peer empires on each other can be examined. By documenting the development of political economy and ideological exchange at Cerro Baul, Dr. Williams research will make a significant contribution to the anthropological study of complex societies and the evolution of Andean statecraft doc3222 none This project will develop numerically viable practical algorithms and associated theories for feedback design of control systems modeled by distributed parameter systems and systems of matrix second-order differential equations. The specific problems to be considered are partial eigenvalue and eigenstructure assignments, robust eigenstructure assignment, model updating and optimal control. Such feedback problems arise in a variety of industrial contexts, including design of automobiles, aircraft, high-rise buildings, large-space structures, and power and manufacturing systems. Special attention will be given to solving the problems in their own natural formulations in distributed parameter systems. Numerical methods that deal directly with such systems are rare, yet, it is desirable, from practical application point-of-view, that the problems be solved directly without discretization to second-order systems; only by doing so, is it possible to avoid losing vital inherent information. The results of the project are expected to impact a variety of industries, from automotive to computer industries to aerospace and manufacturing applications; they will also be invaluable tools in the area of computer aided control systems design and control education doc3223 none The investigator studies a variety of problems concerning interface dynamics in fluids and materials. The problems are 1) control of droplet formation and 2) microstructral evolution in anisotropic and inhomogeneous elastic media. He brings together physical experiments, modeling, mathematical and numerical analysis, and large-scale scientific computations to study certain fundamental problems related to interface motion, such as interfacial pinch-off and evolutions of interfaces in three-dimensional systems. One of the major goals is to develop and apply start-of-the-art computational tools with emphasis on utilizing adaptive methods and parallel computing, and designing robust numerical methods for integro-differential equations involving multiple physical effects with multiple spatial and temporal scales. The investigator studies some fundamental problems related to multiphase phenomenon in physical systems. In particular, he develops mathematical models and performs large-scale computations to investigate diffusional evolution of microstructure in solid solid phase transitions and control of droplet formation in a fluid fluid system. Many structural metals, such as steels, aluminum alloys and superalloys, are products of solid-state diffusional transformations. The multi-phase microstructure resulting from such transformations is a key variable in setting the macroscopic mechanical properties such as stiffness, strength and toughness of the alloy. A goal of this study is to model and simulate the process of microstructure evolution through mathematics and computations, and eventually to provide engineers information on how to generate different microstructures with desirable material properties. The investigation of droplets concerns how to control the formation of drops of many sizes (frequently referred to as satellite drops) in a situation like a dripping faucet or in the breakup of a jet. The presence of satellite drops is undesirable in many practical situations such as in ink jet printers and disk atomizers. He studies the use of focused, external acoustic waves for the control of satellite drops. If successful, this idea can be applied to many modern technologies doc3224 none This project aims for greater understanding of spontaneous formation, self-organization, and long-range pattern formation of steps on silicon surfaces. The approach includes: (1) Surface decomposition of diborane (B2H6) to directly add boron to the surface in a controlled manner, instead of using heavily boron-doped Si wafers. Hot scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) will be used to make real-time atomic-resolution measurements of B2H6 decomposition, boron incorporation (with and without an additional Si flux), and resulting atomic-scale step formation and or surface roughening. (2) Flattened Si(001) substrates (with terraces up to 20 um wide) will be used to study long-range step organization phenomena so as to avoid complications imposed by vicinal steps. Flattened Si(001) substrates permit experiments to study directly the role of long-range relaxation effects in the step formation and organization process, and to determine the equilibrium shape of large-scale step superstructures that form on the terrace. (3) Low energy electron microscopy (LEEM) will be used for real-time studies of large-scale step formation as boron is added to the surface. A second line of research concerns large-scale organization of steps on Si(001) surfaces due to surface electromigration forces. Quantitative measurement and modeling studies of electromigration phenomena on Si(001) surfaces include several approaches. (1) Dimpled Si wafer substrates to directly study how electromigration phenomena depend on the angle between the local surface miscut and an applied current. (2) Detailed measurement and modeling of crossing steps on the Si(001) surface will be done to extract quantitative information about the effective charge (and its possible anisotropy) of surface silicon atoms. (3) LEEM measurements of surface electromigration phenomena will be conducted. Real-time measurements of crossing-step evolution will be used to directly test crossing-step models, and extract quantitative information about the important surface processes that produce surface electromigration phenomena. The research will make use of three existing ultra-high vacuum (UHV) STM facilities (a commercial variable-temperature STM system and two custom-built room-temperature STM systems), and an existing commercial atomic force microscopy (AFM) system. Collaborative studies at Arizona State University will use two separate UHV LEEM systems. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. These studies will improve fundamental understanding of silicon surface processes, which are key to several issues in ultimate limits of silicon-based microelectronics miniaturization. Experimental tools are now available to allow atomic level observation of elementary surface processes which when better understood allow advances in fundamental science and technology. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area doc3225 none This proposal seeks to develop a model of technology-based education and research in a community-based program that serves Latino communities. The focus is on how new ideas are accepted and communicated. It seeks to understand how technology can be better used outside of the structured classrooms by individuals who are not typical users of technology. The project uses IMMEX (Interactive Multi-media Exercises). The project seeks to study 1) what people understand as they solve complex problems and 2) how they use information to solve these problems doc3226 none Taylor The University of Hawaii Manoa will operate the R V Ka Imikai-O-Kanaloa (KOK) during as a general oceanographic research vessel in support of NSF-supported research projects. The KOK is a 223 ft. vessel, constructed in and modified in , and is owned and operated by the State of Hawaii. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 145 operational days during , of which 55 days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The remaining cruises will support NOAA, Navy, and NURP projects. The projects scheduled on the KOK represent several oceanographic disciplines and programs such as HOT and and NOAA s MOBY program, involving ocean times series projects, process studies and assisting with mooring deployments retrievals, thereby fully utilizing the vessel s capabilities. The KOK will support use of the submersibles PISCES-IV and PISCES V. Operations in will mainly take place locally within 60 NM of Hawaiian territorial waters. The RV Ka Imikai-O-Kanaloa is part of a fleet of ships used by the National Science Foundation in support of marine science research. Most oceanographic projects require highly specialized equipment to be permanently installed on the vessel, thus the necessity for specialized ships. These vessels do not operate in the same mode as general cargo fishing vessels. As a result, NSF supports the operation of a variety of ships specifically dedicated to oceanographic research that are operated by universities and institutions around the country doc3227 none 00- Prezelin This award provides funding that will enable the PI to learn modern methods of computational analyses and modeling that will significantly broaden the scope of her research. Currently, she is investigating the effects of changing Ultra Violet Radiation (UVR) on marine primary productivity. However she would like to expand this research into predictive theoretical modeling of the consequences of UVR changes on phytoplankton photoecology and related ecosystem dynamics. Ultimately, she would like to develop a primary production model that considers the influence of UVR at the ecosystem level and that is mechanistically based upon the complex regulatory biology that controls the UVR photoecology of marine plants. This award is relevant to the POWRE program because the PI, who has just spent four years in an administrative position, will be able to expand her science career and continue to advance the visibility of women in science doc3228 none Martin This workshop will be the first All-hands meeting of the Biotic Surveys and Inventories program, and will include all Principal Investigators currently supported by the program. It will be dedicated to examining the successes and failures of projects funded by the program in particular, and of the scientific community s attempts to ducment and disseminate information on the world s biota in general. Although the BS the question of large scale, long-term projects; the future of electronic data gathering and dissemination; the future of funding and partnering with other federal agencies, NGOs, and other agencies; the question of site-based biodiversity observatories; the use of biotic surveys to document the generation and maintenance of biodiversity, and other topics doc3229 none Smoak The objective of this project is to identify molecular determinants of left-right (LR) patterning in the branchial arches of the mouse embryo. A mouse Fgf8 mutant that displays LR patterning defects will be used as a model system for evaluating the potential role of candidate genes. Specifically, cDNAs will be identified that are uniquely expressed in left vs. right and Fgf8 mutant vs. wild-type murine branchial arches. Expression domains of candidate genes will be evaluated in normal and Fgf8 mutant embryos to ensure their relevance to branchial arch development. Unique cDNAs will then be cloned, sequenced, and identified by comparison with a gene bank database. As a POWRE award, this project will provide a unique opportunity for the PI to obtain hands-on training in a laboratory that focuses on molecular mechanisms of heart development. This experience will provide a solid foundation in the tools and skills of molecular biology and thereby allow the PI to change research focus, which will be critical to her career advancement doc3230 none The goal of this Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) is to study the precision diamond wire saw machining of non-electrically conductive ceramic materials. Wire saw machining technologies have been developed to slice large diameter Si or SiC ingots into thin wafers. The thin, less than 0.2 mm in diameter, fixed-abrasive diamond wires and wire saw machines with rocking motion have recently been developed. This new type of diamond wire has not only improved the material removal rate in wire saw machining but also expanded the types of work-material from just Si, SiC, zirconia, to other non-electrically conductive ceramic materials. This project proposes to acquire a laboratory rocking-motion wire saw machine to study the mechanics of wire saw machining and to investigate effects of five major process parameters on wafer warp and thickness variation. These parameters are: (1) wire speed, (2) forward backward wire motion, (3) coolant, (4) wire diameter and diameter variation, and (5) part infeed rate. Two- and four-axis contour wire sawing will also be explored in this project. Similar to the wire EDM process for electrically conductive materials, the diamond wire saw machining could provide flexible and cost-effective methods to machine complicated shapes for non-electrically conductive materials. Since the three targeted work-materials, Si, SiC, and zirconia, are all semi-transparent to the infrared signal, a through-the-workpiece temperature measurement using the infrared video camera will be experimented. Success in this research project will lead to a better understanding of the fixed-abrasive diamond wire saw machining process. Results of this research could also expand the use of wire saw machining processes to a wide-range of non-electrically conductive, advanced engineering materials and to generate more complicated shapes doc3231 none Lindroth Plant defense against herbivory involves two principal traits: resistance and tolerance. A fundamental premise of plant defense theories is that such traits are costly, hence the existence of significant genetic variation in defense characteristics within plant populations. Demonstration of putative costs f defense however, has proved to be surprisingly difficult. Evidence supporting the notion of costs is equivocal and vanishingly small with respect to woody plant species. Over the last 15 years, research on quaking aspen has revealed (1) striking variation in susceptibility to outbreak insects, (2) equally striking genotypic variation in levels of phenolic glycosides, (3) phenolic glycosides reduce performance of aspen-feeding insects, (4) strong, environmentally-dependent trade-offs between growth and phenolic glycoside concentrations in aspen genotypes, and (5) preliminary evidence of genotypic variation in tolerance. The purpose of this research is to further investigate the costs and benefits of defense in the evolutionary ecology of aspen-insect interactions. One objective is to ascertain whether aspen resistance traits afford protection in experimental and natural settings. Levels of defoliation sustained by aspen genotypes are predicted to vary in inverse relation to phenolic glycoside concentrations. The experiment will be conducted in a common garden using clonally propagated aspen trees growing in nutrient-poor and nutrient-rich soil. Defoliation will be effected by addition of forest tent caterpillars. A second objective is to evaluate the independent and interactive roles of resistance and tolerance as defensive adaptations against herbivory. Aspen genotypes are predicted to exhibit costs of resistance and tolerance, and to exhibit negative genetic trade-offs between resistance and tolerance. This will be conducted in a common garden, with clonally propagated trees growing in nutrient-poor and nutrient-rich soils. This work is significant in that it will improve understanding of the evolution and ecology of plant defense against herbivores, and of factors constraining the evolution of defense systems. It constitutes the first in-depth, simultaneous evaluation of costs and benefits of chemical defense and tolerance in a woody plant. And, it involves species with expansive geographic ranges and pivotal ecological importance in early successional forests of North America doc3232 none The objectives of this study are (1) to characterize experimentally stretched, lean, premixed flames under laminar and mildly turbulent conditions using particle thermometry and laser-induced fluorescence; (2) to assess enhancement of flame stability and lean-burning limits in premixed hydrocarbon (methane or propane) flames by addition of hydrogen or hydrogen carbon monoxide mixtures; (3) to develop and validate reduced mechanisms to predict flame behavior (including extinction) of methane hydrogen carbon monoxide fuel mixtures; and (4) to develop analytical understanding of how multicomponent fuels with different Lewis numbers impact flame stability. The experimental studies and subsequent validation of numerical models rely detailed characterization of counterflow, opposed-jet, premixed flames. Independent variation of the hydrogen and carbon-monoxide concentrations in the fuel feed offer a new mean of exploring and influencing the chemical pathways in lean, premixed hydrocarbon combustion, in particular near extinction. To measure extinction conditions in the counterflow flames, flow fields are probed with laser Doppler velocimetry and temperature fields are measured by observing emissions from micron-size particles with a sensitive infrared camera. Laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) along the flame centerline probes flame structure through measurements of hydroxyl and formaldehyde fluorescence signals. Previous studies have shown that small amounts of hydrogen in the fuel stream can substantially extend the stability limits of stretched, premixed flames, suggesting that this may be a way to enhance the operability of lean, premixed, dry, low-NOx combustion systems. Such systems are used for space heating, power generation, and other industrial applications. This concept is further explored in this study doc3233 none The Second Gordon Research Conference on Materials Education is held in Plymouth, NH, from July 30 to August 2, . The conference has as its main focus the contents and design of a Materials Curriculum, predominantly at the undergraduate level. This includes a discussion of the ABET- new accreditation system for engineering schools, student learning styles and portfolios, desirable skills of students from the academic and industrial perspectives, and how to design a new curriculum. The conference encourages participation of faculty from predominantly undergraduate institutions doc3234 none The purpose of this research is to make use of maps of the paths of lightning flashes to study the electrical activity of storms in several different regions of the world. Such data have only recently become available. French scientists have developed an interferometry-based system called Safir that provides a two-dimensional map of lightning paths (that is, the paths projected onto a horizontal plane). More recently, researchers at New Mexico Tech have developed a system based on accurate time of arrival of the VHF signals from lightning to produce a three-dimensional map of the flashes. The New Mexico system, called the lightning mapping array (LMA), has been used in several parts of the United States; the Safir system in Europe, Japan, and Singapore. In collaboration with French and American colleagues, Dr. Stolzenburg will use sequences of maps from different locations to investigate characteristics of the lightning such as (1) relative number of intracloud and cloud-to-ground flashes; (2) evolution of the horizontal extent and total area covered by flashes; (3) development of lightning activity compared with the development of radar echoes of storms. The research is directed toward finding whether lightning data are useful as indicators of a storm s onset, severity, path, and decay, and to determining how the characteristics of lightning vary from one location to another doc3235 none Crimp The objective of this research project is to create a novel, synthetic, biocompatible osteogenic bone substitute having mechanical properties similar to cortical bone. Every year in the U.S. alone, approximately 100,000 bone grafts are performed. Applications for bone substitutes include massive bone loss from neoplasia, comminuted fracture repair, spinal surgery, and fracture treatment in the elderly. The model bone substitute is 1) osteogenic (direct bone formation via transplanted live bone cells called osteoblasts), 2) osteoinductive (the ability to recruit bone forming cells), 3) osteoconductive (the scaffold supports bone in-growth), 4) mechanically stable (able to carry the load of the natural bone) and 5) readily available. Both the limited supply and diminished properties of autografts and allografts have led researchers on a quest for an optimum synthetic bone substitute. Because the mineral content of bone has a composition and crystal structure closely matching hydroxyapatite (HA), it is natural to first turn to bioceramics such as HA-based materials for bone implants. While dense bioceramics do not exhibit osteogenic or osteoinductive properties, HA is osteoconductive. When using HA, the surgeon is faced with a trade-off between the mechanical strength provided by dense ceramics, and the biological incorporation (bone in-growth) provided by porous ceramics. The lack of mechanical strength in combination with the ability to support bone in-growth has prevented HA, or any other bioceramic, from receiving wide spread acceptance as a cancellous or a cortical bone substitute. The research project uses Professor Crimp s background in ceramic processing to create a strong, yet porous HA-based bone substitute where osteogenic and osteoinductive properties are added by in vitro culture of these synthetic bone scaffolds with osteoblasts following protocols developed by the co-PI, Professor McCabe. HA whisker reinforced porous HA and biphasic calcium phosphate (BCP) ceramics will be fabricated using a modified foaming technique. BCP is a mixture of HA and beta-tri-calcium phosphate and is currently receiving attention as a potential bone substitute material. Of fundamental significance is the understanding of the linkages between bioceramic processing and the in vivo behavior by looking at osteoblast adhesion in vitro. This research project will concentrate on tailoring the processing protocol for whisker reinforced ceramic materials for use as bone replacements to yield improvements in strength, at a fixed porosity level matching that of human cortical bone, while maintaining the inherent biocompatibility of the implant materials. These implants will be the only viable synthetic alternative (because of improved mechanical and osteogenic properties) to currently available graft materials for repair of damaged cortical bone tissue doc3236 none Lizzi This award provides funds to support the attendance of United States participants at the Second International Conference on Ultrasonic Biomedical Microscanning (UBM); the conference will be held at Windermere House, Lake Rosseau, Canada, September 5-8, . The technical program builds on the results of the First International Conference on Ultrasonic Biomedical Microscanning, Eastwood Park, UK, September 1-4, . The National Science Foundation (NSF) provided travel support to that meeting for six U. S. participants of the approximately 50 attendees from the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Ultrasonic microscanning is a recent, rapidly emerging field with significant potential for medical visualization and fundamental biological and physical studies. UBM employs new ultrasonic transducers whose high center frequencies (above 20 MHz) and concomitant large bandwidths provide highly-detailed visualization of, e.g., 5-mm depths in superficial organs, tissues accessed via catheters, or unstained microscopic specimens. As an example, 50-MHz transducers are being used to examine the human eye with a resolution finer than 0.04 mm; acoustic microscopes using frequencies higher than 500 MHz have produced resolution superior to optical microscopes -- without the need for staining. The conference will serve as a stimulus to promoting productive research and development directions for this new field. The objectives of the conference are: to provide a forum to assess the current state-of-the-art in UBM technologies and applications; to foster communication among experts in diverse multi-disciplinary UBM fields; to identify key problems needing solution for practical deployment; and, to share insights into future directions with experts in UBM and allied non-ultrasound methodologies. An Executive of the proceedings of the conference will be submitted to NSF doc3237 none Many common movement patterns such as walking, running, and jumping require rhythmic coordination of the arms and legs. In carrying out our daily routine, we often become involved in concurrent cognitive and motor activities, such as talking while walking. When engaging in conversation while walking, it appears that the pace of walking slows, sometimes to the point of stopping, as the conversation becomes conceptually more complex. What happens to the performance of rhythmic movement patterns when attention is taken up by a task that requires mental effort? Recent research suggests that movement becomes less coordinated when one is engaged in a concurrent cognitive activity. Many questions about the precise relationship between cognitive activity and movement coordination remain: When performing dual tasks (i.e., concurrent cognitive and motor activities), does attending to the cognitive task adversely affect performance of movement coordination? Does engagement in cognitive activity have a greater impact on coordination when movement speed is increased and limbs differ in physical characteristics? Does a movement pattern become structurally more complex when an individual is engaged in a concurrent cognitive activity? This research will investigate these and related questions about the influences of cognitive activity on movement coordination. Results will provide information that is foundational to understanding the formation and persistence of human movement patterns. This new knowledge should contribute to the development of methods for improving performance of sport skills, safety in industrial settings, and functional outcomes in rehabilitation. This POWRE grant will provide Pellecchia the opportunity to develop a new movement science laboratory, learn contemporary methods of analyzing human movement, and conduct research that will advance an integrative theory of human attention and movement coordination. In addition, this award will assist her to mentor students in the application of motor control theory and research methods doc3238 none Garrott This project will investigate wolf-ungulate interactions in Yellowstone National Park. The research capitalizes on a rare ecological experiment resulting from the reintroduction of wolves into the park after a 60-year absence and builds upon a long-term database compiled by the scientists. Most elk mortality prior to wolf reintroduction has been attributed to starvation (i.e. resource limitation). It is predicted that wolf predation will substantially increase elk mortality, and that the consequences of this predation will be an appreciable decease in population size toward an alternative equilibrium. The unfolding experiment provides an opportunity to test the influence of bottom-up versus top-down ecological processes in regulating populations. Aerial monitoring and intensive ground-based backtracking will be employed to estimate prey selection, predation rates, and total number of animals killed. Data from this investigation will provide the basis for a new predator-prey model that is both stochastic and age-structured. Results of this project, as well as complementary international collaborations, will significantly enhance wildlife science in large mammalian systems and facilitate design of sound endangered species programs doc3239 none Dr. Sarah M. Boomer at Western Oregon University is establishing a Red Layer Microbial Observatory (RLMO) in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. This observatory will enable undergraduate students to study several similar bacterial communities ( mats ) that thrive in alkaline hot springs. All mats in this observatory contain an unusual red layer of yet-unidentified bacteria, usually beneath top layers of known green bacteria (Cyanobacteria). Preliminary data has demonstrated that some of these red bacteria are unique but related to a known genus of ancient bacteria called Heliothrix. A dozen distinct red layer mats have been identified to date. A key goal of this research is to survey additional regions of Yellowstone during an extensive summer undergraduate research program established by this grant. While in the park, research teams will survey and document new RLMO habitats using a variety of technologies (global positioning systems, pH and temperature measuring devices and digital cameras). In the laboratory following these trips, undergraduates will use microscopy, biochemical analysis of red pigments, and DNA sequence information to further characterize these novel bacteria. RLMO materials will also be used as the backbone project in Dr. Boomer s research-based undergraduate course, Molecular Biology. In both contexts, undergraduates will isolate a specific identification gene (16S ribosomal RNA gene) from various bacterial samples, and determine the DNA sequences of these genes using an automated DNA sequencer acquired through prior NSF support. Using computer programs and internet-based databases, students will use sequence information to infer how red layer bacteria compare from site to site within the RLMO and how they compare with other known bacteria. Original sequence data will also provide raw data for a new undergraduate course in computational biology. Many biology majors at Western Oregon University are bound for careers teaching science; thus, research students specifically interested in education will have methods, materials, and credit-based opportunities to develop and deliver education outreach modules and web-distributed curricula as part of this Yellowstone RLMO doc3240 none This research investigates a Gibbs regression model, which quantifies overall and individual-level effects simultaneously for a social network while modeling a desired response from an individual within that network. This model may be viewed as an extension of a logistic regression model to include a term for modeling pairwise interactions between responses; it may also be viewed as a Gibbs random field on a complete graph; hence, the model s name. A very promising preliminary application of this model to mental health service data took a practical nonparametric approach to estimating the interactions, and precipitated the development of a Markov chain Monte Carlo goodness-of-fit test. The PI will explore the model further using new data gathered specifically for use with Gibbs regression, modeling responses such as whether clients find adequate housing or receive necessary treatment for illness and or substance abuse. This model holds great theoretical and applied potential. The wealth of questions which arise from this model address parameter estimation, model selection, and model diagnostics. Answering these questions will involve extending and unifying aspects of both logistic regression and random fields, and will include both the frequentist and Bayesian perspectives. Towards applications, the Gibbs regression will be useful for modeling networks of dependent multinomial responses in any field of scientific research (e.g., the social aspect of spread and severity of disease; the relatedness of languages or cultural artifacts; perhaps even the effects of seemingly unrelated gene clusters on inherited characteristics). The POWRE program is a particularly appropriate avenue for funding this research due to its exploratory nature. Though it is a ripe area of research for a young researcher such as the PI, it requires a little more development before it is worthy of a full NSF research grant proposal. The POWRE award also enhances the career of the PI, which - in spite of a necessarily slow start due to a two-body problem - is at its critical pre-tenure stage doc3241 none Evolution of animal social behavior often involves a series of steps whereby individuals live near relatives, become more tolerant of each other, share more space and increasingly cooperate with those relatives. One group of mammals, the marmots, offers excellent opportunities to study evolution of sociality because its members demonstrate many levels of sociality, ranging from the less social woodchuck to the highly social alpine marmot. Marmots may have evolved from an ancestor that most resembles today s woodchucks in terms of social behavior and organization. Thus, by discerning the woodchuck s level of social organization, the evolution of sociality in marmots can be understood more completely. This project will investigate social organization in woodchucks, which traditionally are described as asocial and aggressive but which show greater development of sociality in some populations. The objective is to assess genetic relationships among woodchucks, to document mating systems, behavioral and spatial patterns, and to explore relationships among these factors. Specifically, the PI will determine (1) if females settle closer to relatives than males do, forming kin groups, and (2) if close relatives are more tolerant of each other than distant relatives and share greater amounts of space. The PI will employ DNA fingerprinting techniques to assess genetic relatedness and the mating system. She also will use implanted radiotransmitters to gather information about where animals settle and patterns of space use, and she will observe marked individuals to collect information about interaction rates and about breeding pairs. After five years in a tenure-track position, the PI moved to a new institution, which necessitated a change in research focus. This POWRE award will allow her to learn the surgical and molecular techniques required for testing ideas about evolution of sociality. It will lay foundations for future work and will provide exceptional opportunities for undergraduate students to gain valuable research experiences both in the field and in the laboratory doc3242 none The investigator and his colleague atudy the computation of global attractors and invariant manifolds for dissipative partial differential equations. Global attractors are detected by interpolation of analytic (in complex time) rather than direct simulations. The performance of this approach is connected to the growth rate of solutions backward in time. Computations are carried out to determine if a set of solutions with a particular rate is in fact a manifold. Adaptations of a succesful contraction mapping algorthm for inertial manifolds are made for center manifolds and foliations. Specific applications are made to physical models including the Camassa-Holm, Kuramoto-Sivashinsky and Navier-Stokes equations, including issues from turbulence theory. This project concerns a variety of mathematical equations describing such physical phenomena as combustion, fluid flow, and turbulence. Part of the effort is to develop a method to reliably determine whether a particular computed solution represents permanent or merely temporary behavior. Another concerns the visualization of geometric objects corresponding to distinguished sets of solutions, which determine the ultimate behavior of the physical system. Though the work is carried out for several specific, physically significant equations, it is general enough to extend, in a natural way, to many others of a similar form, including some modeling the weather doc3243 none This research will investigate the cultural adaptation of recently immigrated Latino workers to small, rural Southern communities in Arkansas as an example of a new immigration pattern to the U.S. Rapid increases (estimated at 10-20%) of Latinos into small, primarily Caucasian communities in Arkansas to work in non-migratory, year-round, poultry-processing plants has an immediate and long-term impact on various infrastructures and systems. A feasibility study in Arkansas will explore the social, cultural, and health care issues relevant to these rural communities experiencing rapid Latino immigration. A part of this ethnographic research project will investigate immigration patterns regarding gender and age, responsiveness of local educational and governmental systems, and problems of health care access and utilization of available services. This part will include review of public documents, participant observation and key informant interviews. Unlike the sociocultural issues of Latinos and Hispanics in major metropolitan cities, and populations of migrant farm laborers in Florida, California, and some border areas, the Latinos in Arkansas are often entering relatively poor counties with few bilingual services, and are relocating to work in small, year-round manufacturing plants. These Latino immigrant populations are creating an entirely new sociocultural infrastructure in these small towns. Ethnographic analysis of this immigration process is essential for better understanding of the challenges and successes inherent in the process over time and to aid the planning for the provision of adequate services in the future. This study will assist in defining the Latino population demographics and characteristics, mapping the community and organizational contacts and participants needed for appropriate communication with the Latino population, and providing qualitative and quantitative research questions and hypotheses, as well as pilot data, for future research. This ethnographic research will provide better information for addressing the health, education, and general welfare status of similar rural populations experiencing rapid immigration by Latino workers. This POWRE award will provide Erwin with additional training and support to enhance her research methods expertise and skills, in order to complete this research in a new culture group. Specifically, the award will allow Erwin to obtain additional Spanish language training necessary to work within the Latino population and will provide time for training to enhance her analysis and software utilization skills. This award will thus enhance Dr. Erwin s ability to serve as a leader, researcher, and educator in the anthropology and health of rural and minority populations doc3244 none Ezcurra This project will survey the current status of the flora and fauna of Isla Guadalupe, Mexico, a national wildlife reservation established in . Isla Guadalupe has a 10 million year history separated from the North American continent, and represents one of the most pristine habitats of the coastal biota of the Eastern Tropical Pacific. Researchers will investigate the status of land and seabird species, insect and arthropod populations, survey plants, search for secretive reptiles and amphibians, and inventory the status and abundance of threatened species, including several thought to be extinct. The research team will include US and Mexican researchers, and comprise experts representing vascular and non-vascular plants, insects and other invertebrates, fish, mammals, and birds doc3245 none This Symposium on Structural Aspects of Protein Synthesis is an interdisciplinary meeting which aims to provide a forum for discussion and informal exchange among scientists from different backgrounds, on the theme of ribosome structure and its dynamic changes and interactions with ligands during protein synthesis. The goal is to understand the molecular basis of protein synthesis as a dynamic process, and its regulation within the cells, based on recent results of structural research. As the structure is determined to atomic resolution, the structure of the ribosome components are solved, and dynamic information is available from cryo-EM, a reinterpretation of much of the experimental information toward a dynamic model of protein synthesis is possible. The format of the conference will provide for formal and informal exchange of information and ideas among scientists that is not possible in large meetings. All participants will be invited to submit abstracts of posters, and a website address will be distributed to the scientific community. Final abstracts of presentation and posters will be placed on the website enabling wider distribution doc3246 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for . The research and training plan is in the area of Molecular Biophysics and is entitled Systematic Evaluation of Algorithms Models for Protein Structure Prediction Using a Database of Cyclic Oligopeptide NMR Data . While many computational algorithms and models exist for simulation of protein folding, there is a distinct need for statistical measures of their accuracy and efficiency. This project assembles a database of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) data of cyclic oligopeptides. These are proteins which are small enough to be computationally tractable but retain key features of protein structure and thus allow analysis of intermolecular and intramolecular forces as well as sampling algorithms for identifying stable conformations. Algorithms whose accuracy have been validated through this research are then employed to predict the structure of previously uncharacterized cyclic peptides doc3247 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for . The research and training plan is in the area of Population Biology and is entitled Maximum likelihood estimates of the rate of occurrence of selected sweeps and of the time to the last selective event in the history of a sample . The rapid fixation of strongly favored mutations, or selective sweeps, is thought to be a common mechanism by which adaptive evolution occurs. For example, humans and chimpanzees differ by only 2% on the DNA level, yet it is this minute genotypic difference that confers enormous differences in phenotype, such as enhanced communication (speech) and cognition. It is suggested that this fact can be attributed to the occurrence of selective sweeps directional selection of genes that already existed rather than creation of novel genes unique to humans. This research, aims to use computationally-intensive full likelihood methods to estimate the rate of occurrence of adaptive fixations and the time to the last favored substitution in order to identify these genes in humans doc3248 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for . The research and training plan is in the area of Behavioral Neuroscience and is entitled Analysis of Global Gene Expression in the Social and Genetic Determination of Behavioral Diversity in the Bee Colony. Division of labor in the honey bee colony (Apis mellifera) is dependent on variation in the behavior of the colony s individual workers. Worker behavior varies as a function of an individual worker s age, interactions with other colony members, social environment, and inherited genetic factors. To address the relationship between genes and behavior, this research uses DNA microarrays to test whether variation in gene expression in the brain is a mechanism that underlies behavioral diversity in the honey bee colony doc3249 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for . The research and training plan is in the area of Animal Developmental Mechanisms and is entitled Characterization of Transcriptional Networks by Comprehensive Target Identification in Drosolphila . This study proposes to identify transcriptional targets of sequence-specific transcription factors in Drosophila, via in-vivo assays using approximately 50 transcription factors . The goal is the identification of genes whose transcription produces the complex developmental patterns that occur, as well as the resulting diversity in cell function that is necessary to create complex organisms. Further, these data should facilitate attempts at computational modeling of transcription factor networks on a scale that previously has not been possible doc3250 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for . The research and training plan is in the area of Ecology and is entitled Evaluating Alternative Biodiversity Conservation Hypotheses: A test of the Coarse-Filter Paradigm . GIS and computer modeling are used in this study to develop a coarse-filter computer model for conservation reserve network planning in Ecuador. The model will generate multiple alternative biodiversity reserve hypotheses with variable sets of increasing complexity and spatial resolution. The efficacy of the model will then be evaluated with extensive biotic inventory databases for birds and plants doc3251 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for . The research and training plan is in the area of Ecological and Evolutionary Physiology and is Phylogenetic Comparative Methods to Analyze Host-Parasite Trait Evolution . The aim of this proposal is to develop comparative methods to test for correlated evolution. Previous investigations of host-parasite evolution have provided analyses of the congruence of the phylogenetic trees of hosts and parasites, yet have failed to characterize and describe correlative causal effects on trait evolution. The aims of this research are 1. To use simulation techniques to identify the statistical consequences of different levels of host-parasite tree congruence on comparative studies of trait evolution, via computer simulation 2. Develop a system that minimizes statistical bias and inconsistency when host-parasite trees are not fully congruent, and 3. Apply these methods to real-world datasets to test hypotheses for host-parasite trait evolution in primates and carnivores. This research will contribute greatly to knowledge of evolution doc3252 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for . The research and training plan is in the area of Integrated Plant Biology and is entitled An Analysis of genetic architecture, gene expression, and phenotypic variation within resynthesized Brassica napus polyploids. The goal of this study is to investigate the phenomenon of polyploidization (fusion of two genomes into one) in flowering plants, via resynthesizing fifty lines of the natural polypoid Brassica napus from its diploid progenitors Brassica rapa and Brassica oleracea. Changes in genomic architecture, gene expression, and phenotype between the diploid parents, the progeny of the resynthesized B. napus, and the fourth generation offspring of the resynthesized plants are being examined. These experiments will determine the nature of the changes within individual, resynthesized polyploid genomes and whether or not these changes are shared among independently derived polyploids. Such changes will be identified by comparisons of gene expression using Northern blots and DNA microarrays doc3253 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for . The research and training plan is in the area of Population Biology and is The Role of Alu Elements in Regulatory Evolution: Bioinformatic and Experimental Study . About 10% of the human genome is composed of Alu elements, which are primate-specific SINES (short interspersed elements)--sequences of DNA thought to have been retroposed into the primate genome during evolutionary history. The human lineage has thousands of recent Alu insertions that are not found in other hominoids. Alu sequences have all been shown to have transcription factor binding sites. Thus, it is possible that some of these elements, if inserted adjacent to genes, may have altered gene regulation underlying human evolution. The aim of this study is to test, via molecular techniques and bioinformatic studies, the hypothesis that Alus preferentially insert predominantly near male germ cell transcribed genes. The resulting analyses of human-specific SINES will help identify candidate genes that may be expressed differently in humans compared to other hominoids doc3254 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for . The research and training plan is in the area of Molecular Biophysics and is entitled Mechanisms into the folding of Arc Repressor: A theoretical study . In this proposal, a theoretical investigation into the mechanism of the folding of Arc Repressor using developments in the study of kinetics and dynamics of protein systems will be presented. A Master Equation for describing the folding kinetics of protein models (recently demonstrated by Scheraga), as well as the stochastic path approach of Elber, will be used in a corroborative way to elucidate the particular kinetic mechanism of the well-studied Arc Repressor. While the emphasis of this proposal is on application of existing models of protein folding of Arc Repressor, specific theoretical extensions will be developed both with regard to numerical methods and optimizations and with alternative formulations of the model itself doc3255 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for . The research and training plan is in the area of Ecology and is entitled Development of a Biogeographical Information System for Seamounts . Seamounts, which are volcanic peaks found within the ocean and rise feet above the ocean floor (yet not breaking the surface), exist in a variety of locations and latitudes, and may be highly representative of several aspects of biodiversity. This project creates an oceanographic information system by aggregating global biogeographic data from seamounts into a database GIS system which is used to map and explain patterns of seamount biodiversity, and will be freely accessible over the internet to aid research, management, and education doc3256 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for . The research and training plan is in the area of Ecology and is entitled Reconstructing Biogeography: Tree Species as a Novel Explanation for North American Bird Population Declines . One of the most visible environmental problems in eastern North America is the decline of many populations of breeding birds. While deforestation and loss of habitat have been identified as the causes for some species, they do not explain the population decline of the remainder. Important factors, such as quality of breeding habitat, have not been sufficiently studied. This research examines the alternative hypothesis that historical changes in forest composition, such as the decline of previously dominant tree species, is contributing to changes in bird populations due to species preferences for particular trees. Examination of morphology (bill, leg, foot, wing, and tail dimensions) of various bird species allows characterization of their preferences for specific trees and in turn provides a means to identify correlations between tree species and bird species population decline doc3257 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for . The research and training plan is in the area of population genetics and is entitled Using Current DNA Polymorphism Data to Make Inferences about Past Human Demography. Statistical analyses and extensive computer simulations are being used to determine what models of human demography are compatible with existing DNA polymorphism data. These methods can answer important and interesting questions about human populations such as when did they start to expand in size and which groups are closely related to each other. The methods are generally applicable to population studies doc3258 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for . The research and training plan is in the area of Animal Behavior and is entitled Signal Evolution and Speciation in the Common Paradise Kingfisher Complex . The means by which changes in mating signals lead to the formation of new species remain an unresolved issue in biology. The proposed research addresses this question via study of populations of the paradise kingfisher (T.galatea). These populations exhibit different plumage traits and may represent early stages of speciation. Using Geographic Information System, molecular genetics, and spectrographs, this study will determine how differences in environmental conditions, through induction of changes in plumage traits between populations, leads to reproductive isolation of a given population and, in turn, speciation doc3259 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for . The research and training plan is in the area of Evolution of Developmental Mechanisms and is entitled Evolvability and Modularity of Molecules, Viruses, and Regulatory Networks . Plastogenetic congruence, a correlation between environment-induced and mutation-induced phenotypes, has been shown by computational studies of RNA secondary structure evolution. This correlation, where phenotypes produced by an RNA sequence under thermodynamic fluctuation mirror those produced by genetic mutation, has profound evolutionary implications as RNA sequences undergo environmental canalization towards more thermodynamically stable structures. Assuming that the rule of plastogenetic congruence is followed, phenotypes that are resistant to environmental changes must also resistant to mutation-induced changes and the ensuing novel phenotypes. Essentially, phenotypes will reach evolutionary dead-ends. This research applies these principles to develop theoretical frameworks in which to study indirect impacts of a heterogeneous immunological environment on viral evolutionary potential and the origin of modular organization in viruses via analysis of RNA sequence data as well as artificial RNA evolutionary experimentation doc3260 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for . The research and training plan is in the area of Ecological and Evolutionary Physiology and is entitled The evolution of species recognition and mate choice: a neural network approach . The aim of this research is to model mate choice behavior via use of artificial neural networks that will model cognitive function. The proposed research investigates a well known problem in evolutionary biology: the evolution of species recognition that both accompanies and influences speciation itself, i.e. the manner in which the signal recipient (usually female) evolves, and how this change affects evolution of the signaler (typically male). The model neural networks are being tested against the behavior of spadefoot frogs and will determine if species recognition by the female will result in stabilizing the male phenotype or, rather, drive it in a specific direction doc3261 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for . The research and training plan is in the area of Population Biology and is entitled A Comparative Phylogeographic Approach to Studying Biodiversity . Evolutionary and geographical factors influencing patterns of amphibian biodiversity are investigated by analyzing, within three different genera (Ensatina, Taricha, and Batrochoseps), multiple codistributed species for phylogeographic concordance. In addition, comparisons of current and historic population level processes across species provide strong inferences on factors impacting genetic divergence in zones of secondary contact. By combining spatial and genetic information across multiple species and populations, a more thorough understanding of the forces affecting speciation and regional biodiversity will result doc3262 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY- . The research and training plan are in the area of evolution of development and is entitled Evolutionary Rate and Pattern in Developmentally-regulated Genes in Malaria and Related Parasites. Malaria parasites (Plasmodium) and some other members of their phylum, Apicomplexa, have nuclear ribsomal DNA with an unusual organization. Unlike most other eukaryotes, these protozoans have only a few, independently-evolving rDNA loci, and at least in malaria, these genes may be expressed only at specific times in the parasites development. The goal of this research is to identify when in the evolutionary history of this phylum the peculiar organization of these genes arose as well as to examine in detail the rate and pattern of the evolution of these genes. Evolutionary genomics, structural biology, and the use of large databases of sequence data are among the bioinformatic approaches being used doc3263 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for . The research and training plan is in the area of Eukaryotic Genetics and is entitled Analysis of Microarray Data to Identify Adaptive Promoters . This bioinformatic study will examine sequence variation in proximal promoters of genes involved with metabolic processes, and distinguish useful variations (i.e. variations associated with adaptation) from random variations that have no functional significance. Comparisons of microarray analyses of genes expressed in cardiac tissue of different populations of teleost Fundulus, which exhibit different cardiac metabolisms, can identify genes linked to metabolic processes. In Fundulus, genes whose transcription is altered (increased) by transcription factor SP1 will also be identified by using microarray technology, as these genes are preceded by promoter sequences that bind SP1. The subset of genes that are 1. Associated with cardiac metabolism, and 2. Affected by presence and concentration of SP1, will be further examined to determined which variations are adaptive doc3264 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for fiscal year . The research and training plan is in the area of ecology and is entitled, A Web-Based Combinatorial Approach to the Effects of Biodiversity Loss on Complex Ecological Networks. Ecological research into biodiversity loss is limited by what experiments can actually be conducted and by the underlying theory which is complex, making it difficult to separate the many interacting processes. This project applies global optimization techniques and network analyses to high quality food-web data to simulate effects of small to large biodiversity losses on complex communities. Systematic deletion of combinations of species in empirical and model food-webs are being used to generate theory that distinguishes effects of reducing species richness from effects of eliminating particular species functions on ecosystems doc3265 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for . The research and training plan is in the areas of Systematic Biology and Animal Behavior and is entitled Comparative Methods and Data Representation for Structured Traits, Including Temporal Sequences in Behavior, Morphology and Development . Many traits of organisms, especially in behavior, morphology, and development exhibit structured relationships with other traits. Examples of structuring include temporal sequences in behavior and development and whole-part relationships in morphology. This project develops software to apply phylogenetically informed comparative methods to traits in structured relationships. Developing these methods and their underlying representations is an important step in integrating diverse phenotypic data doc3266 none Huffaker Rapid advances have been made in quantum dot (QD) crystal growth and device design to produce lower threshold current density and improved temperature stability in QD semiconductor lasers compared to quantum well (QW) lasers. It is also becoming evident that the QD will have technologically important applications such as extended wavelength (1.0 mm- 1.3 mm) operation of GaAs-based lasers and lateral electronic carrier confinement important for microcavity applications such as low power VCSELs and photonic bandgap defect lasers. Receiving increased attention are lasers and photodetectors operating in the far infrared based on intersubband QD transitions. One of the problems in advancing QD technology, especially at 1.3 mm, is the small gain in the QD active region compared to the QW. A solution to this problem is to stack the QD layers; however, there is a severe limitation on the amount of strained material which can be utilized in the epitaxy. This project will study the development of stacked quantum dot active regions which include strain compensating layers to balance the accumulated strain of the QD stacks. The use of strain-compensating layers is well known in the field of strained multiple quantum well lasers, however it has not yet been investigated for stacked quantum dot active regions. This presents a great opportunity for new experiments in both materials and devices. The project includes the crystal growth of multiple compressively strained InGaAs GaAs quantum dot active layers separated by tensile strained InGa(As)P layers. The active regions will be studied through X-Ray diffraction and photoluminescence to optimize material parameters. Although the work is applicable to all types of QDs formed by strained layer epitaxy, this project will focus primarily on QDs which emit at the 1.3 mm wavelength. These active regions are applicable to monolithic 1.3 mm GaAs-based VCSELs which are important for signal transmission through silica fibers doc3267 none Bronzino The objective of this research is to test a major hypothesis that there are significant changes, during early postnatal development, in synaptic plasticity in a specific neuronal circuit, the first limb of the hippocampal trisynaptic circuit, in a brain structure intimately involved in learning and memory. It has been shown that hippocampal circuit responses to afferent input vary depending upon the frequency and pattern of the input. The response to certain patterns of activation of hippocampal afferent inputs may result in either enhancement (long-term potentiation (LTP)), or a diminishment (long-term depression (LTD)) of the hippocampal synaptic response. The phenomena of long-term potentiation and long-term depression have been extensively studied in adult animals, but the few studies which have examined the developmental onset and maturation of such neuroplastic responses have generally been carried out in vitro slice or anesthetized preparations. No such developmental study has been carried out in behaving animals; hence, the studies to be conducted are unique in this regard. The major goal for the project is to apply recently developed surgical and recording techniques to quantify the ontogeny of frequency-dependent responses of the perforant path dentate granule cell synapse in pre-weaning, freely moving male rats doc3268 none The Proposer intends to work on a number of diophantine questions, with particular emphasis on mixed polynomial-exponential type equations in several variables, and on Diophantine approximation in positive characteristic. For polynomial-exponential equations, the goal will be to obtain bounds for the number of solutions, which are independent of the coefficients of the equations. As for approximation in fields of power series of positive characteristic, the aim will be to exhibit new classes of algebraic series with explicit continued fraction expansions, and to obtain new information on Roth exponents . The Proposer further plans to address the question (connected with a former conjecture of Artin) of how many variables are needed to guarantee that a form of degree d with p-adic coefficients has a nontrivial zero, and he is interested in a certain question on polynomials with applications to Sidon sequences. With the advent of computers, and in modern cryptography, ``discrete mathematical questions, in particular questions involving integers, have turned out to be of increasing importance. The Proposer intends to continue his work on Diophantine equations , i.e., to study integer solutions of equations. Whereas most work up to now has been on polynomial equations, the new project will also involve exponential equations, involving terms with ``exponentially fast growth. There will be applications to linear recurrence sequences, of which the best known is the Fibonacci sequence, which occurs, e.g., as data relating to some plants. The approximation of more complicated numbers by the more simple rational numbers (i.e., ordinary fractions) is at the forefront of much current work. For instance, how well can the number pi be approximated? The Proposer intends to work on the analogous question, on how well a more general function can be approximated by the simpler rational functions. Again of particular interest here is the discrete (positive characteristic) case doc3269 none The PI (Chanyoung Lee Shader) will use her POWRE award to enhance her research and teaching with the following projects and activities: (1) visit Professors Georgia Benkart and Arun Ram at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to continue the joint research in Combinatorial Representation Theory of Lie Superalgebras, and to learn new projects and techniques in the related areas of research; (2) travel to conferences and pursue joint research projects with several researchers in representation theory of associative and nonassociative algebras; (3) participate and learn from the VIGRE project at the University of Wisconsin ways to enhance her teaching in Combinatorics and Algebra courses at her home institution, University of Wyoming. This POWRE project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc3270 none In most rural areas, plant emissions of isoprene are the dominant source of reactive hydrocarbons. During the past three summers, we have made flux measurements of isoprene over a mixed northern hardwood forest in northern Michigan as part of the Program for Research on Oxidants: Photochemistry, Emissions, and Transport (PROPHET), located at the University of Michigan Biological Station (UMBS). We have discovered a very strong correlation between sensible heat flux and isoprene flux on a daily basis. If the basis for this correlation can be understood, using heat flux as a model parameter for isoprene emissions would represent a significant advance in our ability to model isoprene fluxes. Heat flux is an inherent surface layer parameter predicted in all mesoscale meteorological models and global circulation models. Thus, it is readily available for modeling isoprene on regional and global scales. In this project we will continue our isoprene flux measurements at the PROPHET Ameriflux site during the next two growing seasons. We will employ a fast isoprene analyzer along with fast CO2, water vapor, and temperature sensors to obtain continuous flux measurements throughout the growing season doc3271 none This project addresses two areas of research relevant to nanoscale magnetism: 1. A variety of iron-oxide phases sequestered within apoferritin cages will be studied. The iron storage protein ferritin catalyzes the reversible oxidation of Fe 2+ to Fe 3+ and the hydrolytic polymerization of the latter into an iron mineral core of ca. 7-nm diam. The growing core surface exhibits self-catalytic behavior, accelerating the oxidation and polymerization reactions. A ferroxidase center on the protein shell facilitates oxidation at the initial stages of iron binding. Core growth will be arrested at the initial stages of iron nucleation in order to examine the transition from molecular to particle behavior of the growing core and onset of surface catalytic activity. The electronic and magnetic properties will be studied in order to elucidate the molecular solid boundary and the switch from ferroxidase center to core surface catalytic activity. Magnetoferritins, of interest in biomimetic materials development and bio-technological pharmaceutical applications, will also be studied. 2. Microphase separation of diblock and or triblock copolymers into spherical, cylin-drical, lamellar and core shell architectures affords the spatial and electronic confinement of magnetic nanostructures of tailored size and shape. Core shell magnetic nanoparticles within tri-block copolymer nanodomains could achieve improved coercivities, leading to next generation high-density magnetic storage media. Magnetic and electronic properties of iron oxide and core shell nanostructured morphologies within block copolymers will be characterized. Short-range magnetic order, internal spin structure, spin reversal mechanisms, coercivities and finite-particle-size effects will be studied over a wide range of length and time scales, temperature and external magnetic field strength. Magnetization measurements, Mossbauer, Ferromagnetic Reso-nance and UV-Vis absorption studies will be used. Correlation with materials properties, synthe-sis and processing parameters will guide synthetic strategies to advanced materials development. %%% This is a research enhancement grant made under the Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education (POWRE) program. The career related objective of this project is the initiation of an integrated research and education activity in experimental condensed matter physics at Villanova University (VU). The PI is resuming her career goals in research and educa-tion after an interruption in her career, due to the closing of the Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory at MIT. Family responsibilities precluded relocation at an earlier time. Her success in establishing an active research program, with the participation of undergraduate science majors, is crucial in turning an appointment from non-tenure to tenure track. POWRE funding, at this critical juncture, is expected to have a definitive impact on her career advancement as a re-searcher and educator. The proposed integrated activity will advance fundamental knowledge in the behavior of magnetic nanolattices, elucidate biomineralization in ferritin, facilitate the syn-thesis of advanced nanocomposite materials, enhance the infrastructure for research and educa-tion at VU and promote the scientific leadership and career objectives of the PI who is, presently, the only female faculty member in physics at VU. The research is expected to contribute basic materials science knowledge at a fundamental level of special relevance to the behavior of mag-netic materials, and to assist with the integration of research and education. The project is co-supported by the Division of Materials Research, and the MPS OMA(Office of Multidisciplinary Activities doc3272 none The goal of this project is to enhance understanding of defects in heteroepitaxial semiconductor thin films. A fundamental issue in heteroepitaxy is the relaxation of the elastic strain induced by lattice mismatch with increasing thickness of the epitaxial film. Strain relaxation occurs either by nucleation of misfit dislocations or by morphological transformations of the surface, or a combi-nation of both. There remains a wide gap in understanding how temperature and surface mor-phology affect the nucleation of misfit dislocations in epitaxial films. Closing this gap is the cen-tral focus of the proposed research. A new temperature-dependent mechanism for the nucleation of misfit dislocations in heteroepitaxial films is proposed. It leads to a cooperative nucleation of many misfit dislocations in a planar epitaxial film of a given thickness above a certain tempera-ture without any energy barrier. The proposed research focuses on how the process of misfit dis-location nucleation is influenced by changes in morphology. The analytical approach being pur-sued enables prediction of strain relaxation as a function of temperature, growth rate, misfit and morphology. %%% This is a research enhancement grant made under the Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education (POWRE) program. The investigator is at a critical stage of her career making a transition from a Research Specialist to the position of a Research Associate Professor. The POWRE award will enable the PI to begin a new area of research with promising ramifica-tions in technology. A duration of eighteen months will provide an opportunity to investigate and test the applicability of a novel approach advanced for understanding an outstanding issue in het-eroepitaxy. The research is expected to contribute basic materials science knowledge at a funda-mental level of special relevance to the behavior of electronic materials. The project is co-supported by the Division of Materials Research, and the MPS OMA(Office of Multidisciplinary Activities doc3273 none Adler Ceramics used in high-temperature applications must match closely in coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) to avoid excessive stress associated with strain differences over large changes in temperature. Electrochemical ceramics (used as ion-transport membranes or in solid oxide fuel cells) present yet an additional challenge. These materials not only expand with temperature, but also with changes in chemical oxidation state. The majority of expansion at high temperatures in these materials may result from chemical rather than thermal effects. Yet today there is little knowledge or understanding of chemical expansion, or its consequences and technological applications. This project will enlarge our understanding of expansion in ceramics to include these chemical effects. A new continuum theory that defines expansion thermodynamically in terms of temperature and oxygen content will be presented and then an experimental study of expansion in several mixed conducting oxides as a function of cation stoichiometry, temperature, and oxygen partial pressure will be performed. By examining this data in the framework of the theory, a more complete and general understanding of expansion in ceramics will be gained, as well as into how expansion relates to electronic and defect structure. As a secondary goal, new experimental techniques will be developed involving non-equilibrium expansion for directly measuring oxygen surface exchange kinetics and chemical diffusion. The material systems under study include lanthanum-strontium-cobalt-iron-oxide (LSCF) and strontium-iron-cobalt-oxide (SFC). LSCF is of direct relevance to solid-oxide fuel cells and electrically driven air separation, while SFC is of particular interest to workers developing dense membranes for partial oxidation of methane to syngas. LSCF is also a good model material system because its defect thermodynamics are well understood, and its cation composition covers an enormous range of defect and electronic structure (both ionic and electronic). Electrochemical ceramics are of importance in a broad spectrum of applications, including fuels processing, electricity production, and air separation. A full understanding of expansion in is critical to advancing knowledge and application of electrochemical ceramics. This project will also provide a framework for approaching chemical expansion in all solids, thus extending the impact of it much further doc3274 none CTS: C. Han, University of Akron The research equipment requested, Advanced Rheometrics Expansion System (ARES) is a powerful and versatile rheological instrument, which will enable the PI and his colleagues to measure the rheological properties of various polymeric material in the liquid as well as the solid state. Specifically, ARES will enable this research group to conduct the following rheological measurements of various polymeric materials: (1) transient shear flow, (2) steady-state shear flow, (3) flow reversal upon changing the direction of flow, (4) stress relaxation upon cessation of shear flow, (5) oscillatory shear flow, (6) creep, (7) temperature sweep under isochronal conditions, and (8) torsional oscillatory shear. This instrument will allow us to conduct rheological measurements for polymer solutions, molten polymers, polymer blends, particulate-filled polymers or elastomers. The precise measurements of the rheological, properties of such materials will help develop a new generation of polymeric materials for such applications as nanocomposites, computer electronic parts, and nonlinear optical wave-guides. Also, the precise measurements of the rheological properties of polymeric materials will help develop new theories and or modify the existing theories, which will relate the chemical structures of polymers to their rheological properties doc3275 none McDuff The University of Washington will operate the R Vs Thomas G. Thompson and Clifford A. Barnes during as a general oceanographic research vessels in support of NSF-supported research projects. The Thompson is a 274 ft. vessel, constructed in , and is owned by the Office of Naval Research and is operated by The University of Washington. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 223 operational days during , of which 105 days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The remaining cruises will support NASA, ONR, NOAA, State and private projects. The projects scheduled on the Thompson represent several oceanographic disciplines and will fully utilize the capabilities of the vessel. Operations in will take place mainly along the Pacific Coast, Mexico, and near Hawaii. The Thompson will support system trials of the ONR PROD submersible drilling system. Scheduling for the Thompson has been especially difficult as a result of the uncertainty of available funds from NOAA for the GLOBEC cruises. The GLOBEC cruise off the West Coast from North California to the Straits of the Juan de Fuca Ridge system is currently scheduled on the Thompson from mid-May through June. The Thompson will also support the JASON ROV for two cruises. New berthing spaces will be installed during shipyard time in February. The Thompson will be in port from early October through December. The Barnes is a 65.5 ft. vessel, constructed in , and is owned by NSF and is operated by The University of Washington. The vessel is scheduled for a total of 99 operational days during , of which 26 days are in support of NSF-supported investigators. The remaining cruises will support ONR, NOAA, EPA, State and private projects. The projects scheduled on the Barnes represent several oceanographic disciplines, including chemical and biological oceanography, and will fully utilize the capabilities of the vessel. Operations in will take place locally in the coastal waters of Washington and Oregon. The R Vs Thomas G. Thompson and Clifford A. Barnes are part of a fleet of ships used by the National Science Foundation in support of marine science research. Most oceanographic projects require highly specialized equipment to be permanently installed on the vessels, thus the necessity for specialized ships. These vessels do not operate in the same mode as general cargo fishing vessels. As a result, NSF supports the operation of a variety of ships specifically dedicated to oceanographic research that are operated by universities and institutions around the country doc3276 none This is a grant for Research at Undergraduate Institutions (RUI). The understanding and prediction of the physical properties of domain structures which arise in a ferroic phase transition are based on an analysis of the properties and interrelationships of the associated crystallographic symmetries. To provide a basis for the classification of domain pairs and domain twins, the PI has derived and tabulated both the magnetic and non-magnetic subperiodic groups. This work will be continued and extended with a new tabulation of the magnetic space groups and a determination of the relationship between the magnetic space groups and magnetic subperiodic groups which is fundamental for the analysis of the relationship between domain structures and their domain walls. Also to be derived will be all of the magnetic twin laws, groups that express the symmetry relationships between two simultaneously observed magnetic domain states (domain pair) and are used to determine physical properties that can distinguish between the observed magnetic domains. The PI will also determine a classification of magnetic domain pairs where all domain pairs in a single class can be distinguished by the same set of physical property tensors, and determine in which ferroic phase transition such magnetic domain pairs arise. In the context of domain engineering the PI will classify sets of domain states, determining their symmetry and predicting their physical properties. Undergraduate students will participate in these research projects. %%% This is a grant for research at an undergraduate institution (RUI) which involves the participation of undergraduate students. The focus of the research is on tabulating and applying group theory to problems involving phase transitions in ferroelectrics doc3277 none The proposed research is concerned with multiscale discretizations of boundary integral operators on geometrically complicated surfaces. The standard approach, generating multiscale discretizations in parameter spaces and lifting them on the surface, is not efficient when a large number of parameter patches is required. This project is concerned with an alternative approach to multiscale discretizations. The basis is generated in a hierarchical decomposition of the three-space and subsequently restricted on the boundary surface. This construction leads to a sparse representation of the integral operator even for complicated geometries. It is planned to apply this approach to boundary integral formulations of general elliptic as well as time dependent parabolic problems. The range of important engineering applications which the proposed research could impact is quite diverse. Examples include the analysis of integrated circuit interconnect and micromechanical systems. In these areas finding computationally efficient numerical methods for complex three dimensional structures is important in order to generate prototypes interactively on a computer. In the past the major computational tool has been the Fast Multipole Method (FMM), because of its relative simplicity and its flexibility to geometry and integral operator. We construct a multiscale basis by using a hierarchical decomposition of the three-space. The same hierarchy of cubes is also used by the FMM, and therefore the proposed approach is able to combine the flexibility of the FMM with the strengths of multiscale methods. Thus the planned research can lead to faster and more robust algorithms as well as to a better understanding of theoretical and practical issues of both approaches doc3278 none Buratti The goal of this POWRE grant is to give the Principal Investigator (P.I.) an opportunity to experience an academic career in teaching and research. This award will fund a teaching and research sabbatical at Pomona College. As a leading liberal arts college with strong science departments, Pomona College is the ideal location for teaching courses that speak to a wide audience of students. The specific goals are to: 1. Teach several courses. The courses will include one in introductory astronomy that incorporates activities developed in the P.I. s teacher training workshop, and an undergraduate seminar in which the tentative subject is a sharp scrutiny of various areas of pseudoscience. 2. Provide advice to Pomona College in the establishment of a new major in Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences. 3. Work with students at Pomona College on research projects (the tentative topics are observations of seasonal volatile transport on Pluto and physical characterization of Near Earth Objects). The relationships built with students will be reinforced by collaborating with faculty at the Claremont Colleges in establishing a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program. 4. Integrate student teachers from the Claremont Colleges into the Teachers Touch the Sky program. The experience in the academic environment gained through this POWRE award will enable the P.I. to make a career change. This project is funded by the Division of Astronomical Sciences doc3279 none Eubanks More than half of all plant species self-pollinate at least 20% of the time and almost all species studied suffer reduced fitness as a result of inbreeding. Despite decades of intensive, detailed studies of the propensity and fitness consequences of inbreeding in plants, virtually nothing is known about how inbreeding influences the biology of organisms that regularly interact with inbred plants. It is likely that the loss of genetic variation within inbreeding individuals and the associated phenotypic changes in inbred plants will greatly affect other interacting populations of plants and animals. We are expanding the study of inbreeding in plants to include the interaction of plant mating-system and insect herbivory. We will conduct a series of greenhouse and field experiments to test the hypotheses that inbreeding in plants exacerbates the negative effects of herbivory and alters the quality of the host for insect herbivores. We will also partition genetic variation for herbivore resistance and host plant quality into its additive and non-additive components to assess the ability of inbreeding populations to respond to selection imposed by herbivores. Our collaborative study will be the first to unite the important disciplines of plant mating-system evolution and plant-herbivore interactions. The results of this study will have important implications for plant mating-system evolution, for the evolution of resistance in host populations, and for the long-term persistence of population fragments experiencing rising levels of inbreeding. Our results will also be relevant to the development of agricultural crops via selective breeding programs. From the herbivore s perspective, this study will provide insight into the ability of insects to respond to the environmental heterogeneity created by a mixed-mating host and their ability to exploit hosts that have restricted gene flow. As natural landscapes become increasingly fragmented, understanding the genetic and ecological processes that transpire within small populations is critical to conservation management doc3280 none McDuff This award to University of Washington provides shipboard technical support, shore-based support, as well as maintenance and calibration of shared-use scientific instrumentation, for researchers using R V Thompson, a general purpose research vessel operated by the university s School of Oceanography as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The award also provides support for research using a multibeam echosounding system on R V Thompson. The technical support awarded here will assist NSF-funded researchers conduct a diverse suite of oceanographic studies, principally in the North Pacific Ocean, beginning in doc3281 none Three studies will use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to assess the neuroanatomical circuitry involved in three social cognitive domains. In one study, the neuroanatomical of schematic social information will be examined. In a second study, the neuroanatomical differences associated with high-level abstract understanding versus low-level concrete understanding of events derived from action identification theory will be investigated. The third study will focus on the neuroanatomical correlates of outcome framing in terms of gains versus losses. This is a small grant for exploratory research aimed at establishing the utility of a cognitive neuroscience analysis of social cognitive phenomena doc3282 none The primary focus of this project is the study of a variety of mathematical problems in quantum computation and information theory. Although building quantum computers remains a formidable experimental challenge, they have the potential to efficiently handle problems whose computational complexity puts them beyond the scope of classical digital computers. Some aspects of this proposal, such as error correction and the exploration of multi-bit gates, are directly related to quantum computation. However, the main emphasis is on problems in the related area of quantum communication, particularly channel capacity, optimal encoding and decoding schemes and classification of entanglement. The P.I. s past work on the analysis of multi-particle systems in strong magnetic fields, the properties of quantum-mechanical entropy, and maps on operator algebras provides a strong starting point for developing new mathematical tools needed to deal with these challenging issues. The possibility of using quantum computers to efficiently factoring large numbers, is a potential threat to the security of existing cryptographic protocols. Fortunately, using quantum particles for communication, which is more feasible experimentally, offers new mechanisms for distributing cryptographic keys as well as encoding messages and transmitting information. These include both procedures based on the transmission of quantum particles for encoding and sending information; and innovative new protocols, based on a quantum phenomenon known as entanglement, involving particles at distant sites augmented by some classical communication. As with classical communication, one must be prepared to deal with noisy channels and much of this proposal deals with the mathematics of noisy channels. Some of this work has direct implications for experimental design, since it is important to know how to best allocate resources and choose coding schemes to minimize the effects of noise doc3283 none Nitric oxide is a gas produced by the body to perform many functions, including ensuring the diffusion of oxygen from the lungs to the blood. This project will develop and validate a technique to measure the amount of nitric oxide produced in the lungs, known to be a major site of synthesis. Variation in the production of nitric oxide is thought to have consequences for people s ability to inhabit extreme environments where oxygen is limiting, such as those at high altitudes. Understanding how the millions of high-altitude natives of the Andean, Tibetan and Ethiopian Plateaus have adapted to ensure oxygen delivery under conditions of severe low oxygen will improve knowledge of the processes of human adaptation to extreme environments and to environmental change. This POWRE project will provide Beall the opportunity for training and technique development that she cannot obtain otherwise. This developmental and testing phase will be undertaken in a controlled, laboratory environment in order to establish the technique before undertaking field research in remote, high-altitude sites doc3284 none This POWRE award by the Chemistry Division will extend a sabbatical leave for Dr. Helen Leung from her duties at Mount Holyoke College to spend a year in the Laboratory of Dr. Marsha Lester at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Leung will extend her work on weakly bound unreactive complexes to reactive complexes by learning to analyze the reaction dynamics of the latter class of materials, a field in which Dr. Lester is a leading researcher. She and Dr. Lester will establish a continuing collaboration in which Dr. Leung will apply the high sensitivity and high resolution of her Fourier Transform microwave spectrometers to the determination of geometry and energetics of reactive complexes thereby complementing Dr. Lester s laser studies. Dr. Lester will assist in the development and testing of a new source of the complexes which Dr. Leung will assemble and test in Dr. Lester s lab and take back to Mount Holyoke. Additional funds are awarded for development of this source as it is essential to sustaining the collaboration and developing a research program in reactive complexes at Mount Holyoke. Dr. Leung will also use her time at Penn to discuss ways of increasing the involvement of Mount Holyoke undergraduates in research and of presenting the results of her research to undergraduates through the regular curriculum doc3285 none We will develop improved statistical approaches for the analysis of potentially non-Gaussian data with multiple levels of correlation, as might be encountered when repeated observations collected on siblings within families are correlated due to within subject, or within family, similarities. Our first objective is to fulfill the need in the literature for a relatively straightforward approach for analysis of multi-level correlated data by extending the method of quasi-least squares (QLS) [Chaganty ( ), Shults and Chaganty ( ), and Chaganty and Shults ( )]. We will implement QLS using a correlation model discussed in Shults ( ) that is a generalization of a structure proposed by Lefkopolou, Moore, and Ryan ( ). Motivational examples for our research include an international trial to promote exclusive breast-feeding (Morrow, Guerrero, Shults, et. al., ) and an ongoing study of Interstitial Cystitis at the University of Pennsylvania (Mazurick, Landis, et. al., ). Our next objective is to explore issues related to the benefits and implementation of approaches that use patterned correlation matrices to model association among outcomes. We will examine the impact of failure to specify an appropriate model for the correlation structure of our data, by considering several study designs and examining the loss of efficiency when the correlation structure has been incorrectly specified. Of particular interest will be the effect of ignoring one or more levels of correlation for data with multiple levels of association. Simulations will also be conducted to explore the effect of misspecification on the mean square error of the estimates of the regression and correlation parameters for small samples. We will then explore the development of improved guidelines for selection of an appropriate correlation structure when several plausible models are available. Our final objective is to explore the theoretical underpinnings of QLS and contrast QLS with pseudo-likelihood (PL, Carroll and Ruppert, ) and several other fundamental approaches that have been described in the statistical literature. We will then describe a modified PL approach that is closely related to QLS and will explore the development of this approach for several models for the correlation structure of our data. This POWRE project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc3286 none This project explores dynamical properties of solids with strong fluctuations of their magnetic, electronic or structural properties. Impurity bound states in spin systems will be examined through magnetic neutron scattering. The experiments use impurities to reveal local dynamic correlations in the host and will also advance our understand of impurities in strongly fluctuating systems. Transverse lattice vibrations can cause solids to contract with increasing temperature. Lattice dynamics in materials with negative thermal expansion will be examined through inelastic neu-tron scattering. Frustrated interactions in magnets can suppress ordering and give rise to fluctuating phases with strong local constraints. Neutron scattering will be used to establish the spin Hamiltonian in crystalline model systems and provide detailed information about dynamic correlations. Experiments will be performed to examine strong magnetic fluctuations in metals. The experiments will probe the crossover from spin wave to electron hole pair excitations in anti-ferromagnetically ordered heavy fermion systems and explore the role of geometrical frustration in these systems. The educational goal of the project is to create awareness of the neutron scattering technique and produce innovative and competent experimentalists physicists that can contribute to and take advantage of the nations largest scientific project in the next decade: The Spallation Neutron Source. %%% While solids appear static on macroscopic length scales, they are dynamic on the nanometer scale. Understanding such motion is important, especially as technology pushes to smaller dimensions. This project examines fluctuations in solids on the nanometer length scale and pico second time scale using inelastic neutron scattering. The focus is on materials where fluctuations play an important role In certain materials with magnetic atoms, quan-tum fluctuations completely suppress any macroscopic magnetic response. Impurities can however induce magnetism in these systems just as impurities increase the electric conduc-tivity of semiconductors. Experiments will be carried out to understand magnetism close to impurities in these systems. Most solids expand on heating as the amplitude of atomic motion increases. However in some materials, atomic motion leads to contracti6n. Experiments will be carried out to determine what type of atomic motion leads to contraction Competing interactions can lead to strong fluctuations in magnets. These fluctuating magnets are poorly understood and will be examined through magnetic neutron scattering. Finally experiments will be carried out to probe magnetic fluctuations in metals that lead to anomalous metallic properties and superconductivity. The educational goal of the project is to create awareness about the neutron scattering technique and produce innovative and competent scientists that can contribute to and take advantage of the nations largest scientific project in the next decade. The Spallation Neutron Source doc3287 none Ondrechen This POWRE award is for a 15 month sabbatical for the PI at Brandeis University, working with Professor Dagmar Ringe s group on enzymatic systems that use pyridoxal phosphate (Vitamin B6) as a cofactor. A quantum mechanical-molecular mechanical model for enzyme-substrate interactions will be developed and applied to the vitamin B6-dependent enzymes alanine racemase and D-amino acid aminotransferase. This project will enable the PI to expand her knowledge in the biochemical and biomedical areas and develop a research program in these areas. The project is also designed to enhance our understanding of how enzymes perform their functions as catalysts doc3288 none Descour The main objective of this project is a quantitative investigation of a versatile methodology for zero-alignment integration of micro-optical and micro-electronic components. This methodology is based on the concept of a bulk-micromachined substrate that plays the role of an optical table. The PI s propose a micro-optical table (MOT) on which a variety of optical elements, light sources, e.g., surface-emitting lasers, and photo-detectors can be accurately positioned without the need for extensive alignment. In the course of this project we will: (1) design and fabricate prototype MOT mounting slots for optical elements, (2) perform MOT micro-assembly experiments, and (3) develop and apply metrology techniques to characterize the assembled micro-optical systems. The research proposed here will permit a quantitative judgment regarding the suitability of the MOT concept for applications in biomedical sensing, biomedical imaging, optical data storage, and chemical sensing doc3289 none It is clear that nervous system function can be influenced by factors released from a variety of non-neuronal cells. The PI, Dr. Clatworthy, has been using a simple model system, the marine mollusc Aplysia californica, to understand fundamental mechanisms underlying the modulation of neuronal activity by non-neuronal cells. Specifically, she has established that a population of non-neuronal cells (hemocytes) present in the blood of Aplysia can influence the electrophysiological properties of a population of identified sensory neurons. To further develop this line of research, it will be necessary to learn the identity of these hemocyte-derived neuromodulators. The goal of this POWRE proposal is to allow the PI, an electrophysiologist by training, to spend 12 months in the laboratory of Dr. Ken Bost, a molecular biologist, learning a variety of molecular techniques that will be applied directly to identifying the factors released by the hemocytes in Aplysia. This cross disciplinary approach will advance knowledge in the field of sensory plasticity by allowing the PI to integrate information from both electrophysiological and molecular studies. Results obtained in this simple model system can then be used to formulate hypotheses regarding non-neuronal cell modulation of sensory neuron function in more complex, less accessible model systems. Furthermore, because hemocytes have a cellular defense function in Aplysia, learning the identity of hemocyte-derived factors may also provide important clues regarding the origins and evolution of mediators of the immune system doc3290 none Richards Direct impact accretion in stars occurs in the class of interacting binary star systems known as the Algol-type binary stars. These systems contain a type B-A main sequence star and a cool type F-K giant star or subgiant companion that fills its Roche lobe. In the short-period Algol stars, the gas flow from the cool component makes contact with the surface of the companion in a direct impact. This impact does not occur in the long-period Algols because they are wider and the radius of the mass gainer is relatively small when compared to the separation of the stars in the binary. The accretion structures produced by the direct impact range from a hot spot on the surface of the star to nearly stable accretion disks called accretion annuli. Data using Doppler tomogram observations of these binaries show evidence of Hydrogen-alpha accretion along the predicted gravitational path of the mass transfer stream. Such distinct images are unique among the entire class of interacting binaries because the Algols are in the slow phase of mass transfer and hence provide an opportunity to capture the process of mass transfer in action. Some short-period Algols have stable accretion structures while others are quite variable and they change within an orbital cycle from a stream-like distribution to one which resembles a classical accretion disk. Dr. Richards has studied these accretion structures by means of Hydrogen-alpha (H-alpha) wavelength and ultraviolet spectroscopy observations, Doppler tomography, and hydrodynamic simulations. Recently, Dr. Richards completed a major study of the H-alpha spectroscopic morphologies of 18 Algol-type star systems. Dr. Richards will take academic leave from the University of Virginia to go to the Institute of Advanced Studies for a sabbatical visit. Dr. Richards will be able to work on enhancing the results from the previous research, during the sabbatical period, by using data from similar studies of ultraviolet spectra and the comparison of Doppler tomograms generated at both optical and ultraviolet wavelengths. This project is funded by the Division of Astronomical Sciences and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate doc3291 none Lili Zheng, SUNY Stony Brook This POWRE proposal describes the activities to conduct exploratory work on the combined modeling and diagnostic analysis research for the High Velocity Oxygen Fuel (HVOF) thermal spray process. The primary research activities are: (1) developing theory and models for the HVOF spraying process; (2) conducting HVOF spray experiments; (3) validating the models using the information obtained from the experiments conducted during this program or from other programs; and (4) visiting the thermal spray laboratory at Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) and other institutions to learn advanced diagnostic techniques for thermal spray processes. A numerical model will be developed that can connect the particle jet interaction and the droplet substrate interaction. Exploratory experiments using existing facilities at the NSF Center for Thermal Spray Research at Stony Brook will be conducted for three types of powder materials: ceramic (Al2O3), cermet (WC-Co) and metal (Co). The particle velocity, temperature and size during in-flight and the evolution of the coating layers will be acquired and data will be used for validating the model. Thus the model can be further developed and applied to designing and controlling thermal spray processes in the future. The PI will visit national laboratories and other institutes to establish the collaborative relationship and explore advanced non-intrusive diagnostic techniques for thermal spray research such as Rayleigh and Coherent Thomson Scattering and Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Spectroscopy. The main objective of the proposed educational activities is to attract student to science and engineering, to motivate them for advanced studies and multidisciplinary research, and to prepare them for career advancement in engineering doc3292 none An understanding of the molecular details of pheromone perception is essential to understand many fundamental principles of chemosensation. Most invertebrates rely on olfaction as the principal sensory modality, so their olfactory systems have developed to a level of extreme sensitivity and specificity that enables them to identify minute concentrations of behaviorally relevant compounds. Thus, exploring the signal-transduction mechanisms of invertebrates will not only help unravel many fundamental principles but also contribute to understanding the more-complex process of olfaction in higher organisms. To gain thorough knowledge of ligand-protein interactions involved in perception of behavioral chemicals, Dr. Mohanty will attempt a detailed structural characterization of the interactions of pheromone with pheromone-binding protein (PBP). PBP is the first protein that a pheromone encounters when it enters moth antennae. To better understand the binding motif of this protein and the structural features that serve as recognition elements of a ligand, Dr. Mohanty has initiated this structural study of PBP-pheromone complex using high-resolution nuclear-magnetic-resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. This POWRE award will not only support significant advances in our understanding of pheromone binding, it will also facilitate Dr. Mohanty s career advancement by allowing her to obtain training and experience in novel NMR and molecular-biology techniques and to apply them to her research on the signal-transduction process in moth olfaction. In doing so, she will pursue a mutually beneficial research collaboration with other leading scientists in both structural biology and olfaction, and she will become a full-fledged, active participant in the newly established structural-biology program at the State University of New York at Stony Brook doc3293 none The field of comparative politics, and political science more generally, has grown increasingly polarized around two competing approaches - historical institutionalism and rational choice. These two approaches embrace different foundational assumptions and employ different methods. Rational choice theorists have appropriated and applied methods drawn from economics, while historical institutionalists draw insights and strategies from sociology, especially historical sociology. This POWRE award will allow the investigator to acquire competence in game theory and basic mathematical modeling in the social sciences. The skills she seeks to acquire will complement her already strong foundation in the alternative, historical-institutional approach to political science. The investigator is interested in bringing these techniques to bear on the empirical problems around which her work is currently organized, as well as in engaging current methodological debates in her field on the basis of a foundation in different approaches. One project is historical, and explores the origins of cross-national differences in vocational training systems. The other has a more contemporary focus, and addresses the contemporary consequences of cross-national differences in labor institutions and politics. Both of these studies involve precisely the kinds of problems (collective action dilemmas, for example) that have been central concerns for game theorists. They thus provide an ideal context in which to blend two approaches - game theoretic and historical institutional - that are frequently viewed as alternatives in the literature. In line with the goals of the POWRE program, this training will substantially advance the investigator s career. In addition to the contributions to her own substantive research agenda, NSF funding to acquire greater competence in game theory and basic mathematical modeling for political science will enable her to move beyond engaging contemporary methodological debates primarily as a representative of the historical-institutional approach. This training will put her in a good position to explore common ground and to assess the relative strengths of each approach, and in so doing, to probe the prospects for a more synthetic approach to comparative political science doc3294 none PHASE TRANSFORMATIONS IN ULTRA-FAST LASER PROCESSING The main objective of the research is to examine the mechanisms of ultra-fast laser processing of materials. Investigations of the energy transfer, melting, desorption and ablation upon femtosecond laser irradiation will be carried out. Experiments will be conducted to study the femtosecond laser processing of materials including composites, thin films, micro- and nano-structures. Ultra-fast imaging, time-resolved pump-probe reflection, transmission, absorption, scattering, deflection and interferometry measurements will be applied to probe the laser interaction with the irradiated material. The energy distributions of the released particles will be captured by time-of-flight mass spectrometry and spectroscopic analysis of the femtosecond laser-induced plasma. The laser interaction with the target materials will be modeled theoretically and computationally. Ultra-short pulsed laser radiation will be utilized for precision machining, surface engineering, processing and synthesis of advanced materials and nanoparticles. Understanding the associated phase transformations is the central research issue in this work. These extremely rapid phenomena will be interrogated by on-line optical diagnostics and analyzed theoretically doc3295 none Johnson Cretaceous strata of the Caribbean region can provide a testing ground for studying macroevolutionary processes in a reef ecosystem of a greenhouse world. Caribbean coral-algal systems were inherited from the Jurassic, and corals and rudists then co-inhabited the carbonate platforms; rudist bivalves eventually dominated many of the Caribbean platforms. Middle Cretaceous coral and bivalve paleobiota from reefs in the core and northern margin of the tropics will be analyzed for taxonomic composition and morphologic characters. The hypothesis to be addressed involves the mechanism of change in dominance of the two groups: is only the environment driving evolution, are there taxonomic, morphologic, and ecologic factors to consider, or is the change in dominance a macroevolutionary process involving both environment and the ecologic characteristics of the co-existence of the two groups? The presence or absence of macroevolutionary trends noted from this study will be a substantial contribution to our knowledge of evolutionary processes operating in the tropics during a greenhouse world. This study is appropriate for POWRE because funding opportunities for such work in order to research a fundamental question of evolutionary theory in the tropics: are macroevolutionary processes operative in the tropics during a greenhouse world doc3296 none The new digital economy has been experiencing a surge in demand for workers in the area of information technology (IT). Individuals with IT education are rewarded with high salaries. The proposed study will examine the digital divide in terms of information technology (IT) education in college using the University of Illinois undergraduate student data and the logit regression technique. It will show the extent to which a college student s participation in IT education is affected by the student s gender and race, controlling for other factors including his or her math ACT score and high school. Using the Illinois Goal Assessment Program (IGAP) high schools data and census data, the study will go on to examine how the distribution of the ACT scores of students in a high school is influenced by the high school characteristics and the students socioeconomic backgrounds. High school characteristics encompass teacher training qualification, class size, expenditures per students, ethnic composition of students, computer ownership, and Internet accessibility. Socioeconomic variables are family income, education level of the parents, and household type. The empirical findings of the proposed should expand significantly those in the existing literature. The study examines a different aspect of the digital divide . It couches the divide in terms of IT education instead of simply access to technology. Also, it uses a different regression technique, namely the quantile regression, instead of the ordinary regression technique. This different approach can reveal impacts of contributing factors to the divide , which ordinary regression technique will overlook. These results will identify factors that enable access, participation, and diversity in IT education in college. Such knowledge provides empirical basis for implementation of policies to narrow the digital divide by both high school and university administrators doc3297 none Wilks The objective of this POWRE grant is for the PI to develop expertise in triple resonance multidimensional nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) methods to answer fundamental questions on the role of protein structure and dynamics in heme reactivity. She will learn these techniques in the laboratory of a colleague at her institution. Heteronuclear NMR will enable her to determine the three dimensional structure of the protein as well as changes in atomic resolution dynamics and its role in redox based heme reactivity. This laboratory is investigating the mechanism of iron release from heme by heme oxygenase. This enzyme uses heme as the substrate and the prosthetic group. This lab is particularly interested in determining the role the protein environment has in modulating the reactivity of the heme. The information obtained from using heteronuclear NMR will expand knowledge in the protein structure as it relates to heme reactivity doc3298 none Blatter This study will investigate the isotopic compositions (Rb-Sr, Sm-Nd, Pb, and O) of volcanism in the central Mexican volcanic Belt (MVB) where a diverse volcanic suite has been characterized, yet no isotopic data is available. This project will contribute to current understanding of subduction-related processes by evaluating the genesis and evolution of three compositionally distinct volcanic series that have erupted contemporaneously in this region. The first goal of this is to determine whether geochemically diverse volcanism in the central MVB can be attributed to systematic variations in the characteristics of the mantle source. The central MVB is an optimal place to study the connection between mantle processes and volcanism in subduction-related arcs for three significant reasons. 1. The exposure of fresh lavas and scoriae is excellent and three distinct compositional types have already been well characterized with respect to age, volume, and distribution. 2. The tectonic setting is constrained including slab angle, depth to slab, and convergence rate. 3. The shallow (sub-horizontal) subduction angle produces an ~200 km wide arc, which provides excellent spatial resolution to expose the systematic spatial distribution of the three volcanic series. The second goal is to investigate the modification of mantle-derived magmas during their ascent through the crust, and evaluate the contribution of crystal fractionation and crustal assimilation to their evolution. Isotopic data, major and trace element geochemical data, and storage constraints (T, P, fO2, and wt% H2O) available from high quality water-saturated phase equilibria experiments, will allow quantification of the time-scales of some of these magmatic processes. The third goal of this project will be to use the isotopic compositions of the crustally contaminated lavas to expose information about the basement terranes through which they have erupted. This data will be used to constrain the boundaries between the basement terranes of central Mexico. This work will be conducted at the University of Colorado, Boulder in collaboration with Professor G. Lang Farmer, an expert in the application of radiogenic isotope data to igneous petrology, sedimentary provenance determinations, and the tectonic evolution of the Earth s crust. Additionally, all of the necessary equipment and facilities will be readily available to the PI at University of Colorado, Boulder and CIRES (Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences). The training of the investigator has been that of classical igneous petrology with emphasis on experimental studies and fieldwork. The POWRE award will allow the PI to optimize this necessary relocation by providing the opportunity for her to pursue new collaborations and skills, as well as contribute her unique perspective to the field of isotope geochemistry. The research will involve her in learning new analytical techniques (mass-spectrometry) and provide her with experience in the application of isotope geochemistry to a variety of problems, vastly increasing her versatility as a petrologist doc3299 none Bassler Many granular systems that are driven out of equilibrium exhibit nonlinear transport, where the dynamics is intermittent, or punctuated by avalanches. These breakdown events can be small, or catastrophic (system-wide), or the avalanches can exhibit scaling behavior. Understanding the dynamics of avalanches of granular objects is of fundamental theoretical and technological importance to a variety of subjects including magnetic fusion, superconductivity, and internet traffic. Much of the theoretical effort to describe avalanche phenomena has focussed on the behavior of discrete, cellular models, such as sandpile models, which naturally incorporate both the granularity of the objects and the threshold nature of the breakdown process. These models often have the added benefit of being numerically tractable, so that it is possible to study their behavior over a range of length and time scales, which is necessary to detect the presence or absence of scaling, and to determine universality. However, there has been little success, thus far, connecting those simple models with real physical systems to assess their accuracy, generality, and predictive power. This grant aims to address this fundamental problem by constructing discrete, cellular models to study the nonlinear transport properties of vortices driven through a type II superconductor, and making specific, quantifiable connection with experiments. As is well known, the repulsive interaction of vortices combined with attractive pinning due to disorder leads to a pile of quantized vortices in the superconductor, reminiscent of a pile of sand. So it is natural to ask if a sandpile type of cellular model can accurately describe the large scale behavior of the vortex pile. Furthermore, vortex dynamics provides an ideal test bed because of the large body of experimental work characterizing the internal magnetic field profile, the distribution of internal avalanches using micro-Hall probes, longitudinal and traverse noise measurements, current-voltage characteristics, thermally activated flux creep dynamics, magnetic relaxation, dynamical transitions at high currents, etc. This research is complementary to molecular dynamics simulations that have been performed on this same system. The results generated here can be compared quantitatively with the valuable results obtained using MD, but a microscopically realistic model is not sought here; instead, coarse grained, discrete models will be developed to try to capture the same large scale behavior. From a practical viewpoint, the models used here can be studied numerically at significantly larger length and time scales, enabling the use of finite size scaling methods, and the classification into universality classes. From a theoretical viewpoint, if such cellular models can be shown to be accurate, they provide a more general description of the phenomena associated with vortex dynamics, which can possibly be observed in other systems, and lead to a better understanding of nonlinear transport phenomena associated with avalanches. This research involves collaborations between the University of Houston and Imperial College, London. %%% Many granular systems that are driven out of equilibrium exhibit nonlinear transport, where the dynamics is intermittent, or punctuated by avalanches. These breakdown events can be small, or catastrophic (system-wide), or the avalanches can exhibit scaling behavior. Understanding the dynamics of avalanches of granular objects is of fundamental theoretical and technological importance to a variety of subjects including magnetic fusion, superconductivity, and internet traffic. Much of the theoretical effort to describe avalanche phenomena has focussed on the behavior of discrete, cellular models, such as sandpile models, which naturally incorporate both the granularity of the objects and the threshold nature of the breakdown process. These models often have the added benefit of being numerically tractable, so that it is possible to study their behavior over a range of length and time scales, which is necessary to detect the presence or absence of scaling, and to determine universality. However, there has been little success, thus far, connecting those simple models with real physical systems to assess their accuracy, generality, and predictive power. This grant aims to address this fundamental problem by constructing discrete, cellular models to study the nonlinear transport properties of vortices driven through a type II superconductor, and making specific, quantifiable connection with experiments. As is well known, the repulsive interaction of vortices combined with attractive pinning due to disorder leads to a pile of quantized vortices in the superconductor, reminiscent of a pile of sand. So it is natural to ask if a sandpile type of cellular model can accurately describe the large scale behavior of the vortex pile. Furthermore, vortex dynamics provides an ideal test bed because of the large body of experimental work characterizing the internal magnetic field profile, the distribution of internal avalanches using micro-Hall probes, longitudinal and traverse noise measurements, current-voltage characteristics, thermally activated flux creep dynamics, magnetic relaxation, dynamical transitions at high currents, etc. This research is complementary to molecular dynamics simulations that have been performed on this same system. The results generated here can be compared quantitatively with the valuable results obtained using MD, but a microscopically realistic model is not sought here; instead, coarse grained, discrete models will be developed to try to capture the same large scale behavior. From a practical viewpoint, the models used here can be studied numerically at significantly larger length and time scales, enabling the use of finite size scaling methods, and the classification into universality classes. From a theoretical viewpoint, if such cellular models can be shown to be accurate, they provide a more general description of the phenomena associated with vortex dynamics, which can possibly be observed in other systems, and lead to a better understanding of nonlinear transport phenomena associated with avalanches. This research involves collaborations between the University of Houston and Imperial College, London doc3300 none All plant cells must actively export sodium from the cytoplasm. Accumulation of sodium in the cytoplasm results in inhibition of a number of enzyme systems, and is a major cause of damage due to salinity, whether natural or due to irrigation of agricultural fields. A knowledge of the mechanisms of Na+ transport is therefore not only important in general understanding of the function of plants, but also enhances our ability to develop crop plants which are more resistant to salinization. This project will use two species of Charophyte algae that differ in their ability to tolerate saline conditions. Re-moval of Na+ from the cytoplasm by export across the plasma mem-brane is important in achieving salt tolerance, and there is evidence that an ATPase may be involved in this transport, including biophysical evidence that a Na+ H+ antiport is not sufficient to maintain the Na+ gradients measured, immunological evidence of an unusual P-type ATPase in salt-cultured algae, and molecular evidence for an unusual P-type ATPase in the salt-tolerant algae. The objectives of the proposed research are To isolate and sequence a full-length clone for an unusual ATPase from the salt-tolerant species, Chara longifolia. To use northern blot analysis to determine expression of this gene in C. longifolia adapted to saline and freshwater media, and undergoing adaptation to salt stress. To determine whether the salt-sensitive species, C. corallina, has a similar gene and, if so, under what conditions it is expressed. Long-term goals include determining the transport function of the ATPase gene either by expres-sion in yeast mutants lacking Na+ or H+ export capability or by overexpression in Chara by micro-injection of mRNA into the internode. Ultimately, information based on this research could be used to alter the salt tolerance of Chara and other plants by genetic manipulation to enhance sodium export from the cytoplasm. This research will be performed under the POWRE grant program because it will aid the author in remaining competitive in the field of salinity studies in plants. Bio-physical techniques have been successfully employed in the past to investigate important ques-tions in this field, but molecular aspects of the project must be developed in order to remain competitive doc3301 none This POWRE project will provide the resources needed to study representations of dynamic geographic processes and methods of geospatial knowledge discovery about patterns and behaviors of these processes in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The study will address three key research questions: (1) What kinds of information are useful to understand geographic processes? (2) How should geographic processes be represented so that needed information can be computed from GIS databases? and (3) How can exploratory and analytical tools be designed with the proposed geographic representation to facilitate knowledge discovery in GIS? Research on representation for dynamic geographic processes is urgently needed and can have a significant impact on methodologies for all sciences that use geospatial data to understand the dynamics of physical and human systems. As GIS development gradually merges into mainstream information technology (IT), innovative GIS research that emphasizes the computational fundamentals of geographic information representation and analysis requires advanced knowledge and skills in a melange of GIS, IT, and a chosen application domain. To meet such a multidisciplinary challenge, the POWRE study will start a new line of research that applies data mining and knowledge discovery methods in GIS to unveil spatial patterns of weather behaviors from meteorological and climatological data. The research framework to be developed in the study will be readily applicable to GIS knowledge discovery in other application domains. The POWRE award will give the PI, recently granted academic tenure, a unique opportunity to develop a major research program in geographic representation and knowledge discovery in GIS at this juncture in her career. This ultimately will contribute to a greater integration of GIS and IT technologies to enhance the usefulness of volumetric scientific data that are costly acquired at a phenomenal rate doc3302 none This project will use ultrafast THz spectroscopy to study spin excitations in narrow-gap semiconductor quantum wells. These systems exhibit a large spin-orbit coupling, permitting the spin-state of carriers to be controlled with an electric field such as that from a gate contact. These systems will be investigated with a time-resolved spectroscopic probe tuned to the energy scale of the spin-orbit interaction (1-5meV). The lifetimes and energy spectra of spin excitations will be determined for a number of quantum well structures. Such measurements are made possible by the spin-orbit interaction, which will allow optical generation of carriers in a well-defined spin-state, and optical probes of the evolution of spins. Ultrafast THz spectroscopy will also be used to perform pulsed-EPR measurements at terahertz frequencies on donor electrons in InAs. The successful performance of these experiments will demonstrate the applicability of this technique to a wide range of physical systems. Terahertz frequency generation on patterned semiconductor surfaces will also be investigated. It is expected that surface patterning will boost the efficiency of generation of optically pumped THz pulses from semiconductor surfaces by about one order of magnitude. Lastly, carrier lifetimes will be investigated in picosecond carrier-lifetime materials such as low-temperature grown GaAs and radiation damaged semiconductors. Undergraduate students will participate in this research which will be performed at Macalester College and the University of Minnesota. The project will also benefit from collaboration with an industrial partner. The students will thus also acquire research experience in a setting of a major research enterprise. %%% As advances in technology push the size of transistors towards atomic dimensions, their properties will be increasingly influenced by quantum mechanics. For this reason, scientists are exploring devices that rely on quantum phenomena for their function. One such promising area involves semiconductor devices in which an electron s spin, rather than its charge, is used to control the flow of electric current. At the present time the most promising systems for realizing such semiconductor spin-transport devices are thin layers of materials such as indium arsenide and indium antimonide. Realizing these new technologies requires, however, a detailed understanding of the behavior of electron spins in these systems at ultra-short time intervals. This research is devoted to an experimental investigation of the optical properties of indium arsenide and indium antimonide by means of infrared spectroscopy at a time resolution of one trillionth of a second. Such measurements will reveal how much energy is required to change the direction of the spin in these systems, and how long the spin remains in the newly oriented state. Additional experiments will be performed to demonstrate the feasibility of pulsed magnetic resonance spectroscopy at these ultra-short time scales. This research will be conducted at Macalester College as well as at the University of Minnesota. The project will also benefit from the participation of an industrial collaborator. Undergraduate students will be engaged in this research. They will thereby acquire skills and knowledge in a forefront area of condensed matter physics and materials science. They will be prepared for advanced studies with an appreciation for the needs of advanced technology and for entry into the scientific technological workforce doc3303 none Numerous applications of advanced photonics require conversion of an optical signal to mechanical signal. Currently such signal transformation is accomplished only with the intermediate use of appropriate electronics at a significant cost and loss of signal quality. The recent report of the opto-mechanical effect (OME) in a chalcogenide (AsSe) glass film predicts the possibility of faithfully transforming optical information into mechanical signal, bypassing the intervention of electronics. The OME also shows potential use in nano-devices such as nano- actuators, nano-sensors, nano-switches etc. Clearly, the discovery of OME has potential of starting a new area of materials science and make significant impact on technology. However, at present even the defining parameters and the fundamental origin of OME are not known. They are the subject of this Focused Research Group (FRG) proposal. It is built on the initial success of a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) provided by NSF less than a year ago for experiments at Lehigh, in collaboration with the Cambridge group that discovered the effect. From the project, an atomistic understanding of OME by combining theoretical simulations with the experimental observations of light-induced changes in the electronic and physical structures of glass, and the direct observations of the effect as a function of various parameters will be obtained. Three model chalcogenide glass systems will be studied, with the intent of using the new data for developing superior compositions with stronger effect and faster kinetics. The OME is a vector optical phenomenon (depending on the E vector), which is superimposed on scalar light-induced changes in the structure of glass. Using an improvised setup, the PIs will establish the microscopic origin of the former by polarized x-rays from a synchrotron. Naturally the understanding of scalar effects will be a valuable byproduct, which will help clarify various other light-induced phenomena in similar glasses, such as photo-darkening, photo-expansion, photo-melting, photo-plasticity, photo-crystallization, etc. This project will study a newly discovered phenomenon, the optomechnical effect, in glasses. This new phenomenon has potential to radically improve the quality of telecommunications. In addition, it has potential applications in extremely small devices. The project combines complementary expertise of two experimental groups (H. Jain at Lehigh University and S.R. Elliott at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom) and one theory group (D.A. Drabold at Ohio University) as Principal Investigators. It will also provide to several students and postdocs an unusual opportunity for international, interdisciplinary materials research integrating experiments with theory. The students will periodically meet and exchange places and conduct work under the supervision of the three PIs. This Focussed Research Group project is co-funded by the Ceramics Program in the Division of Materials Research and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences doc3304 none The long-term goals of the project are to determine the molecular mechanisms that allow hyperthermophiles to survive at temperatures near the boiling point of water. The underlying hypothesis of these studies is that growth at temperature in excess of 90oC requires the presence of co-regulated DNA repair genes. In previous studies, sequence analysis, physiological, and biochemical studies have been used to investigate DNA repair processes and maintenance of genome integrity in hyperthermophiles. Although this approach has been very successful, it is increasingly clear that new techniques must be developed to understand how hyperthermophiles prevent thermodegradation of their DNA. The goal of this work is to establish genetic methods for gene disruption in hyperthermophiles. These methods are widely used to determine gene function in Bacteria and Eukarya, but have yet to be applied in hyperthermophilic Archaea. To achieve this goal, the Principal Investigator will visit Dr. Forterre s laboratory in Paris and receive training in manipulation of archaeal vectors and transformation protocols for hyperthermophiles. The Principal Investigator will use the information obtained from comparative genome analysis to design selectable markers for shuttle vectors. Two strategies will be used to accomplish gene disruption, in vitro transposon mutagenesis and knock out mutant constructions of known genes. With the first strategy, new DNA repair mutants will be identified and characterized. The second strategy will yield information necessary to determine the functions in vivo of repair genes previously identified. Mutant phenotypes will be investigated for their sensitivity to DNA damaging agents. The location and identity of the disrupted genes will be determined, and regulation of their expression in cells exposed to mutagenizing treatments will be analyzed. This POWRE award will allow Dr. DiRuggiero to develop an independent line of research by learning new skills and methodologies doc3305 none The goal of the projects described in this POWRE award grant application is to determine if dissimilar acute psychological stressors differentially regulate the hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid axis (HPT) of rats. The stress paradigm that is proposed is the controllable uncontrollable stress paradigm; a pair of rats is subjected to an identical physical stressor, but the two rats differ in the psychological aspect of being able to escape from or control the stressor. Both animals receive the identical physical stressor but differ in the psychological aspect of coping. This experimental paradigm is a powerful tool for determining the pertinent characteristics of a stressor that eventuate specific consequences. Currently, little direct evidence suggests that the HPT may be affected by acute psychological stress, and if so, if it is differentially regulated by controllable vs. uncontrollable stress. However, there is indirect evidence suggesting that thyroid hormone levels and the activity of the HPT axis may be decreased in animals subjected to uncontrollable, but not controllable, stress. Using adult male rats, the proposed experiments will characterize circulating thyroid hormone levels during and after controllable uncontrollable stress through collection of blood samples and subsequent radioimmunoassay. Circulating levels of thyrotropin (TSH), via radioimmunoassay, will also be determined. In situ hybridization techniques will also be used to assess any potential changes in hypothalamic thyrotropin-releasing-hormone (TRH) mRNA levels. The analysis of preliminary data documenting the activity of the HPT during acute psychological stress will reveal if exploring the role of thyroid hormones in the development of stress related pathologies, both physiological and behavioral, is a worthwhile pursuit. Also, these results may lead to a model system for determining the neural circuits that direct the activity of the hypothalamus, and if they are differently activated by different categories of stressors. These experiments are appropriate for the POWRE funding mechanism for multiple reasons. The principal investigator (PI) recently relocated to Middlebury College for family reasons and plans to embark on her independent research career. This latter effort involves initiating a new area of investigation, but the PI does not have funds available for collection of vital pilot data. Therefore, funding is requested for research supplies and salary support. If awarded the POWRE grant, the PI will be able to collect pilot data, which are necessary for future competition for traditional funding sources. The POWRE grant is especially useful for the applicant because she is currently employed in a non-traditional, non-tenure track position, which again makes competing for traditional funding mechanisms difficult. Therefore, successful completion of the experiments described in the POWRE application will assist the PI in launching her independent research career and aid in procuring future funding through more traditional support mechanisms. Salary support for research activities is vital to allow the PI to focus on her research strengths without the distractions of earning a salary by other means. Additionally, receipt of the grant and pursuit of the research projects will provide the PI an identity within a supportive, professional community in which the PI possesses professional credentials, but lacks identity and concomitant networking abilities because of her non-traditional employment status doc3306 none Why can some people respond quickly in stressful situations, calm down and think clearly, while others are immobilized with fear and anxiety? Are early childhood experiences responsible for these individual differences in emotional and cognitive coping behaviors? Although much is known about the physiological stress responses in the body, there is very little evidence about how the brain responds to stress. And while it is evident that children who experience traumatic events have trouble learning and coping, there is very little information about compensatory mechanisms and the role of early experience in organizing these pathways. Professor Zimmerberg proposes that a stress compensatory system may be mediated by the neurosteroid 3-alpha-hydroxy, 5-alpha-pregnan-20-one (allopregnanolone), a progesterone metabolite synthesized in the brains of both males and females in response to stress. She has established that this progesterone metabolite reduces fearful behavior in novel, stressful situations in both young and adult subjects. Individual differences in the allopregnanolone-modulated stress response in neonates and adults were demonstrated to be influenced by both pre- and post-natal stress experiences, as well as by selective breeding. This grant will elucidates one possible mechanism underlying the short and long-term consequences of early stress by studying neurosteroid GABAa binding parameters in selected brain regions. This research will lead to a better understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying our ability to dampen the physiological responses to fearful or overwhelming situations so we can adapt and develop more calm and cogent reactions. In a society where stress leads too often to rage, understanding the basic biological responses to stress and their control will have broad benefits to educators, parents, and public policy makers. The POWRE activities are organized around extended visits to two host institutions to allow Dr. Zimmerberg, who is stepping down from major administrative and curricular demands at a small undergraduate college, to upgrade her teaching and research at a critical mid-career stage. At the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at Emory University, she will gain mastery of new molecular and imaging approaches, which are advancing the study of behavior. Second, a new international collaboration with the Laboratory of Experimental Neurobiology at the University of Cagliari will be established as part of this project doc3307 none This research will investigate the nature and organization of semantic (meaning) representations. Specifically, the research will employ physiological approaches to test whether the brain s organization of conceptual knowledge supports models that propose multiple semantic systems. The approach will combine functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the cognitive-neural organization of semantic knowledge representations and to test the role of the right hemisphere in lexical-semantic processing. In this regard, the research will address two main questions. The first is whether specific and separable brain regions (and therefore perhaps cognitive architectures) are involved in the processing of verbal-based and image-based representations of words. The second is whether specific and separable brain regions are involved in the processing of close semantic relations versus more distant semantic relations between words. Swaab s career goals are to develop an active, extramurally-funded research program in language and brain in an academic environment that includes teaching and training at the undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral levels. This POWRE award will allow her to obtain training and to develop expertise in the use of modern brain-imaging tools for pursuing the cognitive mechanisms and brain organization that underlie normal language processes. She already has expertise in the use of ERPs to study language comprehension processes and semantic representations both in neurologically normal persons and in brain-damaged patients with and without aphasia. Because these tools are rapidly becoming essential to studies of normal human language, Swaab will obtain training and experience in the use of fMRI to study the neural instantiation of models that propose non-unitary semantic knowledge representations. Importantly, this award will allow her to integrate fMRI and ERP in language research. This integration of neuroimaging and electrophysiological methods is a recent development in cognitive research and will elucidate both the time course and the functional anatomy of brain systems involved in language. At present, few laboratories have the tools and specialized knowledge to integrate electrophysiology and neuroimaging in the study of human language. Hence, this POWRE award will provide Swaab with a significant opportunity to take her work to the cutting edge of the cognitive neuroscience of language doc3308 none This award provides funding from the POWRE program to allow Dr. Wright to expand her research interests into coastal studies, where her expertise in GIS systems can be applied to a greater range of scientific projects than in the deep sea. In order to accomplish this shift in research focus, Dr. Wright requests funding to apply her GIS expertise to coral reef ecosystem studies currently being conducted by the Sustainable Seas Expeditions (SSE) and the National Marine Sactuaries System. The PI will develop a database system for the Fagatele Bay National Marine Sanctuary (FBNMS) which is located in America Samoa. She picked the FBNMS because studies of this site are just beginning and, therefore, her GIS expertise could be an integral part of plans for data collection. The PI proposes to 1) establish a comprehensive, web-accessible data clearinghouse, with GIS maps, and data layers that can be made available to the FBNMS collaborators, 2) develop a spatial analytical procedures for ecological characterization of the coral reef, which will help to establish future survey, monitoring and management protocols, and 3) develop a brief exploration of information space modeling as a way to augment the content and accessibility of the data clearinghouse doc3309 none This project aims to grow and characterize nanostructured carbon films consisting of carbon nanotube and amorphous carbon films. Films will be grown by CVD (chemical vapor deposition). Structural and electronic properties will be studied as a function of growth conditions using atomic resolution ultra-high vacuum (UHV) scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), Raman spectroscopy, Auger spectroscopy, ultraviolet photoemission spectroscopy and x-ray photoemission spectroscopy. The turn-on field for field emission (FE), emission site density, electron energy distribution, and stability and lifetime of the FE current will also be measured. Effects of residual gases on FE properties will be studied in detail. For carbon nanotube and amorphous carbon films, growth conditions resulting in optimum tube and asperity density, respectively, will be assessed for FPD applications. Such films have potential techno-logical applications as cold cathode electron emitters in flat panel displays (FPDs), miniature micro-wave sources, highly collimated electron sources and vacuum microelectronics. Using UHV STM, the effects of adsorbates on the structural and electronic properties of the caps of individual carbon nano-tubes will be studied. UHV STM will also be used to study structural and electronic properties of ad-sorbates that induce negative electron affinity in diamond such as hydrogen, Ti and Cs. The FE proper-ties of carbon nanotube and amorphous carbon films will be compared with those of diamond films and diamond-coated Mo microtips to determine the best material for FE applications. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technologi-cal relevance. Advanced characterization techniques allow greater understanding and control of ele-mentary processes which will allow advances in fundamental materials science and technology. The basic knowledge and understanding gained from the research is expected to contribute to flat panel dis-play, and related applications of electronic and photonic materials. An important feature of the pro-gram is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area doc3310 none PROJECT : The project proposed is for the development of computational methods in financial engineering. Financial engineering deals broadly with the use of mathematical and computational tools to model the dynamics of asset prices, to value and hedge derivative securities tied to the underlying assets, and to measure and control the risks associated with these instruments. The project proposes three areas of investigation: (1) a stochastic mesh method for solving high-dimensional stochastic dynamic programming problems embedded in certain financial engineering problems; (2) models and methods for incorporating jumps in diffusion-based models of the term structure of interest rates; (3) numerical methods for path-dependent options. Research in financial engineering contributes to the competitiveness and soundness of the U.S. financial services industry. The U.S. holds a leadership position in this important sector of the service economy; future preeminence in this industry will rely on innovation in financial services and in the technology that supports these services, including leading-edge computational methods for financial engineering and risk management. This area employs highly skilled scientists and engineers; this project will contribute, in part, to the training of skilled personnel doc3311 none This POWRE award will support the PI s proposed research while visiting the laboratory of Dr. Jonathan Arnold at the University of Georgia, a leading researcher in fungal genome. Dr. Arnold is the director of NSF funded Fungal Genome Resource which provides high-throughput physical mapping, sequencing, and of fungal genomes microarraying and Internet access to the Fungal Genome Database. This visit will afford the POWRE recipient great potential for interdisciplinary collaboration as the research progresses. It is anticipated that this research will ultimately result in publicly available databases and statistical data mining tools that will be of benefit to the larger scientific community. The research to be conducted while on this visit will include statistical clustering and classification used to group genes with similar expression profiles; exploration of the possibility of using dimensionality et al. reduction techniques such as Kruskal and Shepard s algorithm to analyze microarray data. Also model based (parametric) clustering will be investigated doc3312 none Grodzicker Germ cells are set aside from other types of cell early in development, and differentiate into functioning sperm and egg cells. To understand germ cell differentiation would be a major achievement in biology, and would provide important insights into infertility, contraception, human congenital diseases, germ line tumors, as well as the preservation of endangered species. The molecular basis of germ cell differentiation is beginning to be understood, due to major intellectual and technical advances. General mechanisms that unite both vertebrates and invertebrates are beginning to emerge. Six topics have been chosen for platform presentations: The early germ line; regulation of germ cell gene expression; cell division in germ cells; sperm differentiation; oogenesis and egg polarity; fertilization and germ cell function. Each will be organized and co-chaired by two experts in the topic, who will invite half the speakers, and select the other half from submitted abstracts. Platform presentations from young scientists will be encouraged. The meeting will facilitate interactions between scientists who study different model systems, and different aspects of germ cell differentiation. This meeting will provide a public forum for discussion of all aspects of germ cell research, from the primordial germ cell to the functioning gamete, in diverse model organisms. About 200 - 250 participants from all over the world are expected to attend. There are no competing meetings that are so wide in scope doc3313 none Gierlowski-Kordesch Sr isotopes are a powerful tool in determining provenance (source area) for understanding sedimentation patterns within a basin; this information is important for reconstructing past history as well as resource exploration. Applied in large part to the marine realm, the usefulness of Sr isotopes in solving continental geologic problems has not been totally utilized by the geologic community. Because the Sr signal within basinal sediments can be dominated by the carbonate rocks in the source area (with no significant change in hydrology climate), the application of this technique to nonmarine carbonates might be used to solve many geologic problems. A topic usually addressed in continental research is the differentiation of the main controlling factors in sedimentation: climate vs. tectonics. This has proven quite difficult to do because of the lack of time resolution across continental sequences within a basin development suggests that tectonics is more important than climate in controlling sediment architecture in basins. To test this theory, Sr isotopes from nonmarine carbonate rocks can be used to determine their origin. There are seven possible mechanisms to produce primary nonmarine carbonate sediments. The identification of carbonates formed from the overland transport of material through bedload, suspended load, and dissolved load (clastic carbonates) is crucial to assessing a link between a sediment and its source area. Layers of carbonate within siliciclastic sequences have long been identified as arid climatic events . Large quantities of carbonates, however, can be deposited in any climate as long as the source area for the basin contains calcium-bearing rocks, especially carbonates. The occurrence of carbonate beds in a rock sequence may instead be linked to tectonic changes. In addition, the textures of a clastic carbonate rock are indicative of the type of climate in which it is deposited. Comparing the textures and stable isotopes of nonmarine carbonates within a sequence, one can determine whether climatic change affected deposition across a sequence. If not, then one could test through Sr isotopic signatures whether the rocks are indeed directly sourced from the drainage basin through comparison with the Sr signal of the source rocks. The appearance of a carbonate bed in a sequence might indicate a change in the source area, not in climate; the effects of climate vs. tectonics could then be differentiated. In order to test and refine this technique, a modern example would be sampled rigorously before application to an ancient example. The modern example is Kelly Lake in British Columbia - a lake containing a carbonate bench and associated with a river, which directly drains from a source area containing Permian limestones. The ancient example involves nonmarine carbonates found in the northern Appalachian basin within the Conemaugh and Monongahela Group of the Pennsylvanian, components of the so-called cyclothems , with the source area postulated to be the Cambro-Ordovician carbonates if Virginia. If successful, this technique may change the perception and use of nonmarine carbonates in the sedimentary record doc3314 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Henry Foley Institution: Pennsylvania State University The goal of this proposal is to investigate a low temperature process for converting amorphous carbons into more ordered structures. In this work the PIs will continue the investigation of their discovery that elemental cesium catalyzes the conversion of non-graphitizing porous carbon and carbon fibers to forms such as intercalated graphite and tubular, nested polyhedral structures. One objective of the proposal is to understand the reaction through kinetic measurements and electronic structure calculations on model systems. A second objective is to extend this process to other alkali metal catalysts and other forms of carbon. A combination of ultra high vacuum studies and ex situ techniques is proposed; these studies may suggest other routes to carbon ordering. If electron transport is responsible for the transformation, processing with low-energy electrons may provide a similar structural enhancement. The near-edge x-ray absorption spectroscopy experiments are intended to provide the needed insights into the siting of cesium in the structures. The materials to be studied, nanostructured carbons, offer potential applications in a wide range of areas. A low temperature route to such materials would represent a major accomplishment of great potential significance. A selective, controllable route to produce nanotubes might make their widespread application feasible doc3315 none Miller The proposed research centers on the need to better understand the impact of bioaerosols on public health. Bioaerosols are airborne particles that are living or originated from once-living organisms. The complexity of this problem warrants a multidisciplinary approach, combining expertise in environmental engineering and microbiology. The project consists of two synergistic components. In the first component, the PI will gain expertise in microbiology through a combination of course work in environmental microbiology, a lab-based certification program in Public Health Microbiology, and supporting laboratory activities. In the second component, the PI will conduct research with the support of established experts. The objective of the research is to collect and assay air and settled house dust samples for endotoxin and gram-negative bacteria from homes. This research is based on the hypothesis that air samples are a better correlate with human exposure to airborne allergens compared to house dust samples. House dust samples are easier to collect and have been used extensively in previous asthma evaluations. Results will support epidemiological studies of the causes of increasing asthma rates in children. Support will be used to conduct exploratory work to determine the feasibility of a research thrust in bioaerosols. The PI has a strong background in engineering and will gain access to new skills and expertise in bioaerosols through this award, allowing her to become an independent researcher in a new area of inquiry at a relatively early stage in her career doc3316 none The focus of this research is to better understand the chemistry of organolithium reagents. Major efforts will be undertaken in the following areas: the mechanism of the metal-halogen exchange and related reactions, the structure of allenyl-propargyllithium reagents, the configurational stability of chiral organolithium reagents, the effect of polar cosolvents on organolithium structure and reactivity, the nature and consequences of chelation, and the role of electrophilic catalysts and ion pair structure in organolithium reactions. The research is enhanced by the use of detailed Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) studies. With this renewal award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Hans J. Reich of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Professor Reich will focus his work on gaining a mechanistic understanding of important reactions and processes in organolithium chemistry. The experiments will be carried out under conditions in which they are used by synthetic chemists so that the results will have direct impact on a broad array of users. The research also offers an excellent training opportunity for graduate students doc3317 none Katti In the quest for new materials for bone replacement, it is of interest to design composites with mechanical properties similar to that of bone to avoid problems such as stress shielding of surrounding bone that are associated with the current coated metallic implants. The focus of this POWRE award is to investigate means of controlling mechanical properties in insitu hydroxyapatite(HAP)-polymer composites for their potential use as bone replacement. A molecular control of crystallization of inorganic phases by organic compounds has shown great promise for fabrication of new composites for several applications. Ionic polymers such as poly(acrylic acid) (PAAc) are suitable due to their ability to strongly bind Ca ions. The major aim of the proposed research is to identify and determine fundamental molecular interactions between HAP and polymeric additive during mineralization of HAP. This will allow for a control of microstructural evolution of HAP and hence the observed mechanical behavior in insitu HAP polymer composites. The specific research objectives are: 1. To develop a fundamental understanding of molecular level interactions of organic and inorganic phases in polymer-hydroxyapatite insitu composites. The specific role of ionic polymer chains on microcrystalline aggregate formation and nucleation and growth of HAP will be investigated. 2. Correlate molecular parameters (such as vibrational band intensity changes and shifts) to macroscopic mechanical behavior such as tensile and compressive strengths. The PI is a new faculty at NDSU. The POWRE grant will help her establish an independent research program and further her career development. This grant will help the PI to develop a first research initiative to establish a Biomaterials research and education program at NDSU. The PI proposes to integrate research with education in the Biomaterials field by involving undergraduate women and or minority students into active research. At the conclusion of the proposed studies, the PI plans to integrate results of the study into development of a new course on Biomaterials. This course will be focussed towards senior level and graduate engineering students and will promote the importance of Biomaterials in the engineering community at NDSU doc3318 none Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia Arizona State University POWRE: Time-Frequency Analysis of Signals with Non-Linear Structures This proposal focuses on investigation of the feasibility of obtaining new quadratic time-frequency representations that are matched with non-linear group delay, while exhibiting a maximum concentration and reducing the effect of cross terms. In addition, this work will address a new line of research in analyzing the difficult case of multicomponent signals with different types of linear and or non-linear structures present simultaneously. The proposed methodology will involve a matching pursuit dictionary with basis functions of different types of group delay doc3319 none Proposal No.: Proposal Type: POWRE Principal Investigators: Jane H. Davidson Institution: University of Minnesota POWRE: Adsorption of Low Concentration Gaseous Mixtures With the recognition that the air we breathe can adversely affect human health, there is increased interest in removing gaseous contaminants from indoor air by adsorption. Indoor air may contain hundreds of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) as well as inorganic gases, such as ozone, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide, in trace (parts-per-billion, ppb) concentrations. The aim of this study is to explore the interactions between organic vapors and chemically reactive gases on an activated carbon adsorbent. The dynamic adsorption of a gas vapor mixture of two organic compounds from different chemical families (toluene and dichloromethane) and ozone will be measured. Concentrations of the VOCs will be varied from 1 to 10 ppm. The concentration of ozone will be varied from 100 ppb to 1 ppm. Adsorbent capacities and equilibrium isotherms will be quantified for individual adsorbates and for several binary mixtures and one ternary mixture. Scanning electron microscopy and X-ray photoemission spectrometry will be used to analyze the carbon surface before and after adsorption. The presence of by-products will be assessed with mass spectrometry. These experiments will provide new data for mixed-component adsorption in a concentration range for which very few data exist. Breakthrough curves and isotherm data for ozone and for the mixture of ozone and VOCs will be the first available. The efficacy of predicting adsorption of mixtures using data obtained for the individual components will be appraised. The experimental results will be compared with existing dynamic models for mixed-component adsorption. Predictive model comparisons will ultimately aid the development of design guidelines for adsorption systems for indoor air purification and similar applications, as in automobiles and aircraft cabins doc3320 none Brunet, Johanne (POWRE) Most work on the evolution of self-fertilization has focused on the interactions between inbreeding depression and the gene-transmission advantage of selfing. Theoretical models predict that populations should evolve toward either predominant outcrossing or predominant selfing. However a third of all taxa for which the mating system has been estimated engage in a mixture of selfing and outcrossing. This lack of accord between theory and data suggest that factors other than inbreeding depression and gene transmission should influence the evolution of self-fertilization in natural plant populations. The PI will investigate how pollination ecology influences mixed mating systems. She will investigate the extent of mating variation among populations of the plant, A. coerulea, confirm the difference in major pollinators previously reported among populations, and start investigating geitonogamy, reproductive assurance, and floral characteristics. She wishes to establish a research program in plant breeding system evolution after working on a different problem for a number of years and reinvigorate her program doing this exploratory research doc3321 none Horton An integrated biochemical and X-ray crystallographic analysis will be used to determine the structural and energetic basis for transcriptional activation in the E.coli pap operon. The pap operon consists of genes encoding the proteins of the pili appendages of bacteria. Previous work has led to a model for regulation known as the phase variation control mechanism, in which the methylation state of two GATC sequences determines the binding sites for the dimeric leucine-responsive regulatory protein. Methylation of upstream GATC-I results in Lrp binding to promoter-proximal sites, steric blockage of RNA polymerase and transcriptional repression. If GATC-I becomes umethylated Lrp dimers translocate to upstream sites mediated by the coregulator protein PapI and GATC-II is methylated and transcription is activated. The experiments in this grant will provide a structural and quantitative foundation to evaluate and further explore this phase variation model. Thermodynamic dissociation constants will be measured by gel shift analysis for Lrp binding to wild-type and selected mutant sites, and the consequences of GATC methylation and Pap I binding will be explored. Xray crystallography will determine the high resolution atomic structure of unliganded Lrp, Lrp-DNA complexes, and ternary Lrp-PapI-DNA complexes. These biochemical and Xray crystallographic data will be analyzed and used to develop models for the structure of the DNA control region. This is a POWRE award which will allow the PI, who is currently a research associate, to establish and independent research project doc3322 none This project strives for greater understanding of the primary microscopic processes involved in the growth of III-nitrides. The approach incorporated high temperature scanning tunneling microscopy, reflection high energy electron diffraction and desorption mass spectroscopy. A predictive growth model will be sought. Rate equation models and kinetic Monte Carlo models (in collaboration with others) will be developed. Important issues to be addressed will be the differences in polarity and structure of the GaN surfaces that can be used, the role of growth parameters, and the role of defects. Methods to exert microscopic control over the growth of III-nitrides will be investigated. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. Experimental tools are now available to allow atomic level observation of elementary surface processes which when better understood allow advances in fundamental science and technology. The results of this work may allow a new level of reliable control of materials growth, allowing semiconductor devices with reproducible properties to be attained in a variety of academic and commercial settings. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area doc3323 none Andelman, Sandy J The goal of this research is to develop new approaches and guidelines for conserving interaction biodiversity. Interaction biodiversity refers to the myriad ways in which pairs and groups of species interact with one another - both within and among populations - as well as to the diversity of outcomes elicited by these interactions. Despite growing concern over the loss of interaction biodiversity and its potential evolutionary and ecological consequences, traditional approaches to reserve network design are based primarily on species-level and ecosystem-level considerations. Most conservation decisions are intended to minimize or prevent the extinction of species or the loss of ecosystem function. The view is that if we worry about species and ecosystems, the interactions will take care of themselves. The PI will use a combination of ecological and evolutionary theory and empirical data to develop guidelines for conserving interaction biodiversity and to increase understanding of the potential consequences of species and ecosystem-level decisions for species interactions doc3324 none This project aims to study physical and technological aspects of doping of a-C:H. The overall research goal of the project is to use the Saddle-Field Glow Discharge (SFGD) deposition method to produce a-C:H films with electrically efficient and controllable p- and n-type doping for subsequent use in microelectronic devices. The structural, optical and electrical properties of the samples will be characterized by a variety of techniques. Specific tasks include: (1) Obtain hands-on experience with a SFGD deposition system. (2) Optimize SFGD deposition parameters to provide controllable and electrically efficient p- and n-type type doping. (3) Study effects of substitution of hydrogen in an amorphous matrix by tritium. Understanding the effect of dangling bonds produced by tritium beta decay on the opto-electronic properties of materials will add to fundamental knowledge in the physics of amorphous semiconductors, and may lead to applications in opto-electronic devices. (4) Study possibilities of modifying film properties after deposition by annealing and free-electron laser irradiation. It will help her to overcome scientifically limited environment of a small teaching institution. The PI will acquire additional experimental skills in the area of thin film deposition. The anticipated outcomes from this project are a deeper understanding of (1) the growth and doping mechanisms of a-C:H, and (2) the physical properties of dangling bonds in tritiated amorphous semiconductors. Both outcomes will have fundamental and immediate practical impact. The long term benefits for the PI s research program will occur through both continued collaboration with University of Toronto researchers and the acquisition of the deposition equipment for her home institution. The expansion in the depth and scope of the PI s research will strengthen her position at UTC and in the larger research community, and make her an efficient role model for young women in science. %%% This is a research enhancement grant made under the Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education (POWRE) program. The project covers a sabbatical year and two consecutive summers, which the PI will spend doing full-time research at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the University of Toronto, collaborating with Professor Stefan Zukotynski. The career-related goal of this proposal is to re-establish the PI, whose research career has been interrupted for three years, as an active researcher in the field of semiconductor physics materials science. The POWRE award will provide the PI and her students with the opportunity to use world-class research facilities and to interact with leading researchers in the field of amorphous semiconductors. The research is expected to contribute basic materials science knowledge at a fundamental level of special relevance to the behavior of electronic materials. The project also places emphasis on the integration of research and education through undergraduate student participation in research. The project is co-supported by the Division of Materials Research, and the MPS OMA(Office of Multidisciplinary Activities doc3325 none Davidson The PI has several years experience in earthquake risk analysis. This POWRE award will allow her to expand her research to include hurricane risk analysis as well, with the goal of ultimately adopting a multihazard approach to risk assessment and management. This project will give the PI the skills, background, and connections necessary to make this transition. The study has two main goals. First, the PI will gain expertise and forge relationships in a new research area, hurricane risk analysis, with the support of experts in the field, Dr. David Rosowsky, Dr. Lian Xie, and their research colleagues at the Clemson University Civil Engineering Department and the North Carolina State University Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences Department, respectively. As consultants on this project, Rosowsky and Xie each will host the PI and her research assistant for a two-week visit. Second, more specifically, participation in this study will prepare the PI to conduct a planned collaborative project with Rosowsky and Xie to forecast hurricane risk as it changes over time. As cities grow, age, and evolve, their exposure and vulnerability to natural hazards changes dramatically. Risk assessors and managers, therefore, will always be a step behind the problem unless they anticipate how the world will change, estimate what the risk will be at that time in the future when the next hurricane occurs, and plan for that future scenario. The planned forecasting study will develop a model of how hurricane risk changes over time so that risk managers can plan more effectively. These two goals will be achieved through the accomplishment of the specific objectives of the POWRE project. First, the PI will work with the consultants to develop a deep understanding of the hurricane wind hazard model Rosowsky has developed and the coastal flooding hazard model Xie has developed. Second, the PI will develop vulnerability models that predict damage due to hurricane winds and coastal flooding. Third, interfaces between the Clemson wind model, NCSU coastal flooding model, and vulnerability models will be developed so that together they form a prototype risk assessment system. Finally, the hazard and vulnerability models will be applied to the coast of North Carolina to test the interfaces and demonstrate the feasibility of the prototype risk assessment system doc3326 none This POWRE award will allow Feldman Barrett to integrate cognitive science and neuroscience perspectives into her current research on emotion generation. She has developed a theory that emotional responses are formed when complex emotion knowledge is applied to elementary feelings of pleasure or displeasure. This application may be either automatic, requiring little attention, or deliberate, requiring effort, when generating a discrete emotional response. As a result, individuals vary in the specificity in their current emotional state, called emotional granularity. Low granularity involves little or no distinction between emotions typically assumed to be separate and specific (e.g., anger, sadness, fear, etc.), whereas high granularity involves fine grained distinctions. This award will afford her the opportunity to formulate a theory of functional emotional architecture that will directly address how feelings of pleasure or displeasure combine with emotion representations to produce emotional states. The award will give her the opportunity to develop familiarity with contemporary literature and methods in cognitive science and neuroscience. She will endeavor to connect observed differences in emotional granularity with available evidence about neuroanatomical models of the brain and thereby to formulate a theory of a functional emotional architecture that directly addresses how automatic and deliberative processes produce emotional states. Moreover, she will initiate a program of study addressing how working memory is linked to the deliberate use of emotion knowledge when emotional responses are generated. The work has the potential to change in a fundamental way the research questions that psychologists ask when studying emotion. It may move the field away from the notion that emotions are a small set of discrete, universal states that are essentially defined by distinct autonomic or behavioral patterns, and towards a view that emotions, like memory and attention, are emergent phenomena generated by the complex interplay of multiple systems. In addition, it will pave the way for future research on the adaptive consequences of emotional granularity and contribute to the construction of training programs (in therapy or in skill-building programs) designed to improve emotional adjustment (which will, in turn, improve interpersonal adjustment and vocational performance). This POWRE award, thus, will enable Feldman Barrett to develop new methodological skills, pursue collaborations with cognitive neuroscientists specializing in neuroimaging technology, and thereby broaden the theoretical and empirical base of her research program doc3327 none Project research goals are to develop theoretical models and computer simulations that can pre-dict the properties of complex mixtures containing particulates, and thereby be able to guide ex-perimental efforts along more fruitful directions. The motion of particles influences the behavior of fluids, and the thermodynamic and kinetic properties of the fluids in turn affect the movement of particles. To accurately capture flow properties of complex fluids containing particles, hydro-dynamic interactions must be included in the description of the system. Currently, there are no ef-ficient methods for simulating hydrodynamic interactions in three dimensions for mixtures of multicomponent fluids and mobile, solid particles. To overcome this stumbling block and achieve prediction of properties of polymeric composites, the project is devoted to collaborative development of innovative computational techniques. %%% This is a research enhancement grant made under the Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education (POWRE) program. The project provides partial support for a sabbatical year which the PI will spend collaborating with Prof. Julia Yeomans at Oxford University, UK. The collaboration with Prof. Yeomans is expected to provide a unique opportunity for integrating the PI s experience in modeling polymer particle mixtures with her expertise in modeling the hy-drodynamic behavior of fluids. In addition to research activities at Oxford, the PI will play an ac-tive role in mentoring students at St. Hilda s College, which is the only women s college in Ox-ford, and students associated with the Physics and Materials Departments. The project is co-supported by the Division of Materials Research, and the MPS OMA(Office of Multidisciplinary Activities doc3328 none Clark Ecological forecasting is the process of predicting the state of ecosystems, ecosystem services, and natural capital, with fully specified uncertainties, contingent on explicit scenarios for climate, land use, human population, technologies and economic activity. The spatial extents of forecasts range form watersheds to regions to continents to the globe. The time horizons of the forecasts are typically 10 to 50 years. Projection and forecasting involve predicting future ecosystem states based on past activity and models that incorporate our understanding of relationships. Planning and decision making can be improved by access to reliable forecasts of ecosystem state, ecosystem services, and natural capital. Emerging computing capacities together with broad-scale ecosystem studies will soon make it possible to predict, validate and test many aspects of environmental change. A workshop will be held in May at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis to develop a science agenda for Ecological Forecasting. Presentations from economists, climatologists, demographers, and managers will address cross-cutting issues involved in making forecasts. A series of case study presentations will involve both ecologists and scientists form related disciplines to assess the readiness of ecological science to make forecasts. Subsequent discussions will focus on social and physical drivers of ecological forecasts, basic research needs, quantifying uncertainty decision theory, and communicating forecasts to the users. The workshop will produce a white paper, an overview article and a book doc3329 none AST- Young In recent years it has become clear that elliptical galaxies are not dead, gas-free galaxies as they were once thought to be. Many of them contain neutral gas, which raises the interesting possibility that they may be forming stars. A complete understanding of elliptical galaxy evolution depends on knowing the origin and the fate of this neutral gas and the star formation rate in elliptical galaxies. High resolution images made from observations of the carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen (HI) emission lines from nine elliptical galaxies will be made with the Berkeley, Illinois, and Maryland (BIMA) and Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) millimeter wavelength radio telescope interferometers and with the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope. The analysis of the data on the neutral gas distribution and kinematics will give vital clues to its origin and its fate. For example, the analysis of the data will show whether the gas was acquired in a violent merger, whether the gas is forming stars, is feeding an active galactic nucleus, or is being destroyed by some other process. The knowledge about the gas distribution and kinematics will also help explain the origin of the radio-FIR correlation in elliptical galaxies and will reveal the effects of a galaxy s environment on its neutral gas. The answers to these questions are not known because there are very few elliptical galaxies with good data on the distribution of their molecular and atomic gas. The results from this project will more than double the number of elliptical galaxies with good CO and HI emission line maps. The sample galaxies have a wide range of properties (including environment, morphology, luminosity. and strength of nuclear continuum source), that will help to disentangle the many processes affecting elliptical galaxies. The result from the project will be a unique synthesis of information that will help to give a better global picture of elliptical galaxies and their interstellar media. The project s results on the star formation rates in individual elliptical galaxies will be combined with the statistical work of Cotton & London ( ) to give the first quantitative picture of star formation in elliptical galaxies. The results of this project will also he used to refine the theoretical models of elliptical galaxy evolution. Finally, by showing how elliptical galaxies are evolving today, the project will help to draw the connections between high redshift and low redshift galaxies. This project is funded by the Division of Astronomical Sciences and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate doc3330 none The specific goals of the projects are to: 1) document a relationship between the quality of interaction in a group and the quality of outcomes from group interaction, and 2) to determine if the quality of interaction can be influenced by intervening in the preparatory activities of a group by planning, or by intervening in the activities of group members engaged in discussion. The target content for this project is the human circulatory system. This material provides an opportunity to explore students learning of a complex system. The project involves an examination of middle school students working in collaborative groups to come to an understanding of the circulatory system. Collaborative groups will first learn about the circulatory system of the proboscis worm. They will subsequently work together to determine how the human circulatory system is different from that of this worm. The project will examine the effects of two strategies for providing cognitive support to the collaborative group with the goal of promoting high levels of discourse. One strategy involves students planning how to go about making a complex comparison by listing ideas and organizing and grouping those ideas. A second strategy involves having students generating sets of comprehension and elaboration questions that they then use in making the comparison. Outcomes assessed will include the quality of discourse and the quality of explanations and reasoning provided by groups. The research can contribute to an understanding of how children piece together a theory about how systems work. The data to be collected here will provide insight into how students reason by analogy and by comparison. The results will also contribute to theories about how to scaffold learning in the classroom. Students may be unable to implement the more complicated planning strategy, suggesting that particular approaches to prompting metacognition may be too difficult. It is also conceivable that the planner may focus more quickly on key issues in the comparisons they make. The data collected here will provide a window on some aspects of the transferability of metacognitive prompting. From a practical standpoint, clear data on how to support students reasoning and explanations will be available. This information will be helpful to teachers as they attempt to have students engage in higher levels of reasoning and thinking doc3331 none This project seeks to implement a state-of-the-art photoluminescence capability to extend the PIs semiconductor characterization capabilities and to provide an important tool in undergraduate education; it will be used in undergraduate laboratory projects for a special materials science course. The PI has established a research program in exploring materials issues of semiconductor thin film growth focused on microstructural, morphological, and compositional evolution in III-V semiconductor alloys. This project will allow correlation of microstructural, morphological, and compositional phenomena to optoelectronic properties. %%% This is a research enhancement grant made under the Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education (POWRE) program. The POWRE grant will maintain and raise her visi-bility in the very competitive and male-dominated field of semiconductor and microelectronic re-search by branching her research into the realm of optical characterization and device applica-tions. The research is expected to contribute basic materials science knowledge at a fundamental level of special relevance to the behavior of electronic photonic materials, and to assist with the integration of research and education. The project is co-supported by the Division of Materials Research, and the MPS OMA(Office of Multidisciplinary Activities doc3332 none This project is a molecular dynamics simulation study of the structure and relaxation of vitreous boron oxide, which belongs to the general class of network glasses, and specifically consists of trigonally coordinated boron atoms. The long term goal of the research is to establish a relation between short range order (dimensionality or coordination) of network glasses and physical properties relevant to the glass transition. The basis of the proposal is the relaxation behavior of a material with three-fold coordination. A rapid decrease in relaxation rates and the onset of com-plex dynamics such as non-exponential relaxation is one of the universal signatures of entrance to the glassy state. Materials with four-fold (silica glass) and two-fold (linear polymers) coordi-nation have been more extensively studied than three-fold coordinated materials such as B2O3. The intermediate range order of B2O3 is also of interest. Experiments have revealed the existence of six member boroxol rings, but confirmation with simulation studies has met only limited suc-cess. The work will proceed in two phases: characterizing the structure of B2O3 and studying re-laxation. A promising model that includes many body polarization effects is being adapted to study B2O3 since the polarization effects it describes have been shown necessary for a realistic model of boron oxide. This model will be used to investigate the structure of boron oxide, spe-cifically the question of boroxol rings. Full characterization of the relaxation of B2O3 will follow. %%% This is a research enhancement grant made under the Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education (POWRE) program. The exploratory research activity proposed defines a new area of interest for the PI. The project will allow the PI to apply her expertise in the area of molecular simulation to problems in glass science. The research is expected to contribute basic materials science knowledge at a fundamental level of special relevance to the behavior of glassy materials. The project is co-supported by the Division of Materials Research, and the MPS OMA(Office of Multidisciplinary Activities doc3333 none An exploratory research program is planned to develop and assess through the thickness stitching of composite sandwich structures. We will explore the feasibility and potential benefits obtained by stitching foam core sandwich panels with Kevlar yarns. To offer low cost manufacturing, we propose to manufacture stitched sandwich panels using low-cost, out-of-autoclave processing. Sandwich panels will be stitched in a dry perform state, vacuum bagged, and infiltrated using Vacuum Assisted Resin Transfer Modeling (VARTM) processing. The through-the-thickness stitches will provide resin infusion paths to the facesheet adjacent to the tool surface. Evaluation will focus initially on performing standardized ASTM tests on the stitched sandwich panels and comparing results with comparable unstitched panels. Additional specialized tests will be performed to evaluate the increase in damage tolerance provided by the Kavlar stitched. Finally. We will explore finite element based analysis methodologies that may be used to design optimized stitching configurations for specific applications. If we are successful in this exploratory research, we will demonstrate that stitched sandwich structures offer a significant increase in damage tolerance and interlaminar strength while allowing for low cost processing doc3334 none In our daily lives, we are constantly being bombarded by irrelevant auditory information in the form of machine sounds, background speech, and other disruptive noises. The intensity and prevalence of this noise seems to have grown ever stronger as machines have become more important in our society. At the same time, the majority of occupations have moved from relying mainly on physical ability to relying more on higher-level cognitive processing. These two factors interact in ways that force us to consider the effect of increased noise on mental activity. Attempting to quantify and predict the effects of noise in any form on our cognitive abilities has become a critical issue. This project will examine the link between speech-processing abilities and individual differences in the ability to ignore irrelevant background sounds. This project will consist of two major phases. The first will be to assess individual differences in processing speech and non-speech sounds in different types of noise. The second will use these measurements to relate the ease of identifying words in noise to the memory for those words. The expectation is that if some individuals can process information more rapidly and with less effort than others, they can allocate those resources to rehearsing and elaborating upon the items in order to improve memory performance. If each word is difficult to comprehend, it will take more effort to encode its meaning, resulting in poorer memory performance. Thus, it is expected that speech-processing ability will predict the ability to remember items presented in noise. In practical terms, then, we will be able to identify what types of noise are especially detrimental to memory performance and under what circumstances. These results will be of interest to those designing work environments and can provide date relevant to efforts to ameliorate the negative consequences of noise. This POWRE project will initiate a new line of research inquiry for Surprenant which, although related to her previous work, constitutes a significant departure while still being grounded in basic experimental research. It should enhance her potential for advancement and leadership in her field doc3335 none Cohn The structure in the universe evolves as the universe expands. Small fluctuations present in the very early universe have grown under the influence of gravity and other forces to form all the stars, galaxies, superclusters, etc. that we see around us today. Dr. Cohn will be investigating structure formation by concentrating on the properties of dark matter halos, that is, clustered dark matter. Dr. Cohn will study profiles of dark matter by using data from observed strong gravitational lens systems in the case where the lens is a galaxy. In strong gravitational lensing, the mass of the galaxy has bent the light approaching us from a more distant source so much that we see multiple images of the source. The positions and brightness of the multiple images of the source depend in part on how matter is distributed in the lensing galaxy, and thus these positions and fluxes can be analyzed to find the dark matter structure of the galaxy. The collection of discovered lenses will be used to build up a statistical sample of mass profiles present in the universe at different eras and environments. In addition, if the source varies with time, the images will vary as well. The time delay between the image variations can be used, together with the mass profile for the lensing galaxy, to calculate a fundamental cosmological parameter, the Hubble constant, which characterizes the rate of expansion of the universe today. Dr. Cohn will also study mergers of dark matter halos on larger scales by using numerical simulations. She will simulate the gravitational collapse, and thus the growth of initial small fluctuations, to model and study large structures of the size of galaxy groups and clusters. The focus of these simulations will be to characterize the merging properties of the clustered dark matter and to quantify the amount and importance of merging in the evolution of these structures. This project is funded by the Division of Astronomical Sciences and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate doc3336 none NSF Proposal: Advances in Level Set and Related Methods: New Technologies and Applications Principal Investigator: Stanley J. Osher The level set method devised by Osher and Sethian in has proven to be phenomenally successful as a numerical and theoretical device for representing and analyzing the motion of curves in R^2 and surfaces in R^3. A level set calculus has been developed, and recent extensions include the ghost fluid method, convolution generated motion, dynamic surface extension, the variational level set approach, and the motion of higher codimensional objects. Recent applications include multiphase fluid dynamics, the island dynamics model for epitaxial growth, level set based interpolation of unorganized points, and fast methods in image restoration. This work was partially supported by our previous NSF grants. The goal of this proposed research is to extend the technology and the range of applications through the following two projects: (1) Convolution generated motion for filaments. (2) Fast algorithms for steady state geometric Hamilton-Jacobi equations and the induced motion of fronts. The level set method is rapidly becoming the method of choice to simulate on the computer a host of important physical, biological, materials science, image processing, computer vision, electromagnetic and other real world problems. In particular areas of nanotechnology will also be impacted. Improvements of the numerical methods used to simulate these phenomena will ultimately be crucial in the design of computer chips, analysis of explosions, recognition of objects and many other areas of modern technology. This proposal addresses further improvements of the level set and related methods doc3337 none This project will address the question: What would a shift from reductionist approaches to approaches based on systems theory imply for economic theories and methods as applied to environmental ecological problems? This question will be addressed by: (1) comparing and contrasting the roots of systems theory and methods with those of neoclassical economic theory and methods, specifically as applied to environmental problems; (2) researching applications of systems theory in other disciplines to identify methods and approaches that might inform economic approaches to environmental policy and ecosystem management; (3) developing conceptual models that integrate systems concepts and theory into economic approaches to environmental problems; and (4) exploring the implications and requirements of a shift in economic theories and methods of approaching ecosystem management towards systems theory based approaches. The broad goal of this research is to contribute to the development of transdisciplinary approaches to ecosystem management and environmental policy decisions, by exploring how the discipline of economics might evolve, and ways to link economics and other disciplines. Environmental and ecological problems are systemic in nature, dependent on complex interactions between systems and parts of systems, particularly the interactions between the economic and social systems and the natural system. Traditional disciplinary approaches are effective and appropriate for analyzing parts of these systems. However, individual disciplinary approaches do not address the essential relationships that make a system unique, and thus cannot adequately address environmental issues in a way that will foster long run sustainability. Systems theory, which is designed to address the multiple aspects of a system, as well as the relationships that define it, may provide a framework for more effective transdisciplinary approaches. The results of this research will contribute to improving the ability of economic approaches to address the relationships that are crucial to defining systems, and to improving the ability of economic approaches to better consider the different aspects of people s environmental values. This research will also contribute to newly dominant ecosystem approaches to environmental management, by exploring ways that researchers might help decision makers more effectively carry out these programs, and making economics more relevant to the policy process. The POWRE grant will allow the PI to advance her research program by providing the opportunity to learn more about approaches from other disciplines, and explore whether and how they can inform and be combined with economic approaches. It will enable her to do the scholarly research necessary to take her work to the next level of application by allowing her to conduct exploratory, fundamental research that will lead to implementation in future projects. It will advance her career by allowing her to contribute to broadening the scope of economics, position herself to take advantage of increasing opportunities for interdisciplinary and ecosystems-focused research; and participate in and contribute significantly to research initiatives that are currently being developed at the University of Rhode Island doc3338 none Nectar robbers are animals that take nectar from flowers without contacting the sexual parts of the flower; they rob the flowers of nectar without pollinating them. In this sense, they are considered cheaters of the pollination system. In most cases of nectar robbing, a different kind of animal robs than pollinates: bee robbers taking nectar from hummingbird-pollinated flowers, for instance. In the case of Impatiens (jewelweed), the same species of bumble bees are both robbing and pollinating. Even more surprising, some of the same individuals are both robbing and pollinating. This observation flies in the face of currently accepted ideas of mutualism between plants and their pollinators. The proposed research will determine how bees make behavioral decisions as they forage among jewelweed flowers. Does nectar level in flowers determine which behavior they will perform? Does previous visitor history of the flower affect their behavior? How does age and experience of the bees influence their behaviors? Intensive observations of marked bees will reveal individual behavior patterns. Manipulating the nectar level of flowers will allow the testing of the strength of the relationship between reward level and behavior. It has traditionally been thought that the relationship between plants and their pollinators is a prime example of mutualism: a tight relationship in which both members benefit. The behaviors of bumble bees at flowers of jewelweed suggest that this mutualism may not be as strong, or more subject to exploitation, than previously thought. This research will help us understand what is apparently a unique system of cheating and benefiting, one that currently defies the simple categories of mutualism or antagonism doc3339 none This POWRE award by the Chemistry Division extends a sabbatical leave for Dr. Rosemary Marusak from Kenyon College to work with Brian Hasinoff at the University of Manitoba. This leave will permit Dr. Marusak to extend her research on the inorganic chemistry of metal complexes of cardioprotective drugs and their in vitro oxidation of biomolecules to in vivo studies of such systems for which Dr. Hasinoff is a leading expert. It will also allow her to gain experience in cell culture techniques and electron paramagnetic resonance applications in bioinorganic chemistry. Dr. Marusak will use this knowledge to strengthen her research collaboration with her faculty colleagues in the Biology Department, sustain her collaboration with Dr. Hasinoff and enhance her teaching of bioinorganic chemistry doc3340 none Goman Sediment samples collected from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania will be analyzed for fossil pollen. The sediment samples were collected from deposits recognized as lake or wetland environments from two well-defined strata, Bed I and Lowermost Bed II, from the gorge. These deposits, which date to 2.03-1.78 million years ago (m.y.a.) and 1.75-1.70 m.y.a respectively, are an important area of research for archaeologists investigating early hominids, i.e. Homo habilis. Recent archaeological and geological investigations at the gorge have focused upon reconstructing the landscape and paleoecology of the region in order to better understand the environment within which these hominids subsisted. The palynological work consists of several parts. At first the PI will need to familiarize herself with African pollen taxa and with preparation methodologies for early Pleistocene material. Second, samples from a variety of fossil wetland environments identified from Lowermost Bed II will be analyzed for their fossil pollen content. Third, a calibration data set combining the modern pollen spectra and water quality data from varied wetland environments at nearby sites thought to be comparable analogues for Oldowan wetland environments will be developed and then applied to the data collected from Lowermost Bed II. It is hypothesized that the pollen spectra from different wetland habitats will serve as a proxy for determining paleo-wetland environments and water quality conditions. Finally, samples of laminated lake sediments from Bed I will be analyzed for fossil pollen and the regional paleoecology determined. The paleoecological and inferred water quality information will provide key insights into early Pleistocene environments and landscape at Olduvai, at a key time in Hominid history. This information will be of critical importance to the landscape models archaeologists and geologists are constructing for this period and region. Not only does this POWRE proposal provide a unique opportunity for the PI to work with scientists from other disciplines in order to develop a more complete picture of early hominid land use, it comes at a critical time in the PI s career after taking time off from active research to raise a family doc3341 none The goal of this research is to develop technical cost models to assess the solid oxide fuel cell technology. The program will focus on developing the required skills and methodologies for doing the assessments. Presently, cost is estimated using the averaged cost factors derived from those used for conventional power plants. The cost calculations give little insight to critical design or strategic decision questions. The use of technical cost models based on engineering insight will provide guidance as to the competitiveness of materials or processing choices. The primary focus will be on acquiring tools and methodologies. This research should provide methodologies for using technical cost models with fuel cell technology being used as a case study. The effort will progress from the cell component level to the level responsible for considering materials and processing choices. The project will provide decision-makers with the ability to design, determine the materials required, and processing alternatives doc3342 none This research will begin a series of inquiries into the roles played by minority-owned banks during the transformation of American suburbs from predominantly white middle class to multiracial communities. The research will first document the development and structure of the Chinese banks in the Los Angeles area. Second, it will examine how these banks have facilitated the development of ethnic communities, especially in terms of altering commercial infrastructure and residential landscapes in the eastern suburban San Gabriel Valley. Third, it will explore the transnational ties and the roles of Chinese banks in the globalization process. Planned activities include a joint event, involving representatives from academia, the banking sector, community, and government. This roundtable discussion will address research results, banking experiences locally and across national boundaries, the dialogue among bankers, community leaders, and public officials in terms of community needs, banking regulatory issues, and public policies. The project aims to contribute to our comprehension of the changing dynamics in American suburbs, in order to foster mutual understanding between minority banks and mainstream society, and to provide policy suggestions concerning banking and community development. On the theoretical level, the work will examine the trajectory and structure of a particular minority-banking sector from a geographical perspective, and to contribute to the Geography of Money and Finance. On the methodological front, the project will utilize multiple data sources and multi-faceted analyses, while combining quantitative and qualitative methods. It will test the validity of bank data collection for geographical research and the utility of qualitative research in banking analysis, notably interview and participatory methods. The analyses of publicly available data sources such as FDIC and HMDA, on the other hand, will yield a replicable method that can be applied to the study of other groups and localities. Also it will broaden the impacts through interdisciplinary connections, cross-university and multinational collaborations, and academic, banking, community, and public sector cooperation. There may be implications for changes in banking regulation and public policy within the study area in particular and within multiethnic urban America in general. The project will have a number of outcomes. It will begin with papers delivered at academic conferences at regional, national, and international levels, followed by research articles submitted to scholarly journals, both geography and interdisciplinary, chapter(s) in an edited volume on ethnic banking in Southern California, and a research report made available for all interested parties. Finally, there will be an opinion article targeted at the general public and a videotape clip to be circulated to both Chinese and mainstream mass media, in order to draw attention to the issues of minority banks and community development. This POWRE project will allow Li to initiate a fresh line of inquiry and to re-establish the foundation of her research following a career interruption. A section of the research program will be truly exploratory in nature, particularly regarding the unconventional data sources used. This research will lay the groundwork for future comparative studies of the ethnoburb phenomenon from a financial-dynamics perspective and contribute to a career goal of developing a conceptual framework of understanding and examining changing American suburbs doc3343 none This POWRE award provides funding that would allow the PI to expand her research activity with various national programs and collaborations at a critical time in her career. This project is aimed at investigating neutrino induced electron-positron production and its astrophysical and laboratory significance. The outcomes of the project research may advance knowledge on the dynamics and physics of photon and W Z coupled neutrino- nucleus processes and their impact on stellar and laboratory neutrino research. The award is funded by the NSF POWRE program, the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the MPS Directorate, and the Physics Division doc3344 none Anderson The development of implantable sensors for detecting biomolecules such as important ions in physiological fluids has currently become the focus of increasing investigation. One major problem with common implantable sensors is their poor biocompatibility. The body recognizes these synthetic sensors as foreign substances and promotes undesirable adhesion of proteins to the surfaces. One potential solution to this problem is to introduce endothelial cells onto the sensor surface to increase its biocompatibility. Endothelial cells line the interior surface of blood vessels and form the interface between the vessel wall and the flowing blood. Consequently, they are not foreign to the body and the protein fouling will possibly be eliminated. The objective of this project is to attach human umbilical veins endothelial cells (HUVECs) to cellulose triacetate (CTA) membranes through receptor ligand interactions for use as the basis for increased biocompatible ion--selective electrodes. Briefly, the CTA membrane will be covalently immobilized with cell-surface receptor recognition sequence Arg-Gly-Asp (RGD). The endothelial cells will then be seeded on the modified CT A membrane surface and allowed to attach at 37 degrees Celsius in a humidified atmosphere of 5% CO2. The work will investigate the attachment and growth of the endothelial cells to the CTA membranes and test the analytical performance of these surface modified membrane electrodes. The ultimate goal of the work will be to optimize the transport of ions across the endothelial cell coated surface membrane and hence, optimize sensor response while maintaining biocompatibility doc3345 none Friedman B It is now known that small lipids can mediate cell to cell communication, not unlike the traditional classes of extracellular signaling molecules such as peptide neurotransmitters. While much work has been done in in vitro cell culture studies to document biological effects of small lipids, it is only with the recent cloning of receptor families for small lipids that it has become to systematically study potential sites and mechanisms of action in vivo. In particular, while these lipids promote the survival of immature non-neuronal supporting cells in vitro, it would be of use to know if there are similar effects in the adult organism. The studies impossible this POWRE Proposal will determine which non-neuronal cell types possess receptors for bioactive lipids and also test whether differences in receptor levels influence the survival of these cells in vivo. This POWRE proposal will allow the investigator, after a career interruption for family responsibilities, an unprecedented opportunity to acquire new skills in the use of molecular biological techniques. It is anticipated that this funding will provide support for the generation of pilot data that is necessary to compete for grants by standard mechanisms doc3346 none PI:Skendzic, Elizabeth INSTITUTION: Univ of Wisconsin - Parkside PROPOSAL: The P.I. proposes a project to study the phylogeny of the grass tribe, Andropogoneae. Which includes 85 genera. Past work supports monophyly of the tribe based on spike morphology, leaf blade anatomy, and to some extent molecular data. Recent molecular studies, however, seem discrepant: recent work suggests the tribe is polyphyletic. She would like to investigate this hypothesis by reconsidering the taxa analyzes, the type of molecular marker used, and the addition of novel developmental and morphological characteristics. She will study species of the core genera Andropogoneae and use data from nuclear ribsomal DNA sequences, floral development and seedling morphology in order to obtain a more robust phylogeny doc3347 none Peabody POWRE Proposal # : Genetic Mosaicism in Armillaria gallica Armillaria gallica is an ecologically variable basidiomycete fungus that functions as a saprophyte and pathogen of stressed trees in many of the world s boreal and temperate forests. The PI recently reported that basidiomes (mushrooms) of this fungus can be a genetic mosaic (Fungal Genetics and Biology, , vol. 29). This was demonstrated by isolating ten cells from a single basidiome and genotyping each for six different nuclear loci. Nine different genotypes were recovered for the ten cells that were assayed, indicating that this basidiome was a genetic mosaic. Fifteen cells isolated from another basidiome of the same species produced only one genotype when analyzed for the same six loci, indicating that this basidiome was not a genetic mosaic, at least for these six loci. The goal of this NSF POWRE-supported study is to better understand the phenomenon of genetic mosaicism in A. gallica s life cycle and the contribution mosaicism makes to this species ability to function successfully in forest soils. To accomplish this, the PI will investigate (1) How common and geographically widespread genetic mosaicism is, (2) How the mosaic condition develops, and (3) How mosaicism affects the ability of A. gallica to infect plant hosts and to grow under ecologically variable conditions doc3348 none The focus of the proposed research of this POWRE award is for the PI to acquire new experimental skills and a broad-based knowledge of molecular biology. The PI proposes to accomplish this by working in the laboratory of her collaborator, Dr. D. A. notterman, in the Department of Molecular Biology, Princeton University. There, she will focus her efforts toward integrating nanotechnology with molecular biology. Specifically, she will be developing an integrated microchip which, using a combination of microfluidic channels and nanoelectrodes, can measure the dielectric properties of single cells. Correlations between these dielectric properties and the DNA content of cells will be examined. Since DNA-content analysis and related measurements, such as the determination of S-phase fraction, are potentially useful strategies for detecting cancer cells, the proposed device will be an on-chip detector of cancer cells. The PI will be learning how to culture and manipulate cells for this project doc3349 none Caroline S. Harwood Dr. Caroline Harwood has been awarded a grant for an intensive six-and-a-half week summer course in Microbial Diversity to be given at The Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts in the years though . There is general agreement in the scientific community that the continued expansion of biotechnology into the environmental, pharmaceutical and medical arenas depends on our ability to recognize and exploit the vast biodiversity of microbes that exist on earth. The aim of the course is to train students to recognize and effectively study diverse kinds of new microorganisms. The course will be attended by graduate and postdoctoral students, as well as established investigators, who want to become competent in microbiological techniques for working with a broad range of microbes and in approaches for recognizing and understanding evolutionary relationships between microbes. The course is primarily a laboratory course that will emphasize nature as the source of microorganisms for research; thus the beginner and the advanced student have equal chances to make discoveries. Students will isolate various metabolic types of microbes and they will use molecular techniques, computer analysis and approaches of comparative genomics to mine the riches of diverse microbes. The laboratory component of the course will be complemented by lectures that provide theoretical background in metabolism, evolution and genomics. A series of mini-symposia on current topics of interest in the areas of genomics and microbial evolution will also be given doc3350 none The low Reynolds number motion of freely-suspended particles in bifurcations of capillary tubes will be studied experimentally. A bifurcation is a point where a tube splits to form two tubes. When a suspension of particles flows through a bifurcation, the partitioning of particles between the downstream branches differs from the partitioning of total volume (particles + suspending fluid) between the branches. The difference results from a combination of hydrodynamic interactions between the particles and the bifurcation wall and the exclusion of particles from a thin layer near the walls. This principle will be investigated with the aim of designing a device to separate particles from fluid. Particle trajectories will be measured experimentally, and the effects of bifurcation geometry, particle size, and particle volume fraction will be determined. Experimental results will be combined with numerical models based on mass and momentum conservation to predict the motion and flux of particles in networks of channels and build a framework for the rational design of a separation device. Many manufacturing processes of biological and technological importance involve suspensions of solid particles in a viscous liquid. Separating freely-suspended particles from the surrounding liquid can pose significant technical challenges, especially in cases where the particles are nearly neutrally buoyant in the suspending medium. This project will explore the motion of particulate suspensions as they flow through branching tubes, and will use certain characteristics of the flow to design a new particle separation method. The process has significant potential advantages over traditional methods, such as membrane-based separations. The goal of the research is to design a continuous, stagewise separation process that requires little maintenance or control, is relatively insensitive to ambient conditions such as temperature and pressure, and requires no purging or disposal of filter elements doc3351 none The end of the Cold War has been accompanied by economic reversals and ongoing political crises in sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, fertility has decreased while urban populations have increased. This expanding urban population survives the hardship of economic and political crisis through mutual aid and social control provided by voluntary ethnic (home-town) associations. This project will address the relationship among these three features of urban Cameroonian society focusing on women s reproductive health among Cameroon s most populous ethnic group, the Bamileke. It will investigate how the material and political threats facing urban Bamileke migrants in Yaounde affect women s fertility decisions. In particular, it will examine the effect of Bamileke women s social networks (fellow association members, friends, neighbors, and kin) on how they assess and use contraceptives, on the timing and spacing of births, and on whether and when they seek traditional or modern, public or private obstetric and gynecological care. This project will have two major components. The first will provide Feldman-Savelsberg with training in anthropological demography. The second will support the internationally-collaborative field-research segment of the project, to be undertaken in Yaounde, Cameroon. This project will help us understand the puzzle of fertility change in Africa and the effect of post-Cold War social change on world population. It will also address the puzzle of why ethnic conflict might increase in urban Africa during a time of the development of a more open, democratic society. In addition, it will contribute to the understanding of one aspect of the role of urban home-town associations in the development of civil society in Africa. Finally, this project will potentially enhance women s health care by placing women s reproductive health-care beliefs and behaviors with the context of their social network relationships. Because the work will take place in Africa and will involve African faculty and graduate students, this project will foster U.S.-African partnerships. It will also provide the basis for development of new courses on social network analysis and anthropological demography. This POWRE project will provide a unique combination of training, research, and international collaboration at a crucial juncture in Feldman-Savelsberg s career development. It will support a shift in her research agenda (from rural to urban Africa, and from infertility to a broader range of reproductive decisions) and provide the opportunity for interdisciplinary training to support this new research agenda doc3352 none Lerman, Kristina University of Southern California POWRE: Mathematical Modeling of Multi-Agent Systems This POWRE proposal outlines a novel physics-based approach to solving computer science problems. The proposed activity leverages the author s training in physics, particularly the physics of complex systems, and applies to the study of multi-agent systems. The goal of the research is to propose a feasible mechanism in which interactions between agents with simple local strategies lead to desirable group behavior in each of the two domains: coalition formation in a multiagent system and dynamic routing in a sensor network. The proposed mechanism is then analyzed and a mathematical model of the process is constructed. The model is expressed as a series of coupled differential equations. For the coalition formation problem, for instance, the model describes how the number and distribution of coalitions change with time. The solutions of the equations describe collective behavior, and they can be analyzed for different values of the parameters doc3353 none This POWRE award by the Chemistry Division supports Dr. Jetty Duffy-Matzner in developing a research program in small molecule heterocyclic chemistry at Augustana College in Sioux Falls South Dakota. The objective of this research will be to synthesize, characterize and test the antibiotic activity of a series of polymers with the potential ability to disrupt the sodium and potassium concentration differences across cellular membranes. This award will allow Dr. Duffy-Matzner to: establish a joint collaboration with Dr. Nola Borman, Assistant Professor of Biology at Augustana College to explore the biological activities of the novel compounds synthesized in the project; involve advanced students in Augustana s medicinal chemistry course in molecular modelling; create summer research experiences for Dr. Duffy-Matzner s undergraduate student co-workers in the laboratory of Dr. Karin Ruhlandt-Senge, an inorganic chemist at Syracuse University, who will also collaborate with Dr. Duffy-Matzner on this project. This award will contribute significantly to the professional advancement of Dr. Duffy-Matzner, at a critical stage in her career doc3354 none Misra To obtain maximum performance from nanoscale CMOS devices, conventional polycrystalline silicon gate electrodes will have to be replaced by metallic layers. However, any replacement candidate for polysilicon must adhere to several criteria. Firstly, electrodes should not react with the underlying sub-1.0 nm gate dielectric. Secondly, the electrodes must be able to withstand high temperature processing in order to preserve the self-aligned structure of the MOS device, which has been the foundation of today s advanced technologies. Finally, to obtain desired threshold voltage for giga-scale performance, the electrodes must provide specific workfunctions, i.e. NMOS devices will require gates with workfunctions near 4 eV and PMOS devices will require gates with workfunctions near 5 eV. The need for two separate metals significantly complicates the process technology, both in material and cost issues. The goal of this POWRE project is to investigate alternate approaches for nano-gate electrode formation using workfunction modulation of conducting metal oxides. Transparent conducting oxides offer the flexibility of workfunction modulation via chemical composition changes. This property can be used to benefit nanoscale CMOS. The main theme behind this proposed activity is to deposit a single conducting oxide layer on both the NMOS and PMOS region dielectrics and then via non-critical masking steps, selectively implanting certain elements to modulate the workfunction on N and P regions. This would eliminate the need for two separate metal deposition steps and drastically simplify integration issues. Moreover, conducting metal oxides, never before considered for Si gate electrode applications, can also provide superior thermal and chemical stability. If the above proposed activities are feasible, i.e. workfunction of conducting metal oxides can be tuned in to match the CMOS requirements, then this work offers tremendous potential for nanoscale CMOS advancement doc3355 none Dyer Quantifying and comparing the impacts of plant resources and consumers on ecological communities has been difficult for terrestrial ecologists, but it is an important component of understanding how natural and managed ecosystems are structured and how they respond to perturbations. The ant-plant, Piper cenocladum, and its associated arthropods have been a useful system for examining the effects of top-down and bottom-up manipulations in a tropical rain forest. The proposed experiments will directly compare the importance of plant secondary metabolites (amides) in regulating herbivory versus the role of ants. The experiments will also address specific questions about how these secondary metabolites mediate interactions between the four trophic levels. Field and shade house experiments will be conducted to test several hypotheses. Predators and resources will also be manipulated and changes in plant chemistry, plant biomass, herbivore numbers, and biomass of upper trophic levels will be examined. Herbivore feeding experiments will be conducted to further examine the effects of amides on herbivores. This research is an important step towards gaining an clear understanding of the trophic cascades observed in this model system. It will test the green desert model, which suggests that plant secondary compounds are important in shaping communities, because most plants are not usable resources for herbivores. It will also shed light on the roles of resource availability and plant chemistry in modifying trophic cascades. The larger questions addressed by this research are relevant to current theories about resource availability and chemical defense, controversies about the relative importance of factors that regulate herbivore populations, and advances in studies of ant-plant mutualisms. The results will allow an improved assessment of current theory and better inform practical decisions in the areas of conservation biology and biological control doc3356 none Jonoska, Natasa University of South Florida POWRE: Self-Assembling Graphs by DNA This POWRE award will support research on a new way of solving computational problems using three-dimensional DNA structures. An experiment for solving a computational problem, the so called three-vertex colorability problem for graphs, by actually constructing a three-dimensional DNA graph structure is proposed. This is an initial study towards developing computational methods using three-dimensional DNA structures such as graphs that are not available with current electronic computers. The project proposes use of branched junction molecules to build graphs by DNA. The project will provide a better understanding of the topology of DNA, which leads to a more profound understanding of natural processes in vivo doc3357 none This research project addresses the fundamental mechanisms of non-adiabatic gas-surface interactions. With the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, Professor Andrew Kummel and his coworkers at UC-San Diego are carrying out detailed experimental studies of the dissociative adsorption of halogen and interhalogen molecules interacting with low work function surfaces such as Al(111). Velocity dependent molecular beams of dihalogens and interhalogens are used to probe the mechanisms of remote dissociative and abstractive chemisorption. Velocity distributions of scattered halogen atoms, coupled with scanning probe microscopic examination of the reacted surface provide the details of energy partitioning and mechanism in these studies. The interaction of oriented interhalogen molecules is also examined. In addition to the fundamental insights obtained concerning non-adiabatic processes at surfaces, information relevant to the dry etching of electronic materials results from this work. The mechanisms of halogen etching reactions taking place on low work function surfaces is the focus of this research project carried out by Professor Kummel and coworkers at UCSD. Using a combination of molecular beam methods, laser spectroscopic characterization of scattered species, and scanning probe microscopy to characterize the reacted surface, detailed information about halogen based plasma enhanced etching processes is obtained. This fundamental research has broad impact on the development of electronic materials etching processes, as well as providing fundamental insight into the mechanisms of an important class of surface reactions doc3358 none This project involves systematic research on the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) by transnational groups and individuals to forge interdependent, electronic networks of power to influence government policies and the response of governments to these networks in the age of information technology. As countries explore the use of ICTs to maximize service delivery and facilitate economic competitiveness via electronic government, they must address balancing the expanded access of information technologies and the challenge to political rule. The project will involve six steps: (1) identify and define three distinct populations that form transnational electronic networks; (2) introduce a theoretical model of electronic transnationalism; (3) conduct qualitative and quantitative analyses of ICT activities of the selected networks and the responses of governments to the networks; (4) construct a cyber-mapping or spatial analysis of ICT activities; (5) examine barriers to forging interdependent links in cyberspace and strategies to circumvent these barriers; and (6) create a typology of ICT-level of government and policy issues of electronic networks. This project will contribute to the broader understanding of the formation of electronic networks, the monitoring and tracking of network activities, the use of new technologies by transnational groups to influence public policy and government practices, and the social and political factors shaping the advent of information technology. The investigator s pursuit of a new educational direction that incorporates information technology into the classroom practice and course content has spawned an exciting, intense research agenda on the use of information and communication technologies by groups and individuals to influence government policies. Through national and international conferences and other scholarly exchanges with academic peers, the researcher has been able to share preliminary findings on a theoretical model she has constructed to study the formation and role of transnational electronic networks. To conduct the necessary empirical research to test the model, prepare the findings for scholarly dissemination via published papers, and move forward in this field of scientific inquiry, the researcher needs a twelve-month period of time to focus solely on research and writing. A POWRE award will afford the researcher the time to dedicate her full priority to completing this research agenda and developing her credentials for full professor. With this award, the researcher seeks to intensify her research contribution to the scholarly community, enhance her status as a scientist in a newly emerging area of study, and strengthen her leadership role in a growing discipline in which women and minorities are under-represented doc3359 none Although birds are among the best-studied vertebrate group, extraordinarily little is known about their sense of smell. In fact, chemical signals are known to modulate important aspects of behavior in every vertebrate group (reptiles, amphibians, fish, mammals) except birds. The proposed research will examine the role of chemical communication in an Alaskan seabird group, known as the auklets. Within this group, one species, the Crested Auklet, has an unusual tangerine-like odor on its feathers that appears to be tightly linked with mating behavior. The study has three objectives: to examine in detail the nasal anatomy of auklet species, to study the biochemistry of Crested Auklet feathers, and to determine any behavioral response of Crested Auklets to their feather odor. The aim of this research is to integrate anatomy, chemistry, and behavior in a model bird group, as a means of understanding the role of chemical communication in birds. The use of chemical communication has the potential to alter fundamental assumptions about bird behavior, as scientists have typically only considered signals that involve vision or hearing. Since nasal microstructure and odor chemistry are completely unstudied in birds, the results of this research are also applicable to studies of sensory perception, adaptation, and biochemistry. Such data will increase our knowledge of birds and will enable comparisons with other animal groups, such as mammals. Finally, responses to odors appear to be involved in several important bird behaviors, such as courtship, chick rearing, and predator detection, which can influence reproductive success or mortality. Thus, information relating to odor response in birds is applicable to species conservation, management and situations involving animal husbandry. This POWRE award will permit the PI to develop expertise in several techniques that will support this integrated multidisciplinary study doc3360 none This project focuses on three genes, Hoxa10, Hoxc10, and Hoxd10, and examines their combined activity in the development of the nervous system. These three genes, which encode transcription regulators, are expressed at lumbar levels in the developing embryo and are thought to provide regional identity to the spinal cord and surrounding tissues. Because these genes are expressed in similar patterns and appear to regulate similar processes, they may interact directly with each other or may act in concert to regulate common downstream target genes. Using knockout mice, the current studies will address interactions between the three genes by characterizing alterations in spinal cord development at the cellular and molecular level. At the cellular level, spinal cord motor neurons will be examined for changes in identity and projection in double mutant animals. Observations in single mutant animals suggest that the development of this population of cells is regulated by several different Hox genes; combinatorial interactions between Hox genes may produce more dramatic alterations in motor neuron development. Molecular interactions will be identified using quantitative RT-PCR and downstream targets of gene activity will be identified using microarray assay screening. These studies will demonstrate that three Hox genes act in combination to regulate the cellular and molecular identity of the developing nervous system. Normal development of the spinal cord requires that the correct cells be produced in the proper place at the proper time in order to ensure the integrated functioning of the nervous system. Alterations in cell production can produce diseases such as spinal muscular atrophy or lethal congenital contracture syndrome. The studies to be conducted will examine how several genes may interact with each other to produce the unique cellular and molecular structure of the developing lumbar spinal cord. It is anticipated that this POWRE award will allow Dr. Carpenter s research to move forward more rapidly after a prolonged period of administrative responsibility and will permit the introduction of microarray technology into her laboratory doc3361 none Krol, Marina Mt. Siani School of Medicine The objective of this POWRE project is to advance research by the development of more sophisticated algorithms and mathematical computer models based on pharmacokinetic analysis for predicting critical conditions that are associated with postoperative complications. The project is based upon a database of computerized anesthesia records that grows by 20,000 cases per year. The paradigm is based upon real clinical cases. The end porduct of the research, beyond project duration, will be prototype intelligent workdtation that implements proposed models and algorithms doc3362 none The PI will work on solving polynomials and systems of polynomials. Polynomial equations and systems are used in many areas of scientific computing and engineering: mechanism theory, robotics, chemistry. The development of efficient and reliable algorithms for solving these problems are important particularly for systems with a large number of variables. The goal of this project is to extend the path lifting method which is well understood in the case of a single variable equation, to a system of polynomials. She will begin with a special case of a map from a Riemann surface. For the more general case, she will work jointly, with teams at Toulouse and at Stony Brook and communicate with S. Smale, F. Cucker(Hong Kong) and M. Shub (NY). This plan includes implementing this algorithm, large scale experiments involving various types of Newton method and choices of initial points. We will gather numerical evidence in terms of complexity and in terms of stability with respect to finite precision computations. POWRE will supports her visit to City University of Hong Kong, IBM Watson Center, and Toulouse to collaborate (and consult) with experts in the field. Under POWRE, PI will mentor 3 undergraduate students including two minority students at SUNY at Old Westbury to develop their academic interests towards graduate studies in mathematics. This POWRE project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc3363 none The research goal of this POWRE award is to obtain the equipment and training necessary to apply molecular biological methods to research in the applicant s laboratory. These new skills and methodologies will complement, expand, and enhance research activities in environmental microbiology and will enable the applicant to explore new lines of research inquiry. Molecular biological methods will be applied to current research that investigates the biodegradation of ozone-depleting halomethanes and the biodegradation of carcinogenic polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). 16S rDNA gene analyses will be used to determine the phylogeny of halomethane- and PAH-degrading cultures. PCR will be used to amplify 16S rDNA and functional genes from total community DNA extracted from natural populations and enrichment cultures. Clone libraries will be constructed and clones will be analyzed using restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP). The PCR products will be grouped based on their RFLP patterns, and representative clones from each group will be sequenced and analyzed. In an iterative process, primer synthesis will be refined, as needed based on sequence results. The applicant will learn needed skills and in the process identify and characterize bacteria that mediate biodegradation of halomethanes and PAHs. Presently, there are no researchers at the University of Miami s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (UM RSMAS) that apply molecular biological methods to environmental microbiology. However, a RSMAS colleague, Dr. Jack Fell, has graciously volunteered to oversee the applicant s training. Dr. Fell s laboratory uses molecular techniques to study yeast, but has the expertise to mentor the application of molecular techniques to bacterial studies. Dr. Goodwin plans to teach these methods to her students and thus provide them with experience that will advance their future careers. This opportunity will aid the scientific advancement of both the applicant and her students. Incorporating these methods into the applicant s laboratory will foster collaboration with other researchers, thus enhancing Dr. Goodwin s scientific prominence within her academic setting and field doc3364 none This POWRE award by the Chemistry Division will allow Dr. Leslie Jimenez to pursue research in synthetic organic chemistry at Rutgers University New Brunswick aimed at developing intermediates in the synthesis of the clinically important antitumor agent mitomycin C and analogous compounds. Dr. Jimenez will involve both graduate and undergraduate co-workers in this study and these students will be exposed to new areas of synthetic organic chemistry in addition to being trained in a variety of standard synthetic techniques and methods of characterization of organic materials doc3365 none Rimmer Organic petrography allows the identification and quantification of organic components (macerals) in sedimentary rocks, and as such can indicate varying levels and types of terrestrial and marine inputs to basins. Understanding the carbon isotopic composition of Devonian-and Mississippian-age organic components is key to understanding cyclicity in the organic-rich shales units of central Kentucky that show variations on the order of dm, one-to-two-meter, and larger scales. Before arguments can be made to attribute variations in delta C-13 values to global changes in CO2, to changing redox conditions, or to variations in organic productivity levels, the impact of varying amounts and types of marine and terrestrial organic input must be evaluated. The research will address these issues as they relate to Upper Devonian Lower Mississippian organic-rich shales of the Appalachian Basin. Consisting of Type II kerogen, these rocks contain a mixture of marine and terrestrial components (macerals), rather than purely marine organic matter. Specifically, carbon isotope analysis will be combined with petrographic analysis of both whole-rock and density-gradient fractions of kerogen concentrates for carbon-rich and carbon-poor intervals of these shales. Key to this work is the ability of density-gradient centrifugation to segregate kerogen into its component macerals. Kerogen in these shales contains at least two marine components (alginite and bituminite) and two terrestrial components (vitrinite and inertinite). The PI will identify amounts and variations in the type of macerals that exist in these rocks and their respective carbon isotopic compositions. Such data will be used to further elucidate cyclical changes observed in these sediments. This work also has important implications regarding the interpretation of long-term variations in the stable carbon isotope composition of organic matter in the Paleozoic, and inferences that may be made relative to CO2 in the atmosphere. Funding at this time from the POWRE program will allow this investigator to reinvigorate her research program, and establish re-establish research collaborations after an extended time in administration (7 years). It also represents a natural progression and growth of the investigator s research into a new area (that of stable carbon isotopes). The research will also make an important contribution in the field of stable carbon isotope research doc3366 none Lebron This project addresses the problem of quantifying the influence of solution composition on soil hydraulic properties. The knowledge of these properties is necessary to assess transport of contaminants in soil and subsequent remediation, to predict release and sequestration of CO2, and to interpret and improve the use of remotely sensed soil data such as determination of salinity from electrical resistivity data and determination of water content from satellite information. Flow and transport of water and solutes in soils are controlled by size, geometry and characteristics of the soil porosity. Most of the characteristics of the soil pores are microscopic, such as roughness and circularity. Conventional models of liquid distribution, flow and solute transport rely solely on cylindrical pores, while ignoring the role of surface area, angularity, and connectivity. Neural networks have been used to predict water retention properties in soils using macro and microscopic parameters. These models have tremendous potential to derive pedotransfer functions (PTFs) to predict hydraulic parameters. However the PTFs available in the literature do not consider the chemical composition of the soil solution nor data considering the mineralogy of the clay minerals in the soil. Clay mineral and chemical composition are known to be critical determinants of the hydraulic properties in soils with swelling clays, especially if they are affected by sodicity. The main objective of this project is to quantify the influence of salinity, sodicity and pH on the geometry, size, and distribution of the soil pore space. This quantification will provide the information for developing PTFs using neural network and bootstrap methodology and is intended to improve our capability to predict soil hydraulic properties doc3367 none The growth of knowledge about crime and criminality has focused generally on Western societies, particularly the United States. Theories and techniques used in these societies to understand violence, crime and criminality have seldom been assessed in non-Western settings. In this POWRE project, a program of research and educational activities is presented to develop methods and research protocols that will help produce useful and valid information about antisocial behaviors and delinquency in Filipino society. This project builds upon a pilot study that developed an instrument and tested the feasibility of conducting a self-report survey of grade school children in the Philippines. The proposed project builds upon this study by: (a) conducting a follow-up survey of a sample of youth who responded to the pilot study; (b) conducting interviews of the youth s parents and teachers to validate self-reported behaviors; (c) conducting focus groups on selected teachers, parents, and community stakeholders (such as the police and baranggay officials) to provide cultural context and better understanding of survey results and inform future studies; and, (d) conducting educational seminars to promote the exchange of ideas and growth among project staff . The seminars will also involve interested students, scholars, and community stakeholders. This will provide an avenue for the investigator to disseminate current knowledge about delinquency theories and the empirical development of this field in Western societies, and also learn about the relevance of these theories in Filipino society through discussions with participants in the seminar. At least one of these seminars will discuss results of the completed pilot study. Re-interviewing a sample of youth from the pilot study allows a realistic assessment of workable tracking methods, attrition, and the feasibility of conducting a panel study of youth in the Philippines. Because studies of delinquency in non-Western countries are few and far between and because methodologies employed in these studies have often been based on convenient techniques, the information that will be derived from the systematic follow-up of youth in this study provides relevant methodological groundwork that can be used in future studies of different samples in the same or different populations. Likewise, testing the utility of using informants like teachers and parents to assess the veracity of self-reported antisocial delinquent behaviors adds to the body of knowledge on how these techniques are received in different cultures and how they can be employed. The preparatory nature of the project is appropriate as a POWRE proposal and is consistent with previous projects funded through POWRE. Results of this study will build a more definitive structure and information on how studies of a similar nature may be conducted in the Philippines, and generally in non-Western settings. POWRE support will also augment the investigator s knowledge and skills to conduct research in settings outside of the United States and will provide her with the competence and competitiveness necessary to obtain external funding to conduct further studies on crime and criminality in non-Western settings doc3368 none The goal of this work is to synthesize cytomimetic assemblies with internal complexity approaching that of their biological counterparts. Although scientists from many disciplines have attempted to create synthetic replicas of living cells, only the very simplest of cell structures and functions have been mimicked in vitro. To date, most model cells have been liposomes. These can be excellent models of the plasma membrane, but they lack intracellular organization. Living cells exhibit internal ordering which can be divided into two broad categories based on the presence or absence of a surrounding membrane separating the structure from the cytosol. The exploratory work supported by this POWRE award is aimed at generating experimental systems in which each of these classes of intracellular organization is modeled. It is not difficult to create giant vesicles having smaller internal vesicles - in fact, it can be hard not to, when attempting to synthesize large unilamellar vesicles. This work will move beyond previous studies by designing model organelles (inner vesicles) which differ in composition from the model plasma membrane (outer vesicle). This will be a significant step towards approximating the level of sophistication found in living cells. Internal vesicles will be incorporated within giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs) by including small vesicles in the aqueous phase during swelling of giant unilamellar vesicles. Alternately, preformed vesicles will be encapsulated within large liposomes by microinjection. Encapsulation of organelles will be verified (and in some cases followed) by video-enhanced optical microscopy. Transfer of molecules between organelles and the outer cell will be followed by fluorescence microscopy and flow cytometry. A second approach to model the internal structure of cells is via macromolecular crowding. Macromolecular crowding has been postulated to control the association of intracellular components through phase segregation, which occurs more readily in the presence of high concentrations of noninteracting macromolecules due to volume exclusion. The effects of crowding on the contents of single GUVs will be investigated first with colloidal particles (e.g. latex microspheres and metal nanorods or virus particles), and then with biological macromolecules (e.g. albumin and tubulin or actin). High concentrations of volume excluders will be encapsulated within GUVs to generate static crowding conditions and initiate phase segregation of anisotropic molecules or particles. To control the crowding pressure during an experiment, GUV volume will be altered, e.g. via control of external osmolarity. Organization of internal particles and macromolecules will be followed primarily by quantitative polarized light microscopy. The process of phase-separation into ordered phases will be tracked by monitoring changes (increases) in birefringence. Other methods for observation of internal ordering that will be used include reflected light microscopy (for 200 nm metallic nanorods), fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). This POWRE award will allow Dr. Keating to perform preliminary studies to establish the feasibility of these approaches and to begin to make observations. The longer term development of this project will, if fully successful, lead to a change in the way scientists think about cell models, and will greatly advance understanding of molecular self-assembly in living cells, and will establish this research as an independent line of investigation for Dr. Keating doc3369 none Humphris 00- This POWRE award provides funding to allow the PI to develop an expertise in MATLAB and to develop modules for her research needs. The PI has returned to a full-time research program after many years as an administrator and needs to acquire technical skills in data manipulation so that she can successfully analyze and visualize the complex datasets that her research generates. She would like to spend several short periods focussed on learning the software and data manipulation techniques during an 18-month period. Using these modeling tools, she will relate variations in the physical and chemical characteristics of hydrothermal fluids and the distribution and nature of hydrothermal precipitates to their geotectonic setting doc3370 none The goal of this POWRE award is for McDermott to become fully proficient in the latest functional neuroimaging methodology, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). That complete proficiency should then allow her to become competitive in that research environment and put her in a position to apply independently for major federal funding for future studies involving the functional neuroimaging of human cognition. The specific research goal for this award is to understand the role of right inferior frontal gyrus in the encoding of nonverbal information. Thus far, most neuroimaging studies examining frontal cortex have focused upon verbal processing and have neglected nonverbal processing. Further, most studies focusing on nonverbal processing have targeted regions in the posterior aspects of the brain. This study will target a specific region of frontal cortex, the right inferior frontal gyrus, which has been shown to be important in the processing of nonverbal information. There is still a great deal to be learned about the types of neural computations performed by this brain region. These experiments will focus on its contribution to the encoding of new information into memory. Results from these experiments will have the potential to inform educational practice. That is, by enhancing understanding of brain regions involved in encoding information into memory, we will better understand how people learn new information. In addition to enhancing basic understanding of human cognition, this information may have implications for enhancing performance in the classroom doc3371 none The amount, type and condition of vegetation strongly influence the fluxes of energy and moisture in the atmospheric boundary layer. The partitioning of incoming energy into latent and sensible heat flux is determined, in part, by the amount of evapotranspiration from plants. Although surface evaporation over bare, moist soil greatly enhances the latent heat flux, the effect is more pronounced over vegetation, where roots can access moisture through an extended soil depth. On the mesoscale, the resulting differences in latent heating over vegetation and dry, bare soil can generate a sea breeze-like circulation. A host of past studies has highlighted the impacts of mesoscale vegetative regions on atmospheric conditions; however, these studies are limited in their real-world applicability. Past observational studies have focused on specific events, relatively short time periods, or small regions. Past numerical studies have produced highly idealized simulations or have lacked an extended set of regional observations for model initialization and verification. In all cases, the authors acknowledge these shortcomings and note that they result from a lack of long-term, mesoscale observations across a large area. The research under this award will attempt to fill this gap in adequate measurements by employing Oklahoma Mesonet surface data, including measurements from newly installed sensors to measure the surface energy budget and soil moisture, in both observational and numerical experiments. Oklahoma s winter wheat crop provides an ideal real-world environment to examine mesoscale vegetative influences on the atmosphere. The following hypotheses will be examined in this study: 1 ) The spatially averaged diurnal cycle of surface latent and sensible heat fluxes measured within Oklahoma s winter wheat belt is distinctly different from that measured adjacent to the crop both during the growing season and within a month after the wheat harvest in June. (2) On certain days during and within one month after the growing season, the horizontal gradient of sensible heat flux is larger than 100 W m-2 per 30 km across the crop and its adjacent region: hence, the gradient is large enough to establish a mesoscale circulation. (3) The surface moisture field is significantly affected by the evolution of Oklahoma s winter wheat crop. (4) Advection of surface moisture resulting from Oklahoma s growing winter wheat crop can influence the prestorm environment outside the boundaries of Oklahoma. The experiments will be divided in two parts: (1) observational evidence and (2) numerical modeling. The goals of the observational study are to document evidence that (a) horizontal gradients in surface fluxes across Oklahoma s wheat belt are sufficient to produce mesoscale circulations and (b) surface moisture is significantly impacted by the winter wheat crop both during its growth phase and within one month after harvest. The goals of the numerical study are: (a) to assess the impacts of the measured horizontal gradients in surface fluxes and moisture on the wheat field s local environment, (b) to quantify the effects of mature and harvested cropland on the planetary boundary layer (PBL) by comparing these simulation results with those of a control run without cropland, and (c) to determine how far downstream the wheat field influences near-surface moisture. Results from this study will extend the current state of knowledge in the atmospheric sciences by providing evidence of the extent to which a mesoscale crop belt can impact its environment. Because low-level moisture, PBL development, and atmospheric instability directly influence convection, the results also will offer evidence of the anthropogenic modification of the prestorm environment by large crop regions. It is expected that improved knowledge of the impact of the wheat crop on the prestorm environment will aid forecasters during spring and early summer doc3372 none This POWRE award provides funding that would allow the PI to expand on the initiation of a new research activity at Thomas Jefferson Nuclear Accelerator Facility (TJNF). This proposal will allow the PI to participate in TJNAF experiment 093-038, The electric and Magnetic Form Factors of the Neutron to further advance her research career. This experiment addresses a fundamental question regarding the nature of the charge structure of the neutron: What is the spatial distribution of the constituent quark within the neutron? The question is addressed in this experiment by scattering longitudinally polarized electrons quasi-elastically from a neutron in deuterium. The award is funded by the NSF POWRE program, the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the MPS Directorate, and the Physics Division doc3373 none Concern about the underrepresentation of women in engineering and other sciences has received national attention. This underrepresentation reflects a gender gap in educational preparation and opportunities, and results in an underpresentation of women in one field of lucrative and rewarding occupations. The new College of Engineering at Rowan University incorporates a number of innovative features in its program, which have been noted as favorable to the encouragement and retention of female students and their ensuing career commitment and success. The proposed research will assess the extent to which female engineering students at Rowan are satisfied with their program, committed to completing an engineering degree and career, are confident in their abilities to achieve their engineering goals, and are academically successful. The project is designed to have a beginning-of-the-year survey and an end-of-the-year survey, to assess the changes over the academic year. In the beginning-of-the-year survey, students will be asked about their preentry characteristics and training, engineering aspirations and plans, and self-confidence about achieving their engineering goals. In the end-of-the-year survey, students will be asked to assess various aspects of the Rowan program in terms of their satisfaction with them, the extent of their participation in extra-curricular activities, their current engineering goals and level of self-confidence to achieve them. Objective data will provide information on their academic performance prior to entry, at the end of the first semester, and at the end of the second semester. Focus group interviews will give a more in-depth probe into female engineering students experiences, problems and concerns doc3374 none The aim of this project is for the P.I. to broaden her expertise to encompass a variety of theoreti-cal methods for studying local properties (e.g., atomic and electronic structure and ionic mobil-ity) in solids. The approach involves collaborations and extended visits to groups at the Univer-sity of Oxford and at the University Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg. The P.I. will conduct theoretical studies and develop collaborations to assist with interpreting and understanding experimental data. Theoretical studies are needed to understand experimental data and significantly enhance the information extracted from NMR experiments. Equally important is to ensure that questions posed and addressed by theoretical calculations are targeted at specific experimental observa-tions. The visits to France will also allow the P.I. to develop collaborations with battery groups, to ensure that the P.I. has access to the most technologically important cathode materials. In order to improve the data that can be acquired from these typically paramagnetic materials, the PI will acquire an extremely fast MAS probe; fast MAS should reduce the electronic-nuclear dipolar coupling allowing spectra from unenriched 7 Li materials to be obtained. %%% This is a research enhancement grant made under the Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education (POWRE) program. The project provides partial support for a sabbatical year which will allow the PI to understand how relevant theoretical methods work, the current approximations, and how the methods may be applied to her own research program. Three differ-ent POWRE activities will be carried out: 1. The PI will visit Dr. Mark Wilson and Prof. Paul Madden in the Department of Physical Chemistry at the University of Oxford, to work with them to model ionic transport and local structures in the PI s fluoride systems. 2. Semi-empirical cal-culations of 19 F chemical shifts for the PI s disordered fluorides and oxyfluorides will be per-formed, in collaboration with Dr. Francis Taulelle at the University Louis Pasteur. 3. The P.I. will develop collaborations with a theory group, in order to perform density functional theory calcu-lations, to rationalize the local electronic structures that have been proposed from NMR data of lithium-ion cathode materials. The project is co-supported by the Division of Materials Research, and the MPS OMA(Office of Multidisciplinary Activities doc3375 none The purpose of this project is to assemble and analyze an annual database covering Italy s 32 electoral districts examining possible correlates of political corruption, covering the period from to . Political corruption is operationalized as requests by magistrates to parliament to lift the parliamentary immunity of a member of the Chamber of Deputies in order to proceed with legal prosecution on charges of malfeasance. The data collected will include sociological, demographic, economic and political characteristics of electoral districts in order to study the characteristics of districts prone to more or less corruption. Italy is an especially good case to investigate since the country had the highest levels of political corruption of any wealthy democratic nation in the postwar era. The persistent and extreme nature of political corruption there generates unique data available and potentially permits systematic causal analysis. A cross-sectional (subnational) time-series analysis of political corruption in postwar Italy can ascertain whether the determinants of political corruption in democratic settings are largely economic (occurring in pockets of persistent underdevelopment in an otherwise largely developed economy, for instance), cultural (occurring initially in those parts of the country marked by weak political cultures and low levels of social capital), or institutional (occurring because of specific features of the electoral system acting in combination with competitive dynamics of the party system), as well as how such factors may interact. The investigator s productivity has recently suffered temporary interruption due a combination of family responsibilities and medical problems. The research proposed involves a major shift in intellectual direction, one that will propel the investigator into a more central and visible area of her discipline. Such a shift requires unusual research resources, and especially an interval of reduced teaching in order to devote adequate time to research doc3376 none Daniel A POWRE award supports an investigation of the use of dynamic flow control as a mechanism for integrating management systems for freight movement with management systems for roadway operations. In the next twenty years, domestic and international marine trade is expected to more than double with most of this growth expected in marine containerized trade. Many of the nation s leading ports are located in densely developed urban areas where the availability of additional space for piers, container storage, railroad tracks and roadways for trucks to handle increases in freight traffic is limited. To handle this expected growth, the intermodal freight transportation system must be planned, built and operated in a way that emphasizes optimal utilization of existing resources. The intermodal system should also be designed to ensure that connections between modes provide a smooth flow of goods through an integrated system. Before these objectives can be achieved, tools are needed to represent intermodal transportation as an integrated system. Dynamic flow control offers an approach for integrating the components of intermodal freight transportation into a system. The objective of the control problem is to design a controller that will optimize the flow of intermodal freight from the terminal to a distribution center. This type of problem has its basis in classical automatic control theory and has been applied in many areas including rail and air traffic control. Few applications of dynamic flow control have been made in the field of intermodal freight transportation. The goal of this procedure is to determine the set of inputs that, given the state of the system and disturbances within the system, will result in the objectives being fulfilled. The system includes the components that make up the intermodal freight transportation network for receiving and delivering goods. The system will be limited to include intermodal components necessary for truck transport of goods from a shipper through an urban port facility and for distribution within an urban area. The intermodal connections are linked within the system using information about each component of the intermodal system and the roadway system. The inputs into the control problem include variables describing the volume of intermodal freight movement, the requirements or criteria of the truck pick-up and delivery service, port and terminal activity and roadway conditions. The research will identify a preliminary control system for intermodal freight transportation, identify the data requirements for the control system, develop models describing the state of the freight management system and the roadway system, and finally evaluate the control system for an intermodal freight movement from the Port of New York and New Jersey to a destination in northern New Jersey and New York. This research initiates a new line of investigation while allowing the researcher to achieve career goals and secure a visible and prominent role in the area of freight movement in northeastern United States. Recent developments within the researcher s home institution and state provide opportunities for the research to be utilized on a broad platform. The development of an intermodal freight corridor in the researcher s home state, the establishment of an International Intermodal Transportation Corridor Center, and the initiation of a Logistics Engineering program at the researcher s home institution will provide opportunities to explore additional research and educational opportunities in the area of freight management and logistics. As the PI has recently relocated to her present research institution, funding provided through this program will allow the researcher to broaden her focus area to include intermodal freight transportation as an area of investigation, while adapting her research to her home institution and to local and national interests doc3377 none This POWRE award provides funding to complete a geochemical study of basaltic rocks recovered from the Central Basin Fault of the West Philippine Basin. Samples were previously collected by the PI through participation in a JAMSTEC research cruise and will be analyzed for trace element abundance and Sr, Nd and Pb isotopes. The objective of the work is to investigate the geochemical influence of subduction on the chemical composition of magma erupted at a spreading ridge. The PI will collaborate on this project with Japanese scientists. This international collaboration will allow the PI to take a leadership role in international geochemical research and will lead to expanded research opportunities for her and her students doc3378 none Wilkins, Dawn E. University of Mississippi POWRE: Computational Methods to Support Molecular Biology Applications. The purpose of this CISE EIA POWRE proposal is to allow the PI to conduct research and work with investigators at the Hartwell Center for Bioinformatics and Biotechnology at St. Jude Children s Research Hospital to develop data mining algorithms and software for use with microarray data. In addition, an introductory elective course on bioinformatics and computational biology for upper-division computer science majors at the University of Mississippi will be developed doc3379 none Research supported by this POWRE award will use Quantitative Trait Loci (QTL) analysis to understand plant adaptation to high temperature in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. The long-term goals are: (1) to identify genes involved in plant adaptation to high temperature during reproduction and other phases of the life cycle, and (2) to test the hypothesis that variation in heat-shock protein (Hsp) structure or expression contributes to genetic variability in plant heat tolerance. Although dramatic progress in genome sequencing has provided the complete genetic blueprint of many organisms, including Arabidopsis, only 5% of sequenced Arabidopsis genes have an established phenotypic function. Thus, defining gene function, particularly as it relates to plant phenotype, remains a major challenge. Genetic variation in Arabidopsis offers an underexploited resource for identifying gene function, which can now be accessed by QTL analysis. QTL analysis allows the genetic dissection of complex traits and is an important new approach not only to identifying gene function, but also for testing long-standing ecological and genetic hypotheses. The proposed studies will be initiated by the P.I. as sabbatical research in the laboratory of Dr. Maarten Koornneef in Wageningen, the Netherlands, where she will learn how to use Arabidopsis for QTL analysis. Application of QTL analysis to the problem of high-temperature tolerance in plants will represent a major new scientific direction for the P.I. that will greatly enhance her research program, in line with the guidelines of the POWRE program. A secondary goal of the sabbatical leave will be to expand and solidify international collaborations with other groups in the U.K. and the Netherlands. In particular, the P.I. will learn current computer methods for modeling the three-dimensional structure of proteins and then use these methods to model the structure of diverse members of the plant small-Hsp protein family. This work will be performed in collaboration with Dr. Christine Slingsby, Birkbeck College, London. POWRE support is essential to realize this unique career opportunity for enhanced training and international collaboration doc3380 none Kurtis A POWRE award will support a study of the effects of lithium additives to control expansion by alkali-silica reaction (ASR) in concrete. This reaction occurs between reactive silicates present in some aggregate and pore solution alkalis and produces an alkali-silica gel that is capable of expansion, damaging the affected concrete structure. A more thorough understanding of the mechanisms of expansion control will provide the basis for determining which additives in which dosages should be used in new and existing concrete structures to avoid damage by the reaction. This proposed research is critical for this investigator at this early stage in her career as it will allow her to launch a new research area while building upon her existing knowledge and skills. A key component of the proposed research is the development of the novel application of laser scanning confocal microscopy (LSCM) to examine cement-based materials. Examination of cement-based materials by confocal microscopy has been relatively unexplored, but this technique offers much promise because of the flexible sample preparation requirements, high resolution, and ability to generate three-dimensional representations. Because of their visual impact, these three-dimensional models can be used advantageously in both technical education and public outreach, and several activities have been proposed including the development of two brief tutorials (one appropriate for university education; one appropriate for K-12 education). By demonstrating the utility of this microscopy technique for through-depth examination of concrete to study the alkali-silica reaction, LSCM will find wider applications in concrete technology. Development and refinement of sample preparation protocols, observation methods, and representation formats would establish the investigator as a leader in innovative microscopy of cement-based materials and could lead to additional funding opportunities for the PI doc3381 none Marks, Jane C The PI proposes a study of how introductions of exotic species and water extraction affect food webs of desert springs. She will use stable isotopes of carbon, sulfur, and nitrogen to compare food web structure and energy flow in pristine vs. altered pools to test the predictions that 1) invading species have changed energy flow through food webs by forcing native species to shift their diets, and 2) water extraction has reduced the littoral margins of select pools thereby reducing habitat for insects and other soft invertebrates causing native fish species to feed more on algae and lower quality detritus. This is the first time stable isotopes have been applied directly to a conservation issue in Cuatro Cienegas (Mexico) which is the site for the research. The POWRE award will allow the PI to develop a long term research program with integrates ecology, conservation, and management. This will enhance her research career as she returns to academia after a 3 year leave as AAAS fellow doc3382 none Petschek--This project focuses on developing a system to study the mechanism of the presumed A-to-I base modification RNA editing in messenger RNA molecules expressed by the Drosophila 4f-rnp gene. 4f-rnp is the first example of a gene in the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster to exhibit editing of its messenger RNA molecules. RNA editing is a process that alters the sequence of an RNA molecule from that encoded in the genomic DNA by the insertion, deletion and or substitution of nucleotides. In other systems where RNA editing occurs, these nucleotide changes serve to increase the variety of protein products encoded by a gene. The significance of this discovery in Drosophila is that it is a model organism where genetic analysis can be applied to study the mechanism that carries out RNA editing, and how this process is regulated. Further, because many genes and cellular processes that occur in Drosophila are conserved in humans and other higher organisms, knowledge gained about editing in Drosophila can be applied to other more complex eukaryotes. The specific objectives of the research are (1) to document the presence of inosine in edited 4f-rnp transcripts expressed in the Drosophila nucleus, (2) to physically map the limits of potential antisense RNA molecules expressed by the complementary DNA strand of 4f-rnp that could direct editing of 4f-rnp, and (3) to determine the spatial and temporal distribution of 4F-RNP protein products during fly development. The principal investigator will use this POWRE award to learn new methodologies to advance her research program, and to make her more competitive for a faculty or research-related position as an independent scientist doc3383 none Watanabe The outflow tract (OFT) is a critical portion of the developing and mature heart that connects the ventricles to the great vessels. This structure first appears as a simple tubular structure and undergoes septation, shortening, and rotation within days. Dr. Watanabe has shown that the OFT myocardium of the chicken embryo exhibits a high level of programmed cell death at a time when this tubular structure is shortening. She has have recently found that inducing higher or lower than normal levels of apoptosis specifically in that tissue results in cardiac defects. These results suggest that a regulated level of apoptosis of the OFT cardiomyocytes is critical to the proper alignment of the vessels to the ventricular chambers. The objectives are: (1) Determine whether programmed cell death occurs in the mouse outflow tract myocardium during critical stages in cardiogenesis. If positive, it would support apoptosis as an evolutionarily conserved cellular mechanism for sculpting the OFT myocardium. Standard histological techniques will be used as well as an assay for apoptosis (TUNEL) detecting DNA fragments. (2) Describe the function of the mouse heart using echocardiographic parameters (e.g. peak outflow velocity) as it undergoes a transition from a single to double circuited heart and compare to the OFT morphology. This would serve as the baseline for analyses of mutant mice to be carried out in the future. The applicant has been using the chicken embryo to investigate cardiogenesis, more specifically, the mechanisms by which the cardiac conduction system and the cardiac outflow tract develop. The utilization of the mouse model would complement and expand the current investigations as would introduction of a new functional assay, echocardiography. The funding provided by this POWRE grant would allow the applicant to learn (1) the anatomy of mouse heart at the critical stages of cardiogenesis and (2) application of echocardiography to the study of small animals doc3384 none This POWRE award by the Chemistry Division supports the research of Dr. Tracy D. McCarley on the characterization of branched and conducting polymers by the use of mass spectrometry. The objective is to gain a better understanding of the applicability of new sample ionization methodologies in obtaining mass spectral data not available by other means. This project will establish new research approaches in the field of mass spectrometry of macromolecular systems doc3385 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Melissa M. Rieger Institution: University of Oklahoma The goal of this proposal is to fabricate high density microchannels by using a novel air-gap technology. By incorporating a polymeric material in silicon, the PI plans to form microchannels by thermally decomposing the polymeric material. The channels could be used as microfluidic devices, microreactors or sites for microcatalyst deposition. As a site for catalyst deposition, the fabrication of a chip for combinatorial catalysis should be possible. By premixing catalyst particles in the polymer, catalyst composition can be controlled so that varied catalyst compositions can be deposited as part of a large library. Several in-situ methods for controlling the catalyst composition will be tested. If in situ techniques prove unworkable, the deposition of varied catalysts can be accomplished through evaporation of water from salt solutions in the formed channels. Chemical composition of the resulting catalysts will be determined through XPS and FTIR analysis. This work may lead to new fabrication techniques for the production of structures useful in engineered microdevices doc3386 none EIA- Claire Cardie Cornell University POWRE: Integrating Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval for Intelligent Text-Processing This POWRE proposal, request funds for the PI to explore information retrieval as a new, but related direction of her research. Her past work was in the area of natural language, understanding and intelligent text processing. The PI also proposes a combination of readings and system implementation to solidify her knowledge of information retrieval techniques, while gaining a better grasp of existing results in the field, and to develop the necessary system-building experience. As a result, she will concentrate on two topics that will leverage her existing research strengths in natural language processing. In particular she will investigate the integration of noun phrase conference resolution and shallow parsing for query-dependent text summarization doc3387 none The goal of this project is to design a process for the production and recovery of ajmalicine from immobilized Catharanthus. roseus. In this process, the medium would be cycled between the bioreactor and the adsorbent column. The rate of product removal would be optimized to improve production, maximize recovery of product from the cell, and sustain long-term production of the cultures. Specific objectives of this project are to identify the steps which affect the production and recovery of ajmalicine, determine their associated kinetics, and then incorporate these rates into a model which can then be applied to optimize the strategy of resin addition doc3388 none Palamidessi, Catuscia Pennsylvania State University POWRE: Probabilistic Methods for Concurrency The main objective of this proposal is to develop a probabilistic concurrent calculus, which is the study of its semantics, and formal methods for reasoning with implementation. Furthermore, such calculus will be used as an intermediate level for the implementation of the pi-calculus, a powerful formalism for the specification of concurrent systems with link mobility doc3389 none This POWRE project designs and implements prototype software that integrates database management and geographic information for the purpose of monitoring and forecasting the distribution of environmental pollutants. Mercury contamination, which has been identified as a significant environmental threat both in Massachusetts and across the nation, serves as the initial focus of this project. Specifically, this project develops technology that enables effective collection and rapid processing and interpretation of vast quantities of complex data relating to diverse environmental pollutants. This POWRE award is used specifically to enable the investigator to partner with environmental biologists from governmental organizations and computer scientists from a commercial organization, leading to significant professional advancement of the investigator. In addition, the award supports the investigator s study of new methods of environmental monitoring and forecasting over a relatively short period of time with the long-term goal of establishing academic leadership in the field of environmental conservation doc3390 none This POWRE award by the Chemistry Division will permit Dr. Nancy Levinger to extend her sabbatical leave from Colorado State University to a full year of work in the laboratory of M.D. Fayer at Stanford University, where she will learn the use of ultrafast lasers to obtain vibrational coherence spectra as well as brush up on the time dependent quantum mechanical theoretical description of the non-linear signals generated by such experiments. She will apply these vibrational echo techniques in her continuing study of intermolecular interactions in extrememly small, nanoscale, reverse micelles upon her return to Colorado State University. Vibrational echo spectroscopy has been shown to greatly sharpen spectra allowing more precise information about the chemical environment of the sample to be obtained. Reverse micelles are important systems with which to model biomembranes and nanoscale reactions doc3391 none Dickerson, Julie A. Iowa State University POWRE: Adaptive Fuzzy Intrusion Detection using Cooperative Agents This POWRE proposal explores an interdisciplinary area of research in network security. The project proposes a novel method that uses distributed fuzzy agents to recognize intrusions in networked systems. Intrusions can be detected by noting anomalies in the use of a system and misuse of computing resources or data. As part of this research, the following issues will be addressed: (1) the development of distributed fuzzy agents to collect and assess data on a switched network, (2) new methods of encoding complex causal sequences and intrusions, and (3) novel mechanisms for finding new attack profiles and methods to stop false alarms using neural fuzzy learning methods doc3392 none Brinson An award under the POWRE program will enable the PI to gain expertise in bioengineering, biomaterials and implant mechanics to add to her experience in mechanics and materials in general. This research will begin an investigation of microporous titanium (Ti foam) for use as a bone implant material. There are several motivations for this work: First, the stiffness mismatch between current metallic implant materials and the surrounding bone can cause stress-shielding, leading to bone resorption and eventual implant failure. The development of completely porous metallic implants where the material is designed to more closely mimic natural bone properties will help reduce stress shielding problems experienced in current implants. Second, bone cement failure and cement debris also have a detrimental impact on implants, which is avoidable by use of a porous cementless implant material. Third, development of a fully porous material with controllable microstructure will enable design of implants with improved functionality for tissue attachment as well as unique incorporation of other synthetic materials (e.g., polymer or ceramic coatings or surfaces). In addition to porosity level, pore shape and orientation will clearly affect the mechanical properties and extent of cell ingrowth. Thus, investigation of porous microstructures to identify those which will accelerate and enhance bone ingrowth, while retaining mechanical strength, would provide critical new information for design of bone implants, both to reduce failure rates and to improve quality of life for patients by rapid implant integration. The proposed work will specifically involve Mechanical testing and finite element analysis to ascertain stiffness and strength properties of the Ti foam samples; and Cell growth studies performed on Ti foam samples seeded with bone cells and examined at intervals for ingrowth doc3393 none AST - Chanover Titan is the largest moon of the planet Saturn. Titan s surface will be explored using a. powerful combination of high spatial and spectral resolution imaging in wavelength region heretofore unexplored from the Earth. The methane absorption in Titan s atmosphere results in atmospheric windows between ~ 0.83 and 2 microns wavelength where the absorption of the methane molecule is low, allowing the surface of Titan to be probed. Previous spatially resolved imaging of Titan s surface revealed discrete bright and dark regions, which imply that Titan is not covered with a global hydrocarbon ocean as had been previously suggested. An acousto-optic tunable filter camera, which has higher spec-tral resolution than narrow-band filters and the ability to tune to any wavelength between 0.5 - 1.05 microns, was used to make observations of the image of Titan in the 0.94 micron atmospheric window. These observations were made in the fall of from the Mount Wilson Observatory 100-inch telescope, which is equipped with an adaptive optics system that allowed for high spatial resolution imaging of Titan s disk. The fall observations covered one hemisphere of Titan, and a second set 0f observations is planned for the Fall of that will cover the opposite hemisphere. Thus a complete mapping of Titan s surface will be possible. Both data sets will be reduced and modeled in the same manner to yield information about the reflectivity, of Titan s surface in the 0.9 micron wavelength window. When compared with results of other investigators looking in longer wavelength regions near-infrared atmospheric windows, the spectral dependence of Titan s bright and dark regions will be revealed. This will provide new insight into the composition of Titan s surface, which will be a. timely result in anticipation of the Cassini Huygens satellite probe mission to Titan in . The participation of a graduate and undergraduate student in all levels of the research will enhance science education at New Mexico Stale University, a minority univer-sity. This project is funded by the Division of Astronomical Sciences and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate doc3394 none Motivated by theoretical as well as major practical interests, new and powerful tools have been developed in the last decade for understanding local properties of differential operators near singularities. The proposed research uses recent techniques and results of exponential asymptotics to address questions in the classification of ordinary differential equations in singular regions, as well as analytic properties of partial differential operators. Among the questions addressed are: (1a) finding necessary and sufficient criteria for an ordinary differential equation whose linear part has several regular singular points and is homogeneous, to be analytically equivalent to its linear part (in a domain which contains the singular points); (1b) finding necessary criteria for a nonlinear equation to be analytically equivalent to its linear (inhomogeneous) part in a neighborhood of one irregular singular point of rank 1; (2) finding necessary and sufficient conditions for analytic hypoellipticity of partial differential operators of type ``sum of squares , with special focus on Treves conjecture. This POWRE project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc3395 none This research will investigate the relationship between resource users and the marine environment in two small-scale fishing communities in the mid-Gulf of California, Mexico. Its purpose is two-fold: First, it will look at how fishing impacts and is influenced by fluctuations in regional environmental conditions and market forces. Second, it will examine changes in fishing patterns and household economic diversification strategies as coping mechanisms to deal with a number of severe pressures such as high competition, resource scarcity, increasing economic instability, and significant policy transformations. The research will take a political ecology perspective. It will integrate site specific anthropological research, including the study of local household economic patterns and perceptions of the marine environment, with a more regional analysis of the marine ecosystem using direct biological observations and assessments of fishing technologies. It will also examine local resource users and communities in the context of regional markets, resource management and conservation policies, and competition with external users. This project will contribute to the theoretical and methodological development of political ecology. By acknowledging equally the cultural and the biological and by assessing the nature of environmental changes and trying to understand the actual causes of these changes, this study will contribute to more empirically informed models for the sustainable management of natural resources. This research will also contribute to the sub-field of maritime anthropology by providing an understanding of economic and ecological adaptations to risk in marine environments. The complex situation that will be investigated is occurring in marine areas all over the world and constitutes a significant global scale change in rural life, whose consequences remain alarmingly uncertain. Given the widespread collapse of commercial fisheries, other disciplines are beginning to look at maritime anthropology as a field that has access to a critical part of the puzzle that up to now has been absent from policy. By linking the study of marine resource use, household economics, economic and biological assessments of fishing, and perceptions of the marine environment, this study will contribute a promising approach for the integrated evaluation of policies affecting environmental change and living conditions in coastal communities. The study also will demonstrate that actual human behavior rarely conforms to the behavior assumed by bioeconomic models. Rather, individuals decisions are based on considerations that combine and mold their social, political, and economic realities with the constraints and limitations imposed by ecological forces. This study, the third one to be carried out in different parts of the Gulf of California by Dr. Vasquez-Leon, will allow for updating of basic fisheries data, re-examination of the larger economic and political contexts, and re-evaluation of the privatization and conservation policies that began in . It will also permit comparisons in space and time, providing a more comprehensive picture of the Gulf of California. This POWRE grant will provide Dr. Vasquez-Leon with a unique opportunity for professional growth at a critical point in her career. After family considerations forced her to interrupt her career for two years, she was able to obtain an institutional affiliation, from which she receives no salary or benefits. This POWRE grant will provide salary, allowing her to continue doing research on human environmental interactions in marine contexts and also allowing her to complete a book currently under preparation for publication. Thus, it will enhance the potential for her to find an appropriate tenure-track position in the future doc3396 none Cole-Rhodes This project will address the problem of registering images produced by remote sensing satellite missions. Large amounts of data are generated by these systems from multiple-time observations of the same features, or from many sensors mounted on the platform which may simultaneously observe the same features. The data produced may be in different spectral ranges and or at different spatial resolutions. All this data must be integrated in order to provide a better understanding of earth and space phenomena, and image registration is the first step in this process. Image registration is the process which determines that transformation which provides the best match between a reference image and an input image. The goal is to define fast, accurate methods for the automatic registration of multisensor remotely sensed data. The optimal match can be determined using some similarity measure, such as correlation or the Hausdorff distance between two images. This project will apply a different similarity measure from Information theory, called Mutual Information, to the registration of remote-sensing images. It will investigate whether mutual information can be successfully applied to cross-register images produced by different remote-sensing sensors. The most basic method of finding the optimal transforma-tion, is by an exhaustive search over the space of allowable transformations. This method is computationally expensive and not very efficient. The project will investigate other search strategies based on the use of mutual information, while also attempting to speed up the search procedure by the use of a multiresolution strategy. This strategy will be based on the wavelet decomposition, since this has already been successfully applied to automate the image registration process for remote sensing data. This project invites a new direction of research for the Principal investigator, and it is directly integrated into the developing graduate program in the School of Engineering at Morgan State University doc3397 none This project addresses the fabrication and properties study of quantum dot devices formed from GaAs Al0.3Ga0.7As heterostructure substrates for in-situ deposition of thin film superconductors. Two geometries will be tested, one for capacitive coupling between the superconductor and two-dimensional electron gas quantum dot, the other for direct coupling through a tunnel barrier. Initial experiments will focus on the role of dissipation in reducing phase fluctuations near the su-perconductor-insulator transition, particularly in films with different length scales of disorder. Traditional superconductivity measurements involve macroscopic probes that average over the properties of an entire sample. Mesoscale structures offer the unique ability to probe materials on length scales at which quantum effects dominate. Coupled superconductor-quantum dot structures will provide a powerful means of both analyzing the superconductor-insulator transition and altering and studying electron transport on mesoscopic length scales. %%% This is a research enhancement grant made under the Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education (POWRE) program. The POWRE grant creates an opportunity to initiate a significant research project that is not feasible to develop in its entirety at the PI s home institution, Middlebury College. Access to both state-of-the-art facilities at Harvard and researchers who are experts on mesoscopic physics and superconductivity will make possible the develop-ment and initial testing of devices that will form the basis of future experiments performed at Middlebury. This project will provide support for a pre-tenure leave year. During this time the PI will lay the foundations for a significant research program that will both lead to the advancement of knowledge and constitute the research component of student education. The research is ex-pected to contribute basic materials science knowledge at a fundamental level of special relevance to the behavior of superconducting materials, and to assist with the integration of research and education. The project is co-supported by the Division of Materials Research, and the MPS OMA(Office of Multidisciplinary Activities doc3398 none Ostafin, Agnes E. U. of Notre Dame In this project, the physical and chemical properties of nanometer-sized hollow shells of silicate will be studied to provide proper foundation for their future applications in science and industry. These materials can be used to encapsulate a variety of molecules, and have real potential in a variety of applications including: development of artificial retinas, development of super high definition luminescent displays, building blocks for micro-scale electronic devices, chemical sensors, to encapsulate enzymes for use in harsh environments, and to study the behavior of a single molecule in a fluid environment. The realization of these applications depends on the ability to adequately manipulate shell synthesis and to understand the physical and chemical properties of the shell interior. At the conclusion of this project, the following aspects of silicate nano-shells will be better understood: 1) the control of the size and thickness of the shells 2) the shell s permeability to ions and molecules and 3) some important microscopic properties of the shell interior, such as micro-viscosity, solvent order and pH. This knowledge will be applied in the future to develop a general model for microscopic control of chemical reactions in a broad range of nano-scale systems. The POWRE Award would come at an opportune time for the PI because of a recent move from a chemistry department in which the fundamental nature of physical and chemical processes are the primary concerns to a chemical engineering department in which applications are considered also important. The PI has already built experience in nano-scale particles and is in need of an opportunity to develop them into practical areas. The research will take place in the context of an emerging program in nano-scale and biological materials engineering in the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Notre Dame. The POWRE award will enable the PI s full participation in existing and to-be- developed nano-scale bioengineering research initiatives that include the establishment of a new Materials Research Center at the University of Notre Dame. At the end of this project, the PI will be able to establish a strong and vital program in the engineering of nano-scale silicate shells for practical applications doc3399 none Watanabe The objective of this research project is to evaluate the feasibility of a Bayesian approach to understanding and quantifying the impact of population variability on the biological fate of environmental contaminants. In past studies of contaminant bioaccumulation, emphasis has been placed on the average concentration expected for a population of organisms, using average biological and environmental input values to model the process, and the goodness-of-fit is determined based on the average measured concentrations. In this study a Markov chain Monte Carlo technique will be used in conjunction with a food-web bioaccumulation model of hydrophobic organic contaminants (HOCs). Organism lipid fractions are important in the study of HOC bioaccumulation, yet there is relatively little data published with respect to these input parameters in aquatic organisms. This project investigates the impact that lipid fraction variability has on the bioaccumulation of HOCs in an aquatic food web. A spotted gar food-web bioaccumulation model will be used to demonstrate this approach. In support of the modeling effort, data will be gathered on lipid fractions in crayfish and concentrations of several polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in sediment, water and crayfish tissue. Field sampling and sample analysis will involve collaborations between researchers at Xavier University and Tulane University. Successful completion of this project will contribute to the scientific knowledge base on the naturally occurring variability in crayfish lipid fractions. Future studies of contaminant bioacumulation will benefit by being able to include prior knowledge of input parameter variability in estimates of organism concentrations. Broader impacts include development of an active collaboration between Tulane and Xavier researchers through which the participation of members from under-represented groups in science and engineering can be increased, improved understanding of the biological fate of HOCs in crayfish and its dependence on organism lipid fraction and improved methods for estimation of ecological risk, thereby providing a stronger foundation for environmental decision making doc3400 none Signal transduction refers to the steps involved in transmitting a signal that is initiated by the binding of a growth factor at the cell surface, and is relayed to the nucleus (to alter gene expression), to the cytoskeleton (to alter cell shape and motility) or to the cytoplasm (to control the amount of specific mRNA in the cell). The study of signal transduction is important because it reveals mechanisms via which extrinsic signals can influence the phenotype of the cell. It has recently been documented that the purine nucleoside inosine induces unprecedented levels of axonal sprouting in the mature rat brain after injury. In light of this finding, Dr. Jhaveri will explore the molecular mechanism via which inosine is able to regulate axon growth. These experiments will be carried out in cell culture using PC12 cells. In particular, Dr. Jhaveri will study the role of a specific kinase (N-kinase) that is an important intermediary in the signal-transduction pathway that leads from inosine signaling to process outgrowth. The experiments fit into an ongoing research program in the laboratory of Dr. Larry Benowitz, at the Children s Hospital, Boston. Dr. Benowitz and his colleague Dr. Nina Irwin have both agreed to give Dr. Jhaveri the requisite training for undertaking these studies. In the course of this work, Dr. Jhaveri will become familiar with techniques for protein isolation, designing primers, PCR, cDNA library screening, analysis of protein phosphorylation, generation of mutations, and cell transfection. This is a critical juncture in Dr. Jhaveri s career. The POWRE award will allow her to gain some training in molecular biology; lack of such training has repeatedly been a perceived weakness in her research program. Dr. Jhaveri hopes, in the near future, to apply for a tenure-track faculty position with an independent laboratory, and the training she will gain will greatly facilitate such an upward career move doc3401 none Various persistent organic pollutants (POPs) are suspected of undergoing atmospheric transport to regions far removed from the area of initial release. The objective of this POWRE research project is to develop a technique for distinguishing such long-range from short-range sources of POPs, based on the fractionation of stable isotopes during transport. This project is a feasibility study using a model POP, the pesticide gamma-hexachlorocyclohexane, which is used in various low latitude source regions and has been shown to be abundant in polar regions. The approach will be to conduct a tracer release experiment using isotopically-labelled (13C and 2H) gamma-hexachlorocyclohexane in order to examine its isotopic fractionation during transport doc3402 none Ryall, Kathleen University of Virginia POWRE: Exploring Tangible Interfaces The proposed research is a pilot study into the area of tangible user interfaces. Its broad goal is to prepare the PI to redirect her research efforts into this forward moving area. The PI will be spending two-months at an industrial lab, A Mitsubishi Electrical Research Laboratory. She will also formulate a small-scale flow-on research project in the area of tangible interfaces to pursue back at her home institution that will incorporate a graduate student. The PI s second activity will be to design a new course on tangible user interfaces at her home institution doc3403 none PI: Stanger-Hall, Kathrin INSTITUTION: Univ of Texas - Austin PROPOSAL: The P.I. proposed a project to develop a molecular phylogeny of the North American firefly taxa to study the evolution of their light signals. The proposed work has five parts: 1) develop a molecular phylogeny based on mitochondrial 2) map phenotypic data (light color and signal patterns) onto the phylogenetic tree; 3) determine whether certain light colors and patterns can be traced to a single origin; 4) test specific hypotheses on light signal evolution; and 5) investigate the molecular basis of light color evolution in Lampyridae. This PI will be able to initiate a new research program and this POWRE award will provide unique access to time and material for this project doc3404 none Osteocalcin, a protein synthesized in bone, has an extraskeletal role in maintaining calcium homeostasis under normal conditions and during acute fight or flight stress. This function will be impaired in the absence of catecholamines, resulting from deletion of the gene in mice for dopamine beta-hydroxylase (DBH- -). DBH is the enzyme that converts dopamine to norepinephrine (NE), from which epinephrine (E) is formed by action of a second enzyme. DBH- - mice make it possible to determine more precisely the effects of the catecholamine hormones on osteocalcin in circulation and in bone. It will also be possible to separate effects of NE from those of other sympathetic neural hormones released in response to stressful stimuli. Bone resorption requires NE, therefore will be decreased, leading to a greater quantity of bone in mutant mice compared with heterozygous littermates. Vertebrae and femurs from mutant and heterozygous (normal) littermates will be prepared for extraction of mineral and osteocalcin. Bone calcium, phosphorous, and osteocalcin will be analyzed. Plasma osteocalcin, corticosterone, and prolactin from the same mice will also be analyzed. Subsequently, experiments will be performed to determine the response of these mice to foot-restraint immobilization, an acute stressor that acutely increases NE, E, and corticosterone, and also osteocalcin. Both normal bone metabolism and the acute stress response are expected to be altered in DBH- - mice. Data obtained from this POWRE award is expected to provide a sound foundation for submission of a regular research proposal. The work described is an innovative, though as yet untried, approach to bone research. Demonstration of the ability to obtain external funding could have a significant impact on this PI s future career doc3405 none This grant supports theoretical research in condensed matter physics. The time-dependent density functional theory (TDFT) of charge-density excitations in electronic systems is by now a well developed tool, whose predictions are routinely compared to experimental measurements. However, the theory is still relatively underdeveloped with regard to its ability to describe (i) impurity effects and (ii) spin and coupled spin-charge dynamics in fully or partly spin-polarized electron liquids. The primary goal of this research is to develop the TDFT of spin dynamics and impurity effects to a level of sophistication comparable to what has been reached by ordinary TDFT. In essence, this means developing accurate approximations for the spin- and frequency-dependent exchange-correlation (xc) fields in the presence of impurity scattering. In order to properly include retardation and relaxation effects it is necessary to go beyond the adiabatic local spin-density approximation, and this can be done using the spin-current density as the basic variable. A key role in this approach is played by the spin-dependent visco-elastic spectra of the spin-polarized electron gas with a uniform distribution of impurities. These quantities will be calculated within the framework of the Kubo-Mori formalism. In the macroscopic limit the theory should yield generalized hydrodynamics (Navier-Stokes) equations for charge and spin currents. This theory should complement and extend the recently proposed adiabatic spin dynamics. The calculation of the visco-elastic spectra of a two-dimensional electron liquid at high magnetic field (such that all the electrons are in the lowest Landau level) poses a fascinating problem. It has been recently shown that the charge dynamics of incompressible fractional quantum Hall states are well described by an effective elasticity theory. This theory needs to be extended in two directions: first, energy dissipation must be included, since it is essential to correctly describe the charge dynamics of compressible states; second, the spin of the electron must be taken into account. The objective is to develop an effective visco-elastic theory to unify the treatment of spin and charge density excitations in the lowest Landau level. The theory will be applied to the calculation of the collective excitations of quantum Hall ferromagnets at fractional filling factors, the dynamics of topological spin textures, and the dispersion of spin edge waves. Recent theoretical work has highlighted the need to go beyond the local density approximation (LDA) in density-functional calculations of the dielectric response of crystalline insulators. In this context an effort will be made to express the correction to LDA as an explicit functional of the macroscopic polarization. This polarization density functional theory, if successful, will allow first-principles calculations of dielectric properties to be carried out with relative ease. %%% This grant supports theoretical research in condensed matter physics. The research will extend the theory of interacting electrons to include the effects of impurities and electron spin. In particular, the properties of interacting electrons in very high magnetic fields - the quantum Hall state - will be studied. The research contributes to fundamental understanding in condensed matter physics doc3406 none This POWRE grant will support the PI to edit a book on African climate variability. She will also partially author some chapters. The PI is branching to a relatively new field of the role of aerosols in climate with a focus on African climate. The PI will also conduct a workshop on the topic. The work is important because it will further understanding on African climate variability doc3407 none This POWRE award by the Chemistry Division will support Dr. Jeanne M. Hossenlopp in developing the materials science aspects of her research in thin film deposition and characterization at Marquette University. The proposed work will result in an apparatus to measure the electrical properties of thin films exposed to volatile organic vapors under atmospheric conditions. In addition new procedures will be developed for deposition of tin oxide films using laser assisted chemical vapor deposition. Both graduate and undergraduate students will participate in this work and learn the fundamentas of gas sensor material chemistry thereby providing them with an integrative understanding of this area of science from both the materials and environmental science perspectives doc3408 none The project will characterize fundamental propagation regimes in frontal polymerization. A weakly nonlinear analysis will capture the development of unstable modes normal to the reaction front. The investigation will partition the parameter space into regions that correspond to steady, periodic, and non-periodic propagation. Asymptotic results will guide numerical simulations. Such pattern prediction is one of the most important keys to understanding a physical system. The phenomenon under consideration occurs in a test tube initially filled with a well-mixed combination of a monomer and a thermally unstable initiator. Increasing the temperature at one end of the tube causes chemical conversion to begin. The released heat diffuses into the reactants, causing wave propagation via the usual thermal mechanism. In free-radical polymerization, the reactions take place in a narrow zone that advances into the monomer initiator mix, leaving a polymer in its wake. The behavior of the reaction front depends on the geometry of the system, properties of the material, and the reaction mechanisms. In stable cases, the front flattens and settles into propagating at a uniform rate. Exhaustive analytical techniques will reveal the conditions that produce the various forms of unstable propagation. In particular, they will distinguish between regularly-repeating acceleration-deceleration cycles and erratic propagation. The study will also accurately describe the qualitative shapes of the interface between the polymerized and unreacted regions. The details of various cases will be examined computationally. The work, which makes one of the first forays into the nonlinear analysis of polymer processes, will lend insight into self-propagating free-radical polymerization fronts observed in experiments, paving the way for future manufacturing methods. This POWRE project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc3409 none This POWRE award by the Chemistry Division will support Dr. Nicole Bennett in developing a research program in efficient organo-metallic synthesis at Hope College. The specific objective of this research will be to develop little used synthetic procedures to prepare taxane diterpenes, a class of compounds that have found use as anticancer agents. This project will allow Dr. Bennett to expand the repertory of undergraduate research projects at Hope, especially in the areas of synthetic organometallic chemistry, stereochemistry and structure interpretation by magnetic resonance. The project will also support Dr. Bennett s efforts to incorporate modern synthetic chemical techniques in the undergraduate chemistry curriculum at Hope College and will provide chemistry undergraduates at the college with experience in specialized synthetic chemical procedures, advanced chemical structural concepts, use of the chemical literature, presentation of research results, etc. that will better prepare them for graduate training in the field doc3410 none Hilger This research will examine microbial methane oxidizers in the context of their growth in a soil biofilm. Methane oxidizers exposed to high methane concentrations in landfills can produce copious slime secretions, and it is hypothesized that these viscous exopolysaccharides (EPS) may limit diffusion of gases to cells embedded in the biofilm and thereby control methane oxidation rates. The experimental objective of this project is to define the time dependent growth and spatial orientation of methane oxidizers in a biofilm typical of the vadose zone of landfill cover soils. Biofilms enriched in methane oxidizers will be developed on strips of membrane filter paper buried in or placed on top of landfill cover soil and exposed to synthetic landfill gas in a laboratory simulation. Oligonucleotide flourescent dye-tagged probes will be used to investigate methanotroph species distribution in the film and the spatial patterns of the methanotrophs relative to the film secretions. The biofilm structure will be preserved using cryoembedding techniques and observed after cryosectioning using flourescence microscopy-based image analysis. The results of the project will be used to evaluate whether EPS secretions are a significant and heretofore unrecognized influence on methane oxidation capacity in landfill cover soil. If so, the findings could have implications for global methane and climate change models, for the design and management of landfill covers to mitigate methane emissions, and for volatile organic compound emission, adsorption and cometabolism. The techniques and findings may also be applicable to studies of other vadose zone methane oxidizer environments, such as intermittently drained wetlands, bioremediation sites, biofilters, natural gas recovery and leaks through soil and coal mine operations doc3411 none The goal of this research is to develop a low-cost, robust, automated on-line monitoring system, which controls the painting process based, in part, upon perceived surface appearance. This program will focus on the following objectives: determination of an efficient way to integrate human perception into a vision system hardware and software design which uses reflectance models as a rational basis; an investigation of the best image attributes and processing techniques to exploit the link between this vision system and perceived surface appearance; and prototype development of an expert system within the vision system software which facilitates as assessment of surface quality based on captured image data. The project utilizes a four-prong approach, which includes small-scale experiments, simulation, prototype testing and on-site testing in parallel with existing methods. This effort will expand the small-scale setup and use simulation to develop a methodology for capturing images and obtaining and analyzing derived attributes which are readily interpreted by both system software and line operators. This research should provide direction to a more robust method to characterize, monitor and control surface quality. The educational plan for the program includes collaborative, hands-on research experiences and mentoring for a diverse population, and enhancement of the principal investigator s ability to build and maintain a competitive research program, which attracts a well-prepared, diverse group of students doc3412 none This is a research project on corruption and fraud in the European Union. It is designed to lay the groundwork for a substantial comparative study involving collaboration with several European scholars and institutions. It develops hypotheses from three analytical approaches, the first stressing individual agency and incentives, the second institutional structures, the third cultural influences. The research question is whether fraud and corruption in international organizations are deliberately tolerated by rent-seeking governments and their key constituencies, or whether the phenomena are the result of national or regional cultural practices exported to the larger international arena. The project involves 10 months of research at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, two months of preparatory and completion work in the United States, interviews with officials, businesspersons, civil servants and politicians in four EU locations: Brussels, Paris, Rome and Berlin. The project s goals and importance are methodological, analytical and empirical: why do fraud and corruption occur? How can we measure them? Which theoretical approaches are most useful in explaining the phenomena, and what of their general validity? Although the study of corruption and fraud is not a new field in the social sciences, it has yet to be subjected to rigorous methods of analysis; indeed, nearly all previous research has been anecdotal and country-specific. One key difficulty involved in answering questions about fraud and corruption is that, largely due to the nature of the subject being investigated, we do not have useful methodological instruments to assess levels of fraud and corruption and to evaluate the independent variables. A major purpose of this study is to create a survey instrument for elite level interviews within some EU states as well as the latter s internal organs specifically created to deal with fraud and corruption. Another goal is to develop and identify indicators which will facilitate the measurement of fraud and corruption in a variety of program and economic sector contexts, and which can be used cross-nationally. The information gained from the interviews and the reports of the agencies will be used to develop a set of cross-national indicators and measurement instruments to guide the longer-range, systematic research program. This study will also help to determine whether international organizations undermine their own goals by promoting or allowing fraud and corruption, in the process lowering the organizations economic efficiencies, raising barriers to trade, and eventually discrediting further attempts at multinational cooperation. The goals of this project are relevant to the POWRE Program since the investigator will need to acquire some new skills, develop new methodologies, and undertake some exploratory investigations in several national and international institutional frameworks and systems. It is expected that the research will lead to several research efforts of a collaborative nature - between different institutions and cross-nationally. The POWRE grant will enable the investigator to develop an important new area of research, and make productive use of her post-tenure sabbatical leave through an original research program, thus strengthening her contribution to the field of political science and scientific knowledge. The grant is also important for increasing her capacity to serve as a mentor and advisor to junior women faculty and women graduate students doc3413 none of the physical theory. In practice, the interdisciplinary nature of this project has been mutually beneficial to physics and mathematics and has spurred much progress and activity in both fields. For example, it was shown that although there seems to be many different Calabi-Yau varieties which could describe the 6 extra dimensions, there are in fact surprising relations among them. This is also related to the presence of black holes and to special transformations in algebraic geometry. The research of the investigator involves studying these type of relations for ``elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau varieties doc3414 none The overall objective of the project is to apply engineering methods for modeling mass transport to the problem of optimizing delivery of several commonly used anti-cancer drugs to tumor cells. The models will provide a rational basis for selecting among treatment options. An important feature will be consideration of the kinetics of cellular influx in addition to transport across microvessels and through tissue. Because of the wide variation in transport properties between different drugs, the models are specialized to the drugs melphalan, methotrexate, cisplatin, doxorubicin and 5-fluorouracil, all of which are widely used. Where necessary, spatial gradients of the drug within the compartments will be accounted for. Transport equations for processes such as diffusion and convection within and between the body compartments will be developed. All values of transport parameters will be taken from data in the biological literature. The resulting systems of ordinary or partial differential equations will be solved numerically. The three specific objectives are: (1) to determine the optimal schedule of intravenous infusion for the drugs melphalan, methotrexate and 5-fluorouracil, for both well-vascularized and poorly vascularized tumors; (2) to study the effects of spontaneously occurring intermittent flow, as well as artificially induced alterations in tumor blood flow, on the delivery of melphalan, methotrexate, doxorubicin and 5-fluorouracil. Connections between time-varying blood flow and such phenomena as drug trapping, long tumor half-life of drug, or enhanced retention will be investigated; (3) to develop spatially distributed models to compare cellular delivery of the drug cisplatin to abdominal tumors (such as ovarian or colorectal) when administered intra-peritoneally or intravenously. These models will be used to examine the theoretical rationale behind intra-peritoneal chemotherapy. One of the PI s career objectives is to apply theoretical principles and modeling to improve cancer therapies. She feels strongly that there is a need for a better understanding of drug delivery, and that theoretical studies have lagged behind experimental work and development of new therapies. The PI s work in this area was interrupted when she recently took two maternity leave. This POWRE grant at this point in her career will help her to regain momentum as an independent researcher in this area and to become competitive for standrad federal grant programs doc3415 none This POWRE award by the Chemistry Division will allow Dr. Susan Olesik of Ohio State University to apply her experience with supercritical and enhanced fluidity solvents in separations science to developing innovative polymer synthesis and processing systems. The precise control of intermolecular interactions, high diffusivity and low viscosities of such solvents allows the development of polymers with highly controllable mechanical and chemical properties for use as biocompatible materials, for separation of chiral pharmaceuticals, in sensors and in environmental remediation. Dr. Olesik has recently completed a sabbatical in industry where she learned synthetic and characterization procedures for polymers produced in supercritical solvents. This award will allow her to establish a new emphasis in her research and to train graduate students in the procedures she will be developing doc3416 none In the fall of , MSRI will hold a special program on Integral Geometry and Represntation Theory. I was invited to be a co-organizer of this program. I am confident that this program will have valuable impact in the development and recapture of some important analytic problems in representation theory and its applications. For this reason, I would like to spend the whole semester at MSRI. The POWRE grants will give me that opportunity. My research activities will consist of four concrete problems in topics related to the MSRI program on which I ll be working. This POWRE project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc3417 none Plants first inhabited land approximately 450 million years ago. The adaptations in plant form that accompanied the movement of plants to land have been well studied. Much less is known about the physiological changes or adaptations that accompanied this important event. This project will focus on the origin of the small heat shock protein family in plants, and the question of whether diversification in these small heat shock proteins was associated with movement onto land. All organisms have a heat shock response. Heat shock proteins are produced when organisms are exposed to high temperatures and, through interactions with other proteins, the heat shock proteins enable organisms to withstand and survive high-temperature stress. In land plants the small heat shock proteins are a particularly important component of the heat shock response, making up the bulk of the protein produced during heat shock. Compared to the small heat shock proteins of other organisms, the plant small heat shock proteins are also unusually diverse. Using cDNA cloning and PCR techniques the PI will examine the small heat shock protein genes of Charophytes (a group of algae) and Bryophytes (hornworts, liverworts, and mosses; the most ancient lineages of land plants). The PI will determine if the small heat shock proteins increased in number and changed in amino acid sequence during the time period that plants first inhabited land. This POWRE award will enable Dr. Waters to continue her independent research career and to attend to family needs by supporting her as a visiting scientist at the University of California, San Diego doc3418 none A new kind of differential interference contrast (DIC) microscope that will allow biologists to observe live-cell preparations with all the high-resolution advantages of conventional DIC, but with the added advantage that many more features throughout the specimen volume will appear in focus in a single image, will be developed. At present, high resolution DIC techniques are hampered by an inherent narrow depth-of-focus. Sometimes called optical sectioning (not to be confused with confocal microscopy), DIC tends to image the highest spatial frequencies (i.e. the finest detail) only from features that are nearest the plane of focus. Features above or below this plane rapidly lose contrast and appear as low spatial frequency blur. Any biologist who has used DIC for imaging thick preparations appreciates that by focusing up and down rapidly, one can get a sense of the 3D morphology of a specimen. Unfortunately, there is no current mechanism for acquiring this depth information all at one time in a single image. For many biological applications requiring tracking of moving cell components over time, the limited focal depth exhibited by DIC means that features may rapidly move out of focus, which severely limits the ability to obtain useful, interpretable images. The new microscope will be called an extended-depth-of-focus, differential interference contrast (EDF-DIC) system. It will be based on novel wavefront coding optical techniques that recently have been used to convert a standard fluorescence microscope into one that acquires sharp images from extended depths at much faster rates than are possible with confocal or widefield microscopes. Specifically, the creation of an EDF-DIC system requires simply inserting a custom-designed phase plate into the imaging path of a standard DIC microscope and then applying a very fast, single-iteration digital filter to the recorded image. This also has the advantage that it can be easily adapted to virtually any existing microscope design. It is anticipated that the new EDF-DIC microscope will supply biologists with a promising new tool for a wide range of investigations of the dynamical processes of living cells over time. To name a few examples, the new EDF-DIC system should provide biologists with the capability to perform the following: observe the 3D spatial distribution and dynamic instability of microtubules (e.g. in budding yeast) or view all the chromosomes in focus at once throughout the mitotic cycle in a broad range of applications throughout the animal and plant kingdoms doc3419 none The PI will spend 12 months in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Mississippi State University from August to August . During this visit, he plans to obtain a broad exposure to the general area of biochemistry and molecular biology, and some in-depth understanding of important research issues in computational biology. This will be accomplished by participating in joint research projects with researchers in that department, attending department seminars and professional conferences, and exchanging ideas with colleagues through regular discussions. The PI s long term interest is in modeling and simulating various signal transduction and metabolic pathways in living organisms using nonlinear reaction-diffusion partial differential equations and high performance parallel computers. During the proposed visit, he expects to identify long term interdisciplinary research projects in which computational simulations can play a significant role in solving biological problems, and to develop joint proposals with bioscientists for funding to sustain long term research in computational biology. In addition to the research activities, the PI will also emphasize the education aspect by combining computational simulations and mathematical modeling with biosciences. He plans to involve graduate students in the joint research projects both during and after the visit, examine the current curriculum in biosciences at Mississippi State University to identify the needs for computational simulations, and establish connections with faculty members in biosciences who can help students work on cross-disciplinary projects in computational biology, either as co-advisors or as program committee members. This kind of cross-disciplinary research experience will significantly broaden students career options and enhance their competitiveness in the job market. This IGMS project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc3420 none The purpose of this research study is to collect and analyze the stories of Native American teachers-in-training. The teachers-in-training are participants of a United States Department of Education funded bilingual program on the Omaha Reservation School, Macy, Nebraska. This research project focuses on the stories of these Omaha Native American teachers-in-training. Their stories will describe their experiences and perceptions teaching and learning elementary science in the Reservation school. Stories will be analyzed to explain the nature of science as told in the stories of the teachers-in-training on the Omaha Reservation school doc3421 none In order to understand how muscle functions, it is necessary to know the ultramicroscopic (nanoscale) structure of muscle tissue and how that structure is organized and assembled. The functional unit of muscle tissue, the sarcomere, is a repeating structure consisting of partially overlapping parallel interdigitating filaments of two major protein components, actin and myosin, plus additional protein components. When one set of the parallel overlapping filaments (the thick filaments) move along the other set, the entire sarcomere shortens. Coordinated shortening of sarcomeres throughout the muscle results in overall muscle shortening, or contraction. A long-term goal of the Principal Investigator, Dr. De Stasio, is to understand the role of myosin in the assembly of sarcomeres of striated muscle. Myosin is found in the thick filaments which move relative to the stationary actin-containing thin filaments to cause shortening of the sarcomere and, thereby, contraction of muscle. Myosin is the motor protein, which has an enzymatically active head domain that uses chemical energy in the form of ATP hydrolysis to move itself along the actin filaments and thereby run the contraction cycle. Little is known, however, about the role that the head domain and its ATPase activity might have in the assembly and maintenance of thick filaments and sarcomeres. The genetically tractable model organism, the nematode C. elegans, has been used extensively to study muscle function and development. Genetic approaches have identified two classes of mutations in the myosin B head domain of C. elegans that disrupt thick filament and sarcomere structure. One class of myosin mutants have single amino acid changes in highly evolutionarily conserved functional domains of the myosin head. The second class of mutants contain translational stop codons within the head domain; expression of these mutant genes would produce partial head domains which lack rod segments, but which do contain a highly conserved amino acid sequence for which no function is yet assigned. Both classes of mutants are dominant. These animals are flaccidly paralyzed as heterozygotes and, in most cases, homozygotes die as early embryos. These phenotypes are more severe than that of animals lacking myosin B, indicating that the mutant myosin B is toxic. The early embryonic lethality further indicates that the mutants interfere with some step of thick filament and sarcomere assembly. Dr. De Stasio s lab has used the dominant nonsense myosin mutants as a tool to understand the role of myosin heads in muscle assembly. By producing mutant myosin genes lacking rod-coding sequences, she hopes to identify regions of the protein responsible for the disruptive phenotype. The long-term goal is to then use these truncated genes to probe myosin function by studying protein-protein interactions and ATPase activity of the isolated myosin fragments. This project includes a set of experiments designed to directly test the hypothesis that expression of truncated myosin heads, particularly those including the evolutionarily conserved domain, are disruptive to muscle assembly. Mutant myosin gene constructs including a very short epitope tag have been produced and these are being microinjected into C. elegans gonads where the DNA is taken up by developing oocytes. The host C. elegans have a conditional expression system whereby even lethal transgenes can be maintained at the permissive temperature and transgene expression can be controlled. Dr. De Stasio will use this POWRE award to support a sabbatical leave in the laboratory of Dr. H. Robert Horvitz at MIT to learn techniques necessary to finish the project. She needs to learn the art of in situ epitope detection and Rnase protection as a more quantitative method of assessing mRNA expression, and she wishes to plan a larger set of experiments designed to test the function of myosin heads. She plans to take advantage of the epitope-tagged constructs as a tool for isolating the major body wall isoform of myosin from C. elegans. Lastly, Dr. De Stasio plans to develop at least two new laboratory experiments using new techniques for inclusion in her undergraduate course in molecular biology at her home institution, Lawrence University, and to investigate the applications of molecular modeling for this course and others as well doc3422 none There are two main types of cells in the brain: neurons and glia. Traditionally glia have been thought to be passive cells whose main function is to provide support for neurons. Recent studies, however, indicate that glial cells form a vast network that is actively involved in transfer of information over relatively long distances. This project has two main aims: 1. How do one kind of glial cells, the astrocytes, communicate with each other? Preliminary data indicate that astrocytes can secrete neurotransmitters and growth factors when stimulated. This project will examine the nature of vesicles that store these chemicals in the cell. Vesicle trafficking in astrocytes will be examined using fluorescent dyes to specifically label vesicle membranes. Astrocytes will then be imaged using sensitive CCD cameras and vesicles followed over time. Changes that occur upon stimulation of the cell will be recorded. 2. Are there specialized areas between astrocytes and neurons that facilitate communication between the two cell types? The hypothesis is that if there are such areas and stimulation of astrocytes should reveal microdomains of increased activity. In addition, these hot-spots should be in close proximity to processes of neurons. This will be studied in two ways (a.) Since calcium is essential for communication between cells, increases in calcium concentration (as indicated by calcium sensitive dyes) in well-defined areas of the cell upon stimulation will indicate the presence of hot-spots. (b.) Examination of cells under an electron microscope will expose the ultra-microscopic architecture of astrocytes revealing the presence of any intimate association with neuronal cells. In summary, the aim of this project is to examine the basic cell biology of communication between cells in the brain, especially how astrocytes modulate brain function. Funding of this POWRE project will also enable a beginning investigator to acquire preliminary data towards a larger proposal, and enhance her credentials and opportunities for an independent academic position doc3423 none During development of the vertebrate neural retina, multiple neuronal cell types are born and differentiate under the control of a complex set of factors that are poorly understood. To gain a complete understanding of the molecular mechanisms regulating retinal neurogenesis, it is essential to define the hierarchy of genes involved in this process. The goal of this project is to use recently developed transgenic methods in the model organism Xenopus laevis to define which factors control expression of the transcription factor Xath5, a key regulator of retinal neurogenesis. The Xenopus transgenic method provides a unique opportunity to rapidly and inexpensively map the regulatory control regions of developmentally important genes, thus making it possible to define how genes come to be expressed in precise spatial and temporal patterns during development. These experiments will provide a more complete understanding of the steps leading to normal retinal development. In addition, this work will advance our understanding of nervous system development in general, since the retina has proven to be a reliable model tissue for studying nervous system development and function. Finally, the development and application of the new transgenic method in Xenopus laevis will open up many possibilities for future investigation and discovery in the field of developmental biology. It is anticipated that this POWRE award will allow the principal investigator to travel to learn a novel Xenopus transgenic method and to then establish it in her laboratory doc3424 none The ability of a cell to respond to its environment is one of the most basic of functions and requires a network of intracellular molecules that work in concert to integrate a response. Of the molecules involved in signal transduction, calcium is the most fundamental, serving as a universal second messenger in a plethora of pathways. Many of the effects of calcium are mediated by calcium calmodulin (Ca2+ CaM) regulated protein kinases. Amongst such kinases, elongation factor-2 kinase (eEF-2K), which controls protein translation by phosphorylating elongation factor-2, stands alone. It has a catalytic structure which is distinct from any other protein serine threonine tyrosine kinase or histidine kinase family member. The functional significance of this different kinase structure is unknown, although it is clear that eEF-2K has a non-redundant cellular function, underscoring the importance of its catalytic domain. Another kinase from the amoebae Dictyostelium, which phosphorylates myosin heavy chain on specific threonine residues, shares this unique catalytic domain This kinase also appears to have a nonredundant cellular function since mutagenesis of its target threonine residues in myosin heavy chain results in gross overassembly of myosin and causes defects in myosin-related contractile processes (Egelhoff T. T. et al., Cell., 75:363, ). In order to explore the functional diversity of this new kinase family, a novel gene was cloned from an EST that encodes an eEF-2K-related C-terminal kinase domain. This new sequence, named elongation factor-2 kinase related channel (EFKRC), not only shares homology to the unique catalytic structure of eEF-2K, but is part of a larger protein that also has strong homology to a novel putative calcium channel, melastatin (MLSN1). Importantly, EFKRC is the first protein found to contain an eEF-2K catalytic homology that serves as a domain within a much larger protein. In addition, since eEF-2K is a Ca2+ CaM regulated kinase, the potential exists for the EFKRC kinase domain to play a fundamental functional role within the context of this putative calcium channel. The goal of this project is to determine if the kinase domain (KD) of EFKRC is a catalytically active kinase and or is required for EFKRC function. This will be accomplished by determining if the kinase domain of EFKRC is active when expressed individually and or in the context of the EFKRC full-length molecule both in in vitro kinase assays and in in vivo cellular 32 P-orthophosphate labeling experiments. In addition, the catalytic function of EFKRC will be assessed by determining its ability to substitute for the catalytic core of eEF-2K with the generation and analysis of chimeric molecules and point mutants. The functional requirement of the KD of EFKRC will be determined by analyzing the ability of full-length (FL) and KD-null EFKRC to complement an EFKRC-dependent lethality found in DT40 chicken B cells. In addition, bulk calcium assays will be performed that will compare the effects of FL EFKRC vs. KD-null EFKRC. Overall, these studies should provide critical insights into the functionality of the EFKRC kinase domain. It is unknown why nature utilizes an unusual kinase domain structure for some essential threonine phoshorylation events. During evolution, this domain was incorporated into at least one larger protein, EFKRC. This project will yield new insights into whether larger proteins that incorporate this unique kinase family domain also utilize it in a non-redundant, essential fashion. This POWRE award will allow Dr. Nadler, who is entering a new research area, to gather sufficient preliminary data in order to submit a regular proposal doc3425 none This research will investigate the ways that Southeast Asian immigrants migration and employment patterns shape, and are shaped by, their gender and ethnic identity formation in the larger metropolitan area of Denver, Colorado. Specifically, the study will examine: i) the ways that particular employment opportunities are structured by race - and gender-based exclusions; ii) how these immigrants themselves formulate and enact strategies to challenge the labor market discriminations they face; and iii) the ways that stereotypes of Asian-American femininity and masculinity operate differently across generations and ethnic groups. The research provides an in-depth analysis of labor market participation and identity formation among 100 cross-generational pairs of in-migrants (total n = 200) from four Southeast Asian countries (i.e., Vietnam, the Philippines, Laos, and Cambodia) in the larger Denver metropolitan area. The project will employ multiple methods, including in-depth and focus-group interviews, event-history surveys, and census data analysis. Local student groups representing the specific immigrant communities will be centrally involved in the collection, analysis, and dissemination of the projects findings. The findings will be situated within historical analyses of the different national groups immigration and labor market patterns and experiences. The questions that this project will address are important for three main reasons. First, since , the number of Southeast Asian immigrants entering the U.S. has grown rapidly. They are a population of increasing demographic significance. Second, this project will clarify both the factors influencing this growing population s employment opportunities, and the ways in which their presence is influencing economic and cultural developments in the Denver area. Third, scholars know very little about this population. This research thus can fill a critical gap in knowledge. This POWRE project will lay the groundwork for a wide range of comparative projects and cross-disciplinary conversations and will inaugurate a new realm of investigation that will link Silvey to a broader range of colleagues than she currently has. In addition, at this point in her career, she has a rare window of opportunity to advance this research agenda. Finally, this work will help establish Silvey s knowledge base in topics that remain closely linked to her longstanding research foci but also extend beyond her previous work to include the politics of international, Southeast Asian-American labor and immigration geographies doc3426 none McClellan The Scandinavian Caledonides are a classic area for study of thrust and nappe tectonics, and particularly with the advent of plate tectonic theory, for the study of ancient ocean crust that was thrust onto the continent during Paleozoic orogenic events. In the central Norwegian Caledonides, a majority of these exotic and suspect terranes occur in a thrust complex termed the Trondheim Nappe Complex (TNC). Ophiolitic sequences in the western TNC have received much attention and study, in part because they are commonly intact, of low metamorphic grade, and may be associated with fossiliferous sedimentary rocks that constrain their age. In the eastern TNC, however, such sequences are generally more highly deformed and metamorphosed and fossil preservation is uncommon, therefore obscuring the tectonic setting(s) represented by the igneous successions and relationships between rock units. This proposal addresses the age and tectonic setting of three metavolcanic complexes in the eastern TNC, and offers a test of two recently proposed hypotheses that concern revisions to the traditional nappe terminology and stratigraphy: (1) that the volcanic rocks in question actually do not represent oceanic crust, but extruded into a sedimentary basin on continental crust after a period of ophiolite obduction and erosion; or (2) that the volcanic complexes are related components of an oceanic arc or back-arc complex that was thrust onto continental crust, and underlie a major unconformity. Results of such a study could be applied t more far-reaching problems concerning the nature of a vast ophiolitic belt throughout the Caledonides, and the presence of a belt-length, terrane-linking unconformity developed above it. The metavolcanic sequences in question are all well represented in the study area, and the project would build upon previous mapping by the PI, completed for dissertation work. A one-month field session is planned, for detailed mapping along critical contacts and to collect samples for geochemical and isotopic analyses. The PI has recently relocated to the University of Kansas (KU), because of the prospect of professional opportunities for both her and her spouse. At KU, the instrumentation (ICP-MS, ICP-AES, mass spectrometer) and support structure is available for the proposed work, and colleagues with expertise in this area are willing to assist in the learning process. The proposed activity is in accord with intent of the POWRE Program, as the study would furnish the PI with an opportunity to become proficient with modern instruments and current analytical methods, to collaborate with colleagues abroad and at KU, and to contribute to the KU Tectonics initiative. Finally, this study would support a student as a field and lab assistant, and facilitate building a research program that would provide international prospects for future students doc3427 none This project can be viewed as part of the nationwide trend towards industrial mathematics. It is proposed to apply dynamical systems concepts to model, analyze, simulate and control problems arising from flows through manufacturing chains and networks. In collaboration with researchers in Industrial Engineering and from the semiconductor industry, problems relating to scheduling and to supply chain management will be studied. A small literature base and preliminary research indicate that re-entrant manufacturing lines show chaotic behavior under certain circumstances and that dynamical systems ideas and control theory might be used to optimize many different manufacturing flow problems. The grant will allow the PI to gain a solid foundation in the methods, successes and open problems relating to scheduling re-entrant manufacturing lines and in the issues relating to the organization of supply chains in the semiconductor industry from factories to assembly test to transportation links, warehouses and suppliers. The PI will spend the academic year in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Arizona State University and the follwing two summer months at Intel. The goal is to become immersed into and to deepen the understanding of the research problems in that field. By establishing direct personal interaction with industrial researchers and the research community in Industrial Engineering the PI s graduate students will benefit in their research interests and career options. This IGMS project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc3428 none Smirnova The aim of this research is to understand molecular mechanisms of reversible binding of paramagnetic contrast agents (PCA s) developed for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to biological macromolecules, phospholipids and proteins, and the effort of these interactions on relaxivity of PCA s. Contrast-enhanced MRI has wide applications in clinical work and is a powerful tool in research. New applications are emerging in microimaging and developmental biology. However not enough is known about structure-function relationships of PCS s, especially the molecular mechanisms of reversible binding of PCA to biological macromolecules, and the effects of biological environment on relaxivity of PCA s. This research will characterize the binding interactions and investigate the effect of these interactions on relaxivity of PCA s through systematic studies of a series of lanthanide ion complexes (Gd(III) with different lipophilicity by a combination of spectoscopic techniques, including fluorescence, nuclear magnetic resonance, and electron magnetic resonance at multiple and high magnetic fields. Model phospholipids will be used to see how lipophilicity affects the ability of PCA s to interact non-specifically with biological membranes and how these interactions change relaxivity of the Gd(III) complex. PCA non covalent binding with human serum albumin will use a combination of spin-labeling EPR, fluorescence, and HF EPR to map the PCA binding sites over the albumin molecule and to study how changes in lipophilicity of these complexes affects the binding. Fatty acid binding proteins, which have a single but very different binding site than albumin will also be examined. This is a POWRE proposal, which will allow the PI who is trained as a physical chemist to extend her skills into molecular biology doc3429 none This project addresses mechanical performance of perovskite ceramics using a combination of methods such as bending techniques, micro- and nano-indentation tests coupled with X-ray phase analysis, Raman spectroscopy and electrical conductivity measurements. The project seeks fun-damental knowledge about relationships between hysteresis effects (domain reorientation, phase transformations, etc.) and mechanical behavior of perovskite ceramics, improved understanding of perovskite strength, hardness and fracture toughness and discovery of new toughening mecha-nisms. The approach involves the study of different first or second order phase transitions, such as nonmetal-metal transitions, martensitic transitions, order-disorder transitions, accompanied by volume changes, leading to toughening of perovskites during loading. A paramount goal is to determine the presence of domain reorientation or phase transformation during indentation and bending tests. Studies of reversible transitions that occur upon unloading of samples are also ex-pected to be feasible. New knowledge about domain reorientation, phase transformation, metalli-zation in perovskites will be gained. Key properties relevant to structural performance will be measured within a feedback loop to microstructural and phase composition optimization. %%% This is a research enhancement grant made under the Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education (POWRE) program. The project provides support at a critical time, helping the PI to re-establish her career after a brief interruption as she moved from Europe to the US, and will enhance the PI s ability to succeed in an area where women are under-represented, allowing her to serve as a role model for other women in mechanical engineering. The proposed research will also have an educational impact, training students with a breadth of experience. The research is expected to contribute basic materials science knowledge at a fundamental level of special relevance to the behavior of ceramic materials, and to assist with the integration of re-search and education. The project is co-supported by the Division of Materials Research, and the MPS OMA(Office of Multidisciplinary Activities doc3430 none Ahring The objective of this research project is to study the natural process of anaerobic degradation of treated sewage sludges (biosolids) under conditions of high pressure, high temperature and high salinity found in deep geological formations. This research is motivated by the desire to establish the feasibility of injecting biosolids into deep underground high permeability saline or depleted oil and gas formations. This could replace the current practice of disposing of biosolids on land or in landfills, thereby reducing the surface land impairment, truck traffic and associated emissions, impact on surface waters and groundwaters and release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. If the rate of biogas formation is adequate, methane could be recovered at the surface for beneficial reuse as a clean fuel. It is not known how conditions equivalent to the ones found in deep geological formations would affect the broad variety of microorganisms carried along with the biosolids. It is unknown to what extent the microbial populations colonizing the injected biosolids will actually come from the native populations existing at the deep geological formation or from the microbial populations introduced by the biosolids. Through the use of bench-scale deep-well simulators, the anaerobic degradation of biosolids under conditions similar to those found at deep geological formations will be tested for periods of six and twelve months. The rate of biogas formation, biogas constituents, and changes in the microbial populations present in biosolids, as well as in core materials, will be studied. Biosolids obtained from the Hyperion Treatment Plant in Los Angeles and core material and native fluids (brine) from the Aliso Canyon gas field will be used for these tests doc3431 none Ascenzi Stress distribution and fracture propagation in osteons under cyclic torsional loading are the topics of this research which is supported by a POWRE award. Novel experimental data will be obtained in collaboration with the A. Ascenzi research group at La Sapienza University in Rome. Samples of fully calcified representative osteon types (longitudinal and alternate osteons) will be isolated and torsionally loaded. Experimentally obtained torque vs angle-of-twist diagrams will be statistically analyzed in terms of stiffness degradation, pinching degradation, and energy absorption. The structural differences between the longitudinal and alternate osteons should correspond to differences in such parameters. Subsequent interpretation in terms of ultrastructural components and observation of fractured samples will form the base for a fracture model. This first fracture micromechanical model allows prediction of the progressive growth of the faulting zones by assessing the increased probability of failure in the vicinity of already cracked regions. This research builds on the PI s recent work on bone microstructural osteons and lamellae. The study will serve as a foundation for the deduction of more realistic non-homogeneous macrostructural mechanical properties of compact bone through lamellar distribution, homogenization methods and finite element analysis. Although sample dimensions render bone microstructural experiments difficult, such microstructural studies allow the discovery of properties, absent in the macrostructure, but nevertheless with fundamental implications for it. Accordingly, this research impacts the study of bone reconstruction and prostheses and pertains to the study of other natural composites as well as the manufacture of new composites. The POWRE award will allow the PI to re-start her academic career after an interruption for family reasons and to redirect her research speciality from mathematics to biomechanics doc3432 none This POWRE award supports a Visiting Professorship at the Department of Mathematics at Northeastern University to study differentials of isolated hypersurface singularities. This award will allow the PI to interact with several leading researchers in her field. As part of the human resource development activities she will also sponsor the local graduate student seminar at Northeastern. This research project combines theoretical expertise from cyclic homology and K-theory and computer algebra techniques to gather information about invariants of isolated hypersurface singularities. The most salient invariant of isolated hypersurface singularities is the so-called Tjurina number, or the dimension of the torsion module of differentials. She has identified the torsion module of differentials both as a Hodge-component of cyclic homology and as an ideal quotient. The latter identification has led to an efficient algorithm for computation of the number of generators exploiting Matlis duality in Gorenstein Artin Algebras. As part of her research activities the PI will undertake the following three-part project: 1. The structure of isolated singularities: The anticipated outcome of this research will be an upper bound for the number of generators and the length of the module of differentials for 3 dimensional hypersurface singularities. 2. Residues and Duality for isolated hypersurface singularities: The goal will be an explicit description of residues and an investigation of the connection with inverse systems. 3. Description of the module of logarithmic differentials and connection with hyperplane surface arrangements: This part of the project will be computational in nature and will focus on the use and development of algorithms for Groebner basis computations in exterior algebras. This POWRE project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc3433 none In the space of three years Indonesia has seen immense changes in its economic and political landscape, including a decline in per capita GDP of 12% in . This research explores the consequences of this severe economic downturn for children less than five and for women of reproductive age. The project focuses particularly on how patterns of women s and children s use of community health services have changed. These groups are selected because they have specific needs for preventive care, they are vulnerable to poor health if these needs are not met, and they are the targets of a number of intervention programs. The study uses panel data from household and community-facility surveys from two waves of the Indonesia Family Life Survey. These surveys were collected in Indonesia in and by the researcher and colleagues. The data will be used to address the following questions. First how have patterns of use of services for children under five and women of reproductive age changed since the onset of Indonesia s economic crisis. Second, what characteristics of individuals and households are associated with declines in use of health care services among women and children. Three factors will receive special attention: the economic status of the household, women s labor force participation, and women s educational levels. The exogenous and unexpected change in economic status that occurred between and provides an important lever for understanding the causal relationship between economic resources and health. Multivariate regression techniques are employed to estimate the relationships between individual, household, and community characteristics and various aspects of use of health care. From a scientific perspective, the research will provide important insights into how families investments in human capital respond to economic change and how government and community resources affect such investments. The research will contribute to the scientific literature on the relationships between socio-economic status and health care use patterns. It will also contribute to the scientific literature on individual and family responses to economic shocks. The latter topic is important given the increasing frequency with which developing countries are experiencing exchange-rate driven crises of the type Indonesia experienced in . The activity fits within the guidelines of the POWRE program because the funding will be used to support the researcher in spending a concentrated period of time analyzing and writing papers with the data sets in which she has invested much of the last four years designing and collecting doc3434 none Ludwig This grant supports theoretical research in condensed matter physics. Effects of quenched disorder and strong interactions, when present either separately or simultaneously, dominate many of the most interesting phenomena currently of interest in solid state physics. The behavior of such systems is typically very rich, and is often not captured by standard approximations based on various free particle non-interacting models, such as Fermi-liquid theory and its perturbations. On the other hand, there has been a tremendous development in non-perturbative techniques, which have been successfully used to solve strongly interacting systems observed in experiments. In this grant non-perturbative techniques from conformal field theory and Bethe ansatz integrability, and in part supersymmetry, will be used to investigate electronic systems with strong interactions and strong disorder. Topics include quantum impurity problems such as quantum dots, and localization transitions of non-interacting particles. In addition, effects resulting from the simultaneous presence of disorder and interactions on transport and thermodynamic properties of electronic systems will be studied using novel methods. %%% This grant supports theoretical research in condensed matter physics. Effects of quenched disorder and strong interactions, when present either separately or simultaneously, dominate many of the most interesting phenomena currently of interest in solid state physics. The behavior of such systems is typically very rich, and is often not captured by standard approximations. This research will investigate a number of new methods to deal with these types of physical systems. The work is of fundamental interest and, if successful, will have broad ramifications doc3435 none JACOBS This research project is an exploration of teachers learning in both formal and informal professional development activities; for example, scheduled workshop sessions and teachers conversations about mathematics teaching. All of the professional development is focused on helping teachers learn to use children s mathematical thinking as a framework for engaging in inquiry. Data sources include teachers journal writing, formal interviews and audiotapes of both researcher-teacher interactions and teacher-teacher interactions (when the researcher is not present). The PI and the teacher participants will all be actively engaged in gathering data about teachers learning. Data analysis will (a) increase understanding of differences in teacher learning across settings and (b) help identify issues related to the emergence of teachers as professional development providers doc3436 none Cushing, Judith B. Evergreen State College POWRE: Integrating Information Resources for the Canopy Scientist a Model System for the Ecology and Database Research Community This work extends an ongoing project that focuses on building database facilities for forest canopy scientists into research, leading towards a model for ecologists and computer scientists. The grant will be used to extend a six-month sabbatical into fifteen months of intensive research and development experience. Meanwhile, integrating relevant computer science research, efforts will be made to build an effective community-wise database for an emerging ecological field. The PI will also explore the use of access- and workflow-oriented mediators, integrating metadata with data, data validation, data transformation, schema representation and integration using XML. The focus will be on metadata acquisition and spatial transformations for data integration doc3437 none EIA- Mark, Gloria University of California-Irvine POWRE: Developing a Research Methodology for Studying Mobile IT Usage and Person Mobility The objective of this work is to develop a new methodology that is suitable for evaluating the usage of mobile information technologies, as well as person mobility. The research activity consists of adapting a microcamera technology as an evaluation tool. The project encompasses development of specialized coding software and data analysis techniques and development of supplementary evaluation tool for an electronic diary. The system testing will involve actual users in the field, obtaining user feedback, analyzing the data, and refining the technology and evaluation methodology doc3438 none Todorovska Since first introduced in mid s wavelet analysis has been widely applied in many fields of science and engineering. The wavelet transform is particularly suitable for analysis of transient signals and time varying systems, because it is localized both in time and frequency. Its widespread use is also due to the existence of orthogonal and bi-orthogonal bases, the efficiency in representation of transient signals (data compression), and the availability of fast and accurate computational algorithms for signal image transformation and reconstruction. In spite of its obvious suitability to earthquake related problems (transient by nature), the wavelet analysis has been applied very little in Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Seismology. The objective of this project is to explore various applications of wavelets to these two fields. The focus of the study will be on identification of nonlinear soil-structure systems from strong and weak motion records in structures in presence of noise, and on representation and analysis of strong ground motion. This research enhancement grant, made under the Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education (POWRE) program, will provide an opportunity for the Principal Investigator to initiate independent research on the application of wavelets (and modern signal processing and estimation theory, in general) to her professional field, and will create opportunities for future funding from regular NSF and other sources. This is expected to increase her chances for getting a regular tenure track faculty appointment. The Principal Investigator is a mid career researcher, with interdisciplinary education (in Physics, Civil Engineering, Applied Mathematics and Electrical Engineering), career based in Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Seismology, and with a non-tenure track faculty appointment at the University of Southern California. This grant will also provide an opportunity for her continuing presence and visibility at her home institution, where she has been the only female faculty in the Civil Engineering Department. This project will involve cooperation across two engineering disciplines (the Principal Investigator will cooperate on this project with faculty from the Electrical Engineering Department of her home institution), and participation of one graduate student (with Civil Engineering background). Finally, this project will lead to the introduction of new methodologies for understanding and modeling earthquake strong ground motion and response of structures, and consequently will contribute to the national effort for Earthquake Risk Reduction doc3439 none Subramaniam, Banu The P.I. proposes a project to explore the role of soil communities on invasive and native plant species in southern California. She will test two potential mechanisms of soil community dynamics that may influence establishment of exotics. The first mechanism, the degradation of mutualists hypothesis postulates that exotic species have reduced dependence on soil mutualists and therefore do better in the face of disturbance. The second mechanism, the escape from pathogens hypothesis suggests that exotic species are freed of their native soil pathogens, thereby facilitating their establishment. The PI and collaborator Bever will conduct green house experiments in which they will monitor the growth of plant species in pots inoculated with a range of soil communities. As a POWRE awardee, the PI will continue outreach activities to undergraduate students as part of her effort to enhance the number of young women scientists and to enhance the scientific knowledge of Women s Studies students. This will advance the PI s career by allowing her unique exposure to new tools and allow her to return to field biology after some time away doc3440 none Novel Pectin Metabolizing Enzymes in Ripening Tomato Fruit Proposal: Gerry Prody, PI The focus of this project is the isolation and characterization two pectin hydrolyzing enzymes, rhamnogalacturonase and pectin acetylesterase, in ripening tomato fruits. The investigator plans to (1) trace the development of these enzyme activities as fruits begin to ripen and (2) begin purification of one or both of these proteins. If successful, this work will help to explain why fruit cell wall pectins are extensively solubilized before the more well-known polygalacturonase enzymes are produced during ripening. Many biochemical changes occur as a fruit ripens. In this study, the investigator will look at one or more of these biochemical events during ripening of tomato fruit. As ripening occurs, the fruit turns red, develops flavor and aroma, and softens. One of the events involved in this softening is the breakdown of the cell walls in the fruit. Cell walls consist of complex arrays of sugars strung together and cross-linked to one another to make a fairly rigid assembly that protects the cell from damage and helps maintain the structure of plant tissues. As cell walls deteriorate, small chains of sugars, called oligosaccharides, are released. Some of these oligosaccharides may further stimulate the ripening process. In this study, the investigator will attempt to purify and characterize one or more of the enzymes involved in cell wall degradation during ripening. In particular, she will study an enzyme that degrades pectin, one of the carbohydrate components of plant cell walls. The enzyme, rhamnogalacturonase, cleaves bonds between the sugars rhamnose and galacturonic acid in pectin. This enzyme can serve to promote softening by degrading the pectin molecules and to regulate ripening by releasing stimulatory oligosaccharides. In addition to revealing important aspects of ripening-related biochemistry, this project has relevance to applied post-harvest biology. The most important problem that limits storage and transport of harvested fruits is premature softening. This project may identify important targets for technologies aimed at manipulation of fruit ripening. This is a POWRE project; the award will enable Dr.Prody to acquire the expertise necessary to establish this new line of research in her laboratory doc3441 none Kimmel, Lehigh University Rotating convection, in which buoyant and non-inertial forces govern the resulting motion, are of importance in geophysical as well as some technological flows. The computational description of these flows represents a significant challenge and the developing techniques of Large Eddy Simulation (LES) provide a logical method of approach. The PI will use one of the advanced subgrid models: the estimation model , to attack this complex fluid dynamics problem. The success failure of these computations will be instructive in evaluating the efficacy of the estimation model doc3442 none This POWRE grant will support a new initiative in the PI s research and educaitonal activities. The PI plans to develop a new program in Nuclear Analysis of Materials. She will develop a setup to measure the distribution of oxygen (18) in surface layers of various materials through the detection of the nuclear resonance in oxygen at 151 keV. The development of this technique will complement a large array of existing characterization tool already available on campus. In addition these experiments will be a precursor and test bed for a setup to measure oxygen (18) reaction which has a much smaller cross section and is of importance for the PI s muclear astrophysics research. The development of an experimental techniques course will allow the PI to expand her teaching to the graduate level. The award is funded by the NSF POWRE program, the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the MPS Directorate, and the Physics Division doc3443 none The proposal will provide funding to establish a beginning collaboration between Idaho State University and Triangle Universities Nuclear Lab at a critical time in the PI s career. The new high intensity gamma ray source is based on Compton backscattering of the FEL photons generated by an electron bunch ion the storage ring with a second electron bunch to produce an intense beam of linearly polarized gamma rays. The new technology which will produce a gamma ray flux at least times as great as anything presently available will allow model independent determination of nucleon polarizabilities via Compton scattering. The award is funded by the NSF POWRE program, the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the MPS Directorate, and the Physics Division doc3444 none Eshaghian, Mary M. University of California-Irvine POWRE: Parallel and Distributed Protein Sequence-Structure Alignment This POWRE proposal proposes to study the parallel and distributed implementation of the Protein Sequence-Structure Alignment Problem. This project will enhance the PI s extensive background in the field of parallel processing, to the new field of computational biology. It is proposed that the work be done at the University of California Irvine where there are excellent research facilities available to support the study doc3445 none PI:Keeley, Sterling INSTITUTION: Univ of Hawaii Manoa PROPOSAL: The P.I. proposes a project to establish a phylogeny for Vernonieae, develop new collaborations with researchers working on the subfamily Cichorioideae and evolution within the Asteraceae (Smithsonian s Laboratory of Molecular Systematics). She will acquire sequencing expertise for chloroplast and nuclear genomes. There are four main objectives of this work: 1) obtain training in techniques and approaches for sequencing genes and gene regions in the chloroplast and nucleus that lead to phylogenetically informative data; 2) construct the first subtribal phylogeny for the Vernonieae with representative from all known geographical areas and from all known lineages; 3) participate in ongoing studies of the Cichorioideae; and 4) identify specific clades within the Vernonieae for future study. This POWRE award will provide the PI with a chance to reinvigorate her research program after having spent the last 6 years in adminstration doc3446 none This POWRE award to Dr. Phyllis Leber will allow her to supplement a sabbatical leave from Franklin and Marshall College to extend her repertory of mechanistic probes of organic chemical reactions. She will learn dynamic isotopic dilution kinetic procedures in the laboratory of John E. Baldwin at Syracuse University and apply these techniques to a study of substituent effects in organic chemical rearrangement reactions at Franklin and Marshall College doc3447 none HUBBELL The objective of this research is to conduct an annual census of seedlings and saplings in a tropical rain forest in Panama, to monitor their annual growth, survival, and recruitment for 5 years. We will also record the location and dynamics of all treefall light gaps that open in the forest, because these are the main sites for forest regeneration, where seedling and small sapling dynamics are accelerated. The dynamics of this forest, located on Barro Colorado Island (BCI) in the Panama Canal, has been studied for the past two decades, but thus far seedlings and small saplings have not been included. These new data will enable us to test alternative hypotheses for how the more than 300 species of trees are maintained and coexist in the BCI forest. New evidence suggests that host-specific fungal pathogens that kill seeds and seedlings may be important agents regulating tree diversity in the BCI forest. We will test this hypothesis and test the strength of density-dependent regulation in the seedling and small sapling community. We will also test the hypothesis that treefall gaps, interacting with limited seed dispersal, limit the recruitment success of most tree species in the BCI forest. The work is likely to have broader significance for understanding how tropical forests in general maintain high tree species diversity doc3448 none 00- Carpenter Collaborative Research: Alternative carbon sources for lake food webs Most ecosystems are viewed as driven by photosynthesis deriving from plants within the system s boundaries. Lakes in particular are textbook examples of how algae and aquatic plants support food webs including fish. Yet, plant production is often a poor predictor of fish and invertebrate production. Ecologists have long known that lakes receive significant inputs of organic matter from their watersheds. Recent work demonstrates that this terrestrial organic matter is potentially available, suggesting terrestrial organic matter may be significant in supporting lake food webs including top carnivores. This project will address this question by a series of whole lake additions of a stable isotope of carbon which will produce a strong contrast in isotopic composition between terrestrially-fixed carbon and carbon fixed by aquatic plants. Through a combination of stable isotope addition experiments and computer modeling, this research will provide an ecosystem-level test of the importance of the connections between terrestrial organic matter and aquatic food webs. 00- Hodgson Collaborative Research: Alternative carbon sources for lake food webs Most ecosystems are viewed as driven by photosynthesis deriving from plants within the system s boundaries. Lakes in particular are textbook examples of how algae and aquatic plants support food webs including fish. Yet, plant production is often a poor predictor of fish and invertebrate production. Ecologists have long known that lakes receive significant inputs of organic matter from their watersheds. Recent work demonstrates that this terrestrial organic matter is potentially available, suggesting terrestrial organic matter may be significant in supporting lake food webs including top carnivores. This project will address this question by a series of whole lake additions of a stable isotope of carbon which will produce a strong contrast in isotopic composition between terrestrially-fixed carbon and carbon fixed by aquatic plants. Through a combination of stable isotope addition experiments and computer modeling, this research will provide an ecosystem-level test of the importance of the connections between terrestrial organic matter and aquatic food webs doc3449 none This grant supports an interdisciplinary research project in applied mathematics and neurobiology. Specifically, the PI will spend an academic year leave visiting the Department of Neurobiology and Physiology at Northwestern University. The goal of this interdisciplinary research program is: 1) to participate in and assist with the modeling of ongoing experiments on hippocampal neurons; 2) to use the focused learning environment to develop a sufficient understanding of neurobiology and the skills necessary for continued research in this area; 3) to create materials that can be used as part of the graduate and undergraduate curricula in the PI s home department. Specific problems to be examined include the modeling of slow, cumulative sodium channel inactivation in hippocampal CA1 pyramidal neurons, and a study of the causes of bursting in subicular hippocampal neurons. To help ensure the project s success, the PI will be externally advised throughout the duration of the work by other researchers familiar with the application of mathematics to biology. This IGMS project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc3448 none 00- Carpenter Collaborative Research: Alternative carbon sources for lake food webs Most ecosystems are viewed as driven by photosynthesis deriving from plants within the system s boundaries. Lakes in particular are textbook examples of how algae and aquatic plants support food webs including fish. Yet, plant production is often a poor predictor of fish and invertebrate production. Ecologists have long known that lakes receive significant inputs of organic matter from their watersheds. Recent work demonstrates that this terrestrial organic matter is potentially available, suggesting terrestrial organic matter may be significant in supporting lake food webs including top carnivores. This project will address this question by a series of whole lake additions of a stable isotope of carbon which will produce a strong contrast in isotopic composition between terrestrially-fixed carbon and carbon fixed by aquatic plants. Through a combination of stable isotope addition experiments and computer modeling, this research will provide an ecosystem-level test of the importance of the connections between terrestrial organic matter and aquatic food webs. 00- Hodgson Collaborative Research: Alternative carbon sources for lake food webs Most ecosystems are viewed as driven by photosynthesis deriving from plants within the system s boundaries. Lakes in particular are textbook examples of how algae and aquatic plants support food webs including fish. Yet, plant production is often a poor predictor of fish and invertebrate production. Ecologists have long known that lakes receive significant inputs of organic matter from their watersheds. Recent work demonstrates that this terrestrial organic matter is potentially available, suggesting terrestrial organic matter may be significant in supporting lake food webs including top carnivores. This project will address this question by a series of whole lake additions of a stable isotope of carbon which will produce a strong contrast in isotopic composition between terrestrially-fixed carbon and carbon fixed by aquatic plants. Through a combination of stable isotope addition experiments and computer modeling, this research will provide an ecosystem-level test of the importance of the connections between terrestrial organic matter and aquatic food webs doc3451 none FASTER EIGENVALUE COMPUTATIONS Roy Mathias College of William and Mary I will develop new, much faster, algorithms to solve eigenproblems. My approach is to actively force deflations, rather than passively waiting for them to occur. This idea, called aggressive deflation, was developed by Braman, Byers and Mathias. A very simple untuned implementation of the idea resulted in computational savings of up to a factor of 3. My project consists of two parts. The first part is to perfect the details of the implementation of aggressive deflation, to extend it to other eigenvalue problems, and to write software implementing these ideas, so that others can use them easily -- like a black box. This will provide a simple way to greatly increase the speed of eigenvalue computations. In light of the results mentioned above I have little doubt about the utility and success of this first part of the project. The second part is much more ambitious and more speculative. It is to repeatedly use the aggressive deflation idea, with carefully chosen parameters, so that one is able to force so many deflations that, in the case of the Hessenberg eigenvalue problem, the complexity is less than the now standard n-cubed, and is perhaps as low as n-squared-log(n) for many families of problems. I hope to make similar improvements in algorithms for other eigenvalue problems. Many physical systems are modeled using matrices. The eigenvalues of these matrices provide insight on how these systems behave. Here are two well known examples of the utility of eigenvalues. Firstly, the collapse of the Tacoma narrows bridge could have been predicted by analyzing the eigenvalues of the associated matrix. Secondly, each chemical element emits light of characteristic frequencies, which are the eigenvalues of an associated matrix. One can deduce the make up of stars just by observing the frequencies of light they emit. The larger the matrix used to model the system the more accurate the model. Unfortunately, the number of arithmetic operations that the standard approach to computing the eigenvalues of a n-by-n matrix is proportional to n-cubed. I plan to develop algorithms which 1. have operation count proportional to n-squared (approximately), and since n can be in the thousands or millions this apparently minor improvement should prove very useful, and 2. can exploit the capabilities of modern super computers, which perhaps ironically, take longer to recall numbers from memory than to multiply or add them doc3452 none Pace Collaborative Research: Alternative carbon sources for lake food webs Most ecosystems are viewed as driven by photosynthesis deriving from plants within the system s boundaries. Lakes in particular are textbook examples of how algae and aquatic plants support food webs including fish. Yet, plant production is often a poor predictor of fish and invertebrate production. Ecologists have long known that lakes receive significant inputs of organic matter from their watersheds. Recent work demonstrates that this terrestrial organic matter is potentially available, suggesting terrestrial organic matter may be significant in supporting lake food webs including top carnivores. This project will address this question by a series of whole lake additions of a stable isotope of carbon which will produce a strong contrast in isotopic composition between terrestrially-fixed carbon and carbon fixed by aquatic plants. Through a combination of stable isotope addition experiments and computer modeling, this research will provide an ecosystem-level test of the importance of the connections between terrestrial organic matter and aquatic food webs doc3453 none Tasayco The objective of this research is to establish the principles underlying oligomerization of disordered polypeptide chains through the zippering of b strands. Fragments of oxidized E. coli thioredoxin, a single domain a b proteins of 108 residues well studied by fragment complementation, provide a unique opportunity to study oligomerization in the absence of the fully complementary fragment. The fragment 1-37 self assembles to produce large molecular weight homo-oligomers, and also interacts with fragment 74-108 to form hetero-oligomers. These homo and hetero-oligomers will be examined using recently developed solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (SSNMR) methods, as well as complementary biochemical and biophysical standard techniques to determine the topology. Solid state nuclear magnetic resonance methodologies are a powerful tool for detailed structural analysis of oligomers. This is a POWRE proposal, for the PI, a leader in studying protein recognition by fragment complementation, to collaborate with a colleague in a nearby institution who is experienced in SSNMR, and to learn these techniques doc3454 none of strain relaxation, morphological evolution and dislocation generation in a range of heteroepitaxial systems. Subsequent studies of perturbation mechanisms and programmable surfaces will apply many of the same tools, with emphasis on locally sensitive probes such as TEM-, LEEM- and FEA-based techniques. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. The basic knowledge and understanding gained from the research is expected to contribute to improving semiconductor materials performance in current and future device and circuit applications. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area. The multidisciplinary (materials science, electrical engineering, physics) and industrially-connected nature of this GOALI program offers unique educational opportunities for students to experience a teamwork-oriented research environment from both academic and industrial perspectives doc3455 none This grant will provide an immersion experience for Prof. Jerome Spanier and Dr. Rong Kong at one of the premier Biomedical Optics institutions in the world, the Beckman Laser Institute and Medical Clinic (BLIMC) at the University of California at Irvine (UCI). A major thrust of the research program at BLIMC is to understand how light propagates in heterogeneous tissue. This understanding is essential to the use of the laser as an effective non-invasive diagnostic and therapeutic tool. The immersion of a small group of mathematical scientists at UCI, where there is access to an elaborate training program that prepares physical scientists for work in photomedicine, will deepen understanding of basic biological questions and provide accurate quantitative comparisons of Monte Carlo-based computer algorithms with clinical measurements. The latter is key to the development of real-time imaging techniques for non-invasive, early detection and treatment of cancer, based on the use of laser probes. Benefits to be derived from the grant experience include: a. acceleration of the education of a cadre of mathematical scientists in the biology and medicine essential to an effective collaboration between applied mathematicians and biomedical scientists; b. cultivation of a rich platform for additional training of mathematicians and scientists in the emerging field of tissue optics; c. enhancement of an important multidisciplinary research program aimed at real-time imaging of heterogeneous tissue using hand held laser probes in clinical settings; d. dissemination of new, important mathematical and computational methods for detection and treatment of disease through publications in the biomedical and applied mathematics literature and oral presentations at conferences attended by both mathematicians and biomedical scientists. This year of intense interaction will be followed by an ongoing collaboration between the two universities aimed at substantively improving their joint capability to quantify optical heterogeneities in tissues. This IGMS project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc3456 none This pilot project will begin a study of the climate and hydrology near the isolated Lake El gygytgyn in Siberia. This unique lake was formed by a meteor impact about 3.6 million years ago. Other funded projects are evaluating the climate history of eastern Siberia by examination of the undisturbed sediments in the Lake. The proposed project would place a full meteorological tower at one of the stream inlets to the Lake in order to measure precipitation, air temperature, soil moisture, solar radiation, relative humidity, snow depth, and soil temperature. This data will begin baseline measurements of the local climate. Data would be collected during 6 weeks in summer and instruments left for automated collection over the next 2 years. The data would be used to begin an evaluation the hydrological cycle in eastern Siberia, a region where our current understanding of regional climatological is weak. This work could form the basis for more extensive future research on the vegetation and water cycles of Siberia following the research format presently occurring in the Alaskan tundra doc3457 none The investigator will spend a year at the Center for Control Engineering and Computation (CCEC) of the University of California at Santa Barbara. This will allow him to obtain a sound foundation in the fields of control systems and signal processing and apply this knowledge in his subsequent research. The proposed work emphasizes the positive interactions between mathematics and engineering, and between theory and application. The investigator will initiate and collaborate on interdisciplinary research projects with members of the CCEC. In particular, he will work with Professor Dahleh, the research director at the CCEC, in the area of control of molecular systems. Based on the quantum models of the molecular systems they seek to answer the question of whether a certain chemical reaction rate is possible, and if so what sort of control input is needed. This work will involve the determination of efficient computational algorithms for the assessment of controllability of realistic molecular systems. Along with Professor Chandrasekaran, also a member of the CCEC, the investigator will also develop fast and efficient algorithms for estimation and filtering problems. A critical issue in estimation concerns the uncertainty model used. If the uncertainty model does not give an accurate representation of the true uncertainty in the problem but rather overbounds it, then it will lead to overly conservative results with poor performance. The investigator and Professor Chandrasekaran will explicitly include structured data uncertainties into least-squares type estimation problems. Examples of structured uncertainties are displacement-structured (Toeplitz, Hankel and etc.) and block-structured uncertainties. Displacement structures arise where there are LTI (linear time-invariant) systems. Block structures are more common and will occur when there are sub-systems. The investigator will apply the newly acquired expertise in engineering and applied mathematics to supervise interdisciplinary senior projects for both mathematics and engineering majors and to better integrate mathematics into the engineering curriculum. This IGMS project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc3458 none This project is funded by the Interdisciplinary Grants in the Mathematical Sciences program, with both research and educational components. The principal investigator proposes to substantially broaden his background in industrial engineering, specifically in manufacturing system design, to build an interdisciplinary research program on computational geometry and optimization problems in manufacturing. He plans to study and apply mathematical methods to a variety of problems in the design of manufacturing systems, primarily those involving the setting and evaluation of tolerances, and the routing of automated machinery. The PI will spend the - academic year in the Industrial Engineering Program at the University of Cincinnati. In addition to collaborating with the members of the Computer-Aided Manufacturing Laboratory, he plans to develop a better understanding of Industrial Engineering by teaching undergraduate courses in the IE program, participating in its senior-level Design Clinic, and participating in graduate courses. The goals of this project are twofold. On the research side, the PI expects to develop an ongoing working relationship with the CAM laboratory, with results disseminated in both the mathematical and industrial engineering literatures, as well as directly to industries. On the educational side, the PI will bring the experiences gained back into the Mathematics Department, and assist in the development of its Industrial Mathematics program. The possibility may also arise for the creation of interdisciplinary courses between the two departments at the graduate level. This IGMS project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc3459 none This grant is aimed at a fundamental understanding of the micromechanisms of fatigue crack initiation and growth in pure polycrystalline nickel MEMS structures produced by the LIGA method. The microstructures of the as-received and heat-treated nickel MEMS structures are studied using scanning and transmission electron microscopy techniques. The initial surface topologies are characterized with atomic force microscopy. Monotonic and cyclic deformation experiments are used to determine the constitutive behavior of the nickel MEMS structures. Micro-bending experiments measure the plasticity length scale for the subsequent modeling of deformation. Microstructural and substructural features associated with this length scale are elucidated via scanning and transmission electron microscopy. The fatigue lives of smooth (polished and unpolished) specimens are studied as functions of stress range and mean stress. The initial specimens are deformed continuously to failure to determine the number of cycles to failure. However, subsequent experiments will be stopped at different fractions of the measured number of cycles to failure to facilitate the incremental characterization of surface topology (atomic force microscopy), micro-texture (orientation imaging microscopy), and damage (scanning and transmission electron microscopy). At the senior high school level, the P.I. will interact with a senior class in a Princeton High School in a program designed to expose students to exciting MEMS technology. At the undergraduate level, two minority undergraduate students funded by the Princeton work study program (per year) will work on the proposed program during the regular academic year,. Two additional undergraduate students (per year) from other institutions will be hired to work on the project during the summer, supported by NSF REU funds. %%% The fundamental understanding gained from the experiments will guide the development of mechanism-based models for the prediction of fatigue crack initiation and growth. The implications of the models will be explored for damage tolerant design of Ni MEMS structures. The P.I. will develop a new graduate course on MEMS structures, including the fundamentals of MEMS fabrication, microstructures, textures, physical mechanical properties and device considerations. Overheads and notes from the class will be made freely available to the global audience on the worldwide web doc3460 none The Winter Conference of Gravitational Waves and their Detection will take place at the Aspen Institute of Physics from February 20 through February 26, . About 75 scientists and engineers are expected to attend. This is the fourth in a series of interactive conferences designed to explore new experimental techniques for the detection of gravitational radiation. The grant will provide funds from the NSF to pay for part of travel expenses for about five participants selected on the basis of their need for funds and the importance of their participation to the conduct of the conference. Preference will be given to students and research associates doc3461 none This award supports a three day symposium devoted to the topic of multiscale and multiresolution methods in computational science. Arguably, multiscale and multiresolution methods represent the most important tool in obtaining asymptotic scalability of large scale computations and data manipulation. Although a well-known paradigm of computation, recent developments in the general area of multiscale computation such as, multiscale finite element methods as well as new developments in the area of specialized multiresolution representations such as curvelets and ridgelets have suggested important new application areas for these techniques which will be highlighted by speakers at the symposium. Since multiscale and multiresolution techniques are just beginning to penetrate diverse areas of scientific computing such as molecular dynamics and scientific visualization, one goal of the symposium is to bring together as many differing perspectives on the subject as possible with the goal and expectation of inspiring new avenues of research and application doc3462 none Findley This award to University of Miami provides shipboard technical support, shore-based support, as well as maintenance and calibration of shared-use scientific instrumentation, for researchers using four oceanographic research vessels. The vessels include R V Smith, operated by the University s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, and R Vs Johnson, Link and Sea Diver, all operated by Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution. The four vessels operate as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The technical support awarded here will assist NSF-funded researchers conduct a diverse suite of oceanographic studies from these four vessels, principally in the western North Atlantic Ocean and equatorial Atlantic regions, beginning in doc3463 none This proposal funds the PI to spend the academic year in the Biology department at the University of Oregon with Professor Michael Lynch serving as host. The PI will collaborate with the Ecology and Evolution group on projects including sampling strategies for phylogenetic comparative techniques and the understanding of duplicate gene preservation through subfunctionalization. The first of these is of very practical importance to Biologists as it will help in designing experiments. The second has theoretical importance in the understanding of genome evolution. The PI will also design and teach a course on mathematical modeling for Biology. Expected outcomes of this grant include increasing the interaction between the Biology and Mathematics departments at UO, improving the mathematical training of Biology students, broadening the background of Mathematics students, and shaping the future direction of the PI s research. This IGMS project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc3464 none This award is for the partial support of a conference in the field of Several Complex Variables. The conference will address problems in the theory of biholomorphic mappings and its connections with PDE, geometry and function theory. The list of participants includes all the major contributors in the field and the conference will definitely attract many young investigators. Having conference to be held in Palo Alto, California also provides an opportunity for the participants to interact with researchers from UC Berkeley, Stanford and MSRI. I strongly recommend the award doc2478 none This condensed matter physics project focuses on the use of infrared and optical spectroscopy to study the dynamics of strongly correlated electron systems. From infrared reflectivity measurements one can obtain conductivity as a function of frequency and temperature, which relates to the two-particle electronic correlation function and provides fundamental input to the characterization of novel electronic systems. As industry moves toward higher speeds, smaller sizes and solutions incorporating novel materials, the relevance of strongly correlated systems to technology increases. Compound classes to be studied include ruthenium oxides in the Ruddlesden-Popper series, ytterbium compounds that exhibit or are close to an electronic phase transition, and doped Kondo semiconductors. By studying ruthenates, which are related to both cuprate and manganate transition-metal oxides, one can investigate the relationship between magnetism and unconventional charge transport (e.g. bad metal behavior ). The Yb compounds in our research exhibit a phase diagram that includes heavy-fermion and mixed-valence phenomena, as well as an isostructural electronic phase transition. Research on these materials can help forge a link between the moment compensation physics of the periodic Anderson model and the phase transition dynamics of Mott-Hubbard systems. Undergraduate and graduate students involved in this work learn to carry out careful measurements utilizing modern equipment and receive valuable preparation for graduate school and employment in academic, industrial or government research. %%% This condensed matter physics project involves the characterization of strongly correlated electron systems. In such materials, interactions between electrons are very powerful and can induce electronic phenomena which are not yet understood. Strong electronic interactions can also induce new phases of matter and can lead scientists to new concepts of electron transport. These materials will play an increasingly significant role in emerging technologies: as industry moves toward higher speeds and smaller sizes and seeks solutions incorporating novel materials, the knowledge base from studies of strongly correlated systems becomes increasingly relevant. In this research, spectroscopic measurements of infrared, optical and ultra-violet reflectivity will be used to obtain conductivity as a function of frequency. Such measurements can reveal the fundamental electronic excitations in systems, including ruthenium oxides, which exhibit novel transport and magnetic phases; Ytterbium compounds, which manifest a phase transition at which the electronic valence changes from integer to non-integer values; and iron silicide, a small energy gap Kondo semiconductor with a very high dielectric coefficient at low frequency. Students involved in this research learn to think critically and to carry out careful measurements on modern equipment. For undergraduates this experience provides valuable preparation for graduate school; for graduate students, this training enhances their preparation for a career in teaching, industry or government research. In outreach efforts at K-12 schools with substantial under-represented populations, the PI uses demonstrations of the phenomena of strongly correlated systems (e.g. magnetism and superconductivity) to embellish presentations on research and education and careers in science doc3466 none The general aim of this project is to study the structure of positive closed currents supported by topologically thin pseudoconcave sets, focusing primarilly on the relationship between properties of currents and their supports. Topologically thin sets in two complex dimensions are those fibered along nowhere dense sets by a family of complex lines; their most important subclass is formed by pluripolar pseudoconvex ones. The specific questions to be considered group around the problems of characterization of supports of positive closed currents, characterization of positive closed currents in topological terms, uniqueness phenomena for positive closed currents, and related problems of branching structure of thin pseudoconcave sets. Problems involving the branching structure concern analogs of the mondromy group for thin pseudoconcave sets and properties of the order structure on the reduced homology group of the complement of the set in the ambient complex projective space. In the general context the problems addressed in this project concern the the structure of currents with the singular supports. Currents are generalizations of distributions to the geometrical setting and, as such, are useful to analize low regularity phenomena that are studied with increasing frequency in modern science. The broader aim of this project is to contribute to the understanding of the notion of current and to increase its applica- bility doc3467 none The principal objective of the proposed research is to further the systematic investigation of the novel phenomenon of photodriven polymer mass transport in azo functionalized polymer films, at modest light intensities and substantially below their glass transition temperatures. All-optical holographic fabrication of large modulation depth ( A) surface relief gratings (SRG) have been achieved on azobenzene-functionalized polymer films, without any pre- and or post-processing. A systematic investigation of this novel photodriven surface deformation and SRG formation process in a variety of azobenzene functionalized polymer systems has established a number of critical research findings and conclusions. This includes the fundamental understanding, the mechanism and identifying possible device applications of this all-optical process. The process is a result of polymer mass transport by optical field gradients and is initiated at the polymer film surface. A number of models and mechanisms for the driving force have proposed. The gradient force model developed by the PI describes the macroscopic behavior observed in this unique photofabrication process in amorphous azobenzene polymer film. This model utilizing a single viscoelastic parameter has presented the opportunity to further connect the experimentally established deformation behavior to molecular level processes and molecular structural details. The viscoelastic parameter of the photoplasticized deformation layer can be correlated with the molecular structural details by investigating the SRG process in tailored macromolecules under selected writing conditions. The focus of this further explore the unusual light-driven transport phenomenon discovered under prior NSF funding. In this all-optical process, desired micro and nonopatterning may be carried out in practically all polymers with some azo functionalization, at modest light intensities without any post processing. Understanding the fundamental photophysical processes in this class of materials may lead to important devices and fabrication processes for photonic technologies. Direct inscription of desired patterns is expected to serve as a simple and dramatic demonstration and learning tool for the classroom using this unusual optical and polymer-physical phenomenon doc3468 none This project seeks funding for the analysis of osteological remains with cut marks associated with the Moche (A.D. 100-800) culture of ancient Peru. The principal goal of this study is to investigate Moche human sacrificial practices as represented by physical evidence, and compare them to idealized behavior depicted in Moche iconography. Recent archaeological discoveries have lent support to the argument that scenes of prisoner torture, sacrifice, mutilation, and dismemberment present in Moche iconography may depict actual events. Studying the relationship between actual and idealized ritual behavior will result in a more complete understanding of the interrelationships between Moche technology, iconography, and ideology in particular, and of Moche culture in general. This project will provide the baseline data necessary to address larger issues such as Moche socio-political relationships and religious cosmology. In this proposed study, macroscopic and microscopic techniques will be used to analyze cut mark morphology and patterning from human skeletal remains excavated from Moche sacrificial contexts. The human remains included in the primary data sample are from the Huaca de la Luna in the Moche Valley, El Brujo in the Chicama Valley, and Dos Cabezas in the Jequetepeque Valley. For comparative purposes, human bones from a Lambayeque (A.D. 800- ) mass burial and butchered faunal remains from Moche and Lambayque sites are included in this study. Cut marks will be recorded in terms of frequency, location, morphology, length, orientation relative to one another and to the long axis of the bone, anatomical association, and inferred activity. Casts of selected cut marks will be examined under a light microscope and a scanning electron microscope to record more detailed information on cut mark morphology and tool type (i.e., metal vs. stone). This dissertation research project will address questions of cut mark frequencies, patterning, differential treatment of sacrificial victims, and tool type. It will also compare the patterns of cut mark location and frequency on human remains with those on butchered camelid remains and look for changes in the treatment of sacrificial victims cross-culturally through time. In addition, this project will include an examination of cut mark patterns to see if they can be used to identify different types of ritual activities, and how the physical evidence compares with iconographic representations of ritual behavior doc3469 none The basic goal of this program is to obtain structure-property relationships that can be used to optimize the properties of elastomeric materials. For example, stress-strain results on a variety of elastomeric materials in elongation, biaxial extension, shear, and torsion will be interpreted using both analytical theories based on entanglement-constrained network junctions, and computer simulations. Elastomers will include both commercially important polymers cross linked by some of the relatively uncontrolled techniques used in the industry, but also some elastomers prepared using more selective reactions designed to give networks of better known structure. Such tailor-made networks will be prepared by end linking functionally-terminated polymer chains, an approach that can also be used to synthesize unusual networks with multimodal network chain-length distributions. These results should give a much better molecular understanding of rubberlike elasticity, and provide guidance in the design of materials of unusually attractive mechanical properties. Experiments on these materials that are of particular interest will be stress-strain measurements for identifying maximum extensibilities and toughness. Novel reinforcing fillers such as silica will be generated in-situ by hydrolyses of precursors such as organosilicates, and simple metal salts such as ferric chloride. Of particular importance will be identifying the particle size that maximized reinforcement, and characterizing the effects of particle size that maximizes reinforcement, and characterizing the effects of particle shape and the orientations of non-spherical particles. Novel materials will be prepared by coating particles of one type with a ceramic of another type. It will also be possible to the thread elastomeric chains through reinforcing zeolites, and to prepare fillers that can be manipulated by a magnetic field. The resulting filler-reinforced elastomers will be characterized primarily by mechanical property measurements, electron microscopy, and by X-ray and neutron scattering. Two newer approaches which already show considerable promise are pulse-propagation measurements and Brillouin spectroscopy. This project is focused on learning how the structures of elastomeric materials can be controlled in order to maximize their mechanical properties. The most important structural features are the chemical natures of the elastomers and how they are linked into networks, and the most important properties are their strengths, extensibilities, and toughness. The approaches taken are primarily experimental, but will be guided by parallel computer simulations and analytical theory doc3470 none Brown This proposal seeks support for years 20-24 of a long-term study of demography and social behavior of cliff swallows in southwestern Nebraska. The investigators will continue to monitor survival, dispersal, and colony choice for a population of marked birds that now numbers 110,286 individuals. These data will be applied to other ongoing investigations of swallow population biology that will incorporate study of the effect of group size, and will also be used to study the long-term demographic consequences of a rare climatic event that occurred in the study area in . Severe weather of this timing and magnitude has occurred in southwestern Nebraska only twice inn the last 125 years, and it reduced the population of cliff swallows by over 50%. By applying the same methods and colony sampling schemes developed and used since , this study will provide direct comparisons among years during a period spanning over two decades. Data gathered will be applied to work on (1) morphological evolution - directional selection on body size and selection for low levels of bilateral asymmetry brought about by the rare climatic event; (2) the relationship between colony size, steroid hormone levels, and immunocompetence - how levels of testosterone and corticosterone at different times during the breeding season vary with colony size; (3) transmission dynamics of ectoparasites and their associated alphaviruses; and (4) variation in colony size doc3471 none Lavin and Weeden Botanists Matt Lavin and Norm Weeden, with Mexican collaborator Alfonso Delgado-Salinas, are studying the taxonomy and evolution of the legumes traditionally treated in the large genus Vigna, the Old World members of which include azuki bean and mungbean. Their preliminary molecular (DNA sequence data) and morphological studies show that New World species treated as Vigna in fact are more closely related to other New World legume genera like Dolichopsis, Mysanthus, Phaseolus, and Strophostyles than to the Old World Vigna. The study proposes to analyze the genetic and morphological variation of 140 or so species in Vigna and these other closely related genera, emphasizing in particular DNA sequence data from nuclear and chloroplast genes and adding morphological characters studied from herbarium specimens and field collections. One product of this study will be a taxonomy based on evolutionary relatedness, which plant breeders will be able to use as a guide for most efficiently selecting which species or races to use in experiments involving hybridization. Currently, this is not available to plant breeders for this group of plants. Genetic analysis of the species of Vigna also has biogeographic importance. Again, preliminary evidence reveals that all of the New World species form a genetically distinctive group that is most closely related to another genetically singular group centered in Africa and Asia. Over-water migration is one possible explanation for this disjunct pattern of split ranges, but it is also possible that a once-widespread, ancient range has been split by extinction events or by continental drift between Africa and the Americas. The investigators hope to identify genetic footprints in the DNA data they accumulate from the studied species, that may indicate which species are ancient (i.e., dating back to about 40 million years) on their respective continents, and which species are recent arrivals from another continent doc3472 none Gaimari Lauxanioidea (Diptera) are a large diverse lineage of flies (4 families, 209 genera and subgenera, ~ species), worldwide in distribution, that took two major evolutionary pathways in their larval feeding modes. On the one side, the pathway exemplified by the family Chamaemyiidae is one of larval predation on soft-bodied sternorrhyncan insects such as aphids, scales, and mealybugs. On the other, that represented by Lauxaniidae and Celyphidae is larval saprophagy, feeding in decaying plant material from forest leaf litter to bird nests. The remaining family Eurychoromyiidae is enigmatic, with only one described species whose larval feeding habits are unknown. Discovering the larval habits of this latter family and placing them within the context of one of these pathways are among the goals of this study. The current higher classification for the superfamily does not reflect phylogeny, so this project seeks to place the genera of Lauxanioidea into a phylogenetic context, constructing a natural, biologically predictive classification to reflect the interrelationships among lineages. The hypothesized phylogenetic relationships will be used to examine biogeographical histories of these flies, and to explore the significance of the major feeding shift between larval saprophagy and predation in the early stages of lauxanioid evolution. Within the predatory chamaemyiid lineage, feeding patterns and host shifts will be scrutinized with an eye towards understanding host specificity among species of different genera, providing an additional element of predictability to an important group of predators of Sternorrhyncha. Habitat and food requirements can also be highly specific for saprophagous taxa, and assessing these requirements in the context of a phylogenetic classification can aid in developing conservation strategies within areas with high litter content, such as forest ecosystems. Understanding lauxanioid relationships and associated patterns provides insight into the worldwide radiation of a highly diverse, functionally critical higher taxon. The relationship between lauxanioid diversification and patterns of historical biogeography will provide insight into the reasons for their present-day success, particularly in areas of highest diversity such as Southeast Asia and South America. The nuances of the feeding shift between saprophagy and predation are fundamental to many monophyletic groups of Diptera and other insects, and provide a step towards understanding the true ecological importance doc3473 none The primary motivation for this research project is the need to control residual stresses in ceramic thin films and coatings, which encompasses a wide range of materials used for both electronic and structural applications. Residual stresses arise from the thermal expansion mismatch between film and substrate, and from various intrinsic mechanisms during film growth. The viability of ceramic films and coatings are typically evaluated by calculating thermal stresses, however, this calculation is often inaccurate because it ignores intrinsic stresses. Previous work at Brown demonstrates that tensile stresses caused by island coalescence during film growth often overshadow thermal stresses. This work also shows that these intrinsic stresses can be controlled by altering processing during island coalescence. These efforts are focused on CVD diamond, which is an excellent system for these studies since diamond has large intrinsic stresses that are problematic for a number of applications and because the extensive literature on CVD diamond provides a strong basis for understanding growth stresses. Building on the previous success with CVD diamond, the following activities will be carried out during the project: 1) Establish that intrinsic tensile stresses can be controlled by altering processing during grain coalescence in a wide range of ceramic thin films and coatings; 2) Develop better models for describing the evolution of intrinsic stresses; 3) Investigate relationships between residual stress and film properties (fracture, etc.), which will be based on the processing methods developed at Brown that provide a unique approach for varying stress without changing the substrate, grain size, or film composition; 4) Control intrinsic stresses to modify the total residual stress in novel ways; 5) Investigate discrepancies between Raman spectroscopy and other methods that are used to measure residual stress in CVD diamond; 6) Provide direct input to ongoing work on oxide coatings at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and 8) Continue a variety of educational efforts, including the ExSEL program at Brown (co-PI Prof. Rankin), and an accredited Materials Science workshop for local middle and high school teachers that was developed by the PI. Research activities will continue to involve undergraduates from both Brown and Trinity (an undergraduate teaching institution). %%% Ceramic and diamond thin films are used in a variety of technologically important applications such as computers and telecommunications. During processing these thin films are develop stress that limit their effectiveness in the application. This research project, which will be carried out by two investigators at Brown University and one from Trinity College (an undergraduate institution), will investigated methods of controlling the stress that form. The results from this work will lead to better understanding and improved control of stresses in a variety of thin films and coatings, thus enhancing their usage in the application doc3474 none This research involves the general area of error control coding for digital communication and storage systems. In particular, it describes a number of fundamental research topics related to a powerful new method of error control coding called turbo coding. The research has two major goals: (1) to propose new turbo coding schemes with performance and or complexity advantages compared to the current state-of-the-art, and (2) to advance the fundamental state of knowledge regarding this exciting new approach to error control coding. Although still very new, turbo coding is beginning to be applied in numerous areas that require error control techniques, including deep space communication, satellite communication, and digital cellular telephony, to name just a few. Because of its ability to perform close to theoretical limits with reasonable implementation complexity, it is anticipated that turbo coding and related techniques will have an enormous impact on virtually all applications of error control coding over the next 10 years or so. Turbo coding can achieve moderate bit error rates (in the range of 10-4 to 10-6) at signal-to-noise ratios very close to channel capacity. However, there is still room for improvement in turbo coding performance, particularly in applications that require bit error rates below 10-6. Further, there is considerable theoretical interest in achieving a more complete fundamental understanding of the key properties of turbo codes that result in such excellent performance. The investigators study several new basic research problems in turbo coding. Among the topics to be investigated are (1) several new turbo code designs capable of achieving even better performance than existing schemes, (2) the introduction of a more general class of turbo codes that has the potential to yield better codes and or reduced decoding complexity compared to standard turbo coding methods, and (3) the development of a new sub-optimum soft-in, soft-out decoding approach that can be used with more codes, thus offering the promise of near capacity performance at very low bit error rates, say below 10-10 doc3475 none Carr More than half of all plant species self-pollinate at least 20% of the time and almost all species studied suffer reduced fitness as a result of inbreeding. Despite decades of intensive, detailed studies of the propensity and fitness consequences of inbreeding in plants, virtually nothing is known about how inbreeding influences the biology of organisms that regularly interact with inbred plants. It is likely that the loss of genetic variation within inbreeding individuals and the associated phenotypic changes in inbred plants will greatly affect other interacting populations of plants and animals. We are expanding the study of inbreeding in plants to include the interaction of plant mating-system and insect herbivory. We will conduct a series of greenhouse and field experiments to test the hypotheses that inbreeding in plants exacerbates the negative effects of herbivory and alters the quality of the host for insect herbivores. We will also partition genetic variation for herbivore resistance and host plant quality into its additive and non-additive components to assess the ability of inbreeding populations to respond to selection imposed by herbivores. Our collaborative study will be the first to unite the important disciplines of plant mating-system evolution and plant-herbivore interactions. The results of this study will have important implications for plant mating-system evolution, for the evolution of resistance in host populations, and for the long-term persistence of population fragments experiencing rising levels of inbreeding. Our results will also be relevant to the development of agricultural crops via selective breeding programs. From the herbivore s perspective, this study will provide insight into the ability of insects to respond to the environmental heterogeneity created by a mixed-mating host and their ability to exploit hosts that have restricted gene flow. As natural landscapes become increasingly fragmented, understanding the genetic and ecological processes that transpire within small populations is critical to conservation management doc3476 none Tessmer, S. This project exploits a novel technique, charge accumulation imaging (CAI) to investigate mesoscopic physics in two-dimensional electron systems (2DES) in GaAs-AlGaAs heterostructures. CAI is a scanning probe method that permits minute amounts of electrical charge to be located with high spatial resolution in a cryogenic environment. Although the technique is in its infancy, the initial experiments have shown that it can measure charging structures beyond the reach of other probes. The experiments address some of the more exciting topics in mesoscopic physics, with a central theme of studying electron-electron interactions and their interplay with disorder. To this end, we will perform two separate studies. The first series of experiments will investigate electronic states in an applied magnetic field. At lower fields, we will probe the percolation patterns of the quantum Hall regime. At higher fields, we will investigate the competition between fractional quantum Hall states and states in which individual electrons become localized. The second series of experiments investigates the 2DES further confined by microfabricated gate electrodes to form quantum dots. Using CAI, we can map-out the spatial characteristics of the dot s eigenstates -- essentially imaging electron wavefunctions. Hence, this study represents a new test of the quantum mechanics at play in these systems. %%% This research applies a novel scanning probe microscopy technique to probe the behavior of electrons confined to two dimensions in semiconductor systems. By mapping out the electric field emanating from the semiconductor s surface, our technique can resolve the electronic structure, despite the fact that the electron layer is buried beneath the surface. The goal of the project is to investigate the nature of interactions between electrons, and their interplay with defects and impurities within the semiconductor. The research provides a challenging training ground for graduate and undergraduate students, as they master advanced microscopy and semiconductor microfabrication techniques doc3477 none With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Douglas Price and James Burton will conduct three years of laboratory based research. Their goal is to develop strontium isotope analysis as a tool to address significant anthropological questions. Strontium has two isotopes and these are present in soils, plants and animals in varying ratios. This ratio is ultimately determined by the relative amounts of each isotope in underlying bedrock and because this varies by region, ratios show geographic patterning. These ratios are also reflected in human tooth and bone and if an individual lives their life in one area and eats local foods the relative amounts of strontium will bear a regional imprint. Isotope ratio analysis is a potentially valuable tool because ratios in different parts of the dental and skeletal system turn over at different rates and thus provide locational information for different times in an individual s life. Teeth for example have no turnover and the ratio is set at the time of formation. In bones strontium is replaced during an individual s lifetime but the rate varies by skeletal element. Likewise, permanent teeth are formed at different times. Thus it is theoretically possible to trace an individual s movement over major spans of their life and to determine, for example what percentage of a skeletal population were born locally and what percentage were immigrants. Migration, residence and marriage patterns can be examined in this way. Drs. Price and Burton will use three well controlled archaeological skeletal populations to refine and develop the technique. They will establish intrinsic isotopic variability in populations and relate this to geological diversity. They will develop criteria for establishing significant threshold values for migrant individuals. The case studies come from the late Neolithic of Central Europe (Bell Beaker populations), Mesoamerica (the Classic period of Highland Mexico) and Iceland. They will also examine the possibility of using lead and alkaline-earth abundances in skeletal tissues to pursue this same goal. This research is extremely important because these tools, if refined, will be useful in a wide range of archaeological situations doc3478 none 00- Goldstein Water economy of neo-tropical savanna ecosystems: The impact of hydraulic lift, partitioning of soil water and changes in land use Roots can directly affect the distribution and availability of water in the soil profile by hydraulically lifting water from deep soil layers to shallow soil layers where water may be limiting. Hydraulic lift can have a significant impact on the water cycle of dry tropical savannas, because deeply rooted trees can lift water to within 1 m of the surface where herbaceous plants are rooted. Current land-use practices are reducing the abundance of trees in Brazilian savannas, the second most extensive ecosystem in South America after the rain forests. Tree removal, and the associated reduction in hydraulic lift, may result in a substantial fraction of the deep soil water and nutrients being lost from ecosystem recirculation processes. This study will characterize the regulation of water in Brazilian savannas and evaluate the impact of hydraulic lift on the distribution of water in the soil, on total evapotranspiration and on partitioning of water consumption among woody and herbaceous plants. The results of this study will provide new insights on the nature of interactions between woody and herbaceous plants and on the consequences of current land management practices in tropical savanna ecosystems doc3479 none Frelich European earthworm species have recently begun to invade hardwood forest ecosystems in the northern United States. Many of these forests have thick forest floor layers that serve as the rooting medium for forest herbs and tree seedlings. Exotic earthworms consume the duff layer, sometimes leaving exposed mineral soil. Although there is significant concern about the potential loss of native forest plant species and ecosystem stability, little is known about how plant communities and ecosystems respond to invasion by detritivores (detritus-feeders). The overarching hypothesis of the study is that earthworm invasion will have cascading effects on soil characteristics and forest-floor vegetation, and that resilience of the community will depend on site productivity and interaction with deer grazing. This study will employ deer exclosures, field studies, and experimental manipulations to determine rates and patterns of change in earthworm populations, assess effects of earthworm species on forest floor and understory vegetation, identify factors affecting vegetation recovery following establishment of earthworm populations, and examine earthworm impacts across a site productivity gradient. This study will lead to increased understanding of the process of invasion by exotic animal species and will have significant implications for forest management and restoration doc3480 none The investigator develops efficient and reliable iterative methods for reconstructing an image from recorded, noisy data. To obtain better resolved images, he develops methods that can effectively handle complicated operators (e.g., spatially variant kernels) and methods that enforce a nonnegativity constraint. The emergence of increasingly sophisticated imaging devices has produced a new generation of very difficult computational problems in which an image is to be reconstructed from recorded data. Such problems arise, for example, in breast cancer detection, where there is a tradeoff between the needs to obtain high resolution images and to limit the radiation dose to the patient. New devices have also been recently proposed for 3-dimensional imaging, where high dimensionality and resolution requirements result in nontrivial computational complexity. Yet another example occurs in new ground-based telescopes, which use adaptive optics techniques. To extract detailed information and take advantage of the increase in resolution that can be obtained from new imaging devices, it is important to develop methods that take into account spatial changes of properties in the imaging mechanisms, which are not amenable to standard fast Fourier transform based methods. New fully 3-dimensional medical imaging devices require a new generation of computational methods to efficiently reconstruct images from recorded data, and in order for these new computational methods to find their way to clinical use, it is important to provide software packages that allow for easy implementation and experimentation. Methods that enforce nonnegativity in the computed solution, and that can efficiently handle spatially variant kernels, are developed. Many of the computational tools developed in this project should be applicable to a wide class of iterative image reconstruction methods, including linear, nonlinear and statistical based methods doc3481 none 21st Century ionospheric research using the Cornell University portable radar interferometer Swartz, Wesley E., Cornell University This award addresses the application of a portable interferometer VHF radar (known as CUPRI), presently located in Puerto Rico, to the study of geomagnetic field-aligned irregularities in spread F and sporadic E. This work would be a continuation of the present series of observations combined with analysis directed to the understanding of the causative factors underlying the formation of these irregularities. These ongoing measurements would be supplemented with coordinated campaigns with the Arecibo Observatory incoherent scatter radar observations of the winds of the lower thermosphere region. This award would also undertake significant upgrades of the data acquisition component combined with field tests with the aim of improving the temporal and spatial resolutions of these observations. Further analysis of the Brazilian set of measurements would be undertaken to compare equatorial results with those obtained in Puerto Rico doc3482 none This project focuses on the study of a newer area of aromatic chemical research, metallabenzenes, transition metal analogues of benzene in which one of the methine units has been replaced by an isolobal transition metal fragment. The chemistry carried out in this project takes advantage of a method that allows direct entry into the metallabenzene manifold using a cyclopropane precursor. One goal of the project is to demonstrate that this method provides a general synthetic route to metallabenzenes and valence isomers. This represents the first comprehensive investigation of metallabenzenes where ligand, ring substituents, and transition metal centers will be systematically varied. With this Award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program s Organic Synthesis Program supports the research of Professor Michael M. Haley of the University of Oregon, Eugene. Professor Haley s research interests are in the incorporation of transition metals as integral parts of otherwise all-carbon systems. In particular, modifications of the structure of benzene will be undertaken. Benzene is the prototype structure of an important class of chemical structure referred to as possessing aromaticity, and the effect of carbon-metal substitution will be carried out to explore its effects on aromaticity. In addition, a variety of new organometallic structures will be prepared whose properties are heretofore unknown doc3483 none Hufford Systematics research includes the study of phylogenetic or genealogical relationships among species and genera, and the analysis of how morphological diversity arises within lineages. Dr. Larry Hufford at Washington State University is studying morphological diversity in floral forms, especially in the complex staminal configurations, in the plant family Loasaceae, emphasizing the large genus Mentzelia (blazing stars) and the subfamily Loasoideae. Although a relatively small family in terms of number of species (ca. 325 total), Loasaceae comprise taxa with a wide range of stamen numbers, configurations, and modifications. Taxonomists have used many of these features as characters to recognize distinct genera within the family, but discrepancies with other character evidence have suggested that some of these staminal characters have evolved multiple times, possibly in multiple ways, within Loasaceae, perhaps in association with shifts in pollination. An independent assessment of evolutionary relationships within the family will be made using DNA sequence data collected from nuclear and chloroplast genes, for ca. 114 species and for numerous outgroup taxa in the Hydrangeaceae and other related families. With a robust phylogenetic tree as framework, comparisons can be made between closely related species where the direction of morphological change can reasonably be inferred. Tissue- and organ-level changes in flower development will be studied with light and scanning electron microscopy, to determine whether similar or different patterns of organ formation underlie the various staminal configurations observed in Loasaceae. The study of floral form in Loasaceae represents an early step in the fusion of phylogenetic analysis with morphological transformation. In particular, the study attempts to resolve within Loasaceae what are apparent floral trends in synorganization (unitary growth of formerly separate organs) and juvenilization (early and truncated development that preserves juvenile features as the final adult form in the flower doc3484 none This project will use a unique approach to investigate genetic variation for life-history traits, such as size, in the long-lived invasive plant species, Lythrum salicaria (purple loosestrife). Instead of analyzing individual size-related life history in each season as has been done by other researchers, this project will consider the change in each trait through time. Six years of census data from an experimental garden established in has demonstrated that there is genetic variation for the pattern growth in this species. The proposed research will use additional census data from the established experimental garden and apply new statistical techniques from the field of quantitative genetics to investigate how selection acts on growth and genetic constraints on growth. Tradeoffs (negative correlations) between growth and reproduction will be investigated using both quantitative genetics and experiments manipulating reproductive effort. A new experimental garden of three cohorts of plants of different ages will be established to to determine whether year to year variation in life-history traits is due to the intensity of selection varying with age. Lythrum salicaria is an invasive species that is a serious pest in this country yet we still know little about its life history. Basic information on life span, lifetime reproductive success, contribution of each reproductive episode to total reproduction, etc. will be extremely valuable to researchers studying the invasiveness of this species. Investigating genetic variation for growth in this species is relevant to the fields of both evolutionary ecology and conservation biology doc3485 none Brander Funding is provided to continue partial support for the ICES GLOBEC North Atlantic Regional Program Office within the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES). ICES is an intergovernmental organization designed to coordinate scientific research, fisheries assessment, environmental concerns, and oceanographic matters of common interest to countries bordering the North Atlantic. The ICES GLOBEC program is the North Atlantic regional component of the International GLOBEC Implementation Plan. GLOBEC (Global Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics) is an international research program intended to improve forecasts of the responses of the marine ecosystem to physical forcing and global change by developing our understanding of its structure and functioning under varying physical conditions. The project office is responsible for coordinating efforts to keep interested research communities informed about ongoing work, design means for data exchange, plan cooperative research, organize workshops for the collective appraisal and analysis of information, and publish results in a timely and adequate way doc3486 none Strayer Introductions of exotic species are one of the major ways by which humans affect ecosystems globally. Exotic species have been shown to change the chemical and physical properties of ecosystems, as well as their species composition. Nevertheless, our knowledge of how invasive species interact with ecosystems is still incomplete. An important problem with many studies of invasive species is that they are done soon after the species arrives. The results of such short-term studies may be misleading if the system shows transient dynamics or if the system is driven by factors that vary from year to year, and which interact with the invader. Both of these circumstances are common in real ecosystems. This LTREB project will explore the transient and long-term response of the Hudson River ecosystem to the zebra mussel invasion. This group has been observing the Hudson ecosystem since . Zebra mussels appeared in the Hudson in , and soon caused dramatic changes to the phytoplankton, zooplankton, bacteria, zoobenthos, light quality, nutrients and dissolved oxygen in the river. Over the last few years, evidence has begun to appear that some of the observations made in the early years of the invasion may be transient responses, and may not represent the long-term response of the Hudson River to the zebra mussel invasion. The overall objective of this long-term study is to determine if the interaction between the invasive species and the ecosystem is changing significantly, and if the short-term response of the ecosystem adequately represents its long-term response. This work will help to define the roles of the zebra mussel and other bivalves in aquatic ecosystems, advance our understanding of large river ecosystems, and elucidate the interactions that occur as an invasive species and an ecosystem accommodate one another doc3487 none Professor Nancy Levinger of Colorado State University is funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry program to perform experimental studies on solvation dynamics in micelles. Solvent molecules inside reverse micelle systems are perturbed by interfacial interactions with the walls of the micelle, and this is a model system for the more complicated environments such as those found in cells and in geological structures. In this proposal the PI seeks to continue her previous work on these systems using a variety of advanced ultrafast time-resolved methods such as Stokes shift and photon echoes. Representative micellar systems include ones with varying head groups. Ultrafast electron transfer processes are also to be probed. The overall goal is to develop a comprehensive understanding of the way in which restricted environments inside reverse micelles influence dynamical behavior of the solvent and to understand how this influences chemical reactions. The results will aid scientists studying reactions and processes in biological and geochemical microenvironments such as soils, rocks and biological cells and organelles where the effect of the solvent is poorly understood doc3488 none McCreadie, John : Using a Trichomycetes (fungus) larval Simuliidae (aquatic fly) model, the PI s propose to determine, under both field and laboratory conditions, if the nature of these symbiotic (co-existing in a close association) relationships frequently shift from state to state. Thus, parasitism, commensalism, and mutualism would be merely temporary descriptions of species interactions under particular sets of intrinsic (fungal infection intensity, host species) and extrinsic (environmental) conditions. They suggest that the particular state of this symbiotic relationship can be predicted by the environmental conditions under which the hosts (the larger member of a symbiotic association) and symbionts (the smaller member of a symbiotic association) are found. They will also examine the dynamics of symbiosis across landscapes. This will provide the unique opportunity to assess the nature of the symbiotic interactions over a large spatial scale, and hence determine the importance of geographic structure in shaping symbiotic associations and the opportunity to separate factors influencing the distribution of each host species from those influencing the distribution of each trichomycete species doc3489 none Ostfeld Seven years of observational and experimental studies in oak forests suggest that risk of human exposure to Lyme-disease bearing ticks may be predictable almost two years in advance based on acorn production. High abundance of acorns in the fall stimulates population growth of white-footed mice, resulting in high mouse density the following spring and summer. Newly hatched larval ticks acquire the Lyme disease bacterium more efficiently from mice than from other hosts. Therefore, the greater the abundance of mice in summer, when larval ticks are active, the greater the opportunities to feed on mice. Larval ticks feeding from abundant mice the summer following a mast year molt into nymphs one year later, resulting in high density of infected nymphs, and therefore high risk of exposure to Lyme disease, two summers following mast production. The project will support continued core monitoring of acorn production, population dynamics of rodents, and density and infection prevalence of tick vectors, for the next five years. Five additional years of data will allow investigators to test the hypothesis that (1) significant relationships between acorn production, the summer density of mice, and the density of infected nymphal ticks occur across multiple masting cycles, (2) relationships between acorn production and tick density and infection prevalence, and between mouse density and tick density and infection prevalence, are best described by linear rather than curvilinear regressions, (3) significant relationships between acorn production and tick density and infection prevalence, and between mouse density and tick density and infection prevalence, are caused by the leverage from extremely high acorn production, and (4) interannual variation in mouse density, tick density and infection prevalence not explained by acorn production will be explained by interannual variation in climate. The core monitoring facilitates related research on impacts of pulsed resources on consumer community dynamics, (2) patterns and implications of dispersal by mice in heterogeneous landscapes and 93) the role of vertebrate diversity in Lyme disease dynamics. Continued long-term research will promote linkages between community ecology and epidemiology doc3490 none Dutta Although interfacial sliding has been noted in many materials systems, a clear mechanistic picture of the phenomenon is yet to emerge. Part of this is associated with the difficulty of designing experiments which allow the strain response of the interface to be distinguished from obfuscating superimposed effects (such as creep of one or both components adjoining the interface). In previous NSF work, it was demonstrated that this challenging task could be accomplished by a combination of carefully designed experimental and analytical approaches. The current research aims to: (1) develop experimental and analytical approaches to study interfacial creep in both bulk and thin film materials systems; (2) develop mechanistic insight into interfacial sliding by correlating the sliding kinetics with the interfacial morphology, structure and chemistry; (3) generate sliding kinetics data for selected interfaces of practical importance, and (4) evaluate the impact of sliding on the performance of two engineering systems of importance (fibrous composites and film-substrate systems). %%% Interfaces between dissimilar materials are critical to the performance of many engineering materials. Often, large shear stresses exist at the interface, and at least one of the materials adjoining the interface can be subjected to high homologous temperatures during service. This enables diffusionally accommodated interfacial sliding (interfacial creep) to occur, with potentially severe impact on the dimensional stability and reliability of the system of interest. Possible examples include metal-matrix composites subjected to thermal cycling, thin-film microelectronic devices subjected to Joule heating during service or thermal cycling during fabrication, and flip-chip solder joints in power electronic packages subjected to thermal excursions during on off cycles doc3491 none Stanley V. SU University of Florida CISE Next Generation Software: Research on Advanced Technologies to Support Internet-based Scalable E-business Enterprise (ISEE) The Internet and Web technologies have brought about rapid and significant changes in the way business enterprises operate and have altered the nature of business competition. To remain competitive in the Internet -connected world a business enterprise needs to adopt these and other available information technologies (IT), including the distributed object technology exemplified by CORBA, JAVA RMI, DCOM, and Enterprise Java Beans. The integration of Internet, Web and distributed object technologies provides the basic information infrastructure, which allows distributed, heterogeneous application systems to be interconnected and to share all sorts of resources in a structured manner in the form of communicating distributed objects. This basic infrastructure is not sufficient to support scalable enterprises because e-business requires not just accessing data and application systems over Internet but also the management of business events, constraints, rules and process workflows. A more powerful integrated information infrastructure is needed for Internet-based scalable e-business enterprises (ISEEs). The objectives of this one-year project are: 1) Investigate the architectures, processing techniques and algorithms associated with the proposed technologies and use the industrial endorsers to evaluate the practicality of the results. The development code will be made available to all through the Internet. 2) Train students who will participate in this project and incorporate the concepts and results in relevant graduate courses in three different home departments of PIs and CO-PIs. Identify additional research tasks and form a team of academic researchers and industrial participants who are qualified to tackle these tasks, and develop a joint proposal for submission to NSF for the follow-up work doc3492 none Bird and Bird This exploratory project in evolutionary ecology will test a number of hypotheses concerning the factors that influence variability in food acquisition and sharing among families and bands of the Mardu of Western Australia (hunters and foragers). Individuals vary in the foods the acquire and in the ways the distribute goods to maintain social relationships. In particular, this project will investigate how men and women use food in different ways and for different purposes. The researchers will focus on collecting preliminary data on foraging choices, energy return rates, time allocation and food distribution patterns, and will test to see if men face tradoffs between the benefits that can be had from social signaling and those from provisioning. The project will contribute to our understanding of how men s and women s work differs, why it differs more at some times than at others, and how men and women gain status from the kinds of work they do and how they distribute the products of their labor doc3493 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Michael Barton and his team of international collaborators will excavate four prehistoric (Mesolithic and Neolithic) settlements in upland valleys of the Rio Serpis, a major drainage system in Alciante province of Spain. The goal of the work is to understand the transition from a hunting and gathering to an agricultural subsistence mode and the project builds on nearly a decade of prior research, primarily in the form of intensive, landscape oriented archaeological survey. Excavations will take place over the course of two summer field seasons, each focusing on one hunting and gathering (Mesolithic) and one agricultural (Neolithic) site. Each site will be grided and surface artifacts systematically collected. Surface artifact densities and features will be used to create a sampling design and an integrated field strategy using auger coring, backhoe trenching and hand excavation will be employed to acquire information about the density and distribution of cultural materials (including artifacts, floral and faunal remains) features, paleoenvironmental indicators and radiocarbon samples. GIS databases will be developed. In conjunction with regional data this information will be used to reconstruct changes in subsistence, social and spatial organization over time. The team will also examine the effect of these behavioral changes on the landscape. The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is one of the most significant in the human past, and its repercussions are still felt today. With the advent of agricultural economies, humans began to experience widespread sedentism, urban life, and social complexity with multiple ramifications: social ranking and stratification, occupational specialization, centralized political power and organized warfare. Only after humans become dependent on agricultural economies did the human impact on the environment result in massive, long term or permanent changes in vegetation communities, denudation and anthropogenic soil changes. While this transition has long been a focus for archaeological research, the factors which underlie it are still poorly understood. This research should shed additional light doc3494 none This project provides funding for the development of a scaleable and generic theory of enterprise which will provide new theoretical insight into the nature of the complex organizational networks. From a single firm s perspective, the enterprise includes the organization itself, suppliers, distributors, and end consumers, and invariably transcends multiple industries and markets. Complexity theory will be used as the basis for framing a theory of enterprises. Case study observations from Honda of America and DaimlerChrysler will identify archetypal configurations within enterprises, and a series of theoretical propositions will be developed which can be tested in subsequent extensions of the project. A simulation model of these enterprises will also be developed to verify and validate our theory. New theoretical models in this area are imperative to inform both practice and education. At the core of such a theory lies the tension between control and emergence. Controls represent the actions an organization takes to influence the behavior and outcomes of other firms in its enterprise system. However, the structure and behavior of an enterprise are in large part emergent, outside of the control of the organization. Whereas control may lead to short-term efficiency, emergence leads to long-term creativity and adaptive responses. By implication, then, too much enterprise control may actually thwart the long-term goals of the organization, leading us to raise questions if such extended control (e.g. ERP) is feasible or even desirable. This research will identify the critical middle ground between too much and too little control, between centralized versus emergent order. It will ultimately attempt to identify the theoretical limits of centralized control offered by modern information technology such as integrated ERP. This research will give organizations specific prescriptions concerning how to move forward with their modernization plans concerning information technology and enterprise integration doc3495 none McAllister A morphologically and functionally distinct pair of sex chromosomes provides a basis for gender determination in many organisms. One chromosome (X) is shared between the two genders, and contains a normal set of functional genes; the other (Y) is restricted to one gender, and has few genes. These differences arise through a repeatable evolutionary process, because pairs of sex chromosomes have arisen multiple times from pairs of identical chromosomes (autosomes), a transition that has been demonstrated for the X-Y pair in humans. This project involves molecular and genetic analyses of Drosophila americana americana, a species with a chromosomal rearrangement that has recently transformed a pair of its autosomes into neo-sex chromosomes. The long-term objective of the study is to reveal the forces influencing loss of gene function on the male-limited neo-Y chromosome of D. a. americana. Studies will characterize the pattern of sequence variation in the region adjacent to the centromere of these neo-sex chromosomes, because this region is subjected to a gradient of restricted recombination. These data will lead to a better understanding of the relationship between recombination and the forces of mutation, selection and genetic drift. The study of Y chromosomes provides a model system for demonstrating the consequences of restricted recombination, which has implications for understanding factors influencing asexual reproduction and evolution within closely-linked regions of the genome doc3496 none The evolution of multicellular organisms is the premier example of the integration of lower levels of function and selection into a single, higher-level individual or unit of fitness. Explaining the transition from single cells to multicellular organisms is a major challenge for evolutionary theory. We approach the origin of multicellularity through the understanding of cooperation and conflict among cells in cell groups. Coping with mutation is a critical factor during evolutionary transitions, since mutation enhances the scope for selection both within and between evolutionary units leading to conflict between levels of selection. We will study the evolution of the basic reproductive modes used in multicellular organisms from the point of view of coping with mutation. The way in which mutational variation is organized by the reproductive biology is a fundamental problem for the emergence of new evolutionary units. The general objective of this grant it is to understand the emergence of complex evolutionary units. The organization of the living world is hierarchical-lower level units group together and cooperate to form higher level units of organization (genes, chromosomes, bacteria-like cells, eukaryotic-like cells (cells in cells), multicellular organisms and societies). While it may be easy to agree on the basic role played by cooperation in the diversification of life, it remains a difficult interaction to understand. Cooperation has traditionally been approached from two different perspectives-within species and between species. The proposed work aims to bridge these different traditions doc3497 none This award provides support for Ph.D. graduate students and new investigators in the International Society for Bayesian Analysis attending the Sixth World Meeting, ISBA , held 28 May - 1 June in Hersonissos, Crete. More than 125 talks by over 200 presenters, and three poster sessions, are planned on the themes of Official Statistics, Public Policy, and Governmental Statistics. This conference brings together academic and applied Bayesian statisticians throughout the world, many of them recent Ph.D.s or current Ph.D. candidates, due to the demographic consequence of the rapid growth of the Bayesian statistics. The award funds are primarily devoted to defraying the expenses of graduate students, new researchers, and members of under-represented groups from the U.S. Partial support is provided from the Division of International Programs doc3498 none deBry Living rodents comprise about one half of all extant mammals - a total of over 2,000 species classified into about 32 families. Resolving the evolutionary relationships among these families has resisted over 100 years of study, primarily using morphological characteristics. Previous studies of rodent phylogeny using DNA sequence data have resulted in only minimal resolution of deep relationships. This study will both increase the number of rodent and non-rodent species examined and substantially increase the amount of DNA sequence data per species, compared to those previous DNA sequence studies. Over 5,000 base pairs of DNA sequence data will be collected, from portions of five different nuclear protein-coding genes from 46 representative rodent species and 14 non-rodent outgroups. The study is designed to maximize cohesion with other, ongoing studies of mammalian phylogeny, of both deeper (inter-ordinal) and more recent (intra-familial) divergences. Data obtained will also be used to address several aspects of one of the most fundamental questions in molecular evolution: how and why nucleotide and protein sequences change over time. Three specific hypotheses will be tested: 1) changes in protein structure can convert nucleotide positions that were previously invariable into positions that can be varied; 2) the primary determinant of the rate of molecular evolution is generation time; 3) natural selection on translational accuracy is capable of causing non-random usage of synonymous codons. The tests of all three of these hypotheses are thoroughly integrated with the phylogenetic aspect of this project. Rodents, by virtue of their rich species diversity and access to many different nuclear gene sequences, are perhaps the best model system with which to address these important evolutionary process questions doc3499 none Pitnick The crucial event for the origin of new species is the formation of reproductive isolation. How one species splits into two reproductively isolated groups of organisms, however, is poorly understood. Fruitflies of the genus Drosophila have been a model system for studies of speciation. These studies have focused on premating or postzygotic isolating mechanisms, or those processes that determine whether or not males and females mate and whether or not they produce viable and fertile offspring, respectively. The multitude of events occurring between insemination and egg fertilization has been largely ignored in studies of speciation. Recent work, however, indicates that sperm, seminal fluid, and female reproductive tract characteristics that are of central importance for successful reproduction are rapidly divergent. The investigators postulate that this divergence will cause diminished reproductive success whenever members of genetically differentiated populations interbreed, and they propose a series of experiments to explicitly test this hypothesis using D. arizonae and its sibling species D. mojavensis, both endemic to North America. Because D. mojavensis from different geographic regions are considered to be incipient species, the investigators will take advantage of a naturally occurring continuum of reproductive isolation for testing their predictions. Preliminary data indicate that populations of D. mojavensis differ significantly in the traits to be measured. By conducting laboratory crosses between members of different populations and species with known reproductive characteristics, the investigators will determine how these characteristics lead to reproductive barriers central to the formation of new species. Results of these experiments may have important implications for the formation of new species doc3500 none Markow The crucial event for the origin of new species is the formation of reproductive isolation. How one species splits into two reproductively isolated groups of organisms, however, is poorly understood. Fruitflies of the genus Drosophila have been a model system for studies of speciation. These studies have focused on premating or postzygotic isolating mechanisms, or those processes that determine whether or not males and females mate and whether or not they produce viable and fertile offspring, respectively. The multitude of events occurring between insemination and egg fertilization has been largely ignored in studies of speciation. Recent work, however, indicates that sperm, seminal fluid, and female reproductive tract characteristics that are of central importance for successful reproduction are rapidly divergent. The investigators postulate that this divergence will cause diminished reproductive success whenever members of genetically differentiated populations interbreed, and they propose a series of experiments to explicitly test this hypothesis using D. arizonae and its sibling species D. mojavensis, both endemic to North America. Because D. mojavensis from different geographic regions are considered to be incipient species, the investigators will take advantage of a naturally occurring continuum of reproductive isolation for testing their predictions. Preliminary data indicate that populations of D. mojavensis differ significantly in the traits to be measured. By conducting laboratory crosses between members of different populations and species with known reproductive characteristics, the investigators will determine how these characteristics lead to reproductive barriers central to the formation of new species. Results of these experiments may have important implications for the formation of new species doc3501 none Pulliam Metapopulation theory posits that suitable habitat may frequently be unoccupied. Furthermore, source-sink theory predicts that species may often occupy unsuitable habitat, given that immigration from source areas is sufficiently high. This project addresses the crucial question of how to identify suitable, unoccupied habitat and distinguish it from unsuitable habitat. The proposed research focuses on six species of forest understory herbs. The species were chosen to represent a broad range of habitat distribution and dispersal characteristics appropriate for testing the specific hypotheses to be addressed. This study is being conducted at the Coweeta LTER site. The approach includes experimental field tests of specific hypotheses about the role of soil moisture and temperature in determining the geographic and altitudinal ranges of the study species. Overall, the study will both further conceptual understanding of the relationships between habitat requirements and species distributions and will provide a practical approach to operationalizing the concept of suitable habitat. The study should also prove useful in predicting and monitoring changes in species distributions in response to climate change doc3502 none Delph Some of the most conspicuous features of organisms are differences between the sexes (known as sexual dimorphism). Sexual selection is usually invoked to explain such differences and may explain dimorphism in characters that are not directly related to mate acquisition because of a cascade of genetic effects. Previous research with the dioecious plant Silene latifolia, which has remarkable sexual dimorphism in flower production, shows that individuals that produce a relatively high number of flowers have upregulated metabolisms and may pay life history costs (such as lower longevity). Artificial selection lines will be created that will have both increased and reduced sexual dimorphism in flower size and number. These lines will be planted out in experimental arrays to assess the consequences of flower production on fitness via two pathways - mating success (sexual selection) and longevity (natural selection). The combination of increasing the phenotypic variation in traits via artificial selection and subsequent field experimentation with these lines should yield great power in understanding the causes and patterns of selection. This work will help us determine whether sexual dimorphism in morphological, physiological, and life history traits has evolved via sexual selection doc3503 none Sanderson and Gusfield Supertrees are phylogenies (rooted evolutionary trees) assembled from smaller phylogenies that share some but not all taxa (twigs or end branches) in common. Thus, supertrees can make novel statements about relationships of taxa that do not co-occur on any single source tree while still retaining all the hierarchical information from all source trees. As a method of combining existing phylogenetic information, supertrees potentially solve many of the problems incurred by other methods, such as lack of homologous characters, incompatible data types, or combining trees with different taxa. However, despite the potential for constructing large trees and synthesizing phylogenetic relationships from trees based on disparate sources of evidence, supertree construction has mainly been an informal by hand operation, done without the use of specially developed software. Furthermore, there is little ground for assessing the reliability of such supertrees. In a collaboration among biologists and computer scientists, Drs. Sanderson, Gusfield, and colleagues are examining a new class of methods that is somewhat analogous to phylogenetic distance methods but uses a novel distance measure based on flips of cells in the matrix representation of the source trees. In addition to generating supertrees, flip-supertree methods will help systematists focus on poorly known or contentious taxa, thereby directing future systematic effort where it is most needed. Accuracy and speed of supertree methods will be tested through simulation studies, and through use of the web-based database of phylogenetic trees in TreeBASE, to determine methods most useful to systematists. The graphically oriented software to be developed will implement various supertree algorithms and offer improved methods to visualize and compare trees that share some, but not all, taxa in common doc3504 none This proposal will add some 172 outrigger counters to Milagro. This new addition will improve Milagro s energy resolution, remove a systematic angular bias, and increase the detector aperture. Funding this proposal will also enable Milagro to identify those gamma bursts with high-energy gamma rays in a timely way so that this information can be broadcasted to other detectors and telescopes for confirming observations doc3505 none Ashton The Center for Tropical Forest Science (CTFS) is an organ of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, established to foster research collaboration between universities and research institutions in the US and the humid tropics. A focus of CTFS is to document the abiotic and historical biogeographic correlates of tree species diversity in biodiverse lowland tropical forests, consistently expressed on the three tropical continents. The patterns revealed will facilitate formulation of explanatory hypotheses for the maintenance of biodiversity, testable by experiment. Aided by computer simulations , the impact of timber harvesting and other human interventions on tree species diversity is being predicted, and will be tested in associated research including logging experiments. There are six core study plots in Asian tropical forests and this proposal seeks funding to re-census these plots. Dynamic data forthcoming from four already established plots will enable the investigators to document changes in forest dynamics along abiotic gradients of regional scale, notably rainfall seasonality, for the first time. Two of these four plots experienced unprecedented droughts since their previous census; analysis will here yield base-line data on the impact of climate change on biodiverse tropical ecosystems doc3506 none In recent years it has become clear that all animals share common molecular mechanisms by which they are able to detect chemicals in their environment. Insects, like many animals, use olfaction (smell) to sense changes in their surroundings which in turn influence several characteristic behaviors. One important example of an insect behavior that is largely controlled by olfaction is the preference for human blood meals displayed by several species of mosquitoes some of which are responsible for the transmission of diseases such as encephalitis and malaria. Our work is concerned with the study of the genetic basis for this olfactory driven preference in mosquitoes. To carry out this project we propose to identify and characterize a set of genes from the mosquito, Anopheles gambiae that encode proteins that act as odorant receptors. Such receptors act to recognize and specifically bind particular olfactory cues as a necessary first step in the mosquito s ability to sense and respond to these chemicals. We will use molecular techniques to look for mosquito genes that are closely related to previously identified odorant receptors that have recently been identified in a highly studied model insect, the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster. Once candidate genes for these receptors have been isolated they will be tested to see if they are expressed in correct antennal cells of the mosquito that are known to be responsible for olfaction in this insect. By successfully identifying odorant receptors from mosquitoes we hope to be able to better understand the processes by which this insect is able to sense its surroundings initiate the behaviors that ultimately results in the choice of what type of animal to bite. We also expect that these studies will eventually lead to a better understanding of what signals these insects respond to (which may lead to the development of new and powerful insect repellents) as well as a better appreciation of the events that have lead to the evolution of blood feeding preference among insects in general doc3507 none Pringle The primary objective of this LTREB project is to understand the link between surface-subsurface water interactions and ecosystem processes in tropical streams in lowland Costa Rica. The focus is on how nutrient-rich groundwater affects microbially-mediated decomposition processes in streams where decomposing organic matter is the primary food source for higher trophic levels. The PI s will examine how landscape patterns in stream solute chemistry, resulting from variation in solute-rich groundwater inputs, affect patterns in growth and secondary production of stream-dwelling insects. First, the hypothesis that landscape-scale variation in insect secondary production is affected by inter-stream variation in the proportion of geothermally modified ground water will be tested. Second, to isolate the effects of phosphorus, a whole stream P enrichment study will be continued to evaluate phosphorus effects on insect growth rates, insect secondary production, rates of leaf decomposition, and microbial activity associated with leaf decomposition. Whether or not these processes become N limited as P availability increases will also be determined. The proposal studies will be the first to determine the long-term effects of nutrient enrichment in a detrital-based stream in the wet neotropics. In addition, this research will continue to build the only long-term data set on stream solute chemistry in primary lowland rainforest in Central America. Stream solute chemistry and ecosystem process-oriented data are of fundamental importance to understanding and management of tropical forest and in predicting effects of regional and potentially global environmental change on these threatened ecosystems. This long-term program has provided, and will continue to provide, critical information for other ecosystem studies, along with numerous opportunities for undergraduate and graduate research doc3508 none 00- Briggs Ecosystems in transition: Causes and consequences of dramatic shifts in growth form dominance Worldwide, the structure and function of many ecosystems are in transition due to global changes in climatic means and extremes, increased atmospheric CO2, nitrogen deposition, alterations in land management, and the spread of invasive exotic species. In the tallgrass prairies of the eastern Great Plains, the expansion of shrub cover and forest encroachment into this grassland is a widespread phenomenon. This is a serious conservation concern since tallgrass prairie is considered an endangered ecosystem. The objective of this project is to use a tallgrass prairie ecosystem to evaluate the patterns, mechanisms and ecological consequences of transition to closed-canopy shrub woodland. We will test hypotheses regarding the role that resource availability plays in woody plant expansion in grasslands. Evaluating this grassland-to-shrubland transition at levels from the leaf to the landscape will provide both the mechanistic specificity, as well as the large-scale generality, required for successful conservation efforts doc3509 none Poff This project will investigate the ability of mobile herbivores (grazers) to regulate the structure and function of the autotrophic community (e.g., algae), and how this relationship varies with changing environmental conditions. The research approach is to elucidate the mechanisms underlying the outcomes of interactions among herbivore species under a range of physical conditions. Herbivores that graze bottom communities in streams will be included in a series of experiments whereby the dominant environmental gradient (current velocity) is altered. Experiments will assess autotrophic biomass accumulation and community composition across the environmental gradient, as well as the functional redundancy among grazer species in regulating algal communities. The experimental approaches are well integrated so that it will be possible to scale-up experiments and make mechanistic predictions about the magnitude of multi-species herbivory under variable environmental conditions. Results of this study may extend to other ecosystems with spatial heterogeneity in physical conditions and with a variety of herbivorous species. Moreover, the research has significant implications for understanding co-existence of consumers and the degree of redundancy or substitutability among species. Such understanding is critical for supporting successful restoration of stream and river ecosystems doc3510 none Microorganisms that grow within or upon leaves alternate between a life cycle phase associated with the leaf, a transport phase in the atmosphere, and growth on another leaf of the same or different plant species. This project seeks to explain, both by mathematical models and experimental tests, how a resident population of microbes can be elevated synergistically by the influx of relatively small numbers of immigrant microbe cells to the leaf. The models will be tested by examination of natural and experimentally enhanced levels of a yeast- like fungus, Aureobasidium pullulans, on apple leaf surfaces. The field tests will be facilitated by use of molecular marker methods, which allow the background population of A. pullulans to be discriminated from the introduced immigrant population. This project has two significant scientific implications. First, it may help explain how populations of species survive and compete in nature in isolated patches when the number of immigrants is small relative to the size of the extant population. Second, microbes inhabiting leaves cause important plant diseases. These pathogens share many of the features of A. pullulans. Therefore, this system should give greater quantitative insight into the biology and epidemiology of microbial plant diseases doc3511 none DEB- David A. Grimaldi Drs. David Grimaldi and Valerie Schawaroch of the American Museum of Natural History have been awarded a grant to study the anatomy, habits, distribution, and evolutionary relationships of a group of fruitflies used as an experimental foundation by many researchers in genetics and developmental biology. The common laboratory fruitfly, Drosophila melanogaster, is probably better known than any other animal species on earth. Serious study of the fly began in , when it was first used as the model organism for genetics. Drosophila melanogaster actually belongs to a group of 175 named species, the melanogaster species group, all of which live naturally in tropical forests of Africa, Eurasia, Australia, and Pacific Islands. Some species, like D. melanogaster, breed in a great variety of fruits and vegetables, and have become widespread (even agricultural pests) wherever people have settled. The diversity of species and habits, their ease of lab culture, and unique knowledge of the model species, has made the melanogaster species group an ideal subject for all aspects of comparative biology. Nevertheless, accurate identification of species by specialists and especially other biologists like geneticists is very difficult. Distributions of individual species are poorly documented, and introductions of exotic species are therefore difficult to detect. Collections of major natural history museums already harbor new species, awaiting complete description, naming, and classification. The goal of the PIs is to rectify deficiencies in the basic systematics of the melanogaster species group, by production of a hard copy and digital synthetic monograph which will treat the anatomy, habits, distribution, and relationships of each species in detail, including newly described ones. This monograph will stand as a major reference, and will be accompanied by an interactive, lavishly illustrated CD-ROM for identification of species. The package will be of widespread use to students, laboratory technicians, quarantine entomologists, and various biologists, and will greatly facilitate all aspects of comparative biology wherever these flies are used, from genetics and physiology to development and evolution doc3512 none Susan P. Harrison Outcrops of serpentine soil in California support a rich flora of endemic species, many of which are naturally rare. This study will test the hypothesis that species diversity in this specialized flora is shaped by the island-like nature of serpentine outcrops, among other factors. I will analyze patterns of species diversity in the serpentine endemic flora across the entire state, considering diversity at both the regional scale (subcounties) and the local scale (50 x 20 m plots). The regional data will be gathered from published sources and analyzed with spatial statistics; the local data will be gathered by intensive field sampling at 24 sites distributed around the state. Path analysis and other statistical techniques will be used to determine the relationships between regional species diversity, local species diversity, and environmental variables (e.g. soil chemistry, climate, topography, and the spatial distribution of serpentine doc3513 none Galloway The Department of Physics at Southwest Texas State University develops and implements a science masters program in Materials Physics that will significantly increase the hands-on experience of the degree candidates and train them in areas of interest to the regional semiconductor industry. The program includes new laboratory-focused courses, research internships within the university and co-op type industrial internships. The university is located in the heart of a high-technology industrial community as well as a geographical region rich in under-represented minority candidates in the sciences and engineering. The project can potentially serve as a model for graduate applied physics education doc3514 none This project addresses the problem of running enterprise systems in a flexible, responsive, and reliable manner to capture the economical potential that the market might offer, while minimizing the impact of fluctuations in the market. To achieve these goals, systematic control and optimization tools will be developed that can be used to assess the ability of supply chain systems to react to fluctuations, as well as to control the system to improve its responsiveness. Large scale problems will be addressed, the plan is to investigate the integration of supply optimization, inventory control and dynamics to achieve cost optimal performance, while reducing inventory levels and coping effectively with disturbances in supplies, orders and delivery times. The specific objective objectives are to develop a novel framework for multi-level planning that integrates optimization, inventory control and dynamics in the context of a supply chain with decentralized control. Moreover, to investigate a novel approach to model the dynamics and control of the entire supply chain. For the implementation, the plan is to develop a prototype of an internet-based system that will allow the effective collaboration among the various parties in the supply chain. A major expected benefit of the research is the creation of a science base that provides a framework and guidance for developing decision support tools for enterprise systems that leverage the new information technologies. Regarding the proposed integration of optimization, inventory control and dynamics, the major benefit will be the coordinated decision making in the supply chain that operates as a decentralized system, which reflects more closely the real-world behavior of these systems. Finally, the research should provide a scalable enterprise solution, which is urgently needed as software companies are scrambling to meet the demand, and companies are investing in automated systems without a coherent plan or understanding doc3515 none Mark S. Hafner Dr. Mark S. Hafner, a zoologist at Louisiana State University, along with microbiologists Drs. Frederick Rainey and Naomi Ward-Rainey at the same institution have been awarded a grant to investigate the shared evolutionary history of three symbiotic organisms: small rodents called pocket gophers, the lice that live in the fur of the pocket gophers, and selected lineages of bacteria that live inside the lice. Previous research by Hafner his other colleagues has established that the pocket gophers and their lice have been living together for millions of years, resulting in nearly identical phylogenies (family trees) for the gophers and lice. The presence collaborative team now proposes to use molecular methods, including examination of DNA and RNA, to determine if the bacteria that live inside the lice also have shared a long history of association with their hosts. The major goal of this 2-year project is to characterize the bacterial community living inside the lice, and distinguish between lineages of bacteria that live more-or-less permanently inside the lice versus those that are mere transients passing through the louse s digestive tract. This research will require careful examination and comparison of both intra-louse and extra-louse (gopher-associated and free-living) bacterial communities; hence, an important byproduct of this research will be characterization of the microbial communities associated with the entire pocket gopher burrow system. The experimental approach will incorporate three lines of evidence: microscopic visualization of microbial communities inside the lice, culturing and DNA sequencing of bacterial lineages, and culture-independent molecular analyses of bacterial diversity. Ultimately, documentation of a long-term association between the bacteria and their hosts will allow for comparison of rates of genetic change in these two distantly related groups doc3516 none Hellberg Proteins associated with male reproductive function typically evolve much faster than other proteins. In marine invertebrates that release their eggs and sperm directly into seawater, these male proteins, along with their egg-borne female complements, determine whether individuals and species can interbreed. Natural selection is known to promote the divergence of these male proteins between species; however, the mechanisms causing this selection--particularly the role of functionally related female proteins--remain unknown. Dr. Hellberg will evaluate proposed mechanisms for selection on the sperm protein lysin by comparing DNA sequences of the genes encoding lysin and its egg-borne receptor (VERL) from different species of the marine snail Tegula. VERL contains about 30 internal repeats of 150 amino acids, but sequences for flanking regions at the beginning and end of this protein are not known. Using molecular methods, the PI will determine DNA sequence information for VERL. He will then compare patterns of this sequence data among different species of Tegula. Patterns of VERL variation should illuminate mechanisms causing rapid change in gamete recognition proteins, in turn broadening our understanding of adaptive molecular change in general and the evolution of new, reproductively isolated species in particular. In addition, co-evolution between VERL and lysin may provide insights into the design of highly specific molecular glues (which like VERL are often composed of repeated molecular sequences doc3517 none 00- Groffman Colder soils in a warmer world: A snow manipulation in a northern hardwood forest ecosystem Analysis of the indirect effects of climate change on ecosystem processes is a critical challenge in ecosystem ecology. Snow depth is an important regulator of nitrogen (N) cycling in ecosystems and is highly responsive to changes in climate. This project is investigating changes in nitrogen (N) cycling and loss that occur in response to experimental manipulations of snowpack in a northern hardwood forest. The investigators will experimentally simulate the late development of snowpack, which is predicted to occur under warmer climate conditions, and characterize effects on soil freezing, soil physical structure and N cycling and loss. The project will produce basic information on physical control of plant-soil-microbial interactions and will allow scientists to evaluate the effects of reductions in snow cover associated with climate change on soil fertility, air and water quality, and the N cycling and retention of these forest ecosystems doc3518 none One hundred and forty years ago Charles Darwin proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection. This theory has been remarkably successful in explaining both the diversity of species of plants and animals and the intricate fit between organisms and their environment. One of the great puzzles remaining for evolutionary biologists is the evolution of sexual dimorphism - differences between males and females of the same species in size, shape, and coloration. Divergence of populations in sexual dimorphism cannot be explained by standard evolutionary theory. The research proposed will test the hypothesis that change in dimorphism of adults is the result of changes in the growth and development (ontogeny) of males and females. To test this idea the investigators will study sex-specific growth patterns of recently established populations of the house finch (Carpodacus mexicanus), a small songbird. This will be the first study of the role of growth and development in evolution of sexual dimorphism in natural populations of vertebrates. Ultimately, this work will provide significant new data and insight into our understanding of how the morphologies of males and female evolve. More generally, these data will increase our understanding of the processes that enable rapid colonization by invasive species and, thereby, aid conservation efforts doc3519 none Shaul Mukamel of the University of Rochester and Rudy Marcus of Caltech are supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program for a prototype summer school for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, administered through the Gordon Research Conferences office. The summer school runs 11 days and consists of 3-4 lectures per day morning and evening, with afternoons open for discussion. Lecturers are in residence for at least 7 of the 11 days, to allow time for interaction with students. The focus of this summer school, a pilot program, is on teaching analytic techniques relevant to rate processes in the condensed phase. It is envisioned that future summer schools will focus on other areas of theoretical chemistry. The purpose of this summer school is to provide a basic survey of current theoretical techniques to chemistry graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and advanced senior undergraduate students. The lectures will emphasize and illustrate specific analytical techniques as well as physically motivated approximations and the connection with current experiments. Lecturers will discuss what aspects of their work are transferable to other quite different problems in various fields of theory doc3520 none This research will examine distributed and collaborative decision paradigms for next generation enterprise systems. The goal for the project is to explore a scalable framework for enterprise decision-making through the development of distributed and collaborative transaction paradigms in the context of supply chain management. The main objectives of this research will be to: (1) develop fundamental theory for distributed enterprise transactions, (2) explore enterprise coordination issues in the context of electronic commerce and supply chain logistics, and (3) conduct field studies based on real-world industry applications. A main thesis of this research is that the synergy between e-commerce and supply-chain logistics forms an unprecedented area of innovation and discovery, which play a pivotal role in transforming the current economy. Building on solid theory and industry realities, the research in transaction paradigms and supply-chain coordination will be crucial links in this transformation. If successful, the result of this research will lead to simplify information management in the new electronic business environment. A basic paradigm in conventional Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is one that seeks total visibility of system details in a top-down, hierarchical manner. This is accomplished by maintaining painfully detailed information of all perceivable aspects of the organization using sophisticated information and database management systems. This information must be kept up-to-date since it serves as a basis for decision making throughout the system. For large-scale operations involving multiple facilities or firms in a supply chain, the current approach encounters major difficulties in scaling up. The PI s will use a decentralized approach analogous to the operations of a free market: each decision entity makes locally autonomous decisions based on privately owned information, self-interest, and locally motivated preference constraints. Centralized information management is drastically simplified to that of maintaining market fairness and stability. To be implemented in the context of electronic commerce, this new paradigm facilitates a universally agreed upon domain of electronic transactions and information exchange. The grant brings together a two-institution research team. The research will be conducted with participation from industry partners at Lehigh s Manufacturing Logistics Institute and Wharton s Fishman-Davison Center for Service and Operations Management doc3521 none This grant provides funding to develop a formal methodology for the measurement of scalability of enterprise systems. The project seeks to create a taxonomy of scalability attributes to classify and describe each aspect of the enterprise in an unambiguous, clear, and concise manner. Measurement theory will be applied to generate a quantification of magnitude for scalability aspects, to generate scales, and to define relationships to map within the attribute s domain. Finally procedures for acquiring the measurement from an enterprise system will be conducted. This research project will adhere to the scientific process and after formulating the multi-dimensional definition of scalability and developing scales we will empirically validate the measurement methodology using select industry test cases. The primary goal of the MOSES project is to address the issues of defining and measuring scalability of the enterprise. The specific objectives of the MOSES project are: (1) provide a formal multidimensional definition of scalability, (2) develop a measurement methodology, (3) develop supporting software tools, and (4) illustrate coupling the proposed methodology and software tools with a target enterprise environment. By measuring scalability managers, engineers, and system designers will be able to verify claims of software vendors, to identify areas in the enterprise for improvement with respect to scalability, to compare different system designs, to design scalability into an enterprise system, and to benchmark enterprise systems. A more formal foundation to defining and measuring enterprise system scalability will enable systems designers to better understand and predict the enterprise s performance and contribute to better enterprise system designs doc3522 none This grant provides funding for exploratory research on the development of scalable enterprise systems, with particular emphasis on web-based electronic commerce applications. While transaction volume is one aspect of the problem, scalability also includes the ability of a system to adapt to a changing environment, including new products, processes, technology, markets, and business partners. To address the problem of scalability, a set of interrelated topics will be explored: (1) grammatical models of enterprise workflow; (2) tools for supporting the design of scalable systems; and (3) strategies for actually measuring or predicting scalability. This research will build on an existing prototype system, called MIDAS (Manufacturing Integration and Design Automation System), which provides a grammar-based framework for visualizing and managing work processes. Grammatical models provide the conceptual foundation on which the design tools and measurement strategies will be based. If successful, the results of this research will provide a theory that characterizes system structure and scalability and measures interdependencies among processes. The research will also lead to a prototype of a framework within which such metrics could be validated (through empirical research) and applied (through design methodologies and tools). The theory and the prototype tool will form a foundation for developing a web-based enterprise system that can handle various different yet interdependent, processes. Such an enterprise system will be scalable in terms of not only volume but also variations, and will evolve into a powerful tool to model, configure, and reconfigure a wide variety of processes in relation to e-commerce activities in a virtual community doc3523 none 00- Pregitzer Plant-microbe interactions and the production of dissolved organic carbon and nitrogen Nitrogen (N) saturation of terrestrial ecosystems is one of the most important contemporary ecological issues. Researchers at Michigan Technological University and the University of Michigan are adding nitrate (NO3-) to northern hardwood forests in Michigan to learn how this common forest type responds to chronic N additions. After six years, a variety of changes indicate chronic N additions have altered ecosystem processes. These include much greater leaching losses of dissolved organic carbon, dissolved organic nitrogen and nitrate, and reduced soil respiration. Over the next three years the research team will continue the nitrate additions in order to learn the specific mechanisms behind these changes and to determine if they will persist over time or if they are only temporary responses that will fade as the ecosystems adjust to higher levels of N availability. If the changes persist or magnify, they could have profound effects on this widely-distributed forest type doc3524 none This project focuses on three topics: studies of chiral liquid crystalline materials, studies of polymer surfaces and interfaces relevant to liquid crystal alignment, and studies of surface effects on liquid crystal bulk alignment for liquid crystal displays. According to Lord Kelvin, chirality refers to the structural asymmetry of an object whose image in a plane mirror does not coincide with itself. Chiral liquid crystals have become increasingly important to liquid crystal science and technology. More generally, molecular chirality also plays an exceptionally important role in science and technology in science because, for reasons unknown, practically all natural products such as DNA and proteins are chiral. Research will include developing the nonlinear optical spectroscopic technique for unique studies of this special class of liquid crystalline materials. High sensitivity of the technique allows measurements not only on the bulk fluid but also on monolayers, surfaces, and films of chiral liquid crystals. From the spectra near vibrational resonances, chirality and chiral strength in selected atomic groups of chiral molecules will be deduced. They will be correlated to the chiral molecular structure and the macroscopic helical structure of the liquid crystal bulk. The results will yield a better understanding of chirality from the molecular level and chiral liquid crystal properties for potential applications. %%% Liquid crystals have found wide applications in the modern world, with the surface properties often being the determining factors for an application. This research will enhance our knowledge of liquid crystals as extraordinary materials for modern optoelectronic application such as displays and memory and sensor devices. Substrates in liquid crystal displays and other polymer surfaces potentially useful for liquid crystal alignment. The spectroscopic technique also can be used to study liquid crystal monolayers adsorbed at an interface. Information on the orientation and alignment of liquid crystal monolayers is important as they control the bulk alignment of liquid crystal films. A better understanding of the polymer surface structures and their interaction with adsorbed liquid crystal monolayers would be of help to the design of future liquid crystal devices doc3525 none The genetics of adaptation will be examined in the Leviviridae, a group of single stranded RNA phage. The phage will be selected for growth at high temperature. High temperature inhibits the growth of the wild-type phage. However, after propagating the phage at high temperature for several generations, phage fitness recovers. In this study, eight different phage species will be propagated (via serial transfer) at high temperature. The genetic changes associated with adaptation to fast growth at high temperature will be assayed by completely sequencing the evolved phage and comparing these sequences to the ancestral sequence for each species. The specific questions that will be addressed include: (1) what are the genetic changes associated with adaptation to high temperature, (2) what are the fitness effects of the genetic changes, (3) what is the distribution of fitness effects of mutations that are fixed during the course of adaptive evolution, (4) is the evolution repeatable within a phage species, (5) to what extent does the phylogeny of the species predict specific change associated with adaptation to growth at high temperature, and, (6) to what extent do changes in the RNA molecule increase the stability of important stem-loop structures at high temperature? The Leviviridae are unique in that they have a very high mutation rate and the function of much of the secondary structure of the RNA molecule has been worked out; hence, the functional significance of many adaptive changes can be understood. Moreover, because a well-supported phylogeny of the group exists, the genetic changes can be placed into a phylogenetic context doc3526 none Misra This grant provides partial support of the costs of acquiring a wavelength-dispersive, automated X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometer system that has the capability of producing high-precision analyses of major, minor, and trace elements in bulk samples of rocks and soils. The instrument will be an integral part of several NSF-funded research projects being conducted by our faculty. These include the studies of Paleozoic paleosols by Steven Driese and Claudia Mora, of mantle xenoliths from the Siberian craton by Lawrence Taylor, and of the southern Appalachian granitoids and associated rocks by Robert Hatcher. The instrument will also provide critical analytical support for other active research projects in the Department -- studies of the southern Appalachian mafic-ultramafic rocks and the host rocks associated with mineral deposits by Kula Misra, investigation of contaminant and colloid transport in saprolites by Steven Driese and Larry McKay, analysis of geologic materials and pottery from the Karak Plateau of Jordan by Otto Kopp, and evaluation of high P-T fluid-rock interactions by Theodore Labotka. Potential users from other units in the University, who have indicated a need for the analytical capabilities offered by this instrument and will support its maintenance, include faculty from Plant and Soil Sciences, Anthropology, Chemistry and Materials Science and Engineering doc3527 none John P. Huelsenbeck Dr. John P. Huelsenbeck of the University of Rochester, has been awarded a grant to use Bayesian statistacal methods to study coevolutionary interactions between parasites and their host species. He is collaborating with Dr. Bret R. Larget of Duquesne University and Dr. Bruce H. Rannala of the University of Alberta (Canada) on this research. Parasites are organisms that are dependent on another organism (the host) for their survival and reproduction and are typically harmful to the host. Often, the association of a host and parasite is highly specific and ancient. In such cases, it is possible to infer the history of association between hosts and parasites by examining the phylogeny (genealogy) of related hosts and parasites. It is not uncommon for the phylogenies of hosts and parasites to be fully or partially concordant as the two groups have evolved in parallel. For example, if A, B, and C are the host species, and a, b, and c are the respective parasite species (species a parasitizes host A, and so on), a concordant phylogeny of three hosts and parasites might be ((A,B),C) and ((a,b),c). The host phylogeny is consistent with species A and B being each others closest relatives. Similarly, the parasites associated with A and B (namely, a and b) are also each others closest relatives. This pattern is consistent with cospeciation of the hosts and parasites; a speciation event in a host causes the associated parasite to speciate via allopatric speciation. Typically, the phylogenies of hosts and parasites are not completely concordant. Morevoer, the phylogenies of the hosts and parasites are never known without error. We have taken a Bayesian approach to infer the history of host-parasite association. The research funded by NSF proposes to estimate rates of host-switching, parasite speciation, and parasite extinction while accommodating uncertainty in the phylogenies of hosts and parasites. A numerical technique called Markov chain Monte Carlo will be used to perform the Bayesian inference doc3528 none Hammer This grant provides funding for developing fundamental theory and methodologies to support integrated operation of decentralized networks of firms producing goods under short lead times and variable demand. Research under this grant is directed towards specifying a complete decision support and information architecture that enables automated negotiation among firms and improves overall performance of these Flexible Production Networks (FPNs). In support of this objective, the investigators have identified four high-impact research areas: 1) Simulation, modeling, and analysis of FPN operation under imperfect information; 2) Capacity and cost models for firms that exist in multiple FPNs; 3) Generation of information wrappers that tie firms existing information systems to an information hub infrastructure; 4) Information models for representing complex FPN operations. Each of these four areas is critical to achieving a feasible computational infrastructure that represents the diverse production technologies within the FPN, while addressing issues of scalability, rapid deployment, and decentralized operation. Successful conclusion of this research will generate advances in operational support for firms existing within FPNs, as well as broader advances in theory concerning the deployment of information and decision support systems in a multi-firm environment. Current industrial initiatives in extended-enterprise resource planning systems are a positive step towards deployment and simplification of electronic transactions; however, they lack a framework for analysis and decision support for production involving a network of firms. Research under this grant provides such a framework, with a focus on low overhead, dynamic deployment of a computational, and flexible and scalable decision support for decentralized, multi-firm operations. Research in these areas will also broaden existing theory in decision support and computer science, where current models tend towards exact analysis and representation of limited or highly specific systems. In a broad sense, this work will re-focus current capabilities towards supporting more complex, flexible systems doc3529 none Dawn Tilbury, University of Michigan Workshop on Logic Control for Manufacturing Systems Discrete part manufacturing systems typically consist of numerous machines working together in a coordinated and sequential fashion. Programmable logic controllers are widely used to implement the control algorithms for these machines. Systems with hundreds or thousands of inputs and outputs, many of them simple on off switches, are not uncommon. The logic controller must handle not only the normal operation sequence and synchronization of the machines, but also the operator interface and error handling and recovery routines. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together participants from industry and academia to create an understanding of the gaps which exist between the theory of discrete-event systems and control and their implementation in industrial manufacturing systems. The focus will be on coordination and sequencing problems, complexity management, error handling and recovery, automatic generation of executable code, and control verification doc3530 none This grant provides funding for a interdisciplinary collaboration bringing together design and manufacturing experts with computer science experts to define a scalable information infrastructure to support product design in a multi-organization environment with limited but crucial trust and sharing in a cooperative context. To this end, this project will study the decomposition of a large design into smaller pieces that are worked on relatively independently; it will use and extend the XML internet standard to create a mechanism for self-description of an object-oriented design database structure so that each design group can independently choose to organize information in the most suitable form for its purpose, along with a schema description and access control meta-data in a standardized format; and it will develop tools to manage collaborative design in a diffuse distributed context, with shifting coalitions and topics of interest, using a generalized publish subscribe model. The end result of this project will be to create the basis upon which to build a comprehensive inter-enterprise design information management system. The results obtained from this research will reduce time-to-market and increase efficiencies in the design of complex products such as automobiles. It also has the potential to revolutionize enterprise resource management doc3531 none Roland Knapp and Orlando Sarnelle Collaborative Research: Recovery of Ecosystem Structure and Function Following Exotic Species Eradication The proposed research examines how ecosystems respond, not to invasion, but to the elimination of an exotic species. Specifically, this proposal examines the recovery of alpine lake systems in the Sierra Nevada, California, after the eradication of exotic trout. The PI s will ask whether vertebrate and invertebrate species native to alpine lakes return after the removal of exotic fish. A long-term whole-lake experiment will be used in which exotic fish have been successfully removed from three experimental lakes, while fish stocking continues in three control lakes. Monitoring of faunal assemblages in these six lakes, monitoring begun in before fish eradication, will continue in order to determine the rate of recovery and to better understand the life history attributes of species that facilitate or hinder recovery. The PI s will also ask how changes in species assemblages influence the functioning of alpine lake ecosystems. They will continue limnological monitoring of the whole-lake experiment to evaluate changes in nutrients and algal biomass following fish removal. The results of this study have important implications for the restoration of aquatic ecosystems worldwide doc3532 none This grant provides funding for the development of decision support technologies for e-market intermediaries. The Phase I focus will be on an intermediary model that matches a given set of demands to a set of supplies, e.g., to inventory or capacity across a set of production facilities. Four primary tasks will be required: (1) data representation specification (i.e. supply and demand); (2) intermediary architecture development; (3) matching algorithm development; and, (4) prototype implementation. Due to the Phase I time restrictions, these tasks will be initially adopted for the paper industry. The prototype will be based on an Internet application in order to ensure rapid implementation and easy demonstration. If successful, the primary benefit of this research will be the development of an enterprise approach that can achieve economies of scope attempted in ERP systems, but without the limitations of inflexibility and poor scalability. The enterprise intermediary will allow for multi-attribute search and decision support functionality that provides both the buyers and the suppliers with the ability to build dynamic supply chains and to make best use of this extra flexibility. The trading system will bring value to the participants by lowering the cost of transactions, improving manufacturing efficiency, and improving the business process doc3533 none Johnson & Porter Developmental geneticists have made tremendous progress characterizing molecular mechanisms by which genetic blueprints encode the traits of organisms. Genes often interact in pathways to regulate the final traits, and these interactions usually involve binding between different molecules. Drs. Johnson and Porter, the authors of this proposal, have incorporated these developmental pathways into models of evolutionary change. They started pairs of computer-simulated populations with identical genes and allowed them to evolve under identical conditions of natural selection. As these populations evolved, their hybrids quickly accumulated genetic incompatibilities and thus became drastically less fit. The authors have also developed analytical theory to make quantitative predictions. The simulation results fit the theoretical expectations. Johnson and Porter propose to examine the robustness of their models to different assumptions about binding functions and the relationship between traits and fitness. They will also investigate the extent to which hybrid incompatibilities can evolve despite some exchange of genes between the populations. This study has important implications for the solution to a fundamental evolutionary problem: species formation. Biologists remain interested in how one species become two because, among other things, knowledge of this process is critical for understanding how biodiversity is generated. Hybrid fitness reduction, an important contributor to the speciation process, usually is due to genetic incompatibilities: genes from one species do not interact well with genes of the other. How these incompatibilities evolve is still poorly understood, in large part because mechanistic models of how traits evolve are lacking. The proposed study provides such a plausible mechanism. Moreover, the proposed exploration of the basic evolutionary principles of developmental genetic pathways establishes a theoretical foundation for the ultimate union of population genetics and developmental biology doc3534 none Bemis and Grande Among the earliest lineages of vertebrate animals with living survivors today are several groups of primitive fishes including the sturgeons, bowfins, paddlefishes, and gars. Dr. William Bemis at University of Massachusetts-Amherst and his colleague at the Field Museum, Dr. Lance Grande, have been conducting detailed morphological and anatomical studies of all the living species of these fishes as well as of fossil material housed in the world s major museums. Their goal in this project is to integrate knowledge of the living species of gars with the wealth of fossil material known for the group, to describe morphological changes through time, assess migration routes and biogeographic ranges, and help determine the precise pattern of early vertebrate evolutionary diversification. Although all the living gars are limited to North and Central America, fossils have been described from Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America, from time horizons extending back through the Mesozoic. Many of these fossils are extremely well preserved, providing details of morphology and anatomy that make possible quite fine-scale comparison with living forms. In addition, the integration of fossil species with living taxa in an overall genealogical or phylogenetic framework and classification will help understand the environmental setting in which early fish evolution took place, for example whether marine lineages diversified less than freshwater lineages. Because fossil taxa typically will lack data for some features or characters observable from living species, the investigators will also explore theoretical issues concerning the effects of missing data on algorithms used to reconstruct phylogenetic trees doc3535 none Dwyer Most recent approaches to understanding host-pathogen interactions assume that host-pathogen population dynamics and host-pathogen co-evolution are separate subjects. Moreover, host-pathogen co-evolution is often assumed to be about pathogen virulence, rather than about host resistance or true co-evolution. In previous research on the interaction between gypsy moth and its virus, however, the PI has collected data showing that host variability in resistance to the virus plays an important role in gypsy moth outbreaks, and the preliminary attempts to model this system have suggested that the evolution of resistance may drive gypsy moth outbreaks. Thus, it seems likely that the evolution of resistance and fluctuating population densities are key to understanding the interaction between the gypsy moth and its virus, while the evolution of pathogen virulence may be important largely because it helps to maintain variability in host resistance. This research will investigate the following questions: Does host resistance drive population outbreaks in the gypsy moth? How is variability in host resistance maintained? The approach to answer these questions will be to document changes in host resistance and pathogen virulence in several outbreaking gypsy moth populations, during the period while these populations are collapsing because of virus epidemics. In addition, we will quantify additive genetic variability in virus resistance in the gypsy moth, to understand the potential for evolutionary changes in this insect. Also, we will explore whether host-pathogen specificity and or fitness tradeoffs in host and pathogen can help to maintain host resistance. This will serve to unite the two previously disparate fields of population dynamics and evolutionary dynamics, and may shed light on strategies to manage this pest insect doc3536 none This grant provides funding for the development of models of emergent enterprises that capture the independent behavior of each decision agent involved, as well as the effect of the interactions among agents. The modeling approach entails several steps. First, a representation scheme for the characteristics of individual participants will be developed. This representation will incorporate task information, organizational relationships, local and system level goals and possible changes in the environment. Second, the agent representation will be transformed into a state space representation that is better suited for the overall study of the dynamics of the system. Third, in order to incorporate the interactions between various agents, the problem will be formulated as an interacting particle system. A renormalization scheme will be used to reduce the system to a manageable size while maintaining an adequate level of accuracy. Different levels of aggregation will be tested to examine the tradeoffs between computational complexity and accuracy. Finally, the modeling approach will be validated using data collected from leading companies in the food industry. These data will be used to construct agent representations and then to verify the performance estimates based on real world observations. Large scale multi-agent simulations will be used to empirically estimate the performance of a given organizational configuration and the results will be compared with the predictions of the analytical model. If successful, the results of this research will allow accurate prediction of the dynamics of emergent organizations and the performance of the system in the long run. In addition, these models will provide insight into understanding the mechanisms that result in effective alliances and organizational designs. These models can be used by decision agents in an extended enterprise to estimate the performance of the enterprise resulting from different local decision strategies doc3537 none 00- Goldman LTREB: Energy flow and climate control: A program for continued long-term research at Castle Lake, CA The Castle Lake long-term research program is one of the longest running programs of its kind in the world, with a continuous data set spanning more than 40 years since . This study focuses on how energy in the form of carbon flows from primary producers (phytoplankton)to consumers (zooplankton) and eventually to fish, and on what determines the efficiency of energy flow in aquatic ecosystems in relation to year-to-year variability of climate forcing. In particular, the investigators will study which primary producers are nutritious to zooplankton and how year-to-year differences in climate affect the energy transfer processes in a lake ecosystem. These long-term studies will provide information useful to understanding how lake ecosystems might be altered by future climate change doc3538 none Kobe This proposal presents an integrated set of field experiments and model analyses to evaluate the relative influences of recruitment limitation and resource-based niches on the maintenance of tree species diversity in wet tropical forests. A particular focus of this proposal is soil resources (water and mineral nutrients), because strong indirect evidence warrants an examination of their role in the dynamics of tropical forest communities. The proposed addresses two sets of mechanisms that could enable the maintenance of high species diversity. First, to what extent are tropical tree species recruitment limited? Do species differ in recruitment limitation? Second, do tropical tree species partition gradients of resource availability? Specifically, what is the influence of soil resource and light availability on species-specific seedling survivorship and growth? Is there a trade-off among species in the ability to survive under low soil resources versus rapid growth under high soil resources. Is there a trade-off among species in colonization potential (fecundity and dispersal) versus competitive ability (resource based growth and survivorship), which underlies the maintenance of diversity? To address these questions, species-specific sub-models of seedling production and dispersal, and seedling growth and survival will be developed from field and experimental studies at La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica. This study will contribute to understanding the mechanisms that lead to high tree species diversity in tropical forests. It will characterize offspring recruitment in terms of seedling production and dispersion, which in comparison to seed trap studies, is less biased against animal dispersed species and provides more robust sample sizes to rigorously test recruitment potential. The study also tests the influence of soil resources and light availability on species-specific seedling survivorship and growth. Finally, the research will integrate empirical results to assess the relative importance of recruitment limitation versus resource-based niches to the maintenance of tropical tree diversity doc3539 none Proposal: PI: Yakov eliashberg et al : The program ``Low-dimensional contact geometry is organized jointly by the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) and the Department of Mathematics of Stanford University. It will run from mid-August till mid-December . The program will end with a a Contact Geometry Workshop. The goal of the program is to capitalize on recent progress in contact geometry. It seems that the time is ripe now for new breakthroughs in the field, and that the concentration of both established and young researchers in contact and symplectic geometry and related areas, as well as participation of several graduate students, may help to produce new remarkable results. The organizers feel that a coherent picture of contact geometry in 3 dimensions is within reach. In particular, the participants will try to achieve a complete classification of contact structures for large classes of 3-manifolds, to make further advances in the theory of Legendrian and transversal knots in contact 3-manifolds, and to establish further properties of contact 3-manifolds which serve as boundaries of symplectic 4-manifolds. Contact geometry was born more than two centuries ago in the work of Huygens, Hamilton, Jacobi as a geometric language for optics. It was soon realized that it has applications in many other areas, including non-holonomic mechanics and thermodynamics. One encounters contact geometry in everyday life when parking a car, skating, using a refrigerator, or watching the beautiful play of light in a glass of water. Sophus Lie, Elie Cartan, Darboux and many other great mathematicians devoted a lot of their work to this subject. However, till very recently most of the results were of a local nature. With the birth of symplectic and contact topology in the Eighties, the subject was reborn, and the last decade witnessed a number of breakthrough discoveries. There were found new important interactions with Hamiltonian mechanics, symplectic and sub-Riemannian geometry, foliation theory, complex geometry and analysis, topological hydrodynamics, 3-dimensional topology, and knot theory. Details of the program can be found at http: math.stanford.edu contact.html doc3540 none Alok Chaturvedi Purdue University CISE Next Generation Software: An Agent Based Modeling Framework for Scalable Interdependent Markets and Organization ERP systems are ubiquitous in the world of business. They are the source of competitive advantage that many companies enjoy today. Yet, the process of installing and using them is time consuming, frustrating and costly, and often businesses are not able to capture the full value inherent in such systems. We propose the construction of a scalable, agent based, virtual test bed for ERP systems. The system that is proposed is called SEAS or Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulations. When fully developed, SEAS used in conjunction with existing ERP systems will be helpful in creating a unified view of the business organization and its relation to the market mechanism. Users will be able to better understand the complexities and usefulness of ERP systems SEAS will enable researchers from around the world to create virtual firms, consumers and regulators. Using the SEAS system we plan to model an actual industry, (for example the PC industry) to use it to examine the following issues: The reconfiguration of the enterprise landscape as a result of electronic commerce-including questions of dis-intermediation, and the reconstruction of the supply chain. The creation computational models of competitive and cooperative behavior in a variety of market settings involving the calibration of artificial agents against human players. SEAS will also be used for teaching Economics and Management at all levels including high school, undergraduate, graduate and continuing education doc3531 none Roland Knapp and Orlando Sarnelle Collaborative Research: Recovery of Ecosystem Structure and Function Following Exotic Species Eradication The proposed research examines how ecosystems respond, not to invasion, but to the elimination of an exotic species. Specifically, this proposal examines the recovery of alpine lake systems in the Sierra Nevada, California, after the eradication of exotic trout. The PI s will ask whether vertebrate and invertebrate species native to alpine lakes return after the removal of exotic fish. A long-term whole-lake experiment will be used in which exotic fish have been successfully removed from three experimental lakes, while fish stocking continues in three control lakes. Monitoring of faunal assemblages in these six lakes, monitoring begun in before fish eradication, will continue in order to determine the rate of recovery and to better understand the life history attributes of species that facilitate or hinder recovery. The PI s will also ask how changes in species assemblages influence the functioning of alpine lake ecosystems. They will continue limnological monitoring of the whole-lake experiment to evaluate changes in nutrients and algal biomass following fish removal. The results of this study have important implications for the restoration of aquatic ecosystems worldwide doc3542 none Wang The investigator and her colleagues combine modern techniques of computation and theoretical modeling to complement current experimental research in insect flight. These computations reveal the three-dimensional flows around an elastic wing that mimics the flapping motion of insects. The computational results also establish a basis for developing mathematical models of vortex shedding in unsteady flows (traditionally described by the unsteady Kutta condition). A solution of this longstanding problem in fluid mechanics would help to lay the foundation for a general theory of flapping flight. Insect flight is fascinating in its own right, but more generally, it can provide insight into other fluid mechanical problems that involve interactions between dynamic boundaries and highly unsteady viscous flows. The investigator explores how Nature solves the problem of insect flight. The lessons learned from insect flight are applicable to other physical and engineering systems where there is a tight coupling between a vortex wake and the oscillating body that generated it. Examples range from the famous devastating Tacoma Narrows bridge accident to our everyday experience of the dynamics of a piece of falling paper and the rising of bubbles in fluids. Finally, understanding the aerodynamics of insect flight can provide a new paradigm in designing micro-air vehicles doc3543 none This exploratory research grant provides funding for the development of formal methods that allow information system designers and system managers to design and implement software for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) in e-commerce world. The formalism will take a control-theoretic view of enterprise system and will be built on the principle that the business rules, which govern the operation of the enterprise, should only be soft-wired to the design of the information system, which supports ERP and MES. Furthermore, the formalism will provide the necessary theoretical foundation for re-configurable and scalable software system for enterprise operation. Methods will be developed to take the business process and rules in the form of workflow system and translate them into finite automata. Formal methods will be developed, based on the theory of finite automata and discrete event systems, to synthesize control laws, which if imposed on the enterprise operation will guarantee conformance to the specified business rules. Theoretical results will be developed, which if included in the synthesis procedure will provide the enterprise software system with such important properties as fault tolerance and self-recovery from failures. Analytical methods will be developed to study conflicting business rules, redundancy in the business rules and requirements, and allocation of multi functional agents. At the conclusion of this research, a prototype system including the front end featuring the use of traditional process modeling tools such DFD structured analysis and UML will be developed to demonstrate the formalism. The prototype will be beta sited on an existing enterprise with e-commerce capabilities. If successful, the results of this research can be used to build a generic software environment, which encompasses synthesis, analysis and optimization while providing a blue print for implementation. Software will allow for a dynamic information system design and will provide the management with the control laws for imposing changing set of business rules over the operation of the physical flows and information flows going on in the enterprise. At the front end, the IT engineer or enterprise manager will be provided with more traditional modeling tools for structured analysis and business process modeling and requirements specification. The translation to finite automata formalism will be automatic. At the core of this software there will be a computational engine, which will synthesize control laws and analyze them for desirable properties. Additional modules can be built to translate these control laws and feed them to ERP, MES and the supporting database doc3474 none This research involves the general area of error control coding for digital communication and storage systems. In particular, it describes a number of fundamental research topics related to a powerful new method of error control coding called turbo coding. The research has two major goals: (1) to propose new turbo coding schemes with performance and or complexity advantages compared to the current state-of-the-art, and (2) to advance the fundamental state of knowledge regarding this exciting new approach to error control coding. Although still very new, turbo coding is beginning to be applied in numerous areas that require error control techniques, including deep space communication, satellite communication, and digital cellular telephony, to name just a few. Because of its ability to perform close to theoretical limits with reasonable implementation complexity, it is anticipated that turbo coding and related techniques will have an enormous impact on virtually all applications of error control coding over the next 10 years or so. Turbo coding can achieve moderate bit error rates (in the range of 10-4 to 10-6) at signal-to-noise ratios very close to channel capacity. However, there is still room for improvement in turbo coding performance, particularly in applications that require bit error rates below 10-6. Further, there is considerable theoretical interest in achieving a more complete fundamental understanding of the key properties of turbo codes that result in such excellent performance. The investigators study several new basic research problems in turbo coding. Among the topics to be investigated are (1) several new turbo code designs capable of achieving even better performance than existing schemes, (2) the introduction of a more general class of turbo codes that has the potential to yield better codes and or reduced decoding complexity compared to standard turbo coding methods, and (3) the development of a new sub-optimum soft-in, soft-out decoding approach that can be used with more codes, thus offering the promise of near capacity performance at very low bit error rates, say below 10-10 doc3545 none This project will investigate the changing lives of industrial workers in a large motorcycle manufacturing factory in Faridabad, India. Work processes and conditions have changed dramatically with industrial globalization, including new Japanese-style systems of shopfloor organization, increased casualization of the labor force, and the weakening of trade unions. This has made industrial labor more contentious and the lives of workers outside the factory (social networks) in flux. The researchers will analyze how workers respond to (comply with or resist) changing forms of labor organization and how workers perceive and structure their lives in the context of industrial globalization. Methods include participant observation, structured interviews with workers, managers, union leaders and others, and an intensive analysis of shopfloor politics with a core sample of workers. This project will contribute to our understanding of how industrial workers in the developing world are responding to new forms of industrial capitalism doc3546 none Advances in information technologies are driving fundamental changes in the processes and organizations of global enterprises. Innovations in software, networks, and database systems enable widely distributed organizations to integrate activities, share information, collaborate on decisions, and execute transactions. While many existing tools and techniques of information infrastructure may be adopted and implemented to support these enterprise applications, there has been little focused research to provide a scientific basis to support these developments. This exploratory project develops a new framework to support enterprise-level decision-making in network-based scalable systems. This exploratory study will address: (1) Basic Principles, (2) Architectures, (3) Simulation and Evaluation, and (4) Applications in the case study of design-supplier-manufacturing decisions with examples drawn from industrial collaborators in the printed circuit board assembly industry. The fundamental principle of this approach asserts that decision tasks over a set of multiple, distributed, logically interrelated databases may be cast in the semantics of the underlying distributed database management system (DBMS). In this form, the augmented relational decision framework takes advantage of the principles of normalization and decomposition that are inherent to the relational DBMS model, while the decision process is viewed as an instantiation of the relational schema, and the resulting representation of normal form hierarchies and data dependencies structures the process. The outcomes of this project offer advantages of local autonomy, reliability, improved performance, scalability, shareability, data confidentiality, and efficient software support for a new class of enterprise-level software systems doc3547 none The American Physical Society (APS), in partnership with the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) and the American Institute of Physics (AIP) plans to establish a program that will dramatically improve the preparation of physics and physical science teachers, nation-wide. This project will increase the role of physics departments, in collaboration with education departments, to create more and better-prepared future teachers. The PhysTEC staff will negotiate signed subcontracts and a detailed Scope of Work from each of the preliminary Primary Program Institutions (PPIs) sites. The selection of PPIs will be based on the individual institution s commitment to become actively involved with teacher preparation reform as demonstrated by their degree of effectiveness (success) with previous efforts. The preliminary PPIs initially chosen will include a mix of very large and smaller institutions, as well as, one Historically Black College (HBCU). A small conference will also be scheduled in the fall in Washington, D.C. If the grant is awarded, planning and hiring of the Teacher-in-Residence will commence at each site during the spring and summer months of . The full program of course revision and departmental changes would begin in the fall . This project is co-funded by the NSF Division of Undergraduate Education, Division of Elementary, Secondary, and Informal Education, Division of Materials Research, and the Division of Physics doc3548 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Robert Tykot will conduct two field seasons of geoarchaeological research and follow each with laboratory analysis of the materials collected. He will carry out survey to document obsidian flows and outcrops on the Mediterranean islands of Palmarola, Pantelleria and Lipari and characterize them both physically and chemically. Physical properties including color, translucency and density will complement major minor element data from electron microprobe analysis and trace element and isotope ratio data from ICP mass spectrometry. He will conduct similar analyses of a large number of obsidian artifacts recovered from archaeological sites. Obsidian, a form of volcanic glass can be easily modified to produce a sharp cutting edge and therefore was widely used and broadly traded in prehistory. It is an ideal material for reconstructing trade since it occurs geologically in a limited number of locations, is frequently found on archaeological sites even great distances from a source and may be chemically fingerprinted allowing definitive source attributions of artifacts. For these reasons it has been widely used to reconstruct prehistoric trade and exchange. While some sources in the Mediterranean region have been carefully studied and well characterized, others have not and Dr. Tykot s work will constitute a significant addition to this growing body of knowledge. The data will be used to address a number of specific anthropological questions. It will provide insight into the earliest settlement of the Mediterranean islands, the transition from hunting and gathering to an agricultural way of life, the development of long distance exchange networks, craft specialization and the emergence of social differentiation. The data will also be used to test explicit models of presumed prehistoric navigational and maritime transport capabilities, to reveal specific connections between island and mainland populations and to define the important sociopolitical and economic role of obsidian in many prehistoric Mediterranean societies. This fundamental research will provide a data base which will be widely utilized by prehistorians to address a range of scientific questions. It will also yield new insight into the rise of complex societies doc3549 none Hendrickson This grant provides funding to develop and to demonstrate a software model of life cycle product information based on a distributed, multi-enterprise and networked system of information modules. In this model application, enterprises would provide information on their own goods and services as well as have the capability to aggregate information on the environmental performance of the enterprise itself. Products would have their own information systems to document their manufacture and use. With communication along the supply chain, the costs, associated information (e.g. repair manuals), and environmental impacts of any particular product could be rapidly assessed. Virtual product records could be synthesized to help assess alternative supply chains or product designs. Information would be scalable from individual products, through corporate performance indicators and geographic aggregations of multiple corporations. Effective supply chain logistics and environmental management systems are among the essential elements for successful scalable and sustainable enterprises. Logistics and manufacturing support may be of even greater importance in the age of commerce than in earlier marketing eras, as customers demand rapid and reliable order fulfillment. Environmental management systems are equally necessary as consumers and society demand lower environmental impact from the production of goods and services in order to secure a sustainable future. It this research, we will investigate distributed models of product information that would allow scalable enterprises, government regulators and consumers to understand the entire life cycle of economic and environmental impacts for particular products doc3550 none Dr. Felipe Soto-Adames Dr. Felipe Soto-Adames at the University of Vermont has received a grant to study the evolution of a highly unusual group of insects known as springtails (Collembola, non-insect hexapods). Entomobryidae is the largest family of springtails accounting for 21% of all species described in the class. The family has a world wide distribution and in some tropical settings surpasses all other groups in number of species and individuals. Despite this diversity relatively little work has been done to elucidate their evolutionary relationships. This project is aimed at providing the first comprehensive estimate of phylogenetic relationships among genera of Entomobryidae using a data set that combines DNA sequences and morphology. The resulting phylogeny will accomplish three objectives: clarify relationships among the three largest groups of genera; test previous hypotheses suggesting a polyphyletic origin for Paronellidae; and provide a much needed phylogenetic framework for future studies attempting to identify factors contributing to the successful diversification of this family. All genera of Entomobryidae will be examined to complete their morphological descriptions. Because morphological characters alone may not resolve some relationships, this data set will be complemented with DNA sequences from two nuclear genes. Elongation factor 1-alpha (EF1-a) and the small subunit of the ribosome (18S) are very conserved genes which allow rapid and consistent amplification via the polymerase chain reaction even for single individual springtails, some of which are 0.8mm long or less. Despite their high degree of sequence conservation analysis of preliminary data shows that in combination with morphology these genes can resolve relationships at the subfamily level. Resolution of the long standing problems of relationships among genera of Entomobryidae will result in a more stable classification, with more predictive power than the current system. In addition, Dr. Soto-Adames will update the key to genera of Entomobryidae already available in the internet. This key will be an excellent aid for agricultural entomologists given the recent increased use of Collembola as indicators of soil health. Soil biologists will also benefit from clarifications of the taxonomy doc3551 none Morales and Ruedas Observations and mapping endeavors in the Malay Archipelago dating back to the time of Alfred Russel Wallace formed the beginnings of the modern biological discipline of biogeography: the study of the distributions of animals and plants, and of the causes of those distributions. However, perhaps in part because of the overwhelming influence of Wallace, no further comprehensive biological studies have since been undertaken in the Malay Archipelago, the birthplace of biogeography. A few studies have examined, in isolation, distinct faunal elements (e.g., insects, birds, bats) of certain of the islands of the archipelago. We have, in contrast, begun to integrate these disparate studies and initiate studies of our own across the entire Malay Archipelago, from Mainland Asia to New Guinea and Australia. These integrative studies have as a goal to test the general biogeographic hypotheses founded on ecological studies of the area. Our work focuses on DNA-sequence derived studies of the evolutionary relationships within a single group of animals: the rodents. In particular, we will concentrate on one family of rodents, the Muridae, which is the most speciose: over 65% of all rodent species ( ) are murids. We chose these rodents because these tend to be widespread and ubiquitous throughout the region, thus we are almost invariably assured of study organisms. We will use the DNA-sequence data to determine what the major patterns of historical biogeography are in the area. The specific objectives of the project are to derive DNA-sequence based phylogenies of the area s murid rodents; these phylogenies will be used to test biogeographic hypotheses that have been proposed for the origin of the Australian, Papuan, and Sulawesian rodent radiations. Finally, the data will be used to generate a more comprehensive and robust vision of the relationships among the region s rodents. We will concentrate on Sulawesi as a key missing element in our current data set. We have been studying the region s rodents for some years and have amassed specimens for analysis from islands on the continental margin as well as New Guinea and Australia; however, Sulawesi is of critical importance to regional biogeographic analyses (therefore to biogeography as a whole), as ecologically derived faunal studies are unable to localize the island within either of the two broad regions elucidated by Wallace. Sulawesi s murid rodent fauna, one of the area s and the world s richest, is constituted by at least 41 species, of which 36 are endemic. Of the endemics, ample representation is found of the major murid groups of the area, but most importantly, a group known as the Old Endemics. Rodents in this group tend to be rare and isolated and as such constitute key elements in evolutionary and biogeographic analyses. Discovering these patterns will enable us to begin to understand how the faunal colonization of the area was undertaken, as well as what mechanisms are responsible for one of the richest regional mammalian biotas in the world doc3552 none This research will investigate a theoretical foundation for a major responsibility of enterprise systems to ensure that the right information about the enterprise is available to decision makers at the right time. The Internet and e-commerce are rapidly creating an environment in which businesses can be usefully likened to organisms which must tap into the relevant features of their environments to make rapid life death decisions-where even what is relevant is continually in flux. The primary focus of this project is to formulate an approach to incorporating flexibility in connecting decision-makers (brain) to dynamically relevant data sources (internal and external environment) to support time-critical decisions. Within this framework, the research will study the application of model-driven data acquisition, filtering and attention mechanisms to achieve flexible sensor-to-decision maker connectivity. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are a response to the realization that manufacturing control systems cannot function in isolation from other major enterprise functions. The objectives of ERP systems should also include standardization of principal functional modules to minimize customization and enhance reusability. The ultimate result of this research would be a framework for scalable enterprise system development that does not constrain the continued development of the framework as would a pure software code-based approach. Based on a mathematical formalism, the modules developed would not be bound to any one technology but would be amenable to transition to scalable network infrastructures as they evolve. The development of a model-based framework for goal-driven data delivery could ultimately guide the design of scalable data management as well as other standardized modules in flexible corporate enterprise systems doc3553 none Whitham This project examines the underlying role of abiotic stress, as expressed in a one million-year successional gradient of soil development and a 100-year record drought, in explaining local and regional patterns of outbreaks in a keystone insect herbivore. First, the investigators hypothesize that scale herbivory will decrease across a one million-year successional gradient of young to old volcanic soils under the same climatic regime. Second, they hypothesize that new scale outbreaks are created in response to pulse of drought and that scale populations are less stable than high stress sites that suffer chronic attack. The combination of both new outbreaks and chronic infestations of pinyon needle scale provides the basis for a series of experiments that are designed to increase our understanding of the factors that promote and maintain insect outbreaks. These factors will be examined through intensive population studies comparing incipient outbreaks and chronic infestations, as well as reciprocal transplant experiments of soils and plants. These studies represent a critical opportunity to integrate a million-year successional gradient, chronic stress and acute stress events to explain spatial and temporal dynamics of an outbreak species that has expanded during a recent drought to become a regional problem doc3554 none Tiedje, James #DEB Soil harbors a tremendous diversity of microbes, most undiscovered. A key component to understanding the extent and patterns of this biodiversity is whether or not there are geographically unique populations. Century old dogma states that free-living bacteria are globally dispersed since microbes can be transported by wind, birds and humans. We propose to reevaluate this principle since understanding whether geographic population patterns exist is important to a number of basic and applied issues ranging from understanding biological diversification, to ecological roles, to quarantine, to new strategies for pharmaceutical discovery. We propose to test the bacterial endemism hypothesis using our existing collection of an important soil bacterial group (fluorescent Pseudomonas). These isolates are from undisturbed soil taken from 200m transects, at five different sites in each of six different continental regions. We propose to evaluate the degree of endemicity using a suite of molecular methods that will provide a continuum of genetic resolution of the population. The hypothesis will be supported if genetic distance increases with geographic distance, and if the phylogenetic analysis of genes shows geographic clades doc3555 none Shi This grant provides funding for investigating fundamental issues relating to construction enterprise resource planning systems (Construct-ERP). The major research tasks include exploring suitable architectures for Construct-ERP systems, identifying basic features needed, developing methods for modeling and standardizing construction resources, adopting algorithms for modeling construction products, developing advanced construction resource planning techniques, exploring techniques for modeling functional decisions in construction, and representing human intelligence in decision-making process. The developed techniques will lead to the prototype of an internet-based construction enterprise-wide business automation system. The system developed under this research will assist construction enterprises in optimizing the utilization of their internal and external resources to support maximizing the achievement of business objectives. Specifically, the system will enable a construction enterprise to best utilize available information to make timely business decisions on: 1) how to allocate the enterprise resources (manpower, equipment, materials, and money) to the projects on hand? 2) whether or not and how to compete for additional resources in the market? and 3) establishment of a strategy for bidding projects and planning for these potential projects. Traditionally construction management research efforts have focused predominantly on process project-level activities because of the project-oriented nature of the construction business. The results of this research will help open up new research directions supporting construction business automation with integrated back- and front-office functions doc3556 none This grant provides funding for building highly scalable distributed algorithms for a new class of adaptive manufacturing enterprises using distributed agent architecture over the Internet. These algorithms will be used for reconfiguring work-in-process inventory levels and production schedules to adapt to changing market demands and supply-chain conditions. Moreover, these algorithms and the necessary information will be embedded in agents geographically distributed throughout the enterprise. The goal is to maintain responsiveness and effectiveness to enable the next generation of scalable enterprises. Scalability will be achieved through (1) distributed algorithms that are predictable and computationally efficient; (2) distributed agent architectures that support growth in size and capability; and (3) distributed clusters that provide rapid access to information using cost effective technologies. Analytical models will be developed to predict the emergent behavior of such systems and stability and convergence properties of their computations. These models will be used for assessing computational complexity, communication requirements, and scalability of the algorithms. Distributed agent architecture will be developed in which clusters of similar agents will be identified based on task decomposition and task similarity. An experimental prototype using a cluster of commodity PCs will be used to benchmark the computational load, communication network requirements, and overall scalability of the algorithms. If successful, the results of this research will lead to effective integration of shop floor with enterprise software which is a critical issue in managing multiple enterprises effectively and optimally. These research activities will involve active collaboration with several industry partners. In the short-term, this work will provide a set of novel distributed algorithms and a suitable distributed agent architecture. In the long-term, this work would provide mathematical and simulation models for designing the next generation of adaptive and reconfigurable enterprises by establishing scientific and technological insights into their scalability doc3557 none This grant provides funding to investigate how enterprises can use the Internet to collaborate on design for recycling and cooperate in reclaiming valuable parts and materials from retired products. The project s goal is to lay the information system foundation for a new industry sector of return centers for electronic products. These centers would be supported by manufacturer involvement with a management and archival (MA) subsystem and a product design advisory (PDA) subsystem. By subscribing to the MA subsystem, manufacturers could employ independent return centers as their agents for collecting their retired products. The PDA subsystem would archive design principles and disassembly methods for a consortium of manufacturers that collaborate on product design research. The current exploratory phase of research focuses on designing scalable system architectures for the MA subsystem, developing an integrated design database for the PDA subsystem, and choosing methods to ensure systems security. The research tasks include requirements analysis, preliminary functional analysis and requirements allocation, model development, initial prototyping, testing and initial specifications for a conceptual design of the system. Implementation of the results of this research, if successful, will allow a return center to consult the PDA archive to retrieve methods for disassembly, query the MA subsystem to determine the best market value for components and materials, and track the locations and identities of the products manufacturers and recyclers. The MA subsystem will handle and archive all financial transactions between the return centers and manufacturers who buy back their retired products, components, and materials. The system will encourage manufacturers to collaborate in research on product design for recycling, consumers to return retired products for recycling, and investors to establish retired product collection and recycling enterprises. The results concerning scalability, database design and security will apply to other enterprise computing applications as well doc3558 none Most multicellular organisms, like humans, form from a single cell. By contrast, the social amoeba forms a multicellular body by aggregating individual cells from a small area. This difference allows the investigators to evaluate genetic conflicts within an organism in a system that may prove to be an ideal model system for social evolution. The investigators will characterize the genetic variation in cells in a natural habitat, and will then investigate how these cells interact when they come together in a multicellular individuals. They will evaluate how often some cell lines dominate over other cell lines, forcing them to be part of the sterile stalk instead of the fertile spore. Different cell lineages will be combined in the laboratory and evaluated using variable DNA microsatellite loci. How cells interact with each other is an important question that bears on many fundamental problems in biology. For example, cells that escape the control of other cells and continue to divide characterize cancer. Programmed cell death is an important mechanism for ridding an organism of cells in the wrong place or that have certain kinds of defects. When the social amoeba forms a fruiting body, some cells die while others live. Understanding the process whereby some cells escape the process of programmed cell death, and perhaps force other cells to die is of potential relevance to mechanisms for understanding cancer, and human developmental diseases doc3559 none Manufacturing companies need to make decisions regarding the choice of suppliers providing materials and the manufacturing sites for producing the final products. This decision-making problem in a supply chain is called the procurement problem. The solution to the procurement problem mainly consists of the least cost transportation between the suppliers and the manufacturing sites, and between the manufacturing sites and the customers. This research project tackles the procurement problem when the manufacturing company uses freight companies as third party transportation. The fundamental issues addressed are: (1) minimization of bid (transportation cost) for the manufacturing company, (2) maximization of payoff to the freight companies, (3) cost-optimal and cost-reliable estimation of the task-to-vehicle assignments by the freight companies, and (4) reliable fulfillment of the orders by the drivers of the vehicles. The research seeks to develop the problem solving model, communication mechanism and the solution process by using multi-agent paradigm, game theory and stochastic programming. The approach will be to use the driver s local behavior along with travel time and service time acquired in real-time through on board sensors for determining the bottlenecks on a feasible route, and announce collaboration requests for contingencies. This work will provide the basis for a scalable information intensive modeling and problem solving architecture for real-time procurement problem solving. Results of this research can be extended to build an integrated supply chain infrastructure (in real-time), in the e-business world doc3560 none This grant provides funding for the design, development, and testing of a user-oriented framework for process and performance modeling of enterprise systems. This framework will integrate methods and technologies from the areas of engineering, process modeling, accounting, and distributed computing. Specifically, the framework will integrate Petri net theory, graphical process modeling techniques, activity-based management concepts, and the distributed computing paradigm of the Internet. At the core of the framework is a set of graphical modeling constructs, a set of formal Petri net-based representation constructs, and a mapping scheme between the graphical models and Petri net representations. A proof-of-concept Web-based software prototype of the framework will be developed using XML and object-oriented technologies. The linkage between Petri net theory and graphical modeling techniques in a Web context represents a corner stone in the establishment of a theoretical foundation for user-oriented enterprise process modeling. The research will bridge two distinct worlds, engineering and business, and will help in the design, control, improvement, and measurement of enterprise-wide processes. In summary, the results of this project will provide a theoretical framework, which will further stimulate research and development of a new generation of business process and performance modeling tools that are user-oriented, graphical, scalable, and Web-based -- thereby impacting professional practice and stimulating business improvement doc3561 none 00- Brett Collaborative Research - The Role of Fatty Acids and Limiting Elements in Biogeochemical Cycling and Food Web Dynamics The food quality of plants for herbivores may have profound impacts on a wide variety of processes. These include eutrophication (or nuisance algal blooms), the strength of interactions between different levels in the food web (i.e. plants and herbivores), biomass accumulation at each trophic level, and fisheries production. The objective of this research is to determine the role essential fatty acids and elements such as phosphorus and nitrogen play in regulating these processes. Experimental and modeling results suggest that when algal essential fatty acid content is high, zooplankton grow rapidly and build up a biomass sufficient to suppress plants. This results in relatively high water quality (high water clarity due to low algal biomass) and high fisheries production. Alternatively, algae with low essential fatty acid content will result in poor water clarity and zooplankton growth, and reduced fisheries production. The investigators plan to use fatty acid analyses to examine energy flow through aquatic food webs: from plants to herbivores to carnivores to economically important fish. 00- Goldman Collaborative Research - The Role of Fatty Acids and Limiting Elements in Biogeochemical Cycling and Food Web Dynamics The food quality of plants for herbivores may have profound impacts on a wide variety of processes. These include eutrophication (or nuisance algal blooms), the strength of interactions between different levels in the food web (i.e. plants and herbivores), biomass accumulation at each trophic level, and fisheries production. The objective of this research is to determine the role essential fatty acids and elements such as phosphorus and nitrogen play in regulating these processes. Experimental and modeling results suggest that when algal essential fatty acid content is high, zooplankton grow rapidly and build up a biomass sufficient to suppress plants. This results in relatively high water quality (high water clarity due to low algal biomass) and high fisheries production. Alternatively, algae with low essential fatty acid content will result in poor water clarity and zooplankton growth, and reduced fisheries production. The investigators plan to use fatty acid analyses to examine energy flow through aquatic food webs: from plants to herbivores to carnivores to economically important fish doc3562 none Zeyl The genetics of adaptation will be studied in laboratory yeast populations to test current theories of how populations respond genetically to selection. Every 24 hours, approximately 2 million cells from each population will be transferred to a tube of fresh medium. As the cells reproduce, random mutations that improve growth and survival in this environment will spread, changing the genetic makeup of the population. Each population undergoes about generations per year, allowing a substantial amount of genetic change to be observed. Samples of each population will be frozen every 100 generations, allowing both the degree of adaptation and the genes of each population to be compared directly to those of its ancestor. The adaptations that fit organisms to their environments are a central feature of biology, but in most organisms adaptation cannot be observed in action or studied in genetic detail. Some fundamental questions therefore remain unanswered. For example, does adaptation typically involve few mutations with major effects, or many mutations each with a slight effect? Is adaptation a reproducible process, or does the randomness of mutation make every response to selection unique? In this project the process of adaptation will be observed directly, as it occurs. The powerful techniques of yeast genetics will then provide new insight into how the genes match an organism to its environment doc3563 none The PI recently found ten complete, well preserved, and perfectly articulated in situ neck vertebrae of a very large Late Cretaceous sauropod dinosaur in Big Bend National Park. This new find is unprecedented and rivals in size the giant sauropods of the Late Jurassic and Early Cretaceous. Previously, not even a single complete adult sauropod neck vertebra had been found in North America from Late Cretaceous rocks and no giant Late Cretaceous sauropod had been found anywhere in the world! Partial excavation revealed individual vertebra estimated to weigh from approximately 400 pounds to 1,200 pounds. The three smallest vertebrae were removed on stretchers on the shoulders of four strong men. Five hundred pounds is basically our limit for removal of a vertebra by this method. The only sensible way to remove the remaining seven vertebrae from the desert is by helicopter and then loading them onto a truck for transportation to UTD where they will be prepared for study and display. The bones have a calcite-rich concretionary coating, which is up to three inches thick. This coating can be removed successfully only by time-consuming mechanical means. It is important that the remaining in situ neck bones be removed as soon as possible to limit the possibility of theft or damage, including weathering, to this unique and important scientific discovery doc3564 none Crandall Over 70 species and subspecies of freshwater crabs from the family Aeglidae (Decapoda: Anomura) are known to be endemic to southern South America. These crabs are an interesting and unique group to study because of (1) the unusual distribution of species diversity: aeglids are the only anomurans restricted to freshwater; (2) their morphological peculiarities: they have not developed pleopods (these are the 5 pairs of appendages on the ventral abdomen), the carapace is subdivided by lines, and the gill structure is trichobranchiate (divided into three branches); (3) the ecological importance of crabs to freshwater ecosystems, and the fact that many of the known species may be considered endangered or vulnerable; and (4) the role they play in limiting crayfish dispersion. Despite the attraction of this group for evolutionary study, there has been no work on its phylogenetic relationships. This proposal represents the first detailed attempt to discover the evolutionary relationships of Aeglidae. This study will sample all the speices of the family and some of their anomuran relatives Galatheidae, Porcellanidae and Chirostylidae (Galatheoidea), which will serve as outgroups to test the monophyly of the Aeglidae. Seven mitochondrial and nuclear genes will be screened to survey approximately bp of sequence data. Thus phylogenetic analysis will comprise multiple DNA regions separated and combined using maximum parsimony, neighbor-joining and maximum likelihood, and combinations of these methods with the Templeton, Crandall, and Sing (TCS) method. Recovering a robust phylogenetic hypothesis for Aeglidae will provide a framework on aeglid systematics upon which we can test several hypotheses. For example, what is the taxonomic position of Aeglidae in the Galatheoidea? Did Aeglidae speciation occur from north to south or from west to east or some combination? What are the biogeograpical histories of the river drainages in which aeglids occur? Of the previously identified regions of endemism of freshwater stream organisms, what are the conservation priorities for these regions? Preliminary results and future phylogenetic relationships established from this study, primer sequences, PCR conditions and color photos of each species will be incorporated in a new freshwater crab web page that will be created in the KAC lab as part of the Tree of Life web project (http: ag.arizona.edu tree ). This will contribute to integration of research and education at all school levels. This project will also provide collaborations with Brazilian and Chilean biologists, and training for at least one postdoctoral research associate and one undergraduate student at Brigham Young University doc3565 none Dr. Charles J. O Kelly Drs. Charles O Kelly and Robert Andersen of Maine s Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences have been given an award to study the biodiversity and evolution of an important group of microscopic green algae. It is a challenge to identify small living things, and it is a challenge to obtain accurate information that will allow researchers to identify them when necessary. Research by O Kelly and Andersen will make identification less of a challenge for one family of small green algae, the Ulvellaceae. Members of the Ulvellaceae are common in marine and freshwater environments, but because they are small, they typically go unnoticed - except for those species that cause disease in commercially-valuable seaweeds and in corals. Many species have been described, but the characters separating them are few and hard to use. Descriptions, records, and research reports are widely scattered, hard to acquire and assemble, and frequently are contradictory. Also, species that look very much alike may not be closely related. The historical relationships among species of Ulvellaceae, and species that look like they belong to Ulvellaceae but do not, are not well known and, when discovered, may surprise. For example, the nearest relatives of Ulvellaceae are not small algae, but large ones (the sea lettuces, family Ulvaceae). They will assemble the widely-scattered reports on algae in the Ulvellaceae, and will collect living and preserved specimens of them, particularly from the temperate eastern and western coasts of North America. The research team will interpret these materials using modern culture, microscopical, and molecular methods, and produce more accurate species concepts and reconstructions of historical relationships. They expect to find and describe a number of new species. Results of this work will be posted online, at an authoritative, one stop shopping site for information on this group of algae. The study will provide a workable template for other efforts to assemble and distribute information on the diversity of Earth s small creatures doc3566 none 00- Nepstad The effects of rainfall exclusion on an Amazon forest Droughts increasingly threaten the world s major tropical rainforests. El Nino episodes cause severe drought and widespread forest damage by fire. In this project, the investigators are looking into the future of the Amazon rainforest by experimentally excluding rainfall from a one-hectare (2.5 acre) patch of forest in Brazil. This experiment will determine how much drought the rainforest can tolerate before its trees begin to lose leaves, stop growing and reproducing, and die. The researchers will also be investigating how drought affects the role of the rainforest in the changing chemistry of the atmosphere. It is no small task to exclude rain from a rainforest. The project upon which this research follows hired 26 laborers for a year to build a wooden frame containing plastic panels held 2-4 meters above the forest floor. Gutters carry the rainwater away from the site. The project also built 8 towers into the forest canopy, 10-stories above the ground, to monitor the physiology and dynamics of leaves. In addition, shafts 3-stories deep were dug to study soil water and roots doc3567 none Heather M. Wilson Drs. Heather M. Wilson, Jerome C. Regier and Jeffrey W. Schultz of the University of Maryland have been awarded a grant to study the evolution of millipedes (Class Diplopoda). The millipedes are one of the most diverse groups of animals, with more than 8,000 species. They are important components of terrestrial ecosystems and appear to have been so for over 400 million years. Nonetheless, the role of millipedes in the life history of our planet is not well understood. The project detailed here will resolve the evolutionary relationships (phylogeny) of the millipede orders through extensive original analyses of muscular anatomy, fossil morphology and DNA sequences. This project has four main objectives: (1) to survey the skeletal muscles; (2) to examine the skeletal anatomy of fossilized species; (3) to comparatively sequence the DNA coding for three nuclear protein-encoding genes (elongation factor-1a, RNA polymerase II and elongation factor-2); (4) to use these data, separately and in combination, to infer the phylogeny (family tree) of millipedes and their relatives. This work is unusually interdisciplinary in that it represents a collaboration of specialists in paleontology, comparative anatomy and molecular genetics. This integrative approach to millipede phylogeny promises substantial insights into the evolutionary biology of a large, important group of organisms and will produce and permit the integration and analysis of data of three very different types to address a single question doc3568 none This research addresses the need for decision support tools in this area by developing a Supply Chain Optimization and Protocol Environment (SCOPE) which emulates the behavior of supply chains involving multiple, independent, goal-seeking entities over time. Entities will be represented by optimization models that capture the key decision variables and technological constraints, while retaining enough special structure to allow efficient solution. Interactions among entities will be described through protocols that specify what goods, money and information pass among entities, in what order entities make decisions, how information is processed by each entity to make its decisions, and how entities respond to unforeseen events. The approach combines computational tractability and scalability with the ability to explore the behavior of different supply chain configurations over time. It will also allows the researchers to represent a range of different modes of interaction among entities in the supply chain. Successful development of a tool like SCOPE would permit rapid prototyping of supply chain designs, while researchers would have a test bed for assessing how well theoretically-derived results generalize to different modes of operation that strain some of the original assumptions, and for experimenting with forms of supply chain collaboration too complex for treatment analytically doc3569 none Archie Phylogeography is the study of the evolutionary relationships (phylogenies) of populations of animals and plants in a geographical context, that is, the study of geographical patterns of genetic variation. Many of these studies use mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) which is found outside the nucleus of a cell as the genetic marker of choice. This is because this genetic marker has been found to have a high rate of change over time and because it is inherited through the maternal lineage. Genetic groups that are identified as a result of this type of study are called mtDNA clade groups. In numerous phylogeographic studies, mtDNA clade groups, sampled from populations throughout a species range, form very distinct and geographically circumscribed groups. In general, boundaries between the clade groups are very sharp and appear to act as barriers to gene flow of the mitochondrial genes. It has not been determined effectively what factors influence the rate and extent of mitochondrial gene flow across clade boundaries between the groups or if these boundaries also act as barriers to nuclear gene flow. This research will investigate the evolutionary significance of mitochondrial DNA clade boundaries by determining what factors affect nuclear and mitochondrial gene flow across the boundaries using the western fence lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis) as the model organism. This species is one of the most common vertebrates in the western U.S., has a very complex pattern of geographical separation of the mtDNA clades, and has a high degree of variability in size, coloration, and other features thought to be important in otherwise differentiating between populations that are considered valid species. Clade boundaries will be examined in detail using transect sampling between identified clade groups. The width of the intergrade or hybrid zone and the level of gene flow across the boundaries will be compared in relation to the following: environmental gradients, degree of genetic differentiation between the groups, and degree of morphological differentiation between the groups. In addition, I will complete a phylogeographic analysis of the western fence lizard to identify additional clade boundaries and to test a series of hypotheses regarding the origin of this species. This research will provide opportunities for the training of undergraduate students both through summer research programs and in classroom settings. It will: 1) provide field experience to learn basic ecology, behavior, and data collection techniques; 2) provide training in molecular laboratory techniques (including DNA sequencing and genotyping); and 3) promote critical thinking and provide data analysis skills as well as a sound theoretical background. The discrete nature of specific sub-projects, i.e., the analysis of particular clade boundaries, and the relative ease with which the genetic data can be collected in the laboratory will allow both undergraduate and graduate students to become fully involved in the research doc3570 none This grant provides funding for the modeling, developing and prototyping of communication standards and interfaces that will support scalable, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Based upon an examination of a set of existing supply chains, a general model will be developed to represent a supply chain and the data needed to support transactions within the chain. Standards based upon XML will be developed for communication interfaces in a supply chain consisting of links that receive products from many suppliers in the chain and create products for many customers in the chain. Models will be constructed for representing not only linear relationships of suppliers, manufacturers and customers (supply chains) but also complex relationships that can only be represented as two-dimensional directed graphs (supply networks). The prototype software will be designed, developed and tested to determine how well the model supports operation of a small, sewn products (e.g. parachutes), supply network with scalability to a complex of military sewn products such as apparel, footwear, and chemical protective suits. Final scalability would support the entire set of supply networks of organizations providing consumable military products. Projections suggest the results of this research will lead to new features in ERP systems that currently support only internal operations of firms with common ownership or administration. Results of this project will influence the design of future ERP systems to incorporate business-to-business support for groups of cooperating, independently managed organizations (a virtual enterprise) that builds competitive advantage through collaboration. These new extended systems will reduce overall inventories in the supply network while, at the same time reducing stock outages in all supply network segments. The standards developed will facilitate the exchange of important information in the supply network and thus increase the velocity of both information and product flow between cooperating business entities doc3571 none Battles Forests throughout the world are experiencing worrisome increases in tree mortality. Some cases involve the introduction of exotic pests or exploitative land use practices. For others, the interaction of specifically ordered physical and biological factors produces a progressive loss of vigor that frequently ends in death, a phenomenon called forest decline. Atmospheric pollution often is implicated as a contributor to forest decline. The perceived threat to regional forest health concentrated research efforts on a search for causes. The consequences of decline on forest structure and function have received much less attention. The decline of red spruce in the northeastern United States presents an opportunity to study forest dynamics in the midst of an archetypal decline-disturbance. The extent, severity, and timing of spruce decline are such that the phenomenon can be tractably investigated from an ecological perspective. Given the weak factual foundation on which to build a conceptual understanding of the ecology of decline, a detailed case study quantifying pattern and process is necessary. This project will complete a 37 year record of vegetation change on Whiteface Mountain, New York - a record unparalleled in scope and scale for the northeastern subalpine forest biome. Re-measurement of 64 permanent forest plots stratified by land use, aspect, and elevation would provide robust estimates of growth, mortality, and recruitment rates for spruce and associated tree species. The health of the red spruce forests has been at the center of environmental, political and scientific controversies for two decades. Some of the arguments were about scientific findings that had to rely on inferential approaches to reconstruct the pre-decline status of the forest. Neither the knowledge base nor database existed to properly evaluate the magnitude of the decline and place it within an appropriate ecological context. The proposed research addresses these deficiencies and would perpetuate and preserve the best data available on forest population and community dynamics in this sentinel ecosystem doc3572 none Shaw Peatmosses (plants of the bryophyte genus Sphagnum) are a dominant component of many Northern and Southern Hemisphere ecosystems. Sphagnum-dominated habitats are ecologically important in terms of regional hydrology, and peat accumulation is of profound significance to global carbon budgets and therefore global climates. Sphagnum-dominated peatlands are most prominent in boreal regions where huge deposits of partially decomposed peat accumulate, and most people associate Sphagnum with such northern hemisphere habitats. Nonetheless, species of Sphagnum are also diverse in the tropics, and one evolutionary hypothesis suggests that South America is the center of peatmoss diversity. Dr. Jonathan Shaw of Duke University and colleagues are studying the taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity of the 200-450 species of Sphagnum in order to investigate these and other ideas about the patterns of species diversity worldwide in the genus. The project makes extensive use of DNA sequencing, of both nuclear and chloroplast genes, as sources of evidence of phylogenetic (genealogical) relatedness and to estimate levels of genetic and genomic diversity within sublineages of Sphagnum. Molecular and morphological lines of evidence will be combined in studies of presumptive cases of hybridization and of cryptic species, where similar morphologies are thought to obscure significant genetic divergence. The project will lead to an improved infrageneric classification for the hundreds of species worldwide of Sphagnum, and contribute to understanding the mechanisms of peatmoss diversification over geological time doc3573 none Freshwater crabs pose a number of interesting evolutionary and biogeographic questions. They represent one of the most speciose groups of crabs, but our understanding of their systematics and phylogenetic relationships is severely limited. Although speciose, they are similar in their morphology, their dependence on freshwater, and their unusual life history. Based on a few characteristics, freshwater crabs have long been assumed to be monophyletic. This view has been challenged, however, in light of their intriguing biogeographical distribution. This study will undertake the most comprehensive phylogenetic study of freshwater crabs to date by using both morphological and molecular data for all freshwater lineages and their putative marine relatives. Specifically, we propose to use morphological and molecular mitochondrial and nuclear DNA data to establish independently phylogenies for both freshwater and eubrachyuran marine crabs, to use these results to test monophyly of the groups, to estimate the time of origin of freshwater crabs, and to evaluate and revise the existing higher order classification of freshwater crabs doc3574 none 00- Brett Collaborative Research - The Role of Fatty Acids and Limiting Elements in Biogeochemical Cycling and Food Web Dynamics The food quality of plants for herbivores may have profound impacts on a wide variety of processes. These include eutrophication (or nuisance algal blooms), the strength of interactions between different levels in the food web (i.e. plants and herbivores), biomass accumulation at each trophic level, and fisheries production. The objective of this research is to determine the role essential fatty acids and elements such as phosphorus and nitrogen play in regulating these processes. Experimental and modeling results suggest that when algal essential fatty acid content is high, zooplankton grow rapidly and build up a biomass sufficient to suppress plants. This results in relatively high water quality (high water clarity due to low algal biomass) and high fisheries production. Alternatively, algae with low essential fatty acid content will result in poor water clarity and zooplankton growth, and reduced fisheries production. The investigators plan to use fatty acid analyses to examine energy flow through aquatic food webs: from plants to herbivores to carnivores to economically important fish doc3575 none 00- Ellis Long-term Biogeochemical Changes in China s Anthropogenic Landscapes This study will measure long-term changes in the biogeochemistry of carbon, ni-trogen and phosphorus (C, N, P) across the densely populated agricultural village landscapes of China. The pre-industrial (~ ) and current state of five 5 x 5 km landscape scenes representative of China s agricultural regions will be measured by combining high-resolution satellite imagery, World War II aerial photography and precision land surveys with material sampling, household surveys, elder interviews and historical resources. Current and pre-industrial measurements will then be compared to examine the relative impacts of changes in landscape structure, popu-lation density, agricultural practices, and fuel combustion in driving long-term changes in C, N and P storage and flux across each site. Integration of field meas-urements with regional and remotely sensed data will improve the accuracy of global biogeochemical change estimates across one of the most rapidly developing areas of the world, demonstrating field and statistical tools for the study of anthro-pogenic ecosystems doc3576 none This project will examine the Hox genes, which specify the fundamental organization of body plans, to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships of lophotrochozoans. As one of the three major lineages of bilateral animals, this group contains the greatest diversity of body plan organization and are purported to encompas at least 10 recognized phyla (including annelids, mollusks, ectoprocts, brachipods, and platyhelminthes). Before the factors that shaped metazoan macroevolution and diversification are understood, the evolutionary relationships of the lophotrochozoans are critically needed. In addition to constructing gene geneologies, this work will employ information on organization and gene composition of the Hox cluster. To this end, four bacterial artifical chromosome libraries will be produced, thus allowing the entire Hox cluster to be sequenced. To augment this library, evolutionary history will be reconstructed from 28S rDNA and COI genes for 49 lophotrochozoan taxa. This study will provide data that can be used to address several long-standing issues, including understanding the evolutionary and developmental plasticity of segmentation and embryogenesis doc3577 none The research considers an open view of enterprise based on the extreme premise that information is free - only physical transactions have cost. This approach holds that specialized markets will become the integrating element of supply chains, performing functions once performed by corporations. Examples include markets that reserve capacity on manufacturing facilities at future points in time, or stockpile inventory in geographic regions to hedge against demand fluctuations. The modeling effort will postulate functions and services required by supply chains, and mechanisms by which contracts for these functions and services could be priced and traded in an open market. Characteristics of Nash equilibria for these markets, such as a predicted shift in market power to consumers through the use of on-line auctions, will be studied analytically. A computer simulation for studying the behavior of non-stationary, evolving contract markets in supply chains will be created. Potential applications of the simulation include a market in which companies specializing in product design sell design services, and new generations of a product enter the market. A game version of the market simulator will be created and disseminated for educational use. Most enterprises have many activities that are shielded from the marketplace. Enterprises that adopt an open view will increasingly price functions that they perform and consider contracting them out. This continuous competitive valuation of all services will drive dramatic improvements in economic efficiency. This research will test the hypothesis that the benefits of centralized planning and vertical integration in supply chains can be obtained through dynamic markets. It will identify new opportunities in e-business and supply chain integration. It will gauge the potential for new markets and describe plausible rules to govern these markets. Finally, it will shed light on the capabilities that will allow enterprises to thrive in the future doc3578 none 00- Fisher Integrating linkages among aquatic and terrestrial landscape elements This research is designed to determine where in complex landscapes important chemical transformations of various ecological materials occur. Studies will follow water from the time it falls as rain along its path from small rivulets to large streams. These pathways include landscape features such as upland soils, intermittent and permanent streams, and stream side (riparian) zones populated by mature trees. Increases or decreases in materials transported between landscape patches will be related to production, release, or retention within patches. The PIs will perform this research in the Sonoran desert of Arizona, an ecosystem that responds dramatically to variation in climate, especially rainfall and temperature. Emphasis will be on the movement of nitrogen, which is increasing in landscapes worldwide due to human activity. Results of this research will aid in identifying and managing critical ecosystem components for maintenance and enhancement of water quality doc3579 none Most pathogenic fungi have two stages in their lifecycle. One stage is produced by fertilization and has chromosomes from both parents, whereas the other stage is produced by mechanisms similar to gamete formation, and therefore has only half the number of chromosomes (the haploid stage). Often, the two stages differ in the degree to which they cause disease. This study uses molecular biology and other experimental studies to explore the link between disease ecology and genetic structure of a plant pathogenic fungus where the haploid stage is avoided by a special kind of mating (intra-tetrad selfing). This study will use the anther-smut fungus, Microbotryum violaceum, as a well-studied model system. Intra-tetrad selfing also occurs in a wide range of organism, including commercially and scientifically valuable fungi, plants, and insects (e.g. yeasts and fruit flies), but its consequences have never been explored empirically. The proposed research will therefore have relevance for understanding genetic variation in species with this breeding system and possible novel mechanisms for changes in pathogenic virulence doc3580 none The semiconductor manufacturing supply chain is very complex spanning multiple manufacturing sites in various locations around the globe. This grant provides funding that will allow the multidisciplinary research team to use experience gained in factory control to develop control regimes for semiconductor supply chains. The goal is to efficiently and effectively a) model and simulate the physical entities, b) model and simulate the range of decision algorithms, and c) interface the two. The research team has taken a first step toward this. To depict the physical system a basic module was developed that could be used to represent a factory, a transportation link, or a warehouse. The basic module is made up of capacity and delay sub-modules. A supply chain is modeled by connecting basic modules together in series or parallel. This approach provides reasonable execution times while still capturing the qualitative behavior of these systems. Therefore, the research team will first determine reasonable ways to parameterize the basic module. Next, software architectures to support the modeling and analysis of semiconductor supply chains and ensure scalability will be investigated. Real semiconductor supply chain problems (supplied by the industrial participants) will be used in addressing both the parameterization and architecture issues. Finally, how the approach can be implemented in next-generation ERP systems will be studied. If successful, this research will have an impact on the System Architecture of next-generation ERP systems by determining how to include scalable what-if capabilities in these systems. It will also facilitate Collaborative Decision Making in scalable enterprise systems by allowing one group of people to describe the way their factories work and another group of people to specify enterprise decision policies. Finally, it will allow for the analysis of various Supply Chain Design issues by providing new modeling and analysis capabilities doc3581 none Bradshaw The genetic mechanism of plant adaptation to increasing elevation, from sea level to 10,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada mountains, will be studied using a combination of laboratory and field experiments. Mimulus cardinalis, a plant species adapted to long, hot summers at low elevation, has been crossed with Mimulus lewisii, a closely-related species adapted to the short, cool growing season found in high-elevation alpine meadows. More than 50 years of research has shown that the offspring of crosses between these two species differ in their ability to survive and grow at low, middle, and high elevations. This study will use DNA-based genetic maps of the Mimulus chromosomes to identify the number of genes controlling survival, growth, and reproduction at three historically important field stations (Stanford, Mather, and Timberline) in central California. The gene pools of many closely related species are kept separate by the geographic isolation resulting from adaptation to different environments. Adaptation is believed to be the principal means by which biological diversity is created and maintained. The pace of adaptive evolution depends upon the number of genes that govern adaptive traits such as tolerance of extreme temperatures or number of flowers produced during the growing season. With modern methods of molecular biology and genome mapping, it is possible for the first time to estimate the number of genes required for organisms to adapt to different natural environments doc3582 none William Fagan Extinction is one of the most fundamental processes in ecology-it shapes evolution, community structure, and patterns of biodiversity. Yet studies of extinction are scarce, and studies involving hard data rather than theoretical models are almost totally lacking. We will take advantage of an extraordinary database concerning Sonoran Desert fishes to investigate relationships between extirpation and patterns of rarity and life-history traits. Key to our project is the development of new methods for quantifying patterns of rarity that are independent of the spatial scale of analyses. Investigations of rarity are important because most species are in some way rare. The details of how species differ in the way in which they are rare (e.g., in numbers, in spatial distribution) may be key to understanding a diversity of issues in ecology, including the assembly of communities and how species persist in the face of disturbances. Our unique database includes over 25,000 locality records spanning 160 years of field research for all 50 known taxa of Sonoran Desert fishes. These fishes collectively constitute a gravely endangered biota for which data on the linkages among rarity, extinction-proneness, and life-history traits are of critical conservation importance. The methods we apply are modifications of Kunin s ( ) notion of scale-area curves, which provide a means of quantifying rarity patterns across spatial scales. Specifically, we will examine how the patterns of rarity these fish exhibit relate to their extinction dynamics (e.g., frequency and spatial pattern of extirpation events) and current levels of endangerment. We will also determine the extent to which patterns of rarity and extinction can be predicted by life-history attributes. Biodiversity databases are an untapped storehouse of information on distributions of species. They allow us to ask questions at different scales and with greater taxonomic breadth than any experiment or focused field study can. They also allow us to ask altogether different questions-such as questions about extinction. The research proposed here will explore linkages between rarity, extinction risk, and life-history traits, along the way defining limits on how existing databases can be used and clarifying how to improve development of new databases doc3583 none 00- Mack Effects of plant functional identity on ecosystem nitrogen retention following fire Recent warming trends and increased human activities have led to documented increases in fire occurrence in North American boreal forests. Forest productivity in the boreal biome is generally limited by the availability of nitrogen (N), and increased fire frequency causes increased opportunity for N to be lost from the ecosystem via combustion and post-fire losses to the atmosphere and water. Understanding controls over these N losses following fire is important for predicting the long-term consequences of increased fire frequency for forest productivity and carbon cycling. In this proposal, the investigators hypothesize that the functional traits of the plant species that initially colonize burned ecosystems will control the ability of the ecosystem to accumulate carbon and thus retain N following fire. The researchers will test this hypothesis with a study of N loss in a boreal black spruce forest that burned in June . The research approach will entail an ecosystem-scale addition of a stable N isotope that can be tracked, combined with experimental manipulation of plant colonization doc3584 none Fischer This grant provides funding for the exploratory development of a new kind of construction information technology: construction information workspace (CIW). A CIW is an interactive environment that visually communicates construction project information and their inter-relationships to support group tasks, such as project review, coordination and decision-making. CIW visualizations will be specified and prototyped based on observations of project meetings on planned and on-going capital facility projects and based on existing information visualizations in science and engineering. Mechanisms or filters will be formalized and implemented to generate these visualizations based on information obtained from state-of-the-art desktop tools currently in use in the construction industry (e.g., 3D CAD, project management software) and based on emerging integrated information systems. Through observations in practice and through tests with practitioners in the CIW, metrics will be developed to assess the usefulness of the developed visualizations to support group tasks. The CIW will be implemented in the _ Information Workspace currently under development in Computer Graphics and Human Computer Interaction research groups in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. If successful the results of this research will provide a roadmap for the development of construction information workspaces. Observations have shown that current single-user human computer interaction tools are inappropriate for group use. Therefore, the roadmap will include guidelines for the design of visualizations to support group tasks, examples of the types of mechanisms needed to generate the visualizations from databases and legacy software, and metrics to evaluate whether a particular visualization will be useful for group tasks. CIWs will reduce the state of information overload often observed on projects today. They will make the currently static project information interactive. They will help a team share the focus of a discussion through visually representing the critical relationships between project information. Therefore, teams will be more likely to make better decisions and use available project information in a strategic and not just reactive way. The construction domain provides a challenging application domain for _ information workspaces because of the large number of stakeholders involved in a project and because of the large and frequently changing sets of various types of information necessary to describe a project. Hence the results from this research will likely be useful in other domains doc3585 none Freymueller This grant provides support for the costs of upgrading the computing facilities for crustal deformation research at the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Along with cost-sharing provided by the Geophysical Institute, this grant will provide funds to acquire a new server computer and several workstations, as well as laptop computers for downloading field data. The new computers will replace aging workstations and unreliable laptops. The new computers will be used to support an active ongoing NSF-supported research program on deformation of the crust in Alaska and Asia, using Global Positioning System (GPS) and Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) techniques. The newly-acquired computers will provide a solid computational foundation for GPS and InSAR data analysis, and inversion and modeling of the resulting data. In addition to the PI, Jeff Freymueller, the equipment will be used by five graduate students (three female), one postdoc, and a new faculty member (hiring is in progress doc3586 none This grant provides funding for the development and evaluation of model predictive control methods for integrating entities in supply chains where business and production conditions vary significantly over time. Increasingly, companies find that they must reconfigure their supply chain structure, policies, and operating conditions to maintain or improve their performance in dynamic, real-time environments. In this research, a Model-on-Demand Predictive Control approach will provide a closed-loop methodology for integrating supply chain decisions that generates desirable system behaviors for the enterprise using both feedback and feedforward control action on the dynamical system. In addition, the model predictive control approach will provide the ability to evaluate the economic benefits of heterogeneous supply structures and varying degrees of centralization and information sharing, and the impact of time-varying inputs and outputs on system performance. Using a series of simulation experiments, the Model-on-Demand Predictive Control approach will be compared with the performance of Materials Requirement Planning logic with a rolling horizon implementation. Measures of performance evaluated in this study include inventory, customer service, responsiveness, and schedule stability. If successful, the model predictive control approaches developed through this research will provide benefits that include: (1) improved understanding of the value of real-time, feedback controlled information across heterogeneous organizations in supply chains, (2) demonstration of the value of an integrated modeling approach that uses operations research, data warehousing, estimation procedures, and process control in a distributed decision making environment, (3) managerial insights on designing and operating dynamic supply chains for improved performance through increased coordination and information sharing, (4) advancement of the Internet as the enabling technology for closed-loop decision making across organizational boundaries, and (5) foundation for future research on supply chain integration using dynamic control approaches in real-time environments such as those found on the Internet including supply web enterprises and business-to-business marketplaces doc3587 none Gunnar Carlsson This award provides partial support for graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and persons from under-represented groups to attend a workshop on Equivariant Stable Homotopy Theory and K-theory. The main speakers include I. Madsen, J.P. May, W. Dwyer, J. Morava, G.Carlsson, I Kriz, P. Hu, D. Sinha, R. Mandel, G. Lewis, and J. Greenlees, each of whom will give a one hour talk. In addition, there will be 5-10 short talks by participants. The workshop will be held at Stanford University in the Summer of . Further information is available at http: math.stanford.edu equihomotopy doc3588 none Bekey This workshop will attempt to identify fundamental and applied research issues associated with very large construction and manufacturing systems in space and or on the moon. Such issues will arise in connection with the assembly of solar power satellite systems (which may require the use of hundreds of autonomous, free-flying robots) and with the manufacture of photo-voltaic systems on the moon. The proposed workshop will concentrate on the system issues, including control, intelligence, cooperation, and self-replication. Partial support for the workshop has been obtained from NASA Headquarters doc3589 none Raubeson The cone-bearing plants or conifers, including pines, firs, junipers, cypresses, and relatives, number in the several hundred species of living plants, disposed in 60 or so genera, and are the surviving members of an evolutionary lineage that dominated terrestrial environments in the Mesozoic. Genealogical relationships among these surviving groups are not yet firmly established, although gene sequence data are accumulating for many representative taxa. Dr. Linda Raubeson is contributing new structural genomic data to help answer questions about the phylogenetic relationships of conifers. In particular, she is studying the content and order of genes in the chloroplast genome of a sample of 20 or so genera of conifers, and including the likely related ginkgo and gnetophytes. Fine-scale restriction-enzyme mapping of mutations along the chloroplast genome will reveal changes in gene order (inversions or translocations) and gene losses or duplications, some of which have already been characterized in her laboratory. Most of these structural mutations are of rare occurrence, and are likely to mark groups of phylogenetically related genera, thus providing new evidence for taxonomic and classification studies. The chloroplast genome maps, in turn, will aid more detailed studies of species-level relationships in taxonomically problematic groups, either by gene sequencing or yet finer scale restriction-enzyme mapping. Throughout the project, as in past work by Dr. Raubeson, undergraduate students will participate in discrete activities targeted to provide them training in modern molecular phylogenetic methods and experience in the design and execution of a research activity doc3590 none Willis Darwin did not understand how reproductive barriers between new species could evolve. After all, it is hard to imagine how natural selection alone could regularly result in the evolution of maladaptive traits like the premature death or sterility of hybrid offspring. Today it is understood that chromosomal rearrangements (or underdominant loci) and epistatic interactions between loci can cause hybrid sterility. These alternatives invoke vastly different evolutionary processes, so differentiating between them is a fundamental step in understanding the origin of species. The proposed research will test for the action of chromosomal rearrangements and genetic interactions in causing the partial hybrid sterility observed in crosses between the wildflower species Mimulus guttatus and M. nasutus. The projects use mapped genetic markers to isolate chromosomal segments from each species in the heterospecific genomic background, and test their fitness in common garden experiments. The number, effects, patterns of expression, and genetic basis of individual incompatibility factors will be determined. These experiments address fundamental issues underlying the evolution of hybrid sterility, and so will contribute to our understanding of how new species originate doc3591 none Ashman While the idea that not only pollinators, but also enemies (herbivores pathogens), can contribute to plant floral evolution is gaining acceptance, the role predation plays in plant breeding system evolution is currently unknown. Yet there is ample evidence that plants with separate sexes represent a dimorphic resource base for herbivores. Herbivores preferentially feed on plants with male function relative to those lacking male function (i.e., female plants) suggesting that herbivores may select host plants based on pollen production and, more specifically, may be attracted to pollen scent. This hypothesis will be tested by characterizing floral, pollen, and vegetative scents of female and hermaphrodite wild strawberry and by determining if weevils are attracted to scents specific to the pollen-bearing sexual morph. These data will evaluate a mechanism for sex-biased selection of host plants by weevils and thus will be instrumental in the development of hypotheses concerning the role of herbivory in breeding system evolution. Moreover, by elucidating the role of floral scent in attracting herbivores this research may suggest an alternative to the use of pesticides for controlling herbivory doc3592 none K. Papadopoulos Tulane University This is an exploratory grant for which the hypotheses is that Capillary Video-microscopy can uniquely reveal key aspects of the release mechanisms of water-soluble drugs from double-emulsion globules and their transport into neighboring giant liposomes that mimic biological cells. The goal is to elucidate the phenomena which govern these mechanisms and the control of which will ultimately decide the successful application of soluble emulsions as drug-delivery systems. Ephedrine hydrochloride (EPH HCI) will be used as the model water-soluble drug, encapsulated in the W1 compartment of a W1 0 W2 globule, and the oil membrane will be paraffin oil. Oil-soluble, nonionic surfactant Span-80 (sorbitan monooleate) and water-soluble, non-ionic surfactant Tween-80 will be studied as factors of both globule stability and drug release. The osmotic pressure gradients in the double-emulsion globules will be adjusted through NaCl. Microcapillaries (~200 um i.d., 10 200 um) will be fabricated from melting point tubes (1.1-1.2 mm i.d. x 100 mm) by pulling them in the middle using a Narishige PB-7 micropipette puller (see Picture 2). Injection and micromanipulation pipettes with fine tip will be shaped by pulling microtubes (Microcapes. 0.688 mm i.d. X 78 mm) from one of their ends so as to produce a tip of outside diameter 10-15 um. Micropipettes will be future fashioned with a microgorge (Narishige MF-9, see picture 3), thus allowing us to polish the end of the pipette or to bend it to a desired shape. To prepare a W1 0 W2 globule, a microcapillary will be filled with pure water or a saline solution at first. A micropipette filled with oil (containing oil-soluble surfactants) will then be inserted and will inject a large oil drop. Subsequently, and internal ephedrine-hydrochloride-solution droplet will be formed into the oil via the same procedure as the one that produces the oil drop. This globule preparation procedure will lead to an osmotic pressure gradient between W1 and W2 phases, which will cause the release of the water-soluble drug. A single globule will be used in each experiment and the complete transport process in this globule will be observed microscopically. In those experiments that will monitor the transfer of EPH HCI to a vessel, a giant vesicle will first be prepared with 1-palmitoyl-2oleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine through electroformation. By using different salinities in W1 and W2 and EOPH HCI concentrations in W1 we will know under their conditions the water-soluble is delivered by a swelling-breakdown mechanism. The time needed before rupture will be used as a measure of the drug release rate. An obvious geometrical factor that will effect the time of rupture is the size of the W1 droplets. Since smaller W1 droplets will take longer to burst, polydisperity in such droplets should lead to prolonged release, and thus will be studied as a tool to control delivery. Under those salinity conditions that will not produce swelling and breakdown, water will transport from W1 and W2 via some diffusion-facilitating mechanisms, such as reverse micellization, spontaneous emulsification, hydrated-surfactant or lamellar-facilitated transport. We will determine the kinetics of such drug release as effected by various surfactant combinations and formulations that will favor certain mechanisms over others under different conditions. To visualize the transport of the released material from the W1 0 W2 globule to the neighboring giant vesicle, aqueous fluorescent dye (N-Methylhdroxy-quinolinium iodide) will be added to ephedrine hydrochloride solution. In order to simulate possible release situations in the body, both contact and non-contact a configuration of a double-emulsion globule and a giant vesicle will be studied. To study drug transfer under globule-vesicle contact, the giant vesicle will be pushed gently so as to visually touch the W1 0 W2 globule doc3593 none C. Mei, MIT The requested open-channel flume will be used, in the immediate future, for experimental studies of turbulent flow fields around bridge piers and the dynamics of turbulence in irregular breaking waves. This research will be fundamentally useful in its revelation of basic flow properties around bridge piers in rivers, and in surf zone waves. Improved descriptions of turbulent flows at piers and in breaking waves are critical to the development of accurate and efficient computational methods for pier scour and coastal processes. The proposed research will also provide the high quality data needed to test and improve detailed models of bridge-pier flows and surf zone hydrodynamics. This data set would go far beyond any comparable data set that is presently available, and it would be useful for testing a wide range of modeling techniques, including both present day models and models that are under long-range development in the future. The requested precision-tilting flume will be an important contribution to the modernization of the Fluid Mechanics Laboratory at South Dakota State University. This laboratory is used cooperatively by all departments in the College of Engineering. In addition, cooperative programs at our collaborating institution at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology will also utilize the requested flume for research and education. Such use will be enhanced because a remote operation system will enable researchers to run the flume and acquire instrumental data by computer through the Internet. Acquisition of the requested flume will therefore permit South Dakota faculty to carry out competitive instrumentation and more effectively compete for research funding. The corresponding increase in the amount of research support will enable South Dakota to attract and support capable graduate students and to provide research-training opportunities to undergraduate students. The integration of research and teaching will provide elevated education quality for South Dakota students. Furthermore, Internet-based remote access to equipment will enhance diversity and will enable institutions (e.g. tribal universities, two-year colleges and high schools) that do not have a Fluid Mechanics Laboratory to participate in projects and activities supported by the requested equipment doc3594 none This grant funds investigation of scalable techniques for real-time order promising by discrete build-to-order environments facing dynamic order arrivals. The algorithms to be developed in this project for calculating due dates consider current time-phased availability of resources and material, existing commitments, and the current system state. The presence of various alternate resources or materials increases the combinatorial complexity of the problem. To increase performance, a combination of both optimal algorithms with good scalability such as shortest path and computational heuristics will be considered. One of the heuristics to be examined is based on a novel, even controversial, idea: for the purposes of promising, the time when a resource will be able to process an operation can be estimated with sufficient accuracy by considering only a partially ordered resource task plan. Current support for this principle is grounded in practical experience but little scientific evidence. Joint research occurring at the intersection of Industrial Engineering and Computer Science is necessary in this project because algorithmic and computational aspects are intertwined when performing research in a large-scale systems context. Algorithms will be implemented in an object-oriented, memory-resident, multi-threaded architecture for detailed study and empirical evaluation. A key tenet of this project is that the results be highly scalable. Order promising is perhaps the most important operational-level activity. The ability to make tight, yet achievable, promises in response to requests from consumers or other businesses is a fundamental business requirement. Surprisingly, very little research has been done in this area. Results of this research will increase the accuracy and speed with which these promises can be made. This research is directly applicable to manufacturers that increasingly are selling built-to-order products direct to customers via the Internet and to a future where collaborative commerce freely occurs among dynamically recombinant business partners doc3595 none This award will provide partial support to assist younger scientists (graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, or beginning faculty) to attend the Gordon Research Conference on Polymer Physics. The Conference has two major themes this year: The first is dynamics in polymers (rheology, phase transition kinetics, blends, block copolymers, membranes), and the second is biopolymer physics (membranes, folding, recognition, and self-assembly doc3596 none This project has as its aim the development of methodology that couples normally incompatible early and late transition metal catalysts, to perform multistep catalytic transformations. In particular, early transition metal Lewis acid catalysts will be coupled with late transition metal redox catalysts to enable one-pot transformations. Since such catalysts cannot normally coexist in solution, they will separated by immobilizing them onto solid organic supports. To achieve stereoselective catalysis, polymerizable chiral ancillary ligands will be examined in addition to a molecular imprinting approach. With this Award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program s Organic Synthesis Program supports the research of Professor Michel R. Gagne of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Professor Gagne s research involves the use of metals as catalysts to bring about useful organic reactions. Since several kinds of metal catalysts are used in a variety of ways, Professor Gagne is working to develop strategies whereby more than one catalyst can be employed concurrently in a single reaction vessel. This will significantly increase the efficiency with which synthetic products can be produced in a laboratory or industrial setting doc3597 none The goal of this project is to develop algorithms and tools for interior point methods. The investigator will continue his ongoing research into interior point methods with the aim of advancing several outstanding topics in semidefinite programming (SDP) and related problems. A better understanding of neighborhoods and paths is needed in SDP, and in programming over a symmetric cone in general. This is necessary in order to develop more efficient algorithms in terms of faster asymptotic convergence and numerical stability. The investigator intends to develop effective mathematical tools to deal with these issues. Programming over homogeneous cones and hyperbolic cones are likely to become the next emerging fields in interior point methods, and there is a need to develop efficient, long-step interior algorithms for such problems. Eventually, interior point methods will need to deal with even more complicated industrial applications which must be solved efficiently. The project will involve all of these areas of interior point methods; efficient algorithms will be devised in all cases, and the needed mathematical tools will be developed. The project also has two other goals. The first is an extension of duality theory beyond its traditional convexity, and the second one is the development of faster proximal point algorithms for convex programming. Interior point methods have been successful in solving many large scale industrial problems in industry: in civil and electrical engineering, management, communication networks, finance, and others. Further applicability of these methods depends on a better understanding of their behavior and continuous development of appropriate software. This project aims to search for efficient algorithms and improved mathematical tools so that large scale optimization problems arising from diverse industrial disciplines can be efficiently solved doc3598 none The aim of this project is to achieve greater understanding of damage in crystalline silicon caused by energetic low and medium mass ion implantation, and to conduct a survey study of similar effects in GaN and SiC. Prior research established that most of the point defects remaining after implantation are trapped in defect cluster disorder regions. The clusters subsequently re-emit point defects during an-nealing, producing a spectrum of stable defect complexes. It was also shown that the defect cluster dis-tribution after both 80 K and room temperature implantation produces, in addition to the expected in-terstitial dislocation layer near the projective range, Rp, and a vacancy-rich defect band between the surface and Rp (called the Rp 2 layer), another defect layer of unknown origin at depths of 2 to 3 times Rp. An understanding of the physics responsible for this behavior impacts the performance achievable from ultra-shallow pn junctions, and the correct modeling of post-implantation annealing defect dy-namics which are operative in impurity gettering and transient enhanced diffusion phenomena. In addi-tion to providing new fundamental data on processes in crystals with point defect supersaturations, this project seeks options for control suppression of these phenomena, particularly during the implantation itself. The general approach is to study defect accumulation and evolution within individual collision cascades using very low fluence MeV ions over a wide temperature range starting from ~ 80 K. The negligible cascade overlap for such implants isolates intrinsic intra-cascade point defect processes. The use of sensitive in-situ electrical measurements, together with a broad and complementary set of diag-nostic techniques allows characterization of a spectrum of defect types. Rutherford Backscattering Spectroscopy (RBS) and bevel-polish etching will provide total damage data, while two-detector coin-cidence Positron Annihilation Spectroscopy (PAS) will provide vacancy impurity identification. Deep level transient spectroscopy (DLTS) and electron beam induced current (EBIC) techniques will be used to identify centers with native electrical activity, as well as those with the electrical activity in-duced by trapping of hydrogen or diffusing metal impurities. Underlying these point defect impurity phenomena are fundamental issues related to the release, diffusion, and capture stages of gettering and near-surface dopant diffusion. Specific objectives of the research are to: understand structural, chemi-cal, and electrical properties of the defect clusters formed in Si crystals due to implantation with low and medium mass ions; specifically examine the physical properties of cluster thermal stability, its ability to emit mobile point defects, which enable the formation of stable complexes during annealing; understand the nature of defects formed above(RP 2) and below(2RP) the projected range region and determine their impact on dopant impurity redistribution and gettering; explore photon electric field procedures which enable control of implant defect cluster properties and distribution in order to create defect engineering options. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technologi-cal relevance. Advanced implantation and characterization techniques allow greater understanding and control of elementary processes which will allow advances in fundamental materials science and tech-nology. The basic knowledge and understanding gained from the research is expected to contribute to improving the ability to achieve doping with high residual crystal quality for electronic and photonic applications. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area doc3599 none Tauber Phase Transitions, generic scaling, and universality in systems far from thermal equilibrium are comparatively poorly understood. Yet, many analytic and computational studies are based on simplified theoretical models, the only justification for which is the existence of universality classes. This theoretical grant aims to advance the current understanding of genuinely non-equilibrium systems via two different but complementary approaches, namely (i) through studying simple fundamental models, and (ii) by analyzing specific experiments. In (i), field-theoretic representations and the renormalization group will be used. The equilibrium critical dynamics universality classes will be analyzed to determine how they are affected by violating detailed balance conditions. The effects of spatially anisotropic noise on the dynamics will be studied. The influence of noise correlations will also be studied. In (ii), a variety of non-equilibrium physical conditions will be analyzed. These include light-emitting polymers; the dynamics of driven magnetic flux in disordered high temperature superconductors; complex biological reaction systems; the physics of dehydrated organisms which may be in a metastable glassy thermodynamic state. Work will also continue on teh writing of a graduate textbook on critical dynamics. %%% This grant supports theoretical research on foundations and applications for a variety of non-equilibrium systems. This is a field of research which affects many common systems; life itself is a non-equilibrium system. The study of systems in equilibrium is much more advanced, whereas the understanding of non-equilibrium systems is still in a formative phase. Systems to be studied include light-emitting polymers, high temperature superconductors, and various biological systems doc3600 none The Severe Thunderstorm Electrification and Precipitation Study field program (STEPS), planned for the early summer of in western Kansas, will provide a wide range of observations in and around thunderstorms using aircraft, radar, and other observing systems. As part of STEPS, Dr. Eack and his Co-PI Dr. William Beasley of the University of Oklahoma will launch balloons that are equipped with special instruments to measure gamma rays (and x-rays) and short-term fluctuations in the electric field at altitudes within and just above thunderstorms. They will also arrange for a gamma-ray detector to be flown on the South Dakota T-28 armored aircraft. Objectives of the research are (1) to test hypotheses for the production of transient luminous events (TLEs) including sprites, elves, and blue jets, which are observed at altitudes in the middle atmosphere above thunderstorms; (2) to test hypotheses for the production of bremsstrahlung radiation within thunderstorms by runaway electron processes; (3) to evaluate models for lightning initiation and return strokes. Data analysis will be closely coordinated with other NSF-supported STEPS projects, including the New Mexico Tech lightning mapper ( ), the CHILL radar ( and - ), the South Dakota armored aircraft ( ), balloon soundings of the electrical field ( ), and visual observations of TLEs doc3601 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at William Marsh Rice University will acquire a console for a 400 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) metallocene-alumoxane interactions; b) solution structural characterization of tri-metallic molecules; c) characterization of the product distribution and relative yield from the facile hydrogen deuterium exchange in organic and organometallic aromatic compounds catalyzed by Group 13-mercury complexes; d) synthesis of molecules of precise length and constitution for electronic, photonic, and template self-replication applications; e) development of novel organic synthetic methods and the total synthesis of natural products; f) metal atom chemistry; g) chemistry of novel aromatic systems; h) terpene biosynthesis using recombinant microorganisms; and g) the synthesis of single-stranded DNA oligomers containing nonnatural nucleotides. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometry is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry and biochemistry doc3600 none The Severe Thunderstorm Electrification and Precipitation Study field program (STEPS), planned for the early summer of in western Kansas, will provide a wide range of observations in and around thunderstorms using aircraft, radar, and other observing systems. As part of STEPS, Dr. Eack and his Co-PI Dr. William Beasley of the University of Oklahoma will launch balloons that are equipped with special instruments to measure gamma rays (and x-rays) and short-term fluctuations in the electric field at altitudes within and just above thunderstorms. They will also arrange for a gamma-ray detector to be flown on the South Dakota T-28 armored aircraft. Objectives of the research are (1) to test hypotheses for the production of transient luminous events (TLEs) including sprites, elves, and blue jets, which are observed at altitudes in the middle atmosphere above thunderstorms; (2) to test hypotheses for the production of bremsstrahlung radiation within thunderstorms by runaway electron processes; (3) to evaluate models for lightning initiation and return strokes. Data analysis will be closely coordinated with other NSF-supported STEPS projects, including the New Mexico Tech lightning mapper ( ), the CHILL radar ( and - ), the South Dakota armored aircraft ( ), balloon soundings of the electrical field ( ), and visual observations of TLEs doc3603 none s of other systems, including flow over an aircraft wing or the temperature distribution in a furnace, however, are so complex that present mathematical techniques for the determination of optimal control strategies require such large computer resources that render them impractical. The goal of this research is to develop and analyze computational mathematics tools for the determination of optimal control strategies for a class of complex systems and the demonstration of the practicability of these tools using selected applications in fluid mechanics doc3604 none The objective of this research is to develop pure cultures of giant Eubacteria (to at least 600 x 80 micrometers) which occupy the central intestines of tropical reef-dwelling surgeonfishes ( tangs of the aquarium trade, Fam. Acanthuridae). Only one species of these bacteria has been named (Epulopiscium fishelsoni from the Red Sea) although approximately 10 structural morphs (here termed epulos ) are distinguishable in a light microscope. Epulos represent a distinct phylogenetic lineage related to Clostridium and Metabacterium, and exhibit a daily life cycle of cell growth and reproduction that tracks the feeding and resting behavior of the host fish. Several characteristics emphasize the unique nature of these cells: epulos possess a distinct nucleoid separated from the cytoplasm by an unidentified, thin, membranous structure; condensed DNA is arranged in elongate, chromosome-like structures with cross-striations similar to those seen in dinoflagellates, so-called mesokaryotes; the cytoplasm is packed with an intricately-folded system of what appear to be membranes; cells are highly motile, driven by a covering of bacterial flagella. Cells are large enough to allow use of light microscopy at moderate magnification (100-400 x in most previous studies), manipulative and invasive techniques (e.g., microprobe, microinjection), and other methods normally tractable only with large cells. Such techniques would complement standard physiological, biochemical and molecular microbiological methods used to study the inner workings of bacterial cells, as well as to understand: factors which limit cell size and morphology in prokaryotes; vertebrate host-symbiont interactions in an essentially open system (gut vs. specialized culture organ); and bacterial dispersal and evolution in widespread but patchily distributed habitats (surgeonfishes). Major advances on any front, however, are hampered by the inability to maintain them in pure culture. All prior work on epulos has been done on fixed cells or on live cells within about 1 hour of their collection at a tropical field laboratory. Furthermore, all collections have required a diving ichthyologist to identify, capture and dissect the host fish and collect the bacteria. In a preliminary attempt (Summer ) to overcome this culture barrier, epulos remained alive, bud did not grow or reproduce. The goal of this research is to build from the first step to (1) define complete culture conditions and (2) begin to identify gut environmental factors which cue cyclical daily changes in bacterial physiology and activity doc3605 none John Tully of Yale University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program for research that focuses on the atomic-level understanding of dynamical processes at solid surfaces. New theoretical and computational tools will be created and used to study specific chemical problems in three areas. First, dynamics at metal surfaces will be explored to enable prediction of the contribution of electron-hole pair transitions to adsorbate energy transfer. Methods for computing the relative intensities of vibrational modes and approximate propensity rules in scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) will be developed. Second, mixed quantum-classical dynamics will be developed with the goal of extending conventional molecular dynamics simulations to practical applications involving electronic transitions and or quantum nuclear motion. Finally, ab initio methods for computing energies and lifetimes of adsorbate excited states at semiconductor and metal surfaces will be developed and tested, then extended to calculating energies and widths of adsorbate-ion resonance states and excited states. Understanding molecule and electron behavior on solid surfaces is important for gaining insights needed to drive innovations in technologically important areas such as semiconductor processing. Outcomes from this research are expected to impact a variety of important chemical applications, including the determination of molecular identity from observed topographical features in STM, and the understanding of multi-dimensional processes such as those involved in electrochemistry, condensed phase dynamics, and enzyme reactions doc3606 none This project has the long term objective to apply molecular container compounds in areas such as the characterization of reactive intermediates and in catalysis. Two highly strained cyclic allenes and various intermediates in the naphthylcarbene rearrangement will be generated and spectroscopically characterized in the inner phase of hemicarcerands, and their thermochemistry will be investigated. These species are important to structural theory in organic chemistry. In addition, a new approach for the stabilization of reactive intermediates will be developed. This approach involves the covalent bonding of a precursor molecule on the inside of a hemicarcerand, whereupon generation of a reactive intermediate from this precursor takes place to the exclusion of other reactive species. Quenching of the intermediate is thus prevented. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program s Organic Dynamics Program supports the research of Professor Ralf Warmuth of Kansas State University. Professor Warmuth is pursuing an area of physical organic chemistry wherein chemical species that are implicated as intermediates in reaction processes are created and observed. These species are referred to as reactive intermediates, and are normally so short-lived that direct observation is difficult. By forming these intermediates in a protective shell, Professor Warmuth will be able to extend the lifetimes of these elusive entities, making their observation more feasible doc3607 none A magnitude 7.2 earthquake occurred on November 12, in the area of Duzce-Bolu, Turkey, 70 km east of Adapazari and 170 km northwest of Ankara, resulting in extensive damage, injuries and loss of life. This earthquake occurred along the North Anatolian fault, a strike slip fault that has many similarities to the San Andreas fault in California. This action provides partial support for a reconnaissance team that was dispatched shortly after the earthquake to document the geotechnical, engineering geology seismology, and tsunamigenic features of this earthquake in as much detail as possible. This team coordinated with other reconnaissance teams from Turkey, Japan and the United States. As with all post-earthquake reconnaissance investigations, it is expected that vital records and data will become available as a result of this earthquake in Turkey. From a scientific viewpoint, these large earthquakes act as full-scale experiments that cannot be duplicated via controlled experiments in the laboratory or in the field. It is through quick response reconnaissance efforts that the mostly-ephemeral data from these events can be recovered and used to further advances in earthquake hazard mitigation. The results from this investigation are expected to yield information and data that will help the profession to understand the effects of large-scale strike slip fault systems on urbanized and industrial areas. This is a multi-institutional award involving the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Southern California doc3608 none Parriott The Committee of Astronomy and Astrophysics (CAA) is the National Research Council s advisory body for astronomy and astrophysics, both ground and space-based. The objectives of the CAA are to monitor the status of astronomy and astrophysics, to provide broadly based independent strategic advice to federal agencies, to serve as a multi-agency forum for discussion and coordination, and to monitor implementation of the recommendations in the report of the decadal Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee. The CAA meets these objectives by conducting meetings and by producing reports and studies as needed and as requested by federal agencies and by Congress. The activity is supported jointly by the NSF and NASA. This award is funded by the Division of Astronomical Sciences doc3609 none Typically, rural to urban migration in the developing world is often accompanied by a shift to nuclear families and reduced fertility. But in sub-Saharan Africa, fertility does not always decline with urbanization and this appears to be associated with the highly active, social and economic ties migrants maintain with home villages. Using anthropological demography, this project will investigate how reproductive rates (fertility) are influenced by the kinship networks that link urban migrants and their rural villages in Nigeria. The research focuses on six Igbo-speaking villages and their migrants to Kano, the largest city in northern Nigeria. The PI will adopt a life cycle approach to examine how each of the four major life stages (adolescence, marriage, child-bearing, and cessation of child-bearing) entail different cultural, behavioral and reproductive health issues, as well different patterns of migratory behavior. Methods include a random survey of 400 rural households and a survey of all linked migrant households in Kano, as well as collection of life histories and participant observation. Surveys will elicit fertility and migration histories and explore social and economic interactions between households. This research will contribute to our understanding of rural to urban migration shapes fertility patterns in the developing world doc3610 none Szyperski This research focusses on the development and application of novel Bio-NMR techniques which promise to have a broad imact for science infrastructure beyond use in structural genomics. NMR is expected to play an important role to harvest the fruits of genome sequencing projects by supporting the functional analysis of gene products in structural genomics . The mass production of protein structures in the framework of this big science project requires new methodology for cost-effective structure determination. This research is dedicated to further develop reduced-dimensionality (RD) triple resonance NMR experiments for use in structural genomics . Such spectroscopy promises to be ideally suited because it allows, firstly, matching of the NMR measurement time to sensitivity requirements for signal detection while retaining a high digital resolution for automated spectral analysis, and secondly, assigning proteins with a smaller set of NMR spectra when compared with conventional spectroscopy. The current proposal invokes both fundamental research, i.e., Bio-NMR methods development, and applied research targeting the commercial effeciency of NMR parks or consortia operated for structural genomics projects. Research will aim at the development of a protocol that allows identification of minimal sets of NMR spectra for structure determination of a given protein in a structural genomics enterprise. Considering RD NMR experiments, this will allow one retaining a high digital resolution when investments of spectrometer time have to be minimized, as it can be expected within the frameworkk of a structural genomics project. Moreover, for application in structural genomics, the impact of RD spectroscopy for the automatic resonance assignment of proteins will be evaluated, and an RD NMR package comprising RD pulse programs, NMR parameter sets and job-files for automated spectral analysis will be devised. Moreover, research will focus on the implementation of improved RD experiments including a suite of schemes that allows measurement of residual dipolar couplings in dilute liquid crystalline media. This development opens an avenue to merge their measurement with the resonance assignment, as well as to make use of variations of sums of scalar and residual dipolar couplings along the polypeptide chain to establish sequential connectivities. This research offers outstanding opportunities for involving students at all stages in their academic development, and can be expected to play a valuable role in integrating research and education doc3611 none 00- Myrold Carbon turnover through the soil microbial community Terrestrial ecosystems are driven by inputs of organic carbon derived from their plant communities. The quantity and quality of this carbon changes during the different growth stages of the plants and is influenced by seasonal climate. The investigators hypothesize that these factors exert selective pressures on the soil microbial community and influences which microbes respond to plant carbon inputs, where such responses take place, and the fate of plant carbon in the soil. The fate of plant-derived organic carbon will be followed by labeling tall fescue grass with a stable carbon isotope and following the labeled plant carbon in shoot and root residues as they decompose. At the same time, microbial activities, community composition and turnover will be measured with a combination of molecular and biochemical techniques. The project will provide new information about how climate and plant carbon inputs interact with the microbial community to influence how carbon is processed in soil doc3612 none Support is provided for three educational workshops to be held at the Society of Personality and Social Psychology s (SPSP) First Annual Meeting in Nashville, TN, February 6, . The workshops include (1) Capturing the Vicissitudes of Life: Electronic Experience-Sampling; (2) Functional Neuroimaging in Personality and Social Psychology; and (3) Using the Web for Research in Social and Personality Psychology. The workshops will provide an interdisciplinary focus on the use of cutting-edge technologies in social and personality psychology research doc3613 none This individual investigator award is for a project to investigate a newly discovered phenomenon, superconducting granular balls. When a strong electric field is applied to a suspension of liquid nitrogen and high temperature superconducting particles, the granular particles quickly move between the electrodes and bind themselves together to form macroscopic balls in milliseconds. The phenomenon shows a new property of superconductor: electric field induced surface energy. The current preliminary explanation relates this surface energy to a loss of Joshphson coupling energy between the ab-planes due to the induced surface charge on the particles. The physical model requires extensive development. The new phenomenon is also related to a long-standing unresolved issue: the behavior of superconductors in a static electric field. The basic science of the phenomenon is important to the understanding and development of superconductivity. The research may also lead to a new method to produce superconducting films. The project offers excellent opportunity for the training of undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows in techniques that will prepare them for future careers. %%% This individual investigator award is for a project directed towards the study of a new phenomenon of superconductivity discovered recently, the formation of superconducting granular balls in a strong electric field. The current theoretical explanation concludes that the nature of the phenomenon is a new property of superconductivity. The discovery is also related to a long-standing unresolved important issue: the behavior of superconductors in a static electric field. The basic science of the phenomenon is important to the understanding and development of superconductivity. The research may also lead to a new method to produce superconducting films. The project involves undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellow, whose training in a forefront of physics prepares them for the future career in science doc3614 none This is an award to the University of Alabama Tuscaloosa for the acquisition of a Rheometrics ARES Rheometer. This instrument will be used by an interdisciplinary group of four investigators and their students in the Materials for Information Technology Center at the University of Alabama for a variety of research projects in the general area of advanced materials development and processing as related to information storage technology. The projects include (1) investigation of the microstructure and microstructure evolution of magnetic dispersions, so as to enable the revolutionary advances necessary for step increases in information storage capacity (2) exploration and characterization of the constitutive behavior of magnetic dispersions, so as to provide the enabling science for development of next generation coating processes, and (3) development of solventless, electron- beam-cured formulations that will eliminate the large release of volatile organic compounds typically associated with magnetic media manufacture. Knowledge of the rheological properties of the materials involved is critical to each of these projects. In addition, the rheometer will be used in an undergraduate chemical engineering course in conjunction with a laboratory demonstration module and a numerical analysis project to educate undergraduate engineers on the importance of non-Newtonian behavior in fluid processing operations. This is an award to the University of Alabama Tuscaloosa for the acquisition of a Rheometrics ARES rheometer. This instrument will be used by an interdisciplinary group of four investigators and their students in the Materials for Information Technology Center at the University of Alabama for a variety of research projects in the general area of advanced materials development and processing as related to information storage technology. In addition, the rheometer will be used in an undergraduate chemical engineering course in conjunction with a laboratory demonstration module and a numerical analysis project to educate undergraduate engineers on the importance of non-Newtonian behavior in fluid processing operations doc3615 none for Venerus project Anisotropic Thermal Conduction in Deforming Polymers Flow-induced orientation of polymeric molecules results in anisotropic mechanical, optical and thermal properties and has profound effects on material properties. The objective of this study is to obtain quantitative, time-dependent measurements of the thermal diffusivity tensor in deforming polymer liquids. These measurements will be made using a non-invasive optical technique known as Forced Rayleigh Scattering. Experiments will be conducted on several polymer melts in step-shear strain and cessation of steady shear rate flows. Measured components of the thermal diffusivity tensor will used in conjunction with mechanical (stress) and optical (birefringence) data to evaluate the stress-thermal rule. Understanding the connection between the flow-induced orientation that occurs during processing of polymers and their end-use physical properties is essential. The thermal diffusivity tensor measurements obtained in this study will significantly enhance efforts to formulate physically-meaningful process flow models that can be used for the development of advanced processing technologies and applications doc3616 none Proposal: PI: Michael Langston An adaptive computing system (ACS) offers a revolutionary combination of the performance of custom hardware and the flexibility of software by employing reconfigurable technology. A key feature of an ACS is the reconfigurable processing element, which, in the current generation, is a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chip. This research project investigates the impact of an ACS in the context of a high-performance computational grid with clusters-of-workstations, shared memory multi-processors and rapid interconnects. Suites of fast estimators are devised using approximation algorithms for FPGA mapping and partitioning. An assortment of algorithmic methods is applied. A major focus is on new heuristic and optimization strategies designed to exploit emergent mathematical techniques. Supporting software tools are also developed, with an emphasis placed on portability. Implementation testbeds are built around edge-based segmentation and related problems common to a variety of image processing applications doc3617 none This research, which rests at the interface of anthropology, psychobiology, and mental health, will make an important contribution to our understanding of the social, cultural, and biological dimensions of religious experiences. Specifically, this project asks what characteristics distinguish religious adepts from other religious participants, and what if any relationship exists between certain types of religious participation, and mental illness, among members of a Brazilian religion. Religious adepts, or mediums, have typically been viewed as socially and or psychologically marginal individuals who use religious participation as a sanctioned outlet for tendencies often equated with western categories of mental illness. The biological nature of the altered states of consciousness often associated with this type of religious participation suggests that physiological antecedents might be among the factors that distinguish these individuals from other religious participants. The contribution of social and psychological factors to the development, expression, and experience of such physiological predisposition needs to be examined in contexts like Salvador Brazil, in which religious belief systems affect concepts of deviance and normality, and may shape different outcomes for such individuals than in environments dominated by psychomedical paradigms. This 12-month psychobio-cultural study proposes to employ a combination of ethnographic, psychological, and psychobiological methods to explore the confluence of three domains in the lives of adepts who play the role of spirit medium in Brazilian Candomble : social factors, including demographic and life history variables; psychological characteristics, including personality traits and psychological symptoms; and psychobiology, in the form of patterns of attention and arousal regulation. This study will contribute to the following: 1) explore factors that predispose individuals to mediumship, 2) address questions surrounding the relationship of ritualized altered states of consciousness to psychopathology, and 3) contribute information that could help improve psychomedical approaches to mental illness in non-western contexts doc3618 none N. Olof Pellmyr Dr. N. Olof Pellmyr of Vanderbilt Univerisity, in collaboration with Dr. James H. Leebens-Mack of Colgate University, has beeen awarded a grant to study coveolutionary interactions between plants and moths. Coevolution is an important process in driving diversification and speciation, but understanding of this process is hampered by a lack of phylogenies (family trees) for model groups of organisms. Yuccas and yucca moths are tied in an obligate pollination mutualism, commonly cited as one of the most obvious examples of coevolution. The PIs propose to use multi-gene sequencing to complete robust organismal phylogenies for both yuccas (Agavaceae) and yucca moths (Prodoxidae: Lepidoptera). The results will be used to test hypotheses of coevolution, parallel speciation, and the role of host shifts in diversification. Comparative analyses will be used to quantify coevolution at the level of individual traits in the moths and plants. The goal of objective 1 is to establish a stable phylogeny based on DNA sequence data for the plant genus Yucca. They will use a multi-gene approach, using both nuclear and cytoplasmic markers, to establish a robust species-level phylogeny. In objective 2, the PIs will use a similar approach to resolve relationships among a cluster of rapidly diversified groups of yucca moths whose origin coincided with much life history evolution. Objective 3 utilizes the moth and plant phylogenies to test hypotheses related to coevolution. The distribution and frequency of cospeciation will be estimated, and and comparative analysis emplyed to test how host shifting and evolution of oviposition behavior affect diet breadth and rates of diversification. Finally, the underlying conflict of interests between moth and plant should manifest through selection on traits with major effects on oviposition success in the moth and minimization of seed destruction in the plant. Moth ovipositor shape, oviposition site, and floral ovary shape and thickness are candidate traits that are highly variable among species. They will be the focus of ancestor reconstruction and comparative analyses to partition coevolutionary and phylogenetic components of diversification. Together, the results from the project should provide the first phylogenetic framework at the species level for any of the models of coevolution and mutualism. It will open a venue for analyzing how coevolution acts at the trait level to contribute to the generation of biodiversity doc3619 none The project will lead to improved understanding of entanglements and tenuous structures in complex fluids containing rigid components. It will include a study of the rotation and translation of rigid rods in entangling and non-entangling polymer solutions. The model system here is composed of tobacco mosaic virus and linear or globular dextran. Related experiments concern diffusive transport in liquid crystals, emphasizing synthetic polypeptides of variable length to determine the effects of flexibility. Characterization of poly(stearylglutamate in dodecane will illuminate the unique properties of this, perhaps the simplest of all reversible gels. Studies of self-assembling, two-directional arborols will emphasize basic properties such as stability. Equally important are the mechanisms by which the self-assembly can be controlled. Techniques include static and dynamic light scattering, fluorescence photobleaching recovery, pulsed field gradient NMR spectroscopy, and to-be-developed birefringence methods. Complex fluids with rigid, extended components are important precursors to high-strength fibers and films. They also pose very challenging fundamental questions, such as the nature of entanglements. The experiments will provide the observations to support theoretical developments elsewhere, creating together the underpinnings for rational design and processing of better materials. Good chances for serendipitous discovery exist, particularly in the self-assembling arborols, which show preliminary signs of unusual long-range structures. Potential applications include diffraction gratings and other optical devices, superior stationary phases for enhanced throughput in analytical separations, and more efficient systems for control of polymer colloid stability, which is important in environmental remediation and nanofabrication. Students and others will work in an atmosphere that blends classroom and practical laboratory education with fundamental research and partnership with industrial and other off-campus scientists doc3620 none This research project, supported in the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, addresses questions of interfacial chemistry in electrochemical devices. Using a combination of surface vibrational spectroscopies, electrochemical methods, and electron spectroscopic probes, Professor Pemberton and her research group at the University of Arizona study the structure and properties of three types of important electrochemical interfaces. The orientation of diakylcarbonate solvents at model Li battery electrode surfaces, the interfacial chemistry of dialkylimidazolium salts used in electrochemical capacitor systems, and the interaction of organic thin films with low work function metals are examined in this work. Fundamental questions about interfacial structure and reactivity are studied, with an eye towards the technological applications of this information. The understanding of the interfacial chemistry in important electrochemical systems is the goal of this research project. A combination of experimental probes are used to address questions of electrolyte structure at the electrode interface, the interfacial interactions of organic dielectrics in capacitor systems, and the interfacial chemistry important in organic light emitting devices. Results of this fundamental research impact a number of important microelectronic technologies doc3621 none PI: Miguel J. Bagajewicz Institution: University of Oklahoma Proposal Number: Instrument readings in process plants may be corrupted by the presence of biases and leaks. Data reconciliation is done to obtain process variable estimates. The accuracy of the data and the quality of the information are related to the algorithms used as well as the sensor network used to filter these disturbances. Because plants are usually poorly instrumented for the purpose of data reconciliation, good redundancy is not available to perform this function. This project involves research in cost-optimal sensor location. Numerical procedures will be developed for large systems. Network performance measures will be addressed: residual reliability, residual resilience, multiple gross error detection capability, etc. Work will also be done for the case of dynamic data reconciliation and for nonlinear systems. An extension to cover the design of sensor networks capable of handling normal monitoring tasks such as accounting and parameter estimation, simultaneously with the detection and isolation of faults, will also be addressed doc3622 none Flying insects achieve the highest known mass-specific rates of aerobic metabolism in the Animal Kingdom. How these high metabolic flux rates are achieved to support flight is poorly understood. During flight, steady state rates of mechanical work define rates of ATP hydrolysis and resynthesis. The applicant asks how capacities for ATP synthesis are related to ATP requirements for flight. In previous studies using honeybees (Apis mellifera), the applicant found remarkably close matches between enzymatic capacities for glycolysis and glycolytic rates achieved during flight. As an extension of these studies, further research will be conducted to determine how closely mitochondrial oxidative capacities match requirements during flight. An important question is whether honeybee flight muscle mitochondria possess inherently higher capacities for respiration and oxidative phosphorylation than mitochondria from vertebrate homeotherm muscles. Honeybee mitochondria will be isolated and characterized to determine how oxidative capacities are related to the respiration rates achieved in flight. Further studies to investigate the basis for high respiration rates in honeybees will involve mechanistic studies of electron transfer reactions in isolated muscle mitochondria. The relationships between biochemical capacities and physiological flux rates will be further explored in a comparative study using various species of Euglossine (orchid) bees, which vary greatly in size and are known to display an inverse relationship between body mass and mass-specific metabolic rate during flight. It is proposed that in Euglossine bees, the inverse relationship between body mass and mass-specific aerobic metabolic rate is achieved partly through variation in mitochondrial content and structure, as well as higher enzyme turnover rates (electron transfer rate per enzyme molecule) with declining body mass. These unique studies will shed light upon how metabolic enzymes function in vivo and the principles governing the design of biochemical capacities. The rules that govern how much enzyme is enough but not too much are poorly understood. The applicant s research program is based on the belief that progress towards this goal is of fundamental importance to biology doc3623 none Poly(p-phenylene vinylene)(PPV) and PPV derivatives are of interest for their potential in a variety of electronic and optical device applications. Because the final PPV polymer is highly conjugated and insoluble, the preferred synthetic method follows a precursor polymer route. The routes are referred to as: sulfonium precursor route (SPR), xanthate precursor route (XPR) and chlorine precursor route (CPR). In this project, PPV and PPV derivatives will be synthesized via each of these routes depending on the desired product. PPV will be synthesized from the xanthate precursor which results in a more amorphous polymer. The thermal elimination reaction mechanism and the kinetics of the reaction will be analyzed. This will provide the half-life (shelf-life) of the precursor which is important for commercial application of the polymer. A full understanding of the thermal elimination reaction is important because the conditions of the thermal elimination reaction influence the properties of the final product. Other PPV derivatives that will be synthesized include, for example: poly(2,5-dimethoxy-p-phenylene vinylene)(DM-PPV); poly(phenoxyphenylene vinylene)(PO-PPV) and poly(2,3 diphenyl phenylene vinylene)(DP-PPV). Their thermal properties will be analyzed as discussed above for the xanthate precursor. In addition, the opto-rheological technique that will be employed is referred to as dynamic infrared linear dichroism (DIRLD) and has only recently been applied to the analysis of electroactive polymers. This study will relate the molecular motions (vibrational modes in the infrared region) to the bulk macroscopic properties observed by dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA). %%% Students will be actively engaged in materials research from the synthesis of the polymer precursor through to characterization by thermal analysis and DIRLD. Undergraduate students will work with a graduate student and the PI. Results will be discussed at weekly group meetings where ideas can be exchanged and questions answered. The research will be formally presented at the local, regional and national levels with publications submitted to referred journals for dissemination to the materials science community doc3624 none Elston The broad goal of this project is to gain a mechanistic understanding of energy transduction in biomolecular transport processes. The project focuses on three specific systems: the bacterial flagellar motor, the motor protein dynein, and protein translocation systems found in membranes of the endoplasmic reticulum and mitochondria. While the biology involved in these systems is very different, the same mathematical techniques are applicable for analyzing theoretical models of all three. To model these systems requires the use of Langevin or stochastic differential equations. The randomness in these equations comes from two sources, thermal diffusion and chemical kinetics. Thermal fluctuations are characterized by the diffusion coefficient, which can be measured experimentally, and many of the important reaction rates are known from biochemical studies. In addition to molecular collisions, electrostatic interactions are the other dominant forces involved in these transport systems. If available, structural data are used to determine the relevant electrostatic potentials. Once model equations for the systems have been developed, numerical and analytical techniques are used to compare their behavior with experimental data. The final phase of the analysis is to use the mathematical models to produce experimentally testable predictions. Biological molecular motors are nanometer-sized engines that use chemical energy to generate force. A well known molecular motor is myosin, which is the protein responsible for muscle contraction. Other examples include the flagellar motor, which is used by bacteria for swimming, and dynein, which produces the force necessary for cilia motion. The broad goal of this project is to gain a mechanistic understanding of force generation in both these systems. Current experimental techniques are allowing biophysicists to study molecular motors at the single molecule level, thereby allowing the mechanical properties of motor proteins to be measured. These new physical data in conjunction with structural data provide the impetus for renewed theoretical investigations into molecular motor function. An important reason for performing a mathematical analysis of force generation is that it allows a quantitative comparison between experimental data and model behavior to be made. The results of such a comparison not only are important for model validation, but also can be used to uncover errors in the assumptions underlying the model. However, the significance of mathematical modeling goes beyond model validation and lies in its predictive power. Once a theoretical model has been developed that is consistent with current experimental data, it is straightforward to extend the analysis to include situations that have not yet been investigated in the laboratory. If model predictions are borne out by experiment, further confidence in the reality of the model is gained. For the systems under consideration in this project, this means a mechanistic understanding of force generation has been achieved. From a technological standpoint, the results of these investigations should be relevant for designing and fabricating manmade nanomachines doc3625 none Nelson This award provides support for the travel of U.S. graduate students and post-doctoral fellows to participate in the Gordon Research Conference Lasers in Medicine and Biology . Support is being provided primarily on the basis of research merit, however special consideration is to be given to applicants involved in biomedical engineering laser research. Selection of awardees will be by vote of the conference and session chairs based on information s in response to the requirements in the application form. The form is to be sent by email to directors of all laser research laboratories plus graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in those institutions. This Gordon Research Conference is one of the most useful meetings in the emerging fields of photomedicine and biomedical optics. The top research groups in this field are represented in the program. The major goal of the conference is to bring together key researchers from academia, industry and government to examine the future applications of lasers and the optical sciences in medicine. The graduate students and post-doctoral fellows that will be supported by this grant will benefit greatly from participating in this excellent meeting and listening to the talks given by the top researchers in the field. One of the valuable features of this meeting is the large amount of time devoted to discussion time in the informal atmosphere which lends itself to valuable interaction among the participants doc3626 none Altman This is an award to the Departments of Chemical Engineering and Applied Physics at Yale University for the acquisition of a variable-temperature ultrahigh-vacuum (UHV) scanning probe microscope (SPM). The SPM will be capable of acquiring scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and contact and non-contact scanning force microscopy (SFM) images at rates exceeding one image per second at temperatures between 100 and Kelvin. In addition, atom-tracking techniques will be implemented to enable diffusion measurements at hopping rates up to 104 per second, and to lock onto individual surface sites to allow catalytic processes occurring on the time scale of microseconds to be studied on a local level. The SPM system will be linked to two existing surface analysis systems and thus the complete system will enable the electronic and chemical properties of the same surface to be characterized by a wide range of techniques that probe different length and energy scales. This new system will be used to study problems in film growth, interface formation and dynamics, the electronic properties of interfaces, and heterogeneous catalysis. Both the construction of the new SPM system and the projects that will use the new equipment closely integrate research and education. The Departments of Chemical Engineering and Applied Physics at Yale University will acquire a variable-temperature ultrahigh-vacuum (UHV) scanning probe microscope (SPM). By incorporating both scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and scanning force microscopy (SFM) in a multi-chamber UHV system equipped with an array of surface preparation and analytical techniques, Professor Altman and co-workers will be able to investigate on the atomic-scale the full range of technically important and scientifically interesting surfaces and interfaces including insulators, semiconductors and metals. Further, varying the temperature between 100- Kelvin will allow them to control the rate of surface kinetics enabling the characterization of the mechanisms and kinetics of surface phenomena such as catalysis by direct observation on the atomic scale. The results obtained with this equipment will impact our fundamental understanding of film growth and interface formation as well as heterogeneous catalysis. Both the construction of the new SPM system and the projects that will use the new equipment closely integrate research and education. Graduate and undergraduate students will be involved in all phases of the design, assembly and testing of the new system, providing them a unique educational opportunity to learn first-hand about the design of complex scientific equipment doc3627 none Lega The investigator uses numerical simulations and analytic techniques related to amplitude equations to study pattern formation dynamics in swimming bacteria, wave number selection in a Swift-Hohenberg equation modeling traveling wave patterns, and traveling hole solutions of the complex Ginsburg-Landau equation. The broad topics of pattern formation and the behavior of patterns are widely important in mathematics and in application areas. The investigator studies the conditions under which certain equations have solutions that show such patterns, and what these patterns say about the underlying physical or biological problems doc3628 none The specific objectives of this research are fourfold. First, a thorough investigation of the Co(0) catalyzed Pauson-Khand reaction will be carried out with emphasis given to ligand control of the relative and absolute stereochemical outcome of ring formation. Second, ligand control of asymmetric Rh(I) catalyzed [4+2] cycloaddition processes will be studied. Third, the rational design and synthesis of structurally differentiated, enantiopure P-chiral phosphine ligands will be carried out. Fourth, the ligands will be evaluated in asymmetric bond forming reactions including Ir(I) catalyzed hydrogenations, Cu(I) catalyzed nucleophilic epoxide openings and 1,4-additions to unsaturated substrates. With this renewal, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Tom Livinghouse of the Department of Chemistry at Montana State University. Professor Livinghouse will focus his work on developing new methods for metal mediated ring formation and asymmetric ligand design. Motivation for the research is provided by the growing need for many substances in a stereoisomerically pure state. The research will have broader impacts for the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries and for the training of graduate students doc3629 none Edward Grant of Purdue University is supported by a grant from the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program to continue his experimental research on state-to-state photoionization and dynamics of intramolecular relaxation by rovibronic coupling in highly excited (Rydberg) states of small molecules. These experiments will be accomplished by multi-photon resonant ionization and high-resolution threshold photoelectron spectroscopy, in particular, Zero Electron Kinetic Energy-Photoelectron Spectroscopy. The experiments will be paralleled by Multi-Channel Quantum Defect Theory calculations to identify highly excited rovibrational states and l coupling in these systems. These calculations, initiated by the PI, will be extended by a collaboration with a theorist who is expert in this area. Initially studies on the formyl radical and nitrogen dioxide will be continued, but these will be expanded to include other larger polyatomic molecules which are theoretically more challenging. Small reactive radical molecules in excited states are critical species in many chemical and physical processes occurring in media such as internal combustion, plasma processing, polluted atmospheres and the interstellar medium. In order to understand the molecular structure of, and energy transfer in, these species high resolution spectroscopy and high level theoretical calculations will be made. This will enable observation of these media to be interpreted and the media to be modeled doc3630 none Marks In this renewal project effort, research into the structural aspects, thermodynamics and kinetics of Stranski-Krastanov growth in a binary eutectic system is performed. One of the primary areas of interest is to understand how such a system behaves as the particle size decreases from large, where the bulk phase diagram is applicable, to small where terms such as the surface free energy may lead to depression of the eutectic temperature. Parallel with this research, work on Direct Methods for determining surface structures is performed. The target here is to provide a general code that is freely available to solve, ab-initio, three-dimensional surface structures from transmission electron diffraction or surface x-ray diffraction data. A new area added to the program is charge-transfer at reconstructed surfaces which should in principle be detectable and quantifiable using transmission electron diffraction. Another area is a precession electron diffraction camera, which could become a very important tool in the future for determining structures using transmission electron diffraction. %%% As dimensions continue to decrease in electronic devices, there is no reason why metallic materials should follow the traditional bulk property behavior. This research employs classic metallurgy, surface science, and small particle science to better understand the properties and behavior of thin metallic films doc3631 none Ling This is a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) to a young faculty member at Brown University. He will study vortex phases in the regime where the random potential caused by defects in the material competes with vortex-vortex interactions and thermal fluctuations giving rise to the peak effect in type-II superconductors. The vortex physics in this regime will be studied in a single crystal of Nb using a coil wound directly on the sample to measure the vortex dynamics and simultaneously using Small Angle Neutron Scattering (SANS) to measure the neutron diffraction pattern of the vortex array. This experiment is highly exploratory since the neutron diffraction signal from a vortex array is very weak in the peak effect regime. If successful, this project will generate experimental results that will reveal the direct correlation between the microscopic properties of the vortex lattice and the macroscopic properties of a type-II superconductor in a magnetic field. The question of vortex pinning-depinning is one of technological importance and thus this research could have a high payoff. A graduate student will participate in this research, thereby gaining the experience of working at a National Facility (the Center for High-Resolution Neutron Scattering at NIST) as well as working on a high-risk, high payoff project. This should prepare the student for future work in academia, industry, or government. %%% The capability to carry an electric current without dissipation makes superconductors useful in many applications such as MRI magnets, power transmission, etc. Most technologically useful superconducting materials allow a strong magnetic field to penetrate into the material to form quantized magnetic vortices. In an ideal, defect-free type-II superconductor these vortex lines will move and cause dissipation under the driving force of a current. Fortunately, imperfections, defects, and impurities, in the atomic lattice can pin the vortex lines, allowing a superconducting wire to carry a large lossless current. Therefore a good understanding of the pining of the vortex lattice by random impurities is beneficial to many applications. This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) will fund a project that will use a neutron beam to study the microscopic structure of the vortex lattice that gives rise to what is known as the anomalous peak effect. This effect allows a superconductor to carry more current at a higher magnetic field and temperature. If successful this project will reveal the direct correlation between the microscopic structure of the vortex lattice and the macroscopic properties of a type-II superconductor in a magnetic field, and thus help scientists make better superconductors. The graduate student participating in this project will have the opportunity to work at a National Facility (the Center for High-Resolution Neutron Scattering at NIST) with researches from around the country. This should prepare the student for future work in academia, industry, or government doc3632 none Dean This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program to Tuskegee Institute, George Washington Carver Foundation is for the acquisition of two new instruments, a Dynamic Mechanical Analyzer (DMA) and a Thermomechanical Analyzer(TMA). The DMA and TMA will establish new research capabilities at Tuskegee University and will be very useful in characterizing structure-processing- property relationships of advanced materials that are the focus of both current and future research. Polymers and polymer-based composites are primarily studied at Tuskegee. Several students in a newly established doctoral degree program in materials will benefit significantly from the use of these instruments in their dissertation research, with an additional eight (8) M.S. and six (6 ) undergraduate students in Chemistry, Mechanical and Chemical Engineering also using the instrumentation. Use of these instruments will not only enable students to enhance the quality of their research, but will also allow them to strengthen the principles learned in the classroom with actual hands-on experience and significantly broaden their exposure to physical characterization of polymers and polymer-based composites. Undergraduate students involved in these projects will use their research to satisfy their senior project requirements. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program to Tuskegee Institute, George Washington Carver Foundation is for the acquisition of two new instruments, a Dynamic Mechanical Analyzer (DMA) and a Thermomechanical Analyzer(TMA). The DMA and TMA will establish new research capabilities at Tuskegee University and will be very useful in characterizing structure-processing- property relationships of advanced materials that are the focus of both current and future research. Polymers and polymer-based composites are primarily studied at Tuskegee. Several students in a newly established doctoral degree program in materials will benefit significantly from the use of these instruments in their dissertation research, with an additional eight (8) M.S. and six (6 ) undergraduate students in Chemistry, Mechanical and Chemical Engineering also using the instrumentation. Use of these instruments will not only enable students to enhance the quality of their research, but will also allow them to strengthen the principles learned in the classroom with actual hands-on experience and significantly broaden their exposure to physical characterization of polymers and polymer-based composites. Undergraduate students involved in these projects will use their research to satisfy their senior project requirements doc3633 none Zucker Neurons communicate by releasing chemical transmitters at synaptic contacts. This project will explore mechanisms by which a hormone, serotonin, regulates synaptic transmission at a neuromuscular junction in crayfish, a preparation that is particularly accessible to modern cell biological probes. Serotonin increases transmitter release by elevating the cyclic adenosine 5 -monophosphate (cAMP) concentration in nerve terminals, which activates a particular presynaptic ion channel referred to as Ih. We will explore the mechanism by which Ih influences transmitter release. We will look for roles for Ca2+ influx through Ih channels and connections to cytoskeletal proteins, because such proteins and Ca2+ are known to influence transmitter release. Ih channels also may mediate the induction of a long-term facilitation (LTF) of synaptic enhancement following presynaptic activity. We will establish whether there are for Ih and cytoskeletal proteins in LTF induction. Serotonergic modulation of transmission involves increasing the size of the presynaptic store of releasable transmitter; we will determine whether LTF works the same way. Finally, we plan to measure the spatio-temporal profile of changes in cAMP concentration accompanying serotonin action and LTF. Serotonergic regulation of synaptic transmission is a critical locus for control of complex behaviors such as learning and memory. Pharmacological modification of synapses and serotonergic pathways are increasingly used to treat a large variety of neurological and psychiatric disorders. This project provides the basic knowledge essential for the understanding of complex behaviors and the development of therapeutic strategies doc3634 none Photosynthesis, the process by which the sun s energy is converted to chemical form, supports most of the life on earth. In leaves, the chloroplasts (where photosynthesis occurs) can move within the cell, maximizing light absorption when light is dim and minimizing absorption when light is bright. Although these movements are common, the advantage they confer to plants in the field, if any, is unknown. One possibility is that these movements help protect chloroplasts from damage when visible or ultraviolet radiation is excessive. Radiation stress is common, and plants have evolved a variety of photoprotective mechanisms to cope, possibly including chloroplast movements. The PIs will use laboratory measurements to examine the extent to which chloroplast movements might be photoprotective, and field measurements to ascertain whether this advantage is actually realized in plants growing under natural conditions. In the laboratory the PIs will measure photosynthesis and assess damage to chloroplasts both when chloroplasts are allowed to move freely and when they are fixed in one position. For field measurements, the PIs have developed an instrument to monitor chloroplast movements under natural conditions. The PIs will examine the link between these movements and rates of photosynthesis. This work will determine whether chloroplast movements are part of the suite of adaptations plants use to adjust their photosynthetic apparatus to the unpredictable changes in light they experience each and every day. Results of this study will be important for understanding how plants deal with stress and variability in their environment, both in natural and agricultural systems. In addition, the work will significantly enhance the research infrastructure at St. Mary s College, a small, public, liberal-arts honors college with a strong emphasis on undergraduate research. Several students will be involved in the research during each academic year and at least one will participate in the field research each summer doc3635 none Duane, T. Johnson, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa The infrared camera, that has been requested by the two PI s, will immediately support five active investigations and it will provide the stimulus and basis for future studies. The immediate studies are in two categories: convective flows of liquid metals and the behavior of catalysis units. These investigations are well motivated in terms of their scientific attributes as well as their contributions to the associated technological applications doc3636 none Christina M. Spolsky Thomas M. Uzzell Drs. Christina M. Spolsky and Thomas M. Uzzell of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, have been awarded a grant to study the interaction of genomic imprinting and unusual reproductive lifestyles in salamanders. Mole salamanders (genus Ambystoma) include a variety of clonally-reproducing lineages that are almost exclusively female. Such clonal females are hybrids between sexually reproducing species, and might be expected to be sterile. Nevertheless, the clonal females are capable of reproducing and have broad geographic ranges in which they are common. The mitochondrial DNA of the clonal forms, although distinct, most resembles that in a species in one species group of Ambystoma, whereas the nuclear genetic material (DNA contained in chromosomes) resembles that of two species in another species group. This award will be used to obtain genetic material from tissues of selected sexual species and clonal individuals. All the genes that encode proteins will be archived in so-called cDNA libraries. Two of the nuclear genes (serum albumin and serpin) will be isolated from these libraries and sequenced. These sequences will be used to design and test primers that permit identification of the genomic composition of clonal individuals. The mitochondrial genomes of clonally-reproducing mole salamanders are distinctive, and suggest that these lineages have existed for 3-5 million years. This is far longer than expected according to evolutionary theory, because gradual accumulation of deleterious mutations should eventually doom any strictly clonal lineage to extinction. The paradox posed by the long independent survival of the mitochondrial DNA given the brief survival expected from theory suggests that occasionally nuclear chromosome sets of the clonal salamanders are replaced, in sexual rather than clonal reproduction, by nuclear chromosome sets from males of sexual species. Genome-specific primers will permit an assessment of the frequency with which such chromosomal replacements occur. The data are important for theories about the persistence of sexual reproduction despite the short-term advantages of clonal reproduction. Comparison of variability in mitochondrial and nuclear DNA will provide a basis for evaluating the relative effects of natural selection on these two kinds of DNA in the clonal lineages doc3637 none The Gordon Research Conference Organic Structures and Properties, to be held June 17-22, at Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut is devoted to extend organic systems, their structures, and the properties that ensue from that organization. Areas to be discussed include organic thin films, electronic and optoelectronic materials, biomolecular materials, crystalline pharmaceuticals, and novel supramolecular systems. It is anticipated that this conference will provide a unique opportunity for developing the strong, but often unrecognized, connections between two-dimensional assemblies (thin films) and three-dimensional bulk solids, as well as the principles of molecular recognition and assembly that permeate all the session topics. One evening has been reserved exclusively for five Young Investigators . Solid-State Chemistry continues to have a direct impact on the technological advances in areas such as the design of solid-state organic materials for optoelectronics, ferroelectrics, and biomolecular materials doc3638 none This project focuses on the study of basic processes associated with the photorefractive effect in a novel class of inorganic nanocrystal: polymer nanocomposites. The proposed new class of materials holds promise in that the spectral response for photorefractivity can be selectively chosen for operation at visible as well as near infra-red communication wavelengths, a feature primarily derived from the quantum confinement effect in inorganic systems will allow the photorefractive effect to be observed at low operational voltage. This novel approach to the photosensitization of polymeric materials not only offers a method by which the characteristics and processes involved in the photorefractive effect may be significantly enhanced, but also provides the opportunity to study the fundamental physical processes of photocharge generation, migration, and trapping and recombination. Photoconductivity experiments will be utilized in the characterization of the photosensitivity of the nanocomposite and mobility data will be obtained from time-of-flight experiments. The results will then be analyzed using established model, e.g. the Onsager recombination model. Photorefractive characterizations will be made using degenerate-four-wave-mixing- as well as asymmetric-two beam coupling techniques. These experiments will provide insight into several aspects of grating formation such as phase shift and the kinetics of grating growth and decay. The temerature dependence of the mobility as well as grating kinetic experiments will provide additional insight into the mechanism of trapping and detrapping of carriers. %%% The development of novel optical materials should be reviewed as having potentially a very important impact on technology, and the best properties of both inorganic and organic materials need to be exploited. Graduate and post -doctoral students trained in these areas will have excellent job prospects doc3639 none The goal of this project is greater understanding and control of electrochemical epitaxial processing of compound semiconductors. The focus of the project is atomic layer epitaxy (ALE), where deposits are formed an atomic layer at a time. In ALE, surface limited reactions are used to form each atomic layer. Surface limited electrochemical reactions generally occur at underpotentials, potentials below those needed to deposit the element on itself. The approach makes use of an automated electrochemical flow-cell, which facilitates growth of films thick enough for analysis by X-ray diffraction (XRD), electron microprobe analysis (EPMA), infrared (IR), and optical spectroscopies. Previous EC-ALE studies have focused either on the first few atomic layers or the structure, composition, and morphology of completed films. This project will address surface chemistry of the EC-ALE cycle as the deposit is being formed. It is thought that optimal conditions (potentials) change as the deposit grows, and some form of feedback is needed to better control the process. However, currents measured during various cycle steps do not provide an accurate picture of the deposition process. It is proposed to study the surface chemistry after various numbers of cycles, and at different points in the cycle, while deposits are forming, that is, to follow the surface chemistry during the 2nd , 5th , 10th , 25th , -..200th , cycles. Surface sensitive probes will be used to follow the EC-ALE cycle chemistry during film growth. A unique electrochemical STM flow-cell will be used to monitor surface structure and morphology during deposition. This apparatus allows atomic scale imaging in a controlled environment where solutions are easily exchanged and EC-ALE deposits can be formed. The mass of the deposits will be monitored at each step in the EC-ALE cycle using an electrochemical quartz crystal microbalance (EC-QCM) system. A microbalance crystal will be used as a substrate in a flow-cell. The mass of the deposit at each step will be compared with observed currents to elucidate interfacial processes and current efficiencies. An electrochemical flow-cell deposition system will be constructed for use in the antechamber of a UHV surface system, so that the composition of the surface can be monitored after any number of cycles and after any cycle step. Deposits will be transferred periodically from the flow cell directly to the analysis chamber for examination with AES, XPS, LEED, STM, and LEIS. Improved understanding of the surface chemistry, leading to better control over deposit structure, composition and morphology is expected. InAs and InSb are being grown using EC-ALE and work on the formation of III-V compounds in general will continue. CdSe CdTe and InAs InSb superlattices have been formed, and will continue to be studied. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. New, innovative experimental techniques such as electrochemical atomic layer epitaxy can now be characterized more fully leading to greater understanding and control of elementary chemical and diffusion processes which will allow advances in fundamental materials science and technology. The basic knowledge and understanding gained from the research is expected to contribute to improving the ability to efficiently deposit high crystal quality semiconductor films for electronic and photonic applications. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area doc3640 none James H. Leebens-Mack Dr. James H. Leebens-Mack of Colgate University, in collaboration with Dr. N. Olof Pellmyr at Vanderbilt Univerisity has beeen awarded a grant to study coveolutionary interactions between plants and moths. Coevolution is an important process in driving diversification and speciation, but understanding of this process is hampered by a lack of phylogenies (family trees) for model groups of organisms. Yuccas and yucca moths are tied in an obligate pollination mutualism, commonly cited as one of the most obvious examples of coevolution. The PIs propose to use multi-gene sequencing to complete robust organismal phylogenies for both yuccas (Agavaceae) and yucca moths (Prodoxidae: Lepidoptera). The results will be used to test hypotheses of coevolution, parallel speciation, and the role of host shifts in diversification. Comparative analyses will be used to quantify coevolution at the level of individual traits in the moths and plants. The goal of objective 1 is to establish a stable phylogeny based on DNA sequence data for the plant genus Yucca. They will use a multi-gene approach, using both nuclear and cytoplasmic markers, to establish a robust species-level phylogeny. In objective 2, the PIs will use a similar approach to resolve relationships among a cluster of rapidly diversified groups of yucca moths whose origin coincided with much life history evolution. Objective 3 utilizes the moth and plant phylogenies to test hypotheses related to coevolution. The distribution and frequency of cospeciation will be estimated, and and comparative analysis emplyed to test how host shifting and evolution of oviposition behavior affect diet breadth and rates of diversification. Finally, the underlying conflict of interests between moth and plant should manifest through selection on traits with major effects on oviposition success in the moth and minimization of seed destruction in the plant. Moth ovipositor shape, oviposition site, and floral ovary shape and thickness are candidate traits that are highly variable among species. They will be the focus of ancestor reconstruction and comparative analyses to partition coevolutionary and phylogenetic components of diversification. Together, the results from the project should provide the first phylogenetic framework at the species level for any of the models of coevolution and mutualism. It will open a venue for analyzing how coevolution acts at the trait level to contribute to the generation of biodiversity doc3641 none Leslie This grant is for partial support for a FASEB Summer Research Conference on Phospholipases. The conference aims to review the current status of what is known about the structure, function and regulation of phospholipases A2, C and D. These ubiquitous enzymes trigger major signal transduction pathways by producing lipid products that mediate diverse cellular responses. Phospholipase A2 enzymes release arachidonic acid, which is the first step in the production of the eicosanoids and platelet activation factor, which are inflammatory mediators. Phospholipase C enzymes mediate the production of polyphosphoinositols and diacylglycerols, which regulate calcium levels and protein kinase C. Phospholipase D enzymes produce phosphatidic acid from phosphatidylcholine and are implicated in regulating vesicle trafficking, mitogenesis, respiratory burst oxidase and other enzymes. This conference will bring together enzymologists and molecular cell biologists to provide an opportunity for in depth scientific discussions. It will also promote interactions between young investigators and senior scientists doc3642 none Appling The Eighth FASEB Summer Research Conference on Folic Acid, Vitamin B12 and One Carbon Metabolism will be held under the auspices of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) from August 5 through August 10, , at Snowmass Village, Colorado. This conference offers a unique opportunity for scientists from a broad group of disciplines but united by a common interest in folic acid, vitamin B12 and one carbon metabolism, to interact both formally and informally. Scheduled every other year, the last seven conferences have been fully subscribed. The program includes well-established scientists as well as those just entering the field and topics covering the entire spectrum of research in these fields. In addition to the formal presentations, the program will be complemented with poster sessions and workshops. The meeting is structured to allow graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, as well as established scientists, an opportunity to present and discuss their work. The funds provided by the National Science Foundation will be used for travel awards for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows presenting outstanding posters doc3643 none J. R Elliott In this two-year exploratory grant prospects will be evaluated for integrating molecular modeling tools with a chemical process simulation package to provide a complete, rigorous, and accurate framework for physical property prediction and correlation. Chemical process simulators are becoming the primary interface for industry chemical knowledge. It has been recently discovered that perturbation theory is much more accurate than previously appreciated, especially for polyatomic molecules. Discontinuous molecular dynamics (DMD) simulation combines with perturbation theory and virial expansion to provide a basis for highly leveraged computational effort in all aspects of molecular modeling. An existing DMD program will run the minimal number of simulations necessary with reasonable speed on low-cost microprocessors. The resulting segmental potential models will act as molecular scale group contributions, analogous to conventional engineering group contribution models. Although these segmental potentials act essentially as first group contributions, higher order effects derived from molecular geometry will be explicitly addressed through the connectivity of the first order groups in the user-designated molecular structure. The initial goal will be to test the transferability of discontinuous potential models for the equilibrium properties of pure fluids and mixtures. A database of fluctuation populations for spheres, dimers, trimers, 6mers, 8mers, and benzene will be developed and be used to develop optimal step potentials for representing experimental values for vapor pressures, density, and internal energy for methane, ethane, n-hexane, n-octane, benzene, water, methanol and ethanol. The transferability of the resulting potentials will be evaluated in terms of the accuracy of predictions for n-butane, n-pentane, n-heptane, n-nonane, and n-decane. For mixtures, the transferability will be evaluated in terms of the accuracy of predictions for ternary mixtures and mixtures like n-propanol+methanol, for which the hydroxyl group in n-propanol was specifically regressed. The second goal will be to implement methods of calculating transport properties like viscosity, thermal conductivity, and diffusivity in addition to the equilibrium and coexistence properties that have been computed in the past. Resulting simulations will probe the extent to which potential models developed solely on the basis of equilibrium properties can be applied to estimating transport properties. It is sought to dissect model intermolecular potential functions in the sense of identifying which pieces of the potential correlate most strongly with specific physical properties. Also sought will be broadly applicable mappings of attractive effects on transport properties given DMD simulated properties for reference fluids, by analogy to the perturbation perspective for equilibrium properties. For example, the extent to which the diffusivity of n-decane can be predicted from correlated results for the diffusivity of n-octane and DMD simulations for purely repulsive n-decane will be examined. The work will be performed with collaboration between The University of Akron and ChemStations, Inc. If this exploratory work shows promise, the ultimate goal will be an internet site which clients can access for zero cost up front and relatively low hourly fees varying according to the intensity of the server side computation requested. Services provided will include molecular modeling of transport and equilibrium properties like vapor pressure, activity, water solubility, octanol partition coefficients, viscosity, and the ability to infer knowledge about one property from measurements of other properties through a common molecular model. Within the range of options will be a comprehensive collection of semi-empirical methods with estimates of the accuracy of each property. The scope of this project includes a thorough evaluation of the accuracy all the semi-empirical models and the molecular based models against a database of approximately compounds. Those evaluations will comprise a significant portion of the work beyond the exploratory phase. Also included in the web-accessible version will be flowsheeting and process simulation based on shortcut unit operation models. The sensitivity of the process capital and production costs to the estimated physical properties will be a menu option. The shortcut model will serve as a precursor for rigorous process simulations directly within a web-based environment doc3644 none Vertebrate animals, including man, are able to experience past events in their lives as memory because the nerve cells of the brain are able to create a physical record of those past events. A large body of experimental research has identified one brain structure, the hippocampus, as being critically important for the formation of new memories. However, how the physiological activity of nerve cells in the hippocampus are able to contribute to the physical record of past events we call memory remains uncertain. The problem to be studied in the proposed research exploits the remarkable spatial memory ability of homing pigeons and the important role of the hippocampus in that spatial memory. Electrodes, which permit the recording of activity from single nerve cells, will be surgically implanted in the hippocampus of homing pigeons. The electrodes will be used to observe how nerve cell activity changes as a consequence of exploration and the formation of new memory in pigeons allowed to freely move in an open environment. Changes in nerve cell activity as a consequence of behavior and memory would provide important information on how the hippocampus creates a physical record of past events. How the brain creates a physical record of past experiences is one critical dimension that contributes to the uniqueness of each individual. This is apparent and tragically evident in people who suffer memory loss as a consequence of brain disease, brain trauma or just aging, and gradually or quickly experience a loss of identity. Basic research using animal models is a fundamental part of unraveling the mystery of how the brain creates memories and what goes wrong when an unhealthy brain loses its ability to create new memories. By studying how activity in the nerve cells of the bird hippocampus participates in memory formation, valuable insight may be gained regarding the relationship between the hippocampus, including the human hippocampus, and memory, and help in understanding how dysfunction in the hippocampus can lead to memory loss doc3645 none Rahman Description: This award supports the participation of US scientists in the 25th International Nathiagali Summer College on Physics and Contemporary Needs in Islamabad, Pakistan, June 26-July 15, . Dr. Syed Arif Ahmad, Pakistan Institute of Engineering and Applied Science, Islamabad, Pakistan is the organizer of the College. Professor Riazuddin, Physics Department, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan is the College director. Scientists from Europe, Pakistan and the United States will make presentations. Attendees include scientists, mostly recent Ph.D. s, from a number of developing countries in the region, including Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, China, India, Iran, Nepal, Tajikistan, Turkey, as well as Pakistan. They also include graduate students from Pakistan. The areas to be covered are frontiers of high energy physics; astrophysics, cosmology and relativity; and condensed matter physics. Topics include the standard model of particle physics, supersymmetry and physics beyond four dimensions, precision electroweak tests and searches for the elusive Higgs particles, neutrino physics, evidence for neutrino oscillations from Super Kamiokandle and other detectors, superstrings and physics beyond four dimensions, heavy ion collisions and quark-gluon plasma, modern observations of the heavens using gamma astronomy, and gamma ray bursts. Interactive sessions in the afternoons are planned as part of the College. The organizers plan to publish a proceedings of the presentations. Scope: This award enables seven US scientists to participate in an important teaching and discussion exercise with scientists and students from several developing countries, thus contributing to capacity building within those countries. This is the 25th year of the Summer College. In previous years, in addition to support from Pakistani sources, the College has been sponsored by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy; the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing; and the Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. One of the expected outcomes of the Summer College is the generation of ideas for cooperative research projects among the participants doc3646 none This project in anthropological linguistics will investigate the implementation of a Catholic Quechua language as the principal medium of missionization in Spanish colonial Peru. It will examine the mechanisms through which the colonial regime defined and consolidated a standard missionary vernacular within the existing native languages, and how it reproduced Catholic genre frames (modes of religious discourse) in the Quechua language and among native Andeans. Linguistic and textual analysis will be integrated with the archival study of the history of missionary activity in Indian parishes. This project will contribute to our understanding of how missionization programs (like more recent efforts at language change linked to nationalism, globalization, and education) work to link local cultures into a global political sphere doc3647 none PROJECT SUMMARY The purpose of this award is to provide travel support to allow Douglas Cenzer (University of Florida), Valentina Harizanov (George Washington University), Julia Knight (University of Notre Dame), Steffen Lempp and Reed Solomon (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and Andre Nies (University of Chicago) as well as Marat Arslanov (Kazan State University), Sergey Goncharov and Andrei Morozov (Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk), and Serikzhan Badaev and Mikhail Peretyat kin (Kazakh Academy of Sciences, Almaty) to make one research visit each to work collaboratively with their counterparts in the other country, as well as a total of three additional trips by students. The focus of the proposed cooperative research is the theory of computability and its applications to other areas, in particular algebra and model theory. Specific research topics include the study of computable approximations to sets, the complexity of presentations of algebraic structures, the complexity of additional relations on effective structures, the complexity of isomorphisms of effective structures, numerations of algebraic structures, automorphism groups of computable structures, and applications to abelian $p$-groups, to groups of computable permutations, and to Boolean algebras doc3648 none Wittung-Stafshede This project aims towards probing the role of cofactors in protein-folding reactions. The targeted proteins are azurin, with a copper-ion cofactor, and flavodoxin, coordinating an organic flavin mononucleotide. Biophysical characterization by circular dichroism, fluorescence, and various biochemical methods will aid in revealing the effect of each cofactor on its corresponding protein stability and unfolded polypeptide structure. In each case, the effect on folding speed imposed by having the cofactor bound in the unfolded state will be probed by time-resolved experiments on the protein with and without the cofactor. Time-resolved experiments will be performed using both stopped-flow mixing (ms time scale) and electron-transfer triggering (ms time scale) methods, the latter technique is based on laser-triggered photochemistry. Since oxidized azurin and flavodoxin are more stable than their reduced counterparts, rapid photochemical electron extraction from the unfolded, reduced protein at suitable denaturant conditions, may trigger folding of the newly oxidized protein. Mechanisms by which proteins reach their unique three-dimensional structures are still poorly understood. To reveal pathways governing the native forms of proteins, it is important to describe conformational preferences in the unfolded proteins. Any structural preference in the unfolded state will restrict the ensemble of conformations available to the polypeptide and therefore could guide, or direct, the folding process. Residual structure in an unfolded protein may exist due to coordination of a cofactor. This project will test if cofactors, in case of two selected cofactor-binding proteins, can act as nucleation points that influence speed and or mechanism of polypeptide-folding reactions doc3649 none Recent curriculum design projects have attempted to engage students in responsive or authentic science learning experiences in which students engage in textual and inquiry-based research projects about questions of interest to them (Goldman, ; Marx, Blumenfeld, Krajcik, (b) investigations and artifact creathion; (c) collaboration among students, teachers, and othersin the community; and (d) use of technological tools (Krajcik, Blumenfeld, Marx, Bass the teachers enactments surrounding language and literacy; and the teachers use of the students everyday knowledge and ways of knowing, being, reading, writing and talking. Given these discursive and textual demands, it is important to ask what linguistic - that is language,literacy, and technology skills - are engaged by such curricula and their accompanying texts, and how these skills shape students opportunities to learn. In short, what do young people need to be able to do to get the most from project-based science? What strategies do we need to embed in projects in order to support students learning? In what ways can curricula designed to be culturally responsive also be made linguistically responsive to the needs of students? We propose to engage in three related exploratory studies - a curriculum content analysis, a community ethnology, and a classroom interpretive study - that will allow us to advance the mission of the LeTUS by addressing these questions and laying the groundwork for future investigations of these issues doc3650 none This Cooperative Agreement between the National Science Foundation and the University of California, Los Angeles, provides funding for the operation of a national facility for research in basic plasma science at the University of California, Los Angeles. The core of the facility is the Large Plasma Device (LAPD-II), a unique research instrument well suited for collaborative studies by multiple users. The facility provides a place in which to perform frontier-level experiments that require physical conditions not suitable for small devices. The LAPD will be operated on a 24-hour basis, except for necessary pauses for routine maintenance and upgrades, providing research-grade plasmas at a one Hertz repetition rate and having a wide range of possible parameter choices under the user s control. This project is jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy as part of the NSF DOE Partnership in Basic Plasma Science and Engineering. NSF funding is divided between the Physics Division in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate and the Division of Atmospheric Sciences in the Directorate for Geosciences doc3651 none The primary goal of this research project is to develop underlying materials science in solid solutions of tungsten bronze (TB) structure and to enrich the present general understanding of the oxygen octahedral ferroelectric materials and relaxors, thereby enhancing the capability to design, select and modify electronic ceramics and single crystals for various device applications. Particular research topics include (a) the construction of structure-field-maps for TB compositions; (b) crystallographic structure studies by single crystal x-ray diffraction; (c) understanding the cation vacancy distribution and order on relaxor characteristics and structural properties; and (d) the effect of thermodynamic fluctuation of large cations on low temperature dielectric dispersions. The project will consist of critical experiments and analysis that clarify the underlying structure-property-chemistry relationship in the ferroelectric TB oxide family. A structure-field-map for known TB compositions that summarizes crystallographic phase stability over ionic radii and pressure temperature conditions will be constructed. Morphotropic phase boundary (MPB) systems can therefore be charted and predicted. Single crystal diffraction will be conducted to obtain cationic displacement details in over a broad temperature range. A selected-electric-field-condition single crystal x-ray diffraction and structure refinement system will be designed and built. It will be the first of its kind to allow the study of cation displacement under an electric field. Quenching and annealing studies on single crystals of near MPB composition with filled or partially filled A-site will be carried out to clarify the effect of cation site-preference and the vacancy distribution. Low temperature phase transition relaxation phenomena will be studied by structural analysis (low temperature XRD and neutron diffraction), along with a dynamic pyroelectric measurement. The project will provide students from PSU and from Lincoln University (an HBCU) with an intellectual and challenging research project with access to both university and government lab facilities. Ferroelectric materials of the tungsten bronze structure encompass a large family of solid solution systems with great potential in various electronic, optical and electro-optic applications. The understanding that will result from this project will take materials scientists toward a more unified understanding on the structure-property-chemistry relations in deformed and tilted oxygen octahedral structures, and allow the possibility of intelligent selection of the materials for technologically important device applications doc3652 none The goal of this Engineering Foundation Conference is to provide an international, cross-disciplinary forum for discussion and presentation of the latest results in the area of heat transfer and transport phenomena occurring at very small time or length scales. This conference will provide an opportunity to share the knowledge in the areas of microscale thermophysics and transport which are key to a variety of rapidly emerging areas such as nanotechnology, biotechnology and microelectromechanical system (MEMS) development. The conference will provide the forum for an exchange of ideas, results, and industrial needs in the area of thermal phenomena associated with microstructures and microsystems. This 5 day conference will be held in Banff, Canada in mid October . Papers presented in this conference will be accepted based on abstract reviews. A call for papers for the conference has been disseminated throughout the world, soliciting abstracts of papers to be considered for presentation at the conference. All accepted papers will be included in the conference proceedings, which will be published for wide dissemination doc3653 none This award will enable the purchase of an instrument that combines a rapid thermocycler with a microspectrofluorimeter. This technology allows the quantification of a PCR reaction as it occurs in real time and thus can convert the qualitative results typical of PCR into quantitative ones using the sensitivity and precision of the fluorimeter. Quantitative PCR is emerging as a potentially crucial, but still risky technique in the study of marine organisms. The barrier of instrumentation cost has also limited its development as a tool in marine sciences. The researchers will initially use the instrument in the detection of specific microorganisms (free-living photoautotrophs, heterotrophs, symbionts, and pathogens) in the marine environment, with the goal of developing a fundamental understanding of the mechanisms controlling microbial biodiversity. The detection of the genes for various microbial activities such as toxic metal metabolism or nutrient stress responses is a second potential use. Lastly, population genetic studies of eukaryotic marine organisms such as copepods and sea urchins will benefit from the utilization of the proposed instrument. Three laboratories in the Marine Biology Research Division of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, will begin as major users of the instrument (Palenik, Azam and Burton), but use of the instrument will likely extend to several other labs. In all cases the instrument will be valuable in generating results that will open new research directions in marine sciences and provide preliminary results for future NSF proposals doc3654 none This is an award to Cornell University for the acquisition of instrumentation to study nonlinear nanoscale localization and student training. A pump-probe broad band spectrometer with associated detectors will be purchased to build a new experimental platform for the production and investigation of intrinsic nonlinear nanoscale localization of spin waves in both classical and quantum antiferromagnets. This instrument will make possible both the production of intrinsic localized spin waves in C(2)CuCl4 and other antiferromagnets over a large frequency region. It will also permit time dependent and transport studies of these nanoscale objects down to the milliseconds and sub-milliseconds time regimes. Both the high power and the large tuning range are essential features of this specialized instrumentation for the experimental investigation of a new fundamental nanoscale localization phenomenon in condensed matter physics. The general physical feature that such localization in periodic lattices depends only on nonlinearity plus discreteness ensures that graduate and undergraduate students working in this area will have training in nonlinear dynamics with applications spanning a variety of length scales, ranging from the nano- to the macroscopic ones. This is an award to Cornell University for the acquisition of instrumentation to study nonlinear nanoscale localization and student training. This experimental instrumentation is directed at probing the underlying simplicity of the dynamics of nonlinear periodic physical systems by exploring large amplitude nanoscale excitations in atomic lattices. The work is expected to influence other developing areas of nonlinear dynamics including intrinsic localized electromagnetic modes in optical switches in nonlinear photonic crystal waveguides, intrinsic localization in periodic Josephson junction arrays, mechanical localization in micro-electrical-mechanical systems, acoustic localization of energy in an air filled tube with a periodic array of resonators and, at the largest scale, the nonlinear localization within multibunch modes in high energy accelerators. Graduate and undergraduate students working in this new research area will have training in condensed matter nonlinear dynamics with applications involving technologically important length scales doc3655 none Israeloff An award is made to the Northeastern University for the acquisition of state-of-the-art low-temperature ultra-high-vacuum (UHV) scanning-probe-microscope. Fluctuations in properties on a length scale somewhat larger than atomic scale are increasingly important in complex materials such as glasses, polymers, proteins, ceramics, and small devices. These mesoscopic scale fluctuations are believed to arise because molecules must rearrange cooperatively, an important but poorly understood phenomena occurring in many systems. Nanoscale cooperativity will be directly studied in various complex materials using powerful new nanoscale spectroscopies which require a state-of-the-art low-temperature ultra-high-vacuum (UHV) scanning-probe-microscope. Through cooperative and experiential education programs, undergraduates will participate in research with this state-of-the-art instrument, gaining valuable nano-science experience and enabling them to contribute to important nano-technologies of the future doc3656 none Lynch The main objective of the Gordon Research Conference on Nuclear Chemistry is to provide the international community of nuclear scientists with a unique forum in which the newest developments at the forefront of this science can be presented and subjected to detailed and extended discussions and criticism. The purpose of the conference is to encourage communication and the discussions to be conducted in an atmosphere conducive to open interactions between the scientists, provoking new and even speculative ideas for future research. To accomplish these goals requires the participation in all of the conference activities of a significant number of leaders in the field. However, the field invites and needs cooperative efforts on all levels with a range of expertise for its growth. Therefore, younger scientists from all countries are encouraged to participate in the conference and to present their ideas. In particular, in anticipation of the future need of manpower and of a growing importance of international cooperative scientific ventures, it appears necessary to expose selected advanced graduate students from the major international research universities to the new opportunities and techniques in nuclear science. This award will facilitate participation from these junior scientists doc3657 none Pellmyr Mutualistic interactions create resources that are exploited by parasites. These parasites sometimes evolve from mutualists and they can greatly alter the dynamics of the interactions. Obligate mutualisms, such as those between seed-parasitic pollinators and their hosts, make excellent models for the study of such reversals because of their simplicity. This study will use a recently evolved cheater yucca moth and its pollinating sister species to test the first explicit scenario for any obligate mutualism of how it can evolve. In this scenario, specific life history traits and ecological context are suggested to greatly facilitate this type of diversification. The project has three objectives. First, the study will use phylogenetic analysis based on mtDNA and morphometric data to test explicit hypotheses about changing geographic ranges and history of coexistence between the cheater, two pollinators, and their shared host over the last 2-3 million years. Second, experiments will be used to test the hypothesis that the pollinator that gave rise to the cheater has requisite behavioral plasticity and ovipositor morphology to make the shift from pollinator to cheater habit comparatively easily. Third, the study will test a hypothesis suggesting that offset emergence phenology between coexisting pollinators facilitates the evolution of cheating in the later species. Taken together, this project would place a multi-species mutualism in its historical biogeographic context, and use a very recent case of evolution of cheating within that mutualism as a template to experimentally test specific but generalizable hypotheses about this ecologically important process of diversification doc3658 none The Near East is currently poor in developed annual resolution proxy records of climate extending back into pre-industrial times. This award will fill this gap by establishing reconstructions of past climate in the region using tree rings. In order to do this, the principal investigators will: (1) develop new tree-ring chronologies for the region; (2) examine interrelationships and correlation among the chronologies; (3) study the effect of climate on tree-ring growth; and (4) develop tree-ring reconstructions of climate over the past several centuries for this region doc3659 none Serra, Martin The ultimate goal of this research project is to characterize the molecular interactions responsible for the structural stability of RNA. The fundamental role played by divalent metal ions (Mg +2 ) in nucleic acid biochemistry highlights the need to understand better the dependence of divalent metal ions on RNA structural stability. The specific aim of this project is to investigate metal ion binding (specifically Mg +2 ) to small and structurally well-defined RNA oligomers. The interaction of metal ions with common RNA secondary structural motifs (i.e. duplex, hairpin, terminal mismatch, bulge and internal loop) will be investigated. This study is designed to determine the physiochemical parameters underlying binding of metal ion to these RNA structural motifs under physiological conditions. These studies will combine both thermal stability and binding studies to achieve a better understanding of the nature of RNA-metal interactions doc3660 none Why organisms reproduce sexually instead of asexually is one of the outstanding problems in biology. Recent models suggest that, under higher dispersal rates of asexuals relative to sexuals, asexual organisms may persist for three reasons: escape from parasites (Red Queen hypothesis); relaxed selection against deleterious mutations; or local adaptation of asexuals to marginal environments. Using diploid sexual and asexual Campeloma limum, a freshwater snail from the southeastern US, this proposal outlines molecular and experimental field tests of these hypotheses. Using sequence variation in a mitochondrial gene (cytochrome b) and a nuclear intron (calmodulin), we will assess whether asexuals have higher dispersal rates than sexuals. We will also test unique predictions of the three models by field experiments. Because plant pathologists, epidemiologists, and conservation biologists realize that host genetic diversity plays an important role in the spread of diseases, the results from this study will be of considerable to these scientists. These results will also be of considerable interest to evolutionary biologists, because the study will provide critical tests of ecological and evolutionary causes of the spatial distribution of sexual and asexual organisms doc3661 none This RUI award focuses on equilibrium thermodynamics and kinetics of phase separation in binary polymer blends with additives of various copolymer structures and concentrations. The goal of this work is to better understand how copolymers can influence phase evolution and thermodynamic boundaries. Expanding on previous research, scattering and simulation techniques will be employed. The copolymers to be studied include random, block, multi-block, and graft copolymers. The monomer composition of the copolymer will also include both symmetric and asymmetric compositions for some of the copolymers. The specific experimental ternary system is a blend of polybutadiene, polystyrene, and various copolymers of butadiene and styrene. The molecular weights of the homopolymers will be in two classes, a low molecular weight blend and a blend with molecular weight greater than the entanglement molecular weight. These systems will be studied experimentally using temperature jump wide-angle light scattering as well as small angle neutron scattering (SANS) techniques when appropriate. Lastly, Monte Carlo computer simulation techniques will be employed to model the experimental polymer systems. %%% The development of new polymer-based materials with tailored properties is often attempted through the mixing of currently existing materials. Successful mixing has often been challenging to accomplish and to aid in the mixing an additive is commonly introduced as a compatibilizer. In this work, the effects various compatibilizers have on the mixing of polymer materials will be studied with the goal being to better understand the fundamental processes involved. As these effects are better understood, the knowledge can be applied to industrial systems with the aim of improving the processing and performance of polymer-based materials doc3662 none The research aims at developing a continuum formulation reflecting the coupling between composition and mechanics in polycrystalline solids. Electromigration effects are also included. The motivation is to model the evolution of microstructure, which can lead to failure of metal lines in integrated circuits. Composition, mechanics and electric fields interact via lattice-level mechanisms in a thermodynamic formulation from which the coupled field relations are derived. General initial and boundary value problems reflecting the complexity of phenomena such as diffusion creep, hillock formation, grain boundary motion, void formation and evolution can then be posed. The project will also develop computational methodologies to solve the resulting system of coupled partial differential equations doc3663 none Mesosphere Lower-Thermosphere (MLT) Wind Measurements at Durham Dr. Ronald R. Clark, Univ. of New Hampshire, Durham, NH This award provides funds for the continued operations of the Univ. of New Hampshire meteor radar over a two year period to monitor continuously the dynamics of the mesosphere and lower thermosphere. These observations would be studied to improve our understanding of planetary dynamics, tides and gravity waves as a part of the global task force organized to collect and analyze jointly these observations. The objectives of this study would be the investigation of temporal and spatial variability of the mean, planetary and tidal components through intersite comparisons. A particularly interesting difference in the approach that would be used compared with the normal mode of analysis is the plan to carry out common volume measurements between the UNH meteor radar and the incoherent scatter radar facility of Millstone Hill. Magnetic storm effects and continued climatological studies of the wind field are secondary objectives of this effort doc3664 none Knox This award to University of California San Diego provides shipboard technical support, shore-based support, as well as maintenance and calibration of shared-use scientific instrumentation, for researchers using four oceanographic research vessels, all operated by the University s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The four vessels operate as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The technical support awarded here will assist NSF-funded researchers conduct a diverse suite of oceanographic studies from these four vessels throughout the world oceans, beginning in doc3665 none Investigation of the mechanism of fluorine and chlorine anion emission from adsorbed layers of halogenated hydrocarbons irradiated by electrons forms the focus of this research project supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program. Professor Theodore Madey and his coworkers at Rutgers University are examining the enhanced emission of Cl- and F- from physisorbed layers of CFC s in contact with water, ammonia, or non-polar co-adsorbates. A series of measurements is being carried out to elucidate the mechanism of this enhanced emission, and the connection this may have to the heterogeneous chemistry of ozone in the stratosphere. Electron stimulated ion angular and energy distributions are measured under a variety of conditions of surface temperature, co-adsorbate polarity, and incident electron energy in order to provide mechanistic understanding of the fundamental surface processes of ion emission. When adsorbed layers of chlorofluorocarbon compounds are irradiated with low energy electrons, significant amounts of chlorine and fluorine anions are desorbed. In the presence of certain polar co-adsorbates such as water and ammonia, this emission is dramatically enhanced. This research project examines this effect with a series of ion angular and energy distribution measurements. Connections of this effect with problems of ozone depletion in heterogeneous stratospheric chemistry are made in this research. The results of these studies, in addition to providing considerable fundamental insight into ion processes at surfaces, may help to understand stratospheric ozone depletion processes doc3666 none The objective of this research project is to develop fragility curves for a wide range of problems in geotechnical earthquake engineering; specifically, for foundations, slopes, and retaining walls. Fragility curves provide the probability of exceeding a prescribed damage level (e.g. minor, moderate, major, complete) for a certain type of structure, as a function of the severity of the seismic event. Fragility curves are extremely significant from the engineering applications point of view as practicing engineers can use them directly without having to perform any complex computations, and because they form the basis for all risk analysis loss estimation risk reduction of civil infrastructure systems. Although fragility curves have been established for structures such as buildings and bridges, there hasn t been any systematic effort to develop such curves for geotechnical structures (e.g. foundations, slopes, retaining walls). Such a task is particularly important, as damage to these structures is quite extensive during major earthquake events. Empirical fragility curves will be computed using available damage data from recent seismic events such as: the Loma Prieta, the Northridge, the Kobe, Japan, the Izmit, Turkey and the Chi-Chi, Taiwan earthquakes. In parallel with the task of establishing the empirical fragility curves, analytical fragility curves will be computed using Monte Carlo simulation techniques. One of the important tasks is to compare the empirical and analytical fragility curves so as to improve their accuracy and reliability. Several issues related to the establishment of fragility curves for such geotechnical structures will be addressed, including the definition of the different damage states for each type of structure and the measure of the intensity of the earthquake event. Different mechanisms will be considered to cause damage to the geotechnical structures considered. Particular emphasis will be given to soil liquefaction, to slope failure due to exceeding the shear strength, and to tilting of foundations and foundation systems. The establishment of fragility curves for a range of geotechnical structures will form the basis for the risk analysis loss estimation risk reduction of such structures, when subjected to earthquakes. These fragility curves will allow public and private organizations to make rational assessment of 1) the potential damage to civil infrastructure systems from earthquakes, 2) retrofitting strategies, 3) insurance premiums, and 4) guide emergency management teams to identify high-risk systems. This project involves a collaboration between researchers at Princeton University and the State University of New York at Buffalo doc3667 none Recently there has been a growing body of evidence indicating ATP plays a significant role as an extracellular messenger in a number of biological processes, including cell volume regulation. Extracellular ATP exerts its influence by acting as an autocrine paracrine signal, binding to specific cell surface receptors known as purinoceptors. Purinoceptors have been subdivided into two main categories: P1 receptors that recognize nucleosides, such as adenosine, and P2 receptors that bind ATP and other nucleotides. The P2 receptors have been further subdivided into two main subtypes: P2X (ligand-gated ion channels) and P2Y (receptors coupled to a G-protein). Initial studies have shown that RVD in Necturus red blood cells (RBCs) depends on K+ efflux through an ion channel that is activated during cell swelling by extracellular ATP (Light et al., Am. J. Physiol., 277 (Cell Physiol. 46): C480-C491, ). The objective of this project is to identify the purinoceptor used by Necturus RBCs to regulate cell volume in hypotonic solutions doc3668 none Mays An award is made to the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) to purchase a ALV DLS SLS- F goniometer system. This is a research grade instrument capable of performing simultaneous static and dynamic light scattering measurement and features an avalanche photodiode detector that allows high counting intensity while employing an inexpensive, low power (22mW) Helium-Neon laser. It also features a very large useable angular range (12 degrees to 155 degrees), temperature control from sub-ambient to 90 degrees C, and offers ease of alignment and superior software features. This instrument will provide new infrastructure at UAB for research and education in the area of polymeric materials. From a research perspective, this instrument will be extremely valuable in characterizing molecular weights, radii of gyration, virial coefficients, and hydrodynamic radii of various linear and branched polymers and copolymers and dendrimers being synthesized at UAB. It also will provide a powerful means for characterizing polymer micelles, a research area of intense current interest in the Department of Chemistry. In addition, this instrument will allow UAB to develop new teaching laboratories for both Biochemistry and Polymer Chemistry classes, thus exposing approximately forty students annually to the use of light scattering for characterizing natural and synthetic macromolecules. This instrumentation award to the University of Alabama Birmingham is for the purchase of a state-of-the-art light scattering instrument for use in characterizing polymers, polymeric micelles, and dendrimers. This instrument will provide new infrastructure at UAB for research and education in the area of polymeric materials. From a research perspective, this instrument will be extremely valuable in characterizing masses and sizes of various linear and branched polymers and copolymers and dendrimers being synthesized at UAB. It also will provide a powerful means for characterizing polymer micelles, a research area of intense current interest in the Department of Chemistry. Overall, new and existing research programs of about thirty research scientists in the UAB Chemistry Department will be favorably impacted. In addition, this instrument will allow new teaching laboratories for both Biochemistry and Polymer Chemistry classes, thus exposing approximately forty students annually to the use of light scattering for characterizing natural and synthetic macromolecules doc3669 none Rabolt This GOALI proposal, which involves the University of Delaware and Dupont Corporate Research and & Development Lab, is jointly funded by the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in MPS and the Instrumentation for Materials Research program in DMR. The award supports the development and construction of a fiber-optic IR spectrograph that uses an InSb focal plane array detector and, as such, has no moving parts. The dramatic success of FTIR over the last 30 years is directly attributable to the multiplex and throughput advantages offered by interferometric instrumentation. However the use of such scanning instruments in a process environment can significantly reduce if not eliminate these advantages, due to the elevated noise level which couples with the scanning mechanism of such instruments. With the advances in optical design and material technology, dispersive instruments can now compete with FTIR in terms of throughput while keeping the multiplex advantage. With zero moving parts, the noise can be time-averaged by the spectrograph design. For this reason we believe that such a portable dispersive focal plane array spectrograph may offer significant advantages for infrared spectroscopy in a process environment where sample fluctuation is common. This GOALI proposal, which involves the University of Delaware and Dupont Corporate Research and & Development Lab, is jointly funded by the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in MPS and the Instrumentation for Materials Research program in DMR. The award supports the construction of a first-of-its-kind fiber optic IR spectrograph at the Materials Science and Engineering Department of the University of Delaware. This is a powerful analytical tool with no moving parts. It employs an ultrafast focal plane array detector for real-time studies of different chemical species. The success of this instrumentation project will enable an entire family of analytical tools that will find applications in on-line process monitoring, environmental protection and forensic sciences. The use of fiber optics and a focal plane array makes this infrared instrument portable, allowing it to be brought to the location of interests, e. g., to a production line of thin polymer films. In addition, The involvement of an industrial partner in this project is a good example of how a strong R & D project can provide a valuable experience for students who will spend part of their time doing research in an industrial laboratory, providing them with additional work-force-ready skills. The students and postdoctoral fellows involved in this projects will be exposed to both the state-of-the-art instrumentation and real-life industrial environment, which are both crucial educational components for a successful career in engineering doc3670 none f Vilgalys The study of organismal phylogeny provides a basis for taxonomic classification and also a way to measure the earth s tremendous biological diversity. This project by Prof. Rytas Vilgalys at Duke University and colleagues Dr. Jean-Marc Moncalvo and Dr. James Johnson at Cameron University focuses on phylogenetic systematics of gilled and fleshy mushrooms, in the order Agaricales, and the analysis of biological diversity in this group based on molecular phylogenetic trees. Mushrooms and related fungi are estimated to include over 10,000 species and they are often essential components of terrestrial ecosystems, playing important roles as primary decomposers of organic matter, as mutualistic symbionts of plants, but also as agents of plant and animal disease. The unique biochemical pathways of fungi also represent a largely untapped source of novel metabolites and potential drugs. The project extends current research to incorporate additional sequenced genes from both nuclear and mitochondrial genomes, as evidence to infer phylogenetic relatedness among fungal taxa and to reclassify these fungi into an estimated 25-35 families. This molecular phylogenetic framework in turn permits evaluation of morphological features associated with reduced and enclosed ( puffballs ) forms of agaric fungi and also the mycorrhizal habit, to understand the apparently multiple and independent cases of convergent evolution in spore-producing and root-infecting structures. The project will develop a comprehensive DNA sequence database for quick identification and accurate classification of agaric fungi. The study will also develop a theoretical framework for measuring biodiversity based on DNA evidence, which may prove useful for comparative studies and for making conservation decisions based on measures of genetic diversity within geographic areas doc3671 none The aim of this research program is to elucidate the dynamics of local vibrational modes (LVMs) of defect and impurity complexes in semiconductors. The research focuses on LVMs in crystalline semiconductors, including the stretch-modes of hydrogen- and deuterium-containing complexes in proton- and deuteron-implanted Si and Ge, the acceptor- and donor-hydrogen complexes in Si and GaAs, and the anti-symmetric stretch-mode of interstitial O in Si, Ge, and GaAs. The population lifetime and the dephasing time of the first excited vibrational level will be determined using transient bleaching and photon-echo measurements. The time-resolved nonlinear-optical studies will be carried out with the short-pulse high-power tunable-infrared radiation of the Free-Electron Laser at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. A comparison between hydrogen- and deuterium-related modes, which have widely different interactions with bulk phonons in crystalline semiconductors, will assist in identifying the relaxation mechanism. Temperature-dependent studies will be performed to elucidate the coupling mechanism between the local modes and the crystal s phonon bands. Several important questions will be addressed regarding vibrational energy relaxation and transfer channels, the coupling to bending-modes, and the role of local structure and crystal site in the vibrational relaxation process. This research program provides training for graduate and undergraduate students in an interdisciplinary field including modern optics, materials science and computational modeling. %%% Hydrogen is one of the most prominent impurities in semiconductors. One important property of hydrogen in these materials is its ability to improve device performance by passivating defects, a process, which today is used routinely in the production of integrated circuits such as CPU and RAM for computers. Knowledge of the rates and pathways of vibrational energy flow is critical for understanding thermally and electronically stimulated defect and impurity reactions and migration in these devices. The aim of this experimental research program is to elucidate the microscopic dynamics of local vibrations of hydrogen-decorated defect and impurity complexes in crystalline semiconductors. These fundamental studies require fairly low defect or impurity concentrations to reduce effects due to interactions, which often results in low infrared absorbance of the material. The short-pulse high-power tunable-infrared radiation of the Free-Electron Laser at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility will be employed for high-resolution time-resolved infrared absorption experiments. A direct comparison between the dynamics of hydrogen and deuterium modes, which have widely different interactions with bulk vibrations in these crystalline materials, will further support the identification of the energy exchange mechanism. The training that graduate and undergraduate students will receive while working on this project will prepare them for attractive semiconductor or optics related careers in industry, academe, or government doc3672 none The goal of this proposal is to use the crayfish molting model to characterize the Ca2+ pump and Ca2+ exchanger (Na+ Ca2+ exchanger) on external and internal membranes, the genes that encode them, and the steroid hormone that putatively regulates the genes. Postmolt provides a natural model for upregulation activation of epithelial Ca2+ transporters as crayfish transition from intermolt Ca2+ balance to impressive unidirectional Ca2+ influx (2 mmol kg h) across the primary exchange epithelia. Both cellular and subcellular Ca2+ homeostases are challenged during mass Ca2+ transit across epithelia. The hypothesis to be tested is that a suite of Ca2+ transporting proteins work together to achieve Ca2+ homeostasis in crayfish cells. During postmolt (experimental), enhanced transepithelial unidirectional influx of Ca2+ is associated with coordinated changes in activity or expression of these proteins compared with intermolt (baseline levels, control). Crayfish tissues to be studied are epithelia as well as non-epithelial cells (muscle). The Ca2+ pump and NCX will be characterized during postmolt (transepithelial Ca2+ influx, experimental) as opposed to intermolt (Ca2+ balance, control). The specific aims are: 1. Physiological characterization of Ca2+ transporters through in vitro techniques: The kinetics and pharmacology of ATP- and Na+-dependent Ca2+ uptake into basolateral membrane vesicles (BLMV) will be studied using flow cytometry to detect change in mean fluorescence intensity (versus side scatter) of the Ca2+ sensitive dye fluo-3. The technique will be further refined through binding antibodies to intracellular epitopes, enabling inside out vesicles to be sorted. At the same time, rapid filtration uptake of radiolabelled Ca2+ will be determined into BLMV as well as microsomes prepared from SR ER to determine the kinetics pharmacology of Ca2+ transporters on external or internal membranes respectively. 2. Molecular characterization of purified Ca2+ transporting proteins and their evolution: The complete cDNA of crayfish PMCA and NCX will be cloned using standard molecular techniques. Construction of phylogenetic trees of these ancient gene families will be used to estimate their rates of evolution. 3. Regulation of expression of genes encoding Ca2+ transporting proteins: Expression of Ca2+ transporters will be quantified using standard molecular techniques. 4. Localization of Ca2+ transporters using purified antibodies for immunocytochemistry: Antibodies have been successfully raised against crayfish SERCA PMCA NCX. Immunocytochemistry will be used to locate the tissue distribution of the transporters (using bright field, epifluorescence) and their subcellular distribution (laser scanning confocal, electron microscopy). 5. Regulation of genes encoding Ca2+ transporters: Regulation of genes encoding the Ca2+ transporters will be determined through characterizing genomic DNA. Ca2+ homeostasis has profound biological relevance. Integrating the associated changes in Ca2+ transporting proteins and their genes at multiple epithelia will delineate Ca2+ homeostasis from an organismic context. The project will also enhance research training of students from under-represented groups doc3673 none Barnes The Principal Investigator will take advantage of an unexpected opportunity for investigating hibernation behavior, physiology, and neurobiology in hibernating black bears, Ursus americanus. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game will provide two trouble bears that are just entering hibernation. These bears would be destroyed because they have a history of endangering people. The Principal Investigator has outdoor artificial dens and preliminary that suggests that large mammalian hibernators achieve energy savings with very different physiological mechanisms than do small hibernators, such as arctic ground squirrels, Spennophilus parryii. For example, bears substantially reduce their metabolic rate and do not fast for six months. They achieve this with only a 3-5oC reduction in body temperature (versus a 40 oC decline in ground squirrels). They also remain almost continuously in slow-wave sleep. The Principal Investigator will measure these variables using state-of-the-art telemetry, which allows them to continuously monitor body temperatures, brain waves, EKG, and rates of oxygen consumption in untethered black bears hibernating in natural conditions for six months. There is now an unexpected opportunity to extend these measurements to a female that is likely to be pregnant. This hibernation physiology has never been studied in a hibernating bear that will gestate, give birth, and nurse an offspring. The Principal Investigator will collaborate with Dr. Oivind Toien, previously with the Norsk Polar Institute. Dr. Toien is critical to the study because of his expertise in respirometry and telemetry doc3674 none Mabrouk Resonance Raman, X-ray crystallographic, and computational methods will be used to study three heme proteins, myoglobin (Mb), cytochrome c (cyt c), and horseradish peroxidase (HRP), in organic media. Studies of these systems will be directed toward four specific objectives: 1) elucidating the role of bound distal pocket water and the internal H-bond network in the redox mechanism of cytochrome c and myoglobin; 2) identifying perturbations of the active site structure and function of lyophilized enzyme HRP powders and cross-linked enzyme crystals of HRP in nonaqueous media; 3) determining the mechanism whereby small-molecule excipients such as poly(ethylene glycol) and KCl enhance the catalytic activity of lyophilized enzyme powders in nonaqueous media; and 4) elucidating the heme active site structural changes in HRP in benzene that result in the change in catalytic mechanism for HRP in benzene (from oxidative electron transfer to oxo transfer). The research will be divided into three focus areas: 1) resonance Raman structural studies of horseradish peroxidase enzyme powders and cross-linked enzyme crystals in nonaqueous media; 2) x-ray crystallographic study of bound water in cyt c and Mb and the E-S complex of HRP in benzene; and 3) computational study of heme proteins in nonaqueous media. This research will provide insight at the molecular level into the phenomenon of biomolecular recognition in heme proteins and enzymes and the mechanism of nonaqueous enzymology, a powerful new method of organic synthesis in which enzymes are used as biocatalysts in solvents other than water. Such knowledge will deepen fundamental understanding of the function of these proteins in nature and expand the utility of proteins and enzymes in biotechnology and biocatalysis doc3675 none With National Science Foundation support Drs. Paul and Suzanne Fish and James Bayman will conduct archaeological research at the Marana Mound site, located in the Tucson Basin of Arizona. Associated with the prehistoric Hohokam culture, the site dates to the early Classic Period ( - AD) and was occupied for approximately 100 years. The mound site was constructed at a central geographical point and represents the top level within a broader three tier hierarchical community. It is approximately 1.5 km. long and .5 km wide. Because it is not situated in a favorable riverine or upland locale, it received water from a 10 kilometer long canal constructed from the Santa Cruz River. Composed of compounds of ca. square meters with up to 20 enclosed structures, the site population probably ranged between 500 and 750 people. In a number of ways the site is unique from its smaller counterparts. Not only is it the largest but it also is the only one which contained significant numbers of distant trade items. A neutron activation sourcing study suggests that it, along with two other large sites, participated in a common exchange network that differed from acquisition patterns and ceramic sources in other community settlements. Assemblages recovered from house floors are distinctive in the number and variety of items represented and the high frequency of artifacts linked to craft production and personal ornamentation. Thus there is a marked concentration of imported items and manufacturing activities at the mound site compared to other settlements. While the Marana Mound is distinguished from its smaller counterparts, there appears however to be minimal internal differentiation within the site itself and this finding runs contra to archaeological preconceptions. As site hierarchies emerge and class structure becomes apparent, normally internal differention within individual communities occurs as well. Based on limited evidence from Marana Mound however such did not happen. The team will examine potential differentiation at the site through a four-tiered sampling design focusing on compound clusters, compounds, rooms and trash mounds. Evidence for differential advantage and competitive strategies will be sought in four realms: 1. Access to and consumption of exotic or high value items; 2. Economic activities beyond ordinary subsistence production and consumption; 3. Involvement in external exchange; and 4. Participation in communal or integrative observances as signaled by ritually-related items. This research will provide insight into the paths which led to the rise of complex societies. It shed new light on North American prehistory and provide data of interest to many archaeologists doc3676 none Elder This is a RUI grant to support theoretical research on systems far from equilibrium. The selection of states in non-equilibrium systems is poorly understood despite the vast array of such phenomena occurring in everyday life and technologically important processes. Examples include everything from coffee stains on a napkin and frost on a window pane to vortex flow patterns in superconductors and cellular interfaces in directional ordering, solidification and viscous fingering experiments. While it is unlikely that a single variational method can be developed to encompass all such phenomena (as the Boltzmann principle does in equlibrium) it may be possible to develop methods for specific classes of phenomena or behavior. The goals of this research are to characterize state selection in a number of important physical systems and to develop a variational principle for a relatively simple class of non-equilibrium systems. %%% This is a RUI grant to support theoretical research on systems far from equilibrium. The selection of states in non-equilibrium systems is poorly understood despite the vast array of such phenomena occurring in everyday life and technologically important processes. Examples include everything from coffee stains on a napkin and frost on a window pane to vortex flow patterns in superconductors and cellular interfaces in directional ordering, solidification and viscous fingering experiments. While it is unlikely that a single variational method can be developed to encompass all such phenomena (as the Boltzmann principle does in equlibrium) it may be possible to develop methods for specific classes of phenomena or behavior. The goals of this research are to characterize state selection in a number of important physical systems and to develop a variational principle for a relatively simple class of non-equilibrium systems doc3677 none This award by the Advanced Materials and Processing Program in the Chemistry Division and the Electronic Materials Program in the Division of Materials Research supports the work of Professors Gregory Girolami and John Abelson of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The focus of the research is the synthesis of transition metal and lanthanide borohydride complexes and deposition of thin films from them using remote hydrogen-plasma-assisted chemical vapor deposition. The efficiency and mechanism of thin layer deposition and physical properties of the films prepared are being investigated. These studies will provide scientific information on bulk diffusion properties and limits of metal borides as diffusion barriers in microelectronic integrated circuits. In addition, the research provides training to students in an important interdisciplinary area of materials science. Pure metal borohydrides, which contain only the metal, boron, and hydrogen, are being synthesized and characterized. Thin films for applications in integrated electronic circuits as barrier materials are being prepared by vapor deposition methods. In addition, the interdisciplinary approaches of this project provide knowledge and training to students in materials chemistry, synthesis, characterization, and thin film deposition. The knowledge gained from these studies will have applications in the design and fabrication of integrated circuits for electronic and photonic devices doc3678 none In this research surface-diffuse-scattering experiments and atomic-scale computational modeling are closely coupled in order to investigate the nature of the interatomic interactions governing the energetics and thermodynamic properties of ultra-thin metal-alloy films. The long-term goal is the development of a theoretical framework for predicting how the atomic structure and phase stability of specific alloy systems are affected by variations in temperature, the composition and thickness of the film, and the chemistry and crystalline geometry of the substrate. This experimental effort focuses on the investigation of chemical short-range order and local atomic displacements in thin-film alloys through measurements of surface x-ray scattering diffuse intensities. These experiments are carried out primarily at the Advanced Photon Source, ANL. In order to derive quantitative structural information from these experiments it is necessary to measure the diffuse intensity on an absolute scale. For this purpose, a number of new techniques are explored for providing the intensity of the direct beam for surface diffuse scattering, which is the evanescent wave traveling along the surface. Once data is obtained on an absolute scale at many points in reciprocal space, chemical short-range-order and atomic-displacement contributions to the diffuse scattered intensity of ultra-thin metallic alloy solid solutions can be extracted. Such detailed structural information provides important insights into the nature of the interatomic interactions governing phase stability in thin-film alloys. The theoretical effort focuses on the development of a microscopic framework for calculating both chemical and elastic contributions to the energetics of ordered and disordered structures in ultra-thin epitaxial alloy films. This approach makes use of the results of electronic structure calculations of the total energies and relaxed atomic structures of ordered alloy films to extract interatomic interaction parameters and force constants from first principles. These parameters form the basis for efficient Monte-Carlo simulations from which thin-film alloy structural and thermodynamic properties are calculated. In order to validate and further guide the development of the computational approach, detailed comparisons are performed between the structural information obtained from these simulations and from surface diffuse-scattering measurements. %%% Bulk composition-temperature phase diagrams provide only limited insight into the atomic structures which form in ultra-thin (i.e., a single to a few monolayers in thickness) alloy films. In particular, it has been observed commonly that two elements, which are immiscible in bulk crystalline phases, form stable mixed alloy phases in ultra-thin films. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated recently that ultra-thin films consisting of alloys of immiscible metals display a unique form of lateral, nanometer-scale compositional ordering not observed in the bulk. The potentially novel catalytic and magnetic properties associated with these new metallic alloy phases have given rise to increasing interest in their atomic structures and thermodynamic stability doc3679 none Holt Understanding the implications of patchiness and spatial dynamics is fundamental to many issues in ecology, including many applied problems. This is particularly true of habitat fragmentation, which is a dominant feature of global change. A long-term experiment on habitat fragmentation is underway in the prairie-forest ecotone of eastern Kansas aimed at examining the impact of fragmentation on secondary succession, defined broadly to include key consumer groups, as well as plant dynamics. The physical layout of the experiment (initiated in ) is an archipelago of habitat patches in a large mown field. During the first phases of the project, there wre dramatic patch size effects on the distribution of small mammals, but no overall effect of patch size on succession. By , colonization of woody plants was beginning to accelerate. It was hypothesized that this would lead to patch size effects on succession. This hypothesis has been borne out: the rate of succession towards woody vegetation has increased with patch size and decreased with distance from woodland source pools. There has been corresponding succession and spatial shifts in the small mammal community, and small mammals have been shown to inflict considerable damage on woody seedlings. In there was a serendipitous emergence of 17-year periodical cicadas, which imposed high levels of damage, with more damage in large patches. Monitoring of plant and small mammal dynamics will continue to determine the persistence of patch size and distance effects on successional trajectories. Because a large number of individually marked woody samplings exists, the demographic consequences of succession on woody species can be characterized, including the potential impact of the cicada emergence event on sapling demography. This project is unique in that no experimental studies of succession exist in which patch size effects on plant and animal dynamics have been measured doc3680 none Plasmas in which the kinetic energy exceeds the magnetic energy by a significant factor are common in space and in the laboratory. Such plasmas can convect magnetic fields and create null points in whose vicinity first the ions become unmagnetized, then the electrons. This project focuses on the detailed study of the transition regime of these plasmas. Experiments within the project will address three topics: 1) reconnection at three-dimensional null points produced by nonlinear magnetic vortices; 2) small-scale structures such as current sheets below the electron inertial scale length; and 3) magnetic turbulence and anomalous electron transport doc3681 none This project will investigate institutional centers of scholarly, religious and social life in India, the matha. These caste-based, community oriented institutions work to bind together and empower the members of their caste to achieve various political and economic rights promised by the state. In Karnataka, the largest and most powerful matha-s are affiliated with the three dominant castes, the Brahmans, Lingayats, and Vokkaligas. These matha-s have become politically powerful and also oversee the social welfare of their constituents (schools, hospitals, etc.). The researcher hypothesizes that the matha-s are reconfiguring hierarchical Hindu society around the matha (trans-regional, caste based) institution itself, and that this is a response to urbanization and the expanding market economy. The project will center on the activities, authority, and mobilization efforts of one matha from each of the three dominant caste groups. Methods include participant observation, structured interviews, and audio-visual documentation. The project will contribute to our understanding of the role of these Hindu institutions in constructing contemporary Indian social structure and the modern Indian State doc3682 none The interactions between polyelectrolytes and small oppositely charged colloids are manifested in some important biological and technological phenomena. In order to rationalize these observations and current theory, experiments on well-defined model systems are essential. Such experiments will be carried out on polyelectrolytes in combination with three classes of well-defined synthetic colloid particles - mixed micelles, dendrimers, and carboxylated Ficoll fractions - and also with proteins. Polymer MW, linear charge density and chain stiffness will be varied systemically, along with colloid size and charge. A wide range of techniques, including turbidimetry and total intensity, electrophoretic light scattering, QELS, fluorescence recovery after photobleaching, SANS, time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy and rheology will be used to answer questions about the energetics of interaction, the structure of soluble complexes, and phase behavior. %%% In addition to addressing fundamental questions and linking theory with experiment, the work will be of relevance to problems in (1) chemical technology, (2) cell biology, and (3) environmental issues, as follows. (1) Polyelectrolyte-colloid interactions are central to stabilization and flocculation in: water treatment, paper-making, and preceramics. (2) Non-specific polyion-protein association may be an important phenomenon controlling the role of proteoglycans in the extracellular matrix. (3) Complexes between polyelectolytes and micelles adsorbed on sand soil may serve as barriers in the aquiferous migration of apolar pollutants. Students involved in this work will be exposed to a highly multidisciplinary approach that spans theory and applications doc3683 none This research will generate new methods for studying the behavior of inventories and new insights into the causes and propagation mechanism of business cycles. The particular goals are to develop an appropriate framework for applying the linear-quadratic inventory model to data that exhibit long-run stochastic trends. We also intend to use this method to study different two-digit manufacturing sectors to characterize the response of inventories, production, and final sales to an oil price shock. We will also trace out the intersectoral and intertemporal linkages that may be involved in propagating the shock into an economic recession. Finally, we plan to re-examine the empirical evidence on the role of monetary policy in accounting for the historical correlation between oil price shocks and economic activity doc3684 none This is an instrument acquisition award to Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. A Fatigue Crack Growth Fracture Toughness System will be purchased. The instrument will be used to study Stress-Corrosion-Crack (SCC) growth rates of various aluminum alloys. Specifically, the Fatigue Crack Growth Fracture Toughness System is a critical piece of equipment which, in combination with other equipment, will be used to study the effect of retrogression and re-aging on 6xxx and 7xxx series aluminum alloys in muffle furnaces. Successful results will produce weight savings, a great benefit to aluminum industries. This is an instrument acquisition award to Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. A Fatigue Crack Growth Fracture Toughness System will be purchased. The instrument will be used to study Stress-Corrosion-Crack (SCC) growth rates of various aluminum alloys. Undergraduate students will be taught the background of fracture mechanics and how to use the Fatigue Crack Growth Fracture Toughness System. Additionally, the undergraduate students will learn the background of retrogression and re-aging and the significance of the success of this work. After completing the curriculum and sample experiments, the students will then incorporate the results of testing on this system with the results of other experiments, namely, heat treatments, tensile testing, and electrical resistivity determination doc3685 none Under the direction of Dr. Richard Ford, Mr. Severin Fowles will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. Through a combination of archaeological excavation and the analysis of extant museum materials he will reconstruct the social organization and population movements of prehistoric peoples in the Taos District of New Mexico during the several centuries preceding Spanish arrival. During this period of marked social change aggregated populations dispersed and then rearranged themselves in new concentrations marked by large multi-story pueblo villages. Some areas such as Taos which had been sparsely inhabited saw the rise of multiple village communities. Mr. Fowles wishes to understand both the origins and social organization of these entities. Ethnographic data indicates that many early historic Southwestern Native American peoples were organized into segmentary lineage systems. Clearly defined subgroups existed within the society and individual membership was parentally inherited. Relationships between lineages were clearly defined and social control, marriage patterns, inheritance and ritual responsibility all were determined by lineage structure. While likely this pattern existed prehistorically, this is difficult to prove. It is also unclear how it originated. Mr. Fowles hypothesizes that the aggregated community he plans to examine was structured according to segmentary lineage principles, that its founders derived from distinct cultural groups who migrated from different areas and came together to found it, and that the individual lineages correspond to individual founding groups. To examine this model, will use excavated material from several museums to reconstruct population structure prior to aggregation and search for material signatures which characterize individual groups. He will then examine one large site, Pot Creek Pueblo to determine whether these antecedent populations came together to form the site. He will study the distribution of these cultural markers within the site to find out whether they blend or maintain clear and distinct associations and, if so, whether the are spatially segregated within the as one would predict if segmentary lineages were present. This research is important for several reasons. It will provide data of interest to many archaeologists. It will provide insight into how groups at a technologically simple level adapt and rearrange themselves across a changing landscape and how they are organized into coherent and functioning societies. This project will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc3686 none Award: Principal Investigator: Robert Kusner This project continues research on extremal surfaces and related geometric variational problems, with applications to low-dimensional topology and the natural sciences. The principal investigator will work on (1) existence and uniqueness of surfaces minimizing the Willmore bending energy, (2) determination of the moduli spaces of complete constant mean curvature surfaces (CMC) with finite topology, (3) geometric analysis of brownian motion and potential theory on properly embedded minimal surfaces with infinite topology, and (4) the existence and geometry of energy-minimizing knots and links. In addition, the principal investigator will work at GANG with senior scientist N. Schmitt on the approach to constructing CMC surfaces using monodromy of flat (loop) SU(2)-bundles over a Riemann surface; this will include an experimental aspect (computation and visualization of families of examples), as well as a theoretical aspect (relationship between integrable systems and the functional geometric analysis methods). While the motivation for most of this work is primarily aesthetic, it should be noted that minimal, CMC and Willmore surfaces arise in physical situations as interfaces between fluids, and thus their geometry may have some value in predicting the behaviors of certain natural and synthetic materials. For example, vast resources are wasted when automatic soldering of electronic microcomponents results in short- or open-circuits: some of the principal investigator s work on CMC surfaces has direct application to this problem; he has freely shared his ideas (at NIST and elsewhere) with people trying to solve it. The principal investigator s recent work on ropelength of knots and links (some published in the general science journal, Nature) represents the first careful effort to mathematically investigate -- and, in certain instances, correct -- claims in the literature about the geometry of long polymeric chains (such as DNA); he is actively collaborating with natural scientists around the world on this topic. Schmitt s visualization work on new CMC surfaces has been documented in the recent GANG film Surfaces, Flows & Holonomy, scenes of which are available at www.gang.umass.edu. This award is cofunded by the program in Computational Mathematics doc3687 none This award will provide partial support for the Complex Fluids Gordon Conference to be held at Salve Regina College in Newport, RI. The conference will deal with structures in which external forces exert stress on a soft interface to create new structures. For example, sickle cells are red blood cells distorted by abnormal aggregation of proteins within the cells which in turn exert distorting forces on the cell membrane. The conference will address the ongoing need for cross-fertilization amongst soft matter physicists, biophysicists, chemists and chemical engineers. International participation will be encouraged. Particular efforts are being made to engage the mechanical engineering community in the discussion of force transduction in complex media. The award will provide specific support for junior participants, both domestic and foreign. %%% This award will provide partial support for the Complex Fluids Gordon Conference to be held at Salve Regina College in Newport, RI. The conference will address the ongoing need for cross-fertilization amongst soft matter physicists, biophysicists, chemists and chemical engineers. International participation will be encouraged. Particular efforts are being made to engage the mechanical engineering community in the discussion of force transduction in complex media. The award will provide specific support for junior participants, both domestic and foreign doc3688 none Partial support is provided for the second Gordon Research Conference on Thin Film Mechanical Behavior. The meeting will explore research frontiers in deformation and failure of thin films, their adhesion and delamination, the stress evolution during film growth, and issues in modeling and characterization of these films. The target audience includes highly qualified and currently active researchers as well as graduate students and post doctoral researchers from diverse groups doc3689 none Wu, Ling-Gang for Regulation of the kinetics of vesicle endocytosis in a central synapse Neurons talk to each other via synapses, where the nerve impulse triggers fusion of synaptic vesicles to the presynaptic plasma membrane and release their transmitter content, which in turn acts on the postsynaptic target. To maintain synaptic transmission, fused vesicles must be retrieved from the plasma membrane (endocytosis) for re-use. The rate of endocytosis is critical because it determines whether the synapse can continuously release transmitters. Endocytosis can be either slow or fast. The mechanisms that regulate the rate of endocytosis remain unclear. The investigators hypothesize that the rate of endocytosis is regulated by both the intensity of nerve stimulation and the intracellular calcium level. This hypothesis will be tested at a calyceal synapse, located in the medial nucleus of the trapezoid body (MNTB) in the rat auditory brain stem. At this synapse, the investigators have recently made it possible to measure endocytosis with a time-resolved capacitance measurement technique. This is the first time such a technique has been applied to the fast synapse in the mammalian central nervous system. With this technique, the investigators will determine whether the intensity of nerve stimulation regulates endocytosis by comparing the rate of endocytosis following various nerve stimuli that differ in the number and frequency of nerve impulses. The investigators will also determine whether the intracellular calcium level regulates endocytosis by comparing the rate of endocytosis at various intracellular calcium levels. The proposed work will reveal the mechanisms that regulate the rate of endocytosis at mammalian central nervous system, and improve our understanding on how synapses maintain their activity doc3690 none The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at Northwestern University supports an interdisciplinary research program on materials with an emphasis on the nanoscale. The theme of the MRSEC is Advancing Materials Research and Education to Improve the Quality of Life . Research is carried out in four interdisciplinary research groups, with appropriate seed projects. Within IRG 1 the Center focuses on nanostructured materials for chemical and biological sensing with the aim to develop and characterize new materials for use in making chemical and biological sensors for environmental applications. Within IRG 2 complex oxides are investigated to use materials design and synthesis in order to develop new thin film ceramic materials required for advanced photonic applications. The work in IRG 3 uses and interdisciplinary approach to develop a scientific basis for the synthesis and processing of new types of environmentally benign polymers. Finally, IRG 4, which is concerned with the architecture, transport, and binding in molecular crystals, polyelectrolyte nanocomposites, and nanoscale structures, is focused on new materials and the design of new molecular assemblies with ultimate potential applications to batteries, fuel cells, and molecular electronics. The Center features a strong pre-college educational program, including the widely disseminated Materials World Modules (MWM), as well as outstanding undergraduate and graduate educational opportunities. Of particular interest is the Master s Materials Technology Program which prepares graduates to teach materals science concepts at the community college level. Participants in the 4 IRG Center include 33 senior investigators, 6 postdoctoral associates, 17 graduate students, 15 undergraduates, and 6 technicians and other support personnel. Professor R.P.H. Chang directs the MRSEC doc3691 none This study will examine the role of red imported fire ants in reducing the reproductive performance, and thereby in affecting the social and mating system, of eastern bluebirds. Previous work has shown that the reproduction of bluebirds in Athens, Georgia, where the ants are established, is depressed compared to the reproduction of the same species in Clemson, South Carolina, where the ants have been absent. Now the ants are invading Clemson; this natural experiment will be used to test the hypothesis that the fire ants are the cause of decreased reproduction. Bluebird reproduction and social behavior will be monitored in the two sites. The Athens site will serve as a control for other kinds of environmental variation. If fire ants are the cause of lowered reproduction in Athens, then as they invade Clemson, bluebird reproduction should decline there, as well. A new species invasion is like a stone thrown into a pond. How far do the ripples go, and how many distant relationships do they affect? This study will contribute to the general answer to this big question. It may be that the tendency of a male bird to guard his mate, and the rate at which his mate engages in extra-pair matings, is influenced by an invading ant species doc3692 none This project explores new strategies and methods for the total synthesis of a variety of structural types of natural products. The emphasis of the project is on cycloaddition chemistry, and the focus is placed upon those that can be rendered asymmetric. In this way, polycyclic products will be produced as single enantiomers. The targets selected for synthesis are taken from the broad palette of naturally occurring structures that includes terpene, alkaloids, and other complex systems containing both carbocyclic and heterocyclic frameworks. With this Award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program (Organic Synthesis) supports the research of Professor James D. White of Oregon State University. Professor White is involved in the total synthesis of natural products, wherein specific molecules that have been isolated from some natural source are replicated in exact detail through a series of chemical reactions. The strategies and tactics that one employs in this endeavor determine the efficiency with which these molecules are prepared in a laboratory setting, and this often will determine whether or not a particular substance can be mass-produced for pharmaceutical or other use doc3693 none Parasites are an ubiquitous and important component of biological systems. Parasites affect host behavior, population dynamics, species interactions, and biodiversity. The effects of parasites on host ecology are often influenced by the magnitude of host susceptibility. Previous research has demonstrated that resistance to parasites is often a quantitative and genetically determined trait. However, little is known about the genetic basis and evolutionary constraints of resistance. This project will use molecular markers and gene mapping techniques to examine the evolutionary biology of parasite resistance. The association between a rat tapeworm parasite (Hymenolepis diminuta) and its intermediate host, the red flour beetles (Tribolium castaneum) will be used as a model system. Two questions will be addressed. (1) What are the genetic bases and inheritance of resistance to parasitism? (2) Are there any fitness costs associated with resistance? The research is an important contribution to evolutionary biology because it examines the genetic basis of resistance and common assumptions made about the evolution of resistance. It will affect the way that we understand the evolution of host-parasite interactions, and may have practical implications to the control of human pathogens doc3694 none The Twenty-Second Midwest Probability Colloquium will be held at Northwestern University from October 20-21, . This colloquium series has become an important regional meeting. It attracts participants primarily from the greater Midwest probability community. It has a strong tradition of encouraging graduate students and other young investigators to attend and interact with specialists doc3695 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Ted Goebel and his collaborators will conduct one season of archaeological research at the site of Ushki-1 located in the Kamchatka Oblast, Russia. The site is important and has figured prominently in discussions of the peopling of the Americas because of its location at the Asian end of the Bering land bridge which connected the New World to Siberia at the end of the last ice age The lower deposits contain a stone tool industry which includes bifaces and blades which resemble some materials in Alaska which date to ca 11,000 years ago. It is also possible, but uncertain that there is an earlier level at the site which is dominated by large blades bearing some resemblance to materials associated with the New World Clovis tradition. The site is said to contain copious faunal and lithic remains along with house remains and burials but none of this information has been formally reported in the literature. The site has also been questioned because of uncertainties about dating and stratigraphy, especially of lower levels. Some have argued that the deposits are mixed and that radiocarbon materials were contaminated by groundwater penetration. Dr. Goebel and his colleagues will address these issues. They will excavate a small block within the site and conduct multidisciplinary laboratory analyses to determine the integrity of Ushki-1 and its multiple cultural components. They will work to: establish the age and stratigraphic separation of the lowest components; characterize associated lithic industries; determine the presence and degree of preservation of faunal and paleovegetational remains; and assess archived records relating to previous excavations as the site. These studies will further understanding and peopling of Beringia and the Americas, and determine whether additional archaeological and paleoecological studies of Ushki are warranted doc3696 none The advent of the Internet will have a profound impact on the way commerce is transacted. Since the rise of Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP), all eyes are now on how this paradigm will be transferred to the Web. Unfortunately, there are significant problems with ERP that must be addressed before it can realize the full potential of the Internet. Within ERP is the older model, Manufacturing Resources Planning (MRP II) that was built upon a simple model known as Material Requirements Planning (MRP). MRP, being developed more than 30 years ago, made several simplifying assumptions in order to make the computations feasible. One of these was that lead times are an attribute of the part in question, not the condition of the facility. This assumption leads to inflated planned lead times which, in turn, leads to long flow times. This artifact has been perpetuated to the present day and lies at the heart of the materials management module of the most popular and comprehensive ERP systems today. The conference will address these and other issues involving ERP, including: (1) Integrating material and capacity planning. (2) Effect of supply chain structures. (3) Integrating web based ERP with central data warehouses. (4) Cross-functional integration with marketing and finance. (5) Scalability issues. (6) Lead-time and inventory reduction. (7) New issues such as remanufacturing and process industry ERP doc3697 none Ned Sibert of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to investigate theoretically energy flow in polyatomic molecules in both gas and liquid phases, using combined classical and quantum techniques. The primary goal of this effort is to develop molecular models of the dynamics that are consistent with experimental observations. This work will highlight and elucidate the mechanisms by which a system returns to equilibrium, and permit the sorting out of quantum from classical effects in relaxation processes. Research topics include the calculation of rotation-vibration spectra of methane and its deuterated analogs using perturbative techniques developed by the PI, the detailed study of gas phase relaxation of carbon disulfide and ultimately more complex systems via collisions, and the theoretical study of energy flow in the condensed phase. A quantitative analysis of the dynamics in these problems involves the accurate treatment of both the molecular eigenstates and their interactions with the surrounding environment. The research outcomes are expected to lead to an improved understanding of the competing pathways of energy flow in medium-size molecules and of the coupling terms that are responsible for these pathways. Successful modeling of atmospheric phenomena, combustion chemistry, and drug design via molecular simulations require accurate knowledge of the forces between the atoms and molecules. Recent experimental advances in ultrafast laser spectroscopy have enabled scientists to probe the time evolution of vibrationally excited systems to determine the pathways of energy flow in molecules. Outcomes from theoretical and experimental studies of vibrational energy transfer reveal potentially important information about the forces that control the above technologically important processes doc3698 none A scientifically and technologically important class of composite materials are those which exhibit a sharp transition in their material and microstructural properties as some parameter is varied near a critical point. One example with extremely rich behavior is an electrorheological (ER) fluid, which is a colloidal suspension of polarizable particles of high complex dielectric constant, with typical sizes ranging from micron to millimeter scales, in a viscous fluid of low complex dielectric constant such as oil. The application of a strong electric field to such a suspension produces within milliseconds a dramatic transition from an oily slurry to a solid-like state with an increase in the viscosity of the suspension by many orders of magnitude. For non-conducting dielectric spheres, the transition is characterized by the formation of chains which aggregate into columns parallel to the field. For metal spheres, net-like structures with fractal characteristics form. Recently the investigator has introduced a way of applying the methods of statistical mechanics to macroscopic problems in composite media, for length scales much larger than the in the traditional domain of statistical mechanics. In the research supported by this award, the investigator will develop these methods further and begin applying them to study the critical properties of ER fluids, particularly those with larger spheres where thermal effects are negligible, and classical application of statistical mechanics yields little information. Materials such as electrorheological (ER) fluids which exhibit some type of marked transitional behavior appear throughout science and engineering, and are important in many technological applications. Other examples include sea ice, porous media such as sandstones and soils, particulate composites used in smart devices and in conducting films for electromagnetic applications, and material failure due to fracture. The fluid solid transition in ER fluids is a particularly interesting example of the type of critical behavior exhibited by these materials. The potential for rapid electrical control of rheological properties has attracted considerable attention to ER fluids, with applications including clutches, pumps, brakes and shock absorbers. From a theoretical standpoint, however, there remains much to be understood about the material behavior and properties near the transition. In the proposed work the investigator will develop mathematical methods for understanding the transition in ER fluids, as well as other composite materials exhibiting critical behavior doc3699 none This award to Professor Wayne Gladfelter of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities is a renewal of an earlier award and is supported by the Advanced Materials and Processing Program in the Chemistry Division and the Electronic Materials Program in the Division of Materials Research. The focus of the research will be to study the chemical vapor deposition of mono- and multimetal oxide films from anhydrous metal nitrates. The award also will evaluate the ligand controlled kinetics and microstructure mechanism of the deposition processes, and studies to determine relationship between the deposition mechanism. Another component of the award is the study of atomic layer chemical vapor deposition of multicomponent oxide. In addition, the research will provide training to students in an important interdisciplinary area of materials chemistry. This award will study the ligand controlled kinetics and microstructure mechanism of the deposition processes, and studies to determine relationship between the deposition mechanism and film composition during the chemical vapor deposition. Various thin metal oxide films will be prepared by chemical vapor deposition and atomic layer chemical vapor deposition under this program and these amorphous high dielectric materials may be used for the fabrication of thin films with tunable electronic and photonic properties. In addition, the research program will provide a rich multidisciplinary education and training opportunity to students in material chemistry doc3700 none Musfeldt This is an instrument acquisition award to State University of New York at Binghamton. The overall goal of this project is to set up a near-millimeter and far-infrared spectrometer, a dedicated high-sensitivity detector for the spectrometer, and the associated accessories for temperature dependent measurements over the frequency range of the instrument. Acquisition of this spectrometer will impact on-going programs in magnetic oxides, fullerene polymers, molecular magnets, and organic superconductors. It will also provide an important experimental compliment for the other spectroscopic capabilities that currently exist in my lab. In addition to supporting the low-energy spectroscopy of the aforementioned novel electronic and magnetic materials, the equipment will aid in the training of undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students in the area of materials spectroscopy. This is an instrument acquisition award to State University of New York at Binghamton. The overall goal of this project is to set up a near-millimeter and far-infrared spectrometer, a dedicated high-sensitivity detector for the spectrometer, and the associated accessories for temperature dependent measurements over the frequency range of the instrument. In addition to supporting the low-energy spectroscopy of novel electronic and magnetic materials, the equipment will aid in the training of undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students in the area of materials spectroscopy doc3701 none The main objective of this project is to investigate the electrical properties of insulator-conductor composites using dielectric and impedance spectroscopy as the primary experimental tool and finite element modeling as the primary computer simulation tool. A series of carbon black-polymer composites with varying volume fractions will be fabricated and tested. Once the percolation thresholds have been identified, a large number of samples with the critical volume fraction of carbon black will be prepared and tested. Multiplane analysis of the dielectric functions (permittivitty, impedance, electric modulus and admittance) will also be done and modeled for all samples tested. The microstructure of all measured samples will be evaluated and quantitative correlations between the electrical data and the microstructural parameters will be made (e.g. size, distribution, connectivity). The microstructural results will be used as input for the finite element modeling to further refine the interpretation. It is expected that this project will help determine the significance of the percolation parameters as they relate to the actual microstructure of materials. This project will train up to 3 graduate students in this subject matter. %%% Percolation in conductor-insulator mixtures is the subject of this project. Distribution of telephone lines in a network helps explain percolation. The basic concept is that if all the necessary connections are made, a phone call placed in Vancouver will reach Atlanta instantaneously. If any connections are broken or are inoperative, the phone call does not complete and the desired communication is broken. This concept can be applied to many other problems in a variety of fields. In this project, percolation will be studied by evaluating the electrical conductivity of mixtures of insulating and conducting particles. Even though percolation has been studied for many years, most previous work has only considered direct current behavior. The main objective of this project is to evaluate the effect of frequency (alternating current) on the percolation behavior. Both experimental measurements and computer simulations of idealized insulator-conductor mixtures will be used. This project will train up to 3 graduate students in this subject matter doc3702 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. James O Connell will conduct research to determine the economic utility of non-domesticated geophytes (the underground storage organs of perennial plants) to reconstruct their potential role in prehistoric subsistence patterns. Based on ethnographic data it is clear that geophytes were widely eaten by hunting and gathering groups. Many in the US West incorporated multiple species into their diets. Scientists however do not know how much nutrition individual species provide, how difficult they are to obtain or how much energy must be expended to collect them. The extent to which benefits exceed costs is unknown. Through controlled experimentation Dr. O Connell will address these issues. He and his colleagues will assemble a comprehensive data base on ethnographic patterns of geophyte exploitation throughout the Great Basin region and then conduct a series of experiments designed to quantify the costs of collecting and processing seven widely-used geophyte taxa. They will also generate new, more reliable data on the nutritional utility of these taxa. Recent research suggests that changes in geophyte exploitation may have been implicated in several key developments in human evolutionary history, from the emergence of Homo erectus to the appearance of intensified storage-based economies world-wide in the last ca 150,000 years. Exploration of these changes has, until recently, been hampered by the difficulty of tracking geophyte use archaeologically. Advances in trace element and physical residue analysis promise to improve this situation, although the inductive nature of these techniques inevitably limits their results. The analytic framework of optimal foraging theory which Dr. O Connell will employ should help circumvent this limitation since it provides a basis for developing theoretically well warranted potentially testable predictions about geophyte exploitation under a wide range of circumstances. The data which Dr. O Connell collects will explore this potential though investigation of ethnographic and recent prehistoric geophyte use in the Intermountain West. It will then provide the basis for extrapolation further back into human prehistory doc3703 none Hollingsworth This award is for the acquisistion of a scanning probe microscope for use in the Chemistry Department at Kansas State University. This microscope will incorporate a variety of capabilities, including scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), contact and non-contact atomic force microscopy (AFM), magnetic force microscopy, phase imaging, chemical force microscopy, lateral force microscopy, and electrochemical STM and AFM. This instrumentation will benefit several research programs, including those concerning polymer-dispersed liquid crystal films, crystal growth and dissolution of organic inclusion compounds, ferroelastic and ferroelectric domain switching in organic inclusion compounds, sol-gel-derived silicate glass films used for template-derived sensors and electrochemical devices, semiconductor and magnetic nanoparticles, carbon fiber composites, and oxidized metallic surfaces. Acquisition of this new instrument will greatly benefit graduate student training and research and will also help enhance the undergraduate curriculum in the Chemistry Department at Kansas State University. This award is for the acquisition of a modern scanning probe microscope for use in the Chemistry Department at Kansas State University. This instrument will provide molecular-scale information about the topographical features and adhesive properties of a variety of surfaces, as well as spatially resolved information about the electronic and magnetic properties of numerous materials. Such information is important because it provides a molecular-level understanding of the physical and chemical properties of materials that are relevant in the areas of optical communications, information storage, remediation of hazardous wastes, biomedical sensors, high tensile strength materials, and metallic surfaces in corrosive media. Acquisition of this new instrument will greatly benefit graduate student training and research and will also help enhance the undergraduate curriculum in the Chemistry Department at Kansas State University doc3704 none This grant supports theoretical research to explore fundamental physics of spin-polarized transport properties in magnetic tunnel junctions. There are two focused areas to the research: to establish and generalize new aspects of tunneling mechanisms and tunneling formulations involving magnetic electrodes, and to investigate the influence of external defects on the I-V characteristics of realistic tunnel junctions. This research will facilitate the development of novel spin electronics, which merge spin degrees of freedom into high technologies. In the first part of the research, earlier theoretical formulations will be extended by including the spin-polarized nature of tunneling. Such an extension is not as simple as adding two independent spin channels in a trivial manner. Rather the formulations of spin-polarized tunneling differ from those of charge tunneling in a significant way. The fundamental new features to be addressed include the local spin current variation near interfaces, spin-dependent electric field penetrations into magnetic electrodes, local versus itinerant states near the interfaces, and critical length scales involving the polarized tunneling. Intrinsic electronic relaxations of charge and spin, which determines the temperature dependence of the spin-polarized tunneling of an ideal junction, will also be investigated. A model system with known electronic stuctures from ab initio calculations will be used to test the validity of the theoretical formulations for spin-polarized tunneling. In the second part of the research, applications will be made of these formulations to various realistic magnetic tunnel junctions. The main emphasis will be on predicting novel features of magneto-transport properties and on interpreting the experimental I-V characteristics. The presence of defects in experimental tunnel junctions leads to quite different I-V characteristics and magntoresistance compared to ideal junctions. Suitable Hamiltonians will be developed to model these defects. The magnetotransport properties will be deduced from these model Hamiltonians by using quantum transport equations. In most cases, appropriate perturbation methods will be first used to simplify the problem so that standard numerical techniques can be used to derive the physical quantities up to the point where detailed comparison with experiments can be made. %%% This grant supports theoretical research to explore fundamental physics of spin-polarized transport properties in magnetic tunnel junctions. There are two focused areas to the research: to establish and generalize new aspects of tunneling mechanisms and tunneling formulations involving magnetic electrodes, and to investigate the influence of external defects on the I-V characteristics of realistic tunnel junctions. This research will facilitate the development of novel spin electronics, i.e., spintronics, which merge spin degrees of freedom into high technologies doc3705 none Etkin The importance of RNA sorting, targeted mRNA transport, and local protein synthesis has become evident as a result of the convergence of information from studies focusing on a variety of molecular, cellular and developmental questions. Through these diverse efforts, it is now clear that the targeting of mRNAs to particular intracellular locations plays a key role in biological processes that include the establishment of oocyte polarity, early embryonic differentiation, somatic cell polarization and function, synapse growth, and plasticity in the vertebrate nervous system. The goal of the proposed conference is to bring together researchers with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives who study RNA sorting and localization using a variety of experimental approaches. It is the intent to explore common themes and questions including: (i) The role of RNA localization in the establishment of embryonic cell lineages and axial polarity in invertebrates and vertebrates; (ii) the nature of the cis-acting signals and trans-acting factors that target mRNAs to particular intracellular locations; (iii) the nature of the delivery systems that are involved; (iv) the mechanisms that anchor localized mRNAs once they research their proper destinations; (v) definition of the nature and number of different destinations that reside within individual cell types; (vi) the extent to which mRNA translocation and sorting is regulated by extracellular and intracellular signaling processes; (vii) the mechanisms involved in transport of RNAs from the nucleus to the cytoplasm and in some cases from the cytoplasm to the nucleus; and (viii) the multiple ways in which RNA sorting plays a role in cellular function such as translational regulation doc3706 none This project is aimed at the study of four interrelated areas of materials synthesis with an emphasis on developing phase maps for targeting specific rare-earth metal main group metal materials. The quaternary phase space of rare-earth metal chalcophosphates, quaternary rare-earth metal chalcoantimonates and bismuthates, and quaternary rare-earth metal chalcotrielates and tetrelates, and the high-pressure physical behavior of these materials will be investigated. One hypothesis will demonstrate that formulae suggesting products are indeed valid. These formulae, in some cases, can predict the space group symmetry of the related products. The quaternary phase diagrams of related materials will be explored to identity regions of phase space that support particular oxidation state of phosphorous for a series of selenophosphates. Based on a series of mineralogical studies, other target formulae will be investigated to explore how phases and structures may be controlled. Quaternary phase diagrams will be developed for a series of rare-earth metal chalcotrielates and chalcotetrelates, whether the triels will gallium and indium and there tetrels will germanium and tin. %%% The metal chalcogerides class of materials are highly relevant to applications that include catalysis optical deices such as lasers, infrared detectors, and solar cells, and as new materials called thermoelectrics for refrigeration doc3707 none Vanderbilt The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Kristin L. Vanderbilt with support for her to work with Dr. Janos Toth at the Kossuth Lajos University in Debrecen, Hungary during four field seasons. A better understanding of the environmental controls on soil nitrogen and carbon cycling is needed to improve predictions of forest nutrient availability under different management scenarios, changes in global carbon budgets due to climate change, and forest response. To address these questions, long-term manipulative plant litter experiments (referred to as the DIRT ( (Detritus Input and Removal Treatments)) experiments) have been established at a network of sites in the U.S. The objective of this research project is to establish and sample long-term litter manipulation experimental plots at Sikfokut Forest in Hungary like those already installed at several U.S. locations. This site differs greatly from the sites in the U.S. in terms of management history. Dr. Vanderbilt will conduct baseline measurements of soil and soil solution carbon and nitrogen chemistry, and compare results with data from U.S. sites. She will establish protocols for plot maintenance and sampling, and work with graduate students in ecology at Kossuth Lajos University to develop research projects using the litter manipulation plots. Besides promoting and furthering collaboration between researchers in the U.S. and Hungary, this project will help realize the potential of cross-site research between Long Term Ecological Research and International Long Term Ecological Research sites to provide spatially extensive information about how different ecosystems respond to the same treatments. Dr. Toth has spearheaded the nutrient cycling and litter decomposition studies at Sikfokut doc3708 none Jordan The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Mark A. Jordan with support for eighteen months to work with Dr. William Jordan at the Zoological Society of London in the United Kingdom. They will study gene flow as a constraint on adaptive evolution, a test in a polymorphic population of lizards. Theory predicts that gene flow should constrain local adaptive evolution. The principal investigator proposes to test this hypothesis using a population of Galapagos lava lizards that is polymorphic for traits associated with locomotor performance. He will use microsatellite DNA markers to determine the amount of gene flow within the population. High levels of gene flow will suggest that natural selection must be severe to maintain microgeographic variation in performance. Dr. William Jordan and his colleagues at the Institute of Zoology have extensive experience in the application of molecular techniques for the analysis of microsatellites in natural populations. The principal investigator will also travel to Ecuador and will involve students from there to help with his fieldwork. This research will benefit ongoing conservation efforts in the Galapagos. This project will allow estimates of population structure and effective population size: measures that are critical in making informed management decisions doc3709 none Castellano The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Ronald K. Castellano with support for twenty-four months to work with Dr. Francois Diederich at Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland. This project is being co-funded by NSF s Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. This project involves the study of programmed structural order in functional dendrimer protein mimics. Dendrimers are symmetrically-branched molecules. In biological systems, secondary and tertiary protein structures work cooperatively to modulate the enzyme active site by exposing functionality and providing substrate accessibility. As a next step toward functional, dendrimer-based protein mimics this research will address control over dendrimer surface and branching structure. The proposed coiled coil dendrimers will be a new class of synthetic protein model systems that combine both structural and functional elements and will represent the first peptide-containing dendrimers to demonstrate well-defined and tunable structural order. Dr. Castellano s project will complement ongoing research at Dr. Diederich s lab, on functional dendrimers for recognition and catalysis and promises to help work toward major advances in the field of dendritic biological mimics. Dr. Diederich has nearly 20 years of experience in molecular recognition and supramolecular architectures. He is a leader in biomimetic dendrimer chemistry. The ETH will provide a unique melding of biological and chemical sciences making it the ideal place to this bioorganic research project. This research will have impacts in fields such as biochemistry, specifically biometric synthetic chemistry and in self assembly of nanoscale materials doc3710 none Gulledge The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Allan T. Gulledge with support for 24 months to work with Dr. Greg Stuart at the John Curtain School of Medical Research at Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. Pyramidal neurons in the prefrontal cortex receive information from other cortical areas on distal dendrites. This project will investigate whether dendritic conductances amplify these inputs. To study how distal synaptic inputs are integrated within individual dendritic trees in the mammalian cortex, three hypotheses will be tested. 1) Layer I synaptic input is sufficient to induce Na+ and or Ca+ spikes in the apical tufts of these neurons; 2) Layer I excitatory inputs modulate the pattern of action potential generation in these neurons by interacting with back propagating somatically evoked action potentials; and 3) Dopamine, a prominent neuromodulator in the prefrontal cortex inhibits the propagation of layer I excitory postsynaptic potentials toward the soma of these layer V cells. The host, Dr. Stuart has extensive experience in the field of synaptic integration in cortical neurons. He pioneered techniques for recording from dendritic processes of neurons in brain slices doc3711 none Moore The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Brian C. Moore with support for twenty-four months to work with Professor Angel Linares-Solano at the University of Alicante in Alicante, Spain on the preparation of a novel activated carbon fiber tailored for low pressure methane storage. The objective of this research is to tailor-make activated carbon fibers (ACFs) for low-pressure storage of methane. The PIs hypothesize that the size of the pores within the ACFs will play a crucial role in determining methane capacity. When natural gas is adsorbed into a pore it has a much higher density than it does as a gas. The tendency of natural gas to adsorb in a pore is a function of pore width. ACFs with different pore sizes will be produced and their respective methane storage will be measured. The goal is to determine what pore sizes correlate with the most methane storage. Favorable results could allow natural gas to emerge as a highly competitive vehicle fuel. Natural gas is usually stored under high pressure in heavy, expensive tanks. This study could produce an ACF capable of competitively adsorbing natural gas at pressures that are considerably lower than those of compressed natural gas. Dr. Linares-Solano and his colleagues at Alicante have been conducting activated carbon studies for two decades, giving them considerable expertise in this area of research doc3712 none Crawford The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Andrew J. Crawford with twenty-four months of support to work with Dr. Federico V. Bolanos at the Universidad de Costa Rica and Dr. Eldredge Bermingham at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. This project involves conservation genetics of tropical frogs, important in understanding this decade s global decline in frog populations and species. The goal of this research is to estimate the spatial scale and temporal rate at which the processes of genetic erosion and faunal collapse affect fragmented populations of Neotropical frogs. It will answer the following questions: 1) How far may habitat fragments be reduced and isolated before the following are affected: a) frog abundance, b) frog diversity, c) phenotypic variation, and d) genetic variation within populations? 2) How quickly do the above variables decline over time? The PIs will use DNA fingerprinting and DNA sequencing to resolve evolutionary histories of populations. This will provide an analysis of the long-term survival prospects of a tropical frog fauna. Dr. Bolanos is an authority on the current status of amphibians in Costa Rica and has been monitoring populations for over a decade. Dr. Bermingham is a specialist in genetic studies of tropical vertebrates doc3713 none Simmons The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Harper L. Simmons with support for twenty-four months to work with Dr. Andrew Weaver at the University of Victoria s School of Earth and Ocean Sciences in Victoria, Canada. The PIs will work to determine the impact of increased ocean stratification on ocean thermohaline circulation and ultimately upon climate variability and stability. Specifically, they will implement a known analytical sub-model of small scale, but climatically relevant, oceanic overflow processes into a climate model that cannot directly simulate such processes. The analytical model will be driven by variables that are resolvable within the context of a climate model, namely the large-scale exchange of both moisture and heat between the ocean and atmosphere. An expected result is enhanced dependence of deep water formation climate upon Arctic processes, with a concomitant suppression of climate sensitivity to more southern open convective processes. The theoretical understanding and modeling technology developed through the course of this project will benefit U.S. and international climate modeling activities and programs. The University of Victoria s Climate Modeling Group has expertise in the role of the Arctic in climate. They have a seasoned team of researchers and the equipment necessary to carry out this research doc3714 none The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Christopher Klausmeier with support for 12 months to work with Drs. Peter Bossard and Elena Litchman at EAWAG ETH Limnological Research Centre in Kastanienbaum, Switzerland, Dr. Tadeusz Kawecki at the University of Basel, and Dr. Ulf Dieckmann at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna, Austria. The topic of his research is the theoretical approach to understanding the structure of ecological communities. The goal of this project is to develop flexible theoretical techniques which would allow community structure to self-organize from a range of potentially interacting species. These approaches have been pioneered by Dr. Dieckmann s group at IIASA for use in evolutionary studies. With collaborators at EAWAG, Dr. Klausmeier will apply these techniques to mechanistic models of a particular kind of ecological system: lake plankton communities. He will determine how community structure depends on environmental parameters such as nutrient loading, then test these predictions against data from a range of lakes. He expects to develop new general mathematical techniques for studying community assembly. By applying them to lake plankton communities, he hopes to expand understanding of how the structure of these communities depends on environmental parameters and how they will respond to human impacts doc3715 none Gordon The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Caleb E. Gordon with 12 months of support to work with Dr. Juan Francisco Ornelas at the Instituto de Ecologia in Xalapa, Mexico. Dr. Gordon will investigate biodiversity persistence under five coffee cultivation systems in Veracruz, Mexico. He will sample birds and beetles as biodiversity indicators in cultivation systems ranging from low to high alteration of the original forest. The potential compatibility between the cultivation of a major cash crop and native biodiversity represents an important opportunity to develop management plans that satisfy both the socioeconomic needs of developing nations and the needs of biological conservation. To design such plans, it is necessary to understand the effects of different coffee cultivation strategies on biodiversity. Central Veracruz is an ideal arena to examine this question of biodiversity persistence under different coffee cultivation regimes, as it is one of the country s major coffee production centers and has a high level of diversity. Dr. Ornelas has expertise in bird ecology, natural history, and vocalization doc3716 none Schultheis The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Alicia S. Schultheis with support for twelve months to work with Dr. Jane Hughes at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. This one-year study will use molecular techniques developed by Dr. Schultheis to determine how adult dispersal and differences in life history affect the genetic structuring of Australian stream insect populations. They will address whether 1) adult flight operates as an effective large-scale dispersal mechanism across areas of fragmented adult (terrestrial) habitat?, and 2) are fine-scale patterns of genetic differences among larval populations of stream insects the result of limited in-stream movement and patchy oviposition? Besides leading to a better understanding of the effects of genetic structuring, it will also provide valuable information about whether fragmentation of the surrounding forest affects stream insect populations by disrupting adult dispersal. The study will provide a framework in which to begin studying similar processes in streams throughout the world, including temperate streams of North America. Dr. Hughes and her colleagues have generated a unique set of data regarding dispersal and genetic structure of stream insects that is not available elsewhere. Their data provide the only system in which effects of life history of these insects can be studied doc3717 none Seliktar The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Dror Seliktar with support for 24 months to work with Professor Jeffrey A. Hubbell at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) and the University of Zurich in Switzerland. This project will focus on the development and in vitro testing of specialized synthetic hydrogels that are used to regulate the injury response after balloon angioplasty. Hydrogel biomaterials will be developed with functional components (polypeptides) designed to promote both endothelial cell adhesion and endothelial cell-mediated enzyme (MMP-2) activation, while exhibiting susceptibility to the activated MMP-2 enzyme. Testing the functional characteristics will be done in vitro using a set of carefully designed cell culture experiments. The host, Professor Hubbell has a large, active group at one of the strongest research centers in the world in this area of research doc3718 none Irwin The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Darren E. Irwin with support for twenty-four months to work with Dr. Staffan Bensch at Lund University in Sweden. The splitting of a single species into two, or speciation, takes a long time to occur and is thus difficult to observe directly. A rare opportunity to study speciation is provided by a ring species, in which a long chain or interbreeding populations encircle a geographic barrier; the terminal populations in the chain do not interbreed where they come together. For two ring species - the Willow Warbler encircling the Baltic Sea and the Greenish Warbler encircling central Asia - the principal investigator will use geographical variation around the ring to reconstruct how two species evolved from one. He will work with Dr. Bensch at Lund to focus on four questions: 1) In the contact zone between two forms of the Willow Warbler in central Sweden, are there differences in songs between the forms and are the differences used in mate choice? 2) How do migration patterns vary around the Greenish Warbler ring? 3) Is there gradual variation in Willow Warbler populations around the Baltic, thereby connecting forms in southern and northern Sweden? 4) What is the migratory behavior of hybrids in central Sweden? The answers will clarify the role of behavioral traits and selection against hybrids in speciation. Dr. Bensch uses novel techniques to study migration and to measure genetic differences between populations. Lund University has excellent facilities for studying both migration and genetic variation doc3719 none Coppolillo The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide Dr. Peter Coppolillo with support for twenty-four months to work with Dr. Simon Mduma at the Serengeti Wildlife Research Centre in Tanzania. The goal of this project is to understand the factors limiting species distributions in semi-natural habitats. The researchers will examine the effects of livestock grazing intensity (resource competition), human presence (interference competition), wood cutting (habitat modification), and landscape change from cultivation (fragmentation). Specifically, they will structure sampling using a boundary model, which examines transitions between landscape units (protected, pastoral and agropastoral areas). Data will be analyzed using multiple logistic regression and principal components analysis. This work will provide an important observational basis for understanding the effects of semi-natural matrix habitat on protected areas. This will help disaggregate the factors affecting large mammal distributions and identify key variables for future experimental investigation. Results will provide insights helpful to protected area management and for community-based conservation. Dr. Mduma is director of the Serengeti Biodiversity Program (SBP) located in Arusha, Tanzania. The location of this project, the Rukwa Valley is an ideal site because of its local salience and because it will provide important ecological data on an under-represented ecosystem, Miombo woodlands doc3720 none Johnson Good room temperature toughness has been reported based on limited, qualitative tests on ruthenium aluminide, RuAl. This is unusual for intermetallic alloys that have the CsCl (B2) type crystal structure. Previous experiments suggest that this unusual toughness originates from the multiplicity of slip along the 110 and 100 directions which differs considerably from that of most other B2 compounds in which the common slip directions are either 111 or 100 . Reasons, however, for this unusual deformation behavior have not yet been identified, probably due to the difficulty in processing single crystals and the exotic nature of the alloy. This research effort directly measures the deformation behavior and fracture toughness of RuAl using single crystals and multiphase composite microstructures of controlled orientations. Preliminary work has shown that appropriate materials for testing can be produced by cold crucible Czochralski techniques. The primary goal for the research is to explain the deformation behavior of RuAl and to correlate the similarities and differences with that of other B2 compounds. With this knowledge, the underlying mechanisms for deformation and fracture can be identified and modeled which will lead to design strategies for improving the toughness of semi-brittle materials. %%% Intermetallics are often considered candidate materials for high temperature structural applications due to the high melting temperature and good oxidation resistance of many intermetallic compounds. However, problems with brittleness have not been solved for intermetallic alloy systems that are to operate above the use temperature of the superalloys doc3721 none Harrison This IMR grant supports the acquisition of an extensional rheometer in the Chemical Engineering department at Clemson University. The instrument will support the research of two young and two midcareer scientists in the investigation of extensional viscosity in polymers and polymer blends. The study facilitated by this instrument will allow a more complete characterization of a broad class of materials and lead to the development of new materials engineered with particular extensional properties. The rheometer will also enable current and future students to study extensional properties and investigate the influence of these properties on materials processing. Examples of materials to be studied are highly entangled polymer solutions and melts, polymer blends, composite materials and suspensions. Plastics and rubbers have extraordinary properites when they are squeezed or stretched. Pulling them apart involves measures such as extensional viscosity which play a vital role in the mechanical properties of these materials. The instrument acquisition supported by this grant is to help study the mechanical propertis of these technologically critical materials doc3722 none Drobny This award to the University of Washington is for the development of high fields solid state nuclear magnetic resonance (SSNMR) console for biomaterials research and student training. A common challenge in the molecular bioengineering field is the characterization of biomolecules at material surfaces. SSNMR has the potential to fill a particularly crucial gap in our knowledge by defining the secondary structure of proteins adsorbed onto material surfaces, determining protein dynamics at surfaces, and by providing high-resolution structural maps of protein-surface interactions. This award will allow the University of Washington to upgrade a 500 megahertz, 15 years old solid state NMR console. The new console will dramatically expand the biomaterials program at the university by enabling scientsists to perform NMR studies of biomaterials at high magnetic fields and at reduced temperatures. The NMR console will also be equipped with a refrigeration system for cooling samples to temperatures as low as 200K. The console will also be capable of performing SSNNM experiments at Larmor frequencies as high as 1,000 MHz. This award to the University of Washington is for the development of high fields solid state nuclear magnetic resonance (SSNMR) console for biomaterials research and student training. A common challenge in the molecular bioengineering field is the characterization of biomolecules at material surfaces. This award will allow the University of Washington to upgrade a 500 megahertz, 15 years old solid state NMR console. The new console will dramatically expand the biomaterials program at the university by enabling scientists to perform NMR studies of biomaterials at high magnetic fields and at reduced temperatures. The NMR console will also be equipped with a refrigeration system for cooling samples to temperatures as low as 200K on the absolute temperature scale. The instrument will be used in student traing doc3723 none Bruce Berne of Columbia University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to develop an accurate polarizable force field for water and aqueous solutions based on the principle of electronegativity equalization. This model will be used to achieve theoretical understanding of solvent effects on chemical reactions, solvent dynamics, spectral line shapes, and energy transfer in classical and quantum many-body systems through a combination of analytical and numerical studies. The numerical effort will involve development of methods in molecular dynamics, Monte Carlo, and quantum Monte Carlo for application to chemical systems. A special focus of this project will be on development and application of analytical and new simulation techniques to treat the problem of sampling rough energy landscapes and quantum dynamics. The development and employment of new computational methodologies in this project will lead to insights that impact the understanding of new materials development, complex environmental processes, and the thermodynamics and conformational states of biological molecules doc3724 none The focus of this research is to determine the role of mineral and metal ion catalysis in the formation of 3 ,5 - versus 2 ,5 -phosphodiester bond formation and in the template-directed synthesis of RNA. These studies will provide insight into the possible role of montmorillonite catalysis in the selective prebiotic synthesis of RNA. The use of catalysts to limit the structural diversity of the RNA formed in prebiotic reactions will result in a greater population of those structures able to initiate life. These RNAs would have the structure capable of both serving as ribozymes and as genetic information storage sites in the proposed RNA world. With this renewal award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. James P. Ferris of the Department of Chemistry at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Professor Ferris will focus his work on exploring the role of catalysis in prebiotic synthesis. The experiments, if successful, will provide a major advance in the understanding of life on Earth. The findings of this work will be of great interest to both the scientific community and to the general public as well doc3725 none A strong component of the drive for K-12 educational reform have been concerns about the capacity of Americans to compete successfully in a rapidly changing context defined by intense international competition in global markets and swift technological change. The desire to improve American global and technological competitiveness has led to calls for enhancements in the use of modern technologies at all stages of the educational process. This development coincides with increasing interest in the development of critical thinking skills that enable individuals to conceptualize problems, acquire and analyze relevant information, and use advanced technologies like geographic information systems (GISs) to make effective spatial decisions. To address these related problems, this award will provide partial support for a special study committee established by the National Research Council (NRC) to study the use of GIS and related technologies and the emerging concepts and principles of geographic information science (GIScience) across the K-12 curriculum in the U.S. The review will focus on two related questions: (1) How can current software versions of GIS and theoretical approaches of GIScience be incorporated into standards-based instruction in knowledge domains across the breadth of the curriculum? (2) How can cognitive development and educational theory be used to design age-appropriate versions of GIS software and age-appropriate GIScience curricula? The project will include a review of knowledge and current practice regarding the use of GIS and GIScience in K-12 curricula in geography, mathematics, and science. It will develop guidelines and recommendations for pre-service and in-service training programs as well as curricula for GIS and GIScience programs. It also will identify and follow through on small-scale, highly focused studies of key issues in pre-collegiate GIS and GIScience education, such as the role of collaborative learning models in instruction, patterns of GIS use as a function of gender and cognitive development levels, and interface designs to facilitate cognitive development. The review will result in a book-length final report, with additional information disseminated via the Internet. The project will contribute to the development of application guidelines and outline research needs and strategies to meet future needs for student learning, teacher training, and software development. The study will provide short-term guidance for incorporating GIS and GIScience into American schools, and it will identify longer-term research issues associated with improved design of GISs and enhanced GIScience-related instruction doc3726 none This project will investigate the reasoning of adults untrained in logic. When such individuals tackle a series of logical problems, they spontaneously develop different strategies for going about the task; that is, they come to rely on different sequences of mental steps to make inferences. Some individuals, for instance, try to keep track of all the possibilities compatible with the premises, while others try to concatenate the premises into a complex conclusion, and still others follow up the consequences of a single possibility. There are also other sorts of strategy, and they all have a profound impact on logical performance. The first step in the research will therefore be to trace the development of strategies, to examine their effects on logical accuracy and speed of response, and to attempt to gain experimental control over which strategies participants are likely to develop. The research will test predictions from Johnson-Laird s theoretical account of how reasoners discover strategies, which is based on his earlier theory of mental models. One of its predictions is that the process of strategy discovery is biased by the possibilities compatible with the premises. Experiments will test this prediction, along with others made by the theory. The second step in the research will be to apply the strategic theory to teaching people to improve their reasoning. The pedagogical aim for this step is to devise a strategy that can be taught in a few minutes, that enhances performance, and that can be carried out without the use of pencil and paper. The intellectual aim is to throw further light on strategic thinking. The third step in the research will be to apply the new theory to the study of complex inferential problems from everyday life. Although such problems are outside the scope of current psychological theories of reasoning, the ability to cope with them correlates with intelligence and is crucial for success in academia, science, and business. The project should yield a deeper understanding of the development of strategies in reasoning, an effective pedagogical aid, and an account of the mental processes underlying reasoning in daily life doc3727 none This project, sponsored by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, continues research to develop a better understanding of solvation in condensed phases. Conducted by Drs.Sarah C. Rutan, Sally S. Hunnicutt and Donald D. Shillady and students from Dr. Rutan s research group at Virginia Commonwealth University, the research uses chemometric methods in conjunction with electronic and vibrational spectroscopies to study mixed solvents, solvated surfaces, and solutes in contact in these phases. The project targets three specific areas for study: 1) use of electronic and vibrational spectroscopies along with chemometric curve resolution approaches for the characterization of mixed solvent systems, 2 )use of previously developed chemometric solvatochromic methods to characterize a broad range of C18 and C8 based liquid chromatographic stationary phases, and 3) combinationation of ab initio and reaction field techniques to estimate and rationalize transition energies for the solvated UV-visible probes used for the chromatographic characterization studies. Results from this research could lead to more reliable medical diagnostic procedures, improved sorbents for remediation of environmental pollution, and more efficient industrial processes doc3728 none With this award from Instrumentation for Materials Research Program the University of California, Santa Barbara, will develop a Laser Driven Terahertz System which will provide new research instrumentation for high-resolution linear terahertz spectroscopy of materials, material structures, and devices. The instrument will deliver microwatts of tunable radiation up to ~1 terahertz (THz). Above ~1 terahertz the power will be substantially less but more than adequate for linear, high-resolution spectroscopy of materials and material structures. Up to 1 terahertz, with suitable methods of excitation and sampling, the system will also be used to test the performance of state-of-the-art electronics at frequencies that exceed the capability of existing network analyzers. At the same time, the system will provide a test bed to explore new non-linear materials and devices for optical difference frequency generation of terahertz radiation by photoconductivity and non-linear susceptibility. The research and development of this new instrument will provide interdisciplinary education and training for postdoctoral researcher and to graduate and undergraduate students in physics, materials science and solid state electronics. %%% With this award from Instrumentation for Materials Research program the University of California Santa Barbara will develop a Laser Driven Terahertz System which will provide new research instrumentation for high-resolution linear terahertz spectroscopy of materials, material structures, and devices. The terahertz part of electromagnetic spectrum, from 100 GHz to 10 THz, is science rich but relatively technology poor. The Laser Driven Terahertz System will provide new research instrumentation for high-resolution linear terahertz spectroscopy of materials, material structures, and devices. The research and development of this new instrument will provide interdisciplinary education and training for the post-doctoral researcher committed to the project and to graduate student and undergraduate researchers who will use the instrument in physics, materials science and solid state electronics. The instrument will deliver microwatts of tunable radiation up to ~1 terahertz (THz). Above ~1 terahertz the power will be substantially less but more than adequate for linear, high-resolution spectroscopy of materials and material structures doc3729 none The Arctic is predicted to be the first place to sense global warming due to the climate feedbacks created from melting of snow and ice cover at high latitudes. This project establishes an office that will facilitate collection of information from a multidisciplinary group of Arctic researchers who have individually determined that a significant warming of the Arctic environment has been underway for at least a decade. The office will gather information and conduct planning activities for the Study of Environmental Arctic Change (SEARCH) project in order to assess the cause and effects for a warming of the Arctic that may be related to initiation of greenhouse warming. The SEARCH office will serve as the focus for scientific planning of a research program that will be designed to support a coordinated, interagency effort to gather enough information to assess the causes of the current warming and predict the likely progress of the warming trend and its potential impacts on the environment and society doc3730 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Lloyd Ream and his collaborators will develop a technique to extract and identify DNA preserved on prehistoric stone tools which were used to butcher animals. In preliminary work, Dr. Ream has demonstrated that microcracks produced during stone tool manufacture trap blood proteins and DNA more than 140 microns beneath the tool surface. These residues are not removed by surface washing and thus have the possibility of preservation for significant periods of time. Sonication can release 60 to 80% of the trapped DNA and make it available for identification. The team will build on this preliminary research and: 1. Combine into a streamlined procedure established methods for recovery and analysis of ancient proteins and DNA from stone tools; 2. Test the reproducibility and sensitivity of these methods by comparing the results of simultaneous protein and DNA analyses: 3. Correlate preservation of DNA and protein in bone, and use these data to infer probably condition of residues on stone tools from the same stratum; 4. Determine whether protein and DNA from modern sources contaminate associated sediments, unmodified stone and stone tools; and 6. Correlate archaeological context, deposition rate, and specimen age with preservation of protein and DNA. If successful, the project will help to define parameters, including specimen handling procedures and requisite control samples important for study of protein and DNA residues on stone tools from any archaeological site or museum collection. To accomplish this goal the team will analyze both lithics and faunal remains from the Bugas-Holding and Hell Gap archaeological sites. Together they cover a period from ca. 1,200 to 10,000 years ago and vary not only in age but also in depositional conditions. The sites are well excavated and provide an excellent context within which to develop these techniques. In many archaeological sites, stone tools constitute the primary class of material recovered and researchers therefore expend considerable effort in extracting the maximum amount of information from them. It is often extremely difficult or impossible based on tool form to determine use and Dr. Ream s technique, if successful will allow one to learn whether a specific implement was used to hunt or butcher game. It also has the potential to identify the species of animal and this is important because faunal remains are poorly preserved and often completely destroyed in many sites. If successfully developed these techniques will provide archaeologists with a powerful new tool which can be used in many time periods and many regions of the world doc3731 none Caroline Ross This award will enable the investigators to upgrade a Pulsed Laser Deposition system (PLD) which is already established in MIT. PLD is a powerful and flexible tool for deposition of materials such as oxides or alloys with complex stoichiometries. PLD is particularly useful for materials synthesis because of its ability for rapid prototyping of materials and the large amount of control which can be exercised over material composition and structure by varying the deposition conditions, temperature, ambient gas environment and amount of ion bombardment. A PLD system consists of a high power excimer laser which is used to ablate a target in vacuum, and the resulting flux is collected on a substrate to form a thin film. The PLD system at MIT was donated by IBM and is 10 years old. It has eight targets, and facilities for introduction of reactive gases, in-situ annealing and ion bombardment. However, significant improvements to the laser are needed in order to make it useful to a broad base of users over the next decade. The upgraded system will significantly enhance the thin film fabrication facilities and the educational and training opportunities available to a large, interdisciplinary base of users. This award is for the upgrade of a Pulsed Laser Deposition system (PLD) which is used for making thin films of various materials. These thin films have applications in a range of microelectronic devices, for instance in optical devices, gas sensors, and memories. PLD is particularly useful for exploring a wide variety of materials, allowing rapid proptotyping of new materials and structures to be carried out. The equipment will be used by a group of faculty and students from MIT, Harvard and other institutions. They will benefit substantially from the enhanced PLD capabilities, in terms of performing basic research on film growth and evolution, in developing new materials and processes for device applications, and in training students in thin film science and technology doc3732 none Smith This grant is funded jointly by the Theoretical Chemistry and Materials Theory Programs in the Divisions of Chemistry and Materials Research respectively. Poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO), also referred to as poly(ethylene glycol), is used in a multitude of aqueous solution applications ranging from drag reduction to drug delivery. In addition, PEO solutions have been widely studied, being themselves of fundamental interest as well as serving as model systems in efforts to better understand aqueous polymer solutions. Experimental and modeling studies have resulted in valuable insight into the behavior of PEO solutions. However, many of the most interesting characteristics of these solutions responsible for their broad scope of applications, such as conformations, hydrophobic interactions, phase behavior, the influence of salts, and the interactions of the polymer with particles and proteins, remain at best poorly understood. The principal goals of the research are to gain improved understanding of the behavior of aqueous polymer solutions through coordinated simulation and modeling studies of PEO solutions, to develop and disseminate the computational algorithms and tools required to carry out these studies, and to familiarize undergraduate students students with the power and utility of molecular modeling. Atomistic molecular dynamics simulation studies will be carried out in order to investigate the conformational, structural, thermodynamics and dynamic properties of aqueous PEO solutions. Additional simulations aimed specifically at understanding the phase behavior of PEO solutions, including the influence of molecular weight and pressure as well as the role of polymer conformations, water structure, and ether-water hydrogen bonding, will be performed. Finally, simulation studies of the interactions of PEO solutions with model nanoparticles and proteins will be carried out, aimed at gaining a better understanding of polymer mediated depletion attraction between particles as well as the roles of competitive hydration and hydrophobic polymer-particle interactions. Acheiving these scientific goals requires the capability of addressing solution properties over a wide range of length scales. A force field development toolkit will be created to link the electronic structure level to the atomistic level through parametrization of accurate classical atomistic potential functions. In turn, the detailed results of atomistic molecular dynamics simulations of PEO solutions will serve as input into liquid state theory models for polymer solutions and interactions of polymers with particles, potentially extending the length scale of the atomistic studies as well as allowing investigation of parameter space well beyond that directly accessible by molecular dynamics simulations. These studies have important ramifications beyond the benefits provided by an improved understanding of PEO solutions. These efforts will add significantly to the overall understanding of the behavior of aqueous solutions, both synthetic and biological, as well as that of polymer solutions in general, particularly in crossover concentration regimes and at higher concentrations where there is a paucity of simulation studies. The computational tools and algorithms developed for the proposed simulations, such as the force field development toolkit and methods for determining free energies and phase equilibrium in polymer solutions, will be widely beneficial to the simulation community. Molecular dynamics simulations tools, currently used for graduate teaching as well as graduate and undergraduate level research, will be developed into tools for undergraduate coursework and will include materials simulation and property prediction modules designed to give undergraduate students hands-on experience with computational materials science. %%% This grant is funded jointly by the Theoretical Chemistry and Materials Theory Programs in the Divisions of Chemistry and Materials Research respectively. Poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO), also referred to as poly(ethylene glycol), is used in a multitude of aqueous solution applications ranging from drag reduction to drug delivery. In addition, PEO solutions have been widely studied, being themselves of fundamental interest as well as serving as model systems in efforts to better understand aqueous polymer solutions. Experimental and modeling studies have resulted in valuable insight into the behavior of PEO solutions. However, many of the most interesting characteristics of these solutions responsible for their broad scope of applications, such as conformations, hydrophobic interactions, phase behavior, the influence of salts, and the interactions of the polymer with particles and proteins, remain at best poorly understood. The principal goals of the research are to gain improved understanding of the behavior of aqueous polymer solutions through coordinated simulation and modeling studies of PEO solutions, to develop and disseminate the computational algorithms and tools required to carry out these studies, and to familiarize undergraduate students students with the power and utility of molecular modeling doc3733 none Ge This award provides opportunities for senior engineering students at SUNY Stony Brook to develop and deliver custom-made prototype assistive devices to improve the quality of life for a group of severely disabled children at nearby BOCES (Boards of Cooperative Educational Services of the State of New York) Forest Brook Learning Center. The five year program centers on a systematic approach to engineering design called Total Design . The design approach requires the students to interact directly with their clients in order to develop the product design specifications based on the specific physical limitations of a physically challenged child and then carry out the design tasks systematically. Eight senior design projects are planned each year to develop prototype devices for the disabled. One of the areas emphasized in these projects is the development of Adaptive Play Technology for creating adapted devices and toys that are enjoyable, stimulating, and offer rewarding activities for the child. Another feature of the program is the participation of high school students from the Young Scholar program at SUNY Stony Brook. A summer workshop for local high school teachers is planned. The outcome of the program will include the prototype devices developed for the disabled children and a set of case study materials that high school Technology Science educators could use to stimulate interests of high school students in engineering, and especially assistive technology for the disabled. The education outreach activity will be coordinated with the New York State Standards for Science and Technology. The case study materials will be subjected to the Peer Review process for possible inclusion in the web based American Association for the Advancement of Science MARCOPOLO collaboration doc3734 none Redwing This award provides partial support for the acquisition of a metalorganic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE) system at Penn State University for the epitaxial growth of aluminum-gallium-indium nitride (Al,Ga,In)N alloys. The MOVPE system is designed to facilitate a combination of fundamental studies of transport, growth chemistry, nucleation and thin film stress evolution within the context of a small-scale production MOVPE tool. The MOVPE reactor is custom designed to incorporate an in-situ optical stress measurement system for real time measurement of sample curvature and growth rate. The instrument will permit controlled mixing of Group III and V sources to enable a study of homogenous chemistry effects on film properties. The facility will significantly enhance research and educational opportunities in electronic and photonic materials at Penn State. It will provide an interdisciplinary resource for the education and training of graduate and undergraduate students from Materials Science and Engineering, Electrical Engineering and the Intercollege Graduate Research Program in Materials. The epitaxial growth facility will be used to develop class activities and problem sets for undergraduate and graduate courses on electronic and photonic materials fabrication and characterization and semiconductor crystal growth. This award provides partial support for the acquisition of a metalorganic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE) system at Penn State University. The equipment is designed to facilitate a combination of fundamental growth studies within the context of a small-scale production MOVPE tool. It will enable in-situ measurements of thin film stress and growth rate using high-resolution laser reflectometry. The MOVPE facility will significantly enhance research and educational opportunities in electronic and photonic materials at Penn State. It will provide an interdisciplinary resource for education and training of graduate and undergraduate students from Materials Science and Engineering, Electrical Engineering and the Intercollege Graduate Research Program in Materials. The epitaxial growth facility will be used to develop class activities and problem sets for undergraduate and graduate courses on electronic and photonic materials fabrication and characterization and semiconductor crystal growth doc3735 none The research in this project is guided by a simple principle. Suppose cer-tain societal institutions governing financial and payment arrangements are used in a wide variety of societies. Then there should be a strong presump-tion that those arrangements are economically efficient. (The idea. of course is that the arrangements were not efficient. then the societies would change them in order to achieve the same individual utility, levels at lower costs.) The key here is that the term ` efficient arrangement is to be understood as meaning efficient subject to both resource and informational enforcement constraints: I use the term economic frictions to refer to the latter type of constraints. Given this presumption of economic efficiency, the current project has two immediate goals. The first is to understand the economic frictions that make it efficient for societies to use money in conjunction with other assets. The second is to understand the economic frictions that make it, efficient for societies to use deposit insurance. The general method of attack is as follows. A class of model economies is constructed that incorporates certain informational and or enforcement frictions that appear to be important aspects of the real world. Efficient arrangements are then constructed for the class of economies. These efficient arrangements are examined to see if they resemble real world institutions along key dimensions. If not, then the original informational and enforce-ment frictions are perturbed so as to improve the fit between real-world institutions and the properties of the efficient arrangements. Thus, the task is essentially one of reverse engineering existing institu-tions so as to understand what frictions underlie them. In this proposal, the institutions of interest are money bond co-existence and deposit insurance. There is a simple reason why the proposed research has first-order policy relevance. If institutions are efficient responses to existing frictions, then governments and other agencies can only improve on those institutions if they can overcome the frictions that give rise to them. Doing so requires knowing what the frictions are doc3736 none This is funding to subsidize travel and housing expenses of a select group of US graduate students to attend the ACM International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AGENTS ), to be held June 3-7 in Barcelona, Spain. This is the premier conference devoted entirely to agents research, an area of artificial intelligence which is central to the success of the World Wide Web and the Internet revolution. Attending the conference will allow a diverse group of graduate students whose research spans a range of topic areas and methodologies to present their work to and receive feedback from the agents community. The students will be selected by a committee, and special mentoring activities will be planned for them with the goal of fostering interactions with senior researchers. This, in turn, will help set the directions of future research in the field, and guarantee continued growth and development of agents technology doc3737 none Walden This award to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts provides instrumentation to significantly improve the navigation capabilities of the manned submersible Alvin, a shared-use vehicle operated by WHOI under a memorandum of understanding among NSF, ONR and NOAA. The instrumentation supported here, including a laser doppler instrument and attitude sensors (accelerometers), will allow major improvements in dead reckoning by tracking bottom and correcting for errors caused by near-bottom currents. The improvements in positional accuracy will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists using the submersible in their research during and future years doc3738 none Houde-Walter The Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester is building an excitation spectroscopy laboratory for research in new optical sources utilizing nano-engineered optical materials. An optical parametric oscillator, monochromator and multiscaler will be used in four research programs and two undergraduate graduate training labs. Energy transfer will be studied using excitation spectroscopy to refine laser rate equation models and help to determine the best host composition and doping levels in rare-earth doped nano-glasses. In a related teaching lab exercise, students will observe cooperative luminescence in Yb-doped glasses, as is currently practiced in optical amplifier research. In another project, radiative impurity complexes will be introduced into silicon-on-insulator (SOI) structures that exhibit enhanced absorption emission via nanostructured surfaces. Excitation spectroscopy will be used to elucidate the microscopic processes that determine emission cross sections in the hybridized SOI structures. Photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy will be used to explore phonon mode control in isotopically pure crystalline Si. The new lab will permit the excitation of high spatial densities of indirect excitons, which may result in coherent phonon emission. Group III-V quantum dots, as made by in-situ laser patterning during molecular-beam epitaxial (MBE) growth, will also be investigated. Resonant excitation will be used to probe quantum dots of very narrow size distributions and may indicate the limit of what might be eventually achieved with an ensemble of uniform features. In a related lab, undergraduate students will investigate the absorption spectra of bulk crystals with various bandgaps (Si or GaAs, GaP, and GaN or diamond) as well as quantum well and dot group III-V semiconductors grown in our MBE lab. Honors students will also be encouraged to use the new lab for independent projects during their senior year. The Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester, which grants Bachelors, Masters and doctoral degrees in Optical Science and Engineering, is building a new optical spectroscopy lab for research and training. New optical materials that utilize features on the nanometer (one billionth of a meter) scale, will be emphasized. New training exercises that are closely related to this research will be offered to both undergraduate seniors and first-year graduate students. A tunable source and associated detection equipment will be used to probe the relationships between the microscopic components and their radiative efficiency. Improved knowledge and design of materials for many applications, including biomedical research and telecommunications, are expected. However, the overarching goal of this new laboratory is to reveal fundamental relations and elucidate hidden connections in the characterization and process parameters of new (or just useful) optical materials doc3739 none Semi-immersive data-visualization technology - steroscopic projection to achieve the perception that the viewer is walking through the data - will be acquired under this grant. The instrumentation will provide rapid steroscopic virtual-reality exploration of computed data that have several extremely demanding properties: a) high volumes, b) multiple length and or time scales, and c) complicated materials systems as their source. The major advance expected from this instrumentation is qualitative improvement in our ability to identify and quantify phenomena and mechanisms that are linked across those scales in intricate, non-intuitive ways. Five major projects, three related to NSF-funded KDI effort on Multi-scale Simulation including Chemical Reactivity in Materials Behavior through Integrated Computational Heirachies, will be the primary users. Projects include atomic-level-simulations with millions of atoms and detailed electronic structure energetics, development of those energetics from first-principles calculations on complicated materials systems in low-symmetry geometries, as well as structure, dynamics, and response of both of semi-conductor and biomaterial systems. %%% Planned educational uses include major enhancement of recently initiated courses in Simulations and Modeling and in Parallel Programming. Other instructional uses are to support student projects (graduate and undergraduate) in the Quantum Visualization Studio, incorporation in the new KDI seminary, and training of graduate students and post-doctorals for research doc3740 none This individual investigator award is to a professor at Boston College for an experimental research project that focuses on the electromagnetic and thermodynamic properties of two classes of low dimensional systems in which superconductivity and magnetism compete, or even coexist. These properties will be investigated at low temperatures and high magnetic fields. In one case, critical information on the pairing symmetry in the superconducting state of linear chain molecular conductors (TMTSF)_X will be sought. Previous research has provided strong evidence that these materials, whose superconducting phase is in close competition with an antiferromagnetic spin density wave, are p-wave triplet superconductors. If so, then there would be no Zeeman pair-breaking mechanism to destroy superconductivity in a magnetic field. In addition, there exists the possibility that the orbital pair-breaking effect can be reduced or eliminated, which means that the superconducting state would persist to extremely high fields. In this project, one post-doc and two graduate students will be involved in extending previous work to 50% higher field and 1 5th the temperature of previous efforts, in search of definitive evidence for triplet pairing and reentrant superconductivity. In the second case, the hybrid ruthenate-cuprate magnetic superconducting system, a possibility also exists for high field superconductivity, but perhaps by a different mechanism. These materials have alternating superconducting and antiferromagnetic (with weak ferromagnetic order) layers, providing a unique setting to test the antagonistic relationship between the two broken symmetry states of magnetism and superconductivity. The experiments will be performed in a new laboratory facility at Boston College housing several new high field magnets and dilution refrigerators. The students involved in this project will learn techniques that will prepare them for positions in academic, governmental, or industrial research. %%% It has long been established that magnetism destroys all superconductivity. For example, the superconducting magnets that power modern MRI machines are limited in strength (and thus sensitivity and resolution) due to the fact that the very field created in the magnet s windings diminishes the wire s ability to carry current. There may be ways around this suicidal tendency of superconductors, however. In certain low dimensional geometries, namely in situations where the superconducting electrons are confined to planes (like the pages of a book) or even individual chains (like the lines on a page), the possibility exists for the superconducting state to regain its strength, and to persist in fields well beyond conventional expectations. This individual investigator award to a professor at Boston College is for a project that will investigate this possibility in certain low dimensional materials, where previous work (on so-called molecular superconductors ) has shown an exciting tendency for enhanced superconductivity in very strong magnetic fields. It turns out that these materials are ones in which superconductivity and magnetism compete against each other on a nanoscopic scale, a fact that may prove important in the realization of high field superconductivity and, eventually, the fabrication of ultra-high field magnets. The graduate student and postdoc involved in this project will learn techniques that will prepare them for positions in academic, governmental, or industrial research doc3741 none Switzer This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program and the Ceramics program will allow the University of Missouri Rolla to acquire a high resolution x-ray diffractometer for the study of electrochemically deposited epitaxial films of metal oxide semiconductors. The instrument will be equipped with dual channel-cut monochromators, 100 mm scanning sample stage with motorized z-translation, texture goniometer, high dynamic range detector (0.15 to 1,300,000 cps), and a triple axis stage. The instrument will perform tilt and azimuthal scans, rocking curves, and pole figures for texture analysis, and reciprocal space maps with the triple axis stage to separate the effects of strain and lattice tilt. It will also be used to measure film thickness and interface roughness by low-angle x-ray reflectivity. The diffractometer will be the main characterization tool for epitaxial films of metal oxide semiconductors such as cuprous oxide, bismuth oxide, zinc oxide, and ceric oxide deposited directly onto single crystal substrates such as gold, platinum, and silicon. The films are deposited from aqueous solution at room temperature. Both the out-of-plane and the in-plane orientation of the films relative to the substrate will be measured. Coincidence lattices often form due to the large lattice mismatch. The rotation of the film relative to the substrate will be measured by azimuthal scans and pole figures. The large lattice mismatch causes many of these epitaxial films to form self-assembled ordered nanostructures that may show quantum confinement effects due to their small size. The instrument will be available for student training and education within an NSF REU program at university of Missouri Rolla. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program and the Ceramics program will allow the University of Missouri Rolla to acquire a high resolution x-ray diffractometer for the study of electrochemically deposited epitaxial films of metal oxide semiconductors. The films are deposited onto single crystal substrates such as silicon wafers using a very inexpensive and simple technique - electrodeposition. Although electrodeposition has been used for many years to produce deposit films of metals, the deposition of metal oxide semiconductors is very new. The diffractometer will be used to determine how the film is oriented on the single-crystal substrates. Since the film, and substrate often have very different crystal structures, many of these films form self-assembled ordered nanostuctures in order to reduce strain. These nanometer-scale structures can be considered designer solids, because the optical, electrical, and magnetic properties can be tuned by changing the size. The instrument will be available for student training and education within an NSF REU program at university of Missouri Rolla doc3742 none Researchers examining evolutionary divergence in locomotion characteristically rely upon a model of initial behavioral modification followed by secondary morphological change. Yet, studies of gliding performance in frogs suggest that concomitant changes in morphology and behavior may be required, making the behavioral precedence model untenable. Arboreal squirrels provide a perfect system to test the model since a transition from leaping to gliding likely occurred in this group. The objective of the proposed study is to determine whether the sequence of evolutionary changes from leaping to gliding is consistent with the behavioral precedence model. The study examines variation in three arboreal squirrels (flying squirrel, tree squirrel, chipmunk) and a close arboreal relative (dormouse) at the following levels: 1) Morphology; 2) Biomechanics; 3) Locomotor behavior; and 4) Ecology. The synthesis phase employs multivariate statistics to summarize variation in these levels and to identify significant trait differences among species. Traits are subsequently mapped onto the phylogeny to test behavioral precedence. In addition to testing the model, the study provides the first comparative examination of mammalian arboreal leaping outside of primates, and the only detailed description of mammalian gliding. Biomechanical descriptions of leaping and gliding locomotion may have important implications for those intending to use animals as model systems in engineering design doc3743 none Goss This project seeks to determine the mechanism of stimulation of Poly (A) Binding Protein (PABP) stimulation of protein synthesis and to correlate the helicase interaction with translational efficiency. A direct fluorescence assay for binding and helicase activity will be utilized to determine the unwinding activity of these factors. By correlating the rate of unwinding with the rate of translation, an analysis can be made of the extent to which the helicase reaction is required and if it is rate limiting. By examining quantitative binding and kinetics, insight will be gained on whether secondary structure that blocks translation results from unfavorable binding equilibria or inhibition of rate-limiting steps. Ultimately, translation is a highly regulated process that not only has a closely controlled rate, but also determines the selection of mRNA. The experiments of this project are among the first directed at making detailed connections between helicase activity and translational efficiency. This project will use biochemical assays already understood as well as new biophysical assays that will lead to detailed kinetic analyses of these processes. Protein synthesis is a highly regulated process that allows a cell to respond to changes in the environment rapidly and with and economy of material and energy resources. Protein synthesis is necessary for efficient growth and development. While a great deal of information is available about the components necessary and the general pathways for protein synthesis, much less is known about the rate-limiting steps and molecular details of these processes. In order to regulate a process, one wants to affect the rate-limiting step and identify the crucial differences between normal and abnormal protein synthesis. A better understanding of the molecular mechanism of protein synthesis will lead to possible therapeutic targets for disease states, increased growth efficiency, possible uses of plants for production of vaccines, and anti-viral strategies doc3744 none Garcia Arraras Neurogenesis, or the process by which new nerve cells are formed, is an unusual phenomenon in adult vertebrates. The proposed work focuses on the regeneration of the nervous system, particularly on the neurogenesis that occurs after tissue loss or damage. Holothurians or sea cucumbers will be used to study the formation of new nerve cells, or neurons, in adult organisms. First, the work aims to explore the regeneration capacities of the main nervous system and the associated events of cell division and conversion of the dividing cells into neurons. Second, it studies the regeneration of the enteric nervous system, or the component of the nervous system associated with the digestive tract. Finally, it studies genes coding for proteins known to be important in regenerative and embryological processes. Cellular, histological and molecular techniques will be used to achieve these aims. Neuron loss is associated with mental and motor diseases, learning impairment, memory loss and many other nervous system-related problems. Echinoderms are well known for their amazing regeneration capacities. Studying regenerative neurogenesis in these animals, which are closely related to vertebrates, will provide basic information on the understanding of how neurons are formed and regenerated doc3745 none Gardner This is a proposal for a planning visit to Lake Tai, China by Dr. Wayne Gardner, the University of Texas, to discuss a cooperative research project with Mr. Yang Longyuan, the Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology. This visit involves planning a research project between the University of Texas Marine Science Institute and the Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology and visiting the research sites. The goal is to develop a proposal to study nitrogen fluxes, transportation and sinks in Meilang Bay, Lake Tai and to compare the results to those obtained in Texas coastal waters. The Chinese Academy of Science and the NSF will jointly sponsor this visit doc3746 none This is an instrumentation for Materials Research Award to Brown University for the acquisition of a state-of-the-art solid state nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer. The instrumentation will be extensively utilized for five basic research programs: (1) Ordered Polymer Microstructures Formed From Molecular and Mesoscopic Self Assembly; (2) Nematic Director Configurations in Small Confining Droplets; (3) Basic Studies of Materials for Novel Drug Delivery Systems; (4) Micro-Structure in Carbon Material Precursors; and (5) Characterization of the Porosity in Microporous Carbon Materials. Most of the studies revolve around the determination and characterization of molecular architectures of materials with practical implications in electronic displays, electro-optic devices, drug delivery and fuels. An aggressive outreach program will be instituted which will allow other institutions remote access to the facility through the Internet in real time to bring this capability to a much wider user base in the United States. The University of Massachusetts and the University of Southern Mississippi will serve as beta test sites to develop this remote access program. On the educational outreach front, an on-line tutorial will be available for K-12 students, and a training service will be developed on-line for outside users of the NMR facility. There is also a strong industrial user base that is composed of both large and small companies. Many of the interested companies have existing collaborations with the principal investigators. This industrial interaction is expected to generate funds for the upkeep of the facility, significantly enhance current industrial university interactions, and foster new relationships between university faculty and the private sector. This is an award to Brown University for the acquisition of a solid state nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy system. The spectrometer will be used research on a number of material systems of current scientific and technical importance: liquid crystals, polymers, and carbon materials, with broad application interests in displays, drug delivery and fuels. Solid state NMR spectrometer is expected to significantly impact current sponsored research programs by providing capability to discover new materials and characterize their underpinning physical phenomena, create new pathways to guide synthesis and materials processing, and provide a power experimental technique to probe the composition, structure, physical properties, and performance of materials of technological relevance. In addition to the proposed research, an aggressive outreach program is planned, which would allow other institutions remote access to this instrument through the Internet in real time. Two institutions have agreed to be beta test sites in a development effort to bring the facility to a much wider user base in the United States. On the educational outreach front, an on-line tutorial for K-12 students will be developed as well as an on-line training service for outside users. The investigators have also identified a strong industrial user base. This industrial interaction is expected to generate funds for the upkeep of the facility, significantly enhance current industrial university interactions, and foster new relationships between Brown University faculty and the private sector doc3747 none Cyrus This is an instrument development award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program to the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). Investigators at UCSB will develop a scanning microprobe short wavelength (3.1 A - 0.31 A, photon energy 4 keV - 40 keV ) x-ray microscope capable of multiple imaging modes with 50 nm - 500 nm spatial resolution at the Advanced Photon Source (APS). The microscope will allow co-localized determination of elemental distribution and chemical states by x-ray fluorescence and absorption spectroscopy. Using a combination of K and L shell fluorescence, it will be possible to map the spatial distribution of all elements in the periodic table with detection sensitivity approaching parts-per-billion (ppb), surpassing by orders of magnitude the current level set by charged-particle microprobes. Spectroscopic micro-imaging will be accomplished by spatially resolved X-ray Absorption Near Edge Structure (XANES) measurements, which provide definitive information on the local oxidation states of heavy metallo-ions vitally important in many biological (e.g. cellular development) and environmental (e.g. contaminated soil remediation) studies. The microscope will be constructed at UCSB and installed at the APS accessible by the broader user community through the 25% of total beam time allocated to general users. At a later stage, a second generation microscope will be installed at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory. This instrument development provides excellent opportunities for the training of graduate and undergraduate students. The project will also contribute to enriching of science education for local K-12, and community college doc3748 none This FRG project involves a cross-disciplinary group of PIs to explore underlying properties that dictate ultimate device-viability of lattice-mismatched heterojunctions. Lattice mismatch not only determines the growth morphology but also affects thermodynamic stability, creation of localized electronic states, and transport barriers at band edge discontinuities. Techniques for lattice matching lattice-mismatched materials can manipulate electronic and optical properties on an atomic scale. Control of these issues may remove constraints imposed by standard materials (e.g., GaAs and InP) on the functionality attainable from the full range of semiconductor materials. The perceived challenges are to achieve planar growth and thermal compatibility with simultaneous control of mechanical, chemical, and electronic structure. The inter-relationships between these properties and growth parameters must be understood at a fundamental level to achieve significantly greater utilization of lattice-mismatched heterostructures. The project strives to not only understand each set of properties, but also to discover how they result from specific variations in growth conditions. The approach incorporates (i) growth by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), (ii) direct measurement of the atomic structure of the created materials, (iii) in-situ and ex-situ measurements of electronic, atomic-scale and optical properties, and (iv) theoretical calculations of electronic structure of the actual materials. A few model systems based on III-V compounds were chosen both for the technological importance of these material systems in advanced devices and as precisely controlled sample sets necessary to interpret the measurements and calculations. The project focus is primarily on InAlAs, InGaAs and InAsP mismatched heterostructures grown on InP, InGaP and InAlP grown on GaAs, and a few choice binary combinations of varying misfit to provide precisely controlled measurement data for correlation with theoretical calculations of properties. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. The project builds on recent advances in representative heterojunction systems, while adding new capabilities for characterizing electronic properties of mismatched films as they evolve with growth. The basic knowledge and understanding gained from the research is expected to contribute to improving semiconductor materials performance in current and future device and circuit applications. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area. The multidisciplinary (materials science, electrical engineering, physics) nature of this FRG project offers unique educational opportunities for students to experience a teamwork-oriented research environment doc3749 none An award is made to the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) to purchase an aberration corrector. The instrument will be installed on an existing scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) at the UIC. The increasing use of multi-component semiconductors, oxides and composite systems to exploit exotic electronic and chemical properties, makes it crucial to understand the precise role an interface or defect plays in controlling a particular device function. A fundamental new pathway to a basic atomistic understanding of interface and defect properties has recently been developed in the STEM. Scanning a highly stable probe of atomic dimensions can generate an incoherent, atomic resolution Z-contrast structural image. As the high-angle detector used to form this image does not interfere with the analytical peripherals, the image can be utilized to position the electron probe for simultaneous spectroscopic analysis on the atomic scale. The resolution of these comprehensive STEM techniques is only limited by the ability of the microscope to form a small electron probe; a limitation that is imposed by the spherical aberration of the probe-forming lens. The aberration corrector will help overcome this limitation, improving the resolution to below 1. This will open up a much wider range of key materials systems, defects and interface structures that can be routinely analyzed. This new capability will be used to investigate grain boundaries in electronic oxides, hetero-interfaces in semiconductors, quantum dots, carbon nanostructures and heterogeneous catalysts. This IMR award is for the acquisition of an aberration corrector by the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). The new instrument will be installed into a dedicated scanning transmission electron microscope. Such a corrector will allow unprecedented spatial resolution (sub nanometer) in the analysis of materials interfaces and defects and will support vigorous research programs in such diverse technological areas as superconductors, semiconductors, ceramic oxides and catalysts. The PI, co-PIs and users of the instrumentation span a wide range of the pure and applied physical sciences and include collaborators from both local and national research institutions. This instrumentation will be an integral component of an established facility in the UIC Research Resources Center, specializing in atomic scale studies of materials. The expertise of the staff in the facility and the stability of the laboratory creates a unique opportunity for achieving the desired performance. As with other instruments in the UIC facility, this microscope and the support staff will also be made fully available to other researchers. The new microscope will also strengthen established outreach activities, promoting the benefits, achievements and excitement of research to high school teachers, students and parents as well as providing valuable experience to graduate and senior level undergraduate students doc3750 none Howard Reiss of UCLA is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to investigate molecular theories of nucleation using statistical mechanics methods. This research is divided into four projects: maintenance of rigor and consistency in molecular theories of nucleation; development of a theory for the kinetics of nucleation; formulation of the thermodynamics of solid interfaces with application to the dependence of deliquescence pressure on particle size; and development of a theory for heterogeneous nucleation, in connection with systems of atmospheric interest such as the formation of sulfate aerosols. Nucleation is one of the most ubiquitous phenomena in all of science and technology. Despite its importance, the theory of nucleation has until recently been phenomenological. The formulation of a coherent, consistent theory of molecular nucleation has important consequences for many practical applications in atmospheric science, crystallization, metallurgy, and nanophase chemistry doc3751 none This award to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is for the acquisition of a sum-frequency-generation spectrometer. The instrument will help develop a clearer picture, at the microscopic level, of surfaces and buried interfaces. This picture is difficult or impossible to obtain with conventional forms of spectroscopy, because the region of interest typically has a thickness of only one nanometer. Although their dimensions are small, the technological importance of surfaces and interfaces is extremely large. For example, the Si-H bonds that passivate the Si SiO_2 transistor interface affect the properties of 95% of the world s integrated circuits. The SFG spectrometer will allow to determine the number of bonds at the interface, and therefore to optimize the processing of Si wafers. Surfaces are also very important in catalysis and corrosion. The SFG spectrometer will enable to acquire knowledge which will help in the search for alternative corrosion inhibitors that are less harmful to the environment. Another example is the surface of polyethylene oxide (PEO), which is used to coat prosthetic devices because it prevents the adhesion of proteins and cells. SFG spectroscopy will increase our understanding of the molecular properties responsible for the biological activity of PEO, and accelerate the design of new and better biomaterials. The spectrometer will be placed in a user facility, open to all, where graduate students will be able to receive training, use a state-of-the-art instrument in their research, and interact with experts both inside and outside of their disciplines. This is an award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for the acquisition of an infrared-visible sum-frequency-generation spectrometer. The instrument will help develop a clearer picture, at a microscopic level, of phenomena occuring at surfaces and buried interfaces, e.g. adsorption, deposition, catalysis, corrosion, templating, and steric selection. Infrared spectroscopy is well-suited to this endeavor because it allows one to identify many of the chemical bonds which determine the properties of interfaces, e.g. the Si-H bond which passivates the Si SiO_2 transistor interface. Sum-frequency-generation spectroscopy is particularly sensitive to the interface, even though it is often less than a nanometer thick, because the signal is generated only where the sample lacks inversion symmetry. The spectrometer will help answer scientific questions of technological importance, for example: Why is chromate so effective in preventing the corrosion of aluminum? Why do cells and proteins not adhere to the surface of prothetic devices coated with polyethylene oxide? How does adding a minute amount of benzotriazole to a plating bath drastically change the surface morphology of copper? The spectrometer will be placed in a user facility where a large number of graduate students will receive training and participate in research projects to answer questions such as those above doc3752 none Granick This is an instrument development award to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The PI will develop a new instrument for spectroscopic studies of confined fluids. Prior work on confined fluids by force-based methods now poses scientific questions that require spectroscopic study for definitive answer. This will be the first such experimental platform for integrated spectroscopic and force-based measurements and will take advantage of the fact that modern laser instrumentation has advanced to the point that it can be used productively for materials research by students who are relatively unsophisticated in ultrafast lasers, yet expert in nanorheology. Specifically, an optical parametric amplifier (OPA) pumped by a femtosecond laser will be needed to (a) generate time-resolved vibrational spectra using sum frequency generation (SFG) with broad-band detection for heightened time resolution; and (b) measure, using time-resolved fluorescence depolarization (FD) after two-photon excitation, molecular rotational times when the thickness of fluid films becomes comparable to the size of molecules themselves. This is an instrument development award to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. A new instrument for spectroscopic studies of confined fluids will be developed. Micro and nano-devices will have enormous impact on next generation technology. This new ultra small technology will significantly improve the performance of already existing robots, computers, communication, and other electro opto mechanical devices. While initial efforts have been principally devoted to the fabrication and electrical performance, recent studies have discovered a profound deleterious influence of friction and wear on the efficiency, power output, and steady state speed of micro-dynamics devices. Friction imposes serious constraints and limitations on the performance and lifetime of micro-machines and, undoubtedly, will impose even more severe constraints on the emerging technology of nano-machines. To make the needed future advances in micro- and nano-technology, a fundamental understanding of the operational, friction, and wear characteristics is paramount. Reducing wear and friction has a profound economic impact. By most recent estimates, improved attention to friction and wear would save developed countries up to 1.6% of their gross national product - over $100 billion annually in the United States alone. The expected outcome of this new instrumentation will be to leapfrog our ability to define, predict, and control frictional properties of sliding nano-objects. It will cut across traditional disciplinary lines; it will train engineers to take a chemical point of view and will train chemists and physicists to work productively in the field of friction doc3753 none This grant supports the acquisition, by the Brigham Young University (BYU), of a new environmental scanning electron microscope (ESEM) with a Schottky field emission gun (FEG), configured for advanced applications of (automated) microdiffraction via electron backscattering patterns (EBSP) coupled with energy dispersive spectrometry (EDS). The selected instrument is the Philips XL-30 ESEM FEG, with an integrated EDAX Falcon EDS EBSP system. Improved spatial resolution in both standard contrast and microdiffraction modes, environmental capability that facilitates the examination of low-Z and non-conductive samples and in sensitive biological samples, and the capability to integrate EDS and EBSP analysis in a fully-automated mode (feedback-controlled scanning through the digital interface) for studies of grain boundaries and interfaces, are some of the features of the proposed system that are urgently needed for the advancement of on-going research within the Colleges of Engineering and Technology, Biology and Agriculture and Physical and Mathematical Sciences. The digital and environmental capabilities of this instrument will also advance educational initiatives within BYU, enabling an order-of-magnitude increase in the numbers of undergraduates that can be exposed to structures that require high-resolution imaging. This grant supports the purchase of an advanced scanning electron microscope for it s Electron Optics Laboratory. This new system is configured for high resolution imaging of materials, including sensitive biological samples and non-conducting materials. This breadth of capability is due to it s specialized chamber and lens system, which can operate over a wide range of environmental conditions. The new microscope will also be equipped for micro-chemistry analysis of samples by traditional energy dispersive spectrometry, and for microdiffraction (for crystallite orientation and phase determination) using a low-light television camera for viewing electron backscattered diffraction patterns. The new instrument has a digital interface, capable of providing fully automated studies of the network of grain boundaries and other internal interfaces in crystalline materials. The digital and environmental capabilities of the instrument will also advance educational initiatives within BYU, enabling much larger numbers of undergraduate and graduate students to be exposed to the new insights that attend high-resolution imaging of materials and structures doc3754 none Carpick This award will enable the acquisition of a variable temperature ultrahigh vacuum atomic force microscope (UHV AFM) devoted to the study of mechanics and tribology at the nanometer scale. The long-term research goal is to develop an atomic-scale understanding of the mechanics (including elasticity, plasticity, rupture, and fracture) and tribology (friction, adhesion, wear, lubrication) of novel materials relevant to micro- and nano-technology. Specific interdisciplinary research problems that will be addressed include fundamental studies of the tribology of micromachine surfaces, the dependence of friction upon perovskite thin film surface terminations, and mechanical properties of nanocomposites. This instrumentation will enable new opportunities to integrate research, education, and training by exposing students to cutting-edge AFM techniques applied to the study of novel materials. Further education opportunities include student laboratory tours and development and dissemination of new classroom and web-based material. Although friction is one of the most commonly-experienced physical phenomena in nature, it not yet understood in a truly fundamental way. This award will enable the acquisition of an atomic force microscope (AFM) which will be used to study the fundamentals of friction and related phenomena (deformation, lubrication, and wear) for novel materials. The AFM measures forces and deformations at the nano- or atomic level. The instrument will operate in a pristine vacuum environment at different temperatures to allow precise control of the materials being studied. Specific materials to be studied include surfaces of silicon micromachines, ceramic thin films, and new strong composites made from nano-scale components. The instrument will be integrated with several educational efforts. Instrument tours for undergraduate and high-school students will be provided, and a web-site showcasing the instrument and the current research projects will be created. The training that student researchers obtain on this advanced instrument can be readily applied to other academic and industrial research problems doc3755 none Somatostatins (SS) are a diverse family of peptide hormones that control animal growth, development, and metabolism. Despite the importance of this hormone family, little is known about the basis of its multi-functional nature. In particular, it is not known how the hormones and their receptors interact to elicit a specific effect in a particular target cell or how the structural heterogeneity of the SS family influences such interactions. With this proposed work, the unique situation in teleost fish such as rainbow trout, which possess multiple SSs, will be exploited to examine fundamental aspects of SS-receptor interactions. The hypothesis that rainbow trout possess multiple SS receptors with differential ligand selectivity that are differentially expressed will be tested in four experimental phases. In phase I, multiple mRNAs encoding distinct SS receptors will be characterized. In phase 2, the binding characteristics of expressed SS receptors will be examined. In phase 3, the distribution and abundance of SS receptor mRNAs will be determined. In phase 4, factors (e.g., nutritional state, insulin) that control the expression of SS receptor mRNAs will be identified. While this work pertains specifically to fish, it will provide important new insight regarding linkage between SS receptor type to a specific biological action and have broad relevance to understanding the multi-functional nature of SS doc3756 none Vassiliadis This collaborative proposal focuses on the creation and validation of a community based real-time and retrospective high-latitude ionospheric electrodynamics specification and forecasting tool. At it s core, the tool will have the assimilative mapping of ionospheric electrodynamics (AMIE) technique. The model will make predictions of the eletrodynamic state of the high-latitude ionosphere for up to 60 minutes ahead of time. In addition, the PIs will make the code available to the community through a simple graphical user interface which will allow community members to run AMIE for their campaigns. The creation of the predictive model will give fundamental insight into many non-steady-state magnetospheric processes, such as substroms and storms by allowing a quantitative examination of how the state of the magnetosphere and ionosphere are dependent both on the current state and the external driving conditions. The PI s will perform a quantitative validation of AMIE and rtAMIE. The validation will give average error estimates for each grid point on AMIE for the ionospheric potential and conductances. These error estimates will be functions of: (1) location, (2) data density, (3) activity level, and (4)season. This quantitative validation will allow users of the code to fully understand the accurarcy of the results. No other electric potential model has this capability, even though it is crucially important for studies of ionospheric and magnetospheric phenomena doc3757 none This study will examine the circulatory system of the head in extinct (dinosaurs) and living (birds and crocodilians) members of the Archosauria. The research holds significance beyond basic anatomy in that the inference of vascular devices will shed light on the behavior and physiology of extinct organisms. For example, warm-blooded vertebrates have countercurrent heat exchangers in their cephalic circulatory system, which heat or cool important structures in the head such as the brain. The major objectives of the research are (1) to document the anatomy of the head vessels in birds and crocodilians, (2) reconstruct vascular structures in extinct archosaurs (e.g., dinosaurs), (3) examine the evolution of the vascular system, and (4) formulate hypotheses on functional physiological significance of vascular arrangements. Data on birds and crocodilians will be obtained via gross anatomy, histology, and a novel X-ray technique. Data on dinosaurs will be attained by identifying vascular traces in fossils. This project will be the first to compare head vasculature in crocodilians, birds, and other vertebrates, and to reconstruct vascular structures and patterns in extinct archosaurs doc3758 none This instrument development award to Pennsylvania State University, University Park is jointly funded by the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program, and the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities program. New atomic-scale spectroscopic probes of materials properties will be developed. These will advance the state-of-the-art in the ability to measure and carry chemical fingerprinting of materials surfaces at this scale. These will impact industrial, government, and academic research both via broad dissemination and more directly through extensive network of collaborations and beyond. Specifically, the new tool will allow local measurements to study materials in the optical, microwave, and acoustic regimes with unprecedented resolution. These new capabilities will also be exploited to measure one particle, molecule, or surface site at a time, so as to elucidate the intrinsic materials properties, as distinct from the average properties of heterogeneous mixtures. It will be possible to target structures and properties of interest for more precise synthesis and separation. The University will make these new measurement tools and techniques widely available. Integral to this development effort is training students, post-docs, visitors, and collaborators in how to create, to optimize, and to evaluate new instruments of this type. This instrument development award to Pennsylvania State University, University Park is jointly made by the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program, and the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities program. New atomic-scale spectroscopic probes of materials properties will be developed. These will advance the state-of-the-art in the ability to measure and carry chemical fingerprinting of materials surfaces at the nano-scale. These will impact industrial, government, and academic research both via broad dissemination and more directly through extensive network of collaborations and beyond. Specifically, the new tool will allow local measurements to study materials in the optical, microwave, and acoustic regimes with unprecedented resolution. These new capabilities will also be exploited our to measure one particle, molecule, or surface site at a time, so as to elucidate the intrinsic materials properties, as distinct from the average properties of heterogeneous mixtures. It will be possible to target structures and properties of interest for more precise synthesis and separation. These new measurement tools and techniques will be made widely available broadly. Integral to this development effort is training students, post-docs, visitors, and collaborators in how to create, to optimize, and to evaluate new instruments of this type doc3759 none Merlin, Roberto D An award is made to the University of Michigan for the acquisition of an Optical parametric Amplifier (OPA). The OPA will be used to generate a tunable ultrashort optical pulses to probe, and control coherent phonons in solids using resonant excitation and to study the interaction of photogenerated carriers with phonons. In particular, quantum dot systems, to investigate phonon bottleneck . The bottleneck is important for unipolar intersubband devices such as mid-infrared detectors, since a long excited state lifetime enables reduced noise, but detrimental to bipolar interband devices such as near-infrared lasers, as it limits the modulation bandwidth. The interaction of hot carriers with impulsively generated coherent phonons is an additional new area of exploration. The hot carriers should give rise to stimulated phonon emission which may be useful for controlled ultrafast tunneling in phonon-assisted-tunneling devices, and for the development of phonon lasers. The OPA system will also be used for photon echo and fluorescence up-conversion measurements in chemical and biological systems, particularly reaction centers of photosystem II. Fluorescence up-conversion will be used to probe the excited state population in the reaction centers directly and test models for the charge separation process. Photon echo experiments will provide important information on the coupling between the pigment electronic states and the solvent (protein) bath. The instrument will be used in the training of graduate and undergraduate students who will be the primary users. Several groups at the University of Michigan will be able to use the instrument for their NSF funded research. This is an instrument acquisition award to the University of Michigan. The principal investigators will purchase an Optical parametric Amplifier (OPA). When light shines on a semiconductor material, electrons which are tightly bound to the atoms in the material are freed up to move throughout the semiconductor. When the initial energy of the electrons is high, they are referred to as hot electrons. If the exciting light is in the form of a short (femtosecond) laser pulse, then the pulse generates a burst of hot electrons. These electrons will not stay hot, but will rapidly cool down to the crystal temperature by generating crystal vibrations, or phonons. The cooling process can be controlled in sophisticated ways. For example, if the semiconductor contains quantum dots, in which the electronic states are discrete, then the cooling rate can be vastly reduced. The study of the reduced cooling rate (referred to as the phonon bottleneck ) will be useful for the development of new infrared detectors and lasers. The study of this process may lead to new semiconductor device concepts. Light shining on photosynthetic proteins in green plants also results in electron motion, this time in a protein and across a membrane with the potential used to produce oxygen and carbohydrates. This new instrument will be used in this type of research and other NSF funded research at the University of Wisconsin. Graduate and undergraduate students will benefit tremendously by using this instrument and techniques in well designed research projects doc3760 none This award provides partial funding for the acquisition of Friction Stir Welding (FSW) equipment. FSW is a relatively new solid-state joining technique where a welded joint is produced by the stirring action of a pin that plasticizes and moves material. This simple concept of friction stirring allows joining of any aluminum alloy or composite as no filler material is involved. This is particularly attractive for high strength and advanced aluminum alloys and composites, which are traditionally considered unweldable. In addition, formation of very fine grains in the stirred region due to severe plastic deformation leads to mechanical properties of the joint that are 80-100 % of the parent material. This presents a tremendous advantage over the conventional fusion welding technique where joint strength reduction of 50 % is typical. The equipment will provide data for modeling of the friction stir welding parameters and it will lead to a better fundamental understanding of the mechanisms involved in the FSW process. The equipment will also provide opportunities to develop new processing techniques by utilizing the friction stir concept. The new friction stir welding equipment will allow research in: 1) Joining of high strength aluminum alloys and aluminum matrix composites; 2) Friction stir welding of integrated passive damping structures; and 3) Friction stir processing for economical superplastic forming in commercial aluminum alloy sheets. The research will be conducted by an interdisciplinary team which includes collaboration with industries (e.g. Rockwell Science Center and Boeing Phantom Works) and government laboratories (e.g. Air Force Research Laboratory). In addition, the friction stir welding facility at UMR will serve as a research and educational resource for the educational institutions and small-to-medium industries in the entire mid-western region where no such open facility exists at present. This grant provides partial funding for the acquisition of Friction Stir Welding (FSW) equipment. Friction stir welding is a relatively new solid-state joining technique where a welded joint is produced by the stirring action of a pin that plasticizes and moves material. This simple and elegant concept of friction stirring allows joining of any aluminum alloy or aluminum matrix composite as no filler material is required. This is particularly attractive for high strength and advanced aluminum alloys that are traditionally considered unweldable. Even for weldable aluminum alloys, significant improvements in properties are expected with the FSW method. This technique is also environment friendly as no flux or cover gases are involved and the localized friction heating makes the process highly energy efficient. In addition, the severe plastic deformation during friction stirring leads to very fine grains in the stirred region. The fine-grained microstructure produces very desirable mechanical properties that are as high as 80% of the base metal. This is a tremendous advantage over the conventional fusion welding technique where the joint strength is reduced by 50%. The equipment will provide data for modeling of the friction stir welding process that will lead to a better fundamental understanding of FSW. The research will be conducted by an interdisciplinary research team from the University of Missouri at Rolla, industries (e.g. Rockwell Science Center and Boeing Phantom Works) and government laboratories (e.g. Air Force Research Laboratory). The friction stir welding facility at UMR will be the only such facility at an educational institution in the state of Missouri and one of only a few in the nation. It will serve as a research and educational resource in this joining technology at UMR as well as other educational institutions and small-to-medium size industries in the entire mid-western region where no such open facility exists at present doc3761 none In cereal seeds, the starchy endosperm develops as a storage tissue that is fated to die prior to maturation but persists into the mature seed. The progression of cell death in the endosperm of developing maize kernels occurs in a highly organized manner which is accompanied by a moderate increase in nuclease activity and internucleosomal fragmentation on the nuclear DNA. The endosperm cell death program of wheat and maize is regulated, in part, by ethylene. Consequently, the analysis of the genes responsible for the biosynthesis and perception of ethylene, as well as the nuclease responsible for DNA fragmentation will extend our understanding of the regulation of the cell death program in cereal endosperm. The specific aims of this project are: (1) to investigate the expression of the ethylene biosynthetic and perception machinery during maize organ development and identify the endosperm-specific members of each gene family; (2) to determine the spatial and temporal regulation of the ethylene biosynthetic and perception machinery during the initiation and progression of the cell death program during endosperm development; (3) to isolate ACC synthase and ethylene receptor knock out mutants to genetically characterize the requirement for ethylene biosynthesis and perception for endosperm cell death; and (4) to characterize an endosperm-expressed nuclease and investigate its role in directing internucleosomal DNA fragmentation. The expression studies will be carried out using RT-PCR and in situ RNA localization throughout the development of the maize endosperm. Transposon-insertion mutagenesis has been used to generate mutants affecting ethylene biosynthesis which will be used for phenotypic analysis of ethylene during maize development. The proposed experiments will represent a significant advancement in understanding a basic yet poorly understood aspect of cereal kernel development that will contribute to the improvement of cereal crops by providing a novel means to increase yield through extending the window of storage reserve deposition during cereal seed development doc3762 none The ecological and evolutionary success of bony fishes, the most speciose group of vertebrates, is associated with extensive diversity in feeding biology that is facilitated by versatile systems of prey capture and processing. This research will elucidate mechanisms of function in the pharyngeal jaw apparatus of ray-finned fishes, the primary device used in manipulating, chewing, and transporting prey during feeding. The pharyngeal jaw apparatus is a poorly understood, complex system of modified gill-arch muscles and bones that has underdone extensive modification during fish evolution. Using recordings of muscle activity and a new method for visualizing skeletal motion inside the skull, sonometric-ultrasound, this research will test models of pharyngeal jaw function in several major groups of fishes in order to establish the mechanisms of jaw action and its evolution within the largest group of living vertebrates. This research will address basic questions about how the muscle-skeleton linkage system of the pharyngeal jaw apparatus functions, and how it has been modified during evolution to produce novel function and diversity in feeding biology. The complexity and diversity of this system will provide the raw material for exposing general principles of neuromuscular evolution doc3763 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program allows Harvard University to acquire a rheometer enhanced with scattering and imaging for complex fluids research and education. One of the key features of all complex fluids is their response to stresses or strains; as with all soft materials, the larger scale structures that typify complex fluids make them more easily deformed and thus help define their most fundamental properties. Unfortunately, the relationship of microscopic properties to macroscopic response is still poorly understood for many important complex materials. Of particular interest here are the mechanical responses of foams and emulsions, colloidal suspensions, thin polymer films, and electrorheological suspensions. For example, concerning foams and emulsions, we will explore the influence on the bulk properties of the interfacial rheology of the surfactants used, the related interfacial elasticity, and the drainage of fluid from the interstitial space. In addition, researchers at Harvard University will investigate jammed states that dramatically influence the properties of weakly attractive colloidal suspensions. In order to examine these systems, they will develop instrumentation around a stress-controlled rheometer, which will be outfitted with two different optical probes: dynamic light scattering and a high-speed digital camera. This collaborative interdisciplinary research involves scientists from engineering, physics, and materials science. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program allows Harvard University to acquire a rheometer enhanced with scattering and imaging for complex fluids research and education. We are all familiar with solids, liquids, and gases. However, many other common materials have properties that are intermediate to those of simple liquids or simple solids. For example, consider a foam such as used for shaving or washing dishes. These materials undergo a finite strain when exposed to a small stress (it is easy to do this experiment for yourself), which is characteristic of a solid, but the constituents of the foam (mostly water and air) are both fluids! Of course, this response is influenced greatly by the surfactants (basically large macromolecules) that reside at the interface between the gas and liquid. Materials whose macroscopic properties depend crucially on the different constituents are commonly referred to as complex fluids, which includes foams and emulsions, electrorheological suspensions (materials that respond to electric fields), polymer solutions, polymer films, etc. Because the macroscopic response is so dependent on the microscopic constituents, the proposed research will use modern optical and mechanical measurements to investigate further the world of complex fluids, and will elucidate more clearly the manner in which the microscopic and macroscopic properties are coupled doc3764 none Why do bureaucrats delay? Why do regulatory choices made under identical administrative procedures exhibit highly varying decision times? The investigator conducts a formal and empirical analysis of the duration of bureaucratic decisions, with applications to drug approval times by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The speed with which drugs are reviewed is now one of the most controversial issues in federal regulation, and is arguably the most salient case where the duration, more than the content, of bureaucratic decision making is at issue. While the political control of agencies has been well studied, relatively little is known about why agencies wait, and whether the duration of agency decisions is subject to political control and from what sources. The project tackles this problem through the elaboration of a generalizable formal model of the approval decision. The investigator models product approval as an optimal stopping decision by an uncertain regulator subject to political demand for the drug. The regulator seeks to preserve a reputation for consumer protection and sees drug approvals as irreversible (or reversible only at a significant reputation cost). The payoff of approval is also a function of the political demand for drug approvals from consumers (patients) and producers (firms). The model predicts that even under risk-neutrality, quick approvals are highly unlikely, not all drugs will be approved, and that larger firms receive protection (quicker approvals) even when firms are not politically organized. The investigator tests this model using maximum likelihood duration analyses of FDA drug review times. The formal model suggests that the proper hazard function for estimation is the inverse Gaussian distribution, which has a non-monotonic hazard function. Drug approval times will be modeled as a function of political preferences, budgetary shifts, media coverage and congressional hearings on the diseases treated by the drug, and characteristics of the submitting firms. Preliminary results on a partial sample of 67 drugs approved from to support the model s predictions, and also suggest that political control in drug approval occurs less through principals (Congress and the presidents) than through organized interests (patients and firms) and the media doc3765 none Halperin This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program will allow Northwestern University to construct a state-of-the-art nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) facility that specializes in frontier technology for ultra-high magnetic fields, ultra-high magnetic field gradients, and ultra-low temperatures. The facility will have a strong educational aspect, preparing students, both graduate and undergraduate, for use of advanced instrumentation in the Northwestern University ultra-low temperature laboratories and at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL). Nine senior investigators, including the PI, will participate and benefit from it, including university faculty at Northwestern University, two industrial laboratories, and a national laboratory. A facility for magnetic resonance (NMR) will be constructed including a 9 T magnet and dilution refrigerator capability at Northwestern University to study properties of materials over a wide range of temperature, down to low temperatures. This facility provides the entre to ultra-high field and ultra-low temperature experiments. Probes will be developed to extend the magnetic field scale to as high as 44 T at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in their new hybrid and other resistive magnets. The instrument will be available to students and NHMFL Experimental apparatus for ultra-low temperature NMR measurements will be designed and implemented in the Northwestern Ultra Low Temperature Laboratories. This new capability will enable the study of a wide range of topics such as high temperature superconductivity, diffusion in zeolites and polyelectrolytes, Li-batteries and for zeolites and other heterogeneous catalysts. The problem of chloride ion diffusion in cementitious materials will also be investigated with the improved sensitivity to diffusion using high gradient strength NMR techniques. Northwestern University will construct a state-of-the-art nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) facility that specializes in frontier technology, and will extend the domain of sensitivity and resolution to unprecedented high levels using combinations of ultra-high magnetic fields, ultra-high magnetic field gradients and ultra-low temperatures. The facility has a strong educational aspect, preparing students, both graduate and undergraduate, for use of advanced instrumentation in the PI s ultra-low temperature laboratories and at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL). There are nine senior scientist-investigators, including the PI, who will participate in the near term functioning of this facility and benefit from it, including university faculty at Northwestern University, two industrial laboratories, and a national laboratory doc3766 none Martinez-Miranda This is an award for the acquisition of a scanning X-ray microbeam system. The system will be equipped with a X-Y scanning stage, a temperature controller, and an electromagnet. The system will be added on to an existing Rigaku RTP360RC with a 12 kW X-ray source. This attachment will focus the X-ray beam down to a 10 x 10 micron square spot and will allow spatially dependent diffractometry with localized high flux of X-ray for characterizing combinatorial libraries and composition-spread samples, as well as confined samples of organic and inorganic macromolecules. Work performed with the instrumentation requested will complement and expand already existing efforts in the study of composition-spread samples, nanometer structured materials and spatially confined materials at the University of Maryland College Park. The instrument will provide new and much needed capability at the institution. It enables one to obtain spatially dependent structural information and distribution of various materials phases within individual samples. It is particularly instrumental in investigating formation of various compositional phases at different sites on combinatorial libraries and mapping the structural changes and phase distribution across composition-spread samples. Students with diverse background and origin will benefit from research program based on this equipment doc3767 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program will enable Rutgers University to acquire a variable temperature scanning probe microscope (scanning tunneling microscope and atomic force microscope, or STM AFM) with spectroscopic capabilities for shared use in the Laboratory for Surface Modification (LSM) at Rutgers University. The LSM is a multidisciplinary laboratory with research in many areas in the science and engineering of surfaces and thin films. The instrument will be used, in conjunction with other techniques, for several different projects. These include imaging and characterizing charge stripe phases in highly correlated materials, roughening, structural and electrical properties of ultra thin gate oxides for microelectronic applications, and vacancy diffusion, quantum size effects and nano-faceting of metal surfaces and ultrathin metal films. Rutgers will also integrate the SPM into materials education and outreach programs, including developing some web-based classroom training modules. The latter activity will link research-active postdocs and graduate students with middle and high school students and their teachers, and with undergraduates. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program will enable Rutgers University to acquire a variable temperature scanning probe microscope (scanning tunneling microscope and atomic force microscope, or STM AFM) with spectroscopic capabilities for shared use in the Laboratory for Surface Modification (LSM) at Rutgers University. The LSM is a multidisciplinary laboratory with research in many areas in the science and engineering of surfaces and thin films. The instrument will be used, in conjunction with other techniques, for several different research projects that require state of the art imaging of surfaces at the atomic scale. Today, the need for truly atomic level imaging of surfaces is compelling. Scanning tunneling microscopy and other scanning probe techniques have revolutionized surface science and been applied to a wide range of problems related to interfaces. The SPM will be integrated into materials education and outreach programs, including developing some web-based classroom training modules. The latter activity will link research-active postdocs and graduate students with middle and high school students and their teachers, and with undergraduates doc3768 none This project involves the development of low temperature methasis routes to new and novel metastable superlattices containing alternating layers such as metal sulfide metal oxide, metal nitride metal oxide or metal oxide metal oxide composites. The primary goal is to develop a generic rational synthetic strategy for preparing composite superlattice materials with interesting phenomena that include metallic magnetic superlattices as magnetic memory or magnetoresistive materials, dielectric superconducting superlattices exhibiting interlayer tunneling behavior and proximity effects, and ferrimagnetic superconducting superlattices. Strategies to be developed include: 1) Metal Oxide Metal Chacogenide Superlattices through Soft Chemistry, and 2) Metathesis Chemistry with Layered Nitride Halide Compounds. Collaborations with the Center for Suerconductivity Research at the University of Maryland will provide a wealth of new structure-property correlations that will be of interest to the solid state condensed matter community as a whole. %%% This project involves the development of new materials synthesis and processing tools to optimize the search for high performance materials such as electronic and magnetic materials. Due to the strong collaborations that have been arranged with the Center for Superconductivity Research at the University of Maryland, the education component of this project is particularly strong in that it will provide excellent training for undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral fellows interested in working in industry doc3769 none This IMR award is for acquisition of an instrument that manipulates surface chemistry for new approaches to the growth of ultra-thin (~ one to tens of monolayers) layers. The instrument will be an UHV system equipped with dosers, supersonic nozzles, in situ probes, and a variable temperature substrate holder. The scope of the research includes both potential transition layers between substrate and epitaxial films, and ultra-thin layers between two epitaxial films. The instrument provides an important new capabilities for the Columbia University and will allow the Principal Investigator to conduct research on his DMR program , Manipulation of Surface Reactions For Growth of Ultra-thin Films (1-20 ML). The research program attempts to apply recent advances in our understanding of detailed and fundamental semiconductor surface chemistry to the development of new approaches to the actual growth of ultrathin semiconductor and transition layers. The materials chemistry studied will have implications both for conventional, molecular-based growth, and for fundamentally new approaches to growth. The instrument will incorporate ultrahigh vacuum probes, both conventional and nonstandard, to interrogate the detailed surface chemistry, including, for example, the composition, bonding, and ordering of surface ligands and the reaction pathways of precursor molecules and surface species. This is an instrument acquisition award to Columbia University. The new instrument will be used to perform in situ surface materials chemistry studies for ultrahigh vacuum growth of ultra-thin semiconductor layers. The apparatus has two central goals: 1) collaborative research on new means for chemically forming ultra-thin interfacial layers and 2) graduate education on analytic tools for surface and materials study and for hands-on undergraduate training in experimental techniques. Note that the proposed instrument is composed of both purchased and fabricated components and is thus a combination of the acquisition and development uses of the IMR Program. The proposal provides an orderly plan for bringing this instrument on line and a tested plan for maintenance of this instrument. The instrument request includes 35% matching funds provided by Columbia University doc3770 none This grant will provide partial support for the acquisition of a variable-temperature, ultra-high-vacuum (UHV) scanning tunneling microscope (STM), with modifications to facilitate ballistic electron emission microscopy (BEEM) studies of thin film systems of current scientific importance and very substantial technological potential. This instrument will be interfaced to an existing UHV sample preparation and analysis system, and modified to enable tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy measurements in the presence of applied magnetic fields. This instrument will be used in a graduate research and training program that will quantitatively examine, with nanoscale resolution, the spin-dependent hot-electron transport properties of ferromagnetic multilayer thin films and nanostructures. A major focus will be the further development and application of a new type of magnetic microscopy, based on these transport properties, that can image magnetic structure in thin film systems with unprecedented, near atomic-scale resolution. %%% This grant will provide partial support for the acquisition of a special type of scanning microscope that can examine, with near-atomic-scale resolution, the electronic transport properties and magnetic structure of ferromagnetic multilayer thin film materials and ferromagnetic nanostructures. This instrument will enable a new and very powerful type of magnetic microscopy that will be used to image and investigate, with unprecedented resolution, the magnetic properties of such thin films and nanostructures. The instrumentation will be used in graduate student training and research concerned with the study, understanding and improvement of thin film magnetic systems. Such materials systems are currently of major scientific interest, and also have very strong potential for technologically and commercially important applications in ultra-high-density magnetic information storage systems, and as nanoscale magnetic sensors doc3771 none Markelz This grant supports the acquisition and use of a versatile, optical-access, high-field (10T), split-coil superconducting magnet system for experimental investigations of quantum dots and quasi-two-dimensional excitons in semiconductors, and the dynamical conductivity of high Tc superconductors. This research is directed at achieving an understanding of several outstanding physics problems: 1) Internal transitions of excitons in lateral fluctuation quantum dots in GaAs AlGaAs, 2) dynamics of photoexcited neutral excitons in GaAs AlGaAs quantum wells, and 3) the dynamical conductivity and relaxation times in high temperature superconductors (HTSC) in the mid-infrared and terahertz regions of the spectrum. An improved understanding of the behavior of the fundamental optical excitation of low-dimensional semiconductor structures, the exciton, which may be important in implementations of quantum computation, is also expected to be developed from these studies. In addition, this research will provide insight into one of the fundamental conundrums of high temperature superconductor materials, the apparent non-Fermi liquid transport behavior in the normal state. This project supports the acquisition of a high magnetic field, optical access, cryogenic system to enable unique optical studies of materials systems of fundamental and technological interest using our existing versatile optical systems that range in frequency from the microwave to the ultra violet. We will initially focus on two materials systems: quantum confined electronic structures in semiconductors and high temperature superconductors. This research is directed at achieving an understanding of several outstanding physics problems: 1) Internal transitions of excitons in quantum dots in GaAs AlGaAs, 2) dynamics of photoexcited neutral excitons in GaAs AlGaAs quantum wells, and 3) the dynamical conductivity and relaxation times in high temperature superconductors (HTSC) in the mid-infrared and terahertz regions of the spectrum. These studies will improve present day understanding of the behavior the fundamental optical excitations of low-dimensional semiconductor structures, which may be important in implementations of quantum computation. In addition, this research will provide insight into the origins of high temperature superconductivity doc3772 none This is an instrument development award to Texas Tech university for Micro-Electro-Mechanical-System (MEMS) research. Micro-Electro-Mechanical-System (MEMS) devices generally range from a few microns to a few millimeters in size. This area of technological development that has gone from generating curiosities such as wobble motors and micro-robots, to its current phase in which practical devices of common usage, such as accelerometers and pressure-sensing transducers, are being manufactured and used. This has created a need for improved characterization of MEMS materials to better optimize the MEMS design process. The objective of this research is to design and build a tensile tester for MEMS materials. The tester will be used to determine the elastic properties of MEMS material specimens. The tester will allow simultaneous loading of specimens in two perpendicular directions. It will also accommodate specimens of different sizes; allow alignment of the specimen; apply and measure the load on the specimen; monitor specimen deformation; and permit continuous data acquisition. Several projects related to MEMS materials characterization benefit from the development of this micro-tensile tester. Additionally, the proposed development of the micro-tensile tester will enhance research facilities in the Departments of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering at Texas Tech University. Also, it provides the required infrastructure for a student, who previously worked on a related capstone senior design project, to commence his graduate degree. Furthermore, the existence of this micro-tensile tester will allow potential interaction with the MEMS research facility at Sandia National Laboratory. Micro-Electro-Mechanical-System (MEMS) devices generally range from a few microns to a few millimeters in size. This area of technological development that has gone from generating curiosities such as wobble motors and micro-robots, to its current phase in which practical devices of common usage, such as accelerometers and pressure-sensing transducers, are being manufactured and used. This has created a need for improved characterization of MEMS materials to better optimize the MEMS design process. The objective of this research is to design and build a tensile tester for MEMS materials. The tester will be used to determine the elastic properties of MEMS material specimens. The tester will allow simultaneous loading of specimens in two perpendicular directions. It will also accommodate specimens of different sizes; allow alignment of the specimen; apply and measure the load on the specimen; monitor specimen deformation; and permit continuous data acquisition. Several projects related to MEMS materials characterization benefit from the development of this micro-tensile tester. Additionally, the proposed development of the micro-tensile tester will enhance research facilities in the Departments of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering at Texas Tech University. Also, it provides the required infrastructure for a student, who previously worked on a related capstone senior design project, to commence his graduate degree. Furthermore, the existence of this micro-tensile tester will allow potential interaction with the MEMS research facility at Sandia National Laboratory doc3773 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program allows the University of Delaware to establish a state-of-the-art laboratory for the preparation and characterization of polymeric light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and polymeric thin film transistors (TFTs). Both LEDs and TFTs have tremendous commercial potential for applications in the display industry. However, the rapid progress that has occurred in this field, has left many fundamental questions unanswered. The goal is to investigate the structure property relationships in electroactive polymers for polymer LEDs and TFTs. The instrument will support an NSF funded project to investigate structural property relationships in polymers used in LEDs and TFTs as well as the optimization of polymeric devices. The awardees interact closely with scientists who are researching electroactive polymers at the DuPont Company. Progress is at present, however, hampered by a lack of state-of-the-art equipment necessary for the production of polymeric TPT s and TFTs. Specifically, glovebox systems will be purchased for the manufacture and testing of polymeric devices under inert atmosphere conditions. The equipment will be utilized by the research groups of the two Pls, scientists from DuPont and other faculty. The instruments will be used by students faculty and postdocs from physics chemistry, materials science and electrical engineering departments. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program allows the University of Delaware to establish a state-of-the-art laboratory for the preparation and characterization of polymeric light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and polymeric thin film transistors (TFTs). Both LEDs and TFTs have tremendous commercial potential for applications in the display industry. However, the rapid progress that has occurred in this field, has left many fundamental questions unanswered. Progress is at present, however, hampered by a lack of state-of-the-art equipment necessary for the production of polymeric TPT s and TFTs. Specifically, glovebox systems will be purchased for the manufacture and testing of polymeric devices under inert atmosphere conditions. The equipment will be utilized by the research groups of the two Pls, scientists from DuPont and other faculty. The instruments will be used by students faculty and postdocs from physics chemistry, materials science and electrical engineering departments doc3774 none Toulouse This award from the instrumentation for materials research program in DMR will allow Leghigh University to acquire a multipurpose high-power fiber optic system, which can be operated in the CW or pulsed mode and capable of producing picosecond or femtosecond pulses. The system will significantly enhance present research capabilities and broaden the impact of a recently acquired GOALI research grant. The Lehigh facility will be expanded and developed to op a full-scale, state-of-the-art Fiber Optics Laboratory. This laboratory will serve: (1) to uncover the relationship between the glass microscopics and optical nonlinearities and provide a the necessary link between fundamental glass research and fiber optics; (2) to train PhD level graduate students in photonics (these are in very short supply at the present) who understand optics as well as materials; (3) as a link between the university and industry; (4) as a pole for experimental studies in materials for integrated optics and optical communications at Lehigh. This award from the instrumentation for materials research program in DMR will allow Lehigh University to acquire a multipurpose high-power fiber optic system, which can be operated in the CW or pulsed mode and capable of producing picosecond or femtosecond pulses. The system will significantly enhance present research capabilities and broaden the impact of the GOALI research grant doc3775 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Washington will acquire ultrafast lasers and other equipment for an ultrafast optical spectroscopy center. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) the characterization of optical and nonlinear optical phenomena in condensed matter materials; b) studies of energy transfer and electron transfer by which plants and photosynthetic bacteria capture the energy of sunlight; c) investigation of the dynamics of halogen-containing compounds; and d) studies of the twisting and bending dynamics of various linear and circular DNAs and DNA protein complexes. Ultrafast spectroscopy allow scientists to investigate chemistry that occurs in the picosecond (10^-12) and femtosecond (10^-15) time regimes. On these extremely short timescales, atoms move and bonds between atoms are broken or formed. Ultrafast optical techniques allow for the investigation of chemical reaction dynamics during the course of the reaction itself. The detailed picture of chemical reaactivity provided by ultrafast spectroscopy has allowed researchers to explore how plants harvest solar energy, to create new and more efficient optoelectronic materials, and to understand the fundamental steps in many environmental processes. In short, ultrafast spectroscopy holds the promise of unraveling the microscopic details of chemical reactivity doc3776 none This study examines links between mating behavior and cautiousness towards predators. Experiments will be conducted on a cricket, Gryllus integer, in which females prefer males with long calls. Cautiousness of females will be measured as the time required to emerge from a shelter when placed in an unfamiliar environment. To measure female mating preferences, a tracking device will measure the speed, distance and angle of movement as the female runs in response to alternative male calls. Mating preferences will be combined with cautiousness scores to examine whether females with stronger mating preferences are either more cautious or more bold than females with weaker mating preferences. To test whether selectivity declines when apparent predation risk increases, females will be tested in the presence and absence of a threatening visual stimulus. Finally, to examine flexibility in female mate choices as perceived predation risk increases, females will be presented with a graded series of visually threatening stimuli. Females are predicted to become less selective in their mate choices as perceived predation risk increases. The proposed experiments will provide detailed information on the links in individual females between mating behavior and cautiousness. This information is critically important for current models of the evolution of female mating preferences, because it addresses the balance between natural selection and sexual selection doc3777 none This award from the Instrumentation materials Research program to Florida State University is for the acquisition of a variable-temperature scanning probe microscope system. The instrument will be used for studying microstructures not only at the nano-scale but also on the meso-scale, particularly at high sample temperatures, with applications in thin film semiconductors, semi-crystalline polymers, high-temperature superconductors, and nanostructures of superplastic and precipitation hardening materials. Methods to extend the temperature range capability of atomic force microscopy (AFM) to temperatures in excess of K will be investigated by the addition of thermocouple sensors on the heat-sensitive probe assemblies, and modification of the sample mounting configuration to minimize the volume being heated. This extremely large temperature range will provide scientists from FAMU-FSU College of Engineering with the opportunity to observe and investigate in-situ such phenomena as superconductor vortex structures, crystal reorientation, texture evolution, internal stress development and phase transformation. The information obtained from SPM may be used to complement the data acquired with other techniques, and thereby expand knowledge of the micromechanisms of deformation and phase transformation. The surface atomic arrangement will be used to obtain texture in bulk materials, even at high temperatures. The instrument will be used for instruction at both the undergraduate and graduate level, providing the opportunity for students to work with a truly state-of-the-art instrument at the forefront of materials research. %%% This award from the Instrumentation materials Research program to Florida State University is for the acquisition of a variable-temperature scanning probe microscope system. The relatively new field of scanning probe microscopy has opened up an enormous number of opportunities for detailed atomic-scale study of dynamic surfaces. The fundamental principle behind the technique is the precision electrical manipulation of a needle probe whose tip is less than one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair. Simply by changing the material of the needle probe, the instrument can be converted to respond to differences in magnetic field, temperature, electron density and even chemical reactivity- all on the atomic scale. This instrument is capable of performing measurements on samples over the temperature range of 25 degrees above absolute zero, to over degrees. This remarkable temperature range will enable users to investigate a wide range of surface phenomena and material properties, including high temperature superconductors, shape-memory metallic alloys, high-purity semiconductors, and novel types of polymer materials. The instrument will be maintained by the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, a jointly managed program of Florida State University, and Florida A&M University, a Doctoral-granting historically black university. Approximately 50% of the engineering students are minorities, and over 25% are women. The instrument will be used for instruction at both the undergraduate and graduate level, providing the opportunity for students to work with a truly state-of-the-art instrument at the forefront of materials research doc3778 none Atwater This grant will help develop quantitative electrostatic force scanning probe microscopy. The project includes modification of a commercial ultrahigh vacuum scanning probe microscope and development of new electrostatic force microscopy simulation software. The program comprised both ultrahigh vacuum electrostatic force microscopy measurements and development and testing of finite element electrostatic simulation software describing tip-sample interactions, including van der Waals and electrostatic force contributions . This will enable more quantitative understanding of nanometer-scale charge distributions and low mobility electronic transport. The immediate scientific use for the instrument will be in a collaborative Caltech Bell Labs NASA-JPL multi-investigator research program aimed at probing charge injection and storage in silicon nanoparticle structures for nonvolatile memory applications. Information and software needed to perform quantitative EFM will be disseminated to the materials research community. Electrically insulating thin films are critical and ubiquitous components of electronic devices such as integrated circuits and micromechanical devices. Trapping of electronic charge, whether by design or as an unintended effect, is a common characteristic of insulating thin films. It is desirable to be able to quantitatively measure the extent of and mechanisms for charge trapping in order to better understand the performance and reliability of insulating thin films. Scanning probe microscope techniques such as electrostatic force microscopy have opened a new vista in the understanding charge trapping in insulators because they enable measurement at nanometer-scale spatial resolution and total charge sensitivity down to the single electron level. To date, such electrostatic force microscopy measurements have been used as a qualitative but not a quantitative tool for understanding charge trapping in insulators. This project aims to put the electrostatic force microscopy method on a firm quantitative foundation, through a combination of measurements and development of simulation software needed for quantitative understanding. The results will be applied to characterize charge trapping in nonvolatile floating gate memory device materials containing semiconductor nanocrystals. These materials and the devices made with them are very promising candidates for the next-generation of ultradense, low-power nonvolatile flash memory chips like those now used widely in portable electronic devices such as wireless telephones, pagers, electronic cameras and personal digital assistants doc3779 none This instrument development award from the Instrumentation for Materials Pesearch program allows the to the university of Pennsylvania to upgrade the Neutron Powder Diffractometer (NPD) at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) to a world-class high-resolution diffractometer for materials research and education. With this upgrade the beamline will have a unique capability for simultaneous high-Q (momentum transfer) crystallographic analysis as well as the real-space atomic pair-density function (PDF) analysis. The data acquisition rate at high angles will increase by a factor of five by adding a large backscattering detector module, upgrade computers and install a beam-chopper. The upgrading of NPD will have wide-ranging educational impact. This fivefold increasing in the data collection rate will create more research opportunities for graduate students from five different institutions. Graduate students will also participate in the calibration task and development of software, and thus acquire precious experience of setting up a large instrument at a national facility. This project will significantly contribute to increasing the university users. The power of pulsed neutron powder diffraction method in materials research is widely recognized. It is capable of determining the atomic structure of complex materials with high accuracy, thus providing basic information vital to materials science and technology. This award will allow the University of Pennsylvania to carry a very cost-effective upgrade of the Neutron Powder Diffractometer (NPD) at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) to a world-class high-resolution diffractometer for materials research and education. This will allow a dramatic improvement of the data collection rate, by a factor of five. Upgrading this beamline will have significant impact on graduate education and training at five different institutions. This will help contribute to overcome a critical shortage of trained scientists in neutron scattering in the US. The IMR award is significantly leveraged using funds from LANSCE doc3780 none Palmstrom This is an award for the development of an in-situ magnetic characterization system that will interconnect to an in-situ atomic level growth and characterization facility. The new instrument will allow magnetic and spin polarization measurements to be made at different stages of magnetic semiconductor heterostructure growth. These magnetic measurements will be correlated with in-situ structural and elemental studies to obtain a fundamental understanding of ferromagnetic semiconductor heterostructures and interfaces. The instrument will also be used for in-situ magnetotransport and electroluminescence measurements to determine spin transport across ferromagnetic semiconductor heterojunctions and magnetoresistance of ferromagnetic epitaxial layers. In designing and developing this instrumentation the students and postdoctoral associates will learn to work as a team and be exposed to multiple disciplines ranging from low temperature and semiconductor physics, superconductivity, optics, magnetics, and UHV practices to molecular beam epitaxy, surface and materials science. This is an award for instrument development at the university of Minnesota-Twin Cities. The possibility of manipulating and detecting the spin of an electron in addition to its charge is the key to the development of Spintronics , which integrates magnetic and semiconductor materials. However, the detailed knowledge of both the magnetic and electronic properties of ferromagnetic semiconductor interfaces, is needed to understand and control the electron spin as it crosses the interface. The development of a in-situ magnetic characterization will allow magnetic, magneto-optic and magnetotransport properties of magnetic semiconductor single crystal structures to be studied during their formation from subatomic layer to micrometer thicknesses as they are grown by molecular beam epitaxy without exposing the structures to air. During this project, students and postdoctoral associates will be acquire skills in experimental techniques (ultra-high vacuum technology, magnetics, optics, cryogenics, superconductivity, electronics, mechanical design and materials processing) as well as in understanding the underlying physics (role of atomic structure at surfaces and interfaces and in the bulk of materials on the magnetic properties of thin films and the spin polarized transport across interfaces between magnetic materials and semiconductors doc3781 none Rho. This award to the University of Memphis provides support for the acquisition of a scanning nanoindentation testing system for the characterization of bone materials at the nanoindentation scale. A scanning nanoindenter, which combines the load-displacement transducer of a nanoindenter with the image scanning capabilities of an atomic force microscope, will be used to determine the mechanical properties and image surface microstructure and topography of bone materials. It will constitute a major advance in our ability to understand bone tissue mechanics on a scale much closer to the cellular level. Knowledge of such mechanical properties and structural characteristics are a key step towards predicting the behavior of whole bone and determining the extent to which aging and disease processes alter the strength of bone. This new instrument will enhance the research infrastructure of the University of Memphis and will also serve as a focal point for the introduction of state-of-the-art techniques and instrumentation into several engineering courses doc3782 none Lavernia This award to the University of California at Irvine is for the acquisition an equipment for Laser Engineered Net Shaping (LENSTM model 750) process, for the direct fabrication of nanostructured coatings laminate composites. The LENS process utilizes computer-aided design solid models to automatically control the manufacture of functional, near-net shape, fully dense coatings metallic parts with reasonably complex features. Moreover, the LENSTM technique is unique in its flexibility for the direct fabrication of a component over conventional processing as well as Rapid Prototyping (RP) technologies, including the ability to create an embedded structure, superior material properties for a comparable wrought material, and minimum waste. The research will establish the fundamental issues underlying the fabrication of nanostructured coatings laminate composites based one firm and detailed understanding of the relevant fundamental phenomena. One example is the unusual thermal stability inherent to certain types of nanostructured materials. Critical issues in nanostructured coating and or layered structural materials fabricated by LENSTM technology will be addressed. By varying powder mixture and using multiple powder feeders, the LENSTM facility will be used to fabricate a functionally gradient coating and laminate composites from a variety of materials. The PI s will fabricate functionally gradient nanostructured coatings laminates, and investigate the related fundamental phenomena (i.e., interfacial bonding, thermal stress, and grain size and growth) as well as mechanical properties will be investigated. %%% This is an instrument acquisition award to the University of California at Irvine. Professor Lavernia and collaborators will purchase a LENSTM model 750 for Laser Engineered Net Shaping process, for the direct fabrication of nanostructured coatings laminate composites. Significant interest has been generated recently in the field of nanostructured (also described as nanocrystalline, nanophase, or nanoscale) materials, in which the grain size is usually in the range of 1-100 nanometers. More than 50 volume percent of atoms in nanocrystalline materials may be associated with grain boundaries or interfacial boundaries when the grain size is small enough. Thus, a significant amount of interfacial component between neighboring atoms associated with grain boundaries contributes to the physical properties of nanocrystalline materials. Interest in this class or materials is driven by their unusual physical properties, such as a very high strength and thermal stability. In the case of nanostructured coatings, the potential applications span the entire spectrum of technology, from thermal barrier coatings for turbine blades to wear resistant rotating parts. The new instrument will strengthen the interdiciplinary training of undergraduate and graduate students at UCI doc3783 none Jacobson This is an instrument acquisition award to upgrade a user facility and provide a new capability at the University of Houston and at Rice University. With this new capability, variations in the chemistry and the composition of materials can be detected, even if these changes occur within less than one nanometer within the material. The key to the new technique is the ability to form very small electron probe (less than 0.2 nanometer in diameter) and the ability to precisely position and control the probe. Electrons transmitted through the material contain information about the chemistry of the material at the location of the electron probe. This new capability allows researchers to analyze these electrons. These electrons can also be used to generate a compositional image of the material, in addition to the structural image. It is anticipated that the close collaboration between the users at the University of Houston and at Rice University initiated with this proposal will lead to transfer of knowledge in modern electron microscopy techniques benefiting the education of undergraduate and graduate students. Educational opportunities will be provided as formal courses in electron microscopy including a laboratory component and through multi-user materials characterization facility (MCF) research experience programs. MCF is also an important component in this educational outreach programs designed to increases K12 student interest and achievement in science and provide opportunities for the development of teachers. This is an instrument acquisition award to upgrade a user facility and provide a new capability at the University of Houston and at Rice University. With this new capability, variations in the chemistry and the composition of materials can be detected, even if these changes occur within less than one nanometer within the material. The key to the new technique is the ability to form very small electron probe (less than 0.2 nanometer in diameter) and the ability to precisely position and control the probe. Electrons transmitted through the material contain information about the chemistry of the material at the location of the electron probe. This new capability allows researchers to analyze these electrons. These electrons can also be used to generate a compositional image of the material, in addition to the structural image. It is anticipated that the close collaboration between the users at the University of Houston and at Rice University initiated with this proposal will lead to transfer of knowledge in modern electron microscopy techniques benefiting the education of undergraduate and graduate students. Educational opportunities will be provided as formal courses in electron microscopy including a laboratory component and through multi-user materials characterization facility (MCF) research experience programs. MCF is also an important component in this educational outreach programs designed to increases K12 student interest and achievement in science and provide opportunities for the development of teachers doc3784 none Liu This is an award to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for the acquisition of a digital imaging system for Transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The instrument will be fitted on an existing JEOL TEM to develop two new techniques, super-resolution TEM, (SRTEM) and selected reflection imaging (SRI). This will make it possible to develop a simple but an effective model to extend the resolution of TEM micrograph through post image processing. The first method only involves Fourier transform and image summation. With this method, images with 0.15 nanometer resolution are routinely obtained with this method. The second technique consists in selected reflection imaging for nanostructured materials characterization. This technique uses a single ring in the electron diffraction pattern to form the image. A small aperture and illumination tilting are used to achieve the experimental set-up in a conventional TEM. Preliminary results obtained using conventional JEOL TEM indicate that this technique has the advantage of easy operation, and instant results. Measurement of nano-particle size, phase identification and volume fraction measurement in dual phase materials will be possible. This grant is to support acquisition of a digital imaging system, a sophisticated system which will be a tremendous improvement in terms of resolution, as well as ability to record the images and later analyze them, over the current facilities. The instrument is best suited for research at the small nanotechnology scale doc3632 none Dean This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program to Tuskegee Institute, George Washington Carver Foundation is for the acquisition of two new instruments, a Dynamic Mechanical Analyzer (DMA) and a Thermomechanical Analyzer(TMA). The DMA and TMA will establish new research capabilities at Tuskegee University and will be very useful in characterizing structure-processing- property relationships of advanced materials that are the focus of both current and future research. Polymers and polymer-based composites are primarily studied at Tuskegee. Several students in a newly established doctoral degree program in materials will benefit significantly from the use of these instruments in their dissertation research, with an additional eight (8) M.S. and six (6 ) undergraduate students in Chemistry, Mechanical and Chemical Engineering also using the instrumentation. Use of these instruments will not only enable students to enhance the quality of their research, but will also allow them to strengthen the principles learned in the classroom with actual hands-on experience and significantly broaden their exposure to physical characterization of polymers and polymer-based composites. Undergraduate students involved in these projects will use their research to satisfy their senior project requirements. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program to Tuskegee Institute, George Washington Carver Foundation is for the acquisition of two new instruments, a Dynamic Mechanical Analyzer (DMA) and a Thermomechanical Analyzer(TMA). The DMA and TMA will establish new research capabilities at Tuskegee University and will be very useful in characterizing structure-processing- property relationships of advanced materials that are the focus of both current and future research. Polymers and polymer-based composites are primarily studied at Tuskegee. Several students in a newly established doctoral degree program in materials will benefit significantly from the use of these instruments in their dissertation research, with an additional eight (8) M.S. and six (6 ) undergraduate students in Chemistry, Mechanical and Chemical Engineering also using the instrumentation. Use of these instruments will not only enable students to enhance the quality of their research, but will also allow them to strengthen the principles learned in the classroom with actual hands-on experience and significantly broaden their exposure to physical characterization of polymers and polymer-based composites. Undergraduate students involved in these projects will use their research to satisfy their senior project requirements doc3786 none Chorin The investigator an his colleague continue working in the area of interface modeling, level set methods and fast marching methods, with applications to plastic injection moulding, the computation of seismic travel times, semiconductor manufacturing and computer vision. They also continue to develop statistical prediction methods for partial differential equations with underresolution and partial data, with applications to turbulence, climate modeling, and many-body problems. The common thread of these topics is computation and analysis in the presence of uncertainty The main difficulty in many important problems of engineering is to find the exact location of a surface or the exact time a signal arrives at a given point. Well-known examples occur in the manufacture of microchips, where it is important to control exactly various manufacturing processes, and in robotics, where one has to find the optimal way to perform a task. The investigators have developed powerful computer methods for solving such problems; these methods obviate the need for costly and lengthy trial-and-error in a physical laboratory. They continue to improve these tools, with new applications in manufacturing, geology, and computer vision. Many problems in science lack sufficient data for a complete specification, or are so complex that they cannot be solved in full. Examples are weather and climate forecasting as well as problems in biology. The investigators have examined carefully what is the most one can reliably say in such situations, and have developed computer methods for finding effectively the best information one can in problems where a full solution is out of reach. They are also developing ways of telling in advance what the uncertainty in the answers will be when one can estimate the uncertainty in the data doc3787 none Johnson This an award is for the acquisition of a modern sample preparation equipment to prepare with minimum damage specimens of complex materials for transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The equipment will provide new opportunities and advance the current capability of the TEM facility at Caltech acquired earlier with NSF support. The new sample preparation equipment will allow reliable and controlled specimen preparation, and the reduction of specimen contamination in the electron microscope. It will facilitate investigations of micromechanisms of deformation in bulk metallic glasses, interfacial phenomena in composites and other fundamental properties of a wide range of materials. The equipment will see heavy use for a broad range of materials investigations currently and for materials research at Caltech over the next decade. This an award is for the acquisition of a modern sample preparation equipment to prepare with minimum damage specimens of complex materials for transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The equipment will provide new opportunities and advance the current capability of the TEM facility at Caltech acquired earlier with NSF support. The new sample preparation equipment will allow reliable and controlled specimen preparation, and the reduction of specimen contamination in the electron microscope. It will facilitate investigations of micromechanisms of deformation in bulk metallic glasses, interfacial phenomena in composites and other fundamental properties of a wide range of materials. The equipment will see heavy use for a broad range of materials investigations currently and for materials research at Caltech over the next decade doc3788 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program to the University of California San Diego is for the acquisition and installation of a cold cathode field emission gun scanning electron microscope(FEG-SEM) with analytical capabilities for the Electron Microscopy Facility of the Materials Science Program, part of the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). The new instrument will enhance existing and new research projects currently active at UCSD in the engineering, physics and chemistry departments, as well as at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. The FEG-SEM will provide high beam stability, low energy fluctuation, low beam current and high brightness in a range of accelerating voltages, features that are required for imaging nanoscale features in electronic, magnetic, optical, structural, organic and biological materials. The instrument will enhance both graduate and undergraduate research and education. The graduate students will benefit from hands-on exposure to a state-of-the-art microscope that will aid significantly in their research projects. Undergraduates will particularly benefit from this class, as it will be offered to upper division students who have a materials emphasis in their major program (currently available in mechanical, electrical, physics and chemistry departments). This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program to the University of California San Diego is for the acquisition and installation of a cold cathode field emission gun scanning electron microscope(FEG-SEM) with analytical capabilities for the Electron Microscopy Facility of the Materials Science Program, part of the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). The proposed equipment will replace the existing Cambridge 360 SEM, now 10 years old, and provide state-of-the-art capabilities. This system currently supports the research programs of faculty from departments and research units campus wide. The Materials Science Program will manage the new SEM and it will be available to all UCSD affiliated personnel and the outside community on an hourly fee basis. The new instrument will enhance existing and new research projects currently active at UCSD in the engineering, physics and chemistry departments, as well as at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography (SIO). The FEG-SEM will provide imaging of detailed structures coupled with the elemental analysis capabilities; it is a crucial tool for modern materials research and for training the next generation of engineers and scientists. The instrument will enhance both graduate and undergraduate research and education. The graduate and undergraduate students will benefit from hands-on exposure to a state-of-the-art microscope. A graduate level course in scanning electron microscopy will be introduced yearly into the Materials Science curriculum and will be available to all graduate students at UCSD and SIO. Undergraduates will particularly benefit from this class, as it will be offered to upper division students who have a materials emphasis in their major. In summary, the new instrument will provide a much-needed research and teaching tool by providing image and analytical capabilities not currently available to students on the UCSD campus doc3789 none Kofke, D. A. SUNY @ Buffalo This project is concerned with the development of models that can predict and characterize a broad range of properties of hydrogen fluoride (HF) and its mixtures with water. The specific aim of the project is to develop and test molecular models appropriate for these systems. The larger aim in all of this work is the advancement of modeling techniques that bridge ab initio quantum chemistry and bulk-phase modeling via molecular simulation. Thus the specific focus of the project provides a vehicle for treating a problem of much broader impact. The modeling incorporates as much as possible the fundamental quantum chemistry that governs the molecular interactions. Several approaches are examined. The first approach adopts methods that are currently in wide used for quantitative modeling. Dispersion and repulsive interaction are treated with 12-6 exp-6 models, and hydrogen-bonding is modeled via a simple electrostatic treatment (e.g., point charges). It is anticipated that this methodology will fail because it does not capture important features of HF interactions. Other approaches are considered to include the quantum-mechanical effects present in HF that are difficult to capture using an analytic potential. These include a combined quantum- and molecular-mechanics treatment that ahs been applied to water, and a treatment that considers three-body effects explicitly coupled with a high-quality model for the dimer. Advances in modeling of HF are then introduced to molecular models of water to examine the behavior of HF water mixtures. It is of interest to test the validity of any HF water model by examining its ability to explain the thermodynamic inconsistency obtained in the application of simple models to published experimental HF water vapor-liquid equilibrium data. All modeling efforts here are concerned with the volumetric properties, phase equilibria and heat effects. The behavior of HF in all of these directions is highly anomalous. Additional components of this study are concerned with the effect of intermolecular association on surface tension, and on the development of improved molecular simulation techniques of associating fluids. The interest in the former is driven by the anomalously small surface tension of HF, which contributes to its ability to form aerosols (a significant safety problem), while the motivation for the latter is related to the natural inefficiency of simulation when applied to associating systems, combined with our interest in studying such systems with computationally expensive molecular models doc3790 none Some mechanisms of protein trafficking through the secretory system are conserved among all eukaryotes; nevertheless, plants possess a highly complex vacuolar targeting machinery. The complexity is the result of the diverse nature of vacuoles in some cell types. At least two distinct types of vacuolar structure have been observed: one with a lytic and one with a storage function. Proteins of the secretory pathway are usually first inserted into the endoplasmic reticulum before being transported through the endomembrane system in small transport vesicles. Vacuolar proteins have signals that sort them to vacuoles; if such signals are deleted, vacuolar proteins are instead secreted from the plant cell. The plant vacuolar sorting signals identified to date fall into three classes: N-terminal propeptides (NTPPs), C-terminal propeptides (CTPPs), and much less characterized portions of mature proteins. A putative vacuolar sorting receptor has been identified in pea (BP80) and in Arabidopsis (AtELP), and it likely functions in the route taken by the proteins with NTPP signals. This putative receptor has been found in the Golgi, trans-Golgi network (TGN)-derived vesicles, and in the prevacuolar compartment (PVC). Although transport between the TGN and PVC is critical for faithful delivery of cargo proteins to the vacuole, very little is known about this process in any multicellular organism. This project will focus on mechanisms that mediate transport between the TGN and PVC. Experiments to be carried out in this project aim at investigating further (1) the mechanisms and diversity of NTPP pathway in plants, (2) the in vivo function of the putative vacuolar sorting receptor, (3) the PVC, and (4) vesicles that deliver cargo to that compartment. Although much work has been done with Arabidopsis, no endogenous vacuolar proteins from this plant have as yet been characterized and no reliable antibodies against vacuolar proteins are available. Dr. Raikhel will prepare and characterize antibodies against vacuolar markers to analyze transport of Arabidopsis proteins to the vacuoles using information available in the Arabidopsis EST database and by purifying proteins from isolated vesicles. These endogenous markers and her laboratory s well-characterized heterologous markers will be used to analyze trafficking in both wild-type and Arabidopsis mutants created in the course of this research. The putative vacuolar sorting receptor, AtELP, is a representative of a small gene family. Characterization of the cargo specificity of AtELP has been done only in in vitro assays; no proteins that bind AtELP in vivo have been identified. One important question is whether AtELP and related proteins interact with a number of different vacuolar sorting signals or only with NTPP-containing cargo. Dr. Raikhel will try to answer this question using experimental strategies that include reverse genetics, biochemistry, and cell biology. The nature and function of the PVC in plants is not well defined. Unlike in yeast, most SNARE proteins that mediate trafficking between the Golgi and PVC in plants are represented by small gene families. In addition, the Principal Investigator has found that in plants, some SNARE proteins have different roles than in yeast. Experiments will address the question of whether this is a result of redundancy or functional complexity of plant SNAREs, and structural and functional diversity of the plant PVCs. They will also examine the cargo and resident proteins of the PVC to see whether only proteins found in the AtELP-carrying vesicles are present in the PVC, or whether the PVC is a compartment where vesicles taking different routes deliver their cargo. They will use immunoprecipitation experiments followed by a proteomic approach to obtain sequence information of cargo proteins from various vesicles and the PVC. This research will provide important insights into the fundamental processes of vacuolar sorting in multicellular organisms that may be unique to plants and are of broad significance. Beyond its contribution to basic knowledge, this work will improve the success rate of sorting novel gene products to desired parts of the cell, an important aspect of crop design and biopharming doc3791 none Deepwater rice (Oryza sativa L.) is a subsistence crop in areas of Southeast Asia that are flooded during the rainy season. Survival of this rice depends on its capacity to elongate rapidly when it becomes submerged and to keep part of its foliage above the rising waters. This accelerated growth response is initiated by the altered internal gas atmosphere in submerged plants. Reduced oxygen levels promote synthesis of the plant growth regulator ethylene. Ethylene causes a reduction in the level of abscisic acid, which is a potent growth inhibitor, and enhances thereby the responsiveness of the plant to the growth hormone gibberellin. Thus, the rate of growth may be determined by the balance of endogenous abscisic acid and gibberellin. Internodal elongation is based on increased production of new cells in the intercalary meristem and on enhanced elongation of these newly formed cells. Experiments outlined in this proposal are designed to further elucidate the mode of action of ethylene and gibberellin in deepwater rice internodes and to study biochemical and molecular reactions that underlie the growth response. Expansins are proteins that mediate loosening of the plant cell wall and, by this mechanism, are thought to cause growth of plants. Transgenic rice plants with increased or decreased expan-sin content will be used to elucidate further the function of expansins. Until now, the occurrence and role of four a-expansins have been examined. In further experiments, the localization and function of seven new a -expan-sins will be determined. The soon to be released genome sequence of rice will be examined for additional a -expansin genes to complete the study of this gene family in rice. Experiments will also be extended to determine the occurrence and role of b-expansins in deepwater rice internodes. Evidence indicates that these expansins may be more effective as cell-wall-loosening proteins in monocots, such as rice, than are the a -expansins. A number of gibberellin-regulated genes have been identified in deepwater rice internodes. One of these encodes a protein (Os-GRF1) that appears to be involved in transcriptional regulation. Its function will be further investigated, especially with respect to its interaction with other regulatory proteins. Two other gibberellin-regulated genes encoding a putative plasma membrane receptor (DD3) and a trans-membrane kinase (Os-TMK) will also be studied further with respect to their interaction with other cellular components. The mechanism by which ethylene reduces the endogenous content of abscisic acid will be examined. The most likely route is the -promotion by ethylene of abscisic acid oxidation to phaseic acid. If this proves to be the case, the cDNA encoding ABA 8 -hydroxylase, the enzyme that mediates oxidation of abscisic acid, will be cloned, and the effect of ethylene on the expression of the corresponding gene will be determined. These experiments will address the mechanism of ethylene action at the molecular level. The above project on the regulation of growth in rice will advance the general understanding of growth processes in plants and will serve the education of junior research associates as well as that of undergraduate students who have, in the past, written senior theses or term papers based on experimental work with deepwater rice doc3792 none The objective of this project is to gather farm-level time-series data in Ouro Preto do Oeste, Rondonia, Brazil. These data will be used to investigate the land-use choices of small-scale farmers in the Brazilian Amazon and to assess how these choices impact tropical deforestation in the region. This project is designed to be the second stage of in situ data collection initiated in September . During the first stage 196 farmers were interviewed. The survey questions were designed to assess past and current government policy concerning agricultural practices in the Amazon as well as to investigate individual land-use decisions in Rondonia and their implications on deforestation. Further, the survey sought to determine if sustainable farming techniques were adopted, which farmers adopted them, and the determinants of adoption. In the second stage of the project, a panel data set will be initiated through continuing interviews with these same Rondonia farmers. The project is designed to examine how deforestation is influenced by farmers who live in the region and the impact of choosing between sustainable and nonsustainable agricultural techniques. It is necessary to collect time-series panel data to properly examine deforestation trends comprehensively and to evaluate current and future policy options. This research is important and unique because microeconomic time-series panel data are rarely found in the literature concerning developing countries, especially those data collected at individual households. The collection and analysis of these data will therefore make a considerable contribution to the economic and environmental literature on deforestation (and related environmental issues) that face developing nations and may serve to guide future policy adoption in these tropical environments. The major source of deforestation in Rondonia, Brazil is the use of slash-and-burn agriculture by small-scale farmers. It is well documented that the adoption of sustainable methods of agriculture can reduce deforestation drastically if utilized by a majority of the farmers. Unfortunately, results from the first stage of the analysis found that only a few farmers used sustainable agriculture in - in Ouro Preto do Oeste (as well as many other settlements in the Brazilian Amazon). However, the first stage of the analysis also indicated that, it is expected that more farmers are likely to adopt sustainable agriculture as the benefits of the farming method are shown. Imperfect information appeared to be one of the main deterrents to the adoption of sustainable agriculture in Ouro Preto do Oeste. On the positive side, local farmer organizations and cooperatives were found to play an important role in the decision to adopt sustainable techniques. These results suggest that national and regional policies, that provide information about sustainable agriculture and support local farm organizations, can greatly increase the diffusion of sustainable agriculture in Ouro Preto do Oeste and similar settlements in the Amazon. To examine the continued adoption of sustainable agriculture and the relation between farming techniques and deforestation over time, further data are required. Time-series panel data will provide a framework to trace national and regional policies impacting farmers land-use decisions and therefore offer insight into the rate of and reasons for deforestation in this region doc3793 none This project is to provide partial funding for eleven U.S. geographers to participate in the symposium on Native American Cultural Ecologies at the 50th International Congress of Americanists (ICA) in Warsaw in July . The multinational interdisciplinary group of between thirty and forty experts from Europe, North, Middle, and South America who will collaborate in that symposium intend to synthesize, reevaluate, and redirect theoretical and applied efforts regarding the relationship between sustainable development and the ecological knowledges and practices of native peoples in the present and the past. Scholarship on both past and present native ecologies is well advanced and has achieved many significant insights. But without theoretical integration of those different strands into a meaningful whole that cuts across study of the past and the present to engage contemporary theorization of society, nature, space, and their intersection in development and conservation challenges, the empirical detail will mount without significant general understanding. Understanding of the relationship between sustainable development and the ecological knowledges and practices of native peoples remains as intellectually and societally important as it remains controversial and unclear. The notion of sustainable development sits at the core of addressing the two great challenges of our time -- global poverty and environmental degradation. Those two phenomena are linked in complex ways at multiple scales and with increasing globalization will become ever more interwoven. The special symposium will strengthen an international network of collaboration and help increase our understanding of the various issues associated with sustainable development and native ecologies doc3794 none Heidaran This award provides support for the travel and conference registration fees of students and young investigators as participants in the conference Signal Transduction by Engineered Extracellular Matrices, Tilton, New Hampshire, June 25-29, . This Gordon Conference discussed the converging roles of the extracellular matrix (ECM) and soluble factors for the repair or replacement of tissue lost or damaged due to disease or injury. Emphasis was placed on discussion of the state-of-the-art, unpublished research in signal transduction, the mechanisms by which growth factors and the ECM regulate cell fate, and their application to tissue engineering. Two roundtable discussions facilitated close interaction between researchers working in the fields of cytokine signal transduction, ECM, and tissue engineering. A workshop on career and research funding opportunities in these areas also was held. The meeting provided a platform for the development of long term interdisciplinary interactions, and exposed students and young professionals to the latest ideas and opportunities at the confluence of signal transduction, molecular and cellular biology, and tissue engineering doc3795 none Reptiles and amphibians in the northern portions of their ranges in North America may spend as much as half of their lives hibernating. Some overwinter on land, but many hibernate under water. Aquatic species avoid freezing by hibernating underwater, but they then must switch from aerial to aquatic respiration, with its attendant physiological challenges. However, there have been few detailed physiological ecological studies of naturally hibernating aquatic reptiles and amphibians. The PIs propose to study hibernation and overwintering in northern reptiles and amphibians, starting by expanding their previous laboratory studies on turtles to include additional turtle species, frogs, and wintertime field studies. The field physiology and behavior of naturally hibernating painted turtles, map turtles, snapping turtles, softshelled turtles, and bullfrogs from known northern populations in New England and Wisconsin will be studied by radiotelemetric tracking. Concurrently, laboratory studies of physiological responses to simulated hibernation will be conducted with all species. Data should allow generalizations about physiological ecological strategies employed during this major portion of the life cycle of freshwater reptiles and amphibians, lay the groundwork for future studies, and supply information crucial to conservation efforts doc3796 none With this award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program, the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University will acquire a Variable-Temperature Scanning Probe Microscope bolt-on module from Omicron Instruments. This instrument will facilitate research in a number of areas, including a) the phase transitions of individual nanocrystals, b) the electron transport through individual molecules, nanocrystals and their arrays and c) the electron transport through individual carbon nanotubes and nanorods. The VT-SPM system will serve as a major piece of infrastructure for building present and future efforts in investigating nanostructures and materials at Harvard University and it will serve as a locus for new collaborative efforts to fabricate and manipulate nanometer-scale materials and to investigate their physical and chemical properties in unprecedented detail. A scanning probe microscope (SPM) coupled with a variable-temperature stage allows atomic-resolution imaging of both conductive and nonconductive surfaces as well as a variety of chemically derived nanostructures at controlled sample temperature. This ability of SPM to image and manipulate nanometer-scale structures as a function of temperature opens up many new research fronts in chemistry, physics and related interdisciplinary areas of science since it allows physical and chemical investigations of nanometer-sized materials as a function of the most important thermodynamic variable, temperature. Using the SPM will expose students to a central tool for surface science, materials science and the emerging field of nanoscience. With this award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program, the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University will acquire a Variable-Temperature Scanning Probe Microscope bolt-on module from Omicron Instruments. This instrument will facilitate research in a number of areas, including a) the phase transitions of individual nanocrystals, b) the electron transport through individual molecules, nanocrystals and their arrays and c) the electron transport through individual carbon nanotubes and nanorods. The VT-SPM system will serve as a major piece of infrastructure for building present and future efforts in investigating nanostructures and materials at Harvard University and it will serve as a locus for new collaborative efforts to fabricate and manipulate nanometer-scale materials and to investigate their physical and chemical properties in unprecedented detail. Using the SPM will expose students to a central tool for surface science, materials science and the emerging field of nanoscience doc3797 none Principal Investigator: Haimin Wang, NJIT The investigators will use Big Bear Solar Observatory (California) and the Huairou Solar Observatory (China) vector magnetographs to measure shear properties of the photospheric magnetic field. The main effort is to derive the shear properties from data acquired, and to make the information widely available on a web site for use as a flare predictor. The investigators will also implement a 24-hour high-resolution and high-cadence network (California, China, Austria) to observe the Sun in the spectral line H-alpha, developing automatic monitoring for flux emergence and on-disk filament eruptions. These results will also be made available on a web site for use in space weather forecasting. This network will also be used to improve the classic Bear Alerts and make them more complete. Any of the three stations will be able to initiate an alert - yielding a duty cycle over 80%. The investigation will include a statistical study of the relation between filament eruptions and observed geomagnetic storms, and comparison of observations with a specific (Chen CME) model doc3798 none Symbiosis with chemoautotrophic bacteria enables some marine invertebrates, such as clams, mussels, and tubeworms, to live without relying on particulate food for their nutrition. Instead, these organisms are autotrophic. They are able to fix carbon dioxide and ammonia into organic compounds using hydrogen sulfide as an energy source via a process analogous to photosynthesis in plants. Many of the biochemical pathways of autotrophy are localized to intracellular symbionts housed within specialized cells of the host tissues. Consequently, these invertebrates thrive in otherwise inhospitable or food-poor environments such as deep-sea hydrothermal vents, cold seeps, and anaerobic sediments. The goal of this project is to determine the physiological and biochemical mechanisms that result in autotrophic metabolism. This project will involve a readily collected coastal clam symbiosis, Solemya velum. Previous studies have largely been of animals that are difficult to collect and maintain in the laboratory. Experiments will focus on assimilation of ammonia into organic compounds and address specific questions including: what are the ammonia uptake capabilities of S. velum, how is ammonia uptake affected by environmental conditions, what biochemical pathways are responsible for assimilation, and are these pathways localized to the host or symbiont? These questions will be investigated using a combination of biochemical and molecular techniques as well as whole organism physiological studies using a newly designed automated flow-through respirometry system. Symbiosis-based autotrophy is a globally important process that can support entire ecosystems such as deep-sea vents or coral reefs. This process results from mutualistic host symbiont interactions that are not well understood in these and many other symbiotic systems. A better understanding of the nature of these interactions and how they affect the characteristics and physiology of the association as a whole can be valuable in preserving and managing ecosystems that rely on symbiotic organisms. This information potentially has even broader impacts, since association of bacteria (mutualistic and parasitic) with other organisms are ubiquitous doc3799 none This research will contribute to learning how a novel allatostatin (AST) peptide affects heart rate. Studies will be conducted to determine which part of the peptide is required for its effect, how the peptide interacts with other molecules to cause its activity, and where and when the peptide is present in the brain and gut in order to understand how AST acts. Environmental and physiological factors influence the brain to release peptide hormones that affect activities essential to the development and well being of an animal. The role of peptide hormones as messengers and modulators of critical functions makes it important to delineate the mechanisms by which they act. Understanding how a peptide acts and where it exists in an animal provides important basic science that can lead to applied science applications doc3800 none This project represents a major effort to apply global technologies to the analyses of specific acclimation processes in cyanobacteria. It would make it possible to identify genes that are controlled under a number of different environmental conditions and elucidate networks of control that link the responses of the cell to diverse environmental signals. Specifically microarray analyses is being used to identify genes that become active during acclimation of Synechocystis PCC to high light and nitrogen limitation. A whole genome chip is available. These analyses will provide clues concerning light and possibly redox control of metabolic processes. It may also be possible to identify the regulatory elements associated with high light and nutrient limitation responses since the transcription of regulatory genes in prokaryotes is often controlled by the environmental condition to which the regulator is sensitive. Microarray technology will be used to analyze one regulatory mutant, dspA, that has been shown to be altered in control of many high light regulated genes in Synechocystis PCC ; the DspA protein appears to be involved in acclimation of the cells to high light. The information generated in this initial study will be used to exploit microarrays to dissect global regulation in cyanobacteria doc3801 none George Richter-Addo of the University of Oklahoma is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program for research on the reactions of nitroso and nitrosyl groups with metalloporhyrins. The long-term goal of the research is to use spectroscopic, spectroelectrochemical, structural and electronic properties of X-N=O compounds to increase understanding of reactions of such compounds with metalloporphyrins, and of the reactions of metalloporphyrins containing X-N=O components. Chemical and spectroelectrochemical reactions of metalloporphyrin complexes of nitrosamines and nitrosoarenes will be investigated as well as the chemistry of products that result from trans additions of alkyl nitrites and thionitrites to porphyrins. Emphasis will be placed on understanding the reaction chemistry of the target compounds. Although N=O is a small molecule it has a complex and important chemistry. Compounds of the X-N=O sort are of central importance in biological, industrial and ecological systems, among others. The -N=O grouping in molecules can participate in a wide variety of diverse chemical reactions, depending on the detailed nature of the molecules in which the -N=O group is bound. Following up on a successful research effort that has characterized the atomic and electronic structures of a variety of X-N=O species, including many in which X has been the biologically important porphyrin grouping, the present program focuses on the various types of chemical reactivity that are exhibited by the N=O grouping in its compounds, and seeks to elucidate how those reactivity-patterns are influenced by atomic and electronic structure. Progress in gaining such understanding would have important consequences for science and technology in all the many areas in which X-N=O compounds are involved doc3802 none Canup Dr. Robin Canup from the Southwest Research Institute will pursue a systematic study of the outcome of collisions between planet-sized bodies, i.e. those larger than a few thousand kilometers in diameter. In the past decade, it has been established that such collisions are the dominant process in the final stages of terrestrial planet formation. Current methods for parameterizing such impacts however remain primitive, and rely either on broad extrapolations from laboratory-scale experiments or on idealistic assumptions, such as completely inelastic mergers. Models of terrestrial accretion fundamentally require a better understanding of the outcomes of large-scale planetary collisions to advance significantly. Accretion simulations predict that most terrestrial planets experience impacts by other planet-sized bodies during their final formation stages, and that the specific outcomes of these impacts determine the end characteristics of a planet, e.g. its spin, obliquity, and any impact-generated satellites. In addition, late-stage accretion simulations performed to date all yield terrestrial planetary systems significantly different than our own - most notably with too few planets, whose orbital eccentricities are much higher than those of the nearly circular orbits of Earth and Venus. All proposed resolutions to these discrepancies involve some type of dynamical interaction between the growing proto-planets and a background population of much smaller debris, which has not yet been included in the late-stage accretion models. Such a background population would need to be maintained through the production of ejected debris during embryo-embryo collisions; however the efficiency of debris ejection is currently unknown. Dr. Canup will study of collisional outcomes of planet-scale impacts utilizing smooth particle hydrodynamics (SPH). This will include a directed look at debris production during large collisions and an assessment of the effects of fragmentation on the mass and angular momentum of colliding proto-planetary embryos. This study will be guided by the extensive past work modeling smaller-scale impacts (centimeter to asteroid-scale), as well as by studies modeling the specific impact believed to have formed the Earth s Moon. Specific parameters to be studied include the variation of escaping mass and escaping angular momentum with impactor mass, impactor-to-target mass ratio, impact velocity, impact parameter, and pre-impact spin of the target and impactor. This award is made through the Planetary Astronomy Program doc3803 none The Archbold Biological Station has proposed to conduct a planning workshop to develop the interdisciplinary capability and conceptual breadth of NEON, the National Ecological Observatory Network. The workshop will be held from 10-12 January . Workshop facilitator is Dr. Martyn Caldwell of Utah State University. The goals of the workshop are to: develop some broad ecological concepts that can be addressed by NEON, determine the types of infrastructure needed for observatories in NEON, address management issues for NEON infrastructure, discuss coordination of research within and among NEON sites, and provide advice on the challenges of overcoming the sociological and institutional barriers associated with colaborative research that is multi-institution, large-scale, and broadly interdisciplinary. Introductory sessions and reports by breakout groups will be broadcast on the world wide web. The workshop will result in a report submitted to NSF doc3804 none D. D. Joseph, University of Minnesota It is proposed to investigate the process of liquid fragmentation when submitted to gas flow induced stresses or to cavitation related vapor states. These effects are expected to be associated to high Weber number or very low-density conditions. Several additional contributing factors to the liquid breakup mechanism will be investigated, such as morphology, molecular weights and viscoelastic properties. In particular, the instabilities already identified as Rayleigh-Taylor in shock tube studies, will be now be considered from the Kelvin Helmhoz viewpoint, for such phenomena as stripping the side of the drop, the capillary instability of a filament pulled out of the drop, cavitation and outgassing. The focus of this part of the research is to explain the eventual droplet distribution as validated by high-speed movies and still photographs. Also, the breakup of polymer-thickened liquids under low-pressure conditions has been shown to be very dependent on thickener concentration. It is proposed to examined the dependence of such a process on polymer type, concentration and other related properties doc3805 none Professor Thomas DeVore of James Madison University is funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry program to perform experimental studies on chemical reactions occuring during the industrial process of chemical vapor deposition (CVD). These reactions have been difficult to study in the past due to the high pressure conditions (1 mbar to ambient pressure). The PI will study the chemical reactions of several first row transition metal 2,4-pentanedionato complexes under CVD conditions. Both the kinetics of the thermal decomposition of these complexes on heated glass substrates and their reactions with water or molecules produced by the thermal decomposition will be studied. Evolved Gas Analysis - Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy will be used. The mechanism of thermal decomposition will also be studied using differential scanning calorimetry. The PI then proposes to perform parallel studies on transition metal acetates. A successful outcome of this proposal would be a model to predict the chemical reactions that could occur during CVD processes. Chemical vapor deposition is an industrial process used to coat objects with thin films of material and to produce ultra-pure chemical compounds. Optimization of these processes require some understanding of the chemical rate constants involved in the reactions. This study will gather kinetic data and will attempt to explain the data in terms of mechanisms and energetics of the processes. James Madison University is an undergraduate institution, and several undergraduate students are actively involved in this work doc3806 none This project seeks partial support for the Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology (FASEB) conference on Lipid Modifications of Proteins to be held from August 6 to August 11, at Copper Mountain, Colorado. This will be a state-of-the-art exploration of the structure and function of acylation, prenylation, and GPI-anchorage, the three major forms of lipid modification of proteins in eukaryotic cells, and will provide a unique opportunity for workers in these separate but related fields to exchange ideas and insights. Lipid modification of proteins is an extremely active field. The focus of research in this area has broadened in the past few years from an earlier focus on identification of lipid-modified proteins and structural studies, to include elucidation of the physiological role of the lipid group. Outlined below are the major themes of the meeting. Signaling. Surprisingly high proportions of lipid-linked proteins are key players in cellular signaling pathways. These include Ras, Src-family tyrosine kinases, heterotrimeric G proteins, and 7- transmembrane spanning hormone receptors. In virtually all cases, the lipid modifications are required for function. This focuses attention on the specific role of these lipid groups in cellular physiology. All lipid modifications can allow association of otherwise hydrophilic proteins with membranes. Why are there different lipid modifications? What do they have in common, and how do they differ? Recent results on Ras show that modification of the same protein with different lipids can substantially alter function. New insights into these and other questions can be best answered by discussion between people who focus on individual modifications. This is one of the most important goals of this meeting. Membrane rafts. An important function of both GPI anchorage and acylation is to target proteins to cholesterol and sphingolipid-rich membrane domains or rafts. The finding that a number of cellular signaling events occur in these domains is an exciting development of the past two years, and has attracted a great deal of interest. Structure and function of rafts, and function of lipid-linked proteins in them, is another theme of the conference. Related to this theme are the importance of cholesterol in the biogenesis and maintenance of membrane rafts and its recently discovered role as a post-translational modification of the cell surface signaling molecule, hedgehog. Therapeutic applications of inhibiting lipid modifications. A third theme of this meeting will explore how inhibition of lipid modification can be used as a highly effective strategy in fighting disease. This effort can be divided in two major subclasses. The first is the use of farnesyl transferase inhibitors to blunt the function of activated Ras. The second target is infectious disease caused by unicellular eukaryotic pathogens such as Trypanosoma, Leishmania, and Plasmodium. Most of these organisms express extremely high levels of GPI-anchored proteins. Synthesis of these complex structures by a multistep pathway requires a number of enzymes, some of which are specific to the pathogens and are not shared by mammalian hosts. These are key targets for drug design, an avenue that is being actively pursued. Pathogen-specific features of myristoylation and prenylation are being targeted similarly. Lipid modification and membrane targeting. All lipid modifications increase protein hydrophobicity, and all lipid modifications can target lipidated proteins to membranes. But how are lipidated proteins targeted to different membranes? The specificity of membrane targeting of acylated and prenylated proteins is one of the most active areas of current research. The emerging picture that acylated and prenylated proteins can follow complicated pathways through cells following synthesis will be explored. Lipid-modified proteins are integral players in the cellular processes of signal transduction, membrane and protein trafficking, cellular proliferation and differentiation. The disciplines of cell biology, genetics, biochemistry, and biophysics are all used to understand the biology of protein lipidation. This meeting provides the opportunity to integrate the information derived from these approaches into a more coherent picture of how lipid modifications contribute to protein function doc3807 none The Department of Anthropology and the Office of the State Archaeologist at the University of Iowa recently acquired legal possession of one of the largest collections of documented human skeletal remains in the United States. Officially transferred in from Stanford University s School of Medicine, this extraordinary collection of nearly 1,100 individuals was amassed in the first half of the s from individuals born in the mid to late s. They are thus the remains of people that lived prior to major improvements in modern health care practices including the advent of antibiotics and epidemiological science, the widespread use of fluoride and other modern dental practices, improvements in the treatment of degenerative diseases such as arthritis, and the availability of vitamin supplements and other nutrition based improvements. The U-Iowa Stanford Collection thus provides an important new resource for physical anthropologists given the rapidly shrinking availability of human skeletal material in the United States, and adds significantly to the range of ethnic and regional variability encompassed in the other major collections (e.g., the Terry Collection, Smithsonian Institution, and the Hamann-Todd Collection, Cleveland Museum of Natural History). These collections constitute the cornerstone research resource for many aspects of physical anthropology, and with the advent of new bone DNA extraction and analytical technology, the U-Iowa Stanford collection, in particular, promises to contribute widely to health-related research. It is unlikely that such large, systematically amassed human skeletal collections could be obtained today, or ever will be again in the future. The proper curation and research availability of those few that exist, therefore, is a high priority in physical anthropology and is the focus of the current project doc3808 none Parsons Neurons generate electrical signals called action potentials, which are produced by a regulated movement of ions into and out of the neuron s surface membrane through specialized water-filled ion channels. The proposed studies will investigate how one class of membrane ion channels, the BK potassium channels, is regulated and how the activity of these BK channels affects the generation of action potential. Experiments will be done on neurons dissociated from the heart of Necturus maculosus, an aquatic amphibian. Recordings of electrical activity will be used to measure the movement of potassium ions through BK channels. The synchronous activation of a cluster of BK channels causes a small ionic current, the spontaneous miniature outward current or SMOC. The present study is designed to test what initiates and terminates SMOC activity and how this affects the generation and propagation of action potentials. BK channel activity also is dependent on fluctuations of calcium ions inside the neuron. A second aspect of the proposed study will use sophisticated optical techniques to determine what regulates the release of calcium from internal stores and how an elevation of internal calcium acts as a stimulus to direct BK channels to open. The question under study is important because information in the nervous system is conveyed by action potentials traveling along neurons. The results of the proposed studies will provide insight into the regulation of action potential generation. It is also well established that the activity of membrane ion channels, which generates action potentials, is highly regulated and complex. Thus, understanding the regulation of membrane ion channels in neurons is critical to understanding how information is processed in the nervous system. The results of the proposed studies will provide significant, new information about how one important class of ion channels, the BK channels, is regulated doc3809 none This project will explore the interplay between conformation and aromaticity in annulenes. Specifically, the morphology of the sigma framework of annulenes will be perturbed via replacement of the internal protons with deuterium atoms. The changes in pi-delocalization that takes place will be monitored by NMR spectroscopy. Measurements of the relative ring currents in deuterated and protiated annulenes and their respective dianions will lead to insight into the relative importance of the sigma and pi frameworks in terms of aromatic and antiaromatic character. With this RUI Award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the research of Professor Cheryl D. Stevenson of Illinois State University. Professor Stevenson s research will explore a phenomenon known to chemists as aromaticity, referring not to an olfactory characteristic but to a circumstance whereby the stability of a particular molecule is greater than expected due to a specific arrangement of its bonding electrons. In order to carry out this study, large ring-like molecules known as annulenes will be synthesized and an isotope of hydrogen incorporated at specific locations within the molecule. This hydrogen isotope, deuterium, will display certain behavior depending upon its location among the bonding electrons as well as whether the conditions for aromaticity are met. A molecular-scale MRI known as NMR will be used to probe the deuterium atoms doc3810 none This project will investigate health and nutritional status in three hurricane-affected areas of Honduras. It will focus on how those involved in reconstruction after a major disaster cope with sickness and healing, examining variation between several sites. It is hypothesized that health and nutritional status will be worse in large urban resettlement areas than in affected zones of a small, regional city ( urban disadvantage ); it is anticipated that this will persist despite greater investment in the larger zone in reconstruction resources. It is also hypothesized that local and household food security directly shape overall health and nutritional status. Relationships between health status and household income, demographic factors, educational levels, and hygiene will also be tested. Methods include participant observation, household surveys, and the collection of anthropometric and epidemiological data from sample households. The project will contribute to our understanding of the various forces that shape disaster recovery and public health after disasters doc3811 none driven presentation mechanism. 2. To stimulate future interactions amongst investigators from diverse disciplines. 3. To identify experimental approaches to unsolved questions in the field. 4. To tackle nomenclature issues. 5. To summarize the current knowledge of the field in an updated review to be published in a high profile scientific journal doc3812 none Recent advances in genetic technology have provided tools for studying the genetics of behavior. These techniques have been applied to studying the foraging behavior of honey bees. Some bees specialize on collecting pollen while others collect nectar. Variation among bees for foraging behavior has been shown to be a consequence of at least 3 major genes. These genes affect other behavioral traits as well, such as how bees perceive the taste of sugar, the sizes of the pollen and nectar loads they collect, and the age at which they begin foraging. The objective of this proposal is to better understand the effects and interactions of the genes that have been identified. Genetic analyses will be performed on strains of honey bees that were selected for their differences in foraging behavior. The genetic relationships between the different components of foraging behavior and the development of foraging behavior will be determined using DNA and behavioral analyses. These studies will lead to a better understanding of the genetic organization of behavioral traits. Honey bees share many neuro-physiological characteristics in common with other animals, including humans. However, honey bees are much easier to study because they can be bred, dissected, probed. What is learned from honey bee behavioral genetics can easily be transferred into the classroom and used as a model for a broader understanding of genetics and behavior doc3813 none Lutchen Objective: Two crucial deficiencies associated with pulmonary care during mechanical ventilation are:1) inadequate diagnostics on mechanical function; and 2) the propensity for ventilator induced lung injury. The first prevents efficient weaning of patients off of mechanical ventilation while the second can initiates or exacerbates a condition known as Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS). In this GOALI grant we will collaborate with Mallinckrodt, Inc., the world leader in mechanical ventilators, Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine, and the Harvard Medical School to advance a new paradigm in ventilation that can solve both deficiencies. Recently, we invented an Enhanced Ventilation Waveform (EVW) and a methodology that, in principal, is friendly with current commercial ventilator platforms (). The EVW is a broadband waveform that combines the energies from all its frequencies in an ingenious manner. The resulting waveshape permits reliable estimates of respiratory resustance and elastance (R and E) from 0.1 - 8 Hz while simultaneously ventilating the subject with typical tidal excursions on each breath. These data can allow differentiation from among categories of structural alterations in the lung due to disease. Likewise, we have proposed a potential solution to prevent ventilator induced lung injury; namely the application of noisy or variable ventilation (VV). In conventional ventilation (CV) the same tidal volume and breathing period are applied on every breath. In VV the tidal volume and breath time are varied from breath-to-breath while mean ventilation is maintained (somewhat akin to natural breathing). Our group has proposed a mechanism by which VV would minimize injury. Hence, in this grant we will expand our relation with Mallinckrodt, Inc. to test the following two hypotheses: 1) If delivered clinically, the EVW would provide enhanced diagnostic information on lung mechanics, and, because it contains higher frequency components, will simultaneously provide improved ventilation distribution and blood gas levels compared to any existing CV waveforms; and 2) The EVW and VV concepts are synergistic permitting a new EVW-VV paradigm in mechanical ventilation that will a) provide continuous monitoring of the mechanical conditions in the lung; b) provide superior gas exchange compared to other modes of CV; and c) avoid or minimize the risk of ventilator induced injury. To test these hypotheses we will advance several new technologies. Our specific aims are: 1. To develop technology for delivery of an EVW and a stochastic based VV pattern with currently used commercial ventilators, and then to combine this VV pattern with the EVW on a breath-by-breath basis. One key aspect of this challenge is to develop an adaptive feedback approach for insuring delivery and monitoring of the desired EVW to the patient through a long compliant patient tubing circuit. 2. To experimentally evaluate in a sheep model of asthmatic like constriction the efficacy of the EVW waveform for monitoring lung mechanics in the time and frequency domains and for improving ventilation distribution. 3. To evaluate the diagnostic, preventative and therapeutic benefits of the combined EVW-VV approach via experimental studies in a Sheep model of ARDS doc3814 none The long-term objective of this project is to understand the signal-transduction mechanisms that control cellular morphogenesis during the eukaryotic cell cycle. Normal morphogenesis is essential for the fidelity of cellular differentiation and reproduction. The goal of this project is to decipher the signal-transduction mechanisms that control the cell polarity process in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Polarized growth in response to different signals during the yeast cell cycle can result in the generation of several different morphological structures, such as buds, mating projections, and pseudohyphae. The principal investigator has previously characterized two protein components of the cell polarity apparatus in yeast; the Ras-related GTPase Cdc42p and its guanine-nucleotide exchange factor (GEF) Cdc24p. These components are integral parts of a signal-transduction pathway that leads to the generation of cell polarity during the cell cycle. These components have conserved counterparts in other eukaryotes, suggesting that common signal-transduction mechanisms controlling cell polarity may exist. The goal of this project is directed at understanding the regulation of the Cdc42p GTPase and how it interfaces with different cell-cycle regulatory processes. The hypothesis that will be tested with these proposed experiments is: The Cdc42p GTPase regulates multiple cell-cycle events through interactions with different downstream effectors. Analysis of Cdc42p effector domain mutations has indicated that Cdc42p is involved in multiple processes during the mitotic cell cycle, including bud emergence, a early post-bud emergence checkpoint, the apical-isotropic switch, the G 2 M morphogenetic checkpoint, and cytokinesis. However, the molecular mechanisms by which Cdc42p interacts with multiple downstream effectors to regulate these processes is still unclear. The function of Cdc42p in these multiple cell-cycle events will be examined, concentrating on the early post-bud emergence checkpoint, through the characterization of the D38E mutant allele and new Cdc42 effector-domain mutants. In addition, the mechanism by which Cdc42p is targeted to sites of polarized growth will be determined, through the mutational analysis of a functional GFP-Cdc42 fusion protein. The answers to these questions will not only be relevant to the basic understanding of signal-transduction mechanisms in cell biology, but also to the understanding of the cellular morphogenesis process in yeast and other eukaryotes doc3815 none Pachavis This award provides support for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and young faculty members to attend the Spring Materials Research Society Symposium BB: The Granular State. The symposium will be held in San Francisco, CA, on April 24-26, . The past decade has seen an explosive growth of interest in the physics of the granular state. Granular media are comprised of macroscopic objects with internal degrees of freedom. Granular assemblies exhibit phenomena that cut across the properties of traditional solids, liquids and gases. Hence, one can think of the granular state as a unique state. In many ways, the granular state is a generalized state of matter. The symposium will provide and interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of recent advances in granular materials research. The fifty-seven presentations are distributed among researchers in physics, mathematics and mechanical, civil, and chemical engineering. Participants come from universities, national laboratories and industry, and from twelve countries doc3816 none PI: Peter D. Nagy. Previous work on RNA replication, a central process in viral pathogenesis, has focused on promoter elements. The discovery by the PI and others of novel cis-acting elements, such as RNA replication enhancers that up-regulate RNA synthesis and RNA replication silencers that down-regulate RNA synthesis, changes our view of RNA virus replication. These RNA replication enhancer and silencer elements may play major roles not only in replication, but they may also affect the fitness and evolution of viruses and the symptoms they cause in infected hosts. Defective interfering (DI) RNAs, due to their simple genomes and robust replication are attractive model systems for understanding the role of cis-acting elements in RNA replication. DI RNAs are highly competitive, parasitic RNAs associated with many virus infections. DI RNAs compete against their helper (parental) viruses, resulting in a decreased replication rate of the helper virus and frequently leading to symptom attenuation in the host. The hypothesis to be tested in this research is that the superior competitiveness of the DI RNAs relative to the helper virus is due to (i) favorable positioning of cis-acting elements, such as promoters and replication enhancers in DI RNAs, and or (ii) the absence of some replication silencer elements in DI RNAs that may have been deleted during DI RNA formation. This research uses tombusviruses, model (+)-strand RNA viruses of plants, to: (i) characterize replication enhancer and silencer elements by using a recently developed cell-free replicase system; (ii) elucidate the mechanism of enhancer-mediated stimulation and silencer-mediated inhibition of RNA transcription through testing the direct effect of RNA enhancer and silencer elements on template binding by tombusvirus replicase proteins expressed in E. coli. These studies will lead to a better understanding of regulation of viral RNA synthesis by sequences on the RNA being copied. The studies will also elucidate the ability of certain incomplete viral variants to attenuate infections by the original, complete viruses from which they were derived. These variants are called defective interfering RNA s. They are derived from viruses that infect a wide range of organisms, including plants doc3817 none Transposable element Activator (Ac) often moves to linked sites, thus limiting its use in non-targeted mutagenesis programs. To overcome this limitation, Ac will be distributed at approximately 10 cM intervals throughout the maize genome. Each of the approximately 200 non-transgenic anchor Ac (aAc) lines in this near isogenic set will harbor a single active Ac element at a unique chromosomal locus. By utilizing an aAc line(s) that maps within 10 cM of any mapped gene or EST for directed tagging, these lines will provide an extremely powerful tool for gene isolation and functional analysis. In addition to facilitating the cloning of genes, the inbred nature of the population and low copy number of Ac elements in the genome will permit identification of subtle phenotypic changes in agronomically important traits such as plant height and flowering time. An equally important feature of this system is that multiple Ac-induced alleles can be generated from unstable Ac insertions to produce an allelic series. Thus, the generation of these aAc lines will provide an essential complement to the gene tagging programs currently being developed. This program will not only allow for the identification of novel mutant phenotypes, but will also provide a uniform genetic background for examining epistatic relationships and establishing genetic hierarchies. An important consideration in developing this system for general use, will be to determine the frequencies with which genes can be tagged relative to the position of the aAc. To address this issue, approximately 10,000 new transpositions will be selected from aAc s that have been distributed at roughly 10 cM intervals along chromosome 1S. Plants will be self-pollinated to generate segregating F2 populations that will be screened in sand benches and in the field for mutant phenotypes. Data from these studies will be used to develop a generalized strategy for directed and regional mutagenesis programs. An essential component of this program, is the development of the Emerson Summer Genetics Program to be established at the Boyce Thompson Institute and Cornell. This program will provide researchers from the US and abroad with the opportunity to utilize the Ac anchor lines while helping to generate the approximately 10,000 F1 and F2 families described above. Access to field sites is particularly important for researchers who are interested in initiating a maize genetics program and for those without access to field sites at their home institutions. To help bridge the gap between research and education, undergraduate students, high school teachers and a select group of high school seniors will be integrated into this program. Thus, teachers and students will spend up to 3 weeks in the field as a team with senior researchers from the US and abroad. The interactions and discussions that develop in the field and have long been part of the maize genetics tradition will help foster collaborations, increase public understanding of science and promote research in this agronomically important cereal. Deliverables: All maize seed stocks are propagated, genotyped and deposited as generated at: Maize Genetics Cooperation Stock Center c o Dr. Marty Sachs (msachs@uiuc.edu) To view a list of Ac stocks currently available see: http: www.agron.missouri.edu cgi-bin cprop stock_list.cgi#TK and for updates on the mapping progress see: http: bti.cornell.edu Brutnell_lab2 Projects Tagging BMGG_pro_tagging.html doc3818 none This project is in support of the Gordon Research Conference on Solid-State Chemistry. The invited speakers represent Academia, Industrial Laboratories and National Laboratories. World-class scientists who represent a broad cross-section of currently active areas of the field have been invited, and many younger scientists are included in the program, promising to make the presentations and discussions representative of new directions in the field. NSF support will enable graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty from undergraduate institutions to attend the conference. Solid-State Chemistry continues to have a direct impact on technological advances in areas such as photonic, thermoelectric, and superconductory materials for devices, all of which are included as topics in this conference doc3819 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Miami University will acquire a stopped-flow UV-VIS spectrophotometer. Research will focus on the following studies: a) chemistry of carcinogenic esters derived from heterocyclic aromatic amines; b) oxidation-reduction reactions of oxyhalogen species and ozone in aqueous solution; c) kinetic mechanism of metallo-beta-lactamases; and d) study of glyoxalase II. Stopped-flow spectroscopy is critical for the study of rapid chemical reactions, as it enables the detection of ultraviolet or visible light-absorbing short-lived intermediates. These studies will have an impact in a variety of areas including environmental sciences and biochemistry doc3820 none Color vision is an aspect of the visual world of humans and many animals but our understanding of the neural processes mediating color vision remains incomplete. Normal humans, rhesus monkey, and goldfish all have three cone types (trichromacy) and can discriminate the color of light at detection threshold intensity. Dichromatic ( color blind ) humans have only two cone types (dichromacy) and cannot discriminate the color of light at detection threshold intensity. This suggests that either trichromacy is necessary for high color vision sensitivity or that dichromatic humans have a deficit in color vision sensitivity because dichromacy is an abnormal condition in humans. To decide between these two possibilities behavioral color discrimination thresholds will be measured in normally dichromatic ground squirrels using food reward. If ground squirrels cannot discriminate the color of spectral lights at threshold intensities this will suggest that trichromacy is necessary for high color vision sensitivity. On the other hand if ground squirrels can discriminate the color of spectral lights at threshold intensities this will suggest that dichromatic humans have a post-receptoral color vision deficit and that high sensitivity is one of color vision s evolutionary advantages in both normal dichromats and trichromats doc3821 none Symposium FF entitled Interfaces, Adhesion and Processing in Polymer Systems , is being organized by the Materials Research Society (MRS) in San Francisco from April 24-28th as part of their Spring MRS Meeting. This symposium is being organized by Professors Spiros Anastasiadis (Foundation for Research and Technology, Greece) and Gregory Ferguson (LeHigh University), and Dr. Alamgir Karim (Polymers Division, NIST). The purpose is to hold an international meeting attended by leading polymer scientists in the area of polymer interfaces, adhesion and processing. The choice of the symposium topic derives from recent demands placed upon polymer performance that have paralleled the growth in applications and driven the development of sophisticated multiconstituent polymer formulations with superior physical, mechanical and interfacial properties. The symposium aims at addressing both the fundamental scientific aspects and the advances in applications of polymers at interfaces and in processing. To bring new ideas to these topics, the meeting will have a more multidiciplinary nature by having joint sessions with two other symposiums, Interfacial Aspects of Soft Biomaterials , and Nanostructures in Polymers . Biomaterials and biological interfaces are expected to play a key role in promising areas of biotechnology for the future. Likewise, recent interest in nanomaterials is driven by opportunities for improving material properties. Processing and interfacial aspects are expected to be important for both of these areas and hence the proposed joint sessions doc3822 none Majumdar This award provides support for the travel of U.S. student and post-doctoral fellows to participate in the Conference Non-Invasive Assessment of Trabecular Bone Micro-architecture and Competence of Bone to be held at Big Sur, California, May 7-9, . Recipients of support are to be selected by the Conference Organizing Committee based on their research focus and productivity. The subject matter of the Conference relates directly to two important Program priorities: research in biomechanical properties of bone and tissue, and the encouragement of students and young professionals to engage in research activities. The meeting will provide the opportunity for attendees to meet and confer with world leaders in biomaterials and biomechanics research, as is illustrated by the list of anticipated participants compiled by the Principal Investigator. The proceedings of the Conference are to be published in a book by the University of California San Francisco Post Graduate Education Division doc3823 none Maine The proposed studies investigate the regulation of cell fate during animal development. Experiments focus on how cell proliferation is regulated in germline tissue of the model organism, C. elegans. Germline proliferation in C. elegans is stimulated by a signal from cells in the somatic gonad. Germ cells that receive the signal will divide, whereas those that do not receive the signal will stop dividing and instead differentiate as sperm or eggs. This signaling occurs via a Notch-type biochemical pathway. Notch-type signaling pathways regulate development in diverse animal species; in mammals, they are implicated in certain cancers and other diseases. Many questions remain about the regulation of germline proliferation in C. elegans and how Notch-type signaling provokes a specific cellular response. For example, little is known about the targets of pathway activity or how pathway activity is regulated. Possible targets in the C. elegans germ line include genes that promote formation of gametes, such as gld-1 and gld-2. Notch-type signaling could promote proliferation by turning off gld-1 and gld-2 gene expression. To better understand how germline development is regulated, Dr. Maine and colleagues have identified and studied genes that interact genetically with a known component of the signaling pathway, glp-1. Here, Dr. Maine proposes to extend the analysis of several ego (enhancer of glp-1) genes. Previous studies from the Maine laboratory indicate that ego-1 gene activity is critical for both germline development and a poorly understood process called RNA silencing. RNA silencing is a means of gene regulation that has been observed in plants, animals, and fungi. It is thought to be a defense against viral infection, but the P.I. has data to suggest that it may also be an important regulatory mechanism during development. Consequently, she proposes to investigate potential target genes that might be regulated by RNA silencing during germline development, including gld-1 and gld-2. Several complementary studies will investigate (1) the expression of EGO-1 protein during germline development, (2) whether EGO-1 is essential for phenomena related to RNA silencing, (3) potential genetic interactions between ego-1 and other genes involved in RNA silencing, and (4) the role of EGO-1 in meiotic chromosomal pairing. Related studies will investigate other ego genes. They will be tested to determine if they function in RNA silencing; if so, then molecular studies will be initiated. Molecular studies of ego-3 will determine the nature of its gene product and how it functions to promote germline proliferation. Analysis of ego-3 will receive reduced effort if it does not function in RNA silencing while other Ego genes do so function doc3824 none The Department of Mathematics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University will purchase a computing environment which will be dedicated to the support of research by faculty and graduate students in mathematics, in particular the research group on `Modeling and Analysis of Fluids, Interfaces and Amorphous Polymers (http: www.math.vt.edu people renardyy maa.html). The equipment will be used for several projects which require the use of parallelized codes, including the following: `Formulation of moving contact lines for the volume-of- uid scheme, by Michael Renardy, `Interfacial instabilities in viscoelastic flows, by Yuriko Renardy, `Drop breakup in 3D, by Jie Li, `Simulation of a liquid bridge bathed in a surfactant solution, by Mary Ann Clarke doc3825 none Holten The bacterial RC is a highly symmetric protein that has two chains of pigments, referred to as the L and M branches that are essentially mirror images of one another. However, charge separation takes place exclusively via the bacteriochlorophyll, bacteriopheophytin, and quinone cofactors on the L branch (BL, HL, and QA, respectively). The role of the M branch pigments (BM, HM, and QB-), or more specifically how unidirectionality of electron transfer to the L branch is achieved, has been a focus of the field for many years. Recently, this laboratory has achieved an ~23% yield of electron transfer to the normally inactive M branch in a RC through targeted site-directed changes in the amino acids near BL, HL, and BM. The current work seeks to build on this progress as well as on parallel and equally important advances in understanding the factors underpinning the high yield of charge separation along the photoactive branch. Specifically, further site-directed mutations will be made in the RC protein and comprehensive studies of their effects on all the primary events carried out in order to achieve the following. (1) Elucidation of the participation of each cofactor in the primary events, the mechanisms of their involvement, and how the free-energy relationships of the associated charge-separated states impact the directionality of electron transfer and the rates and yields of charge separation versus charge recombination. (2) Understanding the manner in which polar and ionizable amino acid residues modulate the electronic and vibrational properties of the nearby cofactors and, thus, the photochemistry. (3) Deducing the contributions to directionality of the relative free energies and electronic couplings on the two branches (e.g. involving P and P+BL- versus P+BM-). (4) Obtaining a greater yield of electron transfer both to the M branch (forming P+HM-) and along this branch (forming P+QB-) than has been achieved to date. This will open up many new and exciting avenues for work on P+QB- formed via the M-side versus the L-side and how the events on the two sides are manipulated by analogous mutations. Life on earth ultimately is dependent on photosynthesis, the process by which plants and certain bacteria convert the energy of sunlight into chemical potential energy. This conversion occurs via a series of fast electron transfer reactions that separate charge in a specialized membrane-bound pigment-protein complex called the reaction center (RC). Remarkably, charge separation in the RC takes place unidirectionally via one of two possible pathways and with a quantum yield of ~100%. This research project focuses on RCs from purple photosynthetic bacteria and seeks to come to a comprehensive molecular level understanding of this primary charge separation process. To this end, transient absorption spectroscopic measurements spanning the femtosecond (10-15 sec) to seconds time scales as well as other spectroscopic techniques will be used to directly probe the various stages of charge separation and the rates of formation and decay of the intermediates. These studies will provide further detailed insights into the molecular-level mechanism of one of the most important biological processes, aid in the development of biomimetics for solar energy conversion, and positively impact broader topics in biophysics including biological electron transfer and the role of a protein in modulating the functional properties of its cofactors doc3826 none Higher plants can monitor environmental signals and control growth and development in a manner optimal for the prevailing environment. The long-term goal of this research is to understand the molecular mechanisms whereby the COP9 signalosome is used to integrate environmental and developmental signals in plants. The COP9 signalosome is an eight-subunit protein complex which was identified and characterized in this laboratory. Molecular cloning and identification of the corresponding COP DET FUS loci for each subunit is close to completion. The COP9 signalosome has recently been found in mammals and is probably present in most multicellular organisms. Recent work has suggested that the COP9 complex directly interacts with both a SCF type ubiquitin protein ligase associated with auxin regulation and the 26S proteasome and thus probably plays a role in regulated protein degradation mediated by the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway. Those findings will be extended and their functional implications in light and auxin regulated development examined. The specific aims of this research are: 1. The in vivo association of an Arabidopsis CUL 1 containing SCF type ubiquitin ligase (E3) complex with COP9 signalosome will be confirmed and its possible regulation by light and other light regulatory genes investigated, 2. The possible association of the COP9 signalosome with the auxin specific SCFtir1subtype E3 complex and its possible role in regulating auxin controlled physiological responses will be investigated. 3. Yeast two hybrid or in vitro binding assays will be used in combination to examine the pairwise interactions among the COP9 signalosome subunits and between the subunits of SCF complex and the COP9 signalosome. The proteins outside the complexes including COP1, HY5 and the demonstrated nuclear localized phyochromes and crytochromes will also be examined as time allows. 4. The phenotype of the transgenic lines which specifically alter the expression or activity of individual subunits of the COP9 signalosome will be characterized at the morphological, molecular and biochemical levels in both seedlings and adult plants. Weak or inducible phenotypes using reverse genetic approaches will be created in order to investigate both COP9 and possibly subunit function in developmental stages after the seedling stage. Accomplishment of these objectives will reveal fundamental cellular and biochemical functions of the evolutionarily conserved COP9 signalosome and its linkage with the environmental and developmental signals that regulate plant growth doc3827 none Bradley During embryonic development, cells destined to develop into discrete tissues must recognize and adhere to one another. These adhesive events are mediate by proteins found on the surfaces of cells, on such family of which are the protocadherins. Recently a novel protocadherin member, termed NFPC, was isolated from the frog, Xenopus laevis. NFP is found in the developing frog nervous system in a subset of neurons in both the spinal cord and eye, implying that NFPC might mediate the adhesion and segregation of these neurons during development. Accordingly this study will dissect the role of NFPC in the adhesive events responsible for correct development of these neurons. As it is not known how protocadherins function as cell adhesion molecules, and whether they may have additional roles in cell signaling, the mechanism by which NFPC acdts will be investigated by isolating and analyzing the cytoplasmic factors with which it interadcts. Finally the roles of other novel protocadherins in vertebrate neural development will be assessed. Results from these studies will provide insights into the molecular mechanisms by which the vertebrate nervous system forms, as well as an elucidation of how protocadherins contribute to this process. Thus, these studies will lead to a better understanding of how alterations in cell adhesion can contribute to the etiology of neural defects and cancer doc3828 none The heavy chain variable region (HVR) of swine antibodies is a surprisingly and comparatively simple system that is encoded by ~ 20 highly homologous VH genes, one single JH and apparently only 2 DH segments. Only 4 or 5 of these VH genes, clustered at the 3 end of the locus, are used in fetal and early neonatal life in non-mutated form. This simple system operates in a species in which it is believed that fetal repertoire development occurs in the absence of maternal regulatory factors and environmental antigens. Since combinatorial diversity in the HVR is restricted to 8-10 possibilities, i.e. 0.3% of that in mice and humans, swine may utilize other mechanisms to diversify their antibody repertoire. Considering that an extensive Vl repertoire has been reported for sheep, this project will determine whether extensive light chain diversity or gene conversion compensate for the restricted combinatorial diversity of the HVR in swine. Sequence analysis of VDJs from individual cells recovered by micromanipulation or single cell sorting, will test whether this species uses gene conversion. Light chain diversity will be addressed by cloning and characterizing the Vk and Vl loci and then characterizing the Vk and Vl repertoire used during fetal life. The 30-day fetal liver (114 day gestation) is the first site at which VDJ rearrangements can be found, of which an astonishing 95% are productive. This conflicts with the concept that combinatorial joining is random. Since the proportion of productive rearrangements progressively declines to textbook levels in older fetuses, this raises the question of whether early fetal liver B-cells comprise a distinct subset. Since pro-B-cell-like VDJ rearrangements also occur in the thymus, this project will test the hypothesis that B-cells developed in fetal liver, bone marrow and thymus, may each generate different B-cell subsets. Finally, the role of the ileal Peyers patches (IPP) of the fetal pig remains unresolved. Are they a site for: (a) primary B-cell development? (b) antigen-independent diversification of primary rearrangements? or (c) development of the mucosal immune system? It would be over-ambitious to think that this issue could be resolved in the proposed project period. However, this project is designed to gain greater insight into the role of the IPPs by analyzing the clones derived from individual follicles in the IPP. This project also addresses several testable hypotheses about B-cell lymphogenesis stemming from observations made during previous NSF-funded projects. These hypotheses challenge certain paradigms of immunoontogeny that are based on the mouse model. Addressing these hypotheses will not only provide a clearer picture of B-cell lymphogenesis in this non-traditional species but may also broaden the perspective of B-cell lymphogenesis in all species doc3829 none This proposal seeks to explain why the Egyptian government established an independent constitutional court that has increasingly constrained its ability to control opponents of the regime. The PI hypothesizes that the constitutional court was established by the regime in order to encourage private investment in Egypt s newly liberalized economy and that the court has been able to withstand increasing pressure from the executive branch by supporting the regime s economic liberalization program and by cultivating important networks of support with opposition parties, legal associations, and business groups. This study is designed with several theory-development goals in mind: to assess the impact of economic liberalization upon national judicial institutions in the developing world; to better understand the role of legal institutions in economic development; and to increase understanding of the conditions under which independent judicial institutions emerge from within non-liberal polities. To test these hypotheses, the PI will conduct 12 months of research in Cairo, Egypt and will analyze constitutional court cases for evidence of court activism over time and across economic and political issue areas. Cases will be coded according to their impact on the regime and on other dimensions relevant to strategic behavior by the judges. The PI will also trace a sample of rulings to ascertain impediments to the implementation of court rulings doc3830 none This experimental condensed matter physics program will investigate the temperature and frequency dependent transport properties and charge excitation spectra of the various modifications of the DNA double helix. The method employed - the measurement of the electric loss at micro and millimeter wave frequencies - allows the determination of the conductivity and dielectric constant without applying electrical contacts, and will be used in combination of optical studies. The DNA modifications to be investigated include synthetic DNA oligomers with tailor-made base pair sequences, together with native DNA duplexes; the influence of various counter ions, buffer environment and denaturing will also be studied. The experiments will shed light on the electronic and ionic charge transport process along the double helix, will lead to information concerning the role of disorder, molecular fluctuations and interactions between the electrons and will thus distinguish between the different models which have been proposed. These studies will also lay the groundwork for the investigation of electronic effects associated with biological processes, such as radiation induced defects and repair. %%% DNA is an important biological molecule whose function and properties in connection with genetic phenomena are well known. Less studied are its fundamental physical properties, for example electronic processes such as charge migration, which may be related to oxidation processes and radiation-caused damage and repair mechanisms. This experimental condensed matter physics program will study the motion of electronic and ionic charges on the DNA double helix by conducting experiments at radio frequency, microwave and optical frequencies. Such experiments should determine whether DNA is a nanoscale conductor or semiconductor and help clarify electronic mechanisms of possible biological significance. In the long term the techniques to be developed to study charge migration may also be useful as diagnostic tools for the detection of molecular properties related to genetic events doc3831 none Meiotic recombination differs from mitotic recombination in many important respects. Meiotic recombination is initiated by double-strand breaks (DSB) made by the meiosis-specific Spo11 topoisomerase and requires at least nine other proteins to create the chromosomal environment in which these breaks occur. It is not known if these many proteins also dictate the outcome of Spo11-mediated gene conversions, which show a very high level of crossing-over relative to mitotic events. Meiotic crossing-over is also strongly influenced by at least two classes of proteins, the meiosis-specific Zip proteins that are components of the synaptonemal complex and the Mlhl-Msh4-Msh5 proteins. In contrast, mitotic gene conversions can be initiated by the site-specific HO endonuclease, which does not require the action of other proteins to make DSBs. In this project the HO endonuclease is expressed under the control of a meiosis specific promoter, so that it becomes possible to compare recombination events initiated by the same DSB in both meiosis and mitosis. A major goal of this work is to use this system to ask if the 9 other proteins needed to make meiotic DSBs are also needed to ensure a high proportion of crossing-over. Additionally, the system can be used to determine if the endonuclease can induce a high level of crossing-over in a cold region of chromosome III that represses normal Spo11-induced events. The second major goal of this work is to examine the control of meiotic crossing-over. An aspect of this will be to assess by cytological means if a single, HO-induced crossover is sufficient to promote equational chromosome segregation at the first meiotic division. This approach addresses the question whether such a reductional division will occur in the absence of SC, which appears to depend on the presence of many Spo11-mediated DSBs. The third objective is to use this unique DSB to investigate the molecular mechanism of recombination, with a goal of distinguishing if meiotic recombination, like HO-induced mitotic recombination, proceeds by a synthesis-dependent strand annealing mechanism. Finally, the system is used to investigate the important question of how one crossing-over event interferes with a crossover in an adjacent interval. It has recently been established that some chromosomal intervals do not actually exhibit any significant interference in Saccharomyces. Once appropriate intervals have been identified, one or two HO cleavage sites will be inserted to ask if HO-mediated events interfere with adjacent Spo11-induced crossovers and if two HO-induced crossovers also show interference doc3832 none Meyerovich This grant continues to support the work of this midcareer PI on quantum anomalies in transport, dissipation and related phenomena in ultra-thin micro and nanoscale systems with special emphasis on quantum size effect conditions. The linkage between different projects on properties of various quasi-2d physical systems is a study of the effects of surface roughness. This is based on a novel formalism developed by the PI. Different projects include: (1) Transport and dissipation in ultra-thin systems with quantum size effect, (2) accommodation on rough surfaces and slip length, (3) Surface roughness and friction in quantized systems, (4) time dependent roughness and finally ( 5) periodically modulated walls with or without random roughness. %%% In a film so thin that the size effects are quantum mechanical, there are a variety of possible novel effects related to disorder. For example, the external surfaces may be rough and lead to additional resistance to the motion of electrons in a metal. The grant here continues to support the work of this midcareer PI, who has developed a novel formalism to study precisely these effects. The effects appear in transport phenomena, e.g. flow impedance or electrical resistance of nanoscale thin metallic films. They might appear in properties of friction or accommodation (sticking of fast moving particles near a surface). Finally there are conditions where the surface may be periodically moving or it might have roughness which varies in time. These ideas have application in a wide variety of areas, ranging from properties of ultra-thin films to flow of classical gases past rough walls, and to propagation of waves past rough walls doc3833 none Principal Investigator: Dale Gary, NJIT The investigators will specify solar radio flux density levels and fluctuations as a function of frequency and as a function of solar cycle phase. The main effort is to analyze three datasets: (1) Fixed frequency radio burst measurements observations obtained over the past forty years from a network (RSTN) operated by the United States Air Force. (2) Data from the Phoenix-2 spectrometer operated by ETH in Zurich, Switzerland. (3) The solar radio burst locator at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory. The analysis will provide statistical measures of importance to designers of modern communications systems. The analysis will also determine whether an observed saturation of RSTN data on solar events at high flux density is instrumental in origin or is inherent to the physical process on the Sun. Result of this determination are of direct interest to solar physics doc3834 none Nasrallah Plants employ elaborate and sophisticated signaling systems that allow them to assess genetic relatedness among pollen donors. In many species of the mustard family (the Brassicaceae), a cell-cell signaling system based on the activity of receptor and ligand proteins displayed at the surfaces of the stigma epidermis and pollen grains respectively, results in the arrest of self-related pollen at the stigma surface. This self-incompatibility system, which is controlled by a large number of variants at the S locus, prevents self-fertilization and inbreeding, and promotes cross-pollination and outbreeding. The family Brassicaceae is comprised almost equally of self-fertilizing and outcrossing species, with self-incompatibility being the major determinant of this polymorphism in mating system control. As such, the presence or absence of a functional self-incompatibility system determines the patterns of genetic variation in populations and influences the rate and mode of evolutionary change in this family. The S loci of self-incompatible and self-fertile species belonging to diverged subgroupings of the Brassicaceae will be analyzed. In addition, transgenic experiments as well as interspecific hybrids and backcross populations between self-incompatible and self-fertile Arabidopsis species will be used to determine which genes are required to effect changes in mating system. These studies will be facilitated by advances in comparative genomics, namely the availability of the Arabidopsis nuclear genome sequence, the feasibility of constructing large-insert genomic libraries, and the rapid generation of molecular markers and maps. It is anticipated that the lineage of genes that play a major role in enforcing outcrossing will be traced, promising to shed light on the long-standing questions relating to the origin of SI in flowering plants and the genetic mechanisms underlying transitions between outcrossing and self-fertilizing mating systems doc3835 none Freiman This action supports travel expenses and conference fees for selected participants in the United Engineering Conference, Nanostructured Sensors and Other Gas Reactive Applications. This conference will be held in Il Ciocco, Tuscany, Italy, April 9-14, . Within the broader field of nanostructured materials, microstructural engineering and surface reactivity of nanostructured materials are of great scientific interest and enormous technological potential, especially as they relate to the development of highly efficient and mote reliable gas reactive systems. In fact, advances made in the last decade in the development of novel synthesis and processing methods make it possible to control the microstructure and the chemistry of these materials at the nanoscale level. Improved characterization techniques and modeling permit improved understanding of microstructural effects on the complex gas-surface reaction processes. Motivated by the enormous scientific interest generated in nanostructured materials and considering their critical importance in the development of efficient and cost-effective gas reactive systems, it is timely to have this conference. The conference brings together international researchers from academia, research establishments, and industry to discuss recent advances in the development of nanostructured materials and outline future research directions for this field. %%% The proper utilization of nanostructured materials, using new and versatile synthesis and processing methods, improved characterization techniques, and theoretical modeling, aided by system design and integration, will lead to the development of more efficient and cost-effective gas sensors, getters, fuel cells, and hydrogen storage devices doc3836 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. George Gumerman IV and his colleagues will continue their archaeological excavation at the site of El Brujo, located on the arid northern coast of Peru. The El Brujo complex, over a square kilometer in size, consists of a series of pyramids and associated domestic architecture dating from approximately BC through colonial times. The site contains a substantial component referable to the Moche culture (AD 200-800) that is spatially segregated from earlier and later components. The presence of monumental architecture and associated domestic zones suggests that the site probably served as a major political and ceremonial center. Prior work at the site by both Gumerman and other groups indicates that organic materials including textiles and botanical remains are remarkably well preserved. This amazing preservation offers an unparalleled opportunity to explore specific aspects of Moche foodways. To complement their previous work in the monumental center, they will now focus on related areas of domestic habitation. The Moche peoples occupied the northern coast of Peru and are archaeologically significant for several reasons. It is possible to trace their development for over a millennium from a simple level of village organization to complex primitive state. Lacking writing and situated in a harsh and unpredictable desert environment the Moche were able to unite a large population scattered over separate isolated river valleys into a single political entity. Through a complex irrigation system they produced sufficient surplus to erect monumental pyramids and other ceremonial structures. Archaeologists wish to understand how this culture developed and was maintained. Dr. Gumerman has proposed a unique approach and plans to focus on how food moved through the social system. He will study not only production of both plant and animal species, but also their distribution through the social system, consumption and final discard. In this way it will be possible to address issues such as the development of social hierarchy and ceremonial ritual behavior. He will excavate a series of Moche households to collect and analyze not only flora and fauna but also lithic and ceramic remains. On this basis it will also be possible to address questions such as status differentiation. This research is important for several reasons. It will increase our understanding of the development of social complexity. It will shed new light on an important archaeological culture and will also help to develop an analytic approach of potential use in many parts of the world doc3837 none The goal of this research is to understand how plants perceive changes in their environment, transduce that information and ultimately alter growth and or development to elicit proper adaptive differential growth responses. The phototropic response is being used as a model system to study light-driven signal transduction and regulation of cellular growth. Several loci, previously identified via mutation, have been characterized as necessary for normal phototropism in Arabidopsis thaliana L. Heynh. The NPH4 locus (nonphototropic hypocotyl 4) is important not only for phototropism, but also for several additional differential growth responses, including gravitropism, apical hook maintenance and abaxial adaxial leaf blade expansion. The NPH4 gene has been cloned and found to encode the auxin-regulated transcriptional activator, ARF7, suggesting that auxin-dependent changes in gene transcription are prerequisite for proper organ bending responses. However, NPH4 ARF7 is not the sole regulator of these changes since the phenotypes of nph4-null mutants are conditional. For example, phytochrome A (phy A) activation, which leads to enhancement of blue light-induced phototropism in wild-type, results in restoration of a partial phototropic response in nph4 seedlings. Specific aims are 1) To identify genes that are transcriptionally regulated by NPH4 ARF7 and necessary for tropic reponsiveness and 2) To characterize components of the phytochrome A-dependent modulatory pathway(s) leading to phototropic enhancement. Because of their sessile nature, plants have evolved movement strategies that involve organ bending in order to respond to changes in their environment. Dramatic, rapid and reversible changes in morphology can result from differential growth- or unequal cellular growth in one position of an organ relative to an opposing position. Continued study of the nph4 mutants and in planta function of the NPH4 ARF7 protein will provide significant new insights into the basic cellular mechanisms leading to tropic responses, as well as the interactions between multiple signal-response pathways that modulate those tropic responses doc3838 none The major emphasis of this research project is the solid state chemistry of new classes of extended solids that are of electronic, magnetic, and or catalytic importance. The purpose of this interdisciplinary research program is to provide means for student education through synthesis, characterization, and correlation studies of novel solids. The aim of the proposed research aligns with the goals set forth in the NSF Workshop Report on the Current Status and Future Developments in Solid State and Materials Chemistry. The scope of the proposal is two-fold: 1) mixed-framework compounds containing structurally confined transition-metal-oxide lattices, and 2) open-framework solids via salt-inclusion reactions. The project covers a broad range of fundamental inorganic chemistry, including synthesis, structure, bonding, electronic structure, magnetochemistry, and materials chemistry. Compound characterization will be directed toward revealing and understanding the bond strength, spin-spin and spin-lattice interactions, band structures, the onset of metallic properties associated with finite transition metal oxide structures, and the formation of metal-containing-microporous and mesoporous frameworks exhibiting superior structural and physical properties This study will contribute valuable knowledge needed to achieve state materials synthesis by design. This well integrated research and education project will generate scientifically skilled students and postdoctoral fellows able to make a timely impact on the advancement of materials research doc3839 none V. parahaemolyticus is adapted to communal life on surfaces. When grown on a surface or in a viscous layer, the organism induces a large gene system and differentiates into a swarmer cell. Differentiation to the swarmer cell allows movement over surfaces and through viscous environments. Cells recognize each other, and movement is coordinated or social in nature, resulting in complex multicellular behavior and growth in organized communities. The swarmer cell is well-equipped to move over and colonize surfaces: it is elongated and hyperflagellated. The focus of this work is to unravel the regulatory networks that participate in the surface-adapted lifestyle in order to gain insight into how bacteria form and maintain communities on surfaces. The hypothesis is that different gene sets are turned on and off during the development of these communities. One large set, encoding the lateral flagellar motility system, is known. The first aim will be to identify genes induced by growth on surfaces; a novel transposon and delivery system has been designed to implement search for surface-induced genes. Completion of this aim will result in the identification of genes involved in the lateral flagellar hierarchy, which has not been systematically dissected, and new genes not required for motility but pertinent to the surface-adapted lifestyle. A comprehensive picture of gene activity (gene identity and timing of expression) of surface-attached bacteria will be developed; this will likely reveal the existence of interconnecting regulatory circuits to coordinate gene expression. The second aim focuses on one potential circuit that has recently been discovered. Mutations in two linked operons cause uninducible expression of swarmer cell genes. One operon (fim) encodes a fimbrial-like chaperone-usher pair and proteins that may be outer-membrane associated. The second operon (fli) encodes an ABC periplasmic-type binding protein (similar to Escherichia coli FliY) and a product that resembles a number of proteins in the GGDEF-type sensor family. The interactions between these gene sets and swarmer cell differentiation will be dissected by using a combination of mutagenesis, overexpression, and protein localization experiments. These studies should define gene activity pertinent to growth on surfaces and trace the network of regulatory circuitry that enables bacteria to establish growth and develop communities on surfaces. Understanding the pattern of surface-induced gene expression should reveal important principles about how bacteria adapt to their environment, coordinate behavior, and develop structured communities or biofilms. Moreover, this project will have significant educational impact for genetic analysis in Vibrio, specifically transposon mutagenesis and the genome-wide search for surface-controlled genes, will be used as an undergraduate and graduate level teaching tool doc3840 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Chemistry Department at Princeton University will upgrade their high resolution electron microscope. This equipment will facilitate research in the following areas: a) the application of structural analysis by electron diffraction of nanometer-size crystals of transition metal oxides; b) the use of electron diffraction to determine the structure of beam sensitive biochemical compounds important in photosynthesis; and c) the use of exit wave reconstructions from through focus high resolution electron microscopic images to determine atomic arrangements with a much higher accuracy. This equipment will have a significant impact on cutting-edge research projects across a wide range of disciplines at Princeton, including materials chemistry and biochemistry. In addition, the equipment will make the instrument more user-friendly, so that it will be more accessible to students. The PI will introduce a new course in structure determination using high resolution transmission electron microscopy doc3841 none Uptake and translocation of mineral nutrients in plants is essential for plant growth and human nutrition. In spite of recent advances in identifying genes involved in nutrient transport, the systems that control acquisition of individual nutrients remain largely unknown. The major objective of the project is to identify gene networks that control uptake and accumulation of a wide array of plant nutrients and toxic metals. The approach makes use of recent technical advances in inductively-coupled plasma atomic emission spectroscopy (ICP-AES) which now permit the measurement of up to 72 different elements in 35 seconds per plant sample. Identifying genes controlling solute uptake and accumulation has significance for agriculture, human health and the environment. For example, enhancing the ability of a crop plant to mobilize soil nutrients should reduce the use of fertilizers, thereby making agriculture more cost efficient and less polluting. Because plants are the primary source of food for humans, either directly or through animal feed, the nutritional value of plants is of central importance to human health. The most widespread nutritional problem in the world is iron deficiency. Increasing the ability of plants to provide higher levels of minerals, such as iron, will have a dramatic impact on human health. Furthermore, understanding the pathways by which toxic metals accumulate in plants will enable the engineering of plants to exclude toxic metals and create healthier food sources, or to extract toxic metals from the soil as a strategy to clean up polluted lands and water. The main aims of the project are to: 1) Use bioinformatics to identify genes that potentially encode transporters. 2) Use mRNA expression profiling to identify genes that change expression in response to nutrient deprivation or overfeeding. 3) Use nutrient profiling to screen for mutant plants with abnormal element compositions. ICP-AES will be used in a high-throughput strategy to determine the relative element composition of approximately 50,000 tagged mutagenized plants (Arabidopsis and either rice or maize if tagged lines are readily available in year 2). 4) Use yeast to obtain functional predictions of plant orthologs. The primary approach will be to conduct ICP-AES nutrient profiling of approximately 5,000 knockout lines of yeast. 5) Establish a Web site to provide access to data sets and enhanced annotation of genes. 6) Initiate collaborative research focused on selected mutations that control accumulation of Fe, Zn, K, Na, Ca, Se and Cd to further demonstrate the power of this novel approach. 7) Establish a program to train undergraduate and graduate students in genomics, informatics and plant molecular biological techniques. 8) Work with the Montshire Museum of Science to develop science curricula on metals in the environment. This project will functionally identify many important genes, including those that are involved in: 1) mobilizing nutrients in the rhizosphere, 2) cellular uptake and efflux systems, 3) subcellular compartmentalization of solutes, 4) the operation of phloem and xylem translocation systems, 5) central regulation mechanisms, 6) sensing nutrient levels, and 7) controlling root structure. This functional genomic investigation will provide the first integrated picture of the genes involved in a fundamental feature of all living systems - the selective accumulation of essential minerals. Participants: Mary Lou Guerinot, PI, Dartmouth College David Eide, Co-PI, University of Missouri Michael Gribskov, Co-PI, University of California at San Diego Jeffrey F. Harper, Co-PI, The Scripps Research Institute David E. Salt, Co-PI, Northern Arizona University Julian I. Schroeder, Co-PI, University of California at San Diego doc3842 none A Gordon Research Conference(GRC) on the Chemistry and Physics of Nanostructure Fabrication will be held July 23-28, . The science and engineering of nanostructure fabrication is of particular interest to electronics photonics and related areas since future progress in the field may be paced by advances in the science and technology of nanofabrication. The general conference topic is highly multidisciplinary, and will include: proximal probe fabrication, manipulation, and measurement; single electron phenomena; beyond ULSI to QLSI; quantum devices; novel devices and fabrication; chemical and biological nanostructures. The conference format - a week of continuous interaction with experts in interrelated fields in a casual setting -provides special opportunities for scientists and students to exchange ideas. All participants will have the opportunity to hear first hand high quality scientific work and novel ideas emerging in the field, and the opportunity to establish relationships and interact with other attendees. Such opportunities are particularly beneficial to students and young scientists. %%% An evaluation of the progress and status of Chemistry and Physics of Nanostructure Fabrication along with current assessments of the most important developments in this field will be of great value to the understanding and enhanced utilization of electronic photonic materials in computing, data processing, and communications. The Conference is co-supported by the CTS FPH and ECS EPDT programs doc3843 none A Gordon Research Conference will be held July 9-14, on defects and defect-related phenomena in homogeneous and structured semiconductors, associated with growth and processing of electronic materials. Topics which are controversial and or forward-looking will be emphasized. The program is organized around invited speakers, discussion leaders, a chair, vice-chair, and program committee; both contributed papers and posters are scheduled. Objectives are to stimulate communications among the broad community of researchers who address defects from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds--chemistry, physics, engineering and materials science, and to formulate and delineate critical research necessary to further basic understanding and move concepts closer to technological success. The conference is expected to provide an effective forum for discussion of critical scientific issues in the area of defects in semiconductors. Along with the opportunity to assess the field and future directions, it is expected that new ties will be established between universities, research institutions, and industry. %%% An evaluation of the progress and status of defects and defect-related phenomena in semiconductors associated with growth and processing of electronic materials and device related structures along with current assessments of the most important developments in this field will be of great value to the understanding and enhanced utilization of materials in computing, data processing, and communications doc3844 none Principal Investigator: Michael J. Reiner, Raytheon Technical Services Company The investigators will produce a comprehensive picture of the coronal mass ejection (CME) phenomenon as viewed at radio wavelengths from lift-off at the sun through the response of the terrestrial magnetosphere to its passage. The main effort is to continue to synthesize radio data from the Wind and Ulysses spacecraft, SOHO coronagraph data, ground-based data, and corollary measurements from instruments monitoring the solar wind and energetic particle environment. The work builds on several significant advances made in a previous award from NSF. The investigators developed triangulation methods that permit investigators to track the sources of radio waves (CMEs and finite regions along their boundaries) as they move out from the sun long after they cease to be visible to SOHO instruments. With this technique, regions where the radio waves originate are identified to allow detailed study, using the multiple supporting datasets, of the physical processes that produce the waves doc3845 none Skeletal muscle is capable of significant changes in contractile properties in response to normal and pathological conditions. These changes are brought about by fiber switching (transformation), a remodeling process in which one set of fiber-type-specific isoforms of myofibrillar proteins (e.g., myosin, tropomyosin, and troponin) is replaced by another set in the contractile apparatus. Both hormones and innervation play key roles in determining the fiber type composition in muscles from such diverse organisms as crustaceans and mammals. At the molecular level, transformation requires the coordinated expression of dozens of genes located on different chromosomes. In mammalian muscle, calcium-dependent signal transduction pathways involving calcineurin, a calcium calmodulin-dependent phosphatase, and calcium-dependent kinases (e.g., protein kinase C, CaM kinase) activate transcription factors that drive the expression of slow-type genes during fast-to-slow transformation. This project uses the American lobster, Homarus americanus, in which transformation can be experimentally manipulated, to investigate the regulation of myofibrillar protein expression by molting hormone (ecdysteroid) and motor neuron activity. Fibers in the claw closer muscles undergo a developmentally-regulated transformation as the isomorphic claws of larvae and juveniles differentiate into the heteromorphic cutter and crusher claws of the adult. This fiber switching occurs at the boundary between the central fast-fiber and the peripheral slow-fiber regions, and thus the transformation of a specific fiber is determined by its position within the muscle. The PI will determine the temporal and spatial expression of myofibrillar protein isoforms during the intermolt cycle in order to establish whether thin and thick myofilament proteins are coordinately expressed. Another goal is to determine the effect of chronically-elevated ecdysteroid on transformation in juvenile lobsters in vivo using ATPase histochemistry and in situ hybridization. Since preliminary results suggest that switching occurs during postmolt (when hemolymph ecdysteroid level is low), the hypothesis is that elevated ecdysteroid would delay or block transformation. Chronic low-frequency stimulation of fast fibers in juvenile claws in vitro will induce fast-to-slow transformation. Transcripts of slow-type genes will be detected in single fibers by RT-PCR and in situ hybridization. The PI will also determine how ecdysteroid and serotonin modulate electrically-induced transformation and will use pharmacological reagents to identify components of signal transduction pathways that mediate transcriptional activation. This research has broad application to understanding the control of fiber transformation in both invertebrates and vertebrates. Exercise, motor neuron activity, disuse, disease, and hormones, induce fiber switching in mammalian and avian skeletal muscle, but the molecular mechanisms are poorly understood. One of the long-range goals is to identify master regulators , transcription factors that initiate and coordinate slow-to-fast and fast-to-slow transformation. Signal transduction enzymes and transcriptional regulators are highly conserved in diverse animal species. Thus, the study of transformation in lobster will provide important insights about the potential interaction between hormones and electrical activity on myofibrillar protein expression doc3846 none Calaprice In , Hans Bethe provided the first explanation of the energy production inside the Sun that was able to account for the energy flux we have observed over the lifetime of the Earth. This theory is based on thermonuclear reaction processes occurring in the Sun s core. In Bethe s seminal work, two energy production mechanisms were discussed: the so-called carbon-nitrogen-oxygen (CNO) and the proton-proton (pp) cycles. Today, it is the latter process that is thought to be responsible for the production of more than 98% of the energy flowing from the Sun. The pp cycle consists of a series of nuclear reactions that convert four hydrogen atoms to a helium atom, releasing an energy of 26.7 Mev for each conversion. The energy is released in the form of charged particle kinetic energies, gamma rays, and neutrinos. Because of their weak interaction, the neutrinos leave the sun with very few interactions. The solar neutrino problem came in existence more than 35 years ago, when the pioneering Chlorine experiment of Ray Davis and collaborators showed that the actual number of neutrinos measured on Earth was only about 1 3 of the number predicted by the standard solar model . Since then, other experiments have been performed and all find a deficit of observed neutrinos, compared to the prediction. The present body of experimental evidence indicates that the deficit is not due to a flaw in our understanding of the Sun, but rather, is caused by fundamental neutrino processes that convert the normal electron-type neutrinos produced in the sun to neutrinos not readily detected in the current detectors. The neutrino conversions or neutrino oscillations can occur if the neutrino has a non-zero mass. But a non-zero neutrino mass is contrary to standard particle physics theory. Thus, the solar neutrino problem has become an issue of fundamental importance to elementary particle physics. If the neutrino does have mass, as suggested by the current experiments, new fundamental physics theories will be required. Borexino is a new solar neutrino detector designed to detect low energy solar neutrinos by use of a large 300 ton liquid scintillator. The detector will be located in the Gran Sasso underground laboratory in Italy. It s principle objective is to detect the mono-energetic Be-7 neutrino at an energy of 0.86 MeV. According to current analysis of solar neutrino data, the Be-7 neutrino is expected to exhibit maximal neutrino oscillation effects. Borexino will attempt to observe direct evidence of neutrino oscillations and confirm the present hypothesis of neutrino mass. The signals to be searched for include very large annual and day night variations in count rate that are uniquely caused by neutrino oscillations doc3847 none Proposal number: Proposal type: Investigator Initiated for Conference Support Principal investigator: Richard D. Noble Affiliation: University of Colorado Gordon Research Conferences The Gordon Research on Membranes: Materials and Processes This award supports partially the participation by invited speakers and discussion leaders from academic institutions at the Gordon Conference on Membranes to be held in New London, NH, from July 30 to August 3, . The sessions scheduled for this year s conference include membrane fundamentals, measurement methods, molecular-sieve membranes, inorganic membranes, membrane applications, modifications, novel membranes, and biomedical membranes. In each session there will be two or three invited speakers. Poster sessions are also planned. The Gordon Conferences are kept small and are structured to give the participants considerable time for discussion and interaction. They provide a vehicle for communication between research groups, which will be represented here by researchers not only from U.S. universities but also industry and universities in Europe and Japan. This grant is specifically targeted to permit attendance by ten advanced-level graduate students in the conference doc3848 none It is essential that animals initiate their reproductive effort at time of year that maximizes the likelihood of successful production of young. If dependent young are present either too early or late in a season, there may be insufficient food for the parents to feed their offspring. Unlike mammals, in which a lactating female converts available food resources into milk to be fed young, most nestling birds are fed insects whose abundance varies seasonally. The PIs noted that in the Florida Scrub-Jay (Aphelocoma coerulescens), jays that live in a suburban habitat begin breeding earlier than jays living in their natural environment (at Archbold Biological Station, ABS) and that one apparent result of early breeding is that suburban-young are in poorer condition and survivorship is lower that it is at ABS. (Effects from causes such as automobiles and pets have been factored out of the analyses). Previous experiments and observations point toward human-provided food as the underlying cause of early breeding in the suburbs. Although food has been shown to be an important factor in the decision of when to begin breeding in females of many species, whether it is specific nutrients within the food, such as proteins (or specific essential amino acids that are the building-blocks of proteins), fats, or a combination of these two is less clear. The PIs will provide females at ABS with food supplements that are high in protein (including essential amino acids), high in fats, or high in both to determine the import of these nutritional cues upon the timing of reproduction. To better understand the physiological mechanisms by which the nutritional cues lead to the initiation of reproduction in female jays the PIs will answer the following questions: 1) Does the presence of a reliable food source, independent of content, lead to early breeding? 2) Are specific nutrients essential in the decision of when to begin breeding and, if so, which nutrient serves as the cue to inform a female when to begin breeding? 3) Are blood or whole body levels of these nutrients key in the female s decision to breed? 4) Is the information about the female s nutritional state communicated by hormonal means and, if so, what are the hormones involved? In addition to determining the effects of the different supplementary diets upon timing of clutch initiation, the PIs will answer the answer the preceding questions by measuring plasma levels of reproductive hormones (luteinizing hormone, testosterone, and estradiol) and total protein. The PIs will also measure levels of leptin, a hormone that is involved in the onset of reproduction in some mammals: this makes it a possible hormonal cue that informs a female that her condition is suitable to begin reproduction. By considering numerous physiological factors, the PIs will learn how an organism integrates nutritional information into its decision of when to begin reproduction. This research will contribute significantly to the understanding of how resource availability affects the behavior, physiology, and fitness of seasonally breeding animals in the sub-tropics, especially the threatened Florida Scrub Jay doc3849 none This project is to understand how nervous systems are organized to allow animals to perceive their odor worlds and to respond appropriately. The animal model to be used in this work is the spiny lobster, and the system is its chemosensory system -- the olfactory organ, called the antennule or nose ). The spiny lobster is ideal as an animal model because its sense of smell is very well developed and has been well studied at many levels, thus providing us with an intellectual framework from which to ask higher-order questions about sensory processing. To understand the functional organization of this system, it is necessary to understand not only the adult pattern of organization, but also how during growth and development this pattern is established and maintained. So, the first major aim of our project is to compare the central connections and behavioral roles of the several distinct components of the olfactory organ of adult animals - what is the role of each pathway in olfactory discrimination and orientation tasks, and how are these roles related to their peripheral and central neural organization. Behavioral and anatomical techniques will be used to answer this question. The second major aim is to understand how this olfactory organ maintains its functional organization throughout the animal s life, even while there is a continuous process of birth, maturation, and death of olfactory cells. This aim will be answered with cellular, molecular, and physiological approaches to development. These studies will generate an understanding of the dynamic nature of this chemosensory system and of the developmental factors that control olfactory processing. In the end, it will lead to a comparative view of neural solutions to fundamental problems of sensory processing doc3850 none The sense of hearing results from a series of complex events that transform acoustic pressure waves into the perception of sound. During normal hearing, sound energy is converted to mechanical energy by the middle ear, which then is converted to mechanical motion in the structures of the inner ear, or cochlea. Within the cochlea, the sensory cells-the inner and outer hair cells-are sensitive transducers that convert mechanical vibrations into electrical impulses in the auditory nerve. The resulting nerve impulses are sent to the central auditory nervous system, where they are interpreted and experienced as sound. The sensory hair cells play a critical role in the hearing process. Both inner and outer hair cells have stereocilia located on their apical membranes. Bending of these stereocilia results in a voltage change-or receptor potential-across the cell membrane. The receptor potential in an inner hair cell results in transmitter release from the basal end of the cell. In contrast, the receptor potential in an outer hair cell produces a somatic length change proportional to the membrane voltage change. These length changes in outer hair cells are thought to amplify the sound-induced movements of the cochlear partition. The macromechanics of the hair cell basilar membrane organ of Corti system are well described. What remains to be understood is the micromechanics, that is, the mechanical events that take place between displacement of the basilar membrane and deflection of the inner hair cell stereocilia. Using the recently developed hemicochlea preparation, it now is possible to study the micromechanics of the passive cochlea in a radial cross-section. The experiments proposed here are aimed at (1) clarifying the micromechanical processes that transform basilar membrane vibration into deflection of the inner hair cell stereocilia, (2) describing the micromechanical events that result solely from somatic length changes in outer hair cells, (3) investigating the effect of electrical stimulation on different cell types in the cochlea, (4) examining the interactions between somatic length changes of outer hair cells and the vibration of the basilar membrane known to occur in vivo, and (5) providing empirical data for finite-element models of the cochlea doc3851 none The survival of living organisms and the development of complex life forms depend largely upon the proper coordination and control of the molecular events that take place inside cells. The enzyme-catalyzed interconversion of proteins between physically and functionally distinct phosphorylated and dephosphorylated forms serves as a molecular switch that permits proteins to be turned on and off as needed. The highly effective nature of the phosphate group as an agent for altering the functional properties of proteins coupled with the relative ease with which the phosphate group can be removed render phosphorylation-dephosphorylation uniquely potent and versatile. Consequently, it has been applied to the modulation of virtually every aspect of cell growth, differentiation, motion, metabolism, and communication. The long-term goal of this project is to uncover the fundamental principles through which this regulatory mechanism operates, by tracing its evolutionary history. This project will exploit the phylogenetic diversity of nature to search for and study vestiges of these early events. A set of primitive prokaryotic organisms, the Archaea, serve to some degree as a set of living fossils that preserve within their physical, genetic, and biochemical makeup strong echoes of the organisms of an earlier epoch. This project will explore protein phosphorylation-dephosphorylation events in the extreme acidothermophilic archaeon Sulfolobus solfataricus. The gene for a protein-serine threonine phosphatase, PP1-arch1, exhibiting 30% identity with the PPP-family of protein phosphatases from eukaryotes, has been cloned. This discovery indicates the existence of a continuous line of development evolution between the protein phosphatases in the Archaea and those in Eukaryotes. The proposed study will dissect at the molecular level the protein kinase(s) and phosphorylated proteins that conform the archaeal protein phosphorylation network. An Archaeal protein kinase will be purified by a combination of chromatographic and electrophoretic techniques, its amino acid sequence will be determined and the corresponding gene will be cloned. Availability of the cloned gene will allow determination of the complete, DNA-derived amino acid sequence of the enzyme and expression of the protein using recombinant DNA technology. Phosphorylated proteins from Sulfolobus solfataricus will be isolated and characterized doc3852 none Yee The objective of this research is to identify the structural determinants of multienzyme complex formation and biochemical function for transcarboxylase. Transcarboxylase is a 1.2 million dalton multienzyme complex that catalyzes the transfer of CO2 from methylmalonyl coenzyme A to pyruvate, to form propionyl coenzyme A and oxaloacetate, by way of two biotin-dependent half reactions. This multienzyme complex contains three different types of subunits and a total of 30 polypeptide chains: a 396 kDa hexameric central 12S subunit, six 116 kDa dimeric outer 5S subunits; and twelve 12 kDa biotinylated 1.3S linkers. X-ray crystal structures of the holo enzyme and of its largest (12S and 5S) subunits, in free form and bound to substrate or product, will be determined. The first specific aim of this work is to determine the crystal structures of 12S substrate and product complexes, by heavy atom phasing and subsequent molecular replacement methods. These structures will identify the structural determinants of substrate binding and catalysis for the first transcarboxylase half reaction. In particular, the protein residues which interact with substrate or product molecules will be revealed; the geometry and chemistry of these amino acids as well as others nearby will be analyzed in order to speculate about likely catalytic mechanism(s). The second specific aim is to determine the crystal structures of the free 12S protein, and of 12S bound to biotin, by molecular replacement methods. Comparison of these structures with the substrate and product complexes will allow identification of the conformational changes which occur upon substrate or biotin binding, and may extend the structural insight into catalytic mechanism. Finally, the third specific aim is to determine the crystal structures of the 5S, 6S, and holo enzyme forms of transcarboxylase, either free or bound to substrate, by a combination of heavy atom phasing and molecular replacement methods. The 5S structures will provide insight into the catalytic mechanism for the second transcarboxylase half reaction, by identifying amino acids which are important in substrate binding and or catalysis. The 6S and holo enzyme structures will highlight conformational changes and interaction surfaces which are important for enzyme assembly and function. The assembly of transcarboxylase crystal structures which are being pursued will reveal the features important in homo-oligomeric subunit assembly as well as reveal the structural features of intersubunit assembly. These results will provide a rare structural view of a multienzyme complex. Transcarboxylase has historically served as a model system, which is valuable for understanding the mechanisms for other (de)carboxylase enzymes that carry out similar chemistry doc3853 none Berkowitz The goal of this project is to study the role of electrostatic forces in the interaction between phospholipid membranes and peptides. This research has two major aims: The first aim is to understand the benefits and limitations of simple continuum models that are often used to describe such interactions. Molecular dynamics simulations of typical phospholipid bilayer peptide systems will be performed and the data obtained from these simulations will be compared with the data obtained from the continuum treatment of the system. The second aim of the research is to study the electrostatic contribution into the mechanism of gating in membrane channels. The biological cell and its internal compartments are separated from the surroundings by a membrane that contains mostly, phospholipid, sterol, protein and peptide molecules. The molecules in the membrane self assemble due to mutual interactions. When membrane molecules are uncharged, the main component of the interaction is the So-called van der Waals interaction, which is due to induced polarizability of the molecules. When molecules are charged, it is believed that the main interaction is due to charge-charge interaction. The overall goal of this research is to understand the role of electrostatic forces in membrane-protein interactions, using computational approaches doc3854 none Phase variation is a form of heritable, but potentially reversible gene regulation, which occurs in bacteria. One of the regulatory mechanisms requires the heritable DNA methylation state of specific sites, as has been elucidated for phase variation of a group of fimbrial operons in Escherichia coli. This methylation-dependent regulation requires deoxyadenosine methylase (Dam). The biological significance of specifically Dam-dependent phase variation and how the DNA methylation state is inherited is yet to be understood. This research aims to address these questions by studying the molecular mechanism of Dam-dependent phase variation of the non-fimbrial outer membrane protein Ag43 in E. coli, and by testing the hypothesis that phase variation is important for Ag43-dependent biofilm formation. The long-term goal is to understand the biological significance and mechanisms of heritable gene regulation in bacteria, specifically those involving DNA modification. Dam-dependent regulation of Ag43 requires the oxidative stress response regulatory protein OxyR. OxyR is proposed to repress Ag43 expression by binding to the regulatory region of the Ag43 encoding gene, which contains Dam target sites. Transcription is thought to occur when OxyR binding, and thus repression, is abrogated by methylation of those Dam target sites. In Aim 1 the specific roles of Dam and OxyR in transcription and phase variation will be addressed. In vitro and in vivo analyses will be used to analyze transcription, and genetic approaches will be used to identify essential regulatory elements. The Ag43 locus has been implicated in affecting biofilm formation. Biofilms may contribute to bacterial survival and persistence in the environment. In Ag43 mutants, biofilm formation is defective under certain growth conditions. However, the effect of phase variation of Ag43 on this tractable and biologically relevant process, has not been addressed. Aim 2 will define the role of Ag43 phase variation in biofilm formation using isolates with well-defined mutations in Ag43 expression. In addition, it will be determined whether Ag43 regulation is altered during growth in a biofilm, addressing the adaptive potential of the regulatory mechanism. Regulation of Ag43 expression is an amenable system to address questions concerning the heritable nature of Dam-dependent gene regulation. In Aim 3, cellular or physiological factors that are required to maintain the DNA methylation and gene expression state will be identified by isolating and characterizing mutants with altered switch frequencies. DNA replication can result in a change in DNA methylation state. Therefore, the role of DNA replication in initiating the switch in transcription phase will also be specifically addressed. Various bacterial species contain Dam homologues, suggesting that this mechanism of gene regulation is widespread. Supporting this hypothesis and the importance of this modification system was recently underscored by the observation that Dam is required for Salmonella virulence. Additionally, DNA methylases that do not seem to be part of a restriction-modification system are also found in other species, where they may be involved in gene regulation. Principles elucidated in this study may therefore be applicable to various bacterial species. Heritable gene regulation like phase variation, dictates gene expression in a daughter cell, and thus affects the composition of a bacterial population over more than one generation. Therefore examining the significance of phase variation will increase our understanding of the behavior of bacterial populations. Finally, by addressing how DNA methylation patterns are formed and maintained in a bacteria, general underlying principles can be elucidated that may be applicable to more complex methylation-dependent regulatory systems, perhaps even those in eukaryotic organisms doc3855 none This Dissertation Improvement Award will enhance ongoing studies on the swimming performance of the mako shark. This work will provide new information about how makos, and their close relatives, resemble tunas in features related to an elevated metabolic rate and swimming capacity. Characters unique to mako sharks and to tunas include modifications of the cardiorespiratory system, muscle morphology, elevated enzyme activities, and warm bodies. The project s objectives are to obtain data on makos using a large water tunnel treadmill used previously for tunas, and to gather laboratory based data on the structural components involved in the delivery of oxygen to the muscles used to swim. This project will address the energy requirements of makos for swimming and document the its ability to maintain a warm body temperature. This study is unprecedented in that it will use live mako sharks to measure variables that seem to be unique only to them, their close-relatives, and the tunas. The results of this study will be compared with those obtained for tunas to enhance our knowledge of the evolutionary process in fishes. This will show how organisms that have evolved independently for more than 400 million years have developed unique and almost identical characters that allow for enhanced swimming performance doc3856 none Plant-parasitic nematodes reduce annual US agricultural production by more than $5 billion. The most important group are the root-knot nematodes (RKN: Meloidogyne spp.), which are devastating pathogens of food and fiber crops. With the loss of chemical control agents for health and environmental reasons, the economic importance of RKN is increasing world-wide. A prerequisite to developing any new, environmentally-safe and affordable control strategy is a thorough understanding of the biology of the plant-nematode interaction. Recent advances in genomic techniques make this previously intractable host-parasite system amenable to study. Because of the intimate nature of the interaction, and the obvious developmental and physiological perturbations to the host induced by the nematode, understanding the biology of this association will shed new light on basic plant processes. The very broad host range of RKN (excess of 2,000 plant species) implies that this parasite is able to modulate some very fundamental and widely conserved aspect of host biology. RKN hatch in the soil as developmentally-arrested larvae prior to invading a root, where the parasite establishes an intimate relationship with its host. An elaborate permanent feeding site, characterized by the formation in the host of giant cells within a gall, is induced by the nematode. Giant cells serve as the obligate nutritive source for the developing nematode, which becomes sedentary. Functional genomic approaches will be applied to analyze this interaction. This approach is feasible because well developed models of the host and parasite (Arabidopsis and C. elegans respectively) have been established, including complete genomic sequences. Suites of nematode and plant genes that define pathways for establishment of the parasitic interaction will be identified, and their expression quantified. Host responses during feeding-site formation, and the biological transitions in the nematode that are coupled to the host (e.g., exit from developmental-arrest at the onset of feeding) are especially interesting. The histology suggests that phyto-hormone levels are altered in infected roots, and expression of Arabidopsis gene sets, with an emphasis on hormone-responsive genes (new members of this class are anticipated to be identified) will be quantified, as well as genes previously identified as being specifically nematode-responsive. This project addresses three general and inter-related scientific questions: 1) how is the host recognized, and how does the parasite couple its biology and development to host cues, 2) what are the parasite-induced changes in the host, and in particular what is the source and role of phyto-hormones, 3) how has parasitism evolved, what has been the role of horizontal gene transfer, and is this reflected in the organization of parasitism genes? A large body of mostly descriptive information exists for RKN and an important goal will be to couple the genomic findings with this biological data. Many features of the RKN-plant interaction (e.g., gall formation) appear canonical for a broad range of host-parasite associations involving diverse organism (including insects), and also represents a tractable model to study aspects of normal plant development, including phyto-hormone biosynthesis regulation. Better understanding the host-parasite interaction will reveal the linch-pins from which novel nematode-management strategies can be derived. Furthermore, because this research will be performed within a framework of graduate and undergraduate education, it will provide students with significant opportunities for professional development doc3666 none The objective of this research project is to develop fragility curves for a wide range of problems in geotechnical earthquake engineering; specifically, for foundations, slopes, and retaining walls. Fragility curves provide the probability of exceeding a prescribed damage level (e.g. minor, moderate, major, complete) for a certain type of structure, as a function of the severity of the seismic event. Fragility curves are extremely significant from the engineering applications point of view as practicing engineers can use them directly without having to perform any complex computations, and because they form the basis for all risk analysis loss estimation risk reduction of civil infrastructure systems. Although fragility curves have been established for structures such as buildings and bridges, there hasn t been any systematic effort to develop such curves for geotechnical structures (e.g. foundations, slopes, retaining walls). Such a task is particularly important, as damage to these structures is quite extensive during major earthquake events. Empirical fragility curves will be computed using available damage data from recent seismic events such as: the Loma Prieta, the Northridge, the Kobe, Japan, the Izmit, Turkey and the Chi-Chi, Taiwan earthquakes. In parallel with the task of establishing the empirical fragility curves, analytical fragility curves will be computed using Monte Carlo simulation techniques. One of the important tasks is to compare the empirical and analytical fragility curves so as to improve their accuracy and reliability. Several issues related to the establishment of fragility curves for such geotechnical structures will be addressed, including the definition of the different damage states for each type of structure and the measure of the intensity of the earthquake event. Different mechanisms will be considered to cause damage to the geotechnical structures considered. Particular emphasis will be given to soil liquefaction, to slope failure due to exceeding the shear strength, and to tilting of foundations and foundation systems. The establishment of fragility curves for a range of geotechnical structures will form the basis for the risk analysis loss estimation risk reduction of such structures, when subjected to earthquakes. These fragility curves will allow public and private organizations to make rational assessment of 1) the potential damage to civil infrastructure systems from earthquakes, 2) retrofitting strategies, 3) insurance premiums, and 4) guide emergency management teams to identify high-risk systems. This project involves a collaboration between researchers at Princeton University and the State University of New York at Buffalo doc3858 none The overall objective of this project is to elucidate how the timing program for the replication of chromosomal DNA is established. It is proposed that repositioning of sequences in early G1-phase creates microdomains that establish thresholds for the initiation of replication. Specific hypotheses derived from this model will be tested. The first project will be to examine whether the re-positioning of sequences in the nucleus is associated with a remodeling of chromatin. This work will determine whether the differential DNaseI accessibility of early- and late-replicating chromatin is established in early G1-phase. It will also examine whether hypoacetylation of histones or association with the chromo-domain protein HP1 is necessary to establish or maintain the late-replication time of heterochromatin. A second project will test the hypothesis that chromosome architecture mediates replication timing by setting thresholds that restrict the access of initiation proteins to a subset of origins, focusing on mammalian homologues of Cdc45 and the Cdc7 Dbf4 complex. These replication initiation proteins have been implicated as key targets for regulating initiation events during S-phase progression in S. cerevisiae. This project will examine whether over-expression of these proteins can advance the replication timing program in mammalian cells. The final project will use a proteomics approach, combined with an in vitro replication timing assay, to identify novel candidates for proteins that establish a replication timing program. The working model predicts that intranuclear microenvironments are created through the association of specific proteins with chromatin. This project will identify those proteins that associate with chromatin during the relatively brief period of domain re-positioning. It will also exploit a cell-free system to enrich for those proteins essential to the establishment of a replication timing program. Proteomics offers a potentially powerful means to approach complex biological problems that do not lend themselves easily to traditional genetic and biochemical approaches. Hence, this project will also test the power of this novel technology. How is the structure of chromosomes related to the functions that they have to carry out in the cell? Chromosomes can be divided into independent domains. When they duplicate in a process called DNA replication, there is a defined order in which the domains are replicated. Furthermore, all DNA within a single domain is replicated simultaneously, coordinated by starting replication synchronously from many sites within the domain. Intriguingly, domains that are not in use in any given cell-type are replicated last, while those that are active are replicated first and changes in the order in which these domains are replicated take place at key stages during the development of organisms. The relationship between changes in the replication timing of domains and the functions of those domains during development has been very difficult to study, due to the lack of tools. Recently, a system in which replication of chromosomes can be carried out in a test tube was developed and shown to accurately recapitulate the replication program of chromosome domains. These studies have opened up an exciting new avenue of research into the relationship between gene expression, chromosome structure and DNA replication. This project will test the hypothesis that proteins previously thought to regulate the structure of chromosomal domains may directly regulate the replication program of those domains doc3859 none Lay Blackwell The seaslug, Hermissenda crassicornis, is a model system for studying associative learning because it shares properties of classical conditioning with mammals. In Hermissenda, individual brain cells have been identified in which a change in cell properties is correlated with a change in animal learning behavior . Specifically, the type B class of photoreceptors shows an increase in excitability consequent to classical conditioning with light and turbulence. The excitability of the type B photoreceptor is affected by current flowing across the cell membrane in response to light. The measurement of this current, which has not been adequately characterized, is one goal of this project. The expression of associative learning behavior depends on the interaction between type A and type B photoreceptors in response to light. This interaction is affected by the light-induced current flowing across the membrane of the type A photoreceptors. Thus, a second goal of this project is to measure this current in response to light of various intensities and durations. The third and final goal of this research is to develop a computer model of both (type A and type B) classes of photoreceptors and their interaction. Model simulations are used to evaluate the output of both types of photoreceptors in response to light, and the change in output consequent to an increase in excitability in the type B photoreceptor. This project will significantly contribute to our knowledge of how people learn. Classical conditioning, also known as Pavlovian conditioning, is studied extensively because it is a form of associative learning present in many different species. A change in cell excitability is thought to be a general mechanism of associative learning because it has been detected in brain cells of mammals which have been classically conditioned. However, the pathway between change in cell excitability and change in animal behavior is not fully understood. These is evidence that expression of learning behavior emanates from modulation of the complex interaction between groups of neurons. This project begins to elucidate how changes in cell properties modulate neuronal networks involved in classical conditioning behavior doc3860 none The ability to sequence plant genomes has resulted in the identification of large numbers of novel open reading frames (ORFs). The challenge ahead is to gain information about the function of many known and novel genes that have been identified through these projects. To this end, systematic efforts are underway to characterize the genes on a large scale using both bioinformatics and high throughput procedures. Most of the high throughput methods entail analyzing nucleic acids: mRNAs, cDNAs, or genomic sequences. These data provide information about gene expression, genome sequence comparisons and target sites for DNA binding proteins. However, much information about genes comes from the analysis of gene function and gene products. Therefore, in the post-genomic era, large-scale functional genomics approaches are necessary for converting sequence information into functional information. A recently developed para-genetic approach called virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) offers rapid means of gaining insight into gene function in plants. The strategy is termed para-genetic because it effectively creates genetic suppressors in the absence of host genome mutation. The long-term goal of the project is to develop tools for plant functional genomics that will help to understand how plant resistance genes recognize pathogen elicitors and signal the induction of defense responses that ultimately halt the pathogen spread. The specific objectives are to: (1) develop viral vectors for plant functional genomics using a VIGS approach, and (2) identify global and specific suppressors of disease resistance signaling components using VIGS approach. The tools developed in this proposal will be of great utility to gain insight into plant signaling networks. The tools and information developed in this project will be made available to the scientific community for plant signaling studies. Eventually, the knowledge gained from these studies will provide new strategies for the engineering of improved crops doc3861 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project involves the development of a commercial optical patternator, based on Statistical Absorption Tomography. The mathematical deconvolution procedure that forms the basis for optical patternation of turbulent flows was developed and evaluated during the Phase I research. Local absorptances, resolved to less than 1 10th of the integral length scale were obtained in a turbulent spray, using the deconvolution algorithm, in conjunction with an optical patternator, suited for constant temperature, axisymmetric flows. During the Phase II, three research issues that affect the commercialization of the optical patternator will be addressed. The three issues that will be addressed during the Phase II research are: (1) obtaining local transmittances in turbulent flows with temperature gradients, (2) obtaining spatially resolved mass flux in turbulent sprays, and (3) obtaining patternation factors for turbulent flows issuing from non-axisymmetric nozzles. Two broad areas of commercial applications for the optical patternator are for obtaining pattern factors in commercial nozzles and for monitoring smoke stack emissions. The immediate market for the patternator is as an on-line quality control instrument for spray nozzle manufacturers. The estimated annual market size is approximately 150 million dollars doc3862 none LeBlanc-Straceski Myosins are molecular motors that use stored chemical energy resources in cells to produce movement. For example, myosin hydrolyzes ATP to produce the force for muscle contraction. The myosins constitute a very large family of related proteins, each of which has a specialized function. This proposal studies the expression of a myosin 1 isoform whose expression is restricted to nerve tissue. The function of this myosin in moving critical components around the cell, such as vesicles containing neurotransmitters, as well as the role it might play in the embryonic development of the nervous system, is being investigated using the classic vertebrate model system of the frog. Data gathered about the developing embryonic nervous system should aid in the understanding of certain birth defects as well as spinal cord injuries and neuro-degenerative diseases. Other investigators have linked genetic defects in different myosins to human diseases, such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and inherited deafness or Usher syndrome. Moreover, an additional benefit is gained. The training undergraduate students receive as they perform meaningful, high quality, research, profoundly influences their career goals doc3863 none Professor James Weisshaar of the University of Wisconsin Madison is supported by the Experimental Physical Chemistry program to perform experimental and theoretical studies on peptides oriented in liquid crystals using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. This proposal seeks to make detailed experimental NMR measurements on the structures adopted by small model peptides in solution to calibrate and sharpen the accuracy of molecular force fields. Di-, tri- and possibly tetra- peptides will be studied in liquid crystals, a means by which the problem of the rapid tumbling and averaging of molecules in solution can be overcome. In order to fully characterize the peptides in their conformational diversity, a large number of magnetic dipole couplings between nuclear spins will be measured. The signals will be fit to those predicted from ab initio theory for a superposition of possible stable structures, with iterations on the distribution of conformers and on the force fields. Successful fitting for small, flexible peptides would provide an important step towards cracking the multi-conformation problem in flexible regions of proteins. NMR and X-ray methods, the two major methods for solving protein structures, are limited in characterizing the flexible local conformations within proteins. Computational approaches can assist in obtaining these conformations, however, the calculations are only as good as the force fields used. This proposal seeks to provide experimental data aimed at improving the calculations. It is especially timely because of the increasing massive efforts to calculate protein structures and protein folding processes doc3864 none Rumchitzki, Davis S. CUNY City College Atherosclerosis is by far the leading cause of death, bot above and below age 65, in the United States and all western countries. Atherosclerosis is a disorder mainly of the large, relatively thick-walled arteries; smaller arteries and veins under normal conditions are spared. Atherosclerosis appears to begin with the accumulation of extracellular lipoproteins in the artery wall and develops into lesions. This accumulation is often associated with high plasma low-density lipoprotein (LDL) concentrations and thus lipoprotein transport into and accumulations within the artery wall is the focus of intense study. We hypothesize that qualitative and quantitative vessel-vessel differences in these processes underlie their different susceptibilities to atherosclerosis. Our group has develop a set of detailed theories, portions of which seem to be vessel-independent, that explains much of the data on these processes in large arteries. What is lacking is a detailed understanding of how they differ in other tissues. To begin to fill this gap we propose an experimental theoretical study of LDL transport into and accumulation in the valve leaflet, a tissue whose structure is radically different from the aorta s, but which also accumulates LIPID AT HIGH PLASMA LDL. We present preliminary data suggesting an exciting new hypothesis that, even in the absence of an internal elastic laminar, valve endothelial cells lay down a very thin matrix layer that is much sparser than the bulk of its extracellular matrix; if present, this layer would play a central role in filtration and subendothelial tracer transport (goal 2 below). In addition, data on the transmural pressure dependence of these processes are inconclusive, and we propose to address this in the aortic context. Our specific goals are: 1. To understand the effect of transmural pressure on the transport and accumulation of LDL cholesterol in the artery wall in light of the observation that atherosclerosis-prone vessels live at high transmural pressures and of the apparently inconsistent historic data on pressure dependence. 2. To experimentally theoretically study filtration and tracer convective-diffusion in valve leaflets; to explain in large variation in Tompkins et al s (Circ. Res., 64 , ) experimental tracer concentration vs depth profiles in valves; 3. To couple goal 2 s results to our extracellular lipid liposome formation and growth kinetic models to explain the liposome size distributions in valves of cholesterol-fed rabbits. We advance a new hypothesis that liposome accumulation kinetics are tissue-independent and that the valve-aorta difference in lipid accumulation thus lies in their different transendothelial LDL transport. Successful completion of the project would lead to a better understanding of how vessel structure and conditions, such as transmural pressures, to which the vessel is exposed influence the transport into and accumulation of large molecules (with lipoprotein cholesterol the major molecule of interest) in vessel walls. We hypothesize that this will underlie the vessel s relative susceptibility to atherosclerosis. This knowledge could be useful in the long term in potentially selecting a vessel, in a patient-specific way, to be sued as a bypass for clogged coronary artery doc3865 none The objective of this project is to focus on using enzyme-mediated reactions to effect changes in the chemical structures of triacylglycerols by substituting long chain polyunsaturated fatty acid residues with beneficial attributes for residues that have been implicated in health problems. Studies of the kinetics of the interesterification reactions involved in these transformations will lead to mathematical models that can be used for purposes of process simulation and optimization. These modified fats and oils could be used in formulating an array of nutraceutical products. Nutraceuticals provide either therapeutic or preventative medicinal values doc3866 none Charkaburtty The central theme of this proposed research is to investigate the molecular mechanism of the novel yeast elongation factor 3 (EF-3) uniquely required by yeast ribosomes for translation. A unique structural feature of EF-3 is the presence of the duplicated ATP-binding cassettes (ABC or NBS motifs) similar to that present in transporter proteins such as CFTR and multidrug resistant protein MDR. EF-3 is an ATPase. It s function in translation requires ATP hydrolysis. The intrinsic ATPase activity of EF-3 is stimulated two orders of magnitude by yeast ribosomes. In this project, the PI will investigate the function of the duplicated ATP-binding sequence motifs in translation by oligo-directed mutagenesis studies. The role of these motifs will be analyzed by directed mutation of the invariant lysine residue in motif-A, the aspartate in motif-B and the invariant glycine in motif-C. Each of these amino acid residues has been shown to coordinate with ATP. Na-orthovanadate will be used to selectively inactivate one of the two NBS motifs. The cooperative or independent function of the two NBS motifs will be analyzed by trapping the Mg-ADP-orthovanadate complex preferentially at one site. A battery of biochemical tests are available to analyze the effects of NBS mutation in EF-3 function. The second objective of this research will be to initiate x-ray crystallographic analysis of the ATP-binding domain of EF-3. The structural analysis will be initiated in collaboration with the macromolecular crystallography group at the University in Aarhus, Denmark. The PI will attempt to crystallize the full length EF-3 and the ATP-binding domain in the presence and absence of ATP analogs. The ATP-binding domain will be expressed in an E. coli expression system to obtain seleno-methionine substituted EF-3. This substitution allows rapid structure determination by the multiple anomalous dispersion method. Deciphering the function of EF-3 at the molecular level can be expected to provide new insights into the biochemical mechanism of translation-elongation and the role of EF-3 in maintaining translational accuracy. YEF3 gene is essential for the growth of fungi. The indispensable role of EF-3 in fungi remains an enigma in the face of its apparent dispensability in all other non-fungal systems. Clearly, the question is what protein or RNA species replace(s) the function of EF-3 in higher eukaryotes. In order to determine whether there is an equivalent factor in other systems, it is important to know more about this protein. It will be interesting to learn why mammalian ribosomes do not require EF-3. The answer to this last question is of significant practical importance as EF-3 is a potential target for anti-fungal drugs. The availability of the x-ray crystal structure data of EF-3 and its ATP-binding domain is expected to further our understanding of its binding site on the ribosome. The information, in turn, should provide better understanding of the function of EF-3 in translation doc3867 none Cundari This U.S.-Romanian project between Thomas Cundari of the University of Memphis and Horia Pop and Costel Sarbu of Babes-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca features development and testing of novel soft computing (SC) approaches for use in modeling of transitional metal (TM) chemistry. The Romanian partners bring experience with fuzzy set theory to the effort while the Memphis group contributes significant expertise in development of traditional quantum and classical methods for modeling TM chemistry. Their planned chemical research focuses on identification of novel Ziegler-Natta catalysts for direct polymerization of functionalized olefins and in so doing should serve as a test vehicle for improved methods for SC analysis of chemical databases. Extensions to other chemical systems are intended and include: a) transition metal-catalyzed oxidation of hydrocarbons, and b) dinuclear TM catalysis for carbon-hydrogen bond activation. If successful, results should lead to an improved means for designing inorganic and organometallic materials for a variety of applications in areas such as catalysis, advanced materials and environmental remediation of toxic metals. This chemistry project fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc3868 none The objective of this research is to investigate the potential for ultrathin, metal interlayers to stabilize the interface in multilayered, thin-film structures. The research will identify those metals which when deposited in monolayer amounts at the interface make possible abrupt, epitaxial interfaces in systems that are otherwise characterized by interdiffusion or roughness. The interlayer materials, unlike surfactants, will remain at the interface to promote chemical, thermal, and structural stability. The interlayer should be atomically thin, unlike conventional diffusion barriers, to minimize the impact on any magnetic properties of the device. Since current fabrication techniques for tunnel junctions involve the oxidation of Al films grown on various ferromagnetic metals (Fe, Co, Ni, and their alloys), the structure and thermal stability of these interfaces will be characterized first. The effect of the interlayer on these structures will then be studied. Previous work suggests that Ti, Zr, and perhaps Ta have the potential for serving as stabilizing, ultrathin interlayers in aluminum transition metal interfaces. The structure and stability of these magnetic films on oxidized Al surfaces, with and without an interlayer, will be studied. The measurements will characterize the degree of ordered growth or interdiffusion at the interface using high-energy ion backscattering and channeling, low energy electron diffraction, low-energy ion scattering, and x-ray photoelectron diffraction. Core-level photoelectron binding energies will serve to identify compound formation at the interface. Monte Carlo computer simulations, using embedded atom potentials to calculate total energies, will guide the structure analysis. Test structures will be fabricated using those materials that appear to have the most stable and abrupt interfaces, and the magnetic switching and tunneling properties of these structures will be measured. %%% The results of this research will provide a better understanding of, and ability to predict and grow abrupt epitaxial metal metal interfaces. The work is directed primarily at improving the interfaces in thin-film magnetic tunneling junctions and giant magnetoresistive structures being considered for magnetic memory or sensing applications, where it is felt that more abrupt interfaces will result in devices with better magnetic switching characteristics and lower total resistance doc3869 none Miller Cell division is a fundamental process executed by all living things, yet surprisingly little is known about how cells decide where to place their division planes. Precise positioning of cell division planes plays a crucial role in the development of many plants and animals, by determining the relative sizes, shapes, and spatial relationships of the two cells formed by the division. Cell-division geometry is particularly consequential in cases in which important cytoplasmic components ( developmental determinants ) are unequally distributed in the predivisional cell. This study will use the spherical green alga Volvox carteri is to explore mechanisms that regulate cell division symmetry. V. carteri is especially well suited for this purpose because it consists of just two cell types, large reproductive cells called gonidia and small nonreproductive cells called somatic cells, that are generated by a set of visibly unequal, or asymmetric, cell divisions. At least two different genes, called gls (for gonidialess), are required for the proper execution of these unequal cell divisions. In previous work one gls gene, glsA, was isolated and shown to encode a protein (GlsA) that is closely related to proteins found in yeast, worms, flies, plants, mice, and humans. GlsA protein appears to associate with the cell division machinery, and several lines of evidence suggest the hypothesis that it acts, together with at least two additional proteins (one of them a member of the well-studied Hsp70 family of molecular chaperones), as an adaptor-like molecule that targets the cell division machinery to an off-center location during asymmetric division. The long term goal of this work is to test this hypothesis, and to identify the other factor(s) that are essential for asymmetric division. The investigator will use cell biological, biochemical, and molecular genetic methods to further characterize the mode of action of GlsA and Hsp70 and to identify and study the additional asymmetric division factor(s) with which they are hypothesized to act doc3870 none Knipp The PI proposes to develop a concept that will improve the possibility of observing the impact of space weather on the magnetosphere-ionosphere system, and that will address fundamental physical processes related to space weather phenomena. This will be done by focusing operations of sensitive ground based equipment to occur during potentially disruptive space weather conditions. By analyzing these observations in conjunction with spacecraft observations, SRI can develop an improved understanding of the coupling between the solar wind and magnetosphere and between the magnetosphere and ionosphere (generally termed space weather geoeffectiveness ). Thus, the overall objective of the proposal is to observe and analyze space weather geoeffectiveness by implementing an operational phase and a basic research phase to the program. The operational phase of the program is designed to provide a space weather alert system that notifies observers of solar and space conditions during times of activity so that appropriate planning of ground-based operations can be established. The development and implementation of such an alert protocol for the incoherent-scatter radar community was established under past NSWP funding. The basic research phase of the program is designed to study the geoeffectiveness of the space weather event by analyzing data in the form of substorms, storms, and convection bays. As the acquired data sets will benefit all of these topics, it is anticipated that the results will contribute to a number of space weather research programs, present and future doc3871 none The maize R gene (red-1) encodes a helix-loop-helix transcription factor that determines the timing and tissue-specificity of anthocyanin expression. Anthocyanin is a non-essential plant pigment that can be used as a marker for gene expression. The R locus exhibits epigenetic phenomena such as genomic imprinting and paramutation. Imprinting is apparent in the differential expression of aleurone depending upon parental inheritance of the gene. Paramutation is a form of epigenetic silencing in which the presence of a specific allele such as R-st affect the level of expression of a sensitive allele such as R-r. Both imprinting and paramutation are linked to structural properties of R haplotypes. These structural properties include 1) haplotype complexity or gene number, 2) gene structure, for example, the presence or absence of inverted repeats, 3) transposable element insertion, and 4) cytosine methylation. A molecular genetic approach will be applied to the problem of R gene complexity and expression. The specific aims are: 1. To characterize R haplotypes from races of maize. A phylogenetic tree will be constructed with these data. Tissue specificity of anthocyanin distribution will be surveyed and alleles will be characterized in terms of paramutagenicity, paramutability and imprinting. 2. To use genetic recombination to separate selected haplotypes into single transcriptional unit genes to compare the anthocyanin distribution for each gene. 3. To define the 5 flanking regions of each of the unique non-imprinting alleles and to determine the distribution of methyl-cytosine in the DNA. The results from this study will give more insight into the structural and evolutionary aspects of genes exhibiting epigenetic phenomena, such as the maize R family doc3872 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Carleton College will acquire an Electrospray Atmospheric Pressure Chemical Ionization Ion Trap Mass Spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) the analysis of peptides synthesized as enzyme inhibitors; b) glutathione-nitric oxide chemistry; c) electrochemically-initiated metalloporphyrin polymer formation; d) analysis of synthetic products such as vanadium (IV) ion sequestering agents; and e) analysis of organic components in atmospheric aerosols. The ion trap mass spectrometer will also be used in formal course work at Carleton. Mass spectrometry (MS) is a technique used to probe intimate structural details and to obtain the molecular compositions of a vast array of organic, bioorganic, and organometallic molecules. The results from these studies will have an impact in a number of areas including biochemistry and atmospheric chemistry doc3873 none Ridley This collaborative proposal focuses on the creation and validation of a community based real-time and retrospective high-latitude ionospheric electrodynamics specification and forecasting tool. At it s core, the tool will have the assimilative mapping of ionospheric electrodynamics (AMIE) technique. The model will make predictions of the eletrodynamic state of the high-latitude ionosphere for up to 60 minutes ahead of time. In addition, the PIs will make the code available to the community through a simple graphical user interface which will allow community members to run AMIE for their campaigns. The creation of the predictive model will give fundamental insight into many non-steady-state magnetospheric processes, such as substroms and storms by allowing a quantitative examination of how the state of the magnetosphere and ionosphere are dependent both on the current state and the external driving conditions. The PI s will perform a quantitative validation of AMIE and rtAMIE. The validation will give average error estimates for each grid point on AMIE for the ionospheric potential and conductances. These error estimates will be functions of: (1) location, (2) data density, (3) activity level, and (4)season. This quantitative validation will allow users of the code to fully understand the accurarcy of the results. No other electric potential model has this capability, even though it is crucially important for studies of ionospheric and magnetospheric phenomena doc3874 none Gametophytes of the fern Ceratopteris richardii are sexually dimorphic, either hermaphroditic or male. The determinant of sex in this and other ferns is antheridiogen, a gibberellin-like pheromone that is secreted by the hermaphroditic gametophyte and promotes male development of other sexually undetermined gametophytes. The plant hormone abscisic acid blocks the antheridiogen response. The primary objective of this proposal is to understand how antheridiogen and abscisic acid govern the sex of the Ceratopteris gametophyte. The genetic analysis of five phenotypic classes of sex-determining mutants (12 loci) has led to a hypothetical sex-determining genetic pathway in this species. To understand how these genes regulate sex determination at the molecular level, it will be necessary to clone these genes. The objectives of the proposed research are to continue the genetic analysis of sex determination and develop methods required to clone the sex-determining genes in Ceratopteris. These methods include transformation, which will allow us to incorporate reverse genetic approaches to study gene function, and endogenous transposable element identification, which will provide new options to clone the many genes that have been identified by mutation. Understanding how sex is determined in plants is an important developmental question whose answer may ultimately have practical applications in agriculture and plant breeding. The proposed studies will provide a basic understanding of the genes involved in this process and will also be of value in understanding how the fate of a plant cell (the fern spore) is ultimately regulated by antheridiogen, a gibberellin-like pheromone doc3875 none PROJECT SUMMARY This award provides partial support for the Gordon Conference on Glycobiology scheduled for March 4-9, at the Sheraton Harbortown Resort, Ventura, CA. The previous conference was held at the same venue on February 21-26, . This was a highly successful conference and, in keeping with earlier conferences, demand for places outstripped supply and the 150 delegate places were quickly filled. The Gordon Conference on Glycobiology is the main venue for presentation and discussion of current and future directions in the field of glycobiology. By bringing together scientists whose skills span a wide range of disciplines including chemistry, cell biology, genetics, developmental biology and bioinformatics, these conferences consistently lead to new insights, new interactions, new collaborations, and new research directions. The Glycobiology Gordon Conference will build on the successful traditions of previous conferences whilst taking account of the many exciting new avenues of glycobiological research which are being opened up by the information emanating from Genome Projects. For example, once the amino acid sequences of the several hundred thousand proteins that make up a human being are known, scientists will be faced with the awesome challenge of understanding their functions and learning how post-translational events such as glycosylation contribute to human health and disease. Glycobiologists will play key roles in the post-genomics era and the Gordon Conference is well timed to facilitate inter-disciplinary collaborations essential to the successful exploitation of genomic information of relevance to glycobiology. The main themes of the conference will be: (i) structural glycobiology with special emphasis on technological developments and new information pertaining to lectin-carbohydrate recognition; (ii) the impact of genomics on glycobiology; (iii) discoveries from knockout mouse experiments; (iii) glyco-immunology; (iv) reproductive and developmental glycobiology; (v) neuro-glycobiology; (vi) glycoconjugates as therapeutic agents. Since glycopolymers are important in a wide range of biological and pathological systems, this multi-disciplinary approach should appeal to a broad spectrum of investigators doc3876 none Copley Xenobiotic compounds released to the environment exert selective pressures on microorganisms that promote the evolution of new catabolic pathways. Recruitment of pre-existing enzymes to serve new functions is one important strategy by which microorganisms assemble new catabolic pathways. Sphingomonas chlorophenolica appears to have recruited maleylacetoacetate (MAA) isomerase to serve as a tetrachlorohydroquinone (TCHQ) dehalogenase during biodegradation of the toxic xenobiotic pesticide, pentachlorophenol. MAA isomerase catalyzes the glutathione-dependent isomerization of a double bond during the catabolism of tyrosine. TCHQ dehalogenase replaces chlorine substituents on TCHQ and trichlorohydroquinone with hydrogen atoms, a process which results in the oxidation of two molecules of glutathione to glutathione disulfide. Although these reactions are remarkably different, TCHQ dehalogenase has considerable sequence identity with known MAA isomerases in the active site region and has substantial isomerase activity. Initial efforts will be directed at a rigorous analysis of the function of the progenitor protein, including elucidation of the reaction mechanism and identification of the roles of active site residues. Subsequently, a detailed analysis of the mutations required to develop and optimize the altered activity will be carried out, with emphasis on understanding the function of each residue that is changed. Finally, in vitro evolution techniques will be used to try to evolve a more effective enzyme by alleviating the substrate inhibition that limits the catalytic ability of TCHQ dehalogenase. This work will provide new insights into the evolution of new enzymes in response to environmental toxins. It will also yield important information about the adaptation of the generic catalytic capabilities of a protein scaffold for dramatically different purposes that should provide inspiration for protein engineers interested in developing new catalysts. Finally, it will provide a gene for an improved TCHQ dehalogenase that should be useful in the engineering of an improved strain of S. chlorophenolica with an enhanced ability to degrade pentachlorophenol doc3877 none Ion channels are membrane proteins responsible for the passive movement of ions, and sometimes other substrates, across cell membranes. Channels function in various cell types, including epithelial cells where they regulate the flow of ions across membranes that separate major compartments in the body, and excitable cells where they transduce electrical signals across cell membranes. Ion channels are often the endpoint, or effector, of signal transduction pathways. The overall structure of a typical ion channel can be broken into two major domains -- portions that form the pathway for ion permeation by creating a pore through the membrane, and (usually separate) portions that serve to regulate the open closed configuration of the pore by gating in response to an appropriate stimulus. This proposal concerns one type of channel -- one crucial to the processes of chloride secretion and reabsorption in epithelial cells. This channel, the CFTR protein, is the product of the gene defective in the inherited disease, cystic fibrosis. A variant of CFTR is also involved in modulation of membrane excitability in cardiac ventricular myocytes. The long-term goal of this project is to understand the mechanisms of conduction, specificity, and gating in ion channels and transporters, with an emphasis on anion channels. Compared to cation channels, the structural architecture of anion channels is poorly understood. For this project, the overall objective is to determine the mechanisms controlling permeation in CFTR. Goal #1 is to identify transmembrane (TM) helices that line the pore, by localization of binding sites for open-channel blockers. Goal #2 is to identify groups of amino acids that serve as determinants of anion selectivity. The proposed approach relies upon the use of molecular biological techniques (site-directed mutagenesis) combined with expression in Xenopus oocytes and quantitative biophysical assays. The working hypothesis is that the pore is lined by TM domains 5, 6, 11, and 12. To achieve these goals, whole-cell and single-channel currents will be measured to determine the kinetics of two structurally-distinct classes of pore-blocking molecules, and to determine whether their binding domains contribute to the permeation pathway. Structural elements that contribute to the architecture of the pore will be defined by comparing the ability of wildtype and mutant channels to interact with open-channel blockers. Previous studies from the principal investigator s laboratory have shown that blocker kinetics are highly sensitive to the structure of the pore. A region within TM6 has also been identified that is critical for discrimination between different anions. This region also appears to lie close to the binding sites for pore-blocking molecules. To accurately describe the structure of the pore, it is necessary to consider the contributions made from portions of the channel other than TM6. This project will be guided by a three-dimensional model of the pore, proposed in the application, which takes into account the experimental data for TM domains 5, 6, 11, and 12. This approach hypothesizes that multiple helical domains contribute both to the binding sites for drugs and to the selectivity domains of the channel. A specific subset of residues that may determine the biophysical features of permeation is proposed. Residues in TM6 and TM12 will be addressed initially. Testing the importance of these residues will allow the construction of a detailed map of the conduction pathway in CFTR. Basic mechanisms used for permeation are likely to be common between CFTR and other anion channels. Hence, it is likely that conclusions drawn from the study of this molecular model will be relevant to the understanding of permeation in other anion channels doc3878 none Lindahl and Zengel The Ribosome Biogenesis and Nucleolar Function meeting (planned for August 17-21, in Tahoe, CA), is the fifth in a series of tri-annual meetings. The purpose of these meetings is to give workers in the field, including post-docs and students, an up-to-date view of research addressing all aspects of ribosome biogenesis. Ribosomes are essential to survival of all organisms, from bacteria to humans. The formation of ribosomes requires a complicated, but highly coordinated, set of reactions, including transcription, translation, splicing, RNA processing, trafficking of ribosomal components and assembled precursor ribosomal particles, and RNA and protein modifications. The investigation of this extensive suite of reactions, which collectively accomplish the biogenesis of new ribosomes, requires many types of expertise, including enzymology, genetics, cytology and ultramicroscopic analysis. No single lab can possess all of these types of expertise, yet every worker investigating an aspect of ribosome biogenesis should understand the progress in all other areas. The meeting brings together researchers working on all aspects of ribosome synthesis in a variety of organisms, from eubacteria through humans doc3879 none How do we see? This simple question does not have a simple answer. Vision is a complex process that begins with the absorption of light by the eye and ends with behavior such as perception and locomotion. Because of the complex nature of the vertebrate visual system, especially that of primates, this project uses the relatively simple visual system of the horseshoe crab, Limulus polyphemus. Recent work has uncovered the nature of the neural code for mate detection by this animal during the day, as the eye is neurally tuned for this important task. This work will now be extended by a combined anatomical, behavioural, and physiological study of neural coding in the eye and brain with emphasis on understanding how the animal can see so well at night, when light levels are a millionfold lower than in the day. The animal s visual performance in its natural habitat (ocean) will be precisely measured in day and night. The project will quantify the neural information the eye sends to the brain when the animal sees in its natural habitat and then analyze how the brain processes the information it receives from the eye. New behavioural and physiological techniques developed under NSF support together with a wealth of information about Limulus vision establish the animal as an excellent model for studying the link between neural coding and behaviour. Past studies with Limulus have provided milestones in vision research. The proposed studies should prove equally productive. They should reveal concepts of neural coding and behaviour common to other animals and contribute to our understanding of how sensory signals relate to behaviour. In addition, there are outstanding opportunities for undergraduate participation in this multidisciplinary research doc3880 none Bryant In cyanobacteria and plants, the Photosystem I (PS 1) reaction center (RC) is a membrane-bound, multisubunit oxidoreductase that catalyzes the light-driven transfer of electrons from reduced plastocyanin (or frequently cytochrome C6) on the lumenal side of the thylakoid to oxidized ferredoxin (or flavodoxin). The long-term goal of this research program is to understand the biogenesis of this complex enzyme, as well as the structural and mechanistic details that allow it to catalyze the above-mentioned reaction with a quantum yield approaching 1.0 and a very high thermodynamic efficiency (~45%). Taking advantage of knowledge gained during the present funding period, the powerful methods of site-directed and general mutagenesis, protein overproduction, biochemical resolution and reconstitution, chemical rescue and modification, optical kinetic spectroscopy, X- and Q-band EPR spectroscopy, transient EPR spectroscopy, pulsed EPR spectroscopy, NMR spectroscopy, and mass spectrometry will be employed to produce and to analyze PS I reaction centers with novel properties. The following (long-term) goals will be studied: (1) the roles of RubA and Ycf4 in PS I biogenesis; (2) electron transport kinetics in PS I complexes with modified quinone contents; (3) the role of the 2-methyl group in phylloquinone function and complete establishment of the biosynthetic pathway for phylloquinone biosynthesis; (4) establishment of the biosynthetic pathway for plastoquinone and the properties of mutants unable to synthesize plastoquinone; and (5) an examination of structural properties of PsaC that influence the magnetic and redox properties Of FA and F13. The successful completion of the proposed research program would contribute significant new information concerning the biogenesis of membrane- bound, electron transport proteins; would critically test current theoretical descriptions of biological electron transport processes; and would contribute important new information concerning the biosynthetic pathways for phylloquinone and plastoquinone in cyanobacteria. All life on Earth is ultimately dependent upon light-energy capture and energy conversion to biomass through photosynthesis. Cyanobacterial photosynthesis is not only centrally important in the global cycling of carbon and nitrogen, but these organisms are the major primary producers of biomass in many ecosystems, including the oceans. Cyanobacteria are photoautotrophic prokaryotes whose photosynthetic apparatus closely resembles that found in the chloroplasts of higher plants. However, because cyanobacteria can be experimentally manipulated like other prokaryotes, and because relatively sophisticated genetic methods can be employed with these organisms, cyanobacteria provide unique opportunities as model systems for understanding oxygenic photosynthesis. A better understanding of these processes can lead to improvements in agriculturally important crop plants, to methods for the production of important biomaterials and biosensors, and to possible methods for greenhouse gas amelioration methods. This project also provides outstanding opportunities for multidisciplinary training of students and postdoctoral fellows in areas including microbial physiology, molecular biology, biochemistry, and biophysics doc3881 none Berkowitz The goal of this SGER program is to determine the feasibility of using a novel technique, spark erosion, to provide the particles for a material with strong technological potential, high-energy product exchange-spring permanent magnets (ESPMs). ESPMs are duplex alloys of magnetically hard and soft phases in which the required length scales for the two phases are in the several tens of nm range. These length scales must be well controlled for optimum performance and this has been a principal obstacle to achieving a satisfactory production method. The spark erosion approach controls the sizes of the phases by precipitating them within particles of suitable diameters and microstructure. The idea is to produce amorphous particles of the appropriate composition and diameter such that, after annealing to the equilibrium duplex crystalline state, the length scales of the two phases are constrained by the particle size and initial microstructure as optimum for ESPM. Spark erosion is an under-appreciated, but extremely versatile and economical particle production method. The particle synthesis method is on firmer ground than the control of particle size microstructure constraining equilibrium phase dimensions, since a large variety of powders have been produced by this method. Hot pressing is the primary method for preparing the final product, high-density bulk magnets with dimensions of several cm. A second approach for preparing the bulk magnets is thermal spraying, and this technique will be pursued if warranted by the results of the hot pressing. Both of these methods should benefit from the initial amorphous state expected for the spark-eroded particles since the equilibrium crystalline duplex structure can be developed during or after consolidation. The conceptual approach, although reasonable, is currently unproven. Particle production by spark erosion without contaminants seems feasible, but must be demonstrated. In addition, the particle synthesis method is a novel and economical one, which deserves attention. It is a technique that has great potential for a wide range of applications. Finally, there is new materials science to be clarified by examining the influence of particle size on precipitate dimensions. %%% The concept for exchange-spring permanent magnets (ESPM) has been available since , and it has been intensively pursued because ESPM offer the promise of permanent magnets with higher energy products than currently available, at a much-reduced cost for the rare-earth materials used. The permanent magnet market is huge, and this has inspired a great deal of very useful processing and modeling work on ESPM. However, no bulk processing technique is available at present doc3882 none This project will combine animal physiology with biophysics and biochemistry in order to examine oxygen transport and consumption from whole animal to subcellular levels during the prolonged, spontaneous breath holds of elephant seals during sleep. Unique adaptations in these animals include enhanced oxygen storage and exquisite regulation of heart rate, blood flow and tissue metabolic rates. The physiological processes and biochemical mechanisms underlying these adaptations are relevant to the basic principles of oxygen transfer within tissues as well as to the remarkable diving abilities of seals and whales. A variety of minimally- and non-invasive techniques, including blood tissue sampling, blood flow measurements, and nuclear magnetic resonance imaging spectroscopy, will allow study of these seals while they sleep undisturbed. This will allow: 1) examination of the regulation of heart rate, cardiac output and muscle blood flow throughout the ten-minute breath holds of these seals, 2) measurement of the rate of blood oxygen depletion throughout the breath-hold, 3) examination of blood-to-muscle oxygen transfer as the blood oxygen level decreases, 4) determination of the oxygen desaturation rate of myoglobin - the oxygen storage protein in muscle, 5) examination of metabolic regulation in muscle, as reflected in the depletion of the high-energy phosphate, phosphocreatine, and the formation of lactate, and 6) examination of the mobility of the myoglobin molecule within the muscle cell doc3883 none Ackers Research under this program has yielded the first determination of cooperativity contributions by all eight configurationally-distinct O2 bound intermediates of human hemoglobin at physiological pH. Results showed that the site-specific distribution of O2 affinities through the 16-step binding cascade does not conform to either of the traditional allosteric models ( concerted MWC or sequential KNF). However, the experimentally-resolved distribution was fully consistent with the Symmetry Rule model (Ackers et. al ( ) Science 255, 54) which incorporates both sequential and concerted structural transitions according to site-specific rules. In the next phase, these studies will be extended to learn how the O2-linked proton release (i.e. the physiologically important Bohr effect) is modulated at all sixteen reaction steps of the binding cascade. To accomplish this objective, the ten combinatorial forms of human hemoglobin having 0 - 4 O2 bound will be investigated at a series of pH values (7.0 - 9.5) to evaluate their site-specific contributions to the classical Bohr effect. Experimental methods developed previously under this program for hybrid tetramer studies will be employed (i.e., stopped-flow and haptoglobin kinetics, isoelectric focusing, dimer hybridization, analytical gel chromatography and direct O2 binding). The resulting databases will be analyzed using thermodynamic linkage theory to yield the 16 site-specific Bohr proton contributions of the cascade. The significance of this research lies both in its methodological innovation for experimentally dissecting the functional rules of a complex macromolecular system at the site-specific level and in the importance of human hemoglobin itself, as a prototypic model for numerous other allosteric proteins. While the importance of understanding complex multi-subunit protein systems is widely recognized, as a result of the explosive growth of genomic and proteomic databases and the numerous discoveries from cell biology and the exciting goals of protein design, there is much ongoing interest and debate over the molecular mechanisms of allosterically-regulated proteins, including that of human hemoglobin doc3884 none Pollen tube growth is the process by which flowering plants deliver the male gamete to the egg apparatus for fertilization, a necessary prerequisite to seed production. Characterized by rapid rates and a high degree of polarity, the elongation process is of great interest, both because of its economic implications and its relevance to fundamental aspects of plant cell growth and development. This project focuses on the role of calcium (Ca2+), protons (H+), and the actin cytoskeleton, and builds upon the recent demonstration that pollen tube growth rate oscillates, and that there are underlying oscillations in both ions and cytoskeletal activity. Using pollen tubes of both lily and tobacco, an attempt will be made to correlate at high temporal resolution the oscillations in intracellular Ca2+ and H+ with those in the growth rate. In addition, an exploration will be made on how these oscillations are changed when cell wall properties are modified by various agents, e.g., Ca2+, H+, boron, pectin methyl esterase, or Yariv phenyl glycoside. By determining if and how these agents modify the oscillatory behavior, and its relationship to both the intracellular gradients of Ca2+ and H+ as well as the extracellular fluxes of these ions, it seems possible that a temporal hierarchy can be developed for the activity of factors that control growth. Techniques involved here include ratiometric imaging for intracellular Ca2+ and H+, and ion selective vibration probe analysis to determine the magnitude and direction of extracellular fluxes. In studies on the cytoskeleton, attention will be given to the structure and dynamic distribution of F-actin in the clear zone, where rapid turnover and formation of these elements is presumed to occur. It will be particularly interesting to correlate these turnover processes with the oscillatory pattern of growth, again with the view of determining which events precede the rapid growth phases and which events follow. For these studies the newly developed GFP-talin fusion will be used to fluorescently label F-actin in living pollen tubes. When taken together it is anticipated that these studies will provide insight into the physiological and molecular factors that control growth and development of the pollen tube. To the extent that other tip growing cells, e.g., root hairs, fungal hyphae, fern and moss protonemata, use similar mechanisms, the results from pollen tubes could be pertinent, and help us gain a general understanding of basic mechanisms involved in cell growth doc3885 none Plants and animals display an amazing array of reproductive systems. One of the most intriguing is androdioecy, in which males coexist with hermaphrodites (individuals in which both sexes are present), but there are no true females. Androdioecy is rare, as predicted by theory, yet there are a few, well-documented cases in plants and animals. This project is a continuation of earlier experiments exploring androdioecy in a freshwater crustacean, the clam shrimp Eulimnadia texana. A three-year examination of this species revealed both benefits and detriments to males, and thus to better understand this mating system, refinement of these results is required. Additionally, all previous experiments were conducted in laboratory settings. To truly understand the system, field experiments need to be conducted. The two proposed projects will accomplish both of these goals: (1) a laboratory experiment will measure the relationship between the proportion of males and male mating effectiveness in two natural populations, and (2) development of microsatellite loci will allow genetic fingerprinting of field-collected shrimp so that the previous laboratory experiments can be extended into the field. The proposed projects are one of the few attempts to delineate the benefits of outcrossing (offspring produced by mating with males) in an animal system. This information is crucial for developing breeding programs, both in agriculture and for the maintenance of endangered species doc3886 none With this award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program continues its support for the work of Gideon A. Fraenkel in the Department of Chemistry at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. The work is aimed at understanding the details of the structures and solution dynamics of a variety of organolithium compounds, using a combination of synthesis, dynamic NMR, x-ray crystallography, and gradient corrected Density Functional Theory. The questions to be addressed include: 1) What are the solution structures of ion-paired organolithium compounds? 2) To what extent does stereochemical restriction by a pendant ligand perturb conjugation within allylic lithium compounds? 3) Does heavy alkyl substitution affect conjugation? and 4) Does Li ion coordination to a remote C-C double bond affect RLi addition? Organolithium compounds self assemble into equilibrium mixtures of rapidly interconverting species which vary in aggregation and solvation. Understanding the details of the rates and equilibria of these compounds is expected to improve the ability of organic chemists to employ them to carry out useful organic syntheses, for example in the production of improved rubber for tires. The combination of synthesis, spectroscopy, and theory should provide valuable training for the students involved in the research doc3887 none The nucleus is the subcellular organelle in which the bulk of the genomic information within an eukaryotic cell is organized. From studies using hybridization technologies and microscopy work with serial or optical sections of fixed cells, a picture of an organized subnuclear structure has emerged. More recently, the application of the Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) as an in vivo tag of genomic DNA has allowed the visualization of chromatin in live cells of animals and fungi. Based on studies using 3-D fluorescence microscopy, the chromosomes within an interphase nuclei are perceived to have an ordered arrangement that is relatively static except for slow motions that can be attributed to Brownian movement. However, it is also clear that during other phenomena that are known to occur within a nucleus, such as transvection and recombination, that relatively large and long-range movement of chromatin must be possible. The goal in this project is to contribute to the general understanding of subnuclear architecture by charting the relative physical position and movement of sequences for each of the chromosomes in cells of living plants. To achieve the objective of visualizing and charting the sequences for all the chromosomes of Arabidopsis, GFP and two different color variants of this protein will be deployed as in vivo tags for about 1,000 dispersed sites within the 5 chromosomes of Arabidopsis. Comparative analyses of the relative positions between defined regions of the genome in space and time will provide novel information about the organization principles that control the structure and dynamics of chromatin. Concurrent with optical studies to track the relative subnuclear location and movement for distinct regions of the genome, the effects of genome location on transcription potential of a reporter gene will be quanitified. Together, these studies should provide the first comprehensive 3-D physical and transcription activity maps for a genome and should contribute significantly to understanding the roles that subnuclear location may play in controlling gene expression. This study should generate more than 1,000 mapped insertion lines of Arabidopsis with 3 distinct and optically tractable GFP-tags at defined locations within the genome. These materials should be invaluable for the characterization of chromatin-related mutations that affect gene expression and development. The number of such mutations are likely to rapidly increase due to the efforts of several genome projects that have been funded by the NSF in the past two years. Molecular tools generated from this project will also be applied to an important crop plant such as maize. The fusion of cutting edge imaging technology with the wealth of classical and modern cytogenetics in maize should provide new perspectives on global control of genetic information as well as epigenetic phenomena such as paramutation. These new insights will facilitate understanding of how genomic information is organized in plants and how gene expression can be regulated at a global scale. As such, the tools and knowledge generated by this proposed work should benefit future efforts to improve the quality and yield of crop plants. Deliverables: 1. About 5,000 lac-operator-tagged (beacon) Arabidopsis thaliana lines. 2. 3-D coordinate maps of 1,000 selected beacon insertions with maximal dispersion across the whole genome. 3. A global gene expression map that shows the 3-D coordinates and the luciferase marker expression levels of the beacons. These materials and information will be available at http: aesop.rutgers.edu ~lamlab ccharting.html doc3888 none Stewart The mammalian p70S6 kinase, termed S6K1, is a mitogen-stimulated serine threonine kinase that lies on a signaling pathway leading to the control of translation and cell growth. The current model for S6K1 function is that upon activation, S6K1 phosphorylated the 40S ribosomal subunit protein S6 and this causes the ribosome to selectively increase the translation of a group of mRNAs that encode ribosomal proteins and translation initiation factors. This series of events would be expected to increase ribosome biogenesis and the translational capacity of the cell and thus allow increased general protein synthesis and cell growth. The activation of S6K1 is complex and is associated with the phosphorylation of eight amino acids in the kinase. The signaling pathways that lead to S6K1 activation are only partially defined and only the identity of one of the kinases that phosphorylates one of the eight phosphorylated amino acids inS6K1 that are associated with the activation of the kinase is known. The Drosophila melanogaster S6 kinase homolog, dS6K, is structurally and functionally conserved with the mammalian S6K1. In cultured cells, dS6K can be activated or inhibited by agents that activate or inhibit S6K1, suggesting that the mechanisms that regulate dS6K and S6K1 activation will be conserved between Drosophila and mammals. Similar to the proposed role for S6K1 in translation and growth, the role for dS6K within the fly appears to be in regulating cell size, cell growth and cell proliferation. The overall goal of this proposal is to use the power of Drosophila genetics to identify novel components of the dS6K pathway. Reaching this goal will entail: 1. Testing if mutant alleles of genes that encode suspected components of the dS6K signaling pathway interact genetically with mutant dS6K alleles 2. Screening a collection of Drosophila deficiency stocks to identify dose-sensitive modifiers of dS6K mutant phenotypes 3. Performing mutagenesis screens designed to identify newly induced mutations in genes that encode components of the dS6K signaling pathways. Identifying components of the dS6K signaling pathways will be important for increasing our knowledge of intracellular signaling and also should impact our understanding of the basic mechanisms that regulate translation and cell growth doc3889 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Arizona will upgrade a departmental gas-phase photoelectron spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including the following: a) studies of metal-metal interactions; b) electron transfer in organic compounds containing heteroatoms; c) evaluation of molybdenum-sulfur interactions in molybdoenzyme model complexes; and d) electronic structure of porphyrins and metalloporphyrins. The X-ray photoelectron spectrometer (XPS) is used for chemical analysis. It irradiates a sample with a beam of monochromatic X-rays and the energies of the resulting photoelectrons are measured and related to specific elements. XPS often plays a crucial role in defining the system under study. The work to be carried out by these investigators represents a highly coherent attack on a range of issues at the forefront of materials chemistry and biology doc3890 none Rapid progress has been made in understanding the molecular basis of plant-microbe interactions. Tomato has been important in that research because of its genetic tractability, its economic value, and the cost of the many diseases that afflict it. A centerpiece of that work has been the gene-for-gene interactions of Pseudomonas syringae pv tomato DC and tomato. DC has emerged as an important model in molecular plant pathology because of its genetic tractability, because it also is a pathogen of Arabidopsis, and because its interactions with plants appear representative of many prevalent bacterial and fungal pathogens. An additional factor that makes DC experimentally attractive is the evidence that its parasitic abilities are largely based on (an unknown number of) effector proteins that are injected into plant cells by the type III secretion system. Identification of these effectors will provide the basis for orderly dissection of the molecular processes underlying pathogenicity, and these proteins, which presumably have evolved to exquisitely alter plant gene expression and metabolism, are a likely source of new tools for plant biologists. Consequently, the first objective of this project is the sequencing of the complete genome of DC by The Institute for Genomic Research and genome-based searches for genes encoding effector proteins and other potential virulence factors. Subsequent objectives involve microarray analyses to identify genes and regulons in both DC and tomato that are likely to be important in the interaction and the development of a series of green fluorescent protein-based tools for monitoring molecular cellular events in living plant tissues during bacterium-plant interactions. Because DC interactions with tomato (and Arabidopsis) involve highly localized cellular events and appear to be highly multifactorial and dependent on redundant factors, these new tools will be essential for a functional genomic analysis of pathogenesis and defense. Other important objectives of the project involve the establishment of a community-oriented functional genomics annotation web site and database that will serve the wider research community and also provide the centerpiece for educational outreach activities involving high school students. Deliverables The key deliverables for the project are the complete genomic sequence of P. s. tomato DC , cell biology indicator plants, and bacterial mutants. The draft sequence of the genome is available through a href=www.tigr.org tdb mdb mdbinprogress.html www.tigr.org tdb mdb mdbinprogress.html a , effector gene coordinates and other resources are available through the project web site a href=http: pseudomonas-syringae.org http: pseudomonas-syringae.org a doc3891 none Principal Investigator: Matthew Penn, California State University, Northridge The investigators will determine variations in magnetic structure with height above the visible surface of the Sun. The main effort is to use the San Fernando Observatory Vacuum Telescope (SFOVT) to make a variety of observations of the photosphere and chromosphere at infrared wavelengths. Observations at infrared wavelengths of spectral lines formed at different altitudes will allow the investigators to make Zeeman magnetic field measurements. The investigators will perform a fractal analysis of the spatial structure of the magnetic field, and study the vertical extent of magnetic structures observed at low altitudes, the so-called moss. With high time resolution they will follow dynamic changes in magnetic fields prior to filament eruptions, and low-level outflows observed in coronal holes, possibly implying a low altitude source for solar wind. The proposed research will initiate a new direction for the SFOVT, utilizing a recently acquired, high performance infrared camera doc3892 none The long-term aim of this project is to understand the regulation of heme biosynthesis in the symbiotic nitrogen-fixing bacterium Bradyrhizobium japonicum. The iron-containing porphyrin ring (heme) is involved in several enzymatic reactions requiring microanaerobic conditions necessary for efficient nitrogen fixation (free-living or symbiotic). The multienzyme pathway for heme formation ends with the insertion of iron into the protoporphyrin ring in a reaction catalyzed by ferrochelatase. Because iron may be a limiting nutrient and porphyrins are cytotoxic, this suggests the need for coordination of heme biosynthesis with iron availability. A novel protein called Irr has been recently identified and proposed to mediate iron control of heme biosynthesis. Irr is present under iron limitation and negatively regulates the heme biosynthesis gene hemB, preventing protoporphyrin accumulation from exceeding iron availability. Irr is a conditionally stable protein that degrades rapidly when cells are exposed to iron. Heme is an effector molecule in this iron-mediated degradation, binding to a specific motif in Irr. Irr also binds ferrochelatase directly. This proposal will test the hypothesis that Irr mediates iron control of the heme pathway by responding to the status of protoporphyrin and heme at the site of heme synthesis. The role of heme in mediating iron-dependent Irr degradation will be elucidated. Specifically, two plausible mechanisms will be tested: heme catalysis of Irr oxidation leading to degradation, or heme-induced conformational change in Irr, rendering it accessible to proteases. The binding of ferrochelatase to Irr and the effect of this binding on Irr activity will also be studied. This work focuses on a metabolic pathway that is important for energy production and its novel regulation by bacterial cells, and thus should provide insights on the ability of bacteria to adjust to diverse environmental conditions. The environmental adaptability of Bradyrhizobium japonicum is of special interest because this bacterium establishes a nitrogen-fixing symbiotic association with soybeans. Because this relationship is beneficial to a commercially important plant crop, B. japonicum is thus of economic and agricultural interest. These studies will also involve the training of graduate and undergraduate students, including women and under-represented minority trainees doc3893 none Feigenson, Gerald W. The overall goal of this project is to understand the role of cholesterol in biological membranes. This project has four main conceptual elements: (i) 3-component lipid mixtures, containing cholesterol, will serve as chemically simple experimental models of mammalian plasma membranes; (ii) Several independent, complementary methods will be used to thoroughly map and characterize the compositional phase behavior of these model membranes; (iii) Based on the observed phase behavior, Monte Carlo simulations will be used to find the dominant microscopic lipid-lipid interaction energies; and (iv) The lateral distributions of other membrane components will be studied in these well-characterized systems, shedding light on the nature of cholesterol-rich detergent resistant membranes. Experimentally, this project involves x-ray diffraction to find phase boundaries; electron spin resonance to map order parameters of the phases; pyrene excimer monomer ratios and fluorescence resonance energy transfer to find phase boundaries and to measure partitioning between phases; confocal fluorescence microscopy to visualize coexisting phases; and computer simulations to evaluate the thermodynamic implications of microscopic interaction models and to generate pictures of lateral distributions. Although cholesterol is the single most abundant lipid species in mammalian plasma membranes, the underlying nature of its interactions with neighboring membrane molecules has remained obscure. This research will provide an in-depth physical understanding of these underlying lipid-lipid interactions and could therefore have a very significant impact on the field of signal transduction doc3894 none Impulsive, inattentive and hyperactive children have greater social and academic problems than their peers, at least in the U.S. Teachers and parents find these behaviors difficult to manage, especially in mid-childhood. This research will use a comparative, cross-cultural design to clarify whether these behaviors are similar, have the same consequences for children, and pose the same challenges to parents and teachers, in different countries. This has significant implications for child learning and development in cross-cultural circumstances, whether in multi-ethnic classrooms in the U.S. or internationally. It also has implications for conditions in which children s behavior becomes classified as problem behavior, and how interventions for these behaviors might be designed to promote academic and social wellbeing for children and their caregivers. The comparison will be made between children in three countries: US (Texas), Mexico, and Belize. These cultural settings have been chosen because they have varying teacher and parent values about children s talkativeness and activity. Social and academic consequences of impulsive, inattentive, and hyperactive behaviors will be compared across these settings. Children s behavior will be assessed at home, in the classroom and on the playground, using a combination of anthropological, biological, and psychological methods. Particular attention will be paid to sex differences in behavior, because previous clinical studies have shown that severe levels of impulsive, inattentive and hyperactive behavior are much more likely to be found in boys. By using a biocultural research design, focusing on both biological and cultural contexts of the behaviors, this study will be able to clarify the roles of cultural and biological variation in producing sex differences in these behaviors. Currently, there is a poor understanding of the girls and boys behavior patterns, and the different reactions they may get from teachers, parents and other children. This research also has implications for children s academic and social well being, and why it may vary by sex and ethnicity. Most previous studies have focused only on pathological or extreme degrees of these behaviors, ignoring the fact that most children display these behaviors at least occasionally. Yet, even lesser degrees of impulsive, inattentive and hyperactive behavior may also have significant positive or negative consequences for many children. This study will provide the first clear evidence of the naturally occurring range of these behaviors and should be of interest to researchers in the fields of anthropology, psychology and education doc3895 none Hume Nerve cells communicate information to each other at narrow zones of contact referred to as synapses. The incoming presynaptic cell releases a chemical signal (the neurotransmitter), which binds to receptors on the target cell, eliciting electrical excitation or inhibition. The general goal of these experiments is to understand the mechanisms that allow developing synapses to reach their stable, mature state. The principal hypothesis to be explored is that in addition to the two signals known to pass between nerve and muscle to promote synapse maturation (agrin and ARIA), an additional signaling system also transmits key information. This proposed signaling system consists of ATP (adenosine 5 triphosphate) released from presynaptic terminals interacting with two different types of ATP receptors on the muscle cell surface. The hypothesis will be tested by using molecular biological and pharmacological tools to alter the function of the ATP receptors on the surface of chick muscle cells developing within the egg, and in cell culture. It is important that mature neuromuscular synapses be stable, so that they can reliably control of the routine actions of the nervous system such as commanding muscles to move in the pattern that allows us to breathe. However, understanding the mechanisms that promote synaptic growth and maturation are likely to also provide us with insight into the mechanisms that bring about changes in synaptic function in other regions of the mature nervous system where synapses are not always stable. Changes in the amplitude of synaptic responses are thought to be the cellular basis by which learning and forgetting occur doc512 none This award updates the Correlates of War Project Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data set through . Such an effort is critical for international conflict research, but the enterprise of updating this collection is a monumental one that is beyond the scope or resources of any single researcher. Consequently this is a collaborative effort, linking scholars at eleven different universities to complete the task in a systematic and timely fashion. The MID data set has been at the forefront on international conflict research over the past decade or more. This data set is the most frequently used in conflict research and MID data has been employed to explore a staggering breadth of topics in international relations research, including most of those central to contemporary scholarly debates. Furthermore, MID data are the basis for several other data projects in the discipline as well as highly compatible with a range of other data compilations, thereby facilitating the combination of data sets and the exploration of broader sets of theoretical questions. Updating the Militarized Interstate Dispute data set requires completion of the following major steps: 1) collect and document militarized incidents from a variety of sources. This entails searching global, regional, and national sources for indications of a threat, display, or use of force by one state against another; 2) checking, archiving, and documenting the incidents collected to insure consistency, completeness, and absence of duplication; 3) composing militarized disputes based on the collected incidents and additional research as necessary. Because disputes are conflict episodes, such things as starting and ending dates, secondary participants, stages of escalation, overall fatalities, method of settlement, and general outcome must be determined. A short narrative description of each dispute is also prepared; 4) checking, archiving, and documenting disputes in order to insure such things as conformity with coding rules, compatibility with documentation standards, internal consistency, and absence of duplication; 5) resolving issues that arise concerning coding procedures, documentation requirements, problem cases, and the like; and, 6) preparing a final version (3.0) of the data set for distribution via the world wide web. This requires the resolution of a few problems that have been found in the present version (2.1) before it can be merged with the - data. This is a major infrastructure project for the Political Science program and enables the updating of a data set that will be used by numerous scholars in international relations and comparative politics doc3897 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Georgetown University will acquire an X-ray powder diffractometer with area detector and variable temperature capability. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including the following: a) studies on liquid crystalline phases and the nature of the supramolecular structures in these systems; b) intermolecular interactions of and the supramolecular architecture of low molecular mass gelator materials within gel matrices; c) the relationship between growth of nanocrystalline solids in preferred orientations and resulting optical effects; and d) the identification of solid state materials via the determination of cell constants. The X-ray diffractometer allows accurate and precise measurements of the full three dimensional structure of a molecule, including bond distances and angles, and it provides accurate information about the spatial arrangement of the molecule relative to the neighboring molecules. These studies will have a signifcant impact in materials sciences doc3898 none This project is designed to identify a chemical in the blood of an insect that alters its feeding behavior. It focuses on the frontal ganglion (FG) of the moth Manduca sexta, a part of the nervous system that controls the ingestion of food. The FG drives the activity of the first part of the gut, the foregut. In the caterpillar, the foregut is constantly moving, taking in food and moving it further down the gut. Disrupting the function of the FG greatly reduces the amount of food ingested by the caterpillar or adult moth. At specific times during the moth s life cycle, the activity of the foregut is altered. For example, when the caterpillar is preparing to molt, it stops feeding and the foregut stops moving for about 16 hours. A preliminary study found that this change in activity is triggered by a factor in the blood. In the current study, experiments, several biochemical procedures will be used to isolate and purify the factor(s) in the blood of molting insects that alters foregut activity. Further studies of how the factor(s) act on the FG and foregut to alter their activities will be initiated. This project addresses basic research questions and provides the potential for more practical applications. One of the most fundamental questions in neurobiology is how an animal s nervous system is modified to produce changes in behavior. The large identifiable neurons and relatively simple behaviors of insects have allowed investigators to carry out detailed analyses of alterations in the neural circuitry underlying insect behaviors. Identification of a naturally occurring factor that disrupts a critical component of feeding behavior may prove useful for the development of specific chemical controls of insect feeding doc3899 none Yu The overall objective of this research is to elucidate the role of the supernumeral subunit, subunit IV (Mr = 14,384), in the cytochrome bc1 complex from a photosynthetic bacterium Rhodobacter sphaeroides. Previous studies involving site-directed mutagenesis followed by gene complementation (in vivo reconstitution) have established that subunit IV is essential for the catalytic activity, Q-binding, and structural integrity of the complex. However, judging from the 3-D structure model of this bacterial bc1 complex, built with coordinates from their mitochondrial counter parts (cytochrome b, cytochrome c1, the iron-sulfur protein, and subunit VII), direct participation of subunit IV in the catalytic (Q-binding) sites of the complex seems unlikely. In this project, the PI wishes to continue to use in vitro reconstitution, in concert with biophysical, biochemical, and structural analysis, to probe the mode of interaction between subunit IV and the core bc1 complex. The specific aims of this project are: (a) to identify amino acid residues of subunit IV involved in interaction with the three-subunit core complex; (b) to identify amino acid residues of cytochrome b involved in interaction with subunit IV; (c) to investigate the effect of subunit IV on the protein conformation and thermostability of the cytochrome bc1 complex by circular dichroism and differential scanning calorimetry; (d) to investigate the protein:lipid interactions in three- and four- subunit complexes; (e) to examine the Q sequestering role of subunit IV using synthetic Q- derivatives; and (f) to explore the possible association of supernumeral subunit function with extra segments in the bacterial core subunits. The research described in this project will increase our understanding of the structure-function and mechanisms of action of the Rhodobacter sphaeroides photosynthetic bacterial bc1 complex. The knowledge gained will provide a better understanding of energy transduction mechanisms in the photosynthetic apparatus. This may lead to the design of methods to improve photosynthetic efficiency and effective herbicide design. It will also enhance our understanding of mitochondrial bioenergetics doc3900 none This project will combine MHD modeling using the Michigan MHD code with satellite and ground-based observations to study the interaction of the solar wind with the magnetopause. In particular, two topics will be examined. The first topic is the mechanism by which momentum is transferred from the solar wind to the magnetosphere by reconnection at the dayside magnetopause. The second topic will be the response of the magnetosphere to a change of the interplanetary magnetic field from southward to northward doc3901 none During the three-year period to , a computer software system was developed to assist biologists in identifying individual dolphins in field photographs. The system maintains a database of dorsal fin images, and matches new images to the individuals in the collection. The system is in use in the laboratories of colleagues. During the three year period of this award, new data acquisition, feature extraction and indexing techniques will be introduced, improving the system s performance and extending its use to additional biological species. Many field photographs are unusable because of poor photographic quality, caused by motion blur, splashes, or glints of reflected sunlight that obscure part of the fin s boundary. This problem will be addressed by using digital video data acquisition. Sequential frames showing the same fin will be combined, reducing noise and interference and increasing the likelihood of obtaining usable images. The analysis of the shape of the trailing edge of the dorsal fin will be extended by using spatially coarse descriptors that capture the overall distribution of notches. These descriptors will be computed automatically and will capture properties such as has deep notches and most notches are near the tip. These properties will be more robust than matching the exact edge shape, and will rapidly narrow the search and reduce errors. A variant on the kd-tree search strategy, based on interval arithmetic, will be introduced. The use of interval-valued database indices will allow searching to accommodate scaling and geometric uncertainties without trial-and-error variation. The system will be extended to humpback and sperm whale tail fluke images, introducing new features as indices. Arrangements have been made for collaborative testing by prominent laboratories that maintain large collections of marine mammal sightings as photographic archives. The project will interact with these groups, supporting them as they use the project s system and using their criticisms and suggestions to improve the photo-identification system doc3902 none Powell In one ecological problem of current interest all the elements exist for application and testing of homogenization to resolve the scale issue and simulate climate and human impacts on outbreak insect species. The investigator and his colleagues have developed a deterministic spatial model of Mountain Pine Beetle (MPB, Dendroctonus ponderosae) dispersal and mass-attack of pine hosts. The model is validated and descriptive on spatial scales of hectares and time scales of days. In this project they use techniques of homogenization on the MPB host system to construct a forest scale ( 100 hectare years) model reflecting the large-scale emergent consequences of current small-scale spatial and temporal models of insect development, dispersal, and response to climate. Direct computation on such large scales would be prohibitive; similar difficulties face most ecological simulations involving spatio-temporal heterogeneity at realistic scales and life-system dispersal interactions. The investigators develop homogenization procedures that make this type of ecological simulation generally tractable, and implement and test these procedures in the MPB host system. The homogenization procedure generates an integro-difference equation (IDE), operating with year-long clock `ticks on landscape scales. In a validation phase, the IDE model is used to classify landscapes. Statistically analyzing misclassifications in comparison to aerial imagery makes the simulation methodology self-correcting. Finally, scenario studies are used to examine consequences of hypothetical climate and management trajectories on host insect dynamics. This illustrates the power of homogenization approaches in an ecological context, and provides needed examples to make these techniques accessible to biological and environmental researchers. The method of homogenization is a mathematical technique that allows deduction of large-scale properties from deterministic small-scale models. To the best of our knowledge the method of homogenization has never been applied to ecological problems, where issues of scale are the focus of much debate. One possible angle of attack is joint use of models and simulation, followed by validation with spatially explicit data. Direct computational approaches to ecological problems with full description of spatial heterogeneity and climatic variation are extremely difficult due to interaction of scales in time and space. The difficulty is exacerbated on the one hand by the paucity of validated, deterministic spatial models at any ecological scale, and by the difficulty of extended spatial observations on the other. In this project the investigators and his colleagues apply the technique of homogenization to the Mountain Pine Beetle Lodgepole Pine ecosystem to resolve the scale issue and simulate climate and human impacts on population outbreaks of insect species doc3903 none The proposed research looks at what happens when light hits the eye. Research will examine what happens when the eye adjusts to changing light levels and how that information is transmitted between the retina and the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE). It will zero in on tiny chemical messengers used by the retina to communicate with the RPE. The RPE is a thin layer of tissue located next to the retina. The researchers will use fish eyes as a source of tissue for these studies. Unlike human eyes, fish eyes have pupils of fixed diameter. Fish don t adjust to changing light by dilating or constricting their pupils the way people do. Instead they rearrange their light-sensitive photoreceptors and the pigment granules in the RPE to get just the right amount of light to the photoreceptors, rods or cones, best suited for the job. In the light, pigment granules in the RPE spread out into finger-like extensions that interlace with the rods and cones. These rearrangements let the RPE shade the rod photoreceptors, which are specialized for night vision, while still permitting the cone photoreceptors, bright light and color vision specialists, to detect light. This study will examine the receptors through which acetylcholine, one of the tiny chemical messengers, operates. Receptors are like little antennae found on the surface of cells, and they detect specific chemicals in their environment. There are many different types of receptors for acetylcholine. Each detects acetylcholine, but each has a different effect on molecular signals inside the cell. This study will use chemicals that either mimic or block acetylcholine to figure out what type of receptor is involved in pigment dispersion. This research will illuminate a novel signaling pathway for light adaptation, enhancing understanding of how the eye works doc3904 none McLaughlin McLaughlin In order to probe the weak contacts between proteins and nucleic acids in sequence-specific complexes, isosteric nucleoside analogues will be employed to introduce incremental changes into the DNA recognition site, by what amounts to atomic mutagenesis of the functional group character. If a given functional group is critical to the formation of the protein-nucleic acid complex then an incremental response in the ability to form the complex should be present. If a functional group is unimportant, then no change in complex formation should occur. The most useful analogues are those that do not otherwise alter native inter-strand hydrogen bonding or other helix-stabilizing effects. The analogues used in this project will also permit the study of critical structural parameters such as the importance of the minor groove spine of hydration and or metal ion binding for the stability of B-form DNA duplexes. Three sequence-specific protein-nucleic acid complexes will be examined during the course of this project: (i) The important transcriptional pre-initiation complex (TBP-TATA box complex), one that is critically important for eukaryotic transcription, will be studied. The complex itself is unusual in that the protein interacts with the A T rich recognition sequence by binding solely through the minor groove. Newly developed minor groove base analogues will be used both to examine the importance of functional group interactions in the minor groove, as well as to determine the energetic cost of burying a hydrophilic functional group in a hydrophobic interface. (ii) A study of the Gene-4 proteins, responsible for the RNA primase activity in bacteriophage T7 will be pursued. Photo-affinity labeling techniques will be developed. The information generated should complement the data already obtained through nucleoside analogue studies. (iii) DNA polymerases and or reverse transcriptases will be studied using analogues lacking the critical O2-carbonyl or N3-nitrogen in the minor groove. Differences between the DNA polymerase and reverse transcriptase (RT) activities may lead to a new class of RT chain terminators. The studies in this project will help to further the understanding of DNA structure as well as sequence-specific protein-nucleic acid and ligand-nucleic acid interactions by elucidating the location and relative importance of functional group interactions that contribute to overall specificity and affinity in such complexes doc3905 none The endosperm of the maize seed is one the most economically important and scientifically interesting structures in plant biology. The goal of this project is comprehensive genetic dissection of the molecular mechanisms underlying endosperm development and metabolism. Analysis of mutations that disrupt the endosperm will allow identification of genes that control endosperm development. Molecular analysis of such mutants will in turn lead to other genes that function in the same or interacting pathways. The approach to identifying this critical initial set of genes can be viewed as passing all maize genes through a series of screens, each filtering genes by a different criterion. In the end a large set of cloned genes that confer endosperm phenotypes are identified. 1. Screen one is phenotype. In principle, all genes that have visible phenotypes in endosperm can be tagged by transposon mutagenesis. At least independent mutations may be needed to ensure tagging of all endosperm mutants (~300 genes). A Mutator transposon tagging population large enough to contain the visible endosperm mutants has been created at Florida. This population will be screened to identify a set of maize lines enriched for Mutator insertions in endosperm genes. 2. Screen two is endosperm expression. The goal is to identify the subset of tagged genes whose wildtype transcripts are present in a large endosperm cDNA microarray. 20,000 new endosperm cDNA s will be sequenced and used to construct the microarray. DNA flanking Mutator insertion sites in the mutant lines is amplified by PCR. By probing the microarray with PCR products from pooled DNA samples, insertions that are in genes represented in the array can be traced to individual maize lines. cDNA hits will include candidates for the mutant gene, plus incidental gene knockouts not associated with phenotypes. Independent mutants that hybridize to the same cDNA s define a hybridization group. 3. Screen three is complementation testing. Mutant lines within each hybridization group will be systematically tested for genetic allelism. Finding independent mutant alleles of the same gene will confirm the identity of clones of mutated genes. 4. Screen four is bioinformatics and functional analysis. The mutant gene sequence and phenotype will be used to infer function and guide experimental analysis of selected genes. The participating labs have complementary interests covering the essential processes underlying endosperm development. Participants: Donald R. McCarty, PI, U. of Florida Joachim Messing, Co-PI, Rutgers Brian Larkins, Co-PI, U. of Arizona Philip Becraft, Co-PI, Iowa State University Karen E. Koch, Co-PI, U. of Florida L. Curtis Hannah, Co,PI, U. of Florida doc3906 none The investigators will study the occurrence of Equatorial Spread F (ESF), which are irregularities in the nighttime equatorial ionosphere that cause disruption to communication and navigation signals. The development of these irregularities is highly unpredictable, but some studies have shown the existence of a precursor signature in oxygen dayglow emissions from the thermosphere. The investigators have developed an optical instrument capable of observing faint oxygen emission line intensities buried in the strong daytime background continuum. They will carry out these measurements with an aim to predict the ESF occurrence over South American longitudes from the Paranal observatory in Chile. The measurements will be combined with those of other optical instruments and radars in South America to establish the existence of precursor signatures to equatorial spread F. The development of a technique for predicting ESF will help to mitigate the effects these irregularities have on technical systems doc3907 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Miami will acquire a 500 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) fullerene derivatives and the higher fullerenes; b) structural studies of alpha-aminoorganolithiums; c) natural products from marine algae; and d) novel redox self-assembling systems. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometry is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry doc3908 none The major goal of this project is to elucidate the molecular mechanisms by which plants respond to environmental stress and hormonal signals. Numerous studies have shown that so-called mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) cascades are activated by abiotic stresses (e.g., cold, drought, salt, wounding and touch), pathogens and pathogen-derived elicitors and plant hormones. MAPK cascades are evolutionarily conserved protein modules that function in molecular signaling pathways in a variety of eukaryotes, including yeasts, worms, flies, frogs, mammals, and plants. MAPKs are protein kinases that activate regulatory proteins such as transcription factors by phosphorylating them. MAPKs are in turn phosphorylated and activated by MAPKKs, and MAPKKs are phosphorylated and activated by MAPKKKs. The Arabidopsis genome project has revealed large gene families encoding MAPKs, MAPKKs and MAPKKKs (referred to as MAPK cascade genes). However, little is known about the constitution of plant MAPK cascades and the specific roles that particular MAPK cascade genes play in particular plant signal transduction pathways. A comprehensive approach based on genomic information will be employed to generate a freely available set of MAPK-related resources including engineered MAPK cascade genes and transgenic plants overexpressing these genes. Engineered MAPK cascade genes will be transiently expressed in Arabidopsis protoplasts (individual cells stripped of their cell walls to facilitate DNA uptake) to determine the function of Arabidopsis MAPK cascade genes involved in essential plant signaling pathways. Since the functions of MAPK cascades in plant signal transduction pathways are likely conserved, studies using the Arabidopsis genome resources will have broad implications and applications in other plant species including important crop plants. The four MAPK cascades that will be the focus of this project include those involved in osmotic stress protection, bacterial peptide recognition, hormone signaling, and oxidative stress responses. The overall strategy will involve the identification and cloning of the complete set of Arabidopsis genes encoding the MAPKs, MAPKKs, MAPKKKs and relevant protein phosphatases. Transient expression of immunologically-tagged protein kinases will be used to match particular MAPK cascades with particular abiotic or biotic stress or hormone signals in Arabidopsis and maize protoplasts. Engineered MAPKKKs and MAPKKs, designed to be constitutively active or to act as inhibitors, will be used in conjunction with DNA microarray technology to identify Arabidopsis genes that are activated in response to particular signaling pathways. Identification of Arabidopsis knockout mutants corresponding to key MAPK-related regulatory genes will be initiated. Transgenic Arabidopsis, maize and soybean plants that over-express particular engineered MAPKKK genes will be generated. The transgenic plants will be tested for the exhibition of agronomically useful traits. The experimental design is based on Arabidopsis and maize protoplast technology. The transient nature of the protoplast systems allows direct functional analysis of plant genes at an unprecedented high throughput rate and at a relatively low cost. This approach takes full advantage of the Arabidopsis genome infrastructure that is being created as a part of the NSF Plant Genome Research Program, including DNA sequencing, gene expression technology, and knockout mutant libraries. The experimental approaches are especially powerful in unraveling the functions of genes that are difficult to tackle by traditional genetic and biochemical approaches due to redundancy, lethality or low levels of expression. The elucidation and manipulation of MAPK cascades in plants will reveal fundamentally important regulatory processes and provide new tools for crop improvement related to stress tolerance, disease resistance, and yield enhancement. This project integrates three laboratories that provide complementary expertise in stress and hormonal signaling, pathogen responses, and transgenic crop plant generation and analysis. The project will also provide excellent training opportunities in a multidisciplinary academic environment. Information and materials generated from this project, including the full set of cloned and engineered MAPK genes, will be made freely available to the plant community via a web-accessible database doc3909 none The cerebral neocortex plays a crucial role in perception, action and higher cognitive processes and this has led to an intense effort to understand the functional properties of this tissue. Major goals of this effort have been to elucidate the mechanisms whereby individual cortical neurons obtain their diverse response properties and how ensembles of cortical neurons interact to produce global perceptual and behavioral capabilities. The proposed research, conducted in the rabbit, is aimed at understanding the mechanisms governing cortical function in the awake, intact, thalamocortical somatosensory system. The work is aimed at understanding the transformations performed upon thalamocortical inputs to the cortex by the intracortical circuitry, the role of feed-forward inhibitory interneurons in producing these transformations, and how these transformations lead to parallel and distinct efferent outflows. Using novel multi-electrode methodology, the activity of thalamocortical projection neurons, cortical output (projection neurons), and putative inhibitory interneurons will be simultaneously recorded, and interactions among these identified elements will be analyzed using methods of cross-correlation and microstimulation. Paired intracortical recordings (intracellular extracellular) will also yield information about interactions between interneurons and their neighboring intracortical targets. Special emphasis will be placed on understanding: (a) the rules governing the specificity of functional connections among the populations of thalamocortical and cortical neurons under study, and (b) the mechanisms underlying feed-forward intracortical inhibition. The data obtained from these experiments will offer a unique view of the physiology of individual cortical neurons studied under natural conditions, and will provide insight into interactive networks of cortical neurons and their varied functional properties. Such information is essential if we are to understand how neocortical networks generates perception, action, and higher cognitive processes doc3910 none Conducting polymers exhibit an enormous diversity of interesting and technologically important physical behavior. In an idealized setting the quasi-one-dimensional aspects of charge transport along the conducting polymer skeleton create an intriguing environment for studying low-dimensional physics. The reality is that these materials are polymeric in nature and exhibit a wide, and sometimes bewildering, array of attributes which are intimately tied to structure-property relationships that exist at molecular length scales. With the advent of increasingly more complex architectures and processing steps there is a continuing need to better understand the main underlying relationships and to identify the key structural attributes and the associated structural evolution. This research represents a continuing effort to exploit experimental methods which enable direct and quantitative measures of the local structural order in pi and sigma-conjugated polymers whether they are crystalline, semi-crystalline and or amorphous. Both x-ray and neutron scattering techniques will be utilized. When advantageous, conventional scattering methods can be supplemented by anomalous scattering techniques and optical spectroscopy. These experimental studies will be further complemented by modeling calculations which generate representative molecular structures. In this way, it will be possible to more completely assess the nature of the local structural environment. In addition to these initiatives, methods will be developed for studying the evolution of structure in situ so that subtle and transient effects can be discerned and analyzed. %%% The knowledge and techniques developed through the course of this research will provide basic and accurate answers of structure and its evolution within conducting polymer hosts doc3911 none Meiosis is geared towards ensuring the segregation of homologous chromosomes at the reductional division by forming links between the homologs. The homologs are brought together in an elaborate pairing process that may begin with chromosomes aligned at a distance. This process culminates in a more intimate association where the homologs are held together along their entire length by the synaptonemal complex (sc). During this time meiotic recombination occurs, probably initiated with a double strand break (DSB). The repair and resolution of the repair process is believed to occur within a sc-associated, the recombination nodule (RN). Through our analysis of meiosis in Drosophila melanogaster females it has been shown that a key component of machinery that initiates meiotic recombination is conserved. In contrast, it has also been shown that the relationship between meiotic recombination and sc formation is not conserved. Long-term goals are to understand the mechanism and regulation of meiotic recombination and homolog pairing. Genetic and cytological techniques will be used to test the model that sc forms before recombination is initiated and genetic and chromosomal factors that regulate DSB formation will be identified and characterized. Specific aims are: To test the model that recombination initiates after sc formation. To identify genetic factors regulating double strand break formation. To identify chromosomal factors regulating double strand break formation. Knowledge of the mechanisms resulting in chromosome pairing is critical to an understanding of inheritance. The results of this study will result in greater insight into phenomena central to a complete understanding of genetic mechanisms utilized by eukaryotic cells doc3912 none Reciprocal exchange of goods and services is a universal human economic activity. In animals, so-called reciprocal altruism or tit-for-tat is much discussed yet less investigated. It has been theorized that such behavior should occur in animals, at least to some degree: otherwise they could not build the highly cooperative societies that we see. This investigator will investigate cooperation in capuchins (Cebus apella), small monkeys known for their large brains and high intelligence. An apparatus will be installed from which two or more monkeys can obtain food through cooperative effort. Tested in small subgroups, the monkeys can team up with any others present. The development of cooperative partnerships will be followed in detail as well as the tendency to preferentially share pay-offs with helpers. By manipulating partner availability, the investigator be able to measure the long-term impact of cooperation in the larger social group. The proposed experiments seek to illuminate how cooperation arises between individuals, and to what degree it is regulated by tit-for-tat rules. Although the processes are undoubtedly simpler than those underlying the transactions and obligations in human society are, the underlying assumption is that there is a shared psychology that regulates many different kinds of cooperation in a great variety of species. This study will provide a better understanding of how social relationships foster cooperation, and how cooperation affects subsequent social relationships doc3913 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oklahoma will acquire a 300 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) the synthesis and characterization of liquid crystals; b) the synthesis, stabilization and applications of reactive organic moieties; c) the design and synthesis of chiral transition metal catalysts; d) the reactivity and synthetic utility of organotransition metal complexes; e) the structure and reactivity of metalloporphyrin-nitrosyl and -nitroso organic complexes; and f) the synthesis and characterization of group 13 organometallic compounds. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometry is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry doc3914 none A large fraction of the DNA sequence output from plant genome projects will be derived from transposable elements (TEs). It is estimated that 30% of the small genome of rice (Oryza sativa cv. Nipponbare, 438 Mb), which is the focus of the next major plant genome project, is derived from TEs. Unlike a TE, the function of a gene can be deduced, in part, through the phenoytpe of a knockout mutant, the localization of protein or mRNA and the analysis of microarrays. Such functional genomics approaches are of little value in understanding the contribution of TEs to genome evolution and function. What distinguishes TEs from the genic complement of an organism, among other things, is an ability to transpose and amplify. TEs shake up an otherwise conservative genome and, in this way, both threaten and enhance genomic potential. This project uses a functional genomics approach to discern the contribution of the TEs of rice that includes three components: (1) the identification and characterization of all TE families, (2) the quantification of TE-mediated diversity in closely related Oryza sativa cultivars, subspecies and related species and (3) an assessment of the contribution of TE- diversity to the creation of phenotypic variation. To this an interdisciplinary, whole genome approach will be used with five specific objectives. (i) To computationally identify rice TEs and phylogenetically characterize TE families. A major focus will be the testing of a novel automated repeat element identification algorithm. (ii) To assess the activity of select TE families by using a rapid transposon display screen to assay a panel of wide-species crosses and a variety of stress environments. (iii) To determine the chromosomal distribution of TE insertion sites that are polymorphic in two different mapping populations and to develop a subset of these into anchor markers. (iv) To use the mapping populations and the anchor markers as the basis for correlating TE-based genetic variation with phenotypic variation for selected plant traits. (v) To integrate all data from this project into the RiceGenes database thus adding value to the infomation in the form of annotation linking TEs to QTLs, mutant phenoytpes, genetic markers and germplasm diversity. Transposable elements probably account for the huge difference in size among the agronomically important members of the grass clade including rice, sorghum, maize and wheat. This consortium will serve as a model for how TEs should be studied in these more complex genomes doc3915 none Baculoviruses are a group of viruses that infect insects. The effect of these viruses on insects, however, appears to vary with the chemical composition of the host plant that the insect consumes. For example, baculoviruses are less able to kill tobacco budworm (Heliothis virescens) when the insect feeds on cotton, than when it feeds on its other host plants such as tomato or lettuce. In this study, the PIs seek to determine the chemical interactions that cause some host plants to render their insect herbivores more resistant to infection by baculoviruses. Preliminary studies have suggested that the generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) is a major cause of such disease inhibition, but it is unclear how this occurs or what steps in the pathway of infection are being altered by these reactive products. Generation of ROS occurs as a consequence of normal cellular processes but can be altered by ingestion of dietary chemicals. High levels of ROS lead to a condition known as oxidative stress which can damage cellular substances and has been associated with aging and cancer development. ROS can also destroy many microorganisms and appear to interfere with the ability of baculoviruses to kill their host insects. This study will examine whether diet-related ROS interfere with viral infection of insects by damaging the virus or by altering insect immune responses. These investigations should have broad implications for understanding the chemical basis of complex interactions among multiple trophic levels. Additionally, results will contribute to a general understanding of the effects of oxidative stress on disease processes and disease ecology. Finally, because baculoviruses are currently being used as an environmentally-friendly alternative to chemical pesticides, these results may help improve biological control practices in agriculture doc3916 none The long term goal of this project is to identify, characterize, and understand the function of genes and naturally occurring allelic variants present in the sorghum germplasm collection that contribute to plant adaptation to the environment. The research team will map and sequence cDNA tags (short DNA sequences copied from mRNA) encoded by several gene dense regions of the sorghum genome using direct selection technology and identify sorghum abiotic response genes by sequence similarity and cross species direct selection . This research will further develop direct selection technology for gene mapping, physical map construction, and cross species analysis. The research team is constructing an integrated genetic, physical, and gene content map of the sorghum genome using a novel approach based on multi-dimensional pooling of Bacteria Artificial Chromosome (BAC) DNA, Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism (AFLP) technology, and DNA fingerprinting. A high throughput direct selection gene mapping technology has been developed to map genes across the gene-dense portions of the sorghum genome. This activity will provide valuable information about gene order in grasses, identify candidate genes in trait loci, help construct integrated genetic and physical maps, and create a deep collection of gene tags for microarrays doc3917 none Discriminate analysis of Fourier Transform Infrared Spectra (FTIR) has been developed as a specific, high throughput method to identify mutations that affect plant cell wall components and architecture. This method will be employed to demonstrate the throughput rates needed to identify, in mutagenized populations of maize and Arabidopsis, a broad range of mutants in the biogenesis and dynamic alteration of plant cell wall architecture during growth and development. Both forward and reverse genetic screens will be employed. The FTIR forward screen will detect specific alterations in wall structure and architecture caused by the insertion of DNA tags , regardless of the genetic basis of the alteration. In this respect, the screen will be powerfully selective at the end-product level. Mutations to be identified could include those causing defects in wall substrate formation, wall component secretion and targeting, wall architecture and dynamics during growth. Genes disrupted in these mutants may subsequently be identified based on the insertion position of the tags. The reverse genetics approach will examine the effects of inserting DNA tags into genes that are already known to be related to cell wall biosynthesis. It is anticipated that this second approach will provide a broad set of cell wall mutants that will serve to further the development of FTIR spectrum libraries. These libraries will be useful to diagnose FTIR-selected mutants of unknown genetic deficiency. A major practical goal is to generate plants with genetically defined variation in cell wall composition and architecture to permit assessment of these modifications on plant development. As FTIR mutations are confirmed, the plant biology community will be informed of them through a web site and seeds and clones will be provided to the community through established stock centers doc3918 none In July of a massive tsunami struck the north coast of Papua New Guinea, severely damaging four communities and killing thousands of villagers. This project will investigate the impact of the disaster and subsequent relief efforts on traditional social networks in the four coastal communities. These villages were linked by extensive social, economic, and ritual networks that were studied by the PI in previous research. One of the unanticipated consequences of international rehabilitation aid and NGO reconstruction following disasters is often the disruption and destruction of the local social networks that previously organized community social life; this has long-term implications for the viability of affected communities.The PI will analyze the extent to which these networks have been disrupted, altered, or maintained following the tsunami disaster Methods include participant observation, structured interviews, and the collection of oral narratives. The PI will work closely with officials and students from the Papua New Guinea National Museum and and the University of New Guinea. The project will contribute to our understanding of how communities and social networks respond to natural dissasters, and how aid efforts may unintentionally reshape communities; this has important policy implications for future relief efforts doc3919 none Skeath The elucidation of the molecular pathways that regulate heart development is critical to our understanding of heart formation. In humans, congenital heart defects are one of the most frequent birth defects and occur at an incidence of 1% in live births and 10% in stillborns. The genetic and molecular events that regulate heart development are just beginning to be explored in vertebrate and invertebrate model systems. Initial insights from this work demonstrate a remarkable conservation of structure, expression and function between Drosophila genes expressed in the developing heart and their vertebrate homologs. These studies as well as data from genome projects support the idea that the fundamental architecture of many biological processes are conserved between flies and humans. Thus, research that aims to understand the genetic, cellular and molecular mechanisms that control Drosophila heart development should yield basic insights into heart development in general. The focus of this grant is to dissect the developmental mechanisms that pattern and specify the identity of the different types of cells that make up the Drosophila heart. Present models of Drosophila heart development rely heavily on the analysis of the mechanisms that regulate the development of only a small minority (~10%) of heart cells. To obtain a more comprehensive picture of heart development, it is critical to clarify the genetic, cellular and molecular mechanisms that promote the development of all heart cells. The first specific aim of this grant proposes to create a gene expression, cell division and cell lineage map of all heart cells. The completion of this aim will establish a descriptive foundation of normal heart development at the single cell resolution from which we and others can initiate systematic studies on the genetic mechanisms that regulate heart development. The second specific aim proposes (i) to dissect the genetic regulatory mechanisms that pattern and specify the fate of all heart cells, and (ii) to perform a detailed phenotypic and molecular characterization of two genes that regulate the number of contractile cells that form in the heart. The integration of these approaches should paint an increasingly lucid picture of the genetic, cellular and molecular mechanisms that orchestrate Drosophila heart development doc3920 none Cox Information processing along and between nerve cells is achieved via electrodiffusion along branches and across cell membranes. The relatively poor axial conductance of the branches is offset by the myriad of ion channels that perforate the cell membrane. A nerve cell s salient physical, as opposed to geometrical, properties are then its axial conductance, its membrane s capacitance and permeability to one or more ionic species and the kinetics (rules that govern its open closed state) of the underlying channels. The predictive utility of a mathematical model of course hinges on the accuracy to which these physical properties are known. Unfortunately, the experimental determination of each of these quantities is a formidable task that, in light of recent data suggesting that the permeabilities vary with position in the dendritic tree, requires great investment for all but the simplest geometries. The investigator and his colleagues therefore determine the extent to which the neuron s physical properties may be inferred from more readily available indirect measurements. These indirect measurements are recordings of somatic and distal membrane potential following a known current stimulus to the soma. Assuming current seals at the distal ends, these two potential recordings result in lateral overdetermination of the underlying degenerate-parabolic system of Hodgkin-Huxley equations. The investigator and his colleagues deduce from this overdetermined system a number of well posed problems, and associated algorithms (based on moment, fixed-point and output least squares methods), for the recovery of one or more of the neuron s physical properties. They test these algorithms on data recorded from pyramidal neurons drawn from the rat s hippocampus. In order to repair or reproduce the brain one must have a parts list and a blueprint specifying how the parts are to be connected. At the coarsest level there are but two types of parts, nerves (neurons) and nerve glue (glial cells). Though the human brain has more of each than the Milky Way has stars, it is not their sheer number but rather a subtle combination of interconnectedness and variation in electrical properties that render the brain so powerful. The term `variation is meant to express the realization that a neuron is not simply a switch within a certain brain center or a wire connecting two such centers, but rather is a tree of wires with electrical properties varying along each of its branches. It is this local variation in a neuron s ability to conduct the brain s principal ions that is thought to be responsible for an individual neuron s ability to perform tasks reminiscent of rudimentary computers. Given however the minute size and variegated nature of a single neuron, the direct experimental determination of its electrical properties has yet to be achieved. The investigator and his colleagues therefore pursue the mathematically challenging task of determining these properties from more readily available, though indirect, experimental measurements. This process is akin to determining the size and location of a leak in a transatlantic telephone cable by comparing what the American said to what the Englishman heard. The success of their endeavor, coupled with the increasingly fine resolution of images of neuronal interconnections, will permit the investigator and his colleagues to produce models of sufficient veracity to be of use by the medical community from construction of prosthetic neuronal circuits to the design and testing of drugs and better treatments doc3921 none There exist numerous genome-scale methods for obtaining mutations useful for functional analysis. In traditional genetics, random mutagenesis is followed by phenotypic analysis. The availability of large-scale genomic and cDNA sequence data, however, encourages reverse genetic approaches. In plants, reverse genetics based on transposon mutagenesis or directed anti-sense inhibition have succeeded in some cases, but the methods can be labor-intensive and unreliable. Even in Arabidopsis, where reverse genetic methodology is most advanced, directed antisense mutagenesis is typically the method of choice, in spite of the fact that it requires considerable front-end effort and frequently fails. This project takes advantage of a new reverse genetic method that is especially suitable for plants. After ethylmethanesulfonate (EMS) mutagenesis and self fertilization, DNA samples from several individual plants are pooled, and pools are used as templates for PCR using primers that amplify a region of interest. To detect mutations, PCR reaction pools are heated and cooled to allow heteroduplexes to form between wild-type and mutant fragments, and a sensitive mismatch detection method is applied to each pool. Mutants identified by this TILLING method (for Targeting Induced Local Lesions IN Genomes) can be crossed and subjected to phenotypic analysis. In a pilot screen using mutagenized seed from Arabidopsis thaliana, transition mutations were discovered at the expected frequency for selected regions of the genome, including at least one knockout mutation in a gene of interest. Based upon this experience, it is estimated that by successively typing ~10,000 plants, a scaled-up project will be capable of generating useful mutations more efficiently than other methods used thus far in plants. Moreover, this is the only reverse genetic method that provides a range of point alleles that may be used for analysis of interactions. Given the current concern about genetically modified crop plants, there may be agricultural interest in producing variants without introducing foreign DNA of any type into a plant s genome. Using the current pooling strategy for Arabidopsis and denaturing HPLC (High Performance Liquid Chromatography) as a mismatch detection method, ~100 genes per year may be TILLed. However, the use of enzymatic detection of mismatches should eliminate the need to sequence individual mutant DNAs, and this could increase productivity 10-fold or more. This means that knockouts of most genes in a plant are potentially feasible with a modest future scale-up and with future improvements in throughput. Genes will be chosen for TILLING based on the needs of the community, both through co-ordination with the Plant Chromatin project and from individual requests. TILLING complements forward and other reverse genetic approaches, and collaborations are anticipated for extending this methodology from Arabidopsis to corn and other organisms doc3922 none A key innovation during the evolution of multicellular animals was the ability to distinguish self from non-self. The molecular mechanisms underlying such recognition are understood in considerable detail in vertebrates, particularly as mediated by the various classes of antigen receptors. Despite considerable effort, however, it has not been possible to trace the evolutionary history of vertebrate antigen receptors into any metazoan taxon which diverged earlier than the jawed fishes. Such efforts have been focused on the use of molecular methods in attempts to identify genes encoding orthologues of vertebrate antigen receptors. This project will makes use of a different approach to address the origins of antigen receptor signaling, based on the finding in the early-diverging invertebrate Hydra of a Syk family protein-tyrosine kinase (PTK). Syk PTKs interact with phosphorylated tyrosine residues on the cytoplasmic tails of antigen receptors in vertebrates through two src homology 2 domains. Thus the molecules with which Hydra Syk interacts are candidates for mediating recognition of foreign cells in this organism, and are potentially evolutionarily related to vertebrate antigen receptors. The objective of this project is to identify the molecules with which Hydra Syk interacts and thereby to trace the evolutionary history of the antigen receptor signaling pathway. Initial experiments will test the ability of Hydra Syk to bind to and function with vertebrate antigen receptors. A positive result in this case would provide support for conservation of the basic mechanics of Syk receptor interaction over a wide range of metazoan evolution. Subsequent experiments will be directed towards identifying the molecules with which Syk interacts in Hydra. Comparisons of these molecules with vertebrate proteins should indicate whether there is any evolutionary continuity between them and vertebrate antigen receptors. If no such continuity is evident, the relationships of the interacting proteins in Hydra with the proteins of other metazoans will nonetheless reveal important, and currently unavailable, information regarding the evolutionary history of the signaling pathway which was modified for use with vertebrate antigen receptors doc3885 none Plants and animals display an amazing array of reproductive systems. One of the most intriguing is androdioecy, in which males coexist with hermaphrodites (individuals in which both sexes are present), but there are no true females. Androdioecy is rare, as predicted by theory, yet there are a few, well-documented cases in plants and animals. This project is a continuation of earlier experiments exploring androdioecy in a freshwater crustacean, the clam shrimp Eulimnadia texana. A three-year examination of this species revealed both benefits and detriments to males, and thus to better understand this mating system, refinement of these results is required. Additionally, all previous experiments were conducted in laboratory settings. To truly understand the system, field experiments need to be conducted. The two proposed projects will accomplish both of these goals: (1) a laboratory experiment will measure the relationship between the proportion of males and male mating effectiveness in two natural populations, and (2) development of microsatellite loci will allow genetic fingerprinting of field-collected shrimp so that the previous laboratory experiments can be extended into the field. The proposed projects are one of the few attempts to delineate the benefits of outcrossing (offspring produced by mating with males) in an animal system. This information is crucial for developing breeding programs, both in agriculture and for the maintenance of endangered species doc3924 none The chloroplast is an essential organelle whose biogenesis is a complex, orchestrated process central to plant growth and development. Many hundreds of nuclear genes are involved in the import of nucleus-encoded proteins, the intra-organellar sorting of nucleus- and chloroplast-encoded proteins, the expression of chloroplast genes, the assembly of chloroplast enzymes, and the regulation of these processes. However, only a small proportion of such genes have been characterized in any detail. The goal of this project is to develop, use, and disseminate a set of complementary and powerful resources for the genetic and biochemical dissection of this complex process. Maize offers an ideal set of attributes for this project. In addition to its superb genetic tools and the capacity to generate mutations at high frequency with Mu transposons, this project exploits the fact that non-photosynthetic mutant tissue can readily be obtained for biochemical analysis. The core resource that will be developed is a saturated collection of transposon-tagged chloroplast-defective maize mutants. Mutants will be selected from Mu-active maize lines based upon their chlorophyll-deficient leaves and or increased chlorophyll fluorescence, an indication of a block in photosynthetic electron transport. Previous studies support the notion that one of these easily identified phenotypes will result from a disruption of most aspects of chloroplast biogenesis (import of proteins into the organelle, lipid, pigment, and prosthetic group synthesis, chloroplast gene expression, intra-chloroplast protein sorting, assembly of the photosynthetic apparatus). The mutant collection will be used in two ways: (i) To determine the role of genes of known sequence but unknown function; and (ii) To discover new genes that play critical roles in chloroplast biogenesis and function. (i) Genome sequencing projects have unmasked thousands of predicted chloroplast-localized proteins, the majority of which have no known function. To determine the roles of such proteins, the mutant collection will be used to develop a reverse genetics resource, called Photosynthesis Mutant Search (PMS). PMS, already functioning on a small scale, consists of DNA pools from plants with chloroplast defects caused by Mu insertions. independently-arising mutants are currently in the collection; this number will be increased to ~ , at which point it is predicted that the collection will be saturated. The small number of DNA pools can be screened in a cost-effective manner to find mutant alleles of genes of known sequence with suspected roles in chloroplast biogenesis. Mutants will be identified and provided as a service. Users will analyze the mutant phenotypes to elucidate the function of the disrupted gene. (ii) To discover new genes that play critical roles in chloroplast biogenesis and function, the same mutant lines will undergo snapshot characterization of visual phenotype and chloroplast protein and RNA defects. The description of each mutant will be incorporated into a web site and the mutants will be made available to other researchers. From these snapshots, users will order specific lines for further study and cloning of the disrupted gene. In addition, the team of collaborators will form a synergistic partnership to use these tools to focus on one aspect of chloroplast biogenesis: chloroplast gene expression and its control. The study of many other aspects of chloroplast biology by the community-at-large will be facilitated by the unique genetic resources that will be produced. In addition to the agronomic relevance of genes that function in chloroplast processes, it is anticipated that this project will impact fields ranging from evolutionary biology to basic cell and molecular biology doc3925 none Cell membranes serve as barriers between cells and their environments, and between compartments within cells. Maintenance of membrane function is essential for life, but many environmental variables significantly perturb membrane properties. Physiologists and biophysicists interested in membranes have proposed several competing hypotheses regarding which aspects of membrane structure must be conserved for proper membrane function, but comparative and biophysical experiments have not been able to distinguish between competing models in a consistent manner. This study will use FTIR and fluorescence spectroscopy to investigate which properties of membranes are functionally important in the bacterium, Escherichia coli. Lines that have been subjected to laboratory evolution at different temperatures for ~ generations will be compared with respect to membrane properties and composition, and new selection lines will be initiated to test specific membrane hypotheses. The predicted responses of E. coli membranes to selection differ among models, so these studies will provide a strong test of competing hypotheses for membrane adaptation. In addition to testing membrane models, this research will provide testable hypotheses for membrane adaptation in natural environments. If temperature has been as important a factor in membrane function and evolution as is believed, the membrane changes observed in E. coli may also be found in other organisms adapted to different thermal environments. This work will also have implications for understanding how rapidly organisms can adapt to environmental changes. Many models for climate change predict both higher average global temperatures and increased variability. If generations is not long enough for membranes to adapt to a constant, well-defined habitat, then many species will not be able to keep pace with the rate of climate change. Alternatively, these studies may reveal that organisms can rapidly evolve improved acclimatory ability, which would allow them to better survive variable conditions doc3926 none Common wheat, Triticum aestivum, originated by interspecific hybridization of three diploid species, Triticum urartu, Aegilops speltoides and Ae. tauschii. The wheat nucleus therefore contains three pairs of genomes, designated AA, BB, and DD, respectively. One of the attributes of wheat genomes is that they are large compared to the genomes of the model plants Arabidopsis thaliana and rice. In small genomes, genes are separated by intergenic DNA of a uniform length. This has been shown directly by sequencing the genome of Arabidopsis thaliana. In large genomes, stretches of noncoding DNA separating the genes are likely to vary. Indirect evidence suggests that in wheat, there may be gene-rich islands (gene insulae) in which genes are separated by short stretches of intergenic DNA. These gene insulae are speculated to be separated by gene-poor or gene-empty space. To obtain a detailed picture of gene distribution in the wheat D genome, DNA fragments isolated from Ae. tauschii (the genome of Ae. tauschii is completely equivalent to the D genome of wheat) will be cloned in bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs) and ordered as they are in wheat chromosomes. These groups of ordered DNA fragments are called contigs. A total of 300,000 BAC clones will be characterized by the global fingerprinting method and assembled into contigs on the basis of fingerprint sharing among the clones. Fingerprinting of this large number of BAC clones and their assembly into contigs will be accomplished by automation of the fingerprinting process and computer-based contig assembly. The position of each contig on the chromosome will be determined and neighboring contigs identified and joined to generate the physical map of each of the seven D-genome chromosomes. Thousands of cDNA clones of wheat genes will be placed on the D-genome physical map to integrate the existing D-genome linkage and deletion maps with its physical map and to chart a detailed picture of gene distribution across each D-genome chromosome. The nucleotide sequences of these cDNA clones are being determined in another project funded by the NSF Plant Genome Program. Comparisons of the positions of corresponding genes on the physical maps of the wheat D-genome (large genome), the maize genome (medium-size genome) and the genome sequence of the rice genome (small genome) will provide information on changes in genome structure as a function of genome size increase in the grass family. The identification of gene insulae in the wheat D genome and their mapping will have great practical significance since it will facilitate gene discovery and isolation and, ultimately, the sequencing of the most relevant regions of wheat genomes doc3927 none During the last 60 years, physiological studies have implicated the plant hormone indole-3-acetic acid (IAA or auxin) in the regulation of virtually every aspect of plant development. Auxin is synthesized in meristems and young organs, transported through the plant by a dedicated transport system and ultimately produces a specific cellular response. Since the hormone functions in all higher plant species, a thorough understanding of auxin homeostasis and response will impact all aspects of agriculture. Qualities such as stature, shoot and root architecture, shoot strength, seed and fruit size, fruit ripening, and the senescence program are all regulated in part by auxin and may be targets for directed engineering. Previous studies have demonstrated a high level of genetic and biochemical redundancy in most areas of auxin biology. For this reason it is important to study a model plant system such as Arabidopsis that is amenable to high-throughput biochemical and molecular genetic techniques. This proof of concept award will support an integrated analysis of auxin biology that will include biochemical, genetic, and molecular strategies. The primary goal of the project is to develop novel high throughput genetic screens for genes that function in auxin homeostasis, transport, and response. Three screens will be conducted. 1) Improved analytical techniques will be utilized together with robotic systems, to screen large numbers of chemically mutagenized Arabidopsis seedlings for changes in IAA levels. 2) Large-scale activation-tagging screens for mutants affected in all aspects of auxin biology will be conducted. 3) A functional screen for genes involved in auxin metabolism will be conducted in E. coli cells. These screens are broad and are expected to recover a diverse collection of mutants. The mutants will be subjected to detailed biochemical analysis of auxin metabolism and response and molecular studies of gene function. The results of the project will establish the groundwork for a comprehensive functional genomics study of auxin biology doc3928 none Polyploidy has played a prominent role in plant evolution. More than 70% of flowering plants have had at least one polyploid event in their lineage, either by doubling of a single genome (autopolyploidy) or, more commonly, by combining two or more distinct but related genomes (allopolyploidy). Many important crop plants, such as alfalfa, canola, cotton, potato and wheat, are obvious polyploids, and others, such as maize, soybean, and cabbage, retain the vestiges of ancient polyploid events. Although the importance of polyploidy has been widely recognized, the reasons for its success are not fully understood. Genome redundancy may provide some selective advantage, both through interactions of the combined genomes causing novel patterns of gene expression and through genome changes causing functional divergence of duplicated genes. Thus, polyploidy does not merely result in additivity for all traits from the progenitors, but often produces novel phenotypes that are not present in the parents or exceed the range of the parents. This phenomenon is analogous to heterosis, in which hybrid genotypes often have phenotypes that exceed those of their inbred parents. Rapid progress in genomic research of model plants and important crops has prompted the assembly of this consortium to study functional genomics of plant polyploids. The consortium is aimed at uncovering molecular mechanisms responsible for the evolutionary success of plant polyploids and agricultural utilization of plant hybrids. The theme of the proposed research is to investigate changes in gene expression and genome structure in resynthesized and natural autopolyploids and or allopolyploids of Arabidopsis, Brassica and maize. Gene expression changes will be assayed using mRNA display and EST microarrays. New microarrays of the genes identified in heterochromatic regions will be developed and used for gene expression assays in Arabidopsis and Brassica. Changes in methylation state, transposon activity, chromatin status, and chromosomal arrangements will be determined using a combination of molecular, biochemical, and cytological techniques. The diploids, autopolyploids, and allopolyploids of each plant system will be compared to determine the effects of polyploidy on gene expression and genome structure. Inbred and hybrid maize at different ploidy levels will be compared to determine the relative effects of ploidy and heterozygosity on gene expression. Early and advanced generation polyploids of Brassica will be compared to test for stabilization of changes in the generations after polyploid formation and whether these changes are concerted and mimic natural polyploids. These studies will provide a comprehensive survey of the gene expression and genome changes accompanying polyploid formation and evolution. Most importantly, they should reveal some of the major mechanisms giving rise to these changes, and illuminate our overall understanding of why polyploids have been so successful in nature and agriculture. Participants: Thomas C. Osborn, PI, University of Wisconsin James A. Birchler, Co-PI, University of Missouri Z. Jeffery Chen, Co-PI, Texas A & M University Luca Comai, Co-PI, University of Washington Robert A. Martienssen, Co-PI, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Rebecca Doerge, Co-PI, Purdue University doc3929 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Brigham Young University will upgrade a 500 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) the development of new glycosidase inhibitors; b) natural product and stereoselective synthesis; c) development of metal ion-selective macrocyclic chelators; d) elucidation of photochemical mechanisms and synthesis using photochemistry;e) preparation of pH responsive cavitands based on metal-calixarene interactions; f) structural elucidation of biologically active components of traditional medicines; g) development of novel nucleotides for antisense gene therapy; h) preparation of antiviral agents and elucidation of mechanisms of nucleoside processing enzymes; and i) development of permeabilizers of the outer membranes of Gram-negative bacteria. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometry is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including fundamental medicinal chemistry doc3930 none Kuang All organisms are composed of multiple chemical elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Recent research in the area known as ecological stoichiometry has highlighted the ecological importance of the relative abundance of chemical constituents, known to vary considerably among species and across trophic levels. However, most theoeretical studies in ecology have until very recently ignored the sources and consequences of this chemical heterogeneity. The investigator and his colleagues undertake theoretical investigations of ecological stoichiometry. They develop a relatively new theoretical framework for ecological dynamics that explicitly incorporates stoichiometric constraints. This base model involves a stoichiometric counterpart of the familiar Rosenzweig-MacArthur equations in which the effective carrying capacity of the resource species and the transfer efficiency of the consumer species are constrained by stoichiometric principles. Introduction of stoichiometric considerations in these equations (here, akin to food quality ) allows for a rich array of ecologically realistic dynamics, including deterministic extinction of the consumer species when resources are abundant but of poor quality. They expand this model in five different directions, to explore ecological realities (i.e., complications) whose consideration has proved illuminating in other, non-stoichiometric settings. Specifically, they analyze the dynamics of 1) a multi-nutrient model; 2) trophically complex models in which multiple consumer species share a resource; 3) time delays in nutrient recycling that are a realistic component of terrestrial ecosystems; 4) two patch models featuring habitat heterogeneity and dispersal of the consumer; and 5) age structured models in which juvenile and adult consumers differ in their nutrient requirements. The project aims to provide an analytically rigorous foundation for burgeoning empirical research into ecological stoichiometry. All living things, including humans, are constructed of approximately the same set of basic building blocks, chemical elements such as carbon (C), nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and several dozen more in smaller amounts. However, different organisms contain different proportions of these key elements in their biomass and thus must extract these elements from their environment to differing degrees. In many situations, the environment does not provide these key nutrient elements in the abundance and proportions that are optimal for organism growth and reproduction. Thus, the chemical environment of life may set limits on the success of organisms in various situations. In this project the investigators use mathematical models to simulate the flow of multiple chemical elements in natural food webs to better understand how the requirements of living things for multiple chemical elements establish key feedbacks between the living and non-living world. This work is important for two reasons. First, it may provide a better fundamental understanding of how chemical elements move through food webs. Second, improved fundamental knowledge of how nutrients move in the environment and how to simulate those movements with mathematical tools may help predict and manage natural and human-dominated ecosystems, including those affected by nutrient inputs from human activities (e.g. N and P inputs from fertilizer, sewage) or by global change (e.g. effects of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide on C and nutrient flow in the environment doc3931 none Stomatal pores in the epidermis of leaves regulate the diffusion of CO2 into leaves for photosynthetic carbon fixation and control water loss of plants via transpiration to the atmosphere. A network of signal transduction mechanisms in guard cells integrate environmental stimuli to regulate stomatal apertures for optimization of plant growth under diverse conditions. Control of stomatal movements in response to environmental stress conditions is an important factor in determining crop productivity and plant water loss during drought. The long-term goal of this project is to achieve a detailed quantitative understanding of the network of signal transduction events that regulate stomatal movements using the easily manipulated plant, Arabidopsis thaliana. Guard cells provide a powerful system for quantitative and time-resolved dissection of the complex molecular machinery mediating specificity in early plant signaling cascades. During the preceding funding period a signal transduction model has been developed, suggesting that several types of both positively- and negatively-regulating protein kinases and PP1- or PP2A-type protein phosphatases play central roles in mediating stomatal closing by the phytohormone, abscisic acid (ABA). However, the genes encoding these protein kinases and PP1 2A-type phosphatases, as well as their locations and functions within cascades and their downstream targets remain largely unknown. From an Arabidopsis guard cell cDNA libraries, the cDNAs that encoded for the receptor-like kinases (RLKs), the Ca2+-dependent protein kinases (CDPKs), and the catalytic PP2A subunit have been isolated.. The large gene families and redundancies of these signal transducers in plants have limited direct genetic characterization of individual kinases and PP2As. Direct functional analyses of guard cell-expressed members will now allow determination of their redundancies and of their precise functions in signal transduction. Preliminary studies show that an insertional mutation in a regulatory PP2A subunit causes recessive ABA insensitivity in guard cells. Furthermore, disruption of a receptor kinase abolishes light-induced stomatal opening, illustrating the importance and feasibility of the proposed research. The following hypotheses will be tested in this project: That both positively- and negatively-regulating protein kinases and PP2As function in ABA-induced stomatal closing. That CDPKs control ABA-induced stomatal closing. That specific PP2As may function either as positive or negative regulators of ABA signaling. To test these, the following specific aims will be done: Insertional disruption mutant alleles will be identified and transgenic repression lines will be generated in the isolated guard cell RLK, CDPK and catalytic PP2A genes. Stomatal movement analyses will be pursued to characterize phenotypic responses to ABA and light stimuli in disruption mutants or double multi mutants of redundant homologous CDPKs and PP2As. Effects of two to three kinase and PP2A mutations with the strongest stomatal phenotypes will be characterized on stimulus-induced regulation of guard cell anion or K+ channels and signal-induced cytosolic Ca2+ changes. Epistasis analyses with known guard cell signaling mutants will be pursued to determine the relative sequence of events in the guard cell signaling network. Selected CDPKs PP2As will be analyzed for modulation of cloned guard cell ion channels. Furthermore screens for guard cell-expressed interacting proteins will be pursued for one of the regulators. The knowledge gained from these studies will reveal novel fundamental mechanisms by which a network of kinases and PP2As control signal transduction and mediate signaling specificity in a plant cell. Furthermore, these studies will lead to elucidation of key signal transduction mechanisms by which plants balance CO2 influx into leaves and transpirational water loss and may contribute to future strategies for manipulating gas exchange in plants doc3932 none Lewis The investigator and his colleagues organize an international conference on mathematics in biology at the University of Utah from August 3-5, . Application of mathematical methods to biology is revolutionizing our understanding of subjects ranging from genomics to cancer to environmental change. During this time of rapid growth in mathematical biology, the goal of the meeting is to highlight current top-level research, to provide a perspective on future research areas, to provide opportunities for career development to junior researchers, and to foster interactions between established researchers and junior researchers. The meeting includes scientific sessions on epidemiology, biofluids, molecular motors, theoretical ecology, cancer dynamics, and immunology. Beyind this, it incorporates a careers session, an education minisymposium, and a new mentoring program to nurture employment in the subject, improve the way it is taught, and provide contacts for junior researchers. Biology is becoming a more mathematical subject. Insights gained from applying mathematical methods to biological problems are reshaping our understanding of everything from the genome up to entire ecosystems. This conference describes recent advances in several areas. It also includes sessions that aim to foster both the development of junior researchers and greater interactions among biologists and mathematicians doc3933 none Hill, Roberts & Edwards In , a new songbird disease appeared in House Finches in backyards in Maryland. The severe eye and respiratory disease that was observed in these birds was caused by a bacterium, Mycoplasma gallicepticum (MG), which had apparently jumped from poultry. Since , this disease has spread throughout eastern North America, killing an estimated 100 million House Finches. This study focuses on the co-evolution of this parasite and its newly colonized host. There has been steady decline in the incidence of mycoplasmosis in eastern House Finches since the epidemic year of 6. This suggests that either finches have evolved genetic resistance to the disease, that MG has evolved reduced virulence, or that some combination of change in resistance and virulence has occurred. A combination of field observations, controlled infection experiments, and genetic analysis will be used to test for evolved genetic resistance to MG in finches and to test for change in virulence in the MG. While this research focuses on a disease that does not infect humans, much can be learned from a study of the interaction of a vertebrate population and a novel pathogen. We live in an age of globalization with new pathogens constantly being spread among populations of domestic animals, wildlife, and humans. Understanding the dynamic nature of interactions between parasites and hosts will provide critical information to help us deal with these new infectious diseases doc3934 none Trimmer RANGE AND SPECIFICITY OF NO CGMP SIGNALING IN THE CNS Pi Barry A. Trimmer, Tufts University One of the biggest challenges in biology is to understand how the brain produces thought and actions. It is clear that these processes depend on complex communication between nerve cells (neurons) through the secretion of specific chemicals called neurotransmitters. These chemical messages are non-nally detected and interpreted by receptor proteins on nearby cells. However, some neurons signal by the production of an unstable soluble gas, nitric oxide (NO). This unusual messenger was discovered only recently hence comparatively little is known about its role in the brain. This research project seeks to understand the special functions of nitric oxide when it is released from neurons. We have identified individual nitric oxide-producing and responding neurons in the living nervous system and our goal is to establish how they communicate. In particular, how far does nitric oxide spread in the brain and how is it targeted to specific neurons? These experiments use well-established electrophysiological methods together with a novel technology in which nitric oxide is localized using a fluorescent dye. Nitric oxide has important regulatory functions in the cardiovascular and immune systems but in the brain its ability to simultaneously contact vast numbers of neurons give it the potential to coordinate complex tasks. By exploring the mechanisms, specializations and limitations of nitric oxide signaling this research will help to understand how groups of neurons work together to produce appropriate behaviors doc3935 none This award is in partial support of a Gordon Conference on Research at high Pressures. This conference is vital and important as high pressure research has changed dramatically over the years with the development of new techniques for generating pressure and studying samples at pressures which now extend into the multi-megabar range for static pressures, and substantially higher for shock pressure. The conference serves as an important international forum for topics at the forefront of both static and dynamic pressures, in small volume diamond anvil cells and large volume presses, in the diverse fields of physics, chemistry, geosciences, and emerging topics in biology. The upcoming meeting will feature invited talks in the most exciting subjects of recent interent, including efforts to understand and metallize hydrogen, the composition of the earth s core, novel materials, magnetism and superconductivity, shock on polyatomics, alkali metals, and new methods and techniques. Opening and closing sessions will discuss the challenges of the future and celebrate the successes of the past. This vibrant and successful conference will have representation from all fields and sectors, including new faces, graduate students, post docs, junior faculty and a strong representation from large active groups doc3936 none The presence of abundant repetitive sequences is among the most conspicuous characteristics of eukaryotic genomes. Since most repetitive elements have no obvious genetic functions, they are often regarded as selfish or junk DNA. However, it has become increasingly evident that these sequences could play important roles in regulating gene expression. For example, the yeast telomeric repeats have been shown to regulate gene expression. It has been proposed that gene silencing in yeast is mediated by the telomeric heterochromatin that behaves as subnuclear organelles to store transcription factors and modulate their nuclear concentration. The overall objective of this research program is to elucidate the function of abundant repetitive sequences in the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster. Approximately 30% of this fruitfly s genome is composed of constitutive heterochromatin, which contains highly repetitive sequences. The Drosophila Y chromosome is entirely heterochromatic and accounts for approximately 13% of a male genome. Despite its large physical size, this chromosome carries only six genes that are mutable to male sterility. Recent analysis has revealed that the Y chromosome carries a trans-activator that regulates transcription the male germ line. The Y trans-activator is distributed within a distinct region on the Y long arm and is functionally redundant, suggesting the involvement of heterochromatic repetitive sequences. In addition, the trans-activator is correlated with genetic factors that are dispersed within the same Y long region and are essential for sperm development. These results indicate that the Y trans-activator plays an important role in spermatogenesis. Further genetic and molecular studies have demonstrated that the Y trans-activator interacts with a genetic pathway that controls transcription in primary spermatocytes. In addition, the analysis has identified two potential target genes of the Y trans-activator, the hsp26 and hsp60ms genes, both of which are required for spermatogenesis. This project has three general goals: (1) The transcriptional regulation of the Y trans-activator on the hsp26 and hsp60ms genes will be investigated. Studies of the hsp function will be extended to reveal the effects of the Y transactivator in spermatogenesis. (2) The hypothesis that the Y trans-activator interacts with a branch of a pathway that regulates transcription in spermatogenesis will be tested and it will be determined whether the Y trans-activator controls spermatogenesis by regulating a specific set of genes required for spermatid individualization. (3) Reporter genes to identify the hsp26 regulatory sequence that is controlled by the Y trans-activator will be generated. Site-directed mutagenesis will be used to precisely define this cis-element. Results from thisresearch will provide important information about function of the heterocromatic Drosophila Y chromosome. Furthermore, knowing how Drosophila heterochromatin plays an essential role will help to better understand the biological significance of all heterochromatin, which is a large, yet poorly understood, genomic component in nearly all eukaryotic organisms doc3937 none This award, jointly funded by the Divisions of Chemistry and Chemical and Transport Systems, renews support to the Board on Chemical Sciences and Technology of the National Academy of Sciences for the Chemical Sciences Roundtable. The Roundtable provides a forum for the leadership of the chemical sciences from universities, industry and government to discuss research, education and economic issues of great current concern to the chemical community. The Roundtable serves as means to exchange information among the chemical sciences leadership and through them to disseminate this information broadly within that community. It also organizes and sponsors workshops on topics of critical current importance to the chemical sciences making the proceedings of these workshops widely available to that community as well. It does not make recommendations or provide advice. As a neutral, credible forum managed by the Board on Chemical Sciences and Technology of the National Academy of Sciences the Roundtable facilitates communication among all stakeholders in the chemical enterprise doc3938 none This experimental and theoretical project will address the strong; metal-like temperature-dependence of the resistivity, that was observed in the early s in a low-density and high-mobility two-dimensional electron gas in zero magnetic field. If this effect is actually a metal-insulator transition in 2D (2D MIT), the one-parameter scaling theory of localization would be violated. Despite intensive efforts, even the most basic features of the 2D MIT are not yet understood. This research is focused on two interrelated key issues: (a) the origin of the anomalous temperature dependence of the resistivity in the metallic state, and (b) the nature of the ground state of interacting electrons in the metallic state. A suite of transport and thermodynamic measurements is planned that should distinguish between two major scenarios of the phenomenon: a zero-temperature quantum phase transition versus a finite-temperature crossover due to the temperature dependence of the scattering time. An important feature of the work is the extension of the experimental parameter space down to the lowest accessible temperatures (T ~ 20mK). The experimental studies at Rutgers University are supplemented by the theoretical work at University of Florida. Whereas the main focus of this proposal is on fundamental topics, some anticipated results on transport in high-mobility silicon and silicon-germanium structures are expected to have an impact on a broad spectrum of applications. Graduate students involved in the project receive training in fundamental experimental techniques with cutting edge technology. %%% According to the conventional theory of electrons in disordered conductors, two-dimensional conductors eventually become insulators at sufficiently low temperatures. This theory has been challenged recently by observations of a metallic state, first in high-mobility silicon field-effect transistors, and later in a number of other two-dimensional structures. This metallic state is driven by changes in the carrier density. The unexpected metallic state might be an evidence for a new ground state owing to strong electron-electron interactions (the zero-temperature quantum phase transition). Other explanations have also been suggested including those based on the temperature dependence of disorder, percolation of carriers through macroscopic inhomogeneities, etc. This combined theory and experiment project is aimed at establishing the true nature of the novel metallic state in two dimensions by carrying out a variety of transport and thermodynamic measurements. In order to expand the space of experimental parameters, cutting-edge ultra-low-temperature cryogenic technologies will be combined with novel nano-lithographic techniques. The experimental studies at the Rutgers University are conducted in conjunction with the theoretical work at the University of Florida. Students involved in this research receive rigorous training in advanced experimental techniques, and are prepared for careers in either academic or industrial environment doc3939 none Corden As nascent pre-mRNAs emerge from elongating RNA polymerase II (pol II), their post-synthetic fate is determined by a large number of RNA-binding proteins. Primary among these proteins are the heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoproteins (hnRNPs) which have been shown to play multiple roles in mRNA processing and transport. The broad objective of this project is to understand how a subset of yeast hnRNPs interact with the transcription machinery to regulate specific gene expression. The central hypothesis of this project is that a subset of hnRNPs and processing factors form a complex that binds specific cis-acting sites in some nascent pol II transcripts. The formation of such hnRNP-RNA complexes is proposed to lead to transcription pausing, arrest, or termination through interaction with the pol II C-terminal domain (CTD). CTD kinase I (CTDK-I) may regulate this process by phosphorylating the CTD and changing the nature of the interaction with the hnRNP complex. This hypothesis will be tested in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The first objective is to determine whether interaction between the Nrd1p Nab3p hnRNP complex and the CTD is regulated by phosphorylation and, if so, whether CTDK-I carries out this phosphorylation. In vitro binding experiments will test the role of CTD phosphorylation in regulating this interaction. Genetic experiments will be used to test the role of CTDK-I. A second objective is to identify cis-acting RNA elements in genes that are regulated by Nrd1p and or Nab3p. Both genetic and biochemical approaches will be used to characterize an autoregulatory element in the NRD1transcript. Similar elements will be sought in other genes that are regulated by NRD1 and NAB3. The final objective is to determine the stage in the transcription cycle regulated by Nrd1p and Nab3p. The autoregulation of NRD1 expression will be studied in vivo and in vitro to determine the mechanism of NRD1 function. Reaching these objectives will help to define a novel regulatory pathway in yeast. While RNA-binding proteins have been shown to regulate transcription in procaryotes and in HIV infection, no similar regulatory mechanism has been described in yeast. This project draws together the areas of hnRNP function and transcription regulation in an organism amenable to both genetic and doc3940 none Jones Proteins of diverse function and structural features often can be grouped together because they share common methods for controlling function. Such is the case for some proteins involved in signal transduction. For these proteins, turning on the protein s function occurs when the protein is targeted to and binds to the cell membrane. In the absence of a stimulus, the signaling protein is essentially inactive. It is a conformation of the protein itself that maintains it in this inactive state. Binding of the signaling protein to the cell membrane causes a change in conformation that removes the inhibitory block, and allows the protein to effect its action within the cell. Phospholipase C-g1 (PLC-g1A) is a signaling protein. PLC-g1 is located within the interior of the cell and becomes activated when it receives signals from external growth factors. Activated PLC-g1 binds to the membrane and hydrolyzes phosphatidylinositol bisphosphate (PIP2) to generate two-second messengers, soluble inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate and membrane-associated diacylglycerol. These second messengers then pass the signal along to other proteins and eventually effect an increase in cell division and cell motility. The purpose of this proposal is to determine whether PLC-g1 can be grouped with other signaling proteins that are maintained in an inactive state but become active when a change in conformation occurs upon binding to the cell membrane. This project is designed to determine whether a domain of PLC-g1 keeps it in an inactive state and which part of the protein is responsible for maintaining it in that inactive state. To provide this answer, experiments will be conducted that will determine activity of a modified PLC-g1 that is missing a portion of the inhibitory domain and of a form of PLC-g1 that can no longer receive signals from growth factors. Techniques such as fluorescence, circular dichroism, and electron spin resonance will be used to determine changes in protein conformation. The results of this study will increase our knowledge of how the function of PLC-g1 is regulated and add to our general knowledge of how proteins with divergent functions and structural features develop common ways for controlling protein function doc3941 none Partial support is provided for the bianual gordon Research Corporation on Tribology. The conference has the subtitle Bridging the Gaps and will attempt to bridge gaps in scale, gaps between sub-disciplines, and gaps between applied and bais research. It will also attempt to bridge any gaps in age and experience by brining experienced as well as new researchers and graduate students together for informal discussions doc3942 none Ma Flower development is a complex process and provides an excellent experimental system to study cellular regulatory processes. The AGAMOUS (AG) gene of the small weed Arabidopsis is an important regulator of flower development. However, the temporal requirement of AG function is still not known. In addition, the AG protein encoded by the AG gene is a member of a group of related proteins that are thought to control the expression of other genes. But the genes that are regulated by AG are not yet known. This proposal takes advantage of a plant system that carries a modified AG gene whose function can switched on after the AG protein has been synthesized. It is proposed here to use this system to determine the temporal requirement of AG function for the control of flower development. Furthermore, this system will be used to isolate target genes that are regulated by AG either directly or indirectly. A collection of genes has been generated that is enriched for AG-regulated genes. Preliminary sequence analysis indicates that about of half of the genes are not similar to known genes discovered by others, and the remainder are similar to known genes, but have not been described by others except as DNA sequences. The putative AG-regulated genes will be further studied to confirm and understand their expression patterns. A few selected representative genes will be characterized using molecular genetic methods to learn about their role in flower development. These studies will provide new insights about the control of flower development, particularly how a specific gene can regulate other genes, thereby influence cellular properties during development. Moreover, the results from these experiments should also increase our knowledge about gene regulation and development in general doc3943 none This is a two-part project that explores intense laser-plasma interactions and their applications. In the first part experiments will be done to investigate the use of the laser-produced plasma waveguide for nonlinear generation of coherent, short wavelength light. A great improvement over previous experiments will be the use of an elongated pulsed gas jet that will allow both injection of higher intensity pulses into the waveguide and reduced absorption of x-rays propagating out of the waveguide. The second part of the project will investigate in detail the dynamics of the interaction of intense laser pulses with clusters formed through van der Waals bonding of atoms and molecules in a supersonic gas jet expansion. These clusters are a leading candidate for the extreme ultraviolet light source needed for next generation lithography. Experiments will be performed to explore the laser-cluster interaction dynamics with femtosecond time-resolved interferometry, fast particle spectroscopy, and EUV and x-ray spectroscopy doc3944 none Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are widespread contaminants of aquatic sediments. Anaerobic microorganisms in many of these contaminated sediments have the capacity to remove chlorine from the PCBs. Dechlorination reduces the persistence and potential toxicity of PCBs. To date, none of the dechlorinating microorganisms have been identified and thus nothing is known about their ecology or about the evolution of PCB-dechlorinating enzymes pathways. Previous studies have shown that PCB-dechlorinating microorganisms are present in the Housatonic River (Lenox, MA) and that they exhibit three distinct PCB-dechlorinating activities. Each of these activities has distinct substrates, targeted chlorine positions, and pH and temperature optima. This research project will use molecular techniques to identify the key changes in microbial community structure that occur when these different activities are stimulated and enriched and will use 16S rRNA-based phylogenetic analysis to identify the key microbial players carrying out reductive dechlorination of PCBs. Long-term goals include isolation of PCB-dechlorinating bacteria and isolation and characterization of their PCB-dechlorinating enzymes. This research will expand our understanding of an important environmental process and of anaerobic sediment communities doc3945 none Plants and fungi synthesize short peptides termed phytochelatins when exposed to heavy metals such as cadmium. Phytochelatins are derived from a tripeptide, glutathione, by the transfer of peptide units from one glutathione molecule to another. The gene encoding for the enzyme that synthesizes phytochelatins, named phytochelatin synthase, has recently been cloned. The main objectives of the research program are three-fold: (i) To define the basic enzymology of phytochelatin synthase. (ii) Elucidation of the catalytic defect in mutants expressing variant forms of phytochelatin synthase. (iii) Crystallization and three-dimensional structure determination of phytochelatin synthase. These studies will yield fresh insights into transpeptidation reactions, in general, and the mechanism of phytochelatin synthesis, in particular. The genes encoding phytochelatin synthase could also be used to engineer plants for the remediation of heavy metal pollution doc3946 none Actin is one of the key cytoskeletal elements in eukaryotic cells. Actin protein molecules (monomers) reversibly polymerize to form actin microfilaments, which can further assemble into bundles with the assistance of actin-associated bundling proteins. Microfilaments are dynamic in the living cell, and can shorten and elongate in a manner that is strictly regulated by a variety of other actin-associated proteins. Microfilaments serve many critical roles in the life of the cell, either as structural elements for cell shape or resiliency or as tracks along which the actin-based motor, myosin, translocates. This research is aimed at understanding how actin bundles are formed and maintained using the Drosophila bristle cell as a model. Cross-linked bundles of unipolar (parallel) actin filaments are common in eukaryotic cells and provide the scaffolding that maintains cell shape. Familiar examples include the brush border (microvilli) of intestinal epithelial cells and the stereocilia of the inner ear. In these and other systems there is an array of actin-binding proteins that serve to control the dynamics of actin polymerization, assemble actin filaments into bundles, and regulate bundle maintenance. The Drosophila bristle cell develops a gigantic cellular extension hundreds of microns long over a period of 16 hours and is an excellent example of how a cell uses its cytoskeleton to change and maintain its shape. This cellular extension is supported by a scaffold of long actin bundles constructed by the end-to-end assembly of short modules composed of actin filaments bundled together with cross-linkers. This system offers important experimental advantages for the study of actin dynamics, by allowing the application of genetic and molecular approaches to a fundamental cell biological feature that can be analyzed in the living cell by light microscopy and at high resolution by electron microscopy. Drs. Guild and Tilney plan to determine how the modular components of actin bundles are formed, maintained, and eventually removed from the cytoplasm. They plan to use elongating bristle cells as in vivo test tubes and to employ genetic and transgenic tools to perturb and modify bundle assembly. The cytoskeletal consequences of these changes will be assessed by examining the actin cytoskeleton in the context of living cells by confocal microscopy and by examining the detailed structure of the cytoskeleton by electron microscopy. The project has two aims. First, the investigators will determine whether actin-capping proteins play a role in module length regulation and, if so, they will test whether they can engineer module length with different capping proteins. Second, they will determine how modules break down and whether actin capping proteins play a role in this process. In addition, they will test whether retrograde flow of actin modules plays a role in cell extension and in bundle breakdown and whether myosin motors drive this flow. Modules of actin bundles are used in many specialized cells to support cellular extensions and in all cases module length is an issue. Thus, the principles that are uncovered in the Drosophila system should be generally applicable to many other systems doc3947 none The nuclear receptors are an ancient and widespread family of transcription factors that includes the receptors for the vertebrate steroid hormones, those for many other small lipophilic hormones (for example thyroid hormone and vitamin D), and many orphan receptors that may not be associated with hormones. The family also includes the polypeptides EcR and USP that together comprise the insect ecdysone receptor. A general picture of nuclear receptor function has emerged from extensive biochemical studies: Receptors bind to specific DNA target sequences where they may activate or repress transcription from a nearby promoter by binding to protein coactivators and corepressors that link the DNA-tethered receptor to the transcriptional apparatus. Binding of a ligand (steroid or other small lipophilic signaling molecule) to the receptor converts the receptor from one that binds corepressor to one that binds coactivator. The transcriptional activities regulated by the nuclear receptors are central to normal development. Moreover studies of nuclear receptor coactivators and corepressors are providing valuable clues to the rate-limiting steps in chromosomal gene activation and to processes that lead to tissue-specific regulation by hormones and other regulatory molecules. The ecdysone receptor in insects is a heterodimeric nuclear receptor composed of the protein EcR and USP. It mediates transcriptional responses to ecdysone, the steroid hormone that coordinates molting and metamorphosis in insects (and other arthropods). Many lines of evidence indicate that it is similar (though not identical) in both structure and function to the largest group of nuclear receptors, the type II or heterodimeric receptors and prior work has probed molecular aspects of the EcR USP transcriptional response. Because of its well-developed genetics and because the Drosophila genome has been sequenced, the opportunity exists to begin to use genetic methods to identify proteins that interact with nuclear receptors. This project will develop a genetic screen using flies engineered to be sensitive to small fluctuations in the concentrations of proteins that interact with EcR USP. The objective of the proposed experiments is the identification, by genetic means, of proteins that interact genetically (and physically) with EcR USP. It is anticipated that the genes identified will include coactivators and co-repressors, chaperones, chromatin-remodeling factors, and other proteins that may be required for EcR USP function. By distinguishing between global and tissue-specific interactions, the screen may provide insights into the roles of multiple, functionally similar corepressors and coactivators known from vertebrate studies. This screen has the potential to increase our understanding of gene expression and nuclear receptor function by: (1) Adding new molecules to the list of proteins that interact with nuclear receptors; (2) Identifying critical intermediates (coactivators and corepressors) in Drosophila where they can be integrated into on-going studies of gene regulation in development; (3) Applying a whole organism genetic approach to the analysis of a process (nuclear receptor interactions) that has heretofore been approachable only in cultured cells and by biochemistry; (4) Shedding light on tissue-and stage-specific aspects of coactivator and corepressor function doc3948 none Hagedorn The investigator seeks advances in the reconstruction of phylogenetic, or evolutionary, trees in biology by improving the utility of the method of phylogenetic invariants, one of several different methods of tree reconstruction. It would be extremely useful to have an accurate, computationally efficient method of phylogenetic analysis, but no such method is yet known. The method of phylogenetic invariants theoretically has these advantages. Modern phylogenetic methods analyze the mathematical and statistical similarities between the nucleotide sequences of different species. By modeling the evolution of the sequence for a proposed evolutionary tree T as a Markov model, one can obtain polynomials specifying the frequencies with which certain patterns should occur in observed sequence data. These polynomials parameterize a high-dimensional real algebraic variety X. Finding the equations that implicitly define X is theoretically equivalent to knowing how to determine whether T is the true evolutionary tree. These equations have been previously found for special evolutionary models such as the Kimura 3-parameter model. The investigator studies the invariants for the most general Markov model of nucleotide sequences and uses a combination of combinatorics and non-abelian Fourier analysis to find a complete set of invariants. He also explores ways to reduce the method s sensitivity to evolutionary noise and raising its accuracy. Advances on these issues are essential to make implementations of the invariant method practical for phylogenetic analysis. The investigator develops better methods to construct biological trees explaining the evolutionary relationships between species. Understanding evolutionary relationships is an important biological question, whose applications range from aiding the discovery of the origin of life to helping the medical community research possible vaccines and treatments for pathogens such as the H.I.V. virus. It would be extremely useful to have an accurate and computationally efficient method of phylogenetic (or evolutionary) analysis, but no method is currently known to possess both qualities. The project seeks to improve the accuracy of the tree reconstruction method using phylogenetic invariants. The method of invariants is a computationally efficient method, which is known to theoretically give correct answers. However, in practice, the method is very susceptible to the presence of noise in the data. The investigator aims to minimize this problem by eliminating several assumptions that currently must be met to use the method of invariants doc3949 none After pollen binds to the stigma, the extracellular coating diffuses along the stigma surface and facilitates water transfer to the desiccated pollen grains. Mutations in CER genes cause a defect in pollen hydration by decreasing the levels of long-chain lipids on the pollen surface and destabilizing the entire pollen coating. The pleiotropic nature of the cer defects has identification of a mutation in the GRP17 gene has revealed the function of the major pollen coat protein. grp17 mutants have a normal complement of all other coat proteins and lipids, yet display severe delays in pollen hydration. Genes encoding five other coat proteins have been identified in Dr. Preuss laboratory; identifying mutations in those genes will make it possible to determine whether their products interact with GRP17, contribute to pollen hydration, or play a role in maintaining pollen coat structure. Interestingly, most of the pollen coat proteins are encoded by a tandem array of GRP genes; this arrangement raises the possibility that mating specificity in plants, like that observed in animals or algae, is controlled by concerted evolution of a single locus. There is one specific aim: to investigate the requirements for pollen hydration a) identify mutants defective in individual coat proteins, b) investigate interactions between pollen coat proteins and lipids by combining grip and cer mutations, c) determine the extent of GRP functional redundance by characterizing the effects of a deletion of the entire GRP locus and d) localize GRP proteins, determining their association with lipid droplets and migration onto the stigma surface. Fertilization in flowering plants depends on as elaborate series of cell-cell interactions that enable female pistil cells to discriminate among pollen grains and inhibit, on an individual basis, the invasive growth of foreign pollen and pathogens. These interactions are essential for plant development and species identity, yet in most cases the molecular basis is not understood. The long-term goal of this research is to uncover molecules required for Arabidopsis reproduction, including those that mediate pollen adhesion, recognition, hydration, tube initiation, and growth to the ovules. This project focuses on the initial step in pollination - the interactions between pollen and stigma cells. Nsf-funded investigations in Dr. Preuss laboratory have determined that pollen-stigma adhesion relies on species-specific molecules within the extracellular pollen wall [1], and that the subsequent hydration of pollen requires a glycine-rich, lipid binding protein within the hydrophobic pollen coat [2]. In both cases, genetic and molecular studies confirm that these interactions involve novel classes of molecules and require extremely hydrophobic components. The immediate goals of this project are to elucidate the roles of pollen surface lipids and proteins in pollen hydration doc3950 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa will acquire a nanosecond transient absorption spectrometer. Research will focus on photoinduced electron transfer studies, including a) measurement of electron transfer rates in redox-gradient dendrimers; b) use of fast spectroscopy to understand the phylloquinone cofactor in Photosystem I; and c) investigations of photochemistry in novel chromophores for optical data storage. Transient absorption spectroscopy is an extremely versatile tool that can be used to probe fundamental photophysical and photochemical processes. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials science and biochemistry doc3951 none Little is known about the degradation of proteins during plant development and in response to stress. In particular, there is a gap in the understanding of the class of proteases called aminopeptidases. Two classes of leucine aminopeptidase genes (LapA and LapN) from tomato have been characterized. LapA genes are expressed in response to wounding, caterpillar feeding, and some bacterial and fungal pathogens. In contrast, LapN genes are expressed at all times and in all tissues. The analysis of genetically engineered tomato plants that express a LapA antisense gene (35S:asLap) showed that down-regulation of Lap genes impairs the ability of tomatoes to mount a wound response. This proposal builds on a strong foundation of knowledge about the tomato LAPs built during the previous granting period. This proposed integrated research effort is focused on understanding the location of LAPs and their role in responses wounding, pathogens, water deficit, and salinity. Cell fractionation studies show that LAPs reside in two cellular compartments: the cytoplasm and the chloroplast. Obviously, the substrates available for LAP action are determined by the location of LAPs within the tomato cell. Therefore, LAP-A- and LAP-N-specific antibodies will be used to determine the location of these two classes of aminopeptidases within the cell. The mechanisms that control the accumulation of LAP-A and LAP-N in two cellular locations will be tested. The LapA antisense plants (35S:asLap) do not effectively induce wound-response genes. These data suggest that LAP-A may be one of the first peptidases to regulate a plant-signaling pathway. Since this conclusion is novel for the plant community, these data should be confirmed using additional strategies. Three sets of transgenic tomato plants that have altered patterns of Lap gene expression will be evaluated. First, plants expressing two Lap antisense genes will be made. These plants express the LapA antisense RNA from both the wound-induced LapA promoter (LapA:asLap) and the constitutive 35S promoter (35S:asLap). These plants should afford the tightest regulation of the wound response. Second, co-suppressed plants will be characterized. Unlike the antisense plants that down regulate both LapA and LapN, the co-suppressed plants only down regulate LapA. Third, transgenic tomatoes that express high levels of LAP-A constitutively will be characterized. A tight correlation of LapA and or LapN down regulation with the suppression of the wound response will implicate LAPs as protease that regulates plant stress responses. If LAPs are shown to modulate the wound response, the site of LAP action will be determined by feeding Lap down-regulated plants systemin, abscisic acid, jasmonic acid and intermediates of the octadecanoid pathway. If systemin activation is implicated, the activity of LAP-A and LAP-N on putative systemin precursors will be characterized. Transgenic tomatoes that are up- and down-regulated for Lap gene expression will be used to determine if LAPs are important for controlling bacterial, viral, and fungal infections, as well as insect infestations and tolerance to water-deficit and salinity. The understanding of the expression and impact of LAPs in plant development and in responses to stress has increased greatly. However, continued efforts are essential to elucidate the exact roles of LAPs in stress responses. These studies will enhance our understanding of the mechanisms that favor optimal growth and development. These factors will directly impact on increased crop productivity and may yield significant insights for the development of cogent strategies to enhance a plant s endogenous protection mechanisms to an array of stresses doc3952 none Michael Terns and Rebecca Terns This project will investigate the structure and function of modification guide ribonucleoproteins (RNPs) in the hyperthermophilic Archaeon Pyrococcus furiosus. A long-term objective of this work is to determine the composition and detailed structural organization of the RNPs and to obtain a mechanistic understanding of how these complexes contribute to rRNA modification and ribosome biogenesis. The proposed work will also provide a foundation for detailed structural questions regarding the nature of the RNP interactions and the molecular basis of thermostability of RNA protein interactions in hyperthermophilic organisms. The findings should also provide valuable information on the extent of evolutionary conservation of the rRNA processing and modification machinery in Archaea and Eukarya. The specific aims of this project are to identify the protein and RNA components of the modification guide RNPs, to characterize the RNA protein and protein protein interactions within the RNPs, and to establish a cell-free rRNA 2 -O-methylation system to study the function of the methylation guide RNPs. Michael Terns and Rebecca Terns This project will investigate the structure and function of modification guide ribonucleoproteins (RNPs) in the hyperthermophilic Archaeon Pyrococcus furiosus. A long-term objective of this work is to determine the composition and detailed structural organization of the RNPs and to obtain a mechanistic understanding of how these complexes contribute to rRNA modification and ribosome biogenesis. The proposed work will also provide a foundation for detailed structural questions regarding the nature of the RNP interactions and the molecular basis of thermostability of RNA protein interactions in hyperthermophilic organisms. The findings should also provide valuable information on the extent of evolutionary conservation of the rRNA processing and modification machinery in Archaea and Eukarya. The specific aims of this project are to identify the protein and RNA components of the modification guide RNPs, to characterize the RNA protein and protein protein interactions within the RNPs, and to establish a cell-free rRNA 2 -O-methylation system to study the function of the methylation guide RNPs doc3953 none Poole New genes are being rapidly identified by genome projects, and their functions must be determined. Genetic analysis is a powerful tool for identifying the roles a gene plays in complex developmental processes, but if the loss of a gene s activity can be partially or fully compensated for by the activity of another gene, or if the effects of a gene s loss in one developmental process overshadows the effects on other processes, then a loss-of-function approach may not help reveal the gene s function. A dominant misexpression approach, in which random insertions of a mobile regulatory region activates genes, can overcome some of these limitations. A screen to disrupt the development of external sense organs in Drosophila was used as a candidate system to successfully test the approach. Eight independent insertions that resulted in dominant cell fate changes in the sense organ development pathway or changes in bristle cell shape were isolated. The objectives of this of this proposal are to identify the adjacent genes whose misexpression results in changes in sense organ cell fate or bristle morphology. Once identified, the roles the genes play in normal development will be determined, with the goal of understanding how misexpression of the genes results in specific cell fate changes or altered morphology. Inverse PCR will be used to obtain the sequence flanking the insertion site, and comparison with the Drosophila genome project sequence will identify the affected gene. RT-PCR will be used to test whether a transcript originating in the insert is induced under misexpression conditions. For some of the insertions that change the fate of cells in the sense organ lineage, markers that are expressed in subsets of cells in the sense organ lineage will be used to identify whether under dominant misexpression conditions sensory organ precursor (SOP) cells arise normally in each line and divide properly to produce the cells that make up a sense organ. The roles the most interesting genes normally play in development will be assessed by determining their RNA and protein expression domains and their loss-of-function phenotypes. The proposed work will make a specific contribution to elucidating the mechanisms of how networks of genes assign specific cell fates during sense organ development and how gene activities contribute to cell morphology. The work also has general significance, since as genome projects continue to identify genes, the problems caused by redundancy and complex expression will grow. The analysis of genes identified by dominant misexpression screens should provide an alternative means of assigning functions to genes doc3954 none Wilkinson This project aims to test the hypothesis that females choose ornamented males to alter the sex ratio of their progeny. Two species of stalk-eyed flies (family Diopsidae) that exhibit sexual dimorphism for eye stalk length and X-linked meiotic drive (i.e., sperm bearing Y-chromosomes fail to develop) will be used to test three predictions of this hypothesis. To determine the location of genes that influence eye span and meiotic drive, a quantitative trait locus (QTL) study will be conducted with arbitrary genetic markers. To determine how selection maintains meiotic drive in the population, the longevity of males and females, the fecundity of females, and sperm depletion by males that do or do not carry drive alleles will be compared. To determine if correlated evolution between eye span and drive has occurred, progeny sex ratio, male morphology and sperm development will be assayed for nine populations of flies recently captured from southeast Asia. This project is unique and important because it tests an explicit genetic mechanism for adaptive mate choice. In addition, a genetic linkage map for a non-standard model organism will be developed and may provide novel insights on genome evolution. Finally, comparison to other meiotic drive systems may reveal if sex chromosome transmission can be altered in multiple ways, thereby providing a potential biocontrol mechanism doc3955 none The sense of balance and equilibrium in vertebrates is provided by the vestibular system, which functions to maintain the position of the body in space and to stabilize the visual image on the retina. The semicircular canal system, the subject of the research proposed here, is the vestibular end organ responsible for sensing angular acceleration of the head and transmitting this information to the central nervous system. Unlike many other sensory systems, for example, the visual system, our knowledge of even basic properties of the vestibular system is still very rudimentary, primarily because in higher animals, this system is encased in the hard temporal bone of the head. Recent technical advances have made it possible to isolate neurons individually from this system and record their responses to sensory stimulation. These experiments address the need for advancement in this field of research using some of this new technology. Central to this study is the choice of an experimental animal in which the vestibular system can be easily accessed. In higher vertebrates, in addition to the cost of the research animals and concerns over the use of more evolved vertebrates, the vestibular system is encased in the very dense temporal bone. On the other hand, this end organ in fish is a highly evolved system without the dense temporal bone and thus offers a unique opportunity for study of basic properties of the coding of movement. The fish has therefore been used as a model system to study vestibular processing for over 20 years. The experiments described in this research proposal will be carried out using the toadfish, Opsanus tau, as the experimental animal. In the toadfish in particular, there is easy access to the canals due to the flat head of the fish and hence, this animal has been used extensively to study the process of sensory coding of head and body movement by the semicircular canals. In the past, this research has centered primarily on recording from the most easily accessible nerve fibers. The neural response recorded from these nerve fibers that transmit sensory information from the primary sensory receptor, the hair cell, to the midbrain is complex. This complexity may be due to differences in the properties of several levels of the peripheral vestibular system. The research proposed here is the investigation of the ionic currents of the primary sensory cell responsible for sensing body and head movement. Progress in understanding these currents, as opposed to work from other levels of the vestibular system, has only come about in recent years with the development of a particular technique known as patch clamp recording technology and the use of isolated sensory cells. In the experiments proposed here, the semicircular canals will be removed from the animal and the sensory cells mechanically removed as isolated cells. Patch clamp technology will then be used to record ionic currents from the sensory cells. These currents will be separated and classified using known voltage paradigms and pharmacology to provide a quantitative description of the behavior of the currents as they code the information on body and head motion. The data obtained will be incorporated with that from other levels of the system, either currently available or in the process of experimental investigation in other laboratories, to obtain a more comprehensive knowledge of sensory processing in the vestibular system. Incorporation of these data into a computer generated mathematical model of the semicircular canal system is planned for the future. Not only do the proposed experiments enlarge our basic understanding of vestibular system function but also they provide knowledge vital to science and medicine in arriving at the mechanisms underlying pathology of the vestibular system, such as vertigo, motion sickness and the problems of balance and equilibrium so common in the aging human population doc3956 none Gower Quantifying the effects of disturbance and subsequent successional processes on the exchange of energy, water and nutrients between the land surface and atmosphere is central to many disciplines in ecology. The importance of such studies will only increase as the human population increases and disturbances increase in frequency. Boreal forests are the second largest forest biome in the world and contain approximately the same amount of carbon in the sols and vegetation as carbon in the atmosphere. About 5 million hectares of boreal forest burn each year, however, and in recent years this value exceeded 1.5 million hectares. A mechanistic understanding of the effects of fire on the structure and function of boreal forests does not exist, prohibiting even a precursory use of ecosystem process models to quantify the effects of fire on the carbon budget of boreal forests. This project has three major objectives. The first is to quantify the effects of wildfires on the microclimate, structure and function of successional boreal black spruce forests in northern Manitoba, Canada, and compare these results to other boreal forest age-sequence studies. This study will use integrated ecophysiological, biogeochemical, isotopic, and micrometeorological field measurements to improve understanding of how individual processes change during succession, and the eddy flux approach to quantify how whole-system energy, water and CO2 exchange between a black spruce ecosystem and the atmosphere change during succession following fire. The suite of measurements will be replicated in seven different-aged black spruce stands comprising an are sequence distributed across Manitoba. The second objective is to quantify active and past aerial extent of wildfires for North American boreal forests using current and future satellite-borne sensors, and determine if hypothesized earlier growing season green-up by vegetation caused by warmer soil temperature in recently disturbed forest can be detected. The third objective will use two terrestrial ecosystem models (IBIS and TEM) and spatially explicit fire extent values obtained from satellite-borne sensors to examine the possible effects of fire on exchange of CO2 between the North American boreal forest and the atmosphere. Model simulations will be compared to field data at a range of temporal and spatial scales. The proposed study qualifies as an IRCEB project because (1) it uses past and ongoing field measurements made during previous studies to address a critical and unanswered ecological question, (2) it uses complementary measurements form many disciplines (ecophysiology, ecosystem ecology, meteorology, soils, geosciences, landscape ecology, atmospheric science, and global ecology) to address a fundamental question in ecology that is relevant to global carbon cycles, (3) it employs a suite of measurements that will enable the simultaneous determination of the effects of disturbance on individual carbon cycling processes and whole ecosystem net exchange which will provide standardized, independent estimates of NEE, (4) it establishes critical linkages with other scientists measuring the effects of fire on select components of the carbon budgets in boreal forests of contrasting climate, dominant vegetation and the importance of permafrost, (5) it establishes collaboration with scientists creating historic fire record and monitoring current fire status, (6) it contributes to the development and implementation of fire mitigation strategies for land managers, and (7) it will facilitate the training of undergraduate and graduate students in boreal ecology, and provide very badly needed basic forest ecology and management training to the Nelson House First Nation Cree Indians doc3957 none Lord The goals of this study of plant reproduction are to describe the interaction between the pollen tube, which carries sperm cells, and the style, which must be traversed by the pollen tube before the sperm can be released in the ovule to the egg cell. Two adhesion molecules have been identified from the style in lily that are responsible for pollen tube cell adhesion and guidance. These are the first adhesion molecules to be described in plants. In lily, the transmitting tract is a secreting epidermis that lines the stylar canal which empties into the ovary. Pollen tubes germinate on the secretory epidermis of the top of this canal, the stigma, and enter the style tracking the epidermal surface. These secretions can be isolated from dissected styles and used to make an in vitro stylar matrix which serves as an adhesion assay. When pollen tubes are added to this assay system, they adhere to each other and to the artificial stylar matrix. This assay was used to isolate two fractions from the stigma stylar transmitting tract that are necessary for adhesion; one is a small cysteine rich 9kD protein and the other a large pectic polysaccharide (sugar). Neither of these molecules alone is adhesive; the combination of the two is necessary to induce pollen tube adhesion to other pollen tubes and to the stylar matrix. The hypothesis is that the adhesive molecules are involved both in guiding the tube cell to the ovule and in the mechanism of tube cell movement that accompanies this guidance. A multifaceted approach incorporating the tools of developmental, cell and molecular biology is being used to: 1) decipher the mechanism by which the 9kD protein in lily acts with a pectin to induce adhesion of the pollen tube to the stylar matrix. 2) develop an in vivo test for the 9kD protein s role in adhesion using both lily and Arabidopsis. 3) understand the role of the cytoskeleton in tube cell movement and adhesion. 4) study tip growth in both lily and Arabidopsis pollen tubes. The proposed work on adhesion molecules in the lily and Arabidopsis pollination systems addresses two major questions: 1) What is the mechanism of adhesion of the pollen tube cell to the stylar extracellular matrix? 2) How is adhesion related to tube cell movement and what is the role of tip growth? Adhesion molecules, other than the two we have described for pollination, have yet to be described in plants though adhesion is critical for plant development. There are few cases in plants where doc3958 none Plants recognize and respond to pathogen attack with specific defense mechanisms. The rapid production of Reactive Oxygen Intermediates (ROI), from molecular oxygen, in plants has been correlated with resistance responses against pathogens. These oxygen derivatives can be toxic to invading microbes and can serve as signals to the plant cells being invaded. ROI accumulation is frequently correlated with the Hypersensitive Response (HR), a kind of programmed cell death (PCD) which probably also requires nitric oxide (NO) formation. In addition, ROI play a role in morphogenetic phenomena like cell elongation, strengthening of the cell wall, lignification and response to other stresses such as wounding attack by insects, saline and cold stress. Examples of developmentally regulated cell death include the formation of specialized structures like xylem, organ sculpting (formation of certain leaf lobes, floral organ abortion), the degeneration of organs once they have accomplished their function (the embryo suspensor, or the aleurone and the endosperm after the seed germination) and senescence. In flowers, the interior cell layer of the anther locule (the tapetum) undergoes PCD during pollen development. The role of ROI in these processes is largely unexplored. Several biochemical mechanisms have been proposed to explain ROI generation by plants. However, various lines of evidence implicate an NADPH oxidase, analogous to that which generates the respiratory burst in mammalian phagocytes, as the source of the ROI detected in plants, at least upon infection. This investigator has found transposon insertions in the coding region of 8 Arabidopsis Atrboh homologs of the mammalian gp91phox, the key membrane bound NADPH-binding flavocytochrome b558 so far identified. These mutant lines are an incomparable tool to dissect the role of specific gp91phox homologues, not only in plant defense but also in relation to developmental processes, PCD and other responses to the environment. Preliminary data demonstrate that there is redundancy in this gene family, and that ROI generated via the gp91-phox protein play a role in at least one critical developmental process. The identification of the Atrboh genes enables the PI to look for more components in early steps of the signal transduction pathway to defense, and to study the mechanism that activates the plant NADPH oxidase doc3959 none Hargrove The long-range goal of this research is to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the structural and biophysical mechanisms, which regulate ligand binding to hemoglobins. The immediate goals are to use leghemoglobin as a complementary model system to test hypotheses for hemoglobin function, which are based heavily on the understanding of myoglobin. This work involves the use of site-directed mutagenesis, X-ray crystallography, and modern methods for the analysis of heme vibrational modes in combination with traditional kinetic and spectroscopic techniques to analyze the relationship of structure and function in soybean leghemoglobin. It has been demonstrated that this protein exploits different mechanisms for regulating ligand binding than those used by myoglobin. Therefore, a comprehensive study of leghemoglobin will undoubtedly provide new insight into hemoglobin structure and function. Heme proteins carry out a variety of important physiological functions. A basic understanding of monomeric heme proteins provides a starting point for investigating the structure and function of these different systems and allows for rational design to incorporate desired characteristics into better understood hemoglobins. It is not clear to what degree the current hypothesized mechanisms for hemoglobin regulation can be transferred to an understanding of other heme proteins. The research carried out through this project will test the current hypotheses for hemoglobin function using a comprehensive analysis of a monomeric hemoglobin, soybean leghemoglobin. A better understanding of ligand binding generated from a detailed study of this protein will complement our understanding of these processes gained from traditional model systems. The goals are to provide a more diverse and complete basis for exploring the same questions about more complex, multimeric hemoglobins, oxygen sensors, peroxidases, and related enzymes doc3960 none Darwin s finches of the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador, are well known for having evolved a wide diversity of beak forms, ranging from the thin probing beaks of warbler finches to the massive seed-crushing beaks of large ground finches. Recent data suggest that the evolutionary diversification of beak shape has driven corresponding changes in mating song structure, because of the functional role played by the beak in song production. This project aims to characterize patterns, causes, and consequences of correlated evolution between beak shape and vocal traits. During three field expeditions, finches will be captured, banded, measured, released, and their songs recorded. Evolutionary correlations between beak shape and vocal traits will be assessed, the functional role of the beak in sound production characterized, and the relationship between song structure and song function evaluated, using playback experiments. This project is significant in addressing the mechanisms and dynamics of speciation (speciation refers to the process by which new species are generated). In Darwin s finches and many other animal groups, speciation is driven by the evolutionary diversification of mating signals. Mating signals provide cues about species identity and thus help to maintain genetic barriers among evolving lineages. The causes of mating signal diversification, however, have remained largely undocumented. The present project will document the contribution of ecological diversity and anatomical adaptation in shaping mating signal diversification doc3961 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Florida State University will acquire a Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including the following: (1) polymerization of fluorinated monomers within thin sol-gel films to produce low-surface-energy polymers; b) investigations of the degradation mechanism of unique redox-active monolayers; and c) the use of optical waveguides bearing thin, chemically sensitive films for sensor applications. A Fourier transform infrared spectrometer is a veritable workhorse in the modern chemical laboratory and can provide important information about molecular and electronic structure. These studies on the chemistry at surfaces and thin films will have an impact on sensor development and materials science doc3962 none Schiefelbein All multicellular organisms must solve a fundamental problem during their development: How to generate different cell types from a single original cell? The research conducted in this project is designed to address this question and help uncover the molecular mechanisms used by living things to produce distinct cell types in appropriate patterns. This project employs a simple model system for studying cell fate specification; the formation of the root epidermis in the flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana. The Arabidopsis root epidermis is exceptional because its two cell types are produced in a predictable position-dependent fashion. Furthermore, the root epidermis is formed continuously as the root grows, so the formation of the epidermal cells can be easily followed at all stages of development. Finally, plants that lack either root epidermal cell type are viable, enabling sophisticated genetic experimentation. In recent studies, four genes encoding putative transcriptional regulators (named TTG, WER, GL2, and CPC) have been found to control the patterning of the two epidermal cell types. It appears that the normal patterning of the cell types is due the appropriate production, distribution, and interaction of these regulators during root development. The research in the present project period is intended to: (1) more clearly define the interactions between the WER regulator and each of the other factors, (2) illuminate the functional relationship between the WER and a closely-related transcriptional regulator affecting shoot epidermis cell fate, and (3) uncover new regulators of epidermal cell patterning. The results of these studies are expected to provide a greater understanding of the molecules and mechanisms employed by Arabidopsis and multicellular organisms in general, to generate and regulate cellular diversity during development doc3963 none Legumes, such as clover, alfalfa, and soybean, are important in agriculture and in nature. Soil bacteria known as rhizobia can benefit legumes when they infect their roots, because they can take up atmospheric nitrogen and supply it to the plant. This extra nitrogen increases plant photosynthesis, thereby indirectly increasing the energy supply to the rhizobia. Thus, symbiosis between legume and rhizobium seems beneficial to both. But what if, as often happens, two or more different strains of rhizobia infect the same plant? An initially rare strain that uses plant resources for its own reproduction, rather than for nitrogen fixation, could increase in numbers at the expense of both the plant and the more cooperative rhizobial strain. Although most rhizobia seem to be predominantly beneficial, such parasitic strains do exist. This research will determine whether plant responses to rhizobia that fail to fix nitrogen can select for more beneficial rhizobia. Previous research shows that legumes can control the oxygen supply to rhizobia inside their root nodules. The PIs will determine how this oxygen supply changes with changes in nitrogen fixation by rhizobia, and how this legume response affects the survival and reproduction of the rhizobia. Most of the research will be conducted under controlled laboratory conditions, but a field test will determine whether legumes alter the frequency of cooperative vs. parasitic rhizobia in soil. In addition to possible practical applications in agriculture, the research will contribute to overall understanding of the general problem of cooperation between species. Such cooperation is critical to the pollination of flowers, the survival and growth of coral reefs, plant growth in phosphorus-poor soils, and many other natural systems doc3964 none Reitzer The long-term objectives of this research are to analyze the pathways of nitrogen metabolism, their regulation, and their integration with other pathways in the model organism E. coli. The first specific objective is to construct and characterize mutants with defects in the Lrp-regulated ammonia-generating reactions, in order to test the hypothesis that a major function of Lrp is to control the major ammonia-generating reactions in bacteria. Although these reactions necessarily coordinate carbon and nitrogen metabolism, they have not been identified and characterized. The results might establish a new paradigm for bacterial nitrogen assimilation, since Lrp also controls the well-known nitrogen-regulated (Ntr) response. The second objective is to understand the metabolic basis for the stimulation of nitrogen-limited cells by aspartate and citric acid cycle intermediates. The results will further our knowledge of the coordination of carbon and nitrogen metabolism, of the factors that limit bacterial growth, and of the metabolic potential of E. coli and other bacteria. The third objective is to use commercially available genomic arrays to analyze the pattern of gene expression during nitrogen limitation. The results will test and refine our understanding of the coordination of nitrogen metabolism with other aspects of metabolism (such as carbon metabolism) and the function of Lrp. The results might also help identify Nac-regulated genes and thereby help formulate a physiological function for Nac, which activates several genes during nitrogen limitation. All cells require highly complex regulatory networks to coordinate the vast number of metabolic activities that constitute their lives. This project will deepen our understanding of one of the most important of these networks, that coordinating carbon and nitrogen metabolism. Knowledge of these networks is an important part of the foundation of virtually all our scientific endeavors doc3965 none Hagen This project will clarify the relationship between landscape and parameter regimes that have been explored in models and simulations of folding, and the properties of real protein molecules. It will use time-resolved laser spectroscopy to probe the conformational dynamics of unfolded and partially folded protein molecules, with the aim of extracting basic parameters of importance to landscape descriptions of folding. Laser photolysis experiments on unfolded cytochrome-c and other molecules will allow measurement of the rate of conformational diffusion of an unfolded polypeptide, the effect of inter-residue interactions on that diffusion, and the limitations that this diffusion places on overall folding speed. They will also allow direct measurement of the time scales on which compact denatured proteins interconvert between different configurations; this time scale directly indicates the degree of roughness in landscape descriptions. Using nanosecond-resolved laser temperature jump spectroscopy, this work will also examine the properties of a protein molecule that determine the dynamics of its collapse - the rapid transition from expanded to compact denatured configurations. These experiments will enhance understanding of dynamical events that occur early in protein folding, and they should also provide grounds for more detailed comparisons between protein folding theory and experiment. The question of how proteins fold - how a randomly coiled polypeptide chain attains its proper compact structure - remains one of the most important and interesting problems at the interface of biology, chemistry, and physics. The study of folding has benefited in recent years from several very significant advances in both theory and experimental technique. Theoreticians have developed a new view , or energy landscape description of protein folding, which uses statistical ideas from condensed matter physics to identify and explore those characteristics of proteins that directly control the speed and dynamics of the folding process. At the same time, experimental advances have included the development of new optical methods for triggering and observing the rapid phases of folding, which occur on nanosecond or microsecond time scales. Because these new techniques allow experimentalists to explore and resolve the very earliest events in folding, it is now possible to investigate the connection between real protein molecules and the simplified model proteins studied by theoreticians. Applying new optical techniques, this work aims to strengthen the connection between theory and experiment by characterizing the shapes and statistical properties of energy landscapes of actual molecules, and the dynamics of diffusion on those landscapes doc3966 none Blair The normal development of embryos requires the precise specification of specific tissue types, and failures in that specification underlie many birth defects and congenital diseases. Signaling between tissues and cells during development often plays a critical role in this process. However, the details underlying many important signaling pathways, and the ways in which such signals interact, is still quite poorly understood. This project examines the way in which three important signals, those mediated by the EGF, BMP and Wingless Wnt pathways, are controlled and interact to specify one tissue type. The model system used for this work is the wing of the fruitfly, Drosophila melanogaster. The advantages of this model system are several; the genetic and molecular analyses possible in Drosophila are perhaps unmatched by any other animal, and the mechanisms underlying development of the Drosophila wing shows several striking parallels with the mechanisms used in humans and other mammals. The work focuses specifically on the development of veins within the wing, and proposes the identification of previously undiscovered regulators of signaling by characterizing mutations that affect that process. Analyses are already underway on three such mutations: crossveinless-2, crossveinless-3, and detached. Preliminary work indicates that the gene disrupted by crossveinless-2 encodes a novel protein likely to directly potentiate BMP-like signaling during vein development by binding to the BMP ligand itself doc3967 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Texas A b) synthesis of complex, bioactive, marine natural products; c) development of new synthetic methods centered on asymmetric synthesis; and d) syntheses and applications of libraries of catalysts for discovery and optimization of new asymmetric transformations. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometry is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including biological chemistry and catalysis doc3968 none Kucera Muscle spindles and tendon organs are muscle receptors important for the control of movement and posture. Animals that lack muscle spindles cannot walk. Preliminary studies have shown that numbers and structure of spindles and tendon organs are abnormal in the absence of a gene called 3r81. The present project will address mechanisms whereby the er81 gene causes abnormalities of the muscle receptors. Using genetically altered mice lacking er81, the project will examine how nerve fibers originating from sensory neurons located just outside the spinal cord are able to induce the formation of spindles and tendon organs in muscles, and connect the muscle receptors to appropriate motor neurons in the spinal cord so that they can function properly. Trauma to peripheral nerve or spinal cord often results in disconnection of nerve fibers from their target organs. This inability of injured nerve fibers to match with muscle receptors or spinal neurons hampers recovery of function during nerve regeneration. A better understanding of the role of the er81 gene in the molecular processes that match nerve fibers with their targets may help to devise new restorative therapies for patients with peripheral nerve or spinal cord injuries doc3969 none From the early studies on invertebrate lectins, their designation as protectins was proposed to suggest that, because invertebrates lack adaptive immunity mediated by immunoglobulins, B and T cells, these proteins would mediate internal protection for the adult or its eggs against microbial or fungal infection. The modern era of research on animal lectins has seen a vast expansion on these foundations, to find lectins from vertebrates in direct participation in innate immune functions, as LPS-binding molecules, opsonins, and complement-activating factors. Numerous lectins with immune-related functions have been described, particularly among the C-type, lectins that require Ca++ in their carbohydrate-recognition domain (CRD) for binding to ligand, and share a CRD sequence motif. Recently, some members of the galectin family, another major structural class of lectins which do not require Ca++ for binding and share a different CRD motif, have been proposed to participate in immune functions. This laboratory has focused on lectins as non-self recognition molecules, as the first step of the immune response in invertebrates, using the protochordate Clavelina picta as the model organism. Protochordates lack adaptive immunity, and thus, are suitable models to examine innate immunity mechanisms of invertebrates that may have been conserved through the vertebrate lineages. With prior NSF support this laboratory has: (a) identified and characterized in C. picta a unique soluble C-type lectin (CPL-III) that not only carries both MBL- and selectin-like CRDs, in a single polypeptide subunit, but also binds both non-self (environmental bacteria) and self (tunic sulfated glycan) ligands, (b) achieved partial characterization of putative molecular partners for complement activation, the serine protease MASP, and complement component C3, (c) demonstrated the presence of a CPL-III-like protein on the surface of the hemocytes, and (d) characterized two distinct galectins, one of which is distinctly expressed in hemocytes. By addressing the structure and functional aspects of CPL-III, MASP, C3, and galectin, and investigating their coordinated activity, this research will establish a link between C-type lectins and galectins in complement activation and opsonization. Preliminary results make C. picta an ideal model system to examine the potential coordinate expression and biological roles of the two lectin classes (C-type lectins and galectins) in innate immunity. The tandem organization of CPL-III distinct CRDs, their homologies to mammalian MBL and selectins, and their binding to self and non-self carbohydrate ligands, may provide insight into the evolutionary history of mammalian collectins and selectins. Furthermore, to establish the role of CPL-III as the trigger of an integrally functional lectin-mediated complement activation pathway, would constitute the strongest indication that this pathway preceded the antibody-mediated pathway in evolution, as proposed earlier upon the discovery of C3 in deuterostome invertebrates. This would represent a fundamental advance in our understanding of innate immunity, which would transcend the invertebrates vertebrates boundary doc3970 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Miami will acquire a MALDI-TOF Mass Spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) electrochemical transformations of fullerenes; b) novel redox self-assembling systems; c) chemical analysis of complex urban aerosols; d) oligonucleotide sequencing and micro-array biochip probe analysis of fungal species; and e) characterization of novel porphyrin arrays. Mass spectrometry (MS) is a technique used to probe intimate structural details and to obtain the molecular compositions of a vast array of organic, bioorganic, and organometallic molecules. The results from these studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry, air quality and biology doc3971 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at John Carroll University will acquire an Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) Spectrometer. The new instrument will support the research of major users at both John Carroll University and Youngstown State University. Among the research programs in which EPR spectroscopy will play a vital role are: 1) probing the active site of blue copper proteins; b) systematic study of titatnium (III) in the presence of biologically relevant ligands and a spin-trap; c) structural analysis of an iron-sulfur cluster associated with cytoplasmic aconitase; d) investigation of the electronic states of novel thiovanadyl complexes and new radical anions of cyanoacacarbons; e) determination of high or low-spin crossover in manganese and chromium metallocenophane complexes; and f) analysis of redox states of doped rutile pigments. An electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectrometer is an instrument used to obtain information about the molecular and electronic structure of molecules. It may also be used to obtain information about the lifetimes of free radicals which are often essential for the initiation of tumor growth and or a variety of chemical reactions. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, especially biochemistry doc3972 none Edmands Hybridization between populations results in increased fitness (hybrid vigor) in some cases, and decreased fitness (outbreeding depression) in others. Outbreeding depression is a subject of concern for conservation and is also important to the study of speciation, because it marks the earliest stages of postzygotic isolation. The proposed work will explore the genetic basis of outbreeding depression using the copepod Tigriopus californicus. This species is well suited for such a study due to its short generation time, ease of husbandry and remarkable population structure, with reproductively compatible populations that range from genetically indistinguishable up to more than 20% divergent in mitochondrial DNA. Outbreeding depression is well documented in this species. The proposed study includes four objectives: 1) To develop a linkage map, using a battery of molecular markers. Linkage group determination will be facilitated by the lack of recombination in T. californicus females. 2) To find the sex-determining chromosome in T. californicus. This will be accomplished as a byproduct of the screening of markers in (1) and will allow tests of the role of sex chromosomes in speciation. 3) To test fitness effects of whole chromosomes and interactions between chromosomes in a series of four crosses spanning a wide range of divergence. This will involve measuring associations between viability and genotype in backcrossed hybrids. Results will assess the extent of coadaptation across the entire genome and will reveal how conflicting gene interactions accumulate over time. 4) To demonstrate the fitness effects of interactions both within and between chromosomes and to test the expected pattern of stronger coadaptation between physically linked loci. Results will have significance for a number of different fields of biology. The data will contribute to basic evolutionary theory by measuring the magnitude of epistasis, a factor of increasing interest to evolutionary biologists. Results will be particularly relevant to the mechanics of reproductive isolation and will allow interesting comparisons to the large and elegant body of work on Drosophila. Finally, the proposed work will contribute to the field of conservation biology, which is becoming increasingly concerned over the consequences of interpopulation mixing. Because the nature and extent of coadapted gene complexes has implications for the duration of outbreeding depression, this research may be relevant to the design of management strategies doc3973 none Lilian Hsu Hsu Abortive initiation and promoter escape are reaction processes that accompany the transitional steps from initiation to elongation. For some promoters, this last stage of transcription initiation contains the rate-limiting step governing the extent of productive gene expression. Previously, it was shown that extensive replacement of the initial transcribed sequence could result in a promoter whose expression is severely limited at the promoter escape step. Such a promoter produces an unusually high level of abortive RNA. Thus, the initial transcribed sequence is an important factor influencing abortive initiation and promoter escape. The overall goal of this research is to decipher the mechanism(s) by which the initial transcribed sequence exerts a rate block at productive transcription, and seek conditions factors that can alleviate the rate limitation. The first objective is to define the characteristics, if any, of initial transcribed sequences that impede or facilitate promoter escape. This will employ the quantitative analysis of random initial transcribed sequence mutants. Recent evidence suggests that highly abortive promoters do so due to the formation of a high fraction of unproductive initial transcribing complexes that only carry out abortive RNA synthesis. Thus, for promoters that are severely limited at promoter escape, a second objective will be to examine the formation of the productive versus unproductive complexes and identify conditions factors that modulate the partitioning of the enzyme. Finally, it is observed that supercoiling greatly increases the efficiency of promoter escape. To pinpoint the exact step of activation, reaction rates after open complex formation will be measured from linear versus supercoiled templates. In addition, the extent of productive and unproductive complex formation will be compared between the linear and supercoiled templates. The use of supercoiled template is the first step toward mimicking the in vivo transcription condition and will shed light on the in vivo relevance of abortive initiation and promoter escape. Taken together, the combination of questions and approaches will clarify the role of initial transcribed sequence in promoter activity and offer many insights toward a better understanding of the mechanism of abortive initiation and promoter escape. Given the universal nature of these reactions, the work in the E. coli system, supported by further progress on structural analysis of the transcription complexes, will have greater impact on achieving a general knowledge of transcription initiation doc3974 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Indiana University in Bloomington will acquire a Raman Spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) studies of transition metal enediynes for photodynamic therapy; b) transition-metal diazo complexes: photoactivated nitrogen release for DNA cleavage; c) structural studies of glasses and glass-ceramics; d) 3d transition metal coordination clusters; e) Raman studies of C-H donation and of gas solid reactivity; and f) fundamental studies on analytical Raman spectroscopy. A Raman spectrometer can provide important information about chemical reactivity from the scattered light as it passes through a transparent medium caused by changes in rotational or vibrational energy of the scattering molecules. Its use may enable breakthroughs in our understanding of the properties of reactive and nonreactive molecules doc3975 none Lindahl Ribosomes, the protein-synthesizing machines of all cells, are essential for cellular growth and survival. The biogenesis of ribosomes has been related to growth rate, development, and even disease and aging. Therefore, it is important to understand the process of ribosome formation. The synthesis of these complex organelles requires a series of activities, including processing of the precursor rRNA transcript, modification of specific nucleotides, and assembly of rRNA with 50-80 proteins. The key features of ribosome biogenesis are shared in all eukaryotes from yeast to humans, allowing one to make generalizations from what has been learned in studies of model organisms. In this project, Saccharomyces cerevisiae has been chosen as the experimental organism because of its well-developed systems for genetic manipulation. These studies will focus on the structure and function of RNase MRP, an enzyme that cleaves the precursor rRNA in the Internal Transcribed Spacer between the sequences destined for small and large ribosomal subunits. This nucleolar enzyme contains one RNA subunit and nine proteins. The architecture and mechanism of action of RNase MRP are poorly understood. The PI will use phylogenetic sequence comparisons, mutant analysis, immunoprecipitation and protein tagging to analyze how each protein subunit and territories of the RNA subunit contribute to enzyme structure and substrate specificity. The genetic approach will be complemented with RNA structure probing and computer analysis of RNA structure and protein-RNA interactions. The final goal is to provide a model for the structure and function of RNase MRP doc3976 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Iowa State Institute will acquire a time-of-flightmass spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) the development of new palladium-mediated synthetic organic methods; b) new pathways for the total synthesis of natural products; c) the design, synthesis and analysis of new high performance polymers; d) mechanisms of catalytic reactions promoted by organometallic complexes; and e) photocatalytic degradation of organic wastes in aqueous media. Mass spectrometry (MS) is a technique used to probe intimate structural details and to obtain the molecular compositions of a vast array of organic, bioorganic, and organometallic molecules. The results from these studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials and environmental sciences doc3977 none The mitochondrion is the membrane-delimited organelle of eukaryotic cells within which a number of key metabolic processes occur, including the generation of chemical energy from the oxidative breakdown of nutrients via the complex process known as oxidative phosphorylation. The mitochondrion actually has two membranes separating its inner content from the cytoplasm of the cell. Although the mitochondrion does have its own genome and its own protein translational machinery, most of the proteins of the mitochondrion are encoded in the nuclear genome and are biosynthesized in the cytoplasm; these proteins are subsequently translocated across the membrane(s) to their appropriate place within the mitochondrion. In the particular case of proteins that sit on or in the inner mitochondrial membrane (and which display a wide range of topological arrangements), most are imported into the mitochondria via protein translocation machineries located in the outer and inner membranes (TOM and TIM complexes, respectively). A few polytopic proteins, all subunits of respiratory chain complexes, are encoded by the mitochondrial genome and are synthesized within the matrix compartment. A number of distinct sorting mechanisms exist to direct nuclearly encoded proteins to the inner membrane. A subset of these proteins follow a circuitous route in which they are first imported into the mitochondrial matrix and then embark on an export pathway to the membrane. Mitochondrial gene products have also been shown to undergo a similar export mechanism in order to become inserted into the inner membrane. Protein export from the mitochondrial matrix into the inner membrane bears similarities to Sec-independent protein export in bacteria. These similarities include membrane potential requirements and adherence to the positive-inside rule, described previously for the sorting of bacterial membrane proteins. Recently in yeast, the export of at least the N-terminal tails of both nuclear and mitochondrially encoded proteins has been shown to require the function of an inner membrane protein, Oxa1p. Oxa1p, which physically interacts with substrate proteins as they are undergoing export, has been proposed to represent a component of a novel protein export machinery in yeast mitochondria. Oxa1p is conserved throughout evolution, from prokaryotes throughout eukaryotes (where it is found in mitochondria and chloroplasts). The function of these non-mitochondrial homologs is not known to date. It is tempting to speculate that they may perform a similar function as Oxa1p in mitochondria and mediate protein export events (at least of N-terminal tails) across the thylakoid membrane in chloroplasts and across the plasma membrane in bacteria. The major focal point of this project will be the further elucidation of the function and composition of the mitochondrial Oxa1p complex. The specific goals of the experiments that will be performed are: 1. To determine if the function of the Oxa1p complex is limited to the export of N-terminal tails of proteins. The involvement of Oxa1p in the export of C-terminal tails or hydrophilic loops between neighboring membrane-spanning segments of proteins will be analyzed. 2. To identify other proteins which may physically or functionally interact with Oxa1p. 3. To determine whether Oxa1p forms homo-dimers through coiled-coil structures. 4. To investigate the possible involvement of the Tim17-23 import machinery in the process of Oxa1p-dependent protein export doc3978 none NSF Lommel The project involves the characterization of the origin of assembly sequence (OAS) and other packaging signals directing virion formation of red clover necrotic mosaic dianthovirus (RCNMV). The genome of RCNMV is composed of two positive sense single-stranded RNAs totaling less that 5.5 kb. It is not known whether both genomic RNAs are packaged into virions together or whether each is packaged separately. It has been previously shown that the two genomic RNAs interact by base-pairing to direct the synthesis of a subgenomic RNA from the polycistronic RNA-1. (The subgenomic RNA encodes the capsid protein.) Down-stream from this trans-activating element on RNA-2 resides another element that appears to direct virion assembly. Based on this observation as well as others, a testable hypothesis for how RCNMV packages can be proposed. The hypothesis is that the only cognate origin of assembly for RCNMV resides on RNA-2. RNA-1 is captured for packaging by interacting with RNA-2 via the partially characterized trans-activator (TA) interaction. Those RNA-1s that are base-paired with RNA-2 during packaging form an RNA-1 and RNA-2 particle. Those RNA-2 s that are not paired with an RNA-1 can still be packaged, if multiple copies of RNA-2 molecules coalesce into a forming virion. This hypothesis has a number of constraints that can be tested. I) The hypothesis precludes the formation of RNA-1 only virions. II) It allows for the formation of RNA-2 only virions. III) It states that no OAS is present on RNA-1. IV) No biologically active virion preparation or RNA-1 containing virions will form if the TA interaction is disrupted. V) It suggests that the OAS and trans-activating element, while mutually essential for packaging, may be physically uncoupled. The experimental approach to be taken to address these questions is outlined in the objectives summarized below: 1) Identify and characterize the RCNMV origin of assembly sequence and minimum maximum packaging signal on RNA-2. 2) Uncouple the generation of sgRNA CP expression from the assembly process. This research will allow, for the first time, the determination of the OAS for an icosahedral virus that packages more than one genomic component into a virion. This study will extend the role of RNA-RNA interactions beyond transcriptional activation to virion assembly and further suggest additional important regulatory and structural roles for either cis or trans RNA-RNA interactions. What is discovered in the context of this project will certainly be applicable to other multicomponent icosahedral RNA plant viruses and likely provide insights into similar animal viruses as well. The elucidation of this mechanism may lead to the development of molecular control strategies for virus diseases based on the specific disruption of virion assembly. Finally, plant viruses only cause a disease when they form a systemic infection. For most plant viruses, virion formation has been implicated in this process, but not definitively established. The elucidation of the RCNMV OAS will allow for a direct test of the need for virion formation for long-distance transport and systemic infection doc3979 none The taste world of most mammals, including humans, can be divided into a small number of taste qualities, e.g. sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. Because most tastes in the natural world are a mixture of these taste qualities, it is the job of the brain to decide what qualities are present in each taste stimulus that we encounter. One of the ways that it might do this is to have different groups of cells that each respond to a different taste quality. In reality, it turns out that most cells in the brain respond to more than one taste quality, implying that they can t distinguish between them. The proposed project is designed to study how the brain can tease apart the various taste qualities that we encounter in food by using cells that are broadly responsive. The general approach will be to record the electrophysiological responses to taste stimuli that are bathed over the tongue from cells in the brain stem and from the taste nerves that innervate the tongue in anesthetized rats. In these experiments we will test the hypothesis that when a given taste stimulus is presented, it generates both excitation and inhibition in the brain and that it is this inhibition that allows the cells in the brain to focus their activity so that the components of that stimulus can be determined. We expect to confirm this hypothesis and to define the conditions under which this inhibitory influence is invoked. Further, we hope to determine the site, either in the brain or at the tongue, where these inhibitory effects originate. The impact of this project will be a better understanding of how different tastes are processed by the brain and moreover, how complex perceptions, tastes and otherwise, might be analyzed into their components doc3980 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Mount Holyoke College will acquire a 400 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) solution structures of small, diamagnetic proteins and peptides, as well as complex organic molecules including supramolecular assemblies; b) multi-nuclear NMR studies of transient organometallic intermediates; and c) determination of polymer microstructures. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometry is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry and biochemistry doc3981 none The aim of this project is a broad understanding of the ancient innate immune system of the purple sea urchin Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, a defense system that functions in the absence of adaptive mechanisms. A simpler alternative complement system has been identified and partially characterized in the sea urchin which is composed of SpC3 and SpBf, homologues of vertebrate C3 and Factor B (Bf) respectively. Although this simpler complement system appears to be important for host defense in this animal, additional components are predicted to be present. We propose two approaches to identify additional components of the sea urchin immune system. First, we will construct a normalized, subtracted cDNA library from activated coelomocytes (immune cells) based on subtractions using messages from immunoquiescent coelomocytes. Immunoquiescent cells will be obtained from sea urchins with no detectable SpC3 in the coelomic fluid or in the coelomocytes, i.e., animals that have down-regulated their immune system as a result of being housed in our high quality, closed sea water system. Analysis of clones from this library will result in the identification of genes that are specifically expressed in activated coelomocytes, many of which will be immune response genes. Second, we will use the recently cloned sea urchin homologue of the transcription factor Nuclear Factor kappa B (NFkB), called SpNFkB, to identify additional immune response genes. Innate immunity in both mammals and insects is controlled to a great extent by members of the NFkB or Rel family of transcription factors. We will isolate and sequence the promoters of several immune response genes that we know are up-regulated by immune challenge (SpC3, SpBf, SpNFkB, and a lectin, Sp056), to identify consensus sites, called kB sites, that bind NFkB proteins. This will initiate future studies of the regulatory system that controls sea urchin immune responses through comparisons of consensus binding sites on these promoters and by gel shift assays. We will also use anti-SpNFkB antiserum for chromatin immunoprecipitation to isolate genes linked to kB sites, and perhaps controlled by SpNFkB. This will constitute a second set of genes that will include immune response genes. Results from these efforts will have a number of impacts on our overall understanding of innate immunity. Our knowledge of the immune functions in a simple deuterostome will be significantly expanded. Based on the phylogenetic relationship between the echinoderms (including sea urchins) and chordates (including mammals), the results will also expand our understanding of the complex innate immune system of higher vertebrates and will elucidate aspects that are central and essential for host defense. (The sea urchin complement system is the example of a component that corresponds to an essential and more complex component in the mammalian system.) Finally, results will provide a good estimator of the immune system that functioned in the ancestor of jawed vertebrates at the time when the progenitor of the RAG genes invaded the genome in a retrotransposon. This event introduced gene-rearranging capabilities into the vertebrate ancestor that was required for the evolution of the adaptive immune system. Analysis of the ancestral innate immune system in the sea urchin will allow us to predict the type of defense system that was present in the vertebrate ancestor and that was responsible for RAG-like gene selection and maintenance to allow the evolution of the adaptive immune system to occur doc3982 none Wang ATP (adenosine triphosphate) is the universal chemical energy molecule in all living cells. ATP driven protein motors play a central role in many cell functions. For example, kinesin drives intracellular vesicle transportation and moves chromosomes during mitosis; myosin drives muscle contraction, and the V-ATPases regulate intracellular acidity. Understanding the operating principles of the ATP driven motors is crucial to comprehending intracellular protein transport and cell motility. Structural studies are providing the atomic details of motor proteins, and are revealing more information about the conformational changes associated with the chemical reactions they catalyze. Current experimental technologies permit measuring forces of a single protein motor with piconewton precision and motions with nanometer resolution. These advances, along with advances in mathematical modeling and computer power, make it possible to explore the mechanochemical energy transduction in molecular motors in unprecedented detail. In this project, the investigator and colleagues pursue the mathematical and physical issues that arose in the previous studies of F1 ATPase. These concern the molecular details of how protein motors should be modeled and what mathematical formulations are adequate for modeling them. In particular, the study focuses on the mechanism of force generation at the catalytic site during the ATP hydrolysis cycle. Resolution of this key process will illuminate the operating principles of this ATP driven motor, and likely other protein motors as well. To accommodate more sophisticated modeling, the investigator develops methods for analyzing protein structures and solving complex model equations. The results of these studies set the stage for modeling the mechanochemical energy transduction in myosin and kinesin dimers. The approach is to model the continuous stochastic motion of the motor using stochastic differential equations and couple these to the chemical reactions described by discrete Markov processes. The model equations are constructed from basic physical principles, structural data, and biochemical and biophysical measurements. These equations are then analyzed numerically. The hope is that this will lead to a unified view of ATP driven motors. To facilitate the fast growing field of biotechnology, it is necessary to deduce concise mechanisms for biological systems from experimental results. This requires the application of fundamental principles from the mathematical and physical sciences. The purpose of this interdisciplinary project is to study the mechanisms by which proteins use chemical energy to generate mechanical forces. In turn, these forces drive a wide variety of cellular processes essential to life. In all living cells, the universal chemical energy molecule is ATP (adenosine triphosphate). ATP is produced using the energy extracted from food, and the life of every cell depends on processes that are powered by ATP. For example, muscle contraction is directly driven by the ATP protein motor myosin. Therefore, understanding the operating principles of the ATP protein motors is central to comprehending the life of cells doc3983 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Gonzaga University will acquire a 300 MHz NMR Spectrometer, workstations and printer. This equipment will enable researchers at this undergraduate institution to carry out studies on a) the preparation of novel solid state materials, including nonlinear optical materials and intercalated materials; b) the synthesis and characterization of biomolecular analogs that will be useful in probing the structure of proteins and other biochemical macromolecules; c) synthetic organic chemistry and development of new methodology for the synthesis of polyketide natural products; and d) the synthesis of transition metal porphyrin complexes that may serve as models for metalloenzymes. This equipment will also be used in upper-division chemistry laboratory courses. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometry is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry and biochemistry doc3984 none Professors Frank DeLucia and Eric Herbst of the University of Ohio State University are funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry program to perform experimental and theoretical studies of low energy molecular collisions. The goal is to understand the dynamics, spectroscopy and interactions which govern the behavior of low temperature (10K) collisions of small species such as helium, hydrogen, formaldehyde and carbon monoxide. Under the experimental conditions here, the collision energies are less than the binding energies of the van der Waals complex between the collision partners. (The well depths typically correspond to temperatures of less than a few tens of degrees). Along with providing data on collisions of this type, the PIs will develop new experimental techniques such as state-to-state inelastic rotational energy transfer, collisional cooling methods and new molecular ion production methods. In particular, they will attempt a molecular beam maser scheme which should allow them to overcome some previously encountered thermal averaging problems. Some ab initio calculations will be performed that will aid in the data interpretation. A successful outcome of this work will be highly accurate potentials describing interactions between ultracold molecules that will serve as benchmarks for quantum theory. These fundamental studies relate to the interconnected areas of quantum chemistry and scattering theory, and our understanding of chemical processes and energy transfer in the interstellar medium. The work will also provide spectroscopic data of use for interpreting observations of astrophysical and atmospheric species doc3985 none PI: Christopher Chase-Dunn This project tracks changes in world economic and political systems in the 19th and 20th centuries. Overall, those systems have become more similar and interrelated, changes that have led some observers to speak of a single world system at present. This project develops data on investment and political change to existing data on economic development and international conflict. The second phase of the work uses that dataset to examine how the various kinds of changes are associated with each other and which ones lead to others. Generally, as political uniformity increases, conflict decreases, and at least in some cases, increasing trade and economic development follows that. This project contributes to understanding these changes and how they affect each other doc3986 none Pruitt Land plants are exposed to a variety of environmental fluctuations and challenges that require biological adaptations at the outermost surface or skin of the plant. A better understanding of the biology of this surface has significance not only for plant growth and development but also pertains directly to the effective use and application of man-made agents such as agricultural herbicides. Arabidopsis thaliana, a member of the mustard family, has been chosen as the model organism for these studies. Significant progress toward elucidating biological features of the plant surface have already been made using this plant. The research described here will expand upon this body of work. The biology of the plant surface as it pertains specifically to its biochemical and molecular properties will be studied using a collection of plants with altered surface properties. Using these plants it will be possible to identify additional components involved in the building and maintenance of the plant outer skin . By identifying the constituents that make up this complex outer layer and developing a guide for how this surface is put together, a better understanding of how plants mediate responses and adaptations to their environment will be achieved. Insight into these fundamental processes may possibly have far reaching economic consequences by ultimately diminishing the cost of weed management and the impact of weed-based losses in crop productivity. A reduction in herbicide use would have the added benefit of decreasing the environmental impact of modern crop management practices doc3987 none Ultrasonic sound production has recently been discovered in hummingbirds. Behavioral and acoustic studies suggest that these ultrasonic sounds may function in communication. To test this hypothesis, the researchers propose to determine whether or not hummingbirds are able to perceive ultrasonic sounds (above 20 kHz). If so, further behavioral studies will evaluate the communicative role of ultrasonic signals. Ultrasound perception will be assayed by monitoring hummingbird heart rate responses to presentations of ultrasonic signals. Establishing the use of ultrasound in hummingbirds would demonstrate sound production and auditory sensory abilities previously unknown in any avian species, and would be the first step towards understanding how birds use ultrasound. Basic research of mammalian ultrasound has influenced the development of ultrasound and sonar use across such fields as medicine, engineering, manufacturing, intelligence, and communication. Many features of mammalian ultrasound exceed the sophistication of artificial ultrasound, including the ability to manipulate and respond to changes in signal parameters, use binaural processing with separate transmitter and receivers, and compensate for the Doppler effect due to relative movement between transmitter and receiver. Much of the current applied ultrasound research is directed towards developing effective replications of mammalian ultrasound. Examination of a new animal group, with a distinct ecological niche and evolutionary history, may provide innovative design features not present in mammalian ultrasound systems, which may be adapted for human applications doc3988 none Bowman Most lateral organs of vascular plants are polar in nature, exhibiting asymmetries in both their proximo-distal and abaxial-adaxial (dorso-ventral or top of the leaf versus the bottom of the leaf) axes. For example, in angiosperm leaves these asymmetries are often manifested as a broad distal blade and a narrower proximal petiole in the proximo-distal axis and differences in the morphology and distribution of cell types in the abaxial-adaxial axis. This proposal is focused on the establishment of abaxial-adaxial polarity in lateral organs. Specifically, a molecular genetic approach to elucidate how cell fate is specified in the abaxial regions of lateral organs will be focused on the roles of members of the YABBY gene family. It has been shown that CRC, the founding member of the family, is required for the specification of abaxial cell fate in the carpels, and that other members of the YABBY gene family promote abaxial cell fate in all lateral organs produced from the apical meristem. This conclusion was based on genetic analyses of both loss and gain of function alleles of CRC and gain of function alleles of other members of the YABBY gene family. The aims of the present proposal are three fold. First, four members of the YABBY gene family whose functions appear to contribute to the specification of abaxial cell fate in lateral organs, will be characterized specifically assessing the shared and unique functions of members of the gene family. Second, experiments aimed at elucidating the genetic relationships between members of the YABBY gene family and genes that promote adaxial cell fates and other genes that promote abaxial cell fate will be undertaken. Third, the ability to manipulate polarity in lateral organs should allow an assessment of interactions between lateral organs and the meristems from which they are derived. In particular, the effect of lateral organs consisting entirely of abaxial fates on the fate of the apical meristem will be followed. These experiments should lead to a better understanding of how polarity is established and maintained in developing lateral organs doc3989 none Schreiber The investigator develops mathematical methods for difference and differential equation models to better predict under what conditions biological invasions succeed and the implications of successful invasions on the structure of ecological communities. An emphasis is placed on methods that are robust to structural perturbations of the population equations and that apply to systems with nonlinear dynamics (e.g., periodicity, quasiperiodicity, and chaos). The methods involve the use and development of techniques from smooth ergodic theory. Application of these methods to models of host-parasitoid interactions and tritrophic food webs is pursued. Two aspects of host-parasitoid interactions are examined. First, because parasitoids experience egg limitation when released in systems with highly variable host densities (the typical situation when an exotic insect has reached pest status), a model of host-parasitoid interactions that incorporates this egg-limitation is considered. As successful biological control only occurs after a parasitoid population has established itself, the proposed analysis of the model intends to determine how variability in the dynamics of the host population influences the invasion rate of the parasitoid population. Second, previous work on the coevolution of patch selection strategies in host-parasitoid systems is extended to include two important biological factors, the sex-allocation strategies of parasitoids and plant dynamics. The key issue is whether the manipulation of crop heterogeneity can lead to the coevolution of behavioral traits that simultaneously stabilize the system and increase crop yields. Third, to better understand how ecological communities assemble due to invasions, this proposal undertakes the study of tritrophic systems with more than one species at each trophic level. In these systems, three ecological forces (apparent competition, resource competition and intraguild predation) play an important role and can lead to successional intransitivites (e.g., a sequence of invasions that takes community A to community B, B to C and C back to A). Emphasis is placed on the influence of habitat productivity and the timing of invasions on the community assembly process. In addition, the project includes a program designed to stimulate undergraduate research. Invading non-native species in the United States cause estimated economic losses of 138 billion dollars annually in agriculture, forestry and several other segments of the U.S. economy. Exotic insect species alone are estimated to cause 13 billion dollars in crop losses annually and approximately 42% of the species on the threatened or endangered species lists are at risk primarily because of nonnative species. As biological invasions often involve nonlinear interactions between several species, mathematical models, as simple caricatures, allow one to inexpensively answer questions such as: What characteristics make a species a successful invader? Which ecological communities are most susceptible to large long-term changes following an invasion? How can crop heterogeneity be manipulated to minimize the economic impact of non-native pests? The project proposes to develop analytical methods, and to apply these methods to models that address these and other questions of current interest to community ecology, restoration ecology, biological control, and evolutionary biology doc3990 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the East Carolina University will acquire a 300 MHz NMR and upgrade a 200 MHz NMR spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) development of new reagents for the kinetic resolution of chiral alcohols; b) the study of a one-step stereoselective approach to polycyclic ring systems possessing multiple stereogenic centers as a model for biomimetic-like cyclization processes; c) studies of bleomycin-DNA binding; d) synthesis and coordination chemistry of new classes of macrocyclic ligands;and e) investigations of the rotational dynamics of fullerenes. The upgraded instrument will also be used in a number of advanced laboratory courses. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometry is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry, catalysis, sensor development and medicine doc3991 none The focus of this research is the synthesis of a number of substructures or fragment of an expanded version of cubic graphite. These fragments, with formulae ranging from C168H116 to C672H432, contain large cavities and channels. The fundamental repeating units are hexaphenylbenzene molecules, linked together at the para positions of the phenyl groups. Palladium catalyzed coupling reactions (Suzuki couplings) will be carried out using simple derivatives of hexaphenylbenzene. Approximately ten halogenated or organoboron-containing derivatives of hexaphenylbenzene will be prepared as building blocks, and from this library, a variety of substructures will be made. The cyclodehydrogenation of these substructures will be attempted, perhaps to yield yield homologs of cubic graphite where benzene rings have been replaced by hexabenzocoronenes. As many of the target molecules as possible will be characterized by single crystal X-ray diffraction methods. With this renewal award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Robert A. Pascal of the Department of Chemistry at Princeton University. Professor Pascal will focus his work on the synthesis of large polyphenyl aromatic compounds. The compounds are based on the structure of so-called cubic graphite, a hypothetical allotrope of carbon composed of benzene rings interconnected in three dimensions in a cubic space group. The compounds could have host-guest applications or use in separation technology. In terms of broader impacts, the Pascal group has proven to be an excellent venue for the training of both undergraduate and graduate students doc3992 none Bioactive gibberellins (GAs) are a class of plant growth hormones, which control diverse processes including seed germination, stem elongation, flower and fruit development. Although the physiological effects of GAs on plant growth are well documented, much less is known about how this hormone signal leads to biochemical and morphological changes. Recent studies using biochemical and genetic approaches have identified three negative regulators (RGA, GAI and SPY) in GA signal transduction pathway in higher plant. The genes encoding these proteins are highly conserved in different species. Both RGA and GAI are likely to function as transcription regulators, whereas SPY is probably an enzyme that modifies other proteins by attaching sugar residues. The current working hypothesis is that SPY may modify and activate RGA and GAI to repress GA signal transduction in the absence of (or in low) GA signal. The basal state of GA signaling is therefore to be repressive, and the GA signal de-represses the pathway by inhibiting the negative regulators. This proposal focuses on elucidating the biochemical function of RGA in regulating GA signal transduction in the model plant Arabidopsis. The specific aims are to examine whether the activity of RGA is modulated by protein modification and or by alteration of its subcellular localization, and to identify cellular protein(s) that interact with RGA. These studies will shed lights on the molecular mechanisms by which GA controls plant growth and development. This knowledge will also facilitate more effective strategies to improve agricultural crops in the future doc3993 none Organisms with the most eubacterial-like mitochondrial genomes should have the most ancestral mechanisms for mitochondrial and eukaryotic protein-folding machinery. Sequences of the group I (cpn60, mitochondrial, descended from eubacteria) and group II (CCT, cytosolic, descended from archaea) chaperonin genes, compared with those from prokaryotic outgroups and from other protists including amitochondriate exemplars, should reveal whether this is so. In addition, the organisms with the most eubacterial-like mitochondrial genomes should have an ancestral intron distribution. Most eukaruyotes that are considered to be ancestral lack spliceosomal introns, but evidence is accumulating that these introns were lost. Consistent with this interpretation, preliminary data show the presence of numerous spliceosomal introns in jakobids. Cpn 60 and CCT subunits in jakobid flagellates, of which there are currently eight mitochondriate species in culture, will be sequenced. Initial sequence surveys using PCR techniques will be followed by more complete sequencing based upon genomic liberties. The evolutionary histories of these sequences will be inferred through phylogenetic analyses that correct for the deleterious effects of sparse taxon sampling and such artifacts as long-branch attraction. The abundance and structure of included introns will be assessed in the light of current hypotheses about the evolution of introns in eukaryotic cells. The jakobid flagellates are potentially among the ancestral of living eukaryotes. Jakobid mitochondrial genomes represent the most eubacterial-like mitochondrial genomes discovered, in terms of gene content, gene organization, and putative gene function. Moreover, nearly all groups of amitochondrial protist have been shown to retain genes of mitochondrial origin, suggesting that they are derived from mitochondriate ancestors. The jakobid flagellates may represent an informative model system for the study of early eukaryote evolution doc3994 none This project will investigate the relationship between social behavior and genetic relatedness in the Sage grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus). This species serves as a model system for the analysis of mate choice in animals because breeding takes place at easily observed leks , arenas of males visited by females for mating. The project has the following specific objectives: (i) determining relationships between male breeding behavior and reproductive success, (ii) identifying factors affecting mating patterns of females, and (iii) surveying patterns of genetic relatedness within and across social groups. This research combines field studies of the behavior of marked individual birds with measurement of paternity of offspring and relatedness among adults by genetic analysis of blood samples in the laboratory. Past studies of the sage grouse lek system have been influential in shaping current understanding of mate choice in animals, a topic of central importance in evolutionary biology. However, earlier studies were based entirely on observable mating behavior, which may represent as little as half of all breeding activity in this species. The proposed genetic analyses should reveal mating patterns regardless of their observability and therefore have the potential to substantially revise our understanding of mate choice in this model system doc3995 none Homeostasis in multicellular organisms is achieved through a complex process involving the integration of environmental signals for survival, proliferation, and differentiation. The genetic makeup of a cell, as well as the nature of other cells and factors in its environment, dictates how it will respond at any given moment in time. The complex regulation of these processes is perhaps most apparent from the observation that molecules functioning in pathways leading to one type of response may also play a role in generating completely different, and often opposing, outcomes. Moreover, pathways that become activated through distinct mechanisms may functionally merge to produce a common outcome. These fundamental issues of regulation and integration are at the core of this project. Specifically, the project focuses on a newly identified function of the SRC-CAS protein complex as a modulator of cell proliferation and survival. The research plan that is described in this project is designed to test the hypothesis that the activity of this complex has unique signaling functions that arise from a number of potential factors, including 1) altered temporal and or potency of enzymatic activity; 2) substrate selection; 3) molecular targeting to distinct subcellular compartments; and 4) protein stabilization. Ultimately, the regulated activation of these functions within the proper setting of time (for example, within a particular phase of the cell cycle) and space (for example, within a specific cellular microenvironment) is proposed to play a critical role in pathways leading to proliferation and cell survival . In order to address this hypothesis, C3H10T-one half murine fibroblast cell lines will be generated that over-express various c-SRC and CAS molecules. Preliminary studies in this system have shown that constitutive association of wild-type CAS and c-SRC may circumvent the need for normal positive regulators of growth and survival. Based on these initial studies, it is clear that this model will serve as an excellent tool with which to probe the requisite molecular features of SRC-CAS complex, the specific functions of the complex that contribute to its activity, and its overall impact on cellular growth and survival. Once the mechanism and biological consequences of SRC-CAS activities are better understood, this knowledge will then be applied to more physiological conditions with the goal of understanding how the SRC-CAS complex may signal in space and time doc3996 none The central goals of this project are to develop and apply new statistical techniques to examine behavioral correlations across different contexts, and their effects on individual performance (survival, feeding rate, mating success) across contexts. For example, for aggression level, although all individuals alter their aggression levels depending on the situation, do the same individuals tend to be more aggressive than others across a range of situations? If so, how do these consistent aggression levels influence performance in the different situations? Experiments will examine behavioral and performance correlations: 1) across social and ecological contexts (different densities, sex ratios and levels of predation risk); 2) over a lifetime (correlating juvenile versus adult behavior); and 3) across genders (between male and female siblings). Experiments will focus on an insect, Aquarius remigis, that is ideal for generating the large amounts of data required to illustrate the new methods. Although it is clear that humans and some well-studied mammals exhibit correlated behaviors across contexts (i.e., personality types or behavioral syndromes), it is only now becoming clear that parallel behavioral correlations occur in other animals. The techniques and insights generated by this project should advance our understanding of the ecological and evolutionary significance of behavioral correlations doc3997 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at South Dakota State University will upgrade its mass spectrometer control and data systems. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) environmental chemical studies of organic contaminants; b) organic geochemistry; c) organic synthesis of dendrimeric materials and novel macrocyclic ligands; d) structural elucidation of natural products; and e) the total synthesis and asymmetric synthesis of natural products. Mass spectrometry (MS) is a technique used to probe intimate structural details and to obtain the molecular compositions of a vast array of organic, bioorganic, and organometallic molecules. The results from these studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry, environmental chemistry and geochemistry doc3998 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Tulane University will upgrade a 400 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to characterize a) new main group compounds, organometallic compounds, and natural products; b) novel organic precursors for organic materials development; c) bioactive organic reactants; and d) multimetallic transition metal complexes. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometry is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry and biochemistry doc3999 none JUNG Only a fraction of the cells in brain tissue are neurons. The majority of brain cells are glial cells. The star-shaped astrocytes, a subgroup of glial cells form an integrated network known as a syncytium. Astrocyte syncytia support waves of calcium release that signal information between astrocytes and neurons. The goal of this project is to analyze these signaling patterns in cultures of brain tissue to decipher their messages and to understand how they differ in healthy and epileptic brain cells. The project will be a collaborative effort between biologists at Viatech-Imaging Cognetix and physicists at Ohio University. Viatech-Imaging Cognetix will provide fluorescent video microscopy to observe the calcium waves, and will provide the expertise necessary to grow, modify, and understand the physiology of the cultured brain cells. Ohio University physicists will analyze and model the dynamical properties of the calcium waves to provide a basis for understanding the coherent signaling and communication between regions of cells. The central analytical tool to be used and further developed in this study is called Hyper-cluster analysis. This technique reveals a unique statistical fingerprint of the intercellular messaging. Statistical fingerprints will be obtained in a variety of healthy and epileptic tissues obtained from Children s Medical Hospital in Cincinnati. Once these fingerprints can be deciphered, a wide range of exciting biomedical applications becomes possible. These include personalized quantitative testing of the effectiveness of anti-epileptic compounds and screening of the effectiveness of new drugs in a culture dish without the debilitating side effects that often accompany clinical testing doc4000 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will acquire a MALDI-TOF Mass Spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) polymer synthesis using novel polymerization processes; b) de novo design of synthetic water-soluble and membrane-soluble proteins; c) preparation of polymers using photo- and electron beam initiated polymerizations; d) studies on the origin of life and formation of RNA from prebiotic molecules; and e) protein surface studies. Mass spectrometry (MS) is a technique used to probe intimate structural details and to obtain the molecular compositions of a vast array of organic, bioorganic, and organometallic molecules. The results from these studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry, polymer processing and biology doc4001 none The overall goal of this project is to identify and characterize current-generating and current-dissipating transport systems in the natural environment of an intact principal cell in the Malpighian tubule of the yellow fever mosquito (Aedes aegypti). In the basolateral cell membrane, the aim is to characterize K channels, and putative Na and Ca channels. In the apical membrane, the focus is on current generation by the V-type H+-ATPase, testing the effects of voltage and the two substrates of the pump, H and ATP. Investigating how current is dissipated across this membrane may lead to the discovery of a new family of antiporters. Outside principal cells, the grant proposes to characterize the nature of the shunt taken by Cl during transepithelial secretion. One hypothesis to be tested is that the stellate cell serves as the shunt pathway. The alternate hypothesis considers insect septate junctions to offer a paracellular pathway for Cl. They hypothetical model proposes that septate junctions house a Cl channel-like structure that is regulated by the diuretic peptide leucokinin. Experiments described in this proposal will demonstrate how proton pump, channels, symporters and antiporters are organized in principal cells in insect Malpighian tubules to secrete Na and K into the tubule lumen via a transcellular path. Studies of the shunt pathway will show how Cl is secreted, presumably via a paracellular path. Together, these studies will reveal the combinatorial arrangement of the molecular building blocks of epithelial transport: pumps, channels, carriers, and junctions and how they interact to secrete NaCl, KCl, and water into the tubule lumen. Results from the proposed studies of an ATP-driven pump in an intact cell will be of wide interest to biologists doc4002 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Brown University will acquire an Electrospray LC-Quadrupole Ion Trap Mass Spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) the biosynthesis of polyketide and other natural products; b) screening of the activity of a combinatorial library of peptide-based protease inhibitors; c) analysis of complex glycolipids involved in molecular recognition events on cell surfaces; d) investigations of enolate structures; e) analysis of recombinantly expressed proteins used to study biochemical recognition processes; and f) investigations of the structure of adducts that play a role in carcinogenicity. Mass spectrometry (MS) is a technique used to probe intimate structural details and to obtain the molecular compositions of a vast array of organic, bioorganic, and organometallic molecules. The results from these studies will have an impact in a number of areas including medicinal chemistry and biology doc4003 none Insulin-like growth factors (IGFs) are mitogenic and anabolic peptide hormones that play an important role in growth and differentiation of vertebrates. Results of numerous studies in mammals suggest that while IGF-II is produced in the liver and several other pre-natal and neonatal tissues, IGF-I is produced in the post-natal livers under the modulation of growth hormone (GH). The long-term goals of this project are to investigate the function and regulation of IGF-I, IGF-II and IGF type I receptor genes on development and growth, using rainbow trout as model experimental animals. In the previous funding cycle, this investigator has shown that: (a) a cis-acting element, C EBP binding site, is present in the promoter region of the IGF II gene, and C EBPs are inducible by GH, and (b) mRNA of IGF-I, IGF-II, IGF type I are present in eggs as maternal mRNA, and are differentially expressed during embryonic development. These results suggest that GH, IGF-I, IGF-II and IGF type I receptor play important roles during trout embryonic development and growth. To delineate the functions of these factors, the PI will address the following questions in the next three years: (1) How do the CCAAT cis-acting elements and their hepatic nuclear binding proteins (C EBPs) regulate the expression of IGF-II by GH? (2) In addition to GH, are there any other hormonal factors such as prolactin, insulin, estrogen, testosterone and thyroid hormone that may regulate the expression of fish IGF-II gene via modulation by the CCAAT cis-acting elements and their hepatic nuclear binding proteins (C EBPs)? (3) Are both IGFRa and IGFRb biologically active doc4004 none Strogatz In several branches of science and technology, one like would like to imitate nature s success at designing networks that can synchronize themselves. For instance, a semiconductor laser array generates greater collective power when it synchronizes, but such phase-locked operation is notoriously difficult to achieve in practice. The investigator studies the nonlinear dynamics of oscillator networks, using mathematical methods of dynamical systems theory, bifurcation theory, and statistical mechanics, along with numerical simulation. Three projects explore how synchrony emerges in a group of dissimilar oscillators, motivated by both biological and laser applications. Areas of investigation include the stability of partial locking in the Kuramoto model of coupled biological oscillators; the dynamics of biological oscillators coupled by phase-response curves; and phase-locking in slightly detuned laser arrays. Two other projects address the relation between the connectivity of a network and its ability to synchronize. Small-world networks, which combine small diameter with large clustering, are investigated to test whether they synchronize more readily than lattices. The goal of this project is to develop a deeper understanding of complex systems that are made of many oscillating parts and that manage to synchronize themselves. For instance, the thousands of pacemaker cells in the heart always fire in unison, even though they are all slightly different from one another. Unfortunately, a similar kind of coordination sometimes happens in the brain, where it leads to epilepsy. In both cases, nature has provided us with examples in which millions of cells begin to act in unison. By understanding better how this synchrony is achieved, it should be possible to design arrays of technologically important devices that can synchronize themselves. Such self-synchronizing systems would have important technological applications in many areas of national interest, including environment (atmospheric pollution monitoring uses sensitive detectors based on arrays of oscillators), civil infrastructure (the proper functioning of the national power grid depends on self-synchronization of the generator network), and nanotechnology (where arrays of millions of microscopic mechanical oscillators are being used in new devices doc4005 none COLD SPRING HARBOR LABORATORY COURSE ON COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE: VISION JUNE AND JUNE SUMMARY The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory will give a short 2 week course on Computational Neuroscience: Vision from June 15 - June 28, , and during the summer of . Computational approaches to neuroscience have produced important advances in our understanding of how nerve cells are connected to and communicate with each other. The basis of the course is to study how computer models can best simulate aspects of the nervous system. The course emphasizes that an understanding of the computational problems in conjunction with perceptual and biological data can help guide research in neuroscience. Through a combination of lectures and hands-on computer laboratory exercises, this course will cover different aspects of the function of the visual system. These include problems such as: the neural basis of color vision, pattern vision, and visual motion perception; oculomotor function; and visual attention decision-making. This course has now been taught 6 times over the past 12 years as part of an integrated set of courses at Cold Spring Harbor in a number of areas of neurobiology. This year there will be a new emphasis on theories and computational models of the neural basis of visually guided behavior and decision-making, a burgeoning area of neuroscience. Lectures in the course will be given by the organizers and by invited lecturers who are working on current research frontiers and are leaders in their field. The course is intended for graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and faculty. The course, like other Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory courses, is aimed at teaching novel technologies and approaches. These are state-of-the-art techniques that are often not yet taught in standard courses offered by universities and medical schools. The short duration of the courses also makes it possible for busy scientists to attend. In the case of the Computational Neuroscience course, computer modeling of the nervous system is an important approach to analyzing how nerve cells communicate. The nervous system is very complex with very large numbers of cells. Computer programs that make models of how nerve cells work can make predictions and guide analysis of nerve cell function. Conversely, results from biological experiments can be incorporated into computer models. Because the visual system is one of the best-studied parts of the nervous system, there is a maximal interplay between computational and biological approaches. Thus the Computational Neuroscience course uses the visual system as a model doc4006 none The main thrust of this project is an in-depth experimental and theoretical study of the use of optical pumping, as an alternative to direct electron impact ionization, for the production of low translational temperature (of the order of 500 K), highly non-equilibrium, high-pressure plasmas. The approach is based on the combination of resonant absorption of continuous wave infrared radiation from a CO laser with anharmonic collisional vibration-vibration energy transfer. The work will investigate the following questions: 1) What is the principal mechanism and the rate of free electron loss in these systems? 2) Can the electron density be increased efficiently while maintaining unconditional stability? and 3) How quantitatively can the coupling between free electrons and the vibrational mode be predicted doc4007 none Regulation of the assembly of actin fibers is required for cell movement, changing and maintaining cell shape, and even for cell division. Actin binding proteins are essential in regulating these processes. In Drosophila melanogaster it is possible to use mutations to study the actin fiber bundles involved in bristle development during the pupal stage. These fiber bundles are morphologically very similar to actin fiber bundles present in vertebrate intestinal brush border and in stereocilia in the ear and kidney, but much larger. In the forked and singed mutants, actin fiber bundles are dramatically reduced in developing bristles. As a result, in the adult fly, the bristles are twisted and branched. The singed protein is homologous to sea urchin fascin and bundles actin fibers in vitro, indicating that it may play a role similar to fimbrin in intestinal brush boarder microvilli. The forked gene encodes six proteins with overlapping coding regions which differ primarily in their amino-terminal ends. The forked proteins are also actin binding proteins which are homologous to the vertebrate actin binding proteins, the espins. These were originally identified in rat testis ectoplasmic specializations but have now been also found in kidney and intestinal microvilli and in ear stereocilia. The predicted amino acid sequences of the espins are more similar to forked proteins than to other known actin binding proteins, and an antibody to espin specifically recognizes forked proteins on Western blots. This suggests that forked belongs to a new family of actin binding proteins which are involved in the assembly of specific types of tightly packed parallel actin bundles. The differences between these proteins may contribute to the differences in location and architecture of the bundles, while the similarities should reflect their common function(s). Dr. Petersen will continue to study the role(s) of forked proteins in actin fiber bundle formation in Drosophila bristles and in vertebrate cell lines. Her laboratory has shown that forked proteins are synthesized and concentrated in bristle tips just prior to the formation of actin bundles, and that they can induce actin bundle formation in transiently transfected vertebrate cells. This suggests that they play a critical role in initiating bundle formation. It is planned to use the transfection of vertebrate cells to further define the essential parts of the protein required for bundle formation, and to use affinity chromatography and the yeast two-hybrid system to identify the regions of forked which interact with other proteins. P-factor transformation with forked genes mutated in these regions will then be used to clarify the roles of each domain in actin bundle formation in bristles doc4008 none Physiological demands imposed by the environment are, of course, fundamentally different for marine fish and birds. The cellular and molecular processes that control inorganic phosphate and sulfate, however, appear similar, though they may be used differently. It is by comparing and contrasting these systems that we gain insight into the general principles of ion regulation. The long-term goals of this project are to better understand the comparative physiology of the mechanisms and regulation of renal transport of inorganic phosphate and sulfate. These anions can alter calcium balance, acid-base balance, urinary buffer capacity, extracellular matrix of bone and cartilage, etc., and their levels are tightly controlled in all vertebrates. Dietary in-take, intestinal absorption and renal excretion are the sole determinants, aside from growth, of body phosphate and sulfate balance. Excretion of these anions is a result of renal filtration, reabsorption and secretion. The kidney is the most important site of regulation of excretion of these anions in the body. We here propose likely mecha-nisms regulating phosphate and sulfate transport in members of two verte-brate classes (winter flounder and chicken). Methods are used which permit characterization of anion transport at several levels of organization (proximal tubule primary cultures, isolated proximal tubule brush-border and basolateral membrane vesicles, and renal clearance). We also have a reasonable understanding of the basic intracellular signaling systems that activate and inactivate membrane mechanisms for reabsorption or secretion of these anions in both species. Regulation of transport by proximal tubule involves the interaction of several hormones, acid-base status, and phosphate and sulfate availability. We will examine a variety of hormones that may control kidney handling of phosphate. In addition, our recent studies indicate an important role for carbonic anhydrase in renal sulfate secretion by marine fishes. The enzyme s role probably stems from the membrane anion exchangers responsible for sulfate secretion. Because this transepithelial transport process is profoundly influenced by steroid hormones in both flounder and chicken, we have here proposed to examine a possible regulatory effect of steroids (including vitamin D3) on carbonic anhydrase activity and renal sulfate transport in both fish and chicks doc4009 none This project is directed at understanding the function and control of the heart and vascular systems of vertebrates during the early stages of development. The heart is one of the first organs to form and assume its adult function, yet it does so long before the developing nervous system can reach it. This project will help define the ability of the nascent cardiovascular system to regulate itself without the assistance of the nervous system. It is suspected that the blood vessels themselves may provide the key to regulation during these very early stages of development. Research in this area is hampered by the minute size of vertebrate embryos and larvae, and only recently has it been technologically possible to determine blood pressure and blood flow in embryos and larvae. The question of blood pressure regulation is especially interesting in light of the knowledge that the cardiovascular system is responsive to the pressures and flows it generates and is capable of remodeling in response to increased or decreased pressure. Thus, maintaining appropriate pressures and flows during development may be critical for appropriate cardiovascular morphology to appear. Abnormal pressures or flows may result in pathological abnormalities, but may also account for the ability of heart shape and vascular geometry to evolve in such a fashion as to support the widely varying lifestyles of the vertebrates. The research proposed herein, will also involve training a large number of students from high school to graduate level at New Mexico State University. This is especially valuable in this locale given our high density of under-represented minority students. This research will serve as a training ground to provide hand on research experience to these students doc4010 none Proposal PI: Teresa M. Dunn This research is designed to elucidate the composition and organization of the microsomal fatty acid elongating systems. The properties and functions of cellular membranes are largely determined by the composition of their lipids, and each class of lipids has a distinct fatty acid composition. Most cellular fatty acids have 16 or 18 carbons and are synthesized by the cytosolic fatty acid synthase enzyme. However, the very long chain fatty acids (VLCFA s), with chain lengths greater than 18 carbons, are synthesized by membrane-associated enzyme systems. The function of the VLCFA s is essential to the cellular processes, since alterations in their metabolism can have devastating consequences to the cell. Three Saccharomyces cerevisiae mutants with defects in VLCFA synthesis have recently been isolated in a screen for sphingolipid synthesis mutants. The wild-type genes required for fatty acid elongation have been cloned. These cloned genes and their mutants with defective VLCFA synthesis provide the tools that are needed to resolve several important questions about the fatty acid elongating enzymes. The purpose of this study is to identify the other elongating enzymes by using a combination of genetic screens and affinity-copurification strategies. The functions of the proteins identified in these screens will be determined. Since these proteins have been conserved through evolution, the identification of the proteins in yeast will result in their identification in plants and animals as well. The cells of all living organisms such as yeast, plants, and animals, are enclosed by a thin skin of lipid and protein known as the cell membrane. The cell membrane has special openings or passages through which biochemicals enter or leave the cell. Different tissues can have different types of lipids in different proportions, and the properties and functions of the cell membranes are determined in part by the composition of their lipids. Each class of lipids has a distinct fatty acid composition. Most cellular fatty acids are made by a soluble enzyme system and contain 16 or 18 carbons. However, a special type of fatty acids (VLCFA s) has chain lengths greater than 18 carbons and is synthesized by a different enzyme system, one that is membrane-associated. A typical fatty acid of 16 or 18 carbons is lengthened by two carbon units four times in succession to give a 24 or 26 carbon length fatty acid. These VLCFA s are essential to certain cell processes since if their amounts are altered in a cell the cell will die or stop growing. These VLCFA s are usually found in a class of lipids called sphingolipids. The yeast S. cerevisiae is a good model system for studying VLCFA synthesis and function. Three yeast mutants with defects in VLCFA synthesis have recently been found. This has enabled the isolation of the corresponding genes and the proteins they encode. Normal and mutant genes can then be inserted into yeast to find out how the protein product of the gene works in making the VLCFA s. Since these proteins have been conserved through evolution, the identification of the enzymes in yeast will result in their identification in plants and animals as well. Then the function of VLCFA s and sphingolipids in higher organism can be investigated doc4011 none This project, sponsored by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, continues research on utilization of sol-gel derived xerogels for chemical analysis. The research, conducted by Dr. Frank V. Bright and his students at SUNY-Buffalo, focuses on the behavior and performance of enzymes, antibodies, and signaling proteins that are sequestered in xerogels. These protein doped xerogels are used as platforms for developing discrete and distributed biosensors. The experimental aproach first develops a fundamental understanding of how the analytical performance of xerogel entrapped proteins is influenced by the the choice of xerogel host matrix chemistry, co-dopants, and preparation protocol. The next step determines precisely how the xerogel host matrix chemistry, co-dopants, and preparation protocol affect 1) the biorecognition element s dynamics and 2) the environment around the sites within the biorecognition element that are responsible for producing fluorescence in the presence of the target analyte. Finally, the project uses results from the steps above to produce biosensors and distributed biosensor arrays that are more robust, stable, and reliable than those that are currently available. Use of the sensors developed by this project could result in faster, more reliable, and less costly clinical analyses doc4012 none The broad goal of my experiments is to determine how different areas of mammalian cerebral cortex become specialized to process different types of sensory information, and in particular, how functionally specialized brain circuitry is created during development from non specialized brain tissue. The hypothesis I am testing is that the sensory inputs received during development play a critical role in organizing specific circuits in cortex. To this end, I use three groups of animals; one group of normal animals, one which has had sensory input to auditory cortex (AI) removed (deafened), and another which has had visual input unilaterally diverted into the auditory pathway early in development ( rewired ). We have demonstrated that visual inputs can be processed by auditory cortex if they are present from early in development, and our goal is to determine what changes in auditory cortical circuitry are responsible for the gain of function. The implications of this work are that it provides a uniquely valuable developmental model for mammalian brain evolution. During evolution, neocortex becomes increasingly subdivided, and input processing is increasingly specialized. With our model, we can create a new cortical area or a new input to an existing cortical area on an experimentally-manageable time scale. In addition, the work addresses the basic mechanisms by which an animal s brain becomes adapted to its environment on both an evolutionary and a developmental time scale doc4013 none Richards The seventh FASEB Summer Research Conference on Mechanisms in Plant Development will be held August 12-17, at the Vermont Academy in Saxtons River, Vermont. This conference will bring together biologists studying plant developmental mechanisms using genetic, genomic and cell biological approaches. In addition, Dr. Richards plan to highlight two emerging areas: the evolution of plant developmental programs, and the impact of epigenetic regulation on plant developmental programs, and the impact of epigenetic regulation on plant development and morphology. Beyond simply extending a successful conference series, Dr. Richards believe that this FASEB Summer Research Conference can serve two important roles. First, the meeting will provide an intimate venue conducive to creative interaction among researchers with different expertise and perspectives. This is particularly important as the maturation of molecular genetic research and the availability of genomic resources usher in a movement towards more integrated approaches incorporating biochemical and cell biological data. Second, the FASEB conference will provide opportunity to attend a smaller meeting, where interaction between younger and more established researchers can occur. Opportunities to attend such conferences are becoming increasingly rare as the field of plant doc4014 none When humans reach to grasp an object, many different combinations of muscles and joints can be used than are strictly necessary to achieve accurate hand motion and final hand placement. Thus, when reaching to the same location, two general strategies are possible: a) choose one set of joint motions and use the same set every time, or b) use a range of different joint motions, each of which takes the hand to the same location. Using multiple, equivalent (i.e., in terms of the goal), joint combinations confers advantages under special circumstances, such as when a movement is unexpectedly disturbed. Scientists do not know the extent to which the nervous system uses this strategy during routine tasks. This project will address this question by studying reaching and pointing to target locations throughout the workspace. Motion of the arm and hand will be measured using high-speed video analysis. The experiments are designed to understand how factors such as the subject s level of skill, the presence or absence of vision, and the direction and curvature of the reach, influence which strategy is used. Formal modeling of the nervous system s control of reaching will be used to help explain the experimental results and generate predictions for future work doc4015 none The complete genome of the nematode model organism, C. elegans, has recently been published. This represents the first elucidation of the complete genome of a multicellular organism. The availability of this information is expected to open up vast new opportunities for discovery in biology. This project focuses on an essential cellular function, endocytosis, in C. elegans. This is an area of cell biology that in the past has been studied largely in yeast, in vertebrate cells in culture, and in a limited number of other model systems. The study of endocytosis (and other cellular functions) in C. elegans will ultimately allow the exploitation of not only the genomic information but also the powerful genetic tools available for studies this organism and enable important new discoveries about fundamental cellular processes and functions. Endocytosis is the process by which cells internalize specific materials (proteins, usually) from their environment. In receptor-mediated endocytosis, an extracellular ligand first binds to its receptor on the cell surface; then, that portion of the cell membrane invaginates and ultimately pinches off to form an intracellular membrane-enclosed compartment containing the bound ligand. A new DNAJ domain-containing gene, rme-8, was discovered by using a novel genetic screen for C. elegans mutants defective in receptor-mediated endocytosis (the rme mutants ). Rme-8 is an essential gene required for both receptor-mediated and fluid-phase endocytosis. Highly conserved homologues of RME-8 are found in plants, flies and humans, but none is present in the S. cerevisiae genome. The goal of this proposal is to study the cellular and molecular functions of rme-8 in C. elegans. In an attempt to identify the step where RME-8 functions in endocytosis, RME-8 will be localized to an endocytic compartment by cytological co-localization with known endocytic compartment-specific markers. These subcellular localization and co-localization experiments will provide the first indication of RME-8 s role in a particular step of endocytosis. The role of RME-8 in endocytosis will be also tested by examining mis-localization of known endocytic markers in rme-8 mutant strains. In order to analyze the molecular function of RME-8, RME-8 s domain structures will be studied by creating deletions of RME-8 and assaying their in vivo functions and localization. As RME-8 contains at least one known protein-protein interaction domain, namely a DnaJ domain, proteins that interact with RME-8 will be identified using the yeast two-hybrid system. These experiments will establish the important functional domains in RME-8 and identify the proteins that interact with these domains. Rme-8 is an essential gene whose function is required in multiple cells in C. elegans. In particular, rme-8 mutants are defective in molting and in fluid-phase endocytosis. The role of RME-8 in molting as well in fluid-phase endocytosis will be studied by examining RME-8 s subcellular localization in those cells associated with these mutant phenotypes, namely hypodermal cells and coelomocytes. These experiments will define the step of endocytosis in which RME-8 functions, establish RME-8 s role in that specific step, and define RME-8 s possible involvement in a protein complex. RME-8 represents a previously unidentified component in endocytosis. Therefore, the discovery of RME-8 s role in endocytosis might identify one of the many heretofore missing links in the endocytosis pathway. Understanding RME-8 in C. elegans will provide an important basis for understanding the functions of its close homologues in other organisms doc4016 none P. I.: Turchin, Peter IRCEB: Spatial dynamics are crucial for understanding population, community, and ecosystem processes. Two general problems in landscape ecology do not yet have adequate solutions: (1) translating observations taken at small spatial (and temporal) scales into expected patterns at landscape and geographic scales, and (2) understanding the influences of spatial heterogeneity on individual movements demography, and on population distribution and dynamics. We propose to address these issues using a multi-faceted research program that integrates empirical data collection with spatial modeling and GIS analyses. The proposed experimental organism is the American elk. This species is of high conservation natural management interest, and several elk reintroduction efforts in North America are currently in progress. However, little is known about how fast reintroduced elk populations may spread. Thus, by successfully completing the research goals outlined in this proposal we will not only be able to address questions of central importance to theoretical ecology, but will also obtain insights for improved management decisions. Our specific approach to the two issues above will be based on developing a series of spatial models addressing a range of scales, from a microscale (tens of m and hours) through a mesoscale (km and weeks) to a macroscale (tens to hundreds of km and years). At each scale we will parameterize the model using small-scale data on individual movements and demography, and test the model by predicting independent data on spatial redistribution of populations at broader (landscape and, ultimately, geographic) spatial scales. Data on individual movements will be obtained by following elk equipped with radiocollars at four different sites, varying in landscape heterogeneity and elk population density (two sites where elk have been long established, and two where they were recently introduced). Landscape heterogeneity will be quantified using a combination of remote sensing methods and detailed on-the-ground analyses of such variables as the distribution of winter and summer forage biomass and quality, land and habitat classification, and landscape structure. We will determine how accurately microscale model can predict mesoscale data, and mesoscale model can predict macroscale data. Furthermore, the macroscale predictions of the detailed, mechanism-based mesoscale model will be contrasted to the predictions from a more phenomenological (but much less data-demanding) macroscale model. This comparison will allow us to determine whether it is essential to understand processes governing movement at multiple spatial scales in order to make meaningful predictions of population redistribution at larger (geographic) scales doc4017 none Sackerson The Drosophila body plan is organized into reiterating units called segments. Segmentation occurs early in embryogenesis, and is critically dependent on the proper expression of the transcription factor, even-skipped (eve). In the complete absence of eve function, all segmentation is lost. The segmentation function of eve is carried out through its expression in seven circumferential bands ( stripes ) at the blastoderm stage; the seven stripes mark the positions of the future odd-numbered parasegments, and through this positioning, directly and indirectly determine the positions of the fourteen segments. even-skipped stripe 1 (eve stripe 1) is of special interest, since it occurs between the segments which will become head and those which will become trunk; eve stripe 1 also is required for the formation of the cephalic furrow, a transient invagination at the boundary between the head and trunk that occurs early in gastrulation. The position of eve stripe 1 is presumed to be set by an interaction between the patterning systems of the head and trunk. The objective of this work is to elucidate the mechanisms by which eve stripe 1 is positioned. It is expected that novel insights into gene regulatory mechanisms in the Drosophila embryo will be obtained, since models for the positioning of the other eve stripes in the trunk cannot be extrapolated in a simple way to explain the formation of eve stripe 1. The availability of transgenic flies which express the reporting gene, lacZ, at the position of eve stripe 1, along with clones and the DNA sequence of the eve stripe 1 enhancer, open up the opportunity for a detailed examination of eve stripe 1 expression. This question will be approached by examining the effects of mutations in early developmental regulators on the expression of eve stripe 1 from the transgenes and from the endogenous locus. The maternal coordinate gene bicoid, and the traditional zygotic gap genes will be examined. In addition, the head-specific gap genes and certain pair-rule and homeotic genes will also be examined for effects. From this data a model will be proposed which will then be tested by the production of further transgenic lines. In this second phase of the work, the mutation of putative cis-regulatory sequences and the misexpression of putative trans-regulatory proteins will both be used to further elucidate the regulatory network involved in eve stripe 1 regulation. It is expected that an understanding of eve stripe 1 regulation will contribute to our understanding of head development in Drosophila, pattern formation, and the spatial control of gene expression doc4018 none Laughon The project will investigate the mechanism by which the Drosophila Smad proteins Mad and Medea override transcriptional repression by brinker (brk). In response to Dpp signaling, Mad Med repress brk expression, but also directly activate target genes such as vestigial, apparently in parallel to repression by Brk protein. Band shift and Dnase I footprinting experiments will be used to identify Brk binding sites within Dpp response elements and to determine how these are positioned with respect to previously characterized Mad Med binding sites. Brk binding affinity and reporter analyses will be used to compare short- and long-range Dpp response elements and to determine how Brk contributes to the varying response thresholds of Dpp targets. Gel shift experiments with extracts from transfected S2 cells will be used to determine whether Mad Med complexes compete with Brk for binding to DNA. Mad-Brk interaction will be investigated by means of co-immunoprecipitation and 2-hybrid analysis to determine whether direct contact with Brk protein is required for activated Smad complexes to override repression by Brk. Similar experiments will be performed to investigate the role of Schnurri as a Mad cofactor in the repression of brk, wingless and other genes that respond negatively to Dpp signaling doc4019 none Humans have greatly benefited from the production and use of chlorine and bromine-containing organic compounds. However, chemical pollution has raised alarms over the potential harm that man-made chlorinated compounds can do to the health of humans, animals and entire ecosystems. Until recently it has been thought that most if not all of the organochlorides in the environment are present due to human activity. It is now known that thousands of organochlorides are produced naturally and that many are generated biologically. Thus, there may be a natural cycling of chlorine in the environment similar to the way that other common elements such as carbon, sulfur, etc. are cycled. Microorganisms play a very large role in the cycling of chemical elements. Basidiomycete fungi (mushrooms) are known to produce organochloride compounds and some anaerobic bacteria are known to remove chlorine from some man-made compounds. This project is aimed at determining how anaerobic bacteria degrade fungal organochlorides and participate in a natural chlorine cycle. Knowing how these fungal metabolites are degraded will advance our understanding of chlorine and carbon cycling. Establishing that a link exists between fungi and anaerobic bacteria will confirm that chlorine is cycled between these disparate groups of microorganisms and will provide insight into the fate of man-made and natural organochlorides once they are released into the environment doc4020 none Meiosis is the process used to generate haploid cells from diploid precursors. It is characterized by a single round of DNA replication followed by two rounds of chromosome segregation. In the first meiotic division, chromosomes pair with, then migrate away from, their homologues. A critical aspect of meiosis I is crossing-over, or exchange, between homologous chromosomes. This form of recombination may be part of a recognition process that allows chromosomes to align with their proper partner. This alignment culminates in formation of a proteinaceous structure, called the synaptonemal complex (SC), along the homologues. Crossovers also clearly play a role in providing a physical link between paired homologues, which allows the homologues to attach properly to spindle fibers that will mediate their segregation. Crossovers alone do not provide a stable linkage between homologues. Following DNA replication, each homologue is composed of two identical sister chromatids. The cohesion of these chromatids locks crossovers in place allowing the crossovers to act as a stable link between the homologues until anaphase I, at which time release of the sister arm cohesion allows the homologues to disjoin. Accordingly, mutants unable to complete meiotic recombination usually exhibit low fertility or sterility. However some organisms, including yeast, have mechanisms that insure the segregation of single pairs of chromosomes that have failed to experience a crossover in an otherwise normal meiosis. This project addresses two questions. First, what types of interactions between chromosomes that have failed to experience an exchange enable them to segregate away from one another? Second, how do sister chromatids remain associated in meiosis I, thus helping crossovers to link homologues and ensuring that both sisters will stay joined until meiosis II? Experiments will test the model that interactions between the centromeres of test chromosomes mediate their disjunction at meiosis I. Cytological techniques will be used to test centromeric interactions occur between a pair of homeologues, specifically tagged with GFP. The second objective, to explore the behavior of sister chromatids in meiosis, will be addressed experimentally in three ways. First, experiments will be performed to determine whether the loss of meiotic sister cohesion observed in spo11 mutants (that do not initiate meiotic recombination) is due to a requirement for the Spo11 protein or alternatively a requirement for recombination initiation in meiotic sister chromatid cohesion. Second, the meiotic behavior of GFP-tagged sister chromatids will be observed cytologically in previously characterized meiotic mutants to explore the relationships of sister chromatid association, recombination and SC formation. Finally, the GFP tagged chromosomes will be monitored in a genetic screen to identify new genes involved in mediating proper sister chromatid behavior in meiosis. The experiments conducted in this work will help to elucidate the mechanism of chromosome segregation doc4021 none Some birds, such as cowbirds and cuckoos, do not care for their own young but instead parasitize the parental efforts of other birds, their hosts, by laying their eggs in the hosts nests. This social or brood parasitism depresses host reproductive output and some hosts have evolved defenses, such as removal of parasitic eggs. This study will determine the extent to which bird species retain host defenses when they are no longer parasitized by carrying out egg recognition experiments on populations that are not currently parasitized and by assessing levels of DNA sequence divergence to estimate the elapsed time since such populations became free of brood parasitism. Whether an adaptation is retained in the absence of benefits is a fundamental question in evolutionary biology. The issue of the retention of adaptations is also vital to efforts to understand human nature as behavioral tendencies that were adaptive in the past but are no longer beneficial today may still be expressed, often to the detriment of society. Brood parasitism is significant to efforts to preserve biodiversity because some endangered host species are impacted by the losses suffered to parasitism. Currently, at least six endangered species are protected from parasitism by cowbird control programs that expend significant amounts of public funds. Understanding the extent to which egg recognition is retained in the absence of any benefits will reveal whether this trait has significant costs and will provide insights into the reasons some endangered hosts have not developed this behavior doc4022 none The large number of immigrants arriving in the U.S. on a yearly basis continues to raise questions relating to their distribution and assimilation within American society. Recently, the older notions of assimilation into white, middle class America based upon European experiences early in the 20th century have been questioned, particularly in light of the experiences of Asian and Latin American immigrants. As an alternative, the segmented assimilation framework developed by Alejandro Portes in recognizes differential paths of assimilation into American society, hinging upon the context of immigration (i.e., voluntary or forced), reception by the host country, and the resources that immigrants bring with them. This framework has become an influential hypothesis of immigrant assimilation, but lacks a geographical (spatial) dimension. Using segmented assimilation as a foundation, this project proposes a spatially segmented assimilation framework, recognizing that differences in the spatial organization of immigrant groups will exist. Embedded within this proposed framework are three questions. First, how do settlement geographies differ with respect to national origin, immigrant status, and across metropolitan areas? Second, what differences are observed between successive arrival cohorts with respect to settlement and assimilation? Third, do different origin groups follow similar progressions through a generalized settlement system? The objectives of the research include: the assessment or empirical testing of spatial extensions to the segmented assimilation framework; across-group differences in migration, determinants and assimilation; how the geography of immigrant settlement changes over time by national origin; and, the impact of admission category upon settlement patterns of the foreign-born. The empirical analysis will study assimilation at the intra- (between city) and inter-metropolitan (within city) scales, focusing upon the twelve largest immigrant groups in the U.S. in . Data will be drawn from linked and Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) from the U.S. census, along with data from yearly Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) data. This INS data includes information relating to immigrant status and allows the settlement pattern of groups to be evaluated in non-census years. The empirical analysis will utilize methods already developed and suitable for migration studies, including descriptive and multivariate techniques and more recent techniques of spatial data analysis. Immigration and assimilation have received considerable attention within both the academic and political arenas as witnessed by welfare reform in and California s Proposition 187 in . Underlying these questions is the very timely assimilation debate - what it means, how it is measured, who it is applied to, and its implications and outcomes. Throwing aside traditional and stereotypical notions of assimilation, the research argues that assimilation into American society will occur differentially over space, time, and by origin group, making it a much more complex process than is currently revealed. The research will extend knowledge of the spatial assimilation of immigrants by tracing the evolution of the settlement system over space through concurrent census periods while focussing upon particular groups of immigrants rather than the aggregate immigrant population. As such, the spatial detail within the project will be finer than has commonly been achieved in the past. The research will consequently engage the assimilation debate from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. Linking the and census files, as well as using INS data from the s will provide a modest but important temporal dimension and insight into the development of the settlement patterns over time doc4023 none Myszka, David The research of this proposal is directed at obtaining a better understanding of how ligand receptor interactions involving estrogen receptors control a wide array of biological processes. This project is based on the premise that to gain this knowledge it is necessary to understand the molecular binding events associated with small ligand receptor interactions. Structural data suggest that agonist and antagonist ligands alter the estrogen receptor binding activity for regulatory proteins by modifying the conformational state of the receptor. BIACORE, a surface plasmon resonance (SPR) optical biosensor, is being employed to monitor directly the dynamics of ligand receptor complex formation and to characterize the functional states imposed by different ligands. Preliminary dynamic data on ligand binding interactions demonstrate that agonist and antagonist ligands bind to estrogen receptor via distinct kinetic pathways. In this project, these kinetic pathways will be quantified and by so doing will provide critical information for understanding complex formation and relating structure to function doc4024 none A genome contains all the instructions needed to define the biological aspects of an organism. The ability to read the DNA sequence of genes initiated a revolution in molecular biology. Recent technological advances have made it possible to determine rapidly the sequence not only of individual genes but also of entire genomes. This is critical for understanding cellular processes because the expression and function of each individual gene reflects complex regulatory pathways encoded by multiple interacting genes. The availability of genomic sequence is the single most important resource for understanding the biology of an organism. The genome of the fungus Neurospora crassa will be sequenced through a partnership between the Whitehead Institute MIT Center for Genome Research (WI-CGR) and members of the Neurospora research community. The objectives of this study are to determine within one year the complete sequence of the 43 Mb Neurospora genome, and to make a highly accurate version of this sequence publicly available. This work will produce annotated sequence and large insert clones with endpoints precisely known with respect to the sequence that can be used for ongoing functional studies. While the result will be a clear boost in research productivity, sequencing the Neurospora genome is not, in itself, a research activity. It is a production activity in which proven methods will be applied at a specified rate to achieve a predetermined and easily measured product. The methods for producing the sequence, including shotgun sequencing, detection, and assembly, and the requisite database tools for handling the sequence are already employed at WI-CGR at a scale considerably greater than is necessary for the Neurospora project. WI-CGR has a long history of managing successful large scale projects for genome mapping and sequencing and is engaged in several genome sequencing projects, including human and mouse. The WI-CGR employs factory-style laboratory automation, automated software for data collection and analysis and a production environment that stresses high quality and reliable delivery at extremely high-throughput. The WI-CGR has worked aggressively to become the most efficient publicly funded high-throughput sequencing center in the world, as well as the leader in sequence output. The low cost of this project reflects the economies of scale, in which highly efficient utilization of personnel, equipment and reagents provides great cost savings on a per read basis. The low repeat content of Neurospora makes it ideally suited to whole genome shotgun sequencing, in which paired reads from the ends of random plasmid clones are assembled. In the first phase of the project approximately 1.2 million sequencing reads will be generated and assembled to provide on average 9X depth of coverage of the genome. Subsequent work involves both automatically-selected and human-directed sequence reads needed to close gaps and attain uniformly high sequence quality. Sequence assemblies corresponding to 3X, 6X, and 9X depth of coverage will be publicly released during shotgun sequencing and annotation and verification of the sequence assembly will commence with the 9X assembly. The biological value of this sequence is extraordinarily high because of the widespread use of Neurospora as an experimental system, the applicability of this organism to problems not addressable with other model organisms, the well developed genetic methods that will permit researchers to exploit the sequence for further experimentation, and the immediate boost it will provide to research on a large number of related organisms of economic and biological importance doc4025 none Speciation, the evolutionary process by which one species splits into two, has created the staggering biodiversity that we see in the world today. Behavior plays a large role in speciation. Animals usually have signals - colors, songs, or smells - that indicate identity. Females attend to these signals closely when choosing a mate, and avoid mating with males of other species. Understanding how these communication systems regulate reproductive interactions is important to understanding why there are so many species. Information from DNA sequences will be used to reconstruct the phylogeny - the historical pattern of splitting - that produced the species in the frog genus Physalaemus. The phylogeny will be used to interpret differences among species in calls, vocal tract structure, hormone profiles, behavioral responses to call differences, and the neurobiology of the auditory centers in the brain. The goal is to deduce how differences in species-specific signals and differences in female preferences for these signals have evolved doc3816 none PI: Peter D. Nagy. Previous work on RNA replication, a central process in viral pathogenesis, has focused on promoter elements. The discovery by the PI and others of novel cis-acting elements, such as RNA replication enhancers that up-regulate RNA synthesis and RNA replication silencers that down-regulate RNA synthesis, changes our view of RNA virus replication. These RNA replication enhancer and silencer elements may play major roles not only in replication, but they may also affect the fitness and evolution of viruses and the symptoms they cause in infected hosts. Defective interfering (DI) RNAs, due to their simple genomes and robust replication are attractive model systems for understanding the role of cis-acting elements in RNA replication. DI RNAs are highly competitive, parasitic RNAs associated with many virus infections. DI RNAs compete against their helper (parental) viruses, resulting in a decreased replication rate of the helper virus and frequently leading to symptom attenuation in the host. The hypothesis to be tested in this research is that the superior competitiveness of the DI RNAs relative to the helper virus is due to (i) favorable positioning of cis-acting elements, such as promoters and replication enhancers in DI RNAs, and or (ii) the absence of some replication silencer elements in DI RNAs that may have been deleted during DI RNA formation. This research uses tombusviruses, model (+)-strand RNA viruses of plants, to: (i) characterize replication enhancer and silencer elements by using a recently developed cell-free replicase system; (ii) elucidate the mechanism of enhancer-mediated stimulation and silencer-mediated inhibition of RNA transcription through testing the direct effect of RNA enhancer and silencer elements on template binding by tombusvirus replicase proteins expressed in E. coli. These studies will lead to a better understanding of regulation of viral RNA synthesis by sequences on the RNA being copied. The studies will also elucidate the ability of certain incomplete viral variants to attenuate infections by the original, complete viruses from which they were derived. These variants are called defective interfering RNA s. They are derived from viruses that infect a wide range of organisms, including plants doc4027 none Plants must continually supply their leaves with water that is absorbed by the roots and transported to the leaves through the stem. The driving force for this comes from the evaporation of water from leaf surfaces, which exerts a pull on the water column. This allows the plant to draw water from the soil through hollow xylem cells which form conduits for water transport through the stem -- essentially using the stem as a straw. Because the water is under tension, air is sucked into the xylem occasionally, causing an embolism that blocks water flow. It is well known that air embolism occurs in plants, sometimes to the extent that water delivery to leaves is significantly impaired. The goal of this study is to understand the mechanisms by which plants may be able to repair air-filled conduits such that they are able to reuse them in water transport. It is only in the past decade that researchers have realized that plants can reverse embolism, and there is some evidence that this repair may occur even during the day when the water in the xylem is under substantial tension. The mechanisms by which embolisms are repaired, however, remain poorly understood. This proposal outlines studies to understand this key physiological process as well as to explore factors limiting the capacity for repair in different species. A major objective of the proposed work is to use magnetic resonance imaging to monitor the dynamics of embolism and embolism reversal in intact plants. The major limitation to date in understanding embolism repair has been the lack of any method to examine this process in vivo. In addition, the PIs will use a suite of new approaches that allow the determination of hydraulic properties of individual water transport conduits. Water availability is a major factor limiting agricultural production and plays an important role in determining ecological interactions in both agricultural and natural systems. This study will increase our understanding of how plants survive periods of low water availability and improve our ability to predict plant responses to environmental factors such as drought and temperature extremes doc4028 none Baum Plant species differ in the manner in which they bear their flowers. The aim of this work is to elucidate how such differences might arise through the modification of gene activity and function. The strategy is to compare the genetic model system, Arabidopsis thaliana, with some wild relatives (Jonopsidium acaule, Leavenworthia alabamica and Idahoa scapigera) that differ in the manner in which flowers are produced. Whereas Arabidopsis produces flowers on an elongated, leafless inflorescence, the other three are rosette-flowering, producing flowering from the axils of rosette leaves. Phylogenetic data show that rosette-flowering evolved three times independently from inflorescence-flowering ancestors. Based on information from Arabidopsis and prior work on Jonopsidium it is likely that the difference in flower production reflects changes in the regulation of the flower meristem identity gene, LEAFY (LFY). The aim of this study is to test this hypothesis by (1) characterizing LFY expression in Idahoa and Leavenworthia and (2) by cloning LFY homologs (with intact promoters) from the rosette-flowering taxa and the introducing those genes into Arabidopsis. If Arabidopsis plants containing exogenous LFY show modified LFY expression this will suggest evolution in the LFY promoter. Additionally, If transgenes cause partial or complete conversion to rosette-flowering the most likely explanation is that changes at the LFY locus contributed to the evolution of rosette-flowering. The study will, therefore, shed light on the role of LFY in the evolution of flowering morphology, and will serve to clarify a general approach that can be used to study the genetic basis of morphological and developmental evolution doc4029 none Bennett The germline is responsible for carrying on the species; without a germline, sexually-reproducing organisms would not exist. In most animals germline precursor cells are set aside during embryogenesis, with the precursors dividing later in life. After proliferation, these cells undergo meiosis to produce male and female gametes, the eggs and sperm of the adult. In the model organism, the free-living soil nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, the germline is established very early in development. By the fourth cell division of the embryo, a single cell, called P4, is the founder cell for the entire germline. Throughout the life of the worm, cytoplasmic complexes of RNA and protein, called P granules, are exclusive to the germline lineage. Similar germ granules are found in the germline precursor cells of all higher organisms that possess a germline. The Bennett laboratory has identified four germline RNA helicases, the GLHs, a family of putative ATP-dependent enzymes that are exclusive to P granules throughout the life of the worm. Similar germline RNA helicases are found in the germ granules of flies, frogs, mice and men. This application proposes to determine the genetic interactions between the four glh genes, as well as identifying the RNAs and proteins that interact with these RNA helicases in P granules. Based in part on multiple CCHC zinc fingers that are unique to the GLHs, it is hypothesized that each GLH may associate with a particular set of RNAs and proteins. The work to be carried out will include the isolation of a null mutation in the glh-4 gene, the only glh gene for which a loss-of-function mutation remains to be isolated. Relevant multiple glh mutant strains will be generated, including the glh-1 glh-4 double mutant which RNAi (RNA interference) studies indicate will result in complete sterility. RNAs bound by the GLHs will be enriched for with the SELEX technique, while proteins that interact with the GLHs will be identified in yeast two-hybrid assays. The yeast two hybrid screens have already identified a putative MAP kinase that appears to interact with GLH-3, as well as several other candidate proteins. These analyses will reveal how the GLHs, with their RNA and protein partners, affect germline determination, as well as the establishment and maintenance of the species. This work in worms is expected to relate to reproductive strategies in all organisms, including humans doc512 none This award updates the Correlates of War Project Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data set through . Such an effort is critical for international conflict research, but the enterprise of updating this collection is a monumental one that is beyond the scope or resources of any single researcher. Consequently this is a collaborative effort, linking scholars at eleven different universities to complete the task in a systematic and timely fashion. The MID data set has been at the forefront on international conflict research over the past decade or more. This data set is the most frequently used in conflict research and MID data has been employed to explore a staggering breadth of topics in international relations research, including most of those central to contemporary scholarly debates. Furthermore, MID data are the basis for several other data projects in the discipline as well as highly compatible with a range of other data compilations, thereby facilitating the combination of data sets and the exploration of broader sets of theoretical questions. Updating the Militarized Interstate Dispute data set requires completion of the following major steps: 1) collect and document militarized incidents from a variety of sources. This entails searching global, regional, and national sources for indications of a threat, display, or use of force by one state against another; 2) checking, archiving, and documenting the incidents collected to insure consistency, completeness, and absence of duplication; 3) composing militarized disputes based on the collected incidents and additional research as necessary. Because disputes are conflict episodes, such things as starting and ending dates, secondary participants, stages of escalation, overall fatalities, method of settlement, and general outcome must be determined. A short narrative description of each dispute is also prepared; 4) checking, archiving, and documenting disputes in order to insure such things as conformity with coding rules, compatibility with documentation standards, internal consistency, and absence of duplication; 5) resolving issues that arise concerning coding procedures, documentation requirements, problem cases, and the like; and, 6) preparing a final version (3.0) of the data set for distribution via the world wide web. This requires the resolution of a few problems that have been found in the present version (2.1) before it can be merged with the - data. This is a major infrastructure project for the Political Science program and enables the updating of a data set that will be used by numerous scholars in international relations and comparative politics doc4031 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania will acquire a time-resolved, step-scan Fourier-transform spectrometer. This instrument will support research in a number of areas, including a) studies on adsorption and reaction kinetics on metal surfaces; b) dynamics of biologically relevant electron transfer reactions; and c) reaction pathways in molecular size cavities of zeolites. The general effectiveness of Fourier transform spectroscopic techniques in academic and industrial research has been firmly established. Many advanced spectroscopic courses now routinely include the teaching of FT spectroscopy. The time-resolved capability is one of the most important recent developments in FT spectroscopy that is rapidly being explored for all kinds of research. Recent applications include biological, polymer, and environmental studies. These studies will open up the application of time-resolved FT spectroscopy in unexplored areas such as surface science, zeolite chemistry and bioinorganic chemistry doc4032 none Jahn The ciliated protozoan Euplotes crassus is being studied as a model system in order to uncover the mechanisms producing rearrangements of DNA. Ultimately, investigating this system should help answer questions about the structure of chromosomes and the nucleus, and how cells manipulate these structures such that the genome remains functionally stable while providing genome plasticity, which can be evolutionarily and developmentally advantageous. By studying a controlled rearrangement process such as that occurring in the E. crassus during the formation of a macronucleus, it can be determined what chromosomal proteins, DNA sequences and enzymes are involved and how the process is controlled. E. crassus, like other ciliated protozoa, possesses two types of nuclei, macronuclei and micronuclei, that differ in their properties. Most notably, chromosome segregation is absent from the macronucleus and transcription is absent from the micronucleus. Chromatin and chromosome structure and genomic organization differ in these two types of nuclei. In addition, during the developmental process of forming macronuclei from micronuclei, extensive DNA elimination occurs that includes site-specific deletions and chromosome breakage with telomere addition. The abundance of these rearrangements, their developmental programming, and their occurrence in single-celled organisms that can be developmentally synchronized en masse, provide a unique model system for the analysis of chromosome structure and the mechanisms of genome rearrangements. The principal investigator has identified an unusual chromatin structure of the highly abundant Tec element transposons that are undergoing elimination during macronuclear development. In addition, her laboratory has identified a lysine arginine-rich, histone H1 or HMG-like, chromosome scaffold protein (p85) that has the following properties: a) it is only found in the developing macronucleus, b) it is associated with eliminated DNA (including the Tec elements), c) it colocalizes with topoisomerase II, and d) it affects topoisomerase II activities in vitro. This points to a role for topoisomerase II-mediated, chromosome condensation processes that are conserved in all organisms in ciliate genomic rearrangements. This project aims to determine the sequence of p85 to allow identification of any similar proteins in other organisms. In addition, the role of p85 in DNA elimination will be determined by defining what DNA sequences it binds to and what sequence specificity it has, and by determining how this protein affects chromatin structure. Finally, the interaction of p85 with topoisomerase II will be further analyzed doc4033 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of California in Irvine will acquire a Circular Dichroism Spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) studies on novel polymers, co-polymers, block polymers and ionomers; b) engineering of natural products via tryptophan dimerization; c) characterization of novel protein systems; d) development of efficient chemical syntheses of complex molecules of biomedical importance; e) structure determination of acetonide compounds; and f) chemical models of protein beta-sheet interactions. Circular dichroism spectroscopy is an extremely useful tool in modern analytical chemistry. It provides a very reliable and sensitive method for assigning absolute molecular configurations. The results from these studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry and biochemistry doc4034 none Migration is a fundamental characteristic of the life history of many animals from monarch butterflies to humpback whales and is one of the most fascinating of all behavior. Over two-thirds of all songbirds that breed in temperate North America migrate long distances to wintering areas in Mexico, Central and South America and the Caribbean islands. Traveling long distances comes with considerable risks, and the mortality may be substantial. This research focuses on the problems migrants face when they pause to rest and refuel: Besides the energetic cost of flying, a migratory bird invariably finds herself in unfamiliar surroundings at a time when energy demands are high, often faced with avoiding predator avoidance and finding food, competing with other migrants and resident birds for limited resources, faced with unfavorable weather, and the need to correct orientation errors. Field studies are designed to determine how migrants solve these problems before and after crossing the Gulf of Mexico. Besides gaining a better understanding of how animals respond to periods of energetic demand, this research has important conservation implications. Evidence reveals population declines among many migratory bird species over the past quarter century. Although debate over the causes of the decline continues, what has been largely overlooked in development of conservation plans is the importance of habitat during migration. Unless habitat requirements during migration are met, conservation measures focused on the breeding grounds and or tropical wintering areas will be compromised. We know little about how migratory birds respond to changes in the availability and distribution of stopover habitat doc3987 none Ultrasonic sound production has recently been discovered in hummingbirds. Behavioral and acoustic studies suggest that these ultrasonic sounds may function in communication. To test this hypothesis, the researchers propose to determine whether or not hummingbirds are able to perceive ultrasonic sounds (above 20 kHz). If so, further behavioral studies will evaluate the communicative role of ultrasonic signals. Ultrasound perception will be assayed by monitoring hummingbird heart rate responses to presentations of ultrasonic signals. Establishing the use of ultrasound in hummingbirds would demonstrate sound production and auditory sensory abilities previously unknown in any avian species, and would be the first step towards understanding how birds use ultrasound. Basic research of mammalian ultrasound has influenced the development of ultrasound and sonar use across such fields as medicine, engineering, manufacturing, intelligence, and communication. Many features of mammalian ultrasound exceed the sophistication of artificial ultrasound, including the ability to manipulate and respond to changes in signal parameters, use binaural processing with separate transmitter and receivers, and compensate for the Doppler effect due to relative movement between transmitter and receiver. Much of the current applied ultrasound research is directed towards developing effective replications of mammalian ultrasound. Examination of a new animal group, with a distinct ecological niche and evolutionary history, may provide innovative design features not present in mammalian ultrasound systems, which may be adapted for human applications doc4036 none The focus of this research has three parts. First, polymers with functionalized cross-links and cyclopolymerized functional monomer units will be studied. Second, new linker strategies for synthesis, several of which reveal latent reactive functionality, will be developed and generalized. Third, novel approaches to heterocycle synthesis employing C-C bond formation will be investigated. Emphasis will be placed on applications of polymer chemistry that address synthetic problems which cannot be readily or as efficiently solved in other ways. With this renewal award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Drs. Mark J. Kurth and Neil E. Schore of the Department of Chemistry at the University of California-Davis. Professors Kurth and Schore will focus their work on developing methodology for the preparation and evaluation of reactive polymer systems for use in organic synthesis. The work has broader impacts for the training of graduate students and in the area of combinatorial chemistry doc4037 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Minnesota in Twin Cities will acquire a data system upgrade for their Mass Spectrometer NMR core facility. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) investigations on photosynthetic intermediates; b) metabolic regulation of the plant hormones and genomic approaches to auxin biology; c) biochemistry and chemical ecology of pine bark beetles; d) nitrogen metabolism; structure-function studies of intracellular lipid binding proteins; and e) vitamin K-dependent proteins and sulfur dioxide reactions with nitric oxide. Mass spectrometry (MS) is a technique used to probe intimate structural details and to obtain the molecular compositions of a vast array of organic, bioorganic, and organometallic molecules. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometry is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. Upgraded data systems will increase efficiency of the entire facility, increase educational activities and improve investigator access to instrumentation. The results from these studies will have an impact in a number of areas including biochemistry, molecular biology and biophysics, chemistry, and plant pathology doc4038 none A Supersecondary Structure Unit (SSU) is defined as three or more secondary structures in a given fold that pack against one another. When such SSUs occur in different folds, they are referred to as legos . Numerous anecdotal examples of legos, such as 4-a-helix-bundle and 3-b-corner, have been identified, but there has been no systematic attempt to explore the entire structural database for a full list of recurrent structural patterns from which know protein folds might be constructed. This project will develop the necessary methods to carry out such a search and to fully characterize the resulting lego set. Such an effort will provide an entirely new view for protein folds. Specifically, the project will seek to answer the following questions: 1. How large is the lego set? 2. To what extent can the lego set cover known folds? 3. What are the rules governing lego-lego interactions? 4. Can one construct novel protein folds by following the rules? 5. How conserved are sequences representing the same lego? 6. Do legos correlate to functional sites? This project will be an important complement to current approaches in functional genomics. Most current approaches infer protein function by sequence and structural similarities to existing folds. The results obtained from this project will provide a basis to relate different folds and to extend functional inference beyond the boundary of known folds. The project will lead to the development of an array of lego-based algorithms for predicting protein structure and function. The legos and their various properties will constitute a publicly available database. Via the World Wide Web, researchers will be able to perform two types of searches. A protein structure can be submitted to discover the legos it encompasses. The user can also search a protein sequence against all lego profiles; the matched legos may provide information otherwise unavailable for novel sequences doc4039 none The goal of this project is to understand how animals acquire and process sensory information about their environment. The focus is on identifying and characterizing brain mechanisms and information processing principles that allow animals to enhance signals that are important to their behavior and to suppress irrelevant background noise. The specific studies are centered around the ability of weakly electric fish to detect and localize small prey in the dark using an active electric sense. While much is known about the neural circuitry in these animals, there is a gap in the theoretical understanding of how the brain should best process incoming sensory data. This proposal helps fill that gap by using statistical signal processing theory to develop optimal signal processing models of electrosensory target detection. These models are expected to provide a quantitative link between neurophysiology and behavior, and will provide valuable insights into the structural and functional organization of the nervous system. The issues addressed in these studies are of broad interest in sensory neurobiology, including the role of feedback pathways from higher brain centers, mechanisms for generating predictions of incoming sensory data, and synergistic interactions between sensory and motor aspects of sensory acquisition. In addition to advancing basic knowledge in neuroscience, the models of optimal sensory acquisition have relevance in applied areas of science and engineering such as artificial intelligence and robotics. This project also provides cross-disciplinary training for young scientists with interests that cut across the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science and neurobiology doc4040 none Friedman, W. Interleukin-1B (IL-1B) is a potent and pleiotropic cytokine produced by glia in the brain which influences many different cell types. When IL-1B interacts with receptors on glia, it activates a specific intracellular signaling cascade inducing production of many growth factors and cytokines. Specific neuronal populations in the brain, in particular hippocampal neurons, also have receptors for IL-1B, however neurons do not produce cytokines and growth factors in response to IL-1B. The distinct signal transduction pathways activated by this cytokine determine the functional response of different cell types. In these studies, therefore, we will elucidate the different signaling pathways that mediate the actions of IL-1B in neurons compared to astrocytes. In addition, one of the growth factors which is induced by IL-1B in glia is nerve growth factor (NGF). One of the NGF receptors (p75) is also induced by IL-1B in glial cells, suggesting that NGF has effects on glia distinct from its well-characteristic neurotrophic effects on neurons. These studies will investigate the signaling pathways and functional consequences of NGF on glial cells. Growth factors and cytokines influence many different cell populations, but induce distinct responses which are cell type-specific. Elucidation of the signal transduction pathways activated in neurons and glia by a pleiotropic cytokine such as IL-1B will allow insight into how a single factor can activate different signaling events and functional consequences in distinct cell types doc4041 none A Novel Ca2+ Sensor and Its Target Kinase in Arabidopsis A number of stressful factors such as drought, cold, salinity, can severely hamper plant growth and development. To survive these extreme conditions, plants have evolved complex mechanisms to monitor the stress conditions and respond by changing their physiological and developmental programs. The long term goal of this project is to understand the signaling pathways that link the environmental stress factors to cellular responses in higher plants. Almost all extracellular signals, including plant hormones, light, stress factors, and pathogenic or symbiotic elicitors, can elicit Ca2+ pulses or transients which serve as second messengers in further signaling processes. Because different signals often induce distinct and specific cellular responses, an interesting question is how cells distinguish the Ca2+ messengers produced by different stimuli and respond accordingly. Studies suggest that signaling components that sense and interpret the Ca2+ parameters hold the key. The laboratory has identified a new family of Ca2+ sensor proteins that play a role in plant response to stress signals. One member of the family, AtCBL1, is strongly responsive to stress factors including drought, cold, and wounding. Another member, AtCBL4 or SOS3, is required for salt tolerance. To understand the molecular mechanism for AtCBL1 function, the laboratory has made a key finding that AtCBL1 specifically associates with a family of novel protein kinases that are found only in higher plants. These AtCBL1-interacting protein kinases (CIPKs) are highly related to each other and their kinase domains are most similar to SNF1 subfamily of protein kinases. However, all CIPKs contain a unique C-terminal non-kinase domain that is responsible for interaction with AtCBL1. Further studies with one of the CIPKs, CIPK1, show that AtCBL1 interaction with CIPK1 requires micromolar levels of Ca2+, suggesting that Ca2+-binding changes the conformation of AtCBL1 and triggers association with CIPK1. Kinase assays using recombinant CIPK1 determined that CIPK1 is a serine threonine kinase but has unique cofactor preference. For instance, CIPK1 highly prefers Mn2+ for its activity and functions as a Mn2+-binding protein. This project will further explore the functional significance of AtCBL1-CIPK1 complex using a combination of biochemical, cell biology, and molecular genetic approaches. In the first objective, biochemical and cell biology approaches will be used to dissect the native form of CIPK1 holoenzyme and identify the functional substrates for CIPK1. In the second objective, molecular genetic approaches using transgenic plant and knockout mutant models will be used to unravel the function of AtCBL1-CIPK1 in plant growth and developmental processes especially under stress conditions. This study will establish a new paradigm for Ca2+ signal transduction, which will have major impact on cell biology in general and on signal transduction research in particular doc4042 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project from 3DGeo Development Incorporated will develop a software package which utilizes primary and converted-wave energy to accurately and efficiently image gas and oil reservoirs, and to determine rock properties for reservoir evaluation and management. In the recently completed Phase I project, 3DGeo demonstrated the feasibility of imaging with converted waves by analyzing the nature and occurrence of converted waves in synthetic seismic data. Full wavefield modeling and ray tracing in realistic models was used to simulate both towed-cable and ocean-bottom-cable marine data. Both acquisition geometries show important converted-wave events that will be used in Phase II to accurately image reservoirs and estimate rock properties. In addition to the mode converted energy, this project will incorporate two other significant propagation phenomena that commonly occur in geological settings which give rise to converted waves, namely: (1) multiply reflected events [multiples], and (2) transmitted and reflected energy propagating along multiple paths in the subsurface [multi-valued traveltimes]. These two phenomena, coupled with the mode conversions, which are the main focus of this research effort, comprise the greatest challenge to seismic prospecting for oil and gas. This Phase II project develops a comprehensive and synergistic subsalt imaging solution that exploits the full potential of the seismic wavefield for reservoir imaging and rock property estimation in complex areas. Commercial potential of the proposed technology is directly applicable to subsalt oil and gas exploration in complex areas such as the Gulf of Mexico. US companies will spend $50 billion drilling deep subsalt prospects over the next 5 years, and this project could have a direct and significant impact by developing an accurate and economical reservoir monitoring and imaging technology doc4043 none xu Distinct organs in the body of human are formed by similar signals through cell-cell communications. This proposal focuses on the genetic details that tell cells to form the ear and where to form. The mammalian ear formation involves a series of different signals from different adjacent tissues. However, despite much speculation as to the signals from neighboring tissues, the identity of the signals and how the cells communicate with each other are not known. A gene called Eyes absent 1 has been knocked out in mice. Mutations in the same gene in fruit flies cause no eye formation. Interestingly, Eya1 mutant mice develop no ears and the cells normally forming the ear die from very early embryonic stages, indicating that Eya1 is a key early gene required for ear development. This proposal will use Eya1- and other Eya-deficient mice to study how the mammalian ears form in appropriate places in the body by molecular and genetic approaches. This project begins to dissect out the molecular and genetic information required for normal formation of the mammalian ear. Thus, the major significance of the proposed studies is that they represent one of the first attempts to define specific gene function in the context of the normal developmental mechanisms operating in ear formation doc4044 none Li The investigator develops mathematical models to investigate several important epidemiological and ecological factors for the emergence, re-emergence and persistence of infectious diseases. The project has three goals: (1) to develop a new mathematical framework in epidemiological modeling that links the human population to its environment, (2) to introduce and develop a new mathematical approach to the analysis of epidemic models, (3) to stimulate mathematical development of more effective analytical and numerical tools for resolving important computational issues arising from the model analysis. The work is carried out along two main themes: Theme I. Develop a mathematical framework in epidemiological modeling using network models that takes into account the full cycle of a disease in nature and encompasses three interconnected key elements: human hosts, intermediate hosts and disease vectors, and environment. Theme II. Develop an approach to the analysis of epidemic models using the method of singular perturbation to further our understanding of several key biological issues such as robust mechanisms for cyclic temporal patterns in disease incidence and the short-term evolution of disease pathogenicity. Computational issues arising from the large scale systems in network models and from the multiple time scales that are inherent in disease transmission processes are also investigated. The global spread of infectious diseases and the emergence of drug-resistant disease agents are causes for alarm at the end of the 20th century. As the world population continues to explode, the world economies continue to become globalized, individual interactions and international travel continues to increase, and the environment around the globe continues to be devastated, the effective control and prevention of the global spread of infectious diseases is destined to be one of the grand challenges facing mankind in the new millennium. Essential to our success in meeting this challenge is a renewed effort in epidemiological studies, a better understanding of the transmission and spread mechanisms of various diseases, and more effective disease control and prevention measures based on these studies and the new understanding. While the nature and scale of the problems at hand inevitably limit the effectiveness of experimental approaches, mathematical modeling has proven to be a valuable approach and an indispensable tool for understanding the problems, for testing hypotheses, and for predicting effective measures of control and prevention. It is expected that results from the project can advance our understanding of the basic ecological and epidemiological mechanisms for the emergence, re-emergence and persistence of infectious diseases and their associated temporal patterns, and improve the present theoretical basis for effective disease control and prevention strategies doc4045 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at North Carolina State University will upgrade a 300 MHz NMR and acquire a 400 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) synthesis of natural products and biologically active compounds using chiral auxiliary mediated asymmetric synthesis; b) the design and use of stereoregular polymers in direct lithography schemes; c) synthesis of multiporphyrin light-harvesting arrays and related molecular photonic devices; d) polymers with well-defined architectures; e) paramagnetic ligands for novel extended solids and porphyrins as building blocks for molecule-based magnets; and f) coumarin based cyclic prodrugs of peptides and peptidomimetics. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometry is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry doc4046 none Garcia This award supports Dana Garcia of Southwest Texas State University in a collaboration with Jurgen Markl of the Institute of Zoology at the University of Mainz, Germany. The project will focus on the role of intermediate filaments in pigment granules movements in retinal pigment epithelium of teleost fishes. Such movements are associated with changes in light conditions. The U.S. expertise and facilities are complemented by those in the German lab, which is a leader in this area of research. The German group uses a variety of techniques, including molecular biological, biophysical, and biochemical ones as well as cell biology to evaluate the characteristics of the filaments under study, and the German laboratory offers facilities not available at Southwest Texas State. Together, the U.S. and German groups will be able to make advances in this important field that would not be possible by either side alone doc4047 none In eukaryotes, MSLH systems composed of homologs of prokaryotic MutS proteins and of MutL proteins mediate critical genomic stability functions. Plants encode several MSH proteins whose activities would appear needed to prevent accumulation of replication-error and environmentally induced mutations during the many divisions of apical meristem cells that precede differentiation into gamete-producing tissues and to ensure accurate and productive meiosis. The specific aims of this proposal are: 1) To investigate special properties of Arabidopsis MSH7 protein. DNA substrate specificities of atMsh7.atMsh2 vs atMsh6.atMsh2 protein heterodimers and the steady-state levels of atMSH7 mRNA vs levels expressed by other Arabidopsis MSH and MLH genes in vegetative and putative germ-line tissues will be compared. 2) To analyze MSLH protein roles in prevention of mitotic DNA replication errors and UV mutagensis. 3) To study MSLH protein functins in plant meiosis. Plants are of necessity exposed to sunlight and consequently must have effective DNA repair systems. This work should produce results that will add to our knowledge base but will also be of value to plant breeders and to individuals seeking to genetically engineer plants and to propagate plant cells in culture doc4048 none Chitnis Energy generation in a cell requires electron transfer across membranes, which is typically mediated through multiprotein enzymes, such as cytochrome oxidase of respiration and photosystems of photosynthesis. Photosystem I is one of the two membrane-bound reaction centers of the photosynthetic electron transfer chain in cyanobacteria and chloroplasts. It functions as the light-driven plastocyanin-ferredoxin oxidoreductase and is a heteromultimeric pigment-protein complex. In this project, the PI is attempting to determine the function of photosystem I proteins through site-directed mutagenesis and targeted gene inactivation. A photosystem I complex contains two phylloquinone molecules, one (or both) of which serves as the redox center A1. The PI proposes to introduce cysteinyl residues near the phylloquinone-binding site by mutagenesis and to attach spin labels to them. Paramagnetic interactions between the label and A1 signal will allow identification of the redox-active phylloquinone(s) and consequently the active branch of electron transfer pathway. The PI has generated phylloquinone-less mutants that contain plastoquinone in their photosystem I complexes. The PI proposes to use those mutants to recruit foreign quinones in the A1 site in vivo. The quinones that compete successfully with the native plastoquinone in binding to the A1 site will be useful in determining structural features of the quinones that are important for their function at an extremely low redox potential. The quinones that are unable to substitute function of phylloquinone will be used for directed evolution of the binding site to accommodate and to use these quinones. In addition to studies on phylloquinones in photosystem I, the PI will investigate the role of b-carotene molecules in the excitation energy transfer in photosystem I. The PI recently discovered that several photosystem I proteins are modified post-translationally. He proposes to identify these modifications and examine their functional significance. Electron transfer reactions are key steps in photosynthesis, respiration, drug metabolism, and many other biochemical pathways. Photosynthesis and respiration contain membrane-bound electron transfer chains of general significance. The electron-transfer proteins in energy-transducing complexes provide structural stability, recognize reaction partners, and accurately orient cofactors. We expect that the outcome of the proposed research will provide information about how the protein environment determines functional properties of cofactors. In addition, the results will suggest ways to modify proteins for accommodating and using foreign cofactors and to engineer better biomimetic photoconversion systems. Oxygenic photosynthesis in plants, algae and cyanobacteria is the primary source of energy and oxygen for the life on our planet. Therefore, better understanding of this process is necessary to address the environmental and food challenges of the future doc4049 none The objectives of this proposal are to develop informatics tools to characterize the voids, pockets and tunnels that characterize protein surfaces and to construct a database of protein surface maps. The topographic of the protein helps to define the binding regions essential for the protein s functions. Understanding protein surface properties is basic to understanding interactions with other proteins as well as other small ligands. Such information may provide a way to identify active sites. The tools generate not only the maps of the surface, with area and volume measurement, but also measure the accessibility of binding pockets from the outside of the molecule and the texture of the surfaces. The description can be computed also at different levels of resolution. This research has the potential for linking structure with function by providing information about the possible sites of interaction between and among molecules. In addition, the work will provide an educational resource for understanding protein geometry doc4050 none Weigel Flowers give rise to fruits and seeds, which include all cereals, and thereby provide the majority of calories consumed by humans. Understanding the mechanisms of flower development is therefore interesting both from a scientific and from an agronomic point of view. Early flower development is regulated by a cascade of regulatory genes that include flowering-time genes, meristem-identity genes and homeotic organ-identity genes. Most of these genes encode transcription factors, and some progress has been made in understanding the genetic and molecular interactions between these groups of genes. However, less is known about the downstream effectors of floral homeotic genes. Dr. Weigel is studying the UFO gene, which regulates several aspects of flower development in Arabidopsis. In contrast to many other floral control genes, UFO does not encode a transcription factor. Instead, UFO encodes an F-box protein that is likely to affect the stability of other regulatory proteins. Dr. Weigel has shown that UFO acts as an F-box protein in vivo, and that it functions downstream of the homeotic gene AP1 in the formation of petals. He now proposes genetic, molecular and biochemical approaches (1) to determine whether UFO function is required in all cell layers to promote petal growth; (2) to determine how UFO expression in petals is controlled, with emphasis on the role of the homeotic gene AP1 in this process; (3) to identify proteins that interact with UFO in vivo and mediate its effects; and (4) to identify new genes that act with UFO in petal formation. The proposed work will advance our understanding of the mechanisms by which F-box proteins affect plant growth and development. Furthering our knowledge of plant development in turn will enhance our ability to improve growth and yield of crop plants doc4051 none The transition from vegetative growth to flowering is controlled both by environmental and endogenous cues. Understanding where and how these signals are integrated is a prerequisite for understanding why similar environmental or endogenous cues can elicit opposite flowering responses in different plants. For example, while the plant hormone gibberellin generally induces flowering in rosette plants such as Arabidopsis, it inhibits flowering of several other plants. Similarly, Arabidopsis flowers faster in long than in short days, while other plants flower preferentially, or even exclusively, in short days. Dr. Weigel proposes complementary biochemical, physiological, molecular and genetic approaches to determine how gibberellins induce flowering in Arabidopsis. He has shown that, in Arabidopsis, flowering signals converge on the promoter of the floral identity gene LEAFY. He has shown that the LEAFY promoter contains a gibberellin-response element that is essential for promoter activity in short days. He has also identified, by loss- and gain-of-function mutageneses, several FOG and GAT genes, which affect the gibberellin-requirement for flowering. He now proposes (1) to identify the factor that interacts with the LEAFY promoter to confer GA response; (2) to integrate the newly discovered FOG and GAT genes into the current framework of floral inductive pathways; (3) to study the molecular biology of the flowering-specific FOG1, FOG2 and GAT1-3 genes; and (4) to characterize in more detail FOG4, which strongly affects several gibberellin responses, including germination and flowering. The importance of flowers for human sustenance cannot be overstated. Not only are they organs of plant reproduction, but their immediate products are fruits and seeds, including cereal grains, which provide the majority of calories consumed by humans. Thus, understanding how plants regulate the formation of flowers is likely to have long-ranging practical applications. This research will serve as a starting point for understanding why flowering of different plants can respond in opposite ways to similar signals. The detailed mechanistic knowledge gained from the proposed studies will enable us in the future to fine tune flowering responses of important crop plants doc4052 none Tobias The objective of this project is to study the dynamics of native and partially unfolded proteins and their solvent on time scales ranging from femtoseconds to nanoseconds, using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The role of solvent dynamics in affecting the protein structural relaxation accompanying the dynamical glass transition will be investigated using molecular MD simulations of ribonuclease A in crystals, dry and hydrated powders, and a glycerol water solution, at temperatures above and below the transition. MD simulations, in conjunction with neutron scattering experiments, will be used to characterize the picosecond dynamics of the molten globule state of alpha-lactalbumin. The dynamics of surface associated water in simulations of the native and molten globule states of alpha-lactalbumin will be compared in an attempt to reconcile the traditional view of an expanded, solvent penetrated molten globule with recently reported magnetic relaxation dispersion data that challenged this picture. Finally, vibrational energy storage and relaxation in heme proteins will be investigated. A series of MD simulations will be carried out to investigate heme cooling and dissipation of vibrational energy by the protein matrix and solvent in a myoglobin solution at room temperature, the storage of energy in boson peak vibrations following heme excitation in low hydration, low temperature glassy states of myoglobin, and CO dissociation in a myoglobin crystal to address questions concerning environmental effects in time-resolved crystallographic studies. Techniques of non-stationary time series analysis will be employed to generate joint time-frequency distributions for visualizing the flow of vibrational energy between modes at equilibrium and vibrational energy relaxation following a perturbation. A complete understanding of the folding and function of proteins requires knowledge of the structures, energetics, and dynamics of native and denatured proteins. This project will provide an accurate picture of the changes in protein dynamics on making the transition from an inactive, glassy state at low temperature, to an active state at higher temperatures, as well as further insight into the role of the solvent in affecting this transition. In addition, the work on heme proteins will contribute to the understanding of fundamental chemical dynamical processes connected to protein function, and will produce new tools for the analysis of simulations of complex protein dynamics. It is anticipated that this research should prove useful in the interpretation of experimental measurements on protein dynamics, as a close correspondence with spectroscopic experiments is emphasized in the design of the simulations and the analysis of the results doc4053 none One defining feature of plant organisms is the photosynthetic production of sucrose. Essentially, carbon from the atmosphere is assimilated into sucrose which is then transported throughout the plant where it is used as an energy source. The productivity, or yield, of plants directly depends on the net assimilation of carbon into sucrose and ultimately how much of this sucrose is transported to the harvestable components of plants, such as the seed. Understanding how sucrose is transported through the plant and how this transport is regulated is critical for both for understanding fundamental plant biology and optimization of plant productivity. The sucrose transport protein from soybean cotyledons appears to interact with another protein in the cytosol of plant cells. This interacting protein contains at least three ankyrin repeat motifs which often are involved in linking membrane transport proteins to the cellular cytoskeleton. Since the sucrose transporter interacts with other proteins, it may be that this interaction is important in the assembly of sucrose transporters on the cell surface or in the formation disassembly of protein complexes that both import sucrose and metabolize it further. Thus, sucrose transport may be regulated in part by the nature of interactions between the transporter and this interacting partner. This research will attempt to elucidate the functional significance of this protein-protein interaction in sucrose transport. The three primary objectives are as follows. Objective #1. Identify proteins that interact with the ankyrin-like protein. To understand the nature of this interaction, it is important to determine if other proteins might also be brought into contact with the plant sucrose transporter. For instance, if sucrose metabolizing enzymes are part of a complex with the sucrose transporter, then sucrose import may be directly linked to its subsequent metabolism. These experiments will address this possibility. Objective #2. Assess the role of protein-protein interaction on sucrose uptake. If the interaction of the sucrose transporter with the ankyrin-like protein has an impact on sucrose uptake in the plant, then disruption of the ankyrin-like protein function should disrupt sucrose transport in distinct ways. The ankyrin-like protein function will be disrupted using gene-silencing technology and sucrose uptake parameters assessed. Objective #3. Examine the subcellular localization of the sucrose transporter and the ankyrin-like protein. Several important questions are addressed by characterizing the nature of the sucrose transporter:ankyrin-like protein (ST:ALP) interaction in the cell. Does the ST:ALP complex change during cotyledon development? When does the ST:ALP complex form relative to synthesis of the sucrose transporter and the ankryin-like protein? Our mRNA analysis suggests that the ankyrin-like protein accumulates earlier in cotyledon development than does the sucrose transporter and this raises the question as to whether sucrose transporter is bound to the ankyrin-like protein as it is translated. Immunocytochemical analysis of the sucrose transporter, the ankyrin-like protein, and other potential interacting proteins confocal and electron microscopy will address these issues doc4054 none This study will quantify how genetic variation in a stream-side tree, cottonwoods, affects a diverse community of organisms, which in turn affect ecosystem-level processes such as nutrient cycling. Predictions tested will include: 1). Genetic variation in the tree population has a positive effect on biodiversity, productivity and stability of the dependent community. 2) The impact of genetic variation on keystone species has great potential to affect communities. 3) Important species interactions and community traits have a genetic component that can be mapped onto the plant genome. To study these predictions, a team of scientists whose disciplines range from molecular genetics to ecosystem processing will observationally and experimentally study stands of trees of known genetic composition in plantations and perform a biogeographic analyses of river systems from Arizona to Alberta. Scientists have a very poor understanding of the genetic links that tie species together to form communities, which affect biodiversity and ecosystems. Cottonwoods are well suited to these studies because they exhibit great genetic variation, and are dominant trees in a habitat that supports high biodiversity, but is rapidly vanishing due to loss of stream-side habitat. These studies address major issues in ecological genetics, community ecology and conservation biology doc4055 none Opsins are seven-transmembrane helix proteins that bind all-trans or 11-cis isomers of retinal to form light-absorbing pigments known as rhodopsins. Previously, opsin-encoding genes had only been cloned from animals and the archaea. The principal investigator recently identified the first opsin gene from eukaryotic microbes, Neurospora crassa nop-1. The NOP-1 protein sequence is most similar to that of archaeal opsins, with conservation of all 22 retinal binding pocket residues, including the lysine residue that forms a Schiff base linkage with retinal. NOP-1 is also similar to several predicted proteins from various fungal species, including Saccharomyces cerevisiae Hsp30p. With the exception of two predicted proteins from filamentous fungi, all other related fungal proteins lack the Schiff base lysine residue and we have referred to them as Opsin-Related Proteins (ORPs). NOP-1 has been overexpressed in Pichia pastoris and its spectral properties determined. Similar to archaeal opsins, NOP-1 binds all-trans retinal with a Schiff base linkage. The resultant pigment has an absorption maximum at 534 nm (green). The relatively long photocycle of the NOP-1 pigment is similar to that of archaeal sensory rhodopsins, suggesting NOP-1 functions as a sensory receptor in N. crassa. The nop-1 message is most abundant under conditions that favor asexual sporulation (conidiation) in N. crassa. Although ?nop-1 mutants do not have visible phenotypes at 30oC, these strains exhibit green light-dependent defects in asexual spore-forming structures and cell viability at elevated growth temperatures (37-42oC). Also, the principal investigator identified an EST encoding a N. crassa ORP (orp-1). The predicted ORP-1 protein sequence is most similar to HSP30 from Coriolus versicolor. In contrast to NOP-1, ORP-1 only shows conservation of 50% of the 22 retinal binding pocket residues with archaeal rhodopsins, including substitution of isoleucine for the Schiff base lysine residue. The sequence similarity between NOP-1 and archaeal rhodopsins; the evolutionary relationship between NOP-1 and S. cerevisiae Hsp30p; the light-dependent expression of nop-1; the sensory rhodopsin-like photocycle of NOP-1; the light-dependent conidiation defect of ?nop-1 mutants in the presence of oligomycin, and the light-dependent defects in cell growth at elevated temperatures lead to the following hypothesis: Opsins and ORPs regulate cell growth, viability and development during cellular stress responses in N. crassa, potentially via light-dependent and independent pathways, respectively. The Research Objectives of this project are 1) To determine the localization and native chromophore of NOP-1 in N. crassa and to further characterize the involvement of nop-1 in stress and developmental regulation; 2) to identify genes that regulate nop-1 gene expression and genes whose expression is regulated by nop-1; 3) to create and analyze a ?orp-1 mutant and to over-express and characterize the encoded ORP-1 protein, and 4) to identify other genes encoding opsins and ORPs, and other nop-1 pathway components. During this collaborative research project, one laboratory will focus on Objectives 1 and 3, while the other will focus on Objectives 2 and 4. This collaborative research project will strengthen and extend the existing collaboration, and exploit the complementary skills and resources available to the two principal investigators. One principal investigator has extensive expertise in genome analysis, molecular evolution, the genetics and biochemistry of stress responses and the genetics of filamentous fungi in general. The other has significant experience in protein biochemistry, mutational analysis of fungal genes, stress responses and signal transduction via both G proteins and histidine kinases. The former has access to the resources of the Neurospora Genome Project, including automated sequencing and microarray facilities. The latter is in close proximity to a leader in biophysical analysis of archaeal rhodopsins and who has been a past and is a current collaborator. The existence of seven-helix opsin receptors has been postulated in eukaryotic microbes for decades. Many of these organisms utilize light signals to regulate cell growth, reproduction, phototaxis or the circadian clock. Therefore, the identification of an opsin in N. crassa has enormous repercussions for filamentous fungi and other eukaryotes. Furthermore, the lack of an opsin in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae points to the importance of studying this class of proteins in the model filamentous fungus N. crassa. In addition, very little is known about ORPs in fungi: for example, whether they can bind a chromophore, absorb light, etc. Thus, the principal investigators are in the position of making pivotal discoveries in this field using N. crassa as an experimental organism doc4056 none Eukaryotic cells are composed of a basic set of organelle building blocks that include (among others) the nucleus, endoplasmic reticulum (ER), Golgi apparatus, lysosomes, mitochondria, peroxisomes and, in photosynthetic organisms, chloroplasts. This relatively small number of separate cellular components belies the amazing diversity of cell structure and function that exists in eukaryotic organisms. In each case, the specialization of cell structure and function is mirrored by changes in organelle composition. Thus, a key feature of cell biology is the regulation of subcellular organization, that is, the regulation of which organelles are present and their size, composition, location, number, and life spans. Surprisingly, given the importance of this regulation, there is not yet a single example in which the molecular nature of this regulation is well understood. The experiments that will be performed explore this question by focusing on the regulation of endoplasmic reticulum structure and function in the yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. As in all other cell-types examined, the organization of the ER in yeast is sensitive to the levels of a subset of ER proteins. One of these proteins, HMG-CoA reductase, catalyzes the first committed step in sterol and isoprene biosynthesis. In yeast, expression of increased levels of HMG-CoA reductase induces assembly of specialized regions of ER termed karmellae, consisting of stacks of paired smooth membranes that are closely associated with the nucleus. The ability to control karmella assembly by merely changing the levels of a single protein provides a unique opportunity to explore the molecular mechanisms by which cells increase biogenesis of a particular ER domain when dictated by physiological demands. To uncover these mechanisms, Dr. Wright will use a genetic approach that takes advantage of new resources available as a result of completion of the Yeast Genome Project. Specifically, she will use a population genetic approach to identify deletion mutants that display defects in growth rate when they assemble karmellae. Coupled with information from a Two-Hybrid approach to identify gene products that interact with HMG-CoA reductase, this approach should reveal genes that have important roles in assembly of karmellae. The analysis of karmella assembly mutants will be guided by in vivo time-lapse light microscopy and electron microscopic analysis of karmella assembly. Completion of these experiments should uncover basic features of the communication network that reports and regulates ER function coordinately with changing physiological demands. Such knowledge will have specific application to understanding the cellular regulation of ER structure and function, but should also provide general insights concerning the cellular regulation of organelle biogenesis doc4057 none This project will transform the Tree of Life from a collection of static web pages containing information about biodiversity and phylogeny into a dynamic system using a relational database. The Tree of Life Project is a global, collaborative effort of more than 300 biologists. The project s goals range from informal science education to serving the research needs of systematic biologists, as well as other life scientists whose work benefits from an understanding of the special characteristics and phylogenetic relationships of organisms. In order to convert the Tree into a database-driven system, the project will design database and associated display and data entry modules. The content of the Tree s current pages will then be moved into this database, and customizable, open-source tools will be created for the dynamic presentation of information and for efficient entry of new data into the system. The database will be constructed to allow communication between the Tree and other biological databases. The major benefits of the Tree s new format are expansion of the project s reach through data sharing with other database efforts and novel flexibility in presentation of information allowing us to better serve the needs of diverse users doc4058 none Biological systems are integrated complex assemblies of macromolecules that use chemical energy to sustain life. As such, their properties area function of their physicochemical parameters such as solubility, lipophilicity, electronic effects, ionization, and stereochemistry, that have profound influence on the chemistry and biochemistry of the complex. This project develops a computational platform that integrates 1. physically-based computational and analytical modeling using QM techniques, 2. experimental databases, 3. computational analysis tools, and 4. visualization manipulation interfaces, in order to create a transparent and common interface for the use of these now relatively disparate set of tools. This infrastructure will provide a database and integrate associated tools that allows the user to focus on the principles of stereochemistry, chemical synthesis, computational structure prediction, and physical analysis as applied to molecular recognition, biomolecular conformational analysis, and supramolecular chemistry. The end result will impact biologists and biochemists working in areas such as bioorganic chemistry, medicinal chemistry, enzyme structure and function, and nucleic acid recognition doc4059 none Bernardo The action potential is the universal signal in the nervous system throughout the animal kingdom. Action potentials are very similar in different parts of the nervous system and between different animals. Information is instead encoded in the temporal pattern of series of action potentials. Several factors contribute to generating these patterns, among these the diversity of ion channels carrying, potassium (K ) ions (K channels) is one of the main contributors to shaping neural signals. A large number of new K channels have been discovered recently through genetic analysis, and this is likely to increase as the full sequence of the genomes of several animals becomes known. A major task of future research is to understand the physiological roles of these genes. This project will study a new K channel gene, known as Eag2, identified and cloned in the applicant s laboratory. Eag genes have been introduced into model cells, where they result in the formation properties. The task is to determine if they have the same properties in their native environment in the brain. To discover the functional roles of Eag channels, experiments are design to explore which brain cells normally express the products of these genes. Electrophysiological techniques are then used to study their properties in native cells, and their role in shaping neuronal signals. Preliminary studies suggest that Eag genes are specifically expressed in neurons in the cerebral cortex that are the main recipients of sensory information. This project will test the hypothesis that Eag channels have crucial functions in regulating whether or not sensory information enters the cerebral cortex and hence in determining states of consciousness. This study will unravel the function of novel K channel genes and advance our understanding of the mechanisms by which the brain processes application in discovering the roles of the newly found genes doc4060 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of California in Los Angeles will acquire a Gas Chromatograph-Time of Flight Mass Spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) development of new synthetic methods and total synthesis of biologically interesting natural products; b) studies on singlet oxygen chemistry; c) supramolecular and macromolecular chemistry; d) ubiquinone biochemistry; e) conducting polymers; and f) structural characterization of bioactive oxidized lipids and lipid second messengers of these phospholipids. Mass spectrometry (MS) is a technique used to probe intimate structural details and to obtain the molecular compositions of a vast array of organic, bioorganic, and organometallic molecules. The results from these studies will have an impact in a number of areas including biochemistry and materials science doc4061 none The California chaparral and similar communities around the world have played a pivotal role in the development of plant ecology as a science. The ecological similarity of distantly related species in these communities has long served as a paradigmatic example of convergent adaptation. In addition, the study of ecological differences between species has played a central role in elucidating alternative strategies related to abiotic stress and disturbance. The study of ecological variation has focused on two features: i) water relations and drought tolerance, in relation to rooting depth and habitat distribution, and ii) contrasting life history strategies related to regeneration following fire. The first objective of this study is to examine the relationships between photosynthetic characteristics, drought tolerance, and fire-regeneration traits in a broad comparative study of over 30 species from three sites ranging from northern to southern California. The second objective of this project is to integrate these ecological studies with the rapidly expanding knowledge of phylogenetic relationships among plant species to test whether the similarities and differences among these species represent local adaptations to the chaparral climate, or older characteristics which then led to the assembly of the current community. This project represents the first attempt to assess the contributions of a large number of physiological and life-history traits to the identification of functional groups in woody plant species. The identification of functional groups is a critical step in understanding the mechanisms of coexistence in diverse plant communities, and in assessing the potential responses of different species to changing fire regimes and other environmental conditions. Furthermore, this project will finally provide a test of the long-standing paradigm of convergent adaptation in chaparral-like communities doc4062 none Kimelman The establishment of the three germ layers is a major issue for every embryo. While the ectoderm appears to be the default state of the embryo, the mesoderm and endoderm arise through the use of inductive signals. Within the last decade, many of the key signaling molecules that induce the formation of the mesendoderm in the vertebrate embryo have been identified, but the mechanisms that precisely subdivide the germ layers are still largely unknown. This laboratory has identified a new T-box gene, TbxM, which is proposed to play a major role in the early patterning of the mesoderm and endoderm of zebrafish embryos. The role of TbxM in the inductive process leading to mesendoderm formation will be defined, and its interaction with other proposed maternal components will be studied. Finally, the mechanism of localization of TbxM transcripts during the early cleavage stages will be analyzed. These studies will provide insight into the fundamental mechanisms that pattern the early zebrafish doc4055 none Opsins are seven-transmembrane helix proteins that bind all-trans or 11-cis isomers of retinal to form light-absorbing pigments known as rhodopsins. Previously, opsin-encoding genes had only been cloned from animals and the archaea. The principal investigator recently identified the first opsin gene from eukaryotic microbes, Neurospora crassa nop-1. The NOP-1 protein sequence is most similar to that of archaeal opsins, with conservation of all 22 retinal binding pocket residues, including the lysine residue that forms a Schiff base linkage with retinal. NOP-1 is also similar to several predicted proteins from various fungal species, including Saccharomyces cerevisiae Hsp30p. With the exception of two predicted proteins from filamentous fungi, all other related fungal proteins lack the Schiff base lysine residue and we have referred to them as Opsin-Related Proteins (ORPs). NOP-1 has been overexpressed in Pichia pastoris and its spectral properties determined. Similar to archaeal opsins, NOP-1 binds all-trans retinal with a Schiff base linkage. The resultant pigment has an absorption maximum at 534 nm (green). The relatively long photocycle of the NOP-1 pigment is similar to that of archaeal sensory rhodopsins, suggesting NOP-1 functions as a sensory receptor in N. crassa. The nop-1 message is most abundant under conditions that favor asexual sporulation (conidiation) in N. crassa. Although ?nop-1 mutants do not have visible phenotypes at 30oC, these strains exhibit green light-dependent defects in asexual spore-forming structures and cell viability at elevated growth temperatures (37-42oC). Also, the principal investigator identified an EST encoding a N. crassa ORP (orp-1). The predicted ORP-1 protein sequence is most similar to HSP30 from Coriolus versicolor. In contrast to NOP-1, ORP-1 only shows conservation of 50% of the 22 retinal binding pocket residues with archaeal rhodopsins, including substitution of isoleucine for the Schiff base lysine residue. The sequence similarity between NOP-1 and archaeal rhodopsins; the evolutionary relationship between NOP-1 and S. cerevisiae Hsp30p; the light-dependent expression of nop-1; the sensory rhodopsin-like photocycle of NOP-1; the light-dependent conidiation defect of ?nop-1 mutants in the presence of oligomycin, and the light-dependent defects in cell growth at elevated temperatures lead to the following hypothesis: Opsins and ORPs regulate cell growth, viability and development during cellular stress responses in N. crassa, potentially via light-dependent and independent pathways, respectively. The Research Objectives of this project are 1) To determine the localization and native chromophore of NOP-1 in N. crassa and to further characterize the involvement of nop-1 in stress and developmental regulation; 2) to identify genes that regulate nop-1 gene expression and genes whose expression is regulated by nop-1; 3) to create and analyze a ?orp-1 mutant and to over-express and characterize the encoded ORP-1 protein, and 4) to identify other genes encoding opsins and ORPs, and other nop-1 pathway components. During this collaborative research project, one laboratory will focus on Objectives 1 and 3, while the other will focus on Objectives 2 and 4. This collaborative research project will strengthen and extend the existing collaboration, and exploit the complementary skills and resources available to the two principal investigators. One principal investigator has extensive expertise in genome analysis, molecular evolution, the genetics and biochemistry of stress responses and the genetics of filamentous fungi in general. The other has significant experience in protein biochemistry, mutational analysis of fungal genes, stress responses and signal transduction via both G proteins and histidine kinases. The former has access to the resources of the Neurospora Genome Project, including automated sequencing and microarray facilities. The latter is in close proximity to a leader in biophysical analysis of archaeal rhodopsins and who has been a past and is a current collaborator. The existence of seven-helix opsin receptors has been postulated in eukaryotic microbes for decades. Many of these organisms utilize light signals to regulate cell growth, reproduction, phototaxis or the circadian clock. Therefore, the identification of an opsin in N. crassa has enormous repercussions for filamentous fungi and other eukaryotes. Furthermore, the lack of an opsin in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae points to the importance of studying this class of proteins in the model filamentous fungus N. crassa. In addition, very little is known about ORPs in fungi: for example, whether they can bind a chromophore, absorb light, etc. Thus, the principal investigators are in the position of making pivotal discoveries in this field using N. crassa as an experimental organism doc4064 none Gene expression (GE) data provide snapshots of the cellular biology of living organisms. However, unlike sequence data, GE data only have meaning in an experimental context. Representing that context in a compact, logical way is one of the tasks of this project. Like sequence data, GE data becomes most valuable when they are pooled and become searchable. For this to happen, lab systems must exchange data with higher level databases in a compatible manner. Such compatibility would allow efficient, low-cost sharing of data, in turn encouraging distributed development of objective statistical approaches in evaluating GE data, such as dealing with differences within and between technologies. It would also help to establish baseline levels of GE under many conditions. This project is a pilot study targeted at developing a GE database system that would address such problems in that it 1. Would be freely available as an Open Source project, 2. Could exchange data in a standard format, 3. Would include all the software required to install and run the system locally, and 4. Would be scalable from lab systems to institutional repositories. As a component of the establishment of proof of concept, the project implements a pilot, publicly available installation of contributed GE data doc4065 none Bothwell It is currently believed that biologically active polypeptides, such as peptide hormones and growth factors, may be secreted by two alternative processes - an unregulatory secretory pathway and a regulated pathway, and it is thought that all polypeptides share the same regulated secretory mechanism. For cells that display regulated secretion of several different peptide hormones and growth factors, this model predicts that cells cannot regulate release of these polypeptides independently. Preliminary results indicate, however, that there must exist at least two distinct pathways for secretion of biologically active polypeptides, potentially allowing cells to independently control the release of hormones and growth factors that have different functions. The novel pathway is revealed by studies of the secretion of the neurotrophic factor, BDNF. Regulated secretion of BDNF by brain nerve cells is of profound importance, because BDNF participates as an important regulator of synaptic transmission in the context of memory and learning. The general goal of this proposal is to examine the mechanisms regulating secretion of BDNF in pituitary cells (which serve as a convenient model system for study of regulated secretion) and in nerve cells from the hippocampal and cortical regions of the brain. Secretion of BDNF will be compared to secretion of structurally related neurotrophic factors, NGF and NT-3. Also secretion of BDNF will be compared to secretion of neuropeptides, such as ACTH and NPY. Some experiments will directly monitor the release of these polypeptides, from cultured cells, using immunoassays. Other experiments will compare the distribution of these polypeptides in secretory vesicles within the cell, by immunohistochemical techniques. These studies may have broad importance for understanding hormone action in the endocrine system, and for understanding nerve cell communication in the brain. The orderly function of all tissues of the body is dependent on communication between cells. A major method of cell-cell communication involves secretion of specific polypeptides, which act as messenger molecules. The release of these polypeptides, which may be called peptide hormones, neuropeptides, or growth factors, must be carefully controlled. This project explores the possibility that cells can control release of these polypeptides much more cleverly than was realized previously. Thoroughly characterizing these controlled release mechanisms is essential for a basic understanding of biological processes ranging from hormone action to memory and learning doc4066 none Emlen Funds from this proposal make possible a symposium on the evolution of developmental mechanisms in insects, to be held at the XXI International Congress of Entomology in Iguasu Falls, Brazil (20-26 August, ). Insect research has contributed enormously to our current understanding of both developmental and evolutionary biology. Recently, much of the ground-breaking work at the interface between these two fields has come from studies of insects. Yet there has never been a symposium at any major conference dedicated the evolution of developmental mechanisms in insects. Since our symposium will be part of the largest entomological gathering in the world, the PIs have the unique opportunity to harness a tremendous breadth of biological expertise in insect science towards a more complete and satisfying unification of evolutionary and developmental biology. They bring together investigators from around the world, but bias our participant list towards young investigators who are in the process of establishing lifetime research programs that explicitly integrate developmental with evolutionary biology. Their invited speakers use the powerful tools of developmental and molecular biology to test specific evolutionary questions in related species. This approach has historical precedent as a useful method of forging a meaningful synthesis between developmental and evolutionary biology. They anticipate that interactions derived from this symposium will establish new collaborations and reveal novel directions for future integrative entomological research doc4067 none Joseph One of the fundamental steps in the elongation cycle of protein synthesis is the iterative movement of the tRNA-mRNA complex in the ribosome, called translocation. The long-term objective of this research is to understand the mechanism of translocation of tRNAs from one site to the next within the E. coli ribosome. Ribosomes are composed of RNA and proteins. Results from phylogenetic sequence comparison, genetic studies and biochemical experiments indicate a functional role for ribosomal RNAs in translation. The specific goals of this proposal are to identify functional groups within tRNAs in the A-site and P-site that are required for translocation. Previous research in the PI s laboratory has shown that ribosomes containing a full-length tRNA bound to the P-site and an analog of the anticodon stem-loop of tRNA bound to the ribosomal A-site are translocated. This minimal analog of tRNA will be used to identify essential ribose 2 -hydroxyls and non-bridging phosphate oxygens required for translocation from the A-site. Other experiments from the PI s laboratory indicate that tRNAs with a break in the phosphodiester backbone are translocated from the P-site. Specific modifications within the smaller fragments of the tRNA can be incorporated by chemical synthesis. This presents a unique opportunity to study the role of specific functional groups within P-site tRNA that are required for translocation. Biochemical methods such as toeprinting and chemical probing will be used in addition to functional group substitution studies to identify interactions that are required for the movement of the tRNAs in the ribosome. These studies addressing functional interactions between tRNAs and the ribosome will be especially important once high-resolution crystal structures of the ribosome become available doc4068 none Arnone It is well known that atmospheric CO2 is rising, that changes in atmospheric CO2 are likely to affect the earth s climate, that changes in climate cause changes in net ecosystem productivity (NEP, a measure of ecosystem carbon exchange), and that terrestrial ecosystems act as a regulatory mechanism for atmospheric CO2. Although correlative studies have demonstrated that there are tight connections between atmospheric CO2, climate, and NEP, the fact is that we cannot explicitly quantify the links and feedbacks among them. This is perhaps the most critical void in our knowledge making it difficult, if not impossible, to predict the rate and consequences of global environmental change. This IRCEB project has three components - integrating experiments in a unique mesocosm facility, field experiments, and statistical and simulation modeling - that will allow the investigators to explicitly test four hypotheses regarding the relationships among climate, atmospheric CO2 and NEP: (1) an observed rapid rise in global atmospheric CO2 in anomalously warm years results from temperature-induced decreases in NEP resulting from increased heterotrophic respiration (Rh); (2) stimulated Rh will also lead to increased N mineralization causing increases in available soil N pools which in turn will result in increased plant N uptake and storage; (3) following the warm year, a return to more normal temperatures and Rh levels, along with high plant N stores causing an increase in NPP, will result in a large increase in NEP; and (4) temperature extremes will cause a multitude of ecological responses at different time scales and feedback to affect NEP, and therefore atmospheric CO2. Other feedbacks will be tested, as well. The centerpiece of the study is an experiment to be conducted in the mesocosm-scale EcoCELL lysimeter laboratory at the Desert Research Institute. This facility has the capability to continuously measure NEP on an ecosystem scale while simultaneously controlling climate variables. The EcoCELL experiment involves the imposition of a 4OC increase in ambient temperature during the second year of the experiment, which combined with an array of specific measurements to quantify physiological processes that control the carbon cycle, will enable the investigators to understand how NEP responds to year-to-year variation in temperature. Tallgrass prairie, one of the world s most studied grassland ecosystems, provides a model ecosystem for the project; and intact soil-plant monoliths will be extracted from a prairie field site and transported to the EcoCELLS providing the basis for the laboratory test. The EcoCELL experiment will be linked to two other study components, a native tallgrass prairie experiment in the field and modeling-data synthesis. The tallgrass prairie field study will help to calibrate and scale the observed responses under controlled environments and test causal relationships of temperature-induced effects on the availability of soil moisture and nutrients, hypothesized to be key factors in temperature-induced changes in NEP. These experiments will help determine whether variation in temperature affects tallgrass prairie ecosystem carbon exchange via direct effects, effects on water availability, or effects on nutrient dynamics. Statistical analysis and two specific model will represent a range of techniques to identify the processes that control ecosystem responses to temperature anomalies, and allow understanding and development of linkages between the laboratory and field experiments doc4069 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Barry M. Trost, of the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University, is developing new and efficient approaches for the synthesis of complex organic molecules. He is exploring a number of palladium, platinum, and ruthenium-catalyzed transformations, including the synthesis of skipped and conjugated dienes, butenolides with unsaturated side chains, and cross-conjugated trienes, the isomerization of propargylic alcohols to enals, and the isomerization of ynals to unsaturated esters. Multicomponent cyclizations afford efficient access to a variety of functionalities. Catalytic enantioselective pi-allyl palladium, molybdenum, ruthenium, and tungsten-based methodologies will be designed and developed, with the choice of metal dictating both the chemical and the stereochemical outcomes. Novel cyclization strategies based on nucleophilic catalysis are opening new doors for unprecedented approaches to polypeptide synthesis. As our knowledge of the structure and reactivity of molecules increases, the practice of organic synthesis is undergoing a change in focus, with the question now more often asked being not if a complex target can be synthesized, but rather how. Practical syntheses derive from the existence of a basic set of synthetic reactions, and the limitations of that base set define the extent to which organic syntheses may be made economical, efficient, and environmentally conscious. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Barry M. Trost, of the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University, is developing new and selective reactions which add to our arsenal of techniques for the synthesis of the complex organic molecules increasingly forming the basis of a myriad of applications, ranging from biology to materials science doc4070 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oregon in Eugene will acquire an ultrafast tunable laser source. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) vibrational spectroscopic measurements at liquid surfaces; b) self-assembly of inorganic organic multilayer thin films; c) pump probe studies of cage effects in organometallic radical chemistry; and d) carbon-rich networks and materials based on dehydrobenzoannulenes. Ultrafast spectroscopy allow scientists to investigate chemistry that occurs in the picosecond (10^-12) and femtosecond (10^-15) time regimes. On these extremely short timescales, atoms move and bonds between atoms are broken or formed. Ultrafast optical techniques allow for the investigation of chemical reaction dynamics during the course of the reaction itself. The detailed picture of chemical reactivity provided by ultrafast spectroscopy has allowed researchers to explore how plants harvest solar energy, to create new and more efficient optoelectronic materials, and to understand the fundamental steps in many environmental processes. In short, ultrafast spectroscopy holds the promise of unraveling the microscopic details of chemical reactivity doc4071 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project s objective is to provide oxide coatings that resist deterioration in a high-temperature oxidizing environment. A new, innovative process is will be developed that should form strongly-adherent, high-temperature, oxidation resistant coatings on steel alloys, iron and nickel superalloys, aluminides, and superalloy matrix composites. Using this process in Phase I, Alger Stirling Company (ASC) alpha-Al2O3 as well as ASC alpha-Al2O3 Ti2O3 protective coatings, whose coating-to-substrate bond strength was measured to be in excess of 10,000 psi, were formed on six different aluminum-containing and aluminum-and-titanium-containing alloy substrates. Phase II testing (1) will optimize oxide thickness to provide maximum oxide substrate bond strength, and (2) perform lifetime testing of the oxidized specimens in a high-temperature oxidizing environment. These coatings have broad application in industry throughout the nation. Products that utilize the ASC coatings can achieve longer lifetimes because of the surface protection provided by the coatings. Such longer lifetime translate directly to user dollar savings that are, first of all, a benefit to the entire nation and, second, make the products more competitive in foreign markets doc4072 none This Small Business Innovation Research (sbir) Phase II project will demonstrate use of the novel low-frequence sonic technology for application as an advanced fermentation process. This project objective will establish a fundamental understanding of the low-frequency sonic technology capabilities to increase the productivity and yield of various aerobic fermentation processes, e.g., bacteria, yeast and mycelial. The Phase II program includes the development, design and demonstration of a prototype processing system as an efficient and cost-effective method for advanced fermentation applications. The Phase I objectives were fully achieved and feasibility of the innovative technology was demonstrated to provide extraordinarily high rates of gas mass transport into liquids, at low energy values and at low shear rates. The quality and amount of scientific and engineering data exceeded expectations, providing a solid base for a Phase II success. Post-Phase II experimentation was undertaken, which demonstrated a specific commercial applications that have market-pull for use of the innovative fermentation methods. Several potential Phase III commercial fermentation applications have been identified. A commercial partner for Phase II co-funding and Phase III funding has been obtained. The commercial partner has also agreed to purchase equipment from Montec for their newly acquired fermentation business. Commercial applications for fermentation processes include large quantity drug production for enhancement of both human and animal health, amino acids such as lysine for animal feeds and phenylalanine for production of aspartame, food preservatives such as ascorbic acid (vitamin C), vitamins and a plethora of other commodity compounds. In general, the production of an increasing number of biologically active compounds is shifting from traditional organic synthesis to fermentation. In these areas, the development of a lower cost, higher productivity technology has strong commercial appeal both in new and retrofit situations. Fermentation is the commercial end of the genetic engineering revolution and is virtually used in all of the cutting edge therapeutics doc4073 none Thorpe This senior and distinguished PI works on properties of glasses but in the framework of a network model. In this view, which focuses on the geometric details such as network connectivity, the network is derived by putting the most important forces in the model to be infinite and the rest are set equal to zero. The resulting model is computationally manageable with a large number of particles. In this model, at a critical (as a function of) average coordination number (generally covalent glasses have large coordination number while the polymeric glasses in general have smaller coordination number), the states evolve in to a rigid and stressed state. However the numerical results show the existence if an intermediate state which is rigid but not stressed. This grant supports further work on this intermediate phase of a network glass. Recent experiments in chalcogenide glasses give preliminary evidence for an intermediate phase of this nature. %%% This senior and distinguished PI is a leader in the broad field of study involving glasses. In particular, guided by his belief that many properties of glasses can be studied using a geometric model, i.e. one made from sticks and balls, he has noticed the presence of curious phase of glass which may have been seen experimentally. Looking at glasses from their dependence on an average coordination number (number of atoms that a given atom may be connected to) there are two phases, one where the glass has a small coordination number, no rigidity and no accumulated stress while at large coordination number, the glass is rigid and it has accumulated stress. Near the transition, and a range of coordination number around the critical value, there is an intermediate phase corresponds to a rigid but unstressed glass. He plans to look at the observable properties of state doc4074 none Baldwin, Thomas It is commonly assumed that polypeptides that function as components of multisubunit complexes have the same structure, whether in the complex or as the free subunit. The hypothesis upon which this proposal is based is that this view is not generally accurate. This PI suggest that the conformation of the subunit in the complex may represent only a fraction of the conformations present in an equilibrium population of the free subunits. In support of this hypothesis is the fact that the associate rate constants for assembly of multisubunit complexes span many orders of magnitude in value. Through the experiments described in this proposal, the PI expects to find kinetic heterogeneity in associate rates for the luciferase subunits. Differences in association rates will be evidence for differing structures, and the relative amplitudes of the different rate components will allow quantitative description of the relative populations of conformers. In the second phase of these experiments, the PI will ascertain the extent to which the populations of conformers may be altered by solution conditions and by genetic mutation. A large proportion of all polypeptides in living cells function within multisubunit complexes. The fundamental mechanisms through which these complexes assemble are very poorly understood. There has been extensive work on the energetics of complex formation, but relatively little on the rates of formation and dissociation. Protein-protein interactions play crucial roles in many fundamental life processes. The research of this project is designed to obtain a more detailed and fundamental understanding of the dynamic nature of multisubunit proteins doc4075 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project plans to develop a new fiber based chemical sensor technology that can be used to make rapid trace chemical analysis of gaseous and liquid environments without the need for time consuming sample extraction and preparation. This new miniature sensing technology will combine aspects of fiber optics, enhanced absorption analysis techniques, and ultimately wireless internet communications. This technology will provide commercial and government users a chemical monitoring system which can be inexpensively networked over wide areas. Such a network of sensors can be monitored in real time from any secured computer via the Internet, providing real time information relating to chemical processing and transport, as well as for the monitoring of leaks and hazardous accidents. Such a system could be used as a warning network for large plant facilities and neighborhoods. This technology is being developed for commercial application in several areas in collaboration with an established fiber sensor supplier for trace detection of chemicals around storage facilities and industrial facilities doc4076 none 00- Ogram Linkages between microbial diversity and processes along nutrient gradients in wetlands Much is known of the response of process-level functions (e.g. rates of carbon mineralization, nitrogen fixation, denitrification, sulfate reduction) to nutrient inputs in wetlands. Almost nothing is known of the prokaryotes responsible for these processes or of possible changes in species composition or richness of the resident microbial communities. This Florida Everglades study will test the hypothesis that the addition of nutrients to a large-scale ecosystem will change activities and representation of key groups of bacteria responsible for carbon and nitrogen cycling and sulfate reduction. The investigators are using molecular methods to study the microbial groups present along a phosphorus gradient, identifying indicator phylogenetic and functional groups that change either with regard to composition, species richness or activity along the gradient. The study will provide an opportunity to study the process of reverse eutrophication (recovery) using an integrated biogeochemical cellular, and microbial process-level approach doc4077 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)Phase II project will conduct research to develop a new class of cutting tools for high rate high precision machining of Al-Si alloys, composites, and ceramics. Advanced cutting tools will improve machining economics in the automotive, aerospace and related industries. The new cutters will be made from a patent pending Tricontinuous Diamond Carbide Metal Composite (TDCC) material formed using high pressure high temperature sintering technology. The potential of this TDCC technology was demonstrated in Phase I, wherein proof-of-principle TDCC cutters outperformed conventional PCD cutters and showed up to two times longer tool life in Al-Si alloy machining tests. In Phase II development of the TDCC sintering process will be carried out, with emphasis on demonstrating TDCC tool performance improvement, cost reduction, and quality control applicable for mass production. In addition development and performance demonstration of prototype cutting tools that use TDCC inserts are planned. The primary objective of Phase II research will be to demonstrate the commercial feasibility of making machining tools using TDCC material. Collaboration with a leading automotive parts manufacturer, that will provide facilities and equipment for testing of the TDCC tools, has been arranged. This will help insure that the successful completion of the Phase II effort will lead to Phase III commercialization in the area of high rate high precision tool manufacturing for automotive and other markets. Use of low wear high impact resistance TDCC tools will significantly impact the automotive and aerospace parts manufacturing industry allowing high transfer line speeds, lower operation count, and better surface finish which in turn will lead to improved production efficiency and lower product cost doc4078 none Recent research has suggested that plasma turbulence and the associated transport of particles may also be consistent with a state of self-organized criticality (SOC). However, unambiguous identification of an SOC state for turbulence in plasmas has not been made, and existing evidence remains primarily suggestive. The universality of SOC-like systems, the ability to explain non-local phenomena and their independence of detailed mode characteristics motivate the current research effort. The primary goal of the project is to search for long-range correlation of turbulent transport events and to contrast and compare in detail experimental measurements with the predictions of complex dynamic theory. The work will be performed by a combined theoretical and experimental team, with experiments being carried out on the new Large Plasma Device under construction at the University of California, Los Angeles doc4079 none This project will develop and implement a new analytical tool for the investigation of the nano-optic functional morphology of color-producing and transparent biological arrays. The method uses 2D and 3D discrete Fourier analysis of 2D and 3D electron microscope images to describe the nanostructural periodicity of biological arrays, to predict the hue and shape of their reflectance spectra, and to test the hypothesis that these structures produce colors or transparency by coherent scattering (i.e. interference). The project will further expand the method and apply it in demonstration analyses of nano-optic arrays from vertebrates, invertebrates, plants, and viral aggregations that vary in spatial organization, composition, and optical properties. The accuracy of the physical approximations required by the model will be tested by comparison to explicit solutions using the finite-difference time-domain method. The proposed tools will unify current methods of optical analysis of biological nanostructures, permitting functional analysis of evolutionary transitions among nanostructural classes for the first time. The proposed tool will have broad implications for the study of the function of nano-optic biological arrays in communication, mate choice, sensory biology, crypsis, and other fields nanostructural biology doc4080 none This symposium will bring together ten scientists and engineers from the U.S. and Austria for the first meeting to share research on vibration signals. Talks will describe use of vibration in predator defense, prey detection, recruitment to food, mating behavior, and maternal brood social interactions, as well as synthetic signals sent back to animals, and channels through which signals are gathered and processed. The speakers are males and females from all academic ranks, engineers and biologists, field and lab specialists. The symposium will be hosted by the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) at its annual meeting, January 3-7, , in Chicago. Poster and paper sessions will be held for students and others with interests in vibration. A meeting hosted by the SICB s Division of Animal Behavior will encourage informal discussions among these students and the symposium speakers. The SICB provides a vehicle for the diversity of disciplines to come together for a highly productive session that will be published in a journal, American Zoologist, accessible to scholars that do not attend the symposium. Computers and hardware such as the geophone, used to listen for footfalls in the jungles of Vietnam, now allow researchers to answer increasingly sophisticated questions about how animals send and receive signals. Scientists have known for some time that leafcutter ants use vibration to recruit foragers or to signal for help when buried alive, but the use of vibration in animal communication is much more ubiquitous than previously thought. It occurs in insects, frogs, kangaroo rats, elephants and bison doc4081 none Gopal This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will investigate the use of redox catalyst electrodes for the synthesis of hydrogen peroxide through electrochemical regeneration of the redox catalyst. In the Phase I research, catalysts were developed and their short-term stability for peroxide synthesis was successfully demonstrated. Flow cell operation with 10 cm2 electrode cells showed the preparation of hydrogen peroxide in acidic condition (1N H2SO4) at 60% current efficiency and up to 2% in peroxide concentration. However, Phase I work indicated poor catalytic current with oxygen for these redox systems, as well as an upper limit for hydrogen peroxide concentration (2%). Phase II research effort will be directed towards improving the catalytic effect of these redox catalysts through changes in preparative procedures, electrode structure, and fabrication technique. The electrodes will be tested and optimized for peroxide synthesis using oxygen air and almost pure water (pH adjusted, if necessary) using flow cell experiments. The electrodes will be tested for long-tem stability (500 hours). Larger electrodes (100cm2 ) will be fabricated using the best composite electrode for long-term stability testing and process optimization. Commercialization of the process will be carried out with a Phase III partner upon the successful completion of Phase II work. Potential Commercial Application of the Research Hydrogen peroxide is a clean oxidant, which reacts to form water as its reaction product. It is therefore environmentally acceptable in many industries. The market for hydrogen peroxide is expected to grow by almost 10% for the next few years. New technology (synthesis of hydrogen peroxide from water and air) described in this Phase II proposal could be implemented for various applications. These areas include wastewater treatment, on-site generation (for industrial and consumer application such laundry bleach etc.), as well as commercial peroxide production doc4082 none The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project aims to demonstrate the operation of a commercially viable boron deposition source based on vacuum arc technology. The source is for the deposition of boron-based, self-lubricious coatings of hardness comparable to diamond, which are also compatible with high-temperature applications. A special sintering method, developed in the Phase I, produced boron cathodes that survive the severe vacuum arc environment, when properly supported and heated. This patentable Phase I technology will be applied in the Phase II to demonstrate the production of the desired films. The emphasis will be in ultra-hard forms of nearly-pure boron, although some compounds are also of interest. Water cooling of the anode and surrounding structures will be used to avoid damage in continuous operation of the source. Well established wall conditioning techniques will be used to reduce contamination of the films from the inner surfaces of the vacuum chamber. Partnering with both a major coatings company and with a major manufacturer of heavy machinery, that require low-friction, hard-coatings for components, will enhance this Phase II project with valuable in-kind support, as well as a clear path to the Phase III commercialization. Boron coatings have excellent hardness, tribological (low friction) and corrosion resistance properties. Their high temperature and combustion environment compatibility would make them ideal for advanced automotive applications. For example, such coatings could potentially eliminate the need for added lubricants in high temperature, low heat loss diesel engines, leading to substantial reduction in particulate emissions doc4083 none The number of wives in the labor force has doubled over the past three decades and household migration behavior is increasingly dependent on a complex process of joint decision making. This research examines, in a longitudinal context, the geographic and economic impacts of migration on dual-earner families, with specific focus on the labor-force experience of married women. Research on the impact of women s participation in the labor force has indicated that two-earner households are less likely to move than single-earner households due to their dual labor-force attachment. Traditional family migration research has argued that migration is associated frequently with the loss of earnings, interrupted careers, unemployment, underemployment or leaving the labor force on the part of the wife. In contrast, more recent work has raised questions about the disadvantaged effects and suggests that employment of married women increases with migration. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data this study considers the full range of potential labor force impacts on married women within the larger context of parallel careers in the life course of women and families. The study controls for the bias of migration self-selectivity. It explicitly considers the spatial variation in dual-earner family migration and the effects of migration on women in these families. Furthermore, this research uses longitudinal models to differentiate between the short-term and the long-term impacts of migration on married women. It addresses participation (employment, unemployment, underemployment, interrupted careers) and financial aspects of the impact of migration on married women. A better understanding of the joint employment and location decisions of husbands and wives has the potential to improve the efficiency of the labor market. Women are the most dynamic supply sector of the labor market, and married women are an important component of spatial changes in the labor force, by virtue of their increased participation and their impact on family migration in general. Industry and organizations invest about 15 billion dollars annually in job relocations. Many of the transferees are married and dual earners, and relocating two earners is much more difficult than relocating a single earner. Spouses, relatives, and children are no longer considered mere appendages of the employee. Corporations are recognizing the need for greater incentives and support for the spousal job search process. Further, it is estimated that between ten and fifteen percent of all relocations are for the married woman s job, and there is reason to believe that this figure will continue to rise in the future. Given contemporary social changes it is an appropriate time to reassess family migration theory. New findings will enrich our knowledge of the temporal and spatial variations in the impact of family migration on women in dual-earner households doc4084 none This proposal is for the support of the methodological training of a cultural anthropologist. Specifically, Stone seeks training in crop biotechnology, a first step in a larger agenda for cross-cultural research on genetically modified crops (GM crops). Genetically modified crops are becoming an important component of crop regimes not only in the industrialized countries, but also in the developing world. Anthropologists are seeking to make contributions to various debates about GM crops, specifically concerning the social and political implications and ramifications of these new crops and their agricultural sustainability. The PI is a specialist in agriculture who seeks to gain invaluable training in the biological aspects of GM crops. He will undertake a traineeship and do directed readings at the International Laboratory for Tropical Agricultural Biotechnology at the University of Missouri, as well as work with Professor Ralph Quatrano, Chairman of the Dept. of Biology, Washington University doc512 none This award updates the Correlates of War Project Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data set through . Such an effort is critical for international conflict research, but the enterprise of updating this collection is a monumental one that is beyond the scope or resources of any single researcher. Consequently this is a collaborative effort, linking scholars at eleven different universities to complete the task in a systematic and timely fashion. The MID data set has been at the forefront on international conflict research over the past decade or more. This data set is the most frequently used in conflict research and MID data has been employed to explore a staggering breadth of topics in international relations research, including most of those central to contemporary scholarly debates. Furthermore, MID data are the basis for several other data projects in the discipline as well as highly compatible with a range of other data compilations, thereby facilitating the combination of data sets and the exploration of broader sets of theoretical questions. Updating the Militarized Interstate Dispute data set requires completion of the following major steps: 1) collect and document militarized incidents from a variety of sources. This entails searching global, regional, and national sources for indications of a threat, display, or use of force by one state against another; 2) checking, archiving, and documenting the incidents collected to insure consistency, completeness, and absence of duplication; 3) composing militarized disputes based on the collected incidents and additional research as necessary. Because disputes are conflict episodes, such things as starting and ending dates, secondary participants, stages of escalation, overall fatalities, method of settlement, and general outcome must be determined. A short narrative description of each dispute is also prepared; 4) checking, archiving, and documenting disputes in order to insure such things as conformity with coding rules, compatibility with documentation standards, internal consistency, and absence of duplication; 5) resolving issues that arise concerning coding procedures, documentation requirements, problem cases, and the like; and, 6) preparing a final version (3.0) of the data set for distribution via the world wide web. This requires the resolution of a few problems that have been found in the present version (2.1) before it can be merged with the - data. This is a major infrastructure project for the Political Science program and enables the updating of a data set that will be used by numerous scholars in international relations and comparative politics doc4086 none This project will build on earlier work that explores the relationship between outside interventions and the secession of hostilities. Specifically my research proposal will address the following: 1) the expected duration of a conflict with and without outside interventions; 2) an examination of the relationship between strategy and outcome, specifically the effectiveness of the carrot and stick approach to intervening, by examining the interplay of punishments and rewards, and the relative effectiveness of gradual interventions versus large, episodic ones (the former is epitomized by Nicaragua or El Salvador; the latter by Somalia); 3) the conditions under which states substitute military, economic, and diplomatic initiatives in their attempts to influence the course of internal conflicts. Beyond these specific objectives the project will contribute to our understanding of when and how states choose across a range of potential policy options, the role of selection mechanisms in evaluating outcomes, and policy evaluation more generally. This project will add to the current state of our knowledge of intervention effectiveness, as well as making available to the social science community a fairly refined data set on interventions in internal conflicts. Specifically I will address the following: Conceptual Refinements: Develop and test a more complex understanding of the role of intervention strategy on conflict outcomes Examine the effects of intervention substitution Incorporate diplomatic interventions as a compliment to or alternative for military or economic strategies Examine the effect of outside interventions on the duration of intrastate conflicts Data Refinements: Record intervention data in terms of size and speed of the intervention Sequentially order the unfolding strategy of intervention Update current intervention data from to the present The initial focus would be on the expected duration of the conflict in light of (or in spite of) an outside intervention. The interesting theoretical and policy question is whether interventions shorten or prolong the expected duration of a civil conflict. We would expect that when third parties intervene they anticipate that their effort will lead to shortening the conflict. This has never been sufficiently examined. The second stage of the analysis will examine the effect of different strategies for intervening on the success or failure of the policy. If states (or international organizations) use intervention strategies as a form of conflict management then knowing what works best is critical information. Currently this level of knowledge is rather meager. For example, we know very little about the conflict management implications of using a mixture of diplomacy and coercion in trying to get actors in civil conflicts to stop fighting. I will first test for the conditions under which third parties select into intervention strategies. Using a Heckman selection model I can test whether there is systematic variation in potential conditions that cause an actor to choose to be in a specified category. This requires a two-stage estimation process, where a regression equation that would account for the success or failure of an intervention would be specified, along with a set of variable that should account for selection into the intervention. The first stage would estimate the likelihood that we would observe an intervention, given the set of specified conditions; the second stage would estimate the likelihood that an intervention would be successful. This research effort will produce two things of continuing value to the social science and policy communities. First, a series of journal articles will describe the data and present the results of the analyses. These analyses should have clear policy relevant implications, suggesting strategies for stopping intrastate conflicts that have the greatest chance of success. I anticipate that the project could culminate in a book-length manuscript that would have a dual audience consisting of policymakers and scholars. Second, as a result of the labor-intensive data generation effort we will have a data set on interventions in civil conflicts that will be highly desired and broadly applicable. I will make these data publicly available via my web site and or depositing them with ICPSR doc4087 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project deals with the fabrication of ultra high strength Polymer Metal Multi-layers (PML) nanolaminates. In Phase I, Sigma Technologies has demonstrated that the Aluminum Polymer nanolaminates have distinctive advantages over Aluminum, (a) a superior tensile strength (over 3 fold in some cases), (b) and a lower density. Furthermore, Sigma has developed, based on experimental results, a numerical model to predict the tensile strength of multilayer composites. The attractive features of the PML composites have generated a significant interest in this product by a major aerospace and avionics OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer. Additional functionality of this composite includes ultra-high gas and vapor barrier, high electrical conductivity, electromagnetic shielding, preferential heat conductivity that is useful for low observable applications, and structural self-monitoring characteristics. In Phase II, Sigma will further optimize the properties of the PML composites and upgrade equipment that is already in place to produce 7ft x 4ft PML panels. Parts will be tested independently by Sigma and its industrial and university partners. Market research has shown that several applications may be served by the multifunctional structural PML composites. Sigma will follow a systematic plan to identify niche markets and supply samples for evaluation doc4088 none Dr. Ian P. Rothwell, Department of Chemistry, Purdue University, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, for research into early transition metal aryloxide chemistry. The central theme of the project involves the use of sterically bulky aryloxide ligation to support both stiochiometeric and catalytic reactivity of unsaturated small molecules at transition metal centers. Studies will aim toward a mechanistic understanding of titanium-aryloxide catalyzed [2+2+1] acetylene trimerization and the development of the synthetic utility of the reaction. New C2 symmetric, chiral aryloxides will be used as monodentate supporting ligands to carry out asymmetric carbon-carbon bond forming reactions. Fundamental studies of the factors controlling both kinetic and thermodynamic resolution of the chiral species will be carried out. Finally, cationic metallacyclic niobium and tantalum complexes will be prepared. Sterically bulky groups bound to transition metals are often effective in preventing reactants of certain size and shape from accessing the metal center. As a consequence, the reactions that do occur produce products with a preferred geometry. In this study, bulky alkoxide groups will be used to effect stereospecific reactivity to some early transition metal promoted reactions of utility in the synthesis of organic compounds doc4089 none This NSF DOE collaborative research project between researchers at Michigan State University and Northeastern University will investigate and establish the scientific basis and engineering principles for the design and operation of small microwave plasma sources with discharge dimensions ranging from 0.3-10 mm. Small microwave discharges operate with low input power, while having very high power densities and highly reactive species outputs. The availability of physically compact microwave power sources built for mobile communication systems combined with small microwave plasma sources opens the possibility of many unique microwave plasma applications. The proposed research will experimentally evaluate and theoretically model the behavior of very small microwave discharges, i.e. millimeter and submillimeter size discharges. Two microwave plasma systems will be used including a highly flexible and adjustable testbed plasma source and a micromachined, microstrip line-based plasma source. The research methodology is to study, using experimental diagnostics and electromagnetic plasma simulation models, discharges with diameters ranging from 10 mm to 0.3 mm in the testbed plasma source. Then, this testbed source knowledge will be used to design, build and test micromachined, microstrip line based plasma sources. Some of the possible applications include plasma sources for MEMS-scale chemical analysis, micro-thrusters for spacecraft, miniature electrodeless light sources, and miniature sources for spatially focused, plasma-assisted chemical vapor deposition. This project will demonstrate two applications including diamond deposition on small substrate areas and micro-plasmas for portable, low temperature sterilization doc4090 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Sciences for fiscal year . The research and training plan is in the area of population biology and is entitled, Examining riverbank restricted plants to determine if there is a pattern of genetic diversity coinciding with the structure of the watershed. Riparian plants may periodically be scoured out by seasonal floodwaters. Plant populations high in the watershed are less influenced by stochastic effects and may provide a source of migrants to recolonize regions downstream. This research compares genetic structure to spatial structure of the populations and estimates the relative importance of migration, founder effects and genetic drift. This study illustrates the potential role of population genetic structure for management efforts in terrestrial riparian corridors doc4091 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop a planar magnetic levitator positioner for precision microelectronics manufacturing equipment. Based on feasibility proven in Phase I, Phase II will design, construct, and test a minimum-actuator maglev stage that can be readily integrated in a process tool. A single-moving maglev platen will be driven in all six degrees of freedom with three levitation motors. The platen will generate large two-dimensional motions for transportation with small four-axis motions for alignment and small adjustments. It will lead to a clean-room compatible, lightweight, compact, inexpensive structure that can meet demanding dynamic performance requirements in next-generation precision microelectronics manufacturing. Magnetic levitation has many potential applications in microelectronics manufacturing equipment that require precise planar position control, such as wafer steppers, wafer handlers, wire bonders, surface profilometers, scanned probe microscopes, and precision inspection machines. This technology is expected to figure prominently in the highly competitive microelectronics manufacturing capital equipment industry doc4092 none Rinzel The neural computation by the mammalian auditory system to localize low frequency sound sources relies on processing in the brain stem. Neurons and circuits there, in the medial superior olive (MSO), have specialized biophysical properties for processing and preserving precise timings. These neurons have distinctive firing properties. When a steady stimulus is presented they fire only once, at stimulus onset; many other types of neurons would behave tonically, firing throughout the stimulus presentation. This property of phasicness is believed crucial for the MSO cell s role in precise temporal processing. In contrast, tonic cells are assumed to be less capable of tracking rapidly changing signals. The MSO cells have a special potassium current, IK-LT, that underlies their phasic behavior. The investigator and his colleagues systematically study how the temporal processing ability of a neuron changes as the neuron is transformed from phasic to tonic mode, say by gradually adjusting the strength of IK-LT (using pharmacological blockers and electronic methods of re-introducing the blocked current). When a cell is in phasic mode does it track a time-varying signal better, or does it perform better coincidence detection, than when it is in tonic mode? The research combines both experimental and theoretical approaches. The experiments involve electrical recording from individual MSO neurons while stimulating them with periodic and other time-varying signals. Various quantitative criteria are applied to assess the quality of temporal processing. From the theoretical side, biophysically-based mathematical models are developed that mimic the MSO neurons, including a term for IK-LT. The model s performance for temporal processing is evaluated just like the real cells. In addition, concepts from nonlinear dynamical systems are applied in order to reveal and understand the underlying mathematical structure. This mathematical understanding will shed light on the significance of phasicness in other neural systems where the mechanism might not involve IK-LT. This project also explores the influence of randomness on the temporal processing abilities. Some randomness is intrinsic to the auditory nervous system, and it is believed to be functionally important. Without sources of variability, these nonlinear neuronal systems tend to phase-lock too well, impairing a system s ability to perform discrimination tasks. The investigator therefore also assesses the effects of randomness on the temporal processing power of phasic and tonic cells and on the theoretical models. This work seeks to test whether the commonly accepted notion, that phasicness enhances temporal processing power, passes a set of quantitative criteria and, if so, to develop a theoretical foundation that supports the notion and that extends to other neural and possibly some chemical and physical systems as well. A related subproject is to develop computational models that help explain the dynamic effects seen experimentally as interaural phase (or amplitude or frequency) is varied dynamically. A deeper understanding of some surprising effects, as seen in the auditory mid-brain, should contribute to developing a theory for how motion of sound sources is analyzed in the brain. It is believed that some neural computations involve cellular and circuit properties that enable encoding and decoding based on precise timing of action potentials. Sound localization in the auditory system offers a compelling example. It serves as the case study for this research, that seeks a more qualitative characterization of cellular properties that correlate with precise temporal processing. Many cells in the auditory brain stem contribute to the system s ability to detect coincidence of interaural signals. These neurons have distinctive firing properties. When a steady stimulus is presented they fire only once, at stimulus onset, while neurons of many other types will continue to fire until the stimulus is turned off. This property of phasicness is believed crucial for precise temporal processing. In contrast, tonic cells are assumed to be less capable of tracking rapidly changing signals. The biophysical basis, a special potassium current, IK-LT, appears to underlie phasicness in the brain stem neurons. This project systematically addresses how the temporal processing ability of a neuron changes as the neuron is transformed from phasic to tonic mode, say by gradually adjusting the strength of IK-LT. When a cell is in phasic mode does it track a time-varying signal better, or does it perform better coincidence detection, than when it is in tonic mode? The research combines both experimental and theoretical approaches. The experiments involve electrical recording from individual neurons in vitro while stimulating them with periodic and other time-varying signals, including random components. From the theoretical side, biophysically-based mathematical models are developed that mimic the neurons, including a term for IK-LT. Various measures are applied to the computer and cellular models to assess reliability and precision of processing. In addition, concepts from nonlinear dynamical systems are applied in order to reveal and understand the underlying mathematical structure. This understanding will enable us to generalize about the significance of phasicness to other neural systems where the mechanism might not involve IK-LT. A related subproject is to develop computational models that help explain the dynamic effects seen experimentally as interaural phase (or amplitude or frequency) is varied dynamically. A deeper understanding of these surprising effects, as seen in the auditory mid-brain, should contribute to developing a theory for how motion of sound sources is analyzed in the brain. This project is supported by the Applied Mathematics and Computational Mathematics programs and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in MPS and by the Computational Neuroscience program in BIO doc4093 none Wei Jiang Jiang In all eukaryotic cells, accurate duplication of chromosomes and precise segregation of the sister chromatids into two daughter chromosomes are essential for faithful propagation of their identity. The first event, DNA replication, is a tightly regulated process that is strictly coupled to the progression of the cell cycle. It occurs at discrete chromosomal locations (replication origins) during the S-phase of the cell cycle. When DNA replication is initiated, the cell must ensure that all of its genome is replicated and that the replication of every DNA section occurs once and only once per cell cycle. HsCdc6, a human protein homolog to the budding yeast DNA replication protein Cdc6p, plays an essential role in the initiation of DNA replication in human cells. Like all Cdc6-related proteins, HsCdc6 contains a bipartite Walker nucleotide-binding motif and shows significant sequence similarity to the eukaryotic and prokaryotic clamp loaders that load ring-shaped DNA polymerase processivity factors onto DNA. Recent studies have shown that HsCdc6 has intrinsic ATP binding and ATPase activity, which play important roles in regulating the initiation of DNA replication. HsCdc6 is a physiological substrate of cyclin-dependent kinase (Cdk). Cdk phosphorylation of HsCdc6 is required for the initiation of DNA replication and results in its nuclear exclusion via a receptor-dependent nuclear export. Therefore, it is suggested that Cdk phosphorylation of HsCdc6 prevents its reassociation with chromatin, thereby preventing DNA re-replication. Nevertheless, the exact mechanisms by which phosphorylation of HsCdc6 by Cdk is needed for the initiation and how phosphorylated HsCdc6 is specifically exported from the nucleus are unclear. Determination of these mechanisms is the goal of this project. The first aim of the project is to determine how Cdk phosphorylation of HsCdc6 regulates the initiation of DNA replication. Recombinant HsCdc6 and its Cdk phosphorylation mutants will be purified from insect cells using the baculovirus-based express system. Purified HsCdc6 proteins will be used to determine whether Cdk phosphorylation of HsCdc6 regulates its intrinsic ATP binding and or ATPase activity. Moreover, the functional roles of Cdk phosphorylation of HsCdc6 in regulating the initiation of DNA replication will be determined using the Xenopus cell-free DNA replication system. The second aim of this project is to determine the nucleocytoplasmic transport pathway that regulates the nuclear export of Cdk phosphorylated HsCdc6 and identify factor(s) that specifically regulates the process by in vitro binding protein purification or yeast two-hybrid screen strategies. This will ultimately lead to elucidation of the molecular mechanism by which Cdk phosphorylation of HsCdc6 prevents DNA re-replication in mammalian cells. These studies will contribute to a better understanding of the function roles of Cdk phosphorylation of HsCdc6 in regulating the initiation of DNA replication and preventing DNA re-replication. The results will also lead to a better understanding of the fundamental biological processes of DNA replication and nucleocytoplasmic transport, which are still enigmatic in higher eukaryotes doc4094 none Collisionless magnetic reconnection is a well known, but poorly understood phenomenon that is of critical importance to space plasma physics. This project seeks to understand the fundamental microphysics that produces collisionless reconnection by utilizing a variety of 2- and 3-dimensional computer codes to simulate the reconnection process. The computer codes will use hybrid techniques, where the ions are treated in kinetic particle terms and the electrons are treated as a magnetized fluid, and particle-in-cell (PIC) techniques where both ions and electrons are treated in full particle dynamical terms. The goal is to understand the microphysics that underlies all collisionless reconnection doc4095 none This award in the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research on the development of polyoxoanion-based dioxygenase catalysts by Professor Richard Finke of the Department of Chemistry at the Colorado State University. A specific focus is the development of new, more robust and longer lifetime dioxygenase catalysts using oxidation-resistant polyoxyanions. The approach involves the performance of kinetic and mechanistic studies of the polyoxoanion-to -dioxygenase catalyst evolution process, isolation and performance of compositional and structural characterization on the true active catalyst, and then the use of the isolated catalyst to extend its applicability to additional classes of reactions for which efficient catalysts do not presently exist. The goal of this research is to develop new catalysts which can directly utilize dioxygen to oxidize a wide variety of aromatics, olefins and alkanes of commercial importance. These catalysts will have a significant economic and environmental impact due to their ability to replace current co-oxidation processes and to their potential applications in the degredation of aromatic pollutants. The students involved in this project will receive broad training in analytical, inorganic and materials chemistry and leave them well-prepared for academic or industrial careers doc4096 none Simulation of the propagation of intense optical pulses in gas and plasma media is undertaken using a previously developed code WAKE. The research is done in collaboration with some ongoing experiments in dielectric capillaries using ultra-intense, ultra-short laser pulses at the University of Maryland doc4097 none Despite the importance of the redistricting process on the nature of democratic representation, redistricting practices and their consequences have been little explored outside of the United States context and that of a few other English speaking democracies. This project rectifies this by organizing the first redistricting conference that would be broadly comparative in content. The conference, a collaborative effort on the part of the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California, Irvine, the Administration and Cost of Elections (ACE) Project of the United Nations, and the International foundation for election Systems (IFES) and brings together scholars and practitioners from around the world. It is co-organized by a committee with a representative of each of these groups. The main objective of the conference is to provide academics and practitioners with a forum for collecting and exchanging information on comparative redistricting practices and their potential impact on electoral outcomes. The conference offers several significant theoretical and practical benefits: 1) Information compiled for and during the conference makes an important start toward the compilation of a comprehensive database on comparative redistricting practices. 2) Several important theoretical issues are addressed in the conference, including the implications of malapportionment (the creation of districts that are unequal in population), the potential for partisan gerrymandering (the creation of districts that favor one political party or special interest group at the expense of other groups) and its impact on the quality of representation, and the implications of various redistricting practices for the representation of minority - racial, ethnic, religious and linguistic - groups within the country. 3) This project also has important policy implications, particularly for newly emerging democracies. Because redistricting offers those in power and avenue for manipulating the outcome of elections, it is important to identify redistricting practices that will lend support to the democratic process as well as those that may be used to circumvent representative democracy doc4098 none In our daily life, we move in the environment, grab objects and perform a number of actions that are fundamental to our survival. These actions may seem very natural and effortless despite the fact that the brain performs an extremely complex analysis of the light pattern that falls on our eyes in order to determine the structure and shape of the surrounding objects. This problem is very difficult to solve since objects are three-dimensional but our eyes only register their two-dimensional projection (also called retinal image), like the film in a camera. Most vision scientists have approached this problem by asking the following question: How does the brain derive the 3D structure of objects from the information that is present in a certain instant of time in a certain region of the retinal image? Because the image on the retina is two-dimensional and time can be added as a third dimension, the visual stimulation can be represented in a three-dimensional space. The research conducted so far has focused on the problem of how local regions of this space-time domain are analyzed by the visual system, while the problem of how the visual system is capable of integrating the information contained in different spatial-temporal regions has been neglected. The overall objective of the present research project is to investigate the spatial-temporal integration of information in the recovery of 3D shape from retinal projections. In particular, three goals will be pursued. First, the research will investigate in which manner local visual processing is affected by interactions with stimulus information present in different space-time locations. Second, the research will exploit the stimulus conditions that are responsible for spatial and temporal organization. Third, the research will determine whether spatial and temporal interactions occur among different sources of depth information. Understanding how the human visual system solves this problem will not only be a valuable advance in the study of visual perception but could also produce novel insights toward the building of machines that mimic our behavior and interactions doc4099 none Latvakoski This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop a real-time, whole wafer sensor for process monitoring and fault detection in advanced semiconductor and thin film fabrication processes. The production of future semiconductor and optoelectronic devices will depend critically on continued advances in process sensing and control. In present-day manufacturing, process yield and productivity are limited by the high sensitivity of layer properties to process conditions, and by an inability to control process conditions adequately throughout the process sequence. Current technology relies primarily on open-loop control using indirect sensor signals; a costly practice resulting in significant scrap and equipment downtime for preventative maintenance. To address this problem through improved closed loop control, this project will develop a high performance imaging radiometer with advanced thermographic and wafer mapping algorithms. Phase II includes hardware, software, and applications development that addresses important components of the sensor technology for monitoring blanket and patterned substrates. The sensor will provide near video-rate, spatially resolved whole wafer measurements of temperature and film properties from a model-based analysis of thermal radiance images. In-house testing on a rapid thermal processing tool and field testing on a MOCVD reactor will be performed. Potential commercial applications are anticipated in optimization and control of many advanced semiconductor fabrication processes such as rapid thermal processing (RTP), molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), and metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD). Improved whole wafer sensors have potential for significant increase in the number of process steps performed by RTP and thus increase the RTP as a generic process method. The commercial benefits of an in-situ wafer state sensor include reduced scrap, reduced equipment preventative maintenance, improved process efficiency, and improved device uniformity and performance doc3675 none With National Science Foundation support Drs. Paul and Suzanne Fish and James Bayman will conduct archaeological research at the Marana Mound site, located in the Tucson Basin of Arizona. Associated with the prehistoric Hohokam culture, the site dates to the early Classic Period ( - AD) and was occupied for approximately 100 years. The mound site was constructed at a central geographical point and represents the top level within a broader three tier hierarchical community. It is approximately 1.5 km. long and .5 km wide. Because it is not situated in a favorable riverine or upland locale, it received water from a 10 kilometer long canal constructed from the Santa Cruz River. Composed of compounds of ca. square meters with up to 20 enclosed structures, the site population probably ranged between 500 and 750 people. In a number of ways the site is unique from its smaller counterparts. Not only is it the largest but it also is the only one which contained significant numbers of distant trade items. A neutron activation sourcing study suggests that it, along with two other large sites, participated in a common exchange network that differed from acquisition patterns and ceramic sources in other community settlements. Assemblages recovered from house floors are distinctive in the number and variety of items represented and the high frequency of artifacts linked to craft production and personal ornamentation. Thus there is a marked concentration of imported items and manufacturing activities at the mound site compared to other settlements. While the Marana Mound is distinguished from its smaller counterparts, there appears however to be minimal internal differentiation within the site itself and this finding runs contra to archaeological preconceptions. As site hierarchies emerge and class structure becomes apparent, normally internal differention within individual communities occurs as well. Based on limited evidence from Marana Mound however such did not happen. The team will examine potential differentiation at the site through a four-tiered sampling design focusing on compound clusters, compounds, rooms and trash mounds. Evidence for differential advantage and competitive strategies will be sought in four realms: 1. Access to and consumption of exotic or high value items; 2. Economic activities beyond ordinary subsistence production and consumption; 3. Involvement in external exchange; and 4. Participation in communal or integrative observances as signaled by ritually-related items. This research will provide insight into the paths which led to the rise of complex societies. It shed new light on North American prehistory and provide data of interest to many archaeologists doc4101 none This dissertation research will provide a grammar of the Huehuetla variety of Tepehua, a member of the Totonacan language family of Mexico. The precise number of remaining speakers of Huehuetla Tepehua (henceforth HT) is unknown, but the three varieties of Tepehua are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people in the Mexican states of Hidalgo, Veracruz, and Puebla. HT is spoken only in the township of Huehuetla and the outlying villages. The grammar of Huehuetla, to consist of a basic description of the language, an HT Spanish dictionary, and a compilation of stories and other texts in HT, will be submitted to the University of Texas at Austin as a dissertation in linguistics. This project has significance for several fields and groups. First, it will be significant for linguistics because it will provide a description of a nearly undocumented language, and it will help determine whether HT and the related variety Tlachichilco Tepehua are dialects of the same language or separate languages. More specifically, it will be important to the field of historical linguistics, because a grammar of HT will help facilitate the reconstruction of Proto-Totoncan. Second, the project will provide results that will be useful to fields that focus on Mesoamerica, such as archaeology and art history, and that utilize historical linguistics to decipher glyphs and to reconstruct prehistory. Third, the project will be significant for the Tepehua people themselves: (i) it will provide a foundation on which to base pedagogical materials needed for language preservation, and (ii) it will provide them with the beginnings of a body of literature that is written and recorded in their native language and culturally relevant to them. The project involves nine months of fieldwork in and around the town of Huehuetla. The collected data will consist of elicited words and sentences; elicited narratives such as stories, recipes and jokes; and naturally-occurring speech, such as conversations and ceremonies. All data will be recorded on minidiscs; the narratives will be recorded on Hi8 videotapes as well, both to document speech events and to aid in analysis and translation doc4102 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project continues the development of a hyper-pressure fluid pulse system for installation of blind structural fasteners. Riveting is the preferred method of assembling load-bearing aluminum airframe structures. Upset riveting requires the application of high load to both ends of the rivet using impact or hydraulic pistons. A structural fastener that could be installed from one side of the structure - blind fastening - would simplify aircraft assembly and repair. Existing blind fasteners are expensive, time-consuming and do not match the corrosion and fatigue performance of upset rivets. Phase I of this project demonstrated that a compact, hyper-pressure pulse generator can inflate aluminum alloy rivets with an interference fit and strength approaching conventionally upset rivets. Blind fastening was demonstrated in unsupported aluminum panels. Phase I analysis showed that rivet inflation can be accomplished with a much smaller tool. The Phase II effort will involve the development of a lightweight, hand-held tool with an enhanced trigger mechanism that will provide the pulse control required for reliable fastener installation. The work will continue the development of techniques for inflating rivets with aluminum pins to form a solid, all-aluminum fastener. The objective in Phase II is to meet the performance specifications for a fluid-tight aerospace structural rivet. Airframe assembly represents a major portion of the cost of military and commercial aircraft. The process to be developed will halve the cost of manual airframe fabrication and can be used in an automated flexible-manufacturing environment. There are a variety of other potential applications of hyper-pressure pulse technology including: fastening composite titanium airframes; automotive aluminum sheet bonding; pulsed-jet peening for stress-relief and forming of aluminum sheet; and research into the behavior of materials under dynamic loading at extreme pressures doc4103 none This award in the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program provides continued support for research on metal-metal interactions by Dr. Dennis L. Lichtenberger of the Chemistry Department, University of Arizona. Systems under investigation contain quadruple and triple metal-metal bonds, metal-metal configurations beyond occupation of the anti-bonding delta orbital, and non-bonding and weakly-associated through-space and through-ligand metal-metal interactions. The metal-metal complexes contain a variety of bridging and non-bridging ligands and represent a broad range of electron-donating and electron-withdrawing effects associated with key structural perturbations. Complexes with both weak and strong ligands coordinated to the axial position are also included. High-resolution Hel Hell valence and high precision X-ray core photoelectron spectroscopy will be used to study both gas phase and condensed species. The project includes further development of instrumental capabilities. Metal-Metal interactions contribute to the structure, stability, and reactivity of many species and influence important chemical, catalytic, and materials processes. Unique instrumentation will be developed to provide detailed electronic structure information on these interactions doc4104 none David Chandler of the University of California, Berkeley, is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to continue his research in statistical mechanics directed at understanding structure and dynamics of liquids and related systems. In the first project, charge frustrated models of oil-water-surfactant systems will be used to develop and exploit isomorphisms between very different phenomena, including metal-insulator transitions in liquid solutions and vitrification of supercooled liquids. In another project, hydrophobicity at small and large length scales will be exploited to develop a generally applicable statistical field theory. This formulation will be applied as a bridge between large length scale phenomenology and small scale atomistic theories of complex fluids, and used to analyze systems such as polymer melts and blends, and liquid crystals. These techniques are also expected to enable development of an equilibrium theory for water and other associated fluids. In the area of dynamics, transition path sampling will be used to devise phenomenological theories for weak acid dissociation and proton transfer in aqueous systems. Methods for treating quantum effects within the context of transition path sampling will be explored, with the goal of enabling quantitative treatments of kinetics involving light atoms such as protons in water. In a final project, concepts governing ensembles of trajectories will be developed further, especially for systems far from equilibrium. Outcomes are expected to enable the analysis of broken symmetry, corresponding to broken ergodicity and to phase transitions of driven systems. Improved understanding of liquid systems structure and dynamics has far-reaching implications for fundamental science and technology applications. Outcomes from this project will impact materials science, including polymers and liquid crystal systems. As well, new results on proton transfer and the hydrophobic effect will have strong connections to biologically relevant systems, including protein folding doc4105 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will result in the development of a prototype flywheel energy storage system (FESS) utilizing the innovative passive, non-contacting bearing developed in the Phase I project. This new type of passive magnetic support and damping (PMSD) system consists of integrated stiffness and damping elements in a configuration that overcomes the most significant problems of previous systems. The new bearing technology will result in a more efficient, more reliable, and less expensive FESS than is currently available. The resulting FESS will facilitate the use of alternative energy systems in remote and or hostile environments. Phase II efforts will focus on 2 objectives: (1) The refinement and experimental validation of design equations predictive of PMSD performance; and (2) The development, installation, and testing of PMSD systems in a prototype FESS. The FESS system for the prototype will be a commercial unit provided by the commercialization partner, and modified to accommodate the new technology. The partner currently manufactures FESS for commercial power quality and uninterruptible power supplies applications. Follow-on funding commitments and other agreements have been secured from the Alaska Science and Technology Foundation and from the commercialization partner to pursue additional technical work and for Phase III commercialization. In addition to providing storage for alternative energy systems, there are numerous commercial applications for FESS incorporating the PMSD technology including utility load leveling and uninterruptible power supplies (UPS). The commercialization partner expects that the combination of technical and cost advantages demonstrated in Phase I would enable rapid market acceptance and encourage application of FESS in new markets. The PMSD technology is also applicable to turbo-molecular pumps (TMPs). These are used in the manufacture of silicon chips and in scientific instrumentation requiring high vacuums. Predicted market penetration into these areas is in excess of 18,000 units per year by and in excess of 30,000 units per year by doc4106 none This research investigates evolution in high elevation populations of the leaf beetle Chrysomela aeneicollis. Populations in the Sierra Nevada (California) are on the southern edge of the species range. Previous studies found that drainages differ in air temperature and beetle populations fluctuate with changes in climate. Frequencies of different forms (genotypes) of the temperature-sensitive enzyme phosphoglucose isomerase (PGI) vary among drainages, suggesting that natural selection acts on PGI. Heat shock protein (Hsp) levels in beetles correspond to air temperature differences and depend on PGI genotype. The proposed research will investigate the relationship between temperature and functional property of PGI genotypes (i.e. their ability to catalyze biochemical reactions fundamental to metabolism). Second, the effects of temperature on the physiology of beetles of different PGI genotype will be studied, using Hsp s and ubiquitin conjugates as indices of physiological stress. Third, survival and reproduction of beetles of different PGI genotype in nature will be compared. The research will provide important information about the evolutionary significance of enzyme polymorphisms. It may add insight about the impact of climate change on native insects. Finally, it will allow undergraduates to participate in basic research, enhance their educational experience and expand their opportunities for the future doc4107 none Zylstra Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH s) constitute a class of aromatic hydrocarbons consisting of two or more fused benzene rings in linear, angular, and cluster arrangements. Since many of the aromatic hydrocarbons found in the environment have a natural pyrolytic origin, they must have been in contact with microorganisms throughout evolutionary periods of time. It is not surprising, therefore, that microorganisms capable of degrading aromatic compounds have evolved. Almost all of what is known about the metabolism of PAH s is based on fast-growing gram negative organisms and naphthalene (two rings) and phenanthrene (three rings) as model substrates. Slow-growing gram positive organisms such as Mycobacterium have been shown not only to degrade naphthalene and phenanthrene but also to degrade PAH s consisting of four or more aromatic rings. In fact, this class of organisms is perhaps the best-studied group because of their ability to mineralize high molecular weight PAH s. Catabolic pathways have been proposed based on the identification of a few intermediate compounds detected in culture supernatants. In this project molecular genetics and biochemistry will be used to investigate the ability of Mycobacterium strain PYO1 to degrade high molecular weight PAH s. Cosmid clones containing the PYO1 genes required for phenanthrene and pyrene degradation have been identified, and analysis of the 30 kb of sequence obtained so far has identified at least 21 genes that are involved in the degradation of PAH s intermingled with five insertion sequences. Putative functions have been assigned to each open reading frame and will be tested with biological analyses using expression in heterologous hosts, mRNA analyses, and knock-out mutants. These experiments are expected to result in the determination of every step in the catabolic pathway with the identification of every catabolic intermediate. Highly recalcitrant, stable polycyclic aromatic compounds are found in the environment. Such compounds can be formed during coal gasification and liquification processes, improper waste incineration practices, and in forest fires. Sources of the compounds include oil, carbon black, coal tar, and other petroleum-derived products. Mycobacterium species of bacteria and their relatives are unique in their ability to degrade these compounds. However, little is known about the molecular and biochemical basis of these abilities. In this project, the ability of Mycobacterium strains to degrade polycyclic compounds will be investigated at the gene and enzyme levels. A thorough knowledge of how Mycobacteria degrade these compounds will aid in the design of bioremediative processes for removing polycyclic compounds from the environment doc4108 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project from RSK Assessments, Inc. will expand and improve upon the test battery implemented for Phase I, including cross validation, examination of other behavioral scoring approaches (signal detection theory, Bayesian methods), other agents (viz., sleep loss) as well as the interplay of these methods on special purpose hardware and new software. Phase I examined the feasibility of conducting human performance-based fitness-for-duty (FFD) testing as an alternative to chemically-based testing. The testing method was brief and inexpensive, and the tests were stable and reliable. Using a multiple cut-off analysis varying proportion of tests passed, they yielded 98+% specificity (minimal false positives) with 80% sensitivity for high dosages of alcohol (and 60% for low). The new battery tightens security, running within self-contained kiosks and providing data encryption and access via smart card usage. Improved managerial control will be implemented within the test system, including test control and scheduling, data analysis methods, and reporting. Additional means of quantifying behavioral decrements will be obtained from sleep deprivation research, analyses of past alcohol research, and an alpha test site. Data from these sources will yield a better assessment model and refine calculations for tradeoff between test length, specificity, and sensitivity. RSK Assessments proffers a tool for testing human performance that could facilitate higher productivity in industrial plants, a means of testing employees while in the field, and reduction in worker on-the-job injuries doc4109 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will develop and demonstrate a laboratory prototype of the Advanced Positron Beam Source (APBS) that will provide a high quality pulsed positron beam suitable for a range of analytical instruments for materials science. The project extends the latest developments in techniques to accumulate positrons from a radioactive source in Penning traps. The technical objectives of the Phase I project were fully achieved. The technical objectives of Phase II are: (1) to develop a compact, low-cost, two-stage positron trap; (2) to develop an advanced cryogenic positron moderator system; (3) to develop a high- performance positron buncher; (4) to refine the Phase I approach for extracting positrons from the magnetic field of the trap; and (5) to assemble and demonstrate the APBS system. If successful, this project will provide the basis for commercialization of the APBS in Phase III. A major obstacle to the commercial exploitation of positron-based surface analytical techniques has been the lack of a suitable slow positron beam source. The APBS will fill this need by providing a compact, low-cost, user-friendly positron beam source that can function ultimately as a turnkey system in an industrial environment. The APBS will have advanced performance characteristics that are not available from any other system doc4110 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop an electrochemical method specific to recycling photovoltaic modules, which contain extremely low quantities of hazardous metals in large bulk-streams. It uses an innovative closed-loop approach to remove, separate, and regenerate semiconductor films in a single compact system, and do it with minimum waste. Phase I identified key process parameters, focusing on efficient removal and recovery of semiconductors from devices. Retrieval of sulfur-free cadmium telluride demonstrated method feasibility. Phase II will design a practical system to recycle the entire module for in-plant or centralized applications. It will identify the optimum parameters to delaminate modules, dissolve semiconductors, regenerate useful semiconductor precursor films, and re-utilize the electrolyte. The research will lead to a viable prototype recycling capability featuring low cost, high efficiency, low cycle-time, and production line amenability. Converting defective panels into efficient modules will lead to rapid turn-around and high production yields. Potential commercial applications are expected in the photovoltaic industry with a solution to managing hazardous waste disposal and improvement in module production yield. It has short-term applications for recycling other end-of-life products such as flat panel displays, infrared detectors, and mirror scrap. Benefits are anticipated in increased productivity, large savings in disposal costs, recovery of scarce raw materials, and enhanced commercial success of the emerging cadmium telluride photovoltaic industry, which has grown 50-fold in production capacity within two years doc4111 none This Small Business Innovative Research Phase II project will optimize and scale up the system developed in Phase I (a nonporous perfluoromembrane system for harsh gas separations). These nonporous perfluoromembrane systems provide industry for the first time with a system (membrane module, glue lines, potting, valves, etc.) that has good gas transport rates and separation capabilities composed totally of perfluorocomponents. In Phase I, laboratory testing and economic evaluations showed these membranes could economically remove hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and key non-condensable gases from chlor-alkali tail gases and in so doing dramatically enhance the recovery of chlorine. Analysis comparing the Compact Membrane Systems, Inc. (CMS) technology to alternative membrane and other unit operations (e.g. absorption) technologies, indicated the CMS technology is significantly superior. Large sheet nonporous perfluoromembrane fabrication has been demonstrated in Phase I. All the key components are in place for large scale module fabrication in Phase II. In Phase II we will optimize and scale up the system. Detailed and representative (-20oC) end use testing and long term testing will be conducted in the laboratory prior to field testing. While the focus of this program is chlor-alkali harsh chemical separations, other harsh chemical processes (e.g. fluorochemical synthesis) will be considered. Our close working relationship with a number of large membrane manufacturers and end users allows us to rapidly and effectively drive this program. Phase I testing was done using both single gas testing and mixed gas testing. Materials evaluated include chlorine, Cl2CF2, SF6, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and helium. Results showed mixed gas results were equal or superior to single gas results. This suggests that minimal plasticization or other anomalies are occurring within the system. This would suggest we can project actual end use performance accurately doc4112 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project is developing a novel electrobiochemical leaching (EBL) approach to recover copper from chalcopyrite, providing an alternative to smelting. Chalcopyrite is the most common copper ore, yet it is difficult to process hydrometallurgically because it passivates due to formation of refractory surface layers. The EBL approach in Phase 1 was shown to prevent this passivation and to result in faster and more complete copper extraction than conventional bioleaching approaches. The Phase II research objectives are to: 1) demonstrate the versatility of the process by determining the extent of copper extraction from different sources of chalcopyrite ore; 2) determine the optimum bioreactor configurations for the EBL approach; and 3) make a large laboratory scale (50 to 100 kg) demonstration of the process for determining preliminary process economics. The research will measure the extent of copper extraction and extraction kinetics by EBL, including the determination of metallurgical balances. The results of the Phase II research will provide the data required to establish preliminary economic feasibility of the process and to convince investors or operators (mining company) to support a pilot scale demonstration. If successful, the EBL approach will provide a new technology in mineral extractions that will open additional reserves of copper in the US and elsewhere and reduce smelting of copper doc4113 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will enable conversion of low value residual edgings from sawmill operations into a structural quality engineered wood composite called Structural Strand Lumber (SSL). Edgings are created at sawmills when round logs are sawn into rectangular pieces of lumber. The SSL concept is to cut these edgings into strands, align them directionally, and then glue and compress them into a high value product. Edging material currently is used for low value wood chips for use in paper production. The SSL process will enable sawmills to convert up to 14% more of forest raw materials into structural quality lumber compared to conventional practices. SSL manufacturing will yield a high value added wood product, dramatically reduce waste, reduce demand on natural resources, and increase sawmill operating efficiency. These benefits will reduce dramatically the environmental impacts of sawmill operations. Phase I research provided a fundamental understanding of key processes, and clearly demonstrated the feasibility of the SSL concept. Phase II will demonstrate the operation of critical SSL components, and enable a manufacturing facility prototype demonstration early in the Commercialization Phase. If the research is successful, dramatic increases in the fraction of a log that can be used for quality structural materials will result. The cost of the engineered material will be competitive with solid high-grade structural material. The method is applicable to virtually all sawmills operating in the United States and around the world. More efficient utilization of existing wood supply will be enabled by this innovation doc4114 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project addresses development of economical membrane-based devices primarily suitable for: (a) purification of sub-quality raw natural gas to pipeline quality and (b) carbon dioxide recovery from enhanced oil recovery operations. A large fraction of domestic natural gas reserves are uneconomical for recovery based on current market conditions because they contain significant amounts of non-methane gas. Membrane-based devices are currently commercially employed to purify sub-quality natural gas, but membranes with improved productivity compared to now state-of-the-art devices are required to allow economic use of currently unrecoverable natural gas. The overall objective of this program is to develop an innovative fabrication approach to incorporate microporous silica membranes within low-cost, highly compact modules. Microporous silica membranes exhibit combinations of carbon dioxide permeance and CO2 CH4 selectivity that are unrivaled by conventional organic gas separation membranes, but have not yet been incorporated in low-cost modules to allow their commercialization. Commercial availability of such modules would greatly reduce costs associated with upgrading sub-quality natural gas reserves. In Phase I, the feasibility of the novel module fabrication approach was demonstrated. In Phase II, the separation properties of very small modules will be improved through systematic optimization of processing. Modules with ca. 0.1 m2 membrane area will be fabricated and tested for extended duration for separation of simulated raw natural gas, and a detailed manufacturing scheme with related costs will be developed in preparation for commercialization of the technology. The devices to be developed in this program would significantly reduce costs associated with purification of gas streams in the following applications: natural gas upgrading, carbon dioxide recovery from enhanced oil recovery operations, and biogas processing doc4115 none This award by the Advanced Materials and Processing Program in the Chemistry Division and Solid State Chemistry Program in the Division of Materials Research jointly supports Professor Lee Park of Williams College, an undergraduate liberal arts college, and is to study the use of liquid crystalline materials as molecular conductors. The preparation of one-dimensional liquid crystalline materials of metallomesogens with order and anisotrophy, and with a variety of physical properties are being studied under this award. Liquid crystalline derivatives of known one-directional structures of rigid aromatic core fragments with polar substituents are also being synthesized. Teaching and training of undergraduate students in materials science are parts of the award. Under the award, metallomesogens with rigid aromatic core fragments and polar substituents are synthesized. These structures are robust and oriented in one direction, and their structural integrity and shape are reinforced by intermolecular hydrogen bonding. The broader impact of the project is the potential applications of these materials with enhanced material properties in high performance electrical and magnetic devices, and they are likely to be fabricated at a lower processing cost. In addition, the research program will provide a rich multidisciplinary education and training opportunity in materials chemistry to undergraduate students doc4116 none This NSF DOE collaborative research project between researchers at Michigan State University and Northeastern University will investigate and establish the scientific basis and engineering principles for the design and operation of small microwave plasma sources with discharge dimensions ranging from 0.3-10 mm. Small microwave discharges operate with low input power, while having very high power densities and highly reactive species outputs. The availability of physically compact microwave power sources built for mobile communication systems combined with small microwave plasma sources opens the possibility of many unique microwave plasma applications. The research project will experimentally evaluate and theoretically model the behavior of very small microwave discharges, i.e. millimeter and submillimeter size discharges. Two microwave plasma systems will be used including a highly flexible and adjustable testbed plasma source and a micromachined, microstrip line-based plasma source. The research methodology is to study, using experimental diagnostics and electromagnetic plasma simulation models, discharges with diameters ranging from 10 mm to 0.3 mm in the testbed plasma source. Then, this testbed source knowledge will be used to design, build and test micromachined, microstrip line based plasma sources. Some of the possible applications include plasma sources for MEMS-scale chemical analysis, micro-thrusters for spacecraft, miniature electrodeless light sources, and miniature sources for spatially focused, plasma-assisted chemical vapor deposition. This project will demonstrate two applications including diamond deposition on small substrate areas and micro-plasmas for portable, low temperature sterilization doc4117 none Sexual differences are widespread in animals, including humans, and biologists recognize three mechanisms for their evolution: 1. Sexual selection resulting from mate competition and mate choice; 2: Natural selection resulting from sexual differences in reproductive roles of males; and 3. Natural selection resulting from competition between the sexes for food. Field experiments under natural conditions will be used to examine the roles of natural and sexual selection in the maintenance of sexual dimorphism. Although studies demonstrate that sexual selection and reproductive role mechanisms operate in natural populations, almost nothing is known about the role of food competition in the maintenance of sexual dimorphisms. The problem is that in many species, sexual differences in diet are often associated with sexual differences in size, making it unclear whether dietary differences are the cause or the consequence of dimorphism. The proposed studies avoid this problem by focusing on sexual dimorphisms in feeding anatomy: the beak size and shape of a hummingbird, which can be matched to the size and shape of the flowers the birds visit. Consequently, the proposed studies will be the first to unambiguously link sexual differences in feeding morphology to sexual differences in feeding performances at natural food sources, and to separate the effects of natural from sexual selection on body size and anatomy doc4118 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)Phase II project focuses on the improvement of spatial resolution in microwave microscopy, reducing in particular the measurement sampling area over which sheet resistance and dielectric permittivity at 1 GHz - 20 GHz can be determined with numerical accuracy. A particular focus will be on proprietary semiconductor applications and on the imaging of dielectric properties. Modifications of the existing prototype as required for this goal will lead to additional applications in fields of economic and academic importance, including the non-contact measurement of the electric field dependence and the frequency dependence of the dielectric permittivity at microwave frequencies. Work at Neocera will include instrument modifications, test sample preparation, and a thorough analysis of the probe-sample interactions. Numerical simulations, semiconductor sample preparation, and comparison to an instrument based on a different feedback mechanism will be per-formed through a subcontract with the University of Maryland. The result of this Phase II SBIR will be an instrument developed for a particular (proprietary) semiconductor application, leading to a multi-million dollar market. In addition, the technology will be available for various research applications, with universities being potential customers doc4119 none How are secretory vesicles targeted to and fused with the plasma membrane? The answer to this question is fundamental to the understanding of how cells form specialized plasma membrane domains during growth and differentiation. In eukaryotic cells, secretory vesicles bud from the trans Golgi network (TGN) and are transported along cytoskeletal tracks to the vicinity of their site of fusion with the plasma membrane. The links between vesicle transport, targeting and fusion are just now beginning to be understood. This research will examine the role of Exo70p in these processes. Exo70p is the 70 kilodalton protein component of the yeast exocyst complex that is required for vesicle docking and fusion at sites of polarized growth. This complex contains at least 8 protein components, but little is known about their biochemical function. To gain a greater understanding of the mechanism of secretory vesicle targeting and fusion, the investigators will examine: 1)How Exo70 regulates the specificity of secretory vesicle targeting. 2)How Exo70 links vesicle targeting to the fusion machinery. The research combines the strengths of yeast genetics with biochemical and cell biological approaches. Genetic screens will be used to identify proteins that are required for secretory vesicle transport and for the specificity of vesicle targeting in an exo70-38 mutant. This project will explore the innovative idea that secretory vesicle transport and recognition may be directly coupled to vesicle fusion by Exo70p. Towards this end the project will determine whether an exocyst component protein can regulate the specificity of secretory vesicle docking. The expectations are that the project will provide new insights into how Exo70p links vesicle transport to vesicle docking, recognition and fusion at the plasma membrane. This will be accomplished by investigating the role of Exo70p in t-SNARE clustering at the site of fusion and how different classes of secretory vesicles can be discriminated during vesicle targeting docking to the plasma membrane. In polarized epithelium, the exocyst complex is required for basolateral vesicle targeting and the exocyst is localized to the sites of polarized growth (growth cones) in developing neurons. Therefore, it is expected that insights gained from yeast studies such as these will be applicable to the understanding of the regulation of exocytosis in human cells doc4120 none Michael Paulaitis Johns Hopkins U. The objective of the proposed research is to develop quantitative tools for the analysis and design of protein separation processes. These tools will be compared to those now used routinely to design conventional separations in the chemical process industries. This development is based on combining theory and experiment to enable a new generation of thermodynamic models capable of describing mixtures of proteins. The approach builds on the paradigm that has so far emerged from our work, namely that protein thermodynamic properties are dominated by specific biological interactions in the form of geometric complementarity. It is believed that these specific interactions can be understood and accounted for in terms of electrostatic, dispersion, and hydrophobic interactions. This proposal is centered on extending our understanding of these interactions and finding optimal ways in which to manipulate and exploit them in designing effective separation strategies. Specifically, we will: 1. complete our, model formulation to allow efficient mechanistic calculation of protein-protein interactions for both like and unlike protein pairs; 2. measure the model interactions between like and unlike protein pairs, and correlate results with measure separation performance. 3. use interactions between unlike protein pairs as the basis for developing strategies for optimizing protein separation trains. The molecular theories will be based on recently developed computational methods to account for interactions, and will be combined into an accurate potential of mean force (PMF) describing the interactions between both like and unlike proteins. This PMF is the foundation for the foundation for the description of both the physical properties of the protein solution thermodynamic function that determine the phase behavior. Several computational and molecular simulation methods will be explored for calculating of the phase behavior of the protein solutions. Our working hypothesis is that is the relative magnitudes of like vs, unlike protein interactions that determine how a particular separation can best be accomplished. An array of experimental measurements will complement and guide theory. The experiments first involve characterization of structural and functional protein properties using light scattering and small angle neutron scattering (SANS). Next, measurements of thermodynamic and physical properties and mixtures of proteins will be made to test the validity of the thermodynamic descriptions. One thermodynamic variable of particular interest will be pressure. Specifically the investigator will investigate the effect of pressure on protein stability and how protein folding can be manipulated with pressure to control protein separations and purification. Finally, separation experiments will be conducted to evaluate the predictions of performance based on the thermodynamic models. These measurements and calculations will guide efforts to find conditions under which adverse interactions impair separation effectiveness, and to design and test suitable remedies. Several proteins and protein mixtures will be examined, including eglin C and staphylococcal nuclease. This combination of experimental and theoretical tools will identify the properties of proteins important in the design of separation processes, and will allow separation performance to be predicted on the basis of protein properties. The project is part of a group proposal with investigators at the University of Delaware ( doc4121 none In previous work, we provided a comprehensive treatment of issues related to multiple structural changes in the linear model with stationary or deterministically trending variables. This proposal addresses issues related to multiple structural changes for the empirically important cases where the individual variables are possibly integrated and a system of variables is possibly cointegrated. The presence of integrated variables requires a drastically different theoretical apparatus and poses serious difficulties in the testing strategies to be adopted. This is due to the fact that the limit distributions depend on whether or not a unit root is present but, at the same time, inference about the presence of a unit root depends on whether structural changes are present. Hence, a joint approach is needed. The issues to be tackled will be new theoretical results as well as more practical aspects including extensive simulations about the adequacy of the procedures in finite samples. The research will analyze the consistency of estimated break dates given changes in the slope of a trend function for a univariate integrated series. This is expected to yield more powerful procedures since on ecan then test for a unit root using critical values corresponding to the case of a known break date. The planned research includes the development of tests for structural changes in the trend function of a univariate time series that are valid whether a unit root is present or not. For the multivariate case, research will address the consistency of the break point estimates (whether in the deterministic components or the cointegration vectors); tests for the presence of structural change being agnostic about the number of cointegrating vectors; and tests for the number of cointegrating vectors allowing for multiple structural changes. In this multivariate case, we intend to generalize the univariate Modified AIC for choice of lag length. Finally, we intend to develop an efficient estimation procedure for cases in which other methods for constructing estimates of the break dates will break down In all the research topics described, we intend to provide applied researchers with a comprehensive set of tools and all procedures will be made available in a Gauss program that will be distributed on request doc4122 none Nikonowicz, Edward P. The goal of this project is to understand key aspects of the post-transcriptional modification process of tRNA at the molecular level, including the basis of molecule specific RNA recognition by modification enzymes and the functional basis of modifications within RNA molecules. This research focuses on modification sites within the anticodon stem-loop E. coli tRNAPhe and the rRNA target of the dual specificity modification enzyme pseudouridine synthase RluA. Specifically, the following topics will be addressed: (1) chemical and enzymatic protection of MiaA RNA ligands to identify positions on the RNA that contact MiaA protein and to monitor binding induced RNA structure changes, (2) structural studies of an RNA ligand in complex with MiaA, and (3) structure determination of Helix-35 from E. coli 23S rRNA, the second target of the RluA enzyme. The results of these studies are directly relevant to understanding the specificity and affinity of protein-RNA interactions and the impact of modification on RNA structure and dynamics and its relationship to RNA function (e.g. translation). These investigations also will complement mechanistic studies of the prenylation reaction catalyzed by MiaA. Many RNA molecules interact with specific protein molecules either to be modified by those proteins or to perform unique cellular functions as a protein-RNA complex. Thus, it is of fundamental biological importance to learn the molecular principles that encode the specificity of individual protein-RNA interactions. At present, the molecular details of protein-RNA recognition are known for only a small number of complexes and even fewer general principles for recognition have emerged. The overall goal of this research is to determine the rules of protein-RNA recognition for two model bacterial proteins and to determine the structural and stability effects introduced by their enzymatic action doc4123 none With this renewal award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the work of Dr. Kevin P. Gable of the Department of Chemistry at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon. The research will extend investigations of diolate cycloreversion to study the mechanism of a new epoxide deoxygenation, to determine whether the epoxide undergoes synchronous or asynchronous bond cleavage. A new exploration of useful applications of rhenium-mediated O-atom transfer will be initiated. Selective transfer of oxygen into organic molecules is a large and important class of organic reactions. One approach is to cleave O2 to form reactive M=O units from a low-valent transition metal complex. Reaction of olefins could then give epoxide or diolate complexes in which one or two new C-O bonds are formed, respectively. Much of the work done here, involving the cycloreversion of oxorhenium(V) diolate complexes, involves the microscopic reverse. Oxygen atom transfer to phosphorus(III) is more thermodynamically favorable than transfer to carbon. Tailoring the steric properties of the ligand in LReO3 should make it possible to separate racemic mixtures of chiral phosphines by selective oxidation of one of the enantiomers. An attractive feature of investment in the project is that the PI includes a large number of undergraduates in his research doc4124 none Proteus mirabilis is a motile Gram-negative bacterium that was originally described and named by Hauser in for the character in Homer s Odyssey who has the power of assuming different shapes in order to escape being questioned. What led Hauser to name this bacterium with such an imposing (and surprisingly astute) epithet? The answer: the phenomenon of swimmer-to-swarmer cell differentiation and swarming behavior. While differentiation of a P. mirabilis swimmer cell into a swarmer cell occurs at the level of the individual cell, swarming motility and behavior are characteristics associated with the coordinated movement of groups of swarmer cells, suggestive of a multicellular organism rather than a bacterial cell. Moreover, this behavior is cyclic in nature, so that the movement of the mass of bacteria is punctuated by periodic episodes during which the bacteria cease movement and dedifferentiate from swarmer cells back into swimmer cells. This dedifferentiation occurs while the bacteria are still exposed to the same stimulus that initially induced swarmer cell differentiation. The cyclic nature of P. mirabilis swarming behavior makes this phenomenon unique, even among the other bacterial species that produce swarming colonies. While other bacteria may swarm, none but P. mirabilis produce the clear and distinct cycles of differentiation and dedifferentiation that so well characterize this species. These cycles give rise to the bull s-eye colony pattern associated with P. mirabilis. Moreover, unlike the other swarming genera, phenotypically well characterized P. mirabilis mutants specifically defective in swarming behavior and pattern formation are available, thus providing the starting material for successful molecular analyses. The long-term goal of this research is to understand how bacteria communicate with one another during colony development and how that communication affects the expression of those genes required for differentiation and behavior. This research focuses specifically on the molecular mechanisms that control the onset of swarming migration and the bull s-eye pattern formation. The underlying hypothesis to be tested states that the development of swarming migration is a density-dependent process requiring both proteolysis from two extracellular proteases and the function of a histidine kinase sensor protein. The specific aim to be accomplished is:) Characterization of the inducer molecules (proteolytic products) responsible for density-dependent swarming migration. The results obtained from this study will answer the question What role does AI-2 have in swarming migration behavior doc4125 none Full scale, three dimensional numerical simulation of high intensity particle and laser beam-matter interactions are undertaken to explore novel plasma phenomena. The research develops new algorithms, employs state-of-the-art numerical methods and uses these on the latest massively parallel computers. The training of students in the development of modern computing techniques is a major goal of the research doc4126 none The orderly movement of membrane-enclosed compartments within the eukaryotic cell is critical to proper function. There are many different kinds of such intracellular membrane compartments, each with its own unique molecular mechanisms for biogenesis and intracellular placement and movement. A subset of such compartments utilizes a molecular mechanism for formation and trafficking that involves a protein called clathrin which forms a transient coat or basket around the membrane compartment. Such clathrin-coated membrane compartments are involved in the internalization of specific materials from the extracellular milieu (receptor-mediated endocytosis) and in the movement of newly synthesized proteins out to the cell surface. Thus, the population of clathrin-coated vesicles inside the cell is a heterogeneous mixture of compartments with different contents and therefore necessarily different destinations. This project concerns itself with understanding how the cell knows the content of such a compartment so that it knows where to send it. Clathrin adaptor protein complexes AP2 and AP1 are major components of clathrin coats at the plasma membrane and trans-Golgi network (TGN), respectively, where they participate in formation of clathrin-coated vesicles. These vesicles are responsible for the basic cellular functions of receptor-mediated endocytosis and organelle biogenesis. One of the key functions of AP complexes is to selectively recruit the integral membrane proteins ( cargo ) transported by coated vesicles. The interaction of APs with cargoes is also implicated in the assembly of coats. In spite of a considerable amount of characterization of the biochemistry and cell biology of AP function, there are many aspects of their roles in membrane traffic that have yet to be defined. In particular, the role of AP-cargo interactions in their cellular function has only recently begun to be addressed through preliminary experiments that form the basis for this project. Several laboratories have established through in vitro experiments how APs recognize cargo by binding to sequence motifs (such as YxxQ, where x is any amino acid and Q is a bulky hydrophobic residue) in the cytoplasmic domains of receptors. Others have defined numerous regulatory proteins which interact with APs in cells. It is clear from studies of AP localization in cells that these molecules have very specific interactions with intracellular membranes at the sites of their function. It is not established, however, how much of their ability to function at different sites in the cell is determined by cargo recognition. Dr. Sorkin s lab has developed a unique system for examining the requirements for both AP2 and AP1 in protein sorting. In this system, they have successfully replaced the endogenous m1 and m2 subunits of the AP complexes by mutated versions of the same proteins. Specifically, they have mutated the cargo recognition site of the m2 subunit of AP2 and produced cells expressing the mutant AP2 complex, which allowed them to investigate the role of AP-cargo interactions in dictating AP localization and function. The expression of mutant m2 abolished the uptake of some plasma membrane receptors but do not affect the endocytosis of other cargoes. These data highlight the importance of a careful evaluation of the role of AP-cargo interaction in vivo. This project will extend these studies to a more in depth analysis of the effects of the m2 mutation on clathrin-coated pit formation and cargo targeting, and apply the same strategy to elucidate the role of m1 subunit in AP1 function. The comparative roles of m1 and m2 in different cellular locations will be defined by production of chimeric molecules between the two and analyzing membrane traffic in cells expressing these chimeras. The first objective is to test the hypothesis that interactions with YxxQ motifs, that are critical for cargo sorting, have negligible influence on targeting and docking of AP2 but is important for the assembly of AP1 coats. To this end, cells expressing mutant m2 or m1 subunit of AP2 or AP1, correspondingly, will be utilized to assess the role of m interactions with YxxQ-containing proteins in the correct targeting of APs and the assembly of coated pits buds at the cell surface and TGN. The second objective is to test the hypothesis that AP1 plays a role in bi-directional TGN-endosomal trafficking through analysis of the effects of expression of mutant m1 subunits of AP1 incapable of YxxQ motif recognition. The comparative roles of m1 and m2 in different cellular locations will also be investigated in Objective 3 by production of chimeric molecules between the two and analyzing membrane traffic in cells expressing these chimeras. These studies will establish the role of AP-cargo interactions in directing membrane traffic and uncover new insights into regulatory mechanisms of protein sorting along the endocytic and secretory pathways doc4127 none The Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division is supporting Professor Clark Landis, Chemistry Department, University of Wisconsin - Madison, for the development of new computational and experimental tools for elucidation of solution structures of organometallic molecules. Valence bond, molecular mechanics and hybrid quantum mechanical molecular mechanics computational methods will be used to model transition-metal catalysts and their reaction pathways. Sophisticated NMR studies will be used to correlate the theoretical models with the structures and reactivities of the molecules in solution. New methods for the determination of structures of transition metal organometallic molecules in solution will be studied. The computational methods developed will allow for the determination of structures using molecular mechanics methods that are specifically tailored to include parameters for transition metals. While such calculations are widely used for small organic molecules and proteins, the inclusion of transition metals requires the development of new parameters to describe the force fields around the metal atoms. This project combines sophisticated theory and spectroscopy to devise new methods of determining details of the structures of organometallic molecules and of their ability to catalyze chemical reactions. Algorithms derived from this work will be made readily accessible to other researchers so that it can be widely used to understand catalytic activity and shape interactions involving transition metal ions doc4128 none The Fast Auroral SnapshoT (FAST) satellite has shown that one of the most energetic wave phenomena in the ionosphere and magnetosphere are structures characterized by holes in the phase-space density of electrons. This project will utilize a new three-dimensional kinetic particle simulation code to investigate the fundamental physics of these phase space holes. Five major questions will be investigated: (1) What are the conditions under which these holes are formed, (2) why do simulations indicate that the structures are unstable and what is the implication of this result to the FAST satellite measurements, (3) how do the holes generate whistler waves, (4) how do the electron holes interact with the ions, and (5) what role (if any) do these holes play in the large scale electrodynamics of the auroral electrojet doc4129 none This project, sponsored by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, develops materials and methods for chemically selective extraction without the need for volatile solvents. The research, conducted by Dr.Stephen G. Weber and his students at the University of Pittsburgh, develops novel fluorous membranes and films on which a fluoropolymer supports a fluorous nonvolatile solvent. Membranes are prepared from Teflon (TM) AF , and five plasticizers to form the supported fluorous phases. These supported phases are doped with molecular recognition receptors that allow the fluorous phases to be highly selective for extraction of various target species. Partitioning experiments and infrared spectroscopic measurements are used to quantitate the influence of a particular functional group on partitioning into the fluorous phase. The results of these experiments are used to guide the design of artificial receptors and to develop libraries of receptors. The results from this project could have far ranging effects when fully utilized. Potential applications include improved chemical analysis for pharmaceuticals, reduced energy comsumption in some industries, and a reduction in waste from sample processing in analytical laboratories doc4130 none Wendt Plasma processing of materials is used extensively in the semiconductor industry. In plasma etching, patterns are defined in silicon wafers by exposing them to an ionized gas through a lithographically defined stencil, or mask. One of the advantages of plasma etching over liquid chemical etching is the directional etching that results from bombardment of the surface by positive ions raining down from the plasma. Because the ion bombardment is normal to the substrate surface, undercutting, or etching of material under the mask, can be avoided. This enables the fabrication of ever-tinier transistors critical to the continuing advancement in integrated circuit performance. In typical manufacturing plasma processes today, the energy of ions reaching the substrate surface is coarsely controlled bv varying the amplitude of an RF sinusoidal bias voltage applied to the substrate electrode, but the resulting ion energy distribution (IED) at the substrate is generally broad. The energy provided to the substrate surface upon ion impact can enhance chemical reactions via several mechanisms, with significant implications for etched feature profiles and etch selectivity. The proposed activity employs a newly developed technique for significantly reducing the width of the IED at the substrate, with the potential for significantly improving these aspects of plasma processes. Furthermore, because of past difficulties in controlling ion energy at the substrate under realistic process conditions, this method opens up the possibility of examining the role of ion bombardment energy in etching processes for different materials and process gas systems with minimal impact on other process parameters. This technique for ion energy control replaces the conventional sinusoidal substrate bias voltage waveform with a waveform that produces, on the substrate surface, a constant potential punctuated by periodic voltage spikes. As a result, most ions see a constant voltage drop across the sheath that arises between the substrate and plasma, and therefore arrive at the substrate with the same energy. Potential measurements have confirmed the feasibility of this approach. In addition, preliminary etch rate measurements of blanket films show dramatic improvement in etch selectivity for SiO2 Si etching in a fluorocarbon plasma. This method will be applied to several etching problems, as well as to basic understanding of the role of ion energy in plasma processing. The first step will be to directly measure the IED at the substrate to both confirm the conjecture that this method produces a narrow ion energy distribution, and to verify that average ion energy can be effectively monitored through external voltage measurements. In addition, both etch selectivity and etch feature profile control on patterned silicon wafers by precise tailoring of the IED using this method will be examined. A particular process of interest is etching of silicon dioxide, which continues to pose challenges for plasma processing. Finally, by scanning the ion energy while measuring etch rates, improved understanding of the mechanisms by which ion bombardment affects surface erosion during etching processes is expected doc4131 none The tasks accomplished by this project are divided into two phases corresponding to the two tasks of gene prediction and functional annotation. In the first phase, a gene-finding system is developed and applied. This system is designed to be scalable and extensible with respect to the gene features it models, the machine learning algorithms it employs, and the range of experimental data from which it learns. This project first validates the system by applying it to the complete C.elegans genome, and then retrains the system for the more difficult task of recognizing genes in human DNA. The second phase of this project consists of two parts. First, the software framework used for the gene finding system from phase one is generalized to model families of related proteins. Second, in order to learn from non-sequential data, the project develops functional classification techniques using a discriminative learning method called support vector machines (SVM s). The statistics calculated by the sequence-based modeling system functions as one set of features used by the SVM system. Additional features will come from DNA microarray experiments, the upstream promoter region of each gene, phylogenetic profiles and similarity scores to known protein families doc4132 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project addresses the outdated methods by which companies use material and process specifications. Specifications are a fact of life for any organization involved in complex manufacturing (e.g., aerospace, automotive, materials). Specifications are comprehensive and voluminous documents, covering hundreds of different key characteristics. The constant reading, checking, and analyzing of specifications is extremely labor-intensive, quality-impacting, and time-consuming. During Phase I research, the feasibility of the concept was successfully determined, and a conceptual design solution for tools was created which provides computer-assistance in the interpretation of specification requirements. The conceptual solution is based on the theories of Information Extraction and the analysis of specification content within the context of a meta-specification created as a result of prior NSF-sponsored research. This meta-specification provides an ontology for capturing the semantic knowledge contained in the text of specifications. The Phase II objectives are to build a working prototype of the solution as the foundation for potential full-scale commercialization. The tools created as a result of this prototype will be used to convert existing text-based specifications into the computer-sensible ontology. The Phase II solution is not attempting to totally automate the interpretation process. Instead, the focus is on innovative approaches for providing computer assistance in the semantic analysis of a limited domain of documents. The organizations which have their processing, inspecting, and testing controlled by specifications are extremely interested in using tools that access specifications in an intelligent, computerized format. These organizations include the United States Government as well as suppliers and prime contractors in American industry. This effort could jump-start an entire industry related to providing tools for the computer-assisted analysis of specification requirements doc4133 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will demonstrate the enhanced performance of membrane-based gas-liquid contactors to abate SO2 emissions from flue gas. SO2 present in flue gas streams leads to deforestation and damage to crops and property as a result of its participation in the formation of acid rain. In Phase I, Compact Membrane Systems, Inc. (CMS) developed a nonporous perfluorocopolymer composite membrane designed for use in membrane-based gas liquid contactors to scrub flue gas of SO2 using an aqueous absorbent solution. This membrane is designed to overcome the major drawbacks of conventional microporous supports, i.e. progressive wetting out of the microporous substrate by the (typically) aqueous absorbent and in some instances salt precipitation at the liquid-gas interface. In addition to all the operational advantages of membrane contactors, CMS membranes result in sustained improved SO2 removal efficiencies. During Phase I it was demonstrated that this membrane permeated SO2, scrubbed a flue gas simulant gas stream of SO2 as well as if not better than a conventional microporous membrane contactor under identical conditions, and showed no loss in performance despite exposure to an acidified silica suspension. Phase II will scale-up the process to employ large pilot-scale contactors, study absorbent regeneration technologies, demonstrate the whole process on a pilot-scale combustor, and demonstrate that the CMS system offers better efficiencies and economics of flue gas removal compared to existing systems. The enhanced performance of membrane-based gas-liquid contactors to abate SO2 emissions from flue gas is of considerable interest to ore processors, pulp and paper industries, many oil and natural gas processors (particularly those which have to treat tail gases from gas sweetening processes), power plants employing coal as a fossil fuel, etc doc4134 none Kenneth Jordan of the University of Pittsburgh is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to carry out theoretical studies that address the interactions of water clusters with charged particles, in particular, excess electrons, halide ions, and protons. A flexible one-electron model-potential code for characterizing negatively charged water clusters will be developed and applied in mapping out the rearrangement pathways for small negatively charged water clusters. In addition, spectra will be calculated for negatively charged water cluster ions solvated by variable numbers of argon atoms, with the goal of providing information useful in identifying experimentally observed ion spectra. Motivated by recent experiments, theoretical studies will be undertaken to elucidate the rearrangement pathways accessible following photoexcitation of iodine anion-water clusters. In a third research thrust, the impact of a single proton on the melting behavior of water clusters will be examined and related to recent experiments that indicate that products from photoionization of water clusters depend on whether the charge clusters are solid-like or liquid-like. The outcomes of this research will provide new insights into the fundamentally important water cluster systems, as well as the behavior of charged particles in bulk water and interfaces. Water is ubiquitous and crucial for biological processes. Studies of clusters of water molecules can provide useful insights into biological and chemical phenomena in bulk water and at water interfaces with other media. Recent experimental and theoretical studies of water clusters, and clusters interacting with other molecules, ions, and excess electrons, have provided considerable insight into the structures and other properties of these novel species. This research will address theoretical aspects of new issues raised in the active area of water cluster research doc4135 none McCauley Gynodioecy is a condition in plant populations in which hermaphroditic and female individuals coexist. It arises when a mutation (called a cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS) factor) causes hermaphrodites to lose male function, with a concurrent increase in seed production. Understanding how gynodioecy persists is an ongoing question in the field of plant population biology. This project will combine molecular genetic markers and genetic crosses to ask how many different CMS factors exist in small natural populations of Silene vulgaris, and how those factors are distributed spatially. This will be combined with mathematical and computer models in order to understand how the extinction and recolonization of local populations influences the evolution of gynodioecy. This project will be relevant to several broader scientific issues. First, CMS factors are an example of selfish DNA . The studies of S. vulgaris will be one of the few to link molecular markers to selfish elements in nature. Second, the study of the genetics of small and fragmented populations is significant for conservation biology. This study of S. vulgaris will yield general information about genetic processes in small populations. Finally, gynodioecy is important for agriculture because it is used as a tool by plant breeders for increasing crop yield doc4136 none Maria Szczesniak-Bryant and Grzegorz Chalasinski of Oakland University are supported by a grant from the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to study, using ab initio theory, the effect of the long-range region of potential energy surfaces on chemical reactions. The specific reactions that are to be studied are those of chlorine atoms with hydrogen molecules and hydrogen chloride and hydroxyl radicals with hydrogen molecules. This variously includes open-shell atoms and open and closed shell diatomic molecules, in the open shell cases involving multiple surfaces. The influence of the different components of the interaction energy (electrostatic, exchange, induction and dispersion) will be investigated to determine the physical origin of the interactions and to understand the influence of the early stages of a chemical reaction on the overall reactivity. The way chemicals react is controlled by the energy of the interaction between the reacting species, and between the product species, and thus is of general importance to much of chemistry. Here the interaction at large distances will be explored theoretically to determine its influence on the overall reactivity by orienting the species or trapping them prior to overcoming barriers doc4137 none The importance of saving for personal economic security as well as national performance has long been recognized by economists and policy makers. In the United States, levels of individual savings are particularly low, which has prompted a series of policies designed to encourage saving. A substantial body of research has tried to evaluate their effects. Yet, there is no consensus on the effect of economic incentives on saving, and little evidence on other important issues. Very few studies have analyzed individual micro-data at the firm level and no experimental evidence of the effects of information sessions on TDA participation exists. The general objective of this project is to study the determinants of Tax Deferred Accounts participation (401(k) or 403(b), hereafter TDA participation). Several connected subprojects study the role of economic incentives, program design, financial education and peer effects. The objective of this project is to provide a comprehensive assessment of how the design of TDA plans, the actions undertaken by the benefits office and the environment combine and interact to determine an individual s contribution decision. To answer these questions, this award finances the creation of a unique data set, containing current and retrospective data on individual participation and contribution of all employees in two universities located in the same city. The research combines a variety of empirical methods suitable to address each of these questions, from descriptive evidence to more structural empirical modeling. Notably, to address the question of the impact of the information sessions, a randomized experiment is set up in collaboration with the benefits office at one of the Universities. The project contributes to research on retirement programs in two significant ways. First, it provides new evidence on a number of under-studied issues about TDA participation behavior. Because these projects are based on micro-data in two very similar firms, the investigators are able to provide a convincing assessment of the effects of each variable using systematic comparisons across the two firms. Second, the investigators are able to provide a comprehensive assessment of the effects of variables usually considered in isolation doc4138 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project aims to establishing the first-ever, large-scale production capability needed to manufacture carbon nanotube tips for scanning probe tools. To achieve this, the investigator must combine several fabrications technologies in a unique way. The investigator must also solve challenging problems related to the design, structural form and attachment of the tips themselves that will enable them, as the manufacturer, to guarantee that the products sold meets customers performance specifications. It is believed, for example, that one of their proprietary technologies will enable them to produce carbon nanotube tips that meet the important requirement for adequate stiffness in lateral bending. The core technology being commercialized stems from a new approach for growing a single, aligned carbon nanotube directly on a cantilever, originally identified by the PI. This approach is suitable for fabricating both the carbon nanotube tip and the cantilever in one continuous process, ideal for large-scale manufacturing. Xidex will develop, manufacture and sell carbon nanotube tips for use with critical dimension atomic force microscopes (CD-AFMs), scanning capacitance microscopes (SCMs), regular atomic force microscopes (AFMs) and scanning tunneling microscopes (STMs doc4139 none This project will combine animal physiology with biophysics and biochemistry in order to examine oxygen transport and consumption from whole animal to subcellular levels during the prolonged, spontaneous breath-holds of elephant seals during sleep. Unique adaptations in these animals include enhanced oxygen storage and exquisite regulation of heart rate, blood flow and tissue metabolic rates. The physiological processes and biochemical mechanisms underlying these adaptations are relevant to the basic principles of oxygen transfer within tissues as well as to the remarkable diving abilities of seals and whales. A variety of minimally- and non-invasive techniques, including blood tissue sampling, blood flow measurements, and nuclear magnetic resonance imaging spectroscopy, will allow study of these seals while they sleep undisturbed. This will allow: 1) examination of the regulation of heart rate, cardiac output and muscle blood flow throughout the ten-minute breath-holds of these seals, 2) measurement of the rate of blood oxygen depletion throughout the breath-hold, 3) examination of blood-to-muscle oxygen transfer as the blood oxygen level decreases, 4) determination of the oxygen desaturation rate of myoglobin - the oxygen storage protein in muscle, 5) examination of metabolic regulation in muscle, as reflected in the depletion of the high-energy phosphate, phosphocreatine, and the formation of lactate, and 6) examination of the mobility of the myoglobin molecule within the muscle cell doc4140 none Taylor Gynodioecy is a condition in plant populations in which hermaphroditic and female individuals coexist. It arises when a mutation (called a cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS) factor) causes hermaphrodites to lose male function, with a concurrent increase in seed production. Understanding how gynodioecy persists is an ongoing question in the field of plant population biology. This project will combine molecular genetic markers and genetic crosses to ask how many different CMS factors exist in small natural populations of Silene vulgaris, and how those factors are distributed spatially. This will be combined with mathematical and computer models in order to understand how the extinction and recolonization of local populations influences the evolution of gynodioecy. This project will be relevant to several broader scientific issues. First, CMS factors are an example of selfish DNA . The studies of S. vulgaris will be one of the few to link molecular markers to selfish elements in nature. Second, the study of the genetics of small and fragmented populations is significant for conservation biology. This study of S. vulgaris will yield general information about genetic processes in small populations. Finally, gynodioecy is important for agriculture because it is used as a tool by plant breeders for increasing crop yield doc4141 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project aims to develop a rapid, sensitive and highly specific method for monoclonal antibody production and hybridoma cell line development by combining single cell gel microdrop (GMD) encapsulation technology, a novel protein capture format, and fluorescence activated cell sorting. Using insulin as a model antigen, Phase I studies demonstrated that individual cells, which comprised a 1% sub-population of a heterogeneous population, could be rapidly isolated based on both secretion level and antigen specificity of the secreted antibody. Phase II research will optimize the assay format by permitting simultaneous analysis of other antibody properties, including antibody isotype and blocking properties. Using newly fused hybridomas, Phase II research will isolate and enrich productive clones and compare results with conventional methods which require use of time consuming and labor intensive limiting dilution cloning. Monoclonal antibodies are widely used as research, therapeutic, diagnostic, and imaging reagents, and are increasingly used in the emerging field of proteomics for discovering new drug targets and locating disease specific markers. The GMD method will reduce production time and costs, improve antibody quality and yield, and permit isolation of rare cells doc4142 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will focus on improving solution growth of Nd and Yb,Pr-doped NaYF4 single crystals. Two alternate techniques are proposed: top seeded solution growth and traveling solvent zone. Phase I results indicate that spectroscopically Nd:NYF is superior to YAG and YLF and as good or better than YVO4 as a laser diode-pumped laser; and that Yb,Pr:NaYF4 is a 1.3 micron emitter with favorable properties for use in telecommunications. In a parallel effort to crystal growth, laser evaluation of NYF will continue through laser tests and by measurements of NYF s thermo-optic properties. In Phase I a very efficient single phase green emitter Yb,Er :NYF phosphor was demonstrated. A second thrust of this Phase II effort will then be to develop synthesis processes of granular doped NYF materials for their use in 2-D and 3-D displays. Combinations of Yb,RE-doped NYF will be prepared to extend the range of colors to red and blue. Nd:NYF is seen as a superior material to YLF and YAG for compact diode pumped lasers and an economical alternative to Nd:YVO4 currently used. Yb, Pr: NYF can be used as amplifiers for telecommunications in the important 1.3 micron wavelength range. NYF phosphors, dispersed in plastic hosts can be used in 2 and 3-D transparent displays for head mounted applications such as air traffic control, medicine, autos and aircraft doc4143 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project was motivated by recent research demonstrating that ferroelectric cathodes using commercial ferroelectric materials that were optimized for transducer applications can produce current densities in excess of 30 Amperes per square centimeter at 500,000 Volts, and can sustain an emission pulse (at 50,000 Volts) for a time in excess of 2 microseconds. Under the Phase I project ferroelectric materials optimized for use as cathodes were fabricated and tested, and promising materials were identified for further testing and optimization. The objective of the Phase II project will be to demonstrate a ferroelectric material with emission characteristics and lifetime meeting industry-defined requirements for application as a cathode in a commercial electron tube. Phase II research will include cathode testing at 20,000 volts, 1 microsecond with hundreds of pulses per second, characterization of the electron beam produced by the ferroelectric cathode according to size, energy and emittance, and validation testing of the cathode at an electron tube manufacturer s facility under commercial operating conditions. It is anticipated that these tests will demonstrate the efficacy of the ferroelectric cathode materials developed under this project for use in commercial electron tubes. Cathodes are used in a wide variety of microwave tubes. Applications include radar, communications, radio and TV transmission, accelerators for medical, waste treatment, environmental and research applications doc4144 none The Loess Plateau of China has the most complete and extensive terrestrial records of Quaternary sedimentation on Earth, and analysis of the soil formation and its geographic differentiation should provide useful information on climate history and global circulation modeling. This project will study the last interglacial paleosol (called S1 and dates from 128,000 to 73,000 years ago) with soil samples selected along a SE-NW transect in the Chinese Loess Plateau. The goal of the research is to reconstruct the detailed history of the last interglacial Asian monsoons. To achieve the goal, four sets of analyses will be conducted. First, the paleosol S1 pedostratigraphy and chronology will be established through sample dating and other laboratory analyses. Second, the soil characteristics will be examined, including the meso-scale and mirco-scale morphology. Third, the summer monsoon proxy will be calibrated through analyses of the histories of leaching and general weathering of the soil profiles. Fourth, the winter monsoon proxy will be calibrated through analyses of the bulk size distribution and larger quartz size to determine the degree of post-depositional weathering. To comprehend the scope of future climate changes with considerations of severe human impacts, the last interglacial period deserves special attentions because it serves us best in understanding the natural processes of interglacial times. However, the global records of climate change for this period are inconsistent, and more data are needed from different regions to validate the spatial scale of various abrupt climatic events. A number of basic questions require an improved knowledge of climate histories of continental interiors. For instance, what are the relative roles played by atmospheric and oceanic circulation in transporting heat and water vapor from low to high latitudes and from oceans to interiors. Only by defining and quantifying the specific responses of regional environmental systems to global changes will major uncertainties about the mechanisms of global changes be understood. The Chinese Loess Plateau, a product of interactions between a high-latitude continental winter monsoon and a low-latitude oceanic summer monsoon, is perfectly located to validate the various hypotheses of the mechanisms of global changes. This study of monsoon history will be useful to future more accurate global change modeling doc4145 none William Hase of Wayne State University is supported by a grant from the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to continue his calculations on the dynamics of chemical systems. Specific systems for investigation are: (1) reactions of oxygen atoms with alkyl thiolate self-assembled monolayers, (2) enzyme catalyzed hydroxylation of methane by methanemonooxygenase, (3) dynamics of gas-phase nucleophilic substitution reactions, (4) rare gas scattering by alkyl-thiolate self-assembled monolayers, (5) activation of peptide ions by collision and surface induced dissociation and (6) collision induced desorption of methane from platinum surfaces by argon rare gas atoms. Both classical and quantum mechanical approaches will be used as appropriate and incorporated into, or interfaced with, his VENUS computer program. Calculations of trajectories will be used to investigate the scattering and reactions of atoms with free molecules and self-assembled surfaces and desorption from those surfaces. The studies will be extended to include activation of peptides and reactions catalyzed by enzymes which have biological implications. The computer programs developed for these studies will be made available to the scientific community so that a wide range of systems can be studied doc4146 none The goal of this effort is to relate the composition of acetylene plasmas to processing variables used in depositing plasma-polymerized acetylene films. These films are then investigated as adhesives for rubber-to-metal bonding. Plasma composition is also correlated with such film properties as adhesion, durability of adhesion, and corrosion inhibition. Plasma-polymerized acetylene films are deposited onto steel substrates in a microwave reactor using argon or other inert gases as carrier gases. The composition and morphology of the films are controlled through external variables such as power, pressure, monomer flow rate, and RF bias of the substrate. Plasma composition is determined by residual gas analysis (RGA), optical emission spectroscopy (OES), and time-of-flight mass spectroscopy (TOFMS). Films are characterized using reflection-absorption infrared spectroscopy (RAIR), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), variable-angle spectroscopic ellipsometry (VASE), and atomic force microscopy (AFM). Film properties are determined with electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), fracture mechanics tests, and industrial test methods. This is a collaboration involving the University of Dayton (plasma characterization), the University of Cincinnati (plasma polymerization and film characterization), the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company (film properties), and the Autonomous National University of Mexico (corrosion inhibition doc4147 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will contribute mathematical services in signal and image processing for distributed Java computing. A major component of internetworked information is digital images and audio signals. Current vector, signal, and image processing standards are evaluated to achieve advanced signal processing for Java. Phase I emphasized the design, algorithms, and Java relevance. VSIP (vector signal and image processing) constitutes a viable option for commercialization in the distributed Java environment. This Phase II effort seeks to bridge the gap between the theoretical and the commercial for VSIP in Java, while identifying operational modes and service requirements for this non-traditional programming environment. If successful, a huge community of Java programmers in academia, industry, and government could be enabled, as well as all the service recipients whose applications exploit such as library. Standardization for platform independence is a critical issue for Internet applications. An advanced commercially DSP toolkit would provide for a greater level of portability for signal-processing-intensive Internet applications. This would provide for better support for processing audio visual information in valuable application settings. Embedded Java applications will make use of the toolkit to provide advanced signal analysis capabilities with mobility, portability, and high quality doc4148 none This award form the Synthetic Organic Program will support a series of three annual Workshops on Organic Synthesis and Natural Products Chemistry. These workshops have the dual purpose of providing an effective forum for informal discussion among young industrial and academic scientists on current research in topical areas of organic synthesis and natural products, and assisting the Program staff in identifying emerging areas and researchers. This process, in turn, will aid the Program in long-range planning. The specific goals of the workshops include: 1) Providing an environment for the dynamic exchange of ideas in organic synthesis and natural products chemistry among a small group (about 20) of active young researchers in these fields. 2) Encouraging an attitude of cooperation among individuals working in related areas, and thereby, avoiding duplicative efforts. 3) Stimulating participants to study new problems and methods in synthetic and natural products chemistry. 4) Creating an atmosphere in which the scientific and social interaction among participants will be both stimulating and pleasant doc4149 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will design, fabricate and test a prototype gas-cluster ion-beam (GCIB) sputtering tool for depth profiles with monolayer-specific surface analysis of thin films. Applications will be to multilayer thin films of key importance in the microelectronics industries including semiconductors, metals in magnetic sensors, and dielectrics in photonic and micro-optical devices. The sputtering tool is expected to meet aggressive performance specifications including depth resolution of less than 1 nm in conjunction with mass spectrometry. This GCIB tool will be designed particularly for in-situ sputtering with surface-analytical instruments including the secondary-ion mass spectrometer (SIMS), the Auger electron spectrometer (AES) and the x-ray photoelectron spectrometer (XPS). The overriding motivation is the critical need in microelectronics for techniques to obtain accurate sputter depth measurements. The Phase-I effort demonstrated those GCIB methods with argon clusters sputter with near-atomic smoothness, high depth resolution and high secondary-ion yields. Minor instrumental design issues limited the cluster beam exposure uniformity and this artificially limited the average depth resolution measured. Straightforward engineering solutions are well known and are expected to yield improvements in Phase II that will provide depth resolution of well below 1 nm. The proposed technology will enable analysis of next-generation microelectronics devices having much thinner films. Epion is the first and only to manufacture GCIB systems. The tool to be prototyped will enable and have a wide applicability to many areas of the electronic materials processing and manufacturing industry doc4150 none This project will capitalize on improvements in laser technology that make it possible to generate extremely high laser intensities to probe in detail the highly relativistic parameter regime of laser-plasma interactions. Previous results on harmonic generation from relativistic Thomson scattering will be extended into the XUV spectral region, and the dependence of the harmonic generation on laser and plasma parameters will be explored. Previously observed ion acceleration will be studied in more detail to understand the origin of the ions and the behavior of the acceleration as a function of laser parameters. This work has technological applications to the generation of short x-ray radiation, the ignition of laser-fusion targets, and compact and inexpensive medical radiation sources doc4151 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project is to provide the means to reliably calculate turbopump stiffness and damping matrices based on dynamic force measurements collected using a magnetic bearing rig. During Phase I exploratory development of a high suction specific speed (NSS) = 65,000 rocket engine turbopump pump stage was carried out and laid the foundation for this project. A complementary Phase I project for NASA focused on an NSS = 85,000 stage. Earlier Air Force funding concentrated on demonstrating magnetic bearings as a useful lab instrument. More recent breakthroughs include a novel fix for auto-oscillation and establishing the structure of an innovative dynamic force matrix measurement methodology. The primary challenge in this work is to isolate those forces on the rotor (with and without cavitation) due to the interaction of the impeller with the stator using innovative test and signal processing techniques. By testing a series of impellers, a database of rotordynamic coefficients will be established based on component dynamic force data. An additional objective is to evaluate the capability of CFD for replicating those physical force measurements. The goal is to create scientifically based design methods for lighter high-performance turbopumps. Smaller, lighter, and higher speed rocket engine turbopumps are required to meet lower space launch cost requirements. Successful accomplishment of this fundamentally based approach for measuring component specific rotor dynamic forces and a method for using experimental results on a broader basis in the design process can lead to a breakthrough technology. It will enable turbopump designers to overcome current thresholds due to hydraulic induced rotor dynamic instabilities. In addition to reducing equipment size and cost, reliability will improve. The technology is also applicable to industrial turbomachinery including industrial pumps, aircraft engine fuel pumps, and compressors doc4152 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project is to develop a new computer peripheral: a Volumetric Image Display system that displays 3D images in a real space. Many viewers can walk around the display and see the 3D images from omni-directions without special glasses. The overall business objectives corresponding to this project are to develop and implement the technologies required for building the VID product, to demonstrate the market viability, and to complete the financial preparation for Phase III. In order to speed up commercialization, a Basic Model product will be completed in year 1. It will feature a flexible configuration and good specifications to address the initial need in various fields. Marketing will then begin in year 2 to test market and seek business alliances, using the Basic Model as a demonstration platform as well as an evaluation product. A low-volume manufacturing procedure will be established to support initial sales. In year 2, techniques that further improve product color and gray scale will be developed and demonstrated. We already have a Phase III funding commitment. Based on the demonstrated market viability and technical readiness, a new business plan will be prepared to raise additional funding commitments to complete the finance preparation for Phase III. The marketing goals also include obtaining at least one development contract from a major corporation, as part of the Phase III finance. Market analysis indicates great commercial potential in four major segments: medical, computer aided design and engineering, visual data analysis, and computer gaming doc4153 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project completes development of a production In-Bed Exerciser (IBEX) and tests its efficacy. This unique, active exerciser is a portable and efficient means of giving, in bed, physical therapy sufficient to maintain or restore the walking muscles of bedridden people. Geriatrics are especially vulnerable to bed confinement; they can lose ability to walk after 5-10 days. Becoming bedridden is a leading indicator of mortality for the elderly. A growing elderly population, a shortage of Physical Therapists, their inability to provide force levels and intensity of exercise needed, and pressure to constrain medical costs, demand such a machine. The Company has innovated a portable exerciser that attaches to the bed, is computer controlled, provides bilateral, reciprocal or one-leg exercise and records performance. Phase I demonstrated feasibility. The objective of this SBIR Phase II project is to use scientifically designed clinical trials to prove efficacy. Results are the prelude to successful commercialization according to the enclosed plan. The greatest social benefit will be improved quality of life for the elderly doc4154 none This project is the PI s transition from a traditional biostatistical research career in clinical trials, toxicology and environmental health to statistical methods for community based research, with an emphasis on sociology and behavioral science. The desire for this transition has arisen from the PIs involvement in several initiatives designed to foster diversity in the Biostatistics Department at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). Three types of activities are proposed: Publication of a series of articles on diversity. Development of working collaborations with social and behavioral scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health, with a view to generating stable funding sources to support the future efforts of Biostatistics faculty and students in these areas. Development of new statisticalmethods for community based research. Specific topics to be addressed include spatial analysis of time to event data, missing data problems especially in spatial data analysis settings, measurement error and missing data problems in multilevel modeling. Although the PI is an established and relatively senior researcher with a good track record as a statistical methodologist, the proposal meets the POWRE guidelines in two ways: It will support the PI during a critical time in her career while she makes a transition in her research interests, learns a new area and establishes collaborations that can provide sustainable long-term funding in this new area. It involves innovative ideas for integrating research and education, specifically for under-represented minority students. This POWRE project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc4155 none In this research project supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, Professors James Evans and Patricia Thiel and their coworkers at Iowa State University are examining the atomic level mechanisms of thin film growth. Using a combined experimental computational approach, this team is investigating the anisotropic homoepitaxial growth of metals on metals, concentrating on the growth of silver on the Ag(110) single crystal surface. The effect of adsorbate surfactants on the growth mechanism and morphology of the thin film is also examined. Variable temperature scanning tunneling microscopy, high-resolution low energy electron diffraction, and kinetic Monte Carlo methods are all used to examine these growth processes. The results of this work help to define and control the structure and stability of nanostructures for various technological applications. Understanding the detailed mechanism of metal on metal growth is the goal of this research project carried out at Iowa State University. A combination of experimental and computational methods is used to examine anisotropic growth, surfactant mediated growth, and the stability and morphology of nanostructures on metal and graphite surfaces. Information obtained from these studies impacts technologies for electronic device fabrication and nanostructured materials doc4156 none Holland Amphioxus is a lower chordate that represents the closest living invertebrate relative of the vertebrates. In recent years, gene expression data from relatively late developmental stages of amphioxus have helped to indicate body part homologies between amphioxus and vertebrates. For instance, mapping the expression of neural genes has suggested that amphioxus (and, by extension, the proximate ancestor of the vertebrates) has major brain regions homologous to those of vertebrates. In contrast, relatively little is yet known about gene expression during early development of amphioxus. In the vertebrates, such early acting genes play key roles in setting up signaling centers (organizers), establishing primary body axes, and large-scale patterning of the tissues. This proposal is focused on genes involved in the initial establishment and early regionalization of the amphioxus central nervous system. The ultimate aim is to test the hypothesis that mechanisms for establishing and large-scale patterning of the nervous system were already largely in place in the last common ancestor of amphioxus and the vertebrates. The research comprises two tightly linked approaches. The first is to isolate and study the expression of amphioxus homologs of vertebrate genes known to be important in early nervous system development. The second is to use vital dye tracing to elucidate cell and tissue movements associated with the early morphogenesis of the amphioxus nervous system, including gastrulation, extension of the anterior-posterior axis of the embryo, and establishment of regional identities. Taken together, the expression of key developmental genes in the context of a detailed map of cell and tissue movements will provide insights into the evolution of mechanisms involved in the establishment and regionalization of the central nervous system during the early evolution of the vertebrates doc4157 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will continue to develop and demonstrate a computational tool for detailed simulation of Rapid thermal processing (RTP) in a distributed computing environment by taking advantages of the findings in Phase I. RTP has become a key technology in the fabrication of advanced semiconductor devices. As wafers get larger and chip dimensions smaller, the understanding of the highly coupled physics such as radiative heat transfer, transient fluid flow and heat transfer as well as chemical reactions through numerical modeling using high-performance computing is the key to the design, optimization, and control of RTP reactors. In Phase II, A 3D surface radiation model based on the modified discrete transfer method (MDTM) will be developed to treat radiative transfer in the lamphouse and process chamber as a whole process. The detailed pattern effects will be taken into account by rigorously solving time-domain Maxwell s equations through a finite volume approach. The rarefied gas dynamics in low pressure RTP will be modeled by adding Burnett terms into the Navier-Stokes equations. The governing equations that contain various multi-disciplinary physical models will be solved by a 3D unstructured finite volume method. To address computationally intensive 3D simulation needs, an efficient parallel strategy will be implemented in the solution procedure. Data communication among parallel processors will be conducted by the Message Passing Interface (MPI) library. To accelerate the overall solution convergence and improve the parallel performance, the algebraic multi-grid (AMG) method will be used to solve the discretized equations in each processor. It is expected that the proposed simulation tool can be used to systematically investigate the underlying physics occurring in RTP systems, and to help in the design, optimization, and control of RTP reactors. The proposed simulation tool will significantly benefit the semiconductor manufacturing equipment industries that require a detailed understanding of multimode and highly coupled transport phenomena. The potential applications include the design, optimization, and control of RTP reactors and many other manufacturing and materials processing systems doc4158 none Tabletop laser systems with powers in the terawatt regime have made it possible to study high intensity laser-plasma interactions within a university environment. The goal of this research project is to identify experimentally a regime in which ultrashort laser-plasma solitons can be created. Such solitons, when created at high intenstities, are predicted to propagate with unchanging pulse duration and shape for distances large compared to those which, at low intensity, would result in the temporal stretching of the pulse. The research will seek to demonstrate that ultrashort laser pulses can propagate as temporal solitons and to investigate the stability of such solitons by varying the experimental conditions doc4146 none The goal of this effort is to relate the composition of acetylene plasmas to processing variables used in depositing plasma-polymerized acetylene films. These films are then investigated as adhesives for rubber-to-metal bonding. Plasma composition is also correlated with such film properties as adhesion, durability of adhesion, and corrosion inhibition. Plasma-polymerized acetylene films are deposited onto steel substrates in a microwave reactor using argon or other inert gases as carrier gases. The composition and morphology of the films are controlled through external variables such as power, pressure, monomer flow rate, and RF bias of the substrate. Plasma composition is determined by residual gas analysis (RGA), optical emission spectroscopy (OES), and time-of-flight mass spectroscopy (TOFMS). Films are characterized using reflection-absorption infrared spectroscopy (RAIR), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), variable-angle spectroscopic ellipsometry (VASE), and atomic force microscopy (AFM). Film properties are determined with electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), fracture mechanics tests, and industrial test methods. This is a collaboration involving the University of Dayton (plasma characterization), the University of Cincinnati (plasma polymerization and film characterization), the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company (film properties), and the Autonomous National University of Mexico (corrosion inhibition doc4160 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project combines hermetically packaged, differential variable reluctance transducers (DVRT) capable of peak strain detection (PD) with shape memory alloy (SMA) actuators to produce improved passive PDs. These detectors can withstand harsh environmental conditions, e.g., moisture, salt, vibration, and can be reset for repeated uses. Sensors in smart structures generally require system power in order to operate, but power outages may result in loss of key data. Therefore, sensors that can record peak information without power, i.e., passively, are needed in smart structures. Earlier passive PDs have relied on measuring the magnetic properties of transformation induced plasticity (TRIP) steels. However, these devices suffer from bulky size, low resolution, high nonlinearity, and a one time use limitation due to material yielding. This technology addresses these problems by using modified, microminiature DVRT-PDs. Phase I successfully designed, built, and tested hermetic packages, and SMAs were successfully employed for resetting of the devices. Techniques for remote interrogation using radio frequency identity tags were investigated, micropower prototypes were designed and built, and methods for wireless delivery of power to the SMA actuator were demonstrated. In Phase II, highly integrated microelectronics will be combined with the hermetic DVRT-PD packages to produce self-contained, remotely queried and remotely resettable PDs. Novel micropower sensor excitation circuits, capable of long range interrogation, will be built, tested, and packaged for independent laboratory evaluation and eventual field deployment. Field tests will include health monitoring of structural joints, repairs, and supporting members of civil structures, including bridges. The physical attachment of the DVRT-PDs to these structures will be designed for reliability, low cost, and ease of use. Applications include health monitoring of composite structures, aircraft, trains, bridges, dams, and buildings. Military and commercial markets for these systems are significant. Health monitoring has the potential to enhance the safety and life of military, aerospace, and civil structures. Sensate structures equipped with passive networks of peak displacement or strain measurement devices could be interrogated for their response to test loads or potentially damaging events, and either replaced or their embedded sensors reset for future interrogation. Critical civil and military structures require smart sensors in order to report their strain histories; this can help to insure safe operation after exposure to potentially damaging loads, e.g., earthquakes, hurricanes, military combat, etc doc4161 none This is an investigation of fundamental plasma physics and chemistry in microhollow cathode discharges (MHCDs) with the objectives of determining (1) characteristic lengths of plasma boundary layers in microhollow cathode discharges to provide information on coupling mechanisms between opposite cathode falls; (2) plasma parameters that determine the rate of generation of excimers, such as electron density, electron energy, gas temperature, discharge current and discharge voltage; and (3) the optical gain of high-pressure MCHDs with the goal of explain their possible use as a micro excimer laser medium. The experimental studies are supported by computer modeling. The relations of global discharge parameters to fundamental plasma properties and the scaling of excimer laser gain in xenon-chloride MHCDs are investigated computationally. Microhollow cathode discharge (MHCDs) are nonthermal high-pressure gas discharges between a hollowcathode and a planar or hollow anode with electrode dimensions in the range of 100 micrometers. The large concentration of high-energy electrons and the high neutral-gas density favor three-body processes such as excimer formation. This along with the simplicicty of design and operation, make these systems attractive candidates for light sources, sources of charged particles, and micro plasma reactors doc4162 none Air cargo is an increasingly vital, though little researched, link in the contemporary global economy. Yet the availability and quality of air cargo services vary among cities, regions, and countries. This project will examine how variation in air cargo services affects the competitiveness of exporting manufacturers and the local economies within which they operate. Through questionnaire surveys and in-depth interviews with air cargo carriers and exporting manufacturers, both the supply and demand dimensions of air cargo services will be assessed in the context of Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore. Utilizing both quantitative and qualitative methods, models will be developed to show how the use of air cargo services changes as firms internationalize their operations, how foreign-owned and locally owned firms differ in their relationships with air cargo carriers, and how greater use of information technology has changed relationships in the air cargo industry. While there is a significant descriptive and growing theoretical literature on producer services, virtually none of this addresses air cargo. Heretofore air cargo has been treated simply as a means of transport for certain special goods. However, the accelerated emergence of a new international division of labor and concomitant reach by firms for competitive advantage have produced an evolution in the technological sophistication and organizational structure of the air transport industry. Airlines have developed broader product lines of different speed services, used communication advances to accelerate the flow of information among air cargo shippers and carriers, and formed international alliances to better serve multinational corporations. In essence, a much richer set of services has been developed. An exploration of these complex services, the carriers that provide them, and the exporters that use them in three dynamic Southeast Asian economies will demonstrate the role of air cargo as an influence upon the competitiveness of developing economies doc4163 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will conduct research to develop a new approach to coating metals continuously and rapidly on large areas of moving substrates. Currently, these types of coatings are electrochemically plated resulting in higher operating costs due to environmental regulations in the U.S. This has added to the declining share of the world market for the U.S. electronic metal-coating industry. Consequently, the Phase I results on the technique have generated interest in the commercial sector and a prototype demonstration is needed for the identified customers. The proposed method is suitable for coating conductive as well as nonconductive substrates, and rigid as well as flexible substrates. In this Phase II project, a prototype will be developed for continuously coating nonconductive substrates used in electronic applications. Then metal coatings will be deposited at a rate better than that of the conventional methods. Further research will be conducted to meet customer s expectations of the coating quality and process economics. In addition, process repeatability will be assured by running the equipment for the identified customers. Finally, the coating price will be determined and a cost benefit analysis will be performed. The proposed method has the potential to reduce operating costs in the intended coating operations substantially. Copper, nickel and other metal coatings are widely plated on nonconductive substrates in several electronic and automotive applications. Typical application include EMI RFI shielding in cellular phones, conductor lines in printed wiring boards used in computers and flat panel displays, and decorative trims in automobiles. The method to be developed could provide a lower-cost alternative to the conventional methods in use today and make the US. coating industry more competitive in the international market doc4164 none Philip Pechukas of Columbia University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to explore analytical and computational aspects of quantum dynamics in many-body systems. Equilibrium time correlation functions, which contain all the information needed to describe the dynamics of systems sufficiently close to thermal equilibrium, are difficult to calculate. In the first project, imaginary time calculations will be extended with the aim of enabling accurate evaluation of quantum time correlation functions. In the second project, development of a quantum analog of the Smoluchlowski equation will be explored. Also, an entire class of quantum Brownian motion models will be examined. In the final two projects, the effects of various kinds of correlated initial conditions on system dynamics will be studied, and a quantum approach to the fluctuating barrier model will be initiated. The description and simulation of complex chemical processes at very accurate levels requires the application of quantum mechanics, specifically the quantum dynamics of many-body systems. This research addresses a number of issues in the basic theory of quantum dynamics, including rates of decay to chemical equilibrium and kinetic processes inside a fluctuating protein doc4165 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project addresses the development of highly dispersed Pt-Mo electrocatalysts for application as anodes in proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells. Alternative anode electrocatalysts remain a critical development area for the cost reduction and performance enhancement of PEM fuel cells operating on reformate hydrogen fuel. Specifically, there is a need for catalysts that are tolerant to reformate by-products such as CO. Supported Pt-Mo is a leading candidate for the next generation of these catalysts. The Phase I research successfully produced highly dispersed Pt-Mo catalysts supported on Vulcan XC-72 using two distinct methods. The catalysts produced by both methods show excellent hydrogen oxidation characteristics in 0.5 M H2SO4. The performance of these materials in 100 ppm CO H2 indicated high activity but did not, however, show the degree of CO-tolerance expected on the basis of results from bulk Pt-Mo alloys. These findings were surprising in light of voltammetric evidence that showed electrochemical interaction between Mo and Pt. Phase II of this effort will develop a more comprehensive understanding of the nature of Pt-Mo interactions. The results from the Phase I research at T J suggest that the promotion of enhanced H2 oxidation at lower potentials in CO H2 fuel streams is critically dependent upon the nature of the Pt-Mo interaction. We intend to examine the influence of surface composition coverage of Mo on solid Pt electrode surfaces in the presence of CO H2 fuel streams as a function of potential using a rotating disk electrode (RDE) system. These fundamental studies of solid electrode surfaces will identify the basis of CO-tolerance. Based on these results, we will pursue rational development of supported Pt-Mo catalysts with the appropriate surface chemistry and structure using three novel dispersion methods. As a part of this work, we will conduct in-depth physicochemical characterization of the catalysts as well as more comprehensive electrochemical analysis. We intend to produce prototype membrane electrode assemblies (MEAs) for testing in fuel cells. In addition, we will supply catalyst materials for external evaluation by leading catalyst manufacturers. These companies have committed over $840,000 in follow-on funding for this SBIR project. Low cost CO-tolerant catalysts developed under this SBIR project will enable the commercialization of high performance PEM fuel cells operating on reformed hydrogen. Reducing catalyst costs addresses a key obstacle hindering the commercialization of PEMFCs for vehicle propulsion and off-grid electric power generation doc4166 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project focuses on optimization and scale-up of an aluminum gallium nitride (AlGaN) field emitter technology that could be used for practical applications. Materials have been identified that are very promising to deal with the wide-band-gap for field-emission applications. These materials have low to negative electron affinity. The Phase I project demonstrated various AlGaN compositions that possessed different doping levels for field emission properties. The Phase II project will carry out a detailed and systematic parametric optimization using closely-coupled theoretical modeling and experimentation to produce rugged, low-voltage III-V nitride field emitters. The project will utilize the company s deposition chamber and will demonstrate the effects of composition, doping, ion implantation, substrate temperature and other parameters. Effects of microstructure and conductivity of grain boundaries will also be investigated to develop better understanding of the AlGaN cold cathode technology. The commerical potential for this technology is a compact addressable X-ray source. Additional applications will include electronic coolers, electron guns, solar-blind UV detectors, large-area lighting and flat-panel displays doc4167 none The project studies the evolving relationship among Palestinian moderates, radicals and Israeli politicians. Based on one year of field work in Israel and the Palestinian territories, the primary objective of the project is to answer the question: what caused the breakdown of a twenty-year consensus in Israel against bargaining with the Palestinians on the border question? The broader objective of the project is to specify the general conditions under which any struggle, in what the nationalists see as occupied territory, successfully breaks down the consensus among rulers in the controlling state against a bargained solution. Field research explores the hypothesis that divided nationalist rebels are more likely to secede and thereby to redefine the boundaries of the state that seeks to contain those rebels. Specifically, only when a split occurs between nationalist moderates and radicals, and the moderates are autonomous from the radicals, is the controlling state s consensus of non-negotiation with the rebels likely to break down. The fear that the balance of power could change in the near future in favor of the radicals gives politicians at the controlling state a crucial incentive to negotiate. The project combines a quantitative analysis, a game theoretic model, and a qualitative comparison. On the quantitative side, the development of coding criteria allows a comparison of the mix of ideological positions of all revolutionary factions. Modeling the interaction between moderates and radicals in controlled territories, and the mainstream politicians from the controlling states, helps to identify the conditions in which bargaining for territorial change is the best strategy for the actors involved. Finally, the comparative method allows the testing of implications derived from the theoretical framework. An analytic narrative of the Palestinian-Israeli case over time also provides crucial lessons for other cases of nationalist rebellion-seeking autonomy from the state doc2747 none This project will examine the origin and dynamics of turbulence in the interplanetary medium. Turbulence will be incorporated into mean-field models of the solar wind and the role of turbulence on shock waves and the acceleration of particles at shocks will be investigated. The role of turbulence in the modulation of cosmic rays will also be investigated. The coupling of turbulence to the mean-field models of the solar wind will be accomplished by introducing source terms for the dissipation of turbulence into the large-scale solar wind model. To investigate the role of turbulence in shocks, coupled microscopic and macroscopic models of the shock waves will be used to generalize the Rankine-Hugoniot conditions. The influence of turbulence on cosmic ray modulation will be accomplished by adding turbulent scattering to existing cosmic ray transport codes doc4169 none This is a study of plasma parameters generated in the gliding-arc discharge propagating in both plane and coaxial geometries , especially near the equilibrium-to-nonequilibrium transition point. The gliding air in the plane parallel to the gas flow is the base case; a cylindrical gliding-arc configuration adds tangential velocity independently controlled by external magnetic fields. Arc propagation velocities, geometry, electric fields, and power inputs are determined by optical imaging synchronized with voltage-current measurements. Additional information on plasma conditions is obtained by spectrally resolved imaging, microwave interferometry, and infrared spectroscopy. A concomitant theoretical study focuses on kinetic mechanisms of the equilibrium-to-nonequilibrium transition. Kinetics of excited and charged particles are modeled under conditions when both thermal ionization and nonequilibrium ionization mechanisms are important. Critical values of the electric field and gas temperature in the transition plasmas are identified and compared to experimental findings. The gliding arc is a hybrid type of atmospheric-pressure air discharge that provides relatively high levels of electron density, current, and power (typical of thermal plasmas) along with relatively low temperature and high electric field (typical of cold nonequilibrium plasmas). The gliding-arc discharge, moving in a gas flow between divergent electrodes, contains periodic self-triggered transitions of atmospheric-pressure thermal arc into a nonequilibrium discharge. In this transition, the plasma cools rapidly while electron density remains on the thermal-plasma level doc4106 none This research investigates evolution in high elevation populations of the leaf beetle Chrysomela aeneicollis. Populations in the Sierra Nevada (California) are on the southern edge of the species range. Previous studies found that drainages differ in air temperature and beetle populations fluctuate with changes in climate. Frequencies of different forms (genotypes) of the temperature-sensitive enzyme phosphoglucose isomerase (PGI) vary among drainages, suggesting that natural selection acts on PGI. Heat shock protein (Hsp) levels in beetles correspond to air temperature differences and depend on PGI genotype. The proposed research will investigate the relationship between temperature and functional property of PGI genotypes (i.e. their ability to catalyze biochemical reactions fundamental to metabolism). Second, the effects of temperature on the physiology of beetles of different PGI genotype will be studied, using Hsp s and ubiquitin conjugates as indices of physiological stress. Third, survival and reproduction of beetles of different PGI genotype in nature will be compared. The research will provide important information about the evolutionary significance of enzyme polymorphisms. It may add insight about the impact of climate change on native insects. Finally, it will allow undergraduates to participate in basic research, enhance their educational experience and expand their opportunities for the future doc4171 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project from Orbital Research Inc. will design and test an affordable, multiline refreshable Braille display system (RBDS) able to display computer screen information either from the hard drive or the Internet. The proposed RBDS will combine state-of-the-art microelectromechanical (MEMS) actuators with cutting edge electronic assembly technology to assure ease in manufacturing and robustness. Additionally, Orbital Research will implement a modular architecture that allows for unprecedented versatility through tailoring the Braille surface for various applications requested by the end users. Traditionally, MEMS actuators are very small, cost efficient and low power. However, traditional packaging of the MEMS devices results in a much larger and much more expensive component. In Phase I of this project, Orbital Research as produced a MEMS actuator capable of producing Braille dots. In this phase, Orbital Research will integrate a flexible assembly process to overcome the traditional complexities associated with packaging MEMS actuators. Orbital Research will take full advantage of the features offered by cutting edge manufacturing processes such as MEMS, IC processing, flip-chip and surface mount technologies to assure the final proposed RBDS is light weight and small in size, cost affordable, robust, modula, enables tactile acuity, and is user friendly. The refreshable Braille Display system proffered by Orbital Research will enhance access to electronic information on the job or at home. It will also provide for enhanced educational and employment opportunities for visually impaired individuals in line with the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act. This device will create employment and research opportunities for the visually impaired, especially for those whose interests extend to mathematics, scientific, and technical fields that require frequent access to reference works in order to perform their tasks efficiently doc4172 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project addresses the need for a new generation of laser transmitters for differential absorption lidar (DIAL) measurements of water vapor. Phase II will develop a new laser technology for mini-DIAL measurements of water vapor. DIAL transmitter requirements will be achieved using a revolutionary technology that allows diffraction limited performance from diode bars. These ultra bright diode bars enable efficient end pumped, q-switched, low-gain, quasi-three level lasers. Recently, a laser material that operates directly at the 944.1 nanometer water vapor absorption line has become commercially available. Coupling these two technologies will result in an efficient compact DIAL transmitter. This technology will result in a new class of compact, efficient, and low-cost DIAL transmitters for atmospheric water vapor profiling. Low cost DIAL transmitters are important for future improvements in weather forecasting, global climate models, and understanding of the transmission of communication signals in the atmosphere. In addition, potential commercial applications will be found in the medical and material processing industries doc4173 none The goals of this study are to improve fundamental understanding of the physical and chemical processes that occur on the walls of low-temperature plasma systems and to develop an understanding of how these wall processes feed back to the plasma chemistry and influence the basic properties of the glow. Experimental and computational investigations are combined to address these issues. Measurements of fundamental parameters of plasmas are made in a modified Gaseous Electronics Conference (GEC) reference cell and compared with results from a comprehensive plasma equipment simulator, the Hybrid Plasma Equipment Model (HPEM). The emphasis is on processes occurring on chamber walls and their influence on the overall discharge. Diagnostics used include Langmuir probe measurements, microwave interferometry, Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometry, mass and energy analysis, optical emission spectrometry (OES), and surface reflection techniques. Interactions between working gases and the walls that contain them occur in all terrestrial low-pressure plasmas such as those used for semiconductor processing, lighting, and lasers. These interactions can determine the basic parameters of the glow, but have received little direct study. This work will provide a basis for a rational approach to the design, cleaning, or seasoning of plasma chambers doc4174 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will focus on enhancing maintenance operations scheduling methodologies with condition assessment and diagnostic tools to produce an integrated maintenance management system. The company has developed scheduling tools that allocate maintenance resources on the basis of elapsed calendar time and unit utilization. This project will augment these tools with condition assessment modules. If successful, the result would be a generally applicable system combining condition, time, and utilization as drivers for the maintenance process. The project will develop algorithms for condition assessment based on signal processing and feature extraction using both conventional sensors such as accelerometers, and next generation sensors such as eddy current devices, fiber optic sensors, and MEMS sensors. These methods, when applied a maintenance service program, will lead to new methodologies for the synthesis of integrated diagnostics techniques and for the design of new hardware and software systems to realize those techniques for a wide range of practical applications doc4175 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will complete the research and development to product of a low-cost tool for exploratory science and math learning, a three-dimensional motion detector. This device uses a passive optical detection scheme with two ordinary home video cameras as sensors. For at least 15 years, systems that capture and display motion in real-time have been used for studying the meaning of graphs and to investigate physical phenomena, and their educational effectiveness has been researched and documented. To date, all low-cost systems have been constrained to one dimension, and generally use ultrasonic echo location. This project will make 3D-motion detection affordable and competitive with one-dimensional systems when used with schools existing video equipment. It offers great learning potential by allowing students to build a bridge from their universal 3D-world experience into mathematical space. The Phase II project proceeds along three fronts: refinement of the signal processing hardware, coding of the host software for capture, display, and analysis of the 3D data, and the development and testing of educational activities. The software and activities are targeted for high school mathematics and physics. This small business proffers a hands-on exploratory system to allow students multiple views and ways of understanding the complex study of motion. Several of the largest national distributors of educational electronic laboratory equipment have demonstrated interest in selling and promoting the motion detector doc4176 none This project will examine whether low-income workers experience low levels of accessibility to public transportation and employment in six U.S. metropolitan areas. The project will estimate the extent to which public transportation is linked with marginally employed persons and their job locations. This will be done by comparing public transportation and employment access measures for current and past Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) recipients. TANF recipients represent the target population of welfare-to-work initiatives. Compared to other low-income persons, they are the most likely to have limited levels of transportation mobility. The analysis will control for a variety of personal characteristics such as race, gender, length of unemployment, and educational attainment as primary factors affecting unemployment. An empirical model will be developed to estimate the likelihood that a person became employed and exited the TANF as a function of these characteristics and public transit access measures. This project represents the first cross-sectional analysis of how public transportation and employment access affect employment opportunities for low-income persons. Both the descriptive and multivariate statistical results will describe the effects of employment and public transportation accessibility and clarify areas where policies aimed to increase mobility can have the greatest impact. While analyses similar to this research have been conducted in some U.S. cities, disparate methodologies and data types do not allow the results to be compared across cities. Policy-makers continue to allocate significant resources to welfare-to-work mobility initiatives while having little to base their expectations for success. The analysis of the six proposed metropolitan areas will provide generalizable results that will be of interest to many other metropolitan areas, social service agencies, transportation providers, and researchers concerned with the success of welfare-to-work initiatives doc4177 none AGARWAL This is a study of the mechanism and intermediates in the destruction of nitric oxide (NO) and nitrous oxide (N2O) in combustion emissions using a pulsed corona discharge. In situ laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) will be used to study the behavior of hydrogen atoms, hydroxyl radials, and carbon monoxide in the plasma-induced destruction of nitrogen oxides in the emissions from a coal-field fluidized bed combustion (FBC) system. Although corona discharge is regarded as a promising technology for control of nitrogen and sulfur oxides from both mobile and stationary sources, previous studies have looked only at the stable end products. This is the first attempt to investigate the mechanism of the process and provide a rational basis for optimizing the system doc4178 none This award in the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research on the synthesis and characterization of new cluster compounds of the early transition metal elements W, Ta and Mo with chlorine ligands by Professor Louis Messerle of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Iowa. New, low temperature solid state and solution techniques are employed for the preparation of these complexes, as well as reactivity studies. Characterization is accomplished by means of X-ray diffraction, NMR, electrospray MS and UV-vis spectroscopy. The physical measurements are supported by molecular orbital calculations. The goal of this research is to use low-temperature methods recently developed in the Principle Investigator s laboratory to synthesize new metal atom cluster compounds, and to determine their physical and chemical properties. These complexes will be useful for the production of many other organometallic and coordination compounds, and may they find applications as magnetic materials and in medical diagnostics as contrast agents. Many of the results of this work will be integrated into laboratory courses, and the undergraduate and graduate students involved in the project will learn a breadth of skills in both synthesis and instrumental methods as well as gain experience in an effort which links fundamental chemistry with medical and material applications doc4179 none This project employs pure electron plasmas to study two-dimensional nearly inviscid fluid flow. The project unites the efforts of researchers with experience in pure electron plasmas and plasma fluid experiments with those with experience in the analytic and numerical analysis of geophysical flows and two-dimensional turbulence. Key areas of study will include determining how complex fluid systems equilibrate and relax toward their late-time states, how they create structures and spatial patterns, and how the dynamics differ in flows that are strictly Hamiltonian from those with forcing and dissipation such that the phase space has both repelling and attracting regions. The results of this work will have broad impact on turbulence theory, pattern formation, planetary atmospheres, oceanography, and star and planet formation doc4180 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project is for development of fast bootstrap confidence intervals and hypothesis tests, and ways to make bootstrapping feasible for large data sets. Classical inference (intervals and tests) methods are known to be inaccurate when theoretical assumptions are violated, the usual case in practice. For example, skewness causes the usual t-test to be in error. The new methods are an order of magnitude (power of sqrt(n), where n is the sample size) more accurate in general than classical inferences. Bootstrap methods are a promising alternative to classical inferences, and can handle complex statistics including modern robust statistics, but are slow and have been little used in practice. The methods proposed are typically 17--37 times faster than other bootstrap methods. The methods are fast enough to be seamlessly incorporated into standard software, alongside or instead of classical inferences. This provides statistical practitioners a realistic alternative to easy but inaccurate classical inferences and non-robust methods. The competitive advantage to the firm that does this first is a major opportunity. Furthermore, the large sample methods would be attractive in the thriving data mining market doc4181 none Aydil Chemically reactive gas plasmas are used widely for etching and deposition of thin films and enable a whole class of technologies in the microelectronics industry. Despite the wide spread use and importance of such plasmas, optimization of plasma processes and design of plasma reactors rely heavily upon trial-and-error experimentation. There is a strong need for fundamental understanding of the intricate and complex coupling between plasma physics, homogeneous and heterogeneous chemistry, and species transport in plasma reactors. In particular, interactions of ions and radicals produced in chemically reactive gas plasmas with surfaces exposed to the discharge remain among the least understood aspects of plasma processing technologies. This lack of knowledge on surface reaction mechanisms and kinetics is a major limitation to the predictive capabilities of plasma reactor models that aim to integrate the plasma physics with gas phase and surface chemistry. A research strategy that integrates plasma and surface diagnostics with atomistic simulations is proposed to provide definitive conclusions about plasma-surface interactions during deposition of hydrogenated amorphous and nanocrystalline silicon films from SiH4 H2, Ar glow discharges. Si film deposition is chosen as a prototypical chemical process because of its technological importance in the semiconductor industry. The proposed study aims at identifying the elementary surface chemical reactions that govern the plasma deposition mechanism, determining the corresponding reaction rates, and elucidating how these surface kinetic processes affect the evolution of the structure and composition of the surface. Such knowledge can only be achieved through synergistic analysis of the experimental and simulation results. To this end, atomic-scale computer simulations will be employed to study the interactions of silane molecular fragments, H atoms, and energetic ions from the plasma with the deposition surfaces. For detailed mechanistic study of plasma-surface interactions, molecular-dynamics, molecular-statics, and Monte Carlo simulators have been developed based on interatomic potential-energy functions, which have been tested exhaustively to assess their validity in comparison with ab initio calculations and experimental data. In addition, ab initio calculations within density functional theory will be used to generate accurate chemical reaction energy surfaces and variational rate theory will be employed to calculate the corresponding reaction rates. Furthermore, hybrid off-lattice kinetic Monte Carlo simulations will be implemented for full-scale dynamical modeling of the plasma deposition process over realistic time scales. These computational studies will identify surface chemical reactions that occur on surfaces exposed to a chemically reactive plasma, analyze quantitatively the energetics and kinetics of these reactions, and elucidate the elementary steps of the plasma deposition mechanism. The results of the computer simulations will be compared with experimental data and the insights gained from the simulations will be used to guide new experimental studies and design new plasma deposition strategies. In situ surface and plasma diagnostic methods will be used to study the phenomena occurring in the gas phase and on surfaces during film growth. Surface diagnostics will include in situ attenuated total reflection Fourier transform infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopy and in situ spectroscopic ellipsometry. ATR-FTIR will be at the heart of our experimental plan: The PI s have developed this technique in order to study surface physics and chemistry in a plasma environment. ATR-FTIR will be used to determine the growth surface composition as a function of the fluxes and energies of species incident onto the surface. The plasma gas-phase diagnostics will include various spectroscopic methods, such as infrared and visible emission spectroscopy, and line-of-sight threshold-ionization mass spectroscopy to detect and measure the radical energies and fluxes impinging on the surface. The proposed research is pioneering in linking experimental in situ plasma and surface diagnostics with atomic-scale dynamical modeling and theoretical surface reaction analysis to establish fundamental mechanistic and quantitative understanding of deposition surface interactions with chemically reactive plasmas and how this interactions evolve during the deposition process. In addition, the proposed research will set the stage for developing an accurate chemical reaction database that can be utilized for equipment-scale plasma reactor modeling. Undertaking such a challenging research effort is particularly timely given the recent experimental and theoretical advances in the field. The scientific underpinnings of plasma processing are multidisciplinary and cut across traditional boundaries between different disciplines including physics, chemistry, chemical and electrical engineering. Thus, the proposed fundamental study in plasma-surface interactions provides an ideal educational tool for training students and postdoctoral scholars in addressing technologically important research problems using an integrated experimental and theoretical approach doc4182 none The objectives of this research program are to explore the physics of a new radiation mechanism and to demonstrate its viability as a source of high power radiation. In particular, an intense laser pulse will be used to excite a laser wakefield propagating across a DC magnetic field. The resulting wakefield couples to electromagnetic radiation at the plasma vacuum boundary. It is anticipated that teraHertz radiation at the level of one megaWatt will be generated and detected in pulses lasting a few hundred picoseconds doc4183 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project describes the development of a disposable, highly efficient suspension bioreactor for primary hematopoietic (blood cell-forming) cell culture. The unique challenges (heterogeneous nature, donor variability, and shear-sensitivity) of these cultures render traditional flask or suspension cultures unable to economically and consistently produce large quantities of cells. In Phase I, the feasibility and characteristics of a disposable suspension bioreactor was demonstrated. In Phase II, a scaled-up prototype of a large, agitated disposable bioreactor designed for clinical use (stem cell transplantation) will be constructed, characterized, and tested for reliability and durability. Gas and mass transfer correlations established in Phase I will be verified and extended. The use of medium optical density as a surrogate measure for cell density will be investigated. The final product will be a system that combines the simple, disposable nature of flask culture with the control and monitoring capabilities of a suspension bioreactor. The resulting system will enable the cost-effective production of large numbers of primary hematopoietic cells and will improve the effectiveness and decrease the cost of medical procedures in the fields of transplantation, immunotherapy, and gene therapy doc4184 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II Project will result in the development of two detection systems utilizing Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) capable of rapidly measuring the concentration of cyanide, a highly toxic substance used in large quantities in the extractive metals industry. A portable system will be well suited for use in the field for on-site measurements of cyanide for environmental compliance monitoring. An automated system will be useful for the measurement of cyanide levels in process control of precious metal extractive processes, and in monitoring wells for environmental compliance. Current methods of cyanide analysis give either the total amount of cyanide present in all forms, or that of free cyanide in combination with cyanide in weak acid dissociable (WAD) metal complexes. Our method of cyanide determination will be markedly superior to these methods because it will yield the concentration of free cyanide in addition to that of WAD cyanide. This has very important practical and economic implications for the precious metals extractive industries (e.g., gold and silver mining), since it is free cyanide which is of importance in optimizing metal extraction efficiency, and it is free cyanide which is the species of primary interest from an environmental regulatory standpoint doc4185 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project s goal is a commercial quality liquid crystal exhibiting V-shaped switching with no hysteresis. This LC will be used in gray-scale displays and telecommunications optical switches. Ferroelectric liquid crystals (FLCs), due to their fast switching speed and wide viewing angle, have inherent advantages over the more commonly used nematic liquid crystals. However, when used in displays, they have a disadvantage - they generally can be driven to only two states, on and off. Since displays require intermediate gray states, FLCs currently attain gray scale by rapidly switching on and off. This project uses a new type of FLC which, in addition to its speed and viewing angle advantage, also shows analog switching. This type of material, previously known as a thresholdless antiferroelectric , is now known to be an FLC with a linear optical response to applied field (also known as V-shaped switching ). This project s objective is to make new liquid crystal compounds and mixtures that exhibit V-shaped switching. Towards that end, a variety of cores, chiral tails, and achiral tails, all of which are either known or suspected to promote a de Vries-type smectic A, have been proposed. About 50 - 100 liquid crystals will be synthesized by combining these various components. These new LCs will be combined with LCs made in the Phase I or earlier, giving mixtures that ideally will have not only a de Vries smectic A phase, but also a wide room-temperature smectic C phase, good low-voltage analog electrooptic response, good alignability, and fast hysteresis-free switching. An optimal alignment layer configuration will be determined. The newly formulated mixtures will be placed in cells containing this alignment layer to give V-shaped switching displays. This project could be instrumental in advancing our knowledge of the root causes of V-shaped switching in FLC and, by extension, add insight into the responses of self-assembling molecules to applied forces. In addition, since the interaction of the alignment layer with the liquid crystal is crucial for V-shaped switching, much more so than for typical FLCs, this project will provide a better understanding of the alignment layer-LC interactions doc4186 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project involves development of an integrated sensor system that will accurately and rapidly measure small quantities of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) both in air and in aqueous environments. At present, no inexpensive sensor system is sufficiently sensitive and rugged for use in continuously monitoring of VOCs in underground water streams, soil, effluent discharge, fugitive emissions and in spent liquid and vapor streams. To capture this business opportunity, this project involves the development of low-cost continuous organic chemical sensors based on the change of fluorescence of dyes embedded in polymeric and sol-gel thin films. This program is innovative in combining sensitive diode laser-excited fluorescence with total internal reflection methods of analysis to provide a continuous monitor of VOCs. The Phase I research program was successful in demonstrating the feasibility developing several highly sensitive polymer dye films for use in detection of aqueous and gaseous phase VOCs. Detection limits in the part-per-billion (ppb) range for both aqueous and vapor phase trichloroethylene were achieved using fluorescence detection spectroscopy. The Phase II research and development program will accomplish the feasibility demonstrated in Phase I by developing a turnkey sensor system for multiple chemical analysis. The Phase II Research Objectives include synthesis of polymer and sol-gel solid matrices with pendant functional groups, development of a fluorescence monitoring array and algorithms for multi-chemical analysis, design and integration of miniaturized total internal reflection fluorescence array instrument, acquisition of families of test data to establish instrument specifications, and demonstration of the total-internal reflection fluorescence instrument at environmental remediation facilities and a water treatment plant. This sensor platform together with sensitive polymer dye films is significant in providing rapid on-site identification and quantification of volatile organic compounds and environmental pollutants in groundwater, soil, effluent discharge and fugitive emissions doc4187 none Aruchamy This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop thin-film nitrogen oxide sensors based on novel binary-phased nanocomposites by sol-gel processing. Sol-gel processing offers many advantages for sensor fabrication, including facility and versatility for nano-engineering of the microstructure. In Phase I, such sensor elements have shown much improved microstructure, enhanced sensitivity, and faster response speed than powder-derived sensor elements of the same composition by conventional processing. Thin-film sensors can be readily incorporated with silicon microelectronic technology and conveniently allow miniaturization, low process costs, and high reproducibility. Phase II will systematically optimize the processing, microstructure, and performance of the binary-phased thin-film nitrogen oxides sensors by sol-gel processing. Potential commercial applications of the research are expected in reliable, compact solid-state chemical sensors. This innovation is expected to provide highly stable and sensitive thin-film nitrogen oxides sensors for automotive emission control, industrial processing control, and environmental monitoring. These sensors may be used as stand-alone sensing devices or as sensing units to be integrated into on-chip multifunctional sensors and smart structures doc4188 none Apoptosis (programmed cell death) research is currently among the three fastest growing topics in worldwide biomedical research. Apoptosis plays a critical role in a wide variety of normal physiological processes. Significant data and knowledge are being accumulated on the complex apoptotic pathway, yet no resource exists to appropriately collate this information for the purposes of education and research. With extremely rapid growth of the available experimental data, the problem with redundant research is growing as illustrated with conflicting nomenclature and multiple re-discovery of the same proteins by independent groups. This project assists a rapidly growing community of apoptosis research by providing a public, WEB based resource that brings together all available information about apoptosis and its related proteins. In particular, the resource will contain a searchable database containing information about the following: -Families of proteins involved in apoptosis, including their domain structure, phylogenetic relations, and functional motifs. -Links to literature describing specific experiments with details about function of all proteins. -Three-dimensional structure (or predicted structure) of apoptosis related proteins. -Lists of uncharacterized proteins with domains known for their role in apoptosis. Expertise of leading apoptosis researchers is used to develop the preliminary version of the databases that are then supported by automated methods for finding new sequences, structures, and text information related to apoptosis that appear in various Internet-accessible resources. Once implemented, these automate as far as possible the collection of current, well-annotated data on apoptosis for a worldwide community of users. In addition, novel algorithms for structure and function prediction from sequence are used to enhance existing information with hypotheses about structure and molecular mechanism of function of apoptosis-related proteins, helping to plan and develop new experiments. This project thus provides the rapidly growing community of apoptosis research an access to consistently complete and current data. The prototype resource can be found at http: apoptosis-db.org doc4162 none Air cargo is an increasingly vital, though little researched, link in the contemporary global economy. Yet the availability and quality of air cargo services vary among cities, regions, and countries. This project will examine how variation in air cargo services affects the competitiveness of exporting manufacturers and the local economies within which they operate. Through questionnaire surveys and in-depth interviews with air cargo carriers and exporting manufacturers, both the supply and demand dimensions of air cargo services will be assessed in the context of Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore. Utilizing both quantitative and qualitative methods, models will be developed to show how the use of air cargo services changes as firms internationalize their operations, how foreign-owned and locally owned firms differ in their relationships with air cargo carriers, and how greater use of information technology has changed relationships in the air cargo industry. While there is a significant descriptive and growing theoretical literature on producer services, virtually none of this addresses air cargo. Heretofore air cargo has been treated simply as a means of transport for certain special goods. However, the accelerated emergence of a new international division of labor and concomitant reach by firms for competitive advantage have produced an evolution in the technological sophistication and organizational structure of the air transport industry. Airlines have developed broader product lines of different speed services, used communication advances to accelerate the flow of information among air cargo shippers and carriers, and formed international alliances to better serve multinational corporations. In essence, a much richer set of services has been developed. An exploration of these complex services, the carriers that provide them, and the exporters that use them in three dynamic Southeast Asian economies will demonstrate the role of air cargo as an influence upon the competitiveness of developing economies doc4190 none This research program entitled Structures of Gas-Phase Protein Ions represents a significant expansion of the prior work of Dr. David Clemmer of Indiana University at Bloomington and is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry program. The goal of this research is to investigate the 3-dimensional conformation of gas-phase proteins and peptides using a modified ion mobility time of flight mass spectrometer. The instrumentation to be used can accommodate a high number of analyses, which will enable the screening of large libraries of compounds. Chemical probes, such as hydrogen-deuterium (H D) exchange reactions, will be used to investigate both conformation and reactivity. The novel experiments planned, which couple H D exchange studies with collision induced dissociation experiments, may result in an important new technique for interpreting and measuring H D exchange data. The correlation between solution phase and gas phase protein conformations is not well defined, and may not be similar to solution phase conformations. However, if a correlation is found, this research could have a major impact on the understanding of the chemical mechanisms of biological reactivity and the study of protein structure reactivity relationships. With the increased understanding of the role of proteins in biological systems, it is now known that the 3-dimensional structure of a protein directly effects the function to be performed by the protein. Thus, an important area of chemical research today is the development of techniques to establish the 3-dimensional structure. In this fundamental research by Professor Clemmer, he will develop a new technique to examine protein structure. This research, though high risk, has the potential to impact society in the future through improved understanding of disease mechanisms based on protein structure function relationships. This will lead to enhancements in pharmaceutical development and treatment of disease doc4191 none Allocation of time and energy to reproduction influences both sexes. In this research, the causes and consequences of patterns of sperm allocation in males will be investigated. Historically, most research in this field has concentrated on egg production because an egg is more costly to produce than a sperm is. However, although sperm are smaller than eggs, each ejaculate of a male may contain enormous numbers of sperm. Recent research has revealed that reproductive resources for gamete production can be limited for males as well as for females in many species. Critical to patterns of sperm investment by males is the degree to which females mate with multiple males. Such multiple mating sets up intense competition among sperm of different males to fertilize the same egg. One consequence of such sperm competition is the production of large ejaculates. A dynamic program model developed by W. E. Harris has provided predictions for sperm allocation in the salamander, Ambystoma texanum. This species is highly suitable for such a study because within any breeding aggregation, each male may deposit 60+ sperm packets each containing many thousand sperm, and each female may induct 20+ sperm packets into her reproductive tract before she lays any eggs. Predictions from the dynamic program model will be tested using controlled laboratory experiments. Variation in sperm allocation is a key but understudied aspect of the reproductive pattern of most species. Previously, males of most species were thought to produce large ejaculates because most sperm were defective. More recent theory suggests that sperm allocation may be one of several adaptations of males to maximize their chances of siring offspring if females have multiple mating partners. The goal of this study is to test several predictions of this body of theory doc4192 none The goal of the research is to investigate a neural mechanism linking the processes of expert object recognition and face recognition. Previous research using event-related potentials (ERPs) have shown that an enhanced negative potential (N1) is elicited when participants view faces relative to non-face stimuli. An open question is whether the enhanced N1 is attributale to a unique structural property associated with faces or to a special cognitive operation used in face processing. One explanation is that the enhanced N1 reveals a specialized perceptual process that is reserved for the recognition of ecologically imprtant objects, such as faces. Preliminary data suggest that the enhnced N1 reflects a relatively early visual process that is rectuited in everyday face recognition, but is also employed in more specialized forms of expert object recognition, such as bird watching. The experiments in the current project explore the behvioral and neuro-physiological bases of object expertise as evidenced by real-world experts and normal adults when recognizing faces. These experiments will focus on questions related to the acquisition of expertise by recording ERPs of participants as they undergo extensive training in the visual recognition of articicial stimuli or birds. By testing its sensitivity to orientation, exposure duration, lateral presentation and typicality effects, the functional properties of the enhanced N1 will be examined in a series of follow-up experiments. Studying the behavioral and neurological parallels between expert object recognition and everyday face recognition provides a method for developing a general framework of object expertise doc4193 none Jason Halfen of the University of Wisconsin--Eau Claire is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program for Research in an Undergraduate Institution dealing with development of novel catalysts (involving coordination compounds of copper) for the aziridination of olefins. Main aims of the research include:examination of effects of ligand structure on the ability of catalysts to transfer nitrene groups to olefins; spectroscopic and structural characterization of a high-valent copper-nitrene complex (a putative intermediate in the reaction of interest); exploration of novel protecting groups; detailed mechanistic analysis of the reaction. Aziridines, the end products of the reactions being studied in this project, are strained, nitrogen-containing heterocycles that are finding increasingly wide use in organic synthesis. Aziridines are also present in several naturally occurring drugs that are potent anticancer agents. This research will facilitate synthetic use of aziridines and also contribute to increased understanding of their function in complex systems, including biological activity and medicinal uses doc4194 none Hefzy, This five year continuing award will fund Undergraduate Design Projects to develop custom assistive devices for persons with disabilities. A group of students and the investigators on the project will work on these projects with health care personnel and patients at the Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Unit of the Medical College of Ohio. At the end of each semester an exposition is to be organized to display the prototypes built by the students along with final oral presentations of their work. Ten projects per year are to be completed and written reports on the projects will be submitted for an annual publication. This type of undertaking is important as it provides meaningful projects for engineering students to complete as part of their undergraduate design requirements and also benefits a population where customization is often needed for rehabilitation devices doc4195 none This project undertakes the formulation of an improved synthesis of isofluorane, a commonly used general anesthetic. In addition to pathways that rely on resolution of enantiomers, enantiospecific synthetic transformations are proposed. Specific reactions to be explored include enantiospecific decarboxylation reactions, in which the putative carbanion is not resonance-stabilized. Direct asymmetric synthesis will be studied wherein fluorination of an oxazolidinone enolate will be carried out; alternatively, asymmetric protonation of a bis-silyl ketene acetal will be attempted. The ultimate goals of the proposal include a practical asymmetric synthesis of isofluorane, which will enable pharmacological studies into the chiral dependence of the anesthetic effect, as well as the provision of research opportunities at the Principal Investigator s predominantly undergraduate institution. With this Award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program (Organic Synthesis) extends support to CUNY Baruch College for the research being conducted by Professor Keith M. Ramig and his undergraduate students of chemistry. Professor Ramig is attempting to establish a practical method for the separate production of both individual forms of the commonly used general anesthetic isofluorane. Various chemical reactions will be attempted to find the most effective means of carrying out this procedure. Success in this endeavor will enable future studies into the pharmacology of anesthesia with a view to the exact way in which this important effect occurs doc4196 none Computational Modelling of Multi-Unit Multi-Level Organizations One of the most important organizational forms in modern economies is the multi-unit organization. In manufacturing, the typical plant is part of a multi-plant manufacturer. In services, the typical store is part of a retail chain. A defining problem of a multi-unit organization is how to balance giving units the freedom to handle the idiosyncratic features of their environments while, at the same time, coordinating the units to take advantage of the commonality among them. How do multi-unit organizations solve this problem and what is the most effective means of doing so? What is the relevant set of instruments and what are the relevant features of the environment determining the best organization and strategy? This project explores these questions and more broadly advances our understanding of multi-unit organizations. Our focus is on retail chains. The central idea underlying our approach is that much of the behavior and performance of a retail chain can be explained by understanding how chains generate, communicate, and use information. How new ideas arise and how they are evaluated and adopted. How the authority to use information is distributed within the chain and how incentives are structured to influence the creation and effective dissemination of information. And how competition and technology interact with these information processes. Implementation of this approach involves the development of a computational model of a retail chain in which corporate headquarters (HQ) and stores are adapting to their environments. HQ and store managers develop new ideas, evaluate their ideas and the ideas of others, and then decide whether to adopt and communicate them to other members of the organization. Competing chains are simultaneously engaging in an analogous exercise while consumers experience and experiment among stores to find the one that best suits their needs. Our analysis explores how various factors influence the rate of improvement of store practices and chain efficiency. These factors include organizational structure (in particular, the authority of store managers to change practices), store manager incentives (as influenced by how they are compensated), the degree of competition within and across geographic markets (and, relatedly, the effect of mergers), the amount of consumer search, the rate of change in consumers preferences, the degree of informational spillovers across chains, and advances in information technology doc4197 none Precision Combustion, Inc. Menacherry This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project advances the development of an improved catalytic reactor, based on a novel catalyst substrate design, for the preferential oxidation (PROX) of carbon monoxide in a hydrogen rich feed. The Phase I objectives were fully met and demonstrated the viability of this catalyst substrate for substantial reductions in the size, weight and cost of the PROX component and also identified parameters for designing a full scale PROX reactor. This Phase II effort will focus on catalyst optimization and integration of a PROX reactor based on the catalyst substrate in a fuel processor system for automotive fuel cell applications. This potential breakthrough could significantly advance fuel processing technology for automotive fuel cell applications. The proposed technology has the potential to provide near-order of magnitude improvements in fuel processor volume, weight and cost, with a broad range of potential spin off applications to other catalytic reactors. Success with the PROX reactor would lead to exploring use of this substrate for other components in the fuel processor, including the reformer and the Water Gas Shift reactors doc4198 none The focus of this research is the preparation of NeuAc homooligomers and NeuAc alpha-amino acid conjugates to form compounds with unique secondary structures. Amide-linked oligomers will be conjugated with biotin for biological screening and to polymerizable lipids for protein screening. Oligomers will be conjugated to form tertiary structures or coiled coils. Circular dichroism and inverse detected nuclear magnetic resonance techniques will be used to elucidate structure of the resulting polysialoamides. With this renewal award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Jacquelyn Gervay-Hague of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Arizona. Professor Gervay-Hague will focus her work on the synthesis and characterization of new carbohydrate-based materials with stable secondary structures in aqueous solution. This is the first step toward engineering artificial proteins. These materials have potential impact for use in drug delivery, as biosensors, as affinity materials and as chemical catalysts. Further, the project provides a diverse and multidimensional training environment for human resource development doc4199 none This project will explore the controlled aggregation of cyanine dyes on nucleic acid nanotemplates. The end result is the spontaneous assembly of chiral, helical aggregates of cyanine dimers. The dimensions of the aggregate are controlled by varying the length of the DNA. The properties of the aggregates will be studied using a variety of spectroscopic techniques, including UV-vis absorption, circular dichroism and fluorescence methods, and by stopped flow spectroscopy. Collaborative efforts will explore the possibilities of X-ray crystallographic studies of these aggregates, as well as a theoretical treatment of the electronic interactions among the cyanine dyes. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program s Organic Synthesis Program supports the research of Professor Bruce A. Armitage of Carnegie Mellon University. Professor Armitage will investigate the properties of certain dye molecules to assemble on a template consisting of the DNA helix. Thus assembled, these aggregates can themselves serve as the template for the generation of complex structures that retain some of the characteristics initially imparted by the DNA. The properties of these assemblies will be studied as will the dynamics of their formation doc4200 none Categorization is a fundamental characteristic of human cognition. Recent research has suggested that at least part of language acquisition and adult speech perception depends upon formation of phonetic categories corresponding to the speech sounds of the native language. Unfortunately, much of what is known about perceptual categorization has been learned from examination of categories that are fundamentally different from phonetic categories (e.g., visual categories). Unfortunately, probing the means by which speech is categorized is not so easy as applying methods and results from visual categorization to the domain of speech perception. Speech categories are very difficult to examine because it is extraordinarily difficult to determine the history of speech experience that a listener encounters before entering the laboratory. There simply is little experimental control. Fortunately, there is a means to address this important question. Pilot work by the PIs has suggested that complex non-speech sounds that model the structure of speech categories have value in learning about how listeners form categories similar to phonetic categories. Using the set of novel methods developed in this pilot work, the PIs will investigate the role of experience in forming complex auditory categories. The ultimate goal of this project is to determine the role that general perceptual categorization processes play in first and second language acquisition. A program of research will employ complex nonspeech sounds to provide a detailed account of how human listeners form complex auditory categories. These results then will be examined to determine whether some of the notable characteristics of speech perception can be explained in part by appealing to general processes of perceptual categorization. The results of these experiments will allow the PIs to develop efficient methods of exposure and training to teach non-native contrasts to second-language learners. Exposing the mechanisms of complex category learning will illuminate potential aids for training individuals to discriminate nonnative speech categories. These aids could extend easily to other complex learning tasks such as musical training, acoustic warning systems or auditory data displays doc4201 none Professor William Taylor of the University of Central Arkansas is supported by the Experimental Physical Chemistry program to perform experimental studies on metal ions complexed with hydrocarbons in the gas phase. Transition metals are frequently used as catalysts for activating hydrocarbons, but it is not understood how reactivity depends on the electronic state of the metal. This proposal seeks to study the reactivity of several late first-, second- and third-row transition metal ions with small hydrocarbons as a function of electronic excitation of the metal. Low energy ion drift cell and electronic state chromatographic methods will be used to study reactive systems such as platinum ion and methane. A successful outcome of this proposal would be a model of transition metal reactivity that would allow better catalysts to be designed. Important issues in this model include considerations of electron configuration and conservation of electron spin. New results from the larger metals proposed will be interpreted in the light of the PI s previous results on first row chemistry. Transition metal ions have the ability to break sigma bonds, and this property is most useful in converting hydrocarbons to other compounds. Understanding the mechanism of this process will allow design of new and better catalysts for use in chemical synthesis and the petroleum industry doc4202 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will continue research and development of the Digital Cadaver Environment -- software that makes available to students multiple views of virtual cadavers with improved visual quality of the computed image, an increase in the size and attributes of the data sets used for rendering images, support for automatic configuration of imaging parameter using heuristics, and support for interpolation of missing sections of a user stain document. Marking a unique approach to the application of computer technology to the undergraduate anatomy and physiology curriculum, this environment supports an interactive work model where students engage in the cycle of observation, interpretation, and action that characterizes the historic dissect 2) Imagery from Visible Productions will be introduced into the environment to overcome defects in the Visible Human (VH) data sets; these images may also serve as links to other content, such as animations, photographs, or other images and documents that serve to augment the current environment; 3) tools will be expanded to include volume rendering of images in all viewing planes (i.e., sagittal, coronal, and axial) and arbitrary slicing of any image set; the data sets available to the student will be expanded to include selected cryosections of the female VH data set and selected MRI (magnetic resonance imagery) and CT (computerized tomography) imagery from the male and female; and 4) on the server, a more sophisticated illumination model will be implemented for added realism, user selectable image display properties will be included (i.e., setting some tissue layers to transparent), and higher resolution images will be used; improved support for higher resolution images will complete the Digital Cadaver Immersive Environment. The Digital Cadaver Environment enables a wider range of people to gain greater competencies in human anatomy and physiology. These competencies may translate into better health care, wellness initiatives, and improved research outcomes. The use of the National Library of Medicine s Visible Human Project in the creation of new instructional tools for the health professions offers a good public policy model of government industry collaboration doc4203 none This grant provides support for upgraded equipment at the Precision Engineering Center at North Carolina State University for research and education in precision fabrication, metrology and control. Three pieces of equipment will be purchased: a large aperture (150 mm) form measuring interferometer, a white-light interferometric microscope and a large-sample Atomic Force Microscope. Each device covers a certain spatial wavelength amplitude region of the measurement spectrum and together they provide the ability to measure over a wide range - from form error on large optical surfaces to the details of surfaces created in a machining process. These instruments will be used by faculty, staff and students to pursue a variety of research projects. Examples include the manufacturing of hard disk heads, replication of plastic photonic devices by injection molding, machining of injection molds from hard steel and fabrication of targets for inertial confinement fusion experiments. These projects cover a broad range of industrial sectors but are similar in that the goal is to understand and control a process to produce accurate and repeatable components. Each project requires the ability to measure aspects of the surfaces created - sometimes the overall shape is of interest and sometimes the details of the surface finish is needed. The upgraded instruments will enhance the capability to define the surfaces created and will lead to improvements in the precision fabrication process of interest doc4204 none Deficits in word finding and language comprehension are a significant problem for adult readers with a history of developmental language disorder (DLD; Condus et al, ; Felton, ; German, , ; Hyde Wright et al, ; Rudel et al, ). Much of the research designed to study these language deficits in children and adults has preferentially looked for functional or anatomical anomalies in the left cerebral hemisphere (LH; Galaburda, Sherman, Rosen, Aboitiz, Cohen, Campbell, Galaburda, ; Hynd, Semrud-Clikeman, Lorys, Novey, & Eliopulos, ). However, in the neuropsychology literature, a growing body of empirical work strongly suggests that the right cerebral hemisphere (RH) also plays an important role in language comprehension (for a review see Beeman & Chiarello, ). Furthermore, recent pilot work (Atchley, Story, & Buchanan, in review) suggests that lexical level processing in the RH is impaired in adult readers who have experienced DLD. This research project applies this new understanding of the role of the RH in language comprehension to the study of adult readers with DLD. There are two goals served by these studies. First, to determine the underlying functional neuroanatomy that leads to language comprehension deficits in adults with DLD. Secondly, to better model how these lexical level reading difficulties might contribute to higher order discourse integration and sentence comprehension problems. The research will add to our understanding of both the behavioral and physiological dissimilarities between adults with a history of DLD and adults with normal reading skills doc4205 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Kristen Gremillion and her collaborators will conduct two seasons of archaeological and geomorphological research in the Red River drainage which flows through the Cumberland Plateau of eastern Kentucky. The goal is to advance understanding of the origins and development of Native American prehistoric food production in eastern North America though an analysis of the ecological and economic variables that shaped this process within the uplands of eastern Kentucky between and years ago. Dr. Gremillion wishes to answer questions about why and how food production was a successful behavioral adaptation in this setting whose high relief and limited expanses of alluvium (river margin) imposed unusual constraints. To accomplish this, fieldwork will target archaeological sites that complement a rich data base already available from a series of dry caves which, because of excellent protection afforded, preserve a wide range of floral and faunal remains. The team will target occurrences which represent repeated occupations of alluvial landforms such as terraces and floodplains and that span the period representing the transition from foraging to a mixed foraging and farming mode of subsistence. Sites will be sampled intensively for macrobotanical, microbotanical and sedimentological evidence of changes in diet and environment during this period. The same types of data will be obtained through collection of sediment cores from non-archaeological contexts that are less directly affected by human activity and more directly indicative of environmental conditions. Dr. Gremillion will employ an optimum foraging framework both to posit specific questions and to interpret the data collected. This research is significant for several reasons. From the standpoint of regional culture history, it will serve to fill a significant gap in knowledge of the use of the rugged uplands of Kentucky and thus aid in assessing explanations for the early development of food production in North America. The project is unusual in its explicit employment of pollen, phytolith and macrobotanical evidence to track the development of food production and anthropogenic environmental change in eastern North America. Finally, the proposed work applies evolutionary ecology to the understanding of archaeological data and the explanation of subsistence change. In doing so, it promises to contribute to an improved understanding of the underlying processes which led to food production on a global scale doc4206 none Stewart # What is necessary for good judgment in uncertain situations? For any given judgment problem, some people perform better than others. This is true both for everyday judgments, such as a driver judging a safe speed or a consumer judging the quality of a product, and for professional judgments, such as a physician judging the severity of a child s illness or a weather forecaster judging the probability that a storm will spawn tornadoes. Are the differences in judgmental performance simply a result of differences in experience and training, or do they reflect differences in fundamental cognitive abilities necessary for good judgment? This study will examine three cognitive abilities and how they relate to good judgment: (a) intelligence (b) good statistical reasoning and (c) the ability to learn to use information accurately in new situations. Members of the local community and expert weather forecasters will be recruited to participate. For both groups, two everyday judgment problems will be used to measure judgment performance. In addition, the weather forecasters professional judgment performance will be assessed based on their track record as forecasters and their performance on a new task. The data will be used to explore how judgmental skill in everyday and professional judgment tasks is related to other cognitive abilities. The study results will improve our understanding of what goes into accurate judgment. They will also contribute to the training of professionals and to the design of systems to support better judgment and decision making in uncertain situations doc4207 none This research concerns effects of both the nature and the timing of linguistic input on the course of language acquisition. For most children, first language acquisition is facilitated by exposure to the native language from birth, with a fluent language model. However, some deaf children lack sufficient auditory input for the normal acquisition of a spoken language, and their exposure to a signed language may be delayed by several years. This project examines the course of acquisition of American Sign Language (ASL) by deaf children who did not begin to experience exposure to this language until after the age of 5 years - nowadays, an uncommon experience. Such a delay in language exposure may well result in qualitative as well as quantitative differences as compared with normal language acquisition. The project involves longitudinal recording of the language development of a small group of deaf children with delayed exposure. The longitudinal videotaping of spontaneous, natural interactions with caregivers and experimenters is supplemented with periodic structured activities designed to asses the children s language with respect to particular grammatical elements. These experiments will involve comprehension, judgment, and elicitation tasks targeting both sentence structures which are expected to be more easily acquired and those expected to be problematic. Results from this group will be compared with children s language acquisition in several other situations. The study proposed includes testing both language-matched and age-matched control groups of deaf children whose exposure to ASL began at birth from their deaf, signing parents. The spontaneous production data will be compared with similar data from a separate on-going study of early syntactic development by i) deaf children acquiring ASL with exposure from birth; ii) deaf children acquiring ASL with exposure by the age of two years; iii) normally hearing children acquiring English; iv) normally hearing children acquiring Spanish; and v) normally hearing children acquiring Japanese. By studying children acquiring languages with varying syntactic structures, as well as children whose exposure begins at different times, we aim to examine the contributions of variations in input structure as well as variations in input timing on the course of acquisition. Studies of the acquisition of language with delayed exposure will help in the effort to disentangle some of the factors which influence the course of language acquisition even in the normal situation, helping researchers to pinpoint those aspects of language which must be in-born and those which require experience to develop. Such studies can also provide evidence regarding the critical period hypothesis, the idea that without exposure to language during the early critical period of life, children are not able to use the mental resources normally employed in language acquisition and will therefore never achieve complete adult-like fluency. In ordinary circumstances, this hypothesis is impossible to test, since ordinarily children receive linguistic input from birth. Deaf children whose exposure to ASL begins later are a unique group for this kind of study. These studies also have important social and educational implications for teachers and parents grappling with the question of how to provide deaf children with all possible advantages. A better understanding of the effects of early versus delayed linguistic input on the acquisition of ASL is crucial for improved decision-making doc4208 none Bernard Gravlee This project will investigate the factors responsible for higher than average blood pressures among populations of African descent. While it is commonly assumed that there is a racial-genetic predisposition for high blood pressure among these groups, this project will evaluate social and cultural factors that may promote high blood pressure. Darker skin color is often associated with lower social and economic status, factors that promote chronic stress and sustained high blood pressure. The researcher will isolate the effects of skin color as a phenotype and skin color as a criterion of social status in Puerto Rico where social ascriptions of color (and thus social status) do not necessarily coincide with phenotypic race. Methods include participant observation, intensive interviewing and structured elicitation techniques among samples of Puerto Ricans. The study will contribute to our understanding of racial and cultural differences in health doc4209 none Although the rational-choice model has yielded an array of insights across a broad range of human activities, research from psychology suggests that it is inaccurate in some systematic and important ways. The investigators propose to continue their agenda of integrating psychologically more realistic assump-tions about human behavior into formal economic models of intertemporal choice. Most of the investigators past and proposed future research revolves around a single well-established phenomenon: Whereas the standard economic model assumes that preferences are time-consistent, evi-dence suggests people have present-biased preferences, wherein a person s relative preference for well-being at an earlier date over a later date gets stronger as the earlier date gets closer. But more than merely examining the implications of present-biased preferences per se, the investigators are particularly inter-ested in the importance of whether a person is aware of future self-control problems. Their research fo-cuses on the differing implications of assuming a person is sophisticated - fully aware of future self-control problems - or naive - fully unaware of future self-control problems. The investigators have two continuing projects that they plan to complete during the grant period. The first examines the implications of present-biased preferences for the consumption of addictive products. People with self-control problems tend to over-consume addictive products, but this behavior is affected by sophisticated awareness of self-control problems. Because sophistication makes people pessimistic about their ability to resist future temptations, and hence feel they might as well get addicted now, so-phistication can exacerbate over-consumption. Even so, we show that in realistic cases this pessimism effect is likely to be overcome by an incentive effect, wherein sophistication makes the person realize that current restraint may promote future restraint. In current work, the investigators are attempting to gener-alize and extend this earlier analysis, to explore such issues as the effects of price for consumption. In a second continuing project, joint with George Loewenstein of Carnegie-Mellon University, the investiga-tors explore the implications of a second systematic error that people make in the realm of intertemporal choice: People tend to underappreciate the influence of factors that change their future preferences, and hence to project current preferences on their future selves. The investigators and their co-author develop a formal model of such projection bias, and apply this model to several illustrative economic applications. In continuing research, they plan to apply their model in more depth to such things as addiction and mis-predictions of diminishing marginal utility of consumption. The investigators also have several new projects that are in the very early stages. The investigators plan to carry out the preliminary phases of these projects during the grant period. One explores procrasti-nation of long-term projects. Whereas most work on procrastination assumes that a project requires a sin-gle period of effort, most real-world projects take some duration to complete. This distinction is crucial for people with present-biased preferences, because whether a person starts a project and whether she finishes it become two distinct questions. Self-control problems can lead people to start but never finish projects, and, when faced with multiple ongoing projects, to choose the wrong projects to work on. In a second project, the investigators plan to analyze present-biased preferences in a general framework that allows them to build upon some of the points made in existing research. There is a simple intuition for how the effects of sophistication depend on how indulgence at different moments affect long-run well-being. When indulging in one period makes indulging in the other period more harmful to one s future well-being, sophistication about future indulgence leads a person to perceive high costs of current indul-gence and hence to misbehave less now. When indulging in one period makes indulging in the other pe-riod less harmful to one s future well-being, sophistication exacerbates indulgence. Preliminary analysis identifies a stylized setting in which this effect dominates, and yields insight on why it does not dominate in general doc4210 none This project will investigate how market integration affects general health and nutrition among three indigenous, Amerindian groups - the Moje-o, Chiquitano, and Tsimane of the Bolivian lowlands. There is presently little agreement among scholars concerning whether or not market integration (and its presumed positive effects on those integrated) actually leads to enhanced well being (in this case measured in terms of health). This project will contribute to that theoretical debate. The researchers hypothesize that markets will allow people to gain access to a broader range of insurance (e.g., credit) and reduce variance in consumption; it is anticipated that lower variance in consumption will be associated with enhanced objective measures of health nutritional status, but increased self-reported morbidity. This comparative (cross-cultural) study will examine a range of interacting factors including market-related processes, wealth differences, medical access issues and objective and self-perceived measures of health. It will contribute to our understanding of the material, cultural, and biological drivers of health nutritional status, as well as to health policy and planning debates for parts of the developing world becoming integrated into regional market economies doc4211 none The Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division is supporting the research of Professors Harry B. Gray and Jay R. Winkler, . This project aims to probe long-range electron transfer and the role of electron tunneling through materials such as proteins. Electron transfer of this type is extremely sensitive to the difference in energy between the bridge and those of the donor and acceptor. Tunneling-energy effects should be readily observable for electron transfer over distances greater than twenty Angstroms in systems where the potentials of the redox sites differ only marginally from those of the bridge sites. Oligoxylyene-bridged binuclear have been designed specifically to meet these criteria. Distance decay parameters will be extracted from correlations of electron transfer rates to the number of xylene units in the bridge. Electron-transfer reactions are the simplest of chemical transformations in that no bonds are formed or broken as the electron migrates from the donor to the acceptor. When the redox partners are separated by long distances, the rate of electron transfer is mediated by the intervening medium. This research will study the effects of energy differences between electronic states in the bridge and those of the donor and acceptor metal ions doc4212 none Michael Jackson of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse is supported by a grant from the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program to investigate the high resolution absorption spectroscopy of a series of symmetric (fluromethane and phosphine) and asymmetric (sulfur dioxide, difluoroethylene, hydrazine and methanol) top molecules using far ir (FIR) Stark spectroscopy. Analysis of the spectra will yield frequencies of the many spectroscopic transitions, molecular structural parameters and accurate electric dipoles. In addition, measurements through the FIR region will give the rotational state dependence of doublet inversion splitting and of the electric dipole moments. Molecular spectroscopy provides a way of both detecting and identifying molecules remotely and of determining their fundamental internal properties. This study extends the work into the infrared region of the spectrum where there are applications to molecule detection in interstellar space, planetary atmospheres and to laser science doc4213 none Professor Jean-Luc Bredas of the University of Arizona is supported by the Advanced Materials and Processing Program in the Chemistry Division to carry out theoretical calculations and modeling studies with close collaboration with experimentalists. These studies are to verify the theoretical (ab initio and semiempirical techniques including quantum chemistry) approaches, and to determine the relationship between microscopic molecular properties and the macroscopic bulk properties of conjugated polymers. Oligothiophenes, poly (p-phenylene vinylene), related conjugated polymers and their derivatives in their ground-, ionized- and lowest excited states will be evaluated for electronic structures and charge transfer processes taking place at organic-organic interfaces, and organic-metal interfaces in devices. The knowledge gained from these studies will be useful to enhance the performance and efficiencies of electronic materials and devices such as light-emitting diodes. The computational materials chemistry group, which will be started under the award, will have a major impact on the education of students in Materials Chemistry. Computational and modeling studies of electronic materials will be carried out in close collaboration with experimental research scientists. These studies will provide theoretical information to optimize functions of electronic materials and devices prepared from them. In addition, these studies will provide the know-how to design and fabricate highly efficient optical devices such as light-emitting diodes at low cost. The computational materials chemistry group will provide training and hands-on experience to students in this emerging field doc4214 none Brooks Pate of the University of Virginia is supported by a grant from the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program to develop a new molecular beam spectrometer and to use it to study gas phase isomerization initiated by vibrational laser excitation. Isomerization rates will be determined using Fourier transform microwave spectroscopy. These data will be used to test dynamical theories. The studies will be augmented by studies of isomerization in solution using two-color, time-resolved vibrational spectroscopy and a comparison will be made to distinguish solvent effects. Isomerization will be studied for a series of systems with two and three (epoxides) conformational minima and for systems (terminal chloroalkynes and linear aldehydes) with multiple isomerization coordinates. Isomerization, the change in structure of an isolated molecule, greatly effects chemical reactivity, a feature that is exploited by long chain molecules and in biological systems. Isomerization is to be studied by advanced spectroscopic techniques in both the gas and solution phases to test theoretical models and to determine the influence of the solvent on the reactivity doc4215 none Koplik, Joel CUNY City College MRI: Parallel Computer Equipment for the Levich Institute of CCNY The faculty of the Levich Institute of the City College of New York requests funding for the purchase of a medium-scale parallel computer system for research in fluid mechanics. The equipment will support research activities in (1) shear-induced diffusion in suspensions, (2) polymer blends and instabilities, (3) complex multiphase flows, (4) molecular fluid mechanics and (5) interfacial and surfactant dynamics. In addition, the proposed system will be invaluable for broad educational purposes: developing the conceptual familiarity, hands-on experience, and hardware infrastructure required thinking and working computationally in parallel terms doc4216 none With this award to Prof. Jay S. Siegel of the University of California, San Diego, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program continues its support of annual Workshops in Physical Organic Chemistry, which have taken place since . The workshops in this three-year cycle will be chaired in turn by Dr. Siegel, Dr. Barbara Imperiali of M.I.T. in Cambridge, Mass., and by Dr. Jeffrey Moore at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champagne. The purpose of the workshops is to bring together leaders in the field and young faculty early in their careers, to discuss their latest ideas and results in research and education in an informal setting, with lots of opportunities for interaction and discussion. The meetings are intentionally kept small (ca. 20 participants), and blocks of unstructured time made available to maximize interactions. Attendees are selected by the Chairs to represent a spectrum of research interests, and sizes, types and locations of institutions, and to include both women and under-represented minorities. In order to give as many people as possible the opportunity to participate, no one is invited more than once or twice in any 10 year period. Subdisciplines represented at the workshop include organometallic chemistry and homogeneous catalysis, photochemistry and the chemistry of reactive intermediates, synthesis, bioorganic chemistry, and theoretical organic chemistry doc4217 none This travel grant will provide funds that will facilitate travel for young academic scientists from U.S. institutions to attend the Frontiers in Macromolecular Science in the 21st Century conference to be held at the ACS Meeting in San Francisco, CA on March 26-30, . This symposium specifically deals with research focus at the dawn of the new millennium, and diverse topics were chosen to provide a comprehensive vision of future research in academia and industry doc4218 none With this award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports a proposal by Dr. Devens J. Gust from Arizona State University to provide travel funds to help junior U.S. scientists to attend the XVIII IUPAC Symposium on Photochemistry, to be held in Dresden, Germany from July 22-28, . The IUPAC Symposium, held biennually, is the major international meeting of photochemists. It provides a forum for the dissemination of the latest scientific developments and concepts in photochemistry, a venue for interaction of photochemists from all over the world, and opportunities for new international contacts and collaborations.Travel to international meetings is difficult for junior scientists, particularly at the assistant professor level, because they lack sufficient funds for such travel. This award will make it possible for seven junior scientists to attend and present papers or posters. The selection of travel fund recipients will be based on a vita and an abstract of the proposed presentation from each applicant. Selection will be made by a committee consisting of Dr. Gust, Prof. Silvia Braslavsky, the Conference Organizer, and Dr. Heinz Roth of Rutgers University. Drs. Gust and Roth are the two U.S. members of the International Scientific Committee doc4219 none With this renewal proposal the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program continues its support for the work of Drs. Devens J. Gust, Anna L. Moore, and Thomas A. Moore of the Department of Chemistry at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. Initial studies will involve carotenoid porphyrin fullerene (C-P-C60) triads, with photoexcitation leading to long lived C.+-P-C60.- charge separated states. These will lead to large synthetic porphyrin arrays linked to fullerene electron acceptors. Linking spiropyrans is expected to lead to light-activated switches. Finally, a cell-like vesicle-based system for conversion of light energy to chemical potential will be developed. The work is aimed at the synthesis and investigation of the next generation of molecular photochemical energy conversion apparatus, mimicing the elements of natural photosynthesis: electronic excitation, charge separation, a transmembrane proton gradient, and energy storage in chemical products. In addition to the fundamental understanding developed, there is a real potential for the development of practical photoelectronic devices, including switches activated by light, and cells which convert solar energy into stored chemical energy more efficiently than green plants. The project requires a combination of many skills and techniques (organic chemistry, spectroscopy, biochemistry, and quantum chemistry) and should provide excellent training for the students involved doc4220 none Lester Andrews of the University of Virginia is supported by a grant from the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program to continue his spectroscopic studies of laser ablation to obtain absorption spectra and vibrational frequencies of a series of transition metal complexes (positively and negatively charged and neutral) clustered with molecular hydrogen and carbon monoxide. This is achieved using laser ablation of Ne matrices containing the appropriate species, with the spectra being obtained by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. Spectroscopic identification will be achieved by isotopic substitution and theoretical calculations using density functional theory and comparisons will be made with the theoretical predictions. The work will establish, for example, whether the hydrogen is bound in molecular form or if it forms a di-hydride with the metal atom. Such species are involved in many important reactions in organometallic chemistry. It has been suggested that it may be possible to grow carbon nanotubes using metal carbonyl clusters. Such clusters, and clusters with hydrogen, are involved in many organometallic ion reactions such as synthesis of ammonia. The properties of these clusters will be determined spectroscopically and compared with theoretical calculations doc4221 none This award, jointly funded by the Divisions of Chemistry and Chemical and Transport Systems, renews support to the Board on Chemical Sciences and Technology of the National Academy of Sciences. The Board provides independent, objective advice to the government about chemical sciences and technologies. It carries out peer reviewed studies, organizes workshops, symposia and seminars, and serves as liaison to the community of experts who perform its work. Support of core activities of the Board also ensures that the chemical sciences community will have a credible and independent voice speaking to government, academia and the private sector doc4222 none The objective of this project is to develop quantitative tools for the analysis and design of protein separations. These tools will be useful in the biotechnology industry as analogous tools now used routinely to design conventional separations in the chemical process industries. This development is based on combining theory and experiment to enable a new generation of thermodynamic models capable of describing mixtures of proteins doc4223 none The primary private vehicle for retirement saving in the United States is the 401(k)-type pension arrangement. With emphasis on elective contributions, payroll deduction, employer matching, and personally-directed investment, 401(k) s have been touted as an important public policy that raises household saving and retirement income adequacy. A highly influential body of research has indicated 401(k) s have had substantial effects on saving: based on the Surveys of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), saving in financial assets increased at least one dollar for every dollar saved through a 401(k). However, these findings have been debated hotly. In particular, the previous analyses used no information on the two most important forms of retirement saving: pensions and Social Security. This project improves on existing research in this important area by using: (1) the superior respondent-reported and firm-reported pension information and the Social Security Administration (SSA) matched Social Security wealth in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to measure the extent to which 401(k) s have increased retirement saving, not just financial asset saving; (2) the HRS Pension Provider Survey (PPS) to measure 401 (k) eligibility and pension entitlements precisely and evaluate the extent of error in respondent-reported information on 401(k) s, and transmit these methodological findings to the research community; and (3) the HRS Pension Provider Survey (PPS) to estimate the effect of employer matching on 401(k) saving, precisely measuring match rates and explicitly accounting for kinked budget sets and measurement error in contribution limits. This project also improves the empirical methods used in this area and advances our understanding of the role of federal tax and pension policy on retirement saving and income adequacy doc4224 none In research supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, Professor Mary Wirth and her coworkers at the University of Delaware are applying methods of single molecule spectroscopy to the investigation of the phenomenon of strong adsorption on heterogeneous surfaces. Strong binding of molecules to specific minority sites on silica and modified silica surfaces leads to poor separation in chromatographic methods. A molecular level understanding of this strong adsorption process and diffusion of adsorbed molecular species on the silica surface is the goal of this research project. Information gained from these studies will be useful in designing better separations media, as well as in addressing questions of protein surface interactions and biocompatibility in materials applications. Using single molecule spectroscopic probes, Professor Wirth and her coworkers at the University of Delaware are examining the strong interaction of molecular adsorbates with modified silica surfaces. These spectroscopic probes provide structural information about the adsorption site, and can help to explain tailing in separations processes. Information from these studies can also be used to design improved chromatographic materials, and can help to develop an understanding of the interactions of protein and tissue materials with implant and medical device surfaces doc4225 none Since , American states have continually amended and revised their constitutions. States have experimented with a wide variety of suffrage, representation, legislative structures, judicial structures, corporate law, and public finance. The constitutions themselves are a record of fundamental institutional change in American history. It is a record that not only reflects changes in the way Americans think about their governments, but a record of the changing institutional constraints on the American economy. Since we have been assembling the texts of the state constitutions and their amendments. Most of the texts are now available on our web site: www.bsos.umd.edu wallis constitution.asp. The constitutions will ultimately be indexed by article and section. The index will include thirty main divisions and roughly a thousand topics. The database containing the constitutions can be searched by date, state, and topic. Text can be downloaded in the form of constitutions, articles, and sections. The proposed research will allow us to complete the coding and indexing of the constitutions; complete the collection and integration of constitutional amendments into the data base; and construct a series of data sets measuring attributes of constitutions. These data sets cover a range of topics. They will be in the form of spreadsheets with detailed breakdowns by state and year for each entry. The data sets will also be available through the web site doc4226 none Incomplete contract theory is gradually becoming accepted as a useful way to understand the nature of organizations. This project aims to extend work in this area in three ways. First, I wish to understand better the nature of hierarchies. Much of economic activity is structured hierarchically. That is, if a senior person and junior person disagree about what should be done in an organization, the senior person gets his or her way. Why is this? To what extent is it efficient? Given a hierarchical structure, who should be senior? For example, if one person has the job of coordinating activities and somebody else has a more specialist task, is it necessarily the case that the coordinator should be senior to the specialist? Second, I am interested in the foundations of contractual incompleteness. Everyone accepts that the contracts people write are incomplete, but there is less agreement about the reason for this or the implications of contractual incompleteness. One way contracts are completed in reality is through the allocation of ownership rights: an owner of an asset can make decisions about the asset which an incomplete contract leaves open, and this fills out the contract. But is ownership an efficient way of completing contracts? Are there any other, more subtle, ways of allocating decision rights in organizations than through ownership? Finally, I intend to study procedures for changing management or obtaining control in publicly traded corporations. In particular, I wish to compare three mechanisms: (1) a proxy fight; (2) a takeover bid; and (3) a combination of (1) and (2). I believe that combining proxy fights and takeovers can overcome some of the inefficiencies that each mechanism exhibits by itself doc4227 none The focus of this research is the development of new alpha-hydrogen nitroxides for the mediation of living free radical polymerization of functionalized vinyl monomers. Parallel synthesis utilizing fluorous phase chemistry will be employed for the preparation of libraries. The libraries, in turn, will be screened for efficacy as polymerization initiators. Experimental feedback from polymerization performance coupled with steric variations aimed at lowering the bond dissociation energy of the C-O bond of the N-alkoxyamines will be used to prepare even better initiators. Water soluble nitroxides will be prepared to extend this controlled polymerization method to aqueous media. The methodology will afford polymers of very low polydispersities and controlled molecular weights, generating well defined random and block copolymers, and provide access to the development of advanced materials with complex molecular architectures. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Rebecca Braslau of the Department of Chemistry at the University of California -Santa Cruz. Professor Braslau will focus her work on developing new nitroxides for application in living free radical polymerization. The research, that includes an on-going collaboration with Dr. Craig Hawker at IBM, will lead to the production of materials having importance to biotechnology, microelectronic fabrication and catalyst design. The research also has broader impact in the education of graduate and undergraduate students doc4228 none Ho # Our research addresses how people and organizations learn from experience in strategic situations like bargaining, coordinating joint actions (teamwork), choosing prices and features for new products, bidding in auctions, etc. In previous research we discovered a mathematical formula which explains how people appear to learn from experience, but the numerical details of the formula (its parameters) seem to vary from situation to situation, as if people are learning in different ways. We therefore propose to explore why these parameters seem to vary. In addition, most mathematical theories of strategic learning assume that people only look back at past experiences. We also propose to extend these theories to allow for people who realize that other people are learning from experience, and are able to therefore outguess what others will do based on what happened in the past. If players are sophisticated , in this sense, it pays for them to take actions that are not perfect in the near-term, to teach other players who are learning to take actions which will benefit the teachers in the long-term. This teaching can be beneficial for the teacher but bad for society (e.g., when firms scare away innovative competitors by threatening illegal retaliation), or beneficial for everyone (e.g., when firms reassure others that they can be trusted). Our research develops a precise mathematical theory of how sophisticated players behave and when it pays for them to teach. We use the theory to explain observations from experiments and predicts whether teaching will occur in new situations doc4229 none Moldovan, Dan I Southern Methodist University CADRE: A Tool for Transforming WordNet into a Core Knowledge Base This project extends a popular database of English words to make it more useful in such tasks as question answering, information retrieval, and summarization. Wordnet is a lexical database for English that has been widely adopted in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics for a variety of practical applications. The basic elements of WordNet are sets of words that are linked according to semantic relations: synonomy, antonymy, superordination, and so forth. WordNet is publicly available, widely used, and is currently being into a multilingual database. This project will develop a set of tools that can be applied to current and future versions of WordNet to extend it for knowledge processing applications. The extensions are enhancements of the glosses that currently contain definitions, comments, and examples of sets of words that are linked in WordNet. Enhanced glosses will be syntactically parsed, will have each word tagged with its part of speech, and will themselves be linked with other glosses that describe related concepts doc4230 none The Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences (CBMS) promotes, administers, and provides support services for the conference series known as the NSF CBMS Regional Research Conferences in Mathematics. These conferences have been an ongoing cooperative project administered by CBMS and supported by NSF continuously since . Proposals for grants for individual conferences are made by prospective host institutions directly to NSF and those conferences chosen for funding are selected by a national review panel appointed by NSF and CBMS. Each conference features a distinguished lecturer who delivers ten lectures over a five day period on a topic of important current research in one sharply focused area of the mathematical sciences. The organizer of each conference invites other established researchers in the field and interested newcomers, including graduate students and post doctoral fellows, to participate in the conference. The lecturer prepares a substantial expository monograph based upon his or her lectures, which is then published by one of the following professional societies: the American Mathematical Society, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, or jointly, the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics doc4231 none With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program and the Cell Biology Program are supporting a workshop on the Frontiers in Glycoscience. The workshop will be organized by Dr. Laura L Kiessling of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin and by Dr. Gerald W. Hart of the Department of Biological Chemistry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. The workshop, to be held May 4-5, at the Foundation, will involve approximately twenty Scientists from the USA. The focus of the event will be an exploration of the future of glycoscience research and of the role of biology and chemistry in this important area doc4232 none Carefully tailored synthesis, new analysis of physical characterization measurements, and new computer simulation methods have been developed for the study of ideal simple networks such as those made of a flexible silicone, poly(dimethylsiloxane). This project consists of using these techniques to study elastomers of more complex structures: namely elastomers from semi-flexible chains and from ionomer chains. Poly(diethylsiloxane) networks, whose elastic chains have a stiffer backbone than the corresponding dimethylsiloxane because of their larger ethyl side groups, exhibit an intriguing amorphous-mesophase transition upon uniaxial deformation. Deuterium NMR, X-ray, and computer simulation studies are proposed to elucidate the molecular structure of the mesophase, the kinetics of the transition, and the role of the network architecture on the onset of the transition. On the other hand, recent developments in the synthesis of model ionomer chains and advances in our understanding of the properties of neutral elastomers make a systematic study of some model siloxane-based ionomer elastomers very promising. Such a study will serve as the basis for an understanding of ionomer network behavior and the synthesis of novel materials. %%% Elastomeric materials, and in particular silicone-based elastomers, find a wide range of applications in drug delivery systems, in oxygen enrichment of air by membrane separation, and as stamps in the fabrication of nano-devices, to give a few examples. This project is concerned with the synthesis and characterization of new classes of silicone elastomers based on small modification of their chemical structure. These modifications lead to new physical properties such as phase transitions in elastomers made from stiffer polymer chains and amphiphilicity) absorbance of both water and organic solvents) in elastomers from slightly charged ionomer chains. These new materials can find applications as smart materials (e.g. switches and self-reinforced elastomers) and as absorbents of organic pollutants in environmental remediation doc4233 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will make self-assembled, nanocomposite building blocks, composed of carbon nanotubes on a macroscopic support. Phase I demonstrated the growth of high quality, long nanotubes, adhered to a metal mesh. The support catalyzes the growth of a dispersed uniform structure of sootfree nanotubes. Additional processing is not required. Traditional manufacturing processes can convert the composite into filters, electrodes, and structures that transport mass, charge, and stress on nanometer scales. The nanotubes remain organized and connected electrically and mechanically. Intimate solid-gas and solid-liquid contact accompanied by high transport rates result. Unlike porous nanoscale media, the pore size can be independent of the nanotube diameter, allowing rapid access to their surface. The Phase II product will be microfiltration media with unprecedented filtration efficiency and low energy cost. Carbon nanotubes have enhanced single-collector efficiencies and substantially high surface to volume ratios. These advantages produce enormous, pound-for-pound value. The industrial partner has committed Phase III funding based on initial testing and market pull for low-energy, cost-effective separation technology. The industrial partner is committed to nanoscale technologies and the tremendous physical properties of the supported nanocomposites doc4234 none This project evaluates the impact of a unique program aimed at promoting peaceful co-existence between national and ethnic groups currently involved in intense and protracted conflict. One aim of the research is to develop a developmental model of how changes in perceptions of the self, ingroup, and outgroups relate to improving intergroup relations over time. Participants include adult leaders and adolescent males and females (ages 13-16) from several regions of tension including the Middle East and Cyprus. Participants spend three weeks at the Seeds of Peace International Camp, in a summer camp in Maine. The camp program includes activities designed to enhance cooperative equal status contact between group members, promote the exchange of information, and teach skills of communication and co-existence. Since its inception in , over individuals have graduated from the camp. Although the program has received significant national and international attention, there has been no study of its impact. Changes in the cognition and behaviors of camp participants will be compared with a Control Group composed of individuals who do not attend the camp. Data will be collected on a variety of dimensions that have both applied and theoretical importance. These data include self-esteem, self-identity, stereotypes of ingroup and outgroups, perceptions of group homogeneity and threat, and behaviors between members of the different groups. The results of the study will address three issues: 1) The degree to which the camp experience has a positive effect on the relationship between the different groups at the camp; 2) Whether changes in the perceptions and behaviors that occur at camp generalize to the larger groups represented by the campers; and 3) The extent to which these changes endure over an extended time period (20-24 months). The project represents a special opportunity to test and extend theories of intergroup relations. The measures employed to evaluate the program are based on existing social psychological theories and research. The results will indicate the longevity of the effects of intergroup contact on intergroup attraction. Hypotheses relating to how intensity of conflict affects the influence of intergroup contact will also be examined. The design allows a comparison of the effects of contact on perceptions of the self, the ingroup, and outgroups. Several components of stereotypes (competence, warmth, salience, and homogeneity) will be measured and related to improving intergroup relations. Underlying processes such as recategorization and cross-categorization will be inferred from responses. The research is significant because it employs theoretically-based measures to examine a program that is designed to address a critical social problem. The research program also represents a cooperative effort between an academic institution and private nonprofit organization doc4235 none This project models political systems and studies the efficiency properties of their out-comes. The first part investigates how, in a Downsian model of electoral competition, the number of candidates affects the efficiency properties of the equilibrium. Initial results suggest that, the larger the number of candidates, the larger is the incentive for candidates to engage in inefficient tactical redistribution. This suggests that, in political systems (or countries) with a large number of parties, political platforms should feature a greater fraction of pork-barrel projects, tax cuts, and other redistributive policies, at the expense of more efficient (but less targetable) public goods. The second part builds a model that contrasts two electoral systems, a proportional system where seats in an assembly are assigned proportionally to the vote shares, with a winner--take-all system where the party with the highest number of votes receives all the spoils of office (for instance, the presidential election in the US has this feature). This project shows that politicians competing in a proportional system tend to favor policies that are less risky, in terms of the way that they are perceived by voters, than in a winner-take-all system. Because politicians in a winner-take-all system choose to compete on riskier platforms, vote shares should display greater variability than in a proportional system. Preliminary empirical evidence seems consistent with this prediction. The third part investigates a way to obtain uniqueness of equilibrium in a plurality voting game with N candidates (and strategic voting doc4236 none The proposal requests funds to help support the FASEB Summer Research Conference on Retinal Neurobiology and Visual Processing . This meeting will be the fifth biannual conference in this series devoted specifically to the retina. The presentations will cover many facets of retinal biology: development and the underlying molecular mechanisms; cellular functions that support neural signaling; neural circuits by which the retina processes visual input; the code by which the retinal output is conveyed to the brain; and the resulting abilities and limitations of visual behavior. The five-day conference will attract approximately 180 participants from around the world. Thirty-three internationally recognized experts have agreed to present their work in formal talks, which are organized in nine thematic sessions. In assembling this program, the organizers have sought to span the range of research in retinal neurobiology, taking into account recent exciting advances in specific areas. Furthermore, emphasis has been placed on the contributions of younger scientists in an early career stage. In addition, there will be two informal workshops on topics selected before the meeting by the participants. Finally, all participants are invited to present posters during two poster sessions. The conference format is designed to foster direct scientific exchange among participants. There is ample time for discussion at the end of each presentation, during workshops and poster sessions; there is further free time for informal exchange at meals, which are communal, and in the afternoons. To encourage presenters to discuss their latest efforts and ongoing projects, proceedings are not published, but s of the talks and posters are collected in a small booklet and will be made available to all attendees and to others in the field who might request it. Because this conference attracts most of the field s investigators, it has been highly successful in disseminating results, and has significantly affected the course of retinal research doc4083 none The number of wives in the labor force has doubled over the past three decades and household migration behavior is increasingly dependent on a complex process of joint decision making. This research examines, in a longitudinal context, the geographic and economic impacts of migration on dual-earner families, with specific focus on the labor-force experience of married women. Research on the impact of women s participation in the labor force has indicated that two-earner households are less likely to move than single-earner households due to their dual labor-force attachment. Traditional family migration research has argued that migration is associated frequently with the loss of earnings, interrupted careers, unemployment, underemployment or leaving the labor force on the part of the wife. In contrast, more recent work has raised questions about the disadvantaged effects and suggests that employment of married women increases with migration. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data this study considers the full range of potential labor force impacts on married women within the larger context of parallel careers in the life course of women and families. The study controls for the bias of migration self-selectivity. It explicitly considers the spatial variation in dual-earner family migration and the effects of migration on women in these families. Furthermore, this research uses longitudinal models to differentiate between the short-term and the long-term impacts of migration on married women. It addresses participation (employment, unemployment, underemployment, interrupted careers) and financial aspects of the impact of migration on married women. A better understanding of the joint employment and location decisions of husbands and wives has the potential to improve the efficiency of the labor market. Women are the most dynamic supply sector of the labor market, and married women are an important component of spatial changes in the labor force, by virtue of their increased participation and their impact on family migration in general. Industry and organizations invest about 15 billion dollars annually in job relocations. Many of the transferees are married and dual earners, and relocating two earners is much more difficult than relocating a single earner. Spouses, relatives, and children are no longer considered mere appendages of the employee. Corporations are recognizing the need for greater incentives and support for the spousal job search process. Further, it is estimated that between ten and fifteen percent of all relocations are for the married woman s job, and there is reason to believe that this figure will continue to rise in the future. Given contemporary social changes it is an appropriate time to reassess family migration theory. New findings will enrich our knowledge of the temporal and spatial variations in the impact of family migration on women in dual-earner households doc4238 none In this project, a variety of functional group transformations such as cleavage of epoxides, rearrangement of epoxides to carbonyl compounds and cyclization of epoxy-polyenes will be attempted using various bismuth compounds. These reactions will exploit the Lewis acidity of several bismuth(III) compounds as well as the oxidizing power of bismuth(V) reagents. In light of increased awareness of environmental issues and the low toxicity of bismuth compounds, the successful completion of this project will make a significant contribution to this end. With this Award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program s Organic Synthesis Program supports the research of Professor Ram S. Mohan of Illinois Wesleyan University. Professor Mohan and his undergraduate students of chemistry will undertake a systematic investigation of the applications of bismuth compounds in synthetic organic chemistry. Bismuth compounds are attractive candidates for use as reagents in organic synthesis because of their low toxicity and ready availability at low cost doc4239 none This research tests the theory that voters look at distinct aspects of the economy to determine how well the incumbent administration manages the economy the benefit the voters self-interests, and they vote on that calculation, rather than consideration of the overall growth rate of the economy or of the voter s personal financial condition. The investigators postulate that voters look at changes in the wages, or chnges int he level of employment, of: people in similar occupations; people with similar levels of education; and people in the same industry as the voter to determine how well the economy performs in the voter s interest. Thus, the investigators offer a model of individual-level behavior consistent with aggregate observations of the importance on economic performance on vote choice. The investigators argue that voters are self-interested, and that they evaluate the incumbent based o how well the incumbent manages the economy towards the voters self-interest. Thus, voters would have preferences over both the level of economic growth credited to the administration, and to the distributive impact of the incumbent. Kramer s argument ( ) is repeated that it would be inefficient for voters to look at their own pocketbook as a measure of the incumbent s competence or the incumbents distributve tendencies. The pocketbook of the voter is a function of life-cycle effects, effort, and other idiosyncratic factors -- which would dwarf government-induced change in income. The argument is extended by pointing out that for voters to look at the aggregate macro-economy would mask all intra-economy, distributive variation. This would include skill-based variation, education-based variation, sectoral variation, and regional variation. Thus, it is concluded that the best strategy, which a voter could employ to determine how well the incumbent administration manages the economy to benefit the voter s self-interest, is to look at the economic performance of individuals who share relevant economic characteristics with the voter. The investigators estimate wages of different groups of voters using the Census Bureau s Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation files. The impact of these objective economic measures is examined with respect to: voters evaluations of the economy through the Survey of Consumer Attitudes and Behavior and the National Election Study; voters evaluations of the incumbent through survey instruments measuring presidential popularity; and voters vote choices through the National Election Study. By using a dataset with richer information on the economic circumstances of individuals than used previously, and combining this with the theory offered by the investigators, the project is able to advance the state of the art of the micro-foundations of economic voting doc4240 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop a trace-gas detection system based on a novel laser spectroscopic technique called Phase Sensitive Spectroscopy. This new spectroscopy technique may increase sensitivity by an order of magnitude compared to existing capabilities, and it is expected have lower capital and operating costs as well. The proposed technique relies on measurements of phase shifts of an amplitude modulated laser beam that occur when the laser is tune through a molecular resonance. Unlike current technologies, the measured quantity is insensitive to variations in the amplitude of the frequency components within the modulated laser beam. This fundamental difference promises to eliminate the need for calibrations that are currently required. Phase II will develop the fundamental understanding and lay the groundwork for commercialization. A prototype instrument will be fabricated by utilizing the backbone of an existing commercially successful laser based trace-gas detector. The detection limit, stability, and cost of the prototype instrument will be characterized. Potential commercial applications are expected in monitoring gases in aluminum production and in other industries as environmental regulation and work place safety may require. Point source monitoring doc4241 none This grant provides funding to organize an international workshop on micro meso-mechanical manufacturing. The overarching objectives are to better understand the needs for and issues that surround mechanical manufacturing at the micro meso scale (M4); to identify enabling technologies as well as weaknesses and scientific barriers, both fundamentally and in the industrial practice of M4; and to formulate research and development needs and strategies so as to accelerate the deployment of M4. A subsidiary goal will be the projection of the potential economic impact of this technology once fully developed. The emphasis will be on the exploration of the feasibility of the miniaturization of the manufacturing equipment and tooling; and the development of associated mechanical and allied processes, e.g., material removal, deformation forming, and EDM ECM and others, respectively, in support of M4. It is anticipated that the findings of this workshop will serve as a basis, for government, academia, and industry to formulate appropriate programs and strategies to overcome, in a concentrated manner, the most critical scientific, technological and economic barriers and to identify the requisite enabling technologies for M4. Specific consensus responses, and recommendations will be contained in a written report on: (1) the state-of-the-art in M4; (2) its potential economic impact; (3) existing scientific and technological barriers; (4) enabling technologies; (5) critical areas in which the United States is falling behind, and (6) a specific prioritized R&D agenda on how to accelerate the development and implementation of viable M4 technologies doc4242 none This project will investigate the issue of water use and availability in Leukerbad, Switzerland, focusing on how these processes are shaped by the population assessments and perceptions of water as a resource (marketable commodity, subsistence resource, hydroelectric energy source, health resource, aspect of the environment). As spa town with hydrotherapy-based clinics and hydroelectric plants, Leukerbad s population is economically dependent on high quality water resources in many forms. This research will examine the historic and current uses of water resources, the management of water resources as commodity and commons, the relationship between perceived water qualities (and attached meanings) and chemical analyses of water, and the potential impact of anticipated climatic changes on water systems. Methods include mapping of water resources, archival research, structured interviews and surveys of the population, as well as chemical analyses of water samples. This project will contribute to our understanding of how sociocultural forces shape use and management of a critical natural resource; it will also contribute to our understanding of how communities may respond to anticipated future climatic changes affecting water quality and availability doc4243 none Characterization remains a cornerstone for the development and understanding of new materials. Throughout the last decades, the ability to adequately probe physical properties of materials has shifted from in-house laboratories towards state-of-the-art, regional research facilities (e.g. neutron, high-magnetic field, and synchrotron radiation sources). In an effort to educate and train young materials scientists in state-of-the-art, regional-facility characterization techniques, Louisiana State University s Center for Advanced Microstructures and Devices (CAMD) is hosting a summer school on Synchrotron Radiation Applications to Materials Science from June 5 to June 10, . During this one-week course, advanced graduate students will learn, through lectures, discussions, and hands-on practical experience, how and why the application of synchrotron radiation is indispensable to the characterization of a variety of materials. CAMD LSU faculty, as well as a number of researchers from around the country will give lectures and lead discussions (~ 25 speakers total). The students (~35-45) will take part in approximately 35 hours of lectures discussions on various topics of the application of synchrotron radiation to materials science research, as well as learn hands-on practical technical knowledge at the CAMD facility. Such knowledge can then be applied to further a participant s research program by integrating the unique advantages of synchrotron radiation, as exemplified by a regional laboratory like LSU CAMD, to expand the student s knowledge and potential as a materials scientist. %%% Characterization remains a cornerstone for the development and understanding of new materials. Throughout the last decades, the ability to adequately probe physical properties of materials has shifted from in-house laboratories towards state-of-the-art, regional research facilities (e.g. neutron, high-magnetic field, and synchrotron radiation sources). In an effort to educate and train young materials scientists in state-of-the-art, regional-facility characterization techniques, Louisiana State University s Center for Advanced Microstructures and Devices (CAMD) is hosting a summer school on Synchrotron Radiation Applications to Materials Science from June 5 to June 10, . During this one-week course, advanced graduate students will learn, through lectures, discussions, and hands-on practical experience, how and why the application of synchrotron radiation is indispensable to the characterization of a variety of materials. CAMD LSU faculty, as well as a number of researchers from around the country will give lectures and lead discussions (~ 25 speakers total). The students (~35-45) will take part in approximately 35 hours of lectures discussions on various topics of the application of synchrotron radiation to materials science research, as well as learn hands-on practical technical knowledge at the CAMD facility. Such knowledge can then be applied to further a participant s research program by integrating the unique advantages of synchrotron radiation, as exemplified by a regional laboratory like LSU CAMD, to expand the student s knowledge and potential as a materials scientist doc4244 none This Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) award to Professor Peter Geissinger of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program in the Chemistry Division. The project targets two specific and important areas of analytical chemistry; development of a sensitive and rapid detection scheme for a sensor array and an identification strategy to determine the active components in a combinatorial library. The research uses a novel approach of segmenting an optical fiber into regions that are used in a parallel synthesis scheme. Reactants, along with a fluorophore are added to each fiber segment. Upon excitation with a laser pulse, the evanescent excitation of the fluorophore is detected. The position of the fluorophore is calculated by the time difference between the pulse and the return signal. The position of each compound is known from the synthetic scheme. This allows the active components of the library to be quickly identified. Combinatorial chemistry libraries are becoming increasingly important in synthesis of new chemicals. Accurate and rapid identification of the active species in the library is essential for the optimal use of the library. This project focuses on developing an alternative technique for preparing and screening libraries. This allows quick and economical identification of species that might be effective in applications such as pharmaceuticals. This SGER award to Professor Peter Geissinger of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program in the Chemistry Division. The project targets two specific and important areas of analytical chemistry; development of a sensitive and rapid detection scheme for a sensor array and an identification strategy to determine the active components in a combinatorial library. The research uses a novel approach of segmenting an optical fiber into regions that are used in a parallel synthesis scheme. Reactants, along with a fluorophore are added to each fiber segment. Upon excitation with a laser pulse, the evanescent excitation of the fluorophore is detected. The position of the fluorophore is calculated by the time difference between the pulse and the return signal. The position of each compound is known from the synthetic scheme. This allows the active components of the library to be quickly identified. Combinatorial chemistry libraries are becoming increasingly important in synthesis of new chemicals. Accurate and rapid identification of the active species in the library is essential for the optimal use of the library. This project focuses on developing an alternative technique for preparing and screening libraries. This allows quick and economical identification of species that might be effective in applications such as pharmaceuticals doc4245 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop an optimized prototype of the UNCOPIER-a chemical-free, energy-efficient, ACIM-based device designed to non-destructively deink laser-xerographic prints one sheet at a time. Acoustic Coaxing Induced Microcavitation (ACIM) is a novel, chemical-free, and energy-efficient process which uses only Silent Sound and Clean Water. Underlying ACIM s energy efficiency is microcavitation s ability to concentrate an enormous amount of energy on an extremely small (i.e. sub-microscopic) point. These controlled concentrations of energy result in nearly spontaneous cleaning which does not hurt the substrate. ACIM is the ideal technology for deploying energy exactly at the point of use. UNCOPIER technology will revolutionize the paper recycling industry in a number of ways, as well as innovation in the recycling process itself. Since the UNCOPIER leaves the deInked paper immaculately white and undamaged, it will save environmental resources by making it possible to manufacture new print grade paper from the recycled laser-xerographic prints. The UNCOPIER is being developed as an office machine to advocate a pioneer method for recycling paper-at-source deinking, one sheet at a time. DeInking paper prior to recycling protects confidentiality. This novel approach will appeal to banks, hospitals, law firms, government agencies, and other institutions interested in recycling, but also concerned with safeguarding confidentiality. The UNCOPIER system will reduce recycling costs and enables vital commercial motivations for its improved recycling endeavors doc4246 none Timothy Steimle of Arizona State University is supported by a grant from the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program with which he is using optical absorption spectroscopy to study early transition metal containing radicals and magnesium organometallic radicals. The radicals will be generated in the supersonic expansion of a laser ablated metal source and the species detected using high resolution LIF and a proposed transient frequency modulation spectrometer. These techniques will be used to obtain hyperfine structure of these species and permanent electric dipole moments. Dipole moments will be obtained for the TiCH and VCH known radicals. MgOH, MgCH3, MgCCH, TiCH and CuOH will be studied and searches will be made for hydroxide, imide and thiol radicals containing early transition metals. These data are a stringent test of theory involving electron correlation. This detailed spectroscopy study of transition metal containing compounds will provide high resolution spectra from which fundamental information on permanent electric dipoles of the compounds will be obtained. This will be used to test state of the art theories which are in the development phase for these difficult species. The data are also widely applicable to organometallic, analytical and high temperature chemistry and to stellar atmospheres and the interstellar medium doc4247 none Equipment is acquired to support research on kinetics of elementary reactions, the mechanism of dioxin formation from combustion, and the use of solar energy to destroy hazardous wastes. The equipment consists of a high-temperature flow reactor that is equipped for optical pumping and is interfaced with a time-of-flight mass spectrometer, excimer laser that axially pumps the flow reactor to generate reactive radicals photochemically, and a time-of-flight mass spectrometer (TOFMS) for analysis of products doc4248 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will integrate a novel, inexpensive device to measure tool dynamics with a general purpose analysis program that will optimize the use of high speed machining centers as a routine shop floor practice. High speed machining is often limited by chatter conditions. These conditions depend on system dynamics and cutting conditions. The product to be developed will provide an integrated hardware software solution to assist users in selecting optimal spindle speeds and tool depths without the intervention of experts or specialized equipment. The product will handle general tool geometries, tool paths and in-process part geometries working in conjunction with an industrial grade NC verification program. The program will specifically provide recommendations under low tool immersion (light cut) conditions that are commonly used to avoid tool wear in hard materials. Novel aspects include: (1) the study of chatter under transient conditions; (2) sculptured surface parts; (3) a new analytical solution that provides important physical insights under low tool immersion conditions; (4) a new simulation model that is not restricted to uni-directional feed; and (5) the extension of a new measurement device to provide full tool dynamic data doc4249 none Sherr This Major Research Instrumentation award to Oregon State University s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences provides a flow cytometer and cell sorter for biological research in ocean and environmental sciences. It will be used for a variety of microbial ecological research projects by investigators from OSU and other universities. It will be managed as a recharge facility available to many researchers and students in the laboratory, and it will also be available for seagoing research projects. The project is supported by the Division of Ocean Sciences at NSF. Oregon State University will provide cost-share support for 30% of total project costs doc4250 none Camerer # Our research addresses how people and organizations learn from experience in strategic situations like bargaining, coordinating joint actions (teamwork), choosing prices and features for new products, bidding in auctions, etc. In previous research we discovered a mathematical formula which explains how people appear to learn from experience, but the numerical details of the formula (its parameters) seem to vary from situation to situation, as if people are learning in different ways. We therefore propose to explore why these parameters seem to vary. In addition, most mathematical theories of strategic learning assume that people only look back at past experiences. We also propose to extend these theories to allow for people who realize that other people are learning from experience, and are able to therefore outguess what others will do based on what happened in the past. If players are sophisticated , in this sense, it pays for them to take actions that are not perfect in the near-term, to teach other players who are learning to take actions which will benefit the teachers in the long-term. This teaching can be beneficial for the teacher but bad for society (e.g., when firms scare away innovative competitors by threatening illegal retaliation), or beneficial for everyone (e.g., when firms reassure others that they can be trusted). Our research develops a precise mathematical theory of how sophisticated players behave and when it pays for them to teach. We use the theory to explain observations from experiments and predicts whether teaching will occur in new situations doc4251 none Bargmann Developmental biology demands the integration of cell biology, genetics, molecular biology, and biochemistry. The exciting progress of the past decade has depended upon bringing together people who work with a variety of organisms, including yeast, worms, flies, and vertebrates to learn about the molecules and principles held in common among these seemingly diverse organisms. Despite all the excitement in the field, there are relatively few meetings organized to emphasize the increasingly obvious relationships among developmental events previously viewed as distinct. Our specific objectives are to assemble a group of scientists with broad expertise in modern molecular analysis of development, have a series of talks on up to date research, and have about 120 other attendees present posters describing their research. The meeting will be held on the campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz on July 21st to July 26th, . There are two major goals of the meeting. The first is to teach each other. The planned program will be a superb course in advanced developmental biology, and help those working with each particular organism to keep abreast of exciting new developments in the study of other organisms. This will important not just for established investigators, but also for the many students and postdoctoral fellows who will attend the meeting doc4252 none This award to the University of Oregon by the NSF Chemistry Division s Special Projects Office, its Chemical and Transport Systems Division and the National institute of General Medical Sciences of the NIH supports activities by the Committee on the Advancement of Women Chemists to increase the number and effectiveness of women in leadership positions in the chemical sciences. The project will conduct research to identify factors that are contributing to women s lack of progress in academia, develop a network among women in the chemical sciences workforce to share strategies for successful careers and implement a series of workshops to assist women faculty in achieving their career goals and assuming leadership positions in the profession. This project will redress gender disparity in the academic chemical sciences workforce doc4253 none This NSF DOE Partnership in Basic Plasma Science and Engineering project addresses the development of a new process to generate highly ionized plasma plumes of metallic species for multi-component film growth. Multiple, laser-triggered hollow-cathode plasma sources are used for the deposition of stoichiometric multi-component films. The process affords precise control of the transient plasma dynamics and the plasma plumes can be made directional by external fields, thereby allowing the deposition of material on steps, facets or vias. The basic mechanisms involved in the formation, propagation and gas phase interactions of multiple transient metallic plasmas triggered by synchronized laser pulses is studied through Langmuir probe and in-situ optical diagnostics. These studies include the dynamics and plasma chemistry of multiple colliding plasmas as well as the effect of various plasma parameters on film stoichiometry, rate and area of growth, and the crystallinity and morphology of the films. A theoretical model is developed to simulate species propagation in a transient plasma plume. Applications that include the deposition of Cu, TiN and CuInSe2 films are used to illustrate the general feasibility of the proposed manufacturing process. This novel process will lead to high-throughput, high-quality, cost-effective, environmentally benign industrial applications in the fabrication of coatings and films doc4254 none The cell division cycle is the sequence of events whereby a living cell replicates all its components and divides them between two daughter cells, so that each daughter has the information and machinery necessary to repeat the process. Because it underlies the growth, development and reproduction of all biological organisms, the cell cycle is intensely studied by molecular biologists, who have recently uncovered many details of the biochemical network controlling cell division. Among eukaryotic cells (plants, animals, fungi), the regulatory mechanism is highly conserved, with homologous components functioning across species barriers from yeast to frogs to humans. So many details of this control system are now known that intuitive methods cannot explicate the complex interactions among these molecular components. New methods of knowledge acquisition and development are desperately needed. For this reason, the Principal Investigator has created computational tools to model the cell-cycle control system, analyze its properties, and compare hypothetical mechanisms to the actual behavior of dividing cells. This project is to extend the understanding of cell cycle control by pursuing previous computational approach in new directions. The Principal Investigator s team will construct comprehensive models of growth and division in budding yeast and fission yeast, focusing on the molecular mechanisms that underlie initiation of DNA synthesis, exit from mitosis, and selection of new growth zones. They will also construct new models of meiotic cell division (essential to sexual reproduction) and cell-cycle modifications during embryogenesis. What is learned from modeling the control systems in yeasts and embryos will then be transferred to the vastly more complicated network of biochemical reactions regulating growth and division in mammalian cells. Aside from developing new approaches to the analysis of genetic regulatory mechanisms and training young people in the burgeoning field of computational molecular biology, this project promises to yield novel theoretical insights into the molecular machinery regulating cell growth and division. Deeper understanding of cell-cycle control will eventually be parlayed into practical developments in agriculture, tissue engineering, and medicine (e.g., parasite control, nerve cell regeneration, and cancer treatment doc4255 none This project has as its goal the development of effective and general catalysts for the asymmetric Heck reaction. Work in this direction focuses on the use of elaborated BINAP-phosphine ligands where significant enantioselectivity was demonstrated in an acyclic substrate. Possible transition states of this class of phosphine ligand in asymmetric cyclization were suggested to aid in the rational design of additional catalysts. Application in alkaloid synthesis and the use of solid supported palladium complexes in asymmetric catalysis will also be investigated. With this Award, the Organic and Macromolecular Program s Organic Synthesis Program supports the research of Professor Duy H. Hua of Kansas State University. Professor Hua studies a particular type of reaction known as the Heck reaction, which has many potential applications in the synthesis of pharmaceutical molecules. However, one weakness of this reaction is its inability to govern the three-dimensional aspect of molecular assembly. Professor Hua has made strides in this direction, and will continue to do so with the support of the Organic Synthesis Program doc4256 none This project seeks to dramatically expand the repertoire of self replicating peptides into new peptide motifs, including systems with the potential for conditional selection. The problem of product inhibition will be addressed through the use of environmental cycling and beta-sheet motifs. Specific questions to be addressed include the limitations on structural motifs that are amenable to self-replication and the minimization of product inhibition. With this Award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program s Organic Synthesis Program supports the research of Professor Jean A. Chmielewski of Purdue University. Professor Chmielewski studies the self-replication of peptides by analogy with similar work in the area of DNA self-replication that has contributed significantly to the development of biotechnology. Application of self-replication in proteins could afford similar advances in biotechnology doc4257 none With this renewal award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the work of Dr. Hilkka I. Kenttamaa of the Department of Chemistry at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. The purpose of this work is to generate aromatic biradicals (1,n-arynes) in the gas phase, and study their product branching ratios and rate constants in reactions with atom donors, electophiles, nucleophiles, and stable radicals. Each biradical carries a chemically inert charged substituent that allows it and its reaction products to be studied by Fourier-Transform Ion Cyclotron Resonance Mass Spectrometry (FT-ICR). Structural features of the biradicals will be varied, including the distance and orientation of the two radical sigma-orbital lobes, the type of charged group, and the presence of additional substituents. Reactivity-controlling parameters to be investigated include the biradicals singlet-triplet gaps and the polarity of their transition states. Experimental studies will be complemented by molecular orbital calculations. The proposed research is at the frontiers of mass spectrometry in studies of short-lived reaction intermediates. The fundamental information to be obtained is likely to be of great interest to organic and organometallic chemists who use radicals and biradicals in synthesis. The PI has a large group of undergraduate and graduate students, about half of whom are female or from under-represented groups. For them the research is expected to provide a valuable educational experience doc4258 none F. Ting, South Dakota State Universty The requested open-channel flume will be used, in the immediate future, for experimental studies of turbulent flow fields around bridge piers and the dynamics of turbulence in irregular breaking waves. Improved descriptions of turbulent flows at piers and in breaking waves are critical to the development of accurate and efficient computational methods for pier scour and coastal processes. The proposed research will also provide the high quality data needed to test and improve detailed models of bridge pier flows and surf zone hydrodynamics. This data set would go far beyond any comparable data set that is presently available, and it would be very useful for testing a wide range of modeling techniques, including both present day models and models that are under long-range development. The requested precision-tilting flume will be an important contribution to the modernization of the Fluid Mechanic Laboratory at South Dakota State University. This laboratory is used cooperatively by all deparments in the College of Engineering. In addition, cooperative programs at our collaborating institution at South Dakota school of Mines and Technology will also utilize the requested flume for research and education. Such use will be enhanced because a remote operation system will enable a researcher to run the flume and acquire instrumental data by computer through the Internet. Acquisition of the requested flume will therefore permit South Dakota faculty to carry out competitive investigations and more effectively compete for research funding. The corresponding increase in the amount of research support will enable South Dakota to attract and support capable graduate students. The integration of research and teaching will provide elevated education quality for South Dakota students. Furthermore Internet- based remote access to equipment will enhance diversity and will enable institutions (e.g. tribal universities, two-year colleges and high schools) that do not have a Fluid Mechanics Laboratory to participate in projects and activities supported by requested equipment doc4259 none This award to Professor Gerald Meyer of Johns Hopkins University is a renewal of an earlier award and is supported by the Advanced Materials and Processing Program in the Chemistry Division. The focus of the award will be the determination of the fundamental mechanisms of excited states and photo-initiated interfacial electron transfers in novel photovoltaic materials based on sol-gel processed semiconducting materials. Also, characterizations of these materials for interfacial electron transfer reactions with excited-, ground- and reduced-state inorganic complexes will be carried out under this award. In addition, the studies to determine the steady state and time resolved spectroscopies along with mathematical modeling will be part of the award. The research in photo-driven iodine redox chemistry by steady state and transient optical and electrochemical methods will provide information for the design of highly efficient regenerative solar cells. The award will provide training to graduate and undergraduate students in this emerging field in applying material chemistry theory and applications for the development of efficient and low cost solar cells. Under this award, semiconducting materials will be characterized after preparing them by sol-gel processing. The award will study the mechanism of the electron transfer reactions in these semiconducting materials, which eventually will lead to low cost and efficient regenerative solar cells. Undergraduate and graduate education and training in material chemistry is part of the award doc4260 none A near-field optical instrument for the optical characterization and investigation of semiconductor nanostructures will be developed. The instrument relies on the field enhancement at a laser illuminated metal tip. The electric energy density near the tip will be enhanced by 3 to 4 orders of magnitude over the exciting laser light. The tip is held in close proximity over the sample surface so that a highly localized interaction between the enhanced field and the sample is achieved. Increased signal-to-noise ratio due to non-linear effects will allow performance to perform spectroscopic measurements with high spatial resolution. Favorable tip shapes, tip materials and illumination modes will be investigated and a sensitive feedback mechanism will be implemented to assure nondestructive interaction forces (10pN) between tip and sample. The instrument will be applied to optically interact with semiconductor nanostructures on length scales smaller than the extent of their wavefunctions. The instrument will also give valuable feedback on the physical properties of nanostructered materials and thus provide input for improved nanomaterial synthesis. In collaborative projects the instrument will be applied to investigate biological membranes and to study electron energy transfer between nanoparticles and surfaces. The instrument will also serve for laboratory demonstrations for students attending a course in nano-optics. A new faculty member, his postdoctoral associate and a graduate student will develop a new Near Field Optical Microscope. The instrument will be used to study semiconductor nanostructures and for student training. The new instrument will overcome the limitations of traditional light microscopes which not allow resolving features that are smaller than the wavelength of light. This is why we cannot see individual molecules and particles that form the building blocks of biological tissue and materials. Although these building blocks can be imaged by other techniques such as the electron microscope, the colorful optical properties are lost. Color is an important property since it provides information of the functionality of things: a leaf that is alive is green while a dead leaf is brown. It is therefore useful to find techniques, which extend the optical resolution to smaller length scales, and to make molecules and particles visible. This instrument will have the capability to detect and record the color of the tiny illuminated sample area. By using scanning technique the entire surface of the sample can be covered. Using the stored data a computer can generate an optical image of the entire sample surface. In this way, the instrument will establish an optical image with unprecedented resolution compared with traditional light microscopes doc4261 none Berger, S. L. An important new area in research on gene and genome regulation has emerged in the last decade: the direct role of alterations in chromatin structure and function in the regulation of genetic processes. In particular, it has become evident that enzymes that directly acetylate nucleosomal histones correspond to previously known transcription cofactors. These histone acetyltransferases (HATs) are often components of large protein complexes, whose function and regulation is not yet well understood. A great deal has been learned in recent years about the structure, organization and function of the Gcn5 family macromolecular complexes that acetylate nucleosomal histones and function to promote transcriptional activation. In contrast, very little is known about the complexes that possess members of the MYST family of acetyltransferases. The only complex yet identified is NuA4 from yeast, which is comprised of Esa1, an essential gene (and only essential HAT in yeast) required for cell cycle progression. Because it is essential, and involved in cell cycle progression, its mechanism of action in vivo is of significant interest, and is currently unknown. Preliminary evidence from this laboratory supports a role in repression, as well of activation, of Esa1 in vivo. The project s hypothesis is that the subunit composition of Esa1 dictates its function in repression or activation through specific targeting. Using a combination of genetic and biochemical approaches, the role of Esa1 NuA4 in vivo and how its activity is directed to specific substrates and genes will be studied in vivo. Results from these experiments will provide new insights into the role of HATs and of acetylation in vivo, and the mechanisms that confer specific function. The question of how gene expression is regulated in the context of living cells is fundamental, and underlies the basis for how cells adapt to their environments. In particular, genes are present within intricate and extensive chromosomal structures that include special proteins (called histones) that permit the packaging of DNA into the tiny nuclear space. This packaging typically inhibits gene activity, and thus certain enzymes exist to alter the packaging. The research will focus on one member of a new family of enzymes that has the ability to chemically alter the histones and ultimately to regulate gene expression doc4262 none The goals of this research are: (a) The development of new, improved ligands for asymmetric Zr-Zn transmetalation-carbonyl addition reactions. (b) The use of zirconocene methodology for the total synthesis of lophotoxin. (c) The development of a catalytic asymmetric conjugate addition protocol for organozirconocenes using chiral Cu(I) complexes. (d) The study and synthetic applications of the water acceleration effect in the asymmetric carboalumination reaction of alkenes using chiral zirconocene dichlorides. (e) The study of epoxide opening cascades mediated by cationic zirconocenes that can lead to linked and fused tetrahydronfurans and pyrans of interest to polyether natural product synthesis. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting thre Research of Dr. Peter Wipf of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh. Professor Wipf will focus his work on developing new zirconocene-based methodology for applications in organic synthesis, including the total synthesis of natural products. The work has broader impacts for the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries doc4263 none Generalization from known to the unknown, or inductive inference, is an important component of human thinking. For example, if one learned that robins have hollow bones, would she think that eagles also have hollow bones? Is it reasonable to infer that bats have hollow bones too? Which attributes of robins and eagles are important for inferring that eagles do (or do not) have hollow bones? Do these attributes differ in their importance? And how do children learn which attributes are most predictive for inferring biological properties? Our prior research indicated that young children induce biological properties based on the overall similarity between compared entities, whereas preadolescents rely on a single most predictive source of information, such as biological kind or inheritance information. In this project, we will examine how young children combine different sources of information when inferring biological properties, and how they acquire the ability to rely on a single most predictive source of information. Specifically, we will estimate the importance of different sources of information across different age levels. We will also examine the transition from young children s induction (based primarily on overall similarity) to preadolescents induction (based primarily on most predictive attributes). Finally, we will examine changes in inductive inference as a function of learning. In the course of the project, children and preadolescents (3-4-, 5-6-, 7-8- and 11-12 year olds) will participate in inductive inference and learning studies. The former will consist of a single session where participants will solve induction problems, whereas the latter will consist of 6 learning sessions spaced over a two-week period. At each session participants will be presented with induction problems and provided with feedback as to whether or not their inference is correct. The goal of these learning studies is to establish how children develop understanding of which attributes are most predictive for inferring biological properties. The project will contribute to our understanding of the development of human thinking, particularly of inductive inference and concept formation. In addition, the project may have important implications for the instructional theory and for learning and teaching science because it will specify how children think when they do not have knowledge of most predictive attributes, and how knowledge of these attributes changes their thinking doc4264 none This award allows Roman Sobolewski to collaborate with Michael Siegel of the National Research Center (Forschungszentrum) in Juelich, Germany. The project will investigate the intrinsic dynamical properties of high-temperature superconducting Josephson junctions by experimental determination of the coupling mechanism for the junction when switched either by picosecond electrical pulses or perturbed by femtosecond-pulse optical excitations. The ultimate goal of the research is to develop and fabricate high-temperature superconducting devices and circuits for ultrafast computing and optoelectronic links for supercomputing electronics. The research will also test the ultimate limit of the operating speed of a single-flux quantum superconducting Josephson gate doc4265 none What role do parties play in electoral competition? Why would parties exert discipline on their members? This investigation links these issues theoretically and empirically by modeling parties as informative brands to voters. As conventional wisdom suggests, most party labels carry fairly precise meanings. Democrats are generally liberal, Republicans are generally conservative, and Libertarians are basically conserva- tive but often socially liberal. The theoretical question is, how is this sustained as an equilibrium phenomenon? In the basic model, the researchers assume there are a large number of constituencies, voters are risk averse and incompletely informed about candidate ideal policies, and candidates are unable to commit to a declared policy platform. In this environment, parties can play a critical role by ag- gregating ideologically similar candidates. Importantly, party membership is endogenous. Certain types of candidates thereby have an incentive to affiliate themselves with a party to reduce voter uncertainty about their preferences. The results of a pilot by the investigators are the following. (1) Parties can be effective screening devices for candidate preferences. Intuitively, this screening works because party membership imposes differential costs across candidate ideological types, so that only candidates whose preferences are sufficiently close to a party s platform are willing to affiliate. Even in a single party system, voter welfare is increased by the information party candidates are able to convey relative to unaffiliated candi- dates. (2) In a two party system there is a direct link between the effectiveness of screening and platform choices. When the costs of joining parties is high-e.g., parties can effectively discipline their members or screen out certain type of candidates -party labels are very informative, and the parties platforms converge in Downsian fashion. When party labels are less informative, however, the platforms diverge.This happens because taking an extreme position reduces a party s ideolog- ical heterogeneity, thus making its label more meaningful to voters. (3) Candidates do not always affiliate with the nearest party, since they also take the electoral benefits of party membership into account. These benefits may vary depending on constituency preferences. Thus even candidates with the same ideal policy may affiliate with different parties, depending on the preferences of their district s median voter. Extensions of the basic model provide additional predictions. Of particular interest is the possibility of hot races in which voters learn much more about candidates than we assume in our basic model. This extension can account for the fact that party labels sometimes mean different things in different places. Another extension is to model parties as democratic institutions that must choose platforms and screening mechanisms collectively, perhaps through a primary system. Others include endogenizing the number of parties, exploring alternate electoral systems, and determining the optimal level of screening or discipline. Both the initial results and the proposed extensions are amenable to empirical analysis. Among the topics we will pursue are the effectiveness of party branding, the relationship between party screening and platform choices, retirement and defection patterns, and the evolution of platforms over time doc4266 none The Advanced Light Microscopy Facility at the University of Pittsburgh is currently used for basic biomedical research in cell, molecular, and developmental biology. It is an indispensable tool for many users at the university. The research programs that will use the upgraded facility include several that address the basic causes of diseases such as colon cancer, cystic fibrosis, and neurodegenerative diseases such as spinal ataxia, Alzheimers, and Huntington s chorea. This facility is presently composed of two units, a confocal microscope and an image analysis system. Confocal microscopes use lasers as a light source to visualize biological specimens. This allows researchers to see individual proteins within cells of a tissue sample. It has opened up a new way of studying biology with microscopy. One example of its power is that in , it was used to discover the existence of stem cells in the adult brain. This discovery overturned decades of dogma and promises new methods to treat afflictions of the nervous system caused by disease or injury. A new confocal microscope and upgraded imaging system are being purchased with the aid of this grant. The new confocal microscope from BioRad will replace the old microscope that is no longer state of the art. Moreover, the upgraded image analysis system will provide the ability to rapidly analyze large quantities of confocal image data. It will feature rapid data acquisition and storage, channel processing, counting and sizing, measurement, and 3D reconstruction. Besides its use for world-class biomedical research, the upgraded facility will play a vital role in training and education. The new microscope will be used to train Ph.D. graduate students at University of Pittsburgh and prepare them for their roles as the scientists of tomorrow. The facility is also used to teach University of Pittsburgh undergraduate students in cell biology and developmental biology laboratory courses. It is also used in departmental outreach programs to educate high school teachers in the Western Pennsylvania area. As such, it allows students and teachers to experience the capabilities of light microscopy for discovery in the modern life sciences. The new system will be connected via the internet for image transmission of biological specimens to both classrooms and laboratories around the country doc4267 none PI: NADIM Rhythmic motor patterns such as walking, swimming and digestion of food are fundamental behaviors in all living animals. These behaviors originate in electrical signals produced by complex networks of the central nervous system. The underlying mechanisms that generate and coordinate these electrical rhythmic patterns are only now beginning to be understood. We study rhythmic pattern generation in a small neuronal circuit, the pyloric network of the lobster Panulirus interruptus. This network is responsible for controlling the muscles involved in chewing and filtering of food in the lobster. This network is an ideal model system for understanding rhythmic motor activity due to its experimental accessibility and small number of neurons. We focus on understanding how the pyloric network output is shaped by the dynamic behavior of its synapses. We record neuronal waveforms during an ongoing pyloric rhythm in vitro. We then play back these realistic waveforms into the network in controlled conditions with the aid of a computer. The synaptic response to these waveforms are analyzed and used to build computational models. These model synapses are, in turn, interfaced with the biological network in real time and thus tested directly in an experimental setting. The goal of this work is to further our understanding of the neural basis of behavior by building realistic models that accurately reproduce the behavior doc4268 none The evolution of the diverse array of primate social organizations is a fundamental issue in physical anthropology. Why are males dominant to females among many primate species, yet in a smaller proportion of species females typically dominate males? Why are some primate species highly aggressive, while others are best described as diffident and retiring? Why among most, but certainly not all, primate species do males typically emigrate to other troops in early adulthood, but all females pass their entire life in the same troop in which they were born? The answers to these questions are crucial to explaining the dramatic variation in social behavior exhibited by the more than 200 extant species of prosimians, monkeys, and apes. Furthermore, these questions are central to the eventual understanding of the evolution of social behavior among our hominid ancestors. Controversy exists regarding the underlying variables most important in explaining the variation social organization in primates. Ecological models of social evolution see competition for food as the key factor determining female grouping patterns, and thus the distribution and dispersal options of males. An alternate model attributes variation in social organization and female relationships to male competition with other males for control of mating with group females. What is clear at this point is that the most powerful tests of these models will need to be closely related species that vary in their social organization. Capuchin monkeys (genus Cebus) are noted for behavioral flexibility and variability and are a prime candidate for a successful study system. Major differences in mating system are reported among the four species. Brown (C. apella), and, wedge-capped capuchins (C. olivaceus)are essentially polygynous. On the other hand, females among the white-faced, C. capucinus, and white-fronted capuchins, C. albifrons, typically mate with multiple males during the period of conception. However, preliminary observations of brown capuchins at Raleighvallen Nature Preserve, Suriname suggest a multi-male mating system similar to that of the white-faced and white fronted capuchins. Researchers will perform a three-year field study of behavior, ecology and genetic relationships among the brown capuchins at Raleighvallen, Suriname. In conjunction with long-term field data for brown capuchins at other sites (Manu, Peru and Iguazu, Argentina) and for white-faced capuchins (Santa Rosa and Lomas Barbudol in Costa Rica), this will provide a powerful and important test of current models of primate social evolution. Researchers predict that the mating system and patterns of social interaction among brown capuchins at Raleighvallen will resemble Costa Rican white-faced capuchins rather than Peruvian or Argentinean brown capuchins. This would provide strong support for an ecological basis to capuchin social organization. A major goal of this study will be to determine the relative contributions of food distribution and mate competition in shaping capuchin social organization. Nevertheless, the implications of its findings have the potential to force dramatic reinterpretations of the past 30 years of investigations of primate social behavior doc4269 none This project deals with methods to prepare longer peptides and small proteins, where a major deficiency appears in the application of current methods to the coupling steps. An ancillary concern are protective groups for such amino acid residues as histidine and arginine, particularly where shelf-stability is concerned. Attention will be directed toward new arginine protective groups that do not release cationic species during acidic deprotection steps. Coupling strategies include the discovery of reagents that are compatible with solution as well as solid phase peptide synthesis. With this Award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program s Organic Synthesis Program supports the research of Professor Louis A. Carpino of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Professor Carpino explores ways to combine relatively small groups of amino acids into larger assemblages known as peptides and proteins. These have profound implications in the area of biotechnology, but their synthesis is often quite difficult. With the continued growth in the demand for peptides to probe biological research questions, these studies are of practical significance doc4270 none Professor Roseanne Sension of the University of Michigan is funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry program to perform experiments on energy redistribution in condensed phase chemical reactions. The reason why these studies are of interest is two-fold: first, understanding the interplay between energy relaxation and chemical reactions in the liquid phase is important in biological processes. Secondly, prospects of coherent control of reactions would be another important outcome. This proposal seeks to study the rate and extent of intramolecular vibrational relaxation in polyatomic molecules such as hexatriene, cyclohexadiene and dehydrocholesterol in solution. The PI then proposes to examine the nature of the interactions between a hot molecule and the solvent. A successful outcome of this proposal would be a model used to predict, interpret and or control the outcome of chemical reactions in solution. The proposed work is unique because of the PI s ability to produce 30 fs pulses in the deep ultraviolet. Studying the pathways that energy flows through molecules and the flow rates provides information that is directly applicable to biological processes such as photosynthesis and vision. The use of ultrashort laser pulses in the deep ultraviolet makes small molecules accessible to these studies. It is thought that the first demonstrations of coherent control of reactions in solution will be in small molecules, since there are fewer pathways available to disperse the energy and, thus, it is more likely that the energy can be driven to the reaction of interest (bond breaking, for example.) These fundamental studies take advantage of recent advances in laser pulse generation that make possible the new field of femtochemistry doc4271 none The focus of this research is the photochemically induced skeletal reorganization of pyrones and pyridones to afford intermediates that can be trapped to form one or more carbon-carbon bonds and thus furnish polycyclic products with greatly increased molecular complexity. The reactions of 4-pyrones, 2-pyrones, 4-pyridones will be studied as will the application of 2-pyrone [4+4]-photocycloaddition chemistry leading to a 5-8-5 natural product target. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Frederick G. West of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Utah. Professor West will focus his work on developing novel photochemical rearrangements and the application of the methodology towards organic synthesis. The research has broader impacts for the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries and serves as an excellent training ground for graduate students doc4272 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the University of California in Riverside will acquire a 400 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) the synthesis, isolation and structure determination of biologically active molecules; b) synthesis and identification of chemicals used for intra- and interspecific communication, c) regulation of intermediary metabolism in invertebrate animals, especially insects; d) identification of the products of the atmospherically important reactions of anthropogenic and biogenic volatile organic compounds; and e) the investigation of the gas-phase atmospheric reactions of polycyclic aromatic compounds. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometry is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including biochemistry and environmental chemistry doc4273 none With this Award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program of the Division of Chemistry and the Japan Program of the Division of International Programs support the Paul J. Scheuer Symposium on Marine Natural Products Chemistry. The symposium will bring together junior and senior chemists interested in the broad area of marine natural products chemistry at the International Chemical Conference of Pacific Basin Societies which will be held in Honolulu, Hawaii during December 14-19, . Speakers reflect a wide variety of subfields within marine natural products chemistry, such as microbial diversity, chemical ecology, anticancer marine natural products, and synthetic studies on marine natural products. In addition, speakers will discuss their vision of the field of marine natural products as the new millenium opens doc4274 none Major Research Instrumentation support will enhance the development of a research program at The University of Texas PanAm (UTPA) by acquiring a Torque Rheometer, a Dynamic Mechanical Rheometer and an Electrical and Thermal conductivity tester. This research program will contribute to fundamental understanding of nanoreinforced polymer composites for engineering applications. Project studies will focus on process-structure-property relationships for composites prepared by conventional plastic processing technologies. Studies will investigate reinforcement handling, dispersion, and reinforcement-matrix interactions. Effects of the nanoreinforcement on the morphological, mechanical, thermal, electrical, and rheological properties will be of significant importance for the development of multifunctional materials. Conventional manufacturing technologies such as extrusion, injection molding, and fiber drawing will be employed as well as advanced manufacturing technologies such as rapid prototyping. UTPA, long respected as a teaching institution serving under-represented minorities, is promoting faculty research that will encourage undergraduates to pursue careers in science and engineering and train graduate students as leaders in regional industries. Most of the polymer engineering projects will involve UTPA s undergraduates, 85 percent of whom are Hispanic and have had limited experience with technical research. The acquisition of the requested instruments will also increase research opportunities for faculty from science and engineering departments at UTPA. Finally, the instruments will foster collaborative research with small businesses as well as, training programs with the Rio Grande Valley s local manufacturing entities, an important segment of which is dedicated to the polymer industry doc4275 none With this renewal award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program continues its support for the work of Dr. Edward. B. Skibo of the Department of Chemistry at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. The research builds on earlier work studying reactive intermediates such as quinone methides, cyclopropyl quinone methides, activated aziridines, and iminium ions. Methods were developed to synthesize mitosenes labeled with 13C at the 1- and 10- positions using single-carbon 13C starting materials. These labeled mitosenes and similarly labeled aziridines incorporated into other know aklylating agents will be used to study the chemo and regioselectivity of reductive alkylation of DNA. 13 C NMR will be used to determine the initial product distributions and as a probe to follow product isolation. The majority of antitumor agents function by the chemical modification of DNA, for example by the addition of alkyl groups which interfere with replication of the rapidly growing cells. Very little is known about what factors control the sites of alkylation, in part because of the difficulties of isolating the identifying the many possible products formed. The use of 13C enriched alkylating agents, coupled with 13C Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy, should make it possible to determine alkylation sites and product distributions in crude reaction mixtures - giving fundamental insights which might assist the development of more effective chemotherapy treatments. This research is highly interdisciplinary, cutting across physical organic chemistry, medicinal chemistry, and biochemistry doc4276 none Michael Morse of the University of Utah is supported by a grant from the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program to continue his investigations of chemical bonding and electronic structure of diatomic and polyatomic transition metal clusters with electronic spectroscopy. The measurements will be made on supersonic expansions of laser ablated metals using laser induced fluorescence, resonant two photon ionization and dispersed fluorescence spectroscopies. State symmetries, bond energies and lengths and vibrational frequencies will be determined for: (1) a series of 3d transition metal silicides and (2) 4 and 5d homonuclear transition metal diatomics . The studies will be extended to include a series of metal clusters including those containing aluminum, copper, silver, niobium and silicon. Metals have extremely important applications in catalysis. This study will obtain spectroscopic information about diatomic molecules and clusters of metal atoms to enable the strengths of bonds and other properties of the molecules to be determined. The properties of the diatomic molecules will be compared with those calculated using current theories and those of the larger clusters will form a connection to the properties of the bulk solid doc4277 none This research project addresses the detailed dynamics of photoinduced reactions at well-characterized solid surfaces. Using angle resolved time-of-flight measurements, Professor Ian Harrison and his students at the University of Virginia are exploring the photoactivation of adsorbates such as N2, CO2, and methane. With the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program this work provides detailed insight into the mechanisms of small molecule activation at surfaces, with strong implications for the development and improvement of heterogeneous catalytic methods. Charge transfer excitation of these adsorbed molecules followed by analysis of the desorbed products, allows this group to probe the details of the transition state for photostimulated as well as thermally stimulated surface reactions. The photoexcitation of adsorbed molecules can be used to probe the dynamics of more common thermally activated processes on surfaces. This research project uses fast laser excitation of adsorbates, followed by angle resolved measurements of product velocities to provide information about the detailed dynamics of several important small molecule reactions on well-characterized surfaces. The results of these photodynamic studies are then applied to the understanding of the mechanisms of thermally activated catalytic reactions of considerable importance doc4278 none This award in the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic program supports research on the development of new crystal engineering protocols and their application to the assembly of synthetic zeolite analogs and molecular-based magnetic materials by Professor Christer Aakeroy of the Department of Chemistry at the Kansas State University. This will be accomplished by constructing extended hybrid inorganic organic architectures using hydrogen-bond interactions and custom-designed ligands, notably substituted pyridines, triazines and pyrimidines. The latter will be used in conjunction with divalent Cu, Co, Mn and Ni ions to produce the molecular magnets. The compounds will be characterized by means of IR, NMR, DSC and X-ray diffraction. The utility of the catalytic support compounds will be examined using the hydrogenation of small alkenes as a model reaction, and the magnetic properties of the metal pyrimidines by means of a SQUID magnetometer. The goal of this research is to develop a fundamental understanding of the principles of crystal engineering based on molecular self-assembly and to use these principles to synthesize materials with useful physical properties. In particular, catalytic supports and molecular magnets will be produced which have important applications in the petrochemical and information technology industries. The students involved in this project will learn a breadth of skills in both synthesis and instrumental methods, and gain experience which links fundamental chemistry with commercial use doc4279 none This award in the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research on the stoichiometric and catalytic transformations involving f-element and related organometallic molecules by Professor Tobin Marks of the Chemistry Department at Northwestern University. Using primarily heavier group 14-16 metallocene complexes synthesized by the P.I. and collaborators, reaction calorimetry is utilized to quantify the strengths of metal-ligand multiple bonds. The scope and mechanisms of organolanthanide actinide catalyzed reactions will be determined, to include hydroamination, phosphination and boration as well as olefin polymerization to produce polymers end-capped with a hetroatom (Si, Sn, B, Al) group. The goal of this research is to discover, understand, improve and apply chemical transformations involving organometallic molecules and molecular fragments to numerous areas of US industrial chemistry. The work focuses on the use of organometallic complexes of lanthanides and actinides, a relatively unexplored area, to effect these transformations which include catalytic processes for the production of fuels, polymeric materials, pharmecuticals and other economically important chemicals. This project will help to build both a broad knowledge base and a technically skilled cadre of researchers trained to develop more efficient, selective, environmentally benign and economically competitive process technologies doc4280 none Nowak The investigator and his colleagues develop new theories for the emergence of communication and cooperation among individuals. They focus on theories to explain the evolutionary transitions from simple indexical signals through to iconic and referential signs and finally to symbols and syntax in human language. These transitions are related to increases in fitness brought about through natural selection acting on communication strategies. They approach these problems using evolutionary game theory and population dynamics. The technical objective is to discover evolutionarily stable solutions to language games, such that when all individuals adopt these solutions, no mutant behavior can invade the population under the influence of natural selection. The challenge is to characterize the dynamics of the language game by specifying a realistic set of strategies and payoffs, and then to analyze the stability properties and accessibility of the equilibrium solutions. The mathematical equivalence of the game-theoretical replicator equation to the Lotka-Volterra equation offers a large tool box of techniques from nonlinear dynamics with which to explore the games. They also aim to relate these results to findings in information theory, in particular the formulation due to Shannon and Weaver ( ). Theoretical studies of language therefore provide a set of fascinating conceptual and technical challenges, as the strategies described with the models must be rich enough to capture the symbolic and open-ended properties of signals. While cooperation and animal communication are both areas in which much important theoretical work has been conducted, few attempts have been made to bring them together. The study of language provides an important focus for such a synthesis. Theoretical studies of the evolution of animal communication have stressed extravagant and costly ornamentation, using Darwin s theory of sexual selection, whereas evolutionary approaches to language tend to be represented by studies in historical linguistics within human societies. It is the objective of this project to occupy the center ground and provide a theoretical bridge between these two disciplines. Thus the work is neither a study of animal signals and cooperation nor a mathematical investigation of human syntax and grammar, but rather an attempt to reconstruct the continuous series of stages through which evolution might have proceeded from one to the other. The project does not not attempt to explain the glorious intricacies of human grammar studied by linguists, such as in X-bar theory. Instead it focusses on simple design features of animal communication and human language and attempts to describe their evolution in mathematical terms. These probably antedated grammar, phrase structure, anaphora and related linguistic constructs, and thereby provide some biological foundations upon which these later concepts might rest doc4281 none This program of research in experimental economics incorporates bounded rationality and learning into the mechanism design framework. The project has two parts. The first consists of three experimental studies of incentive-compatible public goods mechanisms. The presence of public goods seriously challenges traditional or natural solutions for the allocation of private goods. Incentive-compatible mechanisms align individual self-interests with the group interest. The investigator s previous work and others work have shown that among these incentive compatible mechanisms those which are supermodular, i.e., when players strategies are strategic complements, converge robustly well to the Nash equilibrium prediction, and those which are not supermodular do not converge as well. This project examines whether the degree of strategic complementarity could have a significant effect on the convergence of a mechanism, i.e., whether the process is gradual. Experiments are conducted on three supermodular mechanisms for public goods provision with varying degrees of strategic complementarity to study this effect. Convergence is an important criterion for selecting a mechanism to solve a particular problem because at the end of the learning process we would like the mechanism to yield the desired outcome. The second part consists of two experimental studies of mechanism design in distributed systems, such as the Internet, which are characterized by asynchronicity and limited information. In a wide variety of real world situations a group of agents share a common production process transforming input into output. A salient example is provided by the Internet, which has becoming increasingly important in global telecommunications. In the context of several agents sharing a network link, the cost to be shared is congestion experienced. In the network context, traditional solution concepts such as Nash equilibrium or the serially undominated set might not apply. Friedman and Shenker ( ) propose new solution concepts for distributed systems. This project runs experiments to examine these new solution concepts. The project also conducts experiments to study the average cost pricing and the serial cost sharing mechanisms under complete information and synchronous moves, as well as distributed settings with limited information and varying degrees of asynchrony. This study will provide information on what types of mechanisms should be selected in distributed systems doc4282 none Aindow This grant supports the acquisition of an automated digital 200-kilovolt transmission electron microscope (TEM) by the Institute of Materials Science at the University of Connecticut. The new TEM will be operated as a central user facility and will offer greatly enhanced capabilities as compared with the existing TEM at University of Connecticut including: ultra-high resolution objective lens (Cs 0.6mm) giving better than 0.19 nanometer a point-to-point resolution; image filter for parallel electron energy-loss spectrometry (PEELS) and electron spectroscopic imaging (ESI); multi-scan charge-coupled device camera enabling images to be acquired digitally; and fully automated microprocessor control allowing remote operation. Five key research programs have been identified which will make most use of the instrument. The research areas are: interfacial structure and defect-mediated interfacial processes in engineering alloys, kinetic studies of mineral reactions and textural evolution in silicate rocks, microstructural evolution in tough ceramics, PEELS ESI as a probe of magnetic structure in metals and alloys, and synthesis and characterisation of inorganic helices. The instrument will also revolutionise classroom teaching of TEM and related topics at the University of Connecticut by allowing faculty to combine conventional teaching materials with live output from the microscope via remote operation over the campus network. %%% This grant supports the acquisition of a state-of-the-art automated digital transmission electron microscope by the Institute of Materials Science at the University of Connecticut. The new microscope will serve as a central user facility and will offer the following key features to researchers: imaging at atomic resolution allowing the crystal structure of materials to be studied directly, energy filtering which will reveal the distribution of elements in materials, and fully automated computer control allowing the instrument to be used across the internet. The new instrument will have a dramatic impact on a wide variety of research programs at the University of Connecticut. These include development of new materials such as aerospace alloys, tough ceramics, and porous semiconductors, studies of nanostructured magnetic materials and of reactions in minerals. Remote control capability of the instrument will also have a revolutionary impact on teaching and outreach. The use of live output from the microscope in the classroom will enable professors at University of Connecticut to teach this challenging topic more effectively. Similarly, when operated over the internet in presentations to high school students and others, the instrument will act as a powerful visual aid which will assist in the ongoing efforts to promote diversity by attracting graduate students from under-represented groups doc4283 none Nigel Richards of the University of Florida is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program and the Molecular Biophysics Program to perform a series of quantum mechanical studies on nitrile hydratase (NHase), a non-heme, Fe(III)-containing enzyme of commercial significance. The project has three specific aims: (1) to evaluate the utility of density functional theoretical (DFT) methods in predicting the spin-state preferences of Fe(III) complexes that are models for the NHase metal center, (2) to model the UV-visible spectroscopy of Fe(III) complexes that are models of the NHase metal center using a combination of the INDO S semiempirical model and hybrid DFT molecular mechanics (MM) force field methods, and (3) to investigate the utility of DFT MM calculations in probing the electronic structure of the NHase Fe(III) active site and the enzyme mechanism. The theoretical description of NHase is expected to impact research in several areas. First, NHase has potential applications in the green synthesis of stereochemically complex compounds, particularly if substrate specificity can be re-engineered on the basis of structural and mechanistic information. Next, insight into the role of the metal center in catalysis, and its interactions with the protein, are expected to stimulate the rational discovery of novel inorganic catalysts for the hydration of commercially important nitriles. Finally, modeling the structure and reactivity of the non-heme Fe(III)-center in NHase will be a robust test of the utility of modern hybrid quantum mechanical molecular mechanics methods and density-functional theory techniques for modeling metalloenzymes. Recent advances in theoretical methods have opened the possibility of new computational studies into the structure, reactions, and catalysis of transition metal-containing enzymes, which often mediate critical steps in the biosynthesis of both primary and secondary metabolites. In this project, modern computational approaches will be used to calculate the properties of these enzymes, which are expected to have future importance in pharmaceutical discovery using metabolic engineering, and industrial chemical synthesis using biotechnological methods doc4284 none This project involves conducting three experimental studies aimed at discovering new ways to overcome undesirable status generalization. Status generalization refers to a well-documented tendency, under certain conditions, to infer ability based on status characteristics such as ethnicity or skin color. This work is aimed at reducing status generalization in classrooms, and it builds on a large body of such applied work conducted over several decades by other investigators. To the ideas of status generalization theories, these experiments add other social psychological processes, including effects of motivation, legitimacy of power structures, types of tasks, and stability of social structures. Results will be useful for extending theories of status generalization, and they should have ready application to practical settings such as classrooms and work teams doc4285 none Project The department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University will purchase a cluster of 32 Dual processors computers which will be used for several research projects, including in particular: 1. Computational Astrostatistics by Larry Wasserman and Chris Genovese 2. Statistical Genetics and Evolutionary Simulations by Kathryn Roeder, Bernie Devlin and Larry Wasserman 3. Data Analytic Approach to Seismic Imaging by William F. Eddy, Mark Schervish and Pantelis Vlachos 4. Parallelized Spatio-temporal Analyses of Functional Magnetic Resonance Data by Chris Genovese, William F. Eddy and Nicole Lazar doc4239 none This research tests the theory that voters look at distinct aspects of the economy to determine how well the incumbent administration manages the economy the benefit the voters self-interests, and they vote on that calculation, rather than consideration of the overall growth rate of the economy or of the voter s personal financial condition. The investigators postulate that voters look at changes in the wages, or chnges int he level of employment, of: people in similar occupations; people with similar levels of education; and people in the same industry as the voter to determine how well the economy performs in the voter s interest. Thus, the investigators offer a model of individual-level behavior consistent with aggregate observations of the importance on economic performance on vote choice. The investigators argue that voters are self-interested, and that they evaluate the incumbent based o how well the incumbent manages the economy towards the voters self-interest. Thus, voters would have preferences over both the level of economic growth credited to the administration, and to the distributive impact of the incumbent. Kramer s argument ( ) is repeated that it would be inefficient for voters to look at their own pocketbook as a measure of the incumbent s competence or the incumbents distributve tendencies. The pocketbook of the voter is a function of life-cycle effects, effort, and other idiosyncratic factors -- which would dwarf government-induced change in income. The argument is extended by pointing out that for voters to look at the aggregate macro-economy would mask all intra-economy, distributive variation. This would include skill-based variation, education-based variation, sectoral variation, and regional variation. Thus, it is concluded that the best strategy, which a voter could employ to determine how well the incumbent administration manages the economy to benefit the voter s self-interest, is to look at the economic performance of individuals who share relevant economic characteristics with the voter. The investigators estimate wages of different groups of voters using the Census Bureau s Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation files. The impact of these objective economic measures is examined with respect to: voters evaluations of the economy through the Survey of Consumer Attitudes and Behavior and the National Election Study; voters evaluations of the incumbent through survey instruments measuring presidential popularity; and voters vote choices through the National Election Study. By using a dataset with richer information on the economic circumstances of individuals than used previously, and combining this with the theory offered by the investigators, the project is able to advance the state of the art of the micro-foundations of economic voting doc4265 none What role do parties play in electoral competition? Why would parties exert discipline on their members? This investigation links these issues theoretically and empirically by modeling parties as informative brands to voters. As conventional wisdom suggests, most party labels carry fairly precise meanings. Democrats are generally liberal, Republicans are generally conservative, and Libertarians are basically conserva- tive but often socially liberal. The theoretical question is, how is this sustained as an equilibrium phenomenon? In the basic model, the researchers assume there are a large number of constituencies, voters are risk averse and incompletely informed about candidate ideal policies, and candidates are unable to commit to a declared policy platform. In this environment, parties can play a critical role by ag- gregating ideologically similar candidates. Importantly, party membership is endogenous. Certain types of candidates thereby have an incentive to affiliate themselves with a party to reduce voter uncertainty about their preferences. The results of a pilot by the investigators are the following. (1) Parties can be effective screening devices for candidate preferences. Intuitively, this screening works because party membership imposes differential costs across candidate ideological types, so that only candidates whose preferences are sufficiently close to a party s platform are willing to affiliate. Even in a single party system, voter welfare is increased by the information party candidates are able to convey relative to unaffiliated candi- dates. (2) In a two party system there is a direct link between the effectiveness of screening and platform choices. When the costs of joining parties is high-e.g., parties can effectively discipline their members or screen out certain type of candidates -party labels are very informative, and the parties platforms converge in Downsian fashion. When party labels are less informative, however, the platforms diverge.This happens because taking an extreme position reduces a party s ideolog- ical heterogeneity, thus making its label more meaningful to voters. (3) Candidates do not always affiliate with the nearest party, since they also take the electoral benefits of party membership into account. These benefits may vary depending on constituency preferences. Thus even candidates with the same ideal policy may affiliate with different parties, depending on the preferences of their district s median voter. Extensions of the basic model provide additional predictions. Of particular interest is the possibility of hot races in which voters learn much more about candidates than we assume in our basic model. This extension can account for the fact that party labels sometimes mean different things in different places. Another extension is to model parties as democratic institutions that must choose platforms and screening mechanisms collectively, perhaps through a primary system. Others include endogenizing the number of parties, exploring alternate electoral systems, and determining the optimal level of screening or discipline. Both the initial results and the proposed extensions are amenable to empirical analysis. Among the topics we will pursue are the effectiveness of party branding, the relationship between party screening and platform choices, retirement and defection patterns, and the evolution of platforms over time doc4288 none This award in the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic program supports research on the acid-base properties of excited-state transition metal complexes by Professor Harry Gafney of the Department of Chemistry at Queens College of the City University of New York. The work will delineate the factors which result in the formation of bimetallic complexes from monomeric components or in the formation of a dissociative excited state from a bimetallic complex that relaxes to reform the original compound. These are the factors that produce excited state acid-base chemistry rather than the more usual energy or electron-transfer reactions. The photoinduced formation and dissociation of various complexes of Ru(II) containing the bipyridyl and other ligands with trivalent Rh, Ir and Co will be examined by means of excited-state and time-resolved methods. Transient absorbtions will be identified through their spectral and kinetic characteristics, while quenching and photochemical reactivity will be correlated with excited-state energies, redox potentials and acid dissociation constants to identify the reaction mechanisms. The goal of this research is to determine how the acidic and basic properties of transition metal complexes, specifically of ruthenium, change when illuminated by light and converted into their excited states. Most of the known net photochemistry of molecules of all types involves the transfer of either energy or electrons rather than protons. The development of excited-state acid-base chemistry will open new avenues for its utilization in a variety of areas. There are potential near-term medical applications which include photodynamic therapy and radioisotope cancer treatment by means of a chemically-loaded endoscope. Both graduate and undergraduate students will be involved in this project and will learn a breath of skills in both synthetic and photochemical methods which will leave them well-prepared to pursue a variety of industrial, medical or industrial career paths doc4289 none This project, conducted by Dr. Paul Flowers and undergraduate students at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, is supported in the Analytical and Surface Chemistry program. The research, which is a part of NSF s Research in Undergraduate Institutions (RUI) initiative, develops fiber optic spectroelectrochemical (FOSEC) sensors and related methodology for potential application to various in situ measurements. Specifically the research includes 1) construction and evaluation of the fiber optic spectroelectrochemical sensors for absorbance and fluorescence measurements, 2) characterization of the spectroscopic and redox properties of selected analytes, e. g. Cu(II) and Cr(VI) in various solutions , and 3) development and assessment of analytical protocols for FOSEC sensor measurement of these analytes. This research is expected to lead to new in situ measurement strategies. Such strategies could result in enhanced selectivities, reduced chemical waste, and increased versatility when compared to the analytical methods that they replace doc4290 none The simple process of transforming the present tense of an English verb into its past-tense form has dominated the debate between two fundamentally different views of language knowledge and processing. According to traditional, symbolic theories, language knowledge takes the form of explicit rules operating over discrete, symbolic representations. By contrast, according to connectionist or neural-network theories, language processing involves the massively parallel interaction of large numbers of neuron-like processing units. The principal objective of the proposed work is to implement a connectionist-style computational model that demonstrates the differential influence of semantic and phonological factors on past-tense production and in turn, derives novel predictions that could be assessed by future neuropsychological testing. The computational simulations will extend preliminary work by Joanisse and Seidenberg in which verb processing involved the parallel interaction of representations of phonology (both in comprehension and production) and their meanings. The proposed simulations will incorporate more realistic representations and temporal dynamics. An initial stage of modeling will employ fixed-length phonological representations of monosyllabic verb stems, but a second stage will employ continuous-time trajectories for phonological input and output capable of handling multisyllabic items. Semantic representations will be derived from a number of analyses of large text corpora, including Lund and Burgess Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL), which will be replicated if necessary in order to make the resulting semantic representations publicly available for unrestricted use by other researchers. The development of a strongly theoretically motivated connectionist computational model of selective impairments in English past-tense formation will not only provide important insights into the role of semantic and phonological representations in lexical processing, but also more generally about the fundamental character of the principal components, and their interactions, in the language system doc4291 none Eukaryotic cells are distinguished by the presence of a number of intracellular membrane-enclosed organelles. All eukaryotic life depends on the transport of material into, out of, and between compartments of the cell. The movement of proteins and lipids between these organelles is mediated by small membrane containers or vesicles which form from one donor compartment and then travel to and fuse with a second target compartment. This traffic must be selective in order to maintain the identities of organelles as well as allow traffic between them. Thus, each stage of transport; the budding, movement, docking and fusion of transport vesicles is subject to regulatory controls. A variety of experimental strategies, using different cell types, has begun to converge onto a common set of elements which appear to be conserved in all eukaryotic cells. These conserved elements include members of the Rab GTPase family, SNARE proteins, NSF Sec18p, SNAP Sec17p, Sec1 proteins and docking complexes that represent Rab effectors. The Rab family represents a distinct sub-group of the Ras superfamily of small GTPases. Each stage of membrane traffic through both the constitutive and regulated secretory pathways of all eukaryotic cells is associated with a distinct Rab protein which regulates the cascade of events that lead to SNARE-mediated membrane fusion. This project is designed to yield insights into the mechanisms by which Rab proteins are recruited onto membranes. Recruitment onto the surface of a particular subcellular membrane is a crucial step prior to activation of the Rab GTPase. It is clear that a protein machinery exists to recruit the Rabs onto their donor organelles although no component of this process has been identified to date. The recruitment machinery is an essential part of membrane transport because it determines the site on the membrane where the Rab protein exerts its activity. The prenylated Rabs are found in the cytosol bound to the protein GDP Dissociation Inhibitor (GDI) and it is the soluble GDI-Rab heterodimer that is delivered to the recruitment machinery. Recently, Dr. Collins has identified a protein in yeast, Yip1p which may play a role in regulating Rab protein action. Yip1p is a membrane protein that binds Rabs in a non-specific manner. YIP1 is an essential gene which is highly conserved in evolution. The goal of this proposal is to exploit molecular genetics in yeast together with biochemical approaches to gain information that can be used to test the physiological roles of this factor. Interestingly, it was found that the requirements of Yip1p interaction with Rabs are the same as the features of Rab protein required for GDI interaction. This suggests that the role of Yip1p could be the mirror image of the role played by GDI,which is also a pleiotropic factor. While GDI retrieves Rabs from membranes into the cytosol, Yip1p acts to retrieve Rabs from the cytosol onto membranes. Yip1p may represent a pivotal intervention point that higher eukaryotic cells use to control membrane transport. Regulated membrane transport is essential for many cellular processes in plants and animals, including the secretion of extracellular materials such as enzymes, hormones, extracellular matrix components and neurotransmitters. In addition, the pleiotropic nature of Yip1p implies the existence of other factors that impart organelle specificity into the recruitment process. Dr. Collins has used Yip1p to identify a novel membrane protein termed Yop1p that physically interacts with Yip1p. The possibility will be explored that Yop1p also plays an important role in mediating the action of Rab proteins. The result of these studies are expected to provide important new insights into the fundamental mechanisms underlying the regulation of Rab proteins and their role in intracellular trafficking and secretion doc4292 none This project involves a theoretical and empirical study of the role played by international law in the management and resolution of international security disputes. Hypotheses are developed to answer two central questions. First, what impact do principles of international law have on the diplomatic and military policies of states that are involved in territorial disputes with other states? Second, how do principles of international law influence the positions taken by third parties toward territorial disputes and whether they intervene to support one of the disputants? A systematic test of theoretical propositions is conducted using statistical analyses of an original dataset of the population of territorial disputes from to . The results of this project should make important theoretical contributions to understanding the domestic and international conditions that help to determine whether states and international institutions are influenced strongly by principles of international law. Empirically, the systematic and wide-ranging tests should provide a strong basis for drawing generalizable conclusions about the causal effects of international law in international security affairs and, in particular, whether international law plays a central role in the conflict-resolution policies of democratic states doc4293 none Gartner and Segura propose to explore the demographics of casualties in war. Their goal is to understand better the system of relationships and choices at the individual, social group and institutional levels that produce the observed distributions of battle casualties across groups in the society. They plan to examine whether and why casualty representation by group, as well as the larger military manpower pool, varies on a variety of dimensions -- region, socio-economic status, religious preference, race, and ethnicity -- within and among conflicts. Their previous research shows that variations in casualties influence a variety of domestic political process, including individual, mass, and elite opinion formation and elections. Gartner and Segura theorize that: 1) an understanding of who dies in war requires an understanding of who fights. 2) Initially, those who fight and die emerge from a peactime personnel process that is endogenous to the lessons of the previous conflict, the duration of the peace, economic variables and other factors. 3) Casualties provide information that leads to a wartime process of personnel selection. 4) In each situation, there are individual and institutional factors that affect the demographics of those at risk in war. 5) The relative influence of the peactime and wartime processes is a function of the duraciton and intensity of the conflict and the preceding peace. Gartner and Segura focus empirically on post-W.W.II American military manpower, and casualties from the Korean, Vietnam and Gulf wars. They use three distinct types of data. First, they use data from the National Archives and Records Administration, including the Korean Conflict Casualties file and the South East Asia Casualties file. Second, data on unemployment, population, and other socio-economic variables are drawn from the Millennial Edition of the Historical Statistics of the United States. Finally, new data, including a continuous measure of civilian-military pay differentials and serial data on inductions, aggregated by race, religion, region and ethnicity are collected from archival sources available from the Department of Defense and state draft boards. Three sets of hypotheses are tested. First, testable arguments are offered about the demographics of manpower across the entire post-W.W.II era, drawing on general concepts such as economic performance and institutional aspects of conscription. Then, they examine the role of casualties, both as a dependent variable and, when lagged, as an independent variable. Finally, they address specific issues about African-Americans and Latinos in Vietnam and Korea. For each group of interest (minority, religion), Garner and Saguaro employ a cross-sectional time series analysis to determine, first, if there is variation between the group s share of the total population, military manpower pool, and wartime casualties. Second, they use multivariate analysis to determine which factors best explain the deviation between these representations. Finally, they attempt to identify the determinants of variation in these deviations across time and space. For example, they examine African-American representation in society, the military, and among causalities nationally and across states, and in each case across time. The normative and policy implications of the study are considerable. A principal tenet of democratic thought is that the benefits and costs of membership in the body politic are visited equally on the citizenry. If one or more social groups bear a disproportionate share of these costs, and this inequity is endemic in the institutional arrangements of society, then there are clear implications for the legitimacy of the system and it ability to use force effectively and in a manner consistent with the preferences of its population doc4294 none The Chemistry Division will support a three day workshop, to be held at Arizona State University, to update and revise the manual Teaching Chemistry to Students with Disabilities. The American Chemical Society will publish the revised manual and it will be distributed by the ACS and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The revised manual will consist of an overview of current and best practices for participation of k-12, undergraduate and graduate students with visual, hearing, motor and learning disabilities in instructional programs in chemistry. The manual will cover safety, laboratory modifications, lecture and testing strategies, use of computers in instruction, instructional materials and rules and regulations such as the Americans with Disabilities Act. Workshop participants will be drawn from those with established reputations in teaching chemistry to students with disabilities at the k-12 through university levels as well as graduate and undergraduate students doc4295 none Keller Central Missouri State University The objectives of this research project are to initiate the first survey and inventory of tree canopy biodiversity for myxomycetes, macrofungi, mosses, liverworts, and lichens in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The research team will include a multidisciplinary research team including experts in non-vascular plants from the US and Sweden, graduate and undergraduate students, and volunteers. The research is focused on searching for undescribed taxa, comparisons of tree canopy dwelling cryptogams, and collection and curation of little-known assemblages of treetop biodiversity. The research will help document the tree canopy biodiversity in tree species rapidly declining due to insect and fungal pathogens, and atmospheric pollution doc4296 none Hodgins, Jessica Georgia Tech. Res. Corp.-GIT CADRE: Digital Muybridge: A Repository for Human Motion Data Despite their age, Eadweard Muybridge s extensive collection of filmstrips of human motion still serve as a useful resource for researchers. This project is creating a modern analog to Muybridge s filmstrips using current techniques for measurement, display, and distribution. Recent technological advances in motion capture equipment make it possible to record three-dimensional joint angle data of a human subject with high fidelity, resolution, and consistency. This project is recording motions such as walking, running, jumping, and gesturing using modern equipment. The world-wide web and the growing capacity and declining cost of disk drives allows this data repository to be easily distributed to researchers in fields including computer graphics, robotics, computer vision, and biomechanics doc4293 none Gartner and Segura propose to explore the demographics of casualties in war. Their goal is to understand better the system of relationships and choices at the individual, social group and institutional levels that produce the observed distributions of battle casualties across groups in the society. They plan to examine whether and why casualty representation by group, as well as the larger military manpower pool, varies on a variety of dimensions -- region, socio-economic status, religious preference, race, and ethnicity -- within and among conflicts. Their previous research shows that variations in casualties influence a variety of domestic political process, including individual, mass, and elite opinion formation and elections. Gartner and Segura theorize that: 1) an understanding of who dies in war requires an understanding of who fights. 2) Initially, those who fight and die emerge from a peactime personnel process that is endogenous to the lessons of the previous conflict, the duration of the peace, economic variables and other factors. 3) Casualties provide information that leads to a wartime process of personnel selection. 4) In each situation, there are individual and institutional factors that affect the demographics of those at risk in war. 5) The relative influence of the peactime and wartime processes is a function of the duraciton and intensity of the conflict and the preceding peace. Gartner and Segura focus empirically on post-W.W.II American military manpower, and casualties from the Korean, Vietnam and Gulf wars. They use three distinct types of data. First, they use data from the National Archives and Records Administration, including the Korean Conflict Casualties file and the South East Asia Casualties file. Second, data on unemployment, population, and other socio-economic variables are drawn from the Millennial Edition of the Historical Statistics of the United States. Finally, new data, including a continuous measure of civilian-military pay differentials and serial data on inductions, aggregated by race, religion, region and ethnicity are collected from archival sources available from the Department of Defense and state draft boards. Three sets of hypotheses are tested. First, testable arguments are offered about the demographics of manpower across the entire post-W.W.II era, drawing on general concepts such as economic performance and institutional aspects of conscription. Then, they examine the role of casualties, both as a dependent variable and, when lagged, as an independent variable. Finally, they address specific issues about African-Americans and Latinos in Vietnam and Korea. For each group of interest (minority, religion), Garner and Saguaro employ a cross-sectional time series analysis to determine, first, if there is variation between the group s share of the total population, military manpower pool, and wartime casualties. Second, they use multivariate analysis to determine which factors best explain the deviation between these representations. Finally, they attempt to identify the determinants of variation in these deviations across time and space. For example, they examine African-American representation in society, the military, and among causalities nationally and across states, and in each case across time. The normative and policy implications of the study are considerable. A principal tenet of democratic thought is that the benefits and costs of membership in the body politic are visited equally on the citizenry. If one or more social groups bear a disproportionate share of these costs, and this inequity is endemic in the institutional arrangements of society, then there are clear implications for the legitimacy of the system and it ability to use force effectively and in a manner consistent with the preferences of its population doc4298 none Alvin L. Crumbliss of Duke University is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program for research on mechanisms of ligand-metal exchange reactions-- with emphasis on second sphere-influences. He is PI of NSF grant ($345K for 36 months) in this same area, and earlier grants extending to . Aims of the present grant include elucidation of: kinetics and mechanisms of dissociation of Fe(III) from chelate complexes, aspects of host-guest chemistry in the second sphere, Fe(III-II) redox potentials of complexes and second-sphere aggregates, and second-sphere effects on mobility of Fe(III) in various environments. Metal ions are centrally involved in important changes that figure in all areas of science, including geology, biology, medicine and ecology. Ferric iron -- Fe(III) -- is one of the most common, versatile, and important metal ions. Since it tends to be rather sluggish in regard to replacing atoms in its near neighborhood ( first coordination sphere ) there are many advantages in selecting that ion for detailed study. Results of this group and others have shown that atoms beyond the first coordination sphere ( second coordination sphere ) influence, modulate, and control what goes on near the metal ion, and thereby have dramatic effect on the overall chemistry that can be observed in macroscopic systems (geology, biology, ecology). This program is making good progress in unrraveling the subtle factors that govern this important class of chemistry doc4299 none The project is a continuation of research on dynamic models (studying the strategic interaction of agents over time, and also studying how changes in the distribution of workers skills over time might influence and be influenced by the distribution of wages associated with those skills); competitive models (studying the problem of designing selling procedures - auctions - that ensure that the good or goods being sold end up in the hands of the buyers who value them the most, and also studying the role of monetary policy in achieving a desirable equilibrium outcome); contracts and implementation (studying how the inability to make accurate forecasts affects the nature of optimal contracts between agents); and voting (examining which voting rules satisfy desirable properties such as anonymity, neutrality, transitivity, and Pareto efficiency on the widest possible class of domains of preferences doc4300 none This award to Professor James Canary of New York University is supported by the Advanced Materials and Processing Program in the Chemistry Division. With this award, copper coordination complexes and their derivatives with electrochemical and chiral properties will be studied as molecule-based switches. Synthesis of electrochemical chiral materials and determination of optical properties of these materials after one-electron oxidation and reductions are parts of this award. One outcome of these studies will be development of molecular switches in place of molecular assemblies as in liquid crystals. Molecular switches will make the electronic devices very efficient, lightweight and compact. In addition, the research program will have substantial impact on undergraduate training and education of students in Materials Chemistry in general and electrochemical chiral materials in particular. Under this award, electrochemical chiral materials will be synthesized and their optical properties determined after one-electron oxidation and reductions. Molecular switches developed from the electrochemical chiral materials if incorporated in electronic devices such as computers will make them efficient, lightweight and compact. Undergraduate and graduate training programs under the award will enhance the overall standard of the Material Chemistry Program and will provide future scientists and engineers in this field doc4301 none BOEHMAN An AVL Engine Videoscope is acquired and implemented on two research engines being used for study of atomization, ignition, and combustion behavior of alternative diesel fuels. This apparatus enables observation of the spray behavior of fuel blends, the impact of oxygenated fuels on the ignition and combustion behavior of diesel fuel, and the ignition of natural gas by a pilot injection of oxygenated fuel. The emphasis of the studies is on emissions characterization and combustion analysis by means of in-cylinder sensing doc4302 none Scale dependency is an inherent property of geographic phenomena, and the increasingly pressing importance of better understanding the effects of scale has been highlighted in a number of recent public forums. So-called multiscale models can be particularly appropriate for this task, that is, mathematical statistical models in which the overall structure of an object under study is decomposed according to its component structures at different scales of spatial and or temporal resolution. In this project, work will focus on the development and implementation of a multiscale statistical modeling framework recently introduced by the principal investigators specifically for geographic data structures. The framework underlying these models is that of a set of hierarchically defined partitions (or aggregations) of a data space. The effects of scale are captured through a fundamental decomposition (or factorization) of the data likelihood, induced by this hierarchy, into individual components of local information at all possible spatial resolutions. Upon combining these multiscale likelihoods with an appropriately defined Bayesian prior probability structure, a powerful inferential framework results. The specific aims of this project are three-fold: (i) further develop and extend the original, general modeling structure, so as to (ii) tailor it to two specific class of problems in geographical analysis, those of remote sensing and census geography, and finally (iii) produce formal tools of statistical inference for characterizing the influence of scale effects in standard tasks such as prediction, classification, knowledge discovery, and decision making. Broadly speaking, this research is aimed at fully developing an inferential statistical framework for the study of scale effects in geographic phenomena, with particular emphasis on problems in remote sensing and census geography. As such, it is expected to have implications in areas such as geographical theory, knowledge discovery and spatial data mining, and theory and methods for database generalization. The resulting framework will be sufficiently flexible and computationally efficient to allow for integration into geographic information systems (GIS), such as those arising in the context of environmental, epidemiological, and agricultural applications doc4303 none The purpose of this project is to empirically evaluate the roles of poverty, commercialization, population pressure, and property right resource management mechanisms on the sustainability of local forest resources in the middle Himalayan region in Northern India. It will involve collection and analysis of data from approximately 100 villages in the two states of Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh. The first stage will involve estimating individual household-level demand for common forest resources, as a function of household demographic and economic characteristics, and village level variables such as prices of complementary and substitute products, market access, property rights system, and local governance enforcement mechanisms. These demand systems will be used to obtain reduced form estimates for aggregate village use of common forest resources as a function of village characteristics. The second stage of the project will investigate determinants of local governance and enforcement mechanisms doc4304 none This project uses exogenous variation generated by quasi experiments to isolate some important relationships in health economics. The following two broad questions are examined: What is the impact of income on mortality? A large body of literature that spans many disciplines has established that those with lower incomes have poorer health outcomes and higher mortality rates. However it has been difficult isolating income as the causal element in this relationship. This project uses what is frequently termed the benefits notch in Social Security as an exogenous source of variation in the income for the elderly. Concerned with rapidly increasing benefit payments, in , the Federal government changed the way benefits were calculated for new beneficiaries, substantially decreasing payments for recipients born after December 31, . As a result of these changes, two people with identical life histories but different birth dates would receive very different retirement incomes. The project plans to compare mortality rates for people born in the last quarter of and the first quarter of . If income does impact mortality, there should be elevated death rates among those with lower monthly benefits. The notch experiment is an excellent opportunity to examine the income mortality link for four reasons. First, the benefits notch reduced monthly payments by a substantial amount. Second, mortality rates in the impacted groups are relatively high, making it easier to detect an impact of income on mortality if one exists. Third, the incomes of the elderly are routinely changed by the Federal government and subsequently, there may be important policy implications if income causally impacts mortality. Fourth, for narrowly defined cohorts, the notch benefits appear to be close to randomly assigned in that workers born just before and after the notch had identical observed characteristics prior to the passage of the legislation establishing benefit differences. What are the benefits of prenatal care? While it is easy to establish that women with more prenatal care visits have better birth outcomes, it is hard to attribute all of these differences to prenatal care. Women who would otherwise have an uneventful pregnancy (married, older, more educated mothers, for example) also have the highest prenatal care use. Because of the potential omitted variables bias, constructing a convincing test that can falsify or confirm the link between care and outcomes has proven to be difficult. This research program uses field variation in prenatal care visits to isolate the benefits of prenatal care. Black women and city residents rely heavily on public transportation to get to health care providers. Shocks in the access to transportation can therefore be used as a way to isolate the impact of reduced prenatal care. A number of possible quasi experiments can be used in this context including public transportation strikes in Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) and Philadelphia. Preliminary evidence from Pittsburgh suggests that women pregnant at the time of the strike had substantially lower prenatal care visits than women pregnant at other times. If prenatal care improves birth outcomes, then the reduction in visits generated by strikes should produce worse birth outcomes doc4305 none As international adjudicating institutions, such as the Court of Human Rights, the World Trade Organization, and others, multiply, we want to understand to what degree these institutions provide and maintain a legal order independent of, and superior to, national governments. The development of European Union (EU) law provides a valuable forum in which to explore these issues of international laws and national sovereignty. Over the past forty years, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has established a supranational legal order superior to national law and to which national governments are subject. This supranational legal integration has generated a vigorous scholarly debate concerning whether the ECJ is a tool of the member states or a truly independent judiciary. This question is the focus of our proposal. The extant literature on the politics of EU legal integration divides essentially into two groups. The pro-Court camp assumes that the ECJ can enforce its judgments and that its rulings constrain national governments and push European integration beyond that intended by national governments. The Intergovernmentalist camp assumes that the ECJ is beholden to the member states and, thus, concludes that member states constrain legal integration. The debate between these two camps is based largely on informal arguments about government-ECJ relations, which obscure the basis of the theoretical debate. Also, the empirical evident consists largely of case studies over which the two camps offer conflicting interpretations. Thus, to resolve this debate, the proposed project provides: (a) a clearer theoretical exposition of the theoretical debate so as to identify testable hypotheses that discriminate between the two camps, and (b) a rigorous empirical analysis of these hypotheses. First, the project generates the intuition behind, and the implications of, two formal models of government-ECJ interaction, each of which is designed to formalize the two extent informal arguments, Beyond the two traditional camps, the formal models also integrate recent arguments about public legitimacy into the formal model. The results demonstrate that the extant empirical evidence does not discriminate between the competing theories. These formal models also generate a set of testable hypotheses that discriminate between the two positions. The proposed project then provides a strategy for data collection and statistical analysis to test these hypotheses. The Intergovernmentalist model predicts that the political costs of compliance with EU law should affect ECJ behavior in the following five ways: (1) whether a government is ruled against; (2) how frequently a government is taken to trial; (3) whether the ECJ makes an effort to distinguish a case from potentially precedence-forming previous cases; (4) how many judges sit on an ECJ-adjudicating panel; and (5) how long the judges take to decide a case. Political costs are measured through both systematic components, such as the number of years until an election must be called and the number of seats that the ruling party controls, and random political shocks, such as a government defeat in a by-election or a political scandal. The first two of these tests are presented in detail, including descriptions of the data, their sources, and statistical issues regarding the actual regressions. The remaining three tests are mentioned briefly. This analysis helps to further an already fruitful debate about the role of the ECJ in EU legal integration. Not only does the analysis clarify and discriminate between the two extant camps, but the data collections also facilitates tests of future theoretical developments. In addition, the results of the analysis have implications for the conditions under which transnational institutions in general constrain national governments and, thus, inform our broader understanding of supranational adjudication doc4306 none With a single known exception (a virus), the DNA, or genetic material, of every organism contains thymine rather than its simpler analog, uracil. This is true even though uracil was used long before thymine in evolution and even though, in the test tube, uracil-containing DNA can be replicated and encodes genetic traits. The reason for the preference of thymine over uracil is a major unanswered question in biology. A major long term goal of this project is to produce a thymineless bacterial chromosome. A multiple mutant in a common gastrointestinal bacterium (Escherichia coli) has been already been constructed that can replace 30% of its chromosomal thymine with uracil. By gradually forcing this bacterium to use increasing amounts of an alternative DNA precursor, deoxyuridine, from the medium, it may be possible to drive the evolution of a thymineless chromosome. The bacterium used in this project has been widely used for the discovery of universal metabolic pathways. It has multiple ways to make thymine compounds, to keep uracil out of DNA, and to remove it once it is incorporated. Some pathways that are still unknown will be identified by mutation. By successive mutation, it may be possible to reverse evolution and produce a bacterium that no longer excludes uracil from the chromosome. Whether or not the goal of a completely thymineless chromosome is reached, the results should provide valuable information about alternate pathways of thymine synthesis, about what genes and enzymes keep uracil out of DNA, and about differences in the biological properties of uracil-containing versus thymine-containing DNA doc4307 none In the United States, the process of allocating executive power after an election is usually straightforward -- the candidate with the most votes wins. However, this in not the case in parliamentary democracies that do not produce usually a majority of legislative seats for a single party (so-called coalitional systems). In these systems, a period of inter-party negotiations follows each election. This negotiation determines who becomes the prime minister and what other parties have a share of executive power. Little is know about ho voters manage the greater complexity of these systems. Do they simply vote for the party that they most prefer, or are their voting strategies more complex? Do they worry about wasting their vote on a party that has little change of getting into the cabinet? Do they even know whether different parties are more or less likely to get into the cabinet? Most previous work ignores these questions and simply assumes that the post-election bargaining over cabinets is simply too complex for voters to understand, and, thus, has little impact on how they vote. In this project, the investigator uses national election surveys to ask voters in coalitional systems questions that reveal what they understand and do not understand about the coalition-formation process and its results. This inquiry is motivated by a specific theoretical model (developed in Stevenson, ) that suggests that voters are actually quite capable of making sense of coalitional systems and using this understanding to modify the way that they vote (that is, to use their vote to try to affect who gets into the cabinet). They gain this understanding, not through knowledge of the details of the coalition-formation process, but by relying on informational shortcuts in the form of empirical regularities that tend to characterize the output of this process in their countries. For example, although voters in a country may not know the rules that govern how proposals for different governing coalitions are put forward, they may know that the largest party in the legislature normally holds the position of prime minister. Stevenson s theoretical model simply suggests that this kind of information is useful to voters and (along with some other empirical regularities) allows them to cast rationally votes that are intended to affect the composition of the cabinet. These theoretical claims, of course, depend on the idea that voters actually perceive the empirical regularities that researchers can identify about the system (for example, that the largest party holds the prime ministership, or that the prime minister tends to pick ideologically compatible parties as partners). However, it is not necessarily the case that this is true. Voters may be ignorant of these simple facts. The survey instrument that the investigator uses in this project helps to settle this question by revealing whether voters: 1) perceive the simple empirical regularities that characterize coalition formation in their countries, and 2) whether they use these regularities to structure their expectations about the likely results of the coalition-formation process. If the answer to these questions is positive, then researchers can have more confidence in the specific theoretical model of voting in coalitional systems put forward by the investigator. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, such a result can revise the common view that, in coalitional systems, the process of coalition formation is too complicated to affect how individuals vote doc4308 none With this new award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the work of Dr. Brent L. Iverson in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin. The goal of the work is to develop a molecular Velcro, consisting of negatively charged polydonor strands that link selectively 1:1 to positively charged polyacceptor strands to provide high affinity (low dissociation constant) dimeric links. Various combinations of polydonor and polyacceptor strand molecules will be investigated using HPLC, NMR, isothermal titration calorimetry, Biacore kinetic analysis, and molecular modeling. The basic idea of the work is to develop complementary molecules analogous to the fiber and hook combination of real Velcro. These tightly binding pairs of molecules can then be used to bind two large molecules together in close proximity, or to bind a large molecule to a surface. There are potential applications in immunoassays and biosensors, for example in a sensor used to detect the presence of specific pathogenic bacteria. In addition to possible practical applications, the work is expected to contribute to fundamental knowledge in the area of noncovalent binding, and to provide excellent training for the students involved doc4309 none This project, sponsored by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, continues research into the determination of structure and reactivity at polymer surfaces and interfaces. The research, conducted by Dr. Joseph A. Gardella and his students at SUNY-Buffalo, uses X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), time of flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (ToF-SIMS), and high resolution electron energy loss spectroscopy (HREELS) to study well characterized macromolecular systems. The systems include mono-and multi- layer thin films, copolymer systems from narrow molecular weight distribution prepolymers and degradable polymers with controllable crystallinity. The project elucidates the effects of chain length, segment distribution, spatial distribution of smaller molecular weight polymer chains, and segregation of multicomponent polymer mixtures on surface properties such as adhesion, friction , and degradability. The information generated by this project will be extremely important in the design and development of new materials for use as semiconductor adhesives, general use adhesives, lubricants and low friction coatings, biomaterials, and non-toxic coatings for evironmental use doc4310 none The proposed research uses data collected by the PI in Ghana to examine social networks, financial markets and household organization in a rural economy characterized by rapid technological innovation and stress on land resources. Over a two year period, we collected detailed plot level data on inputs, outputs, land tenure and soil chemistry, information on learning interactions, financial flows and labor transactions between individuals in the sample, plot level GIS data, and individual level data on economic activities (including panel data on consumption, non-farm income and time allocation) and socioeconomic background. The proposed research consists of three major components. The first is an investigation of social learning and network formation. In the survey region, the farming system is rapidly changing from a cassava-maize intercrop to production of pineapples for export as fresh fruit. This shift involves a set of new technologies including a transformation of the fallow system that had been used to maintain soil fertility, the use of new output markets and, particularly, intensive use of agricultural chemicals where none had been used in the previous farming system. I propose a method for identifying the transmission through the social network of information derived from farmers experiments with these new chemicals. Preliminary results provide evidence that the level of a farmer s use of the new chemicals is sensitive to the outcomes of the experiments with these chemicals by others to whom the farmer is directly or indirectly connected in the network. Given these results, I propose modeling the process of network formation in these villages. The hypothesis to be tested is that an individual is more likely to set up network connections with others who are likely to posses information valuable to that individual. Second, pineapple cultivation is both much more profitable and much more costly than the cultivation of alternative crops. This raises the possibility that the process of adoption is influenced by the characteristics of financial markets in the study area. Preliminary evidence is that variation in wealth (treated as endogenous) is an important determinant of pineapple cultivation. I propose to use the data on financial flows, along with the expenditure, assets and time use panel data to explore the hypothesis that capital constraints influence adoption decisions. Farmers simultaneously make decisions regarding the management of soil fertility. Since this is an intertemporal allocation problem it is intimately related to each individual s position vis-a-vis capital markets. In informal interviews, some farmers stated that they were drawing down soil fertility in order to expand production. The second goal is to examine decision making with respect to soil fertility (using the panel data on soil chemistry) and to relate this to adoption decisions and to the financial markets available in the study area. Finally, there is evidence in Ghana that the mechanism of intrahousehold resource allocation corresponds to neither the unitary household model nor the more general model of a collective household. In particular, the allocation of risk within households is not Pareto efficient. There is evidence of important information asymmetries between spouses. This aspect of the research program will examine the hypothesis that the endogenous structure of production relations within the household is a determinant of intrahousehold information flows and hence intrahousehold allocation decisions doc4311 none This project will investigate the acquisition of cultural knowledge of social hierarchy by Samoan youth; in Samoan society, as elsewhere, kin and family groups are ranked relative to one another in a social status hierarchy (centered on chiefs). Studies suggest that acquisition of cultural knowledge occurs through participation in culturally specific activities. This project will test the hypothesis the differences in participation occur as a result of one s gender and or family rank, and that these differences result in variability in the models acquired. Methods include a demographic survey, structured interviews, participant observation, and videotaping observations. The study will contribute to theories of socialization by examining how variations in participation in cultural practices lead to variation in social learning; it will also contribute to our understanding of how cultural knowledge comes to be transmitted and socially distributed across a given population doc4312 none The Chemistry Division will support Virginia Tech to conduct a one year teacher enhancement curriculum development project for use with its mobile chemistry laboratory, a state and privately funded, fully instrumented, 24 station, tractor-trailer rig that will make 10 visits annually to each of 20 school districts in rural, mountainous Southwestern Virginia. This project will prepare teachers in the target region to develop and implement an inquiry-based (i.e. laboratory based), modern chemistry program as a means of improving student performance, scientific literacy and appreciation of the role chemistry plays in society. Planning and execution of the project involves participation of teachers and administrators in the target schools as well as from Virginia Tech. Comments from individuals who have directed similar projects in other regions of the country have been obtained along with concurrent funding from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation for equipping the MCL and from the Eisenhower Program for preparatory training workshops doc4313 none The researcher proposes an examination of three likely sources of regional and temporal variation in the fit of expected utility predictions of international conflict to actual international conflict. Tests of the msot sophisticated general implementation of rational choice theory to international conflict (based on Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman s international interaction game ) reveal systematic variations in the fit of the predictions of the theory across time and space. This unexpected variation in the fit of the so-called expected utility theory of war is not predicted by the theory, and it has importance implications for the application of rational choice models to international relations, to the study of international conflict, and to quantitative analysis in international relations. The systematic nature of the variation and its apparent fit to plausible hypotheses about learning and regional diffferences suggest that the variation is not solely the result of poor measurement or natural variation. As a result, these variations should be explained as a means of obtaining a more accurate and empirically applicable implementation of a key rational model of international conflict. Variation in the fit of any rational choice model to interactions across time and space could be explained by at least two general approaches. First, some scholars would focus attention on the game structure, refusing to accept the premise that the international interaction game is an appropriate theoretical model of dyadic interaction for all dyads across time. Second, others would argue that measurement and application issues are the keys to testing and using expected utility theory in an applied setting, and that there are particular problems in the current measurement and operationalization of key expected utility concepts that have systematic distorting effects on tests of expected utility theory. Both of these possible problems have relevance in this particular case. The principal investigator first plans to investigate how critical changes in the game structure of the international interaction game affect its predictions and the fit of those predictions to international conflict behavior. The investigator does this by focusing on the key game assumption that all states have the option to use force against one another, and also by developming a computer simulation intended to relax game assumptions sequentially and to reassess the fit of the resulting euilibria to global and regional behavior patterns. The investigator also examines critical measurement issues involved in the current operationalization and implementation of key expected utility concepts. In particular, close attention is given to the effects of distance and absolute state power as key determinants of why the predictions of the international interaction game do not fit as expected in broad empirical application. This work draws in part on insights gained during the development of EUGene (Expected Utility and Data Generation Program), the software package used to generate data to test fully the predictions of the international interaction game (Bennett and Stam , doc4314 none This award to Drs. David Walba and Joseph Maclennan of the University of Colorado at Boulder is jointly supported by the Advanced Materials and Processing Program in the Chemistry Division and the Solid State Chemistry Program in the Division of Materials Research. The focus of the award will be to study and develop the basic mechanisms of optically bistable and photo-switchable molecular schemes in self-assembled monolayers for ferroelectric liquid crystal alignments. Synthesis of self-assembled monolayers of azo-dye units oriented parallel to the substrates that can be aligned using linearly polarized UV radiation will be studied under this award. Photo-activated homogeneous alignment of liquid crystal - photo buffing - in place of traditional mechanical buffing or rubbing will also be carried out under this award. Teaching and training of students in materials science are parts of the award. Under this award, self-assembled monolayers will be designed and developed from photoisomerizable azo groups and attached to bookshelf structures of ferroelectric liquid crystals. Photo-activated alignments of liquid crystals planned under this award will eliminate the traditional mechanical rubbing in the manufacturing process of active matric liquid crystal devices. In addition, this process if technologically exploited will result in reduced manufacturing costs, enhanced contrast and depth of images, and improved yield and quality control of the display devices. In addition, the research program will provide a rich multidisciplinary education and training opportunity in materials chemistry to postdoctoral and graduate students doc4315 none This award in the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research on understanding the nature and applications of ultrasound in chemical reactivity by Professor Kenneth Suslick of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The specific studies include the performance of mechanistic and spectroscopic investigations of the cavitation event in sonochemistry, the preparation of novel inorganic materials and heterogeneous catalysts, and the synthesis of biomaterials. In addition, sonoluminesence will continue to be developed as a spectroscopic probe of the conditions created during bubble collapse. The goal of this research is to understand the complex events taking place in sonochemistry, which is the use of ultrasound for chemical reactions. The work will focus on the preparation of nanostructured and amorphous metals, alloys, carbides oxides and sulfides and their applications as catalysts for a variety of industrially important reactions. In addition, a sonochemical synthesis will be developed for the preparation of biomedical microstructures for use as MRI agents and other applications. The students involved in this project will be well prepared for careers in both chemical and related areas doc512 none This award updates the Correlates of War Project Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data set through . Such an effort is critical for international conflict research, but the enterprise of updating this collection is a monumental one that is beyond the scope or resources of any single researcher. Consequently this is a collaborative effort, linking scholars at eleven different universities to complete the task in a systematic and timely fashion. The MID data set has been at the forefront on international conflict research over the past decade or more. This data set is the most frequently used in conflict research and MID data has been employed to explore a staggering breadth of topics in international relations research, including most of those central to contemporary scholarly debates. Furthermore, MID data are the basis for several other data projects in the discipline as well as highly compatible with a range of other data compilations, thereby facilitating the combination of data sets and the exploration of broader sets of theoretical questions. Updating the Militarized Interstate Dispute data set requires completion of the following major steps: 1) collect and document militarized incidents from a variety of sources. This entails searching global, regional, and national sources for indications of a threat, display, or use of force by one state against another; 2) checking, archiving, and documenting the incidents collected to insure consistency, completeness, and absence of duplication; 3) composing militarized disputes based on the collected incidents and additional research as necessary. Because disputes are conflict episodes, such things as starting and ending dates, secondary participants, stages of escalation, overall fatalities, method of settlement, and general outcome must be determined. A short narrative description of each dispute is also prepared; 4) checking, archiving, and documenting disputes in order to insure such things as conformity with coding rules, compatibility with documentation standards, internal consistency, and absence of duplication; 5) resolving issues that arise concerning coding procedures, documentation requirements, problem cases, and the like; and, 6) preparing a final version (3.0) of the data set for distribution via the world wide web. This requires the resolution of a few problems that have been found in the present version (2.1) before it can be merged with the - data. This is a major infrastructure project for the Political Science program and enables the updating of a data set that will be used by numerous scholars in international relations and comparative politics doc4317 none Professors Gina Hoatson and Robert Vold of the College of William and Mary are funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry program to perform experimental Nuclear Magnetic Resonance studies on disordered solids. One project involves study of the structure, disorder and dynamics of amino acids and cyclic dipeptides in the solid crystalline form and as complexes in the hydrophobic cavities of cyclodextrin. The latter environment is intended as a model for biological systems. The issue of disorder in peptides and proteins is important since a number of systems such as amyloidiogenic proteins and membrane proteins all show significant disorder and are to date difficult to study. The other project involves the investigation of inorganic ferroelectrics. Some of these materials display exceptional piezoelectric and electronic properties, and the origin of these affects is not understood. Studies of mixed perovskites will test the hypothesis that ion disorder and motion are responsible for the unusual dielectric effects. The PIs propose to measure dynamic line shape and relaxation 2H NMR and 13C-15N REDOR distance measurements on the organic complexes. They also propose to use 93Nb 45Sc high resolution MQMAS studies on the inorganic relaxors. This work will allow understanding of the macroscopic behaviors of two classes of disordered solids, based on measurements that give microscopic details. The host-guest chemistry will be of interest to protein structure chemists, as they attempt to understand the structures of the many proteins still not solved. The perovskite work has potential impact on the development of new ceramic electronics materials. There is a considerable component in this work dedicated to developing new nuclear magnetic resonance methods that ultimately could be of benefit in the health and materials fields doc4318 none Drazen Prelec Cognitive Resources and Emotion in Time Discounting It is a basic finding in economics and psychology that people heavily undervalue or discount future events, and we can see evidence of it in many areas of our lives. In financial decisions, many of us find it hard to start to save money for the distant prospect of our retirement or for our children s education. We fail to take proper care of our health, putting off exercise, eating unhealthy snacks, avoiding vaccinations or the dentist, smoking a cigarette or having unprotected sex. Although a great deal of research has demonstrated such discounting, very little is known about why it occurs. Understanding the psychological mechanisms of undervaluation is the aim of the current research. Preliminary findings indicate that the valuation of a future may combine two processes, an initial a-temporal rapid affective judgment followed by slower cognitive adjustment that incorporates temporal information. Pilot data indicate that operations that disrupt the cognitive component (like being forced to decide under time pressure or while distracted by another task) reduce the amount of discounting. Somewhat surprisingly, giving people more time to think things through increases rather than decreases the appeal of immediate rewards. We interpret these changes in valuation in light of the psychological literature on the role of affect in decision making. This literature suggests that, while thoughts may be complex, slow and effortful, feelings are simple, rapid and effortless. It is also true that, in making judgments, people will use their feelings as information. Therefore, initial judgments of people or objects are often based first on their feelings about the object and then adjusted more slowly or modified by their thoughts. In our pilot studies, the valuations of far future events changed when cognitive resources were restricted, suggesting that these valuations had a cognitive component that is disrupted by the resource manipulation. The valuations of the near future events were relatively immune to the restriction of cognitive resources, suggesting these valuation judgments are more feelings-based. With the proposed research, we will extend these preliminary findings to real outcomes and look more closely into the role of affect in the valuation process. These findings will have significant implications for a wide range of decisions. From a normative standpoint, the novel implication of the research is that thinking harder or more thoroughly about a decision may perversely increase the rate at which future outcomes are discounted. The disregard of future outcomes shown therefore may not be simply a case of cognitive myopia, as is commonly thought. On the account proposed here, it is the result of an active cognitive process that counteracts the initial emotional response to a future event doc4319 none The focus of this research is the study of mycoparasitic fungicolous fungi that colonize the stromata and polypores of other fungi. Colonists obtained from the southern, subtropical latitudes of southern Georgia and northern Florida will increase the biodiversity found in samples already collected from Illinois. Activity of isolates from the colonists against Aspergillus flavus, Fusarium verticillioides and the agriculturally important insect Spodoptera frugiperda will be tested. The results of the project will help to determine whether an ecological rationale can be useful as a guide to the discovery of new and potentially bioactive natural products. With this renewal award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. James B. Gloer of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Iowa. Dr. Gloer, in collaboration with Drs. Donald T. Wicklow and Patrick F. Dowd of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, will focus his work on investigating the the fungal invasion of long-lived or persistent stromata of other fungi. Since the invasion may involve antibiosis, the fungal colonists are a potential source of anti fungal agents. The work is an excellent training ground for graduate students and the work could have impact on the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries doc4320 none This project in economic theory consists of two parts: information demand and dynamic contests. The first is reasonably well developed while the second is in its early stages. Also included is a discussion of an ongoing but much better focused project on bargaining theory, appealing to an established psychological fact that individuals behavior is largely governed by their aspirations. The first two subprojects are part of a greater agenda to understand the most basic questions about the nature of information demand, namely, does the so-called Law of Demand hold? Well-known counterexamples in static environments suggest not. In fact, we find two separate contexts where it does hold, one extremely relevant in applied contexts. In the most advanced sub-project, we find that if information is very cheap, and thus demand very large, then the law of demand is eventually true. Additionally, in this context, we show that the fundamental insight provided by Blackwell s Theorem largely does not matter. In fact, when one is permitted to acquire a large enough number of independently and identically distributed copies of any given signal, then a complete ordering over experiments signals arises. That two signals are not sufficient for each other in a statistical sense is no longer relevant. What matters is an asymptotic measure of sufficiency. We extend this so far as to deduce a very simple logarithmic formula for the demand for information, when prices are low enough. This part of the work should make methodological and substantive contributions to Bayesian decision theory and game theory. For Bayesian decision theory, the centrality of the information demand question is manifest. But the methods introduced from asymptotic theory should prove extremely tractable and basic tools for theorists considering information in the future. Economists traditional narrow focus on an overly stylized of model of one-shot information purchase (today I buy my signal, tomorrow I act) likely owes its roots to Blackwell s Theorem. In some sense, the law of large demand paper starts from a different yet contemporaneous foundation (work by Chernoff). The third project is less developed, being still at an early stage. It proposes a new mechanism design question, namely what is the optimal design of a dynamic contest, as a function of the payoff and signaling structure? The wide range of cited instances of such contests, from sports to employment arrangements to television game shows, speaks to the importance of understanding this micro market structure. We have formulated this in continuous time, and have proposed some basic features of the nature of the contest design. This work is intended as a first effort on an unconsidered problem that is incredibly generic. The substantive value of such work is hopefully clear. Many of the technical hurdles are as yet unknown doc4321 none Amy Mullin of Boston University is supported by a grant from the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program to continue and extend her studies of the effect of internal energy on collisional relaxation and reactivity for highly excited polyatomic molecules. Pulsed uv laser absorption will be used to excite the molecules and transient ir absorption will monitor the internal energy distributions to determine the energy transfer and reactive cross-sections. Specific studies to be conducted are: (1) energy dependence of super elastic collisions (pyrazine by carbon dioxide), (2) the influence of quenching species on collisional relaxation (pyrazine and pyridine by water and carbon dioxide), (3) theoretical modeling of superelastic relaxation using trajectory calculations to determine energy gain by the quenching species (the system in (1) and pyridine, 2-picoline and 2,6-lutidine with water) and (4) influence of excitation on chemical reactivity (benzene with a series of radicals). Activate molecules play an important role in chemistry and biochemistry at many levels in influencing the reactivity. This work will show how specific excitation of molecules by laser radiation can be dissipated, influence the rates of reactions and can appear as excitation in the reaction products. The data will be used to test theories of energy relaxation in molecules doc4322 none Roder The goal of this project is to provide a thorough understanding of the structural and energetic factors that govern the spontaneous folding of globular proteins. The kinetic mechanism of folding and unfolding of a small single-domain protein, horse cytochrome c, will be investigated by combining site-directed mutagenesis with ultra-fast mixing techniques, hydrogen exchange labeling and NMR. In order to identify critical interactions involved in stabilizing early intermediates and the transition state ensembles during folding, hydrophobic residues throughout the a-helical core will be altered, and the resulting changes in equilibrium and kinetic parameters will be measured as a function of denaturant concentration. A second series of cytochrome c variants will be prepared to test the hypothesis that polar tertiary interactions are formed late in folding and contribute to the cooperativity of the native structure. Quantitative analysis of the kinetic results for each mutant will provide information on the involvement of individual residues at various stages of folding, including the initial collapse of the chain on the microsecond time scale, the subsequent acquisition of partially structured states and the rate-limiting formation of the native structure. Complementary information on H-bonded structure in early folding intermediates will be obtained by hydrogen exchange labeling and NMR methods. Protection of individual amide protons against H D exchange on the submillisecond time scale will be measured by combining a sensitive burst-phase labeling protocol with a novel capillary mixing device. The structural insight into intermediates and transition state ensembles thus obtained will identify key interactions involved in their stabilization, which is an essential step toward understanding the sequence determinants for folding and stability of this protein. The findings will elucidate fundamental issues in protein folding, including a) the properties and origin of the kinetic barrier encountered during the initial collapse of the polypeptide chain, b) the role of intermediates in directing folding, c) the nature of the rate-limiting energy barrier and d) the cooperativity in folding unfolding transitions. The mutational analysis will provide a critical test for the hypothesis that conserved hydrophobic contacts in the core of globular proteins are formed early in folding and are important for efficient folding, while specific side chain packing and polar tertiary interactions are established late in folding and are important for the rigidity and cooperativity of the native structure. The results will provide a firm experimental basis for testing theoretical and computational models of protein folding, fold recognition, structure prediction and de novo protein design doc4323 none Are preferential trade agreements (PTAs) building blocks or stumbling blocks on the road to global free trade? That is, do such arrangements help or hinder the process of multilateral trade liberalization (MTL)? This dynamic time-path question has taken on greater salience due to the recent proliferation of PTAs. Of the 40 or so now in existence, over half-including the North American free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Asia-Pacific economic Cooperation (APEC) and the Southern Cone common Market countries now belong to PTAs. Pundits and politicians have welcomed this development as a sign of progress toward a freer global economy. The unconditional embrace of PTAs should raise some concern, however, because in fact we know very little about these arrangements dynamic effects. There are two views on the dynamic time-path question. Some scholars believe that PTAs speed MTL and are thus the building blocks of a liberal trade order. Others view PTAs as stumbling blocks, i.e. impediments to MTL. Although arguments on both sides abound, the debate remains unresolved. One reason is that the impact of PTAs may depend on a variety of circumstances; hence a clear, non-parametric answer to the dynamic time-path question may not exist. A second reason is that few claims on either side have been subjected to rigorous empirical testing. This Doctoral Dissertation Research Support project addresses these issues in two ways. First, the researchers have developed a formal model which allows them to examine the impact of PTA formation on politicians trade-policy preferences under different institutional and economic conditions. The model indicates that PTA formation can either increase or decrease members political support for MTL, depending on the interaction of three factors: PTA type, the pattern of trade flows among members, and members initial tariff levels. The model thus advances the currently polarized dynamic time-path debate by identifying conditions under which PTAs help and hinder global trade liberalization. Second, the researchers will conduct extensive quantitative research on PTAs dynamic time-path effects. This will proceed along two paths. First, they will test the model s hypotheses to determine whether it accurately identifies the conditions under which PTAs help and hinder MTL. These tests will indicate not only the model s accuracy but also whether and how the theory needs to be revised. Second, they will inductively examine the impact of PTAs on trade and trade policies within individual countries, regional groups. PTAs, and the universe of cases. The research will thus advance our understanding of the dynamic time-path question regardless of the formal model s success and will introduce much-needed empirical content into this now-theoretical debate doc4324 none Patrick E. Hoggard of the University of Santa Clara is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program for research on photoreversible systems. Certain photosensitive systems exhibit the unusual property of switching between two grossly different states (one predominantly product, the other predominantly reactant) on slight perturbation. This is interpreted as indicating that the forward and reverse reactions involve different mechanisms. This phenomenon will be studied in Ru(bpy)2Cl2 systems, and other systems with this property will be sought for. Switching between two states of quite different properties is important in a number of technologically and scientifically important areas. The systems of interest in this proposal involve both photochemical activation and sensitivity to changes in adjustable parameters, such as the nature of the solvent. This research aims at increased understanding of presently known model systems. That increase in understanding may well lead to development of new and useful photochemical systems and devices, as well as to progress in theoretical comprehension doc4325 none This award by the Chemistry Division supports three studies involving the preparation and characterization of some organometallic systems with unusual bonding. The projects are: characterization of the nonclassical dihydrogen ligand in Rhenium coordination compounds, synthesis and characterization of compounds of quadruply bonded dimolybdenum containing phthalocyanine or dendrimer ligands and a new higher yielding synthesis for MoW(NMe2)6. This project will contribute to knowledge of the coordination chemistry of the subject ligands doc4326 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project addresses the traditional size limit of the Fabry-Perot interferometer (FPI) input aperture. This limit (approximately 8-inches) is imposed by (1) practical fabrication limits to the size of glass flats that can be polished to a surface figure of lambda 100 and (2) by cost limitations. Although an array of smaller glass plates might be used to expand the collecting area of the FPI, coordination of spectral scans over the array elements requires unwieldy control systems or else is not possible with conventional barometric or piezo-electric FRI systems. This research establishes arrays of innovative FPI etalons that use liquid crystal (LC) in the FPI resonant cavity. Spectral scanning of these devices is accomplished by application of a low current to conducting layers applied to the glass substrates. The electric field imposed upon liquid crystal in the resonant cavity alters the orientation of the LC, and thus the index of refraction of the material in the resonant cavity. The ease of electronic control over the refractive index in the FPI cavity permits simple, low weight, low power coordination of multiple LC filled cells and thus makes possible a large array of FPI cells, scanning a spectrum in unison. Phase II will design and fabricate two 10-inch diameter arrays of LC FPI (LCFP) filters. One array will be configured for Doppler measurements of atmospheric emissions and the other for 0.16-nanometer spectral resolution. Potential commercial applications are expected in (1) atmospheric lidar, (2) space-based environmental sensing, (3) passive airglow sensing, (4) clear-air turbulence detection, and (5) target detection doc4327 none Race relations and violence in our nation s schools are problems that stem in part from fundamental human needs to seek inclusion in social groups and to maintain and defend the boundaries that distinguish ingroups from outgroups. In this context, social psychological theory and research on the connection between individuals and their social groups is particularly critical if we are to understand how needs for social identity can be met without the devastating effects of intergroup conflict, prejudice, and discrimination. The theory of optimal distinctiveness is a theory of the motivational underpinnings of group identification which holds that group identities are selected and maintained to help the individual achieve a balance between the need for inclusion and the need for differentiation from others. Optimal identities are group memberships that meet the need for inclusion within the group and meet the need for differentiation through intergroup comparison and distinctiveness. Identity needs can be aroused if either intragroup inclusion or intergroup differentiation are threatened. The purpose of the current program of research is to extend the application of optimal distinctiveness theory to understanding what factors determine the strength of the needs for inclusion and differentiation, with particular attention to implications for intergroup attitudes and behavior. Ten interrelated studies test the effects of value orientations and multiple group memberships on an individual s sensitivity to threats to optimal social identity. Collectivist values are predicted to be associated with heightened needs for inclusion and differentiation, a limited range of optimal identity, and high levels of sensitivity to threats to that identity. Individualist values, by contrast, are expected to be associated with tolerance for inclusiveness and less concern for ingroup-outgroup distinctions. The availability of multiple alternative social identities is expected to have effects similar to those of individualist values, reducing sensitivity to threats to specific social identities and increasing acceptance of outgroups. These hypotheses are tested in a multi-methodological program of research combining laboratory experiments and cross-national surveys. Results from these studies will contribute to understanding how social structure, value systems, and individual needs combine to determine the relationship between ingroup identification and outgroup discrimination doc4328 none This award to Professor Andrew Bocarsly of Princeton University is a renewal of an earlier award and is supported by the Advanced Materials and Processing Program in the Chemistry Division. The focus of the award will be to develop the chemistry of cyanogels based on multi-metal cyanides prepared by sol-gel processing. Systemic development of cyanogel chemistry, their characterization for catalysis, and low temperature processing of them in ceramics, semiconductors and coatings for electrodes will be part of this award. Studies with cyanogel to absorb and preconcentrate carbon dioxide and finally to reduce to methanol will be carried out under this award. Also, multimetal cyanogel will be evaluated as electrocatalysts at low temperatures for combinatorial chemistry. Teaching and training of students in materials science at all levels from high school to graduate school including teachers from high school are parts of the award. Cyanogels prepared from multi-metal cyanides by sol-gel processing will be characterized for functional properties and for applications in catalysis, and for the preparation of ceramics, semiconductors and coatings for electrodes. Use of cyanogels for the absorption and preconcentration of carbon dioxide and its reduction of methanol, will have a lasting improvement in the environment in general, and in the energy sector in particular. In addition, the research program will provide a rich multidisciplinary education and training opportunity in materials chemistry to postdoctoral and graduate students, and students and teachers from high schools doc4329 none This project is a theoretical and empirical investigation of the differences between internal and external product, capital and labor market transactions and the implications of these differences for firm behavior. The first project seeks to understand why some new business ventures are undertaken by established firms, while others are undertaken by start-up firms. The model presents an answer based on a key difference in the functioning of internal and external labor markets, namely the ability of internal labor markets to redeploy workers in the firm to other projects in the firm if the new venture fails. The model will then be used to analyze the level and efficiency of new firm formation; the characteristics of employees at new and established firms; and the type of work employees undertake at the two types of firms. The second project (joint with Sendhil Mullainathan, Department of Economics, MIT) seeks to understand the effects of vertical integration. If integration has no real effects, integrated and non-integrated firms should respond in the same way to external market shocks. This study examines whether this is indeed the case by analyzing the investment behavior of integrated and non-integrated petrochemical producers using a comprehensive 25-year database of over U.S. petrochemical plants. The preliminary results suggest that capacity investments by integrated firms are less sensitive than non-integrated firms to market shocks. The project considers several competing explanations of these findings, and outlines an empirical strategy for distinguishing among them doc1186 none The efficiency and profitability of American slavery have been subject to extensive debates in economic history. In comparing the agricultural outputs of free and slave farms, the modern economic history literature has ignored the disparate effects of diseases on different ethnic groups. Yet there is ample evidence, empirical, scientific, and historical, that populations of different ethnic heritages have different responses to many disease pathogens. In particular, people of tropical West African ancestry tend to have much milder reactions to the warm weather diseases that are endemic to tropical West Africa than do most people of European ancestry. These warm weather diseases became endemic to the Americas as a result of the African slave trade. The present study examines the role that the differential ethnic reactions to disease played in American economic history. The study models and estimates the impact of a specific disease, hookworm, on human productivity and its disparate effects on peoples of different ancestry. The disparate ethnic effects of hookworm differentially affect human productivity, and consequently raise questions about the existing analysis of the economics of slavery in Antebellum America. The study examines the interactions of the biological environment with the human economy and society, integrating biological science, history, and economic analysis. Specifically, the study estimates the differences in total factor productivity between white and black farms in the American South that can be attributed to the impact of endemic hookworm on white and black agricultural labor. To accomplish this, it employs data on the prevalence and intensity of hookworm in a specific area in the early twentieth-century South. The data on the hookworm burden of whites and blacks, and agricultural inputs and outputs on white and black farms are employed in the productivity estimates. With the data, estimates are made for the impact that hookworm had on differences in productivity between farms that employed labor of African ancestry and farms that employed labor of European ancestry. The study employs estimation techniques that control for other potential confounding variables. The estimates for the impact of hookworm on black and white productivity in the early twentieth-century agricultural South are used to assess the relative efficiency and productivity of slave and free farms in the Antebellum South doc4331 none Clifford P. Kubiac of the University of California, San Diego is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry program for research on charge transfer in inorganic and organometallic systems. These studies involve experimental characterization of dynamical averaging of infra-red spectra by electron exchange in a variety of triruthenium cluster-compounds. Differences in electronic interactions among the ruthenium centers in such trinuclear molecular ions account for rates of electron transfer that range both above and below the vibrational time scale. Systematic study of the effects of variation in adjustable parameters (ligands, solvent, etc.) are used to test theories of electron transfer (e.g., Marcus-Hush) at the threshold between weakly-localized and fully-delocalized behavior. Other, related, studies will involve polysilanes and polychromium compounds. Electron-transfer reactions are of central importance in many diverse areas of chemistry and related scientific areas, including biological charge transfers of many types. Since the electron is very light with respect to atomic nuclei, electron-transfer reactions can be discussed theoretically in a level of detail that is impossible for most other kinds of chemical change. Powerful theories (e.g. Marcus -Hush) can deal successfully with charge-transfer reactions in which the electron-donor and electron-acceptor centers are only weakly coupled --- or when these two centers are strongly mixed. The intermediate case, in which interaction between donor and acceptor centers are neither very strong or very weak, has proved more difficult to understand. The PI and his group have shown that the fine details of the vibrational (IR) spectra of trinuclear ruthenium complexes are sensitive to seemingly small changes in adjustable parameters that influence the rate of electron transfer in those complexes. This project uses these changes in IR spectra to probe intra-molecular coupling in these species, and to test and extend theories of electron-transfer for systems with intermediate donor-acceptor interaction. This is a fundamentally important, but previously poorly-understood, region of parameter-space doc4332 none The goal of this dissertation project is to produce a thorough and accessible reference grammar of Laguna Keresan. Laguna is one of seven members of the Keresan language family, which is an isolate, not known to be related to any other language family. Despite this special status, Keresan remains one of the least well-documented families in North America, with no published dictionaries or analyzed text collections, and no full-scale grammatical description since Miller ( ). This project will produce a reference grammar, in two versions, which will address this gap in the literature. The first version is primarily intended for linguists, and will provide coverage of the phonology, morphology, syntax and discourse structures of Laguna Keresan, as well the current sociolinguistic setting of the language in the Laguna community. It will take into account recent work in typology and grammaticization, and will place the grammatical phenomena of Laguna in a cross-linguistic context. This first version will be written in the framework of what has recently come to be called Basic Linguistic Theory, similar to the work of other researchers such as Dixon on Fijian and Foley on Yimas. The goal is to provide information on the language in a way which is accessible to researchers working in a wide variety of different theoretical frameworks. The second version of the reference grammar will be written specifically for the speakers, teachers and learners of Laguna Keresan. It will do away with much of the technical jargon and cross-linguistic perspective of the first version, and instead focus on describing the strictures of the language for the lay audience, using terminology and points of reference which are understandable and meaningful to them. By producing these two versions, the results of the research are made available both to the academic community, as well as to the members of the Laguna tribe, who have afforded the researchers the privilege of working on their language doc4333 none Majda This Major Research Instrumentation award to Courant Institute of New York University provides a clustered workstation environment for research and education related to evaluation and testing of General Circulation Models, and their application to climate problems. The computer system will be part of a new program in Atmosphere-Ocean Sciences at the institute. The project is supported by the Division of Ocean Sciences at NSF. New York University will provide cost-share support for 30% of total project costs doc4334 none This project will investigate Tzotzil Maya ethnoecological knowledge of macrofungi (mushrooms), an important dietary and medicinal element in this part of the world. Since Maya ethnomycological classification focuses almost exclusively on edible or useful species (in contrast to patterns for other plants and animals), mushroom species provide an opportunity for comparative analysis of the structure and function of general purpose and special purpose taxonomies, and how these affect behavior. The naming, classification, and use of mushrooms will be examined in order to understand how both environments and cultural contexts affect ethnobiological knowledge (cognitive variation in knowledge). Hypotheses concerning three competing models of folk biological classification will be tested. This study will also document the biodiversity and ecological requirements of mushrooms and contribute to our understanding of the ecological, dietary, medicinal and economic benefits of mushrooms doc4335 none This pair of research projects explores two aspects of consumer demand that can have important implications for market efficiency: heterogeneous consumer search and social learning. Both projects make use of new datasets that are uniquely well-suited for the questions to be addressed. The first project examines the nature and intensity of consumer search in retail markets for prescription drugs. Retail prices for prescription drugs vary widely across pharmacies even within the same local market, and previous research has shown that patterns in price dispersion are consistent with economic models of consumer search: for instance, prices tend to be much less disperse for medications that are purchased repeatedly (for which the incentives to price-shop are strongest) than for one-time medications. This project will investigate data on over 200,000 prescription purchases in two small cities. For each transaction, the data identify the actual price and payment type (cash, third-party insurance, or Medicaid) as well as prescription characteristics. Since data are available on prices and quantities at all competing pharmacies, information about the extent of consumer search is revealed in the observed sensitivity of market shares to relative price differences. The research will provide answers to important questions about price dispersion and consumer search: How intense is consumer search in these markets (i.e., what fraction of consumers chooses to price-shop before purchasing?) Is variation in search intensity across drugs consistent with the predictions of economic theories of consumer search? What do the estimated search intensities reveal about the underlying distribution of search costs? The second project concerns the impact of social learning on individuals choices of health insurance plans. Employees of large firms typically choose from a set of health insurance options sponsored by their employer; since the choice of a health plan can be a complex decision, individuals may attempt to learn about plans relative qualities from co-workers-either through direct communication or by drawing inferences based observed choices. The causes and consequences of this kind of learning have been formalized and discussed in the theoretical literature, but little effort has been made to measure the importance of social learning empirically. This study will use data on the health plan choices of the employees of a major university to obtain quantitative estimates of the effects of social learning. Information about employee demographics--and especially the departments in which they work-will be used in identifying the communication channels through which learning occurs. Stated very simply, if individuals decisions are significantly more similar within departments than they are across departments, this can be taken as suggestive of a learning or herding effect. This is the basic idea underlying the project s principal approach, which is to estimate an econometric model of health plan choice that incorporates the influence of neighbors decisions on the decision of the individual. The empirical results will yield important insights into the nature and extent of learning, the implications for demand analysis and health plan competition, and the magnitude of potential welfare losses due to imitative behavior doc4336 none Horia Metiu of UC Santa Barbara is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to perform computer simulations of forces acting on ions and water molecules inside a zeolite, and to use these results to explore how the species move through the zeolite. Also, proton transfer rates will be calculated, and complete kinetic descriptions and mechanisms will be evaluated. Rigorous methodology will be applied to small unit cell zeolites, with specific studies of sodium ion and water migration through sodalite and the reaction of ammonia with acidic chabazite. These processes are widely used in industrial applications, yet very little is known about them at an atomic level. All energy calculations will be performed with density functional theory, which considers the full unit cell of the solid. Rate constants of the important processes will be calculated using correlation function theory or transition state theory. The results will be used in a kinetic Monte Carlo program to simulate migration and kinetics over very long time and space scales. It is anticipated that the ability to calculate the properties of molecules inside zeolites will be improved to the point that this methodology will assist in the rational design of industrial processes. Zeolites are crystalline, porous solids that have the ability to absorb inside them a variety of molecules. This absorption is selective (certain molecules are preferred to others) and the selectivity can be used to separate various gases, to remove noxious products from a gas stream, or to replace undesirable ions with benign ones. Zeolites and their absorbed guest molecules interact strongly enough to induce unusual chemical reactions within the zeolite frame. This property has practical importance and is exploited to modify the hydrocarbon content of various products in the oil industry. The outcomes from this computer simulation project will improve the understanding of how fast molecules move inside a zeolite, what determines absorption selectivity, and what causes changes in the chemical behavior of the absorbed species doc4337 none Acquisition of a state-of-the-art, single-wafer cluster tool for silicon-based heteroepitaxy is proposed. The equipment is an Applied Materials Epi Centura High Temperature platform, configured with an epitaxial growth chamber capable of slip-free processing of wafers in the temperature range of 550 to C. The Applied Epi Centura tool enables chemical vapor deposition of blanket and selective epitaxial Si and Si1-xGex with excellent layer thickness uniformity across the wafer. The gas manifold will be customized to allow a wide range of sources to be used, enabling research on new materials of rapidly increasing interest such as Si1-yCy and SiGeC. The proposed instrument will have unique capabilities and will enable collaborations among researchers from industry and universities. There is a significant and growing importance of silicon-based heteroepitaxy in basic and applied device research, particularly as researchers work towards some of the fundamental barriers to continued transistor scaling and performance improvements. Research on the fabrication of new semiconductors and structures, and the development of novel device concepts is required to overcome these limits and this will be permitted by this tool. Additionally, the ability to synthesize new silicon-compatible materials in this tool opens up new areas of research on photonic and microelectromechanical systems. The proposed tool will be operated as a central facility within the Microsystems Technology Laboratory (MTL). The lab has over 300 users per year, and the tool will be accessible to this community doc4338 none This project supports laboratory studies of the reaction of the nitrate radical (NO3) with salt (NaCl) particles. The objective of this work is to study possible nighttime mechanisms of chlorine (Cl2) production. Field studies have established that Cl2 (and perhaps other photochemically labile chlorine containing inorganics such as HOCl) are generated at night in coastal marine areas, however, none of the known processes can explain this phenomenon. Particles will be introduced into an aerosol chamber under conditions of temperature, pressure, and relative humidity relevant to the marine boundary layer. NO3 will be generated in situ, and the reactants and products monitored by FTIR and UV VIS spectrometry and atmospheric pressure ionization spectrometry (APIMS). Experimental results will be interpreted using a computational kinetics model that includes gas and liquid diffusion, mass accommodation and chemistry in real time in both the gas and liquid phases, and where appropriate, the interface doc4339 none With the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, Professor Majda and his coworkers at the University of California-Berkeley are carrying out studies of lateral mass and proton transport at the air water interface. These studies use electrochemical time-of-flight methods developed by Professor Majda, which are applied to model amphiphilic membranes. Information about the lateral diffusion of molecules at the air water interface, the dynamic structure of water at the interface, and proton diffusion at the air lipid water interface is obtained in these studies. These interfacial transport processes are fundamental biological processes involved in membrane energy transduction and storage, and this research project provides important fundamental information about these processes. Using electrochemical transient methods, information about the lateral diffusion of molecules and protons at the air water interface is obtained in this research project. Using Langmuir monolayers as models of biomembranes, detailed two-dimensional diffusion information is obtained in these studies. Proton transport information and diffusion constants are also of interest in many materials science applications such as battery and fuel cell technology doc4340 none This project investigates the construction of a collective social identity among elite, white Acadians of south Louisiana. There has been a recent surge in efforts of this population to shape a historic heritage and to interpret Acadian history. Yet that process must negotiate unacknowledged contradictions concerning differences in Francophone residents notions of their history, as well as in African-American participation in that history. The researcher will analyze the social identities and historic sites of one town, seeking to answer questions concerning the relationship between race, class and gender and cultural heritage. Several hypotheses will be tested that focus on the how official histories constitute and reinforce notions of racial difference, and on the co-existence of vernacular histories that challenge official histories. Methods include archival research, structured interviewing, social surveys, and participant observation. This project will contribute to our understanding of the politics of history making, and inform public initiatives in historic preservation and heritage tourism doc4341 none The International Conference on Tetrapyrroles of Photosynthetic Organisms is to be held July 25-30, , on the campus of Brown University in Rhode Island, USA. The conference will bring together an international group of scientists to present, discuss, and evaluate new data and concepts in the areas of biochemistry and related disciplines that involve the structure, biosynthesis, and function of tetrapyrroles in photosynthetic organisms. Previous conferences in this series were held in Davis, California, in , and in Europe in , , and . The dates and location of the conference were selected to facilitate attendance by individuals who will also be attending the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Plant Physiologists, which will be held in Providence. Awarded funds will be used to support American participants, particularly beginning independent investigators, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students. Photosynthesis is the biochemical process that, directly or indirectly, supports all life on Earth. Photosynthesis itself depends on the capture and use of energy from sunlight. Both the capture of sunlight and the conversion of its energy into assimilable forms of metabolic energy depend on a group of chemical compounds collectively named tetrapyrroles. This family of compounds includes chlorophylls, hemes, and bilins. In addition to their central roles in photosynthesis, tetrapyrroles are required for several other important processes in photosynthetic organisms, including respiration (respiratory cytochromes), oxygen-mediated biosynthetic and catabolic reactions (cytochrome P450, catalase, peroxidases), and light perception for developmental responses (phytochrome chromophores). This is the only conference series that is specifically focused on the group of scientific disciplines that encompass photosynthetic mechanisms, tetrapyrrole pigment biosynthesis, plant photoreceptors, photoprotection, functional and biosynthetic protein structural analysis, and tetrapyrrole metabolism doc4342 none This award will support the creation of a common core facility for DNA sequence analysis at the University of Wisconsin. The main component of this facility is a state of the art instrument for determining the sequences of the nucleotide bases in the DNA or RNA genetic material for any organism. The participating faculty are involved in a broad range of research projects related to biodiversity and biotechnology. The main projects include: sequencing and mutational analysis of insect and mammalian poxvirus genomes; analysis of genes involved in the photosynthetic pathways of cyanobacteria and green algae; and charting the evolutionary history of parasites and fungi. These projects will identify countless new genes and greatly expand the understanding of genome organization. It is anticipated that the new sequences will inc rease our understanding of evolutionary relationships, and the development of new products in biotechnology such as improved plant factories. The following equipment will become part of the new core: a LI-COR S-2 Gene ReadIR DNA sequencing system, a MJ Research PTC- DNA engine thermocycler, and two G4 450 Power Macintosh computers for DNA analysis. The shared facility is aimed to foster the integration of education and research. The centralization of sequencing operations will enhance existing interactions among a number of research groups and will be vital in attracting new faculty and students to pursue degrees in the sciences. It will promote collaborations with other institutions within the community. Aside from individual research programs, several faculty members will develop laboratory exercises using this instrumentation to provide training for undergraduate and M.S. students by incorporating genomics training into such courses as the Biotechnology laboratory course, a Systematic Biology course, and the Combined Immunology Virology laboratory course doc4343 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, Prof. Charles Wilkins of the University of Arkansas will develop a state-of-the-art laser desorption Fourier-transform mass spectrometer (FTMS) for aerosol and bacteria analysis. This new analytical tool will employ multiple lasers for aerodynamic sizing and laser desorption of particulate samples. For mass analysis, a 3 Tesla ion trapping FTMS will be used. The combination of an aerosol source with FTMS will make possible the acquisition of size-correlated laser desorption mass spectral data from single particles, allowing correlation of chemicals identified with the sizes of particles upon which they are found. Because of the trapping features of the FTMS, structural elucidation of unknowns using multiple stage mass spectrometry will be possible. Thus, it will be possible to apply powerful MS MS structure elucidation methods to species desorbed from single particles of known sizes, sampled in real time from inhomogeneous sources. Knowledge of the detailed chemical composition of individual aerosol particles is essential for understanding such diverse topics as the chemistry and dynamics of the atmosphere, how to control small particle contamination in microelectronic fabrication facilities, and the health implications of particulate exposure as a function of size. The new aerosol FTMS will allow high sensitivity-high resolution mass spectral analysis of particles with sizes determined simultaneously. Potential applications to bacterial and small organism analysis also will be explored. The instrument developed in this project will also serve as a prototype for field portable versions, which will allow application of the new technology to a wide range of practical analytical problems doc4344 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the State University of New York in Cortland will acquire a 300 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) sodium ion exchange from DNA in the presence of cation ligands; b) rhenium diimine tricarbonyl anion compounds and supramolecular assemblies; c) stereoselective synthesis of tropanes and other heterocyclic amine alkaloids; and d) the stereoselectivity of the 2+2 photodimerization of orotic acid, with implications on the primary mode of solar radiation induced DNA damage carcinogenesis and mutagenesis at the molecular level. In addition, the NMR instrument will be used for coursework in organic chemistry and in the advanced laboratory component of the Chemistry program. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometry is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including biochemistry and materials chemistry doc4345 none Pruitt The objective of this NSF MRI Award is to develop a Wet Facility for Nano-Bioengineering that employs nanoengineering for the characterization of cellular to molecular-level biological systems. The facility will be unique in that it will provide laboratory equipment that enables characterization of living biological systems in their physiological environments. The research focus of the facility is based on the merger of nanotechnology and bioengineering which are both emerging fields with promise of great scientific breakthroughs in the area of tissue engineering, cell mechanics, biological processes, and imaging. The facilities will provide the resources for creating a biomimetic framework necessary for novel synthesis of engineered materials or devices. The impact of this facility will span the disciplines of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, bioengineering, and materials science, as well as the general areas of chemistry, biology and medicine. The acquired equipment for this facility will provide the necessary tools for nanoscale characterization of cells, proteins, interfaces, and BioMEMs structures. The approach to developing this facility is to acquire several large pieces of complementary equipment that would be difficult for any single faculty member to acquire alone because of the large initial cost and associated long-term maintenance. Thus, they propose to purchase the following systems using funds from this NSF initiative: an atomic force microscope and nanoindenter with fluid chambers for cell and tissue manipulation studies, a confocal microscope for cell imaging and manipulation, an infrared spectrometer and high pressure liquid chromatography system for characterization of protein binding, and an environmental scanning electron microcope to study substructure morphology of biomaterials doc4346 none McManus This Major Research Instrumentation award to University of Minnesota Duluth s Large Lakes Observatory provides funds for acquisition of an inductively coupled plasma emission spectrometer and a carbon, nitrogen, sulfer analyzer for environmental sciences research. It will be used for a wide variety of biogeochemical research projects, many emphasizing Great Lakes studies, and both undergraduate and graduate student will use the instrumentation for classwork, research and training. It will be managed as a recharge facility, available to many researchers and students at UMD and other regional universities. The project is supported by the Division of Ocean Sciences at NSF. University of Minnesota will provide cost-share support for 40% of total project costs doc4347 none This project investigates appellate recruitment, elite representation, and judicial decision making in the higher British judiciary for a 155-year period of British history, - . It significantly expands an existing database that encapsulates more than 150 measures of personal characteristics--especially family status and education legal backgrounds and experience, and career paths--on the judges of the High Court of Justice, the Court of Appeal, and the Lords of Appeals, and the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary. The project has three research objective: (1) To describe and analyze who has served in the higher British judiciary in the last century and a hal. This aspect of the research will show how this judicial elite has changed over time, and how change in the composition of the judiciary has reflected (or failed to reflect) changes in British society and politics; (2) To develop a causal model of judicial recruitment to the appellate bench; and (3) To explore the relationship between background characteristics and judicial decision-making in a British context doc4348 none Gaber The PI has discovered that Cns1 is an essential co-chaperone that physically and functionally interacts with the Hsp90 complex of proteins. The Cns1-Hsp90 interaction is direct, being mediated via the tetratricopeptide (TPR) repeat of Cns1 and the carboxy terminus of Hsp90. The PI has isolated temperature-sensitive alleles of CNS1 that are temperature-sensitive for growth. Several of the temperature-sensitive mutations at CNS1 abolish in vitro interactions between Cns1 and Hsp90. Because both Hsp90 and Cns1 are essential, this provides circumstantial evidence that the Hsp90-CnsI physical interaction is essential. Confirmation of this would be a major new discovery in the molecular chaperone field as none of the Hsp90-cochaperone interactions investigated to date have been shown to be essential. In this project, the PI will use suppressor genetics to identify mutations that restore the ability of cns1-ts cells to grow at the restrictive temperature. One class of mutations is expected to identify key sites in Hsp90 that restore interactions with Cns1-ts proteins at the restrictive temperature. In vivo and in vitro confirmation of these restored physical interactions would provide proof that the interaction between Hsp90 and Cns1 is essential for life. In addition, the general genetic approach is expected to yield the identification of other essential proteins that interact with Hsp90 and or Cns1, and thus enhance our understanding of essential molecular interactions involving these chaperones and co-chaperones. Proper growth control and development in all organisms depends upon the regulation of proteins that play central roles transducing signals that the cell receives from its environment. Molecular chaperones are proteins that help signal transducing proteins to achieve a three-dimensional state from which they can most efficiently transmit signals that ultimately change the profile of gene expression of the cell. Two highly investigated molecular chaperones are heat shock protein 70 (Hsp70) and heat shock protein 90 (Hsp90), so-called because of the original discovery that their abundance in the cell increases upon heat treatment. Although the role that Hsp70 plays in helping proteins fold into their proper configuration is well established, the precise role(s) played by Hsp90 in molecular chaperoning is (are) not well-known, despite the investigation of many groups over the last decade. This PI has developed a system by which the most important in vivo role of Hsp90, i.e., the role(s) it plays that is (are) essential to cell viability, can be investigated using yeast genetics. The goal of this investigation is to identify physical interactions involving Hsp90, a newly discovered protein partner of Hsp90 called Cns1, and other proteins that are required for the life of the cell. By establishing the molecular identity of these proteins and details of their physical associations, the essential role played by Hsp90 in vivo will become clearer doc4349 none The PIs propose to concentrate the study in three elements of physics beyond the standard model: non-baryonic dark matter, negative-pressure dark energy in the universe, and cosmic microwave background radiation. The proposed work will focus on producing theories, models, and calculations for comparison with experimental results in order to achieve a coherent picture of the physics, which governs the universe doc4350 none This project will investigate the role of atmospheric dust deposition in creating regional spatial patterns of soil variation, using a study area in the central Great Plains. On the Great Plains, as in many other arid to subhumid landscapes, there is both geologic evidence and modern documentation of recurrent regional dust transport and deposition. During the Holocene, dust deposition at high rates produced distinct loess deposits in scattered localities in this region. More slowly deposited dust may have been incorporated into developing soil profiles over much larger areas. The key new element in this project is the focus on detecting regional spatial patterns indicative of dust transport, using a network of sampling sites across the central Great Plains. Dust deposition rate, grain size, and mineralogy vary systematically with distance from the source. These trends should be reflected in regional spatial patterns of soil morphology and mineralogy corresponding to plumes of Holocene dust dispersal from major sources. Multiple soil profiles will be sampled at each site to quantify local variability. From the regional sampling network, the investigators will select representative soils to use in more detailed investigations of the mineralogical and geochemical evidence for dust addition during soil development. This project will test methodology that can be much more broadly applied to a basic problem of soil science, in landscapes affected by recurrent dust production and deposition. Dust deposition is widely recognized as an important process in soil formation, but most previous studies have not focused on broad regional patterns of dust effects on soils. These spatial patterns are the key to incorporating dust effects into our understanding of important soil-related environmental issues. For example, the potential of soils to store organic carbon is an important issue in efforts to predict and mitigate human-induced changes in the global carbon cycle. Dust deposition may affect regional patterns of soil carbon storage potential because the added dust can change soil properties that strongly influence carbon storage. Because this project will sample a regional network of soils, the results will be directly applicable to mapping soil carbon storage potential over a large region. Results of this project will also help interpret buried soils that are important indicators of past climate change doc4351 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project aims at further developing and optimizing the innovative technology for the cost-effective fabrication of dense silicon carbide (SiC) fiber-reinforced molybdenum disilicide (MoSi2) composites with enhanced strength and toughness up to very high temperatures ( degrees C). Molybdenum disilicide has very attractive thermal, oxidative, and corrosion resistance properties for applications in turbine engines, burner rigs, hot gas filters, molten metal lances, and heating elements, but is structurally weak. Reinforcement with a mechanically superior second phase material makes MoSi2-based composites serious candidates for such applications if the composites can be processed to net shape cost effectively. The Phase I project demonstrated the feasibility of reaction forming the MoSi2 matrix with controlled amounts of SiC whiskers or particles, which themselves are formed in-situ. Further, several SiC(f) MoSi2 compositions were developed that are strong, dense, and resistant to pesting. These compositions were developed using a single step process that combines Self-Propagating High-Temperature Synthesis (SHS) of elemental mixtures of Mo, Si, and C with psuedo-Hot Isostatic Pressing (HIP) -- electroconsolidation. Phase II research will demonstrate the near-net shape capability of the process along with the ability to produce robust MoSi2-based composites. Based on design specifications from turbine engine manufacturers, the project will also fabricate prototypes for testing at the end of Phase II. Immediate commercial use of the SiC(f)-toughened MoSi2 composites can be realized as heating elements, combustion and burner rigs, and molten metal filters. Future applications include uses for aviation and gas turbine engine components, heat exchangers, hot gas filters, and waste incinerators. Other advanced applications include energy storage devices such as ultracapacitors doc4352 none This award supports the use of crucial genetic technology for research projects in several important areas of ecological and evolutionary research. One project will study the costs and benefits of social cooperation, a second will facilitate the inventory and abundance estimates for North American carnivores, and a third will study the importance of selection at genes scattered throughout the genome in salmonid fish. Each of these projects addresses fundamental issues in ecology or evolution. The equipment purchased is a Li-COR Gene imaging system with additional gene imaging software (LI-COR -2NEN Global IR2). This system will allow researchers at the University of Montana to carry out critical gene sequencing activities and also to determine the genetic profile of individuals with a high degree of resolution. The broad implications of this award include the strengthening of research infrastructure at the University of Montana. In addition, the presence of this infrastructure will allow training of undergraduate and graduate students in some of the latest genetic techniques as they apply to ecology and evolutionary research. One of the research projects will involve studies of an endangered species, the Canadian Lynx doc4209 none Although the rational-choice model has yielded an array of insights across a broad range of human activities, research from psychology suggests that it is inaccurate in some systematic and important ways. The investigators propose to continue their agenda of integrating psychologically more realistic assump-tions about human behavior into formal economic models of intertemporal choice. Most of the investigators past and proposed future research revolves around a single well-established phenomenon: Whereas the standard economic model assumes that preferences are time-consistent, evi-dence suggests people have present-biased preferences, wherein a person s relative preference for well-being at an earlier date over a later date gets stronger as the earlier date gets closer. But more than merely examining the implications of present-biased preferences per se, the investigators are particularly inter-ested in the importance of whether a person is aware of future self-control problems. Their research fo-cuses on the differing implications of assuming a person is sophisticated - fully aware of future self-control problems - or naive - fully unaware of future self-control problems. The investigators have two continuing projects that they plan to complete during the grant period. The first examines the implications of present-biased preferences for the consumption of addictive products. People with self-control problems tend to over-consume addictive products, but this behavior is affected by sophisticated awareness of self-control problems. Because sophistication makes people pessimistic about their ability to resist future temptations, and hence feel they might as well get addicted now, so-phistication can exacerbate over-consumption. Even so, we show that in realistic cases this pessimism effect is likely to be overcome by an incentive effect, wherein sophistication makes the person realize that current restraint may promote future restraint. In current work, the investigators are attempting to gener-alize and extend this earlier analysis, to explore such issues as the effects of price for consumption. In a second continuing project, joint with George Loewenstein of Carnegie-Mellon University, the investiga-tors explore the implications of a second systematic error that people make in the realm of intertemporal choice: People tend to underappreciate the influence of factors that change their future preferences, and hence to project current preferences on their future selves. The investigators and their co-author develop a formal model of such projection bias, and apply this model to several illustrative economic applications. In continuing research, they plan to apply their model in more depth to such things as addiction and mis-predictions of diminishing marginal utility of consumption. The investigators also have several new projects that are in the very early stages. The investigators plan to carry out the preliminary phases of these projects during the grant period. One explores procrasti-nation of long-term projects. Whereas most work on procrastination assumes that a project requires a sin-gle period of effort, most real-world projects take some duration to complete. This distinction is crucial for people with present-biased preferences, because whether a person starts a project and whether she finishes it become two distinct questions. Self-control problems can lead people to start but never finish projects, and, when faced with multiple ongoing projects, to choose the wrong projects to work on. In a second project, the investigators plan to analyze present-biased preferences in a general framework that allows them to build upon some of the points made in existing research. There is a simple intuition for how the effects of sophistication depend on how indulgence at different moments affect long-run well-being. When indulging in one period makes indulging in the other period more harmful to one s future well-being, sophistication about future indulgence leads a person to perceive high costs of current indul-gence and hence to misbehave less now. When indulging in one period makes indulging in the other pe-riod less harmful to one s future well-being, sophistication exacerbates indulgence. Preliminary analysis identifies a stylized setting in which this effect dominates, and yields insight on why it does not dominate in general doc4354 none Professor Andrei Tokmakoff of MIT is supported by the Experimental Physical Chemistry program to perform experimental studies on the ultrafast dynamics of proteins. This fundamental study will probe the basis for the forces that govern protein folding. The PI will use two-dimensional ultrafast infrared spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy to measure the dynamics of the amide bands of peptides and proteins as functions of temperature, pH and solvent. The method will probe vibrational couplings, energy dissipation, solvent-protein interactions and structural heterogeneity in a unique way. The process by which proteins attain their intended 3 dimensional structures from a very large number of possible structures is not well understood, and this is a major unsolved problem in biochemistry. The proposed work is especially timely because of recent progress in computational methods for studying protein folding. New experiments in this area are critically needed and the PI proposes novel laser based approaches in analogy to methods utilized in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy doc4355 none With this award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry program supports the work of Dr. Silas C. Blackstock in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Alabama Tuscaloosa. The work involves the synthesis and study of macromolecular organic poly redox arrays involving spin alignment in new non-Kekule pi-systems, and charge transport along redox chains. Medium effects on the energy ordering of the polyradical ion spin states will also be determined. Parallel work will investigate charge transport in new dendridic poly redox structures with radial redox gradients. Poly radicals, organic compounds with two or more unpaired electron spins, will be studied using electrochemistry, nuclear magnetic resonance, electron spin resonance, and theoretical computations, looking for interesting electrical and magnetic properties. Dendrimeric structures with redox active elements that change as one goes from the center to the periphery are expected to behave as charge funnel devices, and have a potential use as novel charge storage nano-components in redox-imaging media. The work is expected to provide valuable training for students in synthesis, instrumental measurements, and chemical computation doc4356 none This project compares the ongoing Information Technology (IT) revolution with the Electricity Revolution ( - ). It focuses on the stock market, and on the role that the small firm played. Along with the CRSP panel, investigators have collected data on individual firms in the NYSE going back to . Using these and other data from the curbmarket and other exchanges, the study asks if the stock market valuation of incumbent firms and the intensity of takeover activity during electrification behaved as they have so far in the IT era, and if we can expect a repeat of the stock market crash. Preliminary results suggest some key differences between electricity and the computer: 1) Computer use is spreading faster than electricity did. This may have been because the heavy industrial nature of early applications of electricity delayed the entry of new and smaller firms. 2) The decline and poor performance of incumbents associated with electrification lasted longer than in the case of IT. 3) The merger wave of - was less effective as a policing device than the hostile takeover wave of the early s. These three differences probably arise because the capital market is now more efficient than it used to be, and because it makes the entry of small firms easier. And, these differences may be precisely why the current IT driven rise in the stock market may be sustainable, while the rise of the late s was not. Finally, IT probably has a stronger skill-bias than factory electrification did. But as skilled workers were scarce in those days, the skill premium was as high in the early part of the twentieth century as it is today doc4357 none A fundamental problem for both human and machine is to detect and identify moving patterns from sensory information that is often contaminated by noise. Previous research has shown that one way of enhancing signal to noise sensitivity is to sum the outputs of many different motion detectors in different locations of the visual field. An important difficulty with this approach, however, is how to decide which local motion detectors should be summated. Whereas previous studies have examined the case of simple translatory motion where all elements in a pattern move at the same velocity, our research will consider more complicated motions in which it is possible for patterns to rotate or expand over time. We will also investigate the detection of camouflaged objects whose motions are confined to a limited region of the visual field. A series of psychophysical experiments will be performed to isolate the basic mechanisms by which the human visual system is able to cope with these situations. The basic paradigm of these studies is to present a pattern of moving dots with a superimposed pattern of scintillating dots. Observers are required to judge some basic aspect of the moving pattern, such as its shape or its direction of movement. The amount of scintillating noise is manipulated to determine the limits of human performance for each attribute to be judged. Based on the results of these experiments we will attempt to develop a computational model that can simulate the performance of human observers on a wide variety of different tasks doc4358 none Archer This grant provides for the acquisition of a Rheometrics Scientific Melt Elongational Rheometer (RME) and a Rheometrics Scientific Advanced Rheological Expansion System (ARES). Both instruments are needed for investigating complex Fluid dynamics in bulk liquids and near solid surfaces. The RME is the only commercial rheometer available for studying extensional flow behavior of polymer melts, while the ARES rheometer is the only research-grade commercial instrument that allows simultaneous, time-dependent measurements of shear and normal stresses in polymer liquids. The proposed instruments will be the first of their kind at Texas A&M University, and will be used in four research projects and for class room demonstrations in two graduate-level polymer engineering courses. In one project ( ), the RME and ARES rheometers will be used to determine the fundamental origin of strain hardening and apparent extension thickening behavior of branched polymers and their blends with chemically identical linear polymers. This research will be facilitated by a series of novel An-A-An and An-A(A)m-An multi-arm polybutadienes synthesized by the principal Investigator and a collaborator. These polymers are believed, on theoretical grounds, to capture the essence of commercially important branched polyolefins and will shed new light on the effect of polymer architecture on relaxation dynamics and rheological behavior in extensional and shearing flows. In another research project ( ), the ARES rheometer will be used to perfect a new superimposed step steady shear flow technique recently developed by the principal investigator and his students for isolating dynamics of polymer contour length stretch in shear flows. In the third project ( ), a two-step grafting procedure will be used to sequentially graft polymers and low molecular weight chlorosilanes to the ARES rheometer platens. The surface modified rheometer platens will then be used in standard shear rheological testing of bulk, chemically identical polymers to investigate momentum transport, frictional drag, wall slip, and relaxation dynamics of polymers near surfaces. Results from this study will provide the first rigorous test of a scaling theory developed by the principal investigator and his students for quantifying polymer friction, slip, and dynamics near solid surfaces. %%% This grant provides for the purchase of a Rheometrics Scientific Melt Elongational Rheometer (RME) and a Rheometrics Scientific Advanced Rheological Expansion System (ARES). Both instruments are needed for investigating polymer properties in bulk liquids and near solid surfaces. The RME is the only commercial rheometer available for studying extensional flow properties of polymer melts, while the ARES rheometer is the only research-grade commercial instrument that allows measurements of multiple components of stress in polymer liquids. The proposed instruments will be the first of their kind at Texas A&M University, and will be used in four research projects and for class room demonstrations in two graduate-level polymer engineering courses. Three of the four projects are National Science Foundation sponsored activities related to development of structure-processing relationships in plastic materials and for polymer surface coatings. The polymer engineering courses introduce students to polymer physics and polymer rheology doc4359 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Kansas will acquire a X-ray diffractometer with CCD detector for small molecule diffractometry. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including the following: a) structural elucidation of anion coordination chemistry; b) elucidation of the effects of non-covalent interactions on metal ion reactivity; c) probing structure-function ramifications of tetrazamacrocyclic metal complexes in catalytic oxidation reduction reactions; d) examination of the influence of peptide porphyrin interactions on helix stability and on electron transfer; ;e) elucidation of structural influences on asymmetric metathesis catalysts; and f) studies of the growth mechanism for mercury-based high temperature superconductors. The X-ray diffractometer allows accurate and precise measurements of the full three dimensional structure of a molecule, including bond distances and angles, and it provides accurate information about the spatial arrangement of the molecule relative to the neighboring molecules. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, including the preparation of more efficient catalysts, chemical sensors, high temperature superconductors; and biochemistry doc4360 none With this new award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the work of Dr. JoAnn P. DeLuca at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington. The research aims to investigate the use of ylides as precursors for the pyrolytic or photolytic generation of carbene intermediates, and their capture by substrates to form stable organic products. A series of ylides will be examined, encompassing a wide range of stabilities, looking for correlations between the ability of the ylide to act as a precursor and its calculated carbene-nucleophile bond energy. Carbenes - carbon species like R2C: in which R is a carbon or hydrogen and the carbon has a pair of nonbonding electrons - are useful intermediates for the formation of a variety of organic compounds. They have usually been generated by heating or uv radiation of diazoalkanes or diazirenes, compounds that can be thought of as adducts of a carbene with N2. This project will study ylides, compounds where carbenes are combined with other two-electron donors, such as pyridine, in search of better precursors for organic synthesis. The work will include precursor synthesis, mechanism studies, and theoretical computations, and provide excellent training for the undergraduate and masters degree students involved. The PI is playing a leadership role in involving these students in research and nurturing their interest in going on to advanced degrees doc4361 none The focus of this research is the development of the aza-variant of the oxa-di-pi-methane photochemical rearrangement as a new synthetic method for the preparation of nitrogen heterocycles. The rearrangement of azabicyclo[2.2.2]-octenones and azabicyclo[3.2.2]-nonenones is expected to provide tricyclic products in which the 3-member ring can be cleaved stereoselectively to give pyrrolizidines, indolizidines or tropanes. New methodologies based on the Diels-Alder reaction are being developed to synthesize the requisite photoprecursors and the attachment of photoprecursors and photosensitizers to resins will be explored as a means for ready isolation and functionalization of photoproducts. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Cynthia K. McClure of the Department of Chemistry at Montana State University. Professor McClure will focus her work on developing photochemical methods for the production of nitrogen heterocycles. The synthetic targets are compounds with interesting biological properties and the work should have broader impact in the pharmaceutical industry. The research provides an excellent training ground for the education of undergraduate and graduate students doc4362 none Professor David Jonas of the University of Colorado is funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry program to develop femtosecond multidimensional spectroscopic methods. 2D electronic spectra developed already by the PI allows the examination of solvation dynamics as a function of solvent coordination in liquid methanol. This proposal seeks to further develop the method and use it to study the doubly excited states of the photosynthetic reaction center and vibrationally excited molecules. These excited state absorptions usually remain obscure in standard pump-probe methods. The PI then proposes to examine the apparently long-lived heterogeneity reported in photosynthetic energy and electron transfer. A successful outcome of this proposal would be new methods adaptable to many problems in condensed phase dynamics. Most practical and industrially important chemical reactions occur in condensed phases such as liquids, yet little is known how the solvent affects the course of the reactions. Ultrafast dynamics experiments reveal some of the step by step details of reactions in solution. These fundamental studies underlie many of the advances in synthetic chemistry and materials science. Applications of the new multidimensional spectroscopic methods will shed light on fast biological processes involved in energy conversion doc4363 none This award will support a US-Czech collaboration on studies of a recently discovered novel nuclear myosin. The funds (provided from the Division of International Programs) will be used strictly to promote and facilitate the international component of the research. Dr. de Lanerolle and his collaborator, Dr. Pavel Hozak in Prague, Czech Republic have already demonstrated the presence of a myosin I like protein in the nucleus. This protein has an apparent molecular weight of 120,000, it is associated with K+-EDTA ATPase activity, it binds calmodulin, it is photoaffinity labelled with ATP, it binds actin in the absence, but not the presence, of ATP and it is recognized by an antibody to myosin I purified from adrenal glands. Microsequencing of the 120 kDa protein has positively identified it as a member of the myosin I-beta subfamily of the myosin superfamily of actin based molecular motors. The microsequencing data was used to clone the cDNA for this protein. Both methods have demonstrated the presence of a 16 amino acid N-terminal extension that is unique to the 120 kDa protein. Other data suggest that the unique 16 amino acid extension is responsible for the nuclear localization of nuclear myosin I and that nuclear myosin I associates with RNA polymerase II and is involved in transcription. Drs. de Lanerolle and Hozak now propose to continue this international collaboration to explore these findings further. Co-localization and functional assays will be performed in Dr. Hozak s laboratory in Prague, using plasmids, antibodies and other reagents developed in Dr. de Lanerolle s laboratory in Chicago. To facilitate this collaboration, Dr. Hozak s students will be trained in molecular biology methods in Dr. De Lanerolle s laboratory and Dr. de Lanerolle s students will be trained in advanced microscopy and microinjection methods and in situ transcription assays in Dr. Hozak s laboratory doc4364 none General equilibrium theory underlies our understanding of how complex economies manage risk. It is the basis of the tools used to make investment decisions and to guide policy in applications as diverse as regulated industries (utilities, telecommunications, etc.) and pension funds. In spite of this widespread use, scientific support for such applications has been mixed. The research proposed here seeks to build and test a more robust implementation of general equilibrium theory. Our work integrates theory, experiment, and econometrics in an essential way: experiments suggest the shape the theory should have, the theory suggests which further experiments should be carried out, experiments provide tests of the final theory; econometrics links theory and experiment in a formal way. We have developed and succesfully conducted laboratory experiments that test the principles of general equilibrium theory in the context of markets with risk. The model that guided our inference is the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). The experiments confirm the complex pricing relationships predicted by the theory. Since we used the same measurement tools as in the analysis of historical data in the field, our findings suggest that the controversy surrounding historical evidence need not be attributed to a failure of the basic principles of the theory, but to the auxiliary assumptions added to the models to make them testable on field data. Still, we reject the portfolio (allocation) implications of the same theory. The latter finding is particularly perplexing because the traditional theory that explains and supports the prices rests explicitly on the allocational predictions. Our theory explains the puzzle. It perturbs traditional general equilibrium models in ways that better accomodate the types of behavior of individuals when observed in isolation, away from markets. We provide a unified approach to study the effects of such perturbations. We show, for instance, that random perturbations need not always wash out in large economies; in the case of information aggregation, they cause clearcut biases. Preliminary experiments confirm our predictions. We plan to build on these initial successes, to further our understanding of pricing and allocation of risk in competitive markets. In addition, the theory suggests experiments that will uncover the origin of the perturbations that are needed to make general equilibrium models explain the data. One of these will determine whether risk is like any other commodity and that no special principles must be invoked in order to understand market behavior, a fundamental premise of extant theory. Actual attitudes towards and beliefs about risk may be at odds with this view. In addition to its scientific and policy implications, this proposal also has an important educational component. Our experiments are web-based and have involved many subjects from more than a dozen undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools across the country. These experiments provide the subjects with a unique educational experience. Our experiments have shown that access to such a large pool of subjects with diverse backgrounds is necessary to achieve results, and the theory explains why. At the same time, it provides exposure to complex financial markets to students who would otherwise not be given the opportunity, for various geographical and socio-economic reasons. This is a collaborative proposal involving Peter Bossaerts and Charles Plott (both of Caltech) and William Zame (of UCLA doc4365 none We propose to continue our theoretical and experimental research studying Quantal Response Equilibria (QRE), a statistical model of equilibrium behavior in games. The key feature of the equilibrium is that individuals do not always play best responses to the strategies of their opponents, but play better strategies with higher probability than worse strategies. Here we propose to apply QRE to three different areas of application: auctions, voting, and information aggregation. Several different series of experiments are planned, including large-scale experiments (100+ subjects) to test theoretical predictions about information aggregation and strategic voting in large groups. On the theoretical side, we propose to extend the model to dynamic settings to incorporate learning and repeated play, and to generalize the error structure to allow for correlation across moves. There is also a computational part of the proposal. Specifically, we plan to extend our current algorithms for computing QRE in several ways, to allow more efficient computation of equilibria in certain kinds of larger games and to allow for estimation in models with more general error structures doc4366 none Simons SIMONS The ribosome is a complex molecular machine that faithfully translates information stored in the genetic code, into enzymes and other proteins. Understanding ribosome function has been and remains one of the most important challenges in molecular biology. The long-term goal of this project is to understand how the ribosome ensures translational accuracy (proper decoding) at its P-site. The P-site decodes information during translation initiation, and work spanning more that two decades has shown that translation initiation factor three (IF3) plays a crucial role in this event, almost certainly by modulating activities that are intrinsic to the ribosome itself. During the past 5 years, important new insights have emerged, including the three-dimensional structure of IF3 and the ribosome, visualization of the IF3 ribosome complex, and new insights into IF3 structure and function. IF3 is thought to operate at or close to the level of P-site function, most likely altering ribosome conformation and thereby the P-site. This modulation of P-site activity probably manifests itself in several seemingly unrelated IF3 effects. These developments hold great promise for an eventual understanding of P-site function and its modulation by IF3. However, before those important goals can be reasonably tackled, several basic and key aspects of IF3 structure and function must first be resolved. This project involves an integrated genetic and biochemical attack on several major unanswered questions at this level. The effects of key IF3 mutations will be examined with a powerful battery of assays designed to monitor IF3 function at several distinct levels of ribosome function. These efforts are instrumental in testing current models for IF3 modulation of ribosome function. IF3 determinants required for interaction with the ribosome will also be explored, and the IF3 binding determinants within the ribosome itself will be identified, in strategies based on existing experimental evidence. These studies are essential for an eventual understanding of how IF3 structure and function are integrated with that of the ribosome. In particular, this work will form a strong underpinning for studies that will eventually tackle IF3 function directly at the P-site doc4367 none Castillo This Major Research Instrumentation award to University of California, San Diego s Scripps Institution of Oceanography provides funds for acquisition of an inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometer for earth, ocean and environmental sciences research. It will be used for a wide variety of projects, and will include both undergraduate and graduate student in research and training. It will be managed as a recharge facility, available to many researchers and students at UCSD and other regional universities. The project is supported by the Division of Ocean Sciences at NSF. Scripps Institution will provide cost-share support for 50% of total project costs doc4368 none Professor Charles Knobler of the University of California Los Angeles is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry program to perform experimental and theoretical studies on phase behaviors of organic monolayers on water. Using monolayers and methods including Brewster-angle microscopy, grazing incidence x-ray diffraction and scanning force microscopy, the PI proposes to study the molecular origins of sliding friction and also the kinetics of phase transitions. The collapse of monolayers into three dimensional structures will also be investigated. The work is collaborative with the Applied Mathematics department at UCLA and with international groups including two at Saclay, France and MPI, Golm, Germany. Monolayers serve as model systems for the more complicated biological membranes, and also allow one to study phase transformations in two dimensions, which is a tractable problem from a theoretical standpoint. The measurements will have bearing on similar phenomena in liquid crystals, adsorbed atoms on surfaces, liquid crystalline polymers and antiferromagnets. There are applications of this work to problems in lubrication and sensors doc4369 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project focuses on mass production of triploid marine shrimp. Marine shrimp culture experienced exponential growth between and , increasing from 5% to 28% of total world production. Since then, farmed shrimp production has stagnated due to disease and water quality problems. Disease problems are largely due to dependence on wild caught shrimp broodstock and post larvae, which carry many untreatable viral diseases. A solution to this problem is closed-cycle culture, which also permits genetic selection for improved production performance. To protect a breeder s investment in specific pathogen free (SPF)stock, specific pathogen resistant (SPR) stock, and genetic selection, it is highly desirable to sell only sterile post larvae. Triploidy is a possible solution since triploids of other species are typically sterile and may exhibit superior culture performance. In addition triploidy may allow for the culture of exotic species in environmentally sensitive areas where exclusion of exotics is desirable. Phase II will focus on development of tetraploid breeding stocks that will be crossed with normal diploid stocks to produce triploid progeny. The successful outcome of our R&D effort will result in significant changes in marine shrimp culture. It will prevent competitors from propagation of shrimp stocks that have been genetically selected for aquaculture performance. It will help stimulate large-scale investment in SPF, SPR, genetic selection and closed-cycle shrimp culture. It will help create opportunities to expand use of exotic shrimp species into environmentally sensitive culture areas. Our company intends to be at the forefront of these opportunities doc4350 none This project will investigate the role of atmospheric dust deposition in creating regional spatial patterns of soil variation, using a study area in the central Great Plains. On the Great Plains, as in many other arid to subhumid landscapes, there is both geologic evidence and modern documentation of recurrent regional dust transport and deposition. During the Holocene, dust deposition at high rates produced distinct loess deposits in scattered localities in this region. More slowly deposited dust may have been incorporated into developing soil profiles over much larger areas. The key new element in this project is the focus on detecting regional spatial patterns indicative of dust transport, using a network of sampling sites across the central Great Plains. Dust deposition rate, grain size, and mineralogy vary systematically with distance from the source. These trends should be reflected in regional spatial patterns of soil morphology and mineralogy corresponding to plumes of Holocene dust dispersal from major sources. Multiple soil profiles will be sampled at each site to quantify local variability. From the regional sampling network, the investigators will select representative soils to use in more detailed investigations of the mineralogical and geochemical evidence for dust addition during soil development. This project will test methodology that can be much more broadly applied to a basic problem of soil science, in landscapes affected by recurrent dust production and deposition. Dust deposition is widely recognized as an important process in soil formation, but most previous studies have not focused on broad regional patterns of dust effects on soils. These spatial patterns are the key to incorporating dust effects into our understanding of important soil-related environmental issues. For example, the potential of soils to store organic carbon is an important issue in efforts to predict and mitigate human-induced changes in the global carbon cycle. Dust deposition may affect regional patterns of soil carbon storage potential because the added dust can change soil properties that strongly influence carbon storage. Because this project will sample a regional network of soils, the results will be directly applicable to mapping soil carbon storage potential over a large region. Results of this project will also help interpret buried soils that are important indicators of past climate change doc4371 none James L. Drewniak Equipment is requested for electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) research and education in digital and power electronics. Undesirable electromagnetic interference (EMI) and signal degradation that results from switching digital devices is a critical design issue in high-speed digital electronics. EMI is also a dominant problem in power electronics where large voltages and currents are switched rapidly. EMI from one system can cause malfunctioning in other near-by electronics, as well as interfere with wireless technologies. Further, ensuring signal integrity within a high-speed design is essential to functionality. The rapid advance of device technologies has overtaken the state of knowledge of design - basic physics, and design methodologies - for meeting the many EMC challenges with future ultra-fast digital electronics, and power electronics based systems. Further, there are too few engineers to meet the needs for addressing these issues. The new equipment will facilitate current industry-sponsored research, and expand opportunities for ultra-fast differential signaling applications in computers, data switching, broadband internet technologies, and wireless communications. Five senior level undergraduate electives, and two graduate courses will be impacted, as well as educational initiatives in an NSF IGERT program. The proposed equipment will build on existing strengths for expanding EMC research and education in high-speed digital electronics and power electronics systems doc4372 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will develop an inexpensive Visible Light Audio Information Transfer System (VLAITS) that transmits information to small Personal Audio Receivers (PAR) for blind, hard of hearing, non-physically impaired and non-English speaking users. VLAITS uses already-installed visible lighting fixtures like fluorescent lights to provide modulated light as a carrier medium for data. The PAR receives this modulated light and presents audio to the user. VLAITS is remarkably inexpensive because it requires no additional equipment or special wiring other than typically used in existing lighting fixtures. There is no perceptible visual flicker in light because of data coding schemes. Phase I demonstrated VLAITS, qualified commercial visible light as an information carrier, and demonstrated wayfinding and aural assistance with blind and hard of hearing users. This project seeks to design and refine a commercial VLAITS system and validate system functions and capabilities with blind and hard of hearing users. Included are miniaturization and reduction of production cost of the computer-controlled light ballast transmitter and computer-controlled portable receiver. The receiver will also be designed to be compatible with currently installed infrared systems. This project proffers a solution for the communication of information to people, particularly to those with disabilities, that leverages existing infrastructure in an innovative and cost effective way. Commercial products will be modified light ballasts, personal audio receivers and design of assistive networks doc4373 none Laura A. Katz Dr. Laura A. Katz has been awarded a grant to study the evolution of a fascinating type of microorganisms known as ciliates, a diverse group of protozoa characterized by the presence of two types of nuclei in each cell and by unusual molecular processing of their chromosomes. Unlike many plants and animals, we currently have only a basic framework for interpreting the evolutionary history of these organisms. For example, in the past twenty years, as techniques for identifying species have improved, the number of classes of ciliates has risen from only three based on microscopic analyses, to eight based on electron microscopy, to at least nine based on DNA sequence data. The class Spirotrichea represents a particularly contentious assemblage of ciliates as previous analyses provide varying pictures of which ciliates belong within this class and how these ciliates are related. Ciliates thought to belong to the class Spirotrichea can be found in both freshwater and marine ecosystems, and are characterized by diverse, and sometimes dramatic, arrangements of their ciliature. Our current classification system is based on limited data from only a handful of taxa. Analysis of multiple genes from a comprehensive survey of ciliates is needed to accurately reconstruction relationships among these organisms. The overall goals of this study are (1) to identify species of ciliates that belong to the class Spirotrichea, and (2) to reconstruct relationships among these species. To achieve these goals, DNA sequences will be determined for three genes (small subunit rRNA, alpha-tubulin and the largest subunit of the DNA polymerase II) from potential members of the class Spirotrichea. In addition, sequences will be characterized from appropriate outgroup species (non-spirotrichs). The resulting DNA sequences will be aligned using at least two alignment methods and estimates of species relationships will be made using several phylogenetic methods (e.g. maximum parsimony and maximum likelihood) on both individual genes and a combined data set. The resulting genealogies will answer questions about the evolutionary history of spirotrichs, while also indicating areas for future research on the relationships among ciliates doc4374 none Davidson This grant, made through the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, provides partial support of the costs of acquiringa modern, fully automated, low-vacuum scanning electron microscope and light-element EDS detector (SEM-EDS) for research and research training in Geology, Biology, Chemistry, Anthropology, and Museum Studies at Beloit College. SEM-EDS analysis is an essential tool in these fields for characterizing surface topography and chemical composition at the micron scale. Current student and faculty research that will be enhanced by the acquisition of the new SEM-EDS system include 1) metamorphic petrology and tectonic studies of the Coast Mountains in British Columbia; 2) subduction-zone metamorphism in Syros, Greece; 3) the chemical, biologic, and physical environment of microbial nodules from a freshwater creek in southcentral Wisconsin; 4) provenance studies of copper and bronze artifacts from Chile; and 5) use and wear patterns of stone tools from the Gottschall rock shelter in southwestern Wisconsin. In addition, the new SEM-EDS facility will enhance the educational outreach mission at Beloit College by allowing K-12 students in the Beloit area to image and analyze specimens they collect doc4375 none The objectives of this research project are to develop a microeconomic theory that explains the prevalence of laws that restrict parental decisions regarding the education and labor supply of their children. The basic idea is that such laws enable parents to commit to a higher level of education for their children, because in the absence of such laws, poor parents may be too impatient for additional consumption. In the longer run, this theory may serve as a prototype for investigations concerning the -relation between economic inequality and growth, as well as a positive model of the adoption of coercive social policies such as compulsory full-time education. The current stage of the project consists of developing anal testing a static model of child -labor restrictions, anal exploring some of the policy implications of the model, using household survey data from Africa, Asia and Latin America. This work will lead to the development of a proposal for a longer-term project to develop a dynamic equilibrium analysis of child labor on the basis of our findings from the research based on the static model doc4376 none A confocal laser scanning microscope will support research projects at Oklahoma State University (OSU). This instrument will be housed in the University s central Microscopy Laboratory and used in the research of three major projects as well as numerous smaller projects by OSU faculty, students and staff. In addition, graduate students will be trained in the use of the new microscope to broaden and enhance their research training. Access to a confocal microscope will allow OSU investigators to enhance their research capability in the biological sciences as well as the materials sciences. In biology, they will obtain real time images of dynamic processes occurring in plant and animal cells. Specific projects in which the confocal microscope will be used include the study of interactions between plants and microbial organisms, the movement of large molecules between cells in plants, the movement of small molecules inside of plant and animal cells, and research in synthetic materials designed to create new forms of matter which can be used as catalysts or as optical materials. Recently there have been major breakthroughs in several areas of research at Oklahoma State University and these advances have relied on many advanced techniques including molecular biology and electron microscopy. To continue to play a leading role in these fields, a confocal laser scanning microscope is needed. Current trends in science in academia as well as industry in the United States have placed an emphasis on advanced methods including microscopy to analyze genes and their products in living cells. Confocal microscopy is one of the latest advances in cell biology, and its addition to existing equipment will allow OSU faculty and students to remain competitive in the national and international doc4377 none Arijit Bose U. of Rhode Island The University of Rhode Island will purchase a digital camera, interface equipment and image analysis software to provide direct digital imagining capability for the JEOL EX Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope (S TEM). The equipment will be used initially for a series of research projects representing interdisciplinary collaborations between Is in the Chemical Engineering, Biomedical Sciences, Mechanical Engineering and Physics departments at URI as well as the Chemical Engineering Department at Tulane University. These include (a) time-solved cryo-TEM experiments on microstructure evolution in mixed cationic anionic surfactant systems, (b) examination of morphologies of lipid peptide assemblies, determination of specific locations of model membrane proteins in lipid bilayers and swollen micelles (imaged using cryo-TEM) that will expose their functionalities, (c) determination of microstructures (cryo-TEM in newly discovered hydrogels that have nearly equal amounts of water and organic phase (d) SEM examination of fracture surfaces of a new class of composite materials made from polymers with cenosphere fillers, and (e) morphology, size distribution and aggregation characteristics of magnetic nanoparticles (TEM). Digital imaging and analysis will dramatically increase the efficiency and quality of utilization of the electron microscope, and have a critical impact far beyond the specific projects outlined. It will make the electron microscope available as a powerful educational tool for students from several departments in the university, and allow then to gain expertise in a vital technique for colloid, materials science and biological observations doc4378 none Bebout The effects of subduction-zone metamorphism on the chemical and isotopic compositions of oceanic crust and sediments subducted into the mantle have not been adequately considered in models of ocean-atmosphere-mantle geochemical cycling. In the research funded by this grant, the P.I. and his students will evaluate the nature of these effects through combined field and geochemical study of fluid loss and chemical alteration in metamorphic rocks in the Italian Alps thought to have been subducted to 50-120 km depths. The two specific field localities include a well-studied traverse of variably metamorphosed shales and carbonate rocks exposed in the Cottian Alps, and exposures of metamorphosed oceanic crustal rocks (and their overlying sediment cover) in the Valtournenche area. These localities are well-suited because of their particularly well-preserved metamorphic mineral assemblages and chemical compositions representing the effects of deep subduction. In addition, the lithologies at the two localities are representative of those thought to contribute geochemically to the production of arc lavas, and the carbonate-rich metasedimentary sections will afford insight into the decarbonation history of similar sections in modern subduction zones such as the Central America and Banda arc-trench systems. This planned study of devolatilization based on subduction-zone metamorphic suites will contribute to our knowledge of the cycling of volatiles such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen between Earth s oceans atmosphere and mantle (information important in models of long- and short-term atmosphere evolution doc4379 none Giorgio Carta University of Virginia Fundamentals of Protein Transport in Charged Gels for Chromatography and Membrane Applications This project examines protein transport in charged hydrogels prepared for chromatography and membrane applications. The focus is placed on supported gels made by synthesizing them in situ within porous matrices and other rigid structures. The following properties are being investigated: (i) Size exclusion, hydrodynamic permeability, and electrical properties of supported ionic gels; (ii) Protein and electrolyte partitioning and mobility in ionic gels measured through isotope exchange and autoradiography methods; and (iii) Interdiffusion rates for single-protein adsorption and for multicomponent systems in ionic gels stabilized in capillaries and in porous particles using both direct microscopic visualization methods and macroscopic measurements. The experimental data are being used to develop rate models to describe transport of proteins in ionic gels, and the rate theories are incorporated in models for column chromatography to predict and optimize separation performance with practical media. An additional goal is to develop novel membranes based on supported ionic gels to effect protein separations. The overall goal of this research is a fundamental understanding of protein transport in oppositely charged ionic polymeric hydrogels to serve as a basis for the rational development of effective media for biotechnological applications. Polymeric hydrogels have many current and potential uses in this field. While neutral hydrogels serve as size-exclusion media, incorporation of a fixed charge, bound to the polymer backbone introduces the ability to accumulate macromolecules reversibly from dilute solutions. Ionic hydrogels can thus be used in chromatographic and membrane processes for protein separations, for the transdermal delivery of drugs, as implantable vehicles for the long-term delivery of therapeutic agents, and as elements in diagnostic instruments. Understanding the transport properties of charged macromolecules is a key to the optimum design of these materials. The research will also have significant impact on education and development of human resources through the involvement of students and will enhance the development of biotechnology. Separation and purification are generally thought to be the costliest steps in industrial bioprocessing. Hence, the development of improved chromatographic stationary phases and membranes for separations and the education of scientists and engineers in this field are crucial doc4380 none This award supports the purchase of a CCD detector for X-ray data collection at the Dupont-Northwestern-Dow Collaborative Access Team (DND-CAT) beamlines at the Advanced Photon Source. The detector will be used by crystallographers at Northwestern and by independent investigators to determine the high resolution X-ray structures of proteins and nucleic acids. Knowledge of the three dimensional structure of biological macromolecules is essential to a comprehensive understanding of chemical and biological processes. The research problems being addressed cover a wide range of fundamental problems, including the structure of ribonucleic acids, proteins involved in DNA modification and replication, the biology of copper trafficking, mechanisms of the immune recognition and virus infection, the transport of proteins across membranes, and mechanisms of cellular signal transduction. The requested instrumentation will be used to outfit a new experimental station (the 5-BMB station) at DND-CAT. This station is designed to meet the expanding scientific needs of the Northwestern crystallographers, and only requires the equipment described in this proposal to become operational. The requested detector, a 3K x 3K Mar CCD detector, will have an active surface area greater than twice the size of the current detectors. The larger size is required to collect high resolution data from crystals with large unit cell dimensions. Since the structural biologists are pursuing more and more ambitious projects, such as the structures of protein-protein complexes, large unit cell dimensions are becoming common. This detector will be absolutely necessary to obtain high resolution data. In addition, the award will support the purchase of a cryo cooling system for low temperature data collection, a table to house the detector, a computer for data processing and storage, and a fluorescence detector for multiwavelength anomalous dispersion (MAD) phasing experiments. The CCD detector, combined with these items, will render the 5-BMB station a state-of-the-art macromolecular crystallography facility. The 3K x 3K CCD detector will provide a unique data collection resource and enable both the Northwestern structural biologists and outside users to tackle previously unfeasible projects. In addition, it will strengthen the Northwestern training program in biophysics. Approximately 25 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows will use the equipment regularly. The inclusion of outside users will increase the number of potential trainees significantly. The new facilities will also allow more undergraduate students to be introduced to structural biology and participate in research projects at the forefront of modern science. Finally, the instrumentation will help efforts to recruit new graduate students and minority students, thus strengthening all the Northwestern research programs doc4381 none Gilbert The turtle shell is an evolutionary novelty representing a unique departure from the usual way that vertebrate skeletons develop. The turtle shell is a casing made almost exclusively of bone, and it is composed of two main parts, the dorsal carapace and the ventral plastron. Between them, on the lateral sides, is a bridge. The carapace contains fifty bones and is supported by the ribs, which grow dorsolaterally rather than ventrally. The critical event in turtle development and evolution is thought to be the ensnarement of the ribs by the carapacial ridge, a bulge of ectoderm and mesoderm that resembles the limb bud. The bones of the shell are thought to be formed from the dermis by intramembranous ossification, with contributions from these ribs. Dr. Gilbert wish to test three hypotheses for the turtle shell development: (1) that the carapace ridge forms by the co-option of the developmental program that forms the limb buds; (2) that the ribs induce intramembranous ossification in the dermis; and (3) that the dorsal growth of the rib cartilage precursors depends on their encountering the carpacial ridge. To test the first hypothesis, He will examine in the carapacial ridge the spatiotemporal expression profile of genes (especially those encoding fibroblast growth factors) known to initiate limb morphogenesis. To test whether the ribs induce intramembranous ossification, He will look at the expression, in the ribs and in other regions, of those genes encoding paracrine factors (especially the bone morphogenetic proteins) that could induce the ossification of the dermis. He will also insert beads containing inhibitors of known bone-inducing paracrine factors to see if the inhibition of these proteins inhibits regional bone development. The behavior of turtle ribs from turtle somites transplanted into chick embryos will tell us if the turtle ribs need the carapacial ridge to grow dorsolaterally or if this is an intrinsic property of the rib cartilage precursors. The results of this research should give insights into the mechanisms by which the co-option of developmental instructions can be used to create evolutionarily novel structures. It should also aid in the reconstruction of the phylogenetic path leading to the sudden emergence of turtles in the Triassic doc4382 none Recent NSF-sponsored research has resulted in a new model for middle Holocene sea-level change along the Texas Gulf Coast. This model suggests sea level reached present elevations years ago, and was slightly higher than modern for years after that. This view contrasts sharply with traditional interpretations, as well as recent and ongoing work by another research group, which would place sea level 6-10 m below present at that time, with present sea level not reached until years ago. This new phase of research will test these alternative models through documentation of middle Holocene sea-level change and the response of coastal geomorphic systems. Geomorphological, sedimentological, micropaleontological, and geochronological techniques will be used to examine a series of newly-recognized landforms that may hold the key to testing these alternative views of sea-level change and coastal evolution. The Texas Gulf Coast has long served as a natural laboratory for the study of coastal processes and landforms and their evolution in response to post-glacial sea-level rise. Several well-known models for coastal landscape evolution have been developed here, but within the context of the traditional view of continued sea-level rise until years ago. Documentation of a middle Holocene highstand would have significant implications for interpretations of coastal landscape evolution at the regional scale, as well as global-scale ice volume and sea-level signatures. Moreover, the petrochemical, shipping, fisheries, and tourism industries are linked to the present distribution of environments and resources, so past and future sea level changes in this area are of more than academic interest. Documentation of a higher sea-level position, and attendant coastal response, may provide an analog for sea-level rise scenarios that have been predicted for the near future due to anthropogenic and natural climate changes doc4383 none Richard Miles This proposal is for development of a 100 element electron beam array source for the production and control of volumetric air plasmas. The development project will be undertaken in partnership with Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM. The electron beam array source will permit the study of volume filling air plasmas and MHD processes at temperatures far below those required for thermally sustained plasmas and under conditions which otherwise lead to arcing instabilities in electric field driven plasmas. The research areas that will be supported by this MRI equipment include following: 1) The exploration of approaches to the modification of attachment and recombination mechanisms at temperatures below K in order to minimize the power requirements for sustaining volume air plasmas. 2) The study of the extraction of power from high speed, low temperature ( K) air by MHD processes through the use of electron beam sustained conductivity. 3) The development of new control strategies for MHD processes using the currents of the 100 electron beam elements to spatially distribute and temporally modulate the conductivity. 4) The study of rapidly reconfigurable plasma arrays for the reflection of electromagnetic radiation. The device will consist of 100 separately controllable electron beams arranged in a 7 cm by 7 cm, 10 x 10 array. The size of the array has been chosen to fit into a 7 Tesla magnet which will be use to guide the electrons and, with the addition of electrodes, will become the power extraction channel for the study of MHD processes doc4384 none This project explores the importance of two related assumptions in the standard macroeconomic theory of the labor market: the equilibrium search and matching model. The first assumption is that workers can only search for jobs when they are unemployed. The Principal Investigator will follow the lead of some other researchers and explore the implications of allowing for on-the-job search. The second assumption is that firms can only hire workers when they have a job vacancy. The PI will explore the implications of allowing for short-term employment a situation in which a firm hires a worker knowing that it will try to find a better one in the near future. This possibility has not previously been examined. Preliminary research indicates that on-the-job search and short-term employment may qualitatively affect the behavior of the labor market. For example, in the standard equilibrium search model, all increase in the labor force growth rate (e.g. due to the baby boom) or an increase in the job separation rate (e.g. due to business cycle fluctuations) causes an increase in the unemployment rate. In a model with both on-the-job search and short-term employment, the effects may be reversed. More generally, it appears that any activity that increases the flow of workers between employment and unemployment has the potential of reducing the unemployment rate. The first objective of this project is to explore the sensitivity of this result to the model specification. In the course of this project, the PI will endogenize wage determination and search behavior and will introduce heterogeneous workers and jobs into the basic model. He will then examine the properties of the resulting economy. The second objective of this project is to explore the macroeconomic implications of the theory of on-the-job search and short-term employment. The theory will shed light on the large flow of workers between jobs. It also predicts that the probability of a worker losing her job should get smaller as the worker stays in the job for longer, which is consistent with the available evidence. The PI will explore the implications of this for the persistence of individual unemployment spells and of aggregate unemployment. The PI will also examine whether labor market rigidities such as hiring costs may he responsible for high levels of unemployment in Europe. This possibility is suggested by the basic result that a large flow of workers between employment and unemployment is important for maintaining a low unemployment rate The last objective of this project is to test the theory using a variety of empirical evidence. For example the PI will use fluctuations in birth rates 16-24 years earlier to identify anticipated changes in the growth rate of the labor force. The theory of on-the-job search and short-term employment makes strong predictions concerning the impact of these fluctuations on unemployment rates, wages, labor force participation, and the flow of workers between jobs. Thus empirical evidence will ultimately refine or reject this theory doc4385 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the Holy Cross College will acquire a 300 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) conformational studies of cyclohexane derivatives, tertiary amides and Gramacidin S; b) application of isotopic perturbation to halonium ions; c) measurement of carbon-13 - carbon-13 coupling constants in delocalized carbocations; d) incorporation of amino acids into organometallic compounds; e) synthesis of new therapeutic agents; f) use of covalently constrained dipeptides to affect protein folding; g) development of beta- and gamma-turn mimetics; h) natural product synthesis; i) synthetic organic methods development; and j) hydrogen deuterium exchange kinetics. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometry is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including drug development and biochemistry doc4386 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project addresses the need for customized learning tools in mathematics education for primary students with physical disabilities, in particular, those with significant hearing loss. The Phase II study focuses on modifying and testing sections of existing multimedia so that they will be appropriate as instructional tools for PreK-K children with significant hearing loss. The need is critical: 2 out of every 1,000 young children in the U.S. have hearing loss severe enough to adversely affect learning. In addition, resources for these individuals are normally allocated to the development of language acquisition; thus, the development of mathematical computation and reasoning often is not addressed until a significant learning window has lapsed. The National Action Plan for Mathematics Education Reform for the Deaf recommends that more resources address mathematics instruction for children with significant hearing loss. Learning in Motion intends to modify a research-based, field-tested multimedia program for early learners of mathematics. This program was the direct result of Phases I and II of a NSF SBIR project. The multimedia program includes three-dimensional graphics and characters, completed game logic, and four interactive game areas that are suitable for modification. The study s main objectives: 1) design, program, and test modifications to existing software games (4) with students with hearing loss, 2) conduct and use subjective observations from teachers and researchers to further refine the modifications, and 3) initiate a testing plan for the complete modified program. Ultimate results include: salable multimedia for the under-represented group of students with significant hearing loss and publishable design guidelines for others electing to produce specialized software. Learning in Motion seeks to provide in a completely modified mathematics multimedia program for hearing-loss children. Design guidelines informed by the WGBH guidelines will also be produced, encouraging commercial collaboration with other publishers looking to produce similar programs doc4387 none The project develops a theory of dynamic public investment games. These games are intended to model dynamic environments in which current actions have external effects that irreversibly alter future incentives. A canonical example is a fund drive to provide the capital that will produce a future public benefit such as public television programming or a new church complex. Important features of such a drive that characterize a public investment game are: (1) an individual s contribution affects (generally positively) all the other participants; (2) this benefit is irreversible, assuming contributions are nonrefundable; and (3) the contribution alters the incentives of future contributors by enlarging the amount of the public good to which they will contribute. Environments with similar features, and which hence may be usefully viewed through the lens of a public investment game, are far more pervasive than just charity fund drives. They include the following. Firms in an oligopoly invest over time in their own capital stocks, which thus grow and affect all firms via their effect on marginal cost and hence prices. Bargaining when there is no third party to enforce agreements, as in international negotiations over trade, peace, or pollution abatement treaties, often takes place piecemeal over time with future concessions depending on the affirmative steps taken at earlier dates. Payments made over time by lobbyists to legislators generate a bundle of public goods, the legislative outcomes. In a patent race, a firm s current R&D expenditures irreversibly affect the state of knowledge about an innovation that will affect all firms. In a strategic learning environment, the result of an agent s current action provides an informational externality to all agents, irreversibly changing beliefs and hence future incentives. Thus, very abstractly, a dynamic public investment game is intended to model any situation in which social capital is created by individual efforts, investments, contributions, or other influence activities that can be taken incrementally over time. This research formulates an appropriate general definition of such dynamic games. It characterizes as much as possible the sequential equilibria of these games, with the goal being to obtain results that rival in completeness those we now have for repeated games. The overall goal is to increase our understanding of these environments, and to provide guidance for how to alter them, e.g., by modifying the governance of lobbying, patents, or charity drives. The central issues to be addressed concern the inefficiencies caused by free riding and coordination failure that these environments exhibit doc4388 none Decentralization is considered to be a remedy for historical problems of authoritarian, inefficient, and corrupt government in Africa. The current emphasis on decentralization increases the importance of local governments and local elites. Yet, within a country, the performance of local governments may vary dramatically. Existing theories tend to focus on social and cultural explanations of variation in performance. Yet, these explanations fall short when one attempts to understand the ability of recent decentralization schemes to achieve stated goals. Many of the countries moving toward greater decentralization are found in parts of the world where patronage and clientelism remain crucial in deterring political outcomes. In neo-patrimonial societies, one cannot assume that decentralization policies are implemented completely, meet all stated objectives, and remain insulated from previously existing patterns of political rule. This project examines whether decentralization improves local government performance, and it suggests that the nature of local politics explains observed differences in performance across administrative units. In analyzing local politics, it is important to acknowledge the prevalence of clientelist or neo-patrimonial politics in Africa and throughout the developing world. The artificiality of national boundaries and the external imposition of state structures in most African countries explain the fact that national identities and feelings of community at the national level are relatively undeveloped. Consequently, the line between public and private is blurred by clientelism as politicians are forced to exchange material benefits for political support. Similarly, neo-patrimonialism refers to situations in which the line between public and private is shattered completely. According to Clapham ( ), public politics refer to situations in which political actors pursue the goals of the state, whereas private politics describe instances in which individuals or groups pursue their own well-being rather than promoting the general public welfare. This project examines the relationship among decentralization, institutional performance, and local politics in a sample of Uganda s administrative districts. Districts are sampled purposively to reflect diversity in several important characteristics They include region, ethnicity, date when the district was decentralized, and distance from the capital city. Local political institutions are expected to perform better in districts where politics is described best as public but worse in districts where private politics dominate. This type of research requires a mixture of qualitative and quantitative data and, thus, several data collection methods are used. These methods include archival research, participant observation, elite interviewing, and survey research doc4389 none This project is aimed at exploring a new, athermal annealing method for removing ion-implantation generated lattice damage and activating the implanted dopants in important compound semiconductors such as GaAs, SiC and GaN for the first time. In this method a high power (~10 Joules) laser pulse of a few nanoseconds duration is focused to a small spot of 1-2 mm size in the center of a semiconductor sample. The laser pulse is expected to launch a shock wave that propagates across the wafer, resulting in implant annealing all over the wafer, even in areas far from the laser focal spot. This method is expected to minimize impurity diffusion during annealing and preserve surface integrity of the semiconductor. The athermal annealing method will be used to anneal Si- and Be- implanted GaAs, N- and Al- implanted SiC, and Si-implanted GaN. Anneals will be performed with various parameter adjustments such as laser intensity, spot size, and pulse duration. Electrical, impurity redistribution, and lattice quality characteristics of the athermally annealed material will be compared with those of conventional, thermally annealed material. Implanted p-n junction diode and field-effect transistor device structures will be annealed by the new athermal annealing method using the optimum annealing conditions developed during the early part of the work. The devices will be thoroughly characterized to evaluate the usefulness of the new annealing method for device applications. Results obtained from this basic research work could have a profound effect on compound semiconductor device processing technology. This work will be performed in collaboration with federal laboratories doc4390 none This project explores the role of values in determining individuals diffuse support for the Supreme Court. Implementing an experimental survey design, the PI will measure diffuse support for political institutions with feeling thermometers. The following values will be examined: liberty, equality, morality and social order. Some individuals, it is hypothesized, will prefer a decision reflecting one value, whereas others will prefer a decision reflecting another value. The research protocol will test whether the value frame influences diffuse support for the Court by measuring support for the Court after administering the hypothetical scenario and assessing whether or not it has fluctuated over the course of the experiment doc4364 none General equilibrium theory underlies our understanding of how complex economies manage risk. It is the basis of the tools used to make investment decisions and to guide policy in applications as diverse as regulated industries (utilities, telecommunications, etc.) and pension funds. In spite of this widespread use, scientific support for such applications has been mixed. The research proposed here seeks to build and test a more robust implementation of general equilibrium theory. Our work integrates theory, experiment, and econometrics in an essential way: experiments suggest the shape the theory should have, the theory suggests which further experiments should be carried out, experiments provide tests of the final theory; econometrics links theory and experiment in a formal way. We have developed and succesfully conducted laboratory experiments that test the principles of general equilibrium theory in the context of markets with risk. The model that guided our inference is the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). The experiments confirm the complex pricing relationships predicted by the theory. Since we used the same measurement tools as in the analysis of historical data in the field, our findings suggest that the controversy surrounding historical evidence need not be attributed to a failure of the basic principles of the theory, but to the auxiliary assumptions added to the models to make them testable on field data. Still, we reject the portfolio (allocation) implications of the same theory. The latter finding is particularly perplexing because the traditional theory that explains and supports the prices rests explicitly on the allocational predictions. Our theory explains the puzzle. It perturbs traditional general equilibrium models in ways that better accomodate the types of behavior of individuals when observed in isolation, away from markets. We provide a unified approach to study the effects of such perturbations. We show, for instance, that random perturbations need not always wash out in large economies; in the case of information aggregation, they cause clearcut biases. Preliminary experiments confirm our predictions. We plan to build on these initial successes, to further our understanding of pricing and allocation of risk in competitive markets. In addition, the theory suggests experiments that will uncover the origin of the perturbations that are needed to make general equilibrium models explain the data. One of these will determine whether risk is like any other commodity and that no special principles must be invoked in order to understand market behavior, a fundamental premise of extant theory. Actual attitudes towards and beliefs about risk may be at odds with this view. In addition to its scientific and policy implications, this proposal also has an important educational component. Our experiments are web-based and have involved many subjects from more than a dozen undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools across the country. These experiments provide the subjects with a unique educational experience. Our experiments have shown that access to such a large pool of subjects with diverse backgrounds is necessary to achieve results, and the theory explains why. At the same time, it provides exposure to complex financial markets to students who would otherwise not be given the opportunity, for various geographical and socio-economic reasons. This is a collaborative proposal involving Peter Bossaerts and Charles Plott (both of Caltech) and William Zame (of UCLA doc4392 none An integrated microarraying facility will be initiated in the Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology (DMMP) in the Center for Health Sciences (CHS) at UCLA. The facility will consist of a DNA processing robot, a microarrayer, a scanner, a DNA clone resource, and a computational facility. The microarray facility has been designed to provide the highest practicable throughput of this powerful technology. The research will cover the whole range of modern biology including studies of retroviruses, differentiation of neural stem cells and other cells, the cellular response to metals, synaptic transmission, neural growth factors, nitrous oxide physiology, immune system differentiation, neural aspects of behavior and glucocorticoid signaling. An important part is to improve the bioinformatics of microarray technologies using the data provided by the facility. This facility will provide researchers and their students the ability to visualize gene expression patterns for thousands of genes at once and have a major impact on research in cell and molecular biology at UCLA doc4393 none SES: PI: Michael W Macy This project establishes an interactive web-based laboratory situation permitting social psychological experiments in which Japanese and U.S. subjects interact directly with each other. The design will be pre-tested with some new experiments using a well-known mixed-motive game, with participants from both countries. This new setting will permit a variety of social psychological and network exchange experiments. It will foster training of graduate students and collaboration between scholars in the two countries, and will facilitate investigations of cultural differences and generalizability of results from experiments. Microsoft will provide some of the software, with NSF and two universities (Cornell and UCLA) supporting the data collection and some of the training doc4394 none Toole Robbins This project is intended as a continuation of an attempt to synthesize a broad picture of the three-dimensional circulation of the Pacific using observations of deep hydrography and nutrients from the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) together with data from subsurface floats. The approach to be taken will divide the Pacific into approximately 70 boxes and use a linearly constrained inverse estimation technique to deduce a circulation that best fits the observations while conserving mass and tracer fluxes doc4395 none This award will add an 800 MHz NMR spectrometer to the National Magnetic Resonance Facility at Madison (NMRFAM), a shared instrumentation facility. The presence of this instrument will enable researchers to solve new problems and to achieve definitive answers to scientific questions about biomolecular structure-function relationships. The spectrometer will be devoted to experiments that require its uniquely-high field strength: studies of larger molecules, investigations of field-dependent molecular ordering effects, studies of the field dependence of chemical exchange and relaxation phenomena, and functional studies of proteins, nucleic acids, and other biomolecules that require exceptional resolution and or sensitivity. The instrument will be used by a core group of about 40 principal investigators from all around the country, who work on a variety of problems. The improved resolution and sensitivity of the proposed spectrometer will ease the limitation of low solubility, lower the time requirements (and molecular stability requirements) for biomolecular data collection, and increase the accuracy of NMR measurements. The increased sensitivity of the instrument, coupled with new data acquisition protocols (such as TROSY-based pulse sequences), promise to roll back the molecular weight limit for structure-function investigations and improve the feasibility of solution structures of membrane proteins and functional RNA molecules. The 800 MHz NMR spectrometer will serve as a focal point for hands-on training in biomolecular NMR spectroscopy. On average, the National Magnetic Resonance Facility at Madison trains about 30 new users each year. These generally are graduate students and postdoctoral research associates. The facility regularly hosts visiting scientists who come for periods of one week to one year to receive training in biomolecular NMR spectroscopy. Training is primarily by hands-on activities supervised by the staff of the facility. All new internal and external users are required to receive orientation and training, which is tailored to their previous experience. The large number of users of the facility and the many maintenance tasks required lead to unique training opportunities. Staff members also train graduate students and advanced undergraduates to assist in the performance of routine maintenance and testing of the spectrometers doc4396 none The retina is a layered structure and each layer is populated by different cell classes. Most cell classes are further subdivided on the basis of their shape and on the excitatory and inhibitory inputs they receive. In the retina, as well as in the rest of the brain, inhibition plays a central role in neuronal function by modulating excitatory signals. Most inhibitory neurotransmission is mediated by the release of either glycine or gamma amino butyric acid (GABA) from the pre-synaptic cell. GABA is detected by the post-synaptic cell by one of three receptors: GABAA, GABAB or GABAC. Each GABA receptor can be identified by its structure, sensitivity to GABA and selectivity for different agonists and antagonists. These receptors also differ in their pattern of expression in the brain. These structural and functional differences lead to the hypothesis that each GABA receptor mediates a different type of inhibition in the nervous system. In the rodent retina, the GABAC receptor is located only on the axon terminals of bipolar cells. Thus, the GABAC receptor should be able to modulate the excitatory output of the bipolar cells and, thus, ultimately modulate to the overall visual response of the retina. The proposed experiments will use a mouse in which the GABAC receptor was eliminated (GABAC null mouse) via molecular genetic manipulations. The anatomy of the retina of the GABAC null mice will be examined and compared to controls to determine if the absence of the GABAC receptor alters retinal structure. The visual responses of all of the cells in the retina will be assessed in the GABAC null mice and compared to controls using a non-invasive technique, the electroretinogram. These data will determine how the absence of GABAC mediated inhibition affects the visual response at the level of the retina. These experiments represent the first attempt to define the function of an inhibitory input in the retina, using molecular genetic manipulations doc4397 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Vassar College will acquire a MALDI-TOF Mass Spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) the identification of trapped intermediates during the refolding of tick anticoagulant peptide; b) the identification and characterization of organometallic complexes of giant fullerenes; c) the molecular weight determination of novel synthetic polymers; and d) the analysis and identification of organic archaeological materials. Mass spectrometry (MS) is a technique used to probe intimate structural details and to obtain the molecular compositions of a vast array of organic, bioorganic, and organometallic molecules. The results from these studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry, polymer processing and biology doc4398 none This grant provides funding for the purchase of a Laser Engineered Net Shaping (LENS) system and a Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) unit for interdisciplinary research and education in Solid Freeform Fabrication (SFF). The primary objective of the research is to develop science-based processing and microstructure models that will aid in moving LENS from the proof-of-concept stage towards full scale implementation by industry. Processing models will be developed for predicting heat flow, minimizing residual stress and distortion, controlling microstructure, and optimizing tool path planning. The LENS unit will be used for model validation and development of processing algorithms for controlling microstructure and minimizing distortion. Methods for depositing components with graded microstructures and properties will also be investigated through both model and experimental based activities. The role of powder properties on flow uniformity will be assessed, and the LENS process will be evaluated to identify advantages and limitations relative to competing SFF processes. The instruments will be used for education through undergraduate course instruction. In this educational effort, the FDM unit will be used by undergraduates in the Materials, Mechanical, and Industrial Engineering Departments in an integrated manufacturing course to create solid models from computer aided drawings. Once solid models are created, the LENS unit will then be used to prepare functional prototypes for performance testing. New instruction modules on rapid prototyping and SFF will be developed jointly between the participating engineering departments to support the new equipment. From these efforts, generic models and algorithms will be developed that can be applied by end users for process optimization in order to avoid trial and error approaches to LENS manufacturing. The results of this research will be used by industrial partners to fabricate components with reduced manufacturing time, improved dimensional accuracy, and properties that are tailored for enhanced performance. The educational activities will teach undergraduate students how to apply basic concepts in materials, mechanical, and industrial engineering to manufacture components using SFF processes doc4399 none Fischer In a subduction zone, the material transfer from sediments of the subducting plate into arc magmas has been identified by chemical tracers, such as Berillium and Boron. In recent years, significant progress has been made towards understanding the element cycles in subduction zones and the time-scales these cycles operate on with the goal of arriving at element budgets of active margins. The vast amount of detailed geochemical information available for arc magmas stands in contrast to the very limited detailed information available for volatile discharges from active margin volcanoes. Volatiltes play a pivotal role in element transfers occurring at subduction zones. Despite their importance, comparatively little is known about the ultimate sources of the volatiles in subduction zones. Even less is known about the volatile budgets of any active subduction zone. The goal of this project is to perform a detailed, systematic study of the sources of volatile discharges and the fluxes of these volatiles to the atmosphere at 3-4 active volcanoes along the Central American Volcanic Arc. The P.I. will attempt to determine the sources of carbon dioxide, water, nitrogen and noble gases and their fluxes to the atmosphere. The Central American Volcanic Arc is one of the best places in the world for such a study because a vast amount of geochemical information on the magmas is available, the amount of fluid contributions is documented to vary along strike of the arc, and crustal contamination is relatively minor and quite well constrained. The study is a pilot study targeting these 3-4 volcanoes in order to test whether there is a correlation regarding the sources of volatiles with the sources of the magmas as identified geochemically doc4400 none The aim of this Major Research Instrumentation project is to develop a virtual and augmented reality (VAR) system for research in intelligent and collaborative design and manufacturing. The VAR system will be capable of providing 3-D visualization of co-existing virtual and real objects. Our approach of developing the VAR system is to integrate commercial virtual reality systems with image acquisition hardware and software that has been used in the past for feature recognition, object identification, and process inspection. Various components including the display device, haptic device, motion tracker, stereo cameras, etc. will be integrated into a powerful VAR system capable of immersing the user in 3-D virtual and augmented environments. The system development will address the following issues: 1) calibration, characterization, control, and integration of system components, 2) stereo video acquisition and depth map calculation, 3) precision registration between the virtual and real worlds, and 4) development of fast collision detection and response algorithms. The developed VAR system will be used to perform research on topics including freeform design model creation, collaborative modular fixture design, assembly disassembly analysis and planning, human cognition and collaboration in a VAR environment, web-based collaborative infrastructure support for VAR applications, and distributed collaborative product design and development. This project is expected to have significant impact on research, education, research training, and infrastructure building at the proposal institution. Also, it has high potential of revolutionizing the future practice of design and manufacturing, including networked collaboration, for a wide range of products doc4401 none Raleigh Elucidating how the amino acid sequence determines structure, the protein folding problem, is a central issue in modern structural biology. Recent developments have made this problem particularly timely. Massive genome sequencing efforts have lead to an explosion in our knowledge of the primary sequence of proteins. Unfortunately it is still impossible to predict structure from sequence. In principle, a more thorough understanding of the folding process should aid efforts to decipher the code that links sequence and structure. A detailed understanding of the folding process will also aid efforts to rationally modify proteins to enhance desired properties or confer new functions. The research described in this project focuses on experimental investigations of several issues in protein folding. The hypothesis that chain topology is the major determinant of folding kinetics will be examined by conducting studies of the folding of two sets of proteins. The folding kinetics of the C-terminal domain of the protein L9 will be measured and compared to theoretical predictions. In the intact protein, this domain appears to fold much more slowly than predicted by theory. The folding of the isolated domain will be studied in order to test if the deviation is caused by interactions with the rest of the protein or is more fundamental. The structure of the N-terminal domain of RNase HI is very similar to the N-terminal domain of L9 (NTL9) and the folding of this protein will be compared to NTL9. The role of the unfolded state in protein folding and stability will be examined using NTL9 as a model system. Each of the six acidic residues in NTL9 with be mutated and the pH dependence of the stability determined. These measurements provide information about electrostatic interactions in the unfolded state. The formation of electrostatic interactions during the folding process will be studied by conducting kinetic measurements with this set of mutants. These studies will be complimented by experiments that probe the development of the hydrophobic core of NTL9 during folding. Taken together, the kinetic studies will provide a detailed picture of the folding of NTL9 doc4402 none Gersappe This is an award for theoretical and computational research on polymer nanocomposites. Polymer nanocomposites are a new class of materials that are formed when nanometer sized inorganic particles (fillers) are mixed into a polymer matrix. The large surface area presented by these fillers, coupled with the ability to control the interactions between the fillers and the matrix offers the possibility of the development of a new material that can find potential applications in a wide variety of areas give their extraordinary properties: their light-weight but extremely high mechanical strength, their selective filtering capacity and their high thermal stability. Indeed, polymer nanocomposites are being touted as the next generation of materials in applications as diverse as automobile parts and bone fixation materials. Yet, a fundamental knowledge of the processes by which these small nanoscale particles enhance the strength of the material is still unknown. While advances in synthetic methods have led to a precise control of structures at the nanometer scale, the development of a theoretical framework that can predict macroscopic properties of polymers in such nanostructured environments from their microstructural details has not kept pace with the synthetic advances. This is because macroscopic assumptions break down when the critical length scale of the environment is on the order of a few molecular sizes. It is this gap that will be addressed in this research. Thus, the aim is to understand the molecular mechanisms that are responsible for the extraordinary mechanical properties of the nanocomposite. The approach to be taken here uses a combination of mean field methods and molecular dynamics simulations to extract the critical parameters necessary to bridge the gap between the nanoscale (where the critical assemblies exist) and the mesoscales (where the prediction of physical properties takes place). Numerical self-consistent field calculations combined with a netwrok formation theory will be used to focus parallel molecular dynamics simulations into those regions of phase space where one can determine the critical factors that control the response of the nanocomposite to external load. %%% This is an award for theoretical and computational research on polymer nanocomposites. Polymer nanocomposites are a new class of materials that are formed when nanometer sized inorganic particles (fillers) are mixed into a polymer matrix. The large surface area presented by these fillers, coupled with the ability to control the interactions between the fillers and the matrix offers the possibility of the development of a new material that can find potential applications in a wide variety of areas give their extraordinary properties: their light-weight but extremely high mechanical strength, their selective filtering capacity and their high thermal stability. Indeed, polymer nanocomposites are being touted as the next generation of materials in applications as diverse as automobile parts and bone fixation materials. Yet, a fundamental knowledge of the processes by which these small nanoscale particles enhance the strength of the material is still unknown. While advances in synthetic methods have led to a precise control of structures at the nanometer scale, the development of a theoretical framework that can predict macroscopic properties of polymers in such nanostructured environments from their microstructural details has not kept pace with the synthetic advances. This is because macroscopic assumptions break down when the critical length scale of the environment is on the order of a few molecular sizes. It is this gap that will be addressed in this research. Thus, the aim is to understand the molecular mechanisms that are responsible for the extraordinary mechanical properties of the nanocomposite doc4403 none The objective of this project is to develop a thermal imaging system, including both hardware and software, to detect mechanical damage in gas pipelines. The sensors will be in the form of a configurable array of infrared CCD cameras, which will permit the complete imaging of the pipeline as the inspection instrument travels its length. The goal is to arrive at a minimal modification of the current inspection tool design, making the system attractive to pipeline-inspection vendors. The addition of a thermal-imaging sensor to the existing magnetic sensor offers the opportunity for fusing the two data sets in order to improve the accuracy and sensitivity of the inspection tool. Results obtained from this initial study will be disseminated to the gas pipeline-inspection industry and research community. The proposed project addresses a critical problem in the inspection of gas pipelines - faults caused by mechanical damage. The instrument system being developed has the potential for application as a general nondestructive evaluation tool that can be used with any material in which a defect or damage introduces a variation in thermal diffusivity from the bulk material. This method may be applicable to detect, for example, delamination in sandwiched composite materials doc4404 none Hanon Low-Energy Electron Microscopy (LEEM) is used to generate real-time images of surfaces with a lateral resolution of better than 10 nanometer. Surfaces can be imaged at arbitrarily high temperatures, and during growth. Contrast in LEEM arises because of differences in electron reflectivity at the surface, which reflect variations in the structural, chemical and magnetic properties of the surface. This award will help establish a LEEM facility at Carnegie Mellon University for use by an interdisciplinary group of researchers spanning four University departments. Proposed research projects include investigations of phase transitions at surfaces, two-dimensional coarsening and growth, step and phase boundary fluctuations, GaN growth, wetting of organic films, surface magnetism, growth at chiral surfaces, and texture development in thin film growth. Low-Energy Electron Microscopy (LEEM) is used to generate real-time images of surfaces with a lateral resolution of better than ten nanomters, during growth, and at arbitrarily high temperatures. These unique features allow growth at surfaces to be studied in unprecedented detail. A LEEM facility will be established at Carnegie Mellon University for use by an interdisciplinary group of researchers. LEEM will be applied to a wide range of growth problems, from fundamental investigations of the chemistry and physics of surfaces, to process optimization in the development of new magnetic media doc4405 none This project is intended to improve our understanding of how nation-states manage their contentious issues, focusing on disagreements between nation-states over shared freshwater supplies and over maritime zones, to supplement recent research on territorial claims. A general issue-based approach to world politics has developed slowly since the mid- s. This approach depicts world politics as the quest for issue satisfaction by actors that use numerous potential means (including the unilateral initiation of militarized conflict, bilateral negotiations, and multilateral attempts involving binding or non-binding, third-party assistance). Empirically testable hypotheses are developed from this issue-based approach to account for the occurrence and success of attempts to manage or settle issues. Emphasis is placed on the salience of the issues, past attempts to manage the same issues, the regional and global institutional context, and characteristics of the adversaries. Past research on contentious issues has been impeded by a lack of systematic data for empirical testing of propositions about the nature and management of contentious issues. Recent data collection by the Issue Correlates of WAR (ICOW) project overcomes these problems by collecting data on the extent, salience, and management of territorial issues, and, thus, offers substantial support for the hypotheses of the issues approach. The primary objective of this proposed research is to study freshwater and maritime issues in the same manner as this recent research on territorial issues. Data are collected on all freshwater and maritime issues in the twentieth century, including the extent of the issues (the number of issues worldwide and the specific actors involved for each one), their salience (characteristics of each issue that make it more or less valuable to the involved states), and attempts to manage these issues unilaterally, bilaterally, or multilaterally. This collection allows the hypotheses from the general issues approach to be tested using these two additional issue types as a supplement to our current knowledge of territorial issues, and -- in combination with the existing data on territorial issues -- for the first time, allows comparative study of the management of different issue types. The results of the proposed analyses have important implications for both theory and policy, ranging from improved academic understanding of processes of foreign policy making, negotiations, international law, and interstate conflict to the possibility of assisting governments in the identification of peaceful solutions to their problems. This is especially important because the issues covered by this proposal, the management of often-scarce freshwater resources and of potentially oil- or fish-abundant maritime zones, are argued to be among the leading sources of conflict into the next century. The collection of freshwater and maritime issue data also helps to advance an issues approach to world politics. This advance has been slowed considerably by the dearth of systematic data on issues; the few systematic data collections that exist focus primarily on the single issue of territory. Finally, the data sets collected under this proposal will be released publicly for use by other scholars in the field. Although the creation of a new data resource is a secondary objective behind the improved testing of propositions on issues and world politics, this is an important benefit that helps the field of Political Science long after our original analyses with this newly collected data are completed doc4406 none Forecasting of heavy precipitation events remains one of the most difficult challenges in numerical weather prediction. The ability of numerical models to represent precipitation is complicated by the necessity to parameterize some precipitation while some is explicitly resolved. Furthermore, errors in precipitation forecasts have the potential to degrade model forecasts through latent heat release and other diabatic processes, especially during heavy precipitation. It is important to improve understanding of how errors in model precipitation forecasts might influence synoptic-scale forecasts. The problem of quantitative precipitation forecasting (QPF), in addition to significant socioeconomic relevance, holds important implications for the problem of atmospheric predictability. Numerical model QPF errors can promote forecast degradation via the influence of diabatic processes such as latent heat release on atmospheric dynamics and thermodynamics. A previous study by the Principal Investigator has documented errors in numerical forecasts during heavy precipitation, and demonstrated that these errors are consistent with model misrepresentation of latent heat release in the vicinity of a convective, cold-frontal rain band. The Principal Investigator proposes to accomplish the following specific objectives: 1) Development of a climatology of operational model forecast biases for specific synoptic scenarios in which model representation of convection may limit forecast accuracy; 2) Documentation of the physical basis for systematic biases in operational model behavior that relate to the representation of heavy precipitation; 3) Examination of the degree to which model representation of lower-tropospheric, diabatically generated potential vorticity (PV) anomalies are sensitive to model representation of precipitation processes (both grid-scale and sub-grid-scale); 4) Determination of which convective parameterization schemes yield the most realistic representation of diabatic PV modifications in both the lower and upper troposphere; 5) Exploration of modifications to model representations of precipitation that would improve forecasts of the dynamical feedbacks associated with latent heat release. Successful completion of this research could lead to better utilization of current numerical models by forecasters as well as lead to quantitative improvements in numerical models precipitation forecasts doc4407 none Huxel, Gary and Sanchez-Pinero, Francisco The PI s propose work evaluating how external and in situ factors affect ecosystem function, community dynamics, and species diversity on islands in the Gulf of California. There are five primary goals. First, to understand how multiple factors influence the distribution and abundance of populations. Second, to understand how spatial (landscape) factors and temporal variability in productivity affect community dynamics and ecosystem function. Third, to connect processes and productivity in the ocean to population and food web dynamics on land. Fourth, to analyze the long-term dynamics of focal species. Fifth, to address factors that affect the stability of populations, communities, and ecosystems. A combination of experiments and field sampling will be conducted over a 4 year period to test specific hypotheses related to each goal doc4408 none This grant funds the development of a structural mechanics impact laboratory at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Knowledge about how structures behave during impacts is an important feature of many engineering problems including vehicle crashworthiness, roadside safety, aircraft crashworthiness, human trauma research and packaging design. Research in the area of the impact response of structures ideally requires analytical modeling, finite element modeling, dynamic physical testing of components and dynamic testing of full-scale structures. The WPI research team has an established record of accomplishments in analyzing and designing impact resistant structures. Much of this work has been accomplished using analytical methods, finite element analysis and full-scale crash testing. This proposal is for the development of an impact laboratory that can be used to perform dynamic impact tests of components and materials in support of a wide range of existing impact research projects. Currently, WPI researchers are limited to using quasi-static testing to determine material properties and failure mechanisms of structural components under impact loading. An impact laboratory would significantly improve the research team s ability to determine material properties and failure mechanisms at the low and moderate energy levels and strain rates typical in vehicle impacts. Such information would dramatically improve and simplify the development of finite element models and reduce the number of expensive full-scale crash tests required to demonstrate the impact performance of a structural system. WPI has recently dedicated space in Kaven Hall for use as an impact laboratory. An Instron drop tower impact tester has been purchased using funds from a grant from the Keck Foundation and has just recently been installed in the laboratory. What remains is to expand the capabilities of this laboratory so that a wider range of impact events can be tested and a wider range of data can be collected. This proposal involves the development or acquisition of four major systems: (1) a bench-top pendulum impact tester, (2) a high-velocity gas-gun impact tester, (3) a large ballistic pendulum impact testers and (4) a universal data collection system that can be used with these three impact testers as well as the existing Instron drop-tower tester. The resulting laboratory, with four different types of impact testers and a general purpose data collection system, would be a powerful and unique facility for impact research. The bench-top pendulum impact tester is an off-the-shelf device that can be used to perform a number of standard dynamic material characterization tests like Charpy and Izod ASTM tests as well as standard biomechanics tests like dummy head form impacts. The gas-gun impact tester is a unique device that will be developed by the research team. This device allows for higher velocity impacts with small masses and can be used to test scale models of structures as well as determine higher strain rate material properties. The device proposed herein is based on a similar device developed and built by Carney and Villette at Vanderbilt University. The ballistic pendulum will be developed by the research team based on several much larger devices built by the Federal Highway Administration, Southwest Research Institute and Texas A&M University. A ballistic pendulum provides the capability to perform low-velocity impacts with larger mass and can be used to test scale models or materials. These three devices and the existing drop tower will allow the research team to explore impacts at a wide range of velocities using a wide range of masses while still working in a laboratory environment. The universal data acquisition system consists of a computer interfaced to all the impact testers and high-speed video cameras that can be used with all of the impact test stands. The impact testers have all be designed such that they can use the same types of data acquisition equipment and software which will greatly simplify the task of integrating all the impact testers into a single fully functional laboratory. The research team has a demonstrated ability to perform meaningful research as shown by the team s current and pending research activities. Developing an impact laboratory would help provide a broader well-balanced approach to studying impact problems by incorporating dynamic laboratory experiments with classroom instruction, graduate research and sponsored research. The ability to perform dynamic tests would compliment the team s existing expertise and capabilities in analytical and finite element analysis and structural design. The development of such a lab would enhance the research team s ability to perform important basic graduate research in the area of impact mechanics as well as attract additional funding from sponsors interested in the performance of structures during impacts doc4409 none The Division of Statistics at the University of California at Davis will purchase a 32 node Beowulf supercomputing cluster which will be dedicated to the support of research in the mathematical and statistical sciences. The equipment will be used for several research projects, including in particular: studying regression trees for correlated survival data, specifically prognostic classification of cancer and dental patients; Bayesian analyses for detection of climate change and attribution to specific anthropogenic causes such as increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide and sulfate aerosols; linkage analysis incorporating age of onset and clustering methods to study gene expressions; nonparametric prediction regions for multivariate, nonlinear stochastic processes; and analysis of functional or curve data in experimental aging research doc4410 none Painter This grant will help develop a new instrument for polymer characterization that will combine dielectric relaxation and two-dimensional (2D) infrared spectroscopic measurements. Dielectric relaxation measurements have been used for many years as a probe of the dynamics of polymer chains, through the detection of the transitions and relaxations that are a result of various types of coupled or local motions. Infrared spectroscopy provides a probe of molecular level structure and, in certain systems, intermolecular interactions. Clearly, a technique (or, more accurately, a hybrid-technique) that can measure the temperature and frequency range of various transitions and relaxations, while simultaneously probing the functional groups involved and the degree to which their motions are coupled, would be an extremely powerful analytical tool. Essentially, we will use a dielectric spectrometer to provide an oscillating electric field to modulate the dipoles of a sample. This modulation can be probed by infrared spectroscopy. Applying standard methods of cross-correlation analysis, the resulting in-phase and out-of-phase signals can be used to construct two dimensional plots, which, amongst other things, allow an identification of the functional groups whose motions are coupled. By varying the oscillatory frequency applied to the sample and its temperature, the molecular basis of the relaxations and transitions that occur in polymer (and other) materials can be investigated, providing a new and powerful probe of structure and dynamics. The new instrument will be initially applied to the range of problems facing our research groups, including the identification of the functional groups involved in specific interactions in polymer blends, the dynamics of functional groups and chain segments in such mixtures, the relaxation phenomena that occur in crystallizable miscible blends, relaxations in polymer liquid crystals and polymer dispersed liquid crystals, and so on. %%% When a polymer chain is subjected to some external force, such as stretching or other types of mechanical deformation, the chains take time to adjust or relax to a new conformation. Relaxation processes in polymers are complex and depend upon factors such as the flexibility of the individual chains in a sample and how much different chains are tangled up with one another. Relaxation processes have a profound effect on the properties of polymers and hence their uses, ranging from applications in everyday life to their incorporation into advanced devices. An understanding of the molecular mechanisms involved in such relaxations is therefore important in not only understanding the behaviour of polymers presently in use, but designing materials for new applications. Unfortunately, this information is not easily obtained, as certain techniques can measure relaxation processes, but give no information on the molecular mechanisms involved, while others probe the molecules themselves, but give no information on relaxations. To solve this problem we are proposing to build a new hybrid instrument that will simultaneously probe molecular relaxations (or polymer dynamics) and molecular level structure. Dielectric spectroscopy and infrared spectroscopy, respectively, are the two techniques that will be combined and the new instrument will be called a 2D-FTIR Dielectric Spectrometer. The two techniques are both standard tools for analysis and our task is to construct a sample cell that will allow these to work together doc4411 none Gasser As the precursors to seeds, ovules play essential roles in sexual plant reproduction and crop productivity. Because ovule development includes processes which typify development in all multicellular organisms, it can serve as a model for studying fundamental mechanisms regulating the processes of morphogenesis and tissue differentiation. Genes regulating critical steps in ovule development have been identified through studies on mutations affecting this process in Arabidopsis thaliana. Three mutants affecting growth of ovules, or specific substructures, will be used to elucidate the regulation of ovule development. HUELLENLOS (HLL) is essential for maintenance of ovule growth, and SHORT INTEGUMENTS 2 (SIN2) and INNER NO OUTER (INO) are essential for complete formation of the integuments (which go on to form the seed coat). INO encodes a putative transcription factor and exhibits a tightly regulated pattern of expression in ovules. The mechanism of INO regulation will be examined by dissecting the regulatory elements in the promoter region, and by testing such elements for interactions with putative regulators of this gene. HLL encodes a protein with significant similarity to the L14 subunits of bacterial ribosomes. mRNA and protein localizations will be used to determine the expression pattern and subcellular location of the protein product of this gene. These studies will test the hypotheses that HLL has an essential cellular role, or that it is a novel regulator of ovule development. Following isolation, the SIN2 gene will be subject to similar analysis. DNA microarrays will be tested with probes deriving from mutant tissues to assess the utility of this method in evaluation of overall patterns of gene expression in ovules and integuments. Completion of the proposed research will significantly increase our understanding of genetic and molecular control of plant reproductive development and of morphogenesis and histogenesis in general doc4412 none The proposed research project investigates the role of sleep in the behavioral and psychosocial development of preschool children. The preschool age was selected for study because: a) it is a time of explosive development in all areas important to normal functioning and b) it is during this time that children are learning to adjust their sleep habits to changing biological and social pressures. The primary objective of the proposed research is to show that a child s social, emotional, and cognitive functioning are related to the quantity and quality of his her usual pattern of sleep. This relationship is expected to be strong for preschool children as both sleep problems and behavioral problems are common at this age. A representative sample of approximately 300 three- to five-year old children of varying SES and ethnic background will be selected for enrollment in the study from a tri-county area in Mississippi. Behavioral sleep quality and its determinant factors will be assessed using a newly constructed questionnaire interview. This questionnaire will permit a more comprehensive assessment of the relationship between sleep and psychosocial functioning. In this way, the proposed research addresses limitations of existing research on sleep and daytime functioning in young children, which has been stalled by inadequate measurement tools. The investigators believe that this project will act as a building block for extended data collection in this sample to test the prediction that the level of a child s functioning during the early school years will be related to the overall amount and quality of his her sleep during preschool years. This prediction is based on the proposition that sleep is a fundamentally important activity for developmental processes shaped by a child s level of alertness, emotional behavioral stability, and attention capacity doc4413 none This research project is to employ high throughput screening techniques, combinatorial chemistry, and combinatorial biocatalysis to identify novel displacers and affinity ligands for the purification of biomolecules. This project is also to bring together synergistically recent advances by the Principal Investigators (PIs) in these fields. The intent is to produce a new paradigm for the discovery of powerful new bioseparating agents doc4414 none Brillson The combined secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), cathodoluminescence spectroscopy (CLS), and high temperature pressure processing (HTP) instrumentation will provide coupled chemical and electronic analysis of solid state materials. It will operate at the state-of-the-art in detection of trace elements and their influence on electronic properties in solids. It will enable: (1) topographical mapping and chemical identification of elements in one step with spatial resolution of 100 nanometers and detectability of less than 10-100 parts per billion, (2) chemical analysis as a function of depth below a material s surface to detect buried layers, impurities, and products of chemical reactions with a detectability of less than 10 parts per billion, (3) cathodoluminescence mapping and electronic identification of localized states and band structure of the same volume of material with spatial resolution of 20 nanometers and detectability of less than 10 parts per billion, (4) fabrication and analysis of advanced microelectronic, optoelectronic, and electrochemical materials structures by controlled heating and surface chemical reactions under ultrahigh vacuum conditions. The instrument will be used to train students to perform fundamental and interdisciplinary research in areas as diverse as electronic materials, ceramic sensors, metal corrosion, carbon-based electrochemistry, and light emitting organic materials. %%% The electronic, chemical, and mechanical performance of many solid materials can depend sensitively on the presence of particular atoms on or near their surfaces. For example, even trace amounts of such atoms can dramatically change how a computer s semiconductor transistors switch, how a car s ceramic sensors detect gases, how resistant an aircraft s turbine blades are to corrosion, or even how efficiently a plastic film can emit light. The SIMS-CLS-CP instrument will be able to detect and identify all the atoms present in solid materials, even if a particular element s concentration amounts to only 10 atoms out of a billion. To accomplish this, the instrument bombards the material with charged atoms to eject and analyze other atoms from the target solid. The instrument will provide three-dimensional maps of each element present and its concentration. A beam of electrons will bombard the same target area to produce maps of light whose wavelengths reveal electronic properties, especially how well the solid carries electricity and transforms one form of energy into another. The feature size of these overlapping chemical and electronic maps is less than a few hundred atoms square. The instrument will shuttle materials between analysis and processing stations for heating materials in different gases, producing chemical reactions, and measuring the new physical properties that result. Besides research, the instrument will also serve to train students in materials science and technology doc4415 none A state-of-the-art Philips Tecnai F30 Helium Electron Microscope with an attached Gatan Imaging Energy Filter (GIF) and 2Kx2K CCD detector will be used for high-resolution biological imaging at both the atomic and cellular levels. Increasingly, the frontiers of cell biology focus on elucidating the control of cellular shape and organization, the nature and function of cellular organelles, and the role of complex protein machines. Such project areas also define a new frontier for structural biology where the goals are to determine not the structures of individual molecules, but structures of supramolecular complexes as large as entire cellular organelles. Embodied in this goal is a switch from the largely reductionist approach of the past to one that is, at its heart, integrative. Electron microscopy (EM) is uniquely poised to meet this challenge. Single particle reconstruction methods (SPR) hold the promise of near atomic resolution structures of very large complexes while Intermediate Voltage EM Tomography (EMT) provides the unique ability to integrate this information into the context of the whole cell. The combination of Intermediate voltage (300kV) and Field Emission Gun provide optimal imaging for both thin and thick samples. Liquid helium cooling of the sample significantly reduces the effects of beam damage as well as the completely redesigned tilting stage provides unprecedented sample stability and freedom from drift. Addition of an imaging energy filter will revolutionize thick-section imaging and improve cryo imaging by removing inelastic electron scatter. The large area CCD will provide optimal on-line digital image recording. The result will be a facility unique in the US. Goals are to reach 25 angstrom resolution on EMT reconstruction of samples 200nm thick and to reach 4-7 angstrom resolution from SPR of particles larger than 500 KDa. The combination of the capabilities of this microscope with automated data collection methods being developed, should enable near atomic resolution reconstruction of single macromolecular complexes to become a reality. This instrumentation will empower major advances in cell biology and polymer science. A core user group of scientists from UCSF, Stanford, Berkeley, as well as the more distant Harvard and U. North Carolina has substantial tomography expertise and focuses on fundamentally important problems in biology and polymer science. Projects range from the understanding mechanisms controlling actin and microtubule cytoskeletal organization, the structure of chromosomes and mitotic spindle, the structure of the transcriptional initiation complex, the organization of the neuromuscular junction, and the guiding principles of organization in complex plastics. The equipment will be in the existing Electron Microscope Laboratory in the UCSF Biochemistry Department and in August will be moved to the new Mission Bay campus. This facility is available to the entire campus as well as to outside users. A center for electron microscope tomography will act as a magnet to attract and train top students and postdocs. The UCSF programs in Biophysics and Cell Biology provide excellent opportunities for training graduate students and actively seek to attract minority students to campus doc4416 none Tiwari, Sandip Cornell University-Endowed MRI: Equipment for Remote Usage, Access and Learning at NNUN This CISE MRI proposal will research The National Nanofabrication Users Network (NNUN) which proposes the acquisition of equipment and software to enhance the ability of the network to communicate between sites with remote users, and to provide remote training and fabrication-specific information, while providing remote computer aided design (CAD) capabilities. Specifically NNUN proposes acquisition of software and hardware for: (1) video conferencing between sites and external user institutions, (2) production of multimedia training and (3) allowing users to develop the bulk CAD pattern files remotely before arriving on-site doc4417 none Carey The MuLan Project will develop the instrumentation needed to measure the lifetime of the positive muon to unprecedented precision, namely, a factor of 20 better than the current world average. The muon lifetime fixes the value of the Fermi constant, which governs the strength of all weak-interaction processes, just as the fine structure constant governs the strength of all electromagnetic-interaction processes. The Fermi constant is one of the fundamental parameters of the Standard Model of particle physics. A low-energy, continuous-wave muon beam at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland will be modified by a new beam chopper system in order to create intense, short bursts of muons, which will stop in thin targets. A positive muon stopped in appropriate materials decays as if it were in vacuum. Such targets will be surrounded by a nearly hermetic set of 180 fast-scintillator timing detectors, each coupled to a state-of-the-art waveform digitizer, and all readout by a high-speed data acquisition system. Online analysis of the nearly 100 terabytes of data will take place with a small array of fast microprocessors. A second use of the instrumentation is in conjunction with an ongoing effort at PSI to measure the negative muon lifetime in hydrogen gas. The negative muon can decay exactly in the same manner as the positive muon, or in hydrogen it can interact with a proton by the weak-interaction process known as capture. The capture rate is predicted very accurately by theory; however, current experiments, which have various interpretation problems, are in disagreement with theory by a very significant amount. If this disagreement is confirmed, this difference raises the exciting possibility of pointing to new and unaccounted-for physics. By measuring the difference between the positive and negative muon lifetimes, we will determine the muon capture rate reliably and at a precision more than four times better than current measurements. The MuLan timing detectors, beamline and custom electronics are expected to play a major role in this effort doc4418 none NMR is the single most important analysis tool in the Departments of Polymer Science and Chemistry-Biochemistry at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM). This award will allow upgrade of five existing spectrometers to current technology (new consoles, electronics and probes for 3 solution and 2 solid state instruments) plus allow purchase of a much-needed 500 MHz instrument for determining primary and secondary structures of natural polymers such as peptides and poly(amino acids) that cannot be done now at USM. These new capabilities will greatly enhance hands-on educational efforts for on-campus and summer students (REU programs in both departments), and those that participate in summer activities and professional development workshops (for industry and for college and K-12 teachers). Research projects address a broad range of fundamental questions on polymer diffusion and relaxation, morphology, enzyme-substrate interaction and structure-property behavior. Most important is the capability these upgrades will provide for expanding previous efforts at USM in developing new methods for understanding solid state behavior of synthetic and natural materials using a wide-range of isotopic labels including carbon, nitrogen and deuterium. %%%% Public Understanding how atoms and molecules are joined together, and how they pack and move in solutions and in the solid state, helps solve problems in medicine, and in the aerospace and automotive areas. One technique that is unique in providing this fundamental knowledge uses NMR or nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. This method, which is similar to Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) used in looking inside the human body, actually looks at the atoms in plastics and enzymes to provide information on what those atoms are doing undergo strain or when they interact with other molecules like drugs. This award for upgrading and extending the NMR capabilities at the University of Southern Mississippi makes available state-of-the-art instruments for doing this type of analysis. Basic problems being addressed with this equipment include, for example, ways of improving the properties of polymers like nylon so it can be used in the automotive and aerospace industries to reduce weight and increase fuel efficiency. In the biomedical area, studying the natural polymers that make up the human body and keep us healthy will help us understand the problems such aging and cancer. This information also gives clues on how to develop new drugs and new materials that can repair or replace worn out and diseased organs. Most important is how the award will help educate students in Mississippi in basic science that will help them in careers in education, technology and medicine that will benefit all of America doc4419 none Michael Tsapatsis The Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst will purchase a gravimetric system for sorption studies in porous solids. The system that will be acquired and assembled is built around an in situ gravimetric adsorption system designed to operate from vacuum (10-6 torr) to 10 bar and from -195 C to 500 C. This system measures the weight of a powdered sample in contact with a flowing gas or mixture of gases. The adsorption, desorption or reaction on the solid is followed by the change of mass in time. On-line mass spectrometry or an on-line infrared detection system monitors the compositions of the gases passing over the sample allowing competitive adsorption studies. A common theme in the current projects of the investigators to be supported under this effort is the adsorption and transport properties of gases and vapors in microporous and mesoporous media. A wide range of activities is centered in this theme ranging from fundamental studies of adsorption equilibrium in porous media to practical applications of these materials in the forms of powders, monoliths and membranes for gas and organic vapor separations. Examples of activities include: Development of zeolites and other molecular sieve adsorbents and membranes Understanding hysteresis in adsorption isotherms Adsorbent structure modification during adsorption Phase transitions in porous media Development of new techniques for microstructural characterization of fabricated porous media The research to be carried out using the system is all currently funded from Federal sources and grants from private research foundations and US industry (NSF, ATP, NASA, DOE, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, Engelhard Co.). Five faculty members and their research groups currently consisting of over twenty-five graduate students and post-doctoral workers and more than ten undergraduate students will use the equipment requested in this proposal doc4420 none This award supports the 4th International Workshop on Discrete Algorithms and Methods for Mobile Computing and Communications (DIAL M for Mobility). This workshop is devoted for discrete algorithms and methods in the context of mobile and wireless computing and communications. The workshop is intended to serve as a forum for open discussions and lively debate, and to foster cooperation among practitioners and theoreticians doc4421 none semantically-sparse, verb-like forms. The planned experiments will employ a multi-task approach to investigate whether hemisphere-specific processing biases are modifiable based on relative vs absolute differences between words, and whether they can be potentiated by increasing the distinctiveness or heterogeneity of the stimulus context. Additional experiments will determine whether it is task complexity or stimulus heterogeneity that modulates the distribution of function across hemispheres, and identify the time course of such changes. The goal of this research is to better understand how the architecture of the human brain supports language behavior and, most importantly, how the use of different neural systems can be environmentally modulated. The latter has both theoretical and applied significance. While we cannot alter the manner in which different brain regions process information, we can potentially modify characteristics of the linguistic environment, particularly in educational settings doc4422 none The NSF Major Research Instrumentation grant funds a versatile imaging system based on new developments in the state of the art technology. The research instrumentation comprises (a) an extremely versatile, high resolution, image intensified framing streak CCD camera, (b) an all-solid state coherent, collimated and monochromatic laser light source to be operated in conjunction with the high-speed camera, and (c) a wide bandwidth, high sampling rate digital oscilloscope for use in various laser interferometry based optical techniques. The system represents a fundamental upgrade of the laser based diagnostic capabilities of several major laboratories in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and would support other research and development in the Case School of Engineering. The advanced capabilities of the new ultra-fast imaging system will be utilized by the PI, two Co-PI s and several other contributing faculty members of the Case School of Engineering for conducting fundamental experimental investigations in areas of importance to experimental techniques. The proposed equipment is expected to significantly encourage intra- and inter- university collaborations. At Case Western Reserve University the acquisition of the high speed imaging system will bring together talents and facilities in the Macromolecular Science, Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Civil and Environmental Engineering. These collaborative, multidisciplinary research efforts will explore fully the phenomena of high-speed friction between dissimilar materials, design and development of novel damage-tolerant light-weight multifunctional material systems, fundamentals of combustion and explosion science, reliability of MEMS devices, damage evolution and failure in bio-skeletal tissues of importance to trauma-biomechanics and orthopaedics, fundamentals of deformation processing with applications to high rate manufacturing, to name a few. Besides being useful on research and development, the new high-speed digital imaging system will provide an opportunity for laboratory experience and training for graduate and post-graduate students in the state-of-the-art of modern instrumentation. In addition to the basic scientific content within the proposed project areas, this training reaches into areas of applied technology that are bridged by elements within the proposed research that look for active opportunities in the development of instrumentation and novel experimental methods for advanced laser diagnostics of short duration events. One outcome of this would be the development of engineers who can integrate experimental and analytical techniques to attack technologically important areas. The Case School of Engineering at CWRU is strongly encouraging the involvement of undergraduate students in faculty research projects and this would occur for the proposed work as well. Every effort will be made to encourage and involve undergraduate and graduate students especially from groups presently under-represented in the engineering discipline doc4423 none This award will fund a cryoprobe for state-of-the-art nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) studies of biological macromolecules and natural products. The cryoprobe will be used at the UC Davis NMR Facility by researchers in the fields of chemistry, biochemistry, and structural biology. Specific examples include studies of the molecular structure and dynamics of proteins, nucleic acids, carbohydrates, lipids, and natural products from a variety of sources. The high sensitivity cryoprobe dramatically increases experimental sensitivity, reduces experimental run times, and lowers the minimum amount of sample needed for study, thus opening new areas of productive research. The cryoprobe package consists of a cryogenically cooled NMR probe, a mounting platform, associated cryogenic pumps and tubing, and a cryogenically cooled preamplifier. The probe will be a triple resonance type, with proton observation and both carbon and nitrogen decoupling channels. A Z-field gradient coil is also part of the probe. The probe sensitivity is approximately two to four times that of non-cryogenic probes for the same sample volume and concentration. This increase translates into reductions in run time of approximately four to sixteen fold. Such a drastic savings in run time effectively provides another entire spectrometer at a fraction of the cost. The probe will be capable of multi-resonance, multi-dimensional solution studies of biological macromolecules and natural products. The instrumentation will become part of the UCD NMR Facility. The Facility is utilized annually by over 40 faculty members (in approximately 20 departments of the Davis campus). These research groups have approximately 140 students and 50 postdoctoral fellows, of whom approximately 40 individuals are regular hands-on users of the instrumentation. The NMR spectrometers are an ancillary part of 14 classes annually with an average total enrollment of over 100 students. The spectrometers also serve as a state of the art resource for student and faculty recruitment. The cryoprobe will thus make a significant contribution to the research and educational infrastructure at the University of California, Davis doc4424 none Hayden The overall goal of this Major Research Instrumentation project is the development of a state-of-the-art, large scale, physical groundwater flow and transport modeling facility to be used in a variety of research and education training capacities. As a modern research facility, it will be used to: 1) investigate the applicability of computer-aided analysis and design tools to the solution of groundwater contamination problems; 2) study and evaluate fundamental scientific hypotheses regarding mass transport of contaminants in layered porous media; and 3) examine and assess remediation concepts for nonaqueous phase liquids (NAPLs) in heterogeneous (layered) environments. As an education and training facility, it will be an integral part of graduate and undergraduate teaching curriculum in civil and environmental engineering, geology and environmental sciences at the University of Vermont (UVM) and offers students a unique learning and research opportunity doc4425 none A Molecular Dynamics Storm PhosphorImager system will be used for the study of molecular chaperone gene expression and regulation in prokaryotic systems. The Molecular Dynamics Storm system is approximately ten times more sensitive than X-ray film and has 2.5 times the dynamic range. These properties and the data analysis software provided will allow for easy, fast, and accurate quantitation of data. This makes the Storm system an essential tool for looking at low levels of expression and accurate quantitation of labeled oligonucleotides for determining the dissociation constants for protein-DNA binding. The Storm system is amenable to the detection of radioactive isotopes and to chemifluorescence thus providing a non-radioactive option for students doing research while reducing radioactive isotope storage and disposal problems. The research will focus on characterizing the regulation of gene expression of the groESL and dnaKJ operons in Clostridium perfringens and Rhodobacter sphaeroides. The groESL and dnaKJ operons encode molecular chaperones that are conserved in prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms and play a critical role in the folding of proteins in cells. In C. perfringens, a food-borne pathogen, the research will combine the study of gene expression with the analysis of regulatory sequences and structural investigations of the protein-DNA complexes involved in regulation. By understanding the regulatory mechanisms of these systems it may be possible to design therapeutic compounds that inhibit the expression of these critical molecular chaperone proteins. The regulation of the molecular chaperone genes in R. sphaeroides is also of interest due to the different regulatory sequences present in the groESL and dnaKJ operons. This differential expression is unusual and may serve an important comparison model to the regulatory mechanisms of other bacteria. The combination of genetic and biochemical approaches to understand the regulatory mechanism of gene expression will complement each other and promote scientific research in both departments. SUNY Fredonia is a primarily undergraduate institution with small master programs in Biology and Chemistry. The Chemistry and Biology Departments jointly administer a new Biochemistry program, started in , for which Drs. Fountain and Lee are the primary professors. The Biology department also administers a Recombinant Gene Technology major. These programs serve a number of students that are interested in pursuing research in biochemistry and molecular biology. Undergraduate students are encouraged to participate in independent research and will collaborate on projects utilizing the Storm system. The departments of Biology and Chemistry emphasize the integration of teaching and research in the two programs. The Storm system will be utilized in upper divisional Biochemistry and Recombinant Gene Technology laboratories to provide training for students. This will provide unique opportunities for undergraduate students to utilize state of the art equipment. The Storm PhosphorImager will allow for a study of the roles of molecular chaperones and the regulation of their expression in C. perfringens and R. sphaeroides. It will also provide undergraduate student researchers the opportunities to participate in molecular and biochemical research projects using state of the art equipment doc4426 none Richards, Bradley Vassar College MRI: Acquisition of an Eight-Processor Sun Parallel Computer This proposal is to improve the scientific and pedagogical computational capabilities at Vassar College. Also, it is proposed to purchase an eight-processor Sun Enterprise shared-memory parallel computer with 4 gigabytes of RAM and 72 gigabytes of disk space. This machine will assist research groups focusing on the following problems: (i) parallel computing with the goal of improving the performance of parallel Java programs, (ii) hydrodynamics simulations of stellar interactions, and (iii) simulations to investigate reactions between BaCeO3 and water vapor. In addition to supporting faculty research, the new machine will also be invaluable for fostering and expanding student research and training doc4427 none Kidd This proposal seeks funds to equip two laboratories to be used as shared resources for a wide range of experiments in speech and hearing sciences. The two facilities are: (1) the Multi-station Auditory-Visual Laboratory (MAV Lab) and (2) the Anechoic-Echoic Laboratory (AEL). Both laboratories are to be equipped with networked computers with flexible experiment-control software for stimulus presentation and data collection. The MAV Lab will also serve as a general purpose multi-station testing facility for evaluation of speech and language abilities and for speech recording. The requested equipment will allow a very productive group of researchers to conduct a wider range of research with much greater efficiency. The Multi-station Auditory-Visual Laboratory (AM FLab) will be constructed to house up to ten study participants in two large double-walled, sound-treated booths that will permit computer presentation of auditory and visual stimuli at each of ten independent testing stations. The large sound-treated rooms will enable threshold-level sound intensities to be presented via headphones in various experiments while concurrently allowing for the testing of up to ten participants simultaneously. The use of two separate booths in this space will provide more flexibility in the use and scheduling of the facilities. Each testing station will be equipped with a 17 highresolution color monitor, keyboard and mouse, as well as a microphone for voice recording. These components from each testing station will be connected to separate Pentium III, 600-MHZ computers with accompanying electronic equipment needed for sophisticated listening experiments (programmable attenuators with 96 dB signal-to-noise ratios; multi-channel, 16bit, digital-to-analog converters with signal-processing array processors). The ten computers (one per testing station) will be housed in a separate room outside the double-walled booth to minimize internally generated noise in the test area. The MAV Lab will enable state-of-the-art testing in the areas of auditory perception, speech perception, visual perception, combined auditory-visual perception, language development, and general cognitive function. The Anechoic-Echoic Laboratory (AEL) will be housed in a facility that was refurbished by Indiana University approximately seven years ago. It is a unique facility with a large anechoic chamber immediately adjacent to an equally large echoic room, both specially constructed to eliminate outside noise and vibration. The facility, however, has seen very little use because of the lack of appropriate test equipment. This proposal requests funds to equip both the anechoic and echoic chambers with a computer-based stimulus-delivery and response-collection system, a computer dedicated for use in making complex acoustical measurements. A computer-controlled loudspeaker system that will permit precise, quiet movement of a loudspeaker at specified velocities along a circular path surrounding the human listener will be installed in the anechoic chamber. This system will be used to study the localization of sound, the perception of speech in background noise under real-world conditions, and the perception of the movement of sound sources in space. These two facilities will be used by several investigators in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences and their colleagues in other departments at Indiana University and at other universities. Several of the investigators will use the facilities for multidisciplinary projects that include a wide range of populations (e.g., infants, grade-school children, young adults, and the elderly) and many different disciplines (including physics, engineering, and architectural acoustics). These new laboratories will also provide state-of-the-art facilities for research training of students in Speech and Hearing Sciences. Additionally, the special capabilities of the AEL will be used for collaborative research with hearing aid manufacturers and engineers in the evaluation of new directional microphone technologies doc4428 none A thorough characterization of material microstructure is essential to improve the performance of existing materials and to develop new materials for innovative applications. A variety of instruments are available for microstructural characterization. The scanning electron microscope (SEM) equipped with an energy dispersive x-ray analyzer (EDX) and an orientation image mapping (OIM) system is one of the most popular. However, the application of an SEM for imaging, EDX, or OIM is limited when applied to materials that are not conductive and or contain volatile phases (NC VP). Volatilization of these materials can not only damage the SEM, but the results obtained may be negatively affected because the material under evaluation is fundamentally altered as a result of volatilization. These limitations are encountered when using the conventional SEM for characterizing most civil engineering materials, wood products, polymer composites, and some materials used in biomedical applications. Recent advances in instrumentation have resulted in the development of instruments that are uniquely suited for analyzing NC VP materials. Specifically, two of these instruments are the low-vacuum scanning electron microscope (LVSEM) and the x-ray microscope. In the case of the LVSEM, the sample can be viewed in a relatively high-pressure environment, which acts to dissipate any electrical charge that may develop on non-conductive specimens while minimizing volatilization. The x-ray microscope allows a specimen to be viewed at atmospheric pressure using transmitted and backscattered x-rays, as well as through optical microscopy. X-ray micro-fluorescence can also be performed to determine chemical composition of phases and micro-diffraction can be applied to determine the crystallographic orientation of the same microstructure. Without question, the ability to characterize NC VP materials is of paramount importance to a number of disciplines at Michigan Technological University (MTU) including civil, biomedical, and chemical engineering, as well as in wood sciences. Example applications include studies of portland cement concrete failure, observation of asphalt microstructure, investigations of various biomedical engineering materials, and research on various wood composite materials. Tensile compression and heating cooling stages are being included to allow for direct observation of deformation in these materials under controlled environmental conditions. A number of projects are planned using these instruments for the development of innovative materials or materials testing methods, including development of new biomedical engineering materials, research in conductive polymer resins, and methods of determining the water to cement ratio in a hardened concrete mixture. The instrumentation will also result in a hands-on approach to learning for graduate and undergraduate students, as well as provide the opportunity to draw promising high school students into scientific fields of study. In addition to enrolled college students, MTU currently expends great effort to motivate promising high school students to pursue scientific or engineering fields of study, particularly those from under-represented groups. Because of the versatility and capabilities of this equipment, entertaining and informative sessions are being developed and integrated into these efforts to build enthusiasm among high school students doc4429 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Oberlin College will acquire a 400 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) peptide-surface interactions and engineered biomaterials; b) direct measurement of secondary structure in a membrane receptor-ligand complex; c) coordination chemistry of alpha-azoimines; d) asymmetric catalysts; and e) mechanistic and synthetic studies of oxyallyl intermediates. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometry is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including biological chemistry doc4430 none The Department of Mathematics of the University of Alabama at Birmingham will purchase and assemble onsite a 25 node dual Pentium III Beowulf cluster using commodity personal computer technology. The cluster will be dedicated to support of research in the mathematical sciences. The equipment will be used in particular for the following mathematics research projects based in the Departments of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the Departments of Mathematics at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa): Inverse Problems: Ian Knowles. This project centers on the development of computational algorithms for elliptic inverse problems for groundwater modeling and medical imaging. Modeling Coupled Katabatic Ice Ocean Processes Related to the Energy and Carbon Budget in the High Latitude Southern Ocean: Richard T. McNider. It is the purpose of this project to test and further develop simplified two-dimensional coupled atmospheric, ocean, ice and biological models to elucidate the role of physical factors in Antarctic sea ice distribution and heat flux exchange and, ultimately, to address CO_2 exchange between the atmosphere and ocean. Coupled Stochastic Differential Equations: Ryoichi Kawai. When a number of nonlinear dynamical elements interact with each other in the presence of multiplicative noise, ordered phases appear via symmetry breaking noise-induced phase transitions, whereas the same system does not exhibit any interesting behavior in the absence of noise; this phenomenon is investigated computationally. Stability of Interfacial Flows: D. Halpern and A.L. Frenkel. The stability of thin films coating a capillary tube or a planar wall subject to a time-dependent forcing is investigated computationally . Intermediate Shocks for Magnetohydrodynamics: Yanni Zeng. This project is to study the nonlinear stability of intermediate shock waves occurring in magnetohydrodynamics doc4431 none Otto J. Gregory University of Rhode Island MRI: Acquisition of a High-Resolution Scanning Electron Microscope for Forensics and Surface Technology A high-resolution scanning electron microscope for forensic and surface sciences will be acquired. The capabilities of the instrument include low atomic number microanalysis (down to atomic number 4) along with the ability to characterize the microstructure and morphology of pressure and moisture-sensitive species in low vacuum (10-3 torr) environments. This latter feature is extremely important because it permits analysis of wet specimens such as liquids with low vapor pressure, polymers, cements, organic membranes, solvated surfaces, and biological specimens. In addition to these capabilities, the microscope is equipped with an automated programmable specimen stage and appropriate software for residual gunshot-residue analysis, and it has an oversized chamber that permits multi-specimen analysis without operator intervention. The state-of-the-art electron microscope with its expanded capabilities will have a major impact on the quality of research and teaching at the university. In particular, the equipment will provide an opportunity for university researchers in the Forensic Science Partnership and the State Crime Laboratory, located on campus, to develop new courses in textile classification, soils and marine specimen identification, and biological residue tracing. It will present new research opportunities in forensics such as residual gunshot residue analysis and bloodstain analysis. The university investigators in the Sensors and Surface Technology Partnership will also benefit from the acquisition. They are engaged in developing specialty thin-film materials for high sensitivity sensor applications ranging from optical strain gages to GMR high-density hard disk readers. Almost all of these materials developments depend on the ability to analyze rapidly and accurately the chemical composition, morphologies, and structures of the thin film materials involved in these devices, which frequently extend into the realm of nanotechnology doc4432 none Rimmele AST This project will build a state of the art adaptive optics system optimized to image the high spatial frequency structure in the solar photosphere and chromosphere. Theoretical magneto-hydrodynamics modeling of the solar photosphere using our current understanding of plasma physics, predicts that the pressure scale heights and the photon mean free path in the magnetized plasma of the solar atmosphere has a physical scale distance of 100Km. Also observations using speckle interferometry of the solar spicules which reveal information about the role of magnetic field in energy transport between the photosphere and the chromosphere indicate the presence of tightly wound plasma fields, unresolved with current telescopes. High-resolution studies of the sun will help us determine 1) how the dynamics of stellar atmospheres are driven by the interaction of the magnetic fields with the stellar plasma. 2) How magnetic fields are generated and amplified by dynamo processes. 3) How the magnetic fields are destroyed. 4) What physical mechanisms are responsible for heating the corona, variations in the solar constant, triggering flares and coronal mass ejections. The sun is the nearest star to the earth and the only star that can be studied in detail doc4433 none Farkas The applicant proposes to develop unique optical bioimaging capabilities, based on combining some of the most modern current methods in use: confocal and multiphoton-excitation microscopy, spectral imaging, and optical coherence tomography. The most important feature consists in integrating these (on the same workstation to investigate the same specimen), to yield complementary and, hopefully, synergetic information. The workstation resulting from such integration will constitute the centerpiece of a facility, located at the University of Pittsburgh but serving as a regional resource. The rationale is based on the demonstrated advances in physical, chemical, biological and engineering research that can be attained by adding imaging to the arsenal of investigative tools, and the acute need for new approaches to this task. The concept consists in extending what has been learned by the PI and his collaborators during the past decade in an NSF national center (CLMIB, Center for Light Microscope Imagining and Biotechnology at Carnegie Mellon University) predicated to the advancement of microscopic bioimaging. This will be achieved by developing new methods that have been assessed as necessary for advancing optical bioimaging applications. Combining instrument development with newly acquired state-of-the-art commercial devices and the experience gained from past efforts should result in new and relevant capabilities. It is likely that these improved capabilities will yield new insights, superior quantitation and better interfacing with other methods of study. The new funding requested is for development of a novel optical imaging station combining multiphoton excitation 3-D fluorescence measurements (in cells, tissues and in vivo) with optical coherence tomography and spectral imaging. This will be coordinated and augmented via new image processing approaches: remote access will also be implemented by telemicroscopy. The focal point of these developments is a special (and expensive) laser system, capable of both the high intensity, short duration (~fs-ps) near-infrared pulses needed for non-linear excitation, and the broadband output needed for high resolution OCT; additional, patented acousto-optic tunable filters technology will be applied to allow for versatile wavelength and timing selection in these experiments. Expected new capabilities include sub-millisecond spectral shifting, luminescence lifetime and anisotropy measurements, sub-cellular resolution optical coherence microscopy and spectral confocal and 2-photon imaging. Targeted application areas range from testing new dye chemistry and cell membrane fluidity to imaging nerve impulse propagation and minimally invasive sensor placement in vivo doc4434 none This SBIR Phase II project is aimed at developing a novel vibration mixer for the mixing of surgical grade bone cement. Self-curing polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) or acrylic bone cement is used extensively in total joint replacements, in the repair of bony defects and in the fixation of pathological fractures. For surgical use, the methylmethacrylate polymer and the liquid monomer are hand mixed. This hand-mixing entraps air bubbles making the cement porous. Presence of these bubbles adversely affects the mechanical properties of bone cement, making it much weaker under load and may contribute to early failure of cemented artificial joints. Results of the Phase I study indicate that ultrasonic vibration during cement mixing significantly reduced its porosity and increased the fatigue life and mechanical strength of bone cement, compared to hand-mixed cement. Recently, it was shown that combining sonication and vacuum mixing reduced the porosity and further improved the fatigue life, compared to either mixing methods alone. During the Phase II study, the frequency and amplitude of sonication and the vacuum pressure to obtain the best mechanical properties of the cement will be optimized. Subsequently, a new cement mixer will be designed and built incorporating these mixing features. It is expected that the improved mechanical properties of vibrated bone cement will reduce the incidence of cement fracture and this will improve the success rate of total joint replacements. Considering that cement mixers are used in several thousand hospitals in the United States alone, we expect this new cement mixer to be adopted by a large number of Orthopaedic surgeons in these hospitals doc4435 none Development of Equipment for Fabrication of Quantum Cellular Automata D.W. Greve Current interest in nanostructures and nanoelectronics is in part motivated by the perceived limits to scaling of current electronic devices. One critical barrier to the development of future nanoelectric technology is the development of techniques for patterning and the integration of patterning with device fabrication. In this project we will develop equipment for fabrication of one of the highly promising structures for future nanoelectronics. Quantum cellular automata are organized arrays of quantum dots which implement interconnection lines and logical operations. We will develop equipment for fabrication of quantum dot arrays which implement all the essential features of a digital electronic circuit. Quantum dot arrays will be fabricated on silicon substrates using silicon-compatible materials. The arrays will have a quantum dot size suitable for demonstration of operation at cryogenic temperatures (4-77 K) and the techniques used will have the potential for scaling to quantum dot sizes which will permit operation at room temperature. The apparatus we will develop integrates quantum dot lithography, growth of quantum dots and an overlayer, and in situ characterization facilities. This equipment will make possible development of a broad research program directed at future digital electronics. It will provide a focus for future semiconductor device and technology research, with strong potential for interactions with researchers both within and outside the university. This research will be highly interdisciplinary, and will also impact the education of undergraduate students through involvement in research projects and also through the develoment of new course materials specifically related to our nanostructure research doc4436 none This Major Research Infrastructure (MRI) award will provide instrumentation for atmospheric research at Storm Peak Laboratory (SPL). The instruments will focus on measurements of the physical characterization of the atmospheric particle size distribution over the complete size range from aerosol of diameter a few tens of nanometers up to and including cloud droplets. SPL, operated by the Desert Research Institute (DRI), is a mountain-top atmospheric research and teaching facility located at m elevation in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. The site is accessible year-round to researchers and educators who require an instrumented site in the middle troposphere to study the atmosphere and its physical, chemical, and biological properties. This project will permanently equip SPL with a set of instrumentation in the areas of research and teaching conducted by the principal investigators. An enhanced research focus will be developed regarding the mechanisms of aerosol interactions with physical, chemical, and radiative processes in the atmosphere doc4437 none The seasonal timing of seed germination may have critical consequences for plant survival and reproduction. In many plant species, seasonal seed dormancy and germination timing are strongly influenced by the environment experienced by the parental plant. This study will investigate the genetic control of seed dormancy and parental environmental effects on dormancy in the annual weed Arabidopsis thaliana, a species widely used for molecular genetic studies. Genetic mapping will identify chromosomal regions (quantitative trait loci or QTL) associated with variation in seasonal dormancy, parental environmental effects, and fitness under field conditions. Experimental manipulation of parental day length and the seasonal germination environment will investigate how parental environmental effects on seasonal dormancy influence survival and reproduction in the field. This study will be among the first to identify genes associated with seasonal dormancy, parental effects, and fitness under natural conditions. It will provide an important ecological context for numerous molecular genetic studies of development in A. thaliana. The results will elucidate the molecular basis and ecological context of a plant character crucial to survival and performance in variable environments. Appropriate germination responses to environmental cues may contribute to the persistence of plant populations in a variable environment or their expansion into novel habitats. The results of this study will be therefore be relevant for understanding the evolutionary dynamics of agricultural weeds and invasive plant species, as well as the management of rare or endangered plant populations in changing environments doc4438 none Instrumentation will be acquired that will provide the core for a new Molecular Imaging Facility at the Southeast Environmental Research Center (SERC) of Florida International University (FIU). An Epics Altra flow cytometer equipped for cell sorting and detection of submicron particles will be purchased from Beckman-Coulter Corporation, and a FLA -G phosphor imager will be purchased from Fuji Medical Systems. Both of these instruments will be part of an interdisciplinary multi-user facility that will be used for research and research training by the FIU scientific community. The flow cytometer to be acquired has the resolution to visualize even the smallest bacterial cells, and with the cell-sorting option it can rapidly and automatically isolate and collect specific cells from liquid samples, based on those cells particular light scatter or fluorescent properties. Therefore, this instrument not only provides an incredibly powerful tool for characterization enumeration but also for the collection of specific populations (such as specific types of bacterial cells, phytoplankton, or spores). The phosphor imager system to be acquired is a multi-label system, which can detect and digitally record images of samples labeled by radioactivity, fluorescence, and chemiluminescence. It will be used to image electrophoresis gels, blots, labeled tissue, etc. The FLA -G phosphor imager was chosen because of its sensitivity, resolution and versatility since it will also permit the use of other non-radioactive labeling strategies. There are a wide variety of projects that will utilize either or both of these instruments. Typically, the phosphor imager will be mostly used for in vitro analysis (in vitro hybridization, genetic fingerprinting, differential display of gene expression, incorporation studies, etc.) while the flow cytometer will handle the in situ or in vivo characterization of whole cells particles by their scatter and fluorescent properties. Most of the in vivo intact cell analyses by flow cytometry will be used to reveal their numbers, activity, and autofluorescent properties. A variety of other investigations will use intact cells that have been fluorescently labeled based on their specific genotype or phenotype. The acquisition of this instrumentation and the establishment of an Environmental Molecular Imaging Facility at SERC will significantly advance research and educational opportunities at FIU. The instrumentation acquired through this grant will be combined with particle counters, epifluorescent microscopes, digital imaging systems, and other molecular biology resources to provide a concentration of expertise and equipment to the research community within FIU and SERC for molecular biology imaging. This facility will help the faculty and students to adapt and develop appropriate molecular imaging applications to enhance their research doc4439 none Jon P. Longtin State University of New York Stony Brook MRI: Development of a Coherent Gradient-Sensing Tomographic Interferometer: Application to 3D Transient Temperature, Concentration, and Refractive Index Meas-urement This project combines a novel interferometric measurement technique, Coherent Gradient-Sensing Interferometry (CGI), with multi-view tomography to develop a powerful new tool for transient, three-dimensional (3D) measurement of temperature, concentration, or density in fluid systems. The unique advantages of CGI over traditional interferometric techniques include: (1) complete insensitivity to vibration, (2) no reference-beam requirement, (3) continuously variable sensitivity, and (4) lower cost, and (5) more reliable operation. These features make a CGI-based instrument particularly well suited for portable and commercial applications. This novel instrument consists of a CGI interferometer capable of rotating around a transparent test cell to capture interferometric images at different angles, which are then used to compute transient, 3-D profiles of thermophysical properties such as temperature, concentration, or density for the fluid-thermal system in the test cell. Measurement of three-dimensional, time-varying profiles of temperature, concentration, and density is critical for the understanding and optimization of many engineering, biological, and geophysical thermal-fluid systems. Examples include advanced materials processing; natural and forced convection, and surface-tension-driven heat transfer; mass transfer, and species pro-duction; and biological and bio-engineering phenomena. Such measurements are needed to vali-date computer simulations of such situations. The successful development of the CGI Tomo-graphic Interferometer provides, for the first time, direct, transient, 3-D measurement capabilities for transport phenomena in fluid-thermal systems. Some immediate applications of the instru-ment will include measuring temperature and concentration during simulated crystal growth, measuring temperatures during laser-induced surface-tension-driven flows, monitoring tracer concentrations in flow through mechanical heart valves, measuring temperature and concentra-tion during melting and solidification, and assessing 3D crack structures in transparent solids. A prototype instrument is also being developed that will be portable and available for other labo-ratories and local companies for evaluation and application. Furthermore, the instrument devel-opment itself is an excellent vehicle for training students in optical systems and image process-ing doc1191 none This proposed project consists of four empirical studies of competitive bidding behavior in several different auction markets. We develop a sequence of estimation and testing methods for bidding models, focusing on common value environments where the competing bidders are assumed to be differentially and incompletely informed about the value of the object(s) for which they are vying. The second study involves on-going joint research with Professor Phil Haile in the University of Wisconsin. A distinguishing feature of common value auctions, and a recurring theme in the analysis, is the winner s curse, which arises because the winner in an auction will tend to be the bidder who has overestimated the object s value the most. Rational bidders will avoid this undesirable outcome by bidding less aggressively. In the first project, we use data from procurement auctions run by the New Jersey Department of Transportation in order to address whether equilibrium bidding becomes more or less aggressive as the number of bidders increases and, therefore, whether attracting additional bidders will lower equilibrium procurement costs. In the second project, we formalize a nonparametric statistical test for the presence of common value elements by exploring the variation in the number of bidders which is present in many auction datasets. This test relies on detecting the effects of the winner s curse, which are present only in common value environments. In the first two projects, a symmetric model of competitive bidding has been assumed. In the third project, we extend our estimation method to allow for ex ante bidder asymmetries and use this method to analyze the auctions used by the United States Department of the Interior since the late s to allocate offshore oil and gas drilling rights in the outer continental shelf of the Gulf of Mexico. While the first three studies focus on bidding in single-object common value auctions, the fourth project is an empirical analysis of double auction markets. Using data from milk quota auctions administered in the province of Ontario, Canada, we investigate, first, whether common values are present in these auctions (arising from producer uncertainty and private information about future milk prices) and, if so, whether the implied winner s curse is leading to more conservative bidding for producers who wish to transact large amounts of quota. Second, we measure the extent of market power possessed by large bidders in this market by developing a structural model of bidding behavior. The results of this research have potentially important policy implications given the prevalence of auctions as allocation mechanisms in practice. Government agencies at the municipal, state, and federal levels routinely procure services through a competitive bidding process. Similarly, across many states, there are plans to allow for competitive demand and supply bidding in deregulated electricity markets via uniform-price double auctions. Finally, agricultural subsidies--of which milk production quotas are one example--are a perennial bone of contention amongst the G7 countries. While the fourth project does not directly address the desirability of these subsidies, it does shed light on the efficiency of a competitive bidding environment in allocating these subsidies. More broadly, the ideas of increasing competition and lower prices are often inseparable in competi-tion and regulatory policy, but this research highlights the possibility that when market participants have imperfect information about their environment, increasing competition might be associated with higher prices, if winner s curse effects are strong enough. In short, there appear to be important efficiency and revenue lessons to be learned from the proposed projects doc4441 none Katiyar This grant supports the acquisition of a UV microRaman spectrometer at the University of Puerto Rico, San Juan. The instrument provides means for both fundamental and applied studies in materials where the conventional Raman signal is too weak. Then, it becomes necessary to use specialized techniques such as near resonance excitation and the possibility of interference enhancement, available in the current instrument along with higher scattering efficiency, higher sensitivity, selectivity and spatial resolution. The technique will be used to study ferroelectrics, solid state ionics and other wide bandgap materials. Such a non-destructive technique is also useful for the studies of biological systems. Thus there will be a direct impact on the studies of biological molecules at the Medical Campus of UPR. There will be further strengthening of research collaboration with Government laboratories and other universities facilitated by the exchange of data in the range of submicron to nanometer lengthscales in various materials. This grant supports the acquisition by the University of Puerto Rico, a specialized instrument, ultra-violet Raman spectrometer, used to study materials over varying resolutions and with tremendous sensitivity. The materials will be examined using ultraviolet lasers and will be studied for a broad range of their properties. The technique can and will also be used to study biological materials doc4442 none A great deal of work in sentence processing over the years has been preoccupied with the question of whether contextual information can influence early parsing decisions. There is by now considerable evidence that suggests that at least some kinds of information from the discourse context do have such effects. However, the question of how these effects occur and where they come from has remained largely ignored. The possible mechanisms for discourse context effects range from very direct ones where classes of linguistic expressions trigger certain discourse representations, to ones involving subtle inferential mechanisms that evaluate the likely discourse functions of alternative linguistic expressions. The studies in this project focus on the discourse properties of modified definite noun phrases. Work in sentence processing has shown that the resolution of ambiguities in which one of the possible readings involves noun modification is affected by the availability of a discourse model in which the modificational phrase serves to distinguish between two possible referents. A central question is whether such discourse effects found with modifiers reflect a general, conventionalized property of modification, or whether they are more aptly characterized as a subtle system of expectations regarding typical usages. A series of studies is proposed to investigate the hypothesis that a typical default expression exists for neutral (i.e. non-contrastive) contexts, and that the use of a more marked or informative expression signals a contrastive function in the discourse that has immediate processing consequences. Data from elicited production tasks will be collected and directly compared with on-line comprehension results from eye movement experiments that allow for the monitoring of subjects eye movements to a visual array in response to spoken linguistic stimuli. It is suggested here that the discourse effects previously observed with modified NPs are not limited to modified expressions, but extend to other cases involving deviation from a default expression (e.g. the distinction between basic-level and subordinate level expressions as identified in the categorization literature). Experiments testing this hypothesis will be conducted both by means of production and eye monitoring experiments, as well as by building on work in more traditional methodologies such as reading time studies of temporarily ambiguous sentences doc4443 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa will acquire a High Field (W-Band) Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) Spectrometer. Among the research programs in which EPR spectroscopy will play a vital role are: a) the study of carotenoids as radical scavengers; b) the mechanism of formation of mesoporous silicas; c) use of molecular genetics and high-field EPR to identify and characterize the binding site of the phylloquinone cofactor in Photosystem I; d) ferromagnetic resonance studies of high-anisotropy magnetic media; e) studies of biologically-relevant first row transition metal assemblies; and f) EPR spectroscopy of localized radical cations within redox-gradient dendrimers. An electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectrometer is an instrument used to obtain information about the molecular and electronic structure of molecules. It may also be used to obtain information about the lifetimes of free radicals which are often essential for the initiation of tumor growth and or a variety of chemical reactions. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, especially materials science and biochemistry doc4444 none This project will investigate how Tzeltal Maya reconcile their understanding of illness with the biologically-based characteristics of plants in order to select and maintain consensus about medicinal plant cures. Using an approach centered around cognitive prototypes (prototypes from the domains of plants and illness), the researcher will identify variables (taste, plant distribution, cultural interpretation of plant characteristics, etc.) employed by the Maya in selecting plants for medicinal use. A number of hypotheses concerning the relationship between these variables and selection will be tested, as well as hypotheses about the relationship between specific illnesses and plant types. Methods include structured interviews with samples from the population, a plant survey, and elicitation techniques regarding plant illness qualities. Comparative data from Maya migrants will also be gathered to assess the degree to which these same cognitive prototypes guide plant selection in environments with different flora. This project will contribute to the field of cognitive science and to our understanding of how indigenous populations conceptualize and use medicinal plants to cure illness doc4445 none Animals lose water through a variety of avenues, including evaporation from the skin surface, respiratory water loss and excretory water loss. It has long been known that insects may be particularly vulnerable to rapid water loss due to their small size and their occurrence in dry environments, including (stored grain, deserts, saline waters, etc.). This project includes studies on the mechanisms of water regulation in populations of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, which have undergone selection for more than 200 generations for increased resistance to dry environments. Use of fruit flies that have undergone selection for resistance to dry environments provides several experimental advantages. Selection leads to large physiological differences in a single species, allowing detailed physiological comparisons to be carried out. The history of the populations is known, as is the timing of the processes by which the physiological changes have occurred. Finally by conducting these studies with fruit flies, a vast array of molecular and genetic techniques becomes available for studying the mechanisms of water regulation in insects. Such work may be very helpful in developing techniques for interfering with water balance in insect pest species, in the production of new non-toxic insecticides, and in the discovery of novel insect control strategies doc4446 none This project consists of two parts concerned with the determinants as well as the implications of inequality both between people and across countries. The first part studies recent rather dramatic changes in the composition of U.S. households. Between the mid seventies and the beginning of the nineties the share of non-married females grew dramatically in the U.S. (from 17% to 30% in the 30 to 44 age group). At the same time that people are living less as married couples. there has been a steady increase in out of wedlock child-raising that increased the share of single mothers from 12%o to 17% of the total female population, while total fertility remained constant over the same period. There has been another major change in the sane time period: the structure of wages is much different now than twenty five years ago. There has been a modest increase in average wages. together with fairly large increases in the ratio of wages of college to non-college educated and in the ratio of women s to men s wages. This project investigates the contribution of the changes in wages to the aforementioned demographic changes. To this end, a model is constructed where agents differ in age. sex, education. wages, and in the type of family they live. Agents search for a mate, make marital status and fertility decisions and invest in their children s education. The model is calibrated so that it replicates the economic and demographic characteristics of the mid seventies. Next, the model is studied with only changes in wages, absolute and relative (across sexes and education levels) to see how much of the changes in the type of family that people live in can be traced back to changes in wages. The project may have far reaching implications. The findings of a recent body of empirical literature indicate that factors that happen early in life. before age 16, account for most of the differences in lifelong achievements of people. Moreover, it seems that the type of family where children grow up contributes significantly to shape those achievements: the presence of both parents yields more successful children than one parent alone. This implies that a change in household structure of the magnitude observed can shape the characteristics of the next generation of Americans, not only in terms of their average achievements, but probably and in a more dramatic fashion, for the characteristics of inequality. Understanding the mechanisms that generate the changes in family type seems to be a very important task. The second part of the project attempts to understand how differences in the wealth and productivity of nations affect the type of taxing policies that they choose. How do taxes of poorer countries compare to those of richer countries? Why does the U.S. tax capital more intensively than Europe? To answer these questions the investigator develops a model where governments are benevolent towards their own citizens, and choose how to best collect revenue thorough different forms of taxation (corporate taxation, and personal labor income and capital taxation) at different rates. Moreover, these governments cannot commit to future policies, they can always change their mind. In this model government policies of rich and poor countries are interrelated since capital can flow across countries. This part of the project might also shed some new light on the issue of whether it is a good idea that governments can coordinate their policies doc4447 none An analytical transmission electron microscope (TEM) and a cryotransfer system (to complement a field emission scanning electron microscope (SEM) and expand its capabilities) will be placed in the Center for Advanced Ultrastructural Research at the University of Georgia. For nearly 50 years transmission electron microscopy (TEM) has been making significant contributions to our understanding of cell structure and function, crystal structure, systematics, microbial community structure, materials analysis, and countless other fields. Today TEM plays a crucial role in biological research especially in the areas of biomolecular localization (e.g. immunogold labeling) and structural cell biology. Likewise SEM plays an essential role in the characterization of minerals and other materials. The new TEM will be equipped for the research needs of biologists and non-biologists and will serve as the primary research TEM for the University of Georgia. In order to provide the greatest benefit to the largest and most diverse number of researchers a TEM must be able to do more than take high magnification images. It must be capable of performing electron diffraction, X-ray microanalysis, and high tilt imaging for tomography and be adaptable for techniques such as cryoTEM. Similarly the cryotransfer system will complement the Center s three-year-old field emission SEM. The LEO 982 is one of the highest resolution (1.5 nm at 20KeV) SEMs on the market. Equipped with a light element EDS X-ray microanalysis system, backscatter detector, and in-lens secondary electron detector for high resolution, the Center s SEM is able to meet the research needs of many University of Georgia scientists. The cryotransfer system will allow for the examination of hydrated specimens. During conventional specimen preparation, samples must be dehydrated using organic solvents and critical point drying or freeze-drying. Highly hydrated specimens such as polysaccharide matrices, oils, and clay slurries are often significantly altered during this process. Likewise samples that are easily disturbed or are hard to preserve in their natural state (e.g. bacteria or fungal hyphae on a substrate) can be washed off during the process and thus the data acquired from the images can be significantly altered. A cryotransfer system allows one to rapidly freeze a sample and examine it directly in the SEM. While this technique is not appropriate or even necessary for many routine specimens it is often the only method by which certain specimens can be examined. The addition of cryotransfer capabilities to the LEO 982 will significantly increase the utility and versatility of this instrument and allow for many new applications that cannot presently be attempted by Georgia researchers. The Center plays an essential role in the development of graduate training and research programs for 20 different departments and more than 150 individual laboratories. In recent years, the Center s role has expanded to include confocal, quantitative fluorescence, and digital imaging and analysis, and the Center now functions as a core microscopy and imaging facility for the University. This equipment is available to researchers from the University of Georgia as well as other regional institutions and incorporated into the student-training program of the Center, which includes formal courses in microscopy, cell biology, geology, food sciences, as well as informal tours doc4448 none This proposal requests funds to upgrade the existing Princeton Subpicosecond Laser Facility by replacing the current KrF amplifiers with a 600 mJ, 10 Hz repetition rate, multipass Ti Sapphire amplifier. The funds requested are for direct purchase of the system from a commercial company. The first objective of the upgraded system is to further exploit ideas for the development of a compact soft x-ray laser in the water window region of the spectrum that is potentially so valuable for biological applications. At the same time, the facility would serve as a resource for faculty members and graduate students from different departments in multi-disciplinary projects, including Raman amplification of subpicosecond pulses, study of surface modification of solid materials, and the study of property changes in thin layers of semiconductor materials doc4449 none Hemley This award provides partial funding support for the development of a multi-user facility for high-pressure infrared spectroscopy applied to earth and planetary science research. The facility will consist of a dedicated synchrotron beam line source of high-brilliance radiation in the infrared to visible spectra region. The facility will be located at port U2A of the National Synchrotron Light Source at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. The facility will contain a Fourier Transform IR spectrometer along with recently developed long working distance microscopes for high-pressure applications. Laser and grating spectrometer systems will also permit a variety of complementary optical experiments including Raman spectroscopy. The facility will permit systematic spectroscopic measurements on samples held at ultra-high pressure and temperature conditions that apply to a broad range of research problems in earth and planetary sciences doc4450 none Mao With its myriad recent advances, high-pressure research is emerging as a new dimension in physical science. Inelastic x-ray scattering (IXS) can provide high-pressure research with an arsenal of analytical capabilities for key measurements that were previously unattainable, and high pressure research can provide IXS with numerous applications where the technique has unique advantages over other methods. The integration requires a concerted effort in optimizing IXS instrumentation specifically for high-pressure experimentation at the third-generation synchrotron source. A facility will be developed for high-pressure investigations using non-resonant IXS, resonant IXS, nuclear resonant IXS, and x-ray emission spectroscopies with energy resolutions of 100 meV to 1 eV for the study of electronic transitions, and 1 to 10 meV for phonon studies. The impact of the facility will be truly multidisciplinary. By pressure-tuning materials over a wide range, it will be possible to investigate fundamental physics of the electron gas, strongly correlated electron systems, high-energy electronic excitations, and phonons in energy and momentum space. The results will impact materials applications as well as provide basic information for the deep interiors of the Earth and other planets. With its myriad recent advances, high-pressure research is emerging as a new dimension in physical science. The award will allow scientists to harness the enormous x-ray power of the newly established Advanced Photon Source at Argonne, IL for probing materials at high pressures. Inelastic x-ray scattering (IXS) instrumentation will be developed to provide high-pressure research with an arsenal of key analytical capabilities that were previously unattainable, and will help the U. S. to regain leadership at this frontier. Impact of the facility will be truly multidisciplinary. Extreme pressures impart drastic changes to all materials, some of which may have important technological applications, and some may reveal novel scientific principles. For instance, the highest temperature superconductor and the strongest superhard material are both synthesized at high pressures. The high-pressure IXS instrument will enable to see the structure of electrons and vibration of atoms and understand the fundamental physics under the extreme conditions. Such investigations will also provide basic information for the deep interiors of the Earth and astronomical bodies in which the constituent materials are under tremendous compressions doc4451 none A Fluorescence Image Deconvolution-Reconstruction Microscope will be used for a variety of different applications with living cells. Use will be restricted to observations of living cells that are present singly, or in thin specimens. This microscope generates a stack of fluorescent images at different focal planes, and then employs a set of sophisticated algorithms to determine point-spread functions for sources of fluorescence in the specimen. Out-of focus noise is subtracted from the signals in the image slices, and the slices are restacked to generate a three-dimensional reconstruction of the object at high resolution. Since small, bright objects placed against a dark background are detected as spots, it is possible to image fluorescence sources that are smaller than the theoretical limit of resolution for the microscope. During the last twenty years, developments in the design of novel indicator fluorescent probes have enabled biologists to attack formerly intractable problems in cell biology and cell physiology. The cellular processes that have been amenable to this kind of analysis include photoreception, neuronal transmission, animal development, hormonal signaling, triggered gene expression, mitotic regulation, and chemotaxis. The developments in fluorescent dye design have moved in parallel with improvements in our ability to visualize and measure low light intensity signals from small numbers of molecules in living cells, with newly-designed optical microscopes and large pixel array CCD camera detectors. It is reasonable to expect that a significant expansion of analysis of processes in living cells will result from combined developments of reporter molecules and digital imaging technologies. It seems clear that the convergence of developments in photochemistry, biochemistry, cell biology, physiology and microscopy are all about to intersect within the living cell, and when accurate assessments of changing abundance and activity of a variety of molecules can be made in vivo and through time. This microscope will be placed in an imaging facility that provides faculty, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students with access to several high performance microscopes equipped with the capacity to view small quantities of fluorescent reporter molecules in living cells doc4452 none Wegner MRI An upgrade of the infrared detector for the Ohio State University-NOAO infrared imaging spectrometer (ONIS) at the 2.4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory will be implemented. This has been a very productive instrument for astronomical research. The MDM Consortium, Inc operates the telescope, which is a consortium of Dartmouth College (1 3) and Ohio State University, Columbia University and the University of Michigan. In addition to doubling the field of view and wavelength coverage of the instrument, this upgrade eliminates serious cosmetic effect errors in the current system that causes calibration errors. The current detector will be replaced by an improved x pixel large format Raytheon InSb focal plane for use in the 1 to 3 micrometer wavelength region. The scientific research areas planned are wide-field surveys for extremely red objects (ERO s), infrared studies of globular cluster ages and infrared studies of supernovae doc4453 none This Major Research Instrumentation award is for the acquisition of a high performance computing cluster to facilitate the study of solar-terrestrial physics at the University of New Hampshire s Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS). The computing equipment will support studies related to the Geospace Environment Modeling program and the National Space Weather Program. The primary challenge of these programs is to model the flow of energy from coronal mass ejections on the sun via the solar wind, through Earth s magnetosphere and ionosphere, ultimately resulting in atmospheric heating, electrical currents, and auroral displays over the polar regions. The proposed facility will consist of a high-performance compute engine, data storage, and archiving hardware. The goal is to develop a user-friendly facility freely available to senior scientists, postdocs, and graduates students within the participating research groups. The facility will enhance efforts to simulate and model the solar terrestrial environment, facility the analysis of large volume data sets from multiple experimental programs, and aid the characterization of existing and developing instrumentation by providing a platform for generating instrument simulations with high statistics doc4454 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Mount Holyoke College will acquire a Circular Dichroism Spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) conformational studies and spectroscopic characterization of model peptides; and b) studies of the structure and properties of supramolecular systems inspired by naturally occurring ionophores and molecular recognition phenomena. Circular dichroism spectroscopy is an extremely useful tool in modern analytical chemistry. It provides a very reliable and sensitive method for assigning absolute molecular configurations. The results from these studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry and biochemistry doc4455 none Mathematical Sciences Scientic Computing Research Environments (SCREMS) Project The Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst proposes to purchase one SGI four-processor machine, one le server, ten X-terminals, a color laser printer, and site licenses for Maple and Matlab which will be dedicated to the support of research for the projects proposed here. We also request funding for partial support for one professional system administrator to setup and maintain this equipment. A specic list of the projects are as follows: Computations in Algebraic Geometry: hypergeometric functions, toric varieties, enumerative geometry (Eduardo Cattani, David Cox, Frank Sottile) Computational Number Theory: numerical and graphical investigations of Artin L -functions (David Hayes, Siman Wong) Mesoscopic theories and hybrid computational algorithms in materials science and uid mechanics (David Horntrop, Markos Katsoulakis, Bruce Turkington) Geometry, Computation and Visualization: minimal, constant-mean curvature, and Willmore surfaces in 3 and 4 dimensions (Robert Kusner, Nicholas Schmitt) The University of Massachusetts, Amherst will contribute cost sharing of 50% of the amount of this purchase, and will assume the full personnel costs after NSF funding ends doc4456 none Five controlled environment plant growth chambers will facilitate research of a cross-disciplinary group at Kansas State University (KSU) on the response of plants to biotic and abiotic environmental stresses. These chambers will provide controlled growth conditions crucial for understanding the mechanism by which plants perceive and respond to environmental cues. The acquisitions will facilitate the individual and collaborative research of the group members on understanding the biochemical, physiological and molecular changes in plants exposed to stress, identification of genes involved in stress signaling, development of plant varieties resistant to pathogens and insects, and understanding the molecular basis of cell division and cell death in plants. The growth chambers will enhance the quality and productivity of research at KSU by providing infrastructure for innovative research, through cooperative use of facilities and increased collaboration. Students will benefit from specialty courses providing training on plant stress response. The equipment will further facilitate and enhance the recruitment and training of women and minorities in plant biochemistry, physiology, molecular biology and genetics at KSU. Plant growth, development and productivity are influenced by environmental cues. The stress of disease, insect infestation, increasing global temperatures, limited water supply and chemical toxicity, limit plant productivity. The proposed work on understanding the perception and response of plants to biotic and abiotic environmental stresses will expedite the development of plant varieties with enhanced resistance to stress, thereby improving plant productivity, food quality, public health and the environment doc4457 none Neville There is virtually universal agreement that the 21 st century will be a time of unprecedented and unimaginable discoveries about the fundamental mechanisms that give rise to human thought and behavior. Catapulting us to this threshold have been key advances in cognitive science that have identified and specified interactions between the essential components of mental processes, and dis-coveries and technical advances within neuroscience that have made it possible to describe mechanisms of neuronal activity at cellular and molecular levels. - The previously ephemeral interface between these disparate levels of analysis has been strengthened by focussed efforts during this decade of the brain that have made comprehensive and noninvasive brain imaging a reality. Knowledge about the biology of cognition brings a perspective that is critical to understanding mental phenomena just as knowledge of the computations essential to cognition reveals constraints on how the brain performs its essential functions. An understanding of how functionally specialized brain systems develop is now within our grasp. The fundamental significance of these research enterprises lies in illuminating our mental capacities and vulnerabilities and in the benefits that such understanding will confer upon human society in the form of guidance in the design and implementation of educational programs to take advantage of the multiple, specific and limited time windows in human development when environmental input is most effective. Scientists at the University of Oregon (UO) have made significant and pioneering contributions to the componential analysis of cognition, to characterizing single neuron and population electrophysio-logical responses in animals and humans and from the conjunction of these strengths have established one of the world s foremost research and training programs at the interface of cognitive science and neuro-science, i.e. in Cognitive Neuroscience. UO scientists have also performed foundational studies using techniques that image blood flow and oxygenation in the brain iii studies of human cognition. However, since facilities for these studies are not available locally, such investigations have been severely limited in number, are conducted by only a few scientists and students and have been extremely expensive in time and funds because they have been conducted at sites distant from the UO. This application seeks support for the purchase of an MRI System so that each of the faculty and students within the many research and training programs that comprise cognitive neuroscience at UO can access this powerful new technique which has so recently defined a new level of analysis in the study of the human mind. This facility will be employed in basic studies investigating the brain systems and mechanisms important in selecting, localizing and attending to particular events in complex, ecologically valid, auditory environments (Takahashi et al.), the processing cascade involved in transforming visual signals into veridical perceptions and conscious experience (Dassonville, Sereno), systems important for motor control, sensory-motor integration and learning (Mayr, Woollacott, van Donkelaar), the pharmacological and anatomical analysis of covert orienting (Marrocco et al.), the interface between and mechanisms of spatial attention and spatial working memory (Awh), the architecture and encoding mechanisms of working memory and the dynamics of retrieval and forgetting (Awh, Anderson), the neurobiology of emotions and motivational influences on cognition (Tucker), the organization, plasticity and development of sensory and language relevant neural systems in adults and children (Neville, Canseco-Gonzalez, Corina) and the changes in neural circuitry underlying high level cognitive skill acquisition in adults and children (Posner, Rothbart). A unique feature of our research with MRI will be integration of its high spatial resolution with the high temporal resolution of state of the art electrophysiological recordings from humans and with the very high spatial and temporal resolution of single unit studies in non-humans, in which we have unique research strengths. Interdisciplinary research training has long been recognized as a keystone of education at the UO where interdisciplinary research institutes and training programs were established over two decades ago. The proposed facility would build on this unique strength of the UO and will bring it to a new level by providing powerful opportunities for the integration of information about cognition and the brain from multiple levels of analysis. Since there are currently no comparable MRI research facilities in the Northwest, user support from the regional science community will be strong doc4458 none Janes MRI A versatile instrument (PRISM) for the Perkins 72-inch telescope located on Anderson Mesa south of Flagstaff and operated by Lowell Observatory in Collaboration with Boston University will be developed. The telescope currently has no instruments since Ohio State has pulled out of the consortium which owns this telescope. This prism instrument will provide for wide-field imaging, polarimetry and low dispersion multi-object spectroscopy. The system will employ a large format ( x ), 15-micron pixel Loral CCD focal plane. Wide-field imaging on this 1.83-meter telescope will cover a 13.6 x 13.6 arcminutes field of view with 0.4 arcsecond pixels across the entire 0.32 to 1. Micron wavelength range. The moderate resolution grism spectrometer will cover the same spectral range with a spectral resolving power of approximately 1,000. Linear imaging polarimetry will cover 90 square arc-minute field of view with incremental polarization below 0.05%, across the 0.32 to 1-micrometer wavelength band doc4459 none A suite of instruments for a new laboratory (The University of Mississippi Laboratory for Environmental Biogeochemistry and Groundwater Analyses) will be used for studies of the biogeochemistry of groundwater. Instrumentation includes: (1) a Finnigan Delta Plus isotope ratio mass spectrophotometer, (2) a Perkin Elmer Optima DV inductively coupled plasma spectrometer, (3) a Dionex GP 50 ion chromatograph, and (4) a sample preparation line for isotope samples. Analysis of the acquisition, utilization, and transformation of water through natural systems is at the core of many fields within the environmental sciences, including hydrology, biogeochemistry, microbe and plant physiology, and ecology. A laboratory in environmental biogeochemistry and groundwater analyses in the Center for Water and Wetland Resources at The University of Mississippi Field Station will complement a growing program on The University of Mississippi (UM) Oxford campus in: (1) plant ecology, microbial ecology, and conservation biology in the Department of Biology; (2) hydrology and geochemistry in the Department of Geology and Geological Engineering; and (3) chemical ecology and groundwater remediation in the Department of Chemical Engineering. The equipment will be used for analyses of soils, groundwater, sediments, and porewater in research and training of undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral, and visiting scientist collaborators at The University of Mississippi. The UM laboratory in environmental biogeochemistry and groundwater analyses will be a catalyst for both faculty research and research training for students pursuing careers in any area of environmental science. It will attract talented individuals of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds to careers in the environmental sciences doc4460 none Mishra This Major Research Instrumentation project will support the acquisition of an atomic force microscope (AFM) and sample preparation equipment for TEM to enhance materials science research activity at the University of Memphis (UM). The equipment will become part of the Integrated Microscopy Center. The acquisition of the requested equipment will enable investigators from the UM and surrounding institutions to carry out diverse research and training activities in materials science. These activities include: (1) characterization of the surface of orthopedic, dental, and cardiovascular materials and correlation with biological responses to the materials (2) surface and interface investigation of magnetic thin films (3) investigation of the relationship between the surface of metallic materials and their corrosion behavior in various electrolytes. The acquisition of the requested equipment will enhance ongoing projects and facilitate new projects and continued industrial collaborations. Equally important, the requested equipment will be used to train and educate both undergraduate and graduate students in the area of materials science. In the last 30 years, electron microscopy has revolutionized our understanding of the relationship between the structure of materials and their properties. Materials scientists have a growing ability to tailor materials for specific performance properties at even the atomic level. Modern microscopy tools are essential for today s materials research challenges. The acquisition of an atomic force microscope (AFM) and TEM sample preparation equipment will be important additions to the Integrated Microscopy Center (IMC) at the University of Memphis. Modern TEM instruments provide almost all the structural and crystallographic information for analysis of new materials. AFM was developed for imaging surfaces on nearly the atomic scale and has become an established surface analysis tool in scientific and industrial labs. AFM can also measure electrical, magnetic, mechanical and thermal properties on the micron scale. The enhanced IMC will provide increased materials research opportunities and student training in relevant job skills critical to the materials science industry. Through collaborations, training seminars, and community outreach, the equipment will be used as a vehicle for increased interaction with regional universities and industry doc4461 none The Department of Mathematics at the University of South Carolina will purchase computing and visualization equipment which will be dedicated to the support of four research projects in the mathematical sciences. The equipment will support ongoing research in: (1) Nonlinear approximation in multiresolution analysis with applications to digital terrain maps and medical imaging, (2) Domain decomposition and multigrid methods for partial differential equations, (3) Eulerian-Lagrangian localized adjoint methods for advection- diffusion equations, and (4) Computational number theory. The integration of serial, parallel, and visualization equipment, complete with requisite software, will provide the necessary computing environment for the investigators to perform the educational and research missions of these projects doc4462 none The Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis will purchase computer equipment and software as follows: (a) one SUN Enterprise 420R Server with 4 SPARC II processors at 450 MHz (or later model), 4 GB of memory, and 36.4 GB harddisk (b) one Hewlett Packard Visualize Workstation X-Class with two Pentium III processors at 866 MHz (or later model) with 1GB memory, 36.4 GB harddisk and graphics subsystem fx10+, (c) High Performance Computing (HPC) tools and C++ Visual Program Development for Solaris 8.0; Matlab for Solaris and Windows NT; Unigraphics CAD and 3D-modeling software for Solaris and Windows NT; AMBER software for Solaris; PC Netlink for Solaris, (d) peripheral devices: one printer for Workgroups HP DN, one Digital Still Camera, one Color Scanner. This equipment will be dedicated to the support of research in the mathematical sciences. The equipment will be used for several research projects, including in particular: (1) Face recognition using spline-based wavelet-frame analysis (2) Mathematical modeling of cellular dynamic structure (3) Tight frames of rational splines and applications to CAD CAM and computer graphics (4) Wavelet X-ray computed tomography doc4463 none Smith, Scott R. Southern Illinois University Edwardsville MRI: Acquisition of Immersive WorkWall System for Campus-wide Visualization Research This proposal requests funds to provide Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville with the visualization capabilities of an Immersive WorkWall System. The particular Immersive WorkWall consists of a single screen stereoscopic projection system and a workstation rendering dual graphic images onto a six by eight foot screen. Viewers wearing special glasses experience real depth effects. The new equipment capability will significantly enhance the on-going research activities concerning animated simulation models of scientific and engineering concepts doc4464 none This Major Research Infrastructure (MRI) award will provide support for the purchase and development of instrumentation for the in situ and real-time analysis of trace-level organic compounds in air. This will enable studies of the emissions, reactions and transport of organic substances throughout the Earth s atmosphere, in particular hydrocarbons and oxygenated hydrocarbons that are biogenically emitted into the atmosphere by forests and plants. The instruments will be based on Drift Tube Reaction Mass Spectrometry (DTRMS). This technology is sensitive, selective, and can be used for high frequency measurements, which makes its application to flux measurements above forest canopies possible. One of the DTRMS instruments will be purchased from the original developer fully operational and will be deployed immediately to ongoing laboratory- and field-based research projects on biogenic emissions to the atmosphere. These projects are being carried out in collaboration with Washington State University and the Oregon Graduate Institute. A second instrument will be developed at Montana State University. This instrument will be based on a triple quadrupole which will make it more versatile and selective. Additional types of measurements will be possible with that instrument, including the measurement of organic nitrates doc4465 none A cadre of ecologists, biologists and chemists at Michigan Technological University are actively investigating terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem processes. These faculty will use several new research instruments to advance their fundamental studies of element transfers through ecosystems, and to integrate their research with the basic science education mission of MTU. Two mass spectrometers will be used to help trace isotopes of C, N and trace metals within and across atmosphere-land-water interfaces, and through natural food-webs. A portable Eddy-Covariance System will allow the researchers to conduct measurements of C, H2O and energy exchange between the atmosphere and terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, greatly facilitating the extrapolation of experimental global change work to natural ecosystems. Existing multidisciplinary research projects at MTU have the unifying theme of tracing the flow of elements and energy through atmosphere, land, and water interfaces, with the goal of a more fundamental understanding of the processes that govern element transfers, ecosystem stoichiometry, and biological community composition and diversity. Elucidation of chemical transformation pathways in nature has advanced tremendously in the past decade with the advent of instrumentation capable of rapidly measuring elemental and isotopic composition of tissues, water, soils and sediments. The new instrumentation will enhance ongoing component projects and allow the separate working groups to link together their measurements of element fluxes and studies of processes that influence stoichiometry within ecosystem food webs. The instruments will also be utilized in classroom activities at MTU, giving graduate and undergraduate students an opportunity to use the latest state-of-the-art tools for studying ecosystem processes. To better understand mechanisms that regulate ecosystem processes, one must be able to follow compounds from specific sources through and between atmosphere-land-water interfaces. The new instruments will allow the MTU research team to follow compounds and elements at all stages from their source to their final destination. The researchers will be able to elucidate the mechanisms involved in the transformation and transport of compounds within and across ecosystems. Such knowledge is crucial in order to make the step from describing what has already happened to predicting what will happen in a future, changing environment doc4466 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Colby College will upgrade a 400 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) the isolation and identification of natural products; b) synthesis and reactivity of carbenes; c) antitumor agent development; d) nucleic acid and peptide structure function relationships; and e) organometallic synthesis. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometry is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including drug development and biochemistry doc4467 none Ostrom This award provides seventy-percent partial funding support for the acquisition of mass spectrometry instrumentation to be installed and operated in the Environmental Isotope Geochemistry Laboratory at the Michigan State University. The University is committed to providing the remaining funds necessary for the acquisition of the instruments. The mass spectrometers will be used in basic and applied research projects aimed at improved understanding of interactions between the biosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere. The instrumentation will also be employed in laboratory technique courses at Michigan State University doc4468 none A striking feature of the nucleus of multicellular eukaryotes is its ability to completely disassemble and re-assemble during the course of cell division. This process may allow higher organisms to have a structurally highly complex nuclear interior during interphase, but not have such structures interfere with the condensation and partitioning of chromosomes during cell division. Such nuclear dynamics require the regulated reversibility of interactions between chromatin and proteins of the nuclear envelope and probably involve dynamic changes of nucleoskeletal structures. Since plants and animals are most likely derived from different unicellular ancestors that underwent intranuclear mitosis, one expects that nuclear assembly and disassembly have evolved twice. Presently, their molecular mechanisms are poorly understood in any system. The long-term goal of this research is to understand the mechanism, the function in interphase, and the dynamics during cell cycle of chromatin-nuclear envelope interactions in plants. Two novel, interacting plant proteins (MFP 1 and MAF 1) have been identified that are associated both with a filamentous nuclear framework called the nuclear matrix and with the nuclear envelope. MFP 1 is a plant-specific, filament-like protein, which binds specifically to matrix attachment regions (MARs), specific DNA segments which have been proposed to be involved in chromatin organization. In vitro, its MAR-binding activity is regulated by phosphorylation. The hypothesis is that MFP1 is involved in attaching chromatin to the plant interphase nuclear envelope and that MAF 1 is involved in this process through interaction with MFP 1. The specific questions asked in this project are: 1) How does the localization of MFP 1 and MAF 1 change during cell cycle? The strategy employs dual-color imaging of co-expressed MFP 1 and MAF 1 fusion proteins with GFP spectral variants in synchronized cell cultures. The results will show whether the localization of the two proteins functionally correlates with nuclear envelope dynamics. 2) How does the depletion of MFP 1 and MAF 1 alter nuclear, cell, and plant phenotypes? To this end, insertional knock-out mutations of MFP 1 and MAF 1 will be identified in Arabidopsis. They are expected to cause informative cellular and possibly developmental phenotypes, which will allow conclusions about the in vivo function of the proteins. 3) Is phosphorylation of MFP1 involved in reversible regulation of DNA-binding during cell cycle? The pattern of phosphorylated MFP1 isoforms and their MAR-binding activity will be compared at different cell-cycle stages. The effect of overexpressing a constitutively DNA-binding MFP 1 isoform on cellular and plant phenotypes will be investigated. These data will indicate whether reversible MFP1 phosphorylation is a means to regulate the interaction of chromatin with the nuclear envelope. Together, the answers to these questions will allow the evaluation of the role of MFP 1 and MAF 1 in chromatin-nuclear envelope interactions in plants. Because of the possibility that nuclear dissociation and re-association have evolved twice in plants and animals, any molecular information about the plant nucleus is likely to add novel concepts to our understanding of a process which is currently enigmatic in any organism. In addition, the discovery of plant-specific aspects of cellular organization could lead to the development of new classes of broad-spectrum herbicides doc4469 none Kanatzidis Many of the research programs at the Michigan State University are in need of modern Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) imaging and analytical capabilities. This grant provides equipment, which will function in support of research as well as the university s teaching and undergraduate collaborative research mission. This grant provides for a JEOL F field emission transmission electron microscope or equivalent. The microscope along with several requested accessories would provide TEM resolution of 0.19 nm, STEM resolution of 0.17 nm, electron holography, magnetic domain imaging, high angle annular darkfield imaging, convergent beam electron diffraction, energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy, parallel electron energy loss spectroscopy, and energy filtered imaging. None of these techniques are presently available to University researchers. Numerous new scientific investigations would be enabled with the new equipment. The instrument will support research in a variety of material systems including semiconductors, ceramics, metals, polymers, new materials, biomaterials and mesoporous materials. The instrument will be housed at the Center for Advanced Microscopy, one of the University Core Facilities, that serves electron microscopy users from 49 different University departments. One staff academic position will be entirely devoted to the TEM to ensure adequate instrument supervision, user supervision, instruction, and technique development. Instruction on the TEM will be integrated into several existing electron microscopy courses that serve a broad range of users. %%% Michigan State University is host to many scientific grants funded by NSF. Many of these programs are in need of a modern transmission electron microscope. These instruments are used to look at structure and interactions within matter. They are useful in many diverse fields such as chemistry, geology, materials science, physics, biology, and medicine. However, the present instruments at the University are in excess of 15 years old and do not have up-to-date capabilities. Many new imaging methods have been discovered in recent years that enable scientists to see structures never seen before and to determine information about matter never available before. Many of the scientists and students at the University could use this new equipment to make new discoveries. These discoveries have practical applications in electronics, sensor materials, catalysis, absorbent materials, materials for environmental clean-up, petroleum refining and understanding of global ecological changes. It will also significantly impact the discovery of new materials. Michigan State University has been given the funds to purchase a modern transmission electron microscope and to house it in the Center for Advanced Microscopy. This University Center will have one scientist in charge of this new microscope. That person will teach other scientists and students how to use it effectively in their research programs. Acquisition of this equipment will allow safe, effective training and research in electron microscopy of materials. The impact to the future education of students at MSU is expected to last for the next 15-20 years. Students from MSU will receive experience in using state-of-the-art instrumentation, whether they are bound for academics or a career in the private sector doc4470 none Blake The past decade has witnessed a revolution in methods available for imaging correlates of brain activity and, thereby, for studying possible links between neural events and mental activity in humans. Most prominent among those methods is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which is based on detecting and localizing variations in hemodynamic response associated with fluctuations in neural activity during performance of specific cognitive or behavioral tasks (Ogawa et al, ). Sophisticated display technologies paired with fMRI can delineate individual maps of a sensory surface onto different brain areas (Wandell, ), and advances in single event fMRI even make it possible to infer relative timing among the onsets of activity in different brain areas (Menon & Kim, ). Building on its recognized strengths in cognitive neuroscience, Vanderbilt University has committed itself to becoming one of the premier research institutions in the world for the study of cognitive function using fMRI, and that commitment is evidenced in several major initiatives: o Establishment of an interdisciplinary Center for Magnetic Resonance Imaging, with major focus on brain imaging. o Purchase of a 3.0 Tesla GE imager devoted exclusively to research, to be housed in specially constructed space optimized for fMRI work. o Expanded research training in cognitive neuroscience, including brain imaging, available through new degree programs at the graduate and undergraduate levels. o Establishment of a university-wide Neuroscience Institute emphasizing interdisciplinary research and education linking bench to bedside, with brain imaging figuring prominently in that mission o Creation of an interdisciplinary group of investigators whose research involves the study of a wide range of basic and clinical problems using MRI. Among those investigators is a group of individuals -- the applicants of this grant -- who use fMRI to study a diverse set of problems falling within the domain of cognitive neuroscience. This group has been created through key hires of new faculty explicitly trained in fMRI research as well as through investments in the career development of faculty already at Vanderbilt. Our work has already led to new insights into brain mechanisms involved in perceiving, attending, thinking and remembering. For our group to realize its potential, we now seek to expand the Center s fMRI facilities to include cutting edge instrumentation that meets needs common to our group. Specifically, this proposal requests funds to purchase: 1. Hardware for generation and presentation of high-fidelity visual and auditory stimuli to subjects engaged in cognitive tasks during fMRI scanning sessions. 2. Instruments for monitoring eye movements and respiration during scan sessions, so that we can correct fMRI signals for artifacts and so we can use eye movements and respiration rate as indirect indices of cognitive function and emotional arousal. 3. Computer workstation and software for analysis and interpretation of fMRI data, with particular emphasis on computational techniques for three-dimensional, volumetric rendering of fMRI data. As detailed in the body of this proposal, faculty associated with this application are studying a variety of problems centered around questions within the domains of: o visual perception o object recognition o categorization o decision making o affective processes o attention o spatial memory o vocal communication All investigators listed on this grant are also involved in research training of graduate and undergraduate students in one of Vanderbilt s several programs specializing in cognitive science, clinical science and or neuroscience. The facilities provided by this grant will be utilized by some of those trainees doc4471 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) and Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Programs, Robert L. Whetten of Georgia Institute of Technology and Joel H. Parks of the Rowland Institute for Science will develop a heavy-ion trap electron diffractometer, which will combine the advantages of mass spectrometry (sensitivity, efficiency, mass-selectivity) with those of electron diffraction (direct structural determination). A prototype instrument has been developed by Parks and coworkers. Whetten and Parks will significantly extend the capabilities of the existing prototype instrument by extending the range toward heavier ions (~100 kDa), to small-angle scattering and to shorter collection-time; developing interfaces to existing sources of heavy ions. As the instrument is developed, faculty members at Georgia Institute of Technology will exploit the instrument to carry out research on the following topics: a) iron-sulfur clusters; b) small proteins, solvation, salt-complexation, and folding; c) nucleic acids and bioconjugates; d) melting phase transition and alloy formation of metal clusters; e) atmospheric aerosol particulates; and f) synthetic macromolecules. A severe limitation of current mass spectrometric-based instrumentation is that it does not include any general means of direct structure determination. The heavy-ion trap electron diffractometer (HITED) will provide a state-of-the-art instrument that will enable researchers to address many outstanding problems in materials sciences, atmospheric chemistry and biochemical sciences doc4472 none SES- David Lindstrom The research has two broad objectives. They are to (1) identify individual-level and contextual determinants of internal migration in Guatemala and (2) measure the economic and social impact of migration on women in rural communities. The project seeks to help us better understand the impact of rural and urban development on the size, composition, and direction of internal migration streams. Also, it will provide insight in the role migration plays in raising rural household incomes and in the diffusion of urban culture. To address the first objective, the research will analyze the effects of individual and place characteristics on the probability of recent internal migration, and on the choice of destination in Guatemala. Employment opportunities, amenities, and population pressure will be measured to assess the relative attractiveness of alternative locations. Period trends in lifetime internal migration will be examined for evidence of the effects of political violence on population redistribution. Ethnicity is an important stratifying variable in Guatemalan society: social, cultural and economic differences between indigenous Mayan and the nonindigenous populations are well documented and pervasive. The study will investigate alternative explanations of ethnic differences in migration patterns that make reference to culturally based consumption preferences and economic marginalization. Secondly, the research will determine the impact of temporary migration and social ties to internal and U.S. migrants, on the size and composition of household consumption. The investigators will also analyze the effects of individual-, household, and community-level measures of migration on experience on married women s levels of autonomy in decision making, an important dimension of modern, urban culture. Data will be analyzed from the Guatemalan Census and the Guatemalan Survey of Family Health. The census collected information for all household members on the number of years in current place of residence, place of prior residence, place of residence in and place of birth. The Guatemalan Survey of Family Health interviewed 2,872 randomly selected women age 18 to 35 in 60 rural communities. Nested-conditional logit and discrete-time logit models will be used to analyze recent and lifetime migration. The study is unique in that it uses individual level census data to analyze internal migration in a developing country and in its incorporation of ethnicity as an explanatory factor in location decisions. The project will fill a gap in the demographic literature on migration in Guatemala. Also, it will advance our understanding of the role of migration in social and economic change in low-income countries doc4473 none The University of Central Arkansas (UCA) will establish a Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) facility with a R.J. Lee PSEM- scanning electron microscope having both Energy Dispersive Xray (EDX) and variable vacuum capabilities; a Pelco critical point dryer; a Denton Vacuum sputter coater etcher; and a 42-inch Plasmavision monitor for group viewing of images. The equipment will be housed in a dedicated laboratory within Lewis Science Center on the UCA campus. This SEM facility will support the research programs of a diverse group of natural sciences faculty, the instruction of science students, and public outreach activities aimed at pre-college students and science teachers. The SEM will be used by eight primary faculty, whose research covers a wide range of fields, including: paleontological studies of Cambrian life forms; analysis of models of sound propagation in porous media; study of the distributions and characteristics of sensory receptors in gastropod molluscs; understanding the genetic control of micropatterns in developmental anatomy of flowering plants, using a mold-replica technique; comparative study of characteristic structures of invertebrates in support of systematics descriptions and phylogenetic reconstructions; analysis of the formation of particulate matter in the atmosphere, and the catalytic role of metals in atmospheric particulates; and, determination of the chemical and physical properties of meteorites. SEM-based activities will be integrated into 10 courses in biology, chemistry and physics. Finally, the SEM will support three outreach programs to K-12 students and teachers: open sample submissions, an opportunity for K-12 teachers to submit samples related to a class activity; Saturday With SEM, an opportunity for high school students to gain personal experience with the SEM; and, the High School Science Workshops, where high school students gain exposure to SEM as part of a multi-activity, science promotion day. Establishment of a SEM facility on the UCA campus will allow science faculty to pursue lines of research that previously required travel to more distant SEM facilities, or were not pursued at all. Projects in acoustics, developmental biology, neurobiology, and paleontology will be the most immediately impacted, but other areas will also benefit. The SEM will also expose undergraduate and graduate students to modern instrumentation and techniques, through both course enhancements and expanded research opportunities. Finally, because SEM is a readily approachable technology, the K-12 educational and public outreach activities will improve the level of technical literacy of Arkansans doc4474 none This proposal is for the development of a high resolution, high sensitivity magnetic field imaging microscope. This instrument will allow for the measurement of minute magnetic fields (10-5 G) generated by currents in mesoscopic devices, the magnetic properties of quantum structures and the spin states of electrons inside devices. The instrument will be the first scanning Josephson junction microscope (SJM). It will have six orders of magnitude higher field sensitivity than conventional magnetic force microscopy and an order of magnitude better spatial resolution than scanning SQUID microscopy. In order to build this tool, the expertise of several groups at MIT must be brought together. The Josephson junction (JJ) that forms the critical sensing element must be integrated on an atomic force microscope tip in order to be in sufficient proximity to the sample. This process will require the development of a micromechanical silicon submount onto which the JJ will be processed. Once the sensing element has been fabricated it must be integrated into a larger instrument composed of cryogenically cooled piezo-stages and circuits to monitor and amplify the signals from the JJ. When completed, the combination of high field sensitivity and high spatial resolution will allow for the study of vortex states in superconductors, charge transport in circuits and biological systems, the magnetic state of mesoscopic magnets, and the spin state of electrons in devices. Finally, the development of a new scanning probe microscope offers exciting opportunities for interdisciplinary education. Already, students working on device processing, circuit design, mesoscopic device physics and materials science have all participated in the development of the core technologies doc4475 none Most areas of modern materials research focus fundamentally on energetic interactions that operate on the nanometer length scale but which nonetheless are manifested in unusual macroscopic material properties. While many techniques are available to probe the static microscopic properties of materials, few provide microscopic information on the moderate time scales (1 ms - 1 s) characteristic of dynamical modes that determine the interplay between microscopic and macroscopic worlds. There is therefore an urgent need to develop new techniques that combine high spatial and temporal resolution. Professor Kevan and his co-investigators will construct novel apparatus to produce a transversely coherent helium atom beam. They will develop methodologies analogous to dynamic laser light scattering and apply these to study surface fluctuations at length scales as short as a few nanometers and on time scales as short as one microsecond. Examples of phenomena to be studied using this new technique include 1) the elementary steps in diffusion of surface species, 2) equilibrium and steady-state surface fluctuations in conducting and non-conducting polymer and self-assembled monolayer films, and 3) the fluctuations of high temperature superconductors in the spin-charge segregated phase. The PI is developing a helium atom scattering apparatus, to probe nanoscale surface fluctuations. A key focus of modern materials research is to control a material s structure in order to understand and ultimately control its function. Understanding structure requires measuring how atoms are arranged in space and how they are bonded to each other to form molecules and solids. This pertains to a material s static properties. By contrast, understanding function requires measuring how a material operates, either mechanically, chemically, electrically, or magnetically. Function is intrinsically a dynamical concept. While there are many structural techniques - various microscopes and x-ray diffraction, for example - there are only relatively few that provide incisive information about a material s dynamical properties on a length scale ranging from a few to many atoms. That many key technologies rely on materials that are artificially patterned on this scale makes it urgent to develop such techniques. Here the investigators are developing a novel use for helium atoms to try to address this need. Like x-rays, helium atoms can probe very short dimensions. The instrument will produce a very highly collimated beam of atoms that will have some laser-like properties. This will allow application of laser-like dynamical techniques, but with sensitivity to sizes on the scale of atoms doc4476 none We recently proposed and demonstrated novel Strain Energy Band Engineering (SEBE) in AlInGaN-based quantum wells and multiple quantum well structures. SEBE will allow us to independently control energy band offset and lattice mismatch (strain) in AlInGaN-based heterostructures. This should allow us to develop a new generation of electronic and photonic devices, since we should be able to obtain a new family of heterostructures with controlled properties. To achieve this goal, we must develop a high power nonlinear visible UV spectroscopy system in order to study built-in electric fields, non-equilibrium hot carrier dynamics and optical gain in wide band gap semiconductors and heterostructures under strongly non-equilibrium conditions. This system will allow us to apply our experience with wide-band gap electronic and optoelectronic materials and devices to a new, and even more exciting area of photonic wide band gap materials and devices with possible application to solid-state lighting, which is 10 times more efficient than standard incandescent lighting. We will take advantage of being the only group in the world that has access to bulk AlN, bulk GaN, and one of the best sources of epitaxial binary, ternary, and quaternary wide band gap films. We need the system that allows us to obtain (i) subpicosecond time resolution, (ii) that is tunable in the range from 200 nm to 800 nm (to cover the AlN-GaN-InN materials system), (iii) operational in the temperature range from 4.2 K to 300K doc4477 none A Helium gas hydrostatic pressure apparatus with electrical and optical access and a Kulicke and Soffa wire bonder will be acquired to investigate piezoelectric constants in III-nitrides. The bonder is needed to attach metallic wires for electrical access to the semiconductor for conductance measurements. This instrumentation will nicely complement our existing effort funded by NSF, which deals specifically with the polarization issues in nitrides. The effort will be supported by our strong in house nitride growth effort with MBE and MOCVD. Prof. Nathan of the University of Minnesota, with whom we will collaborate, has already conducted these sorts of experiments in nitrides. Initial experiments of resistivity vs. stress on un-gated Hall bars have already been conducted. The resistivity exhibits slow long term drifts (time constants of order 100 to seconds. Similar effects observed earlier in GaAs have been ascribed to a defect center associated with shallow donors called the DX center. However, the effect in GaN is more complex, but it is reminiscent of the type of persistent photoconductivity observed in GaAs in the early stages of development. Clearly trapping effects will have to be separated from the piezoelectric effects. Such a study is crucial to the practical application electronic nitride devices. The requested instrument consists of 1. Helium gas hydrostatic pressure apparatus with electrical and optical access, which will be purchased from Unipress, Poland. ($121,749) Wire bonder which will be purchased from Kulicke & Soffa (model - $20,092.50) Hadis Morkoc Virginia Commonwealth University Department of Electrical Engineering and Physics Department 601 W. Main Street P. O. Box Richmond, VA - doc4478 none FitzGerald This award, made through the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, provides partial support of the costs of acquiring a suite of near-surface geophysical and sampling equipment for research on the Quaternary sedimentology and stratigraphy of barrier island systems, glacial geomorphology, and geoarchaeology at Boston University. Specifically, instrumentation to be acquired includes a ground penetrating radar system (GPR), a trailer mounted hydraulic drill core system and truck, and an electronic total survey system. Acquisition of this equipment will facilitate planned and ongoing research on the sedimentation processes responsible for the development of Holocene barriers in Maine and Massachusetts, studies of Quaternary glacial facies in high latitude alpine environments in an effort to correlate any observed climate signals to other well studied and documented millennial-scale climate events recorded in ice cores and deep marine sediments, and studies of the Miocene landscape evolution of the Dry Valleys of Antarctica doc4479 none This project involves the acquisition of non-contact equipment that forms the foundation of a unique state-of-the-art laboratory for microscale and mesoscale characterization of traditional (e.g., concrete, steel, soils) and innovative (e.g., fiber reinforced polymers, shape memory alloys, geosynthetics) civil engineering materials under combinations of mechanical loading and environmental exposure. The requested equipment combined with the current resources will allow the development of a facility which will be an integral part of an educational research initiative in progress in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech. Development of this facility, through the acquisition of the proposed equipment, will stimulate a variety of research, educational, and institutional interactions, including: (1) Development of laser and infrared measurement techniques for in situ, non-contract characterization of material and structural response. (2) Provision of equipment for the characterization of materials at the micro and meso scales while subjected to various loading and environment conditions. (3) Integration of equipment and research results into new and existing courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels to generate and further develop expertise in the non-contact evaluation of materials and structures. (4) Stimulation of interactions with local and national industry and government agencies to monitor, assess, and improve performance of materials and existing structures by novel applications of the equipment for in situ, non-contract evaluation. This project is supporting the acquisition of complementary systems for infrared thermography, photoelasticity, laser extensometery, and materials characterization using scanning white light interferometry and laser scanning confocal microscopy. These systems will be used in tandem to measure material response (e.g., deformation and damage accumulation) to loading and or environment. It is considered that concurrent integrated research at different scales will generate new scientific and engineering findings that are expected to have national and international significance doc4403 none The objective of this project is to develop a thermal imaging system, including both hardware and software, to detect mechanical damage in gas pipelines. The sensors will be in the form of a configurable array of infrared CCD cameras, which will permit the complete imaging of the pipeline as the inspection instrument travels its length. The goal is to arrive at a minimal modification of the current inspection tool design, making the system attractive to pipeline-inspection vendors. The addition of a thermal-imaging sensor to the existing magnetic sensor offers the opportunity for fusing the two data sets in order to improve the accuracy and sensitivity of the inspection tool. Results obtained from this initial study will be disseminated to the gas pipeline-inspection industry and research community. The proposed project addresses a critical problem in the inspection of gas pipelines - faults caused by mechanical damage. The instrument system being developed has the potential for application as a general nondestructive evaluation tool that can be used with any material in which a defect or damage introduces a variation in thermal diffusivity from the bulk material. This method may be applicable to detect, for example, delamination in sandwiched composite materials doc4481 none The visual environment is so full of information that it is simply impossible to process all of it. Instead, people must select parts of the world to process more fully, and parts of the world to process less fully. Two means are available for this selection. First, it is possible to fixate upon a new location in a scene by moving the eyes. Second, it is possible to select covertly, within a fixation, by movements of visual attention. Recently it has become clear that attentional selection is accomplished not merely by reference to a simple spatial coordinate system that might definelocations in a scene, but also by accounting for the physical or perceived objects that are present. Despite several demonstrations of close links between eye movement and attention systems, relatively little is presently known about the role that objects play in selection that involves saccadic eye movements. That issue is the focus of the present project. Four empirical questions regarding the role of objects in selective eye movements will be addressed in separate clusters of experiments. The questions each examine a key way in which eye movements might be affected by the objects in a scene. In the first cluster, experiments examine the extent to which a plan for an eye movement may benefit eye movements to other parts of the targeted object. The second cluster examines the extent to which a plan to make an eye movement may change if the target for the saccade moves. The third cluster explores the possibility that a newly perceived object or the disappearance of an old one may both facilitate eye movements. In the fourth cluster, experiments examine the extent to which eye movements are planned to a location in an object-centered reference frame. In many experiments the objects to be studied are defined not by physical boundaries, but instead by illusory, subjective contours, or by instructions to the subject. Dependent measures include both the latency and the spatial accuracy of the eye movements in the various situations. Answers to the questions addressed in the experiments will contribute to a better understanding of the nature of the reference frames and mental representations that are used by the brain to plan and produce eye movements. Such an understanding will further elucidate the relation between eye movement and attention systems. Taken together, the results will provide important insights into how it is that people select subsets of the world for further processing doc4482 none The research to be conducted on the new instrument funded by this award relates to solution structural studies on biomolecules using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. It will be directed at aspects of protein structure and dynamics in solution and will involve determination of structures of medium to large proteins, both alone and in complex with small peptides, DNA oligonucleotides or other proteins, and will include examination of dynamics of regions important for recognition of other proteins or DNA. These studies are of a basic nature and will provide mechanistic understanding of processes of ligand recognition and mode of action. Four principal research groups at the University of Illinois at Chicago and an investigator in the chemistry department at nearby Loyola University of Chicago will be the major users of the instrument. Projects include (i) understanding the specificity of binding of the multiple protein ligands of the broad specificity clearance receptor LRP that is involved in metabolism of proteases and lipoproteins, (ii) understanding the molecular basis for recognition of regulatory DNA sequences by a transcription factor protein family, (iii) determination of the structure of domains from the erythrocyte skeletal protein spectrin that are responsible for the shape and flexibility of red blood cells (iv) examination of the mechanism of infection of cells by HIV. The award will be used to purchase a state-of-the art narrow bore 800MHz NMR spectrometer fully equipped for multinuclear, multidimensional, gradient enhanced solution structural studies on bio-macromolecules. The instrument will be housed in custom-designed space. This instrument will complement an existing 600MHz NMR spectrometer that is currently available on campus for determination of protein solution structures, but that lacks the capabilities of the higher field instrument for tackling the very challenging problems described. The 800MHz NMR spectrometer and the studies to be carried out on it will be of great benefit both for improving the research infrastructure of the university and of the Chicago structural biology community and for enhancing the training opportunities for the area students. State-of-the-art highest field NMR instrumentation, as represented by the awarded equipment, will be unique in metropolitan Chicago and will permit the continued development of already active NMR programs into the more challenging, but also most exciting and rewarding areas. This will contribute significantly to the competitiveness of these research programs, their success and hence visibility, which in turn will help both in recruitment of additional structurally-oriented faculty, postdocs and students and in fostering collaborations between faculty within the university and Chicago. All of the investigators currently train both graduate students and postdocs and so offer training opportunities in use of NMR to examine protein structure; an area that is already of the most fundamental importance to all biological sciences, and that will continue to grow in the post-genomic era. The acquisition of an 800MHz spectrometer will enable such students to work and train on the most challenging projects and so acquire skills that will be needed for careers in the critical biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and molecular medicine industries doc4483 none Theodore W. Randolph University of Colorado MRI: Acquisition of a Nanoparticle Analysis Ensemble This grant supports the purchase of a group of instruments that provide the capability of analysis and characterization of various types of microparticles and nanoparticles. One instrument , a Quantachrome Autosorb 1-C, is a multipurpose device for determining surface areas and pore-size distributions as well as surface-site properties by gas adsorption desorption methods. A second, a ZetaPlus, can measure zeta potential on particles from colloidal size up to 30-microns diameter. This device has a phase-analysis light-scattering option that increases the sensitivity of electrophoretic mobility measurements. A third acquisition is an Aerosizer DSP dry powder size analyzer, with supersonic gas entrainment of particles combined with laser optics, which can measure particle-size distributions from 0.2 to 700 microns. The last item in the ensemble is a TSI GEMMA-method size analyzer. This device creates an aerosol of suspended particles, dries the droplets, and then measures mobility of the remaining particles in an electric field. The lower limit on size measurement here corresponds to a protein molecule with molecular weight of . Nanotechnology promises advances in many practical fields. The researchers using these instruments for characterization of nanoparticles are exploring applications in high-temperature synthesis of new ceramic materials, gene therapy, controlled drug delivery, protein stabilization in powders, production and treatment of nanoparticulate materials, and biotechnology. The availability of these highly sensitive measurement instruments increases the accuracy and precision of their observations and enhances the significance of their results doc4484 none Proposal PI: Craig R. M. McKenzie The theme of the proposed research is that everyday inferential behavior is much more accurate than previously thought. People are not general-purpose inference machines, but are instead adapted to the structure of the environment in which they typically operate. This allows them to exploit strategies that are both simple and accurate. The proposed experiments examine the role of an important environmental feature: The extent to which a datum, or observation, is rare or unexpected. Rare observations are more informative than common ones, and people appear to make strong assumptions about what kinds of events are rare. These assumptions make sense outside of the laboratory and help explain many previous findings and lead to new predictions. The proposed experiments examine in detail people s sensitivity to rarity and the implications for several areas of research on thinking and reasoning doc4485 none Meleis, Waleed M. Northeastern University MRI: A Memory Intensive Compilation Environment Targeting VLIW and DSP Architectures This proposal is to acquire Linux Unix TRU64 and Linux X86 compute servers to enable the support of memory intensive compiler research at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of Northeastern University. The research projects that will use the requested compute servers include Optimization-centered code restructuring and scheduling, memory coloring and compaction targeting DSPs, and dynamic profiling, compilation and evaluation environments doc4486 none We know that the brain is a highly efficient computational machine but little is known about how neurons in the central nervous system process information. Deciphering the neural code is made difficult by the enormous and complex set of variables at both the cellular and systems level that determine the behavior of a neuron and of the network in general. Neurons in a network communicate via small electrical signals termed postsynaptic potentials (PSPs). A neuron integrates the PSPs from thousands of other neurons; when the composite signal is sufficiently large, a large all-or-none electrical event, termed the action potential (AP; which is the equivalent of a binary digit), is generated. The AP is subsequently transmitted to other parts of the nervous system where it results in a PSP in other neurons, thereby repeating the process. Information is encoded in the timing and frequency of the APs. The cortex contains a vast array of neurons, each with different biophysical properties. Designing experiments that control for these variables is challenging. While biophysical studies permit detailed characterization of subcellular ion channels in single neurons, they do not directly address how these properties translate to encoding in a network of neurons. Conversely, behavioral electrophysiology describes the behavior of neurons under natural conditions but provides little data about the underlying cellular mechanisms. In the current study, the strategy is to interface a computer with a live neuron. By using computer simulations to generate realistic inputs into the neuron, the manner in which a neuron processes signals within a neural network can be examined systematically and be correlated directly with its biophysical properties. The data obtained from these experiments will provide a solid foundation for constructing realistic models of networks, developing better computing algorithms and hardware, and designing neural prostheses doc4487 none This Doctoral Dissertation Research Support investigation analyzes the strategies competing interest groups use to influence implementation of public policy. Specifically, the student investigates group s choice to cooperate in the implementation of Section 10(1) of the Endangered Species Act (Habitat Conservation Planning). The student argues that the political and structural environments shape this choice by determining the relative advantages of conflictual versus cooperative strategies available to groups. Decisions regarding strategy choice are conditional upon the external political context, group resource capacity, and underlying nature of the problem. By focusing on group behavior at implementation, the analysis will contribute to our understanding of the policy process, and cooperation and political behavior. The Doctoral Dissertation Research Support project proceeds in several stages. In-depth case study analysis of selected HCPs will allow refinement of the hypotheses and enhance the study s validity. The analysis of the model using a broader, existing study, spanning multiple policy areas proceeds. The primary data collection strategy includes an electronic mail survey of group behavior. The data collected allow assessment of those contextual factors that influence the choices groups make doc4488 none Equipment will be acquired to implement an integrated undergraduate education research program in microbial ecology at Marist College. An Olympus BX60F epifluorescent microscope with digital imaging and image analysis system, 2) a BiOLOG MicroStation for microbial identification community characterization, 3) filtration and centrifugation instrumentation, 4) microbial culturing instrumentation, and 5) HydroLab water-quality monitoring instrumentation will be purchased. This equipment will allow the PI to integrate teaching with research in environmental microbiology at Marist and will provide greater opportunities for faculty colleagues to involve students in active learning exercises. Requested instrumentation will be shared by teacher researchers within Marist s School of Science. Work to be accomplished with the requested instrumentation will focus on viral and bacterial contaminant dynamics in the Hudson River watershed, microbial host-virus interactions in the Hudson, characterization of host-virus assemblages from extreme arctic and antarctic habitats (e.g., the McMurdo Dry Valleys LTER site), work on the characterization of polar microbial communities, and pollutant impacts on microbial communities. The equipment will be used for the isolation, culture, enumeration, identification and preservation of a variety of both pro-and eukaryotic microbes from environmental samples. The structure and function of microbial communities will be assessed along with a consideration of relevant habitat characteristics. Students conducting research projects for the PI s course in Environmental Microbiology, those with undergraduate research fellowships, and others performing research for credit, (under the direction of either the PI or faculty colleagues), will have an improved capacity to utilize modern technology in addressing relevant scientific questions. Current scientific research and education-through-research capabilities will be expanded with the creation of better-equipped learning environments. Instruments improving capabilities to conduct research on aquatic systems in the Hudson drainage will place Marist College in a better position for future involvement with Governor George Pataki s proposed Henry Hudson Institute for Riverine and Estuarine Research and Education. Improving capabilities at Marist will also foster collaborative projects with those at other local institutions having expertise in microbial ecology (e.g., the Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, NY). As the requested instrumentation will be for shared-use, faculty in the Biology, Environmental Science and Chemistry Departments will utilize this equipment in diverse ways to promote research, research training and to enrich the educational experiences of Marist science students. This will strengthen a framework in which greater numbers of students, (including female and minority undergraduates doc4489 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, Emory University will acquire a computer system for computational chemistry and chemical physics. This equipment will enhance research in the following areas: a) computational studies of reactions of O+, N+, O2+, N2+ with neutral molecules; b) photodecomposition reactions of small gas phase molecules; c) interfacing multimode to electronic structure codes; d) hydrocarbon combustion; e) chemistry important to propulsion systems; e) gas-surface reactions on silicon; f) spectroscopy and dynamics of van der Waals complexes; g) calibration and applications of the ONION method to transition metal complexes; h) gas-phase reactions of transition metal atoms, ions and clusters; i) reactions of transition metal complexes and full homogeneous catalytic cycles; j) force-field energy-free conformational analysis; k) friction and nanotribology; l) computational neuroscience; and m) pattern formation. A cluster of fast, modern computer workstations is vital to serving the computing needs of active research departments. Such a computer network also serves as a development environment for new theoretical codes and algorithms, provides state-of-the-art graphics and visualization facilities, and supports research in state-of-the-art applications of parallel processing. These studies will have a significant impact in a number of areas, including biochemistry and materials sciences doc4490 none Ling This projects involves the acquisition of a workhorse Electron Beam Lithography (EBL) system using the latest nanopositioning technology for microstructure materials and devices research and education at Brown University. The acquired system consists of a state-of-the-art scanning electron microscope and a Burleigh Inchworm Nanopositioning System as the sample stage. The system offers many of the capabilities, such as the generation of submicron features in a field of view of 25 mm, currently only offered by the multimillion-dollar EBL machines at a small fraction of the cost. A large group of experimentalists at Brown University conduct experimental research at the frontiers of microstructured materials and devices. This workhorse EBL instrument will greatly enhance the research productivity for the existing research programs in condensed matter physics, liquid crystal display technology, small semiconductor devices, novel magnetoelectronics, semiconductor lasers, and experimental cosmology, and open up new exciting research directions, will have a major impact on the materials research and education and will benefit a large number of graduate and undergraduate students at Brown University. This project involves the acquisition of a workhorse Electron Beam Lithography (EBL) system using the latest Burleigh Inchworm nanopositioning technology for micro and nano structured materials and devices research and education at Brown University. The EBL is the state-of-the-art nanotechnology which has revolutionized many areas of science and technology. A large group of experimentalists at Brown University conduct experimental research at the frontiers of microstructured materials and devices. Graduate and undergraduate students at Brown will use the EBL system to fabricate artificially designed patterns for fundamental studies of colloidal crystallization, for applied research in ultrafast transistors and novel magnetoelectronic devices, and for exploring novel liquid crystal materials and for developing sensors for cosmology experiment. The acquired EBL system offers many of the capabilities, such as generating submicron features in a large field of view, currently only offered by the multimillion-dollar EBL machines at a small fraction of the cost. This low-cost EBL system will be housed in the Barus-Holley Building where all physicists and engineers at Brown are working. This instrument will greatly enhance the research productivity for the existing research programs, and open up new exciting research directions, will have a major impact on the materials research and education at Brown and will benefit a large number of graduate and undergraduate students doc4491 none R. Simpson, VA Polytechnic & State Univ The proposed Instrument Development is to produce a unique laser doppler differential velocimeter system for fine- spatial-resolution instantaneous measurements of the complete rate-of-strain and vorticity tensors in complex turbulent flows. This rate-of-strain and vorticity measuring LDV (ROSVOR LDV) will be a unique system providing measurements of the turbulent kinetic energy dissipation rate and the enstrophy without simplifying assumptions. Such measurements are needed for the further development of turbulence models. The innovations in LDV technologies to be used here are: (1) the direct measurement of low uncertainty velocity differences from four closely spaced (100microns x 20microns) volumes, (2) the use of polarization-preserving fiber optics and beam combiners in a compact design, and (3) signal processing and data handling techniques for 9 velocity-component differences simultaneously. The goals of the Virginia Tech graduate program are to provide strong M.S. and Ph.D. education and to conduct research in state-of-the-art-facilities. Research opportunities are available for all qualified persons. In the past, there have been 3 women graduate students involved in this turbulence research program. Currently there is one woman graduate student. It is expected that, the proposed ROSVOR LDV will provide a new international standard for experimentally measuring the instantaneous rate-of-strain and vorticity tensors and determining the anisotropic contributions to the turbulent kinetic energy dissipation rate. These data are expected to guide the development of refined turbulence models that will be used throughout the modern CFD community doc4492 none Walker, William F. University of Virginia MRI: Development of a Next-Generation Ultrasound Research Platform This application proposes the development of an advanced experimental system to support ultrasonic imaging research. The proposed system will be capable of continuing acquisition over a period of 1.6 seconds, the equivalent of roughly 50 image frames. The system will also incorporate a data interface to allow future connection to custom processing units, ultimately enabling real-time processing of aperture domain data. The system will be constructed around AgilentTechnologies SONOS ultrasonic imaging system to enable real-time imaging and preserve broad signal bandwitdth, high signal to noise ration, and wide dynamic range doc4493 none Saxena This award provides 62% partial funding support for the acquisition of an X-ray microdiffractometer system to be installed and operated in the Department of Earth Science at Florida International University. The Florida International University is committed to providing the remaining funds necessary to acquire and install the system. The instrument system will be used for research and training of students in the fields of experimental geophysics, mineral physics, and materials science. Analytical applications will include characterization of the states of matter of samples subjected to extreme conditions of temperature and pressure mimicking ambient conditions deep in the Earth doc4494 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program allows the Colleges of Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame to purchase a LINUX-based High Performance Computing Cluster to enhance the computational resources in the Science Computing Facilities (SCF). The research programs using the SCF span a broad range of disciplines in the areas of theoretical condensed matter physics, theoretical physical chemistry, theoretical and computational chemical engineering, theoretical astrophysics and computational organic chemistry. Within these areas, both method development and applications are pursued. In particular, mechanistic studies of self-assembled quantum-dot formation, transport processes in membranes, simulation of phase equilibria in complex systems, relativistic hydrodynamics and stellar evolution, modeling of industrial chemical processes and the modeling of quantum cellular automata for molecular computing will be performed. For this purpose, Monte-Carlo, Molecular Dynamics, hydrodynamic and ab initio electronic structure calculation will be performed on the proposed cluster. The use of computational methods has become an indispensable tool in science and engineering during the last years. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program supports to the high performance computing cluster in the Science Computing Facilities at the University of Notre Dame and will provide essential resources for research in the fields of chemistry, physics, chemical engineering, and computer sciences. In particular, the new facility will be used to investigate new application in the areas of nanoscience and materials, to make chemical production processes safer and more efficient, to study the transport of drug molecules across cell membranes, and the study of neutron stars. The proposed facility will also allow to train undergraduate and graduate students as well as postdoctoral researchers in the application of high-performance computing in their respective fields doc4495 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, a consortium of universities consisting of Florida State University, Florida A b) photosynthesis; c) metalloproteins; d) the structure and role in chemical reactions of reactive species such as radicals, radical-ion pairs, carbenes and nitrenes; e) use of EPR to study mineral dating and thermal stability; and f) spin distribution along the chains of low dimensional cuprate polymers. An electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectrometer is an instrument used to obtain information about the molecular and electronic structure of molecules. It may also be used to obtain information about the lifetimes of free radicals which are often essential for the initiation of tumor growth and or a variety of chemical reactions. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, in particular biological chemistry, materials sciences and geology doc4496 none This MRI proposal enhances and expands upon the active MEMS and Micro Nanotechnology research program at the University of Louisville through the acquisition of an Inductively Coupled Plasma (ICP) Deep Reactive Ion Etching (DRIE) System. The proposal builds upon (a) existing competitive research facilities in micro nanotechnology, (b) an interdisciplinary collection of research-oriented faculty from engineering and science departments across the campus, and (c) a significant commitment by the University. The requested DRIE System will provide the enabling technology needed to realize the promise of MEMS and micro nantechnology over the next decade and to train the engineers and scientists who will use this technology. The specific research activities addresses in this proposal can be grouped into the following concentration areas and are consistent with the expertise of the PIs: 1) Novel DRIE Processing Methodologies, 2) RF MEMS, 3) DRIE-fabricated Sensors and Detectors, 4) Optical MEMS (MOEMS), 5) Microfluidics and Lab-on-a-Chip Systems, 6) Diamond MEMS, 7) CVD Processing of High Aspect Ratio DRIE-fabricated Micromolds, and 8) Application of ICP RIE to Nanolithography. While the heart of this proposal is the development and application of exciting new research opportunities, an education and outreach program will be developed with both updated and new courses that implement DRIE technology, MEMS, and micro nanofabrication and an associated new Certificate Program. Involved students and industrial professionals will graduate after immersion in an environment with sound science, state-of-the-art technical expertise, and applications to real world problems doc4497 none Salano This grant makes possible the acquisition of a new instrument capable of producing 20nm patterned line widths, 10nm scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and 20nm scanning Auger microscopy (SAM), all while simultaneously providing atomic resolution with a scanning tunneling microscope (STM AFM). The new instrument will be attached to the present molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) growth facility to provide expanded research opportunities with semiconductor quantum dots and wires for scientists and engineers at the University of Arkansas. Initial investigations are on the use of patterned substrates to produce laterally ordered self-assembled quantum dots and how to engineer strain to produce quantum dots. The project explores the underlying science important to the homogeneity of quantum dots, single electron spin dynamics in a quantum dot, and the optical behavior of a single quantum dot and the interaction between them. There will be an investigation of the possibility of forming photonic band structures from quantum dot arrays. While the new instrument is aimed at enhancing the research capability of faculty and students at the University of Arkansas, it will also play a significant role in a new Ph.D. degree program in electronic-photonic materials and devices supported under the NSF IGERT program. Nanotechnology is a new field, centered on the study of nanometer-sized materials. One nanometer, or one billionth of a meter, is one thousand times smaller than the smallest electronic devices that exist today. As a result, progress in scientific understanding on the nanoscale will play an important role in realizing future electronic and optoelectronic devices. This project makes possible the acquisition of a new instrument which when attached to the present molecular beam epitaxy growth facility at the University of Arkansas will provide the opportunity for scientists and engineers to explore and advance our current understanding of nanosize semiconductor quantum dots and wires. It will also play a significant role in a new Ph.D. degree program in electronic-photonic materials and devices, supported under the NSF IGERT program. The educational goal of our program is to produce graduates that are fully prepared to drive the advancement of nanostructures. We will accomplish this goal by utilizing our molecular beam epitaxy facility, coupled with the newly acquired diagnostic and device fabrication tools made possible by this award, as a novel educational tool doc4498 none The Department of Mathematics at Wayne State University will purchase one UNIX server and four UNIX workstations, which will be dedicated to the support of research in the mathematical sciences. The equipment will be used for several research projects, including in particular: Cohomology of Modules over the Steenrod Algebra; Estimation, Control, and Optimization of Large-scale and Hybrid Systems; Computation of Differential Equations with Strongly Discontinuous Coefficients; and Numerical Approximation of Singularly Perturbed Problems. Seven faculty members in the department will participant in the proposed research projects. Many graduate students will be involved in these research projects doc4499 none Guentzel This Major Research Instrumentation award to Coastal Carolina University provides instrumentation for marine and environmental sciences research and training. In particular, support will provide graphite furnace and flame atomic absorption spectrophotometer and carbon-nitrogen-sulfur analysis instruments and computers for developing a laboratory intranet,as well as additional instrumentation to expand the laboratory capabilities in environmental chemistry. The project is supported by the Division of Ocean Sciences at NSF. Coastal Carolina University will provide cost-share support for nearlhy 40% of total project costs doc4500 none The MARGINS program seeks to understand the complex interplay of processes that govern continental margin evolution globally, particularly targeting multidisciplinary research programs involving field experiments, numerical simulations, and laboratory analyses. Support is provided to continue the MARGINS coordinating office, which will be transferred from the University of Hawaii to the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. The coordinating office will help focus and implement efforts of investigators on specific initiatives and geographic areas identified in the MARGINS Program Science Plan, help disseminate information on program activities and results to a large and diverse community, and coordinate MARGINS activities with other appropriate national and international activities doc4501 none (proposal number) Elke Weber Recent work in decision making has expanded the notion of how people make decisions. Many researchers now look beyond the rational choice framework used by economists or the cognitive information integration framework traditionally used by psychologists. With the expansion of the traditional notion of decision-making as a cost-benefit analysis, researchers are finding that decision makers act in a variety of ways that cannot be described in terms of costs and benefits (Beach Gigerenzer, Todd, Hammond, ; Klein, ; Yates Prelec & Hernstein, ). Yates and Lee ( ) coined the term decision modes to describe qualitatively different strategies for arriving at a decision. Given the new plurality of views on the ways that people make decisions, it is time to take a look at the bigger picture and to carefully examine the range of decision modes that people use. In the current climate of decision making research, the careful development of a taxonomy of decision modes will be an important contribution to the field. A central objective of the proposed research is to develop a comprehensive taxonomy of decision modes and a common vocabulary that can be used to identify and distinguish decision making processes that fall within each mode. The proposed taxonomy includes four decision modes, i.e., cost-benefit-based, recognition-based, affect-based, and reason-based. Each mode is characterized in terms of its attentional focus, primary cognitive and affective processes, and mental representations. The further development of this decision mode taxonomy will involve more precisely characterizing the distinguishing attributes of different decision modes and developing experimental procedures able to demonstrate more unequivocally the existence of these qualitatively different modes. A second objective is to establish a better understanding of the factors that determine when a particular mode will be used and why. This requires the development of a model of implicit decision mode selection that is directly related to the decision mode taxonomy. Which decision mode is used in a given situation is hypothesized to depend both on person-centered factors (i.e., cognitive and affective processes) and on situational factors. Identifying and characterizing the factors that influence decision mode selection will be important not only because it is theoretically interesting to better understand the decision making process, but also because the selection of one or the other decision mode is hypothesized to influence the final decision outcome. The proposed research has the potential to integrate existing knowledge about human motivation, the nature and function of cognitive and affective processes, and mental representation into an adaptive decision making framework. The proposed framework is far broader than its precursors in both its specification of the criteria on which people are trying to optimize and its specification of the strategies and processes at people s disposal. Such a framework has the potential to guide and focus new research in the field doc4502 none J. Katz, Johns Hopkins University The objective of this project is to develop and implement a large scale Holographic Particle Image Velocimetry (HPIV) system for measuring complex turbulent flows. The data will be used for addressing fundamental turbulence modeling questions. The system will enable measurements of the instantaneous, three-dimensional velocity distribution over sample volumes of up to 25x25x25 cm^3, at an unprecedented resolution in scale, with arrays of 500x500x500, 3-D velocity vectors. Efficient and high speed processing tools will enable analysis of many holograms. Two main avenues of turbulence research provide motivation: i) scaling dynamics and statistical geometry of velocity increments in high Reynolds number turbulent flows, and ii) relationships between large and small scales in turbulence and their implications for subgird-scale modeling for Large Eddy Simulations (LES). The 3-D data will enable the PI and his colleagues to address the anomalous scaling behavior of high order structure functions that significantly deviate from Kolmogorov s predictions; Turbulence modeling for LES must be based on understanding of the interactions among turbulent motions at various length-scales. Such understanding requires data consisting of well-resolved velocity fields that can be the filtered to obtain the subgrid scale stresses, filtered velocity and its gradients. Development and improvements to this technology would eventually make it available to an entire community of researchers in a wide range of fields where transport phenomena are of significance. Included are communities involved in fundamental and applied fluid mechanics, multiphase flows involving transport of bubbles, particles and droplets as well as environmental flows, such as sediment transport, atmospheric sciences (turbulence and particle transport) and oceanography flow, particles and plankton dynamics, etc doc4503 none The NanoScience and Technology Center of the University of Notre Dame is creating a NanoScience Measurements Laboratory to provide state-of-the-art instrumentation for the characterization of the electronic properties of nanoelectronic, nanomechanical, molecular, and superconducting materials and devices, as well as state-of-the art semiconductor devices and circuits. This major research instrumentation grant will be located in the College of Engineering and support research and teaching across the university including the departments of Electrical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Physics. The instrumentation purchased will provide precision current-voltage and impedance measurements from dc to 110 MHz, 300 mW to 500 MW, with triaxially-guarded cabling and low current and voltage resolution (10 fA and 2 mV). Ease of use and rapid sample exchange will be enabled by use of a Cascade thermal probe station which handles samples from centimeter-sized pieces to 8-inch wafers and with a temperature-controlled chuck (- 65 to 200 C). A computer provides for data acquisition, instrument control, and storage. This system will benefit users across the University of Notre Dame including undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. External use and collaborations will be encouraged doc4504 none A. Couzis CUNY @ City College This is an engineering equipment proposal for the acquisition of a Nicolet Nexus-670 Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer. The instrument is an advanced FTIR device with features that allow operation in the near, mid and far regions of the IR and infrared sources, and an infrared microscope (Nicolet Continum infrared microscope) which will allow surface mapping experiments with minimum x-y resolution of less that .1 um. the total cost for this instrument is approximately $115,000 of which City College has agreed to a one third cost share, thus the requested amount from NSF is approximately $76,500. The Instrument will be used by four faculty (A. Couzis, C. Maldarelli, D. Rumschitski and L. Gilchrist) all of the Department of Chemical Engineering at City College in a series of five projects, some of which are collaborative. These projects are: Water restructuring and monolayer phase behavior of surfactants at the hydrophobic solid - aqueous interface (Couzis). Superspreading trisiloxane surfactant systems allow water to spread on hydrophobic surfaces. How these systems work is unknown. We have posited a mechanism in which the siloxane displaces water as it adsorbs onto the hydrophobic water interface to form a dense hydrophobic domain adjacent to the solid, which lowers the solid water tension and facilities spreading. Total internal reflection in the infrared will be used to follow restructuring and chain coherence in an effort to establish this mechanism, and this information will be used to design mixed hydrocarbon surfactant systems with superspreading ability. The direct measurement of the surfactant equation of state of the air-aqueous interface (Maldarelli). The equation of state describes the dependence of the surface tension on the surface concentration. For soluble surfactants this equation has not been measured directly since surface concentrations are unknown. Infrared reflection adsorption spectrometry will be sued to obtain directly the surface concentration by measuring the infrared adsorbance and suing a calibration with an insoluble surfactant. Nano-engineered templates for a controlled crystallization (Maldarelli and Couzis) Functionalized self-assembled monolayers on a solid support are being designed to serve as template foe selective crystallization of one polymorph over another. The templating is a form of epitaxy in which the functionalized template surface mimics a face of the desired crystal polymorph. Total internal reflection in the infrared will be used to follow structural changes in the template as crystallization proceeds providing insight into how to optimize the epitaxy. Characterization of biomimetic surfaces (Gilchrist) Biomimetic surfaces will be constructed form cellular components such as polypeptides, structural proteins and phospholipids. Internal reflection spectroscopy in the infrared will be used on IR tags on these components to study the structure of the assembling surface. The dynamic of protein folding (Rumschitski) The process of protein folding involves a series of kinetic paths in a transition from a random coil to a native configuration. Folding times are usually complete in times well below a millisecond. Structural studies of the folding process provide insight into the relationship between the protein s sequence and its native conformation, but are currently difficult to obtain because of the long scan times of techniques such as x-ray crystallography and solution state NMR. We propose a new technique in which the protein folding is initiated in a miniature well-mixed flow cell at steady state, with different ages or protein intermediates states present. IR spectroscopy, together with a kinetic model, is used to identify these states doc4471 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) and Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Programs, Robert L. Whetten of Georgia Institute of Technology and Joel H. Parks of the Rowland Institute for Science will develop a heavy-ion trap electron diffractometer, which will combine the advantages of mass spectrometry (sensitivity, efficiency, mass-selectivity) with those of electron diffraction (direct structural determination). A prototype instrument has been developed by Parks and coworkers. Whetten and Parks will significantly extend the capabilities of the existing prototype instrument by extending the range toward heavier ions (~100 kDa), to small-angle scattering and to shorter collection-time; developing interfaces to existing sources of heavy ions. As the instrument is developed, faculty members at Georgia Institute of Technology will exploit the instrument to carry out research on the following topics: a) iron-sulfur clusters; b) small proteins, solvation, salt-complexation, and folding; c) nucleic acids and bioconjugates; d) melting phase transition and alloy formation of metal clusters; e) atmospheric aerosol particulates; and f) synthetic macromolecules. A severe limitation of current mass spectrometric-based instrumentation is that it does not include any general means of direct structure determination. The heavy-ion trap electron diffractometer (HITED) will provide a state-of-the-art instrument that will enable researchers to address many outstanding problems in materials sciences, atmospheric chemistry and biochemical sciences doc4506 none The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is an NSF-funded project to detect gravitational waves. The Center for Gravitation and Cosmology at University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee (UWM) is member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), and participates actively in the LIGO-I development group. Current LSC research activities at UWM are related to the analysis of LIGO data. These activities include the development of methods to characterize and clean the raw data stream (removing instrumental and environmental anomalies), and testing of algorithms to search for gravitational waves from astrophysical sources. This action provides funds for the construction of a Beowulf-computer system at UWM for LIGO-related data analysis and code development. The proposed system is a parallel computer composed of 128 nodes (plus 5 spares) connected by high-speed networking. The system is available, through online network connections, to a broad group of scientists within the LSC, including experimentalists, theorists, and astrophysicists. The system is designed for rapid-turnaround data exploration and code development work. A representative data set (days or weeks of data) is kept on disks of 10 Terabytes capacity where it can be rapidly accessed. The complete system provides an environment with sufficient aggregate CPU power (~ 200 Gflops) for algorithm and code developers to carry out extensive exploration and testing on LIGO data doc4507 none Klein This grant supports the acquisition of equipment that will enhance the strength of a multidisciplinary group in performing research in fundamental areas of chemical engineering, chemistry, and materials science and engineering. The interdisciplinary group of scientists and engineers on this proposal has a common interest in studying the chemistry occurring at solid surfaces. A high-pressure reaction cell and a chemical-vapor deposition (CVD) chamber attached to a common analysis chamber will enable the studies envisioned by the group. This proposal is for the acquisition of the common analysis chamber, which would include X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and ion-scattering spectroscopy (ISS). This chamber will be attached to an existing CVD chamber for characterization of materials growth in situ. A high-pressure reaction cell equipped with a mass spectrometer will also be attached so that sample can be exposed to gases at reaction conditions and subsequently analyzed without exposure to air. With in situ surface characterization, the science behind the growth or reaction becomes obtainable and the studies more confident and complete. The proposed equipment will also be used as a learning tool in several undergraduate and graduate classes that teach laboratory analytical techniques. In addition to the education of graduate students on this equipment, this team of investigators is committed to the participation of undergraduates in research in order to prepare promising students for graduate school or a career in research and development. These undergraduates will have the opportunity to obtain hands-on experience in materials characterization and reaction engineering. As our ability to build devices extends into the nanometer dimension, understanding the surface phenomena occurring during the device building and use is becoming increasingly important. This award will be used to purchase a surface analysis system comprising of X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, ion scattering spectroscopy and a mass spectrometer in order to study the chemical nature of surfaces. The powerful set of techniques will enable us to make advances in three very important areas; ultrathin ( 10 nanometer) coatings for high speed data storage media that exhibit resistance to corrosion wear and oxidation, ultrathin high-dielectric-constant films for advanced field effect transistors used in the chip industry and catalyst development for on board generation of hydrogen in automobile fuel cells. The analysis system will be added to a thin film chemical vapor deposition system and a high-pressure reactor cell so that materials may be prepared, treated and studied in-situ without the contamination of laboratory air and humidity. This represents the unique nature of the proposed system. Graduate and undergraduate research students will be trained to use the proposed system by the interdisciplinary team of researchers involved. The proposed system is unique in its abilities but the various techniques are commonly used in industry and therefore the student researchers will be well trained to make the transition from academic to industrial positions doc4508 none PROPOSAL SUMMARY The Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the Bowling Green State University will purchase a Sun Enterprice 450 Server which will be dedicated to the support of research in the mathematical sciences. The equipment will be used for four research projects, including in particular: _ James H. Albert: Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods in Bayesian Model Diagnostics and Model Comparisons _ Tong Sun: Finite element methods for shells and general mixed finite element code development _ Gordon Wade: Inverse problems _ Craig Zribel: Exact study of turbulent diffusion and pair dispersion in homogeneous turbulence doc4509 none Bromage The Analytical Microscopy and Imaging Center in Anthropology (AMICA), Hunter College, is a unique environment for the digital acquisition and processing of images of relevance to the anthropological sciences. Since it became operational in by virtue of an NSF Academic Research Infrastructure initiative, AMICA has remained true to research, the dissemination of knowledge, and educational opportunities at several levels. We propose now to implement microscopy technologies that advance a three-dimensional (3D) imaging and reconstruction capability in AMICA. We have three primary research objectives concerned with applications of real-time 3D and confocal microscopy to human and non-human primate bone microanatomy and life history. These research activities will take place in the context of an imaging sciences training program to include undergraduate and graduate students at all points in their academic careers. This will include a well established peer mentoring program in AMICA. The first objective is to examine the relationship between the 3D disposition (i.e. distribution and orientation) of secondary (Haversian) remodeling events in the human mid-shaft femur. Our study sample consists of an autopsy collection of known age individuals from 1-95 years for which information on weight, height, and cause of death are preserved. Knowledge of the age-related variability in the 3D conformation of Haversian systems, inasmuch as this variability may be affected by bone growth processes and mechanical history, is expected to provide insights into human life history (e.g., an individual s age, health status, and mechanical loading history). Second, we have the objective to the measure the 3D volumetric density of osteocyte lacunae in primate bone, as hypothesized to vary as a function of ontogenetic age and body size. A variety of primate taxa will be investigated, including some with known individual life history and representing various ages and a large range of body sizes. The primary significance of this work is that bone cell density may be found to vary in respect to the life histories characterizing these primate taxa and to be useful, in combination with other techniques, for the reconstruction of body size and or age in extinct taxa. Third, we aim both to compare the proportions of bone tissue types, that provide information about relative growth rate, as well as to quantify the widths of populations of contiguous bone lamellae in order to have some relatively objective criterion for the determination of bone growth rate variability and life history in Macaca and Ernthrocebus. Our sample derives from juvenile animals of known life history, some of whom have received vital labels necessary for the calculation of bone growth rate. This work is significant as a potential means of finessing high resolution information about growth rate variation in two Old World Monkey s specifically, and for appreciating relationships between aspects of bone microstructural organization and primate life history generally. AMICA s conventional two-dimensional (2D) microscopy has been, and always will be, our first point of access for information about bone microstructure relating to bone tissue organization and growth. Despite this, the visualization, data capturing (i.e. image acquisition), and measurement of bone microstructural features in the third dimension using 2D microscopy is an intractable task for reasons having to do with the superimposition of both in focus as well as out of focus information derived from the full thickness of histological sections. This makes 3D interpretations and measurements difficult. We propose to acquire three microscopes to address these deficiencies and to meet our research objectives: the Edge and H160 Real-Time 3D microscopes, and the Technical Instrument K2-S BIO Confocal microscope. In addition to their visualization potential, images acquired from these microscopes will be reconstructed to provide 3D data sets of histological structures for accurate measurement. The is dependent upon multiple oblique illuminating light sources to obtain very high (i.e. higher than conventional 2D compound light microscopy) resolution transmitted light 3D visualization. This microscope enables one to image with clarity in real-time, and at magnifications offered by a compound microscope, high resolution imagery of the 3D relationships existing between objects within histological thin sections, such as the arrangement of Haversian systems, networks of osteocyte lacunae, and bone lamellae. The H160 emulates a fluorescence microscope but its operating principle relies on splitting of the reflected light image into left- and right-eye views which are interpreted in real-time, correctly, as a 3D image by the eyebrain complex. The distribution of fluorescing label as a result of the administration of vital label in bone growth research, is precisely visualized at optical planes distinct from all others within a histological thin section. This is essential for the unambiguous localization of label to specific bone lamellae in our growth rate variability research. The K3 Confocal microscope is able to image very thin (e.g. 0.35 micron) optical sections deep to the surface of intact, bulk bone as well as in all such optical planes contained within typical histological thin sections. These very high resolution 2D images allow unambiguous interpretations of deep histological structures particularly once these have been understood in their third dimension doc4510 none The primary objective of the VERITAS collaboration s research effort is to find celestial point sources of ultra high energy gamma rays. Over the past decade the collaboration has pioneered the development of the Atmospheric Cherenkov Imaging Technique. Currently the collaboration operates a 10m imaging telescope situated on Mount Hopkins in South East Arizona. The collaboration has successfully detected ultra high energy gamma rays from the Crab Nebula and the active galactic nuclei Markarian 421, Markarian 501 and 1ES_ . The observational program is aimed at looking for gamma rays from a variety of celestial objects such as supernova remnants, pulsars, binary x-ray sources, black holes and active galactic nuclei. A rich education outreach component of this project is under development in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago doc4511 none High precision measurement of small forces and displacements is increasingly important in mechanical testing of tissues and materials. Microelectronic devices have created a need to understand material constitutive behavior at nanometer length scales. Complementary evaluation of mechanical integrity in connective tissue structural biology research has been limited due to size constraints of tissue available. Advances in instrumentation now provide the means to make direct measurements of mechanical integrity at very small length scales. This award will support the development of novel mechanical test methods to measure the mechanical properties of small pieces of tissue generated in cell culture, bone and soft connective tissues from mice, cartilage slices from larger mammals, miniature biomedical constructs, and tiny volumes of material exhibiting size-scale dependence. Relationships between the size or length scale of tissue and material tested and mechanical properties will be established, and these experiments will provide data to test general theories. The methods developed for specific tissues or materials with specific specimen size constraints will combine to enhance our ability to measure mechanical properties accurately and reliably on small length scales, and will advance our understanding of the mechanical property dependence on these length scales. New instrumentation designed for high precision, ultra-low force measurement will be used to meet these goals. Axial force and torsion are applied to specimens that can be oriented either vertically or horizontally. The high resolution of the system in position accuracy for both axial and rotary motion is suitable for measuring mechanical properties of very small volumes of connective tissue, tissue structures, constructs, and materials. Complete computerized control of the instrumentation will allow any desired test sequence to be performed with a simplified user interface suitable for training users with limited backgrounds in laboratory instrumentation. The ability to make measurements at these length scales on small specimens will complement connective tissue and materials research within several research programs at the University of Connecticut and neighboring institutions. Students and teachers in engineering and biological sciences from the University of Hartford, Trinity College, and the Bioengineering Alliance of Connecticut will participate in research and educational programs aligned with the use of this instrumentation and collateral laboratory equipment to illustrate the fundamental properties of tissues and materials. These students and teachers will help in further developing our participation with The Learning Corridor, a new Hartford campus and program with a focus on science, math, and engineering that spans pre-kindergarten, high school, and adult education doc4512 none Just This proposal requests funding for the acquisition of a 3T MRI scanner for human and animal brain imaging for use by a large, multi-disciplinary, dual-university community of users. The instrument is based on a Signa Horizon LX platform, optimized for activation studies. The very high-field strength enhances the signal to noise ratio and contrast for fMRl applications, enables the collection of very high-resolution structural images, and it is equipped for ultra-fast echoplanar imaging (EPI) that enables images to be acquired and processed at the rate of over 10 images per sec. The scanner would be the centerpiece of a new, inter-university Imaging Institute that brings together researchers in several disciplines at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon: cognitive neuroscientists who study human performance in complex environments, neuroscientists combining single-cell recording and neuroimaging with monkeys, biophysicists interested in advancing MR methods, statisticians with expertise in neuroimaging, and computer scientists interested in the analysis of large-scale databases. The basic science approach aims at an interdisciplinary synergy focused on brain imaging and theoretical integration. The university-supported Imaging Institute will provide a rich infrastructure and appropriate staffing to maximize the benefits of the scanner. The new instrument will be optimized for assessing a wide range of cognitive processes and will provide an unparalleled opportunity to relate human and animal cognition. The new facility will provide a data rich environment in which the 34 participating investigators (and a total group of 174 potential users) can combine their expertise in biomedical engineering, cognitive psychology, computer science, education, linguistics, statistics, and neuroscience. The investigators include seasoned researchers who can link brain imaging to their established research disciplines, thereby enriching the imaging research. There are five areas of basic science research: 1. Cognitive processing (of language, problem solving, spatial processing, motor control, and learning); 2. Monkey imaging (of network activity, maturation learning, activity dependent contrast agents, relation to single neuron activity, and structural imaging); 3. Analysis methods including statistical analysis (noise reduction, hierarchical Bayesian assessment, motion correction) and computer science analysis (machine learning, data mining, and analyzing the content of images); 4. MRI methods development including: fast fMRI imaging, respiratory cardiac noise reduction, reduction of susceptibility artifact, metabolic and volumetric imaging, animal RF coils and contrast agents; and MR spectroscopy of metabolites; and 5. computational modeling of cognitive function, examining how a variety of computational architectures can simultaneously account for human performance and fMRI patterns. The facility will provide extensive training and research time (20,000 hours of scanning over the next five years) to undergraduates, graduates, postdocs and faculty, and will infuse the unfolding science into the ongoing educational mission. The training activities include the development of new graduate and undergraduate courses (using a new brain imaging computer classroom), seminars and workshops on brain imaging, a new brain imaging graduate core, and summer undergraduate research traineeships. External training will include workshops, web course materials, software tools, and functional imaging and modeling data sets. Outreach activities include courses for educators, museum shows, web programs, and technology transfer with industrial partners. The activity would advance the new interdisciplinary science, extending and integrating the growing knowledge in this area into comprehensive theories of brain and mind doc4513 none Fulton, Charles T. Florida Institute of Technology MRI: Parallel Algorithm Development on an Upgraded Beowulf Cluster It is proposed to update an existing 5 processor BEOWULF system to 32-workstations, each having two processors, for a total of 64 processors. The upgrade is motivated by the needs of the radiative heat transfer group at Florida Tech for a more powerful computing capability, and the development of parallel numerical algorithms for various large scale numerical linear algebra problems which have been under investigation by the applied mathematics and computer science groups for more than 10 years. Both research activities require the parallel capability and the large amount of RAM proposed on each node doc4514 none A workshop will be organized and held in Central America to integrate the land and marine geological and geophysical studies that are being carried out in the region as part of the MARGINS Program. These studies are focused on both seismogenic zone and subduction factory objectives. The need for such a workshop was established at a MARGINS meeting held on December 14, in San Francisco that was attended by approximately 100 people. The workshop will include a range of international and Central American colleagues doc4515 none Acquisition of a High-Performance Parallel Computer for Mathematical Sciences and Applications The Center for Computational Mathematics (CCM) at the University of Colorado at Denver (CU-Denver) engages in mathematical sciences research and applications covering diverse areas of scientific computation, including model development, discretization methods, numerical linear algebra, optimization algorithms and applied statistics. Because the frontiers in each of these computationally intensive research areas continue to advance, it is essential to maintain high performance computing facilities capable of meeting ever increasing demands. The CCM is the only specialized site on campus for large-scale parallel computations. In addition to supporting research activities, the CCM also fulfills a critical role in the teaching mission of the University. Numerous advanced courses in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics rely heavily on the CCM computers. And the CCM facilities are vital to the success of our Mathematics Clinic Program. Research and teaching activities in computationally intensive areas are becoming increasingly limited by the CCM s outdated computational servers. There is therefore a pressing need to upgrade the computing capabilities of the CCM. This proposal aims to demonstrate the need for a new parallel computer by describing the following research projects and applications that will result from its use by faculty and students: Numerical Solution of Extremely Large Eigenvalue Problems; Acoustic Scattering, Domain Decomposition and Substructuring, and Distributed Parallel Programming; Parallel Eulerian-Lagrangian and Mixed Methods for Deterministic and Stochastic Subsurface Flows; Groundwater Modeling for Environmental Restoration; Validating New Mathematical Models for Swelling Porous Media; Numerical Solutions of Nonsmooth Equations; Estimation of the Value of Options; Atmospheric Models; Statistical Methodology for Massive Data Sets; Development of Accurate Finite Element Methods for Fluids Problems. We have identified the 64 processor Beowulf Intel-based cluster system to meet our computing needs. Each its 32 nodes has two PIII 733MHz processors and 2 GB of RAM. This powerful cluster with 64 GB total memory will handle not only the cross-disciplinary research described in the proposal, but will also be available to other users of CCM, including all faculty, postdoctoral scholars, visitors and students from the Department of Mathematics as well as affiliated faculty and students in the Department of Computer Science and the School of Engineering at CU-Denver doc4516 none Chave This Major Research Instrumentation award to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution provides funds for development of an advanced network communications system for implementation in a deep-ocean fiber-optic cable observatory system. The goal of the project is to develop, using commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) data networking technology, a robust system capable of two-way packetized communications at multiple Gbit s rates over an observatory network cable several hundred kilometers in length, and including numerous nodes for seafloor observations and experiments. The development effort includes fabrication and wet testing of a fault tolerant seafloor communications and control node. The project was reviewed and supported collaboratively at NSF by the Division of Ocean Sciences in the Directorate for Geosciences, the Division of Advanced Networking Infrastructure and Research of the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, together with the Office of Polar Programs. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and their industry partner, Cisco Systems, Inc., will provide cost-share support for 34% of total project costs doc4517 none Ghazi This grant, made through the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, provides partial support of the costs of acquiring a magnetic sector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer equipped with a laser ablation microprobe (hereafter referred to as LA-HR-ICP-MS) for the Department of Geology at Georgia State University. The new high resolution instrument offers increased sensitivity and lower detection limits for the analysis of trace elements in solution or contained in ablated particulates than the current and no longer manufactured quadrupole-based instrument at Georgia State. An excimer laser system operating in the deep UV (193 nm wavelength) will provide for better coupling with relatively translucent minerals (i.e. quartz) than do Nd-YAG lasers, offers a finer spot size and more stable energy profile across the beam width, and offers the ability to raster the laser beam. The LA-HR-ICP-MS system offers the potential to substantially improve the quality and quantity of measurements of trace element abundances contained within fluid inclusions, the specialty of this group at Georgia State. The new ICP-MS facility will also continue a long standing tradition of open use as an analytical facility serving the southeastern U.S. both for academic needs and use by industrial collaborators from Atlanta-based Lucent Technologies. This academic-industrial collaborative effort has resulted in a symbiotic relationship between the Georgia State Geology Department and Lucent Technologies, with Lucent providing financial support for operation of the lab and educational experiences for students and with Georgia State providing trained graduates for Lucent s workforce. Specific research projects in the geosciences that will utilize this new facility include: studies of the petrogenesis of Tethyan ophiolites exposed in Iran to better understand the process of oceanic crustal formation; rare earth element studies of pegmatite mineral-hosted fluid inclusions to shed light on water-rock interaction and its role in the formation of metalliferous deposits; trace element partitioning in high pressure experimental charges to elucidate the geochemical evolution of exposed metamorphic facies; and trace element analysis of groundwater samples from coastal plain aquifers of the southeastern U.S. as indicators of problematic salt-water intrusions caused by over pumping of fresh groundwater resources for agricultural and municipal needs doc4518 none Brown This Major Research Instrumentation award to University of Miami s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences provides funds for acquisition of oceanographic, meteorological and atmospheric chemistry instrumentation for installation on a commercial cruise ship operating in the eastern Caribbean Sea and adjacent Atlantic Ocean. Instrumentation will be operated by technicians provided by University of Miami, and will record data from weekly repeat tracks that cross major oceanographic boundaries and traverse through an important zone of atmospheric variability. Instrumentation to be acquired with NSF support includes a wind profiler, pyranometer, photometers, nephelometer, condensation particle counters, CO and ozone analyzers, sea water fluorometer and other items; additional oceanographic and atmospheric sensors are being provided with separate support by NOAA and Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, the vessel operator. In addition to recording data with the sensors supported here, the University of Miami personnel will include public outreach programs on the vessel, as well as research training courses, high school teacher training courses, on-board lectures, and distance learning programs. The project is supported by the Division of Ocean Sciences at NSF. University of Miami and their non-federal partners will provide cost-share support for more than 30% of total project costs doc4519 none We propose the development of a high-speed imaging system capable of measuring the motion of both solid surfaces and fluid elements inside a micromachined system. The system is unique in that it will be capable of operating both in the near infrared - a capability that allows it to see through silicon substrates and into the inner chambers of complex micromachined devices. This will enable, for the first time, high-speed measurements of the kinematics and dynamics of micromachined devices and the motion of fluids inside complex micromachined systems. Applications of this instrument will include measurement of micro device operation (valves, pumps, accelerometers, gyroscopes, etc), direct measurement of fluid behavior inside micro-geometries where visible imaging is not possible due to intervening silicon surfaces. The instrument development includes the assembly of custom hardware for infrared microscopy and illumination with lasers operating in conjunction with nonlinear Opto-Parametric Oscillators (OPOs). These create two very short laser pulses (4 ns each). The resultant image is captured by a pair of near-IR focal plane arrays and downloaded to a Digital Signal Processing Board (DSP) for real-time processing and display on a host PC. Custom signal processing software will enable three modes of operation: solid motion measurement, solid deformation measurement and fluid motion measurement doc4520 none R. Goldstein, University of Arizona Instabilities of fluid motions represent a large and a fundamentally important branch of fluid dynamics. The PI has proposed to investigate a novel class of instabilities: those which occur in the narrow plumes of positively-or-negatively-buoyant fluid within a large body of the host fluid. The density gradients associated with the buoyancy permit schlieren observations of the plume behavior and this technique will be used to examine the coiling (or chiral) and the axisymmetric instabilities. These experiments will be correlated with theoretical considerations that are used to establish the parameters that will lead to the breakdown of the basic state doc4521 none Sims This award provides 54% partial funding support for the acquisition and installation of a multi-collector inductively coupled mass spectrometer system for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is committed to providing the remaining funds necessary to acquire and install the system. The instrument system will be used for research and training of students in the fields of earth sciences and oceanography. Analytical applications will include high precision measurements of isotope ratios of geochemically significant elements such as Th, Pb, Mo, Hf, O, Sr, and Nd doc4522 none Ligon, Walter B. Clemson University MRI: Acquisition of a Computational Mini-Grid Supercomputing Facility The objective of this CISE MRI proposal is to acquire computational equipment to support research in genomics, polymeric fibers and films, and high-performance computing systems. This enabling technology will be used to support programs in the Clemson University Genomics Institute, the Center for Advanced Engineering Fibers and Films, and the Parallel Architecture Research Laboratory. The requested equipment will help these three groups meet their current goals, increase their computational capacity, and permit expansion into new research areas. It will foster collaboration, interdisciplinary work, and integration of research and education doc4523 none Hertzog The MuLan Project will develop the instrumentation needed to measure the lifetime of the positive muon to unprecedented precision, namely, a factor of 20 better than the current world average. The muon lifetime fixes the value of the Fermi constant, which governs the strength of all weak-interaction processes, just as the fine structure constant governs the strength of all electromagnetic-interaction processes. The Fermi constant is one of the fundamental parameters of the Standard Model of particle physics. A low-energy, continuous-wave muon beam at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland will be modified by a new beam chopper system in order to create intense, short bursts of muons, which will stop in thin targets. A positive muon stopped in appropriate materials decays as if it were in vacuum. Such targets will be surrounded by a nearly hermetic set of 180 fast-scintillator timing detectors, each coupled to a state-of-the-art waveform digitizer, and all readout by a high-speed data acquisition system. Online analysis of the nearly 100 terabytes of data will take place with a small array of fast microprocessors. A second use of the instrumentation is in conjunction with an ongoing effort at PSI to measure the negative muon lifetime in hydrogen gas. The negative muon can decay exactly in the same manner as the positive muon, or in hydrogen it can interact with a proton by the weak-interaction process known as capture. The capture rate is predicted very accurately by theory; however, current experiments, which have various interpretation problems, are in disagreement with theory by a very significant amount. If this disagreement is confirmed, this difference raises the exciting possibility of pointing to new and unaccounted for physics. By measuring the difference between the positive and negative muon lifetimes, we will determine the muon capture rate reliably and at a precision more than four times better than current measurements. The MuLan timing detectors, beamline and custom electronics are expected to play a major role in this effort doc4524 none Adams, Joel C. Calvin College MRI: Acquisition and Analysis of a Multidisciplinary Beowulf Cluster It is proposed to design, acquire, build, and test a ``Beowulf cluster`` multiprocessor that will provide a high performance computing environment for multidisciplinary scientific research and research training at Calvin College. The objective is to determine what cluster design is best suited for research projects in multiple disciplines. More precisely, it is proposed to spend three years studying the performance of three common cluster topologies on different kinds of research problems. The aim of the study is to identify the cluster topologies that are best suited for particular kinds of problems, as well as identify what topology provides the best overall performance for multidisciplinary research machine doc4525 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) and Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Programs, and the Division of Experimental and Integrative Activities (EIA), Prof. Mark S. Gordon of Iowa State University, in collaboration with IBM, Myricom and Packet Engines, will design and build a cluster computer. This computer will look and perform logically like a moderately sized MPP system, but at a fraction of the cost. Key to the development of a successful machine is optimal inter-node communications, and the PI will utilize a) the expertise of the Iowa State University Scalable Computing Lab together with the theoretical chemistry and condensed matter physics groups; b) access to AIX source code via his partnership with IBM; and c) optimization of communications technology via interactions with Myricom and Packet Engines. Gordon will focus on optimization of throughput, reduction of latency, scalability of real applications beyond 64 nodes, cluster heterogeneity, distributed file systems, development of more effective message passing tools, system management and scheduling, and applications in materials science. Computational science and engineering is positioned to play a leading role in solving grand challenge problems that we face in the next decade. These important problems include the design of new materials and catalysts with desirable properties, the elucidation of biological processes, the search for the origin of life, and the development of viable methods for environmental remediation. Solution of such compelling and complex problems requires not only state-of-the-art computational hardware, but also the development of the necessary models and algorithms to take optimal advantage of modern computers. This work will lead to the development of a cluster environment that will enable grand challenge applications that require scalable high-performance computing doc4526 none The Department of Mathematics at Wayne State University will purchase one UNIX server and four UNIX workstations which will be dedicated to the support of research in the mathematical sciences. The equipment will be used for several research projects, including in particular: Cohomology of Modules over the Steenrod Algebra; Estimation, Control, and Optimization of Large-scale and Hybrid Systems; Computation of Differential Equations with Strongly Discontinuous Coefficients; and Numerical Approximation of Singularly Perturbed Problems. Seven faculty members in the department will participant in the proposed research projects. Many graduate students will be involved in these research projects doc4527 none Meyn Description: This award supports the participation of 20 U.S. scientists and engineers at a US-India Workshop: Learning, Optimization, and Adaptation, Kerala, December . Professors Sean Meyn, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and A. Krishnamoorty of Cochin University of Science and Technology will hold a workshop on stochastic optimization and adaptive control. Its purpose is to bring researchers from diverse fields together to learn of new methods for analyzing and controlling complex systems; to advance the mathematical foundations of systems theory; and to learn more about current related technological problems in the information sciences. Scope: Participants include scientists and engineers from Government and Industry, Academia in India and the U.S., and students. The workshop is hosted by the University of Cochin with support from the Government of India agencies including the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Council on Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). The workshop is designed to foster future bilateral collaborations. The Division of Electrical and Communications Systems has provided joint funding for this workshop with the Division of International Programs doc4528 none The characterization of materials that possess a complex hierarchical organization and are composed of multiple constituents, is an important problem in materials science and engineering. To obtain a comprehensive understanding of such materials, a direct imaging technique that will allow chemical contrast and spatial resolution on the nanometer scale would be extremely useful. Near-Field Scanning Optical Microscopy (NSOM SNOM), a relatively new technique, is showing great potential for the topographic and spectroscopic imaging of the surfaces of metals, polymers, semiconductors and biological materials in air as well as in liquids at a submicron scale. The objective of this grant is to set up a NSOM system at the University of Arizona for research and research training in the optical characterization of the surface of materials in air as well as in liquids. The major components of the instrument system are (i) a NSOM with Atomic force microscopy (AFM) capabilities, (ii) a micron Raman spectrometer, (iii) a fluorescence spectrometer and (iv) a laser source. A team of researchers from a variety of disciplines such as materials science and engineering, optical science, mechanical engineering and surgical biology will be able to use this equipment system for advanced research and research training. It is also proposed to use the NSOM system for training and educating undergraduates, especially through the NSF supported Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program that has been active in the department of materials science and engineering since . The acquisition of the system will tremendously benefit K-12 outreach activities as well as the recruitment of under represented and minority students. It is also planned to use the NSOM facility as the core of a more comprehensive Arizona Major Analytical Center (AMAC) for instrumentation and materials characterization doc4529 none A tri-laser confocal microscope will be placed in a state-of-the-art biological imaging resource in the Integrated Microscopy Core (IMC), Department of Molecular 123 postdocs), and as throughout its 25 year history, also will be available to investigators and students throughout Baylor, including numerous outreach programs for young scientists and minority groups. This instrument will greatly enhance the ability to perform biological imaging at Baylor, and will serve as a shared resource throughout the Texas Medical Center doc4530 none This award will fund the acquisition of a 600 MHz solids-capable nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer for research projects that span a diversity of problems, from materials science through the chemistry of signaling events to the determination of macromolecular structure. NMR uses the principle that the nuclei of most atoms act as tiny magnets. These magnets line up parallel or anti-parallel to a magnetic field, and emit or absorb radio-frequency energy when they do so. The amount of energy emitted, and therefore the sensitivity of the technique, depends on using the highest possible field. Because most nuclei are magnetic, NMR is a technique that can be applied to a broad range of materials, ranging from minerals to human tissue (as in MRI). This award will enhance nine identified research projects: to understand the responses of crop-plants to light, the mechanism of important industrial catalysts, the bacterial enzymes that generate methane, potential materials for new, organic magnets, the mechanisms by which proteins bind to DNA, how vitamin B6 works, the structural principles of new classes of drugs incorporating fluorine atoms, how disease-causing fungi signal to each other, and the role of chloride and zinc in protein structure and function. The requested spectrometer is a state-of-the art instrument capable of carrying out the full repertory of modern, multidimensional gradient-assisted NMR experiments, on small molecules and proteins in solution, and on solids. The instrument will have a field of 14 Tesla. It will be a major improvement on existing instrumentation at the University of Nebraska, and it will be the most powerful NMR spectrometer in the state and the region. The new instrument will enable the hiring of a new faculty member in the area of biological chemistry. The presence of this faculty member at the University of Nebraska will create synergistic interactions with other faculty researchers in the areas of biochemistry and synthetic chemistry, will provide a significant training opportunity for graduates students in biophysical chemistry, and will complement the structural biology research efforts of David L. Smith (mass spectrometry) and Gerard Harbison (solid state NMR). The integration of undergraduate and graduate students, particularly those from hitherto under-represented groups, fulfills one of the major goals of NSF s strategic plan, and is a central aspect of research at the University of Nebraska and of this award. The Department of Chemistry has 20 faculty members active in research and a graduate student population of approximately 100. Most of our graduates work in the chemical industry; an increasing number have found employment in biotech and pharmaceutical companies. The University of Nebraska also has a vigorous undergraduate research effort. Typically, five chemistry majors and about an equal number of biochemistry majors continue into graduate research in chemistry or biochemistry. The Department of Chemistry hosts a summer REU program, in which undergraduates from other universities gain research experience. Of the 22 participants in last year s program, four were African-American, two were Hispanic and one was Native American. At the community college level, UNL has growing ties with Nebraska Indian Community College and Little Priest Tribal College at Winnebago, NE. Investigators at these institutions have the opportunity to conduct summer and or sabbatical research at UNL, and will benefit from the instrumentation doc4531 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) and Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Programs, Peter M. Rentzepis of the University of California in Irvine will develop a table top experimental system for time-resolved femtosecond to nanosecond X-ray Diffraction and EXAFS in solids and liquids. Such an instrument will combine high repetition rate with a high X-ray flux, two ingredients especially needed for high quality EXAFS spectra. The investigator will carry out a number of studies once the instrument is up and running, such as grazing incidence experiments on thin (sub-nanometer) films, which will yield important information on the thermal transport properties of such films, and solution phase EXAFS. The application of time-resolved X-rays is a frontier in spectroscopy, and could have great benefits for the chemical enterprise. This work will lead to a new generation of short pulse X-rays with significant impact in science areas that use time-resolved X-ray structure analysis. This is a new direction in X-ray structure analysis insofar as it will provide dynamical information. The development of this user-friendly spectrometer will allow scientists in the region to perform research projects in many different disciplines, including engineering, materials science, chemistry and biology doc4532 none Glatzmaier MRI The necessary supercomputing resources to study several grand challenge problems in astrophysics and planetary science will be developed at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The supercomputing capability will be available to all department faculty and students. The student body has 50% women. There is great potential for a broad public impact on fundamental physics issues, especially in collaboration with the Visualization lab. Research activities enabled by this new capability include simulations of planetary convection s and magnetic fields, planetary collisional modeling with smooth particle hydrodynamics, galaxy formation and large-scale structure of the Universe, and modeling of supernova and gamma ray bursts doc4533 none The Department of Mathematics and the Institute of Theoretical Dynamics at the University of California will purchase a Servernet-II based Beowulf cluster consisting of 32 Digital CPUs which will be dedicated to the support of research in the mathematical sciences. The equipment will be used for several research projects, including in particular the following five projects. Computational Studies of Flow in the Thoracic Aorta - Angela Cheer Large Scale Numerical Linear Algebra Problems - Zhaojun Bai Computational Modeling of Micro-scale Jetting Processes with Industrial Applications - Elbridge Gerry Puckett Object Characterization using Vector-Valued Sensor Data - N. Saito Constructing conservative and dissipative differential equations - S. Shkoller doc4534 none A superconducting solenoidal spectrometer and state-of-the-art detectors for low energy electrons will be used for a series of high precision measurements of neutron beta-decay using, for the first time, Ultra-Cold Neutrons (UCN). In particular the angular correlation (A) between the neutron spin direction and the electron momentum will be measured with a statistical precision of 0.2% and substantially smaller systematic errors. This represents nearly a factor of five improvement over the present best measurements in an experiment with significantly different and considerably smaller systematic uncertainties. High-precision measurements of the A-correlation in neutron beta-decay can be combined with measurements of the neutron and muon lifetimes to extract the u-quark d-quark weak mixing also known as V_ud - a key component of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix. Improved measurements of V_ud can provide access to physics beyond the Standard Model by testing the unitarity of this matrix doc4535 none Cassel, Lillian N. Villanova University MRI: Web Host Access Tools This is a cooperative effort among computing faculty at Villanova University and the College of New Jersey and the objective is the acquisition of web host access tools. The combined research activities address important questions in artificial intelligence, information gathering, human-computer interface and networking all in the context of a common problem. The problem that joins these topics is assisting a user retrieving and using information obtained from the World Wide Web. The actives involve an integration of research and education with an explicit goal to introduce students to a significant research project while advancing the state of the art in enhanced web resource access doc4536 none Mass spectrometry has recently become one of the most powerful techniques for structural characterization of biological molecules, including peptides, proteins and nucleic acids. Tandem mass spectrometry is particularly useful for sequencing these molecules, especially when only small amounts of material are available. The quadrupole time-of-flight tandem mass spectrometer will be used for routine fragmentation and unequivocal daughter fragment identification and characterization. Specific projects which will use this instrumentation include 1) investigations of the molecular mechanisms of iron acquisition by marine microorganisms in order to understand the role of iron in regulating the global carbon cycle and climate change; 2) the search for biological molecular markers of autism, 3) the synthesis and characterization of polymeric peptide adhesives with industrial and medical applications, 4) the development biological nanofabrication processes of new high performance composites and 5) investigations of amphiphilic peptides to control the cell response, particularly on biologically active material surfaces. The quadrupole time-of flight mass spectrometer will include a high pressure liquid chromatograph to separate compounds before analyzing their masses and fragmentation patterns. The mass spectrometer will consist of a quadrupole as the first mass analyzer, followed by a quadrupole collision cell and a time-of-flight detector as the second mass analyzer. The system will also be configured with nanospray and micro ion spray capabilities to allow for a range of flow rates and to permit the small amounts of biological samples to be analyzed. The system will use electrospray ionization (ESI) for soft ionization of proteins and peptides or atmospheric pressure chemical ionization (APCI) for analysis of polar organic molecules. The quadrupole time-of flight mass spectrometer will significantly enhancing the research infrastructure at the University of California, Santa Barbara by extending the mass range and sensitivity capabilities of the UCSB Mass Spectrometry Facility which is housed in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. For example, this instrument provides the capability to elucidate the structures of peptides, proteins and nucleic acids, which is required by the research groups that will use this instrumentation. This mass spectrometer will also significantly enhance student training, by providing exposure to and training in modern structure determination methodologies, which will certainly be useful in the emerging areas of proteomics, genomics and bioinformatics doc4537 none Dickinson This award is for the acquisition of a tunable, ultrafast laser facility to extend existing capabilities in materials physics and chemistry research at Washington State University (WSU). The instrumentation will be used by eight productive faculty from WSU, their students, and their postdoctoral fellows who are all working in areas of advanced materials research. The instrument will also be used by one additional researcher from the University of Idaho. The new instrument provides a complete, versatile light source that ranges in pulse duration from picoseconds down to 100 femtoseconds over a wavelength range from 250 nanometer (5 electron volts) to 3 mm (0.4 electron volts). These wide variations in photon energy and pulse width are of considerable interest for materials research because it allows scientists to probe both ground and excited electronic structure of many modern and model materials. Research benefiting from this instrumentation includes efforts to understand laser desorption and ablation as applied to thin-film synthesis and chemical analysis, laser damage and surface modification, fundamental laser-surface interactions, nonlinear spectroscopic studies, and nonlinear propagation in waveguides, cavities, and bulk materials, ultrafast all-optical switching in polymer optical fibers, and theoretical studies that relate directly to the experimental efforts. This award is for the acquisition of a tunable, ultrafast laser facility to extend existing capabilities in materials physics and chemistry research at the Washington State University. The instrumentation will be used by eight productive at WSU, their students, and their postdoctoral fellows who are working in areas of advanced materials research. A scientist from the University of Idaho will also use the equipment. The new instrument will provide a complete, versatile light source that ranges in pulse duration from a 80 picoseconds down to 100 femtoseconds over a spectral range from the ultraviolet to the infrared. Research benefiting from this instrumentation includes efforts to understand laser desorption and ablation as applied to thin-film synthesis and chemical analysis, laser damage and surface modification, fundamental laser-surface interactions, nonlinear spectroscopic studies, and nonlinear propagation in waveguides, cavities, and bulk materials, ultrafast all-optical switching in polymer optical fibers, and theoretical studies that relate directly to these experimental efforts doc4538 none Lawrence J. Overzet University of Texas at Dallas MRI: Acquisition of a Plasma Science Research and Research Training Laboratory The acquisition and development of a plasma science teaching and research laboratory is a joint effort among 5 faculty members in the Schools of Engineering and Computer Science and Natural Science and Mathematics at the University of Texas at Dallas. The laboratory development provides five distinct plasma stations with related diagnostics on each system. The five plasma-generation systems and the diagnostics for them offer a diverse research-training experience for students. As these plasma systems were chosen to reflect the research interests of the faculty, this laboratory also provides a fertile research environment for the PIs. The facilities installed are the following: 1] an inductively coupled plasma (ICP) system with a residual gas analyzer, a Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectrometer, and an Absorption Spectroscopy (AS) system; 2] a dc pulsed magnetron source for sputter deposition of films with optical emission spectroscopy (OES) and deposited film analysis; 3] a hollow cathode discharge source with a microwave interferometer and Langmuir probes; 4] a dc rf parallel plate plasma source with an FTIR spectrometer, deposited film analysis, Langmuir probe and current-voltage probes; and 5] various lamps with OES, AS, and current-voltage measurement capabilities. The plasma science laboratory provides a research training capability at UTD for both undergraduate (upper level) and graduate students in Engineering and the Natural Sciences. It encompasses a strong teaching component, resonates with the needs of local industry, and can potentially address needs of further removed industry. It will undoubtedly be used to train non-traditional students as well. The extensive research backgrounds and interests of the investigators in semiconductor processing (etching deposition and doping), lighting plasmas, and space plasmas allow students, as well as technical and research staff from local industry, to learn about basic plasma processes and diagnostics in the expanding fields of plasma science and technology. The Laboratory also enhances the research capabilities and teaming of the five collaborating researchers along with other investigators in both academe and industry. The lab is housed in modern clean room facilities, and consequently the equipment is suitable for both research training and for advanced research programs in materials processing, device manufacturing, and lighting doc4539 none The School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science (CEES) at the University of Oklahoma (OU) will purchase and develop state-of-the-art equipment for integrated research education in problems associated with unsaturated soil behavior. Within the civil engineering community, behavior of partially saturated near-surface soils is receiving intense research interest. Slope failures, embankment settlement, foundation heave due to expansive clays, pavement subgrade performance, chemical spills, and vadose zone remediation, are just a few examples of prevalent engineering problems whose solution depends on understanding unsaturated soil behavior. The CEES is poised to be a leader in this field due to the expertise of the faculty and the compelling research already established in unsaturated soil mechanics. Equipment obtained via NSF MRI funding will enable researchers to examine in-depth, comprehend, and define unsaturated soil behavior in ways not currently possible. Five pieces of equipment for testing unsaturated soils will be acquired and developed: 1) A direct shear test device will be purchased and a unique test cell apparatus will be constructed for control and or measurement of pore-air and pore-water pressure. The test cell will accommodate testing of soil-to-soil or soil-to-construction material interfaces. 2) A custom made hollow cylinder apparatus used for examining stress-strain behavior of soil will be purchased and will provide complete freedom on the stress and strain paths applied to the soil. The apparatus allows a hollow cylinder test specimen to be subjected to axial force and torque, and to different internal and external cell pressures. In addition, pore air and pore water pressures can be controlled. These forces and pressures are controlled independently from a PC. Accordingly, it is possible to control the magnitude and direction of the three principal stresses. Data acquisition will be included, and a pressure control panel will be fabricated. 3) An oedometer will be purchased and a test cell will be constructed for control and or measurement of pore-air and pore-water pressure. Data acquisition will be acquired and a pressure control panel will be fabricated. The equipment will allow for the determination of fundamental one-dimensional compression properties of unsaturated soils. 4) A cubical device, currently owned by CEES, permits independent control of total normal stress applied in the principal stress directions during cubical triaxial testing of unsaturated soil. Modifications will allow measurement of pore air and pore water pressure, and automated application of cyclic loads, in addition to measurement of displacements. 5) A parallel miniature pressure cell system will be constructed for rapid, detailed measurement of air water and organic-liquid water capillary pressure-saturation relationships and relative permeabilities in soils. The system will be comprised of eight custom-built miniature pressure cells operated in parallel, and a computerized control system for automated operation and data acquisition. Equipment obtained through the MRI grant will greatly enhance current research capabilities and allow CEES to become a preeminent research institution in the area of unsaturated soil behavior. Currently, there is no unique center of this type in the United States, and thus the new facilities will have broad appeal. It is fitting that OU becomes the location of a preeminent research center for unsaturated soils, particularly in light of the numerous unsaturated soil problems that plague Oklahoma and other surrounding states such as Texas and Colorado doc4540 none In many economic situations delegates are hired to play games on behalf of their principals. The principal-agent literature has had much success in analyzing how optimal contracts should respond to various types of agency problems (adverse selection, moral hazard, and combinations of both) in the delegation relationship. However, the agent in most of this literature does not play a game with other parties, rather, his actions alone determine the principal s payoff subject to perhaps exogenous randomization by nature. The proposed research is a study of how principals should design the delegation contract in order to provide proper incentives for their delegates AND gain strategic advantage against the other parties in several classes of delegation games. The findings will likely provide important ramifications to both the principal-agent literature and the delegation literature. The research may also throw light on interesting features of real life contracts such as holdbacks in car dealer contracts, and allow derivation of certain implications that could lead to empirical tests of the commitment effect. The proposed research, largely joint work with Ph.D. student Walter Cont, is to study a delegate bargaining game in which the seller of an indivisible good hires a delegate (an intermediary) to sell the good to a buyer. We show that the seller s strategic manipulation of the delegation contract may cause bargaining failures between the delegate and the buyer when the seller sets a minimum price exceeding some buyers valuations. Furthermore, the interaction between commitment (through minimum price) and incentives depends on the nature of the agency problem. We would like to extend the basic model in several interesting directions and apply the model to car dealership contracts doc4541 none Costerton This is a development proposal to build a miniature confocal laser scanning microscope for in situ imaging of bacterial biofilms in their natural environments. Confocal microscopy is the dominant imaging modality for the study of bacterial adhesion onto surfaces, and their organization into communities called biofilms. Our understanding of these microbial communities is limited to those species that can be coaxed to grow in optically compliant environments such as flow cells, which are compatible with conventional microscopy tools. Extension of studies to films in their native environment, such as inside pipes and vessels or underground, are hindered because we do not have imaging tools that are compatible with those environments. The applicant proposes to exploit recent advances in Silicon micromachining and microlens technologies to produce a confocal microscope smaller than 2 mm in diameter and only 10 mm long. Called the confocal microprobe, the instrument may be introduced through the working channel of a borescope or endoscope to permit in situ studies of biofilm formation and growth. The confocal microprobe will support brightfield imaging as well as fluorescent imaging with submicrometer resolution. It will interface to an existing commercial confocal optical microscope, and operation of the microprobe will be controlled via the user interface of our commercial instrument. This new miniature instrument will be used extensively in the Center for Biofilm Engineering, where its impact will be felt on several programs. One of those programs is the study of biofilm formation in porous media such as soil, where biofilm research is targeting biobarriers for isolation of pollutants or to improve secondary recovery of oil from injection wells. Another research direction in the Center that will benefit from this development is the microscopic study of fouling and microbially influenced corrosion in nuclear storage facilities, using an ultraminiature microscope delivered through the working channel of a borescope. The study of mixed species biofilms (such as subgingival plaque) in their natural environment is extremely important, and the confocal microprobe will offer tremendous advantage for those studies. This instrument will be used collaboratively between the Center for Biofilm Engineering, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Microvision, Inc., the world leader in micromechanical laser beam scanning devices. Microvision is well positioned to capitalize on this development program and would be a willing partner to transition this technology from the university lab environment into the commercial arena doc4497 none Salano This grant makes possible the acquisition of a new instrument capable of producing 20nm patterned line widths, 10nm scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and 20nm scanning Auger microscopy (SAM), all while simultaneously providing atomic resolution with a scanning tunneling microscope (STM AFM). The new instrument will be attached to the present molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) growth facility to provide expanded research opportunities with semiconductor quantum dots and wires for scientists and engineers at the University of Arkansas. Initial investigations are on the use of patterned substrates to produce laterally ordered self-assembled quantum dots and how to engineer strain to produce quantum dots. The project explores the underlying science important to the homogeneity of quantum dots, single electron spin dynamics in a quantum dot, and the optical behavior of a single quantum dot and the interaction between them. There will be an investigation of the possibility of forming photonic band structures from quantum dot arrays. While the new instrument is aimed at enhancing the research capability of faculty and students at the University of Arkansas, it will also play a significant role in a new Ph.D. degree program in electronic-photonic materials and devices supported under the NSF IGERT program. Nanotechnology is a new field, centered on the study of nanometer-sized materials. One nanometer, or one billionth of a meter, is one thousand times smaller than the smallest electronic devices that exist today. As a result, progress in scientific understanding on the nanoscale will play an important role in realizing future electronic and optoelectronic devices. This project makes possible the acquisition of a new instrument which when attached to the present molecular beam epitaxy growth facility at the University of Arkansas will provide the opportunity for scientists and engineers to explore and advance our current understanding of nanosize semiconductor quantum dots and wires. It will also play a significant role in a new Ph.D. degree program in electronic-photonic materials and devices, supported under the NSF IGERT program. The educational goal of our program is to produce graduates that are fully prepared to drive the advancement of nanostructures. We will accomplish this goal by utilizing our molecular beam epitaxy facility, coupled with the newly acquired diagnostic and device fabrication tools made possible by this award, as a novel educational tool doc4543 none The Doppler on Wheels (DOW) program at the University of Oklahoma (in close collaboration with the National Center for Atmospheric Research) has developed single beam, mobile Doppler radars. These have enabled the collection of very high resolution Doppler data on a variety of meteorological phenomena including tornadoes and convective storms in mountains. These data have allowed major advances to be made in the atmospheric sciences. Under the NSF Major Research Instrumentation program, the Principal Investigator will develop an advanced, five-beam mobile Doppler radar. This will allow researchers to acquire rapid scan Doppler radar information at higher temporal resolution than previously possible. There is a compelling need for three-dimensional Doppler radar observations on short time scales. Tornadoes, small-scale boundary layer structures in hurricanes, microbursts and other phenomena evolve on time scales that are unobservable using traditional radars. An innovative design will permit rapid-scan observations using a hybrid electronic mechanical scanning system with multiple simultaneous transmit and receive beams. This instrument will be used by researchers to open up new avenues of research doc4510 none The primary objective of the VERITAS collaboration s research effort is to find celestial point sources of ultra high energy gamma rays. Over the past decade the collaboration has pioneered the development of the Atmospheric Cherenkov Imaging Technique. Currently the collaboration operates a 10m imaging telescope situated on Mount Hopkins in South East Arizona. The collaboration has successfully detected ultra high energy gamma rays from the Crab Nebula and the active galactic nuclei Markarian 421, Markarian 501 and 1ES_ . The observational program is aimed at looking for gamma rays from a variety of celestial objects such as supernova remnants, pulsars, binary x-ray sources, black holes and active galactic nuclei. A rich education outreach component of this project is under development in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago doc4545 none A confocal microscope will permit state-of-the-art light microscopy and analysis for neuroscientists, cell biologists and microbiologists at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The microscope will be housed in the high-resolution microscopy facility in the Department of Biological Sciences and will be available to all campus researchers. It will provide a valuable resource to researchers that currently must travel to use a confocal microscope and provide excellent opportunities for other scientists to expand their research in directions that are not currently possible. The confocal microscope will be readily adaptable to a wide variety of biological questions that are addressed in a multi-user facility. It will provide the capability for high-resolution localization of fluorescent probes and other markers in fixed and living cells. It will also enable the simultaneous detection of multiple probes in cells and allow the visualization of structures stained with multiple labels. Finally it will provide the capability for three-dimensional reconstruction of tissues containing multiple cellular and molecular markers. The Leica TCS SP confocal microscope is well suited for a multi-user facility. It has a prism to allow users to select the emission bands for specific fluorophores and optimize the wavelengths being used to minimize bleed-through. This permits the use of dye combinations that cannot be used with other systems and provides flexibility for use with future dyes and combinations that are not yet available. The three-laser system will provide for the diverse needs of many users. The design of the instrument provides shift-free illumination through a multi-laser merge module that permits the simultaneous detection of three different fluorophores. In addition, the scanhead is designed to be alignment-free. These characteristics make it extremely valuable for a multi-user facility in which many different applications will be performed on a single instrument. The 13 laboratories that will use this instrument currently house over 50 postdoctoral and graduate students and 20 undergraduate researchers. The facility will also serve as an educational tool in laboratory-based courses and provide unique research opportunities for women and under-represented minorities at the undergraduate, graduate and faculty levels. The microscope will provide users and students with access to state-of-the-art equipment for the acquisition and processing of confocal images doc4546 none McEllistrem The scanning tunneling microscope has done much to broaden our understanding of Semiconductors and metals, providing a unique view of material surfaces available by no other technique. Specifically, the microscope s ability to resolve individual surface atoms has lead to an improved understanding of the chemistry and physics of solid surfaces. How a chemical reaction proceeds on a surface, or how different surface atoms diffuse, segregate, or combine can be literally watched on an atomic scale. The awarded instrument will be used to investigate the formation of metal silicides on silicon, since metal semiconductor interfaces continue to impact device fabrication. At a more fundamental level, understanding the processes that lead to metal silicide formation will allow the controlled formation of nanoscale particles, particles that are driven to self-assemble by their reactivity. The instrument will also be used to investigate how reactions proceed on gallium nitride (from which electro-optic devices that emit in the blue violet can be made). In particular, the dynamics of hydrogen on the gallium nitride surface is of technological interest, and can also be used as a probe of local surface reactivity. Since gallium nitride surfaces are also polar (N- vs. Ga-terminated), the impact of surface polarity on surface reactions will also be studied. Semiconductors are widely used in electronic and electro-optic devices. Nearly all computer chips, for example, are fabricated from silicon. Compound semiconductors (the so-called III-V semiconductors) are often found in devices which convert electrical energy into light, namely light-emitting diodes, found in nearly all consumer electronics, and laser diodes, which form the heart of a solid state laser, the engine in laser printers and compact disc players. Research into semiconductors has lead to the development of faster, smaller computer chips (and thus computers), and novel electro-optic devices. The scanning tunneling microscope has done much to broaden our knowledge of semiconductors and metals, providing a unique view of material surfaces unavailable by any other technique. Specifically, this microscope is capable of attaining atomic resolution images of surfaces. With it, surface physics and chemistry can observed on an atomic scale. In short, how atoms move and distribute themselves on a surface, or how a chemical reaction proceeds on a surface, can be imaged directly with a scanning tunneling microscope. The awarded instrument will be used to further our understanding of how metals interact with silicon, and to investigate the surface chemistry of novel semiconductor materials used in electro-optic applications doc4547 none High throughput automated nucleotide sequencing is critically important for genomics research. A wide array of research projects at Auburn University requires extensive DNA sequencing and fragment analysis. These projects include development of molecular markers, genetic mapping, marker-assisted selection, genetic resource analysis, germplasm conservation, molecular ecology, population genetics, phylogenetic studies, molecular evolution, gene discovery and cloning, molecular detection, environmental genomics, and functional genomics. This award will support the acquisition of high throughput DNA analysis equipment that will greatly increase the capacity of Auburn s research community. The ABI Prism 377 automated DNA sequencer is a high throughput machine with a capacity of 96 samples per run. It is easier to use than the capillary-based DNA sequencers and, therefore, is more suitable for a core facility with multiple users. Its acquisition will meet the current and growing needs in DNA analysis at Auburn University and in the region. The instrumentation supported by this award will address a critical aspect of research need in the region. It will dramatically enhance research capacity, efficiency, precision, and output. Application of the information obtained from accelerated research, research training, and outreach will have a large economic impact in Alabama. Acquisition of this equipment will represent an important step toward improving the research infrastructure at Auburn University. A large number of graduate and undergraduate students will benefit by their involvement in research projects using the equipment or from course offerings providing hands-on experience and workshops on advanced technologies in genomics. The equipment will also be made available to researchers and students at Tuskegee University doc4548 none Swindlehurst, Arnold Brigham Young University MRI: Development of a Comprehensive Real-Time Instrument for MIMO Wireless Channel Measurement and Space-Time Coding Implementation The primary goal of this proposal is the design, construction, and testing of a general purpose wireless communications platform that can be used for multiple transmit and receive antennas channel measurement and space-time coding algorithm assessment. The proposed instrumentation will be extremely flexible, allowing for variable array geometry, antenna spacing, bandwidth (up to 20MHz), carrier frequency (500MHz-20GHz), modulation format, polarization, and path distance. Two system configurations will be constructed, a tethered system for short range ( 300m) indoor experiments, and another that permits longer range (300- m) outdoor experiments using GPS receivers for carrier phase lock doc4549 none Huang, Thomas S. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign MRI: LIVE: Laboratory for Immersive Virtual Experiments This proposal establishes the Laboratory for Immersive Virtual Environments (LIVE) which will provide a testbed for engineering and computer science research on distributed graphics, sensor integration, audio display, and human face, speech, and gesture recognition. Psychologists will use LIVE to determine how visual perception drives information extraction, navigation, and human movement. Scientists will use LIVE to explore and analyze their three dimensional datasets. Twenty-five faculty members from nine departments will use LIVE to build and understand virtual worlds and human interfaces. The heart of LIVE will be a fully enclosed, 6-sided, 10 x10 x10 , backprojected virtual reality environment to be housed at the Beckman Institute and the University of Illinois doc4550 none Instrumentation will be aquired that will enable the measurment of low level sound and vibration in response to micro force. The instrumentation consists of 4 main components: (1) an anechoic chamber, (2) a scanning laser vibrometer, (3) a dual channel compact fiber vibrometer, and (4) a de-aeration system. The anechoic chamber reduces the background noise and vibration. Presently, background noise is the main limiting factor in the newly developed imaging method called vibro-acoustography. The scanning laser vibrometer allows measurment of vibrations in angstrom range and determination of the spatial distribution of motion in response to a small point force. The dual-channel fiber vibrometer will be used to simultaneously measure vibration at two points of the object. Finally, the de-aeration system is necessary to provide clean and completely degassed water for water tank experiments. Graduate students, research trainees and fellows, and senior investigators will use the above instrumentation. Addition of these equipment to will help to attract more qualified students in the Biomedical Imaging track doc4551 none This award will support research at the Laboratory of Ecological and Evolutionary Genetics in the Department of Biology at New Mexico State University. A number of investigators will make use of the DNA sequencer including: 1) Dr. Michele Nishiguchi (PI), who studies the evolution and speciation of symbionts in a squid-luminous bacterium model system and is interested in the evolution of infection mechanisms in related pathogenic bacteria of the genus Vibrio, which are responsible for the radiation and spread of infectious disease. 2) Dr. Peter Houde (co-PI), whose research program focuses on the systematics of birds, with an emphasis in the molecular systematics of the avian order Gruiformes, an ill-defined group within avian phylogenetics. 3) Dr. Daniel Howard (co-PI), whose group is interested in species formation, the process responsible for the diversity of life on earth using a model system of closely related ground crickets. 4) Dr. Brook Milligan (co-PI), whose research interests include developing statistical methods to disentangle genetic and environmental factors affecting quantitative traits thereby identifying the genetic architecture of important medical, physiological, or ecological traits of natural populations. 5) Dr. Kevin Oshima (co-PI), whose research focuses primarily on characterizing and examining environmental factors that influence the diversity, ecology and evolution of fish rhabdoviruses. 6) Dr. Geoffrey Smith (co-PI), whose primarily interests include investigating the relationships in the microbial community between metabolic function and phylogenetic structure of biodegradative microorganisms as they respond to chlorinated pollutant exposure. This award will be used to purchase an Applied Biosystems (ABI) 377XL automated sequencer. In addition to sequencing, this machine can also run microsatellite gels (used in population genetics for identifying specific DNA fragments from individual specimens), as well as AFLP (amplified fragment length polymorphism) techniques used in genome mapping in areas such as agricultural and evolutionary biology. The ABI system does not require any radioactive labeling, enabling a radiation-free environment in the laboratory. The faculty of the Laboratory of Ecological and Evolutionary Genetics have major interests in the evolution and radiation of organisms with respect to environmental and ecological influences. The ABI 377XL will contribute to the research and teaching of numerous graduate and undergraduate students who are pursuing careers in those fields doc4552 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Texas A b) synthesis, structure and ion exchange behavior of inorganic ion exchange materials; c) micro- and mesoporous materials made from polymetal components; d) design, synthesis and magneto-structural correlation of molecule-based magnets; e) introduction of bidentate Lewis acidic functionalities in microporous solids; and f) synthesis of hybrid materials and products of ion-exchange reactions. The X-ray diffractometer allows accurate and precise measurements of the full three dimensional structure of a molecule, including bond distances and angles, and it provides accurate information about the spatial arrangement of the molecule relative to the neighboring molecules. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, especially materials science doc4553 none Karato This grant, made through the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, provides partial support of the costs of acquiring high pressure, high temperature experimental equipment for studies of dynamic Earth processes and materials properties at the University of Minnesota.. The equipment to be acquired includes (1) a multianvil apparatus, (2) a rotational Drickamer apparatus and (3) modifications to our existing Paterson apparatus including a pore fluid module, a torsion module and a physical properties module. The new facility will enable experiments over a greatly expanded array of temperatures, pressures, deformation conditions, and fluid pressures for research on dynamic processes in the upper mantle, lower mantle and core. A central theme of the research will be determining materials properties related to the dynamics and evolution of the Earth. Key research areas will include (1) rheological properties under deep Earth conditions, including the study of plastic deformation and deformation-fabrics. These parameters are crucial for understanding the dynamics of the interior of the Earth, and experimental investigations require a multianvil apparatus for reproducing deep Earth conditions. (2) Microstructural evolution during deformation, which is critical for the interpretation of seismic anisotropy, requires a deformation apparatus that can create a range of deformation geometries including torsion. (3) Transport of fluids including melt, molten iron and water, which must be investigated to understand the chemical evolution of the Earth, require an apparatus with controlled pore pressure. (4) Phase equilibria properties of mineral-silicate liquid equilibria are needed for the understanding partial melting in deep portions of magma source regions and for calibrating high pressure thermodynamic models of magmatic processes. Another component of activities in the facility will be collaborations with Materials Scientists from within the university and from industry for investigations of synthesis and properties of technological materials. Finally, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers will be trained using these state-of-the art experimental techniques and the new facilities will also allow expanded education and outreach activities including undergraduate research experiences, workshop courses on experimental methods, and the development of CD-ROM modules distributed nationally with undergraduate textbooks and modules for teaching petrology using thermodynamic models of magmatic processes refined from projected experiments doc4554 none This grant supports the acquisition of a multichannel microwave radiometer as an addition to the University of Alabama Mobile Integrated Profiling System (MIPS). Manufactured by Radiometrics, Inc., the Model TP WPV- radiometer employs seven channels near the 60 GHZ oxygen absorption line for temperature profiling and five channels near the 22 GHz water vapor line for humidity profiling. The current capability of MIPS enables the measurement of wind and radar reflectivity to 5 km using a UHF boundary layer profiler, visibility and cloud bases to 7.5 km with a laser ceilimeter, and virtual temperature to about 1 km using a radio acoustic sounding system. The radiometer will greatly extend the vertical range of MIPS by providing profiles of temperature, humidity, and cloud water to about 10 km. Applications planned for the augmented system are (1) studies of the time-varying temperature and humidity profiles in the atmospheric boundary layer; (2) investigations of convective initiation in relation to boundary layer structure; (3) relating temperature and humidity profiles to the evolution of thunderstorms; (4) measuring temperature and humidity profiles in landfalling hurricanes; (5) using the system in various multi-agency field programs. The data will be made available in real time to the local office of the National Weather Service to assess the contribution the observations can make to weather forecasting doc4555 none Desai, Jaydev P. Drexel University MRI: Acquisition of a Complete Whole Arm Manipulator (WAM) Robot System The goal of this work is to acquire a whole arm manipulator (WAM) robot which will greatly enhance the development of the medical robotics program, combining haptic and visual information for object exploration in unstructured environment. The robot will also be an invaluable tool for developing and testing novel nonlinear control models at Drexel University. The equipment will also have significant impact on the undergraduate and graduate education at Drexel in the mentioned research areas doc4556 none Gasparian This award will support the construction and operation of experimental detection equipment to perform the most fundamental prediction of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) at low energy. Since the quality of existing measurements is not commensurate with the precision of the theoretical prediction, a modern measurement at the 1.5% accuracy level would fill this important experimental gap, and would test the prediction of the so-called axial anomaly at the level of the theoretical precision. The experiment will measure the decay width of the neutron pi meson via coherent photoproduction in the Coulomb field of the nucleus, i.e., the Primakoff effect. The experiment has been approved to run at Jefferson Laboratory with high priority. The project involves approximately 14 senior researchers from 12 institutions, seven postdoctoral fellows, and eight graduate students, and represents an excellent educational opportunity doc4557 none Yablonovitch, Eli University of California Los Angeles MRI: Acquisition of Equipment for Quantum Information Processing The focus of this proposal is acquisition of a Hitachi S- -II field emission scanning electron microscope (FESEM) with resolution (secondary emission mode) of 1.5nm at 15kV. The proposed equipment will help make an optical communications receiver and transmitter technology that can transfer quantum coherence and entanglement from photons, to spins in a semiconductor and back to photons again. Since the photo-electron spin is reasonable long-lived, the quantum information can be stored and act as quantum memory. If this technology is successful, it can become the front end for more complex semiconductor based quantum processors in the future, perhaps even a full-fledged quantum computer doc4558 none The fundamental goal of this project is to help determine whether certain corporate financing systems perform more efficiently or effectively than others. Modern views of the benefits of universal, relationship banking arise largely from observation of the successful industrialization and post-World War II reconstruction of Germany. The German success story, and the supposed role of the banking system in that success, has made a deep impression on many American economists, economic historians, and policymakers. Recent work by the investigator and others, however, casts doubt on the traditional view of the universal banks as the linchpin of German industrialization. This project builds on this foundation with new initiatives for data collection and empirical analysis. NSF funding supports data collection, cleaning and translation as well as international travel for collaborative work between the investigator and German scholars. The investigator finalizes a database of financial information for 400 German banks and firms between and that was largely collected under a previous NSF grant. The project deepens the existing firm-level information by comparing published financial data to firm records, creating new measures of corporate governance and bank relationships, gathering stock market data, compiling in-depth case studies on a subset of the database firms, and gathering archival evidence on non-database firms. These new data augment the published financial data and reveal more detailed pictures of individual firms. The investigator uses the databases to investigate the economic impact of universal and relationship banking. Relationships are investigated by comparing bank-affiliated and independent firms within Germany-studying rates of return, investment, liquidity constraints, capital structure, new securities issues, managerial turnover, and concentration and collusion in industry. Universality is addressed by comparing banking sector efficiency, firm financing costs, and long-term patterns of growth and investment among three economies with varying degrees of universality: Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. The project includes funding for undergraduate researchers. Participating in this project offers undergraduates a valuable opportunity to learn about the many topics covered-corporate finance, banking, corporate governance, industrial organization, economic growth, and German history-as well as to gain more general knowledge of the methods of scholarly research. The investigator also plans to collaborate with Thomas Gehrig, Professor of Economics at the University of Freiburg, Germany, on several parts of the project. He is concurrently applying for funding from the German government in order to permit much more extensive data collection and analysis doc4559 none A suite of instruments will establish a high-throughput screening and cell characterization facility for microbial functional genomics at the University of Minnesota. The equipment consists of an automated, computer-controlled workstation and a colony pick-robot for the isolation of individual cell types. Isolated cells can be automatically propagated and analyzed by a high-throughput liquid chromatography mass spectrometry analysis station. If distinguishing cell markers are present, rapid cell isolation will be accomplished using the cell sorting capability of a flow cytometer. For detailed cell characterization, the flow cytometer is interfaced with a bioreactor equipped with off-gas analysis instrumentation. The set-up will enable screening of a large number of cells. In addition, the detailed characterization of the growth physiology of selected cells will provide data for the quantitative analysis of cell metabolism within the framework of metabolic control theory. This high-throughput screening and cell characterization facility will considerably extend the research capabilities of a significant number of research groups at the University. It will be used for a variety of research applications by over twenty research groups originating from five different colleges and ten different departments involved in basic and applied research at the University. Examples of research projects include:(i) the study of the ecology and population dynamics of microbial cells, (ii) the microbiology and symbiotic interactions of soil bacteria, (iii) the molecular breeding of carotenoid and tetrapyrrole pathways in Escherichia coli , (iv) the combinatorial creation of novel compounds involving modular polyketide systems, (v) the pathway engineering of polyhydroxyalkanoates, and (vi) the development of novel biocatalysts for the implementation of novel metabolic routes in microorganisms. The proposed facility will be integrated into and take advantage of the infrastructure of existing research facilities which includes the Pilot Plant Facility of the Biological Process Technology Institute, the Mass Spectrometry Facility, the Imaging Center, the Advanced Biology Computing Center and the DNA Sequencing Facility. All facilities are in very close physical proximity and support the University of Minnesota effort in microbial genomics doc4560 none Mammals that consume plants run the risk of being poisoned by naturally occurring toxins produced by plants. Little experimental work exists on the mechanisms mammals employ to deal with plant toxins, or how specialized species such as the koala are capable of consuming plants that are toxic to other species. The proposed research interfaces with ecology, chemistry, physiology and pharmacology to address mechanisms by which herbivores detoxify plant toxins as well as the costs of detoxification. The PI will investigate how woodrat herbivores that specialize on one species of toxic plant differ in detoxification physiology from generalist woodrats that consume a variety of plant species. Woodrats are a model system for this problem because the diversity of specialists and generalists woodrats is unparalleled by any other genus of mammalian herbivores. Thus far, the PI has found that specialist herbivores are capable of tolerating higher doses of toxins than generalists. Contrary to conventional wisdom, specialists do not appear to have unique detoxification pathways compared to generalists but rather systems with a greater capacity. Preliminary results suggest that specialists are able to deal with high toxin loads because they can eliminate toxins faster than generalists. These studies will further investigate how specialists and generalists differ in detoxification abilities and will address issues on costs and constraints of dietary specialization. For example, are specialists more efficient than generalists in processing toxins? Do specialist herbivores trade-off the ability to detoxify a wide range of toxins in exchange for enhanced processing of a subset of toxins? In this century, mammalian herbivores will confront profound detoxification challenges. Novel toxins (eg dioxins, PCBs) are being added to the environment at unprecedented rates. Moreover, in the next 50 years, levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are predicted to double due to extensive burning of fossil fuels. Many species of plants grown under elevated levels of CO2 are substantially inferior in nutritional quality in that they are lower in protein and contain up to twice the toxin concentration as plants grown under current CO2 concentrations. Will mammalian herbivores be aversely impacted by such a radical change in the nutritional quality of their food, particularly the increase in toxins? The results of this research on detoxification processes of wild herbivores will provide vital insights on how herbivores will be affected by this change in nutritional quality of food doc4561 none Dimotakis, Paul E. MRI: Development of the Distributed Teravoxel Data System: Acquisition, Networking, Archiving, Analysis, and Visualization This project addresses the problem of handling very large datasets through the development of generic acquisition and processing capabilities to be hosted at Caltech and made available to both Caltech and outside collaborators. Driven by investigations of flow turbulence, the project is designed to handle both laboratory and numerical-simulation data. The infrastructure will support analysis and visualization of terascale experiment or simulation datasets and their comparison to validate theories and simulation results doc4562 none PROGRAMMATIC RISK ANALYSIS FOR CRITICAL ENGINEERING SYSTEMS UNDER TIGHT RESOURCE CONSTRAINTS Engineering projects are continually expected to accomplish more with fewer resources, and the dependencies among these projects are increasing. At NASA, for example, faster-better-cheaper (FBC) projects are being managed as programs to enhance the benefits of synergies among smaller projects, and to attenuate the risks of single large missions. Under tight resource constraints, FBC project managers must balance several types of failure risks including the effect of their project s performance on future missions. Existing risk analysis models generally focus on the quantification of either technical or management risks. Since it is difficult to balance simultaneously cost, schedule and performance of a given project as well as their effects on other projects, managers who face these problems can benefit from an integrated programmatic risk analysis. The goal of the proposed study is to develop a theoretical framework to integrate the analysis of both technical and management risks. It will be designed to quantify the tradeoffs among these two types of risk and to optimize a project s technical design and budget allocation. We will then incorporate into the model the effects of various amounts of testing and reviews, partial mission failures, and project dependencies within programs. Also, since current management decisions are often made based on intuition and an implicit reward system, we will capture these preferences in an illustrative example with a utility or valuation function that represents the objectives of the organization and its managers. This generic framework for modeling programmatic risks will be developed to support the management of interdependent projects within programs in different industries. An illustration will be provided based on the management of unmanned space missions and programs, and data available at NASA JPL and its contractors doc4563 none McCormick, Bruce H. The Texas A&M University System-HSC Research Foundation MRI: Development of Brain Tissue Scanner The proposed study is a pilot study for imaging the microstructure of brain tissue to visualize brain development and connectivity. The brain tissue scanner, a new instrument for mapping brain microstructure, will be developed for the rapid and massive data acquisition necessary to investigate cytoarchitectural developmental patterns of mammalian brain. Volume scanning rates of 1 teravoxel day are anticipated doc4564 none Kitts, Christopher A. Santa Clara University CADRE: A Robotic Control Network for Distributed Experimentation Santa Clara University is developing a Distributed Robotic Control Network for use as an experimental control system for a variety of remote, unmanned robotic devices. This system supports the operation of remote robots with scientific and technology demonstration missions. In addition, the system permits experimental verification and validation of new operational control techniques. The control network will consist of a centralized mission control center, several low-cost communications stations, a Web-based user interface for distributed users, interfacility communications links, and a few low-cost test robots that can be used to demonstrate system functionality. The system will be designed and implemented to specifically support the work of geographically distributed researchers doc4565 none This proposal includes two separate projects that together contribute to understanding mechanisms that affect incentives in firms. The first project investigates how the market for reputations can affect incentives of firm owner operators. This problem is different from the standard reputation literature that investigates individual reputations. The researcher will use his model of firm reputations as tradeable assets as the starting point. In that model the issue of incentives was not addressed and no welfare or policy implications could be analyzed. By extending the previous model to include moral hazard, some interesting results and conjectures arise. First, there is a relationship with the Career Concerns literature and the signaling literature that provides a useful benchmark. However, unlike in a simple career concerns model, the market for reputations will be able to provide incentives for agents in terminal stages of their career. In fact, the strength of career concern incentives that an agent faces when he is young is the same as the strength of incentives created by the market for reputations when he is old. Some conjectures, policy implications, extensions and future avenues for work are then outlined. The second project is concerned with the role of incentives and transaction costs with respect to the celebrated make-or-buy decision: should a component be produced in the firm or procured across the market? This question has received much attention since Coase s seminal paper and was followed up by Williamson s development of Transaction Cost Economics, and by the Property Rights approach developed by such researchers as Grossman, Hart, and Moore. The researcher proposes to contribute to this literature with a variant of a procurement model that he (together with Patrick Bajari) has recently developed. In that model, which is motivated and informed by stylized facts from the construction industry, a buyer needs to hire a seller that will deliver a custom made good (e.g., house, factory, space shuttle, etc.). The buyer must first incur a cost of providing a comprehensive design, and is faced with a trade-off between providing incentives and reducing ex post transaction costs due to costly renegotiation. This approach shows that weak incentives are preferred over strong incentives when a project is more complex. This proposal seems to indicate that applying the model to the make-or-buy procurement decision may help explain why internal production dominates market procurement when the product is more complex. This is consistent with some well known empirical work, and would provide foundations for Transaction Cost Economics. Directions in which this can be done are outlined doc4566 none This research proposes to identify and validate constructs associated with the successful transition of IT professionals (within companies whose main products or services are not software or IT services)in response to changing demands. Such companies are moving from legacy system technology to distributed and advanced technology; from ad hoc work practices to software engineering discipline; and from work products thrown over the wall to products developed with in-house customers as full participants and business partners. Because IT professionals are in short supply, the successful transition of existing employees is especially important, yet the dramatic and discontinuous change companies and their IT personnel face render prior work on retraining and retention of employees less useful. Both quantitative and qualitative methods will be employed, so that managerial and organizational contexts can also be assessed, and new factors and relationships can be uncovered through causal mapping. Operationalization of the dependent construct, Achievement in the transition role, will be drawn from the case studies. Survey instruments will be used to capture longitudinal change information and either verify or disconfirm the model developed in earlier stages of the research doc4567 none The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at the University of Pennsylvania supports a broadly based interdisciplinary research program on complex nanostructures and materials. The research is carried out in four Interdisciplinary Research Groups (IRG) with appropriate seed projects. The IRG on Functional Biomolecular Materials focuses on developing engineering principles for de novo protein design directed towards creation of novel molecular constructs that carry out natural or novel functions with the ultimate goal of producing selectively functionalized modular materials and devices. A second IRG focuses on Carbon Nanotube-Derived Materials and involves the synthesis, assembly and theory of higher-order structures created from single-walled nanotubes. The IRG on Microscale Soft Materials harnesses theoretical and experimental expertise to design and control the self-assembly of new classes of microstructured colloidal systems with tailored optical, mechanical, rheological and storage properties. An IRG of Multifunctional Complex Oxides designs, synthesizes, characterizes and models novel materials that exhibit highly sensitive responses to external magnetic and electrical fields. The MRSEC is also developing innovative methods of instruction. It is linked to the University of Puerto Rico through a Collaborative to Integrate Research and Education. It hosts a significant program for Research Experiences for Undergraduates and it has initiated a program to provide Research Experiences for Teachers. The Center maintains a large set of shared experimental facilities that provide state of the art instrumentation for the entire University, and act as a focal point for graduate education and for knowledge transfer to industry. Participants in the Center include 36 senior investigators, 12 postdoctoral associates, 29 graduate students, 15 undergraduates, and 5 technicians and other support personnel. Professor Michael Klein directs the MRSEC doc4568 none Louise Anderson P-glycerate kinase, glyceraldehyde-3-P dehydrogenase, and aldolase, or their antigenic analogs, are present in the nucleus of pea leaf mesophyll cells. The kinase appears to be a subunit of the primer recognition protein involved in lagging strand synthesis. The dehydrogenase may be a part of this same complex and or may have additional functions related to nucleotide binding. Aldolase might have a function related to DNA-binding. It is not known whether the nuclear proteins are the chloroplast Calvin cycle (reductive pentose phosphate pathway) isozymes or the cytosolic isozymes. The isozymes present in the nucleus will be identified using mono-specific, isozyme-specific antibodies. These experiments will be important to understanding the regulation of nucleic acid metabolism and gene expression in the plant nucleus and in the chloroplast. The antibodies will also be used in co-localization studies. The investigator has found three enzymes in the nucleus that appear to be the same as three enzymes found in the chloroplast or in the cytosol. The surprising aspect of this discovery is that the functions of the nuclear enzymes must differ markedly from those of their chloroplast and cytosolic counterparts, which are known to function in carbon metabolism. The investigator will rigorously compare and identify these enzymes from the different cellular areas.This work will lay the foundation for future studies of the possible roles of these nuclear enzymes in nuclear metabolism and gene regulation doc4569 none The Board on Physics and Astronomy proposes an assessment of an area of science at the intersection of physics and astronomy. It will focus on opportunities for breakthroughs in understanding the birth, evolution and destiny of the Universe, the laws that govern it. It will identify opportunities to explore new science through (1) new techniques for observing phenomena in extreme environments and new regimes, (2) new applications of fundamental physics to modeling and simulating the origin, evolution, and fate of the universe, and (3) understanding fundamental physics by using space and the cosmos as a laboratory full of experiments that could never be implemented on the Earth. This project is jointly funded by OMA, AST and PHY doc4570 none Cognitive processing in infants has been shown to span a small set of concurrently individuated objects, allowing infants to attend to relations between objects and, within limits, to attend to object numerosity. Some current findings from the study of infancy seem to parallel findings in object-based attention in adults. These parallels have inspired the object indexing framework for studying aspects of the infant object concept which, in turn, has yielded a set of hypotheses concerning how infants might attend to physical objects. One general and long term aim of this research is to draw together the study of the object concept in infants and objectbased theories of attention in adults. Using standard familiarization-test looking times measures, a series of experiments will probe processes underlying infant object individuation and identification. A key process in object cognition is object individuation - the representation of a specific numerosity of objects in a scene. There is evidence that infants in the first year can individuate up to a small number of physical objects in a given scene but it remains unclear what is the representational basis of this ability. Two mutually compatible possibilities are investigated here: the representations may be numerical in character; the representations may be indexical (and non-numerical) in character. Attempts will be made to gather evidence for both types of representational mechanism. A second specific aim is to investigate the relation between object individuation and object identification in infants. If individuation is the initial establishment of a distinct object representation, then identification addresses whether the object is one that has been encountered before. Although these processes are closely related, it is, useful to distinguish them. Current work shows that under some circumstances infants can individuate objects without subsequently being able to (re)identify them. This gives rise to seemingly paradoxical cases where featural information used as the basis for individuation decisions fails to be used for identification decisions. The object indexing model accounts for these cases by linking identification to the key process of feature binding. Drawing inspiration from object-based theories of attention in adults, the object indexing model requires that featural information be attached to object indexes by a non-default process of binding. Experiments are proposed to reveal the nature of the infant object representation and to probe the development of feature binding in infants from 6 to 13 months of age. Finally, experiments are proposed for an initial investigation of the hypothesis that working memory systems are the location for the construction of object indexes and for the binding of featural information to indexes. Data on the early development of these processes will provide the foundations for building a detailed cognitive model. Such a model would be a landmark accomplishment in developmental cognitive science. This proposal will advance our knowledge of one of the fundamental structures of human thought by exploring connections between the infantile ability to track persistent individual objects in a changing world and object-based mechanisms of selective attention doc4571 none This research examines deviation from the principle of stare decisis, or following precedent, by appellate courts in the federal system. Deviation can take subtle forms, including distinguishing, limiting, or avoiding precedents. The goal of the research is to determine why lower courts defy (or comply with) higher courts. The research plan is to: (1) generate a random sample of U.S. Supreme Court decisions; (2) track the responses of lower courts to these decisions (the dependent variable for all the hypotheses); (3) collect data necessary to animate the independent variables; and (4) implement statistical models, testing for the influence of theoretically-critical variables. Data come from a variety of sources, including biographical materials, NSF-supported databases, judicial decisions, and periodical guides-with the final data base archived on the PI web site and with the ICPSR. The empirical findings generated here will show how specific features of the design of the federal judiciary advance or retard vertical stare decisis, revealing, at least partially, the institutional foundations of the rule of law in American courts and showing the effect of various structural incentives created by the design and operation of organizations doc4572 none This grant provides support for the FutureTruck Challenge. This competition is jointly sponsored by the NSF, the Department of Energy and the automotive industry in support of the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV) program. It has the goal of designing and competing commercially producible vehicles in the range of sport utility vehicles to trucks that are simultaneously comfortable, safe, roadable, commercially viable, and highly fuel efficient. Under this competition, a number of universities compete annually in this event. The award provides funding to support the competition and to offset costs for expenses such as team prizes, communication and safety equipment rentals and other competition expenses doc4573 none Over the course of the twentieth century, the committee systems of U.S. state legislatures have undergone major transformations in their structure and procedure. The purpose of this Doctoral Dissertation Research Support project is to assess these changes using three well-known theories concerning the role of the committee system in the U.S. Congress. These theories are the distributive, informational, and partisan theories. While each theory views the committee system as an agent of some principal group associated with the legislature, and assigns committees a very specific and different role purpose in the legislative process, none of these theories have directly addressed the conditions under which committee procedures and structures will change and how they will change. The goal of this Doctoral Dissertation Research Support project is to delineate and empirically test expectations about changes in committee system structure and procedure based upon the distributive, informational and partisan theories of legislative organization. First, why will committee systems change? Second, how will the committee system be changed? Will these changes be structural, procedural or both? Specifically, with respect to procedure, when will the committee system be strengthened relative to the floor of the chamber and when will it be weakened? These questions need to be addressed both theoretically and empirically, and will be the focus of this project. Data collected from all 50 states for the period - will be used to address these questions doc4574 none The flow of visual information from the eye (retina) to the areas of the brain (cerebral cortex) necessary for visual perception is routed through a brain structure known as the thalamus. Part of the thalamus called the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) serves as a relay station between the retina and visual cortex. Current research indicates that the LGN plays an important role in visual processing and should be thought of as a dynamic filter as opposed to a relay. The aim of this research project is to understand the functional role of the inhibitory mechanisms of the LGN (and nearby brain areas). Of particular interest is how inhibitory neurons are involved in filtering out retinal information from this visual pathway. The PI s approach is mathematical and computational. After constructing a biophysically and anatomically detailed mathematical model of the LGN neuronal network, numerical experiments will quantify the input output properties of the simulated neural network. The LGN model will then be used to predict the influence of inhibitory mechanisms on the relay of retinal information to visual cortex. Because the LGN is the most extensively studied thalamic relay nuclei, it is a good system in which to study the role of inhibition in sensory processing by thalamus. This study of a sensory thalamic relay may suggest approaches to investigating the role of the thalamus in intracortical communication, a fundamental aspect of brain function doc4437 none The seasonal timing of seed germination may have critical consequences for plant survival and reproduction. In many plant species, seasonal seed dormancy and germination timing are strongly influenced by the environment experienced by the parental plant. This study will investigate the genetic control of seed dormancy and parental environmental effects on dormancy in the annual weed Arabidopsis thaliana, a species widely used for molecular genetic studies. Genetic mapping will identify chromosomal regions (quantitative trait loci or QTL) associated with variation in seasonal dormancy, parental environmental effects, and fitness under field conditions. Experimental manipulation of parental day length and the seasonal germination environment will investigate how parental environmental effects on seasonal dormancy influence survival and reproduction in the field. This study will be among the first to identify genes associated with seasonal dormancy, parental effects, and fitness under natural conditions. It will provide an important ecological context for numerous molecular genetic studies of development in A. thaliana. The results will elucidate the molecular basis and ecological context of a plant character crucial to survival and performance in variable environments. Appropriate germination responses to environmental cues may contribute to the persistence of plant populations in a variable environment or their expansion into novel habitats. The results of this study will be therefore be relevant for understanding the evolutionary dynamics of agricultural weeds and invasive plant species, as well as the management of rare or endangered plant populations in changing environments doc4576 none Elemental analysis instrumentation will support the current and future research and education needs of California State University, San Marcos (CSUSM), a rapidly growing, minority-serving university in north San Diego County, California. The instrumentation includes: (1) a flow injection ion analyzer for the rapid and routine analysis of ions in seawater and brackish water (nitrate, nitrite, ammonium, silicate, ortho-phosphate, total nitrogen, and total phosphorus) and soil and or plant samples (ortho-phosphate, total phosphate, and total Kjeldahl nitrogen) and (2) a flame atomic absorption spectrometer for the quantitative measurement of metals and cations in water, soil, skeletal, and tissue samples. Users of these instruments include biology faculty, graduate (M.S.) students and advanced undergraduate students. Projects include research on nutrient cycling in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. This equipment will substantially increase the research, research training, and educational capabilities of the CSUSM ecology and environmental science programs. This instrumentation is the first stage in equipping the new elemental analysis facility which will increase opportunities for external funding of research and research training initiatives, and enhance collaborative partnerships in the region doc4577 none Calmodulin (CaM), a ubiquitous multifunctional intracellular calcium receptor in all eukaryotes, mediates a number of calcium regulated processes by interacting with and regulating the activity of a number of key enzymes and structural proteins. In an effort to identify the proteins that interact with CaM, a novel kinesin-like calmodulin-binding protein (KCBP) was isolated from Arabidopsis and other plants. The C-terminal region of KCBP contains a motor domain that is similar to kinesins and kinesin-like proteins (KLPs). However, KCBP is a novel member of the kinesin superfamily in having a CaM-binding domain (CBD) adjacent to the motor domain. In addition, the N-terminal region of KCBP has significant similarities to the myosin tail homology (MyTH4) and talin-like regions present in some myosins, suggesting that the KCBP is part kinesin and part myosin. KCBP has been isolated from three other plant systems including dicots (potato and tobacco) and monocots (maize), suggesting that it is ubiquitous in flowering plants; however, homologues have not been found in the completely sequenced genomes of S. cerevisiae and C. elegans. Several lines of evidence indicate a mitotic role for KCBP in plants. In addition, genetic studies have shown that KCBP (also called Zwichel, ZWI) is essential for normal development of trichomes (Oppenheimer et al., ). Suppressor screens with a zwi mutant strongly suggest the interaction of KCBP with several other yet unidentified proteins (Krishnakumar and Oppenheimer ). Very little is known about the mechanisms that regulate the activity, localization and function of microtubule motor proteins in plants. The long-term goal of this project is to elucidate the function and regulation of this novel CaM-binding microtubule motor protein in cell division and trichome morphogenesis. This unique KLP with a CBD and myosin homology regions offers an excellent opportunity to study the mechanisms by which Ca2+ CaM regulates the activity and the precise role of this protein in cell division and trichome morphogenesis. The specific objectives of this project are: 1) To isolate protein partners that interact with the KCBP, especially the amino-terminal region, using a variety of genetic, biochemical and molecular approaches and characterize these partner(s). Isolation of KCBP interacting proteins should not only help us understand the function of KCBP in cell division and trichome morphogenesis but also provide insights into the function of the tail region in some myosins. 2) To express different regions of KCBP in live cells with green fluorescent protein tag to elucidate precise roles of KCBP in cell division and trichome development. For example, overexpression of constitutively active KCBP (KCBP lacking the CaM-binding domain) should help us understand the role of Ca2+ CaM in functioning of the KCBP in trichome morophogenesis and cell division. Dynamic localization of full-length and different truncated versions of KCBP in dividing cells and trichomes should provide important insights into the function and regulation of KCBP. The effects of manipulation of cytosolic calcium levels on the localization of KCBP will also be investigated. 3) To determine crystal structure of KCBP motor domain with the CaM-binding domain in the presence and absence of Ca2+ CaM. CaM-binding domain in KCBP confers Ca2+ CaM regulation, and biochemical data suggest that the binding of activated CaM to KCBP influences microtubule binding sites on the motor. Knowing the crystal structure of KCBP motor domain in free and CaM-bound form should provide insight into the mechanism(s) by which Ca2+ CaM regulates the interaction of KCBP with microtubules. Overall, these studies will elucidate various aspects of the function of this unique CaM-binding KLP. Understanding the calcium regulation of a CaM-binding motor will be relevant not only to other plants of agricultural importance (as KCBP appears to be ubiquitous in flowering plants) but also to animals where a CaM-binding KLP (albeit with very different properties) has been discovered recently (Rogers et al., ). Identification of proteins that interact with MyTH4 and talin-like regions of KCBP should also help understand the role of these domains in animal myosins doc4578 none This project investigates the formation of a new middle class in the Indonesia, a developing country that has experienced rapid economic growth. Focusing on the societal elites who create the nation s influential mass media, this research examines how private television producers (appealing to new social tastes) are creating and manipulating a new middle class culture where none had previously existed. It will specifically look at the media predominance of various societal forces including nationalism, consumerism, and religion in that culture. Methods include participant observation, analysis of TV production systems and seven popular TV programs, and the collection of demographic data. This project will contribute to our understanding of the development of class structures, as well as a national culture and national identity, in an ethnically and linguistically diverse modern state doc4579 none Hanan This Major Research Instrumentation award to San Diego State University provides funds for acquisition of a multi-collector inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometer for earth, ocean and environmental sciences research. It will be used for a wide variety of projects, including mantle geochemistry, U-Pb geochemistry, bio-geochemistry, and research into laser wave-mixing techniques, and it will include both undergraduate and graduate students in research and training. It will be managed as a recharge facility, available to many researchers and students at SDSU, other California State University campuses, and to collaborators at UCSD and elsewhere. The project was reviewed and supported collaboratively by the Divisions of Ocean Sciences and Earth Sciences at NSF. A portion of the support was provided by the Ocean Drilling Program. San Diego State University will provide cost-share support for 50% of total project costs doc4580 none Voiculescu Dan Voiculescu will study operator algebras in connection with free probability. He will emphasize applications of free entropy to operator algebras as well as the problems in operator algebras and random matrix theory posed by the development and unification of approaches to free entropy. There are also connections to masterfields in certain models in physics. Dan Voiculescu also intends to study noncommutative generalizations of the difference - quotient and of the Hilbert transform, in connection with duality for a certain class of coalgebras arising in free probability. Free probability theory is a highly noncommutative parallel to basic probability theory , modelling the asymptotic behavior of large random matrices as their size increases. One main focus will be on free entropy, the quantity which plays in this context the role of Shannon s information-theoretic entropy. Applications are in mathematics to von Neumann algebras and to random matrices, as well as to some models in physics doc4581 none The foci of this research are twofold. First, methodology will be developed for the enantioselective incorporation of simple olefins such as ethylene and propylene into prochiral molecules. Second, new strategies will be developed for intramolecular coupling of alpha, omega-dienes and alpha, omega-diynes for the synthesis of carbocyclic and heterocyclic compounds. With this renewal award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Thaliyil V. RajanBabu of the Department of Chemistry at Ohio State University. Professor RajanBabu will focus his work on developing highly selective carbon-carbon bond forming reactions based on catalytic activation of neutral molecules. The research has potential broader impacts for pharmaceutical, agricultural and materials science and provides an excellent milieu for the training of graduate students doc4582 none Whisnant This award supports a new research collaboration between C. Steven Whisnant, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of South Carolina, and Simon Connell, Schonland Research Center for Nuclear Sciences (SRC) at the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS), Johannesburg, South Africa. During the course of the three-year award, the researchers will collaborate on theoretical and experimental nuclear physics research on nucleon and meson interactions using photon beams. With separate funding, a recent graduate of WITS will work as a postdoc on the project. Professor Whisnant s experimental photonuclear physics program is conducted at the Laser Electron Gamma Source (LEGS) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and with the Large Acceptance Spectrometer (CLAS) at the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jlab). As part of the NA59 collaboration at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), the researchers at WITS are pursuing a complementary program studying the internal structure of the nucleon through meson photoproduction at very high photon energies. The NA59 collaboration has developed techniques for producing and analyzing the degree of polarization of circularly polarized photon beams that can provide valuable direct information on the beam polarization at LEGS and Jlab. Conversely, the polarized target technology developed for LEGS can significantly enhance the CERN program. The theoretical input provided by the researchers in South Africa spans both energy regions and will be a valuable aid in data analysis and the design of new experiments doc4583 none With National Science Foundation support Drs. LuAnn Wandsnider, Nicholas Rauh and an international group of collaborators will conduct archaeological research in the Western Rough Cilicia region of Turkey. Located in the Eastern Mediterranean the area was famous both as a pirate base and for the tenacity with which it resisted incorporation into the succession of empires which sought to dominate this large Near Eastern region. During the first and second centuries BC pirates reportedly amassed warships and 30,000 combatants and extended their naval operations and depredations throughout the Mediterranean, roving as far as Italy and Spain. In 67 BC the Roman general Pompey temporarily eliminated the pirate menace and in 71 AD the region was formally incorporated into the Roman empire. Although literary sources attest to this fact, it is unclear to what extent the Rough Cilicia maintained a degree of autonomy or the nature of the relationship between this peripheral area and the core of the Roman empire. Through archaeological research the investigators will study the changes in social organization which took place after incorporation and the evidence for direct Roman presence in the area. To meet these objectives they will develop a ceramic reference collection which will allow dating of individual sites. They will conduct a coarse grained foot survey (supplemented by remote sensing and interview with local inhabitants) and will document architectural sites to establish stylistic conventions and construction and remodeling sequences for domestic, fortification, religious and industrial structures. They will also carry out a preliminary paleoenvironmental studies to determine whether detailed environmental reconstruction is possible. If so, this will establish the groundwork for looking at utilization and degradation of the landscape. Empires arose independently in many regions of the world and archaeologists wish to understand the processes which underlay their origins and the functioning. By definition, power rests with a central ethnic group which attempts to extend control - usually through actual or implied use of force - over the maximum area possible. At the same time subject peoples try to retain as much autonomy as possible. Researchers have posited multiple strategies both for the conqueror and the conquered and Rough Cilicia provides an excellent context to evaluate them doc4571 none This research examines deviation from the principle of stare decisis, or following precedent, by appellate courts in the federal system. Deviation can take subtle forms, including distinguishing, limiting, or avoiding precedents. The goal of the research is to determine why lower courts defy (or comply with) higher courts. The research plan is to: (1) generate a random sample of U.S. Supreme Court decisions; (2) track the responses of lower courts to these decisions (the dependent variable for all the hypotheses); (3) collect data necessary to animate the independent variables; and (4) implement statistical models, testing for the influence of theoretically-critical variables. Data come from a variety of sources, including biographical materials, NSF-supported databases, judicial decisions, and periodical guides-with the final data base archived on the PI web site and with the ICPSR. The empirical findings generated here will show how specific features of the design of the federal judiciary advance or retard vertical stare decisis, revealing, at least partially, the institutional foundations of the rule of law in American courts and showing the effect of various structural incentives created by the design and operation of organizations doc4571 none This research examines deviation from the principle of stare decisis, or following precedent, by appellate courts in the federal system. Deviation can take subtle forms, including distinguishing, limiting, or avoiding precedents. The goal of the research is to determine why lower courts defy (or comply with) higher courts. The research plan is to: (1) generate a random sample of U.S. Supreme Court decisions; (2) track the responses of lower courts to these decisions (the dependent variable for all the hypotheses); (3) collect data necessary to animate the independent variables; and (4) implement statistical models, testing for the influence of theoretically-critical variables. Data come from a variety of sources, including biographical materials, NSF-supported databases, judicial decisions, and periodical guides-with the final data base archived on the PI web site and with the ICPSR. The empirical findings generated here will show how specific features of the design of the federal judiciary advance or retard vertical stare decisis, revealing, at least partially, the institutional foundations of the rule of law in American courts and showing the effect of various structural incentives created by the design and operation of organizations doc4586 none The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at Brown University supports an interdisciplinary research program on the mechanics of materials at the atomistic and microstructural level. The research is carried out in one interdisciplinary research group, with appropriate seed projects. Within the IRG one major thrust is the study of the effect of stress on the performance of electronic nanostructures and nanodevices. This research has potential impact on understanding how stress effects the design and performance of atomic scale sized lasers and electronic devices. The experimental results are modeled using the quasicontinuum model developed at Brown. The second thrust in the IRG is concerned with the investigation of the micromechanics of materials with complex microstructures. Emphasis is on the interface between two types of systems such as bicrystals of aluminum, aluminum alloy, and synthetic bimaterials. Computational techniques closely support the experimental efforts. The center is engaged in a variety of educational activities, notably the development aterials science teaching modules aimed at the high school level and the training of secondary teachers in use of the modules. The Center supports well maintained shared experimental facilities, which are accessible to outside users and also supports interactive efforts with industry and other sectors. Participants in the Center include 17 senior investigators, 3 postdoctoral associates, 14 graduate students, 10 undergraduates, and 6 technicians and other support personnel. Professor Clyde L. Briant directs the MRSEC doc4587 none An isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC) system from MicroCal Incorporated will be used at Benedictine University for biochemical enzymatic studies. The system includes a titration calorimeter and computer for automatic control of the instrument. When two substances interact or combine (noncovalently or covalently), the absorption or evolution of heat occurs. The MicroCal ITC system offers a sensitive and rapid way to determine the amount of heat released or taken up by such a reaction. Computer analysis of the data acquired yields the desired binding or interaction constants. Initially the system will be used in three different projects. Project I involves thestudy of the binding of dihydroxyacetone phosphate (DHAP) analogues to rabbit muscle aldolase (RAMA). This enzyme, which is inexpensive and readily available commercially, catalyzes the addition of DHAP to a variety of aldehydes. As a result, RAMA has been used for the organic synthesis of a number of novel compounds. The analogues will be synthesized and the ability of these compounds to bind to aldolase as a function of their structure will be determined using the ITC system. The information should shed further light on the binding specificity of the aldolase active site and provide further details concerning the enzyme mechanism. Project II will investigate the ability of synthetic crown ethers to bind cesium ions. Cesium-137 is a radioactive byproduct of nuclear reactors. Removal of the cesium from wastewater can be done by extraction with inclusion compounds (e.g., crown ethers). The isothermal titration calorimetry system will be used to rapidly screen the synthetic crown ethers for their ability to bind the cesium ion. The binding of peptides to fibrinogen or the fibrinogen receptors of platelets will be investigated in project III. Peptides will be tested for their ability to bind to fibrinogen or cellular receptors using the isothermal titration calorimetry system. The successful completion of this project will make important contributions to the understanding of the fibrinogen receptor interaction. Faculty and students will use this instrumentation in interdisciplinary research projects, classroom exercises doc4588 none A major goal in membrane biology is to understand how transmembrane signals trigger rearrangements of the cytoskeleton that effect cell movement and changes in cell shape. Phagocytosis, a specialized form of endocytosis dependent on the actin-based cytoskeleton and its connections to the plasma membrane, is performed by free-living single-celled organisms such as the soil amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. This phylogenetically primitive mechanism also is used by specialized ameboid cells (macrophages and leukocytes) of immune systems of animals for host defense as well as for tissue repair and morphogenetic remodeling. Phagocytosis is a process that requires local alterations in the cytoarchitecture and thus is a controlled remodeling event. The long-term goal of these studies is to understand cytoskeletal-membrane interactions during the formation of the phagocytic cup and during phagosome processing in Dictyostelium. Because D. discoideum amebae perform the same motile activities, such as phagocytosis and chemotaxis, as macrophages and polymorphonuclear leukocytes, the molecular mechanism of phagocytosis in D. discoideum likely will resemble the mechanisms of phagocytes in other cell types, including animal immune systems. Importantly, and in contrast to macrophages and leukocytes, molecular genetic approaches to the study of motile functions such as phagocytosis are feasible in D. discoideum with its haploid and pliable genome. Previously, a cell-surface glycoprotein gp130 of D. discoideum was identified as a candidate phagocytosis receptor. Based on the amino acid sequence deduced from the recently acquired gene sequence, gp130 is postulated to have an adhesive function and a glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI) anchor that links it to the outer leaflet of the plasma membrane of vegetative cells. Although not novel, this GPI anchor raises intriguing questions about the function of gp130 and its interactions with the cytoskeleton. Gp130 is also one of the few identified plasma membrane proteins known to be internalized during phagocytosis and thus it may serve as a useful marker for the endo-lysosomal membrane network in a cell type with high membrane turnover. Through either gene disruption or antisense methods using the cloned cDNA for gp130, the in vivo function of gp130 will be explored by generating mutant cell lines lacking the gene. The pinocytic and phagocytic activities under different growth conditions, and adhesive properties of gp130-minus cells will be tested and compared to the parent strain. Biochemical analyses, aided by gp130 antibodies, will determine whether gp130 is GPI-linked or an integral membrane protein. The antibodies also will be used to examine the distribution patterns of gp130 during different endocytic activities to determine its fate after internalization. In addition, a role of gp130 in cell-cell adhesion during development will be tested by assaying the ability of gp130-minus cells to aggregate, and with binding assays using purified native protein. To augment localization studies, a green fluorescent protein (GFP)-gp130 fusion protein will be introduced into both normal and cells already containing other spectrally-distinct GFP-cytoskeletal proteins, such as actin, involved in the formation of the phagocytic cup. The ability to monitor gp130 and these other proteins in live cells during phagocytosis will provide temporal and spatial information at the molecular level about this dynamic process that could not be acquired through traditional biochemical and microscopy methods. Finally, actin polymerization kinetics will be measured and compared between normal and gp130-minus cells engaged in phagocytosis to determine if there is a functional linkage between gp130 and the actin cytoskeleton. Because gp130 may be signaling to the cytoskeleton, it likely interacts with other proteins. Future studies will focus on the identification and activities of these associated proteins because they will provide information about the signaling mechanism(s) between cell-surface molecules and the cytoskeletal network responsible for activities, such as cell motility, cell-cell adhesion and cell substrate adhesion that are fundamental to tissue and organ development doc4589 none Wright This is a five-year effort that engages engineering students at Michigan Technological University in the design and development of assistive and or rehabilitative devices for persons with disabilities. The objective is the completion of four design projects annually, which will assist individual disabled persons served by the Copper Country Intermediate School District (CCISD). Each design project will be assigned to a team consisting of three to five senior students in biomedical engineering, mechanical engineering, and electrical engineering. Students in other disciplines may participate, depending on skills required for a given project. Local high school students will be engaged in fabrication of some of the projects, through a partnership with Hancock (MI) High School s industrial arts program. Each project will be advised by a faculty member -- either one of investigators, or another member of the engineering faculty who has appropriate expertise and interest. All students who participate in one of these projects will complete a workshop on professional ethics and standards, prior to beginning a project. This workshop will inform the students of applicable standards and issues in patient confidentiality, liability, and intellectual property rights. This workshop will be conducted jointly by members of the professional staff of CCISD and the investigators. The principal investigator will, by July I of each year, provide the National Science Foundation with a report describing the projects completed doc4590 none The IEA International Coordinating Center (ICC) at SRI proposes to work with OECD staff, U.S. researchers, and researchers in other interested countries to create an implementation plan that coordinates and, to the extent appropriate, combines, the national-level implementation of the complementary IEA and OECD studies. This process will include coordinating research goals and methodologies, merging instruments, coordinating schedules, and providing technical support and quality assurance so that the studies can be done together in those countries (including the United States) that choose to do so. This is a significant, novel, and time-sensitive effort that will increase the payoff and efficiencies of both studies and lay a foundation for future organizational collaboration doc4591 none This SGER is a preliminary grant to begin testing a hypothesis concerning using the web for learning guided by the use of Multi-User Virtual Environments as a place for competitive and collaborative learning games. The hypothesis that this award is testing is that by tracking user performance, managing the set of available playmates for every student, and introducing virtual agent players at a variety of school levels, such a community of evolving learners can keep all participants appropriately challenged and motivated to learn. To test this hypothesis, appropriate games and learning outcomes will be defined and the software protocols written to do playmate matching agent choice, and collection of data or student learning. The students tested will be in fourth and fifth grade classrooms and work with games to improve learning of mathematics and elementary physics doc4592 none Learning to read and to work with numbers are among the most basic symbolic skills children acquire. In order to distinguish characteristics of symbolic acquisition that are universal versus those that depend upon features of a particular language or symbol system, we will compare the development of reading and early mathematics by children who speak two very different language - English and Chinese. The proposed research will study the effects of three specific differences between Chinese and English on children s acquisition, use, and understanding of numbers and written language. Methods will range from eye-tracking studies of reading to model-based artificial counting training studies; in all cases the focus will be on the way that aspects of symbol structure affects different aspects of the acquisition, use, and understanding of symbols. Symbol systems, such as numbers and written words, are fundamental to human cognition. Symbol systems are structured in ways that make learning possible and may affect the way humans think about language and mathematics. Understanding the contribution of symbol structure to cognitive development requires comparative research, in which variation in symbol structure is related to variation in acquisition, use, and understanding of symbols. Such research is of practical as well as theoretical importance, because mastering symbol systems is at the heart of what it means to be an educated person doc4593 none White and Turcotte This study will critically evaluate models of mantle structure in light of geochemical observations. Any successful model of mantle structure and dynamics must simultaneously explain both geochemical and geophysical observations. The model of mantle structure proposed by Kellogg et al. [Science, 283: - , ] appears promising in this respect. A major objective of this study will be to determine whether this model is actually consistent with geochemical observation. Specifically, the investigators will carry out the following studies: (1) Mass Balance and Heat Flow. For refractory lithophile elements, such as Sr, Ce, Sm, Nd, Lu, Hf, U, and Th, the crust plus mantle should sum to give chondritic relative abundances. Mantle heat flow is largely due to decay of U, Th, and K and hence provides a further constraint on the abundances of these elements. Since both the heat flow and incompatible element and isotopic composition of the crust and depleted mantle are known within limits, the composition and size of other mantle reservoirs can be constrained. The investigators will evaluate crust-mantle mass balance using refined estimates of crustal and depleted mantle composition and incorporating the constraint of heat flow. (2) Isotope evolution models. This work will examine the evolution of radiogenic isotopes, particularly the U-Th-Pb-He system, in a multi-reservoir system where residence times of elements are short. Alternative configurations of reservoirs will be considered with both steady-state and episodic recycling of material between reservoirs. The objective will be to constrain the sizes of and fluxes between mantle reservoirs. (3) Models of convective mixing. The investigators will model mixing and homogenization within reservoirs using parameterizations of mixing times versus temperature and viscosity based on available numerical simulations. The analyses will be divided into two parts. First, variable rates of interchange, including strongly time-dependent interchange, between major terrestrial reservoirs will be considered to determine whether a self-consistent model can be obtained that satisfies the geochemical constraints. The second part will consider isotopic evolution within a reservoir doc4594 none This project examines the educational impact of computing and information technologies, both at school and in the home, for middle and high-school students. It investigates a second stage of the Digital Divide, one that goes beyond lack of access to information technology (IT). It examines whether there are different educational benefits to computing when comparing whites to minorities, boys to girls, and more affluent to poorer children. The research combines statistical analyses of survey data with fieldwork observations of children using computers at school, after-school programs, and at home. The goal of the research is to gain insight into the processes by which some children gain more than others in terms of educational benefits from computing. It seeks to document the educational benefits that are occurring, to identify what kinds of students are missing out on these benefits and why, and to identify what kinds of educational applications yield greatest benefits. This research is intended to aid policymakers who are concerned with equity issues in education, educators involved in providing effective information technology in schools, and to inform citizens about the educational consequences of the Digital Divide doc4595 none The long-finned squid Loligo pealei is used at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) for detailed neurobiological study at the molecular, cellular, tissue and whole animal levels. For more than 28 years, this MBL NSF squid program has enabled neurobiologists, physiologists, anatomists, biochemists and biophysicists to study fundamental properties of the nervous system. The giant axon, the giant synapse and the eyes are outstanding and unique features of squids that render them as premiere marine models, and they continue to provide vital breakthroughs into mechanisms of synaptic transmission, nerve impulse propagation, axonal transport and organelle motility, membrane structure, cell repair, cell death, and ion channel distribution and function. Squids migrate inshore by early May and are available near Woods Hole, MA through September each year. About 40-60 investigators come to the MBL specifically during this period to carry out basic research using the squid as a model system. To collect these delicate creatures, the MBL has chartered a suitable trawling vessel - the Loligo- with a knowledgeable captain and mates to find and deliver squids throughout each summer. NSF support has helped defray the cost of the summer charter vessel and developed methods for better maintenance and health of squids. Scientists to the MBL come from diverse national and international geographical regions, and continued funding of this proposal extends beyond the actual science by providing an intellectually stimulating environment for the training of young scientists doc4596 none Landscapes constitute an intriguing and important area of interface between scientists who study the composition and dynamics of landscape change and designers, planners, and other professionals whose jobs include the manipulation and management of landscapes. Advanced technologies like geographic information systems now are being used by both groups, enabling both researchers and professionals to identify more areas and topics of common experience and interest. Using a model developed and used successfully by the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, this award will provide support to conduct a workshop focusing on landscape change. The workshop will bring together representatives of the investigative scientific disciplines interested in landscape change and the design disciplines. The purposes of the workshop are to promote the building of a collaborative research community; to develop a joint research agenda; and to facilitate the exchange of ideas. The workshop steering committee will be chaired by a geographer and a landscape architect. The workshop will address its major objectives in the context of four themes: information technologies, decision making, landscape perception and assessment, and environmental and social sciences. The workshop will be structured as a series of plenary presentations, breakout discussions, and plenary discussion. Findings of the workshop will be published in the form of a report and other materials using both traditional publications and electronic media. This workshop will provide an excellent opportunity for professionals in the design disciplines to directly interact with the investigative scientists interested in landscape change. The workshop will facilitate exploration of the advances in understanding that have been made possible by new technologies like remote sensing and geographic information systems, and it will foster greater appreciation for benefits that may be realized when basic science interacts with normative implementation in the exploration of important topics and issues like smart growth, sustainable communities, and liveable communities doc4597 none Lithgow-Bertelloni The investigators propose to develop joint, self-consistent dynamical-thermodynamical models of the mantle that incorporate the complex thermodynamic description of multi-component mantle assemblages. Their approach will allow them to assess on an equal footing the three distinct causes of lateral heterogeneity in the earth s mantle: lateral variations in 1) temperature, 2) bulk composition, and 3) phase assemblage. Specifically, they plan to build on a previously developed formulation that includes complete thermodynamic information regarding the dependence of material properties on pressure and temperature in realistic multi-component systems. They can then incorporate the thermodynamic description into instantaneous flow calculations to examine the effects of phase transformations and bulk composition on geoid anomalies, dynamic topography, plate motions and mantle flow doc4598 none The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at the University of Wisconsin supports an interdisciplinary research program on nanostructured materials and interfaces. The research is carried out in three interdisciplinary research groups, with appropriate seed projects. Within IRG 1 the Center focuses on the mechanisms associated with materials integration onto silicon. The ultimate aim is to create smart systems based on Si technology for electronic and optical applications. The Center s activities are aimed at understanding and managing heterointerfaces, understanding bonding between dissimilar materials, understanding the role of strain, and effectively utilizing self-organization growth techniques. All of the above are focused on the nanometer scale. Within IRG 2 the goal is to understand actual grain boundaries in high temperature superconductors, which requires an interdisciplinary approach to film growth, materials characterization and modeling. The potential impact is the increase of the maximum current densities that can be carried in such materials for advanced superconducting devices. The activities in IRG 3 are centered on understanding the role of nanostructured textured surfaces on the growth and behavior of biological systems (proteins, viruses, and cells) which have been deposited onto these substrates. A strong feature of the Center s strong educational outreach is the development, testing, and dissemination of instructional materials which can be integrated into high school or college science courses. Of particular interest is the Development of Instructional Materials Program (DIMP) that enables MRSEC graduate students to develop new instructional materials based on their research. The Center carries out an aggressive program to increase the participation of under-represented groups through enhanced contacts with minority serving institutions. The Center supports well maintained shared experimental facilities, which are accessible to outside users and has a very extensive program of collaborations with industry. Participants in the Center include 29 senior investigators, 9 postdoctoral associates, 20 graduate students, 15 undergraduates, and 4 technicians and other support personnel. Professor Thomas F. Kuech directs the MRSEC doc4599 none Dr. Raymond will use a highly simplified two column model to better understand large-scale tropical circulations and to help test cumulus parameterizations for atmospheric global circulation models. The model involves the use of two embedded cumulus ensembles, one in each column, that are coupled by mass flows which tend to drive the two column s environments toward buoyancy equilibrium with each other. These mass flows are the two column analog of large scale tropical circulations where one column represents the ascending (moist, convective) branch of the Walker circulation and the other column is the descending (clear, driven by radiative cooling) branch. The convective ensemble calculations thus operate in a context that is close to that which actually occurs in the equatorial regions of the earth s atmosphere. Vertical velocities in the two columns are created by the model itself rather than being imposed. The cumulus ensembles can be replaced by candidate cumulus parameterizations for purposes of comparison with ensemble model calculations doc4600 none A magnitude 7.6 earthquake occurred on September 21, , near Chi-Chi in Nantou county, Taiwan, about 90 miles south of Taipei, resulting in extensive damage, injuries and loss of life. Extensive damage occurred to bridges and dams and, due to the mountainous nature of the terrain, there were hundreds of s landslides, including several very large catastrophic landslides. A very important feature of this earthquake was the reverse fault rupture with vertical displacements ranging from 2 meters along the southern section to as much as 8 meters along the northern terminus. The fault rupture extends through heavily developed areas and is responsible for much of the damage to major transportation and river control structures. Since much of northern and southern California has extensive infrastructure development along active fault traces, observing and documenting the direct impact of large fault displacement in the Taiwan earthquake is of obvious practical and research interest to the US earthquake engineering community. This action provides partial support for a coordinated industry-academia reconnaissance team to document the geotechnical and engineering geology seismology features of this earthquake in as much detail as possible. Of particular interest is the impact of large seismic fault offset on urban infrastructure. As with all post-earthquake reconnaissance investigations, it is expected that vital records and data will become available as a result of this earthquake in Taiwan. From a scientific viewpoint, these large earthquakes act as full scale experiments that cannot be duplicated via controlled experiments in the laboratory or in the field. It is through quick response reconnaissance efforts that the mostly-ephemeral data from these events can be recovered and used to further advances in earthquake hazard mitigation. The results from this investigation are expected to yield information and data that will help the profession to understand the impact of large seismic fault offset on urban infrastructure. This is a multi-institutional award involving the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Washington, and the University of Southern California doc4601 none The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at the Cornell University supports a broadly based interdisciplinary research program on control of advanced ordered and disordered materials at the nanoscale. The research is carried out in five interdisciplinary research groups with appropriate seed projects. IRG A Nanostructured Materials: Electron and Spin Transport will exploit uniquely nanostructured materials to elucidate fundamental issues of electron and spin transport in systems whose electronic structure have considerable technological potential; IRG B Nanoscale Polymer-Inorganic Hybrid Materials will combine synthesis, physical characterization, and modeling to control the properties of new generations of industrially important polymer-inorganic nanoscale hybrid materials; IRG C Oxide Glasses: Surfaces and Thin-film Interfaces will develop fundamental knowledge of the chemistry and nono- and intermediate length scale structure at and near the surfaces and key interfaces in silicate glasses crucial to emerging thin-film-on-glass technologies; IRG D Fundamentals of Energetic Surface Processing will develop further the means to improve thin film deposition using novel energetic supersonic and hyperthermal ion beams; and IRG E Dynamic Mechanical Properties of Nanoscale Materials will strive to understand and control energy dissipation and the non-linear response of nano-mechanical oscillators to assist in enabling new GHz technologies. The MRSEC includes a comprehensive educational outreach programs targeting K-12; undergraduate; graduate; school teachers and the general public. It places special emphasis on outreach to rural school districts. The Center maintains a significant set of shared experimental facilities that provide state of the art instrumentation for the entire University; act as a focal point for graduate education and for knowledge transfer to industry. Participants in the Center include 44 senior investigators, 8 postdoctoral associates, 41 graduate students, 20 undergraduates, and 18 technicians and other support personnel. Professor Neil Ashcroft directs the MRSEC doc4602 none This is an infrastructure-building award designed to enhance access to research and teaching materials in constitutional law and constitutional history. The PIs will provide a free, searchable, internet-accessible web site containing major Supreme Court briefs, oral arguments, and related materials over the course of the Court s history. Initial case selection will be made by scholars and librarians at Yale and the Supreme Court Historical Society. Copies of the briefs, oral arguments, and related materials will then be transferred to electronic format by a data conversion service. The web site will have several significant advantages over current printed and electronic versions, including full searchability, easy accessibility, and easy citability. Cases will be selected in accordance with their historical importance by criteria that can be evaluated at the web site doc4603 none Rohrer The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at Carnegie Mellon University supports an interdisciplinary research program on grain boundary networks in polycrystals, called The Mesoscale Interface Mapping Project. The group research seeks to advance the understanding of grain boundary systems by developing and applying experimental and analytical techniques, including automated orientation imaging microscopy, to determine the structure, evolution and properties of grain boundaries in metals and ceramics. The Center also provides seed support for emerging research opportunities. The Center supports well maintained shared experimental facilities that provide specialized instrumentation for the preparation and characterization of bulk materials and surfaces. Education and human resources development efforts include curriculum development collaborations with Pittsburgh area high schools, and a Collaborative to Integrate Research and Education with Florida A&M University that includes undergraduate curriculum development and joint research projects. The Center also has extensive research collaborations with industrial and government laboratories, and with other universities in the U.S. and abroad. Participants in the Center currently include 10 senior investigators, 1 postdoctoral associates, 10 graduate students, 5 undergraduates and 2 technicians and other support personnel. Professor Gregory Rohrer directs the MRSEC doc4604 none Weijia Kuang The investigators plan to expand the Kuang-Bloxham geodynamo model to investigate in detail the dynamical couplings between the Earth s core (including the solid inner core) and its solid mantle, and the angular momentum variation of the solid Earth. They will focus on the equatorial components of the angular momentum that excite the polar motion (variation of the rotation axis of the solid Earth; past studies on this subject have all been dealing with the axial component related to the length-of-day). Geophysical excitations of the secular polar motion as well as polar motion of time scales shorter than a few years have been largely understood. On the intermediate time scales, a particularly large undulation known as the Markowitz wobble in the polar motion with a quasi-periodicity of about 30 years and an amplitude as large as 30 milliarcseconds has long been observed but remains a mystery to date. However, the time scale and amplitude of this wobble suggest that the core-mantle coupling may be a possible cause. This project has two parts. First is the modification of the existing 3-dimensional, self-consistent dynamo model to include the hydrostatic elliptic mantle, the hydrostatic elliptic solid inner core and the couplings of the solid Earth. Then, the investigators will use the modified geodynamo model to evaluate core-mantle interactions within the geodynamo simulation. Of particular interest, they plan to investigate the contributions of electromagnetic, topographic and gravitational (between the inner core and the mantle) energy on the equatorial angular momentum exchange between the core and mantle. The proposed research shall be carried out among the PI, Dr. Weijia Kuang, at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (leading effort in geodynamo simulation) and collaborators Dr. Lanbo Liu of the University of Connecticut (mantle structure and dynamics) and Dr. Benjamin Chao of NASA s Goddard Space Flight Center (Earth rotation dynamics doc4605 none Although the Cherokee language, an isolated member of the Iroquoian family, has more speakers (10,000 to 12,000) and more documentation than many other endangered languages of North America, it remains remarkably understudied linguistically. This project will provide a thorough description and analysis of the Cherokee sound system: the goal is to establish the phoneme inventory and describe the tone system and other intonational phenomena through acoustic analysis of consonants, vowels, and pitch distinctions. The full project, which is expected to take three years, will consist of four stages: constructing the body of elicitation data (words and sentences); making recordings of 20 speakers producing the speech samples; phonetically analyzing the recordings (with special emphasis on pitch traces); and writing reports based on this data. The current project, which will take one year, will consist of the first two stages: constructing the elicitation data and recording the speech samples. This work is important both practically and theoretically. Both major Cherokee political entities, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and the North Carolina Band of Cherokee, are engaged in language preservation and pedagogy, and require reliable phonological analysis to further these goals. Several institutions of higher learning in Oklahoma offer college-level credit in the Cherokee language, and have a similarly urgent need for an accurate description of the phonology of the language, both for classroom use and for the design of instructional materials including audiotapes and CD ROM aids. Socially, because Cherokee consists of a large number of distinct dialects, an accurate phonological description is necessary to both distinguish dialects and to provide a cogent basis for the acceptance of all dialects as full-fledged members of the language. Theoretically, Cherokee phonology has long presented several conundrums. One still-unsolved problem is the status of pitch and tone in the language. Another problem is that of word and morpheme boundaries and their relationship to prosodic categories. Yet another problem is the role of intonational processes with respect to syntactic processes, and how these may be different still from discourse functions. This study will provide a large corpus of data that will be drawn from a diverse sample of speakers and provide detailed acoustic information. Using an autosegmental-metrical model, the researchers will identify the associations of the tone tier with other linguistic levels. This study provides research opportunities for undergraduate assistants in the fieldwork phase. It also includes a large proportion of Cherokee persons in major components of the research, including senior personnel, research assistants, and of course, the language consultants themselves doc4606 none An international conference on Calcium and Cell Function will be held July 9-14, at Copper Mountain, Colorado, under the auspices of the Federation of the American Societies of Experimental Biology (FASEB). The conference will focus on recent advances in the molecular biology of intracellular calcium regulation and the numerous roles of calcium ions in regulation of cell function. The topics to be covered are: molecular biology of calcium entry and intracellular stores; regulation of intracellular calcium dynamics; decoding of calcium signals; calcium function in the nucleus, in mitochondria, and in membrane traffic; and the physiology and pathology of multicellular calcium signaling. The overall goal is to bring together a diverse group of scientists working on all phases of calcium and its role in cell function in an atmosphere conducive to informal exchange of ideas. The format of this conference will be similar to that of previous FASEB Summer Research Conferences. There will be a total of 8 morning and evening sessions of 3-4 speakers each and 1 keynote lecture. Afternoons are free to encourage informal interactions between invited speakers and participants. Poster presentations are an important part of such interactions and four 2-hour sessions are reserved for poster discussion. In addition, to enhance participation by junior attendees, time has been set aside for 4 short talks based on the best posters submitted. This is the major long-standing conference in North America that focuses entirely on calcium and covers the spectrum of calcium research rather than a single subdiscipline. Conferences are held every two years. Particular effort has been made to minimize overlap in topics and speakers with other calcium-related meetings such as the Gordon Conference on Calcium Signaling and the International Symposium on Calcium-Binding Proteins and Calcium Function in Health and Disease, both held in alternating, odd-numbered years. The FASEB conference is always oversubscribed and has received high ratings from previous participants doc4607 none Fleck Cell-cell signaling in the nervous system involves the regulated release of chemical neurotransmitters at specialized synaptic contacts. The principal excitatory neurotransmitter in the mammalian brain is glutamate. Yet the methods available to measure glutamate are indirect and insufficient to study its release in real time or at individual release sites. This proposal seeks to develop a reliable, quantitative, and direct method to measure the release of glutamate during synaptic transmission. Highly selective glutamate sensitive proteins will be employed that generate a measurable current upon glutamate binding. The proteins have been cloned, genetically engineered to enhance their fidelity of signal transduction, and will be incorporated into a biosensor probe. Studies are proposed to test the spatial and temporal limits of detection by such probes while measuring the variability of quantal packets of glutamate, perhaps a few thousand molecules, as they are released during synaptic activity. If successful, these studies will provide a means to address previously intractable questions of synaptic physiology. Glutamate release is broadly involved in nervous system function and is highly regulated. Developmental and use-dependent changes in the strength of glutamate transmission are important for synapse maturation, learning and memory. Dysregulation of glutamate transmission is implicated in cognitive-memory impairments, epilepsy, affective disorders, and neurodegenerative disease. Therefore, it is important to advance our understanding of the process and regulation of glutamate release doc4608 none The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at the University of Maryland addresses fundamental problems connected with the dynamics of ferroelectrics and of surface nanostructures, and with the properties of highly spin polarized magnetic oxides. The MRSEC supports an effective pre-college education outreach effort that includes summer science programs for middle school girls and hands-on math and science student programs. The Center has intensive activities for knowledge transfer to a large number of industrial and federal laboratories. The MRSEC also supports promising new projects through seed funding, and develops and maintains shared experimental facilities. Research in the proposed Center is organized into three Interdisciplinary research Groups (IRG). IRG 1, Polarization Dynamics in Ferroelectric Thin Films, addresses key materials issues that will allow to control and optimize the time-dependent behavior of thin film ferroelectrics, and that currently limit their applicability to computer memories, sensors and actuators. IRG 2, Surface Nanostructures: From Fluctuations to Driven Systems, builds upon powerful experimental and theoretical tools developed by this group of investigators to predict the surface structural evolution of films under various processing conditions, including chemical vapor deposition growth and electromigration. IRG 3, Metal Oxides with High Spin Polarization, focuses on issues limiting development of metallic oxides with high spin polarization that can be utilized in magnetic devices, including spintronics and magnetic sensors. Center participants include 23 senior investigators, 8 post-doctoral associates, 20 graduate students, 10 undergraduates and 2 support personnel. Professor Ellen D. Williams directs the MRSEC doc4609 none The Power Systems Engineering Research Center (PSerc) is one of the Industry University Cooperative Research Centers (I UCRC) supported by the National Science Foundation. The mission of the center is to support research activities in electric power systems. PSerc is headquartered at Cornell University. Presently, several corporations support and direct the activities of PSerc. In addition to Cornell, the University of California at Berkeley, Howard University, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Washington State University, Iowa State University and Arizona State University participate in PSerc. The addition of the Georgia Institute of Technology to the participating universities will have many benefits, as outlined in the proposal. The main objective of this proposal is to outline the Georgia Tech research plan within PSerc and to establish a research site for PSerc at Georgia Institute of Technology doc4610 none In this award, co-funded by The Polymers Program of the Division of Materials Research and the Mechanics & Structures of Materials Program of the Division for Civil and Mechanical Systems, novel layer-multiplying technology will be used to coextrude polymer sheet or film with hundreds or thousands of alternating layers of two or more materials. Layer thicknesses from the macroscale (tens of microns) to the microscale (several microns) and finally to the nanoscale (tens of nanometers) will be created. Motivated by the need for new processing technologies to develop the engineered microstructures of the future, a microlayer facility was created at CWRU. This facility includes a two-component process that produces sheet or film with alternating layers of polymer A and polymer B. A second system adds a third tie layer (polymer C) at the interface between each layer of A and B. A research program to explore the possibilities for new materials systems that can be realized with this versatile process is proposed. The proposed research intends to build on the most promising aspects of prior research and to innovate in new areas of opportunity. The specific aims focus on: (1) expanding the flexibility of the coextrusion process to create new anisotropic structures, (2) incorporating an inorganic component in novel ways to produce materials with designed electronic properties, (3) creating microlayered and nanolayered materials having enhanced barrier properties, and (4) probing the nature of polymer adhesion as related to fundamental aspects of polymer blending and alloying. %%% Ultimately, microprocessing , as exemplified by microlayer and nanolayer coextrusion, can be the basis for creating smart skins , film and sheet materials with radiation of specific wavelengths and additionally possess barrier characteristics or unusual electronic properties seems possible. The graduate and undergraduate students who participate in the research will have the opportunity to use a unique coextrusion process to design and realize materials systems that were not possible previously. Through written and oral communications, the results of this versatile technology will be translated to the field-at-large including the industrial sector doc4611 none Hull The Materials Research Science and Egineering Center (MRSEC) at the University of Virginia supports an interdisciplinary research program on nanoscopic materials design. The group research explores the guided growth of epitaxial semiconductor sufaces, combining short-range self-assembly phenomena with long-range pattern definition techniques. Techniques utilized include focused ion beam surface modification, nano-scaled electrochemical etching and strain field engineering. This will lead to the capability for definition of nanoscale semiconductor surface structures of arbitrary length scales and complexity, with applications to quantum device structures, biological templating and nanoscale electrochemical processes. The Center s research is aided by extensive collaborations with other universities, government and industrial laboratories. The Center also provides seed support for emerging research opportunities in related areas. The Center supports well maintained shared experimental facilities and also supports interactive efforts with industry and other sectors. Education outreach efforts focus on developing collaborations with two- and four-year colleges in the Commonwealth of Virginia, and include a joint curriculum development effort with Longwood College, Northern Virginia Community College and Hampton University. Participants in the Center currently include 21 senior investigators, 2 postdoctoral associates, 11 graduate students, 6 undergraduate students and 2 technicians and other support personnel. Professor Robert Hull directs the MRSEC doc4612 none C. M. Sorensen, Kansas State University The PI proposes to extend the results he has obtained in the development of static light scattering diagnostics of aerosol aggregation kinetics. These measurements will be extended to include large particles (including some in the turbulent range), and also some cases in need of time resolution. Some needed theoretical work is planned, to characterize the fractal aggregate scattering, and also to generalize these assessments to homogeneous spherical aerosols. Fast microphotography will give an insight of the particles size and morphology. These quantitative results will make possible the kinetics characterization of aerogelation and turbulent aggregation. A special effort will be to establish the validity limits of the Smoluchovski equation, which does not seem to fit some of the earlier measured kinetics in dilute or turbulent systems. Cluster fractal data will yield the evolution beyond the diffusional (laminar) regime, while density fields will identify deviations from mean-field behavior doc4613 none Chan The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at Penn State University supports an interdisciplinary research program on collective phenomena in porous hosts. The group research addresses the collective molecular, photonic and electronic effects that emerge in nanometer-scale porous systems of one-, two- and three-dimensional connectivity. Particular emphasis is placed on ordered structures with application to tunable photonic crystals, phase transitions in fluids, and electronic effects in one-dimensional wires and three-dimensional solid phase superlattices. The Center also provides seed support for emerging research opportunities. The Center supports well maintained shared experimental and computational facilities and also supports interactive efforts with industry and other sectors. Comprehensive education activities range from K-12 to graduate education, with outreach to the public through ties to science museums. Participants in the Center currently include 13 senior investigators, 2 postdoctoral associates, 16 graduate students and 2 technicians and other support personnel. Professor Moses Chan directs the MRSEC doc4614 none The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at the State University of New York Stony Brook entitled MRSEC-Novel Materials, Processes and Functional Materials by Thermal Spray is a collaboration between SUNY Stony Brook, UC Santa Barbara, MIT, Idaho National Engineering Lab, Sandia National Lab, NIST, and Brookhaven National Lab. The goal of the Center is develop the scientific base for the complex technique of thermal spray and to create a robust and predictive materials deposition tool. The Center s research is organized into one interdisciplinary Research Group (IRG). A major initiative of the group is to develop theoretical and experimental tools for processing and characterization of functional deposits with coupled mechanical electrical and mechanical magnetic properties. The Center supports well maintained shared experimental facilities and also supports interactive efforts with industry and other sectors. The Center has a strong industrial outreach program, which creates mutually beneficial relationships between the MRSEC and the industrial sector. The program also provides opportunities for students to be involved in internship programs and is especially targeted to encourage minority students to enter the field. The collaborations with National Labs are extensive and involve a significant number of faculty members and students. Participants in the Center currently include 17 senior investigators, 3 postdoctoral associates, 6 graduate students, 8 undergraduate students and 1 support person. Professor Herbert Herman directs the MRSEC doc4605 none Although the Cherokee language, an isolated member of the Iroquoian family, has more speakers (10,000 to 12,000) and more documentation than many other endangered languages of North America, it remains remarkably understudied linguistically. This project will provide a thorough description and analysis of the Cherokee sound system: the goal is to establish the phoneme inventory and describe the tone system and other intonational phenomena through acoustic analysis of consonants, vowels, and pitch distinctions. The full project, which is expected to take three years, will consist of four stages: constructing the body of elicitation data (words and sentences); making recordings of 20 speakers producing the speech samples; phonetically analyzing the recordings (with special emphasis on pitch traces); and writing reports based on this data. The current project, which will take one year, will consist of the first two stages: constructing the elicitation data and recording the speech samples. This work is important both practically and theoretically. Both major Cherokee political entities, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and the North Carolina Band of Cherokee, are engaged in language preservation and pedagogy, and require reliable phonological analysis to further these goals. Several institutions of higher learning in Oklahoma offer college-level credit in the Cherokee language, and have a similarly urgent need for an accurate description of the phonology of the language, both for classroom use and for the design of instructional materials including audiotapes and CD ROM aids. Socially, because Cherokee consists of a large number of distinct dialects, an accurate phonological description is necessary to both distinguish dialects and to provide a cogent basis for the acceptance of all dialects as full-fledged members of the language. Theoretically, Cherokee phonology has long presented several conundrums. One still-unsolved problem is the status of pitch and tone in the language. Another problem is that of word and morpheme boundaries and their relationship to prosodic categories. Yet another problem is the role of intonational processes with respect to syntactic processes, and how these may be different still from discourse functions. This study will provide a large corpus of data that will be drawn from a diverse sample of speakers and provide detailed acoustic information. Using an autosegmental-metrical model, the researchers will identify the associations of the tone tier with other linguistic levels. This study provides research opportunities for undergraduate assistants in the fieldwork phase. It also includes a large proportion of Cherokee persons in major components of the research, including senior personnel, research assistants, and of course, the language consultants themselves doc4616 none Elinson Vertebrates share a common body plan, centered on the dorsal axis. Despite this similarity, early embryos of different vertebrates generate the common body plan in different ways. Frogs rely on molecules localized in the egg, while birds and mammals rely on later cell interactions. The evolution of the reptile bird egg from the amphibian egg involved a huge increase in egg size, and this increase may have altered early development. To examine the impact of large egg size on early development, embryos of the Puerto Rican tree frog, Eleutherodactylus coqui, will be investigated. The egg of E. coqui is 20X the volume of that of Xenopus laevis, the frog whose development is best known. The evolutionary impact of this increase in size will be examined in three ways. First, alterations in egg organization will be investigated by determining the localization in E. coqui of RNAs, known to be important in patterning the X. laevis embryo. Second, the origin of the initial cell types, the germ layers, will be examined with the expectation that certain features of embryo patterning may resemble those of reptile or bird embryos. Finally, new evidence suggests that the dorsal axis arises differently in E. coqui than in X. laevis. An examination of these differences may show how the key element in vertebrate development can evolve. The results will demonstrate how an evolutionary increase in egg size affects mechanisms of early developmental patterning, and will suggest how the reptile bird egg arose doc4583 none With National Science Foundation support Drs. LuAnn Wandsnider, Nicholas Rauh and an international group of collaborators will conduct archaeological research in the Western Rough Cilicia region of Turkey. Located in the Eastern Mediterranean the area was famous both as a pirate base and for the tenacity with which it resisted incorporation into the succession of empires which sought to dominate this large Near Eastern region. During the first and second centuries BC pirates reportedly amassed warships and 30,000 combatants and extended their naval operations and depredations throughout the Mediterranean, roving as far as Italy and Spain. In 67 BC the Roman general Pompey temporarily eliminated the pirate menace and in 71 AD the region was formally incorporated into the Roman empire. Although literary sources attest to this fact, it is unclear to what extent the Rough Cilicia maintained a degree of autonomy or the nature of the relationship between this peripheral area and the core of the Roman empire. Through archaeological research the investigators will study the changes in social organization which took place after incorporation and the evidence for direct Roman presence in the area. To meet these objectives they will develop a ceramic reference collection which will allow dating of individual sites. They will conduct a coarse grained foot survey (supplemented by remote sensing and interview with local inhabitants) and will document architectural sites to establish stylistic conventions and construction and remodeling sequences for domestic, fortification, religious and industrial structures. They will also carry out a preliminary paleoenvironmental studies to determine whether detailed environmental reconstruction is possible. If so, this will establish the groundwork for looking at utilization and degradation of the landscape. Empires arose independently in many regions of the world and archaeologists wish to understand the processes which underlay their origins and the functioning. By definition, power rests with a central ethnic group which attempts to extend control - usually through actual or implied use of force - over the maximum area possible. At the same time subject peoples try to retain as much autonomy as possible. Researchers have posited multiple strategies both for the conqueror and the conquered and Rough Cilicia provides an excellent context to evaluate them doc4618 none The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at Johns Hopkins University supports an interdisciplinary research program on nanostructures with enhancd magneto-electronic properties. The research is carried out in one interdisciplinary research group, with appropriate seed projects. Within the IRG one thrust is on the magneto-transport properties of high quality bismuth thin films; another thrust is on ferromagnetic antiferromagnetic multilayers, and another on nanostructured half-metallic chromium oxide films; two other thrusts highlight electrodeposited one-dimensional structures (nanowires) and patterned structures such as arrays of epitaxially grown interacting chromium oxide dots. The center is engaged in a variety of educational activities, including Research Experiences for undergraduates and Research Experiences for Teachers, an undergraduate fellow program and a high school teacher internship program. The Center supports well maintained shared experimental facilities, which are accessible to outside users and also supports interactive efforts within industry and other sectors. Participants in the Center include 11 senior investigators, 4 postdoctoral associates, 8 graduate students, 10 undergraduates, and 2 technicians and other support personnel. Professor Chia-Ling Chien directs the MRSEC doc4619 none The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at University of California, Santa Barbara is focused on classes of material that are both chemically and structurally complex with a significant portion of the effort related to interfaces, including those between organic and inorganic materials. IRG 1, Biomaterial Microstructures, has evolved from the Complex Fluids IRG of the previous MRSEC, and carries out the enabling science for the development of biomaterial microstructure and solution aggregates that perform biological or biomimetic functions and serve as model systems for hybrid devices. IRG 2, Solution Synthesis of Inorganics at Molecular and Atomic Interfaces studies the roles of structure-directing molecules and surfaces in the hierarchical organization of inorganics synthesized from solution at low temperatures. IRG 3, Mesoscopic Macromolecular Structures, develops the principles for synthesis and processing of novel macromolecular structures that are heterogeneous on a mesoscopic scale and exploit these structures to control properties for electronic, optical and biotechnological applications. IRG 4, Strongly Non-equilibrium Phenomena in Complex Materials, applies atomic-scale microscopies and advanced scientific computing to bear on a diverse, but closely related, set of problems concerning deformation, failure, and structural reorganization of complex materials. The Center includes significant shared facilities located in a new Materials Research Laboratory building recently completed to house the Center. The educational activities include development of evaluation methods to measure the degree of success that their outreach programs are having. Outreach projects include Santa Barbara City College Materials Interns; Research Interns in Science and Engineering; Research Experience for Teachers; and UCSB Scienceline, an internet link with Santa Barbara County science teachers and students, impacting both under-represented minority and female students at the college, and pre-college levels. Last year, these programs reached 28 undergraduates (12 women; 2 under-represented minorities) and pre-college students ( women; under-represented minorities). This is an interdisciplinary MRSEC with 31 faculty members, 15 post-doctoral associates and 24 graduate students from programs in Materials Science and Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Electrical Engineering, Geology, Mechanical Engineering, Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry. Professor Anthony Cheetham directs the MRSEC doc4620 none In this program the dynamic of polymeric systems is studied experimentally in a broad temperature range, from deep in a solid state up to deep in a liquid state. The main subject of the program is analysis of the fast dynamics in different polymers. This dynamics includes cooperative molecular motion on a nanometer scale. This motion is a necessary precursor of many slower processes and strongly influences macroscopic properties of the material. The main methods are light and neutron scattering spectroscopy. The combination of these two techniques gives detailed information on the fast dynamics spectra and on peculiarities of the motion on a molecular level. Different theoretical approaches, from Mode-Coupling Theory to model of Asymmetric Double-Well Potentials, are tested and used for analysis of the experimental data. New model approximations that would consistently describe the data in a broad temperature and frequency ranges are discussed and developed. The program is a starting point for broad collaboration between different groups (experimental, theory and computer simulations) working in the field of polymer dynamics. The results of the program will bring better understanding of microscopic picture of the fast dynamics and its peculiarities in polymeric systems and will lead to development of consistent theoretical description of the dynamics in solid and liquid states %%% Molecular motion is a key for many macroscopic materials properties. The proposed here research is concentrated on analysis of cooperative molecular motion on a molecular frequency (GHz-THz range) and length (nanometer) scales. The results of the research will strongly influence the development of the field of polymer dynamics and dynamics of disordered materials and bio-polymers in general. The knowledge received I the result of the program can be useful for designing of new plastics with desired properties, especially for high-frequency applications (optical comunications, computers, optical memory storage devices doc4621 none Award: Principal Investigator: Alexander S. Freire The Barrett Lectures at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in May , New Directions in Differential Geometry will present four main speakers and a number of additional lecturers. These talks will address a broad spectrum of recent work in the subject, including lecture series by four leading researchers on partial differential equations and analytic methods, minimal surfaces, symmetries and isometries in Riemannian geometry, and Lagrangian cycles in symplectic geometry. The major component of this award will support participation in the lecture series by graduate students and recent Ph.D.s. The Barrett Lectures have been held annually since , covering a variety of topics and attracting a national audience. They are one of the few long standing lecture series in mathematics in the southeastern United States. The subject of these lectures for is differential geometry, the study of aspects of a space that can be captured by measures of length, angle, surface area, volume, and related notions. Riemannian geometry concentrates on issues related to curvature, the measurable quantity that makes rigorous the notion that a flat plane and a round sphere are distinct even at very small scales of attention. Symplectic geometry concerns an idealization of the structure underlying the Hamiltonian framework for mechanics, a structure that enables measurements of areas and volumes but does not require that length and angles be measurable. Both of these flavors of geometric information have dramatic consequences for problems concerning efficient or optimal placement of objects such as a surface in a three-dimensional space, consequences which are mostly expressed in the language of partial differential equations and related ideas from mathematical analysis doc4622 none Clearfield, Abraham This project focuses on the synthesis of micro and mesoporous materials based upon two types of reactions; the pillaring of a newly synthesized vanadyl phosphate and the designed exploitation of metal phosphonate chemistry. The novel vanadyl phosphate is a dark green layered compound that intercalates amines and on refluxing in alcohol solution exfoliates. In this condition it reacts with inorganic polymers to produce porous pillared products with high surface areas and uniform pores sizes. A second type of reaction involving gel formation of the vanadyl phosphate with first row transition metal acetates also leads to porous materials of unknown structure, where pores in both cases can tuned to narrow ranges in the important intermediate size range of 10 to 25 nanometers. The second class of materials is more involved with the design of porosity by choice of the phosphonic acid and metal. The nature of reactions leading to new materials will be probed and the materials characterized by use of X-ray and electron diffraction, NMR and vibration spectroscopies, electron microscopy, surface area and pore size measurements and where needed computer modeling procedures. The ion exchange, sorption and complexing behavior, and catalytic properties as well as electronic and magnetic behavior of selected compounds from both the vanadium and phosphonate studies will be examined. %%% Meso and microporous materials area predicted to be useful as catalysts, adsorbents, molecular silvers, ion exchanges and in special cases exhibit interesting electronic and magnetic behavior. This project should result in discovery of new phenomena related to formation of porous structures and will serve as an excellent vehicle for training students, including undergraduates, in the design of new materials with functional properties doc4623 none Building Capacity Among Junior Researchers in the Learning Sciences: A Request for Special Program Support for the International Conference of the Learning Sciences: This is a SGER proposal to support graduate students to attend the International Conference on the Learning Sciences to be held in Ann Arbor June 14-17, . The funds would support the development of 3 workshops on methodology, would support junior faculty attending the meeting, and would provide support for graduate students to attend at a reduced price. Also, the conference will hold a consortium for graduate student research at which students would present summaries of their research in process and receive comments from nationally recognized faculty doc4624 none The goal of this project is to understand the mechanism of signaling during active transport. The hypothesis to be evaluated is that information about rates of solute transport into cells is used by regulatory proteins to control gene expression. The rate of substrate transport into a cell may be a better reflection of its availability in the environment than its intracellular concentration. This may be especially true for compounds that are rapidly metabolized. The maltose transport system of E. coli is a well-characterized ATP-binding cassette transporter that has been extensively studied both by genetic and biochemical approaches. Recently it was found that the maltose transporter participates in the regulation of mal gene expression by repressing transcription. This project will investigate the molecular basis for the ability of the transporter to participate in gene regulation using three approaches. Initially the sites on the MalT protein that are required for interaction with the maltose transporter will be identified. A physical interaction between the MalK subunit of the transporter and the MalT protein has been demonstrated. In order to find the region(s) within the MalT protein that are required for interaction with the transporter, malT mutations that interfere with the ability of the MalT protein to interact with the transporter will be isolated. The sites of the mutations will be determined by DNA sequence analysis. Several phenotypes of the malT mutations will be assessed. Second, it will be determined if repression interferes with the ability of the MalT activator to bind to its recognition sites on DNA. The maltose transporter represses mal gene expression by interfering with the function of MalT, the activator of the mal regulon. This could occur by affecting the ability of MalT to bind to MalT sites found upstream from mal promoters. Alternatively, the transporter may affect the ability of MalT to activate transcription without affecting its binding to specific sites on DNA. DNA footprinting of MalT to sites upstream from mal promoters will be measured to assess the ability of MalT to bind to promoter sites in the presence and absence of the purified transporter. Finally, the hypothesis that the regulatory activity of the maltose transporter is coupled to transport activity will be directly tested. The ability of the transporter to repress mal gene expression is inversely correlated with ATP hydrolysis. A mutant transporter that binds but is unable to hydrolyze ATP is a stronger repressor than the wild-type transporter. In addition, mutant transporters with very high levels of ATPase activity are less able to repress and result in high constitutive levels of mal gene expression. The hypothesis that repression is relieved when the maltose transporter is activated and pumping sugars into the cell will be evaluated. Mutant forms of the transporter that are activated by periplasmic maltose binding protein (MBP) without ligand and are able to transport related sugars that are not normally inducers of the mal regulon will be employed. This hypothesis would be supported if, in these strains, activation by MBP or transport of the related sugars results in relief of transporter-mediated repression and constitutive mal gene expression doc4625 none The U.S. Africa Materials Workshop, an international workshop on materials Research, education, and technology, is being planned for August 6-9, in Pretoria, South Africa. This workshop will be the fifth in a series involved NAFTA countries ( ), European countries ( ), Pan-American countries ( ), and Asian Pacific countries ( ). All of these workshops shared the common goal of fostering greater international cooperation and collaboration in materials research, technology, and education. Participants in these workshops have expressed the desire to establish a Materials World Net, which would link materials scientists and engineers around the world by providing them with access to comprehensive databases and data warehouses. The workshop program will focus on discussions of topics already selected by the Organizers from the participating countries. These topics are Education and Training, Civil Infrastructural Materials, Materials Value-Chain, Advanced and Emerging Materials, and Application of Polymers and Composites. The goal of the workshop is to Enhance international collaboration in materials research, technology, and education Between US and Africa. %%% A potential outcome of the proposed US Africa Materials Workshop, is the Continued pursuit of the goal of creating this Materials World Net to foster greater Cooperation and collaboration in the field of materials research, education, and Technology worldwide. The U.S. Africa Materials Workshop is being jointly funded by the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, The Directorate for Engineering and the International Division of the Directorate for Social and Behavioral Sciences doc4626 none The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) is a partnership between the University of Oklahoma and the University of Arkansas which supports an interdisciplinary research program on semiconductor nanostructure science and applications. The research is carried out in two interdisciplinary research groups, with appropriate seed projects. Within IRG 1 the focus is on the growth and characterization of semiconductor nanostructures. The IRG also includes study of the novel electronic and optical properties and potential device applications. IRG 2 has its focus on interfaces with particular emphasis on the study of narrow gap semiconductors such as based on InAs and InSb. The center is engaged in a number of educational activities from the graduate to the middle school level, including support for workshops for middle and high school science teachers, and support for production of science videos. The Center supports well maintained shared experimental facilities and also supports interactive efforts with industry, National Laboratories and other sectors. Participants in the Center include 17 senior investigators, 6 postdoctoral associates, 15 graduate students, 3 undergraduates, and 1technician. Professor Matthew B. Johnson directs the MRSEC doc4627 none Burghhardt This award supports Wesley Burghardt and Coleen Pugh of Northwestern University to hold a U.S.-Germany joint workshop on polymers in Evanston, Illinois, Aug. 5-10, . This is an important symposium of major potential impact on the field of polymers. The topics are excellent and include biopolymers and biomaterials, synthetic methodologies, and processing in supercritical fluids. The participants represent a very diverse cross-section of the community, including under-represented groups. Furthermore, the PIs are top young educators and researchers in the field. Previous workshops of this type have established a tradition of high reputation and of forging close ties between emerging young scientists of both the U.S. and Germany doc4628 none Smith Zygotic development begins with the fusion of sperm and egg. While sperm provides only the male pronucleus, the egg contributes, in addition to the female pronucleus, the egg cytoplasm which contains molecules essential for proper development of the embryo. These maternal factors in the egg control numerous process include sperm recognition, cell-cycle activation, and determination of the primary axes and germ layers. Ascidians, which are primitive members of the chordate phylum, have classically been used to study the role of maternal factors in early development. In fertilized ascidian eggs extensive rearrangement of egg cytoplasm can be observed. The partitioning of distinct cytoplasmic factors specifies many tissue types including muscle and endoderm. This project will use newly developed genetic methods in ascidians to analyze maternal control of early development. Ascidians are particularly well suited for this type of analysis. The species to be used in this project, Ciona savignyi, is a hermaphrodite with the capacity for self fertilization. These properties streamline procedures for identification and recovery of mutants. Briefly, adult C. savignyi are first treated with the chemical mutagen ENU. Sperm from the ENU-treated animals is crossed to wild-type eggs to generate heterozygous F1s. The F1s are grown to maturity (10-12 weeks), and then sperm and eggs are collected from each and mixed to make a self-fertilized F2 generation. One-quarter of the F2s will be homozygous for each mutant locus carried by an F1. When the F2s reach maturity, the eggs are dissected, crossed with wild-type sperm, and then screened for mutant phenotypes. If a potential mutant is observed, sperm from the same animal is crossed to wild-type eggs in order to recover the mutation. A pilot screen has shown that this screen is feasible, and a number of candidate mutants are being characterized. Funding from this proposal will be used to complete the pilot screen, perform an expanded screen, and characterize recovered mutants in order to better understand the nature of the mutations doc4629 none Studies of congressional structure frequently focus on the powers and authority of standing committees in the House and Senate. From a theoretical perspective, committees are either the foundation and core of the policy process in congress as in a distributive model of legislative structure, or are seen as the vital workhorse in providing information and policy proposals to parent bodies like the party or chamber as described in partisan and informational models. From a more empirical standpoint, recent observers of Congress have disagreed about the contemporary status of legislative committees vis-a-vis other congressional actors, particularly chamber and party leaders. Despite the claims of some of the field s best scholars as to current strengths or weaknesses of committees in the congressional decision making process, we still have few means by which to measure the power and authority of committees, particularly if we seek to understand the changes in influence of specific panels over time. This project rectifies this shortcoming by gathering new data on bill introductions and referrals. This allows the investigators to more accurately define committee jurisdictions, better test theories of jurisdictional change, understand the process and prevalence of committee issue gatekeeping, and discover the effects of individual and committee agendas on the overall work of each chamber of Congress. The researchers collect information on all bills introduced in Congress from - . Grounded in current research on congressional organization and policy decision making, the investigators describe how data on bill introductions and referrals can answer a wide range of questions concerning committee authority and policy agenda setting. For example, information on bill referrals provides a more complete delineation of common law committee jurisdictions by moving scholars beyond simply those issues on which a panel is active (holding hearings), to additional consideration of those matters on which it has referral authority by may remain inactive (no hearings). Similarly, information on non-decisionmaking in committees allows the researchers for the first time to truly test models of committee gatekeeping across panels and over changes in procedural rules and structures. By integrating data on policy inputs (bill introductions) with existing information on policy demand (public opinion and media cues) and governmental outputs (enactments and budget authorizations), they are able to study the dynamics of committee authority and influence over the legislative agenda with a more comprehensive depiction of congressional decision making. The dataset will be of great value to numerous other scholars interested in this topic doc4630 none The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at the supports an interdisciplinary research program on advanced materials, as well as a wide range of educational activities, including outreach to minority communities in California both at the pre-college and college level, and development of pre-college instructional materials. The Center supports well maintained shared experimental facilities and also supports interactive efforts with industry and other sectors. The Center s research is organized into two interdisciplinary research groups (IRG). IRG 1, Biological Synthesis and Assembly of Macromolecular Materials, uses powerful biological approaches for the synthesis and assembly of polymeric materials. IRG 2, Bulk Metallic Glasses and Composites, explores new strategies to produce bulk metallic glasses and their composites with enhanced mechanical properties. The Center also provides seed support for emerging research opportunities in photonic and ferroelectric materials. Participants in the Center currently include 18 senior investigators, 1 postdoctoral associate, 17 graduate students, 16 undergraduates, and 8 technicians and other support personnel. Professor Julia A. Kornfield directs the MRSEC doc4629 none Studies of congressional structure frequently focus on the powers and authority of standing committees in the House and Senate. From a theoretical perspective, committees are either the foundation and core of the policy process in congress as in a distributive model of legislative structure, or are seen as the vital workhorse in providing information and policy proposals to parent bodies like the party or chamber as described in partisan and informational models. From a more empirical standpoint, recent observers of Congress have disagreed about the contemporary status of legislative committees vis-a-vis other congressional actors, particularly chamber and party leaders. Despite the claims of some of the field s best scholars as to current strengths or weaknesses of committees in the congressional decision making process, we still have few means by which to measure the power and authority of committees, particularly if we seek to understand the changes in influence of specific panels over time. This project rectifies this shortcoming by gathering new data on bill introductions and referrals. This allows the investigators to more accurately define committee jurisdictions, better test theories of jurisdictional change, understand the process and prevalence of committee issue gatekeeping, and discover the effects of individual and committee agendas on the overall work of each chamber of Congress. The researchers collect information on all bills introduced in Congress from - . Grounded in current research on congressional organization and policy decision making, the investigators describe how data on bill introductions and referrals can answer a wide range of questions concerning committee authority and policy agenda setting. For example, information on bill referrals provides a more complete delineation of common law committee jurisdictions by moving scholars beyond simply those issues on which a panel is active (holding hearings), to additional consideration of those matters on which it has referral authority by may remain inactive (no hearings). Similarly, information on non-decisionmaking in committees allows the researchers for the first time to truly test models of committee gatekeeping across panels and over changes in procedural rules and structures. By integrating data on policy inputs (bill introductions) with existing information on policy demand (public opinion and media cues) and governmental outputs (enactments and budget authorizations), they are able to study the dynamics of committee authority and influence over the legislative agenda with a more comprehensive depiction of congressional decision making. The dataset will be of great value to numerous other scholars interested in this topic doc4632 none PI: Lockery This project investigates the relationship between brain activity and behaviour in the nematode worm C. elegans. The behavior studies is chemotaxis, in which an animal finds a food item or other odor source by moving in the direction of the strongest smell. The main objective is to create a computer model of part of the nematode brain that converts chemical sensation into bodily movement. The model will be based on information obtained by many methods including laser surgery to eliminate individual neurons in the worm brain and electrical recordings from some of the smallest neurons known to science. Understanding how even a simple brain controls behaviour is important for two main reasons. First, to discover the causes of mental illness and other forms of abnormal behaviour, we must first understand how neurons and genes shape normal behaviour. In humans, which have a 100 billion neurons and about 100,000 genes, this is a daunting task. In the nematode, however, there are only 302 neurons and 19,000 genes, so progress there should be much quicker. Moreover, humans and nematodes share many of their genes, making nematode research directly applicable to humans. Second, this project should help us build a new generation of smaller, smarter, and cheaper computers by unraveling the computation secrets of the brain. Brains can process much more information per unit time that computers, and they do so using much less energy and space, but how this is done is a mystery. The simplicity of the nematode makes its computational mechanisms easier to understand doc4633 none Smethie This project consists of a study of the way in which dense water is formed on a shelf and then descends to depth when the shelf-water is subject to a negative surface buoyancy flux. The intent is to model dense water formation on continental shelves with the Weddell Sea quoted as the main motivation. The approach is to perform laboratory experiments in a rotating tank with a simplified shelf-slope geometry. The experiments are distinguished from earlier experiments by the use of a distributed surface buoyancy flux, by a novel approach to trying to quantify the viscous flow draining fluid from the down-slope gravity currents, and by the inclusion of canyons and ridges on the slope topography doc4634 none The Analytical and Surface Chemistry program and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities provides support for the Symposium on Bioinformatics held at the ACS National Meeting in San Francisco March 26-31, . The symposium is organized by Dr. Robert Kennedy of the University of Florida for the American Chemical Society. Bioinformatics refers to the use of computer searching and modeling to maximize utility of database information. It is particularly relevant to the analytical chemistry community where large volumes of data are being generated on protein sequences, signal transduction networks and genomic sequences. This is a significant, emerging area of scientific endeavor. The success of Bioinformatics will help integrate multiple disciplines including analytical chemistry, biology, biochemistry, biotechnology and computing. The explosive growth in high throughput analytical measurements has resulted in correspondingly large data bases of information. It is imperative that effective means of making correlations and identifications with this data are developed. The purpose of the symposium is to bring together scientists to promote an understanding of this emerging field, to promote collaborations and chart future directions. The symposium speakers include members from academia, the biotechnology industry, the chemical industry and manufacturers doc4635 none The proposed research will address two of the goals defined by PATH (the President Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing.) Research will evaluate the effect of a new method of tracking construction waste in order to improve the reuse at residential construction sites. Additionally, we will measure the effects of improved sites through managed site layouts. The organization of the worksite will also provide a more ergonomically correct material delivery and transportation paths which should lead to fewer injuries including the reduction of back injuries. Current practices will be analyzed and methods for improvement will be noted and tested. Specifically, it is proposed to develop a Site-Integrated-Planning concept that takes into account all levels of residential construction. Such a plan will address critical goals of construction such as finding ways to reduce waste, improve safety ergonomics of a residential building site, and reduced delay time in the inspection process. New models will be provided to aid in the development of more precise and better management tools to improve productivity as well as the safety at a construction site. Additionally, by applying a wide variety of critical information technologies, the researchers will assess the effects improvements in communication can have on residential construction doc4636 none Proposal PI: Marius Brouwer Organisms are dependent on trace metals such as iron and copper for various functions. However, when these metals are in excess they may have toxic effects. The goal of this research project is to further our understanding of the molecular strategies used by organisms to convert potentially toxic copper into a biologically useful form, while avoiding its toxic side effects. Many organisms use metal-specific proteins, called metallothioneins, for detoxification of toxic metals, such as cadmium and mercury, and for detoxification of excess essential metals, such as copper. This project uses the blue crab, an organism that has a very active copper metabolism associated with the synthesis and degradation of hemocyanin, a copper-dependent protein used by the animal to carry oxygen from the gills to the tissues. Earlier work has found that crabs have metallothioneins that are controlled by zinc, as in vertebrates, but also have a copper-specific metallothionein whose synthesis is controlled by copper and not by zinc. This research project has three objectives. First, the hypothesis that the copper-specific metallothionein can provide copper that is required for the biosynthesis of hemocyanin will be examined. These studies may reveal a novel biological function for this new member of the metallothionein family. Secondly, since understanding of the function of a protein at the molecular level requires knowledge of its structure, the three-dimensional structure of the metallothionein protein will be determined. These studies will provide the first structure of a copper-metallothionein of a higher organism. Thirdly, the transcriptional control of the copper-metallothionein gene will be studied. This work may result in the first demonstration of a copper-sensing transcription factor in a higher organism, and may provide the foundation upon which further studies on copper sensing and signaling in higher organisms may be based doc4637 none Robichaux This program will provide training for undergraduates in conservation biology through a dual mentorship model whereby two mentors, one from the University of Arizona and the other from a local conservation organization or government agency, will guide undergraduate student interns over a two year program. During the two summers, students will conduct both independent and collaborative research in conservation biology with an organization or agency. Student research activities will be complemented by academic year seminar courses in conservation biology and scientific methodology, and workshops in academic and professional development. The program will encourage students to publish their results in scholarly journals and to present their research at professional meetings. The program will focus on recruiting, training, and supporting students traditionally under-represented in conservation biology. Conservation biology is a mixture of basic and applied research. The next generation of conservation biologists must be trained to bridge the gap between academics and real world application. This program will provide students such valuable training and experience while advancing the discipline, allowing scientists to make informed decisions regarding the management of organisms and landscapes. By immersing students in a community of peers, academicians, and practitioners of conservation biology; by supporting their personal and professional development; and by creating a culturally sensitive context for their experience; the program will strive to increase student chances of success in pursuit of advanced education and careers in conservation biology doc4638 none Under the direction of Dr. Anthony Marks, Mr. John Williams will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. The goal of his work is to understand the lithic variability which exists in a prehistoric industry termed Levantine Aurignacian. Archaeologists who work in the Near East have noted similarities among archaeological assemblages excavated in Israel and Jordan and which date between 32,000 and 17,000 years before the present. Some researchers point to specific tools fashioned from stone which are present in all assemblages and therefore have applied a single designation Levantine Aurignacian to all of these. However over the past two decades this industry has provided a source for lively debate because significant differences also have been noted and some scientists believe that this categorization serves more to obscure difference than emphasize meaningful similarity. Mr. Williams correctly notes that no single analytic system has been consistently applied to all such assemblages and with NSF support he will do so. He will visit museums in the United States, England and Israel which house carefully excavated material and obtain consistent comparable data. He will examine both tool types and the technology by which they were produced. Archaeologists have focused on the Aurignacian industry because it s European version marks the appearance of anatomically modern humans and a large suite of associated behavioral traits in this region. The origins and extent of the European Aurignacian is unclear as, likewise, is its relationship to its Levantine counterpart. Both areal variants share a set of distinctive lithic forms. For this reason the poorly described Levantine version is of great archaeological interest and Mr. Williams is taking a significant first step to better characterize this industry. Because it extends over a wide range of environments - from deserts to well watered regions - it may also be possible to correlate lithic and environmental variables and gain insight into patterns of prehistoric human adaptation. This research will provide data of interest to many archaeologists. It will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc4639 none Johnson Pisier This award is to continue support for the ongoing Workshop in Linear Analysis and Probability at Texas A&M University. The workshop brings together senior and junior researchers and advanced graduate students in several areas of analysis in order to broaden the education of the younger participants and to promote interaction among investigators in various fields. The Workshop also sponsors three day regional conferences and Concentration Weeks doc1499 none The insect neurohormone bursicon is essential for formation of the insect hard outer cuticle. Although discovered in , bursicon and its action have remained poorly understood. The primary aim of this collaborative project is the characterization of the gene sequence coding for this ubiquitous insect neurohormone. Degenerate primers derived from several partial amino acid sequences of cockroach bursicon will be used to amplify bursicon cDNA from messenger RNA by reverse transcription and PCR. In addition, existing cDNA libraries from other insects will be used for screening with probes derived from PCR. Knowledge of the full sequence of bursicon will facilitate identification of the bursicon active site and its receptor. Because insects wear their skeletons on the outside, they must periodically shed them as they grow or metamorphose. During each molt cycle, new cuticle must be synthesized. The hormone bursicon, triggers the hardening of the new cuticle once the old cuticle has been shed. Cuticular hardening provides not only protection, but also a framework for muscle attachment enabling locomotion. Clearly, interference with bursicon release or its actions will result in the death of the animal. This investigation will provide a basis for new methods of biological pest management by disrupting the function of bursicon doc4641 none Foster This grant provides partial support for the acquisition of a noble gas mass spectrometer, a UV IR dual laser system, high precision furnace, and associated vacuum equipment and electronics to construct a facility for 40Ar 39Ar geochronology and rare gas geochemical investigations at the University of Florida. The lead PI, David Foster recently ( ) joined the faculty at the University of Florida after spending several years as a senior researcher at La Trobe University in Australia. He joins Paul Mueller, Michael Perfit and Ann Heatherington in the geochemistry and petrology group. Establishment of a thermochronology facility at Florida will complement existing and successfully operated geochemical instrumentation in the Geology Department including a TIMS, ICP-MS and SIRMS and will add capacity to a limited U.S. geoscience analytical infrastructure for Ar Ar geochronology. The noble gas mass spectrometer will facilitate research in tectonics, economic geology, basin studies, geomorphology and anthropology by providing for constraints on the timing and rates of geologic processes doc4642 none Halpern Analyses of mutations that affect early development of the zebrafish embryo indicate that specialized cells that lie at the ventral midline of the neural tube, comprising the floor plate, are specified earlier than previously thought. Moreover, recent work has implicated the TGF-b-related signal nodal encoded by the zebrafish cyclops gene in floor plate induction. Dr. Halpern s previous work demonstrated that Cyclops signaling in the early organizer region of the gastrula is critical for restoration of the floor plate and ventral brain in the cyclops mutant central nervous system (CNS), which normally lacks these cells. The goal of this project is to study how nodal signaling effects changes in cell behavior and cell fate that lead to floor plate differentiation. One approach is to define in greater detail the spatial and temporal requirements for ventral neural tube rescue in cyclops mutant embryos. A simple paradigm has also been devised to study the response to signaling at the single cell level, taking advantage of the finding that the One-eyed pinhead protein is a critical cofactor for responsiveness of cells to nodal signals. Using this assay, she will assess directly whether Nodal-related factors are floor plate inducing signals by monitoring the properties of inducing and responding cells. A related goal is to explore further the role of hedgehog genes in specification of the ventral neural tube. Although Sonic hedgehog is thought to be the floor plate inducing signal in vertebrate embryos, mutations of the zebrafish orthologue do not affect development of the CNS ventral midline. Through the generation of mutations, we aim to determine whether the hedgehog-related protein Tiggy-winkle, either alone or in combination with Sonic hedgehog, functions in determination of floor plate in the zebrafish. Through these studies she will gain a greater understanding of the early-acting mechanisms that pattern the developing nervous system doc4643 none The Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX), a multidisciplinary field experiment was conducted from January to March, over the Indian Ocean. A follow-up requirement of such a multi-platform experiment is to develop an integrated database and coherent analysis of various observations that can be utilized by different participating groups and future investigators. The main objective of this project is to integrate and analyze the lower troposphere meteorological observations taken from different platforms such as ships, aircraft, satellites and land-based stations and investigate the role of land-ocean-atmosphere interactions on the atmospheric transport of aerosols and gases. These observations will be used to: 1) evaluate and provide a consistent data set of boundary layer meteorological observations, and 2) develop a detailed analysis of the role of aerosol-rich land plume and its interaction with the Marine Boundary Layer during INDOEX. This study will have a positive impact on the analysis of the various components of INDOEX observations by different groups, and will add to our knowledge of the influence of man-made atmospheric chemical constituents on the climate of South Asia and the Indian Ocean doc4644 none The circadian clock provides for both anticipation of coming changes and for a buffering against rapid variation in the environment. Despite its importance, little is known about the molecular components of the circadian clock in plants, though much phenomenology has shown that the basic properties of clocks are similar across the plant and animal kingdoms. The long-term objective of this study is to identify and integrate components of the circadian clock system of plants into a coherent framework of interaction. The specific means towards this end will be through using the mutant and wild-type gene products of the recently cloned locus in Arabidopsis, ZEITLUPE (ZTL). Mutations at this locus (ztl-1, -2) affect flowering time and greatly increase the period of the circadian clock in a light dependent way. These loci will be one of the primary tools used to understand how light input to the clock system interfaces with the oscillator itself. ZTL is comprised of a novel combination of a putative light-sensing domain (LOV domain), an F-box and 6 kelch motifs, identifying regions that are likely to play distinct roles in function of this protein. The specific goals of this project are: 1) to complete the genetic positioning of ZTL locus within the context of the known red light and blue light signal transduction pathways. 2) To identify physical interaction partners of the ZTL protein through yeast 2-hybrid interaction library screens and through targeted testing of candidate factors. 3) To identify genetic interaction partners of ZTL through suppressor and enhancer screens based on the ztl-1 phenotype. Given the strong effects these mutations have on flowering time, these studies should more clearly develop the link between the circadian clock, light signaling and plant development doc4645 none PI = Peterson Wilson and others have suggested that macro-social changes have a significant effect on crime and other social problems. This research evaluates this claim by analyzing neighborhood variation in crime within cities. The project also probes the impact of racial difference in communities by examining neighborhoods that are racially variant, but similarly situated in economic status. Crime data for neighborhoods in 75 cities with populations over 100,000 are collected. These crime data are combined with socio-demographic data for cities and tracts from census and other published sources to construct a contextual data set of neighborhoods characteristics with city variables appended to each neighborhood unit. These data are used to conduct multi-level analyses evaluating the direct and indirect effects (through neighborhood conditions) of city labor market structure, socioeconomic inequality, and population change on neighborhood crime. Further, the analyses assess whether and how city contextual factors condition the influence of neighborhood social disorganization, structural disadvantage, and socioeconomic inequality on crime. Finally, the research examines the extent to which neighborhood conditions (particularly economic status) have similar influences on crime in predominantly black and white neighborhoods. The research will determine whether and how a number of important city-level factors influence neighborhood crime by empirically evaluating the multifaceted influences of the macro-structural context on local community crime using cutting-edge statistical procedures. The project will also demonstrate whether the influences of socioeconomic conditions on crime are (or are not) invariant across areas with varying racial compositions, and whether the answers to these two issues are the same for different types of criminal behavior. The knowledge gained from addressing these questions will help explicate the determinants of neighborhood crime, and provide a foundation to inform public debate about the differential consequences of de-industrialization doc4646 none Thomas Guilfoyle and Gretchen Hagen Guilfoyle Auxin is a plant hormone known to play important roles in differential growth, root formation, apical dominance, and vascular patterning. These growth and developmental processes may be regulated, at least in part, by the expression patterns of primary (or early) and secondary (or late) auxin response genes. Early auxin response genes contain one or more Auxin Response Elements [AuxREs] containing the sequence TGTCTC, which confers auxin responsiveness to the promoters. Auxin Response Factors [ARFs] are transcription factors that bind with specificity to TGTCTC AuxREs. ARFs contain an amino-terminal DNA binding domain [DBD], and most ARFs contain a conserved carboxy-terminal domain [CTD] that facilitates their dimerization to themselves or Aux IAA proteins. Amino acids located between ARF DBDs and CTDs are nonconserved and represent activation or repression domains. Specific ARFs can activate or repress auxin-responsive transcription by binding directly to TGTCTC AuxREs and may further potentiate transcriptional activation or repression by dimerizing with ARF(s) that are bound to AuxREs. While Aux IAA proteins do not bind directly to TGTCTC AuxREs, they might also potentiate repression [or possibly activation] on AuxREs by forming heterodimers with ARF(s) that are bound to AuxREs. Major questions arise from the identification of many ARF and Aux IAA proteins in Arabidopsis. How do specific ARFs with similar DNA binding domains target particular TGTCTC AuxREs? What governs the formation of specific pairs of ARFs, Aux IAA, and ARF-Aux IAA proteins? How do ARF and Aux IAA homodimers and heterodimers determine whether an auxin response gene is activated or repressed? Does auxin play a role in targeting specific ARFs to TGTCTC AuxREs, in selecting the types of dimers that form, and or in determining whether an activation or repression domain is functional when residing at an AuxRE? What other transcription and signalling factors participate along with ARFs and Aux IAA proteins in regulating primary auxin response genes? The long term goal is to answer these questions and to begin to untangle the seemingly complex network of ARF and Aux IAA interactions that must occur within cells to regulate auxin-responsive gene expression. The project has the following specific aims: (1) to determine if ARFs and Aux IAA proteins show selectivity in interactions with one another; (2) to determine if auxin has an effect on ARF activation or repression domains directly or if an ARF CTD is required for auxin-responsive activation or repression; (3) to determine if Q-rich ARF activators play redundant roles in auxin-responsive gene expression; (4) to determine if the gene expression patterns of ARFs might restrict the types of ARF and Aux IAA dimers that form in planta; and (5) to identify proteins besides Aux IAAs that interact with ARFs and play roles in auxin signaling and auxin responses doc4647 none Antigen receptor diversity, the basis of adaptive immunity, is in part generated by a mechanism of somatic recombination that brings together the different gene segments that are expressed in lymphocytes. In tetrapods gene segments are rearranged from an array of tandemly duplicated genes to form the antigen-binding portion of the Ig heavy (H) and light (L) chains. There is one H chain locus and one to three L chain loci, but only one H and L chain combination is used to form the receptor that is expressed on the B lymphocyte cell surface. A completed and functional rearrangement is required for expression, but the mechanisms that restrict expression to one allele are not well defined. In higher vertebrates rearrangement thus creates a diverse antibody repertoire and plays an intrinsic part of the regulation of Ig gene expression. However, this role is one that evolved since its incipience in the ancestral jawed vertebrate. In representatives of the earliest vertebrates, the sharks and skates, there are hundreds of H and L chain loci ( clusters ), each consisting of a few gene segments. Each cluster potentially can function independently. Moreover in many clusters the gene segments are already recombined in the germline and do not need to undergo rearrangement to be utilized in lymphocytes. The proposed research will exploit these exceptional features in shark Ig gene organization to ask the questions: (i) When multiple Ig loci are available, is clonal receptor expression still achieved? (ii) Are the germline-rearranged genes preferentially expressed in differentiating cells because the recombination step is not needed? (iii) What elements control Ig expression when rearrangement is not required? (iv) Do the germline-rearranged genes compensate by diversifying by other mechanisms? To address these questions we will --determine how many kinds of H and L chains are expressed per lymphocyte. In particular, the ontogenetic expression of shark germline-joined and non-joined genes will be compared. --examine somatic hypermutation in shark L chain genes. Results from prior support have shown that one germline-joined L chain type exhibits an unusual pattern of somatic changes. --investigate the mechanism that rearranges the Ig genes in germ cells. Preliminary results suggest that these events are the result of on-going recombinase-like activity. Experiments are proposed to assay for recombinase activity in shark gonads. It is hoped that the research will shed some light on the regulation of Ig gene expression and the rearrangement process, giving insight as to how the adaptive immune systems of higher vertebrates evolved specific, clonal recognition of pathogenic non-self doc4648 none SES 00- - Theodore Porter (UCLA) - Karl Pearson: Lives of a Statistician This award supports a study of the early career of Karl Pearson, founder of the biometric school that worked out the modern methods of statistics. Pearson did not take up statistics until about , when he was 35 years old. Before that he worked at a remarkable variety of topics and causes, including German religious history, history of philosophy, feminism, socialism, and the ethical value and cultural significance of science. He also wrote a romantic novel and a nineteenth-century passion play. In many ways his early beliefs and values seem at odds with his later advocacy of statistics in almost every domain of inquiry. As a young man he wrote movingly of his desire to know nature directly, in contrast to the putative superficiality of quantitative knowledge. Yet his career displays striking continuities as well, above all in his lifelong opposition to individualism. This was expressed early in a strong moral commitment to socialism and an impulse to dissolve the self in nature. In his later writing, he exalted the rigors of scientific method as a vehicle for taming the individual and creating citizens. This work is also about objectivity, considered not mainly as a set of public, intellectual values, but rather from the standpoint of the internal life of the scientist. For Pearson, statistics was a strategy of self-discipline and renunciation. By giving up the impulse to know nature directly, he was able to define science in terms of method rather than subject matter, and in this way to universalize its claims. Pearson s early professional life provides the historian an unusual opportunity to integrate the private life with the research commitments of a mathematical scientist, and to show something of the sacrifice as well as satisfaction in fashioning a life of exact science. This work should be of interest not only to historians, but also to anyone concerned about the role of science in modern culture, or about patterns of recruitment into science according to intellectual and religious values, social class, ethnicity, and gender doc4649 none The majority of organisms experience life in two distinct habitats as a result of undergoing a metamorphosis during ontogeny. The timing of metamorphosis is an ecologically important event because there are costs and benefits associated with the relative duration of the larval verses adult phase. Although much is known about the ecological and evolutionary significance of metamorphic timing, very little is known about the underlying mechanisms that contribute to variation in metamorphic timing. The proposed project would characterize the physiological genetic basis of variation in metamorphic timing using a model urodele system. The salamanders to be used are crosses and back-crosses of Ambystoma that differ in whether they undergo metamorphosis. These crosses, made with prior NSF support, required years to develop. This is a small award to maintain the salamander colony for a year, while the proposal for the research project is revised and resubmitted doc4650 none This project explores the effect of macromolecular structure on the viscoelastic behavior of liquid polymers (LCPs) and LCP networks in low molar mass nematic solvents. Previous research on the properties of dilute nematic solutions of LCPs of varying architectures uncovered a variety of novel viscometric phenomena, such as LCP-induced transitions between flow-aligning and flow-tumbling states. To explain these observations quantitatively, it is necessary to introduce a new viscous dissipation mechanism, not present in isotropic solutions, which derives from a mechanical coupling between director rotation and LCP backbone configuration. First, further studies of side-chain LCPs in nematic solution, including conoscopic optical analysis of the rate of director rotation, as well as direct determinations of chain dimensions and the relaxation molecular theory. Second, we seek to confirm the theoretical expectation that, for LCP networks swollen by a nematic solvent, there is a mechanical coupling between the distortional elasticity of the solvent, and the entropic elasticity of the LCP network. Third, new dynamical phenomena at higher LCP concentrations will be explored: e.g. the onset of chain entanglement elasticity and the coupling of the flow to the order parameters of LCP and solvent may lead to field- or stress-induced structural transitions. %%% These studies will explore new phenomena in the viscoelastic behavior of nematic materials containing polymers, and will generate information pertinent to the design of novel materials for device applications, based on solutions or gels of LCPs in nematic solvents doc4651 none Towsley, Donald F. University of Massachusetts CISE Research Infrastructure: Infrastructure to Support Research on Mixed Wired Wireless Information The goal of this project is research and development of control strategies, and services required by application suites executing over mixed wired wireless networks. The future of networking will introduce a setting where individuals and embedded processes will communicate among themselves and with multimedia information servers over a network made up of diverse network technologies, including ad-hoc and cell-based wireless, and wired segments. This network will seamlessly provide a diverse range of information-based services. This reflects a fundamental shift in the way users will compute and communicate in the future, moving from today s wire-based network where users are immobile and know where to obtain services to an environment in which users are mobile, may be connected through wireless, perhaps even in an ad-hoc manner, and request and receive services in a transparent manner. The project will produce the fundamental advances required in the areas of coding and modulation, access protocols, routing, quality of service, operating systems (OS), database systems, security, and performance evaluation, that will be needed to produce this next generation network. These advances will occur as the result of an integrated, collaborative, and multidisciplinary effort spanning a wide range of disciplines in computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Massachusetts doc4652 none Andrews, Gregory R. University of Arizona CISE Research Infrastructure: Optimization of Distributed and Networked Systems: A Spectrum of Techniques This project is exploring a variety of complementary techniques for optimizing distributed and networked systems ---from client interfaces, through middleware and servers, to the communication infrastructure---and they examine a variety of optimization criteria---including time, space, power, quality of service, and utility. Client-level projects are investigating ways to reduce power consumption and memory requirements, and ways to protect clients and mobile code from each other. The middleware projects are examining ways to support interactive visualization of geographical databases and ways to optimize evaluation of temporal queries. The server projects focus on optimizing the computational and I O behavior of large, typically parallel server systems connected to many disks; applications include database servers and parallel scientific programs. The final set of projects examines ways to optimize network performance; topics include routing and forwarding in high-speed networks, more efficient protocols for wireless networks and mobile computations, and a new approach called network-resident storage doc4653 none Nelson, Randal C. University of Rochester CISE Research Infrastructure: Spatial Intelligence for Computer-Enhanced Interaction with Physical Environments Intelligent computer systems have considerable potential to augment human abilities, not only in accessing abstracted information, but also in dealing with physical environments (both real and virtual). A canonical example of such a system, though certainly not the only one, is a robot with which one can converse. To mediate between people and a physical environment, an intelligent system must perceive spatial structure of various sorts and competently execute physical actions. At the same time, it must communicate with human users to provide information, accept instruction, or assist interactively with complex tasks. The term spatial intelligence can be used to capture the overarching ability to perceive, act in, and communicate about a physical environment. Implementing spatial intelligence depends on integrating a variety of enabling technologies in AI, distributed systems, and human interfaces. Some of the most critical of these technologies, particularly in machine perception and natural language communication are currently crossing a threshold that promises to make useful, end-to-end, spatially intelligent systems viable for the first time. The overall goal of the project is to enable creation of flexible spatial intelligence with which human users can interact naturally to carry out a variety of collaborative tasks. The project will create and equip a laboratory resource specifically designed to advance the state of the art in the various enabling technologies, and facilitate and demonstrate their integration into end-to-end systems doc4654 none Signal transduction in the Archaeon Halobacterium salinarum provides a paradigm for studying cellular responses to multiple environmental stimuli. Central to these responses is a family of 13 signaling molecules, first discovered in this laboratory. The project will focus on aerophilic transducer HtrVIII and aerophobic transducer HemAT- Hs . The long-term goal of this research is to provide a detailed molecular description of the aerotactic signal transduction system in the halophilic archaeon H. salinarum. Unlike bacterial aerotaxis transducers, HtrVIII has 209 N-terminal residues that form six putative transmembrane helices and are homologous to the oxygen-sensing eukaryotic cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COXI). The C-terminal domain of HtrVIII is homologous to the signaling and methylation domain of bacterial chemotaxis transducers. It is logical to expect that oxygen binds to a chromophore associated with the six-transmembrane helices and induces conformational changes in the C-terminal domain HtrVIII. This hypothesis will be tested by making mutations within this region. Random mutagenesis in the transmembrane region and site-specific mutagenesis to replace His residues will be used to generate mutants to screen for altered aerotaxis. Heme-containing proteins such as hemoglobin and myoglobin play an essential role in oxygen transport and storage. Recently, this laboratory the first myoglobin-like, heme-containing protein (termed HemAT- Hs ) in the archaeon H. salinarum. HemAT- Hs exhibits two striking features: a) the amino-termini (residues 1 to 184) display limited homology to myoglobin; and b) residues 222 to 489 are 30% identical to the cytoplasmic signaling domain of Tsr, an MCP from E. coli . HemAT- Hs exhibits spectral properties similar to those of myoglobin and triggers aerophobic responses. The goals of this research are to identify: the position of the proximal histidine that is crucial for heme-binding, the functional length of the heme-binding sensing domain, the diatomic oxygen-bound signaling state of the sensing and its activation of the C-terminal signaling domain. This research will provide insight into aerotaxis mechanisms used by the Archaea and open new directions for future research into the strategies used by many motile microorganisms to seek environments with concentrations of oxygen optimal to meet their metabolic needs doc4655 none This Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) Phase II project has as the primary focus the development and commercialization of a novel microsensor for the in-situ, real-time detection of toxic organic chemicals. The proposed microsensor will be capable of operating under field conditions, with sufficient sensitivity to permit high detection rates, and with sufficient selectivity to prevent high false alarm rates. Using a revolutionary photo-thermal concept, the detector will operate with both high chemical selectivity and a less than parts per billion sensitivity. The technological concept of the proposed detector (CalSpec) won the R&D 100 award. The chemical sensitivity can be substantially enhanced to a less than parts per trillion level by simply operating in an integrating chemical detection mode. The objective of this research is to demonstrate highly specific, sensitive and selective detection of organic chemical compounds and to develop a multichemical detector which can detect toxic organics with concentrations varying from a few parts per thousand to a few parts per trillion. Sensitive monitoring and detection is an area of continuing importance to EPA, DOD, DOE and other federal agencies. The CalSpec detector could be used in a variety of applications, including process monitoring and control, environmental compliance (including emissions monitoring), ambient air monitoring, airport security, personal dosimeters for toxic gases or metal vapor, and smoke and fire constituent detection doc4656 none Singh, Ambuj University of California - Santa Barbara CISE Research Infrastructure: Digital Campus: Scalable Information Services on a Campus-Wide Wireless Network Researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara will implement a wireless-networked, distributed heterogeneous environment on campus and use it to conduct research in databases, networking, distributed systems, and multimedia. The PIs will focus on large-scale systems in which data is the critical resource and system services are based on various data manipulation functions including data collection, movement delivery, aggregation processing, and presentation. A significant part of the research will be conducted using a digital classroom, a remote classroom, and individual and team kiosks. Services such as lecture on demand, virtual offices, and remote learning will be provided using this infrastructure. Specific research issues that will be investigated include content-based access, personalized views, multi-dimensional indexing, smart end-to-end applications, joint source-network coding, scalable storage, reliable network service, information summarization, distributed collaboration, multimedia annotation, and interactivity doc4657 none Nutt, Gary University of Colorado - Boulder CISE Reserach Infrastructure: The Digital CommonSpace This research program addresses symbiotic computing environments in which people use small, communicating computers (SCCs) to collect and use information and tools in their personal information space. This information space, which we call a Digital CommonSpace, is managed by a broad spectrum of computing and network equipment: SCCs, laptops, personal computers and workstations, and servers all interconnected by a spectrum of networks. This research addresses devices, systems, and networks; dynamic interconnection facilities; and general applications. There is an emerging computing model for symbiotic computing environments in which traditional computer science domains have become blurred: The OS must be tailored to meet the needs of application support tools and the applications themselves. The application support software must exploit the OS design and while providing custom support to the applications. Applications must use new software paradigms to take advantage of the application support tools and OS. The individuals for this research program have conducted research in each of these traditional domains, and they are now focusing on the Digital CommonSpace as the mechanism to advance the state-of-the-art symbiotic computing doc4658 none Despite widespread acceptance that organizational learning consists of a process of understanding new external knowledge, assimilating it and applying it, little is known about the details associated with the stages or with transitions between them. This research proposes to crystallize the concepts of learning structures and processes within the transitional economy of Hungary, building on the researchers prior work there and elsewhere to illuminate how learning develops over time. Phase 1 of the project will collect data from 400 private enterprises through structured interviews, building upon data collected in and that assessess organizational learning and absorptive capacity. In Phase 2, researchers will conduct in-depth interviews with 20 firms and develop comparative case studies of five firms. The focus of inquiry is to examine both differences in what is learned, and differences in the ways firms learn and construct their knowledge bases, anticipating that at different times, firms will have differing learning capabilities, intentions and structures that will affect their learnign experiences doc4659 none The long-term goal of this project is to gain an understanding of receptor serine threonine kinase-mediated signaling in plants. Receptor kinases, including receptor tyrosine kinases and receptor serine threonine kinases, are major transmembrane signal transducers of many processes such as cell proliferation, differentiation, migration, apoptosis, and defense. In animal systems, receptor tyrosine kinases appear to be predominant in cell signaling. In plants, almost all receptor-like kinases (RLK) identified have serine threonine specificity, making plants particularly amenable to studying receptor serine threonine kinase-mediated signaling. The first rice disease resistance gene Xa21, which encodes a RLK, was cloned. The putative intracellular domain of XA21 can autophosphorylate multiple serine and threonine residues and interacts with seven proteins (XBs) in a yeast two-hybrid system. One of the seven binding proteins, XB1, physically interacts with and acts as a substrate of the XA21 kinase. XB1 consists of two domains: an ankyrin domain involved in interacting with XA21 and a RING finger motif belonging to the newly defined R-box family that may play a universal role in ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation. These studies provide an excellent system to study mechanisms underlying initiation, propagation, and termination of RLK-mediated signaling. The specific goals of this project are: 1. Investigate the mode of regulation of the XA21-mediated signaling 2. Investigate the role of XBs in the XA21-mediated signaling Achieving these goals will provide insights into RLK-mediated signaling and will advance our understanding of plant disease resistance at the molecular level. Information from these studies would provide new approaches for the engineering of broad-spectrum, durable disease resistance in rice and other crop plants, thereby reducing the dependency of crop production on environmentally unfriendly chemicals doc4660 none Drickamer Northern Arizona University is combining ongoing Colorado Plateau research initiatives and a diverse student population to create an Undergraduate Mentoring in Environmental Biology program. Seventeen faculty mentors are committed to work with seven community collaborators to recruit, train and promote talented students for careers in environmental biology. Strong emphasis is placed on recruitment of Native Americans and Hispanic Americans. Selected students gain support and training through stipends, coursework, advising and mentoring. This program provides students opportunities to participate in cutting-edge research related to human impacts on ecosystems of the Colorado Plateau. Students work closely with faculty mentors to pose hypotheses, design experiments, complete research projects, and disseminate results thorough oral presentations and published works. Cohorts of UMEB seniors share their training with incoming cohorts and also act as mentors themselves to high school students involved in the GLOBE program and other NAU outreach activities. What are the impacts of climate change on the carbon balance of Colorado Plateau ecosystems? How does livestock management influence productivity and diversity of Southwestern grasslands? Do mycorrhizae function differently in traditional Native American maize and high-input maize? Research on these questions and many more are being advanced by UMEB students and their faculty mentors. Another important outcome of this program is that it increases the number of Native American and Hispanic American environmental biologists. These professionals will be particularly well qualified to contribute expertise towards ameliorating many of the complex environmental problems on the Colorado Plateau and throughout the nation doc4661 none The early terrestrial vertebrates are thought to have had a sprawling posture, as do modern salamanders, where the limbs are held laterally to the body. Erect posture, where the limbs are held directly under the body, is thought to have evolved twice, once in the ancestors of mammals and once in the lineage containing dinosaurs (archosaurs). The biomechanical consequences of these different postures have been little studied and the hypothesis of a three-grade postural system (sprawling, semi-erect, and erect postures) has been recently questioned. A quantitative understanding of locomotor posture in living tetrapods with different postures is necessary to evaluate the consequences of this postural shift in the evolution of terrestrial tetrapods. The general goal of this study is to complete functional morphological analyses of hind limb kinematics and whole body kinetics (ground reaction forces and external mechanical work) during locomotion in a series of extant taxa representative of each major tetrapod class. These data will then be used to define, compare, and contrast various tetrapod postures in order to test a series of hypotheses about postural function and evolution in vertebrates. They will also be used to determine whether and how force dynamics of the limbs have changed during the evolutionary shift from sprawling to erect postures doc4662 none Microbial enzymes, specifically those of anaerobic microbes, are receiving significant attention because they provide an invaluable source for diverse natural catalysts. Of particular interest are those enzymes that catalyze the transformation of relatively unreactive organic compounds. Methyl-substituted benzenes, such as toluene, xylenes, and trimethylbenzenes, are relatively stable and represent important drinking water contaminants that are released into the environment from leaking underground gasoline storage tanks and surface spills. Several diverse, anaerobic, toluene--mineralizing microbes have been isolated and studied in more detail to gain insight into the mechanism of anaerobic activation of toluene. These studies showed that the initial reaction of anaerobic toluene metabolism is the addition of the toluene methyl group to fumarate to form benzylsuccinate. Benzylsuccinate synthase (BSS), which catalyzes this reaction, is emerging as a prototype of a new class of enzymes for activation of methylbenzenes. Recent studies strongly suggest that BSS is a radical enzyme, which carries an essential glycyl radical. Using spectroscopic as well as biochemical and genetic studies, this project will investigate the involvement of a radical in the BSS reaction and examine the mode of BSS activation. This project will further our understanding of the pathways used by microbes to degrade highly stable organic compounds that represent important contaminants of drinking water. This information should help in developing effective biological means of removing these contaminants from water doc4663 none Current evolution of semiconductor integrated circuit technology suffers from the topological tyranny of requiring all active devices to be in one plane: the surface of the single crystal wafer. Because transistors can now be so small (e.g. 18nm channels), the lateral dimension of the crystal needed for one transistor is now approaching the dimensions of assemblies of atoms whose properties can be computed ab initio and such nanocrystals might well be successfully synthesized on suitably prepared surfaces. As an initial experiment we will form islands of nanotemplates on an amorphous substrate, such as deposited SiO2, by electron beam patterning of a Langmuir Blodgett film with a suitable lattice period. Then we will explore the translation of these templates in single crystal semiconductor islands. The complementary calculations will be to assess the competing forces (on the deposited atoms) favoring sites in the periodic template and those favoring sites in the underlying amorphous substrate. Calculations will also be performed to conduct molecular design of the LB molecules, as well as to study the chemistry of growing epitaxial semiconductor films on ordered molecular monolayers doc4664 none McCarty Dr. McCarty will continue his analysis of genes in maize and arabidopsis that encode B3 type DNA binding proteins. He has shown that the B3 protein structure defines a new class of DNA binding proteins that are found only in the genomes of plants. In plants, B3 genes include a family of regulatory genes that control key aspects of seed development, hormone signaling, and leaf and floral organ development. He is intrigued by the broader issue of the role kingdom specific transcription factors like the B3 proteins have had in the evolution of eukaryotic organisms. He will dissect the developmental functions of key B3 gene families in two distantly related plant species, maize and arabidopsis. He will leverage a robust set of molecular tools and new insight into how B3 proteins are regulated. He will characterize a regulatory mutation in B3 and use that mutant as a basis for mutant screens in arabidopsis. He will extend our use of the aleurone cell layer of the maize endosperm as a genetic model for analysis B3 function in monocot plant development. Finally, he will begin functional analysis of a second B3 gene family that reveals intriguing qualitative differences in monocots and dicots doc4665 none Umantsev This grant supports theoretical research at an undergraduate institution (RUI). Soldering involves the use of a molten filler metal to wet the surfaces of joints, leading to formation of metallurgical bonds between components. A typical example of this type of reaction has binary tin-base eutectic solder joining copper components. In order to assess accurately the mechanical strength of solder joints, it is necessary to understand the morphology of the intermetallic compound layer. Growth and microstructural evolution of an intermetallic compound layer between the substrate and the solder is the primary concern of this theoretical research. The present research will study the Cu6Sn5 compound growing between the copper-substrate and a molten tin-base alloy. Experimental observations show that growth of the intermetallic compound from the molten solder demonstrates complex dynamical behavior. The intermetallic compound layer grows from the molten solder in the form of scallops, as opposed to a planar interface morphology of compound layers grown from bimetallic solid state couples. Solidification of the solder and the reaction of the solder with the substrate cause surface undulations. The reasons for the scallop-type growth mode are unresolved. The research will consist of two thrusts. The first concerns the driving force for theinstability of intermetallic layers growing from molten solders and will try to resolve the physical reasons for its existence. The second thrust will involve computer simulations of microstructural evolution which complement the analytical work. The effect of different metals on the evolution of interfacial microstructures will be investigated in the liquid and solid states of lead-free as well as lead-tin solders. The objective is to develop a model that takes into account different aspects of the soldering reaction kinetics and reproduces different regimes of growth of the interfacial structure. This model will help predict the structure of a growing intermetallic layer and improve the design methodology for advanced lead-free solders where the amounts of solder and substrate are highly limited. %%% This grant supports theoretical research at an undergraduate institution (RUI). Soldering involves the use of a molten filler metal to wet the surfaces of joints, leading to formation of metallurgical bonds between components. A typical example of this type of reaction has binary tin-base eutectic solder joining copper components. In order to assess accurately the mechanical strength of solder joints, it is necessary to understand the morphology of the intermetallic compound layer. Growth and microstructural evolution of an intermetallic compound layer between the substrate and the solder is the primary concern of this theoretical research doc4666 none Lacks This is a theoretical research grant in which molecular simulations will be used to investigate the effects of stress on disordered systems. The novelty of the research is the use of the energy landscape as a framework for carrying out the simulations and analyzing the results. The use of energy landscapes will lead to new insights regarding these effects and allow long-time phenomena to be addressed. The investigations will focus on several phenomena involving disordered systems under stress. Specifically, these are (1) the transport properties of flowing fluids; (2) fracture in glassy materials; (3) shock-induced reaction dynamics in energetic materials; (4) amorphous-amorphous phase transitions; and, (5) the effects of stress on aging in glasses. Although these phenomena may appear to be unrelated, this research aims to show that they may be different manifestations of similar stress-induced changes in the underlying energy landscapes. The following physical picture is proposed to explain the effects of stress on disordered systems: The strains resulting from stress lead to changes in the potential energy landscape - of particular importance are changes in local energy gradients and curvatures, heights of energy barriers, and relative energies of different local energy minima. These changes in the energy landscape alter the system dynamics, which in turn modifies the system properties. Short-time changes in the dynamics, associated with perturbations of the atomic trajectories, are due to changes in local aspects of the energy landscape (e.g., local gradients and curvatures, and barrier heights). Long-time changes of the dynamics, associated with viscoelastic processes, are due to changes in nonlocal aspects of the energy landscape (e.g., relative energies of diffferent regions of the landscape). The investigation will consist of calculations that map out the effects of strain on the potential energy landscape, along with simulations that probe the system dynamics. These dynamics simulations will include non-equilibrium molecular and Brownian dynamics simulations to address short-time dynamics, and rare-event methods to address long-time dynamics. %%% This is a theoretical research grant in which molecular simulations will be used to investigate the effects of stress on disordered systems. The novelty of the research is the use of the energy landscape as a framework for carrying out the simulations and analyzing the results. The use of energy landscapes will lead to new insights regarding these effects and allow long-time phenomena to be addressed. The investigations will focus on several phenomena involving disordered systems under stress. Specifically, these are (1) the transport properties of flowing fluids; (2) fracture in glassy materials; (3) shock-induced reaction dynamics in energetic materials; (4) amorphous-amorphous phase transitions; and, (5) the effects of stress on aging in glasses. Although these phenomena may appear to be unrelated, this research aims to show that they may be different manifestations of similar stress-induced changes in the underlying energy landscapes doc4667 none To understand the basics of normal growth, it is useful to study how growth hormone (GH), a key regulator of normal growth, alters gene function. Studying regulation of the cancer-related gene c-fos by GH, multiple DNA sequences and gene-directing proteins (transcription factors) have been identified that participate in GH action. Most recently, it has been found that the transcription factor known as CCAAT Enhancer Binding Protein (C EBP) b plays a wide role in GH-regulated gene expression, and mediates function of multiple genes involved in the physiological actions of GH. This awardee will examine the effects of GH on cells from mice deficient in C EBP-b (knockouts). The ability of GH to regulate c-fos will be examined first to determine whether the well-characterized regulation of this gene by GH is deficient in the absence of C EBP-b and can be restored when C EBP-b is restored in the cells. Then other GH-dependent genes will also be examined in the C EBP-b cells to determine whether C EBP-b has a general role in GH-regulated gene expression. The effects of GH on growth will be examined in the C EBP-b deficient mice. The role of a mediator of GH-stimulated growth, insulin like growth factor 1 (IGF 1), will be tested by crossing the C EBP-b deficient mice with mice genetically altered in IGF 1 regulation. These studies may identify whether there are common mechanisms involving C EBP-b by which the actions of GH are coordinated, through changes in GH-regulated programs of gene expression doc4668 none This project will recruit 8 talented undergraduates per year at Iowa State University to careers in environmental biology by providing research training, intensive mentoring, and a clear view of the excitement, rewards, and importance of the field. Recruiting efforts will target groups under-represented in environmental biology, particularly in the midwest. The program will increase participation of under-represented groups in the field, aid in recruitment of under-represented groups to the University, and produce a set of individuals exceptionally well prepared for continued success in graduate and post-graduate careers. The project will collaborate with and take advantage of Iowa State University s strong institutional emphasis on and investment in recruiting under-represented groups to participate in science and technology in general, and will add a particular focus on environmental biology. The project focus is involvement of students in scientific research programs as full participants, from project design to presentation and publication of the results, all carried out in the context of one-on-one mentoring and strong guidance by University faculty. Each student s research experience will be bolstered by a set of program elements, including rotations through laboratories working on related projects, annual workshops involving the whole group in training and participation in environmental science in the field, an academic seminar that will provide tools for increasing success in environmental biology, and annual symposia, invited speakers, and participation in meetings of professional scientific groups to produce breadth, depth, and a sense of membership in the community of environmental science. The research foci will be those of three groups of faculty, all involving vertebrate environmental endocrinology and physiology in the land between the rivers, the midwest ecosystems of Iowa and its surroundings. Each of these research areas focuses on native species, including species of conservation importance, in a region heavily modified by humans, and of great importance to both human ecology and natural biodiversity. Each studies the effects of environmental stresses using animal physiology and development as measurement variables, and includes study of endocrine pathways by which environmental effects may be mediated. Each project is diverse enough to provide the necessary scope to ensure student independence, and to give students ownership of their research project. Their common elements will enable students associated with any project to understand and contribute to others, and mean that a common plan for training and enrichment can be equally valuable to all doc4669 none REH The Neurons and Photoreceptors in eyes are organized in regular arrays. The regular arrays of neurons in ten retina of the eye are like the pixels of a computer screen or video camera; they allow information to be arranged spatially in the nervous system, which is critical for the operation of the visual system. It is not known how these arrays arise during development. Imagining how difficult it would be for a video camera to assemble itself gives some idea of the fundamental mystery of this process. The purpose of the proposed experiments is to determine the cellular and molecular mechanisms that pattern the first neurons in vertebrate retina. These first neurons develop as a patterned array that spreads from the central to peripheral retina as a wave front of differentiation. It is proposed to further study the process of pattern formation in the retina by addressing the following questions: 1. Is the recently identified proneural Cath5 gene involved in the control of the spacing of the retinal ganglion cells at the front of differentiation? 2. Does the growth factor FGF regulate expression of the proneural gene Cath5? 3. Does FGF-15 control the onset of ganglion cell differentiation? 4. Does Cath5 co-ordinate ganglion cell differentiation? These studies will provide fundamental about the mechanisms by which patterned arrays of neurons are established in the vertebrate central nervous system. It has been said that the human nervous system is the most complicated system in the Universe. The current understanding of this complex machine is still fragmentary; however, it has recently been recognized that those who study the nervous system are studying a moving target -the nervous system is a machine that has constructed itself, and is constantly changing. It would be as if a computer was constantly rewiring part of its circuitry every day to adapt to the changing world. The proposed research will help to understand how such a complex system arises during the development of every person, and how this complexity is maintained and refined throughout a lifetime doc4670 none Approximately 90% of the proteins in chloroplasts are encoded in the nucleus, translated on cytoplasmic ribosomes and imported post-translationally across the envelope membranes. A large subset of these proteins are further targeted to one of the numerous internal plastidic compartments. Most of our knowledge of this process comes through in vitro experiments performed with isolated chloroplasts and thylakoids. More recently, a relatively small number of mutants have been described which are defective in plastid protein import, allowing genetic analysis of the import process. However, it has been difficult to combine both genetic and biochemical analyses in the same plant, as those that are convenient for genetic use are poor biochemical subjects, and vice versa. The moss Physcomitrella patens is unique among land plants in its ability to incorporate introduced DNA by homologous recombination. This opens the possibility to examine plant functions by site-directed mutation and allele replacement. The utility of this model plant system would be significantly enhanced if it were to prove to be a good organism for biochemical as well as genetic analysis. The objectives of this project are to collect the tools required to perform in vitro analysis of chloroplast protein targeting in the moss, and then to optimize the procedures for isolation of protein import-competent chloroplasts and thylakoids. It is hoped that this work will lead to the development of the first plant model in which biochemical and genetic tools can be combined without difficulty in the same organism doc4671 none Keleher, Peter University of Maryland CISE Research Infrastructure: System Support for Enterprise Application Servers This proposal is for the acquisition and maintenance of a single large-scale shared-memory multiprocessor (SMP), and an active disk array. The equipment will be used to support a broad program of research into system support for enterprise applications. These applications include database servers, file servers, multimedia servers, and enterprise application servers. Though the group s projects include a broad range of specific activities, the overriding vision for the group will be a unified investigation of how to structure and support large-scale server applications. The researchers will take a vertical approach to this problem, investigating issues at every level from the application down to the network protocol level doc4672 none Manufactured homes are built within and assembly plant under a controlled environment that provides safe and productive construction. Manufactured Housing has played a critical role in meeting the rapidly growing housing demand over the last 20-25 years. In spite of the growing market and need for efficient production, manufactured housing industry is faced with the lack of streamlined assembly process and the flow and utilization of materials in the production process. The proposed research consists of five objectives, which are: (i) to develop a production process model for multisection manufactured housing production; (ii) to develop a process model for the material flow and its utilization on the assembly line; (iii) to integrate the two process models produced in objectives 1 and 2; (iv) to implement the integrated process model in a computer simulation system; and (v) to develop a dissemination and continuing education strategy for the industry and offer a pilot workshop in conjunction with industry partners. This research will have direct influence on two of the four path goals related to affordability and durability quality, and indirect influence on the other two goals related to energy efficiency and safety doc4673 none It is objective of this research to investigate the behavior of post-tensioned clay masonry walls under in-plane lateral loads. In so doing, it is envisioned that such walls could then be utilized to construct efficient, high performance housing that would achieve goals of improved performance in natural hazards, improved durability, reduced environmental impact, and increased economy. The research described is comprised of three primary tasks: (1) Experimental studies, (2) Analytical Studies, and (3) Web-based technology dissemination. Experimental studies will consist of large-scale reversed cyclic as well as real-time dynamic testing of post-tensioned clay masonry walls. Variables to be considered in the experimental studies consist of pre-stress level and the effect of grouting, bonding, and confining post-tensioned walls. Analytical studies will be geared towards development of design and analysis algorithms for the full non-linear behavior of post-tensioned clay masonry incorporating the effects of bonding, grouting, and confinement. Analytical studies will be performed utilizing dynamic inelastic time history analysis and finite element analysis in addition to simplified displacement-based techniques. Web-based technology dissemination will provide the engineering community access to the research results in the form of test databases and other algorithms developed as part of the research doc4674 none The satisfactory performance of wood-framed housing in a seismic or wind event requires a sufficiently strong, ductile, and energy-absorbing lateral force-resisting system. This project will focus on the development of optimized synthetic fiber-reinforced OSB panels to improve the disaster resistance of conventional wood-frame construction. The project research will employ response simulation, small-scale connection and durability testing, and full-scale shear wall testing. Various fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) systems will be investigated for reinforcing the OSB panels. Shear tests of individual nailed connections between FRP-reinforced and plain OSB panels and lumber framing will be conducted to determine monotonic and cyclic fastener load-slip relationships. In addition, full-scale monotonic and static structural tests of shear walls made with both FRP-reinforced and unreinforced OSB panels will be conducted to quantify the strength and ductility benefits achieved through selective panel reinforcement. We expect that the new fiber-reinforced OSB panels will be stonger, more ductile, and less sensitive to construction errors than conventional OSB or plywood doc4675 none The aftermath of natural disasters during the past decade, rapid evolution of design and construction methods, heightened expectations by the public and scrutiny of perceived and actual deficiencies in codes and code enforcement have made it clear that an improved basis for designing new residential structures and assessing the condition of the existing housing building stock is required. Among the high-priority areas identified at a recent workshop on wood engineering research needs were: behavior and performance of wood structural systems; criteria for performance assessment; and methods for condition assessment of damaged systems following natural disasters. The development of system reliability analysis tools is essential to meet these needs. A fragility model of building system is an essential ingredient of a system reliability analysis. The goal of the proposed research is to provide a general methodology for assessing probable response of light-frame residential construction exposed to various levels of natural and man-made hazards. This methodology will support enhancements in durability and reduction in maintenance costs, facilitate reductions in risk of death, injury and property damage from extreme natural hazards, and provide a technical basis for the new paradigm of performance-based engineering of residential construction doc4676 none This award provides partial support for senior and junior researchers to participate in a conference on the role of values in science. The conference goal is to promote systematic new research on the different kinds of values that are involved in science, on how and where values are involved, and on the consequences that involvement has for science and its interpretation. More specifically, the conference seeks to bring together historical and social science work with research in the traditional analytic philosophy of science and to promote discussion of the place of values in the second tradition. Over thirty people have agreed to participate as speakers and session moderators; they include experts in history and philosophy of science, social studies of science, economics, cognitive neuroscience, psychology and biology. Submitted papers will be solicited, and interaction promoted through a webpage and email discussion list. The webpage will continue after the conference, and organizers will seek to publish a volume of papers doc4677 none The proposed work is a multi-disciplinary research project on eave icing of the nation s low-rise residential building stock. Specifically the goal of the project is to develop a fundamental understanding of eave icing while the objective is development of an analytical model which predicts the size of a ice dam at the eave of one and two family dwelling units. The formation of eave ice dams is, unfortunately, a common occurrence in colder climates. When ice dams become large, wetting of interior surfaces (walls and ceilings) is the typical result. Eave icing is arguably the most common and costly ice and snow related loss for one and two family dwelling units in the United States. By its nature, the model to be developed will address both the generation of meltwater upslope of the eave, as well as solidification of the meltwater at the eave area. This development of an analytical model will allow engineers and builders to deal knowledgeably and quantitatively with the problem. That is, for a given roof (i.e., fixed ridge to eave distance, roof slop, roof R-value, etc) the analytical model would allow one to calculate the combination of below freezing days and roof snow deph which result in ice dam formation. Conversely, for a given winter environment and roof, the model allows one to calculate the minimum eave overhang distance or width of continuous metal flashing required to avoid interior wetting. The model will be verified and benchmarked through simple in-situ experimental observations on full scale buildings and to the extent possible by comparison to and analysis of insurance company loss information from prior winters. The project s objectives are compatible with those of the Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing (PATH). That is, the results, when properly used, will lead to a reduced risk of property destruction, improved durability, reduced maintenance costs and in the long run reduced monthly cost of housing. The multi-disciplinary project team is lead by a civil engineer, Professor Michael O Rourke of Rensselaer, who is an expert in the area of snow effects on building structures. The Co-PI is Professor Richard Smith, of Rensselaer s Mechancial Engineering Department, who is an expert on heat transfer and solidification. In order to ensure appropriate transfer and use of this new technology, a project advisory group consisting of representation from the National Association of Home Builders and State Farm s Building Technology Research Lab has been established doc4678 none This project supports a component of ACE-Asia (Aerosol Characterization Experiment). The project contributes a ground-based aerosol measurement network along the Pacific Rim, including sites in the Philippines, Taiwan, Korea, China, Japan, and Hawaii in collaboration with Asian scientists. Several of these sites have been already established, and others will be added for ACE-Asia. Aerosols will be collected on portable, continuously sampling, sizing impactors and subsets of the collected samples will be later analyzed based on meteorological and other data. The analysis techniques include total mass, trace metals by synchrotron XRF, measurements of soot and organic matter, and ion chromatography. These data will provide information on the size and chemical composition aerosols in the boundary layer and lower troposphere in East Asia during a time of massive transport into the North Pacific. Information on sources and transport pathways will be obtained. Mie calculations will be performed to evaluate the radiative impact of these aerosols doc4679 none 00- - Natalia Lozovsky (University of Colorado at Boulder) - Geographical Studies in Early Modern Europe: The Manuscript Transmission of Latin Geographical Texts and Commentaries, ca. 800 - Objectives: The traditional story represents the early Middle Ages in the Latin West as a period of scientific decline. Contrary to traditional assumptions, geography occupied an important place in medieval thought and education and developed following its own rules and norms, like all early medieval sciences. Parallel evidence of such disciplines as astronomy and calendric computation reinforces the case for reconsidering our picture of science in the period immediately preceding what the traditional story has termed the Renaissance of the twelfth century. This project will investigate the vigorous geographical tradition of the early Middle Ages, which survived in numerous manuscripts transmitting authoritative classical geographical texts written by Martianus Capella, Macrobius, Pomponius Mela, Pliny, and Solinus. Often accompanied by commentaries and diagrams that clarified their meaning and expanded their ideas, these texts provide unique evidence about both intellectual and social parameters of medieval geography. The project will analyze the content, methods, and functions of early medieval geographical knowledge and demonstrate how a reconstruction of this historical variety of scientific knowledge enriches and changes our picture of scientific development. Using the results of the primary research as a foundation, the project will also aim at creating a conceptual framework appropriate for the study of medieval science and potentially applicable to pre-modern sciences in general. Methods: The project is based on the study of medieval Latin manuscripts preserved in the libraries of Europe. The principal objects of research will be scholarly explanations of the classical texts as well as the variations in the text transmitted in different manuscripts. All these reveal how the understanding of classical tradition developed at different times and places. Therefore, at the first stage the method will be close reading of Latin manuscripts, which aims at: 1) identification of variations in the text from one manuscript copy to another; 2) identification and transcription of interlinear and marginal explanations and diagrams. At the second stage, the project will test the methods and conceptual apparatus used by scholars in other historical disciplines for their applicability to medieval material. Significance: The analysis of this important and previously neglected category of sources will provide our study of early sciences with a primary research foundation and a conceptual framework, both largely missing at present. Thus not only will the project open a new perspective on the development and meaning of geography in the early Middle Ages, but, in a broader sense, it will be a new contribution to the history of pre-modern sciences, since medieval geography may serve as a useful model in other areas of study doc4680 none This project provides an opportunity for an outstanding postdoctoral researcher to become involved in collaborative research in quantum computing with university and industry scientists. The project is investigating the use of quantum information theory in establishing time and communication bounds on quantum communication and computing. The project is also investigating space complexity, comparing quantum computers with restricted workspace to classical machines. Finally, taking advantage of the observation that all quantum algorithms that currently provide a time advantage may be viewed as black-box algorithms, the project is investigating use the polynomial method in proving lower bounds in the quantum black-box setting doc4681 none The University of Wyoming and the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) have previously collaborated to research the durability of manufactured homes. This research involved subjecting a single-wide manufactured home to simulated design lateral loads, analyzing structural response and modeling. This project also builds on prior work sponsored by NSF, HUD, and the Manufactured Housing Institute (MHI). The project seeks to better understand structural response and to predict behavior under loads from hazardous winds, the key to providing homeowners higher quality, safety, and cost-effectiveness. The previously tested (design lateral load), single-wide manufactured home is installed in a remote, high-wind area and a meteorological tower provided. Programmed task for this project include: 1) Completion and testing of the data acquisition system, 2) Data collection and analysis during high wind events, #) Wind force studies and wind tunnel testing, 4) Structural analysis and modeling, and 5) Reporting and technology transfer. The results of this research can lead to significant savings in annual losses of life and property by providing validated information for the development of cost-effective building technologies that optimize wind resistance and maintain home affordability doc4682 none The Na + -H + exchanger isoform 1 (NHE1) is present in virtually all mammalian cells where it is involved in the regulation of intracellular pH (pHi) and cellular volume. NHE1 activity can be modulated by a wide variety of intracellular signaling pathways. The receptors that activate the pathways and the specific protein kinases involved in the regulation vary dramatically in different cell types. To date there has been no complete dissection of the a 1 adrenergic signaling pathway in Chinese hamster lung (CCL39) fibroblasts. The overall goal of this project is to clarify the signaling pathway for the regulation of NHE1 in CCL39 cells. Also to clarify which intermediates are involved in the signaling pathway. The following aims are proposed: Specific Aim 1: To study the activation of MAPK and NHE1 by PE. Preliminary studies indicate that phenylephrine (PE) can activate both MAPK and NHE1. The time course and the dose response MAPK activation will be investigated.The relationship between the activation of MAPK and the stimulation of NHE1 will also be investigated. Specific activators and inhibitors of the MAPK pathway will be used to accomplish this task. This aim will clarify the role of MAPK as a potential key intermediate in the stimulation of NHE by PE. Specific Aim 2: To study the involvement of PKC and Ras in the PE induced activation of MAPK and NHE1. Preliminary studies indicate that PE stimulates both MAPK and PLD. Published data indicates that a 1-adrenergic receptors activate Gq. This activation can lead to a q stimulating PLCbeta and leads to the activation of PKC. Additionally, the Gq . subunit can lead to the activation of Ras. To discern the regulatory pathways by which PE modulates NHE1 activity, the time course and dose response for activation of PKC and Ras will be determined. It will then be determined if MAPK and NHE1 activation dependent on one or both of the intermediates. Transfected cells expressing the dominant negative Ras and or dominant negative Raf-1 will be used to determine if activation of MAPK and NHE1 by PE functions occurs through a Ras-dependent or independent mechanism. Expression of these proteins will disrupt the postulated signaling pathways at different levels clarifying the points of convergence of the pathways. This aim will determine the signaling molecules involved in the PE activation of MAPK and NHE1 and clarify the relationship between the signaling pathways activated by PE. Specific Aim 3: To expand the involvement of undergraduates in meaningful research. The primary purpose for faculty members of the biology and chemistry departments at Moorhead State University (MSU) is to have ongoing research projects that involve undergraduates in a meaningful research experience. Students have been trained to perform all the procedures required to carryout the investigations of the signaling pathways and to measure NHE activity as outlined in the proposal. This research project will allow 8 - 10 students to be involved in research during the academic year and three students to work full-time during the summer months of the three years covered by the grant doc4683 none Oriented Strandboard (OSB) is a structural wood composite widely used in house construction as sheathing, flooring, and I-joist materials. As a biological material, OSB is subject to attack from Formosan termites, which nationwide cause over $2 billion a year in damages to homes. Borate-based systems have been shown to provide adequate termite protection for OSB. However, the addition of the chemical often leads to a significant reduction in the strength and durability of OSB. The goal of this project is to pursue an overall understanding of the influence of borate addition on OSB s strength and long-term durability. The specific objectives are: (1) To develop pressing technology for manufacturing OSB with borate-modified flakes; (2) To determine the effects of borate addition on panel stiffness, strength, and stability; (3) To determine contents and micro-distribution of zinc-borate within wood flakes; and (4) To measure and model the creep behavior of the OSB. In this work, borate-modified OSB panels will be manufactured. Panel strength, chemical content and distribution, swelling and creep properties will be determined. Mathematical models will be developed to describe observed creep and durability behavior. The work will lead to the development of processing technology and fundamental durability information information for the manufacture of durable OSB with sound biological performance doc4684 none Ruth This is a planning visit proposal for Professor Matthias Ruth, of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Boston University, to meet with his Mauritian counterparts for the purpose of finalizing plans for a collaborative, multidisciplinary workshop on integrated analysis and management of natural resources in Mauritius. Professor Ruth will meet with Dr. Arjoon Suddhoo, Executive Director of the Mauritius Research Council, and Professor Indur Fagoonee, Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of Mauritius. Mauritius, which is located in the southwestern part of the Indian Ocean, has a stable government and a growing economy, brought about in part by the expansion of tourism. As tourism has expanded, the demand for new facilities has increased, causing many Mauritian natural resources to be overburdened and its environment to become degraded. But Mauritius is still home to several rare animal species, such as the echo parakeet, and the last remnants of its original coastal forest are in a small nature reserve. In the past, Mauritian investigators interacted with the European and Indian scientific communities, and very few American researchers had an opportunity to become familiar with Mauritius or its resources. The proposed workshop can provide an opportunity for the participants to exchange information about their current projects, identify areas of mutual interest, and stimulate the development of collaborative activities. This planning visit will enable the co-organizers to finalize the workshop agenda to maximize these interactions doc4685 none Howard Spivey Compelling experimental evidence has accumulated indicating that the previously considered soluble enzymes are often associated with other enzymes in the same cell compartment or associated with membrane or cytoskeletal components, i.e., they are not independently positioned in a soluble phase of a cellular compartment (e.g., cytoplasm, mitochondria, nucleus or other organelle). In some cases, these interactions have been shown to be critical to cell survival even in the absence of the enzyme activity. Also in many cases, enzyme concentrations in vivo exceed those of their substrates, and thus the majority of a substrate would be expected to be enzyme bound. Furthermore, evidence in vitro and in vivo indicates that some metabolites can be directly transferred from the enzyme producing it to the enzyme utilizing it - a process called substrate channeling. The potential physiological advantages of these enzyme associations and substrate channeling are numerous and significant. For example, they allow local enzyme reactions to proceed independently of the substrate concentrations elsewhere in the same cellular compartment. Thus, a better understanding of these process and implications (e.g., micro-compartmentation of metabolism) is essential for better understanding of cell function. These studies focus on the channeling of NADH between dehydrogenase enzymes. This research project will pursue the following objectives: 1) Obtain direct spectroscopic evidence of the NADH channeling complex and elucidate the kinetic mechanisms; 2) Correlate the NADH channeling properties with molecular structures of the enzymes using molecular modeling and site directed mutagenesis methods; and 3) Test the physiological significance of NADH channeling by expression of enzyme mutants in yeast that lack surface components essential for association and channeling, but have significant enzymatic activity doc4686 none Freeman This award provides partial funding (66%) support for the acquisition and installation of a mass spectrometer capable of measuring hydrogen isotope ratios in very small hydrogen samples taken from natural materials. The mass spectrometer will be installed and operated in the Department of Geosciences at the Pennsylvania State University, and the University is committed to providing the remaining funds needed to acquire and install the instrument. The capabilities of the new instrument will be used in research and educational activities aimed at a better understanding of hydrogen pathways through organic and inorganic processes during earth history doc4687 none Although the construction industry has developed both product and process models, it has yet to refines its models to represent the movements of the human-activated end-tools. The objective of this research is to develop a model of the human skills required in construction operations. To accomplish this research objective, a methodology will be developed for collecting and representing construction activities. The representation will draw on movement representation schemes devised in dance, biomechanics, and ergonomics. In addition to serving as a cornerstone for a comprehensive construction product-process model, the model of the human skills will promote: 1. An enhanced understanding of the ergonomics of home building construction operations and injury prevention; 2. A classification taxonomy for home building construction operations, the identification of special skills and the identification of activities that require special body dimensions and dexterity; 3. The identification of groups of skills that will form the basis of cross training strategies among trades; 4. The identification of activities that are best suited for automation or prefabrication, and 5. The early identification of locked-in site situations where work access is hindered by other construction elements, equipment, or regulatory requirements doc4688 none The electricity industry in the United States and throughout the world is undergoing radical restructuring. These changes require new analysis techniques, both for market participants and for regulators. The goal of this proposal is to investigate appropriate analysis concepts. The underlying transmission system plays a significant role in all market structures. Under certain conditions, transmission congestion can subdivide even relatively large power pools, constraining the generation dispatch. Tools are needed to help market participants devise optimal bidding strategies. Conversely, regulators must be vigilant against anti-competitive acts. Investigation of a market solution algorithm that bridges the gap between and economic analysis is proposed. Ultimately, such an algorithm will facilitate analysis of the impact of underlying engineering constraints on the market. A complete model of the transmission system will be embedded in the market simulation. The starting point is an Optimal Power Flow that maximizes the social welfare of the electricity market. The research will determine the best algorithm for individual welfare optimization. One promising approach is to formulate the problem as a nested optimization: an individual must maximize welfare subject to the fact that their price and dispatch are determined by the pool operator, who is, in turn, attempting to maximize overall social welfare. This algorithm motivates an iterative approach to obtaining Nash equilibria. The algorithm for finding Nash equilibria describes a dynamic process that involves switched algebraic constraints. The insights that are provided by this dynamical systems view of market behavior should facilitate a systematic definition of market power doc4689 none Sucrose is literally the life-blood of plants and moves from photosynthetic leaves to growing cells and tissues. The most rapidly growing organs are those that have a high capacity for sucrose metabolism. Sucrose and or its metabolic products can also affect expression of many genes. Control of sucrose metabolism can thus have profound physiological and developmental consequences for the plant at multiple levels. There are only two known paths for sucrose cleavage, catalyzed by either invertases or the reversible sucrose synthase reaction, respectively. Dissection of the processes involved has been difficult due to multiple genes, diverse functions of their protein products, and sensitivity of the genes to environmental, metabolic, and developmental signals. New materials from our lab and elsewhere now put us in an excellent position to dissect roles and regulation of specific genes for sucrose metabolism in maize. The combination of mutants, physiology, and relevance of maize as a grain model make this an ideal species for this research project. The proposed studies involve analysis of i) knock-out mutants deficient in only one of the sucrose synthase genes (sus1), ii) a newly identified gene for a third sucrose synthase (Sus3), and iii) transgenic maize plants expressing an invertase gene (Ivr2-GUS) designed to generate a blue color when the gene is induced. We will use these tools in combination with specific developmental, genetic, and physiological perturbations made possible using distinctive features of the maize plant. The proposed work will provide a previously unavailable means of addressing the roles and regulation of genes for sucrose metabolism doc4690 none Wrubel This program provides under-represented minority students with an enriched educational and research experience, focused on the theme of human impacts on natural ecosystems. The goal is to provide students with research skills and with confidence based on their accomplishments, thus encouraging them to pursue careers in environmental biology. Faculty will participate in workshops to facilitate effective mentoring relationships with students from minority groups. After an initial student orientation including laboratory rotations, students will work closely with their chosen mentor. Students will engage in rigorous yet supportive research settings, leading to the completion and presentation of an independent project. To promote a sense of community, students and faculty will participate in group activities discussing the practice and implications of science, and exploring the theme. The consequences of human stresses on the environment remain a pressing issue requiring intense investigation. These consequences range from transformation of the land (agriculture, forestry and urbanization) and sea (trawling, dredging and waste dumping) to alterations of biogeochemical cycles and reduction of biodiversity. The students will directly advance active research programs addressing these impacts. The students joining the program will be drawn from urban communities with environments highly influenced by human activities. They will be keenly engaged in science involving their environment and the benefits of the research will be apparent. This urban cohort of students will have a greater likelihood of continuing their studies beyond the program and brings a unique and important perspective to the field of environmental biology doc4691 none Nearly civilian deaths and 17,000 injuries occur in residential structure fires each year in the U.S. Detachment of the gypsum board fire protection membrane is believed to predetermine the failure of light-frame wood roof ceiling assemblies in standardized fires. Identifying the factors associated with maintaining the attachment of the gypsum wallboard to the supporting wood structural assembly will be the focus of this research and holds the potential for improving the fire safety of wood assemblies. The effect of deflections and stresses in the supporting members on the longevity of the gypsum board will be quantified. The scope will be limited to 16-mm (5 8-in) Type X gypsum and the study of a base connection system of 25-mm (1-inch) Type S wallboard screws. Wood members will consist of solid sawn lumber and laminated-veneer-lumber (lvl). Several measures of mechanical performance of 16-mm Type X gypsum board will be established as a function to temperature and duration of fire exposure. These basic properties will be used to propose a model for the fire endurance of gypsum board ceiling membranes attached to engineered wood components. Intermediate-scale fire tests will be conducted to evaluate and verify the fire endurance model of the gypsum board doc4692 none SES 00- - Kim J. Kleinman (Missouri Botantical Garden) Plants, Edgar Anderson, and Evolutionary Theory This post-doctoral fellowship supports an ongoing biographical project on Missouri Botanical Garden geneticist Edgar Anderson ( - ). Anderson was an important contributor to the mid-20th-century discussions among such evolutionary scientists as Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ernst Mayr, George Gaylord Simpson, and G. Ledyard Stebbins. He and Mayr shared the prestigious Jesup Lectures in . Yet, with the exception of Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis s work on Stebbins, the contribution of botanists to the Evolutionary Synthesis has not been sufficiently examined. This award provides the opportunity to develop both existing and projected work into the outline of a full-length biography of Anderson, and to develop other publications about Anderson and his science. A major obstacle to Anderson scholarship is that he destroyed his correspondence. It has been only partially reconstructed at the Missouri Botanical Garden archives. Hugh lltis, a major theorist on the origin of maize and one of Anderson s students, not only has contributed to that effort but has recently commented that his correspondence is one of the four or five focal points around which you can reconstruct the Evolutionary Synthesis. So, this award supports for travel to the American Philosophical Society, Pioneer Hybrid Corn Company, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Missouri, Cornell, Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and Michigan State University among other archives to make possible the assembly of much useful material on Anderson in the archived collections of collaborators, colleagues, students, and teachers. The aim would be to construct as full an Anderson archive as possible at the Missouri Botanical Garden. Finally, the retraining component provides for a sustained grounding in an important element of Anderson s science, biosystematics. Under the guidance of Missouri Botanical Garden botanist Peter Hoch and his colleagues, the PI is combining field and laboratory work with a study of current literature to see how Anderson s ideas have been elaborated doc4693 none Harold Kung This award supports the participation of 12 US scientists and engineers in a US-South Africa Workshop on Catalysis Research, scheduled for June in Pretoria, South Africa. The organizers are Harold H. Kung, Department of Chemical Engineering, Northwestern University, Neil Coville, Department of Chemistry, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and Cyril O Connor, Dean of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of Cape Town, South Africa. The workshop will focus on technical discussions in order to identify potential collaborative research projects. Participants from both countries will be drawn from academia, government, and industry. The three primary themes of the workshop are selective oxidation catalysis, zeolite synthesis and analysis, and supported metal catalysis. Catalysis plays a central role in chemical manufacturing and energy conversion industries throughout the world. Catalysis has also found increasing applications to improve environmental quality. Although there are numerous ongoing collaborations between researchers in the United States and Europe and Japan, relatively few exist with Africa. The area of catalysis is particularly appropriate for US-South African collaboration. In some selected heterogeneous catalytic technologies, South Africa is a world leader. South Africa has the only industrial-scale Fischer-Tropsch process. Further collaborative activity among US and South African researchers is expected to result from this workshop. This award is supported jointly by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Chemical and Transport Systems doc4694 none PIs propose to address the question of how external demands and internal processes combine to produce sustained improvement in productivity in three school districts in Minnesota, North Carolina and Iowa. Five high schools will form the core of an intensive longitudinal case study. Two are in a state with a long history of strong state mandates for accountability for student achievement; two are in a state identified as having weak state mandates; the fifth in a state with no state-mandated accountability. All districts, however, are strongly supportive of improved school practices to increase student achievement. Once schools are identified and school baseline data is gathered, researchers will document each school s context and history of standards adoption and conduct longitudinal process improvement efforts via interviews, focus groups and previously developed survey instruments. Longitudinal analysis will be used to draw preliminary conclusions regarding the research questions and to provide a rich case history to support interpretation; quantitative data will be used to relate school culture and practices to performance on state and district achievement tests. In light of nationwide interest in school accountability, it seems especially important to gather well-grounded empirical data on school practices and the factors affecting them, and to test their impact on student performance, the more so as little published research examines the way in which school culture and practices might affect the impact of state-imposed standards on student achievement. The PIs responded to questions regarding their instruments and construct validity, and also provided additional discussion of their qualitative methodology doc4695 none This project will develop educational information technology and use it to launch a curriculum in information technology and E-business. The educational information technology will focus on providing freely available, not-domain-specific, tools for instructors, students, and professionals to create and access integrated curriculums online, with mechanisms to enhance students critical-thinking skills. A sequence of courses and set of educational material, suitable for both major and non-major students, will be developed to lay the foundation for a substantial curriculum in information technology. The courses developed will span a variety of areas in information Technology and E-business, and is expected to ultimately lead to a new graduate program in information engineering. Researchers from several information engineering and E-business domains will generate the educational material doc4696 none This project examines and analyzes regional differences in the recent rapid growth and evolution of service-producing businesses in the U.S. It will focus on the role of business entry in accounting for these regional differences. Most previous broad-based regional analysis has relied on County Business Patterns (CBP) data, which are limited in several ways. First, they provide only aggregate levels each year, and cannot track changes in a set of establishments over time; secondly, they lack information on firms (or enterprises); and thirdly, much of the data is suppressed for small or sparse areas for detailed industries. The Longitudinal Establishment and Enterprise Microdata (LEEM) file housed at the Center for Economic Studies (CES) covers all establishments with employees for the years - , by linking the annual microdata underlying CBP. The service sector will be partitioned into five or six subsectors according to the markets they serve. Using the Labor Market Area (LMA) definitions to partition the U.S. into local economic units that are large enough to have business entry annually in most of the subsectors, we will prepare regional LMA level data for the services subsectors (including annual data on employment, firm entry and exit) from the LEEM. These data will be aggregated to broad regional and national levels to examine how the distribution of service employment among subsectors and among firm types has changed. Annual gross firm entry rates are calculated to measure levels of entrepreneurial activity in each subsector and region. Seasoned entry rates will be calculated for the more limited set of new firms that have continued in business for at least three years. A model accounting for local differences in both gross and seasoned firm entry rates will be formulated and tested. Other regional data for explanatory variables and ratios will be constructed from publicly available county level databases. We expect to explain regional diversity in startup rates as a function of (1) the size and quality of the pool of potential entrepreneurs, while controlling for (2) the capital requirements, growth, and turbulence rates of the industry, and (3) the population growth rate, and the overall business growth rate of the region. This project s expansion of the investigators previous research on business demographics using the LEEM would also serve to introduce this major new database for analysis of regional aspects of labor markets, economic development, business demography, and agglomeration doc4697 none PIs propose to assess Six Sigma practices as indicators of knowledge creation, diffusion and use in complex organizations. In Phase 1, they will develop exploratory cases in two firms, capturing a current and retrospective project in each. Six different Six Sigma methodologies will be the focus of data collected from structured and unstructured interviews, site tours, archival sources and questionnaires. In phase 2, theories developed will be empirically examined in a larger sample of 200 projects from five other companies. This proposal balances explicit learning and knowledge with tacit learning and knowledge, and, via the Six Sigma process, directs attention to specific knowledge management practices. Panelists suggested further attention to the context of Six Sigma, going beyond this method itself to the larger questions of knowledge management, particularly in light of researchers intent to study Motorola, which has reportedly refocused its attention. In addition, panelists also suggested a closer look at social network data, allowing for a concurrent test of the alternative social factors explanations and substantially bolstering the strength of the proposed research doc4698 none In infants of primate and other mammalian species, the presence of the mother, but not another familiar animal, can prevent or reduce hormonal stress responses to threatening conditions. This selective capacity of the mother to reduce stress responses seems to disappear after puberty, but other companions may attain this ability at about the same time. These normal developmental changes may influence social grouping patterns of the species and have implications for understanding how humans cope with stressful conditions. Many of the relations between stress hormones, social partners, and behavior, observed in primates, have also been observed in guinea pigs. Therefore, guinea pigs are the subjects of these initial experiments. Proposed studies will: (1) document in detail changes that occur from infancy to adulthood in the ability of various classes of social companions to reduce hormonal stress responses; (2) examine how these changes correlate with developmental changes in behavior and social grouping tendencies; and, (3) determine if these developmental changes are due to rising levels of gonadal hormones at the time of puberty. Hormones have a huge impact on behavior and its development from infancy to adulthood. Puberty is the time of the most dramatic hormonal changes of all postnatal life. Yet with the exception of sexual behavior itself, surprisingly little is known about the effects of hormones on behavior during this important period. Proposed studies will provide basic information on how hormones of puberty influence the ability of social partners to moderate stress hormones and organize social behavior. Results will be of value to researchers examining how social support reduces various stress-related physiological responses at different portions of the life span. The proposed work will also further science education by involving undergraduate students planning careers in neuroscience doc4699 none Engineering - Other (59) The American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) is holding the NSF Project Showcase at the ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri. The NSF Project Showcase has been part of the ASEE conference since . The current project consists of exhibit booths showcasing projects sponsored by the Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement and other programs. The Showcase allows conference attendees to see a cross section of effective funded projects that can be adapted into the classroom doc4700 none Smith The objective of this project is to advance understanding of how certain brain cells communicate in order to process sensation from the viscera (i.e., the stomach, lungs, heart, etc.). Sensory nerves in the viscera communicate directly with a set of brain cells, which are called neurons, in a small region of the lower part of the brainstem. These brainstem neurons communicate with each other to integrate digestive, cardiovascular and other autonomic functions. A number of chemicals made in other brain regions help regulate this communication, including a newly discovered brain chemical called hypocretin, which acts within the brain to generally increase autonomic behaviors. The general hypothesis of this project is that hypocretin modifies specific types of neuronal communication within the brainstem in a manner consistent with the chemical s effects on autonomic function. Using state-of-the-art electrical recording and optical imaging methods to study neuronal communication and anatomy, the functional organization of the viscera-related part of the brainstem will be determined, and the effects of hypocretin on that circuitry will be examined in the context of the chemical s reported general excitatory characteristics. Results of these experiments will lead to a better understanding of how neurons in the brainstem communicate with each other, as well as how chemical input from other brain areas can influence this communication. In addition, the results will help scientists better understand how neurons communicate with each other in general, and how various aspects of visceral function might be modified by chemicals acting within the brainstem doc4701 none Roger Arndt, University of Minnesota Cavitation is a ubiquitous problem in hydraulic machinary. It often serves as the limiting condition for the operation of pumps, turbines, and propellars propulsors. An enhanced understanding of the causes, their relationship to the lifting surface geometrics, and how to minimize the adverse effects of cavitation would be of great benefit to these aspects of hydraulic engineering. The PI will address these issues using the advanced experimental techniques which are available in his laboratory. He will identify the distinction acoustic emission features of the cloud and the bubble cavitation regimes using coordinated and conditionally-sampled-photography. Further experiments using the designated hydrofoil will involve identification of the periodic motions within the wake and the associated bubble characteristics doc4702 none The New Deal not only provided employment for millions of unemployed workers, but it also added significantly to the nation s infrastructure. Policy makers today, faced with the simultaneous problems of aging infrastructure and the public s demand for welfare reform, often cite New Deal-type work relief projects as a model for an effective solution. Despite numerous studies of the politics of the New Deal, there are surprisingly few micro-level analyses of how New Deal expenditures affected local economic development in the s. To help fill this gap, this project studies the impact of the New Deal on a variety of measures of economic activity, including real estate wealth, housing values, retail sales, manufacturing activity, agricultural development, as well as demographic changes attributable to the New Deal. The research is a continuation of work that was begun under NSF grant number . A major objective of the research is to use the geographic variation in spending across U.S. counties to perform a series of studies that simultaneously examine the impact of the New Deal on local economic activity, both in the county where the monies were spent and in nearby counties, and the political and economic factors that influenced the distribution of New Deal funds. Because the New Deal was instituted during a period of extremely high unemployment, it seems reasonable to expect that the federal government s spending would have bolstered economic activity in many areas. Yet, recent work on the impact of public infrastructure on economic growth does not unambiguously support conclusions that more spending on public infrastructure leads to substantial increases in economic growth. It is also possible that New Deal spending crowded out the efforts of the private sector and state and local governments. Using a series of measures of economic activity, our goal is to assess the impact of the New Deal on local economies. Since the project examines the impact of the New Deal in relatively small geographic areas, it is important to allow for spillovers from New Deal spending in neighboring counties. That is, one could envision situations in which spending in one county either enhanced or hindered growth in neighboring areas. Moreover, the spillovers are not necessarily confined to the direct effects of New Deal spending. Economic growth in neighboring counties often influences economic growth in the county of interest. In addition, there may be immeasurable economic shocks in one county that might spill over into neighboring counties. Measuring the impact of the New Deal on local economies is complicated further because in most cases we probably cannot treat New Deal spending as purely exogenous. New Deal expenditures might have been related to economic activity in conflicting ways. Given the stated goals of the New Deal, we might anticipate that the New Dealers distributed more resources to areas with lower incomes or to areas with higher unemployment or slower growth. On the other hand, many of the New Deal programs required that the state or local government have the resources to seek help for projects from the federal government or go even further and provide matching funds to help finance the projects. Thus New Deal spending might have been positively influenced by measures of economic activity. To deal with the spillover effects and simultaneity issues this project develops a generalized three stage least squares models that incorporates both the simultaneous relationship between New Deal spending and economic activity and the spatial correlation inherent in the deterministic and random components of the empirical model doc4703 none This project is part of the ACE-Asia Program (Aerosol Characterization Experiment). A variety of aerosol optical properties will be measured at a ground site in Shaanxi Province, China, which is located in the vicinity of major dust sources. The measurement period will coincide with the intensive observing period of the airborne field program downwind of Northern China, thus providing valuable information on aerosol properties in an important source region. The PI will measure aerosol light scattering and determine absorption coefficients. Aerosol samples in the less than 2.5 micron size fraction will also be analyzed for mass, major ionic, and elemental and organic carbon concentrations. These measurements will make it possible to determine the relative contributions of dust and anthropogenic aerosols to aerosol extinction in this region. The PI will also measure the wavelength dependent aerosol optical depth, total column water vapor and ozone during clear-sky conditions, and photosynthetically active radiation. These measurements will provide information on the relationship between dust loading and direct climate forcing doc4704 none Horizontal gene transfer is an important mechanism for evolution of microbial pathogenicity of animals and plants. The specific genetic processes that lead to clustering and transfer of genes involved in pathogenicity of eucaryotic hosts are not well defined. Knowledge about these processes will allow us to determine how gene flow results in the emergence of new pathogens. This research addresses the role of horizontal gene transfer in the evolution of plant pathogenicity in the filamentous, Gram-positive genus Streptomyces. Horizontal transfer of a region containing a phytotoxin biosynthetic gene cluster txtAB and an independent virulence gene, nec1, and other virulence genes between pathogenic Streptomyces species appears to have resulted in the evolution of new pathogenic species in agricultural systems. There are several characteristics of these horizontally transferred regions that indicate association with a pathogenicity island (PAIS). PAIS are known to be important in the evolution of microbial pathogenicity, but have never been described in Gram-positive plant pathogens. Simultaneous transfer of both the nec1 and the txtAB regions from the recently described plant pathogen, S. turgidiscabies to S. lividans and several other nonpathogenic species has occurred in mating experiments. The recipient S. lividans strain has a pathogenicity phenotype. Preliminary data suggest that the putative PAIS may have been transferred on a giant plasmid. The specific objectives of the proposal are to: 1) Characterize the PAI and border regions in S. turgidiscabies; 2) Compare the genetic organization of the PAI and border regions in S. turgidiscabies to the PAIs in S. acidiscabies and S. scabies; and 3) Characterize the mechanism of transfer of the PAI from S. turgidiscabies into S. lividans. The work plan begins with an analysis of the transmissible PAI in S. turgidiscabies strain Car 8. The PAI is likely to be greater than 60 kb in size and contains the nec1 region, the txtAB region and other genes that are necessary for or facilitate pathogenicity. Large portions of the PAIs in the three species are identical in sequence, however, sequence deletions or insertions may be of biological significance and will be characterized. Border regions of the PAIs will shed light on the mechanism of transfer and target sequences. Analysis of the PAI sequences will reveal candidate pathogenicity and virulence ORFs as well as information about the kinds of recombination events that have occurred during the evolutionary history of the islands. This work will compliment research on evolution and mechanisms of pathogenicity in Gram-negative animal and plant pathogens and Gram-positive animal pathogens going on in other laboratories doc4705 none This Small Grant for Exploratory Research project proposes to investigate the innovation patterns associated with the evolution of thirteen complex technologies carried out by organizational networks centered in six different countries. It seeks iinsight into the influence of different national cultures on the innovation processes that produce new or enhanced complex product and process technologies, building on prior research that developed a model of complex technology change. Six case studies of complex technology, paralleling earlier work, will be carried out, structured by a trajectory framework developed previously. The framework reflects evidence that the innovation processes that produce complex technologies manifest three distinct innovation patterns. The proposal will support the PI and a graduate student in carrying out initial round interviews in six countries to determine whether a major research effort is warranted doc4706 none This dissertation research improvement grant examines the impact of changing international and national standards on human and non-human actors in the South African red meat commodity chain. South Africa only recently has had the opportunity to become an acceptable partner in the international trading arena. In order to be successful in international markets, South Africa may have to adopt standards that call into question the existing traditional standards that have and continue to serve other purposes, beyond the economic. This project will examine the way standards shape and are shaped by social interaction, and therefore, will reveal the ethical values that are embedded in standards. Such an understanding will improve the ability to examine the impact of global trade in agriculture and food on diverse groups of actors, particularly as they differ by race and gender, at the national and local levels. The project utilizes four complementary methods to analyze how standards promote particular values and how differing networks negotiate these standards. The methods include: (1) semi-structured interviews, (2) on-going participant observation, (3) a review and analysis of technical documents related to the historical development of red meat standards, and (4) a review of official statistics on the red meat industry in South Africa doc4707 none Hysell, David This is a proposal to conduct a wide-ranging program of research on the mid - and low-latitude ionosphere. The research involves observations to be made with a small coherent scatter radar at Clemson University and with the Jicamarca incoherent scatter radar (ISR) and the JULIA radar near Lima, Peru. Topics to be investigated include midlatitude sporadic E ionization layers, lower thermospheric winds in the equatorial E region, and the response of the low latitude ionosphere and plasmasphere to substorms. These topics have overtones for the National Space Weather initiative as well as for the CEDAR TIMED project and several other CEDAR initiatives (Topside, POLITE). The proposal has experimental and theoretical elements and should result in the development of new radar hardware, new numerical codes, and an improved and enhanced radar database doc4708 none Chloroplasts are the subcellular organelles of plants that convert light energy from the sun into biologically usable form and generate the atmospheric oxygen without which life as we know it on earth today could not exist. The vital chemical reaction catalyzed by the enzymes in the chloroplasts is the combining of carbon dioxide with water and energy to produce glucose plus molecular oxygen. The glucose is then used by the plant (and any animal that eats the plant) as an energy-rich food that can be utilized either directly or indirectly to fuel metabolism. The compartmentation of chloroplast proteins within the multiply membrane-bounded chloroplast is intrinsically critical to its function. Since most of the chloroplast proteins, including the light-harvesting enzymes, are manufactured in the cytoplasm, the cells have evolved a complex mechanism for transporting these proteins to their proper places in the chloroplast. In higher plants, the chloroplasts contain two envelope membranes, and although not all the details are worked out, there is already a good deal known about the protein translocation machineries in higher plant chloroplasts. However, in certain algal cells, the chloroplasts contain three or even four envelope membranes. Far less is understood about how proteins are translocated into these so-called complex chloroplasts. Understanding the biogenesis of complex chloroplasts has important implications for evolution as well as for our understanding of fundamental mechanisms of eukaryotic protein targetting in general. This project has as its long term goal the understanding of protein targetting and translocation to the complex chloroplasts of the unicellular alga Euglena. Eukaryotic cells target and translocate proteins to specific subcellular compartments in ways that differ from one compartment to another in their details; however, there are some general themes, such as the presence of specific targeting sequences in the protein, that are common to all these processes. Generally, chloroplast protein precursors have an N-terminal presequence, the transit peptide, containing information required for post-translational import into chloroplasts. Precursors to both stromal and thylakoid proteins contain a functionally similar transit peptide that targets the precursor to the stroma through a general import pathway. Protein translocation into the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) is usually co-translational and dependent upon an N-terminal presequence, the signal peptide. Integral membrane proteins contain hydrophobic stop transfer membrane anchor sequences that stop translocation, anchoring the protein within the membrane. Proteins destined for other intracellular compartments are transported in vesicles from the ER to the Golgi apparatus, sorted in the Golgi apparatus and packaged in transport vesicles for transfer to their final intracellular location. Euglena chloroplasts contain 3 envelope membranes. Stromal and thylakoid proteins are transported in vesicles as integral membrane proteins from the ER to the Golgi apparatus to the outermost plastid envelope membrane, rather than directly from the cytoplasm to chloroplast. All Euglena chloroplast protein presequences are 140 amino acids in length with a similar structure composed of a N-terminal signal peptide and a second hydrophobic domain 60 amino acids from the signal peptidase cleavage site. This second hydrophobic domain anchors the protein in the membrane with the presequence N-terminus inside the microsomal lumen and the C-terminus on the cytoplasmic membrane face. A Euglena precursor was imported into pea chloroplasts indicating that the Euglena presequence contains a transit peptide recognized by the higher plant import machinery. The Euglena intermediate and inner envelope should contain proteins homologous to components of the plant envelope import apparatus that interact with the transit peptide. Euglena plastid envelope proteins have not been characterized. The most novel targeting region of the Euglena presequence, the Golgi to chloroplast targeting sequence, is also unidentified. The first objective of this project is to develop procedures to isolate the Euglena chloroplast envelope and identify Euglena chloroplast envelope proteins that are part of the protein import apparatus. Advantage will be taken of the fact that two plant envelope proteins, Toc 34 and Toc159, that interact with the transit peptide are GTP binding proteins. This biochemical property will be used to isolate the Euglena Toc homologues. Peptide sequence will be obtained and used to design degenerate primers for cDNA isolation by PCR. Isolation of the cDNAs represents the first step toward characterization of the Euglena envelope import apparatus. The second objective is to develop a Euglena transformation system that can be used to identify the Golgi to chloroplast targeting domain and the chloroplast import (transit peptide) domains in the Euglena chloroplast protein precursor presequence. The Sh ble gene encoding zeocin resistance fused to the 5 and 3 untranslated regions of the Euglena LHCPII gene will be used as a positive selectable marker allowing optimization of transformation conditions by electroporation or biolistic transformation. Cells will be co-transformed with the Sh ble gene and precursor-GFP fusion protein presequence deletion constructs. Zeocin resistant cells will be screened by fluorescence microscopy for GFP expression and confocal microscopy will be used for an initial determination of intracellular localization. The precursor-GFP fusion proteins will contain the Euglena stromal polyprotein processing peptidase cleavage site so that upon chloroplast import, GFP will be released from the fusion protein providing a simple biochemical assay (western blotting) to confirm import. The third objective is to identify the ancestral function of the Euglena presequence domains by using confocal microscopy to determine the intracellular localization of precursor-GFP fusion protein presequence deletion constructs in mammalian cells doc4709 none Kermicle In contrast to animals, the haploid products of meiosis do not differentiate into the gametes but undergo a few rounds of cell division to produce a multicellular gametophyte which produces the gametes. This is obvious in lower plants with large free-living gametophytes but is also the case in angiosperms, the gametophytes of which are highly reduced in size. Female gametophyte development in Arabidopisis and maize, begins when one of the products of meiosis undergoes three rounds of free nuclear division followed by cellularization to give rise to a seven celled embryo sac. The free nuclear divisions are invariant in number, tightly regulated as indicated by their synchrony, and accompanied by stereotypical nuclear migrations. The embryo sac consists of four cell types: the antipodal cells, the central cell, the synergids, and the egg. To further understand genetic regulation of female gametophyte development, mutants with excess polar nuclei in the central cell, which upon fertilization gives rise to the endosperm, are to be characterized in detail using maize as a model system. The sensitivity of maize endosperm development to the addition or subtraction of a single polar nucleus provides a sensitive screen for these mutants. These mutants are expected to affect one or both of two basic processes: nuclear positioning and partitioning or negative regulation of free nuclear divisions. Several mutants with excess polar nuclei have already been identified, and their characterization begun. The mechanism by which extra polar nuclei are produced in these mutants is to be determined by studying embryo sac ontogeny using confocal laser scanning microscopy. Interactions between the genes are to be determined by constructing double mutants between them. More mutants with extra polar nuclei are to be identified through genetic screens of existing mutant collections and collaborations with current genome projects. Molecular analysis of one of the best characterized of these genes, indeterminate gametophytel, is being initiated. A detailed analysis of these genes and their interactions should provide greater understanding of embryo sac development, particularly control of basic regulation of nuclear division and position doc4710 none This project relates to research in advanced concepts in power system load and component modeling. The proposed project encompasses two distinct approaches to the modeling of irregularly time varying power system loads and elements to capture information from measurements (time series recorded data) so that those elements can be modeled accurately. The goal is to develop models directly from operating system data, thereby permitting continuously updated models without specialized tests and disruptive operating conditions. The models shall be used in control system design and for accurate dynamic simulations. The first modeling approach is based chaotic dynamics. The objective is to design a system of local linear approximations to the dynamics of a chaotic process that can be updated in real time as more observations become available or when the underlying process is subject to a slow drift. The second modeling approach is based on the concept of random iterations. It is a statistical approach that can work well when noise, approximation errors, or rapid time variability of system parameters make the first approach unreliable. Random iterations are well suited to explain chaotic series exhibiting statistical regularity in terms of stability of time averages. They can be used to make predictions about average future behavior with specified levels of accuracy and confidence and make predictions based on large data sets more feasible. An educational component of the proposed work is the development of Web-based resources for interdisciplinary graduate courses involving applications of nonlinear dynamics and statistics to contemporary engineering problems doc4711 none The project is a study of Kant s justification of Newtonian science. It shows how Kant s justification of Newtonian science is a justification not of the fundamental principles of Newton s Principia, but rather of Newtonian science, that is, how Newton s Principia was received in 18th century Germany. Given the rich array of ways in which various figures attempted to come to terms with Newtonian science, the project illustrates how Kant s attempt at justifying Newtonian science most closely resemble projects by those with significant interests in metaphysics (e.g., Leibnizians such as Wolff, Knutzen, Gottsched). Kant sees the need to develop non-empirical justifications of Newtonian principles and to articulate an ontology that is compatible with Newtonian physics (given his rejection of Newtonian absolute space and time). The results of this project should benefit anyone interested in the history of philosophy of science, the history of science, and the history of philosophy, and, in general, to those interested in understanding the complex relations among natural science and philosophy doc4712 none Ma This research looks at nonequilibrium alloys created in binary systems exhibiting a positive heat of mixing. It builds on recent progress in understanding such phases alloyed in the solid state using mechanical milling. Several unresolved fundamental issues are identified regarding the structural and thermodynamic nature of alloys produced far from equilibrium. The alloys to be studied are amorphous phases or highly supersaturated crystalline solid solutions prepared through vapor quenching using a co-sputtering technique. The model systems include Ag-Ni, Cu-TA, Cu-Nb, Ag-Cu, Cu-Fe, and Cu-Cr. The plan is to systematically study the local atomic-level structure using Extended X-ray Absorption Fine Structure (EXAFS) and X-ray Absorption Near Edge Structure (XANES) techniques. Short-range clustering or ordering tendencies and bond lengths are examined. In addition to proving true atomic-level alloying, local environment information will be correlated with the thermodynamic states quantitatively determined through extensive calorimetric characterizations of the deposited foils. %%% This work will identify the reasons for the stability of the phases formed relative to other competitors. The similarities and differences for alloys obtained in the same system through different processing routes are also considered. Possible decomposition and compositional modulations, effects on alloy energetics and stability, as well as competing mechanisms of spinodal decomposition versus nucleation and growth, will also be examined doc4713 none The objective of this research is to learn more about the functional significance of a novel apyrase for plant growth and development. In peas the expression of the mRNA for this enzyme is highest in regions undergoing rapid growth and development. A pea cDNA encoding the gene for the enzyme has been isolated and characterized. Its translated sequence includes a signal peptide, which targets it to the plasma membrane, and identifies it as a member of the family of apyrase enzymes that are typically extracellular and are called ectoapyrases. In animals these enzymes play a key role in terminating ATP ADP-induced signal transduction, such as ATP-induced apoptosis. The biochemical function of this enzyme is to hydrolyze NTPs and NDPs, but the significance of this function for plant hysiology, growth and development is not known. The proposed research expands on two key observations that emerge from the PI s current apyrase project: the pea ectoapyrase complements a yeast mutant deficient in phosphate transport and augments phosphate uptake in Arabidopsis roots, and it confers toxin resistance to yeast and to Arabidopsis plants, possibly by enhancing the Multi-Drug-Resistance function of an ABC transporter in those organisms. These startling findings have potentially great significance for understanding alternate modes of phosphate nutrition and toxin resistance in plants, and they call attention to a previously unsuspected role for extracellular ATP (xATP) in the growth and development of plants. To better understand their implications, it will be necessary to investigate the molecular bases underlying them and to test whether predictions based on them can be validated. Toward this end three groups of experiments are proposed. The first group of experiments is designed to better define the structural basis of apyrase-facilitated phosphate uptake. Although the pea ectoapyrase facilitates phosphate transport, it is not clear how the primary structure of apyrase would support this function, since it has only one evident membrane-spanning domain. Recent studies show that the human ectoapyrase, which resembles the pea enzyme in its primary structure and plasma membrane locale, has a tetrameric structure in the plasma membrane similar to the structure of known transport proteins, and thus has the structural potential for a transport function. The second group of experiments will further investigate how overexpression of apyrase in plants and in yeast confers on them resistance to certain toxic compounds. In particular these experiments will test a model which postulates that the ability of ectoapyrase to function in toxin resistance is dependent on its ability to help maintain the steepness of the ATP gradient between the inside and outside of cells by hydrolyzing xATP. The third group of experiments addresses the question of whether ATP can serve a signaling role in plants as it does in animals. This group develops a functional screen to begin testing whether there are ATP receptors on the plasma membrane of plants. All proposed experiments will be greatly aided by the availability of apyrase antibodies, specific apyrase inhibitors, and transgenic plants that overexpress the enzyme or that are suppressed in its expression. The proposed studies will generate valuable and novel insights into how the hydrolysis of xATP by ectoapyrases influences diverse aspects of plant growth and development doc4714 none The University of Washington College of Engineering proposes to mount a major new initiative to integrate biology into the engineering curriculum for undergraduate and graduate students. They will develop this initiative in phases. In the first phase, key elements will be developed under Action Agenda support. In later phases A three-tiered system is proposed that will affect all undergraduate engineering students at the University of Washington. First Tier: The first level will include all engineering undergraduates, and will involve the integration of intriguing biological examples of engineering concepts ( mini-modules ) into the existing core engineering curriculum at the Freshman and Sophomore levels. In addition, they will create ENGR BIO Freshman Interest Groups to create a forum for students with early interest in the engineering biology interface to interact. Second Tier: The second level will involve development of a new Junior-level course entitled, Biological Frameworks for Engineers. This will be a hands-on project based course in fundamental engineering-based biological concepts that will develop in engineers the common language and concepts of biology. Third Tier: The third level is a more in-depth learning experience in the interface between biology and engineering. These experiences take many forms: 1) a large number of existing and planned courses in more specialized subjects, 2) undergraduate research opportunities, and 3) industrial internships at the engineering biology interface. Once students have taken the new junior-level course, they will be better prepared to take advantage of each of these opportunities doc4715 none CTS - Warhaft Turbulence theory, in which formal relationships between statistical properties of the velocity field are developed, undergird the development of the models and computational approaches which are the bases for most computational fluid dynamics. The latter is of considerable and growing value in fluids engineering. In this investigation, the PI will extend his earlier successful efforts to contribute fundamental- experimental observations that clarify and refine the basis for new theories. He will, in this work, examine very large turbulence Reynolds numbers and his data will further clarify issues related to the fundamentally important issue of local isotropy. It can be noted that ever larger R-values are to basic turbulence research as ever higher beam energies are to particle physics doc4716 none This Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) Phase II project addresses the need for rapid, reliable instrumentation for the detection of pathogenic microorganisms in food and environmental screening. The proposed system is based on MEMS-based, optical fiber, extrinsic Fabry-Perot (EFPI) biosensors. During Phase I, Luna Innovations (formerly F&S, Inc.) optimized the EFPI sensing platform for refractive index measurements, applied affinity films to measure kinetic binding with specific antibodies and non-hazardous proteins, and integrated the sensors with an inexpensive signal conditioning system for a complete detection combination. The newly developed system is capable of cost effective, robust, operationally simple detection. It is easily adapted to incorporate microfluidics or other sampling system interfaces thereby offering improvements in refractive index measurements, as well as biosensing capabilities. During Phase II, this sensing system will be incorporated with microfluidic sampling systems and used to demonstrate simple detection of proteinacious targets of Escherichi coli and Vibrio cholerae, and will later be expanded for other high priority pathogens found in raw and processed food products, contaminated water and soil, and biological warfare agents. Anticipated Benefits Potential Commercial Applications of the Research or Development: The prototype system has already generated tremendous interest from many companies involved in refractive index measurements for process control, target screening within the food industry, and other biological research applications. The EFPI as a refractometer has found applications within the beverage industry for milk processing, and the petroleum and chemical industry for distillation processes and concentration monitoring. As a biosensor, the EFPI will find widespread application in multibillion dollar annual markets in food, environmental, medical, and industrial applications doc4717 none Holyoak, Keith J. University of California - Los Angeles Theories of human reasoning are heavily influenced by a number of assumptions derived from formal accounts of deductive logic. A central assumption of these models is that the flow of inferences is unidirectional. The syllogistic, unidirectional nature of the reasoning processes rules out reverse inferences in which a person s conclusions might lead to a change in the evaluation of the premises and evidence. Violations of this assumption are viewed as signs of the frailty of human reasoning. In this project, we explore an alternative conception of reasoning and decision-making, one based on a theoretical paradigm called constraint satisfaction mechanisms. Our preliminary research has shown that reasoning entails bi-directional influences among the participating pieces of evidence, premises and conclusions, and that the changes occur mostly without awareness. This project is a novel attempt to introduce this emerging model of cognition to decision making, particularly in the legal domain. First, we intend to apply it to the issue of evidence integration in the fact-finding phase. We will examine whether the process of evidence integration leads to changes in the evaluation of the individual pieces of evidence. In particular, we will examine cognitive effects on judgments of defendants mental states, a determination that is crucial to adjudication in tort and criminal law (mens rea). Other studies will examine why decision makers encounter problems with ignoring inadmissible evidence. The making of a decision can be a difficult and daunting task, as is often manifested both before and after the decision is made, yet at the time of making the decision people generally feel confident, even overconfident. In the second part of the project we intend to explore this relationship among pre-decisional conflict, confident decisions, and post-decisional regret. This issue is especially pertinent to the legal domain, since a central feature of legal culture is that decisions are taken very seriously. Contract law, for example, is based on a concept of reliance, and a failure to fulfill an obligation is considered a breach. There is even less flexibility when it comes to adjudication, wherein decisions announced by judges and jurors are treated as virtually immutable. Given the weightiness of the issues and the closeness of the vying positions often involved in legal transactions and disputes, it is important that we gain a better understanding of these seemingly paradoxical phenomena of conflict, confidence and regret doc4718 none Over the two years of the project, the research team will carry out several kinds of empirical and theoretical studies of possessive and partitive constructions in a sample of twelve genetically diverse languages. Possessive and partitive constructions are important but relatively unexamined sites for the consideration of crosslinguistic variation in morphosyntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and interactions among these. In the process of carrying out the descriptive groundwork, the team will construct comparable on-line corpora for each of the twelve languages, supplemented by the results of elicitation work with native speakers. The results of these empirical studies will be subjected to formal analyses conducted within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT). These OT analyses of individual languages will then be subjected to further theoretical consideration, providing a sound basis for a set of crosslinguistic generalizations. The typology of possessive and partitive constructions derived from this project can then provide linguistic typologists with a set of hypotheses, based on sound empirical work and a rigorous theoretical framework, that can be tested against analyses of other languages. Finally, the results of this project will provide substantial material for consideration by linguists concerned with finding parallels between clause-level and nominal-level morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic phenomena. The project outcomes will thus be of several types. The research team s empirical work will result in (a) a cross-linguistically diverse set of electronic corpora which will be made available to other researchers (pending appropriate permissions) and (b) a set of descriptive statements about the structural, semantic and pragmatic properties of possessive and partitive phrases in a diverse set of languages. The research team s theoretical work, made available in scholarly papers, a book and conference presentations, will result in detailed accounts of OT-type universal constraints and their relative rankings in specific languages. These analyses will advance knowledge both about the linguistic dimensions that are important in crosslinguistic generalizations concerning these structures, and about the typological power and predictions of the OT framework. The analyses will also allow comparisons with crosslinguistic work on the clause along a number of dimensions. The project will build capacity for the training of graduate students in linguistics at Boston University and Brandeis University, and the empirical products-the corpora-will be used as teaching materials by the senior personnel during and after the project. The sample of languages to be studied includes Cantonese, Czech, English, Finnish, German, Icelandic, Korean, Malayalam, Northern Pomo, Spanish, Swedish, and Wolof. Basic descriptive groundwork will contain results of elicitations with native speakers and examples from corpora. OT theoretical analyses will center on (1) effects of person animacy markedness hierarchies (Silverstein , Aissen ) in possessive constructions of various types within and across languages in our sample; (2) the semantics of determiners and their contribution to the Partitive Constraint, and (3) the various factors contributing to the distribution of case and related phenomena within these constructions, and their relationship to clause-level case patterns doc4719 none Scientific understanding of human evolution in the period between 3.0 and 4.0 million years ago is based chiefly on information derived from the Ethiopian site of Hadar. Since the early s paleoanthropologists now with the Institute of Human Origins (IHO) at Arizona State University have conducted nine seasons of field work at the Hadar site. This research has yielded nearly 350 hominid specimens, the great majority of which fall within the 3.0-3.4 Myr time period and are attributed to the species Australopithecus afarensis. Included in the Hadar hominid sample are Lucy, the fragmentary remains of at least 13 individuals at A.L. 333, and the first fairly complete skull of the species (A.L. 444-2). One of the persistent data gaps in the hominid fossil record lies within the period between 3.0 and 2.0 myr, a period that witnessed the diversification of the specialized, megadont robust Australopithecus lineage and the rise of our own, Homo. Sediments representing this interval are exposed along Awash River tributaries in both the eastern and western sectors of the Hadar site. 2.5-Myr Oldowan stone tools were excavated at localities on the edge of the Gona tributary in by H. Roche and J. Harris and in - by S. Semaw. In the IHO team conducted field work in young sediments exposed along the Kada Hadar tributary and recovered a hominid upper jaw of Homo aff. H. habilis (A.L. 666-1) and stone tools on the surface of 2.33 Myr sediments. A small trial excavation uncovered in situ tools and fragmentary faunal remains. Geological and faunal studies infer a significant shift toward drier, more open conditions at Hadar after 2.95 Myr, represented in sediments stratigraphically situated above a significant erosional event (so-called Major Disconformity Surface, or MDS). The ulitmate goal the two year research plan is to increase the documentary evidence at Hadar concerning this relatively poorly known period in the human fossil record. Excavation of additional localities where stone tools and bones co-occur will be accompanied by volcanic tephra correlation studies and paleomagnetic sampling to achieve a more finely resolved temporal framework for the post-MDS sequence. In addition, this research plan includes further excavations at the unique A.L. 333 A. afarensis locality, which, 20 years after its discovery, continues to yield hominid fossils. Finally, reconnaissance survey of outlying areas that were visited briefly in the early s may be undertaken. These areas are known to be fossilferous and appear to lie within the critical 2.0-3.0 Myr range doc4714 none The University of Washington College of Engineering proposes to mount a major new initiative to integrate biology into the engineering curriculum for undergraduate and graduate students. They will develop this initiative in phases. In the first phase, key elements will be developed under Action Agenda support. In later phases A three-tiered system is proposed that will affect all undergraduate engineering students at the University of Washington. First Tier: The first level will include all engineering undergraduates, and will involve the integration of intriguing biological examples of engineering concepts ( mini-modules ) into the existing core engineering curriculum at the Freshman and Sophomore levels. In addition, they will create ENGR BIO Freshman Interest Groups to create a forum for students with early interest in the engineering biology interface to interact. Second Tier: The second level will involve development of a new Junior-level course entitled, Biological Frameworks for Engineers. This will be a hands-on project based course in fundamental engineering-based biological concepts that will develop in engineers the common language and concepts of biology. Third Tier: The third level is a more in-depth learning experience in the interface between biology and engineering. These experiences take many forms: 1) a large number of existing and planned courses in more specialized subjects, 2) undergraduate research opportunities, and 3) industrial internships at the engineering biology interface. Once students have taken the new junior-level course, they will be better prepared to take advantage of each of these opportunities doc4721 none The Virginia coast is an extremely dynamic landscape. The Virginia Coastal Reserve (VCR) LTER focuses on understanding the relationships between natural and anthropogenic forces on the ecology of a coastal barrier island, lagoon and mainland system. Frequent storms, tides, and winds cause sea level variations that affect over 70% of VCR s land area. Over the last century sea level rose 35 cm, the highest rise along the Atlantic coast. Seventy years ago the dominant species, eelgrass, disappeared from the lagoons; recolonization began anew in the past 5 years. In addition, 60-90% of the barrier island uplands is new land since . This land creation has left a century-long legacy that we can now use for natural experiments. The central hypothesis of the new phase of the VCR LTER program is that ecosystem and landscape dynamics and land use patterns within the watersheds of the VCR are controlled by the vertical position of the land, the sea, and the freshwater table surfaces. Our research approach is to utilize short-term manipulative experiments, long-term observations, and computer models. We will also capitalize on nature s experiments where new landscapes continue to be created and recolonizing species may be moving lagoons back to conditions of earlier times. We will also expand our research to examine 56 watersheds on the peninsula, which currently vary in cover from 80% forest to 80% agriculture. This research goes to the heart of solving fundamental societal problems associated with environmental change at the land-sea interface doc4722 none This is a renewal request of the Cedar Creek Natural History Area Long-term Ecological Research project. The nine co-investigators of the Cedar Creek LTER are using theory with long-term experiments and observations to examine (1) controls of biodiversity, community assembly and ecosystem functioning in upland ecosystems at the prairie-forest boundary, (2) the effects of both biodiversity and community composition on ecosystem processes, and (3) the impacts of major perturbations - including climatic variation, nitrogen deposition, elevated CO2, predator suppression, and changes in fire frequency - on species composition, diversity and ecosystem functioning. The approach combines studies of numerous species on several trophic levels with studies of the ecosystem processes that they affect and that affect them. This work is designed to combine and synthesize the often disparate approaches of population, community, and ecosystem ecology. This work will build on an 18-year record of research at this site. These studies focus on the various direct, indirect and feedback processes that control the composition, dynamics, and biodiversity of these grassland and savanna ecosystems, and on the effects of the composition and biodiversity of these ecosystems on their stability and functioning. Specifically, for the next six years, this team will continue and expand on five major sets of long-term research, including experimental and observational studies on biodiversity, nitrogen addition, fire frequency, trophic interactions, and successional dynamics and land use. The results of many of these studies are relevant to society because they will provide a better understanding of the long-term impacts of human actions on ecosystems. For instance, this research will help elucidate the factors that control biodiversity and the effects of the loss of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning. Studies of the impacts of nitrogen addition, of elevated CO2, of fire frequency, and of changes in trophic structure all address issues related to major ways that humans are impacting the environment doc4723 none Techbridge is a three-year Large Collaborative Project between Chabot Observatory and Science Center, Oakland Unified School District, California State University-Hayward, Mills college, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Community Resources for Science that (1) encourages girls to pursue academic and career options in technology and (2) contributes much needed research regarding gender, culture, and technology. This model program takes an innovative approach to engage teachers, counselors, families, role models, and peer support networks in keeping girls involved and motivated in technology. Techbridge utilizes project-based learning to introduce girls to technology and role models to help girls realize that technology is a tool for many different career options. It builds bridges to ease the transition from middle school to high school and helps girls visualize the next steps to college and careers. In addition to quantitative analysis that will track and assess the progress of participating girls, qualitative analysis will study the complex interaction of gender and culture on girls experiences with technology and choices regarding coursework and career plans to better understand how families and schools can support girls. Project partners will work together to institutionalize project findings and resources into existing teacher training and district programs for long-lasting impact doc4724 none Schuster Description: This award is for US-India Cooperative Research: Synthesis and Study of Interactions of Organic Ligands with Various DNA Structures through Spectroscopic and DNA Sequencing Techniques. Professor Gary Schuster of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Indian collaborator Danaboyina Ramaiah of the Regional Research Laboratory (CSIR), Trivandrum will conduct experimental research on the synthesis of a variety of acridine, quinone and perylene derivatives and their interactions with select DNA structures such as hairpins, base bulges, triplexes and G-quadruplexes. These studies are expected to provide greater understanding of DNA structures, structure-property relationships and develop effective molecular probes for the recognition of nucleic acid structures. Scope: The Georgia Tech group is well regarded for its expertise in photochemical and spectroscopic studies of organic compounds, particularly for interactions of photochemically active compounds with DNA. The photochemistry center in Trivandrum is highly regarded and among the most productive research centers in India. This collaboration uses the strengths of both groups to further the understanding of DNA photo-cleavage reactions. The project is based on a significant collection of preliminary results obtained at Trivandrum and is likely to lead to advances in fundamental knowledge. It may also lead to practical biological and health-related applications in the future. This award is supported jointly with the Government of India s Department of Science and Technology doc4725 none SES 00- - Eric Schatzberg (University of Wisconsin - Madison) Social Critics and Dissendent Experts: Postwar Critiques of Technology This award supports first stage in a major study of post-World-War-II critiques of technology, a study that will explore both the intellectual origins of these critiques and their practical consequences. In the s and s, these critiques became potent social forces in the form of movements that sought to reshape the dominant technological order, most importantly the consumer and environmental movements. This project seeks to understand the origins of these movements in the social and cultural landscape of the s. Historians of the s have done little to explain why movements critical of technology emerged suddenly after so many years of intense technological enthusiasm. This project will seek an explanation in two amorphous groups from the s. The first group comprises social critics, that is, public intellectuals who fostered critical discourse about aspects of postwar technology from big science to suburbia. These social critics included prominent scientists like Norbert Wiener, public intellectuals like William H. Whyte, and journalists like Vance Packard. The second group emerged from the scientific community itself in the form of dissident experts who raised doubts about key postwar technologies. These were the men and women who worked in university laboratories and government bureaus, where they conducted research and authored technical reports that provided the essential evidence needed by Ralph Nader s movement for auto safety and Rachel Carson s critique of pesticide misuse. Together, the social critics and dissident experts laid the groundwork for the movements of the s and s. This project will undertake an intellectual history of the social critics of the s, along with a study of the origins and motivations of the dissident experts. The project will then connect these two groups with the most significant social movements critical of technology in the early s, namely the resurgent consumer movement promoted by Ralph Nader and the new environmental movement inspired by Rachel Carson. These two movements followed similar paths; each inspired by a path-breaking expose that relied heavily on scientific and engineering research. This project will also examine two methodological issues of importance to science and technology studies. The first issue concerns the role of culture in shaping technological change, extending the PI s earlier work on this topic, and the second involves the relationship between theory and practice, stressing practices outside the laboratory doc4726 none New classes of scanning sensors and probes, with minimum feature sizes of approximately 10 nm, will be made on the tips of scanning-probe microscopes using a new stencil technique, which allows the direct deposition of nanostructures onto non-planar surfaces. These sensors will be used to image the nm-scale functional properties of electronic devices and materials with greatly improved resolution and sensitivity, as compared with existing techniques. They should also allow several new forms of scanning microscopy, providing images of quantities not currently accessible. The new probes will be supplied to and optimized in cooperation with several of the leading young researchers pursuing scanned-probe microscopy. Examples of the types of sensors and the research subjects that will be investigated include: (1) magnetic field sensors. Single ferromagnetic nanoparticles will be deposited on the tips of atomic-force-microscope probes, for use in magnetic force microscopy (MFM). Compared to conventional MFM probes, they will provide improved spatial resolution and less magnetic perturbation on the sample, in local studies of magnetic and superconducting devices. Giant-magnetoresistance sensors composed of a ferromagnetic non-magnetic ferromagnetic trilayer will also be made with 10-nm feature sizes for imaging the spatial distributions of magnetic fields. (2) bow-tie antennas for near-field optical microscopy. Metallic pads in a bow-tie configuration will be deposited at the tips of optical fibers, to serve as an antenna for optical photons, and thereby make a nm-scale optical source for use in ear-field scanning optical microscopy. This is predicted to allow greatly improved optical transmission efficiency (10 s of % efficiency, as compared to 10 -3 for aluminum-coated tapered-optical-fiber sources), thus permitting improved spectroscopy and time-resolved measurements. At the same time, these antennas should provide improved spatial resolution, on the order of 10 nm rather than approximately 50 nm for conventional sources. (3) scanning single-electron-transistor electrometers. A metal particle approximately 10 nm in diameter will be deposited on the tip of a scanning tip, in tunneling contact with 2 electrodes, to make a single-electron tunneling device that will serve as a sensitive electrometer. These will be employed to probe electric-field configurations of semiconductor and metal devices while they are in operation, the effects that impurities on metal surfaces have in producing local changes in the work function, and the microscopic origin of offset charges and charge noise in single-electron tunneling devices. (4) gated scanning-tunneling-microscope tips. Two electrically separate metal electrodes will be deposited in close proximity on the same insulating tip. One will be used for conventional scanning tunneling microscopy, while an independent voltage can be applied to the second electrode so that it acts as a gate to shift the local electrostatic potential of the sample under study. This will provide a new capability for characterizing the quantum-mechanical levels participating in electron tunneling, within quantum dots and single-molecule devices. Other new types of sensors or probes that may be fabricated on the 10 nm scale include scannable thermometers, heaters, and refrigerators, sources and detectors of microwave radiation, and electronic spin-filters for use in spin-resolved scanning tunneling microscopy doc4727 none The project will leverage online education for the benefit of diversity in the software profession. Its goal is to enhance the ability of educational institutions to recruit, retain and graduate increased numbers of female and minority students in the areas of software design, creation and maintenance. The project is based at Carnegie Technology Education, a nonprofit subsidiary of Carnegie Technology Education, a nonprofit subsidiary of Carnegie Mellon University, which offers Internet-based learning and certification for software developers. The team will modify ten courses developed for 2 and 4 year undergraduate institutions. The courses will be modified to make them more appealing, accessible, and effective for diverse learners. Pilot sites will be selected among institutions already subscribing to the courses from Carnegie Technology Education. The sites will receive special assistance in recruiting diverse students and in gender equity training for faculty. Thus the project will produce new materials and new practices for recruiting, teaching, and cirriculum in software development doc4728 none This project compares intellectual development of children in the U.S. to the United Kingdom, comparing test scores on mathematics and language, and also reports of conduct problems. The general goal is to test whether findings from research in the U.S. also appear in data from another culture. The surveys in the two countries are designed to be highly comparable, thus permitting direct comparisons of effects in the two locations. Factors to be studied include family size, intact marriage, and parental work hours. This study is the first to permit direct comparisons of results from the large body of knowledge about U.S. families to results from another culture doc4729 none The goal of this proposal is to integrate ethical and social dimensions of engineering, science and technology into the core of engineering education and practice. To achieve these goals, this proposal will develop a permanent graduate option in Ethics, Policy and Systems Engineering at the University of Virginia (UVa). This option will include strong links to the Science and Technology Studies (STS) graduate program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Graduate students in this option, in collaboration with faculty, will develop case studies for use in undergraduate engineering and STS classes. These cases will complement existing cases that focus on the role of moral imagination in the design of complex technological systems. All of these cases will be placed on the Web, and at least two will be put in experimental multimedia formats that will make it easier for instructors to utilize them nationwide. The project will also conduct an evaluation of the option and the cases that will serve as a model for evaluations of similar efforts. To create the case studies, students will conduct research that combines systems engineering, ethics and STS. This research will be done in greater depth than necessary for the case studies, resulting in scholarly monographs and graduate theses. At the end of the three-year funding period, the project team will publish a report describing the process of developing this option so that others can benefit from the lessons learned and the program can serve as proof-of-concept that ethics, STS and engineering education can be integrated at the graduate and undergraduate levels doc4730 none Katharine Donato This collaborative project (Shawn Kanaiaupuni, ) examines the consequences of social capital and their effects on the health of Mexicans. This project investigates two substantive questions. The first derives from epidemiological and other studies that document how the health status of Mexicans declines--in the short run--as their length of U.S. residence increases, and--in the long run--for subsequent generations of U.S.-born Mexican children. Accruing to both U.S.-and foreign-born Mexican, the finding has led many to the following explanation: that initially, cultural factors reduce the deleterious effects of poor socioeconomic status on Mexican health, but over time as Mexicans adopt U.S. lifestyles, their country-of origin protective behaviors erode and their health worsens. The research also examines whether and how social networks improve migrant and nonimmigrant health by offering individuals and communities access to greater economic and social resources. Familial and compatriot network, for example, may offer Mexican migrants job opportunities and other financial resources in part because these networks are often specially organized to assist newcomers in the United States. In this context, social networks may also provide migrants information about how to obtain inexpensive health services and products form border towns such as Tijuana. Social networks may also benefit nonimmigrant (or prior migrants) living in Mexican communities where migration is well-established because it may alter the structure of social exchange and social support in origins and or add new information about alternate living standards. In addition, social ties may also result in economic and health improvements to Mexican communities in the long run as migrants transfer U.S. dollars back to their origins (Kanaiaupuni and Donato ). Therefore, in this project, the investigators will enrich the theoretical concept of social capital by identifying its consequences with greater specificity than in the past, and by examining their effects on the health of Mexicans. These issues will be addressed using data from the health and Migration Survey, fielded in three waves in Mexico between and , and in the United States in and . The two principal investigators have collected and partially analyzed these data with past support from the Hewlett and Rockefeller Foundations doc4731 none The increasingly stringent requirements on performance and reliability of complex technological systems have necessitated the development of systematic methods for timely and accurate diagnosis of system faults. For several years, we have been developing a methodology for centralized failure diagnosis using a discrete event systems (DES) approach. This methodology has been successfully applied in industry. We propose to build on our previous results on centralized and decentralized failure diagnosis of DES in order to develop a comprehensive methodology for failure diagnosis of large-scale complex systems with modular and distributed architectures where intermittent failures may occur. Our primary focus is the on-line diagnosis of the system, i.e., while it is operating, as opposed to off-line testing of a system when it is not under operation. Our research will include: (Pl) diagnosis of intermittent failures in the context of centralized architectures; (P2) dealing with communication delays in the context of coordinated decentralized architectures; (P3) development of new techniques for decentralized failure diagnosis with communication among local diagnostic modules at different sites; and (P4) development of new techniques exploiting the modularity of the system structure in failure diagnosis. These problems are based on feedback received from industrial applications of our methodology and aim at extending its applicability. Problems (PI) and (P2) will be directly based on our prior work on centralized and coordinated decentralized architectures for failure diagnosis. Problems (P3) and (P4) aim at extending the scope of our methodology in new directions. In Problem (P3) we intend to exploit communication among sites to enhance diagnostic capabilities in systems with decentralized information. In Problem (P4) we intend to exploit system structure to achieve computational savings in failure diagnosis of modular systems. The insight gained from our generic formal approach to the above-mentioned problems will provide the guidelines for the design of ad hoc diagnostic protocols that will have reduced complexity and still perform well. Therefore the research described in this proposal will have a significant impact on the systematic design of failure diagnosis protocols for a wide variety of complex engineering and computing systems doc4732 none Our research program objectives are the design and growth of novel InAlGaN-based quantum-cascade lasers (QCLs) operating in the mid-infrared spectral region. The materials for these devices will be grown by metalorganic chemical vapor deposition and will be characterized by a variety of techniques, including X-ray diffraction, optical absorption, photoluminescence, and transmission electron microscopy. The QCL devices offer the potential for a dramatic performance improvement over other types of injection lasers including a smaller dependence of the threshold current upon operating temperature (i.e., a higher To), a more stable emission wavelength vs. temperature, and higher quantum efficiency. In addition, the III-N materials potentially offer significant advantages over other III-Vs used for infrared laser applications. This program will lead to the demonstration of nitride QCLs emitting in the near infrared (IR) in the 4-12m-wavelength regime used in optical sensing applications, as well as potentially at other longer-wavelength mid-IR wavelengths (e.g., 15-30m). Other possibilities include the realization of 1.33 and 1.55mm lasers using this approach. Graduate student training is emphasized in this program doc4733 none Chicuahuan Desert landscapes exemplify the ecological conditions, vulnerability and management issues found in semi-arid regions around the globe. The goal of the Jornada Basin Long-Term Ecological Research program is to identify the key factors that control ecosystem dynamics in semi-arid landscapes, with the objective of understanding the causes and consequences of desertification. Pervious LTER work focused primarily at the scale of a single plant-interspace and on the redistribution of soil resources at that scale. However, the intrinsic nature of semi-arid regions, including the prevalence of high winds and short intense precipitation events in landscapes with substantial topographic variability, promotes the redistribution of materials at larger scales. The central hypothesis of the LTER phase is that landscape position and linkages among landscape units exert important influences on ecosystem dynamics and biotic patterns within sites. We propose to build on our understanding of resource redistribution at the plant-interspace scale in several ways. We will synthesize existing long-term data with new studies on linkages among landscape units, and we will conduct simulation modeling efforts to test the relative importance of within- versus between-unit processes. We will initiate or expand studies of landscape fluxes of water, nutrients, and organisms in order to evaluate key processes affecting ecosystem dynamics at this scale. We will also employ remote sensing to assess fluxes and processes at larger spatial scales. Cross-site studies will be used to test the generality of our hypotheses for application to management and redemption of semi-arid ecosystems and desertified landscapes doc4734 none Simon, Dan Read, Stephen University of Southern California Theories of human reasoning are heavily influenced by a number of assumptions derived from formal accounts of deductive logic. A central assumption of these models is that the flow of inferences is unidirectional. The syllogistic, unidirectional nature of the reasoning processes rules out reverse inferences in which a person s conclusions might lead to a change in the evaluation of the premises and evidence. Violations of this assumption are viewed as signs of the frailty of human reasoning. In this project, we explore an alternative conception of reasoning and decision-making, one based on a theoretical paradigm called constraint satisfaction mechanisms. Our preliminary research has shown that reasoning entails bi-directional influences among the participating pieces of evidence, premises and conclusions, and that the changes occur mostly without awareness. This project is a novel attempt to introduce this emerging model of cognition to decision making, particularly in the legal domain. First, we intend to apply it to the issue of evidence integration in the fact-finding phase. We will examine whether the process of evidence integration leads to changes in the evaluation of the individual pieces of evidence. In particular, we will examine cognitive effects on judgments of defendants mental states, a determination that is crucial to adjudication in tort and criminal law (mens rea). Other studies will examine why decision makers encounter problems with ignoring inadmissible evidence. The making of a decision can be a difficult and daunting task, as is often manifested both before and after the decision is made, yet at the time of making the decision people generally feel confident, even overconfident. In the second part of the project we intend to explore this relationship among pre-decisional conflict, confident decisions, and post-decisional regret. This issue is especially pertinent to the legal domain, since a central feature of legal culture is that decisions are taken very seriously. Contract law, for example, is based on a concept of reliance, and a failure to fulfill an obligation is considered a breach. There is even less flexibility when it comes to adjudication, wherein decisions announced by judges and jurors are treated as virtually immutable. Given the weightiness of the issues and the closeness of the vying positions often involved in legal transactions and disputes, it is important that we gain a better understanding of these seemingly paradoxical phenomena of conflict, confidence and regret doc4735 none This grant provides funding for the workshop on Delivering E-Commerce: Logistics and the Online Revolution which will be held in Atlanta, GA from February 10 to February 11, . The purpose of the workshop is to provide an environment for productive discussions and exchange of ideas that will lead to the identification of high-impact research areas in logistics and e-commerce in order to set an agenda for future academic research. The workshop will bring together leading industry practitioners and academic researchers to discuss issues in supply chain management. The objectives include: (1) establishment of a dialogue between industry and academia on the subject; (2) identification of important research issues in the area; (3) providing industry perspective on future academic research directions; and (4) setting of an agenda for future academic research on high impact topics. The success of the workshop will lead to a better understanding of the challenges of supply chain operations in the information age. It will help foster industry and academic collaboration. The identification of high impact topics will guide future academic research doc4710 none This project relates to research in advanced concepts in power system load and component modeling. The proposed project encompasses two distinct approaches to the modeling of irregularly time varying power system loads and elements to capture information from measurements (time series recorded data) so that those elements can be modeled accurately. The goal is to develop models directly from operating system data, thereby permitting continuously updated models without specialized tests and disruptive operating conditions. The models shall be used in control system design and for accurate dynamic simulations. The first modeling approach is based chaotic dynamics. The objective is to design a system of local linear approximations to the dynamics of a chaotic process that can be updated in real time as more observations become available or when the underlying process is subject to a slow drift. The second modeling approach is based on the concept of random iterations. It is a statistical approach that can work well when noise, approximation errors, or rapid time variability of system parameters make the first approach unreliable. Random iterations are well suited to explain chaotic series exhibiting statistical regularity in terms of stability of time averages. They can be used to make predictions about average future behavior with specified levels of accuracy and confidence and make predictions based on large data sets more feasible. An educational component of the proposed work is the development of Web-based resources for interdisciplinary graduate courses involving applications of nonlinear dynamics and statistics to contemporary engineering problems doc4737 none The proposed research will examine the processes contributing to the spread of novel genotypes resulting from hybridization between morphologically and ecologically distinct lineages of the Florida rock rose (Piriqueta caroliniana). The mixing of divergent taxa via natural hybridization is considered to have been important in the history of a variety of plants and animals. However, we currently have little information on the dynamics of hybrid zones that extend over broad geographic regions. The process of spread of hybrid genotypes and expansion of the hybrid zone will be complicated by hybrid breakdown (loss of viability and fertility) in the early generations following hybridization. This research will examine patterns of hybrid breakdown and its demographic and genetic consequences. Patterns of fitness loss that accompanies hybridization will be documented and its impact on the process of hybrid zone expansion will be assessed. Results from this study will provide information on processes that affect aspects of natural hybridization that have direct economic and social impacts including; 1) the spread of exotic species that is facilitated by hybridization with natives, and 2) the escape of genes from genetically modified crops via hybridization with native and weedy species. Furthermore, information obtained on the development of superior genotypes through natural processes may have applications in plant and animal breeding programs doc4738 none In this project, a plan is outlined to continue the efforts of the Student Meeting Activities Subcommittee of the Power Engineering Education Committee of the IEEE Power Engineering Society (PES) to promote student interest in the power engineering field by sponsoring electrical engineering students from US universities to attend the IEEE PES annual Summer Meeting to be held in Seattle, Washington. The goal of this project is to provide an opportunity for students to be exposed to the most recent developments in design, operation, construction, and research in the power engineering field. This is a particularly critical time for power engineering as the industry undergoes significant change due to the restructuring of the traditional utility structure. The career opportunities for students interested in power engineering are many and varied; the program offers student several opportunities to interact with practicing engineers from utilities, vendors, manufacturers, and consulting firms doc4739 none The primary goal of this proposal is to develop the spectral, asymptotic, and stability analysis for three increasingly more complete models of an aircraft wing in a surrounding airflow, which are governed by complicated systems of evolution-type integro -differential equations. The first two of these models (1-dim and 2-dim respectively) have been developed at the Flight Systems Research Center at UCLA in collaboration with NASA Dryden Flight Research Center. The designing of the 3-dim model is in progress. The 1-dim model has recently been tested in a series of four flight experiments at Edwards Airforce Base. The results have shown an excellent agreement with theoretical predictions of the model, at least, for lower frequency aeroelastic modes. The ultimate goal of the entire wing modeling projects is to give specific practical recommendations to aircraft industry engineers working on flutter suppression in aircraft wings. The objective of this project include completion of the analysis of 1-dim model, i.e., obtaining the asymptotics for the eigenfunctions of the continuous spectrum and deriving the space-time domain representation for the solution of the main equations; b) applying the results to the flutter suppression problem; c) extension of the analysis to 2-dim and forthcoming 3-dim models (the most challenging part of the project); d) developing of a new graduate program on mathematical methods in aircraft engineering for both mathematics and engineering students doc4740 none SES 00- - A. Mark Smith (University of Missouri - Columbia) - Alhacen Edition, 4-5 The goal of this project is to complete a critical edition, with English translation and scholarly annotation, of books 4-5 of the medieval Latin version of Alhacen s Kitab al-Manazir ( Treatise on Optics ), a comprehensive treatment of light and sight in seven books. Composed in Arabic in the very early eleventh century, this treatise was rendered into Latin some two centuries later under the title De aspectibus. In that form it quickly became a canonical source for optical thought in the Latin West, inspiring a series of important derivative works (above all those of the Perspectivist authors Roger Bacon, John Pecham, and Witelo) and also serving as a primary text in the teaching of optics until the early seventeenth century. Both directly and indirectly, then, Alhacen s De aspectibus played a critical role in the formation of medieval and Renaissance ideas about light, color and visual representation. Unlike the first three books of the De aspectibus, which deal with visual perception in general, books 4 and 5 are devoted specifically to reflection and the formation of point-images in plane, convex and concave mirrors. Remarkable for both its originality and its mathematical sophistication, Alhacen s analysis of image-location in book 5 served as the benchmark for the study not only of reflection but also for mathematics in the later Middle Ages. The proposed critical edition will make this portion of Alhacen s work accessible in definitive form not only to specialists in the history of science but also to those with more general interests in medieval and Renaissance intellectual and cultural history doc4741 none The use of geographic information technologies is pervasive throughout business, government, industry and the scientific community in the United States. Conflicts are arising on a daily basis for those using geographic information systems and their affiliated databases, for those implementing such systems, and for those designing the next generations of spatial information technologies. Balancing among competing interests and resolving conflicts involved in the use of these technologies are growing problems for numerous parties within society. Among the problem domains of greatest concern are those involving personal information privacy, intellectual property rights in geographic information, liability in the use of geographic data sets, public access to government geographic data sets, public goods aspects of geographic information in libraries, and sales of geographic information by government agencies. This research involves a pilot study that will evidence the extent to which conflicts are perceived to exist by those using and creating geographic information systems and by those who are the subjects contained within such systems. Researchers will develop and pilot web-based questionnaires to determine whether and to what extent interest and value choices differ among sampled groups of system developers, users, and data subjects within each of the major problem domains. Where significant differences are evidenced as existing among affected parties, researchers will develop conflict scenarios patterned after experiences witnessed in practice. The full range of geographic information conflict issues within each of the major problem domains will be fully explored and documented. The scenarios and the problems drawn from practice will set the methodological and substantive stage for follow on research in which potential solutions may be sought. Eventually, preferences for resolving specific conflicts will be determined and guiding principles will be suggested. Gathered data and scenarios developed during the pilot, as well as suggested principles to be developed and explored in future research, will form the foundation for broad-ranging moral and ethical discussions within the geographic information science community doc4742 none In response to the need for providing advanced engineering education in a shorter time period than is generally possible by traditional curricula, the PIs propose to create an accelerated educational track to attract the brightest students into bioengineering. They propose to get them involved in a research project at an early stage, and provide them with an intensive four-year educational program built around a cohort environment. Upon completion of the program, the students will receive dual BS and MS degrees in bioengineering. A key element of this program is to have students begin work on an individual Masters thesis project early in their careers (i.e., starting in the equivalent of their sophomore year). This project provides a framework upon which to motivate the students in their classroom activities (a concept of just-in-time learning) and to guide them in their selection of elective courses. To equip the students with the skills needed to pursue a Masters-level project, the seminar discussion course sequence will involve engineering, clinical, industrial and scientific input to aid the student in the selection, design and conduct of a Masters research project. A portion of the seminar course is also devoted to oral and written presentations of each student s research progress. Another essential feature of this accelerated plan is the integrated and concentrated nature of the coursework doc4743 none The emergence of significant new technology thrusts in engineering, such as microscale systems, biotechnologies and bioengineering, and environmental monitoring, provides engineering educators with a unique opportunity to impact and shape future directions in engineering curricula. A goal of this proposed innovative curriculum is to meet these identified needs that arise from the recent curriculum shifts toward new technology areas and disciplines. For example, exciting new areas such as micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and biotechnology require modern engineering tools that are often fundamentally different from skills currently taught in many existing engineering programs. In response to such potential shortcomings in engineering education, this program directly addresses the need for new, integrated approaches to provide the necessary knowledge and skills to the next generation of engineers. The proposed curriculum includes several key components. (1) A significant demonstration hands-on component will be integrated with traditional classroom teaching. Course content will be coupled with actual industrial needs and applications to better support emerging technologies. (2) Assessment and feedback is an important component, and will be sought from both student and industrial practitioners. Program assessment activities will be formulated in cooperation with Dr. Seraphine, a co-principal investigator from the Department of Education Psychology. (3) A substantial continuing education program that is targeted to practicing engineers will be included. One specific approach that will be used to foster interactions with industry is the hosting of workshops during the summer doc4744 none Over the next 25 years, the majority of homes will be computer networked. The availability of networked homes is expected to facilitate integrated home control of heating, cooling and lighting. The element of the integrated home control system that enables significant savings in energy consumption is the adaptive shade. With adaptive shading, energy bills in housing with integrated controls can fall by 25% or more, the quality of interior light can improve, and related household conveniences can emerge. A basic understanding of the principles underlying the effective use of adaptive shading in housing is needed for the full impact of the energy savings to be felt. On this basis, this proposal focuses on developing a basic understanding of the principles underlying the effective use of adaptive shading for future housing. The four objectives of the study are (1) to gain an understanding of the home designs that accommodate adaptive shading (2) to gain an understanding of the methods by which energy consumption is reduced with adaptive shading (3) to develop integrated control algorithms for housing and (4) to foster commercialization of low-cost adaptive shading technology doc4745 none A Spin Interference Device Spintronics is an emerging area in solid state science and engineering. Its broad goal is to utilize carriers spin in metals and semiconductors to realize novel electronic devices. In such devices, of key importance are the creation, manipulation, and detection of spin and spin-currents. An example is the spin-FET (field-effect transistor), a switching device whose operation is based on the injection of spin-polarized carriers into the channel, manipulation (rotation via precession) of their spin via an external electric field (gate bias), and the spin-sensitive detection of the carriers at the drain. If successful, such manipulation of spins can also have impact on another emerging, and perhaps even more exotic, field of quantum computing, as spin is the leading candidate for the quantum bit of information in the proposed quantum computers. The goal of this project is demonstrate the realization of a spin device which is somewhat similar to the spin-FET but has the simplifying advantage that it does not require the injection or detection of spin-polarized carriers. The device is essentially an Aharanov-Bohm ring made of a two-dimensional (2D) carrier system with a strong and tunable spin-orbit interaction. Its operation relies on the interference between the clockwise and counter-clockwise travelling spin wave functions. The interference, and therefore the conductance of the ring, can be modulated by a gate electrode which tunes the spin-orbit interaction. The project combines state-of-the art nanotechnology and careful transport measurements. It also requires a high-quality 2D carrier system with tunable spin-orbit interaction. The 2D holes in modulation-doped GaAs AlGaAs heterostructures provide a nearly ideal system for this project; they have very high low-temperature mobility, of the order of 106 cm2 Vs, and the tunability of their spin-orbit interaction has recently been demonstrated doc4746 none Keer Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Dr. Leon Keer, Department of Civil Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, Dr. Fazil Erdogan, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and Dr. Sami El-Borgi, Department of Civil Engineering, Polytechnic School of Tunisia, La Marsa, Tunisia. They plan to collaborate in research on functionally graded materials (FGM). The possibility of using nonhomogeneous coatings made of FGMs is currently being explored as an alternative to the conventional homogeneous ceramic coatings in high-temperature applications. The scientists at the three institutions will consider a number of benchmark two-dimensional crack problems involving fracture of ceramic-metal FGMs under thermal and mechanical loading. The objective is to study the effect of FGM nonhomogeneity parameters on the crack driving forces for the purpose of gaining better understanding on the behavior and design of graded materials. Two approaches will be used, an analytical approach and a numerical approach, to allow comparison of the results and development of a faithful numerical predictive capability. Scope: This award will permit collaboration between Tunisian and US scientists who have complementary capabilities and experience. The two US scientists are eminent in their fields and are highly published in areas related to the problem. The Tunisian collaborator received his Ph.D. at a prestigious US university and has conducted research both in Tunisia and in the United States, with a resulting strong publication record. Two other Tunisians, one a female scientist who completed her education, including a Ph.D., in France and the second a Ph.D. candidate in Dr. El-Borgi s department, will participate in this research. They will be exposed for the first time to research resources and methods in the United States. This project presents a viable means to increase collaboration with Tunisia, where interaction with the United States is limited because of the dominance of French as the foreign language most used by scientists. This proposal meets the INT objective of increasing international scientific collaboration in areas of mutual benefit doc4747 none Storm This grant supports conference costs and travel for participants in the Environmental Sciences: Water Gordon Research Conference to be held at Holderness School, Plymouth, New Hampshire, June 25-30, . The Gordon Research Conferences provide informal, off-the-record sessions for researchers to freely discuss their research interests. This conference (Environmental Sciences: Water) has been held every two years since the s. The theme of this year s conference is Environmental Pressures and Chemical Pathways from the Molecular to the Ecosystem Scale and has as one of its goals the modification of the water-centric focus to include processes and pressures occurring at and across boundaries from the molecular to the ecosystem scales. Participants from the USA, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Great Britain and Canada are scheduled to discuss the following topics: (1) Global climatic variability and impacts; (2) Environmental biogeochemistry from the molecular to ecosystem scale; (3) Environmental aquatic chemistry (in honor of James J. Morgan); (4) Modeling contaminant fate in aquatic systems; (5) Biological processes in natural and engineered systems; (6) Environmental biogeochemistry of natural and pollutant organic compounds; (7) Environmental partitioning of organic compounds and (8) Limits to growth doc4748 none This project supports rapid airborne measurements of bulk aerosol ionic composition during ACE-Asia (Aerosol Characterization Experiment). An automated instrument will be deployed on the C-130 research aircraft. The instrument consists of a particle-in-liquid sampler coupled to a dual channel ion chromatograph (IC) analysis system. The following ions can be measured with a sensitivity of about 5 pptv over a sample integration interval and duty cycle of about 4 minutes: chloride, nitrate, sulfate, sodium, ammonium, potassium, and calcium. Particles are collected directly into a liquid which is injected online and continuously into the ion chromatograph. The rapid ionic concentration measurements will be used to chemically characterize and study the evolution of the aerosol plumes advected from Asia. Another objective is to quantify the extent to which ionic components contribute to aerosol optical properties by synchronizing the airborne chemical and physical measurements doc4749 none A significant change in the Mechanical Engineering Curriculum at the University of Notre Dame is proposed in response to the changes that have developed as a result of the pervasive use of microprocessors in complex, modern mechanical engineering systems. Plans are for the Mechanical Engineering Curriculum at Notre Dame to provide a unique experience with microprocessors and microprocessor-based mechanical systems to its students to better prepare them for the continued proliferation of intelligent mechanical systems in the industrial sector. The program also outlines the introduction of exercises at the sophomore and junior levels. Students will learn to program microprocessor devices and to employ them in a useful fashion to actuate, sense, control or optimize systems and processes in the context of laboratory experiments in solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, controls and dynamics. Support is provided for faculty to collaborate with industry while developing microprocessor based learning experiences for students. The experience from this project at Notre Dame will be a valuable guide for other institutions doc4750 none The Department of Chemical Engineering at NC State University proposes a cross-disciplinary, multi-functional, lab-integrated series of courses in bioprocessing as the crown in a chemical engineering option focused on biotechnology. The proposed curricular innovation integrates several elements of cooperative learning, teaming, communication, and basic technology skills known to be desirable in the workforce, i.e. GMP, GLP, and process validation. Novel features of the proposed curriculum include: active involvement and participation of faculty and students from 9 departments and 3 Colleges; in-depth integration of experiments, computer simulation, and cooperative learning lectures; active participation by representatives of local pharmaceutical and bioprocessing companies in structuring, designing, and teaching the courses; integration of essential employment-related information into the curriculum; and focus on communications and teaming. The proposed curricular paradigm is a shift away from conventional department-based, lecture-style courses. The proposed 3-course sequence, if successful as gauged by proposed assessment tools, can be applied to the microelectronics, nanotechnology, and polymers portions of our curriculum. The protocols developed for implementation and assessment can be used by any engineering program to integrate cooperative learning, multidisciplinary teaming, and communication into their curriculum doc4751 none Vary Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Dr. James Vary, International Institute for Theoretical and Applied Physics, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, Dr. Harry Lee from Argonne National Laboratory and a Jordanian team led by Dr. Mahmoud Hasan, Chairman of the Physics Department, Applied Science University, Amman, Jordan. They plan to apply the constrained Hartree-Fock method to predict the properties of multi-hyperon nuclei at normal and above-normal densities accessible to relativistic heavy-ion collisions. Scope: The Applied Science University (ASU) of Jordan, the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), and the International Institute of Theoretical and Applied Physics (IITAP) at Iowa State University, each have unique and complementary strengths needed to achieve the stated objective. Students from Iowa State University and the Applied Science University will participate and benefit from this collaborative project. A key element of the plan to efficiently carry out this research project is to develop and operate a virtual laboratory over digital networks to exchange research notes, figures and tables, perform calculations, discuss results and draft papers for publications. This proposal meets the INT objective of encouraging collaboration by US and foreign scientists in areas of mutual benefit doc4752 none SES 00- - Kathryn Steen (Drexel University) - Wartime Catalyst and Postwar Reaction: The Making of the U.S. Synthetic Organic Chemicals Industry, - This award provides the Principal Investigator the support she needs to complete the research required for her book on the development of the U.S. synthetic organic chemicals industry, - . Prior to World War I, Germany provided nearly ninety percent of the world s supply of synthetic organic chemicals. When World War I made the United States and Germany enemies, Americans lost their supply of German chemicals and embarked on a campaign to create a domestic synthetic organic chemicals industry. The PI s book will examine how the American industry developed in World War I and the s, focusing primarily on the relationship among manufacturers, the federal government, and university science departments. Support for the nascent industry came in the form of traditional policies, such as tariffs and statistical collections, but the warborn synthetic dyes and pharmaceuticals industry also received help through munitions contracts, the confiscation of German plants and patents in the United States, and reparations provisions in the Treaty of Versailles. Despite the beneficial policies, mastery of the scientific know-how proved a profound challenge doc4753 none Parameterization of stabilizing controllers for two- dimensional systems was first reported in and since that time considerable progress has been made even for models in which some stabilizable transfer matrices do not have right left coprime factorizations. The impact of the multivariate matrix factorization results has recently been demonstrated in the design of multidimensional filter the construction of non- separable wavelets have been realized. Potential applications of interest involved the analysis; processing, coding and compression for reconstruction of multidimensional multimedia signals over bandwidth constrained communication channels. The research proposed here develops further the theory of multivariate factorization and its variants for adaptation and use in challenging applications in multidimensional systems problems. Research will be undertaken towards the of necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of primitive factorization of multivariate polynomial matrices by relating the problem to generalization of unimodular completion for which construction algorithms are now available. Attention will be directed towards actually constructing the factorization after its existence is guaranteed by applying recent tools in algorithmic algebra, particulary Grobner basis theory over polynomial dimensional cases, the conditions for existence and construction of right and left factorizations will be investigated, especially when the zero coprimenss constraint on the reduced minors fail to hold. The very nonrestrictive conditions under which any square unimodular matrix with entries in a multivariate polynomial ring can be expressed as a product of elementary matrices derivable from Suslin s Stability Theorem provides the machinery for biothogonal multiband filter bank realization for perfect reconstruction using the ladder of such structures with the objective of popularizing their use in filter bank as well as wavelet construction. The tackling of the case when both perfect reconstruction and linear phase constraints (or other like paraunitary) are enforced, is still, in general, an open problem. The recent solution given for the two-band n-D case, using Grobner bases, will be studied to understand fully the limitations of its capability for generalization to the multiband n-D case with particular attention to various specializations that may offer complete constructive solutions doc4754 none There is growing consensus in engineering that a fundamental change is required in the education of future engineers to ensure that they be well prepared for their roles in the 21st century. The demands relate both to their success in the job market and to their responsibilities as inventors and innovators of powerful tools and technologies that are increasingly permeating all aspects of our society. In addition to strong technical capability and management skills, future engineers need to develop the understanding and skills needed to design products and services that can serve the diverse needs of different countries, cultures, and peoples. In response to an increasing global economy and marketplace, the changing demographics in our society and workforce, and government requirements for product accessibility, industry is increasingly developing more inclusive approaches to design. Inclusive design of technology means developing systems flexible enough to serve the broadest possible range of users. Curb cuts, for example, were originally designed for wheelchair users, but parents with strollers, bicyclists, youth on skateboards, and senior citizens benefit from them, too. The proposed project is a collaborative effort between Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (RHIT), Innoventure, the Education Development Center (EDC), and the CPB WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM). The overall goal of this project is to develop and broadly disseminate curriculum materials and activities that facilitate the integration of inclusive design concepts into undergraduate engineering curricula. To accomplish this goal, the Engineering Education for Inclusive Design Project will undertake two major activities: (1) RHIT faculty members, in collaboration with staff members from EDC and NCAM, will develop, implement and formatively evaluate case-based approaches towards teaching inclusive design concepts and skills to undergraduate engineering education students. Project staff will develop case studies of inclusive design projects and design instructional activities to accompany the case material. The case materials and activities will be incorporated in several different engineering courses at RHIT, evaluated for their impact on students, and revised based on the results of the pilot tests. (2) The inclusive design case materials and activities will be broadly disseminated both among faculty at RHIT and nationally among other engineering schools through a variety of means: (a) summer faculty workshops hosted by RHIT that will introduce participants to the case-based approach towards teaching inclusive design; (b) through the Engineering Case Library sponsored by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) and housed at RHIT in print and electronic formats (world wide web); (c) and through papers and reports, including proceedings of the summer faculty seminars. These publications will be disseminated nationally in print and electronic formats to schools of engineering, professional organizations, industry councils, and foundations doc4755 none Lindberg This project is a national conference on the teaching of evolution. It will consider ways in which scientific, educational, and other interested professional organizations can work together to improve the quality of and accessibility to materials that support the teaching of evolution. The meeting will be held at the University of California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley and focus on developing an action plan to ensure that evolutionary principles are taught in pre-college, college, and teacher-preparation classrooms as well as in the informal science environment. Evolution is not an esoteric concept, but rather the unifying concept in biology. It affects our lives in countless ways, from the food we eat to our view of health. There remain grave misunderstandings about evolution among both teachers and the general public. This is of great concern to scientists and educators alike. There is a need for further support and professional development for teachers on the nature of science, the patterns and processes of evolution, and classroom strategies. The problem is a complex one and its solution requires a united and proactive effort by the scientific community. We cannot hope to develop strategies to enhance the delivery of evolution education without involving all constituencies with a vested interest in science education doc4756 none This is a project to produce and organize high-quality materials supporting software engineering education. First, a framework will be developed which serves as a taxonomy for the areas of knowledge comprising software engineering. The framework will build on the work of the ABET program criteria for software engineering education and the classification proposed by the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) project sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society and the Association for Computer Machinery. Four areas of particular importance to undergraduate software engineering - design, quality, requirements, and process - have been selected as the most appropriate starting points for developing curricular materials. Each of the above four areas will be further subdivided into modules, each encompassing one to six lecture hours of material. The goal of the proposal is to provide tested materials that can be adopted, modified, and enhanced by engineering educators across the nation. The modules serve simply to organize these materials - data sets, program samples, lab activities, etc. - in a coherent fashion. The repository thus created will be a dynamic, evolving clearinghouse to which all members of the software engineering community can add new and improved materials doc4757 none Shur The purpose of the proposed project is to study the non-linear transport phenomena in short - channel Field Effect Transistors. Recently Dyakonov and Shur have discovered that flow of the electron fluid in two-dimensional channel should be unstable. This instability results in plasma wave generation in a terahertz frequency range. As a consequence, the novel terahertz devices (oscillator, detector, mixer) were proposed, and a terahertz FET detector has been demonstrated. A strong non-linear regime of this instability in a ballistic field effect transistor will be studied. The stationary non-linear oscillations resulting from development of the instability will be investigated. The shape, amplitude, and velocity of the shock waves caused by the instability will be calculated taking into account the viscosity of the electron fluid due to electron-electron scattering and the external friction related to the scattering by phonons and impurities. The analytical results will be compared with the numerical calculation. This theory will also describe a non-linear regime of operation of a terahertz radiation detector based on the short-channel field effect transistor. This instability will also be studied in the case of small electron densities when the electron-electron collisions can be neglected (collisionless plasma). The conditions of the instability for collisionless plasma will be found. The linear regime of the instability will be also considered. The resonant frequencies of oscillations and the increment of instability will be calculated. Another topic of their study is a so-called runaway effect in two-dimensional systems, which leads to the negative differential resistance. Their preliminary estimates show that, in contrast to a three dimensional case, such runaway takes place even for deformation optical and acoustic phonon scattering. It should lead to a negative differential mobility in 2D systems based on silicon (germanium). One of the main tasks of the project is to investigate a possibility of the Gunn generation in 2D Si (Ge) MOS structures. The consequences of the negative differential in the two-dimensional FET channel will be studied. This case should differ substantially from the conventional three-dimensional Gunn effect since diffusion non-exponential law governs the charge relaxation in two-dimensional FET channel. The role of electron-electron interactions for 2D runaway will also be investigated doc4758 none John Snyder This proposal will increase student participation at the M4 Symposium on Magnetic Materials for Magnetoelectronic Devices to be held May 17-18, at Iowa State University. The purpose of the symposium is to provide a forum for discussion and dissemination of cutting-edge research in the rapidly emerging area of magnetoelectronics. The symposium is planned to give an efficient, comprehensive view of the present and future of magnetoelectronics: combining both breadth and depth, both next generation and far-reaching research on materialsand devices. An unusually strong list of speakers have already agreed to make presentations. There will be no parallel sessions, so all participants can attend all the presentations. The target audience is researchers, educators and students with an interest in magnetoelectronic materials and devices, from academia, government and industry. Students do not often have the opportunity to attend a symposium of this type. Student participants will benefit from the opportunity to get an overview and in-depth look at the current and future direction of the emerging field of magnetoelectronics. The symposium should benefit both beginning students, and those who have advanced experience in the area of magnetoelectronic devices doc4759 none This proposal is to develop curricular materials for the newly emerging field of Hurricane Engineering. It will develop and implement several new courses, create a new civil engineering minor in the field at Louisiana State University, and broadly disseminate this information via publication of the first textbook on Hurricane Engineering and through a web-based program. A multi-disciplinary project team with expertise in many aspects of Hurricane Engineering has been formed. It consists of 23 faculty from civil, environmental, chemical, and mechanical engineering, coastal science, landscape architecture, and environmental studies. The lead units are the Louisiana State University Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the LSU Hurricane Center, with participation from other LSU departments, Southern University, and the University of Missouri-Rolla. The team will develop the first textbook in the field, as well as web-based educational materials and modules. The materials will address planning, analysis, design, response, and recovery of civil engineering systems and infrastructure. The scope ranges from individual buildings to levees to entire transportation networks. LSU will use these materials to create three new civil engineering courses, which will form the basis of a new civil engineering minor in Hurricane Engineering. A course, Hurricanes and the Built Environment, will be developed for non-engineering majors. This course will be a core component of a new degree in Disaster Science, Mitigation, and Management, being developed by the LS U Hurricane Center for the College of Arts and Sciences doc4760 none The PIs state that quantitative modeling, analysis, and design which are of critical importance to engineers must be supported by project-based experience with realistic biological models and open-ended problems. The proposed approach of integrating mathematical simulations with didactic teaching material to create virtual experiments addresses this need. Novel simulation tools will be developed and incorporated into teaching material in biomedical engineering. These tools are a collection of mathematical models of biological systems and or processes and will be implemented as computer programs with a unified and user-friendly development and operating environment. Students will be able to perform virtual experiments using these tools and carry out engineering design studies where the focus is to design and test a man-made device that either interacts with or mimics a biological system. In addition, these tools will be useful for expanding the career perspectives of undergraduate students in biomedical engineering. Summer programs that include lectures, participation in the development of virtual experiments and biomedical engineering research will be offered to undergraduate students of Chicago State University to facilitate the transition of minority students to Ph.D. programs in biomedical fields and thereby increase the number of under-represented minority scientists in leadership roles in the nation s biomedical research endeavors. The University of Pittsburgh and the University of Cincinnati are also collaborating institutions. The objectives of the simulation-based modules to be developed focus on case studies in: 1) cardiovascular system and blood flow, 2) pharmacokinetic models and dynamics of glucose-insulin interaction, 3) cardiac biomechanics, and 4) electrical activity in the heart and pacemakers doc4761 none The Sevilleta Long-term Ecological Research (LTER) Program, established in , conducts research on ecological processes and responses to climate dynamics in a biome transition zone in central New Mexico. The major research site is the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, operated by the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). The multi-disciplinary research group comprises 34 scientists from 10 universities and numerous research agencies, including FWS, The Nature Conservancy, US Geological Survey, USDA Forest Service, USDA Agricultural Research Service, DOE Los Alamos National Laboratory, and DOE Sandia National Laboratory. The primary goal of the LTER Program is to develop and test a hierarchical model of controls and constraints on the movements of biotic assemblages at the edges of their distributions. These movements occur as a result of complex interactions among a large number of abiotic and biotic variables, at a wide range of spatial scales, and over time periods ranging from minutes to centuries. The Sevilleta LTER models and experiments address the relative roles of the major controlling variables, and allow prediction of changes in the structure and functioning of biome transition zones that would result from natural and anthropogenic perturbations. Of particular interest is the role of moisture availability in driving the distributional expansion and contraction of C3 and C4 plant species over decadal time frames, and the resulting changes in local and landscape level ecological processes. The results of these studies will provide a greater understanding of the physical and biological processes that govern the dynamics of the major ecosystems in central New Mexico, factors that lead to desertification processes, and contribute to improved understanding and management of the environment for sustainable human use and development doc4762 none The Luquillo Experimental Forest (LEF) Long-term Ecological Research (LTER) program began in with the goal of integrating studies of disturbance regime and forest structure and dynamics with a landscape perspective. Two central research themes were addressed: (1) the relative importance of different disturbance types within the four tropical rain forest life zones of the LEF, and (2) the importance of the biota in restoring ecosystem productivity after disturbance. The long-term monitoring program initiated as part of the LEF-LTER was critical to the evaluation of the immediate effects of Hurricane Hugo, which struck Puerto Rico in , and the long-term response of the forested ecosystems of the LEF to that severe disturbance. Monitoring of the effects of several less-severe storms and a subsequent hurricane (Hurricane Georges in ) has resulted in the LEF-LTER being in the position of the most thoroughly studies forested ecosystem subjected to repeated hurricane disturbance. Important strides also have been made in determining the spatial and temporal patterns of other natural disturbances (landslides, treefalls, floods, and drought). The LEF-LTER also has been instrumental in establishing the predominant importance of human disturbance in molding the structure and functioning of tropical ecosystems. In the LEF, legacies of human disturbance dating from before the s appear in present times as important sources of variation in forest structure and species composition. Human disturbance affects natural disturbance regimes by making particular events more likely to occur (e.g., landslides near roads) or increasing their severity. The long-term experiments and measurements initiated in will remain the central focus of the LEF-LTER. Emphasis on the impacts of hurricanes and human disturbances on ecosystem dynamics of the LEF will continue. Further attention will be directed at deciphering interactions among the biota and their impact on critical ecosystem variables that determine responses to natural disturbances. New initiatives will expand the comprehensive analysis of disturbance and ecosystem response to include elevations up to the summit of the Luquillo Mountains doc4763 none The project addresses basic questions regarding the mechanism of assembly of the novel copper sites in the enzyme nitrous oxide reductase, and their roles in catalysis. Proteins encoded by the nos cluster genes nosD,F,Y,L, which are required for the biosynthesis of nitrous oxide reductase, will be purified and characterized. The investigator s hypothesis is that one or more of the Nos proteins are involved in the assembly of the novel copper cluster that is the catalytic site in nitrous oxide reductase. Over-expression methods for nitrous oxide reductase and other nos proteins have been developed. Site-directed mutagenesis, together with spectroscopic and kinetics methods, will be used to probe the structure, bonding, and reactivity of the electron-transfer (CuA) and catalytic sites. Structural studies (by NMR or x-ray crystallography) of the proteins are planned. The results should be applicable to several major themes in modern biochemistry such as metalloprotein structure and function, the assembly of metal ion clusters in proteins, and the recognition and activation of kinetically-inert small molecules in metabolic pathways. The enzyme that is the focus of the research is the terminal enzyme in the denitrification pathway of bacteria. The denitrification pathway is a part of the global nitrogen cycle and balances the cycle by returning fixed nitrogen to the atmosphere. Global agricultural productivity and water quality are directly affected by the biological processes of nitrogen fixation, assimilation by organisms, and denitrification. Furthermore, under some circumstances denitrification may release nitrous oxide to the atmosphere, thereby contributing to ozone depletion and global warming. Consequently, it is very important to understand exactly how organisms carry out denitrification, and how to control this process doc4764 none Furse Traditional wireless communication is done in an air-to-air environment. Imbedded applications require hardware that can function in an air-to-subsurface interface or subsurface -to- subsurface interface. Examples include antennas that can be implanted in the human body for data links with implantable medical devices (cardiac pacemakers and defibrillators, implantable nerve and muscle stimulators, and hormone pumps), avalanche transmitters, and communication from inside tanks filled with caustic or dangerous materials. In addition to the use of imbedded antennas for wireless communication, these antennas make excellent sensors because they are inherently sensitive to their environment. They are used for remote sensing in geophysical prospecting, dielectric measurement, agricultural measurement, animal or human proximity sensing, and potentially in ice and snow monitoring for avalanche prediction. In addition to the present needs for imbedded antennas, the expansion of MEMS and wireless communication systems, which are expected to play a dominant role in next generation technology, will add dramatically to the applications for imbedded antennas. Ultra-small devices (small enough to be injected in a human vein, for instance) and the desire to communicate with them will inevitably lead to the need for miniaturized antennas imbedded in lossy environments. Furthermore, since these antennas can act as sensors as well as communicators, the possibilities for monitoring and controlling MEMS devices are enormous, and microstrip antennas are a natural addition to MEMS devices. This project anticipates a far-reaching need for a better understanding of microstrip antennas imbedded in lossy environments, an understanding that can contribute a dramatic new ability to sense and communicate with new frontiers in medicine, space, agriculture, and more. Industrial interest in imbedded antennas is extremely high, and funded research projects from this laboratory are already being beta tested for commercial products. These industrial projects have provided excellent experience in imbedded antenna design, but NSF funding is needed to systematically develop a complete analysis of the effects of the critical antenna design parameters (size, shape, feed system, substrate, superstrate, etc.) on performance (gain, bandwidth, radiation pattern, resonant frequency, impedance, etc.). This rigorous understanding is needed to clarify the effects empirically observed and to produce globally optimal designs. The objectives of this proposal are to quantify the effects of imbedded microstrip antenna design parameters on performance, design smart imbedded patch antennas to adapt to changing environments, develop artificial materials for testing antennas in lossy environments, and continue interfacing with industry throughout antenna developments doc4765 none The PIs propose to increase the effectiveness of the U.C. Berkeley Computer Science Department teaching faculty and to extend the reach of the program well beyond the confines of the campus and the duration of a traditional academic career. In particular, the proposed approach will take advantage of problem-based learning to maintain a high standard of quality and will utilize electronic tools that can support the special time and space requirements of off-campus learners. By incorporating the principles and knowledge of problem-based learning, learner-centered design, computer-supported cooperative work, and current research projects in the department, an informed design of a suite of learning, collaboration, and awareness tools will be developed, including: Enhanced lecture viewing tools, including secondary discussion channel chat and participation, TVI and DTVI, asynchronous discussion groups, and analysis tools Media sharing tools with asynchronous discussion and scaffolding tools to support group work, including integration of note-taking tools that are searchable across a number of classes and projects Group awareness tools for keeping students informed about what others in their group are working on, how much they have accomplished, as well as what other groups are doing Monitoring tools to track electronic communications & tool usage by student groups Instructor awareness tools for identifying group progress and lack of progress in achieving project and learning goals, including analysis tools using data generated from the monitoring tools doc4766 none This project proposes a three-year study of the impact of market and regulatory changes on the organizational practices of different hospital units, seeking to understand how hospitals self-regulate to maintain their value systems as they adapt their operational practices in a changing environment. Further, it aims to develop a more refined theory of organizational change and role stress in dynamic contexts than presently exists, exploring the impact of change on organizational and employee outcomes. Finally, the study will develop a valid measure of dynamic chage and empirically investigate its impact on unit effectiveness, an area that has been neglected in past research. Qualitative research centering on interviews with both staff and executives (30-50 interviews per location), archival data review, and quantitative analysis of a scale for measuring dynamic change as well as mail survey data addressing practices and individual attitudes and outcomes from 600 participants will be conducted at five different subunits of 2 different hospital locations doc4767 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II project is expected to result in a biosensor based instrument that can reliably and economically capture and measure airborne endotoxin in-situ with better specificity than existing assay methods. Airborne endotoxin has been identified as a major health hazard to both humans and animals in many agricultural and industrial settings. Endotoxins in the environment primarily enter the body through the lung and are difficult to clear. This contributes to the development of respiratory disorders. Regulation of human endotoxin exposure has not been possible to this point since no quick, reliable system exists to measure airborne endotoxin in the field. Current methods of measuring airborne endotoxin involve collecting dust samples in a sterile filter and sending them to a laboratory for analysis. The results of the analysis take weeks to receive and have poor specificity to endotoxin. The proposed instrument is expected to provide a more accurate, specific, rapid, and reliable alternative to existing assays for detecting airborne endotoxin in the range of 0.01 mg m 3 to 20 mg m 3. Measuring endotoxin levels and subsequent modification of airflow will minimize human endotoxin exposure, and lead to improvement in the respiratory health of workers. A biosensor to detect airborne endotoxin will have commercial applications to protect human health in areas such as livestock confinement and processing facilities, produce storage and processing facilities, cotton processing facilities, waste management facilities, and air quality monitoring of office buildings. Since endotoxin also represents a threat to the health of livestock, particularly swine and poultry, the animal veterinary sciences market is also expected to be significant doc4768 none This dissertation improvement research project will analyze the scientific, cultural and political context of the nineteenth-century astronomical expedition made by John Herschel to Cape Town, South Africa. In particular this research project will focus on the reduction, publication, distribution and reception of those southern hemisphere observations, known as the Cape Results. What is the relevance of Herschel s voyage to history and to the science of astronomy? An analysis of the publication, distribution, and reception of the results of Herschel s southern hemisphere astronomical observations will further inform our understanding of what science meant to different individuals and groups in the nineteenth century. This project will situate Herschel s voyage and astronomical observations within the expansionist ambitions of the early nineteenth-century British Empire. Additionally, this research will consider the relevance of Herschel s observations to current observational astronomy. Many of his southern hemisphere observations would later go into his General Catalogue, the predecessor to the New General Catalog of nebulae and star clusters, which is still used today. Funding will support travel to archives around Cambridge and London for three months doc4769 none Witanachchi Description: This proposal is to support a cooperative research project by Dr. Sarath Witanachchi, Department of Physics, University of South Florida, Tampa and Dr. M.G.M.U. Ismail, Head, Materials Technology Division, the Industrial Technology Institute, Colombo, Sri Lanka. They plan to investigate the process of producing thin film solar devices, and the potential of reducing the costs for possible use as an economical energy source. There is a significant market for renewable energy sources, such as solar energy, in developing countries, especially those with no fossil fuel resources. In addition environmental considerations are increasing the demand for clean energy. However, the high cost of silicon solar cell production and lack of knowledge in new thin film photovoltaic (PV) technologies are limiting solar renewable energy efforts to a handful of demonstration projects in most developing countries. The two scientists plan to investigate the synthesis of photovoltaic cells using chemical processing methods, through optimization of spray pyrolysis processes for the deposition of the transparent conductors and active semiconductor components, and development of sintering processes for the growth of active semiconductors, all based on glass substrates. In addition they plan to examine the process limitations and the potential markets for this technology in developing countries and to acquire production-cost data that may be useful for US companies interested in setting up overseas operations. Scope: Most of the research will be carried out in Sri Lanka, as the technology requires inexpensive equipment. The research allows the US PI to extend his knowledge in vacuum-based solar cell thin film growth techniques into a new area of thin film growth by chemical processing. Dr. Ismail heads the materials division in Sri Lanka s largest governmental research laboratory, and is expected to contribute to the project through his expertise in materials manufacture and characterization. The proposed project is innovative and is exploratory in nature, and the investigators plan to address all relevant scientific and engineering issues in the field. The benefits of the collaboration include potential advances that may facilitate the establishment of production facilities in Sri Lanka, the training of graduate students in both countries, and the promotion of an environmentally friendly technology. The PI will benefit from his exposure to the requirements of solar cell technology in a developing country, and the collaborating scientist will benefit from having access to the experience in solar-cell fabrication technology available at the USF. The proposal meets INT objectives for supporting mutually beneficial international collaboration. This project is co-funded by the Division of International Programs and by the Division of Chemical and Transport Systems doc4770 none A symposium entitled, Morphological and Compositional Evolution of Heteroepitaxial Semi-conductor Thin Films , will be held April 24-27, , in San Francisco, CA. The symposium is organized to bring together experimentalists and theoreticians from a wide variety of disciplines to address fundamentals, consider state-of-the-art knowledge in the field, and to assess applica-tions of morphological and compositional evolution in the nanoscience of semiconductor thin film growth. Examples of topical areas covered by the symposium are: Surface dynamics and atomistic processes; Growth on Patterned, high index, and vicinal substrates; Quantum dots; In-terdiffusion and segregation; Band structure, electronic properties, and devices; Morphology and microstructure; Nitrides. Within each topic, invited speakers will present a critical overview of their recognized specialties. The symposium is expected to provide an effective forum for discussion of critical scientific is-sues in electronic photonic materials. Along with the opportunity to assess the field and future di-rections, it is expected that new ties will be established between universities, research institu-tions, and industry. Support from NSF will be used to partially compensate young scientists (junior faculty, graduate students) for travel and accommodation expenses. The symposium is expected to provide an effective forum for discussion of critical scientific issues in elec-tronic photonic materials. %%% Electronic photonic materials have far reaching economic potential since applications range broadly across electronics and photonics associated with computing, communications, and in-formation processing. An evaluation of the progress and status of this field along with current as-sessments of the most important developments will be of great value to the understanding and enhanced utilization of these materials in applications beneficial to society doc4771 none The exercise of market power by electric generators could cause substantial inefficiencies and price inequities. Because market power in one market can affect other markets, distorting both, we will consider linkages among markets for different commodities, such as ancillary services, energy, and transmission services. In this research, mixed complementary (MC) models will be developed to consider strategic behavior in multiple markets. These models will be designed so that they can be solved for systems with thousands of generators and transmission interfaces. Some models will be formulated as MPECs (mathematical programs with equilibrium constraints) to represent games in which a dominant firm anticipates reactions of other firms. MC and MPEC models will be formulated of markets for transmission services with strategic interactions, and situations in which power producers can exercise market power in more than one market simultaneously. Other markets considered will include capacity, reserves, and green power. Small versions of the developed models will be solved to identify whether market interactions are important, and if their simultaneous consideration significantly alter prices, economic efficiency, market shares, generation mixes, or other outcomes. The MC models will be analyzed to determine whether solutions exist and are unique. The two highest priority applications identified will be modeled using generator, demand, and transmission data from power markets in the US or UK. The potential impact of market power upon market outcomes will be analyzed doc4772 none SES 00- - Luc J. Bovens (University of Colorado at Boulder) Bayesian Networks in Philosophy of Science and Epistemology There is a long philosophical tradition of addressing questions in philosophy of science and epistemology by means of the tools of Bayesian probability theory. In the late s, an axiomatic approach to conditional independence was developed within a Bayesian framework. This approach in conjunction with developments in graph theory are the two pillars of the theory of Bayesian Networks, which is a theory of probabilistic reasoning in artificial intelligence. The theory has been very successful over the last two decades and has found a wide array of applications ranging from medical diagnosis to safety systems for hazardous industries. Aside from some excellent work in the theory of causation, philosophers have been sadly absent in reaping the fruits from these new developments in artificial intelligence. This is unfortunate, since there are some long-standing questions in philosophy of science and epistemology in which the route to progress has been blocked by a type of complexity that is precisely the type of complexity that Bayesian Networks are designed to deal with: questions in which there are multiple variables in play and the conditional independences between these variables can be clearly identified. Integrating Bayesian Networks into philosophical research leads to theoretical advances on long-standing questions in philosophy and has a potential for practical applications. In philosophy of science, there is the question of how we can confirm a hypothesis with unreliable instruments. What is the impact of repeating the experiment many times over? Of repeating the experiment with different instruments? Of developing a theoretical underpinning that boosts the reliability of the instrument? Of calibrating the instrument? These are the sort of questions that can be fruitfully modeled by means of Bayesian Networks. The results have surprising repercussions on standard theses in philosophy of science (e.g. the variety of evidence thesis and the Duhem-Quine thesis) and yield some novel theoretical insights. As to practical applications, our methodology will be applied to a case study on the discovery of the top quark: what makes this case interesting is that the theory at hand and the methods that are used to analyze the data that confirm the theory are probabilistically dependent. In epistemology, foundational questions have not been addressed sufficiently within a probabilistic framework. There is the sceptical challenge dating back to Descartes Meditations that we cannot trust our senses and that our empirical knowledge has no justification. The coherentist answer is that even though the processes by means of which we gather information about the world may be less than fully reliable, the very fact that the scientific story fits together, i.e. has an internal coherence, provides justification that the story is true. But how are we to understand the claim that our information gathering processes are less than fully reliable? How are we to understand the claim that a story is internally coherent? There are many open questions about these central notions in coherentism. Within the framework of Bayesian Networks, multiple notions of less-than-full reliability can be modeled and a probabilistic measure of coherence, which has been a long-time dream of coherentists, can be developed. With a clear understanding of these central notions in hand, the coherentist answer to the Cartesian sceptic can be assessed. This theoretical work on reliability and coherence has practical applications in the theory of belief change. How does a cognitive system (a person or an expert system) update its beliefs when it receives new information as its input? Under what conditions does it add this new item of information to its previous beliefs? Under what conditions does it discard some of its previous beliefs? On the standard approach, new information is added to the belief set until an inconsistency appears. It is more realistic to let belief change be determined by two factors, viz. how reliable are our information sources and how well does the new information cohere with what we already believe. These factors can be directly modeled by Bayesian Networks. Such modeling yields novel theoretical insights about belief change and carries a promise of applications to information management in expert systems doc4773 none Onstott This award supports the participation of seven US scientists in a US-South Africa Workshop on Biotechnological Applications of Deep Subsurface Microbial Investigations to Deep Mining, scheduled for November at the University of the Orange Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. The organizers are Tullis C. Onstott, Department of Geosciences, Princeton University, and Rudy Boer and Frank Hodgeson of the Institute for Ground Water Studies and Department of Geology, University of the Orange Free State. The workshop is a result of earlier investigations by scientists from the United States, Canada, Sweden, and South Africa into microorganisms associated with deeply-buried rocks and groundwater of the ultradeep gold mines of South Africa. The goal of that research was to determine whether these mines, which extend more than 3 km below the land surface, offer ready access to indigenous, subsurface microbial communities and whether radiolysis of groundwater provides a nutrient source for the microorganisms. The PI subsequently received a 5-year LExEn (Life in Extreme Environments) grant from the National Science Foundation to pursue this investigation into the origin of fissure water and the in situ rates of microbial oxidation and reduction in mining boreholes. The main themes of the workshop are: ground water, hazardous gasses, air quality, in situ leaching, borehole technology, and education and training. As part of the latter, the participants will develop educational and field training programs for historically disadvantaged populations in South Africa as part of a capacity building agenda. The workshop will bring together US and South African researchers in universities and government institutes with mining engineers in private industry to discuss research results and explore future collaboration and will also establish a bridge between the PI s LExEn project and South African biotechnology development programs that are mining oriented doc4774 none Harvard Forest Temperate forests, such as those that dominate the eastern United States, are critically important ecosystems at regional to global scales. They harbor a diversity of species and habitats, provide essential resources, offer important amenities to densely populated regions, and comprise key elements in global carbon budgets. Understanding the structure, function and patterns of these ecosystems and anticipating their responses to natural disturbance, environmental change and anthropogenic disturbances and stress are therefore critical societal goals that depend on a sound knowledge of fundamental ecological processes. Such insight can only be gained through long-term, interdisciplinary research that integrates field studies, measurements, experiments and modeling over a range of temporal and spatial scales. The Harvard Forest LTER program seeks to interpret ecological pattern and process in New England forests and to apply this knowledge to regional and global issues in forest conservation, land restoration and protection, public policy and the environment. Over the past decade, the program has matured into a collaboration that applies unique approaches in historical and community ecology, ecophysiology, atmospheric chemistry and ecosystem studies to the interpretation of long-term, large-scale experiments and measurements, mechanistic studies and retrospective research. This research has produced over 300 publications, a synthesis book, an annual research program for more than 35 students, and innovative approaches to regional, national and international cross-site studies. Phase III of the research will (1) extend measurements, modeling and historical studies to regional scales, (2) interpret landscape development, vegetation and wildlife dynamics, and ecosystem patterns in relationship to millennial-scale climate change, land use and disturbance, (3) evaluate ecosystem responses to critical ongoing disturbances and stresses (e.g., forest cutting and conversion, ozone and nitrogen pollution, and invasions by pests and non-native species, (4) interpret long-term measurements and responses to experimental treatments mechanistically and in relation to inter-annual and inter-decadal variation and history, and (5) apply these results to understanding the current and projected role of this region in global carbon storage doc4775 none This Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) Phase II project will develop a cell-mimic optical-based biosensor for the real-time detection of foodborne biological pathogen. Five million analytical tests are performed on food annually in the U.S.; unfortunately, current microbiological test methods are time consuming and labor intensive. Intelligent Optical Systems, in collaboration with the Scripps Research Institute, proposes to develop an optical biosensor that mimics a cell membrane that has undergone biological pathogen attack. The response of the cell-mimic biochromatic membrane to the foodborne toxins is sensitive, specific, and instantaneous. During Phase I, the team developed highly stable cell-mimic membranes and demonstrated them in two laboratory systems: (1) a cell-mimic optical waveguide sensor (COWS) for in-line monitoring, and (2) a cell-mimic optical bead sensor (COBS) for on-site point detection . These laboratory systems were used to detect foodborne toxins (E. coli-enterotoxin and cholera toxin) with excellent speed ( 1 minute), sensitivity (500 - 1 ng ml), specificity (molecular receptor), and simplicity (one step). Phase II will focus on optimizing the cell-mimic biochromatic polymers, engineering and field-testing a portable COBS prototype, and extending the tests to other foodborne toxins doc4776 none Proposal Number: SES 00- Principal Investigator: Joseph Daly This project addresses the impact of differences in organizational culture and values of top managers upon mergers and acquisitions (M&A) outcomes. While organizational culture and differences in values are frequently cited as the cause of M&A difficulties, few empirical studies have investigated the impact of such differences on value patterns in the new organization, or on its financial performance. An important barrier to such studies has been the difficulty of obtaining a sufficiently large sample to permit effective analysis. Using a theory developed by one of the researchers, organizations will be categorized into four organizational value profiles, based on values that center around the organization s reward system. Computer-Aided Text analysis (CATA) of organizations annual reports will be used to provide a quantitative measure of nine values that define an organization s value profile. A second objective of the study is to extend current theory regarding acculturation following a merger or acquisition, addressing questions of uniculturalism in the resultant firm, as assessed by cultural consistency doc4777 none Federal initiatives over the last 25 years to require that all new automobiles sold in the United States be equipped with passive restraints have led to an intense debate between government officials, insurance companies, automobile executives and engineers, public safety advocates, consumer groups, and others. At issue have not just been the feasibility of such a ruling, but the role of the user in these plans. Air bags have been advocated as a technical solution to drivers who refuse to buckle up and attacked as both a needless expense and dangerous threat imposed on people with their own ideas about safety. This dissertation research project will explore how users were portrayed in various proposals, how these conceptions shaped the design of technology, and how others reacted to both these conceptions and the technologies they advocated. It will demonstrate the processes by which some safety technologies have been designed in an effort to circumvent unruly users in a human machine system. By analyzing the documents through which this debate was carried out and interviewing the significant players, the project will construct a social history of the air bag as well as provide an examination of how ideas of the user have shaped automotive design doc4778 none The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at the State University of New York Stony Brook entitled Garcia MRSEC on Polymers at Engineered Interfaces is a collaboration between SUNY Stony Brook, the City University of New York at Queens College and at Staton Island, the Polytechnic University, and North Carolina State University. The Center has its focus the design of polymer properties on macroscopic and microscopic length scales through the precise control of interfacial structure. The engineered interfaces bridge the gap between surface and bulk properties. The goal is to control the surface energies via chemical means with the purpose to design new materials with improved performance. Specific problems that are investigated include role of compatibilizers in clay polymer blends, enhanced mircro-emulsification of polymers, control of nucleation in crystalline polymers, fractionation of DNA on chemically treated surfaces, as well as modeling and theoretical analyze. The Center supports well maintained shared experimental facilities and also supports interactive efforts with industry and other sectors. The Center has a large and effective educational outreach effort at the high school level, and sizeable Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) and Research Experience for Teachers (RET) programs. An annual event, the Garcia MRSEC Open House is held each December at Queens College. The event attracts approximately 400 students from 10 New York area high schools. Participants in the Center currently include 12 senior investigators, 3 postdoctoral associates, 8 graduate students, 10 undergraduate students and 1 support person. Professor Miriam Rafailovich directs the MRSEC doc4779 none Rigsby This grant provides partial support of the costs of acquiring both a particle size analyzer and a carbon dioxide coulometer for the analysis of the total organic and inorganic carbon contents of sediment samples. This basic equipment of the analysis of sediment characteristics will facilitate ongoing and planned paleoclimatic and sedimentological research by faculty in the Geology Department at East Carolina University. Studies of lacustrine and riverine sediments cored in the Bolivian Altiplano, one of the few sedimentary archives of low latitude Quaternary paleoclimates in the southern hemisphere, should yield new insights into low latitude climate fluctuations and its influence on human settlement in the high Andes. Additionally, studies of the Holocene development of the Outer Banks barrier island system and the sedimentological response of these systems and coastal plain estuaries to frequent large storm events (i.e. Hurricane Floyd, ) are a natural focus of faculty in this department proximally located to one of the world s great natural laboratories for the study of barrier beach and estuarine dynamics doc4780 none The Bonanza Creek Long-Term Ecological Research program focuses on improving our understanding of the long-term consequences of changing climate and disturbance regimes on boreal forests. The overall objective is to determine the major controls over forest dynamics, biogeochemistry, and disturbances and how these factors interact in the face of a changing climate. The forest dynamics theme addresses successional changes in biotic populations and communities following disturbance, emphasizing the relative importance of historical legacies, stochastic processes, and species effects in determining successional trajectories and the sensitivity of the trajectories to climate. Changes in the carbon cycle during succession hinge on changes in forest dynamics and other element cycles, but also influence nutrient availability and microenvironment and therefore successional changes in forest dynamics. Regional and landscape controls over disturbance regimes focus on processes that are responsible for the timing, extent, and severity of disturbances. Our research design uses experiments and observations at intensive sites in three successional sequences (floodplains, south-aspect uplands, north-aspect uplands) to document the processes that drive successional change. We will establish the larger context for these intensive studies by studying two large regions, a relatively uniform region in interior Alaska and along a climate gradient from the warmest to the coldest areas in Alaska. Through synthesis we will address three important ecological issues. (1) How do species characteristics and diversity influence biogeochemistry and disturbance regime within ecosystems and landscapes? (2) How can we conceptualize spatial and temporal scaling as the basis for linking processes and patterns from ecosystems across landscapes? (3) How do positive and negative feedbacks that operate within ecosystems influence the sensitivity of ecosystems (i.e., their sustainability) to perturbations, such as changes in climate and disturbance regime doc4781 none Reed Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Dr. Wayne Reed, Department of Physics, Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana and Dr. Huceste Catalgil-Giz, Faculty of Science at Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey. The two investigators plan to study the application of novel instrumentation and methods for absolute, online monitoring of polymerization reactions, recently developed by Reed and his co-workers, to several reaction families. Specifically they plan to deal with a very important class of polymerization reactions, those involving copolymerization reactions. It is planned to monitor online the reactivity ratios of comonomers used in copolymer reactions, at the same time absolute weight averages mass Mw, radius of gyration, reduced viscosity and a measure of polydispersity are measured. It is expected that the methods developed from this project will eventually become important for the advancement of polymer science, for fundamental studies, optimization of processes for producing polymers, and for online quality control at the industrial reactor level. Scope: This award will allow collaboration between Turkish and US scientists who have complementary capabilities and experience. The Turkish investigators have excellent basic training in polymer science although they work under significant equipment limitations. They are actively publishing on the subject of copolymerization ratios. The US scientist is a physicist with instrument building skills and excellent research capabilities. The Tulane-Turkey interaction appears to be a logical collaboration. This proposal meets the INT objective of increasing collaboration by US and foreign scientists in areas of mutual benefit. This project is jointly funded by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Chemical and Transport Systems doc4782 none This FRG project is a collaborative effort between researchers at U. TX, Austin, Harvard U., and U. VA. The project addresses materials science based approaches to achieving high-performance laser diodes in the high-energy visible region: (1) growth and characterization of III-P-based wide-bandgap self-assembled quantum dots(SAQD) composed of direct-bandgap ternary alloys, e.g., InxGa1-xP on GaAs substrates, and (2) growth of InxAl1-xP ( x = 0.6 to ~1.0) quantum dots on GaP substrates. These SAQD materials and lasers will be studied to generate the basic knowledge required to optimize such structures for optoelectronic applications such as light sources emitting in the green and yellow spectral regions for full-color laser displays, sources for holographic memory storage, and high-speed light sources for low-cost plastic-fiber-based optical communications systems. The research strives for fundamental insight into the physics of two-dimensionally confined systems in III-V materials. The growth and properties of III-phosphide quantum dots will be explored and the control of strain will be employed to develop an understanding of the growth of uniform QD arrays. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. Experimental tools are now available to allow atomic level observation of elementary surface processes which when better understood allow advances in fundamental science and technology. The results of this work may allow a new level of reliable control of materials growth, allowing semiconductor devices with reproducible properties to be attained in a variety of academic and commercial settings. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area. The project involves the collaborative work of students and faculty in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Physics, and Materials doc4783 none The overall objective of this research is to develop methods for synthesizing and analyzing logic-based switching control systems. By a logic-based switching controller is meant a controller whose subsystems include not only familiar dynamical components {integrators, summers, gains, etc.} but logic-driven elements as well. An important category of such systems are those consisting of a continuous-time process to be controlled, a family of fixed-gain or variable-gain candidate controllers, and an event-driven switching logic called a supervisor whose job is to determine in real time which controller should be applied to the process. Examples of supervisory control systems include reconfigurable systems, fault correction systems, and certain types of parameter-adaptive systems. We propose first to refine and extend the concept of supervisory control introduced in our earlier work and second to use supervisory control as a motivating vehicle for the study of basic issues in the newly emerging field of hybrid dynamical systems. The supervisory control systems we propose to study fall in the category of adaptive control systems. Adaptive control has been under study for many years. Yet despite the numerous advances which have been made, there are major unresolved issues inhibiting the transfer of concepts into practice: Why, for example, is it still so difficult to explain to a non-expert why a particular algorithm is able to functions correctly in the face of unmodelled process dynamics and L bounded noise? How much unmodelled dynamics can a given algorithm tolerate before loop-stability is lost? How do we choose an adaptive control algorithm s many design parameters to achieve good disturbance rejection, transient response, etc.? A major goal of this research is to answer these questions-and in so doing to make adaptive control much more accessible to practitioners. We will investigate techniques enabling us to much more clearly and concisely quantify unmodelled dynamics norm bounds, disturbance-to-controlled output gains and so on. Our ultimate objective is to lay bare the ideas needed to develop a bona fide computer-aided adaptive control design methodology which relies much more on design principals then on trial and error techniques. Towards this end we will seek to derive new switching algorithms for supervisory control systems which are more amenable to analysis than those which currently exist. We will continue our study of the stability of switched dynamical systems, and we will attempt to draw conclusions about the input-output properties of such systems in terms of the input output properties of the constituant dynamical systems being switched. We will explore the connection between the stability of switched dynamical systems and the properties of the associated Lie algebras generated by the vector fields of the constituient dynamical systems being switched. We will study the problem of `covering a continuum of candidate controllers designed so that at least one is able to regulate a process P whose uncertain model lies in an associated continuum of candidate process models M, with a finite set of candidate controllers C chosen so that for each model in M there is at least one satisfactory controller in C. Using the preceding, we will seek to develop a provably correct apporoach to supervisory control for uncertain nonlinear processes which exploits to the extent possible, established non-adaptive control design techniques and which takes into account both unmodelled dynamics and exogeneous noise doc4784 none Efforts to open pathways for women (and other under-represented groups) in science and engineering frequently take the form of programs or sets of activities thought to have beneficial effects on the attraction, retention, and development of the targeted group. Such programmatic efforts are being planned and undertaken by NSF and by colleges and universities. With this grant, the investigator will conduct a systematic and empirical (quantitative and qualitative) assessment of the basic types, characteristics, and outcomes of programs. In the study of women in science and engineering, programs represent a critical site for analysis. This is because programs embody conceptions both of what is wrong and at issue, and what can be done to improve the participation and performance of women, and because a central claim of programs is that they have a positive effect upon outcomes. With a method involving survey questionnaires to university (registrar) administrators and to program directors, and site visits to a subset of the universe of programs for undergraduate women in science and engineering, the study addresses four focal research questions: (1) What are the range and complexity in programs definitions of the problem issue of women in science and engineering? (2) What are the patterns in solutions posed? (3) To what extent do solutions posed reflect definitions of the problem? (4) What is the relationship between various types-and characteristics-of programs and outcomes (proportion degrees awarded to women and women s attrition levels) within their institutions? A major objective is to help inform practice and policy in future efforts to tackle issues of women s participation and performance in science and engineering, by facilitating the intelligent devising of programmatic initiatives for gender equity. The study will do this by: (1) developing a useful typology that captures the elements and components of existing programs; (2) determining the statistical relationships between various types and characteristics of programs and outcomes; and (3) identifying generalizable aspects of model programs that seem to work particularly well. The study will also provide further understanding of programs as organizational phenomena, and point to both the potential for and limits of programs in relationship to the institutional environments in which they exist. It is intended and likely that the knowledge resulting from the study will improve our understanding of what is at issue about the condition of women in science and engineering, and of what can be done to plan future programs that effectively support women s participation and performance in science and engineering doc4785 none The primary objective of the proposed work is to investigate critical development issues to enable a two-dimensional sensor network called an artificial sensitive skin, with embedded integrated sensors and distributed signal-processing network. Specific technical objectives are summarized as follows. In the area of integrated sensors, the PI plans to develop efficient microfabrication technology to enable modular sensors with potentially high integration density. The benefit of a skin of multiple, distributed sensors can only be realized through the development and Implementation of signal processing architecture and algorithms. A scale-based distributed signal processing architecture will be developed and implemented for two sensor applications - tactile sensing and flow sensing. Integrated circuits need to be implemented under potentially limited and localized power supply in the sensor fabric. The PI proposes to develop low-power techniques for improving the energy efficiency of sensitive skin applications and demonstrate distributed error noise tolerance techniques doc4786 none ECS - ) The main goal of the proposed research is the development of a compact 4.8 nm laser in a transition to the ground state in hydrogen-like BV ions. This concept is an extension toward shorter wavelength of the Soft X-ray Laser (SXL),which was demonstrated at Princeton in transition to the ground state in H-like LiIII at 13.5 nm.The 13.5 nm SXL operates at a repetition rate of 2 Hz using only a 50 mJ, 250 fsec pumping beam (intensity: 1-2 x ). The procedure and experimental set-up for the demonstration of high gain-length product (GL) for the 4.8 nm SXL is the same as that of the 13.5 nm SXL, except much higher intensities are required (~ ). Such intensities will be available from our system through the refurbishing of our 12-year old KrF large volume amplifier. The 4.8 nm laser in transition to ground state of hydrogen-like BV ions would be the shortest wavelength compact, very efficient X-ray laser ( Table top X-ray laser). Demonstration of the lasing at 4.8 nm would be the most straight-forward extension to shorter wavelength of 13.5 nm laser in transition to ground state of H-like Li III ions. Development of 4.8 nm in H-like BV ions will provide crucial scaling point for the development of this type of lasers at shorter wavelength (at 3.4 nm in CVI in water window and at even shorter wavelengths doc4787 none Although sustainable business practices are much lauded in the abstract, there is little grounded research on how contemporary enterprises, facing increasingly complex environments, where many causes and effects are distant in time and place and correspondingly difficult to comprehend; and where behavioral complexity is exacerbated by numerous, diverse agents with decision making power, can evolve effective approaches. This study proposes a series of collaborative research studies among the collaborative industrial partners of the Society for Organizational Learning to focus on how learning might take place within the consortium around topics related to sustainable enterprise business practices. In Phase I of the project, a series of research studies is planned that involves: 1) facilitating and documenting learning and new practices in the Consortium as a whole; 2) historical case studies of individual organizations learning and change projects; and 3) ongoing active participation and observation of learning and change projects within sub-groups of the Consortium. A multi-method approach is proposed, including community action research with teams of insiders and outsiders; content analysis of documents, email and conversations; structured and semi-structured interviews; causal loop diagramming and systems thinking assessments; sociograms; observation of boundary objects used in Consortium change projects; and selective comparisons with non-consortium control groups. Phase II studies will emerge as the Consortium gains experience in Phase I doc4788 none This research proposes to investigate the factors that account for good engineering and make an engineer a high performer, factors that have received much less attention than studies of best practices. The project will undertake case studies of manufacturing firms in five industries to identify and examine the criteria that define an engineer as a high performer ; the education and work experiences that are most important for high peerformance (as identified by high performing engineers and their managers); and where the strengths and deficits are in enegineering education. The present proposal is the US component of a cross-national study, coordinated with research teams in Japan and Germany examining these same issues with a common core set of questions doc4789 none Cox This one-year award supports a summer program abroad for U.S. engineering undergraduate students in aeronautical and aerospace engineering. Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and University, and the Ecole d Ingenieurs in Sceaux, France sponsor the program. U.S. and European students will study engineering practices, theory, problem solving and conduct site visits to several aviation and aerospace engineering firms, such as Dassault, Alcatel, and Renault. This international summer program has several advantages. Students at an early stage in their careers will develop skills needed to function in a global or multinational corporate environment. U.S. and European practicing engineers and university professors will conduct the classes in approaches to engineering theory, quality control, mathematics and reasoning doc4790 none Formal linguists and psycholinguists start with the standard assumption that all human brains operate according to the same principles, and that all human language and human sentence processing must adhere to these principles, regardless of the surface characteristics of any given language. Yet the vast majority of psycholinguistic research (on both production and comprehension) that has been conducted has focused on a tiny number of the world s languages. With only a few exceptions, all of the languages have been typologically homogeneous and therefore syntactically similar. The proposed research seeks primarily to extend psycholinguistic research to the Odawa language, a Native American language closely related to Ojibwa and other Algonquian languages and spoken in southern Ontario, Canada. Odawa is typologically and syntactically very different from any language ever investigated by psycholinguists and thus offers a totally new perspective on the various current and competing theories of human sentence processing. Odawa is often referred to as a nonconfigurational language due to its extremely free word order in independent clauses. Any transitive sentence consisting of two noun phrase arguments and a verb can occur grammatically in any of the six possible word orders. Yet this word order is not facilitated by a rich, conventional case system of the sort observed in languages that exhibit certain degrees of word order freedom and which have been studied by psycholinguists (e.g., German, Japanese). This degree of word order freedom is something that is not taken into consideration in any current model of sentence production or comprehension. The Student Investigator has the unprecedented opportunity to combine his training in formal syntax, psycholinguistics, and the Odawa language to perform a large number of production and comprehension experiments in the town of Wikwemikong, Ontario, Canada, where approximately 50% of the 7,000 residents are still native speakers of the language. The production experiments will be conducted to assess baseline preferences for various structural alternatives, and to determine whether the preferences can be changed with various priming manipulations. The comprehension experiments will seek to establish temporary ambiguities and then observe the manner and time course of participants recovery from such ambiguities. Critically, the syntax of Odawa allows key assumptions made by current theories of sentence processing to be critically examined doc4791 none This project proposes to develop, improve, test and evaluate GRE (Graduate Record Exam) preparatory courses for SMET majors at five women s college s in partnership with the graduate school that developed the SMART GRE Prep course as a component of a NSF MPWG. The sites will use material from this successful course, but provide new materials and approaches to test the course in a variety of contexts. Partners include The Graduate School of Baylor College of Medicine and Wesleyan College. The project will directly serve more than 650 SMET students. The courses will use standardize diagnostic and exit exams to compare results of different models and test successful components at different sites in years two and three. Course guidebooks will be developed and information regarding models will be disseminated to other women s colleges and those with an interest in securing opportunities for women to pursue advances SMET degrees. This Large Collaborative Project will provide information for campuses to improve graduate school opportunities for thousands of US women, SMET majors and impact undergraduate students, faculty and graduate student mentors, and faculty and staff who develop expertise in teaching skills assessed on the GRE doc4792 none Engineering and science fields increasingly demand the use of team decision-making in order to meet needs of a rapidly developing technological society. Although women historically have been limited in their participation during decision-making processes within these fields, this situation is changing. The Colorado School of Mines is currently investigating how gender composition of teams in the first and second years affects quality of their products and satisfaction of individual team members. The goal of the proposed collaborative effort is to build upon current research by investigating mixed gender teams in upper level undergraduate courses, graduate research efforts, and industrial settings. The purpose of this request for a Planning Grant is to refine the collaborative strategy and to secure essential partnerships to bid successfully for a Collaboration Grant. We have subdivided the effort into four work packages. Work package 1 validates the results of the Experimental Study and investigates the extension to upper division undergraduate courses as well as other universities. Work packages 2 and 3 expand the research effort to include graduate programs and industrial settings. Work package 4 examines how results of the previous three work packages can be used to improved both undergraduate and graduate curricula. We are not proposing four independent research efforts, but rather a strategy that supports continual exchange of information across work packages following a natural progress that students follow through their undergraduate education into either graduate school or industry. Results of this study are likely to suggest techniques, supporting strategies, and practices by which mixed-gender teams can make successful decisions doc4793 none This project addresses organizational learning, organizational change and performance improvement in the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA). Its two objectives are to assess the effectiveness of organizational change interventions designed to reduce workplace aggression and stress and improve performance; and to examine whether and how using collaborative action inquiry - a form of participatory action research in which participants partner to co-manage cycles of research-action-reflection - may enhance organizational learning and change. With access to a huge longitudinal database of objective and perceptual measures concerning virtually every aspect of VA operations and performance, as well as enthusiastic participation from not only VA management but also its unions, the research team will first model effects and costs of workplace aggression and stress through VA s value chain, to identify high-leverage intervention points, those with greatest potential to improve service quality and cost-effectiveness. Second, the project will provide a template for how organizations can collaboratively use their own data to generate learning and improvement. Third, the project will derive guidelines for improving academic-practitioner collaboration. Panelists praised the creativity of the project, while raising several issues to which the PI has responded: because the root causes of aggression and stress are common, and because the VA is so diverse, generalizeability of results should be substantial. Improvements in the quality of life for the VA s 240,000 employees, and through them, the VA s many clients alone would be a substantial benefit. The character of the VA, its size and diversity, the importance of service industries in general, and of those like the VA s benefits administration centers, healthcare facilities and cemeteries in particular, all increase the project s potential impact doc4794 none Duke & Paterson This award supports a three-year collaborative research project among Drs. Edward Duke and Colin Paterson, of the Department of Geology and Geological Engineering at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, and Drs. Volker Petzel and Herbert Roesener, of the Geological Survey of Namibia. The project will also include the participation of a US graduate student and a Namibian graduate student. The South Dakota School of Mines and Technology has been developing field-based and remotely-sensed spectroscopic methods for mapping variations in the distribution and composition of metamorphic minerals. While the methods are currently only suitable for use in areas with minimal vegetative cover, they still provide an unprecedented opportunity to conduct basic research on geological processes in understudied parts of the world. Using state-of-the-art satellite, airborne, and ground-based remote sensing techniques and instrumentation in combination with field-based studies, the investigators will map variations in mineralogy, metamorphic conditions, and fluid flow in parts of the Damaran terrane in Namibia. Because of its minimal vegetative cover, this terrane provides excellent exposure of a variety of rock types. It also has a wide range of metamorphic conditions and many hydrothermal ore deposits. The project combines the US researchers expertise in petrology, mineral deposits, and geological remote sensing applications, with the Namibian investigators knowledge about their regional geology and ore deposits. This project complements the work of the Geological Survey of Namibia to map the Damaran stratigraphy and geochronology. The project results are expected to identify the geological environment in which new mineral resources may be identified, and they will be used to develop a database for mineral occurrences in Namibia. These results are expected to provide significant new information on the geology and ore deposits of the orogenic belt, thereby advancing our understanding and knowledge about Earth s system. Additionally, this project will help establish an important scientific and logistical framework for utilizing the new hyperspectral sensors to evaluate natural resources in Subsaharan Africa. The Division of International Programs and the Division of Earth Sciences are jointly providing funding for this project doc4795 none Lay Skoulakis: The ability to learn and remember epitomize the function of the nervous system in all animal species. Learning requires association of environmental stimuli such that they have predictive value and retention of these associations between stimuli over time underlies memory. Identification and characterization of the molecular mechanisms necessary for learning and memory is cardinal to our understanding of brain function and to eventually ameliorate, or cure brain malfunction. The specific problem addressed in this proposal focuses on the function of a very abundant group of brain proteins, the 14-3-3 proteins. The goals of the project are to utilize the simple, but genetically powerful Drosophila melanogaster system to investigate the properties of these proteins within the brain as they relate to learning and memory. Drosophila has been used extensively as a model system to discover genes and functions pertinent to human development. Since this model system is endowed with powerful molecular and genetic tools including the first animal genome to be fully sequenced, it offers a unique opportunity to study the function of these proteins within the context of the entire live organism. This system allows molecular, genetic histological and behavioral methods to be used to understand the role and regulation of 14-3-3 protein function in the brain. Despite their abundance and presence in every animal species, the precise role of 14-3-3 proteins, especially in the context of an entire organism is not well understood. With respect to learning and memory, or brain function in general little is known about the role of these proteins. Therefore, the proposed research will lead not only to better understanding of the functional properties of 14-3-3 proteins, but will elucidate basic molecular mechanisms of brain function essential for learning and memory doc4796 none SES 00- - Ronald R. Kline (Cornell University) - History of Information Theory As one of the cluster of innovations in computing, microelectronics, communications, and control announced to the general public in the late s, information theory forms part of the foundation for inventions in information technology which social commentators now herald as the primary cause of a so-called Information Revolution. Although scholars have challenged the technological determinism of such claims by investigating the social construction and use of communication systems, computers, and computer science, a scholarly book-length history of information theory does not exist. This award supports a PI as he investigates the intellectual, social, and cultural history of the creation of information theory in the United States and Britain by Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Dennis Gabor, Donald MacKay, and others, the widespread interest in applying the theory to biology and the social sciences in the s, its application to communications engineering and information processing in the s and s, and its links to discourses in economics and sociology about an information economy and an information society from the s to the present. The PI is particularly interested in the interrelated themes of boundary-work, the relationship between science and technology, and the role of users of scientific and engineering knowledge as agents of scientific and technological change. He is exploring the concept of boundary-work in regard to competition among scientific and engineering disciplines, such as communications engineering, mathematics, physics, economics, and sociology (instead of the division between science and non-science). In doing so, he is investigating boundary-work as a closure mechanism in scientific and engineering disputes, studying how contemporaries perceived the relationship between science and technology (instead of asking what the relationship was), and extending recent work on users in science and technology studies from everyday consumers to the realm of scientists and engineers. The PI s larger goal is to write a scholarly book about the development of the information theory in the United States (as the result of a series of negotiations among scientists, engineers, and mathematicians) and the connections between these actions and the later discourses on an Information Society. His immediate goal, however, is (with the support of this award) to finish the archival and journal research on this project and conduct interviews with key figures in information theory for the proposed book doc4797 none This project will identify materials and devices for the construction of Sensitive Skin. Sensitive Skins will enable machines to sense over their entire surface, operate in unstructured environments, and become cautious. The availability of Sensitive Skin would trigger a revolution in service automation, raise the efficiency of machine use, thereby greatly benefiting the environment, and provide powerful prosthetic devices to humans. The project will begin by exploring the incorporation of integrated circuit type metalization in bendable and stretchable passive circuits. Their physical components will be first meanders then helices of interconnect wires made by thin film techniques. These will be embedded near the neutral plane of the circuit structure. Active devices, primarily thin film transistors, at first will be confined to rigid platforms. Depending on advances made in the experimental and theoretical understanding of stretchable metalization, further experiments will address flexible active devices and circuits. The result of this project will be basic design rules for constructing Sensitive Skin doc4798 none SES 00- - Rima D. Apple (University of Wisconsin - Madison) Women s Bodies: The Gendered Construction of Science across Time and Cultures At the end of the 20th century, the history of bio-medical sciences, particularly its gendered contours, has attracted increasing attention from scholars of the history of science, the history of medicine, and women s history. This is an age of dramatic developments in bio-medical science and its history has become even more important as we seek to document the ways in which this new scientific knowledge has been produced. This award provides partial support for a workshop conference, Women s Bodies: The Gendered Construction of Science across Time and Cultures, which is intended to bridge scholarship generally separated by geography and discipline. Senior and younger scholars from the United States, Australia, and New Zealand will engage in an intensive cross-national and cross-cultural program that will highlight the history of the production of bio-medical knowledge, in particular beginning an international dialog to examine the critical role of gender in the evolution of science research and theory. The workshops, to be held at the University of Melbourne, Australia on 3 June , are designed to extend and strengthen international dialog on the history and significance of gender in the production of scientific knowledge by bringing together a small group of senior and younger scholars and graduate students in order to facilitate an intensive cross-cultural conversation. This award supports the travel and conference per diem costs of four United States scholars who will be involved in the leadership of the workshops. In highlighting the significance of the gendered development of critical science, Women s Bodies: The Gendered Construction of Science across Time and Cultures will foster creative and distinctive new avenues of international collaborative research. Moreover, the establishment of closer working relationships among the workshop presenters and attendees will serve as a cornerstone for an open-invitation international conference that will follow on 4-6 June . In addition, conference organizers are preparing to offer each workshop presenter from the United States a visiting research award that will enable speakers to extend their stays in Melbourne, conducting research in Australian materials and continuing collaborative efforts initiated during the conference. The workshop conference is distinctive in women s health history for its emphasis on the history of the production of scientific knowledge. Previous conferences on allied areas have ignored this critical foundational knowledge. Also, though some of the earlier conferences were international in scope, they did not incorporate scholarship and scholars from Australia and New Zealand. The proposed auxiliary activities -- the University of Melbourne-affiliated visiting researcher awards for United States participants, the subsequent public conference, and an integrative book -- will enrich and deepen the development of collaborative, international relationships fostered by the workshops of Women s Bodies: The Gendered Construction of Science across Time and Cultures doc4799 none Pezold This award supports ten US and four African participants in the US-West Africa Workshop on Niger River Aquatic and Riparian Vertebrate Conservation, to be held in Bamako, Mali, January . Overall, approximately 40 scientists, policy makers, and NGO representatives from the United States, Mali, Benin, Niger, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, and the European Union will participate. The co-organizers are Professor Frank L. Pezold, with the Museum of Natural History at Northeast Louisiana University, and Professor Mohamed Miaga, of the Department of Biology at the University of Mali. The participants, with their backgrounds in systematics, ecology, genetics, and behavior, will bring diverse perspectives to conservation questions and issues for the Niger River basin. The goals of the workshop are to establish collaborative associations that will stimulate multinational basic ecological and systematic research, and facilitate effective integration of vertebrate conservation initiatives in the Niger River basin. The Niger River and its surrounding area is a center of diversity. The river contains at least 243 fish species, representing 36 families (14 of which are endemic to the African continent). Additionally, the Niger River basin s floodplain wetlands provide habitat for both sedentary and migratory populations of semi-aquatic and terrestrial birds, bats, rodents, crocodilians, frogs, toads, and snakes, as well as migrating elephants. But little is known about the distribution and ecology of most of the fish species, and even for many of the larger riparian and terrestrial vertebrates basic information on their biology and ecology is scarce. The riparian and aquatic ecosystems supported by the Niger River are now being threatened by the increasing desertification of the Sahel, by the competing needs of wildlife and human populations, and by pollution. Conservation initiatives which are soundly based on scientific findings are needed to help alleviate the pressure on these threatened ecosystems. The workshop setting will enable the participants to identify mutual areas of research interest, and begin to establish long-term collaborations on the basic ecology and systematics of West African vertebrates. Also, they will begin to develop a shared international electronic database of species distributions, frequencies, and accessory ecological information, and they will start to create national reference collections. This workshop is being jointly funded by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Environmental Biology doc4800 none The Organizational Competitiveness project aims to explore the roles played by organizational culture and human resource management practices in fostering competitiveness in multinational corporations pursuing global strategies. The researchers seek to further theory and practice around the following questions: 1) How does organizational culture influence company performance in multinational firms? How important is the strength of organizational culture relative to its content? 2) Do human resource management policies and practices influence company performance in multinational firms? If so, what policies and practices are the most critical levers of performance, and how do they influence success? 3) What is the relationship between organizational culture and effective human resource management systems, on the one hand; and global mindset and boundary spanning on the other? What are the effects of these relationships in successful global companies? The sample for this study consists of 11 companies (35 research sites) headquartered in 8 countries across the US, Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Semi-structured face-to-face interviews with line and HRM executives and a written survey questionnaire fille dout by a random stratified sample of employees are the primary research methods, along with archival research. Finally, a survey will be administered to industry analysts to assess outside experts opinions on the current and expected long-term capability of each company in the sample. Contributions from the research will include a theoretical model of how organizational culture and HRM practices influence the performance of MNCs, and of the roles played by global mindset and boundary spanning structures and processes in implementing global strategy. In addition, the program will develop practical tools to measure factors in the model, as well as providing feedback to participating firms. The breadth and global scope of the sample will provide a comprehensive view of the impacts of organizational culture, the prevalence of global mindset and boundary spanning, as well as an unusually rich comparative assessment of global strategies doc4801 none This project proposes to investigate organizational change and innovation in higher education, particularly as regards applications of technology. More specifically, the study focuses attention on: 1) how organizational culture supports institutional innovation; 2) curriculum innovation; 3) the impact of information technology on the educational processes; 4) strategic partnerships in higher education; and 5) applications and relevance in research in educational institutions. The investigation will be undertaken in a collaborative network that includes nine partnering institutions. Comparisons will be made between three categories of institutions (three in each category): established universities that are aiming to transform themselves in light of new technology; start-up universities that have flexibility to operate differently from inception; and corporate new learning institutions that are supported by corporate funds and methodologies. Data will be collected on-site at each institution via interviews, surveys and archival information. The multi-institution, comparative nature of this collaborative inquiry is expected to enable participating institutions to form a much broader and deeper perspective on the impacts of technology and the ranges of organizational response, while providing the opportunity for partners both to learn from one another, and to develop an ongoing network for information exchange. In addition, the study will provide information on how various groups, including governments (Canadian and US), private industry and universities can partner together around innovation. As relatively little empirical research on IT impacts on higher education institutional change has been performed, this study is particularly interesting, and offers a broad perspective on technology s potential and impact in higher education. This preliminary study is expected to provide the groundwork for subsequent further and more detailed study doc4802 none This proposal represents Phase 3 of the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness Research Program (GLOBE). Phase 1 concerned scale development and validation of measurement instruments; Phase 2 collected data from 18,000 managers employed in over 1,000 organizations in 62 cultures. These data were used to test hypotheses derived from an integration of implicit leadership theory and structural contingency theory of organizational forms and practices. Phase 3 seeks to test additional hypotheses, some of which would deal with longitudinal relationships in the data. Phase 3 data will be collected from 50 top management teams in each of 23 societies that vary widely on nine core dimensions of societal culture. These data will be related to the nine core societal GLOBE dimensions previously measured in Phase 2. Data for Phase 3 have already been collected in four cultures, with this preliminary data being used to refine research instruments for subsequent data collection. Teams of Country Co-Investigators (CCIs) have made commitments to collect substantial additional data from 50 organizations in 23 cultures, with half of the organizations to be studied to be entrepreneurial for-profit organizations and half non-entrepreneurial for-profit organizations. Approximately 10 executives involved in substantial international business will be included in each country sample. Phase 3 will also assess the degree to which effective strategic organizational changes introduced by CEOs or top management teams are associated with the leader behavior of the CEOs and the effectiveness of the top management team. Interviews will be conducted and analyzed by CCIs to identify country-specific manifestations of the core leadership dimensions and other country-specific leader behavior, as well as major strategic changes in the recent past or planned for the near future. To date, over 100 GLOBE-related research reports have been presented at professional conferences, 30 scholarly articles based on Phase 1 and 2 research have been published, and 30 country-specific chapters based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative research have been completed. Funds are requested for Phase 3 data collection and analysis, further write-up of prior results (particularly editing of a planned anthology of completed chapters). It is anticipaed that Phase 3 findings will make a substantial contribution to the cross-cultural literature concerning leadership, organizational structure and strategy, and organizational change doc4803 none Project GEOS (Gender Equity Options in Science) extends into higher education a NSF project that for six years has provided career development for math science talented at risk girls. GEOS will follow up the participants of this project who are now in college, as well as provide guidance to young women who remain uncertain about their SMET majors. Career development workshops will be designed that encourage and mentor women in building strong career identities, in participating in leadership activities in their fields of interest, and in overcoming barriers to the attainment of their goals in math, science, engineering, and technology. GEOS involves (1) a year-long series of career development workshops (2) an overnight faculty-student retreat, and (3) a national seminar for university faculty to disseminate this project and teach gender equity strategies for SMET college women. This seminar will be offered in collaboration with the National Wakonse Fellowship for College Teaching, a consortium of universities committed to teaching improvement. Each summer, the model of career development and faculty mentoring developed at Arizona State University will be taught to 80 SMET faculty and college counselors from the eight universities attending the GEOS Wakonse Seminar. The staff, advisory board, student participants, and principle investigators will serve as trainers. Each faculty participant will develop a faculty development workshop or intervention for women based on techniques for career development and women friendly science. Reports on these projects will be collected into a summary of best practices to be disseminated among the 1,500 Wakonse Fellows online as well as available at cost to all participants doc4804 none This award provides partial support for a pilot program to develop and disseminate instructional materials on ethical issues in science via the mechanism of Sigma Xi sponsored workshops on university campuses. Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society, has 518 chapters, most of which are located at US colleges and universities. This support will allow a small, high-level workshop for planning and issue-focusing to occur, to be followed by a larger-scale pilot dissemination workshop. Both will focus on ethical issues in science and technology, ranging from issues of research ethics to issues of the social implications of science, engineering, and technology. Materials that can be used as foundations for coursework will be made available to other academic institutions. Sigma Xi envisages further dissemination workshops, as future funds may allow doc4805 none In the eyes of his contemporaries, Athanasius Kircher, S.J. ( - ) was one of the leading Catholic natural philosophers in Europe during the period between Galileo and Newton. With the coming of the Enlightenment, his star darkened-as did the repute of the bookish methods and arcane subjects that characterized his studies. In recent decades, however, the perspective has again transformed. Historians have made striking revaluation in the history of occult traditions, early modern Catholicism (in particular with respect to the Jesuits) and the post-Renaissance development of humanist scholarship. In addition, recent work in the history of science has dissolved the traditional, narrowly confined narrative of the scientific revolution and expanded the field of early modern science to encompass a wider body of ideas and practices. This dissertation project will investigate the significance of the study the cluster of intellectual traditions including natural magic, alchemy, astrology and kabbalah-known as the occult sciences in the middle of the seventeenth century, as reflected in Kircher s works and career. The researcher will use Kircher s work to demonstrate that the occult sciences presented early modern thinkers with a large and diverse collection of ideas from which it was possible to construct different interpretations, and that Catholic orthodoxy provided its adherents with more room for intellectual maneuvering than is commonly appreciated. By placing Kircher s views on occult topics in relation to the views of his intellectual opponents, the researcher seeks to delineate the range of meanings that adhered to different occult sciences and to identify the larger intellectual and religious issues at stake when early modern writers marked out positions on occult matters. By charting the changing reactions to Kircher s work by European scholars over the course of his long career, the researcher intends to address the much-vexed question of the demise of occult sciences as an important area of scientific inquiry at the end of the seventeenth-century. Support from this grant will allow the researcher to carry out primary source research in European archives and libraries for nine months during the academic year -- doc4806 none This project will investigate the performance-limiting effects of crystal defects on the electrical properties of p-n and Schottky diode junctions made in two important wide-gap semiconductor materials, silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN). These materials are both currently of great interest for high power, high temperature, high frequency electronic applications. GaN is also of interest for short wavelength optoelectronic applications. A major problem in these new materials is the effects of crystal defects on breakdown voltage, leakage currents, and other nonidealities of devices fabricated from them. The objective is therefore to systematically study the effects of various defect classes on electrical properties of junctions in each material, so that the most important defects can be identified and targeted for elimination. The defects will be studied using current-voltage and capacitance-voltage measurements, deep level transient spectroscopy (DLTS), electron beam induced current (EBIC) imaging, electroluminescence under forward and reverse bias, and thermal imaging. The nature of the crystalline defects will be determined using synchrotron white-beam X-ray topography (SWBXT), optical microscopy & selective etching, scanning electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy, and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Very small devices containing at most one defect will be studied to isolate the effects of specific defect types. Several methods of passivating the effects of defects will also be investigated. Industrial collaborations are planned with Motorola and Epitronics. A Ph.D. student will be educated, and information on wide gap materials and devices will be made widely available to other universities and the general public over the Internet doc4807 none Much natural resource policy work stresses the importance of involving lay and expert stakeholders in a dialogue about environmental values so as to inform decisions about land management. This proposal tests and develops the technique, narrative valuation, which is designed to address a problem basic to value elicitation contexts: The fact that discussions about values and land management are challenged by the simultaneous need to consider pragmatic and technical concerns (e.g. cost or inventories of threatened species) alongside ethical or spiritual concerns (e.g. the notion that nature has intrinsic value or forests inspire awe). The researchers posit that narratives offer a viable means for discussing and eliciting different values because they enhance information processing which in turn helps people manage cognitively complex problems, and because they employ a storied and descriptive language well-suited to describing states like awe or lay expressions of ethical concern. They will conduct a set of experiments meant to balance diverse expressions of value. Narrative valuation tools will be tested (against nonnarrative conditions) for their ability to address (a) the representation of technical and social variables; (b) the coexistence of numeric and nonnumeric expression of value (biological health can be measured as the number of returning salmon but how does one measure greater or lesser degrees of intrinsic value); (c) the linking of ethical values to appropriate policy actions; and (d) the use of verbal versus linguistic quantifiers and probability estimates. Further experiments will carefully examine problems of bias or persuasion potentially introduced by this method. These include narrator bias, the influence of different affective tones, and or the ability for narrative frames to emphasize some expressions of values at the expense of others. The project is expected to support the applicability of narrative valuation tools and to result in several papers published in peer reviewed journals covering environmental ethics and values, judgment and decision making doc4808 none This project involves the shipboard measurement of real-time individual particle size and chemical composition during the ACE-Asia field experiment. These measurements will be made aboard the NOAA research vessel Ron Brown using a transportable aerosol time-of-flight mass spectrometer (ATOFMS). The measurements will provide physical and chemical properties of aerosol particles, quantification of physical and chemical processes controlling their evolution, and assessment of the role of chemical composition of aerosol particles in climate change. Of particular interest will be to assess the degree of mixing and reaction aging of the particles present in the sampling locations in order to evaluate their temporal and chemical variability. The proposed ATOFMS single particle analysis will help identify and allocate relative contributions from different sources, using distinct combinations of ion markers from the single particle mass spectra doc4809 none Systemic Research, in collaboration with Research and Evaluation Associates, Inc., propose to conduct a three-year CPMSA evaluative study. The proposed evaluative study effort consists of four distinct deliverables: 1. TISC data collection: Collect upgraded annual TISC data (both quantitative and qualitative) for the next three years. 2. Annual CPMSA Fact Book with a Narrative Progress : Compile and publish CPMSA Fact Books based on TISC with an additional section for a narrative progress summary. 3. CPMSA Case Stories: Publish exemplary CPMSA success stories based on two site visits each year. 4. CPMSA Evaluative Study Report: Publish an overall program evaluative study report each year focusing on causal inferential statistical models doc4810 none Ratchford The Meeting of the Interciencia Association will provide representative from scientific organizations in 20 countries of the Western Hemisphere with the opportunity to meet and discuss their latest achievements and possible collaborative work. This event will also support the participation of these representatives in the next Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in Washington, DC. The AAAS Annual Meeting will be the premier scientific event in the US during the year . Principal outcomes of the proposed activities would be both valuable personal interactions with international scientists and science reporters and an increased visibility for the Interciencia Association and its scientific journal. Recognizing that these activities would represent a significant contribution to scientific collaboration in the Americas, AAAS and the Organization of American States (OAS) have already made a significant financial commitment to support the event doc4811 none The effects of a wide variety of policy changes and economic shocks depend crucially on the ease with which labor can be reallocated from one industry or geographic location to another. This is particularly true of the distributional effects of changes in the economic environment. For example: (i) The distributional consequences of eliminating the Multifibre Arrangement, which has protected the U.S. textiles and apparel industry from international trade, depend crucially on how easily the workers in that sector can find employment in other sectors. (ii) The effects of a cut in income taxes in one state depend on how easy it is for workers in other states to move in response. (iii) The effects of immigration into a particular region of the country depend on how fluid labor is between that region and others, a question of particular importance to states such as California, Florida and Texas. (iv) The effects of privatization and rationalization of the public-sector workforce in post-communist and less developed countries depends on the ease with which the workers thus released can integrate themselves into other sectors of the economy. (v) The costs of labor mobility determine the extent to which the effects of regional labor demand shocks is mitigated by inter-regional labor flows. Surprisingly, given the wide range of issues in which the costs of labor mobility play a critical role, there is very little direct evidence on the magnitude of these costs, and how, they vary across categories of workers, sectors, and regions. This project aims to fill that gap. An integrated framework, which combines a fully-specified theoretical model within which to think about the economic implications of mobility costs with an estimation strategy that derives directly from the model, is used to generate estimates of intersectoral and geographic moving costs for various worker categories. These estimates are used to answer questions such as: Are skilled workers more mobile geographically, but less mobile across industries, than unskilled? What are the costs in terms of reduced mobility of being a homeowner? Has technical change made it easier for skilled workers to switch industries? The estimates are then used to conduct a number of specific policy simulations, among them a study of the desirability of gradualism in implementing trade liberalization in the U.S. and an analysis of the impact of immigration on local labor markets. Time-series data on wages and gross labor flows across region-cum-industry cells, constructed from 28 years of the March Current Population Survey files, provide the main basis for estimation. These data are supplemented with data from other sources in carrying out the program of policy analysis doc4812 none Shi The objective of this proposal is to develop innovative IV-VI mid-infrared vertical-cavity surface-emitting (VCSEL) lasers. Results from the first IV-VI VCSEL that the PI s recently demonstrated were very promising. Further research and development on such lasers could lead to continuous wave (cw) room temperature operation that will substantially advance the state of the art of mid-IR diode lasers to meet the application needs. Mid-infrared lasers have large market potential and high academic interests. Desired performance requirements for diode lasers that are not currently available include continuous wave (cw) operation at room temperature, spectral purity, and high output powers with good beam quality. The IV-VI quantum well devices to be studied under this proposal will have key advantages to meet these needs. Among narrow gap semiconductors, IV-VI materials such as PbSe have suppressed Auger non-radiative loss (by an order of magnitude over the best III-V quantum wells) and much lighter electron and hole masses that lead to further reduction of the lasing thresholds. Previously these have enabled lead salt lasers to set and maintain the records for maximum operating temperatures for both pulsed and cw operation among all mid-IR semiconductor diodes. They also provide advantages of wide temperature and current tuning because of the strong bandgap energy dependence on temperature. Especially exciting is the prospect of IV-VI quantum well (QW) vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELS) on BaF2 [111] substrates, which will have significantly improved heat dissipation, an excellent beam quality with a circular and near-diffraction-limited single-mode, very low threshold that could allow room temperature cw operation. High quality alternating BaF2 and Pbl-x SrxSe materials can be grown together. Because of the large contrast of refractive indices, distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) with only 3-pair quarter wavelength layers will provide reflectivity of nearly 100% with very broad bandwidth. Due to the broad DBR bandwidth, the alignment of the cavity resonance with the gain peak is not as difficult as in other semiconductor DBRs, which allows for a wide range of temperature tuning. Such broadband mirrors also eliminate mode hopping, reduce the fundamental lateral spread of the cavity mode and thus allow an extremely low threshold to be achieved. Recently the PI s have demonstrated the first IV-VI VCSELs and the initial results are very encouraging In the proposed research graduate students will be exposed to diverse experimental techniques and will develop an excellent grasp of cutting-edge technology. The combination of nano-scale material science, opto-electronics and processing technology provides an excellent opportunity for education doc4813 none The goal of this research is to document the effects of photoperiod (day length) on immune function. Dr. Nelson s previous studies have indicated that high energetic demands can compromise immune function. Field studies also suggest that immune function, assessed indirectly, is compromised when energy requirements are high, especially during the winter. The proposed research examines how animals predict the onset of winter with photoperiodic information, and use this information to bolster immune function prior to the immunosuppressive effects of winter. The proposed studies will directly assess immune function among individuals under various energetic challenges or in different reproductive states. Both cell-mediated and humoral immunity will be examined. In some experiments, the effects of natural energetic stressors on immune function will be examined, whereas in other experiments, pharmacological manipulation of metabolic fuel availability will test the role of these metabolic fuels on immune function. The significance of this work lies in its potential contribution to understanding how natural stressors influence immune function, and to determining the effects of certain hormones, leptin and melatonin, in mediating these effects. Many people experience compromised immune function when exposed to stressors. By studying how rodents naturally cope with seasonally-recurring stressors, physiological coping mechanisms might be discovered that could help in the development of treatments aimed at preventing immunosuppression during stress among people. The development of such therapies (e.g., melatonin treatment regimens or gene therapy) would benefit people who function under energetically-demanding conditions (such as military, firefighters, or medical doctors) who are at risk for many stress-related illnesses. From an evolutionary perspective, these studies also provide a mechanistic link between life history strategies and reproductive and survival costs doc4814 none Sensory cells in the nose respond to odors and send signals back to the olfactory bulb of the brain. These cells live for only a few weeks and, when they die, they are replaced by maturing cells from a germinal cell layer in the olfactory tissue. The maturing cells extend their axons into the olfactory bulb where they replace the contacts made by the axons of the dying neuron. The ability of the olfactory receptor epithelium to reconstitute itself in this fashion is unique because neurons in other sensory systems are not replaced if they die. Of particular interest is the fact that if the olfactory bulb is removed, the axons of maturing sensory neurons will continue to grow until they reach brain tissue. They will then make synaptic contact with neurons that do not normally receive inputs from olfactory receptor cells. While this remarkable example of neural plasticity has been demonstrated in anatomical studies, it remains unclear whether these new synaptic contacts can be used by the brain to support the sense of smell. We propose to examine this issue by removing the olfactory bulb in neonatal rats and testing their ability to detect and discriminate odors when they are adults. Operated rats will be trained in a precision olfactometer device to determine their odor sensitivity and whether they can discriminate among odors. Behavioral results will be correlated with an anatomical analysis of forebrain connections originating from the olfactory bulb. A positive outcome would provide evidence for a hitherto unrecognized ability of the brain to utilize novel information and translate it into conscious sensory signal doc4815 none The project submitted in response to NSF 96-145, will build on established activities exploring high performance mechanisms for interoperable distributed digital libraries. In particular, the project will draw on existing efforts related to the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) to demonstrate effective retrieval.across multiple repositories in the US and Mexico. The project will test new integration of diverse systems which exemplify agent, federated search, and multiple database gateway approaches to distributed processing. The testbed aspect of the project aims to advance and facilitate sharing of research in a proven international, multilingual collaborative environment. This project is highly pluralistic and will engage researchers and students from universities in the US and Mexico with high potential for extension to other sites located around the globe doc4816 none A one day meeting, an East Coast Computer Algebra Day (ECCAD), will be held at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario on Saturday, May 13, . The meeting is the seventh of the series, which has been held at a variety of US East Coast locations since . We expect 60-80 participants will be from the computer algebra research community or interested in scientific engineering applications of computer algebra, drawn from the eastern half of North America, but especially from the East Coast of the United States. The meeting includes invited talks and contributed poster software demo sessions, covering the breadth of computer algebra: algorithms, software, and applications. The organizing committee intends to give preference to funding students and recent Ph.Ds who plan to make a presentation at the meeting doc4817 none Diffendorfer The San Diego State University - Undergraduate Mentoring in Environmental Biology project integrates individual research experiences, one-on-one mentoring, and group-based cooperative learning to help develop students that excel in their pursuit of graduate degrees and careers in Environmental Biology. The program will support three cohorts of nine students and focuses broadly on Human Impacts on Biodiversity . Students will travel to Alaska or England, and Mexico during their experience. The nine students form an Integrated Research Group (IRG), which consists of three learning groups. A learning group includes three students, a graduate assistant and a faculty mentor. Each learning group s focus coincides with the research program of its mentor: Habitat Fragmentation, Biodiversity or Global Climate Change. The IRG advances as learning groups share their findings and synthesize knowledge across the research foci. The UMEB project will help students from under-represented groups become broadly-trained and highly motivated professionals in Environmental Biology, a field currently lacking this representation. The research focus on a timely topic will teach students how science can help solve societal problems, thus encouraging them to acquire and apply a range of scientific skills. In addition, the teaching methodologies and organization of the program set a high standard in student training and will be disseminated to other educators doc4818 none The goal of this project is to integrate Si-based tunnel diodes with CMOS and SiGe HBT technology to demonstrate circuits which exhibit higher circuit speed, reduced component count, and lowered power consumption, and which extend CMOS on the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) Roadmap without a linewidth reduction. The proposed project would establish an integrated program by involving universities (Delaware and Rochester Institute of Technology) and government research laboratories (Naval Research Laboratory) with the goal of making the first Si-based tunnel diode integrated circuit. The research will focus on simple tunnel diode circuits which combine Si-based tunnel diodes with CMOS and SiGe HBT technology. The work will be synergistic with another project (NSF-ITR) involving Michigan, Delaware, NRL and RIT which proposes to study the new circuits enabled by this technology. This proposed project focuses upon developing integration recipes with CMOS and HBTs. This body of work includes: studying the back-end thermal budget for unmetalized CMOS to withstand tunnel diode processing; finding appropriate cleaning etchants which prepare the surface for MBE overgrowth while being benign to the pre-existing CMOS; develop selective etchants to remove unwanted poly-crystalline MBE growth atop the CMOS; perform MBE overgrowth into pre-defined windows atop source drain implants; examine possible emitter base junction displacement with tunnel diode overgrowth; develop selective etchants to mesa etch the TD atop the HBT structure; and realize some simple tunnel diode transistor circuits. The Si-based tunnel diodes have already been developed (NSF CAREER- Berger, DARPA- Ultra Electronics) and are currently being optimized (NSF GOALI-Berger, NRL and Raytheon). SiGe HBT integration will be performed by Delaware and by the NRL team, who have considerable experience in the growth and fabrication of SiGe HBTs. For this proposed project, Dr. Phillip Thompson at NRL will perform the MBE growths, Delaware will perform tunnel diode and SiGe HBT fabrication and testing, and RIT will perform the CMOS fabrication. Strong interaction between the University of Delaware, the Naval Research Laboratory and Rochester Institute of Technology will foster open discussion and dialogue. This proposal seeks to bring together circuit designers, semiconductor device engineers and CMOS technologists for the sole purpose of realizing tunnel diode transistor circuits on a Si platform. Undergraduate research and student training will play a significant role at Delaware through existing and anticipated NSF REU supplements and at RIT through their student-run CMOS factory and RIT s senior thesis projects. RIT s budget includes an undergraduate researcher. The cross-disciplinary work and site visits to NRL research labs will enhance the educational process doc4819 none Lin - This research involves the development of a nanomembrane reactor as a molecular extruder for efficient production of chemicals. The reactor contains an inorganic membrane with catalytically active straight nanopores, and can be considered as a bundle of nano-sized reactor tubes. By adjusting the nanopore dimensions, selecting an appropriate active coating species, and optimizing the reaction conditions, the PI can manipulate the reaction mechanism or path for synthesis of molecules at high yield or with special properties, unattainable by the conventional technologies. The research is aimed at demonstrating the synthesis methodology of the straight-nanopore membranes and the technical feasibility of the membrane reactor concept incorporating them, for the production of polyethylene nanofibers. For this initial exploratory phase, alumina-silica membranes with straight pores of 3-5 nm diameter and 10-100 mm in length will be tested. They will be constructed by modifying straight Anopore alumina membranes by atomic layer chemical vapor deposition of silica. The internal pore surfaces of the nanopores will be modified by a metallocene catalyst. The reactor will be tested by using it to synthesize polyethylene nanofibers with polymer chains oriented in one direction doc4820 none Wunsch Nonlinear non-stationary large-scale systems such as electric power networks, telecommunication networks, financial and transportation systems are difficult to control and manage. Mathematical models of such systems are typically derived based on linear techniques, and wide margins of safety ensure stable operation. Advanced identification and control schemes are necessary in order to improve the throughput-versus-reliability tradeoff of such systems. Preliminary work by these PIs has shown that advanced, value-based control methods can substantially improve the ability of individual turbogenerators to tolerate unexpected system disturbances. This project will extend that work to distributed networks of power generators and power grids in general. The underlying technology is an advanced form of learning-based Approximate Dynamic Programming or Reinforcement Learning which outputs measures of value for individual variables, or dynamic shadow prices, rather than the conventional measures of global strategic utility. Success in this area may also have benefits for other domains where distributed control and distributed intelligence are needed doc4821 none The goal of this focussed research group (FRG) grant is to create an integrated model for all of the steps associated with the metal alloy design process. The approach is an integrated combination of computational and experimental materials science among six universities and four national laboratories. The selection of Ni-base alloys and alpha beta Ti alloys as focal points for the alloy design is based on the availability of a well developed Ni-base alloy data bank that places nickel alloys on a much firmer footing than alpha beta Ti-base alloys. This allows a useful comparison between the ability to model the two alloy systems. The funds requested go almost entirely to student support at the participating universities, thereby providing superb educational value. Industry has endorsed the effort with additional support from eight companies at $30K year (and more participation is expected). The State of Ohio will add $500,000 for the first year s funding based on the NSF support. NSF funding is primarily from the Division of Materials Research with participation from the Division of Civil and Mechanical Systems in the Engineering Directorate. %%% The ultimate goal of this research effort is to produce an integrated set of computational tools for the development and optimization of new and existing materials to such a degree that its application will replace the need for costly experimental testing schedules. This will permit the introduction of new materials that are characterized by an appropriate degree of maturity within a framework of reduced cost and time doc4822 none Suryanarayana The international conference THERMEC is planned for Las Vegas, NV, December 4-8, . Two earlier THERMEC conferences were held in Japan ( ) and Australia ( ). It was decided to hold this conference in the US because of the cutting-edge materials research that is being carried out in different academic, government, and industrial laboratories in the US. THERMEC Conference topics include materials advancements in light metal alloys (aluminum, magnesium, and titanium), steels, composites, superalloys, coatings, and superconductors and related materials processing and fabrication techniques. The NSF support is directed toward assisting graduate students in attending the meeting. %%% The scientific knowledge of materials has reached a level that permits the development of advanced materials by innovative, closely-controlled processing and fabrication techniques. This conference examines recent progress in this field doc4823 none SES 00- - Janet Abbate (University of Maryland, College Park) Fifty Years of Women in Computing This award supports a project designed to document the contributions and experiences of American and British women who were active in computing between and . The project includes travel to conduct interviews with 70 to 90 women who were employed in computer science departments, the software industry, or business computing during this period. The award also supports archival research at several locations in the United States and United Kingdom. This research will provide the basis for a scholarly book that analyzes how notions of gender shaped both women s opportunities in the computing professions and the practice of computer science and programming. In addition, the project will create a valuable collection of oral histories that will be made available to researchers at an established archive. This study will give historians, science studies and women s studies scholars, and the general public an increased understanding of the role of gender in shaping science and technology. By publicizing women s past achievements in computing, the study will also encourage women to enter an area of science in which they have been under-represented doc4824 none The question of the origins, composition, and reactivity of the dissolved organic matter that is found throughout the world ocean is one of central importance in chemical oceanography. In particular, there has been much speculation about the possible importance of the reaction products of amino acids and reducing sugars (so-called amino sugars) and their relation to the biochemistry of marine bacteria. In this project, researchers at the University of South Carolina will determine the origins, abundance, and composition of amino sugars in marine organisms and in particulate, colloidal, and dissolved organic matter. Three component efforts will be undertaken. First, the principal investigator will conduct a survey of the abundance and composition of amino sugars, neutral sugars, and D L amino acids in marine organisms, POM, colloids, and DOM from the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Then, the relative reactivities of amino and neutral sugars will be evaluated and compared in an assessment of their use as diagenetic (water column and sediment reaction) indicators. And finally, a series of field surveys and decomposition studies will be used to assess the importance of bacteria as sources of amino sugars and DOM in seawater doc4825 none Light-dependent chloroplast movements have been observed in many plants including algae, moss, ferns, and angiosperms. These chloroplast movements have been hypothesized to serve adaptive functions such that movement of chloroplasts to the upper and lower surfaces of cells in low light may improve light capture, whereas chloroplast movement to the sides of cells may protect them from photodamage. The experiments outlined in this proposal incorporate a combination of genetic, molecular and physiological approaches to understand the mechanism of chloroplast movements and to test the hypothesized adaptive significance. The proposed work is expected to lead to the identification of the photoreceptor system(s) for light-induced chloroplast movement, elucidate the motility mechanism(s) responsible for the movement, provide insights into the nature of the signal transduction pathway, and allow us to determine the functional significance of chloroplast movements during plant growth and development. Understanding how light-induced chloroplast movements impact photosynthetic potential could lead to agricultural applications. In addition to the training of one postdoctoral fellow and two graduate students during the award period, the participation of several undergraduate students throughout this project is also anticipated doc4826 none Smith The Conference on Future Directions in Distributed Parameter Systems will provide a forum that illustrates past accomplishments in distributed parameter systems and indicates open questions, challenges, and future research directions. The organizers have contacted and received tentative acceptance from 14 plenary speakers who will address the state of the art and future research directions in their respective fields. The plenary speakers will also be asked to write 10-15 page chapters, summarizing the perspectives and recommendations made in their addresses, which will be published within a year after the conference. Secondly, younger scientists will be invited to present contributed talks that focus on specific applications modeled by distributed parameter systems. This will provide the younger scientists with exposure to the perspectives provided by the plenary speakers and a mechanism for disseminating their own research. The conference is scheduled for October 5-7, at North Carolina State University. Significant advances in both theoretical and computational resources have recently facilitated the development and implementation of distributed parameter models and control designs that incorporate the full spatial and temporal behavior of complex physical systems. Because distributed parameter methods are based on the physical mechanisms that produce the system dynamics, the approach provides advanced capabilities with regard to system design and control. The Conference on Future Directions in Distributed Parameter Systems, which is scheduled for October 5-7, at North Carolina State University, will provide a forum that illustrates past accomplishments in this field and indicates open questions, challenges, and future research directions. The organizers have contacted and received tentative acceptances from 14 internationally recognized scientists who will address the state of the art and future research directions in their respective fields. The plenary speakers will also be asked to write 10-15 page chapters summarizing the perspectives and recommendations made in their addresses. These will be published within a year after the conference. Secondly, younger scientists will be invited to present contributed talks that focus on specific applications modeled by distributed parameter systems. This will provide the younger scientists with exposure to the perspectives provided by the plenary speakers and a mechanism for disseminating their own research doc4827 none Research on the complex interactions among human and natural components of the integrated Earth system have highlighted the need to understand both individual and collective perceptions and actions of human beings, because people operate both as individuals and as members of groups and institutions. Institutions figure prominently both as causes of large-scale environmental changes and through direct response and through establishment of the frameworks of responses to changing environmental conditions. This award provides renewed support for the International Project Office (IPO) of the Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change (IDGEC) project. IDGEC is one of four major core projects of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change Programme (IHDP), which is an international collaborative research program overseen by the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), with cooperation from the International Social Science Council (ISSC). IDGEC seeks to understand the roles that institutions play in causing and confronting a range of environmental changes. IDGEC provides a framework for a series of collaborative research activities conducted by social scientists from a broad range of nations. That framework focuses on three major sets of issues: (1) Causality (How much of the variance in the condition of ecosystems is attributable to human institutions?); (2) Performance (Why are some institutional responses to environmental problems more successful than others?); and (3) Design (How should institutions be structured to maximize their performance?). The IDGEC-IPO plays a critical role in the success of this research project by catalyzing and coordinating a global network of scientists pursuing a common research agenda. Through continued support for the IPO, the infrastructure for the conduct of current and future international collaborations focusing on this important set of problems will be strengthened, and the U.S. will give a positive signal to other nations regarding the value and utility of major international collaborative efforts doc4828 none s of cultural elements, rewarded behaviors, and organizational metaphors, as well as measures of culture strength and degree of use of cultural elements. It considers parallel measures of organizational culture and individual culture preferences, and examines the potential role of a variety of key individual difference variables, including work values, propensity to commitment, positive affect, the Big-5 personality variables, and propensity to prosocial behaviors doc4829 none The brain is the most powerful information processor known. Part of its power derives from its ability to combine (or integrate) information from multiple sensory systems. For example, we can combine sight, sound, and touch in forming an integrated perception of events in our environment. Combining input from multiple sensory systems is known as multisensory integration. Understanding how multisensory integration actually works in the brain will provide important insights into the nature of perception. In studying perception it is important to realize that, no matter how good sensory systems may be, they can t provide perfect information. The information provided by sensory systems must be considered as uncertain to some extent. Perception may involve the use of sensory inputs to provide evidence of events in the environment. The superior colliculus is a brain structure that causes mammalian animals (like us) to turn our heads and eyes in the direction of new events in the environment. Many neurons in the superior colliculus receive inputs from more than one sensory system. These multisensory neurons exhibit a property know as multisensory enhancement, in which the response to an input from one sensory system can be greatly increased by input from another sensory system. We have developed an hypothesis that multisensory enhancement is the result of processing by which collicular neurons use multisensory input to compute the probability that an event has occurred in the environment. The goal of our project is to develop a model that explains how neurons might actually perform this computation, and then use actual data from collicular neurons to test the model. The computational model we propose will be adaptive, that is, capable of changing its own behavior on the basis of its experience with the environment. It will be composed of two stages that are meant to represent two separate stages in the development of multisensory enhancement in the brain. Collicular neurons are known to receive multisensory inputs from both lower and higher levels in the brain. In the first stage, model collicular neurons will learn to extract the maximum amount of information from lower-level multisensory inputs. In the second stage, model collicular neurons with use higher-level multisensory inputs to refine their computation of the probability of events in the environment. We will test this model by comparing its behavior with that of actual collicular neurons studied in cats. Our model predicts that the amount of multisensory enhancement observed for collicular neurons should depend upon other properties such as the location of those neurons in the colliculus. Our model should also make predictions concerning how the behavior of collicular neurons should change when the higher-level inputs are removed. Proposing a detailed model of multisensory enhancement and testing the model against actual data should provide us with some new insights into how multisensory enhancement may be organized in the brain. A better understanding of this more basic form of multisensory integration might open the door for a better understanding of perception in general doc4830 none Many essential biological signals, ranging from DNA transcription to immunological responses to infection, can be activated and controlled by a single or a few molecules or in the cell; therefore, the capability for measurement of dynamical functions of individual biomolecules in vivo and in vitro is necessary for effective biophysical research. The objective of this award is to create effective instrumentation for observing and understanding these sensitive life processes, and as a byproduct to enhance the molecular sensitivity of analytical microchip biotechnology. Non-invasive optical detection of individual biomolecules and location with nanometer precision and measurement of the dynamics of individual molecular functions in vivo or in vitro is needed. Optical microscopic imaging of fluorescence is a promising approach, but access to single molecule processes is tenuous, although individual molecules have been detectable in special cases for many years. The aim of this award is to develop a user-friendly, benign optical nanoscope for single molecule detection and localization at nanometer scales on living cells for biophysical research. Recent research on fluorescence of individual molecules has revealed photophysical pathology that confounds many biophysical applications at the single molecule level, but fortunately promising research approaches have been discovered that may yield satisfactory optical probes. The optical nanoscope development relies on multiphoton laser microscopy (MPM) and fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS). Combining these methods enhanced by precision nanostructure fabrications, new optimized optics and new software developments provides the basis to design and construct a purpose-designed optical Nanoscope complex for optimized single molecule dynamical measurements using FCS with MPM imaging for nanometer molecular localization in cellular and tissue structures. The equipment to be purchased consists of the components required to develop, construct and optimize the optical nanoscope on a timeline of about three years. The development of single molecule optical probes utilizes photophysical instrumentation to measure optical dynamics from hundreds of picoseconds to hundreds of seconds with time correlated single photon counting, fluorescence correlation spectroscopy, photon burst analysis, and spectral recording, all at the single molecule level. Human resource development comprises an inherent byproduct of this program through interdisciplinary training of participating predoctoral and postdoctoral students and visiting scientists in several disciplines. They can be expected on the basis of our past experience to become effective biophysical researchers as academic faculty, technology managers, and research and development leaders doc4831 none The stress response of mammals is a complex response to stimuli such as severe environmental change that might otherwise be deleterious to the whole organism. The appropriate response requires the interplay of the nervous system and production of certain hormones that prepare the animal to adapt physiologically to the stressful challenge. Certain peptide neurohormones and neurotransmitters in the key brain region of the hypothalamus are critically involved in stress-activation, but the fine regulation of these basic mechanisms is poorly understood. This project is designed to uncover the specific role of a recently discovered neuropeptide, PACAP (pituitary adenylate cyclase-activating polypeptide), in stress-activation in the hypothalamus. Neuropeptides are small, protein-like molecules that serve specific functions in the brain, and help establish or maintain communication between nerve cells (neurons). PACAP is an intriguing molecule presumed to have important functions in adaptive functions such as stress-activation. Biochemical, molecular, anatomical and immunocyctochemical methods are used in this research to determine where, when and how PACAP regulates the gene expression and the release of a key hormone, CRH (corticotropin-releasing hormone) from a population of cells in the hypothalamus. Results will be important not only for neuroendocrinology, but also potentially for many systems where PACAP may have a novel role as a co-transmitter with classical neurotransmitters like catecholamines. This project will also have an impact on the development of the career of a young investigator doc4832 none Calmodulin (CaM) proteins function to transduce a chemical signal (increase in cytosolic calcium) into a biochemical signal. The ability of the CaM protein to recognize and functionally interact with a target protein is essential in this signal transduction process. In many organisms, with the exception of plants, there exist one or two CaM-type proteins. In the model organism Arabidopsis thaliana there are seven known CaM proteins and five additional CaM-related proteins. Further analysis of the Arabidopsis genome suggests that there are at least an additional 13 potential CaM-related proteins. In this project, the biochemical and functional difference between three CaM-related proteins will be addressed. These proteins all possess conserved cysteine residues, which are proposed to form a disulfide bond. This PI will investigate the role of the cysteine residues and potential disulfide bond formation in calcium binding and in binding to a hydrophobic resin. If disulfide bond formation appears to influence the ability of the proteins to bind calcium and to interact with hydrophobic surfaces, the cysteine residues will be individually mutated. The mutated protein will then be expressed and purified to test the effect of elimination of specific cysteine residues on the biochemical activity of these proteins doc4833 none The foci of this research are threefold. First, the development of synthetic methodology using the Zr-catalyzed enantioselective carboalumination of alkenes will be carried out. Second, the chemistry of ate complexes of Zr, Ti and other early transition metals, especially in the area of 1,2-migratory insertion reactions will be probed. Third, Zr-catalyzed carbometallation and Pd-catalyzed cross coupling reactions will be used for the synthesis of carotenoids and other polyconjugated natural products. With this renewal award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Ei-ichi Negishi of the Department of Chemistry at Purdue University. Professor Negishi will focus his work on developing new synthetic methodology using organotransition metal compounds of early transition metals, especially zirconium and titanium. The methodology, in turn, will be used to prepare natural products having interesting biological properties. The work has broader impacts for the pharmaceutical industry and for materials science. Further, the project is an excellent venue for the training of graduate students doc4834 none Using model cell systems for cell growth control, the principal investigator and others have advanced the concept that ion channels are integral components of the central growth factor proto-oncoprotein oncoprotein growth regulatory signaling networks. Specifically, the laboratory of the principal investigator has identified a fibroblast intermediate conductance, calcium-activated, potassium channel, FIK, that is selectively up-regulated in response to growth factor or oncoprotein stimulated mitogenic signaling. In addition, specific block of FIK function with peptidyl toxins has been shown to reversibly inhibit cell proliferation. FIK has also been shown to regulate transcriptional activity of the MRF4 muscle regulatory transcription factor in 10T1 2-MRF4 fibroblasts, a model cell system for defining the linkage between signaling events at the cell membrane and growth regulatory transcription events. A key hypothesis for how FIK regulates cell growth is that it insures consistent hyperpolarization of the cell membrane to or near the potassium equilibrium potential. The model predicts that this hyperpolarizing action will, in turn, promote mitogenic calcium entry via growth factor activated, voltage-independent calcium channels. In support of this idea, preliminary studies have identified a calcium channel in 10T1 2-MRF4 fibroblasts which is activated by bFGF, an important growth regulatory peptide for these cells. Thus, a wealth of published work and preliminary data have identified FIK and peptide growth factor activated calcium channels as key physiologic regulators of cell growth. The long term goal of this project is to define how these channels regulate cell growth, thus providing a unique insight into this aspect of cell physiology. Specific project goals are: 1. Establish a mechanistic basis for the role of FIK in cell growth regulatory signaling. Physiological and pharmacological means will be used to examine the link between FIK channel regulation and growth control in fibroblast cells, with the 10T1 2-MRF4 model system being exploited to understand how FIK modulates growth-associated transcription. 2. Homology clone the fibroblast IK channel (FIK). An homology cloning strategy will be implemented based on the sequence of recently cloned human calcium-activated potassium channels. Physiology of the heterologously expressed cloned channels is remarkably similar to the fibroblast IK which this lab has extensively characterized. Cloning FIK will ultimately allow utilization of a number of approaches (inducible expression, antisense inhibition of native expression, point mutations to perturb ionic selectivity, etc.) to determine how the channel regulates cell growth doc4835 none Late Prehistoric Cultural Dynamics and the Subsistence Parameters of Whaling at Wales, Alaska. : The Wales archaeology project focuses on a community in Alaska that, during contact period, comprised a population of at least 500 individuals. Historically the village was a primary socioeconomic center in northwest Alaska. Wales people engaged in trade and warfare with Asiatic Eskimos; these activities may have drawn the large Wales population to the location. This circumstance provides perhaps the best opportunity in western Alaska to examine the possibility of social ranking in late prehistoric Eskimo society. The results of this analysis will therefore pertain directly to sociopolitical and socioterritorial studies of hunter-gatherer groups worldwide, and they will contribute substantially to increased understanding of developing complexity in egalitarian societies as they are transformed into formally ranked social groups such as those that have been documented in the Northwest Coast culture area. Analyses of trait distributions will also examine relations between the late prehistoric Eskimo manifestations at three sites in the Wales locality. The sites contain faunal remains, which can illuminate the context in which the prehistoric human predation of whales was carried out against the background of simultaneous exploitation of various non-cetacean marine and terrestrial fauna. Preliminary findings indicate that non-cetacean sea mammals played a much larger role in the economy of Wales than has been suggested previously, and they raise a number of questions concerning the carrying capacity of the local resources in relation to the exceedingly large number of human inhabitants of the locality. Further development of the faunal database and accompanying analysis will illuminate how the large, concentrated population used local resources. The results will contribute to an increased precision in interpretations of the role of mega-fauna in prehistoric Pleistocene and Holocene human subsistence economies doc4836 none Mousseau The University of South Carolina (USC) and its partners have formed a South Carolina Statewide Coalition (SC2 ) to support talented undergraduate students from under-represented groups in an environmental biology research endeavor. In partnership with several South Carolina Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and state agencies, this Undergraduate Mentoring in Environmental Biology (UMEB) project will be a key element of a comprehensive initiative aimed at training and preparing minority undergraduates for graduate programs in science and mathematics. SC2-UMEB will train students and their mentors in a wide range of environmental technologies and concepts, ranging from ecological and conservation genetics to ecosystems studies, and will integrate with other ongoing undergraduate training programs in genetics, molecular biology, ecology and evolution. The SC2-UMEB program will feature a course that introduces participants to environmental biology research, summer research experiences in academic and or a government research laboratories, assistance and counsel from mentor teams (faculty, graduate students and other researchers), academic year research experiences at the students home campuses, and financial support for travel to professional meetings. The project links the SC2 UMEB partners with other minority research collaborations (e.g., the Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP) programs, the Minority Institutions of Excellence (MIE) program, the Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program) across the nation, as well as the Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN) graduate program which provides 25 PHD fellowships for qualified students from under-represented groups wishing to pursue graduate degrees in science and mathematics at USC. SC2-UMEB fellows will have the opportunity to select and engage in active research programs addressing basic environmental issues including genetic, behavioral and ecological responses to environmental change, conservation and restoration biology of terrestrial, coastal and marine ecosystems, and ecological community response to natural and anthropogenic contaminants doc4837 none Historically, Tanzania has served as a major source for evidence into the evolution of humankind. In the relatively unexplored southwestern portion of the country, the Rukwa Basin presents favorable conditions for the preservation and recovery of primate fossil remains. The current project will be a survey and reconnaissance of this area to collect paleontological, and geological, samples relevant to human evolution from this relatively unexamined area. The Rukwa Basin is a northwest trending rift roughly 300km by 50km. Geologic surveys have identified four major stratigraphic units with the most relevant being the Lake Bed deposits dated roughly 10 -- 0.1 million years ago. The objectives of the project are as follows 1) survey of the Rukwa Basin; 2) collection of hominin fossils; 3) collection of other fossils, and geological specimens, relevant to dating of the area, or reconstruction of the paleoenvironment. Human origin studies have thrived in the past few decades from a variety of advances in analytical approach, or from the application of technology including medical imaging techniques such as computed tomography (CT). Few advances, however, have as dramatic and immediate an impact as the announcement of new fossil finds. The past decade alone has seen one new genus and several new species of early hominin described. Equally important are reports expanding the known geographic distribution of some species (e.g., Australopithecus boisei in Ethiopia; Homo rudolfensis in Malawi). The proposed survey of the Rukwa basin hopes to add to the early hominin database by discovering new fossils and or increasing the understanding of the ecological circumstances of human evolution doc4838 none Meeks The nitrogen-fixing cyanobacterium Nostoc punctiforme exemplifies filamentous cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) whose vegetative cells have four developmental alternatives and are the most complex of all bacteria. Depending on the environmental conditions vegetative cells can: grow and divide to continue the vegetative growth cycle, transiently differentiate into motile filaments called hormogonia, transiently differentiate into resting cells called akinetes, or terminally differentiate into heterocysts, the sites of nitrogen fixation. This project focuses on identifying the regulatory mechanisms involved in hormogonium differentiation and behavior. Motile hormogonium filaments serve in the colonization of new habitats and as the infective units in establishment of symbiotic associations with plants and fungi by the Nostoc. Cyanobacteria are important producers of reduced carbon and nitrogen for other organisms in maintaining steady state environmental conditions. In symbiotic associations with lichens for example, nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria contribute to the consumption of atmospheric carbon dioxide in poor soils and lessen the extent of global warming. This project has two overall objectives. 1. Determine the extent of differential gene expression during hormogonium differentiation, using two dimensional protein gel electrophoresis to identify differentially synthesized proteins, determine the amino acid sequence of selected proteins and use the N. punctiforme genome data base to identify the corresponding genes that encode the proteins. 2. Characterization of a set of genes, whose synthesized proteins may function in the production of a metabolic compound that represses hormogonium differentiation. Specific focus will be on the activity of the hypothetical transcriptional repressor of the genes. The results of this study will be of value in addressing questions of the hierarchy, integration and evolution of regulatory pathways in developmental biology using doc4839 none Reactions of gases at solid interfaces play a key role in atmospheric chemistry. This project aims at developing a better understanding of the surface composition of systems that make up atmospheric particles, such as sea salt particles and sea salt ice. In particular, the phenomenon of surface segregation in mixed halides (e.g. NaCl doped with Br) will be studied using X-ray photoelectron microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and other techniques. The kinetics and mechanisms of other heterogeneous reactions relevant to atmospheric chemistry will also be studied, including the particle size dependence of the effect of water on reactions on NaCl surfaces, and preliminary studies of chemistry on soot doc4840 none The proposal requests support for graduate students and post docs to attend a workshop on neutrino factories based on muon storage rings. This workshop will bring together accelerator experts, experimental and theoretical physicists to study physics potential of such facilities. It will also help to define a worldwide R&D program necessary to address the technological issues associated with their construction doc4841 none The competence of citizens to participate fully in democratic governance remains a controversial issue in political theory, particularly with regard to policy issues involving sci-ence and technology. In this context, two promising new approaches have emerged to foster citi-zen participation and engagement: the citizen s consensus conference, originally developed in Denmark, and Internet-based public deliberation. Because of their relatively short histories, however, little research has been conducted on either deliberative mode. To refine and promote ways to increase citizen participation in the formation of science and technology policy, an interdisciplinary team of four faculty working in the rhetoric of science and technology, small group communication, and political science will conduct two consensus conferences on a scientifically and or technically complex policy issue of concern to the citizens of North Carolina. In keeping with the Danish model, conferences will include demographically diverse panels of 15 citizens each who meet one weekend per month for three months to deliberate and ultimately generate recommendations concerning a current policy is-sue. Citizen panelists will receive information about that issue from a range of content-area ex-perts, experts on social implications of science and technology, and representatives of special interest groups. However, the panelist group itself will be responsible for forming policy rec-ommendations. These recommendations will then be reported to the media and relevant policy-making bodies in an initial press event and through wide dissemination of a final report. Using a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, the team will investigate four compo-nents of successful consensual deliberation - learning and reasoning (cognitive components) and trust and confidence (affective components) - in face-to-face and Internet settings. The team will seek to determine first how these four components characterize the tradi-tional face-to-face conference and then track how they might change in a conference held strictly over the Internet. In so doing, project investigators will expand the Danish consensus conference model by beginning to examine the comparative effective-ness of the Internet as a deliberative tool. This new medium will be used both as a way to ex-plore improving the cost-effectiveness and wider adoptability of the Danish model in the U.S., as well as a counterpoint against which to compare the relative roles of the cognitive and affective components of successful consensus formation. Project results will be disseminated to a wide variety of audiences to 1) promote the practice of public consensual deliberation; 2) ad-vance basic research; and 3) inform the public about these processes implications for their po-tential role in policy deliberation and formation doc4842 none SES 00- - Deborah E. Harkness (University of California, Davis) - Neighborhoods of Science: Knowledge and Practice in Francis Bacon s London, - This award supports a study exploring the content and practice of science in early modern England, prior to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Through an analysis of intellectual history sources (manuscript treatises and published scientific works) as well as social history sources (parish, guild, court, and civic records), Neighborhoods of Science aims to reconfigure dramatically our understanding of English science during the lifetime of its most important scientific philosopher, Sir Francis Bacon. It will do so by focusing on practitioners in the city of London, rather than on the royal court, and on a wide-range of scientific practitioners, rather than just a few university-trained philosophers. The study thus focuses on practice as well as theory, and popular as well as elite interest in the natural world and its properties. During the year of the award the PI will visit archives and libraries in England and search for relevant materials, will create a database of London s scientific practitioners, and will develop a digital map of the city s scientific communities, using the information from the database. Neighborhoods of Science thus aims to promote a new socio-cultural methodology in the history of science, take advantage of the tools of spatial analysis, and uncover previously unknown worlds of intellectual exchange and collaboration doc4843 none This project is an effort to use aerosol source apportionment to study the origin, transformations, and light scattering properties of aerosols in the outflow of Eastern Asia. This study will be carried out in the context of the ACE-Asia experiment. Aerosols will be collected for this study at Cheju Island, Korea and ground sites in China. The analyses will include a broad range of organic and inorganic compounds, and stable isotope ratios of important tracer elements. These analyses will involve ion chromatography, gas chromatography with mass spectrometric detection, and magnetic-sector, multi-collector inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry. This is a collaborative effort involving investigators from Georgia Institute of Technology, NCAR, and Oregon State University doc4844 none The ultimate goal of this research is to understand how small complex systems, like birds, learn about how the world operates (i.e., relations between objects and events) and use this knowledge to flexibly respond to new situations. The specific objective of the current research is to examine how pigeons learn to respond to the general and specific properties of same and different relations between various types of visual stimuli and their arrangement. Recognizing difference and similarity is among the oldest and most fundamental of psychological discriminations, with important implications for our understanding of perception, conceptual behavior, intelligence-related behaviors, and their general mediation by language. Pigeons are ideal for such comparative cognitive studies because they evolved small, powerful, central nervous systems capable of exceptional visual perception and complex discrimination learning capacities. This research will immediately impact our understanding of the psychological mechanisms by which complex animals, including humans, learn to use concepts. This research is part of the general effort to understand how the brain generates rule-governed behavior, the long-term outcome of which will have implications for educational system. In addition, understanding the mechanisms of how small biological systems work could be key to the practical engineering of similar smart systems for a variety of purposes (e.g., compact visual prostheses for the blind, autonomous robots for search and rescue, efficient information transmission algorithms). This comparative research is also part of a larger scientific enterprise by many scientists to understand the evolution and mechanisms of cognition and behavior by investigating the distribution of behavioral similarities and differences among a wide variety of animal species doc4845 none Steroid hormones act throughout the body to regulate development and reproduction by binding to receptors that activate specific genes in cells. The ovarian steroids, estradiol and progesterone, act in brain to mediate complex behaviors, such as female reproductive behavior in rodents. Thus, studying the function of estradiol and progesterone in rodent reproductive behavior provides an excellent model to investigate how hormones work in the brain. Understanding how these ovarian hormones act in brain is essential to understanding their role in various CNS functions. However, the cellular and molecular mechanisms by which steroid receptors activate genes in brain to control behavior are not well understood. Recently, a novel class of proteins, known as nuclear receptor coactivators, has been shown to dramatically enhance the ability of steroid receptors to activate genes. While research has led to a much greater understanding of the molecular mechanisms of these coactivators in steroid receptor action in the test tube, very little is known about how coactivators function in brain to regulate hormone-dependent gene expression and behavior. This grant will test the hypothesis that the two coactivators, Steroid Receptor Coactivator-1 (SRC-1) and CREB Binding Protein (CBP), are important in progesterone action in brain to regulate reproductive behavior. We predict that decreasing SRC-1 and CBP expression in specific brain regions will reduce progesterone-dependent reproductive behavior in rats. These studies will greatly enhance our understanding of how these novel coactivators work with steroid receptors to activate genes in brain doc4846 none Regulated neurotransmitter secretion mediates communication between nerve cells of the nervous system. A sender cell encodes its electrical signal into a chemical signal by using a neurotransmitter stored in synaptic vesicles. The neurotransmitter is secreted onto a receiver cell, which decodes the signal back into an electrical signal. Neurotransmitter secretion is accomplished by fusing the vesicle membrane with the cell membrane expelling its content. Little is known about the molecular machinery driving vesicle fusion. The goal of this proposal is to investigate these molecular mechanisms and, in particular, the role of cysteine-string protein (CSP). This project will test the hypothesis that CSP may mediate secretion by modulating Ca2+ channels, Ca2+ channel-vesicle linkage, and or vesicle fusion. This will be achieved by employing genetically manipulated motor nerve terminals of the fruit fly Drosophila as a model system. The extraordinary fast and precise communication of nerve cells is central to understand how the nervous system works - how we perceive, move, feel, learn, and remember. Failure of secretion has a fatal influence on human life. In most cases, the abnormalities are so severe that embryonic development will not proceed. Even subtle defects of neurotransmitter secretion severely impair higher brain functions like learning and memory. CSP has been recently implicated as an important factor during the treatment of manic depression in humans. Thus, the research being conducted has crucial implications on our basic knowledge of neuronal secretion and subsequently on human medicine to detect, to treat, and to possibly prevent neurological disorders doc4847 none Animal models of auditory communication are especially relevant for studies on auditory communication in infants who primarily engage in nonverbal communication. Nonverbal communication is the only means of communication in animals. An understanding of the cortical mechanisms for processing and integration of communicative sounds can provide insights into the cellular basis of human speech and how it evolved from the available neural circuitry. The proposed research will explore the role of the frontal cortex for audiovocal social communication in bats. We will develop and deploy a behavioral assay to examine how the absence of a frontal auditory field and the anterior cingulate affects the perception and production of social calls, e.g., broadband noisy syllables that are emitted during aggression. The behavioral assay will allow us to assess in a quantitative fashion the response to both normal and modified communication sounds in normal and brain-lesioned animals. Cortical lesions will be localized using magnetic resonance imaging technology and, if necessary, their functional inactivation will be confirmed using electrophysiological recording techniques. The acoustic structure ofvocalizations in animals with lesions in the frontal cortex and microstimulation of these areas in normal animals will examine the role of the frontal cortex in regulating the spectral and syntactic structure within communicative vocalizations. This research will provide new insights on the relationship, if any, of the frontal cortical areas in bats with the so called language areas associated with speech sound perception and production in humans doc4848 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Can Erkey Institution: University of Connecticut The goal of this project is to develop a methodology based on computational chemistry and mathematical programming coupled with computational phase equilibria to design homogeneous catalysts that are highly active, selective, and can be readily recovered from the reaction mixture. A model reaction will be the hydroformylation reaction catalyzed by rhodium phosphine complexes. To avoid computationally intensive quantum chemical calculations, the PIs plan to screen homogeneous catalysts using a neural network model based on selectivity data obtained from data on several different ligands. Catalyst ligand characteristics will be related to selectivity. Through model predictions additional catalysts can be screened without using ab initio calculations. Solvent effects on catalytic reactions will also be modeled using several approaches. The PIs will develop a model for predicting distribution coefficients for a fluorous solvent and supercritical carbon dioxide. These efforts will complement experimental work currently being carried out in homogeneous catalysis. This work may lead to an improved methodology for catalyst design and accelerate the use of homogeneous catalysts in industrial processes doc4849 none This research project s common theme is the empirical evaluation of economic models in which agents decisions and outcomes are affected by other agents behavior directly, rather than being mediated by markets. A common assumption in these models is that individuals interact locally with a set of neighbors defined by a social or economic distance metric. The proposed research is concerned with analyzing models of local social interactions in the context of job search and urban unemployment. The primary objectives of the project are threefold. First, the conditions under which one can identify the model parameters, or at least place bounds on the magnitude of the local interactions, are explored. Second, the project studies whether identification can still be attained when the researcher only has access to spatially aggregated data, and determines how the estimates change as one moves to different levels of aggregation (e.g., block groups, Census tracts, Community Areas). Third, this project aims at studying the dynamic properties of local interaction models: in particular, determining how long it takes to reach the stationary distribution, measuring the persistence of clusters generated by these models, and computing Impulse Response Functions in time and in space to exogenous shocks. The secondary objective of the project is to develop empirical methodologies in order to estimate and test the validity of such models. In particular, the identification analysis will guide the choice of the specific estimation strategy to be employed. The proposed research uses Bureau of Census data, augmented by other sources, on several large U.S. cities. Spatial correlation patterns in the data are analyzed using a non-parametric estimator of Auto-Correlation Functions. When possible, point estimates of the structural parameters are provided via a Simulated Method of Moments methodology. Other non-parametric estimation methods are also used to compute bounds for the structural parameters or for the local interaction effects doc4850 none Rotea Several control engineering problems require the determination of parameters that optimize a system level cost function in real time. Real-time optimization is necessary to seek optimal control parameters in many application areas such as vibration and noise attenuation, flow separation, combustion control, and control of flying formations. In these problems the control architectures that improve system operation (e.g., minimize a noise or vibration figure, minimize flow separation in an airfoil, minimize the unsteady pressure fluctuation in a combustion chamber) are known in advance. On the other hand, the optimal control parameters are not known in advance and must be determined. Off-line calculation of the optimal parameters is impractical when no reliable model is available to predict the variation of the cost function with time, the optimization parameters, or the system s operating conditions. It is generally possible, however, to make real-time measurements of the cost function through the addition of sensors and data processing. This additional hardware and software opens up the possibility of calculating optimal parameters by experimenting with the system in order to determine the parameter setting that leads to a cost function improvement. The practical implementation of this idea requires an iterative algorithm that seeks the optimal parameters in real time. The main objective of this project is the development of new iterative algorithms for the real-time optimization of a measurable cost function. Iterative extremum-seeking algorithms that make use of function evaluations only, to estimate optimal parameters, will be considered. The challenge is to derive algorithms that (I) track fast variations in the optimal parameters, (II) are insensitive to the noise present in the measurements of the cost function, and (III) exhibit monotonic improvement of the cost function during the course of the optimization. The focus shall be on gradient-based iterative algorithms for which the necessary gradient information is not available and it must be estimated from the measurements of the cost function. Analysis of the algorithm performance, and sensitivity to modeling assumptions, will be carried out using methods and tools from the theory of nonlinear uncertain dynamical systems. Performance and sensitivity (or robustness) bounds will be obtained from the combination of traditional differential equations methods (averaging techniques) with recent tools from uncertain dynamical systems analysis. The bounds will later be used to synthesize algorithms that optimize criteria (I)-(III) above from available prior information. If successful, the proposed research will advance the state-of-the-art of real-time gradient-based optimization algorithms. A novel framework for analysis that takes into account fast variations in optimal parameters and measurement noise will be developed. New systematic procedures to design extremum-seeking algorithms that work in uncertain noisy environments will be created. These design procedures would allow engineers to implement extremum-seeking algorithms with minimal development effort doc4851 none This award is for support of a collaborative study (University of Arizona, University of Colorado, and Columbia University, the latter funded under a separate award from NOAA) to considerably broaden the scope of past drought reconstructions from tree rings, now based on the Palmer Drought Severity Index, by (a) improving and geographically expanding the existing grid of North American drought reconstructions from tree rings, (b) considering new measures of drought, (c) specifically developing techniques for reconstructing and analyzing key attributes of gaged streamflow series that are relevant for drought management through reservoir operation and water resource allocation, and (d) investigating new statistical methods for improving the reconstructions and the analysis of space-time drought variability doc4852 none Sacks This award provides partial funding support for the fabrication of an integrated downhole sensor package to be installed in the Long Valley Exploratory Well (a 3-kilometer deep hole drilled for geophysical observations in the Long Valley Caldera). Since the Long Valley Caldera has shown sustained unrest characterized by recurring earthquake swarms, dome-shaped uplift, and increased levels of fumarolic activity as well as high concentrations of CO2 gas emitted through its surface soils. The sensor package to be built will include a dilatometer strainmeter, seismometers, and pressure sensors. The combination of measurements, made at depth and presumably close to the magmatic source, will allow probing of changes in the volcanic system with heretofore unprecedented sensitivity doc4853 none Gordon The functioning of the nervous system depends on an intricate network of connections between cells. Much of the communication occurs at tiny physical contacts between cells called synapses. How molecular components of synapses come to be organized together is an important problem within neuroscience. The current project will examine how influences from motor neurons direct the localization of synaptic molecules on muscle cells. It is hypothesized that calcium channels on the muscle cells mediate the signaling from the neurons and that local entry of calcium through these channels directs the local accumulation of synaptic molecules. In order to test this hypothesis, muscle cells in tissue culture will be stimulated with signaling molecules derived from neurons, and the calcium channels will be manipulated with pharmacological agents. Both local calcium entry and the local accumulation of synaptic molecules will be assayed. The results of the proposed work will further our understanding of the molecular signaling mechanisms that control the formation, maintenance, and modulation of synapses. Synapses provide the nervous system with something akin to what transistors provide computers, pathways of communication that can be modulated to obtain different results. As such, an understanding of how synapses can be modulated has profound implications for learning and memory doc4854 none Interfacial thermal resistance and anomalous thermal diffusion strongly impede energy transport in high power, ultra-short pulse laser interactions, producing higher peak temperatures than expected from conventional long-time scale analyses. This may consequently enhance or diminish the effectiveness of the laser application. Through a comprehensive computational and experimental study, this research will investigate sub-nanosecond thermal transport in micro-and nanostructured materials. Molecular dynamics simulation and femtosecond laser experiments will be performed to characterized the two phenomena. Contemporary exploration of ultra-short length and time scales are creating opportunities for new nanotechnology developments. Future scientific progression will inevitably be concerned with the interaction of ultra-short time scale lasers and micro- and nanostructured materials, but current research in these combined extreme areas is limited. This project will reveal information essential to further advancements in sub-nanosecond laser diagnostics and processing of nanomaterials as well as provide an improved understanding of nanoscale thermal engineering doc4855 none This grant provides support to a collaborative team of researchers in the United States, China, India and Japan, to complete fieldwork, data analysis and comparative analysis, and preliminary reports of results from a multisite, multiyear investigation of values and their role in environmental policy making in localities in each country. By examining values in the context of real world environmental struggles, the project aims to understand the relationships between public values and policy, to determine the circumstances in which local values matter, and to assess the way globalization influences the authority and capacity of local actors to guide and manage environmentally sustainable growth. The project aims to assist in the production of more workable and equitable domestic and international environmental policy solutions. The project uses an innovative methodology for comparative analysis of the role of environmental values in such economically and culturally diverse societies. This assessment of values is one distilled from local empirical fieldwork and integrated into an international comparative study. The Carnegie Council is directing the project in conjunction with prominent collaborating institutions in Asia and the United States: the Beijing Environment and Development Institute (PRC), the National Institute for Environmental Sciences and the Lake Biwa Museum (Japan), the Center for the Study of Developing Societies (India), and the Bureau for Applied Research in Anthropology at the University of Arizona. Fieldwork to generate empirical data at local and national levels is being designed, conducted, and analyzed by leading scholars in each country with input from local policy practitioners. A research protocol for the project has been carefully constructed providing the rigor needed for valid comparative analysis, while at the same time allowing teams the latitude to employ the methodological tools that they deem appropriate to their respective societies. Two types of cases serve as the focus of the fieldwork: industrial pollution and resource use. The fieldwork consists of participant observation, open-ended interviews, focus groups, workshops, policy and expert panels, and analysis of media reports, educational materials and policy documents. With initial matching grants from the United States-Japan Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation, the research teams in China, India, Japan and the United States began conducting preliminary on-site investigations of their cases in August and to date most cases are well underway. The project creates an important opportunity to support the exchange among Asian and American research communities who have previously had little contact. The comparative dimension provides a map of the role of values in environmental policy across politically, economically and culturally diverse societies. It also enables participating researchers to learn about each other s value discourses and styles of research, which in turn infuses their own studies with new perspectives and creates momentum for further social science initiatives relating to values and sustainable public policy doc4856 none Barton The Earth s primary producers, plants and algae, capture sunlight and use it to make the biomass that all other organisms on the planet use to survive. Much of plant growth occurs at the tips of branches, where regions of undifferentiated, dividing cells, called meristems, are located. The shoot meristems produce new leaves, stems and flowers. Dr. Kathryn Barton s lab studies how shoot meristems work. Using the small weed Arabidopsis as a model system, her lab studies the genes and proteins that direct meristem function. The work in this proposal focuses on regulation of the SHOOT MERISTEMLESS (STM) gene product of Arabidopsis. When the STM protein is lacking, the plant is not able to make a meristem, and conversely, when the STM protein is supplied in excess, the plant produces a mass of meristems that covers the leaves and results in a highly deformed plant. From these observations it follows that the STM gene must be carefully regulated. The BOBBER gene is required to prevent the expression of STM in the seed leaves; in bobber mutants, the seed leaves inappropriately express STM. bobber mutants also arrest growth during embryogenesis. To understand the mechanism of STM regulation by BOBBER, the BOBBER gene will be molecularly cloned and characterized. bobber mutant embryos will be carefully analyzed to determine the extent to which they are defective in the development of cotyledons and shoot apical meristem. The role of BOBBER in repressing STM in leaves will also be determined and the cis-acting sequences through which BOBBER acts will be defined. These, and other experiments, are leading to improvements in our understanding of basic plant biology, information that will ultimately improve the way in which we manage our crops, woodlands and other natural resources doc4857 none This project describes network patterns among email users in the United States, identifying how electronic relations form and the implications of such relations for behavior. In the first of three stages, the project identifies the global features of electronic communication networks by identifying sets of people linked through email exchange. This sample provides the information needed to identify network features such as social distance, social cohesion, small-world properties, social balance, and segregation. Stage two examines the dynamic details of electronic networks by collecting in-depth information about online activity, social behaviors, and demographic characteristics over a year for a sample of the original study population. Using these data, researchers can model the stability of online relationships and the effect of network position on social behaviors. The third stage of the project re-contacts members of the original sample a year later. Data from this stage allows researchers to develop network-contextual models of social behavior that situate individual behavior within both local and global network contexts. The three stages of this project provide social network researchers and information technology specialists with an unprecedented ability to model network effects on social behavior and patterns of social relations in the rapidly changing electronic social context doc4858 none In collaboration with EPS 00- ) Scientists at the Desert Research Institute (Atmospheric Sciences); University of Nevada, Reno (Department of Physics, High Energy Density Science Group), and the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma will collaborate to design and construct a system to simulate and study, in the laboratory, electrical discharges through atmospheres containing cloud and aerosol particles over a wide range of terrestrial and also extraterrestrial conditions. Lightning, as an electrical discharge, occurs through the atmosphere in and above thunderstorms, in volcanic eruptions and in clouds of other planets, notably Jupiter. The system will also be well suited to study certain industrial processes for producing and modifying aerosol (such as diamond) and the technology of protection from lightning strikes to spacecraft launch vehicles and electrical transmission systems. It will have a high voltage capability, up to one million volts, with a discharge current of up to 100,000 amps through a cubic meter laboratory cloud chamber with controlled gas composition, pressure, temperature and relative humidity and will be capable of being filled with particulate clouds of both volatile materials, such as water droplets and ice crystals, as well as aerosol of low volatility, such as certain minerals and alkali halides. The electrical system will consist of a Marx bank parallel - series arrangement of capacitors together with additional elements, with capability for control of voltage, current and current rise and fall time. The chamber will carry appropriate feed-throughs and electrodes for direct discharge and an inductive loop to give an electrode-less ring discharge. The time constants of current rise and fall (on the order of 100 nanoseconds and 10 microseconds, respectively) will be controlled to give direct simulation of atmospheric and other processes. Measurements will be made of the form and speed of the discharge using a streak camera and gated optical detectors. The role of particulates of different size, shape and composition as they relate to changes in trace gas composition will be investigated and emissivity absorption measurements in selected visible, UV and x-ray wavelengths will also be performed. The chamber will be designed with internal sensors and appropriate transmission windows for external laser diagnostics. The utility of the system will be demonstrated in the second year through initial studies of the leading discharge tip through ice and water cloud interfaces and in the rate of NOx production, both of which are current scientific issues in atmospheric science doc4859 none Bonnell This study combines two approaches to examine the relationship between local structure and polarization in ferroelectric crystals. Using scanning tunneling microscopy the effect of electric fields and temperature on atomic structure of the (100) surface will be determined. Using variants of electrostatic force microscopy including scanning potential microscopy and piezo response imaging, the contributions of atomic polarization and charge compensation will be quantified. Single crystal barium titanate will serve as the model system in which carrier concentration, and surface charge (via adsorption) will be varied. The effects of applied fields on surface adsorption will be quantified. Ferroelectric ceramics are receiving much attention in the context of high density information storage. This project will enhance our understanding of these complex materials by studying their properties at the nanometer scale doc4860 none This project evaluates the use and social impacts of Blacksburg Electronic Village, one of the prominent American community networking projects of the s. It employs community surveys, detailed interviews, session logging, a participatory evaluation forum, and a variety of psychological scales. It addresses a variety of key issues: Who participates in community networks? What are the networks used for? How are local business activities and opportunities changed, and how direct a cause is the network? In what ways does access to local government information, or to public decision-making change? What are the consequences for community life, and for community health and well-being? How is participation in community life greater or more diverse? Do people feel safer in a community networking context than in the general Internet context? Do they feel their personal data is safer? Can a community network enhance self-perceptions of collective self-efficacy in the community? Has the social capital of the Blacksburg community increased as a consequence of the BEV? And what are the causes and effects of unequal participation throughout the community? The vision of community networking is inspiring; it extends creative participation to citizens through computing. Systematic evaluation of these new opportunities is timely and appropriate doc4861 none This award is for a workshop to develop a working plan on reconstructing detailed pre- hurricane activity for the Atlantic Basin for the last years from a network of high resolution proxy records. The main workshop themes will be: 1) to assess the quality and quantity of documentary data suitable for reconstruction of Atlantic hurricanes from the different colonial archives, 2) to discuss and devise methodologies for merging different colonial archives, tree-ring, and sediment records together in order to reconstruct Atlantic hurricanes quantitatively as they relate with the modern (20th century) hurricane record, and 3) to address the key paleoclimatic issues and potential forcing mechanisms (e.g. ENSO) that can be answered from longer records of Atlantic hurricanes prior to the modern record doc4862 none Mate choice affects many aspects of male and female behavior across different species. Information on female mate searching by females is an important but little studied part of this process. The proposed study uses information gained from long-term observation of mating and mate searching of bowerbirds to test novel hypotheses about 1) the rules for mate searching, 2) how searching is affected by past female experience, and 3) how female searching behavior affects male display strategies, reproductive skews and lifetime male reproductive success. The proposed work will provide previously unavailable information on lifetime records of mate searching and mating for both sexes. Satin bowerbirds are an excellent model for such studies because female visitation can be monitored with cameras that provide time and date information that allows mate searching patterns to be reconstructed. Mate choice is a fundamental process that affects nearly all animals. There are many questions about the process of mate choice that are unresolved. Studies of mate choice are valuable because they are useful in constructing a general theory of choice. Such a theory is useful in understanding mating behavior and the genetics and conservation of natural populations doc4863 none This award is given in partial support of an ACS Symposium on Light-Emitting, Light-Harvesting, and Light-Responding Organic Systems at the ACS National Meeting, San Francisco, CA, March 26-31, . This symposium will address the fundamental issues, preparation, and applications of organic materials and devices. Three major areas will be in focus: (1) Light-emitting materials and devices - photo -and electroluminescent materials for information technology; (2) Light-harvesting materials and evices - wavelength-shifting and photovoltaic materials and devices for new energy sources; (3) Light-responding materials and devices - nonlinear optical and photo-refractive materials, photoactive materials for chemical sensing and information technology, liquid crystals, and photonic bandgap materials doc1012 none This award is for support of a study of the post-glacial carbon cycle as a non-steady state system, where carbon includes the two stable isotopes 12C and 13C, coupled to the nutrient cycles of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P), in the four major domains of the Earth s surface system: land, atmosphere, coastal zone, and open ocean (including the sediments of these latter two domains). The project is a collaborative one between the University of Hawaii (Mackenzie) and Northwestern University (Lerman). The work will be based on the modeling approach that the principal investigators developed and used with some success in the study of the coupled carbon-nitrogen-phosphorus-sulfur cycles in the past 300 years, when the system was subjected to human environmental forcings and a rise in temperature. A new model of the four domains and coupled C-N-P biogeochemical cycles for the analysis of the longer period since the LGM (last glacial maximum) to the start of the Industrial Age will include past changes and spatial distributions of 13C (effectively separating the carbon cycle into the 12C and 13C cycles), and modifications of the numbers and structure of the reservoirs within the system, and the kinetic parameters. These fundamental feature changes should allow close approximation of the major changes of the Earth s surface system in that period of time doc4865 none EVANS Ultraluminous infrared galaxies (ULIGs) are observed to be closely interacting merging galaxies. Both circumnuclear star formation and active galactic nuclear (AGN) activity in ULIGs are believed to be fueled by molecular gas, and the strong ultraviolet-to-optical radiation generated by both processes is absorbed by dust and re-emitted at infrared wavelengths. Optically bright QSOs may be an evolutionary end product of the ULIG phase. The appearance of optically bright QSOs may be the result after outflows and supernovae have cleared much of the dust responsible for obscuring the QSO nucleus. Two projects will be carried out that will provide potential clues to the early and final stages of ULIG phenomenon. The first is a study of the molecular gas properties of ULIG progenitors. Specifically, an observational survey of the Carbon monoxide (CO) (1 to 0 transition) line radiation of ULIGs, whose nuclei are still widely separated, is being undertaken in order to determine the relative molecular gas content of the progenitor galaxies. The CO data are being compared with ground-based and space-based optical to near-infrared images of these ULIGs to verify the location of the molecular gas relative to the stellar nuclei. Preliminary analysis of five ULIGs with nuclear separations of about 5 parsecs shows that ULIGs with warm, Seyfert-like infrared flux ratios have CO associated with only the AGN, whereas ULIGs with cool, starburst-like flux ratios has CO associated with both nuclei. Such a dichotomy may indicate the manner in which mergers with different primary power sources become ultraluminous early in the merger process. The second project is a search for molecular gas remnants of an early ULIG phase in a sample of QSOs. The sample consists of a family of 17 infrared excess QSOs believed to represent the transition stage between the heavily obscured ULIGs and the classic, optical QSOs. The sample has been previously imaged at optical near infrared wavelengths. These studies have shown evidence of unresolved bright nuclei with underlying spiral arms and tidal tails, as well as luminous young star clusters. The CO observations of these QSOs will provide the statistical sample needed for a direct comparison of their molecular gas properties to those of ULIGs, as well as to the population of gas-rich, high redshift ULIGs and QSOs recently detected in CO. The results of the research will help astronomers understand the differences between galaxies and QSOs. Both of these projects will make use of observational data taken at the Owens Valley Millimeter Array that is operated by Caltech. This project and the Owens Valley Millimeter Array are supported by funds from the Division of Astronomical Sciences doc4866 none AI is approaching the point where it will be possible to build autonomous robotic agents capable of performing human-like tasks without direct human control. Such autonomous agents must be able to plan their activities in the face of incomplete knowledge of their environment. This project aims at understanding how such planning works and building implemented systems that accomplish it. Specifically, this investigation is aimed at the construction of an artificial rational agent capable of engaging in decision-theoretic planning in environments of realistic complexity and unpredictability. The design of a system to do automated planning is one of the traditional goals of artificial intelligence research, and some highly successful planning systems have been constructed for use in narrowly constrained environment; however, these systems presuppose that the planner knows everything it needs to know when it is first presented with the planning problem, and most of them further require complete knowledge of all relevant aspects of the agent s environment and knowledge of precisely what will result from performing any relevant act in any circumstance the planner will encounter. While such assumptions might be satisfied by an industrial robot operating in a constrained environment, human beings plan without satisfying any of these conditions. In particular, planning problems often drives the search for new knowledge rather than presupposing that the planning agent knows everything it needs to know from the beginning. And human beings do not assume that they can predict with certainty what will happen when they perform any available action under any conceivable circumstances. In constructing and evaluating plans, people take account of the varying probabilities of different consequences of actions, and they assign values and costs to those consequences before deciding whether to adopt a proposed plan. In other words, they plan decision-theoretically. The objective of this project is to understand how decision-theoretic planning is possible in an agent operating in an uncooperative and only partially predictable environment, and then to build an artificial agent whose planning capabilities more closely approximate those of human beings. This should illuminate some of the structure of rational cognition in both artificial agents and human agents doc4851 none This award is for support of a collaborative study (University of Arizona, University of Colorado, and Columbia University, the latter funded under a separate award from NOAA) to considerably broaden the scope of past drought reconstructions from tree rings, now based on the Palmer Drought Severity Index, by (a) improving and geographically expanding the existing grid of North American drought reconstructions from tree rings, (b) considering new measures of drought, (c) specifically developing techniques for reconstructing and analyzing key attributes of gaged streamflow series that are relevant for drought management through reservoir operation and water resource allocation, and (d) investigating new statistical methods for improving the reconstructions and the analysis of space-time drought variability doc4868 none This is a group travel award, funded jointly with the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities, to provide travel support, primarily for young investigators, to attend the Psi-k Conference in Shwaebisch Gmeund, Germany, August 22-26, . This is an European Union Network sponsored conference. The grant will allow about fifteen young scientists to attend this conference doc4869 none To shed their old skin at the end of a molt, insects display the ecdysis sequence, a complex behavioral sequence that involves at least three discrete behavioral phases. Previous work in the moth, Manduca sexta, indicated that this behavioral sequence is organized by a circuitry of neuromodulatory neurons that control the duration of each behavioral phase and the transition from one phase to the next. One of the key neuromodulators is the neuropeptide eclosion hormone (EH), that controls the transition from the first to the second behavioral phase. EH target neurons, identified by their increased levels of the intracellular messenger cyclic GMP after EH release, include the modulatory neurons that produce the peptides needed for the last two behavioral phases. Initially, electrophysiological studies will focus on these cells and determine the relationship of their activity both to EH release and to the onset of the appropriate behavioral programs. Since there are defined environmental stimuli that are known to stimulate or suppress the transition from one behavior to the next, studies will be done to determine if and where these stimuli affect the neurons in the neuromodulatory circuit. New studies on the fruitfly, Drosophila, will then genetically dissect the neuromodulatory circuit that is involved in the last two phases of the sequence. The proper functioning of the brain requires the regulated release of neuromodulators such as neuropeptides and amines. Since these modulators play a crucial role in determining behavioral states, a key to understanding behavioral organization lies in understanding how modulatory systems are organized and how behaviorally important stimuli act on them to control neuromodulator release. The ecdysis system has become a premiere system for studying the organization of neuromodulatory circuits and how they relate to complex behavior doc4870 none PI: Sebastian Elbaum Univ. of Nebraska - Lincoln ITR:SW: Collaborative Research: A New Generation of Scalable, Cost-Effective Regression Testing Techniques Collaborating PI: Gregg Rothermel ( ) This project is carried out in collaboration with Gregg Rothermel ( )of Oregon State University. Regression testing is an expensive process performed on modified software to provide confidence that modifications have not impaired its quality. To help with this process, previous research has considered various test-suite reuse techniques. Despite progress with these techniques, they remain limited along several dimensions. For example, they typically assume that test cases have equivalent costs, faults have equivalent severities, and fault likelihood is constant across portions of a program. These assumptions are unrealistic in practice, and limit the applicability and effectiveness of techniques. The proposed research will address these limitations. The research will provide: (1) comprehensive regression testing cost models that capture the necessary factors; (2) regression testing techniques that account for these factors; (3) more precise understanding of the effects these factors have on regression testability, program and test design, and software engineering practice; and(4) guidelines that help software engineers select and create cost-effective regression testing tools and processes. In addition to providing models, algorithms, and processes, the research includes a substantial empirical component, and will provide a publicly available base of empirical data about techniques and factors. Together, these contributions will support more efficient and effective regression testing, and improve the quality of software doc4871 none PI: Rothermel, Gregg Oregon State University ITR:SW: Collaborative Research: A New Generation of Scalable, Cost-Effective Regression Testing Techniques Collaborating PI: Sebastian Elbaum ( ) This project is carried out in collaboration with Sebastian Elbaum ( )of the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Regression testing is an expensive process performed on modified software to provide confidence that modifications have not impaired its quality. To help with this process, previous research has considered various test-suite reuse techniques. Despite progress with these techniques, they remain limited along several dimensions. For example, they typically assume that test cases have equivalent costs, faults have equivalent severities, and fault likelihood is constant across portions of a program. These assumptions are unrealistic in practice, and limit the applicability and effectiveness of techniques. The proposed research will address these limitations. The research will provide: (1) comprehensive regression testing cost models that capture the necessary factors; (2) regression testing techniques that account for these factors; (3) more precise understanding of the effects these factors have on regression testability, program and test design, and software engineering practice; and(4) guidelines that help software engineers select and create cost-effective regression testing tools and processes. In addition to providing models, algorithms, and processes, the research includes a substantial empirical component, and will provide a publicly available base of empirical data about techniques and factors. Together, these contributions will support more efficient and effective regression testing, and improve the quality of software doc4872 none Proposal number: Proposal type: Investigator Initiated for Conference Support Principal investigator: Rakesh Agrawal Affiliation: Gordon Research Conferences Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. The 42nd Gordon Research Conference on Separation and Purification This award supports partially the participation by invited speakers and discussion leaders from academic institutions at the Gordon Research Conference on Separation and Purification to be held in New London, NH, from August 6 to August 11, . The sessions scheduled for this year s conference include Bioseparations, Crystallization of Organic Materials, Nonideal and Reactive Distillation, Extraction, Novel Separation Methods and Equipment, Simulation of Mixed-gas Adsorption, Membrane Separation, and Microchemical Separation. In each session there will be two or three invited speakers. A poster session is also planned. The Gordon Conferences are kept small and are structured to give the participants considerable time for discussion and interaction. Such gatherings provide a vehicle for communication between research groups, which will be represented here by researchers not only from U.S. universities but also from key industrial organizations. This grant is specifically targeted to permit attendance by ten advanced-level graduate students in the conference as well as university faculty. The impact of the conference is expected to arise from the communication between industrial and academic researchers to identify key research issues doc4873 none Heat and salt exchanges at the ice ocean interface play a key role in the annual cycle of sea-ice growth and ablation. Recent observations of significant change in the extent and thickness of the Arctic ice cover have focused attention on factors that control the mass balance, and treatment of ice ocean exchanges in numerical models is becoming increasingly sophisticated. Direct measurements of turbulent heat flux under pack ice (by covariance techniques) have shown that it is nearly proportional to the product of friction velocity (square root of the kinematic Reynolds stress) and the elevation of mixed layer temperature above freezing, but that the exchange coefficient is an order of magnitude smaller than the corresponding exchange coefficient for momentum. This implies that unlike momentum flux, heat flux at the interface is rate-limited by molecular processes in thin sublayers adjacent to the surface. At low temperature, the molecular diffusivity of salt in seawater is only about 0.6% of that for heat, thus the possibility exists for double diffusive effects, where the transfer rate is ultimately controlled by salt diffusion. There is evidence that this holds when ice is melting, according to measurements in relatively warm water in the marginal ice zone. A model developed by Yaglom and Kader to describe laboratory studies of heat and mass transfer over hydraulically rough surfaces considers the difference in diffusivities between scalar properties, and has been applied in several numerical ice ocean models. The models do not distinguish between melting and freezing (although the YK studies did not consider crystalline growth at the solid liquid interface), consequently, heat is diffused through the interface faster than salt is ejected during ice growth. The models thus predict enhanced ocean heat flux under thin ice, and produce a significant amount of supercooled water, which is generally assumed to nucleate as frazil crystals distributed in some fashion throughout the ocean boundary layer. Observations do not support the modeled response: there is little evidence of extensive frazil production under growing ice in the Arctic, nor do the limited data from under thin ice indicate larger heat flux. The proposed work aims to understand ice ocean heat and mass exchange, particularly during freezing conditions, by collaborating with Norwegian and US scientists in making detailed measurements of ice ocean interaction in tidally active fjords in Svalbard. Fast ice will serve as a laboratory for carefully controlled experiments measuring exchanges both in the ice cover and in the ocean boundary layer. Work proposed here deals mainly with the latter, including measuring momentum, heat, and salinity flux in the boundary layer near the ice undersurface. A specific goal is to improve parameterization of ice ocean heat and mass transfer for numerical models doc4874 none Proposal No.: Proposal Type: Investigator Initiated- SGER Principal Investigators: Alan L. Myers Institution: University of Pennsylvania SGER: Molecular Simulation of Mixture Adsorption on Zeolites With the development of modern high-capacity adsorbent materials, such as zeolites, adsorption has become an important gas-separation processes. A number of researchers are currently developing molecular-scale models to characterize the effects of adsorbent structure and intermolecular forces on the phase equilibrium in these systems. Most work to date, however, has considered the adsorption of only one gas species at a time. In this project, molecular models that are quite successful in predicting the non-ideal thermodynamics of the adsorption of various molecular species in silicalite are being tested to predict two-component adsorption on zeolites. The models are based on realistic intermolecular force models. These models account for sorbate-sorbate interactions as well as the energetics of different sites within the solid lattice. Success of this project, which considers both polar and nonpolar and two different zeolite structures, will demonstrate that these molecular models can be extended to non-ideal mixtures. The results will be a major contribution to the fundamental conceptualization of these processes and will guide the proper formulation of more detailed models for design of new adsorbents and the optimization of gas-separation processes doc4875 none Rasch This research investigates responses of aquatic microcrustaceans to massive losses, gains, and reorganizations of genomic DNA. The focus is on embryonic chromatin diminution - reduction in size and reorganization of the genome, with additional exploratory research on endoreduplication - the amplification of nuclear DNA without subsequent mitosis. The PI s will investigate whether variation in DNA content in somatic and germ cell lineages can explain variation in developmental time and embryonic and adult body sizes through effects on bulk size of the genome. Research will include reconstruction of a phylogeny of the Cyclopidae and use of phylogenetically-independent contrasts to test for correlated evolution of adult somatic DNA content with developmental rate and adult body size. The PIs will investigate whether large amounts of germline DNA in embryos make possible higher rates of protein transcription at times during development when there is greatest need for such transcripts. Quantitative changes in DNA will be measured using cytophotometry and isotopically labeled DNA and RNA precursors. Copepods are ideal for examining evolution of large-scale changes in the genome because their genome size varies greatly among species, mechanisms that modulate their DNA contents are known, their life history variation and population biology are well studied, and their chromosomes are amenable to quantitative and comparative analyses. Copepods may be the most abundant multicellular organisms in the oceans, are a primary diet item of many fish, and thus play a major role in global ecology doc4876 none Moreno, Oscar University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras MII: Infrastructure for a New Program in Computer Science at the University of Puerto Rico - Rio Piedras Campus This project focuses on establishing a Division of Computer Science at the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras (UPR-RP). Specifically, the project will involve: (i) cooperation with University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez to offer a joint Ph.D. program in computing and information sciences and engineering, (ii) enhancement of cutting-edge computer science research at UPR-RP, (iii) increase in the number of under-represented students completing a Ph.D. in computer science and (iv) increase in the production of cutting edge research projects in computer science. The new equipment will be used to enhance existing research activities at UPR-PR and to attract four new faculty who have a proven ability to engage in cutting edge research. The grant will support directly nine graduate students doc4877 none This award is for high-resolution, multiproxy analyses on cores from 3 lakes in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Paleoenvironmental reconstructions will be based on the following proxy records: (1) sediment lithology and percent organic matter - erosion rates and terrestrial and aquatic productivity; (2) chironomids - maximum summer water temperatures; and (3) pollen and plant macrofossils (stomates, needles and seeds) - vegetation and changes in species range limits. The goal of this research is to determine whether the cold events and millennial scale climate variability observed in the North Atlantic affected the environment of the White Mountains of New Hampshire doc4878 none What a speaker communicates embraces both what a speaker says and what a speaker implicates by what is said. Linguists and philosophers of language have extensively studied sentences allegedly giving rise to generalized conversational implicatures. However, an understanding of the psychological processes underlying the interpretation of such sentences is currently lacking. This study attempts to apply well-established psycholinguistic methods to this new area. We have identified three rival pragmatic processing models that embody features of the major competing theories. The models inspired by Gricean ideas are committed to a stage in processing at which a minimal proposition is accessed or accessible, whereas models inspired by Relevance theory deny that a minimal proposition needs to be retrieved unless the context is biased towards such an interpretation. This project proposes a series of 10 experiments, using both self-paced reading tasks and reading tasks during which eye-movements are monitored, to test the predictions of these rival models doc4879 none Hesketh An investigation of new methods for micro-scale impedance and surface potential mapping of surfaces will be undertaken. The AFM microscope has been modified to carryout micro-scale two and four point probe impedance mapping, and micro-Kelvin surface potential mapping. Custom tips will be microfabricated with multiple tips on a single cantilever, and multiple cantilevers on a chip. The principle of operation is similar to the macro four-point probe except the microfabricated four-point probe will perform better in several respects. First, the testing will yield sub-micron precision mapping of conductivity, doping profiles and surface potential, be non-destructive and will providing quantitative data from an ambient environment, scanning probe platform. Graduate student training will be provided in surface probe microscopy and MEMS fabrication methods. Commercialization of these analysis methods will be facilitated by the probes compatibility with existing AFM technology doc4880 none LeTourneau Function of the nervous system depends on correct wiring of synaptic connections that communicate information between neurons or between neurons and other targets, such as muscles. Axons make these connections during fetal development by extending through intervening tissues to reach the targets where they make regularly patterned connections. Growing axons are guided by extrinsic positive and negative guidance cues. Two of these cues, nitric oxide and the neurotrophin BDNF are involved in regulating the formation of axonal branches in target organs. The proposed experiments will examine how growing retinal axons integrate signals from these tips, growth cones, to establish proper connections between the eye and the brain. Tissue culture studies show that axonal tips, growth cones, collapse when exposed to nitric oxide, but if the growth cones are first exposed to BDNF and then nitric oxide, they are stabilized against nitric oxide-induced collapse. The project goals are to clarify the intracellular molecular singaling that mediates regulation of axon terminal development. Nitric oxide and BDNF are implicated in a wide range of activities that involve structural changes in neural connections. The mechanisms that underlie the structural plasticity of early development are relevant to ongoing functions on the mature nervous system, such as learning, memory and repair of injuries. Better understanding of these mechanisms will help develop strategies to improve nervous function and better treat injuries and diseases of the brain doc4881 none The gibberellin (GA) group of plant hormones controls many processes and developmental events in plants, such as seed germination, stem growth, flowering and fruit development. These processes are often not controlled by GAs alone, but by an interplay of GAs with other hormones. The proposed research will investigate whether auxin can exert a regulatory effect on GA biosynthesis, and thus provide one mechanism for cross-talk between these two types of growth promoting hormones. Previous work in the principal investigator s laboratory led to the isolation of a mutant of Arabidopsis thaliana (previously known as 10.3 or ga6) which had reduced stem growth, delayed flowering and reduced fruit size. These symptoms could be overcome by treatment of mutant plants with certain GAs, leading to the hypothesis that biosynthesis of active GA hormone was blocked in this mutant. It has now known that this mutation is allelic to the transport inhibitor3 (tir3) mutation, which leads to an alteration in polar transport of auxin. The proposed research will examine whether auxins exert control at two stages in the GA biosynthetic pathway, namely 20-oxidation and 3b-hydroxylation. Since the genes encoding these biosynthetic enzymes have been cloned, the possible effect of auxins on GA biosynthesis will be examined at the level of gene expression. It is proposed to compare the expression of these genes in wildtype and tir3 plants by RNA blotting, and by using reporter gene fusions. The altered auxin response 1 (axr1) mutant will also be examined to see if this mutation, which dramatically reduces the sensitivity of plants to auxin, also affects the expression of genes encoding these GA biosynthetic enzymes. Finally, the auxin status of wildtype plants will be perturbed pharmacologically, and possible effects on GA response and expression of genes for GA biosynthetic enzymes will be examined. The work will be carried out at the University of Texas at San Antonio. This University is one in which the majority of students are undergraduates from ethnic minorities. The research program presents an opportunity to provide training in practical aspects of plant physiology and biochemistry to undergraduates from groups who are historically under-represented in science and technology doc4882 none The objective of this project is the establishment of an independent, self-sustaining research Institute for Bioinformatics and Evolutionary Studies, (IBESt) at the University of Idaho. Researchers with common interests in evolutionary mechanisms in the intersection of biology, computer science, and mathematics will focus on tool and infrastructure development to sustain interdisciplinary research and to further growth and understanding of Bioinformatics and Evolutionary Studies research issues. Research projects will be carried out in the following areas: (1) Parallel and Distributed Bioinformatics, (2) Transposable Element Simulation and Analysis, (3) Statistical Analyses of Comparative Phylogeographic Data, and (4) Self-Repairing, Fault Tolerant Programs via Evolution. The goals of the project which will advance the formation of IBESt are as follows. Recruit a new distinguished professor of Bioinformatics, retain and support current faculty, and retain and recruit excellent graduate students. Expand the current record of accomplishment in interdisciplinary research in order to build a successful, externally funded research program in bioinformatics and evolutionary studies. Construct a powerful, expandable Beowulf computing system for teaching and research. Disseminate knowledge to the broader university community and to the public through the conduct of seminars and workshops doc4883 none Novick, David G. University of Texas at El Paso CISE Minority Institutions Infrastructure: Graduate Education for Minority Students in Computer Science and Engineering: Extending the Pipeline The proposed project concentrates on: (i) building community among relatively isolated majority-Hispanic institutions, so that students early in the pipeline have access to role models, (ii) building a strong graduate program in a majority-Hispanic community, so that students and the program can take advantage of existing community and university support structures, and (iii) building communities of interest among the four-year colleges, an M.S. and Ph.D. granting university with the experience and capabilities to support Hispanic students, and Ph.D. granting research universities so that the students late in the pipeline have a high level of engagement with excellent research doc4884 none Professor Yves Rubin, of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles, is studying the functionalization chemistry of fullerenes with the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program in the Division of Chemistry and of the Solid-State Chemistry Program in the Division of Materials Research. Atoms are incorporated inside fullerenes through a chemical functionalization approach using rational organic mechanisms for breaking bonds within fullerene derivatives. Insertion of atoms or small molecules inside the resultant open fullerenes is followed by closure reactions, regenerating the fullerenes with their entrapped species. In addition to providing preparative access to endohedral fullerenes, Professor Rubin s studies are providing fundamental information about the chemical reactivity of fullerenes, leading to advances in the synthesis of functionalized fullerenes expected to display interesting materials properties, such as electroluminescence and ferromagnetism. Fullerenes possess a unique combination of structural, topological, and electronic features. Of particular significance in the discovery and elucidation of the unusual physical and chemical properties of the fullerenes has been the development of techniques for their chemical modification and for the incorporation of atoms and small molecules within the fullerene shell. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program in the Division of Chemistry and the Solid-State Chemistry Program in the Division of Materials Research, Professor Yves Rubin, of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles, is developing new chemical methods to achieve these modifications. By the discovery of selective reactions capable of creating and of repairing holes in the fullerenes, Professor Rubin is able to prepare fullerenes containing a variety of species. These studies provide new methodologies for the selective chemical modification of the fullerenes and offer promise for the preparation of materials displaying important and useful physical properties doc4885 none This project supports the Science & Technology Studies Department of Cornell University for a graduate student workshop on The Significance of Noise to be held April 8 at Cornell University. The conference will engage peers and colleagues in Science & Technology Studies, Psychology, Communications, Sociology, Anthropology, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and other disciplines in untangling the term noise, and how it can be used to gain a better understanding of how scientists and engineers sort meaning from chaos. Four graduate student papers have been selected for presentation. In addition papers from two outside scholars, as well as commentaries from three Cornell faculty members have been solicited. The workshop is organized into three sessions. The first two sessions will consist of two students papers each, running 20 to 30 minutes with a 5 minute follow-up question period for each speaker. After the two students in each panel have given their talks, each guest speakers will present his own material plus some commentary on the theme of the panel. The first panel is entitled Noise and the Body: Human Presence in the Lab, and the guest speaker will be Prof. Brian Rotman of The Ohio State University. Prof. Rotman s talk will be on n01se---the man god number nexus . The second panel is entitled Manufacturing Sense: Noise and Social Negotiation, and the guest speaker will be Prof. Harry Collins, of the Center for the Study of Knowledge, Expertise, and Science at Cardiff University. Prof. Collins talk will be on The Meaning of Data: Open and Closed Evidential Cultures in the Search for Gravitational Waves . A discussion of 45 to 60 minutes on general themes running through all three papers will immediately follow each panel. The third session will be a roundtable discussion with the two guest speakers, three Cornell faculty members, and questions and comments from the audience. The Cornell S&TS faculty members, Michael Lynch, Ronald Kline, and Trevor Pinch, will give 10 minute summaries of their thoughts on the workshop and the topic of noise, followed by 45 to 60 minutes of discussion. In addition, between the first two panels there will be a working lunch, at which all attendees can sit down and discuss the issue of noise more informally. In the lunch discussion, as well as throughout the day, issues raised by speakers on different panels, as well as questions left unanswered in general discussions, and crosscutting themes that deserve extra time and consideration will hopefully be addressed doc4886 none This award provides support for a collaborative study (Universities of Colorado and Wyoming) to analyze the isotopic composition (O and H) of 15 years of samples collected weekly at 80 sites across the United States, samples collected and stored by the National Acid Deposition Program. This new data set will increase the existing database of stable isotopes in precipitation in the U.S. by about a factor of 200, allowing a better characterization of the basic isotope - climate relationships in the U.S. Such information is needed to make better use of paleoenvironmental data such as are found in lake sediments, tree rings and carbonate deposits. The study will examine both the classic isotope - climate relationships such as those with temperature, rainfall amount, continentality and elevation, as well as synoptic scale patterns such as pressure patterns (i.e. ENSO), storm tracks, long wave patterns, and drought and flood patterns doc4887 none This Small Business Technology Transfer Phase II Project will demonstrate the real-time detection of single foodborne pathogenic bacteria in a real-world operating environment. SoftRay demonstrated an innovative technique to detect pathogenic microorganisms in Phase I, based on laser-induced fluorescence coupled with flow cytometry. The Phase I research showed conclusively that this approach is feasible, and that the technique has key advantages over current alternatives including it is: 1) capable of detecting single microorganisms (techniques other than immunofluorescent flow cytometry or immunofluorescent microscopic imaging require in excess of 104 microorganisms), 2) able to completely examine a large volume of food or water in real time, 3) intrinsically automatic, and 4) sensitive only to the selected bacteria or viruses. In Phase II, SoftRay will demonstrate a lost-cost, self-contained prototype system for the detection of pathogenic microorganisms in food or water, including E. coli O157:H7 on beef. This innovative technique is based on laser-induced fluorescence in which a stream of solution containing the microorganisms is labeled with fluorescent probes and is then illuminated with a laser diode (commonly called flow cytometry). The resulting fluorescence is detected with a CCD imager using a novel time-integration scheme. The proposed device will use a simple optical configuration and a laser diode to provide a low-cost, rugged, small, lightweight package that can be used to detect specific, individual bacteria in real time. Key technology objective is to develop a pathogenic bacteria detection technique that can analyze 1 ml of fluid for selected pathogens in less than 1 minute, to a sensitivity of less than 10 pathogenic microorganisms per ml. The result of the Phase I and II project will be the demonstration of a prototype sensor capable of individual microorganism detection of unprecedented sensitivity, selectivity, and speed. This will enable rapid detection of individual specific pathogenic microorganisms in a wide array of applications, including: food processing inspection, clinical applications (such as detection of tuberculosis in sputum), biological warfare defense, and many other situations where single microorganism detection is required. The technique can also be used to detect small numbers of molecules, including explosives and groundwater contaminates doc4888 none Proposal Number: PI s Name: Bloom, Stephen L. Institution: Stevens Institute of Technology TITLE: Support for Student Speakers at MFPS 00 This project provides funding to offset the cost of graduate student attendance at the Workshop on Mathematical Foundations for Programming Semantics, MFPS- , to be held at Stevens Institute of Technology April 12-16, . Invited speakers for MFPS- include Samson Abramsky, Rance Cleaveland, Andy Gordon, Robin Milner, Peter O Hearn, and Dana Scott, each of whom is known for outstanding interaction with students. MFPS has always been hospitable to graduate students, usually attracting a good number of students, who present a significant number of talks. In addition, because of the location, graduate student participation could be unusually high. Attendees at this event are expected to number less than 100, permitting significant student-researcher interaction doc4889 none CMS 00- A Clearinghouse on Natural Hazards Research and Applications Mileti, Dennis S. University of Colorado, Boulder This award supports continuation of support for the Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder for the two-year period from October through September . The Center s basic function, to serve as a bridge between the hazards research and practitioner communities in the United States, will not change. The Center will monitor and disseminate hazards research information to multiple users: administrators, practitioners, policy makers, engineers, and scientists of all disciplines. The Center will publish and distribute the Natural Hazards Observer to over 15,000 subscribers six times a year; operate an electronic newsletter, Disaster Research; and disseminate information via the World Wide Web and traditional hard copy publications. In addition, the Center will continue co-sponsorship of the Natural Hazards Review journal with the American Society of Civil Engineers and seek outside funding to produce and distribute issues of the Natural Hazards Informera publication series designed to synthesize state-of-the-art hazards knowledge so that it can be easily applied by practitioners. The Center will continue to build its library database, and information will be provided on a day-to-day basis in response to inquiries. The Center will sponsor an annual, national and international workshop involving users and producers of hazards research each year. It will also support social science research following disasters by funding researchers throughout the nation to carry out quick response studies of specific hazard events. The Center s in-house research program, which is largely funded with separate research grants, will focus on conducting research recommended in Disasters by Design: A Reassessment of Natural Hazards in the United States (Mileti, ) which presents the results of the Center s five-year research project taking stock of what is known and not known about natural hazards and examining the relationship of hazards to a sustainable society. In particular, the Center s research will address the issue of what, exactly, sustainable recovery from disasters entails. Facilitating and ensuring links among the highly diverse group of academicians and practitioners involved in sustainable hazards management remains the greatest challenge for, and the most significant result of, Center activities. The Center is co-funded by the National Science Foundation, Federal Emergency Management Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and the U.S. Department of Transportation doc4890 none Despite impressive gains in realism over the last decade, computer graphics is currently unable to effectively generate images of objects and environments that look large. This is mostly because computer graphics is poor at conveying information about absolute depth. The goal of this project is to demonstrate that it is possible to significantly improve the sense of depth and scale in computer graphics if rendering methods are developed with specific attention to the need to convey cues for absolute depth. Accomplishing this goal will require new insights into the 3D information extractable from 2D images, modifications to graphics algorithms in order to better render salient information, and sophisticated perceptual experimentation to validate that people can actually see the intended 3D space. The PI s approach will be to draw upon the results and methods of computational vision in ways that have not previously been done in the computer graphics community. Computational vision provides insights into the intrinsic constraints on how information about 3D space can be recovered from 2D images. In particular, the computational analysis of vision points out the important distinction between relative depth judgments and absolute depth judgments. Surprisingly few of the commonly studied image cues are in fact sufficient to provide information about absolute depth. Of those that do, several cannot be exploited in computer graphics due to fundamental limitations in display technology and our inability to precisely control viewing conditions except in immersive environments. The research will impact a broad range of graphics applications in which accurate spatial information needs to be conveyed, including education and training, design and prototyping, and telepresence doc4890 none Despite impressive gains in realism over the last decade, computer graphics is currently unable to effectively generate images of objects and environments that look large. This is mostly because computer graphics is poor at conveying information about absolute depth. The goal of this project is to demonstrate that it is possible to significantly improve the sense of depth and scale in computer graphics if rendering methods are developed with specific attention to the need to convey cues for absolute depth. Accomplishing this goal will require new insights into the 3D information extractable from 2D images, modifications to graphics algorithms in order to better render salient information, and sophisticated perceptual experimentation to validate that people can actually see the intended 3D space. The PI s approach will be to draw upon the results and methods of computational vision in ways that have not previously been done in the computer graphics community. Computational vision provides insights into the intrinsic constraints on how information about 3D space can be recovered from 2D images. In particular, the computational analysis of vision points out the important distinction between relative depth judgments and absolute depth judgments. Surprisingly few of the commonly studied image cues are in fact sufficient to provide information about absolute depth. Of those that do, several cannot be exploited in computer graphics due to fundamental limitations in display technology and our inability to precisely control viewing conditions except in immersive environments. The research will impact a broad range of graphics applications in which accurate spatial information needs to be conveyed, including education and training, design and prototyping, and telepresence doc4892 none The Eastern Algonquian languages, members of a family of Native American languages spoken across North America, occupy a culturally, historically, and linguistically significant position. They were among the first languages to be encountered by the Europeans, and among the first to succumb to the unfortunately widespread subsequent pattern of language loss on this continent (only four Eastern Algonquian languages are still spoken today). They also fall into the typologically significant class of polysynthetic languages currently under intense scrutiny in theoretical linguistics. Polysynthetic languages make extensive use of agglutinative morphology in the construction of complex verbal and nominal stems; exhibit a similarly extensive use of agreement morphology and accompanying null pronominals; and possess relatively free word order, including the use of discontinuous constituents. This project will investigate these properties by carefully exploring the syntax of Passamaquoddy, an Eastern Algonquian language currently spoken by approximately 500 people in Maine and New Brunswick. The dissertation will attempt to illuminate theoretical issues raised by polysynthetic phenomena through a study of double-object constructions and transitivity alternations in Passamaquoddy. In addition, the study will have two descriptive goals: the systematic description of a broad range of syntactic constructions, not touched on in previous studies; and the recording, in digital form, of as large a sample of the spoken language as possible over the term of the project. The work will directly contribute to current efforts to document and revitalize the language, such as a web-based dictionary project and ongoing bilingual education programs doc4893 none Drabold This grant supports the work of a mid-career PI, interested in a theoretical study of the electronic properties of chalcogenide glasses. These are glasses, which involve selenium and sulfur, in their pure form and also alloys involving them. There are three research projects: In the first one, there is a calculation of the electron states near the optical gap, including lattice dynamics effects and using state of the art methods. These states are of critical importance in the transport, doping and optical characteristics of these materials. The second project studies light induced structural changes. Experiments show that such light induced structural changes may be spatially non-local and lead to dramatic phenomena such as athermal photo-melting and giant photo-expansion. There will be a study of models of these glasses, using the activation-relaxation technique of Mousseau and Barkema, in conjunction with fast, approximate ab initio methods. A limited study of the surface states of selected glasses will be performed, both for their fundamental interest as well as for light-induced structural changes, especially photomelting. Finally, there are the associated methodological aspects, e. g. non-adiabatic dynamics. These studies will involve a judicious application of techniques ranging from the simplest empirical potentials to density functional methods in the local spin density approximations with generalized gradient corrections. %%% This grant supports the work of a mid-career PI who is intrigued by the photomechanical effects in chalcogenide glasses. The subject is key to an understanding of the solar cells operating efficiency in that if their are substantial structural changes in the material, as a result of its operation as a photoelectric device, then an understanding of how that happens might suggest ways of improving the battery lifetimes. Additionally the subject is of fundamental importance since the physics involved is subtle and the effects have been beyond the reach of conventional methods and approximations doc4894 none Previous research by the PI showed that waters from the Sepik River on the northern coast of Papua New Guinea (PNG) had dissolved rare earth element (REE) compositions which are quite distinct from seawater. When normalized against the REE composition of Coral Sea Composite, the river had enriched Sm, Eu and Gd concentrations. This signature remained well developed in the estuary despite dilution of river water by seawater. For this reason, the PI will analyze water samples collected from the Sepik River estuary to Manus Island along the track of the Pacific Equatorial Undercurrent (PEU) for REEs. The primary objective for this research is to show that the REE signature and other lithogenic elements, especially Fe, in the PEU results from the transport of terrestrial material via island weathering and river inputs into undercurrents doc4895 none Tivey Researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will build and test a small, solid state, low power, and cable-free orientation device using new magnetic sensor technology and newly available optical communications technology using blue LED (light-emitting diode) devices. The orientation device would be used to determine the orientation of geological features on the seafloor in the same way that geologists use a Brunton compass to measure strike and dips of rock formations on land. The proposed instrument will provide an order of magnitude improvement in seafloor orientation measurements, and it will demonstrate the feasibility and robustness of optical communications using blue LED technology in the deep-sea environment doc4896 none Mazer and Reichman A fundamental problem in population biology is determining the extent of the spread of novel genes in natural populations and its effect on evolutionary and ecological processes. In plants, the introduction of novel genetic material into indigenous populations is becoming more common due to the accidental spread of seeds and due to attempts to restore native vegetation. While the introduction of new genetic material may benefit populations with little genetic diversity, there are also serious potential risks. For example, when individuals representing genetically distinct populations mate and hybridize, the mixing of the genetic material from the two populations through sexual reproduction can result in hybrid offspring (or grandoffspring, two generations later) that are poorly adapted to local ecological conditions. This phenomenon is known as hybrid breakdown and can result in an increased risk of extinction. To date, the possibility that major restoration efforts may hold such a poison pill for future generations (i.e., hybrid breakdown) has just begun to be discussed by ecologists. The collaboration to be initiated here will be the first study of this possibility in grassland species, which have been a major focus of restoration efforts. The investigators will use molecular fingerprinting techniques to seek evidence for hybridization and hybrid breakdown between introduced and resident populations of three species of native California perennial grasses at an extensive grassland oak woodland reserve managed by the University of California doc4897 none Reid This is a continuing analysis of the mean circulation of the Indian Ocean using modern, WOCE-era observations. The approach is one of classical hydrographic and water mass analysis, computing relative geostrophic velocities and then inferring absolute reference velocities from tracer distributions. Once the Indian Ocean circulation has been mapped, it will be synthesized with the circulations already calculated for the Atlantic and the Pacific doc4898 none Joynt Some of the deepest problems in science have to do with the motion of electrons, the carriers of electricity. Their behavior is governed by quantum many-body theory, whose laws often lead to strange and beautiful consequences. The understanding of these particles, and the resulting control that we have over them, underlies a wide range of technology from chemical engineering to computers. A particularly difficult challenge for solid-state physics is to understand the behavior of groups of electrons under special circumstances: when they act collectively because of their mutual interactions. This is a much deeper problem than the individual behavior of isolated electrons. The understanding of the latter is relatively well developed and forms the basis for today s electrical technology. The understanding of collective behavior will be important for the technology of tomorrow. The research in thi sgrant attacks this problem from two different directions: experimental analysis and fundamental calculations. In order to understand collective, or correlated, behavior of electrons, we must have well-developed tools for gathering information about them. One very important such tool is the photoelectric effect, which probes electron behavior by looking at the electrons that emerge from a metal when light is shown on it. In order for this experiment to give accurate information about the metal, we must understand the various ways that the electron can slow down and lose energy before it is detected. Calculations of thi senergy loss, and the resulting experimental signatures, i sone focus of the research. A second focus is to calculate the energies of electrons in very small structures called quantum dots. These structures are sure to be important in future computer technology, as miniaturization of chips and memory elements continues. Current theory does not furnish a good account of the motion of electrons in these structures. Their energy levels are puzzling: we even lack a rough, statistical description. We will use an algorithm based on biological ideas, the so-called gentic algorithm, to calculate these levels. This will be the first time such ideas have been applied specifically to the quantum nature of these particles. One very important example of collective behavior of electrons is superconductivity: the ability of electrons to carry electrical current as a group. Important new classes of these materials have been discovered in recent years, and their properties are novel and, in many cases, poorly understood. The theoretical research in this area, a continuation of a long-standing effort, focuses on understanding numerous experiments and constructing models that combine the phenomena of superconductivity and magnetism doc4899 none s. A concerted effort has been made to invite junior investigators, including graduate students and postdocs, to give these talks. Posters will be available for viewing during three formal sessions, and because the poster session will be adjacent to the lecture hall, it will be easy for participants to go back and forth between posters and lectures doc4900 none This research is designed to examine the physiological processes that occur during development and suppression of the sense of taste. Previous studies of taste development and modification have been severely handicapped by a lack of suitable animal models and a lack of known chemical compounds. Our recent discovery of diet-dependent taste sensitivity and development in a caterpillar suggests that this insect may serve as an ideal model. Newly hatched larvae of the cabbage butterfly are insensitive to bitter feeding deterrents present in unacceptable plants, but taste sensitivity develops as they feed on a suitable food plant such as cabbage. At the same time, larvae feeding on cabbage become dependent on, or addicted to specific chemicals for continued feeding. However, when the larvae are reared on a wheat germ artificial diet, development of sensitivity to deterrents and dependence on stimulants never occurs. Two major questions need to be answered before this model can be fully utilized. (1) To what extent are taste receptors involved in the modified ability of animals to taste? (2) What are the compounds in wheat germ that are responsible for taste suppression? We propose to answer these questions using behavioral tests after selective removal of known taste receptors from sensitive larvae. The involvement of these receptors will be confirmed by electrophysiological recordings from taste hairs of individual insects as their sensitivity to stimulants and deterrents develops. Behavioral assays also will be used to monitor isolation and identification of the active compounds from wheat germ. This work is expected to pave the way for more detailed studies of the biochemical processes involved in molecular recognition of specific food constituents as well as the development of cravings and addiction. If these taste hairs are in fact involved in sensitivity changes, the results are expected to help in explaining development and loss of taste in humans. The availability of an insect model may serve to eliminate or reduce the use of higher animals for clinical testing, and information about dietary experience that can influence food choice by insects could have significant agricultural importance in the design of new pest management strategies doc4901 none A typical auditory scene contains multiple simultaneous events, and a remarkable feat of the auditory nervous system is its ability to disentangle the acoustic mixture and group the acoustic energy from the same event. This fundamental process of auditory perception is called auditory scene analysis. Of particular importance in auditory scene analysis is the separation of speech from interfering sounds, or speech segregation. Speech segregation remains a largely unsolved problem in auditory engineering and speech technology. In this project, the P1 seeks to develop a dynamics-based system for speech segregation using perceptual and neural principles. Auditory grouping will be based on oscillatory correlation, whereby phases of neural oscillators encode the binding of auditory features. The investigation will consist of subsequent stages of computation, starting from simulated auditory periphery composed of cochlear filtering and hair cell transduction. A mid-level representation will be formed by computing auto- and cross-correlation of filter channels. A stage of segment formation then creates individual elements of a represented auditory scene, each of which is a dynamically evolving, connected time-frequency structure that may overlap with other elements. Operating on auditory segments from the segment formation stage, both simultaneous organization and sequential organization will be incorporated. For simultaneous organization, grouping will be based on periodicity, location, onset and offset analyses, while for sequential organization grouping will be based on pitch, spectral, and location continuities. In particular, two pitch maps corresponding to two ears and one location map will be computed for auditory organization. All of the employed grouping cues are consistent with perceptual principles of auditory scene analysis. These cues guide the connectivity of neural oscillator networks, which perform grouping and segregation of auditory segments. The proposed system will be evaluated using real recordings of speech and interfering sounds, where speech can be both voiced and unvoiced. The success of the system will be quantitatively assessed using two measures: changes in signal-to-noise ratio and speech recognition rate. This project is expected to make significant contributions to automatic speech recognition in unconstrained environments doc4902 none The goal of this project is to identify the brain areas through which estrogen acts to modulate learning and memory. The underlying hypothesis is that the effects of estrogen on learning and memory are specific to types of learning, and associated brain areas, used to solve different mazes. Two mazes that tap two different types of learning strategies, place learning and response learning, will be used to determine whether estrogen acts directly at specific discrete brain sites, the hippocampus and dorsal striatum, respectively, important for good performance in these tasks. Two experiments examine the role of estrogen on learning in rats that have had their ovaries removed, thus removing the intrinsic source of estrogen. In the first experiment, rats will receive estrogen directly into either the hippocampus or the striatum and will then be tested for place and response learning. In the second experiment, rats will receive injections of estrogen into the circulation after an estrogen blocker is administered directly into the hippocampus or the striatum, and the rats will then be tested for place and response learning. Some prior reports suggest that estrogen impairs learning and memory, while other reports indicate that estrogen improves learning and memory. The approach taken in this proposal may clarify the basis for these conflicting reports by showing that both conclusions are correct. Estrogen might activate or inhibit different brain areas, thereby changing the learning strategy used and thus what and not necessarily how much is learned under different hormone conditions. The basic finding that estrogen s effects on learning strategy are governed by different neural systems will prove useful for understanding the neural and cognitive processes that accompany the decline in hormones with menopause doc4903 none Paul Durbin, Stanford University By-pass transition, in which a laminar boundary layer becomes turbulent, without passing through the stages associated with a very low disturbance free stream, is a manifestation of subtle and technologically important physical phenomena. The PI will use sophisticated numerical simulations to execute numerical experiments that will clarify the roles of the competing physical effects in by-pass transition. It is expected that this work will have rather far reaching consequences for aerodynamics and turbomachinary doc4904 none In this project, the principal investigators and his associates at the University of Miami will continue their ongoing research into the physical chemistry of iron and other dissolved substances in seawater. They will especially concentrate on determining the solubility in seawater of the very important iron species ferric hydroxide -- believed to be of great importance in the regulation of bioavailable iron. This work will also include an examination of the effects of natural organic ligands that can bind iron and this impact its chemical reactivity, solubility, and availability for utilization by marine organisms. This work with iron will be a continuation of this investigator s longstanding basic research program into ionic interactions in seawater and the implications for chemical speciation, thermodynamic processes, and the rates of chemical reactions in seawater doc4905 none Millis This grant supports the theoretical work of a distinguished, mid-career PI on strongly Correlated electron systems. The list of research projects in this grant includes (1) Disorder and Quantum Critical Phenomena, (2) High Temperature Superconductivity and (3) Nonequilibrium phenomena in highly correlated systems. The class of problems here is frequently referred to as non-Fermi liquid effects. They lie beyond the edge of understanding of electrons in metals offered by Landau s Fermi liquid theory. The anomalies beyond the Fermi liquid theory include the large number of thermodynamic calorimetric results in rare-earth alloys, which are believed to be near a quantum critical point due to disorder. There are related effects in materials relevant for high-density magnetic memories and in relaxor ferroelectrics. There are nonequilibrium effects such as the high temperature resistivity of high Tc copper oxides. The projects involve analytical and numerical approaches along with close contact with relevant experimental work. %%% The theoretical work supported in this grant comes from two themes in current research on materials. There are certain anomalies in the properties of electrons in metals, which Apparently lie outside the conventional paradigm, referred to as the Landau s theory of metals. They are caused by the presence of substantial disorder and or extreme environmental such as pressure, magnetic field or temperature. The work here is fundamental and far-reaching in that it may require development of sophisticated, new mathematical tools and at the same time it is motivated by a need to understand materials which are important for high density magnetic memories or materials which use their ferroelectric properties for memory applications. This work will be carried out in close contact with experimentalists and will make use of both analytical and numerical techniques, as may be necessary doc4906 none Matthews The overall goal of this project is to understand the mechanism by which the amino acid sequence of a protein directs its rapid and efficient folding to the native conformation. Biophysical and protein engineering techniques will be employed to study a set of homologous proteins that have low sequence similarity but nearly identical three-dimensional structures. Dihydrofolate reductases (DHFR) from Escherichia coli (ecDHFR), Lactobacillus casei (lcDHFR) and human (hDHFR) sources all belong to the alpha beta sheet class of proteins and contain an embedded nucleoside-binding domain (NBD) that appears to play a critical role in folding. Small angle x-ray scattering and fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) will be used to probe for residual structure in urea-denatured ecDHFR. Mutational analysis will be used to test for the contribution of hydrophobic clusters to the residual structure and to their role in the formation of parallel folding channels previously identified in the ecDHFR folding reaction. Microsecond folding reactions will be monitored by interfacing FRET technology to an ultrafast continuous-flow mixing system. Mutational analysis will be used to test the hypothesis that alternative docking modes between the loop domain and NBD are responsible for the parallel channel folding mechanism. Systematic fluorescence and circular dichroism studies will reveal the folding mechanism of lcDHFR. Comparison with the mechanisms for ecDHFR and hDHFR will test the hypothesis that folding mechanisms of homologous proteins are better conserved than the amino acid sequences. Because the NBD is one of the top ten motifs found in all three super-kingdoms, it is expected that the insights obtained from these studies of the folding mechanisms of a set of DHFRs will be applicable to the folding of a large class of proteins. An understanding of the mechanism by which the sequence of a protein dictates its folding pathway and, ultimately, structure would have a major impact on the prediction of the three-dimensional structure from sequence, on the de novo design of proteins, and on the production of protein products by the biotechnology industry. This research will provide valuable instruction in experimental design, modern biophysical and protein chemistry techniques, and computer-based data analysis to undergraduate students, graduate students and postdoctoral research associates doc4907 none H. Arastoopour, Illinois Institute of Technology This proposal plans to build on the results obtained by the PI in previous grants on the process of polymeric materials pulverization. In particular, it was shown that it is possible to use an extruder to submit a polymer to a program of stresses and temperature fluxes, resulting into a desirable product. Such are, for instance, the recycling of wasted tires or the creation of useful powders or coatings. This success, which included the successful deposition of several patents, has generated an interest from a number of industrial organizations (Amoco, Dow, Dupont, etc). Future cooperation is being contemplated. The main goal of this proposal is to produce a model, which among other things, will be generic enough to include both laboratory and industrial scales. A detailed research plan includes three parts: experimental, theoretical and computational . A systematic series of tests will expand our current knowledge of particle production , pulverization, mechanical chemical behavior, and waste stream additive component interaction. All these measurements will be the basis for a dependable assessment of the physical processes which lead to desirable materials . A reliable numerical model should follow, including an optimizing procedure doc4908 none Rosson, Mary Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University ITR: Universal Access to Programming-- A Cross-Generational Learning Community Issues of lifelong learning can be addressed by informal education-- voluntary and self-directed learning activities taking place in diverse settings (often outside traditional classrooms) that incorporate a variety of learning methods and are motivated by intrinsic interests such as curiosity, completion of a task itself, or social interaction. The voluntary and self-directed nature of these informal activities make them ideal for reaching populations outside traditional education settings. With respect to informal education on programming, modern visual simulation environments have many features that make them appealing. This research will investigate the effectiveness of a state-of-the-art simulation programming environment as support for informal education of a diverse population of end-user programmers within the context of an ongoing research project on community network infrastructure. Key research objectives include: Characterization of the programming literacy gained through visual simulation programming and a determination of how this knowledge and its accusation is mediated by the maturity and background of end users. Analysis of the role of the existing local community as a learning community in building and maintaining the programming skills of end users of varying ages and roles. Prototyping and evaluating a framework for cumulating and sharing the artifacts and practices of end-user programming within the learning community doc4909 none Twidale, Michael University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ITR: Interfaces for Supporting Over-The-Shoulder Learning For many people, a key form of learning how to use software, for example, is not by taking a training course, nor reading a manual or online help, or experimenting with the software. Instead they may lean over the shoulder of a colleague at work and ask for help. This over-the-shoulder-learning (OTSL) is important to study to understand more about its relative importance and the circumstances in which it is and is not successful. Building on prior work studying informal collaborative help in libraries and offices, the research will address how often OTSL occurs and its significance as a way of learning, possible genres of OTSL, the evolution of learning a software application over time, the resources people use to support OTSL, barriers to OTSL as currently practiced, and the skills of efficient help-giving and determining how these skills may best be taught. This work will help determine the functionalities that have the greatest potential for improving the effectiveness of OTSL and contribute to fundamental research in user interface design and computer-supported cooperative work and learning doc4910 none This award is for a systematic reconstruction of a high quality record of paleotemperatures and paleotemperature gradients over the last approximately 70,000 years across Europe. The specific objectives of this research, a collaboration between McCoy at the University of Massachusetts and Oches at the University of South Florida, are 1) to measure the extent of amino acid racemization in fossil gastropod shells collected from loess localities ranging from northern France, across western and central Europe, and into the highly continental region of the eastern European loess plains; 2) to determine independent ages of the fossil shells or enclosing loess sediment using radiocarbon and luminescence dating methods; 3) to quantitatively estimate paleotemperatures and paleotemperature gradients for selected intervals of time through the last glacial cycle across the region based on the chronological data and amino acid racemization measurements in fossil gastropod shells; and 4) to quantify the relationship between effective ground temperatures, which drive the racemization reaction, and surface air temperatures, which are critical data in the reconstruction of past changes in terrestrial climate doc4911 none This project develops increased instrumental and human capabilities in microwave remote sensing and related fields by making the existing Wyoming Cloud Radar (WCR) and dual-wavelengths radiometers (MR) system available for development work in ground-based setting under normal operating conditions, and by using the ground installation for education and training. Both WCR and MR were developed in collaboration with the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. The WCR MR system has been assembled for use in atmospheric research primarily on board of the University of Wyoming s King Air aircraft. The radar, in operation since , has proved to be a productive research tool and the current work will continue its development, including sensitivity and internal calibration capabilities. The WCR MR airborne system is typically used 2-3 months per year. During those times, exclusive focus is on the collection of cloud physics data, with very limited opportunities for system development, training, and education. When not airborne, the system will undergo minor modifications and be installed in an existing mobile laboratory. This will provide greater access to and increased utilization of this advanced microwave remote sensing instrumentation. In addition, these ground-based data can place air-based data into a better perspective. Education and training will be directed toward graduate students working on theses and dissertations related to airborne remote sensing, microwave and signal processing hardware and software projects, and atmospheric sciences graduate and undergraduate courses doc4912 none Potter, Clinton University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ITR: Bugscope: An IT Test Bed for Sustaining Educational Outreach In general, the scientific research community is enthusiastic about supporting educational outreach efforts (e.g. remote access to scientific instruments via the Internet) if they can be achieved with minimal impact on the primary research mission of a research group. The research proposed here is the development of information technology (IT) to automate the infrastructure, administration and data handling tasks necessary to support remote instrumentation projects for K-16 education. The goal is to develop an IT infrastructure that can be readily adopted by other academic research groups. One result could be the incorporation of the remote use of research grade scientific instrumentation as an integral part of teaching within K-16 curricula with little time and effort from the research groups supplying the scientific resources. The outreach project, Bugscope, that will serve as the focus of this work will be structured so that the instrument, an environmental scanning electron microscope, is provided as a resource while leaving the planning, execution and control of the experiment in the hands of teachers and students. Projects such as this can provide benefits not only to the students involved but also have the potential to provide the general public with better insight into the goals, techniques and instrumentation used by scientists doc4913 none Nitrogen in the marine environment is cycled through a complex and imperfectly understood geochemical and microbiologically-mediated transformations, especially in suboxic waters -- the zone between regions of distinct oxygen availability on one hand and the complete absence of oxygen on the other. While some oxidation-reduction reactions in the nitrogen cycle are certainly driven directly by microbial activity, there is evidence that geochemical linkages to the cycling of other redox-senstitive moieties (such as manganese) may also drive some of these nitrogen transformations. In this study, researchers at the University of Washington, in collaboration with colleagues at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Middle East Technical University in Turkey, will study the chemical reaction rates and microbiology of denitrification reactions in the suboxic regions of the Black Sea. High-resolution measurements of nutrients, trace metals, and the key nitrogen species associated with nitrogen cycling under suboxic conditions would be made. The Black Sea will offer an ideal study site for this work because the spatially extensive suboxic zone will permit the fine-scale measurements that would be difficult, if not impossible, in other marine areas, The project should lead to an improved understanding of both the geochemical and microbiological linkages of the nitrogen cycle in suboxic marine waters to the cycling of other redox-sensitive substances in the Black Sea and other marine environments doc4914 none F. Escobedo Cornell U. In spite of the numerous recent methodological advances in simulation methodologies, an engineering-oriented framework has not been established. If successful, the proposed work will provide general guidelines and specific algorithms to construct such an engineering-oriented framework. In the short term, this work will provide efficient methods that scientists and engineers can use to generate any type of phase diagram for fluid mixtures that could be needed to understand and unveil a particular phenomena or to facilitate engineering calculations in the design of separation processes. In the long term, the results of this work could pave the way to the development of process simulation software having a molecular simulation module for thermodynamic data generation. Applications to the study relatively new systems and processes will unquestionable be explored in the future once better force-fields and faster computers become available. The first step is the development of methods for the simulations of different classes of phase diagrams through single-stag simulations. Novel Gibbs ensemble variants and novel pseudo-ensemble methods will be developed to accomplished this. Pseudo-ensembles provide a general framework to connect arbitrary phase equilibrium specifications with the parameters needed to simulate a selected ensemble; these methods thus provide a convenient tool to generate arbitrary projections (phase diagrams) of the thermodynamic phase space of the system. The second step involves the development of new approaches to map out specific sub-domains of phase space that are relevant to the simulation of phase equilibria in multi-stage processes for systems with many components. These approaches combine simulation data and engineering thermodynamic models in order to harness the predictive power of molecular simulation and the efficiency of engineering models. Novel quasi-Gaussian analytical models will be investigated which, by design, synthesize more information about the underlying ensemble density distribution function (available from simulation output) than conventional engineering models. Several systems will be investigated to test the usefulness of the proposed methods, in particular, the separation of oligomeric mixtures by supercritical antisolvent fractionation doc4915 none SES 00- - Stuart W. Leslie (Johns Hopkins University) Geographies of Innovation: SiliconValley and Its Imitators This award supports the research required to complete an electronic, web-based book about the origins of the Silicon Valley model of regional economic development and subsequent attempts to deploy this model elsewhere in the United States and abroad. The medium may or may not be the message, but the medium can certainly reinforce the message. Consequently an electronic book seems a particularly appropriate format for a study of Silicon Valley and its imitators, not only because producing a conventional book with as much graphical and photographic material as the subject deserves would be prohibitively expensive, but because the layout of the book can take advantage of multimedia in a way that underscores the book s thesis about the importance of space and interconnection. The essential template will be a map, which not only shows where these places are and how they are interrelated to one another, but which allow the readers to trace those interconnections throughout the account, underscoring the spatial dimensions of the modern electronics industry. This project seeks to discover whether regions, like corporations, can reinvent themselves. It asks if models of regional development originally intended to foster the growth of new industries in new places could be adapted to reinvigorate older, or at least established industries, in old places. It also asks if other models may be more appropriate for maintaining the vitality of high technology industry in regions facing economic maturity or decline. It considers what role, if any, the state should play in an era of declining federal support for corporate and academic science. It thus asks whether the state should attempt to serve as a catalyst for economic development, either by direct subsidy or by supporting new kinds of partnerships between industry, universities, and state agencies; or whether industrial policy better left in private hands, so that individual corporations, large or small, can decide for themselves how best to leverage their research and development investments. Where other accounts have generally focused on successful efforts at regional development in new places (e.g. Research Triangle Park), this study gives equal attention to older industrial regions which have drawn upon what they believed to be the Silicon Valley model in an effort to retain and revitalize existing high technology industries, and explore places such as South Korea and Taiwan which have translated the Silicon Valley model into new idioms. In addition to reinterpreting Silicon Valley itself, with particular attention to the role of large firms such as IBM, Bell Labs, and Xerox, the planned electronic book will include chapters on the electronics industries of New York State and New Jersey; on Texas and Oregon, regions which have become satellites of Silicon Valley; and South Korea and Taiwan, which have, through deliberate government policy and a strategy of foreign investment and reverse brain drain, developed indigenous versions of Silicon Valley. These choices are not arbitrary. Each of them represents a place that hired Frederick Terman, the acknowledged father of Silicon Valley as a consultant to advise them on high technology policy. It will conclude with a comparison of Silicon Valley, the exemplar of postmodern production and Las Vegas, the exemplar of postmodern consumption, each unexpectedly dependent on the other doc4916 none This ESH award will examine the seasonal flux of the planktic foraminifer N. pachyderma in sediment traps from the Pacific sector of the Southern Ocean to determine whether this species accurately represents surface water conditions or, as the PI hypothesizes, subsurface conditions caused by the presence of a shallow, very cold subsurface layer and intense density stratification doc4917 none R. Rajagopalan, University of Florida The processes of nucleation and crystallization are important in a number of industrial applications, including molecular self-assembly and synthesis of nanocrystalline materials where the role of long range forces between atoms and molecules dominates the evolution of the crystal structure. The PI proposes to study, experimentally and theoretically, the crystallization of charged ( soft ) colloids. The role of long range molecular forces within the parametric range of colloids will be investigated using tested measurement techniques (such as optical, neutron and X-Rays) and classical constitutive models as applicable. The PI selected the nature of the colloid (e.g. monodisperse latex particles), its geometry, composition and suitability to the available beam techniques ( reciprocal-space ). An important section is devoted to data analysis and theoretical examination. Such questions as the relative role of equilibrium thermodynamics and crystallization kinetics, crystal liquid interface interaction, will be researched doc4918 none This award provides support for the U.S. contribution to a highly collaborative international scientific drilling expedition to collect new data to aid in understanding Earth s climate by recovering long cores from Lake Malawi. Recovery of a long core from the southern end of the East African Rift Valley dating some 800,000 years into the Earth s past will be attempted with the use of the Global Lake Drilling 800 Drilling System (GLAD800). The key scientific goals of the proposed research are to: 1) examine the response of the tropical terrestrial African climate to changes in low-latitude insolation and high-latitude ice volume orbital forcing, 2) determine if high-frequency climate variations are superimposed on glacial-interglacial variations in the form of wet dry climate cycles, and 3) examine how inter-annual African climate variability may have changed as a result of longer-term climate variations. If the researchers are successful, the resulting research will move the field of global change research forward by providing a high-resolution terrestrial record of tropical climate in a key climatic region. The proposed collaboration with scientific colleagues from Europe and Africa, as both intellectual and financial partners, greatly enhances the potential for success of this endeavor. The lessons learned from drilling in Lake Malawi will provide information as to the utility and practicality of using a mobile drilling system such as the GLAD800 as a tool for paleoclimatic research doc4919 none This ESH project will collect and analyze coral specimens from the Cape Verde and Gulf of Guinea, using stable isotopes and trace element geochemistry, to determine the climatic variations in this region over the past 200 years doc4920 none PI: Werner Proposal Number: Funds are provided for the analysis and interpretation of archived data from the wind-driven boundary layer over Georges Bank. These analyses will test the generality of recent findings concerning the dynamics of the boundary layer and extend them. The study will address what causes the flatness of the Ekman spiral during summer conditions, how the boundary layer dynamics are modified in winter when the surface and bottom boundary layers overlap, and under what conditions a one-dimensional model of the coastal surface Ekman layer is an adequate representation of the dynamics doc4921 none PI: Whitehead Proposal Number: Funds are provided for an experimental laboratory study of the dynamics of partially mixed flows driven by both salt and heat fluxes. The study will perform a careful examination of the parameter space in which different states of such doubly-driven flows have been observed to exist and will determine the stability of these flow regimes within this space. Supporting theory will be developed. This information will be of significant value in studies of climate variability and estuarine circulation, as well as in the interpretation of paleo-oceanographic data sets doc4922 none This SGER project will explore a unique approach to creating long-range ordered arrays of self-assembled, three-dimensional (3D) quantum dot islands. The concept being explored in this project is that with nucleation-less islanding, periodic arrays of uniformly sized QD islands may form spontaneously under suitable conditions-or may be induced by weakly invasive growth modifiers that promote and enhance existing ordering forces. The research will use growth in an ultrahigh-vacuum system and post-growth, in-situ scanning tunneling microscopy to explore aspects of QD island formation. Epitaxial SiGe alloys on Si(100) will serve as a model system. A range of growth parameters in which islands form without 3D nucleation will be sought. The surface morphology evolution at early stages of heteroepitaxy (before islands with discrete facets form) will be studied to detect possible driving forces for spontaneous self-organization of QD islands into periodic arrays. Additionally, transient straining of the substrate surface by an optical interference pattern as a way of enhancing these driving forces to impose long-range order will be explored. %%% This project will explore a new and innovative approach to creating long-range ordered arrays of self-assembled, three-dimensional (3D) quantum dot islands. The idea being explored involves nucleation-less islanding, whereby periodic arrays of uniformly sized QD islands may form spontaneously under suitable conditions. The project sets specific goals and methods for an initial study to test these ideas, and several key issues can be appropriately addressed and resolved by the project doc4923 none This ESH project will collect and analyze coral specimens from the Cape Verde and Gulf of Guinea, using stable isotopes and trace element geochemistry, to determine the climatic variaions in this region over the past 200 years doc4924 none This is the first year funding of a three-year continuing award. Access to non-textual material for persons with visual impairments has become increasingly important in recent years. Tactile or haptic displays hold considerable advantages in term of non-textual information transfer, particularly for navigating in GUIs and in the transfer of graphic and spatial information (plots, bar graphs, etc.). This project will evaluate a new type of haptic display based on electrostatic stimulation (as opposed to the more common electrocutaneous or vibrotactile modes of stimulation). Electrostatic displays have the potential to overcome many of the problems of electrocutaneous and vibrotactile displays. Electrostatic displays can be easily batch fabricated using micro fabrication techniques, the percept is one of texture (there is negligible direct current flow into the skin) and there are no moving parts to stick or wear. The project will focus on the evaluation of the display for use in practical situations and will also lead to a better understanding of the perceptual mechanisms in electrostatic stimulation. Specifically, the work will focus in two areas: (1) evaluation of the display including learning effects, young vs. old, visually impaired vs. non-impaired, comparison to raised line drawings, pattern recognition, academic business graphics and dynamic range, (2) development of improved display technology guided by continuous evaluation experiments doc4925 none Object-oriented programming is the mechanism of choice for implementing high-end applications. However, the architectures supporting these applications continue to be biased toward array- rather than object-based paradigms, where proximity of storage layout does not necessarily imply contemporaneous access. Object-oriented programs do exhibit repeated patterns of storage access. Thus, a dynamic approach that can facilitate intelligent pre-fetching of data into Caches or TLB s can better support object-oriented programs. This research investigates the use of intelligent storage systems, such as Intelligent RAM (IRAM) and Processor in Memory (PIM) devices, to improve the performance of object-oriented programs in the following three ways. Storage management functions, such as allocation and garbage collection, are migrated to intelligent memory devices using algorithms that are not only efficient in execution time, but also simple in logic design. Storage prefetch functions, such as memory forwarding and jump-pointers, are migrated away from the CPU and its cache and into the intelligent storage system. Storage access idioms are captured, compressed, and sent to the intelligent storage system for execution. The result of this research is the liberation of the CPU and its data cache from the overhead associated with the dynamic, garbage-collected storage of modern object-oriented languages doc4926 none The topic of trust and its influence on consumer behavior has received growing attention of late with respect to electronic commerce, especially with regard to establishing and evaluating the trustworthiness of a single web site. However, consumers who rely on the Internet for information gathering are better served by tools that integrate information from many different sources and measure the trustworthiness of the integrated body of information. We propose to develop a methodology that addresses this problem of assembling an information product from many sources and evaluating its trustworthiness. Drawing on techniques in text analysis, knowledge acquisition, graph theory and visualization, and statistical inference, we will enable the user to generate an automated summary from a group of web pages, evaluate its trustworthiness, and visually navigate the information models. The final deliverable is a software package that implements the methodology. The proposed research will benefit the Internet community by providing a new technology that fills the void left by current information retrieval and trust assessment technologies. In addition, the techniques we propose to develop have the potential to contribute to a wide variety of fields confronted with the problem of analyzing samples of graph-valued data doc4927 none This award is for a study of the isotopic composition of stalagmite specimens grown over the past 500,000 years in three caves in China: Buddha Cave south of Xian, Huanglong Cave in northwestern Hunan, and Fengyu Cave south of Guilin. The stalagmites will be dated by TIMS U-series methods to establish precise time frameworks upon which the variations of d18O and d13C are to be examined. In these stalagmites the long-term d18O variations provide the history of temperature changes, with lighter d18O values reflecting colder climate. The d13C record represents vegetation changes, such that warm and dry conditions reduce the C3 C4 plant ratio, the density of vegetation, and the 13C fractionation for carboxylation in C3 plants, giving rise to heavier d13C values. From the isotopic measurements, the proponents will reconstruct records of the paleotemperature and paleomonsoon variability over the past 500 ka, at 102 -103 year resolutions. The proponents will then compare them with the loess records from Central China and the marine oxygen isotope records, to investigate the response of the winter monsoon to global ice volume change doc4928 none This award is for a study to test the use of diatom-inferred conductivity as a proxy for fluctuations in P - E (precipitation minus evapotranspiration) for lakes adjacent to the western portion of the Greenland Ice Sheet. If robust, the investigator will be able to reconstruct the Holocene hydrologic history of a coastal region of West Greenland at sub-century scale, which in turn can contribute to evaluating hydrologic influences on marine and terrestrial systems over this time frame. Evaluation of coarser scale changes in P - E during the Holocene will be made from geomorphic studies of paleoshorelines. The study will use biological and geochemical proxies in lake sediments to reconstruct Holocene environmental history of three local regions of West Greenland at sub-centennial scale doc4929 none Multiple parties are increasingly using distributed information systems, especially the Internet, for automated negotiations. Game theory provides a basis for engineering incentives into the interaction mechanisms of these systems so that desirable social outcomes follow -- even though every party acts based on self-interest. However, there is a hazardous gap in game theory when it comes to incentives and computation, leaving such systems open to manipulation. Extensions to game theory that address computation are required for settings where the participants are self-interested, and there is an underlying intractable problem that limits the agents rationality. In this project, a theory of interaction is being developed where computational actions are treated as part of each agent s strategy. The work involves model development, game-theoretic analysis, mechanism and algorithm design, and computational experiments. This research paves the way to building secure systems that are robust against manipulation, yet computationally feasible. The theories being developed allow the construction of optimal negotiating agents in settings where computation is an issue. This enables wider and fairer access to Internet commerce by putting novices, assisted by these software agents, on an equal playing field with expert market participants. The methodology being developed also enables the design of economically and computationally more efficient interaction mechanisms doc4930 none This ESH project will analyze alkenone unsaturation as a proxy for sea surface temperature in sediments from the Bermuda Rise at sample intervals of 100 years for the last 450,000 years. The goal is to construct a highly-resolved record of SST that can be compared with variations in the Vostok ice core to assess the timing and occurrence of rapid (millennial) variations and to serve as a reference section for North Atlantic variability comparable to the Greenland ice core record doc4931 none The memory model for a programming language specifies the relationship between the order in which data accesses appear in a program and the order seen during execution by the different program components With the advent of parallel programming environments like Posix threads, Java, and OpenMP, multi- threaded explicitly parallel programs have become much more frequent. This increases the need for memory models that are easy to understand and efficient so that correct pro- grams can be developed and still give good performance. Unfortunately, the usability of memory models, their impact on performance, and the compiler technology needed to per- form optimizations of parallel programs are poorly under- stood. The result is that current memory models tend to favor performance over usability by restricting the programs that can be written with them, or by being difficult to understand. The objective of this project is to study com- piler techniques to optimize explicitly parallel programs by using optimizations and analysis algorithms structured to handle a broad class of consistency models. The techniques studied will be implemented in a compiler that will serve as a testbed for prototyping and studying programming language memory models and for studying the optimization and analysis of explicitly parallel programs doc4932 none With the widespread dissemination of digital video, images, audio and other data on the Internet and other media, information protection and copyright protection have become areas of vital importance. These applications have generated an extraordinary level of interest in digital watermarking techniques in recent years. Whereas novel watermarking algorithms and novel ways to defeat them have been developed, fundamental principles of information theory have barely skimmed the surface of this field, and recent results by the PI have shown that existing schemes operate far below the ultimate achievable limits. We intend to develop our ideas for a theory of watermarking codes and to construct codes that approach capacity. We also plan to develop a closely related thrust of research on robust watermarking and authentication techniques for images and video. Our research will be guided by extensive body of knowledge (much of it developed in the last decade) developed in the context of modern communication systems on one hand, and image analysis on the other hand. Our plan is to explore the following topics: Codes for Gaussian channels. We have recently derived closed-form solutions for the hiding capacity of channels involving Gaussian sources and squared error distortion metrics. Our first goal in this research is to develop codes whose performance approaches capacity for such channels. This model, in addition to being useful in the context of practical watermarking applications, will shed light on the fundamental issues involved in constructing watermarking codes. Hence its implications go beyond the particular model studied. Estimation of Attack Channel Parameters. In blind watermarking applications, the decoder does not have access to the original data, and does not know the particular attack that may have been used to corrupt the data. Desynchronization attacks such as scaling, shifting, rotating or warping of image data can then be deadly. We will explore fundamental mechanisms for the decoder to estimate the parameters of such attacks. Codes for arbitrary channels. While Gaussian channels are the worst channels under certain conditions, watermarking codes need to be robust against a variety of attacks. One of our goals is to develop codes and decoding techniques that perform well not only against Gaussian noise attacks, but also against desynchronization attacks, erasures, and other attacks. Application to Image and Video Watermarking. While information theory and coding theory provide fundamental guiding principles to the design of watermarking systems, application of these principles presents unique challenges in specific situations such as image and video watermarking. These two applications will be investigated in detail. Fingerprinting and Authentication Codes. There are several information-hiding problems closely related to watermarking that we intend to explore. Many graduate students are interested in moving into such an attractive research area, which combines breadth and strong emphasis on fundamentals with practical relevance. We intend to train these students for leadership roles in information technology. We also plan to involve undergraduate students, as they find this subject to be a truly enjoyable learning experience doc4933 none The goal of this project is to develop advanced algorithms for visualizing the sources of noise and vibrations of complex vibrating structures based on simple measurements of acoustic pressures. The software developed will provide an efficient, robust, and user-friendly tool to practicing engineers concerned with identification and control of noise and vibration. For example, this will allow aircraft designers to reduce the amount of noise inside the passenger cabin of an airplane, or make quieter cars. This project will address mathematical, computational, and engineering issues related to finding the source of acoustic radiation from a vibrating structure, also known as acoustic holography. This process involves determining the vibrational patterns in a structure based on simple acoustic pressure measurements from an array of microphones near the structure. The mathematical part of acoustic holography is an inverse problem, the direct problem being to determine the radiated acoustic pressure field in the fluid medium, given the vibration responses of the structure. Inverse problems such as this are ill-posed, thus requiring effective regularization techniques as filters. In this project, the researchers will pool their expertise and experience in advanced computational science, mathematical analysis, and mechanical engineering to elevate the acoustic holography to a higher level for solving engineering noise and vibration problems in a cost-effective manner. The algorithms and regularization techniques will be firmly based on current work in numerical linear algebra, mathematical analysis, and engineering practice. Iterative methods will be developed to provide fast computational techniques for both the single layer and Helmholtz-Kirchhoff integral equation methods. Estimates of stability and accuracy will be established to provide guidance for optimal regularization strategies, measurement locations, and number of expansion functions for the Helmholtz Equation Least Squares (HELS) method and combined HELS (CHELS) method. Experimental validation of the methods will be carried out for both interior and exterior regions on an aircraft cabin and a vehicle front end doc4934 none As computers become pervasive in the home and community, new applications will emerge that will make daily living easier by automating or assisting in a variety of human activities. Such applications will be information rich and they will create and manipulate sensitive information about the activities of their users, and the environment in which they live and work. At the Georgia Institute of Technology, an information rich Aware Home has been built to explore many such applications. Clearly, it is important that such applications be secured if they are to be deployed successfully. This project will undertake a range of research activities to secure future applications. These include new security policies for such applications, and intuitive and flexible access control models. A variety of automatic user identification techniques will also be investigated to authenticate sources of requests without requiring burdensome participation from the users making the requests. New notions of integrity for information accessed from outside sources will be developed. The authorization, authentication and integrity mechanisms will be used to build security services for emerging applications. The use of formal models will be explored to study important properties of the new security policies and access control models doc4935 none This award is for support of Phase II of the Patagonian Lake Drilling Project (PATO), a multi-disciplinary, international collaborative effort to recover and analyze long lacustrine cores for paleoenvironmental and paleoclimate history. Based on the results of Phase I, the investigators plan to concentrate PATO Phase II on Lago Cardiel because it contains the most promising sequences in terms of continuity, chronology, temporal resolution, and paleoclimate sensitivity. PATO Phase II aims to: (1) Develop a 3-dimensional sediment and tectonic basin history based on analysis of the obtained seismic profiles and landscape imagery. Physical properties of the dated cores will be used to validate and calibrate the seismic stratigraphy. (2) Further collect and analyze the modern lake and terrestrial components for climate calibration. Sediment traps will document sediment components, stable isotopes and biological proxies. These are needed to understand the hydrological, geochemical and lake productivity changes. (3) Analyze sediment cores recovered during Phase I, estimated from our combined radiocarbon and ash chronology to date back beyond 18,000 years B.P., for magnetic, sedimentological, and geochemical stratigraphy (including stable isotopes on carbonates and organic matter), along with paleoecological stratigraphies for pollen, charcoal, diatoms, and ostracodes (including stable isotopes and amino acid racemization for chronological assessment doc4936 none This is the first year funding of a three-year continuing award. This multi-disciplinary study will explore a novel approach based on 3D magnifying lenses to building improved highly interactive 3D interfaces to scientific and engineering data that allow users to easily interact at multiple scales and with multiple coordinate systems. To be effective it is necessary that interfaces to large data bases be highly interactive allowing users to drill down on demand to see detail as necessary, or to zoom out to get contextual information. The P1 will extend human spatial cognition theory to deal with common problems in interactive 3D visualization systems, and in particular to cover perceptual issues relating to eye-hand coordination in multi-scale environments using stereo and head tracking VR technologies to improve visualization and interaction. The PI will develop techniques to link views so that users do not become disoriented while interacting with data at different scales. A proof-of-concept prototype that enables scientists and engineers to monitor and control remotely operated vehicles or autonomous undersea vehicles will be used to conduct experimental user evaluations to provide feedback and measure success doc4937 none This award is for a study to provide the first snapshot of past tropical cyclone activity during the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period. To accomplish this goal, the investigators will collect several speleothems from a site in Jamaica. They will then perform 210Pb dating to supplement annual band counting and unambiguously determine the year of deposition of each speleothem layer. Stable isotopic analyses will be conducted at weekly intervals (20 micron resolution, sufficient resolution for detecting individual storms) on the selected speleothem for three decades in the late 20th century. The speleothem record of tropical cyclone events thus generated will be calibrated and assessed by comparison to the historical storm record for that location. Finally, the investigators will apply the proxy method to detect tropical storms and hurricanes during the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period (using the same speleothem), and thus determine the relation between climate (i.e. sea surface temperature) and storm frequency doc4886 none This award provides support for a collaborative study (Universities of Colorado and Wyoming) to analyze the isotopic composition (O and H) of 15 years of samples collected weekly at 80 sites across the United States, samples collected and stored by the National Acid Deposition Program. This new data set will increase the existing database of stable isotopes in precipitation in the U.S. by about a factor of 200, allowing a better characterization of the basic isotope - climate relationships in the U.S. Such information is needed to make better use of paleoenvironmental data such as are found in lake sediments, tree rings and carbonate deposits. The study will examine both the classic isotope - climate relationships such as those with temperature, rainfall amount, continentality and elevation, as well as synoptic scale patterns such as pressure patterns (i.e. ENSO), storm tracks, long wave patterns, and drought and flood patterns doc4939 none The origin of landforms and soils along temporal landscape gradients long has been a topic of study and speculation in geomorphology, soil science, and related fields. This is true for sub-Arctic areas that were covered by glaciers until very late in the Pleistocene. While considerable attention has been given to analyzing the dates and processes that formed moraines and other landforms as well as soils, far less attention has been given to integrated examinations that link the development of micro-scale landform and soils with vegetational succession. This doctoral dissertation research project will investigate the geoecological controls on micro-scale landscape evolution in the late-Holocene deglaciated terrain of Jotunheimen in south-central Norway. The study will focus on local environmental parameters that were conducive for the formation of patterned ground initially after deglaciation, with attention also given to the processes that led to vegetation succession and soil development in the micro-scale (from 0.5 m to 3 m) patterned ground landforms. The central hypotheses of this project are that significant micro-scale soil development differences occur within patterned ground and are positively correlated to vegetation succession. Vegetation tends to establish itself on the periphery of patterned ground structures due to decreased frost activity. The biotic effects interrelated with the physical environmental parameters will be increasingly detectable in terms of soil genesis within patterned ground along a chronosequence transect. The project will include field work in two glacial forelands within the mountainous area of Jotunheimen. Extensive data are available on postglacial surface ages in the terrains before the Storbreen and Slettmarkbreen glaciers. This project will use these data in addition to data gathered through the excavation of soil pits. Vegetation also will be sampled to obtain measures of species composition, diversity, and coverage (biomass indicator). The results of this project will provide new insights into rapid landscape evolution induced by environmental change. Specifically, this study will contribute to the understanding of factors controlling soil formation, particularly the vegetation factor, and it will elucidate the ecological process of succession as controlled by substrate. This knowledge may then allow for predictions of future landscape changes in other mountainous areas. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc4940 none This project will discover novel scheduling techniques for large scale applications on parallel computers, and will develop new parallel algorithms using those scheduling techniques to calculate quantum trajectories for electron scattering problems. Such research is important to help enable theoretical models as close as possible to real events, so that simulations of physical phenomenal derive accurate predictions. Since many application problems in science and engineering are irregular, large and computationally intensive, finding their best solution in terms of numerical properties and parallel performance represents an important contribution to the development of advanced computational science. Technically, this project will develop new models for dynamic scheduling strategies used in scientific computing based on probabalistic and statistical analysis, and will evaluate their effectiveness on an analytical and experimental basis. The project specifcally addresses the following general issues: (1) to develop novel dynamic scheduling strategies that can accommodate applications with unpredictable behavior in load distribution, and evaluate their competitiveness with respect to existing technology; (2) to develop new parallel numerical algorithms using those strategies for the study of scattering from an Eckart potential barrier in one dimension and electron scattering in three dimensions from the ground state hydrogen atom and one, two, three and four electrons bound to a hydrogen-like one and two dimensional multicharged ion; (3) to analyze the performance of this parallel application via new and predictive performance metrics. In addition, visualization methods will be applied to the calculation of quantum trajectories, leading to the possible identification of visual and quantified signatures of quantum chaos. This is chaos in quantum mechanical systems defined in terms of the behavior of quantum trajectories doc4941 none Torrellas, Josep University of Illinois ITR: Intelligent Memory Architectures and Algorithms to Crack the Protein Folding Problem This project is a multidisciplinary effort to design fundamentally improved algorithms, hardware, and software to solve the protein folding problem. The project, which teams experts in hardware, software, and computational biology, promises advances in applications of protein folding such as drug design and understanding of diseases. In addition, the project will investigate new hardware and software based on advancing IC technology. The architecture under examination will use increased integration of processors and memory in a single chip, and software will take advantage of the proximity of memory and processing. This work is tightly coupled to the IBM Blue Gene effort, but will investigate complementary issues. In particular, simulation-based studies will investigate the use of next-generation intelligent architectures doc4942 none Advances in processor technology, both in increased processing power and decreased energy consumption, have led to the creation of a new breed of small intelligent devices from tiny laptops, to PDAs, to smart phones, to wearable computers made from a collection of small independent devices. The advent of such devices and wearable computers brings to light new possibilities and new needs, specifically: cooperation among devices and elimination of cables. The development of short-range radio technology, such as Bluetooth, enables the cooperation of such devices over wireless links. As users collect multiple small computing devices, the amount of communication resources available to the user increases and so the demand for coordination of resources between these devices increases. The overhead of this coordination may tax the available bandwidth and energy resources of the devices. The goal of this research is to support such cooperation and coordination through intelligent communication management with an emphasis on the efficient use of available resources. As the user moves between different environments, these MObile grouPEd Devices (MOPEDs) cooperate as a coordinated local area network that provides the user the desired mobile services. This cooperation and coordination between a single user s devices changes the definition of what it means to communicate with a user. With a MOPED, communicating with any of the devices in the MOPED represents a successful connection to the local area network, and so to the individual. In order to better support the needs of the user, the MOPED may interact with networks in the current environment surrounding the user in order to determine the availability of local services. The researchers approach relies on decision algorithms; services and protocols for determining what communication channels are available to which devices, as well as resource and quality information about such channels. The researchers address four major challenges faced in the design of such a solution. 1) Channel Discovery: The researchers propose the design of intelligent service discovery protocols based on the requirements of the user and the tradeoff between having current information about the availability of communication channels with the overhead in resources (i.e. bandwidth and power) used to acquire that information. 2) Resource Monitoring: The researchers propose the design of a distributed resource information repository, which is a database internal to the MOPED. The algorithms governing the dissemination of resource information to devices in the MOPED must take into consideration the topology of the network, the energy and bandwidth availability of each device, and the priority at which each device actually needs the information. 3) Resource Allocation: The researchers propose the design of intelligent transport and routing protocols able to use the resource availability information to determine which and how many of the MOPED s external channels to use to complete a specific connection. 4) Mobility Management: The researchers propose mobility management techniques to provide the ability for external users to communicate with the user, and so the devices of the MOPED, wherever it is currently connected to the Internet and propose the design of mobility management protocols based on the current technology for host mobility. The results of the research will enable simultaneous connections through all available communication channels. This creates a very robust environment, where it becomes easier to guarantee complete communication coverage. It allows using MOPEDs for critical tasks such as patient monitoring where it is important to maintain connectivity at all time, through there may be some flexibility in the amount of data that is transferred as well as the importance of that data. If the communication patterns of such a MOPED are not well monitored, certain devices may unacceptably lose power due to inefficient connection management doc4943 none Proposal Number: PI: Xi, Hongwei Institution: West Campus, University of Cincinnati TITLE: Imperative Programming with Dependent Types Programming is notoriously error-prone. As a consequence, a great number of approaches have been developed to facilitate program error detection. The proposed research intends to enrich practical imperative programming with a type discipline that allows for specification and inference of significantly more precise information on programs than those enforced in languages such as Java and Standard ML. The primary motivation for developing such a type discipline is to enable the programmer to capture with types more program properties such as memory safety and then enforce these captured properties through type-checking. This practice allows for detecting more program errors in less time. Another motivation is to use the type discipline to generate memory safety proofs for low-level code and thus effectively produce proof-carrying code that asserts its own memory safety. In short, the research studies a type discipline for practical imperative programming at both high and low levels, aiming for producing software that is not only more robust to run but also less costly to maintain doc4944 none This project will address the needs of researchers involved in solving large nonlinear problems, which exhibit multiple solution paths, or large-scale minimization problems with multiple local minima. It will develop a library of visualization and computational steering tools to address path following problems efficiently on Beowulf computer clusters. It will also provide tools for optimization of the cluster communication. It will produce tools that are integrated with the CUMULVS steering and visualization environment. The software libraries will be open source and provided to the community of researchers and users doc4945 none Krishnamurthy, Prashant University of Pittsburgh ITR: Educating a Wireless Information Systems Workforce The primary objective of this project is to develop and implement a wireless information systems degree track that provides a unique education in the development, design, and deployment of wireless information systems with an emphasis on emerging wireless data technology. The goal is to produce information technology (IT) professionals with the knowledge to address the special challenges (e.g. user mobility, adverse communications channels, limited battery life) posed by emerging wireless information systems. A secondary objective is to develop innovative instructional methods and tools using wireless devices in the classroom and laboratory that extend through K-16 education. The research and coursework associated with this educational track are needed to help meet the explosive demand for IT professionals from wireless service providers, wireless equipment manufacturers, applications developers using wireless systems, and wireless information systems users doc4946 none DeMille, David Yale University ITR: Quantum Computation with Trapped Polar Molecules David DeMille This project is developing the basis for a new technical approach to the design of a quantum computer, which can plausibly achieve several orders of magnitude improvement in number of operations performed before decoherence. The quantum mechanical bits in this design consist of the electric dipole moments of diatomic molecules, which may be oriented either along or against an external electric field. Coupling between bits for logical operations is established because the electric field created by each dipole influences the energy of its neighbors. The molecular dipoles are trapped in a linear array formed by a standing-wave laser beam. It is estimated that this design can lead to a quantum computer with 10,000 qubits, which can perform 100,000 processor steps in the 1-10 seconds before decoherence. This project will address two aspects of the development of this approach: a source of ultracold molecules, and demonstration of the couplings between polarized molecules. The first stage of the work will be development of the source of molecules by simultaneously collecting Rb and Cs atoms in a magneto-optic trap, then photoassociating them to form ultracold RbCs molecules. The second stage will demonstrate the possiblilty of coupling between molecules by measurement of molecular electric resonance frequencies as a function of density and applied electric field. Once the effect has been observed the project will turn to the construction of an optical trap for the quantum computer. Demonstrations of most of the technical elements necessary for the quantum computer will be possible within the period of this project doc4947 none Sources of on-line information are becoming increasingly decentralized, heterogeneous, and complex even as they become correspondingly richer and more valuable. Determining the structure of these information sources is becoming key to extracting and managing the knowledge they contain. Some of these sources exhibit an explicit network structure --- the hyperlinks of the World Wide Web form an excellent example. In other domains, ranging from electronic communication to informal human social networks, subtle hidden linkage relations play a large role in determining the information flow within and between communities. The link structures of both types of environments can yield a surprising wealth of latent information about their content, making their complexity manageable. The proposed research seeks effective mechanisms for eliciting a global understanding of link structures in information networks. A key component of this effort is the design of techniques and tools enabling a richer level of interaction with on-line information. The research focuses on the development and integration of new techniques in three areas: natural language understanding methods to uncover implicit relationships in on-line content, efficient algorithms to analyze complex networks of inter-connections, and mathematical models of the dynamics and social processes by which networked information evolves doc4948 none As design-for-test (DFT) research becomes mature, a deep understanding of the relationship among structural features and their mutual effects on testability is needed. Sequential loops are widely accepted as a significant testability problem that must be addressed by the DFT process. Reconvergent fanout is also known to be a problematic structure for testability, however its impact on test has not been thoroughly studied. This project will investigate the relationship between reconvergent fanout, sequential loop length, and aspects of testability including fault coverage, test application time, and test generation time. This understanding will enable the creation of new DFT approaches, which improve testability in a unified way, considering all structural features and their interactions doc4949 none s that can be spread over multiple paths. The researchers intend to integrate the above multi-path transport scheme for video traffic into a comprehensive simulation of the ad-hoc networking environment, that will include a radio propagation model, nodal mobility model, MAC protocol, and a routing algorithm (to discover the network paths). The researchers will gather performance measures from the simulation that will allow them to determine the quality of video at the application level depending on the parameters of the models used. The researchers expect to be able to answer questions, ranging from the very basic issue of viability of supporting real-time traffic in an ad-hoc networking environment to what type of routing protocol is most suitable for real-time traffic. The research will be performed through both analytical and simulation tools. In particular, for the simulation, the researchers will use advanced models for prediction of the radio propagation environment, the user mobility model, and the traffic generation model doc4950 none The Internet is used by a rapidly expanding and changing set of applications. The need for the network to evolve and even to provide application specific processing is significant. However the current network infrastructure is hard to evolve and does not readily support customizability. The goal of Active Networking [21, 3, 2] is to facilitate this evolution and customization by making the network infrastructure programmable. One way of adding programability is to allow code to be down-loaded into the routers, thus enabling the addition or modification of services. A more radical approach is to allow the packets themselves to carry programs to be executed selectively on the network s routers. Among other issues, these two approaches increase the possibility of denial of service attacks whereby a user places excessive demands on network resources in order to deny access to another user. However, they also enable new approaches to handling such attacks and to addressing the general problem of allocating resources within the network. The proposed research focuses on issues involving programmable, or active, packets. Active packets facilitate denial of service attacks in several ways. First, unlike conventional data transport packets, an active packet may require processor cycles and memory at the routers beyond those needed to simply forward the packet. Second, in general, the execution of an active packet at a router may cause more than one active packet to be transmitted from the router. Such behavior is useful, since it allows a packet to fan out across the network, but it is potentially dangerous since it can lead to an exponential growth in the resources used by a single initial packet. Experience with active packet-based systems [9, 8, 23, 22, 24] suggests that denial of service is the single biggest obstacle which must be overcome before such systems are feasible. The proposed research tackles this problem along various fronts. First, the researchers propose to design packet programming languages that make some types of behavior intrinsically impossible. For example, in PLAN [9], packet programs are guaranteed to terminate and thus can never use an un-bounded number of router cycles. The researchers will explore tradeoffs between restricting behavior in terms of resource requirements and limiting the expressibility and thus the flexibility of active packets. However, not all potentially harmful behaviors can be eliminated in this manner. Thus, on a second front, the researchers will consider mechanisms that explicitly account for a packet s resource usage in the network. For example, each packet may carry a resource bound, which is decremented as resources are used, and which triggers termination when the bound is used up. The proposed research combines both implicit and explicit mechanisms for controlling resource usage, with algorithms to control the flow of traffic into the network to decrease the likelihood of denial of service. More generally, one can envisage assessing costs to active packets that execute on congested resources. Thus, on a third front, the researchers propose to investigate mechanisms based on congestion costs to achieve more efficient resource allocations and how they can be facilitated via active packets. Three methodologies will be used to validate proposed solutions. First, the researchers will draw on mathematical modeling to motivate the benefits and investigate the characteristics of the proposed solutions. Second, the researchers will leverage expertise and past work on implementing active networks to demonstrate what is feasible to build, and explore the constraints each solution will place on eventual applications. Finally, the researchers will use network simulation to investigate systems on a scale not achievable on the experimental testbeds doc4951 none The PI will investigate the stucture and function of new multiview eyes, that is new imaging devices built out of several conventional cameras. The research is motivated by the variety of eye designs in the biological world and obtains inspiration for an ensemble of computational studies that relate how a system sees to what that system does. This, coupled with the geometry and statistics of multiple views, points to new ways of constructing powerful imaging devices which suit particular tasks in robotics, visualization, video processing and augmented reality. First, the Argus eye will be designed and built, which is a system consisting of up to 12 cameras attached to a sphere-like structure and pointing outwards. The video cameras, equipped with a synchronizer will simultaneously record data onto disk. Next new algorithms will be developed and implemented for processing video collected by the new sensor for the purpose of very accurately estimating 3D motion and subsequently shape models of the imaged scene. how to use such models in video editing and manipulation will be shown. In the second stage of the project, new algorithms for negative spherical eyes , i.e. networks of video cameras attached to the walls of a room pointing inwards, will be developed. The main effort will consist of algorithms for recovering descriptions of action, in particular human movement. Specifically, software will be developed for building representations of 3D motion fields, and these structures will be analyzed using geometric and statistical techniques to develop invariant characterizations of action. It is expected that these developments will have a strong impact to automatic animation doc4952 none This award is for a study using recent advances in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to analyze the extent, area-altitude relations, microclimatic, and major climatic relationships of all Alaskan glaciers. Data sources include high-resolution Digital Elevation Models (DEM s), Digital Line Graph (DLG) files of glacier extent, and gridded climate estimates. The study will complement existing monitoring programs through spatial analysis of more than 46 derived parameters, including: minimum, maximum, and average elevation; area, slope angle, length, width, aspect, curvature, and shape; area-altitude distributions; potential insolation, shading, backwall height, upslope area, and continentality; hypsographic ELA, summer temperature, winter precipitation, and sensitivity to climate change. These parameters will be quantified for each glacier as a whole, and for individual 60 m grid cells as appropriate. Portions of the study will be dedicated to testing GIS results with direct measurements for greater than 30 Alaskan glaciers. Results will include not only datasets, but the ability to draw meaningful relationships from spatial trends. The new approach will be applied on a statewide level, providing an orders-of-magnitude increase in understanding of glacier and climate dynamics in the American Arctic doc4953 none This dissertation project investigates institutional and technological changes in the production of scientific and medical knowledge about tuberculosis (TB) in Soviet Georgia. It examines the impacts of social and political instability on healthcare reform and on the experiences of healthcare practitioners with processes of national reconstruction in scientific and medical settings. Georgia, like much of the former Soviet Union (FSU) is currently facing widespread epidemics of TB and multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB). Massive social and economic changes throughout the FSU have led to extremely high levels of poverty, crowded living conditions and shortages of food and energy, all of which create the conditions in which TB has become endemic in many parts of the world. With the demise of the Soviet Union came the dismantling of the centralized healthcare infrastructure. Severe shortages in technological resources necessary to effectively treat and control TB, and in the financial resources necessary to pay healthcare practitioners, to obtain basic diagnostic and treatment supplies and to otherwise maintain stable biomedical research and treatment facilities present great difficulties for local healthcare systems. Georgia is in the throws of a severe energy crisis and political and economic upheavals that persist after years of interethnic conflicts. The cultural, political and economic conditions fuel the spread of TB and further complicate healthcare reform in general and TB eradication in particular. This health crisis has drawn a great deal of attention from the World Health Organization (WHO) and other members of the international health community, as well as other Western European and US based humanitarian aid agencies such as SOROS and USAID. They are working to coordinate efforts with a heterogeneous constellation of locally and internationally based public and private aid organizations, hospitals, labs, pharmaceutical corporations and governmental organizations to implement the standardization of WHO-based management and treatment strategies. By employing ethnographic methods of participant observation, interviews and document analysis within this network of labs, clinics and administrative sites, the researcher will pursue three main goals. Specifically: 1) to map the changing constellation of actors populating the landscape of knowledge production about TB in Georgia and the transnational routes and relationships through which they travel and interact; 2) to understand the processes through which western scientific and medical discourses, technologies and practices take on local meaning in the Georgian context and 3) to thus understand larger processes of decentralization and national reconstruction via the lens of healthcare reform in general, and of changing institutional and technological aspects of TB management and control strategies in particular. This research will contribute to an understanding of these processes, and to the inseparability of the organization and distribution of biomedical institutions and resources from local and global cultural, political and economic forces. As a cultural approach to biomedical knowledge production concerning infectious diseases, this project will enhance participants understandings of the effects of recent political and economic upheavals on health and on responses to health-related issues in Georgia and the former Soviet Union doc4954 none The researchers propose to design, implement, analyze and evaluate mechanisms that will enable mobile clients to opportunistically exploit computing, data and communication resources in the fixed infrastructure to facilitate information access. A mobile client typically faces many resource challenges. These include unpredictable variation in wireless network quality; wide disparity in the availability of remote services; limitations imposed by weight and size constraints on CPU power, memory size and disk capacity; and concern for battery power consumption. The goal is to exploit remote infrastructure, such as transient caching sites or compute servers, to overcome these challenges. When such infrastructure is unavailable or would be too expensive or slow to access in terms of battery power or bandwidth, the researchers wish to be able to continue operation relying solely on local resources. The challenge is to come up with the adaptive mechanisms, algorithms and policies that can be effectively implemented on a resource-limited mobile client, yet function smoothly and seamlessly from a user s viewpoint. The research will span both experimentation and analysis. On the one hand, the researchers plan to design, implement, and evaluate mobile computing systems embodying innovative solutions to the challenges described above. This will give the researchers the hands-on experience and insights needed to elucidate sound design principles for this domain. In parallel, the researchers plan to conduct an analytical and modelling effort to obtain a deeper understanding of fundamental tradeoffs in adaptation, and to explore a much broader region of the design space than feasible experimentally. This effort will be organized into three major thrusts: 1.Efficient file cache management for mobile clients 2.Offloading computation for energy and bandwidth savings 3.Modelling and analysis of adaptation tradeoffs In the first thrust, the researchers plan to explore the use of intermediate caching sites in the infrastructure to improve the efficiency of cache management in mobile file systems. The importance of caching for mobile information access is widely acknowledged, but what specific form it should take in the mobile systems of the future remains an open question. In the second thrust, the researchers will explore techniques for mobile clients to adaptatively offload computation on servers in the infrastructure. Such offloading may be useful for improved performance as well as enhanced battery life. In the third thrust, the researchers will analytically investigate a wide range of policies for the mechanisms developed in the other thrusts. The mobile computing systems of the future are likely to encounter considerable variability in environmental conditions, user preferences, and application characteristics. Characterizing this large multi-dimensional space analytically, and understanding its implications for alternative policies will be critical to the development of successful systems. If successful, the research will bring mobile computing one step closer to reality. Although commercial deployment of mobile computing systems is an enormous potential market for industry, many difficult technical problems remain to be solved. Incremental efforts by industry to extend today s widely-deployed commercial off-the-shelf systems to mobile environments will not solve these problems. The researchers proposed effort, combining experimentation and analysis on a key set of challenging problems, thus represents a high-risk, high-payoff venture doc4955 none The proposed study aims to improve surface exposure dating using in-situ accumulation of cosmogenic isotopes by improving knowledge of the spatial variability of the cosmic-ray intensity with geomagnetic cutoff rigidity (a measure of geomagnetic intensity) and with elevation. The proposal is to conduct a survey of the neutron intensity at the rigidity greater than 17 GV and at altitudes up to 6 km. The work will be conducted in southeast Asia (probably in Thailand), the only location with rigidities above 17 GV. The proponents will measure the neutron intensity using a small aircraft flying at a constant altitude. The results will be used to determine the neutron attenuation length (the function that relates neutron intensity to elevation) for this rigidity. The value will then be used with their other survey results and with other published data to determine how the attenuation length varies with the cutoff rigidity (or with geomagnetic latitude). The final goal of the project will be the construction of improved formulations for scaling production rates of cosmogenic isotopes from one location to any other arbitrary location doc4956 none Parallel computing has promised very high performance, but has delivered it only in a narrow range of applications. Exploiting parallelism at the level of large distributed-memory systems is hampered by the cost of message-passing, while shared-memory systems remain mostly small-scale. With the advent of symmetric multiprocessors (SMPs), however, shared-memory on a modest scale is becoming the standard for desktop scientific and engineering applications. Yet very little has been done yet to support effective parallel computing on an SMP beyond basic linear algebra and fast Fourier transforms. Fortunately, preliminary work by the investigators indicates that it is possible to design and implement algorithms for irregular (i.e. graph-based) computations that provide efficient, scalable performance on SMPs. This project will further develop, implement, assess, and refine those algorithms. Technically, the project will focus on science-driven problems that are graph- or geometry-based (e.g. phylogeny tees and watershed modeling) and thus involve irregular computation. It will provide three main benefits for these problems. First, it will develop new algorithms and a library of basic routines to support graph and computational geometry algorithms, leveraging insights from nearly twenty years of theoretical work on Parallel Random Access Memory (PRAM). Second, it will produce an assessment methodology for SMP-based computations using both generated test instances and real-world data, extending recent developments in algorithmic engineering and experimental algorithmics. Finally, it will provide a practical demonstration of high performance computing on desktop SMPs for scientific problems doc4957 none In this project an integrated fault recovery system is developed that quickly isolates faults in programmable digital components and determines new device programming configurations to return them to full functionality. After detection of a hardware fault in a digital component such as a digital signal processor or a field-programmable gate array, an attempt to recover from the fault is made at the local embedded system affected by the fault. If the local system is unable to complete the recovery effort, a computational-superior remote system may be accessed via a local network to aid in the recovery effort. In either case, the result of the recovery procedure is a new device configuration (instruction sequence or configuration bitstream). This configuration allows the affected system to perform the same logical function as the original configuration while avoiding the detected functional hardware fault. The direct result of this work is a set of compilation techniques for both DSPs and FPGAs that produce instruction and bitstream configurations that avoid detected hardware faults. These tools are directly integrated into a networked environment through the use of TCP IP transfer mechanisms built into operating systems frequently used for scientific computing doc4958 none To overcome the limitations of current development methods for embedded software, which include limited use of secure and type-safe languages and the lack of support for formal validation techniques, this work explores the use of the modern secure language Java coupled with light-weight formal methods to establish correctness. It tailors the Java technology to fit the domain of embedded systems by placing restrictions on the Java subset, supporting provably correct-by-construction synthesis techniques for reactive control skeletons, and analysis techniques based on algorithmic as well as deductive formal verification techniques. A key goal is also to support advanced features such as dynamic software upgrades and process migration through safe implementation methods that are formally verified. It develops a new set of model-checking and program analysis tools that are demonstrated on prototype hardware software co-designs of embedded Java processors doc4959 none The project will construct a Virtual Variorum Edition (VVE) of Cervantes ( - ) influential Don Quixote de la Mancha . The VVE, based on available-quality microfilmed images of the original editions published during Cervantes life, will contain the important editions of the work in image and text; annotation of the variances present among the editions to enable comparison; derivative editions, generated as the result of scholarly analysis of the variances and bearing supporting reasoning; and commentary by experts that illuminates elements of texts and of the comparisons among editions. The project s focus is on the digital representation, interlinking, and dissemination of the many computer-based manifestations of the documents and commentary. It will prototype an end-to-end effort; from front-end acquisition of materials through flexible back-end presentation to readers. The VVE, even in prototype form, will be an important artifact, with potential to become the standard research tool used by Cervantes scholars. It will, for the first time, make the resource of multiple rare editions of the Quixote easily available in primary-source form. The project will have implications for Digital Library projects involving the humanities, both as an demonstration of what can be achieved today but also through development and validation of techniques doc4960 none Particular protocols and mechanisms (e.g., cookies, finger commands, the design of message headers), as embedded in commonly used information technologies such as the Internet, have the ability to affect experiences in online environments and to regulate behavior. A series of historical case studies will be conducted to understand how the use of these mechanisms can have social consequences. These case studies will encompass the historical development of the Internet as well as the ways in which social values such as free speech, privacy, and intellectual property rights have intersected these developments. Documentary methods and qualitative interviews will be used. The results of these case studies will allow a better understanding of the processes that build norms, customs, and consensus in online environments. Further, this research will aid in the development of theoretical models to assist policy makers in understanding how sensitivity to the design of IT (and its various mechanisms, protocols, etc.) may be an alternative to formulating new laws and regulations to achieve positive social outcomes from new information technologies. Finally, this research addresses the relationship between the commercialization and privatization of the Internet and our established constitutional and social values doc4961 none This research focuses on the analysis of spatial interactions in distributed GIS environments. Data related to systems of spatial interactions includes spatial flows and locational and attribute data pertaining to origins and destinations. Given that these datasets are distributed across multiple nodes of a computer network, this research aims to: 1) study mechanisms of data partitioning and develop a metadata structure that describes the partition; 2) develop decomposable algorithms for gravity modeling that minimize communication cost; and 3) develop efficient algorithms for learning and classifying flow patterns using distributed data sources. The approach is to let the databases reside at their native sites. The algorithms dynamically decompose themselves into partial computations that are executed at individual database sites, and local results are composed to obtain the same global results that would have been obtained if the databases had been moved to a common site. The algorithms can find the decompositions to match the distribution of data across the network. This research will have significant impact on many problems that need to process distributed data. For example, it can enable GIS systems to analyze spatial-temporal datasets distributed over the Internet without having to move the databases to a common site doc4962 none Eckstein, James University of Illinois ITR: Toward Agile Information Networks: Electro-Optic Frequency Shifter A new type of optical frequency translator, under study and development in this project, can provide very rapid optical routing capability. The device, known as an Electro-Optic Frequency Shifter (EOFS) provides an all optical way to rapidly shift a bitstream from one optical channel to another in a high-bandwidth wavelength division multiplexed network. The EOFS uses a traveling wave electro-optic interaction between a microwave control signal and the optical bit stream. The microwave signal co-propagates with the optical bit stream through a LNO waveguide, and shifts frequency of the optical pulses via the linear electro-optic effect. Tuning in this device is accomplished by changing the microwave power level, keeping the microwave frequency fixed. All of the light is shifted in frequency, so there is no need to filter unshifted light. A single-stage device should have a tuning range of over 2 THz, which would encompass many optical data channels. Since there is no second optical source needed, there is no settling control time required for tuning a second optical frequency; the device can change frequency shifting as quickly as the amplitude of the microwave signal can be changed, which should be on the order of the inter-pulse time spacing doc4963 none This award is for a study of oxygen-isotope records from Ethiopian lakes. High-resolution multi-proxy paleoclimate records that have been calibrated against instrumental data are rare from the continental tropics. A group of crater lakes in Ethiopia present an unusually favorable combination of accessible and inter-comparable study sites with laminated carbonate-rich sediments, and long instrumental records of climate, hydrology and limnology. This project will use oxygen-isotope records from the lacustrine carbonates, calibrated against instrumental data and compared to model simulations and other paleoclimate proxies, to document climate variability at the study site at decadal to century timescales over the last years doc4964 none It is very well known that there is sometimes a striking divergence between the continuous and the discrete. The theory of time scales has been initiated by Stefan Hilger ten years ago in order to unify study for differential and difference equations. Not only is it able to treat these two cases simultaneously, but it also can handle numerous other cases \in between the continuous and the discrete, and those cases might be important for applications. For this reason it also could be worth to think about the consequences of a better developed time scales theory for graduate and in particular for undergraduate education. As the theory is very new and virtually important to every area in analysis, work on this subject done now will be fundamental. If NSF funds this proposal we would expand the theory of dynamic equations on time scales in various ways. We would like to conduct study of linear dynamic systems on time scales which would result in a better understanding of higher order dynamic equations. For those the task of characterizing disconjugacy is an interesting one, and this question we also want to address for higher order Sturm-Liouville dynamic equations or, more general, linear Hamiltonian dynamic systems on time scales. Such systems also would be interesting if an eigenvalue parameter was involved, and we would like to derive an existence theorem, an expansion theorem, Rayleigh s Principle, and more general oscillation results for these eigenvalue problems. Another interesting task, which is intimately connected to the above problems, would be to establish a theory of variational analysis on time scales. To give necessary and sufficient conditions for strong and weak local minima would be the main concern of such a project, and it would also be of use to establish a Weierstrab Theory for variational problems on time scales doc4965 none This award is for support of a study to take advantage of the known and estimated patterns of present and past climate variables in eastern North America in developing dD (deuterium) values for selected biomarkers into a new proxy for climate measurements. The project will study how the hydrogen isotopic composition of individual biomarkers varies in lacustrine surface sediments and in sediment cores from seven well-studied sediment sites in eastern North America and Yucatan Peninsula. The investigators will also collect and analyze dD values of lake water and aquatic plants along transects of surface sediment sites doc4966 none PI: Michael J Lovaglia, Leda Kanellakos Status cues give clues to an individual s status characteristics and task abilities, and through the theoretical mechanism status generalization, have been shown to affect group structure and individual behavior. This project investigates formal vocabulary as a potential status cue. Preliminary results have shown that formal vocabulary does raise the performance expectations associated with an actor. This research investigates how that effect may interact with other status characteristics; in particular, whether the enhancement produced by vocabulary can raise expectations for actors already possessing high status as much as for actors possessing low status. Results will improve determinacy of theoretical explanations for effects of status cues, and will give some understanding of the applicability of this particular status cue in different kinds of social situations doc4967 none The East Pacific Rise (EPR) is currently our best-studied section of fast-spreading mid-ocean ridge, yielding a wealth of observational data and results spanning many scientific fields. However, this information has not yet been fully utilized. Most of it exists in noninteractive form (e.g. journal publications) or as incompatible datasets and models. To make the most of this data, scientists will need a wide range of sophisticated programming support to coordinate the use of data, computational tools, and numerical models across distributed networks of computers. This project will develop that support. Technically, this project will develop the computational infrastructure needed to support data sharing, tool composition, and model coupling for the use of large scale, interdisciplinary data archives. It will then apply that infrastructure to build a domain-specific environment called the Virtual Research Vessel 1 (VRV-1). The VRV-1 will facilitate the use of data, maps, and models related to the EPR. The project will address fundamental issues of integrated middleware for scientific data management and computational science. In particular, it will support data sharing by merging three technologies: geographic information systems, database management systems, and electronic notebooks. It will support tool composition through an extension of an existing electronic notebook. Finally, it will support model coupling by developing support for exploring model correlations and relationships at a very high, domain-specific level in a fast prototyping environment doc4968 none Schmitt An extensive field experiment will be conducted in the area of the extensive thermohaline staircase in the western tropical Atlantic to investigate the role of double diffusion in subsurface water mass transformation. A purposeful tracer (Sulfur hexafluoride SF6) will be released into a layer near the middle of the staircase to obtain a robust 9-month measurement of vertical mixing and lateral dispersion. Surveys of fine- and microstructure with a profiling instrument will determine the dissipation rates of turbulent kinetic energy and thermal variance. Formulae for the relationship of these dissipation rates to vertical diffusivity depend dramatically on whether the source of energy for mixing is salt fingering or turbulence. This experiment will determine the relative contribution of these two sources to the vertical mixing of tracer, salt and heat. A moored CTD Current profiler will be used to relate fine- and microstructure surveys to the long term tracer dispersion. The hope is that the work will lead to improved parameterizations of diapycnal mixing for general circulation and climate prediction models doc4969 none Ray tracing methods are an important tool in computational geophysics, and are used regularly both for simulating seismic wave propagation and for generating images of subsurface geologic structures in inversion and imaging methods. For example, these are some of the basic tools in oil exploration. However, even recent high-efficiency ray tracing implementations have some potentially important limitations. On the other hand, wavefront construction algorithms are another class of solutions that do compute all of the relevant physical information. This project will develop these methods. They will find use in a wide range of activities ranging from fundamental studies of the nature of the Earth s deep interior to analysis and characterization of oil reservoirs in the petroleum industry. Technically, this project will develop new wavefront construction methods for seismic ray tracing in 3-D, anisotropic models of the Earth. This allows more general and realistic Earth models than are currently possible. At the same time, this is an important problem in advanced computational science, because the 3-D mesh constructed in the course of the simulation will have geometries and features not usually considered in other common mesh construction algorithms. Another important aspect of the research will be the development of self-tuning components in the software to allow the algorithm to automatically adapt itself for maximum computational speed on hardware configurations ranging from small desktop workstations to massively parallel supercomputers doc4970 none This award is for a collaborative research project to drill and core approximately 300 m of sediments at each of two sites in Lake Titicaca (Bolivia Peru) with the primary objective of reconstructing a 0.5 million year history of climatic change in tropical South America. Lake Titicaca provides a unique opportunity to study a continuous record of past climate in tropical South America. It has a long, rapidly accumulating sediment record in its deep basins. Changes in lake level are well correlated with precipitation amounts (and temperature) in the Amazon basin, and tropical sea-surface temperatures in the adjacent equatorial Atlantic. Modern Lake Titicaca is a nearly closed basin, so that the studies of lake level, chemical composition, and biota are particularly indicative of changes in the amount of precipitation and the precipitation evaporation ratio doc4971 none The need to improve congestion control techniques for the Internet has grown recently. Non real-time data traffic, which is currently transported on a best effort basis, will increasingly have more stringent delay and throughput requirements to meet critical scientific, corporate and e-commerce applications. In order to meet this enhanced quality of service requirement, the existing feedback congestion control scheme incorporated in the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) needs to be understood. For this purpose, the PIs intend to: 1) Build an analytical model that can incorporate key features of TCP Reno and TCP enhancements under consideration by the IETF. The model the PIs present here is interesting in that it can accommodate multiple TCP flows and possibly multiple network nodes. 2) Place TCP in a control-theoretic framework so that its stability and transient behavior is well understood. The use of non-linear control techniques proposed here is novel, and should make available a new set of mathematical tools to study this problem. 3) The synthesis of these two activities will in turn suggest methods that ensure that any proposed TCP successor is stable, as well as improving throughput and fairness. A more limited goal but with perhaps more immediate impact is a better understanding of the stability and performance of TCP Reno. All of this work will be performed within the complementary congestion control efforts underway such as traffic engineering using the Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) protocol, traffic shaping and policing, service scheduling and buffer management. In addition to a survey of the state of the art, the PIs present some preliminary results and ideas for future research. The PIs demonstrate an analytical model of TCP Reno for the single node case, and some of the insights that even such a simple model provides. The PIs also present a way of extending recent control theoretic work in flow control to a more realistic and general context, where boundary effects and unknown, time-varying propagation delays appear in networks. Lyapunov theory, the theory of functional (retarded) differential equations and constructive design methods in modern nonlinear control will play a key role in the synthesis of new feedback congestion control schemes for the Internet. The broader impacts of this research include the development of closer interaction between the control theory and networks research communities, curriculum enhancement at the graduate and undergraduate levels, applying some of the practical implications of this work through ongoing industry interactions, and inputs to IETF groups doc4918 none This award provides support for the U.S. contribution to a highly collaborative international scientific drilling expedition to collect new data to aid in understanding Earth s climate by recovering long cores from Lake Malawi. Recovery of a long core from the southern end of the East African Rift Valley dating some 800,000 years into the Earth s past will be attempted with the use of the Global Lake Drilling 800 Drilling System (GLAD800). The key scientific goals of the proposed research are to: 1) examine the response of the tropical terrestrial African climate to changes in low-latitude insolation and high-latitude ice volume orbital forcing, 2) determine if high-frequency climate variations are superimposed on glacial-interglacial variations in the form of wet dry climate cycles, and 3) examine how inter-annual African climate variability may have changed as a result of longer-term climate variations. If the researchers are successful, the resulting research will move the field of global change research forward by providing a high-resolution terrestrial record of tropical climate in a key climatic region. The proposed collaboration with scientific colleagues from Europe and Africa, as both intellectual and financial partners, greatly enhances the potential for success of this endeavor. The lessons learned from drilling in Lake Malawi will provide information as to the utility and practicality of using a mobile drilling system such as the GLAD800 as a tool for paleoclimatic research doc4973 none PROJECT SUMMARY Stochastic Dynamical Systems Analysis of Neural Information Representations The nervous system is composed of specialized cells called neurons that transmit information through the pattern of electrical impulses known as action potentials or spikes. The sequence of spikes forms point process time-series, i.e. a series of ones and zeros. Neural systems use the firing patterns of spike trains to encode representations of relevant biological signals and external stimuli. An experimental system widely used to study neural information encoding is the rat hippocampus. The hippocampus is a brain region critical for the formation and storage of both short- and long-term memories. Within the hippocampus the rat uses neurons known as place cells to develop a spatial map of an environment. As an animal moves through its environment, a hippocampal place cell demarcates, within as few as 5 minutes, its own region in the environment by firing spikes only when the animal is within that region. The region of the environment in which the cell fires is termed its place field. Large numbers of hippocampal place cells tile each environment with overlapping place fields and their ensemble-firing pattern gives a continuous representation (memory) of the animal s location in space. How ensembles of place cell neurons work together to represent spatial information is an important question. An active area of neuroscience research is the development of mathematical techniques to decipher this ensemble encoding. Because neural spike trains are point processes, standard statistical signal processing techniques for continuous data have limited application in the analysis of neural systems. Accurate processing of neural system dynamics requires development of techniques to characterize correctly the point process nature of neural encoding. Martingale theory offers an efficient way to relate the current behavior of a point process stochastic dynamical system to the system s history and provides a prescription for finding the best estimate of signal encoded in a multidimensional point process time-series. While martingale theory has been applied in cancer survival studies, queuing theory and communication problems, it has yet to be adapted to signal processing in neural systems. Another signal processing discipline whose ideas have had limited application in neuroscience is adaptive estimation. Adaptive estimation offers a way to track the dynamics of how a neural system updates its encoding of a relevant biological stimulus. This project will study two problems in neural signal processing: 1) development adaptive estimation algorithms to track instantaneously the dynamics of spatial information encoding by individual rat hippocampal place cell neurons; and 2) development of neural spike train decoding algorithms based on martingale theory to study information representation by ensembles of rat hippocampal place cell neurons. This work will provide a statistical framework for analysis of experimental studies on the role the hippocampus plays in memory formation. The adaptive estimation and martingale methods developed in this research will offer a new statistical paradigm for studying the dynamics of information representation and transmission in neural systems doc4974 none The objective of this research is to determine how best to design computer systems for collecting data from (rather than providing data to) users. Government agencies might use such systems to gather the factual data used to calculate the unemployment rate or the Consumer Price Index. Three sets of laboratory experiments focus on actual and simulated desktop (i.e., keyboard and mouse entry) and speech survey interviewing systems. The first set of studies examines response accuracy and user satisfaction with systems that monitor users speed of responding and speech patterns in order to diagnose when users misinterpret concepts in the survey questions and could use additional clarification. The second set of studies examines user response accuracy and satisfaction with interfaces that do (or do not) tailor this clarification through dialogue. The third set of studies contrasts interfaces that require users to educate themselves about how the questions should be interpreted with interfaces that engage users in dialogue to figure out the correct answer. The project uses the methods of experimental psychology to provide guidelines for future development of interfaces that collect information from users. This research could significantly improve the accuracy of data collected online by government agencies and others doc4975 none Network simulation is an indispensable tool for researchers seeking to understand the principles of network architecture and protocol design. A key parameter in any moderate to large-scale simulation is the topology, i.e., the way the nodes of the network are organized and connected to each other. Good models for topology are essential for good simulations. The PIs have developed graph modeling software that currently is widely used as a tool for generating topologies, particularly models of large internetworks. The Georgia Tech Internet Topology Models (GT-ITM) package allows researchers to construct model topologies whose structure arguably resembles the node-level structure of the Internet: routers or switches, connected by (bidirectional) links, and grouped into domains. The GT-ITM software is included with ns2 [2], the defacto open-source standard for network simulation. Despite the wide-spread use of GT-ITM, in general, and its transit-stub model, in particular, a number of critical and fundamental questions remain unanswered about network topology modeling. For example, 1)Topology models. Recent data indicates that the current Internet topology has some properties that are not well reflected in the transit-stub model of GT-ITM [17]. For example, features such as the exchanges where many transit domains come together are lacking. Are there better techniques to generate topologies intended to model the Internet? More fundamentally, how should a topology generation technique be evaluated (i.e., how is better measured)? 2)Topology scaling. Although strides are being made in supporting large-scale simulations [33], most researchers will continue to simulate their protocols on topologies that are smaller than the target operational large-scale networks. How should smaller topologies be configured so that they reasonable reflect their larger counterparts? Is there a theory of topology scaling that can provide the fundamental grounding for configuring topologies of various sizes? 3)Topology use. The PIs primary interest in topology modeling is to provide a foundation for large-scale simulations. Facilitating the use of topologies in simulations must go beyond providing theoretically sound models, however, and include a set of complementary tools for graph visualization, routing table construction, etc. What visualization tools are useful to researchers and assist in accurate intuitive understanding of underlying topology? How can different routing policies be effectively reflected in routing table construction? The researchers propose (1) to address these and other fundamental questions in the area of topology modeling and (2) to reflect their understanding in a set of topology tools and benchmarks made available to the research community at large. This work will build on the PIs prior experience in modeling internetworks. The proposed work will contribute to fundamental understanding in the area of topology modeling. The work will include a set of evaluation criteria to assess the quality of a topology generation method and improvements in topology models. The work will also produce an evolutionary theory of topology scaling, with implications for efficient simulation using topologies that are smaller than the target. In addition to contributions to fundamental understanding, a central component of the proposed work is a set of tools and benchmarks to be made available to the research community at large, following in the tradition of the GT-ITM suite. These tools will allow other researchers to generate topologies, assess the quality of candidate topology modeling methods, utilize benchmarks based on current and future technologies, and interact with a visualization of topology doc4976 none Compilers are an essential component in the software engineering process. They bridge the abstraction gap between high-level programming languages, where the design and reasoning about software takes place, and intermediate or machine level, at which distribution or execution takes place. This project explores strategies for increasing the reliability of compilers by constructing a compiler companion, called a translation validator, that watches the compilation as it unfolds and checks that each transformation preserves the operational meaning of the program being compiled. This promises to be a feasible alternative to compiler verification since it is, in general, easier to verify that a transformation has been performed correctly than to verify the program that performs it. Two major benefits are expected from translation validation. One is a significant increase in the effectiveness of testing during development and maintenance of compilers. The other is a methodology for translating along with the source code the formal arguments obtained by source-level static analyses into corresponding formal arguments at the level of the executable that is being distributed and executed. This would allow a code receiver to check quickly that the code has certain properties of interest, such as secure behavior, without having access to source code doc4977 none Platform-Independent Computing, as popularized by Java, is a key technology for developing and executing next generation software on distributed and heterogeneous computing platforms. The current state-of-the-art mobile-code system is built around the Java Virtual Machine Language (JVML). Unfortunately, JVML does not support other programming languages well and is notoriously inefficient, complex, and hard to extend. This research focuses on developing a new mobile-code infrastructure that eliminates all of these weaknesses. The infrastructure will be based on the FLINT typed common intermediate format (also developed by the PI) and will provide support to multiple programming languages such as Java, ML, and C. The research will investigate new techniques on building certifying compiler, smaller virtual machine, and more extensible runtime system for compiling and running the FLINT mobile code. The resulting infrastructure will be made publicly available to support other cutting-edge research on proof-carrying code and secure internet programming doc4978 none Reasoning about the behavior of large component-based software systems demands a modular or compositional reasoning system, in which summary properties of a system s pieces are composable to deduce properties of the entire system without delving into the internal details of those pieces. This research focuses on contributing principles for how to design component-based software that supports modular reasoning, and to help bring this new knowledge into practical application with commercial distributed component technologies. Specifically, the project investigates: (1) developing and describing detailed principles for designing the interfaces of software components so that they support both modular reasoning about system behavior and effective and efficient distribution and execution; (2) showing how to write human-understandable behavioral specifications for the interfaces of components designed using the above principles; (3) demonstrating additional practical benefits from having formal specifications available to software engineering tools. The generality and efficacy of the results will be evaluated through construction of prototype tools that support distributed component-based software design and development in a programming-language-neutral environment, and by observing the effects of using such tools in the classroom to see how much students benefit from the tools new specification-enabled capabilities as they design and develop distributed component-based software systems doc4979 none This study will test several hypotheses about organic transformations through independent thermodynamic models of reversible and irreversible processes in comples water mineral organic systems. The hypotheses to be tested include: (1) The transformation of solid and liquid organic compounds in heated sediments near ridge hydrothermal systems can be interpreted in terms of aqueous alteration, hydrolytic disporportionation, and the approach towar metastable equilibria using models based on irreversible thermodynamics. (2) Marine dissolved organic matter is altered into characteristic suites of simple organic solutes when heated in submarine hydrothermal systems. These compounds are driven toward metastable states at high temperature, but provide support for heterotrophic hyperthermophiles when vent fluids mix with seawater. (3) Owing to coupled electron-transfer processes, there are reaction pathways involving inorganic and organic sulfur compounds that expedite the transformations documented in hydrothermal organic compounes doc4980 none Project Objectives - This project aims to develop new applied mathematical technologies that add res a widespread need in computational and simulation science: the quantitative optimization and verifi- cation of dynamical models, incorporating both chaotic and stochastic behaviors, against observed data. In the last couple of decades, great effort has been devoted to constructing simulation-based models for complex phenomena, with profound advances in both analytic techniques for numerical approximation and implementation technology on digital computers. Progress along one of the final steps to gaining scientific insight, the verification of models against Nature, has been more haphazard. When model and natural physical system produce temporally unpredictable variables one cannot match any specific time-dependent behavior but only compare statistical quantities extracted from both. Here, common practice is frequently quite crude, and is where we direct our investigation. Methods to be employed - We exploit recent developments in coding theory, specifically, context- tree methods developed for universal data compression by the information theory community. These techniques are computationally rapid, have excellent empirical performance and theoretical properties. Our goal is not literally to compress data, of course, but to use the data structures and models of the coding methods as high-quality statistical intermediaries between computational models and observed data sets, providing a common mathematical meeting ground where fair, and theoretically justifiable comparisons may be made. Potential impact of the project - Large scale simulations play an increasingly important role in the study of complex phenomena of national and global importance, from the efficiency, capability and byproducts of complex industrial combustion and reaction systems, to environmental moni- toring, culminating with global climate models. Predictions derived from these models inevitably enter into the public discourse about policies, with significant legal and economic impact upon many. The scientific community thus bears a burden to ensure that the models have been tested against actual experiment and cross validated with intellectually sound approaches, and herein lies the principal scientific value of the proposed investigation. The Institute for Nonlinear Science at UCSD has an excellent international reputation and has been able to attract high-quality post and pre-doctoral students with diverse backgrounds and educational emphasis. This particular project offers will offer an opportunity for the students to simultaneously learn about intriguing statistical and theoretical developments from the engineering and applied mathematics community applied, in an novel cross-disciplinary approach, to models of realistic, and important engineering problems, all set in the Institute s milieu and language of applied theoretical physics. The skills that a successful student will take from this project com- prise as are some mathematical fluency, physical intuition, engineering practicality and integrated numerical and symbolic computational skills. Finally, to the computational community, we anticipate developing and universally offering free-standing software to perform the analyses described in the project proposal. We hope to lower the barrier to entry for on-the-front-line computational and experimental scientists to employ these algorithms, raising the quality of common scientific practice in dynamical model verification without being so impractical or esoteric that few are able to successfully adopt our viewpoint doc4981 none This project will construct a combustion Oxygen demand instrument. The automated instrument will provide a relatively inexpensive analytical tool for the study of the amount of oxidizable material in marine sediments and will be used in studies of carbon sequestration in a variety of marine environments doc4982 none This ESH project will address the hypothesis that shifts of the westerly winds in the South Atlantic resulted in changes of primary production during the last glacial period. A combined circulation and biogeochemical model will be developed, using 13N as one of the tracers for production. Results of the model will first be compared against modern 13N distributions, and the model will then be applied to alternate climate scenarios for the last glacial using sedimentary 13N as test prodictions doc4983 none This project proposes runtime and compiler support that will enable programs to harvest idle SMPs and or single processor workstations to perform parallel computations. The unique feature of this system is the ability to adapt parallel programs to the dynamic availability of processors while exploiting the locality within an SMP. The project integrates several goals, namely: 1) Extend the Distributed Shared Memory, Strings, to support thread migration, incorporate adaptation to the changing number of available processors at runtime and propose techniques to balance data locality and the parallelism used when the number of processors changes at runtime. 2) Study the impact of eviction time on remapping strategies and constraints. 3) Develop compile-time support for parallel programs which can be executed in an environment where the number and the availability of the processors can change. 4) Develop analytic models and extensively evaluate the above compiler and runtime techniques using several real programs . 5) Integrate the utilization of idle cycles for parallel computing on cluster of SMP workstations into the existing parallelization environment doc4984 none This ESH project will analyze stable isotopes and Mg Ca in planktic foraminifera from two sites in the equatorial Pacific to determine whether the early Pliocene was characterized by a permanent ENSO-like state with uniformly warm tropical temperatures and a shallow termocline. A second hypothesis to be tested is that since the early Pliocene there has been a steepening of the thermocline and SST gradients from east to west, and that this steepening has allow the eastern equatorial Pacific to be more sensitive to orbital (insulation) forcing doc4985 none As the complexity of the Internet, the nature of its applications, and its socioeconomic framework evolve, new algorithmic and architectural ideas will be proposed, tested, and adopted. While the original Internet design principles will likely remain valid, the researchers believe that it is important to have in place a mathematical framework within which these design principles can be expressed and applied to the next generation of Internet algorithms and architectures. Building such a framework is the ultimate goal. The mathematical tools will come from optimization, game theory and competitive analysis. The researchers shall work on the following topics. Multicast. The researchers shall seek to determine the relative efficiency, in terms of link usage, of multicast versus unicast, devise and analyze efficient methods of multicast error recovery, and determine how efficiently multicast can be simulated in the application layer by a coordinated set of unicasts. Congestion Probing. The TCP congestion control protocol controls its window size with an additive-increase and multiplicative-decrease (AIMD) algorithm. One can think of this as a probing algorithm in which the flow attempts to discover the maximum rate of traffic that can be send under current conditions; if a packet drop is recorded it is assumed the bandwidth rate was too high and so the window size is reduced. The researchers shall develop efficient probing algorithms and theoretical limits on the efficiency of probing under different models of Internet congestion. Cost Sharing. How are the recipients of a multicast transmission to share the network costs? The researchers assume that the information to be multicast is of a certain value to each possible recipient, but this value is private to that individual. The researchers shall investigate strategyproof cost sharing methods where each user is assured that their outcome is maximized if they truthfully reveal their value to the network. The researchers goal is to characterize the set of protocols that are acceptable on both game-theoretic and complexity grounds. Information Dissemination. While traditional databases require transactional consistency, many repositories of information require only the much weaker notion of eventual consistency. That is, in such cases we care only whether, and how quickly, the information is disseminated, but do not require global consistency during the dissemination. The researchers shall identify message-efficient strategies for selectively propagating information so that the network will eventually converge to a fully updated state doc4970 none This award is for a collaborative research project to drill and core approximately 300 m of sediments at each of two sites in Lake Titicaca (Bolivia Peru) with the primary objective of reconstructing a 0.5 million year history of climatic change in tropical South America. Lake Titicaca provides a unique opportunity to study a continuous record of past climate in tropical South America. It has a long, rapidly accumulating sediment record in its deep basins. Changes in lake level are well correlated with precipitation amounts (and temperature) in the Amazon basin, and tropical sea-surface temperatures in the adjacent equatorial Atlantic. Modern Lake Titicaca is a nearly closed basin, so that the studies of lake level, chemical composition, and biota are particularly indicative of changes in the amount of precipitation and the precipitation evaporation ratio doc4987 none One of the goals of third and fourth generation cellular systems is to provide broadband data access to highly mobile users. Space-time transmission strategies, which exploit the presence of multiple antennas at the transmitter or receiver, have been cited recently as one of the key technologies needed to achieve this goal. While there has been great progress on space-time coding and modulation in recent years, most of this work has assumed that perfect channel estimates are available at the receiver. In certain situations, however, it may be difficult or costly to obtain accurate channel estimates. The goal of this project is to design new space-time modulation strategies that do not require channel estimates at the transmitter or receiver. The core idea is a new and general architecture for differential modulation using multiple antennas, which can be applied to any number of antennas and any signal constellation. Modulation techniques adhering to this architecture can be demodulated coherently or noncoherently. These techniques permit the receiver to exploit accurate channel estimates when they are available, but performance degrades only slightly when estimates are not available. The tools developed here also over a fresh perspective on pilot-assisted space-time modulation and provide a systematic way to jointly design the training symbols, receivers, and modulation schemes. This project addresses a broad spectrum of issues, including fundamental performance limits, new modulation and coding techniques, and low-complexity receivers. The ultimate goal of this work is to more fully exploit the potential of multi-antenna radio channels, and in the process reduce the power and bandwidth requirements of wireless communication doc4988 none This award supports U.S. participation in a conference of twelve to fifteen scholars whose purpose is to test several premises that have emerged in the course of a current NSF-sponsored research project by the PI in collaboration with Roy M. MacLeod (University of Sydney). These scholars are studying Allied and German responses to the chemical war during World War I. In so doing, the two investigators are focusing not upon the development of chemical weapons, which has been extensively studied, but the emergent chemical explosives industries and its transformation in Britain, France, Germany and the United States. In recent years, several scholars, working independently both in Europe and the United States, have revisited many of the key issues involved in the mobilization of science and the wartime applications of science-based industries between and . To avoid overlap and duplication, and to ensure the best chances of success of their current three-year NSF study, Johnson and MacLeod plan this conference. They are inviting a selection of colleagues to outline, describe and analyze the key issues they see as definitive in deciding the direction of the military chemical industries of the United States and Europe, including explosives and related intermediates and raw materials such as nitrates, during the war and in the immediate postwar period. In particular, each is examining and testing the concept of technological momentum, one of the more salient current ideas for describing patterns in the development of science-based industry. Johnson and MacLeod are using this term and seek to refine it through their own investigations. Primary interests here are the ways in which the momentum of the industry s development initially shifted from the conditions of peace to those of war, how the momentum of wartime production was shaped and grew as the war became more total, and finally the ways in which wartime momentum did or did not carry over to peacetime. To test the utility of this concept in a variety of contexts, the organizers are inviting colleagues familiar with the experience of the chemically-based industries in the United States and Europe, including nations that the organizers themselves are unable to study directly, such as the Netherlands and Russia. Also central to the investigators work are some other ideas to be-considered, including the notions of total war and chemists war in their relation to the militarization of the chemical industry during the - period and immediately afterward, as it affected the victorious Allies efforts to bring about and maintain the chemical disarmament of Germany. Moreover, the conference encourages comparative and transnational analyses on each topic discussed, in accordance with the organizers view of the war as an international system. To facilitate analytical discussion based on details as well as generalizations, the organizer have prepared clear guidelines highlighting the issues mentioned above. The organizers are circulating the papers in advance to all participants. The group is small enough to allow all participants to take part in all sessions, to be held at in Paris, possibly the Centre de Recherche en histoire des Sciences et des Techniques (CRHST), in the Cite des Sciences et de l Industrie. This location is convenient because a majority of the participants will be Europeans or working in Europe at the time. Following the conference, the organizers expect revised papers to constitute an edited volume, possibly published by Kluwer in its Chemists and Chemistry series, which already offers several related conference volumes. The organizers expect the results of the conference will not only enhance their own research and that of the other participants, but also contribute to a broader understanding of the interrelationship of war, science, and industrial development. This is of interest not only to historians, but also to scientists, economists, and policymakers working in the area of international security and arms control doc4989 none The worldwide expansion of network access is driving an increase in interactions among people, among businesses, and between people and businesses. Such interactions are the staple of major Internet uses such as electronic commerce and virtual communities. Successful interaction relies heavily upon trust. Whereas security seeks to prevent illegal actions, trust goes beyond security in seeking assurance of accountability (of intent and capability) even for legal actions. However, figuring out whom to trust and to what extent is extremely difficult in an open networked environment such as the Internet. This project will study distributed, scalable computational approaches for trust management taking into account the different forms in which trust is exhibited in networked environments. Such approaches rely less on centralized authorities and more on community policing through reputation mechanisms. This project will evaluate the approaches based on criteria such as how easily a given approach can be bootstrapped, how efficient it is in helping members find competent and good peers, and how immune it is to invasion by untrustworthy members. This project will also study aggregate phenomena such as the emergence of subcommunities, linkages among subcommunities, and the sensitivity of a community to change in membership doc4990 none This award is for a collaborative experiment (University of Minnesota and Iowa State University) using a Coupled Land Atmosphere Simulation Program (CLASP) to make direct comparisons between simulated paleo lake-levels and hydrochemistry with those inferred from high-resolution lake-core records. The study will quantitatively evaluate how aquifer systems influence lake-level fluctuations within glaciated watersheds by applying CLASP to the well studied Crow Wing watershed in north-central Minnesota and by comparing the CLASP model results to paleoclimatic reconstructions from proxy records preserved in lake sediments. By simulating the hydrologic fluctuations of individual lakes and streams, the model will permit the most comprehensive evaluation of paleo atmospheric general circulation model reconstruction of Holocene climatic change at the regional scale doc4910 none This award is for a systematic reconstruction of a high quality record of paleotemperatures and paleotemperature gradients over the last approximately 70,000 years across Europe. The specific objectives of this research, a collaboration between McCoy at the University of Massachusetts and Oches at the University of South Florida, are 1) to measure the extent of amino acid racemization in fossil gastropod shells collected from loess localities ranging from northern France, across western and central Europe, and into the highly continental region of the eastern European loess plains; 2) to determine independent ages of the fossil shells or enclosing loess sediment using radiocarbon and luminescence dating methods; 3) to quantitatively estimate paleotemperatures and paleotemperature gradients for selected intervals of time through the last glacial cycle across the region based on the chronological data and amino acid racemization measurements in fossil gastropod shells; and 4) to quantify the relationship between effective ground temperatures, which drive the racemization reaction, and surface air temperatures, which are critical data in the reconstruction of past changes in terrestrial climate doc4992 none PI: Cenedese Proposal Number: Funds are provided for laboratory experiments in a rotating tank simulating the interaction of an oceanic eddy and a shelf break frontal current. Oceanographically interesting subsets of parameter space will be investigated. Stratification representing both summer and winter stratification on the Middle Atlantic Bight New England shelf will be utilized. The parameter space investigated will be the ratio of shelf jet current strength to eddy current strength and the ratio of shelf current width to Rossby radius of the eddy. Emphasis will be placed on understanding the exchange of mass across the shelf break region doc4993 none This ESH project will develop a high-resolution record (100 year intervals) of surface and bottom water geochemistry in sediment samples from a site south of Iceland, spanning the last 65,000 years. Th goal is to assess the timing and phase of events at this site compared to those reported for a site on the Iberian margin, where benthic events are inferred to have occurred before surface ones by about 500 years. Comparison of the timing of events between surface and bottom water at both sites will test the hypothesis that rapid climate changes in the North Atlantic were driven by global changes in sea level resulting from melting ice sheets doc4994 none Zhao, Wei Texas Engineering Experiment Station ITR: On a Virtual Laboratory for Network Engineering Educational Programs The primary objective of this proposed research is to investigate issues involved in building a virtual laboratory for network engineering educational programs. Different from a conventional teaching laboratory, the proposed virtual laboratory will not require students to physically present in the laboratory rooms, rather they conduct their experiments via remote network connections, such as the World Wide Web. The intent is to demonstrate that this kind of virtual laboratory facilitates the training of IT workers in a significant way: it will reduce the cost, increase the facility utilization, and improve the quality of IT courses that are experiment-oriented. This project will focus on addressing technical challenges that are critical for successful implementation and operation of such a virtual laboratory. Configuration and scheduling techniques will be studied that provide students with remote but real time access to the equipment during their experiments. These kinds of configurations must be carried out in an efficient and flexible manner so that a large number of students can do their experiments simultaneously. Access control methods will also be investigated that deal with the degree of control over network components given to the user. The efficacy of diverse access control methods will be examined over a range of implemented exercises. The aim is to build a virtual laboratory that allows an instructor to choose the interplay of operating system support, experiment semantics, and network support to best suit the learning environment doc4995 none With the high levels of system-level integration for electrical systems available today, tools for simulation and test of complex mixed-technology systems are urgently needed. Circuit simulators such as Spice are not adequate for simulating large circuits due to large run times. Even behavioral level simulation is too slow for the large numbers of simulation runs needed to do simple things such as design centering and fault simulation. The key thrust of this research is to develop new simulation algorithms that significantly speed up the process of design and test of complex mixed-signal mixed-technology systems. The algorithms will quickly assess the merits of mixed-technology system design perturbations. The key observation is that the impact of design perturbations on the relative performance of the designs can be assessed accurately by approximate simulation methods, rather than by expensive exact simulation. These techniques are expected to speed up evaluation of design transformations for optimization of complex systems and test optimization by three orders of magnitude. The project has three specific goals. First, it will develop techniques for fast time and frequency domain approximate numerical simulation of mixed-technology systems. Second, it will develop algorithms for fast time and frequency domain approximate spatial simulation of mixed-technology systems by partitioning the system into blocks that can be simulated under open-loop conditions. Third, it will develop techniques for fast time and frequency domain approximate numerical and spatial simulation. The project will accomplish this by combining the first two techniques doc4919 none This ESH project will collect and analyze coral specimens from the Cape Verde and Gulf of Guinea, using stable isotopes and trace element geochemistry, to determine the climatic variations in this region over the past 200 years doc4990 none This award is for a collaborative experiment (University of Minnesota and Iowa State University) using a Coupled Land Atmosphere Simulation Program (CLASP) to make direct comparisons between simulated paleo lake-levels and hydrochemistry with those inferred from high-resolution lake-core records. The study will quantitatively evaluate how aquifer systems influence lake-level fluctuations within glaciated watersheds by applying CLASP to the well studied Crow Wing watershed in north-central Minnesota and by comparing the CLASP model results to paleoclimatic reconstructions from proxy records preserved in lake sediments. By simulating the hydrologic fluctuations of individual lakes and streams, the model will permit the most comprehensive evaluation of paleo atmospheric general circulation model reconstruction of Holocene climatic change at the regional scale doc4998 none X-ray crystallography is a fundamental technique for determining the structure of proteins. However, the physics of this process means that information about the relative phases of the thousands of x-ray beams used in the process is lost. The recovery of phases is referred to as phase retrieval. Essentially all modern algorithms for phase retrieval are iterative, including the well-known Shake and Bake algorithm. However, a general problem with iterative approaches is that the iterates are drawn to attractors that are not true solutions. This project will investigate a significantly different, non-iterative approach that does not share this drawback. If successful, the result will be a computing environment that will benefit a variety of disciplines that engage in phase retrieval. The new algorithm exploits techniques in optimization theory that have never been used in phase retrieval before. One key idea is to use a different objective function from past approaches: the zero-frequency component, or charge Q. A key property of Q is linearity, which avoids the many local minima that stagnate iterative methods for other objective functions. In the language of optimization theory, the objective function Q permits a direct translation of the phase retrieval problem into a mixed-integer program (MIP). Decades of research on solving MIPs can thus be applied to solve difficult instances of phase retrieval encountered in crystallography doc4918 none This award provides support for the U.S. contribution to a highly collaborative international scientific drilling expedition to collect new data to aid in understanding Earth s climate by recovering long cores from Lake Malawi. Recovery of a long core from the southern end of the East African Rift Valley dating some 800,000 years into the Earth s past will be attempted with the use of the Global Lake Drilling 800 Drilling System (GLAD800). The key scientific goals of the proposed research are to: 1) examine the response of the tropical terrestrial African climate to changes in low-latitude insolation and high-latitude ice volume orbital forcing, 2) determine if high-frequency climate variations are superimposed on glacial-interglacial variations in the form of wet dry climate cycles, and 3) examine how inter-annual African climate variability may have changed as a result of longer-term climate variations. If the researchers are successful, the resulting research will move the field of global change research forward by providing a high-resolution terrestrial record of tropical climate in a key climatic region. The proposed collaboration with scientific colleagues from Europe and Africa, as both intellectual and financial partners, greatly enhances the potential for success of this endeavor. The lessons learned from drilling in Lake Malawi will provide information as to the utility and practicality of using a mobile drilling system such as the GLAD800 as a tool for paleoclimatic research doc5000 none The study of interacting fermions is fundamentally important to a wide range of physics research, including fields as diverse as electronic structure theory of solids, strongly correlated electron physics, quantum chemistry, and the theory of nuclear matter. Among other applications, the understanding of high-temperature superconductors depends on these interactions. This project will develop a new computational method for the controlled approximate solution of interacting fermion models. The method combines Monte Carlo (MC) summation techniques with self-consistent high-order Feynman diagram expansions. The implementation of the MC diagram summation method poses major algorithmic and computational challenges in several distinct areas of computational science and, by its very nature, requires a multi-disciplinary approach. Technically, the project will develop novel computational graph theory algorithms and employ them to achieve a computationally efficient representation, generation and classification of Feynman graph topologies. New MC updating, scoring and variance minimization approaches will be implemented to carry out the simultaneous stochastic summation over diagram topologies and over internal momentum-energy variables. For the two-particle calculation, a novel combination of Lanczos matrix inversion and MC techniques is used to achieve efficient solutions of the Bethe-Salpeter equations with the full high-order irreducible interaction vertex. The efficient parallel implementation of the MC code is achieved by software pipelining and ring message passing approaches. These parallel applications are supported by novel parallel run-time systems that provide dynamic performance optimization doc5001 none For large-scale simulation problems, experience shows that, despite the rapid evolution of microprocessor and parallel computing technology, only a small fraction of peak performance from high-performance computing systems is generally realized. This is so because there are typically critical mismatches between the architecture of high-performance computing systems and the fundamental structure of the target simulations. This is clearly a problem of critical importance to information technology. It represents both an opportunity and a challenge to the disciplines of system-level design, targeting special-purpose architectures for high-performance computing, and algorithm and data structure design for large-scale engineering and software applications. Accordingly, this project will investigate systematic methodologies for designing the systems and algorithms for high performance applications. On the system design side, the project will focus on specialized billion-transistor chip multiprocessor architectures and a hierarchically distributed organization of resources tailored to the needs of the application. On the algorithm and application side, it will focus on finite element simulation applications, including representative problems from semiconductor device design and coupled flow and heat transfer processes doc5002 none This grant focuses on characterizing the microstructural evolution and consequent changes in mechanical properties that result from thermomechanical fatigue for four Sn-Ag based solders. The goal is to develop microstructurally based phenomenological models that can be used to predict the onset of failure. The experimental plan uses component-scale solder joint specimens that allow effective monitoring of microstructural and mechanical property changes as a function of the number of real-time thermomechanical cycles. The thermomechanical cycling includes short times at elevated temperatures and long times at cold temperatures to allow the effects of low temperature creep to be evaluated, a condition not considered by the commonly used but non-conservative accelerated testing practice of the electronics industry. Specimens will also be cycled in industrial accelerated testing facilities to examine how different rates and magnitudes of heating and cooling affect structural damage accumulation. Orientation imaging is used to evaluate structural changes in crystal orientation and misorientation. The size distribution and shapes of second phases are also determined. Mechanical properties are measured using nanoindentation and destructive testing techniques that include stress-relaxation, creep-rupture, and constant strain rate tests to evaluate corresponding failure strains. Modeling is based upon a combination of the Dorn Garafolo sinh equations for creep-plasticity coupled with threshold stresses based upon growth rate kinetics of particles and microstructure as modified by stress strain history. %%% Alternatives to leaded solders used in electronic applications are being sought to address environmental concerns and to accommodate the policies unfolding in several foreign countries that will affect the global marketing of US electronic products. Eutectic Sn-Ag solder is a recommended alternative solder, aimed at higher temperature service conditions. Solders used in severe service environments, such as automotive, aerospace, and military environments, can experience thermal excursions that range between -50 to 180 degrees C. Such thermal cycles cause severe thermal stresses due to the thermal expansion mismatch between soldered components and the substrates. This thermomechanical fatigue process damages solder joints, and more than 70% of electronic system failures are due to failed solder joints doc5003 none Linden UCSD A study will be made of the interaction of vortices in stratified rotating flows. The study will consist of laboratory experiments conducted on a rotating table. Vortices will be generated by pumping flow in and out through the sides of the experimental tank in a number of different source sink configurations. Experiments will be made in tanks with cylindrical and annular geometries. Sophisticated optical flow measurement techniques will be used to obtain flow velocities at a variety of depths. The aim of the study is to build up an understanding of the rotationally dominated, large-scale turbulence prevalent in the ocean. Interactions between individual vortices will be studied, together with the way in which multiple interactions between continuously forced vortices give rise to mean circulations doc5004 none This ESH award will attempt to estimate past concentration of carbonate ion in the ocean during glacial interglacial climate transitions by examining the occurrence and magnitude of changes in sediment carbonate preservation. Carbonate concentration will be estimated by two methods: mass size ratio of planktic foraminifera and the ratio of sand-sized to total calcite, in depth transects of cores from the eastern and western tropical Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans doc5005 none This award is for a stable isotopic study of ferricrete deposits in the Rocky Mountains of the western United States. The purpose of this study is to understand the nature of climate change during the current interglacial in the Rocky Mountains. The primary importance of this study is the investigation of rapid climate change (last 10,000 years) in high alpine catchments which should be sensitive to local and regional climate perturbations. This project makes use of variations in oxygen isotope ratios of goethite from ferricretes through time. Ferricrete deposits are found throughout the American west in areas of naturally acidic waters, typically near sulfide-rich rocks. These ferricrete deposits consist of goethite-cemented stream sediments that can be meters thick and which entombed datable wood fragments. The investigator s previous research has shown that ferricretes are an important new climate indicator which is useful in terrestrial, mountainous areas where few other climate proxies currently exist doc5006 none The goal of this project is to develop new tools based on the notion of discreet proof for ensuring security of electronic-commerce transactions. This type of proof is discreet in the sense that it reveals no more than is strictly necessary for the purposes of a given transaction. Discreet proofs are useful in providing authenticity, confidentiality, anonymity, accountability, and other properties often needed to ensure security of a transaction. For example, discreet proofs can be used to decouple the information in a medical database regarding a patient s medical condition and treatment from the patient s identity, thereby protecting the patient s privacy while simultaneously providing accountability in the dispensing of drugs and facilitating the collection of aggregate data for socially desirable goals. Constructing discreet proofs for a given application can be technically challenging. Expected research results include i) software tools to automate the construction of discreet proofs; ii) specific proofs for frequently used cryptographic primitives in E-commerce; iii) practical protocols based on discreet proofs for E-commerce applications. Through its educational component, the project is expected to increase the pool of adequately trained personnel in the growing area of E-commerce doc5007 none This ESH award will support further development and application of the use of marine molluses to reconstruct annually-resolved estimates of water temperature. Four directions are planned: (1) evaluation of amino-acid dating method by comparison with 14C dates, to address varying reservoir age, (2) construct an annual record of 18O for the interval - Ad using cross-matching of growth bands from dated specimens, (3) assess ontogenetic effects on 18O by comparing the same time interval in specimens of different age and (4) explore utility of Mg Ca and Sr Ca to resolve temperature and salinity effects upon the oxygen record doc5008 none The last decade has witnessed a significant research thrust aimed at handling very large models in computer graphics. This project will extend those efforts by focusing on means to efficiently visualize, interact with, and manipulate large-scale graphics datasets over networks. The PI plans to develop techniques that will decrease latency, reduce bandwidth, and increase the interactivity for large graphics datasets over networks. The technical vision is to build a distributed rendering system that (a) takes advantage of the respective powers of image-based and object-based rendering for visualization of large-scale graphics datasets, (b)is well-suited for visualization-assisted collaboration and interaction across limited bandwidth links, and (c) takes into account the client, server, and network resources to deliver the best overall performance including times to transfer and render a dataset. Towards these ends the PI will explore techniques for high compression, progressive transmission, rendering from compressed data, handling time-varying datasets, and resource- aware rendering. The project work plan also seeks to develop tools for annotation, navigation, and sharing of educational spaces for use in synchronous and asynchronous learning environments that use three-dimensional datasets. This research will help push network-based collaborative design to the next level in a variety of science, engineering, and medical applications doc5009 none This award provides support for a study of the numerous tuff layers interbedded in the Early to Middle Green River Formation, which offer an opportunity to establish the most precise terrestrial geochronologic record of climate change available for any pre-Quaternary deposit. These sediments have been interpreted to reflect climate fluctuations ranging from annual varves, to 21,000 yr and 100,000 yr astronomical cycles, to longer-term climate changes. In the absence of precise temporal control, however, these inferences have yet to be verified. The project is a cross-disciplinary investigation of the sedimentology, stratigraphy, and precise 40Ar 39Ar radioisotope chronology of the Wilkins Peak and Laney Members of the Green River Formation, aimed at documenting rates of sediment accumulation and the absolute timing of expansions of Lake Gosiute doc5010 none The vast majority of data used by scientists, engineers, and decision makers resides in a poorly structured collection of reports, memos, and other documents in a myriad of file formats. The increasing densities and falling prices of storage devices make it practical to store for perpetuity all such data that crosses a scientist s electronic desktop. The resulting Information History has the potential to serve as an intelligent assistant by detecting trends and patterns, suggesting potential collaborators, uncovering relevant documents and data from diverse sources, etc., resulting in dramatic increases in the effectiveness of information use. However, current technology, which focuses on either fully structured or completely unstructured databases, cannot be effectively adapted to extracting knowledge from a large historical semistructured database. The goal of the proposed research is to develop suitable formulations of the knowledge discovery problem for historical semistructured databases and to develop, implement, and evaluate solutions. The research thrusts are: (1) devising knowledge discovery operators for semistructured data and an algebra for them; (2) developing efficient methods for implementing these operators; (3) determining methods to incorporate structure incrementally and flexibly; and (4) incorporating differential processing. A Personal Information History Assistant application serves as a test-bed for this research doc5011 none This award is for a study to retrieve, analyze and interpret isotopic and chemical proxy records of El Nino-Southern Oscillation events from speleothems in caves documented on the Island of Niue (19 degrees 00 S, 169 degrees 50 W) in the western tropical Pacific. The study will focus on modern speleothem deposits and cave drip waters to characterize speleothem growth rates, their dating potential, their isotopic composition, and their relation to modern water and vegetation doc5012 none This award is to support a study that addresses the generation of the subsurface geothermal climate signature through the application of a specialized Land Surface Process (LSP) model, investigating the temperature coupling between the atmosphere and the solid earth with the LSP model previously developed to describe the upward-propagating microwave signal seen by satellites. Project members will investigate both the adequacy of this LSP model to generate the downward propagating temperature signal utilized by geothermal scientists for climate reconstructions, and the effects upon the temperature signal induced by changes in landcover or mean precipitation. They will also investigate the generation of the subsurface temperature field in a special setting: the prairie grasslands of the North American mid-continent. The investigators will test the model s performance with an abundant dataset of subsurface temperature profiles already available from Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta doc5013 none High velocity work environments such as medical trauma centers depend on robust and efficient coordination by team members to bring together appropriate knowledge and skills, or expertise. This project investigates the existing and potential role of information technology (IT) in expertise coordination in a type of high velocity, high outcome work environment: level-I trauma centers in this country. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods are used to collect observational and survey data in a range of trauma centers regarding the expertise needs of trauma medical teams, the points of expertise needs, the modes of acquiring needed expertise, the sources of information related to work and expertise coordination, and uses of IT for the coordination of needed expertise, as well as broader organizational variables. The project will contribute to the development of guiding principles in the design of next generation IT for high velocity work environments in the areas of user interfaces, coordination modes, and the evaluation of IT on coordination. It will contribute to the understanding of expertise coordination and how IT affects these processes. Finally, the project will enhance an existing multi-disciplinary research program on information and coordination, particularly as it relates to issues in emergency trauma care doc5014 none This award is for support of a collaborative project (between University of Colorado, Bates College, and the Carnegie Institute of Washington) to study the impact of Pleistocene colonization of Australia by modern humans. The investigators hypothesize that human burning activities destabilized ecosystems across the interior such that a large segment of the dependent fauna became extinct, and that this ecosystem change ultimately led to reduced effective moisture over the interior. The study involves a tightly focussed field campaign to acquire primary collections, and a coordinated analytical program for these samples concentrating on their physical characteristics, geochronology, and carbon isotopes as a paleovegetation proxy. By evaluating whether unparalleled shifts in the diet of Genyornis occurred as extinction approached the investigators can test whether human predation (no expected dietary change) or ecosystem collapse (expected adjustment of diet to meet these changes) is the more probable extinction mechanism doc5015 none Long-term chronologies of relations between climate change and floods in North America during the Holocene (post-glacial) epoch primarily are restricted to the Upper Mississippi Valley and American Southwest. These areas provide valuable insights, but the dynamics of post-glacial physical system dynamics in other locales and for the continent as a whole remain incomplete. This doctoral dissertation research project will focus on the responses of runoff and floods to climate change recorded in relict river systems along the north slope of the Uinta Mountains in northern Utah. Low-gradient streams in this region have experienced extensive lateral migration, with former channels preserved as abandoned meanders. The magnitudes of past floods that filled these channels will be quantitatively reconstructed by applying hydraulic equations to the surveyed dimensions of relict channels. Fill sediments will be analyzed using drill cores along transects perpendicular to each relict channel. The magnitude of the modal flood for each relict channel will be compared with the magnitude of the modern modal flood at the same location and calibrated for the associated drainage basin area. Absolute ages of relict channels will be constrained directly through the use of radiocarbon dating on organic material in the channel fills. The results of these analyses will be used to reconstruct a chronology of post-glacial floods in this semi-arid region of northern Utah. The results of past flooding are expected to contribute to improved understanding of how future climate changes might influence runoff and flooding in this same region. The results also should provide evidence to test models that predict regional hydrologic responses to continental-scale changes in atmospheric circulation patterns. The Uinta study area is particularly appropriate for examination of linkages between climate change and flooding behavior because the region lies along a large-scale atmospheric circulation boundary. Variability in large-scale hemispheric circulation patterns, such as those associated with El Nino Southern Oscillation, has been shown to influence the magnitude of the snowmelt floods. The records of past floods from these relict channels will be used to evaluate sensitivity of flood regimes to climate changes and will be compared to long-term chronologies of past floods from other regions to assess the behavior of hemispheric circulation patterns through the Holocene. The hydrologic responses recorded in the stratigraphic record also will enhance understandings of the dynamics affecting water supply in the Colorado River basin, because summer water production in this basin is sustained by runoff from the Uintas and surrounding ranges. Furthermore, the study area s transitional location between locations of similar prior studies in the arid Southwest and the humid Midwest provides a framework for understanding continental-scale linkages between climate change and hydrological responses. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc4950 none The Internet is used by a rapidly expanding and changing set of applications. The need for the network to evolve and even to provide application specific processing is significant. However the current network infrastructure is hard to evolve and does not readily support customizability. The goal of Active Networking [21, 3, 2] is to facilitate this evolution and customization by making the network infrastructure programmable. One way of adding programability is to allow code to be down-loaded into the routers, thus enabling the addition or modification of services. A more radical approach is to allow the packets themselves to carry programs to be executed selectively on the network s routers. Among other issues, these two approaches increase the possibility of denial of service attacks whereby a user places excessive demands on network resources in order to deny access to another user. However, they also enable new approaches to handling such attacks and to addressing the general problem of allocating resources within the network. The proposed research focuses on issues involving programmable, or active, packets. Active packets facilitate denial of service attacks in several ways. First, unlike conventional data transport packets, an active packet may require processor cycles and memory at the routers beyond those needed to simply forward the packet. Second, in general, the execution of an active packet at a router may cause more than one active packet to be transmitted from the router. Such behavior is useful, since it allows a packet to fan out across the network, but it is potentially dangerous since it can lead to an exponential growth in the resources used by a single initial packet. Experience with active packet-based systems [9, 8, 23, 22, 24] suggests that denial of service is the single biggest obstacle which must be overcome before such systems are feasible. The proposed research tackles this problem along various fronts. First, the researchers propose to design packet programming languages that make some types of behavior intrinsically impossible. For example, in PLAN [9], packet programs are guaranteed to terminate and thus can never use an un-bounded number of router cycles. The researchers will explore tradeoffs between restricting behavior in terms of resource requirements and limiting the expressibility and thus the flexibility of active packets. However, not all potentially harmful behaviors can be eliminated in this manner. Thus, on a second front, the researchers will consider mechanisms that explicitly account for a packet s resource usage in the network. For example, each packet may carry a resource bound, which is decremented as resources are used, and which triggers termination when the bound is used up. The proposed research combines both implicit and explicit mechanisms for controlling resource usage, with algorithms to control the flow of traffic into the network to decrease the likelihood of denial of service. More generally, one can envisage assessing costs to active packets that execute on congested resources. Thus, on a third front, the researchers propose to investigate mechanisms based on congestion costs to achieve more efficient resource allocations and how they can be facilitated via active packets. Three methodologies will be used to validate proposed solutions. First, the researchers will draw on mathematical modeling to motivate the benefits and investigate the characteristics of the proposed solutions. Second, the researchers will leverage expertise and past work on implementing active networks to demonstrate what is feasible to build, and explore the constraints each solution will place on eventual applications. Finally, the researchers will use network simulation to investigate systems on a scale not achievable on the experimental testbeds doc5017 none PI: J Craig Jenkins, Zeynap A Kuzucu This project examines attributional biases in two cultures, China (a collectivist culture) and the U.S. (an individualistic culture). Previous research has shown that tendencies to attribute behavior to individual traits rather than to external circumstances differ by cultural norms. Thus it would be reasonable to presume that internal attributions would be more likely in the U.S. than in China. Project participants will be asked to read several accounts of situational behavior, and then to explain why certain acts occurred. Responses will be scored for individual vs. situational attributions, with particular emphasis on understanding tendencies to attribute hostile intentions. Results will improve theoretical understanding of attributional tendencies, and may help understand cultural differences in tendencies to infer hostile personality traits in different situations doc5018 none Genetic variation and local adaptation may be responsible for many of the differences in somatic growth rate that are common among populations of fishes and other organisms. The existence of genetic variation in juvenile growth is an enigma, challenging the belief that organisms should maximize energy intake and utilization in the early life stages. If higher rates of juvenile growth and larger size translate into greater fitness, sub?maximal rates can only be explained by the existence of tradeoffs associated with rapid growth. Recent evidence suggests that a major tradeoff exists between the amount of energy allocated to growth as opposed to locomotory performance and vulnerability to predators. Using a marine fish, the Atlantic silverside (Menidia menidia) as a model system, this project will explore the mechanisms responsible for this tradeoff and its life history implications. In silversides, the genetic capacity for growth varies inversely with length of the growing season across latitudes (termed countergradient variation ). Northern genotypes grow at up to twice the rate of southern forms by consuming more food and converting it more efficiently into somatic tissue. But northern fish are poor swimmers and are more vulnerable to predators compared with southern fish. And within populations, juveniles that consume large meals and or grow more rapidly are also more vulnerable to predators. This project will combine modeling, experimental, and field studies to explore the trade?off between the cost of growth and the benefits of increased size in different environments. There are five major objectives. First, 1) a life history model will be constructed to evaluate the optimal growth strategy when both grow rate?dependent and size-dependent sources of mortality and reproductive success affect fitness. The model will be used to predict how the optimal growth strategy changes across a latitudinal gradient. 2) To parameterize the model, experiments will be conducted to determine the functional response of swimming performance to feeding level, and 3) long?term mesocosm experiments will be used to test the model s predictions. 4) To validate the importance of these trade?offs under natural conditions, tests for an association between growth rate of silversides in the field (as estimated from otoliths) and those found within the stomachs of their major predator, young bluefish (Pomatomus saltatrix), will be conducted. 5) Finally, in order to generalize results to other species, experiments will be conducted to determine the physiological basis of the trade?off between grow rate and swimming performance. The results of this project will greatly increase understanding of the strategies and tactics that larval and juvenile fishes employ during recruitment to the adult stage and will further illustrate the capacity of marine organisms to adapt to abiotic and biotic change doc5019 none Small coastal communities in the North Atlantic have faced widespread unemployment, substantial outmigration, and closure of major social institutions since the collapse of the northern cod fishery in . This research project will (1) describe and analyze the fisher-families perspectives of their changing situation and their conceptions of feasible responses to those changes; (3) compare these perspectives to actual social and economic processes affecting the communities; and (4) analyze the connections between perceptions and actual rapid changes. By illuminating the range of community perspectives and responses, this research is designed to contribute to the development of co-management policies to address resource crises doc5020 none This is the first year funding of a three-year continuing award. This project aims at addressing basic issues for enabling an augmented reality interface using computer vision. Augmented Reality has the goal of enhancing a person s perception of the surrounding world, offering the potential for the computer to be integrated into the activities of a user, serving as a personalized helper. There are two key challenges to enable such an interface. The first is sensing , which would allow the augmentation to be matched to the state of the world as the user interacts with it. The second challenge is that of developing systematic augmentation schemes that result in user-centered information flow. To aid in the conceptualization of the problem and for experimental verification, the main focus of the project is on an assembly domain . The context is that of a human engaged in assembling a mechanical object from its components. The focus on the assembly domain , allows us to suitably formulate and address the sensing, augmentation, and other issues in the novel human-computer interface. At the same time, it allows us to examine specific interactive assembly tasks using augmented reality, such as guiding and training during assembly and for evaluation of prototype assembly sequences. To address the key problem of tracking the context , the project seeks to advance the state of art of computer vision techniques for recognizing assembly states. A combination of appearance-based and CAD-based approach will be used for addressing the problem of simultaneously tracking a large number of known assembly parts. A probabilistic approach is proposed to improve the performance of assembly state recovery over time as the assembly task progresses. Another focus is to look for efficient approaches for building the model spaces for subassemblies with larger number of parts. Geometric modeling and analysis of the assembly domain will be utilized in the development of systematic flow of augmentation to aid various assembly tasks. Two experimental setups will be used, involving a see-through head-mounted display and a computer monitor with graphics overlaid on live video. Specific assembly task scenarios will be devised to determine the practical feasibility of augmented reality interface for the assembly domain. Another goal will be to experimentally evaluate the effectiveness of augmented reality interface as a training tool compared to other means of instructions. The resulting augmented reality interface is expected to impact many applications that benefit from the on-line, scene-dependent presentation of multimodal information, such as assembly prototyping, aircraft maintenance, repair of space vehicles, cost-effective training of factory workers, and perhaps guiding inexperienced users through complex repair of machinery doc5021 none This award is for a collaborative project (between University of Arizona, Louisiana State University, and Academia Sinica, China) to use proven methods to provide the first systematic study of century-scale SW Asian Monsoon variability. The project will focus on Tibet, where earlier work has demonstrated strong monsoonal influences, and where the investigators know they can obtain well-dated lake sediment records characterized by century-scale variability. By comparing high resolution, multiproxy (sedimentologial, geochemical and paleoecological) records along a sensitive east-west climate gradient, they will be able to separate the regional (monsoonal) climate signal from site-specific environmental influences. Moreover, they will be able to discern if any observed monsoonal events are time-transgressive or not, and also be able to quantify the sensitivity and rate of response of three different important vegetation types to century-scale climate events doc5022 none The explosive growth of biological information sources, available over the Internet, has given rise to both opportunities and challenges for biological and medical researchers. The opportunities they provide are both scientific (e.g., understanding the information encoded in elementary biological structures) as well as technological (e.g., new drug discovery). The challenges, on the other hand, lie in how to efficiently discover, among the vast volume of information, the items that are relevant or interesting to a given researcher. The objective of the proposed research is to investigate related basic research problems and develop a biological information delivery system in a collaborative project between computer scientists, information scientists, and biological researchers. The specific plans include developing methods to make the proposed system pro-active (surveying evolving on-line sources for relevant information), personalized (cognizant of a particular researcher s interests), adaptive (able to react to changes in the information sources as well as user interests or objectives), and capable of integrating multi-format data. The impact of this research is a significant enhancement in the ability of students and researchers in biological sciences to efficiently utilize on-line resources, while generating methods for computerized analysis of biological data and providing computerized support for new scientific discovery doc5023 none With many communications applications, such as mobile computing, as well as in data storage, data compression is essential for large sets of digital information such as images, video, and multi-media. Adaptive methods that can in real time learn about the data to compress it well are the most powerful, but can have the drawback that a single error can propagate and corrupt all data to follow. Based on past work by the PI, this project will study error resilient communication protocols and adaptive real-time data compression where error propagation is essentially prevented. This new work is targeted at both lossless and lossy applications, including image and video compression. The project will consider how the proposed techniques can be implemented in a way consistent with existing video compression standards. It will study how these techniques can be combined with reversible variable length codes (used in the MPEG-4 standard) to improve recovery from a catastrophic error burst. Although reversible codes have been studied by a number of authors in the past, there is much that is not known about efficient optimal methods. The project will also investigate how the learning employed by error resilient adaptive compression methods can provide a filtering mechanism that can be used for fast browsing of large data over a noisy channel, a situation that is increasingly important. The work will include theoretical analysis, algorithms design, and experimental work doc5004 none This ESH award will attempt to estimate past concentration of carbonate ion in the ocean during glacial interglacial climate transitions by examining the occurrence and magnitude of changes in sediment carbonate preservation. Carbonate concentration will be estimated by two methods: mass size ratio of planktic foraminifera and the ratio of sand-sized to total calcite, in depth transects of cores from the eastern and western tropical Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans doc5025 none At present, access to the information in large-scale text collections is largely limited to keyword-based searches which retrieve entire documents or passages. While such tools are often satisfactory in retrieving information on general topics, they provide little support for accessing information involving specific relationships, events, or facts. Information extraction technology offers the possibility of creating structured, tabular representations of selected relations from large text collections --- representations which can support more detailed document querying. Until now, however, developing extraction systems for a broad range of relations has been too expensive and time-consuming to consider its use in this way. Recent developments in extraction system customization offer the promise of substantially easing this task, and so making this approach to document indexing feasible. This research project will: 1) use corpus-based techniques to automatically identify the most common relationships within a sublanguage (the set of texts concerning a particular subject matter), and the different ways in which these relations are expressed in the text; 2)construct systems to extract information about these relationships from new text, building tabular summaries; and 3) provide a user interface for querying these relationships and accessing the underlying documents. Taken together, these tools should offer significant new capabilities for accessing the information in large text collections doc5026 none The purpose of Computational Geometry is to provide provably efficient algorithms and data structures for applications of a geometric nature. Unfortunately, the commonly adopted attitude of studying worst-case behavior has disserved the field by building a gap between the theoretical research and the growing community that implements and uses geometric algorithms. This project will develop frameworks that model more closely the behavior of algorithms of practical importance on actual data. To do this, it will concentrate on ray shooting, which is the bottleneck operation in the fundamental ray tracing technique for producing photo-realistic images in graphics. Ray shooting also has numerous other applications. Technically, the project will develop a new framework for predicting the average (rather than worst-case) performance of ray shooting on any decomposition- or hierarchy-based data structure on a given input. This would allow one to compare the expected performance of different approaches on a given data, with the eventual aim of being able to predict the cost of an operation, such as rendering a scene at a certain resolution, or optimizing the choice of a data structure to store a scene, prior to actual ray-shooting computation. It will also devise novel ray shooting ray tracing algorithms that reduce the I O-complexity for datasets too large to fit in main. In addition, It will attempt to extend the proposed performance-predicting framework to incorporate I O-complexity as well, to cover the entire spectrum of the input sizes. Finally, the project will implement its algorithms, address the corresponding robustness issues, and investigate the accuracy of the predictive framework on practical data doc5027 none Shim, Jung Mississippi State University ITR: E-business and Business Telecommunications Center This proposed research is for planning the development and expansion of research, training, and education in electronic business (e-business) and telecommunications of an information systems program. Collaborative research, enhanced course offerings, equipment, and industry partnerships would result in new methods for educating citizens in information technology (IT), expand the supply of entrants into IT professional jobs, and increase the breadth and depth of existing computer science, information systems, and marketing programs. Research in telecommunications would be expanded to involve experimentation with remote teleconferencing systems to conduct IT work. Other foci include anywhere, anytime training over the Internet and experimentation with the effectiveness of video distance training methodologies. The overall goal would be to expand education and training efforts to form a regional center for the production of bachelor degree students with concentrations in e-commerce and telecommunications along with technical Internet-oriented coursework. In addition, faculty and graduate students would have opportunities to extend their training through telecommunications and e-business oriented training workshops doc5028 none s of four illustrative cases (Arkansas, California, Connecticut, and Michigan). Supplementary data sources include the NCES Common Core Data on schools practices and teacher qualifications, and published reports of policy initiatives from national, state and local level educational systems. Results will contribute to theoretical understandings of institutional change, as well as shedding light on some sources of contemporary educational practice in the United States doc5029 none The project involves an empirical and philosophical analysis of the relative influence of science and religion in recent American popular environmental concern. The empirical component of the project involves development, administration, and statistical analysis of a U.S. adult sample survey designed to obtain information on the connections between public views of science, popular religiosity and spirituality, and extent and form of environmental concern, as expressed in relevant attitudes, practices, and policy priorities. The empirical analysis seeks to explain these connections by drawing upon theory and methodology from recent research on human values. The aim of the philosophical analysis is to broadly understand and critically evaluate the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical premises of major positions on science and religion in the context of environmental concern, ultimately as a means of reconstructing the optimal roles science and religion can play in informing environmental concern. The project will result in an empirically-based, up-to-date, critically-informed understanding of environmental pluralism in America, in particular the scientific and religious motivations of different forms of American environmental concern. It will offer theoretical advancement on the role of values in environmental attitudes, practice, and policy priorities, as well as empirically-grounded philosophical insights into the relationship between science and religion, leading to clarification of their appropriate bounds and optimal contribution to contemporary policy. It will also produce a robust, up-to-date dataset on American values, environmental attitudes and practice, and other characteristics available for further social scientific analysis by other researchers doc5030 none This is the first year funding of a three-year continuing award. A demanding application area of virtual or augmented environment is multi-user collaborative environment where multiple users at either a local site or remote sites communicate with each other and interact with a synthetic or virtual scene. Among the necessary sensors and devices, an effective visualization device and a real-time image acquisition system are two main challenges. The objective of this project is to develop a novel visualization device referred to as head-mounted projective display (HMPD), build a multi-user interactive workbench by integrating the developed HMPD technology with a unique real-time image acquisition system known as an omni-focus camera, and evaluate and quantify the system as an effective tool for remote collaboration. The head-mounted projective display (HMPD) proposed is coupled with a supple, non-distorting and durable projection surface as an alternative to current visualization devices. Its novel concept suggests solutions to part of the problems of state-of-art visualization devices, such as large distortion with wide field of view, occlusion contradiction between virtual and real objects, and brightness conflict with background illumination. Several properties of the proposed HMPD make it extremely suitable for multiple-user collaborative applications. Research efforts will be made to design and implement a lightweight and compact head-mounted prototype by introducing diffractive optical element (DOE) and plastic materials, and investigate approaches to optimize the illumination of the display and retro-reflective material properties for imaging purpose. At one site, a multi-user interactive bench prototype with tele-presence capability will be built by using the HMPD concept and adding an image acquisition system developed from a unique omni-focus camera system. At the other site, a mural display system will be built with conventional stereoscopic video system located near the mural display, where one or several collaborators will also gather. Tele-collaborative work will be tested between the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois--Urbana Champaign and the School of Optics-CREOL at the University of Central Florida through the Internet II connection linking our laboratories. Finally, the PIs will quantify the depth and size representation and perception accuracy, evaluate occlusion perception aspects, and set up a comprehensive calibration procedure for the HMPD and the workbench and mural prototypes. The results are expected to impact a wide range of applications such as collaboration tele-collaboration, tele-presence, tele-manipulation, and visualized education tele-education doc5031 none During the past decade, many states and districts, particularly National Science Foundation (NSF) funded systemic initiative (SI) programs, have made substantial efforts to reform their science eduation systems. these reform effortsare expected to lead to improved learning, which in turn will lead to high achievement in science by all students. But how do these statesand districts know that theirefforts are indded making such a difference? How can they determine if all students are learning the content recommended by national science statandards? The data and results collected by the California Systemic Initiatives Assessment Collaborative (CSIAC) can help answer those questions. Over the last four years, CSAIC has established a rich collection of student acheivement data, school and district profile data, and student and teacher opportunity-to-learn data from numerous SI programs. The CSIAC data study proposes to assemble a group of experts, including SI participants, to analyze and report on this collection of data in terms of the achievement of different subgroups of students, and to address questions andconcerns regarding the correlations between SI efforts and achievement in science by all students. The CSIAC data study will provide important new information to science educators who will use the study s findings and recommendation to better understand and use assessment data that described the achievement of subgroups of students. SIs and other science reform efforts will use the Study s results to inform and change curriculum, instruction and practice so that their efforts will lead to improved learning and high achievement in science by all students. This study will also extend current efforts in the field of measurement to explore the impact of standards-based assessments on differentn groups of students and educational practices doc5032 none The primary thrusts of this research are to help improve human-computer interaction methodologies, develop new interface modes, make physics-based interaction accessible to all users, and enhance the capabilities of graphical modelers. To these ends, the PI is focusing on the interactive manipulation and direct sculpting of Subdivision Splines (S-splines) through the integration of physics-based interaction with powerful subdivision geometry, both in terms of its theoretical aspects and its practical aspects in visual computing applications. The novel, dynamic framework of s-splines will not only augment well-established NURBS-based design technologies but also generalize newly developed theory and methodology of physics-based modeling in the practice of modeling and design. The ultimate goal is to develop software environments that can greatly facilitate human-computer interaction through the physics-based modeling of graphical entities. This work will broaden the accessibility of graphical modeling by combining conventional geometric models with computational physics and applied mathematics, thus offering novel interactive methodologies based on realistic model behavior doc5033 none Kitts, Christopher Santa Clara University ITR: An Internet Robotics Learning Testbed This research involves the implementation of a project-based learning strategy through the development and use of an Internet Robotics Learning Testbed (IRLT). The IRLT will consist of a network of robots and control centers. The robotic devices will be used for exploratory missions ranging from ocean archeology to space science and the control centers will provide wireless communication with the remote robotic devices in order to send commands and receive data. Several IT learning challenges that emerge include human-computer interfaces, task planning, resource scheduling, fault detection and diagnosis, and goal-directed commanding. The IRLT will enable students to understand the need for specific IT applications, iteratively develop such applications, test application functionality in an operational environment, and experience application value in a mission setting. The IRLT will include a suite of services to support collaborating IT educators. These services will include an educator support program to train faculty in the use of the IRLT as an educational resource, several pre-packaged educational modules permitting the rapid and low-cost use of the testbed, and Web-based documentation providing engineering details, user manuals, guides for new experiments, and libraries of past IT applications. The IRLT will be centered in an undergraduate engineering curriculum and its high school outreach program. It will draw stakeholders from multiple universities and research laboratories who will serve as advisors and mentors doc960 none Optimality theory suggests that preferential allocation of resources to one form of defense should occur among a series of alternative defenses resulting in a single prevailing defense strategy. Although this idea has been widely accepted, few studies provide rigorous evidence to support the notion of trade-offs among defense systems, particularly in marine systems. The PI s recent data indicate that, with stinging organelles (nematocysts) and secondary metabolites as likely alternative defenses (Stachowicz (2) the Caribbean (FL); and (3) the temperate (but less seasonal) eastern Pacific (northern CA), allowing biogeographic comparisons of hydroid defenses against predators. The results of this study will provide a conceptual framework for comparing ecological and evolutionary consequences of chemical vs. nematocyst defenses among broader groups of cnidarians that presently seem to rely largely on chemical defenses (e.g., octocorals like gorgonians and soft corals) vs. those such as sea anemones and hard corals that seem to rely on nematocysts for defense doc5035 none The problem of numerical robustness and geometric consistency is well known in many areas of computational science. The issue is that inexact computer arith- metic leads to incorrect and inconsistent geometric conclusions (for example, is a point inside or outside a triangle). While computers are getting faster, software is not getting more robust. Indeed, the trend is towards more nonrobustness. We propose a new computational paradigm to reverse this trend. Robustness is often seen as an all-or-nothing proposition. Our new paradigm consists in viewing robustness as a computational resource, to be traded off against other resources such as speed. Each program defines a certain robustness-speed trade-off curve; we want to be able to run the program at any point along this curve. This proposal will develop the technology to make this capability effcient and easily accessible to all programmers. As a result, any programmer can produce nearly ordinary C C++ code which can be run robustly. The implications of this paradigm are wide ranging, and will bring the fruits of robustness research into mainstream computing. We propose to (1) conduct basic research to support this new computing paradigm, (2) to create the technology and software tools to achieve this paradigm, and (3) to explore the applications of fast and usually robust algorithms in algo- rithm design. For (1), we will focus on effciency issues such as novel root bounds, incremental computation, guaranteed absolute precision for elementary functions. For (2), we expect to significantly extend the power, efficiency and usability of our Core Library and include capabilities such as symbolic perturbation. Finally an example of (3) concerns the general problem of checking of geometric structures and their applications in new efficient geometric algorithms. We propose to apply our robustness techniques and software to two significant applications in which nonrobustness problems are well-known: Mesh Generation: we will construct the first fully robust mesh generator which will be deployed in a major ow solver system, Cart3d. Geometric Modeling: we will build a robust geometric modeler which will be the first such system that is precision-sensitive. This proposal involves international collaboration with Professor Mehlhorn s Algorithms and Complexity Group at the Max-Planck Institute of Computer Sci- ence in Germany. Our domestic collaborator are Michael Aftosmis from NASA Ames Research Center (on mesh generation) and Shankar Krishnan from AT&T Research Laboratories (on geometric modeling doc5036 none The primary goal of this project is to study the effects of economic integration on labor markets. This project supports three primary activities: data collection, research, and the development of a web-based teaching tool for undergraduate education. The project complements the Program for the Improvement of Surveys and the Measurement of Living Conditions in Latin America and the Caribbean implemented by the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, and the Economic Commission of Latin America and the Caribbean of the United Nations. The academic literature has established that three types of data are necessary to thoroughly examine the effects of international economic integration on labor markets. First, the Heckscher-Ohlin (HO) framework that embodies the Stolper-Samuelson theorem suggests that product-price data are necessary because, in the HO model, price changes directly affect wages. Second, models that move beyond the single cone framework and relax additional assumptions of the HO model suggest that trade liberalization affects firm behavior and ultimately wages, employment, and productivity. Thus, firm-level surveys are also necessary. Third, household-level surveys are necessary to capture worker heterogeneity, measure skill, and control for changing demographic patterns. This project will collect and harmonize these three types of data from the four largest Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. The principle investigator has already collected these data for Mexico and will combine these data with similar U.S. data to analyze effects of U.S.-Mexican integration. As the data arrive from the rest of Latin America, they will extend the initial research. The goal of the research component is to produce at least three empirical papers. The first will examine the role of borders and distance in segmenting labor markets and identify which factors play the largest role in market integration. The second will apply the HO model in a price study by comparing mandated wage equations and cointegration techniques using time series of wages and prices. The third will relax the numerous assumptions of the HO model to explore factors at work at the firm level that affect labor markets, such as technology choice. The research and data collection will be integrated with teaching through the development of a web site. This web site will provide Internet access to the data and serve as a source point for structured upper-division undergraduate research projects. The site will also be used to guide lower-division undergraduate research projects by making tailored subsets of the data available for active learning projects that illustrate key concepts in international economics. The goal of the upper-division component is to develop a class for economics majors in which students use the web site as part of original publishable research. The timing of the research corresponds to the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas negotiations so that the results may inform involved countries about potential benefits and risks of the agreement. Because the data will ultimately be universally available, it will help fill a large gap in the empirical literature on the effects of liberalization in developing countries. The research also directly addresses currently unresolved academic issues in the trade and wages debate and offers potentially important contributions to the literature. The web tool will significantly enhance economic education in ways consistent with recent studies of undergraduate education by using technology in the classroom to encourage active learning doc5037 none Recent years have seen an explosive growth in the number of multimedia devices and communication tech-nologies. While these multimedia technologies still depend on wireline links, the future of multimedia com-munication is in wireless. Mobile multimedia networks will provide seamless communication between roam-ing users. Applications such as video conferencing or internet access will become available from any where in the world. Widely varying classes of network traffic (traffic heterogeneity) that change over time will be generated by multimedia applications. The network itself will consist of both wireline and wireless links (network heterogeneity). We are already beginning to feel this change. A major constraint in multimedia wireless technology is the limited power budget. Mobile devices such as laptops and personal digital assistants have limited battery life. The re-chargeable battery technology has resulted only in a small increase in battery efficiency. So, it is important to optimize network protocols for minimum power to ensure the continued growth of wireless based multimedia communication. Many attempts have been made towards this goal at individual layers of the network protocol stack. Most of these efforts have concentrated only at the physical and link layers. In this proposal, we deal with the wireless network protocol stack as a whole and provide a unified framework to optimize both computation and transmission power at various layers of the protocol stack. A power manager serves as the central core of our framework. The different layers of the protocol stack communicate with each other through the power manager that makes adaptive policy decisions based on the network, traffic, and power limitations. This is a uniqueness of the proposal. In the conventional model, the network layers have minimal or no communication at all leading to poor performance compared to the proposed framework. The proposed methods strive to optimize the quality of service (QoS) with minimum power consumption at the mobile wireless nodes. Towards achieving our objectives we consider the following research issues : Adaptive source coding and modulation strategies at the physical layer that minimize power for a desired reliability. The adaptation is done based on channel state estimates produced by the link layer. New error-resilient coding methods that do not have the drawbacks of the conventional forward error correcting codes. Little overhead, graceful degradation, and simple encoding and decoding that reduce the power requirements for computations are the main strengths of the coder. The coders are especially well-suited for state-of-the-art compression standards like JPEG, MPEG, and H.263. Radically different on-line channel state estimators are also proposed. Power-aware transport control protocols that distinguish between various channel and battery state. Application layer adaptation mechanisms to conserve power. The mechanisms use techniques from networking and signal processing areas to improve the performance. Adaptive power manager (integrated controller) policies that control the entire wireless network from a global point of view. Reliability, bandwidth, robustness and power considerations are taken into account for policy decisions. A simulation framework to experiment with different hardware configurations and network topologies and constraints. The developed framework will be help to validate and update our theories. This tool that will be made available through the web will be invaluable for other researchers in designing future energy-efficient wireless multimedia systems doc5038 none Optimization is the process of finding the smallest (or largest) value that a function can return. The demand for advanced optimization software tools is increasing sharply as the importance of optimization methodology in engineering, basic science, and finance is becoming more widely recognized. The dramatic increase in computing power, and the improvements in supporting technologies such as modeling languages and automatic differentiation, are fueling demand for optimization codes. These codes must solve more and more computationally challenging problems, including integer programming and nonlinear optimization problems. This project will develop new algorithms and advanced software for large-scale nonlinear, nonconvex constrained optimization, with special emphasis on interior-point methods. Specific goals include (1) fundamental research on interior-point methods that have appealing convergence properties and robust behavior; (2) development of modern software that is well suited to implementation on advanced computing platforms and interoperable with relevant high-performance software; (3) integration of interfaces to modeling languages and automatic differentiation tools; and (4) free distribution of the software to the manufacturing, engineering, and scientific community through the NEOS web site doc4935 none This award is for support of Phase II of the Patagonian Lake Drilling Project (PATO), a multi-disciplinary, international collaborative effort to recover and analyze long lacustrine cores for paleoenvironmental and paleoclimate history. Based on the results of Phase I, the investigators plan to concentrate PATO Phase II on Lago Cardiel because it contains the most promising sequences in terms of continuity, chronology, temporal resolution, and paleoclimate sensitivity. PATO Phase II aims to: (1) Develop a 3-dimensional sediment and tectonic basin history based on analysis of the obtained seismic profiles and landscape imagery. Physical properties of the dated cores will be used to validate and calibrate the seismic stratigraphy. (2) Further collect and analyze the modern lake and terrestrial components for climate calibration. Sediment traps will document sediment components, stable isotopes and biological proxies. These are needed to understand the hydrological, geochemical and lake productivity changes. (3) Analyze sediment cores recovered during Phase I, estimated from our combined radiocarbon and ash chronology to date back beyond 18,000 years B.P., for magnetic, sedimentological, and geochemical stratigraphy (including stable isotopes on carbonates and organic matter), along with paleoecological stratigraphies for pollen, charcoal, diatoms, and ostracodes (including stable isotopes and amino acid racemization for chronological assessment doc5040 none Flight is the most common form of animal locomotion, and much is to be learned about evolution of flight design and performance. Avian flight performance appears to vary with body size in a systematic fashion, with small animals capable of hovering and flying over a wide range of speeds and larger birds being forced to locomote using an increasingly narrow window of flight styles, until the largest are rendered flightless. Although frequently cited, fixed-wing aerodynamic theory poorly describes or at least inadequately predicts features of avian locomotion. Important questions yet to be resolved concerning avian locomotion are: (1) how and why do animals of differing body sizes differ in performance?, (2) what are the metabolic (i.e., fuel consumption) and mechanical power (i.e., horse-power) costs during flight and can we accurately measure muscle (i.e., the motor) efficiency?, and (3) how do three-dimensional configurations of flight surfaces change over a range of flight styles and speeds? Locomotion is involved in nearly every aspect of animal life including, dispersal, food acquisition, predator avoidance, and finding mates. Locomotor agility, speed, power, and maneuverability typically differ among species, allowing them to successfully occupy differing environmental conditions. Results from the proposed studies will elucidate aspects of avian form and function, as well as have broader implications for the evolution of vertebrate biodiversity, body size, and locomotor strategies. Moreover, as we advance our knowledge of the biomechanical bases of locomotion in animals, it can provide important insights into design features of human-made locomotor machines, as was done by the great aeronauts of aviation history doc5041 none PI s will study workplace charitable giving in three cities, Washington DC, Chicago, and San Francisco. In addition, they will survey several other cities across the U.S. for comparison. Changes over the past 25 years ( - ) will be documented, in terms of whether the giving is designated to particular recipients, and whether the collector of the charity is public or private. Investigators will first interview about 20 respondents in each of the three focal cities. From those interviews, they hope to reach some conclusions about reasons for different charitable patterns in the three cities, and for changes taking place in kinds of giving over the past 1 4 century. The second part of the study will be a mail survey of residents in about 100 additional cities, to check on the accuracy of the causal inferences drawn from the interviews. While the results of this research have obvious practical implications for fund raising, they also shed light on processes of voluntary affiliation and rational choice models of behavior doc5042 none Current optical networks typically offer two degrees of service reliability: full (100%) protection (e.g., in presence of a single fault in the network) and no (0%) protection. This reflects the historical duality that has its roots in the once divided telephone and data environments, in which the circuit oriented service required protection, i.e., provisioning readily available spare resources to replace working resources in case of fault, while the datagram oriented service relied upon restoration, i.e., on dynamic search for and reallocation of affected resources via such actions as routing table updates. The current trend, however, is gradually driving the design of networks towards a unified solution that will support, together with the traditional voice and data services, a variety of novel multimedia applications. Evidence of this trend over the last decade is the growing importance of concepts, such Quality of Service (QoS) and Differentiated Services to provide varying levels of service performance in the same network. According to the fact that today s competitive networks can no longer provide only pure voice and datagram services, the historical duality between fully protected and unprotected (100% and 0% reliability in case of a single fault) is rapidly becoming obsolete. Modern networks can no longer limit the options of reliability only to these two extreme degrees. On the other hand, while much work is being done on QoS and Differentiated Services, surprisingly little has been discussed about and proposed for developing differentiated network reliability to accommodate this change in the way networks are designed. In this proposal, the researchers proposed to address the problem of designing cost effective multi-layer network architectures that are capable of providing various reliability degrees (as opposed to 0% and 100% only) as required by the applications. In the proposal, the concept of Differentiated Reliability (DiR) is for the first time formally introduced and applied to provide multiple reliability degrees (classes) in the same layer using a common protection mechanism, e.g., line switching or path switching. According to the DiR concept, each connection in the layer under consideration is assigned a minimum reliability degree, defined as the probability that the connection is available at any given time. The overall reliability degree chosen for a given connection is determined by the application requirements. In a multi-layer network, the lower layer can thus provide the above layers with the desired reliability degree, transparently from the actual network topology, constraints, device technology, etc. The cost of the connection depends on the chosen reliability degree, with a variety of options offered by DiR. The proposed research explores the multifaceted aspects of DiR-based design of multi-layer optical networks, with specific emphasis on the IP WDM architecture. Optimally designing a DiR network is in general extremely complex and will require special techniques tailored to handle it with acceptable computational time. Therefore, along with research on the architecture and modeling of DiR-based networks the researchers propose a powerful novel discrete optimization paradigm to efficiently handle the difficult tasks. The optimization approach is based on adopting and adjusting the Fourier Transform technique for binary domains. This unique technique makes it possible to realize an efficient filtering of the complex design optimization problem, such that the solution becomes computationally feasible, while still preserving sufficient accuracy doc5043 none One of the most significant achievements of the last century has been the development of accurate methods to predict the electronic and structural properties of matter. These methods, based on density functional theory and pseudopotentials, allow us to explore the properties of materials without resort to experiments. We can now predict new materials and their properties based on numerical calculations. The only inherent limitations of these methods are computational constraints; current electronic structures methods have a very high computational cost. While the use of modern high-performance computers has enabled tremendous progress in raw computational power for these problems, gains on the algorithms side are also necessary to accommodate more complex materials. This project will introduce new methods, based on efficient algorithms, for bypassing the computational limitations mentioned above. It will seek novel solution methodologies that improve efficiency without sacrificing accuracy and functionality. In particular, one goal will be to avoid the use of eigenvectors, the primary cost for both computation and memory. The project will do this by examining the fundamental physics of the problem, which reveals that a different basis for the subspace spanned by the same eigenvectors can be computed and used instead. The project will find efficient and robust methods for computing these bases, find efficient solutions to the time-dependent and self-consistent Kohn-Sham equations, develop effective out-of-core parallel methods for solving these very large systems, and use these methods to perform pioneering calculations of real materials doc5038 none Optimization is the process of finding the smallest (or largest) value that a function can return. The demand for advanced optimization software tools is increasing sharply as the importance of optimization methodology in engineering, basic science, and finance is becoming more widely recognized. The dramatic increase in computing power, and the improvements in supporting technologies such as modeling languages and automatic differentiation, are fueling demand for optimization codes. These codes must solve more and more computationally challenging problems, including integer programming and nonlinear optimization problems. This project will develop new algorithms and advanced software for large-scale nonlinear, nonconvex constrained optimization, with special emphasis on interior-point methods. Specific goals include (1) fundamental research on interior-point methods that have appealing convergence properties and robust behavior; (2) development of modern software that is well suited to implementation on advanced computing platforms and interoperable with relevant high-performance software; (3) integration of interfaces to modeling languages and automatic differentiation tools; and (4) free distribution of the software to the manufacturing, engineering, and scientific community through the NEOS web site doc5021 none This award is for a collaborative project (between University of Arizona, Louisiana State University, and Academia Sinica, China) to use proven methods to provide the first systematic study of century-scale SW Asian Monsoon variability. The project will focus on Tibet, where earlier work has demonstrated strong monsoonal influences, and where the investigators know they can obtain well-dated lake sediment records characterized by century-scale variability. By comparing high resolution, multiproxy (sedimentologial, geochemical and paleoecological) records along a sensitive east-west climate gradient, they will be able to separate the regional (monsoonal) climate signal from site-specific environmental influences. Moreover, they will be able to discern if any observed monsoonal events are time-transgressive or not, and also be able to quantify the sensitivity and rate of response of three different important vegetation types to century-scale climate events doc5046 none This is the first year funding of a three-year continuing award. Inspired by the fact that even the simplest of animals, such as insects, have remarkable perception capabilities which are difficult for present-day engineered systems to duplicate, this project seeks to understand how the brain accurately organizes and processes on the macro-scale level the temporal flow of visual information at a lower stage of the visual pathway that is the primary visual cortex (also called area V1) and to develop machine vision systems based on the findings to mimic brain visual function. The novel aspects of this project include the innovative use of scalp electrodes to probe macro-scale processes of the visual cortex, investigation of encoding of sequences of patterns rather than single presentations, use of innovative mathematical models, and recognition of the existence of several different, task modulated, low-level perceptual mechanisms. The experimental part of the project focuses on the storage of temporal patterns, presented continuously over the time scale of tens of minutes, and how the stored information is integrated in the primary visual cortex with the newly acquired visual input. Scalp recordings will be used to investigate collective responses of neurons in area V1 to sequences of patterns in which the similarity among patterns will be modulated in different ways. Mathematical models of dynamic aggregation, encoding, and reduction of information will be developed. The models will be augmented later to explore different possible roles that memory and attention can play in this aggregation of visual information. Finally, the models based on adaptive versus fixed cell responses will be compared. Of major interest throughout will be the investigation of perceptual capabilities that can emerge at the level of processing of the primary visual cortex and the innovative machine vision algorithms that can be developed that capture these capabilities. In addition to the potential of producing machine vision systems with capabilities of real vision, the work will contribute to the advancement of basic scientific understanding in the field of neurosciences, in particular of processes in the visual cortex. Neuromorphic system design is a developing new discipline that meshes neuroscience and mathematical modeling. Furthermore, the project will be a three way international collaboration between laboratories at the University of California at San Diego, the Algerian Ecole Nationale Polytechnique, and the Brain Science Institute in Japan. This will provide a rare opportunity for the students to work in an international research setting and to establish collaborative ties they may benefit from in the future in their independent research careers doc5047 none Ghil, Michael University of California, Los Angeles The research bears on the problems of internal and external causes of climatic change. It emphasizes the role of the atmosphere in climate variability from months to years, of the oceans in variability from years to decades, and of the coupled ocean-atmosphere-ice-sheet system from decades to millennia. The methodology uses tools from fluid dynamics, dynamical systems theory, scientific computing and nonparametric statistics. The dynamical tools will be applied to a hierarchy of atmospheric, oceanic and coupled models. These models range from the simplest models with a small number of variables, such as box models of the ocean, to fully coupled general circulation models (GCMs). The PIs will study coupling of climate subsystems across timescales using various mathematical and statistical techniques. On the intraseasonal time scale of 10-100 days, the PIs will consider two complementary descriptions of low-frequency atmospheric variability, episodic and periodic, i.e. multiple weather regimes and intraseasonal oscillations. On the subannual-to-interannual time scale of 100 days to 10 or more years, the research emphasizes internal variability of the mid-latitude oceans wind-driven circulation. This circulation is studied for prescribed time-constant and seasonally varying wind stress acting on ocean-only models, as well as for fully coupled ocean-atmosphere models. On time scales of decades-to-centuries and longer, the PIs will use comprehensive coupled models such as CSM and IPSL. The simulations will be analyzed and compared with instrumental and paleo-records to determine and describe the relative importance of natural variability and anthropogenic climate change on these time scales. The work is important because it will increase understanding of climate variability across various time scales doc5048 none This project is a collaboration between members of the global optimization computer science and the computational biology communities to develop new methods for protein structure prediction and ligand docking. If successful, the methods developed here will help solve two important problems in computational biology - the need for fast conformational searching to predict the structures of proteins or complexes of proteins with other proteins and ligands, and the need to improve folding and docking models. Both problems are fundamental to understanding how the molecules of life work. This project will not solve these problems itself, but will develop new computational methods that can contribute to their solution. Technically, there are two specific aims: (1) To develop efficient methods for searching conformational spaces to find globally optimal (native) conformations on energy landscapes. (2) To develop efficient methods for searching parameter spaces to find optimal parameters for the large, complex models that are common in computational biology. This work is based on Underestimator methods that do not search over the tops of energy landscapes like Monte Carlo, Simulated Annealing, and Molecular Dynamics, the current standard methods doc5049 none Although developing nations frequently focus on natural settings when promoting tourism as a central facet of their overall economic development strategies, a number of nations recently have given attention to the possible attraction that agriculture and other forms of economic activity may constitute for visitors. Within the French dependencies of Guadeloupe, Matrinique, and Guyana, French government investments in infrastructure, medical facilities, commercial activities, and other sectors have recently been complemented by development of a local, bottom-up approach for expanding tourism associated with local agricultural activities. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine the political, economic, and cultural changes that are taking place in current development programs linking tourism and agriculture in Martinique. The project will examine not only the tourists and their impact on the island s agricultural economy but also the perceptions and responses of local residents to agro-tourism development. The project will consist of data collection through the use of questionnaires, intercept surveys, in-depth interviews, and participant observations. The doctoral candidate also will work with a range of voluntary participants, including local, regional and national policy makers, food distributors, tourists and farmers. This research project should enhance understandings of the complex interdependencies that exist within the continually evolving and increasingly related industries of agriculture and tourism. Questions regarding local identity, tourist food preferences, and forms of development will be among the main concerns for which this research will provide answers. By employing a geographic perspective in this study, the student will shed new light on many complex questions associated with this type of sustainable rural development, using the case study to address the potential and consequences of agro-tourism in the region and elsewhere. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc5050 none The embedded processor of the future will have multiple heterogeneous processors on a single chip integrated with a large shared memory. Many of the applications for this processor will have strict real-time requirements. This project investigates novel architectural and system software features that can allow such a processor to support complex real-time applications. Architectural features that limit shared memory contention and reduce synchronization overhead will be studied in order to reduce latencies and make thread execution times more predictable. The project will also explore the use of specialized I O processors having direct and equal access to shared memory in order to minimize interference of I O operations on real-time thread execution. Novel techniques for scheduling real-time threads on a heterogeneous multiprocessor-on-a-chip will also be studied doc5051 none Researchers at the Bermuda Biological Station for Research hypothesize that there is a supplementary source of fixed nitrogen to the subtropical thermocline of western Sargasso Sea in the form of organic N species laterally advected into the upper ocean of the region from distant sources via the Florida Current and Gulf Stream. Subsequent mineralization of this organic material is needed to yield nitrogen:phosphorous ratios consistent with present geochemical estimates than those expected based on direct observation of local N2 fixation rates in the region. In the source regions in the Caribbean and Tropical Atlantic, directly evaluated biological measurements of nitrogen fixing rates have been described as being more vigorous than that observed in the western North Atlantic. Further, the proposed spatial field measurements are expected to reveal the physical mixing processes responsible for this transport into the subtropical gyre. The index parameters N and a derived quantity, ProN , will be used to indicate the degree to which the observed dissolved inorganic nitrate concentration is in excess of that expected from the remineralization of phosphate at Redfield stoichiometries. The field program of spatial sampling within the Caribbean, along the western boundary current and in the western Sargasso will be examined against the temporal variability at the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Station (BATS doc5052 none The goal of this research is two-fold. The first is to test the adequacy of exemplar-based models of language processing. Two exemplar models will be utilized, Analogical Modeling of Language (AML) and Tilburg Memory-based Learner (TiMBL). To this end, these models will be tested on several linguistic phenomena in Spanish: stress placement, gender assignment, diminutive formation, and selection of change of state verb. A database containing 800- instances of each phenomenon will be extracted from available frequency dictionaries and Spanish language corpora. Each instance will be encoded as a set of linguistic variables that are pertinent to predicting the phenomenon at hand. The task will be to predict the behavior of each instance by using the remaining database items as possible analogs. For example, the gender of a given noun will be predicted on the basis of its similarities to other nouns in the database. Since AML and TiMBL utilize radically different algorithms, the second aim is to determine which model makes better predictions. Each model will be compared on the above-mentioned language tasks in terms of its ability to correctly predict the linguistic behavior in question. For some of the phenomena, studies involving language acquisition, production of nonce words, and slips-of-the-tongue, are available. The ability of the exemplar-based models to mirror the data from these studies may provide additional tests on which they may be assessed doc5053 none This project will analyze the sea-ice distributions in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. Over the last decade, the summer-time edge of the Arctic pack ice found off of Alaska has retreated dramatically northward for reasons that are not clear. To better understand this trend, the climatic conditions associated with recent dramatic reductions in sea-ice extent will be evaluated. In addition, the research will examine whether the recent years trend relates to a broad-scale climatic change. This work will involve both the analysis of sea-ice observations as well as modeling the movement as well as the formation and melting of the Arctic ice pack. The results of this analysis will improve the predictive capability for extreme sea-ice events doc5054 none This award is for a study that will examine otoliths, incrementally grown aragonitic skeletal elements found in the endocrania of fish. The species of sea catfish chosen is fully marine, non-migratory, and has a wide temperature tolerance. Otoliths collected from precisely dated archaeological sites from prehistoric coastal Peru will be incrementally sampled and analyzed for d 13C and d18O via micromilling and laser ablation mass spectrometry. These analyses will permit the principal investigators to calculate water temperature with a temporal resolution of approximately 2-4 weeks for continuous periods of up to 30 years. Results will be compared to similar data from modern otoliths of the same species collected from waters near these sites as well as predictive models. Comparison of the data sets will allow for unambiguous assessment of seawater temperatures during the early and middle Holocene doc5055 none The PI has previously developed several variants of a new statistical framework based on the principle of maximum entropy (ME) for learning the joint probability mass function associated with a discrete (possibly high-dimensional) feature space. Although excellent results which surpass those attainable with competing approaches have been obtained, the PI is currently limited to handling small-to-intermediate feature spaces (up to 30 dimensions), and has only considered artificial general inference problems. The main objective in this project is to develop a large-scale extension of the new methods capable of handling hundreds, or even thousands, rather than tens of features, and to then apply the approach to emerging domains such as multiple topic retrieval from document databases and collaborative filtering. Applications to diagnosis and marketing will also be explored. Successful completion of this work will result in a practical set of ME tools that outperform existing methods and thus have a significant impact on large-scale inference tasks. The work will also develop principled methods within the ME framework for treating mixed continuous categorical data and arbitrary patterns of missing features. By attacking large-scale problems, heterogeneous data, and missing features, the work addresses some key challenges encountered in machine learning in practice doc5056 none The focus of this project is on the development of conceptual foundations along with a middleware infrastructure for rapid construction of dynamic and secure distributed collaborations. This project is investigating techniques for constructing dynamic collaboration environments from their high-level specifications. These specifications are interfaced with a middleware to build the desired environment. This project is developing techniques for specifying a collaboration plan using XML and mechanisms for a mobile agent based middleware for implementing such a plan. A collaboration specification identifies the participants in a collaboration by their roles, and also specifies the associated role-based security policies. It specifies the shared objects together with the coordination and workflow requirements for information flow among the participants. Mechanisms are being investigated for participants to dynamically join or leave an environment. These include mechanisms for authentication of a participant s credentials, assignment of roles, and discovery of resources by a participant. These mechanisms and services are integrated in an agent based middleware, using the Ajanta agent programming system, for constructing distributed collaborations. This middleware investigates use of mobile agents for building transportable user interfaces, for executing remote coordination actions, and as mobile workflow objects. It also provides support for resource discovery, naming, event management, and security doc5057 none The Mississippi River is the trunk stream of a continental-scale drainage network that served as the principle conduit for meltwater and sediment discharged from the southern margin of the Laurentide ice sheet during the end of the last ice age. The large braided-stream terraces in the lower Mississippi valley (LMV) have been described in three generations of age models based on the interpreted significance of glacial dynamics and sea-level change on fluvial (riverine) dynamics. These models are conceptual and or based only on relative age relationships, providing little numerical age control on the terrace surfaces. The dynamic responses of the Mississippi River to changes in meltwater discharge, glacial sediment load, sea-level rise, and tectonic activity therefore remain largely unknown. To approach the question of lower Mississippi valley fluvial response to these changing conditions, this doctoral dissertation research project will provide a field study and dating campaign. The geomorphology, sedimentology, and stratigraphy of the terraces will be examined. Terraces ages will be determined from a new dating technique (optically stimulated luminescence, OSL dating) that can measure the age of the sediments themselves. Organic material will be radiocarbon dated. The dating results will be combined with mapping and sediment data to produce a comprehensive model of lower Mississippi valley fluvial dynamics during the transition from full-glacial to non-glacial conditions. The proposed research will provide, for the first time, a numerical age chronology for lower Mississippi valley terrace formation during the transition from late Pleistocene full-glacial to early Holocene non-glacial conditions. During this time period the Mississippi River experienced rapid sea-level rise at its mouth coupled with large-scale changes in discharge and sediment load from the former ice margin and flashy drainage of pro-glacial lakes. This research will provide insight into the lower Mississippi valley fluvial dynamic response to these impacting forcing mechanisms; an important contribution to the fluvial dynamic community because of the continental-size scale of the river system. This study also will contribute to the understanding of river response to environmental change, an issue of interest due to the uncertain impact of global warming on river systems and the economic costs associated with river related disasters. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc5058 none The PIs will undertake a three-year program of coupled experimental and theoretical studies of the formation of continental-margin stratal patterns. The program will use the new experimental basin with a subsiding floor where baseline, sediment supply and subsidence rates can be controlled. The experiments will focus on linkages among dynamic sedimentary environments and the relation between morphodynamics and stratigraphy. The studies will test some of the existing models of strata formation. Theoretical modeling of the continental margin s response to controlling factors and the comparison of numerical models with the experimental results will form a basis for refining both types of data doc5059 none The proposed research explores the economic implications of non-time-separable preferences and technology. The research is motivated by experience with spectral utility for time-separable constant-relative-risk-aversion utility functions, as well as non-time-separable functions. Spectral utility functions decompose agents preferences for consumption smoothness into preferences for particular types of smoothness by frequency. Smoothness at low frequencies (the long run) may be more or less important than smoothness at high frequencies. For time-separable preferences, utility does not vary by frequency, but for non-time-separable cases it does. This carries implications for a variety of economic phenomena that we propose to study. We will consider how models with habit formation in preferences produce observed equity premia and risk-free rates of return and whether such temporal nonseparabilities could play a role in explaining the excess volatility puzzle of stock prices. We will also analyze the implications for dynamic diversification; optimal portfolio allocation, fund separation, and other results require modification when returns are serially correlated and or preferences are temporally nonseparable. We expect that the spectral properties of evaluation devices like the Hansen-Jagannathan bounds will provide additional insight into behavior of economic models even when preferences are time separable. Finally, we will explore whether or not these devices are useful for assessing the successes and failures of business cycle models that use time-to-build and other technologies doc5060 none This grant provides funding for the conference on Stochastic Optimization: Algorithms and Applications which will be held at to the Center for Applied Optimization, University of Florida, Gainesville, Fla., February 20 to February 22, . The conference will provide a forum for researchers working on different aspects of stochastic optimization to present recent discoveries and to interact with individuals working on industrial applications. The benefits of the practical experience gained will allow application of the theoretical advances to financial modeling, asset-liability management, bond portfolio management, currency modeling, risk control, and probabilistic risk analysis doc5061 none Prives Transmission of impulses from nerve to muscle is made possible by the existence of neuromuscular junctions; specialized sites of communication between motor neurons and skeletal muscle cells. The formation of these synapses during embryonic development depends on the intricate coordination between nerve endings and muscle cells. A striking aspect of this coordination is the nerve-induced redistribution of acetylcholine receptors (AChRs), specialized membrane components that are initially uniformly spread on the muscle surface but become highly concentrated at postsynaptic muscle surfaces immediately under nerve endings. The objective of the studies described in this proposal is to identify the molecular mechanisms that trigger neuron-induced AChR clustering. The focus is on the role of a specific family of regulatory proteins - the Rho GTPases - as crucial mediators of AChR clustering. The planned studies will utilize cultured muscle cells to measure the effects of transfected Rho GTPase mutants on AChR surface distribution. Biochemical assays and fluorescence microscopy will be used to analyze the mechanisms by which the trans-synaptic signaling proteins agrin and laminin, as well as cultured neurons, activate the Rho GTPases and trigger AChR clustering. The overall aim of this study is to elucidate the molecular mechanisms that control neurotransmitter receptor site density at synapses. Regulation of receptor site density constitutes a potential mechanism for functionally altering neuronal circuits. Thus, in addition to increasing the understanding of how neuromuscular transmission is regulated, the proposed studies can yield information relating to the synaptic mechanisms underlying learning and memory doc5059 none The proposed research explores the economic implications of non-time-separable preferences and technology. The research is motivated by experience with spectral utility for time-separable constant-relative-risk-aversion utility functions, as well as non-time-separable functions. Spectral utility functions decompose agents preferences for consumption smoothness into preferences for particular types of smoothness by frequency. Smoothness at low frequencies (the long run) may be more or less important than smoothness at high frequencies. For time-separable preferences, utility does not vary by frequency, but for non-time-separable cases it does. This carries implications for a variety of economic phenomena that we propose to study. We will consider how models with habit formation in preferences produce observed equity premia and risk-free rates of return and whether such temporal nonseparabilities could play a role in explaining the excess volatility puzzle of stock prices. We will also analyze the implications for dynamic diversification; optimal portfolio allocation, fund separation, and other results require modification when returns are serially correlated and or preferences are temporally nonseparable. We expect that the spectral properties of evaluation devices like the Hansen-Jagannathan bounds will provide additional insight into behavior of economic models even when preferences are time separable. Finally, we will explore whether or not these devices are useful for assessing the successes and failures of business cycle models that use time-to-build and other technologies doc5063 none Although efforts are being made in a number of laboratories to improve dissolved organic nitrogen (DON) analysis and method comparisons appear to show that different techniques are not too disparate, serious precision and accuracy problems continue to plague DON data. For example, DON measurements from various experienced scientists showed that replication is on the order of 25-50%. For this reason, the PI proposes to coordinate a large group of international analysts to evaluate the efficacy of the wet chemical technique versus the high temperature combustion (HTC) method and to develop guidelines for the HTC method for routine analysis using reference standards relying on help from a small group of laboratories dedicated to type of measurements. However, the primary objective of the study will be the preparation and distribution of DON reference materials for broad use by the scientific community and to document and evaluate the impact of their use doc5064 none After centuries of exploitation, including the harvest of both adults and eggs, populations of the freshwater turtles Podocnemis expansa and P. unifilis are seriously reduced throughout most of their ranges in the upper Amazon basin. These turtles remain important wildlife resources for river-oriented communities within the jurisdiction of National Park Noel Kempff Mercado in eastern lowland Bolivia. A major challenge facing people of this region is maintaining population levels of turtles in the face of growing demand for turtle meat and eggs. This doctoral dissertation research project will investigate how contemporary socioeconomic factors affect the hunting pressure on turtle populations. Data will be collected on socioeconomic characteristics of two communities where Podocnemis turtles are hunted and consumed. The relative abundance of turtle populations will be assessed through basking observations in areas with active hunting as well as in lightly or non-hunted river transects. Human activity patterns along transects of the rivers accessed by two communities will be cataloged and recorded using a global positioning system. This information, combined with the relative abundance data and socioeconomic information will be analyzed in a geographic information system (GIS) to ascertain patterns of spatial correlation. The relative abundance data should provide parameters for the calculation of sustainable turtle harvest. Regression analyses of socioeconomic data will offer insights into the importance of specific elements and their influence driving turtle protein consumption. It is hypothesized that with greater access to markets and cash-generating opportunities, consumption of turtle meat and eggs as subsistence will decrease. Also under examination will be the relevance of microeconomic theories that hold that increased levels of knowledge and ensuing protection of natural resources will result as the market values of species increase, thereby encouraging residents to be more likely to protect valuable species. The combined relative abundance and socioeconomic information that will be gathered through this project will contribute to knowledge about the effects of increased access to cash income on wildlife resources and community-based conservation and management efforts. The location of the study area in the buffer zone of a protected area should also yield results that are useful for protected-area management. Quantifying the impacts of hunting and the driving forces behind them will provide a basis for development of a management plan that is based on a local context and thus will be more likely to remain in tact than plans developed without consideration of such factors. The aggregation of the information collected in this study will contribute to the understanding of the present situation of turtle use in eastern lowland Bolivia and to the potential for community-based conservation of Amazonian wildlife species. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc5065 none Many stereotypes exist regarding the status and situation of women. Within the U.S. and other western nations, for example, women in Arab nations frequently are assumed to have their identities primarily constructed or influenced by Islam. Corollaries to this assumption are views that all Arabs are Muslim, that all Muslims are Arab, and that Muslim women are more oppressed and less emancipated than their western counterparts. This extreme oversimplification of the vastly complex and diverse histories and people in the Arab world perpetuates a situation of misunderstanding and ignorance between countries of the region and elsewhere. This doctoral dissertation research project will investigate the processes underlying Moroccan women s spatial practices and identity strategies in urban areas in France and Morocco. The study will focus on understanding how Moroccan women from different socioeconomic situations use space differently and how power and gender relations in households and urban areas come together to influence their mobilities, daily spatial practices, and identity strategies in different places. The concept of spatial practices as used in this study refer to the ways that women occupy and move through spaces in different ways, such as. using chaperons to go to cafes, walking in groups, using taxis as opposed to buses, socializing in particular parks, and avoiding streets at night. Identity strategies pertain to ways that women may mobilize certain aspects of their identity, such as accentuating or downplaying particular codes of dress, notions of femininity, questions of ethnicity or class, and political alliances. The comparative aspect of this research will allow for a consideration of the ways in which different national-cultural and socioeconomic contexts (France vs. Morocco, poor vs. non-poor) affect the degree and modes of Moroccan women s mobilities. Working in Montpellier, France, and Rabat, Morocco, qualitative research methods will be employed to gather primary data on a small number of Moroccan women s daily lives. Intensive in-depth interviews will be combined with time-geography diaries by working with female and male members of a limited number of Moroccan households on several different occasions. Time-geographies will be collected from all individuals interviewed. Interviews will be analyzed alongside time-geographies in an effort to understand the processes that influence women s mobilities, spatial practices, and identity strategies in urban areas in both France and Morocco. These data will be supplemented with daily participant observation and field notes, archival records, newspapers, and statistical sources. This study will contribute to theoretical debates currently taking place around questions of the role that place and mobility play in the construction of modern gender identities. It will shed light on the ways that different characteristics of the settings where women live influences their spatial behavior and identities. Understanding the factors that influence Moroccan women s spatial practices and identity strategies in France and Morocco will provide insight into how these women understand their own modern lives in a way that allows them to cope with the pressures and contradictions of contemporary urban life. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc5014 none This award is for support of a collaborative project (between University of Colorado, Bates College, and the Carnegie Institute of Washington) to study the impact of Pleistocene colonization of Australia by modern humans. The investigators hypothesize that human burning activities destabilized ecosystems across the interior such that a large segment of the dependent fauna became extinct, and that this ecosystem change ultimately led to reduced effective moisture over the interior. The study involves a tightly focussed field campaign to acquire primary collections, and a coordinated analytical program for these samples concentrating on their physical characteristics, geochronology, and carbon isotopes as a paleovegetation proxy. By evaluating whether unparalleled shifts in the diet of Genyornis occurred as extinction approached the investigators can test whether human predation (no expected dietary change) or ecosystem collapse (expected adjustment of diet to meet these changes) is the more probable extinction mechanism doc5067 none This renewal project is focussed on this laboratory s long standing interest in understanding the calcium calmodulin-mediated signaling in plants. Changes in intracellular calcium concentration can affect a number of physiological processes through the action of calmodulin (CaM), a ubiquitous calcium-binding protein. Calcium CaM-regulated protein phosphorylation is believed to play a pivotal role in amplifying and diversifying the action of calcium-mediated signals. Although calcium CaM-dependent protein phosphorylation is implicated in regulating a number of cellular processes in plants, not much is known about calcium CaM-dependent protein kinases and their role in calcium signaling. This laboratory has cloned a chimeric calcium CaM-dependent protein kinase (CCaMK) gene from developing anthers (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 92: - , , communicated by Professor Edwin Krebs, nobel laureate). CCaMK is characterized by the presence of a kinase domain, an autoinhibitory domain, a CaM-binding domain and a neural visinin-like calcium-binding domain in a single polypeptide. One of the unique features of CCaMK is the presence of a visinin-like calcium-binding domain, an additional calcium sensing mechanism not previously known to exist in kinases (J. Biol. Chem., 271: - , ; J. Biochem 121: 984-990, ). The effect of autophosphorylation of CCaMK and its interaction with CaM was studied by using 35S-labeled CaM and dansylated CaM as probes. The affinity of CCaMK for CaM (CaM trapping) increases over eight-fold upon autophosphorylation. These results suggest the existence of a new state of CCaMK when it has a higher affinity for CaM. CCaMK is expressed in a stage-specific manner in pollen mother cells and tapetal cells during anther development (Planta 209: 161-171, ). We hypothesize that CCaMK phosphorylates protein(s) in these target cells in a calcium CaM-dependent manner and the phosphorylation triggers stage-specific changes during microsporogenesis and microspore maturation. To study the functional significance, transgenic plants carrying the antisense construct of CCaMK were produced. Results indicate that the transgenic plants are male sterile, suggesting an important role for CCaMK in anther development. Based on this work, Washington State University Research Foundation has obtained a U.S. patent entitled Compositions and Methods for Production of Male Sterile Plants and a global patent application is pending. To investigate the biological functions of CCaMK, the yeast two-hybrid system was used to isolate genes encoding proteins that interact with CCaMK. One of the cDNA clones obtained from the screening (LIEF-1 alpha 1) has high similarity with the eukaryotic elongation factor-1 alpha (EF-1 alpha). CCaMK phosphorylates LlEF-1 alpha 1 in a calcium CaM-dependent manner. A CDPK isoform cloned and characterized in this laboratory (CRPK2) phosphorylates multiple sites of LIEF-1 alpha 1 in a calcium-dependent but CaM-independent manner. Unlike CDPK, CCaMK phosphorylates only one site (Thr-257), and this site is different from CDPK phosphorylation sites. Interestingly, Thr-257 is located in the putative tRNA-binding region of LIEF-1 alpha 1 (J. Biol. Chem., 274: - , ). We propose to continue this investigation by emphasizing the following: the functional significance of CCaMK in anther development by characterizing antisense plants (T1, T2, T3 and T4 generations) and by obtaining T-DNA insertion mutants; protein-protein interaction between CCaMK and its target proteins in pollen mother cells and tapetal cells; and the structure function relationships of CCaMK, especially the role of the visinin-like calcium-binding domain in autophosphorylation and substrate phosphorylation. A better understanding of the regulation and function of CCaMK will increase our knowledge of calcium CaM-mediated signaling in plants while at the same time promoting teaching, training and learning at all levels doc4970 none This award is for a collaborative research project to drill and core approximately 300 m of sediments at each of two sites in Lake Titicaca (Bolivia Peru) with the primary objective of reconstructing a 0.5 million year history of climatic change in tropical South America. Lake Titicaca provides a unique opportunity to study a continuous record of past climate in tropical South America. It has a long, rapidly accumulating sediment record in its deep basins. Changes in lake level are well correlated with precipitation amounts (and temperature) in the Amazon basin, and tropical sea-surface temperatures in the adjacent equatorial Atlantic. Modern Lake Titicaca is a nearly closed basin, so that the studies of lake level, chemical composition, and biota are particularly indicative of changes in the amount of precipitation and the precipitation evaporation ratio doc5069 none The objective is to improve the reliability of software produced by end-user programming languages in general, and by spreadsheet languages in particular. The approach is to address software engineering issues as an integrated whole in ways that incrementally interact with each other and with the user. For example, the system will notice the user s reactions to sample values she tests, and will then suggest general principles about the spreadsheet, encouraging the user to refine or modify the suggestions. This collaboration between the system and user will incrementally generate formal specifications as the spreadsheet evolves. These specifications can in turn be fed back to enhance reliability -- by automatically suggesting appropriate test values, by helping locate faults, and by ensuring continuing consistency with the specifications. The research involves three facets: developing an interactive mechanism for user-system collaboration, developing algorithms for the system s part of the collaboration, and conducting experiments to evaluate effectiveness. This is the first research attempting to bring fundamental software engineering principles to bear on end-user programming. Since the use of end-user-written programs and spreadsheets is very widespread and their lack of reliability is pervasive, improved reliability will impact a potentially huge number of business and personal computer users doc5058 none The PIs will undertake a three-year program of coupled experimental and theoretical studies of the formation of continental-margin stratal patterns. The program will use the new experimental basin with a subsiding floor where baseline, sediment supply and subsidence rates can be controlled. The experiments will focus on linkages among dynamic sedimentary environments and the relation between morphodynamics and stratigraphy. The studies will test some of the existing models of strata formation. Theoretical modeling of the continental margin s response to controlling factors and the comparison of numerical models with the experimental results will form a basis for refining both types of data doc5071 none The exponential growth of the number of Internet hosts has been well documented in the trade press. The research community, however, has not seen many systematic empirical studies of how the Internet topology evolves over time and in space. Most recently, the authors of [FFF99] report on several power-law relationships observed on Autonomous Systems (AS) connectivity degree, degree frequencies, and the neighborhood size within any given hop count from an AS. This pioneering work represents a first important step toward a better understanding of the dynamic nature of the actual Internet topology. The need for realistic random topologies in simulations has long been recognized by researchers working on routing and multicast protocols, e.g. [BE90, ZGLA91, WE94]; more recently, the need for realistic random topologies has also been voiced by researchers studying traffic dynamics and protocol behavior [MS94, FGHW99, F+00]. In recognition of this, several topology generators have been proposed in the literature. The most recent one, proposed in [J+00] and called Inet, takes advantage of the power-law relationships reported in [FFF99] in its construction of random topologies. The preliminary work conducted as part of this research and reported in this proposal shows exponential growth over time in frequency of every outdegree, the outdegree of every rank, and the neighborhood size within any given hop count from an AS. The preliminary results also show that only the random topologies generated by the Inet model have the power-law relationships similar to those of the Internet. Unfortunately, these random topologies do not exhibit the exponential growth observed of the Internet. A new Inet topology generator, called New Inet,was constructed to generate topologies exhibiting both the power law relationships and exponential growth rates over time. The research proposed here consists of three parts: 1. To investigate whether or not proposed topology models are in fact capturing the essence of certain underlying network design mechanisms or engineering constraints that result in random topologies that perforce exhibit many of the empirically observed phenomena. To this end the PIs focus on two particular approaches concerning the emergence of scaling phenomena associated with Internet-like graph structures in the context of the models of Barabasi and Albert [BAJ99, BA99] and of Carlson and Doyle [CD99a, CD99b]. 2. An in-depth analysis of the properties of connectivity graphs at the intra-AS level. In particular, the Pis are interested in large ASs spanning wide geographic area. 3. To determine if trees constructed from a given graph can serve as a fingerprint of the graph from which various properties of the graph can be derived; and to model policy routing on the Internet as such trees. In particular, the PIs want to check whether these tree structures exhibit scaling laws that have been found ubiquitous in the context of river networks such as the Horton-Strahler laws [Hor45, Str57]. The PIs propose to continue studying AS-level connectivity data made available by the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR) for better understanding of how ASs connect to each other, how this connectivity changes over time, and how each individual AS can be modeled in long-running simulations. Additionally, the PIs also propose to model router-level connectivity within ASs. For this, the PIs have access to intra-AS connectivity information from the AT&T WorldNet backbone. Funding for two graduate student research assistants was requested in this proposal. Both students will spend their academic year at the University of Michigan under the supervision of the PI, Sugih Jamin. They will help the PIs carry out research on studying AS-level connectivity, intra-AS connectivity, source-rooted trees constructed from traceroute data, and improve the New Inet random topology generator. During summers, one or both of the students will visit AT&T Labs-Research in Florham Park under the supervision of the co-PI, Walter Willinger, to collect and study data on AT&T WorldNet backbone. To improve the collaboration, the PI and co-PI may also visit each other ssite during the project doc5072 none Multicast is a network service for delivering the same data to multiple destinations. A wide range of emerging network applications - such as multi-participant video conferencing, multi-party interactive games, distance learning, group collaboration, and resource location - can greatly benefit from this service. In this project, the researchers will develop congestion control protocols for IP multicast to support scalable and efficient dissemination of layered data to a large number of receivers in heterogeneous, dynamic networks. The researchers will investigate the use of an integrated set of three distinct mechanisms - per-group feedback-based transmission adjustment, selective participation, and menu adaptation - to solve the general multicast congestion control problem. These mechanisms will operate at different time-scales and distribute the responsibility of adaptation to different entities in the network. The researchers will experimentally evaluate the scalability and performance of protocols in a large-scale network environment where the multicast session shares network with other unicast and multicast sessions, receivers join and leave the network, and the bottleneck links and bandwidths fluctuate over time. The researchers will implement multicast congestion control protocol in the network testbed of programmable routers, based on the Internet eXchange Architecture (IXA). The outcome of the research will be a family of algorithms, protocols, and prototype implementations that will significantly advance the state of art in designing multicast congestion control protocols doc5073 none Heterotrophic bacteria play a central role in the carbon cycle of the oceans, consuming organic matter equivalent to 30?60% of phytoplankton primary production. Although we have learned much about the diversity of bacteria in the ocean, there is little information on the metabolic function of specific bacterial groups in natural assemblages as few culture?independent studies have linked bacterial community structure and function. In particular, there is little information on dissolved organic matter (DOM) consumption by different phylogenetic groups of bacteria, an important ecological and biogeochemical role of bacteria in the ocean. This study will determine the role of one group of bacteria in DOM consumption, the Cytophaga?Flavobacter group. Our hypothesis is that the Cytophaga?Flavobacter group plays a central role in DOM consumption in the ocean. We will address the following questions: (1) Does the Cytophaga?Flavobacter group comprise a large fraction of marine bacterioplankton abundance and biovolume? (2) Does the Cytophaga?Flavobacter group consume DOM compounds that support a large fraction of bacterial production and comprise much of the DOM input? and (3) Is the Cytophaga?Flavobacter group responsible for a large fraction of the measured bacterial production? Culture?independent approaches will be used to assay communities in estuarine and upwelling environments having a range of DOM input and consumption by bacteria. The relative abundance of the Cytophaga?Flavobacter group will be determined using fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH). Uptake of DOM compounds by the Cytophaga?Flavobacter group will be determined using radiolabeled DOM compounds and microautoradiography coupled with FISH (MICRO?FISH). The contribution of the Cytophaga?Flavobacter group to bacterial production will be compared to other groups by determining which bacterial groups take up H?thymidine and H?leucine. DOM uptake is an important aspect of carbon cycling in the ocean, so determining which types of bacteria are responsible for the bulk of bacterial production and DOM consumption is a key step in developing a better understanding of the marine carbon cycle doc5007 none This ESH award will support further development and application of the use of marine molluses to reconstruct annually-resolved estimates of water temperature. Four directions are planned: (1) evaluation of amino-acid dating method by comparison with 14C dates, to address varying reservoir age, (2) construct an annual record of 18O for the interval - Ad using cross-matching of growth bands from dated specimens, (3) assess ontogenetic effects on 18O by comparing the same time interval in specimens of different age and (4) explore utility of Mg Ca and Sr Ca to resolve temperature and salinity effects upon the oxygen record doc5075 none Understanding the magnitude and variation of the deposition and partial dissolution of atmospheric dust in the surface ocean is important because it represents a largely unquantified link in the geochemical cycle of reactive trace metals and may contribute significant amounts of biologically active elements. For this reason, the principal investigators plan to collect aerosols over a seasonal cycle from the atmospheric sampling facility at Bellows Air Force Base on Oahu, Hawaii and subject them to a series of dissolution experiments to determine the fractional solubility of Al, Fe and Co in aqueous matrices mimicking rain and surface seawater. Results of the dissolution experiments will be compared to the concentration of the same dissolved trace elements in rain water collected at the same site to establish the validity of using aerosol suspensions as a means of estimating dust solubility. This study will provide a comprehensive assessment of the fractional solubility of biologically important trace elements from atmospheric aerosols during a seasonal cycle and ascertain the factors that control it. In addition, the aerosol project also will elucidate the role that dust deposition of potentially limiting micronutrients to the surface ocean play in promoting biological processes and how past changes in atmospheric dust loadings may have affected surface water biogeochemical fluxes including carbon doc5076 none Network simulation is an indispensable tool for researchers seeking to understand the principles of network architecture and protocol design. A key parameter in any moderate to large-scale simulation is the topology, i.e., the way the nodes of the network are organized and connected to each other. Good models for topology are essential for good simulations. The PIs have developed graph modeling software that currently is widely used as a tool for generating topologies, particularly models of large internetworks. The Georgia Tech Internet Topology Models (GT-ITM) package allows researchers to construct model topologies whose structure arguably resembles the node-level structure of the Internet: routers or switches, connected by (bidirectional) links, and grouped into domains. The GT-ITM software is included with ns2 [2], the defacto open-source standard for network simulation. Despite the wide-spread use of GT-ITM, in general, and its transit-stub model, in particular, a number of critical and fundamental questions remain unanswered about network topology modeling. For example, 1)Topology models. Recent data indicates that the current Internet topology has some properties that are not well reflected in the transit-stub model of GT-ITM [17]. For example, features such as the exchanges where many transit domains come together are lacking. Are there better techniques to generate topologies intended to model the Internet? More fundamentally, how should a topology generation technique be evaluated (i.e., how is better measured)? 2)Topology scaling. Although strides are being made in supporting large-scale simulations [33], most researchers will continue to simulate their protocols on topologies that are smaller than the target operational large-scale networks. How should smaller topologies be configured so that they reasonable reflect their larger counterparts? Is there a theory of topology scaling that can provide the fundamental grounding for configuring topologies of various sizes? 3)Topology use. The PIs primary interest in topology modeling is to provide a foundation for large-scale simulations. Facilitating the use of topologies in simulations must go beyond providing theoretically sound models, however, and include a set of complementary tools for graph visualization, routing table construction, etc. What visualization tools are useful to researchers and assist in accurate intuitive understanding of underlying topology? How can different routing policies be effectively reflected in routing table construction? The researchers propose (1) to address these and other fundamental questions in the area of topology modeling and (2) to reflect their understanding in a set of topology tools and benchmarks made available to the research community at large. This work will build on the PIs prior experience in modeling internetworks. The proposed work will contribute to fundamental understanding in the area of topology modeling. The work will include a set of evaluation criteria to assess the quality of a topology generation method and improvements in topology models. The work will also produce an evolutionary theory of topology scaling, with implications for efficient simulation using topologies that are smaller than the target. In addition to contributions to fundamental understanding, a central component of the proposed work is a set of tools and benchmarks to be made available to the research community at large, following in the tradition of the GT-ITM suite. These tools will allow other researchers to generate topologies, assess the quality of candidate topology modeling methods, utilize benchmarks based on current and future technologies, and interact with a visualization of topology doc5077 none The principal investigator will conduct a survey of the concentration of oxygen and the amounts of three oxygen isotopes (18O, 17O, 16O) in the upper water column of the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean to constrain the rates of net and gross production in the region.. The triple isotopic data will be used to estimate gross primary production., and the 18O measurements will can be used to constrain estimates of lateral diffusive mixing along surfaces of equal seawater density. The project is expected provide a link between instantaneous the rates of production made in typical shipboard ocean process studies and basin-scale rates inferred from observations chlorophyll, nutrients, hydrography and other tracers assessed by satellite and hydrography. The survey is expected to test and improve Generalized Circulation Models and biogeochemical models of the equatorial Pacific that are important not only for understanding primary production and oxygen cycling in this vast oceanic region but also for gaining an indirect assessment of the regional dynamics of carbon cycling doc5078 none The project explores the possibility of whether application-specific customizations of embedded processor cores can preserve the fundamental benefits of a processor architecture, while alleviating the associated deficiencies, such as reduced performance and excessive power consumption. The fundamental approach undertaken is the identification of application properties during compile time and their dynamic exploitation during program execution by the embedded processor. The basic characteristic of these properties is that their existence can be statically identifiable by the compiler, and that they lead to significant improvements in performance when exploited dynamically. Extended transfer to the microarchitecture is to occur by embedding performance-boosting knowledge, rather than communicating it through narrow ISA channels. Microarchitectural features that can be enhanced with such application-specific information include the branch predictor, the cache subsystem and the dynamic scheduling hardware. While the proposed approach aims at processor customization based on application-specific knowledge, it does so without violating the flexibility offered by processor architectures. Late customization through microarchitectural reconfigurability exploits application and architecture characteristics, thus boosting performance, reducing power and area, while keeping intact the volume and flexibility benefits of general purpose architectures doc5079 none A fundamental problem in a wide variety of wideband communications applications is that of adapting a unitary matrix. For example, consider an array-to-array AWGN wireless communications link in which the transmitter has knowledge of the channel. To achieve the Shannon capacity of such a link, the optimal transmitter prefilters the vector of transmitted symbols by the right unitary factor in the channel singularvalue decomposition. This prefilter, coupled with a matrix-valued matched filter at the receiver, converts the matrix channel into an equivalent bank of independent scalar channels, greatly simplifying the modulation, coding, and other signal processing tasks needed to maximize throughput. Despite the optimality of the unitary prefilter, however, the high complexity of the SVD (especially for rapidly varying channels) makes it difficult to realize in practice. A low-complexity algorithm for adapting a unitary matrix could be the catalyst that brings such optimal space-time processing closer to reality. Other applications requiring an adaptive unitary matrix include blind fractionally spaced equalization; blind multiuser detection for CDMA; blind combining for narrowband arrays; and signal-noise subspace separation and subspace tracking. The objective of this proposal is to develop low complexity and robust strategies for adapting unitary matrices, to assess their performance, convergence properties, and complexity, and to compare them to existing alternatives. The proposal is built around three core algorithms for adapting a unitary matrix U k T he MPLL algorithm, the subspace separator, and the adaptive SVD algorithm. All three take the form: U k + 1 = U kR l {g(z k ) z k }, where z k = U k y k and y k is the receiver observation vector, and where R l {x z} denotes a particular unitary matrix that rotates x || x || a fraction l of the way to z || z ||. The memoryless function g(z) is anonlinear decision device for the MPLL, while it is a linear matrix for the subspace separator and the adaptive SVD algorithm. This recursion has a number of nice properties; it is conceptually simple, and simple algorithms are often the most robust; it ensures that U k is always unitary, since R l is unitary; there exists a lower complexity implementation that does not require full-rank matrix multiplication; and the recursion has a useful geometric interpretation that facilitates its application to new areas. Furthermore, as discussed in this proposal, preliminary results indicate that the recursion has excellent convergence properties. The inspiration for the proposed algorithms came from the scalar phase-locked loop (PLL). The PLL is clearly the workhorse for adapting unitary scalars, primarily because of its robustness, low complexity,good performance. It stands to reason, therefore, that some of these properties might carry over into the higher-dimensional problem of adapting unitary matrices. The proposed research constitutes a significant advancement in the theory of signal processing and its application to communication theory, and is applicable to a wide variety of signal processing applications beyond communications. The project will provide two Ph.D. students with extensive physical-layer training for next-generation wideband communications systems doc5080 none The goal of this work is to explore the fundamental properties of optimal paths for robots subject to contact and velocity constraints, and to implement practical path planners based on that exploration. This is a collaboration to combine work on time-optimal paths with work on path planning algorithms. The primary application is to plan time-optimal paths for a differential drive mobile robot that navigates a known environment. The planner will construct an explicit model of the configuration space and will search for time-optimal collision-free paths. This defines the goals for the theoretical work: to identify constraints on the motions that reduce the complexity of the search. Optimality and velocity constraints are both a source of such constraints. A better understanding of time-optimal nonholonomic paths will lead to efficient planning of efficient motions doc5081 none The Principal Investigators will conduct a detailed study of high resolution IMAGES (International Marine Global Change Study) cores from the East Greenland continental shelf. Cores up to 25 m long were collected from specially targeted, high-resolution sites with support from a an NSF grant their partnership in the international IMAGES V cruise, Legs 3 and 4 in the Nordic Seas. The Leg 4 Greenland cores were collected for study of climate and glacial history of the shelf from degradation to the present. The sites were selected from seismic profiles and shorter gravity cores collected on previous. The 25 meter, high resolution cores are unprecedented in this are and likely represent at most the last 14,000 years. Initial radiocarbon and dating results and previous work indicate that the Principal Investigators will be able to resolve changes occurring on decade-to-century time scales. These records will provide an excellent basis for looking at the natural variability of sea ice and climate in the Arctic under a wide range of environmental conditions. The goal is to document the hydrography of the East Greenland Current, including its sea-ice cover and freshwater flux, and associated changes in the extent of the Greenland Ice Sheet and local glaciers during three critical time intervals. They will employ multiple proxies that have been calibrated to modem oceanographic, biological and sedimentological data. The proxies include: oxygen and carbon stable isotope analysis of benthic and planktonic foraminifers, benthic and planktic foraminiferal assemblages, grain-size changes (including quantification of iceberg rafted grains), carbon and carbonate flux changes, diatom assemblages and abundances lithofacies and paleomagnetic intensity records. The Principal Investigators will employ sampling intervals to provide decade to-century scale resolution of the environmental changes that have occurred through the critical time periods. These cores from a shelf area directly influenced by the arctic sea ice, rapid sedimentation rates and little influence of relative sea-level fluctuations offer exciting prospects for understanding natural variability in the Arctic sea ice, in the properties of the EGC, and in the interplay of paleoceanography, glacial history and paleoclimate doc5082 none This project is primarily concerned with the econometric testing of asset pricing theories using data on equities, currencies, and bonds. The first part develops an empirical analysis of several competing equity pricing models. Currently, there is no generally accepted asset-pricing model. The most important model in the literature is the CAPM. Unfortunately, it is now well known that the CAPM fails along a number of dimensions. Its primary failures are the size and book-to-market anomalies: the CAPM under-predicts the average returns for small firms and high book-to-market firms. Several new models have been offered as replacements for the CAPM. All of the models have distinct business-cycle attributes, and the proposed research should enhance our understanding of the links between observed cyclical fluctuations and the required rates of return on equities. I propose to compare the new models and the CAPM on a common data set using the methodology of Hansen and Jagannathan. I also plan to draw out the implications of the analysis for international pricing of equities. The analysis is important because the expected return on equity is one aspect of the cost of capital for corporations. Without an understanding of the determinants of required rates of return on equity, the profession cannot advise corporations how to perform capital budgeting analyses. The second part of the proposal is a comprehensive econometric examination of the expectations hypotheses of the foreign exchange market and the bond market. Econometric inference using standard asymptotic distribution theory indicates strong evidence against the expectations hypotheses. In fact, the evidence is so strange that development of alternative models with time-varying risk premiums has proved difficult. However, there is accumulating evidence that the small-sample distributions of the usual test statistics do not conform well to the asymptotic theory. In such a situation, it is prudent to take a close examination of this issue by developing a well-structured Monte Carlo analysis in which the null hypotheses are true by construction and the data-generating process conforms as closely as possible to the actual data. The proposed research will estimate vector autoregressions that satisfy the null hypotheses, and it will use modern bootstrap methods to generate the simulated data. The estimation strategy is something that should be emulated widely as it involves only matrix manipulations and does not involve non-linear search routines which are often difficult to implement and time consuming to estimate doc834 none The project will modify an existing catchment-based Land Surface Model to include the effects of snow and freeze-thaw dynamics on Arctic tundra hydrology. The development of this model will fill a gap in currently available models that do not incorporate the combined effects of snow physics, permafrost dynamics and topography on tundra hydrology. The current deficiency has severely limited efforts aimed at understanding and predicting the effects of climate change on arctic ecosystems. By addressing this problem this project will have a major impact on our understanding of the responsiveness of the Arctic to climate change doc5084 none This is the first year funding of a three-year continuing award. The project investigates on-chip analog and mixed mode computation for an intermediate sensory signal representation before the information is read out from the sensor chip. By appropriate information encoding, such representation will be robust to limitations of the sensing and readout process, thus enabling efficient extraction of useful environmental information. On-chip computation enables a sensor to make partial decisions on-chip and to use those decisions to create an optimal signal representation and robust extraction of sensory information. This project will focus on image sensors. From a theoretical point of view, image sensors are interesting because they are scalable parallel systems that require fine-grain, distributed computation and global data communication among a large number of sites. The necessity to bring together data from a large number of processors sites quickly saturates communication connectivity and adversely affects computing efficiency in large parallel systems. The aim of this project is not to miniaturize conventional image processing on-chip, but rather to obtain information about the environment that is not obtainable if computation is not performed on the sensory level. From a practical point of view, this project focuses on the ability of image sensors to adapt to high and low dynamic range scenes. Such scenes routinely cause conventional sensors to fail; yet such scenes are omnipresent in everyday imaging applications. The PI s group will build several high resolution CMOS line and area computational image sensors to test our signal encoding techniques. Ultimately chips will be tested in an ongoing robotic application at the CMU Robotics Institute. One candidate application is a visual guidance of fully autonomous or robot-assisted wheelchair for severely disabled users who are able to provide only high-level control to the system. The primary significance of this research is toward alleviating the problem of global data aggregation and communication from large and scalable parallel systems. The secondary significance of this research is in its practical application to visual perception systems and its superior information extraction ability doc5085 none This award is for a study that will contribute to our understanding of the nature of persistent precipitation fluctuations by investigating the linkages between newly discovered long ( + years) tree-ring records from the Greater Yellowstone Region (GYR) and atmospheric circulation and sea surface temperature anomaly patterns in the Pacific Basin. Specifically, the project will address three questions: 1) what are long-term patterns of temporal and spatial variability of precipitation in the Greater Yellowstone region?; 2) how are multi-decadal patterns linked to indices of ocean-atmosphere interactions such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation?; and 3) what do long-term records of precipitation imply about the frequency and duration of droughts in the GYR? These questions will be addressed through the development of tree-ring based reconstructions of winter precipitation for the past + years based on a multi-species network of sites in the GYR doc5086 none Adomaitis We propose to develop the computational framework that will make possible a rapid proto-typing approach to simulator development for microelectronic device fabrication process systems. This research is intended to fill the gap that exists between supercomputer-based, highly resolved simulations and lumped-parameter models, a range currently spanned by specialized methods for process simulation, analysis, model reduction, and parameter estimation - numerical tools that are generally incompatible with each other. The proposed approach to process simulation is based on developing computational elements that have a one-to-one correspondence to the steps taken when implementing high-dimensional projection, spectral filtering and advanced weighted residual methods, such as the reduced basis and nonlinear Galerkin projections. Methods for assessing model validity; solution analysis (e.g., stability), and discretization error will be addressed in this framework. Indeed, because of its reliance on parameter estimation methods, an absolute measure of reduced-model predictive power always will be produced in this simulation framework. These interconnected computational tools will be developed in the MATLAB environment, taking advantage of MATLAB s object-oriented programming features to simplify simulations of complex systems and to create a pathway to incorporating our simulation tools in spectral element and other commercial software packages. The need to generate computationally efficient, validated simulations for improving across-wafer processing uniformity in chemical vapor deposition and other semiconductor materials manufacturing unit operations provides the primary motivation for this research. Reduced models are suitable for real-time and run-to-run control, efficient process recipe optimization, and model-based sensing and estimation of unmeasurable processes, such as microfeature evolution. This proposal will support the joint research between the PI and the Tecbnology CAD group of Intel through a graduate student internship aimed at testing the simulation tools in a corporate research environment. The basic elements of this approach also will be developed in the context of a commercial chemical vapor deposition (CVD) cluster tool located at the University of Maryland, with the goal of producing a validated, reduced model to be used for wafer temperature prediction and conformal CVD studies doc5087 none EPIC (Eastern Pacific Investigation of Climate processes in the coupled ocean-atmosphere system) is an activity of the US CLIVAR Program. EPIC consists of four components focussing on (i) intertropical convergence zone warm pool phenomena; (ii) cross-equatorial inflow into the intertropical convergence zone; (iii) upper ocean structure and mixing and (iv) an exploratory study of boundary layer cloud properties in the southeasterly tradewind regime. The field phase of EPIC is scheduled for a 6-week period during the interval Sept 1 to Oct 15, . In addition to the eight awards made by ATM, this collaborative research has awards made by NSF OCE and NOAA OGP. During the field phase, the PIs will collect data from GPS soundings and from scanning C-band radar permanently mounted aboard R V Ron Brown. The boundary layer and cloud structure documented by these and other observations taken on the cruise will be compared with that from reanalyses and selected general circulation models. A goal of the integrative data analysis is to assess whether precipitation processes are significantly influencing cloud thickness and albedo over large spatial scales, and if so, under what environmental conditions. The work is important because it will improve understanding and modeling of climate variability over the eastern tropical Pacific doc5088 none The fundamental project hypothesis is that management and control of the Internet is the ideal application of active networks; the researchers propose a system architecture to test this. Active Networks are constructed from elements, such as packet routers, allowing programmability on a per-user or even per-packet basis. With the new software capabilities available from systems such as Caml and Java, active networks offer the promise of more rapid adaptation to changes in technology or requirements, and more rapid introduction of new services. These potential advantages come with the disadvantages of increased complexity, and its consequences for performance and security. Early prototype systems (ANTS, CANES, Smart Packets, SwitchWare and others) illustrated various points in the design space, trading off among usability, performance, and security. The prototypes demonstrated first, that such systems could be built, that applications did indeed exist, (e.g., Active Bridging and Active Reliable Multicast), and second, that they performed well enough (10-100 Mbps) to handle the throughputs of almost all current Internet access points. Thus much of the edge of the Internet can add active network capabilities with minimal performance impact. A more interesting possibility exists, that of using active networking technology to incrementally activate the IP Internet. The researchers believe this can be achieved, as described within the proposal, by co-locating programmable elements with IP routers capable of fast packet forwarding. The researchers have experimented with this idea on a small scale and it offers considerable promise for increasing the manageability of the Internet with its exponential increases in scale. The Global Active IP Network (GAIN) project represents the University of Pennsylvania s research program as part of a larger 10M Euro research effort (FAIN). FAIN was considered and top-ranked within the E.U. IST Programme competition. European members were funded, with the expectation that Penn would seek funding from U.S. sources. The consortium includes University College London (UK), the Jozef Stefan Institute (Slovenia), the National Technical University of Athens (Greece), the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (Spain), Deutsche Telekom Berkom (Germany), France Telecom CNET (France), KPN (Netherlands), Hitachi Europe Ltd. (UK), Hitachi Ltd. (Japan), SAG ICN (Germany), ETH Zurich (Switzerland), GMD Forschungszentrum Informationstechnik (Germany), IKV++ (Germany), INTEGRASys (Spain), and U. Penn in the United States. This proposal to NSF is a request for funds to support Penn in this international consortium. Penn s focus with GAIN is applications of Active Networks to IP network resource management and security. The researchers will investigate the prevention and mitigation of sophisticated denial of service attacks on security. The researchers are playing a strong role in experiment definition and evaluation for FAIN. This proposal to NSF provides background on Active Networking, outlines the research goals for an active IP network, sets this work with the context of FAIN, and argues the importance of providing U.S. participation in a truly global consortium with European and Japanese collaborators. ( The FAIN proposal has been provided to NSF doc5089 none EPIC (Eastern Pacific Investigation of Climate processes in the coupled ocean-atmosphere system) is an activity of the US CLIVAR Program. EPIC consists of four components focussing on (i) intertropical convergence zone warm pool phenomena; (ii) cross-equatorial inflow into the intertropical convergence zone; (iii) upper ocean structure and mixing and (iv) an exploratory study of boundary layer cloud properties in the southeasterly tradewind regime. The field phase of EPIC is scheduled for a 6-week period during the interval Sept 1 to Oct 15, . In addition to the eight awards made by ATM, this collaborative research has awards made by NSF OCE and NOAA OGP. During the field phase, the PI will add special sensors to an existing buoy array to collect atmospheric pressure data at a temporal resolution of 10 minutes. He also will conduct preliminary large-eddy simulations of the quasi-lagrangian evolution of the planetary boundary layer as it is advected across the equatorial cold tongue and into the ITCZ. A combination of in-situ soundings from past studies and September climatology from the NCEP reanalysis will be used to initialize and force these simulations. The work is important because it will improve understanding and modeling of climate variability over the eastern tropical Pacific doc5090 none Hickey, Timothy Brandeis University ITR: Groupware-Mediated Cooperative Programming: Teaching Web Technology to Non-Scientists One consequence of the rapid growth of the Internet is the corresponding rapid increase in the demand for teams of software and Web site developers to support the creation of Web content and services. Complicating matters is the need to train large numbers of workers with non-technical backgrounds for the growing electronic workplace. This research explores groupware-mediated cooperative tools to teach IT skills to novices. A same time different place groupware system will be built, deployed, and experimentally tested that supports collaborative learning of Web development and applet programming for a computer science general service course serving social science, humanities, and fine arts students doc5091 none Storage systems have evolved from small disk systems under control of a file server to large, independent disk and disk-array systems that can be directly accessed by applications. It is becoming increasingly difficult for system administrators to manage these complex storage systems manually. This work addresses this problem by proposing to develop smart storage systems that perform complex tasks like configuration, capacity planning, fault management, and load balancing in addition to routine tasks like data storage and retrieval and data backups. The automated storage system adapts to changes in the workload and system configuration without human intervention. The storage management software uses device and workload models to compute the optimum data-to-device mapping. These models are embedded inside the storage management software that is developed using constraint satisfaction programming techniques. The main contribution of the proposed work is the development of workload-aware and system-aware storage techniques that significantly improve system performance and ease storage data management doc5092 none This award is for the development and quantitative analysis of a detailed physical cyclostratigraphy of the early to middle Eocene Green River Formation of the greater Green River Basin of Wyoming based on extensive cores and outcrops. The study will use three suites of proxies for lake depth and hence climate: sedimentary facies (depth ranks), available shale oil yield data on cores, and geophysical logs. External time constraints will be based on varve calibration and single crystal 40 Ar 39 Ar dating of tuffs within the formation. Age models will be developed from these constraints as well as quantitative frequency analysis of the data. Thus, the study will be able to produce an orbitally tuned cyclostratigraphy for much of the early and middle Eocene, with a resolution of less than 20,000 years, registered to the existing detailed lithostratigraphy, biostratigraphy, and paleomagnetic polarity stratigraphy doc900 none Technological Disaster, Resource Loss and Long-Term Social Change in a Subarctic Community In contrast to natural disasters, technological disasters have been found to have long-term community impacts. The present research will identify patterns of social change in a small fishing community twelve years following the Exxon Valdez oil spill. The loss of ecological, social and cultural resources will be related to patterns of community stress and change from survey and ethnographic data collected from through . This research will provide an evaluation of the Conservation of Resources theoretical model of collective stress for understanding the chronic social impacts of technological disasters for renewable resource communities doc5094 none This project focuses on Information Dependency (InD) measures and the application of these measures to databases and datamining. InD measures use classical (Shannon) information theory to evaluate the information structure of database relations. This work extends results by the investigators of this project which show how InD measures generalize concepts important in database design, namely functional and multivalued dependencies. Research in this project is taking place across the spectrum from theory to practice. On the theoretical side, deeper details of InD s are investigated with an eye toward mechanisms for manipulating and applying InD measures. On the theoretic side, properties of InD s are investigated with an eye toward manipulating and applying InD measures, as well as toward implications of InD s on modeling. In the center, techniques for computing the measures are being investigated. Because the ultimate goal of datamining is to inform the user, investigations also include the interaction of InD and visualization. On the applied side, the major focus is the application of InD measures on data mining. Recognizing that research into applications requires real rather than toy targets, this project seeks collaborations involving data mining: the first such collaboration being with researchers in Biology. All of the activities of this project ultimately lead toward the development of prototype toolkit components based on InD measures doc5095 none This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) project is an effort to develop a new capability for the analysis of stable carbon isotope ratios and carbon dioxide concentration in air. The method to be developed is laser-assisted isotope ratio anaysis (LARA). The technique utilizes fixed wavelength isotopic lasers for specificity and the optogalvanic effect for sensitivity. The research to be carried out in this study involves optimizing electronics, laser systems, and radio frequency discharge conditions to maximize signal to noise ratios and long-term stability. The system will be tested under a variety of temperature, flow and humidity conditions using standard air in order to study the effect of these parameters on system precision and accuracy. Experiments will be carried out with ambient air and intercomparisons with standard isotope ratio mass spectrometry will be done using flask air samples provide by existing air sampling networks. The LARA technique has the potential to be a low-cost, field deployable research instrument for use on fixed and mobile platforms doc5096 none The marine biogeochemical cycle of phosphorus is intricately linked to the partitioning of major and trace elements within the ocean and to the atmospheric abundance of CO2, and on longer time scales, O2, through its role as an important nutrient. Preliminary work by the PIs has shown that the oxygen isotopic composition of dissolved inorganic phosphate (d18Op) in continental sources of the weathering flux of phosphate is quite distinct from that of the deep ocean and varies with depth. These variations in space and time of the d18Op in the oceans can be used as a means of estimating the rates of the biogeochemical and physical processes that control the availability and the isotopic composition of dissolved inorganic phosphate. For this reason, the PIs propose to measure profiles of d18Op with depth at the HOT and BATS sites, as well as in transects of the Housatonic and Connecticut Rivers of Long Island Sound using new methodologies for sampling and analyses doc5097 none ed by the object granularity, temporal locality of accesses, and object access patterns. A novelty of the proposed work is the mapping of application parameters into protocol parameters using the analytical model parameters: thread creation time, synchronization time, and execution overhead. These parameters can be estimated analytically and measured. The correlation between model parameters and adaptive protocols needs to be investigated. It is necessary to develop heuristics that link parameters with the protocols. As part of the preliminary work, a distributed Java Virtual Machine called DISK has been implemented in our network-of-workstations laboratory consisting of sixteen Pentium III computers connected by a 100 Mbps network. DISK currently supports two memory consistency protocols: an invalidate and an update lazy release consistency protocol. Several Java-specific applications will be investigated to measure and tune the performance of the adaptive protocols developed. Four different classes of applications from the Internet and knowledge processing technology will be used as new benchmarks: (1) client-side I O intensive applications, (2) server-side I O intensive applications, (3) computational intensive applications, and (4) computational and I O intensive applications doc5098 none PI: Lee Clarke, Lynne Moulton This project examines ways lenders make decisions about borrowers, focusing on non-economic factors such as a borrower s social status. It includes both profit-making and non-profit lending organizations. Many investigators have noted that various types of discrimination probably figure into lending decisions, and this study attempts to specify the processes involved by examining the application and decision processes directly. Some of the factors to be measured are how characteristics of borrowers signal loan officers of their reliability, and how those factors are used differently by loan officers in traditional and marginal loan markets. The study emphasizes decision processes in the loan applications rather than outcomes doc5099 none Siphonous green algae are a conspicuous feature of many tropical marine habitats, including coral reefs, seagrass beds, and mangroves. Within these communities, green algae typically represent an important source of food, shelter, competition, and sediment. Understanding the factors that govern the timing, intensity, and consequences of algal reproduction represents an important step towards elucidating the ecological role of green algae within tropical marine habitats. This study seeks to examine the environmental factors governing the onset and timing of sexual reproduction; the resulting success of gamete release; and the association between these variables and patterns of algal dispersal, recruitment, and, life?history. Field studies will link the environment and algal ecology, particularly with regard to life history parameters and the expression of sexual reproduction. Using permanent quadrants, the investigator will quantify patterns of algal growth, mortality, and reproduction (both sexual and asexual). Measures of the physical environment (currents, salinity, day length, temperature) and demography (age, size, density) will be correlated with the timing and intensity of reproductive events. Algal transplants will help identify causality among these variables. Zygote dispersal and development will be monitored during early life?history. In addition, the investigator will study fertilization as a function of gamete size and behavior (e.g. motility, phototaxis, etc.) by mixing of gametes, in vitro, at varied concentrations. Spatial and temporal patterns of gamete concentration will be quantified, in situ, as a function of adult dispersion, gamete production, gamete size, and the physical environment. These data will be compared with rates of gamete cloud dispersion by means of video image analysis doc5100 none Cuffey This is a collaborative proposal with Principal Investigators from the Universities of California-Berkeley and Calgary. The Greenland ice sheet is a rich repository for paleoclimate information and may contribute to substantial increases in global sea level. The Principal Investigators will develop a model to improve understanding of Greenland ice sheet dynamics and history; this will complement existing modeling programs at European universities and institutes. The work will improve understanding of: 1) controls on accumulation rate (through more accurate historical reconstructions), 2) flow dynamics through the role of ice stream flow, and 3) response to climate forcings (by investigating response to spatially variable forcings of temperature and precipitation rate). They will develop a numerical fully three-dimensional thermomechanical model of the ice sheet using a realistic geographic domain by Dr. P. Huybrechts. The specific objectives include: 1) To improve the accumulation rate history derived from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP 2) ice core and establish uncertainties for this record. No attempt has been made to reconstruct accumulation rate history from the Greenland ice cores that is consistent with the partial dynamics of the whole ice sheet 2) To improve the general methodology for derivation of accumulation rate from ice cores. This will be the first attempt to link accumulation rate reconstructions to the dynamic predictions of a whole ice sheet model. 3) To improve understanding of Greenland ice sheet dynamics by accounting for fast flow in ice streams. The enormous ice flux through the Jakobshavn ice stream has not been resolved in whole ice sheet models, but this system affects a large region of the ice sheet and probably allows the ice sheet to respond more rapidly to climate change than is usually calculated. 4) To improve understanding of the response of the Greenland ice sheet to climate change by the response to spatially varying forcings. Century-scale climatic forcing for the model ice sheet will be derived from the NCAR Climate System Model, a coupled ocean-atmosphere-sea ice-land surface model doc5101 none Current predictions of climate change in the Arctic estimate mean annual air temperature increases of between 2 and 4.5 degrees C. Although increases in the emission and atmospheric retention of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are seen as the primary causes of these increases, the Arctic is one of the world s regions where a net carbon sink is thought to exist, with more carbon is absorbed by plants and the land surface than is emitted. While this sink somewhat ameliorates the impacts of atmospheric carbon accumulation, changes in moisture availability or temperature could alter the dynamics of chemical exchange in the region. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine one facet of chemical exchange in the Arctic, specifically the role of geochemical weathering in controlling the availability of soil nitrogen and phosphorus under a global change scenario in Karkevagge in the Swedish Arctic. This project will utilize both field data collection as well as laboratory simulations to develop a model that predicts the rates of nitrogen and phosphorus release into the environment under changing environmental parameters. This work will build on preliminary fieldwork in Karkevagge investigating the spatial variability of chemical weathering. Previous work has suggested that chemical weathering is an important component of the geomorphic system in this valley and that the patterns of chemical weathering vary spatially. Weathering rates and surface water solute alteration will be investigated by combining in situ weathering measurements made with electron microscopy and stream water chemical measurements. Geochemical models will be used to determine the chemical pathways between the weathering calculations from the electron microprobe and the measured water chemistry. Data on soil temperature, mineralogy, grain size, and water fluxes will be used to generate a laboratory simulation experiment for investigating the potential effects of human-induced environmental change on the release of nitrogen and phosphorus into the environment. These simulations will be used to understand the controls these parameters have on weathering. These simulations can be used as a first-order test of a model predicting weathering rates in natural systems. The models then will be validated with field data. Further simulations investigating the effects of increasing temperature and pC02 on weathering rates will also be undertaken. Data will then be combined into a synthetic model predicting the release of nitrogen and phosphorus into Arctic environments by geochemical weathering. This model will make predictions about the possible alterations to this system by human-induced environmental change. The changes investigated through this project may play a role in altering the carbon sequestration ability of Arctic ecosystems. Arctic ecosystems are one of the major unknowns in global climate models, because the rates of carbon sequestration are largely unknown. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc5102 none Top?Down Control of Primary Production in Atlantic Salt Marshes Understanding the relative importance of consumers (top?down forces) and resource supply (bottom?up forces) in controlling the production and distribution patterns in natural communities has long been one of the fundamental questions of community ecology. Many aquatic communities have been shown to have strong top?down control, while most systems dominated by vascular plants have been assumed to be controlled by bottom?up forces. Salt marshes are generally used as textbook examples of ecosystems dominated by vascular plants that are controlled by edaphic factors and resource supplies. Here we present data that suggests grazing by the snail Littoraria irrorata controls primary production of the dominant macrophyte in western Atlantic salt marshes, the cordgrass Spartina alterniflora. This snail is common in marshes from New Jersey to the Gulf of Mexico and often is found at high densities at intermediate marsh elevations associated with dying and senescing plants. While it has been assumed that these areas represent patches of dying plants that attract snail detritivores, our data suggest that snail grazing may generate these patterns and thus that these marshes are potentially under top?down control. In this study, we will examine the general hypothesis that the marsh snail Littoraria can exert top?down control over the primary production of Spartina alterniflora on marshes in the southeastern United States. In particular, we examine the generality of our preliminary results on Georgia marshes where the paradigm that marshes are controlled by bottom?up forces was originally developed over 30 years ago. Specifically, we propose to examine the following hypotheses to elucidate the causes and consequences of grazer control in these systems. 1) Where does top?down control by snail grazing occur on southeastern marshes? We will test the hypothesis that snail densities sufficient to control cordgrass production occur where high larval delivery and predator refuges coincide across marsh landscapes. 2) Where is top?down control by snail grazing possible in southeastern marshes? We will examine the hypothesis that grazer control of cordgrass production is possible anywhere on the marsh landscape that high snail densities can be maintained. 3) The high production of cordgrass in southeastern salt marshes is the consequence of a trophic cascade, where snail predators, including crabs, fish and turtles, limit the densities of grazing snails that are capable of limiting cordgrass production. The results of this study may change the way we view one of the most dominant shoreline ecosystems in North America. If these marshes are potentially consumer controlled, as hypothesized, how we manage, restore and think about these communities ecologically and evolutionarily will need to be rethought doc5103 none Lamorey Waddington Interpretation of paleoclimate records from ice cores depends on understanding the ice sheet flow to determine depth-age relationships and whether the ice has been affected by folding. The alignment of crystals in ice, called fabric, is an important factor in understanding ice sheet flow because preferentially aligned crystals cause the ice to flow more easily in certain directions. Fabrics have traditionally been determined by using thin sections cut at intervals in the ice core. A new method of determining fabric is sonic logging, where a probe is lowered into a borehole to measure the velocity of compressional waves through the ice. Sonic logging is valuable because it provides a continuous profile of the ice fabric and averages the alignment of ice crystals over a larger volume than do thin sections. The Principal Investigators will measure sonic velocity profiles at the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2), Greenland Ice Core Program (GRIP), and Northern Greenland Ice Core Program (NGRIP) and use them to: 1) improve the understanding of the relationship between thin section and sonic velocity data; 2) determine if sonic velocity data can be used to identify the depth at which paleoclimate record continuity is lost and if so, formulate criteria to identify this depth; and 3) provide verification and input data for anisotropic flow law models. Sonic velocity profiles, combined with thin section data, will be used to investigate how sonic velocities and thin section data can be combined to better determine ice fabric. A fabric estimation model will be developed that uses thin section data and velocity profiles to predict fabric parameters and their uncertainty and spatial variability. The sonic velocity profiles will be used to determine if the depth at which the paleoclimate record continuity is lost can be identified from sonic logging. This determination was facilitated at GISP2 and GRIP by comparing two paleoclimate records because they correlate highly above this depth and diverge below it. NGRIP will provide another important set of data because this location was chosen specifically to recover ice that was found to have disturbed stratigraphy at GISP2 and GRIP. Finally, the GISP2, GRIP, and NGRIP sonic logs will be used to verify and constrain the latest generation of ice sheet flow models that use an anisotropic flow law to include the effect of fabric doc5104 none Research on Information Technology Transfer (ITT) to developing countries has suffered due to a lack of knowledge about how the process works. Studies have generally been done from a distance and have assumed an acultural environment in which national IT policy plays an unspecified role. Implementation factors have also been missing from the explanatory models. The goals of this project are to test a theoretical model that explains the ITT process and examine the effectiveness of national IT policy in one developing country -- Egypt. Egyptian users of urban rural information centers, cybercafes, and ISPs, private and public sector knowledge workers, and national IT policy makers will be sampled. Research methods will include ethnography, interviews, systematic observation, and questionnaires. Drawing from anthropological, economic, and technology innovation and diffusion theories, this research integrates technical and socio-cultural factors within a national setting. Policy makers in developing countries can learn why some policies encourage the process of ITT while others hinder it. Managers in transnational firms charged with introducing IT in foreign subsidiaries, offices, and plants can learn how to better implement IT. This research will result in new knowledge, theories and methods for assessing Information Technology Transfer in other developing countries doc5058 none The PIs will undertake a three-year program of coupled experimental and theoretical studies of the formation of continental-margin stratal patterns. The program will use the new experimental basin with a subsiding floor where baseline, sediment supply and subsidence rates can be controlled. The experiments will focus on linkages among dynamic sedimentary environments and the relation between morphodynamics and stratigraphy. The studies will test some of the existing models of strata formation. Theoretical modeling of the continental margin s response to controlling factors and the comparison of numerical models with the experimental results will form a basis for refining both types of data doc5106 none Once located on the margins of the world economy, Ireland is now Europe s fastest growing economy. Investment from high-growth producer-service industries like software and financial services has contributed greatly to Ireland s recent economic boom. The success of these sectors is viewed as a critical factor for Ireland s continued economic success. Using the concept of embeddedness, this doctoral dissertation research project will determine the significance of these industries now and in the near future. Embeddedness has been employed in much academic research to study the connections between multi-national corporations (MNCs) and local economies, yet in spite of its importance to social science research, the concept remains vague and ambiguous. This project therefore will address three goals, seeking (1) to establish a concrete framework for analyzing the embeddedness of multinational firms, (2) to assess and compare the current and future significance of these firms to the Irish economy, and (3) to determine the degree to which software and financial service MNCs are embedded in Ireland. The empirical research will make use of interviews with private, public, and non-profit organization leaders, mail questionnaires, and published data sources. This research will assess the impact of these industries on the Irish economy and will yield a collection of theorized case studies that describe in detail relationships among service MNCs and Irish organizations. The findings of this project are expected to show that this recent wave of investment is characterized by more deeply embedded firms than previous rounds of inward investment. This project s research results will contribute to academic debates by examining the critical intersection between global capital and territorial economies. This study is of direct importance to policy debates within and about the Republic of Ireland. The Irish government relies upon both the software and financial service industries to act as engines for future economic development, but if these firms are weakly embedded, they are potentially susceptible to relocation in the face of greater global competition for inward investment. Because other nations and regions use similar strategies to stimulate growth and economic development, the results of this Irish case study may have utility in many other locales. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc5014 none This award is for support of a collaborative project (between University of Colorado, Bates College, and the Carnegie Institute of Washington) to study the impact of Pleistocene colonization of Australia by modern humans. The investigators hypothesize that human burning activities destabilized ecosystems across the interior such that a large segment of the dependent fauna became extinct, and that this ecosystem change ultimately led to reduced effective moisture over the interior. The study involves a tightly focussed field campaign to acquire primary collections, and a coordinated analytical program for these samples concentrating on their physical characteristics, geochronology, and carbon isotopes as a paleovegetation proxy. By evaluating whether unparalleled shifts in the diet of Genyornis occurred as extinction approached the investigators can test whether human predation (no expected dietary change) or ecosystem collapse (expected adjustment of diet to meet these changes) is the more probable extinction mechanism doc5108 none Today there exist three environments in which to perform network research: live networks, network simulators, and static small-scale testbeds. Although each environment has benefits, each also has many limitations. This project proposes to build a new type of experimental environment, an Internet in a room, which will not only complement the strengths and weaknesses of existing experimental environments, but work synergistically with some of them, such as simulation. The proposed instrument, a large-scale network emulation facility, will be a unique resource for network experimenters. The researchers are currently building a prototype, based on donated equipment and University of Utah funds. Under this proposalthe researchers will continue this early work, make the testbed real through developing significant software and deploying additional hardware, work closely with others to integrate it with network simulators, and provide professional staffing so that the facility is of maximum use to external researchers. A crucial goal is to make the facility universally available to any external researcher, without administrative or technical obstacles to simple and straightforward use. Single-node systems research and development has flourished as the barriers to entry have plummeted. Inexpensive, commodity, open, hardware (x86 PC) and software (Linux, BSD), have made such R (4) capture of low-level device OS costs such as interrupt load and memory bandwidth; (5) experimentation on the router software itself, as well as ease of maintainence and robust security, is provided by fully user-replaceable router OS software; (6) ns compatible specification language and integration with the Georgia Tech software backplane for emulation, allowing experiments easily to move between simulation and emulation; (7) remote configurability and availability to researchers world-wide, both time and space-shared; (8) isolated control, monitoring, and data acquisition network; remote power control and serial line console debugging for all nodes; (9) incorporation as an integral part of the national Active Network Backbone (ABONE doc5109 none Multihop wireless capabilities are enabling communication and coordination among autonomous nodes in unplanned environments and configurations. At the same time wireless channels present challenges of dynamic operating conditions, power constraints for autonomously-powered nodes, and complicated interactions between high level behavior and lower level channel characteristics (e.g. increased synchronized communication significantly degrades channel characteristics). The major goal of the research proposed here is the development, testing, and characterization of algorithms for scalable, application-driven, wireless network services using a heterogeneous collection of communicating mobile nodes. Some of these nodes will be autonomous (robots) in that their movements will not be human-controlled. The others will be portable, thus making them dependent on humans for transportation. While the focus of the work is on the mobile nodes, the project includs immobile computers on the network as well. The project emphasizes that most (though not all) of the mobile nodes will have modest sensing, computational, and communication resources. The chief scientific motivation behind the work is the design of robust, efficient, and scalable algorithms. The project hypothesizes that distributed algorithms that rely on local interactions have many compelling characteristics, resulting in these properties. There is significant overlap between the problems of coordinating the autonomous mobile nodes that carry some of the sensors and the algorithms that direct the flow of information from sources(s)to sink(s) in the network. Both sets of algorithms need to be carefully designed to improve robustness, efficiency, and scalability. As motivation the project proposes that the experimental part of the research be conducted on a testbed which simulates some characteristics of an urban post-earthquake scenario in a building. The sensors in the experiments will be distributed geographically (within the building) and linked by a wireless network. Many of the mobile nodes will be largely autonomous, serving as easily-accessible knowledge collectors and repositories, and exercising a wide range of independent options in the dispatch and control of information flow and resources. Other mobile nodes will be carried about the environment by people. The project will study issues of scale (how many sensor nodes does the application software accommodate), fault tolerance (how robust is the system to loss of sensors and or communication) and efficiency (e.g. time vs. quality of service). As part of a one-year pilot study funded by NSF, the project has been conducting initial research in the issues underlying a system such as the one above. The project also recently received a substantial equipment grant from the Office of Naval Research to support the experimental portion of this work. The project has identified two key unsolved sub-problems that are relevant to the overall goals: localization and communication coverage. In this proposal the project discusses the broad research challenges in the area of communication and coordination of autonomous mobile nodes. The project then focuses on the two key problems as concrete questions that will be addressed in the research and describes a method involving simulation and experimentation to study them systematically doc5110 none An interdisciplinary team of experimentalists and theoreticians from the University of Kansas and the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications are collaborating to explore the use of superconducting interference devices for quantum computing. The SQUID devices under investigation consist of Josephson junctions embedded in a superconducting loop, and will be used to implement quantum bits and quantum gates. This work concentrates on two problems: 1. To increase the decoherence time of qubits using niobium nitride (NbN) as the superconducting material. NbN has much lower intrinsic damming than the commonly used niobium SQUID. The Japanese collaborators, who have the best NbN junction fabrication facilities in the world, will make samples of tunnel junctions and SQUIDs. These will be sent to Kansas for measurement of decoherence times. 2. To conduct an integrated theoretical and experimental study of Controlled-Not gates using SQUID doc5111 none One of the most theoretically challenging and practically important problems in modern computer science is the analysis of cryptographic authentication protocols, which play an essential role in Internet privacy and security. There is a general cryptographic protocol specification environment developed at SRI that includes a high-level specification language, CAPSL, and an intermediate language, CIL, based on a multiset rewriting rule model. The objective of this project is to write a translator to generate prototype protocol implementations in Java from CAPSL specifications. The translator will use existing Java classes and APIs (application program interfaces) for communication and encryption tasks. Concrete interface routines will be generated from the CIL representation. The advantage of this approach is that the originally specified protocol can be shown to be free of design flaws through analysis of the CIL using other tools doc5112 none The purpose of this project is to demonstrate a new paradigm for wireless network services. The motivations for this project are the f ollowing: (1) Today, wireless service is either local to an institution (as in wireless LANs) or is provided as part of a regional or national service (as in cellular). But there could be other models. Individual providers of wireless service could put up a base station and o er service locally. Users could move among these providers and select a service based on requirements and prices. Just as we have over wireline Internet service providers today, many only serving a small area, we could have wireless coverage built bottom up. (2)Today, we see a restricted range of wireless devices - a laptop PC with a wireless card, a cell phone augmented with data capabilities, a highly integrated device such as a pager. There is not an open market for new wide-area wireless devices, because such devices today are tightly bound, both technically and through service contract, to a particular wireless service provider. But there could be a wide range of new consumer devices if the proper interfaces and modules were available. For this to work, two things are necessary. First, each of the broad mix of competing wireless services must be accessible to a wide variety of devices. What is needed is an overall system architecture that allows cheap, small, low-power consumer-level objects to access a wide variety of technically incompatible wireless services with ease, using open interfaces. Second, selection of a service among competing alternatives must be easy. For example, a manual process of selection and entry of a credit card would be too burdensome to succeed. What is needed is a model for automated dynamic negotiation, based on rules provided by the users and providers, together with a workable economic model and a simple micro-payment scheme. The goal of this research is to demonstrate two related innovations. The irst is a framework for automated negotiation for access to wireless services. The second is a small hardware device that the user can carry, a personal router, which contains the necessary wireless transceivers, implements the access negotiation protocol, and provides a network connection for the other devices and appliances that a person might choose to carry. By creation of an open interface between this personal router and other devices a user might carry, an environment can be created for the development of new devices and applications. The intellectual merit of this project is embodied in: a) the automated service negotiation framework, b) experience with systems that use policy constraints to guide automatic configuration; c) the related protocols for security and billing; d) the demonstration of the new application user interface paradigms implied by the personal router; and e) identification and definition of the interfaces between this device and the other consumer devices that can be connected to the Internet using it. The broader impacts are the possibility of creating a new market model or wireless service, based on small business investment and local competition, rather than service provision (only) by large, national-level corporations, and the development of an increased understanding of user pricing preference for communication services. Research that explores technology supporting alternative economic models is not likely to be done in private industry, and is thus especially appropriate for public-sector support doc5113 none Deregulation and restructuring of the electricity industry is fundamentally changing a sector of the economy that is crucial to our standard of living. Electricity restructuring is occurring or has occurred in many countries and, in particular, in many states of the United States, with change accelerating subsequent to orders instituted by the United States Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in . Restructuring has the potential to unleash competition in the generation sector of the electricity industry, spurring reductions in the costs of electricity production and of electricity delivery and consequent gains for consumers. There is a pressing need to understand the ramifications of electricity market restructuring and to benefit from the experiences in electricity markets that are developing throughout the United States and the world. However, various disciplines are strongly inter-related in the analysis of electricity markets and, consequently, research demands a coordinated, inter-disciplinary approach. This proposal is for inter-disciplinary research in the analysis of restructured electricity markets and for holding an inter-disciplinary research workshop on electricity markets. The research will involve significant interaction between faculty and graduate students and prepare these students for careers that integrate ideas from several disciplines. The three goals of this project are: 1. to develop models of electricity prices over time, 2. to develop models of strategic behavior in transmission-constrained electricity markets, and 3. to hold a workshop on electricity market organization and design. The model development goals require coordination across several disciplines: electrical engineering, finance, and public policy. The principal investigators combine expertise from these areas. The proposed work involves both the development of analytical methods and the implementation of these methods in software. The results of this project will include enhancements to the University of Texas electricity market model as well as journal papers describing the analytical methods and software doc5114 none Snyder, Lawrence University of Washington ITR: Fluency 1 and Teaching Teachers to Teach IT Fluency with information technology (FIT) is the ability to effectively use computers, networks, software and information resources now and in the future. Fluency is a new standard of IT knowledge formulated by the National Research Council s Committee on Information Technology Literacy in their report, Being Fluent With Information Technology. To enable students to continually learn IT, Fluency provides the foundations (concepts) on which to build further understanding, and the mechanisms (capabilities) to understand when more must be learned. The goal of this project is to pave the way for the widespread offering of information technology fluency courses in K-12 schools, community colleges and adult education. The project will allow the creation of a Fluency 1 curriculum whose presentation stretches over one year, allowing for a paced introduction of IT topics and time to prepare for and work on IT projects. Fluency 1 contains components of algorithmic thinking and programming and should help provide teaching guidance that is suitable to assist a present computer literacy teacher in teaching Fluency doc5115 none The proposed work aims to understand climate phenomena that arise by interactions between the ocean, land surface and atmosphere. Methods developed by the PI and his group under previous NSF support will be applied to four related areas: (i) Tropical teleconnections and ocean-land-atmosphere interaction. Atmospheric teleconnections by which oceans influence land regions often occur within convective zones, or shifts or modulation of convective zones. Hierarchical modeling methods will be applied to analyze convective, cloud-radiative and land-surface feedbacks that occur in tropical teleconnections and related phenomena in tropical land convective regions. (ii) Intermediate atmosphere-land modeling. The intermediate model developed by the group will be maintained in support of research at UCLA and other institutions. It will be used as a platform for testing some non-standard modeling approaches (iii) Stochastic convective parameterization. Conventional convective parameterizations parameterize the mean effects of small-scale convective motions but omit the variance. A method for including this is to be explored and the impacts of this on large-scale motions will be tested. (iv) Ocean atmosphere interaction. Continuation of work on ENSO aims to provide theoretical prototypes for the substantial variability that is not associated with the leading oscillatory mode. Work is also proposed on the tropical Pacific signal of global warming that has some features in common with El Nino. The work is important because it will increase our understanding of the role of ocean, land and atmosphere in the climate system doc5116 none This project focuses on glassforming liquids. It includes a study of formation of glasses of unusual properties via first order liquid-liquid phase transitions to test the possibility that there exists a class of vitreous materials of unusually low entropy (appromixating perfect glasses ), with atypical vibrational characteristics. It also includes exploring the possibilty of creating a class of (variably) porous, hence lightweight, glasses by using the Maxwell randomly-connected freely-joited slats approach, with rigid molecular slats chemically linked at pivot points. These new project will be blended with a variety of novel studies addressing conventional body of visocous liquid glassformers. One source of novelty here comes from the recognition that the configurational excitation of liquids, which usually progresses continuously once the glass transition temperature has been passed, can occur in distinct stages if the intermolecular interactions have inhomogeneous components. The major thrust of the project involves a search for deeper understanding of the physics of the glass transition. The molecular level distinction between strong and fragile liquids and plastic crystals, on the one hand and the distinction between structural glassformers on the one hand, and the various spin glasses, dipole glasses, etc of solid state physics, on the other will be explored. The project will also address the relation between glassforming liquids and biomolecules and, alternatively the use of glassforming liquids to preserve biomolecules studies of the relation between folding in individual molecules(proteins) and two-tier excitation processes in simpler systems, and possible links between the nucleation phenomenon in complex systems and the aberrant folding of membrane proteins to new forms involved in mad cow disease and its human disease relatives will continued. %%% Describing at the nanometer level the amorphous state of solids in central to many areas of advanced materials technologies that include polymers, metals, pharmaceuticals and biomaterials. An understanding of the amorphous state and how it is prepared and stabilized will lead to new routes for synthesizing novel materials with unique properties doc5117 none Miller Using ocean models, coupled ocean-atmosphere models, and observations the investigators will address scientific questions involving (1) the specific feedback processes in the Latif-Barnett decadal coupled mode and its consistency with observations; (2) the fate of subducted temperature and spiciness anomalies traveling equatorward in the thermocline using a very weakly diffusive ocean model; (3) the adequacy of observations that sample anomalous subduction in the Northern and Southern hemispheres; (4) the baseline shapes and levels of spiciness spectra in coupled models; and (5) the specific tropical feedback processes in the decadal spiciness mode and its consistency with observations doc5118 none The Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) is a software package for data processing and visualization and is used by several thousand scientists in both the U.S. and aboard. To improve both stability and functionality of the package, the GMT development team will be expanded by allowing volunteers to make conributions in several key areas doc5119 none The goal of the project is to develop innovative technology for analyzing complex structured databases, particularly in biological domains, that can be used to find interesting and useful patterns and regularities in these rich domains. The work is motivated by two challenge problems from molecular biology: gene expression data and tuberculosis data. The former data are the key to understanding the function of certain genes in an organism and therefore how those genes manifest themselves as properties of the organism. The latter data are useful in understanding the infection patterns and eventually controlling the spread of TB. Similar data can provide deep scientific understanding of many other biological processes. This project will develop languages for statistical modeling of biological processes, techniques for learning the models from data, and algorithms for reasoning with the resulting models. The project will be based on probabilistic relational models, an extension of Bayesian networks recently developed by the Principal Investigator doc5120 none s (mathematical specifications). We extend the type systems for widely used languages, such as Java, with PVS-like specification constructs. We develop an effective static typechecker for this type system that detects many common programming errors. The research builds on advances in programming languages, type theories, program optimization techniques, decision procedures, and program analysis methods, and tools such as LCLint, ESC, and BANE. An extended type system for programming languages can be a foundation for the design and development of well-specified, efficient, and safe programs doc5121 none This proposal is to provide partial support to acquire a new Delta-plus mass spectometer and a Kiel III sampling device to replace a 17 year-old Finnigan-MAT 251 equiped with a 10 year-old common acid bath system that is that has recently been subjected to numerous breakdowns doc5122 none Product line engineering (PLE) is a specialized form of software reuse that has recently attracted the interest of software researchers and practitioners. Software architecture is generally perceived as an effective artifact to control the evolution of product lines; it embodies earliest decisions for the product line and provides a framework within which reusable components can be developed. The focus in this project is on defining and investigating metrics for domain architectures. The project adopts a three-tiered approach, involving a distinction between qualitative features, quantitative factors, and computable metrics. The link between qualitative features and quantitative factors is investigated by analytical means (to derive deterministic or probabilistic relationships between them), and the link between quantitative factors and computable metrics is investigated by empirical means (to validate the proposed metrics). A compiler will be developed to derive metrics tables for product line architectures from formal architectural descriptions. This project will enhance our understanding of quality attributes of product line architectures, and will enable us to better quantify these attributes doc5123 none Interactive exploration effectively enables scientists to identify and interpret data, embedded in much larger datasets, that represents significant underlying phenomena. There is a critical need for data management support for the process of interactive exploration of very large data sets. However, scientific database research has not yet had a major impact on the way that scientists actually use scientific data. The lack of a comprehensive conceptual model for the scientific data has limited the success of current systems in becoming more general and less ad hoc. The principal goal of this research is to develop, validate, and prototype a formal data model for distributed multi-resolution scientific data that encapsulates its inherent structure to guide efficient database implementation. The model includes comprehensive geometry and topology-based features for describing a wide variety of sampling grids, features for representing sub-domains of a dataset that contain discovered knowledge, and error measures that reflect the accuracy or authenticity of each representation level. From a repository containing a dataset represented as a multi-resolution hierarchy, a scientist accesses successive levels of error-annotated detail to zoom into the meaningful areas, downloading data from these regions to a LAN and his her workstation for further doc5124 none During remote collaboration, partners have access to much less information than during face-to-face collaboration. This project uses psychological experiments to examine how knowing where a partner is looking affects performance and strategies on collaborative tasks. Phase 1 asks: When partners are physically co-present, how aware are they of where the other is attending, and how do they achieve shared attention? Phase II applies these basic results to remote collaborations; partners wear eye-trackers that transmit gaze information to each other s computer displays. A space of tasks and representations is explored: Tasks are varied in systematic ways (e.g., some lend themselves to parallel activity, while others require consensus for each step), and different representations of the same gaze information are compared. The goal is to understand which representations work best for which tasks. With technological advances making eyetracking easier, less cumbersome, and more affordable, a gaze-based computer interface may someday join the ranks of ubiquitous input devices like the mouse. If this technology is to be integrated into the every citizen interface, it is necessary to understand how people use the information in gaze to achieve a joint focus of attention. This could provide the foundations for new technology for computer-mediated collaboration doc5125 none This project will focus on the study of the structural response to wave action of an ecologically important intertidal mussel, Mytilus edulis. Preliminary experiments have demonstrated mussel attachment strength varies seasonally, peaking in winter and declining in summer. This cycle in attachment strength may represent a plastic response to seasonal shifts in wave climate, or alternatively, may reflect temporal shifts in the allocation of energetic resources between reproduction and attachment. Laboratory experiments will determine the environmental and metabolic cues to which mussels respond and the time lag between cue and response. In addition, field experiments will measure the seasonal variability of the forces imposed on mussels, and of their attachment strength and reproductive condition. Together, these experiments will allow for predictions of the rate of disturbance of mussels that can be verified with measurements of disturbance in the field. This study will provide a detailed understanding of the mechanics which allow this species to dominate wave?swept shores, and will enhance the ability to predict the rate of disturbance of this ecologically important species. Furthermore, this study allows for the prediction of the quantitative response of mussels to any future shifts in wave climate. Given current evidence that increases in wave exposure may be common in the near future, these estimations are likely to form a valuable test of the ability to predict the ecological consequences of climate change doc5126 none Petar M. Djuric Project Signal processing is an area that already plays a significant role in the current GSM and IS-95 systems. This role will only increase in the projected third generation wireless communications, and in fact, the success in implementing these systems will strongly depend on the ability of the signal processing methods to resolve the new technical problems that will emerge with it. The underlying technology of the third generation systems will be based on the wideband CDMA (WCDMA) modulation scheme. In the core of this technology will be sequential signal processing algorithms with abilities to capture fast-changing characteristics of transmission channels very quickly and to exploit known system information optimally. The significant advances of latest CDMA signal processing methods notwithstanding, it is clear that the requirements for much lower bit error rates than in current systems will markedly increase the demands on signal processing capabilities of sequential algorithms for WCDMA signals. Additional challenge arises due to complexities that are a result from the need to handle high data rates and users with high mobility. Since the communication channels will be rapidly time varying, the signals will undergo quick attenuations and the new algorithms on channel estimation and tracking, channel equalization, interference rejection, and RAKE receiver adaptations must have extremely fast convergence rates. The objective of the proposed research is to develop algorithms that will meet the challenges of this new technology. The basic methodology for the proposed processing of WCDMA signals will be based on particle filters, which recently have gained much attention for their potential in handling nonlinear and non-Gaussian models. The underlying principle used in the design of such filters is the representation of the posterior distribution of state variables (the unknowns of the system) by a set of particles (samples). Each particle is given an importance weight so that the set of particles and their weights represent a random measure that approximates the desired posterior distribution. The particles may also represent means of density functions, usually Gaussians, in which case the particles have additional variables, the covariances of the Gaussians. As new information becomes available, these particles propagate recursively through the state space and their weights are modified using the principles of Bayesian theory. There are several ways of applying particle filters including sampling-importance-resampling, mixture Kalman filtering, and Monte Carlo and Metropolis-Hastings importance resampling. These approaches have their advantages and disad- vantages in performance, and impose different demands for real-time implementation. In the proposal, new schemes will be studied that naturally combine the best features of the existing schemes, and tailor them for processing of WCDMA signals. Not only will the new schemes be able to replicate or surpass the best possible performance of the known methods, but they will also be general enough to provide foundations for development of new task specific schemes. Four important topics will be investigated. The first is the examination of fundamental schemes for propagation of state particles. This issue is critical for two important reasons: (a) it aspects the performance of the algorithm and (b) it subsumes the implementation, which although parallelizible, is in some cases too computationally demanding and therefore not too practical. The second topic is task specific and is related to multiuser detection and channel estimation as well as exploitation of the physical characteristics of the channel and the base station mobile asymmetry for development of improved algorithms. The third one is examination of the flexibility of the proposed methodology and the interaction of the various algorithms and tasks in order to improve their performances and robustness. Finally, the fourth topic will be related to investigation of computational requirements, and structures that would allow for real-time use doc5127 none EPIC (Eastern Pacific Investigation of Climate processes in the coupled ocean-atmosphere system) is an activity of the US Climate Variability and Predictability (CLIVAR) Program. EPIC consists of four components focussing on (i) intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) warm pool phenomena; (ii) cross-equatorial inflow into the ITCZ; (iii) upper ocean structure and mixing; and (iv) an exploratory study of boundary layer cloud properties in the southeasterly tradewind regime. The field phase of EPIC is scheduled for a 6-week period during the interval Sept 1 to Oct 15, . In addition to the eight awards made by the Division of Atmospheric Sciences, this collaborative research has awards made by NSF s Division of Ocean Sciences and NOAA s Office of Global Programs. Under this award, the PI will gather various data sets in the field phase, and use these to examine the set of mechanisms that force convection in the east Pacific ITCZ. The work will be key to the development and verification of parameterizations for diabatic processes in the atmospheric components of coupled ocean-atmosphere global circulation models. The work is important because it will improve understanding and modeling of climate variability over the eastern tropical Pacific doc5128 none The goal of this research is to reduce the cost and improve the performance of observation-based branch characterization mechanisms in the compiler and hardware. Often, correlation discovered at great cost or missed entirely through execution can be determined in a simple algebraic fashion at compile time. Relationships between program structures can be inferred from these algebraic expressions and subsequently conveyed to compiler optimizations and to the hardware through appropriate mechanisms to be developed by this research. Once employed, these relationships can refocus the efforts expended by observation-based mechanisms, or can eliminate the need for them altogether doc5129 none The goal of this project is to develop a methodology and set of prototype tools to enable associative mining of very large scientific data sets. The researchers will use content, such as solution features, patterns, and shapes, to examine the data and retrieve required information. Unlike other approaches that use index-based coordinates, this lets scientists answer the kinds of questions that they typically ask - such as Have I seen this evolution before? and Is it similar to any experimental observations? The tools developed by this project will operate on distributed time-varying data and will act as templates for other methods. Specific technical objectives include developing distributed multi-resolution techniques for cataloging interesting phenomena and searching both run-time and archived data for interesting phenomena. The research will specifically target two domains that are representative of other scientific areas and have a pressing need for scientific mining tools: fluid dynamics (large-scale, high-accuracy Direct Numerical Simulation of compressible turbulence) and oceanography (comparison of simulation data with acoustic observations of hydrothermal plumes doc5130 none Williams, Ronald University of Virginia ITR: Security Education in Embedded Computing Education and research will be tightly coupled as this effort focuses upon security in networked embedded computer systems. The vulnerability of networked computers to malicious or mischievous attack has become apparent with several recent incidents. With the present trend to connect more embedded systems to global networks, security is a growing concern. The investigators on this project seek to identify aspects of well-studied embedded computing characteristics that can be extended and applied to issues of security. The primary objectives of this work are to develop a theoretical foundation for embedded system security and to expand the base of security education for computer engineers. The theoretical foundation will build upon the body of knowledge developed over past decades in availability, reliability, and safety research. Educational modules will be made available and can be used in the future to form the basis for a more extensive educational program in this area. The potential impact of this effort will include a significant increase in the sensitivity to embedded system security issues among those computer engineers who participate in the project or are exposed to the educational modules. Further, new applications of existing techniques will improve the evaluation and design of embedded systems to include security considerations. Both of these impacts are significant to increase the integrity of networked embedded computer systems doc5131 none The PIs will investigate and develop software and computational methods to address one of the most challenging current problems in molecular dynamics (MD) simulations - large proteins, consisting of tens of thousands of atoms in solution over the physiological range of at least a microsecond of folding time. This will be accomplished using a reduced basis approach based on singular value decomposition (SVD) of the MD trajectory. The work will entail: - developing a block SVD updating scheme that will enable new trajectory information to be adjoined to a current truncated SVD approximation to a prior trajectory and avoid having to store the entire trajectory - developing, analyzing, and implementing a reduced basis integrator that will work in concert with the SVD updating scheme to compute the reduced basis simulation more rapidly - adapting the fast marching algorithms developed for latent semantic indexing to develop the rapid graphical query tools to locate sites that potentially match local structures of interest - developing the I O support and visualization capabilities to handle the extremely large data manipulation and representation problems that will be generated The result of the research will be an efficient time integration scheme that can drastically limit storage and yet resolve detail on multiple scales. It will be demonstrated on a fully solvated protein molecule over a time scale of a microsecond, and the high order, low frequency motions will be visualized doc5132 none Newby, Gregory B. School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ITR SW: TeraScale Retrieval TeraScale Retrieval addresses the scientific investigation of large-scale information retrieval (IR). TeraScale Retrieval will facilitate experimentation to advance knowledge of information retrieval, especially text retrieval, by implementing a software toolkit for IR research and development. IR systems seek to identify documents or passages from documents that satisfy a human information need. Text retrieval is directed at collections of relatively unstructured documents, such as HTML documents, as well as more structured documents (e.g., XML). In order to advance scientific knowledge and improve performance of IR, there is a need for a software toolkit that enables rapid and practical implementation of experimental IR systems. The TeraScale Retrieval toolkit will emphasize large-scale performance with terascale datasets: hundreds of millions of documents with terabytes of raw data, millions of unique terms, multiple languages, and potential for quadrillions (petascale) of sub-documents or document fragments. The toolkit will emphasize software reuse, high-performance algorithms, and modularity for rapid prototyping and evaluation. Rather than moving quickly from academic use to commercialization, TeraScale Retrieval will focus on experimentation and evaluation to contribute to scientific knowledge about information seeking and use doc5133 none Parallel programs using MPI are widely used in compute-intensive scientific and engineering applications. They perform well on dedicated distributed memory machines and workstation clusters. However, their performance can deteriorate on multiprogrammed shared memory machines (SMMs) or clusters of those machines. This project will optimize execution of parallel programs through both program transformation and efficient run-time support. The resulting programs will deliver robust performance in both dedicated and multiprogrammed SMM clusters. Technically, the work has three aspects: It will study compile-time code transformations to achieve threaded execution of parallel code on a cluster of SMMs, allowing each MPI node to be executed safely as a thread. It will study thread-safe run-time execution and fast lock-free communication that takes advantage of address space sharing among threads within an SMM. It will evaluate and model a variety of scientific applications (including sparse-matrix algorithms with irregular computation, PDE computations with coarse-grain computation, and data-intensive applications) to verify the proposed techniques doc5134 none The DHARMA domain-specific middleware system being developed in this project is intended to allow hydrologic field engineers to address water-management problems, on a scale previously impossible, with sophisticated domain-specific computational management systems. DHARMA is used to provide automatic data acquisition via the Internet; data fusion from online, local, and cached resources; smart caching of intermediate results to allow for reuse in future simulation cycles; and smart scheduling to optimize execution times on metacomputing systems. Our target watershed model, WEPP, is a continuous simulation processed-based model which represents new soil erosion prediction capabilities. However, it is limited to very small watersheds with current computer technology. A revolutionary change in hydrologic modeling on the watershed scale will be brought about by applying the WEPP model to the 925 square miles Lake Decatur watershed. Currently, all watershed scale hydrologic models are based on empirical relationships. WEPP is the only model which scientifically accounts for soils, sediment transport, runoff, channel flow, plant growth, decomposition, snow melt, freeze-thaw effects, and climatic conditions. Through DHARMA, WEPP is the only model which will provide accurate predictions and evaluate the effects of alternative watershed management practices on watershed water quality doc5128 none The goal of this research is to reduce the cost and improve the performance of observation-based branch characterization mechanisms in the compiler and hardware. Often, correlation discovered at great cost or missed entirely through execution can be determined in a simple algebraic fashion at compile time. Relationships between program structures can be inferred from these algebraic expressions and subsequently conveyed to compiler optimizations and to the hardware through appropriate mechanisms to be developed by this research. Once employed, these relationships can refocus the efforts expended by observation-based mechanisms, or can eliminate the need for them altogether doc5136 none Contemporary distributed systems are increasingly extensible, heterogenous and dynamically evolving. Further, the execution environment (including the hosts and the network) is dynamic in its underlying structure and capacity. This research project aims to develop and analyze an adaptable distributed programming environment (including a programming model and a runtime system) for effectively utilizing such complex systems. The research project will develop a programming environment in which programs and its components can freely migrate across different hosts. The distribution of program components across different hosts can be controlled by binding specific mobility paradigms with the components. Further, the mobility paradigms can be changed dynamically, both by an application and or by the runtime system. Such a programming model entails an execution environment in which distribution of program components can be controlled dynamically in order to adapt to changes in load, resource availability, resource distribution, component distribution and computational capabilities of hosts. The research will also develop runtime system techniques for creation and management of mobile components, resource allocation and security. It will develop adaptive scheduling schemes that allow hosts to precisely control allocation of local and distributed resources to non real-time and real-time distributed components doc5137 none This award is for support of a study to determine the influence of lake-level changes on chironomid-based temperature estimates. A transect of cores from within each of two lakes in northern Maine will be examined for evidence of past water levels. Chironomid analysis will be performed on cores from both lakes. Geologic chronologic evidence of Younger Dryas-age ice readvance in northern Maine will provide the data necessary to apply a well-developed glaciological model to determine the range of temperature and precipitation that could possibly have prevailed during this period. Chironomid estimates of temperature will be reconciled with the temperature range derived from the glaciological model, and the transfer function will also be refined with respect to lake-level. The new chironomid lake-level transfer function will then be applied to Holocene sediments from the two lakes doc5138 none The small-scale physics of sea ice formation will be studied in a natural setting with the objective to resolve critical paradoxes about the rate of ice formation, supercooling in the ocean boundary layer, and the effective diffusivities of heat and salt. Factors affecting the mass and energy balance of sea ice are currently of much interest both because of the potential impact of sea ice on climate change, and because there is a growing body of evidence that rapid changes are occurring in the Arctic. An important facet of the problem is the exchange of heat and salt at the ice-ocean interface. Here there is a significant gap between theory and observation. Current theory suggests the boundary layer under growing ice should be constrained by double diffusive processes at the ice-ocean interface to force supercooling and in situ frazil ice formation in the boundary layer. Theory also suggests that ocean heat flux will be greater under thin ice than thick ice. These results greatly affect models for small scales and very large scales. Yet, observations indicate these things do not happen. This may be because the existing boundary layer theories do not properly represent the microphysics of the ice formation process. This effort will cooperate with Norwegian colleagues in a combined observational and theoretical investigation to test the hypotheses. The observational work will be done from fast ice in frozen but tidally active fjords in Svalbard. With proper planning and preparation, and the ability to operate from an extensive existing logistics base, the fjord setting will offer a superb natural laboratory for investigating small-scale ice-ocean interaction. This work will take advantage of the recently signed Statement of Cooperation (SOC) between NSF-OPP and the Norsk Polar Institute, and it exemplifies close interaction between U.S. and Norwegian scientists. We will make educational outreach an important part of this project by: supporting a U.S. graduate student who will attend University Courses on Svalbard (UNIS), working with the UNIS students in the field, and giving lectures at UNIS doc5139 none Considerable information is known to exist in the form of soft information such as the hunches, opinions, beliefs and expectations distributed across many individuals. When individuals are differentially located in time and space and receive signals in the form of complex patterns from a common source, such information can aggregate into a reliable statistic. Tools for extracting such information, called Information Aggregation Mechanisms (IAMs), have evolved naturally but the scientific foundation for their successes has not been explored. IAMs involve subtleties because they depend upon incentives and the ability of individuals to update their opinions beliefs by observing others. Through the application of new laboratory experimental methods, this research will isolate the principles that lead to the successes. Then, using the behavioral principles together with modern communications and computational technology, the research will produce new types of IAMs unlike any that are found occurring naturally. Potential applications range widely across almost any complex system in which the need for information is continuous or reoccurring, the state is not clearly observed from any single vantage point and observation requires human interpretation. Presumably, this would include anything ranging from epidemics, pending systems failures, the outcome of complex decision processes in an organization, or social tendencies doc5140 none Color vision in butterflies is dependent upon the presence of different photoreceptor neurons within the retina, which are sensitive to different colors of light. Just as in many vertebrate and invertebrate species, this results from the highly regulated expression of different forms of the light sensitive visual pigment rhodopsin, in different types of photoreceptor cells. During evolution, gene duplication events have produced numerous forms of rhodopsin in different species. The PIs will study this evolutionary process and the origin of the different forms of rhodopsin. The PIs will examine the rhodopsins of the Tiger Swallowtail butterfly (Papilio glaucus) as well as those of more distantly related species. The PIs will measure the colors of light absorbed by the different butterfly rhodopsins and determine which specific photoreceptor cells within the retina express each form of rhodopsin. The PIs will also compare the amino acid and nucleotide sequences of these and other rhodopsins to determine whether the rhodopsins absorbing the same wavelengths of light are likely to have evolved from a common ancestral gene or if they may have evolved independently. These studies will clarify the evolutionary mechanisms by which color vision was established, and contribute to the basic knowledge of the visual system of insects doc5141 none PI: Alberto Palloni, Miguel Ceballos This longitudinal project studies health statistics of Mexican immigrants to Chicago, in an attempt to understand a demographic and epidemiological paradox. Despite generally better health care available in the U.S. than in Mexico, many health statistics are worse for long-term Mexican immigrants than they are for short-term immigrants. Most earlier studies of this paradox have been cross-sectional rather than longitudinal. This project uses a variety of new data sources: retrospective surveys, bimonthly clinic follow-ups, medical records, and state statistics related to health. About 300 migrants will be interviewed about their health, health practices, and services they may have used over the past ten years. Data from this study will be supplemented by other data from national samples, including the National Longitudinal Study of Youth. Analyses will include hazard models for several health outcomes: infant health, birth weight, and mortality in first year doc5142 none The Oman Upwelling Zone is one of the most physically complex and economically important regions of the Arabian Sea. Although significant progress in understanding the physical, chemical, and biological dynamics of the broader region was achieved during the international Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS), the limited resources available had to be expended on achieving an general understanding of the biogeochemistry of the greater Arabian Sea itself. The purpose of this award is to support a joint seminar and workshop on the Omani Upwelling Zone involving investigators from the United States, Oman, and India. The participants will synthesize an up-to-date picture of the state of knowledge about the Upwelling and then work to prioritize research imperatives for the future. A workshop report will be published and disseminated doc5143 none Collaborative Research on Ethnicity and Transition in Russia and This project explores the connections between ethnicity, post-communist transition, and trust in Yakutia (Sakha) and Tatarstan, two leaders in the Russian republics campaign for sovereignty. Principal Investigators examine the implications of ethnicity as social capital for intra- and inter-ethnic relations among Yakuts, Tatars, and Russians. The project uses survey data, decision-making experiments, and elite interviews. The project promises to shed light on the role of ethnicity in periods of economic transition doc5144 none The automatic conversion of text to speech provides a means to achieve universal access to on-line information. However, except for simple messages, speech generated by current synthesizers is both unpleasant and hard to understand: even though words presented individually are quite intelligible, listeners are generally unable to comprehend longer or more complex messages without intense concentration. A key reason for this incomprehensibility is the lack of proper prosody in synthetic speech. Prosody refers to the rhythmic and melodic characteristics of speech, which are used by the speaker to structure information for the listener. That is, prosody conveys to the listener which words or phrases are important prominence, and which words belong together in some semantic or syntactic sense (phrasing). Prosody involves a host of acoustic features, such as variations in fundamental frequency (F0), timing, and features that are related to the speaker s level of effort. Current synthesizers have poor prosody for two main reasons: (i) accurate prediction from text of timing and F0 is intrinsically difficult, and (ii) they can neither predict nor control features in speech that correspond to the speaker s articulatory effort. While many techniques exist for control of segmental duration (one aspect of timing) and F0 characteristics of speech, little attention has been paid to control of this second category of effects, and the quality of current synthesizers is poor as a result. The PI has defined a concept of degree of articulation to refer to the fact that, at a given speaking rate, speakers can control the precision and speed of the motions of their tongue, lips, velum, etc. with varying degrees of effort, from hypo-articulate (sloppy) to hyper-articulate (precise). Acoustic correlates of degree of articulation have been shown to covary with linguistic factors such as word emphasis and syllabic stress. While clearly important, this concept is nevertheless vague and its static and dynamic acoustic correlates have not been well established. Moreover, no quantitative models exist that predict degree of articulation from text or that provide a sufficiently precise quantitative description of these acoustic correlates for implementation in a synthesizer. The overarching goal of this project is to develop principled quantitative models for the prediction of acoustic features associated with degree-of-articulation, and to implement these results in a speech synthesizer. The strategy will be (a) to use text materials that systematically vary in prominence-related factors in order to elicit varying levels of degree of articulation in read speech; (b) to analyze speech signal, laryngograph signal, and jaw lip articulatory data; and (c) to use the analysis results to generate mathematical descriptions of the relationship between prosodic structure and spectral features of the speech signal. The outcomes of this project will include the following: Improved understanding of the acoustic, glottal, and articulatory correlates of degree of articulation, including both static and dynamic features. This knowledge will impact not only basic science, but also technologies like speech synthesis and automatic speech recognition; Accurate prediction of spectral features of the speech signal from prosodic structure, based on a principled model that incorporates both acoustic and articulatory knowledge; Techniques for more natural-sounding speech synthesis that requires a lower attentional demand on the listener. This will lead to greater user acceptance of synthesized speech in applications including voice-based information access, language training, and tools for visually or vocally disabled persons doc4858 none In collaboration with EPS 00- ) Scientists at the Desert Research Institute (Atmospheric Sciences); University of Nevada, Reno (Department of Physics, High Energy Density Science Group), and the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma will collaborate to design and construct a system to simulate and study, in the laboratory, electrical discharges through atmospheres containing cloud and aerosol particles over a wide range of terrestrial and also extraterrestrial conditions. Lightning, as an electrical discharge, occurs through the atmosphere in and above thunderstorms, in volcanic eruptions and in clouds of other planets, notably Jupiter. The system will also be well suited to study certain industrial processes for producing and modifying aerosol (such as diamond) and the technology of protection from lightning strikes to spacecraft launch vehicles and electrical transmission systems. It will have a high voltage capability, up to one million volts, with a discharge current of up to 100,000 amps through a cubic meter laboratory cloud chamber with controlled gas composition, pressure, temperature and relative humidity and will be capable of being filled with particulate clouds of both volatile materials, such as water droplets and ice crystals, as well as aerosol of low volatility, such as certain minerals and alkali halides. The electrical system will consist of a Marx bank parallel - series arrangement of capacitors together with additional elements, with capability for control of voltage, current and current rise and fall time. The chamber will carry appropriate feed-throughs and electrodes for direct discharge and an inductive loop to give an electrode-less ring discharge. The time constants of current rise and fall (on the order of 100 nanoseconds and 10 microseconds, respectively) will be controlled to give direct simulation of atmospheric and other processes. Measurements will be made of the form and speed of the discharge using a streak camera and gated optical detectors. The role of particulates of different size, shape and composition as they relate to changes in trace gas composition will be investigated and emissivity absorption measurements in selected visible, UV and x-ray wavelengths will also be performed. The chamber will be designed with internal sensors and appropriate transmission windows for external laser diagnostics. The utility of the system will be demonstrated in the second year through initial studies of the leading discharge tip through ice and water cloud interfaces and in the rate of NOx production, both of which are current scientific issues in atmospheric science doc5146 none Project Environmental observation and forecasting systems (EOFS) are emerging new technologies with unparalleled potential to impact sustainable development. EOFS are expected to foster and support new paradigms for generation, transfer and social application of knowledge in domains that range from the global earth to its regional and local sub-systems. At the core of EOFS is the timely and customized acquisition, generation, processing and delivery of reliable, relevant information to many and very diverse audiences. Multiple challenges need to be met to implement this concept. A critical challenge is the development of automated procedures to verify the quality of the huge amounts of observational and simulation data that are generated by EOFS both in real-time and off-line. Process- based strategies for quality control of scientific data, while effective for moderate-size archival data are too labor-intensive to map well into EOFS-scale data sets. Strategies based on pattern recognition and machine learning hold significant promise as an alternative or complement. Under the proposed project, we will develop approaches based in statistical pattern recognition and signal processing, on-line adaptive systems, datamining, and advanced search to address critical quality control issues including: 1) Detecting sensor corruption in non-stationary, spatial-temporal systems, 2) Estimating true signals from corrupted sensor data, and 3) Detecting and characterizing regimes where model anomalies are likely. These quality control techniques will be developed and exercised on CORIE, a pilot EOFS for the COlumbia RIver Estuary and adjacent coastal waters (http: www.ccalmr.ogi.edu CORIE) The project will have strong social impact, through the role of EOFS (and, specifically, CORIE) on regional and national sustainable development issues. The project will also include cross-disciplinary educational opportunities at multiple levels doc5147 none The Computer Science and Engineering, and Telecommunication Departments at Michigan State University (MSU) requested support to conduct research involving the categories: Human-Computer Interface, Information Management, and Scalable Information Infrastructure. Three existing research laboratories will be connected and used as a testbed to facilitate this collaborative interdisciplinary research: High-Speed Networking & Performance Lab (HSNP), Media and Entertainment Technologies Lab (MET), and Media Interface and Network Design Lab (MIND). A primary objective of the proposed research is to further advance the client-server technologies for a ubiquitous multimedia computing environment. Since ubiquitous computing capability may take the form of advanced personal digitized assistants (PDAs), wearable computer systems featuring heads up displays, or argumented reality systems, this proposal addresses key issues which include: (1) personal environment data capture, (2) environmental data salience, (3) transport of multimedia data over wireless and heterogeneous network systems in a client-server environment, (4) media access and retrieval, and (5) human-computer-interface (HCI) design and analysis. Some of the significant questions that are addressed in the project are: (a) given continuous audio and video capture, what is the best choice of content to archive in a personal multimedia database? (b) how can audio and video capture of unconstrained content be used as an effective query mechanism for a multimedia database? (c) how can perceived latency and communications performance be optimized in a wireless environment where bandwidth, error rates, and latency are continuously variable and dependent upon many environmental conditions?, (d) how can the quality-of-service for the transport of real-time multimedia traffic be guaranteed using heterogeneous networks and wireless network systems?, and (e) what should be the design principles to support a fully mobile user engaged in hand-free high-bandwidth, collaborative work and communication? New algorithms and techniques will be developed and tested to address these questions either via simulation, emulation, or experimentation. It is anticipated that the existing facilities will be significantly enhanced via a pending NSF research equipment proposal. This proposed equipment (e.g., VoD servers, multimedia lap tops, WaveLan products, wearable argumented reality interfaces) will be the defining infrastructure to support a sophisticated testbed, connecting three research laboratories (HSNP, MET, MIND) via wireless links. The multi-lab testbed will be used for the experimental phase of the project. As an effort to broaden the participation in our research, the PIs will invite interested faculty (via two-week summer workshops) and students (via ten-week summer research experience) from HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) to work with them during the three summers. Additionally, the PIs will invite a few interested professionals from industry to participate in the research initiatives doc5148 none In academic researchers combined with the National Geographic Society (NGS) to design and implement Survey : Charting Communities and Change, an effort that explores the potential and limits of web-based survey research. A second survey effort to be hosted by the NGS website in the fall of the year is the cornerstone of this project. The substantive focus of Survey centers on the impact of information technology on changing perceptions of global and local spheres in contemporary society. In particular, the survey examines respondents perceptions and understanding of global and local in three areas: community, culture and conservation. The survey explores the extent to which new information technology has redefined the distinction between global and local. A second aim is to consider methodological issues related to web survey research, in particular the non-random nature of a web survey sample. Toward this end, the project calls for a parallel telephone survey effort using standard random digit dialing techniques to replicate the web survey. Beyond questions of sampling and validity, Survey will pursue issues regarding web survey instrument development and implementation, as well as instrument and design effects in web surveys. Collaboration with the NGS assures that the results will receive broad public dissemination doc5149 none This study will obtain a 6 Ma record of isotopic, faunal, and lithologic chemical indicators from ODP Site in the South China Sea. The multiple proxies will be used to develop a timeseries at 2 ka resolution of the East Asian winter and summer monsoon. The record will be used to test the response in both intensity and timing of the seasonal monsoon to solar forcing and to changing Northern Hemisphere glaciation and other boundary conditions including uplift of the Isthmus of Panama doc5150 none There has been a significant change in the upper ocean characteristics of the eastern Arctic in . The change was manifested through the loss of a near-surface layer known as the cold halocline layer (CHL). Without the CHL, the Arctic water column looks and behaves like the Antarctic water column. The local impact involves the likely initiation of considerable winter ocean heat fluxes (15-20 W m 2 ) and reduction of winter ice growth by 70-80% relative to previous years in which the CHL was present. It is not known how long the CHL did, or will, remain absent, though it appears to begun recovery by summer . This project will examine CTD stations throughout the Arctic region in order to quantify the strength of the CHL as well as other seasonally-averaged characteristics of the ocean-ice interaction (e.g., ocean heat flux, bulk stability, reduction in ice growth potential). The quantification is achieved through analysis of upper ocean integrated property distributions, and then generating robust bulk property parameters describing relevant physical quantities. The methodology was originally designed for analysis of Antarctic ice-ocean interaction, but as recently shown, is equally applicable to the Arctic. Once applied to the Arctic data, the parameters will be averaged to provide climatologies for the various properties. The spatial distribution of these climatologies will be compared to physical and dynamical properties of the Arctic in an attempt to determine the relationship between the climatological nature of the ocean-ice interaction and the physical dynamical setting. Methods of optimal interpolation will then be applied, to the extent allowed by the sporadic data coverage, in an effort to determine how the various integrated properties have changed through space and time. This will provide spatial temporal distributions of the ocean-ice interaction that will be used to evaluate the manner in which the CHL and other ocean-ice interactions have changed. The temporal variations will be examined for evidence of cycles, trends, or other coherent patterns, as have been suggested recently in the literature. Analysis of ocean data is ideal for this undertaking given the long time scales of the medium which may reveal evidence of the suspected changes even in sparsely sampled (in space and time) regions doc5151 none Walters, Deborah SUNY at Buffalo ITR: Women-Friendly Environments for Learning Information Technology There is currently an unsatisfied national demand for people trained in information technology (IT) with a minority of the students enrolled in IT programs being female. The proposed project is to develop an educational approach that will appeal to women and provide them with an appropriate learning environment for IT courses. There are four components to the project. First, will be efforts to build upon results of investigations on how to use technology to increase learning and decrease costs as taught within an IT fluency course. Second, will be research on learning styles to provide quantitative evidence to explore the validity of learning styles in general, and the consistency of women s learning styles, particularly, correlations between learning styles, learning environments and performance. Third, will be research on how to improve Web-based collaborative experiences. Fourth, will be the testing of findings through comparisons of learning achieved in a traditional environment with learning in an environment restructured to take into account the project s findings and those of other researchers in the field. The specific application of the project will be the development an a women-friendly information design and technology undergraduate certificate program that is accessible to students of any major. The introductory courses of the certificate program will be designed so that students can move easily into either a traditional computer science or media studies program doc5152 none The NSF grant Control and evolution of seawater adaptation in Oncorhynchus mykiss will seek to determine genetic factors that differ between non-migratory forms of rainbow trout and sea-run forms known as steelhead. These two forms are present in natural populations along the Pacific coast of North America but the genetic basis of the differences between them are poorly understood. The differences will be studied by making crosses between genetically uniform lines of steelhead and non-migratory rainbow trout that have been developed at Washington State University, generating offspring from the hybrid between the two types, and examining the inheritance of both steelhead-like characteristics and DNA markers in the offspring. The PIs will try to estimate how many genes and which specific genes are different between steelhead and rainbow trout. This study will increase knowledge of how trout and salmon populations adapt to their specific environments. Understanding the differences between steelhead and rainbow trout could be helpful in conservation programs by allowing more accurate identification of the groups, some of which are considered endangered or threatened. In addition, efforts to farm rainbow trout and steelhead could benefit by making it easier to breed the trait of seawater adaptation into fast-growing rainbow trout strains doc5153 none PI: Barry Markovsky, Christopher Barnum Oftentimes in group settings, both status differences and in-group membership are salient. Theories of status generalization describe how status differences can lead to inferences of differential ability, while theories of situated identities describe how group membership can lead to certain differences in influence behaviors. In situations where both processes function, they may make different predictions. For instance, a committee composed of Republicans and Democrats will show influence effects dependent both on ability inferences (a status process) and on group membership (an identity process). This project offers a conceptualization of such situations, and tests the conceptualization in a series of experiments. The primary result of this work will be to build a theory of how status and identity interact in some cases, and the theory may have important real-life applications doc5143 none Collaborative Research on Ethnicity and Transition in Russia and This project explores the connections between ethnicity, post-communist transition, and trust in Yakutia (Sakha) and Tatarstan, two leaders in the Russian republics campaign for sovereignty. Principal Investigators examine the implications of ethnicity as social capital for intra- and inter-ethnic relations among Yakuts, Tatars, and Russians. The project uses survey data, decision-making experiments, and elite interviews. The project promises to shed light on the role of ethnicity in periods of economic transition doc5155 none Rapid advances in computation and communication technologies are giving rise to an ever wider use of automation in the monitoring and control of dynamic engineering and computing systems in manufacturing, communication networks, transportation, and electric power systems, to mention but a few key areas. The software programs that monitor and control these systems are responsible for various functions, including start-up and shut-down procedures, monitoring and control, detection and isolation of significant events, system reconfiguration, etc. We refer to all of these software programs as the supervisory control software . This proposal is focused on systems that are distributed over several sites and where the supervisory control software is distributed as well. The goal is to conduct fundamental research on novel formal generic methodologies for designing distributed software systems that monitor and control systems with decentralized information. We propose to bring the concepts and techniques of Systems, Control, and Decision Theory to bear on the problem of designing distributed software systems that are provably correct and efficient. As part of this effort, we will educate computer science and engineering students at the University of Michigan and Wayne State University on the fundamental issues associated with distributed software design doc5156 none Miledi All the functions of the brain, functions such as our sensations, love, hate etc. depend, in the last instance, on the transfer of signals from one nerve cell to another. The main process of synaptic transmission of signals involves the release of a chemical substance (neurotransmitter) from one neuron and its action on neurotransmitter receptors located in the neighboring nerve cells. Essentially, the interaction of a neurotransmitter with its receptor either stimulates or inhibits the neuron. The main inhibitory neurotransmitter in the vertebrate brain, including that of humans, is a simple chemical called ?-amino butyric acid (GABA). This neurotransmitter was known to act on two types of GABA-receptors (GABAA and GABAB); and a few years ago a new type of GABA receptor was discovered (GABAC). The main purpose of this research is to determine the structural and functional characteristics of GABAC receptors, to determine their localization in the brain, and to search for new members of the GABAC family of receptors. The basic scientific information obtained will lead to a better understanding of how the brain works and will also serve as a first step towards the rational design of new medicinal drugs, targeted specifically to GABAC receptors doc5157 none Gottschalk, Thomas ITR: A Distributed Simulation Infrastructure for a K-12 Inquiry Environment This research involves planning the construction of a scaleable, persistent, interactive event simulation framework for supporting knowledge-building curricula within K-12 education. The proposed system uses advanced simulation and information technology methods to create an inquiry environment, fostering cooperative interactions and knowledge co-creation while students work together to solve curriculum-based problems and challenges. The technical basis of such an inquiry environment is a metacomputing system combining distributed discrete event simulations, information and operational databases, graphical control interfaces, and visualization. While much of the system can be built from familiar pieces, the focus on education provides a number of interesting opportunities for new research in computing and metacomputing strategies. The general area of user-directed simulations is viewed as a particular area in which High Performance Computing (HPC) can become a true enabling technology for substantive educational reform. The proposed work will plan the exploration, development, and extension of HPC technologies for K-12 education. This work relies on strong partnerships in cognitive science and education to ensure that the technology features and capabilities are matched to objectives within progressive models of knowledge and learning. The K-12 simulation framework that could result from this work may be regarded as a first step in the larger task of matching HPC capabilities to contemporary cognitive science and educational research, enabling substantive advances in learning doc5158 none The adult nervous system depends on highly specific pathways that interconnect nerve cells with their appropriate targets such as muscles, sensory organs, and other cells within the nervous system. This pattern is established early in development by unknown mechanisms that allow growing nerve fibers to navigate their environment. The goal of this proposal is to identify the basic mechanisms that steer nerve fibers to their targets. This will be accomplished by studying the internal organization and movements of tiny structures that form the growing end of nerve fibers, called growth cones. Living growth cones will be observed microscopically using computer-based imaging while chemical agents are released in front of them to either attract or repel their growth. As growth cones turn, measurements will be made of regional changes in ions that enter the nerve fiber to signal a change in direction. In addition, regional changes in the internal scaffold of filaments that determine growth cone shape and that form the structural basis of changes in movement will be identified. The turning of growth cones in response to chemical signals is a fundamental event that allows nerve fibers to establish highly specific pathways in the nervous system. The highly specific nature of these pathways is crucial for nervous system function, which depends on point-to-point communication within the nervous system. This project will reveal a fundamental property of nerve cells that allows them to be guided to their appropriate target locations doc5159 none This project represents a comprehensive effort to develop a nationally recognized interdisciplinary research and graduate training program in air quality. It emphasizes physical, chemical, and biological characterization and control of particulate matter. This effort will involve researchers at Kansas State University, Kansas University, and the University of Nebraska joined by an active Internet link. The project will examine the science and engineering of indoor and outdoor air quality with special attention given to sampling and analysis of air, including research on processes to remove volatile compounds and particulates from air as well as methods to reduce contaminant generation in production processes. Major Kansas and Nebraska industries depend on advances in air quality control technology to remain competitive and in compliance with regulations (e.g. production agriculture, aircraft manufacturing, grain handling and processing, building systems, bioprocessing, and microelectronics). Graduate students will be trained in three major air quality areas: indoor air quality in buildings, particulate sampling, characterization and control, and bioaerosol science and engineering. Students in toxicology, biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering will participate in interdisciplinary research efforts. The project represents a major step towards the establishment of an Environmental Air Quality program that will play a significant role in both the technological and economic development of Kansas and Nebraska doc5160 none Application Service Providers (ASPs) - which distribute the use of software, rather than the software itself, via the Internet - are increasingly coming to be seen as one of the next major elements in the development of network services. This project will study and test the application of the ASP concept in an area where it is likely to have a particularly great influence: software for large-scale optimization. The complexity and variety of optimization software present challenging obstacles to the development of network services, but the exceptional variety and modularity of this software insure that successful efforts will have a broad impact in science, education, and business. Technically, the project will build on previous work by the Optimization Technology Center of Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory. One subproject will investigate resource allocation for optimization requests whose needs cannot be easily forecast. Others will involve the design and testing of both client-side and server-side object class libraries that have no models in current mathematical computation. The project will also include the automation of algorithm choice and solver scheduling, through the construction and use of a database to learn from results of previous optimization requests and from human experts. The project thus brings together methods, software, and systems for computational large-scale optimization, with the aim of making the impressive technology in this area more accessible for applications, algorithm development, and education doc5161 none This research project introduces needed advances in multimedia data management and access for applications dealing with streams of multimedia data. In particular, medical patient information involves streams of sequences of multimedia data, including streams of images (X-rays, MRIs, etc.), medical reports, treatment and medication information, and other alphanumeric data taken at various points in time, any part of which must be readily accessible for patient care. The goal of this effort is to enable doctors and the patient to store and easily retrieve and visualize the variety of such medical information, and various related data in the web. Data modeling constructs to support the needed substreams, aggregated streams, derived streams, and relationships among and within these constructs is expected to result from this research. A stream algebra for expressing queries is introduced to explore methods for effective query processing, as well as a corresponding visual language for users to easily express the queries. A Time Line end-user interface is extended to incorporate the new constructs introduced for a variety of representative medical user queries. A prototype system will be developed and tested at the UCLA Medical Center to determine the potential impact of these advances through the Time Line paradigm vs current practice in the actual medical domain. Demos will be developed for various computer science and medical domain forums, and will be accessible via Internet, to highlight the technical and medical application innovations. It is expected that the resulting multimedia stream data modeling and data accessing advances will have significant applicability in the medical domain and other areas doc5162 none Several large-scale IT applications are enabled by the design, implementation and evaluation of a scalable real-time streaming media architecture. Large volumes of real-time data are stored, maintained, and retrieved online. Popular examples of real-time media include video and audio, while less familiar examples are haptic and avatar data. The real-time end-to-end delivery of very high quality (megabits per second) media cannot be supported with the current Internet-based infrastructure due to the lack of a scalable server architecture as well as a missing global resource management protocol. The evaluation of our architecture in a realistic setup is the objective of integrating three of our previous successful research projects: 1) a distributed real-time file server (RTFS), 2) a redundant hierarchical interconnect architecture (RedHi), and 3) the Super-streaming paradigm to improve individual RTFS utilization by using client side resources. The impact of this architecture is on both the server design as well as the online multimedia content. Furthermore, the realization of such an infrastructure is enabling large scale applications such as video-on-demand, news-on-demand, distance learning and scientific exploration and visualization. These applications, in turn, will be promoting teaching, training, and learning as well as enhancing scientific and technological understanding doc5163 none Humans can recognize objects and scenes using their senses. The ability of learning the appearance of a great number of objects, organizing them into categories, and quickly recognizing them later is an important skill for survival. Replicating such ability in machines would be extremely useful in a great number of scientific and industrial applications such as automatic exploration of databases of medical images, diagnostics and quality control in industrial plants, automatic classification of images and sounds on the web. The aim of this study is to develop a theory of recognition that is applicable any type of sensory data and where no supervision is required for learning and categorization. The approach is probabilistic: object categories are modeled by probability density functions on part appearance and object shape. Detection and recognition are formulated as statistical inference problems. Unsupervised learning of object categories is approached using maximum likelihood. In order to motivate and test the theory the investigators will engage in three applications: automatic classification and retrieval of objects from image databases, of human actions from movies, and of neuronal signals associated with perceptual tasks doc5164 none This project, involving a collaboration with Auburn University (AU) and North Dakota State University (NDSU), focuses on research related to materials development with inherent passive and active damping, noise and vibration control flexibility in conjunction with affordable processing manufacturing, and extensive dynamic characterization and modeling. The developed sandwich composite materials and structures can be used in a variety of infrastructures, commercial and defense applications, where composite affordability constitutes a prime area of concern. The expertise that effectively integrates the collaborating team includes the following strengths given by university: University of Puerto Rico Passive damping and smart materials characterization Damage assessment and vibration modeling Mechanical response Analytical studies Nondestructive evaluation of advanced materials Auburn University Acoustics and vibration testing, Active and passing damping Noise and vibrations control expertise and facilities North Dakota State University Fargo Affordable composite materials processing manufacturing In-situ sensing Materials development Impact and dynamic damage response The outcome of the project is expected to have wide-ranging technical benefits with direct relevance to industry in areas of transportation (automotive, rail), infrastructure development (bridges, buildings and civil structures), aerospace, ship marine, and other applications. The project addresses a significant number of doctoral, masters, bachelors, work study, undergraduate researchers, and high school students in the three jurisdictions, as well as under-represented groups doc5165 none One of the most important classes of programs today is large-scale adaptive and time-dependent simulations. These are increasingly important for solving important scientific problems such as particle dynamics and boundary element problems. An equally important environment for running any code is a cluster of workstations. Such a system may include single-processor and SMP nodes supporting a hybrid message passing shared address space programming paradigm. This project will provide automated and semi-automated tools for optimizing serial performance, parallel performance, and overall resource utilization when those complex codes are run in such complex environments. Technically, the goal of the project is to develop a comprehensive dynamic code enhancement, resource management, scheduling, and performance monitoring framework. This is accomplished by relegating a number of code optimization and scheduling decisions to run-time, where they can rely on performance traces. The framework generalizes the process-thread model to a schedulable entity model in which processes and threads are treated as free and bound entities respectively. Either the programmer or the compiler can create these entities. In addition, the dynamic code enhancer performs optimizations at run-time granularity control for threads, and transformations between free and bound entities to improve performance. The overhead of dynamic code enhancement is amortized over several computation steps. An aggregate scheduler resource manager maps the specified entities to hosts, using performance data to optimize its decisions for CPU, memory system, network, and parallel code performance. The dynamic code enhancer scheduler framework is triggered by online performance monitoring that is automatically instrumented into the code doc5166 none This project involves the study of the behavior of polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) occurring at the gas liquid interface of fog droplets. Laboratory measurements will be made to evaluate how the thermodynamic properties of PAH affect their partitioning between atmospheric fog droplets and air, information needed to model the fate and transport of PAH in the atmosphere. The dependence of PAH partitioning on temperature, multi-species concentrations, and fog droplet diameter will be assessed. Measurements will also be made in the field to derive fog-water air partition coefficients in ambient air and to verify the laboratory results doc5167 none PI: Christopher R Udry, Richard S Akresh This project uses data to be collected in Burkina Faso to assess a formal model of decision making as applied to decisions to put children out for foster care. The general concern is to assess the importance of household demographic preferences, informal insurance mechanisms, and labor productivity on these decisions. Both sending and receiving households will be tracked, thus improving on prior studies that only study one end of the transactions. The outcome of this work will be a structural model for understanding household decisions regarding desirable size of families. Results should be usable in designing programs to better meet the education, health, and labor needs of families doc5168 none Gass This grant provides funding for a workshop with the theme: Supply Chain Management Practice and Research: Status and Future Directions. The general subject of Supply Chain Management (SCM) has become a driving force for the betterment of the U.S. economy, as well as it s having strong implications for effective and efficient management of global industrial interactions. Present day and near-future analytical and information-based technologies are positioned to make this global concept of SCM an actuality. However, our understanding of current SCM accomplishments indicates that there is a need for determining what can now be accomplished, want needs to be done, and what research and developments are required to make SCM reach its full potential. To this end, we have enlisted practitioners, researchers and SCM software vendors to address specific topics, with the audience being active SCM participants. The workshop is scheduled for April 18 and 19, and will be held at the University of Maryland System Center, Gaithersburg, MD. The Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland and the Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology sponsor the workshop, in association with the Center for Logistics Research, Pennsylvania State University and the Supply Chain Council. Each workshop speaker will describe a research agenda for their topic. These agendas will be combined into a suggested research program for the further improvement of all aspects of SCM. The workshop papers will be published as proceedings to be distributed to all attendees. The objectives and scope of the workshop, and the bringing together of SCM practitioners, researchers, and software developers and consultants, will lead to beneficial relationships and projects that will further the improvement of SCM doc5169 none Page, Rex University of Oklahoma ITR: Formal Methods Education and Programming Effectiveness: Are They Related? Software is often laced with coding errors which result in loss of life and productivity. These problems have been addressed by improved tools, disciplined processes, more effective design and analysis, and software product inspections. This research addresses the problem through better education. This work seeks evidence for the integration of mathematical reasoning in computing education as leading to improved programming skills. The project will measure and compare the programming effectiveness of two cohorts: one that studies core concepts of mathematical reasoning within the context of programming and another studying these core concepts in a pure mathematical context. The comparison measure of programming skills will be software development projects in a subsequent course. Learning more about any relationships between programming ability and mathematical reasoning can be an important step in improving curricula that educate students for the critical information technology positions of the future doc5170 none Users increasingly want to use Internet applications for information access and processing from a variety of fixed and mobile networked computing devices, such as desktops, cell phones, and PDAs. These devices have different capabilities, are not equally secure, and operate under different network conditions. Mobile users may also want to transfer an on-going communication activity from one device (e.g., a desktop) to a different device (e.g., a PDA). The proposed research aims to design a software framework for building distributed applications to meet these emerging needs. A key concept is to use mobile, context-aware communicating components to compose distributed applications. Using component mobility across devices, system designers can build robust and responsive applications that adapt to varying network connectivity and to various device capabilities. The framework will also allow applications to adapt to changes by dynamically adding and removing components, or by replacing a set of components with another set. To allow users to move active work across devices, communication among components will handle component mobility and tolerate transient disconnections. This research will address performance issues, develop software methodology to accommodate device heterogeneity, and explore solutions to handling security concerns in using the framework to build distributed applications doc5171 none Physical and intellectual infrastructures in computational sciences will be developed as part of a long-term effort to stimulate new collaborations and research opportunities utilizing high-performance computing as a necessary tool among a diverse group of researchers. The physical infrastructure will consist of a low-cost cluster of Linux workstations for education, training, and development of activities that utilize high-performance computing, coupled with partnerships with the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center, the North Carolina Supercomputing Center, and the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. Most importantly, intellectual infrastructure will also be developed that provides a highly proactive environment towards training and aiding researchers in various disciplines to utilize high-performance computing methods to enhance their existing research programs and to establish new research approaches. It is anticipated that the project will result in a physical computational infrastructure, a center of expertise in computational infrastructure, a center of expertise in collaborative computational sciences, and a catalyst for obtaining sustained funding from a wide range of resources. Such environment, the Northern Rockies Center for Applied Computational Science, will act as a focal point to stimulate numerous opportunities for researchers to branch out in new directions that benefit with increased computational literacy doc5172 none The Internet is governed by a compendium of protocols spanning a number of functionalities including congestion control, routing, multicast, label switching, resource reservation and admission control, error control, and network management. These protocols engage in control actions at multiple time scales, from microseconds for routing and label switching, to milliseconds for congestion control, and the several second range for multicast, routing table updates, and network management. The behavior and performance of a network system is influenced by the workload that drive the protocols - reliable transport of heavy-tailed files, QoS-sensitive streaming of VBR video and audio, burstiness of connection arrivals, skewed make-up of short- and long-lived flows, and self-similar burstiness of multiplexed traffic - with Internet workload exhibiting variability and correlation at multiple time scales, from multiplicative scaling observed for IP flows in the millisecond range, to long-range correlations present in the second range. With QoS emerging as a unifying umbrella under which the various network subsystems can be organized and viewed as provisioning user-specified services, the need arises to coordinate and integrate the control activities - many of whom have direct impact on end-to-end QoS - such that both effective and efficient services can be rendered. In tandem with the QoS integration challenge, the PIs are presented with the opportunity to explicitly exploit the multiple time scale nature of network protocols and Internet workload to affect seemless and predictable services. In the proposed project, the PIs plan to address the following two-pronged problem: (1) exploit multiple time scale property of network protocols to facilitate effective coordination and integration of disjoint network controls for end-to-end QoS, and (2) exploit multiple time scale nature of Internet workload to achieve workload-sensitive traffic controls. Problem (1), in turn, is comprised of two key issues: sufficiency or separation conditions under which two network controls - e.g., routing and congestion control-acting at different time scales can be integrated without causing harmful effects with respect to stability and efficiency, and the effective coupling of protocols when time scale separation is not available - e.g., label control and congestion control. Problem (2) consists of three key issues: short-lived connection management using lightweight optimistic control, long-lived connection management using connection duration prediction and multi-layered feedback control, and QoS amplification through workload-sensitive, end-to-end and per-hop control. The two-fold challenge that the PIs plan to attack is grounded in well-defined technical problems, and at the same time, represents an innovative traffic control dimension with broader implications to the next generation Internet. The PIs bring expertise in core traffic control areas spanning congestion control (Park), QoS routing (Hou), multicast (Hou), label switching (Park), and traffic modeling (Park). Both PIs have significant experience in performance analysis and protocol design, and they complement each other s strengths with respect to simulation (Hou) and implementation (Park) based performance evaluation. The PIs will leverage existing benchmarking platforms - the Purdue Infobahn QoS testbed comprised of Cisco routers (Park) and the NetSim performance evaluation environment (Hou) - to implement, test, and benchmark the protocols. The research results, technology demonstration, and software prototypes will be made available through the Web to academic institutions, industrial affiliates, and the networking community at large doc5173 none Highly interactive graphics applications have stringent latency requirements to ensure a compelling experience. These requirements are usually met by overprovisioning hardware resources and are validated through ad-hoc testing. Recent advances in real-time scheduling technology could serve as the basis for a more analytical approach. Unfortunately, conventional real-time scheduling disciplines are quite rigid and are usually implemented only within special-purpose real-time operating systems. For these reasons, real-time scheduling techniques have been largely ignored within the graphics community. In this project, a real-time scheduling and analysis framework will be developed for latency-sensitive graphics applications. This framework will extend recent work on rate-based processor scheduling. The proposed framework will allow timing requirements to be specified as average rates and will be highly tolerant of any deviance from specified rates. The proposed rate-based framework will be evaluated through research involving the nanoManipulator system (www.cs.unc.edu Research nano). The nanoManipulator couples a scanning tunneling microscope or atomic force microscope to a virtual-reality graphics display and a haptic interface to provide a telepresence system. The existing nanoManipulator is not multi-threaded, and thus the system is difficult to modify and analyze. In this project, a fully multi-threaded version of the nanoManipulator will be developed using the proposed framework doc5174 none Two of the largest issues facing the Internet today are the problems of (1) providing quality-of-service to applications that require some form of guarantee of bandwidth availability and or end-to-end delay, and (2) the problem of avoiding congestion between traditional best-effort flows. Packet scheduling has been the mechanism traditionally used for quality-of-service guarantees while end-system adaptations in the transport layer have been the dominant form of congestion control. Typically, the problems of congestion control and quality-of-service have been addressed as largely independent concerns and separate mechanisms have been developed for each . The essence of this project is to study the interplay between congestion control and quality-of-service and the mechanisms that have been employed for realizing each. The starting point is an investigation of using active queue management(AQM) techniques in network routers to provide both congestion control and quality-of-service for IP flows. Active queue management refers to the practice of manipulating the queue of packets at an outbound network interface on a router to bias the performance of network flows. For example, discarding packets from the queue is an active queue management mechanism that is used in the RED (random early detection) congestion avoidance mechanism. There does not yet exist any fundamental theoretical understanding of how individual AQM mechanisms effect the performance of network flows. From the perspective of Internet service providers this problem is compounded by the fact that there is little, if any, understanding of how AQM mechanisms can be tuned to realize specific performance goals. The impact of AQM mechanisms on broader measures of network performance is unknown because a framework for analyzing AQM performance does not yet exist. This is in contrast to other approaches for quality-of-service such as packet scheduling. Packet schedulers have been carefully analyzed and frameworks exist for computing bounds on performance metrics such as delay, delay-jitter, packet loss, etc. The main goal of this project is to develop the theoretical underpinnings and engineering principles to guide the construction and deployment of AQM for the Internet. This requires an analytic and empirical study of AQM mechanisms for the purpose of understanding the costs, benefits, and scalability limitations of using AQM for congestion control and quality-of-service. The project also contributes to the overall understanding of principles of resource management in routers. In addition, novel AQM schemes that provide new, scalable solutions for quality of service and congestion control are developed. Specific objectives include the following: 1. Develop an analysis framework for understanding the performance of AQM mechanisms. A novel aspect is consideration of both network-centric performance metrics such as link utilization, and end-system or user-centric measures such as response time. 2. Develop and analyze novel AQM and hybrid AQM-packet scheduling schemes that realize a spectrum of quality-of-service and congestion control services. A key contribution here is a demonstration of the costs and benefits of using packet scheduling v. AQM for scalable implementations of services. 3. Demonstrate the effectiveness of the AQM schemes through a case study in managing a research network and supporting an advanced, real-time, distributed-virtual-environment application. The results of this project can have a significant impact on the evolution of the Internet to support new levels of service quality and control congestion while ensuring scalability for very large numbers of users and devices doc5175 none Future information appliances are expected to become increasingly mobile and operate under highly fluctuating workloads, thus imposing stringent design constraints on their energy dissipation, size, cost, performance, and quality of service. This project explores algorithmic and design automatin technologies for creating computing systems that dynamically adapt their operation to their workloads with the objective to maximize thieir energy efficiency and resource utilization. In the area of algorithms, research is conducted on the design and analysis of precomputation schemes that can be used to predict the load of a computation in the future and adapt system resources accordingly. In the area of design automation, the project is concerned with behavioral-level transformations and scheduling algorithms that rely on precomputation to generate energy-efficient hardware or software implementations of general computations doc5176 none s of large amounts of critical textual information is expected to speed up and otherwise facilitate their access to the Web. Large-scale deployment of a Web-based summarization system based on cross-document structure is planned and is expected to be used by millions of users doc5177 none During the last decade, researchers in our Scientific Visualization Group at Stanfor University have been developing general data analysis techniques for vector and tensor fields based on rigorous mathematical approaches. The work has systematically explored direct visualizations and feature extractions of both vector and tensor fields in two and three dimensions using computers. Recently, we have been developing the next stage of our visualization efforts: automated atad comparisons. Traditional techniques for vector field comparison fall into three basic categories: image, data, and feature based comparison. In most instances, comparisons are made visually, not automatically. In addition, there are fundamental limitations with these existing comparison techniques. Image base comparisons suffer from difficulty in representing datasets beyond two-dimensional vector fields, data based comparisons suffer from grid alignment problems, and feature base comparisons, while providing excellent location of specific features, may not show all the global information in the field. Our new approach to this problem is essentially a feature-based comparison technique, with the important stipulation that our features attempt to represent the topological structure of the field. This ensures that we do not overlook any important structures in the field. Our paradigm is to analytically study vector and tensor fields to extract topologically critical information, transfer this knowledge into effective computer programs, and then to visualize the fields using the results of our analysis. We have successfully implemented our ideas for two-dimensional vector fields and for three-dimensional vector fields. We now intend to study tensor fields associated with white matter brain functions. Our fundamental technique for the comparison of vector and tensord ata would be applicable to almost every field of science and engineering, ranging from the magnetic field of the sun to airflow over a wing. In addition, time varying fields can be studied by comparing a field at a fixed time with its state at later times. Our approach is unique in the field of scientific visualization because it is based on rigorous mathematical analysis, and it is the only approach available to quantitatively study NMR tensor brain data. Our methodology in the analysis of tensor and vector datasets allows better design of air vehicles, better understanding of electromagnetic problems, and provides substantial time savings when dealing with large experimental datasets. Quantitative understanding of white matter brain functions has the potential to open up a whole new area of medical research doc5178 none of the cusp, a secondary feature that eventually limits the accuracy of large scale electronic structure computations. The new method solves the first-order wave function by use of explicitly correlated geminal basis functions doc4918 none This award provides support for the U.S. contribution to a highly collaborative international scientific drilling expedition to collect new data to aid in understanding Earth s climate by recovering long cores from Lake Malawi. Recovery of a long core from the southern end of the East African Rift Valley dating some 800,000 years into the Earth s past will be attempted with the use of the Global Lake Drilling 800 Drilling System (GLAD800). The key scientific goals of the proposed research are to: 1) examine the response of the tropical terrestrial African climate to changes in low-latitude insolation and high-latitude ice volume orbital forcing, 2) determine if high-frequency climate variations are superimposed on glacial-interglacial variations in the form of wet dry climate cycles, and 3) examine how inter-annual African climate variability may have changed as a result of longer-term climate variations. If the researchers are successful, the resulting research will move the field of global change research forward by providing a high-resolution terrestrial record of tropical climate in a key climatic region. The proposed collaboration with scientific colleagues from Europe and Africa, as both intellectual and financial partners, greatly enhances the potential for success of this endeavor. The lessons learned from drilling in Lake Malawi will provide information as to the utility and practicality of using a mobile drilling system such as the GLAD800 as a tool for paleoclimatic research doc5180 none Wagner, Kelvin University of Colorado ITR: Revolutionary Computing Using Ultrafast Optical Soliton Switching The objective of this project is to develop a new technology for ultra high speed (terabit per second) information processing, communication, and computing. The technology is based on optical spatio-temporal solitons, which are localized packets of electromagnetic energy. Logic devices and computing architectures based on the interactions of spatio-temporal solitons in two and three dimensions will be investigated theoretically and experimentally. These devices and systems will employ materials with high order optical nonlinearities as well as artificially structured media designed to support soliton propagation and interactions. This research is expected to provide a foundation for a robust, practical, compact, cascadable, and logically complete switching technology with processing speed and density orders of magnitude beyond those of existing information-processing electronics doc5181 none This project explores two complementary techniques for addressing fundamental limitations in replicating network services. The first aspect of this proposal seeks to automatically replicate service programs and state information to allow transparent caching or replication of dynamic services. The goal of the research is to allow transparent caching or replication of dynamic services, a key step toward automatically converting unscalable service implementations into scalable ones. The second thrust of this work is to allow network services to dynamically trade replica consistency for increased system availability and performance. The TACT (Tunable Availability and Consistency Tradeoffs) toolkit allows Internet services to flexibly and dynamically choose their own availability consistency tradeoffs. We use three consistency metrics, Numerical Error, Order Error and Staleness to capture application-specific consistency requirements of Internet services. Applications use these metrics in addition to application-specific parameters to assign a numeric value to system consistency, e.g., the percentage of user requests that must eventually be rolled back because of underlying replica inconsistency. Finally, TACT allows consistency to be specified on a per-user, client, and replica basis, enabling differentiated quality of service doc5182 none Cote, Robin University of Connecticut ITR: Quantum Information Processing with Ultracold Rydberg Atoms Ultracold Rydberg atoms have long lifetimes and interact strongly at large distances, which may make them ideal for quantum information processing. This project is investigating this possibility by studying and experimentally implementing a universal two-qubit logic gate, in which a two-atom state acquires a phase that depends on the time the atoms are interacting. The project is investigating sparsely populated optical lattices containing Rydberg atoms, which will permit the preparation of well-identified atoms in arbitrary states. The properties of atom-atom interactions, including the effect of external electric and magnetic fields will be investigated. Finally, methods of reading the information stored in Rydberg atoms will be investigated, including imaged fluorescence and selective ionization. Scaling to large numbers of qubits, as well as the effects of the optical lattice on decoherence, will be explored doc5183 none The goal of this project is to develop an integrated hardware software infrastructure to support power management for battery-powered mobile and wireless applications. These future environments will support applications with demanding requirements such as disaster recovery. Energy conservation, especially for mobile and embedded devices, promises to have significant economic, environmental, and societal impacts. The activities focus on three key directions: i) the development of power measurement tools, workloads, and experimental methods to evaluate energy consumption, ii) the energy-aware APIs to allow application-directed power management, and iii) the development of system support for high-level solutions. These research projects all rely on experimental techniques for evaluating ideas. Making empirical measurements and observations on device and workload characteristics pinpoints the problem areas of greatest potential. Initially formulating simulation models narrows the solution space and allows consideration of new architectures. Finally, constructing working prototypes allows observation of all activity associated with real operating environments and offers deeper insights into their behavior. The popularity and accessibility of the palmtop and handheld platforms gives this research significant potential for immediate technology transfer doc5184 none Schnabel, Robert University of Colorado ITR: Research, Curriculum and Partnerships for Broadening the Information Technology Pipeline This project supports a collaboration to explore a new multimedia paradigm for educating students for careers and lives in the networked information age. Through research and course delivery, this collaboration will explore new curricula that allow students from a wide variety of disciplines to obtain the understanding and skills that prepare them to be a part of the modern information technology workforce. The project will broaden the information technology pipeline in two critical ways: by increasing the diversity of academic disciplines and aptitudes from which students can enter the information technology workforce, and by applying this approach to a racially diverse population. The project will develop a multidisciplinary curriculum and research in technology, arts, and media (TAM). The research associated with the development and evaluation of the TAM curriculum has four components: 1) computer and cognitive science research addressing approaches to using information technology in education that will help determine both the content and the delivery of the curriculum. 2) social science research about the impacts of the networked information age upon our society that is linked to a key portion of the curriculum, 3) education research about the use of information technology in K-12 education that will impact the education course offerings of the TAM curriculum, and 4) formative and summative evaluations of the TAM curriculum in achieving its goals doc5185 none With the advent of Internet, it is now anticipated that wireless data services will within a few years surpass the demand for voice services. The explosive demand for wireless data services is forcing the telecom and networking research communities to rethink some of the well-known solutions to the limited capacity problem which is fundamental in such networks. In this proposal, a new concept for solving the limited capacity problem in current wireless systems is formulated, and a cost-effective approach to implement the concept is described. The researchers main concept is to circumvent congestions in cellular networks by hopping to frequencies in the unlicensed band, such as the Industrial, Scientific, and Medical Band (ISM) band (2.4 - 2.5 GHZ) and by diverting traffic to noncongested areas. The researchers propose to integrate cellular and mobile relaying technologies by deploying new devices called mobile relaying stations (MRS s). With MRS s, a mobile host can communicate with the base transceiver stations (BTS s) located in a different cell by switching (or hopping ) to the unlicensed frequency band. In this way, a mobile host moving into a congested cell can continue its call that would otherwise be dropped; likewise, a new call that would normally be blocked in a congested cell could be served by borrowing channels from a nearby cell via relaying. As a result, handoff-dropping probability and new call blocking probability of existing cellular systems can be substantially improved. This, in turn, leads to an unprecedented increase in the number of users (i.e., capacity) of these systems if one utilizes the proposed new concept in conjunction with cell splitting. While the hardware complexity of the proposed next-generation wireless systems will be slightly higher than that of the conventional systems, the anticipated benefits in terms of improved network performance, capacity, and connectivity at all times will far outweigh this slight increase in hardware complexity. The success of this project could lead to a major paradigm shift in the next-generation wireless network standards. It is also anticipated that this project will enhance the telecommunications and networking education and research programs at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and could pave the way for a Center for Advanced Telecommunications and Networking that houses faculty and graduate students from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, as well as other departments doc5186 none Despite significant advances in recent years in speech recognition generation technology and statistical language modeling, existing natural language systems are still limited to very specific, narrow domains, and totally lack common sense - the ability to see the obvious when interacting with a user. A major reason for this is the lack of a broad base of general world knowledge in current AI systems - knowledge such as that a sandwich is food (for. humans), while dinnerware is not; that dwellings usually have doors and walls; or, that when one person is killed by another, it is often with a gun; etc. This project will use previous work on mining linguistic knowledge from text as a springboard for tackling the problem of mining general world knowledge from texts. The methodology depends neither on deep text understanding nor on explicit occurrence of the desired general facts in the targeted corpora. Rather, the PI s approach elaborates on the idea that regularities observed in patterns of predication in texts generally reflect regularities in the world, particularly regularities in the way certain types of entities jointly participate in various events and relationships. While absolute statistical frequencies of such patterns can be severely misleading (people do not commit crimes, or have accidents or hold public office nearly as often as scanning of newspapers might suggest), the techniques that will be employed rely on conditional frequencies to obtain factually reliable hypotheses. The knowledge extracted will be cast in a formally interpretable propositional form, lending itself to certain and uncertain inference. This in turn will help sanitize the extracted knowledge, by revealing and helping to remedy apparent contradictions. Suitable corpora for this work include not only newspapers and other factual sources, but also realistic novels and writings for children - in fact, almost all electronically accessible texts are potentially useful, and no annotation will be required. While not all kinds of common-sense knowledge can be acquired in this way, the knowledge that can be acquired is very extensive, is essential to language understanding and common-sense reasoning, and is relatively close at hand. The kind of general knowledge to be mined from text corpora is not only useful, but essential in the long run for intelligent systems with some general linguistic competence and a modicum of common sense. Thus the work will bring a step closer the prospect of computers that genuinely understand their users doc5187 none The n-body problem - i.e. simulating the motion of many particles that attract or repel each other - is a classic one with many applications. N-body algorithms are the computational means of solving this problem. The many users of these algorithms include biophysiologists and biochemists studying biological phenomena, pharmaceutical researchers dealing with drug structures and interactions, astrophysicists studying the structure of the cosmos, and engineering researchers studying hydrodynamics. The algorithms are also interesting in their own right to computer scientists. This project will develop an innovative approach to n-body algorithms called self-scheduling n-body algorithms. This family of algorithms promises not only reduced computational complexity, but also a straightforward implementation. Technically, the research will use a multiple time step method where each pairwise interaction is evaluated using a dynamic schedule that attempts to equalize the error of each interaction, drastically reducing the computational cost. The fundamental new idea is to equalize the impulses for all interactions, rather than equalizing the time steps for all interactions (which is too conservative in most cases). Mathematically, the constant time step t is traded for a constant impulse I, defined as Fij tij, where Fij is the force between particles i and j and tij becomes the time step used to re-evaluate Fij. This leads to an expected execution complexity of O(n4 3) per simulation step. Algorithmic improvements that rely on the first and second derivatives of force reduce the per step computational complexity to O(n log n) and O(n), respectively. The project will fully explore these algorithms, analyze their error bounds and computational complexity, implement prototype versions, and explore additional topics (such as efficient parallelization and cache-efficient memory layouts) as time permits doc5188 none This proposal is for a conference grant for the eighth Small Genomes Conference (formerly the E. coli and Small Genomes Conference) to be held September 24-28, , at the conference center in Lake Arrowhead, California. There is great excitement over the prospect of comparing the sequences and contents of as many as 50 microbial genomes over the next year or two. Considerable integration of different aspects of microbiology will undoubtedly take place, including new perspectives on evolution and the requirements for life. To achieve these goals, particularly of integration and synergy, scientists from diverse disciplines must interact. Thus, this conference will include active genome researchers, such as sequencing experts and informatics specialists working in database design, sequence analysis, or simulation; geneticists developing new methods to take advantage of genomic information for functional analysis; and cell biologists and biochemists who have specialized in areas now ripe for genomics such as metabolism, chromosome structure, or gene regulation. One focus of this conference will also be on genomes of pathogens. While there have been a number of recent genome conferences, continuing completion and release of new genome sequences and developing momentum for analysis of this huge amount of information means the community has continued need of such conferences. This meeting has become established as a major annual microbial genomics conference during the last seven years and has assured status and quality doc5189 none This is the first year funding of a three-year continuing award. This project addresses the need to assist humans in heavy materials handling, since such tasks expose the worker to known risk factors for work-related musculoskeletal disorders, such as lifting, bending, twisting, and maintenance of awkward postures. This project will study the use of cobots to implement ergonomic guiding surfaces to assist a human in the manipulation of a heavy load. With such a mechanism, the load can be constrained to move along a frictionless guide, and the human is allowed to apply forces in directions which are comfortable while the guide directs the motion to the goal. Cobots use rolling contacts to directly implement passive guiding constraints, and as a result they are safer to interact with and use less power than a conventional robot. To design assistive guide constraints, the project will study how humans naturally interact with constraints assuming that the essential nature of this interaction can be modeled by the human s desire to minimize some notion of effort. With this model, The PIs will design guides that minimize the necessary human effort and will experimentally verify the correctness of the model. The PIs will develop software for automatically planning near-optimal guides in cluttered workspaces and will test the guides using cobot hardware on realistic materials handling tasks. The resulted ergonomic virtual surfaces in materials handling will reduce the occurrence of work-related musculoskeletal disorders. It will also increase productivity, providing an intuitive and safe interface between human and computer. Finally, this work will expose new principles in human motor control, as the design of assistive guiding surfaces requires a better understanding of how humans interact with constraints doc5190 none This is the first year funding of a three-year continuing award. Hybrid user interfaces combine together multiple displays and interaction devices to benefit from the advantages of each. For example, a hybrid user interface could be constructed in which multiple users view one or more common displays, such as a wall-mounted data visualization and a desk-top virtual workbench 3D model. At the same time, each user might see complementary private material, customized to her own information needs, and overlaid on and registered with the common displays---an augmented reality that is presented on personal, tracked, hand-held or head-worn see-through displays.This project addresses environment management, the task of managing large numbers of virtual objects on large numbers of displays in hybrid user interfaces. More complex than the tasks involved in current window management, environment management will be especially challenging if it is to address the needs of future mobile, collaborating users, whose proximity to other users, displays, and interaction devices may change rapidly and unpredictably as users move about. This work explores an alternative to direct manipulation approaches, in which knowledge-based environment management tools take over many low-level tasks to avoid overwhelming the user. The goal is to increase a user s effectiveness by making it possible for her to exert higher-level control over the layout and contents of her personal and shared work environment. This project will develop the underlying concepts for hybrid user interfaces and effective environment management facilities, and will design, demonstrate, and test research prototypes that embody these concepts. Special emphasis is placed on issues raised by collaborative, 3D augmented environments that exploit a wide range of displays (held, worn, and stationary), including head-tracked see-through displays that create augmented realities, in which virtual objects coexist in the same surrounding space as users and other physical objects. User interface design approaches that can promote shorter task performance time, lower error rate, or greater user satisfaction, will be vital for improving our ability to interact with information and with each other in the nontraditional world of collaborative mobile computing doc5191 none The goal of the Sutter graph database architecture is to help biologists make sense of the human genome, by enabling them to search genome sequence alignments for patterns of functional and structural relationships between genes. Sequence alignments are the key for discovering meaningful connections between diverse biological data, to make sense of the completed Human Genome. Yet no current database is designed to query detailed sequence alignment relationships as is needed. The Sutter architecture is designed to provide a fast, flexible, and intuitive query system for genomic alignment data, based on storing the entire graph database in a set of indexes, enabling direct lookup for any item to find its relationships. By focusing on indexing, Sutter can move away from the fixed, inflexible schema (table structure) of relational systems, while retaining some of the basis of their speed. A major design goal of Sutter is to implement genomic data objects efficiently, enabling it to store a full genome database in RAM, and achieve dramatically faster query performance. Sutter s first application is to serve the genome research community as an online resource for mining single-nucleotide polymorphisms, their effects on protein function, and mapping disease genes doc5192 none PIs: Z. Zhang and D.B. Tanner, University of Florida High-temperature superconducting (HTS) films with transition temperatures above 77 K have numerous applications in quantum electronics, microwave and infrared devices. However, because of their complex chemical structure, the electron-electron, electron-phonon and electron-defect interactions in these materials have not been fully understood. Understanding the optical response and transport mechanisms in HTS films is crucial for many promising applications, such as infrared radiation detectors and modulators. This project uses infrared spectroscopy to examine the effects of film thickness, microstructure, and bias currents on the radiative properties. In addition, a synchrotron radiation source will be employed to measure the rapid changes of far-infrared reflectance of HTS films after picosecond optical excitations. Tunable Fabry-Perot resonators will be built from HTS films using a piezoelectric controller. The experimental results will be analyzed to study the quasiparticle dynamics and low-frequency residual losses. The thermal boundary resistance at the film-substrate interface will be determined from time-resolved measurements using a simplified kinetic-theory model. Support from this NSF project allows cross-disciplinary education of two graduate students and provide research experience for several undergraduates doc5193 none This project, strengthening the microelectronics program in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (ECE), proposes to establish an electrical characterization and test laboratory which will provide the capability for measuring electrical properties of materials, devices, and circuits. Electrical test equipment for the measurement and characterization of dielectric materials, devices, and circuit components, will be acquired in order to provide students with hands-on experience in electrical measurements complementing the other labs in the ECE Department. In addition to providing training in microelectronics testing, the facility will allow for expanded research in the area of solid-state electronics. Focusing on material characterization, including thin films and novel gas-sensor, the project pursues the following objectives for the proposed lab: Characterizing electronic thins films, Enabling systematic characterization of novel devices including gas-sensors, and Providing a state-of-the-art capability for testing custom-designed integrated circuits. The amount of time needed to adequately test integrated circuits has been increasing with the greater level of integration in modern microelectronics. Continued increases in the density of the microelectronic circuits push against fundamental limits of device operation, driving the need for novel devices and new electronic materials. Hence, the microelectronic community should exhibit interest in a systematic approach to testing and characterization of new materials, devices, and circuits. Synergistic with existing programs at the University of Maine (e.g., sensor development, new materials development, and materials and device modeling), the project will contribute to strengthen the relationship between the ECE Department and the semiconductor industry in Maine, provide students with skills needed by these companies, and help forge relationships with research groups involved in electronic materials development doc5194 none This project focuses on the basic science needed to realize new nanosize devices specifically related to optoelectronic and optical communications. It aims at forming the nucleus of the Arkansas Center for Nanoscale Devices (AceND). Research will focus on the design, epitaxial growth, fabrication, modeling, and testing of nanodevices for generating and detecting coherent waves over a wide range of spectral regions covering IR and mid-IR (1-6mm), far-IR (6-100mm ) and THz (100- mm). The development of coherent sources and detectors in these wavelength ranges will impact medicine, food inspection, pollution control, communications, and remote sensing. Quantum-dot detectors and lasers, optical parametric oscillators and amplifiers, mid-IR and THz emitters, and inter sub-band lasers are included among the examples of specific devices to be investigated. Currently, two categories of quantum are being investigated (i.e., self-assembled dots grown by Molecular Beam Epitaxy in a vacuum chamber and colloidal dots synthesized by chemical methods either in solution or in certain host matrices). Although the two categories are related to each other by quantum confinement and other size-dependent physical properties, each category differs from the other based on its popular size range, fabrication technology, and promising applications. ACeND scientists will integrate active research on both categories of quantum dots to enhance the understanding of quantum effects in quantum dots, and thus the capability of implementing and optimizing nanodevices based on them doc5195 none This project, aiming at establishing infrastructure to reduce existing barriers to multidisciplinary research in environmental science and engineering, originally identified two main areas of research. Ombrotrophic bog hydrology and Environmental change along gradients. Under reduced funding only the first area will be pursued. The team working on the former area, promoting interactions between ecologists, hydrologists engineers, microbiologists, and toxicologists, will also focus on hydrology, ecotoxicology, microbial ecology, and biodiversity of ombrotrophic bogs of Vermont. The research will include field and laboratory measurements, mathematical modeling, and training of graduate students with a multi-disciplinary course curriculum. The team working on the latter, requiring a smaller investment of seed funding, was expected to develop a collaborative effort involving environmental change along spatial, temporal, and societal gradients in the Winooski (VT) River basin. This project will build a research partnership between selected faculty at UVM School of Natural Resources, and the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Geology, and Geography doc5196 none This project, creating high tech self-sustaining operations in the field of photodynamics (the study of change associated with the interaction of light and matter), will assemble state-of-the-art facilities and involve faculty in various stages of their careers. South Dakota has made a conscious effort to develop a critical mass of researchers in this area; the effort involves four researchers at the University of South Dakota (USD) and two at South Dakota State University (SDSU), all in the Department of Chemistry. So far this group has had an important impact on the science and technology infrastructure. With funds from NSF, the Petroleum Research Fund, the Department of Defense, private-sector alliances, university sources, and the South Dakota EPSCoR program, some facilities have been added such as two lasers (one nitrogen and one YAG), an x-ray diffractometer, a closed-cycle cryostat, and a laser-based short-lifetime fluorescence spectrophotometer. This project aims at increasing the scholarly activities and promoting the group into the realm of national recognition by providing some necessary additional infrastructure to coalesce this group into a collaborative team that is capable of national competitiveness. As first priority in the development, the Center will increase interaction between existing membership by bringing in distinguished faculty as part of a lecture series, as well as through a visiting scholar program. Other goals include summer symposium support, the augmentation of a faculty start-up package, and the enhancement of graduate and undergraduate research in photodynamics. Nine detailed project descriptions are provided: A Complementary Experimental and Theoretical Study of Energy Transfer Mechanisms for Isolated Lanthanide(III)-Ion Pairs in CsM(II)X3 Hosts, Photodynamics Studies of a Novel Anion-Sensing System, Studies of the Mechanisms of Photoisomerization of Cinnamamides, Thiocinnamamides, and Related Compounds, Studies of the Photofragmentation of Naphthalimide Dyes, Studies of the Complexation of Derivatized Cyclem and Cyclam, Mapping the Excited State Decay Dynamics in a Coupled Lanthanide System, Excited-State Properties of Bimetallic Complexes Containing Cu(II) and Ru(II) Fragments, Molecular Beam Studies of the Decay Dynamics of Isolated Lanthanide Compounds, and Photoinduced Electron Transfer in Chelating Quinone-Bipyridine Complexes doc5197 none This project establishes an inter-disciplinary research team in bio-molecular data management and computing to develop database support and numerical algorithms for bioscientists to retrieve and interpret data efficiently and to simulate important biological processes on high performance parallel computers. It will create a database query system, a Genetic Query language, which will allow biological researchers to successfully extract individually formatted information from multiple disparate databases in which bio and genomic information is currently located. The work will incorporate bioscientists, computer scientists, and mathematicians to accomplish the following goals. Identify genome-centric database research issues and develop database support in the form of interconnecting disparate genomic databases on the Internet and facilitate intelligent retrieval of data using novel query languages. Develop an easy-to-use one-step query browser, which will provide a unified view of various genomic databases on the World Wide Web. Develop efficient and scalable solution algorithms based on multiscale analysis and domain decomposition for modeling and simulating important biological processes described by systems of nonlinear reaction-diffusion equations, and implement these algorithms on multiprocessor parallel computers using novel dynamic scheduling and load balancing strategies for large scale computations. The project also suggests a mechanism for allowing researchers to query heterogeneous distributed databases for genetic information without many of the current impediments and develops scalable methods for domain decomposition that would allow efficient use of multiprocessor computer systems for modeling large-scale biological processes. In addition, educational activities in computational biology would be enhanced through development of new course materials, involvement of undergraduate students in research projects, and the conduct of summer student workshops. Participation of members of groups under-represented in science and engineering will be encouraged and facilitated in each of these activities doc5198 none This project will develop a multiresolution numerical methodology for solving the partial differential equations of fluid dynamics on the sphere, and apply it to practical atmospheric-flow simulations. Its starting point is the spectral-element method (SEM), which retains the spectral accuracy of spherical-harmonic transform methods, without the latter s problems near the poles. Observing that the spatial discretization via SEM and via multiwavelets (on the finest scale) are the same, the researchers will develop an adaptive multiresolution multiwavelet solver, and test it using standard atmospheric simulation benchmarks. Although it is well understood that atmospheric phenomena involve strong multiscale interactions, today there are no adaptive multiresolution solvers. The necessary mathematical tools that take the multiscale nature of the problem into account have appeared only recently, and form the foundation for this research. The success of this project will have a significant impact on both the speed and the accuracy of atmospheric simulations and weather prediction doc5199 none The integration of the graphical and virtual capabilities of Immersive Technologies (VR) with the powerful spatial data generation and analytic capabilities of Geographic Information Systems (GIS); promises substantial scientific and commercial benefits. These benefits to both scientists and a broader user community will increase significantly if such a coupling can be achieved and can be made available and distributed through an Internet environment. To that end this project will develop the scientific research base and the core tools needed to integrate VR and GIS technologies and provide access and electronic collaboratory capacity to this VR-GIS integration through an Internet-based environment. The integration of these technologies via the Internet will address bandwidth issues, platform interoperability, and operational constraints. The scientific, economic, and social potential of distributed VR-GIS via the Internet will be demonstrated through application test projects. This work builds on the interdisciplinary national and international partnerships essential to the development of the computing and scientific methods necessary to achieve successful technical integration. The research cooperators comprise the Departments of Geology and Geography at West Virginia University and International Society on Virtual Systems and Multimedia at Gifu University, Japan doc5200 none This project explores techniques for efficient computation on large, disk-based data sets. The research focuses on theoretical and practical aspects of ``active storage systems, in which each storage unit (a disk or group of disks) has some limited capability for local computation. A key goal of the project is to develop a theoretical model for active storage systems. The model is a basis for designing and evaluating algorithms for active storage systems, identifying useful computation kernels for active storage units, and deriving lower bounds for fundamental problems. The applied aspects of the project include design and implementation of a programming environment (PEARL) for active storage algorithms, and experimental evaluation of new algorithms for active storage. This project is a collaboration with a separately funded project team at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada doc5201 none PROJECT SUMMARY The channel fading and co-channel interference present in a wireless radio propagation channel presents a harsh challenge to the radio design engineer. Diversity techniques commonly used to combat the channel include the use of interleaved coded modulation and multiple antennas at the receiver end. Lately there has been a great deal of interest in the use of multiple antennas at the transmitter end, i.e., in using transmit diversity. Researchers have shown that the capacity of multi-antenna systems significantly exceeds that of conventional single-antenna systems. Space-time codes attempt to realize the potential increase in capacity by distributing code symbols intelligently in space (across the different transmit antennas) and time. This topic has received a great deal of attention since the BLAST space-time system was proposed and demonstrated at Bell Labs. This is because, owing to the additional dimensionality obtain by exploiting space, a spectral efficiency of 40 bits per sec per Hz at realistic signal to noise ratios was demonstrated (i.e., 20 times the spectral efficiency achieved in current cellular systems). The importance of space-time methods in communication and information theory was recently recognized by the selection of the work by Tarokh, Seshadri and Calderbank for the IEEE Information Theory Paper Prize. The great majority of space-time coding research has been based on the following assumptions: Single-user link or time-division multiplexed Complex Gaussian channel gains (frequency at fading) from each transmit (Tx) antenna to each receive (Rx) antenna. Independent channels for each Tx-Rx antenna pair. Equal average energy in each Tx-Rx antenna channel. Time non-selective channels (quasi-static assumption) Based on these assumptions, effective design rules have been established by considering the probability of pairwise codeword error. These design rules aim to maximize the diversity and coding gains. The assumptions described above best represent a system with a dense, rich scattering environment sur-rounding the Tx and Rx antenna arrays and stationary or slowly moving receivers. This model is applicable, for example, to an indoor office environment. It may also be accurate for a pedestrian cellular user in a dense urban environment, depending on the base-station antenna location. However, space-time channel measurements and models suggest that in many cases of practical interest, the above assumption of independence of channel gains is not accurate. The lack of like-signal interference may also not be applicable to code-division multiple access (CDMA) systems since a well-utilized CDMA system is limited by such interference. Virtually all third-generation mobile radio standards are based on CDMA systems as are the most effective wireless LAN systems. In a CDMA system, the effects of signature sequence design must also be considered together with coding and modulation. In this project, we have developed an expression for the pairwise error probability for a system model that is broadly applicable. Our model includes arbitrary correlation between Tx-Rx antenna channels, multiple CDMA users, and the potential for time variations in the channel gains. Based on this model we propose to develop design rules for space-time spreading and coding for CDMA systems. Our goal is to develop rules that are applicable to a variety of applications (i.e., mobile users and dense scattering, or fixed-point systems out of the scatter) and or which are robust to uncertainties in the channel model. We propose to generalize the methods of space-time coding so that the approach may be used in CDMA systems and or systems without rich scattering environments. Research directions include rules for spacetime spreading and code design, investigation of receiver structures and channel estimation tracking, code design for simplified decoding and modified design rules for non-Euclidean distance receivers. This study will be conducted under different channel model assumptions and presumed knowledge at the receiver and transmitter of channel knowledge doc5202 none This is the first year funding of a three-year continuing award. The goal of the Virtual Trainer is to create a computer-based animation that can interactively teach how to move. The hardware requirements for the Virtual Trainer in its final stage would be an inexpensive state-of-the-art personal computer equipped with a camera system. The Virtual Trainer will be able to demonstrate movements to its user, monitor the execution of these movements by the user, and suggest corrections in case of inadequate performance. The Virtual Trainer will be useful in a large number of applications, including rehabilitation of movement-impaired patients (e.g., stroke-patients), sport and exercise education, dance instruction, and interactive entertainment industry. Additionally, the technology developed for the Virtual Trainer has the potential to pioneer new algorithms for robot control using teaching from demonstration , to contribute to the development of automated monitoring systems for human environments, to the generation of humanoid computer simulations, and also to gaining new insights into biological motor control and the functioning of the nervous system. The research team of this project will primarily focus on issues of movement recognition and movement generation with the Virtual Trainer for rehabilitating stroke-impaired patients with upper and lower limb disabilities doc5203 none The researchers propose an integrated approach to energy efficient collaborative communication in ad-hoc wireless networks. The interdisciplinary approach will address simultaneously all key levels of system design: data link layer power management, network layer energy, location, and quality of service-based routing, and application layer interfaces. The objective is to reduce communication power consumption while simultaneously increasing the communication quality between the collaborators. The model problem assumes that people are interacting via ad-hoc networking integrated into pocket computers for some common task. For the communication to be successfull, all participants must be reachable via the network and have sufficient energy to perform any necessary computation. At the heart of the problem is the distributed scheduling of communication between entities to reduce communication and computation energy. Participants must have an estimate of the remaining energy available by other participants as well as models of the communication topology. Decisions must be made whether to route traffic through adjacent nodes (reducing direct power expenditure while possibly increasing latency or global energy consumption) or increasing transmitter power (potentially reaching a broader set of participants). This objective will be reached by developing design methodologies in the following research areas: Link-layer controllers that adaptively learn low-power strategies for error correction codes, transmission power levels, and radio activity times for reduced overall power consumption, within the constraints of delay and error bounds. Network-layer controllers that use inter-node attenuation, available node energy, and current traffic flows to optimize routing so as to maximize the availability of all nodes. Network interfaces that allow the programmer to describe delivery constraints on messages such that communication schedules can reduce energy in a changing routing topology. System level power modeling that allows the application layer to trade additional processor power to reduce networking power. The project is targeted to the emerging spectrum of highly capable pocket or wearable computers and the ad-hoc networks formed by those computers. The researchers will both deploy an experimental infrastructure and use in-depth simulation models to evaluate our system. The prototype system will use a combination of laptop computers using 802.11 wireless networking and the advanced Itsy palm-top computer with lower bandwidth (and significantly lower power) interfaces. The simulation models will use realistic whole-system power models for advanced pocket computers coupled with a standard network simulator that we have enhanced with more realistic RF propagation models. This project is significant because it address a communication model that will be common with future generation computation and communication devices. It is realistic because it will use an experimental network. It is general because we will be able to use the simulation framework to model future compute and communication networks. Finally, it is achievable because it leverages the on-going work in optimizing channel assignment in wireless networks and energy efficient computing doc5204 none This project will build a new generation of numerical simulation systems by creating a feedback path between physical experiments and numerical solvers. There are a number of exciting implications of this data-adaptive simulation idea. Engineering fluid flows are inherently complex. This complexity limits measurement and precision, so engineers are forced to work with fluid flows based on very sparse information. Numerical solvers, on the other hand, can resolve tiny flow structures, but they generally run in an open-loop mode and are thus unverified. Coupling the two forms of technology offers powerful advantages to each. Comparisons against live experimental data will allow simulation algorithms to be verified quantitatively, in detail, and in-line. Once it is verified in this fashion, one can use the simulation with confidence on related problems. Once can also use the sensor information to correct the solver s data, or even to adjust the solver parameters on the fly. Moreover, once the solver is properly synchronized with the real system, one could use the former to explore the physics of the latter in more detail than sensors would allow - and still trust the results. A particularly compelling application area for data-adaptive simulation techniques is microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). This emerging technology is driving a revolution in engineering design that is placing new demands on numerical simulation. Accurate modeling of the interaction of tiny, flexible, moving structures with high-speed chaotic fluids is challenging. To resolve the fine details in this kind of simulation, computational fluid dynamics technology requires extremely fine meshes and the solution of very large systems of nonlinear equations. This makes it difficult to build production-quality computer-aided design (CAD) tools for MEMS, which in turn forces engineers to fabricate devices without testing them. Functional CAD tools would allow MEMS designers to achieve one-pass design, much as VLSI does now doc5205 none This project, using combinatorial search methods to discover and fabricate new phosphors for flat panel displays, aims at developing new methodologies to Discover new phosphor materials and Actually identify new materials that have attractive properties for flat displays. The general approach consists of using electrodeposition as a means of preparing new inorganic phosphor materials (e.g. oxides, silicates, aluminates, phosphates, etc.) that vary in composition over wide range of values. Because of the multicomponent nature of these phosphates (typically containing three or four different metals), the number of compositions that must be examined to effectively map compositional space for a given class of materials may be many thousands. The effort comprises activities in several distinct areas: Synthesis of new metal-containing precursors that can be used in electrodeposition, Development of electrodeposition methods that can be used as the substrate for electrodeposition, Development of a microelectrode array that can be used with the new precursor metal complexes, as the substrate electrodepositions, Actual phosphor deposition using the methods and precursors just described, Parallel testing of the emission characteristics of the arrays of phosphors, and Bulk synthesis and characterization of the most promising materials. The expected outcomes of the effort include: Development of new approaches for rapidly discovering phosphors, Identification of new materials that have attractive properties for flat panel displays, and Development of a long-term materials discovery and characterization effort at University of Wyoming (UW), that will dovetail with the institution and state s efforts at fostering the establishment and maintenance of a viable science and high technology based in the State. The effort involves 3 researchers at UW and one at Blue Sky Applied Technologies, Inc. (BSAT doc5206 none This is the first year funding of a three-year continuing award. Multimodal technologies and machine learning have the potential to open doors for individuals with disabilities, by enabling systems to provide interfaces which allow people to express themselves through a variety of modalities which suit their capabilities. But individual differences among potential users make it difficult to design a single interface that works for everyone. Adaptive systems which tune to a user s idiosyncratic abilities and preferences can eliminate the need for users to conform to fixed interface protocols. Previously, the P1 has achieved promising results both in developing models of learning from multimodal input, and in discovering acoustic features that carry information in severely impaired speech. In this project the PI will develop a framework for adaptive interfaces by integrating these threads of research. Multimodal learning will provide interfaces with a core adaptive engine that can detect and statistically model salient inter-modal patterns. Acoustic analysis of impaired speech will provide one of many modes of input which an individual with disabilities might use to express him or herself. By combining multiple modes of sensing with learning, an interface can be trained to respond to an individual s unique expressive behaviors (speech., gestures) and translate them into appropriate machine actions. The P1 will implement two assistive communication aids to test our. these ideas. The first prototype will learn to translate unintelligible spoken phrases into clear synthetic speech. To do so, it will learn consistent acoustic features of the user s voice that can reliably be mapped onto machine actions. The second system will dynamically adjust the display of a communication aid by predicting words and symbols that the user would most likely select. Predictions are based on observations of patterns of behavior exhibited by the user in past communication interactions. Unlike currently available word prediction systems, this interface will take into account the topic of conversation by analyzing the speech of the user s communication partner using speech recognition and topic identification technologies. Both interfaces will undergo usability testing in hospitals and clinics in Boston and Toronto. Based on these efforts, the P1 will derive a set of design principles for using adaptive elements in assistive communication aids and man-computer interfaces doc5207 none This is a grant to support a workshop on Algorithmic Issues in Modeling Motion to be held at Duke during August . Representations of motion are central to all computational disciplines dealing with modeling the physical world. This grant will support a direction-setting workshop on algorithmic issues in modeling motion. About 20 research leaders from a variety of fields, such as computational geometry, computer graphics, robotics, spatial databases, molecular dynamics, and computer vision will participate. Currently, each of these fields has its own methods for handling moving objects. By bringing together these experts in different areas, unified approaches and new techniques for representing, processing, reasoning, analyzing, searching, and visualizing moving objects will be developed. The workshop will produce a final report doc5030 none This is the first year funding of a three-year continuing award. A demanding application area of virtual or augmented environment is multi-user collaborative environment where multiple users at either a local site or remote sites communicate with each other and interact with a synthetic or virtual scene. Among the necessary sensors and devices, an effective visualization device and a real-time image acquisition system are two main challenges. The objective of this project is to develop a novel visualization device referred to as head-mounted projective display (HMPD), build a multi-user interactive workbench by integrating the developed HMPD technology with a unique real-time image acquisition system known as an omni-focus camera, and evaluate and quantify the system as an effective tool for remote collaboration. The head-mounted projective display (HMPD) proposed is coupled with a supple, non-distorting and durable projection surface as an alternative to current visualization devices. Its novel concept suggests solutions to part of the problems of state-of-art visualization devices, such as large distortion with wide field of view, occlusion contradiction between virtual and real objects, and brightness conflict with background illumination. Several properties of the proposed HMPD make it extremely suitable for multiple-user collaborative applications. Research efforts will be made to design and implement a lightweight and compact head-mounted prototype by introducing diffractive optical element (DOE) and plastic materials, and investigate approaches to optimize the illumination of the display and retro-reflective material properties for imaging purpose. At one site, a multi-user interactive bench prototype with tele-presence capability will be built by using the HMPD concept and adding an image acquisition system developed from a unique omni-focus camera system. At the other site, a mural display system will be built with conventional stereoscopic video system located near the mural display, where one or several collaborators will also gather. Tele-collaborative work will be tested between the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois--Urbana Champaign and the School of Optics-CREOL at the University of Central Florida through the Internet II connection linking our laboratories. Finally, the PIs will quantify the depth and size representation and perception accuracy, evaluate occlusion perception aspects, and set up a comprehensive calibration procedure for the HMPD and the workbench and mural prototypes. The results are expected to impact a wide range of applications such as collaboration tele-collaboration, tele-presence, tele-manipulation, and visualized education tele-education doc5209 none This project investigates the transport mechanism and behavior of a new class of microfibrous porous solids. These materials possess heretofore-unavailable combinations of void volume and active sites which permit optimization between the intrinsic kinetics of the process and the intraparticle intrabed heat and mass transport required to feed these sites. If broadly successful, new classes of materials may result which can sustain selected chemical reactions and associated physical processes at rates per unit volume as much as one- to two- orders-of-magnitude greater than currently available. The broad-based and fundamental impact of these new materials will allow investigation of their application across five normally diverse areas. These include: (1) thermal management systems using microfibrous heat pipe wicks; (2) microfibrous entrapped catalysts and sorbents; (3) microfibrous entrapped electro-catalyst and Faradaic materials, (4) microfibrous metallic filters, and (5) microfibrous entrapped biosupports. Inaugural research activities will focus on: assembling key personnel and training staff; building microfibrous materials; mechanical testing of materials; and studying the structure property behavior and resulting transport phenomena toward each of the five core scientific areas doc5210 none This project, investigating the development of magnetoelastic sensing based on magnetic thin films that display large values of magnetostriction at low fields, aims to improve the interface behavior that controls the mechanisms of giant magnetoresistance (GMR). The project will focus on imperfect interfacing and its consequences, performing integrated experimental and modeling research dealing with both the transport and magnetic aspects involved in the design of nonvolatile magnetic random access memory (MRAM) or GMR sensor. Low values of magnetic anisotropy are crucial to the investigation, where several possibilities for obtaining desirable film properties will be considered. Magnetic films and multilayer systems are central to several forefront technological areas. The use of GMR-based components has become the dominant market element in the computer disc business, which in constituted a $38 billion enterprise. The use of GMR materials is at the heart of spintorics (spin electronics), which includes the development of MRAM, and the improvement of read heads and hard disc media. Single film and multilayer magnetoelastic sensors exhibit great potential due to their ability to provide inexpensively remote query sensing of chemical or environmental parameters to monitor ongoing industrial processes, even the quality of material in sealed containers (e.g., milk). Morever, magnetoelastic sensors can also provide miniature pressure and acceleration sensors for Navy or Air Force use. The project will initiate an interdisciplinary effort integrating experimental, theoretical, and computational modeling research to establish an ongoing Center for the Sciences and Technology of Magnetic Films. To provide a state-of-the-art central facility, the SQUID magnetometer will be upgraded first. Targets involve the submission of an NSF MRSEC preproposal by September , and the pursuit of ONR and AFOSR funding sources. Industrial collaboration with IBM Almaden and Seagate will provide additional experimental facilities as well as the opportunity for students to spend residential time in an industrial environment. The effort involves collaboration among WV, LA, and KY: Tulane University and University of Kentucky doc5211 none The recently Access Grid (AG) technology, will be used to establish and strengthen the networking bonds to researchers in jurisdictions participating in the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). This will facilitate technology transfer to and formation of collaborations with, the major research centers in the more densely populated and technologically developed parts of the country. The AG is a multi-site, interactive multimedia system which allows group to group collaboration. To deploy AG nodes to EPSCoR states, a concerted effort is needed to package the required hardware, document the installation process, assist in trouble shooting, and provide training. Six multimedia teleconferencing facilities in the EPSCoR states would be established after constructing nodes of the AG at: the University of Kansas, the University of Kentucky (in place), Montana State University, North Dakota State University, the University of South Carolina, and West Virginia University. The project, serving as a prototype, or proof of concept of viability within the EPSCoR community, is geared toward establishing partnerships (e.g., additionally, the Argonne National Laboratory, along with the National Computational Science Alliance at the University of Illinois will serve as technical resources). In addition to establishing the six AG sites the project will also explore research issues that affect AG operation. For example, Spatialized Audio (ability to make a qualitative differentiation to separate voices to make individual voices more distinguishable), Audio, Setup, Balance and Quality (mechanisms for remotely setting and detecting audio balances), Video (improvements: tools to monitor and control color balance and quality), Networking (designate important streams to dynamically switch and re-route traffic), and Application Integration (visualization stream integration doc5198 none This project will develop a multiresolution numerical methodology for solving the partial differential equations of fluid dynamics on the sphere, and apply it to practical atmospheric-flow simulations. Its starting point is the spectral-element method (SEM), which retains the spectral accuracy of spherical-harmonic transform methods, without the latter s problems near the poles. Observing that the spatial discretization via SEM and via multiwavelets (on the finest scale) are the same, the researchers will develop an adaptive multiresolution multiwavelet solver, and test it using standard atmospheric simulation benchmarks. Although it is well understood that atmospheric phenomena involve strong multiscale interactions, today there are no adaptive multiresolution solvers. The necessary mathematical tools that take the multiscale nature of the problem into account have appeared only recently, and form the foundation for this research. The success of this project will have a significant impact on both the speed and the accuracy of atmospheric simulations and weather prediction doc5213 none The DNA Analysis Facility recently established at the University of Nevada, Reno has greatly enhanced the potential for Nevada scientists to employ cutting edge genomics techniques. This new expertise in molecular biology will be united with the well-established research programs in evolutionary genetics and conservation biology to establish a Center for Conservation Genetics within the University of Nevada System. The proposed Center will add significant capabilities in the area of the genetics of natural populations, and promote interaction among conservation biologists and other scientists with expertise in molecular biology and evolutionary genetics. Molecular technologies have been increasingly used to analyze genetic structure of natural populations and determine the degree of population isolation, information that is critical for determining how best to protect threatened and endangered species. The Center for Conservation Genetics will carry the following specific missions. Enhance the capability of the Biological Resources Research Center to conduct population genetic structure analyses of threatened and endangered species. Function as an umbrella organization to bring the expertise of faculty to bear on conservation genetics projects. Serve as a focus for graduate education in conservation genetics at the University of Nevada, Reno and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Serve as a vehicle for outreach and training in conservation genetics in the West doc3607 none A magnitude 7.2 earthquake occurred on November 12, in the area of Duzce-Bolu, Turkey, 70 km east of Adapazari and 170 km northwest of Ankara, resulting in extensive damage, injuries and loss of life. This earthquake occurred along the North Anatolian fault, a strike slip fault that has many similarities to the San Andreas fault in California. This action provides partial support for a reconnaissance team that was dispatched shortly after the earthquake to document the geotechnical, engineering geology seismology, and tsunamigenic features of this earthquake in as much detail as possible. This team coordinated with other reconnaissance teams from Turkey, Japan and the United States. As with all post-earthquake reconnaissance investigations, it is expected that vital records and data will become available as a result of this earthquake in Turkey. From a scientific viewpoint, these large earthquakes act as full-scale experiments that cannot be duplicated via controlled experiments in the laboratory or in the field. It is through quick response reconnaissance efforts that the mostly-ephemeral data from these events can be recovered and used to further advances in earthquake hazard mitigation. The results from this investigation are expected to yield information and data that will help the profession to understand the effects of large-scale strike slip fault systems on urbanized and industrial areas. This is a multi-institutional award involving the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Southern California doc5215 none Boron isotopes, sensitive to the carbonate system, may be an important tool in understanding coral chemistry and has the intriguing possibility of tracking changes in pCO2, whether it be global changes over long time scales or a record of internal carbon pool conditions mediated by the coral itself. For this reason, the PI will determine the boron isotopic composition for two separate sets of cultured coral samples to increase our knowledge on the uptake and fractionation of boron isotopes. One suite of coral samples cultured under controlled light intensity and nutrient conditions will address whether the interpretation of observed seasonal variation in the boron isotopic composition of a natural coral is correct. The second set of corals grown under specified temperature and pCO2 levels, will address the influence of these two parameters on the boron isotopic composition, as well as specifically answer the question as to whether boron isotopes in corals can be used as a paleo-pH proxy. The potential application of boron isotopes as a proxy for pH may provide further insights into our understanding of global changes in pCO2 over glacial interglacial time scales, and thus ocean-atmosphere interactions and global climate change doc5216 none M. Zachariah, University of Minnesota The proposal is an extension of the PI s ongoing work, trying to establish the relationship between the bulk properties of metal oxides and the underlying processes which take place between their component nanoscale particles. The latter are characterized by such thermophysical properties as surface tension, viscosity and diffusion coefficients. The collision dynamics of such particles will be computed by classical molecular dynamics, and their properties chosen so that the calculated bulk (continuum) properties coincide with their corresponding experimental value. In this manner, it is possible to predict the properties of metal oxides through reliable microscopic models, at ever decreasing sizes. It is proposed in particular, to study silica clusters with 2- or 3 body potentials. Similarly, it is planned to model the coalescence process (i.e. sintering) with an atomistic simulation of particle-particle impact doc5217 none This project will implement a comprehensive plan to enhance the role of technology in North Dakota s economy and its educational system. The plan will encourage and assist graduate students in starting up companies. Their new small businesses and existing ones will be tied into the university research community. They will be informed of the federal technology development programs such as the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs and assisted in submitting applications. Strong and meaningful links will be forged between engineering and the natural sciences at both the research and pedagogical levels. Project objectives to be accomplished include: (1) increased submissions by North Dakota companies to federal SBIR and STTR programs; (2) implementation of a Master of Science in Technology degree that will equip students with a range of skills needed to be effective in a smaller company; (3) strengthening the research programs of existing faculty at North Dakota State University, and (4) development of an undergraduate short course to stimulate entrepreneurial activity. These activities are intended to provide the talent pool necessary to develop a high technology base in North Dakota and in turn provide local employment opportunities for in-state students educated at the North Dakota State University doc5218 none Farrell The objective of this research is to investigate the mechanisms involved in reductive dechlorination of chlorinated organic compounds by metal cathodes. The kinetics and reaction mechanisms for hydrocarbon reductive dechlorination will be investigated using rotating disk electrodes. The catalytic effectiveness of three electrode materials, iron, nickel, and palladium, selected to span a range in hydrogen storage capacity, overpotential for hydrogen evolution, and metal work function, will be investigated. The reaction rates, reaction byproducts and Faradaic current efficiencies for a suite of chlorinated organic compounds, tetrachloroethylene, trichloroethylene, carbon tetrachloride, chloroform, and 1,1,1-trichloroethane, will be determined for the three electrode materials as a function of electrode potential doc5219 none The researchers envision a future where a universal network connects every human being and most human-made electronic devices. The universal network spans locations engaged in every human endeavor, including the home, workplace, transportation vehicles, public facilities, and space facilities. The wide availability of open computing power, bandwidth, and natural interfaces such as speech recognition and brain-computer interfaces will allow the user or organization to merge with the network into a unified, ubiquitous entity. To realize this vision, the researchers believe a radical shift in network design paradigms is necessary. The PI proposes a new network architecture called the Bio-Networking Architecture. The Bio-Networking Architecture is inspired by the observation that the biological world has already developed the mechanisms necessary to achieve such key requirements as self-organization, scalability, adaptation and evolution, security, and survivability necessary for our envisioned universal network. In the biological world, each individual entity (e.g., a bee in a bee colony) follows a simple set of behavior rules (e.g., migration, replication, reproduction, pheromone emission, energy exchange, mutation, death), yet a group of entities (e.g., a bee colony) exhibits complex, emergent behavior and characteristics (e.g., self-organization, scalability, adaptation and evolution, security and survivability). The researchers believe if a network is modeled after biological concepts and mechanisms, it may be able to achieve the desirable properties of self-organization, scalability, adaptation and evolution, security, and survivability. In the Bio-Networking Architecture, network services and applications are implemented by a distributed, adaptive, and self-organizing collective entity called the super-entity, which consists of a large number of autonomous entities called cyber-entities (analogous to a bee colony consisting of multiple bees). Each cyber-entity implements a functional component related to the overall service or application and follows simple behavior rules (e.g., migration, replication, reproduction, pheromone emission, energy exchange, mutation, death) similar to biological entities. Useful behaviors and characteristics arise from the behavior and interaction of individual cyber-entities. The innovative features of the Bio-Networking Architecture include: 1)Application of Biological Concepts. The proposed Bio-Networking Architecture is the first attempt to apply the biological concepts of emergent behavior, adaptation, evolution, diversity, social networking, and food (energy) to the design of a network architecture. 2)User-Network Unification. The Bio-Networking Architecture represents a paradigm shift in the relationship between a user or an organization and the network. It merges the network and the user or organization into a unified entity, giving the user or organization a ubiquitous presence. 3)Emergent Behavior and Evolution. The Bio-Networking Architecture enables the construction of complex services and applications with the inherent properties of self-organization, scalability, adaptation, evolution, security, and survivability. Because the Bio-Networking Architecture adapts and evolves to accommodate short and long term changes in network conditions, system designers, administrators, and users are free from managing and tuning network applications. 4)Self-Organization. The proposed Bio-Networking Architecture is a self-organizing, administration-free, and scalable networking architecture which vertically integrates the protocol stack from the network layer upward, eliminating duplication of functionality among protocol layers doc5220 none This study will develop empirically grounded models and theories of the social processes, technical system configurations, organizational contexts, and interrelationships that give rise to open software. Open software , or more narrowly, open source software, represents a new approach for communities of like-minded participants to develop software systems that are intended to be shared freely, rather than offered as commercial products. While there is a growing popular literature attesting to open software, there is little in the way of careful systematic empirical study that informs how such communities produce software; how they coordinate software development across different settings; and what social processes, work practices, and organizational contexts are necessary to their success. Thus, to the extent that science research communities and commercial enterprises seek the supposed efficacy of open software, they will need better grounded theories of use to allow effective investment of their resources. This study investigates four communities engaged in open software. Field study methods will be employed to examine each community from both a technical and social viewpoint. Studying both social and technical arrangements allows the examination of the continual emergence of both within a joint social-technical ecology. Case study methods will be used to compare across communities doc5221 none Scientists at the Bermuda Biological Laboratory for Research will convene a workshop to organize the several ocean time-series activities currently operating in the Sargasso Sea in the vicinity of Bermuda into a cooperative scientific confederation. These include the U.S.JGOFS Bermuda Atlantic Time Series Station (BATS), the Bermuda Testbed Mooring, the Deuser-Conte Ocean Time Series (OTS), and a number or related activities. These activities collectively constitute one of the most intensive and internationally utilized -- and acclaimed -- ocean observation systems in the world. Hundreds of scientists at the leading oceanographic institutions in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia have either participated directly in the field activities of these facilities (especially BATS) or else have utilized the open data sources that they provide. The workshop, planned for autumn in Bermuda, will have several objectives: (1) to provide the opportunity for the principals of the component activities to meet one another; (2) to identify common needs and goals; (3) to articulate the means for achievement of these goals; (3) to lay the groundwork for a more formalized organization; (5) to develop an organizational and leadership structure; (6) to identify and develop linkages to and methods for data exchange with relevant international marine research activities; and (7) to establish linkages with other time series programs, especially in the North Atlantic doc5222 none BIOCOMPLEXTIY INCUBATION ACTIVITY: Earth System Regulation Through Biogenic Sulfur - Molecular to Global Interactions and Feedbacks. While individual research projects have provided insight into various processes involved in the ocean atmosphere cycling of DMS-related research, the reality of today s funding has forced this reductionism approach. It is time for a multi-disciplined approach given the complexity, apparent non-linearity, and feed-back-type of processes involved. Some combination of intensive, process-oriented, field studies, large-scale ocean surveys and comprehensive modeling will most likely be required to advance our understanding of the DMS-climate link. Unlike previous DMS research, we propose to study simultaneously all known processes that regulate DMS concentration in seawater, leading to its sea-air flux. Also novel will be the inclusion of modeling from the outset, the ultimate goal of which will be the refinement of a DMS submodel that can be included in comprehensive and predictive global climate-system models. An ecological DMS model already exists and global scale DMS modeling has been done with GCMs [Erickson et al., ] and data compilations [Kettle et al., ]; however, much more work needs to be done, especially if a big picture understanding is to emerge. Developing an effective, detailed plan of research will require the coordination of a diverse set of investigators and a comprehensive review of the state of DMS science. This is a request for incubation funds to support a review of our current understanding of DMS dynamics in seawater and a workshop on DMS dynamics in seawater doc5223 none The objective of this project is to develop the design methodology, software tools and programming environment for the automated synthesis of Mission-specific Processors (MSPs) based on the Morphosys architecture developed at UC, Irvine. Because their hardware design is not tailored to the application(s), generic embedded processor architectures make inefficient use of area and power. ASICs on the other hand cannot be updated to accommodate different algorithm improvements. By allowing a set of target applications to dictate the architecture, MSP designs incorporate the necessary components and interconnections to optimize the performance of a specific suite of programs. The synthesized architecture is dynamically reconfigurable and supports a retargetable compiler to incorporate algorithm enhancements or changing task specifications. The proposed approach relies on the compilation of a program expressed in a high-level algorithmic language into a data-flow graph (DFG) format and from that format into VHDL. This technology has been developed as part of the Cameron Project at Colorado State University. A new MSP design framework will be developed to incorporate constraint-based MSP synthesis and estimation as well as compilation support for the synthesized architecture doc5224 none MB-System is a public domain UNIX package for the processing and display of swath mapping sonar data. This project will continue the development and maintenance of the MB-System software package. In addition, new and improved documentation will be developed, new functionality added, and new data formats supported doc5225 none Fortes, Jose A. Purdue University CISE CNPq: US-Argentina and US-Chile Collaborative Research on Computer Science and Engineering This is an award to support two workshops, each of two days duration in May , in Chile and Argentina. It is anticipated that these workshops will build on the success of the CISE NSF programs with Mexico and Brazil (CONACyT and CNPq, respectively) to begin creating the collaborations and personal connections necessary to support the possibilities for similar government to government bilateral arrangements with Chile and Argentina doc5226 none The overall objective of our proposal is to explore the fabrication and characterization of all-waveguide laser devices that integrate a lasing medium with optically written Bragg gratings and a nonlinear optical element in a single phosphate glass waveguide. The nonlinear element can either be a periodically poled (for frequency doubling) or uniformly poled segment (for an electro-optic modulator) of the waveguide device. The rapid growth of the telecommunications industry has led to intensive research and development of new fiber based components, such as Erbium doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs), fiber Bragg gratings and fiber lasers. As a spin-off from telecom applications, fibers are now also rapidly finding their way into other industrial applications, such as medicine and sensor technology. For certain applications, waveguide structures may be preferred over fibers because of their compactness and the ability to integrate different optical components such as splitters, couplers and laser amplifiers or signal sources on a single substrate. Existing waveguide laser technology would be greatly enhanced if it could be integrated with a nonlinear optical, (2) , element in such a way that the laser and the nonlinear optical function were fabricated in the same waveguide. Such an integrated optics approach requires the use of Bragg gratings in the waveguide to define the laser cavity. Second-order optical nonlinearities, which do normally not occur in glasses, can be introduced through a thermal poling process. The research described here addresses the following two issues: 1. A study of the formation of refractive index changes and Bragg gratings through an optical writing process in phosphate glasses and waveguides. Here the goal is to effectively write Bragg gratings in phosphate glasses and waveguides using sensitization of the glass through doping or by writing the grating with ultra-short (100 fs) pulses from a high peak-power laser. 2. A study of the formation of a second-order nonlinearity through thermal poling in these glasses. Experiments will be carried out to determine whether a second-order nonlinearity can be induced in phosphate glasses and for which poling parameters and glass compositions it is optimized. This technology will lead to new integrated optical devices with applications in telecommunications - in particular WDM (wavelength division multiplexing)- and optical computing, as well as metrology, spectroscopy, and remote sensing. In addition, these studies will contribute to the understanding of photosensitivity and poling in glasses. Because of its multidisciplinary nature and great relevance for the high-tech industry, this research offers a unique opportunity for education and training of graduate students doc5227 none A state-of-the-art H.323 video communications network will be built to promote systemic reform in research in Louisiana. The network will interconnect eleven institutions of higher education and the Board of Regents and offer linkages to other networks and campuses. Specifically, a state-of-the-art desktop-to-desktop video conferencing research system will be developed at institutions that provide leadership of state-wide research and educational programs such as the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) or the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP). The network will: (1) provide Louisiana researchers with tools for participating in inter-institutional scientific sharing and strategic planning session; (2) showcase EPSCoR s strategy for enhancing the state s research competitiveness; and (3) build a prototype statewide H.323 network in Louisiana. The project will upgrade existing audio video network from H.320 to H.323 and install sixty H.323 desktop endpoints, 5 at each of the 12 sites. A Multipoint Control Unit will be purchased to create a Network Operations Center that allows for network management from remote sites. The network will reduce geographical barriers so inter-institutional collaboration can figure strongly into the state s systemic plan to enhance academic research competitiveness. The initiative will become a component in a regional network being built on a robust Abilene vBNS connection to Southern Crossroads doc5228 none This project will establish a Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) receiving station at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). MODIS is one of the instruments on board the Terra satellite launched into polar orbit last year; another MODIS will accompany the Aqua satellite into orbit next December. These wide range remote sensing instruments, which span a wide spectral range from the visible to thermal infrared wavelengths, are designed to observe and monitor global changes on land, sea, and within the atmosphere. MODIS uses a Direct Access System to provide a direct-to-user communication link. This system relies upon distributed receiving stations to gather real-time data across their reception masks. The UAF is the ideal location for receiving, processing, archiving, using, and distributing MODIS data across the high northern latitudes. From Fairbanks a reception mask will cover all the land and sea territories of Alaska and span a considerable portion of the whole Arctic Region. The MODIS Science Team has developed and validated a suite of algorithms to confidently extract various surface and atmospheric properties from the satellite measurements. When combined with additional properties, these data should provide a powerful means of approaching issues of scientific, social, and economic importance to the state. The University of Alaska Fairbanks MODIS station will have four main objectives. These are: (1) to expand capabilities for researchers to contribute in solving arctic global change problems; (2) to enhance educational opportunities in remote sensing and satellite image analysis; (3) to assist state and federal agencies, as well as Alaskan Native Corporations, in inventorying and monitoring activity on land (volcanic eruptions, forest fires, atmospheric pollutants, etc.) and sea (oil spills, ocean productivity, sea ice migration, etc.); and (4) provide expedient, real-time, and low-cost access to MODIS data to the private sector in order to encourage development and expansion of remote sensing industry in Alaska (capable of marketing, processing, and distributing satellite image information to their customers doc5229 none This project addresses the need for improved connectivity among coastal observing systems by creating a regional framework for enhanced communication and sharing of coastal observation capacities. Data will be made available to potential users via Internet. The work involves the following states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Specific project objectives are: To conduct an inventory of southern regional marine laboratories to determine types of sustained observing systems in place or planned for the near term; information on accessibility data; mechanisms and infrastructure in place to share data; and special processing or modeling capabilities; To identify those monitored parameters that are common to laboratories covering a broad geographical range, which can be used to develop a regional analysis and or predicting capability; To create a connective framework among these key labs by providing critical infrastructure and implementing data processing steps necessary for sharing or consolidating data; To identify significant gaps in monitored parameters and connectivity infrastructure, and to provide the necessary infrastructure and data processing steps to create a connective framework; To incorporate from the outset a dialogue with potential users of data (e.g., researchers, resource managers, climatologists, public health officials, ship operators) to ensure that the framework is designed so that data are accessible and in a format; To conduct one or more pilot projects that utilize common monitoring elements of multiple regional labs and demonstrate a regional framework for building and sharing coastal observing capacities; and To ensure that this southeastern regional framework is compatible with the national and international vision of global ocean and coastal observation systems doc5230 none As semiconductor technology strives for higher circuit densities, higher bandwidths, and lower power requirements, circuit elements have a higher susceptibility to ionizing radiation. Since the discovery that spallation neutrons from cosmic rays and alpha particles from chip packaging materials produce electronic upsets, extensive design efforts have been undertaken to make electronic devices less sensitive to ionizing radiation. Immunity to soft errors or Single Event Upsets (SEU) is listed as a requirement in the National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors prepared by the Semiconductor Industry Association in the U.S. The aim of this research project is to undertake extensive experimental, theoretical modeling, and computer simulation studies of the physical processes underlying Single Event Upset (SEU) phenomena in prototype advanced IC devices. All of the pieces are in place at the University of North Texas (UNT) to accomplish the proposed research including (1) the completion of the focused, scanning, heavy-ion microprobe, (2) establishment of an extensive user s facility, and (3) identification of an industrial partner that has made a commitment to the charge diffusion and collection measurements and simulation research doc5231 none An Arkansas-Oklahoma Center of Instrumentation and Science for Planetary Surfaces will be established at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville and Oklahoma State University, Stillwater campuses. The Center will enable the development of state-of-the-arts facilities for the creation of instrumentation for robotics exploration of planets in the solar system and establish a critical mass of researchers with diverse but synergistic interests. Core faculty, with unique expertise in remote geo-sensing, luminescence dating, and platform engineering prototypes, will form the nucleus of the Center. Moreover, the center will provide facilities and infrastructure that will bring together researchers in the Chemistry and Biochemistry, Biological Sciences, Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Physics departments at the University of Arkansas and Oklahoma State University. The proposed research is based on: simulation of modern and ancient surfaces of meteorites and related materials, luminescence dating of Martian water-formed sediments, search for Martian life by strictly controlled exploration of conditions which could support a particular type of life (methanogens), and platform experiments which involve in-situ gas generation for inflatable structures which could eventually be deployed on Mars and other bodies. All of the projects envisaged for the Center, including outreach, will have industrial partners ready to utilize the Center s work as opportunities arise doc5232 none Proposal: PI: Walter D. Neumann Despite the venerable history of the algebraic geometry, many difficult problems remain even in low dimensions. Methods of low dimensional topology have proved very helpful here, and part of this project concerns a continuation of the investigator s successful application of such methods to the study of singularities of complex surfaces and the topology of plane affine curves. One issue to be addressed is explicit analytic description of singularities with given topology. The general question is notoriously difficult, but the investigator and J. Wahl have recently made a series of conjectures on realising rationally Gorenstein singularities with rational homology sphere links as explicit quotients of complete intersections and are making significant progress towards their resolution. 3-manifold topology is also being applied to the study of the global topology and analytic classification issues for two-variable polynomials. These issues are of intrinsic interest as well as having potential to contribute to the resolution of the famous Jacobian Conjecture. In a rather different direction, the investigator will study invariants of 3-dimensional manifolds that relate to number theory and algebra, namely the so-called character and eigenvalue varieties and the Bloch invariant. Connections are emerging between these invariants that will inform both topology and algebra number theory. Algebraic Geometry, which is essentially the study of the zero sets of families of polynomials, has always been an important area of fundamental research, and is also important in such diverse applications as control theory and communications. The project will apply topological methods to algebraic geometry, to obtain results on how to realise and classify families of polynomials that lead to particular topologies. The methods of 3-dimensional topology are of particular importance to this project, and there is also feedback from algebra and number-theory to topology, as well as some interaction with theoretical physics and cosmology. The project also studies new insights that these connections bring to all these fields doc5233 none Partial support is provided for a meeting to be held at the Institute for Theoretical Physics during May . The focus of the workshop is on evaluating the prospects for advancements in the field of astrophysical turbulence. The talks are organized along several parallel themes: 1. Observational properties of astrophysical turbulence, from the Solar atmosphere to the interstellar environment. 2. Physics of turbulent processes, with special emphasis on nuclear burning fronts, magnetic reconnection, thermal conduction and radiative fluids. 3. Techniques for numerical modeling of turbulent flows. 4. Transport of angular momentum via turbulent flows. 5. Instabilities and boundary layer effects in turbulent flow regimes. 6. Magnetic dynamos Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Stellar Astronomy & Astrophysics (AST SAA doc5234 none PROPOSAL NUMBER: INSTITUTION: Univ of Ca - Irvine PI: Debra Richardson and David Redmiles TITLE: ITR: Quality Software by Design Quality has always been a concern with respect to software. Yet now, with such great reliance on software in every aspect of our lives, there is even greater need to address quality in software development. High quality software means software whose specifications meet customers requirements and whose implementations meet specifications. The focus of this proposal is helping software developers design quality into their systems, which is far more cost-effective than relying solely on post-implementation quality evaluation and corrective maintenance. In particular, the proposed research encompasses a plan for combining for the first time (1) formal architecture and component design models, (2) analysis and testing techniques based on these formalisms, together with (3) cognitive-based, design environments for critiquing software design. The proposed research explores innovative user interface approaches to delivering critical design-related quality assessment information to software developers as they interactively develop designs. The information to be delivered is based on design heuristics, formal analysis and testing, and usage data and feedback. Information is to be delivered in a manner consistent with research in human cognition. Finally, to ensure that this research has the potential to impact real work, the formal architecture and component design models leverage and extend industry standards doc5235 none This project will develop an explicit formal system for the learning of phonologies, capable of inferring lexical representations, deducing constituency and other nonovert structure from overt observables, and constructing the mapping between lexical forms and the grammar s output. The primary formal problem to be attacked is the mutual entanglement of constituent structure, phonological mappings and phonological lexical representations. A language learner has direct access to none of these; they must be inferred from positive overt data. However, the three are tightly interrelated. The correct phonological mapping depends upon the structural analysis assigned to overt forms by the target grammar as well as on the lexical representations taken to underlie the overt forms. Assigning the correct structural analysis to an ambiguous overt form requires some grasp of what the correct phonological mapping is like, as does the induction of underlying forms. In the face of these entanglements, a successful solution to the full learning problem must work on all three simultaneously, using progress on one to achieve further progress on the others, ultimately arriving at the correct conclusion for each. The research will build on existing work solving important subproblems within phonological learning under Optimality Theory (OT). In prior work, learning algorithms have been developed for OT systems in which there are mutual entanglements between constituent structural analysis and phonological mapping, but in which lexical representations need not be learned. The new research proposed here will extend and generalize these approaches so that they may apply to systems which require non-trivial learning of lexical representations. This requires the addition of significant further structure to the learning and processing algorithms: a lexicon must be constructed and maintained, the parsing algorithms which assign analyses to overt data must be expanded to make use of the lexical representations, and the learner must have procedures for hypothesizing and adjusting lexical representations. The basic algorithms for learning mappings will also be modified to ensure learning of phonotactic distributions as a preliminary to the analysis of lexical relations. The investigations will begin with metrical stress grammars, including those with rich morphophonemic relations dependent on underlying contrasts in stress and quantity. An important part of the project will be the construction, as targets for learning, of constraint systems that plausibly capture phenomena requiring the nontrivial interaction between lexical representations and phonological mappings. Extensive survey and analysis of the targeted linguistic generalizations will be required to establish the empirical basis of the learner s goals. The proposed learning algorithms will be tested and evaluated via both formal analysis and computer simulations. Given that the property of mutual entanglement of analysis and mapping is not particular to phonology, but is endemic to the problem of learning from observable data in all linguistic domains, the results of this research are expected to provide insight into how language learning must proceed in general doc5236 none This project lays out an innovative program to use genomic and biochemical approaches to investigate genes and gene products in commercial shrimp associated with their resistance to environmental stresses and viral infections. Genomics tools such as the functional analysis of expressed proteins (deduced from the comparative analysis of expressed sequence tags or ESTs) will be developed and applied to explore which genes are involved in resistance and how these genes are regulated. The initial work will focus on the host response of commercial shrimp species to two virus diseases (TSV and WSSV); later the methods may be applied to other marine species as well. A multi-institutional network of researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina, the SC Department of Natural Resources, and the National Ocean Services Laboratory will establish the program building on expertise already in place on molecular genetic and protein biochemical approaches to one aspect of shrimp physiology, namely, the host response. The research effort is directed towards functional genomics, i.e., the detection and study of genes by virtue of their expression. The work presents an integrated approach for understanding the combined and interacting effects of environmental stresses and viral infection in both cultivated and wild shrimp species, focusing on gene expression as studies by cDNA to mRNA ( ESTs ), and by rapid identification of expressed proteins using mass spectrometry-based protein structure analysis. The current application proposes to put infrastructure in place to: (1) focus efforts on a single species which will lay the groundwork for expansion into other marine species; (2) increase competitiveness by hiring two new additional junior faculty to augment and complement existing capability in molecular biology genomics and bioinformatics; (3) develop a bioinformatics component which will lay the groundwork for further research and graduate training efforts, and (4) form partnerships with private companies to transfer the findings for commercial interests doc5237 none A major new materials analysis facility will be established within the State of Kentucky. The facility is designed to build on, complement and integrating existing capabilities for nano-scale analysis available within the state. It will consist of the following components. Several complementary analysis tools designed to probe composition and structure of the surface and sub-surface to a depth of several atomic monolayers, with nanometer, and sometimes, atomic resolution. A sample preparation lab for preparing and mounting crystalline samples that are 10- atomic layers thick for analysis by University of Louisville (UL) and University of Kentucky (UK) Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM) facilities. An expert staff to assist and support Kentucky researchers in using the analytical system, as well as expedite for UL researchers analysis using the TEM s at the UL Medical School and UK Chemical and Materials Engineering Department. Key to the project is a custom designed system containing Auger electron spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy, low energy electron diffraction, surface profiling microscopes (including atomic force and surface tunneling microscopy and surface tunneling spectroscopy), and ion milling to provide X-ray and ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy depth. Together these instruments provide precise and detailed information on material composition, topography, crystalline structure, and electronic properties, as well as some capabilities to perform in situ surface modification and nanolithographic patterning. The instruments attach to three interconnected, ultra high vacuum (UHV) chambers, which permit measurements in a UHV or other controlled atmosphere without exposure to the detrimental effects of air. The system can be connected through UHV transports to many other co-located analyses, syntheses and processing chambers, and thus supports investigations of researchers who require in vacuo materials analysis and synthesis capabilities doc5238 none Vaccarino Fibroblast Growth Factors (FGF) are thought to increase the generation of neurons in the Central Nervous System. These factors elicit their effect by binding to FGF receptors on the surface of neural progenitor cells. The function of each of the four existing FGF receptors during normal brain development is unclear. This Project investigates whether FGF receptor 1 (FGFR-1) controls the growth of the mammalian brain. To study the function of FGFR-1 in brain development, mice will be generated that lack the FGFR-1 gene only in the brain. These mice are produced by targeting a DNA recombinase called Cre to cells of the developing brain. The Cre recombinase will excise critical segments of the FGFR-1 gene in these cells. The resulting brain-specific FGFR-1 mutants will be studied to elucidate the role of FGFR-1 in cell proliferation and fate. Cognitive functions strongly correlate with an increase in the relative size and complexity of the brain. Studying the basic mechanisms that construct the brain during early development may shed light on the underlying basis for cognitive functions. In addition, because neural progenitor cells persist in the adult mammalian brain and may continue to use FGF-regulated mechanisms, this research may help understand the role of this receptor in brain cell renewal and repair doc5239 none This project will investigate the detailed nature of brain evolution. Specifically, the part of the brain that mediates courtship behavior will be studied in contrasting populations of a well-studied fish species, the guppy of Trinidad. In nature, some guppy populations exist in the presence of other fish that are strong predators on adult guppies, while other populations above barrier waterfalls are free of those strong predators. In the presence of the strong predators, males are drably colored and court relatively little, but in the absence of these predators, males are more brightly colored and court more. Because of earlier field transplant experiments, these characteristics are known to evolve rapidly when guppies are moved from a high-predation to a low-predation environment, but the brain changes that cause the change in behavior are not known. To address the neural mechanism of this evolutionary change, the cells which produce a hormone (arginine vasotocin) that is critical for courtship in vertebrate animals, will be compared using molecular biological and neurobiological methods. The specific goal is to assess a possible role for arginine vasotocin in adapting courtship behavior to the local predator environment. The general goal of this research is to understand the detailed nature of changes in the brain that underlie differences in animal behavior. The research approach taken here will help to link the progress in understanding the environmental factors shaping animal behavior with advances in our understanding of the functioning of the brain. Given rapid advances in our understanding of the genomic and neural bases of behavior, the knowledge generated by this project may also be useful in improving the reproductive performance of domestically grown fish doc5240 none Wan Several areas of machine learning including classification and regression, nonlinear signal processing, and adaptive control, rely heavily on the extended Kalman filter (EKF). For example, the EKF plays a central role in nonlinear state estimation required by complex control applications, and is used as a parameter, estimation algorithm in neural network training for pattern recognition, and for identification of dynamic systems. The EKF also plays an important role in the simultaneous modeling and estimation (known as dual estimation) of noisy time-series, with applications ranging from speech enhancement, to financial forecasting and environmental modeling. The central approximation used in the EKF is a linearization of the nonlinear system dynamics. While this is done in order to propagate the mean and covariance of the state variables being estimated, the EKF can introduce considerable errors between the estimates produced by the algorithm and the true statistics of the state. However, the computational expense of the algorithm is considerably lower than that of more accurate Markov-Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling methods, and produces excellent results in many circumstances. The benefit of good results at low cost is primarily responsible for the widespread use of the EKF. In , Julier and Uhlman introduced a new approach called the Unscented Kalman Filter By avoiding a linearization of the system, the UKF offers increased accuracy in the estimation of the mean and covariance of the state variables, resulting in a substantial performance improvement. The implementation of the UKF requires no analytic derivation of Jacobians (gradients) as in the EKF, and most importantly, the improved accuracy is achieved without an increase in computational expense. The prior application of the UKF focused only on state-estimation problems in the context of nonlinear control. The objective of this project is to extend the use of the UKF to the full breadth of machine learning applications that currently depend on the EKF. This will entail the systematic development of algorithmic extensions and application evaluations as detailed in the proposal. Although numerous theoretical and practical problems must be overcome before this goal is achieved. Preliminary investigations have shown that the potential advantages of the UKF in these contexts are significant. Clearly, the diversity of applications that currently employ the EKF suggests that the proposed research aching impact on a wide variety of fields doc5150 none There has been a significant change in the upper ocean characteristics of the eastern Arctic in . The change was manifested through the loss of a near-surface layer known as the cold halocline layer (CHL). Without the CHL, the Arctic water column looks and behaves like the Antarctic water column. The local impact involves the likely initiation of considerable winter ocean heat fluxes (15-20 W m 2 ) and reduction of winter ice growth by 70-80% relative to previous years in which the CHL was present. It is not known how long the CHL did, or will, remain absent, though it appears to begun recovery by summer . This project will examine CTD stations throughout the Arctic region in order to quantify the strength of the CHL as well as other seasonally-averaged characteristics of the ocean-ice interaction (e.g., ocean heat flux, bulk stability, reduction in ice growth potential). The quantification is achieved through analysis of upper ocean integrated property distributions, and then generating robust bulk property parameters describing relevant physical quantities. The methodology was originally designed for analysis of Antarctic ice-ocean interaction, but as recently shown, is equally applicable to the Arctic. Once applied to the Arctic data, the parameters will be averaged to provide climatologies for the various properties. The spatial distribution of these climatologies will be compared to physical and dynamical properties of the Arctic in an attempt to determine the relationship between the climatological nature of the ocean-ice interaction and the physical dynamical setting. Methods of optimal interpolation will then be applied, to the extent allowed by the sporadic data coverage, in an effort to determine how the various integrated properties have changed through space and time. This will provide spatial temporal distributions of the ocean-ice interaction that will be used to evaluate the manner in which the CHL and other ocean-ice interactions have changed. The temporal variations will be examined for evidence of cycles, trends, or other coherent patterns, as have been suggested recently in the literature. Analysis of ocean data is ideal for this undertaking given the long time scales of the medium which may reveal evidence of the suspected changes even in sparsely sampled (in space and time) regions doc5242 none The specific resistance of ohmic contacts to n- and p-type GaN, AlGaN, and GaInN are very important for many device properties such as power efficiency, amplification, noise, device heating, and reliability. In this work, a fundamentally novel approach to low-resistance ohmic contacts to AlGaN, GaInN, and GaN will be developed and investigated. The contacts are based on the employment of the strong spontaneous and piezoelectric polarization fields occurring in GaN and related compounds. The polarization fields in the near-surface layers of metal-semiconductor contacts will enhance the tunneling probability of carriers thereby reducing the ohmic contact specific resistance. The theory and modeling pertaining to tunneling probability, contact formation, and specific contact resistance will be developed. Polarization-enhanced contacts will be demonstrated and reduced contact resistances will be verified. In addition, the role of polarization fields in AlGaN-GaN superlattices will be investigated and the superlattices will be optimized for ohmic contact applications. An integral part of the work will be the incorporation of the polarization-enhanced ohmic contacts in optoelectronic and electronic devices. Light-emitting diodes (LEDs), in particular LEDs used for high-power illumination applications, are in need of low resistance ohmic contacts in order to reduce device heating and improve device efficiency and reliability. GaN GaInN LEDs with polarization-enhanced ohmic contacts will be demonstrated. Polarization-enhanced ohmic contacts will also be realized in lasers and transistors and improved properties of these devices will be demonstrated doc5243 none Considerable attention has focused recently on the development of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) to more effectively manage transportation networks. In particular, Advanced Traveler Information Systems (ATIS) are being developed to alert drivers and public transportation passengers to delays in real-time so they can make travel decisions to avoid congestion and take advantage of under-utilized facilities. Urban area governments need to assess which types of ATIS are most cost-effective, and whether other projects might be better investments of public funds. This collaborative research project will develop transportation models to support these types of analysis by integrating geographic theories and transportation network models and explicitly considering the heterogeneity of spatial knowledge among the traveling public. The research plan includes field experiments to establish tests of spatial relationships. Residents of a number of metropolitan areas will participate in surveys that address transportation behavior, assessment of spatial knowledge, and perceptions of transportation alternatives. Latent variable and discrete-choice models will be estimated to establish the effect that knowledge of the transportation network and information-processing capabilities have on short- and long-range transportation and urban behaviors. The analysis will compare the predictive capabilities of these models against conventional models. The expected outcome of this research project is an enhanced capability to model travelers responses to emerging information strategies to manage transportation demands. This project represents an important advance in basic scientific knowledge, as it more closely ties geographic theories to transportation planning models. Many geographic experiments have established means to measure a person s spatial knowledge by observing their wayfinding efficiency and transportation behavior, but these methods have not been used to predict future travel choices. Transportation planning models have ignored the heterogeneity of spatial ability and knowledge and instead assumed that travelers have full information about the network or homogenous perception errors. More innovative research studies have examined how spatial knowledge may influence travelers response to ATIS messages but have not addressed the more basic question of how travelers become aware of alternative routes, modes, destinations, etc. This project will address that question by relating spatial knowledge to transportation choice from the full range of options. Project findings will contribute to the refinement of existing transportation planning models, thereby allowing government planners to examine transportation investments and more effectively allocate public expenditures doc5244 none Mayer This research project focuses on the development of metrics for comparing various evolutionary multiobjective optimization methods that may be applied to the design of environmental systems, as part of a larger study for developing decision-making tools for environmental remediation. The main objective of this project is to advance the knowledge on evolutionary multiobjective optimization by (a) assessing the most common metrics currently in use, (b) developing new metrics, (c) conducting a comprehensive study of metrics in a real-world application and (d) conducting a sensitivity analysis of the existing and newly proposed metrics. The research developed as part of this project will make contributions to both computer science and operations research in the areas of evolutionary algorithms and multiobjective optimization, and will have important implications in decision making for environmental remediation. This project involves collaboration of the PI with Dr. Carlos Coello at the National Laboratory for Advanced Informatics (LANIA, Xalapa, Mexico) and Dr. Carlos Mariano at the Mexican Institute for Water Technology (IMTA, Cuernavaca, Mexico). The collaboration will take the form of communication via internet, biannual meetings of the investigators and the exchange of graduate students. This project will lay the groundwork for a long-term collaboration between Michigan Technological University, LANIA and IMTA doc5245 none This project, building upon and seeking to substantially accelerate the recently established momentum in nano and microscale research at the University of Kentucky, enhances the device fabrication capabilities to include clean room, MEMS fabrication, chip processing and microscale package integration or connection to macroscale devices. Added to a Class 10 Clean Room funded by the state, and to the LIGA microfabrication and testing equipment provided by DARPA, the several key pieces of device fabrication equipment enabled by this award contribute to establish an advanced micro nano-scale fabrication facility, capable of making both 2-D and 3-D structures. The microdevice-MEMS fabrication facility will support and strengthen multiple ongoing research projects, facilitating synergistic multi-disciplinary research. The project blends the skills of the Electrical, Mechanical, Chemical, and Materials Engineering Departments with those of the Chemistry and Physics Departments. Thirty-two faculty members have identified on-going research projects that will be significantly strengthened. This project substantially bolsters state capabilities for fabrication of the sensing 2-D microdevices, and interfacing packaging technologies by enhancing the capability to fabricate 2-D and 3-D micro nano scale device assemblies from silicon, ceramics, and metals; thus, complete systems may be fabricated, encompassing integrated circuit micro-systems interfaced with macro scaled components such as pumps, heat sinks, etc. that are able to operate in harsh industrial or biomedical environments. Optimizing finite state resources, the Device Fabrication Facility will be open to all state researchers. The infrastructure fosters collaborations with regional industries that require robust microdevices in their manufacturing processes, providing the basis for enhanced economic development and growth in the state. The work also contributes to enhance the educational experience of a substantial number of students doc5224 none MB-System is a public domain UNIX package for the processing and display of swath mapping sonar data. This project will continue the development and maintenance of the MB-System software package. In addition, new and improved documentation will be developed, new functionality added, and new data formats supported doc5247 none Under the direction of Dr. E. Wyllys Andrews, Mr. Jim Aimers will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will analyze ceramics from a series of Mayan archaeological sites located in the Belize Valley and shall visit museums in Toronto, Illinois and Belize which house excavated materials. The goal of the research is to understand changes in settlement pattern and social organization which occurred during the Maya collapse in Late Classic and Post-Classic periods when temples and monuments characteristic of the height of Mayan civilization were no longer constructed and large site centers were abandoned. While these latter periods were clearly different from the former, researchers do not agree how society was reorganized. Some believe that population significantly decreased while others hypothesize that people redistributed themselves and lived in smaller groups away from the earlier civic and ceremonial centers. It is unclear the extent to which the resultant society was hierarchically organized and whether smaller settlements were in fact interconnected into larger functioning entities. Mr. Aimers will examine ceramics from a number of sites in the Belize Valley to address these questions. During the Classic period when Mayans were organized into highly stratified regionally expansive groups, ceramic production was, many researchers believe, centrally controlled. Because of this types were highly standardized, highly decorated elite wares were clearly distinct from their utilitarian counterparts and pots made in single centers were distributed over a wide area. Thus a close relationship existed between social political organization and the production and consumption of ceramic vessels. Relatively little work however has been conducted on Late Classic and Post-Classic ceramics and Mr. Aimers believes that similar insight can be gained into social and political organization through such an analysis. He will test a series of specific hypotheses against the museum data he will collect. The Maya are one of the best known prehistoric New World peoples and the collapse of their civilization is both impressive and poorly understood. The data collected by Mr. Aimers will shed new light on this period. The project will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc5248 none The Satellite Communications for LeArning (SCOLA) is a Nebraska non-profit organization, which provides real-time foreign news, cultural, and video language programs via satellite to the United States federal government and many teaching institutions (SCOLA viewership was estimated at 15 million in ). This project will build on the existing success of SCOLA programs by establishing an advanced multimedia platform to broadcast real-time learning and cultural video materials over Internet2. A superior test-bed to research video transmissions over next generation Internet, will be provided by: (1) creating a leading national center; (2) developing useful practical applications; (3) expanding research, teaching, and outreach opportunities state-wide and nationally; (4) developing unique multimedia courses and laboratory experiences; (5) supporting and enhancing the work of SCOLA, and (6) fostering rapid dissemination of information for learning, collaboration, and research. The research problems are well defined and include: multicast routing and quality of service (QoS), transport protocol needed for reliable multicasting, and potential scalability of reliable multicasting. The project provides for the creation of video databases. Multicast routing and its QoS extension will be studied, as well as, reliable multicast transport protocols, scalable fair reliable multicast, and security in multicast. The research aspect focuses on finding a good solution to the integration of routing and resource reservation. Its success will further the understanding in the field. The move towards an Internet2-based SCOLA system offers an advanced, real-time multimedia delivery, and the potential to integrate a variety of data types, and support many audiences; while the Internet2-based SCOLA and its connectivity to the Tel Laboratory will advance research in multicast protocol definition, security, and reliability uses doc5249 none Target-Based Document-Independent Information Extraction With ever-growing volumes of data in widely varying formats, there is a need to sift and funnel information to users to meet their own specific requirements. This project addresses the challenge of finding, extracting, and delivering appropriate data by developing a versatile framework that is target-based (i.e., based on a user s description of the desired information) and document-independent (i.e., robust, not failing whenever documents change or when new documents of interest are encountered). A combination of document-related clues regarding textual content as well as geometrical and organizational layout enables processing across various document formats. Developers and users specify areas of interest via descriptive ontologies (i.e., declarations of information types and concept relationships). These ontologies facilitate reformulating, matching, and merging retrieved information. The result of these efforts will be a comprehensive infrastructure to extract expertly, organize automatically, and summarize succinctly critical information in a queriable personalized view. An online repository will contain research results, downloadable software (including source code), and a Web interface enabling user access to the various tools and engines developed. Potentially, this technology can be embedded in personal agents; leveraged in customized search, filtering, and extraction tools; and used to provide tailored views of data via integration, organization, and summarization. http: www.deg.byu.edu doc5250 none This project, combining research expertise from University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC), University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and University of Southern Mississippi (USM), and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), focuses on the synthesis, manufacture, processing, and characterization of network forming biodegradable oligomers and composites to produce bio-inert materials that mimic the natural environment and can be actively involved in growth and body repair. Two different types of functional biodegradable oligomers will be synthesized for use in forming biocompatible matrices, incorporating carboxylic acid groups, and both carboxylic acid and olefinic functionalities. This recommendation speaks to the current critical shortage of materials for bioengineering applications and implantable devices. Because of the inherent liabilities associated with biomedical devices, major companies are no longer interested in supplying biomaterials, while others have been put out of business completely. Recent advances in genetic and tissue engineering suggest the possibility of replacing or regenerating nerve tissue, blood vessels, skin, bone, cartilage, and even whole organs. This technology requires the use of a biocompatible matrix or surface that can be seeded with cells, and signal molecules and growth factors that can support growth in or out of the body. Unlike biomaterial applications that require bio-inert material, tissue-engineering materials must mimic the environment while being actively involved in the growth and repair process. Ideal matrix materials serve as a template for tissue regeneration and then disappear or actually become part of the tissue. Consequently, biodegradable polymers such as polylactides and polygycolides are attractive precursors for these applications. To overcome difficulties, this work will synthesize the two biodegradable oligomers that can be used to form biocompatible matrices under mild conditions. In the collaboration, UMMC contributes expertise in biomaterial research, while UAB and USM contribute in synthetic polymer chemistry, and ORNL offers expertise in ceramic engineering. The project provides an ideal training environment, developing a broad perspective in biomaterial research doc5251 none The goal of this collaborative research project involving Christos Faloutsos and Ngai Hang Chang at Carnegie Mellon (award ) and Tara Madhyastha at U of Cal Santa Cruz (award ) is to develop and apply statistical and datamining tools to analyze bursty time sequences, with emphasis on I O traffic optimization. The interdisciplinary team includes researchers in computer science, computer engineering and statistics, and industry collaborators. The approach has three parts: (1) advanced statistical tools using the ``ARFIMA method; (2) wavelets and the related ``80-20 law to model disk traffic; and (3) incorporation of these models inside the so-called ``Active Disks , with the goal to build self-tuning, adaptive disk subsystems. The results will advance data mining and statistics as well as disk design. An easy-to-use toolkit T-REX will aid in I O and systems design, handling bursty traffic, and better buffering and prefetching. The theory behind the T-REX toolkit will be based on new data mining algorithms and statistical methods that model self-similar time sequences (like web and network traffic, in addition to I O traffic). The research team has strong ties with database, data mining and disk manufacturing industrial groups, and this will aid in testing the research toolkit and its technology transfer. It can be expected that the T-REX system will significantly aid the design of disk sub-systems with beneficial impact on the storage industry doc5103 none Lamorey Waddington Interpretation of paleoclimate records from ice cores depends on understanding the ice sheet flow to determine depth-age relationships and whether the ice has been affected by folding. The alignment of crystals in ice, called fabric, is an important factor in understanding ice sheet flow because preferentially aligned crystals cause the ice to flow more easily in certain directions. Fabrics have traditionally been determined by using thin sections cut at intervals in the ice core. A new method of determining fabric is sonic logging, where a probe is lowered into a borehole to measure the velocity of compressional waves through the ice. Sonic logging is valuable because it provides a continuous profile of the ice fabric and averages the alignment of ice crystals over a larger volume than do thin sections. The Principal Investigators will measure sonic velocity profiles at the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2), Greenland Ice Core Program (GRIP), and Northern Greenland Ice Core Program (NGRIP) and use them to: 1) improve the understanding of the relationship between thin section and sonic velocity data; 2) determine if sonic velocity data can be used to identify the depth at which paleoclimate record continuity is lost and if so, formulate criteria to identify this depth; and 3) provide verification and input data for anisotropic flow law models. Sonic velocity profiles, combined with thin section data, will be used to investigate how sonic velocities and thin section data can be combined to better determine ice fabric. A fabric estimation model will be developed that uses thin section data and velocity profiles to predict fabric parameters and their uncertainty and spatial variability. The sonic velocity profiles will be used to determine if the depth at which the paleoclimate record continuity is lost can be identified from sonic logging. This determination was facilitated at GISP2 and GRIP by comparing two paleoclimate records because they correlate highly above this depth and diverge below it. NGRIP will provide another important set of data because this location was chosen specifically to recover ice that was found to have disturbed stratigraphy at GISP2 and GRIP. Finally, the GISP2, GRIP, and NGRIP sonic logs will be used to verify and constrain the latest generation of ice sheet flow models that use an anisotropic flow law to include the effect of fabric doc5253 none The project focuses on the problem of recognizing objects in outdoor images acquired under unknown conditions when only a few pixels are available on the object. The development of this capability would enable the recognition of small or partially obscured objects at large distances thereby enhancing the performance of systems for many applications such as wide-area search and image registration. A recognition system that operates in an uncontrolled outdoor environment must overcome several substantial challenges. The appearance of an object in an outdoor scene is highly variable due to spatial and temporal variation in the illumination and atmospheric conditions. Also, in images of distant or obscured objects, modeled object surfaces may appear at subpixel scale therefore reducing the usefulness of geometric features. This project will address several important scientific issues. Methods will be developed to build hyperspectral subspace models for materials of interest and backgrounds using physical models and the underlying image data. Models will also developed that describe the statistical properties of these subspaces. These models will be the basis of statistical algorithms for recognition that are invariant to the scene conditions. The models and algorithms will be evaluated using a range of hyperspectral data acquired under different conditions in different environments. An important goal is to determine the fundamental bounds on recognition performance in unknown environments as spatial resolution degrades doc5254 none This is a collaborative investigation involving experimental geochemistry and microbiology to quantitatively assess the relative roles of microbial activity and geochemical mass transport processes in low temperature hydrothermal environments. The study entails both closed and open-system experiments, with and without chemolithotrophic thermophiles, cultured at temperatures from approximately 70 to 100 degrees Centigrade, and 250 bars doc5251 none The goal of this collaborative research project involving Christos Faloutsos and Ngai Hang Chang at Carnegie Mellon (award ) and Tara Madhyastha at U of Cal Santa Cruz (award ) is to develop and apply statistical and datamining tools to analyze bursty time sequences, with emphasis on I O traffic optimization. The interdisciplinary team includes researchers in computer science, computer engineering and statistics, and industry collaborators. The approach has three parts: (1) advanced statistical tools using the ``ARFIMA method; (2) wavelets and the related ``80-20 law to model disk traffic; and (3) incorporation of these models inside the so-called ``Active Disks , with the goal to build self-tuning, adaptive disk subsystems. The results will advance data mining and statistics as well as disk design. An easy-to-use toolkit T-REX will aid in I O and systems design, handling bursty traffic, and better buffering and prefetching. The theory behind the T-REX toolkit will be based on new data mining algorithms and statistical methods that model self-similar time sequences (like web and network traffic, in addition to I O traffic). The research team has strong ties with database, data mining and disk manufacturing industrial groups, and this will aid in testing the research toolkit and its technology transfer. It can be expected that the T-REX system will significantly aid the design of disk sub-systems with beneficial impact on the storage industry doc5254 none This is a collaborative investigation involving experimental geochemistry and microbiology to quantitatively assess the relative roles of microbial activity and geochemical mass transport processes in low temperature hydrothermal environments. The study entails both closed and open-system experiments, with and without chemolithotrophic thermophiles, cultured at temperatures from approximately 70 to 100 degrees Centigrade, and 250 bars doc5257 none This project will investigate micro-mechanical bi-stable systems for use in nonvolatile data storage and optomechanical computing, in harsh environments where conventional microelectronics face severe limitations. Such environments include high or low temperatures, and radiation as encountered above the earth s atmosphere (space exploration and satellite communication), in nuclear reactors or in other environments involving intense radiation. The proposed project will employ an approach based on our recent theoretical and experimental investigation on a MEMS bi-stable system that consists of a micro mechanical column compressed by an axial force so that it buckles in one of two possible states (0 or 1). The state of the column will be changed by the pressure of a moderate intensity laser beam, thus potentially enabling opto-mechanical computers and digital data storage. Being a mechanical system, it is inherently robust. Our long term vision is to develop micro-mechanical computational elements driven by a fixed light source such as CW laser or focussed sunlight. Such a continuous light source can be used to completely power a finite state computational machine using the elements proposed herein. This project will address four fundamental queries: (1) The mechanism by which an optical beam switches the state of the bi-stable system, such as light pressure or photo-induced stress. (2) The material of choice for computational elements that will sustain harsh environments, e.g., thermally grown Silicon dioxide on a silicon column. (3) The limit of miniaturization or the limit of the minimum force by which the state can be changed due to thermal noise. (4) Radiation damage: The effect of high energy particles encountered in space, and high electromagnetic fields on the stability of the bi-stable system, and the radiation damage of the material(s) will be studied at nanosecond intervals with nanometer resolution. We also propose to design and construct the basic memory (bi-stable multivibrator) and logic elements,(AND, OR, NOT) using variations of the MEMS bi-stable system. The above study will be a first step in applying micro mechanical systems for computational and data storage purposes in very harsh environments doc5258 none Becker 00- Recommended project is for acquisition and instrumentation costs for two Advanced Circulation Obviation Retrofit Kits (A-CORKs) that will be installed on Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Leg 196. These will be used for sustained observations of subsurface fluid pressures in three stratigraphic regions of the Nankai Trough subduction zone- the oceanic basement of the subducting plate, the decollement between the accretionary wedge and the subducting crust, and in major faults within the accretionary wedge. The advanced CORKs use multiple packer strings to independently seal off several regions of the borehole, in contrast to the original CORK design that integrated fluid pressure measurements over the entire borehole length. The A-CORKs will also allow for eventual sampling of in-situ fluids. This proposal is part of a larger, multi-national effort that includes Canadian and ODP resources in designing and fabricating the A-CORKs, installation of the A-CORKs and associated, Japanese-funded instrument strings by the ODP JOIDES Resolution drillship, and related logging-while-drilling (LWD) occurring in conjunction on the same cruise. Ship and submersible operations for follow-up data recovery and instrument servicing will be funded by the Japanese technology agency JAMSTEC doc5259 none This Small Grant project proposes to organize an international conference for presentation and discussion of models of partnership between universities and small manufacturing companies in the US and around the world that have proven to be efficient and effective. While major corporations have long been involved in such partnerships for research and development of new technologies, it makes even more sense for smaller manufacturers to do so, because they often lack R because smaller firms as a whole now hire more new graduates than larger companies; and because smaller firms are often more community oriented. The Advanced Manufacturing Institute of Kansas State University through its Manufacturing Learning Center and support from NSF, NIST and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers has developed an innovative model that integrates education and training, research, and economic development in partnership with a large number of small-to-medium-sized manufacturing companies. Other models of such partnerships exist elsewhere around the world. This conference will provide a forum for presentation and discussion of both the Kansas State activities and other successful working partnerships from around the world, thus publicizing the results of earlier NSF-supported research and extending the prior effort doc5260 none The long term goal of this research is to explore the molecular mechanisms that bacteria use for inter-cellular communication. This proposal focuses on a study of quorum sensing in the model bioluminescent marine bacterium Vibrio harveyi. V. harveyi has two quorum sensing circuits (Signalling System 1 and Signaling System 2) that converge to regulate light production (Lux). Each system is made up of a two-component sensor-autoinducer pair; LuxN AI-1 for System 1 and LuxQ AI-2 for System 2. Both sensors transduce information to a shared phosphorelay protein called LuxU, which in turn conveys the signal to the response regulator protein LuxO. Phospho-LuxO is indirectly responsible for repression of luciferase production at low cell density, because it activates the expression of a negative regulator of Lux. A transcriptional activator protein called LuxR is also required for expression of the luciferase structural operon. Results suggest that V. harveyi uses Signaling System 1 and AI-1 for intra-species communication and Signaling System 2 and AI-2 for inter-species communication. LuxO and RpoN are required for the repression of the expression of luminescence at low cell density. The hypothesis that both of these proteins are required for the activation of a repressor X at low cell density will be tested by isolating and characterizing mutations in the putative repressor gene doc5261 none The complex social lifestyles of ants are based on their ability to perform different tasks during an individual s lifetime (e.g. brood-care, guarding, foraging) and on learning and memory. These behaviors are controlled by the brain and depend on brain plasticity. The aim of the project is to study the causal relationship between the structure and function of the brain and the complex behavior that it controls. Particular brain regions and individual nerve cells that generate complex behavior will be analyzed in different ant species using diverse anatomical techniques. Morphological differences will be correlated with the behavioral performance of the respective species or guild member (e.g. forager versus nurse ant). The behavior and learning ability of each ant will be quantified in standardized tests (e.g. maze performance), the effect of brain lesions on the ant s behavior will be assessed, and the electrical activity of prominent nerve cells in the ant brain will be correlated with behavioral changes. Together, these techniques will help to understand how a small brain with a limited number of nerve cells can yet generate the behavioral plasticity required for the survival of the colony. Ants have to cope with the same general problems and physical constraints as larger animals and humans. Their brains function by the same principles and their nerve cells rely on the same cellular mechanisms and network properties. Unlike vertebrates including humans, where populations of thousands or millions of nerve cells control each small behavioral component, in ants much fewer cells orchestrate the behavior. Hence the effect of a single nerve cell s activity on behavioral changes is much stronger and can be studied much more directly in ants than in larger animals. This and their complex behavior and high learning capacities makes the ants particularly well suited as model systems for research on brain plasticity. Studying the changes that occur in the brains of ants that learn a simple task may help us to better understand how our own brains acquire new capabilities and optimize our behavioral output doc5262 none This collaborative project involving Drs. A. Robock and D. Robinson of Rutgers University and Dr. K. Vinnikov of the University of Maryland will explore the connection between snow and soil moisture anomalies and the timing and strength of the Indian summer monsoon. This analysis will include examining the links among snow, soil moisture, rainfall and circulation anomalies, and sea surface temperatures using special observations and the NCEP reanalysis data. The principal investigators (PIs) will exploit a newly available data base of soil moisture observations, with more than 400 stations covering most of Eurasia, including the former Soviet Union, Mongolia, China, and India, along with an updated data set of snow extent and snow water equivalent observations. A critical part of the activity will be the PIs careful assessment and quality control of the diverse observations that make up the data set. The data set will be made available to the wider community via the web doc5263 none The Villafranchian is a European time interval based on the mammals which lived from roughly 3.5-1.5 million years ago, an interval which saw important events in human and faunal evolution. Although this concept was first proposed nearly 150 years ago, there is still uncertainty as to the timing of the unit and subunit boundaries. The PI s will attempt to clarify the situation through reanalysis of one of the major late Villafranchian mammalian localities, the volcanic explosion-crater lake (maar) of Seneze, in central France. No major paleontological collection has been undertaken at Seneze in 60 years, while stratigraphic and dating studies since have yielded conflicting results. Neither the precise location of productive findspots nor who controls access to them is known, and there may be more than one fossil-bearing horizon. The team effort will involve three complementary approaches: 1) to clarify the local geology of this complex site; 2) to utilize a combination of dating methods on the site and its fauna; and 3) to collect mammalian fossils from known points within the revised and dated stratigraphy. New specimens of important mammals such as the terrestrial primate Paradolichopithecus may result from this study. This application requests funds for a one-week exploratory visit in June . If that is successful, a stratigraphic-geochronological season will be attempted in , with full-scale collecting of fossils planned for and doc5264 none The 5th International Symposium on Radiative Corrections (RADCOR- ) will be co-hosted by the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. The conference will be held from September 11-15, . The conference will bring together theorists and experimentalists in elementary particle physics in a highly interactive format to confront the Standard Model of the elementary particles and basic forces, and its possible extensions, with a wide range of observational data. The unifying theme of the conference will be small effects which can be predicted with some precision, and so can serve to test the Standard Model and to search for new physics beyond it. Such effects have already taught us a great deal about the Standard Model and about possible new physics. A conference to consider the recent and future study of such effects will be very worthwhile doc5265 none Hasler, Paul Georgia Institute of Technology ITR: High Density Analog Computing Arrays This project is investigating an alternate model of real-time sensory signal processing based upon a mixture of analog and digital computation. The arrays under study perform analog computations directly in modified EEPROM memory cells; each cell acts as a multiplier that multiplies the input signal by an analog value stored on a floating gate. Potential advantages of analog computing arrays include lower latency than digital computers, lower power consumption, and parallel processing of many analog inputs. The project encompasses experimental demonstration of analog computing arrays, simulation and design tools to make the technology accessable to DSP designers, and investigation of the robustness and reliability of the technology. Several single-chip signal processing systems will be developed, including adaptive matched filters, a cepstrum calculater, systems for hidden Markov models, and a multi-directional filter array doc5266 none Trace elements, especially those that may be used as paleoproxies, behave as lattice impurities that regulate biomineralization and provide critical information on crystal growth history. For example, incorporation of Mg2+ has been shown to modify the morphology, solubility and polymorphic expression of CaCO3 biominerals. In addition, Mg2+ is the principal inhibitor of calcite growth in natural waters, thereby influencing the size and reactivity of the biogeochemically significant carbonate reservoir. However, the fundamental mechanistic interactions of Mg2+ with calcite surfaces remain controversial. For this reason, the PI will use an experimental approach that integrates techniques from aqueous geochemistry and surface sciences to quantify the kinetic and thermodynamic controls on Mg and Sr contents of calcite grown in 0.1 M NaCl and synthetic seawater solutions. The PI also will determine the mechanism(s) by which Mg and Sr modify calcite growth properties and morphology and construct a quantitative and mechanistic model of calcite growth that provides a baseline for understanding the complexity of the influences of biological processes on the elemental composition of carbonate minerals. Results from this research will provide a baseline for understanding the influence of trace elements incorporated into calcite. This information is needed to interpret the compositions of biogenic calcite and in understanding paleotemperature data doc5267 none Fulton The Colloquium Links between Recombination and Replication: Vital Roles of Recombination will be held from Nov. 10-12, , at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center in Irvine, California. Attendees will include geneticists, biochemists, physical chemists, and molecular biologists. Recent examples in Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae have provided increasing evidence that links between recombination and replication are widespread. It is now clear that replication forks frequently stall or break, and that recombination enzymes forestall cell death by rescuing those forks. These findings have important implications for biology, medicine, industry and agriculture. A full understanding of the functions of recombination in the repair of damage to DNA will provide further insights into cell division, the multifarious response to DNA damage, and the mechanisms that limit carcinogenesis. Clues may be found as well for the biotechnology of gene targeting. In bacteria, the repair of collapsed replication forks has a dramatic impact on viability, the further study of which may suggest new targets for therapy directed at bacterial infections. The goal of the Colloquium is to stimulate further research on the connections between DNA recombination and replication, and to increase awareness of this developing area among colleagues and students throughout the biomedical community. Toward the achievement of that goal, an entire issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences will be devoted to research reports emanating from the Colloquium doc5268 none PI: Alberto Palloni, Kristin A Velyvis This project studies the social networks and religious beliefs of migrant women in Senegal. These economically disadvantaged women have a high risk for exposure to HIV, and this research seeks to identify network and belief structures that may be protective in reducing risks. Most of the data collection will occur in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, a destination for large numbers of migrant workers. Structured interviews will be conducted with women of two ethnic groups to establish demographic characteristics (age, education, occupation, migration history, marital status, and other facts), and those will be used to select probability samples corresponding to the migrant populations. Further interviews with women selected in the sampling will inquire about sexual partners and practices, friendship and family ties, and religious beliefs. Data analyses will focus on potentially protective effects of social networks and religious beliefs in reducing the incidence of unprotected sexual activity, the frequency of sexual activity, and the number of partners. Regressions, using density of social networks and homophily in ethnicity, village of origin, and religion as independent variables, permit assessment of hypotheses regarding social structures and sexual practices. Networks are expected to directly affect sexual practices, while effects of religion are expected to be indirect, operating through networks. Results of this research include developing network models, establishing a network data set, and improved understanding of how social networks interact with what might appear to be highly individual decisions regarding sexual practices doc5269 none Tyson This is an acquisition award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program to the Foundation @ New Jersey Institute of Technology. The institution will acquire a 10 Tesla superconducting magnet for magneto-structural and magneto-electronic studies of complex metals such as transition-metal oxide (TMO) systems. The instrument will be located at the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven National Laboratory. It will be used to conduct research that will elucidate the lattice-magnetic field correlations and field dependent local moments. The results will assist in the development of more accurate theoretical models of these materials. The study will focus on the manganese doped TMO systems (manganites) and the ruthenium doped (ruthenates) TMO systems. These materials exhibit novel charge transport and spin correlations, including colossal magnetoresistance, and the possible coexistence of superconductivity and ferromagnetic correlations at the atomic level. The exact details of this coexistence are not understood. Utilizing plane polarized synchrotron radiation researchers will be able to examine structural deformation parallel to and transverse to the applied magnetic field and correlate these structural deformations with magnetoresistance data. Additionally, direct measurements of the local magnetic moments on the transition metal sites with circular polarized radiation (x-ray magnetic circular dichroism) will be performed. Undergraduates, graduate students and experienced researchers will conduct research utilizing this magnet. Use of the magnet will be integrated into laboratory courses. This is an acquisition award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program to the Foundation @ New Jersey Institute of Technology. The institution will acquire a 10 Tesla superconducting magnet for magneto-structural and magneto-electronic studies of complex metals such as transition-metal oxide systems and to train students to perform modern physics experiments. The instrument will be located at the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven National Laboratory (NSLS). Local structural distortions play a key role in the determination of the properties of complex metals such as transition-metal oxide systems. This magnet will give researchers the capability of measuring x-ray absorption spectra and magnetic circular x-ray dichroism in varying magnetic fields. Utilizing the unique properties of x-ray radiation from the NSLS, researchers will be able to measure atomic structural deformation parallel to and transverse to the applied magnetic field and correlate the structural deformations with changes in the electron transport. In addition, the atomic level magnetic properties on the transition metal sites with circularly polarized radiation (x-ray magnetic circular dichroism) will be studied. The elucidation of the lattice-magnetic field correlations and local magnetic properties will assist in the development of theoretical models of these materials. Undergraduates, graduate students and experienced researchers will conduct research utilizing this magnet. Use of the magnet will be integrated into laboratory courses doc5270 none Kemp This technology development project will address how modern molecular techniques can provide new and fundamental insights into marine microbial communities and their activities. Studies of microbial processes have lagged far behind the technological revolution in oceanography. This project, applying biosensor technology, will continue development of a prototype fiber-optic, nucleic acid hybridization biosensor for rapid, quantitative detection of the abundance and expression of targeted bacterial genes, and the activity of targeted organisms in a mixed microbial community. The biosensor is novel in its design, in its application to marine microbial process studies, and in the proposed use of RNA targets that provide a natural signal amplification to increase sensitivity. The mail objective is to develop a highly sensitive, flexible instrument that can be applied to a broad suite of ecological problems. The components of the prototype system are relatively inexpensive, compact, and simple to operate. Procedures for extracting and purifying nucleic acids require ordinary laboratory skills and do not require any unusual equipment not already found in a typical molecular-biology laboratory. It is intended that the proposed instrument and analytical procedures be broadly useful and eventually be automated such that the system would be useful for remote moored and continuous underway monitoring of marine microbial processes doc5271 none The goal of this project is to investigate the effects of culture conditions on recombinant protein production, specifically the effects of cell adhesion on yield and glycosylation patterns of recombinant proteins produced in Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells. The specific goals for the POWRE project are: (1) to develop expertise in the techniques for studying protein glycosylation including high performance liquid chromatography and gel electrophoresis; (2) to determine what probes and imaging techniques are best suited for studies of the cytoskeleton for suspension and adherent cultures of CHO cells; and (3) to obtain preliminary data analyzing the glycoforms of tissue plasminogen activator produced under the different culture conditions and determine which of the techniques for studying protein glycosylation will be best suited for future studies doc5272 none Halpin-Healy This grant for Research at an Undergraduate Institution (RUI) provides support for theoretical research on the statistical mechanics of directed polymers in random media (DPRM) and domain-walls in impurity-stricken magnets. Because of common technical aspects, the DPRM has been christened a baby-version of the spin-glass problem. As such, the T=0 DPRM is a matter of global optimization, exhibiting an ultrametric tree structure reminiscent of those found in river delta basins, capillary blood vessel networks, and neuronal arrays in the brain. A Hopf-Cole transformation maps the DPRM to the far-from-equilibrium dynamics of Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) stochastic growth models. A final payoff follows from the blood relation of KPZ and noisy Burgers equations, the latter relevant to nonequilibrium kinetics of driven lattice gases. An important goal at hand is further exploration of this rich KPZ triumvirate: DPRM, kinetic roughening, and driven lattice gases. With the DPRM becoming a classic problem of ill-condensed matter, however, future research will focus on diverse, general issues concerning geometric complexity, including scaling of extremal trajectories and networks in geomorphology, evolutionary biology, and other multidisciplinary statistical mechanics contexts. %%% This grant for Research at an Undergraduate Institution (RUI) provides support for theoretical research on the statistical mechanics of directed polymers in random media (DPRM) and domain-walls in impurity-stricken magnets. These statistical models have far-reaching applications in addition to their intrinsic fundamental interest. The research involves extensive undergraduate participation doc5273 none Surround perception is crucial for an immersive sense of presence in communication and for efficient navigation and surveillance in robotics. To enable surround perception, new omnidirectional systems provide a new impetus for us to rethink the way images are acquired and analyzed. This project will be focused on two fundamental issues: the intrinsic geometric properties of catadioptric omnidirectional sensors and the space-variant signal analysis of omnidirectional images with non-uniform resolution. The PI has proven in the preliminary work that every catadioptric system can be shown to be equivalent to a generalized stereographic projection from a virtual sphere to the real image plane. He intends to develop a unifying framework for all catadioptric systems, where conventional perspective cameras will be just a special case, and exhaustively study invariants of the projections on reflective urfaces as well as efficient representations for reconstruction and motion estimation. Catadioptric designs need a new signal-theoretic treatment since shift-invariant processing does not apply in the non-uniform resolution of omnidirectional images. This research will make use of integral transforms that map the 2D signal to the spatial-frequency domain of a plane with virtually uniform resolution. The investigation will be extended from the simple edge detection to template matching and to the computation of optical flow in omnidirectional images doc5274 none Kroll Complex fluids such as amphiphilic mixtures are characterized by structure on mesoscopic length-scales, ranging from nano-to micro-meters, and energy scales comparable to the thermal energy. The mesoscale structures of these systems endow them with many interesting and unique features, and they are widely used in the processing, chemical, and energy industries. The modeling of these systems requires the use of coarse grained or mesoscopic approaches that capture the essential physics of atomistic systems on the length scales of interest. The mesoscopic structures which form in a wide range of self-assembling fluids consist of membranes which divide the material into distinct volumes. Such two-dimensional assemblies can form a large number of thermodynamic phases, such as vesicles, lamellar or cubic crystals, and disordered bicontinuous networks. They also determine the architecture of biological systems. At the mesoscale, the elastic properties of these assemblies can be described using network models which consist of two-dimensional sheets of tethered particles. These models have proven to be very versatile, and they can be used to model fixed connectivity surfaces, such as polymerized membranes, fiber mats, and thin elastic shells, dynamically triangulated surfaces, such as fluid membranes, and dynamically triangulated surfaces with fluctuating topology, such as microemulsions and sponge phases. Monte Carlo simulations of network models have made a number of important contributions to our understanding of the equilibrium thermodynamics, structure, and phase behavior of these systems. Experience gained using these simulations will be used to address new issues involving both the equilibrium and non-equilibrium behavior of these systems. In particular, we will study the vesicle size distribution in dilute surfactant solutions, budding and vesiculation of clathrin coated membranes, and the shape, fluctuation spectrum, interaction, and dynamics of active membranes. We will also develop and implement a new particle-based mesoscopic simulation technique for fluid flow. This approach retains many of the attractive features of other mesoscopic simulation schemes such as the lattice-Boltzmann and dissipative particle dynamics methods while avoiding several of their shortcomings. Since it is a particle method, collisonal coupling to embedded polymers, membranes and vesicles is straightforward. A significant benefit of the method is the ease and efficiency with which it can be implemented on parallel computers. Part of this work will involve the extension of this appoach to treat binary and amphiphilic mixtures, using Landau-Ginzburg models to describe the equation of state of the fluid, and part will entail simulation studies of the rheology and dynamics of vesicles in flow, using network models to describe the membrane degrees of freedom and the new mesoscopic simulation technique for the solvent degrees of freedom. One goal of this research is to obtain a better understanding of the viscoelastic behavior of vesicles under capillary flow conditions. This work will be a first step towards integrating simulation techniques for network models of membranes with mesoscopic solvent simulation techniques. We anticipate that this approach will have significant modeling advantages over more traditional methods for simulating flows with dynamic interfaces. Furthermore, this work will lead to advanced parallel algorithms for mesoscopic modeling which we believe will be competitive with appoaches based on continuum mechanics. %%% This research will study the properties of complex fluids, such as those found in biological and polymeric solutions, using computer simulation techniques. New simulation methods will be developed and applied using parallel computers. The research has wide application doc5275 none Hajimiri Most of the recent work in the area of wireless networks has been focused on systems operating at 2.4 and 5 GHz. The bandwidth available at these frequencies limits the maximum data rates for these networks. Very little has been done to use frequencies at or above 20 GHz for wireless networks. The major advantages of higher frequencies are higher available bandwidths, smaller antenna sizes and possibility of using phased array structures for directionality and gain boosting. The major impediment to operation at these frequencies is the large hardware cost, which originates from the large amount of circuitry that has to be done in gallium-arsenide or other III-V semiconductors. An alternative approach using a large silicon integrated circuit core and a small gallium-arsenide front-end is proposed to remedy this problem. The proposed approach uses an array of resonant microstrip patches etched on a 5-cm square printed circuit board to receive and transmit signals. The antenna system can provide a gain of 20 dB, and this great directionality is available for both transmitting and receiving. The array can scan in azimuth to find, and communicate to other units on the network, while rejecting undesired interference cause by other users. The system has a gallium-arsenide monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) that only consists of a low noise amplifier (LNA) for the receive path and a power amplifier (PA) on the transmit side. Due to the high cost of gallium arsenide components, every effort is taken to minimize the size of the gallium-arsenide circuitry. Silicon integrated circuit is at the heart of the system and is the most critical part of it. It contains the first down- and up-conversion blocks, i.e., the fully integrated frequency synthesizer operating at 21.6-GHz and two mixers down- and up-converting the signal from and to 24 GHz from a 2.45-GHz intermediate frequency (IF). This choice of IF frequency is not arbitrary and is to allow for bypassing the front-end circuitry and using a lower-frequency resonance of the array to effectively act as a single patch antenna receiving at 2.45GHz ISM band for finding other users and low bit rate data transmission in so-called sniffing mode. The fully-integrated 21.6-GHz silicon frequency synthesizer is based on using distributed voltage controlled oscillators (DVCO), which make it possible to use transistors close or even beyond their cut-off frequency, fT. These DVCOs produce a reasonable output power with good phase noise performance and large tuning range, using a novel tuning technique, known as delay-balance, current-steering tuning. A super-harmonic injection-locked frequency dividers can be used as the prescaler to divide the output frequency to lower frequencies that can be handled by digital dynamically-loaded frequency dividers to further divide to reference oscillator frequency to maintain phase lock. To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, a 0.35-mm CMOS DVCO operating at 10 GHz with 12% tuning range and a phase noise of -104dBc Hz at 1-MHz offset from the carrier is designed and tested. Also two silicon bipolar DVCOs operating at 12 GHz and 17 GHz are demonstrated, further verifying the feasibility of such systems. A complete analysis of MOS switching mixer makes it possible to exploit the higher bandwidth of the MOS transistor when used as switches and not gain devices. This approach which is based on stochastic differential equations with cyclostationary sources is used to optimize silicon up- and down-conversion mixers performance at 24 GHz. It is shown that high performance circuitry for the first IF sniff mode RF can be implemented in silicon, making it possible to integrate the complete back-end of the transceiver doc5276 none Flowering plants synthesize diverse metabolites, many of which are stored in the vacuoles. Many such secondary metabolites are toxic or highly reactive and must be sequestered from the cell to prevent damage; interestingly, many of these stored compounds are useful drugs, because of their specific interactions with enzymes and other cellular constituents. To understand how plants manage toxic metabolites the mechanism of vacuolar sequestration for anthocyanin pigments and the precursor flavonoid compounds will be analyzed using a combination of genetics and biochemistry. Anthocyanins are ideal model compounds because so much is already known about their biochemistry and the genetic control of their synthesis. These pigments confer the red blue purple colors in many flowers; the pigments are members of a large chemical class, the flavonoids, widely distributed in green plants. Flavonoids are natural sunscreens against UV damage, attractants for pollinators, signals in plant-microbe interaction, and molecules required for successful pollen-stigma interaction. Flavonoids are also an important component of a healthy human diet. Despite their good features, flavonoids cause cellular damage by oxidizing proteins and intercalating into DNA increasing mutation frequency; such damage is prevented if the flavonoids are sequestered efficiently into the vacuolar compartment. Presently, it is known that the BZ2 protein of maize and the AN9 protein of Petunia are required at an early step in the transfer of anthocyanin from the cytoplasm to the vacuole; mutant plants lacking these proteins accumulate anthocyanin in the cytoplasm. In this project the role of MRP29 in moving anthocyanin across the tonoplast membrane will be tested. The current model is that BZ2 is a carrier protein for anthocyanin; it delivers this cargo to the MRP29 transporter, which in turn transfers the cargo into the vacuole. MRP29, an ATP Cassette Binding Protein transporter, is regulated by the same transcription factors that are required to activate the biosynthetic genes of the anthocyanin pathway. Research will focus on establishing whether MRP29 is localized to the tonoplast membrane of the vacuole, on the impact of mutation at MRP29 on anthocyanin sequestration, on the interaction of MRP29 with BZ2 and related proteins in vivo and in vitro, and on the requirements for anthocyanin sequestration in an in vitro assay that will be established during the research project. Mutant yeast cells, lacking all ABC transporters, will be transformed to express the maize MRP29 protein; using vacuoles prepared from such yeast strains, tonoplasts containing just one plant ABC transporter can be purified. This material will be used to test the model at a more refined biochemical level doc5277 none This project brings together two NSF I UCRC s to improve accelerated life testing (ALT) of vehicle electronics. The Center for Advanced Vehicle Electronics (CAVE) of Auburn University with partner with the Quality and Reliability Engineering (QRE) Center of Rutgers University and Arizona State University to investigate the relationship between wear, degradation and failure of vehicle controllers as experienced in the field with that expected by the results of ALT conducted in the laboratory. DaimlerChrysler Electronics of Huntsville, Alabama supplies the test bed. Vehicle electronics are subject to stress due to temperature, humidity, cycling and other environmental hazards. The materials that comprise the controllers are susceptible to the effects of corrosion and oxidation. The solder that connects the controller components can crack due to fatigue and creep under high temperature and thermal cycling stresses. These failures affect the performance of the vehicle from slightly to severely. The research of this project will develop a general methodology for specifying accelerated life tests so that they result in an accurate characterization of the degradation and failures that will be experienced in the filed. The failure mechanisms for the assembly materials in field units will be investigated in the development of the accelerated life tests. ALT standards, which new units must pass prior to marketing, will be adequate without being overly conservative, potentially allowing new designs and new materials to be used in vehicle electronics doc5278 none C. Petty, Michigan State University The ability to predict the low-order statistical properties of turbulent flows is an important aspect of modern engineering design. The exact equations governing the instantaneous pressure and velocity fields of constant density, Newtonian fluids are known. However, the Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS-) equation for the mean velocity is statistically unclosed. This closure problem has been an intense area of research for more that fifty years. Current commercial CFD codes offer closure models of varying complexity. Although the Boussinesq approximation for the Reynolds stress limits the utility of the k-e theory, engineers attempting to understand the flow behavior within complex spatial domains nevertheless apply this theory. Unfortunately, for many practical flows with streamline curvature, the use of a linear gradient type model for the Reynolds stress may produce qualitatively results. Significant efforts has been expended to address the short comings of the k-e theory by developing closure models for statistical correlation s that appear in the unclosed second-order moment equation for the Reynolds stress. The approach is less appealing for design in astute as six additional non-linear partial differential equations must be solved in addition to the vector-valued RANS equation, the scalar-valued e-equation, and the continuity equation. LES and DNS methods are limited to benchmark flows for model calibration. Unfortunately, computational demands associated with LES and DNS prohibit the use of these methods for routine engineering design calculations in complex geometries. With this research a spatial smoothing approximation is used to derive an algebraic preclosure representation for the Reynolds stress in terns of a prestress correlation. This novel theoretical approach stems directly from the exact dynamical equation governing velocity fluctuations. The prestress, which is a self-correlation of an effective fluctuating force per unit mass of fluid, stems from the divergence of fluctuations in the instantaneous Reynolds stress and pressure fluctuations. The working hypothesis for the research is that the prestress correlation, which depends explicitly on fourth order statistical quantities, is more amenable to a universal phenomenological closure that the Reynolds stresses itself. The resulting new algebraic Reynolds stress model will open up new opportunities for engineering design. An isotropic prestress (IPS-) model and algebraic prestress (AAPS-) model will be validated for flows with strong streamline curvature and integrated into a commercial software code, Fluent. The new closure model will be tested and optimized for a class of statistically stationary benchmark flows with streamline curvature. The IPS- and AAPS- models will be used to describe the internal flow structures encountered in hydrocyclone separators, industrial scale mixers, and swirl combustors doc5279 none This project is concerned with the problem of recovery, representation, and recognition of shapes in images. The PI proposes to use the symmetry map, the shock graph of an edge map, as an intermediate-level representation for 2D shape. Deformations of shape are then expressed as a sequence of symmetry transforms which correspond to the inherent instabilities of skeletons (shock transitions). The optimal deformation path between two shapes is found using an edit distance approach to finding the least action sequence of transforms, or edits, on the shock graph. The cost of this path is used as a dissimilarity measure for indexing into image databases. This approach also allows for shape modeling and design, the construction of morphing sequences, and deformable templates. In 3D, The PI proposes to reduce the three-dimensional skeleton to a shock scaffold consisting of 1D space curves on which the 3D skeleton can be analytically constructed, leading to significant savings in recovery and storage of complex shapes, e.g., Michelangelo s Pieta, human lungs, etc. The research is generic and can potentially significantly impact a number of industrial and medical applications, including shape-based retrieval and construction of computational atlases doc5280 none This project seeks to develop a novel class of computer interfaces centered on a vision-based interaction paradigm, and human augmentation using a range of panoramic sensors and intelligent controllers to provide assistive technology to disabled users. The goal of such interfaces is to enable people with physical disabilities such as impaired limbs, paralysis, or tremors to overcome difficulties associated with accessing computers and products with embedded computers such as wheelchairs, household and office electronic equipment, and robotic aids with traditional input devices. The goal is to create the framework, architecture, scientific algorithms, and augmentative hardware and software to facilitate (a) interaction; (b) control and tasking; and (c) programming of computers and computer-controlled smart devices. There are two main sets of research problems that need to be solved: (a) the development of novel, flexible, portable, adaptable interfaces that allow users with physical disabilities to interact with computers and computer controlled devices by touching and feeling; and (b) human augmentation via a combination of inexpensive sensors and controllers, along with a set of algorithms and software for computer mediated control. This research will result in the next generation of interfaces for users to interact with computers and robot assistants, and more generally, devices with embedded controllers. Although the immediate goal is to develop the basic framework, methods, and algorithms using the smart wheelchair as a test product, the basic ideas will be applicable to a wider range of products doc5281 none Steele Continuing support via the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will permit U.S. ocean scientists in the academic research community to participate in specific activities of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) and the Scientific Committee for Oceanic Research (SCOR). These activities are of particular interest to the ocean sciences community and the National Science Foundation. ICES is an intergovernmental organization that coordinates data and information exchange regarding scientific research, management of fisheries, environmental monitoring, and oceanographic research matters that are of common interest to countries bordering the North Atlantic. SCOR serves primarily as an organization to facilitate international collaboration of ocean research through the formation of working groups and publication of findings on various marine topics. Under this award U.S. academic research scientists will participate in selected ICES and SCOR activities in - doc5282 none This award is for a project that involves coring and initial analysis of sediments in a deep, long-lived bog in the heart of the glaciated Sierra Nevada. The bog is unique in western North America because of its mountain location, depth, and potential to preserve sediments that date through most if not the entire last glacial cycle (~70,000-120,000 years). The location is particularly crucial, because the bog should record changes in sedimentology, slope stability, sediment geochemistry, paleomagnetism, and paleoecology in an environment that heretofore has not yielded a continuous record that dates past the last glacial maximum (~20,000 year B.P.) The investigators propose to drill through the Tioga outwash in the bog and into the underlying sediments recovering continuous core. They will then do basic analyses of the core sediments and obtain enough radiocarbon ages to demonstrate the kind of paleoclimate record that is potentially available from the bog doc5283 none Geology (42) This award supports a workshop, Building the Quantitative Skills of Students in Geoscience Courses, that will be offered in the summer of . In the last century, the geosciences have changed from being a predominantly descriptive to a more quantitative science. However, many geoscience courses, particularly those at the entry-level, are non-quantitative, many faculty have little experience in effectively incorporating quantitative exercises into entry-level courses, and many students do not feel confident about their ability to use mathematics to solve geoscience problems or to make well-informed decisions as effective citizens. Thus, a central question facing geoscience education is the role of quantitative skills development in geoscience courses. The National Association of Geoscience Teachers workshop will provide an opportunity for participants to learn about best practices and current issues in building the quantitative skills of non-majors and majors, revise a particular course to more effectively use quantitative problems to promote deeper understanding of geoscience, develop specific activities and assignments for that particular course that engage students, and address other issues associated with teaching mathematical skills in context. Workshop presenters will share inquiry-based activities and assignments that are data-rich and promote active learning. Workshop participants will leave the workshop with specific strategies for developing, implementing, and assessing exercises that will build the quantitative skills of students and use effective pedagogies, all with an aim of improving student learning in geoscience courses. The workshop participants include geoscience and mathematics faculty members from a variety of institutions, including two-year institutions, and some geoscience graduate students. Participants are strongly encouraged to attend in teams that might include faculty members from paired two-year and four-year schools, geoscience and mathematics education faculty from the same institution, or a graduate teaching assistant and a geology faculty member. Presenters include geoscience and mathematics faculty from two-year and four-year colleges universities. Issues addressed in the workshop include the specific quantitative skills to be developed, strategies to most effectively teach such skills, standards for teaching mathematics developed by the mathematics and mathematics education community, examples of best practices with a particular emphasis on entry-level geoscience courses, strategies to support students in learning more quantitative skills, and models for collaboration between geoscience and mathematics mathematics education programs, various assessment strategies, and other related topics. Following the workshop, participants and presenters will submit activities, assignments, and problems sets to be included in an electronic publication to enable wide dissemination of workshop results doc5284 none Under the direction of Dr. Joyce Marcus, MS Christina Elson will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. She will continue ongoing archaeological research at the site of San Martin Tilcajete, located in the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico. Archaeologists wish to understand the processes which lead to the development of social complexity and MS Elson s work focuses on a latter stage of this progression: the rise of the state. Evidence clearly indicates that early states arose independently in many parts of the world and scientists believe that through comparison of individual examples general underlying processes can be discerned. The Oaxaca region is important from this perspective because it saw the rise of the Zapotec state approximately 2,000 years ago. While considerable research has been conducted at Monte Alban, the capital, relatively little is known about the hinterland regions which came under centralized rule and MS Elson s research addresses this issue. Her work at the secondary outlying center of San Martin Tilcajete will contribute to an understanding of the role elites played in governance through investigation of local elites and their relationship to elites at the capital of Monte Alban. Scholars recognize that prehispanic Mesoamerican elites were a powerful group who comprised a very small percentage of the overall population. Although they made decisions that had far reaching consequences for themselves and their followers, it is difficult to acquire the archaeological data necessary to document the full range of variety in their decision making behavior. The elite at Monte Alban used many different political, economic and ideological tactics to integrate previously independent polities into the early state. However, while excavation data have revealed the presence of a similar group at San Martin Tilcajete, a clear picture of their behavior is not available. Since the site existed as an independent entity prior to incorporation into the Zapotec state it would be valuable to know how this group adapted during this fundamental change. In prior work MS Elson uncovered an elite residence and with NSF support she will continue her excavations to obtain comparative data from other contexts such as public buildings and commoner households. On this basis a more comprehensive picture can be developed of early state level administration. This research is important because it will yield data of interest to many archaeologists. It will shed new light on the rise of complex societies and assist in training a promising young scientist doc5285 none Recommended project for Pb isotopic analysis of olivine-hosted melt inclusions from mid-ocean ridge baslats (MORBs) from a geochemically anomalous segment of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (MAR), with a goal of examining the origin, amplitude, and scale lengths of chemical heterogeneity of the MORB source mantle. Analysis will occur by an innovative, new technique using the ion microprobe to analyze melt inculsions that are 40 um or large in size, examining melt inclusion isotopic heterogeneity that occurs within individual olivine crystals, within individual samples, and within an individual ridge segment. About 50 melt inclusions will be analyzed from a number of individual lavas to examine within-flow heterogeneity. The samples to be analyzed are from 12-16 degrees N on the MAR, where a range of PB isotopic composition occurs in host samples, and include individual samples showing great diversity in their melt inclusions compositions. This data will be used to test and calibrate models of mantle melting and melt transport associated with slow spreading ridges such as the MAR doc5286 none NSF Equipment Proposal: Integrated Optical-Force and Scanning-Probe Microscope Raj Rajagopalan, University of Florida The funds requested through this proposal will be used to construct an optical-tweezer-probe for a scanning optical microscope and to add dynamic light scattering peripherals to the instrument. The resulting optical force microscope will be used to study polymer-induced forces at solid-liquid interfaces and to develop techniques for measuring dynamic compliance of polymer layers. The requested additions will enhance the capability of the basic instrument so that a number of related problems, such as mechanical response of oil-surfactant-water interfaces and fluorescent microscopy on single polymer chains, can be studied. The overall objective of this grant is to incorporate a device for optical manipulation of small particles in a microscope. A tightly focused laser beam trained on a small particle allows one to manipulate and move the particle using the forces generated by the light beam. The combination of such a laser tweezer with a scanning optical microscope allows one to use the optically held particle as a probe to study local interactions on a surface. The laser beam holding the particle behaves like an invisible spring on the particle, and the stiffness of this spring can be changed easily by adjusting the laser power. Therefore, the optically held probe allows one to study very soft surfaces such as polymer chains on a surface or a liquid liquid interface. This opens up new ways to study the mechanical and dynamic properties of polymer layers, single polymer chains, surfactants at interfaces, and the like. The implications of such phenomena extend to a number of important problems in engineering and the sciences, such as stability of biological and pharmaceutical dispersions, polymer compatibility with biomedical surfaces, and environmental separation processes involving particulates doc5287 none McCartney WHOI A moored array will be deployed in the Vema Fracture Zone, a deep channel between the Guiana Basin and the eastern N. Atlantic through which bottom water from the Antarctic eneters the eastern N. Atlantic. The array of instruments will directly measure the transport and lateral structure of deep and bottom water flowing through the restricted channel and indirectly measure the degree of mixing and its variability. The instruments will stay in the water for roughly one year. The moored array will consist of four newly developed profiling moorings together with two more traditional curren meter moorings. Apart from the science questions that are the focus of the experiment, a by-product will be a comparison of new and traditional approaches to measuring abyssal circulation doc5262 none This collaborative project involving Drs. A. Robock and D. Robinson of Rutgers University and Dr. K. Vinnikov of the University of Maryland will explore the connection between snow and soil moisture anomalies and the timing and strength of the Indian summer monsoon. This analysis will include examining the links among snow, soil moisture, rainfall and circulation anomalies, and sea surface temperatures using special observations and the NCEP reanalysis data. The principal investigators (PIs) will exploit a newly available data base of soil moisture observations, with more than 400 stations covering most of Eurasia, including the former Soviet Union, Mongolia, China, and India, along with an updated data set of snow extent and snow water equivalent observations. A critical part of the activity will be the PIs careful assessment and quality control of the diverse observations that make up the data set. The data set will be made available to the wider community via the web doc5289 none This collaborative research project will examine the relation of emergent geographic information technologies to changing patterns of individual identification. The interdisciplinary research team will address the long-term social consequences, and in particular the consequences for personal privacy and identity, of the transition to digital geographic information systems. The project will provide a comprehensive comparative analysis of a set of case studies of information systems which incorporate both geographic and personally identifying data. This analysis will identify trends and tendencies in identification practice, theorize possible effects on social equity and power, conceptually separate local forces from more global ones, and suggest ways in which these technologies may be modified so that their use is more consistent with the protection of privacy and associated human values. The cases include developing systems in each of three areas of application: (1) Geodemographic Mapping; (2) Emergency Response Systems; and (3) Intelligent Vehicles and Mobile Telematics. The choice of cases is designed to facilitate comparisons along three dimensions. The first two dimensions concern the functions of the system: whether the geographic information system is intended to model places, populations, or mobile individuals; and whether the system is intended primarily to facilitate commerce or to regulate social risk. The third dimension concerns the jurisdiction within which the system operates. The chosen cases permit a complex set of comparisons that can hold aspects of each dimension constant, while varying aspects of the remaining dimensions. Each case study will employ the compilation and analysis of documentary and interview data to reveal the mechanics of the system s information collection and manipulation, the modeling of persons and places, and the institutional, economic, legal, and cultural context of the system s development and use. The research results will interest a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary groups, including scholars of communication and information technology, public policy, and geography, as well as public policy practitioners, technology developers, and privacy activists. Moreover, the research examines systems with which individuals will interact throughout their daily lives, often without meaningful knowledge and consent. Given the proliferation of systems based on geographic information and the growing public sensitivity to privacy and identity issues, the research results are likely to be of general public interest and valuable to policy discussions doc5290 none Under the direction of Dr. Kathleen Morrison, Mr. Enrique Rodriguez-Alegria will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. To examine the changes in pottery production and utilization in early colonial Mexico City, he will examine relevant collections there, study archival material in Spain and assist in neutron activation analysis of clay at the University of Missouri reactor facility. While the Spanish conquered the Aztec city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan in and subsequently formed the uppermost stratum in the society thus created, the situation was not straightforward. Intermarriage between conqueror and conquered was common and within the Spanish themselves significant social stratification took place. While documentary evidence provides some insight into this process, many details are unknown and through the study of ceramic material excavated from Mexico City residences significant additional insight can be attained. Immediately after the conquest Spanish conquistadors began to import serving vessels from Europe and China. These vessels were different from Aztec pottery because they were covered with a white glaze and had specialized shapes that pleased European tastes. Indigenous Mexicans immediately began producing pottery in imitation of the form and surface finish of European imports. These imitation types, although recognizably different from the European products, apparently gained favor in the colonial market in Mexico City. Using archaeological material from 12 Spanish houses Mr. Rodriguez-Alegria will address basic questions related to who consumed different imported types and who used indigenous imitations of Spanish imports. Among the factors to be studied using archival records are the immigrant or local status of the families involved, the presence of Indians in the household as spouses or servants, the financial wealth of the families, and the role of the family in the conquest or in government. The use of imported and indigenous products should shed light on the factors which led to emerging class structure in New Spain and the role of Indians in the production and distribution of this significant artifact class. This research will shed new light on the process of assimilation and acculturation and produce data of interest to many archaeologists and historians. It will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc5291 none This project addresses new methods to generate collision-free paths for robots that operate in environments that change over time. Typical applications of this research include robot arms mounted on mobile platforms, arms that operate in factory settings, or any other manipulation systems that operate in environments that are either unknown a priori or may change over time. The proposed approach comprises preprocessing and on-line stages. Preprocessing produces a representation of the configuration space that can be easily modified in real-time to account for changes in the environment. A one-dimensional roadmap is constructed for an obstacle-free workspace, and the mapping from workspace cells to nodes and arcs in the roadmap is encoded. In the on-line stage, when the environment changes, this mapping is used to make the appropriate modifications to the roadmap, and plans can be generated by searching the modified roadmap. At the heart of the method is the encoding for the mapping from workspace obstacles to configuration space obstacles. To make the proposed approach truly viable, a major component of the proposed research will focus on robustness and complexity issues. These issues will be addressed by using tools from the fields of image processing, information theory, graph theory, computational geometry, and incremental algorithms doc5292 none BAXTER The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) rewards teachers for their content knowledge and skill through a portfolio assessment system where teachers performances are judged against a set of professional teaching standards. The data base of candidate portfolios represents a rich, potentially useful, and untapped reservoir of information about accomplished teaching practice in middle grades mathematics and science. This project will examine portfolio entries of candidates who applied for certification in (N = 250 and 204 for mathematics and science, respectively). Both qualitative and quantitative analyses will be undertaken, with a goal toward characterizing the nature and quality of teachers assessment and instruction practices. The PIs will discuss what the analyses suggest about teaching and learning in middle grades mathematics and science doc5293 none A symposium will be held at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) on the topic of statistical aspects of natural language analysis and processing. This symposium originates with the Association for the Mathematics of Language (MOL), a special interest group of the Association for Computational Linguistics which has held bi-annual meetings for over 10 years. The bigger goal of the proposed symposium is to heighten general scientific awareness of mathematical investigations of natural language structure and processing. Formal and computational studies of language draw on a broad range of mathematical fields (among them formal language theory; complexity; classical and non-classical logic; algebra and category theory; game theory) and have inspired innovations and extensions in a number of them. It would be difficult in a AAAS Symposium to address the full range of this work in a way that would do justice to both its breadth and its depth. The symposium will therefore concentrate on a single, more sharply delineated topic -- statistical aspects of natural language analysis -- in a way that connects technological advances in language engineering, linguistic structure and processing. Capacity for language depends on the interaction of biological endowment and empirical experience, in such a way that the stable interpretation of physical objects is possible in the face of broad variation across speakers, in changing contexts, and over time. Advances in computational methods of storage, search, and processing make it possible to model the dynamic interaction of endowment and experience qualitatively, in a way amenable to quantitative methods. This symposium focuses on approaches to this range of problems based on statistics and information theory. The presentations will begin with a survey of statistically-based work on speech processing (which underlies successful and available computational speech-to-text processing). It will then examine applications of these ideas to syntactic parsing and lexical ambiguity resolution. The presentations will be designed to stress the importance of the appropriateness of different statistical methods to different problems in natural language analysis and processing and to show how distinctions among current models connect with such classical problems as the distinction between supervised and unsupervised learning doc5294 none s, with opportunities to test the adequacy of existing agent designs against real-world problems at a relatively low development cost; the project also has the potential to increase the visibility of interface agents research, by allowing agents to work in previously inaccessible areas. Finally, it will result in a model and implementation of agents specialized for tool use, an area of ecological research that remains unexamined to date, and which should contribute significantly to our understanding of complex software environments doc5295 none This proposal is aimed at creating TCP autotuning so the TCP applications take full advantage of the available bandwidth without the need for off-line manual tuning by the experts. Part of the work is to the design of TCP Management Information Base (MIB) first for identifying where the performance bottleneck is (receiver, transmitter or the network path itself) and then use that information for performing automatic and dynamic TCP tuning at the level of the user process (autotuning). The primary application focus of this effort is on the scientific bulk data transfer using FTP. Implementation of an optimized FTP code is part of this work. In parallel with the development effort the project will also pursue substantial user support services and vendor liaison. The development will be based on the commodity Intel hardware and Linux OS, however, the goal is for other OS vendors to adopt and incorporate TCP autotuning in their kernels doc5296 none Robbins Friction, lubrication and adhesion are fundamental processes with many technological applications. Traditional engineering approaches to these phenomena start from macroscopic continuum equations that rely on phenomenological inputs. The goal of this research is to improve our understanding of how molecular level processes control macroscopic properties and how behavior changes as dimensions approach the atomic scale. The primary tool will be molecular dynamics simulations, coupled to continuum theory at large scales. %%% Friction, lubrication and adhesion are fundamental processes with many technological applications. Traditional engineering approaches to these phenomena start from macroscopic continuum equations that rely on phenomenological inputs. The goal of this research is to improve our understanding of how molecular level processes control macroscopic properties and how behavior changes as dimensions approach the atomic scale. The primary tool will be molecular dynamics simulations, coupled to continuum theory at large scales doc5297 none As scientific data becomes larger and more complex, the problem of presenting data effectively is joined by another, potentially more difficult one - how to extract presentable data from the flood of raw information. This problem is equally difficult for results from large simulations and data from high-resolution instruments. Thus, the field of scientific visualization becomes intimately tied to more traditional studies of data analysis, including image processing, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, and computer vision. However, in contrast to those fields, visualization explicitly includes the user in the process of filtering, extracting, and rendering meaningful data. The goal of this project is to make level-set modeling - a useful but computationally expensive visualization technique - interactive for use in 3-D visualization of biological data sets. Technically, the project has three components. The first is the design and implementation of a hardware and software system for interactive level-set surface model computation and display. This system will use off-the-shelf PC hardware and graphics boards and new algorithms and software to reach its interactivity goals. The second component will create the human-computer interface that allows users to interact with the level-set models. This will require mapping user input onto the mathematical descriptions controlling surface motion and deformation in the models. Finally, the third component will be the application of the techniques to visualize large biological data sets by researchers in this project. This is a collaborative project between and the University of Utah doc5289 none This collaborative research project will examine the relation of emergent geographic information technologies to changing patterns of individual identification. The interdisciplinary research team will address the long-term social consequences, and in particular the consequences for personal privacy and identity, of the transition to digital geographic information systems. The project will provide a comprehensive comparative analysis of a set of case studies of information systems which incorporate both geographic and personally identifying data. This analysis will identify trends and tendencies in identification practice, theorize possible effects on social equity and power, conceptually separate local forces from more global ones, and suggest ways in which these technologies may be modified so that their use is more consistent with the protection of privacy and associated human values. The cases include developing systems in each of three areas of application: (1) Geodemographic Mapping; (2) Emergency Response Systems; and (3) Intelligent Vehicles and Mobile Telematics. The choice of cases is designed to facilitate comparisons along three dimensions. The first two dimensions concern the functions of the system: whether the geographic information system is intended to model places, populations, or mobile individuals; and whether the system is intended primarily to facilitate commerce or to regulate social risk. The third dimension concerns the jurisdiction within which the system operates. The chosen cases permit a complex set of comparisons that can hold aspects of each dimension constant, while varying aspects of the remaining dimensions. Each case study will employ the compilation and analysis of documentary and interview data to reveal the mechanics of the system s information collection and manipulation, the modeling of persons and places, and the institutional, economic, legal, and cultural context of the system s development and use. The research results will interest a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary groups, including scholars of communication and information technology, public policy, and geography, as well as public policy practitioners, technology developers, and privacy activists. Moreover, the research examines systems with which individuals will interact throughout their daily lives, often without meaningful knowledge and consent. Given the proliferation of systems based on geographic information and the growing public sensitivity to privacy and identity issues, the research results are likely to be of general public interest and valuable to policy discussions doc5299 none This project will develop machine learning algorithms, prototype tools, and supporting theory for solving complex machine learning problems. Existing theory and algorithms have focused on learning simple classifiers that take a description of an object and assign it to one of a small number of classes (e.g., taking an image of a character and classifying it as one of the 26 letters of the alphabet). Emerging applications in science and industry require learning much more complex functions that map from complex inputs (e.g., 2D maps, time series, and strings) to complex outputs (e.g., other 2D maps, time series, and strings). Despite the lack of theory covering such cases, many practical systems have been built that work well in particular applications. These systems all employ some form of divide-and-conquer, where the inputs and outputs are divided into smaller pieces ( windows ), classified, and then the results are merged to produce an overall solution. This project will develop a general formulation of machine learning for divide-and-conquer problems, a collection of algorithms for solving these problems, and a prototype tool kit for solving new learning problems via the divide-and-conquer approach. In addition, theoretical models will be developed to understand the tradeoffs that affect the design of divide-and-conquer systems. The resulting algorithms and theory will extend the range of problems that can be solved via machine learning methods and make it easier to construct new divide-and-conquer machine learning applications. This will lead to improved performance of existing machine learning applications, for example, in text processing, intrusion detection, and the analysis of sensor data to signal alarms doc5300 none This workshop will bring together a multidisciplinary collection of mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists, biological scientists, and social scientists for the purpose of developing models of complex networks in both human and biological systems, with special emphasis given to integration of social and ecological networks. The specific objectives used to structure the workshop are: (1) establishing common ground; (2) modeling of complex systems; (3) interfacing and extension; (4) visualization and exploration; and (5) data quality issues. Thirty experts in the various disciplines have been invited to participate in a three-day workshop at the Duke Marine Laboratory in March of . Prior to the meeting, in order to establish common ground, we will distribute to each participant a statement of purpose, key readings, and a lexicon of analogous terms used in the various disciplines. The workshop will commence with a full day of focused presentations, a second day devoted to breakout groups focusing on the last four objectives, and a final day where breakout group summaries and recommendations will be synthesized using rapporteurs. The attendees will: identify the common issues of complexity across disciplines, the limitations to cross fertilizations of ideas, and ways to overcome these limitations; explore the appropriateness of various mathematical and statistical network models and analyses developed by mathematicians, statisticians, and social and biological scientists applicable to the study of complex biological systems; explore the inclusion of human system dynamics, both of a trophic and non-trophic nature, into models of complex biological systems; develop and improve computer based tools for the exploratory visual analysis of complex biological systems; and, address issues concerning the quality of data used in modeling biocomplexity in food webs and trophic networks. Both social scientists and ecologists use network models to study complexity. However, current computer-based methods of the study of complexity in human and biological systems are not fully developed. Most significantly, these models lack integration of human and ecological networks. Until now, there has been much work done on a variety of fields in complexity, but there has been little contact among researchers in the various fields, each field forming an invisible college. Recently, social scientists and ecologists have recognized their parallel efforts and have begun collaboration. Short-term products of this workshop will include publications from the attendees, but the greater significance will come in the long-term with increased collaboration among scientists from different backgrounds. This workshop will aid in promoting such collaboration and has the potential to contribute significantly to a better understanding of various problems in the study of biocomplexity. This incubation activity was funded as part of the FY Biocomplexity Special Competition doc5301 none Conflicting trends in the requirements for system design and testing are leading to a crisis in existing design-for-test methodologies. The need for design cost reduction motivates design approaches which raise the design abstraction level, including high level core-based paradigms. While the design abstraction level rises, the currently accepted fault model is the single stuck-at model at the gate-level. Behavioral fault models are needed which enable both test and validation of complex systems. In addition, test approaches are needed target high-level fault models and achieve good validation and test coverage. This work examines how to use component-specific testability information to target pseudo-random resistant (PRR) faults. Since only a few pseudo-random resistant faults are typically the source of a disproportionately large fraction of test overhead, targeting these faults is a cost effective DFT approach doc5302 none The Materials Research Society symposium on Non-Lithographic & Lithographic Methods for Nanofabrication: from ULSI to Photonics to Molecular Electronics will address the materials science, chemistry, physics, and biology of micro- and nanoscale structures including potential applications areas. In addition to the materials science and physics of these nanoscale systems, the symposium will include a discussion of techniques such as self-assembly and lithographic methods as fabrication tools for building structures with micron and nanometer feature sizes, and novel and emerging devices that rely on structures with submicron dimensions. %%% Nanostructured materials often display chemical and physical properties distinctly different from their corresponding bulk materials. Nanotechnology areas such as electronic, photonic and catalytic materials nanostructures exhibiting novel properties for various applications are currently viewed as high priorities within industry. Preference for NSF support to participate in this symposium will be given to students, postdocs, and faculty who are early in their careers who may otherwise find it difficult to to travel to this conference doc5303 none RUI: Query Optimization for Multi-Database and Data Warehousing In multi-database systems, similar information may be represented under different structures (schemas). Current database languages are suitable for querying a single database, but are not powerful enough to reconcile such schematic heterogeneity among databases. New languages have been proposed to achieve interoperability among multiple databases. This research project is concerned with query optimization for such languages, in particular schemaSQL , a recently proposed extension of the industry-standard database language SQL. The restructuring capabilities provided by schemaSQL and similar languages have applications far beyond multi-database systems. For example, operating data over possibly many years of operation are summarized and stored in a data warehouse. The warehouse data can then be analyzed for patterns and trends to improve the operations. Restructuring of the warehouse data can potentially result in a significant increase in query processing efficiency. This research project involves a team of graduate and undergraduate students, and will enhance the development of human resources in science and engineering both at graduate as well as undergraduate level. The results of this project will provide a new approach to querying and query optimization using restructuring and will have applications in multi-database systems interoperability and efficient query processing, data warehousing efficiency, and physical database structuring for optimized operation. URL: http: www.uncg.edu ~sadrif nsf query-optimization.html doc5304 none This study will refine and use a new index of calcite dissolution to reconstruct vertical carbonate dissolution gradients through the mid-depth regions of the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans over the last glacial - interglacial cycle. The new index is sensitive to dissolution above and across the foraminifer lysocline. The improved information on carbonate ion content and gradients will provide constraints on model results of past oceanic carbon budgets and thus test model inferences about past atmospheric pCO2 changes during glacial-interglacial cycles doc5305 none The cell division cycle is the sequence of events whereby a living cell replicates all its components and divides them between two daughter cells, so that each daughter has the information and machinery necessary to repeat the process. Because it underlies the growth, development and reproduction of all biological organisms, the cell cycle is intensely studied by molecular biologists, who have recently uncovered many details of the biochemical network controlling cell division. Among eukaryotic cells (plants, animals, fungi), the regulatory mechanism is highly conserved, with homologous components functioning across species barriers from yeast to frogs to humans. So many details of this control system are now known that intuitive methods cannot explicate the complex interactions among these molecular components. New computational methods to describe complex genetic regulatory systems are desperately needed. For this reason, the Principal Investigator has created mathematical tools to model the control system, analyze its properties, and compare hypothetical mechanisms to the actual behavior of dividing cells. The purpose of this project is to bring these computational tools to a wider audience of theoretical and experimental biologists by developing a web-based, collaborative, problem-solving environment (PSE) for modeling cell-cycle regulatory networks. When fully developed, the PSE will allow users to access experimental databases on cell cycle genes and proteins, to construct hypothetical control mechanisms and explore their properties by numerical simulation, and to compare model behavior with the observed properties of cells, so that the underlying mechanistic hypotheses can be tested, refined and expanded. This incubation project will initiate the development of the PSE, in order to demonstrate the feasibility of the computational method that will in turn make a convincing case for full funding of the project doc5306 none Kleppel Suburbanization, the conversion of native forest, range and farmland to infrastructure intensive, ecologically simplified landscapes, is currently consuming enormous amounts of land, with generally negative impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem integrity. The process, however, creates a complex feed back system that results in rapid and significant increases in stress on human social and economic systems. This Biocomplexity incubation award will allow this group to (1) develop mechanisms to facilitate communication between collaborative disciplines by defining key variables and parameters, and critical linkages among natural and social forcing functions, (2) identify existing data and resources, and (3) explore possible modeling, model analysis and interpretive approaches to link the dynamics of social and natural systems in response to suburbanization doc5307 none Proposal number: Proposal type: Investigator Initiated for International Research Workshop Principal investigator: Robin D. Rogers Affiliation: University of Alabama Tuscaloosa International Conference Award: NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Green Industrial Applications of Ionic Liquids This award supports partially the participation by American researchers in the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Green Industrial Applications of Ionic to be held in Crete, Greece, from April 12 to 16, . This workshop will deal with an exciting new area of chemistry that offers an alternative to toxic and volatile organic solvents for use in various types of industrial processing, the use of room-temperature ionic liquids. It will bring together about 50 or so researchers from Europe and the US. Both academic and industrial researchers will participate in sessions on separations, electrochemistry, catalysis, chemical syntheses, and other industrial applications of ionic liquids. The major funding for the workshop is coming from NATO, but this organization has certain representational guidelines that limit US participation. Minor support from NSF will be used to pay conference fees and partial travel expenses for US participants not covered by NATO funds, including some younger faculty and students. Also, the funding will be used to insure adequate participation by industrial organizations. The communication resulting from this conference will stimulate the development of ionic liquids and their industrial applications as well as promote scientific cooperation between Europe and the U.S doc5308 none This incubation activity will investigate the nature of the complementarities and conflicts between the services of ecological systems and economic activities, focusing specifically on the land-water interface for North Carolina s linked rivers and estuaries. Recent concerns about rapid economic growth, ongoing transformations to North Carolina s environmental resources, growing nutrient loadings to coastal waterways, animal agriculture, and the prospect of increased hurricanes and coastal flooding in a rapidly developing landscape have focused attention on the development of integrated research to design policy responses to these issues. This research seeks to develop linkages between ecosystem models and a dynamic computational economic model describing equilibrium locations of heterogeneous households and firms in a spatial context. The ecosystem structures simulate ecological processes and functions based on the land use designation of their cells along with their interface with rivers, wetlands, and coastal estuaries. The research will take advantage of attributes of the study area and the research team drawn from the Research Triangle and external universities. These include: (a) a long history of field research for background data (e.g. the EPA Albemarle-Pamlico Study -96), some relatively undisturbed coastal environments for new monitoring activities, and recent efforts to collect fairly extensive information on key descriptors of the major watersheds; (b) a network of linked natural scientists, engineers, and GIS-based landscape ecologists with a history of collaboration; (c) one of the largest collections (in the US) of environmental economists (who also have a history of collaborating with the natural science community); and (d) a select group of distinguished external scholars with experience in the quantitative and methodological requirements of developing and linking spatial models capable of describing the dynamic interactions of ecological processes and economic activities. A team of natural and social scientists and engineers will work with: V. Kerry Smith and Leonard J. Piedrafesa of NC State University; Nancy Bockstael, University of Maryland; and Thomas Rutherford, University of Colorado. Activities include a conference with commissioned papers and a continuing workshop series where natural and social scientists will interact to define the research. This incubation activity was funded as part of the FY Biocomplexity Special Competition doc5309 none Roesner It is well known that urbanization results in severe degradation of urban streams, particularly headwater streams. Various scientific and engineering groups are studying the problem, but there remains to be an organized project with sufficient funding to combine the talents of scientists from various disciplines (such as biology geomorphology, and sociology), with engineering specialists in ecologic hydraulics and urban drainage to develop an approach to urban stormwater management that will result in ecologically sustainable streams and lakes in the urban environment. This Incubation Activity proposes to combine the talents of scientists and engineers at Colorado State University, in partnership with two rapidly growing cities in the front range of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, to lay the groundwork for a larger project, which is to develop and test a Sustainable Urban Stream and Reservoir Model that can be used to design urban drainage systems that will result in ecologically sustainable urban water resources for cities in the arid west. The algorithm should be transferable to eastern climates, which have more precipitation, and more evenly distributed seasonal precipitation. As currently envisioned, the model to be developed will combine 1) An urban runoff model; 2) An urban stream geomorphologic model; and 3) A water quality ecologic model for streams and lakes into a single model or linked models that can be used by scientists, engineers and planners to assess the ecologic impact of proposed urban development, and or aid in the design of urban stormwater drainage facilities to prevent ecologic degradation. In the arid west, we believe that we can actually ecologically enhance existing natural streams because of the increase in stream baseflow that generally accompanies urbanization of a watershed doc5310 none This project is for partial support of the technical program of the US Panel on Wind and Seismic Effects during the period from March 15, through September 30, . This project is co-shared by several other Government Agencies. The National Institute for Science Technology (NIST) will be the coordinator for the US Panel of members. NIST will develop and manage the technical program, prepare and distribute reports and proceedings to the US members, Agencies, and Japanese counterparts, plan and develop strategies shared by the US members. Through the task committees specific issues will be discussed at the meeting. Issues are: Earthquake hazard reduction, control systems, repair and retrofit of structures and wind effects on structures doc5311 none Over the last several decades, the Arctic has experienced unprecedented climate change, with dramatic reduction in sea-ice coverage and the warming of both lands and oceans. The driving forces for these changes are currently believed to be greenhouse warming and cyclic oscillations in the atmospheric circulation. Ecosystem structure in the more-southerly Bering Sea has been dramatically altered and a few scattered observations suggests that alterations in food-webs are occurring elsewhere in the more isolated Arctic. Few comprehensive studies of the ecosystem structure and function have been done in the enclosed Arctic, yet it is straightforward to expect dramatic and non-linear biotic changes. In this Incubation Activity, the P.I. proposes to develop a research plan for studying Arctic environmental change and its impact on the ecosystem and society. This proposal would establish a multidisciplinary team of experts which would lead 2 workshops over 24 months to develop a strategy for evaluating biological and societal impacts of the physical environmental changes doc5312 none EWING Texas A&M will institute the Center for the Applications of Information Technologies in the Teaching and Learning of Science. The Center focuses on the development of innovative strategies and unique learning experiences to enhance teacher preparation and teacher professional education through the development of education specialists with advanced degrees. The Center joins research faculty in scientific disciplines with research faculty in education to address the critical issues of teaching and learning in science in grades 7-12. Typically discrete strands of scientific research, educational research, and information technology are woven into a more seamless and aligned infrastructure with a national mission. The partnership includes universities, community colleges, research centers, museums, state education agencies, and the mathematics and science teachers in NSF-funded systemic initiatives in Texas. The Center provides research-rich professional development experiences for 700 grades 7-12 teachers and the education of approximately 60 professional development specialists with the capacity for national leadership. The research objectives focus on the impact of information technologies on (1) how science is done, (2) how science is taught and learned, (3) how the processes and products of learning science can be assessed and (4) how a network can involve 7-12 teachers and their students in a community of scholarship. The activities and outreach efforts of the Center are conducted through interdisciplinary research teams, consisting of university faculty, doctoral and master s students, and master teachers working with Texas districts involved in systemic reform. These teams work on research and development that introduce modern science methods and integrate information technologies into the teaching of science. The outcomes of the project include science education technology specialists, increased district capacity for and delivery of teacher enhancement, and research on the effective uses of information technologies in science education doc5313 none The PI and his team will explore solutions to the problem of access to computer graphics for blind users by combining a limited number of sensors and stimulators with the very high human capacity for fine movement control and spatial localization. He will conduct experiments to determine performance with a large number of skin stimulation points (by means of linked photosensor-to-vibratory stimulator units) on the hand, thus permitting individual finger motion (e.g., finger spreading) as well as total hand motion. Both the PI s own prior work and sensorimotor studies by others, along with concepts of the role of motor outflow brain signals in determining precise spatial localization, have led him to the hypothesis that a haptic system - as opposed to one which is strictly tactile, because the fingertips actively scan the display - can convey important spatial concepts from 2D and 3D images on a computer monitor. The PI s approach is based on concepts of brain plasticity underlying his prior sensory substitution studies, which have demonstrated that blind persons can obtain complex visual information in real-time through TV cameras leading to tactile interfaces. The current project will result in a tool for perceptual, electrophysiological and brain imaging (e.g., transcranial electromagnetic stimulation) studies on sensory substitution and late brain plasticity, and to practical applications for science education of blind students as well as for increasing their vocational opportunities in information technology doc5289 none This collaborative research project will examine the relation of emergent geographic information technologies to changing patterns of individual identification. The interdisciplinary research team will address the long-term social consequences, and in particular the consequences for personal privacy and identity, of the transition to digital geographic information systems. The project will provide a comprehensive comparative analysis of a set of case studies of information systems which incorporate both geographic and personally identifying data. This analysis will identify trends and tendencies in identification practice, theorize possible effects on social equity and power, conceptually separate local forces from more global ones, and suggest ways in which these technologies may be modified so that their use is more consistent with the protection of privacy and associated human values. The cases include developing systems in each of three areas of application: (1) Geodemographic Mapping; (2) Emergency Response Systems; and (3) Intelligent Vehicles and Mobile Telematics. The choice of cases is designed to facilitate comparisons along three dimensions. The first two dimensions concern the functions of the system: whether the geographic information system is intended to model places, populations, or mobile individuals; and whether the system is intended primarily to facilitate commerce or to regulate social risk. The third dimension concerns the jurisdiction within which the system operates. The chosen cases permit a complex set of comparisons that can hold aspects of each dimension constant, while varying aspects of the remaining dimensions. Each case study will employ the compilation and analysis of documentary and interview data to reveal the mechanics of the system s information collection and manipulation, the modeling of persons and places, and the institutional, economic, legal, and cultural context of the system s development and use. The research results will interest a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary groups, including scholars of communication and information technology, public policy, and geography, as well as public policy practitioners, technology developers, and privacy activists. Moreover, the research examines systems with which individuals will interact throughout their daily lives, often without meaningful knowledge and consent. Given the proliferation of systems based on geographic information and the growing public sensitivity to privacy and identity issues, the research results are likely to be of general public interest and valuable to policy discussions doc5315 none Kang This award supports a National Science Foundation Dissertation Enhancement award to Dr. Kyungsik Kang of Brown University, Providence. Dr. Kang s student, Mr.David C. Dooling will conduct his Ph. D. dissertation research on investigations in flavor physics. Mr. Dooling requests fund to travel to South Korea and per diem for carrying out his Ph.D. dissertation work at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS) for 12 months, while his thesis advisor Prof. Kang visits KIAS on a sabbatical. The research project concerns one of the major unsolved mysteries of particle physics, that of fermion masses and flavor mixing. The proposed research to be conducted at KIAS also concerns the experimental mysteries of the fermion masses and mixings. Mr. Dooling wishes to investigate simultaneous explanations of the quark and lepton sectors, as well as to take into account the possible role of gravity in explaining the observed values of these parameters doc5316 none This workshop by the Net@EDU Project within EDUCAUSE and the follow-on information dissemination activities are designed to generate an analysis of voice-over-IP (VoIP) options, strategies, and best practices. The results will be made available to the community of universities and parties involved in NGI, Internet2, and other related initiatives. VoIP promises to be an important technology on emerging, advanced networks. One of Net@EDU s special interest groups has already been working these issues. They will be involved in these workshops and already have some useful work done that should help to jump start and accelerate this workshop activity and the quality of the proceedings doc5317 none The PI will pursue research in areas of algebraic geometry, commutative algebra, combinatorics, and their computational aspects, with emphasis on syzygies and their relevance to geometry. The PI will study (1) Syzygies of Lawrence toric ideals and their relation to chromatic numbers of graphs, (2) Syzygies, the rank variety and the complexity of Orlik-Solomon algebras, (3) Syzygies of symmetric sheaves, and corresponding obstruction classes in derived Witt groups to the existence of symmetric locally free resolutions of such sheaves, (4) Natural compactifications of configurations of points in projective space and their applications to enumerative problems. Algebraic geometry is one of the oldest parts of modern mathematics, but one which has had a revolutionary flowering in the past quarter-century. The main thrust is towards discovering connections between the geometry of sets defined by the vanishing of polynomials and the algebraic invariants derived from the defining equations of these sets, for instance syzygies. Results in algebraic geometry and combinatorics have also found uses in communications, security and robotics doc5318 none This CONACyT research project will enable a research group at the University of South Carolina to cooperate with a research group at the Instituto Politecnico Nacional in Mexico City, Mexico. Together they will develop a methodology that enables software agents with different ontologies to interact and exchange information. The objectives are to increase the ease with which such software can be produced and its robustness. Under this approach, software development would consist of choosing among volunteers (agents from an active repository) and assembling them into a problem-solving team, instead of debugging lines of code. Software development would be more like coaching and less like traditional programming. The research will explore 1) how independently constructed autonomous agents reach mutual understanding, 2) what categories of software are suitable for team-oriented programming, and 3) how team behaviors can be analyzed and validated. Groups of students will assemble agent-based software systems and compare the resulting systems for robustness with software developed conventionally. The two resarch sites will collaborate through online meetings, the exchange of graduate students and mutual visits to each other s research centers doc5319 none Two methods will be tested for identifying family members within ancient cemeteries using inherited variation of the skeleton. The first method involves analysis of data on inherited variation in hand bone lengths to identify individuals who are very close genetic relatives (e.g. siblings, their parents, and grandparents). This method is an adaptation of a radiographic technique called metacarpophalangeal pattern profile analysis, which uses data on the lengths of the digital bones of the hand. Since human pattern profiles have been shown to exhibit high correlations between close genetic relatives, skeletons that show highly correlated pattern profiles can be assumed to have been close genetic relatives. The second method for identifying family members involves collection of data on inherited structural anomalies of individual bones to identify genetic lineages that often span many generations. Examples of such anomalies include unusually short thumbs, congenitally fused vertebrae in the neck, and extra bones in the feet. Analysis of these structural variants will follow a method already developed for analysis of genetic kinship, except that inherited anomalies from throughout the skeleton will be used, rather than just anomalies of the skull and teeth. For each cemetery of interest, the frequency of 48 skeletal anomalies will be determined and compared to the frequencies of these same anomalies in a reference sample from the same time period and geographic region. If there is a statistically significant difference between the frequency of an anomaly in one of the cemeteries and in the reference sample, then the individuals sharing the anomaly in common within the cemetery have a high probability of being genetic relatives. The subjects of this study will be approximately skeletons from medieval church cemeteries in Denmark. Familial relationships will be investigated among 800 skeletons from the Black Friar and Gray Friar cemeteries in Odense, which date from around AD to the mid- s. These skeletons are curated at Odense University. Another skeletons from several other medieval cemeteries in Denmark will comprise the reference sample. Identification of genetic relatives will allow anthropologists to better estimate the number of lineages belonging to the two parish churches. In addition, this information will permit anthropologists to address questions about the extent to which quality of life issues such as social status, burial treatment, childhood mortality rates, general health, and susceptibility to diseases were affected by membership in a particular family or lineage, and how this effect may have changed over time doc5320 none The goal is to create a collaborative, multi-investigator consortium to address the complex question of how environmental stress is transduced through organisms to influence their distribution in both time and space. The study system is the rocky intertidal habitat of the northeast Pacific, an environment that is one of the most stressful and physiologically challenging on Earth. During field experiments on the U.S. coast of the northeast Pacific, data will be collected to generate a predictive model of the interaction of physiological stress, climate and community structure in the rocky intertidal zone. The project integrates the effort of four scientists: an ecological physiologist (Helmuth), an integrative and molecular physiologist (Hofmann), a computational mathematical ecologist (Kinzig) and a community ecologist (Menge). Three specific incubation activities are included: (1) Travel to meetings to plan the project and integrate the components of the project, (2) development of techniques essential to the success of a full proposal and (3) the recruitment of a climatologist to the project to assist with modeling small-scale weather patterns at the intertidal field sites. The project also includes a training component. Graduate students will be involved in one of the planning meetings and will assist in developing the new techniques required for the full proposal. These techniques include: optimization of the use of an infrared camera to record body temperatures of individual animals, development of a biochemical analyses of stress proteins that will allow high through-put processing and the development of a GIS-based model for the project. This collaboration meets the criteria established for the Biocomplexity theme and stands to contribute greatly to scientific understanding of the interaction of organisms with their environment and the biological consequences of changes induced by natural or anthropogenic forces doc5321 none The major issues to be addressed by the life scientists of the 21st Century will require both the admixture of life science disciplines that have traditionally been separate and the inclusion of disciplines that have traditionally fallen outside the life sciences. Achieving these goals is largely a matter of social engineering: getting isolated scientists to interact with one another, shifting the training of pre-and post-doctoral students from an oligodisciplinary to a multidisciplinary mode,instituting mechanisms for the sharing of scientific resources, forming interactive scientific communities around major topics or problems,and so on. For some key communities, this social engineering is already well underway,but for others it is not. For this reason we propose a series of incubation activities for a potential community we will name evolutionary and ecological functional genomics (EEFG). The proposed incubation activities have two main goals: 1. Physical coalescence of this potential community 2. Strategic planning by this community,which will identify its scientific, programmatic, and educational goals; and formulate workable structures for achieving ongoing interaction and attaining these goals. The two goals of the incubation activities would be achieved first by a planning organizational meeting to be held at the National Science Foundation, and then by a series of outreach meetings that would be embedded in the annual meetings of existing scientific societies on an international scale doc5322 none Biocomplexity: The Bio-Feedback basis of Self Organization in Planktonic Ecosystems using Phaeocystis as a Model Complex Adaptive System. The concept of a complex adaptive system (CAS) has emerged as a central element in complexity theory as developed in recent years at the Santa Fe Institute and elsewhere. This concept embodies the idea that inherent in complexity, per se, are self-organizational tendencies that transcend the particulars of any complex system under investigation. The phytoplankton genus Phaeocystis produces prodigious blooms of gelatinous colonies, releases copious amounts of DMS, and significantly alters material flows among trophic levels and export from the upper ocean. A potentially salient property from a CAS standpoint is the ability of Phaeocystis to transform between solitary cell and gelatinous colonial life cycle stages, a process which changes organism biovolume by 6-9 orders of magnitude, and which is hypothesized to be mediated by chemical communication. The colony skin confers protection against grazers, viruses, and parasitoids. Phaeocystis utilizes chemistry and or changes in size as defenses against predation, and its ability to create refuges from biological attack is known to stabilize predator-prey dynamics in model systems. The life cycle form in which it occurs determines whether primary production flows through the traditional great fisheries food chain or the more regenerative microbial food web. Phaeocystis is proposed as a model organism from which to begin the study of biocomplexity in marine pelagic ecosystems. The central question is: how do physical (light, temperature, particle distributions, hydrodynamics), chemical (nutrient resources), biological (grazers, viruses, bacteria, other phytoplankton), and self-organizational (stability, indirect effects, distributed control) mechanisms interact with life-cycle transformations of Phaeocystis to mediate ecosystemic patterns of trophic structure, biodiversity, and energy flow? Ultimately the goal is to understand and predict why Phaeocystis occurs when and where it does, and the bio-feedbacks between the smaller single species CAS (Phaeocystis) and the larger multi-trophic level CAS (ecosystem). The significance of this need is emphasized by the formation of a recent Scientific Committee on Ocean Research (SCOR) working group, Marine Phytoplankton and Global Climate Regulation: the Phaeocystis Species Cluster. Laboratory experiments will quantify the impact of various physical, chemical, and biological factors on Phaeocystis life cycle transformations. Bioassays will be conducted to quantify chemical communication between life cycle stages and other organisms, e.g. grazers and competing phytoplankton. Concurrent studies will focus on the sensing and genetic response of Phaeocystis to environmental cues. Genetic probes will be developed to recognize and quantify Phaeocystis solitary cells in situ, and to identify genetic regulatory elements involved in controlling Phaeocystis life history. Mesocosm experiments will be conducted in Bergen, Norway, where Phaeocystis blooms can be reliably developed. Field studies will be conducted in the fjords of Tromso, Norway, to quantify how biocomplexity operates in the water column and the feedbacks to the ecosystem. This environment is well known, has a long database, has Phaeocystis blooms every spring, and is an excellent location for related cooperative studies, e.g. DMS gas exchange. An ecosystem model will be developed as an investigative tool to deconvolve how physics, chemistry, and biology interact to regulate planktonic structure and function. A preliminary model is already available as a starting point. A life history submodel of Phaeocystis will also be developed and embedded within the ecosystem model to explore the mutuality of the bio-feedback between these complex adaptive systems of different organizational scales doc5323 none Tonnesen The objective of this Incubation Grant is to bring together faculty and researchers from various academic departments for development of an interdisciplinary research and education plan centering on Riverside County s unique ecology. A critical challenge for humanity in the 21st century will be adapting our technology and lifestyle choices to live in harmony with our natural resource base and to protect the integrity of the earth s natural ecosystems. For scientist and educators, this requires an understanding of the functioning of complex biological systems and of the dynamic interactions between human and natural systems. It also requires the education of citizens so that they better understand the impacts of lifestyle choices and are empowered to adopt sustainable lifestyles. Initially, the program will involve faculty from Conservation Biology, Soil Science, Engineering-Center for Environmental Research and Technology (a laboratory whose principal focus is air quality), Political Science and Anthropology. As the program matures, it is expected that faculty encompassing the various physical sciences, social sciences and humanities will become involved. This project will take the first steps toward identifying interdisciplinary research and educational opportunities relating to biocomplexity in Riverside County, which stretches from the outskirts of Los Angeles to the Arizona border. It will provide the resources for investigators to share data sets and models, including data from the Riverside County Integrated Plan, for exploratory research into new approaches for modeling and analysis. This grant will serve as a catalyst for development of an integrated approach to research and curriculum that will use Riverside County as a living laboratory to illustrate academic concepts and to provide opportunities for research doc5324 none The results of mesoscale (in situ) and microscale (shipboard-bottle) iron enrichment experiments conducted in the high nitrate, low chlorophyll (HNLC) waters of the sub-arctic Pacific, equatorial Pacific and the Southern Ocean strongly suggest that the rate of phytoplankton growth and biomass accumulation are limited, at least in part, by the availability of iron. To directly assess this hypothesis without the restrictions of deck-board incubation experiments, an in situ mesoscale iron enrichment experiment will be conducted in the Southern Ocean - the largest HNLC region on Earth and arguably the most important area in regulating global climate. The SOFeX project, led by Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, will involve two iron enrichment experiments along the 170 W meridian during this austral summer (December-January). During one 45-day cruise they will fertilize waters in the nitrate-rich and silicate-rich waters south of the Polar Front, and in the silicate-poor, but nitrate-rich waters north of the Polar Front. This sub-project will investigate the nitrogen dynamics of the natural planktonic community in response to the iron enrichment. The 15 N stable isotope technique will be used to quantify nitrate, nitrite, ammonium and urea uptake within and outside of the iron-enriched sites, thus providing a direct and unambiguous measure of nitrogen uptake independent of anv observable changes in the ambient nitrogen concentrations within these waters. Since cell size is thought to be a major factor controlling the flux of material from the surface to deep waters (i.e. export production), the size- spectrum of nitrogen utilization (pico-, nano- and microplankton) will be determined by using different pore-sized filters to collect particulates after short-term 15 N incubations. To evaluate the factors controlling nitrogen preference (or inhibition) in this HNLC region, the activities of nitrate reductase (NR) and nitrite reductase (NiR) will be assessed, in concert with N uptake rate measurements, to determine if iron limitation directly regulates the ability of phytoplankton (both large and small) to assimilate ammonium versus nitrate and test whether iron-limited phytoplankton are Fe-nitrogen co-limited. Deck experiments are designed to determine the effects of irradiance on nitrate and ammonium uptake. During collaborative studies with MLML and Mark Brzezinski (UCSB), the scientists in this sub-project will determine the effects of various concentrations of iron and zinc on the growth of phytoplankton (in particular diatoms) and their use of nitrogen and silicate. To ensure that the rates of nitrogenous nutrition are an accurate measure of new and regenerated production, the experimental design includes corrections for the effects of isotopic dilution from 14 NH4, losses from release of 15 N in dissolved organic nitrogen (DON) and N02, and competition from heterotrophic uptake. These N uptake experiments are a key component in the proposed SOFeX study and their results are critical to a comprehensive understanding of the ecosystem response to iron enrichment in the Southern Ocean. Modest phytoplankton growth and the lack of significant depletion of macronutrients are two fundamental observations common to HNLC regions and still remain to be explained in the Southern Ocean. This study will directly answer the question does iron stimulate the uptake and assimilation of nitrate, and if so, what group is stimulated? all within the context of an in situ ecosystem response to iron enrichment doc5325 none A. O. Willows FSML Housing for Visiting Researchers and Students at Friday Harbor Laboratories The Friday Harbor Laboratories (FHL) of the University of Washington has initiated a program to invite up to 8 research groups year, each group made up of an independent researcher plus her his graduate and post-doctoral colleagues and 5-8 undergraduate apprentices, to conduct research at FHL for a 3-month period. Four such groups were selected and invited to FHL in , and 6 in , with FHL providing laboratory and field facilities plus full salary to the faculty, graduate research assistants, and support personnel (computer staff, marine and instrumentation technologists, administrative staff), and stipends to the student participants. FHL will expand this program to incorporate groups from around the US and abroad. FHL plans to provide an increased, intense, academic year opportunity for research people and undergraduate apprentices to take advantage of FHL field, laboratory and housing facilities, and to focus upon current, important research opportunities in marine sciences. In order for the station to be able to accommodate more national international participants, FHL will build two new duplex housing units with financial support provided by this award and the University of Washington. FHL is located at the junction of Juan de Fuca and Georgia Straits, at a site of unusual biological diversity. FHL supports research from molecular and cell biology along a scale of increasing spatial dimensions to animal behavior and community ecology and has traditionally encouraged innovative and cross-cutting original research by eminent scholars, researchers, and students in wide ranging fields, including zoology, oceanography, botany, and basic biomedical sciences doc5326 none This project seeks to advance understanding of luminescence properties of rare earth (RE) doped GaN, AlN and their alloys which have great potential for use in new generation of light emitting devices. Study of optical and electrical properties of wide-bandgap III-V nitride semiconductors doped with RE ions will be performed in an attempt to gain further insight into the excitation and deexcitation processes of RE 4f n transitions. It will provide a comprehensive understanding of the optical-electrical properties of these materials and thereby assessing the potential for rare earth doped semiconductor devices. In addition, the optical properties of rare earth doped III-V nitride alloys will be investigated in order to attempts to build MIS, p-n heterojunction and other light emitting structures. Investigation of electro-optical properties of GaN and AlN doped with rare earth impurity should determine what type of defect RE ions introduce in III-nitrides hosts. The optical technique will include photoluminescence spectroscopy (PL), selective excitation spectroscopy (SES), cathodoluminescence spectroscopy (CL), rise and decay kinetics measurements and other complementary characterization techniques. The goal of this work is to develop highly efficient materials for novel UV visible and infrared optoelectronics devices. For these applications controllable doping n and p type are an obvious necessity. The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of photonic material science having high technological relevance. An important feature of the project is the integration of research and education through the training of the students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area doc5327 none The human genome project has become a site of significant conceptual, institutional, and social changes-both in science and in society more broadly. Genome research has generated and catalogued vast quantities of biological information, an enterprise intended to bring new order to biological knowledge and to extend human control over the molecular machinery of life. Genome research has also reordered the institutional life of laboratories, changing scientific practices, technology, work, and the identities of researchers. In addition, genome research has produced new patterns of scientific exchange and forms of property, redrawing the boundaries between public and private science in complex and nuanced ways. Because these interconnected conceptual, institutional, and social changes are likely to have far-reaching consequences, the processes that produced them merit scholarly attention. This research will complete a long-term, prospective ethnographic study of the genome mapping and sequencing community. The study began in and has followed the genome project since before its official launching in . Using interviews and participant observation, field research has been conducted in genome mapping and sequencing laboratories, scientific meetings, advisory committees, and commercial firms, mainly in the United States but also in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Funding will support the final rounds of fieldwork and interviewing and the analysis needed to support the completion of a book-length manuscript, tentatively titled REORDERING LIFE, that will analyze the changes in knowledge and social order that have characterized the human genome project, and that-all indications suggest-have only just begun doc5328 none This project will investigate apparent rapid changes in global temperature in the early Danian. The study will use isotopic analyses of planktic and benthic foraminifers and carbonate content measurements in several high-accumulation rate deep sea cores to determine the geographic extent and magnitude of a rapid cooling event in the early Danian that appears to be related to the Chicxulub impact event and a following warm event termed the Dan C-2 event that is associated with a large change in carbon isotope values. The study will focus on records from DSDP 465A and ODP doc5329 none Scholars have long known that multiple events data, which occur when subjects experience more than one event, cause a problem when analyzed without taking into consideration the correlation among the events. In particular, there has not been a solution about the best way to model the common occurrence of repeated events, where the subject experiences the same type of event more than once. This research project will result in an assessment of whether one of the two main approaches for the study of repeated events, variance corrected or frailty, is better able to account for within-subject correlation. Monte Carlo evidence will help determine whether and under what conditions alternative modeling strategies for repeated events are appropriate. Next, the project will compare frailty and multi-level frailty models by examining the results of a standard hazard model with no correction for clustering, three single frailty effect models to allow for clustering, and finally a model based on a cross-classified frailty model that allows for clustering by all three levels. Finally, the project will investigate the treatment of missing data in analyses of heterogeneity. Simulations will be rerun comparing variance corrected and frailty models with the complication of missing data. The statistical work resulting from this project will help resolve debates about political dynamics, such as the liberal peace, by commenting on the reliability of the different modeling strategies used to test those theories and applying the models discussed. The fellowship period will allow me to deepen my understanding of event history models and acquire new skills in the areas of Monte Carlo simulations, Bayesian analysis, and computer programming. The question as to the best modeling strategy for repeated events data is an important one. Our understanding of political processes, as in all studies, depends on the quality of the inferences we can draw from our models. There is currently little guidance about which approach or model is appropriate and so, not surprisingly, we see analysts unsure of the best way to analyze their data. Given the dramatic substantive differences that result from using the different models and approaches, this is a problem that will be of interest across research communities. This research is supported by the Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics Program and the Statistics and Probability Program under the Mid-Career Methodological Opportunities Fellowship Announcement doc5330 none This project will perform fundamental investigations of the strenghts and limitations of the low-level human visual system. It will seek to identify image properties that people can see quickly, to test how those properties interact with one another, and to determine how to harness those properties. Understanding how we perceive the world around us will benefit many research areas including information display, image generation, image analysis, and the simulation of vision. This project will apply this knowledge to an important area of computer graphics: the visualization of large, complex, multidimensional datasets. The goal in this area is to design visualizations that support rapid and accurate exploration and analysis of such complex data. To do this, the project must display all of the data without overwhelming the viewer s visual system. It will solve this problem by constructing a perceptual visualization architecture, which will inclued a visualization assistant . This assistant will use artificial intelligence search techniques to help viewers choose perceptually optimal methods of converting their data into effective visualizations doc5331 none Brown Underlying the diversity of life and the complexity of ecology is order that reflects the operation of fundamental physical and biological processes. Scaling relationships are emergent quantitative features of biodiversity. Some of them appear to be universal, occurring in virtually all taxa of organisms and kinds of environments. They are patterns of structure or dynamics that are self-similar or fractal-like over many orders of magnitude. They can be described mathematically by power functions. They allow extrapolation and prediction over a wide range of scales., They offer clues to underlying mechanisms that powerfully constrain biodiversity. This research will use the interplay of mathematical models and empirical measurements to elucidate the physical and biological principles that determine how the life history, abundance, distribution, and species richness of organisms scale with body size, space, and time. The program of research and education activities involves: (1) collaborations among physicists, mathematicians, geologists hydrologists, biologists and ecologists, (2) interactions among scientists from seven institutions, (3) cooperation between the University of New Mexico, the Santa Fe Institute, and Los Alamos National Laboratory, and (4) interdisciplinary training for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows doc5332 none This multidisciplinary research effort develops methods for content based retrieval, analysis and visualization of probabilistic 3D spatial maps, in particular, the statistical parametric maps obtained from the fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) analysis of the brain. The approach is based on activation signatures which represent fMRI brain activations by size, shape, number (of foci), location, density, orientation, and other parameters. These signatures are used in providing automatic classification of activations into classes. Since fMRI brain imaging is a non-invasive technique it has attracted enormous interest in recent years because of its potential to solve fundamental problems explaining cognitive processes and to find relations between brain structure and function. The environment developed in this project can fully utilize fMRI s potential by enabling inter- and intra- studies and support large-scale mining of fMRI brain activations. The techniques can extract associations at multiple levels: among different activations for the same or different (groups of) individuals, between activations and tasks, between activations and ancillary data, and between tasks and ancillary data. Automatic characterization tools open the field to numerous new research opportunities, as they can offer common signature formats to do cross-modality brain data searches and correlation over multiple studies. In turn, the mined results can speed up discovery in the neuroscience field. The methods will be demonstrated on a prototype robust database of brain activations that includes scan data as well as biographical, clinical, historical and other subject-centered ancillary data. This database supports retrieval requests and subsequent analysis incorporating spatial statistics, classification, and visualization techniques and provides an evaluation of the system by the professional communities. The results of this work will be applicable to the analysis of other brain data such as brain lesions, Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans, and MRI scans; thus helping to create tools for search across brain data formats. In addition, objects similar to brain activations appear in many other different domains, including cellular biology, tumor analysis, fluid dynamics, or financial records, therefore, the resulting techniques are expected to have broad impact. http: devlab.dartmouth.edu doc5333 none FEY The Mid-Atlantic Center for Mathematics Teaching and Learning (CMTL) is a consortium led by members of the mathematics and education faculties of three research universities and three school-system partners -- the University of Delaware, the University of Maryland, the Pennsylvania State University, the Delaware State Department of Education, the Prince George s County (MD) Public Schools, and the Pittsburgh (PA) Public Schools. The University of Maryland is the designated grantee institution. The CMTL addresses the shortage of mathematics education professionals through two major sets of activities: Design, operate, and evaluate an innovative prototype for doctoral and postdoctoral education of specialists in mathematics teacher education, curriculum, development, policy leadership and mathematics education research. Develop, evaluate, and disseminate models for mathematics education of pre-service teachers and professional development of in-service teachers in elementary, middle, and high schools. The specialists training draws upon the combined resources of faculty and students from the three participating universities. Courses, research experiences and field experiences are provided that go far beyond the capability of each institution separately. The program for specialists is be characterized by three major elements: Breadth and depth of knowledge in mathematics and its applications. Knowledge of mathematics teaching and learning. Scholarly Skills. The education of pre-service teachers and the professional development of in-service teachers are a joint effort involving each of the universities and its school partner. Mathematics and Education faculty at the University of Delaware work with staff from the Delaware State Department of Education to improve pre-service education for elementary and middle school teachers. Mathematicians and mathematics educators at Penn State work with doctoral fellows and mathematics teacher leaders to develop college-level courses focusing on foundational ideas from secondary mathematics for prospective high school teachers. These courses are revised with the help of teachers from the Pittsburgh Public schools to be suitable for courses for in-service teachers. The University of Maryland and Prince George s County Public Schools cooperate to formulate and evaluate a model for professional development for middle school teachers that develops school-based leaders and evaluates their efforts to effect instructional change in schools doc5334 none In this project, a mobile gas analyzer for the detection of NO, NO2, and aromatic hydrocarbons at the ultra trace (ppt) level will be developed. The instrument is based on resonance enhanced multiphoton ionization time of flight mass spectrometry (REMPI MS) and will feature highly selective real-time detection, direct sampling of air at ambient pressure, and a temporal resolution shorter than one second. Solid state laser technology and fiber optics will be used, making the instrument rugged and mobile doc5335 none Holl Restoration ecologists have often generally discussed the importance of landscape-level processes, such as flooding and animal movement, in determining restoration success, but have rarely used understanding of basic ecological processes to provide land managers with tools to prioritize restoration efforts. This research comprises an initial assessment of population, community, and ecosystem processes that regulate the dynamics of riparian forest ecosystem recovery along the Sacramento River, the largest river in California. Incubation activities will include two parts. First, existing data will be used to model linkages between hydrology, riparian vegetation, and riparian bird communities. This model will be used to assess the importance of processes at different scales and to prioritize areas for future research. Second, two meetings will be held with additional scientists who have experience modeling linkages between hydrology and ecological succession and or have expertise in other areas that would be important in linking riparian restoration efforts and ecosystem dynamics, such as fish ecology, nutrient cycling and socioeconomic analysis. This research will: (1) address fundamental questions of the scales at which ecosystem dynamics are regulated, (2) help to prioritize future experimental and modeling efforts, and (3) provide guidance to land managers on prioritizing restoration strategies doc5336 none Migration involves the movement of individuals between geographically separated sites, and is a common life history trait in many taxa, including birds. Our understanding of the movement of individuals among populations of migratory species, and the consequences of these movements, remains rudimentary, in large part because tracking individuals has proven near impossible. Recent technological advances, in both molecular genetics and geochemistry (e.g., isotopic tracers), now provide tools that can be used to address these complex questions. We propose to hold two separate workshops to develop and refine an integrated approach for measuring movement and dispersal patterns of migratory birds and for assessing through modeling the consequences of these movements for population dynamics and microevolution. These workshops will bring together experts in the field and will focus on: (1) how data from isotopic, molecular genetic, and population studies can be combined to develop a robust model of the connections between summer and winter populations of migratory species, and (2) the theoretical consequences of strong versus weak population connectivity. A better understanding of migration is central to several issues in ecology, evolution and conservation. The most pressing need, and to date the most seemingly intractable problem, has been in determining (1) the movement patterns of individuals between summer and winter populations and (2) dispersal rates and distances from natal sites to eventual breeding locations. The former is important for determining how limiting factors (including impact of habitat destruction, effects of climate change, etc.) operating in different parts of the birds annual cycle determine local abundances and thus population dynamics. The latter is needed for assessing gene flow among populations and its effects on local adaptation and speciation. In addition, many migratory songbirds are undergoing population declines, and thus an understanding of the factors that determine their abundances, which could operate in breeding and or non-breeding periods, is of urgent conservation concern doc5337 none Harmon This project will investigate how processes such as water flow, fire, wind, and other disturbances interact in a forested landscape. The work will involve an exploration of how parts of landscape (elements) are linked together by these processes. The results will be used to develop a general framework to analyze and predict the behaviors of landscapes. This framework will separate processes that occur in a place versus those that link places. The latter set of processes can be used to define landscape versus ecosystem behavior. The framework will change perspectives of scientists and managers from one in which landscapes are viewed as patterns of elements to a perspective in which landscapes are viewed as places where interactions among processes vary according to the arrangement of landscape elements. The former view emphasizes pattern, whereas the latter emphasizes processes. This project will not only advance scientific understanding of the biocomplexity of landscapes, but will also allow land managers to manage natural resources at appropriate scales and in a sustainable manner doc5338 none PI: David DeVorkin Inst: Smithsonian Institution The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM) will develop and install a major new permanent exhibit, Explore the Universe, which shows how understanding of the Universe has changed over time as the tools we use to study it have evolved. The exhibition makes use of a selection of artifacts, working models, images, interactive videos and computer programs, hands-on exhibits, and live demonstrations to explore scientists view of the Universe as well as how they use ground- and space-based technology to study it. The exhibit will cover all regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, and offer a blend of historic perspective and modern experience with the science of astrophysics and cosmology. The goal is to communicate both the magnificence of the Universe and the efforts of scientists to understand it. An accompanying web site will be developed that contains the images, text, and computer interactives of the exhibit, and a virtual tour of the gallery. Educational materials will be prepared for teachers, students, and families visiting the exhibit, and a supplemental educational program of visitors, workshops for teachers, and internship programs will be created. Funding for this project is provided by the Division of Astronomical Sciences, the Division of Physics, and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences doc5339 none Perturbation of biological communities, exemplified by habitat loss and the invasion of novel taxa is well documented. Economic development, new technologies, and population pressure have escalated the scale, frequency, and severity of such perturbations. As a result, evolutionary and ecological dynamics may be driven so far from their equilibria that the linear approximations used for understanding and predicting consequences of subtle perturbations are inappropriate and probably misleading. To elucidate the consequences of massive perturbations in biological communities, a spatially explicit model whose dynamics are complicated by ecological, genetic, and historical factors, is proposed. Studies on (i) corn smut and corn, (ii) rhizobia associated with common bean, (iii) corn borer and genetically modified Bt and non-Bt corn, and (iv) prairie plants and their pollinators provide the empirical basis that are framed by the general model of interactions between hosts and their associates. A hierarchy of models at different spatial scales will determine the evolutionary and ecological role of different factors at the different spatial scales. In addition, statistical tools are used to develop and analyze data of genetic diversity under non-equilibrium conditions using both temporal and spatial information. Understanding the complex interactions between the members of communities undergoing such massive perturbations and their evolutionary and ecological consequences requires the integration of empirical work and mathematical models across temporal and spatial scales. The empirical studies represent examples of large perturbations that occurred either in the past (as in (i) and (ii)) or in the present (as in (iii) and (iv)). The historical studies allow testing the predictability of the theoretical models to assess the accuracy of the predictions for the consequences of massive perturbations that occur presently. The perturbations consist (1) of the introduction of novel organisms or (2) of habitat destruction, both at a large spatial scale: Corn and beans were moved from South and Central America to North America in the past carrying with them microorganism that, after introduction, competed with already present microorganisms. Bt corn is currently being introduced in North America as a control mechanism for the European corn borer, a devastating pest of corn; Bt corn is introduced at a large spatial scale that introduces large selection pressure on the evolution of resistance to Bt corn, which will make this control mechanism ineffective. Habitat destruction is an ongoing process affecting nearly every natural community in North America and in other parts of the world leading to loss in biodiversity. The goal is to predict the evolutionary and ecological consequences of large range expansions and contractions of plants on their associated biological communities in order to better manage natural and agricultural systems doc5291 none This project addresses new methods to generate collision-free paths for robots that operate in environments that change over time. Typical applications of this research include robot arms mounted on mobile platforms, arms that operate in factory settings, or any other manipulation systems that operate in environments that are either unknown a priori or may change over time. The proposed approach comprises preprocessing and on-line stages. Preprocessing produces a representation of the configuration space that can be easily modified in real-time to account for changes in the environment. A one-dimensional roadmap is constructed for an obstacle-free workspace, and the mapping from workspace cells to nodes and arcs in the roadmap is encoded. In the on-line stage, when the environment changes, this mapping is used to make the appropriate modifications to the roadmap, and plans can be generated by searching the modified roadmap. At the heart of the method is the encoding for the mapping from workspace obstacles to configuration space obstacles. To make the proposed approach truly viable, a major component of the proposed research will focus on robustness and complexity issues. These issues will be addressed by using tools from the fields of image processing, information theory, graph theory, computational geometry, and incremental algorithms doc5341 none Researchers seeking to understand the complex dynamics between humans and their environment commonly have used census-type data that are gathered at the household level, aggregated these data up to some geographically defined administrative unit, and then linked these aggregated data with land-use and land-cover data gathered from remote sensors in satellites or airplanes. In recent years, a number of projects have systematically sought to gather socioeconomic data at the household level as well as remotely sensed land-use and land-cover data. These projects generally have been independent of each other, and there has not been a careful review of the methods being used to actually link data on people and pixels (the units of land as viewed by the remote sensors). This Biocomplexity Incubation Award will support the conduct of a workshop to address both theoretical and practical issues involved in collecting and linking socioeconomic data from households and communities with remotely sensed data to study land-use and land-cover change. This project will bring scientists from a number of these major projects discuss the methods, challenges, and opportunities currently facing researchers. The workshop is expected to be held at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, in mid- to late . Papers prepared by and discussions among participants at the workshop will be used to produce a publication that provides a state-of-the-art survey of methodology and issues for linking household-based socioeconomic data with remotely sensed land-use and land-cover data. This project is designed not only to enhance the knowledge of the scientific community regarding the interaction between human and natural systems. It also will provide decision makers with information and tools to enable them to better understand human impacts on land-use and land-cover change and to predict environmental responses to such changes. Understanding these processes is critical if policy makers and planners are to create the conditions that promote environmentally sound and sustainable development. More specifically, the proposed workshop will lead to a better understanding of methods of analyzing human impacts on land-use changes and of how these changes influence land cover over time doc5342 none The goal of this research project is to improve our understanding of how humans behave in information-seeking digital environments such as the Web. The approach consists of using massively large Web logs to infer patterns of behavior. New probabilistic models for modeling human behavior on the Web are under investigation including Markov and switching models, mixture models, and Bayesian hierarchical models. Adaptive statistical techniques form the basis for building up individual user models in an online fashion, automatically learning both the dynamic time-dependent patterns of a user as well as text-vector representations of their interests. Test data sets from large commercial Web sites are being used to develop, validate, and test the models. Data are anonymized to protect individual privacy. The statistical user models are in turn being used to develop two primary software tools. The first tool allows an analyst to explore, cluster, predict, and visualize Web logs with millions of entries, allowing an understanding of dynamic patterns of access and behavior in a manner that is not currently available in research or commercial tools. The second tool, WebMARS, uses adaptive user-models to enhance information retrieval algorithms by interpreting search queries in a personalized manner. More generally, the results from this project will provide tools and techniques to enable a better scientific understanding of modes of human behavior across a broad range of digital environments, with potential applications in wireless information appliances, medical informatics, scientific exploration of massive data sets, and so forth doc5343 none The seafloor contains diverse assemblages of organisms, woven into complex ecological systems where their activities, distributions and biological interactions are intricately linked to the physical and chemical character of the sedimentary environment. It is also an active site of elemental cycling, and a critical long?term sink in the global cycles of major constituents, including carbon, nitrogen and sulfur. Thus, the interplay between organisms and sediment properties can strongly influence the geological geochemical record, clouding the understanding of past climate and paleoceanography, and obscuring the ability to determine current rates of elemental cycling and burial. There is considerable information about specific processes within sedimentary environments but little is known of how to integrate them. Such integration is critical to understanding the role of sediments in global environmental processes, and the selective pressures affecting population structure, community ecology and reproductive success of resident organisms. To understand and predict the interactions between the biology, chemistry and physics of sediments, and their impacts on populations, communities, and biogeochemical processes, models must be developed to permit the basic geochemical and geophysical processes to respond to the activities of organisms, and vice versa. A series of workshops will be held to bring together ecologists and ecological modelers, physiologists and microbial biologists, physical and geochemical modelers with numerical modeling expertise, biogeochemists and applied mathematicians to attack this numerically intensive and difficult problem. The goals are as follows: to discuss scales of interactions, feedback loops, nonlinear processes and emergent properties, and how they might be successfully included in existing modeling approaches; to broaden models to achieve integration over multiple spatial and temporal scales; to discuss novel mathematical approaches or combinations of models; to summarize findings in a commentary piece, and finally to discuss next steps . The research topic will most likely lend itself to one or more research proposals, or perhaps, a new initiative in coastal sedimentary processes doc5344 none Cluster computing exploits the exponential growth in processing power, memory disk capacity, and network link speed of commodity hardware developed in the PC industry to achieve excellent price-performance, and is becoming a major platform for scientific computation, Web page and file servicing, as well as large-scale information analysis applications such as data mining and knowledge discovery. A distinct characteristic shared by many emerging workloads on PC clusters is the requirement for intensive disk data accesses during program computation. The fundamental technique to address the performance problems associated with disk I O is to overlap disk access with program computation so that the I O delays are completely masked. Disk prefetching is one incarnation of this technique. In this project, we propose an automatic application- specific file prefetching scheme that exploits specific applications access patterns to the fullest extent and achieves close to perfect prefetching. The key idea is to apply the concept of decoupled architecture, which was originally proposed to bridge the gap between CPU and memory, to overlap computation with disk I O. Given an application program, the compiler automatically translates it into two threads, one corresponding to the original program (computation thread) and the other including all statements in the original program that are related to disk I O (prefetch thread). At run time, the prefetch thread is scheduled to be suficiently ahead of the computation thread so that all the file access requests of the computation thread are satisfied in the file system cache, which is populated by the prefetch thread anticipatively. To validate the decoupled I O architecture, we will design, implement, and evaluate an active parallel disk I O subsystem called Platypus that embodies the application-specific file prefetching scheme and that is designed to be a modular building block for scalable PC cluster systems that aim at data-intensive computing. Platypus consists of a source-to-source translator to generate computation and prefetch threads from a SPMD parallel program automatically, a run-time thread scheduler that coordinates the execution of prefetch threads on the I O nodes, and a cache manager that maximizes main memory utilization efficiency by optimally balancing the benefits of file caching and prefetching doc5345 none This research project integrates experimental research on the biochemical aspects governing chemotaxis in Dictyostelium discoideum with theoretical developments from control engineering and dynamical systems theory. Chemotaxis - the ability to sense the direction of external chemical sources and respond by polarizing and migrating toward chemoattractants or away from chemorepellants - is crucial for proper functioning of single cell organisms, such as bacteria and amoebae, as well as multi-cellular systems. In fact, chemotaxis occurs to some extent in almost every cell type at some time during its development. It is a major component of the inflammatory, and wound-healing responses, the mammalian reproductive systems (spermatozoa), the development of the nervous system as well as tumor metastasis. Despite of recent advances in the understanding of the biochemistry regulating chemotaxis in eukaryotic cells -specially of the slime mold D. discoideum, knowledge of the signaling network is far from complete. Nevertheless, this signaling network serves as a particularly timely candidate for mathematical and computational modeling, as well as an ideal model organism for discovering how cells sense and respond to directional external stimuli. The introduction of control engineering and dynamical systems theory into this research is particularly appropriate as these fields focus on nonlinear phenomenon, particularly those involving feedback systems and thus provide a natural counterpoint to biochemical research. Specifically, in this research we propose to 1) localize the signaling proteins in living cells undergoing chemotaxis; 2) account for the source and nature of signal amplification; 3) explore the mobility of signaling proteins during chemotaxis; 4) determine the roles that conflicting chemoattractants have on cell polarity; and 5) ascertain the robustness properties of this cell signaling mechanism. Our goal is to develop high-fidelity models of the regulatory network controlling eukaryotic chemotaxis. Eukaryotic chemotaxis is a fascinating biological phenomenon. A thorough understanding will represent a huge step forward in our knowledge of one of the basic properties of life, i.e. purposeful movement, and enable a logical approach to the treatment of many devastating human diseases that result when this process fails. Moreover, the similarity of the chemotactic responses in mammalian cells to those of D. discoideum ensures that the proposed research will have far reaching impact beyond this organism doc5346 none This research explores the use of geochemical tracers in a marine gastropod as an indicator of Chilean coastal upwelling. Mg Ca will be used to indicate water temperature and Cd Ca will be used to indicate nutrient content. Measurements from a series of water samples will be compared to analyses of living shells to test and calibrate the usefulness of the method doc5347 none Biocomplexity-Incubation Activity: How Physical-Biological Coupling in the Western Arctic Ocean Influences Marine Mammal Abundance and Native Subsistence Harvests Marine mammal distribution, relative abundance and availability to Native subsistence hunters in the Western Arctic likely are influenced by oceanographic variability resulting from interannual variation in both weather patterns in the Arctic and longer-term global climate fluctuations. This variability influences the development of localized hot spots at which elevated concentrations of marine mammal plankton prey, and aggregations of marine mammals, are found. Indigenous knowledge demonstrates that such hot spots are favorable hunting locations. To investigate Biocomplexity in the Arctic marine environment, this effort will develop a five-year research program to examine trophic cascades from the bottom up (i.e., from physical -biological interactions to human consumption of marine mammals). The central hypothesis is: Marine mammal distribution, relative abundance and availability to Native subsistence hunters can be modeled in relation to variability in plankton production and food web structure which are linked to physical conditions in the Western Arctic. This is a one-year Incubation Activity (IA) to support the development of a research plan that effectively addresses this question. The IA will be collaborative and includes physical and biological oceanographers, modelers, marine mammalogists and Alaska Native representatives. Incubation activities will include: 1) identification of existing relevant data as background for our modeling and field work; 2) assembling a team of scientists and Native representatives with relevant expertise and knowledge; and 3) the conduct of two planning workshops with this team to develop a comprehensive research program to focused on the central hypothesis doc5300 none This workshop will bring together a multidisciplinary collection of mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists, biological scientists, and social scientists for the purpose of developing models of complex networks in both human and biological systems, with special emphasis given to integration of social and ecological networks. The specific objectives used to structure the workshop are: (1) establishing common ground; (2) modeling of complex systems; (3) interfacing and extension; (4) visualization and exploration; and (5) data quality issues. Thirty experts in the various disciplines have been invited to participate in a three-day workshop at the Duke Marine Laboratory in March of . Prior to the meeting, in order to establish common ground, we will distribute to each participant a statement of purpose, key readings, and a lexicon of analogous terms used in the various disciplines. The workshop will commence with a full day of focused presentations, a second day devoted to breakout groups focusing on the last four objectives, and a final day where breakout group summaries and recommendations will be synthesized using rapporteurs. The attendees will: identify the common issues of complexity across disciplines, the limitations to cross fertilizations of ideas, and ways to overcome these limitations; explore the appropriateness of various mathematical and statistical network models and analyses developed by mathematicians, statisticians, and social and biological scientists applicable to the study of complex biological systems; explore the inclusion of human system dynamics, both of a trophic and non-trophic nature, into models of complex biological systems; develop and improve computer based tools for the exploratory visual analysis of complex biological systems; and, address issues concerning the quality of data used in modeling biocomplexity in food webs and trophic networks. Both social scientists and ecologists use network models to study complexity. However, current computer-based methods of the study of complexity in human and biological systems are not fully developed. Most significantly, these models lack integration of human and ecological networks. Until now, there has been much work done on a variety of fields in complexity, but there has been little contact among researchers in the various fields, each field forming an invisible college. Recently, social scientists and ecologists have recognized their parallel efforts and have begun collaboration. Short-term products of this workshop will include publications from the attendees, but the greater significance will come in the long-term with increased collaboration among scientists from different backgrounds. This workshop will aid in promoting such collaboration and has the potential to contribute significantly to a better understanding of various problems in the study of biocomplexity. This incubation activity was funded as part of the FY Biocomplexity Special Competition doc5349 none The primary goal of this project is to explain long-term, complex change processes in human-bioecological systems-especially forested regions. We will develop agent-based models to examine how land-use decisions made at one level (a household) affect outcomes at that level and at several higher and lower levels in a hierarchically nested set of systems. We develop two agent-based models to explain land-use patterns in the frontier and post-frontier Midwest of the United States and the frontier of the Brazilian Amazon. The first model will address two major puzzles: (1) Why did the descendants of the initial settlers in nineteenth-century Indiana cut down timber at such a massive and seemingly uneconomic rate that they eventually denuded the land, causing massive erosion and soil loss, and leading to substantial farm abandonment? and (2) Why have forests regrown so extensively on privately owned land when so many public policies are based on the assumption that fragmented, privately owned parcels are destined never to have significant forest regrowth? The second model will explain the spatial and temporal patterns of deforestation in the Amazon over the last three decades. The assumptions we make in the two models will be empirically tested and grounded by rigorous laboratory experiments. The patterns of land use at any point in time and the processes of change also will be tested against a rich set of data derived from ground-truthed satellite data, aerial photographs, land surveys, census data, household interviews, forest mensuration undertaken in a sample of forest patches, and archival data regarding timber and agricultural prices, input costs, and land values. After further development and testing, both models will be used to extrapolate into the future and assess how diverse public policies are likely to affect land use in general and forest change in particular in these regions. The project will involve three important capstone activities: a Workshop on Agent-Based Models of Biocomplexity, a synthesis volume to be derived from the Workshop, and a Summer Institute. The study will have multiple impacts. By achieving an empirically validated understanding of land-use decisions of individual households under different policy regimes, the study will produce useful tools for evaluating alternative public policies. Ascertaining how public inducements, taxation, and constraints affect rates of forest change contributes to the worldwide effort to find effective methods for stimulating reforestation and thereby sequestering carbon to offset carbon released into the atmosphere. The study also addresses fundamental questions related to the appropriate model of human behavior to use when examining a combination of investment decisions in complex, dynamic environments. Thus, the study is relevant for achieving an empirically validated foundation for an array of decision situations beyond those of land use and deforestation. Tools from multiple social, biological, and physical science disciplines will be combined and expanded in unique ways and disseminated in publications, workshops, and training institutes. This research activity was funded as part of the FY Biocomplexity Special Competition doc5350 none Teeri This incubation activity will lead to the development of a new biocomplexity research program. The purpose of this research program is to improve the understanding of the extent to which forest ecosystems can be managed to maximize the uptake and storage of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The long term goal is to determine if the uptake and storage of carbon dioxide in forests can significantly reduce the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth s atmosphere. This multi-institutional research program will be built upon six existing forest carbon dioxide research programs of the AmeriFlux network. The six programs are located at: Harvard University, Indiana University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, and Yale University. A seventh institution, The Ecosystems Center at Woods Hole, will participate and provide doc5351 none This grant will be used to pay student travel expenses to the annual conference of the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology (SBN) in August . The SBN fosters research and education concerning how hormones act on the brain and body to influence behavior. SBN is unique in its attention to student members. For example, last year s annual SBN meeting drew136 student attendees, 85 competitors in the student poster competition, and 42 competitors for the student travel awards. Students typically have limited financial resources, and thus, we set membership dues at $10, and consistently provide affordable accommodations. This year s annual meeting in Madrid, Spain will offer special opportunities to travel abroad and to interact with a diverse group of distinguished scientists. The momentum we generated in student participation might have been dampened by the prohibitive cost of transatlantic travel, had we not received this travel grant. Research presented at the SBN conference has impact on clinical treatments as well as on environmental awareness. For example, the hormonal changes of menopause and those associated with stressful experiences are associated with a loss of memory and learning ability. Members of SBN are studying the effects of the ovarian hormone, estrogen, and adrenal hormones on the specific brain cells that influence learning and memory. Other members of SBN are studying the effects of hormones secreted by plants such as soy. Ingested plant hormones impair fertility or even reverse the sex of animals, including people. These are just two of the many examples of hormonal effects on behavior that SBN members seek to understand. While most of science reduces these phenomena to the cellular and molecular level, SBN members seeks to integrate cellular and molecular concepts into a functional framework that is relevant for the whole animal in its environment doc5352 none A key question in the social and evolutionary sciences is the explanation of cooperation among human groups. Current models explain cooperation either as a result of fitness benefits to kin or as a consequence of reciprocal altruism among individuals in small groups. Both explanations are limited to small groups that are united by kinship ties or reciprocal exchanges. The purpose of this Biocomplexity research project is to improve general understandings of the role of the environment in the formation and dissolution of large-scale cooperative groups. To accomplish this goal, an adaptive-agent simulation model will be created that can predict variation in cooperation as a consequence of processes that occur over historical time. Among the changes to be examined are changes in population density, kinship relationships, and ecological feedback. The model will also predict statistical patterns of biological kinship relationships among individuals and conflicts between social groups. These patterns will be tested against observed data on conflict and cooperation among Balinese farming communities. This project builds on prior NSF-funded research that showed how stable cooperative networks encompassing tens of thousands of farmers in Balinese watersheds can be explained through a model of self-organization through which ecological feedback rewarded cooperation with high harvest yields and reduced variance in yields. In computer simulations, agents coalesced into cooperative groups as a consequence of ecological feedback, and these groups often coalesced into higher-level agents. Calculated optimal structural patterns of cooperation bear a very close resemblance to observed patterns among the subaks. But despite the ecological rewards for cooperation, it frequently breaks down. Because the existing ecological model always predicts that cooperation will be rewarded, it cannot account for such failures to cooperate. Detailed observations of 15 villages over the past four years suggest that cultural rules of kinship and patterns of demographic change strongly influence both the emergence and dissolution of cooperative bonds among farmers. The proposed adaptive-agent simulation model will enable simulation of these historical processes. The model will predict specific patterns of demography, kinship relationships, and levels of cooperation for particular villages. These predictions will be tested against observed data. The model will be constructed and tested using data from Bali, but it will be designed to facilitate a search for similar processes and dynamics in other societies doc5353 none 00- Carpenter Biocomplexity: Divergent dynamics: Complex interactions of riparian land, people and lakes Surprises -large, unexpected changes from apparently small causes -are common in systems of people and nature. Are these surprises a consequence of the complexity or nonlinearity of natural-social systems? Or can they be explained by simpler processes? This research project addresses this question for systems composed of lakes, their riparian vegetation and land use, and social and economic organizations of lake users. The investigators will study the self-organization of lake users and associated characteristics of shoreline and lake ecosystems. The project will determine whether thresholds in riparian organization set the stage for an important class of surprises: collapses of economically important game fish stocks. The researchers will also test the possibility that nonlinear dynamics can be used to design manipulations that remove invading crayfish from a lake. If successful, this experiment will catalyze a self-sustaining removal of an invasive species - a path-breaking ecological restoration doc5354 none Ongoing research examining the complex interactions among human and natural systems have demonstrated the need for more frequent and cohesive communication among social and natural sciences. This Biocomplexity Incubation Activity award will support a project that consists of a series of workshops and other activities designed to integrate research on environmental change and its effects on biocomplexity being carried out by ecologists, who generally work on spatially explicit models of population dynamics, and social scientists, who tend to do research on the social, economic and institutional bases for human modification of environments. The project will involve two workshops. Each workshop will run for three to five days and will involve 30 to 45 participants; including roughly equal numbers of ecologists and social scientists. The first workshop will center on the construction of preliminary models and the exploration of issues that have to be resolved in order to integrate the insights and working methods of ecology and social science. Preliminary models will be developed and tested over the following year in a sequence of graduate seminars. Web-based materials will be developed to maintain contact among the participants. A substantial portion of the second workshop will be devoted to preparing proposals for further research on biocomplexity and biodiversity. Ecologists and environmental social scientists have been addressing related issues although they have emphasized different research questions and have used dissimilar models and methods. Despite their differences in research traditions, these two fields have reached a stage where intensive interactions in a series of workshops should be very fruitful. Both groups have been heavily concerned with the destruction or transformation of habitat, a set of processes that probably pose the greatest threat to biodiversity. Both groups have also addressed these processes in ways that make spatial processes explicit and important. Among ecologists, space has become an extremely important component in the logic of theoretical models of ecological processes. Among social scientists, spatial frameworks have become crucial as basis for gathering and organizing information about environmental change. This project will use these common concerns with habitat destruction and spatially explicit modeling to develop a set of research projects that integrate the work of ecologists and environmental social scientists doc5355 none Parker Biological invasions, acting in conjunction with climatic variability and spatial heterogeneity, are generating rapid ecological and evolutionary change in native ecosystems. Understanding how spatial and temporal dynamics shape the invasion process requires multiple integrated approaches. This project is designed to develop a consortium of natural and social scientists to advance our understanding of the current and future state of ecological systems in California. The consortium will combine two approaches. First, museum collections and historical data on invasions and climate will be analyzed and synthesized. Second, the group will coordinate monitoring and replicated experiments on the ways in which landscape context and climatic cycles shape the pulsed structure of invasions, rapid evolution within communities, food web and ecosystem dynamics, and regional patterns of biotic change. This research will lead to a practical and predictive understanding of environmental change and be of significant value to policy makers and resource managers doc5356 none The conference Strings will be held at the University of Michigan July 10-15, . This will be a major conference devoted to superstring theory and its M-theory generalizations, which hold promise of unifying all the fundamental forces of nature. There has been significant recent progress in this area, including the discovery of duality relations showing the equivalence of seemingly unrelated theories. This conference, at which many leading scientists in superstring theory will exchange ideas, is very important to further progress doc5357 none LAY Neural Transmission & Modulation in the Cerebellum and the Vestibulo-ocular Reflex James G. McElligott Operation of the vestibulo-ocular reflex is essential for maintaining clear vision in the presence of head movements. For proper operation of this reflex throughout life, adaptive increases or decreases in the magnitude of this reflex are necessary. This adaptation corrects for alterations in the vestibular and visual system associated with early developmental, age, and injury related events. A simple brain circuit involving the cerebellum and vestibular nucleus controls adaptation of the reflex. Presently, it is not known where in this neuronal circuitry these changes occur. It is also unclear if changes occur by a single common neuronal mechanism or by multiple mechanisms. The purpose of the research is to address these questions. Experiments will be directed towards investigating the involvement of two brain neurotransmitters (glutamate and GABA) and their actions at specific receptors (NMDA for glutamate and GABAa for GABA) within the cerebellar neuronal circuitry. Of particular interest is the glomeruli synapse in the cerebellum where these receptors are present. It is at this unique synapse that mossy fibers, Golgi and granule cells contact each other and interact. Often the brain is compared to a computer in its operation. However, the brain has the ability to repair and to alter its circuitry, a property that the computer lacks. The object of this research is to understand the mechanisms by which the brain produces these alterations or adaptive changes. This knowledge will aid in the development of techniques to facilitate the adaptive process. This knowledge will also have a direct bearing on understanding problems associated with disturbances to the vestibular or balance system. This has an impact on everyday vestibular problems encountered on the earth, as well as the more recently identified vestibular alterations that are associated with extraterrestrial space exploration doc5358 none Goldberg Funding is requested for a Fourier-Transform Infrared (FTIR) microscope-spectrometer system to serve the needs of investigators in the Departments of Archeology, Chemistry and Earth Sciences at Boston University. This instrument will be used to obtain complete spectra on very small (ca. 100-microgram) samples and to analyze very small ( _10-micron) features in macroscopic samples. Specific applications of the FTIR microspectrometer will include the analysis of polymer-embedded sediments (e.g., from caves) for evidence of prehistoric human occupation, of paint pigments and binding materials from paintings, of archeological objects currently being uncovered at sites in China; and the detection of volatile substances (HZO and CO ) trapped under high pressure in volcanic rocks, in order to better understand the explosivity and other properties of magma in volcanoes. Geological and paint pigment applications exploit existing techniques; the archeological applications are novel. The FTIR microspectrometer is a robust instrument which can be used by faculty and students alike and therefore will have a significant impact on both our research and training programs. It will promote new areas research and strengthen developing core programs in archeology and materials analysis at Boston University, besides contributing to the understanding of prehistoric human behavior, the documentation and conservation of human cultural artifacts doc5359 none Bridgham Peatlands are wetlands that have accumulated significant amounts of soil organic matter. Northern peatlands are an important component of the global carbon cycle and contain one-third of the global soil carbon pool. Under a warmer climate, this soil carbon may be oxidized and emitted to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and or methane, two important greenhouse gases, and thus exacerbate human-induced climate change. Therefore, it is important to predict the response of peatlands to climate change. The objective of this incubation proposal is to bring together two research groups that have developed separate models of peatlands which display complex behaviors. One model focuses on feedbacks between carbon accumulation and hydrology, whereas the other model focuses on feedbacks between plant communities and nutrient availability. A framework will be developed for a comprehensive simulation model that can both (i) simulate the initiation and development of peatlands over thousands of years and the resulting pattern of different peatland ecosystems that form on the landscape, and (ii) explore their shorter term response to climate change. This model will provide great insight into the complex behaviors of these unique ecosystems and will be invaluable in predicting the effects and potential feedbacks of climate change on peatlands doc5360 none Levin Biological systems, from ecosystems to the biosphere, support our continued existence on the planet. From them we derive food and fiber, fuel and pharmaceuticals. Ecosystems mediate local and regional climates, stabilize soils, purify water and in general provide a nearly endless list of services essential to life as we know it. The case for the preservation of ecosystems and these services is manifestly clear; the essential challenges are in the details of how to do it. The key is in understanding biocomplexity - how it arises, how it is maintained, and how it sustains the services we derive from it. This project will examine the mechanisms sustaining crucial regional and global processes that underlie our life-support systems. The research approach will combine empirical and theoretical work, documenting emergent laws of organization, and examining through sophisticated modeling the mechanisms that generate and maintain biocomplexity and predictable doc5361 none Ferreira The grant provides funds to allow the investigators to obtain significant instrumentation for cognitive behavioral research. The requested-funds wo6 ld be used to purchase a free-viewing, mobile eye movement monitoring system, along with a computer workstation and a monitor for displaying some stimuli (in other cases, stimuli will be real, three-dimensional objects and scenes). The mobile eyetracker allows the viewer to examine real-world scenes or visual displays of scenes while making normal, natural head and body movements. Indeed, the system allows researchers to obtain precise information about where a person is looking as he or she moves through or manipulates objects in a natural environment. The instrumentation would be used for a variety of studies in cognitive and behavioral sciences. These include: (1) Research to examine how comprehenders quickly obtain interpretations for spoken sentences. No other existing methodology allows researchers to measure moment-by-moment processing for aurally presented sentences. (2) Research to study how real-world scenes are represented, and how representations of objects and scenes are generated dynamically over time in the context of meaningful actions. (3) Investigations of how humans are able to navigate novel and familiar environments, focusing particularly on eye movement patterns (e.g., what objects are used as guideposts and landmarks). (4) Studies of human-computer interaction, including the representation of objects and navigation through virtual reality environments. The free-viewing eyetracker would complement the Principal Investigators existing laboratory facilities and greatly enhance the ability to train undergraduate and graduate students in sophisticated methodologies for studying complex behavior in intelligent systems doc5362 none Under the direction of Dr. Joyce Marcus, MS Laura Villamil will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. She will survey and conduct test excavations at two Mayan archaeological sites, Lagartera and Margarita Maza de Juarez (MMJ), located in the Quintana Roo region of lowland Mexico. Centers of this type were, in fact, pre-industrial cities because they incorporated thousands of individuals into single spatially integrated units. Both sites contain temple and plaza complexes which indicate the ability of rulers to mobilize large numbers of individuals for public work projects. Differences in building type within such cities demonstrate they served multiple functions both public and domestic in nature. Archaeologists have focused considerable attention on the spatial organization of such entities because they believe such data will provide insight into the social, political and economic organization of the Maya. MS Villamil, along with other researchers, has noted that even within a single region cities vary significantly in form and that some have a single well defined center while others appear to have multiple clearly defined areas of public buildings. She wishes to understand why such is the case and hypothesizes that centers with a single core developed slowly over time and were situated at the top of the regional hierarchy. Multiple core centers, she believes resulted from a single building episode and that the cores serve complementary rather than redundant functions. Such cities, she argues represent secondary centers and appeared slightly later in time than their single core counterparts. To test this idea she will compare Lagartera and MMJ which have single and multiple cores respectively. Using aerial photographs she will create maps of both sites and over the course of two field seasons conduct ground surveys to verify them and to fill in additional detail. She will then excavate a large series of test pits to collect stratified ceramics which will allow individual structures and areas to be dated relative to each other. In this way she will determine the extent of construction contemporanity. This detailed examination of contrasting site plans will contribute to understanding of the development of urban society. The investigation of different urban patterns in the Maya area and of the specific historical trajectories which led to their development will contribute to cross-cultural studies seeking to understand the effects which various sociopolitical circumstances have on the appearance, growth and transformation of cities. The project will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc5363 none Hastings, Alan M. , Susan L. Ustin, Edwin D. Grosholz, and Donald R. Strong Dynamics of an invasive non-native species and its biological, physical, and human impacts: Spartina alterniflora on the Pacific coast The PIs propose an integrative study of the dynamics of the invasive species, Spartina alterniflora (cordgrass), including a core mathematical conceptual model, physical and biological feedbacks, and a study of the impacts on non-commercial human values. The core model is termed a local-state, regional-state model and the crucial innovation is the use of discrete time and continuous states and explicit inclusion of stochastically based on integro-difference equations, yielding substantial mathematical and computational advantages over reaction diffusion models. The state of the invasion will be a function of position along the shore, tidal height, age of Spartina, and densities of other species or human valuations in the system, and time. ENSO fluctuations, feedbacks, and non-reciprocal effects are included in the framework. Hypotheses concerning the biological bases of positive feedbacks, Allee effects, and density dependence will be tested experimentally and results integrated into the model. Parameterization will be from a rich set of historical records and from remotely-sense images, references with GPS. Mixture analysis with data will inform the model of biochemical conditions of the cordgrass. Experiments will give data on demography, clonal growth, seed set, tide flow profile, sediment erodability, and shear stress. Sediment accretion will be quantified. Intensively studied sites will be extrapolated to the entire estuary using NASA s ASTER sensor on the Terra satellite. A map will be built of Pacific estuaries using daily MODIS satellite images. Food web and community effects will be studies experimentally. The ultimate faunal effects on the invasion will be measured in passerines and rallids. These observations will be combined with the overall model to develop long term prediction of the impact of Spartina on birds. Finally, these invasions are ideal for studying non-commercial values lost to the changes caused by Atlantic cordgrass. Integrating the valuation with the model will provide one of the first rigorous studies of invasive species on the value of ecosystem services doc5364 none Laubenbacher : This Biocomplexity incubation activity proposal will study the emergent properties of ecological systems by applying new techniques from algebraic combinatorics, as well as methods from mathematical logic and statistical physics. Based on these methods, we will develop an integrated conceptual framework to analyze global properties arising from the connectivity structure among species and their constraints. Within this framework, the researchers will analyze specific ecosystems, by employing a set of formal mathematical combinatorial tools. To accomplish these goals the project includes the following activities: regular meetings of project personnel and visitors to collaborate and create a common knowledge base; a four-day international workshop hall on The mathematics of network dynamics in biological, social, and economic systems; and simulation and analysis of specific systems. The results of these simulations will be used to refine our theoretical approach doc5365 none Cities in Africa are experiencing rapid human population growth without comparable economic development, and this is creating diverse ecological problems. In many African cities, the majority of residents live impoverished in settlements without adequate water, sanitation, and electricity. Such conditions promote the transmission of dangerous insect-borne diseases like malaria. This project will study Anopheles mosquitoes in two ecologically different Kenyan cities. The goal is to develop a model for better understanding and predicting how Anopheles mosquito populations are affected by key factors associated with urbanization. Activities will include: 1) planning meetings to develop the model for assessing Anopheles mosquito populations and 2) field and laboratory studies of Anopheles mosquito populations in Kenya. This project will be coordinated with a well-established insect science program in Kenya to unite scientists working on mosquito ecology and behavior with teams of scientists specializing in ecological modeling and spatial statistics, geographic information technology, social and behavioral sciences, hydrology, demography, and urban planning. This project on biocomplexity and urbanization in Africa will produce a computational model for Anopheles mosquitoes that can be used practically to help guide activities relating to urban planning and environmental policy in Africa. With a strong focus on training African scientists and student, the project will strengthen international educational programs in the area of insect science and will help promote the use of ecological techniques for problem-solving in Africa doc5366 none Surfaces abound in advanced scientific analysis and computing. The basic geometry of virtual environments, the isosurfaces of volume data, and the subdivision surfaces of synthetic environments are some examples. Effective utilization and data management of surfaces requires the ability to query archives of surfaces to look for particular surface shapes and features. Central to this capability is an efficient means to measure the distance between two surfaces. The objective comparison of algorithms that produce surfaces requires a similar precise and quantitative measure of the surfaces with each other or with an ideal. This project will develop a new methodology for computing the distance between two surfaces. It will also develop efficient basic techniques and algorithms that will bring this technology into everyday use in areas of searching databases of surfaces and comparing algorithms on surfaces doc5367 none Growing evidence indicates that activities associated with our increasingly urban-industrial society are causing global environment change and may not be sustainable. One of the major impacts is the decline of many animal and plant species. An interdisciplinary group of biologists and social scientists will work together to better understand how roads, disease, pollution, war, hunting, and other activities affect the long-term survival of endangered species. Computer models and other research tools will be developed in a series of workshops to better understand and explain these relationships. An important goal is to build an international network to encourage future research and application of these new tools and concepts. This project has national and international significance. To conserve the world s most threatened species it is necessary to understand how they can survive in landscapes dominated by people. Historically, biologists studying plants and animals have not often worked closely with social scientists. This project is a valuable opportunity for researchers from different disciplines to share their expertise and to develop tools that can be used to create effective and sustainable conservation strategies for endangered species in the United States and around the world doc5368 none Miller Recent developments in community ecology reflect a shift from equilibrium, niche-based concepts to a more expansive view that incorporates species interactions, non-equilibrium dynamics, migration, and evolutionary history. This creates a much more complex perspective of the forces determining patterns of species abundance and distribution in communities: dealing with the complexity itself has become a major hurdle in conceptual and experimental community ecology. This project is designed to organize a group of ecologists, evolutionary biologists, mathematical modelers, and systematists to conduct a comparative observational and experimental study of the metazoan community inhabiting leaves of the pitcher plant Sarracenia purpurea. This community is remarkably consistent and widespread across North America and provides a model microcosm for experimental studies. Project activities will bring together a working group of scientists to plan a set of coordinated field studies to investigate this community, to collect pilot data from these studies, to develop macroecological hypotheses that can be tested with these data, and to formalize models of community structure based on these data. The long-term goal is the development and execution of a comprehensive set of field experiments and phylogenetic studies of ecological and evolutionary determinants of community structure from local to continental scales doc5369 none Gehring Global changes are affecting ecosystems worldwide, and some of the strongest effects are in the arid lands of the southwestern US. In response to recent droughts, trees have died in large numbers and harmful insects have expanded to record levels. How these changes impact plants, animals and microbes may change the way entire ecosystems function, thereby affecting human populations living in arid areas. We have assembled a team of researchers in ecology, genetics, physiology and soil science who have studied the soil microbes that help plants acquire nutrients from the soil, the insects that attack drought-stressed trees, and the importance of birds and mammals in one of the largest forest types of the southwestern US. We propose to hold a workshop and virtual meetings so that these experts may develop new collaborations and determine areas of future research that will best meet the challenges of global change in arid environments. The goals of this workshop are to expand our understanding of complex ecological processes by incorporating other disciplines and technologies, like computer modeling and stable isotope analysis, to predict the likely impacts of global change on ecological and genetic systems doc5370 none This NSF Biocomplexity Program recognizes that thorough knowledge of ecosystem structure and function must incorporate the external environmental surroundings. The principal theme organizing this research effort is biocomplexity in open ecosystems. The main hypothesis is that the average time water takes to move through an aquatic system is a key variable defining the extent that ecosystems are self?organized or dominated by outside influences. The project team will study distinct and enclosed freshwater bays and lake?level lagoons (embayments) along the New York coast of Lake Ontario including the associated watersheds, wetlands, and human settlements. Lake Ontario embayments are representative of wetland?dominated coastal habitats around much of the Great Lakes and they are of great importance in the region. The embayments provide habitat for most Great Lakes aquatic species, change the quality of water entering the lakes, effect nutrient inputs to the open waters, support highly diverse and productive wetland vegetation, and provide very desirable locations for water?oriented human settlements. The investigators have identified eight study ecosystems that combine extremes of three key factors that will determine water residence time: bay volume, watershed size, and connectedness to Lake Ontario. All data and model simulations will be integrated mathematically to determine the conditions that allow ecosystem self organization or ecosystem property forcing by external factors. While the study is designed to answer fundamental questions about ecosystem control, the research will have major practical value for resolving technical questions about Great Lakes water level regulation. For this reason, a management and policy advisory panel has been organized with representatives of key international, federal, New York State, intergovernmental, and academic organizations. Panel involvement in the research will allow these organizations to understand the details of NSF sponsored research, and it will provide opportunities for them to be early adopters of the results. The education goal for the project is to complete a set of seven doctoral students that conducted their research within our interdisciplinary surroundings while specializing on one of the component fields. Project investigators will promote the themes of the NSF Biocomplexity Program to students through cooperative inter?field advising, cross?disciplinary research involvement, and a team directed graduate?level course in Biocomplexity Theory, Principles, and Research Methods doc5371 none The grant address the evolution of so-called infinite-dimensional traits in natural populations. Many highly complex traits, such as morphological shapes, developmental trajectories, and phenotypic responses to continuous environmental variables (like temperature, photoperiod, or rainfall) are infinite-dimensional because their complete description would require, in general, an infinite number of measurements. The project will involve the joint development of specialized mathematical models, identification of critical statistical issues and methods (including experimental design, parameter estimation, hypothesis testing, and prediction), and evaluation of field and laboratory empirical approaches that can be used to study infinite-dimensional trait evolution in natural systems. Understanding the evolution of highly complex (i.e., infinite-dimensional) traits is one of the most important and challenging problems in biology. Although holistic quantitative approaches to study infinite-dimensional trait evolution were first proposed over a decade ago, current methods lack many developments required for practical implementation in empirical studies of natural populations. These incubation activities will enable development of a research proposal that would, when implemented, provide practical and powerful quantitative tools and empirical systems for investigations of complex trait evolution doc5372 none Glazier Developing multicellular organisms exhibit dramatic changes in shape and form, as well as the emergence of rapidly changing spatial organization of specialized (differentiated) cell types, e.g. neurons and muscle fibers. These events, which generate the body plan and the various organs, depend on regulated gene expression, elaborate interactions between and among cells, and coordinated cell movement. Gene expression by itself cannot give a full account of the emergence of body plans, specific forms and shapes. Genetics and biochemistry interact with the physical properties of individual cells and cell aggregates in the course of development, making it a multiscale process of enormous complexity. As in many complex processes, however, one can discover dynamical and organizational rules at various levels if appropriate techniques are used to analyze developing organisms. This project brings together biologists, experimental and theoretical physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists, each of whom has experience analyzing individual biophysical problems, and brings their expertise to bear on a specific developmental process-the formation of the vertebrate limb. Experimental and theoretical methods will be used to investigate the emergence of the limb bud from the body wall, the control of genes mediating cell aggregation, the spatiotemporal regulation of the limb skeletal pattern, and the ingrowth of nerve fibers into the limb from the spinal cord. This work will result in a multilevel characterization including subcellular, cellular and supracellular mechanisms which will provide a causal understanding of vertebrate limb development, as well as generate analytical tools that can be used to study similar problems in developmental biology. These tools will include software for solving the inevitably complex systems of mathematical equations that describe the interplay of genetic and material properties found in living embryos. New software will be built and distributed to model not only limb development, but also other types of organ formation and illness (e.g. tumor metastasis and vascularization). The overall strategy represents a step towards genuinely integrated research on animal development to deliver on the promise of the gene sequencing projects of the previous decade doc5373 none Pamela S. Soltis Drs. Pamela S. Soltis and Douglas E. Soltis of Washington State University were awarded, through the Biocomplexity Incubation Activity Program, a grant to coordinate scientific discussions and propose future research into the complexity of genome diversification in plants. The green plants represent one of the largest branches on the Tree of Life, with more than 1 2 million species. Plant nuclear genomes, which vary tremendously in size, organization, and structure, are the products of nearly a billion years of evolutionary history. Recent breakthroughs in the study of plant phylogeny, as well as new developments in the study of genes and genomes, are being integrated to examine genome diversification and complexity over vast evolutionary time. The primary goal of this Incubation Activity is to foster interdisciplinary research to facilitate a new synthesis of plant genomics and plant evolutionary biology. Genome doubling, a process that has been responsible for generating the majority of plant diversity on Earth, including the origins of most crop plants and 17 of the 18 world s worst weeds , apparently leads to complex genomic interactions that may ultimately be responsible for new chromosomal and gene arrangements and novel patterns of gene expression. Soltis and Soltis have assembled a core of researchers with extensive expertise in plant phylogeny, analysis of gene and genome evolution, mechanisms of genome evolution, computation, and bioinformatics. This group will (1) explore the role of genome doubling in the diversification of plants and (2) investigate the patterns and mechanisms of genome evolution following genome doubling. The group anticipates publication of multi-authored original research contributions, initial software releases, and development of a full-scale Biocomplexity Research Proposal during the two-year funding period of this grant doc5374 none This institute will be operated under the auspices of the Department of Mathematical Sciences and the Center for Nonlinear Analysis at Carnegie Mellon University. The institute is a seven-week summer program for undergraduate students. Minority and female students are targeted for recruitment into the institute. The primary goal of the institute is to prepare students for and interest them in pursuing graduate work in applied mathematics. Secondary goals are to acquaint students with modern application areas of mathematics and to give them some understanding of the work involved in studying in these areas at the graduate level. The institute has operated successfully since under this format doc5375 none The Great Lakes hold about 20 % of the world supply of freshwater and about 95 % of the supply of the United States, and are the world s largest and biologically diverse fresh water resource. Lake Erie, the smallest in volume of the Great Lakes, is the most complex lake (southernmost, shallowest, warmest, most biologically productive, highest level of nutrient sediment contaminant loading), and therefore provides an excellent laboratory from which to understand and model the complex interactions among the physical, biological, and social economic systems which affect the lakes. The entire Lake Erie ecosystem is changing due to recent, human?induced impacts such as aquatic nuisance species, water diversions, and loading from nutrients, sediments, and contaminants. As a result the distribution, diversity, and abundance of aquatic species are declining alarmingly in some areas, and human activities along the coastline are being restricted. Unless a holistic system?wide approach is taken to understanding the interrelationships among biological, physical, and social economic systems, this vital and unique ecosystem will be permanently damaged. The ultimate goal of this project is the development of an integrated set of biological, physical, and social economic models to describe study the biocomplexity of the Great Lakes, and thereby improve management decisions in this complex system. Lake Erie will serve as the laboratory to study three aspects for improving the ability to understand the results of current modeling activities of the biocomplexity of the Great Lakes. Three areas have been identified that are possible impediments to our current capabilities: (1) the disparate spatial and temporal scales among the different models in use, (2) the need for the detailed coupling of physical, biological and social economic models, and (3) inadequate application of new technology to our understanding of the causes of biocomplexity. Each area will be the subject of a workshop to help prepare for a longer?term study of the biocomplexity of the Great Lakes doc5376 none Maffei This award to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts provides technical personnel and hardware to support and extend the existing SeaNet program to provide Internet and other computer communications capabilities between vessels conducting oceanographic research at sea and facilities on shore. SeaNet is a development bringing enhanced communications protocols to research vessels of the U.S. academic research fleet. This capability substantially enhances efforts for outreach and K-12 educational activities, in particular, for researchers combining real-time research projects at sea with public and elementary education activities. SeaNet also offers vessel operators substantial benefits in managing shipboard communications, including both electronic mail and large data file transfers, on behalf of scientific users of the vessel, and it provides common protocols and high-speed access to satellite communications. Already implemented on six academic research vessels, the present award will provide for addition of four new systems as well as support of operations, maintenance of hardware and software, and some enhanced communications capabilities doc5377 none This project details an integrated, multiscale and multidisciplinary approach towards characterizing and understanding the development of Dictyostelium discoideum, from gene expression to morphology and multicellular organization. The basic underlying premise is that the time is ripe for the concerted application of quantitative methods, both experimental and theoretical, to a central problem of modern biology, namely how one can form an integrated picture of an organism that connects genetic information to behavioral response. For a variety of reasons, Dictyostelium is the logical system in which to tackle this challenge. The research project has three components: First, DNA microarray techniques combined with the knowledge of hundreds of well-characterized mutants will be used to acquire a large body of gene expression data relevant to Dictyostelium development. Second, a new generation of experiments, focusing on the cell response to external signals that coordinate multicellular development, will be devised and carried out. Finally, computational simulations will be used to tie together the different pieces, e.g., genetic networks with protein networks, protein networks with cellular response, and cellular response with multi-cellular morphogenesis. To accomplish these tasks, a high quality, interdisciplinary team of scientists has been assembled at the interface of biology, physics, and computation doc5378 none S. Sandler University of Delaware The unifying theme of the research is the use of modern computational chemistry to improve predictive methods used in the chemical, biochemical and environmental industries. Modern computational quantum mechanics has progressed rapidly in the last decade, both in terms of accuracy and speed, largely as a result of the availability of large-scale, highly parallel computers. To a large extent, the chemical engineering community has not taken advantage of this progress. This project is directed to the application and utilization of computational quantum chemistry in three areas of molecular thermodynamics. The first area of application of computational quantum mechanics is to the improvement of group contribution methods. It is well known that such methods suffer from several defects. The most important is the proximity effect in which the behavior of a functional group is affected by neighboring groups on the same molecule. This is a violation of the basic group contribution concept that a functional group should behave the same independent of the molecule of which it is a part. Here one generalize s a successful, but so far restricted hybrid quantum mechanics group contribution model that had been developed that corrects the properties and interactions of each group based on how its charge and dipole moment vary from a reference state due to neighboring groups on the same molecule. The second area is the application of quantum chemistry methods to compute the interaction energy landscape between two molecules, and then to use this information in a interaction potential function together with nonadditive multibody effects in Monte Carlo computer simulation. Computer simulation techniques have provided a great deal of qualitative insight into molecular level phenomena. However, the quantitative accuracy of simulations have been poor unless the empirical parameters in the effective two-body potentials have been fit to experimental data. The goal of the this part of the research is to determine whether the phase behavior of mixtures of interest to chemical engineers can be accurately computed using state-of-the-art multibody potential models. The third research area involves the use of the results of combined quantum chemistry computer simulation calculations for mixtures mentioned above to test the underlying theoretical basis of activity coefficient models traditionally used by chemical engineers. The goalis to improve upon these models, and to provide a method of determining the parameters in these models in the absence of experimental data doc5379 none Considerable scholarly and popular attention continues to focus on research associated with understanding human origins -- the development of the human species and its adaptation to the natural environment. This Biocomplexity Incubation Activity award will support a project that will gather multidisciplinary scientific talent from the natural sciences, the social and behavioral sciences, and the humanities to formulate research strategies that probe the origins of human biology, behavior, and society from diverse perspectives. It also will introduce talented junior researchers, including post-doctoral associates, and senior graduate students to this broad challenge and encourage them to become involved in this and related multidisciplinary efforts as their careers progress. This project s objective is to draft plans for a major, multidisciplinary research project on human origins. A two-day, workshop-style conference with three sessions will bring together molecular biologists, geneticists, evolutionary-developmental biologists, geologists, computer scientists, paleontologists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and humanists, all of whom share a common interest of better understanding of human origins. This multidisciplinary group will identify key issues and areas of potential collaboration. The first conference session will focus on how comparative primate, genomic data can help decipher the genetic basis of being human. The second will focus on the organismal and cultural-social levels of human evolution, with special attention to issues like the impacts of the Earth s changing physical and biological environment on human evolution and language development. The third session will focus on how system-level methods and related computer modeling can help scientists and other researchers to probe a range of complex interactions, such as those linking molecular genetic and organismal development and cultural-social organization. This conference will make use of the American Academy of Science s multidisciplinary base of scholars and will involve complementary talent nationwide. Conference participants will be about evenly divided between junior and senior researchers. Of the senior scholars, about one-third are expected to be Fellows of the Academy. The gathering will yield a synergy in the study of human origins that has not been possible with meetings of single disciplines of scholars or even in meetings of closely related disciplines doc5380 none Kerfoot The paradox of the plankton was postulated in to emphasize how little we understand about the factors which promote great plankton diversity in apparently featureless pelagic regions. In , the supply ratio hypothesis was presented and served as an important contribution for understanding how species could coexist on limiting nutrients. Recent modeling and experimental results suggest that very short time scale fluctuations, either caused by external forcing factors (nutrient pulses) or internal oscillations (chaos) inherent in nutrient-competition or predator-prey dynamics, may greatly increase diversity at the base of food webs. A series of interdisciplinary workshops and a symposium will gather researchers to examine how temporal and spatial patchiness interacts with food-web oscillations to promote diversity doc5381 none The rapid growth in understandings of the complex ways that human and natural systems interact in a broad range of environments have led to intensified calls for greater collaboration among social and natural scientists in the study of long-term environmental change. Major differences in theoretical perspectives, vocabulary, organizational structure, and scientific culture have inhibited these collaborations, but increasing numbers of researchers in both the human and natural sciences now are looking to bridge the gaps that previously separated them. This Biocomplexity Incubation Activity award will provide support to enable the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research (CAP LTER) project in collaboration with the Baltimore Ecosystems Study (BES LTER) to hold a series of workshops to promote the integration of social sciences into long-term ecological research. The project s primary objective will be to spark scientifically exciting interdisciplinary research that brings together social, biological, and physical scientists to better understand human ecosystems. The project is based on a previous workshop where social and biophysical scientists reached a consensus on a broad conceptual framework for investigating human ecosystems and proposed a set of social patterns and processes key to their study. Because a unified understanding of human ecosystems needs to be taken in incremental steps, four research projects will be identified where investigators agree that bringing together social, biological, and physical scientists would lead to a better understanding of the mechanisms that govern ecosystem dynamics. An initial workshop focusing on the practical issues will help the four research projects implement integrated research. A second workshop will focus in depth on the proposed social patterns and processes and suggest ways these core topics can be implemented in the pilot projects. A final workshop will develop specific ways the proposed projects can accommodate the multiple spatial and temporal scales of the human ecosystem. This project will facilitate the development and dissemination of strategies for integration. The focus on four pilot projects will enable pragmatic solutions to emerge, with these solutions providing insights that will facilitate planning for enhanced involvement of social scientists by additional LTER sites. This sustained effort will foster progressive steps toward the integration of the social sciences into long-term ecological research and development of a unified understanding of human ecosystems, one of the most urgent challenges to understanding biocomplexity and the environment doc5382 none Ward Faculty from the University of Alabama and the University of New Mexico will coordinate development of a Biocomplexity research proposal that (1) advances our current, limited understanding of how droughts are initiated and maintained; and (2) provides assessments of impacts of drought in river basins in the contrasting mesic and semi-arid climates of Alabama and New Mexico. We will develop a new, quantitative understanding of biological, hydrological and atmospheric interactions that control initiation, duration, and consequences of drought. Our ultimate goal is to understand biotic response to drought well enough to make estimates of climate feedback and contribute to better predictive climate models. The planning proposal will fund analyses and integration of relevant data sets from both regions, travel for faculty exchanges, and full-group workshops to facilitate preparation of a biocomplexity and other interdisciplinary research proposals appropriate for this theme doc5383 none This project is an incubation activity aimed at seeding a multidisciplinary group in biocomplexity research. Through preliminary collaborative work, this group has developed an approach for analyzing complex relationships in natural (biological and others) environments, in a way similar to those for analyzing complex computing and information systems. The goals of this project are to better understanding of this new approach and to test its extensibility from a single domain to multiple domains. The project will support the interaction and collaboration among several faculty members, graduate students across several institutions. A center piece of the project is the holding of two workshops that bring together researchers from various disciplines within the biological, physical, and social sciences. The outcomes of this work will contribute significantly to the enhancement of the project team for future research and education in biocomplexity doc5384 none This is a Biocomplexity-Incubation Activity Award in the area of Complex Systems. Complexly organized systems constitute a vital frontier that crosses virtually all boundaries of scientific domains. Progress in exploring this realm will require a multi-disciplinary, multi-form approach, involving investigators from a range of disciplines. The Complex Systems Group at Lehigh has formed around the central issues of multi-scale and multilevel dynamics, emergence, self-organization, and cross-level causation. This award will provide resources to nurture this Group and to assist in the development of a full Biocomplexity proposal doc5385 none Simons The objective of the research project proposed here is to gather new collections of primate and other vertebrate subfossils in Madagascar from caves in limestone karst regions and from swamp deposits at a variety of sites. Efforts are focused on a series of caves in the Mahafaly Karsts near Toliara (Tulear). We will explore new sites in the western Bemaraha Massif and the northern Narinda Peninsula. We will also return to the productive Ankarana Massif of northern Madagascar and to the marsh sites of Ampasambazimba and the recently rediscovered Masinandraina. This research program has continued for several years, more recently funded by NSF BNS 89- , BNS 92- and 96- . Earlier we found the most complete skeletons known for almost all giant extinct lemurs, and many new lines of investigation have opened up based on these associated finds. The cooperation involves scientists from five or more Universities. Roads in the regions we need to reach in order to make discoveries are awful or nearly nonexistent. There is terrific wear and tear on the vehicles and several we previously had have ceased to function. Hence, this proposal. Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the attempt to understand the interaction in Madagascar between colonizing humans and the endemic species they met, as well as in documenting the role of environmental change in the extinction process. We have learned a great deal about paleodistributions of both extinct and living lemurs, and we have documented hithertofore unrecognized corridors and exchanges of fauna from different regions of the island. We are now beginning to understand the similarities and differences between modern and paleo- communities of the recent past, and we hope to document further, and in greater detail, the nature or rules (if any) and temporal framework of this continuing extinction event. To do so, we plan to gather new dates for subfossils, to search for better evidence of the contemporaneity of humans and giant lemurs, to focus on the systematics and ecogeographic variation of the subfossUs, and to test and modify if necessary our recent reconstructions of ecospace via ecomorphology. Controversy persists as to the probable agency for primate extinction in Madagascar: whether by disease, environmental change, human hands, or by their synergistic interaction. Additional island-wide radiocarbon dates are needed to establish the temporal length of the wave of extinction and better document the timing of environmental change. The very real possibility exists that different regions of Madagascar experienced a different combination of insults, and the extinction process was piecemeal and regionally distinct. Analysis of the associated fauna, particularly birds and small mammals, will provide new evidence about environmental change in particulhr regions and allow us to assess the nature and time depth of regional endemicity. Discoveries made to date from this project have revolutionized our understanding of essentially all known types of giant extinct lemurs and have added a few new species to the still growing roster of Malagasy primate taxa. We hope that new exploration planned here in the Bemaraha and Tulear regions will expand our knowledge of the rarest species such as Hadropithecus and the giant aye-aye or may lead to the discovery of new forms. We hope that the efficacy of our team working under previous grants has been demonstrated by the many finds and recent publications listed below. The present proposal requests 80% funding for al00GX Toyota model Landcruiser Station Wagon doc5386 none In sequential decision tasks such as resource optimization, robot control, and game playing, several decisions must be made before the outcome can be evaluated. Such reinforcement feedback depends on the entire sequence of decisions, and it is difficult to determine which of the decisions were responsible for the outcome. This project aims at developing better techniques for learning in domains with such sparse feedback, based on evolving neural networks with genetic algorithms. The goal is both to be able to solve existing problems faster, and to be able to solve problems that have not been feasible as sequential decision tasks before. Our previous work showed that neuroevolution is most powerful when individual neurons are evolved to cooperate and form good networks. In this project, such cooperative coevolution methods are studied in depth. The research aims at answering three main questions: Where does the power of cooperative coevolution come from and what are the best ways of making use of it? How do the evolutionary reinforcement learning methods differ from the traditional value function methods in learning sequential decision tasks? Does evolutionary reinforcement learning have the accuracy and flexibility required in real-world applications? If successful, the project will result in cooperative coevolution algorithms that will solve existing sequential decision tasks faster, and will allow solving more difficult tasks than before. We will know how to decide between evolutionary and value function methods for a given reinforcement learning task, and also how to use each method most effectively. Finally, the project will demonstrate how learning in general, and cooperative coevolution of neural networks in particular, can be used to save resources and achieve complex behavior in challenging real-world tasks doc5387 none A series of three workshops will be held and are designed to develop an interdisciplinary study of the viability of coral reef ecosystems under strong anthropogenic stress. Using the establishment of a new marine reserve network in the Bahamas as a case study, an attempt will be made to determine which specific reserve implementations and additional zoning policies are most important for maintaining ecosystem function across the network. In doing so, the study of oceanographic and biological processes will be the basis for setting contextual limits, and investigation of resource use by humans will be used to model management options. Participants from such disciplines as statistics, oceanographic modeling, population genetics, marine ecology, theoretical population biology, anthropology, and economics will be brought together tol analyze ways to integrate theoretical and empirical information across important spatial and temporal scales. Based on the results of the workshops, a complete report of discussions will be created and distributed and educational materials (especially for Bahamian teachers and U.S. graduate students) will be developed doc5388 none Scientific visualization - that is, presenting computed or measured scientific data to human senses - is a vital area of research. Pictures are often the clearest and fastest way to give a scientist an intuitive feeling for an experiment or simulation. Unfortunately, visualization of time-dependent vector fields (such as velocity of a fluid at all points) is currently limited to a few basic techniques that originally came from experimental methods. Every technique is a variation on streaklines and timelines, both built from particle paths. Crude extensions to algorithms developed for steady flows have recently supplemented these. Most notable among these are the computation and display of streamlines, but these are only physically relevant for steady-state fluid flows. This project will place these commonly used techniques within a general geometric and mathematical framework, and advance the notion that no single method is best suited for all flows. Therefore, it will study a more general class of algorithms, and will seek to match a vector field representation to the display of a desired time-dependent feature of the flow (e.g. vortices, eddies, or shocks). To explore this parameter space, the project will develop a suite of interactive vector field visualization tools using both software- and hardware-based techniques. The methods will be tested on prototypical unsteady vector fields, namely linear and quadratic fields in the spatial and temporal variables doc5389 none Recommended project is for three years of continued funding of research on coupled phase equilibria and trace element partitioning between mantle phases and melt at temperatures, pressures and compositions which closely approximate those which exist under mid-ocean ridges during partial mantle melting and mid-ocean ridge basalt (MORB) genesis. This work will build upon previous results that determined mineral-melt partitioning at for lherzolite mantle compositions at pressures between 1.2 and 3.4 Gpa. Crystal liquid partition coefficients will be determined for the rare earth elements (REE), Hf, Zr, Nb, U, Th, and Ba using an ion microprobe. Analytical charges will be prepared that are as close as possible to the peridotite solidus to most closely approximate conditions of partial mantle melting. In this work peridotite experimental charges formed at pressures up to 5.0 Gpa will be examined, including new studies at lower pressures. Pyroxenite charges representing pressures of 1.0-3.0 Gpa will also be analyzed, to form critical datasets that will allow the testing of models hypothesizing garnet pyroxenite (or eclogite) in the source of both MORB and plume melts. Depleted peridotite (harzburgite) charges will also be analyzed. These new data will be incorporated into new integrated models of mantle melting that integrate both major and trace element compositions doc5390 none Meiosis, the special division process in eukaryotes wherein chromosome number is reduced from diploid to haploid during the production of gametes, is complex and highly conserved. It is possible to think of the various steps of meiosis somewhat like an intracellular developmental pathway. Mitotic cells get a signal to enter meiosis and must go through premeiotic DNA synthesis, recombination and synapsis, reductional division, equational division, and packaging of the haploid nuclei in the proper order. An interesting and important question is how the various steps of meiosis communicate with each other to ensure that they occur at the right time and in the right sequence. In the budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, answers to some of the questions are known. A key feature ensuring that events occur properly is ordered transcriptional regulation. Entry into meiosis involves the loss of a mitotic repressor (RME1) and expression of a meiotic activator (IME1). This results in the transcription of the Early Meiotic Genes , which include the genes necessary for meiotic recombination. These early events activate a second transcriptional regulator, NDT80, which is required for expression of the Middle Meiotic Genes and the first and second meiotic division. NDT80 activation also results in the expression of Late Meiotic Genes , though it is not yet completely clear whether this is direct or and a consequence of NDT80 activation of the Middle genes. A second layer of regulation in meiosis is meiotic checkpoints. For example, a failure to perform premeiotic replication results in cell arrest. Recent interest has been stimulated by the realization that cells also have a checkpoint that assesses the state of meiotic recombination. In certain recombination mutants (e.g., dmc1) blocked at intermediate points in the meiotic recombination pathway, the cell arrests before the first division. This arrest requires several genes (e.g., RAD17, MEC1 ) known to be involved in mitotic DNA damage recognition checkpoints. It has been proposed that this checkpoint assessing the state of recombination is a key feature of normal progression through meiosis and that the dmc1 checkpoint also occurs in wildtype cells, as the intermediate is made normally during recombination. It makes good sense that the high frequency of breaking and rejoining chromosomes during recombination is a process which the cell should be able to sense. Attempts to segregate chromosomes before recombination was finished would be disastrous. There is yet another mode whereby meiotic recombination communicates with the first division, and that this communication occurs as recombination starts in wild type cells. It has been shown that meiotic cells are capable of recognizing that recombination has been started; the response is to delay the first division for a time equivalent to the time necessary to accomplish recombination. Null mutations in four genes required to initiate recombination ( EE genes) result in a earlier first division. This is intuitively pleasing; it seems eminently reasonable that starting the complex process of recombination should signal the next meiotic step, the first division. It appears that this signaling process is complex since null mutations in different EE genes can have somewhat different effects on the timing of the first division. It has been shown that the signal is not the formation of double strand breaks (the first easily observed DNA intermediate in recombination initiation). The importance of this initiation signal is indicated by noting that, in its absence, the first division occurs at the time when homologs would normally be recombining. This indicates that the first division segregation apparatus can be ready and functional considerably earlier than it normally acts. Data from this laboratory indicates that the start of recombination prevents this premature division. This project asks how this novel signal from recombination to the first division works. Does it require the majority of the initiation genes, consistent with the idea that the signal is the formation of an initiation complex? What is the role of the synaptonemal complex and its component parts in sending the signal? Is the normal signal from recombination initiation recognized and communicated by the checkpoint genes that also respond to the dmc1 mutant block which occurs at later stages? Does the signal work by affecting activation of the central meiotic regulator NDT80? Finally, what are the other genes involved in this signal from recombination to the first division? This work will define how this intracellular signaling process, crucial for the proper progression through meiosis, functions to ensure that two critical steps in meiosis happen at the proper times doc5391 none The movement of large mammals through multiple-use landscapes is essential to the viability of many large mammal populations that occur in national parks and nature reserves. This incubation grant will be used to develop a conceptual, theoretical and methodological approach to study large mammal movement through multiple-use landscapes of East Africa: in the Masailand of northern Tanzania and the Laikipia Plateau in central Kenya. This effort will require a synthesis of four active areas of ecological and interdisciplinary inquiry: (1) Landscape Ecology; (2) Behavioral Ecology; (3) The mathematical modeling of animal movement; and (4) Land tenure and economics. A review paper on large mammal movement through multiple-use landscapes will be written and a mathematical model linking landscape pattern to components of animal movement behavior will be developed. Nature reserves everywhere are increasingly isolated by multiple-use human landscapes. A number of important studies suggest that all but the largest reserves are too small to maintain populations of all resident vertebrate species. Thus, the ability of animals to disperse through the multiple-use landscapes that surround nature reserves becomes essential.. The effort to link reserves with wildlife corridors is hindered by our relative ignorance of the ability of multiple-use landscapes to support the movements of these species. The conceptual, theoretical and methodological approach developed in this incubation grant will serve as a template for the study of large mammal movement through multiple-use landscapes. By developing a quantitative understanding of the effect of landscape patterns on movement it will be possible to evaluate the effects of changing land use on animal movement. By examining how land tenure and economics affect landscape pattern, these social factors can also be linked to animal movement and nature reserve viability doc5392 none Many uses of computer visualization rely on displaying surfaces so that a person can easily understand the relationships between the different parts of the visualized object. This project will study new methods to identify the visible parts of an object, and will use this information to produce better images (that is, more accurate and complete images) of scientific data. Some possible applications of this work are medical visualization (e.g. showing the chambers of the heart), studying fracture mechanics (e.g. identifying interior cracks), and computational fluid dynamics (e.g. finding and studying vortices in turbulent flow). Technically, the project has two sub-goals. First, it will automatically identify interior structures of a complex surface, that is, those regions that are not visible from locations outside the object. Currently, this is done manually or by connected component analysis, both of which have limitations. This project will explore both analytical and sampling approaches to quickly computing a visibility function for all surface points. Secondly, the project will automatically produce a group of viewpoints and associated images (an image coverage) that collectively show every visible portion of a given surface. This can be used to both save the user from the error-prone task of manually rotating the object to see all visible portions, and may aid in creating simplified models for rapid navigation and display. This project will explore several approaches, including sampling-based ones, to this previously unsolved problem doc5393 none One of the primary mandates of the Biocomplexity initiative is to understand how biocomplexity arises and changes in response to changing physical chemical environments. Quantifying the influence of local geochemistry on the establishment and evolution of microbial systems is best achieved by studying environments where steep physical and chemical gradients exist over a small spatial scale. The primary goal of this Biocomplexity Incubation Activity is to establish a new collaboration among microbiologists from the University of Delaware and geochemists from Arizona State University. They will develop strategies for measuring and collecting physical, chemical, and microbiological data, and preliminary testing of novel devices for seafloor sampling. This interdisciplinary team of researchers brings with them expertise in high pressure high temperature experiments, fluid mineral geochemistry and spectroscopy, molecular microbiology, engineering, and seafloor vent studies. They will accomplish the research goals through real and virtual meetings, design of new sampling devices, and participation in a vent cruise. An investigation will be initiated of how microbial colonization is influenced by the dynamic thermochemical gradients and variable mineral fluid chemistry of deep?sea hydrothermal vents and, in turn, how the presence of microorganisms influences the local geochemistry. Young seafloor hydrothermal chimneys will be examined because they represent one of the few environments on Earth that are known to evolve rapidly from strictly abiotic conditions to complex microbial communities in a short time period (days to weeks). These high?temperature systems offer access to intense thermochemical gradients that are characterized by rapid and predictable mineral precipitation and chimney growth. These sulfide structures can be manipulated in situ, providing reliable access to both the initial abiotic geochemical system and progressive stages of microbial colonization. Appropriate measurements of fluid chemistry, mineralogy, pore structure, and microbial communities in these environments provide the constraints for recreation of these systems in the laboratory for detailed and quantitative examination. Examining microbial colonization in these dynamic geochemical environments provides a unique opportunity to understand the diverse and complex interactions between microbes and fluid mineral evolution doc5394 none Ford The release of chemical pollutants into groundwater disturbs the resident microbial community and triggers a complex network of feedback loops affecting the groundwater geochemistry, soil structure and microbial diversity of the system. Human intervention in the form of engineered remediation to restore the site introduces yet another disturbance to which the microbial community and abiotic components of the systems must respond. An emergent property typically associated with microbial communities is homeostasis. The objective of this research is to test the homeostasis hypothesis for a subsurface microbial community under the stress of a chemical pollutant release and the remedial actions which may follow. To accomplish this objective will require effective collaboration among a team of scientists and engineers with expertise in microbiology, hydrology, biogeochemistry, engineering, ecological modeling, adaptive control theory, and data visualization. Incubator activities are designed to foster communications between experimentalists with an understanding of the physical system and mathematical modelers with quantitative tools for characterizing and predicting properties of the system. A relatively simple laboratory experiment [two bacterial species within a fixed-film flow-through column with a reactive mineral surface (iron) that serves as an alternative election acceptor in the absence of oxygen] is defined in order to explore three modeling approaches: (1) system of nonlinear partial differential equations for each species, (2) metabolic modeling, and (3) adaptive control theory. This prototype system will be used to focus the interdisciplinary discussions on a concrete problem and facilitate productive interactions. Additional modeling approaches will be explored through a brainstorming session, computer systems and a follow-up videoconference. A written summary from the workshop will be published in technical news journals to benefit the scientific community at large doc5395 none British transatlantic ocean liners of the late 19th century transported some bourgeois travelers, and many of the emigrants who fueled America s second industrial revolution; by the s ocean liners catered almost exclusively to an expanding British and American middle class, the vanguard of consumer-driven economies. Throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries, the ocean liner also remained an important example of sites in which architecture, sophisticated technologies, and modern, efficient work organizations mediated the experience of its inhabitants. This makes it an ideal site to view technological and architectural changes as passengers, crew, and ship designers transformed the vessel from a vehicle of transportation to a site of consumption. Beginning with the assumption that a mutually shaping relationship characterized the vessel s physical environment-its architecture and technologies-and the social and work relations it mediated, the researcher of this dissertation research project will examine the changing use and distribution of space and technologies among various categories of passengers and crew. A focus on technology and architecture can integrate a study of work relations with one of consumer behavior, building on the work of historians who separate these realms of inquiry in their examination of the transition from industrializing to consumer-driven economies. To facilitate an analysis of ocean liner architecture and technology, the researcher will create an historical typology of flagship ocean liners, charting the changing distribution, physical character, and experience of space among vessel inhabitants. The researcher will amass information about activities and interactions among crew and passengers into a database of records, tracking developments through such categories as ship size and compartment, class among passengers, department and rank among crew, and gender and age among all inhabitants. The database will draw on passengers and crew members written accounts of travel and work, published descriptions, and the activities companies prescribed in advertising and travel guides. Where possible, papers relating to ship design and operation will be used to analyze company managers architectural and technological attempts to reconcile and harness developments among passengers and crew members in economic power, expectations, and use of space-the market of labor and passengers. The investigator seeks to illuminate connections among architecture, technologies, and experience in the transition from industrializing to consumer- and service-driven economies doc5396 none Human speech processing engages multiple neural resources, exhibits individual neural reorganization and variation in response to system perturbations disorders, evolves along and is also constrained by temporal processes, and responds to statistical properties in the language environment. Human speech perception comprises not only auditory perceptual processes but also visual ones. For example, seeing a talker enhances the ability to accurately perceive speech in noise. Auditory and visual processing of the speech signal is a biocomplex phenomenon. During audiovisual speech perception, information is integrated across perceptual systems to give rise to unitary speech percepts. This integration implies the coordination of perceptual, psycholinguistic, and possibly cognitive systems such as attention. Perception emerges from processing at the levels of cortical and sub-cortical brain structures, but perception cannot be reduced simply to its underlying neural mechanisms, it must also be accounted for in behavioral terms. Speech perception emerges across temporal scales, including the scale of development and the scales of communication. Speech perception also is responsive to environmental demands, as is evident in the development of perceptual skills by expert deaf lipreaders. This Biocomplexity Incubation Activity award will support a project that seeks to create a development context for researchers who might solve the problem of how the auditory and visual perceptual systems are integrated with the spoken language system, but who have not yet had the opportunity to learn enough about each other s fields and perspectives to propose a research program. Researchers with expertise in visual psychophysics and perception, multimodal integration, auditory and visual speech perception, neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, and computational modeling will meet in a regularly scheduled research seminar covering visual and auditory perception in relation to spoken language processing. The seminar will include demonstrations of relevant phenomena and experimental methods apparatus. Demonstrations for the seminar are intended to teach and also generate discussion. They will include examples such as the McGurk effect, sinewave speech, point light speech, random-dot motion effects, structure from motion and others. The research seminar will be assisted by an undergraduate student who will help to create the demonstrations. These demonstrations will be made available on the House Ear Institute (HEI) Web site. The seminar will develop hypotheses and methods to form the basis for future collaborative research. The foci will be auditory perception, visual perception, audiovisual integration, and visual speech perception enhancement. A workshop will conclude the research seminar. Its purposes are to present the generated hypotheses and methods and to obtain feedback. Presentations will outline the biocomplexity issues addressed in the seminar, the key lines of research identified to be of critical importance, and the experimental and computational approaches following those lines. Expert panelists from other Southern California institutions will participate in the workshop. A final report on the project and the workshop will be prepared for the HEI Web site. The use of spoken language is a fundamental distinguishing characteristic of humans, but knowledge is incomplete regarding how humans accomplish it. The particular focus of this project is to understand how the perceptual systems of vision and audition process linguistically relevant information. A complete understanding of perception and language will need to comprise links between levels of explanation, from the neural to the behavioral. Societal use of this fundamental knowledge will be in such areas as that of enhancing learning and teaching, ameliorating the effects of diseases such as stroke and impairments such as hearing loss, and developing artificial systems for processing language (e.g., automatic speech recognition and machine language translation doc5397 none Colberg It has long been hypothesized that interactions between biotic and abiotic processes at small scales affect the movement and fate of elements at large scales, yet, to date, this relationship has not been systematically explored in aquatic ecosystems. One of the major challenges of such work is to quantitatively integrate the biological and physicochemical controls at small scales (i.e., microbial communities) with those of larger scales (i.e., river networks), so that we can begin to address some of the unifying questions that characterize biocomplexity research. Rivers in Yellowstone National Park are ideal systems in which to examine the interactions of biotic and abiotic complexity. The Upper Madison River drainage, for example, is strongly influenced by geothermal activity that produces sharp spatial gradients involving temperature, redox potential, major ions, and trace elements. These physicochemical features, in turn, drive changes in mocrobial and metazoan diversity and functions. Unlike hot springs, which have been intensively studied in recent years, streams and rivers in this unique geothermal landscape remain much less examined. Because geothermal inputs are spatially variable along these rivers, the inputs and reactions of elements (e.g., irons, phosphorus, carbon, nitrogen) are also expected to exhibit spatial variability that will affect the distribution and composition of biological communities. The objectives of the proposed incubation activities are to: (1) develop new research interactions that will facilitate biocomplexity research along geothermal gradients in Yellowstone National Park; (2) develop a scientific database on the Upper Madison Basin; and (3) organize and sponsor two workshops for the project team and their students that will focus on mathematical modeling and linking biological community structure with ecosystem function, respectively doc5398 none Stanford Rivers are currently viewed as linear segments where materials spiral downstream in relation to catchment setting and water yield. This project is designed to shift science toward a non-linear, more dynamic view that emphasizes energy dispersion and materials retention as the primary organizing elements of river ecosystems. This research is conceptually based on the view that alluvial flood plains are regional centers of ecological organization, owing to dynamic, non-linear processes linking water and materials flux and retention to interactive landscape-forming processes. This interaction creates a complex, dynamic array of resource patches and interfaces, thereby producing a regional hot spot of biodiversity (including a very wide array of migratory species). Important modifiers of system dynamics include drought, wildfire, flow and geomorphic regulation (dams and revetments) and invasions of nonnative species. The interdisciplinary team will develop an expert system derived from available empirical data describing the structure and function of alluvial flood plains. The team will use an existing, novel simulator that routes water during specified flows through a large flood plain in western Montana. A primary task is to develop a tactical plan for refining the model to allow it to be driven by remotely sensed data doc5399 none Bar-Yam, Yaneer : Recently, systems and fields ranging from physics to Meteorology, from chemistry to biology, and even from psychology to economics and political science have been recognized as having common features which identify them as complex systems. Complex systems have structure and behavior on multiple scales of time and space. However, complex systems methods are lacking a formal multiscale methodology,. This project of formalizing multiscale descriptions of complex systems is a stage in the development of a unifying approach, which will be useful to solve important problems. In this incubation activity the researchers will develop collaborations and core research that will enable implementing this formalism for problems of hurricane prediction, the sign of robust computer networks, and the analysis of high throughput data generation in biology. This incubation activity will lay the groundwork for this generally useful methodology to be pursued by a community that includes selected members of the faculty of Brandeis University, Boston University, Harvard University, MIT, Tufts University, University of Massachusetts, Yale University, and other academic institutions. Interdisciplinary supervision will be integrated through a core program developing the multiscale methodologies doc5400 none s of these systems and computational methods to analyze them. This project will develop several pilot research endeavors to begin cross-disciplinary collaboration among ecologists, mathematicians, and computer scientists. In addition, the project will hold workshops and seminars to initiate the creation of a graduate degree program in mathematical and computational ecology, to train a new generation of researchers to better manage and restore our natural systems doc5401 none Computer graphics has made great advances in producing realism and detail in synthetic scenes, yet these techniques have not been applied to scientific visualization. A realistic-looking 3D scene is immediately and viscerally apprehended, which promotes understanding of its contents. Fidelity of shading is important to a person viewing an already-familiar architectural environment. Such fidelity is even more important for a person viewing the complicated and unfamiliar geometry of isosurfaces and field lines that reveal the features in a dataset resulting from computational simulation or from physical measurement. This project will develop global illumination techniques for isosurfaces and field lines in 3D data, with applications to medical data and engineering data doc5402 none For over two decades the Carbon Dioxide Research Group at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography has been collecting seawater samples with the goal of assaying dissolved inorganic carbon in seawater as a means of detecting and understanding long-term changes associated with rising atmospheric carbon dioxide. In this project in an effort to continue and update this work, the Scripps investigators will (1) re-evaluate the calibrations of the manometric instrumental measurement systems utilized by the Group, (2) complete dissolved inorganic carbon, alkalinity, and 13C 12C isotopic analyses of stored samples backlogged over the years, and (3) adjust any past seawater-carbon dioxide Certified Reference Materials and data based on the new manometer calibration. Continued operation of the manometric measurement facility is of great importance to ocean and global carbon cycle research doc5403 none Martinez An interdisciplinary collaboration will apply recently developed techniques for analyzing computer networks to the study of complexity in large food webs. The focus of the research is the scaling of complexity with diversity, especially the statistical relationships between the numbers of nodes and links in Internet, WWW, and ecological networks. The strikingly robust patterns in the way network complexity scales with diversity along with the ability of this scaling relationship to underpin successful network models form the scientific basis of the collaboration. Recent insights into these scaling relationships have made fundamental advances in understanding networks. This project synergistically integrates scientists responsible for several of these advances to increase the scientific productivity of biocomplexity research. The project will use insights into the scaling of complexity to predict the relationship between diversity and the structure and function of ecological networks. Workshops will gather several researchers to exchange data and analytical methods to use computers to study both networks and models of networks as well as the effects of losing nodes and species on networks doc5404 none Built-in asynchronies between political process and regulated sectors or activities can produce unintended disruptions in rates of economic change and development undermining the original intent of the policy or regulatory action. Such events sometimes lead to unexpected future disruptions as well. This incubation research sets out to investigate whether the concept of time-ecology combined with direct methods for visualizing government industry interactions, complexity theory, and related computer-based simulation methods might yield a fruitful line of inquiry. Successful global competition requires political leadership to continuously develop, adapt, and balance its public resources and regulatory activity to support the competitive advantage of its industries. Regulations and public programs, by prescription and proscription or the provision of resources, limit the scope of decision making by business and other individuals in order to achieve public purposes. Adaptive governance should guide this process based on an adequate understanding of industry development. Knowledge of competitive resource patterns of the state and region now and into the near future also can guide development of appropriate public policy interventions. These findings suggest that a policy approach is needed that adaptively ties the right mix of resources and regulatory activity to the timing of particular stages of economic development associated with a particular industry within a democratic context. The catch is that the nonlinear nature of economics and politics during development transitions such as those associated with California s emerging new information economy are complex, sensitive to initial conditions, with both elements interacting across time in unknown ways. This project will lay the groundwork for developing user friendly visualization and simulation tools for policy makers so that they can address such issues. This incubation activity was funded as part of the FY Biocomplexity Special Competition doc5405 none Benda Recognizing and solving environmental problems are becoming major research priorities in the United States and across the world. Solving environmental problems involves understanding how human activities interact with complicated natural environments, including impacts dealing with climate, oceans, lakes and streams, and watersheds. Natural environments can be extremely dynamic over periods of years to centuries and such natural variability can complicate our understanding of environmental changes triggered by humans. The proposed research aims to develop a new scientific method for integrating across a range of scientific disciplines in the study of environmental problems dealing with streams and rivers. The research will develop quantitative tools that explicitly account for natural dynamics of environmental systems, and how human activities alter those dynamics in space and over time. The new approach will include the use of computer simulation models and new parameters that describe the full suite of watershed attributes and how those attributes change over time due to natural processes and human activities doc5406 none Biological invasions involve complex interactions over a wide range of temporal and geographic scales. These invasions are becoming more frequent, are widely distributed throughout the world, and can pose a significant threat to biological diversity. The Hawaiian Islands are particularly well suited for investigating these processes because of their relative isolation and because their complex topography creates wide variability in climate and habitats across limited geographic areas. These conditions facilitate studies of the interactions of a wide range of biotic and abiotic factors on the invasion process over spatial scales that are orders of magnitude less than in most continental areas. Accidental introduction of mosquito-borne avian malaria and pox virus to Hawaii is an outstanding example of how biological invasions can have a profound effect on endemic biota. The geographic distribution, density, and community structure of endemic Hawaiian avifauna has changed dramatically in the last century, in large part because of the spread of these diseases and their introduced mosquito vector. This disease system is dynamic and biologically complex, involving both direct and indirect interactions among endemic and introduced avian hosts, mosquito vector, parasites, and environmental conditions that extend across multiple temporal and spatial scales. Prior research, limited in scale, has focused on host-parasite and vector relationships at disparate locations in the islands. A holistic modeling approach will be used to study this complex system by integrating across scales ranging from the gene to the landscape. Integrated research projects will focus on demographic studies of exotic and endemic forest birds, mosquito vectors, and pox and malarial parasites using study plots that span a range of climate, hydrology, and vegetation patterns. Complementary laboratory studies will focus on genetic variation of hosts, vectors and parasites and epidemiological factors such as host susceptibility and resistance, parasite virulence and vector competency. Components of the study will be linked through a GIS based modeling approach to incorporate important spatial patterns (e.g., homogeneous vs. fragmented landscapes), spatial complexity, and land use patterns. The model will be used to evaluate broad hypotheses about the dynamics of this system including how biocomplexity associated with biotic and abiotic components of the system at multiple scales affects the persistence of disease in forest bird populations, how changes in land use and environmental conditions affect the stability of the system, and how habitat changes and specific conservation strategies might alter long-term trends in the decline and extinction of the endemic Hawaiian avifauna. An important objective will be to identify weak links and determine the ecological scale that is necessary to facilitate future intervention in this disease system. In addition, specific hypotheses about how parasite virulence, vector susceptibility, and host resistance may be coevolving in this recent host parasite vector association will be investigated. The proposed study location is on the east flank of Mauna Loa on the island of Hawaii and encompasses major portions of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, State Natural Area and Forest Reserves, small towns, and rural agricultural areas. Prior ecological studies of this region provide a wealth of background data that can be incorporated into the model. This approach will be applicable to a wide range of conservation issues both in the state of Hawaii and elsewhere in the world doc5407 none The gene expression process in nature evaluates the fitness of a DNA through the production of different proteins in different cells. The DNA sequence first produces the mRNA sequence. Next, the mRNA produces the protein sequence by using a transformation called the genetic code. Finally, the protein sequence folds into a 3D structure which determines the fitness of the genome. This project derives from the observation that genetic code-like transformations introduce interesting properties to the representation of a genetic fitness function. The PI recently showed that such transformations in binary sequence representations can convert some functions with an exponentially large description to an alternative form that is amenable to polynomial-size approximation under certain practical conditions. This project will extend this preliminary finding and explore the computation in richer genetic code-like transformations for non-binary representations that are used in natural DNA, mRNA, and proteins. The research will have the following primary components: theoretical exploration of the class of genetic code-like transformations from the function induction perspective; extension of the PI s preliminary findings for binary representation to non-binary representations; extension of the analysis to orthogonal bases other than Fourier and Walsh, in particular exploration of the invariance of the properties of genetic code-like transformations across different basis representations, exploration of biologically meaningful choice of basis and the properties of genetic code-like transformations in those representations, and identification of the class of functions for which such transformations can be used to construct efficient representations; development of a practical adaptive technique for constructing such representation transformations for non-binary representations. Because there currently exists no known strong technique to induce functions with exponentially large representation to functions with only a polynomial number of terms, if successful this research will have significant impact on the theory of computation, machine learning, data mining, automated program induction, optimization, etc doc5408 none The processes that govern the population dynamics of nearshore benthic species ? larval production and transport, larval settlement, local disturbance, predation, competition for space, etc ? are each complex. For example, larval settlement depends not only upon the rate of arrival of larvae but also the availability of free substrate, larval behavior, and small?scale hydrodynamics. Each of these processes is nonlinear and has been studied separately. The principle investigators have already been successful in identifying some of these processes. But because each one is complex and operates at a different temporal and spatial scale, little progress has been made in coupling them together. This project should increase understanding of these processes using, a combination of observational and mathematical techniques. The following will also be investigated: whether alongshore differences in recruitment, larval transport, and larval dispersal result from the differences in local stratification, and whether the behavior of the larvae interacting with the local stratification results in differences in larval transport doc5409 none Kurstedt This one-year award supports the participation of 25 U.S. junior faculty in the third global engineering education workshop, Educating the Engineer for the 21st Century, in Aachen, Germany, October 18-20, , and in post-workshop visits to research laboratories in Aachen, Grenoble, France, and Lausanne, Switzerland. The organizers of the workshop are Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (INPG), France, the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPF) in Switzerland, and the Rheinisch-Wesfalische Technische Hochschule (RWTH) in Aachen. The workshop is a forum of new ideas and concepts for future engineering education and will address such issues as the internationalization and interdisciplinarity of engineering practice and the impact of information technology. Education versus training, lifelong learning, interaction between engineering education, research and industry, and best practices are other workshop topics. Participants will also visit with potential research partners at institutions near the partner hosts of the workshop. The goal is to develop future collaborations. Some areas of interest are information technology, communications, transportation, materials, and bioinformatics. The conference organizing institutions propose to track progress in matching researchers of like interest. The workshop website will feature the visit reports of these research visits which eventually could be used to determine an institution s particular strengths and weaknesses. The project takes advantage of expertise in three world class research and education institutions. INPG, EPF and RWTH offer rigorous engineering education and research programs. In addition, the workshop will lead to sustained institutional ties with these European schools and future research collaborations doc5410 none Marshall Our goal is to search for generalities and common processes, or laws , that govern the co-evolution of biodiversity and the environment over geological time scales. Given that available time series are inadequate for our purposes, we will continue to develop our paleontological and geochemical databases. The paleontological database will document the occurrences of macroscopic organisms throughout the Phanerozoic (the last 543 million years), and will include geographic, stratigraphic, paleoenvironmental, phylogenetic, body mass, and trophic relationship data. The geochemical database will include the record of the isotopic compositions of organic and inorganic carbon from the rock record. Using these databases we will conduct a series of analyses to characterize the intrinsic dynamic properties of the evolution of the biosphere. Further, the paleontological and environmental data will be dissected regionally to determine the extent to which intrinsic and extrinsic factors mediate local diversity changes doc5411 none Brown Projecting change in land use and land cover is often more art than science. This project will explore the intersection of social systems, land use, land cover, and the physical environment. The goal is to better understand how human behavior, policy choices, and economic forces affect land use, how land use relates to land cover, and how social and ecological systems interact in the context of changing landscapes in the Great Lakes region. The approach to exploring this complexity involves: forming interdisciplinary working groups; conducting pilot studies to help define and characterize drivers of landscape change; assessing existing spatial models that link social and biological processes; and formulating conceptual models that express relationships between social and biological systems doc5412 none This award supports establishment of an analytical laboratory at the Caribbean Marine Research Center (CMRC) on Lee Stocking Island. This laboratory will accommodate biochemical procedures and instrumentation for study of the biochemistry, physiology and genetics of marine organisms and for related oceanographic research. Awarded funds will be used to purchase building materials, research equipment and related items typical of analytical laboratories used for biochemical procedures. The new laboratory building will 1) provide workspaces for scientists to utilize biochemical procedures in a separate laboratory from scientists performing experiments with live organisms in the present laboratory, 2) provide a clean and dry environment for advanced analytical instruments that is not subject to the corrosive seawater aerosols found in existing laboratory space, and 3) increase laboratory space for visiting researcher and education groups. CMRC is one of six National Undersea Research Centers with responsibility for conducting undersea research in the Caribbean region. The research station at Lee Stocking Island was created in by the Perry Institute for Marine Science to support long-term marine research in tropical and subtropical environments. The station affords a unique opportunity to study a variety of tropical habitats, including shallow and deep coral reefs, subtidal and intertidal mud and sand flats with mangroves, submerged carbonate terraces, subsea caves, blue holes, grassbeds, ooid shoals, stromatolites, and tidal channels. Using the facility and surrounding area, scientists conduct a diverse array of research on recruitment processes, coral reef ecology, life histories, fisheries oceanography, physical oceanography, marine carbonate geology, paleo-oceanography, and long-term monitoring of oceanographic and meteorological conditions. Because of its recent designation as a no-take marine reserve, the still pristine habitats in the surrounding area remain protected for research that takes advantage of these unique scientific and explorative opportunities doc5413 none An NSF-CBMS Regional Conference on Modular Elliptic Curves is to be held at the Department of Mathematics, University of Central Florida, August 8-12, . Professor Henri Darmon, McGill University, will serve as the Principal Lecturer of the conference. The organizing committee will consist of mathematicians selected from the Departments of Mathematics in different universities at national and international levels. The general area of the conference s endeavor is of great topical interest and has seen an explosive expansion of research activity in the last ten years. Despite this intense activity over the past decade, there are still numerous unsolved problems and outstanding issues, many of which are among the greatest mathematical challenges of the 21st Century. Darmon, who is a consummate lecturer and a major contributor to the area, has a very broad view of the subject matter. He is currently leading a research program to develop the recent body of work of Bertolini and Darmon on the generalization of the theory of complex multiplication to modular elliptic curves over real quadratic fields. His lectures would serve to survey and unify major developments in the field, assessing both achievements and future directions of research in the field. Consequently, Professor Darmon is an obvious choice to lead a gathering of experts in this area doc5414 none The focus of this multidisciplinary research program is to understand the historical origins and environmental conditions that led to selection and radiation of the major eucaryotic phytoplankton taxa, and the ecological processes that contribute to their continued success in the contemporary ocean. The research utilizes a combination of geological, molecular biological, ecological, and modeling approaches to address an important and complex puzzle in Earth system science. The primary goal is to develop the first quantitative models of eucaryotic phytoplankton community structure in the contemporary oceans based on paleoecological and evolutionary inference. The central question raised in this project is: Why have three phylogenetically diverse groups of eucaryotic, unicellular algae been so ecologically successful and what does their evolutionary history tell us about the history of Earth and the ability of eucaryotic phytoplankton to accommodate to change in the future? The study seeks to test a set of three related hypotheses, from which a conceptual model for evolution and ecological success (dominance) of key phytoplankton taxa in the contemporary ocean will be developed. Thus the research program contains three basic elements: (1) A geological geochemical team focussing on reconstructing the paleoecology at key periods in the Mesozoic; (11) A molecular biology biochemical team engaged in elucidating how paleoecological processes have selected specific phenotypic traits that led to the origin and subsequent tempo of evolution of the major groups, and (111) An experimental ecophysiology modeling group that quantitatively evaluates how phenotypic traits relate to the ecological success of specific taxa in the historical and contemporary ocean. These three elements will be integrated across traditional disciplinary lines and will include coordinated field, laboratory and modeling efforts. Modeling efforts will be directed towards hindcasting and forecasting the success of key phytoplankton groups using observational and experimental information. The research program is also coupled to a strong educational effort, designed to provide a broad exposure and opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as a K-12 and teacher training program designed to integrate Earth system science in primary and secondary school curricula doc5415 none Marine and terrestrial ecosystems in coastal zones around the Earth are particularly vulnerable to local and global impacts from natural and anthropogenic sources. The Antarctic coastal zone, while utilized by humans to a limited extent, is among the most pristine regions on the planet for unambiguously assessing global environmental changes. The primary objectives for the proposed workshop are related to the interpretation of Antarctic terrestrial-marine biocomplexity along the latitudinal environmental gradient of the Victoria Land Coastal Biome (from ~72 degrees S to ~78 degrees S in the western Ross Sea) as a global climate barometer. The workshop will be convened within six months of project funding at the Byrd Polar Research Center. Participants will include 20 United States and 4 foreign scientists from ecosystem, environmental, computational, educational and social science disciplines. Workshop priorities are as follows: (1) compiling existing information regarding the components, dynamics and chronologies of terrestrial and marine ecosystems and environments - which have been studied largely with integration since the beginning of the 20th century; (2) assessing marine-terrestrial ecosystem coupling related to sea-ice coverage and regional hydrology over seasonal to millennial time scales; (3) assessing marine-terrestrial ecosystem dynamics associated with environmental gradients and transition zones across the Victoria Land Coastal Biome which reflect global climate dynamics; and (4) identifying potential emergent phenomena that would provide sentinels for predicting local human impacts and global environmental changes (such as increased temperature and ultraviolet radiation feedbacks). Each participant will be expected to bring data, maps, photographs, publications and other research products that are relevant to integrating environmental and ecosystem biocomplexity along the latitudinal gradient of the Victoria Land Coastal Biome. Overall, the interdisciplinary dimensions of studying this high latitude gradient will contribute to our understanding of global environmental changes and the role of science in our society doc5416 none Funds provided through this award will permit the purchase of analytical instrumentation to be placed in a new, state-of-the art analytical laboratory at the Marine Biological Laboratory. The laboratory will support expanding research and education programs in land use change and its consequences for aquatic ecosystems. The new laboratory will be located in climate-controlled space in a new building currently under construction. The new laboratory will contain instruments for analysis of nutrients in soil and surface waters, measurement of carbon and nitrogen in soils, sediments and biological samples, and analysis of nitrogen fixation and denitrification in soils and sediments. The new instruments will significantly expand the MBL s analytical capabilities in areas of recent technological advances, including dissolved nitrogen and phosphorus, and by greatly expanding capacity for analysis of large numbers of samples. They will improve the MBL s rapidly-growing undergraduate education in land-water research by allowing instruments to be dedicated to undergraduate and graduate education during critical periods of demand doc5417 none George A multi-disciplinary team of scientists has been assembled to study the complex issues governing the effects of human activity and climatic fluctuations on the interrelationships between contaminants and biota in the Lower Mississippi River. Workshops and discussions will be conducted examining the river and its entire watershed, defining all natural forces and anthropogenic activities as subsystems whose various elements account for the observable condition of the whole. This project centers around a 3-million record database of water quality information for the Lower Mississippi River, and incorporates a new approach to comprehensive compilation of data from heterogeneous sources, using integrated batch analysis techniques and an associated geographic information system to evaluate data quality, comparability, and water quality trends. Project activities will provide the framework for a comprehensive effort to develop a predictive model of the interrelated system elements and their endpoint effects on the water quality and ecology of the Lower Mississippi River doc5418 none This award provides funds for the purchase of a gas chromatography interface and related equipment. The interface will extend the capabilities of an existing isotope ratio mass spectrometer to allow compound-specific, stable isotopic analyses to be performed. The instrument will add near state of-the-art analytical capabilities extremely useful in the scientific fields in which the Marine Science Institute has its greatest strengths. The PI and his colleagues will develop new measurement techniques specifically tailored to critical problems facing the Gulf of Mexico region. These types of experiments can be accomplished with much greater specificity and control with this new equipment than with the bulk isotopic analyses that existing equipment allows. The use of compound-specific analyses has begun to revolutionize the fields of ecology, environmental science and oceanography by allowing specific measurement of the uptake and transfer of biochemicals into marine food webs, elucidation of degradation pathways, and source identification of environmental pollutants. The extremely small samples needed for the gas chromatography interface make it ideal for analysis of limiting or trace biochemicals in fisheries and other ecological studies. The addition of this equipment will create a central light isotope analysis facility that will make available new and exciting capabilities for scientists throughout the south-central Texas region doc5419 none M. Zahn, MIT The behavior of colloidal suspensions of nanoscale ferromagnetic particles (~10 nm in size), with and without carrier fluid, will be investigated. Such flows, when driven or controlled by magnetic fields, can display a number of aspects of potential interest to practical applications of special interest are nano-electromechanical devices (NEMS). The PI plans to take a fundamental look at the following flows, in close cooperation with industrial partners: 1. Channel flows with a width of the order of 100- nm: under alternating and traveling magnetic fields, they can achieve significant flow rates with only a moderate (or even reverse) effective viscosity. 2. Rotational motion can be applied to nanoparticles in a fluid-free medium by a suitable array of nanocoils on the surface of the channel. 3. The reverse effect, i.e. applying fluid force to particles, whose rotational motion will induce in turn an electric current into the nanocoils. 4. The fabrication of mechanical nanocomponents can be accomplished by using a material which is in the liquid state of high temperature, but in the solid state at room temperature. Thus it is possible to apply at high temperature the magnetic fields necessary to give the desired flow shape, and then freeze. Gear shapes seem to be an easy first step to test this technique. 5. The use of nonmagnetic fluids, or of surfactants, will be tested as way to reduce surface tension and therefore improve the detailed quality of the component shape. There is a strong collaboration contemplated with the Ferrofluids Corporation, at both experimental design levels doc5420 none Wedin The Nebraska Sand Hills is the largest sand dune area in the Western Hemisphere. Today these dunes are stable and covered by native grassland. However, in the not too distant past (perhaps as recently as years ago), most of these dunes were active. To ecologists, geologists and Sand Hills ranchers, this ecosystem is a desert in disguise . How do short- and long-term climate change interact with ecological processes such as grazing and fire to destabilize this massive sand dune system, or, on the other hand, restabilize large areas of moving sand? What role do the numerous interdunal wetlands and lakes of the region play in stabilizing the grassy Sand Hills uplands? Geologists, soil scientists, climate specialists, grassland ecologists, landscape ecologists, and modelers will be assembled to address these questions. By combining ecological studies of the region s current wetlands and grasslands, with geological studies of climate change, sand dune movement and wetland dynamics over the last years the interdisciplinary team will develop a model of the Sand Hills that will facilitate predicting the future of this region under various scenarios of management and climate change doc5421 none Uehara and Burke University of Washington This dissertation study will examine the fit between social work and the culture of Alaska s Yup ik people. Scholars have demonstrated that other western systems are ill matched with Yup ik cultural expectations and practices. This study will document whether the practice of social work is another example of cultural mismatch by examining the everyday institutional practices of social service provision in four Yup ik villages. Methods will include participant observation with semi-structured and unstructured interviews doc5422 none More is known about the bacterium Escherichia coli K12 and its metabolism than any other free-living organism. Nonetheless, the role of 38% of its gene products is unknown, much less whether these products (or even many of the known products) are essential functions under standard laboratory growth conditions. This research project is using a unique Tn5 transposition system to define essential genes in E. coli. As an important side product, genes that are dispensable will also be determined. The project will use pulse transposition mutagenesis to create a complete library of transposon tagged inserts, transcripts will be generated that extend off of the inserted Tn5s into adjacent sequences and then nucleic acid hybridization of these transcripts to all open reading frames (ORFs) will be used to follow the growth (or failure to grow) of all members of the library under defined conditions. This procedure should allow the determination of the growth potential of null mutants in each of the known ORFs in the E. coli K12 chromosome under defined growth conditions. In addition, if the complete library reproducibly lacks certain representatives, the in vivo biases of Tn5 transposition will be investigated. While of considerable interest in furthering the basic understanding of E. coli K12 genome function, the procedures that shall be used should also have a number of important applied uses. For instance, in developing this project a technique has been discovered that should be able to efficiently generate Tn5 transposition events in many types of bacteria without the necessity of developing a Tn5 containing replicon for, or expression of the Tn5 transposase in, the various bacteria. This will aid in transposon mutagenesis of a number of interesting bacteria for which conventional genetic approaches have failed doc5389 none Recommended project is for three years of continued funding of research on coupled phase equilibria and trace element partitioning between mantle phases and melt at temperatures, pressures and compositions which closely approximate those which exist under mid-ocean ridges during partial mantle melting and mid-ocean ridge basalt (MORB) genesis. This work will build upon previous results that determined mineral-melt partitioning at for lherzolite mantle compositions at pressures between 1.2 and 3.4 Gpa. Crystal liquid partition coefficients will be determined for the rare earth elements (REE), Hf, Zr, Nb, U, Th, and Ba using an ion microprobe. Analytical charges will be prepared that are as close as possible to the peridotite solidus to most closely approximate conditions of partial mantle melting. In this work peridotite experimental charges formed at pressures up to 5.0 Gpa will be examined, including new studies at lower pressures. Pyroxenite charges representing pressures of 1.0-3.0 Gpa will also be analyzed, to form critical datasets that will allow the testing of models hypothesizing garnet pyroxenite (or eclogite) in the source of both MORB and plume melts. Depleted peridotite (harzburgite) charges will also be analyzed. These new data will be incorporated into new integrated models of mantle melting that integrate both major and trace element compositions doc5424 none Industrial products and processes exert some of the most profound and irreversible changes on the ecosystem. They contribute to biocomplexity by altering the delicate balances of biological, physical, and social systems via the usage of natural resources, the reintroduction of new materials to the environment, and the influence on behavior patterns and stimulating responses of living species. The primary objective of this incubation activity is to enable, orient, and integrate the multidisciplinary endeavors of a group of researchers to define the major issues, system interactions, critical needs, opportunities and future directions pertaining to the impact of industrial systems on biocomplexity. A pool of excellence will be formed to include 26 multidisciplinary faculty members from Auburn University and Tuskegee University along with their associates and students, and leading authorities from other academic institutions, Federal agencies and labs, and industry. These individuals provide a truly diverse background (engineering, chemistry, biology, microbiology, forestry, agronomy, business economics, sociology, and psychology) to address the proposed biocomplexity research for the first time in an integrated, systematic, and truly multidisciplinary framework. The requested NSF fund along with its institutional and industrial matching funds will be used to develop research networking, interactions, and management plans, to support a two-semester weekly seminar series, a focused retreat, an international conference with topical symposia and published proceedings, and three special issues in leading journals doc5425 none This project focuses on the intricate combination of biological and physicochemical processes by which dissolved organic matter (DOM) is formed and cycled in the ocean. The interlinked biological and physical processes by which bioactive elements are cycled in the ocean represent one of the most complicated and critical systems on earth. Although living organisms are the ultimate source and sink of the organic matter in which these elements primarily cycle, the major currency for both their active transfer and long?term storage in the ocean is as small, nonliving organic molecules. This molecular prerogative results because the biomacromolecules composing organisms and tissues must be broken down to inert subunits to pass bacterial cell walls prior to complete intracellular respiration. In the ocean, much of this molecular dismantling is accomplished by bacterial exoenzymes operating on organic substrates. Nutrient elements carried through this bacterial loop become available for conversion back to living particulate form either through photosynthesis or via transfer of bacterial production up food webs through protists and zooplankton. Such biologically mediated cycling between dissolved and particulate organic forms is critical on a larger scale to the transfer and fate of nutrients because only particles can sink to selectively transport bioactive elements from the lighted surface ocean into deep storage below the thermocline (i.e., the biological pump). Recent evidence for spontaneous assembly of colloidal marine molecules into microscopic polymer gels has fundamentally changed the way that oceanographers think about processes linking the microbial loop and biological pump to the rest of the biosphere and the geosphere. The key observation was that colloidal?size organic molecules found in surface seawater can coalesce spontaneously. The resulting particles (microgels) are sufficiently large to sink and might undergo other processes such as catastrophically collapsing to dense forms after passing sharp thresholds of temperature, pressure or pH. Our group has also recently found that these microgels are degraded approximately an order of magnitude faster by marine bacteria than the dispersed molecules from which they are formed, apparently by providing an effective means for abiotically concentrating substrate for efficient exoenzymatic dismantling. This project is an interdisciplinary focus on the role of these microgel particles in carbon cycling processes doc5426 none Pahlavan Indoor geolocation science is vital for the implementation of the fourth generation (4G) wireless information networks. The 4G wireless indoor networks are expected to provide geolocation services to locate people and important portable equipment and support multi-media services to interconnect a wide range of equipment with a wide range of QoS and dynamic data rate requirements at a very low cost. Geolocation applications supported by these networks will provide a number of innovative and vital technologies for commercial, public safety, and military applications. In commercial applications for residential and nursing homes environments indoor geolocation technology will provide for tracking the elderly and children who are away from visual supervision, for navigating the blind and other special need people, and for locating in-demand portable equipment in hospitals. In the public safety and military applications, indoor geolocation systems will provide for tracking the inmates in prisons and navigating policeman, fire fighters, and soldiers to safely complete their rescue operation inside buildings. Although the myriad of indoor geolocation applications have already attracted public attention to the extent that it has been addressed in several mass media scientific programs, there has been no serious attempt to develop a scientific basis to evaluate the physical limitation of these systems. The existing geolocation system (GPS) do not work in indoor areas and there is a need for new and innovative signal processing and locating algorithms to handle positioning in indoor area. However, there is no scientific framework that accurately and quantitatively relates the multipath characteristics of the indoor radio channel to excessive positioning error observed in geolocation systems operating in indoor environments. The principal research goal of this project is to provide a foundation for the indoor geolocation science that must provide for the design and performance evaluation of indoor geolocation systems. Two specific research objectives to be met to achieve this goal are: Objective 1: To analyze the multipath characteristics of the indoor radio propagation that affects the performance of indoor geolocation systems through empirical broadband measurements in typical sites, and design of statistical measurement based and geometrical models for the behavior of the channel. Objective 2: To use the results of objective 1 to lay a foundation for the design and performance evaluation of distributed indoor geolocation systems capable of locating objects in smart indoor spaces where numerous unreliable sources interact to provide an accurate location of each element. The novel methodologies developed to meet the above objectives can be further extended to other evolving 4G wireless information network applications providing both geolocation and telecommunication services and operating in severe multipath environments such as those observed in urban canyons. Keywords: indoor geolocation, indoor navigation, multi-media wireless, indoor radio propagation, angle of arrival, time of arrival, intelligent homes, wireless information networks doc5427 none This award supports purchase of boats, diving equipment and facilities at the Long Marine Laboratory (LML) of the University of California Santa Cruz. These improvements in facilities and equipment will allow the Diving and Boating Safety Programs (DBSP) to meet the growing numbers and needs of students and researchers. Funds will be used to equip a new Marine Support Facility with scuba cylinder racks, Nitrox tank-charging equipment, cabinets, and heating and ventilation systems. The new facility will provide students and researchers with areas for staging, fabrication and maintenance of diving and scientific equipment. The award will augment institutional funds to be used for site preparation, foundation, rough carpentry and minimal interior finish work. In addition, the award will support purchase of a 16 inflatable boat, a 22 fiberglass vessel and 3 outboard engines. A forklift will also be purchased to move boats and heavy gear on the grounds of the facility. Since , the LML has been the coastal research laboratory for the University s Institute of Marine Sciences. The laboratory is located on a coastal bluff adjacent to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, the nation s largest National Marine Sanctuary. The LML Education Program (K-12) and aquarium displays serve 35,000 visitors each year. The Diving and Boating Safety Program provides support for faculty, staff, student and visiting researchers in biology, chemistry and earth sciences. Approximately one-third of the University s 300 undergraduate Marine Biology students use the scuba diving and small boat facilities in classes or as part of their research doc5428 none This project will support a Workshop on Global Priorities for Coelacanth Research and Conservation for the 21st Century. The workshop will bring together experts, policy makers, conservationists, and active researchers on coelacanth biology for the purpose of quantifying the present state of knowledge of coelacanth biology, and ensuring the continued survival of these ancient fish. Thought to have been extinct for millions of years, the chance discovery of coelacanths in has focused much research and interest on their biology. A recent, highly unexpected finding of a new species in Indonesian waters has prompted numerous research questions regarding geographic range, dispersal, gene flow, and speciation. The workshop results will be made available on the web, and in a printed volume doc5429 none With this award, the Connecticut Audubon Coastal Center (CACC), which administers the Milford Point Ecosystem Project (MPEF), will undertake a year-long systematic, comprehensive planning program. This program is a major step towards achieving the five-year CACC goal to develop a model field station for the study of coastal ecosystems at Milford Point. To initiate the planning process, the CACC, and its Science Advisory Committee (SAC), has identified three objectives: 1. Upgrade data management and communications systems to state-of-the-art status in order to foster strong multidisciplinary research and education programs. 2. Identify the needs of institutes of higher education to conduct multidisciplinary ecosystem field research and training at CACC facilities; design and implement activities to fill needs 3. Create a framework for partnering in regional research that will draw a broad spectrum of scientists to the Center for research and for research-based education The CACC will build on its strong foundation and will use its 32-member expert SAC (section IIIA) to conduct a dynamic, yet logical, planning process to meet these objectives. Activities and products include: 1. Four strategic planning workshops. Each workshop will include invited consultants, will concentrate on a single aspect, and will produce a product aimed at accomplishing the five-year goal: a) assessment of communications and data management systems and of scientific equipment needed to attract and foster interaction among an array of users; prioritized recommendations for next steps; b) development of a series of training workshops and research programs for a multidisciplinary ecosystem approach, with a plan for their implementation; c) guidelines for seeking funding opportunities for research and training and a plan of development; d) framework and five-year plan for building regional partnerships with outside scientific researchers and research facilities. 2. Activities think tank. An outline of activities to complement educators course offerings will be produced at this meeting. 3. Best practices field study. Innovative models for the integration of estuarine research and education will be explored. In addition, managers and research directors from leading field station sites will be invited to assist the CACC in developing long-term plans for scientific research and training. 4. Communications plan. A plan will be developed to inform potential users about MPEP and the use of the CACC as a field station. The CACC is dedicated to salt marsh, coastal and estuarine research. Because of its location at the mouth of the Housatonic River, next to a new and rapidly accreting salt marsh, CACC is well situated to provide access for research and training in coastal ecology. In addition, the CACC has a strong associations with teachers, colleges, universities and school systems in its own and adjacent counties and along the Housatonic River. This professional infrastructure, along with CACC s unique location, has the potential for making a significant impact on field research and training in urban and suburban coastal ecology doc5430 none In assessing the risk to US society of nonindigenous species (NIS)-species introduced into an ecosystem in which they did not previously exist-this interdisciplinary team will use a model derived from economic theory to integrate ecological, economic, and social benefits and costs of NIS. In the freshwater ecosystems of the world, NIS are the leading cause of biodiversity loss; in most other ecosystems, NIS are one of the top three causes. Not only do NIS cause enormous ecological changes, but they also directly cause large economic losses and social change (e.g., as native harvestable resources are replaced by NIS). Although policies and regulations are being implementing to reduce the occurrence and impact of NIS (e.g., ballast regulations in the Great Lakes and coastal waters), these steps are being taken in the absence of a basic scientific understanding of the biological, economic, and social dimensions of the process of biological invasions. This team of aquatic ecologists, ecological modelers, and social scientists will develop an integrative approach to risk assessment of NIS, using the North American Great Lakes as a case study doc5431 none This award provides partial support for the construction of a central research facility at the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve of Stanford. The Preserve currently has a patchwork of dispersed, antiquated structures that were never intended to be permanent or to serve their current functions. The new centralized buildings will provide space for research, and for a variety of educational activities. The Preserve offers significant research opportunities in a number of fields because of the geologic history of its site, the resulting ecological diversity in the area, and the proximity of the site to research and educational institutions in the San Francisco Bay Area. Research activities at the site include a number of long-term and short-term projects, both representing a broad range of disciplines and a diverse community of researchers. Areas of research strength include: multi-disciplinary studies of global change; biological invasions; global biogeochemistry; conservation biology; and landscape and community ecology. The new construction has been planned with three major considerations: needs demonstrated by research programs at the site over the past 10 years; current and anticipated research programs, including pending proposals; and feedback from visiting scientists and students. The new centralized facility is expected to accommodate current activities plus 20% growth over a 20-year period doc5432 none Archbold Biological Station (Archbold), established in , is a not-for-profit independent research institution dedicated to long-term ecological research. Staff, visiting investigators, and students conduct research primarily focused on the organisms and environments of the Lake Wales Ridge and adjacent central Florida. Areas of research strength are population ecology and conservation biology, emphasizing ecological changes over local and regional scales, and demographic shifts in ecologically sensitive species. Although Archbold is not an affiliated university field station and has no formal college-level teaching program, it is heavily used for education. In the last five years education programs have involved research training for 40 graduates and 44 undergraduates, extensive use by visiting college classes (over instructional use days) and an active K-12 education program (7,421 K-12 visits). Current facilities for teaching and for visiting investigators are limited. This award will allow Archbold to renovate three existing rooms (a poorly equipped teaching classroom, a storage area, and a display storage area) into four custom facilities: (a) 650 ft2 multi-user classroom with dissecting scopes, modern audio-visual capabilities and integrated computer networking; (b) a 140 ft 2 purpose built storage area for K-12 displays and equipment; and a 475 ft 2 area including (c) a new Wet Lab area; and (d) a Multi-Purpose Laboratory with extensive general use equipment - including a drying oven, balances, and a compound and dissecting microscope linked to camera computer output and classroom display via remote monitor. These classroom and laboratory improvements will significantly enhance Archbold s research and education infrastructure and increase opportunities for college classes, K-12, continuing education, as well as visiting investigators and students. The new facilities will (1) increase the efficiency of space expanding the numbers and range of classes and visiting investigators that can be accommodated simultaneously; (2) enhance student understanding of the ecosystem and improve the teaching environment, for example allowing classes to view and manipulate specimens and conduct computer-aided taxonomic identification; (3) capitalize on Archbold s existing high-end computer network to promote greater use of Intranet, Internet, and www technologies directly in the classroom and provide classroom AV equipment for modern multi-media presentations; (4) better accommodate studies of freshwater ecology in a new Wet Lab area; (5) improve safety by providing a centralized Safety First Aid area; and (6) reduce the use of the current Chemistry Lab, with associated risk, to those who need full facilities. These renovations will also provide a more conducive research environment for visiting investigators and graduate students who currently rely on space and equipment in resident investigator labs. Two complementary items, a growth chamber and germinator, will expand the capabilities of the Plant lab and its collaborators and allow them to study: abiotic factors controlling reproduction seed ecology of plants; microbiotic ecosystems including fungi and algae endemic to the native soils and crusts; and to incubate algae from Lake Annie and seasonal wetlands. This award will also increase Archbold s abilities to link its research programs with regional education, conservation and land management activities doc5433 none Results of more than sixty years of scientific investigation at the Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory have established the LTER site as a national and international center for forest ecosystem and hydrologic research. When combined with other research activities, more than 150 investigators are currently conducting studies at Coweeta. This tremendous site use by visiting investigators has greatly out-paced logistical support and there is a need to improve all aspects of Coweeta facilities. A comprehensive multi-phase facilities plan has been developed to meet current and future research, education, and training needs. The -ha laboratory, located in the southern Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, is USDA Forest Service property where cooperative research is jointly administrated by the Southern Research Station (SRS) and the University of Georgia (UGA). Within the past five years, the research program has substantially broadened to include regional analyses of causes and consequences of land-use change in the southern Appalachians as part of the LTER program. This award will support implementation of Phase II of the Facilities Development Plan for Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory. Specifically, the sample cold room and drying oven space will be replaced and expanded. Current refrigerators and small drying ovens are outdated, malfunctioning, much smaller than what is needed, and expensive to operate and maintain. Completion of the development plans will provide the logistical support needed to sustain and build the science program of Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory doc5434 none This award provides support to the White Mountain Research Station (WMRS) to (1) improve laboratory resources for modern biological research and (2) establish voice and data telecommunication links between its high altitude laboratories and the rest of the world. WMRS is located on the western edge of the Great Basin with four laboratories spanning an elevation transect that exceeds meters in just 20 kilometers. The region is rich in topographical and biological diversity and is accessible to research because 97% of the land is publicly owned. With the aid of this award, the Station will develop a modern biology laboratory at the Owens Valley Laboratories (at 1,235m above sea level), the site of the Station s headquarters in Bishop, CA. The laboratory will provide the essential tools for conducting field research and stabilizing biological samples for transport to other laboratories with specialized instrumentation. In addition, the Station will establish telecommunication links between the high altitude laboratories (Barcroft at 3,801m and Crooked Creek at 3,094m) and the headquarters where there is a dedicated connection to the Internet. The new system will (a) provide a transparent extension of the Owens Valley Laboratories local area network to Barcroft and Crooked Creek using a combination of wireless and cable data transmission, and (b) provide internet and telephone connectivity between the high altitude laboratories and the outside world. Currently, research at the Station includes efforts in wildlife and conservation biology, physiological ecology, animal energetics and ecology at high altitudes, animal behavior, evolutionary biology, plant genetics, and paleobiology. The extent and quality of these research efforts will be aided by modern biological laboratory facilities at the Station. Recent educational use of the Station has included visiting field classes, programs such as the WMRS Supercourse in Environmental Biology, the UC Conservation Biology Summer Symposium, and WMRS Undergraduate Internships. Establishing a data communication link to the high altitude laboratories will bring them on-line for educational programs as well as enabling research programs requiring uninterrupted monitoring and telemetry of remotely sensed data doc5435 none This award provides support for an effort to compile a manual of standard operational policies for biological field stations. There are approximately 170 field stations in the US that are member stations of the Organization of Biological Field Stations (OBFS) as well as a smaller number of foreign stations. OBFS members have pointed to the need for and utility of a manual that describes common procedures for field station planning activities, administrative structures and policies, facility provision and maintenance, program integration, data management and communication, fundraising, fiscal responsibility and financial management. As a major component of the effort, 10 participants selected from member stations of the OBFS will meet in a three day workshop to finalize an outline and develop an initial draft document Prior to the workshop, survey efforts and preliminary discussions with a wider group at the OBFS annual meeting will result in the compilation of existing operating policies, and generation of a draft outline of the proposed manual. The final product will be available via the internet and also as hard copy. New field stations are being established at a phenomenal rate, and older, established stations are reconfiguring to meet demands for integrating research and education programs. The OBFS, with support from NSF through several workshops and initiatives in the recent past, has identified the development of a standard operating procedures manual as a significant step in streamlining administrative and facility processes at stations. This is expected to help the stations offer the best possible field research and educational opportunities to researchers and students across the nation doc5436 none This award provides funds to the University of Wisconsin s Trout Lake Station to aid in the purchase of a boat and microscope for accurate measurements of fish and microbes in fresh water ecosystems. The station provides access to aquatic systems that range from temporary ponds to large lakes and that represent a broad diversity of hydrologic, edaphic, and trophic conditions. Most of these habitats lie within protected watersheds with low population densities. Current programs at Trout Lake include several multi-investigator, ecosystem-level investigations as well as numerous smaller-scale projects involving population and community ecology, hydrology, fisheries biology, and basic limnology. One major focus in these efforts has been to evaluate and quantify the organisms that occur in the ecosystems in our region. The new equipment will improve the ease and quality of these efforts doc5437 none Earth Systems Science (40) This special project will support the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) Leadership Workshop: Building the Community. The purpose of this workshop is to inform leaders in the Earth system education community about the National SME&TE Digital Library initiative, and ongoing work in the development of DLESE. The workshop will also provide a forum to obtain feedback from community leaders that will be used in the design and development of DLESE collections, services, and related functions. Workshop activities will include hands-on demonstration of successful computer-assisted learning activities, networking and community building activities across all interests in Earth system education, and focus groups to become acquainted with the work of the DLESE Users, Collections, services, and Technology Committees. Participants will be provided with information and tools to become regular users of, and contributors to, DLESE functions, and to recruit broader participation among their home constituencies. Participants will be invited from among the leaders of Earth system education from K-12, undergraduate, and community outreach instructional settings. the outcomes of the workshop will be posted on the DLESE webpage (www.dlese.org), and reported in newsletters of professional societies. This workshop will be the first opportunity to engage the full spectrum of Earth system educators in the development of DLESE doc5438 none Chen This is a one-year dissertation enhancement proposal submitted by Ms. Julie Callahan, a doctoral candidate in Environmental, Coastal and Ocean sciences, University of Massachusetts at Boston and her advisor, Dr. Robert Chen. This project involves collaboration with Professor Minhan Dai, Xiamen University, China. This study will characterize high molecular weight dissolved organic matter in the Preal River Estuary. This project will provide an excellent opportunity for comparative studies of two large river systems, the Mississippi River plume and the Preal River Estuary and will fill a need for information on cycling of dissolved organic materials in these estuaries. This will also provide opportunities for Ms. Callahan to carry out Ph.D. research in China, and for her to gain valuable field research experience there. The Natural Science Foundation of China and the NSF jointly support this project doc5439 none Preparation and Testing of Microporous Glass Membranes for Gas Separations George R. Gavalas Supported glass membranes suitable for gas separations are developed using phase-separated-glass casting techniques. Membranes are made by first dip-coating flat or tubular porous alumina supports in a suspension of the glass components (Na2O-B2O3-SiO2-Al2O3). The particle coating is then heated to react the components into a continuous glass film 5-10 mm thick. Upon cooling, the glass separates into two intertwined phases, one soluble in acid and the other insoluble. Leaching in acid removes the solid phase, leaving behind the insoluble phase as a porous film with pore sizes varying from below 1 nm to 10 nm depending on the initial composition as well as on the processing conditions. To achieve high membrane selectivity it is essential to identify compositions that give pore size below 1 nm. For this purpose membrane specimens are being prepared over a broad range of glass compositions. Such an effort is prohibitive using conventional membrane-preparation techniques. In this project parallel processing is used to explore quickly and thoroughly a large multicomponent composition space. Specifically, arrays of several small circular membranes, each of different composition, are deposited simultaneously on a single alumina disk. After thermal treatment and leaching the membranes are characterized by scanning electron microscopy and tested for permeance and selectivity with various gas mixtures, including CO2-CH4 and combinations of C1-C4 hydrocarbons. The permeation testing is carried out serially using a mass spectrometer probe. Approximately fifty disks, each containing upwards of thirty membranes, are being processed in the course of this project. Inorganic membranes offer a practical and energy-efficient technology for gas separations needed in industrial processing of materials such as natural gas and petrochemicals and in fuel cells. One type of such durable membranes consists of thin microporous glass films supported on porous ceramic plates or tubes. To achieve good membrane properties it is necessary to bring the pore sizes down to molecular dimensions, and for this purpose it is necessary to test a wide range of preparation conditions. This necessarily extensive experimental effort would be extremely time consuming by conventional techniques. In this project techniques for simultaneously depositing and testing a number of membrane formulations on a single support disk is being developed. The increased productivity afforded by this parallel, or combinatorial, processing permits evaluation of over one thousand membrane compositions in order to optimize their separation properties. Such optimized membranes will contribute to improved efficiency and economy in separations pertaining to the natural-gas and petroleum industries doc5440 none This award supports purchase and installation of computer and communications equipment and software to be used for data management and communications at two San Diego State University (SDSU) field stations, Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve (SMER) and Sky Oaks Biological Field Station (Sky Oaks). Currently there is a wealth of data regularly being collected instrumentation at the SDSU Biological Field Stations for both research and educational programs. This includes weather data from both Sky Oaks and SMER, eddy covariance and micrometeorology data from Sky Oaks, and other data collected from biological monitoring programs at the two sites. The biological monitoring activities have been expanded so that, through time, the data from these field stations can be points of comparison for regional conservation plans. The improvements supported by this award will allow the data from Sky Oaks and from SMER to be integrated and sent to a main database server at SDSU where it will be available through the internet to researchers and educators at other institutions. The two SDSU field stations are located 160 km north of San Diego, but have distinct mixed-chaparral Mediterranean vegetation and differ in elevation and marine influences (temperature, rainfall) as well as slope and aspect. These differences produce measurable variations in microclimate, solar radiation, carbon dioxide concentrations and various other environmental factors that are reflected in plant and animal communities. The data obtained at the stations is of use in monitoring of global change, and in educational efforts related to global change and physiological ecology doc5441 none The Fourth International Conference on Formal Methods for Open Object-Based Distributed Systems (FMOODS ) will be held at Stanford University September 6-8, . The organizing committee is chaired by Carolyn Talcott (Stanford University) with co-organizers Scott Smith (PC Chair, The Johns Hopkins University) Nalini Venkatasubramanian (University of California at Irvine), and Sriram Sankar (Metamata Inc.). The conference series was initiated by Elie Najm and Jean-Bernard Stefani, who organised the first FMOODS in Paris in . The second was held in Canterbury in , and the third was held in Florence in . FMOODS will be the first time the conference is held in the US. By bringing the conference to the US we are hoping to increase the US participation in the series, and to bring more US researchers into the FMOODS community. The objective of FMOODS is to represent work at the convergence of three important and related fields: formal methods, distributed systems, and object-based technology. This convergence is representative of some of the latest advances in the field of distributed systems (for example, the ODP reference model and the work of the OMG) and provides links between a number of important communities (for example, FORTE PSTV, ICODP, ECOOP, et cetera doc5442 none This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) project will be used to develop an experimental multi-component structure which exhibits resonances that depend on the state of the system due to coupling of the dynamics associated with the various components. The proposed coupled system will slowly move in and out of a state of resonance as time evolves, a phenomenon that for example is encountered in multi-bladed turbine disks. Successful completion of this facility will enable investigations on the development of tools for implementation of reduced-order models and equations that capture the pertinent coupled dynamics these complex systems. If successful, the proposed project will also enable advances that can lead to the development of tools for capture of alternative models of complex dynamic coupling, such as those introduced by intermittent contact and friction doc5443 none A microbial observatory is being established to study the diversity and ecological roles of coastal marine bacteria. The project study site is Sapelo Island, a barrier island off the coast of Georgia that supports some of the most extensive and pristine salt marshes in the United States. Prokaryotes play critical ecological roles in these marshes, carrying out decomposition of the salt marsh grasses, serving as the basis for an extensive microbial food web, and driving the cycling of carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and other major and minor elements. Despite these important roles, relatively little is currently known about the identity and diversity of coastal marine prokaryotes. The study will undertake a comprehensive inventory of bacteria in the waters and sediments of the marshes and adjacent estuaries, using both culture-based approaches (i.e., methods that rely on growing bacterial colonies in the laboratory) and culture-independent approaches (i.e., methods that rely on retrieving bacterial DNA directly from the environment). Selected prokaryotes that play important ecological roles in the marsh ecosystem and are amenable to culturing in the laboratory will serve as the focus for detailed physiological and genetic studies. These studies will develop tools to link specific prokaryotic groups with the biogeochemical functions they perform. Understanding the diversity of prokaryotes and their functional roles will be important for meeting environmental challenges in the coming decades. Coastal marshes and estuaries are particularly relevant environments in this effort because of their location at the interface of terrestrial and marine ecosystems and the growing pressures they experience from human activities doc5444 none This is a planning proposal to conduct workshops and associated activities towards the goal of developing a research framework applicable to the North Carolina coastal zone. The central theme focuses on the question of how to best understand, quantify and predict the consequences of large-scale environmental trends and forcing on coastal estuarine ecosystems. They will investigate the most relevant information that might be needed from these systems to efficiently monitor biological health, structure and function and how to translate this for integrated assessments in vivo in order to better understand the synergisms occurring between interacting subsystems and between natural and anthropogenic forcings doc5445 none The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL) is operated by a consortium composed of the University of Florida, Florida State University, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Florida State University administers the Laboratory as a national user facility, available competitively to users on the basis of merit. Established in and dedicated in , the Laboratory through an extraordinary state-federal partnership with multi-agency participation has developed unique facilities in support of magnet-related research at the highest attainable magnetic fields. The Laboratory is structured around four major thrusts: (1) user facilities developed in response to users needs that are opening new frontiers for science opportunities, (2) magnet science and technology developed in partnership with the private sector to enhance U.S. competitiveness, (3) basic science research driven by a partnership between external and in-house users that drives new opportunities in high magnetic field science and technology, and (4) the integration of research and education at all levels, and partnership with academia, industry, government and international institutions to advance research and technology in the area of high magnetic fields. Over the first ten years the NHMFL has put in place a unique range of instruments and facilities for research in high magnetic fields, including continuous field, pulsed fields, and magnetic resonance research. During this time the Laboratory has established itself as the world s leading center for multi-disciplinary research using high magnetic fields. It has developed an outstanding educational program and built strong collaborations with academic, industrial, government and international partners. The focus of the Laboratory is now shifting from a primary emphasis on magnet technology and development to include increased support for service to users from a wide range of scientific and engineering disciplines. The Laboratory is now building on the federal and state investment to realize the full scientific potential of the new facility, while the science and magnet technology programs expand the current capabilities, develop new magnet systems, and drive new science discoveries at the highest fields and at extremes of pressure and temperature. The Laboratory provides continuous fields (up to 45 tesla) in the magnetic field region formerly thought to be reserved for only pulsed magnets, and reversible pulsed fields (60 tesla for tenths of a second and up to 79 tesla for milliseconds). The availability of opportunities in magnetic resonance at 900 MHz and beyond will be a critical aspect of the Laboratory s efforts to build a users center of excellence in very high field magnetic resonance spectroscopies. The in-house science program has been developed in cooperation with the external users and addresses a wide range of research areas including highly-correlated electron systems, magnetic materials, magnetic resonance spectroscopies applied to the chemical, physical, and biological sciences, and the development of novel instrumentation to take advantage of the magnet facilities available to users doc5446 none This project is designed to advance knowledge about the diversity and activity of microorganisms residing in subsurface water and sediments in a shallow naphthalene-contaminated aquifer in South Glens Falls, NY. This site has been studied hydrologically, chemically, and microbiologically for a decade and features an extensive infrastructure and both hydrogeochemical and microbiological data bases for developing and testing hypotheses about factors controlling the identity, activity, and genetic exchange processes of resident microorganisms. The four main project objectives are: (i) to assess the diversity of general heterotrophic microorganisms residing in water and sediments; (ii) to assess the diversity of microorganisms metabolic pathways, and dioxygenase genes responsible for metabolizing the naphthalene (the major environmental contaminant on site); (iii) to discover the mechanisms of horizontal gene transfer causing the subsurface microorganisms to adapt to naphthalene exposure; and (iv) to assemble a heterotrophic geochemical budget for the site that quantifies the role of microorganisms in carbon and energy flow through the system. These objectives will be achieved by sampling site waters and sediments quarterly for 5 years. Sampling locations will be inside and outside the contaminated zone and key climatic and biogeochemical parameters [O2, other electron acceptors, bicarbonate, dissolved organic carbon (DOC), N, P, and organic contaminants] will be measured and used for interpretive purposes. Microbial characterization procedures will include growth and isolation on ecologically-relevant carbon sources (site DOC and naphthalene) -- as well as nucleic acid-based procedures [e.g., DNA extraction, cloning, sequencing, PCR, and Terminal-Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism (T-RFLP)]. Measures of diversity will be based on phenotypic (colony type, Gram stain, physiology, etc.) and genotypic [e.g., 16S rRNA sequences, naphthalene dioxygenase (nahAc and analogues)] traits. Microscopic examination of site populations will play a critical role in achieving this project s goals. Fluorescent In situ Hybridization (FISH) will be used in conjunction with Substrate Specific Direct Viable Count (SS-DVC), and a general respiratory assay (electron transport reduction of a tetrazolium compound to its fluorescent form) to independently assess the identity, physiological potential, and gene expression of individual microorganisms residing in this site. Prior studies at the site have indicated that naphthalene catabolic plasmids within the native populations play a role in metabolic adaptation. Factors controlling plasmid transfer will be examined in laboratory and field experiments. This project will advance knowledge of the identities and roles that microorganisms play in this subsurface habitat. To date, no complete census of microorganisms residing in any habitat has been achieved. By systematically applying both culture-based and nucleic acid-based procedures at this already well-studied site, a complete census may be approached. But more importantly, the diversity of microbial metabolic function will be determined in this unique setting where introduced naphthalene has strongly influenced the local biogeochemistry. Because of its relatively simple biogeochemical characteristic and the preexisting database, this site is ideal for the ambitious task of cataloging the presence, heterotrophic activity, and genetic exchange mechanisms of naturally occurring microorganisms. Discoveries of the roles of individual microbial populations in biogeochemical cycling will be conveyed to the public through written documents, an internet web site, and site visits doc5447 none Among all eukaryotic organisms, the diversity of microscopic algae is perhaps the least understood. Yet coccoid algae are extremely important primary producers in many freshwater systems. It has been demonstrated that Chlorella sp. contributes over 70% of the total carbon fixed in some lakes. It is estimated that as many as 1 million species of algae remain to be discovered. This problem is probably most acute for the unicellular autosporic coccoid algae, where a lack of morphological characteristics has severely hampered species identification. These algae are all nearly spherical in shape, lack any flagellate stage, and do not sexually reproduce. Coccoid algae that are green in color and represent at least three evolutionarily divergent types of organisms; xanthophytes (Xanthophyceae), eustigmatophytes (Eustigmatophyceae), and green algae (Chlorophyta). These organisms can not be distinguished from each other (even at the class level) by light microscopy and thus have typically been identified as little green balls , or (usually incorrectly) Chlorella spp. Coccoid algae are present in high numbers in oligotrophic, mesotrophic, eutrophic, and dystrophic lakes. However, because the organisms have not been identified, studies of the coccoid algae have been very limited in scope. Researchers have generally assumed that there are only a few widely distributed species of coccoid algae. This collaborative (with Dr. Jeffrey Bailey at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, Award ) project is investigating the diversity, population dynamics, and physiological ecology of green-colored autosporic coccoid algae in Itasca State Park, Minnesota. Itasca possesses a high diversity of lakes, ponds, and bogs that are ideal for this study. The project encompasses several specific goals, including the 1) discovery of new taxa of coccoid algae; 2) development of reliable genetic criteria for the identification of coccoid algae; 3) establishment of a reference collection of coccoid algae; 4) determination of the distribution patterns of coccoid algae in different lake types; 5) study of the population dynamics of coccoid algae; 6) investigation of the higher-level systematics of coccoid algae; 7) investigation of the physiological tolerances of the coccoid isolates; and 8) development of a database of identification criteria and distribution data. Other phycologists working with additional algal groups will be involved. These studies should revolutionize the understanding of the temporal distribution, environmental requirements, and population dynamics of these important organisms. This project will provide conclusive evidence for new, more realistic hypotheses concerning populations of coccoid algae doc5448 none During mid-day, plants are absorbing much more light energy than they can use to fuel photosynthesis. This excess absorbed light energy photosensitizes pigments in plants and can cause extreme damage to cells because of the oxidation of various cellular building blocks such as proteins and lipids. To alleviate this situation plants and algae have developed efficient mechanisms for eliminating excess absorbed light energy as heat. One of these mechanisms can be measured as a change in the chlorophyll fluorescence of the cell, or nonphotochemical quenching of chlorophyll fluorescence. Using measurements of chlorophyll fluorescence, mutant strains of the alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii were isolated that could not dissipate excess light energy as efficiently as wild-type or normal cells. A number of these strains appeared to be more sensitive than wild-type cells to high light; they bleach and die upon exposure to high light. Analyses of these mutants have led to the identification of both pigment and protein molecules that are critical for the elimination of excess absorbed light energy in photosynthetic organisms. Developing a greater understanding of how plants respond to high light and the mechanisms used to eliminate excess light energy offers the possibility of engineering specific, agronomically important plants to survive longer periods of time under harsh environmental conditions, where plants are often absorbing excess light energy. This may extend the range of environments in which certain crop plants can grow, which in turn could increase the yields of specific crops doc5449 none This project is part of an integrated set of proposals for the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic (SHEBA) Ocean project. The goal of the current phase of the SHEBA project is to use data collected during a one year experiment during which an icebreaker frozen into the ice pack of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas was used as a platform for data collection. A full annual cycle of data relating to feedbacks of the ocean-ice-atmosphere system was collected and will be used to improve model parameterizations of sea ice response to global warming. The data originally collected by these researchers provides an essential dataset of ice-surface observations of the atmospheric boundary level for use in improving large-scale models that require better parameterization of cloud-radiation and surface-albedo feedbacks for predicting the response of Arctic sea ice to global warming. The project involves analysis and quality control of surface-level data and production of a time-series of surface heat flux. The data will be incorporated into models of the atmospheric boundary layer and used to compare to data sets of surface parameters collected by aircraft over flights. The results of this project will be used in conjunction with other projects to enhance mesoscale and General Circulation Models (GCMs) that facilitate better simulations of the Arctic sea ice response to projected global warming trends doc5450 none Among all eukaryotic organisms, the diversity of microscopic algae is perhaps the least understood. Yet coccoid algae are extremely important primary producers in many freshwater systems. It has been demonstrated that Chlorella sp. contributes over 70% of the total carbon fixed in some lakes. It is estimated that as many as 1 million species of algae remain to be discovered. This problem is probably most acute for the unicellular autosporic coccoid algae, where a lack of morphological characteristics has severely hampered species identification. These algae are all nearly spherical in shape, lack any flagellate stage, and do not sexually reproduce. Coccoid algae that are green in color and represent at least three evolutionarily divergent types of organisms: xanthophytes (Xanthophyceae), eustigmatophytes (Eustigmatophyceae), and green algae (Chlorophyta). These organisms can not be distinguished from each other (even at the class level) by light microscopy and thus have typically been identified as little green balls , or (usually incorrectly) Chlorella spp. Coccoid algae are present in high numbers in oligotrophic, mesotrophic, eutrophic, and dystrophic lakes. However, because the organisms have not been identified, studies of the coccoid algae have been very limited in scope. Researchers have generally assumed that there are only a few widely distributed species of coccoid algae. This collaborative (with Drs. Marvin W. Fawley and Karen Phillips at North Dakota State University Fargo, Award ) project is investigating the diversity, population dynamics, and physiological ecology of green-colored autosporic coccoid algae in Itasca State Park, Minnesota. Itasca possesses a high diversity of lakes, ponds, and bogs that are ideal for this study. The project encompasses several specific goals, including the 1) discovery of new taxa of coccoid algae; 2) development of reliable genetic criteria for the identification of coccoid algae; 3) establishment of a reference collection of coccoid algae; 4) determination of the distribution patterns of coccoid algae in different lake types; 5) study of the population dynamics of coccoid algae; 6) investigation of the higher-level systematics of coccoid algae; 7) investigation of the physiological tolerances of the coccoid isolates; and 8) development of a database of identification criteria and distribution data. Other phycologists working with additional algal groups will be involved. These studies should revolutionize the understanding of the temporal distribution, environmental requirements, and population dynamics of these important organisms. This project will provide conclusive evidence for new, more realistic hypotheses concerning populations of coccoid algae doc5451 none The goal of this research is to investigate and develop computational methods for supporting automated negotiation of contracts in business-to-business E-commerce applications. Such processes require the ability to negotiate over contracts that have scheduling constraints, interact with a highly distributed web of suppliers with different capabilities through the completion of the contracted work, and deal with failures in contract execution. These problems are modeled using a community of self-interested agents with limited rationality, each representing a business entity or a decision-maker. Algorithms and decision strategies will be developed for effective bid construction, bid evaluation, supplier selection, execution monitoring, and renegotiation of contracts among multiple agents. A distributed computational testbed will be developed and used for simulation, and analysis. The results of this research will contribute to the development of general computational models for multi-agent contracting. The research efforts will also produce a highly distributed market infrastructure with an agent population that can be used by industry and researchers for further investigations, as well as by educators as a tool for training the next generation of e-commerce specialists. The potential payoff of the research is high, given the projected size of the business-to-business and make-to-order e-commerce doc5452 none In many large-scale ecological studies the diversity of fungi and their roles in ecosystem function and change are almost totally ignored. Recent advances in the fields of DNA sequencing, bioinformatics, and phylogenetic analysis have made possible many advances in studies of microbial diversity. A system for performing routine surveys of fungal biodiversity in Duke Forest (Durham, NC) based on molecular systematics is being developed. The Duke Forest lies near the eastern edge of the North Carolina piedmont plateau and supports diverse plant species (over100 tree species), soils, and land use conditions and research projects currently underway include surveys of arthropod diversity, studies of the effects of environmental change including elevated carbon dioxide, different land use histories, and the dynamics of naturally evolving forest communities. The Duke Forest Mycological Observatory (DFMO) will permit the study of those fungal communities which form the core group of saprophytic and mycorrhizal fungi in temperate forests. As a pilot project, plots representing a range of forest types will be surveyed in order to establish a baseline data set of basidiomycete diversity from the forest. Plots located within several long-term studies including the recently initiated Free-Air Carbon dioxide enrichment (FACE) experiment will next be studied. Early data from the FACE study indicate shifts in the microbial population in the soil, but as yet there have been no surveys of microbial diversity by FACE. Shifts in the abundance, activity and diversity of mycorrhizal fungi are particularly likely (in response to a greater supply of root exudates in the FACE plots) and may play an important role in long term forest ecosystem health and stability. This study will develop a DNA-sequence database framework (based on ribosomal ITS sequences) linked with sites within the Duke Forest. Extensive molecular databases are already available for most fungal groups, making it possible to identify isolates to the genus in most instances and often to the species level. The focus will be on soil, litter and mycorrhizal samples from these sites, which will provide a more unbiased estimate of microbial diversity than estimates based above ground sampling of fruit bodies or cultivable diversity. These data will then form a basis for the long term monitoring of fungal microbial diversity within the Duke Forest and FACE site. This project will provide baseline data about soil-inhabiting, mycorrhizal, soil, and litter-fungi from a variety of habitats. This project will also be one of the first studies of fungal community structure to assess the impacts of various environmental variables such as increases in carbon dioxide concentration on fungal diversity doc5453 none Picoplankton, small planktonic microorganisms ranging in diameter from 0.2 to 2.0 mm, are the most abundant cellular organisms in the world s oceans. At concentrations of ranging from 10,000 to 1,000,000 cells ml worldwide, these microorganisms consume an estimated 20-50 % of marine primary productivity. Planktonic microbes are also biochemically versatile, mediating most of the key chemical transformations of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur that occur in the oceanic biosphere. However, very little is known about the biology, physiology and genetics of these globally important microbes - mainly because some of the most dominant types have resisted cultivation. This project will characterize cosmopolitan and abundant, but uncultured, picoplankton species using newly developed genomic technologies. Specifically, the project will sequence, annotate and analyze large insert chromosomal DNA libraries prepared from naturally occurring planktonic microorganisms. These data will provide hitherto unavailable information on uncultured microorganisms that have a high abundance and ubiquitous global distribution. Genomic organization, gene content, and functional protein distributions of planktonic microbes will become available for the first time. Furthermore, the new approaches and tools developed will significantly advance and extend current Microbial Observatory efforts in the ocean and other diverse environments. Our approach will significantly increase the general understanding of uncultivated microorganisms that largely mediate the flux of energy and matter in the world s oceans. Data resulting from this effort will also provide the foundation necessary for constructing DNA microarrays, designed for high throughput monitoring of the variability and gene expression of diverse, globally significant marine microbial species. Ultimately, the approaches developed in this research will provide detailed insight into the variability, activity, and significance of important microbial communities from any site doc5454 none This research will assess the gains from explicitly incorporating space-time dependence in traditional air pollution concentration-response functions. It has a methodological and an application component. The methodological component involves evaluating the benefits and costs of various models that are based on sometimes conflicting statistical paradigms; e.g., Bayesian vs. frequentist time series extensions, geostatistical vs. lattice spatial models, and analytical vs. computational models. The application concerns the measurement of the effects of air pollution on human health, as measured by hospital admissions, in California s South Coast Air Basin. Previous applications have ignored the spatial variation in the data, losing potentially valuable information. The research requires (1) space-time interpolation to obtain reliable surfaces of pollutant concentrations; (2) exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) and visualization of model fit; and (3) estimation of space-time linear statistical models. The research agenda is designed to uncover and highlight the most promising areas where space-time analyses can contribute to policy analysis. An important aspect of research underlying U.S. environmental policy is concerned with the precise measurement of the relation between the ambient concentrations of criteria pollutants and socio-economic and health outcomes. The anticipated increase in precision and accuracy from space-time analysis facilitates an assessment of several key policy questions, including: what are the best empirical measures for air pollution concentrations; what is the role of various pollutants in explaining responses; are there no observable effects thresholds in concentration-response functions; and what is the range of uncertainty in the predictions from the various models. To the extent that, as a result of this methodological and empirical investigation, society gains insight into the accuracy and uncertainty from estimated models, this research will contribute to the refinement of the analysis of the costs and benefits of US environmental policy doc5455 none Robert M. Goodman Jo Handelsman Holy M. Simon Research teams headed by Drs. Robert M. Goodman (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Anna-Louise Reysenbach (Portland State University have been awarded collaborative grants to establish a tropical microbial observatory for collaborative research on microbial diversity (Bacteria, Archaea, Fungi, Protists) associated with caterpillars. The observatory will be based in the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG) in northwestern Costa Rica, which has been identified as a hotspot for biological conservation. The project is logistically based on the network of biological stations established throughout the ACG, where another NSF-funded team is conducting a large, long-term survey and inventory of caterpillars. Studies of the microbial observatory will focus on the detection, characterization, and inventory of cultured and non-cultured microbiota, the latter which is expected to be vastly more diverse than that revealed by traditional culturing methods alone. The long-term goal is to study the dynamics and function of microorganisms (most of which will be new to science) in the feeding preferences, habits, development, and nutrition of herbivorous caterpillars. In short, to determine if microbial diversity parallels animal and plant species diversity in this tropical forest system. The research teams will use groundbreaking methods in environmental microbiology to accomplish these goals, including metagenome cloning and tools such as DNA microarrays. The molecular studies will be integrated with the cultivation-based studies and, together, these two approaches will lead to a better understanding of the nature and dynamics of assemblages of microorganisms associated with caterpillars at the observatory. The results are expected to allow scientists to tap into the biochemical and genetic capabilities of the microorganisms that may lead to the discovery of potentially new and useful natural products. This observatory will also foster U.S.-Costa Rican collaboration through training of US and Costa Rican undergraduate and graduate students, close collaboration with US and Costa Rican conservation biologists, database linkages to the Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad Costa Rica (INBio), and direct collaboration with researchers at the University of Costa Rica at San Jose. All cultures and DNA obtained from this project will be stored in both US and Costa Rican collections, which will provide an organismal and genetic foundation for future screening of novel products or genes. This study will set the framework for additional microbial diversity inventories in this species rich area, and its results are expected to have extensive local and global impacts for both cross-disciplinary scientific training and public outreach and education doc5456 none Drs. Steven K. Schmidt and Andrew P. Martin have been awarded a grant to establish a microbial observatory to study the distribution and functioning of microorganisms that live in soils of high-elevation tundra and forests of the Rocky Mountains. They will concentrate on microorganisms that are involved in environmentally important processes such as soil nitrogen transformations and methane (natural gas) exchange between soil and the atmosphere. These processes are important because they can contribute to global warming and pollution of drinking water down stream from high mountain areas. Emphasis will be placed on studying the microbes that carry out these functions during the winter under deep snow packs of the Rocky Mountain region. Their preliminary work shows that soils under deep snow are actually very biologically active and that important environmental transformations of nitrogen and methane take place under the snow. Almost nothing is known, however, about the identity of the cold-adapted organisms that carry out these processes under the snow pack. Drs. Schmidt and Martin will measure the production and consumption of various nitrogen compounds and methane across the landscape during summer and winter. They will simultaneously use DNA sequencing and probing methods to determine the identity of the dominant microorganisms that carry out these important biogeochemical processes doc5457 none Anna-Louise Reysenbach Linda Amaral Zettler Research teams headed by Drs. Robert M. Goodman (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Anna-Louise Reysenbach (Portland State University), and Greg Thorn (University of Western Ontario) have been awarded a grant to establish a tropical microbial observatory for collaborative research on microbial diversity (Bacteria, Archaea, Fungi, Protists) associated with caterpillars. The observatory will be based in the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG) in northwestern Costa Rica, which has been identified as a hotspot for biological conservation. The project is logistically based on the network of biological stations established throughout the ACG, where another NSF-funded team is conducting a large, long-term survey and inventory of caterpillars. Studies of the microbial observatory will focus on the detection, characterization, and inventory of cultured and non-cultured microbiota, the latter which is expected to be vastly more diverse than that revealed by traditional culturing methods alone. The long-term goal is to study the dynamics and function of microorganisms (most of which will be new to science) in the feeding preferences, habits, development, and nutrition of herbivorous caterpillars. In short, to determine if microbial diversity parallels animal and plant species diversity in this tropical forest system. The research teams will use groundbreaking methods in environmental microbiology to accomplish these goals, including metagenome cloning and tools such as DNA microarrays. The molecular studies will be integrated with the cultivation-based studies and, together, these two approaches will lead to a better understanding of the nature and dynamics of assemblages of microorganisms associated with caterpillars at the observatory. The results are expected to allow scientists to tap into the biochemical and genetic capabilities of the microorganisms that may lead to the discovery of potentially new and useful natural products. This observatory will also foster U.S.-Costa Rican collaboration through training of US and Costa Rican undergraduate and graduate students, close collaboration with US and Costa Rican conservation biologists, database linkages to the Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad Costa Rica (INBio), and direct collaboration with researchers at the University of Costa Rica at San Jose. All cultures and DNA obtained from this project will be stored in both US and Costa Rican collections, which will provide an organismal and genetic foundation for future screening of novel products or genes. This study will set the framework for additional microbial diversity inventories in this species rich area, and its results are expected to have extensive local and global impacts for both cross-disciplinary scientific training and public outreach and education doc5458 none This project is part of an integrated set of proposals for the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic (SHEBA) Ocean project. The goal of the current phase of the SHEBA project is to use data collected during a one year experiment during which an icebreaker frozen into the ice pack of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas was used as a platform for data collection. A full annual cycle of data relating to feedbacks of the ocean-ice-atmosphere system was collected and will be used to improve model parameterizations of sea ice response to global warming. This project will analyze data sets of surface properties for the atmospheric boundary layer and cloud-microphysics to identify the parameters controlling cloud-radiation feedback. Better parameterization of the feedbacks will allow other investigators looking at additional aspects of cloud-radiation feedback mechanisms to improve model simulation of the heat budget. The activities of this project are an essential effort to enhance the outcome of the SHEBA research projects designed to improve column, mesoscale and General Circulation Models (GCMs) that facilitate better simulations of the Arctic sea ice response to projected global warming trends doc5459 none Arzberger and Fountain The San Diego Supercomputer Center has proposed to conduct a planning workshop to develop the interdisciplinary capability and technological breadth of NEON, the National Ecological Observatory Network. The workshop will be held from 9-12 March . Workshop facilitators include Dr. Martyn Caldwell of Utah State University, Dr. Bruce Hayden of the University of Virginia, and Dr. Jim Beach of the University of Kansas. The goals of the workshop are to: determine the types of infrastructure needed for observatories in NEON, determine the types of infrastructure needed for the network of observatories in NEON (including communication and computational support), address management issues for NEON infrastructure, discuss coordination of research within and among NEON sites, and provide advice on the challenges of overcoming the sociological and institutional barriers associated with collaborative research that is multi-institution, large-scale, and broadly interdisciplinary. Reports by breakout groups and a synthesis of the emerging technologies symposium will be broadcast on the world wide web. The workshop will result in a report submitted to NSF doc5460 none This project is part of an integrated set of proposals for the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic (SHEBA) Ocean project. The goal of the current phase of the SHEBA project is to use data collected during a one year experiment during which an icebreaker frozen into the ice pack of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas was used as a platform for data collection. A full annual cycle of data relating to feedbacks of the ocean-ice-atmosphere system was collected and will be used to improve model parameterizations of sea ice response to global warming. This project will assemble a data set of atmospheric boundary layer parameters in order to improve the physics used in models. The researchers are collaborating with other investigators looking at additional aspects of the cloud-radiation feedback mechanisms. The activities of this project are an essential effort to enhance the outcome of the SHEBA research projects designed to improve column, mesoscale and General Circulation Models (GCMs) that facilitate better simulations of the Arctic sea ice response to projected global warming trends doc5461 none This award establishes a microbial observatory at an ocean site located midway between Los Angeles and the University of Southern California s Wrigley Marine Science Center on Santa Catalina Island to discover and study previously undescribed microorganisms. Marine microorganisms play crucial roles in the biology and chemistry of the sea and thus have a strong influence on processes ranging from the development of toxic algal blooms to carbon cycling in the ecosystem, and thus ultimately on fisheries and other uses of the coastal ocean. The tiny size and lack of easily distinguishable morphological features, plus the difficulty and expense of cultivating microorganisms in the laboratory, have made it extremely difficult to identify most of these species until very recently. This situation has been particularly true of marine archaea, bacteria, and the smallest microalgae and protozoa. Therefore, important details are lacking regarding the kinds of microorganisms present in the water column, how they vary in time and space, and exactly what they might be doing. This project will apply newly developed molecular biological approaches that will permit us to discover and identify even the smallest microorganisms by their genetic characteristics, directly from field samples and without the need to grow them in laboratory culture. The different microbial types will also be quantified directly from field samples with state-of-the-art fluorescence probe technology, and a combined isotope-fluorescence probe technology will be applied to investigate the physiological characteristics of the dominant identified organisms within their mixed natural communities. Measurements will be taken biweekly for most of the 4-year project. Access to the study site will be facilitated by the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies which operates an oceanographic time series station with biweekly sampling, and also by boats traversing between LA and USC s marine laboratory twice weekly. The project will take full advantage of the physical, biological, and chemical data already being collected for the ocean time series. It is anticipated that this study will discover new species of microorganisms (based on previously unreported genetic signatures), indicate new approaches for bringing these newly discovered microbes into laboratory culture (based on phylogenetic analyses of their DNA sequences), and thus answer many questions concerning the composition and activities of one of the most abundant yet poorly understood groups of organisms on the face of the planet doc5451 none The goal of this research is to investigate and develop computational methods for supporting automated negotiation of contracts in business-to-business E-commerce applications. Such processes require the ability to negotiate over contracts that have scheduling constraints, interact with a highly distributed web of suppliers with different capabilities through the completion of the contracted work, and deal with failures in contract execution. These problems are modeled using a community of self-interested agents with limited rationality, each representing a business entity or a decision-maker. Algorithms and decision strategies will be developed for effective bid construction, bid evaluation, supplier selection, execution monitoring, and renegotiation of contracts among multiple agents. A distributed computational testbed will be developed and used for simulation, and analysis. The results of this research will contribute to the development of general computational models for multi-agent contracting. The research efforts will also produce a highly distributed market infrastructure with an agent population that can be used by industry and researchers for further investigations, as well as by educators as a tool for training the next generation of e-commerce specialists. The potential payoff of the research is high, given the projected size of the business-to-business and make-to-order e-commerce doc5463 none The islands of the Hawaiian Archipelago occupy a unique geographic location, and thus offer a rare opportunity for studies of microbial diversity. Situated at the center of the Pacific Ocean, they have formed through volcanic activity that has over millennia shaped, and continues to shape a myriad of unique habitats. Very different habitats occur on each Hawaiian Island, but the flora and fauna may differ in the same type of habitat on even the same or adjacent islands. To investigate how microorganisms may have diversified in widely distributed habitats of the same type in Hawaii, the first, comprehensive study of microbial diversity in the five natural lakes in the Hawaiian Archipelago will be conducted. Each lake is unique in terms of morphology, elevation, chemistry and macrobiota. In all, the lakes range over m ( ft) elevation and nautical miles. Four lakes occur in isolated volcanic craters, including Lakes Kauhako and Waiau, the fourth deepest and third highest lakes in the United States, respectively. Lake Kauhako also has the highest ratio of depth to surface area of any lake in the world. Microbial diversity in the waters, sediments and selected invertebrates of these lakes will be determined through culturing techniques and molecular tools. Preliminary work on only 2% by depth of the Lake Kauhako water column has shown the presence of remarkably diverse microbial populations. These studies will 1). Describe microbial diversity in physically and chemically diverse lacustrine habitats throughout an oceanic archipelago. 2). Bring into culture and describe bacteria, yeast and fungi from different phylogenetic groups. Considering the chemical and physical diversity of the lakes in question, and their geographic isolation, it is likely that novel strains will be isolated. 3). Screen Bacteria and Archaea from each habitat for enzymes of biotechnological interest. 4) Establish a collection of bacteria, yeast and fungi, and an internet-based archive of data pertaining to each culture. This archive will be accessible by other researchers. A new experimental Undergraduate laboratory course, Microbial Diversity in the Hawaiian Archipelago will be established, through which students will conduct fieldwork and process samples from collection to discovery. This project will address for the first time, a comprehensive microbiological study of a diverse habitat throughout the Hawaiian Archipelago doc5464 none This workshop is designed to promote public-private partnering to further the development and usefulness of the National Biological Infrastructure (NBII). The NBII Framework has as its goals: obtaining the broadest possible participation of both public and private sectors; encouraging greater coordination of and support for R promoting use of collaboratively developed standards; increasing federal R and cooperatively developing the long-range implementation plan for the NBII-2. During the day and a half gathering, 40 executives and educators from corporations, non-profits, and non-governmental organizations will address issues of how NBII-2 can meet needs of industry and public sector interests, intellectual property rights, and means to capture interests of various constituencies. Outcomes of the workshop will include focused white papers that may help to educate the public and provide new directions for the NBII program doc5465 none Extremophile Research: Theory and Techniques is a course presented by the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) under the auspices of the Center of Marine Biotechnology (COMB), University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute, and George Mason University s Institute for Bioscience, Bioinformatics, and Biotechnology (IB3). The four-day course will be held at COMB facilities in the Columbus Center, Baltimore, MD, during the summer each year for the next three years. Year one, the course will be held from July 24 to July 27, ; dates for years two and three will be determined in January of and , respectively. Extremophile Research: Theory and Techniques includes a one-day symposium and a three-day intensive laboratory workshop. The symposium brings experts from various areas of extremophile research to present the current state of knowledge on growth, biochemistry and genetics of extremely anaerobic methanogens, hyperthermophiles and extreme halophiles. The laboratory sessions includes lectures, demonstrations and hands-on experiments in the specialized techniques used to study these organisms. Because of the high operating costs for the laboratory sessions, accessibility to faculty from small colleges and universities as well as post-doctoral and graduate students is limited by their ability to secure funds. To address this problem, funds will be used to provide full tuition scholarships to facilitate the attendance of graduate students and post-doctoral students working in various areas of extremophile research as well as half tuition fellowships to faculty from small colleges and universities who will be able to include these experiments in their curriculum doc5466 none Dunlap Biological rhythms are periodic or cyclic changes in acitivity that occur in virtually all living organisms. The time scales of such cycles may be shorter than seconds, or the well-known daily (circadian) rhythms of waking and sleeping, or long-term seasonal changes of reproduction. The organisms studied range from unicellular microbes to complex plants and animals, and the approaches range from the molecular to behavioral. The Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) has a biennial meeting that brings together diverse researchers in the field, and also introduces scientists in related fields to the biologicaly rhythms community. In addition to regular slide and poster presentations, this meeting has tutorial sessions, review lectures, and a symposium on a particular topic, to promote cross-disciplinary interactions. The NSF contribution supports attendance by graduate students, postdoctoral students and young faculty who otherwise do not have the resources to attend. This conference wil have an impact on these groups by introducing them to the current leading edge of the field and to potential future mentors, and will have an impact on biological sciences in general because of the fundamental importance of biological rhythms doc5467 none PI: Francesco Lanza di Scalea, University of California, San Diego NSF Proposal # Development of a Non-contact Remote Ultrasonic System for the Non-destructive Inspection of Railroad Tracks This proposal is aimed at the development of a new-generation ultrasonic system for the nondestructive evaluation of railroad tracks in-service. The proposed approach makes use of new developments in the areas of non-contact and remote ultrasonic testing, namely laser ultrasonics and gas(air)-coupled ultrasonics, to provide a more powerful and efficient tool for rail inspection than currently available methods. The three-year project will be performed in three-phases that include the following activities: 1) development of the inspection approach, 2) assessment of the inspection system capability for defect detection and 3) determination of the system potential for field inspection. The development of a non-contact and remote sensoring system is expected to dramatically increase the effectiveness of ultrasonic testing for rail inspection. The implementation of fiberoptic technology will enhance the flexibility in positioning the ultrasonic probes. In turn, this will allow for the inspection of virtually any locations of the test rail. The unique features of laser ultrasound generation, in terms of simultaneous production of different wave modes and excitation of a broad frequency content, will allow to target a variety of defect types, sizes and positions. Besides contributing to ensuring the safety and structural soundness of the Nation s existing railroads, the research will have a broader impact. It will provide fundamental advances toward a better understanding and use of non-contact ultrasonic technologies for a number of advanced inspection applications. A few examples of these applications include any type of process control of materials during manufacturing, inspection of components at extreme temperatures and inspection in vacuum environments such as in space doc5468 none The National Research Council s Board on Mathematical Sciences (BMS) and Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) are planning a 1.5-day workshop to explore the actual and potential breadth and depth of their fields mutual interface. The goals of the planned workshop are to demonstrate the potential for additional cooperation between the mathematical sciences and computer science and to begin building some new research collaborations. The workshop is planned for April 28 (afternoon) and all day on April 29, . It will be held at an NRC facility in Washington, D.C. At least 25-30 researchers will be invited to (1) share research interests that are of interest to both fields, and (2) discuss whether further steps by the NRC are necessary to encourage collaborations between the fields. This activity will be funded jointly by the Division of Mathematical Sciences of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate, and the Division of Computer and Computation Research of the Computer, Information Sciences and Engineering Directorate doc5469 none Project The New York Academy of Sciences conference titled The Neurobiology of Music will examine the increase in scientific work motivated by the idea that music offers a unique opportunity to better understand the human brain. Like language, music exists in all human societies. Like language, music is a complex, rule-governed activity that is specific to humans. Similarly, music appears associated with specific brain architecture. However, unlike most other high-level functions of the human brain, only a minority of individuals become proficient musicians through explicit tutoring, although sensitivity to musical structure develops early in life without conscious effort in the large majority of the population. The goal of this conference is to bring together leading scientists who are working on music and who are using a wide range of different methodologies from the cognitive sciences and the neuroscience. The originality of the conference will be to favor integration across disciplines and methodologies, by grouping presentations under seven major themes: I. The Origins of Music All societies have music. It was not invented by some groups and spread to others, like the alphabet writing system. Instead, music seems to have emerged spontaneously in all forms of human societies. Moreover, this emergence is not recent in human evolution. Music emerged as early as 40,000 to 80,000 years ago. Music competence is exhibited in infancy, as early as four to six months of age, when infants may show a predisposition for processing aspects of auditory patterns that are specific to music. I. The Neurons of Music The neural hardware of the brain allows all musical processes to take place, but also constrains perceptual and motor functions relevant for music. In turn, musical behavior also changes neural pattering. The specific ways in which neural architecture determines and interacts with musical structure is the subject of debate. II. The Musical Mind Music is not a monolithic function that one has or has not; it involves multiple processing systems that are, to a large extent, shared by non-musicians and musicians alike. To map these abilities onto the human brain, we must know what abilities are essential, and how they are functionally organized. III. The Musical Brain First steps in understanding auditory processes occurred in the late 19th Century. There is abundant evidence that music perception fractionates along several processing components, each of which may be differentially localized in the brain. To properly map musical functions within the brain, scientists are now using a wide range of technologies, such as brain imaging (MRI and PET) to visualize functional aspects of the normal musical brain. IV. Music as an Emotional Language The majority of experimental studies have been devoted to the study of musical structure as a nonverbal language, but only rarely as an emotional language. Recent work has shown that some emotions elicited by music are both amenable to study experimentally, and relatively consistent across individuals. Moreover, emotions are associated with cerebral and physiological responses that may be specific to the domain. V. Musical Expertise Brain Plasticity Music provides the opportunity to study the effects of early versus late learning on brain plasticity. It has been shown that the primary motor cortex and cerebellum can be modified by early practice of music, and that the shape or size of receptive areas traditionally associated with language may correlate with specific musical skills. The key question is to specify to what extent these brain changes confer qualitative gains to the musician, and hence help us to understand the nature of musical talent. VI. Modularity for Music We have treated music as if it were an autonomous system, having its own operational rules. This modularity position is not universally shared. For others, music has neither specific brain sites nor computational specificity. Key proponents of these opposite positions will defend their views doc5470 none This project is part of an integrated set of proposals for the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic (SHEBA) Ocean project. The goal of the current phase of the SHEBA project is to use data collected during a one year experiment during which an icebreaker frozen into the ice pack of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas was used as a platform for data collection. A full annual cycle of data relating to feedbacks of the ocean-ice-atmosphere system was collected and will be used to improve model parameterizations of sea ice response to global warming. This project will further analyze radar, lidar, and radiometer data taken during the field program to produce a data set that is essential for determining cloud properties controlling cloud-radiation feedback mechanisms. The activities of this project are an essential effort to enhance the outcome of the SHEBA research projects designed to improve column, mesoscale and General Circulation Models (GCMs) that facilitate better simulations of the Arctic sea ice response to projected global warming trends doc5471 none This project is part of an integrated set of proposals for the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic (SHEBA) Ocean project. The goal of the current phase of the SHEBA project is to use data collected during a one year experiment during which an icebreaker frozen into the ice pack of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas was used as a platform for data collection. A full annual cycle of data relating to feedbacks of the ocean-ice-atmosphere system was collected and will be used to improve model parameterizations of sea ice response to global warming. This project will utilize aircraft data to examine the role of ice crystal size shape on the heat radiation properties in the cloud-radiation feedback component of the heat balance. New parameritizations of cloud-radiation feedbacks will be very important in determining overall heat balance. The activities of this project are an essential effort to enhance the outcome of the SHEBA research projects designed to improve column, mesoscale and General Circulation Models (GCMs) that facilitate better simulations of the Arctic sea ice response to projected global warming trends doc5472 none The goal of this project is to determine the range in diversity and role of the bdellovibrio-like organisms (BLOs) in aquatic environments. Our specific aims are: 1) to reveal and characterize the genetic, cultural and physiological diversity of the predatory, bdellovibrio?like organisms (BLOs) in nature and to show a correlation between strain diversity and prey range; 2) to reveal the predominant uncultured and cultured strains of BLO, those most likely making the greatest contribution to bacterial mortality in nature, and show their spatial and temporal distribution in aquatic ecosystems; and 3) to monitor the population dynamics of BLO in phytoplankton bacterial blooms and assess their potential role in bacterial mortality. Genetic diversity will be analyzed for both cultured and uncultured BLOs. The initial effort will be to complete the diversity analysis on the 50 strains currently in the laboratory that have been recovered from water samples collected from lakes, oceans, seas, ponds and streams in the United States and abroad. Samples will be processed to detect both cultured and uncultured BLOs. The uncultured organisms will be identified by using molecular techniques employing BLO?specific oligonucleotide probes. The cultured strains will be recovered using the double agar overlay technique. In particular, we will sample to determine the potential interaction of the BLO community with phytoplankton blooms at the LEO? 15 site (a Long?Term Ecosystem Observatory site on the continental shelf offshore from the Rutgers University Marine Field Station) during upwelling-stimulated blooms. This work will be done in collaboration with Dr. Lee Kerkhof at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey doc5473 none This research will examine and quantify the impact of ice-ocean heat exchange on the ice-albedo feedback mechanism using SHEBA data and a hierarchy of ice-ocean models ranging from simple turbulence scaling to large eddy simulations. The role of under-ice roughness altering the vertical turbulent fluxes of heat, of open water conditions found in leads, and of summer-time melt-water stratification in would be investigated. Improved parameterizations for this heat exchange over area scales of 10-100 km would be developed for use in large scale regional and global models. These parameterizations would then be tested in these larger scale models. The results will lead to be forecast capability of global ocean-climate models doc5474 none The PI will use climate and photochemistry models to simulate changes in climate and atmospheric composition due to changes in both natural and anthropogenic climate forcing factors, estimate the statistical significance of the simulated changes, and determine feedbacks that occur as a result of including interactive photochemistry into climate system models. The research is divided into the following six related projects: (i) study of CO2 and CH4 induced climate change with interactive photochemisty; (ii) study of whether the sun has changed climate; (iii) simulations of the changes in climate and atmospheric composition induced by the Pinatubo volcanic eruption; (iv) simulations of the climate and atmospheric composition of the last glacial maximum; (v) study of the interactions between tropospheric ozone and climate; and (vi) continuation of collaborations on climate impacts and policy and participation in model intercomparison projects. The PI will estimate impacts and effects on an adaptive decision strategy for climate-change abatement. The work is important because it will increase our understanding of climate variability on longer time scales. The research also has important implications for climate change policy doc5473 none This research will examine and quantify the impact of ice-ocean heat exchange on the ice-albedo feedback mechanism using SHEBA data and a hierarchy of ice-ocean models ranging from simple turbulence scaling to large eddy simulations. The role of under-ice roughness altering the vertical turbulent fluxes of heat, of open water conditions found in leads, and of summer-time melt-water stratification in would be investigated. Improved parameterizations for this heat exchange over area scales of 10-100 km would be developed for use in large scale regional and global models. These parameterizations would then be tested in these larger scale models. The results will lead to be forecast capability of global ocean-climate models doc5476 none Y. Gogotsi, University of Illinois at Chicago The processes which govern fluid processes in pipes are well understood for diameters in the range of micrometers and above. As the diameters diminish ( e.g. in the range of a few nanometers), the role of surface tension and capillarity is has been seen to change, as well as their dependence on material properties. Thus, the expected promise of Carbon nanotubes in technological applications is in urgent need of a well documented basic understanding of such forces, especially since no consistent experimental data have been collected so far. The PI has obtained preliminary results in the determination of the liquid vapor distribution in nanotubes, with the help of transmission electron spectroscopy. On that basis , he offers to develop an experimental program which will explore as thoroughly as possible the various aspects of phase interfacing in a number of nanotube situations. The special case of the newly developed closed nanotubes will be examined . Such work should offer a precious set of data for the elaboration of a model based on precise experimental observations doc5477 none Chlorophyll (Chl) b binds and stabilizes the light harvesting complex proteins of photosystem II in vascular and non-vascular plants, green algae and prochlorophytes. Chl b is synthesized from Chl a in a reaction that requires chlorophyll a oxygenase, the product of the Arabidopsis AtCAO gene. This project will yield transgenic plants that overexpress AtCAO in order to observe if the stable ratio of Chl a to Chl b can be perturbed. Plants with constitutive and inducible promoters will be produced, AtCAO mRNA and protein level will be measured, and rates of Chl b synthesis will be determined. The phenotypes of overproducing lines will be examined to determine if an extra large PSII light harvesting complex is formed. The second objective will be the production of an AtCAO antibody for measurement of protein levels and for suborganelle localization by immunogold labeling. The third objective concerns a mutant, conditional chlorina, that has decreased levels of Chl, especially Chl b, under moderate light intensity. This line appears yellow-green under moderate light intensity, and this visible phenotype correlates to partial loss of Lhcb proteins located in the inner and outer antenna complex. This line has been used to screen for mutants that turn less yellow-green under moderate light intensity, cch suppressors. One of these suppressor lines has been shown to have a phenotype that is visible during segregation of the F2. Characterization and mapping of this, and other suppressors, are proposed. The final objective is to initiate a new project in the laboratory; an analysis of the very high-light responsive promoters of the nuclear Elip1 and Elip2 genes. Both Elip genes are induced 100-fold after four hours at very high light intensity. These studies could lead to an understanding of the factors that are required for the exciton-dissipating chloroplast to communicate with the nucleus. Along with furthering knowledge about the regulation and localization of Chl b synthesis, and chloroplast-nuclear communication, talented undergraduate and Masters degree students, many of them from minorities that are under-represented in the sciences, will receive training for research careers doc5478 none This project is part of an integrated set of proposals for the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic (SHEBA) Ocean project. The goal of the current phase of the SHEBA project is to use data collected during a one year experiment during which an icebreaker frozen into the ice pack of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas was used as a platform for data collection. A full annual cycle of data relating to feedbacks of the ocean-ice-atmosphere system was collected and will be used to improve model parameterizations of sea ice response to global warming. This project uses data from all environments in a column-model approach to examine feedbacks between changes in each environment. A hierarchy of sea-ice models will be used and the results will be incorporated into the National Center for Atmospheric Research Community Climate System Model to produce improved simulations of Arctic climate. The activities of this project are an essential effort to enhance the outcome of the SHEBA research projects designed to improve column, mesoscale and General Circulation Models (GCMs) that facilitate better simulations of the Arctic sea ice response to projected global warming trends doc5479 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: N. Wright : The uniaxial thermomechanical response of elastomers has been studied for nearly two centuries, but the multiaxial response has been less studied. The multiaxial mechanical response can yield complex and unique behavior, such as unequal biaxial deformation of sheets of rubber subject to equibiaxial loading. Not surprisingly, complete constitutive models of the elastic response are lacking, largely due to the scarcity of suitable multiaxial data. Scarcer still are multiaxial measurements of thermophysical properties. This project will extend the flash thermal diffusivity method to measure the thermal diffusivity of elastomers subject to multiaxial finite deformation. This extended method will allow for the thermal diffusivity of such materials to be arbitrarily anisotropic. These property measurements and resulting constitutive relations should lead to improved continuum models of the general thermoelastic response of elastomers. Developing new property measurement techniques remains important and relevant even with the increased use of computer modeling, because experiments remain, in most cases, the only method of developing the constitutive relations that the models need. The techniques developed here can be applied to materials other than elastomers, for example composites and biological tissues, whether or not these materials are deformed doc5449 none This project is part of an integrated set of proposals for the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic (SHEBA) Ocean project. The goal of the current phase of the SHEBA project is to use data collected during a one year experiment during which an icebreaker frozen into the ice pack of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas was used as a platform for data collection. A full annual cycle of data relating to feedbacks of the ocean-ice-atmosphere system was collected and will be used to improve model parameterizations of sea ice response to global warming. The data originally collected by these researchers provides an essential dataset of ice-surface observations of the atmospheric boundary level for use in improving large-scale models that require better parameterization of cloud-radiation and surface-albedo feedbacks for predicting the response of Arctic sea ice to global warming. The project involves analysis and quality control of surface-level data and production of a time-series of surface heat flux. The data will be incorporated into models of the atmospheric boundary layer and used to compare to data sets of surface parameters collected by aircraft over flights. The results of this project will be used in conjunction with other projects to enhance mesoscale and General Circulation Models (GCMs) that facilitate better simulations of the Arctic sea ice response to projected global warming trends doc5481 none This project is part of an integrated set of proposals for the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic (SHEBA) Ocean project. The goal of the current phase of the SHEBA project is to use data collected during a one year experiment during which an icebreaker frozen into the ice pack of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas was used as a platform for data collection. A full annual cycle of data relating to feedbacks of the ocean-ice-atmosphere system was collected and will be used to improve model parameterizations of sea ice response to global warming. This project is to manage a Project Office for SHEBA. The office activities include: data analysis, formal presentations, annual workshops, development of gridded images, and public outreach. The activities of this project are an essential organizational effort to enhance the outcome of the research projects designed to enhance mesoscale and General Circulation Models (GCMs) that facilitate better simulations of the Arctic sea ice response to projected global warming trends doc5473 none This research will examine and quantify the impact of ice-ocean heat exchange on the ice-albedo feedback mechanism using SHEBA data and a hierarchy of ice-ocean models ranging from simple turbulence scaling to large eddy simulations. The role of under-ice roughness altering the vertical turbulent fluxes of heat, of open water conditions found in leads, and of summer-time melt-water stratification in would be investigated. Improved parameterizations for this heat exchange over area scales of 10-100 km would be developed for use in large scale regional and global models. These parameterizations would then be tested in these larger scale models. The results will lead to be forecast capability of global ocean-climate models doc5483 none This research project will improve the representation of Arctic upper-ocean - sea-ice processes in global climate models. An existing general circulation model of the oceans of a resolution to describe meso-scale surface ocean eddies would be used. It will be coupled to a model of sea-ice circulation and sea-ice thermodynamics which quantity the seasonal processes of sea-ice formation and melting. An atmospheric boundary layer model would be included which would define the balances between visible and infrared radiation, winds, and atmospheric conditions near the sea-ice boundary. The model would then be used to test simplified parameterizations of the ice-albedo feedback and of ocean mixed layer dynamics to see which parameterizations best describe conditions observed during the year-long SHEBA experiment. The parameterizations which best fit the SHEBA data would then be utilized to examine role of meso-scale surface ocean eddies on ice dynamics and its impact on the ice-albedo feedback. These studies will result in better descriptions of the Arctic Ocean in global climate models doc5478 none This project is part of an integrated set of proposals for the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic (SHEBA) Ocean project. The goal of the current phase of the SHEBA project is to use data collected during a one year experiment during which an icebreaker frozen into the ice pack of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas was used as a platform for data collection. A full annual cycle of data relating to feedbacks of the ocean-ice-atmosphere system was collected and will be used to improve model parameterizations of sea ice response to global warming. This project uses data from all environments in a column-model approach to examine feedbacks between changes in each environment. A hierarchy of sea-ice models will be used and the results will be incorporated into the National Center for Atmospheric Research Community Climate System Model to produce improved simulations of Arctic climate. The activities of this project are an essential effort to enhance the outcome of the SHEBA research projects designed to improve column, mesoscale and General Circulation Models (GCMs) that facilitate better simulations of the Arctic sea ice response to projected global warming trends doc5485 none Liu This award provides support for the second Workshop on Opportunities in Materials Theory to be held October 4-6, , at NSF in Arlington, VA. The workshop will be comprised of fifteen speakers presenting original research which highlights cutting edge research, often interdisciplinary, in materials theory. Topical areas include strongly correlated electron systems; nanoscience to mesoscience; disordered systems; biological physics; and, quantum coherence. Stipends will be made available for young investigators to attend. Part of the time will also be used to present to attendees, particularly young investigators, information about NSF and avenues of support for materials theory research and education doc5486 none This project is part of an integrated set of proposals for the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic (SHEBA) Ocean project. The goal of the current phase of the SHEBA project is to use data collected during a one year experiment during which an icebreaker frozen into the ice pack of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas was used as a platform for data collection. A full annual cycle of data relating to feedbacks of the ocean-ice-atmosphere system was collected and will be used to improve model parameterizations of sea ice response to global warming. This project will utilize surface data to evaluate the cloud radiation feedback mechanisms that affect the heat balance. The data will be used in a regional model developed by the investigator to assess which parameters are important for use in global models. The activities of this project are an essential effort to enhance the outcome of the SHEBA research projects designed to improve column, mesoscale and General Circulation Models (GCMs) that facilitate better simulations of the Arctic sea ice response to projected global warming trends doc5487 none This project is designed to examine the hypotheses that solitary bee species have radiated in deserts because social bee species are excluded by highly seasonal bloom, that nesting opportunities for ground-nesting bees are enhanced in deserts, and that seasonality increases floral diversity or creates strong selection for host-plant synchrony and pollen specialization by bees. The field work will be an international collaboration that takes advantage of an unusual landscape experiment in the Chihuahuan Desert. Differing land use on US and Mexican lands provides opportunities to use adjacent desert and riparian areas to evaluate how floral and nesting environments influence bee diversity and abundance. This area, located in the enter of peak bee species diversity in the world, is well-suited to distinguish variation in bee diversity due to ecological factors from the natural dynamics of bees in undisturbed areas. Baseline data is critical, and an abrupt change in land ownership has already begun to affect the ecology of the region. The project will begin surveys immediately to gather distribution and ecological data at the beginning of what will likely be a extended trajectory of ecological and environmental change. This project is supported under the guidelines of the Small Grants for Exploratory Research (NSF 00-2: II.D.12.a doc5473 none This research will examine and quantify the impact of ice-ocean heat exchange on the ice-albedo feedback mechanism using SHEBA data and a hierarchy of ice-ocean models ranging from simple turbulence scaling to large eddy simulations. The role of under-ice roughness altering the vertical turbulent fluxes of heat, of open water conditions found in leads, and of summer-time melt-water stratification in would be investigated. Improved parameterizations for this heat exchange over area scales of 10-100 km would be developed for use in large scale regional and global models. These parameterizations would then be tested in these larger scale models. The results will lead to be forecast capability of global ocean-climate models doc5489 none The major photosynthetic light harvesting structures of cyanobacteria are phycobilisomes, complexes that can constitute 40% of the total soluble protein. The composition of these structures is altered by numerous environmental conditions, including changes in the wavelength (color) of the ambient light. A process called complementary chromatic adaptation allows many filamentous cyanobacteria to respond to such changes by restructuring both the chromophore and protein composition of their phycobilisomes, permitting them to continually maximize the absorption of the predominant wavelengths of light available for photosynthesis. Numerous mutants that are aberrant in chromatic adaptation have been isolated, based on their color phenotypes, from the filamentous cyanobacterium Fremyella diplosiphon. The complementation of black mutants resulted in the discovery of RcaE, the first of a new class of prokaryotic photoreceptors. RcaE contains a transmitter module found in sensor kinase proteins of two component regulatory systems, and a chromophore binding domain found in plant photoreceptors called phytochromes. Complementation of two different classes of red mutants led to the identification of two separate response regulator proteins called RcaF and RcaC. RcaF is a small, single domain, CheY-like protein; RcaF is much larger and contains two response regulator input domains, a DNA binding motif, and a HPt motif, the hallmark of complex types of two component systems. A preliminary model has been proposed for the early steps in the chromatic adaptation regulatory pathway: RcaE is proposed to be a photoreceptor and act upon RcaF, which in turn regulates RcaC. Based on in vivo site directed mutagenesis studies, this pathway is proposed to be phosphorylated in red light and dephosphorylated in green light. Finally, recent biochemical evidence has demonstrated that a tetrapyrrole chromophore is covalently attached to RcaE and functional studies suggest that another, red-light absorbing chromophore may be involved in regulating chromatic adaptation. The goal of this project is to add to our understanding of the regulation of chromatic adaptation. This will be done by detailed analyses of RcaE and its interactions with RcaF and RcaC, as well as through the identification of new regulatory elements controlling this process. There are three specific objectives in this project. First, the hypothesis that a second chromophore, and photoreceptor, controls chromatic adaptation will be tested by gel filtration and immunoprecipitation studies. If a second photoreceptor is found to regulate this process, a putative chromoprotein encoded by a gene located in the genome near rcaE will be tested, using site directed mutagenesis and gene replacement studies, for a possible role in chromatic adaptation. Second, in vivo biochemical studies will be initiated to test the hypothesis that RcaE is a light-regulated histidine kinase and that phosphoryl group transfer occurs between specific histidine and aspartate residues within RcaE, RcaF, and RcaC. Third, genes containing lesions will be identified, isolated, and characterized from currently existing chromatic adaptation regulatory mutants using transformation approaches. Proteins related to both RcaE and the response regulators isolated thus far have also been found in a wide range of non-photosynthetic prokaryotes and photosynthetic eukaryotes. Thus, the findings from this work are expected to have broad implications for advancing our understanding of signal transduction processes in both bacteria and land plants doc5490 none This project will focus on how interface dynamics is different on the liquid liquid interface, namely on the oil water interface (O W), contrasted to the gas liquid interface, with amphiphilic polymers that have strong propensity to reside at O W interface. Secondly, expanding on the exploration of interface dynamics to solid surfaces, this research will study in detail surface-group migration in hydrocarbon polymers following plasma treatment. This arises from studies of plasma-induced etching reactions on hydrocarbon polymers; the issue is closely associated to an important application problem of why the surface printability of hydrocarbon polymer films diminishes with time upon glow-discharge treatment. Thirdly, porous polymeric beads will be fabricated that have very large specific surface areas and are made to function as biomembrane mimetic surfaces. This is connected to an exploratory effort to design biosurfaces that can act as enzymatic catalysts. %%% The significance of the first part of this project is to develop ways to synthesize better surfactants that should work as better oil-spill containment materials. The second part addresses the ways to improve on the printing and painting on plastic sheets and films. The third part deals with new and inexpensive ways of screening potential drugs by use of biological catalysts mad viable on plastic beads and nanoparticles doc5491 none Curvature deformations have been previously observed in thin films of optoelectronically active polymers and in single crystals showing uniform twist. However, the detailed manner in which three-dimensionally ordered polymer and molecular crystals are distorted by curvature remains to be clearly established. Direct imaging of the mechanisms of curvature will obtained using low dose high-resolution electron microscopy (HREM). Samples of organic molecular and polymer crystals with a variety of degrees of curvature will be prepared by depositing droplets onto solid surfaces, evaporating droplets in a column, electrospinning samples into nanometer diameters with oscillations in diameter, and by electric-field alignment of thin silicon nitride membranes. HREM images of the lattice spacings both parallel and perpendicular to the direction of curvature will be obtained and examined in detail. Theoretical considerations show that by examining the distance between partial dislocations that mediate curvature, and by measuring the characteristic distance between stacking faults, it is possible obtain estimates of the stacking fault energy on various crystallographic planes. These result will be compared with the predicted geometric distortions in the vicinity of the dislocation core as obtained by molecular modeling. %%% The results of this work will be useful in the design, synthesis, and processing of new organic materials with precisely controlled nanostructures. This research will facilitate the ongoing development of inexpensive, soft electronic devices. By elucidating the detailed means by lattice curvature is accommodated in synthetic molecular crystals, it should also be possible to learn how natural biological systems develop useful structures with similar symmetries doc5492 none This research will study the ocean mixed-layer circulation within sea-ice leads. These openings in the pack ice allow a greater proportion of the summer-time solar radiation to be absorbed which results in enhanced ice melt. In winter, leads allow significant cooling of the ocean waters which promotes enhanced ice formation. The finely-resolved SHEBA hydrographic data set, taken during intensive studies on leads, as well as remote sensing data will be used to guide the work. Modeling will be based on an existing 3-dimensional convection model to which will be added a sophisticated ice-ocean submodel. High resolution studies would examine the interactions between open water fraction, mixed layer temperature, and ice thickness. Numerical studies would examine both winter and summer conditions. This work will contribute to the understanding of the near-surface heat budget and will aid in parameterization of lead processes in global circulation models doc5493 none The PI seeks to build in novel and innovative ways upon the research agenda currently supported by NSF under award number , Project Hiller: The Impact of Ubiquitous Portable Technology in an Urban School. The PI has a time-sensitive opportunity to expand her investigation of the use of home-school networking technology to her district s second high school. The PI proposes to compare the role of technology in two very different high school contexts, one that has made substantial strides in the reform arena (Emerson High School) and another that has a long way to go before a more student-centered pedagogy can take hold (Union High School). The project will enable the PI to conduct research which will allow her to systematically investigate the relationship between technology and systemic educational reform at the high school level. The PI will also be able to look across these contexts at the affordances of home-school access to technology in an urban environment doc5494 none This project is part of an integrated set of proposals for the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic (SHEBA) Ocean project. The goal of the current phase of the SHEBA project is to use data collected during a one year experiment during which an icebreaker frozen into the ice pack of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas was used as a platform for data collection. A full annual cycle of data relating to feedbacks of the ocean-ice-atmosphere system was collected and will be used to improve model parameterizations of sea ice response to global warming. This project will conduct quality control analyses of aircraft data taken during the field program. The data will provide information about the ice water in the clouds and, therefore, will be critical for determining the cloud properties affecting cloud radiation feedbacks in the heat budget equation. The activities of this project are an essential effort to enhance the outcome of the SHEBA research projects designed to improve column, mesoscale and General Circulation Models (GCMs) that facilitate better simulations of the Arctic sea ice response to projected global warming trends doc5495 none This project is part of an integrated set of proposals for the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic (SHEBA) Ocean project. The goal of the current phase of the SHEBA project is to use data collected during a one year experiment during which an icebreaker frozen into the ice pack of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas was used as a platform for data collection. A full annual cycle of data relating to feedbacks of the ocean-ice-atmosphere system was collected and will be used to improve model parameterizations of sea ice response to global warming. This project will use atmospheric boundary layer data and a nested set of models to determine the appropriate scale for parameterizations useful to larger-scale models of arctic climate. The activities of this project are an essential effort to enhance the outcome of the SHEBA research projects designed to improve column, mesoscale and General Circulation Models (GCMs) that facilitate better simulations of the Arctic sea ice response to projected global warming trends doc5449 none This project is part of an integrated set of proposals for the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic (SHEBA) Ocean project. The goal of the current phase of the SHEBA project is to use data collected during a one year experiment during which an icebreaker frozen into the ice pack of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas was used as a platform for data collection. A full annual cycle of data relating to feedbacks of the ocean-ice-atmosphere system was collected and will be used to improve model parameterizations of sea ice response to global warming. The data originally collected by these researchers provides an essential dataset of ice-surface observations of the atmospheric boundary level for use in improving large-scale models that require better parameterization of cloud-radiation and surface-albedo feedbacks for predicting the response of Arctic sea ice to global warming. The project involves analysis and quality control of surface-level data and production of a time-series of surface heat flux. The data will be incorporated into models of the atmospheric boundary layer and used to compare to data sets of surface parameters collected by aircraft over flights. The results of this project will be used in conjunction with other projects to enhance mesoscale and General Circulation Models (GCMs) that facilitate better simulations of the Arctic sea ice response to projected global warming trends doc5497 none This project is part of an integrated set of proposals for the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic (SHEBA) Ocean project. The goal of the current phase of the SHEBA project is to use data collected during a one year experiment during which an icebreaker frozen into the ice pack of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas was used as a platform for data collection. A full annual cycle of data relating to feedbacks of the ocean-ice-atmosphere system was collected and will be used to improve model parameterizations of sea ice response to global warming. This project will process all satellite data taken during the field experiment and provide a final product of surface conditions that can be merged with aircraft data of surface properties. The merged data set will be valuable for modeling of ice and atmospheric conditions over a range of climate conditions. The activities of this project are an essential effort to enhance the outcome of the SHEBA research projects designed to improve column, mesoscale and General Circulation Models (GCMs) that facilitate better simulations of the Arctic sea ice response to projected global warming trends doc5498 none This project is based on the isolation of a series of Arabidopsis mutants with specific alterations in leaf fatty acid composition. These mutants have facilitated investigations of the biochemistry of chloroplast glycerolipid synthesis and the roles of membrane composition in chloroplast structure and function. The mutants exhibit a series of very striking phenotypes that result from changes in the fatty acid composition of chloroplasts. In the fab1 mutant, increased saturated fatty acids result in the collapse of photosynthesis after 2-3 weeks at 2 deg. C and an associated breakdown of chloroplasts. The fad3 fad7 fad8 mutants lack trienoic fatty acids but their growth and photosynthesis are normal at 22 deg. C under 120-150 umol quanta m2 s of light. The phenotypes initially discovered in this mutant result from their inability to synthesize jasmonate, an oxylipin that is derived from linolenic acid. Photosynthesis is affected in fad3 fad7 fad8 plants at low temperatures and under high light. A screen for additional Arabidopsis mutants with reduced growth at 5 deg. C did not identify additional lipid mutants but did lead to the isolation and cloning of other genetic determinants of low-temperature responses. A fad2 fad6 mutant that is deficient in polyunsaturated fatty acids achieves strong vegetative growth on sucrose media but is incapable of autotrophic growth. The effects of lipid changes on short-term photosynthesis at low temperature are very modest when expressed on a chlorophyll basis. Instead, characterization of the mutant lines points to the significance of membrane composition being on assembly or long-term maintenance of the photosystems. The overall goal of the experiments described in this proposal is to understand the biochemical and biophysical bases of these phenotypes. Measurements of photosynthesis and photoinhibition in the mutants will allow detailed comparisons of the mutant phenotypes. Experiments have been carried out to generate additional mutant lines with intermediate fatty acid compositions and to screens to isolate mutations that suppress the low-temperature phenotype of fab1. The isolation of suppressors is a particularly powerful approach for identifying genes and processes contributing to a mutant phenotype and suppressor screens with the fad3 fad7 fad8 and fad2 fad6 lines will also be performed. Genomics tools available in Arabidopsis will allow cloning of the suppressor genes and characterization of the biological processes in which they are involved. Observations on the Arabidopsis mutants and results from researchers working in other systems suggest that protein import into the chloroplast or transport into and through the thylakoid membrane may be disrupted by changes in fatty acid composition. Assays of protein trafficking in wild type and each mutant will be carried out to test this hypothesis and to determine which of the several protein-targeting mechanisms are affected by the different changes in membrane composition that are represented in the mutants. The improved understanding of chloroplast membrane structure and photosynthetic function that will result from this work is an important prerequisite to modifying these processes for increased plant productivity doc5499 none Hatcher This three-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research involves Philip J. Hatcher and Robert D. Russell of the University of New Hampshire and Luc Bouge s research group at the French National Institute for Research in Informatics and Applied Mathematics (INRIA) Laboratoire de l Informatique du Parallelisme in Lyon, France. The proposal addresses implementation of the Java programming language for parallel programs on cluster computers using the multithreading package PM2 developed by the French researchers. The work will be performed in the context of the Hyperion environment, developed at the University of New Hampshire and comprised of a Java-bytecode-to-C translator and a run-time library for the distributed execution of Java threads. The proposal will advance understanding of Java language as a tool for programming distributed memory parallel computers. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to NSF and the French National Institute for Research in Informatics and Applied Mathematics (INRIA). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for US Investigator. INRIA will support visits of French researchers to the US doc5500 none This award provides funds to help in construction of a multi-user experimental research facility (pole barn) at the Cornell Biological Field Station (CBFS) on Oneida Lake. The facility will be outfitted with access to low pressure aeration, drains, ground fault electrical service, controlled temperature, natural and artificial light, natural diurnal light and temperature, experimental tanks (differing in size and volume), and walk-in environmental chambers. The new tanks will permit a range of experiments in biogeochemistry, fish bioenergetics, nutrient dynamics, and land-water interactions. The CBFS research program includes long-term studies of Oneida Lake, a focus on large lake limnology, and the training of graduate and undergraduate students in field research. Understanding the mechanisms driving the long-term patterns documented for Oneida Lake can frequently be approached in experiments conducted in relatively small-scale facilities, where controls and suitable replicates can be employed. Historically, CBFS has had a strong field orientation and this award will provide the station with the capability to adequately test mechanisms hypothesized from field observations doc5501 none This award provides support for student attendance at the Gordon Conference on Multiphoton Processes. The Conference will discuss topics such as high harmonic generation, ultrafast processes, wave packet dynamics, and high-field laser-matter interactions doc5502 none This GOALI project focuses on in-situ, real-time studies of complex oxide thin films composition, structure, and properties to be used to optimize film quality and to develop film formation models that optimize desired film properties. A unique process and characterization system combining spectroscopic ellipsometry and low energy ion scattering, together with a multi target ion beam sputter deposition system for film growth is being completed. This GOALI project involving systems development requires not only the diverse scientific talents provided by the University of North Carolina and James Madison University (an undergraduate institution) and Argonne National laboratories, but also industrial participation for the industrial hardware implementation phase. Oxide films with both complex compositions and structures are being considered for the next generation electronic and optical devices. Among the classes materials currently being emphasized are highly optimized thin films of superconductors, high dielectric constant dielectrics, ferroelectrics and piezoelectrics. Training students for job opportunities in these areas is regarded as a high priority by industry. %%% This ROA grant will increase the participation of undergraduate students at James Madison University in GOALI project . Oxide films with both complex composition and structures are being explored for the next generation electronic and optical devices. These include superconductors, didectrics, ferroelectrics and prezoelectric materials. This GOALI will provide excellent training for students competing for 100 opportunities in areas regarded as a high priority by indarky doc5503 none Cedar Point Biological Station provides research opportunities and advanced course work in field biology, with special emphasis on prairie ecology, insect-plant interactions, animal behavior and parasitology. Cedar Point is located in the North Platte River valley, in a location that gives its faculty and students excellent access to a variety of ecosystems and habitats including the Nebraska Sand Hills. Cedar Point was founded in and has established a strong educational program and an outstanding record of research productivity. Cedar Point Biological Station has been awarded funds to construct a new Resource Building, which will include space for a new library, computer lab, classroom and seminar room. Provision of this space will then allow better access to the biological collections of the station. It will also allow for improvement and expansion of the dining hall and teaching facilities in existing buildings. The resources provided by this award will allow for a substantial increase in the capacity of Cedar Point Biological Station to provide opportunities for research and education in field biology to faculty, graduate students and undergraduates for many years doc5504 none Human-managed systems are arguably the most complex and fragile of complex systems. Usually poor in biodiversity, they display most other characteristics of complex systems, including feedback loops, step functions and other nonlinearities, surprises, and unpredictability. The most complex human-managed system is the modern city of the developed world. Its complexity may well be of benefit to the environment; more complex cities may prove to be even more benign. The rapidly growing cities of the developing world, in contrast, are often insufficiently complex, lacking even basic elements of infrastructure such as water and sewage systems. Their vulnerability as forms of human organization and the vulnerability of their residents to poor quality of life, disease, and death are often extremely high, and are likely to be severely tested by environmental changes at the local, regional, and global levels. This Biocomplexity Incubation Activity award will support work in association with the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) to develop an international, interdisciplinary research project under the auspices of the IHDP-Industrial Transformations core research program. That project will address the issue of whether and how it would be possible to decouple the improvement of human well-being from the negative environmental effects of the production and consumption systems that sustain life in cities. Noting that humankind is now a majority urban species and will be even more so within 50 years, the project will focus on the form of human social organization that will probably have the greatest impact on the environment at local, regional, and global scales throughout the next century. It will design an implementation plan for interdisciplinary research on cities as complex systems, drawing upon insights from other disciplines about forms of biocomplexity. It will give special attention to urbanization in the developing world, where most of the world s megacities are now being built, and particularly to the Asia-Pacific region, because of the rapid rates of urbanization in countries of the region and the large population size of many countries in the region. The project will initially focus on two subsystems through which humans have large effects upon their environments: the subsystem by which humans utilize water, affect the hydrological cycle, and produce pollution of various forms, and the subsystem by which humans achieve mobility of goods and persons, usually consuming substantial amounts of energy in the process and emitting several forms of environmentally active substances. Each subsystem may contain tractable solutions to the problem of combining the improvement of human well being with the reduction of human impacts on the environment. The incubation project will provide for capacity building through workshops, small seed grants, international collaboration, and the production of an implementation plan. It also will facilitate the involvement of interested investigators from the natural and social sciences and engineering will be sought doc5505 none This project will collect low altitude aerial photographs at sites in northern Alaska where photographs were previously taken in and . The new photographs will be examined for evidence of decadal changes in vegetation and landscape that may have occurred in response to a significant climatic warming that has taken place in the Alaskan Arctic over the past two decades. The purpose of the comparison is: 1) to determine if ecological change has occurred and 2) if oblique aerial photography can be used to detect the changes. The results of this feasibility study could be useful as demonstration of a technique that could be applied to a widely distributed set of aerial photographs taken fifty years ago over much of the Arctic Slope in Alaska doc5506 none The proposed high risk exploratory research introduces a new approach to the evolutionary question of why there is a contrast in the oxygen transport characteristics of Andean and Tibetan natives exposed to the same stress of high-altitude hypoxia. It hypothesizes that the reason why Andean populations at high altitude have higher blood oxygen content than their Tibetan counterparts at the same altitude is due to differences in the production of nitric oxide, a gas heretofore not measured in native high altitude populations. The proposed research will be carried out in Bolivia and the Tibet Autonomous Region of China and is designed to test the hypothesis that high-altitude hypoxia decreases the production of nitric oxide in the lungs which in turn causes the pulmonary arteries to reroute blood to the better-oxygenated portions of the lung and improves blood oxygen. It will test the hypothesis that individuals with lower exhaled nitric oxide levels have higher oxygen saturation, and that Andean populations have higher nitric oxygen levels than Tibetans as a result of their higher blood oxygen content. The proposed exploratory research introduces nitric oxide as a trait relevant to the study of high altitude adaptation and expands our knowledge of human adaptation to high altitude and our understanding of human evolution doc5507 none Jarvis. Lay Vocal learning is the process by which young animals learn to imitate the vocal sounds made by their parents or a tutor. This rare trait has only been found in humans, whales, dolphins, bats and 3 groups of birds (hummingbirds, parrots and songbirds). The goal of this project is to identify and characterize the brain areas that control vocal communication in hummingbirds, as well as test whether the brains of birds that do not have vocal learning, such as chicken and pigeons, contain similar structures. The main method used is analysis of a gene that is expressed in the brain when neuronal cells fire. Utilizing a molecular technique called in situ hybridization, one can determine the exact brain cells that are involved in the perception and production of vocalizations. By comparing hearing and vocalizing animals, one can then generate high-resolution maps of brain areas that control the production of learned vocalizations. Language acquisition, both in terms of speech production and semantics, is a fundamental aspect of the human experience and depends on vocal learning. Why is it though that so few animals have vocal learning? Do only these animals have the necessary brain structures and connections? If so, what are these structures, and how did they arise during evolution? By addressing such questions, this study may help reveal what are the brain mechanisms required for vocal learning, and potentially help understand how humans learn speech. The results should also provide a framework for studying the neurobiology of learned vocal communication in other animal groups. If the evolution of vocal learning is under strong epigenetic constraints, it is possible that humans, cetaceans and bats have also evolved similar brain structures. Alternatively, brain areas for vocal learning may have evolved as a specialization of structures present in a vocal non-learning ancestor. Results from this project are expected to throw considerable light on these questions doc5508 none J. H. Fendler, Clarkson University The objective of the proposed research is to demonstrate the possibility of continuous fabrication of nanostructures of chosen size and shape. The demonstration will be carried on self-replicating reversed micelles. It will be attempted to manufacture size-controlled monodisperse sulfide semiconductor nanoparticles and their capped counterparts in reverse micelles. The PI has acquired an extensive experience in studying the creation of nanoparticle films and multiparticulate layers on surfaces, with the help of surfactant coatings. It was observed that in such processes, man-made templates replace nature s biological membranes. Such apparent mimicking of biological processes has been generalized to a systematic biomimetic membrane chemistry for advanced materials preparation (e.g. colloids). The PI has explored in detail the self-replication of membrane mimetic components. The need is now to identify and control three essential biological function: compartmentalization, self-replication and self-assembly. Templates and compartments, supplemented by surfactant coating, provide the same control on the extent of a chemical transformation as a membrane would. The PI wants to generalize his research on the replication and assembly of semiconductor materials to more materials and nanogeometries. The proposed research plan is exploratory and high-risk doc5509 none E. Samimy, Ohio State University Research Foundation High-speed (compressible gas) jet flows are of obvious importance in transport and military aircraft. They are also widely utilized as ejectors, blast nozzle flows, etc. Unlike their low speed counterparts, these flows have not received extensive study by the research community. One limiting issue is the availability of appropriate diagnostic techniques. The Co-PI s bring considerable experience and insight to the planned studies of basic turbulence properties in such jet flows. The one-year funding is to permit them to address the concerns that have been raised regarding their experimental methods and the relationship of the data to the needs of their theoretical numerical colleagues doc5510 none This award will provide funding for a core computer network that will serve as the central nervous system for the new Field Research Station of The University of Montana located at Fort Missoula. The station is located on 100 hectares of land about 15 minutes away from the main University campus, and will provide a bridge between the existing University research facilities and the largest expanse of wilderness surrounding any university in the lower 48 states. The facility currently lacks computers, and thus is not fully functional. The computer network to be established with the aid of this award consists of a central high-power and high-speed server, which will run a local area network (LAN) at the field facility, and allow backup and storage of large data files. This central computer will be linked to a network of workstations that will allow different users to simultaneously collect, store, retrieve, and analyze massive data sets. A second computer server will allow researchers throughout the world access to several data sets on the distribution, nesting habitat, and reproductive success of birds in North America. These databases are among the largest and most important sources of such information in the world. The principal investigators share interests in avian biology, and their research programs span a diverse set of disciplines that includes behavior, flight biomechanics, life history strategy, community ecology, physiology, communication and signaling, and conservation biology. In addition to significantly enhancing these investigators research, the computer network will allow unprecedented, innovative, multi-disciplinary collaborations on a wide range of questions pertaining generally to animal design, life history, and behavioral activity patterns. Moreover, this facility and associated faculty is expected to serve as a magnet for attracting sabbatical professorships, summer researchers, post-doctoral associates, and outstanding graduate students. The computer network and associated research facility will also enhance the already existing collaborations between the faculty, private industry and governmental organizations, as well as broad community outreach programs and developing educational collaborations with regional K- 12 science teachers. With the aid of the equipment to be purchase with these funds, the Field Research Station will be fully integrated into the University of Montana s educational priorities to provide student-directed research opportunities doc5511 none Research has shown that for some tasks computer input is best performed by manipulating physical objects. This project will explore the integration of paper and pixels for collaborative web design. The PI will investigate tangible and pen interaction techniques to support collocated collaboration for creating information hierarchies, as well as tools and interactions that support versioning of a physical artifact as well as manipulation of the artifact when all or part of the physical representation is unavailable. The PI will try to better understand virtual representations of a tangible information space for remote collaboration by creating a desktop GUI that allows remote users to see and manipulate the information space. He will explore the use of a two-board UI for hybrid tangible virtual interaction, where designers in physically distant places can collaborate through the artifact under design. A strength of this project lies in its foundation in actual work practice, as observed by both the PI s research group and others. To insure the utility of the prototype system, the PI will conduct extensive evaluation of different areas of the system, and iterate system design based on these evaluations. He will have designers create actual information architectures on the prototype running in the lab, and will also perform long term usability studies by deploying a working prototype of the system in a web design firm. An outcome of the project will be a publicly available vision toolkit that can be used for tracking physical objects on a flat surface, and which will enable HCI researchers to create vision-based tangible user interfaces absent domain knowledge in computer vision. The work will contribute a better understanding of techniques for combining tracked physical objects with an interactive display surface, and will also contribute new techniques for collocated and remote collaboration, as well as a better understanding of the means of interacting with large, physical information architectures doc5512 none This collaborative project with Clemen ( ) and Hammitt ( ) will develop and demonstrate improved methods for using expert judgment in environmental risk analysis. Risk-analytic models rely heavily on parameter estimates obtained using either informal or formal expert judgments. Such methods can be sensitive to two problems: biases in experts coding their knowledge into probability distributions (such as overconfidence bias), and the typically uncertain degree of dependence in judgments between experts (e.g., each expert s judgment combines his reading of a common scientific literature and his own experience and interpretations). The project will analyze the properties of two state-of-the-art methods for combining expert judgments: the classical method developed by Roger Cooke and colleagues at Delft University of Technology and the copula method developed by Robert Clemen and colleagues at Duke University. It will compare the methods mathematically and by evaluating their performance on synthetic and actual expert judgment data sets. In addition, the project will develop improved methods for combining distributions based on fully Bayesian methods for incorporating overconfidence and dependence among experts, and compare them with the two existing methods. The project will lead to better methods and an improved understanding of alternative methods for combining expert judgment in environmental risk analysis. Many parameters in a risk-analysis model cannot be measured directly, for physical or ethical reasons (e.g., one typically cannot trace pollutants far from their source nor conduct toxicity studies on humans). As a result, parameter estimates are often based on expert judgment. In most cases, the expert judgment is applied informally, as when the model builders use their own best guess estimates of parameter values. In some cases (such as risks associated with nuclear power), judgments (in the form of probability distributions) are elicited from a panel of experts. However, there is at present no standard method for combining judgments from multiple experts, and limited understanding of the properties of alternative methods. This research will lead to better understanding of alternative methods and, ultimately, to better use of expert judgment doc5513 none This collaborative project with Clemen ( ) and Gelman ( ) will develop and demonstrate improved methods for using expert judgment in environmental risk analysis. Risk-analytic models rely heavily on parameter estimates obtained using either informal or formal expert judgments. Such methods can be sensitive to two problems: biases in experts coding their knowledge into probability distributions (such as overconfidence bias), and the typically uncertain degree of dependence in judgments between experts (e.g., each expert s judgment combines his reading of a common scientific literature and his own experience and interpretations). The project will analyze the properties of two state-of-the-art methods for combining expert judgments: the classical method developed by Roger Cooke and colleagues at Delft University of Technology and the copula method developed by Robert Clemen and colleagues at Duke University. It will compare the methods mathematically and by evaluating their performance on synthetic and actual expert judgment data sets. In addition, the project will develop improved methods for combining distributions based on fully Bayesian methods for incorporating overconfidence and dependence among experts, and compare them with the two existing methods. The project will lead to better methods and an improved understanding of alternative methods for combining expert judgment in environmental risk analysis. Many parameters in a risk-analysis model cannot be measured directly, for physical or ethical reasons (e.g., one typically cannot trace pollutants far from their source nor conduct toxicity studies on humans). As a result, parameter estimates are often based on expert judgment. In most cases, the expert judgment is applied informally, as when the model builders use their own best guess estimates of parameter values. In some cases (such as risks associated with nuclear power), judgments (in the form of probability distributions) are elicited from a panel of experts. However, there is at present no standard method for combining judgments from multiple experts, and limited understanding of the properties of alternative methods. This research will lead to better understanding of alternative methods and, ultimately, to better use of expert judgment doc5514 none SPATIAL MODELING, ANALYSIS AND PREDICTION OF NONSTATIONARY ENVIRONMENTAL PROCESSES Montserrat Fuentes, North Carolina State University Richard L. Smith, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Spatial statistics is one of the major methodologies of environmental statistics; its applications include producing spatially smoothed or interpolated representations of air pollution fields, calculating regional average means or regional average trends based on data at a finite number of monitoring stations, and performing regression analyses with spatially correlated errors to assess the agreement between observed data and the predictions of some numerical model. However, the most commonly used spatial statistics methodology, also known as geostatistics or kriging, is essentially based on the assumption of stationary and isotropic random fields. Such assumptions cannot be expected to hold in large heterogeneous fields. The research described here concentrates on nonstationary spatial models. Some new models are introduced, as well as new fitting methods based on spectral analysis. The applications include three real data sets: (i) monitoring data for nitrate fields compared with Models-3 output as part of the process for assessing compliance with the Clean Air Act Amendments of ; (ii) modeling the spatial distribution of particulate matter fields, as one of the components needed for an improved risk assessment of human health effects of particulate matter; (iii) developing statistical models for spatial temperature fields and applying them to the attribution of various signals produced by climate models - in particular, this methodology will permit improved assessment of the extent to which observed global climate change may be attributed to anthropogenic influences. In more detail, the new statistical methodology concentrates on two approaches to nonstationary models: a spatial deformation approach due to Guttorp and Sampson, and an approach where the field is represented locally as a stationary isotropic random field, but the parameters of the stationary random field are allowed to vary continuously across space. Kernel functions are used to ensure that the field is well-defined but also continuous. Some combination of the two approaches may be needed for fields with are neither stationary nor isotropic. New fitting algorithms are developed, using both space domain and spectral approaches; in cases where the data are distributed exactly or approximately on a lattice, it is argued that spectral approaches have potentially enormous computational benefits compared with maximum likelihood. The methods are extended to prediction interpolation questions using approximate Bayesian approaches to account for parameter uncertainty. We develop applications to obtaining the total loading of pollutant concentrations and fluxes over different geo-political boundaries, to risk assessment for particulate matter random fields, and to the attribution of an observed climate record to various components produced by numerical climatic model, the latter forming a new approach to the fingerprint estimation technique developed by climatologists. This program is being jointly funded by the Division of Mathematical Sciences and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities from the Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences doc5515 none This research develops, assesses, and provides convenient tools for implementing parametric modeling of processes that are driven by point sources. The project uses a hierarchical Bayesian approach to an extension of a process decomposition model that was recently introduced in the context of modeling the effect of point sources. The process decomposition model decomposes the observed process into a trend surface, a baseline error process, and additional error processes (one for each point source) that may be viewed as shocks to the baseline. This approach allows flexibility and autonomy to modeling the individual sources. The Bayesian approach properly accounts for uncertainty in parameter estimates when evaluating prediction uncertainty, easily incorporates prior information, and is more flexible for assigning ranks according to the impact of several point sources. A Markov random field or conditional autoregressive model based on a distance-to-source neighborhood structure is used for the error processes. A multivariate distribution of weights describes the relative ranks of the sources. Because all models are parametric, significance testing is easily accomplished. The project accomplishes the following technical goals: A. test the impact of several point sources, where exact locations of the point sources are known; B. rank several point sources according to impact; C. provide models that are useful for determining appropriate corrective action for altering an observed process or for optimizing a designed process; D. provide predictions, and appropriate measures of prediction uncertainties, at unsampled sites by accounting for the effects of point sources. The educational component of the project involves teaching high school students the rudiments of the methodology developed and its relevance to major issues such as environmental equity. The Clean Air Act of and its and amendments defined a pollution source as any place or object from which pollutants are released. A source can be a power plant, factory, dry cleaning business, gas station or farm. Cars, trucks and other motor vehicles are sources, and consumer products and machines used in industry can be sources too. The effects of these sources on human health are well-documented, as is the importance of modeling these effects. This project responds to this need by developing, assessing, and providing convenient tools for modeling processes that are driven by point sources. The resulting methodology is applied to address a public health and welfare concern of the Environmental Protection Agency, namely to determine which nitrogen oxide (NOx) and sulfur dioxide (SO2) emission sites are most responsible for site-specific ambient concentrations far from the emission sites. These site-specific ranks will help determine which emission sites require stricter regulations for controlling their impact at different spatial locations. More generally, project results may impact the regulation of point sources, the assignment of equitable consequences to several point sources within the vicinity of an ecological or environmental disaster, and help in determining appropriate corrective actions. Furthermore, the creation of teaching modules aimed at high school students will improve the readiness of these students for studies in the mathematical, physical, and biological sciences. This project is jointly supported by the Statistics Program in the Division of Mathematical Sciences and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in MPS doc5516 none This collaborative project with Gelman ( ) and Hammitt ( ) will develop and demonstrate improved methods for using expert judgment in environmental risk analysis. Risk-analytic models rely heavily on parameter estimates obtained using either informal or formal expert judgments. Such methods can be sensitive to two problems: biases in experts coding their knowledge into probability distributions (such as overconfidence bias), and the typically uncertain degree of dependence in judgments between experts (e.g., each expert s judgment combines his reading of a common scientific literature and his own experience and interpretations). The project will analyze the properties of two state-of-the-art methods for combining expert judgments: the classical method developed by Roger Cooke and colleagues at Delft University of Technology and the copula method developed by Robert Clemen and colleagues at Duke University. It will compare the methods mathematically and by evaluating their performance on synthetic and actual expert judgment data sets. In addition, the project will develop improved methods for combining distributions based on fully Bayesian methods for incorporating overconfidence and dependence among experts, and compare them with the two existing methods. The project will lead to better methods and an improved understanding of alternative methods for combining expert judgment in environmental risk analysis. Many parameters in a risk-analysis model cannot be measured directly, for physical or ethical reasons (e.g., one typically cannot trace pollutants far from their source nor conduct toxicity studies on humans). As a result, parameter estimates are often based on expert judgment. In most cases, the expert judgment is applied informally, as when the model builders use their own best guess estimates of parameter values. In some cases (such as risks associated with nuclear power), judgments (in the form of probability distributions) are elicited from a panel of experts. However, there is at present no standard method for combining judgments from multiple experts, and limited understanding of the properties of alternative methods. This research will lead to better understanding of alternative methods and, ultimately, to better use of expert judgment doc5517 none Conventional measures of gross domestic product (GDP) fail to account for the effect of economic activity on the environment. The primary objectives of the project are (1) to develop a methodology for computing green GDP and to apply the method to international data and (2) to compute a green Malmquist productivity index (MPI). Related objectives include (3) examining the effect of R&D spending on green productivity and (4) examining the convergence or divergence of green total factor productivity (TFP) growth rates across countries over time. Throughout, environmental depletion degradation variables are treated as inputs. Examples of these variables include air pollution, deforestation, and energy and land use. Green GDP will be calculated using a data-envelopment-analysis (DEA) framework. For this purpose a dynamic cross-country technology will be specified and estimated. Exploiting the duality properties of the underlying technology, the shadow prices of these variables will be calculated. Deriving green GDP, then, involves subtracting the inner product of the vectors of shadow prices and degradation variables from conventional GDP. Green MPI will be calculated using a nonparametric output distance function, from which an output-oriented Malmquist index will be derived. This index incorporates the effects of environmental depletion degradation. The effects of R&D on green productivity growth will be examined using regression analysis, in which lagged values of the R&D variable also appear as explanatory variables. Lagged terms are introduced to reflect the fact that R&D spending may have lagged effects as well as current effects. The convergence or divergence of green TFP growth rates will be tested using time-series analysis. An auto-regressive model of green TFP growth will be specified and a unit-root test will be employed to determine whether green TFP growth rates are converging or diverging over time. The U.N. System of National Accounts has been criticized because GDP, the most widely used measure of aggregate economic activity, fails to account for environmental effects. Economists and others have suggested that GDP accounts should be adjusted for the value of environmental damages, an adjustment that would lead to so-called green GDP accounts. It is thought that green GDP is a more accurate measure of social welfare than is GDP itself, because it captures the disutility due to environmental degradation and not only reflects the true social welfare at the national level but also provides an informational background for evaluating social policy. Adjusting GDP to account for environmental effects is difficult, though, because it requires measuring the monetary value of environmental depletion and degradation. The study will develop a method for making this adjustment, and will go on to compare green GDP across countries and over time. Productivity growth, which stems from improvements in the fundamental productive capacity of an economy, is the engine of GDP growth and of increases in welfare over time. As with GDP, though, it is important to account for environmental factors in measuring productivity growth. In addition to measuring green GDP, the study also will develop a related method for measuring green productivity growth and apply the method to international data over several years. Using the green productivity measures across countries, two statistical models are employed. The first will explore the effects of R&D activities and technological spillovers on productivity advancement. The second will determine whether productivity converges or diverges across countries over time. The study will thus produce a number of extensions to the academic literature. It will also yield important insights for policymaking. It seems clear that environmental policy should be based on integrated environmental-economic analyses. The measures of green GDP and green productivity growth developed in the study will provide a useful input to the formation of policies regarding environmental management and economic development doc5518 none This award from the National Facilities and Instrumentation Program to the University of Wisconsin-Madison supports the continued operation of the Synchrotron Radiation Center (SRC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. SRC is one of the most productive, innovative, cost-effective, and user-friendly facilities in the U.S. SRC will continue to operate as a national users facility for uniquely difficult and time-consuming experiments that lead to new depths of understanding of key materials problems at the micro and nano levels. These activities match well with the characteristic spectrum of the Aladdin ring, which is concentrated at low photon energies. SRC provides output of high stability and spectral purity for experiments involving intricate sample preparation and characterization. Work on superconductors, low-dimensional solids, magnetic nanostructures, and the microanalysis of cells, together with cutting edge nanolithography and research in microcircuit device fabrication will continue to be supported. The funds also support low-cost plan to improve the beam quality, which will result in beam size reduction by up to a factor of 3-4. These will provide world-class flux and resolution in the 5-50 eV range that is critical for exploring valence electrons, but difficult to reach for higher energy rings. The impact of these efforts will be felt well beyond the five years award period. SRC will continue to host the Center for NanoTechnology (CNTech), a major federally- and industry-funded facility at the SRC. As a DARPA Test Bed for Lithography, and a unique training facility in the U.S, CNTech is indispensable to the nation and the semiconductor industry in providing fundamental and applied research for microcircuit device fabrication. In addition, the Canadian Synchrotron Radiation Facility (CSRF) depends on SRC as its host; this collaboration will continue until the Canadian facility (CLS) is completed. SRC continues to make important contribution to Graduate training with its reinvigorated program in accelerator physics. This educational effort is enhanced through a creative new NSF-funded initiative involving high school teachers and students doc5519 none Frisbie These projects exploit the atomic force microscope (AFM) to measure electrical potentials and current-voltage characteristics of materials with high spatial resolution. The work focuses on organic semiconductors and self-assembled monolayers (SAMs). The first project, Kelvin Probe Force Microscopy (KPFM) of metal-organic semiconductor interfaces and operating organic field effect transistors (OFETs), employs metal-coated AFM tips to sense surface potentials. Frisbie will use KPFM to measure the contact potential difference (CPD) at metal-organic interfaces to determine the extent of interfacial charge-transfer. He will also use KPFM to map voltage drops in operating OFETs to determine the bottlenecks to electrical transport in these devices. These KPFM studies will quantify the importance of film microstructure and metal-organic interfaces to organic semiconductor transport. The second project, fabrication and electrical characterization of metal-molecule-metal junctions, will use conducting AFM tips to contact single monolayers of molecules assembled on surfaces. The objective of these studies is to characterize transport in molecules as a function of bonding and functional group architecture. It is expected that fundamental understanding stemming from this work about the roles of microstructure, metal-organic interfaces, and molecular architecture on transport will impact efforts to improve electronic devices based on molecular films. These studies involve training of graduate students in the areas of organic thin film electronics, transport physics, and scanning probe microscopy, all of which are areas of high interest to industry doc5520 none Heath This proposal is to support a workshop that will be designed to explore issues related to the future of nano-scale and molecular electronics. In particular, issues related to computer architectures for molecular and nano-electronics, chemical self-assembly as a fabrication technology, and the expected scientific challenges associated with making molecular electronics a reality will be discussed. The meeting will include presentations by leading practitioners in the fields of computer architecture and design as well as physical scientists working in the areas of nanoscale systems and molecular electronics. Of potential interest to both of these groups is the field of neuroscience, and a small number of participants (and a corresponding few scientific presentations) will be from that field. The goal of this workshop will be to explore the common ground that exists between computer architecture, molecular and nano-scale electronics, and neuroscience. The result will be a document that can assist the NSF in developing a strategy for funding these various areas. The workshop is being co-funded by NSF Divisions: ECS ENG, CTS ENG, DMR MPS, DBI BIO AND EIA CISE doc5521 none The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Directorate for Education and Human Resources Programs (EHR) will develop a series of media products featuring the scientists, engineers and research being conducted in Science and Technology Centers (STCs) supported by the National Science Foundation. They will accomplish this by sending reporters from their award-winning daily radio show Science Update to 14 of the 23 NSF STCs, plus selected Collaboratives to Integrate Research and Education (CIRE) sites. Over a period of 16 months, Science Update will produce and broadcast 48 radio features, heard by a weekly audience of over two million, as well as 24 short classroom lessons disseminated via AAAS s award-winning Science NetLinks web site for science teachers. NSF will also have access to stories and interview transcripts for other educational purposes doc5522 none This proposal is a request for funds to enable assist students and junior researchers to attend the Strangeness in Quark Matter conference, to be held in Berkeley, California on July 20-25, . The scope of this conference is strangeness production in Heavy Ion collisions, strangeness and the search for Quark Gluon Plasma, Strange Matter, and Astrophysical aspects of Strangeness. The conference is especially interesting this year from the standpoint of heavy ion collisions, because of provocative data from the CERN heavy ion program and the first collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven which might occur at the time of the conference doc5523 none Maradudin This three-year award, which supports U.S.-Spain cooperative research on scattering of surface-plasmon polaritons by surface defects, involves Alexei Maradudin of the University of California at Irvine and Jose Sanchez-Gil at the Institute of the Structure of Materials in Madrid, Spain. The objectives of their research are to produce equations describing the scattering of surface plasmon polaritons (SPP) by surface defects that can be solved numerically in an efficient manner; to provide information about how the scattering depends on the features of the defects; and to yield explicit analytical expressions for very narrow defects as well as for defect configurations of interest in photon scanning tunneling microscopy experiments. The U. S. investigator brings to this collaboration access to first rate computational resources and expertise in electrodynamics of nonideal surfaces. This is complemented by the Spanish investigator s computational skills and his experience in dealing with the electrodynamics of perturbed surfaces. The results of this research will benefit the electromagnetics of disordered media in general doc5524 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Duane Johnson Institution: University of Alabama Tuscaloosa The objective of this project is to use novel anodic dissolution techniques to produce highly ordered, nanometer-sized holes in aluminum. In a series of experiments, single crystal aluminum substrates with 111, 110, and 100 orientations will be used. Complementary numerical simulations will demonstrate how the crystal orientation affects the pattern development during electropolishing. The procedure for producing nanoscale patterns is to apply a constant bias voltage on the aluminum substrate in an acidic alcohol-water solution. The applied voltage causes the aluminum to dissolve as aluminum ions into the solution. Although striped patterns have been observed, these are not of current industrial interest. Conditions that favor the formation of ordered hexagonal patterns will be explored. Collaboration with the University of Alabama laboratory on Materials for Information Technology (MINT) is anticipated. This facility is an NSF Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC). Students will have use of the facility for work on this project. Ordered arrays of nanometer-sized holes form the basis for a number of emerging technologies including magnetic media, photonic bandgap filters, and molecular sieves. A new fabrication method that produces such arrays would be potentially useful in the development of these devices doc5525 none This project evaluates the Arizona Collaborative for Excellence in the preparation of Teachers (ACEPT). It investigates the more lasting impact of the project on the community and the teachers trained through the project. This includes assessment of the impact of early reforms and more recent reforms and assessment of the effect on ACEPT graduates and their students. The project determines the impact on shaping the way graduates teach K-12 science and mathematics, whether or not reformed teaching methods significantly improve student achievement, and the change in the nature of college and university level instruction. The project tests hypotheses about why some teachers readily embrace reformed teaching methods while others remain resistant. This project provides valuable measurement instruments that can be used by other projects and data that helps in assessment of the impact of ACEPT and the CETP program doc5526 none This request for block international travel funds for selected U.S. authors to attend the 39th IEEE Conference on Decision and (CDC) to be held in Sydney, Australia, between the dates of December 12th and 15th, . The CDC is one of the world s largest and leading conferences in control theory and applications. This will be the fourth time it will be held outside the United States. The requested funds will be instrumental in increasing the U.S. participation at the conference, thus contributing toward its technical success doc5527 none This is a renewal proposal to continue development of first--order system least squares (FOSLS) for numerical solution of partial differential equations (PDEs). It combines theoretical analysis, algorithm design, and software development, driven by several real applications, including aerodynamics, meteorology, elasticity, electromagnetics, particle transport, and porous flow. The goal is to develop accurate discretizations and fast solvers for the governing PDEs. The focus will be on the continued development of the FOSLS methodology, with special attention on developing methods that allow non-smooth problem character and solutions, and on further implementation of the methodology in the software package FOSPACK. Applications will include coupled systems, especially those arising in biological simulation, and porous media flow. Successful progress of this project would enable numerical simulations beyond current capabilities in many important applications of national interest. The central aim of this project is research in the field of computational mathematics. The purpose is to improve our understanding of the mathematics behind numerical computer simulation of complex physical phenomena. Such simulations are key to the study and control of many important processes, including groundwater flow, global change, energy production, biological modeling, and material science. One of the challenges in such simulations is the development of improved computational methods for solving the mathematical equations that arise in these models. The basic aim of this research is dramatic improvement in our ability to model increasingly more complicated and sophisticated processes with much greater accuracy and efficiency. This should pave the way for simulations that can provide scientists, engineers, and policy-makers with much more powerful tools to understand and improve our industry, science, and environment doc5528 none This award provides support for the improvement of the seawater system at the Bodega Marine Laboratory (BML), a research unit of the University of California at Davis located on the Sonoma coast 70 miles north of San Francisco. The laboratory s existing seawater system consists of a seawater intake, pumphouse, storage tanks, treatment systems, and a network of transport and distribution lines to dozens of labs throughout BML. The seawater system incorporates elements of filtration, sterilization, temperature conditioning, aeration and mixing. Growth in research demand for seawater from resident and visiting scientists at BML has taxed the capacity of the present system, which now suffers from problems with supersaturation, biofouling, and insufficient filtration, temperature control and sterilization. Improvements aided by the award will include additional intake lines; increased pumping capacity; a new, large, Seawater Clarifier employing degassing, filtration and clarification through gravity-induced particle settlement and filtration media impaction; a sterilization upgrade using two-stage ozone and chlorine processes to sterilize seawater leaving the marine pathology lab; an increase in chiller capacity for temperature control; and an expansion of the computerized control of the system. The BML lies within the Bodega Marine Reserve (BMR); a 362-acre protected field site with a diverse set of marine and terrestrial coastal habitats. Adjacent subtidal areas are protected and available for study within the Bodega Marine Life Refuge. The laboratory provides opportunities for field and laboratory research on a rich flora and fauna in close proximity to the Laboratory buildings. BML has well-equipped laboratories, strong on-site support staff and a firm commitment from the UC Davis campus to continue developing the facilities and support needed by the growing number of resident and visiting researchers Growth in research demand for seawater from resident and visiting scientists at BML has taxed the capacity of the present system, which also suffers from problems with supersaturation, biofouling, and insufficient filtration, temperature control and sterilization. This award will allow BML to significantly expand and upgrade the seawater system to meet current and future needs. These changes will include additional intake lines; increased pumping capacity; a new, large, Seawater Clarifier employing degassing, filtration and clarification through gravity-induced particle settlement and filtration media impaction; a sterilization upgrade using two-stage ozone and chlorine processes to sterilize seawater leaving the marine pathology lab; an increase in chiller capacity for temperature control; and an expansion of BML s Monitoring Control Network. This last element will simplify routine maintenance, increase reliability, and provide remote trouble-shooting and control, and will provide options for remote monitoring of Life Support Systems in individual labs by researchers using the BML network and the Internet doc5529 none This project will innovate digital access and data mining tools for specimen-based collections of animal sounds. A team of programmers will design the tools and implement them for use on the world s largest such sound collection at Cornell University s Laboratory of Ornithology. The conversion of this collection to digital storage has made specimen-based research on sounds a reality for the first time. No other facility has developed the tools required for using this non-traditional type of collection. Specific tasks will include structuring the sound database to be compatible with inter-institution searches, designing search tools that allow searches using both contextual data on the recordings and extracted measures of the sounds, incorporating GIS tools and maps into the search interface, providing thumb-nail images for selection of subsets of archived recordings, providing easy access to sound analysis and comparison tools, and devising a method for uploading sounds by remote recordists over the internet. These tools will permit for the first time rigorous remote use of sound collections by scientists, conservation managers, educators, and the media doc5530 none The essence of this program is to investigate intertemporal effects in quantum measurements utilizing an optoelectronic experimental setup. The goal of the project is to realize an idea identified as a backward time telegram based on the experimental setup of the delayed choice quantum eraser . A telegram code, or a string of bits, consisting of 0 s and 1 s shall be used for active control of an optical switch to make the delayed choice of which-path or both-paths . The particle-like or wave-like behavior of a light quantum, which corresponding to code 0 or code 1 respectively, will be registered in a much early time even before the generation of the code. The code may be considered as a message, a string of bits to be transmitted. The working principle of this Backward Time Telegram could then be demonstrated. The project will extend a previous experiment by the PI, entitled Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser, reported in Physical Review Letters, Vol. 84, No. 1, . This new extension will clarify the alternative possible explanations of the prior results, and thereby take a significant step towards a deeper understanding of the role of intertemporal effects in the process of measurement in quantum field theory. Recent work in quantum information sciences (QIS) has demonstrated the great importance of the measurement process, particularly in regards to the interface between macroscopic and microscopic phenomena. A better understanding of that interface may be very important, in the long-term, to a better understanding of the design space available to the emerging field of QIS and quantum computing doc5531 none PI: H. I. Ling Institution: Columbia University : Reinforced soil structures are an emerging technology that allows rapid and economic construction of retaining walls, slopes and embankments. Many reinforced soil structures are constructed in difficult terrain or in urban areas where space is limited. The performance of reinforced soil structures under normal loading conditions is known to be satisfactory. During the Northridge and Kobe earthquakes their performance was better than conventional gravity and cantilever retaining walls. However, during the Northridge Earthquake, the reinforced soil structures were at a distance from the epicenter and thus they were not subjected to high seismic loading. Reinforced soil structures constructed in Japan have rigid facing and they are different from those present in other parts of the world. In particular, reinforced soil structures with modular-block facing, commonly used in the United States, Turkey and Taiwan are not constructed in Japan. Therefore, the earthquakes of Taiwan and Turkey provided a unique opportunity to examine the performance of versions of reinforced soil structures commonly found in the United States. The PIs visited the earthquake-affected areas in Taiwan and Turkey to identify damaged reinforced soil structures which are similar to the U.S. proprietary system. The proposed research involves investigating the mechanism of failure through collaboration with researchers and practicing engineers from Taiwan and Turkey. The proposed research aims to achieve the following objectives within the given one-year time framework: 1. To assess the performance of reinforced soil structures during the earthquakes of Taiwan and Turkey. 2. To obtain the technical details of the reinforced soil structures in the earthquake-affected areas, including wall configuration, reinforcement layout, soil and reinforcement properties, and earthquake characteristics. 3. To evaluate simplified seismic analysis procedures for the identified reinforced soil structures. 4. To organize an international workshop on the issues of seismic design of reinforced soil structures. 5. To suggest improvements to current design procedures based on the results of study and workshop. The failure of reinforced soil structures during recent earthquakes may indicate that existing design procedures are inadequate. Alternatively, it might be a result of improper design construction. Thus, the proposed research will lead to significant technological benefits to researchers and practicing engineers in the United Staes and worldwide doc5532 none This award provides support for an NSF-sponsored Workshop on Force Transduction in Biology, to be held in Arlington, VA, July 24-26. The transduction of mechanical force into biological response occurs at many length scales, ranging from the molecular to the macroscopic. This Workshop will examine mechanisms of force transduction that span these multiple length scales. Or particular interest are hierarchical aspects of force transduction, or common themes that may unify concepts at the cellular, sub-cellular, tissue, organ and organism levels. Also important are specific force-response events that may occur within the cell, between cells, among tissues, etc. The major themes of the conference will be (1) force transduction at the molecular, cellular tissue, and organism levels, (2) relations between molecular structure and mechanical properties, and (3) relations between mechanical forces and biological function. The Workshop is interdisciplinary and is intended to encourage and facilitate communication at the Physics Biology interface. Participants come from a wide range of disciplines, including bioengineering, biology, mathematics, physics, and the neural sciences. Support will be provided for younger faculty and advanced graduate students. The results of the workshop will be presented in a Workshop Report, which will be discuss opportunities and challenges in the general area of force transduction in biology. %%% This award provides support for an NSF-sponsored Workshop on Force Transduction in Biology, to be held in Arlington, VA, July 24-26. The Workshop is interdisciplinary and is intended to encourage and facilitate communication at the Physics Biology interface. Participants come from a wide range of disciplines, including bioengineering, biology, mathematics, physics, and the neural sciences. Support will be provided for younger faculty and advanced graduate students. The results of the workshop will be presented in a Workshop Report, which will be discuss opportunities and challenges in the general area of force transduction in biology doc5533 none Tubbesing This award will provide partial support for the 6th International Conference on Seismic Zonation. Funds will be used to offset administrative expenses for conference organization, venue and the development and publication of the proceedings of the meeting. The Conference will provide an opportunity to showcase advances in science and engineering. It will provide an additional opportunity to highlight applications in Federal, State, local agencies and the private sector that take advantage of developments in seismic zonation research and technology to mitigate seismic hazards to reduce losses from earthquakes doc5534 none Global climate is intimately connected to variability in sea ice, open ocean biogeochemical cycling and circulation, atmospheric radiation, and clouds over the Arctic Ocean. Uncertainty in the formulation of interactive air-sea-ice processes results in large differences between the arctic, and global, climates simulated by different global climate models. In particular, the effects of long, narrow channels (meters to hundreds of meters wide and kilometers long) in pack ice, also called leads, upon the atmosphere and the formation of new aerosol particles in the Arctic Ocean must be more accurately represented in climate models to allow possible feedbacks between them. The Swedish Polar Research Secretariat has presented the research community with a unique platform (Icebreaker Oden) as part of its third expedition to the summer Arctic in entitled Sources of airborne particles over the remote Arctic Ocean and their climatic relevance . This effort will allow a concerted study of chemical and related processes from the sea-ice air interface to the cloud-topped boundary layer in a climatically and environmentally sensitive region. The international program is designed as an integrated package, which includes both a field experimental phase and a closely coupled modeling effort. The overall aim of the program is to identify and quantify the role of the biological, chemical, physical and meteorological processes that control the formation, evolution, and properties of the aerosol relevant to radiative forcing and climate in the Arctic region. A further objective of the international program is to incorporate the results in both regional and global-climate models and to improve the overall accuracy in the calculation of climate forcing by aerosol particles. Selection of the central Arctic Ocean as the preferred site for an attempt to provide better information on the role of aerosols on climatic change is based on its climatic sensitivity given the importance of its sea ice in controlling mass and energy fluxes at the surface, the relatively sparse existing databases and the possibility of following the entire aerosol-cloud-radiation system with very little interference from continental or anthropogenic sources. Currently, a great deal of attention is being given to the thinning and decreased extension of pack ice, perhaps increasing the generation of leads. Leads facilitate the exchange of both heat and materials, coupling the atmosphere with the Arctic Ocean. The focus of this proposal is on the summer season when melt is maximal and leads are most prevalent . This project will specifically address the question of What compounds of biological origin are present in the ice and in the water column next to or below it, and that may be involved in the production of airborne particles? To this effect, the project will quantify the abundance and production of DMS, DMSP, and S-amino acids as potential aerosol precursors in surface seawater in open leads and also determine the biological content of the open leads and the chemicals and particles (i.e., POC, PON, POS, chlorophyll a, microplankton composition) in the water. These parameters will also be measured, when pertinent and possible, in ice and surface film samples collected by other investigators. Other European investigators will address issues concerning how the marine particles and derived products become airborne, whether they lead to new particle formation or growth in the atmosphere and under what circumstances doc5535 none The Synechocystis sp. PCC genomic sequence will be used to develop DNA microarrays, thus enabling efficient techniques to monitor global patterns of differential transcription in this important model system. The project will produce and utilize a PCR-generated gene set representing the entire genes of the Synechocystis sp. PCC genome, a unicellular, transformable cyanobacterium that is an important model organism for the study of photosynthesis and environmental gene regulation. The amplified gene set will be arrayed on microscope slides to be probed with fluorescently-labeled cDNA produced from mRNA for the purpose of analyzing global patterns of differential transcriptional activity. The PCR-generated gene set will have utility beyond the primary application of differential transcriptional profiling, because the PCR amplification oligonucleotides incorporate a pair of common adaptamer sequences connected to the gene-specific sequences. The ordered library of PCR-generated gene fragments will thus be flanked by adaptamer sequences. The presence of these adaptamers will have two important functions. First, it will allow re-amplification of master-sets of the primary gene fragment sets from common PCR primers, thereby maximizing yields of printable product and minimizing the depletion of the original stock of gene-specific PCR primers. This will provide ample DNA for these arrays and allow experimentation, for example, with different coupling chemistries for the DNA hybridization microarrays. Second, this approach allows in-frame directional cloning of the amplified genes, thus permitting the future connection of these nucleic acid-based procedures with high-throughput protein analysis. The resulting availability of DNA microarrays for global transcriptional profiling will provide researchers with a powerful new tool to address fundamental problems in many different areas of biological research doc5536 none This award is for partial support of an international workshop on Global Ice Sheets and Sea Level at the Last Glacial Maximum in October, , at Mt. Hood, Oregon. The workshop is part of the EPILOG (Environmental Processes of the Ice-age: Land, Ocean, and Glaciers) Project that is intended to establish a new and comprehensive look at the environments of the last Ice Age and to foster a revision of global reconstructions of the Ice Age earth, drawing on progress made in the last ~20 years since completion of the Climate Mapping Project (CLIMAP) maps doc5537 none Telomeres, the protein-DNA structures present at the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes, serve functions necessary for maintaining chromosome integrity. These functions include a) a mode of replication that solves a problem with the replication of ends, b) the capping of the chromosomal DNA to prevent terminal degradation and instability, and c) the ability of telomeres to quiet gene expression from genes near the ends of the chromosomes. The long-term goal of this project is to understand the mechanism and inheritance of telomeric silencing using the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Three specific aims include: First, continuation of previous work aimed at understanding the function of one of the central regulators of silencing, Sir3p. Several key steps of silencing require Sir3p. These include a) the initiation of silencing, b) subtelomeric telomeric associations, c) the propagation (or spreading) of silencing, and d) the ability to interact with key silencing factors. Sir3p may represent a functional paradigm for silencing regulators. Specific Aim 1 involves defining the functionally critical amino acids in the Sir3p C-terminal domain (CTD) minimal silencer, the proteins that interact with the CTD, and the sir3p domains involved in events downstream of the initiation events. Cellular memory, the ability of a cell to perpetuate a specific transcription state through multiple generations, is a central characteristic of position effect, of variegation and of differentiation in most eukaryotes. Specific Aim 2 centers specifically on the relationship between telomeric chromatin state and heritability The telomeric chromatin state will be determined by the degree of accessibility of artificially introduced telomeric restriction sites to exogenous probes. Specific Aim 3 investigates the relationship between heritability and subtelomeric structure using the chromatin immunoprecipitation assay system. This technique permits the mapping of specific chromatin factors that are in close proximity to defined segments of subtelomeric DNA. Several issues are being explored, including the relationship between a)telomeric length and the formation of unique subtelomeric chromatin structures, b) heritability and formation of specific subtelomeric structures, and c)telomeric and subtelomeric states. In addition the unique role of yeast chromatin factor-1 in the propagation of silencing at the structural level is being examined. Understanding how chromatin structure can regulate gene expression is very important as this type of regulation takes place in imprinting and during development. It is also a major issue in the generation of transgenic organisms. Yeast is the most tractable system in which to study this phenomenon doc5538 none Maples. The Carboniferous Period has been called the Age of Echinoderms , yet a noticeable gap exists in our understanding of the origins and global expansion of Carboniferous crinoids. A few recent studies have shown that assessment of crinoid and blastoid bearing faunas from outside the North American and Western European realms can lead to paradigm shifting leaps in our understanding of extinction rebound and paleobiogeography of these animals. Devonian-Permian crinoids are virtually unknown from the Middle East into southeastern China. Devonian and Carboniferous crinoid cups and crowns were recently discovered in Iran by Dr. Mehdi Yazdi. These faunas are of sufficient diversity and quality to be of great scientific value. The PIs wish to sample and analyze these faunas for their taxonomic and biogeographic importance. With the recent thaw in Iranian-American relations, it is important that they take advantage of this window of opportuinity doc5539 none American Association For the Advacement of Science Stern The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the recipient of an award for summer internship support for the ENTRY POINT! Program. ENTRY POINT! a national effort to discover and develop talent among students with disabilities, seeks summer internship opportunities for students majoring in science, mathematics and engineering. Through the program academically prepared students have received quality internship assignments throughout federal government agencies and industry. Participants are exposed to various career options in the Federal sector that serve as a basis in helping students make informed career choices and solidify career objectives. By partnering with the Federal government, AAAS has been able to successfully place over 150 students in summer positions since ENTRY POINT! commenced in . In an effort to continue its collaboration with AAAS, the National Science Foundation, one of two of the participating government agencies, will offer challenging assignments that will broaden the exposure of participants pursuing careers in science, mathematics, engineering and technology (SMET). Internship opportunities create an unique opportunity to assist in the fulfillment of two core strategies related the goals of NSF s mission: developing intellectual capital, and integrating research and education. As a result the Foundation actively participates in strengthening the infrastructure to achieve excellence in SMET education doc5540 none This proposal outlines a comprehensive program in an emerging area of control of nonlinear distributed parameter systems. The motivating practical problems come from stabilization of unstable fluid flows, ubiquitous in today s advanced consumer products and automotive, aerospace, and marine vehicles. These applications abound with nonlinearities of superlinear growth and instabilities in the interior of a spatial domain where controls can act only from the boundary. These issues have successfully been dealt with in a finite-dimensional setting, and are uniquely positioned to address them for distributed parameter systems. This proposal advocates the development of two types of methods. First, methods based on backstepping, which employ either the measurement of the state in the interior of the spatial domain, or a nonlinear observer, for stabilization of highly unstable systems with boundary controls. The control action is typically propageted from the boundary into the interior of the domain by viscosity diffusion mechanisms present in many disstributed parameter systems. The second method is based on simple feedbacks involving only boundary measurements. Such feedbacks are in the form of Jurdjevic-Quinn feedback laws that add damping for asymptotic stabilization of systems with known control Lyapunov functions. An example is shown of a fluid flow problem in which a J-Q type controller is developed for low Reynolds number and demonstrate its effectiveness for a high, realistic value of Reynolds number, many orders of magnitude higher than the design value. In the same setting, this proposal proposes to go beyond equilibrium stablization, to enforcement of non-equilibrium quasi-steady motion. An example of such a control objective is mixing in fluids where one wants to achieve random motion of particles by deterministic means. This proposal plans to dramatically depart from conventional approaches to this problem which are all of open-loop motion-planning type. A feedback law will be shown that raises both the turbulent kinetic energy and the vorticity of the fluid (uniformly in space). Several theoretical advances have been produced in stabilization of uncertain nonlinear systems (resulting in several best paper awards and a new book on this topic), as well as transition (industrial experiments with our control algorithms and a patent offered for licensing consideration to a leading aeroengine manufacturer doc5541 none The investigators will study the physics of plasma injections into the inner magnetosphere during magnetospheric substorms and storms. The project will use a newly coupled model consisting of the UCLA global magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) model and the Rice Convection Model (RCM). The coupled model will eliminate the shortcomings that are currently inherent to the models: the lack of a ring current and correct particle drift physics in the MHD code, and the dependence of the RCM on empirical submodels and ad hoc assumptions. The coupling process will be done by using a novel data structure to exchange information between the models at certain times during the calculation, allowing the models to run in parallel, and not necessarily on the same computer. The data exchange will be in the form of a protocol, similar to the protocols that are used on the World Wide Web, which will allow for maximum flexibility, extensibility and openness. Coupling of the models will proceed in six stages of increasing complexity. As each coupling stage is completed the investigators will model a set of selected substorm and storm events and perform comprehensive comparisons with in situ observations. The comparisons will yield information about the relative importance of different processes. The goal is to develop a global magnetosphere model with much improved capabilities compared to contemporary models, and a much more thorough understanding of substorm and storm time injections doc5542 none The goal of this project is to gain a better understanding of the biosynthesis, compartmentation,and function of plant isoprenoids. Recent work in several laboratories has revealed the presence of two distinct isoprenoid biosynthetic pathways in plants: a mevalonate-dependent pathway that is responsible for the synthesis of sterols, brassinosteroids, cytokinins and other terpenoids, and a mevalonate-independent pathway that is involved in the production of plastidic isoprenoids (plastoquinones, phytyl tail of chlorophylls, carotenoids, etc.). However, much remains to be learned of the interactions between these different isoprenoid compartments in plant growth and development. To address this complex problem, this PI has identified mutants of Arabidopsis thaliana that are resistant to lovastatin (lvr ), a specific inhibitor of mevalonate synthesis that severely impairs root growth of wild type seedlings.One of these mutants, lvr 111, exhibits extreme resistance to lovastatin and is defective in chlorophyll and carotenoid pigmentation. Interestingly, F2 population analysis suggests that both phenotypes are caused by a single mutation. Since this mutant exhibits alterations in the cytoplasmic pathway (lovastatin resistance) as well as the plastidic pathway (pigmentation defect), the PI will test the hypothesis that the communication between these isoprenoid compartments is altered in the lvr 111 mutant. This will be accomplished by positional cloning and characterization of the LVR 111 gene, which will provide insights into the flux and or function of isoprenoid compounds within plant cells doc5543 none In this research, a plan is outlined to continue the efforts of the Student Meeting Activities Subcommittee of the Power Engineering Education Committee of the IEEE Power Engineering Society (PES) to promote student interest in the power engineering field by sponsoring electrical engineering students from US universities to attend the North American Power Symposium to be held in Waterloo, Ontario. The goal of this project is to provide an opportunity for students to be exposed to the most recent developments in operation, construction, and research in the power engineering field. This is a particularly critical time for power engineering as the industry undergoes significant change due to the restructuring of the traditional utility structure. The career opportunities for students interested in power engineering are many and varied; the program offers student several opportunities to interact with faculty and students from other universities in the power area doc5544 none Chen Model-Based Simulation (MBS) has provided designers with flexible and cheaper means to explore design alternatives before physical part deployment. However, question of the confidence level on a particular model considering the full range of uncertainties in prediction and in physical tests has hampered wide applications, especially when dealing with real-life engineering problems. This collaborative research represents the joint efforts from two universities and General Motors for the development of a rigorous and practical approach for model validation (Model Validation via Uncertainty Propagation -- MVUP). The approach will utilize the knowledge of system variations along with computationally efficient uncertainty propagation techniques to provide a stochastic assessment of the validity of a modeling approach. The proposed methodology will be demonstrated through validating the simulation models for sheet metal forming processes. The research is expected to lead to a model validation procedure that can provide a general-purpose stochastic assessment of model validity with the least amount of statistical assumptions and possibly one physical experiment. The research results developed will have an immediate impact on simulating springback in sheet metal forming process. It is our expectation that it can be generalized to other engineering problems and will make a significant impact on how we view numerical simulations by considering all the physical and numerical uncertainties. The research results will also contribute to the development of new courses on model-based simulation, modeling and optimization of manufacturing processes, and uncertainty analysis in engineering design. This collaborative research between University of Illinois at Chicago and Northwestern University is funded under NSF 00-26, Exploratory Research on Model-Based Simulation doc5545 none This research proposes novel techniques for power analysis and optimization at software level. Specifically, the problem is addressed in the context of both general purpose or application specific processors. In addition, the case of processors with multiple instruction issues or out-of-order execution, or architectures based on the Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) paradigm are also considered. The main feature of the proposed models is their dependency on input data, allowing profile-driven optimizations. Based on the proposed models, appropriate optimization techniques at compile-and run-time are proposed for reducing the energy of the instruction sequence. This research will enable the assessment of any energy performance trade-offs present in today s processors. Also, based on a power estimate of the embedded software running on application specific processors, the co-design of mixed hardware software systems can be extended to incorporate as a further design constraint power consumption, in addition to performance doc5541 none The investigators will study the physics of plasma injections into the inner magnetosphere during magnetospheric substorms and storms. The project will use a newly coupled model consisting of the UCLA global magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) model and the Rice Convection Model (RCM). The coupled model will eliminate the shortcomings that are currently inherent to the models: the lack of a ring current and correct particle drift physics in the MHD code, and the dependence of the RCM on empirical submodels and ad hoc assumptions. The coupling process will be done by using a novel data structure to exchange information between the models at certain times during the calculation, allowing the models to run in parallel, and not necessarily on the same computer. The data exchange will be in the form of a protocol, similar to the protocols that are used on the World Wide Web, which will allow for maximum flexibility, extensibility and openness. Coupling of the models will proceed in six stages of increasing complexity. As each coupling stage is completed the investigators will model a set of selected substorm and storm events and perform comprehensive comparisons with in situ observations. The comparisons will yield information about the relative importance of different processes. The goal is to develop a global magnetosphere model with much improved capabilities compared to contemporary models, and a much more thorough understanding of substorm and storm time injections doc5547 none In a one-year small grant for exploratory research (SGER) granted by the ECS Division of NSF, we have explored new concepts for coherent quantum effects in nanotechnology devices. We have conceived of several new solid-state devices based on coupled coherent quantum phenomena that are potentially useful for computing and communications, and investigated their practicality through theoretical studies. With this initial success, we now propose to continue these studies with a more extensive and precise analysis of the phenomena and to initiate a coupled experimental program to show feasibility. The nanotechnology structure that shows most promise for a quantum computer is based on the spin of exchange coupled electrons trapped in an array of gated quantum dots fabricated in either III-V or silicon. The proposed quantum computer is capable of 10 5 operations within the coherence time at a two-qubit operation rate at 10 8 Hz. It is readily scalable to a large number of elements, on the order of ~10 6 qubits, and electrically reconfigurable utilizing a planar architecture. This device is unquestionably manufacturable using technology enabled by the 70-nm technology node as specified in the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, Edition . We have established collaborations with industry that wish to take advantage of this nanotechnology once we have shown feasibility. To fully examine the potential of our concepts, we propose to conduct a comprehensive study by analyzing the physical parameters of the devices to generate the desired energy structure and coupling strength among neighboring device elements, by investigating the limitations to coherence, and by simulating the operation of the device to operate it as a quantum computer. We further propose to undertake an experimental program to fabricate and test elementary prototypes of these devices to demonstrate feasibility. Collaboration between the theoretical and experimental studies should result in a nano-device structure that is technically interesting and potentially important for commercial use. This research will be coupled to an educational program that provides interdisciplinary research for graduate students and for the development of courses that introduce quantum information processes at the graduate level within the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at North Carolina State University doc5548 none This award provides support for improvement of the physical infrastructure of the La Selva station of the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS), a nonprofit consortium of 56 universities and research institutions from the United States, Costa Rica and Australia. La Selva encompasses 1,536 hectares of classic lowland tropical rain forest in northeastern Costa Rica, a country renowned for its outstanding national system of conservation areas. The station is the largest of three biological field stations operated by OTS in Costa Rica, the others being Las Cruces (mid-elevation cloud forest near Panama) and Palo Verde (lowland monsoonally-dry forest in Guanacaste Province). At these sites OTS works in cooperation with governmental and partner-organizations on scientific issues of training, conservation, environmental education, and natural resource management. Over its 46-year history, La Selva has hosted 3,000 research projects, resulting in over 2,000 scientific publications and 160 theses and dissertations. Visitation has reached 25,000 person-days a year, with education use by 3,000 students and faculty in . After a decade of increasing usage, La Selva s housing and trail system are inadequate to meet the physical demands of this level of use. This award will support plans to permanently address the issue of inadequate housing for researchers, degraded trails in the old-growth forest and a deteriorating laboratory at the station. This assistance will enable La Selva to continue to be a center of excellence for research and training in tropical ecology during the decade ahead doc5549 none This Gordon Research Conference on Solid State Studies in Ceramics will focus on interfacial networks, their structure, dynamics, and control. This subject lies at the heart of the emerging ability to design ceramic materials with specific microstructures and properties. Recent research activities among ceramists and the growing number of publications in this area indicates that a meeting on this topic is especially timely. Key researchers in the field have committed to attend this meeting and describe their most recent findings (see http: mimp.mems.cmu.edu ~grc for a schedule). To augment the traditional technical presentations, four additional program initiatives have been incorporated into the meeting. First, a scientific panel discussion is will be held to address the important issue of how we conduct interface studies. The expert panel (and audience) will address the question of how one selects an appropriate length scale for the study of grain boundary networks; the advantages and disadvantages of atomic and microscopic observations will be debated. An online, web-based discussion of the question will be initiated to foreshadow the proceedings at the meeting. At the conference, the forum will involve a moderated panel of experts in the area who will each be given 15 minutes to present a viewpoint. Comments will then be invited from the audience so that all of the participants can engage in the discussion. Second, an education forum is planned. A panel of educators has been invited to present strategies for the co-existence of ceramics education within a materials science curriculum. The panel will meet with interested conference participants during an afternoon session and the panel leader will present a synopsis of the findings during a meeting of all conference participants. Third, an invited poster session has been arranged to accommodate a higher fraction of young professionals in the program. This poster session is meant to provide an opportunity for young scientists and engineers at the start of their independent research careers to describe their most recent results. Fourth, graduate students working on thesis topics relevant to the conference will be encouraged to submit abstracts for poster presentations and, based on the merit of the abstracts, will be offered funding for their conference registration. This Gordon Research Conference on Solid State Studies in Ceramics will focus on interfacial networks, their structure, dynamics, and control. This subject lies at the heart of the emerging ability to design ceramic materials with specific microstructures and properties. The conference will gather scholars and educators at all career levels in an atmosphere conducive not only to making technical progress, but also for establishing sustainable collaborations and professional relationships doc5550 none The objective of the project is to evaluate the applicability of a pulse-heating calorimeter to metal systems. The experimental apparatus allows the simultaneous determination of the electrical resistivity (r) and the specific heat (Cp) from room temperature to degrees C. An experiment, including processing the data, takes about an hour. This specimen in the form of a wire or rod is self-heated by a current from a programmable power supply controlled by a computer. This device can also be used to control the thermal history of the specimen. For example, isothermal aging can be conducted with r and the associated heat effects determined which occur during aging. Due to the high heating rate that can be employed, r and Cp can be determined for metastable states. This allows the calculation of the free energy of transformation, for example, for the ordering reaction in Ni4 Mo. If defects form during heating (e.g., vacancies), the associated heat effect causes an abnormal increase in Cp. The data can be analyzed to determine the energy of formation of the defects. This would be particularly applicable to intermetallic compounds, such as FeAl, NiAl, Laves phases, etc doc5551 none Three studies will be conducted using functional magnetic resonance imaging to test hypotheses about psychological processes and neural systems that support self-regulation. The first experiment targets the ability to regulate the self-concept in response to an ego threat by either self-enhancing or changing an attitude. The second experiment targets the ability to regulate emotion through suppression of an emotional response or reappraisal of an affective stimulus. The third experiment targets the ability to regulate thought through the suppression or expression of target cognitions. Together, these studies will provide new insight on the common and distinct neurofunctional systems used to regulate the self-concept, emotion, and thought doc5552 none This award will provide funds for the support of a workshop to discuss the integration of advanced techniques into antarctic weather forecasting. The workshop will be held at the Byrd Polar Research Center of Ohio State University, in May . The objective of the workshop is to bring together the atmospheric community with interests in antarctic weather forecasting and synoptic meteorology. This group, which will include operational forecasters, numerical modelers, atmospheric scientists, and others, will be expected to review the current state of knowledge in antarctic weather forecasting, as well as define and recommend goals and research needs for the U.S. Antarctic Program over the next decade. Recent advances in polar numerical weather prediction, resulting from ongoing efforts at improving the capabilities of numerical weather prediction models for use in polar regions, and real-time simulations of the antarctic atmosphere using the Pennsylvania State University National Center for Atmospheric Research fifth generation mesoscale model have placed the field of antarctic weather prediction at the brink of a period of rapid improvement. This potential can only be realized through a directed effort by all parties involved, and a stronger link between the research and operational meteorology communities. A formal workshop on this specific aspect of antarctic meteorology has not been convened before doc5553 none This project, which will be conducted by the Center for High Technology Materials at the University of New Mexico, will investigate the basic physics of quantum dot (QD) materials that influence the performance of semiconductor lasers in the 1.3-1.6 micron wavelength range. An advanced theoretical model of the QD will be employed to determine the bound states in single, adjacent, and stacked QDs. This information will be subsequently used to determine precisely the transition matrix elements required for gain and spontaneous emission computations. The theoretical knowledge will be tested against the experimental component of the program, which will investigate carrier capture by the quantum dot, gain, and homogeneous broadening. Our acquired expertise will enable the design, fabrication, and optical characterization of external cavity lasers that can be tuned over a 250 nm range with threshold current densities of less than 1 kA cm^2, ultra-low-chirp optical devices for telecommunications, and filament-free lasing in broad area devices. Tunable semiconductor lasers from 1.4-1.6 micron are particularly attractive as the need for greater bandwidth in fiber-optic communications is increasing dramatically. Theoretical studies indicate that the elimination of filaments and chirp in QD lasers is possible because of the QD s exceptionally low linewidth enhancement factor. The impact of this project will be most significant at the telecommunications wavelengths of 1.3-mm and 1.55-mm and at eye-safe wavelengths operating above 1.4 mm doc5554 none Stone This grant supports theoretical research topics related to the behavior of electrons and photons in confined geometries for which the spatial confinement scale is large compared to the wavelength but small enough (in many cases) that quantum or wave effects are important. A unifying theme of this research is that the confining potential is either disordered or complex enough to generate chaotic classical motion, so that one must employ techniques from quantum transport theory and or semiclassical methods for classically chaotic systems ( quantum chaos theory ). Most of the specific proposals relate to two categories of systems: dielectric micro-cavity resonators and micro-lasers, and semiconductor quantum dots. For optical resonators, the theory of asymmetric resonant cavities (ACR s) will be further developed. ACR s are cylindrical or spherical dielectric resonators smoothly deformed from rotational symmetry. The resonances of such systems are non-perturbatively related to those of the symmetric system. In such a case semiclassical methods are very powerful since photons are non-interacting (in the linear regime) and these methods will be developed further. Within this theory, we will attempt to describe such effects as chaos-assisted tunneling and dynamical localization of photons. In addition, we expect to make substantial progress on the basic resonator theory of ARC s, developing a full quantitative theory of the output directionality and Q-value in various different parameter regimes, and understanding the conditions of single and multi-mode lasing. Finally, we will for the first time address the non-linear and quantum-optical properties of these resonators and micro-lasers. For the case of semiconductor quantum dots the problem is more difficult because treatment of the strong electron-electron interactions is essential. Here the focus will be on the role of disorder and or chaos in causing interaction fluctuations which are not captured by mean-field theory. Specifically we intend to explore our recent discovery that interaction fluctuations play a major role in suppressing spontaneous magnetization in a model for a disordered quantum dot, i.e., the interaction fluctuations generically oppose the Stoner instability of itinerant electron systems. These effects appear to increase as the conductance decreases, so that they may also play an important role near the metal-insulator or superconductor-insulator transitions. In the regime where mean-field theory does work, we will study the evolution of the self-consistent spectrum using semiclassical methods applied to the self-consistent potential. %%% This grant supports theoretical research on the nanoscience of electrons (electrical charge) and photons (light). The topics are related to the behavior of electrons and photons in confined geometries for which the spatial confinement scale is large compared to the wavelength but small enough (in many cases) that quantum or wave effects are important. A unifying theme of this research is that the confining potential is either disordered or complex enough to generate chaotic classical motion, so that one must employ techniques from quantum transport theory and or semiclassical methods for classically chaotic systems ( quantum chaos theory ). Most of the specific proposals relate to two categories of systems: dielectric micro-cavity resonators and micro-lasers, and semiconductor quantum dots. The topics are both of deep intellectual interest and of great potential application doc5555 none This award will partially support the Second IMACS International Conference on Nonlinear Evolution Equations and Wave Phenomena to be held at the University of Georgia, April 9-12, . IMACS is the International Association for Mathematics and Computers in Simulation. This award will support six invited speakers, students, and some direct costs. The conference will focus on the computational and theoretical aspects of nonliner waves and optical solitons doc5556 none This award supports the use of boundedly-rational agent-based models to study the emergence of multi-agent trusted information structures in a rudimentary societal group setting by incorporating models of trust and emotion in these agents. As these agents exchange only information, the emergence of these trusted structures represent a primitive (but fundamental) form of organizational learning and adaptation. However, the social setting complicates matters, as the adjustment of these structures is also purely informational - through gossip about the other agents, choices to trust other agents or not, and emotional-type responses to particular categories of events. The computational formulation of the model integrates theories from psychology, sociology, and anthropology. This research advances knowledge at the interstices of social and computational sciences, provides insight into the emergent forms of advice networks occurring on the Internet, explores how elementary forms of emotion alter agent (and group) behaviors, and contributes to the linking of agent properties to emergent group and organizational learning and behaviors doc5557 none Circadian clocks represent an aspect of intracellular regulation that influences physiology and metabolism in most agriculturally, medically, and industrially important species on the earth. This regulation is based in processes that occur within cells although the regulation is apparent throughout the entire organism in multicellular species. Based on work in the Loros laboratory and in others the molecular bases of these rhythms are becoming known, but much remains to be done. In particular one productive approach has been to study how known components of the clock respond to light in the environment of the cell. Another has been to ask how components of light signaling are involved in operation of the clock. This research is based on experiments using several genes (cloned in the Loros laboratory or in the laboratory of close colleagues) whose expression patterns are either under direct control of the circadian clock or whose activities are required for daily operation of the clock. Additionally, all of these genes either control blue-light inducible gene expression and or are themselves blue-light inducible and therefore show multiple levels of regulation between light and the clock. One of these genes, the frequency gene, is a component of the clock mechanism and mutations in it s own ORF effect the periodicity of it s transcript rhythm. The wc-1 and wc-2 genes are PAS domains (a sequence and functional motif conserved among the activating elements from all eukaryotic clocks) containing transcription factors required both for general global control of light responses in this organism and for normal operation of the circadian clock. The VVD protein also contains a PAS domain and appears to play the role of a regulator of light-induced gene expression, a role mediated by the anticipated interaction between the PAS domains of VVD and the WC proteins. Molecular and genetic analysis has begun on the three lis mutations that alter blocking of FRQ negative feedback in light. In collaboration with others, the Loros laboratory has shown two more genes, clock-controlled gene-1 and clock-controlled gene-2 to be light-regulated and involved in output pathways from the clock and as such they are good model target genes known not to be involved in the oscillator. Based on this past work, research in this project will be focused on (1) examining the physiological and biological role of the lis mutants at the molecular level in clock function, (2) continuing the genetic identification of new genes and gene products in the operation of the Neurospora clock, and (3) the identification of, in a global sense, the light regulated genes in Neurospora. The on-going, long-term goals of this research are to understand, at the molecular level, the genes involved in operating the circadian clock, the role of light in regulating the clock and to what extent the light input pathway to the clock is merged with the clock cycle itself. This has included understanding the actions of light directly on the molecular feedback loop that supports clock operation and on the regulation of the expression of genes that are additionally regulated by the clock, genes known as ccg s or clock-controlled doc5558 none Ram-Mohan Layered quantum semiconductor structures such as multiple quantum wells, superlattices, and, multi-barrier resonant tunneling diode (RTD) structures have been realized as viable devices over the past several years. Here the PI proposes the investigation of carrier tunneling, with special, emphasis on hole tunneling, in such structures. The in-plane energy dispersion for holes in these structures displays large non-parabolicities of the energy sub-bands. It has also been found that in-plane dispersion in such quantum heterostructures significantly influences the tunneling spectrum in the growth direction. In the existing literature, these crucial aspects have not been included in (a) multi-band Schrodinger-Poisson self-consistent band bending calculations, (b) a tunneling theory including in-plane wavevector dependence, and (c) the full theory of the I-V characteristics of general layered systems including these effects. The modeling aspects of the theory are best done in a highly accurate finite element approach that was investigated earlier by the PI. A number of puzzling features in the I-V characteristics in Type-11 RTDs observed by Magno, et al., at the Naval Research Laboratory will be addressed. A proper understanding of the Type-II interband quantum cascade laser (proposed and later implemented by Meyer, Vurgaftman and the PI), under active device conditions also requires a detailed multi-band approach to tunneling. These device applications should permit the realization of wavefunction engineering of optimized structures for superior performance. In addition, nonequilibrium dissipative effects of phonon emission and phonon-assisted tunneling under active device conditions, will be investigated using a Numerical Green s Function approach proposed here. These investigations will have direct relevance to device design, to device performance, and to the implementation of mid-IR lasers and Type-II RTDs doc5559 none Golub This proposal seeks support for a symposium on Toxic and Essential Trace Elements in Brain Development to be held at the Neurobehaviora Teratology Society meeting. The symposium focuses on research concerning damage to brain development caused by both deficiencies and excesses of trace elements. It is unique in that it brings together scientists who study trace elements as toxicants and those who study trace elements as essential elements for an exchange of information and research perspectives concerning brain development. The symposium includes a diversity of participants. One of the 3 organizers is a woman as are two of the four symposium participants. In addition, there is one foreign contributor (Canada). The symposium also presents opportunity for scientists early in their careers, in that two of the participants are young scientists from research groups with active programs in this area doc5560 none Lovell All ecosystems are dependent on nutrient supply and regeneration by microbial communities. These communities are thought to be very sensitive to variations in environmental conditions, changing species diversity and or activity levels in response to environmental changes. Important environmental functions may be maintained since microbial communities contain a sufficient diversity of species in each major functional group (i.e. functional redundancy) to negate species losses. However, dramatic decreases in function that are correlated with changes in community structure have been observed in some studies. The plasticity of natural microbial communities, particularly in physically structured environments such as vegetated soils and sediments, and the connections between microbial diversity and ecological function are clearly not well understood. A major hurdle impeding progress in this area has been our inability to determine which species within a given functional group (such as the nitrogen fixing bacteria) are actually performing the vital function in question. In this SGER project the investigators will extract messenger RNA encoding the nifH gene product, the nitrogenase iron protein, directly from Spartina root and rhizosphere samples, convert the mRNA sequences to double stranded DNA, and determine the nucleotide sequences of these copy DNA molecules. These sequences will be compared to those recovered directly from existing DNA extracts of nitrogen fixers in a Spartina marsh, to identify which of the many species are actively fixing nitrogen. The responses of the functionally dominant species to experimental manipulations and to seasonal changes in environmental conditions will be determined, to directly assess the importance of functional redundancy to maintenance of the ecologically important process of nitrogen fixation. This study will be among the first to link the environmental function of a key microbial functional group directly to the species responsible for this function. The approach taken here will be broadly applicable to understanding the significance of microbial diversity in a functional context and will provide one of the first direct examinations of the significance of functional redundancy for a natural bacterial assemblage in a complex, natural environment doc5561 none This award to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is for a six-month, scoping study to define detailed user requirements, hardware and software technologies, and needed support infrastructure for the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) system for the NEES collaboratory. The NEES collaboratory is part of the NEES Major Research Equipment project, which will be developed during - and operated from - . The collaboratory will connect, through a high performance network, distributed major earthquake engineering research equipment such as shake tables, centrifuges, tsunami wave tanks, large-scale laboratory experimentation systems, and field experimentation and monitoring installations. The collaboratory will also provide a curated repository for experimental data, enable teleobservation and teleoperation participation in earthquake engineering experiments, and provide capabilities for computation and distributed simulation. The scoping study will identify the needs of the earthquake engineering research community as well as the advanced networking, data management, and computation technology that will be available in and beyond for the NEES collaboratory. Based on this information, this project will develop a system architecture, a detailed system design, and an implementation plan for the NEES collaboratory. Project participants include the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Mid-America Earthquake Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Argonne National Laboratory, University of Michigan, and University of Southern California doc5562 none This effort is a collaboration between researchers at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and Stanford University. The objective is to explore and utilize advanced computational and information technologies to further develop a state-of-the-art nonlinear finite element program (CYCLIC) for earthquake ground response and liquefaction simulation. Calibrated codes for modeling and simulation of earthquake geotechnical phenomena will be combined with advanced computational methodologies to facilitate the simulation of large-scale systems and broaden the scope of practical applications. The proposed work involves three main research elements: 1. Further development of the computational program CYCLIC: This development will introduce parameter sensitivity and optimization options. The capacity of the computational program will be extended from two-dimensional (2D) to 3D simulation. In addition, a transmitting boundary feature will be included. 2. Parallel and distributed computing capability: CYCLIC will be significantly enhanced by incorporating state-of-the-art software paradigm and solver technologies that are designed for parallel and distributed computing environments. Specifically, a multitask Single-Program-Multiple-Data (SPMD) program paradigm will be employed and implemented. Furthermore, parallel sparse matrix solvers will be developed and incorporated into the computational engine to improve performance and extend the simulation capabilities. 3. Internet-based interactive web environment: In addition to the current 1D remote execution and visualization capability (http: casagrande.ucsd.edu), extensions to 2D and 3D will be facilitated through parallel computing. Novel useful features will include an extensive library of on-line input earthquake records, and a soil material library with pre-defined calibrated models for sand, silt, and clay soils. User friendliness will be addressed throughout the development process. Advanced Internet-enabled and web browsing technologies will be deployed to allow remote users to view the results in an interactive and dynamic manner. The experience gained in the development of the Internet-enabled simulation environment will be shared with other researchers and may help make many other useful computational programs widely accessible over the Internet for future applications doc5563 none Mark Funds are provided to support the travel and conference registration fees of young investigators as participants in the conference Computers in Cardiology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, September 24-27, . A series of conferences on computers in cardiology was established 27 years ago in recognition of the import role that computer technology would play in cardiovascular research and in clinical patient care. The conferences also facilitate important productive communication between engineers and clinicians that stimulates relevant research and development. Participants have found the meetings to be particularly helpful because of the manageable size, and the commonality of interests of attendees which fosters interpersonal interaction outside the formal sessions. For these reasons, Computers in Cardiology has proven to be a major world forum for presentation of new research over a wide spectrum of computer applications in cardiology. The conference has been the prime site for gestation and early nourishment of a number of fundamental technologies that have led to major improvements in the practice of cardiology. The Proceedings of the conference is to be published by the IEEE press and copies distributed to the attendees and a number of libraries doc5564 none Graham In recent years, tremendous progress has been made in the fabrication of advanced materials, such as composites. As these fabrication techniques have progressed, it has become apparent that models describing behavior of these materials need improvement in order to be properly introduced into engineering design. A major obstacle in improving these models for many materials is the high degree of randomness at the microstructural level. This research plan describes simulation-based methods that address both the improved analysis and the design of random composite microstructures, including advanced fibrous particulate composites, cellular porous materials, concrete, or other multi-phase materials. Specifically, the proposed research work will focus on the following three areas: 1) probabilistic characterization of material microstructures, 2) stochastic simulation of material microstructures, 3) sensitivity studies of material behavior - design issues. The sensitivity studies will identify critical sizes and clustering patterns of inclusions, volume fractions, etc. The above analyses serve two extremely important roles in engineering of composite materials: to characterize existing composite materials and to aid in improving and optimizing the design of new applications of composite materials. Because the proposed techniques are all based on finite element methods, they could potentially be applied to any phenomena that have been successfully modeled using standard (deterministic) finite element analyses, including critical stress, strain, or displacement response of mechanical structural systems, general thermoelastic behavior, material or geometric nonlinearities, or nonlinear loadings. The study is a collaborative effort between Princeton University and The Johns Hopkins University supported under NSF initiative 00-26, Exploratory Research on Model-Based Simulation doc5565 none The Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM) was created in March at Los Alamos under the auspices of the University of California Office of the President by scientists from universities, national, and government laboratories to foster multidisciplinary research in the areas of soft, hard, and biological matter. Support is provided for (1) organizing exploratory multidisciplinary workshops and communicate the results with the scientific community; (2) develop multi-institutional research teams on topics emerging from the workshops with a focus on young scientists; (3) establish ICAM research nodes at academic institutions and supporting programs for graduate and postdoctoral students, summer schools, and conferences on complex adaptive matter. The award is jointly supported by the NSF Divisions of Materials Science and Physics, as well as the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate doc5566 none Maier, David Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & Technology Digital Government: Workshop on Biodiversity Informatics Many Federal agencies are involved in research, monitoring, and management of biodiversity. Together with partners and cooperators in state and local government agencies, academia and non-profit organizations, and private industry, these agencies have a need for advancing the development of a national data and information infrastructure to better support the collection, management, dissemination and application of biodiversity data and information. To a great extent, the vision of this enhanced 21st century biodiversity data and information system is described in the Teaming with Life report of the President s Committee of Advisory in Science and Technology (PCAST) which called for developing the Next Generation of the National Biological Information Infrastructure of NBII. The development of this next generation NBII has also been endorsed by the Office of Science and Technology Policy s Committee on Environment and Natural Resources (CENR) as a key component of the multi-agency science strategy called Integrated Science for Ecosystem Challenges. The need now is to convey the informatics research issues and requirements involved in developing the next generation NBII to computer science and information technology researchers and developers in academia, industry and government laboratories. This workshop will bring together a broad spectrum of people from the CS IT community in pursuing the research agenda and applying that technology doc5567 none Deodatis In recent years, tremendous progress has been made in the fabrication of advanced materials, such as composites. As these fabrication techniques have progressed, it has become apparent that models describing behavior of these materials need improvement in order to be properly introduced into engineering design. A major obstacle in improving these models for many materials is the high degree of randomness at the microstructural level. This research plan describes simulation-based methods that address both the improved analysis and the design of random composite microstructures, including advanced fibrous particulate composites, cellular porous materials, concrete, or other multi-phase materials. Specifically, the proposed research work will focus on the following three areas: 1) probabilistic characterization of material microstructures, 2) stochastic simulation of material microstructures, 3) sensitivity studies of material behavior - design issues. The sensitivity studies will identify critical sizes and clustering patterns of inclusions, volume fractions, etc. The above analyses serve two extremely important roles in engineering of composite materials: to characterize existing composite materials and to aid in improving and optimizing the design of new applications of composite materials. Because the proposed techniques are all based on finite element methods, they could potentially be applied to any phenomena that have been successfully modeled using standard (deterministic) finite element analyses, including critical stress, strain, or displacement response of mechanical structural systems, general thermoelastic behavior, material or geometric nonlinearities, or nonlinear loadings. The study is a collaborative effort between Princeton University and The Johns Hopkins University supported under NSF initiative 00-26, Exploratory Research on Model-Based Simulation doc5568 none At all stages in the structural life-cycle, engineers are faced with the formidable challenges of complex decision-making, including open-ended and ill-structured problems, uncertain and perhaps incomplete data, and models with varying scales and levels of refinement that may be incompatible. Overall, goal of this research is to develop formal computational approaches that support comprehensive decision making in structural engineering. Specifically, these approaches will be realized in a prototype decision support system that draws on the complementary strengths of the engineer and the computer in a joint-cognitive system. Its design will be based on three major concepts- (1) optimization for evaluating alternatives and supporting what-if analyses; (2) sub-component approach to address structural model synthesis, scalability, model updating and uncertainty propagation; and (3) implementation in an object-oriented framework of high performance distributed computing. A series of simple and real-life test cases will be used to evaluate the proposed prototype doc5569 none Fluid flow through porous materials is critical for understanding and predicting the behavior of systems as diverse in function and scale as hydrocarbon reservoirs, aquifers, separation tower and reactor units with packed beds, filters, membrane separators and even catalytic converters. Recently, there has been a thrust to incorporate more physics in reservoir simulations, as well as a call for substantial improvements in computational capability through the use of High Performance Computing (HPC), in order to improve reservoir management. This need has become particularly critical as oil and gas prices have fluctuated within one year from the lowest level of the past two decades to the highest. The goal of this project is to develop an integrated simulator for flow through heterogeneous porous materials using a hierarchy of simulations. Current approaches involve the use of simulations having a single physical scale. However, recent advances in HPC have made it possible to increase significantly the problem size and to use more sophisticated approaches. The challenge is to combine the individual simulations into an integrated multiscale system that will be able to include all physical scales and will self-adjust in accordance with the input data. Emphasis will be placed on the portability, scalability, efficiency and extensibility of the final product. The proposed simulator will be an improved prediction tool for hydrocarbon reservoir management and will be ready for use on integrated grid architectures, as they become available. Flow through porous media is a multi-scale phenomenon. Microscopic scale simulation, based on Lattice Boltzmann Methods, will be used for the direct simulation of flow through porous materials. Microtomographic digital images of rock samples will be used to realistically represent the spatial domain subjected to flow, taking advantage of the flexibility of Lattice Boltzmann Methods. At the mesoscopic scale, stochastic methods will be used for the systematic isolation and study of the effects of microscopic features of rock structure on the flow field. The stochastic approach will also be used to develop a method for rock property characterization. A macroscopic simulation, based on conventional finite difference methods, will be used to test the impact of modified flow models on hydrocarbon production at reservoir scale. The macroscopic simulation will incorporate the behavior of production injection wells (which form singularities in a reservoir model) over the life of a reservoir. It will also incorporate coupling of flow with geomechanics (porosity-dependent permeability and non-Darcy coefficients). The education effort resulting from this project will emphasize the training of undergraduate students in the use of HPC resources. This research will: (i) improve our understanding of the fundamental flow mechanisms; (ii) update the model for non-Darcy flow through anisotropic porous materials; and (iii) integrate the presence of discontinuities, such as wells and fractures, in the simulation. The innovations of the proposed study include: (a) use of state-of-the-art simulations at different scales; (b) use of experimentally measured quantities to deduce the properties of the porous medium and to update flow models; (c) integration of the individual components of a set of prototype software into a seamless simulator for industrial use; and (d) application of a hybrid of shared-memory and distributed parallelism to achieve scalability on a variety of HPC architectures. The research project will be extremely valuable for the educational experience of the graduate students involved. Its educational aspect will also involve the incorporation of HPC applications in the undergraduate curricula of three Departments and the development of research projects for Research Experience for Undergraduates. It will, thus, prepare a large group of the technical workforce of our State to the useful aspects of HPC applications and to interact with HPC infrastructure doc5570 none Numerical modeling of geotechnical problems is used routinely in major construction projects. These models and simulations involve nonlinear analysis of staged construction for open-cut excavations, tunnels, slopes, and similar engineered structures. The most important and difficult part of these computer simulations is the representation of the constitutive behavior of the soil strata. In current engineering practice, the engineer selects an existing constitutive model and calibrates its parameters to match the results of few laboratory material tests. The tests do not generate information on important aspects of the soil behavior, which are relevant for a field problem. Often the results of numerical simulation using the calibrated constitutive models do not match the field measurements. Ad hoc methods are used to select and adjust the constitutive model and its properties to match field performance. We propose a novel, powerful and systematic method to calibrate the constitutive model of the soil behavior directly from field measurements. We will apply the autoprogressive method; a neural network based methodology that has been proposed by Ghaboussi and his co-workers, to the modeling of staged construction for a deep braced excavation. A neural network (NN) material model will represent the constitutive model of the soil behavior and will be calibrated using laboratory test and observed field behavior of excavations. Initially, the proposed methodology will be applied to synthetically generated field measurements from numerical simulations of deep excavations. The synthetic data will include wall lateral displacements and surface settlements. A classical bounding surface plasticity model will be used to represent clay behavior to generate the synthetic data. As a verification of the proposed approach, the soil behavior computed by the trained NN constitutive model can be compared to the classical soil model. The proposed methodology will then be applied to field measurements from deep excavations in Boston Central Artery Tunnel CA T project. The NN material will learn the constitutive model of the soil behavior directly from field measurements of deformations. The proposed approach can be applied to problems other than open-cut excavations. The approach will potentially greatly enhance the numerical modeling of geotechnical problems. Field observations and local experience can then be directly and systematically incorporated into numerical models doc5571 none Dinman The project involves two major paradigm shifts: 1) that certain cellular mRNAs use programmed -1 ribosomal frameshifting (PRF) as a post-transcriptional regulatory mechanism, and 2) that -1 PRF is used to regulate two intracellular signaling pathways (the Jun Kinase and Stress Activated Protein Kinase pathways) that play critical regulatory roles in the control of cell growth, division, differentiation and apoptosis. A bioinformatic strategy combining genome DNA database analysis and DNA microarray technology will be used to test this hypothesis. Computer analyses of the large DNA databases have been used to identify and generate databases of cellular genes that contain potential -1 PRF signals. This project utilizes a DNA microarray approach to identify cellular mRNAs that are specifically stabilized by addition of anisomycin, a drug that specifically inhibits -1 PRF and activates these two signaling pathways. Initial experiments will be done using a yeast-based system due to its experimental malleability. These will allow for testing of the general hypothesis and fine-tuning of the technology. From there, the project will continue using human cell lines. The resulting databases of anisomycin- stabilized mRNAs will be cross-referenced with the database of -1 PRF signal containing- genomic sequences from both yeast and humans. It is envisioned that this approach will identify the mRNAs that serve as the critical checkpoints in the regulation of these essential cellular signaling pathways. Positive results may have significant impact on our understanding of many of the underlying causes of birth defects, cancer and aging doc5572 none This is a cross-national project to study government offices to improve the status of women and promote sex-based equality. Five US scholars, the PIs in this award, will work with approximately 30 researchers from 11 other countries in a project that has been underway since to study law making processes pertaining to abortion, prostitution, job training and democratic representation of women, as well as the status of women s concerns in immigration, economic restructuring and welfare reform. Using the comparative method of political research, three general hypotheses will be examined in this research project (1) whether or not the success of women s movements in achieving their goals is due to intervention by women s policy offices inside the government; (2) whether or not women s movement success or women s policy office effectiveness depends on the resources of the movement and an open policy environment or both; (3) whether or not women s movements can be as successful without intervention by policy offices. The PIs have established a detailed set of operational definitions and procedures that will guide the data collection by each researcher. This plan is designed to ensure the comparability of the findings and thus enhance the project s potential contribution to empirically tested theory of institutional effectiveness and social movement impact doc5573 none The validation of structural analytical models in practice is mainly based on comparing both experimental static and dynamic data with model predictions. The objective of this project is to develop an algorithmic framework suitable for distributed processing which updates both the model structure (constitutive laws, modeling idealizations, discretization) and model parameters (material parameters) to produce a test validated model capable of predicting the response character of the structure when subjected to a wide range of inputs and design changes. The algorithmic framework is based on the Genetic Algorithm (GA) optimization paradigm. The GA paradigm loosely implements Darwin s survival of the fittest concepts and attempts to evolve better solutions to a given problem statement. The GA paradigm is being used because it does not require sensitivity information (which doesn t exist for model structure changes) and can seamlesslyhandle both continuous and discrete design variables. Several GA formulations are being developed which address the computational efficiency of the algorithm based on what experimental data is available and the model structure and parameter changes that are allowed. Even with advances in computational power, model updating can be applied to realistic problems only if a suitable approximation theory relating changes in vibration properties to changes in model structure and parameters is developed. An iterative structural dynamics modification theory is under development which provides accurate approximations in a computationally efficient manner. The major impact of this project is that upon completion a framework for developing test verified structural models which can be used with confidence in model-based simulations will be established. The ability of engineers to rely on model-based simulations will have a profound impact in a wide range of areas, including product design development, product safety evaluation, national security and infrastructure assessment doc5572 none This is a cross-national project to study government offices to improve the status of women and promote sex-based equality. Five US scholars, the PIs in this award, will work with approximately 30 researchers from 11 other countries in a project that has been underway since to study law making processes pertaining to abortion, prostitution, job training and democratic representation of women, as well as the status of women s concerns in immigration, economic restructuring and welfare reform. Using the comparative method of political research, three general hypotheses will be examined in this research project (1) whether or not the success of women s movements in achieving their goals is due to intervention by women s policy offices inside the government; (2) whether or not women s movement success or women s policy office effectiveness depends on the resources of the movement and an open policy environment or both; (3) whether or not women s movements can be as successful without intervention by policy offices. The PIs have established a detailed set of operational definitions and procedures that will guide the data collection by each researcher. This plan is designed to ensure the comparability of the findings and thus enhance the project s potential contribution to empirically tested theory of institutional effectiveness and social movement impact doc5575 none This project concerns modeling and simulating dissipation in solids. Although common forms of dissipation such as internal damping and contact damping have a very important role in dynamics, dissipation is still treated as an empiricalphenomenon without a description based on first principles. Dissipation in solids often describes conversion of kinetic energy to heat as in, for example, a sound wave passing through a solid exciting its atoms, and raising their energy level. The increased kinetic energy of the oscillations of atoms define the heat capacity of a solid with the assumption that they are in thermal equilibrium. Simulation of dissipation in a solid involves a 3-D lattice of oscillators that represent atoms connected to each other with springs. Springs represent displacement-dependent forces that result from the nonlinear potential between the atoms. The specific research tasks to accomplish this goal begin with a one-dimensional array of nonlinearly connected oscillators to investigate numerically the conditions of irreversibility and equipartitioning. The simulations will then be extended to nonideal lattices that include impurities to describe real solids to investigate their role in wavenumber (and frequency) conversion. An important aspect of this effort will be to determine the lower limit of the size of simulations to correctly describe dissipation in a solid and determine means to quantify dissipation characteristics of solids. The proposed investigation will also help clarify the theoretical requirements inherent in fuzzy damping by putting them on a more fundamental footing regarding energy equipartition and irreversible absorption of energy doc5576 none Cao Model-Based Simulation (MBS) has provided designers with flexible and cheaper means to explore design alternatives before physical part deployment. However, question of the confidence level on a particular model considering the full range of uncertainties in prediction and in physical tests has hampered wide applications, especially when dealing with real-life engineering problems. This collaborative research represents the joint efforts from two universities and General Motors for the development of a rigorous and practical approach for model validation (Model Validation via Uncertainty Propagation -- MVUP). The approach will utilize the knowledge of system variations along with computationally efficient uncertainty propagation techniques to provide a stochastic assessment of the validity of a modeling approach. The proposed methodology will be demonstrated through validating the simulation models for sheet metal forming processes. The research is expected to lead to a model validation procedure that can provide a general-purpose stochastic assessment of model validity with the least amount of statistical assumptions and possibly one physical experiment. The research results developed will have an immediate impact on simulating springback in sheet metal forming process. It is our expectation that it can be generalized to other engineering problems and will make a significant impact on how we view numerical simulations by considering all the physical and numerical uncertainties. The research results will also contribute to the development of new courses on model-based simulation, modeling and optimization of manufacturing processes, and uncertainty analysis in engineering design. This collaborative research between University of Illinois at Chicago and Northwestern University is funded under NSF 00-26, Exploratory Research on Model-Based Simulation doc5577 none Conventional finite element methods exhibit a number of shortcomings in analyzing problems that involve large deformation, high gradient, material separation, and multiple-scale phenomena. These difficulties are partially due to the regularity requirement of the finite element mesh. In agricultural and construction industries, designs for high productivity earth-moving equipment are highly desirable. The understanding of soil motion during excavation, hauling, and dumping is critical to the design of high productivity earth-moving equipment. Soil motion during the earth-moving process exhibits excessive plastic deformation in conjunction with failure mechanisms. Finite element methods have not been successfully applied to the analysis of earth-moving primarily due to an inability to effectively model large material distortion and separation. There is also a fundamental difficulty associated with the numerical solution of strain localization that often exists in analyzing earth-moving processes. Grid-based numerical methods such as finite element methods introduce a length scale, i.e., the mesh size, in a bifurcation problem. As a result, the numerical solution can be sensitively dependent on the mesh size. The multiple-scale nature of shear-band formation in geotechnical materials also adds considerable complication to conventional finite element approaches. The objective of this research is to develop a practical simulation method capable of predicting large deformation, shear-band formation, damage evolution, and material separation in geotechnical materials with applications to earth-moving processes. Special emphasis will be given to the development of an adaptive multiple-scale meshfree method that allows an interactive and continuous h- and p- model refinement in the simulation of soil motion. The local shear-band and damage mechanisms are critical to overall soil motion in earth moving processes. The ultimate goal is to capture the fine-scale local shear-band and shear tensile failure mechanisms embedded in the overall soil response. A collaboration with Caterpillar will enable research effort on experimental validation of the employed constitutive model and the proposed meshfree methods. The major objectives of this research are: 1. Based on the PI s previous research progress on meshfree methods for geotechnical materials, develop meshfree multiple-scale formulation and h- and p- adaptivity methods for application to earth-moving simulation. 2. Develop a stabilized conforming nodal integration for accelerated meshfree large deformation analysis of geotechnical materials. 3. Develop an enhanced regularization method for analysis of material instability in strain localization. 4. Collaborate with Caterpillar to verify the performance of the employed material models and the proposed meshfree methods by comparison with experimental data provided by Caterpillar. This proposed multiple-scale adaptive meshfree method extends the development from an ongoing collaboration with Caterpillar Inc. The commitment from Caterpillar to aid in validation of the soil constitutive and damage models and meshfree methods will assure the applicability of the proposed meshfree methods for practical use in analyzing industrial earth-moving problems doc5578 none During the past decade, significant changes have occurred in building design and construction: the move toward limit states design; revolution in the use of advanced computation as a tool in structural design; revolution in the use of advanced computation as a tool in structural design: and the introduction of innovative high-performance materials. At the same, time, the performance of many structures designed by traditional methods and criteria and subjected to extreme natural hazards has been judged increasingly inadequate. The problem is that in current design codes the prevention of structural collapse has been used as the primary criterion of acceptable performance. It has been found, however, that less drastic forms of structural damage as well ass the functional disruptions resulting from natural hazards can lead to economic losses that approach the cost of the structure itself. Current design practice focuses on the characteristics and behavior of a new facility. However, the continued satisfaction of the building owner and occupants depends on the performance of the building over an extended period. In the past, durability of materials usually has been addressed through material selection, detailing and finishing at the design and construction stage. This approach has not always led to satisfactory results in service, and is likely to even less successful as innovative materials are introduced into building construction. To achieve better solutions in performance-based engineering, material selection and durability issues must be better integrated into the design process. Methods to do this are only in a rudimentary stage of development. For performance-based engineering to achieve its full potential, the following ingredients must be available: computational tools to evaluate the performance of integrated systems; relations that define performance in terms of structural response quantities that engineers can compute using available methods; databases to measure uncertainties in the engineering parameters of interest; system reliability analysis procedures to provide the framework for managing these uncertainties and quantitative risk targets doc5579 none A new framework will be developed for reliable computational simulations of earthquake-induced soil liquefaction effects on soil and soil-structure systems. This is an important problem of great economic implications, which remains largely unsolved due to its complexity. Water-saturated sands and other soils that liquefy are characterized by particle interactions at their contacts as well as with pore water and with structural surfaces. The pore water changes in pressure and moves within the soil mass and out of it during and after earthquake shaking. When the sand liquefies the particles separate and the physics change. Other changes of physics include the formation of water interlayers at soil and soil-structure boundaries, instances of nonlaminar flow, and formation of shear bands, separation and other localized phenomena in the soil and at soil-structure boundaries. In the current state-of-the-art, typically homogenized constitutive relations are used in a Biot-type phase-coupled formulation. The proposed new simulation framework will be multiphysics, multiscale and adaptive, with two coupled scales used for the soil. One of these scales will remain homogenized, while the second scale will explicitly consider the particle scale in the critical regions, such as shear bands and boundary layers. The investigation will include strong experimental, mathematical and computational components, linked by a systematic use of system identification techniques, adaptive analysis techniques, and feedback loops as well as comparative visualizations of computational and physical simulations, and synthesized within a general framework. Both mathematical and computational components will include micromechanical studies needed for both homogenized and micro-scale model development and simulation, including treatment of pore water and its interaction with the soil particles. This study will initiate the development of an operational adaptive multiscale multiphysics computational simulation framework based on first principles for the study of earthquake-induced soil liquefaction and its effects doc5580 none Motivation: Reinforced Concrete Structures, RCS, are strongly heterogeneous composites, the performance of which depends on the subtle interaction of the brittle concrete and the ductile reinforcement. Under extreme seismic events, the interplay between the two components is critical for the safety and survival of RCS as demonstrated by dramatic failures recent earthquake in Turkey, Taiwan, Japan, and the USA. Objectives: It is proposed to develop a 3-dim simulation platform for the earthquake response, SPER, to model progressive failure of RCS subjected to seismic events. The parallel finite element architecture of FEMS-FETI, which was developed by the team of Dr. Farhat for the solution of large fluid-structure interaction problems, provides the basic platform for the proposed earthquake simulation environment. SPER will feature a novel nonlinear solver using incomplete elimination, and an innovative interface model to capture localized cracking and shear failure in concrete. For proof of concepts, a RC column will be examined in which quasi-static failure takes place in the form of a cascade of events, such as spalling of the concrete cover, progressive debonding of the reinforcement, yielding and rupturing of the transverse stirrups, and subsequent buckling of the axial reinforcement. As an illustrative example on system analysis, a two-span RC bridge structure will be selected to highlight the 3-dim interaction between the bridge super-and the pier and to showcase the scalability of SPER. The long-term objective envisions multilevel substructure models of elevated transportation systems exemplified by the Hanshin Express Way, which exhibited dramatic multiple segment failure during the Kobe earthquake. Methodology: The proposed SPER software will be based on a combination of multilevel multigrid, domain decomposition and incomplete nonlinear elimination methods. Roughly speaking, in these algorithms, (i) domain decomposition provides the parallelism, (ii) multilevel provides a scalable computing environment with respect to problem size and the number of processors on parallel computers, while (iii) incomplete elimination removes the sensitivity of the nonlinear solver to localized singularities. Relevance: Progressive degradation of RCS is a matter of great importance in earthquake engineering. The current design philosophy has moved to a performance-based approach which requires reliable assessment of the structural behavior beyond the elastic range. SPER is designed to simulate the seismic performance of existing RCS which have been built according to older and often non-conservative earthquake provisions, and to assist the development of rapid and cost-effective rehabilitation procedures. Outreach: SPER will be disseminated through a web site which will document the progress and outcome of the model-based earthquake simulation software of RCS. In the long haul, the intention is to eventually incorporate the 3-dim capabilities of SPER into the forthcoming NSF Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), and to develop therein an internet-based capability for earthquake simulations which may be used by colleagues in academia and the earthquake engineering community. Human Resources and Education: The exploratory research will involve three graduate research assistants from the Civil Engineering, Computer Science and Aerospace Engineering, respectively, which will be guided and supervised by the four Co-Pi s in three departments. They will work in an interdisciplinary environments that encompasses civil infrastructure systems, parallel computing technologies, and numerical solution schemes. The simulation platform SPER will be used as an education tool in a number of undergraduate and graduate courses that are being offered in the Civil Engineering Program at the University of Colorado, such as the Design of Reinforced Concrete Structures, Earthquake Engineering, and Computational Mechanics. SPER will also serve as a demonstration tool for public outreach, especially to high school teachers and K-12 students, on earthquake disaster awareness. This effort will take advantage of the new Integrated Teaching and Learning laboratory (ITLL) at the University of Colorado which has received national attention because of its novel approach to learning through discovery doc5581 none Rizzoli Funding is providing to support a workshop on shallow tropical-subtropical overturning cells (STC) and their interaction with the atmosphere. The goal of the workshop is to assess the present understanding of the structure and dynamics of the shallow tropical-subtropical overturning cells in the tropics and develop strategies for future observational and modeling studies. Through their effects on sea surface temperature the STC s have been proposed as the oceanic component of coupled modes of air-sea variability that influence the atmospheric climate on decadal time scales. Physical oceanographers and meteorologists will participate in the workshop. The funds requested from NSF will support travel expenses for graduate students, young scientists and some needy invited speakers and program committee members. This workshop will be a contribution to the CLImate VARiability and predictability (CLIVAR) program doc5562 none This effort is a collaboration between researchers at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and Stanford University. The objective is to explore and utilize advanced computational and information technologies to further develop a state-of-the-art nonlinear finite element program (CYCLIC) for earthquake ground response and liquefaction simulation. Calibrated codes for modeling and simulation of earthquake geotechnical phenomena will be combined with advanced computational methodologies to facilitate the simulation of large-scale systems and broaden the scope of practical applications. The proposed work involves three main research elements: 1. Further development of the computational program CYCLIC: This development will introduce parameter sensitivity and optimization options. The capacity of the computational program will be extended from two-dimensional (2D) to 3D simulation. In addition, a transmitting boundary feature will be included. 2. Parallel and distributed computing capability: CYCLIC will be significantly enhanced by incorporating state-of-the-art software paradigm and solver technologies that are designed for parallel and distributed computing environments. Specifically, a multitask Single-Program-Multiple-Data (SPMD) program paradigm will be employed and implemented. Furthermore, parallel sparse matrix solvers will be developed and incorporated into the computational engine to improve performance and extend the simulation capabilities. 3. Internet-based interactive web environment: In addition to the current 1D remote execution and visualization capability (http: casagrande.ucsd.edu), extensions to 2D and 3D will be facilitated through parallel computing. Novel useful features will include an extensive library of on-line input earthquake records, and a soil material library with pre-defined calibrated models for sand, silt, and clay soils. User friendliness will be addressed throughout the development process. Advanced Internet-enabled and web browsing technologies will be deployed to allow remote users to view the results in an interactive and dynamic manner. The experience gained in the development of the Internet-enabled simulation environment will be shared with other researchers and may help make many other useful computational programs widely accessible over the Internet for future applications doc5583 none Preston An astronomical sciences educational outreach workshop will be held in Cape Town, South Africa on February 2-6, . The workshop is expected to be small (about 15 to 20 attendees total). The purposes of the workshop are: 1.) to provide the attendees, especially those from the Southern African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO), with an opportunity to learn from, and collaborate with, colleagues in the field of astronomy education outreach from leading international astronomical centers; and 2.) to discuss the goals, mission, and priorities for an international astronomy educational outreach collaboration. The attendees will be made up of educational outreach staffs from observatories worldwide that are planning activities and programs for formal and informal public education that relate to their state-of-the-art telescope projects. The workshop will include representatives from the Gemini International telescopes project, Keck Telescope in Hawaii, the Japanese Subaru Telescope, the Gran Canarias Telescopio in Spain, the European Southern Observatory s Very Large Telescope in Chile, the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Texas, the Southern African Large Telescope, and the Very Large Array Radio Telescope in New Mexico. The expected outcome from the meeting is to establish a framework to inspire future international collaborations and coordinated programs. During the course of the workshop, attendees will have the opportunity to brainstorm and share ideas and philosophies. Poster papers will be presented and a compendium, following the workshop, will be published to provide information to help others who work, or wish to work, or wish to work, in similar areas. This project is funded by the Division of Astronomical Sciences and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate, the Education and Human Resources Directorate, and the Division of International Programs doc5584 none Petrenko It was found recently that a small DC bias applied across an ice metal interface can significantly modify the work of ice adhesion and interfacial shear strength. Depending on particular experimental conditions ice adhesion can be either significantly enhanced or almost eliminated by the DC bias. It is proposed to study the physical mechanisms that are responsible for these effects. The following three physical processes, which are capable of modifying ice adhesion and are the most probable mechanisms of the phenomenon will be studied in detail: 1. The electrochemical decomposition (electrolysis) of ice adjacent to electrodes. 2. Depression of the freezing point of water caused by intensive injection of ions from electrodes in the water. 3. Electrostatic energy stored in electric double layers on the ice metal interface. The inverse process of healing the interfacial damage caused by ice electrolysis will also be studied. The healing occurs due to mass transport in the ice quasi-liquid layer. Finally, Joule s heat generation and heat transfer will be measured. Experiments will be performed on pure and doped ices and on various electrode and substrate materials. Because of the project s multidisciplinary nature, a variety of experimental and theoretical methods will be applied. Among them are measurements of the work and strength of ice adhesion, several modes of scanning probe microscopy (SPM), optical spectroscopy of ions and atoms in water and ice, AC and DC electrical measurements of ice and water, and theoretical analysis. When completed, this research will provide fundamental knowledge of how direct currents and electric fields affect ice adhesion to metals. That basic knowledge can then be used in developing new de-icing and anti-icing technologies doc5585 none Sun This research is supported under the initiative Exploratory Research on Model-Based Simulation. Analytical and numerical tools are developed to efficiently predict the effective magneto-mechanical behavior of ferromagnetic Fe particle reinforced elastomer composites and their structures. The project focuses specifically on the effects of saturated magnetostriction of Fe particles, finite hyperelasticity of elastomer matrix, and the fabrication curing-induced residual stresses, on the effective constitutive behavior of these composites. Model-based simulations using newly developed meshfree numerical procedures are performed on an automobile engine mount example to demonstrate structural responses and provide reliable information for the engineering design. The modeling and simulation of magnetostrictive elastomer composite structures is intended to decrease design process time and cost, by reducing component testing, and to increase the simulation accuracy of the structures. The proposed three-dimensional material constitutive model is able to illustrate the overall magneto-hyperelastic behavior of Fe particle-reinforced elastomer composites doc5586 none Soom In modern engineering practice, systems and components that rely on frictional response are ubiquitous. Clutches, brakes and rubbing seals are well known examples from mechanical engineering. Despite the apparent simplicity of the sliding contact problem, its economic importance, and the efforts that have been devoted to research on this topic recent decades, a detailed physical understanding of many aspects of behavior remains elusive, particularly those associated with thermal effects. In this project, supported under the initiative on Exploratory Research on Model Based Simulation, we will develop a computational mechanics approach to modeling these problems based on a multi-level boundary element method which can be scaled up to solve large problems. An unsteady three-dimensional thermomechanical formulation that includes surface texture and near-surface nonlinearities will be implemented. A speed or temperature dependent friction will be employed. The computational methods, while fully three-dimensional in nature, will initially be applied to a series of rotating ring geometries that will be studied in a parallel program of physical experiments. The experiments will be compared with computational results based on full field deformation analysis of a stationary ring or disc under both constant and unsteady sliding conditions doc5587 none This project articulates a long-term vision centered around the concept of an Internet-based Meta-Model Driven Distributed Workbench (M2D2W), and aimed at revolutionizing the ways in which MBS can assist engineers in the design and analysis of complex systems. It focuses essentially on an 18-month exploratory research effort whose two main objectives are to address a number of identified obstacles and challenges, and demonstrate the credibility of MBS for the engineering of civil and mechanical systems. For this purpose, the concept of a multidisciplinary M2D2W will be researched, a prototype built, and its potential demonstrated by applying it to the aeroelastic stabilization of the Bronx-Whitestone bridge. The stabilization study is to include the planned design of a new orthotropic deck, which when installed will lighten the bridge considerably, and the investigation of several mitigation procedures in anticipation of even poorer aeroelastic response characteristics. The main technical purpose of the M2D2W is to provide an open, multidisciplinary, scalable, interactive, and Internet-based simulation environment. The outcome of this research effort is expected to promote and enable a paradigm shift from closed single discipline analysis codes, to open, multidisciplinary, Internet-based,what-if simulation environments. This in turn will contribute to transforming MBS into a practical methodology for the engineering of civil and mechanical systems doc5588 none Humphrey The objective of this research project is to test the hypothesis that stress-mediated regulation of nitric oxide (NO) and endothelin-I (ET-1) plays a key role in governing the growth and remodeling in carotid arteries that is induced by sustained alterations in blood flow. The hypothesis is to be examined by comparing morphological, immuno-histochemical, and biomechanical data at multiple time-points (I 2 hrs, 1, 3, 5 and 7 days) under four conditions: normal regulation of NO and ET- I (i.e., vasodilatation or vasoconstriction) in response to equal increases or decreases in flow versus equal vasodilation via adenosine plus a NOS-inhibitor or vasoconstriction via norepinephrine plus a ETA receptor blocker. Two potentially broad results of the proposed project are (a) the construction of a novel computer-controlled ex vivo pulsatile perfusion system for small arteries that enables testing for 7-10 days, and (b) development of a new theory of constrained mixtures for mathematically describing growth and remodeling in soft tissues. Both would be key advances, and together would provide a general experimental and theoretical foundation for future studies on vascular biology and mechanics (including tests on knockout mouse models doc5589 none Thermal processing is a fundamental part of almost all materials manufacturing processes. Thermal processing encompasses a broad range of processes in which heating or cooling are used and during which process the material may undergo some change in internal structure and or external geometry. The thermal processing industry faces a number of challenges to continued growth and international competitiveness as outlined in a technology road map for the industry, The R&D Plan for Heat Treating published by the Heat Treat Society. This planning grant is to support activities aimed at determining the feasibility of establishing an I UCRC focused on thermal processing technology. The activities will culminate in a planning meeting with industry to develop a research agenda and commitments for membership doc5590 none The objective of the proposed work is to examine the computability of solid mechanics problems in the simulation of failure. The issue is addressed in the context of the failure of slopes, foundations and excavations but we will also examine computability in other areas of failure simulation. The computation of the bearing capacity of soils is considered as a case study. Such computations have become commonplace for large projects where the ground movements associated with a supported excavation are a primary design parameter. For example, in the Central Artery Tunnel Project in Boston, which is estimated to cost $16 billion, a significant percentage of the cost is in the temporary support of excavations. The simulation of these problems is difficult because failure in these problems usually arises due to material instabilities. Material instabilities are very sensitive to the models and data of the problem, and it is not understood how accurately they can be simulated or how to bound the behavior. In the proposed work, methods for extracting bands of likely response will be developed. Techniques will be developed for modeling inhomogeneous data and obtaining the extremes in responses via anti-optimization methods. As part of this work, new finite elements for modeling arbitrary discontinuities will be developed. In these methods, discontinuities in functions and their derivatives can be modeled independent of mesh alignment so that arbitrary shear bands and cracks can be modeled. The results of this work will be applicable to a large class of simulation problems. In manufacturing, processes such as sheet-metal forming, extrusion, and metal cutting are subject to material instabilities. Material instabilities are also important in seismic analysis, where they are manifested as liquefaction, and in the fracture of structures doc5591 none We propose the construction of a tabletop tomographic device -Optical Computer Tomograph (OCT)-to generate images of small semi-translucent objects, such as biological samples and manmade objects, and to conduct a preliminary exploration of its educational and scientific potential. The Optical Computer Tomograph will enable students to create 3D and cross-sectional representations to be displayed and manipulated on the computer screen. Students will be able to navigate the virtual image of the object (e.g. a slice of an onion or a small fish) similarly to how a radiologist navigates computer-generated images for a part of the human body obtained through MRI technology. The fact that the students will see and touch the represented object, in parallel with the manipulation of computer images, is likely to make a crucial difference for their understanding. This tool could naturally be used in relation to topics in middle and high school biology (e.g. cell structure), physics (e.g. light and matter), and mathematics. Regarding the latter, the mathematical transformations entailed in reconstructing an object from a sequence of flat projections involve a set of crucial pieces of mathematical concepts used extensively in countless technological applications. Experimenting with these processes of reconstruction can make this mathematics accessible to students-from middle school students to students of medicine and engineering. While the primary purpose of the OCT is educational as a classroom-teaching tool, we can foresee its use for scientific research, to investigate questions such as: What resolution can be achieved with an Optical Computer Tomograph? Does it matter whether the source of light is coherent (laser) or not? How do people process visual projections to envision objects in space? The only application of optical tomography that we know of is a Computer Tomography Laser Mammography being developed by a company in Florida. Their focus is unrelated to microscopy. Our proposed work could lead to the development of an unexplored field of research, that of visible-light tomographic microscopy doc5592 none An aircraft-based cloud water collection system will be developed, tested, and deployed on a C-130 aircraft during the DYCOMS-II (Dynamics and Chemistry of Marine Stratocumulus) field program. The design improves upon previous aircraft-based collectors by offering an automated collection system that is capable of obtaining multiple, well-characterized cloud water samples for chemical analysis. An axial flow cyclone system provides efficient separation of cloud drops from the ambient air stream. Centrifugal force resulting from the rotational flow acts to remove cloud drops to the duct wall, where they accumulate and are removed through an extraction slot located downstream of the vanes. Cloud water samples collected in the field study will be analyzed chemically. These data will be used to investigate the effects of cloud processing on aerosol particles and the influence of aerosol physical and chemical properties on cloud formation doc5593 none Smith This award from the Division of Astronomical Sciences supports the operation of the International Gemini Observatory, under the management of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. This observatory will operate two 8-meter optical infrared telescopes in a collaboration consisting of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil. The Gemini 8-meter telescopes are designed to work effectively at optical and infrared wavelengths. They are located at sites with superlative astronomical observing conditions, one in the northern hemisphere on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and one in the southern hemisphere on Cerro Pachon in the Andean foothills of central Chile. Gemini s scientific mission is focused on fundamental questions, using new technologies and new observational and operational approaches. These key scientific themes include: 1. The origin of Planetary Systems - a detailed mapping of dusty disks around nearby stars will enable planetary formation to be studied directly. 2. The identification of Extrasolar Planets - exploiting Gemini s infrared facilities and advanced instrumentation to observe directly planets around other stars. 3. The origin of Stars - Gemini s near infrared capabilities will enable the direct study of protostars and young stars shrouded in dust. 4. The Internal Structure of Stars - high-resolution spectroscopy of nearby stars will enable the observation of stellar oscillation modes that will provide insight into the internal structure of stars. 5. The Origins of the Chemical Elements - high precision, high resolution spectroscopy of distant, faint objects will allow the study of absorption and emission lines that trace the enrichment of chemical elements as a result of stellar evolution. 6. The Origin of Quasars and Active Galactic Nuclei - high sensitivity spectroscopic observations of dense gas clouds surrounding super massive black holes will enable the masses and structures of active galactic nuclei to be studied. The award provides funds for operations and maintenance, for the development of new instrumentation and for facilities renewal. The observatory will also engage in an ambitious program of education and public outreach in Hawaii and in Chile, and provide support for similar efforts in the partner countries doc5594 none Four hydrographic sections straddling the deep western boundary current in the tropical North Atlantic will be made in an effort to locate a rapidly propagating pulse of Labrador Sea water traveling down the western boundary of the Atlantic. This transient was generated when Labrador Sea water production intensified in the late s. The objective is to obtain a quantitative estimate of the speed with which the deep ocean conveys information about climate anomalies in high latitudes to the tropics doc5595 none Seidman This proposal is a request for participant support costs ($5,000) that will enable ten young scientists (Ph.D. and post-doctoral students) to attend the International Field-Emission Symposium (IFES) at the University of Pittsburgh during July 23-29, . IFES- focuses on both the scientific and technological uses of field-emission microscopy, atom-probe microscopy, and three-dimensional atom-probe microscopy for studying a wide range of problems. The major topics covered are: (1) field emission: processes and theory; (2) new methods and instrumentation; (3) liquid metal ion sources; (4) scanning tunneling microscopy atomic force microscopy and field- ion microscopy in surface science; (5) surface science, oxidation, and nanostructures; (6) atom-probe techniques; (7) atom-probe microanalysis and materials science; and (8) vacuum microelectronics. The tentative list of invited speakers includes scientists from Japan, Germany, Jordan, Sweden, Britain, France, Belgium, and the United States. %%% The IFES Symposia bring together scientists who utilize field emission, field-ion, atom-probe field-ion, and or three-dimensional atom-probe field-ion microscopy for part of or all of their research efforts. The IFES Symposia is unique in that it is the only symposium that brings this eclectic group of scientists together for four days once every one to two years. The focus is on how these instruments can be used to solve a wide range of significant physical and technological problems. This symposium is important to researchers who use these experimental techniques because it is the only conference where the focus is primarily on these research tools and their applications to a wide range of physical problems doc5596 none As the transistors in microprocessor chips continue to decrease in size, specific materials and design issues must be addressed as outlined in the National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors. This project addresses the problem of replacing the SiO2 gate dielectric with a high dielectric constant material. This proposed work will use organometallic chemical vapor deposition to deposit HfO2, Al2O3 and HfAlxOy. Various oxygen sources including O2, H2O, and N2O will be used to optimize film properties by minimizing hydrogen and carbon contamination. A remote plasma containing the oxygen precursor and helium will also be used to create reactive oxygen containing species to optimize film properties. Carbon impurity concentration will be correlated to film properties. The proposed work will lead to an increased understanding of remote plasma organometallic chemical vapor deposition and will benefit other developing areas of research. These areas include the manufacture of displays and devices on plastic substrates, optical coatings on low temperature glasses, piezoelectrics for MEMS, and photovoltaic device applications such as antireflection coatings and transparent conductors. The primary objectives of this study are to demonstrate uniform film deposition of HfO2 , Al2O3, and HfAlxOy on Si by remote plasma enhanced OMCVD, and to extensively characterize the films by transmission electron spectroscopy, XPS, C-V measurements, among others doc5597 none Albert This Americas award will support travel and related expenses for a Planning Visit to Peru organized by Dr. James S. Albert, University of Florida, with the collaboration of one Canadian and two other Latin American researchers from several zoological disciplines. The proposed visit is to organize a faunal survey of floating meadows in the Pacaya-Samiria National Park, a highly diverse aquatic community in the Peruvian Amazon. The planning visit will help to forge a research methodology and reach agreement on specific research sites. Since the proposed research will be interdisciplinary, it is essential that the organizers have an opportunity to agree on conceptual approaches and practical field research methods. Documenting the fauna of floating meadows is essential for planning fisheries management and conservation in the Amazon, and the future project will provide baseline biodiversity and genetic data for use in future studies in systematics, ecology, and conservation biology doc5598 none PI: James B. Rawlings Institution: University of Wisconsin Proposal Number: Chemical Process Control (CPC) VI will bring together engineers and scientists from universities and industry. It will provide a forum for assessing the current status and the future needs and challenges in the field of process control. The first five CPC conferences were successful in establishing a constructive dialogue between control theoreticians and industrial practitioners. Common research goals were defined and steps were taken to narrow the gap between the theory and practice of process control. As a continuation of these efforts, CPC VI will examine recent advances in process control vis a vis the current trends in the chemical and allied industries, and attempt to define the needs and intellectual research challenges for the next decade. In addition, this CPC will explore the evolving Researcher - Manufacturer - Vendor tripartite relationship that is emerging as a viable paradigm for the efficient development and deployment of novel process control technologies for broad application in the manufacturing industries. The theme of the conference is: Future Needs and Challenges in Process Control. Specific goals of CPC IV are: - To gain an appreciation of the state of process operations and control practice in industries currently or potentially employing, and supported by, process control engineers and chemical engineers with systems backgrounds. - Present tutorial overviews for nonspecialists in each of the important areas of systems and control theory, particularly emerging and new areas. - Provide a forum for in-depth discussions between university researchers, industrial practitioners and commercial control technology vendors. - Provide practitioners and vendors with a current understanding of the new and significant tools emerging from the research community in order to stimulate wider implementation. Provide a forum for assessing promising research directions for the next decade. - Assess needs and challenges in the process industries, as well as evaluate opportunities for increased activity and application in non-traditional industries doc5599 none This award supports the travel, housing and registration costs of 15 students who would not otherwise be able to attend the 4th International Conference on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS- ) in Boston, Massachusetts, July 7-12. This conference is the premier conference on agent technology and will have associated with it many tutorials, workshops and other events given by leading researchers in this field. One valuable part of student training is participation in the excitement of an international conference where major researchers present their work and engage one another in dialogue. The goal of this proposal is to enable students who are deserving but may not have the financial resources available to attend. A committee of senior ICMAS organizers has been formed to select students based on the following criteria: 1) those presenting papers; 2) those presenting posters; 3) those presenting in workshops or other associated conference forums; and 4) those whose research could benefit from attendance doc5600 none Djorgovski This award will support the participation of junior scientists and invited speakers at the conference on Virtual Observatories of the Future. The conference will be held in Pasadena, California on June 13 - 16, . The goal of the conference is to serve as a roadmap building venue for a National Virtual Observatory. The meeting should provide a forum for starting the process of transition of a National Virtual Observatory from a vision into a well-designed, effective program, driven by the scientific needs of the community doc5601 none The Binary SuperGrating (BSG) is a novel concept enabling a new class of guided-wave devices: wavelength-selective optics, which offers customized WDM filtering, WDM coupling routing, and wavefront and spectral shaping. Conceptually, BSG can be regarded as an extension of the Bragg grating to frequency space, much like the photonic bandgap concept can be viewed as an extension of the Bragg grating to 3D real space. The BSG utilizes a simple two-level equal-size implementation, turning this constraint into an asset: fabrication tolerances are greatly eased, and performance is virtually immune to process non-linearities and defects. The BSG concept can readily be applied to a wide variety of optical devices and functionalities, with greatly improved and often unprecedented performance characteristics. We propose to build on our first conceptual and experimental demonstrations, to develop the BSG concept into an enabling technology for a broad class of wavelength-selective devices. Using passive channel waveguides, we will implement BSG designs synthesized with techniques adapted from digital signal processing, and explore the corresponding performance limits. In the active regime, we will implement self-collimated multi-wavelength lasers (SCMWLs), to examine BSG behaviour with complex refractive index. We will also develop pattern-transfer methods that would permit mass-production of BSG devices, facilitating industry acceptance. It is our hope that these efforts will produce the broadened understanding necessary to take full advantage of this exciting new technology doc5602 none This is study of the structure and dynamics of unsteady, partially premixed flames including liftoff and stabilization mechanisms associated with triple flames and the effects of stretch and curvature on flame structure and stability. The experimental effort uses established nonintrusive optical diagnostics such as laser Doppler velocimetry, particle image velocimetry, high-speed videography, C2 radical imaging, and holographic interferometry. Numerical simulations of the flames employ higher-order time-accurate multidimensional algorithms incorporating detailed chemical kinetics models for oxidation of such fuels as hydrogen, methane, and n-heptane. Hydrodynamic stretch effects on flames are studied in a counterflow burner, while the contribution of curvature to stretch is investigated in a slot burner. Instabilities in triple flames induced by buoyancy or shear are investigated; simulations suggest that these occur as functions of flow rate. Computationally, a conserved scalar approach based on a modified mixture fraction is used to characterize state relationships doc5603 none Sean F. Wu, P.I. Wayne State University NSF Proposal No. Laser-Assisted Prediction of Acoustic Radiation and Scattering This research aims at developing a highly accurate and efficient methodology for predicting acoustic radiation and scattering from an arbitrary object. A non-invasive three-dimensional laser Doppler velocimetry (LDV) is used to scan and measure velocity vectors of suspended particles in an insonified fluid medium over a control surface that completely encloses the structure under consideration. The measured velocity vectors are taken as input to an explicit integral formulation to calculate the acoustic pressure field. This methodology is superior in that: (1) it correlates the field acoustic pressure directly to the particle velocity distribution; (2) it provides unique solutions for acoustic pressures in all frequencies; and (3) it enables one to solve transient acoustic radiation problems conveniently. Applications of this new technology can be found in predicting sound radiation and scattering from any structure. In particular, it is suitable for a flexible or lightweight structure, or for a structure that does not allow for conventional contact measurement devices. This project is carried out jointly between Mechanical Engineering Department and Electrical & Computer Engineering Department of Wayne State University. This joint research has a far-reaching impact on computational acoustics. It is expected to revolutionize the current way of calculating acoustic radiation and scattering from an arbitrary object, and significantly improve the efficiency in numerical computations. This is especially true for a complex structure for which the fluid-loading effect must be considered. Applications of this new technology can be found in the analyses of the sound field generated by an underwater or ground vehicle. Using this new method, engineers can assess the performance of noise transmission into an aircraft cabin or vehicle passenger compartment, or vehicle pass-by noise levels. The knowledge thus gained will enable them to tackle aircraft and vehicle vibration and noise problems in a cost-effective manner doc5604 none Sarewitz, Daniel R. Extreme events, ranging from earthquakes to epidemics to computer viruses, cause major societal disruption. Yet extreme events are also normal aspects of evolving complex systems, and may be beneficial (e.g., floods contribute to ecosystem health). Scientific approach to understanding, preparing for, and responding to extreme events are Balkanized among disciplines, institutions, and sectors. In this project, we are convening experts involved with extreme events from a variety of perspectives, as a first step toward developing an integrated research and policy approach to address the implications of extreme events in an increasingly global society doc5605 none Drs. L. Kidder and S. Teukolsky will carry out research in numerical gravitation, and will develop new algorithms for supercomputer simulations of solutions to the Einstein Equations. The focus is to track the coalescence and merger of binary black hole systems and to calculate the gravitational waveform emitted by such processes. The investigators will apply the computational technique of pseudospectral collacation to this problem. The study of reliable waveforms is particularly timely. The theoretical solution of this problem is remarkably difficult. While the technique used in this study are new for this application, it has proven successful in many other areas, and shows much promise for improving computational efficiency in this area. The radiation processes under study are the primary target for gravitational wave detectors, such as LIGO, currently under construction doc5606 none Drake This Study will address the effects that extended cold storage conditions such as those encountered in extended shelf life refrigerated foods (cold stress, cold acid stress) have on subsequent growth characteristics, heat tolerance, acid tolerance, freeze thaw stability, and virulence factor expression of E. coli O157:H7. Studies will be conducted in broth as well as in a model food system, skim milk. A better understanding of the effects of cold storage and cold acid storage on subsequent growth characteristics and virulence of E. coli O157:H7 will enable design of food processing and storage regimes to minimize risk and will expand knowledge of cold adaptation of this foodborne pathogen doc5607 none The primary objective of the proposed research is to construct a nanoscale molecule sorter powered by F1-ATPase (see illustration below). Five milestone goals have been established as part of this overall objective: 1.) Evaluate the physical and chemical properties affecting the binding elution of target molecules to the collector; 2.) Design and fabricate the collector portion of the molecule sorter, and demonstrate its ability to specifically bind molecules; 3.) Design and fabricate the storage portion of the collector; 4.) Integrate of F1-ATPase with fabricated structures to assemble the final molecule sorter; and 5.) Demonstrate the functionality of the integrated molecule sorter, and evaluate its performance and efficiency. The molecule sorter will consist of two parts: the active collector and the connected storage units. The engineered nanoscale collector will be coated with a-green fluorescent protein (GFP) IgG molecules, and will be actuated by F1-ATPase motors positioned in nickel posts. This collector unit will remove GFP from the surrounding solution, and transfer them into the storage units (containing an oil-based medium) through changes in hydrophobicity and electrical potential at the liquid interface. Connective conduits lined with electrodes will generate an electric gradient, and thus act as an osmotic pump to concentrate GFP in the end reservoirs. The rate and efficiency of collection will be evaluated using fluorescent imaging of the end reservoirs. Construction of this device will establish an adaptable system for constructing intracellular-based molecule sorters capable of directly interfacing and utilizing cell physiological responses doc5608 none The flow towards noncircular wells is asymmetrical; however, this asymmetrical flow is often approximated as symmetrical flow to aid in design calculations. For example, the rectangular cross section of a prefabricated vertical drain (PVD) is often converted to a circular cross section during design. Unfortunately, the impact of this conversion is not fully understood. Regardless of whether PVDs are used for soil improvement or remediation, the rectangular cross section is converted to a circle regardless of the application. Many different formulations for this conversion have been developed; yet no definitive research exists that clearly shows one formulation to be superior to the others. An experimental program is proposed to study the hypothesis that equivalent diameter formulations should be based upon equivalent flow rates instead of equipotentials. It is anticipated that the equivalent diameter well with the cross-sectional area closest to that of the PVD will yield the most similar flow rates. The results of this proposed research can be used in future research efforts of interest to this researcher and others. For example, studies on the use of PVDs to remediate soils in the vadose zone and the impact of heterogeneities on PVD remediation systems are planned. Selecting the appropriate equivalent diameter will be an important part of these studies, and will be especially important when performing mathematical modeling. In addition to being of use to researchers, engineers can use the information provided by this study when using PVDs for soil improvement and remediation doc5609 none This grant provides funding for the development of fundamental understanding of the mechanics of material removal during Chemical Mechanical Polishing (CMP), which is a necessary process step in fabrication of multilevel metallizations integrated circuits (IC) with sub 0.5 micron line dimensions. The project will utilize a combination of experimentations and analytical efforts. Nanoscale indentation and single grit scratch experiments will be conducted at the laboratory scale using the interference of an atomic force microscope (AFM) tip with the workpiece. The observations from these AFM tests will be synthesized in a mechanistic model of the CMP process. The model will be validated against experimental observations from a full scale CMP operation conducted in collaboration with industrial partners. Both uniform as well as patterned wafers will be tested, and the model will be further refined in view of the feature scale and wafer scale measurements taken during these CMP tests. Detailed parametric study will be conducted, and the validated model will then be utilized to seek new design avenues for further improving the CMP technique. In particular, the effects of various process parameters on the degree of nonuniformity (die scale and wafer scale) of local material removal rate will be investigated. If successful, the research will facilitate CMP technology development in three different avenues: (1) It will aid in identifying the dominant causal relationships between the material and process parameters, and the effectiveness (measured by quality and integrity of the finished surface) and efficiency (measured by material removal rate) of a CMP process. Such a mechanistic description will provide a fundamental understanding of the material removal process in CMP, and facilitate process optimization. (2) The model, through its mechanistic description, will aid in alleviating impediments and will facilitate a much more versatile use of experimentally gathered data for realistic CMP processes. (3) In addition to providing a more fundamental understanding of the CMP process, the value of the experimental and modeling efforts lie in its enhanced capability for exploration of the design space . Currently, many process design options (e.g. optimum selection of slurry and pad properties) remain a trial and error procedure due to lack of reliable models depicting those effects. The model will aid in identifying such unexplored process parameters, and guide toward new and novel avenues for designing CMP processes. This capability to explore new design avenues may have the potential to provide a new impetus to effective and efficient designs of CMP processes and related equipment doc5610 none Gould The object of this research is to explore the failures of two types of critical industrial facilities during the Kocaeli(Izmit) Earthquake in Turkey. The general tasks are: to study the nonlinear time history response of cooling towers and stacks which failed during the earthquake; to compare the predicted response with the field observations; and to evaluate the adequacy of current design procedures. The research will be conducted in phases, initially considering similar structures in the U.S. for which data is obtainable. Then, the research will focus on the actual structures in Turkey, for which one type will be selected for a more detailed evaluation. The failures of the stacks are thought to have initiated in the vicinity of large holes in the shell wall while the cooling towers suffered column failures. In the initial studies using relatively simple models, the dynamic characteristics of the representative structures will be determined so that a response spectrum analysis can be performed, followed by a local stress analysis. For the structure selected for further evaluation, the dynamic analysis will be carried out considering the nonlinear characteristic of the system doc5611 none The main objective of this research is to develop basic knowledge and to design the high capacity equipment for the new ultrasonic technology of recycling ground tire rubber (GRT). It has been discovered in the earlier research that through the application of certain levels of ultrasonic amplitudes in special devices, the three-dimensional network in reinforced and non-reinforced vulcanized elastomers can be broken down leading to devulcanization within a short period of time of the order of a few seconds. As the most desirable consequence, ultrasonically treated GRT becomes soft thereby enabling the rubber to be reprocessed, shaped, and revulcanized alone or in blends with virgin rubbers and plastics. The study outlines a series of tasks enabling: (1) the design of new equipment for continuous ultrasonic devulcanization of GRT; (2) the identification of the effect of powerful ultrasound on structure and properties of model unfilled and carbon black filled styrene-butadiene, natural, butadiene, and EPDM rubber vulcanizates and their mixtures which are the constituents of GRT; (3) to reveal the effect of carbon black on the ultrasonically induced mechanochemical reactions in each model rubber and their mixtures; (4) to investigate the effect of ultrasonic treatment of each model rubber vulcanizates on the mechanical properties of their blends with virgin rubber upon revulcanizations; (5) to establish the optimal processing conditions enabling one to obtain the devulcanized GRT-based materials with high mechanical properties; (6) to develop the theory of rubber network degradation and to develop computer simulations of the reactors as an aid to scaling the process doc5612 none Many pharmaceutical products are manufactured by batch and fed-batch fermentation processes with complex reaction mechanisms. Slight changes in operating conditions during critical periods of the batch run may have significant influence on growth and differentiation of organisms, and impact final product quality and yield. Consequently, improvements in real-time process monitoring, fault diagnosis, and process control will enhance product quality and yield, and reduce the number of rejected batches. An objective of this project is to develop batch process monitoring methods based on functional data analysis. The project will entail working with Abbott Labs engineers to develop and test such rigorous statistical methods for looking at the trajectories of process data. When used in a real-time vs. retrospective fashion, the data analysis methods can enable (1) improved end point prediction and (2) the prescription of corrective action to reacquire high yield and desirable product properties when a batch or fed-batch process strays off course doc5613 none PI and CO-PI propose to design, grow, and characterize quantum-well dots. They propose to grow this novel structure by growing InP stressors on the top of barrier GaAs surface by molecular-beam epitaxy. The InP stressors modulate the quantum-well band-gap with local strain generating confinement potential. InP islands are formed due to a strain-induced 2D-3D transition, taking place, because of lattice misfit between the GaAs barrier and InP layer. They will characterize the structure by photoluminescence, excitation spectum, and time-resolved pump-probe technique. They will optimize the structure following his experimental results. Since this is an untested and novel idea, a SGER grant is appropriate and crucial for them to obtain preliminary results on the quantum-well dots, and therefore to compete for NSF funding in the future. These properly-designed quantum-well and double-quantum-barrier dots have applications in efficient THz emission and detection doc5614 none Data mining is one of the very promising information technologies today. We are concentrating our research into two new topics in data mining. First, instead of optimizing construction of a complete data mining model, parts of the model are incrementally constructed as guided by user feedback in order to reduce the long construction times of data mining models. The methods enable interactive response times, and this research is expected to result in a paradigm shift away from batch-oriented mining to interactive data mining. Second, data mining has traditionally been performed over static datasets, and mining algorithms could afford to read the input data several times. This traditional approach is referred to as offline data mining. This research addresses the online mining of high-speed data streams. The goal is to develop data mining systems that never stop working, incorporate new records immediately as they arrive, and update current and construct new models continuously. This new approach is referred to as online data mining. Anticipated applications include the discovery of patterns in network data, click-stream data, text data, and or biological databases doc5615 none This Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) project will focus on heat exchangers made of thin-walled co-extruded nylon tubing woven into tube bundles. Polymer heat exchangers are an attractive alternative to metal heat exchangers in large-volume applications where corrosive fluids are present, weight is important, or integration with other components is desirable. The collaborative GOALI project of the University of Minnesota, DuPont, and ThemoKing aims to solve key material, design and manufacturing problems that must be addressed before polymer heat exchangers can be successfully commercialized for cooling automotive and truck components and refrigerated containers. Fundamental issues that will investigated are failure mechanisms in the coextruded tubes, design and manufacture of tube manifolds, and characterization of convective heat transfer in unique woven tube bundles. Tube failure, particularly delamination, will be characterized in terms of the relationship between loads, strain, temperature and time. A modification of laminated plate theory will be applied to predict failure in tubing of various layered constructions from limited creep DMA data. Design guidelines and manufacturing techniques for tubesheet and tube bundle manifolds will be established using analytic and experimental approaches. Experimental measurements of heat transfer in prototype air-to-liquid heat exchangers will result in generally applicable Nusselt number heat transfer correlations that can serve as the basis for design of woven tube bundles. The models and design tools resulting from this research are expected to play a key role in the successful commercialization of polymer heat exchangers for the transportation industry doc5616 none The conference is designed to provide a forum for specialists in Dynamical Systems and bordering disciplines to meet, exchange ideas and present their research. The field of Dynamical Systems is acquiring increasing importance because of the connections to other disciplines. Some of these connections have been developed over the past, and there are new applications that are constantly found. Traditionally Dynamics has been related to Analysis, Geometry, Number Theory, Differential Equations. More recent applications are found in molecular biology, population dynamics, theory of communications and economical sciences. Some examples include such recently established and still emerging directions of influence as nonlinearity, chaos, complexity, information flow, internet and self-similar data traffic. The conference continues the tradition of the Southwest Dynamics meetings of which it will be the fourth Southwest Dynamics Workshop. The previous three conferences took place in Austin (U. of Texas, ), Tucson (U. of Arizona, ) and Denton (U. of North Texas, ) respectively. The meeting will take place on the main campus of the University of Southern California on 17--19 November . There will be several 1 hour plenary talks and a larger number of more technical 30 minute talks. Most of the participants will come from the Southwest and Northern Mexico and will include a considerable number of postdocs and graduate students in dynamics an adjacent scientific areas doc5617 none The Birmingham Public School District has established a strong infrastructure in support of its thrust to improve the science, mathematics, and technology (SMT) education for all of its K-12 students. The goals and objectives of the Birmingham Urban Systemic Program (BUSP) are to enhance the system s capacity to provide a rich and challenging curriculum in that regard. To accomplish these goals and objectives, the District intends to incorporate the activities proposed in the USP into those that are outlined in its new Strategic Plan. This design strategy will provide further assurance that the state s higher requirements for science and mathematics will come to fruition. Efforts will be purposefully focused at the classroom level as prescribed by the Alabama State Course of Study. A plan is operable in the District to acquire standards-based instructional materials for all grades. Extensive professional development will be provided for all teachers and all schools via embedded-day activities. Special sessions, task-specific workshops, and academic-year and summer institutes will be offered through the new McWane Professional Development Center. Longstanding partnerships with local colleges and universities will assist the District in delivering SMT content as prescribed in the Alabama State Course of Study doc5618 none Skitka, Linda University of Illinois - Chicago The principal investigator intends to use the Elian Gonzalez controversy as a means of testing the moral mandate hypothesis. Most social psychological research has shown that if people judge the procedure to be fair, then they will judge the outcome of that procedure to be fair. The moral mandate hypothesis suggests that if people have strong a priori beliefs concerning what constitutes a fair outcome, then their evaluation of the outcome trumps any judgment concerning the procedure. For example, if a person feels that Elian Gonzalez should return to Cuba, then the person will deem the granting of asylum to be unfair no matter what procedure is followed. The principal investigator will collect a random sample of adults before the resolution of the Gonzalez situation in order to locate persons who do or do not have a moral mandate with regard to this issue. Those who do are predicted to base their fairness estimates on the outcome. Those who do not are predicted to base their fairness estimates on the procedure doc5619 none Gurer, Denise Association of Computing Machinery Special Project: Scholarship and Travel Grants for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing , ACM, Denise Gurer, PI On September 14-16, , the third Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) is being held at the Sheraton Hyannis Hotel in Hyannis, Massachusetts. The meeting is a technical conference presenting talks by successful women in the computing field, short technical presentations by a range of conference participants, as well as panels, workshops, and birds-of-a-feather sessions. This grant provides travel costs and registration expenses for approximately eighty people in computing and related fields who otherwise would be unlikely to attend. The awards are made to selected advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and people early in their professional careers. Cost sharing by the institutions represented covers part of the costs for many of the participants doc5620 none In this United Engineering Foundation conference in Singapore (Sept. 24-28, ) the recent progress in both fundamental aspects and applications of bulk metallic glasses will be discussed. Topics include the atomic structure, materials synthesis, glass-forming ability, and physical, chemical, thermal, and mechanical properties of metallic glasses. Metallic glasses with amorphous structures were first synthesized by Paul Duwez in the early s using rapid solidification techniques. A breakthrough in the design of metallic glasses was first made in in Japan when bulk quantities of material were successfully synthesized with multi-element systems. The critical cooling rates of these bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) containing multiple alloying elements approach those of oxide glasses. At present, BMGs based on Zr, Ti, Ni, Fe, Co, Al, Mg, and rare-earth elements have all been successfully synthesized. %%% BMGs constitute a new and exciting class of metallic materials with interesting properties for structural and functional use. For the past decade, substantial advances have been achieved in understanding the glass forming ability and synthesizing new bulk amorphous alloys containing multi-components. BMGs with cross-sectional thickness greater than 3 cm can now be produced by conventional melting and casting techniques. Despite this technological success, fundamental understanding of phase stability, impurity effects, localized shear band formation, and non-Newtonian flow behavior is still lacking doc5621 none MICRO-MACRO MODELING OF THE EXTERNAL STRENGTHENING OF CONCRETE WITH FIBER REINFORCED POLYMER The objective of the project is to develop innovative short-term tests that would allow the development of analytical models for accurate prediction of long-term performance of retrofitted highway bridge structures. Specifically, the interfacial bond between the concrete substrate and the FRP composite material used for external strengthening must remain durable for the specified lifetime over a range of mechanical loads, temperature cycles, moisture diffusion and de-icing salt ingress. The technical approach for developing a bond durability prediction methodology consists of understanding the fundamental mechanisms of degradation at the bond interphase using nano-scale fractograhic inspection and incorporating these in analytical models using global-local substructuring to bridge length-scales doc5622 none This grant provides funding for the development of an automated and cost-effective control system to minimize occupational health and safety risks posed by microorganisms and excessive reliance on biocides in metalworking fluid (MWF) systems. First, the research aims to understand the mechanisms that permit membrane-based microfiltration technology to remove microorganisms and associated endotoxin from biocide-free MWFs without disrupting chemical integrity. The research will examine the interactions between MWF chemistry, membrane transport, and ingredient retention. Second, the research will examine a novel application of flow cytometry technology for real-time microbial detection in MWFs. The research will evaluate the physicochemical conditions that maximize flow cytometry performance in MWF applications. Third, an optimal control system will be developed based on flow cytometry and microfiltration. The control system will utilize artificial intelligence methodologies on-line to dynamically predict the required microbial removal rate and optimal microfiltration operating parameters. The control system aims to eliminate microbial-based health risks to approximately 1.2 million workers in the United States. The system would also significantly improve the competitive position of the United States machine tool industry by reducing environmental impact, lowering total machining costs, and minimizing MWF performance variability by enabling contaminant removal and recycling. These considerations are of increasing importance since legislative pressure is mounting at the national level to compel the industry to address the environmental and health risks associated with MWF applications (e.g., EPA Metal Products and Machinery Rule and NIOSH Recommended MWF Exposure Criteria). Recent studies have also demonstrated that total MWF system costs, including acquisition, disposal, and maintenance, are significant in machining, in many cases far-outweighing the cost of tooling. Owing to the technical difficulty removing MWF from manufacturing processes, these drivers will continue to push industry demand for biocide-free microbial control systems and recycling of MWFs to reduce health risks, cost, environmental impact, and performance variability doc5623 none Onuchic The success of energy landscape theory and the funnel concept during the last several years has been tremendous and has changed the general understanding of the protein folding problem. It has been demonstrated that topological effects are central in determining the structural details of the transition state ensemble for protein folding. Most of these results, however, have been obtained with C-alpha off-lattice models with energetically unfrustrated sequences. Although these models are able to predict the geometrical features of the folding mechanism, they are unable to determine appropriate energetic properties, such as folding barrier heights and stability of the native state or intermediates. In this project, new simulation and analytical methods will be developed with the help of a family of off-lattice minimalist models with different levels of detail in the protein representation, varying from simple C-alpha chains to all-atom descriptions, and various choices of potentials. By exploring the folding at different levels of detail, a quantitative understanding of how the interplay between energetics and topology controls folding mechanisms will be obtained. To verify the applicability of these models, a suite of different proteins, with different levels of complexity, will be studied. Some of these proteins have the same native structure but show distinct folding mechanisms. Proteins comprise the machinery that controls most of the functions in living organisms. The fact that their activity depends on their three-dimensional structure and dynamics and not directly on their amino-acid sequences presents novel conceptual challenges for studying protein function. Energy landscape theory and the funnel concept are at the center of the theoretical framework needed for a quantitative understanding of the protein folding question. This theoretical endeavor is now sufficiently advanced that it is possible to establish a quantitative understanding of the protein folding problem. The initial connections between this approach and experiments, that demonstrate that topology plays a central role in determining the folding mechanism, are encouraging. By further improving the theoretical and computational efforts, a quantitative understanding of how the interplay between energetics and topology controls the folding will be obtained. Such advances are needed, if one hopes to answer a central question: at what level will a model be sufficiently good to predict the folding mechanism of a protein for which no experimental information is available? This project is supported by the Molecular Biophysics Program in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences in the Directorate for Biological Sciences and the Division of Physics in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate doc5624 none This proposal concerns the study of flexible structures, such as disk breaks, magnetic tape drives and computer hard disks, whose mechanical behavior is significantly affected by frictional contact conditions. Of specific interest in the proposed research is the analytical modeling and computational implementation of novel friction laws (including wear) for the study of vibratory phenoomena such as squealing and chattering, which depend crucially on the modeling on the material interfaces doc5625 none Cowie, Lennox L. Submillimeter Studies of the Cosmological Star Formation and AGN Histories This work has as its goal the analysis of new information about the dust-obscured star formation and AGN activity at high-redshifts which was recently discovered with the Submillimeter Common User Bolometer Array (SCUBA) on the 15 m James Clark Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii. The project scientists plan to extend their observations to cover galaxy counts for sources in the flux range of 0.5 to 20 mJy at submillimeter wavelengths. They expect these low flux sources to comprise the bulk of the light seen in the far infrared background. They will use deep centimeter radio maps from the VLA and hi-resolution, hard x-ray images from the Chandra satellite to determine the multi-wavelength properties of these distant, heavily dust-obscured sources. This data in turn will be used to identify objects for further study with the Keck, Subaru, and Gemini telescopes. These studies focus on the properties of galaxies during an interval of cosmic time when most of the stars we see today were being formed. In the early stages of formation, stars are enshrouded in dust and this dust blocks visible light. However, very energetic electromagnetic radiation, such as X-rays, or very low energy radiation, such as submillimeter (far infrared) or radio waves can penetrate the dust and allow us to see the stars as they form. The newly developed SCUBA detector at the 15 m JCMT in Hawaii can be used to detect very faint submillimeter sources, which may be dust enshrouded stars (starbursts) or may be active galactic nuclei (AGNs), by using intervening clusters of galaxies to lens , or enhance the brightness, of the faint sources. By combining these observations with ones in the X-ray region (from the Chandra satellite) and other observations in the radio region (using the VLA) Cowie and Barger will be able to sort out the starbursts from the AGNs and determine the relative importance of the two types of activity for galaxies in the early stages of evolution. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc5626 none Deficiencies exist in the current understanding of sulfate attack reaction kinetics and damage mechanisms, and this lack of understanding of reaction fundamentals limits the production of concrete that is expected to exhibit long-term durability in sulfate containing environments. A multi-disciplinary team has planned an integrated research program employing a combination of x-ray techniques to improve current understanding of sulfate transport and damage mechanisms in cement-based materials. Under this proposal, the application of three-dimensional x-ray microbeam diffraction mapping, x-ray microtomography (i.e., very high resolution computed tomography or CAT scanning), and soft x-ray microscopy for non-destructive, in situ examination of sulfate damage will be developed doc5627 none This project develops a decision support tool for robust airline crew scheduling. A model that solves the airline crew-scheduling problem and captures two objectives the crew cost and the number of crews that can be swapped in operations will be devleoped. The former cost forms the traditional objective function and the latter cost is a measure of robustness since schedules with many swappable crews are likely to be robust. Two methodologies to solve the model are proposed. A Lagrangian decomposition approach relaxes the robustness constraints and iteratively solves the crew-scheduling problem with different objective coefficients. A parallel branch-and-cut algorithm for solving these crew-scheduling problems will be developed. The second approach uses subgradient optimization and the new concept of computing a dual of an integer program. An algorithm for computing such a dual vector will be developed and implemented. The proposed methodology will yield crew schedules that can potentially reduce operational crew cost. The operational crew cost increases up to seven times due to various disruptions in the flight schedule. Using robust crew schedules obtained by this research can significantly reduce this factor and hence it can provide substantial benefit to airlines. The proposed methodologies use the concept of dual vectors for integer programs. In this case they are used as a subgradient but it can also be used for sensitivity analysis, pricing, and producing alternative optimal solution to integer programs doc5628 none The Oklahoma City Public Schools proposes a courageous project to improve math, science, and technology achievement for all students. This objective will be accomplished by implementing three driving goals, all resting on a standards-based curriculum and district wide reform agenda referencing the Malcolm Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence guidelines. Goal one of this initiative is to enhance the quality of teaching and learning for all students. This goal concentrates on professional development and will be accomplished through extensive teacher pre-service and in-service plan in collaboration with four partnering universities, Langston University, Oklahoma State University, University of Central Oklahoma, and University of Oklahoma. Goal two will refine and further develop the standards-based mathematics, science, and technology curriculum and improved curriculum alignment, both vertically and horizontally. This will be accomplished with ninety (90) school-based teams, each at a school site working with a cadre content coaches and professional consultants. Goal three will use continuous instructional improvement strategies in classrooms to enable students, assisted by teachers, to research and measure their own progress and identify immediately areas of accomplishment and measures for continuous improvement. Special measurement tools and techniques will assess individual student progress, strategies, and class performance. All goals will aim arrows at the same target of closing gaps in student academic achievement. The cost share for this project is $2,481,250 doc5629 none Fiber reinforced polymers (FRP) have been examined as a convenient and cost-effective means of strengthening unreinforced masonry (URM) structures. However, seismic design in the U.S. is based almost entirely on the assumption that the structural system provides a ductile failure mode. One alternative is to combine the desirable traits of conventional steel systems with those of the new FRP systems. The proposed research includes investigating and defining the failure modes associated with a combined FRP Ductile connection at the pier interface. Several connection methods are proposed for use with both concrete and clay masonry. A predictive model based on experimental and analytical work for the pullout capacity of the ductile anchor will be developed. A series of connection tests will be conducted on proposed techniques. Furthermore, a series of sixteen pier tests are proposed with eight concrete masonry specimens and eight clay masonry specimens. From the experimental work, a predictive analytical model for the in-plane strength and ductility of the hybrid FRP Ductile connection will be developed. A predictive model for in-plane shear strength of FRP strengthened piers will be defined. This will include a review of existing experimental work and analytical modeling of various aspect ratios doc5630 none This project supports a two-day workshop addressing topics in the general area of hierarchical scientific visualization. This includes topics such as hierarchical data representation and approximation; using hierarchical data representations for the purposes of interactive visualization emphasizing level-of-detail, adaptive, and view- dependent strategies; hierarchical data representations as they relate to distributed, remote, and collaborative visualization applications; and hierarchical visualization in immersive and virtual reality environments. The workshop will take place at Lake Tahoe, NV, on October 15-17, doc5631 none The objective of this proposal is the feasibility study of fundamental control mechanisms for agent-based systems that facilitate network resource management and traffic control. The primary emphasis is on orchestrating the work of multiple intelligent mobile agents such that the resulting collaboration scales well with the size, the resource availability, and the dynamics of the infrastructure. The proposed research investigates the feasibility of autonomously adapting the size of the agent population as a function of parameters that describe properties of the infrastructure directly or indirectly. The underlying idea is the separation of network centric functions from the nodes into a mobile sub-layer. The researchers expect that this approach will yield a more scalable architecture for solving a variety of different network centric problems. To facilitate this approach, thet have defined fundamental mechanisms such as agent cloning, agent merging, knowledge acquisition, and agent migration. It is through the use of these mechanisms that the researchers attempt to show the feasibility of integrating the intelligent mobile agent paradigm into system-level tasks. The proposed work will involve a formal analytical study of the behavior of the agent population as a function of properties of the infrastructure and computational progress of individual agents. The analysis will further be based on carefully constructed simulation experiments and the emulation of a large distributed network environment. This proposal intentionally disregards several issues of agent-based systems, such as knowledge representation, fault tolerance, and security, and focuses on the design and analysis of the fundamental mechanisms. We believe that the limited scope of the proposed project and its intrinsic exploratory nature makes it an ideal candidate for the Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) program doc5632 none Barger, Amy J. Submillimeter Studies of the Cosmological Star Formation and AGN Histories This work has as its goal the analysis of new information about the dust-obscured star formation and AGN activity at high-redshifts which was recently discovered with the Submillimeter Common User Bolometer Array (SCUBA) on the 15 m James Clark Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii. The project scientists plan to extend their observations to cover galaxy counts for sources in the flux range of 0.5 to 20 mJy at submillimeter wavelengths. They expect these low flux sources to comprise the bulk of the light seen in the far infrared background. They will use deep centimeter radio maps from the VLA and hi-resolution, hard x-ray images from the Chandra satellite to determine the multi-wavelength properties of these distant, heavily dust-obscured sources. This data in turn will be used to identify objects for further study with the Keck, Subaru, and Gemini telescopes. These studies focus on the properties of galaxies during an interval of cosmic time when most of the stars we see today were being formed. In the early stages of formation, stars are enshrouded in dust and this dust blocks visible light. However, very energetic electromagnetic radiation, such as X-rays, or very low energy radiation, such as submillimeter (far infrared) or radio waves can penetrate the dust and allow us to see the stars as they form. The newly developed SCUBA detector at the 15 m JCMT in Hawaii can be used to detect very faint submillimeter sources, which may be dust enshrouded stars (starbursts) or may be active galactic nuclei (AGNs), by using intervening clusters of galaxies to lens , or enhance the brightness, of the faint sources. By combining these observations with ones in the X-ray region (from the Chandra satellite) and other observations in the radio region (using the VLA) Cowie and Barger will be able to sort out the starbursts from the AGNs and determine the relative importance of the two types of activity for galaxies in the early stages of evolution. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc5633 none In recent years, performance-based seismic design methodologies have been developed with increasing success for steel, concrete, masonry, and timber structures. However, there are few performance-based design guidelines in the U.S. for composite steel concrete structures. This proposal outlines research on establishing a methodology for performance-based design of composite structures. To focus the work, the research will apply specifically to frames incorporating concrete-filled tube (CFT) beam-columns. In performance-based design, critical force and deformation design parameters are used to quantify building performance for an anticipated seismic hazard level. The primary objectives of this research are: 1) assess seismic demand in composite CFT frames through a set of parametric frame analyses; 2) consolidate worldwide test results in CFT beam-columns, connections, and frames, and use these results to assess capacity of key components of CFT frames; 3) use the quantified assessments of demand and capacity for all design parameters to formulate a reliability-based performance-based design methodology for composite structures, specifically CFT frames. These frame analyses and the performance-based design methodology together will yield valuable information required for understanding the seismic demands of composite CFT frames, for providing a first step towards comprehensively improving composite CFT design specifications, and for accelerating the trend to use CFTs in common frame structures doc5634 none Harris This research investigates responses of aquatic microcrustaceans to massive losses, gains, and reorganizations of genomic DNA. The focus is on embryonic chromatin diminution - reduction in size and reorganization of the genome, with additional exploratory research on endoreduplication - the amplification of nuclear DNA without subsequent mitosis. The PI s will investigate whether variation in DNA content in somatic and germ cell lineages can explain variation in developmental time and embryonic and adult body sizes through effects on bulk size of the genome. Research will include reconstruction of a phylogeny of the Cyclopidae and use of phylogenetically-independent contrasts to test for correlated evolution of adult somatic DNA content with developmental rate and adult body size. The PIs will investigate whether large amounts of germline DNA in embryos make possible higher rates of protein transcription at times during development when there is greatest need for such transcripts. Quantitative changes in DNA will be measured using cytophotometry and isotopically labeled DNA and RNA precursors. Copepods are ideal for examining evolution of large-scale changes in the genome because their genome size varies greatly among species, mechanisms that modulate their DNA contents are known, their life history variation and population biology are well studied, and their chromosomes are amenable to quantitative and comparative analyses. Copepods may be the most abundant multicellular organisms in the oceans, are a primary diet item of many fish, and thus play a major role in global ecology doc5635 none The grant is to study three approaches for devising algorithms and analyzing their effectiveness for obtaining solutions to hard optimization problems. These three approaches: (1) probabilistic analysis of heuristic algorithms; (2) worst case analysis of heuristic algorithm; and (3) (implicit) enumerative algorithm design-are often pursued separately, since the techniques involved are usually quite different. The first two approaches are often considered theoretical in nature, yet they can have profound practical implications. It is proposed that considerable insight can be gained by employing all three approaches in parallel. Algorithm design is largely an ad hoc procedure, whether the goal is to devise an algorithm with good performance based on its average or worst case performance, or to provide bounding procedures within a branch-and-bound context. The grant is to devise unified techniques applicable to certain problem classes and expand the range of applications of the developed unified techniques. The research is to address, among other topics, a specific technique, which called factor-2-transformations. This technique has enormous potential for deriving constant factor approximations and tight bounds that are useful for enumerative algorithms applicable to a wide range of problems. In addition, the technique leads to so-called persistency results that permit the fixing of some variables within an enumerative procedure and thus limiting the search space. This technique has already been shown to have a wide range of applications in diverse areas ranging from scheduling, to layout problems, to geometric planning and packing problems, to location problems and to generalize satisfiability problems doc5636 none Stanton This project will develop two autonomous drifting buoys capable of measuring vertical fluxes of heat, salt, and momentum in the upper layers of an ice-covered polar ocean. Recent advances in low powered sensor technology has made possible the development of ice-deployed buoys capable of measuring oceanic fluxes directly, and make possible regional studies of the coupled ice-ocean-atmosphere system. One of these two instruments will measure fluxes using an eddy correlation method within the weakly stratified oceanic mixed layer. A flux probe integrated with an acoustic doppler current profiler will allow the estimation of turbulent dissipation rates. Internal micro-power computers will process and analyze the data streams and hold the resulting information for uplink to low orbit satellites. Two-way communication through the satellite link will facilitate diagnostic modes of operation, which are critical for long term (15 months) remote instrument systems. The second of the two instruments will measure heat fluxes using a dissipation method within the thermocline. A profiling instrument package will contain dual microthermistors which can resolve the temperature gradient spectrum to dissipation scales, even in the strongly stratified pycnocline found at the base of the mixed layer in polar oceans doc5637 none This grant provides funding for the development of information aggregation technologies and automated sensor planning algorithms that support information automation of multiple-sensor integrated systems for agile metrology and precision manufacturing. The developed information automation technology will be demonstrated using a multiple-sensor integrated coordinate measuring machine. This integrated system consists of a high precision coordinate measuring machine, a motorized probe, and a three-dimensional vision system. In the multiple-sensor integrated system, the active vision system will be employed in the early stage of coordinate acquisition to simultaneously acquire thousands of data points over a large spatial range, therefore capturing the global information of an object s surface geometry and feature topology will be possible. The obtained coordinate points (view cloud) will then be processed in real time by the proposed information aggregation technologies so as to extract high-level geometric abstractions, including feature boundary, feature position and orientation, feature geometry, and feature topology. These high-level geometric abstractions will provide the global information that can be used either to locate objects and to control critical dimensions when Computer Aided Design models are available or to form a preliminary description of the surface geometry and feature topology of an unknown object. The obtained preliminary description of the object will be subsequently used by the automated sensor planning algorithms to locate the most informative view of the vision system, to automatically guide the contact probe for rapid coordinate data acquisition, and to strategically control the coordinate measuring machine for high precision sampling of critical surface area. If successful, the results of this research will be a significant advancement in sensor integration and metrology. By integrating advanced information aggregation technologies as well as automated sensor planning algorithms with the state of the art equipment, a fully automated, high speed, high precision, coordinate acquisition system will be developed for agile metrology and rapid surface digitization. In addition, since the developed system will be fully automated, it will be possible to integrate the developed technologies into various precision manufacturing processes for part localization and real-time calibration, and for the control of critical size, location, and precision dimension. This work will also have potential applications in a whole spectrum of manufacturing problems with a major impact on metrology, dimensional control, and reverse engineering doc5638 none The Memphis City Schools, currently in its fifth year of the National Science Foundation s Urban Systemic Initiative, proposes the improvement of K-12 mathematics and science student achievement through the extension of previous accomplishments and the implementation of a rich and comprehensive full-scale standards-based program districtwide. The Memphis Urban Systemic Program s (MUSP) instructional plan focuses on the implementation of K-12 mathematics and science standards-based curricula in 100% of the schools through professional development that provides over 100 hours of learning experiences to teachers. The proposed professional development comprises subject content, pedagogical approaches, integration of learning technologies, and alignment of student assessment with both curriculum and instruction. Teacher networks and action research will be used as tools to expand teachers abilities to reflect on their students learning and their own instructional process. Summer camps and Saturday academies will be implemented to assist students meeting the new standards, and parental involvement activities will be conducted in schools to promote their understanding of the ongoing standards-based reform efforts. Furthermore, the MUSP expects to improve the quality of current teacher preparation programs and the science and mathematics teacher shortage by developing a strong sequence of undergraduate and pre-service education courses in close and intense collaboration with the University of Memphis, LeMoyne-Owen College, and Christian Brothers University. The MUSP proposal constitutes a potential urban district reform model, especially by illustrating appropriate alignment among standards-based curriculum implementation, professional development, and student assessment-one of the most critical components of and a necessary condition for successful educational reform. The development of a seamless teacher education program addressing teacher recruitment and certification, preservice, and in-service activities depicts a promising undertaking as well. Success of the MUSP will be determined by the degree to which students meet or exceed the performance benchmarks established over the five years of the proposed program doc5639 none This grant provides funding for the development of a virtual reality-based tool to be used in the design of products that are subject to critical stress and or fluid flow constraints. The primary goal of this research is to develop a methodology that couples computer-aided-design (CAD) models with analysis models and allows shape changes to be performed in real time in a three-dimensional virtual environment. This tool will couple the CAD geometry model to the analysis model of a product and provide a three-dimensional environment to allow for investigation of the effect that shape changes have on the stress or fluid flow distribution within the product. A critical component to this research is the development of fast approximation or calculation methods for stress analysis and fluid flow analysis that will allow for immediate display in the virtual environment. A method of transferring the final shape of the product back to the CAD environment will be developed. Haptics, in the form of force feedback, will be an integral part of the virtual environment and will provide additional information to the participants concerning the feasibility of the design and the impact that the shape changes have on assembly with other parts in the product design. If successful, the results of this research will lead to improvements in concurrent design methods and result in reduced product development time. Participants from diverse backgrounds such as engineering, marketing, and manufacturing will benefit from the use of this methodology in the virtual environment because the environment more closely mimics the real world than does the traditional monitor, mouse and keyboard computer interface. Providing this design analysis environment will encourage the quick investigation of many possible shape changes and how they affect the final product assembly and operation doc5640 none The objective of this research is to develop a new approach for robust design called smart assembly. A smart assembly has features, not otherwise required by the function of the design, which allow the design to absorb or cancel out the effects of variation. The research will investigate both passive and active smart assemblies. A passive assembly requires external adjustment and cannot absorb variation after being set. An active assembly can automatically adapt itself to variation which changes over time. The research will elucidate and place within a framework principles of smart assembly design so that a methodology for such design can be developed. Computer-based analytical tools for tolerance propagation will be modified to facilitate the modeling and design of smart assemblies. This will require that the capability of absorbing variation be included in the modeling strategy. Another task will be to investigate the possibility of indirect absorption--of locating the feature to absorb variation away from the point at which it occurs. This may be beneficial for cost or manufacturing reasons. If successful, the research will provide designers with additional means for controlling variation in mechanical assemblies. Although numerous methods have been proposed for developing robust designs, none have focused on the development of features which can absorb variation, even though such approaches have been used in industry. The research will provide the design engineer with a methodology and analytical tool to control variation when it is not possible in any other way. The proper control of variation in assemblies has a direct link to product quality and is crucial in the development of competitive worldwide products doc5641 none This research addresses one of the long outstanding fundamental problems in metallic glasses: microscopic mechanisms of deformation. Metallic glass deforms in highly localized zones called shear bands. The inability to spread the local deformation is the dominant factor affecting the fracture strength, toughness, and widespread applications of amorphous metals. The aim of this work is to search and identify defects that promote deformation in amorphous metals. To answer the challenges posed by the lack of long-range order in amorphous materials, we plan to use extensive, multiscale computer simulations. We will develop algorithms to characterize free volumes, non-equilibrium simulation methods to model local heat dissipation, techniques to identify extended defects such as dislocations, and finally, development of stochastic dynamic method to model shear band propagation on mesoscopic scale. We expect the knowledge generated from the multiscale simulations to lay a foundation for the future development of theoretical models, and provide guidance to experiments in synthesis, testing and application of metallic glasses and their composites doc5642 none Metro-Nashville Public schools (MNPS) proposes to design and implement a project titled: Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) Urban Systemic Program. The vision for MNPS is to institutionalize the teaching and learning of science and mathematics for all K-12 students through this Urban Systemic Program (USP). The overall objective of this initiative is to substantially elevate student interest, participation, and achievement in K-12 science and mathematics and to foster broader career opportunities for all students graduating from the MNPS. Ultimately, this initiative would foster greater workforce diversity, high standards, achievements, and success for all students. Fundamental, comprehensive and coordinated changes in education will be supported by changes in policies, financing, management, course content, and pedagogy to sustain the systemic reforms. This USP Award will allow the MNPS to move forward aggressively to implement sustaining successful strategies that will enhance the district s capacity to provide K-12, standards-based, science, mathematics, and technology education for all students. MNPS plan to utilize the USP resources to catalyze the districts investments and converging resources to improve science, mathematics, and technology teaching and learning for all students and to meet its equity and excellence goals doc5643 none The Miami-Dade County School District (M-DCSD) proposes to significantly advance the science, mathematics, and technology education (SMT) of all K-12 students through the Miami-Dade Urban Systemic Program (M-DUSP). The M-DUSP will accomplish this task by building on the extant infrastructure that serves as the foundation for the District s Urban Systemic Program s (USP) implementation plan. This infrastructure is characterized by an exemplary leadership team, Competency-Based Curricula Standards for science and mathematics based on the Florida State Sunshine Standards, a comprehensive accountability plan. This infrastructure is also supported by policies in support of SMT education for all, the convergence of fiscal and intellectual resources for a single K-12 program for SMT, and a shared vision among all sectors of the community in support of the teaching and learning of science and mathematics, system-wide. To accomplish the USP goals, the M-DCSD will provide all of its students with the fundamentals of mathematics and science so that their understanding, ability, and academic achievement enable them to perform at or above their peers from around the world. The M-DCSD goals are directed toward: (1) student achievement and graduation priorities; (2) equal access and equitable outcomes; (3) an enhanced curriculum, instruction, and assessment; (4) school environments that supports improved teaching; (5) enhanced support for beyond school learning; (6) increased teacher capacity through content and pedagogy; and (7) effective use of of technology in science and mathematics The infrastructure was developed over the last ten years with support from the Urban Systemic Initiative, other federally funded programs, local partners from colleges and universities, and business and industry. Future efforts will be increasingly informed by research and guided more deliberately by state, local and international comparison data sets to advance to full scale the district s capacity to provide a standards-based science, mathematics, and technology education for all students doc5644 none The design of pile foundations subjected to lateral dynamic cyclic loading such as caused by earthquakes, ship collision, etc., is still in need of a rational analysis method. In recent years, the applicability of the Beam on Nonlinear Winkler Foundation (BNWF) method for these problems has been studied. The BNWF method has been proven to work well for problems involving static, monotonic loading. A number of difficulties occur when trying to extend the static BNWF to dynamic problems. Among these, the difficulties of selecting a suitable damping model (series or parallel) and the corresponding damping values, a suitable method for accounting for the cyclic pore pressure build up, and a rational method for accounting for the pile-soil gapping stand out the most. One method of addressing these difficulties is to conduct a suitable field experiment, monitor the behavior and back-calculate the needed parameters from the field data. Recent studies indicate that the Statnamic testing device might be used for conducting lateral pile load tests. The Statnamic device produces a single pulse loading. We have analytically determined that, instead of applying the loading directly on the pile head, if it is applied through a single degree-of-freedom oscillator involving a mass and a spring, the motion of the pile head becomes cyclic. The objective of the proposed study is to develop a method of back-calculating the p-y multipliers and damping parameters directly from a set of field data derived from a dynamic cyclic lateral load test on single piles. In achieving the objectives, a series of field tests will be conducted at the test site of Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center (TFHRC) of FHWA. Some of the tests will be conducted in a 18-foot deep test pit on wet and saturated sands and silty sands of different densities, and the others outside the pit in the natural soil which is clay. The pile and the surrounding soil will be adequately instrumented for measuring the needed quantities. Existing p-y curves based analysis methods will be modified to account for pore pressure effects and pile-soil gapping. Also, experiments will be conducted on a nine-pile group, and methods of applying the single pile data to analyze pile groups will be explored. The study will be conducted by a doctoral student and supervised by the PI. The doctoral student has already spent over an year on the analysis portion of the study and developed computer codes based on existing p-y curves based methods. The proposed modifications to the analysis method and experimental work will be completed in a period of two years doc5645 none Heyliger The purpose of this research is to study and model the 2-D compaction of aggregates of non-spherical viscoplastic particles under external load. A numerical model will be used in which each particle is treated individually, with the appropriate constitutive relations, kinematic conditions, contact restraints, and elimination of overlap satisfied for every particle in the aggregate. The model will be used to study the effects of particle shape, size, distribution, orientation, and compaction history on the macro behavior of viscoplastic powders during and after compaction. The results are expected to provide new insight into the fundamental behavior of granular media, including overall aggregate stress-strain response, the formation and evolution of force chains, and the nature of yield surfaces for precompacted aggregates. The results will be useful in a wide variety of problems that can be represented using granular media, such as polymers, aluminum, food products, and others doc5646 none This grant provides for the development of a method for quickly comparing different industrial coating choices based on their environmental and societal impacts and their performance in a given application. The method will expedite the selection of industrial coatings during conceptual design by developing a set of expressions that relate coating key performance criteria (hardness, corrosion resistance, chemical resistance, etc.) to environmental and societal impacts (human health effects, resource depletion, energy utilization, etc.). The research will seek to produce a taxonomy of auditable environmental characteristics relevant in the selection of industrial coatings; an underlying method for trading off environmental concerns over the entire life-cycle of an industrial coating from its production, through its use, removal, and reapplication; and the relationships used in industrial coatings selection to balance environmental impact and cost as a measure of functionality. If successful, this research will yield a fundamental bridge between design, the environment, and auditing; allowing all three to operate with a single schedule of environmental and societal impact. Specifically, the project will provide a rapid, quantitative methodology for identifying the most environmentally benign candidate for a given coating application, which minimizes energy and resource utilization, without conducting exhaustive analyses of the systems. After application by design engineers, the result could be reduced environmental impact from everyday products doc5647 none Automated biometric identification systems measure a physiological, behavioral, or biological signature from the human body or environment, process and recognize classifiable signal components, and then renders an identification decision based upon the parameters of a given application. Effectively addressing the breadth of needed biometric identification system research from to life sciences to the computing sciences represents a significant challenges to industry and government. The proposed Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR) organizes the activities of faculty groups at four universities spanning the physical, health, and computer sciences and engineering, to effectively address the cross-cutting research needed to advance identification technology and systems in the application domain spanning security law enforcement, information systems, and public health. CITeR will serve an enabling role in the technical and economic development of this area through research of new enabling technologies, the integrative training of scientists and engineers across its breadth, and the facilitation of the transfer of this technology to the private and government sectors doc5648 none Multivariate statistical process control research has produced tools that can be used to identify when irregularities in production occur and to characterize the components of this variation. The diagnosis and control actions, in the sense of process adjustment, are not modeled and it is up to the process engineer to interpret and correct causes of variation. The presence of quality characteristics that drift with time (auto-correlation) and that vary in similar ways across several characteristics (cross-correlation) makes multivariate statistical process control a difficult task. For these reasons, interest exists on integrating process adjustment techniques with statistical process monitoring tools. The major components of variation in quality data can be found by decomposing the data according to principal component analysis, but this is a data-oriented approach and not based on any process knowledge, which makes interpretation difficult. The process-oriented basis representation (POBREP) analysis uses process knowledge to decompose quality data into cause-associated components. In POBREP, each potential production problem is associated with one basis element. This research investigates the thesis that POBREP can provide an effective tool for process adjustment. It has been shown previously how POBREP can be used for process monitoring purposes. For process adjustment, the following questions, among others, will be investigated: (1) What are the appropriate statistical models for adjustment that incorporate POBREP knowledge? (2) When is POBREP likely to provide a performance advantage? and (3) Can POBREP be applied effectively to a wafer fabrication process? There are several benefits associated with this research. A monitoring and adjustment strategy based on anticipated problems and disturbances can transform the ineffective performance of an omnibus control strategy. The work includes collaboration between researchers at Arizona State, Intel, and Penn State. The collaboration includes eight-month internships at Intel for Penn State and Arizona State graduate research assistants, visits to Intel by Penn State faculty, and regular visits to Intel by Arizona State faculty. There are extensive infrastructure benefits related to this collaborative approach: (1) synergistic benefits of coordinated research from four previously separately sponsored NSF researchers; (2) GOALI benefits, including engineers in the classroom, faculty visits to industry, etc.; (3) the opportunity to leverage results using existing laboratory equipment; and (4) to enhance existing courses in Applied Statistics at Penn State and Arizona State doc5649 none The overall objective of this CAREER initiative is to investigate the mechanisms governing the performance of alternative, evapotranspirative cover systems for waste containment applications while, at the same time, to develop alternative educational modules that will expose a wide range of populations (pre-, post-, and college students) to the challenges of environmental geotechnics. It is expected that this integrated research and education initiative will provide significant contributions through advancements in: (1) basic understanding of complex unsaturated flow processes, (2) combined centrifuge and numerical modeling, (3) design of waste cover systems in arid and semi-arid environments, (4) integration of research into engineering education, (5) teaching of design and of environmental geotechnics, and (6) outreaching strategies for minority high school students and the profession. Even though field monitoring programs and numerical simulations have provided invaluable insight into the behavior of earthen cover systems, the important task of validating predictive numerical tools remains, at best, incomplete. The research plan herein is then to use centrifuge modeling as an additional source of geotechnical data in order to gain further understanding into the complex unsaturated processes that take place in evapotranspirative covers. Centrifuge modeling will allow systematic control of the relevant variables, combination of weather and soil conditions critical for design, and significant reduction in the time needed for acquisition of experimental data. Of major relevance is the fact that, instead of generic soils, actual soils from two of the nation s most significant hazardous waste sites (California s OII Superfund Landfill and Colorado s Rocky Mountain Arsenal) will be used in the centrifuge models. These two sites are, respectively, currently implementing and seeking implementation of evapotranspirative cover systems. Rather than attempting to replicate actual prototype covers in the centrifuge, this research pursues validation and calibration of analytical tools used in cover analysis. Consequently, comprehensive unsaturated flow numerical simulations of the centrifuge experiments will be undertaken, followed by a careful parametric evaluation of generic prototype covers. This investigation will capitalize on the PI s past experience as centrifuge modeler and as designer and numerical modeler of the evapotranspirative cover at the OII Superfund site. Some of the major issues to be investigated through combined centrifuge and numerical modeling include the proper representation of surface flux boundary conditions, the sensitivity of the cover behavior to hysteresis in soil hydraulic properties, and the appropriate selection of the lower boundary condition in numerical simulations. Two educational modules, which are significantly related to and draw major strength from the research plan, will be developed as part of the education plan. The very same two modules will be used to achieve four specific engineering educational goals relevant to different populations. This effort will attempt to bring the site to the campus by developing: (i) a Multimedia Case History Series, and (ii) a Field Alternative Cover Demonstration. These educational modules will be used to address the needs for: (1) enhanced design experience for civil engineering undergraduate students, (2) curriculum development in environmental geotechnics for graduate students, (3) effective recruitment of under-represented minority high school students into engineering programs, and (4) active outreach to the professional community, both locally and internationally. Through implementation of alternative, though still structured programs, the education plan will not only promote current advances in geoenvironmental engineering, but it will also address general deficiencies in engineering education doc5650 none This grant provides funding to examine the impact of high speed, distributed graphical design environments on the efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction of the decision-making process during design optimization. These graphical design environments will be implemented using metamodels (simplified models of more complex models) to enhance the speed of the visual design interfaces. The effect of response delay and the availability of a graphical representation of a design and its performance on design time, design quality, and the design process will be examined using metamodel-driven graphical design environments. Students in both graduate and undergraduate courses will help assess various aspects of the graphical design environments within the context of three examples: the design of a bimorph actuator for minimally invasive surgical tools, the design of a desk lamp, and structural design using topology optimization. The desk lamp example will also involve collaboration with researchers from Ecole Centrale Paris in France to examine the effectiveness of graphical design environments for distributed design optimization. If successful, the results of this research will help guide the development of future graphical design environments to improve design optimization. The proposed research will provide objective and substantive evidence of the impact, both positive and negative, of various components of current graphical user interfaces, leading to improved graphical design environments. The rapid feedback on design performance combined with graphical representations of a design and its performance will help designers improve their understanding of the relationship between a design and its performance, making designers more knowledgeable and, therefore, better decision-makers. Furthermore, by integrating the proposed research within several graduate and undergraduate courses, students will be better educated to work in a distributed design environment doc5651 none This Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) research project is to investigate thermoplastic polymer-based molding technologies, i.e. high speed high pressure (thin wall) injection molding, and micro-embossing, because of their great potential for low cost mass production. In high speed high pressure (thin wall) injection molding, the polymer melt may flow under a pressure twice as much as in conventional injection molding, and the shear rate can be more than 10 times higher. Current commercial simulation codes which are typically used to evaluate moldability and cycle time do not accurately predict mold filling at these extremely high pressures and shear rates. An experimental data base of the high shear rate and high pressure rheology of polycarbonate will be created and used as input in a commercial software called C-MOLD. The effect of high shear stresses on mold wear and molded-in stresses will also be investigated in detail. C-MOLD will be used to simulate the molding of micro-scale features. The simulation software is capable of predicting flow patterns, pressures and shear stresses on the mold surface. In micro-embossing, the plan is to carry out detailed thermorheological study around the glass transition temperature of selected polymers. The molding cycle will be designed according to the rheological behavior of polymers, instead of arbitrarily chosen molding temperatures. The thermorheology results will also be used in FEM simulation to calculate the stress distribution in the mold and in the molded polymer product. Predicted shear stresses on the micron scale mold features will be correlated with the experimentally observed level of mold wear and molded in stresses. The simulations and experimental results (pressures, temperatures, shear stresses, fill time, and cooling time) will also be used to design a process window as a function of feature size aspect ratio, mold material, and processing conditions. The goal is to develop an efficient mass production method with cycle time similar to or less than that in conventional injection molding and embossing doc5652 none The objective of this research is to study the assemble-to-order (ATO) system, which is a hybrid of make-to-stock at the component (subassembly) level and assemble-to-order (or, configure-to-order) at the end-product (final assembly) level. The usual inventory-service tradeoff, a key factor in supply chain management, becomes even more prominent in the ATO system, as each customer order typically involves a large number of components, and the stockout of any component will cause a delay in supplying the order. Quantitative analysis of the ATO system, in general, is difficult as the production-inventory dynamics among the components are highly correlated, driven by a common demand stream. The research will focus on developing bounds and approximations based on various notions of stochastic order, and use these as surrogate performance measures, such that the resulting optimization problems possess special structures, which in turn lead to efficient algorithms. The ATO system is an appealing business process that provides both mass customization and quick response to order fulfillment, and hence plays an important role in a wide range of industries, internet commerce in particular. The research is expected to generate new knowledge and insights to the mathematical foundation and basic properties of ATO systems, and to enhance supply chain management technologies in the design and analysis of such systems doc5653 none This research grant supports exploration of potential methods of using genetic programming to allow design of mechatronic systems, based on joining multiport models of devices. The research objectives are: (1) to find a problem representation and set of operators which will, with high probability, allow the genetic programming system to generate multiport models of mixed-domain dynamic systems that satisfy causality constraints, (2) to create efficient ways of evaluating model performance relative to the problem s functional design specifications, (3) to conduct experiments to improve the globality of the search of the design space and the speed with which good designs are found, and (4) to determine the capabilities and limitations of the automated design system created. The desired output of the system will be sets of candidate solutions among which the design engineer can choose according to criteria specific to the implementation domain. The results of this research will ultimately lead to improved design capabilities for new mechatronic devices and systems, and will, in the shorter term, provide guidance for potential implementors of commercial mechatronic design automation systems. These results will be usable across the spectrum of applications of mechatronic systems, in such industries as automotive, computer peripherals, and durable goods (appliances such as washing machines, refrigerators, etc.). An excellent example is the automotive industry, which is greatly expanding its use of mathematical modeling in the design of subsystems and vehicles. Automotive applications for the multiport-modeling genetic-programming approach will include such areas as vibration reduction, increased efficiency in power transmission, and perhaps also entirely new and patentable applications of mechatronics doc5654 none The Interdisciplinary Conference on Electrical, Electronics & Computer Engineering Education in the Third Millennium (ICEECEE) will be held September 10-15, in Davos, Switzerland. ICEECEE is sponsored by the United Engineering Foundation and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The aim of this conference is to create an opportunity for worldwide cooperation in the goals, curricula and methods of Engineering Education. The ICEECEE will fund travel expenses and registration fee for young investigators and educators doc5655 none This project is supported by NSF as a Cooperative Activity in Materials Sciences between the National Science Foundation and the European Commission. The kilogram is the only remaining fundamental unit that is still defined by a specific artifact: the standard kilogram, kept at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris. A more fundamental standard is needed and could be defined if Avogadro s number were known more accurately. An international consortium has been working for the last decade to determine Avogadro s number more accurately by measuring the physical properties of highly perfect silicon crystals. These studies, however, revealed a surprising occasional variation in the density of nominally equal quality float-zone silicon caused by the presence of small voids. This project aims to develop a method for determining the volume of these voids accurately through high-precision measurements of copper dissolved in silicon. The project is being carried out in collaboration with the Institute for Reference Materials of the European Commission, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the German Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt doc5656 none The overall goal of our proposed investigation is to formulate and develop methods to study the long term effects of small dissipative, symmetry-breaking and time-dependent perturbations on nonlinear gyroscopic systems, particularly the dynamics of rotating shafts and pipes conveying fluid. This proposal outlines a unified framework to study nonlinear systems with either periodic} or stochastic perturbations. An understanding of the dynamics of parametrically excited gyroscopic systems necessitates a study of the complex interactions between time-dependent inputs, symmetries, and nonlinearities. Our approach will consist of the application of some recent theories of deterministic and stochastic dimensional reduction to relevant nonlinear gyroscopic models. The proposed work consists of essentially four components: appropriate modelling, further development of some theoretical considerations, numerical algorithms, and experimental verification. The outcome will be a greatly-enhanced understanding of the stability and global dynamics of gyroscopic systems under dissipation and time-dependent perturbations. In the deterministic context, we will be able to predict global dynamics and the mechanisms which give rise to global bifurcations in gyroscopic systems. We shall also examine stabilization of gyroscopic systems by periodic excitations when the excitation frequency is slightly above a certain resonance frequency. In the stochastic context, we will be able to compute a number of standard stability indices (e.g., stationary measures and exit times) in a theoretically correct and computationally efficient way. In the final part of this research, dynamic experiments will be conducted on a rotating shaft to verify the theoretical results obtained. These dynamics experiments will locate the stability boundaries and examine the nature of the nonlinear response. The numerical and experimental results will, in turn, guide the theories to incorporate any new phenomena observed doc5657 none Holloway This Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) project will develop and test two kinds of fiber optic chemical sensors for use in monitoring the chemistry of hydrothermal fluid -- seawater mixtures in seafloor hydrothermal system environments and in laboratory simulators of those environments. Raman spectroscopy using optical fibers as the light path to and from samples is known to work well to quantitatively determine a variety of organic and inorganic species in aqueous solution. In addition, a relatively new technique, Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) spectroscopy holds great promise as a simple means of monitoring fluid densities. This work will evaluate the efficacy of each of these techniques (Raman and SPR spectroscopies) for use as short, and long-term monitors of seafloor hydrothermal fluids. If proven to operate under hydrothermal conditions, these devices could be used on manned or ROV dives, as nodes in cabled seafloor observatories and in laboratory reactors doc5658 none Steven W. Shaw and Alan G. Haddow, Michigan State University Proposal Number The Dynamic Performance of Nonlinear Vibration Absorbers The objective of the proposed work is to gain an improved understanding of the dynamic response and performance of systems that utilize multiple vibration absorbers and to distill this knowledge into design guidelines. Of specific interest are centrifugally driven pendulum absorbers that are used for reducing torsional vibrations in rotor applications. These absorbers consist of masses that are suspended from the rotor in such a manner that their motion counteracts the effects of fluctuating torques that act on the rotor. This study employs both analysis and experimentation of such absorbers. The analysis focuses on mathematical modeling and the application of predictive techniques, including perturbation methods and symmetric dynamic bifurcation theory. The desired performance of absorbers is achieved by proper selection of design parameters that are included in the formulation. Experimentation is carried out on an existing torsional vibration facility that allows for control of the mean rotor speed and fluctuating torque components. Specific topics being investigated include: the application of absorbers to reduce vibrations in rotating beams, the use of absorbers for shake reduction, the avoidance of localization in absorber systems, absorbers for multi-harmonic excitation, and the transient performance of absorbers. By systematic investigation of nonlinear behavior, instabilities, and vibration localization, this study offers strategies for avoiding effects that limit the performance of absorber systems, and the results are used to provide useful recommendations for implementation of systems of absorbers in rotating systems doc5659 none Peralta Instrumented sharp indentation provides valuable information on the mechanical properties of materials and is the test of choice when small volumes are involved. This is usually the case in single crystal studies, since they are often produced in small quantities and can be too delicate for conventional testing. Single crystal behavior is intrinsically anisotropic and so is the response of textured polycrystals and thin films, which are also often characterized using indentation. However, most of the models used to analyze hardness are isotropic and, therefore, cannot capture all the aspects of the anisotropic behavior of monocrystalline and or strongly textured materials. Furthermore, models to account for crystallographic slip around indents on monocrystals do not seem to be available. It is then necessary to perform experimental and theoretical work to relate load-penetration data, slip and hardening behavior around indents on single crystals to their mechanical properties. A dual experimental theoretical approach can be used to understand the effect of anisotropy on the indentation mechanics of materials. Monocrystals will be grown from selected materials and instrumented indentation tests performed on high symmetry planes. Profilometry, atomic force microscopy and reference grids will be used to determine surface displacements. The slip behavior around indents will be characterized using slip trace analysis and transmission electron microscopy. Meanwhile, small-scale yielding models for sharp indenters will be developed for anisotropic elasticity as well as models to account for plasticity due to crystallographic slip. These models will be used to obtain load-penetration curves and the evolution of the contact area between the sample and the indenter. Finally, correlations between the experimental data and basic material properties in single crystals, such as the elastic moduli and critical resolved shear stresses, will be established through the models. This project will also actively involve undergraduate and graduate students in experimental and theoretical research doc5660 none The development of optimal feedback control laws for nonlinear systems has been the topic of intense research over the past half a century. The cornerstone of this theory is the so-called Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman partial differential equation, the solution of which provides an analytic expression for the optimal feedback control. Unfortunately, the analytic solution of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation is a formidable task. Solutions can be obtained only for some special cases of very low dimension. Even traditional numerical methods for solving the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation are often inadequate due to the ``curse of dimensionality . That is, the number of computations involved increases tremendously with the state of the system. In this project, we propose to use wavelets for solving the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation numerically. Wavelets are orthogonal basis functions that use the concept of multiresolution. Namely, they are able to capture the local behaviour of signals both in frequency and time. Using translations and dilations, they decompose the solution space into finer and finer subspaces and the final solution is computed as an aggregation of the solutions in these finer subspaces. Only the subspaces which significantly contribute to the solution have non-zero coefficients in the final Fourier Wavelet series expansion. Therefore, given a level of accuracy for the solution, only few non-zero Fourier coefficients are needed to capture the exact solution. As a result, solutions can be obtained much more efficiently than with other methods. This research will have an immediate impact on the area of embedded control systems. Dedicated computer chips running the developed algorithms will be able to calculate optimal feedback control laws on-line, thus achieving unprecedented levels of intelligence, autonomy and versatility for several applications such as, automobile control, aircraft navigation, autonomous mobile robot control, etc. In addition, the multiresolution property of wavelet expansions implies a decoupling of the solutions in the different resolution levels. Therefore, wavelet-based solutions are uniquely suited to parallel processing for computer implementation doc5661 none The Community of Excellence in Mathematics and Science (CEMS) will build on the work of the Banneker Partnership (CPMSA). It will use innovative, best practice strategies to reform the educational patterns that limit student such and achievement in mathematics and science. The core approach for teaching, learning, staff development, and community involvement is the base for this reform. Omaha s initiative is designed to complete the implementation of a standards-based curriculum and assessment model that will enhance the teaching and learning of mathematics and science. The K-12 core--curriculum will focus on student outcomes and be implemented by restructured graduate and undergraduate professional development in mathematics and science, and increase the effectiveness of partnerships among parents, community members and educators. CEMS will greatly increase the number and diversity of students who succeed in science and mathematics and graduate prepared for advanced studies. It will substantially increase professional knowledge and skill of teachers and engage them in selecting and using teaching strategies that assure all students will increase achievement. It will use proven methods of engaging parents, businesses, and the general community for improving achievement and perseverance In mathematics, science and technology. 1t will Influence long term changes in the way teachers are prepared for urban education at the University of Nebraska Omaha. It will strengthen data-based decision making and problem solving skills in schools doc5662 none This grant provides funds for the verification of theoretically predicted distortion in grazing incidence interferometric measurements and for the development of a method for elimination of imaging distortion, variable sensitivity and low axial spatial resolution present in current techniques of grazing incidence interferometry. Verification of the errors will involve both calculation of the expected effects of different sample geometries and experimental measurements of the distortion. Measurements will be carried out using a diffractively coupled grazing incidence interferometer designed to measure nominally flat parts. Specific geometries will be created on the parts using single-point diamond turning. The results of the verification studies will be used to develop a design for a distortion-corrected grazing incidence interferometer. If successful, the results of this research will lead to improvements in the design of industrial metrology instruments using the principles of grazing-incidence interferometry. The primary goal of this research is to allow the design of grazing-incidence interferometers with the ability to resolve features with both small height and small lateral extent. Such interferometric metrology capability would allow high-resolution in-process metrology for quality control of a wide variety of manufactured parts doc5663 none Chadwell This project addresses techniques to measure present-day deformation of seafloor crust in the vicinity of mid-ocean ridges. By measuring the acoustic range directly between seafloor mounted transducers on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, the rate at which crustal plates move over long time periods can be precisely measured. To continue an ongoing plate monitoring effort, the existing installation will be replaced prior to at which time the batteries will likely be depleted to a level that will not permit intra-transponder ranging. This project allows construction of a second generation instrument that will address shortcomings in the existing installation while maintaining an unbroken time series of crustal motion measurements from through to . The proposed design will be a new type of seafloor instrument that can be configured to extend the temporal and spatial sampling to hourly daily measurements over 10-km scale distances. The new design will incorporate both horizontal and vertical crustal deformation measurements in an intelligent controller that will respond to changes in background measurements of temperature, pressure, tilt and travel times as sustained deviations from background measurements may indicate the onset of tectonic activity. The multiple sensors and extended spatial coverage of the new system will be applicable to other ridges or across other seafloor faults e.g., on continental shelves at subduction zones. In year one, the instruments will be constructed and tested during a month-long deployment in waters off-shore San Diego. In year two, the instruments will be deployed across axial Cleft of the South Cleft Segment on the Juan de Fuca Ridge doc5664 none The objective of this grant is to develop a fundamental understanding of synthesizing nanocrystalline thin films of ultra-hard borides with predictability and reproducibility. Ultra-hard borides, recently discovered by the co-Principal Investigator, are the new, second hardest materials on earth with a projected cost of manufacture approximately 10% of the cost of diamond and cubic BN. Research will focus on the development of a novel Ti:Sapphire femtosecond (fs) pulsed laser deposition (PLD) technique for preparing ultra-hard boride thin films on silicon and cemented carbide substrates for Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) and hard turning applications respectively. The films will be compared to those deposited by conventional nanosecond (ns) PLD. The research will investigate the laser-boride interactions as a function of pulse width and the interactions of plasma with the surface of substrate that affect the evolution of structure, composition, and growth of films. Nanoindentation and scratch tests will be used for mechanical characterization that includes hardness, Young s modulus, and adherence. Hard coating applications in tools and MEMS will be explored. The research has potential for enormous payoffs. This pioneering work will set the stage and serve as a catalyst for rapid and innovative advances in the new boride materials for numerous tool and hard coating applications including bulk cutting tools, hard and erosion resistant coatings, wear-resistant electrical switch contacts, and conductive thin films for MEMS. In addition, these coatings can serve as high-temperature solid lubricants. The integrated experimental and analytical approach is expected to transfer the next-generation hard material as well as advanced laser process technology to industry and supply high-quality products to manufacturing industries. Graduate and undergraduate students from both Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering will benefit from hands-on research experience in preparation of nanocrystalline borides, advanced laser deposition of thin films, advanced machining, and MEMS fabrication doc5665 none Mechanism-Based Theories of Strengthening and Hardening for Alloy Design and Processing We plan to conduct a systematic study of precipitate hardening of aluminum alloys based on mechanism-based strain gradient (MSG) plasticity. A unit-cell model will be used to represent dispersed particles in an aluminum matrix. The size of the particle ranges from a tenth of a micron to tens of microns. The size of the representative cell is determined by the particle size and volume fraction. A computer code based on finite element methods for MSG plasticity will be developed to predict macroscopic mechanical properties as particle size, shape and distribution are varied at a fixed volume fraction. This code will be validated by benchmark analytical solutions associated with void growth in aluminum. The predictions will be compared to existing experimental data and tested by further experiments to be conducted in ALCOA doc5666 none This research will develop novel hybrid machine tool axes as key components of new manufacturing machines for meso-scale parts. Hybrid means that some of the axes of motion of the machine are compounded within a single component. Meso-scale parts are defined as having a size on the order of fractions of a millimeter up to centimeters, and thus falling between the domains of microfabrication and standard machining. On the small end of the scale, such parts include micromechanical devices; on the large end of the scale are elements such as dental restorations and turbine blades. The project participants will design and build a promising hybrid axis in which a cylindrical element is driven in both rotation and linear translation. This hybridization allows the minimization of machine inertias and thereby the optimization of acceleration in order to produce parts rapidly and accurately. Such a hybrid axis can form the core of novel machines for fabricating meso-scale parts and thus catalyze the development of the manufacturing infrastructure for such devices. In developing this axis, the project participants will design, prototype, and test the mechanical actuation, sensing, and control elements of the device. One challenging meso-scale application is the cutting or grinding of metal and ceramic dental restorations. A project objective is to make it possible to rapidly produce the complex geometries of these elements with a 5-axis machine incorporating two of the proposed hybrid axes, one carrying the part, the other carrying the cutting tool. This proposed machine will be designed in detail, and selected components fabricated and tested in order to verify the value of the developed concepts. The project participants will work with researchers and manufacturers in the machine tool and dental fields in order to see the developed concepts utilized in practical devices and thereby have a significant impact on these and other industries doc5667 none The objective of the research is to develop a model to predict phenomena leading to poor formability in A1-Mg alloys based on the underlying deformation mechanisms. Magnesium is added to aluminum to improve strength properties but is found to also have a detrimental effect on formability. The microstructural mechanism responsible for the poor formability is a process called dynamic strain aging. Dynamic strain aging results from fast diffusing solute atoms, such as magnesium, interacting with dislocations. These interactions lead to unsteady, collective motion of dislocations, within grains and across grain boundaries, resulting in unstable flow and hence poor formability. At the macroscopic level, a key defining manifestation of flow and hence poor formability. At the macroscopic level, a key defining manifestation of dynamic strain aging, is a negative strain rate sensitivity. Predicting this phenomenon and the resulting poor formability, based on microstructure events, is the primary objective of this work doc5668 none In these Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) project, the investigators will jointly develop and use polycrystalline and phenomenological constitutive models for hydroforming process simulations of aluminum alloy thin-walled extrusions. The predictive capability of the phenomenological models will be fine-tuned and validated with a combination of polycrystalline modeling results and experiments. Hydroforming of thin-walled hollow extrusions has become popular with automotive and materials industries for making complex structural components, such as instrument panel beam and engine cradle. The main advantage of tube hydroforming, in comparison with conventional stamping, is the potential to replace an assembly of parts by only one component. This leads to a reduction of the number of welding operations and to substantial gains in manufacturing costs. Components manufactured from aluminum alloy tubes would translate into significant weight saving for the structure as well. In order to optimize the conditions for a given hydroforming operation, numerical simulations of the process are carried out. However, realistic predictions can be achieved only with accurate mathematical descriptions of the material behavior (constitutive models), specifically for aluminum alloy tubes. To date, most of the hydroformed parts are made with steel and very little research has been performed on hydroforming of aluminum alloy tubes. The ultimate goal of the project is to develop the most accurate phenomenological equations and a set of guidelines to provide, within the constraints existing in industrial environments, the best possible material description for hydroforming of aluminum alloy thin-walled extrusions. This should accelerate the proliferation of hydroformed parts for these materials doc5669 none The mission of the Center for Lasers and Plasmas for Advanced Manufacturing (LPMC) is to develop a science, engineering, and technology base for laser and plasma processing of materials, devices and systems. Laser and Plasma processing of materials is used in various manufacturing sectors such as semiconductor electronic manufacturing , aerospace, automotive, general manufacturing, life science products, medical device manufacturing. The focus of this center in the area of lasers and plasma processing will include: bulk processing, surface processing, coatings, surface etching and patterning. The center will build upon the on going large number of industrial projects and state supported center for plasma and photon processing at the Applied Research Center. This center will also take full advantage of being sited next to Free Electron Laser Facility of Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The Free Electron Laser Facility is the world s most powerful, tunable laser, currently delivering kilowatt average power in the mid-infrared. The lead institution is Old Dominion University and partner institutions are Christopher Newport University, College of William and Mary and Norfolk State University (historically black college and university doc5670 none Based on data of the federal bridge inventory, about 39% of the nation s 576,665 bridges are structurally deficient due to long-term degradation. The use of fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) retrofit is attractive but reliable predictive models and sound design guidelines for the use of FRP retrofit in civil infrastructure applications are needed. The objective of the project is to develop innovative short-term experiments that would allow the development of analytical models for accurate and reliable prediction of long-term performance of retrofitted highway bridge structures. Specifically, the interfacial bond between the concrete substrate and the FRP composite material used for external strengthening must remain durable for the specified lifetime over a range of mechanical loads, temperature cycles, moisture diffusion and de-icing salt ingress. Experiments and models that bridge several length scales will be used to develop basic understanding of delamination mechanisms and a predictive capability that can be used to for design guidelines. This is a collaborative research project between UT-Austin and U. of Missouri-Rolla doc5671 none While high-rise construction serves as one of the most challenging projects undertaken by society, tall buildings are one of the few constructed facilities whose design relies solely upon analytical and scaled models, which, though based upon fundamental mechanics and years of research and experience, has yet to be systematically validated in full-scale. To address this issue, several tall buildings in Chicago whose structural systems are most commonly used in high-rise design will be instrumented to measure response characteristics under the action of wind. The instrumentation will include accelerometers and high precision GPS systems. To facilitate unhindered access to real-time measurements, a Java-based internet framework will be developed, permitting the project team, and its advisory board of designers, consultants, and interested researchers, analysis capabilities from any remote location. The subsequent analyses, in total, will provide valuable insight into a variety of response characteristics for tall buildings and permit the systematic validation of existing design practice through the comparison of analytical and wind tunnel response estimates with full-scale observations. Both amplitude-dependent frequency and damping estimates using Wavelet-Based System Identification will be made to shed new light on the dynamic characteristics at varying response levels doc5672 none This grant provides funding to develop the theoretical modeling as well as experimental research of the wiresaw technology. Research issues and the implementation of the next-generation re-configurable wiresaw integrated with on-line and real-time metrology, such as the real-time monitoring of wire wear and wire web management, will be investigated. Innovative modeling integrating the rolling-indenting mechanism, elasto-hydrodynamics, fracture mechanics, plasticity, vibration, and stiffness control will facilitate the integrated modeling of the wiresaw manufacturing process. Such sound theoretical methodology is particularly important for the production of large wafers to avoid typical trial-and-error approaches at the expense of quality and consistency. The research objectives include: (1) investigation of both theoretical and practical issues of the novel agile wiresaw, with integrated monitoring and metrology that can be adapted to slice different materials, sizes, configuration, and other characteristics; (2) development of in-situ, real-time sensors for monitoring of wire wear and on-line wire web management; (3) research of the next-generation shadow moire measurement of the whole wafer surface using the phase shifting technique to render high precision and resolution; and (4) design and application of smart MEMS transducers for the wiresaw machine. The research also features collaboration between academic institution with industrial partners to strengthen the relevance of this research and application in industry. This collaborative research will make it possible to establish a superior technology for the next-generation wiresaw. If successful, the results of this research will enable us to further the technology of wiresaw and to facilitate the advancement of semiconductor technology by providing high-quality and low-cost substrates in the fabrication of microelectronics, MEMS, and microsystems. The wiresaw research results and applications of smart MEMS transducers can be utilized for the development of the next-generation, re-configurable, and smart wiresaw for wafer production; as well as optical metrology, such as shadow moire technique with phase shifting, to enhance the capability of both in-situ and post-process measurements and controls of wiresaw manufacturing process parameters and topology of wafer surfaces. In addition, the breakthrough in fundamental research and technology advancement will feature a very promising enabling technology in the manufacturing of not only large diameter silicon wafers but also silicon carbide, lithium niobate, III-V and II-VI semiconductors, ceramic, and composite materials doc5673 none This Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) award provides funding for the development of a highly efficient electrolytic in-process dressing method that is inherently consistent, efficient, and cost-effective in controlling the level of super-abrasive grit protrusion during high-speed grinding. High-speed electrolytic in-process dressing systems (HELID), an innovative high-speed in-process dressing system, will be developed to overcome the technical barrier existing in today s state-of-the-art electrolytic in-process dressing (ELID) method developed in Japan. The HELID method will be designed to work with a wheel surface speed of up to 350 m s, while existing ELID does not function well at wheel speeds over 30 m s. HELID with a moving-foil electrode and HELID with a hydrodynamic electrode will be studied. This study will include (1) modeling of the fluid dynamics of the HELID based on the moving-foil electrode and hydrodynamic electrode, (2) modeling of electrolytic process at high speeds, (3) HELID grinding and process control, and (4) simulation and experimental study. Sharpening or dressing high-speed precision grinding wheels today means that machines have to be slowed down or stopped. This interruption of high-speed grinding process, reduces productivity and results in inconsistent grinding performance. Skilled machinists have to be used today as dressing is more an art than a science, making the costly, time-consuming grinding the least automated among machining processes. Despite considerable research effort over the years, inconsistent and inefficient dressing of high-speed grinding wheels remains a serious problem for industry. If successful, the results of this research are expected to significantly improve grinding productivity over the existing approaches without sacrificing accuracy and surface integrity. The method will contribute to the development of scientific tools which can significantly enhance automation in grinding doc5674 none Annette D. Shine, University of Delaware Proposal # Channel Flow of Homogeneous Electrorheological Fluids In this research, homogeneous electro-rheological (ER) fluids based on liquid crystalline polymers (LCPs) are characterized experimentally in pressure-driven flow between narrowly separated electrodes. The objective of this work is to develop a quantitative understanding of homogeneous ER fluids in complex flow geometries, in order to assess the technical feasibility of using the fluids in conventional and microfluidic applications. The project scope consists of three parts: (1) synthesis of the LCP, (2) experimental characterization and quantitative mechanistic modeling of the ER behavior of LCP solutions, and (3) testing of the LCP solutions in simple and complex fabricated channels. Poly(n-hexyl isocyanate) (PHIC) is synthesized by living, reversible polymerization to produce monodisperse samples various molecular weights. The viscosity of concentrated solutions of PHIC is experimentally characterized over a range of shear rates and electric field strengths, and modeled with a previously developed two-dimensional version of Doi s molecular theory of LCP rheology. Steady state and transient pressure drop measurements at constant flow rate are conducted in rounded-entry channels. Special micro-electrodes are fabricated by electron beam lithography in an overlay pattern in order to direct two-dimensional planar ER fluid flow in a prescribed fashion by selective electrification of electrodes. This work will allow, for the first time in 50 years of ER fluid research, the complete a priori prediction of ER behavior from the properties of the fluid components. This predictive capability links ER fluid formulation with ER device design, so that rigorous engineering analysis can identify which fraction of the estimated potential billion dollar market for ER devices can be realized using homogeneous ER fluids doc5675 none Raul F. Lobo University of Delaware The Local Structure of Zeolites from X-Ray and Neutron Scattering Data Like many useful materials, zeolites are often idealized as perfect crystals, solids in which periodic long-range order is observed in all three directions in space. Yet, very frequently the useful properties of a material stem from a small amount of minority elements (or defects) incorporated within the structure that shift the local environment away from the average. In this project the Pair Distribution Function (PDF), as derived from X-ray and neutron diffraction patterns, is being measured to investigate the local atomic environment in an important group of industrially significant zeolites. The gas-adsorption behavior and the catalytic activity of these porous materials are intrinsically associated with minor amounts of aluminum substituted for silicon in the structure. Since both catalysis and adsorption are fundamentally local phenomena, the understanding of zeolite properties thus depends on a detailed knowledge of the geometry of the sites. The research objective is to determine in detail the atomic geometry of these sites using the PDF. The results will help to explain the properties of various zeolites in their roles as catalysts and adsorbents. More detailed structure-property information will guide the design and synthesis of new, more effective materials with enhanced properties. The experimental structural data will also be valuable as a guide in the molecular modeling of zeolite properities doc5676 none The LA-USP, building upon the infrastructure and improved student outcomes emanating from previous funding under the National Science Foundation s Urban Systemic Initiative effort, focuses on enhancing the capacity of the system as a whole, and the instructional workforce in particular, in order to support all students in learning and mastering standards-based mathematics and science at a level sufficient for successful matriculation to university or the workforce. Building upon the accomplishments of the LA-USI, LAUSD proposes specific goals that are congruent with the USP solicitation goals and exemplify a core vision of success for all. Through the LA-USP, LAUSD intends to: (1) raise the district s capacity to bring the highest quality of mathematics and science instruction to students; (2) substantially increase all students achievement, pass rates, access to college and careers in mathematics, science, and technology, with special attention to under-represented minorities; (3) scale-up implementation of standards-based curricula, pedagogy, and assessment for all students through Differentiated Professional Development (DPD); (4) align mathematics and science instruction so that grade-appropriate content and processes lead progressively to higher level science and mathematics for all students; (5) increase the number of college-eligible students and the number majoring in mathematics and science by increasing enrollment in Advanced Placement (AP) mathematics and science courses; (6) improve instructional workforce quality in collaboration with universities by developing appropriate pre- and in-service courses in mathematics and science; (7) work with university and district partners to connect teachers in-service professional development to the standard-based student expectations; (8) engage parents in advocacy and action roles related to enrollment in advanced mathematics courses, as well as promote parental interactions with preservice teachers in order to encourage such interactions with families by teachers in the future; and (9) effectively use internal and external research and evaluation to assess progress for all students, and to identify interactive factors that foster present gains as foundational for increased future gains. In order to accomplish these goals, the LA-USP staff will (A) use Differentiated Professional Development (DPD), a platform for in-service, that shapes sessions to fit teacher needs; (B) increase dissemination of program information to the community; (C) accelerate collaboration with higher education to equip teacher graduates with new skills needed for LAUSD s multilingual, multicultural, multiethnic enrollment; and (D) restructure instructional services to fit the reorganization of the LAUSD s administrative structure in order to meet the system s need for DPD and accountability for student achievement. Central to the implementation of the USP is the expansion of the MST Centers and attendant Resource Teachers to serve all of the recently formulated eleven (11) local school districts that comprise the united district that is the Los Angeles Unified School District doc5677 none This award supports the development of a prototype in-situ fossil air melt extraction device (INFAMED) for recovering large volumes of air and particles from polar ice sheets. Although this device would have a number of applications, the primary initial scientific objective would be to measure radiocarbon in atmospheric methane trapped in the ice at depth. This measurement would provide a definitive test of the hypothesis that decomposition of sedimentary methane clathrates caused the abrupt atmospheric methane concentration increases at the end of the last glacial period. In addition to studies of gases extracted from the ice sheet, such an instrument would allow large volumes of ice to be sampled and filtered for the collection of both terrestrial and extraterrestrial particles. The first phase of technology development involves a pilot project to explore feasibility at low cost, and will recover preindustrial air from depth in the Greenland ice sheet. If the technology is successful, a second proposal will be submitted to construct a full-sized device, designed to reach m depth and sample 15,000 year old air at the South Pole doc5648 none Multivariate statistical process control research has produced tools that can be used to identify when irregularities in production occur and to characterize the components of this variation. The diagnosis and control actions, in the sense of process adjustment, are not modeled and it is up to the process engineer to interpret and correct causes of variation. The presence of quality characteristics that drift with time (auto-correlation) and that vary in similar ways across several characteristics (cross-correlation) makes multivariate statistical process control a difficult task. For these reasons, interest exists on integrating process adjustment techniques with statistical process monitoring tools. The major components of variation in quality data can be found by decomposing the data according to principal component analysis, but this is a data-oriented approach and not based on any process knowledge, which makes interpretation difficult. The process-oriented basis representation (POBREP) analysis uses process knowledge to decompose quality data into cause-associated components. In POBREP, each potential production problem is associated with one basis element. This research investigates the thesis that POBREP can provide an effective tool for process adjustment. It has been shown previously how POBREP can be used for process monitoring purposes. For process adjustment, the following questions, among others, will be investigated: (1) What are the appropriate statistical models for adjustment that incorporate POBREP knowledge? (2) When is POBREP likely to provide a performance advantage? and (3) Can POBREP be applied effectively to a wafer fabrication process? There are several benefits associated with this research. A monitoring and adjustment strategy based on anticipated problems and disturbances can transform the ineffective performance of an omnibus control strategy. The work includes collaboration between researchers at Arizona State, Intel, and Penn State. The collaboration includes eight-month internships at Intel for Penn State and Arizona State graduate research assistants, visits to Intel by Penn State faculty, and regular visits to Intel by Arizona State faculty. There are extensive infrastructure benefits related to this collaborative approach: (1) synergistic benefits of coordinated research from four previously separately sponsored NSF researchers; (2) GOALI benefits, including engineers in the classroom, faculty visits to industry, etc.; (3) the opportunity to leverage results using existing laboratory equipment; and (4) to enhance existing courses in Applied Statistics at Penn State and Arizona State doc5679 none Superplastic forming has emerged as an attractive near net shape forming technique for production of complex shaped components and unitized structures for aerospace applications. In spite of many attractive features, the widespread commercial use of superplastic forming outside aerospace sector is hampered by two major drawbacks: (a) slow superplastic forming rates, and (b) high cost of starting material for superplasticity. Fine grain size is a key requirement for materials to exhibit superplastic behavior, i.e., tensile ductility of 200%. The conventional rolling-based thermo-mechanical processing methods for producing aluminum alloys having superplastic properties typically require six steps. The goal of this research is to develop an innovative one-step thermo-mechanical processing technique for grain refinement, Friction Stir Processing (FSP). The basic concept of FSP (an adaptation of friction stir welding) for enhanced superplasticity is based on the very fine microstructure that develops during solid-state friction stirring. Successful development of FSP would provide opportunities to develop new concepts, that include: (a) selective superplastic forming; (b) superplastic forming of thick sheets; and (c) one-step processing for superplasticity from cast sheet or hot-pressed powder metallurgy sheet. This project will focus on developing an understanding of critical microstructural issues, such as: (1) influence of FSP parameters on the microstructural development; (2) the effect on microstructure of overlapping passes during FSP; (3) the response of refined microstructure to elevated temperature exposure; and (4) microstructure-superplastic property correlations in friction stir processed materials. The research involves active collaboration of university (UMR) and industries (the Rockwell Science Center and the Boeing Phantom Works). The direct industrial participation will result in faster technology transition and the overall impact is likely to be very significant doc5680 none This Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) project is to develop an integrated set of scheduling and structural controllers to implement a global schedule. The investigators will not explore new methods of developing global schedules, but rather will seek to develop a systematic approach to implementing them, with implicit assumption that the global schedule accurately reflects management priorities. The scheduling controller takes the job priorities developed by the global schedule as input, and reschedules jobs in the face of disruptions to minimize deviations from the global schedule as well as improve system performance. The structural controller manages the distribution of work in the system to avoid states in which the system is vulnerable to disruptions. Thus the function of the structural controller is to make the tasks of the scheduling controller easier by maintaining a good distribution of jobs relative to production and material handling capacity. The researchers will formulate a novel approach for rescheduling problems, which exploit the information in a global schedule while maintaining its performance as closely as possible. Structural control policies that avoid system states, i.e., distributions of lots throughout the factory that are unduly vulnerable to disruptions will be investigated. The research will be pursued in the context of semiconductor wafer fabrication, where the investigators have extensive experience and the industrial partner is the primary supplier of such software to the semiconductor industry. Hence the team is uniquely qualified to address this inherently interdisciplinary problem and present novel, practical approaches for its solution doc5681 none This proposal seeks funds for an exploratory operation to obtain transects of cores from three coastal ponds on St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. These cores will taken with a vibracorer that will allow penetration of sand and coral rubble layers. The cores will then be examined for sedimentological evidence, including coarse layers, of past hurricane strikes on the island, and pertinent layers will be dated by radiocarbon methods. The results will be compared with an independent but complimentary study of geochemical signals of past hurricanes in offshore corals around the island doc5682 none The School District of Philadelphia (SDP) proposes to advance significantly the science, mathematics, and technology (SMT) education of all K-12 students through the Philadelphia Urban Systemic Program (PHUSP). The PHUSP goals parallel those of the USP that seeks: (1) to improve student achievement in science and mathematics; (2) to advance the implementation of mathematics and science education reform in the District; (3) to increase the competency and diversity of teachers and administrators; and (4) to promote collaborations with colleges and universities. The SDP proposes to accomplish this task by building on the existing infrastructure developed by reform efforts that began in concomitantly with the awarding of the Urban Systemic Initiative. The foundational tenets include a strong preK-12 leadership team, a standards-based curriculum for science and mathematics based on the SDP Curriculum Frameworks, Content Standards, and Benchmarks. The core structure is also characterized by a state-driven school accountability plan, and policy changes that increase graduation requirements for science and mathematics, recertification mandates for teachers and principals, and the teaching of SMT at grades preK-12. The infrastructure also features converged fiscal and intellectual resources, and significant external support for the implemented curriculum from multiple institutions of higher education, business partners, and the community. State, district, and classroom data are being used extensively to inform and drive change supported by research and evaluative studies and surveys from local and national experts. An array of instructional materials supports the implemented curricula that have embedded technology, integration of disciplines, community links, problem-based instruction, and writing across the disciplines doc5683 none Prater This study focuses on governmental and institutional response to the 9 21 Earthquake in Taiwan that occurred in September of , leaving almost 2,500 people dead and many thousands injured and homeless. A major issue in disaster studies is the capacity of local governments to respond to a major disaster and the relationships between local governments and the national governments. Data will be collected from interviews with local and national government officials as well as members of NGOs and other private sector responders to the 9 21 earthquake. These data will be used to extend our understanding of intergovernmental relations after disasters doc1520 none The ability to perform machining operations in a comprehensive simulation environment and to obtain realistic predictions of its outcome in terms of workpiece attributes (dimensional tolerance, form, and surface finish) and process capabflities is the vision motivating this proposal. An initial framework for the realization of this capability, epitomized by the designation Virtual Machine Tool (VMT), will be defined. The envisioned VMT environment will ultimately allow machine tool builders to evaluate alternative machine designs and configurations, and will assist machine tool users to predict the achievable workpiece attributes during planning, selection, and use of metal cutting machine tools. The underlying assumptions, interrelation between the necessary functions, and the envisioned methods and approaches to the computational simulation of the functional elements of the VMT will be addressed. The principal emphasis will be on fundamental issues related to the integration of machine and process related funttions, and on the development of predictive models for workpiece attributes and process capability measures that are essential missing ingredients of the VMT concept. The outcome, consisting of prototype code for the characterization, visualization, and mapping of workpiece attribute deviations from the nominal, will be experimentally verified on the example of end milling, drilling, and tapping operations doc5685 none Modeling of fluid flow through jointed rock is important in petroleum, environmental, civil and mining engineering disciplines. Fluid flow through jointed hard rock is very much dependent on the fracture network pattern in the rock mass and on the flow behavior through these fractures. Discrete fracture flow models (flow models that incorporates a network of fractures with each fracture considered as a discrete element) are suggested in the literature to simulate fluid flow through jointed hard rock masses. However, a proper model to represent fluid flow through single fractures is not available in the literature. This research will overcome this shortcoming. Flow behavior through a single fracture depends on the spatial distribution of the aperture (void space between the two contact surfaces of the fracture) including its connectivity, the contact area distribution of the fracture, and fluid properties. The aperture and the contact area distributions of a fracture depend on the stress system acting on the joint. This research deals with fluid flow behavior through single joints subjected to normal compressive stresses. Experimental, theoretical, analytical and numerical procedures will be used to reach the following goals: (a) To find a minimum set of parameters, which have the capability of representing the spatial distribution of aperture in fractures; (b) To find a suitable parameter, which has the capability of quantifying the percentage contact area of a fracture and capturing the influence of contact area on fluid flow behavior; (c) To develop functional relations between (i) the apparent overall fracture closure and normal effective stress, (ii) the contact area and normal effective stress, (iii) the spatial distribution of aperture and normal effective stress, (iv) the apparent overall fracture closure and spatial distribution of aperture, and (v) the apparent overall fracture closure and contact area for different types of fractures; (d) To develop a numerical model for fluid flow through single fractures, which has the capability of predicting results obtained through laboratory experiments; (e) To develop a fluid flow law applicable for different types of fractures; (f) To study the effect of directional change of fracture roughness on the fluid flow behavior; and (g) To study the effect of size of fracture on the fluid flow behavior of single fractures at an introductory level. A comprehensive experimental program will measure fracture deformations, contact and void areas, spatial distributions of aperture and flow rates resulting from applied hydraulic pressures under different normal stresses for three types of fractures coming from three different rock types. All these tests will be performed on 15 cm square fracture surfaces. Experiments will be conducted to study the effect of directional change of fracture roughness on the fluid flow behavior through single joints. For the roughest fracture surface, the experiments will be repeated on a 7.5 cm square fracture surface sample obtained from the 15 cm square sample. Liquid injection techniques coupled with laser profiling, and video imaging will be used to determine the aperture, contact area and void area distributions of the fractures. Advanced numerical and statistical techniques will be used to develop functional relations between parameters which are connected with fluid flow through single rock joints. The influence of the roughness and rock type of the fractures on the coefficients of the developed functional relations will be investigated. The developed relations obtained for the two sizes of the roughest fracture will be compared to evaluate the effect of size of the fracture on the fluid behavior of single fractures at an introductory level. The preliminary conclusions obtained here will be used to suggest a more comprehensive experimental program to evaluate the size effect in a complete manner in a future research. Upon successful completion of the proposed research, improved tools and techniques will be available to perform better simulations of fluid flow through single fractures to use in discrete fracture network models in modeling fluid flow through jointed hard rock masses. Such modeling will be useful in the following field problems associated with jointed rock masses: (a) characterization and development of fractured rock oil reservoirs, (b) geothermal energy development, (c) petroleum well design, (d) nuclear waste repository performance assessment studies, (e) interpretation of hydrologic tests, (f) design of in-situ hydrologic tests, (g) groundwater contamination studies, (h) in-situ mine leaching studies, and (i) stability studies of rock masses in the presence of groundwater flow. It is expected that this research will lead to a completion of a Ph.D. dissertation. Research findings will be published in journals and or in conference proceedings. Presentations based on research findings will be given at national and international conferences in rock mechanics and petroleum engineering doc5686 none New York City Board of Education By-Borough Prototype Implementation Model Building Standards Based Educational Environments as Models of Systemic Reform in Mathematics and Science The overarching goal of this effort is to provide the professional development and support to district and school teams that will build their capacity to develop Standards Based Educational Environments and become models for systemic reform in Mathematics and Science. This one-year grant award provides limited resources to the New York City Board of Education (NYCBoE), in collaboration with the City University of New York (CUNY), for a scalable reform model in one of New York City s five boroughs. The NYCBoE Borough of Queens is a set of districts that are representative of the entire set of forty districts and serves approximately one-fourth of the entire student population. Each district within the Borough of Queens will have six (6) elementary, four (4) middle and two (2) high schools engaged in the prototype model. This will result in 84 schools that will serve as models and mentors for other schools in future years. The prototype borough model will include: Borough-wide professional development activities, individual district specific activities, and school specific activities. Schools will have teams trained to provide professional development on mathematics and science standards, implementation of standards-based curricula and standards based assessment; Meaningful Action Research on Teacher Practice developed to track the progress of instructional reform; Formation of study groups and learning communities as one professional development strategy; The use of New Standards Performance Standards Applied Learning in Mathematics, Science and Technology curricula; Engagement of colleges and universities to supply support in improving the content knowledge of teachers and in increasing the number of certified teachers; Collaboration with colleges and universities towards changing the Mathematics and Science Teacher Education Curricula to include the use of the New York City Customized versions of the New Standards Performance Standards in Mathematics and Science; Preference for teachers of model schools for participation in professional development with outside science-rich institutions; and Development of standards based field trip activities in cooperation with science-rich institutions. Through a one-year grant, NYCBoE will engage in forging the necessary elements and demonstrating the efficacy of the by-borough model while building the capacity of the borough to move to full scale within the borough. Further, the learnings from this prototype will be refined to assist the other four boroughs in moving towards full implementation of reform efforts leading to improved student achievement in mathematics and science for all students. The NYCBoE will also continue citywide endeavors, which are not funded through this grant, for district teams from all the boroughs, in the sustained effort to support standards-based mathematics learning across the entire system doc5687 none Newman This Americas Program award will fund travel and related expenses for a short-term visit to Venezuela by Dr. Ronald D. Neuman, Auburn University, Alabama, to plan, with his collaborator, Dr. Orlando J. Rojas, of the Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Los Andes, Venezuela, the establishment of a research program in the fundamental and practical aspects of interfacial phenomena. The facilities and expertise s in heavy crude oil emulsions and foams of the Universidad de los Andes group and this expertise of the Principal Investigators in experimental measurements of interfacial properties of surfactant systems to do well for international cooperation, which may involve both faculty and graduate and undergraduate students at the two academic institutions doc5688 none This proposal requests funding for supplementing the purchase of a servo-hydraulic material testing system. Two-thirds of the funding required has been committed by external sources, namely the Asphalt Paving Association of Washington, Washington State DOT, and internally by Washington State University (WSU). This system is to be utilized jointly by the geotechnical and pavement engineering faculty at WSU in conducting student technical personnel training and research. It will allow hands-on training of an average of 75 students enrolled in 5 undergraduate and graduate courses to state of the art methods of asphalt concrete and soil testing. These include the resilient modulus of asphalt concretes (AASHTO TP31 ASTM D ), the fatigue and creep testing of asphalt concretes (AASHTO TP9 and TP-9, resp.) and the resilient modulus of aggregates soils (AASHTO T294-94). Two particular research studies will be made possible with the proposed servo-hydraulic material testing system. The first will explore the visco-plastic response of the constituents of asphalt concretes to dynamic loads utilizing imaging techniques. The second will study the dynamic response of cohesive soil subgrades to shear stresses of various magnitudes and frequencies, in the light of recent developments in critical state soil mechanics doc5689 none Harrison Echelmeyer The Principal Investigators will be funded for two years to develop techniques for inserting instrumented probes into several meters of actively deforming till under the Black Rapids Glacier in Alaska. Recent observations have identified a four to seven meter till layer under the most active part of the Glacier, and that almost two-thirds of the surface motion of the glacier is due to processes acting in the bottom few meters of the till. There is negligible sliding at the ice-till interface. Till has been observed under other glaciers, and in many of them, it may affect their flow pattern. Therefore, it is important to develop a method for studying the flow of thick, active till. The Principal Investigators will drill to the to the top of the till using a hot-water drill and then drive the probes into the till with a heavy down-hole hammer and receive data without the use of wires. At the present time, there is no adequate way to investigate the behavior of tills in situ under thick, rapidly moving ice. This research effort would develop the means to make these essential measurements doc5690 none The Minneapolis Public Schools Urban Systemic Program mission is to accelerate learning and expand opportunities so that all MPS children can achieve high standards in mathematics, science, and technology. The Minneapolis Minnesota Mathematics and Science-Technology Education Reform (MinnMASTER) will expand district-wide, standards-based, integrated instruction to all students in grades K-12 in mathematics, science, and technology resulting in improved student achievement in K-12 mathematics and science by all students. MPS defines high standards in terms of students meeting the requirements of the NCTM Mathematics Standards , National Research Council Science Standards, Minnesota Profile of Learning, and the Minneapolis Public Schools content grade level expectations. The MPS-USP proposes to focus on the following: 1) Staff development for teachers in: - Mathematics and science content; - Meaningful integration of mathematics, science, and technology concepts and instruction; - Pedagogy regarding mathematics, science, and technology instruction; - Understanding how children think and learn mathematics and science; - Assessment and examining student work; and - Equity issues impacting learning in mathematics, science, and technology (including an emphasis on techniques for content teachers working with English Language Learners [ELL] to increase student s academic language base and deepen their cognitive thinking skills); 2) Staff development for administrators (referring to the above) 3) Alignment of assessments (both classroom and district-wide) to standards-based, best practices in mathematics, science, and technology; and 4) Community outreach regarding standards-based instruction in mathematics, science and technology. MPS will utilize Teachers On Special Assignment (TOSA) as well as school-based lead teachers as a first-line mechanism for sustaining classroom teachers in their support of all students engaging and succeeding in a standards-based learning environment that will lead to improved student achievement on a number of student progress indices doc5691 none This research will develop and test new methods for using readily available data from cylindrical samples to quantify rock fracture measures. Cylindrical data from boreholes, rock core, tunnels and shafts are widely available but currently under-utilized for rock fracture characterization. Boreholes and core are standard components of geotechnical geoenvironmental site investigations and petroleum exploration worldwide and borehole-imaging techniques (such as BIPS) are highly developed and rapidly progressing. On a larger scale, tunnels, shafts and wells provide excellent windows into the subsurface rock mass structure. Borehole images, rock core and full-periphery tunnel maps will be used to quantify fracture size, density (number of fracture centers per unit volume of rock mass) and intensity (area of fractures per unit volume of rock mass) - all major components of a unified system of fracture abundance measures. The research results could be used by engineers or geologists to help quantify fracture characteristics from small-diameter cylinders such as boreholes, bolt holes or oil wells, as well to obtain direct, real-time quantitative fracture data from tunnels and shafts. Methods to be explored include: (1) estimating mean fracture size from the ratio of transections to partial transections of the cylinder by fractures; (2) using the frequencies of intersections, transections and partial transections to quantify fracture density and intensity; (3) combining circular scanlines normal to the cylinder axis with straight scanlines parallel to the axis to create an orthogonal sampling geometry that minimizes orientation bias; and (4) modification of the Terzaghi correction for zero-diameter boreholes to take into account fracture size and cylinder size. These approaches are outgrowths of previous work by the principal investigators on the sampling and interpretation of linear fracture traces exposed on planar surfaces. A key aspect of the proposed work is continued cross-disciplinary research and teaching involving civil engineering and structural geology. This collaboration brings together investigators from two fields that have strong but different interests in understanding rock fractures. A major goal of the proposed research is to meld the two viewpoints together. A key output of the research will the two co-supervised Ph.D. students, who will be cross-trained in rock engineering and structural geology doc5692 none The Phoenix area is comprised of one 9-12 high school district with 23,000 students, and 13 K-8 elementary districts with over 100,000 students. The Phoenix Union High School District proposes the implementation of the Phoenix Pilot project, an outgrowth of the Phoenix Urban Systemic Program proposal ( ), to enhance the existing K-12 science and mathematics learning infrastructure by effectively integrating the 14 school districts into a structure with the greatest potential to improve student achievement. The goals of the proposed 12-month effort are: 1. To increase enrollment and student success in college preparatory mathematics and science. 2. To provide K-12 standards-based staff development opportunities for mathematics and science teachers in collaboration with the Arizona State University. 3. To implement K-12 standards-based mathematics and science curricula. 4. To increase parent involvement and awareness of the importance of student success in mathematics, science, and technology. 5. To evaluate program implementation and student achievement in mathematics and science. In order to accomplish these goals, the 14 school districts will be organized into five clusters for effectiveness and efficiency. Each cluster will consist of a high school and its nearest elementary schools. Although the cluster formation will provide all school districts with opportunities to address each of the project goals, Phoenix Pilot will focus on the following three clusters: 1. Alhambra High School with the Alhambra Elementary District 2. Camelback High School with Balsz, Creighton, and Madison Elementary Districts 3. Carl Hayden High School with Isaac, Murphy, and Riverside Elementary Districts High school and elementary science and mathematics teachers will participate in seminars and discussions with emphasis on the implementation of high-quality, standards-based instructional programs and the delivery of effective curricula. A total of four lead teachers (two mathematics and two science lead teachers), in conjunction with the Arizona State University, will provide support to classroom teachers, ensure the K-8 to 9-12 transition of mathematics and science curricula, and conduct staff development activities that focus on standards-based curricula, instruction, and student performance assessment. Additional major components of the Phoenix project include a three-week algebra summer program eight grade students; and parent involvement through quarterly meetings, newsletters, and workshops doc5693 none Epstein The purpose of this grant is to explore the possibilities of greatly expaniding a successful outreach program developed at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at California State University - Los Angeles, known at the University Preparatory Program (UPP). This effort will include data gathering and making contact with potential partners in universities, high schools, and corporations in greater Los Angeles and the southwestern United States doc5694 none Fresno Urban Systemic Program Proposal The Fresno Unified School District (FUSD) proposes to significantly advance the science, mathematics, and technology education (SMT) of all K-12 students through the Fresno Urban Systemic Program (FUSP). To accomplish the USP goals, the FUSD will provide all of its students with the fundamentals of mathematics and science so that their understanding, ability, and academic achievement will enable them to perform at or above their peers from around the world. The FUSD goals are: (1) to improve science and mathematics achievement; (2) to increase the competency of SMT teachers and administrators; and (3) to strengthen the District s capacity to sustain SMT reform. The proposed plan is based on prior accomplishments primarily achieved via the Urban Systemic Initiatives Program and the Local Systemic Change Project funded by the National Science Foundation. The District intends to move aggressively to scale up activities to ensure that the SMT standards were transformed into classroom practice as prescribed by the state. A differentiated approach to professional development will be implemented via embedded day, after school, and summer activities. The District will work with two of its eight feeder patterns during Year 1 to test pilot the proposed design model. The District has taken on the challenge and commitment to use resources from multiple entities to upgrade facilities and provide state-of-the art improvements in support of a more rigorous course of study for SMT. Existing partnerships with local institutions of higher education, educational consultants, cultural organizations, community groups, and parents will serve to maximize the USP efforts doc5695 none This Polar Instrumentation and Technology Development (PITD) Project promises to develop several novel electro-optical instruments for atmospheric research. The goal is to produce high-luminosity, rugged and reliable instruments suitable for unattended use in polar regions. The devices will be based on the principles of Fabry-Perot interferometers which have the usual etalon gap made of an electro-optic material such as lithium niobate, which changes its effective optical thickness when an electric field is applied. The specific instruments to be developed are: a rugged, enhanced-luminosity, high resolution Fabry-Perot spectrometer; a spectrally agile filter; and a double etalon modulator. These instruments, if successfully built, should find wide application in many areas doc5696 none This NSF supported project involves a multi-disciplinary team who will develop new manufacturing methods to improve the functionality of dental implants. The goal of this project is to produce dental implants through new powder processing technologies to create functionally graded materials that can be biologically bonded to the human bone. Specifically, the objectives are two-fold: (1) to develop net shape near net shape Ti implants of dense core with surface porosity that are coated with biocompatible hydroxyapatite (HAp) coating and (2) to characterize the implants in terms of mechanical properties and biocompatibility. The hypothesis is that bone re-growth will be promoted by the pores in the Ti that support the penetration of the HAp coating deeply into the substrate. The dense Ti core will maintain the overall strength. An innovative processing technique will be used to create an inverted porosity in Ti. Thick films of HAp will be deposited on Ti using an electrodeposition technique. The coatings will be characterized by Scanning Electron Microscopy, X-ray diffraction, Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy techniques. Mechanical property evaluations such as hardness, fracture strength, and adhesion will be performed to examine the quality of the as-coated implants. In vitro testing in simulated body fluids will be carried out to evaluate its bioactivity. The surface characteristics of the implant in simulated fluid will be studied in situ by an Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope. The participation of local high school students will be one of the outreach activities of this project that will introduce them to the Biomedical Engineering field. The high school students will work with both undergraduates and graduate students on this project, creating an exciting learning environment at all levels doc5697 none The Newport News Public Schools (NNPS) proposes to plan and implement a project titled: STEP.Com. This project is designed to significantly advance science, mathematics, and technology (SMT) education of all K-12 students. The NNPS would accomplish this task by building on the extant infrastructure developed by a systemic reform process initiated in and catalyzed by the CPMSA program, implemented . System components identified for more extensive deployment are as follows: (1) Intensify the institutionalization of the K-12 science, mathematics, and technology (SMT) standards-based curriculum. (2) Elevate principals leadership capacity to promote and sustain reform. (3) Expand school-business partnership programs that would increase the number of skilled-entrants into the technology-based workforce. (4) Accelerate the integration of parents and community as partners in the whole school reform process. Critically new system components include in this project design: (1) Collaboration with universities to revise teacher education program. (2) Expansion of student-teacher research activities supported by post-doctoral personnel from the universities. (3) Infusion of technology to improve teachers delivery of SMT standards-based curriculum for all students. (4) Application of key indicator data systems that correlate teacher performance and student achievement. This NNUSP project will lead to a unified, full-scale implementation of a SMT program for all students. It has the potential to dramatically impact the future of the Newport News Community doc5698 none The Hamilton County Department of Education s (HCDE), Mathematics and Science Synergy (MaSS) supports the continuation and expansion of HCDE s efforts initiated through the infrastructure and success of the Chattanooga Comprehensive Partnerships for Mathematics and Science Achievement (CPMSA). Through MaSS, HCDE will provide the exemplary mathematics and science education that each child needs and deserves to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. MaSS has at its core the development of a cadre of building-level lead teachers of mathematics and science, building-based on-site activities facilitated by district consulting teachers, and professional development of all educational stakeholders, including guidance counselors, administrators, and community members. In order to attain the challenging targets for improved student achievement that HCDE has set forth, MaSS delineates six (6) Essential Components: Intensify the implementation of a district-wide standards-based SMET curriculum, instruction, assessment, and supporting professional development; Strengthen the alignment between district policies and MaSS goals; Institutionalize a culture of continuous improvement by increasing school and district organizational capacity; Broaden parent and community involvement; Increase the competency and diversity of the mathematics and science workforce; and Employ research as an effective tool in improving the teaching and learning of mathematics and science program. MaSS will support 42,220 students in eighty (80) schools to succeed in a rigorous high-quality standards-based mathematics and science doc5699 none G. Fuller, Stanford University The PI will execute work at the leading edge of microrheological measurements. His past studies have led to the development of a novel measurement instrument which has been adopted by other laboratories. It is expected that a similar benefit may derive from this investigation. His work will examine the rheological properties of the thin gelatin layer between an air water and an oil water interface. He will also examine the rheological properties of a nematic monolayer. The support letter from the Kodak Company emphasizes the major contribution which this work will provide to the photographic, food, paper and pharmaceutical industries doc5700 none The Chicago Public Schools, formerly an Urban Systemic Initiative site funded by the National Science Foundation for five years ( - ), proposes to increase significantly K-12 student achievement in mathematics and science by noticeably improving the level of performance of the current science and mathematics teachers through a Citywide Professional Development University Partnership. By means of the proposed partnerships, the Chicago Urban Systemic Program plans: (1) to increase the competency and diversity of the science and mathematics instructional workforce; (2) to advance the implementation of K-12 standards-based mathematics and science curricula; (3) to increase student achievement as measured by standardized assessments; and (4) to promote and sustain collaborations with colleges, universities, and museums. The proposed model encompasses four major initiatives to upgrade the standards of mathematics and science teaching via new university courses and the creation of a community of teacher professionals: (1) the K-4 Specialization in Mathematics and Science; (2) the Grades 5-8 Mathematics and Science Endorsement Program; (3) the Grades 9-12 High School Science and Mathematics Certification Courses; and (4) the Professional Development Networks. The Northwestern University s Center for Learning Technologies in Urban Schools (LeTUS) will engage as a major partner to create innovative professional development course models that will typify the linkage of content to pedagogy and field-based experiences to practice. By strengthening professional development as an essential component of systemic reform, and aligning it with other elements of the system, such as standards-based curricula, instruction, student assessment, and policies, the District will be able to sustain its systemic effort aimed at improved student achievement. Furthermore, it is anticipated that all of Chicago s major collaborating universities continue to use the USP model and reform their teacher education programs. The Chicago Education Alliance will coordinate the participation of ten universities that comprise this partnership. The CUSP will gather formative feedback on the connection between professional development and student achievement by using the research capacity of LeTUS doc5701 none This project will develop advanced broadband radio receivers and antennas to be buried in the ice below South Pole Station for detecting the interaction of ultra-high energy (PeV) astrophysical neutrinos with nuclei in the ice. Ultra-high energy, with energies exceeding eV, could be used to discover the sources of the very highest energy cosmic rays, the source of which is a long standing open question. The radio detection technique is complementary to the more common detection of light produced by high energy particles because the optical techniques begin to lose sensitivity at the ultra-high energies near the threshold for the radio technique. From there on up in energy, the sensitivity of the radio detectors is expected to increase dramatically. This rising sensitivity with energy works well with the steeply declining flux of cosmic rays. The University of Kansas the leading institution in the development of these detectors in the United States doc5702 none This collaborative research will examine atmosphere-biosphere interactions, a key component of the Earth s physical system. Understanding this interaction is crucial to improve general circulation models, as well as to monitor variations in the carbon budget. The PIs will combine models and techniques produced in previously funded projects, with surface vegetation data sets, surface energy balance and carbon flux data, and new remote sensing products. They will further develop the physical interpretation of the first appearance of spring foliage commonly called the green wave in the mid-latitudes. The results will allow the development of a time line that interconnects various atmospheric and biospheric changes associated with the green wave phenomena. Baseline 30-year normals and 20th century change assessments of the timing of the onset of spring across mid-latitude locations will serve as references for future research. The work is important because it will demonstrate the critical roles that surface phenological and meteorological data play in atmosphere-biosphere simulations and for global change monitoring, when used in concert with satellite-derived bioclimatological data doc5703 none 300 WORD PROJECT SUMMARY The performance of micro-electro-mechanical-systems (MEMS) is strongly influenced by adhesive forces and surface energies. In some regimes, these quantities cause device failure, when components come into sticking contact and cannot continue to perform their designated task. In order to identify acceptable operating regimes, significant advances are needed in our ability to quantify close range attractive forces and adhesion energies. This program will develop (i) novel experimental techniques to characterize these quantities in-situ and (ii) physics-based models to predict component performance when adhesion and stick-release events are critical factors. Both quasi-static and dynamic behavior of a model MEMS system will be studied, with an emphasis on the transition between sticking and no-stick regimes. These studies will determine if and when dynamic excitation may be used initiate and control stick-release events. Such information may be used to design novel vibratory assembly processes used to manufacture complex MEMS. A state-of-the-art nanoindentation facility will be integrated with an idealized MEMS device to directly measure forces and displacements at the micron level. In addition to established dynamic measurement techniques used in nanoindentation systems, a combination of electronic and optical measurements will be implemented. Adhesive energies, electrostatic forces, and the dynamic response of the MEMS device will be quantified during both mechanical and electrical excitation. The measured MEMS behavior will be used to validate a combination of analytical and numerical models that incorporate electrostatic forces and surface energies. These models will be used to predict a priori transient dynamic response, including stick and stick-release events. The proposed program integrates research and education through the development of a MEMS test facility. Graduate and undergraduate research assistants will design and fabricate test rigs and will contribute to model development. Students will also spend time collaborating with the Micro-Technology Group at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory doc5704 none The objective of this research is to study the assemble-to-order (ATO) system, which is a hybrid of make-to-stock at the component (subassembly) level and assemble-to-order (or, configure-to-order) at the end-product (final assembly) level. The usual inventory-service tradeoff, a key factor in supply chain management, becomes even more prominent in the ATO system, as each customer order typically involves a large number of components, and the stockout of any component will cause a delay in supplying the order. Quantitative analysis of the ATO system, in general, is difficult as the production-inventory dynamics among the components are highly correlated, driven by a common demand stream. The research will focus on developing bounds and approximations based on various notions of stochastic order, and use these as surrogate performance measures, such that the resulting optimization problems possess special structures, which in turn lead to efficient algorithms. The ATO system is an appealing business process that provides both mass customization and quick response to order fulfillment, and hence plays an important role in a wide range of industries, internet commerce in particular. The research is expected to generate new knowledge and insights to the mathematical foundation and basic properties of ATO systems, and to enhance supply chain management technologies in the design and analysis of such systems doc5705 none This grant is aimed at modeling tool-wear in grooved tools based on its relationships with cutting forces, stresses, temperatures and tool-chip contact in 2-D machining and turning. Experimental work involves measurement of tool temperature distributions, tool-chip contact length and tool-wear parameters. The results from the experimental work will provide important modeling parameters and boundary conditions for a predictive 2-D model (numerical) for forces, stresses and temperatures. The first phase of the project is focused on establishing comprehensive relationships among tool-wear and tool temperatures, stresses and tool geometry parameters. The effects of a finite cutting edge radius on tool-wear and tool temperatures will also be investigated. In the second phase, turning experiments with grooved tools will be performed to collect data on 3-D tool-wear, temperatures, forces and tool-chip contact. A modeling approach based on decomposition of cutting forces at different wear regions of a grooved tool will be extended to correlate tool-wear with forces and temperatures using the effective 2-D chip-flow direction. The results from this approach will be used in developing an integrated hybrid 3-D predictive model, involving analytical-numerical-empirical approaches. The anticipated major benefit from this project is the development of a new, fundamental modeling approach for tool-wear. Machining operations constitute a large segment of the manufacturing sector in the US. There has been a growing need for developing robust models and methodologies to enable reliable and accurate predictions of machining performance measures in process planning to ensure the highest quality of machined products with maximized productivity. The tool-wear rate has significant correlation with other important machining performance measures such as chip-form chip breakability, surface roughness surface integrity and part accuracy. Traditional models for tool-life tool-wear have been heavily empirical due to the complexity of the problem; hence, the current project advocates the use of a hybrid modeling methodology. The expected results from this project will provide fundamental new knowledge for tool-wear predictions in machining with grooved tools. The results will also serve process planners in selecting the most appropriate cutting tools and cutting conditions for maximized machining performance, especially with respect to tool-wear tool-life doc5706 none PI: J. Bray Institution: University of California at Berkeley : The field laboratory of Adapazari, where hundreds of buildings settled, tilted and collapsed due in part to liquefaction and ground softening, provides an exceptional opportunity to document the effects of ground failure on building performance. Moreover, there are a number of observations of damaging ground response that have not been documented previously. The seismic interaction between buildings and softened foundation soils is an especially important feature, as ground failure appeared to be more prevalent and severe adjacent to and under buildings than away from structures. Current guidelines, such as the California Hazard Mapping Program, are poorly defined regarding the effects of liquefaction on building performance and necessary mitigation measures. Considerably more building performance documentation and subsurface characterization are required to learn the lessons from this exceptional field laboratory on the effects of ground softening and failure on structures and the effects of soil-structural interaction and response on ground performance. The primary goal of the proposed study is to develop well-documented case histories of building performance at sites undergoing moderate to severe ground failure, so that the profession can use these case histories to advance our understanding of these phenomena and enhance our ability to numerically simulate them. A parallel goal is to provide a comprehensive record of ground performance data in Adapazari and adjacent communities so that additional lessons can be learned. This research project combines the talents of several professors and students who led and participated in reconnaissance efforts of the Kocaeli earthquake. It has been effectively coordinated through key Turkish professors who are sharing their expertise, data, and equipment. Existing aerial photographs offer the opportunity to coordinate the study and generalize findings. The team has access to detailed damage statistics collected by the Turkish government. Building systems for key case histories will be better documented, because ground failure appeared to be caused in part due to the dynamic response of the overlying structures. For example, ground failure was not pervasive in undeveloped areas, and taller buildings settled more than shorter buildings. Additionally, areas with significant ground failure contained significant structural damage. Due to the significant variations in subsurface conditions across Adapazari, efficient Cone Penetration Testing will be invaluable. But it is important to tie this type of testing with Standard Penetration Testing, where soil samples are retrieved, due to the presence of significant nonplastic, and sometimes plastic, fines in many of the deposits that softened as a result of shaking doc5707 none This research will provide methods that allow engineers to test and validate data acquisition and supervisory control programs during the design phase of the manufacturing plant. A supervisory control module will be developed based on finite automata theory. It will be interfaced with simulation software that can be used for modeling the manufacturing plant. Control methods will address normative plant behavior as well as adaptation to unanticipated events in the plant, such as machine breakdowns and the failure of sensors and other data acquisition systems. Methods will be developed for re-configurable modes of operation within control specifications during periods when components of the plant and or data acquisition system have failed. Experiments using the prototype supervisory control module in conjunction with the plant simulation module will be run to demonstrate that various control strategies can be validated for both their control logic and the resulting performance of the controlled manufacturing system. If successful, the results of this research could be used to build a new design tool for engineers. Currently, in discrete parts manufacturing, the simulation of manufacturing system designs do not incorporate models of the electronic control systems and data collection devices that will eventually drive the operation of the factory that the simulation is modeling. The primary goal of this work is to incorporate these design details into the early stages of plant design, when engineers are evaluating alternative factory designs through computer simulation. Successfully meeting the objectives of this research can reduce the cost of new plant development by reducing the lead time for manufacturing system design and test, and by validating the control programs and resulting plant performance before the construction and start up phase of the new plant doc5708 none This grant provides funding for establishing the fundamental principles for realizing open product architectures by building upon constructal theory developed in the field of thermodynamics. Constructal principles along with concepts and techniques from engineering design will be utilized to develop and instantiate the foundational mathematics to provide mathematical rigor for the methodology to engineer open product architectures. The principles and the methodology will be verified by analytically and will be illustrated through two industrial test cases, namely, the design of beverage merchandisers for a mass customized production system and a family of absorption chillers. This work, if successful, will provide the proof-of-concept for the development of a formal, mathematically rigorous methodology for designing product architectures that are open, that is, flexible in accommodating product evolution with a process of continuous improvement and adaption. The successful use of this methodology by manufacturing enterprises will allow them to respond rapidly and cost-effectively to changes in the market and or demands for customized products doc5709 none We will address remodeling in trabecular bone from a mechanical viewpoint. In order to understand how mechanical factors contribute to this process we will predict local stress and strain fields at the cellular level where bone remodeling takes place. In particular we are interested in differences between healthy and osteoporotic bones. By knowing local fields in these two types of bone, under the same external loads, we hope to determine relations between mechanical load and bone remodeling in healthy and osteoporotic bone. Our analysis will account for the hierarchical nature of bone and will involve both theory and experiments doc5710 none The Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) have made a strong commitment to, and significant progress in, establishing standards-based education. The greatest progress to date is in mathematics, partially due to the PRIME professional development project. Standards-based mathematics instruction has been fully implemented in 15% of the elementary and 36% of the middle schools, and at least partially implemented in almost all of them. The achievement gains in the high-implementation schools have shown impressive results. This model will lead to the implementation of standards-based mathematics education district-wide. In addition, the model is being used in implementing standards-based reform in science. USP support will provide resources needed to (a) bring mathematics reform to scale in all PPS elementary and middle schools as well as up to the high schools; (b) fully engage in implementing science reform, using the model employed in mathematics; and (c) leverage additional resources to enable the extension of the PPS current success far more quickly. The ultimate goal of the USP is to establish standard-based mathematics and science education systemically, so that all PPS classrooms and schools effectively support all students in meeting high standards doc5711 none Project title: Investigation of Soil Liquefcation in the Chi-Chi, Taiwan, Earthquake PI: C. H. Juang Institution: Clemson University This research project is aimed at improving the geotechnical engineer s ability to assess liquefaction potential using in-situ tests. The project seeks to acquire, document, and disseminate field liquefacation data from the Chi-Chi, Taiwan, earthquake. The significance of this project lies in the fact that the data collected from the Chi-Chi earthquake will greatly expand the existing databases, particularly for high values of cyclic stress ratio and silty and gravelly sands. The collected data will be made available at no cost to other parties on the World Wide Web upon completion of the project. The web page created for this project will be updated periodically to include additional new data and the results of the subsequent analysis doc5712 none A New Class of Stabilized Methods for Multiscale Problems in Computational Solid Mechanics Many problems in mechanics of materials involve operation of multiple spatial and temporal scales. The issue of scales gets compounded in micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). A general trend in engineering practice toward miniaturization of mechanical and electronic components in MEMS highlights the need for computational techniques that can successfully address this issue. The research being proposed here is aimed at developing a new class of multiple scale methods for the modeling and analysis of coupled electro-magnetic fields in semiconductor materials. Educational activities in this program include the development of curriculum on micro-mechanical issues in MEMS and a new course on multi-scale finite element method doc5713 none Near Field Bridge Response Library for the Chi-Chi Earthquake Gongkang Fu, Department of Civil Engineering, Wayne State University Recent seismic failures of bridges indicate or allude to inadequacy of today s US design code, including that (1) near field effects are not well understood and not covered, and (2) involved uncertainties are not explicitly addressed. These issues even will not be systematically addressed in the new AASHTO LRFD seismic design code under development, due to lack of knowledge and field performance data. The Chi-Chi earthquake in Taiwan offers an opportunity to improve the knowledge in these aspects. This research project s objective is to develop a web-based comprehensive data library containing information on bridge behavior performance and ground motion in the Chi-Chi earthquake, with an emphasis on near field effects. The project will also include a preliminary study on these effects. The research objective is to be reached by fulfilling the following tasks. (1) Review the latest developments in relevant areas. (2) If warranted based on Task 1, immediately visit Taiwan to collect time-sensitive data that are likely to be destroyed soon. (3) Develop a detailed plan and structure for the data library. (4) Collect detailed field data. (5) Conduct a preliminary study on near field effects. (6) Develop the data library and post it on the World Wide Web. (7) Prepare a final report. Useful applications of the data library may include, but certainly not limited to, the following. 1) Calibrating numerical models for predicting seismic behavior and performance of bridges, particularly for including near field effects. 2) Calibrating performance based design codes for consistent reliability of bridge performance. 3) Comparison with other earthquakes for developing prediction models for ground motion and response spectra. 4) Educating engineering students and practicing engineers about earthquake engineering and bridge engineering doc5714 none Komvopoulos Recent demands for polymers exhibiting chemical inertness, low adhesion (friction), high wear resistance, and good biocompatibility have necessitated the discovery of surface treatments that can alter the physicochemical surface properties of polymers without affecting the bulk characteristics. This research is on plasma-assisted modification of the surface chemistry and microstructure of various polymer materials used in the medical field(i.e., polyethylene, polyurethane, polycarbonate, polymethylmethacrylate, and polystyrene). The proposed research will utilize state-of-the-art plasma-assisted surface modification, microanalysis, and tribotesting techniques suitable for evaluating the material response at different scales. The novelty of the proposed surface modification method stems from the use of different plasma compositions to modify, in a controlled fashion, the surface chemistry (e.g., crafting of low-surface long-chain molecules in the near-surface region) of the polymers. Since the resulting surface properties and chemical state strongly depend on controlling process conditions, basic research elucidating the effects of plasma treatment parameters (e.g., power density, plasma composition, working pressure, and gas flow rate) on the chemical behavior (e.g., crafting of protein friendly molecules, surface energy, and degree of hydrophilicity) and tribological properties of the polymers will be conducted. The ultimate objective is to develop a plasma treatment technique that enables modification of the surface chemistry, microstructure, and mechanical tribological properties of polymers used in various medical applications. Specifically, in addition to obtaining insight into the surface characteristics of plasma-treated polymers, the information derived from this research should have direct implications to the fabrication of low-friction catheters for non-invasive cardiovascular treatment and design of wear-resistant artificial joints exhibiting good biocompatibility doc5715 none This study proposes to explore the ways in which language and patterns of discourse shape innovation and change in complex adaptive human systems, here focused on changes in communication interaction among representatives of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and nuclear industry stakeholders. The context for change is an industry-wide change initiative in which the NRC engaged industry stakeholders in a dialogue to develop and implement a revised reactor oversight process (RROP). The RROP initiative is considered by industry experts to be a significant innovation in the way that NRC interacts with its regulated clients. Using a grounded theory methodology, the study will compare and contrast two patterns of communication interaction, one that occurred during the development of the RROP change initiative, and the other reflecting the traditional form of communication interaction among representatives of the NRC and the nuclear industry. As a consultant in the industry the researcher is a participant observer and has an unusually high degree of access to project data and participants in the study. The study has the support of the NRC, the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and nuclear power plant management doc5716 none This grant provides funding for research on methods for performance evaluation of large network models of complex systems that arise in manufacturing and communication systems. The systems in mind are so complex that simulation is typically the only viable tool for benchmarking the system. Unfortunately, simulation is not a particularly scalable technology. The research focuses on developing fast and efficient simulation methods for complex systems, by exploiting prior knowledge of the system s dynamics. Such prior knowledge may be obtained from examination of a fluid model , for example, which is an idealized model of complex systems where all entities are modeled as fluids flowing through pipes. A great deal is known about fluid models, and the hope is that this information can lead to very efficient simulation methods. If successful, the results of this research will ensure that simulation becomes a more scalable tool than before for a large class of systems. The central idea is that more accurate results may be obtained in (far) less time than would otherwise be the case. One can then implement more efficient algorithms for searching over different operating policies to determine the best operating policy, or at the very least one that is better than the existing policy doc5717 none A.W. England STAR-Light - A 1.4 GHz Scanning Thinned Array Radiometer for use on light aircraft in arctic land-surface hydrology STAR-Light will enable hydrologists to extend plot models of land-atmosphere energy and moisture transport processes to the circumpolar Arctic. Arctic energy balance experiments at sites that are both representative and accessible are used to develop Land-Surface Process (LSP) models, but extrapolating from these sites to the varying and mixed terrains of the circumpolar Arctic will require model calibration and validation that can be achieved only with frequent observations over broad regions beginning with spring thawing and ending with fall freezing. Once calibrated, these regional models will then serve either as improved lower boundaries of atmospheric models or as more reliable elements of integrated regional hydrology models. At the heart of the LSP model are estimates of moisture stored in soil, vegetation, and snow. The quality of these estimates and the skill of model predictions can be significantly improved by assimilating near-daily observations of the moisture in the upper few centimeters of soil. The remote sensing hydrology community has converged upon 1.4 GHz brightness as the most effective observation for this purpose. Recent breakthroughs in radiometer technology, in LSP Radiobrightness models, and in efficient schemes for assimilating radiobrightness have placed us on a path toward reliable long-term monitoring of changes in the amount, state, and spatial distribution of moisture stored within tundra throughout the Arctic. Essential elements of this vision are data from satellite radiometers and calibrated LSP R models for arctic terrains. Both the European Space Agency and NASA are developing 1.4 GHz synthetic aperture radiometers for low Earth orbit. Hydrologists are preparing for the advent of data from these instruments with extensive field campaigns to develop and calibrate LSP R models, and to validate schemes for assimilating satellite data. The focus of these efforts has been prairie terrains. There are no proven LSP R models for arctic terrains even though one could reasonably argue that remote sensing technologies are more vital to Earth system science in the Arctic. Mature LSP R models for arctic terrains require collaborative campaigns involving arctic soil and snow hydrologists and remote sensing hydrologists supported by near-daily regional data from an airborne 1.4 GHz imaging radiometer. Only three such instruments are planned for the next decade -two in Europe and an enhanced version of NASA s Electronically Scanned Thinned Array Radiometer (ESTAR) which flies on the NASA P-3 -a large, 4-engine turboprop aircraft. The high operating costs of the P-3, the conflicting schedules of instruments on the P-3, and the demand for ESTAR data in NASA s many large field campaigns will greatly limit its use in seasonal and inter-annual investigations in the Arctic. The PI s research group has developed the first example of a compact, 1.4 GHz, Direct Sampling Digital Radiometer (DSDR). The proposed STAR-Light instrument will use seven 1.4 GHz DSDR receivers configured as a 2-dimensional synthetic aperture radiometer. STAR-Light will be sufficiently compact and robust to operate in the Arctic on a light aircraft or on an Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle (UAV). A design goal is that it fit within the performance and configuration limitations of a Super Cub. STAR-Light will be designed, fabricated, and tested over a 3-year period by the Space Physics Research Laboratory (SPRL) at the University of Michigan doc5718 none White Introduction. Electrical activity in nerve and muscle cells is generated by populations of ion channels that gate (open or close) in response to changes in transmembrane voltage and or the concentrations of crucial chemicals. In studies of the biophysical processes underlying electrical activity, scientists and engineers rely upon two basic recording configurations. In the first recording configuration, commonly referred to as current clamping, the researcher controls the amount of net transmembrane current (i.e., current across the cell membrane) and measures transmembrane voltage. In the second recording configuration, called voltage clamping, the researcher uses an electrical feedback circuit to control transmembrane voltage and measures transmembrane current. Current clamping is useful for characterizing the patterns of electrical activity generated by a given nerve or muscle cell; voltage clamping is useful for studying the biophysical mechanisms underlying a particular pattern of electrical activity. More recently, a third very useful recording configuration has been developed, in which neither transmembrane current nor transmembrane voltage is the controlled variable. Instead, the researcher uses a sophisticated recording system to mimic in real time the electrical conductance associated with a given population of virtual ion channels. This recording mode, called dynamic clamping, allows the researcher to block native ion channels, and replace them with virtual analogs, the properties of which can be controlled precisely. Dynamic clamping and other real-time-computing-based protocols enable entirely new classes of experiments, in which (for example) the applied stimulus can mimic the behavior of a (blocked) dynamic component of the system, and thus be used to determine unequivocally the effects of the mimicked component of overall behavior. Dynamic clamping and other real-time experimental techniques show enormous promise as important research tools. Dynamic clamping could be used, for example, to study the electrical effects of computer-designed pharmaceutical agents even before the agents are developed in the laboratory. So far, however, the impact of this technique has been educed by three interrelated difficulties. First, the technical complexities of its design are beyond the skills of most end-users, and no one has yet provided a flexible, powerful, turn-key system. Second, existing dynamic clamp systems do not account for the seemingly stochastic (i.e., probabilistic) nature of voltage-gated ion channels. Adding this capability would allow researchers to attack entirely new sets of exciting problems that are as yet unapproachable. Third, existing dynamic clamp systems cannot account for measured or assumed spatial distributions of ion channels. Specific Aims. The specific aims of this proposal are (1) to complete construction of a stochastic dynamic clamp (SDC) system that can be used to study the actions of noisy virtual voltage- and ligand-gated ion channels in living cells; (2) to create a web-based system of support to help end-users adopt and use the SDC system for dynamic clamping and other real-time experimental applications; (3) to develop methods for representing virtual ion channels that are remote from the recording site in the cell body, and (4) to use the new SDC system to test specific hypotheses regarding the relative importance of noise from synaptic sources and noise from voltage-gated ion channels in limiting neuronal reliability. The project will have educational impact at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, in the context of the classroom and research projects. Innovations from Specific Aims 1 and 3 will extend the dynamic clamp method to account for stochastic and spatially distributed channels. The investigators support (Aim 2) will be a crucial step in developing a turn-key system. The system will be easily adaptable to apply techniques of real-time computation in many biomedical engineering applications. Field tests of the device (aim 4) will push the field of neurobiology in a more quantitative, information-oriented direction. In particular, they will advance the study of the biophysical underpinnings of neuronal reliability, which play a fundamental role in the understanding of coding strategies used by the nervous system. Such advances are not practically achievable without real-time computing technology doc5719 none This Polar Instrumentation and Technology Development project will lead to the development of a 16 x 16 element array of bolometers with Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID) readout. The array will be used as an imaging device in the focal plane of a submillimeter wavelength telescope at South Pole, the Antarctic Submillimeter Telescope and Remote Observatory (AST RO). The new detector on AST RO will be able to make observations much faster at wavelengths of a few hundred micrometers than any previous telescope arrangement and will permit entirely new astronomy to be done. The new detector array will also be used on other submillimeter telescopes at other sites, so it will find broad application doc5720 none ions and freedom within the collaborative design process; creating a framework for automated, distributed design; and establishing a new approach to engineering design pedagogy are the principle issues to be explored. Theoretically, the effort proposes to integrate living systems theory, working principles and working. The intended deliverable is a full formal proposal to develop the foundational principles for designing microworlds that support human reasoning and judgment in an information-driven, distributed, engineering-related enterprise doc5677 none This award supports the development of a prototype in-situ fossil air melt extraction device (INFAMED) for recovering large volumes of air and particles from polar ice sheets. Although this device would have a number of applications, the primary initial scientific objective would be to measure radiocarbon in atmospheric methane trapped in the ice at depth. This measurement would provide a definitive test of the hypothesis that decomposition of sedimentary methane clathrates caused the abrupt atmospheric methane concentration increases at the end of the last glacial period. In addition to studies of gases extracted from the ice sheet, such an instrument would allow large volumes of ice to be sampled and filtered for the collection of both terrestrial and extraterrestrial particles. The first phase of technology development involves a pilot project to explore feasibility at low cost, and will recover preindustrial air from depth in the Greenland ice sheet. If the technology is successful, a second proposal will be submitted to construct a full-sized device, designed to reach m depth and sample 15,000 year old air at the South Pole doc5722 none Development of a Remote Coil Magnetoelastic Stress Sensor for Monitoring Steel Cables and Tendons Despite the increasing popularity of cable-stayed bridges, no accurate or simple method is available for directly measuring the stresses (forces) in the cable stays. The measurement of the forces is important for monitoring excessive wind or traffic loadings, to gage the redistribution forces present after seismic events, and for detecting corrosion via loss of the cross section. It is planned to develop a remote (portable) magnetoelastic sensor for the direct measurement of stress in steel cables and tendons. A magnetoelastic sensor based on a cylindrical solenoidal geometry, which is suitable for installation at the time of construction or winding in-situ for existing cables has been developed at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The technique is based upon the dependence of the magnetic properties of structural steels directly related to the state of stress. The magnetic properties are measured by subjecting the steel to a pulse or periodic magnetising field. Changes in flux through circuits surrounding or adjacent to the steel allow the magnetic properties to be measured. Accuracy within 1% (against a load cell) in the temperature range of -40 (F) to 140(F) are routinely achieved with different sizes of sensor below the elastic limit. These sensors have been accepted for field testing during the construction of several projects. This project will investigate avenues to extend the magnetoelastic measurement principles to a new sensing circuit which does not require winding it around the cable. It is portable and reusable. It is highly desirable to perform the stress measurement using this coil geometry in the post-yield regime for damage assessment of cables due to unanticipated loadings doc5723 none The Pittburgh Supercomputer Center (PSC), a jointly supported venture of The University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University acting through the MPC Corporation, in collaboration with Westinghouse Electric Corporation, will put in place a 6 peak teraflop computing system for use by US researchers in all science and engineering disciplines. The system will be provided by Compaq, based on a cluster of 686 4-processor Alpha based SMP nodes and Quadrics ELAN4 interconnects; it will have 2.7 terabytes of memory, 25 terabytes of local disk and 160 terabytes of global disk. The system will be deployed in two stages. The initial system will consist of ES40 systems with 16 nodes arriving in September . In October the system will be upgraded to 64 nodes and be available in friendly user mode. This would form the basis of a relatively stable production environment for a modest number of users and will remain in service until the final system is completed in October . Delivery of the final TCS system to PSC will begin in May although a 256-node test system will be available in December at Compaq. A 256-node system will be installed at PSC in June followed by a steady increase in size to about 618 nodes in September . The conversion of the initial system to complete the final 686-node system in October . Allocations will be managed by the existing PACI National Resource Allocation Committee (NRAC doc5724 none The goal of this project is the development of a local area imaging network for polar regions that is remotely accessible via satellite high-speed data link. The primary purpose of this imaging network will be the performance of close-range three-dimensional photogrammetry for the remote determination of accurate spatial dimensions. By incorporating 3D-photogrammetry into the imaging system, the PIwill transform remote, close-range imaging from a simple observational tool to into a sophisticated quantitative tool for the accurate assessment of biological and physical systems in extreme environments. The rationale for this system is a critical knowledge deficit of vital life-history data on polar pinnipeds and seabirds. In northern regions, significant marine life management decisions are being made in the absence of adequate data. In the Bering Sea ecosystem in particular, apex predators such as Steller sea lions have declined to about ten percent of peak population levels. Despite years of intense research, hypothesized competition between marine apex predators and fisheries industry remains untested, predominantly for lack of viable research approaches for obtaining crucial life history data. Such data include frequent accurate census and age structure information in rookeries, as well as body mass and condition estimates of individual animals prior to, during and after fishing seasons. In a novel approach, we propose to use remote 3D-photogrammetry to significantly increase temporal resolution and numerical accuracy of remote census operations, to determine the age structure of rookeries through measurements of animals lengths, and to use photogrammetric volume determinations as estimators of body mass, in a technique recently validated by our laboratories. The proposed Satellite-Linked Data collection and Photogrammetric imaging system (SLiDaP system) will consist of initially four independent sub-stations, linked via wireless LAN to a fifth core-station. All stations will contain ultra-high-resolution digital still cameras and PCs, and will be independently powered by solar panels and batteries. The core station will be remotely accessible via an INMARSAT high speed data link. Key system design criteria will center around extreme ruggedness, highest reliability with minimal service requirements, low temperature capability, complete independence from any local power and communications infrastructure, rapid system deployment capability, as well as very low environmental impact. Two prototype SLiDaP systems. The first system will be tested in Astoria, or for greater accessibility and early developmental refinement. The second prototype system will be tested under realistic field conditions on Ugamak Island, in the Aleutian Island chain. This cooperative proposal between Texas A&M University Laboratory for Applied Biotelemetry & Biotechnolgy and the National Marine Mammal Laboratory (NMFS), brings together leading academic research and marine resource management laboratories, as well as the industry leaders in photogrammetry and mobile archival tag design. Our efforts aredesigned to enhance basic biological research as well as marine ecosystem management. The proposed system will have applications far beyond our projected use: geologists, glaciologist and vulcanologist should profit from the availability of accurate remote close-range measurements for monitoring of shore degradation, land movement hazards, or volcano hazards to arctic air traffic routes along the Aleutians doc5725 none This project is investigating the relationship between mercury and archaea. Mercury is an extremely toxic heavy metal mined from cinnabar deposits but is otherwise rare. Most bacterial prokaryotes employ the mer genes to achieve mercury resistance. The mer genes are highly conserved, widely distributed, and frequently transmitted among bacteria. Surprisingly, there are no reports of mercury resistance among archaeal prokaryotes. To investigate this question studies have been undertaken on a naturally occurring mercury-rich geothermal environment distinguished by sulfhydryl deficiency and oxidative excess. Mercury resistant archaea were cultured from Pool 3-4, a cinnabar hot springs (pH 1.7, 78 degrees C, 2 mg liter mercury) located in the Mojave Desert. Pool 3-4 is strongly influenced by seasonal rainfall with concomitant changes in pool solute levels, particularly mercury. Efforts in this project are focused on one isolate identified as Sulfolobus solfataricus. Maintenance of archaeal mercury resistance in this isolate requires selective pressure. Co-segregation of mercury resistance and a 13 kb endogenous plasmid indicates that resistance is plasmid encoded. A mercury adaptive response was identified which is accompanied by transient induction of a 25 kDa protein. The first part of this LExEn project focuses on archaeal mercury resistance and adaptation. Enzyme assays for mercury reduction and volatilization will test for presence of a bacterial mer-type mechanism. Characterization of the endogenous plasmid will enable identification of possible mer orthologous sequences. Regions critical for mercury resistance will be identified using plasmid deletion derivatives for genetic transfer studies with mercury sensitive recipients. Identification of the mercury induced 25 kDa protein will help clarify the mechanism of toxicity. The relationship between mercury resistance and adaptation will focus on expression patterns of the 25 kDa protein. The second part of the project focuses on the origin and potential transfer of mercury resistance genes. Phylogenetic analysis of cultured and uncultured microbes from Pool 3-4 will be completed and used to create specific fluor-labled probes for community structure analysis. Measurements of community composition will establish the consequences of seasonal variation in mercury levels. Archaeal mercury resistance gene probes will be used to track distribution and transfer of mercury resistance among members of the Pool 3-4 community coinciding with peak mercury concentrations. The anticipated results should distinguish possible origins of archaeal mercury resistance and establish an understanding of the mechanism of mercury toxicity in archaea. This information will extend knowledge about life in extremely oxidizing environments and contribute to the genetic manipulation of archaeal hyperthermophiles doc5726 none Eloranta This project will design, fabricate, and test a prototype next-generation automatic weather station (AWS) for use in polar regions. The current network of AWS units relies on a twenty-year old design that has proven very reliable, however critical components are no longer available and newer and improved versions make a redesign not only feasible, but also necessary. The next generation AWS will incorporate the current capability to operate in a harsh environment, and to transmit data through System Argos receiver on polar orbiting satellites, but will also consume much less power, be much more flexible in its ability to interface with many different sensors, offer greatly reduced component size, and significantly greater processing power. It will also anticipate the Argos-3 satellite platform that will allow two-way communication with the AWS network deployed in Antarctica doc5702 none This collaborative research will examine atmosphere-biosphere interactions, a key component of the Earth s physical system. Understanding this interaction is crucial to improve general circulation models, as well as to monitor variations in the carbon budget. The PIs will combine models and techniques produced in previously funded projects, with surface vegetation data sets, surface energy balance and carbon flux data, and new remote sensing products. They will further develop the physical interpretation of the first appearance of spring foliage commonly called the green wave in the mid-latitudes. The results will allow the development of a time line that interconnects various atmospheric and biospheric changes associated with the green wave phenomena. Baseline 30-year normals and 20th century change assessments of the timing of the onset of spring across mid-latitude locations will serve as references for future research. The work is important because it will demonstrate the critical roles that surface phenological and meteorological data play in atmosphere-biosphere simulations and for global change monitoring, when used in concert with satellite-derived bioclimatological data doc5728 none This grant provides funding for the development of a process control strategy for the control of moisture content in paper manufacturing. The control strategy will utilize as feedback, estimates of the moisture content of the paper as it is being manufactured. The vacuum dewatering process, in addition to the thermal drying process, will be used as the control actuators. The estimates of the moisture content will be based on surrogate measurements which are measurement of quantities that are more easily measurable than moisture content, but are related to moisture content. To develop this control strategy, constitutive models that govern the water removal process in vacuum dewatering will first be developed. Suitable surrogate variables will be identified and models that describe how they relate to moisture content will be developed. These models will be validated in both static and dynamic dewatering environments. Based on the developed models for dewatering and for the surrogate measurements, algorithms for estimating moisture content will be developed. Control algorithms will then be developed, analyzed, optimized, simulated, and finally, experimentally tested. If successful, the results of this research will lead to improvement in the quality of moisture content control in paper manufacture. Accurate and uniform moisture content is critical for paper to be curl free, cockle free and not cause printer and copiers to jam. In addition, reduction in energy expenditure is also expected as the energy intensive thermal drying process will be more efficiently utilized. The constitutive models developed in this research will improve the fundamental understanding of vacuum dewatering, which in turn will lead to improved designs for future paper machines doc5729 none This Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) award provides funding for the development of a numerical tool for determining optimal process parameters in bulk forming processes, such as rolling, extrusion, and forging. The developed numerical tool will determine the optimal process geometry, temperature and speed that satisfy specified design criteria for a given two- dimensional forming process. An optimization algorithm based on an adaptive arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian finite element formulation for modeling large deformation thermo-elasto-viscoplastic contact problems used. The algorithm will be implemented in the context of an existing advanced computational framework that has tools for mesh generation, adaptivity, and parallel computing. Experiments involving the extrusion process will also be performed to validate the algorithms developed. Experimental dies will be manufactured according to the optimal die shapes predicted in this work and tested at the predicted optimal die speeds. A model press, which can extrude plasticine material marked with grid, will be used in these experiments to observe the material flow behavior. If successful, the results of this research will lead to improvements in the design of bulk forming processes and new developments in optimization methods for handling complex nonlinear problems. The primary goal of this work is to determine optimal process geometry, thermal conditions, and process speed in bulk forming processes that will satisfy typically prescribed design criteria. These design criteria may include generating a uniform flow of the material, generating a specified material property distribution in the formatted product, minimizing the production time, or minimizing the energy required for the process. Determining the process parameters to achieve these objectives will help to reduce the cost and improve the quality of the final product in processes such as extrusion and forging. The proposed work will also contribute to the computational tools and methodologies available for nonlinear optimization problems doc5730 none This work will develop a new type of refrigerator to cool astronomical infrared detectors to less than 1K using the new pulse tube technology. USAP currently spends about $1M per year providing liquid helium to South Pole for this purpose. If this effort is fully successful than most of that money can be saved and even more science will be obtained from the South Pole telescopes. The cooler will have application at other sites as well and possibly eventually in space doc5731 none Kamb- This award supports the development of a new core-drilling system for obtaining samples of bedrock and glacial sediment from beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet, with applicability to arctic glaciers and the Greenland Ice Sheet. Such samples are needed for a wide variety of investigations of antarctic and arctic geology, geochemistry, glaciology and geobiology. Examples are studies of sedimentary and volcanic rocks of the West Antarctic rift system, studies of the fast-moving West Antarctic ice streams, and microbiological studies of life under the extreme conditions at the basal ice-bedrock contact. The core-drilling capability will make it possible to carry out such investigations over the 98% of the Antarctic continent that is covered by the ice sheet and thus has been inaccessible for sampling up to now. The system involves the coupling of two proven drilling technologies that are both based on a source of high-pressure water: 1) hot-water jet drilling to drill rapidly through the ice, and 2) hydromechanical rotary drilling to drill into the underlying sediments or bedrock doc5732 none Jensen Barrow Arctic Science Consortium Thule burial sites in the Point Barrow, Alaska area have been exposed by storm-driven erosion. Archaeologists will survey the sites, attempting to recover information from the most endangered sections, and test less endangered areas to determine if there are more archaeological deposits that can shed light on the Thule culture. Historic remains are also endangered and will be investigated in this community-based project with the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium and the Ukpeagvik Inupiat Corporation doc5733 none This grant provides funding for research to integrate environmental and economic performance information for manufacturers. This research will attempt to help industry see, in real time, opportunities for improving both economic and environmental performance. The objective is to develop new business process instrumentation and corresponding methods of analysis that will quantify and qualify the joint environmental and economic performance of manufacturing plants. This project will extend familiar cost management principles (in particular Activity-Based Costing) into environmental management in order to create a combined economic and environmental performance measurement framework. A model of a manufacturing plant s processes using an Activity-Based Cost, Mass, and Energy approach will be developed. Manufacturing process sensors will be used to enhance response time of performance measurements. The data streams will be integrated into a web-browser based display that provides read-outs of the plant s performance at various levels of detail. The tools will be implemented and tested in an actual manufacturing plant. This test-bed will be used to assess the findings and lessons learned with respect to developing integrated economic and environmental assessments. If successful, this research will provide new business and process instrumentation and corresponding methods of analysis that will quantify and qualify the joint environmental and economic performance of manufacturing plants. These tools will advance the cause of environmentally conscious manufacturing (and ultimately, sustainable development) by providing a basis for benchmarking a manufacturing plant with other plants and other industries. Companies will use these methods to accelerate their contributions to a more sustainable society doc5734 none Behavior of Large Diameter Water Pipe at Seismic Fault by M.J. O Rourke and R. Dobry The proposed work is a collaborative research project on the seismic behavior of potable water systems with particular emphasis on buried pipe. The project has two specific goals. The first is to fully and properly document the behavior of buried pipeline and other water system components in the affected areas of Turkey and Taiwan during the earthquakes in . The second goal is to investigate the behavior of large diameter water pipe subject to the fault rupture hazard. In terms of the first goal, the data gathering and subsequent analysis will be directed at establishing fragility relations based upon key engineering parameters and mechanics, as opposed to simply a statistical analysis of empirical observations. The earthquakes in Turkey and Taiwan provide a unique opportunity to develop a fundamental understanding of the behavior of large diameter pipe subject to the fault rupture hazard. In both events, large diameter water pipe were severely damaged where they transversed the surface expression of a fault The opportunity is unique in the sense that surface faulting has not intersected large diameter pipe in past events. We plan to develop a fundamental understanding of this hazard by comparing the results of computer simulation and small scale laboratory modeling using the Rensselaer Geotechnical Centrifuge `with observed full scale behavior doc5735 none Bay The Kocaeli and Duzce earthquakes in Turkey have generated important information and data at: (l) stations where strong ground motions were recorded, (2) sites where significant soil liquefaction occurred, and (3) localized areas with widely varying building damage. One key variable in investigating the earthquake response at these three types of sites is the shear stiffness profile of the foundation soils. A joint study will be conducted by researchers at Utah State University (USU) and the University of Texas at Austin (UTA) to characterize selected sites in each category using seismic measurements made in the field. A total of about 20 sites will be investigated. The seismic measurements will be used to develop small-strain shear modulus profiles, some one-dimensional and some two-dimensional, over critical depths at the sites. Profiling depths will range from 9 to 60 m, with liquefaction sites generally requiring the shallowest profiles and strong motion recording stations requiring the deepest profiles. To perform the seismic measurements, a non-intrusive seismic testing technique involving Rayleigh-type surface waves will be used. This technique is called spectral-analysis-of-surface-waves (SASW) testing. The technique is non-intrusive because both the source and receivers are placed on the ground surface. Measurement of surface wave dispersion (i.e. surface waves of differing wavelengths travelling at different velocities) is performed in the field and forward modeling is used in the laboratory to evaluate the shear wave velocity profile at the site. Researchers at UTA have been successfully using SASW testing at geotechnical sites on land for the past 18 years. During the s, UTA researchers completed numerous investigations in California at liquefaction sites, solid-waste landfills, and strong motion stations shaken by the Loma Prieta and Northridge earthquakes. In Turkey, this previous experience will be used to optimize profiling at the selected sites. For instance, a bulldozer, which will be rented locally near the strong-motion sites, will be used as a source for deep profiling. A drop-weight source, which can be readily fabricated in Turkey, will be used in profiling the shallower depths. The proposed project is critical because it provides extensive shear wave velocity characterization of important sites shaken by the Kocaeli and Duzce earthquakes. SASW testing is the most cost-effective method for evaluating shear wave velocity profiles. The shear wave velocity data obtained from this study will be shared with the earthquake engineering and seismological communities and will prove invaluable to future research projects doc5736 none Liquefaction-induced building settlement and loss of bearing strength were major causes of damage during the 17 August Kocaeli, Turkey earthquake. The area primarily affected was within the city of Adapazari where hundreds of buildings settled and tipped by varying degrees due to liquefaction of subsurface sediment layers. With so many buildings affected, Adapazari provides a natural laboratory for the study of effects of liquefaction on building performance and development of improved design procedures to prevent future damage. Design of buildings to resist effects of liquefaction is a major issue in structural design in the US and other seismic areas. Because of the importance of this problem and the lack of adequate criteria in engineering practice, results from this study will likely be immediately and widely used in foundation design practice. Following the 17 August earthquake, NSF funded several reconnaissance investigations to Turkey, including a rapid deployment of an Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) reconnaissance team lead by the principal investigator (T.L. Youd) and follow-up geotechnical investigations organized through the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER). These investigations produced a large and detailed inventory of settled and tipped buildings, the most extensive and complete inventory of such buildings following any earthquake to date. This building damage and the compiled inventory provide an important and unique opportunity to generate numerous documented case histories of building performance, complete with subsurface sediment stratigraphy and soil properties. These case histories are essential to the development of evaluation criteria and design procedures for prevention of liquefaction-induced building settlement and tilting due to liquefaction. The primary objective of this study is the compilation of stratigraphic cross sections and soil property data from an array of cone penetration soundings (CPT) to be conducted in areas of Adapazari most affected by building settlement and tilting. Soil samples will be extracted either by this project or through related projects for sediment classification and testing. A second major objective of this study is to prepare data files for distribution on the web and other venues for use by geotechnical and earth science professionals in the US and abroad. These data should be sufficient for analysts to develop and test procedures for predicting building settlement and loss of bearing strength at liquefaction-prone sites. A third objective will be to analyze the compiled data along with similar data from previous earthquakes to develop empirical procedures for evaluating building settlement and tilting hazard doc5737 none Seismic Fragility and Retrofit of Non-Ductile Reinforced Concrete Structures using New Technologies This project will address the applicability of new technologies, namely supplemental passive energy dissipation systems (EDS) for the retrofit of non-ductile reinforced concrete (NDRC) structures. The effectiveness of various EDS alternatives will be demonstrated and comparative studies will be performed. This study will be carried out based on the actual observed damage during the Turkey (August 17, Marmara and November 12, Duzce) earthquakes. In collaboration with researchers and engineers in Turkey, damage data from the Turkey earthquakes will be compiled. Selected data on the damaged reinforced concrete structures will be utilized to develop realistic computational models using the inelastic structural analysis software IDARC, and to develop fragility information from the statistics of the observed structural response. Retrofit design of several alternative EDS systems such as friction devices, metallic devices, viscous devices and re-centering devices will be carried out according to established performance criteria. This part of the study will allow a direct and comprehensive comparison of the effectiveness of all the considered EDS systems. Overall, this study will provide valuable information to the rational quantification of loss reduction through fragility changes. The assessed change of fragility curves will allow immediate evaluation of the sensitivity of suggested retrofit solutions using EDS simultaneously considering all the influencing parameters, i.e. seismic hazard, seismic demand, and the capacity limit states of structures doc5738 none The research objectives of this Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) award are to develop new statistical quality control for healthcare adverse events, such as medication and laboratory errors, hospital-acquired infections, and other preventable problems and mistakes. Three new methods will be control rare events based on inverse binomial sampling and mixtures of non-identical distributions, to incorporate logistic regression and other approaches into a general risk quality control framework, and to combine these control methods simultaneously. Numeric programs will be developed and used to investigate the statistical performance and operating characteristics of these methods, and an optimization search algorithm will be developed implemented to determine the optimal economic and statistical-economic designs of methods. Developed methods also will be validated empirically using large database drug events, needle stick injuries, and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aurous at two academic hospitals. If successful, the benefits of this research will lead to improved surveillance methods and reduce the occurrence of preventable adverse healthcare events, estimated to result to 2 million patient injuries, 45,000 to 98,000 deaths, and $8.8 billion in costs annual nationwide. The developed methods will provide greater statistical power to detect changes in the occurrence rates of infrequent adverse events and will accurately account for aggregation homogeneous patients. Determining the operating characteristics and optimal design of each method will help reduce the time to detect problems and the associated costs. Results will be used to compare proposed and traditional hospital surveillance methods, identify conditions under which each method performs better than others, and develop design and selection guidelines. The proposed research also will benefit similar quality control problems in high yield manufacturing and other industries doc5739 none Steinberg The August Turkish earthquake offers a unique opportunity to study how hazardous materials releases may be triggered by earthquakes. In this project, Turkish industrial facilities will be surveyed to learn what types of hazardous materials released occurred and what types of mitigation and emergency response measures were effective. The data will be tabulated and hazard assessment methods employed to describe the series of events, which led to these releases. Recommendations for making the U.S. and Turkish hazardous material management plans and emergency response procedures more responsive to the particular needs generated by joint natural and technological disasters will be offered doc5740 none PI: R. Frosch Institution: Purdue University : The specific and sole objective of the proposed work is to gather, collate, and archive for distribution data related to the assessment of urban building seismic vulnerability in the Duzce-Bolu region in Turkey. The work will focus on the damage caused by the 12 November event and will be carried out by faculty and students of Purdue University cooperatively with the University of Notre Dame, the University of Illinois, and The Middle East Technical University, Ankara. The Turkish State Waterworks and the Turkish Directorate for Resettlement and Natural Disasters have committed to allow free access to their databases on geological, geotechnical, and seismological information. The distinctive feature of the project is that the final product will include a database (initiated already at www.AnatolianQuake.org) containing information selected by a cohesive group of structural engineers, geotechnical engineers, and geologists and presented in a manner to be understood by researchers in all three disciplines so that cross-cutting hypotheses about urban earthquake-risk can be tested. The plan is to include basic building data (damage level, number of stories, framing type, footprint, critical member sizes, location coordinates) for approximately 750 buildings in Duzce, Bolu, and Kaynasli. The geotechnical data will include geological and geotechnical surface maps as well as hydrogeological maps of the Duzce-Bolu region. In GIS format, it will also include borehole logs with soil characterization and available field and laboratory data such as SPT, CPT, permeability, and shear vane. In addition to the currently available line maps of the fault, geological data will include detailed information on ground fracturing and deformation to be obtained by the project staff. Availability of these data, focused on specific locations of heavy and light damage to the built environment, will provide a rich and useful database to geologists, geotechnical engineers, and structural engineers working jointly or independently to test and develop methods for assessment of earthquake vulnerability doc5741 none analysis PI: R. Zhang Institution: Colorado School of Mines : Near-field ground acceleration recordings have revealed many vibration wave characteristics that are uniquely different from the medium- to far-field ones. These include, among others, the low-frequency pulse-like wave signals and high-energy distribution in the beginning of the recordings. They are very useful primarily in the following two aspects: (1) As the output in modeling earthquake wave motions and or explaining earthquake phenomena in the earth, they can help solve such seismological issues as source mechanism, directivity influence, and soil dynamic non-linearity. (2) As the input to geotechnical and structural engineering systems, they can be used to compute dynamic nonlinear responses and thus to evaluate seismic performance of systems. This analysis can quantify earthquake impact on various engineering systems designed on the basis of knowledge obtained form medium- to far-field ground motion records. However, before the Kocaeli (Turkey) and Chi-Chi (Taiwan) earthquakes, there existed only 8 ground motion recordings worldwide for earthquakes greater than a magnitude 7 and at a distance of less than 20 kilometers from the fault. The lack of data has restricted studies on the quantitative nature of near-field motion and its impact on engineering systems. In addition, conventional approaches (e.g., Fourier or Fourier-based wavelet analysis) supply either distorted or indirect information from the ground motion recordings. This might mislead, to a certain extent, the consequent use of the ground motion data for solving the aforementioned seismological and engineering issues. This study seeks to use a newly developed Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT) to comprehensively analyze the near-field acceleration recordings of the Kocaeli and Chi-Chi earthquakes. In particular, the proposed study focuses on the following subjects: (1) singling out the undistorted low-frequency pulse-like wave signals from the original data and presenting a simple measure of them in terms of their peak and duration; (2) providing an accurate representation of time-frequency seismic energy distribution of the motion; and (3) revealing the commonality and difference in terms of vibration wave characteristics of the motion among the near- and far-field recordings of each of the two earthquakes, among the near-field motions at observation sites with different orientations to the fault, and among the near-field motions of the two earthquakes compared with large-magnitude US earthquakes (e.g., Landers earthquake). A multi-disciplinary research team has been formed to perform the proposed project, consisting of the PI, and a senior structural engineering researcher (Erdal Safak) and a seismologist (Stephen Hartzell) at USGS at Denver, CO. The results from this study will be disseminated through the Internet at designated web pages related to these two earthquakes. Seismologists and engineers will be able to use the results for their further studies and applications in pertinent research frontiers. This study will not only help advance our knowledge of the earthquake source, but it will also improve the understanding of the damage potential of earthquake motion on various structures and thus enhance the contemporary seismic-resistance structural design doc5742 none The objective of this proposal is to explore the feasibility of using remote sensing technology, in particular Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging, to quantify the scope and magnitude of damage after major earthquakes. To accomplish this objective, we plan on using a combination of technologies and modeling techniques from the remote sensing and loss estimation areas. An important element of this plan will be the use of damage information and data from the Turkey and Taiwan earthquakes to calibrate and test the resulting methodology. The research plan is described in three major phases: (1) development of methodology and collection of remote sensing and damage data from the Turkey (Izmit) and Taiwan (Chi-Chi) earthquakes, (2) calibration of methodology using data from the Izmit earthquake, and (3) application and validation of methodology using data from the Chi-Chi earthquake. The present proposal is directed at Phases 1 and 2 only. A second proposal will be submitted after completion of this study to expand the analysis to the Chi-Chi Earthquake doc5743 none PI: J. Martin Institution: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University : Across the world, many large cities have developed over low-lying, relatively flat waterfront areas underlain by weak, soft sediments deposited by rivers, lakes, or bays. In terms of make-up, these deposits typically contain soft clays and or loose sands saturated by a high water table. Of particular concern is the safety and integrity of constructed facilities and lifelines in these areas against large earthquakes expected in the future. As illustrated by recent large earthquakes (San Francisco, CA; Kobe, Japan; and Istanbul, Turkey), these settings are frequently the site of heavy infrastructure damage from soil failures such as excessive settlement and large lateral movements. Recent experience indicates that damage potential in these environments can be reduced using ground improvement techniques. As a result, a variety of ground modification methods are being developed to strengthen and stiffen weak soils. These techniques involve compaction, densification, drainage, replacement, adding of chemical mixtures, and other measures that increase the resistance to ground failure during shaking. Although these techniques are seeing increased acceptance, there remains a lack of performance data to confirm the effectiveness of the methods under actual earthquake loadings (current soil improvement methods for earthquake damage mitigation are based primarily on laboratory and computer studies). Field data are crucial for improving current design procedures and refining improvement techniques. The presence of a number of improved soil sites in the affected region of the recent earthquakes in Turkey provides the unique opportunity to study such sites under field conditions. Following the August Kocaeli Earthquake (M=7.4) and significant aftershocks, the PIs performed investigations in the affected area to document geotechnical field performance. These studies focused on investigating improved soil sites. Six sites were identified, and field reconnaissance and preliminary analyses were conducted. The sites represented a range of soil conditions and ground improvement techniques. Five sites were located in industrial commercial settings and contained mixtures of loose sands and soft clays that were treated using vibro-densification, stone columns, and or jet grouting. The remaining site was a reinforced earth wall constructed of steel strips and compacted granular backfill. The sites were subjected to ground motions ranging from about 0.10g to 0.35g. The site locations ranged from 0 to 35 km from the zone of energy release. Preliminary observations showed that ground treatment was generally effective in mitigating earthquake-related damages, especially relative to damages observed at nearby sites of untreated ground. The reinforced earth wall also performed well despite being subjected to large ground displacements. Each site was carefully studied and documented during the reconnaissance. Although some subsoil data and construction details were obtained for most of the sites investigated, there were inadequate data to characterize soil conditions at the scale needed for careful, detailed study. Of particular concern is the complete lack of geotechnical data for untreated sites located adjacent to the main study sites. The untreated sites provide an important basis for performance comparisons. This proposal is submitted to obtain the data needed to make possible case history analysis of the ten sites. The proposed work involves collection of existing soil data where available, Standard Penetration Testing (SPT), Cone Penetration Testing (CPT), insitu shear wave velocity measurements, and laboratory index and strength testing (in Turkey). The balance of the effort during this phase will be directed toward preliminary case analysis of the Turkish sites. A subsequent proposal will be submitted to perform a more general study of improved ground that will include cases from Turkey, Taiwan, Japan, and the U.S., along with numerical modeling and centrifuge data. This project will rely on close collaboration between Virginia Tech and Turkish researchers. The PIs have a long-standing close relationship with engineers and researchers at Zetas Engineering Company and Bogazici University. Also, Virginia Tech and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology recently established the World Institute for Disaster Risk Management (DRM). The Swiss government, Swiss Re, and the World Bank support DRM. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH), Virginia Tech, Bogazici University, and Yokohama National University through DRM recently developed a collaborative proposal, Microzonation for Earthquake Risk Mitigation. The Swiss component of the project has been funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. Work with Sakarya University in Adapazari, Turkey is underway. The current proposal would play an integral role in Virginia Tech s involvement in this project doc5744 none Turkish government and non-governmental organizations failed to anticipate the scale of human needs following the August 17, earthquake. Scenario based needs estimation modeling is essential to the development of response and recovery strategies, plans and organizational structures needed to prepare for future earthquakes. The purpose of the proposed research is to identify, collet, synthesize and quality assure human needs planning data required to populate and calibrate these models before this data is lost or the ability ti interpret data is degraded. The resulting data bases will be made available on their internet for researchers and emergency planners doc5745 none Time sensitive data and field information, records of constructed facility performance, and institutional action related to emergency response and recovery during the Kocaeli (August 17, ) and Duzce (November 12, ) earthquakes will be collected and organized under a spatially based framework. The research work will be implemented through the coordinated effort of teams of U.S. and Turkish scientists, engineers and earthquake professionals. The research work is part of a larger research program with an overall long-term objective to develop a spatial based analytical approach to facilitate the integrated assessment of emergency preparedness, response, and recovery for earthquakes doc5746 none PI: N. Sitar Institution: University of California at Berkeley : Seismically triggered landslides are a common phenomena associated with earthquakes in mountainous regions. The September 21, , Chi Chi, Taiwan earthquake and subsequent large aftershocks generated more than 1,800 landslides throughout the central mountain region of Taiwan. What makes these landslides particularly interesting for follow up studies is the fact that the earthquake activated instruments at more than 700 free-field acceleration sites. Consequently, with this large database of recorded ground motions we now have a unique opportunity to directly relate the extent and type of slope failure to the magnitude of shaking and to evaluate our capability of GIS based models to assess seismic slope stability on a regional and local scale. One of the principal problems in being able to develop an accurate predictive GIS based slope stability model is the resolution of the baseline information, which consists of many layers of data collected from various sources. In Taiwan, such data resides in CEDAMS (Chi Chi Earthquake Database Analysis & Management Systems), which provides on-line analysis and management functions for about 15-20 Giga Bytes of data available in the form of aerial photos, SPOT images, basic datasets of disaster areas, Digital Terrain Maps and digital maps in the Chi Chi Earthquake database. The main problem is making sure that the database contains the right type of information with sufficient accuracy for future analyses. Thus, the immediate objective of this one-year effort is to take advantage of this large amount of data and to concentrate on the task of collecting detailed field data on a small subset of the landslides. Digital field mapping techniques based on GPS positioning will be used in order to augment the existing database with more accurate topographic information. This information will be used to define sharp breaks in the terrain, such as the top and toe of the slopes, stream banks, road cuts, ridges or other locations of abrupt surface change. Furthermore, accurate mapping of landslide scarps, local geology, and an assessment of strength characteristics will be needed. These data will then be coupled with best interpretation of the local ground motions in order to calibrate the model doc5747 none PI: K. Stokoe Institution: University of Texas at Austin : The Kocaeli and Duzce earthquakes in Turkey have generated important information and data at: (1) stations where strong ground motions were recorded, (2) sites where significant soil liquefaction occurred, and (3) localized areas with widely varying building damage. One key variable in investigating the earthquake response at these three types of sites is the shear stiffness profile of the foundation soils. A joint study will be conducted by researchers at Utah State University (USU) and the University of Texas at Austin (UTA) to characterize selected sites in each category using seismic measurements made in the field. A total of about 20 sites will be investigated. The seismic measurements will be used to develop small-strain shear modulus profiles, some one-dimensional and some two-dimensional, over critical depths at the sites. Profiling depths will range from 9 to 60 m, with liquefaction sites generally requiring the shallowest profiles and strong motion recording stations requiring the deepest profiles. To perform the seismic measurements, a non-intrusive seismic testing technique involving Rayleigh-type surface waves will be used. This technique is called spectral-analysis-of-surface-waves (SASW) testing. The technique is non-intrusive because both the source and receivers are placed on the ground surface. Measurement of surface wave dispersion (i.e. surface waves of differing wavelengths travelling at different velocities) is performed in the field and forward modeling is used in the laboratory to evaluate the shear wave velocity profile at the site. Researchers at UTA have been successfully using SASW testing at geotechnical sites on land for the past 18 years. During the s, UTA researchers completed numerous investigations in California at liquefaction sites, solid-waste landfills, and strong motion stations shaken by the Loma Prieta and Northridge earthquakes. In Turkey, this previous experience will be used to optimize profiling at the selected sites. For instance, a bulldozer, which will be rented locally near the strong-motion sites, will be used as a source for deep profiling. A drop-weight source, which can be readily fabricated in Turkey, will be used in profiling the shallower depths. The proposed project is critical because it provides extensive shear wave velocity characterization of important sites shaken by the Kocaeli and Duzce earthquakes. SASW testing is the most cost-effective method for evaluating shear wave velocity profiles. The shear wave velocity data obtained from this study will be shared with the earthquake engineering and seismological communities and will prove invaluable to future research projects doc5748 none Manuel The Role of Input Energy in Assessing Seismic Hazard and Damage following the Turkey Earthquakes The main focus of this study is to examine the extent of correlation of energy-based descriptors of ground motion with the observed spatial distribution of damage during the recent earthquakes in Turkey. Of secondary interest is a comparison between more conventional strength-based descriptors (such as spectral acceleration) and these energy-based descriptors. Probabilistic seismic hazard analyses will be performed using both of these frequency-dependent ground motion parameters. Revised attenuation models including data from the recent earthquakes (with emphasis on recorded near-fault motions) will enhance the current database and reduce uncertainty in hazard estimates. Whenever soil profile information is available, attempts will be made to include site effects in the hazard estimates. Damage data for short-period industrial structures and for residential and office buildings will be collected from various regions and will also be correlated spatially with input energy and spectral acceleration demands. Products of this study will include new predictive attenuation models as well as an understanding of the importance of energy-based ground motion descriptors and of the role of site effects on seismic hazard and on damage to short- and long-period structures doc5749 none During the Kocaeli and Duzce, Turkey, earthquakes, surface faulting caused substantial damage to structures and lifelines. It is the first time that surface faulting impacts urban and industrial areas to such an extent, and raises major concerns about our current practices in earthquake engineering. During the Kocaeli, Turkey, earthquake, there was also major damage due to liquefaction-induced lateral spreads and coastal subsidences along the coasts of the Bay of Izmit and Lake Sapanca. The objective of this proposed exploratory research is to measure ground deformations caused by surface faulting and liquefaction during the Kocaeli and Duzce, Turkey earthquakes. This information, which will be disseminated to researchers and practitioners via the Internet, will contribute to improving models for liquefaction-induced lateral spreads and mitigation criteria for surface faulting effects. The proposed exploratory research completes the work performed immediately after the earthquakes by the earthquake reconnaissance teams and subsequently by our research collaborators in Turkey. The discontinuous dislocations from surface faulting have already been mapped by geologists. However, the continuous fields of ground strain surrounding surface faulting have not yet been measured. The aerial photographs taken prior and after the earthquakes are yet to be interpreted to yield a large-scale understanding of ground deformation and failure mechanisms, especially in stepovers between two strike-slip strands (e.g., Golcuk). The same image processing techniques need also to be also applied for producing maps of liquefaction-induced ground deformations (e.g., Sapanca Lake). The processing and interpretation of aerial photographs will be instrumental in understanding the large-scale ground deformation and failure mechanisms observed during the Kocaeli and Duzce, Turkey, earthquakes. The objectives of the proposed exploratory research are: (1) Compilation and organization of existing data on surface-faulting and liquefaction-induced ground deformation for the Kocaeli and Duzce, Turkey, earthquakes; (2) Processing of aerial photographs taken prior to and after the earthquakes for producing maps of permanent displacement vectors and settlements induced by surface faulting and liquefaction; (3) Collection of additional ground surveys, and data on geology and geotechnical soil profiles (e.g., SPT and CPT soundings) in selected areas; and (4) Dissemination of information collected thorough a new GIS platform (Internet Map Server) on the Internet doc5750 none R. Maynes, Brigham Young University This one year grant will permit the PI s to make initial measurements in microchannel flows and to provide a more refined statement of their plans to address the unexpected pressure drop flow rate results obtained in prior investigations. Microchannel flows present complexities that are not encountered in their macro scale counterparts and the PI s are well positioned to make contributions in this developing field doc5751 none The 21 September Chi-Chi earthquake caused widespread damage and disruption to the transportation system throughout central Taiwan. Bridges in the epicentral region experienced severe ground motion and in many cases large fault offset. The thorough investigation of bridges in the earthquake will help reduce the seismic risk of the highway system in the United States. The two countries use similar structural systems for bridges and, as in Taiwan, large fault movement is expected in the western U.S. This project involves collecting data on damaged and collapsed bridges in Taiwan and analyzing the data to evaluate bridge performance. The tasks of the project are to: (1) document damage of bridges; (2) correlate fault movement and strong ground motion records with observed damage; (3) develop models for nonlinear dynamic analysis of selected bridges to assess performance and damage modes; (4) identify the factors affecting performance; (5) develop recommendations for U.S. specifications for seismic design of bridges; (6) develop recommendations for specific research needs; (7) publish findings in a report and on the World Wide Web, including access to databases. Of particular interest for investigation are bridges built after , including the Mao-loh-shi viaduct bridge and the Ji-lu cable-stayed bridge doc5752 none Shoaf This project is proposed in order to improve casualty estimation models for earthquakes by using data from the earthquakes which occurred in as additional datapoints for the refinement of the existing models. The investigators will collaborate with Taiwanese researchers to collect available injury and damage data. This data will be summarized, categorized into the standard categorization scheme (currently under development), and made available on the UCLA CPHDR website. Additional analysis of he Colombia data (and Greece and Turkey if available), including review of building damage and matching the damage data to the injury data are planned doc5753 none Improvement in quantitative-precipitation forecasts over the western United States requires advances in several areas including the understanding of dynamical and microphysical processes during orographic precipitation events and the numerical simulation and parameterization of orographically-induced circulations and precipitation microphysics. The interaction between terrain-induced flow fields and orographic precipitation processes remains poorly understood, and the measurement and prediction of orographic precipitation is a major scientific challenge. This is particularly true over narrow and steeply sloped mountain ranges, such as those of the Intermountain West, where the quantitative precipitation forecast skill of operational numerical weather prediction models is substantially lower than in other regions of the United States. The primary objectives of the research are (1) to advance fundamental knowledge of orographic precipitation processes over the Intermountain West, with an emphasis on the Wasatch Mountains of northern Utah; (2) to validate and improve mesoscale model performance and quantitative precipitation forecasts over regions of complex terrain. The project will utilize data collected during the Intermountain Precipitation Experiment (IPEX), a major field program held in northern Utah during February . Specialized data sets collected during IPEX include airborne Doppler-radar and microphysical observations, ground-based radar observations collected by two mobile Doppler radars, and high resolution surface and upper-air observations. These data sets will be used to examine factors controlling the distribution of precipitation across the Wasatch Mountains, including windward enhancement by upstream blocking effects and the influence of mountain-wave structure on lee-side spillover. These objectives are directly related to the quantitative-precipitation forecasting focus of the U.S. Weather Research Program (USWRP). Results from the project will also have positive scientific and socio-economic benefits for the West, including Salt Lake City, host of the Winter Olympics. Educational benefits include the participation of graduate students from the University of Utah and the use of project data sets and findings for classroom instruction doc5754 none Burke The Rustbelt RNA Meeting is planned for November 3-4, in the Lodge at Deer Creek State Park in Mt. Sterling, Ohio. The Rustbelt RNA Meeting (RRM) is the only major Midwest regional meeting of RNA researchers. Last year the RRM was attended by 103 individuals including principal investigators, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students from Ohio State University, Cleveland Clinic, Case Western Reserve University, the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Michigan, Indiana University, Purdue University, University of Delaware, SUNY Albany and the University of Illinois. Attendance in the previous year had been 77 individuals, and we anticipate between 100 and 120 participants in . The objective of the RRM is to provide an inexpensive, high caliber, interdisciplinary regional meeting for RNA researchers in the Midwest with an emphasis on participation by undergraduate, and graduate and postdoctoral trainees. The meeting is open to principal investigators, postdoctoral fellows and graduate and undergraduate students who are interested in RNA in its many aspects. The meeting format is designed to foster interaction between trainees at the participating institutions with each other and with the participating principal investigators doc5755 none Funding is provided to support the participation of young foreign and US scientists in a meeting entitled Biofilms , that is being sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). This meeting, held at the Big Sky Resort in Montana during the summer of , brings together researchers in the field of bacterial biofilms from all over the world. A similar ASM conference, in Snowbird, Utah in , drew 360 participants from 42 countries and was characterized by the purposeful inclusion of young investigators, postdoctoral fellows and students, mostly from the US and UK. The Snowbird meeting is widely regarded as having defined the emerging field of Biofilm Microbiology, and many important connections were made between people in different basic disciplines who all share a keen and urgent interest in biofilms. Because of the increased interest in the field, this meeting is expected to draw even more delegates. Matrix enclosed biofilms are responsible for all of the beneficial (sewage treatment) and deleterious (corrosion, fouling) effects of bacteria in industry and in the environment. Biofilms includes a full day workshop to teach the special biofilm methods necessary for research in this area, and a full day symposium on the development of a special interdisciplinary cadre of scientists who will carry research forward in studies of biofilms doc5756 none Glasmacher This grant provides partial support for the participation of graduate students and postdoctoral associates to attend the Nuclear Structure conference, to be held in East Lansing, Michigan, from August 15-19, . The conference is the major topical conference on Nuclear Structure Physics in North America this year doc5757 none Known definitively from only mammals and angiosperms, autosomal genomic imprinting is a form of non-Mendelian inheritance in which methylation and expression of an allele depend on whether it is inherited through sperm or egg. Imprinting disruption has been implicated in a growing list of embryonic abnormalities, unstable DNA diseases and cancers. Numerous hypotheses, ranging from chromosomal surveillance to maternal paternal genome conflict over resource transfer from mother to embryo, have been proposed to explain imprinting, and virtually all invoke viviparity as crucial to its evolution. Unfortunately, evidence of imprinting in animals is currently restricted to mammals, thus limiting the scope for rigorous testing of alternative hypotheses. The aim of the proposed exploratory research is to establish whether genomic imprinting occurs in the pseudoscorpion, Cordylochernes scorpioides, as indirect evidence suggests. Allelic message display approach, a technique that utilizes RT-PCR to screen cDNA libraries for genomically imprinted genes will be used. To distinguish between maternal versus paternal allelic expression, polymorphic transcripts will be visualized in reciprocal hybrid and pooled backcross progenies from crosses between two C. scorpioides populations known to exhibit extensive DNA sequence divergence. Investigation will focus on the transcriptional activity of the embryonic pumping organ (a specialized mouth precursor responsible for sequestering nutritive fluid from the mother s reproductive tract) as the organ most likely to exhibit parent-of-origin gene effects. If imprinting is found to occur in C. scorpioides, this pseudoscorpion will provide a model viviparous arthropod system for investigating the importance of genomic imprinting in biological processes ranging from evolution to epigenetic-mediated disease doc5758 none Response of Precast Construction in Turkey during the Earthquakes The Turkish Seismic Code permits four types of precast construction: moment-resisting frames, single-story hinged frames, structural wall panels, and combinations of precast moment-resisting frames with cast-in-place structural walls (solid or coupled). Single-story hinged frames are used throughout Turkey for industrial facilities. This type of structural system has not performed well in recent earthquakes, including the event in Erzincan, the event in Ceyhan, and the recent events near Izmit and Duzce. Recent experience has shown that precast structures in the U.S. are also vulnerable to earthquake damage. Parking structures were sustained damage at higher than anticipated levels during the Northridge earthquake. Only after detailed evaluation of precast parking structures in the Los Angeles area were the causes of the damage identified. Many factors that contributed to the observed response were not considered in the governing building codes. The goal of the proposed work is to collect detailed information about the structural configuration and connection details from damaged and undamaged precast buildings in the region of Turkey affected by the 17 August and 12 November earthquakes. Data collected will be evaluated with the goal of reducing the seismic vulnerability of precast construction in both the U.S. and Turkey doc5759 none The investigator and his colleagues organize a workshop to explore opportunities in robotics for synergistic collaborations among engineers, computer scientists, and mathematicians. The workshop brings together engineers, computer scientists, and mathematicians to discuss examples of research needs in robotics, to look for common themes, and to explore new ideas, rooted in mathematics, that could advance this area. A major product of the workshop is a report that summarizes the present state of the art and that lays out future opportunities for collaborative research. Robotics is concerned with the design of mechanical manipulators, the systems needed to control them, and various applications such as materials handling, assembly, exploration in extreme environments, prosthetics, and minimally invasive surgery. For their solution, problems in robotics have drawn heavily on techniques and ideas from engineering and computer science. It is becoming apparent that progress on significant open problems requires greater involvement of modern mathematics. This workshop combines engineers, computer scientists, and mathematicians in a joint exploration of needs and opportunities in robotics. The workshop report is expected to stimulate both new interactions among researchers and new insights and approaches to this important class of problems doc5760 none A world-wide effort is in progress to understand the high speed switching process in high coercivity magnetic media in order to optimize materials capable of supporting recording data rates projected to approach 1GHz. Here it is proposed to attack the problem in collaboration with Seagate, a media manufacturer, experimentally and theoretically with four specific objectives: a) An integrated microsensor will be fabricated photolithographically to detect M(t). A unique fast switch using two pressurized spark gaps in series will be built which should provide field pulses of Oe with rise times ~0.1 ns. b) Thin films with coercivities of - Oe will be sputtered both at Alabama and at Seagate, and thoroughly characterized magnetically and structurally. Material development will be guided by the experimental switching data, compared to the predictions of the model. c) A micromagnetic model will be developed in which the damping constant depends on the fineness of the discretization. A fast multipole method will be used to allow the efficient compilation of magnetostatic field. d): New prototype media based on the predictions of this study will be prepared at Seagate and recording performance analyzed to define an optimized high frequency media product. Finally, a program integrating research in education will be carried out at the graduate, undergraduate and middle-school levels doc5761 none Mata de Platano is a 53 ha reserve within a large area set aside for conservation. Originally established by an environmental organization, Mata de Platano is now managed by Inter American University of PR. Located in the northern karst belt of Puerto Rico on the West Indies, Mata de Platano lies within the largest unfragmented and most diverse forest in the island. Twenty-two percent of the island population uses ground water that originates in this karst belt, and the region is considered wilderness in terms of its geomorphic, ecological, and subterranean features. Nevertheless, the area has received less attention from a scientific point of view than the wet forest in the igneous soils of eastern Puerto Rico. The major reason for this unbalanced examination of ecosystems is the lack of a field station capable of providing much needed infrastructure for the pursuit of long term ecological studies. Mata de Platano Nature Reserve contains within its premises a standing concrete structure that will be restored using funds from this award in order to establish a center capable of sustaining long-term research and educational activities. The establishment of this field station will greatly improve our knowledge of karst forests; increase the availability of research experience for students, including low income minority students; and as an added value will contribute towards the conservation of forests with high biotic diversity doc5762 none Kalia This award supports a Focused Research Group at Louisiana State University for research and education on computational materials. The grant is jointly supported by the Division of Materials Research and the Division for Advanced Computational Infrastructure and Research and is a blend of condensed matter physics, materials science and computer science. The objective of the research is to understand how the bonding between dissimilar materials at the atomic level determines structure and macroscopic properties such as adhesion, friction, stiffness, and fracture toughness. The research will focus on: (1) ceramic composites (SiC fibers coated with silica in a Si3N4 matrix and aluminum oxide matrix containing aluminum oxide fibers coated with LaPO4); (2) metal ceramic interfaces (Al SiC and Ti TiO2) and nanostructured composites of passivated metallic nanoparticles; and (3) oxidation, fracture and nanoindentation in these materials. These applications require a methodology that can describe physical and mechanical processes over several decades of length scales. Quantum mechanical (QM) simulations based on the density functional theory will be preformed in regions where atomic bonds are formed or broken; molecular dynamics (MD) simulations will be carried out in nonlinear regions surrounding the QM region; and the finite-element (FE) approach with constitutive input from QM or MD calculations will be used in regions far away from the process zones. The QM, MD, and FE schemes will be integrated with an approach based on control theory. Algorithms will be designed to carry out these hybrid QM MD FE simulations in a metacomputing environment with multiple parallel machines, mass storage devices, and immersive and interactive virtual environments on a Grid with high-speed networks. The Concurrent Computing Laboratory for Materials Simulation, where the research will be performed, has a record of innovative educational activities including a joint MS PhD program in computer science and physics. Efforts are underway for a joint masters degree in computer science and applied physics. In addition, a web-based computational physics course is being taught simultaneously at LSU and the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands. As part of this grant, a workshop will be established to mentor and recruit minority students. %%% This award supports a Focused Research Group at Louisiana State University for research and education on computational materials. The grant is jointly supported by the Division of Materials Research and the Division for Advanced Computational Infrastructure and Research and is a blend of condensed matter physics, materials science and computer science. The objective of the research is to understand how the bonding between dissimilar materials at the atomic level determines structure and macroscopic properties such as adhesion, friction, stiffness, and fracture toughness. The Concurrent Computing Laboratory for Materials Simulation, where the research will be performed, has a record of innovative educational activities including a joint MS PhD program in computer science and physics. Efforts are underway for a joint masters degree in computer science and applied physics. In addition, a web-based computational physics course is being taught simultaneously at LSU and the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands. As part of this grant, a workshop will be established to mentor and recruit minority students doc5763 none The MATE Center is building upon its past achievements in order to increase its impact on marine technology education and enhance student preparation for marine technology careers. In light of the national need for a well-prepared technical workforce and the changing ways in which society views technician work, MATE is building partnerships and collaborations that improve marine technical education and increase public awareness of technical education and career opportunities. They are also developing or enhancing model marine technology associate degree programs at Monterey Peninsula College and MATE partner community colleges. The Center has five major goals. These are to: (1) build active partnerships; (2) identify industry needs and develop industry guidelines for curricula development; (3) increase the quality and availability of curricula; (4) provide professional development for faculty and teachers; and (5) increase outreach and dissemination. The Center is building active partnerships with business, industry, research and academic institutions, and professional societies by strengthening existing partnerships and developing new ones. These partnerships are an important part of the Center s efforts to assess industry s needs. These needs in turn are being used to create industry-driven guidelines for curriculum development. These guidelines then form the basis for the development of skill competency clusters that reach across numerous occupations. The Center is also working with government agencies to define specific marine technical occupations. The guidelines and skill clusters form the basis of the Center s efforts to improve the availability and quality of curriculum and instructional materials at the high school and college level. Monterey Peninsula College is piloting this effort. The Center is offering an annual faculty summer institute and faculty internships to foster the process. Dissemination of Center products and information is being carried out using the Web site, extensive information services, conference attendance, and site visits to other programs and industry doc5764 none HomeNetToo is a research project designed to address two fundamental questions: What causes people to use or not use the Internet? What effect does Internet use have on people? A model of Internet use is proposed that addresses these questions by considering motivational, affective, and cognitive factors as antecedents and consequences of Internet use. Participants in HomeNetToo will be low-income African American and European American families who will be introduced to the Internet as a communication tool or an information tool. On-line surveys and computer-logged measures of Internet use will be used to test hypotheses about the antecedents and consequences of Internet use over an 18-month trial. Relationships between cognitive style and interface design will also be examined. Results will have implications for how to reduce the digital divide, how to design user interfaces to accommodate diverse cognitive styles, and for identifying factors that influence whether Internet use will have desirable personal, social and professional consequences doc5765 none The lateral load capacity of deep foundations is critically important in the design of bridges, buildings, and other structures in seismically active regions. Although fairly reliable methods have been developed for predicting the lateral resistance of piles in non-liquefied soils, there is very little information to guide engineers in the design of piles that are surrounded by liquefiable soils. An accurate assessment of the resistance-displacement relationship for piles in liquefied soil is needed to determine whether additional piles are required for a foundation in liquefied sand, or whether soil improvement must be undertaken to prevent liquefaction altogether. These issues become even more important as the engineering profession attempts to move to performance-based design codes where estimates of displacements are required. A series of full-scale lateral pile load tests were performed at Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay after a surface layer was liquefied using controlled blasting techniques. These tests demonstrated that controlled blasting can induce liquefaction in a well-defined volume of soil for full-scale experimentation. Because of the success of that test program, another series of full-scale liquefaction load tests were undertaken in connection with the design of a new bridge in Charleston, South Carolina. Funding for the testing program was provided by the South Carolina Dept. of Transportation; this action is to support a detailed analysis required to develop lateral load-deflection (p-y) curves for the liquefied sand and to generalize the load test results. These analyses take full advantage of over $250,000 invested in the construction of the foundations, instrumenting the structure, and conducting the testing. The experimental results provide time histories of bending moment at regular intervals along the length of the shafts; the excess pore pressures at corresponding depths; and load, deflection and rotation measured at the pile head. Using these results, p-y curves are being computed as a function of excess water pressure. Several techniques for developing these curves are being used and compared. The influence of fines content and sand density on the p-y curves is also being evaluated. For the dynamic testing, accelerometers were placed at regular intervals along the length of the shaft. The results from the dynamic and static load tests are being used to evaluate the effect of loading rate on the measured resistance, and to evaluate the influence of damping on resistance. As a supplement to the load-testing program, shear wave velocity measurements were made during the blasting to define the change in velocity as a function of the water pressure change. In addition, CPT (cone penetration test) soundings were made at several intervals after blasting to determine the rate of change in penetration resistance with time. Information of this type often becomes very important in assessing the quality of soil improvement techniques where it is not possible to wait for long-term test results doc5766 none Pagilla The objective of this research is to explore the genetic engineering of Burkholderia sp. with Vitreoscilla hemoglobin (VHb) gene (vgb) to enhance its ability to degrade 2,4-dinitrotoluene in soil and groundwater. Burkholderia strain R34 is known to degrade DNT by oxidative pathway, and Vitreoscilla, although a strict aerobe, grows in oxygen-limiting environments due to its ability to synthesize hemoglobin. The broad focus of the proposed research is to incorporate vgb from Vitreoscilla into Burkholderia and other organisms to improve bioremediation of contaminated soils and groundwater under oxygen limiting conditions. The specific objectives of the proposed research are to 1) investigate the transformation of Burkholderia DNT R34 strain with vgb (encoding Vitreoscilla hemoglobin VHb) to create Burkholderia strain YV1, 2) determine the influence of vgb VHb on the growth, oxygen uptake and DNT degradation behavior of Burkholderia, 3) investigate DNT degradation by R34 and YV1 strains under oxygen limiting conditions such as in soil and groundwater and 4) integrate vgb into the chromosome of Burkholderia for enhanced DNT degradation under oxygen limiting conditions. If successful, this project will provide a way to overcome the difficulty of sufficient oxygen supply to bacteria in aerobic bioremediation of contaminated soil and groundwater doc5767 none Lerman This project is based on the assumption that the polymerase chain reaction can be driven by changes in hydrostatic pressure at constant temperature. The PI and co-workers will examine each step of the cycle to determine its compatibility with the hydrostatic pressure and temperature necessary to maintain helicity and enzyme activity at an elevated temperature and strand separation at low pressure. The pressure-driven procedure would provide an alternative to conventional PCR with some advantages - more rapid transition between stages of the cycle, unlimited processing volume, simplified assurance of processing uniformity, and perhaps different sequence restrictions. The project will proceed through measuring the dependence of DNA helicity on temperature, pressure, and composition of the medium. Initially the PI and co-PI will follow in detail the progress of a single cycle using DNA templates of well characterized thermal stability and domain structure and determine the relation of the parameters of each domain structure to pressure. They will use a simple temperature- and pressure-controlled cell, to be constructed at MIT, equipped for spectrophotometric measurement of UV absorbance and fluorescent emission of specific labels. The function of appropriate DNA polymerases will be explored with respect to physical parameters and some aspects of medium composition that affect protein stability and enzyme activity doc5768 none Lewis Polymer materials are often used as biomedical devices that come in contact with human blood, of which platelets are a component. Platelet adhesion onto materials incorporated in prosthetic and extracorporeal circulatory devices can hinder mass-transport of chemical species or lead to life-threatening emboli (blood clots). Although several materials have been developed to minimize platelet adhesion, complete inhibition has not always occurred and the potential formation of dangerous blood clots still exists. The proposed project will optimize and characterize novel polymers that utilize endogenous sources (naturally occurring within the body) of nitric oxide to inhibit the deposition of platelets. Nitric oxide is a simple biological molecule generated in vivo by many cells, including those that line the blood vessels, and is involved in the inhibition of platelet adhesion and aggregation. The polymers will be modified with various chemicals that will extract nitric oxide from circulating blood components, following which the nitric oxide will be released from the polymer to inhibit platelet adhesion. A polymer that is continually capable of inhibiting platelet adhesion for long time periods, such as the one(s) optimized in this study, would be valuable for long-term applications of polymers exposed to blood. In addition, the concepts demonstrated in this proposal could be applied to minimize platelet deposition to non-polymeric materials or polymers not currently used that would have beneficial properties in blood-exposure applications doc5769 none This proposal seeks funding for the VIII. International van der Ziel Symposium on Quantum 1 f Noise and Other Low Frequency Fluctuations, Mainly in GaN, Quantum, or Nanometric Devices, organized by the author and A. L. Chung at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, on June 5-6, . This International Symposium will bring together researchers from universities, industrial and governmental research laboratories, working in the field of Quantum 1 f noise and other low frequency fluctuations. This time the Symposium is focused primarily on GaN bulk material, thin sheets, quantum structures and devices. These are particularly important for opto-electronic devices and integration. Lower quantum 1 f noise is predicted for wide-band-gap materials and devices, because of their larger effective masses of the current carriers. This proposal focuses on the description of the present state and of the research directions in the field of quantum 1 f noise. Funding of this Conference is important, because high technology is becoming more and more a race between signal and noise in devices performing previously impossible tasks; the lowest noise infrared detectors, SQUIDs, logic boards or NMR machines will have the competitive edge. Quantum 1 f noise is a fundamental form of quantum chaos present in all physical cross sections and currents, which limits the performance of most high-technology devices. Furthermore, electronic noise has become important in the quality control of electronic devices. The study of electronic noise now represents an important diagnostic tool that provides important information on the nature and life time of the current carriers, as well as on the nature of the processes which limit the mobility of the carriers. The main objective of the participants at the present Symposium is to cooperate in this new field, in order to further reduce the 1 f noise in the known devices, and to extend the application to new devices which are now being developed, in particular involving high T c superconductors. The Focus of the Symposium also includes further development of the quantum 1 f theory in most rigorous terms, and its connection to studies of quantum and classical deterministic chaos. Finally, it is expected that this Symposium to benefit virtually all high-tech applications, through general low 1 f noise design and optimization principles, and to improve the understanding of the quantum 1 f effect as a technically important fundamental law of nature doc5770 none Lovely Microorganisms are thought to have an important impact on the geochemistry of hot (80-110 degrees C), oxygen-depleted environments such as those found deep below the Earth s surface, at the bottom of the ocean, and around terrestrial hot springs. The goal of this research is to evaluate the metabolic diversity of anaerobic hyperthermophilic microorganisms in order to learn more about the biogeochemical processes that are possible in hot microbial ecosystems. It is hypothesized that there is wide diversity of microorganisms that are capable of living in hot environments by oxidizing organic compounds such as: acetate and other short-chain fatty acids, long-chain fatty acids, amino acids, aromatic compounds, and a variety of hydrocarbons. Electron acceptors for the oxidation of these organic compounds are predicted to include Fe(III), sulfate, S (zero), or nitrate. It is proposed that in the absence of these electron acceptors that these organic compounds can be microbially converted to methane. Novel strategies will be employed in an attempt to recover autotrophic, hydrogen-oxidizing, Fe(III)-reducing hyperthermophiles because it is hypothesized that some organisms with this form of respiration will phylogenetically be among the most deeply branching microorganisms still existing on Earth. In order to evaluate the possibility that Fe(III) reducers may be active in hot, acidic environments, an attempt will be made to recover acidophilic hyperthermophiles that can reduce the soluble Fe(III) found at low pH. The possibility that Fe(III)-reducing hyperthermophiles produce isotopically unique Fe(II) minerals will be evaluated by examining the oxygen and iron isotopes in these minerals. It is expected that these studies will provide further insight into the biology and geology of hot microbial ecosystems on Earth as well as the microbial ecosystems that may exist in the hot subsurface of other planets. These studies are also expected to have economic benefits by: 1) better explaining the generation of economically important ore deposits; 2) providing new strategies for the remediation of toxic organic and metal contaminants; and 3) suggesting a new approach for increased recovery of hydrocarbons from petroleum reservoirs doc5771 none This Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) project is to develop multi-agent architecture for coordinating decision-making among groups or organizations arising within supply chains and supporting freight transportation networks. Decision-making units can be managers at different terminals in a large rail or trucking network, or managers at different suppliers within a supply chain. Better decision making occurs with better information, and a more formalized decision-making process. The research will first define the four major classes of information that are used in decision making. A general class of mathematically based decision functions will be designed, which will formalize how each class of information is used. These functions will allow us to study how decisions by one unit impact the decisions of another unit. The presence of uncertainty, and missing or incomplete information, will be explicitly modeled. The expectation is to implement these decision agents in a loosely coupled environment, using the Internet as the primary means of communication. All testing will be done using data already available from major railroads and trucking companies. If successful, the architecture will improve overall coordination between decision-makers in large transportation and logistics networks, accelerating network response, with lower cost and better service. The technology will capture the inherently decentralized process of decision making in complex operations, but will develop a process, which offers global optimizing behavior. The process should produce plans that can be followed in real-time, using forecasts of decisions in the future (and on other elements of the system) to make better decisions now. The expectation is to develop insights into the value of improved information, which will allow quantifying the cost of better information against the benefits. It is this tradeoff that is the primary deterrent against the use of more advanced information technologies in many elements of the transportation and logistics information infrastructure, and the research should speed adoption of information technologies by helping us understand the economic barriers to adoption doc5772 none Collins It is well established that cochlear implants restore some level of functional hearing to most deaf individuals. However, speech recognition abilities vary widely across subjects and the mechanisms responsible for this variability are poorly understood. One factor that may impede speech recognition by cochlear implant subjects is that electrically stimulated nerves respond with a much higher level of synchrony than what is normally observed in acoustically stimulated nerves. Recently, some researchers have suggested that adding noise to a speech signal may decrease the synchronicity of the neural response observed under electrical stimulation, and thus, might restore a more normal response pattern. By generating more natural patterns, it may be possible to improve speech recognition for cochlear implant patients. Preliminary theoretical results from our lab indicate that more normal neural response patterns can be induced when small amounts of additive noise are added to periodic electrical signals. In addition, preliminary experimental results, again from our lab, indicate that speech recognition may also be improved using this approach. In the literature, the phenomenon whereby additive noise, when presented at an optimal level, improves signal transmission in nonlinear systems is known as stochastic resonance (SR). The goal of this research is to investigate and optimize a novel speech processing approach for cochlear implant patients based on the theory of stochastic resonance. To date, SR research has focused on the addition of noise to a weak signal within the context of a nonlinear systems. This research will instead consider the theoretical basis for driving a complex system to respond in a more chaotic fashion, and thus better mimic the responses observed in the normal auditory system. A series of theoretical and laboratory experiments has been designed to address the fundamental role of additive noise under electrical stimulation. A computational model of the neural response to electrical stimulation will be employed to develop the theoretical results, and results will be verified in psychophysical as well as neurophysiological experiments. Although optimizing the additive noise process for weak signals under normal acoustic neural stimulation has been considered in traditional SR research, this issue has not been addressed for neural systems subject to electrical stimulation. The specific questions that are proposed involve both generating a SR phenomenon and optimizing the phenomenon under electrical stimulation of the auditory system. This work will form an important theoretical basis for driving the auditory system to respond in a more natural, albeit chaotic fashion. Construction of the computer models will improve understanding of the neural response driven by electrical stimulation and assist in the design of new electrical stimulation paradigms that improve the representation of speech within the profoundly impaired auditory system. A collaboration with a neurophysiologist will ensure that the theoretical predictions are validated in a human model via psychophysical experiments and in neurophysiological data. In addition, the interdisciplinary scope of this work will provide a unique venue for the training of biomedical engineers doc5773 none This project involves both microbiologists and geologists who will attempt to isolate live microorganisms from extremely old (5 million years and older) salt crystals. The program will develop methods to identify those geological formations most likely to contain crystals with surviving life forms. This project is a continuation and expansion of a successful, exploratory LExEn Project (Paleobiology of Ancient Salt Formations: Examination of Primary Crystals for Trapped Biological Materials, NSF Award # ) during which the investigators isolated the worlds oldest living bacterium (250 million years old) from an ancient sodium chloride crystal. The current project has four main goals. First, to develop new methods and media to isolate, quantify and analyze ancient microbes trapped in NaCl crystals. Second, to improve understanding of life and the paleoenvironment at the time the crystals formed. Third to expand the use of non-contaminating methods for sample recovery. Fourth, to train graduate and undergraduate students for future interdisciplinary work with microbes from extreme environments. This project is based on the hypothesis that small numbers of bacteria, trapped in the stable environment of a salt crystal, can survive for extremely long periods of time. The Principal Investigator s laboratory has been involved in the study of extremely halophilic Archaea associated with salt crystals for over ten years. The Project Director has published ten refereed articles on this topic since . The project will obtain salt crystals that range in age from modern hypersaline environments to Early Miocene (20-24 Ma), Early Middle Eocene (ca. 50 Ma), Late Permian (ca. 250 Ma), and Late Silurian age (408- 421 Ma). The data produced will describe the state of evolution and the environment in which these crystals originally formed. The investigators will also complete the description of the 250 million year old bacteria they have already isolated from Permian aged crystals doc5774 none Grinspoon Dr. David Grinspoon and colleagues at the Southwest Research Institute are developing a program of modeling the evolution of planet climates that will lead to a greater understanding of the stability of climates against geologically induced episodes of climate change. It will help to define the range of planetary size, composition and location that can lead to stable, habitable environments on terrestrial-type planets in the universe. A systems approach has been applied to studying the climate of Venus which simulates the interactions between interior, surface, atmosphere and clouds. Several improvements will be made to this model which will turn it into a powerful tool for studying the general problem of climate evolution on terrestrial planets. These improvements include: 1) A detailed cloud microphysical model to more accurately simulate cloud responses to changes in atmospheric composition. 2) A simulation of the runaway or moist greenhouse effect, including cloud feedbacks, that will help us refine the inner edge of the habitable zone. 3) A modification of the model to simulate the climate evolution of Mars as a function of geological activity on that planet. 4) The incorporation of models of the thermal and volcanic evolution of terrestrial planets to parameterize outgassing histories as a function of planetary size. This will allow the modeling of climate evolution on a suite of hypothetical terrestrial planets as a function of size and stellar-centric distance. This project is funded through the Division of Astronomical Sciences for the NSF s Life in Extreme Environments program doc5775 none Marcolongo Over five million Americans suffer from chronic lower back pain making it the number one cause of lost work days in the United States and one of the most expensive health care issues today. While the causes of lower back pain remain unclear, it is believed that 75% of the cases are associated with degenerative disc disease, where the intervertebral disc of the spine suffers reduced mechanical functionality due to dehydration of the nucleus pulposus. Current treatments include conservative bed rest, discetomy or spinal fusion. Each treatment may be successful in alleviating patient pain, but no current treatment will restore biomechanical function to the disc or prevent further degeneration. Our general premise is that if the initial dehydration of the degenerated nucleus can be arrested and a fully hydrated state returned to the disc, the degenerative process (including the associated pain) would be postponed or prevented and the mechanical function would be restored to the vertebral segment. To accomplish this objective, the investigators propose replacement of the nucleus with a biocompatible, hydrogel polymer implant made from a novel polymer blend of poly vinyl alcohol (PVA) with poly(vinyl pyrrolidone) (PVP). The investigators put forth that the addition of PVP to the PVA will result in a new hydrogel system that will exhibit high stability in vivo and provide adequate mechanical properties while maintaining biocompatibility. The increased stability of these gels is due to hydrogen bonding between the PVA and PVP chains and the formation of interpolymer complexes. In addition, the hydrogel is a memory material, meaning that it can remember or regain geometry from its hydrated to dehydrated states. The investigators will exploit this material property in order to insert the implant into the nuclear cavity arthroscopically, enabling this procedure to be performed in a minimally invasive manner resulting in an approach that is extremely attractive to both patient and surgeon. For this work, the investigators will establish a relationship between material composition, processing, and properties so that they more fully understand the material behavior of the PVA PVP hydrogel blends. The dehydration rehydration characteristics of the hydrogel to establish its feasibility for arthroscopic implantation will be investigated. The investigators will then optimize the hydrogel properties so that the mechanical behavior of a spinal segment with the implanted disc most closely matches that of the intact spinal segment. In this project, the investigators propose to: 1. Synthesize novel co-polymer gels based on PVA and PVP. Characterize the degradation of the hydrogel in vitro to establish the material stability over time as determined by weight loss, changes in surface chemistry and changes in the degree of crystallinity. In addition, the investigators will examine the static mechanical and viscoelastic behavior of the hydrogels as a function of immersion time in vitro. 2. Optimize the dehydration rehydration conditions of the PVA PVP hydrogel necessary to facilitate arthroscopic implantation of the disc while retaining adequate mechanical properties. 3. Perform two-dimensional finite element modeling of a simplified lumbar segment to evaluate the effect of implant material properties on stiffness of the lumbar segment under compressive loading as compared to an intact lumbar segment. 4. Compare the biomechanics of a natural lumbar vertebral segment with those after replacement with the hydrogel nucleus in a cadaver model to ascertain the ability of a nuclear prosthesis to restore function to the segment doc5776 none Ledley The National Science Education Standards (National Research council ) emphasize the importance of students engaging in an inquiry based approach to learning science (Science Content Standard A Science as Inquiry) and of students understanding the concepts and processes that shape our understanding of the natural world (Science Content Standard D Earth and Space Science). One method of having students learn science through an inquiry approach is to involve them in student and scientist partnerships. In order to develop a successful student and scientist partnership there are a number of issues that need to be addressed. The main requirement is that both sides need to benefit from the partnership. This means that the scientist needs to be able to see the advantage of having students work on his her project, and the students and teachers need to see that the students contribute to the project and develop the skills in inquiry and the content knowledge in geoscience that are desired. This project will address both of these issues by developing an Earth System Scientist Network for Student and Scientist Partnerships. The PIs have identified scientists and will identify others who have projects that would benefit from the help of students, and recruit them to participate in the program. The scientists will work with the principal investigator, to first completely define their project, determine what role the students would have in the project, and map out the scientific protocols that the students will follow and the background and support materials to facilitate students successfully participating in their project. The scientists will also work with the principal investigator to identify issues in Earth system science, relevant to their data, that the students and teachers could use as a guide to help develop student s investigative skills and content knowledge in the geosciences. When the student and scientists partnerships are implemented students would contribute to the investigation that the scientist is conducting; however, if the scope of the project is too large or the content knowledge required too difficult, students will investigate these issues and thus still have the opportunity to develop their inquiry skills and content knowledge in geosciences. This project will also make use of the opportunity provided by the development of the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) to facilitate student and scientist partnerships. DLESE will be a place through which the scientists, students, and teachers will be able to access the data they need and the tools and resources that will facilitate students participating in research, developing their inquiry skills, and increasing their knowledge in the geosciences doc5777 none Hall Historically, Louisiana has ranked at or near the bottom in educational support and the educational achievement of its students in comparisons with other states. The New Orleans region, in particular, commonly ranks at the bottom within the State of Louisiana. This result is particularly true for science and mathematics. Fundamental weaknesses in science, mathematics, and technology literacy by teachers get transferred to the students. These students grow into adults lacking critical-thinking skills and knowledge of using technology. Therefore, they are ill prepared to face the challenges of the 21st century workplace. Urban centers, such as New Orleans, can no longer expect to survive with a population of teachers who themselves do not understand the fundamental tenets of science. As a member of the Great Cities Consortium and the major educator of K-12 teachers in the New Orleans environs, the University of New Orleans is striving to improve the pool of teachers to the community and improve links with the community-at-large. At UNO, education is no longer viewed as K-12 then college. Instead, we are looking at education as pre-K-16 and beyond. Competently trained science educators that reflect this new paradigm are critically needed in our school system. This proposal is written to request funds from the National Science Foundation to support the development of an Earth System Science based curriculum for preservice K-8 teachers. The program we propose will: 1) Align the science methods and science content courses taught to preservice teachers, 2) Develop a constructivist-based curriculum in earth-systems science that emphasizes the local environment, and 3) Prepare preservice teachers to use appropriate technology in their classrooms. This curriculum will focus on the regional environment, including the Lake Pontchartrain Basin, Mississippi River drainage area, Mississippi River Delta, and Gulf of Mexico. Furthermore, the students will learn the environmental interconnectivity of these areas as an interdisciplinary science aligned with the national and state science education standards. Importantly, this curriculum will be taught in inquiry-based classes with emphasis on group-cooperative learning and authentic assessment practices. Students will have access to, and be trained in, technology that they will be using when they become teachers, including computers and internet access, graphing calculators, and calculator-based laboratories. Furthermore, we will adapt components of this curriculum and test it in a local middle school. The population of this school is composed almost entirely of persons under-represented in geoscience. Success of this adaptation will be used as a model for adapting the entire curriculum to the K-8 level. Drs. Hall and Buxton s complementary backgrounds make them ideally suited to develop and implement this curriculum. Hall is a scientist with expertise in science education whereas Buxton is an educator with expertise in science doc5778 none Studies of soil behavior have historically focused on properties of sedimented clays and clean sands in which the material micro-structure and engineering properties are defined by the deposition process and subsequent stress history. In contrast, the structure and properties of residual soils are controlled by in situ weathering processes that involve chemical dissolution and reprecipitation. Existing methods of classifying residual soils and predicting their behavior are far from adequate and can be linked directly to problems in construction. The PI s have recently been involved in a project in San Juan de Puerto Rico, where unexpectedly large ground settlements have occurred during tunneling through deposits of old alluvium. Further research has established that this material can be classified as a transported residual soil (i.e., weathered after deposition), a class of soil barely documented in the literature, but of apparently quite widespread occurrence. Extensive block samples of the soil already obtained by the PI s provide an excellent opportunity to investigate the structure, engineering properties and spatial variability of the material. To date, these preliminary investigations have identified iron oxides as the cementing agent, and have found an extraordinary reduction in bulk hydraulic conductivity due to breakdown in the structure in 1-D compression tests. This project will undertake a comprehensive experimental study of the material micro-structure and investigate how the breakdown in this structure can be linked to changes in the shear strength, deformation and flow properties. The work will benefit from the prior studies and availability of high quality block samples. Data from the experimental program will be used to formulate a constitutive model, based on a conceptual interpretation of the micro-structure. Model validation will then focus on predictions of material response associated with destructuring. This project will provide a valuable and unique database of properties for a transported, residual soil comparing the behavior of intact (in situ), destructured and intrinsic properties. By understanding the material structure, the project will also contribute towards standardizing the classification of residual soils. Future application of a well validated constitutive model will lead to more reliable predictions in geotechnical analyses of projects in the old alluvium and other similar deposits doc5779 none This award provides funding from the AFGE program to develop an educational program that will complement the New Millennium Observatory (NeMO), a multi-year research project investigating an active submarine volcano located on the Juan de Fuca Ridge. The goal of the NeMO Project is to understand the dynamics interrelations between volcanic events, the chemistry of seafloor hot springs, and the biological communities that inhabit them. Scientists use remotely operated vehicles, advanced sampling and mapping tools, and sophisticated seafloor instruments during annual cruises to the site. The objective of this proposal is to 1) develop a new web-based geoscience curriculum based on the NeMO research project for middle and high school teachers, 2) conduct a teacher development workshop to train teachers to use the new curriculum, and 3) create new public exhibits for two of the most visited museums in the region doc5780 none Recent studies have revealed a number of subglacial lakes beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. Lake Vostok, lying four kilometers beneath the ice surface is the largest of these lakes with a surface area near 10,000 square kilometers and a depth exceeding six hundred meters. A permanent ice sheet covered the lake about fifteen million years ago, isolating it from the atmosphere. This interdisciplinary project will examine the following: the physical stresses in deep glacial and accretion ice; the role of clathrates on gas dynamics within the lake; the origin of microbes in accretion ice; the physiological state of ice-bound microbes; the geochemistry of the ice column (bulk and within ice veins); and living microbes in ice veins that form at triple junctions in the ice crystal matrix. Collectively, results from this study will provide new information on the deepest ice yet collected and allow boundaries to be placed on conditions within Lake Vostok. Considering the enormous financial and logistic effort that will be required to obtain uncontaminated samples from Lake Vostok, it is imperative that conditions within the overlying ice, which presumably supplies the nutrients and biological seed to the lake, be understood before any attempt is made to sample the actual lake water. Information collected will provide critical background for the development and implementation of a sterile sample recovery system. Results from this interdisciplinary study will allow meaningful hypotheses to be drawn regarding the physical, chemical and biological properties of the Lake Vostok doc5781 none In the last few of years, the mathematicians and engineers started studying the behavior of social insects (ants, termites, bees, wasps) in an attempt to use the Swarm Intelligence concept in order to develop various Artificial Systems. The development of Artificial Systems does not entail the complete imitation of natural systems, but explores into them in search of ideas and models. It should be noted that a large number of traditional engineering models and algorithms is based on control and centralization. On the other hand, bee or ant swarm behavior in nature is primarily characterized by autonomy and distributed functioning and self-organizing. Natural systems teach us that very simple individual organisms can form systems capable of performing highly complex tasks by dynamically interacting with each other. It is of course of great importance to investigate both advantages and disadvantages of autonomy, distributed functioning and self-organizing in relation to traditional engineering methods relying on control and centralization. The basic question about the above-mentioned characteristics of social insects that should be answered is: Can we use some principles of natural Swarm Intelligence in development of Artificial Systems aimed at solving complex problems in traffic and transportation? In this research project, models inspired by the Swarm Intelligence principles will be developed for some of the following potential applications: (a) Designing transportation networks for highways and public transportation routes through complex geographic spaces (b) Locating emergency and non-emergency facilities on the transportation networks, and (c) Vehicle fleet planning and static and dynamic routing and scheduling of vehicles and crews, with emphasis on truck operations and public transportation services. This award is made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) program solicitation doc5782 none Jansma In an increasingly technologically complex world tied together by rapid dissemination of information on the Internet, the amount of data available for analysis in any discipline grows exponentially each day. Critical skills for undergraduate students who will become knowledge workers, therefore, are the ability 1) to distinguish between data that are relevant to solving the problem at hand and data that do not constrain what is asked, 2) to identify data trends that are statistically significant, 3) to retrieve appropriate data from a variety of sources, and 4) to use the data to solve complex problems and make informed judgments about technical issues. Unfortunately, concepts of precision, accuracy, variance, periodicity, and error analysis often are left to the domain of introductory statistics and underemphasized in the geosciences at the undergraduate level. Undergraduate geoscientists, therefore, frequently are unaware of the limitations and sources of data, which are the foundation for interpretation and essential to the development of a well-prepared scientific professional. The PIs will use Global Positioning System (GPS) geodesy to improve data and information literacy among undergraduate students. The objectives are: to address data and information literacy; to promote communication skills; to enhance critical thinking; and to build teamwork. The intent is not to replace a traditional introductory statistics course, but to illustrate important statistical concepts and techniques relevant to the geosciences that will encourage undergraduates to enroll in statistics courses. GPS geodesy is ideal for illustrating data literacy concepts. Data precision and accuracy depend upon several factors, including type of equipment, environmental conditions, length of occupations, monument design, site location, configuration of the geodetic network, and processing strategies. All of these can be varied, allowing the students to learn the trade-offs among cost, time, and quality and to determine the most efficient methodology for specific problems. In addition, precision, accuracy, and errors govern the interpretations that can be made and the potential to distinguish among competing models. The focus is to create an outcomes-based WWW-module that uses GPS geodesy in real-world applications and also requires integration of GPS data into oral presentations and written reports that incorporate resources found both through the WWW and traditional avenues, such as the library. The module is for use both by other educators in their own curricula and for undergraduate students to learn basic concepts independently. The PIs will develop the module by teaching a course and subsequently transferring all materials to the WWW, including video of student presentations, team discussions, and equipment demonstrations. In the course, students will work in teams on cases that pose hypotheses for testing. Research suggests that working in groups in a cooperative setting produces greater growth in achievement than straining for relative gains in a competitive environment. The structure of the course will emphasize independence and self-reliance within the context of the collaborative team. Three of the four cases are derived from on-going research projects and take advantage of on-line continuous GPS (CGPS) data as well as archived campaign data. The case studies are: 1) Is the Puerto Rico-Virgin Islands Block rigid?; 2) Do inflation deflation cycles in Montserrat correlate with faster dome growth?; 3) Does slip occur in the New Madrid Seismic Zone?; and 4) What is the surface deformation field in Nicaragua? The first two studies are mature research projects for which much data already are available either on-line (CPGS) or in our archives. The third case study is included to give students an example of a controversy where two groups of scientists have come to opposite conclusions based on the same dataset and to force students to search the WWW and journals for the data. The fourth case is a research project in its infancy. Finally, a pilot project involving a field trip to a volcano in Nicaragua is included. The trip serves two purposes: 1) testing if students can take what was learned in the course and apply it to a real-life situation, thereby assessing the efficacy of the course; and 2) providing video of students in the real-life situation for use on the website doc5783 none One of the most challenging requirements for the study of life in extreme environments is studying the organisms inhabiting these environments in situ, and understanding the unique aspects of biological life and adaptations required for survival. The Antarctic marine psychrophiles provide an excellent model group of extreme microorganisms for this work, since very little is known about their biological and functional diversity, or specific metabolic adaptations to life at -1.8 degree C. The overall goal of this research is the development of genomic approaches for studying microorganisms sampled directly from extreme environments and thus, circumventing the requirement for cultivation. The objectives of the proposed work are (1) to sequence six large bacterial genomic DNA fragments isolated directly from Antarctic marine psychrophiles; (2) to construct two different types of DNA microarrays designed to identify genes being actively expressed in uncultivated microorganisms living in the sub-zero marine waters of the Antarctic; (3) to optimize specific aspects of microarray technology for use with environmental samples; and 4) to develop a transferable methodology that will be useful for other researchers in accessing gene expression information directly from the natural environment. The proposed study will make use of an Antarctic genomic DNA library comprised of large (40 kb) genomic fragments of planktonic archaeal and bacterial DNA created in earlier studies to develop targeted and shotgun DNA microarrays. The application of DNA microarray technology to studies of life in extreme environments offers an outstanding opportunity for identifying new genes for biotechnological use. Discovering specific adaptations to extreme environments by detecting genes that are uniquely expressed in the natural environment is an ultimate goal of the research doc5784 none LEXEN: Effects of Microbial Activity on Rates of Basalt Alteration About three quarters of the ocean floor is basalt, providing chemical and physical environments that are suitable for many known microbial species. This ocean crust is a vast source and sink for chemical exchange with the ocean, and basalt seawater chemical reactions release energy that is a resource for microorganisms. From a global geochemical perspective, the role of microbes in this chemical exchange is an important issue. From an astrobiological perspective, the deep ocean crust is an extremely stable environment and microbes in deep sea basalts may be some of the most primitive organisms on Earth. Study of microbially precipitated minerals and microbial marks in minerals is also relevant to the search for evidence of life on other planetary bodies composed of water and rock. This project explores a new strategy for culturing microorganisms that directly interact with deep sea basalts. A submersible will be used to collect exposed basalts from the sea floor, and to isolate the rocks in sealed containers and introduce tracers into the containers to evaluate contamination. Molecular biology and microscopy techniques will be used to identify organisms and study their interactions with the basalt, and dilution culture methods will be used to search for pure cultures. Mineralogical products of the microbially alterated basalts will be identified by microbeam chemical analysis. ICP-mass spectroscopy will be used to monitor the release of elements from the basalts into solution. This project is relevant to the LExEn objectives (1) of understanding life supporting environments where chemical fluxes are extremely small, (2) of fostering interdisciplinary research - in this case the disciplines of microbiology and geology are closely linked, and (3) of exploring environments on Earth that are likely to exist on planets or moons in the solar system doc5785 none This award was made via the Awards to Facilitate Geoscience Education (AFGE) program to Drs. Thor Hansen, Western Washington University and Patricia Kelley, UNC Wilmington. The award provides funds to organize grade 6-8 students from schools around the coastal U.S. to learn about ecology and paleoecology of marine ecosystems and gain an understanding of the workings of science by participating in an authentic scientific investigation. The students will help the PI s collect data on the modern predation habits of the moon snail, a carnivorous gastropod. Moon snails leave a diagnostic trace of their feeding by drilling distinctive beveled holes in the shells of their prey. The students will collect shells with drill holes in them to help the scientists identify the characteristics of the preferred victims, such as size, morphology and age. Drillholes also provide information on; 1) identity and size of the predator (based on the size of the hole that is drilled); 2) the efficiency of the predator (by analyzing the siting of the borehole on the prey s shell); and 3) the success of the attack (based on whether the hole completely penetrates the victim s shell). Fossil records left by the moon snails and their prey create an excellent system for testing hypotheses concerning the evolution of predator-prey relationships. Current work by Kelley and Hansen on the naticid system tests the hypothesis of escalation using a database of 146,000 mollusc samples collected from Gulf and Atlantic coastal plain sediments. In order to complete the study of fossil records, the PI s need data from modern samples. They propose to work with students from across the U.S. to collect this data. The PI s have recruited teachers to work with them. They will train the teachers in a two-week workshop and will develop a curriculum based on the collection of shells. Data from each class will be posted on a common web site. The students will be an integral part of a real scientific investigation. The PI s will work with a variety of schools, including many schools with substantial Native American populations (see letters of support doc5786 none 00- This award provides funding for scientists at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences and the University of New England to collaborate with the Data Distribution Laboratory, a facility based at California Tech JPL, to create a multimedia educational experience that will bring the lower end of the marine food web to life . Interaction with multimedia tools and data simulations will enable students to discover why the marine ecosystem is critical to human existence. These multimedia products will provide a window to the fascinating world of the oceans microscopic plant life which, at present, only scientists see. In order to develop the project, the PI s will also develop the first searchable database of important phytoplankton from the world s temperate oceans using three-dimensional phytoplankton models. The program will be used and tested in the University of New England s Biology classes, which are required for all incoming freshmen, as well as the upper level courses. Although this pilot is aimed at undergraduates, the PI s propose to expand the program to include pre-college students and informal education audiences. Initially, the program will be disseminated via CD ROMS and a website, but the program is aligned with efforts to create a Digital Library for Earth Science Education doc5787 none Exopolymeric substances (EPS), secreted in the form of mucous slime by aquatic microorganisms, are known to play important roles in marine ecosystems. The proposed research will investigate the potential for exopolymeric substances to alter the microstructure of the sea-ice habitat and to serve as cryoprotectants for microorganisms dwelling within ice structures. Main research goals are as follows: (1) to determine how and to what extent the pool of EPS present in sea ice may result in an alteration of the microhabitat; (2) to assess the potential role of EPS as cryoprotection; and (3) to determine the major sea-ice producers of EPS along with relevant environmental cues for bulk and specific exopolymer production. These objectives will be pursued through a combination of laboratory and field studies, including culture-based and open-air ice-growth. The role of polymers in ice desalination processes (through their effects on brine viscosity and ice permeability) and in preventing pore closure at very low temperatures will also be investigated. These findings will be compared to in-situ EPS production by bacterial and diatom communities under quasi-natural conditions. The cryoprotectant effects of EPS and their associations with highly concentrated wintertime brines will be examined directly with in-situ experimentation in the Arctic ice sheet near Barrow, Alaska. The proposed work is relevant not only to low-temperature survival strategies and their impact on the physical environment, but also in the general context of polar marine ecology and carbon cycling, radiative and other transfer properties of the polar ice cap, industrial applications in cryobiology, and the potential habitability of Jovian moons doc5788 none Jiracek This project will develop computer-based learning tools to teach the concepts of: 1) digital signal analysis, and 2) wave characteristics, in geophysical context. This will be done in a unique way by using temporal and spatial data collected at SAGE (Summer of Applied Geophysical Experience). During the 18 years that SAGE has operated, the faculty have recognized a major lack of understanding of important fundamental geophysical concepts after courses at home campuses and after completion of the SAGE program. This is despite special efforts with extra lectures and demonstrations in these topics at SAGE. Topics such as the consequences of digitizing (aliasing, truncation, Fourier analysis, filtering, etc.) and wave phenomena such as scattering, phase and group velocity, and dispersion are simply not appreciated by most students (especially undergraduates). In today s increasingly digital world these concepts must be fully understood for basic competency in geophysics. The two topics chosen are critical to understanding many fundamental relations in several geophysical methods. The goal is to insure that those geophysics students completing SAGE, and at campuses elsewhere, understand how digital analysis is used in seismology, electromagnetics, and potential methods (gravity and magnetics). And, that they know the principles of wave propagation in low-loss, low frequency electromagnetic waves. The computer-based aids are expected to sharply increase a student s fundamental grasp of modern geophysics. The two learning modules will be integrated and hyper linked and will utilize the latest in computer simulations, visualizations, and interactive self-discovery to teach basic ideas. Advantages to tying the proposed effort to SAGE include using past, co-located SAGE data collected with different geophysical methods and to provide a unique assessment environment. The topics will be reinforced at SAGE as the students complete their own field work and apply their understanding first-hand to the collection, analysis, and interpretation of the new results. The tools will be incorporated back at the home campuses of SAGE students and faculty (including one community college) and they will be disseminated to other campuses via Internet access. Success of the modules will be determined by appropriate testing especially with SAGE REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) students since they return six months after SAGE for a winter workshop. To insure proper testing the PIs have enlisted the assistance of the Center for Research in Math and Science Education at San Diego State University (SDSU). Development of computer graphics, animation, and visualization will be done by SDSU s Instructional Technology Services under the technical direction of SAGE faculty doc5789 none The goal of this project is to understand and quantitatively predict the transport of small molecules through nanostructred material by an ab inito hierarchical approach. This is being achieved by combining quantum mechanics with statistical mechanics and molecular dynamics simulations to accurately predict thermodynamic solubilities and short-time tracer diffusivities in model nanostructred membranes. Novel methods for predicting the nanostructure of NPCs is being developed and validated. The information from this molecular modeling is being used within the context of generalized hydrodynamics and transition state theory to predict macroscopic permeability. These predictions are then validated by comparison to ongoing experiments on supported nanoporous carbon membranes and supported polymer-inorganic membranes. The results will provide a rational framework for designing nanostructred membranes to meet current and future challenges in separation science doc5790 none Microorganisms adapted to growth at high temperature (thermophiles) have evolved a variety of unique mechanisms to cope with these extreme conditions. This demands a repertoire of adaptation mechanisms to cope with fluctuating environmental temperature ( adaptability ). There have been numerous reports suggesting that thermophilic microorganisms (e.g. Bacilli) exhibit a variety of biochemical adaptations in response to a change in the growth temperature. This is accomplished by employing a variety of adaptation mechanisms whose components are encoded by genes that are differentially regulated by temperature (temperature-responsive genes). Temperature-responsive gene products can include one or more enzymes for catabolic reactions, for energy generation, or for the formation or modification of lipids and or other cell components which exhibit increased temperature stability or which allow the cell to survive or exhibit enhanced growth at the higher temperature (extrinsic protection of critical cell macro molecules). This was confirmed by genetic and biochemical studies on the unique glutamine transport operon (glnQH) of the genetically well characterized Bacillus stearothermophilus NUB . The normal temperature-regulated transcription pattern for glnQH is inactive at low temperature (50 degrees C) and active at high temperature (65 degrees C). One of the goals of this project is to determine the molecular mechanisms of temperature-regulated transcription of glnQH. Reporter gene technology in combination with deletion analyses, site specific mutagenesis, gel mobility shift analysis, and DNAase I footprint analysis will provide detailed knowledge about the elements (promoters and transcription factors) that function in the differential regulation of this operon. Another goal of this project is to identify other genes operons that are differentially expressed by temperature. The identification and characterization of other loci that are transcriptionally regulated by temperature will establish if there is more than one mechanism for the regulation of temperature-responsive genes. and enhance our understanding of the thermoadaptation mechanisms that allow B. stearothermophilus to survive at high temperature. This will be accomplished by subtraction differential hybridization and by Tn9 17-mediated operon fusions that place a reporter gene (bgaB) under the transcriptional control of contiguous genes. The temperature-responsive genes will be characterized using reporter gene technology, in silico analyses, and by the phenotype of null mutants. Thermoadaptation studies with B. stearothermophilus have opened up a relatively unexplored area of gene regulation. This is a challenging frontier of current biology that will have wide spread interest in both the scientific and the biotechnology communities. Research on thermoadaptation in the moderate thermophile B. stearothermophilus will not only contribute to our understanding of how this organism has adapted but will serve as the paradigm for studies with microorganisms that exist near the temperature extremes of planetary conditions. The long-term goal of this project is to find the right tools and approaches so that this knowledge can be applied to these novel microorganisms doc5791 none This project is a collaborative effort between scientists at the University of Pittsburgh and MIT to investigate the problem of efficient design of nanocomposites, polymeric batteries, and adsorbents for hydrogen storage and molecular sieves for gas separations. The project takes advantage of a comprehensive suite for techniques, ranging from quantum mechanics to coarse-grained models to macroscopic finite element methods. A variety of nanoparticles including carbon nanotubes are being investigated. A possibility for prediction of electrical and mechanical properties of polymer nanotube composites will allow the design of materials that exhibit both superior strength and high electrical conductivity. Polymer nanocomposites that facilitate the development of lightweight polymeric batteries will also be studied as part of this research. Quantum calculations of metal oxides embedded in a polymer matrix will be coupled with coarse-grained models of solid diblock copolymer interactions and finite element methods to predict both the morphology and electronic properties of the resulting materials. This same general scheme will be applied to mixtures of diblock copolymers and carbon nanotubes. The combined approach will allow the design of next-generation of polymeric batteries from the electronic to the macroscopic levels. In addition, new courses at the undergraduate level in Computational Science and graduate level courses in parallel code development, computational methods, and modeling of nanostructred materials are being developed. The MIT Center for Computational Materials Science is also launching a comprehensive graduate-level initiative in Computational Materials Science doc5792 none Cold environments comprise more than ninety percent of the earth s biosphere yet relatively little is known about the diversity, physiology, phylogeny, and metabolic activities of cold-loving (psychrophilic) microorganisms. This research focuses on bacteria involved in the sulfur. The study is Lake Fryxell, a meromictic lake that contains significant levels of sulfide in the water column. The research will take a polyphasic approach that includes in situ biodiversity studies, isolation and laboratory culture, and molecular analysis of metabolic activity. Each of these objectives will be pursued using a combination of traditional research strategies coupled with novel experimental techniques, the prime objective being to dissect the microbiology and microbial ecology of sulfur-cycling that occurs at 0 degree C in Lake Fryxell. Work will focus on Proteobacteria with the biodiversity studies using metabolic genes rather than ribosomal RNA genes as molecular targets. Targeted genes include pufM, csoS1, and dsr. Isolation and culture of key representatives of each major group of sulfur-cycling prokaryotes will be pursued using a combination of methods, including extincting dilution, high-throughput microtiter plate, and archaeal-targeted enrichments. Molecular measurements of metabolic activity in situ will be combined with these biodiversity and laboratory culture results. Collectively, the results of the proposed research will: (1) reveal for the first time the biodiversity of sulfur-cycling prokaryotes active in an important nutrient cycle at permanently cold temperatures; (2) make available new genetic resources of psychrophilic phototrophs, sulfur chemolithotrophs, and sulfate-reducing bacteria for basic research and for biotechnological exploitation; and (3) reveal the most ecologically significant sulfur-cycling prokaryotes in Lake Fryxell and identify metabolically important organisms that remain to be cultured. In addition to advancing an understanding of the microbial sulfur cycle, the results of the proposed research will positively impact efforts to recognize and culture microbial life outside planet Earth, and should reveal the limits, in terms of low temperature, to which microbial sulfur-cycling can occur on Earth doc5793 none Moore Analysis of spatial data has always been a key component of geoscience research. The relatively recent acquisition of large digital data sets is revolutionizing our understanding of the dynamic Earth system. Use of these data by geoscience educators and students has lagged behind the research community because significant barriers confront inexperienced users of geospatial data. Geospatial data will be an important element in the design and construction of a Digital Library for Earth System Education. In order for all users to fully exploit these resources, well-designed and simple-yet-powerful data visualization and analysis tools must accompany digital data archives. We propose to use the experience acquired in the construction of Cornell University s Solid Earth Information System (SEIS), a digital archive of solid Earth datasets originally compiled for the geophysical research community. These data are web-accessible through the use of data search, query and display tools developed for SEIS that allow universal access to all users regardless of expertise. Cornell University and the Paleontological Research Institution will modify and extend the capabilities of the SEIS system for educational purposes. They will take advantage of the underlying data structures and query and display functions of the current system to develop an improved interface for on-line analysis of geospatial data. They will prototype and test this system with feedback from university and K-12 students. The system will allow students to access, view, combine, and analyze a wide variety of geospatial data in an interactive way. They will develop educational user scenarios that utilize global, regional, and local scale data, and will help educators take better advantage of the same data sets and tools used by the world s leading researchers. Through ready access to comprehensive data and easy-to-use tools, students and the general public can learn about the Earth through hands-on discovery with original data doc5794 none PI: Eddy M. Rojas Institution: SUNY Buffalo Understanding Decision-Making in Construction Engineering This award is for the support of an exploratory research project focused on the decision-making process of current and future construction engineers through pilot development and implementation of a virtual environment called the Construction Simulator. This environment is created using a Web-centric modular architecture and provides a platform on which different Scenario Developers interact and collaborate with the environment. As each participant advances through the scenario, responses are captured and used by a simulation engine to create outcomes. The stored responses constitute an automatic recording of detained performance data, which is available for replay and analysis. The research includes definition of the environment s framework, the development of a simplified version of the Construction Simulator mark-up Language (CSML), and the design and construction of simplified simulation and visualization engines. This award is made under the SGER (Small Grants for Exploratory Research) program. This preliminary study will determine if the Construction Simulator has the potential to provide knowledge about the decision making process of participants. It will also determine if the Construction Simulator has the potential to improve the process. Development of the Simulator will involve participation doc5795 none Mitchell Sogin Dr. Mitchell Sogin of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, MA has been awarded a grant to study the adaptation of eukaryotic microorganisms to extremely acidic environments. Studies of life in extreme environments rarely focus upon eukaryotic microbes. Yet there is clear evidence that protists inhabit and sometimes dominate ecosystems that are either very acidic or very alkaline. A particularly interesting system is the Rio Tinto, a river basin in southwestern Spain. This is an acidic environment where the pH ranges from 1.7-2.5 and iron concentrations are as high as 20 mg ml. The river does not directly support multi-cellular animals but it is teeming with eukaryotic microbes, sometimes representing as much as 65% of the biomass. The goal of this proposal is to define protist diversity in the Rio Tinto and to explore alterations in physiological mechanisms that might allow the growth of eukaryotic microbes in this extreme environment. Sogin s team will use a combination of culturing and molecular techniques to estimate protist diversity. Molecular studies of gene sequences that have been isolated from the Rio Tinto biofilm samples will provide estimates of protist diversity. These will be compared to the diversity of protists that can be brought into culture. They will also use the culture isolates to explore natural variation in physiological properties that underlie the stability of acidophilic protist populations. We will determine what modifications to existing eukaryotic mechanisms are necessary for growth at extremely low pH and how eukaryotes have adapted to extreme acid environments doc5796 none Birnbaum An integrated Earth system field research component will be developed to incorporate into the science curriculum. Objectives are to (1) work with a high school and two of its feeder middle schools to develop teacher-teams capable of incorporating an integrated Earth system field component into their curriculum; (2) establish a challenging and exciting environment where teachers and students conduct inquiry-based science by addressing questions they formulate themselves; (3) develop an appropriate curriculum built around integrated Earth system field research; (4) involve students and teachers in research that they may present at a UTSA sponsored research conference; and (5) provide opportunities for faculty in the sciences and education to conduct research: students using the field site will contribute to faculty research through data collection (in the case of the sciences) and as participants in education research. Nine teachers representing science and mathematics will be selected for the project: six from middle schools and three from a high school. Teachers will be trained over a five-month period in field and laboratory methods in disciplines that include archeology, ecology, environmental science, geoscience, and microbiology; emphasis will be placed upon critical thinking and developing hypotheses based upon observations. With this background, teachers will take their classes into the field a minimum of three times for data and sample collection. Data will be recorded on maps developed by students using global positioning satellite receivers and Arcview Explorer GIS software. Students will publish their data on a Web site and present their research results at a conference developed for the project. This project will have significant impact on the students and teachers involved. There will be improvement in critical thinking skills, proposing hypotheses based upon observations, communication skills, and understanding the linkages between Earth systems. In addition, this will develop a greater enthusiasm for, and understanding of, the sciences doc5797 none Norman R. Pace Dr. Norman R. Pace of the University of Colorado at Boulder has been awarded a grant to study microbial diversity of a highly unusual, but perhaps fundamentally important environment, the endolithosphere. The endolithic habitat, comprised of the pore-space within rocks, is a ubiquitous extreme environment on Earth, and may contribute significantly to global biomass. Although of large significance to our understanding of microbial diversity and bio-geochemical processes, such as nutrient cycling and mineral weathering, relatively little is known about microbial constituents of endolithic ecosystems. This research project will survey, identify and study the microbial organisms that occur in selected photosynthesis-driven endolithic communities. Molecular DNA-sequence-based methods will be used that do not require pure-cultivation in order to identify organisms and to gain information about them. This consideration is crucial for such environmental analyses because most ( 99%) microorganisms in environmental samples are not cultured using standard techniques. The specific goals of the proposed program are the following: i. To identify and quantify the constituents of selected temperate-zone (Colorado) endolithic communities, DNA sequences will be obtained from microorganisms in the environment, and analyzed using phylogenetic methods to explore their evolutionary relationship. The results will provide insight into the physiological workings of photoendolithic ecosystems, and expand our view of microbial diversity. ii. To validate organisms indicated by environmental sequences, community samples will be visualized by microscopy using fluorescent tags (probes) to these specific environmental DNA sequences. The results will disclose the morphological properties of organisms that correspond to the selected sequences and reveal their physical distribution in the community. iii. This survey will likely encounter novel organisms and raise questions about their properties. To explore such physiological hypotheses, DNA-based probes will be used to monitor the growth of selected organisms in culture. The results are expected to identify many new cultivatable microbes for subsequent culture-study, and will provide information regarding their metabolic capabilities. Overall, the proposed program is expected to advance substantially our understanding of the kinds and activities of organisms that comprise photosynthesis-based endolithic communities doc5798 none Gary M. King Drs. Gary M. King of the University of Maine and Klaus Nusslein of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst have been awarded a grant from the NSF Life in Extreme Environment (LExEn) program to determine the role of atmospheric trace gases in microbial colonization and succession on recent lava flows. Volcanic activity has played an important role in the development of terrestrial ecosystems for much of Earth s history, and continues to shape terrestrial environments at present. Deposition of lava and tephra result in surfaces that over time support complex, highly productive biological communities. However, young or recently extruded lavas represent extreme environments that contain few of the major nutrients necessary for sustaining life. Neither organic matter nor a fixed form of nitrogen (e.g., ammonium or nitrate) are readily available within or on the matrix of young lava. Thus, early colonization of lava by microbes requires a source of exogenous nutrients. Recent observations of young Hawaiian lava indicate that the atmosphere provides a significant source of carbon and energy for early microbial colonization. In particular, trace gases such as hydrogen and carbon monoxide (and possibly methane) serve as substrates that fuel the metabolism of functionally diverse microbes. Among these microbes are bacteria that use atmospheric nitrogen as a source of cellular nitrogen, and species that form important symbioses with plants. The nature of trace gas utilization by microbes colonizing young lavas will be the primary focus of this LExEn research effort. A variety of field and laboratory studies in the vicinity of the Kilauea volcano will document relationships among lava age (emphasizing chronosequences from 0-300 yr), microbial biomass, trace gas utilization (hydrogen, carbon monoxide and methane) and precipitation regimes (e.g., moist versus dry). Extractions of genomic DNA from lava will be used to determine the diversity of microbial communities across age and climate gradients, and the diversity of specific functional groups within these communities. Finally, the research will include efforts to enrich, isolate and characterize novel trace-gas utilizing microbes from young lava and to determine the significance of such isolates in situ. The research is expected to yield new insights about the survival and dynamics of microbes in extreme environments relevant for understanding both contemporary and ancient terrestrial systems as well as systems that might exist on other planets doc5799 none Henyey The objective of this project is the creation of an Electronic Encyclopedia of Earthquakes (E3), which will function as an integral part of the NSF Digital Library Initiative. The lead organization in this project is the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), in collaboration with California Universities for Research in Earthquake engineering (CUREE) and the Incorporated Research Institutes in Seismology (IRIS). The one-year pilot phase of this project will result in an operational framework with an initial set of entries; the enlargement of this collection is planned to then efficiently follow in a subsequent phase. The project name, Electronic Encyclopedia of Earthquakes, accurately describes the product of this project: The information will be electronic in form, communicated via the World Wide Web. Rather than only reading text, the user will be able to access data sets and to manipulate, visualize, and analyze the data in individualized ways. For example, the student or instructor will be able to select from a library of earthquake ground motion records and play a given record in combination with a structural model to experiment with the concept of dynamic response. The Electronic Encyclopedia of Earthquakes is related to a traditional printed encyclopedia in that it is entry-based, consisting of a series of topics, each dealt with as independent explanations and sets of information and yet also cross-referenced. The root meaning of encyclopedia, the circle of knowledge, also applies, because the expanse of the topics will cover the earthquake subject in cross-disciplinary fashion. Earth sciences, engineering, physics, and mathematics are the four basic fields of knowledge to be included, with some treatment of impacts on human systems of earthquakes. Entries and data sets are provided that will allow the instructor or student to tie different topics together in an individualized, inquiry-based way, or to complete the circle, without encountering artificial divisions along traditional disciplinary lines. Thus, encyclopedia is an accurate description of this product, rather than primer, because the goal here is to provide clearly organized, dynamic information that allows the learner to discover many different paths through the subject matter, or to create new knowledge, and not to meter out one idea or piece of information at a time in a pre-determined sequence. The third term, earthquakes, is largely self-explanatory, except to note that E3 will not be limited to individual earthquakes, though specific major earthquakes will be included as entries and will be used to illustrate broader concepts. To balance the broad range and open-ended nature of the entries with the need for an instructor or student to quickly co-locate information found under different headings that is appropriate to their inquiry, threads of related content will be tagged and linked to provide continuity for a given likely level of user. For example, the content that will be mapped out to show high school teachers what may be useful for their physics courses is different than in the case of a college-level engineering or geophysics class where the same topic is treated in greater depth. The information will be layered in terms of its complexity or implied prerequisite knowledge: A primary (glossary), secondary (precis), and tertiary (in-depth information) framework will be used. A large amount of information exists in this field that can be adapted for this collection, but a common problem is that the Web user often encounters a large volume of low quality or irrelevant data in the process of eventually finding the content they desire. The layered framework and the encyclopedic idea of cross-references, along with a commitment to quality control to ensure high academic standards, have been designed to overcome this problem doc5800 none Microbial Life in Freshwater Hydrothermal Vent Systems. Carmen Aguilar EAR- Understanding physical, chemical and biochemical characteristics of organisms that thrive at high temperatures has been a hot topic in exobiology and evolutionary biology. The organisms can be a link to ancient organisms and can be a key to the early evolution and development of life. One of the theories is that life arose under reducing conditions with high temperatures, similar to the hydrothermal vent systems that are currently found on Earth. These high temperature systems are relevant to understanding extreme environments on Earth as well as other planets and moons in our Solar System. Yellowstone Lake, WY is located in the caldera of the largest volcanic eruptions , the area is well known for its steaming geysers, shimmering thermal pools and bubbling mudpots. Equally relevant, though not visible, are the hydrothermal vents submerged under the northern area of Yellowstone Lake. These vents exist within spatial microbiogeochemical domains, which may mimic conditions of early Earth and perhaps other planets. The bacteria inhabiting vent systems have access to the reduced minerals and oxidizing agents necessary to support lithotrophic life. Mineral inputs to Yellowstone Lake come from a variety of sources, namely hydrothermal vents, ground water, rain water, flux from sediments and direct runoff (including tributaries). Approximately one third of Yellowstone Lake is directly influenced by hydrothermal activity (hot water vents and fumaroles). Mass balance suggests that microbes play an important part in modifying lake chemistry using vent chemical inputs. It is the intention of the proposed work to identify and characterize denizens of the extreme high temperature (to 143C) and caustic mineral (pH to 4.5, H2S to 1mM, elevated trace metals, etc.) output of freshwater hydrothermal vents and identify their metabolic signature upon the geochemical record. Using a Remote Operated Vehicle with well-developed sampling capabilities, we propose to sample water chemistry and microbial populations in underwater hot vents of the Yellowstone Geothermal Ecosystem. We will then conduct microbiological and geochemical analyses aimed at determining the metabolic processes promoting life in the habitats and tolerances of the organisms to extreme conditions. Particular effort will be directed towards elucidating mineral reactants and products of microbial metabolism under the harsh vent water conditions doc5801 none The objective of the proposed research is to establish a collaborative team of experts from the chemistry of molecular electronics, the physics of electronic conduction at the molecular scale, advanced electronic structure, transport properties and experimental agreement, and silicon device and circuits technology to address the challenges of electronics at the quantum scale. This will require modeling and simulation involving multiple length and energy scales, starting from atomic Hamiltonians and going to complex circuits. Leveraging advances in molecular self-assembly, interfacial control, and the use of scanning probes, we will examine molecular bridges between bulk contacts, and relate the general features observed in experiments to simulations which compute the Landauer conductance from the Green s function of the molecule coupled to bulk, metal leads. Very recent, interesting, and potentially useful, reversible switching characteristics that have been observed will be analyzed theoretically. The systems typically consist of hard contacts (semiconductors or metals) and soft molecules that may exhibit dynamic structure modification. The objectives of this multi-disciplinary, small group effort are: i) to understand the physical and electronic structure and vibronic interactions of molecular bridges between hard contacts, ii) to develop a theoretical understanding of the interesting nonlinear I-V characteristics of molecules that are now being observed and to relate them to the structure of the molecule, iii) to devise methods for extracting physics-based, circuit models from the Hamiltonian of molecular electronic devices and iv) to use this knowledge and the simulation tools developed to identify molecular structures that are promising from a device and circuits perspective. The development of an understanding of how to relate electronic device and circuit function to molecular structure is the key objective of the proposed research. Other important components and products of this work include: i) the development of a set of community codes for molecular nanoelectronics that emphasize the structure function relationship of molecular devices and that connect them to the macroscopic world of circuits and systems, ii) a methodology to allow a researcher to suggest a particular structure, electrodes, and interfacial linkages, predict the electrical performance of the device, and to extract a circuit model, iii) a unique software infrastructure, The Computational Electronics Hub, that will permit users to access and operate simulation tools through a WWW browser, iv) a set of courses that will be enriched and expanded by this multidisciplinary effort, v) close interactions with leading experimental efforts in academia (Reed at Yale) and industry, vi) a partnership with the NIST group to provide expertise in advanced molecular electronic structure methods, vii) collaboration with international centers, particularly the Central University of Venezuela, viii) A high-school level teaching module in the Materials World Modules program, and ix) close interactions with the Semiconductor Research Corporation and with individual semiconductor companies to bring ideas and approaches of self-assembled molecular electronics to the electronics industry doc5802 none LExEn: Hyperthermophiles of the Hydrothermal Vent Subsurface and Their Environmental Tolerance Hyperthermophilic archaea, isolated from deep-sea hydrothermal vents, survive and grow under extreme heat, pressure, and most likely chemical toxicity. Their isolation and detection in hydrothermal vent effluents and in solids from undersea volcanic eruptions strongly suggest that they also occur in hot and anoxic subsurface environments. Their ability to survive or grow under extreme subsurface hydrothermal vent conditions (pH, sulfide, metals, temperature, and pressure) will show whether these organisms have potential as widespread and environmentally tolerant deep-subsurface inhabitants. With the exception of temperature, and to some degree pressure, many critical factors which determine growth and survival of vent hyperthermophiles under subsurface conditions have not been tested, preventing a realistic assessment of the occurrence range and environmental tolerance of these organisms. This project will test the hypothesis that hydrothermal vent archaea actually grow in the hot, anaerobic and toxic hydrothermal vent subsurface, most likely along the flow paths of vent fluids through the porous or cavernous rock. Four hydrothermal vent hyperthermophilic archaea will be used for these experiments, the methanogen Methanococcus jannaschii, the heterotrophic sulfur reducers Thermococcus fumicolans, Pyrococcus sp. strain GB-D, and the sulfate reducer Archaeoglobus profundus. These archaea were selected as a cross-section of anaerobic, thermophilic metabolisms which are representative for hydrothermal vent archaeal populations, and have the physiological potential to withstand subsurface conditions. Most importantly, these genera have been isolated directly from ongoing undersea eruptions and vent megaplumes. We will systematically test the growth and the survival of these vent archaea under approximated in situ conditions: high hydrostatic pressure of mid-ocean ridge hydrothermal vents and their subsurface extensions; acidic pH; and high sulfide and metal concentrations. These factors will be tested individually, and together in ways that approximate the natural situation. The hypothesis that the synergistic effects of these stress factors on growth and survival of hydrothermal vent archaea in the subsurface environment will differ considerably from the effect of each factor alone will be tested by comparing single-factor and multi-factor experiments. An important feature which influences growth and survival is biofilm formation, only recently studied for archaea model systems. Since biofilm formation enhances the environmental tolerance of many bacteria, archaeal biofilms in hydrothermal vent and subsurface environments are likely to show increased tolerance to environmental stress factors. In other words, the most resistant organism of hydrothermal vents and the earth s subsurface biosphere may not be an archaeon, but an archaeal biofilm. These experiments aim at integrating several physical and chemical factors which together determine the tolerance limits of some of the most extreme life forms on earth doc5803 none Morrow The PI and associates will conduct three annual 4-day workshops on K-14 education, with a focus on recruiting geoscientists from around the nation to participate. They will develop a collection of follow-up activities (surveys to strengthen and increase the effectiveness of the education activities presently (and soon-to-be) underway in the geoscience community; and to provide geoscientists who are active in K-14 education with an opportunity to showcase their work and network with educators and other scientists involved in education doc5804 none The Gulf of Mexico seafloor contains vast reservoirs of liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons that overlay thick accumulations of Jurassic salt. Conduits, or focused flow regions, permit rapid vertical migration of thermogenic hydrocarbons from deep reservoirs to the sediment-water interface and, ultimately, into the water column. The close association of salt and hydrocarbon systems results in frequent co-migration of brine and hydrocarbons (oil and gas). Upon reaching the surface, the co-migration of these fluids creates distinct extreme environments capable of supporting prolific microbial communities and complex chemosynthetically-based food webs. The Gulf of Mexico setting is complicated by the mode of hydrocarbon occurrence. At one extreme, free gas and or liquid oil is a component of a complex fluid contained in seafloor brine pools or diatremes. The fluid in these pools is hypersaline, can reach temperatures of 40 degrees C or greater, and may entrain quantities of silt or clay as ejecta or debris flows. At the opposite extreme, hydrocarbons and H2S form ice-like clathrates with water, called gas hydrates. Relatively little is known about the types of microorganisms dwelling in these environments, their genetic diversity, or their ecology and ecophysiology. This project will test the hypotheses that brines and hydrates form distinct microbial niches containing specialized communities and functions and that the dynamic interaction between the microbial activity and geochemistry of these systems results in distinctive geochemical signals that can be detected in the environment. Key functional and phylogenetic groups in the community will be identified by analysis of microbial and genetic diversity. The organisms can then be linked to their characteristic activities through measurement of biogeochemical rates (e.g. sulfide and methane oxidation, methanogenesis, sulfate reduction). Evidence of these processes is recorded in both the microbiota and the surrounding environment and can be revealed through stable isotopic analysis of cellular and environmental molecules. This information will contribute to the field of deep-sea microbiology and will lead to a better understanding of the microorganisms adaptations to unique environments that may be present on other planetary bodies (e.g., hydrates on Europa doc5805 none Samson Environmental issues in the geosciences can be used to develop student abilities and understanding in the sciences and are germane to a number of the National Science Standards. It is the goal of the Shared Air project to connect students to their atmospheric environment, offer them experience in making models of how air is shared and modified by human actions, and introduce them to laws of nature through their understanding of how the atmospheric system works. The activities include: (1) Enhancement of an initial software and curriculum design with the addition of integrated collaborative and data analysis tools, (2) Implementation of curriculum and software package to an invited and volunteer base of classrooms in the Midwestern United States, and (3) Evaluation of its use as a project-based learning tool for middle and high-school students for exploration of the atmospheric environment, and (4) Presentation to traditional and Internet-based publishing communities to facilitate the self-sufficiency of the developed program in subsequent years. Students will use an enhanced software tool based on a model originally developed at the University of Michigan to determine where their air has been and to compare observations with other participants along the path of the air quality elsewhere as it traverses the country doc5806 none This proposal addresses devices that have become sufficiently small that they approach the scale at which their dynamics must be described by quantum mechanics. The quantum-mechanical nature of nanoscale systems brings both problems in the form of quantum noise and fluctuations, and opportunities in the form of novel methods for control and information processing. This proposal focuses on one of the most promising of opportunities for nanoscale modeling and simulation: quantum simulation by quantum computers. Quantum computers are devices that process information in a way that preserves quantum coherence. Prototype quantum computers have been realized experimentally and larger `second-generation quantum computers are currently being constructed. Quantum computers are uniquely suited for performing nanoscale simulations. Nanoscale systems, though small, consist of many parts. The interaction between those parts is governed by quantum mechanics. The difficulty of simulating such systems on a classical computer increases exponentially with the number of parts. In , however, Feynman noted that a quantum computer might be able to perform quantum simulations much more efficiently, so that the difficulty of simulation increases only linearly with the number of parts. In , the PI of this proposal showed how Feynman s proposal could be put into practice. In , the co-PI demonstrated the power of quantum simulation experimentally by using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to construct a special-purpose quantum simulator capable of performing simulations far too difficult for any classical computer. The proposed NSF research program will construct, program, and operate quantum simulators. Quantum simulators are essentially `analog quantum computers that are programmed to mimic the behavior of another quantum system. In the first stage of the research program, quantum simulations will be performed on existing liquid-state NMR quantum computers and on special purpose solid-state devices. In the second stage, general-purpose, large-scale simulations will be performed on the large-scale, solid-state, NMR quantum computers being constructed at MIT with separate (non-NSF) funding. These simulations will investigate the properties of chemical and physical systems, ranging from molecules to bulk spin systems, concentrating on issues of information propagation and processing, including examining quantum mechanisms for entropy production, decoherence, and chaos. In addition to generating algorithms for simulating such phenomena, the program will develop methods for using dynamic quantum models to manipulate and control nanoscale quantum systems doc5807 none Microfluidic devices are rapidly finding an increasing number of applications in biology, chemistry, and medicine, to name a few. These devices rely on the ability to control the flow and transport of fluids and macromolecules through micron and nanometer scale geometries. As the ability to manipulate and process materials at the sub-micron level advances, so will the demand to make a priori predictions of molecular behavior in flow processes on this scale. In the proposed work, a large-scale computational approach is adopted to model the transport of fluids containing long-chain molecules through microdevices of arbitrary geometry. One overall goal is to develop efficient Brownian dynamics methods for the molecular study of: (1) long-chain flexible molecules in flow, fully accounting for hydrodynamic, excluded volume and electrostatic interactions; (2) assemblages of semiflexible polymers, accounting for interparticle interactions that often dominate flow behavior; (3) hydrodynamic interaction effects on dynamics of chain molecules near solid surfaces; (4) coupling of nanoscale Brownian dynamics simulations and continuum fluid mechanics simulations (for self-consistent solution of complex problems). A general approach to multi-scale computational fluid dynamics will be developed, in which microstructural, nanoscale simulations are seamlessly and efficiently integrated into full scale flow simulations for design of microfluidic processes. Our goal is to develop the fundamentals for development of a general nanoscale process simulator, akin to those currently used in design of large-scale industrial processes. In this project, these advances will be applied to improve the understanding of polyelectrolytes in flow; to study the flow of DNA solutions through microchannels and near surfaces; to study the interaction between flow and nanostructure in geometries characteristic of microfluidic devices doc5808 none Greenberg Jupiter s satellite Europa has been identified as one of the most likely sites for life in the solar system. In order to assess the habitability of Europa, Dr. Richard Greenberg and colleagues at the University of Arizona will investigate the character of its surface, with particular attention to testing whether and how a liquid water ocean interacts with the surface through the ice crust. He will test models of crustal processes by continuing quantitative assessments of spacecraft data and theoretical studies of the mechanics of the underlying processes involved. From those results, the research team will describe the character, locations and time changes of Europan environments most benevolent to life. The goal is to characterize the physical conditions, diversity, and variability of potentially habitable settings on Europa. This project addresses issues raised by a model of Europa s crustal processes in which much of the geology of the surface is governed by interaction with an ocean under only a very thin crust, thus providing a variety of evolving environmental niches. Dr. Greenberg and his team have constructed that model based on quantitative analysis of observations, combined with calculations of the effects of tidal processes, which control heat, stress, and rotation. They have confirmed that surface lineaments are correlated with global stress patterns, demonstrating that they form by lithospheric cracking, but only if a substantial ocean is present to give adequate tidal amplitude. While the evidence for this broad picture is compelling, the model is not proven and important issues remain unresolved. This project is aimed at testing the thin-ice model by an interdisciplinary range of investigations and comparing it with alternative possibilities, such as a model of a thicker ice crust in which surface processes are governed by solid-state viscous flow. This work will define and constrain the range of possible habitable environments, because of the implications regarding linkage of the crust to the ocean. This project is funded through the Division of Astronomical Sciences for the NSF s Life in Extreme Environments program doc5809 none Janet L. Siefert Dr. Janet L. Siefert of Rice University, and Dr. James F. Kasting of Pennsylvania State University have been awarded a grant from the Life in Extreme Environments (LExEn) program to trace past environmental crises in Earth history by using a combination of climate biogeochemistry modeling and molecular systematic techniques. Models will help predict what kinds of organisms were capable of making the changes in atmosphere and to simulate interaction of different species ofmicroorganisms. For instance, initially archaea that produced methane might have dominated and then were usurped by bacteria that produced oxygen (cyanobacteria). Cyanobacteria are known to have existed by at least 2.7 Ga, so why does the rise in oxygen not occur for another 0.3 Ga? Their models will attempt to explain discrepancies such as this. Molecular systematic techniques will use DNA sequence data to track the ancestry of organisms and their genomes. These reconstructed ancestries will reveal which organisms were most likely present, whether there is evidence of molecular fossils of new kinds of metabolism that may have evolved, and whether or not the assumptions of the climate biogeochemical models make sense doc5810 none Gao Computational nano-engineering is an emerging field of research aimed at developing nanoscale modeling and simulation methods to enable and accelerate the design and development of functional nanometer-scale devices and systems. Just as microfabrication has led to microelectronics revolution in the 20th century, nano-precision engineering will be a key to the nanotechnology revolution in the 21st century. A major challenge in this technology is to fabricate patterned nanostructures. The objective of the proposed research is to develop multiscale modeling and simulation methods for nanopatterning. As a prototype example with comprehensive industrial impact, we will focus our efforts on nanopatterning of magnetic nanostructures for high-density information storage device applications where the control of grain size distribution is becoming increasingly important, and the drive for decreased media noise and increased storage density is pushing the grain size below the 10 nm regime. We propose a systematic study of the mechanisms that control the grain size and grain size distribution in magnetic thin films. We will use continuum theories to model the length scales determined by competing mechanisms of epitaxy, surface stress, surface energy, strain energy, compositional free energy and quantum energy. We will develop kinetic Monte Carlo and quantum simulations to simulate nanoscale self-organization for creating magnetic thin film media with ultra-fine grain sizes and ultra-narrow grain size distributions. The simulation tools will allow us to quantitatively investigate nanofabrication processes, and in particular, to predict the grain size and grain size distribution in magnetic nanostructures. The proposed project will have immediate impact on the magnetic information storage nanotechnology by providing industry with the first theoretical tool to analyze nanofabrication processes based on the state-of-the-art knowledge of nanoscale modeling and simulation. This project will allow engineers to reduce or eliminate costly and slow processes of developing new nanostructured materials. Through the proposed research, we will develop the framework of computational nanopatterning technology which will benefit the whole spectrum of current nanotechnology challenges. This project will lead to better understanding of the basic mechanisms that control the structuring of materials at the nanometer scale. The Kinetic Monte-Carlo simulation and quantum simulation methods developed under this project will have far-reaching significance for the design and manufacturing of nanodevices doc5811 none AWARD Sulfuric Acid Speleogenesis by Chemolithotrophic Bacteria: Community structure and habitat modification by acid extremophiles P. C. Bennett and L. Stern, Dept. of Geological Sciences, University of Texas The Earth s subsurface contains innumerable extreme habitats that are occupied solely by microorganisms that survive by manipulating chemical forms of energy and altering their geologic surroundings to scavenge nutrients. This project will investigate the geology, geochemistry, and microbiology of a sulfidic cave system in Wyoming, and characterize the interaction between an acid-generating microbial population and the surrounding rocks. The Kane Caves, WY have a diverse microbial community that consumes hydrogen sulfide as a source of energy, while producing sulfuric acid as the waste product. The produced acid chemically dissolves the surrounding carbonate rock to produce a cave, a potential modern analog for the formation of Carlsbad Caverns. The goals of this project are to characterize the importance of these unusual microbial populations in the production of acid, and the carbon and sulfur cycles in this chemically based subsurface ecosystem. PIs will also identify the source of fundamental inorganic nutrients, measure the rate of carbonate dissolution and cave expansion, and characterize the influence of changing hydrologic conditions on the microbial community. These results will be used to develop methods for identifying the geologic fingerprints of chemical autotrophy, extremely acid environments, and microbial acid speleogenesis doc5812 none Nomanbhoy Seismic data recorded at PEPP (Princeton Earth Physics Project) seismograph stations in Colorado and existing seismology resources on the World Wide Web will be used to meet the Colorado Model Content Standards in earth sciences for grades 9 to 12. Teachers will be trained in both content and use of curricular materials so that they can use real-time seismic data to engage students in real world research. The training will enable teachers and students to access seismic data from the Internet and to use those data to solve real problems in seismology. This will provide teachers with the opportunity to experience a hands-on, project-based approach to learning science before implementing this approach in their classroom. The training will be done in collaboration with the Center for Science, Math and Technology (CSMATE) at Colorado State University. During the first phase the PIs will: (a) visit each PEPP seismograph station in Colorado to ensure that the seismometers are running and data are being archived; (b) prepare the seismic data collected at local PEPP seismograph stations for dissemination by the Internet; (c) research the Internet for appropriate seismology resources and activities for classroom use; (d) design a website that will act as a gateway for teachers to access the seismic data, activities, and support from team members; (e) train a small group of teachers in summer to use the seismic data so that they can in turn act as trainers during a weeklong teacher-training workshop during the following summer; and (f) design and begin implementation of an evaluation plan and initiate organization and recruiting for the teacher-training workshop. During the second phase they will: (a) train 45 more teachers to use these resources during a weeklong workshop at Colorado State University; (b) provide follow-up through on-site visits by a project team member; (c) complete assessments and finalize evaluation of the project; (d) disseminate project outcomes through the Internet, presentations at conferences, publications in journals and newsletters, and contributions to the Digital Library for Earth Science Education (DLESE). The on-site visits will serve two purposes: (1) to assist teachers in the transition from the workshop laboratory to their own working environment, and (2) to ensure that all hardware, software and resources are readily available and functioning in the participant s schools. There will be two lasting outcomes of this project. First, the PIs will establish and maintain a web site at the Colorado Geological Survey for archiving PEPP data, posting instructional materials, and providing on-line support for teachers. Second, they will have provided up to 48 teachers (who teach at least students) with the content knowledge, confidence, and instructional materials they need to teach earth science content through active research, using real quantitative data and interacting with scientists through the Internet. With the focus on web-based activities and dissemination through DLESE, the project has the potential to serve a far larger, essentially global audience doc5813 none Hartman The Red River Geoscience Education (RRGE) Pilot Project will give secondary school students in eastern North Dakota a learning opportunity that will prepare them to understand the issues that affect watershed water quality in general and, specifically, the water quality of the Red River of the North (in North and South Dakota, Minnesota, and Manitoba). Incorporating a complementary expansion of the tributary monitoring activities initiated in the Minnesota portion of the watershed, this geoscience education program provides a collaborative approach to science teacher development and student education using the major geological feature of the region. One objective of the project is to provide area educators with effective geoscience activities and methods, focused on water issues, to be used in the field and in the classroom. Objectives for the students include developing critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, participating in scientific research, and promoting interest in geoscience in particular and science in general. These objectives compliment the priorities and recommendations of the NSF directorate for Geosciences, Working Group Report, and national and state science education standards. Tailored to the individual needs of the participating urban and rural schools, the pilot project will improve the quality of science education by integrating experiential geoscience content into the coursework. The students will receive field, laboratory, and technology training in themes relating to riparian habitats, hydrology, and human impacts on water quality. Under the guidance of their teachers and geoscientists, students will monitor water quality parameters and examine riparian status at sites along the Red River and two of its tributaries, gathering data and analyzing water samples during monthly field trips. The students will perform wet-chemistry and instrumental techniques using EPA-approved methods to evaluate water samples in their school laboratories. As the students gain experience in observation, sampling, analysis, and data reduction techniques, the emphasis will shift to the correlation of the results from schools in the Minnesota portion of the watershed and incorporation of information on fluvial systems, precipitation, soil and near-surface geology, ground cover, landscape, and aquatic species. The program will draw from established curricula such as Project WET (Water Education for Teachers) to supplement research activities and provide the background to interpret the analytical results and draw conclusions on the factors affecting the quality of the ecosystem. They will develop an understanding of the interactions between nature and humans that determine the health of the river. The preparation and presentation of research papers for regional scientific and water quality conferences will summarize the students research experience and relate the significance of their findings to other geoscientists. These activities will help raise the scientific literacy of adults as well as students through the presentation of results at venues such as science and county fairs and community open houses. The participation of partners from several educational and professional fields will build closer relationships between K-12 education, universities, and government agencies in North Dakota and Minnesota. This program will connect local scientists and practitioners with classroom teachers and provide student opportunities to work with scientists in research discovery. The hands-on learning aspect will enhance science and math education through the practical application and connections of skills developed in the classroom. Placing research in the context of their local environment will empower students with responsibility toward the Earth and ignite their curiosity. The impact of this project s activities will be greater science literacy in the communities participating in the program and a successful model for bringing the hands-on-minds-on approach to geoscience education to the high schools of the Red River watershed. Because the pilot includes both rural and urban school districts, the unique problems associated with both groups can be explored and addressed, yielding a program exportable throughout the Red River watershed and beyond doc5814 none The presence of bacteria in glaciers has generated considerable public and scientific interest in recent times. Bacteria are deposited from above on wind-borne dust particles and aerosols, overlayered by thousands of years of deposition and accretion, and finally returned to the coastal marine environment by glacial calving and melting. Bacteria have been detected in and cultured from glacial ice ranging from a few hundred to many thousands of years old. Evidence suggests that glacial ice cannot support bacterial growth but rather traps these organisms for considerable lengths of time in an anabolic state. This research will test the hypothesis that bacteria sustain significant levels of DNA degradation and damage (base damage) during glacial entrapment and that this base damage leads to mutations. Ice core samples representing a wide range of geographical locales and age distributions will be obtained from the National Ice core Laboratory (NICL). Current and emerging molecular biology tools will be used to analyze bacteria and bacterial DNA extracted from these ice cores. A diverse array of bacteria extracted from glacial ice will be cultured, preserved, and characterized. A recently developed technology to detect and quantify base loss and deaminations in single bacterial cells using damage-specific endonucleases and visualization of double-strand breaks using microgel electrophoresis will be employed. The lethal effects of glaciation on bacteria using clonability, transcription, protein synthesis, and fluorescence hybridization using rRNA probes as biological endpoints will be examined. Relative mutation frequencies in bacterial isolates will also be estimated by comparing sequence homologies within conserved and nonconserved regions of the 16S rDNA genes. From the proposed work, insight will be gained into understanding basic mechanisms of mutagenesis that may be relevant to bacterial speciation, diversity and the evolution of life on earth as well as in extremely cold environments found elsewhere in our solar system doc5815 none The goal of this research project is to conduct a multi-scale computational and theoretical investigation of the evolution of thin film morphology on metal and semi-conductor surfaces. This research involves several nanoscale modeling strategies: (1) ab inito electronic structure calculations for small-scale systems using density functional theory and quantum chemistry approaches for energetics, electronic effects, diffusion paths, and selected adsorbate vibrational modes; (2) development of robust model potentials from parameterization of results from the proposed ab initio calculations and experimental data; (3) application of recently developed accelerated MD code to examine novel cluster diffusion process which may appear when simulations are performed for micro-mili seconds; (4) determination, successively, of the vibrational dynamics, thermodynamics, diffusion prefactors and rates for small Ag clusters on proposed substrates; (5) calculation of energy barriers and diffusion paths for Ag clusters on proposed substrates using the model potentials; (6) modeling of epitaxial growth for realistic system sizes (microns) using the calculated diffusion rates an energetics in kinetic Monte Carlo technique; (7) continuum modeling of nanostructure relaxation using information from all of the above. An added strategy is to work in tandem with on-going experiments to provide constant feedback. This is a collaborative effort by researchers in chemical engineering, physics, chemistry and mathematics. Together with industrial collaboration, the project will allow them to determine the characteristics of the systems for length and time scales that are several orders of magnitude larger than the atomic scales for which the information is initially collected doc5816 none LExEn: Integrated Biogeochemical and Microbiological Studies of Cold, Anoxic Environments Although cold, anoxic marine sediments are a seemingly inhospitable location to support life, they are populated by microbes with unusual metabolic capabilities. They play a key role in the global cycling of organic matter today and in the past, and are also important for our understanding of life elsewhere in the Universe. Although previous studies have considered such environments, numerous questions still remain about the microbial communities and processes which occur there. The objectives of the current project are to further the understanding of the processes occurring in cold, anoxic systems, and to link the understanding of the processes with the microbial communities that participate. More specifically, this project will couple biogeochemical experiments performed at a permanently-cold, anoxic bay with sophisticated chemical analyses, culture-dependent and independent identification techniques, and laboratory-based studies of microbes isolated from the site, to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the microbiology and biogeochemistry of such globally-important environments. Specific Goals Include: 1. Determine the prokaryotic community structure of the study site (sediments of Skan Bay, AK). Several independent techniques will be utilized encompassing both culture-dependent (most-probable- number analysis, isolations) and culture-independent (complete depth-profile using 16SrRNA, DGGE, species-specific fluorescent probes, lipid biomarker analysis) identification techniques. 2. Determine the pathways and thermodynamics of carbon and energy flow at the site. Several independent approaches will be utilized including following natural isotopic variations (lipid biomarker isotope analysis - 2 H and 13 C, methane isotope analysis - 2 H and 13 C), utilizing isotope-labeled tracers (14 C-labeled methane, acetate, glucose), and determining depth profiles of important metabolites (CH4, SO4 2- , and H2). 3. Isolate and characterize novel psychrophilic and psychrotolerant prokaryotes, including methanogens, sulfate reducing bacteria, amino-acid degrading syntrophs, and methane oxidizers. 4. Integrate all laboratory and field studies with prior studies to develop a conceptual model of the microbial-biogeochemistry of cold, anoxic environments. This project will also yield insight into the formation and consumption of methane hydrates by microbes. This work should also lead to the isolation and characterization of several novel prokaryotes capable of growth at low temperature, including sulfate-reducing bacteria, methanogenic Archaea, methane-oxidizing Archaea, and amino-acid consuming syntrophs. In addition, this work will help to identify the mechanism and organisms responsible for anaerobic methane oxidation. Results of this work are expected to be broadly applicable to other extreme environments doc5817 none Young Amino acid precursors (AAPs) have been detected on meteorites, in comets, and in the interstellar medium (ISM). In addition, these precursors (HCN, NH 3 , and CH 3 OH) have been irradiated with UV photons in a 10 K water ice matrix to form glycine without any aqueous chemistry taking place. Dr. Eliot Young at the Southwest Research Institute will lead a project that will conduct a survey on 16 of the icy bodies in the solar system to look for AAPs. The goal is to assess the distribution of AAPs throughout the icy bodies of the solar system and determine under what conditions AAPs can survive and participate in prebiotic chemistry. Dr. Young expects that this telescopic survey will be more sensitive to the presence of AAPs than any previous survey. The research team s efforts are concentrated in three areas: 1. Observations at 3 - 5 Mm using NIRSPEC. The 3 - 5 Mm spectral range contains the fundamental transitions of the AAPs. These are an order of magnitude stronger than the overtone transitions which have been customarily observed. The breakthrough is NIRSPEC, a 1 - 5 Mm spectrograph on the Keck telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, that will acquire targets as faint as Charon. 2. New Optical Constants: Interpretation of spectral data requires accurate optical constants. The team will generate sample AAP ices under a variety of temperatures and in water and nitrogen host matrices. 3. More Accurate Spectral Modeling: Modifications to a current Hapke code based on the Monte Carlo results will be developed. This will allow more accurate fits to bright ices in which the scattering is non-isotropic and to cases in which the imaginary index is close to 1. This program of observations and analysis is expected to discover many new constituents throughout the solar system, including many molecules with prebiotic significance. Taken as a whole, the results of the survey will help us to understand the conditions in which AAPs can survive in surface ices. This project is funded through the Division of Astronomical Sciences for the NSF s Life in Extreme Environments program doc1516 none COLLABORATIVE LEXEN RESEARCH: DIRECT SAMPLING OF THE OCEANIC SUB-SURFACE BIOSPHERE AT OLD AND YOUNG SEAMOUNTS Oceanic crust is a plausible but unproven habitat for a microbial biosphere of planetary proportions. The upper 500 meters of igneous basement is warm, porous and permeable, forming a global-scale aquifer hosting the circulation of nutrient-rich hydrothermal fluids. Heat from the lower intrusive crustal rocks drives fluid convection cells within this aquifer, even in crust many tens of millions of years old. This thermal convection is strongly modulated by tidal forces, increasing fluid velocities and stirring the sub-surface incubator more vigorously than previously believed. Two unique methods will be used for sampling uncompromised crustal fluids from two contrasting hydrothermal areas on the Juan de Fuca Ridge. Axial Seamount is currently forming directly on the ridge axis, with recent eruptions on the summit and flanks, and has considerable geological and surface biological variability with periods of less than a year. At Axial caldera a sampling facility with a re-entry cone was cemented directly to the seafloor in , providing uncontaminated access to a 50 degrees C diffuse vent. In contrast, Baby Bare (BB) Seamount sits on 3.5 My crust east of the ridge axis, with a small exposed summit of altered rock completely surrounded by low permeability sediments. This project will sample Baby Bare fluids (40 degrees C) below the water rock interface, using a newly developed break-away coring instrument to insert a 3-meter long titanium tube into the sub-surface, below the biologically active surface zone. The samples obtained from both Axial and Baby Bare will be studied for the entire spectrum of bacteria and archea populations, the fluids will be analyzed for their inorganic and organic chemistry, and the data placed in their full environmental context using temperature and fluid flow measurements. This project attempts to integrate for the first time inorganic and organic chemistry with geophysical parameters including porosity and fluid flow rates, so as to better understand the microbial ecology of these sub-surface biotopes. By examining the chemical and microbial ecology and energetics of the sub-surface, and particularly the sub-surface associated with hydrothermal systems, a framework for studying the prospects of extraterrestrial life may be developed doc5819 none Messina Web-based Investigations in the Geosciences (WIG) is a multidisciplinary, broad-audience endeavor, targeting undergraduate and graduate students, pre-college science teachers, and those in their charge. The core of this initiative involves the development, field-testing and implementation of inquiry-based GIS (Geographic Information Systems) GPS (Global Positioning System) modules and virtual geologic field trips that will be widely distributed over the Internet. With the assistance of a graduate student intern, the Principal Investigator of the proposed project will gather and organize spatial data to construct critical thinking activities in which geologic, biologic, geographic, meteorologic, and other GIS layers are combined into Earth Systems puzzles. The modules will be in the form of interactive directed inquiry lessons and virtual field trips in which the end-user will explore a remote terrain in search of physical evidence to help solve a problem. The PI of this project will employ the assistance of current students within San Jose State University s College of Science, who will collect further spatial data as part of Geology course requirements. Current students will also field-test the modules before they are more widely distributed via several public and private Internet servers. Dissemination strategies also include pre-college and in-service teacher workshops, national conference participation, and journal articles on the project s resources. WIG will make available Web-based student-centered activities, archived data sets to conduct spatial investigations, and virtual field trips for use in colleges and secondary schools around the country, or internationally doc5820 none This award provides funding from the Directorate of Geoscience to develop secondary school instructional materials that teach ocean science using Geographic Information System (GIS) data. The GIS-based instructional materials will be called Mapping an Ocean Sanctuary and will consist of five modules that will help the learner master GIS technology; employ GIS to study the surface and underwater geography of (and bathymetric, ecological, and geophysical data from) three national marine sanctuaries; collect geophysical and ecological data during field studies at the sanctuaries and use GIS to map and analyze the data; and share data and analyses with other students and schools via the Internet. The work is a collaborative effort between the Center for Image Processing in Education (CIPE) and the Sustainable Seas Expeditions (SSE). It will use data collected in the Monterey Bay, Channel Islands, and Florida Keys Marine Sanctuaries doc5821 none Brian Johnston This project explores the idea that extreme environmental conditions such as freezing and dehydration could be vital forces in the emergence of life from a prebiotic world containing RNA. The idea is based on the discovery that such conditions can stimulate a key synthetic reaction (self-ligation) in a small, virus-associated, modern, catalytic RNA. The discovery of RNA catalysis inspired the concept dubbed the RNA-world hypothesis, which maintains that early in the evolution of life, both information-carrying and catalytic functions of self-replicating entities were provided by RNA. However, the susceptibility of the RNA backbone to chemical cleavage, particularly in the presence of the divalent metal ions that are the normal cofactors for RNA catalysis, challenges whether RNA could ever have developed enough complexity to become functionally useful in the absence of the protective environment of the cell. The P.I. s laboratory recently discovered that the hairpin ribozyme (HPR) catalyzes efficient ligation in the absence of metal ion cofactors when solutions of the HPR are subjected to freezing and or dehydration. This discovery led to speculating whether dehydration-induced ligation could have played a role in building up RNA complexity in prebiotic evolution. Several facts support this conjecture: (1) Since their chemistries are the same, ligation provides a means of reversing random cleavage; (2) Freezing and dehydration can provide important mechanisms for concentrating and stabilizing macromolecules; and (3) Freezing and dehydrating environmental conditions are very likely to have existed on the early Earth. Moreover, such conditions are likely to exist or to have existed on Mars and Europa, two possible candidates for bearing extraterrestrial life. (Europa is believed to contain large amounts of freezing water, and Mars appears to have had flowing water in the past, possibly quite recently.) This conjecture would be strengthened if RNA structures in addition to HPR were found to have similar freezing- or dehydration-induced catalytic activity. Therefore the authors will investigate the likelihood that enzymatic capabilities conducive to the emergence of life can arise from those extreme conditions, by searching a random library of RNA sequences for new motifs that catalyze ligation of RNA under those conditions. An established selection protocol will be used, but only those sequences whose catalytic activity is induced by either freezing or chemical dehydration will be chosen. Successfully isolating and characterizing new families of such sequences will enhance our understanding of the mechanisms of RNA catalysis, provide important support for the origin of life in extreme environments, and invite searches for extremophiles that use such activities. This project will be a collaboration between Somagenics, Inc. and Princeton University, and will include a training component involving a graduate student and a post-doctoral fellow. As a company applying RNA technology to functional genomics, therapeutics, and diagnostics, Somagenics wishes to exploit special properties of RNA that emerge under unusual and extreme conditions doc5822 none The objective of this effort is to understand properties of oligobacteria that allow growth in extremely dilute solutions in order to facilitate examination for extraterrestrial life. While dominant in terms of biomass in aquatic systems, typical forms are rarely if ever cultivated. New techniques such as growth from single cells give improved examples of typical forms and the strategy outlined is to generate cultures that may taken as examples for detailed examination. Procedures are designed to optimize culturability by observing numerous cultures inoculated with statistically abundant single cells. The populations appearing are visualized by flow cytometry and the number of species are assayed by molecular techniques using novel statistical formulations to assess viability. Sensitivity to the initiation of growth is examined by culture media amendments. Nutrient responses are examined within the framework of novel Janusian kinetics that relate organism construction to nutrient sequestering ability. Key questions involve artifactual contamination and substrate accelerated death. Fresh water will therefore be used to eliminate some salt-associated problems during media preparation. Temperature and species-species interactions will be evaluated as well. The cultures will be characterized physiologically and genetically. One objective is to obtain a representative culture for gene sequencing as an aid to a detailed understanding of the functionality of oligobacteria doc5823 none Adomaitis - An exploratory research program is planned to design a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) reactor that will enable across-wafer spatial control of deposition characteristics. An existing CVD reactor will be modified and used to generate data for developing a detailed simulator for reactor design and operation. The goals are to evaluate the actuation capabilities of this programmable reactor and establish its process simulation, optimization, sensing, and control requirements. The research is expected to demonstrate proof of concept for an entirely new mode of CVD processing. Specific tasks will include: (1) Proving a new concept for CVD reactor design that will demonstrate spatially controllable reactant delivery to the wafer: This will enable across-wafer uniformity to be achieved at virtually any process design point desired for material performance or manufacturing throughput. It will also allow intentional, programmed non-uniformity to reduce cost and time in process development. (2) Developing object-oriented simulation-based design, analysis, optimization, and process control tools for the programmable CVD reactor system. (3) Establishing a prototype for the next generation of CVD reactors for use in a materials development environment for conducting combinatorial CVD studies to rapidly evaluate new processes and materials. (4) Demonstrating a concept in semiconductor processing equipment design that can be extended to other important manufacturing processes, including plasma-enhanced CVD, reactive ion etching, and possibly liquid-phase processes such as wafer cleaning and plating doc5824 none This award provides funding for a one-year Research Opportunity Award to the University of Florida to work on a joint research project with the Industry University Cooperative Research Center on Corrosion in Multiphase Technology at Ohio University. This interdisciplinary research program will focus on inhibitor steel interactions and its effect on the chemistry and morphology of corrosion product layers doc5825 none This award is made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industry (ETI) program solicitation. The research effort will address tactical and strategic planning decision support systems to aid Air Traffic Control (ATC) personnel manage the air traffic in the terminal area and in the enroute National Airspace (NAS), as well as to aid policy makers in planning future directions and in formulating various operational guidelines. Related to the enroute airspace, a comprehensive Airspace Planning Model (APM) will be explored to select among alternative flight-plans for a set of flights in a collaborative decision making framework between FAA and airline carriers. The model will consider various issues concerned with safety and collision avoidance, sector workload, fuel and delay costs, and equity among the involved airlines. Related to the terminal area at hub airports, a comprehensive decision support system called the Airport Ground Control Advisory System (AGCAS) will be explored to aid in ground control issues pertaining to aircraft sequencing and runway operations, and pertaining to taxiway and airport ground network operations. The intent of this research is to develop a vision for an overall framework for ground and enroute air-traffic control, describing existing capabilities, and identifying needs and opportunities for improvements and coordination. To achieve this, new models will be proposed to aid in tactical decision making as well as in policy formulations regarding the airport terminal area and the enroute airspace. A framework for integrating these models with existing advanced ATC automation tools will be explored in collaboration with FAA and NASA in order to enhance air traffic management capabilities. The long-term impact expected from this research effort will be to improve airspace and airport handling capacities and to reduce delays and congestion effects through a more efficient and effective control and management of resources and operations doc5826 none Hypergeometric functions have been the objects of mathematical study since the seventeenth century. Recent advances in the subject include the development of the Aomoto-Gelfand theory of multivariable hypergeometric functions. This theory is of particular interest in mathematical physics, with implications in the study of the Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov (KZ) differential equations from conformal field theory. In the Aomoto-Gelfand theory, a significant role is played by hyperplane arrangements, finite collections of codimension one affine subspaces of a complex vector space. The study of arrangements is a relatively new branch of mathematics on the interface between topology, algebra, algebraic geometry, combinatorics, and analysis. Professor Alexander Varchenko of the University of North Carolina will deliver a series of lectures entitled Arrangements, Hypergeometric Functions, and KZ-Type Equations at Louisiana State University. As the title indicates, in these lectures, Professor Varchenko will explain the role of hyperplane arrangements in the study of hypergeometric functions and equations of KZ-type. The lecture series, and surrounding discussion, will serve to crystalize recent research trends in arrangement theory deriving from connections with hypergeometric functions, and to focus attention on the outstanding important questions in this area and their applications. The lectures should be of interest to experts and students in all branches of arrangement theory, and to newcomers to the field as well doc5827 none Pipeline systems are widely used in transportation industries. Examples are transportation of coal, iron ore, mineral concentrates, ore tailings, sewage sludge, and nuclear waste. In many of these applications, transported slurries are complex multi-species mixtures. In the past, most of the theoretical and experimental studies dealt with only single-component slurries such as sand- or coal-water mixtures; little is known about multi-species slurries. The design of pipeline systems based on the studies of single-component slurries causes substantial limitation of safety and efficiency. Thus, there is a significant need to study multi-species slurry transportation in order to build a scientific basis for better pipeline system design in the future. It is proposed to study multi-species slurry transportation both experimentally in the lab-scale flow loop and numerically, using commercially available solvers as well as developing new computer codes. Both two- and three-component slurries will be used in the study to focus research on the effects of slurry component density on transport characteristics. Materials such as glass particles, sand, aluminum oxide, and nickel oxide will comprise slurry components in studying density ratios of heavier to lighter material in the range of 1.2 to 5.0. Different particle sizes of slurry components in the range of 50m to 500m and different relative component concentrations in the slurry will be tested. In addition, we will study solids concentrations in the range of 5% to 40% by volume for each slurry recipe. A flow loop for slurry transport experiments will be constructed. The flow loop and its instrumentation will be calibrated by performing experiments with clear water. Next, slurry transport experiments in the flow loop will be performed. Important engineering parameters such as critical deposition velocity and pressure drop versus flow velocity will be of interest. Flow patterns associated with different flow regimes will be examined by using flow visualization techniques such as Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV). A wide range of Reynolds numbers from 500 to will be considered to cover laminar, transitional, and turbulent flow regimes. Critical deposition velocity will be determined by visual observations of particle settling and from the turn point on the pressure drop versus mean flow velocity curve. Rheology studies of slurries under investigation will be performed. A reasonable numerical model of multi-species slurry flow will be developed. Experimental data will be used to improve numerical model. Improved model will then be used for parametric study to obtain detailed information about the effects of solids densities, particle sizes, and solids concentrations on slurry transport characteristics. In addition, we will study re-suspension phenomenon to investigate pipeline restart feasibility and characteristics. Slurry will be allowed to fully settle in the loop and then mean slurry velocity will be increased gradually until the settled bed is completely removed. Correlations and numerical models obtained from this research will be useful in designing next-generation pipeline systems for multi-species slurry transportation. The study will also contribute to the improved fundamental understanding of physical phenomena associated with multi-phase flows. This award is made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) program solicitation doc5828 none This award is made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) program solicitation. The United States depends on the smooth functioning of its electrical power and communication systems infrastructure. To minimize disruptions to these complex systems, it is necessary to understand, predict and control their responses to outside perturbations. The concept of self- organized criticality (SOC) brings together ideas of self-organization of nonlinear dynamical systems with the often observed near critical behavior of many natural phenomena. This work advances the understanding of self-organized criticality in these systems. The primary focus of work is electric power system blackouts and the secondary focus is disruptions in communication systems. Initial analyses of time series of power system blackout sizes and internet congestion show evidence of long time correlations, which are consistent with SOC behavior. We will expand and deepen these initial analyses of experimental data. We will develop and analyze simulation models capturing SOC effects in electric power systems and communication networks. Initial work suggests a heuristic explanation of SOC in electric power system blackouts. We will test and refine this initial heuristic explanation by analyzing simulation models. We will determine the extent to which electric power system blackouts and communication system networks show SOC in their global complex dynamics doc5829 none The United States global positioning system (GPS), NAVSTAR, consists of a constellation of 24 satellites orbiting in high altitude. GPS receivers that can be placed in any type of vehicle, including automobiles, trucks, buses, airplanes, trains and ships, calculate their position on the earth based on their distance from four or more of these satellites. This ability to determine the location of vehicles in time has many useful applications in transportation including tracking vehicles on networks for navigation or travel surveys, as well as collecting and storing data about the networks of roads, waterways or even pipelines for facility inventories. Although development of a technique such as that proposed here to map GPS point data to linear network configurations has many applications, it is routing behavior and route choice as an improvement to traffic assignment models in urban planning that are specifically of interest to this researcher. The objective of this research is to develop a mathematical model to determine routes on networks from GPS point data in order to automate the route data collection process such that the recording of routes can become routine and widespread. The data points collected by GPS receivers for the route of a vehicle travelling in a transportation system are recorded as single points in space. Network segments such as roads, even though they have two dimensions including width, are represented as one dimensional lines in a GIS or other network database. Even if there were not errors in both the GPS points and the network data it would be necessary for the GPS points to be translated to links in order to consider the route behavior or optimize it in the network system. Currently, errors that can not be completely eliminated in both the GPS collected points as well as the base linear networks make the process of matching the GPS data onto the network complicated. In many cases, humans are needed to directly transform the GPS point data into a representation consisting of network line segments for analysis. This is not practical on a large scale for full transportation networks where a large number of vehicles are being tracked. In this project GPS point data for automobiles traveling on an urban road network will be collected (urban roads will be used because their close spacing as well as the interference from buildings challenges the methodology). Data will be collected during various weather conditions as well as at different times of the day when satellite configuration varies and affects measurement quality. The known actual routes will be manually entered into the road network database and a mathematical model will be developed to transform the GPS points into complete routes in link by link network (line) nomenclature. The model will make use of a minimum path algorithm and link impedances defined based on GPS point density, velocity and bearings. Goodness of fit measures that determine the extent of match between the actual and modeled routes will be used to evaluate alternative model specifications. This award is made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) program solicitation doc5830 none Recently combinatorial methods have played important role in mathematical research. The theory of symmetric polynomials and other (non-symmetric) classical polynomials is particular important due to its applications in topology, representation theory, algebraic geometry, algebraic number theory as well as mathematical physics. Schur polynomials and Schubert polynomials stand out as one of the major combinatorial objects in connections with the enumerative geometry of manifolds, Yang-Baxter equations, Hecke algebras and quantum groups. In order to make this area of investigation accessible to a wide audience we are holding an NSF CBMS regional conference on Algebraic Combinatorics at North Carolina State University in Raleigh during June 4-8, . The principal speaker is Professor Alain Lascoux, from Universite de Marne-la-Vallee, who will give a series of 10 lectures on ``Multivariate Polynomials . As a leading figure in algebraic combinatorics, Professor Lascoux (himself and jointly with his coauthors) developed many key concepts and tools in this field. During the 10-hour lectures he will present the theories of multi-Schur functions, lambda-rings, divided differences as well as applications to Yang-Baxter equations. The lecture notes of Prof. Lascoux will be published by CBMS within one year after the conference. The conference s main purpose is to attract newcomers and the secondary purpose is to provide a venue of discussions for experts doc5831 none This project is building a collection of references to resources that offer a broad, balanced perspective of topics relating to the origins, functions, and legacies of the Manhattan Project. The materials referenced include books, articles, videos, and vetted web sites. The critical task of the Alsos project is the integration of these references into a structured collection that allows users to examine this important period of history from many perspectives, thus strengthening the quality of science, mathematics, engineering, and technology education by connecting different disciplines, issues, and ideas. Searching and indexing tools link the components of Alsos and facilitate the exploration of these materials for general readers and specialists alike. In addition to the references, Alsos contains a set of indexed, digitized sound tracks and images. A clear, intuitive user interface provides seamless navigation through all of these components doc5832 none This research seeks to answer the question of how to measure the capacity and flexibility of a transportation system, considering uncertainty in system performance and traffic. The emphasis is on the term system, for methods already exist to measure the capacity of individual links and nodes of a network in terms of volume-delay functions. But as we have learned with the recent capacity problems of U.S. freight railroads, capacity is dependent on many other system elements, including the fleet, labor, and energy, among others. And information technology -- vehicle and cargo tracking systems, mobile communications, real-time movement control, etc.-- can increase fleet productivity and shift link volume-delay curves. This research will develop overall metrics for system capacity. These are intended to address questions of the maximum amount of traffic a system can accommodate, and the flexibility of the system in accommodating different mixes of traffic. Such mixes include changes in: spatial patterns resulting from shifts in national or international trade patterns, the mix of commodities carried, and speed or other level of service features required by industry. We term these different quantities and mixes of commodities and related features traffic scenarios. The methods developed are intended to address fundamental questions that face those responsible for providing transportation infrastructure, including: Is the system capable of accommodating an expected future traffic scenario? If not, what are the bottlenecks? How flexible is the current system in accommodating various traffic scenarios that might arise? How adequate and flexible will the system be given planned investments and other changes? Traditional transportation models have focused on estimating the performance-- cost and level of service--of a given system with given traffic scenario, and generally do not consider uncertainty. This research addresses different but related questions, namely, the ability of a system to accommodate various possible traffic scenarios. Our results should provide improved methods by which private and public sector infrastructure mangers can assess the state of their systems and also evaluate improvements resulting from investments and operational changes. In undertaking this research, we will build upon existing models of the system, but structure these into an optimization formulation that enables us to posit different measures of capacity and flexibility. One version will be deterministic. But our goal is to develop a stochastic model that will take into account stochastic variations in such features as link performance and the quantity and mix of different commodities over time. Thus we also intend to develop a Monte Carlo simulation version of the model, which will provide a basis for developing a combined optimization and stochastic approach to the problem. We expect to use current capacity problems in the freight transportation system as examples and tests of the methodology that we develop. This award is made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) program solicitation doc5833 none This award is made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) program solicitation. It provides funding for the development of effective modeling, fast simulation and sensitivity analysis for day-to-day transport and handling of coal based on a fluid-flow modeling approach (the approach taken can be easily extended to other bulk materials). Worldwide usage of coal is increasing, the United States being the second largest coal producer in the world and a major coal exporter. The recent trend towards deregulating the power industry has been exerting economic pressures to lower energy prices via improved coal-related operations, due to emerging competition. Our proposal adopts a Continuous-Flow Model (CFM) worldview for modeling, analysis and optimization of the movement of bulk material over distribution networks. We propose a three-prong research project to support coal transport and handling operations as follows: (1) CFM-based analytical modeling and performance analysis of coal-related operations; (2) design and development of a Monte Carlo simulation templates for capacity planning, performance analysis and design of coal enterprise operations from extraction of coal to consumption in coal fired power plants, as well as coal export via marine terminals; and (3) sensitivity analysis via Infinitesimal Perturbation Analysis (IPA) algorithms for efficient computation of derivatives of performance measures with respect to design parameters to support design trade-off decisions. If successful, this research will improve the efficiency and effectiveness of coal handling and transport operations in the U.S. The tool will be made available to the coal and power industries, and its functionality will include capacity planning and performance analysis design. Another impact will be in the educational arena. The models and scenarios to be developed will be incorporated into various courses (e.g., Performance Analysis, Simulation Modeling, and Operations Management), thereby acquainting students with important issues arising in the coal and power generation industries doc5834 none The Digital Multimedia Library for Health Sciences Education project is developing and implementing services for a national, publicly accessible database designed to facilitate uploading, cataloging, retrieval, and metadata exchange of multimedia items. A prototype system is under construction based on an extensive test collection of multimedia items from K-12 schools, undergraduate colleges, and medical schools. The project team expects to form collaborations with other projects in the NSDL Program and other professional health organizations to broaden the collection of multimedia and the collection s metadata standards. Other activities that the project team is engaging in include: development of policies and procedures for protecting and defining intellectual property rights; maintenance of a quality assurance system to ensure that high quality and relevant items are maintained in the database; and the implementation of best practices for incorporating multimedia into popular course authoring tools. The National Library of Medicine expects eventually to employ the project s services to host a Digital Multimedia Library database doc5835 none The effective operation of power systems in the present and the future depends to a large extent on how well several emerging challenges are met today. Power systems continue to be stressed as they are operated in many instances at or near their full capacities. Addition of new transmission lines to relieve this stress is often very difficult and is mired in regulatory procedure. The new deregulated environment has the potential of exacerbating this stress as more power is shipped from longer distances. At the same time, new flexible ac transmission system (FACTS) devices are being commissioned in various locations. While these devices can offer significant performance improvements and may help alleviate some of the problems alluded to; they do have unique dynamic properties that are less familiar than those of existing devices. In addition proper design and analysis of control systems for FACTS is crucial for efficient operation. The resulting dynamic behavior of the overall system that incorporates these FACTS devices is not well understood. Consequently, the potential benefits of these devices may not be fully realized. The market mechanisms in the future will have a bearing on the operating conditions and the transaction contracts that are established. Since the market would be geared to fully utilizing efficient generation, additional stress would be imposed on the transmission grid in certain locations. New technology involving distributed generation is being rapidly introduced in the system to meet growing demand. As a result several important technical issues related to system interconnection, reliability, and location need to be addressed. These important issues call for work in the areas of real time control, sensing, communication, economics, modeling, and analysis of large scale systems. We propose to conduct a workshop that will bring together researchers, scientist, and federal agency participants in the areas described above. Selected participants will present position papers and discussions that address key research issues will be conducted. The workshop will focus on identifying emerging problem in power systems that can benefit from the system and control theoretic developments as well as presenting new research ideas in the control, operation, and economics of large networks and their application to power systems. The outcomes of the presentations and discussions will be used as the basis to identify future research needs in the area of large-scale power systems and the means by which such needs can be met. The presentations, discussions, and recommendations for future research will be published in the workshop proceedings doc5836 none The detailed magnetic behavior, especially that associated with magnetic phase transitions, of various pure, dilute and mixed magnetic systems with short-range exchange interactions will be examined. The pure materials are interesting because: some are members of a new transition metal series certain members of which exhibit nonequilibrium behavior, one is ferromagnetic and a potential member of a rare universality class; and others show signs of very large zero-field splittings. The study of spin glass behavior in insulators is of particular importance, and several of the proposed mixed magnets could exhibit such behavior in insulators is of particular importance, and several of the proposed mixed magnets could exhibit such behavior. One of these is a potential new type of spin glass which may occur on diluting a previously studied ferromagnet of novel type. Even apart from spin glass formation, the behavior of a ferromagnet of this kind with dilution is an important problem. Two of the mixed systems are ternary in character, that is they contain more than two components. Such systems are virtually unstudied among insulating materials. The mixed magnets will contain either competing exchange interactions, competing anisotropies, different spin values, or some combination of these. Determination of magnetic phase diagrams, showing the dependence of ordering temperature on composition and regions of phase stability, is a major objective of this work. Some theoretically predicted phase diagram types are yet to be observed. Very high field magnetization data will also be obtained for several systems, both pure and mixed; this will yield new information on critical fields in the materials and on zero-field splittings. %%% The chemical compounds to be examined included novel monohydrates of simple transition metal salts that exhibit certain novel structural or magnetic features. Studies of these systems will further such materials science goals as elucidation structure-property relationships and developing materials with new properties. A major impact will be the opportunities afforded undergraduate science students to gain experience with frontier research topics in a field of high priority to industry doc5837 none This award is made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) program solicitation. Bulk power systems form one of the largest and most complex inter-connect transportation networks ever built. These net-works throughout the world consist of large numbers of energy sources operating in near synchronism coupled through a high-voltage AC transmission system. As power systems have evolved, the dominant bulk power system has been formed as large groups of closely coupled machines connected by one or more transmission links. This situation has devel-oped as a consequence of growth in interconnections among regional power systems. With increasingly heavier power transfers, such systems become vulnerable to cascading failure as dynamics can couple throughout the system in unpredictable ways, Cascading failures may be brought on by naturally occurring events, or may be induced through terrorist-type activities. Examples of naturally occurring cascading failures include the infamous New York blackout in and more recently, the two California blackouts of July and August . Control of the power network has traditionally been decentralized due to geographic and regulatory constraints. The nodes (called buses ) in a power system are often geographically remote from one another with little or no systematic communication between them, making coordinated control difficult. Also, different regions of the national power grid may be owned by independent private or public entities whose operating venues differ. This, too, poses difficulties in coordinated control. One of the most promising decentralized network controllers is the family of power electronics-based controllers, known as flexible AC transmission system (FACTS) devices. These devices locally modify the topology of the system by rapid switching. By the choice of switching patterns, these devices can achieve a variety of power system objectives, such as voltage support, oscillation damping, and stability improvement. This ability can be used for not only reliability objectives such as increasing the maximum throughput power, but can also be used to adjust power flow for economic reasons. In the power system restructured environment, it is foreseeable that power flows will be adjusted throughout the system to maximize economic objectives. These devices, however, are relatively new and few are cur-rently beyond the prototype stage, therefore their wide-spread impact on the transmission network has not yet been thoroughly analyzed. While these devices offer increased network power flow controllability, the decentralized nature of their actions may cause deleterious interactions between them. In this project, we propose to utilize flexible topology FACTS devices in developing distributed control strategies to i) detect and mitigate intentional or unintentional cascading failures, ii,) develop operating strategies that can automatically adjust to changing economic and physical environments, and iii) develop interaction policies to mitigate counterproductive actions doc5838 none This Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) award is to investigate the effectiveness of grid-based multi-tier network architecture for the highway system, which will be expandable to include other transport modes. Two subnetworks, backbone and access networks, represent the highway system. Interstate highways forming grid boundaries define the backbone network. Each grid has its own access network connected by border gateways (interface nodes). A framework for a decision support system (DSS) is developed to provide support for B2B and B2C transportation as well as support for highway monitoring. Advanced sensors are used to collect traffic and vehicular data. On the backbone network, locations where sensors are currently available are identified. New locations are selected for sensor deployment and sensor types are defined for these locations. The data collected from various sensors will be converted into knowledge to be used by decision models and route planning algorithms. Efficient optimization methods for hub location selection, synchronized load routing and consolidation, and for congestion and flow control will be investigated. The multi-tier highway representation allows for scalability in design. If research results are found promising, the model can be expanded to represent inter-modal transport by adding levels to the architecture. Tactical decisions on the backbone network are critical to operations of any transport company and can be shared by all. Seamless integration of surveillance data with the decision support system to provide efficient load consolidation and routing schedules over the multi-tier highway network architecture is novel and will lead to enhanced B2B relations in the e-marketplace. Deployment of sensor technology on the backbone network can also be used for other decisions such as highway safety and maintenance doc5839 none This proposal explores new concepts for the damage assessment, control, and restoration of the electric power grid following catastrophic disturbances. These disturbances would include: 1. Natural disasters like earthquakes, tornadoes, ice storms, wind storms, and large electrical impacts like short circuits, and failure of major components. 2. Man-made disasters, such as terrorist attacks, and human errors. The damage assessment consists of determining the severity based on the following criteria: a) Degree of damage, b) Degree of danger, and c) Extent of hazard. This type of analysis will require input from a well-established information and sensing system. The complexity of the problem is further increased because of the large geographical expanse of the Electric Power Transportation system. The use of a wide array of communication technologies including GPS, Microwave Networks, Internet, low earth orbit satellites, and other communication networks will be examined as a part of the information. Infrastructure. Issues related to the scheduling and processing of real time information will also be carefully examined. Key requirements for the computing and communication infracture to support real time supervisory control and data acquisition of large electric power grids are identified. Information and computing architectures to meet these requirements will be proposed. Various control strategies to prevent and minimize the extent of the dislocation of the electric network will be compared. Concepts of graceful degradation as applied to the electric power grid will be proposed. This aspect of the work would also involve corrective strategies to facilitate fast restoration. Newer configurations for the electric power distribution networks and their control and protection equipment so that the network responds to emergencies in a more controlled manner will also be explored. The final step in the investigation will deal with approaches for the restoration of the system following catastrophic disturbances. This is one of the least analyzed aspects of large power grids. It is a highly complex undertaking and involves several issues that relate to automatic restoration as will as manual switching that involves a variety of manpower issues. It is important to note that the power delivery network is overlayed with several hierarchical information and control networks that provide various functions dealing with supervisory control data acquisition, and transaction information in the new deregulated electric utility environment. The roles of each network layer will also be carefully identified doc5840 none PIs: Henry M. Levy and Susan J. Eggers : Over the next decade, highly scalable computer systems consisting of hundreds or thousands of nodes will become necessary to meet the demands of emerging global applications, such as Web and database servers used for Internet commerce. These applications must be multithreaded to handle the thousands of simultaneous requests. One promising technology for this scalable server domain is the use of multithreaded processors; for example, Compaq has announced Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) support for its Alpha processor in the time frame. Unfortunately, no research has been conducted on multithreading support for operating systems or on how to structure operating systems for multithreaded CPUs. Yet the OS may be crucial in this environment; e.g., measurements show that a loaded web server can spend 75% of its time in the OS. The proposed research will develop the software environment to complement the multithreaded hardware environment provided by SMT and other fine-grained parallel processors. The research sits squarely between architecture and operating systems, examining (1) the design and performance of multithreaded processors to support OS needs, and (2) the structure of operating systems in light of the capabilities of multithreaded processors. The research will focus on these questions in the domain of highly parallel, request-driven workloads, such as Web servers and database servers doc5841 none This award will support the analysis of the Dynamics Explorer measurements of vertical winds made with the WATS mass spectrometer. The data would be treated to remove the effects of a slowly varying bias by analyzing the raw unaveraged data to determine the variance of the observations. Different methods for determining this variance would be explored. The purpose of this effort is to gain improved insights into the effects of vertical winds in the polar region upon the composition of the auroral thermosphere. The typically large vertical winds of the this region are believed to have major effects upon the composition as a result of the modified mixing that vertical winds will introduce. The impact of this mixing enhancement is not well understood doc5842 none This proposal explores new concepts for the damage assessment, control, and restoration of the electric power grid following catastrophic disturbances. These disturbances would include: 1. Natural disasters like earthquakes, tornadoes, ice storms, wind storms, and large electrical impacts like short circuits, and failure of major components. 2. Man-made disasters, such as terrorist attacks, and human errors. The damage assessment consists of determining the severity based on the following criteria: a) Degree of damage, b) Degree of danger, and c) Extent of hazard. This type of analysis will require input from a well established information and sensing system. The complexity of the problem is further increased because of the large geographical expanse of the Electric Power Transportation system. The use of a wide array of communication technologies including GPS, Microwave Networks, Internet, low earth orbit satellites, and other communication networks will be examined as a part of the information infrastructure. Issues related to the scheduling and processing of real time information will also be carefully examined. Key requirements for the computing and communication infrastructure to support real time supervisory control and data acquisition of large electric power grids are identified. Information and computing architectures to meet these requirements will be proposed. Various control strategies to prevent and minimize the extent of the dislocation of the electric network will be compared. Concepts of graceful degradation as applied to the electric power grid will be proposed. This aspect of the work would also involve corrective strategies to facilitate fast restoration. Newer configurations for the electric power distribution networks and their control and protection equipment so that the network responds to emergencies in a more controlled manner will also be explored. The final step in the investigation will deal with approaches for the restoration of the system following catastrophic disturbances. This is one of the least analyzed aspects of large power grids. It is a highly complex undertaking and involves several issues that relate to automatic restoration as well as manual switching that involves a variety of manpower issues. It is important to note that the power delivery network is overlayed with several hierarchical information and control networks that provide various functions dealing with supervisory control, data acquisition, and transactions information in the new deregulated electric utility environment. The roles of each network layer will also be carefully identified doc5843 none Multicomponent Space-Charge Ion Uptake and Ion Solvent Transport Models for Ion-Exchange Membranes Peter N. Pintauro Department of Chemical Engineering Tulane University New Orleans, LA Ion-exchange membranes are used in a variety of industrial processes and electrochemical devices, including electrodialysis separations, electrochemical reactors, sensors, and proton-exchange-membrane fuel cells. In order to understand better the mechanism of selective ion transport by these membranes, new space-charge equilibrium ion uptake and ion solvent transport models are being developed and tested. The models consider: (i) multivalent counterion fixed-charge-site ion-pair formation, (ii) concentration-dependent ion diffusivities and solvent viscosity within the pores of a membrane, (iii) variable Gibbs energy of ion solvation within the pore-fluid double layer, (iv) electrostatic interactions between ions and the membrane s fixed charges, and (iv) the orientation of solvent dipoles inside a membrane pore due to the strong electric field generated by the membrane s fixed-charge groups. The models are applied to a variety of systems: (i) commercially available cation-exchange and anion-exchange membranes, (2) solutions composed of monovalent monovalent cation and anion salts, monovalent divalent cation salts, alkali metal quaternary ammonium salt mixtures, and NaCl amino acid (glycine) mixtures, and (3) water, methanol, methanol water, and acetonitrile water solvents. Experimental measurements include ion and solvent fluxes and bulk solution concentration changes during multicomponent Donnan dialysis and electrodialysis as well as membrane-phase counterion concentration levels during multicomponent ion uptake. The data are used to test the space-charge membrane models. The development of sufficiently detailed structure function models that describe accurately absorption and transport of multiple ionic species in ion-exchange membranes would be of great value to polymer engineers and membrane scientists who are developing new membrane applications and formulating new polymeric membrane materials. Such models could be used (i) to simulate the performance of a given ion-exchange membrane in a particular electrochemical device or separation application, and (ii) to indicate new membrane structures with desired ion-transport rates and selectivities. This research project seeks such models by expanding the fundamental knowledge-base regarding the molecular-level processes and interactions that control the separation of multicomponent salt solutions from aqueous and non-aqueous solvents in anion and cation-exchange membranes doc5844 none The goal of the proposed research is to develop a new class of devices based on Er-doped microcavities that function as efficient light emitters, as photonic switches and as terahertz signal oscillators. The devices will exploit the basic physics of the strong photon-atom interaction to determine the feasibility of the using of Er-doped media in a high Q microcavity as a basic unit of photonic device design. The fabrication of these devices will involve the design of the structures and the process metrics, such as stress relief, planarity and uniformity of the layers and the phase stability of the materials systems. If successful, this research creates a new class of devices for the generation, detection and manipulation of photons that could be critical to the evolution of all optical networking for the movement and management of information. Our preliminary results obtained with an Er 2 O 3 microcavity medium clad by Si SiO 2 dielectric stack mirrors showed direct evidence of photon-atom coupling, an enhancement of the light emitted from the microcavity by orders of magnitude at room temperature, and the capability of optical switching. The Si SiO 2 microcavity structure of this potential new class of devices provides a very important route to CMOS compatible processing and integration. In addition, the high dielectric contrast of the Si SiO 2 materials system (D nr=2) means that only four layer pairs are required for cavity Qs of . Rare earth elements as quantum dot analogs offer the ultimate in size monodispersity and electronic localization. Erbium is an ideal rare earth optical dopant because of its emission spectrum in the telecommunications standard, l=1.55 micron wavelength region. The main obstacle to the development of a Si:Er platform is the small optical cross section, long radiative lifetime and difficulty of tuning of the atomic resonances of the rare earth elements. We propose to use monolithic planar microcavities to enhance the Er-photon coupling, and hence, add a mechanism for tuning of the oscillator strength. An Er2 O3 cavity medium provides a high density of atoms that can experience coherent interactions with light. These interacting Er atoms are weakly coupled to their host matrix with sharp emission lines. This property yields a device that responds to light as a set of Er-photon coupled oscillators. By tuning the microcavity resonance the emission, transmission and reflection properties of the structure may be controlled at speeds equivalent to the frequency difference between the Er and cavity resonances. We propose a three-year effort to design, fabricate and characterize room temperature operating devices for emission and switching of light in the l=1.55 micron wavelength region. The proposed study explores a new device platform of photon coupling to optically active ions and its application to the generation and control of light. If the promised performance can be achieved, then this Er:Si SiO2 system will provide a highly manufacturable, silicon compatible photonic device platform doc5845 none This grant is made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transportation Industries (ETI) program solicitation. This award provides funding for the development of new optimization models, algorithms, and software for solving large-scale logistics problems, in which cost effective solutions are sought by integrating transportation and inventory decisions. The network and assignment structure inherent in many logistics problems will be utilized to develop efficient algorithms to solve these problems. Due to the scale of these problems, the investigator will concentrate on efficient heuristic methods. In particular, the development of greedy heuristics and neighborhood search techniques for solving the assignment component, integrated with heuristics for solving the nonlinear network flow component. The focus on heuristics seems particularly promising for taking advantage of the larger availability of operational data, which calls for a frequent reoptimization of the flow of goods through a logistics network, based on data as it becomes available. If successful, the results of this research will lead to improvements in the design of logistics systems and the development of new heuristics for solving complex non-linear and integer network flow problems. The primary goal of this work is to produce logistics systems in which operational decisions can be made more efficiently, by providing a much better starting point for making these decisions. The factors that will be taken into account for the evaluation of the costs of a logistics network design are the, generally conflicting, costs of transportation and holding inventory, as well as customers demands for service, such as just-in-time deliveries and single-sourcing. This will help to achieve an overall cost reduction in comparison to the traditional two-stage approach where the transportation and inventory decisions are decoupled. The proposed work will also contribute to the theory of assignment and network flow problems by providing new and efficient heuristic for such problems doc5846 none This award, made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) program solicitation, provides funding to identify important forces, trends and opportunities in transportation and logistics resulting from the increasing presence of the Internet and information technologies. One opportunity, using flexible pricing and bidding strategies to improve transportation and logistics efficiencies, will be studied in detail. The challenge is that most practical bidding systems possess a variety of complications, like uncertain demands, sequential bidding systems and conditional bids, which current models and algorithms are unable to handle efficiently. The results of this grant will include: (1) a survey of emerging practices in the transportation and logistics industry, cataloging among other things, the types (and timeliness) of information available to buyers and sellers of transportation services, the levels of integration among suppliers, producers and carriers, and the degrees of coordination between elements of the value chain; (2) a summary of the important emerging opportunities and the associated research problems in the transportation and logistics industry, serving as a potential roadmap for future research efforts in this domain; and (3) a case study (involving the development of a new optimization model and a solution approach) showcasing an important trend in the industry and characterizing the potential responses and implications. With the development and application of new theory, the major changes occurring in transportation can be exploited to improve transportation and logistics efficiencies significantly, for carriers and shippers doc5845 none This grant is made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transportation Industries (ETI) program solicitation. This award provides funding for the development of new optimization models, algorithms, and software for solving large-scale logistics problems, in which cost effective solutions are sought by integrating transportation and inventory decisions. The network and assignment structure inherent in many logistics problems will be utilized to develop efficient algorithms to solve these problems. Due to the scale of these problems, the investigator will concentrate on efficient heuristic methods. In particular, the development of greedy heuristics and neighborhood search techniques for solving the assignment component, integrated with heuristics for solving the nonlinear network flow component. The focus on heuristics seems particularly promising for taking advantage of the larger availability of operational data, which calls for a frequent reoptimization of the flow of goods through a logistics network, based on data as it becomes available. If successful, the results of this research will lead to improvements in the design of logistics systems and the development of new heuristics for solving complex non-linear and integer network flow problems. The primary goal of this work is to produce logistics systems in which operational decisions can be made more efficiently, by providing a much better starting point for making these decisions. The factors that will be taken into account for the evaluation of the costs of a logistics network design are the, generally conflicting, costs of transportation and holding inventory, as well as customers demands for service, such as just-in-time deliveries and single-sourcing. This will help to achieve an overall cost reduction in comparison to the traditional two-stage approach where the transportation and inventory decisions are decoupled. The proposed work will also contribute to the theory of assignment and network flow problems by providing new and efficient heuristic for such problems doc5848 none Transportation systems involve complex interactions among multiple resources, such as humans, vehicles, shipments, information and infrastructure. Transportation systems must increasingly operate in a highly dynamic environment, characterized by considerable stochasticity and unpredictability, to serve customers demanding ever more exacting service levels. For example, the kind of customer-responsive, made-to-order manufacturing that has been a major factor in the spectacular global success of companies such as Dell Computers, has shifted the logistics and transportation process from one that relies on long planned lead times to an extremely dynamic, short-term driven process. It is well recognized that information and communication technologies (ICT) are changing many aspects of the way in which business is conducted, though the full implications for transportation systems structure and operations continue to unfold. Explosive growth in electronic commerce and virtual integrated supply chains through the Internet create huge information flows that allow and require dynamic adjustments in the markets underlying the physical movement of goods. A significant change may be taking place in the structure of the transportation market, with the development of auction markets for transportation services, in the form of Internet sites that match shipments (shippers demand) and transportation capacity (carriers offer). The development of these virtual hubs where shippers and carriers meet may have deep implications for the structure and efficiency of the transportation system. The complex relations that may emerge from the interaction of shippers, carriers, and intermediaries in auction sites may rapidly transform the virtual logistic net in the short term, and the way infrastructure and equipment is used and operated in the long term. These developments also have implications for the kinds of methodologies to both analyze the performance of such systems, as well as to incorporate these mechanisms in the operational decisions of both carriers and shippers (and or their agents). In addition to analyzing the performance of auction markets for transportation services, which would allow us to address several questions articulated in the proposal, this research will conduct exploratory development of methodological approaches to support fleet operators decision-making processes in this environment, and examine the implications for shippers experienced service levels. These challenges will be addressed in the particular context of the dynamic operation of vehicle fleets to provide highly responsive service to a general pattern of stochastic time-sensitive customer loads. Matching of demands to supply is assumed to take place at least partially through an auction market mechanism. These problem classes are distinct from conventional static deterministic problems as well as their time-dependent and probabilistic extensions. This class of problems includes truckload and less-than-truckload trucking, intermodal and integrated shipping, as well as traveling repairman and dynamic inventory-routing problems. This award is made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) program solicitation doc5849 none This award is made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) program solicitation. This exploratory research will focus on modeling and performance measures which will lead to a strategy for real-time control of transport networks. Models will be developed that integrate information and product flow. Information-based quantities need to be a part of the entire model and need to be responsible for some portion of the control. Information flow is at least as important as physical product flow and the two must be integrated for effective real-time control of the network. At least 50% of the research effort will be spent on the modeling problem in the context of distributed load control for energy delivery systems, distribution of goods in the shipping industry, and distributed manufacturing. Performance measures will be identified that are useful indicators of how well the transport network is operating. These measures along with the modeling effort will lead to the formulation of a real-time control strategy for these integrated systems. The development of the real-time control strategy will be the second major effort. Transport networks are hybrid systems, systems with components operating in continuous-time while being driven by discrete events. The interface between the continuous components and the discrete events will require further advances in the modeling and control of hybrid systems with particular emphasis on the stability of such systems. The controller will use information and product flow knowledge to make decisions about the operation of the network subject to real-time constraints. Reconfiguration in real-time is one possible function of the controller. The main goal of this proposed research is to build a science-based foundation across the major themes of modeling, performance analysis, and real-time control, all in the context of transport networks doc5850 none This award is being made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering Transport Industries (ETI) Program solicitation. Advances in Information and communication technology offer significant potential to relieve pressures of highway and railway operation. A class of problems is considered where technological advances offer significant potential to increase the capacity of the systems and reduce congestion (and thereby loss of human life and properly, lost time, pollution levels and fuel cost) by safer and more efficient scheduling and control of the system. The common features are the concentration on the Longitudinal dynamics of the flow of traffic (on highways or railways), the need to coordinate a large number of individual control units, and the use of simulation models to assess the characteristics of the longitudinal dynamics and the affects of controls on efficiency, capacity and safety. Communication means best suited to support the resulting control architecture are also identified. Semi-automated or fully automated driving on multi-lane urban highway systems is one of the central issues in alleviating urban congestion. Considered is the system-wide lane assignment problem, whereby an Urban Highway System Control Center (UHSCC) assigns to each vehicle a lane of travel (in each section of the highway) so as to maximize highway capacity. Simple models show that maneuvers have a significant effect on capacity, and that their number should be kept at a minimum. Suitable algorithm are developed to assign lanes to vehicles depending on their trip itinerary, based on the assumption that trip itineraries are concentrated in the UHSCC so that this information, not available to individual drivers, can be used to resolve this system-wide control problem. The use of Arcs (in some or all vehicles) can also increase the capacity because the reaction curve of the AVCS does not increase the inter-vehicle distance in function of lane velocity, and will, theoretically, maintain a set distance between vehicles. The average reaction curve of the AVCS controlled vehicles is estimated through simulations and used in lane assignment algorithms to balance excess lane capacity and I the capacity of the highway. Trains equipped with Positive Train Control (PTC) equipment and electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes have e significant potential to increase railway capacity. The problem of articulated braking of freight trains is one of the important control problems in railway transportation in US where the predominant type of railway transport is freight transport over long distances using trains consisting of over a hundred cars and three to four engines. Braking characteristics determine the safe stopping distance and the capacity of a railway section. A significant opportunity for better prediction of stopping times, safer braking on long grades, on undulating terrain and or curved terrain, and for coordinated use of brakes in emergency conditions, is now available with ECP brake systems because the brake on each unit can be controlled individually. Algorithms are developed to better understand and exploit these possibilities doc5851 none A two component polymer system, such as a homopolymer blend or a block copolymer melt, in the vicinity of an interactive surface is an inherently inhomogeneous system. The difference in chemical affinity between the components and the substrate induces a preferred orientation in the system. In most studies of this nature, silicon has been the substrate of choice since it can be obtained in single crystal form with an atomically smooth surface. Furthermore, it is used extensively in the semiconductor industry where numerous procedures have been developed to modify the surface energy and apply both chemical and topographical patterns. Most of what is known today on the orientation of polymers at surfaces has been obtained by neutron and x-ray reflectivity methods or dynamic secondary ion mass spectrometry. These methods work best when the orientation occurs normal to the surface and is symmetric in the plane parallel to the surface. Transmission electron microscopy studies of thin polymer films ordered on atomically smooth silicon have been very difficult for cross-sectional specimens. It was not possible to directly section heard silicon crystals by ultramicrotomy and ion milling is a long and tedious process with uncertain results. %%% This award under NSF 94-147 Minority Research Planning Grant provides initial funding to establish a polymer nanostructured electron-microscopy program at SUNY Stony Brook and to investigate compatibilization of homopolymer blends ordered on attractive surfaces. The following issues will be addressed in this initial study: (a) Can the focused ion-beam lift-out procedure be used to produce cross sections of novel thin films ordered on silicon? (b) Can uniquely tailored polymer nanostructures induce miscibility in hompolymer blends doc5852 none PI: James Crowley Proposal Number: The Workshop on Challenges for Theoretical Computer Science will be held on Saturday, May 20, at Portland State University during the Symposium on the Theory of Computing. In this workshop, the participants will survey the many challenging directions open to theoretical computer science at the beginning of the 21st Century. What are the areas in which theory can have, is having, might have an impact? The Workshop will cover a full range of opportunities, from gaining new understanding of the fundamental mechanisms and limitations of computing to impacting science, information technology, and commerce. A report of the deliberations at the workshop will be prepared and distributed to the theoretical computer science community and interested scientists and engineers doc5853 none The Integrative Freight Market Simulation (IFMS) attempts to depict a comprehensive picture of freight movements, in which both the user side, i.e., commodity flows, and the logistic side, i.e., vehicle-trips, are considered. This framework has the potential to overcome the limitations of both commodity based models and vehicle-trip models. Commodity based models have great limitations in considering the flow of empty vehicles (which are the result of logistic decisions), while vehicle trip models are unable to take into account the economic characteristics of the cargoes. The IFMS is based on a market equilibrium formulation that depict the competition among freight transportation providers, and a subset of routing problems to represent the actions of these companies when picking up and delivering the goods. The IFMS entails a bi-level approach in which the top level corresponds to the estimation of the provision of service consistent with Cournot-Nash equilibrium, while the bottom level focuses on the construction of tours that satisfy the Cournot-Nash solution and the remaining system constraints, in a context of a large scale simulation-optimization problem. The system constraints have been classified in: a) Primary; and b) Secondary. The primary constraints are: I) freight transportation companies maximize profits in a context of market equilibrium; and II) the user requirements are met, i.e., the commodities produced by and attracted to each zone are transported. Secondary constraints are: III) the resulting trip chains are consistent with known trip chain data; and IV) the resulting commercial vehicle traffic is consistent with secondary data sources, e.g., ITS traffic data. This project will focus on solving the most basic case of IFMS, taking into account the primary constraints (I and II), referred to as the Primary IFMS. This would entail developing solution algorithms that obtain the routing patterns that are consistent with both the Cournot-Nash solution for the provision of service (based on assumed economic parameters) and the user requirements. This will entail the definition of a set of synthetic, though meaningful, test cases that are meant to represent urban areas of different sizes and levels of complexity. These cases will be comprised of a number of data sets: 1. zoning system; 2. set of relevant economic parameters; 3. a set of commercial vehicle operators; 4. a set of user requirements; and, 5. a set of commercial vehicle trips. In other words, a set of synthetic cases for which all relevant information is known will be created. The collaboration of freight industry representatives will be requested to ensure a meaningful and realistic definition of the test cases. Their input is particularly important for the creation of data sets 3, 4, and 5. Algorithms will be developed to solve the Primary IFMS and applied to these test cases. The input data will be comprised of the data sets 1, 2, 3, and 4. The reasonableness and efficiency of the algorithms will be assessed by determining how well they are able to estimate the commercial vehicle trips (data set 5). This award is made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) program solicitation doc5854 none This grant provides for general support towards the organization and expansion of JETS National Engineering Design Challenge (NEDC) through the partnering with the Disney Discover Magazine Awards for Technological Innovation. NEDC is a national program, which provides an actual engineering design activity for high school students working in teams. The national winner will be participating in the highly visible Discover Awards ceremony in late June with a full-page ad on NEDC and JETS appearing in the July issue of Discover Magazine. If successful, the added visibility will increase the awareness of NEDC among its core constituents and help in the recruitment of teachers, students and engineering mentors who will participate in the program in the - school year. This will help address the goals of NEDC which are to increase interest in engineering among the high school student population, increase student ability to apply scientific and mathematical concepts to real problems, give students first hand knowledge about engineering through the link with the engineering advisor, and promote interest in engineering to the general public doc5828 none This award is made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) program solicitation. The United States depends on the smooth functioning of its electrical power and communication systems infrastructure. To minimize disruptions to these complex systems, it is necessary to understand, predict and control their responses to outside perturbations. The concept of self- organized criticality (SOC) brings together ideas of self-organization of nonlinear dynamical systems with the often observed near critical behavior of many natural phenomena. This work advances the understanding of self-organized criticality in these systems. The primary focus of work is electric power system blackouts and the secondary focus is disruptions in communication systems. Initial analyses of time series of power system blackout sizes and internet congestion show evidence of long time correlations, which are consistent with SOC behavior. We will expand and deepen these initial analyses of experimental data. We will develop and analyze simulation models capturing SOC effects in electric power systems and communication networks. Initial work suggests a heuristic explanation of SOC in electric power system blackouts. We will test and refine this initial heuristic explanation by analyzing simulation models. We will determine the extent to which electric power system blackouts and communication system networks show SOC in their global complex dynamics doc5856 none In order to learn effectively, people need to know how to independently find the right information, in the right format, at the right time. Digital libraries provide access to a wide range of networked resources, but there are two potential problems: (1) people will be intimidated by the scope of the information and be reluctant to use it, or (2) they will attempt the journey alone and become lost in hyperspace. This project is exploring new ways to make relevant information easier to get and easier to use. High-end multi-agent collaborative competitive intelligence systems are able to mine data from a wide variety of internal and external sources to support the decision processes of managers. This project is testing the feasibility of also using such systems to transfer knowledge from experts to novices. The focus of the study is on creating and testing a digital library as support for instruction in introductory computer programming courses. These courses are part of the push toward online delivery of core content for distance or on-campus asynchronous learning, and are likely to benefit from the availability of a topical digital library. This is the first known effort to automatically capture, process, and associate relevant cross-disciplinary digital content into topically related libraries designed to support traditional research and learning environments. The project team expects to develop a framework that supports a taxonomy of learning practices that will help to integrate the disparate literature in the various domains. The major technical challenges addressed by this study are how to: -- identify and synthesize the knowledge discovery processes of experts, students, and non-specialists; -- customize access to relevant sources and forms of digital content; -- support the capture, maintenance, and sharing of knowledge among a community of users; and -- evaluate the related cost-benefit issues doc5857 none This award is made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) program solicitation. This research involves the development of a scalable special-purpose hybrid computing architecture comprising fine-grained parallel analog processing and digital control and reconfigurability to accelerate the computation of large-scale electric power network transfer capacity. The research in this one-year exploratory program will proceed concurrently along three lines. First, the core analog computational units needed to solve the steady-state power-flow problem will be designed, simulated, fabricated, and tested experimentally to determine their potential accuracy and computational throughput. Second, the parallel analog solution method will be developped and refined through simulation. Third, work on a scalable architecture will be initiated. The architecture should support digital reconfigurability as well as the control, communications, and data storage needed for the solution of large-scale network problems. If this research is successful, it could result eventually in the development of a specialized chip set or an accelerator board that would interface with an engineering workstation and could perform a near real-time solution of the steady-state power-flow equations. Such an accelerator board would be something like the specialized graphics cards that are widely for used for accelerating compute-intensive computer graphics tasks doc5858 none This project is collecting, organizing, and maintaining geoscience data sets focusing on the Solid Earth component of the geosciences for a national digital library for science, mathematics, engineering, and technology education. Concurrent with this effort the project is developing advanced, dynamic Java-based user tools to manipulate, map, model, analyze, and visualize the collected data sets. The focus on the Solid Earth component is intended to complement the work of groups in the oceanic and atmospheric sciences, resulting in more complete geoscience data sets doc5859 none The proposed work will develop a multimodal network analysis to simulate the effects of e-commerce and different freight supply chain costs on the movement of goods. Major physical actions, including information exchange, and decisions required to move goods from source to destination will be simulated. A method will be developed for simulating large numbers of individual freight shipments by vehicle and for assigning them to specific links in the US truckrailwaterair freight transportation network. Within a supplychain management framework, information and cash flow will be incorporated into the network analysis. Created in the s, the Internet has become an open access, inexpensive, and globally available means for rapid correspondence with the rest of the world. On-line Internet trading is now a major form of business activity. What this rapid transition to e-commerce ultimately implies for the U.S. transportation sector remains to be seen. It is likely to initiate some profound changes in both domestic and international product supply chains, leading to some important new patterns of freight movement which can only be modeled by inter-relating the physical and information networks. The focus of this research will be on the development of a sound theoretical base using information in the literature as a guide to proof of concept instead of an empirical analysis. This award is made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) program solicitation doc5860 none This Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) grant provides funding for the development of a numerical tool for determining optimal process parameters in bulk forming processes, such as rolling, extrusion, and forging. The developed numerical tool will determine the optimal process geometry; temperature and speed that satisfy specified design criteria for a given two-dimensional forming process. An optimization algorithm based on an adaptive arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian finite element formulation for modeling large deformation thermo-elasto-viscoplastic contact problems will be used. The algorithm will be implemented in the context of an existing advanced computational framework that has tools for mesh generation, adaptively, and parallel computing. Experiments involving the extrusion process will also be performed to validate the algorithms developed. Experimental dies will be manufactured according to the optimal die shapes predicted in this work and tested at the predicted optimal die speeds. A model press, which can extrude plasticine material marked with a grid, will be used in these experiments to observe the material flow behavior. If successful, the results of this research will lead to improvements in the design of bulk forming processes and new developments in optimization methods for handling complex non-linear problems. The primary goal of this work is to determine optimal process geometry, thermal conditions, and process speed in bulk forming processes that will satisfy typically prescribed design criteria. These design criteria may include generating a uniform flow of the material, generating a specified material property distribution in the formed product, minimizing the production time, or minimizing the energy required for the process. Determining the process parameters to achieve these objectives will help to reduce the cost and improve the quality of the final product in processes such as extrusion and forging. The proposed work will also contribute to the computational tools and methodologies available for nonlinear optimization problems doc5861 none This is the first year funding of a five-year continuing award. The world of business and organizations is entering a period of dramatic and rapid technology-based transformations that many people believe will be as significant as those that characterized the Industrial Revolution. This project will investigate the profound socioeconomic changes likely to be associated with such transformations through conducting empirical research that is broad-based, in-depth, and longitudinal. Using multiple theoretical and methodological approaches, a panel of strategically-selected firms in established as well as entrepreneurial and emergent businesses will be tracked over time. A comprehensive set of systematic and grounded empirical data in these organizations will be collected and analyzed over five years, and will generate deep insights and general theories about what is really happening as organizations use information technology to transform how they work and interact with the market over time doc5862 none As international trade increases in our nation, there is a need for the marine transportation system infrastructure, which handles a large part of international trade, to be integrated into an efficient and effectively operated system to remain competitive. Despite the extensive marine infrastructure system, growth of intermodal freight traffic has spawned concerns about the capacity of the existing infrastructure to handle expected growth. Physical expansion of many of the components of the marine transportation system cannot be accomplished easily due to physical, environmental, political and economic constraints. The effective operation of the intermodal freight transportation system relies on the development of an approach to plan, build, and operate the intermodal system in a way that emphasizes optimal utilization of existing resources and ensures that connections between modes provide a smooth flow of goods through an integrated system. Before this objective can be achieved, there is a need for tools, which can be used to represent intermodal transportation as an integrated system. This research investigates an approach for integrating freight management systems and roadway control systems using simulation so as to: (1) optimize flow of intermodal freight from the terminal to a distribution center; (2) minimize costs and delays to users of the system; (3) maximize capacity; and (4) have flow rates tend to the maximum capacity of the system.The research uses high performance computing as a tool to provide the means of modeling the integrated system. High performance computing will provide the computational power needed for integrating the components of the system in a seamless fashion and will allow for a large scale network to be evaluated. Hence, the numerical simulation of the proposed model will effectively identify parameters or modes that are critical to the optimization of this system. The initial algorithm will be developed for a single processor high end computer which can later be scalable to a parallel computing paradigm. As an investigation, the proposed work will focus on the movement of containers from port terminals via truck transportation. In many metropolitan areas where major port facilities are located, trucks represent a primary mode for freight movement. Using the simulation model developed in this research, a preliminary control system for intermodal freight transportation will be identified. The data requirements for the control system and models needed for describing the state of the freight management system and the roadway system will be identified. Finally, the control system will be evaluated for an intermodal freight movement from the Port of New York and New Jersey to a destination in northern New Jersey and New York. This award is made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) program solicitation doc5863 none This research aims to develop a new generation of microscopic traffic simulation with driving behavior models that capture strategic behaviors of drivers and utilize high performance computational methods. Flexible simulation tools are needed to conduct experiments of innovative Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) including dynamic traffic management technologies and traffic control and routing algorithms. More reliable simulation tools are also needed to study traffic impacts such as congestion, safety, energy consumption and air pollution. These applications require detailed and accurate models of drivers behavior. Online and offline applications to large networks and increasingly complex models and traffic management systems require the use of more efficient computational methods. The most notable driving behavior models are acceleration (or car following) and lane-changing models. State-of-the-art models will be enhanced to include more realistic behaviors such as: Proactive anticipatory behavior: Drivers create opportunities to undertake their desired maneuvers by anticipating future traffic conditions and acting upon them. This is contrasted with existing models in which drivers passively react to present traffic conditions. Extended field of view: Drivers decisions are based on traffic conditions in their extended neighborhood as opposed to simply following a leader or reacting to the adjacent vehicles. Interdependent decisions: Interdependencies exist across different decisions (e.g. the effect of lane changing on acceleration) and within one decision over time (e.g. the effect of past lane changes on future ones). These dependencies are ignored in existing models: lane-changing models assume that once a driver decides to change lanes, s he will passively consider available gaps as they appear in the traffic stream - the driver does not adjust his her acceleration in order to change lanes. As a result, capacities of merging, weaving and similar facilities are not captured correctly. The development of high performance computing implementations will extend the applicability of microscopic traffic simulation. Using coarse-grained parallel and distributed computing platforms will allow for the development of portable codes using public domain inter-processor communication software libraries. We will review the state-of-the-art in network decomposition methods, thus creating a basis for follow-up research. The focus of the project will be the development and calibration of innovative driving behavior models capturing the intelligent behavior principles mentioned above. Calibrated models will, in the future, be implemented in MITSIMLab, a microscopic traffic simulation laboratory developed at MIT. Simulations will be conducted to test the models and to suggest further refinements. This award is made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) program solicitation doc5864 none The University of Missouri-Columbia, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the University of Illinois, and the Missouri Botanical Garden are collaborating on this pilot project to build a prototype core integration system for a national digital library for SMET Education. The technical infrastructure for the system builds on the NCSA distributed information retrieval system, EMERGE. This system is being extended to an adaptive and flexible distributed search engine for a wide variety of learning environments and resources, and is being tested on the rich plant contents of the Missouri Botanical Garden, and the NSF Plant Genome projects at the University of Illinois (Soybean) and the University of Missouri-Columbia (Corn). Seamless coordination with services is being offered on several learning environments, including NCSA s Biology Workbench 3.2. A digital repository, BLOE (Biological Learning Object Exchange), serves to collect and organize experiments, simulations, and projects from learners and teachers for collaborative learning. Additional project activities include studies of requirements of user services, management procedures, evaluation methods, and technical standards using various undergraduate and graduate programs of the two universities and the K-12 educational activities of the Missouri Botanical Garden doc5865 none The project will: Estimate and predict travel times between any two points and the corresponding shortest path; Calibrate the PARAMICS and possibly, CORSIM, micro-simulation models; Develop and evaluate a ramp metering policy based on the calibrate model. The primary sources of data consist of data from Orange County and Los Angeles County. The Communication and database infrastructure for collecting, storing and processing data is in place and operational. The simulation models will be calibrated with data from the two counties. The ramp metering policies will be tested and evaluated through simulation. The most promising strategies will be selected for field implementation. This research effort will be devoted to network state estimation and prediction algorithms, calibration of simulation models, and design evaluation of ramp-metering algorithms doc5866 none A necessary step towards the goal of building more reliable software systems, on time and within budget, is to establish an institutionalized empirical discipline for understanding causal relationships among the processes, components, and technologies that affect the building of systems. As in the physical and natural sciences, experimentation in software engineering requires a community with support for collaboration, experimental replication and refinement, and sharing of experimental data and results. For these reasons the Center for Empirical Software Engineering Research (CESER) undertakes original empirical research and is developing a prototype system for sharing and evolving the results of such research with a community of affiliated researchers and practitioners. CESER develops and refines techniques to increase the descriptive and predictive power of empirical models, and studies specific software development technologies to enable industrial organizations to understand the benefits and drawbacks of those technologies in their specific context. The Center provides courses and symposia on empirical methodologies and results, and assists the use of empirical knowledge in software engineering education. The Center s initial focus is on empirical studies of software COTS integration and software quality improvement phenomenology. The center is initially organized as a collaborative effort among the University of Maryland, the Fraunhofer Center - Maryland, the University of Southern California, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and Mississippi State University doc5867 none CTS_ M. Dennin University California @ Irvine This research is a study of the flow behavior of Langmuir monolayers using a combination of optical and rheological techniques. It consists of two sets of experiments: a study of the effects of the multivalent ions in the water subphase on the flow behavior of Langmuir monolayers; and a study of the flow behavior of mixed surfactant systems. The focus is on systems and their flow properties that directly impact foam and emulsion stability. Lagmuir monolayers are intrinsically two-dimensional and consist of amphiphilic molecules that are confined to the air-water interface. The Langmuir trough used in this work consists of two concentric cylinders that are oriented vertically. The inner cylinder is fixed and the outer cylinder is free to rotate. The top surface of the water is free, and the monolayer is placed on this surface. As such, the monolayer models the gas-liquid interfaces in a standard aqueous foam. The inner cylinder consists of two parts. A stationary cylinder in the water subphase, and a torsion pendulum that just makes contact with the water surface. The dc viscosity is measured by rotating the outer cylinder and measuring the stress on the inner cylinder with the torsion pendulum. The ac viscosity is measured by holding the outer cylinder fixed and oscillating the torsion pendulum. Additional information about the flow properties of the monolayer is obtained by direct observation of velocity profiles and domain dynamics with a Browser angle microscope. There has been a renewed interest in the theology of Languor minelayers, in part, due to the elucidation of their liquid condensed (LC) phases. The LC phases are two-dimensional analogs of three-dimensional smectic liquid crystals. They posses hexatic order, and in phases where the molecules are tilted with respect to the surface, the tilt azimuth exhibits orientational order. Because LC phases are ubiquitous in Langmuir monolayers, understanding their reheology has relevance to a range of processes that involve surfactant monolayer flow at interfaces. The focus of recent work has been on fatty acid monolayers, as their phase behavior has been thoroughly studied, and a wide range of interesting flow phenomena has been observed. Despite this, even the flow behavior of the pure fatty acid monolayers is not completely understood. The work here proposes to extend these measurements to fatty acid salts (fatty acid monolayers in the presence of ions in the water subphase) and mixed fatty acid ester system. A number of fundamental question will be addressed. What is the connection between the structure of the equilibrium phases and the viscoelastic properties of the monolayer? How do interactions between charged monolayers and multivalent ions affect the flow properties of the monolayer? How do flows in the subphase impact the structure of the monolayer, and what effect does this have on the bulk flow? The motivation for choosing these two systems is their role in foam stability. The presence of ions in solution is often found to stabilized foams. On the other hand, fatty acid salts can also be used to decrease foaming. The study of fatty-acid salts proposed here will help elucidate this dual role of electrolytes as foam stabilizers and destabilizes. It may even result in a method for controlling foam stability as a function of time. Fatty acid ester mixtures are often used as foam stabilizers. Also, there is a correlation between surface viscosity and foam stability. However, there is no fundamental understanding of the stabilizing mechanism. It may be a simple relationship between viscosity and stability, or it may involve non-Newtonian properties of the LC phases. The use of mixtures allows one to alter the phase of the system and the corresponding flow behavior, for a fixed temperature and pressure. Preliminary studies the interaction between subphase flows and the monolayer will be made doc5868 none The objective of the National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL) Program is to transform science, mathematics, engineering, and technology education and knowledge sharing. The resulting national digital library should not only provide traditional library services, but also encourage new methods of learning, collaboration, and dissemination of resources. This project is building a one-year prototype of the core integrating component of the digital library, that provides a technical infrastructure, standards and guidelines, integration of diverse collections and services, and an organizational framework for the management of the facility. Collaborations on which the PI and team are involved are contributing several technologies and expertise to the project. The Dienst architecture, which has proven effective in a number of distributed digital library applications including the Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library (NCSTRL), forms the technical foundation for the project, and provides a framework for multiple levels of participation including those defined by the agreements of the Open Archives initiative (which are based on the Dienst protocol). The ongoing leadership role of project staff in metadata initiatives and research, such as the Dublin Core and Warwick Framework, is facilitating the development and incorporation of NSDL metadata standards. The experience of the University Library in developing, refining, and managing the Cornell University Library Gateway provides expertise in licensing, organizing, and managing digital resources. Finally, the project team s high-level of participation in the digital library research community is accelerating crucial technology transfer doc5869 none This award is being made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) program solicitation. Information acquisition and processing is central to all Intelligent Transportation System technologies. Technological advances continue to facilitate the acquisition of a wide variety of data. However, in order to realize the potential benefits of equpping the transportation systems with sensing, actuation, data acquisition and communication systems, methodologies that provide guidelines, on the information to be acquired and how the acquired information must be processed and utilised to empower the transportation system with real-time decision making capability, are required and are currently lacking. The focus of this proposal is on engineering traffic flow behavior from the synthesis of control actions for constituent vehicles; we view vehicles as information sensing, purveying and actuating devices. In this study, we seek answers to the following questions. At the fundamental level, we would enquire into: 1. What characterizes the performance of a transportation system? What information is relevant and useful to improve the performance of a transportation system? Of these, what is feasible with the current state of technology? What kind of technologies can be developed? 2. What tools must be developed for the analysis of performance of the transportation system? At the applied level, we are interested in determining answers to the following questions: 1. How does one determine the effect of information acquisition, processing and utilization in the transportation system on its performance? 2. Given macroscopic performance specifications of the transportation system, how does one engineer a transportation system that achieves the given performance specification? We will develop tools to model traffic flow behavior, examine their stability and develop robust adaptive traffic flow control strategies to compensate for any changes in traffic flow behavior arising from road and weather conditions and from the effects of informed microscopic actions of the vehicles. It is expected that this research will provide guidelines on required infrastructure, communication and information processing capabilities for the next generation of vehicular and traffic control sytems doc5870 none This award is made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETD program solicitation. With the emerging restructured nature of the power industry, there is a need to look at new approaches to modeling as well as tools of analysis. Among the transport industries, the power industry can both profit from the experience of other deregulated industries, as well as offer new ideas in terms of modeling and analysis. Increasingly, discrete events affect the performance of systems in real time. Such events are common in the physical system, for example relays, tap changing transformers, and FACTS devices. However the rules underlying the market layer also introduce discrete events. System performance under these conditions, where continuous dynamics and discrete events interact, is the principal focus of the proposal, A major theme is to map formal languages that describe hybrid systems, such as Petri nets and finite state automata, into a differential-algebraic model structure. A linking strategy will be exploited to maximize model flexibility. We shall also focus on trajectory sensitivity analysis of hybrid systems. Application areas that build upon trajectory sensitivities will be investigated. Trajectory sensitivity analysis entails a heavy computational burden. Hence new numerical analysis approaches such as iterative solver techniques will be considered. Finally the interaction of the market layer with the physical system will be explored, The results of the research will be in the form of formulating new areas of research for the restructured power industry doc5871 none Despite enormous progress in networking and computing technologies, their application has remained restricted to conventional person-to-person and person-to-computer communication. However, the Moore s Law driven continual reduction in cost and form factor is now making it possible to imbed networking - even wireless networking - and computing capabilities not just in our PCs and laptops but also other objects. Further, a marriage of these ever tinier and cheaper processors and wireless network interfaces with emerging micro-sensors based on MEMS technology is allowing cheap sensing, processing, and communication capabilities to be unobtrusively embedded in familiar physical objects. The result is an emerging paradigm shift where the primary role of information technology would be to enhance or assist in person to physical world communication via familiar physical objects with embedded (a) micro-sensors to react to external stimuli, and (b) wireless networking and computing engines for tetherless communication with compute servers and other networked embedded objects. The proposed research seeks to explore wireless networking, middleware, and data management technologies for realizing the above vision. The problems of ad hoc structure, distributed nature, unreliable sensing, large scale density, and novel sensor data types are characteristic of such deeply instrumented physical environments with inter-networked physical objects. This requires one to rethink current architectures, protocols, algorithms, and formalisms that were developed for different needs. Further, to provide a concrete problem domain, we propose to use and evaluate our technologies in a smart kindergarten driver application targeted at developmental problem-solving environments for early childhood education. This is a natural application as young children learn by exploring and interacting with objects such as toys in their environment. Our envisioned system would enhance the education process by providing a childhood learning environment that is individualized to each child, adapts to the context, coordinates activities of multiple children, and allows unobtrusive evaluation of the learning process by the teacher. This would be done by wirelessly-networked, sensor-enhanced toys with back-end middleware services and database techniques. The main information technology contributions of this research would be: Wireless protocols for networks using short-range radios, with focus on highly unstructured, dynamic, and dense networks of embedded devices, and problems of energy efficiency and quality of service needs of sensor data. Network architectures designed for naming, addressing, and routing by object capabilities and attributes, as opposed to id based approaches in conventional networks. Efficient techniques and algorithms for identifying, locating, and tracking users and objects in instrumented environments, particularly indoors. Middleware architecture providing services such as special communication patterns, context-aware network resource allocation and scheduling under attribute and capacity constraints, power-aware operation, media processing using shared background servers, and context discovery, tracking, and change notification. Data management methods to handle data from multiple heterogeneous, unreliable, noisy sensors in a highly dynamic environment, with support for real-time sensor data interpretation and fusion, and off-line mining. Automated mining of user profiles from sensor data, and their use in task planning and execution of actions in the instrumented environment Techniques for sensor-assisted automatic speech recognition of children s speech. Complementing the above will be the driver application where a Smart Kindergarten for developmental problem solving will be prototyped based on the above ideas, and evaluated in a real classroom setting. Various objects, particularly toys, will be wirelessly networked and have sensing and perhaps actuator capabilities. A wireless network, with radios and protocols suitable for handling a high density of proximate objects, will interconnect the toys to each other and to database and compute servers using a toy network middleware API. Sensors embedded in toys and worn by children will allow the database servers to discover and track context and configuration information about the children and the toys, and also orchestrate aural, visual, motion, tactile and other feedback. The system will enhance the developmental process by providing a problem-solving environment that is individualized, context adaptive, and coordinated among multiple children. It will also allow monitoring and logging for unobtrusive paper-free assessment by teacher or parent. The project team is interdisciplinary, with researchers from UCLA s CS and EE Departments for the technology component of the project, and from UCLA s Graduate School of Education and Information Sciences (GSE&IS) for the application component. GSE&IS operates a reputed laboratory elementary school on campus, which will be used for real-life evaluation of doc5872 none This project is part of a collaboration that is building a broad and deep collection of educational resources for Earth system education as part of the Digital Library for Earth Systems Education (DLESE) project. First, existing resources pertaining to Earth system education are being collected into a broad works in progress collection. Second, metadata are associated with each resource, to facilitate discovery by end users. Third, a community review system is being created to evaluate resources for pedagogical effectiveness, ease of use for faculty and students, and power to motivate and inspire students. This step enables identification of the best of the collected resources, which are then placed in a smaller high-quality reviewed area. Finally, assessment of both the reviewed and unreviewed collections is taking place, to ensure they are well-balanced and meet the needs of the user community. Partners in the collaboration are the American Geological Institute, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, and Foothill-DeAnza Community College. This project has responsibility for the metatagging component doc5866 none A necessary step towards the goal of building more reliable software systems, on time and within budget, is to establish an institutionalized empirical discipline for understanding causal relationships among the processes, components, and technologies that affect the building of systems. As in the physical and natural sciences, experimentation in software engineering requires a community with support for collaboration, experimental replication and refinement, and sharing of experimental data and results. For these reasons the Center for Empirical Software Engineering Research (CESER) undertakes original empirical research and is developing a prototype system for sharing and evolving the results of such research with a community of affiliated researchers and practitioners. CESER develops and refines techniques to increase the descriptive and predictive power of empirical models, and studies specific software development technologies to enable industrial organizations to understand the benefits and drawbacks of those technologies in their specific context. The Center provides courses and symposia on empirical methodologies and results, and assists the use of empirical knowledge in software engineering education. The Center s initial focus is on empirical studies of software COTS integration and software quality improvement phenomenology. The center is initially organized as a collaborative effort among the University of Maryland, the Fraunhofer Center - Maryland, the University of Southern California, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and Mississippi State University doc5874 none Object-oriented programming languages, notably Java, are gaining broad use because of their benefits, which come largely from their flexibility. But this same flexibility makes Java programs more difficult to optimize in advance. One sample collection of programs, optimized in advance, spent 40-95% of their time on an aggressive processor waiting for the memory to provide data, illustrating the need to improve memory behavior. Future processors will only make the problem worse. The project makes an integrated attack on this problem, incorporating new program analyses and optimizations, profile feedback, run-time techniques including adaptive garbage collection algorithms, and ways of communicating high-level predictions and observations of program behavior to the hardware. The project aims to design and build a compiler, run-time system, and enhanced architectural and operating system features that react quickly and gracefully to compiler predictions and actual run-time behavior to achieve high performance. The goal is synergy via cooperation between the system components versus solving each problem within an individual component. While the research focuses on improving memory performance, the project s envisioned framework is suited to a wide range of performance optimization techniques, so the expected research results and software products have broader impact doc5875 none This project continues the development of a new online Journal of Earth System Science Education (JESSE), plans for which were laid with the support of a previous planning grant (Award No. ). The new e-journal is emphasizing research and experimentation with the peer review process as it establishes, through electronic publication, an orderly collection of reviewed resource materials for the broadly defined geoscience and related disciplines involved in Earth system and global change education. The interdisciplinary richness of Earth system and global change science provides unusual opportunities for research and experimentation with the peer review process in advancing science, mathematics, engineering, and technology education (SMETE). JESSE is focusing on learning resources and metadata where scientific content combined with visualization enriches learning across a broad range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary educational efforts. The initial emphasis is on creating, implementing, testing, and evaluating a peer review process embracing anonymous and open review components for the submission of educational resources at the undergraduate level. This research and experimentation aims to optimize the efficiency of the review process and the quality of the offerings as the digital library s collections are built. In providing for both anonymous and open reviews, JESSE is experimenting with the process. Guided by Principal Editors, the anonymous component is to ensure credibility of the process and judgments reached through the open review. Within the open review process, both editors and reviewers work directly with the authors of resources to suggest changes and develop informative commentary for classroom and other educational endeavors, while reaching common agreement on the acceptability of a resource for publication. JESSE s review criteria include those recommended by the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE). Review criteria also constitute a topic of research as they are applied and adapted for resources from different disciplines and of different types. Different types of resources include courses, syllabi and lectures, laboratory exercises, interactive models, topical modules, virtual field trips, annotated image databases, and electronic texts and monographs. Other types include notes, correspondence, and user experiences for review and publication within a peer commentary section of the journal. JESSE also intends to publish articles and review papers concerning the learning process involved in Earth system education. Copyright of all materials reviewed and published by JESSE remains with the author, while the peer review process itself and publication ensure national recognition for the author. As part of its research and experimentation with the review process, the journal aims to stimulate the creativity of educators in the development of quality electronic resources that describe both the state and underlying processes governing the Earth system. Ultimately, the peer-reviewed collection will provide a holistic perspective of Earth system and global change science doc5876 none This is the first year funding of a four-year continuing award. The proportion of elderly in the United States is growing at a phenomenal rate, yet little of today s information technology addresses the critical problems that arise as a result of this demographic shift. This project will develop advances in IT to address one such challenge, that of enabling the elderly to remain living in their homes for as long as possible. More specifically, the PI and her team will design and build a personal mobile robotic assistant for the monitoring and guidance of the daily activities of an elderly person. To achieve that vision research will be conducted to advance the state-of-the-art in several areas of IT, including: the development of advanced techniques for flexibly reasoning about plans and monitoring their execution; the development of statistical algorithms for learning models of people s daily activities; the design and evaluation of self-tailoring multi-modal interfaces that enable elderly people to interact easily with the robotic assistant; and the development of new sensor modalities to meet the needs of a mobile robot in an elder s home. The work will be evaluated along three dimensions: through theoretical and simulation-based evaluations of components, through targeted user studies, and through a series of field tests conducted at regular intervals throughout the project in the homes of elderly people. The research team is multi-university and interdisciplinary, comprising experts in the fields of computer science, robotics, human-computer interaction, and health care. The project also includes a strong education focus in that it seeks to provide a unique forum for training undergraduate and graduate students in issues related to IT for the elderly doc5877 none A digital library constructed in support of a research community s activities contains material of direct relevance to undergraduate SMET education. However, its organizational structure reflects the conventions established by the research community, not the needs of the undergraduate student. This project is researching and developing software tools to organize and contextualize information in a research digital library so that it may better reflect the needs of undergraduate learners and the pedagogical goals of faculty. The project uses the metaphor of a path or guided tour for these organizing and contextualizing tools. The content testbed on which the use of guided tours is being demonstrated is a large body of Web-based material centered initially on WWW-based floristics and extended recently to include entomological materials. The tool development extends previous investigations into the application of paths in K-12 classrooms to include the creation of more complex structures, collectively known as metadocuments doc5878 none This award provides support for a collaborative project involving two computer scientists and a plant geneticist who will develop new methods, efficient algorithms, and software tools for several important problems in the field of bioinformatics. This supported work includes research into computational paradigms such as quartet methods, interactive systems, and approximation algorithms as applied to the evolutionary analysis of gene sequences, gene duplication, and horizontal transfer events in the genomes of chloroplasts, a DNA-containing organelle found in all plants. Additional studies will examine the information content of genomes by improving and testing a recently developed sequence entropy estimator and a distance metric for genomic sequences. Work in this area will include the application of the improved methods to sequence data from the genomes of mitochondria, viruses, chloroplasts and bacteria. Other efforts will address the important problem of simultaneous multiple sequence alignment and evolutionary tree reconstruction. The multiple sequence alignment approaches to be developed are based on the use of conserved blocks that have few or no gaps, and multiple alignments within a constant band. Work in a fourth area will develop efficient algorithms for computing short and long interspersed nuclear elements (SINES and LINES) in genomic sequences of lengths up to billions of nucleotides. Because of the large amounts of data that must be analyzed, this will require the development or adaptation of appropriate external memory algorithms. Biological, biomedical and pharmaceutical research is undergoing a major revolution as new analytical technologies produce unprecedented amounts of genetic data. The exploration of this information is critically dependent upon the development of advanced computational and software techniques for data analysis, storage and retrieval. From this dependency, a new interdisciplinary research field, bioinformatics (or computational molecular biology) has emerged in recent years. The work supported through this award is expected to make both fundamental and applied contributions to the field. The fundamental research will explore and explicate new ideas and methods for solving algorithmic problems in bioinformatics and the applied research will involve the development and evaluation of software tools in the practice of plant genomics. Although the efforts are aimed at improving the understanding of the evolution of chloroplast genomes, the approaches should be readily extensible to analysis of all other genomes doc5879 none Mortality patterns in early agrarian populations indicate that adult males had higher survivorship than adult females, possibly as a result of increased female mortality associated with childbirth. Two problems have stood in the way of testing this hypothesis: 1) lack of knowledge about sex differences in mortality prior to reproduction, and 2) uncertainty regarding the accuracy of distinguishing male from female skeletons. The characteristics used to determine sex of skeletons are adult secondary sex characteristics and are not reliable for sexing subadult skeletons. We propose to extract ancient DNA from skeletons and adapt newly developed molecular methods for determining sex to prehistoric samples. We will attempt to improve upon these methods and develop them into an efficient and reliable method for sexing skeletal samples. The improved methods will permit us to study sex differences in mortality among ancient subadults. Adult skeletons from Tirup, a rural Medieval cemetery in Denmark, show the same female survival disadvantage found in other early agricultural skeletal series from northern Europe. By examining subadult mortality patterns at Tirup with molecular methods, we will test the hypothesis that sex differences in adult death relate to the dangers of reproduction for early agrarian women generally. We will also provide a test of sex estimates based on bone characteristics of adults doc5880 none This project is creating a National Virtual Teacher Resource Center (NVTRC) that focuses on a collection of resources for two-year and four-year Colleges of Arts and Sciences and Colleges of Education faculty members who teach science and mathematics undergraduate courses. The NVTRC is a collaboration between the Ohio State University and the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse, and it expects to serve as a hub and focal point for mathematics, science, and technology undergraduate teacher education and professional development. The collection of the NVTRC focuses primarily on electronic resources including web-based text or data resources, software or video that can be downloaded via the web or other electronic means, or other emerging technology applications. A review process is being established to ensure that the resources are accurate, pedagogically effective, and that the NVTRC operates as an efficient source of quality materials. Additionally, the NVTRC staff identifies electronic materials at a level of specificity or granularity not often supported by other web searching mechanisms. Finally, a range of digital and human services are offered to users of the NVTRC including ready discovery and retrieval of materials and information about materials through effective indexing and linking, user or third-party reviews awards linked to items in the collection, user registration for additional services such as email notification of new resources, and real and virtual reference desk services doc5881 none Today s Internet owes its great success to the simple, hour-glass IP network protocol architecture laid out twenty-five years ago. With rapid advances in networking technologies and explosive growth of rich multimedia content in recent years, the networking community finds itself at an important crossroads: what should be the next generation Internet architecture for controlling network resources and provide the quality of service (QoS) needed by emerging multimedia applications? There is a multidimensional spectrum of possible approaches to providing QoS guarantees. The choice of a QoS solution for the next generation Internet will have a substantial impact on both the evolution of the Internet itself, and on what it enables. Making the right choices requires the development of a fundamental understanding of the scalability of QoS controls and the impact of these controls on the efficacy of QoS provisioning. The goal of the proposed research is to develop a comprehensive, quantitative understanding of the fundamental trade-offs involved in various approaches toward providing scalable QoS guarantees. To this end, we will develop coherent theories to systematically address the issue of scalability in QoS controls. The research program divides broadly into four areas: Aggregate network calculus for guaranteed flows: To gain a thorough understanding of the fine time-scale(e.g., packet-level) behavior of a network system in providing QoS performance guarantees, the researchers will develop an aggregate network calculus to study the impact of aggregate QoS control mechanisms on the performance and complexity of data plane operations. This theory is developed for guaranteed flows - flows which require the network to commit, either at a per-flow or an aggregate level, a certain amount of resources (e.g., bandwidth and buffer) throughout their life time, regardless of the network congestion status. The aggregate network calculus will provide a mathematical framework to quantify the impact of aggregate QoS controls on the fundamental trade-offs in QoS provisioning. It will also yield insights into the design of scalable data plane QoS control mechanisms. End-to-end QoS controls for responsive flows: The researchers will develop fluid models to study the impact of aggregate QoS control mechanisms on the end-to-end performance of responsive flows. A responsive flow responds to signs of network congestion, such as loss, by adapting its transmission rate. These models will enable us to develop a better understanding of the behavior of responsive flows such as TCP coupled with different aggregate QoS mechanisms and to design end-to-end QoS services for responsive flows. QoS control laws and control plane aggregation rules. We will develop QoS control laws for capturing the slow time-scale, system-wide behavior of a network and aggregation rules that address the perfor-mance and complexity of control plane operations under aggregate QoS controls. These QoS control laws and aggregation rules will lead us to the design of distributed and centralized algorithms for scalable control plane operations. Scalable QoS mechanisms and service architectures As an integral part in developing these theories, the researchers will also design effective and scalable QoS mechanisms, and tools and techniques for quantifying and evaluating the trade-offs of various QoS solutions. Based on the results from these efforts, the researchers will study how various QoS solutions can be combined to construct meaningful end-to-end services. The research will blend formal modeling analysis, experimentation implementation, and evaluation. The understanding and insights gained as a result of our research will lead to the establishment of the theory, design principles, and guidelines for building scalable QoS controls for the future Internet. This, in turn, will allow reasoned and informed choices to be made as the next generation Internet takes shape doc5882 none This collaborative project develops interactive environments through a component design and production service and an assembly environment to support identification and reuse of curricular materials. The component design and production service supports collaborative creation of learning objects. It is aimed at programmers and focused on direct coding of components, from graphical user interface elements to complex simulations. It tests strategies by developing reusable components for selected topics in several disciplines. The assembly environment service is aimed at instructors. It provides an environment that allows for easy yet flexible creation of curriculum materials that utilize interactive learning objects. This project develops a base around with future work can crystallize and build new content and structure. It has enormous potential for facilitating the potential of creating ever-growing, collaboratively-driven online repositories of educational software components. This could result in a wealth of online resources for students and teachers and enable teachers to create learning environments for their own use and for use in the next generation of digital libraries and learning environments doc5883 none This project is part of a collaboration that is building a broad and deep collection of educational resources for Earth system education as part of the Digital Library for Earth Systems Education (DLESE) project. First, existing resources pertaining to Earth system education are being collected into a broad works in progress collection. Second, metadata are associated with each resource, to facilitate discovery by end users. Third, a community review system is being created to evaluate resources for pedagogical effectiveness, ease of use for faculty and students, and power to motivate and inspire students. This step enables identification of the best of the collected resources, which are then placed in a smaller high-quality reviewed area. Finally, assessment of both the reviewed and unreviewed collections is taking place, to ensure they are well-balanced and meet the needs of the user community. Partners in the collaboration are the American Geological Institute, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, and Foothill-DeAnza Community College. This project has responsibility for the community review system development doc5884 none The problems associated with building complex heterogeneous systems composed of computer, human, and electromechanical components are starting to overwhelm system and software engineers, resulting in failed projects and accidents related to software behavior. As the complexity of the systems grows, so does the difficulty of ensuring safety. Model-based system and software engineering is an approach to building complex systems that is based on common models and specification languages that are understandable and reviewable by all the engineers on the project and by those who must interact with and use the automation as well. The research topics to be investigated are: (1) enhancing requirements specification reviewability, (2) assisting engineers in creating large, complex specifications, (3) minimizing the disruptions caused by changes in requirements, and (5) specifying and analyzing safety-related properties using the models. To ground the research, the new approaches will be applied experimentally to the advanced air traffic control systems being developed and validated by Eurocontrol (the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation). ATC provides a challenging testbed but the results of the research should be equally applicable to medical, defense, transportation, manufacturing, and other complex, real-time systems doc5885 none This research aims at designing efficient algorithms and computational tools for a set of dynamic flow problems that arise in intelligent transport networks, which are defined as networks equipped with information technologies aimed at dynamically collecting, processing, and communicating data on current and future network conditions. Problems to be studied include those belonging to two classes:problems that are generic to multiple types of transport networks, and problems that emerge from the domain of intelligent road and highway networks. Performance characteristics of transport networks are at best known with uncertainty, and are typically represented as random variables. In this project, uncertainty will be taken into account in developing efficient computational algorithms for the generic dynamic network flow problems, and in investigating the development of more realistic models, and their corresponding solution algorithms, for traffic flow problems in intelligent road and highway networks. This leads to modeling and algorithmic research questions involving stochastic and time-dependent networks. Intelligent transport networks must operate in real-time. This project will develop algorithms that can run much faster than real-time for networks with real-life sizes. Fast sequential algorithms, that exploit properties of dynamic networks and data representation and manipulation techniques, will be developed and their implementation on high performance computing platforms will be considered. Fastest computer implementations for a given algorithmic problem will be integrated in a library of software tools. The research has the following directions: study of some generic dynamic network flow problems; study of dynamic flow problems in intelligent road traffic networks; and software tools and high performance computational methods This award is made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) program solicitation doc5886 none This project is part of a collaboration that is building a broad and deep collection of educational resources for Earth system education as part of the Digital Library for Earth Systems Education (DLESE) project. First, existing resources pertaining to Earth system education are being collected into a broad works in progress collection. Second, metadata are associated with each resource, to facilitate discovery by end users. Third, a community review system is being created to evaluate resources for pedagogical effectiveness, ease of use for faculty and students, and power to motivate and inspire students. This step enables identification of the best of the collected resources, which are then placed in a smaller high-quality reviewed area. Finally, assessment of both the reviewed and unreviewed collections is taking place, to ensure they are well-balanced and meet the needs of the user community. Partners in the collaboration are the American Geological Institute, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, and Foothill-DeAnza Community College. This project has responsibility for the resource acquisition component doc5887 none The services being developed in this project will enable patrons of the future National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL) to efficiently locate video resources and meld them into compositions that effectively support particular objectives. Video is a rich medium for communicating visual, time-dependent phenomena and for providing real-world footage capable of illustrating and motivating science and mathematics concepts. Vast collections of video have captured field studies and experiments, documented discoveries in space and throughout our planet, and recorded events in our world and in micro-environments not accessible to the human eye. However, despite their potential for use in educational settings, video resources are often discounted or overlooked by science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) educators and students. Barriers include: -- Loss of investment made by authors of video compositions who blaze pathways through the video information space. These pathways remain unmapped, and hence undiscovered by other information foragers with similar requirements. -- Lack of support to tailor video resources to specific needs. -- Frustration in searching and browsing video, as much time is invested in viewing numerous video clips to gauge their relevance. -- Inability to locate pertinent video material, due to insufficient indexing of its contents. This project is exploring ways to overcome these barriers by capturing and managing the threads of video information access, use, and reuse within the NSDL. Specifically, the project is working on the following services: -- Creation and organization of annotations for video compositions and information pathways, enabling a dynamic information repository where one s diligent work in producing a stellar video lesson plan can be recognized, rewarded, archived, and reused in future overlays of video information. -- Support for composition of video lesson plans and multimedia essays from component clips meeting the time, message, and pedagogical requirements of the NSDL patron. -- Explicit video annotation mechanisms, whereby NSDL patrons can access reviews and other commentary aligned and synchronized with video resources. -- Implicit annotation mechanisms for video, allowing information retrieval schemes with relevance judgments based on access frequency and incorporation of video resources into derivative works. -- Enhanced content-based video search functionality derived from the integration of speech recognition, language processing, and image processing automated techniques. The project s focus on video complements the research of others focusing directly on the text or image domains. The project team is well-positioned to pursue this work, given their past accomplishments with the Informedia project (NSF Award Nos. and doc5888 none Modern statistical learning approaches are expected to play a key role in providing more powerful tools to harvest information from bits, a crucial and growing problem for the Internet. The goal of this project is thus to develop a new technology for the management, organization, and search of multimedia digital information by exploiting and extending new statistical learning theories and algorithms. In the process we expect to prototype key system components and to develop scientific insights. Anticipated outcomes of the research are (1) new learning algorithms and associated representations that can be applied to categorize text, images, and video, (2) new theoretical analyses of these learning algorithms and query-answering methods and (3) demonstrations and evaluations of prototype systems for classifying and routing email messages and searching, categorizing, and extracting information on the Web. Smarter classification software for multimedia data is a prerequisite to enable a second, more intelligent wave of Internet technologies. Automatic techniques to route, organize and search information are needed to help individuals and organizations exploit the sea of data that the computer networks are creating. The success of projects like this will make such a step possible and accelerate the evolution of the Internet doc5889 none This project uses natural language processing and machine learning to investigate methods for breaking the human metadata generation bottleneck that has plagued projects providing access to educational resources on the Internet. Breaking the metadata generation bottleneck is necessary if access to National SMETE Digital Library (NSDL) resources is to scale appropriately to the Internet. Comporting fully with emerging international standards for educational metadata, the project demonstrates the feasibility of automatically generating metadata for the NSDL through the processing of full-text collections from the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse on Science and Mathematics. The metadata generated enhances the GEM metadata repository, a nationally recognized finding tool for educational resources, and provides the technical means for the automatic generation of educational metadata from text-based resources. There are five research goals for this project: (1) develop a sublanguage and discourse model for science and mathematics educational materials; (2) extend an automatic metatagger to these materials, using machine learning, the GEM metatag set, extended metatag sets, and heuristics based on the sublanguage and discourse model; (3) extend a sophisticated information extraction technology that can simultaneously extract event-specific relational information as well as domain-independent concepts and relationships;(4) identify appropriate controlled vocabularies and thesauri for science and mathematics educational materials, and incorporate them into the registry used by the automatic metatagger; and (5) evaluate automatic vs. manual metatagging, in both quantitative and qualitative terms. An innovative array of experimental methods is used to achieve these goals. The project includes a qualitative analysis to understand the role of human inconsistency within the manual process and quantitative analysis of the results through the metrics of precision and recall. This project is designed to apply natural language processing and machine learning to the task of automatic metatagging to scale to the needs of the NSDL and to provide access to a far greater number of educational resources doc5889 none This project uses natural language processing and machine learning to investigate methods for breaking the human metadata generation bottleneck that has plagued projects providing access to educational resources on the Internet. Breaking the metadata generation bottleneck is necessary if access to National SMETE Digital Library (NSDL) resources is to scale appropriately to the Internet. Comporting fully with emerging international standards for educational metadata, the project demonstrates the feasibility of automatically generating metadata for the NSDL through the processing of full-text collections from the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse on Science and Mathematics. The metadata generated enhances the GEM metadata repository, a nationally recognized finding tool for educational resources, and provides the technical means for the automatic generation of educational metadata from text-based resources. There are five research goals for this project: (1) develop a sublanguage and discourse model for science and mathematics educational materials; (2) extend an automatic metatagger to these materials, using machine learning, the GEM metatag set, extended metatag sets, and heuristics based on the sublanguage and discourse model; (3) extend a sophisticated information extraction technology that can simultaneously extract event-specific relational information as well as domain-independent concepts and relationships;(4) identify appropriate controlled vocabularies and thesauri for science and mathematics educational materials, and incorporate them into the registry used by the automatic metatagger; and (5) evaluate automatic vs. manual metatagging, in both quantitative and qualitative terms. An innovative array of experimental methods is used to achieve these goals. The project includes a qualitative analysis to understand the role of human inconsistency within the manual process and quantitative analysis of the results through the metrics of precision and recall. This project is designed to apply natural language processing and machine learning to the task of automatic metatagging to scale to the needs of the NSDL and to provide access to a far greater number of educational resources doc5891 none This project is part of a collaboration that is building a broad and deep collection of educational resources for Earth system education as part of the Digital Library for Earth Systems Education (DLESE) project. First, existing resources pertaining to Earth system education are being collected into a broad works in progress collection. Second, metadata are associated with each resource, to facilitate discovery by end users. Third, a community review system is being created to evaluate resources for pedagogical effectiveness, ease of use for faculty and students, and power to motivate and inspire students. This step enables identification of the best of the collected resources, which are then placed in a smaller high-quality reviewed area. Finally, assessment of both the reviewed and unreviewed collections is taking place, to ensure they are well-balanced and meet the needs of the user community. Partners in the collaboration are the American Geological Institute, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, and Foothill-DeAnza Community College. This project has responsibility for the collections assessment component doc5892 none The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Directorate for Education and Human Resources Programs, Science s Signal Transduction Knowledge Environment (STKE), and Project --- with 11 other professional societies and coalitions for biology education --- have established the Biosci Ed Net (BEN) Collaborative. This Collaborative, through its Coordinating Council, is facilitating the development of digital library collections for the teaching and learning of undergraduate biology, with users at the center of the development. For the long-term, the BEN Collaborative views this initiative as a revolutionary approach for transforming undergraduate biology teaching and learning. Towards this end, the BEN Collaborative is developing a portal site to a collection of resources (tools and products), that adhere to uniform standards for the teaching and learning of biology by students at the undergraduate level. It is intended that the resources accessible through the site will have an impact on learning of the biological sciences by undergraduates with diverse interests and career aspirations (i.e., science majors, non-science majors, and prospective K-12 teachers). The materials will be collected and maintained by respected professional societies representing a broad spectrum of biological sciences, from molecular to population levels. During the next two years, the BEN Collaborative Partners are developing metadata technical standards, and the American Physiological Society (APS), Ecological Society of America (ESA) and Science s STKE are modifying a representative sample of existing materials for the collection so that they meet these standards. In addition, Stanford University s HighWire Press is developing and testing the search engine for the portal site. Undergraduate biology educators are participating in development of standards, teaching resources, and field-testing of the portal site. Other Partners include Access Excellence (The National Health Museum), American Institute for Biological Sciences (AIBS), American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB), American Society for Microbiology (ASM), BioQuest Curriculum Consortium (BCC), National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT), National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII), and the Society for Toxicology (SOT doc5893 none The emergence of new applications has fostered a number of attempts to add functionalities to the minimalist Internet core. However, the adoption of enhancements to the Internet has either been slow, failed entirely, or limited to special-purpose private networks. The key reasons for this failure are extensibility and scalability: First, IP networks were not designed to be extensible at the internetworking level. Second, proposals for new network layer services often require that vast amounts of state information be managed in the core network infrastructure, thus, introducing scalability bottlenecks which exacerbate the existing scalability problem of the growing Internet. Today, the development and deployment of advanced services on the Internet has reached a crossroads: efforts to add new services have quickly encountered scalability problems, yet new services are in critical demand and must be rapidly and widely deployed. The research goal is to develop truly scalable services for each of the three fundamental components of the Internet s infrastructure: information communication, replication, and storage. Taking a new and unified approach to the seemingly conflicting requirements for scalability and sophisticated network services, the researchers propose to develop: 1. Scalable Performance-Predictable Communication: a new foundation for quality-of-service communication via a scalable edge-based architecture. 2. Scalable Multicast for Efficient Data Dissemination: a self-organizing multicast infrastructure scalable to many spontaneously-formed groups. 3. Scalable Storage for Next Generation Information Services: an infrastructure which brings information closer to users and enables scalable third-party information storage services. 4. Design Principles of Scalable Services: a multi-faceted approach for the development and deployment of scalable services in the global Internet, under consideration of economic models, industrial structure, theories and algorithms, engineering, and deployment. Thus, this project proposes to develop architectures and methodologies for deploying scalable services in the global Internet. The impact of this project will be to provide the theoretical underpinnings, basic architecture, and a prototype implementation for the information communication of the global Internet of the 21st century. An integral part of this project is the dissemination of results and the infiltration of standard organizations with the concepts developed within this project, and innovative approaches to educate the next generation of engineers for the future Internet doc5894 none Second and third generation wireless systems have been designed primarily for voice, so they are con-nection oriented, delay sensitive, and provide fixed bit rates. Additionally, since service is desired any-time anywhere, these systems must provide ubiquitous coverage. This coverage is achieved through rela-tively uniform grids of cell sites, which are placed to control interference and minimize outage rather than to maximize throughout. As a result, such systems deliver low bit rates and are relatively expensive when used for large amounts of information. At the same time, wireline connection to the Internet has encouraged uses (and users) that depend upon bits being virtually free. We contend that this economic mismatch between wired and wireless access is the primary obstacle to the dramatic growth of a wireless Internet. The solution may lie in designing systems specifically for wireless data, recognizing that data services are often connectionless, delay insensitive and have no specific bit rate requirements. These differences suggest that ubiquitous (anytime anywhere) coverage is not a strict requirement for wireless data networks and makes possible systems in which small, separated coverage areas facilitate transfers of megabytes of data in fractions of a second, and for a fraction of the cost associated with conventional ubiquitous coverage. Communication theory and simple link budget calculations tell us that it is possible to build such sys-tems, but the signal processing challenges are numerous and distinct from the historical challenges offered by connection-oriented wireless services. When a mobile user passes an Infostation, there will be a window of opportunity, perhaps as short as a fraction of a second, in which the user will have access to a high-rate communication channel. A key task is to identify that window and transmit at an appropriate rate. The mobile must make these decisions based on measurements of a wideband radio channel in which there is frequency selectivity and time variation in the fading as well as in the interference. In the specific context of an Infostations system, we plan to divide our research into four components: Radio Channel Modeling: The characterization of typical Infostation radio channels. Transceiver Design: The analysis and performance evaluation of transmitters and receivers for both single carrier and multicarrier systems. Radio Resource Management Transmitter power and rate adaptation policies derived from receiver measurements. Algorithm Development Testbed A platform employing DSP and FPGA technology for the practical evaluation of transmitter and receiver algorithms. The activities of this project will encompass three research institutions in New Jersey (New Jersey In-stitute of Technology, Princeton University, Rutgers University) under the auspices of the N.J. Center for Wireless Telecommunications (NJCWT). The NJCWT is an inter-institutional research and educational or-ganization sponsored and funded by the N.J. Commission on Science and Technology. The focus of the center is a multi-year effort in Digital Radio Technology for Computing, Communications and Information Systems. This effort is supportive of and will enhance the present proposed project in wireless networks doc5895 none Today s Internet owes its great success to the simple, hour-glass IP network protocol architecture laid out twenty-five years ago. With rapid advances in networking technologies and explosive growth of rich multimedia content in recent years, the networking community finds itself at an important crossroads: what should be the next generation Internet architecture for controlling network resources and provide the quality of service (QoS) needed by emerging multimedia applications? There is a multidimensional spectrum of possible approaches to providing QoS guarantees. The choice of a QoS solution for the next generation Internet will have a substantial impact on both the evolution of the Internet itself, and on what it enables. Making the right choices requires the development of a fundamental understanding of the scalability of QoS controls and the impact of these controls on the efficacy of QoS provisioning. The goal of the proposed research is to develop a comprehensive, quantitative understanding of the fundamental trade-offs involved in various approaches toward providing scalable QoS guarantees. To this end, the researchers will develop coherent theories to systematically address the issue of scalability in QoS controls. The research program divides broadly into four areas: Aggregate network calculus for guaranteed flows: To gain a thorough understanding of the fine time-scale (e.g., packet-level) behavior of a network system in providing QoS performance guarantees, the researchers will develop an aggregate network calculus to study the impact of aggregate QoS control mechanisms on the performance and complexity of data plane operations. This theory is developed for guaranteed flows - flows which require the network to commit, either at a per-flow or an aggregate level, a certain amount of resources (e.g., bandwidth and buffer) throughout their life time, regardless of the network congestion status. The aggregate network calculus will provide a mathematical framework to quantify the impact of aggregate QoS controls on the fundamental trade-offs in QoS provisioning. It will also yield insights into the design of scalable data plane QoS control mechanisms. End-to-end QoS controls for responsive flows: The researchers will develop fluid models to study the impact of aggregate QoS control mechanisms on the end-to-end performance of responsive flows. A responsive flow responds to signs of network congestion, such as loss, by adapting its transmission rate. These models will enable us to develop a better understanding of the behavior of responsive flows such as TCP coupled with different aggregate QoS mechanisms and to design end-to-end QoS services for responsive flows. QoS control laws and control plane aggregation rules. The researchers will develop QoS control laws for capturing the slow time-scale, system-wide behavior of a network and aggregation rules that address the performance and complexity of control plane operations under aggregate QoS controls. These QoS control laws and aggregation rules will lead us to the design of distributed and centralized algorithms for scalable control plane operations. Scalable QoS mechanisms and service architectures as an integral part in developing these theories, the researchers will also design effective and scalable QoS mechanisms, and tools and techniques for quantifying and evaluating the trade-offs of various QoS solutions. Based on the results from these efforts, the researchers will study how various QoS solutions can be combined to construct meaningful end-to-end services. The research will blend formal modeling analysis, experimentation implementation, and evaluation. The understanding and insights gained as a result of the research will lead to the establishment of the theory, design principles, and guidelines for building scalable QoS controls for the future Internet. This, in turn, will allow reasoned and informed choices to be made as the next generation Internet takes shape doc5896 none This project is developing a Digital Library Network for Engineering and Technology (DLNET), to facilitate the lifelong learning of engineering faculty, practicing engineers and technical professionals. Towards this end the project proposes to develop a content hosting platform, design standardized templates for posting new content, set up a process for electronic review and validation of new materials, and provide a portal through which content can be both posted and accessed. This portal is intended to provide the gateway to education and research materials published by universities and professional associations in the various engineering disciplines including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). It also provides the means to contribute new and relevant material efficiently and quickly doc5897 none This research examines the global diffusion of Internet-based electronic commerce, how national environments and policies influence e-commerce use within countries, and the economic and social impacts of e-commerce. The project employs both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, including a comparative study of diffusion across 42 countries and detailed case studies in eight countries that look at the growth of e-commerce nationally, and also in three critical industry sectors: high-technology, financial services and retail. These studies will identify key trends in diffusion, critical environmental and policy factors that influence the diffusion, and major impacts of e-commerce. The project will be carried out by researchers from computer science, social systems and management and will involve data collection collaboration with experts from a total of eight countries, including Brazil, Denmark, France, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, Taiwan, and the United States. The outcomes of the research include 1) new scientific understanding of the use and impacts of e-commerce in different countries, 2) baseline benchmarks for future studies of industry, national and global trends, 3) strategic insights for business executives involved in global e-commerce, 4) policy insights for governments to promote and maximize the benefits of global commerce, and 5) extension of the research community through the education of graduate students doc5898 none The project will create a distributed repository of significant historical monographs in mathematics. The participation of these three institutions is significant not only because of their pioneering work in building digital libraries, but also because of their extraordinary collections in this topical area. Michigan will contribute 1,000 monographic volumes focusing on non-Euclidean geometry from its collection; Cornell has digitized 576 volumes of mathematical monographs, and will generate OCR to enhance access to their materials. The State and University Library Gottingen will contribute digitized monographs, dissertations and multivolume works of the electronic Mathematical Archive and the database Jahrbuch uber die Forschritte der Mathematik , funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Its collections are regarded as unparalleled in this area. These funding requested will be used primarily to develop an interoperability layer with the three strong digital library systems at these institutions. In doing so, the participants will focus on many of the issues central to the advancement of digital libraries, including distributed repositories and integration of digital resources, advanced access and retrieval, high levels of interoperability, and models for dissemination and use doc5899 none This project creates a system comprised of a set of online services collectively called the Instructional Architect. The Instructional Architect is a suite of services for digital libraries consisting of four tools that provide for discovery, presentation, inspection, and recommendation of learning objects. A primary goal of digital libraries is to provide users, including teachers and students, a way to search for and display digital learning resources or learning objects. Often, the digital libraries do not provide methods or support for recombining and embedding discovered learning objects within new instruction and curriculum. This project provides this functionality by including an additional tier of services that will overlay and be compatible with existing digital library services. These services include the enhancement of search capabilities provided by existing digital libraries, automated recommendation of learning objects based on feedback from members of communities of users, instructional support for the combination of learning objects into lessons, an integrated Web-based development environment in which learning objects can be assembled into instruction, and a method for enabling the spontaneous formation of new communities of users based on shared interests. While many advances have been made in the creation of digital libraries, there is considerable room for improving how learning objects are accessed and re-used by the large population of teachers and learners who have Internet access but need technological and instructional support. This project will result in a system that will enable more focused and relevant access to learning objects for the purpose of creating instruction and thus enhance the role of digital libraries in promoting effective SMET education doc5900 none This proposal requests support for the third conference on Metabolic Engineering. Meetings I and II were held in Danvers, Mass. in and Elmau, Germany, in , respectively. Among the key sessions planned are: Experimental and computational tools; Applications of ME to medicine; pharmaceuticals; and fine chemicals ME and biocomplexity; New directions, etc. Many members of the organizing committee, steering committee, and a number of the speakers are academic researchers actively working on Bioengineering Division research grants. The meeting will be cofunded by the Whitaker Foundation and industrial contributions. The funds will be used to support travel by U.S. academic participants doc5901 none of the product, a table of contents (where appropriate), and a link to the publisher s site for more information. The MATHDL Project works closely with other digital libraries. In particular, the close association with Math Forum connects MATHDL to Project NEEDS, ENC, and a host of others. Through the multi-track work of the SMETE.org alliance, MATHDL plans to offer federated searches, user profiling, and common metadata. They plan to cooperate with these organizations in the search for solutions to the problem of curation of aging material doc5902 none This collaborative project develops interactive environments through a component design and production service and an assembly environment to support identification and reuse of curricular materials. The component design and production service supports collaborative creation of learning objects. It is aimed at programmers and focused on direct coding of components, from graphical user interface elements to complex simulations. It tests strategies by developing reusable components for selected topics in several disciplines. The assembly environment service is aimed at instructors. It provides an environment that allows for easy yet flexible creation of curriculum materials that utilize interactive learning objects. This project develops a base around which future work can crystallize and build new content and structure. It has enormous potential for facilitating the potential of creating ever-growing, collaboratively-driven online repositories of educational software components. This could result in a wealth of online resources for students and teachers and enable teachers to create learning environments for their own use and for use in the next generation of digital libraries and learning environments doc5903 none This is the first year funding of a five-year continuing award. This research program is geared towards making significant advances to the science and engineering of visual information processing, and addresses fundamental problems in the fields of computational vision, computer graphics, and human-machine interactions. Today, images and video clips are ubiquitous on the internet, digital video is changing the way entertainment is produced, distance learning is used in various facets of education, and advanced visual interfaces to machines are around the corner. However, at present there are severe limits to the extent to which a user can benefit from visual information, because virtually all of this information is presented in its raw form, that is, the way it was captured. The goal of this project is to develop the technical tools needed to achieve a variety of complex manipulations of visual data. These tools will enable a user to freely explore, interact with, and create variations of the physical world being presented. For instance, a user may remove and add objects to an image of a scene, vary lighting conditions, change the materials of surfaces, or view the scene from a novel perspective. This project encompasses a comprehensive research program for creating the science and technology base required to enable such advanced manipulations of visual data. The general research problem may be stated as follows: Capturing, understanding, and predicting the appearance of our everyday world. Success in this domain of research necessitates a unified approach to open problems in two fields: computational vision and computer graphics. The research effort will focus on five pertinent areas: sensing, modeling, estimation, generation, and evaluation. The tangible contributions will be in the form of sensors that provide new types of visual information; complex models of materials, reflectances and textures; estimation algorithms that use the team s new models to recover scene properties from minimal data; advanced rendering techniques; and a set of comprehensive image video databases for evaluation of work in this field. The results will impact numerous application domains, including digital imaging, entertainment, virtual environments, distance learning, e-commerce, interactive product design, art restoration, architectural modeling, restorative surgery, and surface inspection doc5904 none This project is developing a prototype information infrastructure that integrates high quality, focused, and well-maintained collections with an intelligent, interactive, and community-based user interface to assist teachers in developing powerful science and mathematics instruction for the secondary classroom. The collaboration of one of the nation s largest university-based teacher preparation programs with the leadership of the Merit Network is specifically addressing the needs and developmental perspectives of pre-service teachers in their preparation of instructional strategies and use of standards-based materials. Project activities include the collection of materials for understanding and implementing science and mathematics curriculum at grades 6-12 by locating and, where necessary, archiving exemplar materials, with a particular focus on the needs of pre-service teachers. In addition, the PI and team are addressing interoperability among existing information resources, including online clearinghouses and traditional library catalog collections. Finally, the project is establishing a user community to build, share, and review resources that promote engaged learning in the context of state and national curriculum standards. Significant co-funding of this project is being provided by the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the NSF Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences in particular recognition of the important K-12 teacher preparation and professional development aspects of this work doc5905 none Under the auspices of the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia (EPIC), a university-based organization involving the university press, the libraries, and the Academic Information Systems computing center, we are creating mechanisms for the development, implementation, and sustainability of innovative, cost-efficient, and high quality digital library resources designed for the enhancement of teaching and learning in science. Utilizing our experience in creating Columbia International Affairs Online and Columbia Earthscape, the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia is developing models for rights management, sustainability, content development, interoperability, business partnerships, and archiving systems necessary to create an effective Core Integration System for the National Science Digital Library (NSDL). Expected outcomes of the project include the development of a set of scalable organizational and operational models for the successful implementation and long-term sustainability of the NSDL. Specifically, we are creating in this project (or plan to create in the future in follow-on work): 1. an intellectual property and rights management system that can be employed for digital rights management for the NSDL. 2. business models, license agreements, pricing, sales, and sustainability mechanisms for use by the NSDL. 3. system and staffing models for developmental editing of educational materials contributed to the NSDL with the goal of transforming them into professional-quality teaching tools for use on a large scale by educators and students. 4. system and staffing models for site design, production, interoperability, and security systems necessary for the effective operation of the NSDL. 5. models for partnerships with outside content providers such as scholarly societies, not-for-profit organizations, and commercial publishers for licensing of content, joint development of intellectual property, and collaborative ventures that will result in the availability of valuable content for inclusion in the NSDL. 6. models for the archiving and preservation of content in the NSDL with the goal of insuring reliable and perpetual access to the collection doc5906 none Biology Education Online is a peer-reviewed, online journal for teaching and learning science. The goal is to bring together developers and users of digital resources for biology education that span the range from kindergarten through high school, youth and adults in colleges and universities, and life-long learners interested in biology. Using a two-tiered, on-line peer-review system, Biology Education Online is developing and publishng to the web a collection of new, interactive, participatory resources that exemplify the multimedia capabilities inherent in the Internet for the advancement of teaching and learning science, consistent with the goals and standards inherent in the National Science Education Standards and the AAAS Benchmarks for Science Literacy. But Biology Education Online is much more than a collection of reviewed digital resources. The interactive online journal itself is both a teaching and learning resource. The unique features of a two-tiered interactive review process with message boards attached to each posted resource allows Biology Education Online to be used in professional development of new and current teachers as well a nursery incubator for developers and potential developers of new materials. For example, instructors in teacher preparation programs can incorporate the ongoing review process for Biology Education Online materials as part of the development of evaluative and analytic skills in their students. In this way, beginning teachers not only have a collection of highly peer-reviewed materials to use in developing their teaching strategies and portfolios, they also participate in the review process and learn how to critically evaluate teaching materials. Biology Education Online melds together users and providers. The development process for materials and the resources themselves promotes easy use by the community and encourage users to become developers by creating a nursery incubator where users can present, test, revise and publish new ideas and material in a non-threatening community setting. As a peer-reviewed online journal, Biology Education Online is being developed through an iterative process that requires two levels of online, interactive review prior to publishing to the formal Web site. Biology Education Online creates a synergy between a strong, well-developed audience for digital teaching and learning resources and a proven operational program for delivering those resources. The National Association of Biology Teachers and Access Excellence are collaborating in this endeavor doc5907 none This demonstration project for the Core Integration System (CIS) of a national digital library for SMET Education is providing functioning horizontal and vertical integration of disciplinary collections and associated services. Www.smete.org represents an alliance of nearly twenty partner organizations - disciplinary collections, educational institutions, industry, and non-profit organizations - that is working to establish the basis for a national digital library for SMET education. Collaborators also include strong partners with experience in identifying and collecting digital resources for K-12 education. The project envisions this virtual facility as a place where members of the SMET community of learners interact with one another to develop, locate, use and discuss digital resources that enhance teaching and learning in classrooms, in coursework, in informal settings, and within and across disciplines. Towards this end the PI and team are developing a library portal to demonstrate interoperability of resources and federated search across multiple disciplinary collections. In addition, the project is coordinating the development of shared metadata across multiple disciplines in SMET education and developing subject thesauri and descriptors for describing pedagogy in SMETE. Other activities include participation with other pilot projects in developing a governing structure for the library, developing classifications for ranking materials, and identifying issues associated with curation of aging materials. Significant co-funding of this project is being provided by the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the NSF Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences in recognition of the breadth of disciplinary coverage represented in this work doc5893 none The emergence of new applications has fostered a number of attempts to add functionalities to the minimalist Internet core. However, the adoption of enhancements to the Internet has either been slow, failed entirely, or limited to special-purpose private networks. The key reasons for this failure are extensibility and scalability: First, IP networks were not designed to be extensible at the internetworking level. Second, proposals for new network layer services often require that vast amounts of state information be managed in the core network infrastructure, thus, introducing scalability bottlenecks which exacerbate the existing scalability problem of the growing Internet. Today, the development and deployment of advanced services on the Internet has reached a crossroads: efforts to add new services have quickly encountered scalability problems, yet new services are in critical demand and must be rapidly and widely deployed. The research goal is to develop truly scalable services for each of the three fundamental components of the Internet s infrastructure: information communication, replication, and storage. Taking a new and unified approach to the seemingly conflicting requirements for scalability and sophisticated network services, the researchers propose to develop: 1. Scalable Performance-Predictable Communication: a new foundation for quality-of-service communication via a scalable edge-based architecture. 2. Scalable Multicast for Efficient Data Dissemination: a self-organizing multicast infrastructure scalable to many spontaneously-formed groups. 3. Scalable Storage for Next Generation Information Services: an infrastructure which brings information closer to users and enables scalable third-party information storage services. 4. Design Principles of Scalable Services: a multi-faceted approach for the development and deployment of scalable services in the global Internet, under consideration of economic models, industrial structure, theories and algorithms, engineering, and deployment. Thus, this project proposes to develop architectures and methodologies for deploying scalable services in the global Internet. The impact of this project will be to provide the theoretical underpinnings, basic architecture, and a prototype implementation for the information communication of the global Internet of the 21st century. An integral part of this project is the dissemination of results and the infiltration of standard organizations with the concepts developed within this project, and innovative approaches to educate the next generation of engineers for the future Internet doc5909 none An NSF CBMS Regional Conference on Using Spectral Data to Solve Inverse Problems will be held at the University of Texas - Pan American. The dates for the conference are December 14-18, . Professor Joyce McLaughlin, the Ford Foundation Professor of Mathematics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, will provide ten lectures as the conference Principal Lecturer. The lectures will provide a self-contained and comprehensive exposition on the use of spectral data to solve inverse problems. In these problems, indirect measurements are used to determine material properties of objects. For the set of problems to be presented, the data consists of natural frequencies and selected mode shape measurements. These lectures will present the newest methods for solving these problems, and give both mathematical and experimental insight into how the data depends on the material properties to be recovered. The main thrust for these lectures is for two-dimensional problems, with a brief introduction and insight given for one-dimensional problems. Demonstration experiments will be included to exhibit the response of vibrating systems at natural frequencies, to show the change in the response as material properties change, and to show geometric properties of selected mode shape data. A select number of additional lectures will be provided by applied mathematicians and scientists addressing related inverse problems, in some cases where spectral data is utilized in other contexts doc5910 none Proposal No.: Proposal Type: Investigator Initiated Renewal Principal Investigators: Steven H. Strauss Institution: Colorado State University Separation and Recovery of Ions from Aqueous Media with Redox-Recyclable Metal-Complex Extractants Development of methods for the selective and efficient extraction of ionic species from water and the recovery of the target ions in a minimal volume of secondary waste using one-electron, redox-active, recyclable molecular extractants continues along with an investigation of the underlying scientific principles. The redox-recyclable extractants are sterically demanding iron complexes which are shuttled between their neutral (deactivated) states and their monoanionic or monocationic (activated) states. New extractants with improved performance are being prepared, as are new composite ion-exchange materials made from them. Some of the latter will be activated and deactivated electrochemically, avoiding the need for chemical oxidants and reductants in the complete extraction deactivation-stripping reactivation cycle. Recovery schemes that allow the target ions to be isolated as crystalline salts, a truly minimal volume of secondary waste, are also being developed. The use of these new adsorbent materials for highly-sensitive FTIR or electrochemical real-time, in-pipe detectors for selected target ions is also being explored. The capabilities provided by this new separation technique can have a significant impact in environmental protection. Among the ions that have been selected for new extraction and or detection processes are those that pose a direct threat to the environment, such as perchlorate (groundwater pollution in several western states), cyanide (runoff from many mining operations), dimethylarsenate (groundwater pollution), cationic pesticides such as monoquats, fluorinated surfactants (including perfluorooctylsulfonate, the manufacture of which has been recently discontinued because of its possible threat to human health). In addition, this project can contribute to the efficiency of important biotechnological processes. Other target ions also include selected pharmaceuticals such as penicillins, prostagladins, and methotrexate cations, because the new extraction processes will be efficacious for their isolation from reaction mixtures and fermentation broths generated in current manufacturing processes doc5911 none The project is driven by the vision of a Global InfoBase (GIB): a ubiquitous and universal information resource, simple to use, up to date, and comprehensive. Towards this vision, the project is developing technologies needed to transform today s World-Wide Web into the GIB. The project consists of four interrelated thrusts: Integration of existing technologies into a ``universal information model and query language. Personalized information management, so users obtain more relevant and timely information. Sophisticated semantic-analysis tools. Algorithms for mining information to synthesize new knowledge. The Web has created a resource comprising much of the world s knowledge. Yet today our ability to use the Web as an information resource is in a primitive state. The GIB project is developing technology that will allow society far more effective and efficient use of the dramatically growing amount of information available online doc5912 none The problem of attaining peak performance--which has dominated the research agenda for the past 20 years--will be secondary to concerns of availability, maintainability, and evolutionary growth (AME) in the PostPC era, where computers must cope with the flood of new data and yet be much more dependable and maintainable. This project develops fault insertion techniques to test for graceful recovery from hardware and software failures; self-scrubbing data structures that check and repair themselves to improve software reliability; and the ability to isolate subsets of live systems to test AME in the field. A large-scale prototype is being constructed, with the help of industrial partners, to demonstrate these ideas. This research is being carried out in collaboration with Matthew Merzbacher of Mills College doc5878 none This award provides support for a collaborative project involving two computer scientists and a plant geneticist who will develop new methods, efficient algorithms, and software tools for several important problems in the field of bioinformatics. This supported work includes research into computational paradigms such as quartet methods, interactive systems, and approximation algorithms as applied to the evolutionary analysis of gene sequences, gene duplication, and horizontal transfer events in the genomes of chloroplasts, a DNA-containing organelle found in all plants. Additional studies will examine the information content of genomes by improving and testing a recently developed sequence entropy estimator and a distance metric for genomic sequences. Work in this area will include the application of the improved methods to sequence data from the genomes of mitochondria, viruses, chloroplasts and bacteria. Other efforts will address the important problem of simultaneous multiple sequence alignment and evolutionary tree reconstruction. The multiple sequence alignment approaches to be developed are based on the use of conserved blocks that have few or no gaps, and multiple alignments within a constant band. Work in a fourth area will develop efficient algorithms for computing short and long interspersed nuclear elements (SINES and LINES) in genomic sequences of lengths up to billions of nucleotides. Because of the large amounts of data that must be analyzed, this will require the development or adaptation of appropriate external memory algorithms. Biological, biomedical and pharmaceutical research is undergoing a major revolution as new analytical technologies produce unprecedented amounts of genetic data. The exploration of this information is critically dependent upon the development of advanced computational and software techniques for data analysis, storage and retrieval. From this dependency, a new interdisciplinary research field, bioinformatics (or computational molecular biology) has emerged in recent years. The work supported through this award is expected to make both fundamental and applied contributions to the field. The fundamental research will explore and explicate new ideas and methods for solving algorithmic problems in bioinformatics and the applied research will involve the development and evaluation of software tools in the practice of plant genomics. Although the efforts are aimed at improving the understanding of the evolution of chloroplast genomes, the approaches should be readily extensible to analysis of all other genomes doc5914 none This project is developing tools and processes for the quality control of digital learning materials, using a model based on building and sustaining communities of individual and institutional users and contributors, professional discipline organizations, and publishers of education materials. The effort leverages the work of the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) Initiative which has a growing collection of over 2,000 digital learning materials. Over twenty higher education institutions - led by the California State University System, the University of Georgia System, the University of North Carolina System, and the University of Oklahoma System - are forming discipline communities in biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering mathematics to develop standards and processes for implementing and sustaining mechanisms for peer review of digital learning materials. Additional discipline communities are expected to form as the project evolves. Discussion, debate, and communication take place via MERLOT s web-based worksites where members of the virtual communities collaborate. Institutional participants are supporting their faculty s endeavors through stipends and or reassigned time and travel allotments for attending the MERLOT sponsored workshops and conferences doc5915 none Research proposed here deals with the problem of reliable control of geographically distributed complex real-time systems over a heterogeneous communication network. It is aimed at developing thefoundations of network-based control, from theory to applications. The overall objectives are: the design, analysis, implementation, and performance characterization of distributed and decen- tralized control algorithms and middleware that are affected through hierarchical and heteroge-neous networks comprised of wired and wireless subnets, and the specification and implementation of network services and support required for the development and deployment of distributed control algorithms over hierarchical heterogeneous networks, and demonstration of efficient and fault tolerant remote control using such networks for a number of emerging commercial and scientific engineering applications. Our research agenda will cover the following domains: Research toward a network based control theory that emphasizes and accounts for decentralized, distributed and delay aspects of information transmission dictated by speciffic network structures, and bandwidth limitations. Basic research to leverage the latest developments in distributed robust fault-tolerant control, and to build a new theory for multifaceted control of remote objects over heterogeneous networks, using also the framework of dynamic games. Development of dynamic and adaptive methods for representation of large systems and computation of associated control strategies, using of hierarchical, adaptive graphs and distributed agents. Design and implementation of algorithms and middleware that will interact with the host-node communication protocols and provide the necessary support for the implementation of coordinated distributed control applications. Furthermore, design and implementation of an embedded real-time operating system kernel which will support hard deadlines and stringent QoS guarantees. Development of a demonstration prototype to be deployed on a small-scale heterogeneous hierarchical network comprised of a wireless subnetwork and campus-wide nodes of local area and Internet hosts. In addition to the development of new analytical paradigms and approaches, a component of the research program is the development of reusable simulation and design software, so that the research output can be parlayed to other researchers, practitioners, and industry. We envision numerous future scenarios where the results from this research program will apply. Among these are satellite control, air traffic control, congestion control over highways, remote guidance of airplanes, power networks, electronic commerce, and remote surgery doc5893 none The emergence of new applications has fostered a number of attempts to add functionalities to the minimalist Internet core. However, the adoption of enhancements to the Internet has either been slow, failed entirely, or limited to special-purpose private networks. The key reasons for this failure are extensibility and scalability: First, IP networks were not designed to be extensible at the internetworking level. Second, proposals for new network layer services often require that vast amounts of state information be managed in the core network infrastructure, thus, introducing scalability bottlenecks which exacerbate the existing scalability problem of the growing Internet. Today, the development and deployment of advanced services on the Internet has reached a crossroads: efforts to add new services have quickly encountered scalability problems, yet new services are in critical demand and must be rapidly and widely deployed. The research goal is to develop truly scalable services for each of the three fundamental components of the Internet s infrastructure: information communication, replication, and storage. Taking a new and unified approach to the seemingly conflicting requirements for scalability and sophisticated network services, the researchers propose to develop: 1. Scalable Performance-Predictable Communication: a new foundation for quality-of-service communication via a scalable edge-based architecture. 2. Scalable Multicast for Efficient Data Dissemination: a self-organizing multicast infrastructure scalable to many spontaneously-formed groups. 3. Scalable Storage for Next Generation Information Services: an infrastructure which brings information closer to users and enables scalable third-party information storage services. 4. Design Principles of Scalable Services: a multi-faceted approach for the development and deployment of scalable services in the global Internet, under consideration of economic models, industrial structure, theories and algorithms, engineering, and deployment. Thus, this project proposes to develop architectures and methodologies for deploying scalable services in the global Internet. The impact of this project will be to provide the theoretical underpinnings, basic architecture, and a prototype implementation for the information communication of the global Internet of the 21st century. An integral part of this project is the dissemination of results and the infiltration of standard organizations with the concepts developed within this project, and innovative approaches to educate the next generation of engineers for the future Internet doc5917 none Kortemeyer, Gerd Michigan State University Information Technology Research: Investigation of a Model for Online Resource Creation and Sharing in Educational Settings The advent of widely accessible networked computer technology has opened new avenues for educators, yet the creation of appropriate resources for this medium is extremely time and effort intensive. To truly become more effective than a textbook, a resource needs to take advantage of its medium by being interactive and part of a learner-centered, adaptable and individualizing whole. This research project is designed to address questions of resource pooling and sharing across content areas. The investigators will incubate multi-institutional collaboration and bring together stakeholders to address content issues such as reuse, customization, online community building, quality, and effectiveness. An existing software system under development will be used as a model to support the formation and study of an online collaborative community, including workshops, conferences, support, evaluation, and dissemination doc5918 none This project is a combined experimental and theoretical research effort to manufacture and investigate a system of interacting quantum bits (qubits) based on electrons on a helium film which covers an array of micro electrodes, and to develop methods for controlling this system. In particular, the team is studying the lifetimes and coherence times of the excited state in configurations suitable for qubit operation, including effects of electron-electron interaction, in-plane confinement, and a magnetic field. Problems of broad physical interest, such as quantum localization and chaos in a controlled system with interacting excitations is also being investigated. The project is focused on 1) trapping the electrons over micro dots, 2) controlling the energy-level spacing of targeted electrons by the microdot potential, 3) selective writing of information on individual qubits by appropriately tailored pulses of resonant microwave radiation and microdot potential 4) logical operations on a system of two qubits and 5) reading out the quantum register by detecting single electrons released from the surface or determining the electron distribution over energy levels with underlying micro dots, with a hope of building a system with a large number of qubits to be used as a multi-qubit quantum computer. If successful, such a computer can be manufactured using mainly conventional technologies and can operate at a temperature accessible with commercial refrigerators doc5919 none The proposed research studies the design of agile wireless networks that accommodate time variations in the communication channels, the information sources, and the network topology. The research will lead to design principles that, in addition to enabling more efficient use of the current cellular and PCS bands, will allow exploitation of frequency bands in the 10-100 GHz range to provide high-speed multimedia services for both indoor and outdoor applications. While the basic cellular paradigm of wireless access to a high-speed communication and computing backbone will be adhered to, nearly every other assumption in existing second-generation and projected third-generation cellular and PCS networks will be reexamined. Some of the significant differences from current designs are as follows. A dense network of base stations will provide connectivity despite the high path losses and sharp shadowing at higher frequency bands. Cells with well-defined boundaries may no longer exist, and mobile terminals will see a rapidly varying network topology. A variety of traffic classes, such as voice, data, and video, with diverse requirements regarding delay, loss, quality of reproduction, and number of potential receivers will be considered. Packetized transmission will be considered as a flexible means of supporting such multimedia applications so that current circuit-based cellular trunking is not applicable. A key element of the approach is to envision new applications and new overall system architec- tures. Modeling based on propagation studies and analysis of requirements for carried datastreams will be used both to continually revise the concept systems and to provide models for the design of algorithms for such things as joint implementation of source coding, channel estimation, interference suppression, routing and congestion control. The performance of the algorithms will be evaluated broadly, including aspects of implementation in VLSI as appropriate, and the results will lead to further revision and refinement of the overall system architecture. Many tradeoffs will be explored, such as the tradeoff_ between the performance of distributed soft detection and the network capacity needed to assemble the required information. The integrated research effort will be conducted by five overlapping research teams of University of Illinois faculty investigators and their students, organized around the following interdisciplinary projects: Concept Systems, Modeling, and Performance Limits Design Principles for Wireless Packet Networks Design for Time-Varying Channels Jointly Optimized Source Coding, Channel Coding, and Estimation VLSI Algorithms, Architectures, and Bounds The bulk of the requested funding will be used to support the students. Most of the faculty and students have adjacent offices within the Coordinated Science Laboratory, an environment carefully cultivated to promote intense interaction and collaboration. Regularly scheduled weekly meetings of the investigators are used to coordinate the research and identify opportunities for better integration of the design approach. An External Advisory Committee of key technical people from industry will help ensure that the research is focused on problems and issues likely to be important in the future. This proposal is to supplement NSF grant NSF CCR \An Integrated Exploration of Wireless Network Communication. That grant is funded at a level of $700K for three years beginning October 1, , whereas the original funding request was for $2.5M over five years. Although the proposal was rated as highly competitive, the funding received covers only six students and no faculty time. Additional funding will greatly enhance our ability to achieve our research and educational goals. Keywords: Wireless networks, fading channels, multimedia communications doc5920 none Today s Internet owes its great success to the simple, hour-glass IP network protocol architecture laid out twenty-five years ago. With rapid advances in networking technologies and explosive growth of rich multimedia content in recent years, the networking community finds itself at an important crossroads: what should be the next generation Internet architecture for controlling network resources and provide the quality of service (QoS) needed by emerging multimedia applications? There is a multidimensional spectrum of possible approaches to providing QoS guarantees. The choice of a QoS solution for the next generation Internet will have a substantial impact on both the evolution of the Internet itself, and on what it enables. Making the right choices requires the development of a fundamental understanding of the scalability of QoS controls and the impact of these controls on the efficacy of QoS provisioning. The goal of the proposed research is to develop a comprehensive, quantitative understanding of the fundamental trade-offs involved in various approaches toward providing scalable QoS guarantees. To this end, the researchers will develop coherent theories to systematically address the issue of scalability in QoS controls. Our research program divides broadly into four areas: Aggregate network calculus for guaranteed flows: To gain a thorough understanding of the fine time-scale(e.g., packet-level) behavior of a network system in providing QoS performance guarantees, we will develop an aggregate network calculus to study the impact of aggregate QoS control mechanisms on the performance and complexity of data plane operations. This theory is developed for guaranteed flows - flows which require the network to commit, either at a per-flow or an aggregate level, a certain amount of resources (e.g., bandwidth and buffer) throughout their life time, regardless of the network congestion status. The aggregate network calculus will provide a mathematical framework to quantify the impact of aggregate QoS controls on the fundamental trade-offs in QoS provisioning. It will also yield insights into the design of scalable data plane QoS control mechanisms. End-to-end QoS controls for responsive flows: The researchers will develop fluid models to study the impact of ag-gregate QoS control mechanisms on the end-to-end performance of responsive flows. A responsive flow responds to signs of network congestion, such as loss, by adapting its transmission rate. These models will enable us to develop a better understanding of the behavior of responsive flows such as TCP coupled with different aggregate QoS mechanisms and to design end-to-end QoS services for responsive flows. QoS control laws and control plane aggregation rules. The researchers will develop QoS control laws for capturing the slow time-scale, system-wide behavior of a network and aggregation rules that address the perfor-mance and complexity of control plane operations under aggregate QoS controls. These QoS control laws and aggregation rules will lead us to the design of distributed and centralized algorithms for scalable control plane operations. Scalable QoS mechanisms and service architectures As an integral part in developing these theories, the researchers will also design effective and scalable QoS mechanisms, and tools and techniques for quantifying and evaluating the trade-offs of various QoS solutions. Based on the results from these efforts, the researchers will study how various QoS solutions can be combined to construct meaningful end-to-end services. The research will blend formal modeling analysis, experimentation implementation, and evaluation. The understanding and insights gained as a result of our research will lead to the establishment of the theory, design principles, and guidelines for building scalable QoS controls for the future Internet. This, in turn, will allow reasoned and informed choices to be made as the next generation Internet takes shape doc5921 none Many of today s performance-critical applications involve manipulating data sets that are either too large or too rarely used to be reliably found in local memory caches or local cache servers. Due to the enormous disparity between processor cycle times and disk and network access latencies, these applications waste a large fraction of their time waiting for data; as we look to the future, this problem is expected to become even worse. To overcome this problem, this research will combine aggressive storage prefetching with intelligent cache management to fully hide the data access latency while using memory resources intelligently. Program transformation tools and runtime support systems will be developed that collaborate to customize memory hierarchy and distributed cache resource management for data-intensive applications. With application-specific guidance of memory, network and disk resources, it is possible to decrease execution times by orders of magnitude. The ultimate goal of the research is for programs to never waste time waiting for data, and for programmers to never waste their valuable programming time thinking about this performance problem doc5922 none This is the first year funding of a four-year continuing award. This project addresses issues relating to the construction of a system for answering questions about information contained in a collection of spoken documents. It focuses on the key scientific questions that arise in the integration of prosodic information, speech recognition and parsing in the retrieval of spoken documents, but will not involve implementation of a complete system. There are four key themes in the research: utilizing parsing in information retrieval; integrating prosodic information in parsing spoken language; incorporating uncertainty in parsing to handle speech recognition errors; and improvements to speech recognition of spontaneous speech. All components will share a probabilistic formulation, thereby affording a systematic framework for integrating the information they provide. A primary project goal is to better understand how information provided by one of these components might be effectively utilized to improve he performance of other components in the information retrieval task. Absent a corpus tailored to the information retrieval topics the PI and his team plan to study, progress will be evaluated using existing annotated text collections such as Switchboard and LDC s Broadcast News collections. The work will lead to advances in information extraction from telephone messages, conversations, university lectures, or from any text (such as encyclopedias), and should potentially serve as the basis for a sorely needed sophisticated web browser technology and data mining applications, which in turn would enable people who currently under-utilize computers to become full participants in the information revolution doc5923 none Vast musical databases are currently accessible over computer networks (e.g., the Web), creating a need for sophisticated methods to search and organize these databases. Because music is a multifaceted, multi-dimensional medium, it demands specialized representations, abstractions and processing techniques for effective search that are fundamentally different from those used for other retrieval tasks. By exploiting reductionist theories of musical structure and performance (i.e., musical style), this project will develop hierarchical, stochastic music representations and concomitant storage and retrieval mechanisms that are well-suited to music s unique characteristics, and are both musically and psycho-acoustically plausible. A software system exploiting these representations and retrieval mechanisms will be developed that accepts sonic input, compares abstractions of this input to those in a database of digital recordings, returns sonic samples of the database that best match the query, and allows the user to refine the query using music acoustic-based interfaces of varying degrees of complexity. This research will yield a working music-search engine will application to e-commerce and will provide new scientific knowledge in terms of algorithms and mathematic models in the fields of databases, information retrieval, artificial intelligence, signal processing and perception, for music search and retrieval, which will generalize to other multimedia processing tasks doc5924 none Learning while working in the knowledge-work professions can be supported by appropriately-designed scaffolded work environments (SWEets). Several researchers have assembled a unique team of 10 senior researchers from four major universities to develop a principled engineering process for constructing SWEets. The work will be based in the knowledge work context of science inquiry using an engineering process to construct SWEets for fourth through eleventh graders learning science via scientific investigations in Detroit and Chicago classrooms. The results of the proposed research will be explicit guidelines on how to build effective, computationally-based work environments that scaffold and support individuals engaged in knowledge work. The aim of this effort is to transform what presently appears to be the art into a principled, software engineering approach doc5925 none This project investigates techniques and tools for assuring software quality: finding and removing defects in software systems, as well as improving current methodology for designing high-quality software systems at the outset. The project consists of both experimental and theoretical components. The experimental effort is focused on designing and building tools to improve the quality of Open Source software. Open Source is attractive as a research vehicle in software quality because of the critical role it plays in the nation s economy and precisely because it has the unique feature that it is a real-world system that is completely open and available for study. Because of the Open Source tradition of incorporating useful new techniques and tools into the Open Source environment, there is also an opportunity for direct and widespread impact. The foundational work in this project combines expertise in the three branches of the discipline of the analysis of software: formal verification and theorem proving, model checking, and large-scale software analysis. These three areas have developed rapidly in recent years, seeing both significant theoretical and practical advances. A central thesis of this project is that significant further advances are possible by bringing together these areas to work on a common set of problems doc5926 none Collaboratories are new organizational forms to help scientists who are geographically dispersed to work closely together. A number of collaboratories have been built, and their successes and failures have been due to a combination of technical and social factors not yet fully synthesized. This project will define, abstract, and codify the underlying technical and social mechanisms that lead to successful collaboratories. It will provide the vocabulary, associated principles, and design methods for propagating and sustaining collaboratories across a wide range of circumstances. This project will enhance both the practice of science and the training of new scientists. These goals will be achieved through three coordinated activities: (1) The qualitative and quantitative study of collaboratory design and usage, examining both technical and social aspects of performance; (2) creation and maintenance of a Collaboratory Knowledge Base, a Web-accessible archive of primary source material, summaries and abstracts, and relevant generalizations and principles, a database of collaboratory resources, and other related material; and (3) the abstraction and codification of principles, heuristics, and frameworks to guide the rapid creation and deployment of successful collaboratories, including principles of design or customization doc5927 none York, Bryant Northeastern University ITR: New Approaches to Human Capital Development through Information Technology Research The objective of this project is to discover effective mechanisms for reducing the disparity between the technological haves and have-nots, in terms of employability, income and societal participation (aka The Digital Divide). Since a disproportionately large number of African-Americans fall in the category of have-nots, we have taken on the so-called African American Problem as our research challenge. Recent data suggest that Hispanic Americans have begun to close the gap in the Digital Divide. However, this is not the case for African Americans. Despite years of affirmative action and targeted programs, African Americans as a group have not benefited in proportion to the resources expended. The Internet, the World Wide Web, and new information technologies are powerful engines for change and rapid technological change tends to exacerbate pre-existing social and economic conditions. Thus, the Digital Divide continues to grow because it is firmly supported by existing racial, economic and social divides, despite what appear to be grand efforts to the contrary. Our project will implement a multidisciplinary approach to the solution of the Digital Divide problem for African Americans through basic research in information technology, distributed systems, human computer interfaces, and collaboration technologies with a central emphasis on how culture expresses itself in and influences information technologies. We will utilize our results to develop technologies that diminish the Digital Divide. In this project we will conduct basic research in distributed systems, information retrieval, human computer interfaces, collaboration technologies, social cultural preferences of African Americans, public policy analysis and culture-specific pedagogies and assessments. A unifying framework for our project is the development of a culture-specific, distributed, distance learning system for African Americans based on the single-learner multiple-teacher model. Our basic research is complemented by a number of educational technology development projects and community deployment assessments doc5893 none The emergence of new applications has fostered a number of attempts to add functionalities to the minimalist Internet core. However, the adoption of enhancements to the Internet has either been slow, failed entirely, or limited to special-purpose private networks. The key reasons for this failure are extensibility and scalability: First, IP networks were not designed to be extensible at the internetworking level. Second, proposals for new network layer services often require that vast amounts of state information be managed in the core network infrastructure, thus, introducing scalability bottlenecks which exacerbate the existing scalability problem of the growing Internet. Today, the development and deployment of advanced services on the Internet has reached a crossroads: efforts to add new services have quickly encountered scalability problems, yet new services are in critical demand and must be rapidly and widely deployed. The research goal is to develop truly scalable services for each of the three fundamental components of the Internet s infrastructure: information communication, replication, and storage. Taking a new and unified approach to the seemingly conflicting requirements for scalability and sophisticated network services, the researchers propose to develop: 1. Scalable Performance-Predictable Communication: a new foundation for quality-of-service communication via a scalable edge-based architecture. 2. Scalable Multicast for Efficient Data Dissemination: a self-organizing multicast infrastructure scalable to many spontaneously-formed groups. 3. Scalable Storage for Next Generation Information Services: an infrastructure which brings information closer to users and enables scalable third-party information storage services. 4. Design Principles of Scalable Services: a multi-faceted approach for the development and deployment of scalable services in the global Internet, under consideration of economic models, industrial structure, theories and algorithms, engineering, and deployment. Thus, this project proposes to develop architectures and methodologies for deploying scalable services in the global Internet. The impact of this project will be to provide the theoretical underpinnings, basic architecture, and a prototype implementation for the information communication of the global Internet of the 21st century. An integral part of this project is the dissemination of results and the infiltration of standard organizations with the concepts developed within this project, and innovative approaches to educate the next generation of engineers for the future Internet doc5929 none The Archimedes Project will create a testbed for developing and exploring model interactive environments for the history of mechanics. It will also serve as a proof-of-concept project for open digital libraries for topics in the history of science designed to integrate research and knowledge dissemination in new ways. The project is a join endeavor of the Classics Department at Harvard University, the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, Germany, the English Department at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and the Perseus Project at Tufts University. It also engages wider network of scholars supported in particular by Project International de Cooperation Scientifique (PICS). Numerous treatises on mechanics as well as other forms of documentation of mechanical knowledge and practices constitute the corpus of the testbed. Ongoing research at the MPIWG on the long-term development of mental models of mechanical thinking and their manifestation in technical terminologies, inferences of practitioners, engineers, and scientists plays an important role in the testbed design. The testbed also requires a powerful, linguistically based information technology for handling the variety of languages occurring in the source materials. Source documents must be prepared with tools such as automatic morphological analysis of Latin, Greek and Italian, and semantic linking of sources to general and technical, historical and modern dictionaries and reference works doc5930 none Our society increasingly relies on prompt, accurate delivery of information over the Internet. Users need assurance that the information they get in this way is authentic, and they need to get this assurance in a cheap and reliable way. The research centers around a new approach for engendering this confidence. The starting point is to separate the roles of the owner of a database and its publisher (or publishers). With this approach the user need not trust the publisher. Instead, the owner of the database provides the user with a small amount of summary information . After that, the publisher not only answers the user s questions, but also provides, along with each answer, a short digital certificate of accuracy. Using the summary information, the certificate lets the user check that the information received is correct and complete. Developing and evaluating good schemes to construct these certificates is the key technical challenge. The publisher need not maintain a trusted system, lowering his cost of doing business. The publisher can also more easily provide information from multiple owners. Overall, the approach should make it cheaper to obtain reliable data over the Internet, and will expand the settings where the data is used doc5931 none This is the first year funding of a five-year continuing award. This project is based on the belief that, to be more accessible to the general population, computers must be more proactive in their interactions with people. In human interaction, someone who waits for each command before making any communication attempt would be regarded as uncooperative and unhelpful. In order for a computer to be more proactive and, thus, to bear its part of the burden of initiation in interactions, it must have (1) much more real-time information about its user, and (2) algorithms that select actions based on this information rather than simply on user commands. The computer needs information about the user s current and past emotional, motivational and cognitive state as well as the state of the task at hand. A theory, is needed to guide the development of algorithms that select appropriate actions based on user and task state. This research constitutes the next steps in an attempt by the PI s multidisciplinary team to develop this capability. Proposed research includes: (1) further development of methods to sense user postures, movements, expressions and speech; (2) analysis and fusion of this information to identify and track user states; (3) task state tracking; (4) creating a corpus of emotion- and action-labeled videotapes for use with computer learning; (5) further development of affective communication; (6) development of the basis for human-centered state-based action decisions; and (7) evaluation of computer proaction on human behavior and response. The testbed is an environment for hands-on education in science and engineering, using the Lego Mindstorms construction and robotics environment, with children of middle school age. An emphasis will be on developing proactive computing methods for encouraging interest and conceptual development of minority children and females, who often show lower achievement in science. Although the work will be conducted within an educational environment, the methods developed and studied will be broadly applicable, and this project should serve as an exemplar of the type of work that is needed in other computer-aided situations doc5932 none This award is made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) program solicitation We propose to study transportation as complex adaptive systems (CAS). It is our intent to carry out exploratory research and analysis of various aspects of highway and road transportation systems. The topics for exploratory research and some of the methods used to analyze them are borrowed from many disciplines. They are as mentioned below: (1) The hidden order in apparently random daily urban highway traffic patterns based on algorithmic entropy (Kolmogorov entroy). (2) Connectivity of Transportation Network as a fractal dimension derived from river flow networks and fractal geometry models. (3) Accessibility and mobility based on site and bond percolation theory. (4) Emergence of long-term traffic patterns based on NK models of evolutionary biology. (5) Congestion as a second order phase change based on spin glass theory and emission as a collective outcome of distributed agents modeled after neural networks. (6) Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) and urban activities transport systems based on models of self-organized criticality. We believe that the interdisciplinary research and analysis of transportation systems will offer insights into Complexity and Transportation fields. It is hoped that this would in turn spur interest in development of new traffic flow and transportation models that address the issue of how micro level interactions give rise to macro level behavior and the phenomenon of phase change doc5933 none ion take a long time to make it into applications. The intellectual core of this proposal is to create a coordinated effort in Algorithms from Theory to Practice that connects the basic development of fundamental algorithms and data structures to their many disparate uses. This work will address critical needs by connecting relevant algorithms to application areas, by exposing and tackling important issues that are common to multiple applications, and by developing fundamentally new approaches to solving key problems via the connections made. This proposal aims to provide impact at a number of different levels. At the lowest level are specific research projects that target key application domains. These include algorithms for mesh generation with applications to scientific simulations and graphics, algorithms for indexing and searching needed for a number of data analysis tasks, and protocols that connect machine learning with cryptography to produce a fundamentally new way for people to securely authenticate to their computers. At a higher level, this proposal will create a center to which researchers in application areas can come to build connections and integrate algorithmic techniques and principles into their own projects. At the highest level, this proposal will create tools to improve the process of moving algorithms from theory to applications more broadly. As one example, the course Algorithms in the Real World run by PI Blelloch has already developed a set of web pages detailing how algorithms are used in various applications and what turn out to be the crucial issues involved. A new, extensible version of this database would provide support for theoreticians, practitioners, and educators. We hope the end result to be both a faster pipeline from algorithm design to application, and improved sharing of algorithm techniques across application areas. In addition, we expect the students supported by this effort to fulfill the highest-level goals of this project becoming the next generation vertically-integrated algorithm researchers. The PIs each have a strong track-record in algorithms, both theoretical and applied. Guy Blelloch is developer of the NESL parallel programming language, as well as fast parallel algorithms for a number of core problems. Arvin Blum is known for his work in machine learning and approximation algorithms, and is developer of the Graphphan planning algorithm, used as the basis of many AI planning systems. Manuel Blum is winner of the ACM Turning Award for his work in the foundation of computational complexity theory and its applications to cryptography and program checking. John lafferty is known for his work in language modeling and information retrieval, and is co-developer (along with PI Sleator)of the Link Grammar natural-language parser. Daniel Sleator is winner of this year s ACM Kanellakis Theory and Practice award for the development of the Splay Tree data structure, and more recently been developing algorithms for natural language applications doc5934 none An interdisciplinary team, bridging academia and industry, proposes a united effort to study the dynamics of the global Internet, moving beyond the traditional single-timescale, single-network, single-protocol paradigm to a description that compactly incorporates a wide range of time-scales, a broad spectrum of spatial network topology structures, andmultiple protocols interacting with one another and across the different networking layers. Achieving such a global, multi-scale, and multi-layer understanding of complex large-scale networks is imperative for the successful design and development of the next-generation Internet protocols and engineering tools, where issues related to robustness,scalability, and efficiency take center stage. In this united effort, there are three main ingredients. First, the researchers plan to fully exploit a new breed of datasets of network-wide measurements - unprecedented in volume and quality - that are the result of recent exciting networking research projects, such as the National Internet Measurement Infrastructure project (NIMI). Another source of such data will be various Internet Service Providers (ISPs), such as AT we expect that our collaboration will lead to deeper insights and understanding; a first identification of models, patterns, the influences of various external factors and protocols; and an initial glimpse at the underlying physics of the Internet - a solid understanding of how basic networking mechanisms and user behaviors contribute to the fascinating dynamic observed in today s Internet doc5935 none Second and third generation wireless systems have been designed primarily for voice, so they are con-nection oriented, delay sensitive, and provide fixed bit rates. Additionally, since service is desired any-time anywhere, these systems must provide ubiquitous coverage. This coverage is achieved through rela-tively uniform grids of cell sites, which are placed to control interference and minimize outage rather than to maximize throughout. As a result, such systems deliver low bit rates and are relatively expensive when used for large amounts of information. At the same time, wireline connection to the Internet has encouraged uses (and users) that depend upon bits being virtually free. We contend that this economic mismatch between wired and wireless access is the primary obstacle to the dramatic growth of a wireless Internet. The solution may lie in designing systems specifically for wireless data, recognizing that data services are often connectionless, delay insensitive and have no specific bit rate requirements. These differences suggest that ubiquitous (anytime anywhere) coverage is not a strict requirement for wireless data networks and makes possible systems in which small, separated coverage areas facilitate transfers of megabytes of data in fractions of a second, and for a fraction of the cost associated with conventional ubiquitous coverage. Communication theory and simple link budget calculations tell us that it is possible to build such sys-tems, but the signal processing challenges are numerous and distinct from the historical challenges offered by connection-oriented wireless services. When a mobile user passes an Infostation, there will be a window of opportunity, perhaps as short as a fraction of a second, in which the user will have access to a high-rate communication channel. A key task is to identify that window and transmit at an appropriate rate. The mobile must make these decisions based on measurements of a wideband radio channel in which there is frequency selectivity and time variation in the fading as well as in the interference. In the specific context of an Infostations system, we plan to divide our research into four components: Radio Channel Modeling: The characterization of typical Infostation radio channels. Transceiver Design: The analysis and performance evaluation of transmitters and receivers for both single carrier and multicarrier systems. Radio Resource Management Transmitter power and rate adaptation policies derived from receiver measurements. Algorithm Development Testbed A platform employing DSP and FPGA technology for the practical evaluation of transmitter and receiver algorithms. The activities of this project will encompass three research institutions in New Jersey (New Jersey In-stitute of Technology, Princeton University, Rutgers University) under the auspices of the N.J. Center for Wireless Telecommunications (NJCWT). The NJCWT is an inter-institutional research and educational or-ganization sponsored and funded by the N.J. Commission on Science and Technology. The focus of the center is a multi-year effort in Digital Radio Technology for Computing, Communications and Information Systems. This effort is supportive of and will enhance the present proposed project in wireless networks doc5936 none This project will develop a formal, but practical information technology infrastructure to make government regulations more effectively available to the public. The topic area is hazardous waste management. Federal and California state environmental protection agencies will be engaged in the project. The infrastructure to be developed will include distributed data repositories, and also tools to locate, merge, compare, and analyze the information. Project phases are 1) textual storage, 2) semi-structured indexed storage, 3) means to resolve semantic ambiguities, 4) cross-referencing appropriate for automated access from relevant legal documents, and 5) on-line compliance checking of government regulations. This is an interdisciplinary project with the involvement of experts in law, computer science, and civil environmental engineering doc5937 none In , for a few hundred dollars a year, everyone will have a personal petabyte database (PetDB) that can be accessed from any point of connection, with any device from a high-powered workstation to a PDA. Each individual s PetDB will be their evolving and customized view of all the on-line digital data that exists anywhere. It will store and organize any kind of digital data, without losing structure or information. All this data will be queryable and arranged by type, content, structure, association and multiple categorizations and groupings. The PetDB is an example of what could be done with a new generation of software infrastructure we term Net Data Managers (NDMs). The object of this research is not to build a PetDB per se; but to design and implement the NDM technology upon which PetDBs and other applications could be readily built. NDMs are a departure from current database management systems. They focus on data movement, rather than data storage and must handle data of arbitrary types, without necessarily having a matching database schema. They must execute queries over tens of thousands of information sites, while monitoring possibly millions of triggers over rapidly changing information sources. The first exploratory steps have been taken towards NDMs with initial work on XML querying, text in context indexing and searching, multi-trigger planning and data stream processing. This work has demonstrated some of the basic capabilities of NDMs. Continued research will address the challenging fundamental problems that must be solved to extend these capabilities to exploit the full capabilities of NDMs. At the same time, the scale at which NDMs operate will be extended, in terms of numbers of users, tasks and sites, as well as data volumes, through distributed and parallel implementations doc5938 none Current software design concepts for products, processes, projects, programs, portfolios, and policies largely overlook a simple but fundamental idea: the goal of software design decision making is to create the maximum value added for any given investment of valuable resources. In a business context, profit and opportunities to profit are most valued. In other context, other measures of value apply, such as the solution of major social problems by philanthropic foundations. The investigation will focus on developing and enhancing scientific foundations for software design decision-making models, methods and tools explicitly tied to value-maximization objectives. Strategic approaches to value creation under conditions of uncertainty, incomplete knowledge, competition, and the need for cooperation among self-interested stakeholders will receive particular attention. The research is a joint effort of the University of Virginia, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Washington, and the University of Southern California doc5939 none The s have witnessed explosive, if not revolutionary, growth in wireless telecommunications, fueled in large measure by the technology scaling of digital processing power. Third-generation (3G) wire-less systems promise even more with high-bit-rate data services, such as video and Internet access, with wide-band spread-spectrum modulation. Yet, despite the continued benefit of technology scaling below 0.1am in the next decade, these mobile 3G systems will demand digital processing power, along with programmability and energy efficiency, which are not achievable with conventional digital design techniques. Reconfigurable and flexible software radios, which implement digital IF as well as baseband function, will be essential for 3G systems because of the need to support multiple modulation waveforms and multiple air interface standards. These systems can be expected to demand MIPS of digital IF-processing power and up to MIPS of baseband DSP power. To achieve power levels necessary for mobile sys-tem, energy efficiency of better than 0.15 mW MIPS while deliever MIPS of processing power will be necessary, an order of magnitude better than what can be achieve today with conventional design practices. In this extensive three-year research effort, we will consider asynchronous design techniques for achieving energy-efficient, high-performance digital signal processing for 3G wireless applications. We will fully exploit the inherent high-performance and low-power properties of asynchronous design, to consume power only where needed and to adapt to the actual data inputs. Specifically, we will combine fine-grained asynchronous micropipelines with adaptive (or programmable) power-supply control and a dataflow-driven microarchitecture to provide a funcadmental leap in complex programmable digital signal processing power and energy efficiency, unachievable using existing synchronous techniques. We in-tend to develop an asynchronous programmable DSP that is capable of supporting a significant fraction of the IS-95 and W-CDMA standards in software, including the performance- and power-intensive I and Q modulation and demodulation at less than 400 mW of peak power dissipation doc5940 none Proposal Number: GOALI: Surface Heat Transfer, Surface Skin Friction, and a Reynolds Analogy For Flows Over Surfaces With Real Component Roughness PI: Phillip Ligrani This project focuses on fundamental research to relate friction and thermal effects of flow path surfaces to real detailed surface roughness from actual applications. These include the complex, spatially-varying roughness on internal turbine airfoil cooling passages, external turbine airfoil surfaces (as employed in gas turbine engines), and heat exchanger surfaces. Such roughness plays major roles in augmenting heat loading, pressure drop, drag, and aerodynamic losses. The real rough surfaces employed for testing are prepared using similar procedures and environments employed for actual operating engine components, and are provided by General Electric Corporate Research and Development Center, and General Electric Aircraft Engines. Experimental data are obtained in an internal channel flow, as well as on an external airfoil with the same Reynolds numbers, Mach numbers, pressure gradients, free-stream turbulence levels, passage flow rates, boundary layer development, and physical dimensions as those that exist in operating gas turbine engines. Two principal goals are: (i) the development of a rough surface Reynolds Analogy for flows over the rough surfaces encountered in the actual applications, and (ii) the development of new predictive models to account for roughness in boundary layer numerical prediction schemes. The results obtained as part of this study are also useful for the development of improved surface manufacturing techniques doc5941 none Life at its most detailed level depends on the geometric shape of molecules. Nevertheless, geometric methods are relatively uncommon in computational biology, primarily because of difficult and unsolved issues in applying geometric computing to biology. This project will address these causes by investigating geometric representations and developing novel geometric methods. It will incorporate these into software that helps structural biologists with their work and integrates with their current tools. The key research issues include: 1)representation and classification of geometric shape; 2)synthesis of geometric, physical, and statistical information; 3)computation and representation of motion; 4)organization of shapes for rapid searches; and 5) hierarchies for everything. This research is expected to shed light on some of the most important unsolved biological puzzles: prediction of protein structure, simulation of protein folding, and analysis of ligand to protein docking. These processes link form to function. Understanding them will pave the way to a post-genomic era in biological research, in which the wealth of DNA sequence information is complemented by corresponding knowledge of geometric shape. Together, sequence and shape will provide a description of the biological function so critical for all life doc5942 none Reif, John H. Duke University ITR: Self-Assembly of DNA Nano-Scale Structures for Computation This project is a multi-institutional effort to investigate the use of DNA self-assembly to do massively parallel computations at the molecular scale. The main goal is to develop a proof-of-concept demonstration of the application of DNA self-assembly to various basic computational tasks, such as sequences of arithmetic and logical computations executed in massively parallel fashion, and the application of this method to computational problems such as integer factorization. The research involves testing of various input output methods, development of novel DNA tiles with properties that facilitate the self-assembly and their visualization by imaging devices such as an atomic force microscope, and methods to minimize errors in self-assembly. Specifically, the experiments are being conducted to evaluate the speed and error rates of the various types of self-assembly reactions. In addition, experimental testing of massively parallel DNA self-assembly on particular problems, such as arithmetic and Boolean vector operations, is being performed. Some of the technological areas that could be impacted are the application of DNA Lattices as a substrate for surface chemistry and as a substrate for layout of nano-scale circuit components, the construction of 3D DNA lattices, and DNA motors and their application to DNA computations doc5943 none Second and third generation wireless systems have been designed primarily for voice, so they are connection oriented, delay sensitive, and provide fixed bit rates. Additionally, since service is desired any-time anywhere, these systems must provide ubiquitous coverage. This coverage is achieved through relatively uniform grids of cell sites, which are placed to control interference and minimize outage rather than to maximize throughout. As a result, such systems deliver low bit rates and are relatively expensive when used for large amounts of information. At the same time, wireline connection to the Internet has encouraged uses (and users) that depend upon bits being virtually free. We contend that this economic mismatch between wired and wireless access is the primary obstacle to the dramatic growth of a wireless Internet. The solution may lie in designing systems specifically for wireless data, recognizing that data services are often connectionless, delay insensitive and have no specific bit rate requirements. These differences suggest that ubiquitous (anytime anywhere) coverage is not a strict requirement for wireless data networks and makes possible systems in which small, separated coverage areas facilitate transfers of megabytes of data in fractions of a second, and for a fraction of the cost associated with conventional ubiquitous coverage. Communication theory and simple link budget calculations tell us that it is possible to build such systems, but the signal processing challenges are numerous and distinct from the historical challenges offered by connection-oriented wireless services. When a mobile user passes an Infostation, there will be a window of opportunity, perhaps as short as a fraction of a second, in which the user will have access to a high-rate communication channel. A key task is to identify that window and transmit at an appropriate rate. The mobile must make these decisions based on measurements of a wideband radio channel in which there is frequency selectivity and time variation in the fading as well as in the interference. In the specific context of an Infostations system, we plan to divide our research into four components: Radio Channel Modeling: The characterization of typical Infostation radio channels. Transceiver Design: The analysis and performance evaluation of transmitters and receivers for both single carrier and multicarrier systems. Radio Resource Management Transmitter power and rate adaptation policies derived from receiver measurements. Algorithm Development Testbed A platform employing DSP and FPGA technology for the practical evaluation of transmitter and receiver algorithms. The activities of this project will encompass three research institutions in New Jersey (New Jersey Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Rutgers University) under the auspices of the N.J. Center for Wireless Telecommunications (NJCWT). The NJCWT is an inter-institutional research and educational organization sponsored and funded by the N.J. Commission on Science and Technology. The focus of the center is a multi-year effort in Digital Radio Technology for Computing, Communications and Information Systems. This effort is supportive of and will enhance the present proposed project in wireless networks doc5944 none Implanted biomedical devices have the potential to revolutionize medicine. The types of procedures that are being proposed could greatly improve the health and vitality of persons in ways previously not possible. Information technology is a critical component of this endeavor, requiring both novel hardware and software design. The limited power and computational capabilities of these biological implants present challenging research issues. As progress is made on these topics, there is great promise of long-term benefits. Multidisciplinary research, drawing on the expertise of researchers in a wide array of areas is required. This proposal assembles a multi-institutional team of researchers in computer science and engineering, solid state devices, and medicine. The combined talents of this team will be required to realize the goal of this proposal - small biomedical devices composed of smart sensors that are implanted for long-term use. These devices require the ability to communicate with an external diagnostic computer system via a wireless interface. A large-scale research program on smart sensors is on-going at Wayne State University, covering all aspects from materials characterization through integrated circuit design and simulation to hybrid device fabrication. This major research initiative requires a multidisciplinary team involving faculty, researchers, and students from the Colleges of Engineering, Science, and Medicine. All are members of the Smart Sensors and Integrated Microsystems (SSIM) research group. The research in this proposal adds a new dimension to the currently funded research of the SSIM program by providing wireless communication capabilities to the implanted microsensors. This additional capability is possible because of the close collaboration among researchers at Wayne State University and Colorado State University. The proposed work will take an integrated hardware and software approach to developing solutions for wireless networking of human-embedded microsensors. These solutions will be bio-compatible, energy-efficient, fault-tolerant, and scalable. In addition, they would support continuous operation and provide diagnostic capabilities. The proposed work will address several fundamental questions for the wireless networking of embedded microsensors, including those arising due to the need for low-powered, low-maintenance, highly-reliable, and scalable solutions. As a demonstration of our proposed techniques, an artificial retina prosthesis and related visual cortical implant will be developed. The goal is to design wireless network protocols for energy-efficient communication between multiple retinal sensor array cortical implants and an external base station. The research in this proposal provides the building blocks for this wireless network. The severe limits on the computational and memory capabilities of the smart sensor implants place tight constraints on the communication protocol. For this reason, an external communication device, contained in a pair of eyeglasses, for example, will provide the additional resources necessary for protocol-compliant communication, and increased range and bandwidth. Software to display the message contents will be developed in order to validate the network protocols and the sensor communication. The software to perform image analysis and recognition will be also be developed by our research team. The developed solution will be evaluated, through both simulation and pro-totyping, for various performance and functionality criteria including bio-compatibility, energy-efficiency, reliability, and scalability Upon completion, the proposed work will have several benefits in the area of wireless networking of low-powered microsensors, which are suitable for biomedical applications. Other biomedical applications where this technology are useful is limited only by our imagination. For example, patients with Parkinson s disease and epilepsy could benefit from the ability to implant sensors in the neural pathways of the brain to alter the undesired signals and restore proper functioning. Existing technology is very crude and not suitable for chronic implanted devices or complex signal stimulation and detection. Another example is acoustic and optical biosensor arrays for blood analysis currently under development at Wayne State University. Similar sensors are being developed to detect cancer cells by implanting a smart sensor in the body of a recovering cancer patient. One of the main contributions of this project would be a framework for developing scalable wireless networking and powering solutions for biomedical applications. The integration of advances in wireless networking and smart sensor technology have great potential in several other applications such as the monitoring of distributed environmental sensors. It is envisioned that networked smart sensors will revolutionize our world in ways beyond our current imagination. Besides the technical benefits there will be several societal and educational benefits. Societal benefits include improved quality-of-life for many individuals and the accompanied benefits to society of their increased vitality and longevity. The educational component of this project will train information technology personnel in this very important interdisciplinary area. In particular, the PIs plan to develop a wireless networking of distributed and embedded sensors, to integrate the course in the existing curriculum at Wayne State and Colorado State, to develop tutorials centered around the theme of the proposal, and to work towards increasing the involvement of minorities and women in interdisciplinary research doc5945 none Power consumption, thermal issues, and battery lifetimes are primary design issues in many computer systems. To address the needs for effective and efficient power management in current computer systems, this project studies unified methodologies for creating power-aware hardware and software. A key underlying philosophy in this work is the notion of real-power systems. Drawing an analogy to real-time computer systems, real-power systems seek to maintain predictable and manageable levels of power consumption with the best possible performance, rather than simply reducing power consumption regardless of performance. A multi-level approach spanning operating systems, compilers, and hardware brings leverage to a problem that is difficult to address at the hardware level alone doc5946 none This project studies the integration of heterogeneous resources into a system-on-chip (SOC) solution. Heterogeneous SOC integration supports the fabrication of RF, analog, high performance digital, and re-configurable subsystems within a single piece of silicon, and includes issues of simulation, design, integration, test, and education. An example SOC is a human machine transducer chip that provides a speech recognition interface to a ubiquitous wireless network. Such a system represents a standard interface modality. Multiple topics are being researched including low-power speaker identification, speech processing algorithms, and hardware implementations. Low power, high performance wireless protocols are also being developed to support the asymmetric communication loads, sending low bandwidth control messages produced from the recognized speech and receiving high-bandwidth information return for visual, audio, and other feedback to the user doc5947 none Asynchronous (or clockless) circuits have become the focus of renewed interest because of their potential to alleviate a number of challenging problems in future-generation chip design: clock distribution, power management, and design reuse. To overcome the limitations of current asynchronous design methodologies, this project is developing an automated CAD framework for the synthesis and optimization of large-scale asynchronous systems. In addition to basic high-level scheduling, binding and allocation, and Hardware Description Language support (Verilog HDL), the project is exploring the open and challenging problems of: (a) high-performance pipeline synthesis and optimization; (b) architectural exploration (targeted to the frequent common-case operations); (c) distributed controller synthesis and optimization; (d) system-level performance and power analysis; and (e) the synthesis of mixed asynchronous synchronous systems. The tool framework is being applied to a number of commercial examples and validated through chip design, fabrication, and test doc5948 none An interdisciplinary team of researchers in Physics, Applied Physics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science are establishing an Institute for Quantum Information (IQI) to facilitate the investigation of quantum information science to provide new capabilities in the revolutionary field of quantum computing. To this end, efforts are being made to develop new algorithms for the manipulation, processing, and distribution of quantum information (including information capacities of communication channels, reliable schemes for distributed computation, efficient quantum error correcting codes). Investigations of physical systems for the implementation of quantum computation and communication, as well as coherent nanotechnology, principally by the way of theoretical models and analysis, are being performed. The team is also pursuing techniques to develop active control of quantum effects in nanoscale integrated circuits involving systematic approaches to the suppression of unwanted quantum effects via on-chip feedback networks and methods for stabilizing and exploiting emergent quantum behaviors in the context of analog hybrid VLSI doc5949 none The goal of this project is to provide the Information Technology (IT) advances required for petabyte-scale data intensive science in the 21st century. Driving the research are unprecedented requirements for geographically dispersed extraction of complex scientific information from very large collections of measured data. To meet these requirements, the GriPhyN (Grid Physics Network) team of seven IT research groups and four frontier physics experiments will pursue IT advances centered on the creation of Petascale Virtual Data Grids (PVDG). Only PVDG technology can meet the data-intensive computational needs of a diverse community of thousands of scientists spread across the globe. GriPhyN s physicists (the CMS and ATLAS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)) are about to enter a new era of exploration of the fundamental forces of nature and the structure of the universe. The data analysis for these experiments presents enormous IT challenges. Thousands of scientists, connected worldwide by various networks, need to perform computationally demanding analyses of data sets growing from 100 terabytes to 100 petabytes. The scale of this task far outpaces our current ability to manage and process data in a distributed environment, demanding fundamental IT advances. To meet these challenges, GriPhyN will pursue an aggressive program of IT research to realize the concept of Virtual Data. This encompasses the definition and delivery of a (potentially unlimited) virtual space of data products derived from experimental data. In this virtual data space, requests can be satisfied by direct access and or by computation, depending on the requirements of local and global resource management and security policies. GriPhyN s IT researchers will target advances in the areas of: Virtual data technologies, including information models and new methods of managing software components for virtual data manipulation, Request planning and scheduling, including mechanisms for requesting and enforcing policy constraints in a networked environment, and Task execution, including agent computing and other paradigms for meeting user requirements for performance, reliability, and cost. In order to apply these advances to experimental data analysis problems, GriPhyN will package them in a multi-faceted, domain-independent Virtual Data Toolkit, and use this toolkit to prototype the PVDG technology for the CMS, ATLAS, LIGO, and SDSS data analysis tasks. In the process, it will create PVDG systems for community use. This will educate a new generation of interdisciplinary scientists with expertise in the critical area of data intensive computing. The benefits of doing so will not be unique to physics, but will also apply to problems in biology (e.g. the human genome project), the environment (e.g. the Earth Observation System), and many other areas doc5950 none This award provides funding for a two-year collaborative project between the NSF Industry University Cooperative Research Center in Ergonomics at Texas A&M University and Professor Arun Garg from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The purpose of this proposal is to expand the intellectual capital of selected research projects at the Ergonomics I UCRC through Dr. Garg s participation in several research projects. Dr. Garg will contribute to these projects by interacting with the students, faculty, and industrial partners on the design, analysis and interpretation of the selected studies. The expected outcome of the proposed collaboration would include higher quality research in ergonomics at the Center which should enhance the Center s reputation both in the scientific community as well as in industry doc5951 none This research addresses the problem of adding data management facilities to inherently autonomous, distributed information sources such as those that occur in the web. Here, by data management, is meant the allocation and structuring of resources to provide more responsive access to data for applications. In this kind of environment, data management must be superimposed through an independently controlled service that exists between the data sources and the applications. This is facilitated through the introduction of architecture based on data centers, a collection of machines that prestage and distribute data for its clients. Client applications submit profiles describing their overall data needs, and the data center gathers data and organizes it on behalf of their clients in order to provide efficient data access. This research explores systems issues and techniques for the design and operation of data centers. This includes the management of large numbers of profiles, heuristics for balancing the needs of large numbers of users against the available resources of the data center, and the efficient processing of future client data needs against the data that is managed by the data center doc5952 none The applications of microfluidic devices (which involve liquids moving in spaces measured in micrometers, i.e. millionths of a meter) are growing explosively. As a specific example, consider the development of microsystems for blood testing and screening. For consumers, one could envision devices available in drugstores that could perform genetic screening for conditions of concern to individuals. At a larger scale, use of such devices in blood banks could significantly reduce the time and blood lost in screening the 14 million pints of blood donated per year. Sample preparation is a critical bottleneck in the development of integrated miniature analytical systems, and it remains largely unaddressed. It is currently done outside the microsystem by mixing, shaking, and pipetting, because there are no effective integrated design method. Improved computational methods promise to allow integration and interconnection of microfluidics. This will have an effect analogous to automated methods for VLSI design on microelectronics; it will revolutionize the field. This project will develop a computational infrastructure for simulation and design of microfluidic systems involving non-Newtonian, micrometer nanometer-scale flows dominated by surface-related phenomena. Computational tools and analytical tools will be developed and used to compare with theoretical and experimental results. The project emphasizes methods to deliver complex molecules to flow surfaces, to create surface reaction sites and to provide the components for molecular-scale mixing and dispensing. It will design, fabricate, and characterize both stationary and oscillating MEMS fluidic channels and surfaces to evaluate molecular-scale mixing, flow, delivery, and dispensing of complex biological fluids. The focus will be on surface dominated flow and reaction phenomena that can be scaled for delivery of single molecules to programmed reaction sites. Such surface-related phenomena should find broad application in making MEMS-based, chip-scale analytical instruments and biochips . The computational tools required to analyze and design such devices are currently nonexistent. This project brings together a team of computer scientists, numerical analysts, fluid dynamicists, experimentalists, and microscale process theoreticians who will collaborate closely on creating those tools and using them doc5953 none Visualization of Multi-valued Scientific Data: Applying Ideas from Art and Perceptual Psychology This is a multi-disciplinary research project to discover new visualization tools for interacting with and understanding multi-valued volumes of scientific data and the physical phenomena they measure. The tools will be developed and evaluated in close collaboration with scientists in three disciplines: neurobiologists studying neural development and disease via biological imaging, computational flow researchers studying blood flow through arteries, and geographers using remote sensing for environmental monitoring and resource management. We will factor out common patterns from the problems in these multiple disciplines to develop interaction metaphors and visualization techniques that are generalizable and widely applicable. This project develops new visualization evaluation methodologies, an area that has only begun to be addressed. And it compares the effectiveness of visualization applications in several interactive and static computing and display environments including a 4-wall Cave, a 40 x40 virtual environment with a head mounted display, stereo head-tracked workbenches, desktop workstations, paper, and 3D rapid-prototyping output. Immersive environments will be studied because the value of these non-traditional working environments has not been established and because they present an opportunity to explore fundamentally different interaction metaphors. Comparisons will be performed for both interactive and static cases with appropriate technology determined for each application. This project brings together experience from art and perceptual psychology for inspiration. Through several centuries, artists have evolved a tradition of techniques to create visual representations for particular communication goals. Art history provides a language for understanding that knowledge. We will draw inspiration from painting, sculpture, drawing, and graphic design and apply these techniques to the scientific problems. Beyond inspiration, perceptual psychology also brings a second set of knowledge to bear on scientific visualization problems. Evaluating the effectiveness of visualization methods is difficult because, not only are the goals difficult to define and codify, tests that evaluate them meaningfully are difficult to design and execute. These evaluations are akin to evaluating how the human perceptual system works. Perceptual psychologists have been developing experiments for understanding perception for decades, and they will help develop methodology and expertise for evaluating visualization methods in close collaboration with biologists, fluids researchers, geographers, artists, and computer scientists. While many of the individual components of this project are important alone, the collaborative aspects are the most notable. Mining ideas from art and perception will suggest unusually innovative visualization ideas. The application of new visualization techniques and collaboration with researchers in other fields will provide us with a unique opportunity to validate the techniques and ensure that they are responsive to the needs of the scientific problems. Because the techniques will be developed with application to multiple disciplines, they are likely to find further application within these and other disciplines. The assembled team brings strengths in all of the disciplines and has already demonstrated a track record of collaborative work. The broader impact of the proposed research lies not only in the information technology arena, where new methods will help scientists in many disciplines to more effectively interact with and understand their data and gain insight about the physical phenomena they represent, but also in the specific scientific domains we will study. The study of blood flow could lead to improved understanding of and treatment for cardiovascular pathologies. An understanding of early neural development could enable new therapies for birth defects, genetic disorders, and other diseases. Remote sensing advances could provide more effective resource monitoring and permit widespread improvements in global quality of life doc5954 none This is the first 4 years funding of a five-year continuing award. Humans are very good at discerning the spatial origin of sound using a mixture of frequency-dependent interaural time difference (ITD), interaural level difference (ILD), and pinna spectral cues in disparate environments ranging from open spaces to small crowded rooms. This ability helps us to interact with others and the environment by sorting out individual sounds from a mixture, and helps us to survive by warning us of danger over a wider region of space compared to vision. These advantages of spatial sound are important for human-computer interaction. While the frequency-independent ITD cues (delays) associated with the two ears are relatively easy to render over headphones, the ILD (level difference) and pinna elevation cues are not. For a given source location and frequency content, the sound scattered by the person s torso, head and pinnae, and is received differently at the two ears, leading to differences in the intensity and spectral features of the received sound. These effects are encoded in an extremely individual Head Related Transfer Function (HRTF) that depends on the person s anatomical features (structure of the torso, head and pinnae). This individuality has made it difficult to use the HRTF in the proposed applications. Recent research, including that of members of this team, has focused on measuring the HRTFs for individuals in specific environments, on constructing models of the HRTF, on understanding how the geometry of the body is related to the characteristics of HRTF, and how the brain processes the cues to derive spatial information. However, this research has also indicated that the brain is extraordinarily perceptive to errors in cues that result when sound is rendered with an incorrect HRTF. In this project the PI and his team will use numerical methods to compute individualized HRTFs from accurate 3-D surface models of the body. They will use multiview, multiframe computational vision techniques to extract the surface models from imagery. They will then use boundary element methods employing fast multipole transform techniques and parallel processing to compute the HRTFs from the surface models. The resulting HRTFs will be evaluated both by objective comparisons with acoustically measured HRTFs and by psychoacoustic testing, and will be used in demonstrations of virtual reality, augmented reality, and teleconferencing. A major advantage of this vision-based approach is that it will allow the PI and his team to investigate and model the way that HRTFs change with body posture, providing the potential of tracking dynamic environments. Thus, the project will include fundamental research to extend the static HRTF measurements to dynamic situations in different environments, using a combination of visual tracking to locate the person in real space, and construction of in-room HRTFs from free-field HRTFs using fast iterative techniques. This will provide a scientific foundation for HCI applications of audio rendering. The research will in addition yield algorithms and understanding that will have an impact on varied fields, including computer vision based model creation; scientific computing; computational acoustics for noise control and land mine detection; neurophysiological understanding of human audition; etc doc5955 none The objective of the five-year project is to develop and implement a model IT-education training economic development program for rural areas utilizing distance education and telecommunications technologies for education and employment of IT-workers. The project will (1) train adult IT-workers, (2) facilitate expansion of IT-employment opportunities to rural areas, (3) encourage K-12 students to pursue IT-careers in their community, (4) and to evaluate the education, economic and social impact of the IT-education training economic development program. The project will impact the entire state of South Dakota with the involvement of three State Universities, three Native American Community Colleges, a consortium of thirty-three rural schools and communities, and several information technology businesses and rural communities in Nebraska, North Dakota, New Mexico, and Idaho. A specific emphasis will be placed on Native Americans, with the involvement of K-12 schools with high Native American populations and Native American Community Colleges. The proposed research project involves the development and implementation of an IT-education program for K-12 students and adults in rural areas to help meet the current information technology worker shortage. The project will involve development of an IT-education program for K-12 schools to prepare students to move into IT-careers and an intensive IT-training program for adults in rural areas. The adult IT-worker training program will identify residents in rural areas who have an aptitude for IT-work and a desire for a career in information technology. The project team will work with IT-employers to design an intense training program for these adults. Upon successfully completing the IT-training program, IT-business partners would either locate a facility in the rural community or allow the workers to telecommute. Year 1 of the project will involve three primary efforts (1) development of the IT-worker training program for rural residents, (2) identification and testing adults for participation in the IT-training program, and (3) development of the K-12 IT-education program. Years 2 through 4 will involve implementation of the IT-education program into the thirty DIAL Consortium communities in South Dakota. In Year 5 the program will be disseminated to other South Dakota communities as well as Nebraska, North Dakota, and Idaho. Through out the project period the social, economic, and educational impact of the IT-education program will be evaluated. A special focus of the evaluation will be to study the impact of the program on the Native American community members involved in the project. Based on the results of the project, the IT-education and training programs will be extended to other rural communities throughout the United States. The proposed model will have a significant impact on the economies of rural communities and will reduce the IT-worker shortage in the United States doc5866 none A necessary step towards the goal of building more reliable software systems, on time and within budget, is to establish an institutionalized empirical discipline for understanding causal relationships among the processes, components, and technologies that affect the building of systems. As in the physical and natural sciences, experimentation in software engineering requires a community with support for collaboration, experimental replication and refinement, and sharing of experimental data and results. For these reasons the Center for Empirical Software Engineering Research (CESER) undertakes original empirical research and is developing a prototype system for sharing and evolving the results of such research with a community of affiliated researchers and practitioners. CESER develops and refines techniques to increase the descriptive and predictive power of empirical models, and studies specific software development technologies to enable industrial organizations to understand the benefits and drawbacks of those technologies in their specific context. The Center provides courses and symposia on empirical methodologies and results, and assists the use of empirical knowledge in software engineering education. The Center s initial focus is on empirical studies of software COTS integration and software quality improvement phenomenology. The center is initially organized as a collaborative effort among the University of Maryland, the Fraunhofer Center - Maryland, the University of Southern California, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and Mississippi State University doc5957 none The principal lecturer for this CBMS series on Environmental Statistics will be Richard Smith from the University of North Carolina, and the series will take place at the University of Washington, in conjunction with the National Research Center for Statistics and the Environment. The lectures will cover topics in geostatistics, nonstationary models, lattice models, spatio-temporal models, monitoring network design, time series, trend detection, and extreme values, with motivation for each topic drawn from environmental applications doc5958 none Ensembles of distributed communication, computation, and storage resources, also known as Computational Grids , are emerging as a critical platform for high-performance computing. Grids are used effectively to support runs of distributed applications at a large enough scale to provide new disciplinary results to their developers. Researchers in almost every field of science and engineering are particularly interested in a class of applications particularly well suited to the Grid, scientific simulations where many parameterized instances of a give computation are performed. The development of accessible, efficient, fault-tolerant Grid-enabled versions of simulation software will enable disciplinary scientists to investigate wide-ranging scenarios and to obtain new results orders of magnitude faster than is currently possible. Many scientists would like to view large-scale simulations as software instruments that support some level of user interaction. This would be effective only if simulations can be deployed easily and controlled dynamically, i.e. if the computation can be steered. A traditional scenario is for the user to steer the simulation based on partial results that evolve continuously during execution. The partial results provide an increasingly refined indicator of the final results of the simulation and can be used to identify mid-execution which parameter sets are most promising. Given the potential of wide-area, federated Grid environments to deliver the aggregate computational power, data storage and dissemination facilities for large-scale simulations, and the need for scientists to steer such computations, it is increasingly important to develop performance-efficient and steerable software instruments that target the Grid. This project will address the significant computer science problems that arise from the need to support steerable scientific simulations in large-scale Grid environments. The project will design, develop, and prototype a virtual software instrument as a vehicle for designing and prototyping scalable, steerable scientific simulations for the Grid. It will use a Monte Carlo simulation program, MCell, as a prototype application for development and testing of the virtual instrument. The virtual instrument itself will consist of a set of software modules, libraries, interfaces, and steering-sensitive scheduling algorithms. The project will have impact on both the computer science and disciplinary science communities. It will foster new research in computer science through the development of event models, performance models, data management strategies, and adaptive scheduling and steering algorithms. It will also enable domain scientists to obtain new results in neuroscience doc5959 none This Project will develop advanced parallel algorithms and software for simulating complex flows with dynamic interfaces. The development of scalable, parallel high-accuracy algorithms for simulating such flows poses enormous challenges in computational science. The project will use these algorithms for microstructural simulation of blood flow. This application provides an excellent testbed for the methods: it is extremely computationally challenging and of critical medical importance. Blood flow belongs to a class of flow problems with dynamic interfaces. Blood is a mixture of interacting gel-filled solid sells and fluid plasma. Current blood flow models are macroscopic, treating the mixture as a homogeneous continuum. Microstructural models resolve individual cells deformations and their interaction with the surrounding plasma. Because of the computational difficulties of resolving tens of thousands of dynamically deforming cells, no one to date has simulated realistic blood flows at this level. Yet such simulations are necessary in order to gain a better understanding of blood damage - which is central to improved artificial organ design - and for the development of more rational macroscopic blood models. Simulating flows with dynamic interfaces is much more difficult than flows in well-understood fixed domains. The central challenges are to develop numerical algorithms that stably and accurately couple the moving fluid and solids, and geometric algorithms for computing the resulting dynamic meshes. This project takes the approach of treating both fluid and solid domains as collections of grid points, with associated meshes, that evolve over time and devising numerical algorithms that couple the domains seamlessly. It will attack the difficulty of creating and managing the evolving mesh by developing scalable parallel algorithms for the convex hull, Delaunay triangulation, and mesh partitioning components. With careful attention to fundamental algorithmic issues, these cheap geometric computations will enable these dynamic flow simulations to scale to thousands of processors as on mult-teraflop systems. This research will benefit a wide community of scientists and engineers. The computational algorithms will be widely applicable to a variety of fluid-solid and fluid-fluid interaction problems. More generally, the core parallel computational geometry kernels will provide generic support for the geometric computations underlying many dynamic irregular problems. The project will distribute a portable library of efficient implementations of these algorithms. Also, the project will undertake a broad-based, interdisciplinary program integrating research and education. It will be part of a new program in Computational Science and Engineering, serving as the archetype of how applications, computational, computer, and mathematical scientists can work together to tackle societal problems that cannot be solved solely by any one discipline doc5960 none The project researches a new form of operating system to manage a model of computing called an Active Space. It integrates physical spaces that contain ubiquitous computers into a computational environment that supports human activity and applications. With anytime anywhere ubiquitous devices, the users view of the computational environment is extended beyond the physical limits of a computer and is placed into the surrounding physical space, augmented with computers that sense and affect that space around the user. Applications become mapped not just to views associated with specific windows in a monitor but instead to the physical environment. Therefore, the physical space, augmented with communicating computer devices, becomes a distributed computing system. Active Spaces have the potential for creating multi-billion dollar industries. Automated surgery, collaboration and engaged learning are a few of the compelling examples. Gaia, an operating system for Active Spaces, will accommodate diversity by exploiting standards for interoperation and cooperation. System services track, authenticate and support mobile users with reconfigurable graphics, multimedia and Active Space applications. A unifying object bus, component model, and adaptive stream model extends plug and play to distributed mobile ubiquitous computers cooperating to support a computational environment within physical spaces like cities, buildings and rooms doc5961 none Large-scale networked software systems are hard to design, and even more difficult to validate. Validation of such systems is increasingly important, since they are more and more being called on to perform critical functions. This validation difficulty stems from the inherent complexity of these systems, and often is due to the fact that they are often designed to adapt to variable workloads and operating conditions at the process, node, and network levels. Incorrect operation during periods of dynamic adaptation can lead to unpredictable and potentially hazardous consequences. In order to ensure that such systems operate correctly in critical environments, one must perform validations to confirm that they will function reliably in the presence of faults failures, have predictable performance, and will continue to operate when intrusions occur. Validation of multiple behavior dimensions (e.g., reliability availability, performance, and survivability) is also critical. This research will develop the theory, methodology, and tools necessary to experimentally validate the reliability availability, performance, and survivability of large-scale networked software systems. The intention is to develop a comprehensive framework for experimentally validating large-scale networked software systems. Taken as a whole, this work will provide a sound and fundamental approach to validation of networked software and applications doc5962 none This pilot project is building both a technical infrastructure that facilitates user discovery of and access to collections of diverse digital material for a national digital library for SMET Education, and a strong social foundation for the digital library that provides for its members a voice for their vision, an equitable governance structure, and opportunities for community leadership. Project activities build on the geoscience community s experiences to date in conceptualizing and laying the organizational and managerial foundation for a Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE). A suite of tools and services is also being developed to support member collections and help them achieve interoperability. Key partners in this aspect of the project include the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the Alexandria Digital Library project at the University of California - Santa Barbara. Examples include protocols for cross-collection searching; central services for persistent storage, authentication, and related needs; and tools that aid in materials classification and discovery, end-user support, and usage monitoring. Recognizing the importance of this effort to the larger science, mathematics, engineering, and technology education enterprise, the NSF Geosciences Directorate is providing significant co-funding for this project doc5963 none This is the first year funding of a five-year continuing award. The goal of this project is to improve reading achievement of children with reading problems by designing computer-based interactive reading tutors that incorporate new speech and language technologies. The reading tutors will help English- and Spanish-speaking children learn to read by providing classroom teachers and reading specialists with tools to instruct and exercise the set of auditory, visual and linguistic skills needed to read, speech discrimination, speech production, phonological awareness, sound-to-letter mappings, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. The tutors will be designed, tested and refined in collaboration with reading specialists and instructional designers, and tested with children in special education programs in elementary schools in Boulder Colorado. The tutors will incorporate new and improved auditory and visual speech recognition and facial animation technologies. Five partner sites - Oregon Graduate Institute (OGI), Universidad de las Americas, Puebla (UDLA), University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the University of Colorado (CU), will develop speech and language technologies. Research and development of children s speech recognizers will be conducted at UDLA for Spanish and at OGI for English. In addition, these sites will design and develop speech corpora to enable recognition research. UCSD will conduct research leading to development of head tracking and speech reading systems, and design and develop video corpora to enable this research. UCSC will conduct research leading to development of new animated faces with improved animation capabilities. System integration will be conducted at OGI, which will integrate auditory and visual recognition systems and facial animation systems into the CSLU Toolkit. CU will develop English reading tutors in collaboration with teachers, instructional designers and students, and conduct evaluations of project outcomes. UDLA will also develop and test Spanish versions of the tutors. The project is expected to produce significant advances in auditory and visual recognition technologies, including accurate recognition of children s speech, accurate recognition of visual features of speech, and the first real-time integration of auditory and visual speech recognition in language training applications. In addition, the PI and his team will achieve a new level of understanding of the structure of children s speech, and the processing of auditory and visual information in reading. Facial animation is expected to play a major role in engaging children, enabling them to enjoy the learning experience more and therefore spend more time on task. The PI expects to demonstrate that facial animation using visible articulators will improve speech discrimination and speech production skills, improved phonological awareness and improved reading. By integrating auditory and visual speech recognition and speech generation technologies into animated agents, and designing reading tutors that incorporate these agents in a well designed reading program, the PI hopes to improve reading achievement in schools. To optimize this outcome, the PI is working closely with reading specialists to incorporate their experience and best practices; and by developing formative and summative evaluation plans that assure fair and accurate assessment of the outcomes of the planned interventions doc5964 none The Fort Belknap College Initiative (FBCRSI) will expand the efforts that were begun during the past five years of work with the Tribal College RSI. First, Standards-Based Curriculum and Assessment Training will be offered at least twice per year to orient new-hires and to provide ongoing training in current developments in standards based curriculum and assessment for all teachers. For the last two years the target schools have synchronized their academic calendars to facilitate these professional development sessions and currently the schools are working on synchronizing the next academic year s calendar as well. Now that the Standards-Based Curricula is in place, the focus has shifted to appropriate evaluation. Training in alternative assessment will be conducted three times per year, with the goal of all math and science teachers in the target schools attending at least one of the sessions each year. FBCRSI will coordinate the development of a Summer Institute for Math and Science teachers. Second, since the bulk of accomplishments over the first five years has been at the elementary level, it is now time to focus on the secondary level and on the pre-service teacher program at Fort Belknap College. This slight shift in focus will insure that the FBCRSI is providing services to the entire target population on the Fort Belknap Reservation at grades K-14. This will not only increase student achievement in math and science at the secondary level, but will also increase the number of Native Americans who choose math or science teaching as a career. Third, the FBCRSI will expand its efforts in student achievement by coordinating and facilitating enrichment activities that include: Standards-Based After School Programs, Saturday Academies, and Summer School Programs. These programs will be customized for each target school student population to assist the students with remediation and or enrichment activities to help all students achieve at high levels. Fourth, the now-established FBCRSI program will continue with its successful RSI Steering Committee, which represents all targeted school populations in math and science. Program personnel will expand efforts to provide leadership for the various programs and departments within the reservation that will lead to more cooperation and less duplication of efforts. FBCRSI will work collaboratively with all other RSI programs in Montana and statewide educational agencies programs to coordinate shared activities, leverage resources, and share effective practices that have optimal impact on student achievement doc5965 none With the advances in embedded processors, low cost sensor technologies, and wireless communication, unprecedented amounts of diverse types of information about the real world and its activities are being generated. Much of the information is spatio-temporal in nature; concerning objects dispersed in space and time, and interacting and communicating with each other and their surroundings. An infrastructure that facilitates real-time capture, storage, processing, display, and analysis of the information generated will truly revolutionize a wide variety of application domains. Examples of domains that will benefit from this technology include avionics, ground traffic, commercial applications such as ship-ping and transportation, emergency response and disaster relief operations, physical phenomenon such as weather and storm tracking, forest fire tracking, migration patterns of animals birds, command and control, smart environments, etc. Applications in the above domains require real-time monitoring, tracking and analysis of objects events phenomena in space and time. An integral component of such sensor enriched communication and information infrastructure is a database management technology that allows seamless access to information dispersed across a hierarchy of storage, communication and processing units - from sensor devices, where data originates, to large data banks where the information generated is stored for analysis and mining. This research will explore next generation database management system technology that provides effective support for information processing in highly distributed and dynamic sensor-enriched environments. The approach taken will be end-to-end - that is, research will be conducted on all aspects of the system ranging from representation, data modeling, query languages, data structures, query optimization, query processing, distribution, and concurrent accesses. A prototype database management infrastructure that supports highly dynamic geographically dispersed spatio-temporal data, multi-resolution representation of data, and provides effective support for visualization and analysis will be developed doc5965 none With the advances in embedded processors, low cost sensor technologies, and wireless communication, unprecedented amounts of diverse types of information about the real world and its activities are being generated. Much of the information is spatio-temporal in nature; concerning objects dispersed in space and time, and interacting and communicating with each other and their surroundings. An infrastructure that facilitates real-time capture, storage, processing, display, and analysis of the information generated will truly revolutionize a wide variety of application domains. Examples of domains that will benefit from this technology include avionics, ground traffic, commercial applications such as ship-ping and transportation, emergency response and disaster relief operations, physical phenomenon such as weather and storm tracking, forest fire tracking, migration patterns of animals birds, command and control, smart environments, etc. Applications in the above domains require real-time monitoring, tracking and analysis of objects events phenomena in space and time. An integral component of such sensor enriched communication and information infrastructure is a database management technology that allows seamless access to information dispersed across a hierarchy of storage, communication and processing units - from sensor devices, where data originates, to large data banks where the information generated is stored for analysis and mining. This research will explore next generation database management system technology that provides effective support for information processing in highly distributed and dynamic sensor-enriched environments. The approach taken will be end-to-end - that is, research will be conducted on all aspects of the system ranging from representation, data modeling, query languages, data structures, query optimization, query processing, distribution, and concurrent accesses. A prototype database management infrastructure that supports highly dynamic geographically dispersed spatio-temporal data, multi-resolution representation of data, and provides effective support for visualization and analysis will be developed doc5967 none Cheney, David Internet Policy Institute Digital Government: Internet Voting Study This is an award to support a 2-day workshop on the topic of Internet or electronic voting. This topic has been of increasing interest as States, municipalities and political parties are more seriously considering this possibility. The workshop will focus primarily on the technical issues and concerns associated with electronic voting, but will be informed by social scientists, private concerns, non-profit organizations and others with viewpoints and experience in the topic area in developing a research agenda for electronic voting. The workshop will occur in early September and a report should be completed in November doc5968 none This is the first year funding of a three-year continuing award. Robust domain-independent language understanding is essential for multilingual information extraction, summarization, question answering, and automatic translation. With pervasive computing environments soon to come, language understanding will become even more indispensable for interacting with artifacts of widely different functionalities. The field of natural language understanding has made significant progress in the last fifteen years. A large part of this gain is due to the sophisticated combination of statistical algorithms with template-based algorithms tailored to specific domains like air-traffic information, travel scheduling, and business news. But any real solution to the problem of domain-independent understanding will require moving beyond template-based monolingual systems to more flexible, general purpose HCI systems via three key innovations: (1) a domain-independent semantic language as the back end for these understanding systems, replacing the current domain-restricted templates and slots; (2) rich semantic lexical databases which are broad enough to cover the necessary words for language engineering tasks, and deep enough in usable semantic information to support true domain-independent understanding; and (3) sophisticated techniques for performing this mapping. This project will develop these three components: a very large lexical database FrameNet++, a semantic language designed for domain-independent understanding tasks, and the tools for applying it to and evaluating it on key NLU applications. The semantic language and lexical database are based on formalizing the semantic frames and the semantic and syntactic combinatory properties - the valences - of a significant portion of the English lexicon. FrameNet++ will offer significantly richer semantic information than is available in current databases like COMLEX and WordNet, by characterizing the conceptual frames within which words are defined and identifying the semantic roles which the arguments of these words can take. These roles and frames are key to building domain-independent language understanding applications. The project will focus from the start on specific NLU applications: word sense disambiguation, information extraction, multilingual information extraction, and an eventual extension to text data mining. For each application, the PI and his team will apply the FrameNet++ system to improve the domain independence of the semantic components, using statistical algorithms for semantic annotation that we have already begun to implement. These applications will in turn provide a rich and realistic evaluation framework to guide FrameNet++ development, and will encourage potential users to apply it to a wide variety of tasks. The FrameNet++ database will be capable of serving many purposes. Provided with statistical information about frequencies of words, word sense mappings, and combinatorial patterns linked to word senses, it will be usable in various automatic language understanding processes, including word sense disambiguation and information extraction. Since the formal semantic annotations are keyed to conceptual structures which are independent of any individual language, they are available for the creation of parallel lexicon databases of other languages. The semantic structures in the databases will facilitate matches from one language to another, in machine translation and machine-assisted translation, while the syntactic structures allow the production of appropriate grammatical sentences in the target language doc5969 none The Oklahoma Rural Systemic Initiative, a collaborative project of the OKRSI Leadership Consortium, is a comprehensive program leading toward systemic reform in standards-based mathematics, science and technology education. It incorporates the synergistic combination of twenty-first century teaching and learning methodology and content with Oklahoma American Indian tribal perspectives. The infusion of culturally appropriate methods and materials brings relativity and functionality to classroom interactions in Oklahoma rural schools where there is a significant number or percentage of American Indian students and limited resources. This project in the developmental phase is organized around two major structures; The OKRSI Leadership Consortium, consisting of statewide agencies, tribes, institutions, organizations and businesses and six-to-eight Rural Regional Task Forces located throughout the state. Local school districts and tribal communities are included and interface with Consortium members to allow teacher access to meaningful and effective professional development, which in turn leads to increases in student skills and achievement. The Consortium will provide leadership in leveraging human and fiscal resources to assist local schools to improve the delivery of mathematics, science and technology education. The first year goals of the OKRSI are: The solidification of the OKRSI Leadership Consortium to provide overall leadership and guidance. American Indian tribes, business and industry and educational agencies engaged as partners in systemic change. The development of a comprehensive Implementation Plan and submission of a grant proposal for the ensuing five year Implementation phase which will lead to improved academic achievement in mathematics, science and technology throughout rural Oklahoma. The building of local and state fiscal capability to result in leveraging support and enhance comprehensive reform in the state and in local rural schools doc5970 none This five-year project will support a variety of activities designed to promote the use of national databases of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grantee, the Association for Institutional Research (AIR), will organize and administer a program to support several types of awards to investigators using these data bases. The project will consist of eight components. The first three components include continuing support from the previous award. The first component would support fellowships to individuals to support on-site work in Washington, DC providing professional experiences to the fellows using NSF and NCES databases. The second components would support research work at the awardees home institution on NSF or NCES databases. The third component would provide support for communicating and disseminating information about the content of the NSF and NCES databases and techniques for utilization of these databases for analysis. The fourth component of the project includes dissertation fellowships. This program will provide fellowships to conduct dissertation research on postsecondary education using NSF and NCES databases. The fifth component of the program includes an interdisciplinary certificate program operated at U. S. universities. This program will allow students or professionals to enroll and obtain a certificate in institutional research. The programs will use NSF and NCES databases in their training and course work. The sixth component of the program is the support of senior fellows. The fellows will be selected and are expected to serve in residence at NCES or NSF during an academic year to gain experience on the operations of Federal statistical agencies regarding the organization and collection of postsecondary institutional data. The seventh component of the project includes national collaborative training on IPEDS data. Workshops will be designed to train staff from postsecondary institutions in the actual web based collection of IPEDS data using newly designed analytical tools from NCES and in dealing with common data base and organizational problems that are part of the implementation of a new technology. The eighth component of the project includes the design and development of a Voluntary Institutional On-Line Information Network doc5971 none An NSF-CBMS Regional Conference in the Mathematical SCiences entitled, New Horizons in Multiple Comparison Procedures will be held during August 13 - 17, at Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. Professor Yosef Hochberg of Tel Aviv University, Israel, a leading researcher in the area of multiple comparisons, is the principal lecturer who will deliver a series of ten lectures covering some of the most important recent advances in multiple comparisons. Ample time will be provided after each lecture for informal discussions, and one-hour talks willbe given by each of a number of additional speakers. A major focus of the conference will be opportunities for students and new researchers, particularly those from the Philadelphia area, to engage in dialogues with established researchers to gain a deeper understanding of newer ideas in multiple comparisons. The funds requested will be to support the participation of about ten established and fifteen younger researchers having credentials in the area of multiple comparisons, with an emphasis on those from traditionally under-represented groups doc5972 none This five-year project to study science learning in authentic, immersive, virtual environments involving 1) simulated environments for teaching science topics, each framed according to a theoretical approach, role-based learning, 2) an innovative, integrated, distributed software platform for developing and hosting virtual environments, 3) empirical studies using an innovative protocol, scenario-based assessment, for measuring student learning in virtual worlds, and 4) a graduate-level summer school course for in-service teachers who will be trained, beginning in year three, to use virtual environments in their classrooms. This interdisciplinary project, in part, depends on fundamental computer science research in the areas of distributed systems, software agents and intelligent tutoring, and virtual environments. The intent of this research is to produce a large, controlled study demonstrating the statistical significance of the impact of the above methods on student learning doc5973 none This project will coordinate several efforts to test competing theories and hypotheses about the Internet s impact on society, including functional equivalence and time displacement, declining social capital, classic innovation diffusion, and reconfigured social networks. This work will be carried out in three ways: 1) Enhancing an interactive statistical website at the University of Maryland (www.bsos.umd.edu webuse) that would make publicly available on-line the latest national data sets (from both the U.S. and other countries), research articles and research findings related to Internet use and its possible impact; 2) Having up to 50 graduate and undergraduate students from across the country participate in a multi-week Summer Webshop in which they discuss with leading research scholars current theories, hypothesis and expectations concerning the Internet; and 3) Undertaking new data collections to address controversies or missing variables in existing data sets. The major vehicle for this purpose is the General Social Survey (GSS), which has been monitoring social change for the past 27 years and for which a new Internet module was included in the year GSS. This project will educate young researchers in studies of Information Technology. It will make available new national data sets for dissertations and other research studies. And it will extend and refine the GSS to include questions on Internet impact and use doc5965 none With the advances in embedded processors, low cost sensor technologies, and wireless communication, unprecedented amounts of diverse types of information about the real world and its activities are being generated. Much of the information is spatio-temporal in nature; concerning objects dispersed in space and time, and interacting and communicating with each other and their surroundings. An infrastructure that facilitates real-time capture, storage, processing, display, and analysis of the information generated will truly revolutionize a wide variety of application domains. Examples of domains that will benefit from this technology include avionics, ground traffic, commercial applications such as ship-ping and transportation, emergency response and disaster relief operations, physical phenomenon such as weather and storm tracking, forest fire tracking, migration patterns of animals birds, command and control, smart environments, etc. Applications in the above domains require real-time monitoring, tracking and analysis of objects events phenomena in space and time. An integral component of such sensor enriched communication and information infrastructure is a database management technology that allows seamless access to information dispersed across a hierarchy of storage, communication and processing units - from sensor devices, where data originates, to large data banks where the information generated is stored for analysis and mining. This research will explore next generation database management system technology that provides effective support for information processing in highly distributed and dynamic sensor-enriched environments. The approach taken will be end-to-end - that is, research will be conducted on all aspects of the system ranging from representation, data modeling, query languages, data structures, query optimization, query processing, distribution, and concurrent accesses. A prototype database management infrastructure that supports highly dynamic geographically dispersed spatio-temporal data, multi-resolution representation of data, and provides effective support for visualization and analysis will be developed doc5975 none Two major goals are: (1) To establish a new-generation integrated methodology for real- time (RT) distributed programming and software engineering on the basis of the recent developments in object-oriented (OO) RT distributed programming; and (2) To develop an integrated tool-set named the Real-time Object Network Engineering Environment (RONEE), which will bring about a quantum jump in the system engineers productivity in constructing distributed RT application systems. The research base of this multi-nation researcher team includes (1) a new high-level style of RT OO distributed programming called the TMO (Time-triggered Message-triggered Object) programming, (2) middleware supporting RT objects such as TAO object request broker and TMOSM, (3) OS and middleware support for fault-tolerant RT distributed computing such as ROAFTS and TTP OS, (4) frameworks such as RT UML and ACSR for formal specification, etc. Specific research tasks include integrations of cornerstone techniques and development of RONEE for: (1) High-level distributed RT programming based on C++ and JAVA; (2) Formal multi-level specification of requirements and designs; (3) Efficient execution of RT objects, stationary and mobile; (4) Fault-tolerant computing with distributed RT objects; (5) Verification of timing designs; (6) Distributed RT simulation and 3D visualization of application environments to support software validation doc5976 none The proposed research will investigate new software engineering techniques and tools for infrastructural software that will improve its reliability, safety, and predictability. The key idea is to use abstract design models to drive new static analyses that check that the software correctly implements its design (and if not, identify the source of the problem). To ensure that our research addresses the important issues that developers face in the field, we will conduct our research in the context of the development of an air traffic control system component. Specifically, the research will investigate the use of object models to express important design properties and new pointer analysis algorithms to verify that the code correctly implements the object models. Object models describe essential object in the heap and the relationships between them; pointer analysis automatically analyzes code to extract information about how objects refer to each other. The research will investigate techniques that improve the precision of the pointer analysis by using the object model to focus the analysis on the properties of interest doc5977 none We will discuss when two dynamical systems can be considered equivalent under a smooth change of variables. This is a natural problem since results on dynamics should be invariant under changes of variables. The problem is also related to singularity theory (classifying functions up to smooth changes of variables of the domain and the range), the topological classification of dynamical systems, and the rigidity program of classification of group actions. We will discuss the following situations, when a reasonable classification can be accomplished: a) Local equivalence near a hyperbolic fixed point b) Hyperbolic systems c) KAM theory d) Nilpotent groups e) Renormalization. The lectures will be pedagogical and will attempt to introduce people to this area of research. Dates: June 4-8, . http: www.math.missouri.edu ~staff conference cbms-conf.html doc5978 none The Dull Knife Memorial College (DKMC) Rural Systemic Initiative will be a five year effort that will sustain and amplify the transformations already begun in the educational experiences of the K-14 students on and the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. The quality and quantity of the learning experiences in science, mathematics and technology within and beyond the school walls will be enhanced by professional development for teachers, adoption of effective strategies, and promotion of parental and community involvement in the educational process. An advisory committe to the principal will provide input on program direction, objectives and activities, policy decisions and special requests by program participants. The creation of fonnal personal professional growth plans for each individual teacher will be initiated with plans that are reviewed and updated annually but extended forward for a five-year period. Professional development activities will be structured around cohorts teachers based on closely related job and interest factors that the teachers identify and a regional professional development committee will be formed to make training programs self-determined by the area teachers. Emphasis will be placed on making the school site a place to learn for teachers and parents as well as students. Alternative assessment methods and implementation will be included as a component of the professional development for school administrators and teachers. Staff will include a local community member who will be employed to actively seek public and political support for educational priorities within the reservation community, one educational professional in mathematics physical sciences and one in biological sciences who will work with area K-14 teachers doc5979 none Rockmore This award will partially support the production of a documentary video that will be used as a high school college teaching tool and will also be suitable for airing on public television. The purpose of the video is to improve the public s perception of mathematics and thereby encourage an increased number of students to pursue careers in the mathematical sciences. This will be accomplished by portraying the human side of mathematical discovery and creativity. This project is being supported by the Divisions of Astronomy, Materials Research, Mathematics, and Physics within the Directorate of Mathematics and Physical Sciences, and the Division of Elementary, Secondary, and Informal Education within the Directorate of Education and Human Resources doc5980 none Cankdeska Cikana Community College was part of cohort 3 of the Tribal College Rural Systemic Initiative (TCRSI). Programs in this cohort received planning support in the first year, with the subsequent two years used to implement systemic reform. As a result of this initial funding, 100% of the teachers at the target schools were trained and began to implement standards based curriculum in their classrooms. Strategies for Phase II were selected based on extensive research on high poverty schools that scored highly on standardized achievement measures. Effective reform efforts have been shown to provide professional development programs of high quality, be well coordinated with desired instructional outcomes results oriented, and have consistent policies throughout the system. Successful schools carefully assessed student performance in comparison with standards and created additional time for academic instruction. Based on this research, the C4 Initiative will expand on the following three fronts. PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT Standards Based Curriculum training offered twice per year will acquaint new hires and provide current developments for experienced teachers. Additional training sessions will focus on standards based assessment, including objective, standard alternative assessments to standardized tests. C4 will coordinate a Summer Science Institute during which teachers pilot lesson plans using independent and guided research in mathematics and science, and alternative assessment. With the coordination of C4 this curriculum will be piloted, evaluated and revised by the teachers involved in implementing it. This teacher-as-researcher model is anticipated to contribute to the scientific training of the workforce, and increase school commitment to the curriculum. An innovation in this area is the inclusion of a second strand of training for paraprofessionals, with a separate Summer Institute for teacher aides. CONSISTENT POLICIES The existing RSI Council of reservation programs aimed at improving SMET at the k through 14 level will be expanded to include Title I and RSI programs on other reservation. This committee will meet monthly to coordinate activities that will leverage resources, maximize teacher participation and have the optimal impact on student achievement. The Project Director will be appointed a member of the curriculum committee at each of the target schools. These committees are charged with adoption, implementation and publication of policies supporting standards based curriculum and other aspects of systemic reform. Extensive use of telecommunications will facilitate coordination with off-reservation programs. COORDINATED RESOURCES Examples of resource coordination outcomes are dual high school-college credit course to increase advanced opportunities in mathematics and science, and training at the state Indian Education Association conference supported jointly by all North Dakota reservation RSI projects. RSI staff and Council will coordinate the development of after-hours instruction in mathematics and science, funded by resources from private and federal grant funded programs already on the reservation. Training for these programs and policy development will be provided with RSI funds and by the RSI Council respectively. Cankdeska Cikana can draw upon three years of successful collaboration with the school districts and an experienced RSI Project Director who is an enrolled tribal member and also a former middle school mathematics and science teacher. As such, the project begins with a high level of credibility with the target school administrators and teachers doc5981 none The Salish Kootenai College Rural Systemic Initiative (SKC RSI-Phase II) will result in a transformation of the educational experience for both teachers and students. Professional development for teachers, adoption of effective assessment strategies, and promotion of community involvement in the educational process will enhance the quality and quantity of the learning experience for students in science, mathematics, and technology within and beyond the school walls. The classroom teacher is the key to the effectiveness of the delivery of curricular changes to the individual student. In the SKC RSI project, the primary goal is to have every teacher achieve the status of master teacher and to have every student achieve the status of master learner. It is important to understand that the journey of the educational experience Is a balanced effort between teachers and students. The overall goal of this proposal is to implement a comprehensive, sustainable, adaptable system-wide reform of science, mathematics and technology instruction and learning on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. This will lead to increased achievement for all students and specifically emphasizes greater achievements for two groups of under-served populations in this rural setting: Native American students and girls. SKC is the resource identifier for science, mathematics, and technology areas and has already developed coursework in biology, chemistry, physics, and earth sciences. SKC will, in effect, become a mini clearinghouse for science, mathematics, and technology (SMT) areas using American Indian-specific teaching and learning materials in professional development in SMT areas for teachers and students. SKC is currently preparing assessment strategies and activities that will be shared with other TCRSI projects. Other major goals are the improvement of science, mathematics, and technology education on the Flathead Indian Reservation including access to high quality, standards-based instruction for all students, innovative use of educational technologies for interactive delivery and the training of the teaching workforce to meet the demands of a new instructional paradigm. Rigorous, standards-based instruction for all students will be implemented on the Flathead Indian Reservation and the curriculum, professional development, and assessment systems to support that instruction. The development of the policy changes and resource allocations to support these efforts are the long-term goal of the SKC RSI Program doc5982 none level. Whereas specific tools have been developed by compiler writers to detect specific common programming errors, this system will allow programmers to formulate the correctness property or safety criterion that they wish to check in their programs. It places the full power of sophisticated static and dynamic analyses in programmers hands, allowing them to analyze and manipulate the program at ease. Success of this reserach will have a significant impact on improving software reliability. Expected results of this research include (1) a high-level interface with which the programmers communicate information to the system, (2) technology for creating new application-specific program analysis, (3) deep program analysis techniques such as pointer alias analysis and path-sensitive analysis to improve the precision of the static checker, and (4) new ways to combine static and dynamic analysis to locate violations of the stated properties in the code. A prototype system will be developed and tested on general-purpose codes such as open-source operating systems, compilers and browsers as well as embedded systems such as routers and telephone switches doc5965 none With the advances in embedded processors, low cost sensor technologies, and wireless communication, unprecedented amounts of diverse types of information about the real world and its activities are being generated. Much of the information is spatio-temporal in nature; concerning objects dispersed in space and time, and interacting and communicating with each other and their surroundings. An infrastructure that facilitates real-time capture, storage, processing, display, and analysis of the information generated will truly revolutionize a wide variety of application domains. Examples of domains that will benefit from this technology include avionics, ground traffic, commercial applications such as ship-ping and transportation, emergency response and disaster relief operations, physical phenomenon such as weather and storm tracking, forest fire tracking, migration patterns of animals birds, command and control, smart environments, etc. Applications in the above domains require real-time monitoring, tracking and analysis of objects events phenomena in space and time. An integral component of such sensor enriched communication and information infrastructure is a database management technology that allows seamless access to information dispersed across a hierarchy of storage, communication and processing units - from sensor devices, where data originates, to large data banks where the information generated is stored for analysis and mining. This research will explore next generation database management system technology that provides effective support for information processing in highly distributed and dynamic sensor-enriched environments. The approach taken will be end-to-end - that is, research will be conducted on all aspects of the system ranging from representation, data modeling, query languages, data structures, query optimization, query processing, distribution, and concurrent accesses. A prototype database management infrastructure that supports highly dynamic geographically dispersed spatio-temporal data, multi-resolution representation of data, and provides effective support for visualization and analysis will be developed doc5984 none Autoadaptive media are systems, materials, and or devices that respond to external stimuli by changing their characteristics. This change in characteristics or properties can be used to modify the response of the system, or to monitor the health or condition of the system. Currently, autoadaptive media are used in the aeronautical, automotive, and medical industries. Although researchers have pointed to the many opportunities for using autoadaptive media in civil engineering, little research has focused on civil engineering applications, and virtually none has been directed to geotechnical engineering. This lack of applications in civil engineering is a reflection of the lack of information within this community regarding available autoadaptive media and their possible applications. Consequently, the major goals of this workshop are to introduce the concept of autoadaptive media to leading researchers in the field of geotechnical earthquake engineering, to describe some of the current applications of autoadaptive media, and to stimulate creative discussions on possible uses in geotechnical earthquake engineering. Examples of autoadaptive materials are shape-memory alloys whose properties change based on temperature and stress; piezoelectric composites that convert electric current into mechanical force or vise versa; magneto-rheological and electro-rheological fluids that change from a viscous liquid to a solid in the presence of a magnetic or electric field, respectively; magneto- and electro-strictive solids that change properties in the presence of the same fields; and micromechanical systems (MEMS), which are small electomechanical machines that fit on a microchip. These innovative materials and systems have the potential to make a significant impact in earthquake engineering research and practice in two distinct ways. First, new sensor technologies will affect the way experimental research is performed: small, inexpensive, and robust sensors -- that are perhaps wireless -- will permit accurate measurement of more material and system parameters with a smaller disturbance to the system being monitored. Second, both new sensor technologies and new autoadaptive materials and systems will affect the performance and monitoring of civil engineering systems during and after earthquakes: new sensors will permit the health of systems to be assessed quickly and accurately after an earthquake. Further, data from these sensors during an earthquake will allow significant insights to be gained into the dynamic response of these systems under strong earthquake shaking. The results from the workshop will be distributed widely throughout the earthquake engineering community and fields related to autoadaptive media, and will be available on the World Wide Web doc5985 none The Wind River Rural Systemic Initiative (WRRSI) has been promoting quality RSI programs for the Wind River Indian Reservation students for the past five years. Phase II funding will allow WRRSI to expand its focal area and serve approximately 2,150 students, of which 95% are Native American. The need for science and math systemic reform on the Wind River Indian Reservation is documented by test scores showing Native students still score below the state average. WRRSI s Phase I data shows that their programs have made a difference, however, as Wyoming has now adopted statewide standards and has begun to require statewide standardized tests, WRRSI must continue to work to improve these traditionally under served students scores. Phase II programming will include: On-going professional development opportunities for teachers on the Wind River Indian Reservation; Summer school and after school activities for K-8 students; Summer institute for 9-12 grade students; An integration of culture into the curriculum; and Career awareness and job shadowing programs. Data collection over the next five years will be extensive. WRRSI will develop databases for both students and teachers. Teacher databases will document professional development opportunities and courses taken. The student database will document student achievement and participation in program offerings; track students after they leave high school; and allow WRRSI to determine program effectiveness by comparing students participating in programs to those not participating. WRRSI s underlying goal is to provide Native American students with a solid base in science and mathematics to provide opportunities and choices to compete at the college level doc5986 none Little Big Horn College (LBHC) proposes to build upon Phase I activities to develop and maintain a comprehensive and sustainable reform effort in mathematics, science and technology education for schools on or adjacent to the Crow Tribe Reseravtion in southeastern Montana. LBHC will utilize the lessons learned from Phase I activites and continue to promote the NSF drivers while implementing strategies to assist in their effort to provide a program that will catapult the schools serving their students to meet the National standards. Special emphasis will be placed on a holistic approach to community reform using RSI activities to promote a comprehensive approach for systemic reform. First, it is recognized that the vision held by stakeholders must be changed to accomplish systemic reform. Through the stages of implementation, the various groups must be increased to shape the purpose and goals of the new system. LBHC will invite all stakeholders to participate in this process. As the vision develops and is translated into practice, the support of the public and of the political leadership at all levels of the system must expand. Several isssues will be addressed during Phase II to ensure that the stakeholders are in careful collaboration. The following will guide this effort: A common language and purpose will be develop and will resonate for the RSI to all stakeholders. Training and orientation will help all sites to envision the total picture and each will be better positioned to take action and support the reform effort. A strategy will be implemented to move reform forward with a clear plan and related objectives. An evaluation process will be implemented to measure the progress and guide the project. For systemic change to occur, key participants will be included in all activities throughout the reform process. The proposed systemic reform effort will impact the required fundamental, comprehensive and coordinated changes for MST systemic change. The changes will reflect policy, financing, governance, management, content and conduct. All essential features of the school systems and LBHC will be engaged and operating as a seamless entity in promoting a comprehensive, standards-based curriculum and instructional materials for all students. Special emphasis will be placed on assessment of effort and on assessment practices. Activities will be aligned with the NSF drivers doc5987 none The Turtle Mountain Rural Systemic Initiative proposal for Phase II proposes that the Turtle Mountain Community College coordinate continues systemic reform of the K-12 schools in the reservation area. These schools include: Dunseith Day School, Dunseith Public Elementary School, Dunseith High School, Ojibwa Elementary School, Turtle Mountain Elementary School, Turtle Mountain Middle School and Turtle Mountain High School. Objectives 1. Sustain professional development of staffs of Turtle Mountain schools as a year-round endeavor. 2. Institutionalize the process for continually reviewing, revising and implementing standards-based curriculum in all classrooms in each school engaging the teachers in alternative assessments. 3. Establishing teacher learning communities headed by lead teacher to continue to improve instruction in SMET areas. 4. Put in place policy mandates supporting high quality SMET at all levels of each system. 5. Sustain a resource network for continuing organizational improvement in SMET areas. 6. Disseminate success via a conference involving stakeholders in SMET to demonstrate gains in student achievement for traditionally underserved populations. Methods The TMRSI will institutionalize the ongoing annual Teacher Enhancement Institute pre-school year training session providing graduate credits for area teachers. TMCC s newly constructed main campus will become its permanent site. To support continued staff renewal, a teacher learning community program will be implemented in which lead teachers will identified and trained to conduct staff improvement clinics for their fellow teachers in SMET areas. TMRSI will assist area schools in obtaining consultants to help systematically acquaint them with varied alternative assessment methods and to conduct one pilot project in alternative assessment in area schools. TMRSI will work with policy makers to shape mandates including reserved inservice days for improved SMET education. Rational budget forecasting, leveraging funds from external resource providers, and implementing and annual SMET conference will also sustain the momentum of system reform from Phase I doc5988 none This project would conduct Development-phase activities such as the regional self-study, to collect and analyze data aligned with the Systemic Reform Drivers. The data and the associated discussions, resulting in stronger partnerships between stakeholders, will be used to formulate the strategies for the Implementation phase. These strategies will then be examined for their effectiveness in the rural context. The primary expected result of the Development phase would be an Implementation strategy that will be submitted to the RSI program for funding. The conduct of the project will be under the guidance of a Steering Committee, composed of individuals who have been working on ASSET or one of its related activities doc5989 none The Rural Systemic Initiative proposed by Fort Peck Community College for the next five years will build on the accomplishments of the previous High Plains program. Fort Peck Community College will serve as the catalyst for establishing common goals for the new program. Systemic change in science, mathematics and technology education will be implemented throughout the reservation school system K-12 and Fort Peck Community College. Members of the collaboration include the five public school districts, Fort Peck Community College, the Fort Peck Tribal Education program, the Montana Office of Public Instruction and other collaborators. Objectives Objective 1. By August , each of the five reservation schools will implement vigorous, standards-based instruction for all students and the curriculum, professional development and assessment systems to document systemic change. Objective 2. By June 1, , each leadership team will establish a unified set of policies to facilitate and enable Objective 1. Objective 3. By July 1, , each instructional leadership team will insure that all resources (school and grant funded) are uniformly applied. Objective 4. By September , the Project Coordinator and leaderships teams will mobilize the full community stakeholders in order to facilitate Objective 1. Objective 5. By August , the instructional leadership teams will insure that all schools increase student attainment in science, mathematics and technology. Objective 6. By August , the systemic approach will result in a reduction in attainment differences between those traditionally underserved and their peers. Methodology The Principal Investigator and Project Coordinator will administer the project. The Project Advisory Committee composed of major stakeholders, will be responsible for policy development, change process, dissemination of information about the project to the community, strategic planning and project evaluation. The instructional leadership teams, composed of all Fort Peck public school teachers who regularly teach mathematics, science and technology, school administrators, and Fort Peck Community College advisors, will be responsible for systemic change in instruction, curriculum and evaluation. Potential Impact The project will result in a reduction in attainment differences between students traditionally underserved and their peers. The degree of student attainment will be documented by the Core Data Elements. Project achievement will be measured by documenting the degree to which the objectives have been achieved doc5990 none The proposed work would build upon the pilot activities undertaken through the TCRSI, which centered around schools in two. The focus of the proposed work is curricular alignment with technology integration. UTTC is a leader in distance instruction and instructional technology for the tribal colleges in the state. The conduct of the project will be under the guidance of an Advisory Council, composed of parents, teachers, administrators, students and corporate partners. The works will be accomplished through avenues such as improved pedagogy, improved content, standards-based materials, integration of technology into instruction, professional development workshops and training, and the use of technology resource teachers doc5991 none This SGER proposal describes exploratory research into the technology and techniques required for fabrication of nanopores (e.g. 5 to 100 nm). These nanopores will become part of a unique planar nanopipette for the study of single ion channels in biological cells - cells that need to form a gigaseal around the opening of the nanopore. In the future we will locate low-noise amplifiers and sensors millimeters from these nanopore openings formed in a multi-well chip. In the field of single channel recordings from individual ion channels the recording noise is an important limiting factor in characterizing the behavior of ion-specific channels in the presence of drugs. We plan to investigate nanopore techniques, such as E-beam, focus-ion beam (FIB) and field emission from a scanning transmission electron microscop. The results of our ion-channel research may be applied to the threading of a polynucleotide, single-strand, DNA molecule through a nanopore under an applied electric field. As the DNA passes through the limiting aperture of an open nanopore, the flow of ions in the nanopore should be blocked in a manner indicative of the molecular size and chemical properties of each nucleotide in the polynucleotide chain. Thus, we hope to utilize single channel recordings to determine electronically the direct sequence of the individual bases in a single-stranded DNA molecule, thereby opening the door to sequencing the human genome in hours rather than years as with capillary electrophoresis (CE) and ultra-thin slab gel techniques. Ion channel research will play an increasingly important role in understanding numerous diseases and processes in the cardiovascular system and the central nervous system. Diseases and disorders such as migraine, epilepsy, Alzheimer s, cardiac arrhythmias, cystic fibrosis, and hypertension have all been found to have ion channel involvement and drug therapies directed at these and other disorders are focused on ion channels doc5992 none The Ozarks RSI proposes to use an existing coalition of school districts in rural southwestern Missouri to initiate systemic reform of science, mathematics, engineering and technology. The target school districts evidence a desire for reform and the districts 26,090 students meet the criteria established by NSF. During the development year, the Southwest Center for Educational Excellence will take a strong leadership role in the collection of data and the delivery of services. The SCEE has strong performance capacity and has been active in professional development and curriculum training since its formation. The leadership team is headed by Dr. Arch Gordanier, Superintendent at Seneca R-1. Dr. Gordanier and the project director has experience with the El Paso USI and with TIMSS research. They expect to expand their coalition of local teachers, business leaders, community members, students and university officials throughout the development year. The Ozarks RSI s primary goal is to ensure that in international comparisons all of our students achieve exemplary levels of mathematical and scientific understanding through creating partnerships and networks; applying research; and designing, sharing, implementing and disseminating exemplary programs and practices doc5993 none The project would build upon the on-going activities undertaken through the TCRSI, which centered around schools on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation that straddles North and South Dakota. The work will be accomplished through avenues such as professional development workshops and guidance, collaboration with the school systems involved in the project, and active participation and leadership by Sitting Bull College to facilitate change, direct delivery of services, and restructuring its own math and science programs doc5994 none The Sisseton Wahpeton Rural Systemic Initiative, based at the Sisseton Wahpeton Community College, is in many aspects a continuation of the Tribal Colleges Rural Systemic Initiative. However, since it is a locally based project, instead of a six-state effort, we will be able to concentrate on the educational needs of the Lake Traverse Reservation population to a far greater extent. The ultimate goal of the SWRSI project is improve the education, particularly in the areas of math and science, of our children through systemic reform. This is a process that requires the support and dedication of all the stakeholders in the community. This reform began three years ago with the introduction of the TCRSI program, with the development and adoption of standards and increased professional development in research-based curricula. The formation of a coalition of the local school districts and the establishment of focal schools also occurred. Activities during the TCRSI project are referred to as Phase I. Phase II will be a more intensive program of systemic reform, with our major objectives being the increased implementation of research-based curricula and the development of culturally relevant alternative assessments. These assessments will be tied to benchmarks established by local and state standards, and correlated to traditional standardized tests. By this method our schools will be able to develop better teaching methods based on our students learning styles. The implementation of research-based curricula is a potential hazard if not supported by up-to-date and intensive professional development for teachers. When these programs are introduced without understanding their underlying philosophies, the curriculum becomes part of the problem. Our second objective is to create a system of professional development that is curriculum specific, intensive, ongoing, and relevant to teacher needs. At the same it must be able to overcome the problems of a rural setting, limited budgets, and high teacher turnover rates. Our strategy to overcome these issues is to use distant learning technologies, web-based support, and the development of local experts at SWCC and lead-teachers in the focal schools. Information given at traditional workshops and via video conferencing sessions will be placed on curricula support web pages available 24 hours a day to our participants. Questions related to the use of the curricula could be posted with answers being provided by expert consultants or other classroom teachers. To combat the high teacher turnover rate Internet courses for training purposes will be developed and maintain by SWRSI and collaborating institutions. These efforts will directly address the issue of sustainability. The third objective of the SWRSI project is to increase the level of cooperation between the individual focal schools and the tribal college. An Administrators Committee and a Steering Committee (composed of focal schoolteachers, SWCC staff, and community members) has been formed as one component of this effort. The professional development activities of SWRSI will attribute to this effort, as each school will help plan and participate in these joint-training sessions doc5995 none Krantz This proposal will initiate a second site at the University of Cincinnati of the NSF I UCRC for Membrane Applied Science and Technology (MAST) that was established at the University of Colorado in . The MAST Center has focused on polymeric and inorganic membrane formation, catalytic membranes, and membrane fouling and characterization. The proposed MAST site at the University of Cincinnati will complement the Colorado site via thrusts in biomedical, pharmaceutical, food and beverage, paper industry, and personal home care product applications of membranes. The University of Cincinnati has commitments in the amount of $160,000 from four sponsors and has an expression of interest from 14 additional companies and government laboratories doc5996 none Providing and instituting viable outcomes for its students of the 21st Century, Fort Berthold Schools and Fort Berthold Community College recognize systemic reform as timely and appropriate for reservation schools. Fort Berthold Community College s primary commitment as a Phase II participant to systemic reform within the Fort Berthold Reservation Schools is to continue the established improvement of mathematics, science, and technology education. Fort Bethold Community College s gains within its home reservation will continue and maintain its current success through cooperative arrangements with tribal, state, private and federal efforts. The effort will promote consistent and appropriate policies, community participation, tribal council education and commitment and fund resourse expansion. All measures of achievement and directional assistance will be closely evaluated, assessed, documented and through test results, data compilation and reports doc5997 none Northwest Indian College (NWIC) proposes a Developmental effort to maintain a comprehensive and sustainable systemic reform effort in mathematics, science, and technology for its service area. In doing so, NWIC will utilize the lessons learned from TCRSI Phase I activities and will continue to promote the NSF drivers while at the same time seeking current strategies to assist in their effort to have a comprehensive program that will catapult the surrounding schools and their students to meet the National standards. Special emphasis will be placed on a holistic approach to community reform using RSI activities as a springboard for a comprehensive reform effort. The primarily goals of the Northwest Indian College RSI program is to establish a center for surrounding schools that will provide comprehensive services in systemic reform of mathematics, science and technology. The NWIC proposes to develop a system in which the following will be promoted: 1. Promote school- and district-based mathematics and science education reform. 2. Provide comprehensive professional development for school-wide, rather than individual teacher, participation. 3. Advocate for opportunities that foster systemic reform. 4. Serve as a catalyst for educational, business industry and parent communities to work together to advance science and mathematics education for all students. 5. Reach large numbers of schools, including those with high minority low income populations, through regional and statewide networking. 6. Create site-based leadership capacity. The overall goals are: To prepare citizens who value critical thinking, mathematics, science and life-long learning. To increase the numbers of students appropriately prepare in mathematics and science in this rapidly change age of technology and information. To foster public understanding and support of mathematics, science and technology by all stakeholders. To help NWIC site schools to meet local, state and federal requirements and provide all their students with the best possible education doc5998 none The Appalachian RSI (ARSI) has submitted a plan for another five years of support that is built upon the successes and experiences, as well as the programmatic infrastructure, of the first award. The second phase is geared toward ensuring sustainability, although significant work in that area has already taken place, and on broadening the scope of the Teacher Partners work to have a greater districtwide impact. In addition to continuing to work toward the goals of Phase I (i.e., develop knowledge and skills in the teaching workforce; develop a sustainable system to support teachers and students; and develop the leadership and ancillary support to sustain the project), ARSI will promote the following specific Phase II goals: Document the effectiveness of the program Develop a research base for math and science reform in rural communities Establish rural math and science education sites at Appalachia-serving universities ARSI will promote these goals through a variety of activities and restructurings, such as: Resource collaborative directors (RCDs) will assist participating districts with systemic reform strategies, as they have done during Phase I. However, the emphasis will be more on district-wide rather than individual school development. RCDs will also work with their sponsoring institutions to get the services that ARSI has provided institutionalized in the universities. The ultimate objective for this activity is to evolve universities that are service-oriented to the Appalachian districts in their regions. RCDs will continue and expand their efforts to engage State Departments of Education to support and promote the ARSI model, in non-participating as well as ineligible districts. RCDs will continue to develop and nurture the Teacher Partners as instructional leaders in the region. This is crucial as TPs expand their roles to a district scope doc5999 none The work of the Development phase will coalesce around conducting a regional self-study; and establishing the basis and infrastructure upon which the school reform will be generated. Specifically, the Development phase will: establish local leadership teams (LLTs), coalition leadership teams (CLTs), and core management team (CMT). These teams--district, regional, and central, respectively--will manage the various aspects of the Development phase (e.g., LLTs will spearhead the Self-Study; CLTs will compile and identify resources; CMT will coordinate everyone s efforts doc6000 none Rezayi This is a RUI (Research at Undergraduate Institution) award for theoretical reseach on highly correlated electrons in reduced dimensionality. Electrons confined to two-dimensional Landau levels exhibit a host of intriguing phenomena. The most notable of these is the fractional quantum Hall effect. An emerging area in quantum Hall systems is the physics of high Landau levels. Experiments show highly anisotropic and non-linear electronic transport coefficients, as well as a reentrant quantum Hall phase showing a conduction threshold. These unusual transport properties have been associated with translational symmetry-breaking phases of the two-dimensional electron gas as predicted by Koulakov, Fogler and Shklovskii and also by Moessner and Chalker. The anisotropic transport results from a striped phase and the reentrant behavior could be a signature of a pinned crystalline phase. These are different from Wigner solids in having more than one electron per unit cell. The research projects to be done here are extensive studies of these phases by numerical exact-diagonalization methods. This approach seems particularly promising as the broken-symmetry phases have already been detected using such techniques by the principal investigator, Duncan Haldane and Kun Yang. Another area of research is to study various excitations (particularly involving reversed spins) of the quantum Hall state observed at half-filling of the first excited Landau level. Recent numerical calculations by the principal investigator and Duncan Haldane favor a BCS-like spin-polarized ground state of p-wave pairing of composite fermions - a composite object made up of an electron and an attached magnetic flux carrying two units of flux quanta. Upon tilting the magnetic field towards the electron-layer, a transition to a striped phase with associated anisotropic transport has been seen experimentally. The nature of this transition, as well as the quantitative dependence of physical properties (such as the energy gap) on the tilt angle, will also be investigated. In addition, the relevance of recently proposed novel quantum Hall phases involving groupings (generalized pairings) of more than two electrons to states of the first excited Landau level will be investigated. Many of these projects involve three important phases of electronic matter: the Fermi liquid, BCS-type pairing, and charge-density wave states. The work is therefore likely to enhance and deepen our understanding of these important phases of matter and uncover important inter-relations among them. %%% This is a RUI (Research at Undergraduate Institution) award for theoretical reseach on highly correlated electrons in reduced dimensionality. Electrons confined to two-dimensional Landau levels exhibit a host of intriguing phenomena. The most notable of these is the fractional quantum Hall effect. A number of different projects will be undertaken in this field, primarily using numerical methods. Undergraduate students will participate in some phases of the research doc6001 none The underlying purpose of the AK RSI has been to implement a set of initiatives to document the indigenous knowledge systems of Alaska Native people and develop pedagogical practices and curricula that appropriately incorporate indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing into the formal education system. The systemic reform focus of the AKRSI reform strategy is the fostering of connectivity and complementarity between two interdependent but historically disconnected, alienated complex systems - the indigenous knowledge systems rooted in the Native cultures that inhabit rural Alaska, and the formal education systems imported to serve the educational needs of rural Native communities. Within each of these evolving systems is a rich body of complementary scientific and mathematical knowledge that can serve to strengthen the educational experiences and improve the academic performance of students throughout rural Alaska. The following initiatives constitute AKRSI educational reform strategy: Culturally Aligned Curriculum Cultural Standards Village Science Applications and Careers ANSES Chapters, Camps and Fairs Indigenous Science Knowledge Base Multimedia Cultural Atlas Development Native Ways of Knowing Parent Involvement Elders and Cultural Camps Academy of Elders The initiatives above will be implemented on a region-by-region basis, building on Phase I to integrate the reform process into the everyday workings of the schools and districts to a sustainable level by the end of Phase Il. Also an array of statewide intiative will be implemented to support the activities at the local and regional levels. Following is a summary of the statewide initiatives relative to the implementation of the Regional initiatives during Phase II. Math Science Performance Standards and Assessments Alaska Standards for Culturally Responsive Schools Cultural Frameworks for Curriculum Native Educator Associations Alaska Native Knowledge Network Consortium for Alaska Native Higher Education The experience and academic achievement successes gained during Phase I, are the basic strategy for Phase II, but will be continued with greater intensity and delineation. of emphases. The locus of activity will be in the same 20 rural school districts as partners in those schools with the primary differences during Phase II being the concentration of effort and increased emphases on sustainability of the initiatives doc6002 none This project requests incremental funding for the Regional Laboratory for Applied Network Engineering Research and Training (RLANRT) project to build a living on-line repository for network engineering instructional materials and training. Continual exponential growth in traffic and bandwidth usage is imposing severe strain on the Internet, and the gap between the immediate needs of the Internet infrastructure and current classroom content is growing. New computer science and engineering solutions are needed, but producing the necessary skills and talent is hampered by the small size of the current pool of knowledgeable network engineering practitioners. Under the auspices of RLANRT, JSU proposes to coordinate a Web-based repository for network engineering curriculum materials. Resources are the current instructors from within and outside this institution, and Internet vendors such as CISCO, NOVEL, and Microsoft. These vendors have a wealth of training materials related to their hardware and software, and the objective is to draw together the myriad topics in a continual updated resource for both teachers and infrastructure whose reliability and throughput at various levels will be secured by the activities of engineers, users, and service providers alike doc6003 none Funding from the National Science Foundation will support the development of a new, cooperative research program in paleoanthropology between scholars at Kent State University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the Geological Museum hence, the natural history of Southeast Asian primates is essentially unknown despite the fact that modern members of this group exhibit the greatest diversity of modern primates for any geographic area. In this exploratory project the researchers will survey areas that have been mapped as sedimentary deposits dating to the Cenozoic (the last 65 million years) for fossil primates. This is a high-risk endeavor for at least two reasons. First, while the vast majority of primate fossils come from Cenozoic sedimentary deposits, many sedimentary deposits do not yield vertebrate fossils. Second, much of the geological mapping in Vietnam is preliminary in nature. This high-risk research is, however, because it has recently been argued that the earliest known anthropoids (monkeys, apes, and people) lived in Asia, not Africa; and that the initial adaptive radiation of apes occurred in Asia, not Africa. New fossil primates from Vietnam would bear on these ongoing discussions. The co-principal investigators of this project have recently developed a strong research relationship with scientists working for the Geologic Museum of Hanoi and have initiated a survey for fossil mammals in Vietnam. During they hope to significantly expand this collaboration by extending this study of the geology of Vietnam and by surveying additional areas for fossils. Because fossil primates predating about 100,000 years are unknown from Vietnam any primate fossils yielded by this research have the potential to expand significantly upon the understanding of primate paleobiogeography, Asian natural history, and ultimately, human evolution doc6004 none The NSF NIST Center for High Resolution Scattering (CHRNS) at the NIST Center for Neutron Research (NCNR) operates and develops state-of-the-art neutron scattering instrumentation for use by the general scientific community. Over the past decade, research carried out on the CHRNS instruments has had a major impact on U.S. science and industry in fields as diverse as polymer science, colloid chemistry, biology, porous materials, and magnetism and superconductivity. More than 250 scientists, post-doctoral fellows, and graduate students currently use the CHRNS instruments each year. This award from the National Facilities and Instrumentation program supports the expansion and associated operations of the Center for High Resolution Neutron Scattering at NIST. The NCNR has recently commissioned three cold neutron spectrometers: a spin echo spectrometer, a backscattering spectrometer, and a disk chopper time-of-flight spectrometer that are now incorporated into CHRNS. These new instruments extend the time scale that can be probed using neutron scattering in the U.S. by more than three orders of magnitude allowing scientists to probe dynamic processes from 10-7 to 10-13 seconds. This provides an opportunity to create an entirely new subfield of neutron spectroscopy in America with applications ranging from, for example, polymers, micelles, biomaterials, ionic conductors and fuel cell materials, new tailored catalysts, membranes and molecular sieves as well as a wide variety of magnetic phenomena. This cooperative agreement provides the scientific community with increased access to these spectrometers. Proposals for the use of these facilities are peer reviewed and allocated measurement time by a Program Advisory Committee in a manner approved by the NSF. In addition to the three new instruments, this project enhances user support in the areas of complex sample environments and improved data acquisition, reduction, and analysis software. Moreover, it is anticipated that the creation of the first world-class capabilities for cold neutron spectroscopy in the U.S. will have considerable impact on graduate research and education. Just as the CHRNS instruments now welcome over 150 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers each year, this project allows many more to visit CHRNS in order to pursue training and research in high resolution cold neutron scattering methods thereby producing a large contingent of informed young users for the future doc6005 none The Antarctic continent has been relatively isolated from human impact due to its remote location and extreme environment. The first human contact with the continent was made by explorers and sealers of the nineteenth century s who were followed by explorers and scientists of the twentieth century. In the past thirty years, there has been an increase in human presence in Antarctica through tourism. A concern has been the potential introduction of wildlife diseases in Antarctica through the increase in human presence. Birds in the wild are susceptible to an array of infectious and parasitic diseases, but clinical signs of disease are relatively obvious and disease is generally diagnosed post mortem. The diagnosis of disease in Antarctic birds in the wild is hampered by the lack of information on both the diseases themselves and on what is normal and what is pathological. There are few cases in Antarctica where die-offs have been observed and could be attributed to disease. Few clinical investigations have sampled healthy birds. Research to date has confirmed the presence of infectious agents in Antarctic penguins, but pathology has not been confirmed, nor has the source of the agents. Besides the potential of introduction via humans, the South Polar skua is a strong candidate as a source of introduction of disease in the Antarctic environment. Skuas are scavengers and predators, which frequent the vicinity of stations and ships and prey on penguins and other birds at colony sites. More significantly, skuas migrate outside Antarctica during the winter. This Small Grant for Exploratory Research will examine previously collected blood samples of both penguins and skuas to determine the presence of bacteria and viral diseases, parasites, and antibodies to infectious agents. In conjunction with Australia scientists, a reference collection of sera as well as viruses, bacteria, and parasites will be established. This will provide a valuable baseline for future studies of wildlife diseases in Antarctica doc6006 none The workshop will permit that the researchers, who have received grants from NSF 98-42 to study the long-term durability of materials and structures, share information on their recent accomplishments. This will bring a unique opportunity to scientists and engineers conducting research in the field of durability to be exposed to new methods and materials used in diverse applications. Another goal of the workshop is to provide close links between basic research and engineering applications in the field of deterioration science by also inviting engineers from a number of agencies. The workshop will present open discussions on innovative accelerated tests and modeling of deterioration behavior as well as research needs which will enable reliable prediction of long-term performance from short-term tests doc6007 none The ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Communications Architectures, Protocols and Applications will be held in Stockholm, Sweden, from August 28 September 1, . This conference is the premier technical meeting that examines the state-of-the-art in computer networks and communications. This proposal requests funding to assist 18 United States-based graduate students in attending this meeting. Participation in conferences such as SIGCOMM is an extremely important part of the graduate school experience, providing the opportunity to interact with more senior researchers and to be exposed to leading edge work in the field. The support requested in this proposal will enable the participation of students who would otherwise be unable to attend ACM SIGCOMM doc6008 none Over a two year period, the research will focus on Biosurface Contact and Bioadhesion Studies Using Atomic Force Microscopy, using fungal spores. Other aspects of the research will address monocyte and hepatocyte adhesion to reference substrata. Surface characterization expertise at UB will supplement the research performed by Towson and Frostburg undergraduates and faculty. IUCB colleagues at the U.S. Army Biotechnology Program and at the US FDA Division of Mechanics and Materials also will participate in the program. In addition to providing quantitative, time dependent evaluations of hepatocyte, monocyte, and fungal spore attachment strengths to different substrata, this study will produce techniques that can be applied to other applications involving cell and or particle adhesion. These techniques could be applied to the dental and medical industries, as well as environmental health issues of the paint and xerography industies doc6009 none Neuman An equipment award supports the fabrication of a tribology attachment for a MASIF (Measurement and Analysis of Surface Interactions and Forces) surface force apparatus. The redesign and specification of the tribology attachment that has the requisite capabilities for both high precision lateral friction force measurements and in-situ laser spectroscopic analyses will be undertaken in collaboration with Australian Scientific Instruments. The development of a fully working tribology attachment for use with the MASIF will result in a new type of molecular tribometer. Its application in molecular tribology studies holds promise to significantly enhance the fundamental understanding of friction and wear, boundary lubrication and other tribological phenomena important to advanced materials doc6010 none This project would conduct Development-phase activities such as the regional self-study, to collect and analyze data aligned with the Systemic Reform Drivers. The data and the associated discussions, resulting in stronger partnerships between stakeholders, will be used to formulate the strategies for the Implementation phase. The project will be conducted by a group termed the Proposal Development Team (PDT) and the Comprehensive Planning Committee (CPC) who represent each state. The goals of the project are: Develop a structure to gather baseline data about the status of math science education in the targeted region. Use the data to develop intervention strategies for the region and for each district. Research models of best practices for rural systemic reform. Further the partnerships. Develop and articulate a strategy for reform, submitted to the RSI Implementation competition doc6011 none This grant supports an NSDL collection based on near-real time visualization of atmospheric data from the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program (ARM) Southern Great Plains (SGP) site. In order to ensure the continued existence of this collection, a model user and provider community of students and teachers will be developed. This visualization collection will have a great impact on the educational community, since the SGP site is the largest group of remote sensing atmospheric instruments in the world. The development of this collection entails collecting visualization code, implementing visualization code, and a scientific and educational review of these visualizations. The collection process has been started with code contributed from NOAA, UCAR, and many Universities. Implementation of this code in an automated format that can be used by the digital library and is self-sustaining is a major component of the effort involved. The ARM scientific community already has a scientific review process, which will be used to ensure the visualizations implemented are of scientific quality. The educational review process will contain four sections. Materials will be reviewed for use by middle school and high school students and teachers, as well as by undergraduate and graduate students. These reviews will address the benefits and problems associated with using the visualization for educational use, and will be used to ensure the educational value of the collection. The direct involvement of teachers and students in the implementation work, testing of a community provider model, and class-testing of the collection are steps in this project to create a model user and provider community. Undergraduate and graduate students will assist in the implementation of visualization code. Given this introduction, these students will be ready to create or make additions to current visualization code, which will go through the educational and scientific review. Successful completion of these reviews will end in implementation of the code as part of this collection. This would start the capability of EIU and University of Utah to be both user- and provider-communities. Further, an EIU undergraduate class will use this collection with visualization projects. Class-testing in this manner will act as a feedback mechanism to improve the usability of the collection. The class projects will be another example of how students can become providers. The professor of the class will determine which projects are viable to request a scientific review. Such visualizations would then become available for use as summer projects for the in-service high school teachers in EIU s MSNS program to review for use in their classrooms. This would create a long-term avenue for scientific and educational review. The massive amounts of data and access to atmospheric visualization codes may even lead to the creation of an open source community around building code for this collection. One thing is certain, visualization of atmospheric data will spark the intellectual curiosity of students at all education levels doc6012 none This project, carried out in close conjunction with the Software Engineering Research Center (SERC, an NSF-sponsored IUCRC Center), establishes a Software Engineering Technology Watch to track trends in Research, Technology, and the Market as relates to software engineering. The results of the these Watch activities-reports and studies-inform the respective communities about the state of the art, promising directions, and apparent failures. As part of laying the foundation for the modeling of trends, data is compiled on various aspects of the national software engineering enterprise. Example case studies would be the Internet, the Web, Java, Unix, Ada, and Linux. The activity also serves to define and refine the best strategies for collecting, analyzing, and disseminating the information, thus providing a feasibility study to determine the process to follow. Issues to address include: What cost factors guide trends, What lifecycle do technologies follow, and What aspects of technology evolution are controllable? The research develops a synthetic model of a technology trend, a synthetic comparative survey of other existing tech-watch initiatives in software engineering, an identification of relevant indices and sources of information, and a report including factual information pertaining to the evolution of the field doc6013 none The project will build on established activities exploring new modes and mechanism for scholarly communication. In particular, the project will draw on existing efforts of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) and the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). The NDLTD promotes student production and submission of their own electronic theses and dissertations - in many different natural languages. This project will pursue metadata standards and tool building for searching the distributed, multilingual, large-scale collection. The collaboration with the University of Oldenburg will focus on PhysNet, an existing service which collects physics papers and scholarly materials from the Web doc6014 none The contribution of midwater appendicularians to particle dynamics remains understudied in marine food webs. This project will develop in situ submersible-based techniques that will lead to more detailed, long-term investigations of the ecological role of species with relatively large houses (1-30 cm diameter). These species are poorly known but ubiquitous in water column environments on a global scale, are often numerous, and are tractable targets for in situ documentation of rates of feeding, house production, and house flux. The limited but compelling amount of field information about these omnivorous, non-selective filter feeders suggests that they may have a central role in the flux of material throughout the water column, especially in particle-rich layers. First, appendicularians are capable of rapid generation times. Second, most species are capable of high grazing rates on a wide spectrum of particles, including microbial phytoplankton, bacteria, and detritus. The rate of export or recycling of biogenic carbon from particle-laden appendicularian houses depends upon several factors. For example, the investigator believes that particle loading on houses in the epipelagic and epibenthic zones will vary in relation to surface production and resuspension, respectively. Rates (of particle selection, feeding, house-fecal pellet production, and house-fecal pellet sinking) will also vary with species, particle selection, and house age. Therefore, developing reliable field methods will be essential to better understand how behavioral and environmental parameters interact to influence the fate of particulate matter doc6015 none EIA- Chen, Su-Shing University of Missouri - Columbia CISE Educational Innovation: Integrating Agent Technology into CISE Curriculum Using Lecturelets This project integrates research results from agent technology into both course delivery mechanisms and course content in computing curricula. Specific smart learning materials for individual subjects, including definition description, examples, exercises, quizzes, projects, and supplemental information are developed and implemented into lecturelets (active XML documents with Java code) for customized interactive presentation of subjects. The lecturelets are self-contained and can be integrated into a wide range of courses. They contain both the XML documents and the instructions (templates agents) on how documents should be processed or displayed according to the profile and model of a student. In addition to developing the lecturelets delivery system, the project also provides course materials (i.e. a collection of lecturlets) on agent technology that can be used as a stand-alone course or integrated into existing courses in such fields as software engineering, distributed systems, communication systems, and AI-related courses doc6016 none Freedman, Richard NStars: Understanding the L-dwarfs and T-dwarfs Dr. Freedman is producing a model spectral catalog for L-dwarf and T-dwarf stars. Also known as brown dwarf stars, such objects are below the hydrogen-burning limit for normal stars. To facilitate the discovery of and subsequent follow-up research on brown dwarfs Dr. Freedman and colleagues are computing a library of high-resolution spectra covering the wavelength regime of 0.5- micrometers appropriate for objects with effective temperatures ranging from 500- K and metallicities ranging from -2 [Fe H] 0.5. The opacity of alkali metals and the influence of dusty condensates are included in the calculations. The resulting model spectra are compared to observed spectra of L- and T-dwarfs over the full range of L- and T-dwarfs. The results are distributed to the scientific community via the web. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF Stellar Astronomy & Astrophysics (AST SAA) program through the joint NSF NASA Nearby Stars (NStars) initiative, and the NSF Mathematical & Physical Sciences Directorate Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (MPS OMA doc6017 none This CISE Educational Innovation (EI) proposal requests funds to develop a series of modules that seamlessly integrate logic and logic-based software tools into existing, widely taught computer science (CS) courses. Few undergraduate computer science curricula prepare students adequately in logic. The typical student sees a few weeks of truth tables and propositional logic in discrete practical work. These modules would allow CS departments to easily modify their curricula to rectify this situation. By supplying modules, complete with lecture notes, presentations, problem sets, and tools, the investigators hope to facilitate curricular treatment of applied logic at all levels of college education, particularly in CS departments with scarce resources. This project has the potential to have a major impact on the way that CS is taught doc6018 none Hauschildt, Peter NStars: Model Atmospheres and Spectral Analyses of Nearby T L M Dwarfs Dr. Hauschildt is working on a series of projects designed to better understand the structure of cool stellar and brown dwarf atmospheres. Many such objects are being discovered in the solar neighborhood. An existing model stellar atmosphere code PHOENIX is being improved to compute the emitted spectra of very cool atmospheres. The project is focussed on several key areas: (1) incorporation of molecular processes into the existing code; (2) treatment of the effects of companion star illumination on cool atmospheres; (3) the effects of grain condensation and cloud formation; (4) creation of a grid of predicted emergent fluxes for cool stellar and sub-stellar atmospheres; and (5) direct comparison of the computed spectra with observed spectra of M-, L-, and T-dwarf stars and brown dwarfs. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF Stellar Astronomy & Astrophysics (AST SAA) program through the joint NSF NASA Nearby Stars (NStars) initiative, and the NSF Mathematical & Physical Sciences Directorate Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (MPS OMA doc6019 none Luck, Earle NStars: Spectroscopy in the Local Neighborhood: A High-Resolution Survey and Abundance Analysis of Selected Stars Dr. Luck is conducting a high-resolution survey of about 150 stars within 15 parsecs of the Sun. The objective of the project is to assemble a high quality database from which the frequency of binary companions, spectral peculiarities, and spectrum variability can be assessed. In addition, a detailed abundance analysis is being performed on ~80-100 stars with and without planets to determine what role metallicity plays in the frequency of planetary formation. The observations for the project are conducted the University of Texas McDonald Observatory 2.1-m telescope. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF Stellar Astronomy & Astrophysics (AST SAA) program through the joint NSF NASA Nearby Stars (NStars) initiative, and the NSF Mathematical & Physical Sciences Directorate Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (MPS OMA doc6020 none D. Gidaspow, Illinois Institute of Technology This is the proposed continuation of a research supported by NSF for the last six years. Its objective is to obtain a good quantitative understanding of the flow particle suspensions (fluidization), including some of its main characteristics (Reynolds stresses, granular temperature, bubbles and particle size). The challenge is to add to the traditional conservation equations for each phase and particle type, the phenomenological properties of the mixtures involved (e.g. viscosity). With this information, it was shown early in this research that it is possible to generate a predictive theory with a more accurate and detailed description of the flow. A number of experiments (seven) are proposed to establish the necessary phenomenological constants for different multiphase mixtures: gas-solid, gas-liquid-solids, bubbling beds doc6021 none Guha University of Central Florida Guha, Ratan K. CISE Educational Program: Introducing Fundamental Concepts and Evaluation Methods for Distributed Systems and Applications in the Computer Science Undergraduate Curriculum This CISE Educational Innovation award supports the development of innovative curricula for teaching contemporary concepts of distributed computer systems, computer network technologies, and principles of distributed applications to undergraduate students at the University of Central Florida and three collaborating institutions. The focus of the project is on the development of modules, course materials, courses, a delivery infrastructure, faculty enhancement workshops, and web-based data collection. Module topics include: networks and the Internet, mobile and wireless computing, network management, concepts of distributed systems, network security, performance evaluation, distributed applications, and parallel and distributed simulation. This project provides a web and CD-ROM based mechanism for distribution of modules, courses, support-software and evaluation instruments. A one-week workshop for faculty, government, and industry covering these topics will be conducted in and . In addition to transferring current research in distributed systems into the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Central Florida, the project also enables three partner institutions with under-represented student populations (Grambling State University, Florida A&M University, and the University of Houston) to actively participate in the project. The collaborating institutions are involved in development and evaluation of the instructional modules and use them in their programs either as new courses or thread the modules through existing undergraduate courses doc6022 none The long term goal of this Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) project is to provide a web-based resource for sharing information about research funded through the Plant Genome Research Program. This resource will serve several roles. First, it will provide an internal resource for rapid communication of ideas and issues among members of ongoing projects. Second, it will serve as a resource to members of the community seeking information about Plant Genome projects or opportunities for participation. Third, it will serve as site for informing the community about new initiatives and soliciting input on a variety of issues. In summary, this resource will facilitate the interaction between members of Plant Genome projects and broaden the participation of the community in sharing the resources generated by these projects doc6023 none Waite, William M. University of Colorado at Boulder CISE Educational Innovation: A Tool-Supported Programming Languages Curriculum This project integrates research and development in software tools development into the undergraduate computer science program at this institution with special emphasis on computer-supported cooperative work and decision support. The project strategy involves scaffolding content-related problem solving skills and process-related group interaction skills by integrating a suite of tools, developed by the research community, into a three-course sequence required of all computer science majors. The key idea is that students are involved in realistic projects, beginning with their introductory courses, but an infrastructure selectively hides complexity from students. As students progress to more advanced courses, more of the complexity is revealed, until finally, students are involved in realistic projects involving significant collaborative work. The project has two components: (i) a software infrastructure that manages the complexity that students are exposed to, and (ii) a collection of tools that allow students to undertake larger projects than would normally be possible in a classroom setting. Students also use a web-based journal tool to keep track of significant milestones, problems, and other issues related to tasks assigned to them. The backbone of the collaborative system used in this project consists of a repository that contains code and implementation monitors for student projects, tools that students use when interacting with the materials in the repository, and a set of policies that control how students can interact with the repository contents. This project addresses the national need of educating software practitioners who can work on large, complex software systems in teams doc6024 none EIA- Cook, Diane J. University of Texas at Arlington CISE Educational Innovation: Integrating Intelligent Agent and Wireless Computing Research into the Undergraduate Curriculum The research-base for this project is Artificial Intelligence (AI), in particular, rational agent development. The project provides undergraduate students with access to a large-scale distributed mobile agent laboratory containing both real and simulated agents. The focus of the project is new curriculum material for AI, mobile computing, multimedia, and robotics courses that allow students to test their knowledge in a real and virtual environment as well as new courses in human-computer interaction and wireless-multimedia computing. The PIs have demonstrated successful research and development of AI simulators that provide students with environments for testing agent design ideas in decision making, multi-agent cooperation, and learning. The PIs expanded agent environment includes real-world tasks involving distributed decision-making, cooperation with both human and computer agents, and wireless communication. The project increases students interest and expertise in this area through hands-on experiences with physical and simulated collaborative environments. In particular, the project uses a wireless communication system, called Wireless Intelligent Simulator Environment (WISE), in this institution s Computer Science area that permits human, software, and robot agents to interact over a distributed environment. The WISE environment, in addition to supporting new features of this university s existing courses (in AI, Mobile Networking and Computing, Multimedia, Robotics, and Senior Capstone Design Courses), supports new courses in Human-Computer Interaction and Wireless Multimedia Computing doc6025 none EIA- Bruch, John C. University of California - Santa Barbara CISE Educational Innovation Program: HPC Diagnostics for Scientific Computing in the Undergraduate Curriculum This project transfers results of research in parallel algorithms into the undergraduate engineering curriculum at this university. The overall objective of the research component is the generation of learning tools that demonstrate how to analyze numerical algorithms for parallel processing for two important and realistic classes of engineering problems involving free and moving boundaries. Course modules enable students to easily and proficiently engage in high-performance parallel computing. A variety of software helps students analyze and understand execution behavior including problem partitioning, module communication patterns, processor load balancing, computation versus communication ratios, timing characteristics, and processor idle time. Specifically, the modules demonstrate the use of the computing diagnostic software applied to typical runs on a parallel computer for fixed and free and moving boundary value problems. The transfer of this research into the undergraduate curriculum enhances students understanding of the capabilities of parallel computers for solving difficult engineering problems and enhances the computational infrastructure in engineering and other areas doc6017 none This CISE Educational Innovation (EI) proposal requests funds to develop a series of modules that seamlessly integrate logic and logic-based software tools into existing, widely taught computer science (CS) courses. Few undergraduate computer science curricula prepare students adequately in logic. The typical student sees a few weeks of truth tables and propositional logic in discrete practical work. These modules would allow CS departments to easily modify their curricula to rectify this situation. By supplying modules, complete with lecture notes, presentations, problem sets, and tools, the investigators hope to facilitate curricular treatment of applied logic at all levels of college education, particularly in CS departments with scarce resources. This project has the potential to have a major impact on the way that CS is taught doc6027 none The Division of International Programs and the Division of Chemistry support Hannes Jonsson for a workshop on Simulations of Long Time Scale Dynamics: Molecular and Continuum Descriptions at the University of Reykjavik in Iceland. The focus of the workshop is on new developments in simulations of atomic systems over long time scales and the coupling of atomistic simulations with continuum descriptions. The workshop will bring together researchers who are approaching this problem from different perspectives with different tools and to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches. Dynamical simulations such as those covered in this workshop have led to insight and understanding in many diverse areas such as materials design, drug discovery, and protein structure. Current simulations are limited to extremely short time scales, about a nanosecond or less. It is important to find ways to carry out molecular-level simulations on the much longer time scales of interest for applications in chemistry and materials science doc6028 none The biochemical molecules and processes on which life depends are exquisitely sensitive to the acid-base state, or pH, of their fluid environment. Mammals are known to regulate this fluid environment with great precision near pH 7.4. Although they have not been directly measured, the PIs assume that small mammals (less than 50 grams) regulate their acid-base state like larger mammals. However, Dr. Szewczak s laboratory has developed microsurgical and small blood volume techniques that have enabled acid-base measurement in small mammals, and their efforts indicate that small mammals regulate their pH at 7.3 and less. The PIs plan to investigate the acid-base state in a variety of mammals as small as seven grams to explore whether this is a general regulatory strategy of mammals at this scale. Although this may seem like a small change in pH, it is sufficient to significantly alter biochemical processes. Because the earliest known mammals from the Triassic Period weighed 20-30 grams, this may provide essential clues for understanding mammalian organism and macromolecular evolution. This also has broad implications to many biological investigations because small mammals are so often the source for living materials used in laboratory preparations for tissue culture and biochemical investigations. Such preparations are adjusted to an assumed pH of 7.4, which could significantly alter function from a correct pH of 7.3 or less. Thus many standard laboratory protocols may require adjustment, and the results of many prior studies may require reconsideration doc6029 none The proposed exploratory study is to establish the first terrestrial high-resolution paleoclimate archive spanning the last 200 years based on a tree ring oxygen isotopic record in the tropics. This will be accomplished through the analysis of a very unique tree species in Brazil. The oxygen isotopic data from this study may be used to infer changes in the isotopic composition of soil water that the trees are using, which is directly related to precipitation (and thus potentially linked to atmospheric circulation). This work will be accomplished using a newly developed methodology for the optimized measurement of oxygen isotopes in organic matter. This approach is both novel and experimental, yet the results would provide the first annual resolution isotopic record of climate change of the last 200 years from Brazil doc6030 none This project leverages several K-12 outreach programs at the University of Washington to help increase the subject-matter understanding of precollege mathematics teachers and their students while increasing the Fellows understanding of teaching and learning. The College of Arts and Sciences, as home of the departments that teach mathematics and the sciences, has a long history of preservice and inservice teacher preparation. The proposal seeks to place 12 graduate students (recruited university wide) as GK-12 Fellows in local elementary and junior high mathematics classes. The project will involve a coordinated program of selection, initial preparation, in-depth preparation, on-going mentoring and assessment. Feasibility has been demonstrated by a two-year pilot project supported by the UW President s Fund and NSF. Fellows will receive initial preparation in instructional methods of inquiry based mathematics by Lillian McDermott and the Physics Education group followed by Developing Mathematical Ideas session to analyze student thinking given by the Expanding a Community of Mathematics Learners local systemic change project. This GK-12 projects extends partnerships with local school districts already involved in systemic change efforts and strengthens on-going attempts to help teachers implement curricula that meet state and national standards doc6031 none The Materials Research Society Symposium on Anisotropic Nanoparticles - Synthesis, Characterization, and Applications will be held in Boston, MA November 27 - December 1, . The goal of the conference is to facilitate multidisciplinary interactions and information exchange within a broad spectrum of researchers and top post doctoral scholars and graduate students working in priority areas of the broad field of nanoparticles. The NSF funds will be used to offset expenses associated with attending the symposium for graduate students, post doctoral scholars, and junior faculty, many of whom will present posters. %%% The nanoscience and technology community continues to have direct impact on important technological areas that are crucial to advancing society through the design, synthesis and application new nanoscaled materials involved in the assembly of value-added materials and devices from nanoassembled anisotropic particles with benefits to the biotechnology and computer industries. Students educated and trained in these multidisciplinary areas compete very well in the job market and go on to contribute in many significant ways to the global economy doc6032 none The US Army Research Office has agreed to fund Advanced Concepts Workshop - Centrifuge Modelling Research for Civilian and Defense Applications: Taking Stock and Recommendations for Future Research in January . The workshop will be held at the US Army Corps of Engineers Geotechnical Laboratory of ERDC in the Waterways Experiment Station in Vicksburg, MS. Deborah Goodings at the University of Maryland, and Richard Ledbetter of the Geotechnical Laboratory of ERDC are the two primary organizers. The purpose of the workshop is to take stock of what has been accomplished to date using centrifuge modelling, and then to assess new directions for research considering the needs of both DoD and non-DoD research users. Centrifuge researchers as well as research sponsors and users, both present and potential, will be invited to attend. This proposal to NSF is to request $15,000 in supplemental funding to subsidize travel for a group of academics who would not otherwise be likely to attend the workshop. There are two components to the target group: first, junior faculty who work in related areas and who may be educated to the benefits of centrifuge modelling results in their research programs; and second, PhD students who presently are engaged in centrifuge model research, who will benefit from exposure to the Army facility, to the centrifuge modelling community, and to potential research sponsors. Special attention will be given to including under-represented minorities and females in both groups doc6033 none Young This grant supports theoretical research on phase transitions in disordered systems. The work is primarily numerical. The research will focus on two areas. The first is to investigate the nature of the spin glass state, which occurs in systems with frustration and disorder. Although the terminology refers to a class of magnetic systems, the concepts developed in spin glasses have a much wider applicability and have found use in other areas of science such as protein folding and optimization problems. Only limited results have been obtained analytically, so numerical simulations have played an important role. Past work has established fairly conclusively that a finite temperature transition does occur. The nature of the spin glass state below the transition temperature is, however, fairly controversial. Recently the PI s group has embarked on a series of studies to elucidate the nature of the spin glass state by investigating how the ground state changes when various types of perturbations are applied. Because of frustration, determination of the ground state is non-trivial and required a fairly sophisticated genetic algorithm. These calculations suggest a picture of the spin glass which is a modified version of one of the proposed theories, the droplet picture, but also contains an important ingredient of the alternative theory, replica symmetry breaking. During the course of this grant, the PI will investigate this scenario in more detail, and, most importantly, check that it is also consistent with finite temperature Monte Carlo simulations on rather small sizes but taken down to temperatures much lower than before using the exchange Monte Carlo method, which considerably reduces the slowing down that occurs at low temperature in conventional Monte Carlo. Since numerical results on spin glasses can only be done on rather small systems at low temperatures, because of long relaxation times due to the many-valley nature of the phase space (which is only partially reduced by the exchange Monte Carlo method), a major concern in the interpretation of numerical data is the size of the corrections to scaling. The PI therefore also intends to look systematically at how the size of these corrections varies for different models, to see if there is an optimal model for which the corrections are smallest. Finally, the second area that will be studied concerns quantum phase transitions with disorder. These are poorly understood compared with classical phase transitions at finite temperature. This is because many of the techniques used successfully in classical transitions don t work in the quantum case, perhaps because non-perturbative (Griffiths-McCoy) effects are important. Hence again, numerical work has been very important. Several studies will be carried out. %%% This grant supports theoretical research on phase transitions in disordered systems. The work is primarily numerical. The research will focus on two areas. The first is to investigate the nature of the spin glass state, which occurs in systems with frustration and disorder. Although the terminology refers to a class of magnetic systems, the concepts developed in spin glasses have a much wider applicability and have found use in other areas of science such as protein folding and optimization problems. Only limited results have been obtained analytically, so numerical simulations have played an important role. The second area that will be studied concerns quantum phase transitions with disorder. These are poorly understood compared with classical phase transitions at finite temperature. This is because many of the techniques used successfully in classical transitions don t work in the quantum case, perhaps because non-perturbative (Griffiths-McCoy) effects are important. Hence again, numerical work has been very important. Several studies will be carried out doc6034 none Marley, Mark NStars: Understanding the L-dwarfs and T-dwarfs Dr. Marley is working to produce a model spectral catalog for L-dwarf and T-dwarf stars. Also known as brown dwarf stars, most of these objects are below the hydrogen-burning limit for normal stars. To facilitate the discovery of and subsequent follow-up research on brown dwarfs Dr. Marley and colleagues are computing a library of theoretical high-resolution spectra covering the wavelength regime of 0.5- micrometers appropriate for objects with effective temperatures ranging from 500- K and metallicities ranging from -2 [Fe H] 0.5. The models include the opacity of alkali metals and the influence of dusty condensates. The resulting model spectra are compared to the observed spectra of L- and T-dwarfs over the full temperature and age ranges of L- and T-dwarfs. The results are distributed to the scientific community via the web. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF Stellar Astronomy & Astrophysics (AST SAA) program through the joint NSF NASA Nearby Stars (NStars) initiative, and the NSF Mathematical & Physical Sciences Directorate Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (MPS OMA doc6035 none For the past five years, the AMS has provided developing contries with the Journal of Climate and Monthly Weather Review The program has been extremely successful in providing background materials for the scientists in those countries so that they can be part of the international policy dialogue on environmental issues. As a matter of national policy, the United States is committed to build the scientific infrastructure of the developing nations. As a result, NOAA s Office of Global Programs and the National Science Foundation have continued to provide the support for this significant endeavor. The support has enabled the AMS to provide these two important jornals to 175 organizations. They are expanding the program this year by asking NASA s Office of Earth Science and the Navy s Oceanographic Office to join the effort doc6036 none The Materials Research Society Symposium on Solid State Chemistry of Inorganic Materials III will be held in Boston, MA November 27 - December 1, . The goal of the conference is to facilitate multidisciplinary interactions and information exchange within a broad spectrum of researchers, to include CAREER grantees, and top postdoctoral scholars and graduate students working in priority areas of the broad field of solid-state chemistry. The NSF funds will be used exclusively to offset the expenses associated with attending the symposium for graduate students and post doctoral scholars, junior faculty and selected plenary speakers in the area of solid state chemistry of inorganic materials. %%% The Solid State Chemistry community continues to have direct impact on important technological areas that are crucial to advancing society through the design, synthesis and application new materials. Examples include porous strength composite structural materials. Since these technical areas are of very high priority to industry, students educated and trained in these multidisciplinary areas involving solid-state chemistry compete very well in the job market and go on to contribute in many significant ways to the global economy doc6037 none Blackfeet Community College (BCC) proposes to examine past activities of Phase I, look at what was learned, and continue into Phase II as a development grant. Phase I efforts in developing and maintaining a comprehensive and sustainable systemic reform effort in mathematics, science, and technology fell short of expected activities and BCC has learned from its past activities. BCC will utilize the lessons learned from Phase I activities and will continue to promote the NSF drivers while at the same time seek current strategies to assist in their effort to have a comprehensive program that will catapult Blackfeet Indian reservation and its students to meet the National standards. Special emphasis will be placed on a holistic approach to community reform using RSI activities as a springboard for a comprehensive reform effort. There are fourteen K-8 schools (1,814 students) and two high schools (563 students) in the service area of BCC. BCC will work with eight of these schools in a comprehensive effort for systemic reform, impacting 1,777 (98%) in the K-8 area and 563 (100%) of the High School students. BCC will work with mathematics and science teachers and administrators through existing channels established during Phase I in setting goals and objectives for Phase I implementation activities. A task force made up of reservation school administrators will be chaired by the BCC college administrator and will include all school administrators of schools served. A mathematics task force will be developed and will include area mathematics instructors (recommended by school site administrators) and BCC mathematics instructors. It is this group that will examine, recommend, and assess efforts in mathematics. Another task force in the sciences will be formed composed of all service area science teachers and BCC science instructors. They will work closely with the science curriculum of area schools and look at how they are involved in the overall reform effort. The Phase II developmental efforts will continue to promote systemic reform in math and science education at two school districts consisting of six different school buildings located in rural Montana. The utmost goal of the program is to develop and maintain a population that is prepared to meet the needs of a technologically competent work force doc6038 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Robert Weber Institution: Gordon Research Conferences The Gordon Conference on Catalysis in will be held on June 25-30 in New London, New Hampshire. The conference will focus on several areas that are key to the fundamental understanding of catalytic systems: molecular level characterization of catalysts, quantitative descriptions of reaction pathways, novel materials and the accelerated development of catalysts, electrocatalysis, chiral catalysis, and the production of ultralow sulfur fuels. The themes and speakers are of interest to both academic and industrial communities. Current and future trends in heterogeneous catalysis will be the general theme. This grant will provide partial support for speakers, graduate students, post-doctoral students, and younger faculty. This support will permit a more comprehensive discussion and dissemination of the material doc6039 none Anandakrishnan This award supports a four year project to develop of better understanding the ice streams of the Ross Sea Embayment (A--F) which drain the interior West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) by rapidly moving vast quantities of ice to the calving front of the Ross Ice Shelf. The project will examine the role of these ice streams as buffers between the interior ice and the floating ice shelves. The reasons for their fast flow, the factors controlling their current grounding-line-, margin-, and head-positions are crucial to any attempt at modeling the WAIS system and predicting the future of the ice sheet. For the Antarctic ice streams of the Siple Coast, the transition from no-sliding (or all internal deformation) to motion dominated by sliding is defined as the onset-region . To fully understand (and adequately model) the WAIS, this onset region must be better understood. The lateral margins of the ice streams are also a transition that need better explanation. Hypotheses on controls of the location of the onset region range from the purely-glaciologic to the purely-geologic. Thus, to model the ice sheet accurately, the basal boundary conditions (roughness, wetness, till properties) and a good subglacial geologic map, showing the distribution, thickness, and properties of the sedimentary basins, are required. These parameters can be estimated from seismic, radar, and other geophysical methods. The transition region of ice stream D will be studied in detail with this coupled geophysical experiment. In addition, selected other locations on ice streams C & D will be made, to compare and contrast conditions with the main site on ice stream D. Site-selection for the main camp will be based on existing radar, GPS, and satellite data as well as input from the modeling community doc6040 none The investigators will study the effects of gravity wave packets on the chemical exothermic heating in the mesopause region. Chemical exothermic heating is an important heat source in the mesopause region, and there is much evidence that gravity waves interact with hydroxyl nightglow emissions. A detailed, time-dependent study including fully nonlinear chemistry required to understand and quantify these wave effects has yet to be performed. The investigators will use state of the art models specifically designed for these tasks, including the Spectral Full-Wave Model, which simulates a time-dependent gravity wave packet, and a time-dependent, nonlinear, 2-D chemistry model that solves the coupled continuity equations of chemically active minor species. Hydroxyl chemistry will be included in the modeling to better understand the complex interplay between dynamics and airglow emissions. The main thrust of the research will be to understand the forcing of the mean state minor species distributions and associated chemical exothermic heating due to waves. The results are relevant to global climate modeling used to study the effects of global change on the middle atmosphere doc6041 none This award is for the partial support of a conference in the field of Partial Differential Equations with concentration on three topics: Hamilton-Jacobi PDE, nonlinear elliptic and parabolic equations, related topics in nonlinear functional analysis doc6042 none Durand This award provides partial support for a special track in Neural Engineering as part of the annual Biomedical Engineering Society meeting in Seattle, Washington in October . The meeting will 1) bring together scientists and engineers working in the area of Neural Engineering, 2) provide a opportunity for young scientists to organize and chair multidisciplinary sessions 3) provide mini-symposia in chosen topics of Neural Engineering 4) provide a forum for scientists, engineers and students to present their research in Neural Engineering through oral presentations and poster presentations. The Neural Engineering track is part of a larger scientific and engineering meeting whereby interaction and collaboration between neuro-scientists and biomedical engineers will be greatly enhanced. The Annals of Biomedical Engineering is to publish a special issue dedicated to this Neural Engineering Track doc6043 none This project is in support of an international conference on Spintronics in the form of a travel grant. Spintronics is the control of electron flow by means of magnetic fields (acting on the spin-magnetic moments of the electrons) rather than by conventional electric fields. Thanks to the spectacular development of growth and fabrication methods, the body of experimental, theoretical and conceptual knowledge of new spin states and coherent spin processes in artificial quantum structures has grown enormously in recent years. The field has reached a stage where the active control and manipulation of electron spin is possible. The conference will bring together leading scientists and young researchers working in different areas of spin physics in mesoscopic systems, to stimulate the exchange of ideas and to facilitate the dissemination of the most recent results. The conference covers the most intriguing and innovative aspects of spin effects in systems of reduced physical dimensions. Its aim is the highlighting of general concepts and the exploration of new directions of research. %%% This project is in support of an international conference on Spintronics in the form of a travel grant. Spintronics is the control of electron flow by means of magnetic fields (acting on the spin-magnetic moments of the electrons) rather than by conventional electric fields. Thanks to the spectacular development of growth and fabrication methods, the body of experimental, theoretical and conceptual knowledge of new spin states and coherent spin processes in artificial quantum structures has grown enormously in recent years. The field has reached a stage where the active control and manipulation of electron spin is possible. The conference will bring together leading scientists and young researchers working in different areas of spin physics in mesoscopic systems, to stimulate the exchange of ideas and to facilitate the dissemination of the most recent results. The conference covers the most intriguing and innovative aspects of spin effects in systems of reduced physical dimensions. Its aim is the highlighting of general concepts and the exploration of new directions of research. The conference is international in scope. This project will provide funding to support the travel and local expenses of advanced graduate students, postdoctoral research associates and junior faculty from universities and colleges in the United States. The benefits that derive from this support include up-to-date information to our young investigators on the most advanced research conducted in the world in nano-science and technology doc6044 none The purpose of this workshop is to enhance the cooperation among various control groups and high school teachers of mathematics and science throughout the United States and the world, to give attention to control and systems ideas and technology, and to increase the general awareness of the importance of control and systems technology and its cross-disciplinary nature among high school teachers and students. Control and Systems Science occurs in many different disciplines and its applications occur in a wide variety of technologies. It involves a variety of tasks, such as, modeling, identification, simulation, planning, decision making, and optimization. Some application areas of control and systems include transportation, manufacturing, communications, processing industries, and financial markets. The basic control systems science influences and impacts a diverse range of study, such as, biology, physics, chemistry, economics, and medicine doc6045 none Patrick Cote The aim of this project is to support a spectroscopic study of stars and dwarf galaxies in the halo of M31. These data would extend our detailed knowledge of stellar metallicities and kinematics in a systematic way beyond the stars in our own galaxy and its dwarf companions and provide valuable information for defining the basic parameters of the Local Group and for constraining theoretical pictures of galaxy formation and dynamics. M31 is both the dominant mass concentration in the Local Group and nearest large spiral galaxy. Thus, it offers a unique opportunity to study the fossil record of galaxy formation in a level of detail which will never be possible with high-redshift galaxies. This work will carry out a systematic study of the dynamics and chemical evolution of M31 s stellar halo and its dwarf spheroidal galaxies based on spectroscopy of individual red giant branch stars measured with the Keck 10m telescopes. Specific goals of the program include: (1) a direct measurement of the angular momentum of the M31 stellar halo using radial velocities for several hundred halo field stars; (2) a measurement of the mass of M31 s dark halo on scales of several hundred kiloparsecs based on the radial velocities of its outlying satellites; (3) a spectroscopic study of the chemical abundances of stars belonging to these satellites; and (4) a dynamical survey of the dark matter content in these faint galaxies. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc6046 none Northern Illinois University (NIU) will engage in a small, experimental project to improve the participation and retention of women in mathematics. E-WOMS: Expanding Women s Opportunities through Mathematical Science, offers a twopronged approach to solving the problem of low continuation rates for women in college mathematics. The first component of the project includes a novel collaboration among three units in NIU s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences-the Department of Mathematical Sciences, the Department of Communication, and the Women s Studies Program. The objective of this component is to change negative campus perceptions regarding women s roles, abilities, and achievement in mathematics. Graduate interns in Communication will work with the other two units in designing a public information campaign to educate the community during the funding period. This activity will give the interns opportunities to translate their research and theoretical knowledge into practice, and then to reflect back on their experiences in final papers. The second component consists of teaching interventions focusing on 60 women taking Calculus I during their first semesters at Northern (30 students each in fall and ). The interventions will create a community of students engaged in collaborative problem solving and the other activities (both in class and in a separate support group) enhanced by an associated section of UNIV 101. An orientation class. By enrolling in these courses together, attending presentations by professional women who use mathematics in their careers, and being offered ample opportunities for mentoring by members of the Department of Mathematical Sciences as the Women s Studies Program, the students involved will receive support and knowledge necessary to continue to take the higher mathematics courses required for many majors. Throughout, particular attention will be paid to the fact that many NIU students come from rural communities in which there are few (if any) female models of achievement in careers involving mathematics and higher education doc6047 none Goldberg The National Science Foundation s proposed National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) will establish 10 observatories located throughout the United States that will serve as national research platforms for integrated studies in field biology. This proposal specifically addresses the logistics and arrangements for a NEON management planning workshop that will be 2-4 May at the Santa Fe Institute. Participants will review how the NEON observatories will provide a state-of-the-art infrastructure to support interdisciplinary, integrated research and allow scientist to conduct comprehensive, continental-scale experiments on ecological systems. Specific components of management of individual observatories, network-level management needs, and interactions between the network and NSF will be discussed. In addition, the group will discuss evaluation of the NEON by NSF and external sources. This proposal outlines the details of the workshop program, travel arrangements for participants, food services, and lodging. A workshop report will be posted on the NEON website (http: www.sdsc.edu NEON) maintained by the San Diego Supercomputer Center within two months of the workshop doc6048 none Hunter This award supports a collaborative research and education project on the scholarship of diffraction education and utilization of advanced diffraction methods in chemical research. Dr. Allen D. Hunter of Youngstown State University will spend a first-time sabbatical working with Dr. J. Derek Woollins and Alexander Slawin of St. Andrews University in Scotland. The objectives of this collaboration are: (1) to conduct research on structures and bonding of main group inorganic and organometallic ring and cage complexes in solid state and determine their spectroscopic properties in solution; and (2) prepare a variety of teaching materials in crystallography. The US investigator is a crystallographer and brings to this collaboration expertise in diffraction methods . This is complemented by the Scottish group s expertise in main group inorganic and organometallic chemistry, their excellent crystallography facilities, and different approach to teaching diffraction methods. The project will advance understanding of the synthesis and characterization of novel main group organometallic and coordination complexes, and result in new teaching materials on diffraction methods doc6049 none This project will establish a transdisciplinary working group, and ultimately, a Center on Social Neuroscience at The University of Chicago. This working group, guided by the PI and a nine member steering committee, will involve faculty from several departments in the Biological Sciences, the Social Sciences, and Physical Sciences Graduate Divisions of the University. A wide range of levels of analysis and a diverse array of methodologies will be represented, including functional magnetic resonance imaging, surface event-related brain potential morphological and topographical analyses, indwelling (within the brain) event-related brain potential analyses, coregistration and source localization, computational neuroscience (including nonlinear dynamical analyses), neuropsychology and behavioral neurology, psychopharmacology, autonomic psychophysiology, surface electromyography and startle blink modulation, kinematic analyses, behavioral and social endocrinology, cognitive psychology, social cognition, and experimental social psychology. In the first year, a series of internal and external speakers and meetings will be held to develop a common scientific language, grounded in the structure and function of the brain, and to examine the strengths and limitations of each of the available methodologies. In the second year, the focus of the meetings, formal presentations, and workshops will build on this base to include theories of and experimental paradigms for studying problems confronting our society such as learning, stereotyping and prejudice. Pilot research will be conducted to test specific hypotheses about the neural substrates of the component processes underlying stereotyping and prejudice doc6050 none The plant epidermis contains microscopic pores called stomata through which gas exchange with the environment occurs. Through the stomata, carbon dioxide is taken up for photosynthesis and water vapor and oxygen are lost. Stomatal apertures are regulated by pairs of guard cells which border and define the stomatal pores. Guard cells regulate stomatal apertures by osmotic swelling and shrinking, driven by uptake of ions and production of organic solutes (stomatal opening) or loss of ions and catabolism of organic solutes (stomatal closure). The plant hormone abscisic acid (ABA) inhibits stomatal opening and promotes stomatal closure when plants are droughted or otherwise stressed. A few years ago, the PI s laboratory used biochemical methods to identify in guard cells an ABA-activated, Ca2+-independent kinase (ABA-activated protein kinase; AAPK). This serine threonine kinase is activated within one minute by physiological concentrations of ABA and is detected in guard cells but not in epidermal or mesophyll cells (Li and Assmann ( ) Plant Cell 8: - ). These characteristics suggested that AAPK could play an important role in triggering the rapid changes in guard cell solute content that drive stomatal closure upon ABA exposure. This project represents a request for additional funding for research related to that of PI s current NSF grant MCB 98- , initiated in March of . Under the first year of funding of MCB 98- , the PI s laboratory succeeded in cloning the cDNA encoding AAPK, starting from AAPK peptide sequence obtained by mass spectrometric analysis of the purified guard cell protein. The PI s group has shown that biolistic transformation of guard cells with a dominant negative version of AAPK ( AAPK(K43A) ) blocks ABA-induced stomatal closure. The PI s laboratory also has shown that AAPK(K43A) inhibits ABA-activation of a class of guard cell anion channels through which anion loss normally occurs during ABA-induced stomatal closure. This research has been published (Li et al., ( ) Science 287: 300-303). The research for which funding is sought under this request is the identification of proteins that interact with AAPK. The following approaches are proposed and prioritized: interaction cloning with labeled AAPK; yeast two-hybrid analysis; immunoprecipitation; and use of mass spectrometric analysis to identify the covalent modification of AAPK that occurs when ABA activates the kinase. Elucidation of the AAPK signal transduction pathway by these methods will increase understanding of hormonally-activated cellular signaling in plants and may provide an entry-point for biotechnological manipulation of stomatal responses to enhance ABA-induced stomatal closure when water is limiting, or to reduce ABA-induced stomatal closure and thus stomatal limitation of photosynthesis when water is abundantly available (e.g. during irrigation doc6051 none This award, provided by the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds from the Polar Instrumentation and Technology Development Program to develop an advanced ice-penetrating airborne radar system for studying polar ice sheets. Since its inception in the late s, radar sounding has distinguished itself as perhaps the single most important technique for glaciological work and an important aspect of sub-ice geological research. In the s The Technical University of Denmark (TUD) designed and constructed an ice-penetrating radar based on, then, state-of-the-art technology. This now venerable system is responsible for the vast majority of all ice sounding data yet collected over the ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland. This same radar was upgraded for digital recording by The University of Texas and used for extensive ice-thickness-resolution surveys in both West and East Antarctica conducted during the s. Currently, three categories for advances in radar ice sounding capability have been identified. These advances are required to achieve scientific progress on several problems at the forefront of glaciological and glacio-geophysical research. These categories are: 1) improved ice column penetration for detection of the subglacial interface through thick and or warm ice and through highly heterogeneous ice; 2) improved internal layer spatial resolution and improved deep layer detection; 3) the ability to characterize the subglacial interface and, specifically, to identify the presence of water. Recent interest in the Martian paeleoenvironment and the recognition of possible ice covered oceans on the Jovian satellites has stimulated research activity in sub-ice detection and characterization problems from both within and outside the terrestrial glaciological community. This activity has culminated in a new design for an ice penetrating radar that is a test-bed for sounding of planetary ice bodies. A prototype was developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (and constructed with the assistance of The University of Kansas) that draws on the best of modern radar technology. Field tests of this JPL KU system in both Greenland and Antarctica indicate that this new radar has the potential for addressing fundamental questions at the forefront of glacio-geophysical research. From the perspective of the three categories of needed advances outlined above, these field tests have also revealed some limitations with the current prototype. This project will work to overcome these shortcomings by merging components of the JPL KU radar with the UT TUD radar. The objectives for this new Multi-Institutional Radar Sounder (MIRS) are to improve layer resolution and total system sensitivity through pulse compression (relative to the current UT TUD radar), and to enable material roughness characterization of the detected interfaces by preserving the complete shape (both magnitude and phase) of the echo waveform along with automatically calibrating the overall system sensitivity. An additional benefit of this system will be the improved ability to see through highly scattering ice such as the crevassed regions near ice stream margins or in valley glaciers. In order to verify system design and fully establish the capabilities the MIRS, this development work will include field tests that target a wide range of ice sheet environments, including both hypothesized and established subglacial water bodies underlying the thickest portions of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. This will be accomplished with a series of airborne radar surveys to be conducted during the 02 Antarctic field season doc6052 none SES 00- - Wesley Shrum (Louisiana State University) - Feasibility Study of Scientific Communication in Africa and India This award supports an effort designed to collect baseline data and to establish the feasibility of a project assessing the role of the Internet for scientific communication in developing areas. The overall objective of the broader project is to determine the actual and potential impact of the web on scientific and technological communication in less developed areas through an examination of the conditions associated with interpersonal networking and information search behavior. Researchers in three areas with different levels of research capacity -- Ghana, Kenya, and India (Kerala) -- in two organizational contexts (academic, governmental) are the focus of the study. Currently, each of these areas is planning to introduce web-based communication capacity within their research systems. The objectives of this SGER project are: (1) to provide a baseline survey of scientific communication immediately before the introduction of the web in the organizations where the larger study will be conducted; (2) to establish the viability of using local research resources to conduct the repeated surveys necessary for the broader project doc6053 none This US-Brazil award will support a planning visit by Drs. R. Bowen Loftin and Elizabeth Bollinger of the University of Houston to travel to Concepcion, Chile, in order to plan a collaborative research project with Arquitecto Emilio Armstrong Delpin. The topic of this research is the development of a prototype computing interactive display system for a Virtual Interactive Science Museum. The system would be made available to students via the Education Internet Enlaces project of the Ministry of Education in Chile. Studying the development and impact of the Virtual Interactive Science Museum on Chilean children in public schools should offer insights on culturally and linguistically relevant pedagogies for informal education. Other likely benefits are the diffusion of results for use in U.S. public schools and museums, culturally and linguistically relevant pedagogies for U.S. Latino populations, drivers for research in the computer and information sciences and engineering, and advances in learning science and technologies. One compelling indirect benefit of the collaboration is the development of new strategies for international collaboration regarding the intersection of technology- and education-related topics doc6054 none A total of 24 outstanding middle school teachers will be recruited to be students in an Interdisciplinary Science program of Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Virginia and to serve as Graduate Teaching Fellows. Each Graduate Fellow will: Complete an M.S. in Interdisciplinary Studies of an M.S. program in physics, mathematical sciences or chemistry. The Interdisciplinary Science program included graduate course work in at least two disciplines, two interdisciplinary science courses and a final thesis. Receive training for in-school activities through the mathematics and Science Center of the Richmond area schools Provide enriched science and mathematics disciplinary content for current middle-school teachers working with them in a training institute and offering in their classrooms model lessons for students. After serving as Fellows, they may become members of the Clinical Faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University or the University of Virginia, continuing to link the schools and the college teacher preparation programs. This award is co-supported by the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences doc6055 none Lambert, David NStars: High-resolution Spectroscopy of Nearby Stars Dr. Lambert is conducting a detailed study of absorption line asymmetries and wavelength shifts in the spectra of stars using realistic three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations. He is working to quantify the effects of convective motions and the resulting surface irregularities on measurements of radial velocity, photocentric stability, chemical composition and other basic stellar parameter measurements so that the data on nearby stars can be corrected for these effects. Some of the ultra-high resolution spectra needed for this project are obtained at the University of Texas McDonald Observatory. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF Stellar Astronomy & Astrophysics (AST SAA) program through the joint NSF NASA Nearby Stars (NStars) initiative, and the NSF Mathematical & Physical Sciences Directorate Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (MPS OMA doc6056 none Marvel Three special awards for outstanding astronomical research projects by high school students are awarded annually at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF). The awards are: The Priscilla and Bart Bok awards (one award and one honorable mention) are awarded jointly by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP). The Richard D. Lines Special Award in Astronomy is awarded by the International Amateur-Professional Photoelectric Photometry (IAPPP). Information on the details of the awards may be found at http: www.aas.org education bok html . The winners are the subjects of a special article in the AAS newsletter each year. In the year , these honorary awards will be supplemented with a financial award, from the National Science Foundation, to be used by the recipients to further their education. A modest sum will be awarded to their present school for use in enhancing science education. This award is funded by the Division of Astronomical Sciences doc6057 none Irwin Kra This US-Mexico award will help to fund participation by senior and junior researchers and students in the 2nd Iberoamerican Congress on Geometry, to be held in Guanajuato, Mexico, January on the general topic of Riemann surfaces. Organized by Prof. Irwin Kra of SUNY at Stony Brook and Prof. Xavier Gomez-Mont of the Centro de Investigacion en Matematicas (CIMAT) in Guanajuato, the meeting will continue and expand the activities initiated at the 1st Iberoamerican Congress held in Chile in , promoting international collaboration by bringing together researchers from Latin America, Europe and the U.S. The main themes for the discussions will be automorphic forms, theta functions and Poincare theta series; discrete groups and Teichmuller theory; maps on surfaces, Galois groups, and Klein surfaces; complex dynamics and ordinary differential equations. Emphasis will be on recent results and new methods through workshop sessions in the various themes of the meeting. Expository talks on important topics will be presented and conference results will be published in a proceedings volume available to the mathematics community doc6058 none A site description directory, key to activation of group communications, provides a basis from which to consider a broader information directory schema representing a distributed cognition and an articulated organizational history for communities of practice. This project supports investigations into organizational metadata to further the development of a description directory for networked research sites with web interfaces providing distributed site dada input and access. The project encompasses testing a three level system sub-system prototype directory, exploring a design applicable to a variety of federated networks and system interfaces, as well as incorporating elements of social design to enhance organizational effectiveness. The Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network serves as a unique testbed for the directory concept doc6059 none A two-week workshop workshop short course will be held at the University of Washington, Friday Harbor August 20th -September 3rd, . The course will acquaint students with a modeling approach and software in the context of how biologists can use such tools to explore the evolutionary potential of developmental mechanisms. The first half of the course will cover background information that is crucial to young investigators working in the evolution of development (EvoDevo). This will include: major conceptual issues in evolutionary theory; evidence of evolvability from analysis of fossils and morphology; use of sequence data to infer phylogeny; and paradigms of developmental mechanics (i.e. networks of interacting genes). The second half will focus on modeling gene networks and the use of Ingeneue to do so. Molecular biology is providing ever more detailed maps of developmental mechanisms as a first step in understanding development. The problem is, however, that these maps are so complex that even when a network is known well, human intuition and language cannot predict or even comprehend its dynamic behavior. The informed, careful use of computer models can help complete maps of gene networks, test the plausibility of those maps as explanations and direct efforts toward inconsistencies among the known facts. This course is a first step in providing biologists with a minimum of training in the use of software towards that end doc6060 none This project allows for the continuing collaboration of Southwest Missouri State University (SMSU) with Springfield Public Schools (SPS) in a nationally recognized manner. The plan includes the involvement of twelve GK-12 Fellows (four graduate students and eight senior undergraduate students) for year one of the project and 16 GK-12 Fellows (eight graduate students and eight senior students) for years two and three of the project. Initial training of the GK-12 Fellows will include a two-week session prior to the beginning of the academic year. Training will continue through the academic year with weekly follow-up meetings led by two SMSU faculty members. Goals and objectives of this program have been developed in collaboration with SPS. Four SPS Middle Schools will be targeted in this project based on a recent study conducted by a School Board appointed task force on the dropout problem in Springfield. These four middle schools feed into high schools with the largest dropout rates. GK-12 Fellows will work with SMSU faculty and middle school teachers to make a significant positive impact on student-teacher contact and student learning in selected middle schools within the SPS system doc6061 none This project investigates the potential to promote understanding and interest in science among middle school girls on an informal science learning web site called Whyville. Whyville provides an environment for students to explore scientific phenomenon, together with other students, and participate in both scientific and design activities. Preliminary studies of the current Whyville users show that over 60% of the users are girls, most from grades 4-8. Because Whyville is successful in attracting girls to a science oriented site, it is poised to be a potentially powerful tool for motivating and educating girls in science. The proposed project would use several methodologies to investigate Whyville characteristics, participants, and effects. A survey of the current Whyville users (N=600) will gather data on science interest, demographics, and background. Focus groups with current users (N=20) will be conducted on-line, within Whyville, to gather information on site use. A group of first time users (N=60) will be recruited from local schools and given a science interest and background survey, as well as a pre-assessment before entering Whyville. Then, using a tracking program, a subset of the current users (N=60) and all first time users will have their movements on the site monitored for three months in order to determine the activities of greatest interest and appeal. A subgroup (N=20) of new and current users will visit Whyville in a lab setting where their use of the site will be tracked in depth. They will also participate in a think aloud session with an interviewer while using Whyville and will explain their perceptions and understanding of the science content. The new users will also be asked to complete an interim assessment at the end of their think aloud session. Finally, any subsequent voluntary use of Whyville by these new users will be tracked for three months and they will be asked to complete a post-assessment to provide a third comparison point for the impact of Whyville exposure on science concept knowledge. The research proposed should provide a number of benefits. Its examination of Whyville characteristics, participants, and effects may provide a model for researchers, evaluators and site developers in future work. The findings should suggest guidelines for improving the effectiveness of educational websites in attracting your girls interest in science and technology, and they may have important implications for improving school-based learning as well doc6062 none A Maine ScienceCorps Promoting Excellence and Equity in Ifigh School Biological Science Education In partnership with high school biology teachers, a ScienceCorps of University of Southern Maine (USM) immunology and molecular biology graduate student fellows will bring laboratory and inquiry-based activities into underserved Maine classrooms while adding a focus upon inquiry methods of learning and teaching to their graduate curriculum. Students in chronically underfunded rural schools typically have inadequate access to laboratory facilities and the scientific world beyond the classroom. ScienceCorps extends the twenty-two year partnership of USM and the Foundation for Blood Research in enrichment of high school biological sciences education through programs of inquiry-based learning activities and laboratory experiences for students and teachers. ScienceWorksfor ME, an ongoing program providing summer institutes for teachers and students and hosting visiting high school bioloav classes for laboratory-based activities, provides the framework for much of the training that graduate fellows will need to serve effectively in high school biology classrooms. ScienceCorps teams, each consisting of two graduate fellows, will take activities developed and tested through ScienceWorks into rural high school classrooms across the state and will also work with skilled high school teachers in developing new activities that will facilitate these teachers efforts to meet state and national science education standards. doc6063 none Ulloa This Pan-American Advanced Institutes award, jointly supported by the NSF and the Department of Energy (DOE), will consist of a series of lectures and research interactions on physics and technology at the nanometer scale. The course will be held in Alajueata, Costa Rica June 21-30, . Lecturers for the PASI will be selected from an international advisory committee consisting of top researchers in the area and will come from a broad selection of countries and institutions in the continent. Because most of the research at the nanoscale crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries, the organizers have chosen to cover topics in five major areas: self-organized semiconductor nanostructures; carbon nanotubes, buckyballs, and molecules, materials and electronic transport; magnetic nanostructures; structure and epitaxy of low-dimensional systems; and theory of low-dimensional systems: transport, optical properties, and correlation interaction effects. The course will combine lectures with poster sessions for the presentation of research studies and results by junior and other participants in order to foster content-specific interactions. These interactions should be helpful in laying the groundwork for future collaborations doc6064 none The objective of this project is to increase the number of high school deaf girls who take mathematics classes in high school, with an ultimate goal of increasing the numbers who major in science, mathematics, engineering and technology (SMET) in college and who eventually enter careers in SMET. At present, very few deaf girls think of careers in SMET because they are not encouraged to take mathematics and science courses while in high school. Deaf girls generally are not encouraged by teachers or counselors to consider careers in SMET. Part of the reason for the lack of deaf women in SMET is due to stereotyping and partly due to the historical perspective about deaf in general. This project, through a partnership between the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) and Mt. Holyoke College, will integrate deaf female high school students into a well established and successful summer mathematics program at Mt. Holyoke. Through their summer experience in this program, it is expected that the deaf girls will gain confidence in their ability to handle mathematics and will consider careers in SMET. The deaf girls in this project will be integrated into the Mt. Holyoke Summermath program with full support of interpreters and other services funded by this grant. This will be the first time that deaf girls will be able to attend one of many summer math programs for high school girls presently offered at many colleges in the United States. These programs have been closed to deaf students. By forming a partnership between NTID and Mt. Holyoke, pre-training in deaf strategies can be provided to the faculty and staff at Mt. Holyoke, pre-training in deaf education strategies can be provided to the faculty and staff at Mt. Holyoke, and needed support services will be provided to the deaf girls. Through this partnership, it is expected that the girls self esteem, confidence, problem solving abilities toward mathematics and science will be strengthened, and that the girls will be more willing to take science and mathematics courses in high school and be better prepared to enter postsecondary programs in SMET. This project will have a very powerful impact on deaf education, since these initial eight students can become role models for other deaf high school girls. Furthermore, this project should help to change teachers , administrators , and parents perspectives on the career opportunities for deaf females. It is expected that this project will also open the doors of other SMET summer programs for high school students at postsecondary programs, and will provide real gender equality to a group of students that have been shut out from these opportunities because of their deafness doc6065 none Locke This international cooperative research project involves three research groups, one in the Unites States, one in the Czech Republic and one in Croatia. Bruce Locke of Florida State University, Tallahassee, serves as the principal investigator along with partners Pavel Sunka from the Czech Institute of Plasma Physics, Prague, and Natalija Koprivanac of the University of Zagreb, Croatia. Their overall objective is the development and analysis of a type of advanced oxidation technology for the degradation of complex industrial and commercial organic dyes in aqueous solutions. Specifically their work features development and evaluation of liquid phase electrical discharge reactors for the chemical degradation of azo dyes, reactive dyes, and 3-phynylmethand type dyes. The international project builds upon the strengths of each lab including Locke s expertise in analysis of chemical reactors including electrical discharge reactors, Koprivanac s expertise in chemical reactions involving synthesis and degradation of organic dyes, and Sunka s strengths in plasma physics and analysis of electrical discharge reactors for both gas and liquid applications. Findings are expected to lead to an improved understanding and eventual development of: 1) new electrode materials for liquid phase electrical discharge processes using plasma-spraying technology in Prague, 2) new reactor configurations combining gas and liquid phase discharges in Tallahasee, and, in Zagreb, 3) chemical reaction pathways for dye degradation using ozone and or hydrogen peroxide in combination with various zeolites. If successful, combined results should yield more efficient and effective processes for the degradation and removal of complex organic dyes from commercial, industrial and manufacturing wastewater. This project in engineering processes fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc6066 none Uetz In April , a class 5 tornado struck north of Cincinnati, Ohio. This storm destroyed approximately one half of the 65 acre Benedict Hazelwood Botanical Preserve. This event provides an opportunity for a number of studies on ecosystem recovery following a catastrophic natural disturbance. The blow-down area has been managed minimally and most of the area has been left relatively undisturbed for studies of forest recovery. This SGER study is directed at the first post-disturbance generation of several animal species (invertebrates and vertebrates; primary and secondary consumers) that have been subjected to environmental stress fro a major ecosystem catastrophe during their development. This study concerns the question of whether environmental stress from habitat destruction will have an impact on developmental instability. The investigators will use a frequently-cited indicator of environmental stress - measures of fluctuating asymmetry, or FA (small, random deviations from perfect left-right symmetry in bilaterally symmetrical animals) - as a means of determining impact of disturbance on animal populations. Recent studies with forest-dwelling animal populations have demonstrated that FA is increased in populatoins undergoing interruptions in food, or in areas where vegetation is removed by logging. This is the first study of FA associated with environmental stress from a major natural catastrophe. This SGER research represents a unique opportunity to increase our knowledge about the response of animal populations to a rare but severe natural disturbance doc6067 none This program will train and support graduate students in science and mathematics to provide resources for middle and high school students and teachers. Fellows will participate in workshops that focus on interdisciplinary science and math curriculum and effective teaching. University faculty and K-12 teachers will provide a background in inquiry-based techniques and activities, emphasizing national and state learning standards. Fellows and teachers will form school-based teams that will formally assess the science, mathematics, and technology needs at each site. They will collaborate to compile and present curriculum enhancement mini-units, emphasizing inquiry-based activities. The fellows will also adapt the computer technology available at school sites to the needs of specific classrooms. Fellows will provide science resources for students through e-mail communication, an Ask-a-Scientist network, Saturday Science workshops, and collaboration with the Children s Discovery Museum of Central Illinois. University faculty, fellows, and staff members of the Center for Mathematics and Science Education will plan and present professional development programs for classroom teachers. The project will address issues of scientific literacy, equity, and attitudes toward science and math among middle and high school students. It will integrate research and teaching, as well as enhance teaching and curriculum selection development skills for all participants through collaboration doc6068 none Houston This two-year award, which supports U.S.-Italy cooperative research on using product imaging techniques to investigate molecular dynamics, involves Paul Houston of Cornell University and his students and Domenico Stranges and Anna Giardini of the University of Rome, La Sapienza. The objectives of their research are to study cluster photodissociations using a combination of resonance enhanced multiphoton ionization, time-of-flight mass spectrometry, and product imaging to provide a coherent picture of the energetics and dymanics of the cluster. The U. S. investigator brings to this collaboration his group s improved imaging system using ion counting techniques in conjunction with velocity mapping. This is complemented by the Italian investigators expertise in photofragment translational spectrometry and cluster photodissociation. The results of this research are expected to uncover new physical phenomena of importance for practical purposes doc6069 none PROJECT FULCRUM: BUILDING STUDENT-SCIENTIST- TEACHER PARTNERSHIPS - Give me a long enough lever and a place to stand and I can move the Earth - Project FULCRUM is a teacher-scientist-teacher educator collaboration that will place graduate and undergraduate science students from the University of Nebraska in grades 4 - 8 in the Lincoln Public Schools to form partnerships with teachers. The goals of this collaboration are: 1) Enhance 4 h _ 8,h grade students opportunities to team science by increasing access to inquiry-driven experiences in content areas that satisfy national and state science standards; 2) Assist teachers in feeling more comfortable and knowledgeable about teaching science; 3) Provide students with diverse role models by involving women and other under-represented groups at all levels; 4) Improve student attitudes regarding their involvement in and future study of science; 5) Help GK-12 fellows improve pedagogical, communication and teamwork skills, thus enhancing future employment opportunities; 6) Assess the short- and long-term impacts of the program on the elementary and middle schools, the teachers at those schools and the GK- 12 fellows; 7) Strengthen the UNTL - LPS partnership by establishing an infrastructure that facilitates interactions between teachers, teacher educators and scientists; and, 8) Piomote long-term cooperation between scientists and teacher educators at UNL to stimulate additional joint activities impacting. K- 12 education. Project FULCRUM is based on school-centered teams that include a graduate and an undergraduate GK-12 fellow, a lead teacher, other classroom teachers, faculty scientists and pre-service teachers. GK-12 fellows will form partnerships with teachers at their school to increase the inquiry component of existing activities and to develop new activities that introduce the students to science content, and to the relationship of science to people and society. Fellows will attend a summer institute to introduce them to inquiry learning. Seminars throughout the school year will help them understand their role in the classroom. The lead teacher will mentor the fellow and assist the Pls in gathering and evaluating. data from their schools. Pre-service teachers will share a common methods course and will discuss experiences from the program as part of their course. Internal and external assessments will monitor whether the program is meeting the needs of the students. doc6063 none Ulloa This Pan-American Advanced Institutes award, jointly supported by the NSF and the Department of Energy (DOE), will consist of a series of lectures and research interactions on physics and technology at the nanometer scale. The course will be held in Alajueata, Costa Rica June 21-30, . Lecturers for the PASI will be selected from an international advisory committee consisting of top researchers in the area and will come from a broad selection of countries and institutions in the continent. Because most of the research at the nanoscale crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries, the organizers have chosen to cover topics in five major areas: self-organized semiconductor nanostructures; carbon nanotubes, buckyballs, and molecules, materials and electronic transport; magnetic nanostructures; structure and epitaxy of low-dimensional systems; and theory of low-dimensional systems: transport, optical properties, and correlation interaction effects. The course will combine lectures with poster sessions for the presentation of research studies and results by junior and other participants in order to foster content-specific interactions. These interactions should be helpful in laying the groundwork for future collaborations doc6071 none This summer initiative will familiarize selected high-school students with Bioinformatics, an increasingly important field with strong potential for growth in the coming decades. This course is oriented toward female high school students. This program will be offered in the summer of , and will be open to qualified young women who have just completed their third year of high school. Particular encouragement will be given to young women who are members of minority groups; who are from low-income families; and who lack strong role models in science and technology. Upon conclusion of the program, the participants will be able to: - Describe, apply, and analyze principles of molecular biology; - Use the Internet, Microsoft Office, and Bioinformatics tools; - Use problem-based learning techniques; - Distinguish the outcomes of their data entries and manipulations; - Comprehend Bioinformatics as a field of study; - Know the roles that women can achieve in science and information technology; and - Value group process as a means of learning . In the program, participating young women will live on campus during the five-week program period; take courses during the day; participate in hands-on lab work; work together as members of small teams; benefit from presentations from and discussions with working professionals in the field; and travel to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, government laboratories, and other sites to complement their coursework, and learn how Bioinformatics is used in the scientific field. The program will use the NSF-funded Biology Student Workbench (BSW) program as the part of the curriculum, and the program organizers will work closely with the staff of that project in order to implement it appropriately. Using a problem-based learning approach, the investigators will teach via student-centered group interaction, and will create specific scenarios for student research. The program will be designed to encourage young women to pursue Bioinformatics as a field of study, and ultimately as a profession. Participants will strengthen their general computer skills and their ability to use the Internet as an interactive tool. By working in teams they will increase their problem solving abilities, communication skills and ability to interact with others. Upon conclusion of the program, information will be disseminated to encourage the replication of the program at other sites nationwide through presentations and publications, as well as work with BioQuest and the Biology Student Workbench team. The program organizers except to extend the benefits to other high school students and teachers, and encourage many young women to enter computer technology, mathematics, and science fields doc6072 none Podila This award supports Gopia Podila and students from the Michigan Technological University in a collaboration Robin Sen of the Department of Biology at the University of Helsinki, Finland. The project will focus on the molecular characterization of cellular development and functioning processes in conifer ectomycorrhizae, which are symbiotic root-fungal organs essential for seedling establishment and tree growth in nutrient-limited soils. The essence of the symbiosis is that the fungus provides roots with needed nitrogen and phosphorus in exchange for carbon at the root-fungus interface. A deeper understanding of the functional genomics of the symbiosis is an essential part of forest science and has considerable potential in future forest biotechnology applications the U.S. and Finland. Each lab brings unique equipment and expertise to the research, and the collaboration is a perfect match for advancing fundamental knowledge of the molecular bases of ectomycorrhizal symbiosis. Exchange of junior researchers is emphasized to add an international dimension to their training and to allow them to establish international connections early in their careers doc6073 none In conjunction with a public radio program, Sheldon Jackson College and Pacific High School will conduct a one-week camp on science and society issues for ninth-grade girls. Our marketing plan will be to encourage traditionally underserved students, such as Alaskan Natives, low income and rural (bush) students. The camp will be preceded by a three-day workshop for teachers to become familiar with update science concepts. The camp will be held on the Sheldon Jackson College campus located in downtown Sitka, on the Pacific Ocean at the edge of the Tongass National Forest in the Heart of Alaska s inside passage. The cam will utilize Expeditionary Learning School techniques: guided questions, and posing challenges to have students explore scientific arenas. The goal of the camp will be to expose young women to science in relation to social and ethical issues. The camp will cover the scientific method, scientific assumptions and explore how science impacts our culture, how the media portrays scientists, and science communication. The experience should result in positive student attitudes towards exploring careers in science. Further, time will be spent with each individual developing a career pathway that will map out a plan for courses during their high school career doc6074 none Novotny The objective of this project is to explore a new methodology to increase the spatial resolution of optical microscopy and spectroscopy. The instrument to be developed holds promise for gaining deeper insight into the functionality of nanometric structures embedded in complex environments such as single proteins in biological membranes. It is propose to develop a high resolution near-field optical microscope based on the effect of surface enhanced Raman scattering. In this technique, a sharp noble metal tip is held in close proximity over the sample surface. Properly polarized laser light illuminates the tip and induces a strong surface charge density at the tip. This leads to an enhancement of the exciting laser field. Rigorous calculations show that the intensity of the optical fields at the tip can be enhanced by 3 - 4 orders of magnitude over the intensity of the exciting laser light. The enhanced field at the tip enables a highly localized optical interaction with the sample surface thereby generating a Raman signal and thus a vibrational spectrum of the sample area right beneath the tip doc6075 none There are three major barriers to increasing female involvement in science, mathematics, and technology: 1) inequitable treatment of females in classrooms, 2) lack of self-confidence, and 3) lack of successful mentors. The WE CAN (women Engineers Changing Attitudes Now) grant will address these barriers through extensive modeling, direct teaching, and mentoring. In WE CAN grant there are four objectives and ten activities which will address engineering and gender equity concerns. The objectives include: 1) mentoring young women from elementary school to undergraduates, 2) informing young women about engineering careers and providing them opportunities to experience engineering activities, 3) informing teachers, counselors, and parents about engineering and gender equity issues, and, 4) disseminating information about gender equity and engineering through the WE CAN program and future WE CAN activities. The activities included in this grant are as follows: 1) establishing a WE CAN mentoring program, 2) establishing a WE CAN web page, 3) presenting information about the field of engineering while modeling gender equity to K-12 groups, 4) teaching engineering to elementary students in the Super Saturday program, 5) teaching engineering to middle school students in the Summer Camp for Academically Talented Students (SCATS) program, 6) conducting a WE CAN engineering day 7) creating an all female team for the BEST (Boosting Engineering, Science and Technology) robotic competition, 8) teaching elementary girls in an engineering enrichment program, 9) providing a workshop for teachers and counselors in the field of engineering and gender equitable teaching and counseling strategies, and 10) disseminating information at conferences and events about gender equity and engineering. Participants from the first grade through the university level will experience a hands-on and minds-on approach to the field of engineering in gender equitable environment. Participants will experience support through the WE CAN mentoring program. A strong focus will be placed on mentoring young women as a way on increasing self-esteem. Several activities in the WE CAN grant are integrated with existing programs in an attempt to make the seeds of this program sustainable in future years doc6076 none Magasanik This US-Mexico award will fund an international workshop on nitrogen regulation in ascomycetes, to be held at Cuernavaca, Mexico from March 21 to March 25, . Organizers are Dr. Boris Magasanik, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Dr. Alicia Gonzalez, Universidad Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). The proposed workshop will serve to bring together major researchers in the area of nitrogen regulation to explore new directions influenced by genomics-based approaches, which provide insight into the control of nitrogen regulation in metabolic processes and how genes are regulated in response to nitrogen availability. An elucidation of the similarity and differences of these regulatory interactions in different, but related organisms, such as fungi and bacteria is of much theoretical and practical interest to most microbiologists doc6077 none The Women in Science Program (WISP) at Indiana University-Bloomington (IUB), is creating a research fellowship program to encourage women to pursue science degrees and science careers. The Undergraduate Research Fellowship (URF) Program for Women in the Science will provide research experience to upper-division undergraduate women who have shown potential and interest in the sciences. Third-year women science majors will participate in researh under the auspices of IUB faculty starting the summer of and continuing for the - academic year. The participate will also serve as mentors to lower-division undergraduate women interested in pursuing science majors The URF Program will identify qualified students during the - school year to begin laboratory work in the summer of . The Program will run through the summer and through both fall and spring semesters of the - academic year. By focusing on upper-division students, the Program hopes to assist students to gain the experience they need to pursue careers in laboratory research or to be competitive for graduate school. Students will also be required to write a paper and present posters on their research to increase their communication, writing and presentation skills, to make them more competitive with others in their field. The laboratory experience provided by the URF Program will enhance the participants research capabilities and will increase interest in and preparation for jobs and graduate school majors in the sciences. The interactions among the participants, faculty mentors, fellow lad researchers, and the sophomore mentees will increase the support system for women in the sciences. The overarching goal of the URF Program is to increase the number of females that graduate with Bachelor s degrees in the sciences and to retain them in science fields after graduation doc6078 none Reichl This U.S.-Mexico award will help to support a meeting on quantum chaos, its theory and applications, to be held in Cocoyoc, Mexico, July 8-13, . Organized by L. E. Reichl of the University of Texas at Austin and G. Luna Acosta of the Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla with T. Seligman, J. Flores, and P. Mello of the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), the meeting will be a satellite meeting to the larger International Conference on Statistical Physics, STATPHYS-21, to be held in Cancun, Mexico, July 15-21, . The manifestations of chaos in the quantum dynamics of mesoscopic and atomic systems is a topic of growing importance because of the increasing variety of experiments in atomic systems and nanometer scale devices in which it is now being detected. Nuclear scattering experiments and atomic spectra, atomic systems driven by microwave radiation, very intense laser pulses, and electron waveguides made from semiconductor materials furnish examples of these phenomena. This meeting will allow the growing number of researchers and students in the U.S., Mexico, and other countries in Latin America, who work in these areas, to have a broader exchange of views on these issues and develop future collaborative projects. Convening the meeting close to STATPHYS, which attracts experts in the field of quantum chaos and mesoscopic systems from all over the world, will serve to enrich the discussion for all participants doc6079 none The teaching fellows (graduate and senior undergraduates in biology, earth sciences, physics andastronomy) will be trained in a summer institute, and then paired with grades 3-6 teachers. Inconsultation with Binghamton University faculty, the pairs will develop the research lessons , test them during the academic year in grades 3-6 classrooms and continue to refine them. Each66research lesson is a series of lessons based on the 5E Teaching Cycle and with an emphasis on identifying and challenging misconceptions of students in grades 3-6. The research lessons willprovide models for addressing the new curricula programs of New York State and BinghamtonCity Schools, the chosen school district. The research lessons will make use of a wide varietyof excellent educational materials, and so what the lessons will do is provide conceptually linked and carefully sequenced lessons that specifically address the students misconceptions. A prioritywill be to develop the habits and skills of scientific inquiry through demonstrations and hands-on activities. An important outcome is that both the teaching fellows and the teachers will learn howto develop, assess and refine research lessons that target science content, habits and skills instudents doc6080 none Grodzicker This grant supports the Cold Spring Harbor Conference on Axon Guidance and Neural Plasticity. The field of axon guidance and developmental plasticity have emerged as one of the most exciting and rapidly growing areas in Neuroscience and during the last 5 years exceptional progress has been made in guidance molecules and their receptors. This meeting will assemble many of the leaders of the field to discuss leading edge developments in the field and the impact of recent advances in genomics. In addition, efforts have been made to include graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty in the program, in large part via afternoon poster sessions. It is expected that this will be a biennial event and the first meeting in was considered to be highly successful. There is a clear organizational plan and detailed list of distinguished speakers. There has also been a clear effort made to recruit applications from under-represented minorities and women have a significant presence on the program, including session chairs doc6081 none Project - We describe an educational partnership between The University of Akron, the Cuyahoga Valley Environmental Education Center, Bath Township Elementary School, and Akron Public School District that builds an educational community covering K-graduate work in Life Sciences. Each partner will provide expertise in training GK- 12 fellows in research, teacher training, and curriculum and pedagogy development. Impact of our project will stretch well beyond a single school district, to train teachers that come into contact annually with more than 15,000 K- 12 students in over 20 school districts in NE Ohio. A compelling feature of our project is the integration of GK- 12 graduate research projects into content modules that will serve as the organizing theme for teacher professional development and curricular enhancement. Our model moves well beyond the central goal of using GK- 1 2 Fellows as K- 12 content resources. Our approach allows faculty and GK- 12 fellows to integrate their research and teaching goals (an NSF priority) and to provide curricular content that is immediately and directly relevant to the K- 12 institutions. Because each of these partners already cooperate in educational activities, building the comprehensive partnership we describe will benefit from well established lines of communication. Furthermore, extending the existing solid foundation promises that the educational community we seek will have longevity well beyond the granting cycle. doc6082 none The investigators will develop a new spaced-radar technique to study coupling processes and energetics taking place in the equatorial electrojet. With this technique, it will be possible to measure the complete altitude profile of the electric field in the electrojet as a function of time. The technique is based on a well-established technique that uses the Doppler velocity of radar echoes from the electrojet measured at two or more locations. The two radars will be located on the islands of Pohnpei and Majuro. The data will be used to study the electrical current in the electrojet, the sources of variability in the electrojet, and the role of gravity waves in modifying the electrojet doc6083 none A Rayleigh lidar system will be deployed to Maui, Hawaii, to measure absolute temperatures and relative atmospheric density throughout the stratosphere and mesosphere regions in combination with simultaneous observations of upper mesosphere and lower thermosphere winds and temperatures carried out by the U. of Illinois sodium lidar system. The 10 watts laser transmitter on loan from the Univ. of Illinois would be combined with the 3.7 m USAF-AEOS telescope located on Mt. Haleakala to achieve a power aperture product unmatched by any other Rayleigh lidar system regularly operating today. These lidar measurements would be supplemented by all sky imaging observations provided by the Univ. of Illinois OH intensity imaging system and the Utah State Univ. all sky imaging system of temperature and intensity for OH and O2 emissions. This suite of measurements would provide for focused investigations of small-scale wave propagation properties within the stratosphere and mesosphere regions. Larger scale dynamical measurements would be possible by combining these results with those from the Illinois meteor radar system doc6084 none We propose a collaboration between Harvard and the Cambridge Public Schools to help public school students learn science and technology. Cambridge teachers follow a curriculum which meets standards of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) and prepares students for state-wide examinations. Our plan is based on teams, each consisting of one faculty member, three GK-12 Fellows, and three Cambridge teachers. Each team will choose a topic from one of three areas: the environment, materials science, and information technology. During the first half year the team will meet weekly to introduce Cambridge teachers to research at Harvard and to discuss how to involve students in investigations related to the Cambridge curriculum and MCAS standards. In the second half year, GK- 12 Fellows will move to the Cambridge Public Schools to help teachers and students in discussions and student projects. A workshop will be held at the end of the year in which Cambridge students present their results to an audience of students and parents. We will start with eighth grade students and move to the ninth and tenth grades in following years. These activities will help Cambridge students learn science and technology and help GK- 12 Fellows become more involved in public education. This award is co-supported by the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences doc6085 none Through the unique partnering of Engineering and Education Graduate Fellows, Columbia University s School of Engineering and Applied Science, Teachers College, Barnard College, and New York City School Districts will create a comprehensive model of teacher recruitment and education that is a significant departure from traditional pre-service and in-service teacher training programs. The long-term objective of this program is to create a sustainable teacher-training model that significantly infuses technology- competent teachers into urban school systems. The proposed fellowship project has as its major goal to develop a unique pre-service and in-service teaching model that has the following program elements: o the creation of an innovative, interdisciplinary education program that seamlessly integrates new educational technologies into their curriculum and capitalizes on a large pool of technology-savvy undergraduate and graduate engineering, science, math, and education students; o the collaboration of Columbia University s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS), Barnard College, and Teachers College (TC) with Community School Districts and High Schools in Harlem to share institutional resources, experience and expertise; o the organization of parallel college and secondary school technology environments for the training of teachers in academic and real world school settings; o the development and organization of curriculum modules in the sciences and mathematics that enable the full use of computer technology and the Internet to foster learning through self-directed study and group project applications; and o the demonstration and assessment of the impact a technology-integrated learning environment has on secondary students science and math knowledge and skills. The project s concept is to build the infrastructure and formal mechanisms required to develop the technology and pedagogical skills of graduate and undergraduate engineering, science, and math students to prepare them for careers in urban secondary schools systems. Engineering and Education Graduate Fellows, as partners, will be responsible for the creation of educational technology laboratories located at Columbia and School District #5, the development of technology-enhanced curriculum modules in support of secondary school student learning in science and math, direct mentoring of secondary school students, and the supervision of undergraduate teaching students during a junior year technology-focused field experience. Throughout the project, the fellows will participate in a series of special workshops and mentoring experiences to support the development of their teaching knowledge and skills doc6086 none For the past year, Georgia State University has successfu Ily operated the Bio-Bus, a 3 0-foot mobile instructional laboratory that serves Georgia s K- 1 2 school systems. In partnership with six Georgia School systems (Bremen City, Carrollton City, Carroll County, Decatur City, Haralson County, and Paulding County), the University proposes to inaugurate the GKI2 Bio-Bus Pilot Project, an extension of the main Bio-Bus program that provides additional preparation and reinforcement learning experiences not currently available to Bio-Bus participants. For the Pilot Project, science graduate students and advanced undergraduates chosen as GK12 Fellows will present a selection of learning modules to novice learners in their partner districts that incorporate scientific inquiry, hands-on investigation, and student-directed learning. Though centered around a biological theme, each learning module will take a multidisciplinary approach, presenting fundamental physical, chemical and geological concepts in a biological context. Summer workshops in biotechnology will be provided for in-service teachers and their GKI2 Fellow partners. Teachers who complete the summer workshop will qualify for the Bio-Bus Lending Lab,. which provides free equipment and supplies for a week s worth of biotechnology experiments during the school year. doc6087 none This award provides partial support for the symposium entitled Organic Thin Films for Photonic Applications to be held at the ACS National Meeting, Washington, D.C., August 20-25, . The organizers wish to have broad international representation and to have participation by both acknowledged leaders and promising newcomers to this field. A special effort is made to support and include junior faculty amongst the invited speakers and to promote contributions from graduate students and postdocs. %%% The primary sponsor of the sponsor of the symposium is the Division of Polymeric Materials Science & Engineering (PMSE) of the American Chemical Society (ACS) with secondary sponsorship by the Division of Polymer Chemistry (POLY) of the SCS and the Optical Society of America (OSA). The principal objective of this symposium is to promulgate the science and technology of organic and polymeric materials with novel and useful optical and electronic properties. This symposium is designed to bring together organic chemists, polymer scientists, optical physicists and device specialists to discuss materials science capabilities and photonic and optoelectronic device requirements so that their combined efforts may lead to new advances doc6088 none The purpose of this project is to place undergraduate and graduate students from science and engineering at UMCP as teaching Fellows in area middle and high schools to enhance and extend the science and mathematics curriculum. The conceptual and pedagogical focus of this project is to develop a program in which Fellows and teachers work together to integrate learning practices into classroom based activities. The Fellows will be drawn from the departments of chemistry, physics, materials science and engineering. They will enhance the curriculum in collaboration with K-12 teachers to develop classroom hands-on, inquiry-based activities that will supplement the curriculum content, by integrating programs that connect classroom learning to science and technology beyond the classroom. The Fellows will also act as liaisons between teachers and university based resources. Through training and direct involvement in K-12 schools, Fellows will become knowledgeable in education outreach, and will in turn become a resource to the University. It is expected that the GK- 12 Fellows will develop a broader sense of their professional options, a stronger grounding in science and engineering education, and a sense of the educational relationships between the university and the community. This award is co-supported by the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences doc6089 none Baylor College of Medicine (tCM) and the Houston Independent School District (HISD), propose to partner BCM graduate student scientists and HISD biology teachers to improve teaching and learning in biology, while providing opportunities for graduate students to improve their teaching-related skills. The project will create guided, goal-oriented partnerships between BCM graduate students and 15 selected HISD teachers, provide new professional development for all 96 HISD life sciences high school teachers and produce science, mathematics, engineering and technology career awareness events for all HISD secondary students. A Biosciences Learning Center will be established at an HISD school to support project activities as an in-kind contribution. BCM graduate student scientists will have opportunities to improve their own teaching skills, their knowledge of K-12 education and their abilities to communicate science information to novice audiences. Project evaluation will investigate changes in graduate students personal science teaching paradigms and beliefs, to development of graduate students teaching and communications skills, to changes in science teachers content knowledge and to changes in student science learning and achievement. Each year, proposed activities will impact more than 400 biology students annually through graduate student teacher partnerships, and all 8,000 students enrolled in biology classes through teacher professional development doc6090 none Various K-12 educational programs have been developed by University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez Campus, which coherently couple motivation, orientation, training, and follow-up activities of K-12 teachers and students with undergraduate, graduate, and university professors. Among them are the programs enclosed in the Earth Science Initiative: Science on Wheels, GLOBE (Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment), SCBL (Sensors and Calculator-Based Laboratory) and the Geology Outreach. University graduate and undergraduate students are already a significant part of the training activities resulting in a favorable model for the development and motivation of future science and engineering professionals and pre-college teachers. Therefore, the GUEST K-12 (Graduate and Undergraduate Students Enhancing Science and Technology in K-12 Schools) program proposes to coordinate and reinforce the partnership between the university and K-12 schools by funding highly qualified undergraduate (four) and graduate (sixteen) students to serve as resources in the pre-college classroom. This initiative will be coupled to existing K-12 outreach programs and will benefit more than three hundred teachers and over ten thousand students. The GUEST K-12 program will transform precollege teachers into science and technology proficient educators while fellows will improve communication and teaching-related skills. This award is co-supported by the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences doc6091 none Proposal: Institution: Columbia University PI: Judith Klavans This proposal is to fund travel for US participants to a US-Japan International workshop on digital libraries and transportation support. The planning workshop is being jointly organized by Columbia University and Kyoto University. Both institutions are leaders in digital libraries and related research. The workshop is largely by invitation and will include top researchers from the US, Japan and Europe. The goals of the workshop are to identify existing opportunities for joint research efforts, new promising research areas, and to stimulate cooperation between US and Japanese researchers and Institutions doc6092 none Project STEALTH involves thirteen graduate and twelve advanced undergraduate Fellows, twelve secondary science and mathematics teachers (from two high schools and two middle schools located in Oklahoma City and Del City), and seven OU faculty (from the School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science, School of Industrial Engineering, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, and the Oklahoma Networks for Excellence in Education), who will work in teams developing, designing, implementing, and assessing authentic learning, inquiry-based activities for secondary science and mathematics students. These activities will be incorporated into lessons, demonstrations, laboratory exercises, individual and group projects, and field experiences in order to: 1) emphasize authentic and community-based experiences; 2)encourage creative problem-solving skills; 3) develop interest in life-long learning; and 4) prepare secondary students for advanced education. Activity themes will focus on environmental science and engineering, new materials and their use, and civil infrastructures. Activities will be designed to fit the teachers and students needs based on curriculum requirements, course content, students abilities and interests, and available resources. Fellows will be prepared to create and implement these activities through a new course presenting: 1) educational theory, concepts, and assessment congruent with authentic learning; 2) the design, implementation, and assessment of hands-on, inquiry-based activities in secondary science and mathematics curricula; and 3)appropriate teaching practices and methods for secondary students, as well as local, state, and national curricula standards. The program s effectiveness on the Fellows teaching skills, as well as its effect on secondary science and mathematics education will be quantitatively assessed and used to continually improve the program doc6093 none This Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) project experiences and the numbers of Latinas choosing to pursue careers in science and technology. The three primary project goals of Latinas en Ciencia are: 1. To engage Latina girls in science and technology at early age before they ve decided against science and technology career pathways. 2. To support Latina girls engagement with science and technology from preschool through high school. 3. To change the internal culture at OMSI in order to make the Museum feel like home for the Latinas. Several strategies will be utilized to achieve these project goals. OMSI will create an outreach program in three communities with a large Latino population around the Portland Metropolitan area. Aimed at recruiting and supporting Latina girls in third through fifth grade, this program will help build ability and create opportunities for girls in science and technology, while reinforcing the girls abilities, fostering independence, and creating an I can succeed attitude in the girls. Activities in each community will include school assemblies, a weekly science club, family science nights, overnight programs at the Museum, and summer camp experiences. OSMI will create a culture within the Museum that is conducive to attracting Latina girls and provide effective programs at the Museum, and summer camp experiences. OMSI will create a culture within the Museum that is conducive to attracting Latina girls and provide effective programs and opportunities for them in science and technology by instituting monthly Latino Family Science Days, utilizing bilingual staff and volunteers for interpretation, within the Latino Community and within the Museum will be linked to facilitate connections at all age levels, offering mentoring opportunities and building leadership abilities and self-confidence in the Latina girls. Community partnership established during the Planning Grant will also be further developed and nurtured. These various strategies will be evaluated to assess participation levels in different programs and for different age group and to assess the engagement of the Latina girls in science and technology activities. Academic and skills-based gains will also be evaluated for particular groups to provide useful insight into the effectiveness of the strategies employed. The hope is to determine which strategies are most effective so as to further understanding of how to engage Latina girls in science and technology through nonformal science experiences. By learning how to more effectively introduce this undeserved population to science and technology, nonformal science institutions can help Latina girls discover possible career paths in science and technology that may have otherwise been inconceivable doc6094 none The Georgia Tech Student and Teacher Enhancement Partnership (STEP) Program partners Graduate Fellows from the Colleges of Sciences, Engineering and Computing with metro-Atlanta area high school SMET teams that are led by master science or mathematics teacher-coordinators. The program seeks to improve the teaching-related communication, and leadership skills of Georgia Tech graduate students, and to use the exceptional scholarly expertise available at Georgia Tech to assist in increasing the mathematics and science performance of Atlanta-area school students. STEP Fellows will participate in summer training workshops to familiarize them with inquiry-based learning pedagogy, classroom management and effective teaching skills, and appropriate uses of educational technologies. They will also work with high school personnel to develop a needs assessment and action plan for the school. During the school year they will work in pairs with their partner school, choosing activities from a menu of options that includes: 1) Student instruction, 2) Teacher professional development, 3) Student enrichment and mentoring, 4) Implementation of classroom websites, 5) Science fair project assistance, and 6) Georgia Tech lab tours. The program will be open, by competitive application, to all of the nearly 3,000 graduate students in the Georgia Tech Colleges of Engineering, Sciences, and Computing doc6095 none In this project, we plan to test and evaluate a three-pronged approach to attracting females into computer science and for keeping them in computer science once they have entered college. The two largest components of our program are aimed at giving high school girls the tools necessary to have confidence about their technical abilities and be comfortable in computer science, as well as providing them with an independent project experience with female university faculty mentors in computer science. The third prong of our approach is aimed at retaining college women in computer science through their bachelor s degree and into graduate school. The summer component of this program is designed for 20 high school students to participate in an 8-week, half-day summer camp. The camp will focus on both static and interactive web programming, and animation and gui programming with Java. The Girls POWER (Programming Of the WEb Rocks!) summer program will include lectures, lab sessions, and most significantly individual and group projects. In order to provide personal contacts for high school girls on their own territory, the high school, we plan to set up a Visit a High School Program, in which females in computer science from both academia and industry participate as distinguished role models and visitors to local high schools. The visiting role models would be accompanied by a graduate or undergraduate female computer science or computer engineering student to provide a role model at two different levels. The activities for undergraduate women focus on lessening women s of isolation as a computer science major, raising their self-esteem, increasing their awareness of career opportunities, and promoting research and graduate study. Activities include a mentoring program, informal lunch meetings, organized field trips, and independent research study opportunities. The proposed project has a number of aspects that are innovative. We have created a strong team of three senior female computer science professors who are noted for both their research and teaching excellence. The program leverages off of the technical strengths, excitement, and successes of the web for achieving the goals of the program. The program targets females in the critical high school and early undergraduate years, and focuses on the hypothesized barriers to attracting and retaining women at these stages. The anticipated regional outcomes of this project include an increase in the number of local high school women taking the Advanced Placement exam in computer science, as increase in the number of high school women at the participating schools majoring in computer science in college, and an established communication between numerous female computer scientists at all levels in this local geographic region. Beyond the Delaware Valley, the results should help to advance the understanding of the kinds of activities that actually aid in attracting and retaining women doc6096 none The goal of the Clemson University GK-12 Project is to improve student performance and the teaching of mathematics and science in the middle grades in Title I and impaired schools in the school districts of Anderson and Pickens county through the use of inquiry based learning exemplifying a standards-based approach. Benefits are to improve the perception of K-12 mathematics and science education among professional graduate scientists and mathematicians in academe and industry, to increase knowledgeable participation and support by scientists and mathematicians of K-12 education; to improve the perception of collegiate education and the professorate among professional K-12 teachers and administrators, and to improve the teaching skills of graduate students in mathematics and science disciplines through practice and training in the inquiry method with practice in the K-12 arena. Benefits to the teachers include a stipend, content resource support, graduate credit, improved laboratory equipment and manipulatives, and role models for their students. The University will benefit through closer ties with the local schools. The Fellows will have improved presentation skills through mentoring from the teachers. Graduate students in Biological Sciences, Computer Science, Geological Sciences, Mathematical Sciences, and Physics will undergo in-depth training in teaching methods, familiarization with South Carolina frameworks and performance standards, a series of seminars with their mentoring teacher to develop demonstration lessons and ways in which the Fellows will provide content resources for NSF sponsored exemplary curricula, several of which have been developed at Clemson University. Fellows will team with mentoring teachers to provide professional development to colleagues in their schools doc6097 none K-12 schools in South Carolina are implementing new state science standards. As a result, many teachers must obtain significantly new content knowledge while developing new curricula and lesson plans. This project supports ten graduate students majoring in mechanical, chemical, electrical, computer, civil and environmental engineering to work with grades 3-9 science teachers and their students. Project planning involving school district personnel has identified a number of connections between the content knowledge of these engineering students and the new science standards for these grades. The graduate fellows will help teachers adopt, adapt and develop curriculum and instructional materials that use engineering examples, experiments and inquiry and design problems. Each fellow will become an expert in one or more area of the standards, and will work with several teachers and schools throughout their tenure. This plan effectively integrates the fellows teaching activities with their graduate education and research experiences. In addition to the service learning activities proposed, the fellows will receive formal instruction on teaching principles, cognitive processes and learning styles through a field-based course developed by the College of Education. A series of summer workshops involving the fellows and participating teachers is also proposed doc6098 none WSU will implement a young women s afterschool and summer science camp program to determine what type and degree of contact is most effective in increasing their understanding of, and interest in, the areas of science, math and technology. Three types of science camps are proposed for middle school girls: eight-week afterschool camps (two days week); week-long summer camps (six hours day); and week-long residential summer camps. Each camp provides 30 hours of instruction. The theme of the camps in Science at the Summit. This mountaineering theme covers many fields of science, mathematics and technology related to popular Northwest outdoor experiences. Camps are taught by a certified teacher, assisted by local outdoors experts, with support from women science professionals. A mentoring program brings together women professionals and students through regular E-mail contact over six-month period immediately following the camp experience. Girls also have program contact through CityLab s website and with CityLab s monthly newsletter. Program evaluation will determine whether or not the mode of delivery of content material, in combination with a strong mentoring program, significantly affects middle school student s interest in, and intent to pursue courses and experiences in science, math and technology doc6099 none The University of Northern Colorado, Colorado State University, Weld County School District 6, and the Poudre RI school district propose a collaborative to support fellows in SMET disciplines and discipline-based education. Our teaching and research themes focus on Human impacts on land use and ecosystem structure andfunction along the Front Range of Nortitern Colorado. Objectives and Activities: Form Teaching-Research Teams - of teachers, fellows, and researchers that will interact throughout the year, for up to 3 years. Conduct Teaching and Research Strategy Workshops - to familiarize teachers, researchers and fellows ,%ith each others culture. Conduct Grant Writing Workshops - for the teachers and fellows for professional development and sustainability. Develop Schoolyard Research Plots - based on the research experience. Teachers and fellows will establish schoolyard plots. Apply,4ge-,4ppropriate, Standards-Based Modules - will be developed to link the research to the classroom. Benefits include: Fellows: I)GuidefellowstoincludeK-12outreachasacareergoal,2)lmprovedcommunication- teaching-related skills, 3) Financial stability, and 4) bnprove grantsmanship. K-12 Teachers: 1) Connect with the research community, 2) Professional development (travel, credit, stipends), 3) Improve classroom resources (supplies, equipment technology), 4) Schoolyard sites, and 5) Provide additional classroom help via the fellows doc6100 none The NDSU Graduate Student-University-School (GraSUS) Collaborative for Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology is a project in which graduate and advanced undergraduate students (fellows)will work with science and mathematics teachers in grade 6-12 classrooms. The project uses problem-or inquiry-based learning, in which solutions of interesting real -life problems promote students learning, problem-solving skills, creative thinking, and teamwork. Challenging problems will be selected to reflect existing school curriculum in the context of the research and applications from core SMET disciplines at the university. The school courses involved include mathematics, general science, environmental science, chemistry, physics and biology. Real-life applications in these areas will come from the same disciplines and from several engineering, agricultural, and technology disciplines. The graduate and undergraduate fellows will receive pedagogical training. Summer workshops will involve school teachers and university faculty in planning and development activities with the fellows. The project s expected outcomes include enhanced communication and teaching skills for the fellows, enriched learning by K- 12 students, professional development opportunities for K- 12 teachers, and stronger partnerships between NDSU and local school districts. This project will build upon several other similar and successful programs at NDSU doc6101 none This proposal outlines a plan to involve Rutgers University-Newark graduate students and advancedundergraduates with the Newark Public Schools, Newark Museum, and Kids Corporation as NSF TeachingFellows. The conceptual focus of the proposed program falls largely under the thematic heading of knowledge transfer and curriculum development. The university students will be trained to deliver educational activities that are curriculumintegrated, inquiry-centered, and constructivist-based. The strength of the proposed program is that all participants, university students, teachers, and school students,will benefit from the experience. The benefits to be realized are inherent in the following program goals: o to enhance the teaching skills of the university participants o to motivate and excite students about science, mathematics, and technology o to expose students to new ideas, resources, and potential careers and to demonstrate the relevance of their learning experiences to real life situations o to contribute to student knowledge and understanding of science and mathematics o to provide teachers an opportunity to collaborate with graduate students and advanced undergraduates indesigning learning experiences for their students and incorporate new ideas, activities, and resources into their curricula o to provide teachers opportunities to learn, and become comfortable applying, hands-on, inquiry-based approaches to teaching doc6102 none TechGirl will be a fun and dynamically evolving website dedicated to helping middle school girls learn about science and engineering. It is intended to help them develop an appreciation for the beneficial impact of science and engineering on society, and to encourage them to consider possible careeers in science and engineering. This site will contain four major parts: 1) Biographical sketches of women at different stages of their careers, including high school, college, beginning their careers, and at the peak of their careers, including a short bio and a fun interesting description of a specific event in their career. 2) Advice on developing their careers, from choosing courses and activities in high school to picking a college and major to finally choosing a career. 3) Puzzles Brainteasers designed to challenge the girls and expose them to different aspects of science and engineering. 4) Engineering Encounters, a role-playing game where the girls simulate how their life could develop through high school, college, and their career. This game will present them with a series of choices, and then they choose a response which then results in different events occurring in their lives. TechGirl will be developed in close collaboration with two major programs at Arizona State University, the Women in Applied Science and Engineering program and the MInority Engineering Program. The design of TechGirl is based on extensive discussions with middle and high school girls, their teachers and counselors, college girls in WISE, engineers who mentor for WISE, and college students in the OMEP program. Those groups will continue to play a critical role in the development and assessment of TechGirl, so that it is designed as much as possible by girls and women for girls doc6103 none This proposal extends the catalyzing impact of EdGrid (http: www.eot.orgledgrid), a consortiumconunitted to developing, testing, and disseminating systemic approaches to integrate the use ofcomputer-based modeling and scientific visualization in science and mathematics education. Therole of the GK- 12 fellows is to bring to each team content expertise and experience withapplications of computational science, modeling and visualization. Fellows will benefit byimproving their own computational suls, learning to relate complex science and mathematicsconcepts to others, by becoming comfortable with teaching, and by understanding how they canparticipate in the improvement of science and mathematics education. Teachers and educationfaculty benefit from access to content expertise, assistance with the use of computationalmodeling and visualization tools, and by learning current scientific methods. The main objectives include: o Training on issues of K-12 science and mathematics education and computer-based modelingand visualization. o Enhanced conununication among the content and education faculty within the university, andbetween the university and K- 1 2 communities. o Science and mtheniaties curriculum utilizing computational science, modeling andvisualization tools, technologies, and methodologies. o Classroom experiences for K- 12 students using computational science, modeling andvisualization to do science and mathematics. o Dissemination of experiences and materials. o Inculcating a comrffitment to broad outreach of leading-edge scientific ideas on the part offuture scientists who will be the graduate student trainees in the project. o Applying to the GK-12 enterprise abilities that NCSA EOT-PACI have developed for long-distance collaboration communication, and conununity-building. Noteworthy features of the project include the collaboration of very different and geographicallyseparated university communities as well as the integration of research universityscienceleducation enterprises. This will be facilitated by NCSA EOT-PACI experience inorganizing and computing across geographically distributed human and material resources doc6104 none Sheaff This is a US-Mexico research project for a study in the field of experimental elementary particle physics. The research will involve primarily the analysis of data already in existence, but also cooperation on the development of radiation hard pixel detectors for the proposed BteV experiments at Fermilab. This type of detector is probably the most rapidly developing and revolutionary type of detector used in Fermilab. The main goal of experiment E791 was to study charm decay Physics. It provided a unique opportunity to study total and differential cross sections as functions of the incident particle species and target material. However, the statistics available in E791 are some 50 times greater than in E769, and this new study aims to improve the cross section measurements for the so-called golden modes of charm doc6105 none This project is designed to integrate exciting adventure-based scenarios, solutions to which require inquiry learning and an engineering design approach, into the middle grade (5-9) science and mathematics classrooms. Middle grade students win be posed with adventurous scenarios, e.g., Engineering the Congo, Mission to Mars, filled with carefully crafted obstacles, e.g., water purification, power generation, route optimization. The level appropriate science and or mathematics principles are woven into the obstacles. Student groups then develop solutions to the posed obstacles through inquiry learning and the engineering design approach, running the gamut from experimentation to conceptualization to prototype construction and testing. This curriculum that weaves m the required science and or math content is designed to replace the existing middle grade content. A team (AE Team) will develop the Adventure Engineering curriculum of engineering graduate and undergraduate Fellows, middle grade science and mathematics teachers from urban, suburban and rural schools, and faculty from Science Education, Mathematics Education, and Engineering at the University of Oklahoma. The engineering fellows will be extensively prepared in the pertinent standards, existing curriculum, and inquiry learning method through observation and participation in the middle grade classrooms, participation in College of Education methods courses, and workshops with middle grade teachers. During the three-year project, the AE Team will develop inquiry and design based science and math curriculum, with diligent assessment, under the adventure-based engineering premise. To accomodate the middle grade teachers, the AE Team will meet outside the classroom monthly on Saturday mornings during the academic year and for daylong workshops in the summer. Between AE Team meetings, the Fellows will work to develop and implement curriculum with the designated teachers in the middle grade classrooms. Each year, the engineering Fellows will increase outreach activity by seeking different teachers and assisting them with Adventure engineering curriculum implementation. The curriculum will be developed and prepared for web-dissemination to be self-sustaining beyond the three-year project period. The Adventure Engineering program is designed to motivate those students in the critical middle grades that otherwise would not pursue technical careers, particularly women and minorities. To this end, the Adventure Engineering curriculum will be developed for and implemented in approximately 72 classrooms, half of which will be predominantly minority classrooms in Oklahoma City. The AE team Fellows will be recruited from and with the dedicated assistance of the outstanding Multicultural Engineering Program at the University of Oklahoma doc6106 none Experimentation and exploration - the way scientists create new knowledge - will be adopted as the cornerstone for learning and teaching science in Arizona State University s Down to Earth Science fellow teacher student partnership program. The activities are based on a strongly interdisciplinary, multiscalar approach to earth systems science in three important research domains that powerfully convey science content - Materials Science and Engineering, Ecology, and Planetary Studies. ASU is poised to launch, and sustain, new approaches to increasing scientific literacy. We will expand upon the strong infrastructure of successful K-12 educational outreach programs from large-scale science and engineering research projects as well as ongoing and extensive collaborations with K-12 education. This project will: 1) integrate research, education, and outreach in a meaningful way by incorporating instructional strategies consistent with the national science standards; 2) increase teachers knowledge of science content and concepts, and provide them opportunities to engage their students in actual scientific research; 3) help revitalize science education from the use of abstract and obscure examples to the contextual and the relevant; and (4) instill fellows with the skills to communicate scientific concepts to a wider audience and prepare them to be mentors and role models for students. This award is co-supported by the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences doc6107 none San Francisco State University s College of Science and Engineering (COSE) and the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) have collaboratively developed a GK-12Fellows project to serve students at underperforming middle and high schools (3 each).Fellows will be systematically prepared to support the efforts of SFUSD teachers todeliver an inquiry-based pedagogy rich in science and math content. Fifteen SFSUFellows per year will directly benefit by enhancing their teaching and learning skills;SFUSD will benefit by the having these Fellows co-teach with SFUSD teachers, tutor,and serve as school-based resources, knowledgeable about the content and the applicationof SMET. Fellows will complete two formal classes--one focused on pedagogy andanother focused on either the physical or natural sciences. To ensure compliance withstate and national standards as well as to develop collegial relationships, teachers willpartner with the Fellows in the content classes which will provide both with basicconcepts in integrated biological areas and in fundamental concepts of physical sciences,along with laboratory curriculum modules. Fellows will be selected from COSE s diverse(63% minority) student body. Inverness Research Associates, an evaluation groupspecializing in science education, will conduct a comprehensive evaluation with bothquantitative and qualitative components. A-1 doc6108 none Frequently, applications that require several hours to a few weeks to execute on typical desktop computers are ported to supercomputers or large compute servers. Not only is this option costly, but often the entire program must be rewritten to effectively utilize multiple processors and other resources available on these systems. Reconfigurable computing (RC) systems can offer an advantage over this option since RC systems have been demonstrated that deliver performance approaching that of a supercomputer at a fraction of the cost. However, not only could it take several months to complete an RC system design, but RC system developers must be trained in both hardware design and software development. The research project will develop a Remote Adaptive-Computing REsource on the Internet (RARE) that will assist scientists and engineers in solving problems that require excessive execution time when solved on a typical desktop computer. RARE comprises a comprehensive set of routines that have been optimized for high performance on a reconfigurable computer. A novel client server program interface, developed as a part of this research effort, will manage the loading and execution of user process requests. The user interface to the resource consists of a library of functions and procedures that perform typical scientific engineering computations. The goal of the project is to speedup local and remote versions of scientific data processing applications by orders of magnitude at reduced costs. Users of the system need only call a local or remote procedure that executes the application on the reconfigurable computing resource. A novel feature is that data is sent to RARE from a remote site, processed on hardware that has been optimized to perform a particular task significantly faster than a typical desktop computer, and transmitted back to the user via the Internet. Recent experiments verify that remote hardware versions of several algorithms (implemented on a reconfigurable computer) can complete execution significantly faster than logical software versions of the same algorithm (implemented on a typical desktop computer). This statement is true in spite of the communication overhead that is present due to data transmission via the Internet. Applications in the area of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) are prime candidates for this resource since many of these computer simulation models require enormous execution times. Typically, CFD simulations require the solution of a large number of simultaneous equations or extensive computation of derivatives and or integrals. One such CFD model, developed at NC State, requires two weeks to run on a desktop computer and this model is only a subset of the complete system simulation. Software profiling reports obtained during execution of these models demonstrate that more than 70% of the total execution time is spent in a small number of atomic procedures. Hence, these applications are the primary focus of this research project doc6109 none This Americas Program award will support a US-Brazil research project between Dr. Jay A. Nelson, Towson University, and Dr. Francisco Tadeu Rantin, Federal University of Sao Paulo. The goal of the project is to investigate the digestive system and gut environment of the loricariid catfish. These researchers will use large loricariids to test the null hypothesis that the lumen of the loricariid gastrointestinal tract is anaerobic as in other vertebrates. They will investigate the environment of the gastrointestinal tract and the blood draining it in animals that are breathing either water only or both water and air. Unlike the guts of most animals, which are highly anaerobic, loricariid catfishes use their digestive tracts to uptake oxygen from air gulped in with water, so that the gut may be an aerobic environment. Our current understanding of the digestive physiology of herbivorous fishes is poor, and given the evidence that loricariids have a strange and unique digestive physiology, it is important that we broaden this knowledge. In this work Nelson will combine his knowledge of respiratory physiology with Rantin s capabilities for studying the physiology of large loricariids. The results of this study should aid in understanding the respiration and digestion of these fish, which constitute a highly diverse and ecologically important group of herbivorous fishes that has received little scientific attention doc6110 none INT- Musfeldt This is a U.S.-Polish collaborative research project on electrodynamics in organic molecular solids. The principal investigator is Dr. Janice Musfeldt from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Her Polish collaborator is Dr. Iwona Olejniczak from the Institute of Molecular Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Poznan. The researchers will investigate the polarized infrared and optical spectra of several chemically similar ET-based materials as a function of temperature and high magnetic field. Through this research they expect to provide further information on chemical and physical tuning in organic molecular solids. This project in materials research fulfills the program objectives of bringing together leading experts in the U.S. and Central Eastern Europe to combine complementary efforts and capabilities in areas of strong mutual interest and competence on the basis of equality, reciprocity, and mutuality of benefit doc6111 none The investigators will study the ionospheric response to short-term variations in the solar spectrum; particularly those associated with solar flares. Solar radiation in the soft X-ray and extreme ultraviolet spectral regions is the source of the non-auroral ionosphere. Variations in the solar flux may perturb the ionospheric morphology and behavior. The study use theoretical models and incoherent scatter radar measurements to investigate the effects on electron density, ion composition, minor species concentrations, and airglow. The investigators will also use Faraday rotation measurements of very high frequency signals from geostationary satellites to compare with models of the seasonal and latitudinal asymmetries in total electron content during ionospheric disturbances doc6112 none McCulloch The three-dimensional muscle structure of the heart walls is a fundamental determinant of cardiac mechanical and electrical functions and their mutual interactions. The main objective of the proposed research is to develop anatomically and biologically detailed computational models of cardiac electromechanics, and to test them using novel experimental methods. The computational and experimental models will be used together to investigate hypotheses regarding the structural and molecular determinants of cardiac electromechanics. The specific aims are: 1. Cardiac muscle fibers are arranged into laminae with a characteristic architecture that varies regionally within the walls. We will test the hypothesis that this layered organization affects cardiac electrical and mechanical properties, contributing to optimal performance during health. Alterations in this structure could contribute to health failure. This will be explored by a combination of structural imaging and measurement, computational modeling, and functional imaging of mechanical and electrical properties using magnetic resonance imaging and high-speed optical imaging. 2. Cardiac muscle fibers branch and splay in the heart wall. This pattern can be disarrayed in some inherited heart diseases. We will investigate the hypothesis that the statistical pattern of fiber branching affects the mechanical and electrical properties of the heart walls. These studies will use theoretical modeling, automated microstructural tissue analysis, computational modeling and experimental studies in genetically engineered mouse strains. 3. Cardiac electrical impulses trigger mechanical contraction, but we and others have also shown that mechanical loading also affects electrical properties and the risk of rhythm disorders. We will investigate the hypothesis that the specific patterns of wall mechanics can affect the electrophysiology of cardiac muscle through stretch-activated ion channels and other cellular mechanisms. These studies will use a biologically detailed, dynamic, three-dimensional computational models, which will be validated by experimental measurements in isolated hearts. These studies will also investigate the effects of regional mechanical properties on the risk of arrhythmia. 4. To help enhance the national science and engineering infrastructure, we will deploy web-based versions of the computational models of the heart, continue to involve undergraduates in research and expand our minority outreach efforts; and hold an industry-supported workshop. The new experimental and computational models to be developed in this research will have applications in understanding basic cardiac physiology and biophysics, in drug discovery and biomedical engineering design, and in simulation environments for education, training and collaboration doc6113 none Measurements of aerosol backscatter at two wavelengths, ozone concentration, relative humidity, and temperature will be obtained from balloons up to altitudes of 30 km, providing high resolution vertical profiles. Monthly flights will be carried out from Natal, Brazil. These measurements will serve to define the natural aerosol background and identify perturbations occurring throughout the free troposphere. These measurements will add information on a very undersampled region and provide the opportunity to study sources of aerosols in the tropics, their transport, and radiative impact doc6114 none A six-member project team is developing and administering a survey that evaluates the experiences of mechanical engineering programs that have undergone ABET Engineering Criteria review. The survey consists of a questionnaire and a set of metrics developed by a focus group representing a cross-section of four-year undergraduate mechanical engineering programs evaluated under ABET EC . Site visits to participating institutions are also being conducted. Survey results from ME programs across the nation are being collected and analyzed. Findings are being disseminated to all mechanical engineering programs and to academic committees of other engineering disciplines doc6115 none Lodders, Katharina NStars: Understanding the L-dwarfs and T-dwarfs Dr. Lodders is working to produce a model spectral catalog for L-dwarf and T-dwarf stars. Also known as brown dwarf stars, most of these objects are below the hydrogen-burning limit for normal stars. To facilitate the discovery of and subsequent follow-up research on brown dwarfs Dr. Lodders and colleagues are computing a library of theoretical high-resolution spectra covering the wavelength regime of 0.5- micrometers appropriate for objects with effective temperatures ranging from 500- K and metallicities ranging from -2 [Fe H] 0.5. The models include the opacity of alkali metals and the influence of dusty condensates. The resulting model spectra are compared to the observed spectra of L- and T-dwarfs over the full temperature and age ranges of L- and T-dwarfs. The results are distributed to the scientific community via the web. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF Stellar Astronomy & Astrophysics (AST SAA) program through the joint NSF NASA Nearby Stars (NStars) initiative, and the NSF Mathematical & Physical Sciences Directorate Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (MPS OMA doc6116 none Udwadia This award supports Firdaus E. Udwadia, and up to 15 other researchers to attend a workshop on Dynamics and Control to be held October 9-11, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Special emphasis will be given to the topics of the use of analytical mechanics in control theory, control of uncertain systems, and applications to control of nonlinear dynamical systems. U.S. participants will be chosen from a broad range of universities and geographic locales. The workshop will bring together expert senior and junior researchers from Europe, the United States, and the Americas and answers a need for increased interaction in this field between scientists from those areas. It also addresses a need to bring pure and applied mathematicians together to combine their approaches to particular problems that will require a combined effort if they are to be solved. The workshop is also expected to lead to new collaborations between scientists from the participating regions. The government of Brazil also intends to support participation by providing travel for a selection of European participants and lodging for all participants doc6117 none PI: Eli Ruckenstein Institution: SUNY Buffalo Proposal Number: Thermally reversible covalently (TRC) linked halide containing crosslinked polymers based on ionene formation may be particularly suitable for manufacturing recyclable materials and for improving the mechanical and physical properties of traditional thermoplastic materials without loss of thermoplasticity. These crosslinked polymers can also be employed as thermal sensor materials. Two kinds of thermally reversible reactions, namely the thermally reversible Diels-Alder cycloaddition of a diene and the thermally reversible Menschutkin reaction, will be employed to generate TRC links. Salts of dicyclopentadiene dicarboxylic acid (SDCPDCA) will be used as TRC crosslinkers of halide-containing polymers. CL-containing polymers possessing benzyl chlorine, primary Cl, secondary Cl, tertialy Cl or allyl Cl moieties, will be subjected to esterification crosslinking with SDCPDCA. The latter compounds are prepared by reacting dicyclopentadience dicarboxylic acid (DCPDCA) with ethoxide or hydroxide. The crosslinked polymers will exhibit TRC crosslinking due to the thermally reversible dedimerization dimerization of -DCPD- bridges. The above CL-containing polymers will also be crosslinked with ditertiary amines vial the formation of ionene networks based on the Menschutkin reaction. The generated ionene networks are expected to exhibit TRC crosslinking due to the dequarternization on heating and requarternization on cooling of the ionene bridges doc6118 none Kean College of New Jersey is seeking support to replace the departmental s server and to purchase a portable classroom projection system to bring Unidata products directly into the classroom. The present server is inadequate and has become unreliable to fulfill the demands requested by faculty and students. With the new equipment, Kean will provide an opportunity for students to enhance their learning experience in and out of the classroom. In addition, faculty and students will be able to share data and information with the Unidata community and surrounding K-12 institutions doc6119 none Under the direction of Dr. Robert Drennan, Mr. Gerardo Jimenez Delgado will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. A central question in archaeology concerns the processes which led to the transformation of small scale egalitarian societies into large, complex socially stratified entities. This pattern of change occurred prehistorically, and seemingly independently, in many parts of both Old and New Worlds and this fact suggests an underlying dynamic rather than historical accident as cause. Many possible factors such as managerial control over scarce resources - agricultural land, irrigation water, clay or other mineral deposits - may, it has been suggested, play important roles. Some anthropologists have postulated that control over labor rather than natural resources per se facilitated the emergence of social complexity. Working in a ca. 500 sq. km. region on Mexico s Gulf Coast Mr. Delgado will examine this question. The Olmec was the first of Middle American s early civilizations and monumental architecture, including multi-ton stone heads fashioned from basalt testify to the Olmec s ability to mobilize a substantial labor force. Variation in residence and in the materials they contain also point to a hierarchically organized society. Mr. Delgado will focus on the Early Formative stage in Olmec development. Working in an area with variable agricultural land of different degrees of productivity and point sources of potting clay and high quality basalt, he will determine the relationship between the distribution of population and natural resources. To accomplish this he will use GIS analysis of areal photographs as well as ground survey to map the patterning of soils and reconstruct the paleo landscape. He and his colleagues will then conduct a carefully designed surface survey with limited shovel testing to locate archaeological sites and to date them. He has developed a series of scenarios which relate developing complexity to differing causes and which predict how population would map onto resources in each case. This research is important for several reasons. It will address a basic question of high anthropological significance. It will provide data of interest to many archaeologists and assist in training a promising young scientist doc6120 none Vashishta The goal of this project is to understand atomistic processes involved in the constrained sintering of multilayered ceramic films and the mechanical properties of the sintered systems using large-scale molecular dynamics simulations. Research will focus on 1) ceramic ceramic interfaces involving, Si3N4, SiC, and Al2O3 with amorphous SiO2 interlayers; and 2) sintering in laminated multilayer films consisting of nanoparticles of these ceramics with glassy coating. The objectives are to investigate: structure, stresses, friction, and debonding at interfaces; effects of thermal-expansion mismatch anisotropy, nanoparticle size, and interfacial glassy layers on sintering; residual stress distribution; and delamination. Algorithms will be designed to carry out multiscale simulations combining the coarse-grained MD and the finite element methods in a metacomputing environment with multiple parallel machines, mass storage devices, and immersive and interactive virtual environments on a Grid with high speed networks. The proposed research will have significant impact on new multilayer ceramic integrated circuit technologies in the electronic industry doc6121 none Brouwer This grant supports theoretical research on transport through semiconductor quantum dots in the mesoscopic regime. The systems under consideration are small enough that quantum interference and the finite dwell time of the electrons play an important role, while they are big enough, and with irregular shape, so that the (classical) dynamics is chaotic and statistical methods, such as random matrix theory, need to be used to describe a sample, or an ensemble of samples. The research consists of two parts: time-dependent transport and the interference of resonant and non-resonant paths through quantum dots. A unifying theme of both parts is the interplay of chaotic dynamics, quantum interference, and electron-electron interactions. The primary focus of the research is how, in quantum dots, electron-electron interactions manifest themselves through Coulomb blockade and dephasing. The first part of the grant is centered around the adiabatic quantum electron pump which has recently been realized experimentally. The idea is that if any two parameters of a (quantum mechanical) system are varied, a d.c. current will flow through it. In the experiment, the parameters that are varied are gate voltages that control the shape of the quantum dot. In this case, one can show that the pumped current is entirely of a quantum interference nature, hence the name quantum pump. The current flow is in a random direction, set by microscopic details of the dot. Basic aspects of the experiment can be understood from a simple scattering matrix formula. The research to be done here is aimed at improvement in our understanding of the experiment (effect of dephasing), and to prediction of properties (relationship between voltage and current, which appears not to be given by the dot s conductance), through a more detailed analysis and extension of the scattering matrix formula, as well as entering new directions by inclusion of electronic interactions (Coulomb blockade) into formalism for time-dependent transport. The second part of the research is about interference of direct transmitting and resonant paths through a quantum dot. This interference gives rise to Fano resonances in the transmission through the dot. Fano resonances have been observed recently and are described by a resonance width and by a complex Fano parameter q. Both the resonance width and q vary randomly from resonance to resonance. This research aims at a calculation of the distribution of q for a chaotic quantum dot. Further possible activities include the study of the interplay and mutual connection of Coulomb blockade, direct transmitting paths, dephasing, and the Kondo effect, which all occur in one and the same system. %%% This grant supports theoretical research on transport through semiconductor quantum dots in the mesoscopic regime. This area of research is related to the current interest in nanotechnology. The systems under consideration are small enough that quantum interference and the finite dwell time of the electrons play an important role, while they are big enough, and with irregular shape, so that the (classical) dynamics is chaotic and statistical methods, such as random matrix theory, need to be used to describe a sample, or an ensemble of samples. The research consists of two parts: time-dependent transport, and the interference of resonant and non-resonant paths through quantum dots. A unifying theme of both parts is the interplay of chaotic dynamics, quantum interference, and electron-electron interactions. The primary focus of the research is how, in quantum dots, electron-electron interactions manifest themselves through Coulomb blockade and dephasing. While the research is of a fundamental scientifc nature, the results will also be of great interest to those interested in constructing nanoscale devices doc6122 none Interdisciplinary (99) The interdisciplinary field at the interface of physical and life sciences is undergoing explosive growth. More and more Physics departments are hiring faculty in this field, yet those faculty complain of the lack of a suitable textbook to teach their subject at the undergraduate level. Indeed the core foundational material for this subject can be taught successfully at the sophomore level. The same course can also introduce much foundational material for later study in nanotechnology. The objective of this project is to create a text Biological Physics and a suite of ancillary materials, including Web materials, to address these needs, which will be of interest and useful to undergraduates in Physics, Biology, Biophysics, Biochemistry, Materials Science, Chemical and Bio-Engineering, all the way up to advanced graduate students. The text will be class-tested by faculty interested in teaching this material at a variety of institutions, and it will be published by a major textbook firm doc6123 none CTS- New Functionalized Mesoporous Silicas for Adsorption of Heavy Metal Ions Mietek Jaroniec Kent State University This research project is focused on the development of heavy-metal-ion adsorbents that would exhibit high loading capacities and could be readily regenerated and reused without any appreciable loss of the loading capacity. More specifically, the effort is to synthesize new mesoporous silica-based adsorbents for removal of mercury ions and other heavy-metal ions from aqueous solution. The porous silica surface is being functionalized with ligands such as 1-benzoyl-3-[3-(triethoxysilyl)propyl]thiourea and 1-allyl-3-[3-(triethoxysilyl)- propyl] thiourea, which are expected to bind mercury and other heavy metal ions less strongly than in the case of commonly used 3-mercaptopropyl ligands. Thus, it should be possible to regenerate these new adsorbents under milder conditions (i.e., without using concentrated acids), and consequently, to prevent the loss of adsorption capacity upon regeneration. These adsorbents are being prepared by a direct functionalization of self-assembled silica surfactant mesostructured materials and by functionalization of surfactant-free mesoporous silicas of high specific surface areas, large pore volumes, and readily accessible porous structures. The performance of the resulting heavy-metal- ion adsorbents are critically evaluated, and the best combination of support, functionalization procedure, and ligand for water treatment is being sought. The immediate impact of the proposed research will be the availability of novel, easy-to- regenerate adsorbents for selective adsorption of harmful heavy-metal ions from waters. This study promises to provide valuable insight into important and yet largely unresolved problems of the influence of confined geometry and pore size on adsorption of ionic and molecular species and to reveal a potentially useful correlation between the structure and type of bonded layers with their performance in metal-ion adsorption. The interdisciplinary nature of the proposed research provides a unique educational opportunity for training graduate and undergraduate students for a range of careers in academia and industry. Also, students will have an excellent opportunity to participate in the international collaborations established by PI in the area of synthesis, functionalization, and application of nanostructured materials doc6124 none SGER Proposal: Climate Calibration of Soils for Application to Paleoclimates Judith T. Parrish-Jones and Jon D. Pelletier Paleosols are increasingly used as paleoclimate indicators. Preliminary work by the PI and colleagues has suggested that the climate calibration of modern soils may not be as robust as previously thought. If paleosols need to be reexamined more closely as paleoclimatic indicators, then that must take place as soon as possible. This is because the impact on ongoing deep-time paleoclimatic studies may be profound and the wider community should have this information just as soon as possible. This project will use large-scale databases to address this problem doc6125 none The State University of New York at Stony Brook is requesting support to purchase a weather ingest computer, disk space, a Proxima projector display system, and a PC workstation. The equipment will be used to establish an 11-seat meteorological computational and visualization laboratory for undergraduate education and research. This equipment will allow SUNY to serve as aa dedicated data acquisition site for the Unidata community and serve as a real-time data distribution site. SUNY s meteorology department will be able to continue its growth in atmospheric sciences and enhance educational instruction and research opportunities for students and faculty doc6126 none Biological sciences are entering an exciting new era: the ability to measure patterns of gene expression for all the genes in an organism. This approach is known as functional genomics, and it seeks identifying interesting patterns of gene expression: patterns that influence how an organism is formed, how it deals with environmental challenges, and how it adapts. One of the major advances in this field is the use of MICROARRAYS to measure the expression of thousands of genes simultaneously. Microarrays are thousands of micro-formatted DNA samples printed on a small glass slide. Each DNA spot represents a unique gene that is used to measure gene expression. Examining the patterns of gene expression is just the first step. Additional research will be required to determine how changes in gene expression cause physiological, morphological or other phenotypic change. If we are seeking to understand the functional importance of how patterns of gene expression affects the biology of organisms, one of the more productive approaches is to follow August Krogh s principle (Krogh ): for many problems there will be an animal for which it can be most conveniently studied. Thus, functional genomics will be enhanced by examining a diversity of organisms in which physiological, developmental or biochemical traits are readily studied. Unfortunately, many biologists believe that a functional genomics approach is beyond their reach: their ability to acquire the necessary molecular tools (e.g., all or most cDNAs expressed in a tissue) or the funding to acquire these tools. This is far from the truth and is the reason for a short course on Comparative Functional Genomics. Participants in this course will produce s of sequenced and identified cDNAs, microarray of many of these cDNAs and a simple analysis of gene expression. Although this is not a completed microarray for their organism, it does represent a large step toward the completion of one of the fundamental tools for functional genomics: the production, printing, and analysis of many expressed genes. The most important attribute of this course is that it will provide the knowledge on how to produce the necessary molecular tools for functional genomics from any organism simply and inexpensively. These objectives of the Comparative Functional Genomic course will accelerate the utilization of functional genomics among non-model species and thus enhance our understanding of how the variation in gene expression affects biological processes doc6127 none This project will explore three avenues in reasoning and knowledge representation: development of new approximation methods that incorporate user-adaptive and any-time features; development of hybrid knowledge-bases that combine deterministic information (constraints) and probabilistic information (belief networks), and which are both semantically coherent and computationally effective; and application of hybrid languages and algorithms to temporal reasoning problems in the domains of planning, scheduling, and diagnosis. The outcome of this research will include a system of algorithmic tools which address issues of non-tractability in an innovative and practical manner, and which are applicable to a new knowledge-based framework that allows the expression of both causal and constraint-like information, thus facilitating tasks such as planning, diagnosis and design. Parameterization will allow users to control the algorithms and adjust them to their own domains and resources. The computational tools will support the solution of challenging problems at the frontiers of diverse areas of science and industry such as robotics, planning and scheduling, bioinformatics (linkage analysis and protein secondary structure prediction), and e-commerce (multi-agent combinatorial auctions doc6128 none West Chester University of Pennsylvania is seeking support to build a Meteorlogy Laboratory in its Department of Geology and Astronomy. The MetLab will give students the capability to analyze real and archived weather data in the classroom using Unidata software. Also, the MetLab will provide an extended curriculum in meteorology for students to pursuit an education minor in meteorology. With this equipment, further advances will be made to provide analytical tools of modern meteorology to pre- and in-service K-12 science teachers doc6129 none The Electromechanical Systems Laboratory (EMSyL) is an existing consortium composed of the University of Alabama, Auburn University, the University of Tulsa, Shelton State Community College (with HBCU status), and the Alabama School of Mathematics and Science. The EMSyL industrial partners are: Bartronics (minority owned), Honeywell, T.B. Kim Technologies International, Lockheed Martin, Moog, and Preco Industries. The federal partners in EMSyL are Oak Ridge National Laboratories and NASA - Glenn Research Center. The consortium is presently in the first year of a two-year NSF EPSCoR standard grant. EMSyL represents a vast collection of resources, both human and capital, that provides a unique opportunity to tackle the complex issues associated with the proliferation of electromechanical systems in industry doc6130 none Ripley This grant provides support to Ed Ripley and a graduate student at the University of Indiana to conduct stable isotopic, trace elemental and compositional analysis of rocks associated with the Voisey s Bay massive sulfide deposit in Labrador, Canada. The Voisey s Bay deposit is one of the largest economically viable nickel deposits in the world today. Previous preliminary studies by the PI in collaboration with Tony Naldrett (Univ. Toronto) have indicated that mineralization of this deposit, though sulfide saturation, appears to have been caused by contamination of the magmatic intrusion by country rocks. Nonetheless, a smoking gun has not yet been found. This study would expand on previous research by adding high resolution stable isotopic analyses of sulfur, oxygen and carbon from multiple whole rock and mineral separate samples taken from the low-sulfur county rock and unmineralized and mineralized portions of the deposit to elucidate the source of sulfur responsible for sulfide saturation within the deposit doc6131 none North Carolina State University (NCSU) requests support to replace its outdated equipment. Specifically, NCSU proposes a one-time upgrade to a SUN Ultra-60 with a single 450 MHz processor, and 1 GB RAM. With the new upgrade, students will be trained in the latest weather analysis techniques and be able to develop case studies for research in important meteorological problems. Various studies of East Coast weather phenomena will use the observations and model data. Furthermore, the real-time mesoscale models that focus on the local area will be very useful in solving forecasting problems doc6132 none Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University requests support to modernize its meteorology centers located in Florida and Arizona. The upgraded centers will enhance undergraduate instruction in meteorology and aviation weather as wells as graduate education and scientific research. ERAU seeks to acquire two high capacity Unix servers to perform data ingest functions and to serve data to multiple workstations at both weather centers and the entire university. Along with the Unix servers, the purchase of additional hardware will increase the data hard disk space and provide a tape drive and CD-writing devices for on-line storage and permanent archiving of data. This equipment will further enhance the education and training of students in cross interdisciplinary research across ERAU departments and campuses doc6133 none The investigators will study high frequency mode excitation in near-Earth space plasmas in the presence of low frequency waves, and to examine the significance of this mechanism on plasma energization and wave saturation. The coupling of lower hybrid and ion acoustic modes with Alfven waves in the ring current and auroral zones is a particular area of emphasis. The novelty of this research is in the generalization of the method developed for analysis of high frequency wave parametric excitation in plasmas of the near-Earth space environment. Defining and understanding the physics of multi-component plasma is essential for the analysis of magnetospheric plasma phenomena doc6134 none This project involves the measurement of aerosol optical properties in east Asian outflow. The measurements will be made during the spring of aboard the NOAA R V Ron Brown. Aerosol light scattering properties will be obtained with controlled relative humidity nephelometry. These measurements will describe the ambient aerosol light scattering coefficients and their dependence on wavelength of visible light, direction of light scattered (total and back), and upper particle under increasing and decreasing controlled relative humidity conditions. These measurements will be used in conjunction with other shipboard aerosol measurements to relate aerosol scattering to chemical composition, refractive index, and dry particle size distributions doc1157 none The University of Arizona and the University of Maryland are proposing the renewal of their successful joint Industry University Cooperative Research Centers (I UCRC), entitled The Center for Optoelectronic Devices Interconnect and Packaging (COEDIP) under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation. The Center was created five years ago to promote collaborative research between the two Universities and industries based on their strengths in the field of optoelectronics components, packaging and interconnection. The major goals of the Center are: - To promote collaboration and joint projects between the two universities; - To transfer new technology developed within each university to their industrial partners; and - To train highly qualified students and promote their interaction with industries doc6136 none Dobry The Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) Program is a project funded under the NSF Major Research Equipment Program. This cooperative agreement, under the NEES Program, establishes a NEES centrifuge earthquake engineering research equipment site at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). RPI will design, purchase, construct, install, commission, and operate new equipment for, and upgrades to, its existing 100 g-ton Geotechnical Centrifuge. The upgraded Centrifuge will be operational by or earlier and will be managed as a national shared-use NEES equipment site, with teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities, to provide new earthquake engineering research testing capabilities through . This NEES equipment site will be connected to the NEES collaboratory through a high performance network. Shared-use access and training will be coordinated through the NEES Consortium. This award is the outcome of peer review of this proposal submitted to program solicitation NSF 00-6, NEES: Earthquake Engineering Research Equipment. RPI s Geotechnical Centrifuge has been successfully used by RPI faculty and students and other researchers since . The Centrifuge is located centrally on the RPI campus in the Jonsson Engineering Center. This award provides the following equipment: (a) one 2D in flight shaker (two prototype horizontal components) and associated 2D laminar box container to allow for more realistic 2D modeling, (b) modifications to the Centrifuge to enable safe operation of the 2D shaker, (c) one four degree-of-freedom robot, robot tools, and associated software, capable of performing in flight operations such as construction and excavation, pile driving, ground remediation, cone penetration, and static and cyclic loading tests without stopping the Centrifuge, (d) a networked data acquisition system with Internet teleobservation teleoperation capability, to be linked to the high-speed RPI Gigabit Ethernet Backbone, (e) two high-speed cameras, image processing software, and commercial sensors, (f) advanced sensors for better resolution of the measured model response, and (g) additional instruments, special containers, and other equipment. This upgraded Centrifuge will provide capabilities to investigate three important problems in earthquake engineering: lateral spreading and flow failure due to soil liquefaction, soil-structure interaction and foundation response due to liquefaction and lateral spreading, and the seismic behavior of innovative slope stabilization systems. This award includes a subaward to the University of California, San Diego, for a pilot project during the development of the Centrifuge s teleobservation teleoperation capability. RPI will integrate experimentation with the upgraded Centrifuge into its research program and undergraduate and graduate curricula and provide training opportunities for outside researchers doc6137 none Small-group social structure, cultural practices, and demography have shaped the amount of human genetic variation throughout most of human history. This study examines Y-chromosome variation among a group of native South Americans, the Yanomamo. This population provides a model of the demographic history of early human society (though this is by no means perfect, as the Yanomama, like all groups, have been affected by their broader context, including agriculture and contact - often detrimental contact - with the outside world). Still, small group dynamics have been the most important factor shaping modern human genetic diversity. This study uses genetic markers on the Y chromosome, which is unique to males, in order to understand the evolutionary patterns that have lead to the low variability found on the human Y chromosome. Specifically, this study will examine how differential reproductive success among males and the demographic processes of population growth and village social structure effect the distribution of Y-chromosome variation. In addition, this study will examine how cultural contact has changed the native distribution of Y-chromosome variation. This study uses and builds on the work of cultural anthropologists who precisely documented village histories, genealogies and demographic patterns during fieldwork conducted over the last three decades. The data generated by this project will be combined with this earlier data as well as with the data from other current studies on mitochondrial and autosomal DNA to produce one of the most comprehensive studies of a tribal population in the history of anthropology. The overall result will be a deeper understanding not only of the genetic patterns of the Yanomamo, but also of the processes that have shaped the genetic variation of all human beings. In particular, this study will examine aspects of the way that social and cultural factors affect human variation in the small-group circumstances in which most human populations throughout our history as a species have lived doc6138 none The goal of this project is to develop improved optimization techniques for use in three- and four-dimensional data assimilation in meteorology that will both reduce the computer time required in the assimilation process and increase the reliability of the results. The research will consist of experimental work with existing assimilation codes, in conjunction with a theoretical study of both the optimization algorithms and the physical models. The project represents a collaborative effort among Dr. Jorge Nocedal (Northwestern University), Dr. Stephen Wright (University of Chicago), and researchers at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP). The new optimization techniques include enriched limited memory quasi-Newton methods for minimizing the nonlinear cost functions, automatic preconditioners to accelerate the conjugate gradient method, and structured quasi-Newton methods of nonlinear least squares problems. The new techniques will be designed for the case in which the background covariance matrix does not have a simple sparsity structure. The techniques must also be robust when varying levels of resolution are used in the model during computation, a common situation with meteorological models. Thus, a theoretical framework that quantifies the effects of these inaccuracies on the performance of the algorithms will have to be developed. The Divisions of Atmospheric Sciences and Mathematical Sciences jointly support this project doc6139 none Kutter The Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) Program is a project funded under the NSF Major Research Equipment Program. This cooperative agreement, under the NEES Program, establishes a NEES centrifuge earthquake engineering research equipment site at the University of California (UC), Davis. UC Davis will design, purchase, construct, install, commission, and operate new equipment for, and upgrades to, its existing Geotechnical Centrifuge. The upgraded Centrifuge will be operational by or earlier and will be managed as a national shared-use NEES equipment site, with teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities, to provide new earthquake engineering research testing capabilities through . This NEES equipment site will be connected to the NEES collaboratory through a high performance network. Shared-use access and training will be coordinated through the NEES Consortium. This award is the outcome of peer review of this proposal submitted to program solicitation NSF 00-6, NEES: Earthquake Engineering Research Equipment. This Centrifuge is located in the Center for Geotechnical Modeling, two miles west of the University of California, Davis campus, and has been used by UC Davis faculty and students and other researchers since . UC Davis will provide infrastructure improvements for housing and operating the Centrifuge and for storing new equipment. This award provides the following equipment: (a) modifications to the Centrifuge to enable operation up to 80 g, (b) upgrades to the existing horizontal shaker, (c) one large hinged-plate container, (d) one biaxial horizontal-vertical shaker, (e) one four degree-of-freedom robot, robot tools, and associated software, capable of installing and or operating test devices such as piles, penetrometers, deep soil vibrators, and video inspection devices without stopping the Centrifuge, (f) networked data acquisition systems with Internet teleobservation teleoperation capability provided through the campus Gigabit Ethernet Backbone, (g) data visualization capabilities with a high resolution projection system, (h) ten strands of 20 dual-axis digital MEMS accelerometers developed under a subaward to Integrated Mico Instruments, and (i) tomographic imaging and geophysical testing tools methodologies, developed under a subward to the Georgia Institute of Technology. The capabilities provided by the upgraded Centrifuge will enable researchers to investigate important problems in earthquake engineering such as: soil-pile-structure interaction in soft or liquefiable soils; the effects of vertical shaking on bridge structures, industrial and lifeline facilities, slopes, and embankment dams; and ground improvement methods to mitigate liquefaction hazards. UC Davis will integrate experimentation with the upgraded Centrifuge into its research program and undergraduate and graduate curricula and provide training opportunities for outside researchers doc6140 none The George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) Program is a project funded under the NSF Major Research Equipment Program. This cooperative agreement, under the NEES Program, establishes a NEES tsunami wave basin research site located at the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory (WRL) on the Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, campus. This award is an outcome of the peer review of proposals submitted to program solicitation NSF 00-6, NEES: Earthquake Engineering Research Equipment. The following equipment is provided under this award: (1) long-stroke, high velocity, directional, solitary wave generator, (2) velocity transducers, (3) video workstations, (4) database and file server, (5) expansion of the existing data acquisition system to accommodate teleobservation, teleoperation, teletransmission, and telestorage, and (6) equipment for teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities so that experiments on the equipment will be observable and controllable via high performance network connections. To accommodate the new wave generator and tsunami experimentation, Oregon State University will expand its existing 3-D wave basin facility at the WRL to 26.5m x 48.8m x 2.0m deep and provide a bridge crane over the wave basin. The basin will be equipped with electro-resistive wave gauges to provide accurate, local wave measurements and to validate other imaging techniques (video, laser, radar and acoustic) to increase aerial coverage of wave diffraction and refraction patterns. This equipment will be operational by or earlier and will be managed as a national shared-use NEES equipment site, with teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities, to provide new earthquake engineering research testing capabilities for test and validation of advanced analytical and numerical models of tsunami-wave structure interactions for a full range of ocean, coastal, and harbor studies through . Shared-use access and training will be coordinated through the NEES Consortium. This NEES equipment site will be connected to the NEES collaboratory via a Gigabit Ethernet link to the information management facilities located at the Northwest Alliance for Computational Science and Engineering (NACSE). The transmission of data to remote sites will take place via Internet2 s Abilene Network. Digital cameras will be used to enhance the physical model experience by providing multiple, simultaneous frames of reference and fields of view for both local and remote investigators. In addition, full-motion cameras, a new data acquisition system, and a comprehensive Information Architecture will allow local and remote users to rapidly examine selected data channels at various levels of analysis. A Tsunami Experiment Databank will be established so the broader earthquake engineering research community can study the results of tsunami experiments, reducing the need for experimentation and providing data for validating numerical models. The University will integrate this tsunami wave basin equipment into its research program, undergraduate and graduate instruction, and K-12 and community outreach. The University will also provide training opportunities for outside researchers through on-site courses and workshops, and web-based materials that will assist university faculty at other institutions to incorporate tsunami test experiences in undergraduate and graduate courses doc6141 none Vestibular research has seen recent major advances with the advent of new tools, techniques and ideas. These advances have been realized in studies of both the central and peripheral vestibular systems and in studies performed in both terrestrial and micro-gravity. Advances have been made in the understanding of the contributions of biomechanics, including intralabyrinthine pressure and the stiffness and elastic restoring forces of the stereocilia and cupula to the formation of the response dynamics of the semicircular canal nerves The conference should be of interest to broad areas of neuroscience, including developmental biology, physiology and pharmacology, space biology, bioengineering, and the medical fields of neurology, otolaryngology, and neurosurgery. The conference will be held in the Eric P. Newman Center for Continuing Education of the Washington University School of Medicine from Thursday November 16 through Saturday November 18, under the direction of Drs. Stephen M. Highstein, Chair and Joel Goebel, Co-Chair. Speakers have been chosen by Drs. Highstein and Goebel with the advice of the advisory panel and others prominent in vestibular research. While many of the speakers have national and international reputations as leaders of their fields, an emphasis has been placed on the contributions of younger workers wherever possible. Women are also represented to the maximum extent possible. We are interested in bringing existing controversies to light, and adequate time will be provided for discussion and resolution of differing viewpoints. An effort has been made to provide an outlet for research that is new and on the cutting edge in a poster session doc6142 none King, Jeremy NStars: Spectroscopic Abundances in Nearby Solar-Type Stars Dr. King is measuring photospheric chemical abundances for solar-type stars within 60 parsecs of the Sun using low-resolution spectroscopy. Additional high resolution spectroscopy is performed for a subset of these stars to examine the frequency of chromospheric activity, multiplicity, kinematics, rotation rates, ages, and metallicities with which to address issues concerning planetary companions, circumstellar environment, and the Galactic chemical evolution history. The project also seeks to address how these parameters vary among stars in nearby open clusters. The necessary observations are performed at NSF-supported Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, and the Lick, Keck and McDonald Observatories. The large quantity of information on stars in the solar neighborhood that is collected in the course of this project is incorporated into the NStars database, where it is widely available to the astronomical community. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF Stellar Astronomy & Astrophysics (AST SAA) program through the joint NSF NASA Nearby Stars (NStars) initiative, and the NSF Mathematical & Physical Sciences Directorate Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (MPS OMA doc6143 none The proposal is to request funding to support, in part, expenses incurred towards the organization and conduct of a symposium titled: Mutation : Mutation Testing in the Twentieth and the Twenty First Century. This is the first symposium of its kind. Its twin objectives are: (a) To fuel research in the area of Mountain Testing in emerging software technologies. (b) To educate educators, researchers. and practitioners in the principles, technique, and use of Mutation Testing doc6138 none The goal of this project is to develop improved optimization techniques for use in three- and four-dimensional data assimilation in meteorology that will both reduce the computer time required in the assimilation process and increase the reliability of the results. The research will consist of experimental work with existing assimilation codes, in conjunction with a theoretical study of both the optimization algorithms and the physical models. The project represents a collaborative effort among Dr. Jorge Nocedal (Northwestern University), Dr. Stephen Wright (University of Chicago), and researchers at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP). The new optimization techniques include enriched limited memory quasi-Newton methods for minimizing the nonlinear cost functions, automatic preconditioners to accelerate the conjugate gradient method, and structured quasi-Newton methods of nonlinear least squares problems. The new techniques will be designed for the case in which the background covariance matrix does not have a simple sparsity structure. The techniques must also be robust when varying levels of resolution are used in the model during computation, a common situation with meteorological models. Thus, a theoretical framework that quantifies the effects of these inaccuracies on the performance of the algorithms will have to be developed. The Divisions of Atmospheric Sciences and Mathematical Sciences jointly support this project doc6145 none GROW-MAIENZA The project supports the completion of translations of Korean mathematics texts and accompanying teacher s manuals for Grades 1-6. The Korean instruction on number and computation is being analyzed to reveal how key concepts are developed. A similar analysis is being conducted for both traditional and reform materials in use in the U.S., and a comparison of the instructional strategies across all texts will be made. An interpretive report is being prepared so that a variety of audiences (e.g., teachers, curriculum developers, teacher educators) can make quality judgements about the different instructional approaches doc6146 none SES 00- - Richard Creath (Arizona State University) Feasibility Study for Carnap Collected Works Something odd has happened recently in the world of philosophy of science. Just as it seemed that the work of Rudolf Carnap and other logical empiricists was being rescued from near oblivion, the most important and illuminating of Carnap s publications have largely gone out of print. Carnap was an enormously influential mid-twentieth century philosopher of science and logician. Although his work had gone out of fashion by the s, its historical and substantive importance was being recognized anew -- slowly in the s and more strongly in the 90s. Oddly, at the same time virtually all of his major works were going out of print. Thus, they are now unavailable for classroom use, unavailable for younger scholars, and often unavailable in any form (including electronic form) even in research libraries. To remedy this situation Carnap scholars have proposed the publication of a Carnap Collected Works, to include first all of the published material and second the most important parts of the unpublished work. Until now this goal had seemed impossible. The Carnap family s agent had seemed uncooperative, the copyrights were uncertain, presses were unwilling, and no one was eager to fight all this to undertake the editing of at least 12 to 15 volumes. Within the last year (and in some respects within the last weeks) the situation has changed. The literary advisor to the Carnap family died, and the PI has taken on that role. Many, but not all, of the copyrights have been clarified. A major press has agreed in principle to undertake publication in whatever form or forms seems most appropriate. A small group of prominent scholars has agreed in principle to serve as an editorial board. And the PI has agreed, again in principle, to serve as the general editor. None of this will happen unless feasibility plans (scope, timetable, and budget) for the project can be developed fairly quickly. For this purpose we must explore existing models for collected works projects including, for example, the Goedel papers, the Peirce papers, and the electronic Edison edition. As this short list of examples suggests, we will also explore electronic and web-based publication in order to see what sort of publication makes the most sense. This Small Grant for Exploratory Research supports this exploratory study, designed to lead to a publication plan for the Carnap Collected Works doc6147 none The George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) Program is a project funded under the NSF Major Research Equipment Program. This cooperative agreement, under the NEES Program, establishes a NEES fast hybrid test platform for seismic response simulation of structural components, subassemblages, and systems at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado. The University of Colorado at Boulder will specify, develop, purchase upgrade, construct, install, commission, and operate a fast hybrid test system consisting of high speed actuators, digital controller, data acquisition system, computers, and simulation software for full size and large-scale models of walls, columns, frames and subassemblies under experimental hybrid testing at loading rates between 10% and 100% of that experienced during an earthquake. This capability is one to two orders of magnitude higher than currently available in pseudodynamic tests. This equipment will be operational by or earlier and will be managed as a national shared-use NEES equipment site, with teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities, to provide new earthquake engineering research testing capabilities for large structural systems through . This NEES equipment site will be connected to the NEES collaboratory through the CU Engineering Center, which already has Gigabit Ethernet connection. Shared-use access and training will be coordinated through the NEES Consortium award. This award is an outcome of the peer review of proposals submitted to program solicitation NSF 00-6, NEES: Earthquake Engineering Research Equipment. The following equipment is provided under this award: (1) One high-speed actuator, 220 kip load capacity, +5 in stroke, 250 gpm servo valve, maximum velocity of 9 in sec; (2) Upgrade two existing 110 kip, +5 in. stoke actuators with 250 gpm servo valves to attain a maximum velocity of 18 in sec; (3) High-performance digital servo-controller with three control channels and three-variable control capability; (4) High-speed data acquisition system with 32 data channels; (5) Three digital displacement transducers; (6) Ten analog displacement transducers; (7) Three accelerometers with frequency range up to 500 Hz; (8) Three personal computers for numerical simulation, data processing using Matlab and C++ complier, and data display teleobservation connection; (9) Expansion of existing data acquisition system to accommodate teleobservation, teleoperation, teletransmission, and telestorage; and (10) Equipment for teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities so that experiments on the equipment will be observable and controllable via high performance network connections. The core of the facility is the digital controller, the computer where the dynamics of the structure being evaluate is modeled and numerical computation is performed to solve the equations of motion, and the software (to be developed as part of this project) which controls and links the physical and mathematical subassemblages. Sophisticated actuator control algorithms will be developed as a part of this project and they are the keys to project success. The facility would be the only one of its kind in the United States (multiple actuators) with full substructuring capability. It would serve as the test bed for future large scale, multi-degree-of-freedom fast hybrid testing systems. The University has committed $190,685 for the control room construction and refurbishing work, equipment purchase and partial support for a laboratory technician from through . The University will integrate this fast hybrid testing system into its undergraduate and graduate curricula, and it will promote the use of the results by other educational institutions mainly through the use of the World Wide Web. Further, the experimental observations obtained from the test will be incorporated in an ongoing NSF sponsored K-12 educational program. The University will also provide training opportunities for outside researchers through seminars and workshops doc6148 none The George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) Program is a project funded under the NSF Major Research Equipment Program. This cooperative agreement, under the NEES Program, establishes at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), a NEES equipment site for field testing and monitoring of structural performance. UCLA will design, construct, install, commission, and operate a mobile field laboratory for forced-vibration testing and earthquake aftershock monitoring of full-scale structures. This equipment will be operational by September 30, or earlier and will be managed as a national shared-use NEES equipment site, with teleparticipation capabilities, to provide new earthquake engineering research capabilities through field experimentation and monitoring through . This NEES equipment site will be connected to the NEES collaboratory through the University s Abilene Internet2 connection, with 1 Gb sec capabilities. Shared-use access and training will be coordinated through the NEES Consortium. This award is an outcome of the peer review of proposals submitted to program solicitation NSF 00-6, NEES: Earthquake Engineering Research Equipment. The following equipment is provided under this award: (1) four state-of-the-art forced vibration sources that include one omni-directional eccentric mass vibrator with maximum force of 10 kips (continuous operation) and 20 kips (intermittent operation) over a frequency range of 0.1-4.2 Hz, two uni-directional eccentric mass vibrators with maximum force of 100 kips and frequency range of 0-25 Hz, and one linear inertial shaker with maximum force of 5 kips and programmable arbitrary force (or acceleration) time histories over a wide frequency range (0-60 Hz), (2) wireless sensor and data acquisition system (accelerometers, LVDT s, fiber optic gage readout unit, digitizers, routers, and workstations), (3) a cone penetration truck, equipped with a seismic piezocone, 20-ton hydraulic push capacity, side augers, and in situ soil vibration sensors, and (4) networking equipment (data concentrator, satellite uplink station) to allow for real-time data acquisition, processing, and world wide web broadcasting of experimental results. Large arrays of sensors will be placed in buildings and the surrounding foundation soils to obtain high spatial and temporal resolution response data at levels of detail that have not been previously possible. These structures will be excited in the linear and nonlinear range using linear and eccentric shaker systems, or in some cases, using quasi-static loading with actuators. The data obtained will lead to a better understanding of linear and nonlinear response mechanisms (including damage localization, soil-structure-foundation interaction effects, and nonstructural participation), and will aid in the development and verification of improved numerical models indispensable for the full realization of the performance-based earthquake engineering paradigm. The equipment can also be used for forced vibration experiments and aftershock monitoring of structures in the event of a large earthquake. UCLA will integrate this field testing facility into its undergraduate and graduate curricula and research program, post-earthquake reconnaissance involving students under the guidance of a mentor, and provide training opportunities for outside researchers doc6149 none Proposal No.: Proposal Type: Investigator Initiated- SGER Principal Investigator: T. Alan Hatton Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology SGER: Liquid Crystals as Stimulus-Responsive Media for Dynamic Mediation of Chemical Separations This project explores new concepts for the dynamic mediation of chemical separations by use of liquid crystals as adsorbents. With these materials small changes in external stimuli can cause major changes in fluid or interfacial structure that change significantly the capacity of the separations media for targeted solutes. Specifically, the influence of changing electric or magnetic fields on thermotropic liquid crystals near their smectic nematic isotropic transition regions is exploited to control the capacity and selectivity of gas separations. This work is intended to provide an initial assessment of the feasibility of such an approach, primarily in determining what factors affect solubilization capacity and release profiles and to determine the sensitivity and robustness of the method to temperature fluctuations. Consideration is given to strategies for implementation of this concept in large-scale chemical processes. Tunable separation media could find major implementation in tackling global problems associated with greenhouse gas mitigation and in performing sensitive chemical separations in the fine-chemical and pharmaceutical areas. The ability to vary electric and magnetic fields rapidly and dynamically could provide additional process flexibility beyond the usual temperature and pressure changes used to drive many gas separation processes, and a greater degree of control over process operations is anticipated. A second area of potential applications is in the control of separations in microchemical devices, where the sub-millimeter dimensions are such that high electric fields and sensitive temperature control can be readily attained doc6150 none The PIs proposes to conduct a workshop to bring together groups of researchers that do not regularly interact but all deal with cutting-edge scientific issues related to root-soil biology. The objective is to find common ground in the search for key processes and control points that regulate interactions of organisms and molecules in the rhizosphere. The importance of the rhizosphere to ecology, agriculture and plant biology is undisputed. The root-soil interface is a research frontier where scientists from separate disciplines, ranging from ecology to molecular biology, use contemporary techniques to pursue complementary goals. Progress will be made in this research area by establishing communication across the spectrum of diverse disciplines represented by rhizosphere biologists doc6151 none Climate in northern regions is expected to change dramatically in the coming decades. Climate research has developed tools to predict long-range change and to evaluate the uncertainty in these predictions. It is possible that these research products could potentially play a role in regional and local decision making. However, communities may have alternate approches to dealing with climate events and climate change, approaches that may not link to predicitive research products. This Small Grant for Exploratory Research would conduct interviews and small conferences with residents of the Alaskan North Slope communities. These gatherings will be used (1) to evaluate the understanding by individuals within these communities about climate events, (2) to determine what policies or actions they take to adapt to or mitigate climate events, and (3) to examine whether their culture institutions can incorporate predictive research products doc6152 none The George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) Program is a project funded under the NSF Major Research Equipment Program. This cooperative agreement, under the NEES Program, establishes a NEES large-scale, laboratory earthquake engineering research experimentation site at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities campus. The University will design, purchase, construct, install, commission, and operate a Multi-Axial Subassemblage Testing (MAST) system for structural earthquake engineering experimentation. This equipment will be operational by or earlier and will be managed as a national shared-use NEES equipment site, with teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities, to provide new earthquake engineering research testing capabilities through . This NEES equipment site will be connected to the NEES collaboratory through the University s Abilene connection, with Gigabit Ethernet capabilities. Shared-use access and training will be coordinated through the NEES Consortium. This award is an outcome of the peer review of proposals submitted to program solicitation NSF 00-6, NEES: Earthquake Engineering Research Equipment. The Multi-Axial Subassemblage Testing (MAST) system provides an integrated approach to the simulation of structural response of buildings and bridges in moderate and large-scale earthquakes, linking large-scale testing of structures with three-dimensional nonlinear analyses of structural components and systems. The MAST system enables multi-axial cyclic and pseudo-dynamic tests of large-scale structural subassemblages, such as portions of beam-column frame systems, walls, bridges, and piers. The MAST system consists of high performance actuators, cross heads (large steel weldments for the top and bottom reaction surfaces, a digital controller with six degrees-of-freedom (DOF) software (control system), a hydraulic distribution system, and an L-shaped reaction wall system to provide lateral load resistance for the horizontal actuators. The MAST system uses the six DOF controller to position the top cross head using eight actuators (four vertical and two horizontal pairs of orthogonal actuators) to apply realistic states of deformations and loading in a straightforward and reproducible manner. The six DOF control software employs advanced control technology to locate the position of the cross head through real-time simultaneous control of the eight cross head actuators. This system not only enables control of the position of a point in space, but also of a plane in space. This feature makes it possible to apply biaxial control of structures such as multi-bay subassemblages or walls. It also enables the application of pure planar translations, as well as the possibility of applying gradients to simulate overturning (e.g., axial load gradient in the columns of a multi-bay frame or wall rocking). With this system, a full six DOF loading condition can be imposed on the test structure, thus providing a new large-scale testing capability that will enhance the earthquake engineering community s understanding of complex failure states. The MAST system will be located in the Structural Engineering Laboratory in the Department of Civil Engineering on the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities campus. The University has committed to $875,000 in cost sharing for laboratory infrastructure improvements to accommodate the MAST system. The University of Minnesota will integrate the MAST system into its research program and undergraduate and graduate curricula, implement a MAST collaboratory for researchers, practitioners, and industry professionals to facilitate experimental, computational, and technology transfer aspects of the MAST system, and provide training opportunities for outside researchers doc6153 none Stokoe The Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) Program is a project funded under the NSF Major Research Equipment Program. This cooperative agreement, under the NEES Program, establishes a NEES earthquake engineering field experimentation site at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin. UT will design, purchase, construct, install, commission, and operate new mobile, large-scale field equipment for geotechnical and structural earthquake engineering experimentation. This equipment will be operational by or earlier and will be managed as a national shared-use NEES equipment site, with telepresence capabilities, to provide new earthquake engineering research testing capabilities through . This NEES equipment site will be connected to the NEES collaboratory through a high performance network. Shared-use access and training will be coordinated through the NEES Consortium. This award is an outcome of the peer review of proposals submitted to program solicitation NSF 00-6, NEES: Earthquake Engineering Research Equipment. Understanding of the response of near-surface geologic materials to earthquake loading is essential to the design of new structures and the remediation of existing structures. Currently, prediction of soil liquefaction and subsidence, lateral spreading, and site amplification are based on small-strain laboratory and field testing, which does not duplicate the nonlinear strain levels that occur during major earthquakes. Mobile, large-scale field equipment will be developed to produce dynamic motion in the ground comparable to that produced during earthquakes. This equipment includes a large three-dimensional mobile shaker; two cubical, stand-alone three-dimensional shakers; an instrumentation van with field equipment and multi-channel data acquisition and processing systems; and communications equipment for teleparticipation. The large, 3-D mobile shaker will have the ability to generate up to 267 kN (60,000 lb) of force in the vertical direction over a frequency range of 11 to 200 Hz and up to 133 kN (30,000 lb) of force in the horizontal direction over a frequency range of 5 to 200 Hz. The two stand-alone cubical shakers will also be able to generate force in either the horizontal or vertical direction. One cubical shaker will generate forces of 18 kN ( lb) over frequencies from 2.6 to 800 Hz, and the other shaker will generate forces of 57 kN (12,800 lb) over frequencies from 0.7 to 125 Hz. They will be used inside buildings and on top of liquefiable deposits. Specific instrumentation will include low and high frequency accelerometers, triaxial 1-Hz geophones, pore pressure transducers, high-speed data acquisition, waveform recorder signal processing capabilities, and wireless technology. The equipment will be based at UT, but will be truck mounted and portable for relocation throughout the U.S. as NEES shared use equipment. The equipment will be used for: 1) characterizing the nonlinear earthquake performance and liquefaction resistance of geomaterials in situ; 2) effective and efficient 3-D imaging of significant zones of the geotechnical environment, including depths of 300 to 500 m over distances of 1 to 2 km; and 3) investigating and documenting the dynamic response of large-scale or full-scale foundations or structures in actual geotechnical settings. Field experiments using this equipment will significantly enhance our fundamental knowledge of earthquake effects associated with geomaterials, thereby reducing loss-of-life and economic losses from future earthquakes. UT will integrate this field equipment into its research program and undergraduate and graduate curricula and provide training opportunities for outside researchers doc6154 none This research explores the interconnect problem in nanotechnology, which involves solving problems relating to design of high density of devices and high speed of transmission of within the circuit. The approach is to investigate a modified version of the traditional metallic interconnects. The modification consists in using the concept of parallel processing by providing two or more paths between the driver and the load stacked vertically isolated from one another by insulating layers between them. In addition to heating problems, this research also studies the parasitics associated with such a structure, the propagation delays expected in it and the potential problem of crosstalk among the various paths of the same interconnect and that among the neighboring interconnects. The model of the multipath interconnects includes the self and coupling parasitic capacitances and inductances in addition to the very high-frequency effects doc6155 none The George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) Program is a project funded under the NSF Major Research Equipment Program. This cooperative agreement, under the NEES Program, establishes a NEES large-scale laboratory experimentation equipment site towards real-time hybrid seismic testing at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY. The University at Buffalo will design, construct, install, commission, and operate a modular and highly flexible dynamic testing facility for large-scale geotechnical and structural earthquake engineering experimentation. This equipment will be operation by September 30, or earlier and will be managed as a national shared-use NEES equipment site, with teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities, to provide new earthquake engineering research testing capabilities for large structural systems through . This NEES equipment site will be connected to the NEES collaboratory through the University s vBNS connection, with Gigabit Ethernet capabilities. Shared-use access and training with be coordinated through the NEES Consortium. This award is an outcome of the peer review of proposals submitted to program solicitation NSF 00-6, NEES: Earthquake Engineering Research Equipment. The following equipment is provided under this award: (1) Three 100 ton dynamic actuators equipped with dual 400 gpm servovalves, + - 500 mm stroke, (2) two 200 ton static actuators with 15 gpm servovalves, + - 500 mm stroke, (3) hydraulic distribution lines and manifolds, (4) surge tank and accumulators, (5) two hydraulic pumps of 185 gpm each for continuous operation which along with the accumulator banks can provide maximum flow of gpm for 30 seconds, (6) digital control system, (7) test control package for both static and dynamic tests, (8) upgrade and expansion of existing data acquisition system to accommodate teleobservation, teleoperation, teletransmission, and telestorage, (9) data management and processing system to accommodate real-time systems, data acquisition, storage, distribution and analysis, and test instrumentation, (10) equipment for teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities so that experiments on the equipment will be observable and controllable via high performance network connections, (11) video imaging equipment with the eventual goal of streaming real-time video, and (12) sensors and measurement devices. The experimental facility allows for multiple configurations of full-scale component tests combined simultaneously with real-time numerical simulations to investigate the seismic behavior of large structural systems incorporating use of actuators, reactions walls, strong floor, and shake tables (one moveable). Further, the equipment will be used to develop new hybrid testing algorithms for near full-scale large-scale testing. The University has committed $4 million for expansion and infrastructure improvements of the Structural Engineering and Earthquake Simulation Laboratory in Ketter Hall on the University at Buffalo campus to house the upgraded and new equipment. This expansion includes a new research laboratory area with a strong floor and reaction walls, control rooms and offices for training and data processing, service areas, storage and office spaces, and a new 40 metric ton crane. The University at Buffalo will integrate this large-scale, high performance testing equipment into its research program and undergraduate and graduate curricula, provide training opportunities for outside researchers through on site courses, host visiting scholars, and develop a web-based teleoperation simulator of the NEES equipment doc6156 none The George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) Program is a project funded under the NSF Major Research Equipment Program. This cooperative agreement, under the NEES Program, establishes a NEES earthquake engineering shake table research equipment site at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY. The University at Buffalo will design, construct, install, commission, and operate two six degree of freedom (DOF) shake tables for geotechnical and structural earthquake engineering experimentation. This equipment will be operational by or earlier and will be managed as a national shared-use NEES equipment site, with teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities, to provide new earthquake engineering research testing capabilities for large full-scale and long span structures through . This NEES equipment site will be connected to the NEES collaboratory through the University s vBNS connection, with Gigabit Ethernet capabilities. Shared-use access and training will be coordinated through the NEES Consortium. This award is an outcome of the peer review of proposals submitted to program solicitation NSF 00-6, NEES: Earthquake Engineering Research Equipment. The following equipment is provided under this award: (1) upgrade of the existing 3.6 m x 3.6 m, 50 metric ton, shake table from 5 DOF to 6 DOF by adding a transverse DOF, (2) a new, movable 3.6 m x 3.6 m, 50 metric ton, 100 Hz shake table, (3) upgrade and expansion of the existing data acquisition system to accommodate teleobservation, teleoperation, teletransmission, and telestorage, (4) data management and processing system to accommodate real-time systems, data acquisition, storage, distribution and analysis, and test instrumentation, (5) equipment for teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities so that experiments on the equipment will be observable and controllable via high performance network connections, (6) video imaging equipment with the eventual goal of streaming real-time video, and (7) sensors and measurement devices. The new shake table can be rapidly repositioned from immediately adjacent to the existing shake table to 30 m linearly from it. Together these two tables can host specimens of up to 100 metric tons, as long as 36 m, and subjected to fully in-phase or totally uncorrelated dynamic excitations. The University has committed $4 million for expansion and infrastructure improvements of the Structural Engineering and Earthquake Simulation Laboratory in Ketter Hall on the University at Buffalo campus to house the upgraded and new equipment. This expansion includes a new research laboratory area with a strong floor and reaction walls, control room and offices for training and data processing, service areas, storage and office spaces, and a new 40 metric ton crane. The University at Buffalo will integrate this shake table equipment into its research program and undergraduate and graduate curricula, provide training opportunities for outside researchers through on site courses, host visiting scholars, and develop a web-based teleoperation simulator of the NEES equipment doc6157 none The George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) Program is a project funded under the NSF Major Research Equipment Program. This cooperative agreement, under the NEES Program, establishes a NEES reconfigurable reaction wall-based earthquake simulator facility at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), California. UCB will design, construct, install, commission, and operate a modular and highly flexible dynamic testing facility that will enable experimental and analytical model-based simulation of interactions among substructures that form a single structure. The knowledge gained from such simulations will help develop a new generation of performance-based design guidelines and implement them in practice to improve the safety and reliability of civil infrastructure. This equipment will be operational by September 30, , or earlier and will be managed as a national shared-use NEES equipment site, with teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities, to provide new earthquake engineering research testing capabilities for large structural systems through . This NEES equipment site will be connected to the NEES collaboratory through the University s Abilene connection, with 1-2 Gb sec Ethernet capabilities. Shared-use access and training will be coordinated through the NEES Consortium. This award is an outcome of the peer review of proposals submitted to program solicitation NSF 00-6, NEES: Earthquake Engineering Research Equipment. The equipment will be installed in Building 484 at the Richmond Field Station of UCB and will make use of the existing strong floor, existing four-million-pound axial compression-tension testing machine, and an array of existing static and dynamic actuators. The following equipment is provided under this award: (1) reconfigurable reaction wall, with post-tensioning bars and couplers, (2) seven dynamic and static actuator assemblies: four dynamic, two rated at 50 kips (222 kN) with 40-in ( mm) stroke minimum and two rated at 150 kips (667 kN) with 40-in ( mm) stroke minimum, and three static, one rated at 446 600 kips ( kN) with 40-in ( mm) stroke and two rated at 216 328 kips (961 kN) with 72-in ( mm) stroke, (3) one hydraulic distribution system, (4) one high-performance accumulation system, (5) one digital control system with real-time hybrid control packages and integrated data acquisition channels, comprising hardware for 8 control channels and 16 additional data acquisition channels and software development kits, (6) advanced data acquisition system with a modular 128-channel data acquisition system with A D converter, (7) digital video teleobservation system including a system of digital cameras, digital video recorders and a digital video Internet server, (8) instrumentation that includes potentiometer-based displacement sensors, MEMS-based accelerometers, load cells, tilt-meters, cabling, and connectors, and (9) network interface hardware. The reaction wall consists of concrete modules, hollow-core blocks designed to be mated at the top and bottom and postensioned into a monolithic unit. The same postensioning will be used to connect the reaction wall to the strong floor. At least 14 blocks will make it possible to configure a single 42-ft (12.8 m) reaction wall or two 21-ft (6.4 m) tall walls. Numerous combinations of walls and arrangements will be possible with this modular strong wall concept. A network interface will enable cooperative hybrid testing between an existing shaking table and the reaction wall. Furthermore, a network interface to the University of California Millennium cluster will provide access to a massively parallel computation facility necessary to implement the multiply substructured pseudo-dynamic testing method. The experimental facility is designed to support the development of a new generation of hybrid testing methods that smoothly integrate physical and numerical simulations. Portions of the structure, expected to behave in a predictable manner, are modeled numerically, while one or more complex subassemblies and the boundaries on which they interact are modeled using scaled physical models. Using numerical integration algorithms, the physical and numerical substructures can be analyzed as a single structure. The substructures, physical or numerical, involved in such hybrid testing can be at different geographic locations connected by the NEES network. UCB will integrate this reconfigurable reaction wall-based earthquake simulator into its research program and undergraduate and graduate curricula (including making the material widely available in online web-based course modules), and provide training opportunities for outside researchers through on-site courses and web-based materials doc6158 none The George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) Program is a project funded under the NSF Major Research Equipment Program. This cooperative agreement, under the NEES Program, establishes a NEES biaxial multiple (3) shake table research equipment site at the University at Nevada Reno, Reno, Nevada. The University of Nevada Reno will design, construct, install, commission, and operate one new biaxial shake table and the upgrade of two existing shake tables for large-scale geotechnical and long, linear structural and lifeline earthquake engineering experimentation. This equipment will be operational by or earlier and will be managed as a national shared-use NEES equipment site, with teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities, to provide new earthquake engineering research testing capabilities for large structural systems through . This NEES equipment site will be connected to the NEES collaboratory through the high-performance Nevada Research Network that serves as the University s connection to Internet2 s Abilene Network, with Gigabit Ethernet capabilities. Shared-use access and training will be coordinated through the NEES Consortium. This award is an outcome of the peer review of proposals submitted to program solicitation NSF 00-6, NEES: Earthquake Engineering Research Equipment. The following equipment is provided under this award: (1) one new, relocatable, 4.3 x 4.5 m, 445 kN payload, +1 g, + 300 mm displacement (longitudinal and lateral) shake table, (2) upgrades to two existing, moveable, 445 kN shake tables from uniaxial to biaxial (longitudinal and lateral) capability, to be identical to the new table, (3) new hydraulic distribution lines, (4) new blowdown bank with the same capacity as the existing banks, (5) upgraded hydraulic power supply, by addition of a third pump (720 lpm), (6) digital control system for three tables, (7) expansion of existing data acquisition system to accommodate teleobservation, teleoperation, teletransmission, and telestorage, and (8) equipment for teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities so that experiments on the tables will be observable and controllable via high performance network connections. The facility will consist of three biaxial shake tables, which will be relocatable on the strong floor of the Large-Scale Structures Laboratory on the University of Nevada Reno campus. A variety of table configurations will be used to meet present and future research needs. Furthermore, each table may be operated independently of the other two tables, in-phase with the other two tables (thus forming a single large table), or differentially with the other two tables for the simulation of spatial variation effects in earthquake ground motions. The facility will be the only one of its kind in the United States and will enable next generation experiments to be conducted. These include studies of spatial variation in earthquake ground motion on critical extended-in-plan lifeline systems, the biaxial response of long structural systems and their components, and the behavior of very large-scale systems that are either physically too large for existing, single-table facilities, or too heavy, or both. Together the three tables can host specimens up to 1.35 MN in total weight, with the tables separated up to a maximum of 36 m centerline-to-centerline. The total cost of the equipment requested in this proposal is $7,017,200. The University has already obtained $2,618,750 towards this goal from the U.S Department of Energy ($1,000,000) and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development ($1,618,750) reducing the budget request to NSF to $4,398,450. The University will integrate this shake table equipment into its research program, undergraduate and graduate assistantships and internships, high school summer camps, and K-12 outreach. The University will also provide training opportunities for outside researchers through on-site courses and workshops doc6159 none This workshop will bring together US and foreign researchers to develop and enhance methodology to expand the role of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species as tool for monitoring trends in biodiversity. The International Union of Conservation of Nature s Red List is widely recognized as the most comprehensive, apolitical global system to evaluate the conservation status of plant and animal species. To enable the Red List to function as an indicator of the state of biodiversity, the state of species, and the state of ecosystems, two major changes are required. The first is much better documentation of each species entry in the list, in particular, whether its population is increasing, decreasing, or stable. The second change is agreement on the core taxonomic coverage of the Red List. This needs to include groups that are broadly representative of the major ecosystems of the world, that are taxonomically tractable, that are reasonably well-known, and for which expertise networks exist or could be developed. The outcome of this workshop will be to develop indices from Red List criteria that will provide a valuable tool for biodiversity planners and to serve as the basis for strategic development of the Red-list program doc6160 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Julie d Itri Institution: University of Pittsburgh The goal of this project is to study supported metal particle catalysis and to understand the influence of metal electronic properties for control of carbene coupling and hydrogenation reactions. An important element is the synthesis of both metallic catalytic precursor materials and the clean carbene sources. To test hypotheses that have been predicted with respect to electronic properties, a number of kinetics and spectroscopic measurements will be carried out. The chemical reaction kinetics of hydrogen dissociation, carbene coupling, and carbene hydrogenation will be measured. Diazomethane and difluorodiazirine will be synthesized and used to provide a clean source of carbenes so that the elementary steps can be probed directly. The experiments outlined should lead to a greater fundamental understanding of the way in which carbenes combine or hydrogenate on various transition-metal and alloy catalysts. This work may lead to the development and understanding of catalytic systems that are effective for chlorine removal and for the production of useful chemicals doc6161 none This document describes a proposed software system, called INBOUNDS (Integrated Network-Based Ohio University Network Detective Service), that will address the difficult research problem of security in the dynamic real-time Internet environment populated by both legitimate users and hostile intruders. Internet security is becoming more critical by the day. Successful attacks on banks, schools, government agencies, and corporations that do business online are becoming more and more common, and the frequency of these attacks and the amount of damage done is rising rapidly. Commercially available firewalls and intrusion detection systems are currently the only weapons with which to defend against the threat, but they are obviously not capable of keeping up with the ever-changing attack strategies of hackers. Thus, we propose INBOUNDS a real-time network based intrusion detection and response system under development at Ohio University s Laboratory for Real-Time, Secure Systems and Applications. INBOUNDS detects and responds to suspicious behavior by using TCPTrace (a network traffic analysis tool) and DeSiDeRaTa (dynamic, real-time resource management middleware). INBOUNDS is intended to function in a heterogeneous environment with fault tolerance, very low overhead, and a high degree of scalability. A prototype of INBOUNDS is currently being used for around-the-clock intrusion detection and response at Ohio University and we propose to add functionality that will enable INBOUNDS to deal with the following important types of attacks: Large-scale, distributed denial-of-service attacks Abnormal network protocol behavior including SYN and RESET attacks Suspicious keywords in interactive sessions email Suspicious patterns of data, such as the fan-out patterns commonly seen with email viruses Communication over unusual network ports, which are common when attackers target seldom used and insecure servers Connections from unknown unusual hosts Abnormal data patterns for a particular time of day Unusual data patterns on known ports, such as would be seen when at attacker installs programs using the fingerd port as in the Morris Worm doc6162 none McEnery In the past few years, several inherited neurological disorders in mice and human have been identified as arising from mutations in voltage-dependent calcium channel (VDCC) subunits. VDCC are assembled from component alpha1, gamma and other accessory subunits and impart temporal and spatial specificity to the influx of calcium across the membrane in response to changes in the transmembrane potential. The goal of this project is to expand our fundamental knowledge of how alterations in calcium expression and hence, calcium homeostasis, lead to disease. The information derived from this research will contribute to the identification of perturbations in calcium dynamics within neurons and so will aid in the identification of new therapeutic targets in the management of these diseases in human populations. At the foundation of this study is our detailed biochemical and immunohistochemical diagnosis of epileptic (petit mal seizures) and ataxic stargazer (gamma-2 null), tottering (alpha1A point mutation) and engineered mice that have had the alpha1A gene eliminated (alpha1A knock-out mice). We have identified a reoccurring pattern of cellular defects in hippocampal neurons of these three strains of mice. The altered expression and localization of gamma and alpha1A subunits evidence this defect. Hence, we have, as a fundamental starting point, the hypothesis that calcium entry will be altered in hippocampal neurons of these animals compared to controls. An important aspect of our proposal is the quantitative modeling of the calcium dynamics in mutant neurons. This will give the localization of the sites of calcium flux, the magnitudes of calcium influx, the degree of calcium buttering, and the assessment of calcium diffusion. The experimental data to be used in the quantitative modeling will be obtained by employing a variety of techniques (biochemical, immunohistochemical, and optical) analyzed by contemporary fluorescent microscopic instrumentation (fluorescent microscopy, confocal microscopy, and two-photon microscopy). For calcium imaging studies, we will employ conventional small-molecule calcium indicators with different calcium affinity (Oregon green 488 BAPTA-5N (20 uM), fura-2 (high affinity 145 nM) indo-1 (230 nM) and compare these results with those obtained using a novel calcium indicator, termed cameleon YC3.1 (4 uM). Cameleons are proteins can be expressed in neurons and have the advantage of functioning as cytosolic calcium indicators when expressed as soluble proteins or functioning as strategically placed calcium indicators when attached, by molecular cloning techniques, to VDCC subunits. A long term objective is to mate mice that have been engineered to express cameleon YC3.1 as transgenes with our experimental animals (control, stargazer, tottering and the alpha1A knock-out) to establish strains of mice that offer the opportunity to visualize possible defects in calcium homeostasis in living animals doc6163 none Fountain This award supports a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) to study glaciological change in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica under the category of application of new expertise or new approaches to established research topics . The purpose of the project is to assess the application of classified imagery to the study of the magnitude and rate of change of glacier extent and lake area as an indicator of climate change. Because the rate of change of both glacier extent and lake area is small compared to the resolution of unclassified imagery, the increased resolution of classified imagery is clearly needed. Access to classified imagery with 1 meter or better resolution will provide a baseline measurement against which future changes can be compared. Maximum use will be made of archived imagery but if necessary, one request will be made for new imagery to supplement the existing archive. This work will support on-going field measurements which are part of the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site in the McMurdo Dry Valleys but which are limited by logistic constraints to only a few measurements during limited times of the year. If successful, the information gained in this project will enable researchers to better direct their efforts to identify the important physical processes controlling the changes in the valleys. The information acquired in conducting this project will be made available to the public, using appropriate security procedures to declassify the data. The exploratory and high risk nature of the proposed work and its potential to make an important impact on the field of Antarctic glacier studies are all reasons that this work is appropriate to support as an SGER doc6164 none This Americas Program award will support a US-Brazil research project between Drs. George B. McManus and Hans G. Dam, University of Connecticut, and Dr. Rubens M. Lopes at the State University of Santa Cruz in Brazil. The goal of the project is to investigate the trophic role of zooplankton on the Brazilian continental shelf, and in particular the effect of ecosystem forcing on biological structure and trophic relationships within the plankton. In this project the physical mechanisms that control the seasonal intrusion of the South Atlantic Central Water (SACW) onto the continental shelf of the Southern Brazilian Bight will be studied, and its impact on the biological processes of the region s ecosystem will be evaluated. It is hypothesized that intrusions of the nutrient-rich SACW onto the shelf are partly responsible for the high fisheries yield as well as for some of the year-to-year fluctuations in fish stocks. The linkages between nutrient-input events and fish production are made though micro- and metazoan zooplankton. This research will fill a gap in the knowledge of the structure and function of these zooplankton and of the interactions between them. It will combine the strengths of the Brazilian researchers in taxonomy and descriptive ecology with those of U.S. scientists in experimental process studies doc6165 none The International Antarctic Benthic Deep-Sea Biodiversity Program begins planned field work on the German Icebreaker, R V Polarstern during the - austral season. The proposed research for this program addresses the following themes: 1) the origins of the deep-sea benthic fauna in relation to the Antarctic shelf and linkages to the deep-sea faunas of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans; 2) development of hypotheses to explain high biodiversity in the deep sea; 3) deep-sea benthic community structure in the Southern Ocean; and 4) biological process including reproduction and larval development of benthic invertebrates. Within this scheme, the proposed work will focus on seven polychaete families. During the course of two cruises, materials will be collected to map the spatial and bathymetric distributions of polychaete families while incorporating GIS mapping software. The systematics of the selected polychaete families will be examined. Furthermore, larval and post-larval stages will be observed in an effort to understand the mode of larval dispersal for Antarctic and deep-sea polychaetes. This information will contribute to an understanding of the origins and evolution of these families in the Southern Ocean doc6166 none The objective of this New Technologies for the Environment project is to adapt the air to vacuum (AVA) conveyor system to meet the needs of recycling and remanufacturing. It is expected that the recycling and remanufacturing of printed circuit boards (PCBs) and solar cells can be enhanced and made more cost effective if the AVA system can be introduced into the process. The manufacturing of PCBs is a very large industry ($20 billion globally) and there is a very large growth (20% annually) in the solar cell industry. High technology industries contribute significantly to the economy. Most of the products of the high technology industries are manufactured in systems where the air has been removed (vacuum environments). At the present time, recycling and remanufacturing is extremely limited in the high technology industries. Many of the products at the end of their life cycle end up in landfills and contribute to the pollution. Many of the same vacuum processes used for manufacturing can also be used for recycling and remanufacturing. These processes which offer great environmental benefits are not currently used due to the low throughput and high cost of vacuum processing. In order to reduce the cost of vacuum processing of thin films, a unique belt conveyor system has been developeda that transports discrete objects from air to vacuum for processing and then back to air. The environmental impact of this study will be to reduce the waste going into the landfills and the associated water pollution. The recycling and remanufacturing will also reduce the overall pollution from the manufacturing of these products doc6167 none Wesnousky The Great Basin province is the largest, best-exposed, and most accessible region of continental extension in the world and accounts for up to 25% of the motion across the North American - Pacfic plate boundary. Global Positioning Satellite GPS measurements operated by others are beginning to provide a picture of strain accumulation across the Basin. It is the process of strain release that results in the structure, physiography, and the spatial and temporal pattern of earthquakes that define the Basin and Range as we observe it today. Measures of both strain accumulation and strain release are required to understand the dynamics and evolution of deformation in the Basin and Range province. Neotectonic and paleoseismic techniques are being applied to active faults that bound major mountain fronts that sit subparallel to the existing GPS transects and adjacent to the I-80 corridor of Nevada. The paleoseismic studies are designed to quantify and compare the history and evolution of fault displacement through the late Quaternary to the pattern of strain accumulation that is being observed today doc6168 none The National Geotechnical Experimentation Sites (NGES) program comprises a system of six well-characterized sites located throughout the United States that are available for full-scale geotechnical experiments. In , the National Council for Geo-Engineering and Construction (the Geo Council), a council of ten geo-related organizations, assumed management of the NGES program. The Geo Council expressed interest in expanding the program to new types of sites, such as a geoenvironmental site or a rock site. In addition, with FHWA support, the NGES database is currently being updated and improved and will be a major asset for users including professionals, educators, researchers and students. In order to give direction and priorities to NGES program, a workshop is planned, with NSF support, to develop a broader vision for the program and inject some new thoughts and people into the process. The workshop, to be held in the fall, , will be sponsored by the Geo Council and will produce a report that is widely disseminated and available on the council s Web site: www.geocouncil.org doc6169 none Clyde This grant provides partial funding for the development of a paleomagnetic laboratory at the University of New Hampshire. This laboratory will strengthen research activities at UNH in three general ways. It will (1) support the PI s research into magnetostratigraphy, (2) augment other University of New Hampshire faculty research programs in geophysics, tectonics, and stratigraphy, and (3) enhance the undergraduate and graduate curriculum. The laboratory will be outfitted with a SQUID-based spinner magnetometer, a dual-chamber thermal demagnetizer, an alternating-field demagnetizer, and a three-dimensional field compensation coil system in which to house and operate this equipment. At present there is no paleomagnetic facility in northern New England that is capable of measuring the remanent magnetization of weakly magnetized sediments. This laboratory will provide this capability to researchers at UNH and surrounding institutions. The primary research of the PI focuses on investigating the role that climatic and tectonic changes play in the evolution of mammals. This research requires the ability to make precise chronostratigraphic correlations among continental sections and between continental sections and marine sections. Magnetostratigraphy is the most reliable and applicable method to carry this out. Other faculty at UNH will use the facility to augment their research into magnetic surveying, Appalachian tectonism, eustatic sea-level changes, and the stratigraphic architecture of paleoaquifers. Several undergraduate and graduate classes will also use the facility for hands-on laboratory exercises doc6170 none We request SGER funding to develop a novel technology for self-assembling spatially ordered arrays of uniformly sized nanostructures (quantum dots) on arbitrary substrates. These arrays have intriguing optical, electronic, magnetic and superconducting properties. We have already demonstrated that they exhibit an enhanced transition temperature for the onset of superconductivity because of a discretization of the density of quasi-particle states. We foresee many other applications of these arrays. Self-ordering of the arrays is achieved through a process known as Coulomb crystallization. This technique has many advantages over existing self-assembly methods such as Stranski-Krasatanow growth of quantum dots and electrochemical synthesis. We will develop the Coulomb crystal technology into a new paradigm for nanosynthesis and demonstrate device phenomena in finished nanostructures. A theoretical understanding of the self-assembly process will be gained through extensive modeling and simulation doc6171 none HAGER This Small Grant for Exploratory Research will enable the applicant to film an expedition of Mexican and American scientists who will go to Isla Guadalupe, 160 miles off the coast of Baja California. From June 3 through June 11, the expedition will investigate the status of land and sea bird species, study the insect and arthropod populations, survey the plants, search for secretive reptiles and amphibians, monitor the effects of overgrazing, and prescribe needed conservation measures for the island. In conjunction with this expedition, there will be the first ever visit by humans to an offshore islet that remains undisturbed. The period in June when the expedition will be there is when the Storm-Petrel, a species some think to be extinct, would most predictably occupy this breeding ground. The expedition, itself, is partially supported by a Small Grant for Exploratory Research from the Biology Directorate at NSF. The request to the Informal Science Education Program is for support to a small film crew to document the expedition. The footage obtained would be jointly owned by The San Diego Natural History Museum and North Lights Production, the film production partner. Subsequent to the expedition, potential uses of the film include full production of a one-hour documentary for national broadcast (interest has already been expressed by National Geographic), as well as production of a video for use in formal education and by museums doc6172 none Edward L. Robinson This is a collaborative research project with William F. Welsh at San Diego State University (AST ). This project will use the 9m Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) to obtain high signal-to-noise spectra of QSO broad line regions, with good time sampling, to analyze changes in the full kinematic spectral profiles as a function of time. These will be used to test different kinematic QSO models ( inflow vs. outflow) for the broad line emission regions. Lurking at the center of many massive galaxies are supermassive Black Holes (BH). If there is material nearby, the BH will trap and accrete this matter releasing a huge amount of energy which will show up as increased luminosity of the galaxy nucleus. Galaxies which possess such an accreting BH are said to have an active Nucleus (AGN). Accretion is an inherently unstable process. The accretion region close to the BH is called the Broad Line Region (BLR). The BLR is luminous because it is photoionized by the hard (UV and x-ray) continuum flux produced very close to the BH. Because this ionizing radiation is variable, so is the BLR. Thus the emission lines from the BLR echo the variations in the continuum flux. Using these echoes structures near the BH with microarcsecond scales can be mapped. To do this one needs a very long time baseline of well-sampled observations of the variations in the BLR. This requires data over weeks or months. The HET Echo Mapping Project is a new research project which aims to: (1) Map the size, geometry, and flow of the BLR gas. (2) Make direct estimates of the mass of the central BH using the geometry and kinematics of the BLR. (3) map AGN with BH of 10 to 100 times the mass of those previously measured. (4) Measure the parameters of any accretion wind and the temporal changes in the BLR. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc6173 none Macroporous cellulose membranes are being prepared from filter paper by cross-linking. With these highly porous membranes, further chemical modifications are carried out in order to obtain affinity membranes containing selective ligands for specific protein or enzyme adsorption. The final goal is to produce affinity cartridges which can be used to separate with high selectivity a number of proteins. As therapeutic proteins find wider use in medicine, efficient and effective methods are required to produce these proteins economically. Macroporous affinity membranes offer advantages over conventional chromatography by providing higher rates at lower pressure drops. The cross-linked cellulose membranes are mechanically durable and chemically stable as well as biocompatible. They can be used in cartridges for selective protein separation and purification and tailored by introduction of specific ligands doc6174 none PI: Fienberg, Stephen E A special international conference, Foundation of Statistical Inference: Applications in the Medical and Social Sciences and in Industry and the Interface with Computer Science , will be held in Israel at the conference center at Kiryat Anavim near Jerusalem, on December 17-21, . This conference brings together leading experts in statistics and its applications to discuss both the issues in the foundations of inference and their relevance to the many and varied uses of statistics in the medical sciences, the social sciences, and in industry. A similar conference was held in December . A special focus at this conference will be on the interface between statistics and computer science. Funding will provide travel support for approximately 20 U.S. primarily new researchers and members of under-represented groups, and invited speakers and participants. The KCS Program in the CISE directorate and the MMS Program in SBE directorate is providing co-funding along with the Statistics Program in MPS doc6175 none William F. Welsh This is a collaborative research project with Edward L. Robinson at the University of Texas at Austin (AST ). This project will use the 9m Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) to obtain high signal-to-noise spectra of QSO broad line regions, with good time sampling, to analyze changes in the full kinematic spectral profiles as a function of time. These will be used to test different kinematic QSO models ( inflow vs. outflow) for the broad line emission regions. Lurking at the center of many massive galaxies are supermassive Black Holes (BH). If there is material nearby, the BH will trap and accrete this matter releasing a huge amount of energy which will show up as increased luminosity of the galaxy nucleus. Galaxies which possess such an accreting BH are said to have an active Nucleus (AGN). Accretion is an inherently unstable process. The accretion region close to the BH is called the Broad Line Region (BLR). The BLR is luminous because it is photoionized by the hard (UV and x-ray) continuum flux produced very close to the BH. Because this ionizing radiation is variable, so is the BLR. Thus the emission lines from the BLR echo the variations in the continuum flux. Using these echoes structures near the BH with microarcsecond scales can be mapped. To do this one needs a very long time baseline of well-sampled observations of the variations in the BLR. This requires data over weeks or months. The HET Echo Mapping Project is a new research project which aims to: (1) Map the size, geometry, and flow of the BLR gas. (2) Make direct estimates of the mass of the central BH using the geometry and kinematics of the BLR. (3) map AGN with BH of 10 to 100 times the mass of those previously measured. (4) Measure the parameters of any accretion wind and the temporal changes in the BLR. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc6176 none Boppart The applicants propose to develop an integrated microscope capable of optical coherence tomography (OCT) and multi-photon microscopy (MPM) for simultaneous acquisition of microstructural and functional image data in microfluidic systems. This microscope will be used to investigate the design and performance of microfluidic mixing systems and to non-invasively monitor molecular beacon hybridization in real-time for the detection of specific nucleic acids from microbial pathogens and microorganisms in the environment. The microscope will enable the complementary use of OCT to provide microstructural and flow information and MPM to visualize the spatial distribution of fluorescent molecular beacons with respect to the microstructure. Optical coherence tomography is an emerging high-speed high-resolution imaging technology which has largely been applied to medical and biological applications. OCT performs optical ranging with micron-scale resolution in a manner similar to ultrasound, except reflections of near-infrared light are detected rather than sound. Optical Doppler OCT, a technique analogous to laser Doppler velocimetry, can acquire image-based data of fluid flow profiles and make quantitative measurements of flow velocities. The capabilities are ideally suited for diagnostic monitoring of three-dimensional microfluidic systems, which typically have microstructural dimensions of 10-100 mm. Molecular beacons, oligonucleotides that fluoresce only upon hybridization to a nucleic acid target site, are promising optical probes for the detection of microbial pathogens and other microbial populations. The optical sectioning capability of MPM will be used to simultaneously monitor the three-dimensional spatial distribution of fluorescing molecular beacons within microfluidic systems doc6177 none Chen The objective of this research is the development and testing of high affinity, tunable biopolymers for the selective removal of heavy metals from aqueous streams. In this research, tunable protein conjugates that have a high affinity for specific metals will be developed by starting with specific proteins associated with metal resistance in bacteria. The proposed process uses genetically engineered proteins which posses functional groups or domains that: (1) chelate transition metal ions, and (2) change folding patterns in response to pH and temperature so that they can be rendered insoluble to remove the metals, and (3) can revert to a soluble form in response to pH and temperature to separate the polymer from the waste stream, e. g. tunable biopolymers. This grant is made pursuant to Solicitation NSF 00-49, New Technologies for the Environment doc6178 none ion reaction will be extended. Reactions involving various free radicals including hydroxyl, alkyl, and chlorine will be examined. Reactants containing primary, secondary, and tertiary carbon-hydrogen bonds will also be studied to fit and test the applicability of the model. Ab initio calculations will be performed to determine the activation barriers and the intermolecular forces between reactants during reaction. These calculations will permit an estimate of the relative importance of each term in the predicted overall rate. This work may lead to better models for the prediction of kinetic data for use in chemical reaction process simulators doc6179 none The proposed NM-AGEP is designed to triple the number of SME graduate minority students pursuing doctoral degrees and entering the professoriate over the next five years at the three NM-AGEP Universities through the following objectives: (a) coordinating efforts to support minority SME graduate students statewide, (b ) increasing the recruitment, retention and graduation of minority doctoral students in SME and supporting those students in pursuing academic careers, and ( c) institutionalizing a graduate education cultural climate that is receptive and supportive of a diverse graduate student population doc6180 none The deregulated electric power industry requires new optimal power flow (OPF) and state estimation tools to maintain high levels of security while operating near full capacity in competitive markets. Stochastic OPF problems incorporate operating contingencies and random effects such as uncertainty in demand or energy prices. No operator in today s markets can afford the cost of operating so that its system can withstand fully every contingency, regardless of the probability of its occurrence. Because so many contingencies are included, these problems are massive, to large for direct methods. We propose the use of Monte Carlo-based importance sampling coupled with Benders decomposition, techniques that produce subproblems of tractable size. The proposed work will first develop Monte Carlo-based stochastic OPF algorithms for a DC network subject to random failures of lines and generators. The second stage will add uncertainty to loads, requiring separate importance sampling for the two sources of uncertainty. Finally, the stochastic model will be extended to include day-ahead purchase of spinning reserve in the face of uncertain loads and energy prices. The algorithmic methods for these three classes of OPF will then be extended to a full AC network. A number of public discussions have identified a growing problem arising from undisclosed bilateral energy transactions that distort a network s planned operating point as they pass through it. The task of identifying such rough transactions can be formulated as a problem in hypothesis testing in power system state estimation. The potentially daunting number of undisclosed buyer-seller combinations to be tested can be accommodated by careful problem formulation and by efficient computational techniques such as low rank updates. The central conceptual step is proper use of all a priori information. The proposers will draw on their experience in state estimation-observ-ability, efficient computation, bad data detection and identification-and in time-coupled dynamic dispatch, unit commitment, and price-responsive load modeling to develop efficient algorithms for both classes of problems by exploiting common aspects of their problem structure. This work will lead to new estimation and hypothesis-testing paradigms, robust approached to stochastic OPF, and efficient, practical computation algorithms doc6181 none Tearney The objective of this program is to develop and construct a prototype clinical confocal microscopy system capable of non-invasively obtaining images of cellular microstructure in internal human organ systems. The scanning techniques currently used in laser confocal microscopy are not readily adaptable to the dimensions and constraints of medical endoscopes. Spectrally encoded confocal microscopy (SECM), a technique developed in this laboratory, uses a broad bandwidth light source and a diffraction grating to simultaneously illuminate multiple points along a transverse line within a sample and to detect reflected light from these points. Since this method does not require fast spatial scanning mechanisms within the probe, it is capable of being miniaturized and incorporated into a catheter or endoscope. Special emphasis will be placed on developing an endoscopic confocal microscopy imaging system that is clinically viable, and can potentially be applied to applications ranging from screening for dysplasia to intra-operative tumor margin detection. In addition, this imaging modality could be used for basic science applications to investigate the pathophysiology of disease processes at a cellular level in situ doc6182 none Kirkpatrick It is well known that the mechanical properties of pathological tissues vary from that of healthy tissue. For example, many disease processes such as tumors of the breast and prostate manifest themselves as stiff, hard nodules relative to the surrounding tissue. Subsurface skin tumors present themselves as objects with distinct mechanical properties relative to the surrounding normal tissue. The displacement of fibrillar papillary dermis by the softer, cellular mass of a growing melanoma is one such example of this. This feature frequently allows their detection through manual palpation. However, standard soft tissue palpation is not only qualitative, but also highly subjective. Furthermore, it provides information on a rather large spatial scale, thus the ability to detect small tumors by palpation is limited. Acousto-optic elastrography (AOE) offers the potential for increased spatial resolution (i.e. smaller lesions may be detected) and better strain resolution (low-contrast elastic modulus distributions may be visualized) than other elastographic methods. However, this increased spatial and strain resolution is gained a the cost of decreased probing depth, as optical methods are limited to the outer few millimeters of tissue. Furthermore, optical elastography is limited in that only relatively small areas or volumes of tissues may be probed at any one time. Never the less, optical methods can still be useful in the early detection of neoplastic changes because many of these early changes occur in the mucosa and submucosa of the affected organs. In this proposal, the investigators aim to implement a novel, acousto-optical method for evaluation tissue mechanical properties. The method, incorporating a novel fiber-coupled laser speckle strain gauge, provides high resolution strain and strain rate measurements in tissues undergoing loading or undergoing creep recovery following loading. These data can be used to quantify tissue regions with differential stiffness for both diagnostic purposes and for basic tissue mechanics research. Using image and signal processing techniques, tissue regions which display differential tissue stiffnesses can be delineated from these images. The end goal is that these images can provide the clinician direct information regarding the pathological state of the tissue under examination doc6183 none Botsaris, G. Tufts University This investigation deals with the coupling of a novel emerging technology and a serious environmental problem. The technology is based on the use of the minimally explored class of solvents, the room temperature ionic liquids (RTILs). In contrast to the molten inorganic salts, that have a high melting point, RTILs are melts of salts that are liquids at or below room temperature. These solvents are comprised entirely of ions and constitute a new class of solvents that are different in properties from the two classes of molecular solvents currently in use: water and organic liquids. The environmental problem concerns industrial wastewater effluents and groundwaters contaminated by halogenated organic compounds. These pollutants are highly toxic polychlorinated organics, such as polychlorinated phenols, dioxins, furans, PCBs, chlorobenzenes, etc. They are usually in low concentrations in the contaminated water, nevertheless they need to be removed with high efficiency. This investigation examines the selective extraction and concentration of these organic halogens by an RTIL. The unique properties of ionic liquids provide high selectivity and the large partition coefficients necessary for a very efficient extraction and concentration. In one of the subsequent options to be considered, the extracted contaminants are removed by back extraction to a concentrated aqueous phase or by adsorption onto a solid, where they are destroyed by known advanced oxidation techniques (AOTs). The most interesting idea to be studied, however, is the in situ destruction of the pollutants inside the ionic liquid, either by AOTs or electrochemically. The unique properties of the ionic liquids may provide a particularly favorable environment for these destruction processes. It is expected that the funding of this investigation will have ramifications beyond this particular application to other environmental problems doc6184 none This New Technologies for the Environment project will assess the feasibility of using lead-free solder with existing manufacturing equipment, through novel processing. Using this process may have the added benefit that fluxes, potentially hazardous organic materials, may be eliminated from the solder paste as well. Solder joints will be prepared by a solid state process, known as sintering where by powders are joined without melting the powder. Sintering is widely used to manufacture ceramics and high temperature metals. In the process proposed here, solders considered as alternatives to lead-tin solder will be heated to slightly below their melting point and allowed to sinter. Were these alternatives used in conventional processing, electronic materials would be exposed to temperatures 50C higher than if lead-tin were used. By sintering, the temperature will actually be reduced. This technique can also be used to form cold solder joints with mechanical integrity. This means that a wider range of materials can be considered. In this project students at VCU will prepare novel low flux solder pastes, form joints through sintering, and test their mechanical integrity. The mechanical integrity of these joints will be compared to those prepared by lead-tin solder doc6185 none Proposal No.: Proposal Type: New Technologies for the Environment Initiative (00-49) Principal Investigators: Mamdou S. Diallo Institution: Howard University NTE: Removal of Toxic Metal Ions from Contaminated Water by Dendrimer-Enhanced Ultrafiltration The discharge of toxic metal ions into publicly owned water-treatment works (POTWs), surface water bodies, aquifers and coastal water systems has caused a major water contamination problem throughout the world. Polymer-enhanced ultrafiltration (PEUF) is emerging as a promising process for treatment of water contaminated by toxic metal ions. In PEUF, a water-soluble polymer with strong binding affinity for toxic metal ions is added to contaminated water. The resulting solution is passed through an ultrafiltration (UF) membrane with pore sizes smaller than those of the metal-ion-laden polymer. Highly purified permeates have been obtained using PEUF. This project exploits recent advances in nanoscopic chemistry such as the invention of dendrimers to develop more efficient and cost effective functional materials for PEUF. Dendrimers are highly branched polymers with controlled composition and architecture consisting of three components: a core functionality, interior branch cells, and terminal branch cells. Critical properties of dendrimers such as size, shape, core chemistry, surface chemistry and polydispersity can be controlled by a judicious choice of synthetic building blocks and reaction conditions. For example, the terminal groups of a dendrimer can be designed to be compatible or incompatible with a specific surface, while its core may act as receptor for metal ions. The overall objective of this project is to evaluate the feasibility of Dendrimer Enhanced Ultrafiltration (DEUF) as an efficient, environmentally acceptable, and cost effective process for treating water contaminated by toxic metal ions. Commercial dendrimers are being modified chemically to determine the effectiveness of various forms in separating copper, zinc, and cadmium ions. The tendency of the dendrimers to foul UF membranes is also being tested. The Metal Products and Machinery (MP&M) industry is the first target for the application of DEUF. Approximately 40,000 of the 70,000 companies of the MP & M industry generate wastewater contaminated by toxic metal ions. Under current regulations, the MP& M industry is required to treat its contaminated wastewater prior to discharge into POTWs. EPA is in the process of issuing new and more stringent effluent concentration limitations for the MP&M industry. The additional costs of compliance to these new regulations using the best practicable control technology currently available are estimated to range from 1.95 to 3.59 billion dollars per year. A preliminary evaluation by EPA of the PEUF process shows it to be cost effective compared to chemical precipitation, the wastewater treatment baseline technology in the MP& P industry. Because the metal-ion binding capacity of dendrimers is significantly larger than that of linear polymers currently used in PEUF, the use of DEUF should result in more efficient water purification and significant savings for the MP& M industry doc6186 none This is an international collaborative research project between Oregon State University and the Institute of Experimental Botany of the Czech Republic focusing on the regulation of senescence by a plant hormone (cytokinin). The research will lead to a better understanding of the processes leading to cessation of growth in annual plants at the end of the season. The collaboration is a continuation of a previous COBASE project between Machteld Mok David Mok and Radomira Vankova and the research is an extension of a NSF-funded project to the Mok lab ( ). The collaboration combines research expertise of the two labs to address a classical topic in plant physiology with molecular tools. Cytokinins are hormones promoting cell division and regulating many phases of whole plant development. Zeatin is the most common and active natural cytokinin. Of the wide spectrum of zeatin metabolites, those derived from modifications of the N6-isoprenoid side-chain are of particular interest since biological activity is largely dependent on side-chain configuration. O-Glucosides of zeatin and ribosylzeatin occur in most plant species examined and are particularly abundant at the onset of leaf senescence. By virtue of their resistance to cytokinin oxidase attack and ready conversion to zeatin via b-glucosidase hydrolysis, O-glucosides are considered to be storage and transport forms of active cytokinins. However, their precise function has not been defined. Molecular tools, genes encoding the zeatin O-glucosyltransferase (ZOG1) and a b-glucosidase (Bgl4), are now available to examine this question. Gene expression, enzyme activity and distribution of zeatin, ribosylzeatin, and their O-glucosides will be determined in tobacco at specific stages of leaf development. The effects of modifying O-glucosylation and sugar hydrolysis on maturation and senescence will be examined by generating transgenic plants harboring the ZOG1 and Bgl4 genes in sense and anti-sense orientations. As few cytokinin-related genes have been isolated, the proposed study offers a unique approach to examine the control of a specific metabolic step on a single developmental process, and should bring new perspective to the hormonal regulation of leaf senescence doc6187 none This goal of this research project is to develop a new geocomposite overlay to contain and remediate contaminated, subaqueous sediments. The existing state of practice to treat such sediments is either subaqueous capping with clean sediments, or removal of the sediment for ex situ treatment and or storage. The geosynthetic-based, reactive cap to be developed will provide the same isolation as that of traditional caps, but will also: provide a remediation layer that will absorb and effectively neutralize target contaminants; block resuspension of fine dediment particles; and serve as a stable, protective foundation material. After prototype geocomposite designs have been developed, a bench-scale testing series will use an existing large-scale consolidation device to assess each geocomposite s filtering interactions and remediation effectiveness. Tests using three soils of different grain sizes and two contaminants will indicate the amount of remediation, contaminant particle resuspension, and limitations of the geocomposite with regard to long-term performance. The geocomposite s remediation process will be analytically modeled using the test results and existing data on subaqueous sediments. The research will show the feasibility of this concept at the bench scale, and serve as a basis for field scale implementation and modeling doc6188 none Descour The goal of this interdisciplinary research project is to develop miniature microscopes that can utilize the interaction of light with tissues in many modalities to image morphology and cytochemistry in vivo, yielding tools that provide better delineation of tumors. The investigators envision pen-sized, battery-powered multi-modal miniature microscopes (4Ms) designed to specifically image microscopic and molecular features of pre-cancer. The proposed miniature microscopes are being called multi-modal because of their potential for enabling different imaging modalities such as optical sectioning, 3-D spectral fluorescence imaging, and reflectance imaging. The size and cost of these microscopes will be small enough so that they can be used for wide-scale screening of disease. These tools will have broad applicability in many organ sites due to their very compact size and capability for imaging. The investigators will first apply these tools to improve detection of oral-cavity pre-cancers because of the oral cavity s easy accessibility. Furthermore, the assembled multidisciplinary expertise empowers the investigators to treat the design of miniaturized imaging sensors in an all-inclusive manner. In addition to developing 4M devices, the investigators will also design contrast agents specific for molecular alterations associated with pre-cancer that can be applied topically to significantly expand the imaging capability of miniature microscopes doc6189 none This award will fund a conference, in March . This conference will deal with a broad spectrum of the theory of quadratic forms, including algebraic theory, arithmetic theory, K- theory and algebraic groups. This is an important and broad research area in Number Theory. There will be approximately eight one-hour survey lectures and between twenty-five and thirty contributed talks by the participants doc6190 none Anderson The objective of this research is to establish the potential for enhanced aquifer bioremediation under anaerobic conditions by means of electochemically mediated electron transfer. The research will evaluate electrochemically-based mechanisms of 1) hydrocarbon oxidation by continuous electron acceptor supply via oxidation of an added electron shuttling compound in an electrochemical cell, 2) hydrocarbon oxidation via electrochemical oxidation of naturally-occurring electron shuttling compounds within aquifer sediments and 3) hydrocarbon oxidation via direct electrode reduction by contaminant-degrading microorganisms found in contaminated aquifer sediments. Contaminated aquifers contain naturally-occurring electron shuttling compounds suggesting that the anaerobic subsurface could function as the working compartment of an electrochemical cell. Direct microbial reduction of the working electrode is also possible in poised electrochemical cells with an externally applied voltage. Electrochemical cells small enough to be placed into existing wells or into aquifers directly could provide a continual source of electron acceptors for organic contaminate oxidation. Such devices would stimulate natural attenuation processes occurring within the subsurface, while requiring low power input and minimal maintenance, and they could be configured to provide a record of current production in order to monitor degradation processes in situ. This grant is made pursuant to Solicitation NSF 00-49, New Technologies for the Environment doc6191 none PI: Claude Cohen Institution: Cornell University Proposal Number: This project involves the study of the use of novel cross-linked amphophilic polymer nano-particles in the removal of hydrophobic organic pollutants from contaminated soil. The experimental effort will be directed toward polymer synthesis, polymer characterization, and laboratory evaluations of the fate and transport of amphiphilic polymer networks in porous media, and of their efficacy in the removal of polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) compounds that will be employed as model hydrophobic organic contaminants. Polymer networks can be prepared in nano-size scale by cross-linking droplets in an oil-in-water suspension. Preliminary experiments have demonstrated that polymer nano-particels have advantages over surfactants in soil remediation including low adsorption onto soil and greater extent of removal of PAHs doc6192 none Roberts This research explores the use of zero-valent metals for treating vapor phase chlorinated organic contaminants commonly found in landfill gas. Specifically, the reactions of 1,2-dichloroethane and cis-1,2-dichloroethane (and their daughter products) with a variety of bimetallic reductants (or iron alone) will be studied. Batch and column tests will be conducted for screening and for determining performance, longevity, and reaction rates and products. Additional studies will focus on developing a better understanding of the molecular-scale chemical reactions that result in destruction of halogenated contaminants at metal particle surfaces. Batch and column studies will be complemented by surface chemical investigations, designed to provide information concerning trhe composistion of the reactive metal surface as it evolves under the influence of exposure to water, chlorinated contaminants and the minor gas-phase constituents, oxygen and hydrogen-sulfide. In addition to the intended application to landfill gas, applications of this research include controlling emissions from chemical production and manufacturing processes, as well as treating contaminants present in soils (removed via soil vapor extraction or bioventing). This grant is made pursuant to Solicitation NSF 00-49, New Technologies for the Environment doc6193 none The objective of this New Technologies for the Environment project is to develop the new technologies needed in paper processing and agronomy to make mimosa (Albizia julibrissin) a viable materials substitute for hardwood fibers in fine paper manufacturing. Quality writing and printing paper grades require a blend of long fibers derived from softwood and short fibers derived from hardwoods. Hardwoods are not plantation grown, making accessibility and proper reforestation difficult. Mimosa is a fast growing perennial plant and our preliminary studies show that it has pulp with qualities similar to that of southern hardwoods. This project focuses on studies that address: (1) the response of mimosa to different pulping and paper making processes; (2) the response of mimosa to bleaching sequence; (3) the paper properties of mimosa in softwood and hardwood blends; (4) the optimum age of wood for mimosa harvesting; (5) genetic improvement of mimosa by making a germplasm (seed) collection from wild mimosa; and (6) evaluation of germination rate and early plant growth from this material. The experiments synergize interactions among faculty and graduate students from Chemical Engineering, Agronomy and Soils, and the Auburn Pulp and Paper Research and Education Center. It includes research experiences for undergraduates in laboratory courses and through an undergraduate summer exchange program with minority students from Tuskegee University. The environmental impacts of this work will be the reduction in harvesting of hardwoods in old growth forests, and the reduction in energy usage associated with the ease of pulping, bleaching, and refining of the mimosa fibers doc6194 none This grant provides funding for research on reducing the environmental impact of small-to-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in manufacturing, specifically, by focusing on the strategic and operational decisions that impact flows of energy and mass through the enterprise. The objective is to develop decision support technologies that will allow SMEs to simultaneously consider costs, energy, and mass impacts of environmentally important strategic and operational decisions. To achieve this objective, first the particular needs, barriers and opportunities for SMEs with respect to self-motivated environmental impact reduction efforts will be identified. Secondly, one or two SME manufacturing plants suitable for a pilot study will be identified. Next, an integrated activity-based cost, energy, and mass model will be developed for the pilot SME. The purpose will be to demonstrate that environmental concerns can be incorporated into both strategic and operational decision making. The infrastructure needed to obtain data from the plant to develop a top-level economic and environmental performance monitoring tool will be identified. If successful, this proposed work would provide SMEs with a new cost-effective technology to identify and tackle their most significant opportunities for improving economic and environmental performance of manufacturing. Benefit of these technologies would be long lasting because it could result in sustained self-motivated environmental performance improvements by SMEs in their manufacturing operations. The very same technologies would quantify the results of improvements, thus providing justification for future rounds of investment technologies to increase economic and environmental efficiency doc6195 none Ma The objective of this research is to explore the utility of a fern in the Pteris genus for arsenic phytoremediation. The pytoremediation process involves transferring the arsenic from contaminated soils to plant tissue. The plants can be periodically removed and disposed of in a low impact manner and arsenic removal will, in turn, restore the site for productive uses. This fern is singular in its high ablity to remove arsenic from surrounding soil. Additionally, high sunlight tolerance has been exhibited which bodes well for its use for phytoremediation in a wide array of field situations. In addition to the field trials where arsenic removal from soils will be studied, the work includes exploring the efficacy of using a patented gasification technology for the disposal of the arsenic-rich, plant biomass. The bulk of the plant mass will be gasified leaving a small volume of ash and arsenic for ultimate disposal. This grant is made pursuant to Solicitation NSF 00-49, New Technologies for the Environment doc6196 none Edward J. Maginn U. of Notre Dame This project concerns the synthesis, characterization and evaluation of functionalized mesoporous silica-based materials for adsorption-based separations critical to environmental applications. Specifically, we seek to develop high performance adsorbents for two applications: the remediation of aqueous streams contaminated with heavy metals, and the separation of paraffin olefin gas mixtures. Heavy metal contamination is a major source of environmental concern, and existing technologies are not always adequate for meeting stringent regulatory limits. There has been renewed interest recently in developing highly selective adsorbents for the removal of heavy metals such as mercury from aqueous streams, but most of the attention has focused on optimizing the selectivity of materials. Many practical engineering concerns such as stability, regeneration capability and mass transfer issues have been largely ignored. Olefin paraffin separation represents another opportunity where advanced adsorbents can play a large role in environmental protection. Due to the high capital costs associated with distillation of these mixtures, many chemical production facilities flare recycle purge streams containing valuable olefin species. This results in a significant waste of feedstock as well as increased emissions. A low capital adsorption-based process that could separate these mixtures is highly desirable, but requires the development of new types of adsorbent materials. Using molecular modeling as a guide, we will follow a strategy in which mesoporous silicas from the M41S family of materials are tailored for either heavy metal remediation or olefin paraffin separation by functionalizing the pore walls with ligands. The ligands will be chosen so as to tune the pore diameter and interaction strength between the target species and the ligand to achieve desirable separation performance. This means that the interaction strength must be great enough to achieve high selectivity and capacity, but weak enough so that the material can be easily regenerated. We will also engineer the material to achieve optimum mass transfer characteristics. Our synthetic strategy will build on some of our recent work in which we have attached organosilane ligands onto the pore walls of mesoporous silica. These materials can be made in powdered form using conventional techniques. We have also been able to synthesis self-supporting functionalized macrostructures using an emulsion process. The project involves three main components. Detailed molecular modeling studies using Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics techniques will be conducted to probe fundamental issues pertaining to the way in which ligands interact with guest species to change the adsorption thermodynamics and diffusion properties of the system. Using these results as a guide, we will then incorporate different ligands into mesoporous silica and characterize the materials using a range of techniques, including X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy and nitrogen adsorption. For the heavy metal adsorbents, we will initially investigate the use of amine-terminated alkoxysilane ligands and sulfonated ligands with exchangeable cations. For the olefin paraffin adsorbents, we will test whether metal cations such as silver can be used with the sulfonated ligands to selectively adsorb olefins. The performance of the materials will then be evaluated by measuring mixture isotherms to obtain selectivities and adsorption capacity. Importantly, we will also perform breakthrough curve analyses and regeneration tests using a packed bed. These tests will help determine the feasibility of using these materials for industrial and consumer applications doc6197 none Berger Vibrational Raman spectroscopy is a precise tool for the identification and quantification of molecular species. Because the spectral bands are narrow, signals from many compo-nents can be resolved and analyzed simultaneously. Consequently, Raman spectroscopy provides a method for analyzing multiple components concentrations in complex sam-ples accurately, non-invasively, and non-destructively. These attributes are valuable in the medical field for both in vivo and in vitro measurements. Acquisition of Raman spectra is limited by the effects of intrinsic sample autofluor-escence. For most biological samples, the spectral background from fluorescence will typically be much (greater than100 times) larger than the Raman signal, and fluorescence shot noise can be the limiting source of noise. Consequently, fluorescence limits Raman spec-troscopy from being a more widely applicable technique for biomedical purposes. The investigators propose to develop a novel Raman spectroscopy system based upon wavelength shifting to suppress these fluorescence effects. Such a system would be able to acquire fluorescence-corrected Raman spectra with unprecedented speed and accuracy. The technique uses a laser whose wavelength is varied over a range of 1 nm at kHz fre-quencies. Because Raman spectra shift with the laser wavelength while fluorescence re-mains stable, the fluorescence background can be efficiently rejected; at the same time, detection in the kHz regime reduces the fluoresence shot noise significantly relative to DC detection. To date, the published implementations of wavelength-shifted Raman spectroscopy have used either steady-state detection, in which the noise-suppression advantage is lost, or single-wavelength scanning, which makes them too slow to com-pete with present multipixel systems. The proposed system would combine all of the ad-vantages and should significantly improve concentration predictions. In addition, sup-pression of fluorescence signal and noise could open new avenues for biomedical Ra-man spectroscopy, such as visible-excitation experiments (avoided because of extremely high fluorescence) and higher-contrast Raman imaging. This proposal is broken into four Specific Aims, which are (1) to assemble the above Raman system and acquire a first round of spectra; (2) to optimize the signal-to-back-ground and signal-to-noise of the system and compare values to other Raman modali-ties; (3) to increase the optical throughput of the spectrometer via spatial Fourier-trans-form techniques; and (4) to conduct experiments to detect clinically relevant analytes in biological samples and phantoms. This proposal combines basic spectroscopy with advanced instrumentation, provid-ing a solid platform for training graduate and undergraduate students in biomedical optics. Through Raman spectroscopy, discussion of related topics in absorption, fluo-rescence, and diffuse photon migration will arise. Conference attendance and presen-tations by graduate students (for which funding is explicitly requested) will further in-crease exposure to the field. Within the laboratory, students will gain direct experience assembling lasers, optics, spectrographs, and detectors into a functioning system and also programming computers to control the system. This will nurture broadly applica-ble skills for future use in both academic and industrial laboratory settings doc6198 none Wei The objective of this proposal is to develop a minimally intrusive, Raman-based sensor for monitoring changes in intracellular ion and neurotransmitter concentrations. These will be used to address outstanding questions in transporter function. Gold-silica superparticles (shell of gold particles around a silica core) 100-200 nm in diameter will be prepared by self-assembly techniques and used as substrates for surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). The surfaces of the superparticles will be functionalized with non-fluorescent receptors designed to recognize inorganic or organic cations. These nanoprobes will be introduced into cells via picoliter injection and will be monitored for SERS using near-infrared laser excitation. Sampling will be performed using a micro-Raman instrument with high spectral resolution coupled to an inverted microscope stage. The vibrational spectra will enable specific binding events to be detected by direct assignment of analyte group frequencies or by modulation of receptor spectral profiles. Detection limits can be in the low nanomolar range with resolutions on the order of milliseconds. Raman-active nanoprobes will be employed to investigate two transport systems of fundamental importance to neuron activity. First, the influx of Zn2+ ions will be monitored by SERS in a time-dependent fashion to provide insight into the mechanism of Zn2+ transport by Ca2+ ion channels. This will be correlated to electrophysiological measurements of total ion influx by patch clamp recording techniques. Second, novel reverse transport activity by the serotonin transporter (SERT) will be investigated by monitoring intracellular levels of serotonin and the amphetamine--like drug MDMA. Third, the mode of SERT transport will be elucidated by correlating intracellular neurotransmitter concentrations with changes in ion current caused by Na+ co--transport, again by the concurrent use of SERS and patch clamping techniques. This may reveal valuable insights into the mode of action behind amphetamine and related psychoactive drugs. These studies are representative of the myriad molecular transport issues that can be addressed by intracellular monitoring, such as actively coupled transport of carbohydrates and amino acids, efflux pumps in multidrug resistant cells, and viral infections. The mutual exchange of ideas from traditionally unrelated disciplines will provide fertile ground for student training. Students will be exposed to issues in supramolecular and materials chemistry (organic synthesis, colloid science, design principles in molecular recognition), photonics (microscope and laser optics, Raman theory and applied spectroscopy, signal processing), and molecular and cellular neuroscience (cell transfection and cultures, transporter function, electrophysiology). Their intimate involvement in the proposed project will make them experts in one or more of these areas, and have a working knowledge of the others by their active participation in project-related discussion groups and conferences doc6199 none Controlled Fire Polishing for Scratchitti Removal and Glass Resurfacing Shane Y. Hong and Vijay Modi Columbia University The objective of this proposal is to develop an environmentally benign, novel re-manufacturing process to relief the bothersome scratchitti vandalism- permanent scratches on the glass surface. In this proposal, an innovative approach, controlled fire polishing, will be used. Intensive heat melts only a thin layer of the glass panel. During the cooling process, the surface tension will even out the scratching indent. The process will enable the reuse of the damaged window door and eliminate the otherwise waste by replacement new glass. It allows a better living environment for people, rid of the unpleasant and annoying graffiti vandalism doc6200 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Charles Eckert Institution: Georgia Institute of Technology The goal of this project is to study phase-transfer catalysts (PTCs) for supercritical fluid applications. Synthesis of perfluorinated PTCs will be carried out, and a series of industrially useful reactions will be performed. Proposed reactions include displacement reactions, ether syntheses, polymerization reactions, and alkylations. The replacement of organic solvents with supercritical carbon dioxide will have a positive environmental impact. The PIs plan to demonstrate the tuning of catalyst properties with structure, focusing on phase distribution and activity. This project represents a multidisciplinary collaboration between chemists and chemical engineers to implement a novel technology involving PTC reactions in safe, cheap, nontoxic supercritical carbon dioxide. The chemistry of the reactions will be engineered with the downstream separations to achieve both process advantages and economic benefits. PTC is currently an important industrial technology, useful for carrying out reactions between two or more reactants that would normally be immiscible. Numerous chemical products are synthesized through PTC, and novel methods for enhancing reaction kinetics and selectivity may have a large economic impact doc6201 none The objective of this project is to demonstrate environmentally-acceptable methods for complete oxidation of chlorinated solvents for environmental remediation. The active oxygenation species will be superoxide ion, which will be generated in an aprotic room temperature ionic liquid using a suitable cathode. In addition to demonstrating complete oxidation of chlorinated pollutants, partial electrochemical oxidation using the same superoxide chemistry will provide a route for synthesis of organic molecules that are functional derivatives of carboxylic acids. The PI will conduct low-temperature oxidation of wastes via electrochemical generation of superoxide ion in novel ionic liquid solvents. Low-temperature oxidation of waste solvents will provide a much-needed alternative to high temperature waste incinerators, whose use is greatly complicated by regulatory requirements and locating suitable sites. Such superoxide chemistry has previously been demonstrated in volatile and environmentally-suspect aprotic solvents such as dimethyl formamide and acetonitrile. However, ionic liquids are non-volatile and non-flammable, and should minimize the problems of secondary solvent waste and separation of products from solvent. Assuming the basic electrochemistry of superoxide is successful, it is further proposed to conduct organic synthesis by electrochemical activation of carbon dioxide (CO2) and oxygen, followed by carboxylation of appropriate substrates. The classes of molecules to be synthesized are carbamides, which are valuable intermediates in the production of consumer products such as pharmaceuticals and agrichemicals. Present commercial processes may require organic solvents, expensive catalysts, or even phosgene in the synthesis of these intermediates. There is thus a strong motivation for better, sustainable approaches to manufacture of these intermediates. This project supports the development of a clean and environmentally friendly technology for both waste remediation and chemical manufacturing, based on superoxide chemistry. The project will involve a graduate student, a post-doctoral student, and undergraduate students through an existing NSF REU program in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of South Carolina doc6202 none Concrete has been the material of choice for the nation s $1.4 trillion infrastructure. The rapid growth of human population, industrialization, and urbanization has led to more cement being used in concrete materials to meet the increasing needs of infrastructure. As a result, the environmental concerns related to portland cement clinker production, such as greenhouse gas (carbon dioxide, CO Z) emission and disposal of cement kiln dust (CKD), a by-product of cement manufacturing, have become increasingly important. The United States cement industry generates about 80 million tons of CO 2 and 5 million tons of CKD every year. The disposal of waste CKD is not only associated with the problem of land use but also with the contamination of ground water from leaching of chemicals (especially heavy metals) in the material. Similarly, another industrial by-product, fly ash, collected from the stack gases of power plants burning pulverized coal, is also commonly considered an extensive waste material. About 59 million tons of fly ash are generated annually in the United States and 80% is placed in landfills. The goal of the proposed research is to explore an effective way to substantially utilize CKD and fly ash by developing an environmentally friendly, sufficiently performing, and cost effective cementitious product (without portland cement clinker) for future concrete materials. CKD and fly ash have been used as a supplementary cementitious material in concrete in small amounts. Usage is limited due to deficiencies of the two materials. For example, CKD contains an excessive amount of fine particles and a high alkali content, which often impart a,,,,erse effects on concrete workability and durability. Most fly ash hydrates slowly and some contain a high unburned carbon content. These inadequacies are unacceptable for strength development and volumetric stability of cement and concrete materials. However, if the two materials are blended together, the alkalis from CKD may activate hydration of fly ash. The proposed research involves properly blending CKD with fly ash to create a cementitious material in which the material deficiencies will be converted into benefits. The proposed research program includes six major tasks: (1) raw material characterization, (2) statistical design and optimization of blend proportions, (3) the grinding process, (4) testing and evaluation for effectiveness of chemical and mechanical activation of the blends, (5) developing criteria for acceptance of new products, and (6) testing and evaluation for performance of concrete made with the new products. Task 2 contains four successive steps: design, preliminary optimization, refinement, and conformation, thus developing optimal blends orderly. A series of chemical, physical, and mechanical experiments will be used to evaluate product performance at each step of optimization, thus leading to the next optimal step of blend proportioning continuously. A systematical study of different grinding processes and their affect on alkali activation and cement hydration will be conducted along with the curing conditions that promote such hydration. Thus, four key issues, (a) alkali activation, (b) high-energy grinding, (c) proportion optimization, and (d) product performance, are brought together into the proposed development of a non-clinker CKD-fly ash cement. The new product performance is engineered by tailoring the chemistry, microstructure, and manufacturing process. An interdisciplinary collaborative research team has been formed, consisting of members from the Center for Advanced Cement-Based Materials (ACBM) at Northwestern University (NU), Evanston, Illinois, and Construction Technology Laboratories, Inc. (CTL ), Skokie, Illinois. The team members have complementary strengths needed for the proposed research, with expertise in the areas of concrete material science, statistical design and analysis, cement chemistry, manufacturing, guideline development, and concrete testing and properties. Working together, they expect the successful conversion of CKD and fly ash from a current environmental burden and industrial profit thief into a viable construction material doc6203 none There is a growing need for a fast, robust, efficient and environmentally benign surface treatment process for plastics and metals that can be easily incorporated into the manufacturing environment. This New Technologies for the Environment project will emphasize high risk high return, exploratory feasibility study into the ability to use UV light, in air, to clean and surface treat polymer and metals surfaces as a replacement technology for abrasion, solvent and detergent based cleaning methods to prepare surfaces to painting and or adhesive bonding. The UV source will illuminate a surface with photons of sufficient energy and intensity in air to create atomic oxygen and ozone to both decompose surface contaminants and oxidize and increase the surface energy of the surface being illuminated. If this process could be accomplished, it would result in a reduction in VOCs; a reduction in detergent fouled waste water; and a reduction in fine particulates. This technology also has the potential to be very cost effective through its energy efficiency. Preliminary research being conducted has shown the potential ubiquitous nature of this process to a large variety of polymer and metal surfaces. Research in this portion of the project will be directed at the fundamental scientific and engineering aspects of this process which would allow life-cycle considerations for costs and efficient materials reuse in a sustainable materials stream doc6204 none The objective of this research is to develop high performance, low cost, composite resins from soy oil and other natural oils for liquid molding and sheet molding manufacturing applications. The proposed new technology for the environment project will examine the fundamental issues pertaining to the cost-effective synthesis and manufacture of soy-based high modulus resins using chemically modified triglycerides. The research significantly expands on recent patented inventions of the Principal Investigator and is expected to develop the fundamental science to support the bio-based products by providing an affordable replacement for petroleum based materials. The focus of the research will be on: (1) the optimization and synthesis of liquid molding resins designed for mass-production manufacturing such as Resin Transfer Molding, VARTM and SCRIMP (This will be accomplished by chemical modification of model triglyceride and monoglyceride systems involving hydroxylation, glycerolysis, maleinization, epoxidation and acrylation of oils with known fatty acid distribution functions and degrees of unsaturation.), and (2) the development of Sheet Molding Compound (SMC) from these reactive liquids. The resulting SMC, when blended with glass and natural fibers forms the equivalent of sheet metal that is extensively used for mass production in the auto, trucking and ag-equipment industries. Computer simulations of network structure evolution during reactions will be conducted to provide insight into the fractal structure of the crosslinked molecular networks obtained. It is anticipated that the thermal, mechanical, and durability property analysis of the resulting bio-based materials, coupled with their low cost will provide suitable commercialization incentives for industrial partners in the subsequent research doc6205 none This New Technologies for the Environment project will demonstrate the proof-of-concept for vapor deposition of photoimageable dielectric polymer films through an integrated experimental investigation that will provide fundamental understanding of thin film processing, properties and performance capabilities and limitations. If successful, this research will lay the foundation for realization of significant environmental advantages in printed circuit board manufacture and in advanced microelectronics packaging. The inherent photosensitivity of the polymer films will allow the elimination of a significant number of waste-generating process steps from the overall manufacturing process flow, and the production of the thin films through vapor deposition will eliminate solvent wastes in precursor production, thin film application, and shelf-life expiration. This research will address key barrier issues inhibiting the implementation of photoimageable dielectric technology. Focus will be on auto-photosensitive film deposition from pyromellitic dianhydrides and co-monomers from the ortho-aliphatic di-substituted diaminodiphenylmethane series. Life Cycle Analyses will be conducted to demonstrate the environmental benefits of the technology including minimal emissions, solvent-free film production, and high precursor utilization doc6206 none Primates, the order of mammals to which humans belong, are characterized by arboreal locomotion. This is also a key feature that differentiates primates from most other groups of animals. As such, understanding the development of this locomotor pattern is important in understanding our own roots. This project examines primate locomotion on arboreal supports. Life in the trees presents many challenges for balance and movement. Arboreal supports differ in diameter (size), in angular orientation, and in the degree to which they move under the weight of an animal (compliance). While a number of studies have identified behavioral and morphological specializations correlated with the use of an arboreal habitat, detailed locomotor data are necessary to better understand the postural strategies primates use to maintain balance in an arboreal setting. Since precise locomotor data are difficult to collect in the wild, laboratory studies on simulated branches allow us to examine these issues. This study examines locomotor adjustments that members of three families of prosimian primates make in response to differences in arboreal support type. Subjects have been chosen from six species to compare locomotor responses in animals of different body sizes and proportions, to address adaptations to arboreality that have been suggested to characterize the earliest primates doc6207 none Reardon The objective of this research is to improve the efficacy of the in situ treatment of migrating plumes of contaminated ground water. The engineering technologies to be developed and synergistically combined are (1) electrochemical alteration of the local redox environment and (2) enhanced biodegradation. The envisioned implementation entails constructing a plume-intercept zone in which the augmented degradation of chlorinated pollutants (e.g. perchloroethene) occurs as ground water traverse the zone. The augmented destruction of contaminants is an anticipated outcome for two reasons. First, the reducing conditions generated at the cathodic surfaces inserted in the upstream side of the intercept zone will stimulate the development of bacterial populations that can dechlorinate the pollutants. Second, the oxidizing conditions generated in the down stream section of the zone in conjunction with the dechlorinated state of the pollutants will lead to accelerated mineralization. This grant is made pursuant to Solicitation NSF 00-49, New Technologies for the Environment doc6208 none Nyman The objective of this collaborative research project is to test the feasibility of pretreating contaminated sediments and dredge spoils such that rapid and complete microbial degradation can occur. As one panelist commented, such materials have heretofore been relegated to the impossible to deal with category; hence, should the results of this feasibility study prove to be positive, an option for reducing the environmental impact of these materials prior to land filling or return to the environment will exist. The contaminated materials will be contacted with organic acid and peroxide. The former will prompt contaminant desorption whilst the latter will initiate the breakdown of the high molecular weight polycyclic aromatic contaminants to simpler molecules that bacteria can degrade. Following the pretreatment and neutralization, microbial degradation will be used to complete the waste treatment. The second step can, for example, be initiated with microbe-containing material from a municipal composting operation thereby providing for the integration of different waste treatment processes. This grant is made pursuant to Solicitation NSF 00-49, New Technologies for the Environment doc6209 none Deshusses The objective of this project is to develop an alternative to trickling bed filters and other biofilter configurations that are currently employed to remove and destroy volatile organic contaminants in air streams. The conventional technologies are prone to biomass build up which, in turn, diminishes performance due to increased pressure drop and channeling. The proposed alternative contacts contaminant-laden air with descending droplets that contain microbes. The droplets are formed by pumping a microbial suspension through an array of nozzles. Microbial-mediated degradation of air contaminants occurs as the pollutants transport from the gas to the droplet phase. The liquid collects at the bottom of the device. It can be recycled to continually introduce droplets with biomass into the process and excess biomass can be purged. Apart from good interfacial contacting and potentially rapid kinetics, the proposed device offers the benefits of (1) low pressure drop and (2) steady vs. intermittent operation. The panel was intrigued with the idea and viewed the proposal as fitting well with the initiative. This grant is made pursuant to Solicitation NSF 00-49, New Technologies for the Environment doc6210 none Smith This project investigates a new technique for in situ quantification of Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) amplification products using electrochemiluminescence (ECL). The technique implements the highly sensitive, ECL detection and quantification of tris(2,2 bipyridyl) ruthenium (II) labeled DNA. This method is expected to yield significant improvement in speed, cost and performance over existing quantitative PCR methods, by reducing the number and quantity of reagents, reducing the number of sample preparation steps, increasing sensitivity, and shortening analysis time doc6211 none PI: Jimmy W. Mays Institution: University of Alabama at Birmingham Proposal Number: Room temperature ionic liquids (RTILs) are emerging as replacements for environmentally dangerous volatile organic compound solvents (VOCs) traditionally used as industrial solvents. RTILs offer a solvating medium in which a number of organic and inorganic compounds can be dissolved. They are non-volatile, non-flammable, have high thermal stabilities, and are inexpensively and easily manufactured. The polymer industry is a major segment of the chemical industry and VOCs are used as solvents in polymerization as well as polymer isolation and purification processes. This industry could benefit by replacing VOCs with RTILs in polymer production. This project will be a study of the feasibility of conduction free radical addition polymerizations in RTILs. It will be a collaborative study between a polymer chemist, an inorganic chemist and a chemical polymer engineer. The group, also working with industrial collaborators, will evaluate a number of different RTILs and different vinyl and acrylic monomers. Special emphasis will be placed on developing processes that completely avoid the use of VOCs throughout the polymer synthesis and isolation process. In addition to conventional free radical polymerization, living free radical polymerization in RTILs will also be studied. These living polymerization processes offer the potential to produce tailored polymer and copolymer architectures and limit polydispersity, while avoiding the high cost associated with ionic polymerization processes. Fundamental engineering and toxicity date will also be generated for the RTILs used doc6212 none Davis The objective of this research is to make new biopolymers to stabilize aqueous suspensions of inorganic colloidal particles. Such suspensions are used in processes for making microelectronics, structural ceramics, filled adhesives, coatings, biomedical devices and personal care products. A problem common to all of these applications lies in controlling the state of aggregation of the suspensions. Particle aggregation leads to higher viscosities and sedimentation of the solid particles, effects that are very undesirable for suspension processing and application. Additionally, many particle processes still employ organic solvents, but environmental concerns will soon require that the fluid phase for suspension processing be converted from organic solvents to water. Prior research indicates that copolymers of amino acids have the potential to form stabilizing molecules for metal oxide nanoparticles. The structures to be developed are diblock and triblock copolymers of amino acids that have an adsorbing anchor block and a non-adsorbing tail block. Two approaches to biosynthesis of these structures will be studied: 1) to engineer E. Coli to produce monodisperse diblock and triblock copolymers that stabilize alumina nanoparticles and 2) to screen combinatorial libraries of polypeptides for anchor block candidates for aluminum oxide particles. This grant is made pursuant to Solicitation NSF 00-49, New Technologies for the Environment doc6213 none Love The objective of this research is to explore the phenomenon and sensor applications of cation release from bacteria. Upon exposure to chemical toxins, bacteria release potassium ions. These ions, in turn, can generate a detectable optical signal when they interact with fluorophores that are incorporated into polymeric films. This project will investigate the physiology and kinetics of ion release in more detail. Additionally, a prototype toxic indicator device that integrates immobilized bacteria and optical sensing will be developed in collaboration with the Chemical Science and Technology Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This grant is made pursuant to Solicitation NSF 00-49, New Technologies for the Environment doc6214 none Whereas decoding the entire genomes of procaryotic and eucaryotic organisms was a major biological challenge of the nineties, this new decade seeks to capture an understanding of the protein interactions of a cell. This understanding has the potential to yield enormous societal benefit via predictions of total cellular responses to new pharmaceutical compounds, infectious agents, environmental toxins, or disruptions in particular regulatory pathways. The research described in this proposal aims to address this grand challenge by establishing a fundamentally new and highly sensitive optical measurement technique that permits rapid, simultaneous detection and quantification of multiple protein molecules involved in regulating intracellular signaling pathways. The research described in this proposal fuses principles of optics in liquid crystalline media with the design of nanostructured surfaces to create a fundamentally new optical tool that has the potential to be broadly applicable to studies aimed at unraveling the complex behavior of cellular systems at the protein level. The first goal is to establish the use of biophotonic methods based on liquid crystals for analysis of key regulatory signaling pathways in cells. Such a technology could impact drug discovery, pharmacodynamic monitoring, regulation of gene expression, protein-protein interactions, and our understanding of carcinogenesis. The second broad goal is to demonstrate that liquid crystals can form the basis of a general and powerful methodology that permits detection of post-translational modifications to proteins. Because the identification of specific chemical modifications of a protein can reveal its cellular location, biological lifespan and activation status, classification of proteins by their post-translational modification would be enormously useful in studies elucidating the complex behavior of cells. We propose to explore the use of liquid crystals to monitor cellular expression and activation of regulatory signaling proteins such as Ras, and to detect the interaction of Ras with target proteins in the multiple signaling pathways that mediate its biological activity. Although our initial focus will be on detecting the binding of Ras to anti-Ras IgG and, when activated, its binding to the down stream effector molecular RAF1, this system is prototypical and will, therefore, be generalizable to a broad class of regulatory signaling proteins. We propose to demonstrate the generality of the methodology by using liquid crystals to screen simultaneously for post-translational modifications of multiple proteins involved in a common regulatory pathway. First, we will design surfaces that permit coupling of biomolecular recognition events between total Ras and anti-Ras IgG, and between activated Ras and RAF1, to the orientations of liquid crystals. Second, we will determine the sensitivity and capability to quantitate photonic methods based on liquid crystals using as examples detection of total Ras and activated Ras. Third, we will integrate photonic principles based on liquid crystals with microfluidics so as to minimize sample size and enable detection of minute amounts of captured proteins (~104 molecules). We will provide simultaneous measurement of total Ras and activated Ras, and integrate the delivery of the sample and the liquid crystal. Fourth, we will demonstrate the generality of the above described methodology based on liquid crystals by rapidly screening for the post-translational modifications of multiple proteins involved in a common regulatory pathway (MAPK, JNK, ERK 1 2). Although the principles we propose to develop are broadly applicable to fundamental studies in cell and molecular biology, they also have the potential for a tremendous impact on biomedical investigators. One such example is in the detection of the activation states of intracellular regulatory proteins. It is the activation state of these proteins that determines which intracellular signaling cascades are initiated, and these in turn determine the fundamental behaviors of cells. As such, the rapid determination of the activation states of these regulatory proteins will represent a boon to the study of diverse medical conditions that result from inappropriate signaling events such as those linked to neoplastic transformation and immune mediated disorders doc6215 none Woodbury The applicants proposed to develop a glucose biosensor using a directed evolution approach based on the green fluorescent protein (GFP). A library of DNA sequences encoding glucose binding motifs will be inserted into an appropriate position in the gene for GFP and directed evolution methods will be applied to generate a bioprobe that fluoresces much more brightly when bound to glucose than in the unbound state. High throughput screening of fluorescence from microcolonies will be performed using a high resolution CCD camera. The selection of individual microcolonies will then be performed using a novel photolithography based approach in which a digital light processor is used to image UV light onto bacterial plates with high resolution (patterned cell growth). The remaining live bacteria will be grown, plasmids isolated and subsequent rounds of directed evolution will be initiated using a combination of error prone PCR and DNA shuffling to generate additional variation in the gene sequence. Screening of colonies in later stages of the directed evolution will also take advantage of fluorescence lifetime imaging using a scanning confocal microscope and a mode-locked laser. This will help to discriminate between variations in the glucose binding constant and changes in the GFP fluorescence lifetime upon binding. GFP-based probes generated in this way have the advantage that they can either be expressed in E. coli, purified and used directly for biosensor applications without modification, or they can be expressed in modified host cells generating a living biosensor that constantly replenishes the sensor molecule. This procedure for generating GFP-based bioprobes is general and can be applied to a large number of potential target molecules doc6216 none Chen The broad, long term objective of the proposed research is to develop a high speed noninvasive endoscopic functional optical coherence tomographic (OCT) system using microelectromechanical system (MEMS) technology for early diagnosis of tumors in gastrointestinal (GI), respiratory, and urogenital tracts. Functional optical coherence tomography uses coherent gating techniques to obtain information on tissue structure and blood flow dynamics at discrete spatial locations in highly scattering biological tissues. The exceptionally high spatial resolution (2~10 mm) of functional OCT allows noninvasive imaging of both in vivo tissue structure and blood flow dynamics simultaneously. The applicants propose to combine the advances in biomedical imaging and MEMS technology to develop a high speed, compact, and fast endoscopic functional OCT with a miniaturized probe. This is a collaborative project that involves principal investigators with expertise in biomedical optics, endoscopic imaging, and silicon and polymer MEMS technology doc6217 none The purpose of this project is the generation of data and analysis leading to proper analysis, material characterization, and field implementation of highway embankments reinforced using shreds from recycled waste tires. The project includes four distinct phases: (1) analytical framework, (ii) material characterization, (iii) field feasibility demonstration, and (iv) educational modules. The analytical component pursues the development of a generic desighn methodology for stability evaluation of embankments reinforced with tire shreds. Tire shreds will be treated as discrete reinforcing elements in the proposed analytical framework. The material characterization component involves a comprehensive shear strength testing program of tire shreds-soil specimens. This experimental program will evaluate the response of tire shredsoil composites to varying dosages of tire shreds, shred geometries, and soil characteristics. the field feasibility demonstration involves construction of a full-scale prototype embankment reinforced with shredded tires in order to address field constructibility and performance aspects of the proposed technology. Contruction of the permanent embankment will take place in the premises of a collaborating company that will provide the physical space, materials, and construction equipment for the field component of this research. Finally, the educational component involves the compilation of educational modules that will integrate the proposed research into geoenvironmental engineering instruction and into ongoing outreach minority programs. The proposed effort seeks implementation of comprehensive material characterization, analysis, and field demonstration components in order to establish the basis for a green reinforced soil design in which the reinforcement inclusions are not made from nonrenewable polymeric materials (i.e. geosynthesis) but from recycled waste products doc6218 none Environmental scientists who develop policies for the effective management of human activity are often thwarted by a lack of accurate information about the state of the environment. In some cases, the correct policy is not clear because the relationship between human activity and the environment is not well understood. Additional environmental data could improve such under-standing and provide the means to develop effective policies. In other cases effective policies have been proposed but additional data is required to justify the political and economic costs of implementation. However, more data by itself is not the solution. The human resources neces-sary to parse and analyze the data are scarcer than available data. What is necessary is intelli-gence to actively sample in such a way as to maximize the useful content in the data. The proposed inter-disciplinary program will investigate means of extended-term environmental monitoring. Specifically, this project seeks to endow a solar-powered airship with the intelligence to conduct extended-duration, autonomous environmental sampling. We will explore issues of configuration and design, path planning and control in the presence of weather patterns, and algorithms necessary for intelligent environmental monitoring. The intended result is an instru-mented platform for efficiently gathering accurately tagged environmental data that can stay aloft indefinitely. Airships are well suited for environmental monitoring tasks, however their potential in this capac-ity remains unfulfilled. As aerial monitoring platforms, they exhibit numerous advantages over fixed wing aircraft and helicopters. They are safer, more stable, and less expensive. They con-sume less power and are capable of extended operation. Given the intelligence to operate auton-omously and the proper sensing hardware, an airship provides a sensing platform that would be an asset to a diverse range of environmental scientists who seek to understand, remediate, and manage the environment. Potential applications of this technology include forest and crop man-agement, wetland surveys, land use assessment, monitoring of hazardous waste sites, and ero-sion quantification. Through a cost-sharing provision with Carnegie Mellon University, we will demonstrate our results on a prototype, instrumented airship to generate a characterization of air pollution. Work-ing together with a recently funded EPA Supersite in Pittsburgh, this project will employ an airship to generate 3-D profiles of air pollution and ambient particulate matter. The resulting data set will provide new insights into the vertical distribution and transport mechanisms of air pollution. New technologies cannot turn back the ecological clock but they can help environmental scien-tists push back the frontiers of knowledge and help ordinary citizens grasp the urgency of pre-serving our natural world. It is now possible to use previously classified images from spy satellites that show the extent of environmental degradation at a macro scale. This proposal will create a means of gathering dense environmental data at a much finer resolution, in a more effi-cient manner doc6219 none Ju The objective of the proposed research is to design and synthesize a large library of combinatorial fluorescent energy transfer (CFET) tags with unique fluorescence emission signatures that can be analyzed using a simple optical system. A fundamental limitation in fluorescent genetic analysis is the availability of fluorescent tags with distinctive fluorescence emissions. The PIs will develop a novel fluorescent-labeling scheme that uses a limited number of fluorescent molecules to create a large number of CFET tags with unique fluorescence signatures. The approach is based on the fluorescence energy transfer principle, the combinatorial concept, and that the energy transfer efficiency is dependent on the separation distance between the donor and acceptor. Synthetic procedures will be developed to construct a library of at least 20 of these CFET tags, and the spectroscopic properties of the CTET tags will be evaluated. The CFET tags will be generated using combinations of a number of different fluorescent molecules that will be linked through a rigid polymeric scaffold. The scaffold will be assembled by solid phase synthesis and solution coupling chemistry. The fluorescent signatures and chemical properties of the CFET tags will be carefully characterized to identify the most useful members of the collection. The tags will have particular utility in the massive high-throughput approaches of the genomics revolution, including DNA sequencing, identification of individual variations in the genome that are responsible for human disease, detection of microbial pathogens, and even drug screening, essentially any approach that can benefit by multiplexing operations. The utility of this library of CFET tags with unique fluorescence emission signatures will be validated by labeling a multiplex set of oligonucleotides for genetic mutation detection in a model system, as well as for genome-wide chromosome analyses doc6220 none Perry Until recently, a fundamental understanding of how to control the position and strength of the two-photon absorption peak or organic molecules was lacking. However, this group has now developed structure-property guidelines that allow for the systematic control of these factors. This has resulted in new chromophores with high fluorescence quantum yields and unprecedented two-photon absorption cross sections (delta) in organic solvents. The principal investigators have been working closely and with Professor Watt Webb of Cornell to understand the design requirements for chromophores for a variety of biological labeling applications to be implemented with two-photon fluorescence laser scanning microscopy (TPLSM). This has provided this team with insight into dealing with problems that have been encountered with existing chromophores, such as low sensitivities and bleaching doc6221 none Booksh The environmental sensing goal of this project is to develop and demonstrate new engineering capabilities associated with optical computational methods for improving the design and performance of optical sensors for convenient, user-friendly, and field-portable environmental analyses. Optical computational methods and novel systems integration approaches promise reduction in power requirements for field portable sensors, simplification of electronics and optical train of field portable sensors, optimization of signal collection and processing for field portable sensors, and adaptation to changing calibration models by updating the programmable memory in the sensor controller. Thus, compared to traditional sensors that rely in discrete digitization of optical signals, smaller, lighter, and less power-hungry sensors with superior detection limits are to be developed using these new engineering technologies. The proposed novel optical computational methods will be incorporated in the design and construction of hand held surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensors for determination of a range of environmental pollutants at superior detection limits and sensitivities. In Phase 1, application of the sensor will be limited to quantitation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in ground water. PAHs are carcinogenic EPA priority pollutants that largely enter the environment through fuel and oil spills or as a byproduct of incomplete combustion. In Phase 2, this sensor will be expanded to a massively parallel array of SPR sensors designed for multi-analyte detection. The scope of target analytes will be expanded to other (EPA) priority pollutants. One key area of progress to the sensors designed for both Phase 1 and Phase 2, will be the increasing ability of the system to account for environmental changes that affect the SPR spectrum. In Phase 1 of the proposed research, these optical computations will be integrated into a novel, fiber optic, surface plasmon resonance sensor design. The goals of Phase 1 are to demonstrate the improvements in sensitivity, power, space, and signal-to-noise ratio achievable with integrated optical computation in the SPR sensor, to improve system concentration sensitivity in isolated but integrated photodetectors, to demonstrate programmability for ease of calibration and referencing to environmental changes, and to increase greater than 12 hours of battery life capable of determining to + - 1% PAH concentration down to ppb levels in a changing environment. The fiber optic SPR sensor will have two sensing areas: one responsive to the target analyte and any environmental changes, the other responsive to only environmental changes doc6222 none This New Technologies for the Environment exploratory research project proposes a novel technology to enable continuous casting of molten metals, in a single step, to the specifications of the designer. To cast aluminum foil, e.g., in a single step, would reduce CO2 emissions to the atmosphere by 250,000 tons per year, in the US alone. Every kilogram of aluminum saved in reducing manufacturing waste translates into electricity saved at the energy-hungry smelter. The technology is based on controlling length scales previously uncontrolled. Successful casting by design, or `tunable casting, will use substrate modification to manipulate product quality. The goal is to condition the substrate by imposing thermal gradients before the contact zone. Gray-scales in ink-jet printing are produced by the spacing and arrangements of ink dots of the same size. In much the same way, the proposed gradients will be established with arrangements and spacing of hot spots. Laser heating will induce the hot spots doc6223 none Ghiorse The American Academy of Microbiology requests partial support from NSF to convene a colloquium, entitled Geobiology: Exploring the Interface Between the Geosphere and the Biosphere, to be held November 30-December 3, , in Tucson, Arizona. This colloquium will deliberate the relationships of the microbial world to the geosphere and the biosphere from several perspectives. The field will be defined in breadth and scope. A list of urgent scientific questions will be the basis for in-depth analysis of the intellectual, economic, and social issues. Technological, educational, and communication issues also will be addressed, along with specific scientific problems. The results will be summarized in a comprehensive report to serve as guidelines for future development of the field doc6224 none Anne Simon Although RNA viruses have been the subjects of intensive investigations for the past 100 years, replication, a fundamental process in the life cycle of a virus, remains poorly understood. The viral-encoded enzyme involved in replication, the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp), together with possible proteins from the host, must recognize specific viral RNAs, initiate complementary strand synthesis and then use these complementary strands as templates for synthesis of the viral genome. Promoters for RdRp are poorly understood, and much of the research to date involves viruses terminating with either tRNA-like structures (e.g., Brome mosaic virus) or poly(A) tails (e.g., Poliovirus). Much less is known about viruses whose genomic RNA(s) terminate with a free hydroxyl group such as turnip crinkle virus (TCV). In addition, it is only recently becoming clear that internal sequences, and not just end sequences, are important for initiation of transcription by RdRp. Possible roles for such sequences are (i) RdRp-binding sequences, or (ii) sequences that engage in RNA-RNA interactions with end sequences to bind the RdRp to the viral genome. TCV is used as a model to study sequences and structures involved in replication since it is among the smallest and simplest of the RNA viruses. More importantly, TCV is associated with very small subviral RNAs that can be used in replication studies. Protoplast and in vitro systems have been developed to study replication of TCV genomic and subviral RNAs and several regions involved in replication of the subviral RNA satC have been identified. The TCV RdRp undergoes a process called abortive initiation when using TCV as template, which produces short RNA sequences able to function as primers for repair of deletions of satC ends. Preliminary results suggest that promoters at the ends of TCV and satC strands may not be functioning as units independent of upstream sequence as previously thought, but rather may be involved in specific interactions with interior sequences. To address this hypothesis, the sequence structural requirements for abortive initiation from the TCV hairpin promoter will be determined by analyzing the importance of the 3 single-stranded tail and an upstream sequence element in abortive initiation by the TCV RdRp. This objective should permit the delineation of an element required for abortive initiation on the TCV genome. Mutations that are able to restore replication of TCV with the promoter from satC and that are outside the promoter sequence will be mapped by replacing segments of the mutant TCV into TCV with the promoter of satC and assaying for infectivity. This objective should provide another means for elucidating internal cis-acting sequences that interact with the 3 terminal promoter of TCV. In addition, the importance of an interior sequence in satC required for transcription in the absence of the 3 end bases will be investigated. Successful completion of these experiments should provide significant advances in our understanding of the function of RdRp s and their ability to recognize a wide variety of linear and structural elements as promoters for complementary strand synthesis doc6225 none One of the most important fields of application for sensor systems is sensing environmental pollutants- particularly the detection of chemical and bacterial contamination of drinking and recreation waters. Sensing systems can provide continuous monitoring of chemical and bioanalytes. In phase I of this research we will develop a new type of chemical and biosensor system which provides a class of economical and portable devices that can detect desired analytes sensitively and rapidly. The intrinsic selectivity of this microsensor chip arises from the specific nature of bio-recognition reactions, e.g., antibody-antigen reations. The sensitivity depends upon the coupling between the recognition reaction and the transducer and upon the inherent sensitivity of the transducer. We will develop ultra high sensitivity wide bandgap semiconductor based shear acoustic wave structures as the common sensor platform for the integration with the sensing medium. The device will be developed using new Excimer laser micromachining technology and state-of-the-art immobilization chemistry. The proposed research will be a systematic multi-disciplinary research and development project involving novel materials development, new processing and integration technology and a synergy with our educational program. The goal of the research is to develop an E. Coli and a pesticide detecting prototype sensor system that can be adapted to a large array of microsensors, for the detection of a multitude of contaminate sources, during phase II of the project doc6226 none The field of animal behavior has been divided in recent decades. On one hand, those who study laboratory animals like mice and fruit flies have developed sophisticated genetic tools to study problems in learning and drug addiction. On the other hand, studies of natural populations of animals have emphasized behavioral ecology, with very little ability to come to grips with the physiological and genetic factors that influence behavior. The proposed workshop is designed to re-integrate the various fields of animal behavior by developing ways to apply the methods learned in the laboratory to species that have been studied largely in the wild. In particular, we wish to develop ways to exploit the recent explosions of new techniques and knowledge about molecular genetics, which are largely a result of the Human Genome Project. These techniques are becoming so straightforward that it may well be possible to apply them to animals that were too difficult to study genetically in the past. Further, we wish to provide behavioral ecologists with the opportunity to apply their expertise and insights to studies of laboratory species, which could allow laboratory research to address behavioral problems from new perspectives. These goals can be met if molecular biologists are trained in the basics of animal behavior and if behavioral biologists are trained in molecular techniques; such training does not currently exist. The planned workshop has three goals. First we will discuss the techniques from biotechnology that could be applied to animal behavior. Second we will consider the kinds of behavioral problems that are amenable to molecular studies. Finally, we will develop the framework for a training program that will allow scientists in each discipline to learn enough about the other discipline to enable them to develop productive research programs that integrate behavior with biotechnology doc6227 none The research will increase knowledge of tropical cyclone activity by systematically investigating high latitude linkages to tropical cyclone and hurricane activity. The goals are (i) to identify and predict the most important components of US interannual hurricane variability; and (ii) to describe and predict annual to decadal variability of US hurricane landfall probabilities conditioned on climate anomalies. A new dynamic probability model will be used to answer what if questions concerning the regional likelihood of hurricanes conditioned on large-scale climate anomalies. The method of empirical orthogonal teleconnections will be modified to describe and predict the dominant covariability patterns of hurricanes along the US coastline. Factor analysis and change-point models will also be used. The PI and his group have made several breakthroughs in understanding hurricane and typhoon activity as it relates to climate. The essential theme has been that space-time variability in tropical cyclone activity is related to climate processes operating both within and outside the Tropics. The work is important because the perspective that extratropical climate anomalies play an important role in modulating tropical cyclone activity is new, and has the potential to significantly alter understanding of global climate processes doc6228 none CTS- Thermally Responsive Membranes Donald R. Paul Univerisity of Texas Austin Polymer membranes for separation of gases and liquids are well known; however, this research addresses a new set of applications, such as seed coatings and membranes for modified atmosphere packaging that require membranes with an abnormal increase in penetrant permeability as temperature is increased. The basis for these so-called thermally responsive membranes is polymers having long alkyl side-chains that can crystallize. The melting point of the side-chain provides a switch effect for properties like flow, adhesion, or permeation; the temperature of melting can be adjusted by the length of the alkyl unit attached to a polyacrylate or a polymethacrylate backbone. In their simplest form, membranes formed from such polymers exhibit a dramatic change in permeability to gases, water, and other penetrants by a factor of 10 to 100-fold over a narrow temperature range, i.e., a permeability switch. One objective of this research is to develop a better understanding of how the chemical and physical structure of such membranes must be manipulated in order to achieve a desired switch effect. A fundamental problem relates to how the chemical structure and processing of the polymer affects the crystalline morphology of the membrane and, in turn, how the presence of the crystallites alters the solubility and mobility of the penetrant in the amorphous phase. A second objective is to develop methods to spread the permeation switch effect over a broader range of temperature to achieve a membrane whose permeability depends more strongly on temperature than is found for most polymers. This aspect of the research involves combining a distribution of alkyl side-chain lengths into a single membrane using copolymerization, blending, and lamination. The scientific results of this work will have impact in at least two growing technologies. The first is a coating for seeds that ties their germination to the temperature of the soil by the permeability switch effect; water must enter the seed for germination to occur. Prevention of premature germination has been shown to improve crop yields among other benefits for farmers. This research will provide a better understanding of how to formulate such coatings. The second application involves modified-atmosphere packaging, where polymer membranes are now being used to control the oxygen and carbon dioxide concentration in packages containing fruits and vegetables so they remain fresh longer than normally possible. The membranes must transmit these gases at rates that match the respiration rate of the produce. Unfortunately, the permeability of conventional polymers does not change with temperature as rapidly as the respiration rate of produce does; hence, there is a need for more thermally responsive membranes of the type suggested above doc6229 none We propose to create an infrastructure, a Virtual Laboratory, to support sharing of knowledge in structural biology, to plan an experiment, and to facilitate a rigorous process of scientific discovery. We call it a virtual laboratory because it will allow an individual sitting in front of a computer connected to the Internet, to control an experiment, to follow the most relevant aspects of an experiment conducted in the past by a well established group, or to get advice at a critical junction. The process of discovery in structural biology, and other natural sciences like physics or chemistry is fairly complex, it involves some tedious and time consuming activities, sharing of knowledge, analysis of the results, backtracking. The virtual laboratory will allow structural biologists to reduce the time to obtain the results, improve the quality of the results, and restructure the human involvement by allowing a scientist to concentrate on the experiment and the discovery process. To reduce the time to obtain results we need efficient components, fully integrated experiment, simulation, and modeling environments, and some form of knowledge sharing and management. To improve the quality of the solution we need to fully integrate sensors in the feedback loop and to use optimal model parameters. Last, but not least, we need to automate simple tasks like data migration, format conversion, and selection of optimal running condition for each computational task. The high level of sophistication necessary to obtain quality results in this field motivates our effort. Some components of the infrastructure are specific to structural biology e.g. the interfaces for building the knowledge base, but the basic mechanisms e.g., the planning and the workflow enactment engines, are general and can be used for other classes of problems with similar characteristics. In this grant application we propose to develop agents for 3D structure determination using cryo TEM methods and to design an integrated workflow enactment engine based upon a Petri Net model with a planning engine and a knowledge management system. All our programs are distributed under open source licenses from our Web site: http: bond.cs.purdue.edu. The project will contribute to education and support knowledge sharing in structural biology laboratories doc6230 none Carey Juvenile volcanic particles form an important component of pyroclastic rocks in recent and ancient volcanic terrains. The identification of volcaniclastic deposits often relies on an analysis of such particles. Although significant progress has been made in linking qualitative aspects of particle morphology to different types of source eruptions and fragmentation processes, a quantitative method of particle classification has remained elusive. We propose to investigate the use of fractal geometry as a quantitative method of volcanic particle discrimination. Volcanic particles are particularly well suited for the application of fractal analysis owing to their complex shapes and presence of re-entrants on their boundaries. We have developed a new technique based on the quantification and statistical analysis of discrete fractal elements in the outlines of volcanic particles. Preliminary work on this technique has shown excellent potential for quantitative discrimination of different volcanic particles. We propose to carry out fractal analysis on a suite of well-characterized samples to build up a matrix of fractal characteristics that will be representative of a wide variety of volcaniclastic deposits. The samples will encompass magma types from basalt to rhyolite and fragmentation mechanisms that include primary volatile degassing, phreatomagmatism, and granulation by quenching with seawater. In addition, samples will be analyzed from deposits produced by different transport mechanisms such as pyroclastic fall, flow and surge. We anticipate that the results of the study will provide significant advances in the quantification of volcanic particle morphology and lead to the means of statistically discriminating particles of different origin. Such a technique will be valuable to workers seeking to interpret the nature of ancient volcanic activity from the characteristics of their resulting deposits. Furthermore, the detailed quantitative analysis of particle morphology may lead to new insights about the roles of various fragmentation processes during complex explosive eruptions involving both the degassing of primary volatiles and the interaction with external water doc6231 none As part of Pacific Rocks , the Fourth North American Rock Mechanics Symposium (NARMS), the American Rock Mechanics Association (ARMA) Foundation with support from the National Science Foundation will hold a one-day workshop, Underground Space in the City: Rock Engineering Issues in the Development of the Urban Underground Environment on July 30, at the University of Washington in Seattle. The workshop will explore the current international use of underground urban space, describe by example unique applications of rock mechanics and rock engineering in an urban setting, generate research ideas and researchable issues that will foster new innovation in the urban underground environment. The ARMA Foundation will produce a report documenting the workshop and describing research needs. Proceedings of the workshop will also be available. Information on the workshop can be found on the Pacific Rocks page of www.armarocks.org doc6232 none Jennifer Preece University of Maryland-Baltimore County Special Projects: Student Fellow Support for the ACM Conference on Universal Usability On November 16 and 17, the ACM Conference on Universal Usability is being held in Washington, D.C. The conference seeks to promote research that will enable the widest possible range of users to benefit from information technologies. These user groups include ethnic minorities, women, and those who are physically, intellectually, educationally or financially challenged. The aim of this research is to enable them to participate in communication, online education, online health care, e-commerce and government services via the Internet. The goal of this project is to support and train students from these designated groups (and others who have strong skills and experience in assisting individuals from these groups) about potential research opportunities in universal usability by involving them in the conference, its planning and the dissemination of ideas and initiatives arising from the conference. The grant will provide partial support for ten graduate students and ten seniors and juniors to work with the conference committee, participate in planning, attend the conference, disseminate research ideas and develop a web site doc6233 none Funding is provided to support an AGU Chapman Conference on the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). The goal of the conference is to move toward a consensus on the primary process or processes which are responsible for observe low frequency variations in the NAO, including its unprecedented upward trend over the past 30 years and to identify the key remaining issues and future research activities needed to resolve them. Physical oceanographers, meteorologists, climatologists and paleoclimatologists will participate in the conference. The funds requested from NSF will support ravel expenses for graduate students, young scientists and some needy invited speakers and program committee members doc6234 none The New Mexico Analysis Seminar is an annual three-day meeting, now in its fourth year. Its principal goal is to provide an opportunity for scientific exchange among mathematics students and faculty in the Southwest region and beyond. To encourage participation, analysis is defined broadly. The centerpiece of the seminar is a series of one hour lectures given by a first rate mathematician who is also a first rate lecturer, capable of communicating very well with students and faculty. Time is allocated for shorter talks and informal discussion as well. The main speaker for the Fourth New Mexico Analysis Seminar will be Steve Hofmann, who recently proved Kato s 40 year old conjecture known as the Square Root Problem. The New Mexico Analysis Seminar is playing an important role in facilitating student exposure to pioneering research and in providing role models for future and present practitioners and communicators of mathematics in the classroom and in industry. The need for this is particularly urgent in a region of relative geographical isolation and limited financial resources. The conference site alternates between New Mexico State University and The University of New Mexico, which have the only Ph.D. granting mathematics programs in New Mexico doc6235 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: A. Narain Achievement of steady or quasi-steady annular or stratified internal condensing flows in pipe (for any given inlet pressure, mass flow rate, and condensing surface temperature distribution) is dependent on compatibility between the condenser-section heat removal rate and exit pressure condition, or, equivalently, exit vapor flow rate fraction. For certain exit conditions, quasi-steady wavy-interface flows are realized and, for other conditions, significant compressibility-induced oscillations will persist. These unresolved issues will be experimentally investigated with the help of electronic flow control techniques which assist in identifying the range of conditions for which quasi-steady flows are achievable for different exit conditions. The experiment will also allow for novel observations and measurements for annular film condensation in 6.35 mm inner diameter pipe of 0.8 m length. The pipe, and subsequently channel, may operate from vertically downward to horizontal configurations. We also propose to measure time-varying condensate film thickness by fluorescence technique applicable to boiling and condensing flows of doped di-electric refrigerants such as FC-72, etc. From these measurements, mean and wave-structure may be found. Separate efforts relate the results of the proposed experimental research to computational simulations and applications such as Looped Heat Pipes, etc doc6236 none Physics (13) Modern society is increasingly reliant on technologies developed from the optical sciences. In order to sustain growth in these fields, there is a need for people with technical skills in this area and for professionals with knowledge of basic optical phenomena. To address these societal needs, the goal of this project is to improve the Optics education that students receive throughout the Physics curriculum. To implement this goal, we have established three objectives for this project: 1) Integrate a hands-on laboratory experience including the topics of nonlinear optics, laser design, spectroscopy, and optical communication technology into the Optics course for Physics majors. 2) Develop Optics-based summer coursework for high school teachers as part of the Master of Science in Education program with opportunities for teachers to design their own classroom activities. 3) Create a new liberal arts course called The Science of Light to give non-science majors the opportunity to explore optical phenomena such as vision, liquid crystals, color, and holography. These objectives impact not only university students, but also high school science teachers and their students. Each of these objectives are being met by implementing activities which integrate modern optical technology throughout the Physics curriculum. The project is adapting experiments from the physics research and education literature and adapting more common experiments for use by teachers and their students doc6237 none Truffer This award supports a two year project to investigate the dynamics of the marginal zone of the Siple Coast ice streams using existing velocity and temperature profiles. The flow and stress fields will be modeled using finite element methods and a thermo-mechanical model will be used to investigate the coupling of the flow and temperature fields. Direct comparison of these models with the observed velocity profiles will lead to estimates of the structure of the margins and the softening of the marginal ice. The distribution of basal and marginal shear stress will be investigated, leading to an estimate of the relative roles of the bed and the margins in the overall force balance of the ice streams doc6238 none The investigators will conduct an extensive program of solar physics research at Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) through the maximum of solar cycle 23. The main effort is to make synoptic, calibrated, comprehensive, and continuous observations of the whole sun at the highest possible resolution and cadence, as well as to come to a scientific understanding of the implications of the data obtained. The research plan emphasizes high resolution and high cadence studies of solar activity and magnetic fields. New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) took over operation of BBSO on July 1, . Since that time, the observatory has undergone fundamental changes marked by significant achievements in science, instrumentation and education. The investigators have solved the long-standing dome seeing problems at BBSO, so that the observatory is now one of only two observatories in the US capable of high-resolution observations of the sun. They will use the new capability to conduct sub-arc second resolution studies of active regions and the quiet sun including comprehensive studies of vector magnetic fields in flare-producing active regions. They will also develop and deploy new instruments and facilities, such as a new generation vector magnetograph system employing state-of-the-art digital cameras, a parallel computing system for real-time speckle reconstruction, and near infrared magnetograph and imaging systems. These will employ a unique, narrow band Lyot filter and an infrared Fabry-Perot filter. As a service to the community, they will also continue the successful BBSO Activity Reports and Warnings (www.bbso.njit.edu cgi-bin ActivityReport), and make daily full-disk data and data from the 25 cm telescope available by anonymous ftp (ftp.bbso.njit.edu doc6239 none NSF support of $ is requested for student participation at the International Conference Characterization and Metrology for ULSI Technology. This Conference will be held at NIST, Gaithersburg, MD, June 26-29, . It continues a sequence of two highly successful conferences held in and , each of which led to a formidable Proceedings book published by the AIP Press. The funds will support student travel and registration for about 20 students who will be making presentations and submitting papers for the Conference Proceeings. The Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) and the American Vacuum Society (AVS) are also contributing funds toward student support ($5K from SRC, $2K from AVS doc6240 none McDowell Numerous studies of decomposition have focused on short-term, transient effects of organic matter breakdown. Much has been learned from these studies about the roles of litter nutrient content and carbon quality in controlling the cycling of nutrients through the litter layer to soil organic matter (SOM). However, far less is known about the fate of plant litter and its role in determining SOM content and nutrient cycling over time scales ranging from decades to centuries. To address this gap, long-term experimental studies of controls on soil organic matter formation, or DIRT (Detritus Input and Removal Treatments), have been established independently at forested sites in three US LTERs and one international LTER site. DIRT plot treatments consist of long-term above- and below ground litter doubling and removal. While the fundamental experimental design of these installations is similar, there are few measurements in common and each site is instrumented quite differently. The purpose of this LTER cross-site research project is to bring these four sites into a general experimental and measurement uniformity, and to test models and hypotheses made at individual sites over this network. The LTER program serves as an ideal host for the emerging cross-site DIRT network both because it serves as a focal point for many investigators and because of its focus on long-term studies. The central goal of the DIRT project is to assess how rates and sources of plant litter inputs control accumulation and dynamics of organic matter and nutrients in forest soils over decadal time scales. This cross-site comparison will address three specific goals: (1) to examine effects of forest floor biomass, organic matter inputs, sources, and chemistry on net N retention and the ratio of inorganic to organic N losses in leachate; (2) to examine the effects of forest floor chemistry on gross N mineralization, immobilization, and nitrification rates; and (3) to evaluate the generality of models of sources of C to soil respiration doc6241 none 00- Sheppard SGER: Measuring and interpreting nitrogen in tree rings Presently, scientists cannot unequivocally interpret nitrogen concentrations in tree rings. The ability to do this would greatly improve understanding of N cycling, including the effects of recent large anthropogenic increases in N deposition. One difficulty in interpreting N concentration in tree rings is that N is notoriously mobile across plant tissues, rendering questionable its simple interpretability in tree rings as indicators of environmental availability at the time of ring formation. Another difficulty that has confounded simple interpretations of tree-ring N concentration is that its response to changes in N availability and uptake is still uncertain. This exploratory research has two objectives: to refine techniques for accurately measuring N in tree rings and accounting for possible translocation of N across rings, and to calibrate the response of N concentration in tree rings to known changes in N availability doc6242 none Bowden Numerous studies of decomposition have focused on short-term, transient effects of organic matter breakdown. Much has been learned from these studies about the roles of litter nutrient content and carbon quality in controlling the cycling of nutrients through the litter layer to soil organic matter (SOM). However, far less is known about the fate of plant litter and its role in determining SOM content and nutrient cycling over time scales ranging from decades to centuries. To address this gap, long-term experimental studies of controls on soil organic matter formation, or DIRT (Detritus Input and Removal Treatments), have been established independently at forested sites in three US LTERs and one international LTER site. DIRT plot treatments consist of long-term above- and below ground litter doubling and removal. While the fundamental experimental design of these installations is similar, there are few measurements in common and each site is instrumented quite differently. The purpose of this LTER cross-site research project is to bring these four sites into a general experimental and measurement uniformity, and to test models and hypotheses made at individual sites over this network. The LTER program serves as an ideal host for the emerging cross-site DIRT network both because it serves as a focal point for many investigators and because of its focus on long-term studies. The central goal of the DIRT project is to assess how rates and sources of plant litter inputs control accumulation and dynamics of organic matter and nutrients in forest soils over decadal time scales. This cross-site comparison will address three specific goals: (1) to examine effects of forest floor biomass, organic matter inputs, sources, and chemistry on net N retention and the ratio of inorganic to organic N losses in leachate; (2) to examine the effects of forest floor chemistry on gross N mineralization, immobilization, and nitrification rates; and (3) to evaluate the generality of models of sources of C to soil respiration doc6243 none Gehring Global change models predict an increase in the frequency of intense drought in the continental interior of the US, and recent field studies have shown that semiarid ecosystems can be highly sensitive to this type of abiotic stress. For example, in the s a severe drought in New Mexico resulted in high tree mortality that shifted ecotones by 2 kilometers in less than five years. Rapid, sustained ecotonal shifts depend on to processes: high rates of mortality of one or more of the dominant plant species in the ecosystem, and lack of recruitment of the dominant plant species following the mortality event. This LTER cross-site research will test the hypothesis that the probability that an ecotonal shift will occur depends on the degree of abiotic stress, and on the relative effects of positive and negative biotic associations on the dominant plant species. Positive associations, such as mycorrhizal associations and nurse plants, could buffer communities from major ecotonal shifts while negative associations with herbivores and parasites could increase sensitivity to global change. This study will focus on pinyon pine growing at the southern edge of their distribution in New Mexico and Arizona. Pinyon is an ideal candidate for global change studies because it is a dominant member of the third largest vegetation type in North America. Both paleoecological and recent studies show that pinyon is highly sensitive to environmental change. Much is known about the interactions among pinyon pine and its associated community, including is co-dominant tree associate and the bacteria, fungi, invertebrates and vertebrates that live in close association. This knowledge of broader interactions will allow a more accurate prediction of the effects of pinyon mortality on other members of the community and on ecosystem processes doc6244 none Mathematical and computational methods will be developed to endow the macromechanical continuum formulation with the fine scale physics of micromechanical material models. Cases of interest are: (1) Micromechanical models that are typically applied at spatial scales of the order of a micron. (2) Theories which incorporate microscale kinematics, constitutive laws, forces and force balance coupled with macroscopic counterparts. The aim is to extend the applicability of fine scale micromechanics to macroscopic problems, which could then be analyzed with enhanced physical accuracy by the resulting multiscale model. The methods eliminate the need for computational grid refinement to the finest microscales, thereby ensuring efficiency, while preserving a tight coupling between coarse and fine scales doc6245 none Fred Roberts DIMACS, the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, will run three special focus programs, one beginning each year for the next three years. One of the topics, Next Generation Networks Technologies and Applications, explores algorithms, models, and the fundamental principles governing the design, deployment and use of next-generation networks of unprecedented scale, heterogeneity, and complexity. The second, Computational Information Theory and Coding, is concerned with the interconnections among coding theory, theoretical computer science, information theory, and related areas of computer science and mathematics, in order to address challenges presented by wireless communication, magnetic optical storage, signal processing in networks, network information theory, and quantum information theory. The third, Computational Geometry and Applications, emphasizes the development of geometric algo-rithms and solutions to problems of discrete and combinatorial geometry, and aims to deepen connections of computational geometry to such areas as real algebraic geometry as well as to applied problems from geographical information systems, VLSI design, graphics, and computer-aided design. The special foci are organized around a series of workshops. Visitors and graduate students will be heavily involved and there will be programs of a tutorial and educational nature doc6246 none This Engineering Sciences for Modeling and Simulation-Based Life-Cycle Engineering (LCE) grant provides funding for the development of advanced computational tools to forecast the response of complex structural systems to extreme natural phenomena hazards, to analyze uncertainties, and to manage risk. Time-dependent structural reliability methods will be developed to provide the interfaces between models of the uncertain environment, physical models of the structural system, and its performance requirements. Databases and other information from experiment or field data, model simulation, and expert opinion will be incorporated using a computational Bayes framework. Highly efficient techniques for evaluating structural performance under uncertainty using sharpened methods for determining inclusion-exclusion bounds, will be investigated. The methods will be demonstrated using a testbed problem of significant current interest: fragility modeling of building structural systems subjected to severe earthquake stochastic ground motions. If successful, the decision tools developed in this research will provide a living picture of a complex civil infrastructure facility during its service life of 50 to 100 years, which could be used as a basis for the new performance-based design paradigm and for managing facility risk due to extreme natural hazards. In recent post-disaster assessments of building performance during earthquakes and hurricanes, it has been found that current design practices do not prevent non-life-threatening forms of structural damage and functional disruptions that may lead to direct economic and opportunity costs that approach or exceed the cost of the structure. The public is demanding engineering solutions with more predictable and controlled performance, greater durability, and lower life-cycle costs. A demonstration of advanced decision-theoretic technologies on an appropriate civil infrastructure testbed problem would accelerate improvements and enhance competition in building technologies and in structural design, minimize the need for prototype testing, and lower the risk of death, injury and property damage from natural hazards doc6247 none Analysis and Control of Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) in the Presence of Uncertainty George C. Johnson Andrew Packard Panayiotis Papadopoulos Department of Mechanical Engineering University of California Berkeley, CA Uncertainties in material properties and structural dimensions are unavoidable at any length scale, but they are particularly important as devices become smaller. This work seeks to identify and quantify the sources and effects of the inherent uncertainty in micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). Methods for assessing the effects of this uncertainty on overall system response will be developed. Quantitative bounds on the effect of uncertainty for any given design will be accessible and, once this is achieved, design variables can be chosen that minimize the effects of the uncertainties. Software will be developed compatible with existing analysis packages, including finite elements, that will allow design optimization for MEMS in the presence of uncertainty doc6248 none del Moral This LTREB proposal is to extent the continuous record of primary plant succession on Mount St. Helens to 25 years. It will clarify and extend the understanding of primary succession mechanisms developed in earlier studies. Public documentation includes data from permanent plots, grids, and photographs available from two web sites. It will improve our comprehension of how communities are structured and will help to develop more effective strategies to rehabilitate landscapes devastated by human impacts. Previous work has shown how distance affects community development, that microsites were crucial in early succession and that chance dominates early species assembly. By now, pioneer species have established, but initial patterns dictated by habitat stress, heterogeneity and isolation persist. There is scant evidence that initial colonists are being replaced by better-adapted ones. This study will compare development on widespread substrates and atypical, geographically isolated sites. It will investigate the development of community homogeneity and of positive associations among establishing species, assess evidence for deterministic control of community structure, evaluate the importance of habitat heterogeneity, attempt to determine rates at which species expand their distributions, and evaluate how rapidly developing habitats affect their immediate surroundings. Permanent plots and grid monitoring remain the backbone of this study. These data will be augmented by studies of species composition in relationship to environment, development of stable, repeatable assemblages, effects of trees on invasion, dispersal limits along transects, landscape effects and turnover rates in permanent plots. At the end of this study, a comprehensive discussion of how communities are initiated, developed and invaded will be possible doc6249 none The primary goal of this project is to enhance the resolution and sensitivity of mass spectrometers by two or three orders of magnitude. A secondary goal is to reduce power consumption. Combined, these goals will lead to the development of a portable mass spectrometer with greater sensitivity than current, large mass spectrometers. This will allow the quantitative analysis of low concentration compounds with little or no sample preparation. This mass spectrometer could be widely used for environmental assessment and for many other applications. Three innovations will accomplish these goals. The first is the use of a cascading DC RF and RF-only quadrupole mass filter. This new filter will give excellent mass resolution. It is also much less sensitive to mechanical tolerances, so small filters can be built, and this leads to a large reduction in electrical power requirements. The second innovation is the use of an integrated Faraday cup VLSI amplifier detector. Unconventional CMOS design leads to a single stage dc current gains of 100,000,000. Using extremely low biasing currents, differential and narrow frequency ban operation will result also in significant improvement of the signal to noise ratio. This detector will detect ion currents 1,000 times smaller than the conventional electron multiplier detectors, and the performance of the VLSI detector should be much more stable. The third innovation is the addition of AC modulation to the detector circuitry. This eliminates noise due to DC drift, thereby greatly improving the signal-to-noise ratio. Results of this research may give the University of Wyoming a competitive edge for obtaining additional funding for future research. Several government agencies may be interested in expanding our results. Results of the proposed research may also generate a significant interest in the private sector. Several branches of our economy may be interested in portable mass spectrometers including the pharmaceutical industry, the environmental remediation industry, the semiconductor industry, the petroleum industry, and the mining industry doc6250 none LTER Cross site : Interactions between climate and nutrient cycling in Arctic and Subarctic tundras The proposed project would continue a long history of arctic ecosystem science by the PI and collaborators. The climate of high latitude ecosystems strongly limits the inputs and turnover of essential elements like N and P. The broad aims of this research are to: 1) improve understanding of the causes and consequences of variability in climate-nutrient interactions and in the availability and plant uptake of N and P among contrasting arctic and Subarctic tundra ecosystems and 2) to apply this understanding to better develop large-area, long-term predictions of their responses to climate change. The research will compare ecosystems at two sites: Abisko in Sweden and Toolik Lake in Alaska. The proposed work involves: two workshops focused on comparisons at the sties; field research on N and P turnover in soil, plant microbe interactions, and amino acid uptake; and modeling of primary production, biomass accumulation, and organic matter turnover. The new experimental component of the project includes a deeper examination of the importance of organic N uptake by arctic vegetation and extends many ongoing measurements to the tails of the growing season during which time there is indication of important, but previously under appreciated biological activity doc6251 none The American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), in collaboration with the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) and the Independent Colleges Office (OIC), is conducting a three-year project to develop interest in K-12 mathematics and science teaching careers among undergraduate students and concurrently support K-12 faculty teaching science and mathematics. This project adapts components of the NSF GK-12 program for implementation in predominately undergraduate colleges, including community colleges. Recognizing the national need for excellence in science and mathematics in K-12 schools, AACC, CIC, and OIC and their community-based member colleges are developing partnerships with K-12 schools in local communities. The K-12 Teacher Development (KTD) program features science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) college students as content resources and role models in K-12 classrooms. The college students gain mentoring and classroom experiences with K-12 students by sharing their knowledge and skills; the K-12 teachers gain content resources for their classrooms. The KTD program improves communication and fosters awareness of K-12 teaching as a career for college students, offers classroom assistance and curricular enrichment to K-12 teachers, provides opportunities for college faculty to help undergraduate students implement discipline-specific applications and pedagogical strategies, and provides enriched learning opportunities in SMET for K-12 students. The program includes the following components: 1) greater awareness by college students of K-12 instruction in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology; 2) a network of K-12, community college, and four-year college faculty and schools; 3) collaboration by AACC and CIC to offer a national grant competition for their member colleges; 4) incentives such as community service scholarships, stipends, mini-grants, or course credit to encourage student involvement in K-12 schools; 5) mentoring relationships; 6) professional development opportunities for K-12 and college faculty; 7) dissemination through publications, presentations, and the World Wide Web; and 8) program evaluation doc6252 none PI: Leff, Laura Bacterial community composition and dissolved organic matter in streams: a cross site comparison Information about bacterial community taxonomic composition and population ecology is generally lacking. This study will identify and compare bacterial community composition among streams with different amounts and sources of dissolved organic matter (DOM). The PI hypothesizes that streams that differ in the source of DOM will have different bacterial community composition and that experimental exposure of bacteria from different streams to different types of DOM can profoundly affect the bacterial community of streams and that bacteria differ in their responses to different DOM mixtures. The project has two components: a field survey and lab experiments. Field work will be used to demonstrate the breadth of bacterial diversity and the differences among streams. Experiments will be used to demonstrate of DOM differences caused the patterns observed in the streams. The field survey will be done in 11 streams: six at LTER sites (Konza, Kellog, Coweeta, and North Temperate Lakes) and the others selected based on their DOM features. This study will allow the addition of bacterial diversity information to the LTER information base and answer basic questions about factors that control microbial diversity. Methodological limitations that have forced ecologists, in many situations, to black box bacterial communities will be overcome by this are and related work. This lays the groundwork for other fundamental questions about the role diversity plays in ecosystem function and the degree to which it is imperiled by human activities doc6253 none A modern XRD instrument that is user-friendly, resilient, allows sophomore students to engage actively in elementary research projects in mineralogy and petrology and is enabling the Department of Geological Sciences at San Diego State University to revise its sophomore-level curriculum to include more opportunities for hands-on, inquiry based, activities. Research experiences are being introduced at this level, and students are being taught how to formulate testable hypotheses, construct relevant experiments, analyze results, and present conclusions through written and or oral reports. In addition, the XRD is enhancing the department s existing program of outreach to public school teachers and students. This project is an adaptation of Professor Wendy Bohrson s NSF funded program at Central Washington University doc6254 none Georges Belfort Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute SGER: Surface Molecular Imprinting of Synthetic Membranes The goal of this one-year Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) is to evaluate two promising methods of molecular imprinting to produce selective molecular-recognition membranes. The expected advantages of the new methods are lower cost, an increased number of accessible imprint sites, significantly faster binding with improved mass transfer rates and reduced tailing, and applicability in aqueous environments. With two photooxidation approaches - surface template and emulsion polymerization - the approach is to prepare, characterize, and test molecular-imprinted synthetic polymeric membranes. First, for surface template polymerization, molecular-imprinted poly(ether sulfone) (PES) membranes are produced using Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute s patented photooxidation process. Since PES is intrinsically photoactive, a photoinitiator is not required, thus reducing the cost, duration and complexity of the process significantly. PES is also one of the most widely used polymers for membranes and is amenable to surface modification in aqueous environments. Second, for emulsion polymerization, after casting of water-in-oil emulsions as a thin film onto flat surfaces and onto microporous synthetic membranes, the oil phase is polymerized around the imprint and functional molecules using UV radiation. Finally, in both cases, the water and templates are removed by microwave heating, which opens up pores and leaves imprinted cavities in a two-dimensional film. The nature and significance of the potential impact of this work, should it succeed, can be summarized as follows. In traditional affinity-separation methods the active functionality must be synthesized and then attached to a support matrix. Fabricating the functionalized surface in situ can eliminate a number of processing steps. Both surface-template and emulsion polymerization as applied here have the potential to be simple, scalable, and inexpensive. Also, the resulting thin membranes could effectively compete with more common adsorption affinity methods to accomplish difficult separations doc6255 none Although ecologists and paleoecologists have long sought to understand what controls biotic diversity, modern biological crises such as widespread extinction and the introduction of exotic species have made this search for understanding increasingly urgent. Modern ecological studies are well suited for describing and predicting the short-term ecological interactions and changes that occur during biotic invasions, that is, the large-scale introduction of exotic species to a region. However, paleontological studies are much better suited for documenting the long-term impacts of such episodes as well as identifying the rules by which ecosystems are constructed or dismantled. Most previous studies of fossil biotic invasions have come from relatively young deposits from the Cenozoic Era (from 65 million years old to the present). Study of much older biotic invasions is needed to determine whether the outcome of these younger biotic invasions is typical of biotic invasions throughout geologic history. Conservation strategies will depend on whether a few simple rules for the long-term effects of biotic invasions exist or whether the long-term effects of any given invasion are idiosyncratic and less likely to be predictable. PIs propose to document how a marine ecosystem responded to a Late Ordovician (454 to 444 million years ago) biotic invasion that affected shallow marine communities in the region stretching from Cincinnati, Ohio to Nashville, Tennessee. Specifically, they will determine for this 10 million-year window of time how diversity changed within individual ecological communities (alpha diversity), how the distinctiveness of ecological communities changed (beta diversity), and how the diversity changed over this entire geographic region (gamma diversity). Because each of these measures of diversity is linked to specific ecological predictions regarding the importance of incumbency of species, vacant ecological niches, and ecological interactions between species, our study will be able not only to document changes in diversity partitioning, but will identify the ecological roots of those changes. Their research will build on their previous studies in the Nashville region and will use advanced sequence-stratigraphic frameworks to reconstruct environmental conditions and to establish the temporal sequence of events within the region. PIs expect that the methods they will develop for studying biotic invasions may be useful for studying biotic crises in other parts of the geological record doc6256 none This project involves laboratory studies and supporting computational research to obtain rate constants for reactions of selected alkoxy radicals of importance in atmospheric chemistry. The long-term goal for the research is to build a database for use in determining the atmospheric fate of alkoxy radicals and the degradation pathways of volatile organic compounds (VOC) in the atmospheric. This research will make an important contribution to our mechanistic understanding of tropospheric ozone production and enable better modeling of ozone formation in smog episodes doc6257 none Wood Tungsten is a metal of strategic importance. Reliable thermodynamic data with which to calculate the solubilities of the most important tungsten ores, scheelite (CaWO4) and ferberite (FeWO4), and the mass transfer of tungsten, in hydrothermal solutions are generally not available. Yet, such data are required to develop comprehensive genetic models of hydrothermal tungsten deposits; these models can guide exploration for new tungsten resources. A study is therefore proposed in which the solubilities of scheelite and ferberite will be measured in non-complexing solutions at saturated water vapor pressure as a function of temperature from 50 degrees to 290 degrees C, pH and ionic strength. The pH will be monitored directly in-situ using a hydrogen electrode concentration cell (HECC) of the type developed and used successfully at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. From the solubilities measured as a function of pH and ionic strength, the solubility products for scheelite and ferberite, and the dissociation constants for tungstic acid (H2WO40), all of which are essential thermodynamic data for the calculation of W mass transfer, can be derived. The project will involve one Ph.D. student who will be trained in hydrothermal geochemistry and high-pressure high-temperature experimental methods. This project will not only result in the acquisition of high-quality thermodynamic data with which to calculate tungsten mineral solubilities and W mass transfer in hydrothermal solutions, but will also provide the PI with an HECC for future studies of other systems of geochemical interest doc6258 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This project produces a prototype for a curriculum project to increase the participation and success of an under-represented minority population in mathematics and the sciences. It develops non-traditional materials and accompanying assessment materials for developmental courses. These materials help students relate the analytical methods of mathematics to the rest of their world, think mathematically in investigations that guide their conceptual development, and develop a social support network for learning. It includes development of professional development workshops for faculty to pilot the materials. Products include curriculum materials for a developmental mathematics course at the level of elementary algebra, supplemental materials that support the least prepared students in a laboratory environment to learn or strengthen underlying conceptual understanding, a prototype for workshops intended to prepare instructors to use these materials effectively, and a plan for testing the prototype in other settings doc6259 none Several aspects of tropical dynamics that are still poorly understood are the potential vorticity mixing processes in hurricanes and the details of the convective-scale generation of potential vorticity in both hurricanes and the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). Under this award, Dr. Schubert seeks to increase dynamical understanding and to improve the accuracy of numerical simulations of tropical circulations. Within hurricanes, recent work has shown that there are smaller-scale, seemingly unrelated, phenomena associated with potential vorticity mixing such as mesovortices and polygonal eyewalls which have some common characteristics. Dr. Schubert will employ a hierarchy of theoretical and numerical models, from a nondivergent barotropic model to one that employs the nonhydrostatic, full-physics equations to explore them. The exciting new aspect of this study will be the incorporation of moist processes in the models. A second area of investigation is to use a version of the full physics model to explore aspects of the Hadley circulation and the ITCZ. Of particular interest is the study of the role of cloud ice processes in the circulations and the sensitivity to the nature of the cloud microphysics parameterizations employed in the models. This research, while highly theoretical and conducted with idealized models, is critical to advance the understanding of the basic dynamics of tropical circulations doc6260 none The PI has used the National Center for Atmospheric Research Community Climate Model version 3, NCAR-CCM3, together with observational analyses to study climate processes important to atmospheric ozone and sulfate aerosols. In collaboration with Dr. Isaksen of the University of Oslo he has examined the chemical aspects of these constituents with the ultimate goal of developing a global climate-chemistry model. Under this renewal award, the PI will continue his effort focusing on the following: (i) the role of atmospheric ozone in affecting present climate; (ii) the effect of climate and climate change on ozone distribution; (iii) diagnoses of the systematic biases of the general circulation model simulated large-scale climate relevant to atmospheric chemistry, as part of the Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project, AMIP; and (iv) projections of climate change. The work is important as it may provide background information useful for developing policy on emissions targets doc6261 none Kavi, Krishna M. University of Alabama Huntsville Digital Government: SGER: Exploratory Research for Correlating and Data Mining Flight Data From NSTB Accident Investigations This grant will support preliminary explorations of the design of intelligent wireless flight data recorders and real-time monitoring systems using modern computer and information science concepts and technologies. The partnership is with the National Transportation and Safety Board (NSTB). Previously collected flight data held by NSTB will be standardized for purposes of data mining. Potential uses of such a system would be to predict and provide early warning of potentially unsafe conditions for pilots doc6262 none Doak Ecologists increasingly understand the importance of spatial variability in natural systems, a recognition that led to the creation of the LTER network. However, we still know surprisingly little about spatial variation in the demography of individual species, creating an important gap in knowledge for both applied and basic ecology. The paucity of full demographic studies that span multiple populations across substantial geographic scales creates two general problems. First, population biologists are forced to extrapolate from the population dynamics and life history patterns found in single, well-studied populations to those occurring in distant parts of a species range. Such extrapolation is commonplace in conservation biology, comparative life history analysis, and climate change predictions, and is currently done with little understanding of how much spatial variation actually exists in the demography of individual species. Second is the question of what sets the range limits of species. While the physiological effects of climate are often well-known, the lack of broad-scale demographic studies makes it less clear how population dynamics vary near range limits, and thus the extent to which poor demographic performance versus other proposed factors, such as metapopulation dynamics, determine the distributional limits of species. As a result, we have little ground for building mechanistic predictions about how species ranges will shift as climate changes doc6263 none Lajtha Numerous studies of decomposition have focused on short-term, transient effects of organic matter breakdown. Much has been learned from these studies about the roles of litter nutrient content and carbon quality in controlling the cycling of nutrients through the litter layer to soil organic matter (SOM). However, far less is known about the fate of plant litter and its role in determining SOM content and nutrient cycling over time scales ranging from decades to centuries. To address this gap, long-term experimental studies of controls on soil organic matter formation, or DIRT (Detritus Input and Removal Treatments), have been established independently at forested sites in three US LTERs and one international LTER site. DIRT plot treatments consist of long-term above- and below ground litter doubling and removal. While the fundamental experimental design of these installations is similar, there are few measurements in common and each site is instrumented quite differently. The purpose of this LTER cross-site research project is to bring these four sites into a general experimental and measurement uniformity, and to test models and hypotheses made at individual sites over this network. The LTER program serves as an ideal host for the emerging cross-site DIRT network both because it serves as a focal point for many investigators and because of its focus on long-term studies. The central goal of the DIRT project is to assess how rates and sources of plant litter inputs control accumulation and dynamics of organic matter and nutrients in forest soils over decadal time scales. This cross-site comparison will address three specific goals: (1) to examine effects of forest floor biomass, organic matter inputs, sources, and chemistry on net N retention and the ratio of inorganic to organic N losses in leachate; (2) to examine the effects of forest floor chemistry on gross N mineralization, immobilization, and nitrification rates; and (3) to evaluate the generality of models of sources of C to soil respiration doc6255 none Although ecologists and paleoecologists have long sought to understand what controls biotic diversity, modern biological crises such as widespread extinction and the introduction of exotic species have made this search for understanding increasingly urgent. Modern ecological studies are well suited for describing and predicting the short-term ecological interactions and changes that occur during biotic invasions, that is, the large-scale introduction of exotic species to a region. However, paleontological studies are much better suited for documenting the long-term impacts of such episodes as well as identifying the rules by which ecosystems are constructed or dismantled. Most previous studies of fossil biotic invasions have come from relatively young deposits from the Cenozoic Era (from 65 million years old to the present). Study of much older biotic invasions is needed to determine whether the outcome of these younger biotic invasions is typical of biotic invasions throughout geologic history. Conservation strategies will depend on whether a few simple rules for the long-term effects of biotic invasions exist or whether the long-term effects of any given invasion are idiosyncratic and less likely to be predictable. PIs propose to document how a marine ecosystem responded to a Late Ordovician (454 to 444 million years ago) biotic invasion that affected shallow marine communities in the region stretching from Cincinnati, Ohio to Nashville, Tennessee. Specifically, they will determine for this 10 million-year window of time how diversity changed within individual ecological communities (alpha diversity), how the distinctiveness of ecological communities changed (beta diversity), and how the diversity changed over this entire geographic region (gamma diversity). Because each of these measures of diversity is linked to specific ecological predictions regarding the importance of incumbency of species, vacant ecological niches, and ecological interactions between species, our study will be able not only to document changes in diversity partitioning, but will identify the ecological roots of those changes. Their research will build on their previous studies in the Nashville region and will use advanced sequence-stratigraphic frameworks to reconstruct environmental conditions and to establish the temporal sequence of events within the region. PIs expect that the methods they will develop for studying biotic invasions may be useful for studying biotic crises in other parts of the geological record doc6265 none Cohen This grant supports a long-range, broad-based research program in condensed matter physics and materials science. The research covers the fields of semiconductors, metals, surfaces and interfaces, defects, superconductivity, materials under pressure, clusters, fullerene-based materials, nanotubes, conjugated polymers, and many-electron effects in solids. The major objective is to use quantum theory to explain and predict the properties of materials. Emphasis is placed on using realistic models, close collaborations with experimentalists, investigations and suggestions for producing novel and useful materials, development of new theoretical approaches, and predictions related to electronic and structural properties of solids. Many new techniques based on quantum theory were developed in this research program to enable accurate calculations for real materials. In particular, the ab initio pseudopotential method and total energy techniques are applied within the density functional formalism to compute ground-state properties. Excited-state (spectroscopic) phenomena are investigated using a first-principles self-energy approach based on the GW approximation for quasiparticle excitations and an ab initio two-particle Green s function method based on the Bethe-Saltpeter equation for optical excitations. Other studies rely on variational and diffusion Monte Carlo approaches, molecular dynamics simulations, dielectric function methods, BCS theory, density functional perturbation theory, and extensions of standard many-body theory. Proposed projects include understanding and predicting properties of nanotubes and nanocrystals; hard materials and mechanical properties; semiconductors, heterojunctions, and materials under pressure; NMR chemical shifts in solids and liquids; electron-hole interaction and optical properties of solids, defects, and polymers; quasiparticle excitations, lifetimes, and electron correlations in solids; and quantum computing and ransom access devices for computers. The research program has a strong history of supporting graduate students and postdoctoral associates. Because of this extensive involvement of graduate students and postdoctoral associates in these projects, expertise and knowledge are transferred nationally and internationally. %%% This grant supports a long-range, broad-based research program in condensed matter physics and materials science. The research covers the fields of semiconductors, metals, surfaces and interfaces, defects, superconductivity, materials under pressure, clusters, fullerene-based materials, nanotubes, conjugated polymers, and many-electron effects in solids. The major objective is to use quantum theory to explain and predict the properties of materials. Emphasis is placed on using realistic models, close collaborations with experimentalists, investigations and suggestions for producing novel and useful materials, development of new theoretical approaches, and predictions related to electronic and structural properties of solids. The research program has a strong history of supporting graduate students and postdoctoral associates. Because of this extensive involvement of graduate students and postdoctoral associates in these projects, expertise and knowledge are transferred nationally and internationally doc6266 none Morris Ecologists increasingly understand the importance of spatial variability in natural systems, a recognition that led to the creation of the LTER network. However, we still know surprisingly little about spatial variation in the demography of individual species, creating an important gap in knowledge for both applied and basic ecology. The paucity of full demographic studies that span multiple populations across substantial geographic scales creates two general problems. First, population biologists are forced to extrapolate from the population dynamics and life history patterns found in single, well-studied populations to those occurring in distant parts of a species range. Such extrapolation is commonplace in conservation biology, comparative life history analysis, and climate change predictions, and is currently done with little understanding of how much spatial variation actually exists in the demography of individual species. Second is the question of what sets the range limits of species. While the physiological effects of climate are often well-known, the lack of broad-scale demographic studies makes it less clear how population dynamics vary near range limits, and thus the extent to which poor demographic performance versus other proposed factors, such as metapopulation dynamics, determine the distributional limits of species. As a result, we have little ground for building mechanistic predictions about how species ranges will shift as climate changes. To address these problems, a demographic study of two widespread tundra plant species, moss campion and alpine bisort, will be conducted as part of this LTER cross-site research project. These species will be studied in 16 populations across two habitats and four geographic sites. These sites span most of the latitudinal range of the species in North America. The study is designed to parameterize stochastic matrix models for each population of each species. While multi-site demographic studies are unusual, ones that measure and properly analyze temporal stochasticity in vital rates are even rarer. In addition to statistical analysis of the means and variance in individual vital rates, the PIs will base much of the analysis on outputs of these stochastic models, including stochastic growth rates, stochastic elasticity values and extinction risk predictions. Furthermore, the work will utilize LTER climate data to tie spatial and temporal variability in vital rates to specific environmental factors. The results will be used to test for the strength and pattern of life history variation across geographic sites and habitats, and to determine how best to make predictions about demographic variability with limited data. Finally, specific tests will be conducted for demographic factors leading to both northern and southern range boundaries. Overall, this study will be the first multi-site, multi-year demographic analysis to carefully include temporal stochasticity and to explicitly test how and in what ways life history patterns vary across species ranges doc6267 none Travel support for students and postdoctorals is provided for the 10th Workshop on Nonideal Plasmas in Greifswald, German, Sept 4-10, doc6268 none Saleeby Ducea An important concern in the study of a currently active tectonic system is the role of inherited features. This project will explore the relationships between the structure and composition of the upper mantle and major surface tectonic features in the southwest Cordillera, that may be inherent from the shallow segment of the Laramide slab having been emplaced beneath the Mojave Desert region, thus strengthening against the modern plate juncture system. To the north, the intact batholithic segment in the Sierra Nevada retained its high-density keel which was susceptible to delamination and foundering into the mantle as rifting and transform tectonic propagated into the region. Results should help explain the dramatically different response of the Sierra Nevada and the Mojave desert to onset of the modern tectonic system doc6269 none Clustered data are very common in social sciences research and other fields. For example, in a study involving school children, school districts form clusters and schools form sub-clusters within each cluster. In this context, researchers want to explain a certain variable of interest (the response variable) in terms of certain categorical variables (factors) while adjusting for the presence of other incidental variables (covariates) which might influence the response. This project aims at developing statistical methods for analyzing such data. Though the classical statistical methods accommodate the lack of independence that is inherent to data arising from cluster sampling, they are very often unsuitable for data arising from social science research. This is because they require a set of restrictive assumptions (such as normality and homogeneity of the residuals, linearity, scale dependence) which are rarely satisfied in the social sciences. In addition, data in social sciences research are often incomplete (censored or missing) in which case inference based on the classical statistical models cannot be implemented. Alternative approaches developed to deal with these issues also rely on assumptions which may or may not be satisfied for any given application. The research for this project will focus on the development of statistical models and methods that are free of restrictive assumptions. Central components of the project is the application of these methods to questions regarding routine activities and deviant behavior, and to the question of whether there has been a secular rise in job instability among young adults over the past three decades using two cohorts from the National Longitudinal Survey (NLS). Programs for formal hypothesis testing, graphical summaries of effects and exploratory data analysis plots, will be made available on the web for use by the social sciences community. Correct statistical analysis is very important as it often forms the basis for policy and other decisions. The nonparametric formulation in this project is especially apt for many kinds of social science data where we have weak theories about functional forms and weak measurement procedures (e.g., with attitudes) that produce ordinal or only somewhat stronger (but typically not interval) scales. The violation of assumptions underlying a statistical approach can result in misuse of scarce data resources and ultimately misguided policy decisions doc6270 none Givin This grant provides support for theoretical research on condensed matter physics. The main objective of the work is to enhance our understanding of novel electronic phenomena in condensed matter systems. The research includes investigations of the quantum and statistical mechanics of various quantum phases of matter including superfluidity in bilayer quantum Hall systems, quantum coherence in mesoscopic devices, quantum magnetism, and high-temperature superconductors. Analytical, as well as quantum and classical Monte Carlo and other numerical, techniques will be applied to the study of these phenomena. %%% This grant provides support for theoretical research on condensed matter physics. The main objective of the work is to enhance our understanding of novel electronic phenomena in condensed matter systems. A combination of analytical and computational techniques will be used to study these novel systems doc6271 none Conway This award supports the study the glacial history of Ridge AB in West Antarctica using well-established geophysical methods. Our study is motivated by the need to improve under-standing of how the configuration and activity of the West Antarctic drainage system is changing, and how this affects the stability of the ice sheet. Ridge AB has been chosen for several reasons: 1) previous studies of inter-stream ridges in West Antarctica have revealed much information about the history of the surrounding ice streams. There is an information-hole in the southern sector of the ice sheet; we are optimistic that our study of Ridge AB will reveal new information about recent changes in the configuration and activity of Ice Streams A and B; 2) geologic evidence from Reedy Glacier indicates that ice in the vicinity of Ridge AB was ~700 m thicker during the last glacial maximum. This helps constrain the magnitude of thinning that has occurred through the Holocene, and opens the possibility of linking the history of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to the geologic record in the Trans-Antarctic Mountains. Our approach is to first map spatial variations of internal layering, buried crevasses, surface velocity, and accumulation rate. The main investigative tools are: high and low-frequency radar systems, GPS surveying methods, and short (20 m) firn cores. The diagnostic measurements will then be examined with ice flow models to infer the glacial history of Ridge AB and the surrounding ice streams. The history will be interpreted in context of the histories that are emerging from the other inter-ice stream ridges, as well as the geologic evidence from Reedy and other outlet glaciers in the Trans-Antarctic Mountains. Our overall goal is to improve understanding of the evolution of the WAIS drainage system doc6272 none Chemistry (12) Insufficient instrumentation currently limits curriculum diversity in the Physical Chemistry Laboratory conducted at this institution. With a survey indicating that many students are not motivated to study physical chemistry, the challenge has been to develop course content which encourages these students. This project consists of setting up a new physical chemistry curriculum based on a wavelength tunable nanosecond pulse laser system. The objectives are: (1) to expose students to interdisciplinary topics which integrate the fields of biology, physics, and chemistry, and (2) to include topics on fast kinetics and electronic relaxation. Topics will include the inversion rate of sucrose catalyzed by enzyme, conformational transition of polypeptides or diblock co-polymer, the effect of a quencher on the electronic relaxation of an aromatic compound, solvent response to fast heat flow, and photolysis of benzophenone. These topics demonstrate how physical chemistry concepts are applied to biological systems and introduce the concept of real time probing of a chemical event. Core instrument of this project is a Nd:YAG pumped Optical Parametric Oscillator (OPO) based laser spectrometer system. Included in this OPO-based system are monochromator, photomultiplier tube detector, digital storage oscilloscope, and a CCD camera. The proposed system enables introduction of previously unstudied experimental methods: optical rotation, scattering experiment, fluorescence lifetime measurement, thermal lens calorimetry, and laser-flash photolysis. Planned laboratory experiments are adaptations from the Journal of Physical Chemistry and the program at Harvey Mudd College which was supported by earlier NSF funding. The evaluation will be provided by an off-campus advisory committee doc6273 none Under the direction of Dr. Alan Kolata, Mr. Edward Swenson will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. His research is centered on the late prehistoric period in the Jequetepeque Valley located on the northern coast of Peru. While this region is best known for the Inca civilization which united a large area of western South America under centralized political rule, the Incas were, in fact only the last in a series of kingdoms. A predecessor group, the Moche, achieved a similar result, although on a smaller scale, and their presence in the Jequetepeque Valley is characterized by adobe pyramidal mounds which mark primary and secondary centers, technically sophisticated and artistically exquisite ceramic and metallurgical artifacts and a complex centrally administered agricultural system with irrigation canals. Based on settlement size, it is highly likely that the site of Pacatnamu served as the focus of power and functioned as the central administrative center. Mr. Swenson wishes to understand both the degree of political centralization within the Moche kingdom and the mechanisms employed to integrate its constituent parts. He proposes several alternative models: on one extreme exists the possibility of a direct extension of urban control to the hinterland wherein intermediate or secondary level sites served as administrative outposts to enforce elite urban-based dominance. At the other, it is possible that economically autonomous communities that maintained a significant degree of independence. To assess these alternatives Mr. Swenson will take advantage of the fact that many of these sites are only minimally buried and well preserved. In fact it is possible to trace the walls of structures and determine their size and conformation. Based on their nature and the artifacts they contain, evidence indicates that many served ceremonial and ritual functions and with such data one can compare similarity of form among individual secondary centers and between these and the capital. Greater similarity will indicate a higher degree of unification indicative of greater centralized control. With National Science Foundation support Mr. Swenson will produce digital maps of the 15 to 20 known secondary sites in the valley. The result will be plan views of the sites and three-dimensional architectural models permitting a spatial analysis of ceremonial architecture. Archaeological materials which provide evidence of site function will be collected through both surface collection and limited excavation. This research is important for several reasons. It will provide data of interest to archaeologists who wish to understand how complex societies arose and were maintained. It will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc6274 none for proposal EAR (PH #8x) Investigation of Anomalous Seismic Radiation of Long Valley Earthquakes Douglas Dreger University of California, Berkeley, Seismological Laboratory Whether seismic events in the Long Valley Caldera (LVC) region of eastern California are due to tectonic or volcanic (fluid) controlled processes has been the focus of research since a swarm of four M6 events in May of demonstrated non-double-couple (NDC) seismic moment tensors. The NDC radiation of those events was attributed to a number of possible mechanisms including 1) tensile failure under high fluid pressure, 2) complex shear failure, and 3) bias due to unmodeled near-source velocity heterogeneity, however the controlling mechanism has remained unresolved. Recently broadband recordings of LVC seismicity have displayed anomalous radiation that may be characterized as a combination of deviatoric non-double-couple and volumetric dilation (NDCI) seismic sources (Dreger et al., ), which indicates that fluids are directly involved in the source process of some events. Whether the NDCI radiation is due to magmatic or aqueous injection, due to gaseous phases and advective over-pressure, or the proposed mechanisms for the events is the focus of this research. To address these questions and to investigate how widespread the anomalous events are we will conduct seismic waveform studies to determine seismic moment tensors and source process time histories of 118 ML 3.5 LVC events. Additionally, we will perform 3D numerical simulations to test whether near-source velocity structure can bias moment tensor inversion results. Finally, microseismicity associated with the studied events will be relocated to determine event specific fault structure, geometric fault complexity and possible temporal migration of seismicity as evidence of fluid flow during cascades of multiple NDCI events. Understanding the nature of seismic radiation in the LVC is an important step to unraveling the tectonics and magmatic hydrothermal processes in the region, and to better characterize the related seismic and volcanic hazard doc6275 none Providing reliable multimedia communications in mobile multihop wireless networks is a formidable challenge. Communication networks in which all users are potentially mobile and untethered to any fixed wireline infrastructure arise in a variety of contexts. The mobile users of the system desire reliable communications, including real-time voice and video, notwithstanding the lack of a fixed infrastructure. That is, the disconnection probability should be low and certain quality of service (QoS) guarantees should be provided: for many applications, the information exchanged should have low delay, low jitter and a low loss rate. In a fully distributed wireless network, there is no fixed (wired) backbone that can be exploited to centralize some of the network management and routing functions. In order to provide the desired functionality, the mobile terminals must be organized into a network that has some hierarchical organization or reliable structure that is maintained (at least to some degree) under varying network connectivities. This structure should, if possible, be maintained in a distributed fashion, without reliance on a centralized controller. Our approach to solving the ad hoc network problem is to use an embedded hierarchical structure, with physically different networks at the various levels. Recently, we have proposed the employment of a mobile backbone to support guaranteed QoS (as well as best effort) applications for mobile networks. Certain mobile terminals are assigned to effectively serve as mobile base stations, and these selected users ( backbone nodes ) together with their interconnecting communication links constitute the mobile backbone. The backbone network consists of a mesh topology with point-to-point links used to interconnect neighboring backbone nodes. The mobile backbone, which has a functionality analogous to a fixed backbone in a cellular network, is then exploited to make the routing, access control, scheduling and congestion control problems tractable. Such mobile backbone networks can also be exploited to supplement an employed ad hoc mobile network that lacks a transport backbone, and is thus not able to readily provide QoS guarantees to multimedia applications. This research proposes a new approach to synthesizing communication backbones for mobile wireless networks. The backbone will satisfy user-specified accessibility and connectivity requirements and will support guaranteed QoS objectives. The mobile backbone construction algorithm will incorporate terminal positional information and a distance metric in order to discern geographical sections of the network with high concentrations of users. Pattern recognition based techniques will be developed and employed for the first time in the context of telecommunications networks in order to discern compact sections of the network, and to choose representative backbone nodes for these compact sections. This approach provides a new means of decomposing a global network into smaller simpler subnetworks, on each of which a backbone construction algorithm can then be run. Once the network has been divided into subnetworks (termed itclustersln), a backbone is then constructed for each separate cluster. These separate intra-cluster backbones are then linked together to form a composite global backbone network with the desired functionality. New graph-theoretic algorithms will be developed to synthesize the separate intra-cluster backbones. These methodologies will incorporate deterministic and probabilistic relaxations of the backbones accessibility features. Investigations will also include preprocessing of the input graph that models the communications network and subgraph removal techniques to determine optimal topologies that can be exploited for backbone synthesis. Robust algorithms will be developed that ihlook aheadlp to possible future graph scenarios (based on terminal movement) and choose the best backbone for the ensemble. The global backbone construction algorithms will be simplified by decoupling the inter-cluster backbone connectivity requirements from the intra-cluster connectivity requirements. A mobile backbone will be designed with a single user-specified inter-cluster connectivity requirement, but may have different user- specified intra-cluster connectivity requirements for each cluster. The inter-cluster backbone will be constructed using graph-theoretic techniques wherein each cluster is treated as a single node a supernode. The mobile backbone construction algorithms will be analyzed and evaluated to optimize methods of backbone reconstitution under failures caused by nodal movement, environmental variations and loading fluctuations. Extensive analyses and simulations will be performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed backbone construction protocol under several scenarios that correspond to, e.g., different mobility patterns, different network loads, and a multitude of multimedia applications. The mobile backbone networks to be investigated here are of significant importance in many application scenarios. They have been targeted for the implementation of next generation wireless networks for military unit operations, as well as for a multitude of commercial networks, which require rapid and reliable deployment in an area that lacks an existing fixed-backbone infrastructure. Included are civilian and government networks used for disaster relief purposes doc6276 none Interdisciplinary (99) College-level science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) faculty are increasingly expected to educate all students to be scientifically literate, to develop the ranks of future scientists, engineers, and technicians, and to prepare K-12 teachers who are fully prepared to teach science and mathematics. They are expected to achieve these goals in the context of a national reform movement in undergraduate SMET education, while also making appropriate and (at times) transformative use of new computer-based learning technologies. Faculty typically find only a few professional development resources to assist them in meeting these daunting expectations. This project is working to meet these needs by constructing a complete, web-based professional development site. This site will give faculty access to 9 case studies covering a variety of SMET disciplines of effective Learning Through Technology (LT2). These cases are focused on certain types of learning technologies that seem particularly promising in SMET disciplines. All are computer based, connected to well-established teaching methods, and enable some of the following learning activities: visualization, simulation, data analysis, interpersonal interaction, software-based feedback, locating pertinent information, and improved student creativity. The case studies combined with other elements of the site will provide important information to faculty seeking to learn more about computer-based learning applications and how to implement these effectively. The project is building on an earlier discovery that the implementation of this technology matters at least as much as the technology itself. The web-site is designed to emulate hallway conversations that characterize how many faculty share crucial information about new technical developments. This resource is being designed to ease the way for faculty to learn how to use instructional technology to improve student learning. This resource also teaches faculty about technology pitfalls to avoid and provides them access to a series of vignettes that provides more breadth and depth while demonstrating how their faculty peers are integrating instructional technology into their courses. It is anticipated that this will raise the rate of adaptation and implementation of exemplary materials and practices using instructional technology doc6277 none Cole-Dai This award supports a two year project to analyze shallow (~150 m) ice cores from South Pole in order to construct an annually resolved, sulfate-based volcanic record covering the last years. Two shallow ice cores will be recovered at the South Pole during the 00 01 field season and will be used for this work. Volcanic records from polar ice cores provide valuable information for studies of the connection between volcanism and climate. The new records are expected to be continuous and to cover at least the last years. The information from these records will verify the volcanic events found in the few existing Antarctic records and resolve discrepancies in the timing and magnitude of major explosive eruptions determined from those earlier records. In order to achieve the objectives of the proposed research, funds are provided to assist with the construction of an analytical laboratory for ice core and environmental chemistry research doc6278 none This research proposal addresses electric power system security, the ability of the high voltage transmission and generation interconnected grid to respond to disturbances in the network without equipment damage, load interruption, cascading outages, or blackouts. It represents a component of reliability that is of great interest to those who operate the power system, as it is the security level that determines their flexibility in responding to the economic imperatives of the electric energy markets that have evolved during the s. Because of existing and future disincentives to constructing new transmission facilities, high voltage operating conditions are increasingly stressed, and the key to maintaining attractive energy prices is to efficiently utilize the existing transmission equipment. Efficient equipment utilization involves careful balancing of the security level against the market needs a continuous decision making problem. The underlying thesis In this proposal is that diversity of participants, heterogeneity and dispersion of required data, and Inherent complexity associated with today s security-economy decision-making problem necessitates development of new information management and decision-support Infrastructure. Our objective is to develop the foundation for this infrastructure, using mobile software agents within a distributed knowledge network. Anticipated results of the proposed research include: much-needed algorithmic and systems solutions for monitoring and coordination of complex, dynamic, deregulated power grids as well as for distributed decision making taking into account the financial needs associated with market efficiency as well as the engineering (but ultimately financial as well) needs associated with maintaining reliability of the electric power system. The proposed work will result in a modular and extensible suite of distributed knowledge network tools for monitoring of dynamic, distributed systems in general, and power systems in particular. A specific outcome is to be a working prototype simulator that will clearly illustrate the benefits of the approach. The broader impacts as envisioned by the authors are the social benefits that would accrue to the society and to the economy at large, due to improved decision-support for operating the high voltage electric energy system, a critical part of the US national infrastructure doc6279 none Recent improvements in laser rangefinder technology, together with algorithms for combining multiple range and color images, allows accurate digitization of the external shape and surface characteristics of many physical objects. This capability makes it possible for the first time to digitize and archive substantial bodies of three-dimensional artistic and cultural artifacts, such as statues, buildings, and archeological remains. Although the methodologies needed to create and manage digital archives of two-dimensional artifacts have matured substantially in the last ten years, the jump from two to three dimensions poses new problems. These are problems of both scale and substance, and they touch on every aspect of digital archiving: storage, indexing, searching, distribution, viewing, and piracy protection. This pilot project, will focus on the following subproblems of this new domain: (1) cataloguing 3D artworks using techniques from image-based rendering, (2) searching catalogues (and the Internet) for 3D models or rendered views (3) protecting 3D archives against piracy using robust 3D digital watermarking, (4) efficient streaming of 3D models over networks of limited bandwidth, and (5) real-time display of large 3D models on low-cost PCs. As test data, a 250 gigabyte archive of the sculptures of Michelangelo and the fragments of the Forma Urbis Romae, a giant marble map of ancient Rome will be used. The data for this archive was generated during a year-long digitization effort called the Digital Michelangelo Project doc6280 none Alley This award provides support to continue paleoclimate and ice dynamical studies of the Siple Dome deep ice core and associated shallow cores from West Antarctica, to help understand the history of climate and ice-sheet stability. Visible examination of the ice cores contributes to the required dating of the paleoclimatic records. Because ice-flow corrections for accumulation rates are difficult in deep ice, a new physically based paleoclimatic indicator of temperature or snow accumulation will be developed, based on bubble-size histories and on the physics of firn densification and grain growth. The paleoclimatic reconstruction of summer temperatures will be accomplished through observation and analysis of the rare melt layers in the ice core. Studies of the distribution of climate change in space and time will be continued, focusing on the possibility that a climate oscillation of ~ years has combined with noise from changes in freshwater fluxes to force rapid, large, nearly synchronous, widespread to global changes in the mode of operation of the climate system. Visual and c-axis studies of ice grains in the core will help detect flow disturbances, such as the ones which were seen in the GISP2 ice cores, if they are present in the Siple Dome core. The results of this study should lead to a better understanding of rapid climate change in Antarctica and, through comparison, to other records worldwide. The study should also contribute to knowledge of the flow and stability of the West Antarctic ice sheet doc6281 none de Jager This grant provides partial support for the Gordon Research Conference on Photonuclear Reactions, to be held at the Tilton School in Tilton, NH, July 30 - August 4. The structure of the conference encourages speakers to minimize review and to maximize information concerning new developments in the field. The meeting is especially timely with the rich experimental program now underway at Jefferson Laboratory in the United States, as well as new results becoming available from other electromagnetic accelerator laboratories worldwide. The funds will be used to support the participation of graduate students and junior researchers doc6282 none Mooney Tissue engineering is an exciting new discipline that uses implanted cells, scaffolds, and inductive molecules to repair or replace injured or diseased tissues and organs. Tremendous progress in biological and biomaterials aspects of this field have been accomplished to date, and several engineered tissues are now being used clinically. However, tissue engineers face major challenges in repairing or replacing tissues that serve a predominantly biomechanical function. To meet this challenge, the United States National Committee on Biomechanics adopted a new paradigm called Functional Tissue Engineering to emphasize the importance of biomechanical considerations in the design and development of cell and matrix-based implants for soft and hard tissue repair. The committee now seeks to address these important issues by holding a Functional Tissue Engineering Conference. A select group of biomedical engineers, biologists, and clinicians have been contacted and have agreed to participate in this conference. The goals of the conference will be (1) to increase awareness among tissue engineers about the importance of restoring function when engineering cardiovascular, orthopaedic, and dental constructs, (2) to identify the critical structural and mechanical requirements needed for each construct, (3) to provide a source for tissue engineers of functional criteria in the design, manufacture, and optimization of tissue engineered constructs, and (4) to develop a teaching and reference text for students and investigators in the field of tissue engineering. Parallel proposals are also being submitted to the National Institutes of Health, the Whitaker Foundation, and selected tissue engineering companies to cosponsor and co-fund this meeting. This conference will set the tone for both research and training in tissue engineering for the next decade and will serve as the paradigm for academic industrial interactions in this field. The conference will also lead to a synergy between biomaterials and biomechanics issues in the next generation of biologic devices doc6283 none This one-year award will provide support for Tanmay Vachaspati of Case Western Reserve University and a graduate student to attend the European Science Foundation meeting, Topological Defects - Non-Equilibrium Field Theory in Particle Physics, Cosmology and Condensed Matter, to be held in Capri, Italy, September 7 - 12, . The workshop will focus on the results of the Europeans collaboration and the outlook for future research in this and related fields. The workshop will also highlight new theoretical and experimental perspectives in the understanding of the physics of defect formation and of phase transitions. The purpose of US attendance is to develop ongoing collaboration with the European members of the ESF network on topological defects, and to provide contacts and opportunities doc6284 none Phillip C. Stancil This is a collaborative research project with Drs Stephen Lepp, (University of Nevada, Las Vegas, AST ), and Alexander Dalgarno, (Harvard University, AST ). This program will construct models to investigate the formation of the first cosmological objects. These models will describe the history of the first bound objects to form from the primordial gas in the early universe. They will include the coupled evolution of the time-dependent, nonequilibrium chemical, atomic and molecular level populations as well as the nonequilibrium rovibrational level populations of the molecules with contributions due to chemical reactions in the primordial gas. The models can be used to suggest strategies for observing structures in the early universe in the Infrared from space. This program will use astrophysical modeling to investigate the formation of the first cosmological objects. These models will compute the coupled evolution of the time-dependent nonequilibrium chemical, atomic and molecular level population, thermal, and hydrodynamic history of the first bound objects to form from the primordial gas. This will be the first time such extensive, coupled evolution models have been attempted. In addition, this project will investigate the explicit nonequilibrium rovibrational level populations of the primordial molecules with contributions due to chemical reactions, resulting in an improved determination of molecular cooling and the prediction of the emission spectra of primordial clouds. The emission spectra will be used to suggest the most likely ways these objects may be observed with the next generation of infrared space telescopes. The needed atomic and molecular data and derived cooling functions will be assembled and posted on the World Wide Web. The data that is not available, primarily involving rovibrational state-specific molecular collisions, will be computed with established quantum-mechanical techniques. The studies of the primordial gas will be extended to follow protogalaxy and protostar formation under increasing metallicity and radiation field conditions to the beginning of the era of Population II. These studies will be relevant to the interpretation and planning of future space-based observations with NGST, SIRTF, FIRST, and Astro-F and ground-based telescopes. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc6285 none This collaborative project with Scott ( ) will develop a class of longitudinal data models appropriate for modeling clustering and heterogeneous patterns in such data. This work extends the modeling paradigm of Banfield and Raftery ( ), in which clusters are identified via an explicit statistical model. The extension will incorporate a parsimonious class of models developed by Scott and Hancock ( ) to identify population-level patterns in individual-specific differences. The study will develop algorithms to estimate the models, and will incorporate the approach of Bensmail et al. ( ) to establish a Bayesian model formulation. Inference to assess the validity of the models will be developed, as will information criterion, and Bayes factor approaches. A further outcome of this work will be an extension of the lme software in Splus to incorporate these new methods (Pinheiro and Bates ). An important part of the project will be the development of a case study of long-term trends in wage inequality. This will include comparisons of two important economic periods and will contrast the findings under the new models to results from more traditional mixed effects models. In addition, the implications of the findings for wage inequality and labor market segmentation will be explored and published in an applied journal to provide a bridge for subject matter researchers to this methodology. In much of social, behavioral and biostatistical research, the goal is to understand the structure of the heterogeneity in a population, and in so doing yield insight into social phenomena. In longitudinal studies subjects can become increasingly differentiated over time, and the identification of natural groupings, or clusters, in the subjects has important consequences. They may yield evidence suggesting the presence of several distinct phenomena--that is, different social processes could exist for different subjects. The accurate identification of these clusters depends on the specification of the structure within a subject s responses. Methods that describe this aspect of an individual s profile have been sparse and often hard to interpret substantively. This research will extend the statistical models for clustered longitudinal data developed in Banfield and Raftery ( ) to include a new, parsimonious, and interpretable representation of individual behavior. This extension represents a hybrid population-average and individual-specific approach to modeling the heterogeneity in individual profiles doc6286 none DeSilva In attempting to better understand the human, societal, and environmental impacts of volcanic eruptions, scientists are increasingly aware that the fundamental underpinning to this endeavour is knowledge about the physical volcanology of volcanic eruptions. Since plinian eruptions are amongst the most devastating, considerable effort is focused on these phenomena. However, few such eruptions have been observed and documented and our understanding relies heavily on data from eruptions that have occurred in the recent past. Such studies have proved to be the source of much of our insight into the dynamics of plinian eruptions and their local and global effects. A completed study of the eruption of Huaynaputina, conducted under the auspices of a previous NSF grant, reveals that this eruption is one of the most significant eruptions of historic times. Over 25km3 of tephra was erupted, 90% of which was ejected during a ~20 hour sustained plinian eruption during the first stage of the eruption. Two coeval but distinct deposits formed; a regionally extensive and well-preserved plinian pumice fall deposit, and a much more extensive plinian ash deposit. No caldera collapse occurred despite the large volume erupted allowing the rare preservation of ultraproximal sections and vents. This project will build on the general model of the eruption that we have elucidated to focus on the ultraproximal sections and the proximal pumice fall deposit to increase our understanding of the Stage I plinian eruption in particular and the dynamics of plinian eruptions in general. Two interrelated objectives are to be addressed. The first is better constrain the evolution of the ~20 hour long plinian eruption, and the second is to better understand the origin and significance of the extremely coarse fall deposits in the ultraproximal sections. These objectives will be addressed through extensive fieldwork to log sections, identify and map key horizons, and map their dispersal. These data will be coupled with existing detailed grainsize and componentry of these horizons throughout the fall deposit to develop a more detailed understanding of the Stage I plinian eruption that breaks down the ~20 hour eruption into several stages. The involvement of graduate and undergraduate students as key players in the team maximises the educational impact of this project doc6287 none The investigators will determine which heating mechanisms dominate in different regions of the solar atmosphere. The main effort is to construct novel theoretical models that will describe the entire solar atmosphere. Observations show that the solar atmosphere can be divided into three main regions: chromosphere, transition region and corona. In each of these regions the temperature increases with height and reaches its maximum in the corona, where both X-ray emission and the solar wind originate. One of the most important, and still unsolved, problems in solar physics is to identify the basic physical processes that are responsible for this heating. There are at least two general classes of models of this heating. In the first class, the solar atmosphere is heated by hydrodynamic (mainly acoustic) or magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) waves, and it is assumed that these waves are generated by turbulent motions in the solar convection zone. In the second class, dissipation of currents generated by photospheric motions of solar magnetic fields is the primary source of energy for the heating. Despite the vast amount of solar data collected during numerous ground observations and space missions, and significant theoretical efforts, it is still unclear how different regions of the solar atmosphere actually are heated. The investigators will take a novel approach to this problem by constructing theoretical models that describe the entire solar atmosphere. By comparing these models with observations, they will determine which heating mechanisms dominate in different regions of the solar atmosphere. Their work will be important in ongoing efforts to understand the principal energy sources for the solar atmosphere and the basic physical processes responsible for creating the heliosphere doc6288 none PI: VAINA The objective of this proposal is to investigate computationally a biologically plausible model for learning invariance. Invariant recognition is a fundamental capacity of perceptual systems, which makes it possible to recognize visual objects under different viewing conditions, such as changes in the relative position of the object in the visual field, changes in distance, viewing direction, illumination, and also under shape deformations. The purpose of this study is to extend and generalize the shift invariance algorithm and incorporate a broader class of invariances, such as size and rotation in depth and combine it with a learning algorithm to achieve solutions to novel types of computational problems in biological vision. A major focus of this research will by on computational studies of biological visual problems for which there is ample neurophysiological and psychophysical data. Two important and novel characteristics of the models to be developed are: 1) invariance is achieved gradually in a series of processing stages, and 2) a simple unsupervised learning mechanism is sufficient for connecting units in a neural network in a way that results in invariant recognition. This approach is broader than previous approaches and therefore riskier. However, if it is shown to be correct, then it will offer a uniform account of multiple aspects of invariant perception and allow the development of powerful learnable mechanisms for computer vision systems doc6289 none Ritchie Herbivorous mammals can have profound effects on the sustainability and productivity of grasslands through their effects on nutrient cycling. Recent studies suggest that herbivores can accelerate the cycling of nitrogen by returning mineral nitrogen in urine and feces to the soil and favoring more nutrient-rich and decomposable plants. Alternatively, they can slow down nutrient cycling by modifying the species composition of plant communities, reducing litter quality, and slowing decomposition. However, an important question remains: what controls which of these effects herbivores will have? This LTER cross-site research project addresses six major hypotheses about what controls mammalian herbivore effects on nitrogen cycling in temperate grasslands. These hypotheses suggest that herbivore effects may vary in response to productivity, the prevalence of legumes in the plant community, and the susceptibility of soil to compaction. In addition, the density of different sized herbivores and their migratory versus seasonal use of grasslands may influence nitrogen cycling. Hypotheses will be tested by measuring herbivore impacts on nitrogen cycling within an existing cross-site study of the effects of different sized herbivores on grassland biodiversity and ecosystem function. These sites encompass a wide range of productivity, legume abundance, soil types, and patterns of seasonal use by herbivores. By comparing particular pairs of sites to test specific hypotheses and examining broad patterns in herbivore effects across all sites, this study will provide unique insights that are not possible with studies at a single site. The research will allow understanding of how different herbivore species affect the sustainable production of grasslands at sites with different productivity, plant species composition and soil types. Such information is critical to evaluating the role of mammalian herbivores, including domestic livestock, in the sustainable use and conservation of grasslands doc6290 none Knops Herbivorous mammals can have profound effects on the sustainability and productivity of grasslands through their effects on nutrient cycling. Recent studies suggest that herbivores can accelerate the cycling of nitrogen by returning mineral nitrogen in urine and feces to the soil and favoring more nutrient-rich and decomposable plants. Alternatively, they can slow down nutrient cycling by modifying the species composition of plant communities, reducing litter quality, and slowing decomposition. However, an important question remains: what controls which of these effects herbivores will have? This LTER cross-site research project addresses six major hypotheses about what controls mammalian herbivore effects on nitrogen cycling in temperate grasslands. These hypotheses suggest that herbivore effects may vary in response to productivity, the prevalence of legumes in the plant community, and the susceptibility of soil to compaction. In addition, the density of different sized herbivores and their migratory versus seasonal use of grasslands may influence nitrogen cycling. Hypotheses will be tested by measuring herbivore impacts on nitrogen cycling within an existing cross-site study of the effects of different sized herbivores on grassland biodiversity and ecosystem function. These sites encompass a wide range of productivity, legume abundance, soil types, and patterns of seasonal use by herbivores. By comparing particular pairs of sites to test specific hypotheses and examining broad patterns in herbivore effects across all sites, this study will provide unique insights that are not possible with studies at a single site. The research will allow understanding of how different herbivore species affect the sustainable production of grasslands at sites with different productivity, plant species composition and soil types. Such information is critical to evaluating the role of mammalian herbivores, including domestic livestock, in the sustainable use and conservation of grasslands doc6291 none Chemistry (12) Recent improvements in diffraction hardware, theory, and software, and in computers have made diffraction methods increasingly routine for scientists, engineers, and professionals in many disciplines. It has also made them increasingly accessible to novices such as undergraduates. Experience at a variety of institutions has shown that these methods can be effectively integrated into the undergraduate curriculum in a wide variety of disciplines, including: biochemistry, biology, chemistry, geology, physics, materials science, engineering, and science teacher education. One of the biggest impediments to integrating diffraction more widely into undergraduate coursework is the lack of hands on access to appropriate diffractometers. This project is adapting and implementing several existing collaborative models from regional Predominantly Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs), and research instrumentation networks. A WEB-accessible diffraction facility that emphasizes single crystal methods but with some powder capabilities has been established at this instituion. It is dedicated to undergraduate instruction in both formal courses and undergraduate research. The facility is fully accessible over the WEB so that participating PUI faculty and their students are able to both observe and control the diffraction instruments remotely as well as access databases located at the institution. Structure solution software for use at each home site is provided as are faculty training and curriculum implementation help for the twenty two participating PUIs. Because of the operation over a distance model proposed for instrument access, this facility is particularly useful to faculty and students in geographically remote regions, to those from less well funded institutions, or to those whose disabilities make travel problematic doc6292 none The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR) will host a planning workshop that will bring together experts in the areas of networking and wireless - including satellite - communications, network administrators from the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) campuses, and field station researchers, in order to exchange and discuss information on the networking needs in the rural areas of the country. Rural areas across the nation include field stations and observatories for various scientific disciplines, as well as remote schools, including tribal colleges. This workshop will be the starting point to exchange state-of-the-art with state-of-practice information, and to discuss the projected network communication needs of the researchers, as well as to develop a consensus of probable paths to solving these needs doc6293 none Canham Hurricanes represent the dominant natural disturbance in both temperate forests of northeastern North America and the tropical forests of the Caribbean islands. A series of devastating hurricanes in the Caribbean in the past two decades has stimulated an enormous amount of research on the effects of wind disturbance on tropical forests. One of the most consistent lessons has been that the responses of tropical forests can be astonishingly swift, with recovery occurring on time scales of years or less. This suggests that hurricanes represent far less of a perturbation to tropical forests than to temperate forests. Despite the extensive body of literature generated in the wake of these storms, the relative importance of hurricanes for the structure and dynamics of tropical versus temperate forests is open to debate. The most general objective of the proposed LTER cross-site research is to follow up on a project initiated under SGER funding to develop a SORTIE model for forest dynamics following hurricane disturbance in the Caribbean, and to use the resulting model from that funding to address a broad suite of hypotheses on the effects of hurricane disturbance regimes on species diversity, community dynamics, and ecosystem structure in temperate and tropical forests. Given the likelihood that climate change will alter future patterns of hurricane frequency and intensity, this research is not as interested in documenting the effects of past storms as exploring the consequences of a broad range of variation in future storm severity and frequency. This research will take advantage of the wealth of empirical research on the ecological effects of hurricanes at two LTER sites. As in previous research with SORTIE, the basic approach will be to tightly link field studies and new methods of data analysis with model development. The proposed model will have five basic sub-models. Each of the five sub-models will be tightly linked to new empirical research or new analyses of existing LTER datasets to provide the necessary parameter values. Besides providing an integrated platform for comparison of disturbance dynamics in temperate versus tropical forests, experience suggests that the new model will play a significant role in guiding new empirical research at each of these sites doc6294 none Silliman A substantial body of literature exist which demonstrates the importance of the zone of transition, dominated by the capillary fringe, from the vadose zone into the region at and below the water table. However, there has been minimal study of the interplay of flow and transport mechanisms across this zone of transition in general, and specifically within the capillary fringe. It is here hypothesized that heterogeniety will lead to unique flow, transport and geochemical characteristics within the zone of transition related, in part, to low gas-phase permeabilities that can be present at high moisture contents. Air Entry Barriers (AEBs)and other impediments to flow and transport may form in situations in which fine-grained overlie coarse-grained sediments. During drainage, air may be prevented from entering coarse-grained sediments that are overlain by fines. During imbibition, air may be trapped within zones of coarse material overlain by fines. Such restriction on the movement of the air phase will have significant effect on and over time be affected by water-flow, chemical transport, geochemistry and microbiology in the zone of transition. The central hypothesis is that due to AEBs, the moisture content, hydraulic conductivity, and flux of fluid and chemicals within coarse-grained sediments within the ZT will depend on: (a) the pore water pressure within the coarse-grained sediments, (b) the continuity of the coarse sediments, (c) the position and continuity of the surrounding finer-grained sediments, (d) the history of fluctuation of the water table relative to both the coarse-grained sediments and the surrounding finer-grained sediments, and (e) the initial distribution of moisture content. This hypothesis will be addressed through laboratory experiments on flow and transport in homogeneous media, and in media consisting alternatively of simple layers, interconnected layers, and disconnected lenses of the coarse size fraction embedded within a fine size fraction. Discrepancy between pore water pressure and measured moisture contents, plus observation of preferential flow pathways will be used to identify the presence of AEBs doc6295 none Grew This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports a project to investigate the role of beryllium in lower crustal partial melting events. The formation of granitic liquids by partial melting deep in the Earth s crust is one of the major topics of research in igneous and metamorphic petrology today. One aspect of this sphere of research is the beginning of the process, specifically, the geochemical interaction between melts and source rocks before the melt has left the source area. One example of anatexis in metamorphic rocks affected by conditions found deep in the Earth s crust is pegmatite in the Archean ultrahigh temperature granulite-facies Napier Complex of Enderby Land, East Antarctica. Peak conditions for this granulite-facies metamorphism are estimated to have reached nearly Degrees Celsius and 11 kilobar, that is, conditions in the Earth s lower crust in Archean time. The proposed research is a study of the Napier Complex pegmatites with an emphasis on the minerals and geochemistry of beryllium. This element, which is estimated to constitute 3 ppm of the Earth s upper crust, is very rarely found in any significant concentrations in metamorphic rocks subjected to conditions of the Earth s lower crust. Structural, geochronological, and mineralogical studies will be carried out to test the hypothesis that the beryllium pegmatites resulted from anatexis of their metapelitic host rocks during the ultrahigh-temperature metamorphic event in the late Archean. Host rocks will be analyzed for major and trace elements. Minerals will be analyzed by the electron microprobe for major constituents including fluorine and by the ion microprobe for lithium, beryllium and boron. The analytical data will be used to determine how beryllium and other trace constituents were extracted from host rocks under ultrahigh-temperature conditions and subsequently concentrated in the granitic melt, eventually to crystallize out in a pegmatite as beryllian sapphirine and khmaralite, minerals not found in pegmatites elsewhere. Mineral compositions and assemblages will be used to determine the evolution and conditions of crystallization and recrystallization of the pegmatites and their host rocks during metamorphic episodes following the ultrahigh-temperature event. Monazite will be analyzed for lead, thorium and uranium to date the ages of these events. Because fluorine is instrumental in mobilizing beryllium, an undergraduate student will study the magnesium fluorphosphate wagnerite in the pegmatites in order to estimate fluorine activity in the melt as part of a senior project. The results of the present project will provide important insights on the melting process in general and on the geochemical behavior of beryllium in particular under the high temperatures and low water activities characteristic of the Earth s lower crust doc6296 none Williams, Mark W. and Diane McKnight University of Colorado -Boulder Dissolved organic nitrogen intersite comparison (DONIC) Dissolved organic nitrogen (DON) is a major component of nitrogen inputs and outputs in watersheds, yet it has not been quantified adequately in most ecosystems. This proposal offers a synthesis of what is currently known about DON, and how it may be a key indicator of ecosystem processes and responses to increased inorganic N deposition. The PIs plan to conduct work at many LTERs sites from across the globe ( Luquillo, Hubbard Brook, Bonanza Creek, Toolik Lake, McMurdo Dry Valleys, Santa Barbara Coastal, Sierra Nevada, Niwot Rigdge). The PIs also plan to bring the PIs from multiple LTER sites together for discussions of methods. The specific objectives are to determine if DON inputs and outputs are a measurable and important component of the N-cycle from cold regions to warm regions and over a wide range of inorganic inputs; evaluate whether DON output makes up a substantial fraction of dissolved N lost from ecosystems with low N availability; test whether DON export is controlled by microbial activity; explore whether the N status of an ecosystemn can be evaluated by the ratio of DOC:DON and NO3-N: DON in annual export from streams; determine the bioavailability of DON using two isolation techniques; and discriminate terrestrial and aquatic sources of DON using florescence excitation matrices of humic material doc6297 none JOERN, ANTHONY Ecological stoichiometry of North American grassland grasshoppers (Acrididae) along a latitudinal gradient Insect herbivores in grassland ecosystems encounter widely varying food quality embedded in a variable mosaic of primary production, plant species composition and nutrient dynamics. The PI s asked: how similar or how different are the underlying processes mediating these interactions in southern arid grassland compared to northern mixed-grass prairie? Do patterns associated with larger scales provide insight that cannot be obtained by studying a single or nearby grasslands? As dominant and diverse aboveground herbivores, grasshoppers are an excellent model insect herbivore to evaluate these processes for a wide array of native North American grasslands. The PI will examine constraints on grasshopper secondary production resulting from limiting nutrients across twelve sites ranging from arid grasslands in Texas to New Mexico, through a highly dynamic mid-continent set of sites comprising tallgrass, shortgrass and mixed grass prairies in Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado and Nebraska until northern mixed grass systems in South Dakota and Canada are encountered. Four LTER sites will be included in this transect (Jornada, Sevilleta, Shortgrass Steppe and Konza Prairie). Ecological stoichiometry provides the primary conceptual framework for addressing these key issues, employing the principle of mass balance to account for the regulation of limiting elements in their transfer between trophic levels. This research will examine stoichiometric elemental ratios (C:N:P) as a constraint on secondary production in grasshoppers. A series of predictions will be tested using C:N:P ratios of common grasshopper species, ingested food and grass from each of twelve sites. Sites that manipulate food quality with large experiments (fire, grazing and or nutrient additions) provide an opportunity to better identify causal relationships doc6298 none Milchunas Herbivorous mammals can have profound effects on the sustainability and productivity of grasslands through their effects on nutrient cycling. Recent studies suggest that herbivores can accelerate the cycling of nitrogen by returning mineral nitrogen in urine and feces to the soil and favoring more nutrient-rich and decomposable plants. Alternatively, they can slow down nutrient cycling by modifying the species composition of plant communities, reducing litter quality, and slowing decomposition. However, an important question remains: what controls which of these effects herbivores will have? This LTER cross-site research project addresses six major hypotheses about what controls mammalian herbivore effects on nitrogen cycling in temperate grasslands. These hypotheses suggest that herbivore effects may vary in response to productivity, the prevalence of legumes in the plant community, and the susceptibility of soil to compaction. In addition, the density of different sized herbivores and their migratory versus seasonal use of grasslands may influence nitrogen cycling. Hypotheses will be tested by measuring herbivore impacts on nitrogen cycling within an existing cross-site study of the effects of different sized herbivores on grassland biodiversity and ecosystem function. These sites encompass a wide range of productivity, legume abundance, soil types, and patterns of seasonal use by herbivores. By comparing particular pairs of sites to test specific hypotheses and examining broad patterns in herbivore effects across all sites, this study will provide unique insights that are not possible with studies at a single site. The research will allow understanding of how different herbivore species affect the sustainable production of grasslands at sites with different productivity, plant species composition and soil types. Such information is critical to evaluating the role of mammalian herbivores, including domestic livestock, in the sustainable use and conservation of grasslands doc6299 none Mills, Aaron L University of Virginia The relative importance of organic material vs. local environmental conditions on microbial decomposer communities: a cross-site comparison This work will address the issue of the relative importance of plant litter vs. local environmental conditions in determining the community composition of decomposers. Communities from 10 Atlantic estuarine sites, including four LTER sites (the Virginia Coast Reserve, Georgia Coastal site, Plum Island Estuary, Florida Everglades) and six other research sites will be used. Three types of plant litter (smooth cordgrass, red mangrove, and the locally dominant high marsh plant species) will be compared to test the effect of local environment on the decomposer community for that plant species. During decomposition, samples will be collected at 1, 2, 6, 12, and 18 months and a combination of molecular and culture techniques will be done to assess microbial communities. Cultures will be frozen and stored as a library that can be accessed and examined as needed to compare the composition of the culturable fraction of the microbial community with that obtained with the molecular methods doc6300 none Yanai Understanding the factors controlling nutrient uptake is essential to the advancement of ecosystem science and to the sound formation of environmental policy. Unfortunately, ecosystem nutrient uptake cannot be measured directly, in contrast to ecosystem inputs, outputs, and various aboveground fluxes. There are basically two approaches to estimating nutrient uptake. Uptake can be calculated by mass balance based on certain ecosystem fluxes: litterfall, root turnover, foliar leaching, and biomass increment. Alternatively, uptake can be calculated using nutrient uptake models, which depend on knowing root surface area, root uptake kinetics and the simulated concentration of the soil solution at the root surface. The potential of nutrient uptake models to provide accurate prediction has been confirmed by their success with field crops, but has yet to be demonstrated successfully in forest ecosystems. The purpose of the LTER Cross-site research project is to identify the most important gaps in our current understanding of nutrient uptake processes in forests at the ecosystem scale. The approach involves the parameterization of a nutrient uptake model and comparison of the results to ecosystem budgets of nutrient uptake across a variety of forest ecosystem types. The strength of the cross-site comparison is that different processes are likely to be important at different sites. This study will address three main issues. The first issue is the comparison of budgeted with simulated uptake will reveal the circumstances under which various model assumptions fail. Second, analysis of parameterized models will identify which parameters are most important to specify accurately. Finally, new data will be provided on uptake kinetics across a range of non-agricultural species and conditions. Both errors in parameter values and errors in model assumptions must be identified and corrected before uptake models can make useful predictions. Overall, this study will be the first to provide detailed mechanistic measurements of uptake kinetics on a variety of tree species in a different forest ecosystems doc6301 none Broadband satellite systems have an important role to play in the delivery of multimedia applications. In this proposal we concentrate on GEO (geo-synchronous) based satellite networks. GEO based systems deliver continuous services to a specific region with a single satellite. They play an ever-increasing role in the public and private Internets, due mostly to their large geographic coverage, inherent broadcast capabilities and fast deployment. They are attractive to support data, audio and video streaming; bulk data transfer such as software updates or dissemination of Web caches; and applications involving limited interactivity such as distance learning. They are also attractive to provide broadband access to users who are either beyond the reach of the terrestrial network, or have particular needs for broadcast multicast applications or fast deployment. We will focus in this proposal on Next Generation Satellite Networks that comprise one (or more) GEO satellite with some form of onboard processing (OBP). Two of the essential issues regarding broadband satellite network are 1) end-to-end resource management, and 2) network availability. Resource management is key to deliver acceptable Quality of Service (QoS) to services while providing adequate efficiency. It is central to any satellite system, be it a bent pipe or an onboard processing (OBP) satellite system. Indeed, in order to offer flexibility and efficiency to bursty applications, the capacity of the multiple access uplink has to be managed using some bandwidth on demand (BoD) scheme. We define network availability as the ability for the network to offer some level of services to some applications even during degraded periods. Most of the next generation systems will be using the Ka band, which is known for its very difficult transmission characteristics. Many solutions involving variable rate coding, power control, and or variable modulation have been proposed to make this band friendly to broadband applications. This proposal will not study directly those layer 1 2 mechanisms but rather study how their use affects BoD and more generally end-to-end resource management. Hence the final objective of our proposal is to design and evaluate end-to-end resource management for the Next Generation of Satellite Networks that interworks efficiently with the range of solutions proposed by the air-interface designer to improve the availability of the transmission. In particular, we want to understand the trade-off in terms of efficiency and system complexity. To achieve this ultimate objective, we will study: 1. Static end-to-end resource management for large GEO OBP systems. The term static refers to the fact that the coding and modulation are fixed. The focus here will be to develop and evaluate mechanisms that are scalable, robust, flexible and protect the OBP (i.e., the switch in the sky). We will build upon our extensive previous work in the domain where we developed scalable, robust, flexible end-to-end resource management for large GEO bent pipe systems. 2. Network availability. One of the main concerns of satellite network designers is to offer an appropriate level of service to the users in spite of the difficult characteristics of the frequency band. However it is not very clear what is meant by an appropriate level of service since it may vary from a user to another or from an application to another. Most of the studies have focussed on link availability without taking into account the networking and applications aspects. We believe that coordinating the lower layers with the upper layers will give us a flexible and cost-efficient solution allowing the system to deliver different levels of network availability to the users depending on their need and their willingness to pay. Hence network availability can be seen as a QoS requirement and should be defined and studied that way. 3. Designing end-to-end resource management for a system comprising layer 1 2 mechanisms to dynamically improve the uplink availability so as to offer flexible and cost efficient services to the users. We need to propose solutions and to evaluate them to ensure that the increase in complexity is worthwhile in terms of efficiency. We will also propose and study some dynamic pricing schemes integrated with the BoD so as to allow the users to indicate their willingness to pay for capacity in a context where the total available capacity is variable due to link impairment doc6302 none Waddington This award supports the development and testing of digital probes for high precision temperature measurements in boreholes in polar ice sheets. These measurements are key to obtaining calibrated paleotemperature records in the polar regions. The current state-of-the-art system is the USGS Polar Borehole Temperature Logging System (PBTS), which uses analog probe technology with the electronic package at the ice sheet surface. Strong winds can disturb the recording electronics, forcing the field team to modify logistics plans to produce high quality data. Probes that transmit digital signals up the cable would not be affected by these surface conditions, improving the efficiency of field operations. This project will adapt a recently-designed digital probe for use with the PBTS system in cold temperatures in polar drilling fluids. These probes will reduce some of the stringent hardware and procedural requirements of the current analog system. These new digital probes will be calibrated alongside the currently used sensors and will be tested at Siple Dome as part of an already-funded program of borehole temperature logging. The final product (in addition to a working borehole temperature logging system with new digital probes) will be a publication in the Journal of Glaciology describing the new probes, the comparisons, and the new research opportunities that digital probes can offer doc6303 none Smyth This is a proposal to investigate the stability, crystal chemistry and equation of state of hydrous spinel and spinelloid phases that could occur in the Transition Zone of the mantle (410-670km depth). In collaboration with colleagues at the Bavarian Geological Institute (Bayerisches Geoinstitut), the investigators will perform synthesis experiments to see if spinelloid V may exist in mantle compositions and to better refine the pressure-temperature-composition field of spinelloid IV (wadsleyite II). Preliminary experiments in hydrous systems have produced crystals of sufficient size for single-crystal diffraction methods, so run products will be analyzed by this method. They will use single-crystal X-ray diffraction measurements in the diamond anvil cell (DAC) to measure compressibilities (isothermal bulk moduli) and thermal expansion of the hydrous spinelloid observed in these experiments. Because the bulk modulus is directly related to seismic velocity, if the compressibilities of these phases differ greatly from the anhydrous modifications, it may be possible to place some constraint on the amount of OH actually present in the minerals of the Transition Zone. Samples will also be made available for collaborative studies by various spectroscopic and ultrasonic methods doc6304 none Myers This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Chris Myers of the University of Utah and Professor Tomohiro Yonder of the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan. The researchers will be undertaking a study of synthesis and verification of high performance timed circuits and systems. In order to continue to produce circuits of increasing speeds, designers are considering aggressive circuit design styles such as self-resetting or delayed-reset domino circuits. These design styles can achieve a significant improvement in circuit speed as demonstrated by their use in a gigahertz research microprocessor d(guTS) at IBM. Designers are also considering asynchronous circuits due to potential higher performance and lower power as demonstrated by the RAPPID instruction length decoder designed at Intel. This design was three times faster while using only half the power of the synchronous design. These new timed circuit styles, however, cannot be efficently and accurately analyzed using traditional static timing analysis methods. This lack of analysis tools is one of the reasons for the lack of mainstream acceptance of these design styles. The collaborators aim to develop practical tools for the synthesis and verification of timed circuit design styles. They will plan to unify the best aspects, from both groups of researchers, of their analysis and verification methodologies and then plan to develop techniques for the synthesis and verification of industrial-scale systems. These systems will include a combination of both datapath and control circuits. They will develop methods using automated abstraction in which datapath components will be verified partially and control parts completely. They will then use hierarchical information to determine how the abstraction is to be performed. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. This research advances international human resources through the participation of a graduate student. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of the research in scientific journals and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc6305 none Peters, Debra P New Mexico State University Regional variation in direct and indirect influences of animals o a Chihuahuan Desert grasslands In Chihuahuan desert grasslands, the loss of grass to shrubs and the reclamation of grasslands from shrublands are important problems in community dynamics that emerge from several direct and indirect processes. The PIs will investigate direct and indirect biotic influences on the persistence and recovery of Chihuahuan desert grass. They propose an assessment of the effects of different animal taxa on the dominant grass species, black grama Bouteloua eriopoda. The will: 1) determine the relative importance of different animal activities for several plant processes and 2) test the hypothesis that variation in local and regional patterns of grass establishment are related to variation in animal activities and abundances. They will perform a series of exclusion experiments on seeds, seedlings, and adult plants inhabiting grass- and shrub-dominated habitats within two Chihuahuan desert LTER sites (the Sevilleta and Jornada and Big Bend National Park). By comparing the effects of animal taxa where grasses are successful versus where they are not, tests of specific hypotheses by which animals influence vegetation will be performed. Specifically, they will examine four hypothesized mechanisms: a) seed loss due to predation by ants and rodents, b) seed protection and increased germination in cache pits dug by rodents, c) mortality and diminished seed production due to herbivory by small mammals and grasshoppers on seedlings and adult plants, and d) the positive effects of nutrient enrichment and or increased availability of water due to the nesting of scavenging ants under adult plants. These experiments will help us understand animal abundance and grass recruitment at broad scales. The work will clarify the role of animals in generating and maintaining patterns and dynamics in desert grasslands. It will also contribute to a multi-scale perspective on the importance of direct and indirect plant-animal interactions... a research area of ecological significance to many systems doc6306 none Shara Dr. Michael Shara is conducting an all-sky survey to discover nearby high proper motion objects in the solar neighborhood using first- and second-epoch Digitized Sky Survey data. The SUPERBLINK software tool is used to identify objects that have moved between the two image epochs, roughly spaced 40 years apart. The main goal of the project is to complete the census of lower main sequence, white dwarf and subdwarf stars in the solar neighborhood. A carefully selected subset of this sample will be targets for the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM). The entire database generated by this project is incorporated into a web-accessible resource. Funding for this project is provided through the joint NSF NASA Nearby Stars (NStars) initiative and the NSF Mathematical & Physical Sciences Directorate Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (MPS OMA doc6307 none Homogeneous Chemical Nucleation of nanoparticles Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Mark Swihart Institution: SUNY Buffalo The objective of this proposal is to construct mechanistic models of chemical reactions for use in the prediction of cluster formation leading to the production of particle nuclei. The major challenge is constructing mechanistic models is the extreme complexity created by accounting for all possible reactions, products, and reactive intermediates. Automatic generation of reaction mechanisms will be used to deal with the complexity. A system will be developed to convert a set of reactants and rules by which they react into a detailed chemical mechanisms with rate parameters. The PIs plan to focus on silicon deposition because this system is of importance in the microelectronics industry and because some experimental data on this system are available for comparison with simulations. This approach will be employed to predict silicon nanoparticle contaminant formation, which is a leading cause of yield loss, in semiconductor processing. This project will be a collaboration between the PI and co-PI (Linda Broadbelt) at Northwestern University. This work could lead to a more general predictive description of a particle formation. Model validation will be performed with limited data available in the literature. This work may be useful in predicting the effects for changing operating conditions on particle formation and contamination with the potential to increase yields of semiconductor materials doc6308 none This project will continue the analysis of data obtained by a network of autonomous magnetometers deployed on the Antarctic continent by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). The magnetometers provide information on the interaction of the solar wind with the Earth s magnetic field, an area of research that is particularly important in the context of space weather, and the effect of solar events on the operation of satellites and ground-based electronic systems. The data analysis will be a joint project among scientists at Augsburg College, the University of New Hampshire, and at BAS and will focus especially on ultra-low frequency (ULF) waves and increases in the solar wind dynamic pressure, and dawn-side events apparently related to the injection of ions from the magnetotail. Studies of irregular ULF waves, especially during magnetic storms and substorm periods are a further area of interest. These analysis efforts are highly suitable for undergraduate research participation and build on currently strong programs of faculty and student research doc6309 none Montgomery Reiners The Washington Cascades cast one of the largest climatic rain shadows in North America, with mean annual precipitation in some areas on the west side higher than 4 m yr, and on the east side lower than 0.15 m yr. We are studying the temporal relationships between mountain-building and climate in this regional setting by using a combined approach of low-temperature apatite (U-Th) He thermochronometry in the Cascades crystalline rocks themselves, and stable isotope variations in authigenic minerals in clays and carbonates in paleosols of different ages on the dry, east side of the range. In addition, through combined GIS and He dating work, we are examining the relationship between creation of Cascades topographic relief and Pleistocene-to-recent glaciation in the range, and evaluating the role of relatively recent erosional forces on orogenic exhumation. Our preliminary work indicates that He ages record much younger ages than other radiometric systems in the Cascades, suggesting a relatively recent (late Miocene at the earliest) period of exhumation, which is consistent with paleontological evidence from eastern Washington for the lack of a severe climate contrast until this time doc6310 none Klepeis Studies of convergent margins worldwide have shown that deformation patterns within continental crust vary according to crustal level and tectonic settings. This project is aimed at determining how strain was partitioned vertically from upper to lower levels of an ancient orogen where the relative strengths and rheology of the middle and lower crust changed during convergence, and will utilize a deeply eroded, early Cretaceous granulite belt in Fiordland, New Zealand. Results should provide a measure of the characteristics and kinematics of ancient lower crustal strain fields and determine how they changed vertically through the crust, thereby addressing the extent to which the upper, middle and lower crust were coupled, and the effects of a changing strength profile as orogenesis proceeded. Successful results are expected to be applicable to a wide range of tectonic doc6311 none More than 14 decades after the publication of On the Origin of Species, the processes leading to the appearance and genetic stabilization of new, consistently distinct populations remains one of the least understood of evolutionary processes. While a variety of mechanisms may be associated with genetic isolation, attention recently has focussed upon genome-level features that are both rapidly-evolving and can drastically reduce the ability of their carriers to interbreed and produce viable hybrid offspring. A variety of recent evidence implicates transposable elements (TEs) in facilitating such reproductive isolation. TEs are small (100-10kb base pairs) genetic elements that have retained their ability to move about within genomes. Investigations conducted on organisms as diverse as fruit flies and wallabies suggest that there is a positive correlation between transposable element activity and sterility in inter-strain hybrids. In order to determine how TE-mediated barriers to inter-population hybridization might evolve, it is necessary to examine the behavior of such elements in fertile hybrids and their progeny in naturally occurring hybrid zones. The goal of this project is to investigate the relationship between TE amplification and hybridity by testing for evidence of baboon endogenous virus (BaEV) transposition in a graded series of Old World Monkey hybrids in the papionin group. BaEV is an endogenous retrovirus that was once transmitted horizontally from individual to individual but now forms an integrated part of the vertically inherited genome of many Old World Monkeys. Retroviruses are one of the most complex TE forms, with large genomes that can generate copies through the intrinsically driven process of reverse transcription. This project will thus investigate the relationship between TE activity and reproductive isolation by testing BaEV amplification in papionin hybrids with varying degrees of hybrid ancestry. The specific aims of the proposed research are: to determine the degree to which BaEV amplification is correlated with hybrid sterility; to determine the degree to which BaEV amplification increases in hybrid papionins with increased evolutionary distance between parental taxa; to detect novel BaEV integrations in individuals with known parentage that may be attributable to specific hybridization events; and to determine the extent of BaEV sequence variation in a wild primate population. These objectives will be accomplished by sampling a graded series of hybrid papionins reflecting different degrees of hybrid ancestry. These data will serve as a first step in determining the contribution of TEs to reproductive isolation in papionins doc6312 none PI: Keith D. Koper, University of Arizona The proposed research focuses on seismic constraints of global variations in topography on the inner core-outer core boundary (ICB) and the core-mantle boundary (CMB). Variations in steep angle (S,P)KiKP-(S,P)cP differential travel times will be used to estimate the ellipticity of the inner and outer core, to search for short-wavelength topography on these boundaries, to provide observational bounds on the homogeneity of the liquid outer core, and to search for evidence of differential rotation of Earth s inner core. Variations in steep angle outer core differential travel times, primarily ScP-PcP, will also be used to quantify global variations in vertical mantle profiles of bulk sound velocity. An unprecedented number of steep angle differential core reflection data are available from the seismicity catalog produced by the prototype International Data Center (pIDC). Approximately 20 of the globally distributed stations that report data to the pIDC consist of arrays of short period vertical component seismometers. Array stations are markedly more sensitive to steep angle core reflections than traditional three component stations, and the azimuth and slowness observations made by array stations greatly reduce phase misidentification. By considering the differential travel times of pairs of such reflections the effects of earthquake mislocation and upper mantle heterogeneity are substantially reduced and seismic structure at the CMB and ICB is revealed doc6313 none Sharp The goal of this project is to use oxygen isotope geochemistry to quantify the temperature of crystallization of coexisting aluminum silicates (AS), andalusite, kyanite and sillimanite. These are important index minerals, and their coexistence has been used to infer pressure-temperature conditions of metamorphism. Previous investigations of triple point localities, defined by the occurrence of all three polymorphs, have relied on textural evidence for assessing whether or not the AS minerals crystallized in equilibrium. In this study, the oxygen isotope values of quartz and AS minerals from quartzites will be measured in classic triple point assemblages from New Mexico in order to address four goals: 1) Determine the temperatures of aluminum silicate formation: 2) Evaluate the degree of fluid exchange following AS crystallization: 3) Determine whether triple point assemblages actually formed over the narrow P-T range defined by the invariant equilibrium: 4) Compare the d18O values of sillimanite and fibrolite to better understand the temperature interval over which the latter forms. It is envisioned that the study will demonstrate the feasibility of a powerful tool for deciphering the timing and temperature of AS crystallization. This work will constitute the work of a Ph.D. student s thesis at the University of New Mexico doc6314 none The objective of this joint project involving the University of Michigan, Imperial College (London), and Sandia National Laboratory (Livermore) is to improve understanding and predictive capability of nitric oxide (NO) formation from the prompt (Fenimore) pathway favored in diffusion and fuel-rich flames. Chemical species critical to the prompt mechanism are measured and compared to the results from detailed kinetic models. Temperature and concentrations of NO, CH radical, and oxygen atoms are measured in a stable diffusion flame using nonintrusive laser-based diagnostics. The flame studied is a methane air diffusion flame stabilized on a Tsuji-type counterflow burner. Species measurements are made with nanosecond and picosecond laser-induced fluorescence (LIF). Temperatures are measured with coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy (CARS) and quenching is measured directly by resolving the temporal decay of the picosecond LIF signal. Calibration is performed using Rayleigh scattering (CH, O-atom) or by measuring known amounts of dopant (NO). Flame strain rates (air and fuel flows) are adjusted to provide various reaction conditions, and nitric oxide is added to the fuel to measure destruction of NO by reaction with hydrocarbons (reburn). Reduction of pollutant emissions, especially nitrogen oxides, is a key issue in the design of energy conversion devices including automobile engines, gas turbines, and home heating furnaces. Depending on flame conditions, formation of nitric oxide can proceed by two different mechanisms: the thermal (Zeldovich) mechanism or the prompt (Fenimore) mechanism. The thermal mechanism, which dominates in fuel-lean, premixed systems, is fairly well characterized. However, the prompt mechanism is poorly understood doc6315 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Conference in Continuum Mechanics and Conservation Laws Dafermos This award supports U.S. participants (invited speakers, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students) in the Conference in Continuum Mechanics and Conservation Laws on April 27-29, . A major goal of the conference is to bring together leading international researchers in the fields of conservation laws and continuum mechanics for discussion of recent advances at the boundaries of the fields. Continuum mechanics is a scientific area with well-developed mathematical theory and important applications to engineering. The theory of hyperbolic conservation laws has been developed in conjunction with applications to gas dynamics, magnetohydrodynamics, and nonlinear elasticity. In recent years there has been rapid progress in areas with connections to both subjects, such as the kinetic theory of gases, plasma physics, the mathematical theory of semiconductors, and general relativity. This conference is a timely opportunity for workers in these fields to discuss important recent results doc6316 none The author proposes to study a set of problems in harmonic analysis and related areas where the Gaussian curvature, the determinant of the differential of the Gauss map taking the point on a hypersurface to the unit normal at that point, plays an important role. More specifically, the author proposes to study the following three basic problems: regularity of averages over surfaces, distribution of lattice points in convex domains, and the existence of orthogonal exponential bases for domains in Euclidean space. In the context of averages over surfaces, we propose to find a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the Lebesgue space boundedness of these averages in terms of natural and easily computable geometric criteria. In the context of lattice points in convex domains, we propose to compute a sharp rate of growth for the discrepancy between the volume of a dilated convex body and the number of lattice points trapped inside, again in terms of natural geometric properties of the boundary. In the context of orthogonal exponential bases, we propose to make progress towards the proof of the Fuglede Conjecture, which says that a domain has orthogonal exponential basis if and only if it is possible to tile Euclidean space with disjoint translates of this domain. Combinatorial and number theoretic methods are expected to play an important role. The study of the maximal averaging operators and other similar operators in harmonic analysis is partially motivated by the following interesting question: How close can we come to recovering a set of data from the various kinds of averages of that data? The question is of potential practical value since scientists are often called upon to make predictions based on average information. For example, meteorologists make predictions about the rainfall in a particular location based on the average rainfall in years past in nearby towns. Seismologists make earthquake predictions based on the pattern of shocks in the surrounding area. The tradeoff involved in the study of these phenomena is, roughly speaking, the following. If the data is very precise, then it can, generally speaking, be recovered from any kind of a reasonable average. If the data is less precise, then we have to make sure that the averaging process compensates for the deficiencies of the data. The main thrust of this project is to study the averaging phenomenon when the data is given by a certain kind of a mathematical function, and the average is taken over a curved surface. The study of the distribution of lattice points in convex domains and the associated discrepancy function is motivated by the desire to approximate discrete information, for example integer points in the plane, by more easily computable continuous information, in this case the area. Finally, the study of orthogonal exponential bases is motivated by an important practical problem of approximating functions by trigonometric functions. These types of approximations have numerous applications in physics, engineering, and many other areas of science and technology doc6317 none An unresolved and underdeveloped area for the evolving Internet is the issue of ubiquity. Rural areas across the nation are affected by the lack of network access; solutions are either prohibitively expensive, or many years away from implementation. The research and education communities have immediate connection needs, for researchers working in remote areas (in the field, in observatories, and with autonomous telemetry sensors) and for remote educational facilities, at reasonable performance levels to the Internet. The goal of this project is to create a substantial and robust wireless backbone network for bidirectional traffic flows by expanding upon a prototype connection recently installed by the Measurement and Network Analysis Group of the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), as well as the School of Engineering and its Center for Wireless Communications (CWC). This proposal is a collaboration between network researchers and disciplinary researchers in geophysics, and other fields. Multiple different users with different impacts will help to define and understand requirements, as well as appropriate parameters for the implementation of a high performance wireless networking environment, with high performance extending beyond raw speed and including aspects of predictability, as well as spacial and temporal availability. The project is heavily leveraged with the existing network measurement and analysis activity of NLANR, as well as the seismic measurement and analysis activities at SIO. The immediate impact of providing services to researchers and telemetry stations in the field and a delivery mechanism for distance education in disadvantaged areas (in San Diego County) is clear. This network will have the technological capability to accommodate a high volume of data (for both communications and telemetry), thus increasing the scope and area of many projects currently limited by these constraints. The wireless network s primary function as an applied test bed to address distance access issues over a relatively large rural area in general, and to assess performance characteristics of such a network will result in long-term developments and advances in the area of Internet technology. The impact of this Internet Technologies project will be substantial and wide-spread. Benefits to the research and education communities - and ultimately, the public - include improved functional capabilities (across a variety of disciplines), facilitated collaborations between institutions, better and more reliable network access, and a prototype which can be emulated throughout rural areas in the U.S doc6318 none This award supports a program of ground-based geophysical measurements to map in detail the spatial variations of ice flow, accumulation rate, internal layering and ice thickness at the sites which have been identified as promising locations to drill the next deep ice core in West Antarctica. The main investigative tools are a high- and low-frequency ice penetrating radar to image the topography of internal layers and the bed, repeat GPS surveys to calculate the present day surface velocity field, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry to calculate the regional velocity field, and short firn cores to calculate present day accumulation rates. The data which will be collected will be used to as input to time-dependent ice flow and temperature models that will predict depth variation of age, layer thickness, and temperature. As well as yielding an estimate of expected conditions before drilling, the mismatch between the model prediction and data eventually recovered from the core will help infer thinning and climate (accumulation and temperature) histories for the region. The Western Divide, between the Ross Sea Embayment and the Amundsen Sea, has been identified as the region which best satisfies the criteria which have been established for a deep drilling site. Preliminary site selection using airborne geophysical methods has identified several potential drill sites on the Western Divide where the climate record should be best preserved. This work will contribute in a major way to the final site selection for the next deep ice core in West Antarctica doc6268 none Saleeby Ducea An important concern in the study of a currently active tectonic system is the role of inherited features. This project will explore the relationships between the structure and composition of the upper mantle and major surface tectonic features in the southwest Cordillera, that may be inherent from the shallow segment of the Laramide slab having been emplaced beneath the Mojave Desert region, thus strengthening against the modern plate juncture system. To the north, the intact batholithic segment in the Sierra Nevada retained its high-density keel which was susceptible to delamination and foundering into the mantle as rifting and transform tectonic propagated into the region. Results should help explain the dramatically different response of the Sierra Nevada and the Mojave desert to onset of the modern tectonic system doc6320 none Stephen Lepp This is a collaborative research project with Drs Phillip Stancil, (the University of Georga, AST ), and Alexander Dalgarno, (Harvard University, AST ). This program will construct models to investigate the formation of the first cosmological objects. These models will describe the history of the first bound objects to form from the primordial gas in the early universe. They will include the coupled evolution of the time-dependent, nonequilibrium chemical, atomic and molecular level populations as well as the nonequilibrium rovibrational level populations of the molecules with contributions due to chemical reactions in the primordial gas. The models can be used to suggest strategies for observing structures in the early universe in the Infrared from space. This program will use astrophysical modeling to investigate the formation of the first cosmological objects. These models will compute the coupled evolution of the time-dependent nonequilibrium chemical, atomic and molecular level population, thermal, and hydrodynamic history of the first bound objects to form from the primordial gas. This will be the first time such extensive, coupled evolution models have been attempted. In addition, this project will investigate the explicit nonequilibrium rovibrational level populations of the primordial molecules with contributions due to chemical reactions, resulting in an improved determination of molecular cooling and the prediction of the emission spectra of primordial clouds. The emission spectra will be used to suggest the most likely ways these objects may be observed with the next generation of infrared space telescopes. The needed atomic and molecular data and derived cooling functions will be assembled and posted on the World Wide Web. The data that is not available, primarily involving rovibrational state-specific molecular collisions, will be computed with established quantum-mechanical techniques. The studies of the primordial gas will be extended to follow protogalaxy and protostar formation under increasing metallicity and radiation field conditions to the beginning of the era of Population II. These studies will be relevant to the interpretation and planning of future space-based observations with NGST, SIRTF, FIRST, and Astro-F and ground-based telescopes. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc6321 none Liu This grant supports theoretical and computational research on the properties of disordered systems. In particular, research will be done on the concept of jamming. Many systems with no quenched disorder can jam, i.e., develop a yield stress or an immeasurably long stress relaxation time in a disordered state. These systems include supercooled liquids, colloidal suspensions, granular materials, emulsions and foams. It has recently been suggested that the onset of jamming might lead to some degree of universality. This is the concept of jamming. Specifically, it has been suggested that different systems should show similar behavior as they jam, and that each system has a jamming phase diagram. The concept of jamming will be explored using numerical simulations on two very different systems that both exhibit transitions to constrained dynamics. The first is a quiescent thermal system, namely a binary Lennard-Jones mixture. This model has been shown to jam as the temperature is lowered to the glass transition. The second system to be studied is a driven, athermal system that has been shown to jam as the shear stress is lowered to the yield stress or as the density of particles is raised above close-packing. One objective of the proposed research is to exploit the idea of jamming to gain new insight into the glass transition by applying recent ideas from granular materials (namely force chains) to supercooled liquids. We will also test the idea of jamming by calculating the complete jamming phase diagram for a binary Lennard-Jones mixture. Finally, we will test whether shear-induced fluctuations can be described by an enhanced effective temperature in binary Lennard-Jones mixtures. The idea of an effective temperature is already widely used to describe unjammed granular materials and needs to be examined carefully. At a minimum, we will learn much more about the behavior of two intriguing systems (supercooled liquids and sheared athermal packings), even if we discover that their connection is only superficial. If the concept of jamming is correct, however, it will be extremely powerful because ideas derived from one system will be applicable to another. The recognition that different systems can be viewed within a broader framework has revolutionalized a number of fields in the past. It is important to explore the avenue of jamming because it may lead to new and deeper understanding of long unsolved problems such as the glass transition. %%% This grant supports theoretical and computational research on the properties of disordered systems. In particular, research will be done on the concept of jamming. Jamming commonly occurs to most of us in the form of traffic jams. As too many vehicles try to pass through a constrained path, the smooth flow of traffic becomes stopped or jammed. Many physical systems comprised of many particles can also jam, i.e., develop a yield stress or an immeasurably long stress relaxation time in a disordered state. These systems include supercooled liquids, colloidal suspensions, granular materials, emulsions and foams. It has recently been suggested that the onset of jamming might lead to some degree of universality among these diverse systems. This is the concept of jamming. Specifically, it has been suggested that different systems should show similar behavior as they jam, and that each system has a jamming phase diagram. In this research the concept of jamming will be explored using numerical simulations on two very different systems that both exhibit transitions to constrained dynamics doc6322 none This Small Grant for Exploratory Research will examine the role of state agents, specifically customs officers, in the management of international boundaries and the implications of this process for the expression of state sovereignty in Ghana. Ghana has recently and successfully implemented market reform policies and promoted liberal foreign trade and investment. The research will investigate how economic liberalization is reflected in and has shaped state boundary control and construction. Three sites - the international airport, a major national border site, and a peripheral border site - will be compared to analyze how different types of global commerce, as well as variation in state surveillance, border officers training, and local regional integration, impact state border management. Methods include policy analysis, extensive observation and documentation of day-to-day border activities, decision analysis of border agent activities, structured interviewing of agents, and survey data analysis. This project presents a number of methodological challenges due to the political sensitivity and secrecy surrounding border activities. The researcher has research affiliation and research clearance from the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana. This study will contribute to our sociopolitical understanding of the nation state and its efforts to maintain sovereignty in a highly transnational and global world doc6323 none White This award supports a project to examine and compare high resolution methane concentration and isotopic histories during the last millennium from the Law Dome ice core in coastal Antarctica. Atmospheric methane is an important chemical component of both the stratosphere and troposphere, and is a major contributor to the anthropogenic enhancement of the greenhouse effect. Quantifying the budget of methane has proven difficult because of the wide range of sources and locations from which it is emitted. Measurements of the atmospheric concentration and the carbon isotopic composition of methane have enabled a greater understanding of the controls over the modern methane budget. Studies of the methane budget prior to and during industrialization and the emergence of large human populations can help in the understanding of the controls on this budget. Measurements of the carbon-13:carbon 12 ratio and of the carbon isotopic composition (d 13C) of methane in air from the last millenium trapped in polar ice will be made to aid in understanding of the paleo-methane budget. This is a collaborative effort between the stable isotope laboratory and the University of Colorado and the New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, the Australian Antarctic program and the NOAA carbon cycle group. The Australian and New Zealand groups will provide the ice and past results of Antarctic firn air measurements and the stable isotope lab will provide expertise on isotopic measurements of very small firn air samples. The carbon cycle group will assist in the calibration of standards and analysis of firn air samples. All groups will participate in the modeling and interpretation of results doc6324 none Funding is requested to support a student-organized symposium to be held at the next annual meeting (December 26-30, ) of the Western Society of Naturalists. The symposium, which is entitled Natural History in the 21st Century , will explore the role of natural history in modern biology. The proposed speakers represent diverse fields, ranging from evolutionary biology and ecology to molecular biology; some work in terrestrial systems and some in marine systems. The common thread uniting these scientists from different disciplines is the important role that an understanding of the natural history of the systems they study has played in the discoveries they have made. Therefore, unlike most symposia at ecology or evolutionary biology meetings that focus on specific topics within a field, this symposium seeks to cut across diverse biological fields to discuss an issue relevant to all of them: the role that natural history can play in research. At a time when the explosion of high-tech laboratory approaches and of sophisticated statistical designs capture our attention, it is important to re-examine what role, if any, natural history should play in a variety of biological disciplines. The purpose of the symposium is not only to explore this important and timely topic, but also to provide students with the valuable experience of organizing and running their own symposium and participating in the governance of a scientific society doc6325 none Physics (13) More than 23,000 students are enrolled nationwide in accredited architecture programs. Most of these programs require their students to take a course of introductory physics, for three main reasons: (1) Architects need to use concepts and methods of physics in their profession. (2) As a component of liberal arts education, physics provides a framework for understanding the physical world. (3) As an exact science, physics develops analytical and quantitative thinking skills. Most architecture programs do not offer a special physics-for-architects course, and their students take physics with students from other disciplines. The drawbacks to architecture students from this situation are significant: They do not learn all the basic physics concepts that they need professionally, while they learn in detail concepts that they do not need. There is not enough time to introduce concepts that are important as general education. The amount of time devoted to problem solving is not optimized for the specific needs of architects. The objective of this project is to develop a text, based on which physics-for-architects courses could be taught. The text, written from the perspective of architects, balances the three required components: relevant professional knowledge, general education, and thinking skills. The availability of such a text encourages architecture programs nationwide to offer physics-for-architects courses. This advances the knowledge and understanding of physics and scientific thinking within the architecture community. During the entire developmental phases, the project is undergoing formative and summative evaluations, both in-house - by students that take the course and by the architecture and physics curriculum committees, and externally - in architecture programs that field-test the material doc6326 none Wright This is a project to study the Caribbean-South American oblique arc-continent collision zone using various geologic (mapping, structure), geochemical (Ar-Ar and U-Pb Geochronology), and seismic (active MCS with onshore offshore recording using OBS instruments, passive array) techniques. There will also be a geodynamic modeling study that, very innovatively, includes the dynamics of crust-mantle interaction. The overall goal of the project is to understand further the geometry and chronology of a world class, arc-continent accretion event. Seosmic geological cross-sections are to be derived for several transects across the orogen at different ages of collision. The group of investigators include highly capable seismologists in both active and passive seismology, as well as geologists familiar with the orogenic developments on land. The cooperation with Venezuelan scientists and students is excellent doc6327 none PI: Sankaran Sundaresan Institution: Princeton University Proposal Number: Multiphase reactors for classic applications such as fluid catalytic cracking are still evolving. Reliable multiphase reactor models that can be used with confidence for improving existing processes and scaleup of new processes can benefit greatly by applying the latest computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques. This grant is to provide support to subsidize ten graduate students attending Chemical Reaction Engineering VII: Computational Fluid Dynamics, which will be held in Quebec City, Canada. The purpose of this conference will be to take stock of the state-of-the-art and identify critical physics and deployment needs for the next 5-10 years. The technical program will include plenaries by leaders in the fields of single-phase reacting flow and various multiphase flows and presentation by CFD vendors and industrial practitioners doc6328 none Lake sediments provide a temporal record of surface and lacustrine processes influenced by environmental and climatic changes. Since environmental changes affect the biological communities in and around lakes, evidence of local and regional environmental histories can be found in the chemical composition of organic material preserved in their sediments. The extreme climatic changes associated with glacial-interglacial transitions had profound ecological impacts, which are recorded in lake sediments. The objectives of this project are to understand how and at what rates lacustrine ecosystems were established in newly created post-glacial lakes, and to investigate the relationship between lake ecosystem and watershed evolution. In order to meet these objectives, sediment cores spanning the whole late Pleistocene-Holocene time interval will be collected from post-glacial lakes in New England. Analyses that will be performed to characterize the sedimentary organic matter include: carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes, organic carbon and nitrogen content, C N ratios, and hydrogen and oxygen indices. Samples of present-day watershed and lake plants will also be collected for each of the cored lakes. This modern dataset will provide a base for the interpretation of the sedimentary records. The proposed study has significant potential impacts. If, as hypothesized, geochemical records such as those provided by carbon isotopes reflect the individualistic response of the developing lake systems to the local geology, hydrology, and biota, these factors must be considered before attempting correlation of environmental climate proxies on a local, regional, and global scale. Results will also provide constraints on how much time is needed for lake ecosystems to recover from extreme natural or anthropogenic disturbances doc6329 none A collaborative project: Thickness, Extent, and Basal Conditions of the Scandinavian Ice Sheet Around the Last Glacial Maximum (Proposal Nr. ) by David M. Mickelson and Paul Cutler (Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Wisconsin-Madison) We will reconstruct the thickness, extent, and subglacial environment of the Scandinavian Ice Sheet (SIS) from ~32 ka to ~10 ka. Four still controversial aspects will be considered in the study: First, what was the thickness of the ice sheet at the last glacial maximum (LGM), and did ice-free regions exist in western Norway? Second, is it physically reasonable to interpret geomorphic evidence from the central parts of the ice sheet as indicating a cold-based ice sheet through most of glacial time? Third, what was the extent of the eastern margin of the ice sheet in Russia at 21 ka - a time for which no geomorphic evidence exists, but a key time in GCM simulations of past climates. Fourth, what were the relative contributions of climate and internal cycles to regulating ice dynamics, and what was the role of the SIS in a global context? To answer these questions, we will focus our efforts on two key regions of the SIS (western Norway, and a transect from northern Norway eastwards into Russia) where we will collect samples for preconsolidation tests and cosmogenic dating. The results from field work as well as other available geologic and climate data will be incorporated into a two-dimensional, time-dependent flowband ice-sheet model doc6330 none Considerable work has been done in devising mechanisms for providing service guarantees within a network. These schemes can be broadly classified into two categories, schemes that require maintaining state for each flow and schemes that do not require maintaining state for each flow withing the network. Integrated services architecture and differentiated services architecture and differentiated services architecture are prime examples of such approaches. Both the approaches have their advantages and proponents. This proposal aims to investigate approaches that fall in between two extremes, where a network switch may be able to maintain state for a fixed number of flows (possibly less than the number of flows it serves). This proposal looks at the services that can be provided by a limited amount of state. The proposal plans to pursue the general direction of investigating new approaches for providing QOS with a limited amount of state. Our initial work has identified the following guiding principles: The provided service needs to be flexible i.e., should be able to work with any amount of state (relative to the number of flows). The provided service needs to be scalable i.e., increased amount of state should improve QOS. The provided service needs to be additive i.e., as more network components employ it, QOS should be improved. The proposal plans to investigate mechanisms that can provide the following QOS: Identify and limit the resource consumptions of non-responsive flows. Provide fair sharing of bandwidth. Provide bandwidth allocations to different flows. As a first step, we propose to employ Sampling and Caching in addition to queue and buffer management techniques at a router to enhance the QoS. The proposed mechanism uses caching to deal with the limited amount of state and uses sampling to select flows for which individual state is maintained. Our preliminary results show that sampling and caching can be effectively used for containing non-responsive flows and fair sharing of bandwidth. The proposal plancs to study the effectiveness and feasibility of employing partial state in currently defined architectures such as IntServ and DiffServ. The proposal also plans to study if partial state can be used to provide delay and jitter service. Besides studying mechanisms, the proposal also plans to do both trace-driven and statistical analysis of usefulness of partial state. Available network traces will be used to study the impact of state on the amount of work to be done at a network element and the QOS impact of such mechanisms. We also plan to analyze partial state with well understood models of network traffic to see if we can make qualitative conclusions about the impact of partial state doc6331 none The IEEE INFOCOM Conference on Computer Communications will be held in Anchorage, Alaska, during April 22-26, . This preeminent technical conference is the primary venue for presenting new research results in the area of computer communications, and is widely attended by researchers and practitioners in the field. Attending conferences such as INFOCOM is of paramount importance for the development of graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and faculty members. Participants have the opportunity to present their work, attend panel and keynote sessions, and interact with hundreds of others performing leading-edge research in the field. This proposal requests funding to aid approximate twelve graduate students, post-docs, and junior faculty in the United States in attending this premiere conference doc6332 none Alley This award provides three years of support to use a broad, adaptable, multi-parameter approach, using a range of techniques including artificial neural networks to seek the relations between meteorological conditions and the snow pit and ice core records they produce. Multi-parameter, high resolution, ice core data already in hand or now being collected reflect snow accumulation, atmospheric chemistry, isotopic fractionation, and other processes, often with subannual resolution. The West Antarctic sites from which such data are available will be used as starting points for back-trajectory analyses in reanalysis data products to determine the meteorological conditions feeding the data stream. The artificial neural nets will then be used to look for optimal relations between these meteorological conditions and their products. Previous work has demonstrated the value of reanalysis products in determining snow accumulation, of back trajectory analyses in understanding glaciochemistry, and of artificial neural nets in linking meteorological conditions and their products. Preliminary work shows that neural nets are successful in downscaling from reanalysis products to automatic weather station data in West Antarctica, enabling interpolation of site-specific data to improve understanding of recent changes in West Antarctic climate doc6333 none Hodges One way to explore the thermal structure of the Earth s crust over geologic timescales is by the judicious application of well-calibrated isotopic thermochronometers. Because the thermal structure of the upper crust reflects surface topography, low-temperature thermochronology also provides a powerful tool for studying paleotopography, and thus landscape evolution in mountainous terrains. A recent explosion in the application of the (U-Th) He apatite thermochronometer, which has a nominal closure temperature of ~70 C, has catalyzed a new era of research that integrates tectonic geomorphology with isotope geochemistry. However, high-fidelity reconstruction of topographic evolution over geologic timescales requires a more complete understanding of time-temperature histories than is currently provided by existing thermochronometers. In particular, we have relatively few ways of recovering thermal histories over the 200-300 degrees C interval. This proposal presents a program of laboratory investigations aimed at evaluating two new thermochronometers that may improve the situation: (U-Th) He monazite and xenotime. The rare-earth phosphates monazite and xenotime typically contain high concentrations of U and Th and thus have the potential of accumulating substantial radiogenic 4He over short timescales (104-105 yr). Calculations of nominal (U-Th) He closure temperatures for these minerals using the ionic porosity model for rare-gas diffusion in minerals suggests that these systems may be useful thermochronometers over the ~200-350 degrees C temperature range. We are fortunate to have extensive collections of both monazite and xenotime at MIT as a consequence of a vigorous research program in U-Pb geochronology, and thus we are able to propose a series of basic 4He diffusion experiments that would be conducted on naturally occurring samples representing a broad range of compositions. Some of these experiments will focus on diffusivity as a function of grain size, others on the influence of compositional variability. A significant question, given the high concentrations of U and Th in these minerals, is the extent to which their 4He diffusion systematics is affected by radiation damage, and this will be evaluated explicitly through a series of experiments. Based on in-house experience with monazite and xenotime microsampling procedures, we also have designed a set of empirical tests of the computational method commonly used to correct (U-Th) He dates for alpha ejection. Collectively, these studies should permit a comprehensive evaluation of the viability of rare-earth phosphates (U-Th) He thermochronometry doc6334 none This award is for the partial support of the Southeastern-Atlantic Regional Conference on Differential Equations (SEARCDE) that has met annually since . This year conference will cover broad range of topics in the areas of ordinary and partial differential equations, numerical methods, inverse problems. The internationally recognized mathematicians: Jerry Bona (Texas A&M), Eric Carlen (Georgia Tech) and James Glimm (SUNY Stony Brook) are invited as plenary speakers. SEARCDE are traditionally providing support to young investigators and women doc6335 none The PI proposes to organize and carry out the VII International Workshop on Advanced Computing and Analysis Techniques in Physics Research. The goals of the workshop are to discuss issues in advanced scientific computing and foster closer interactions between computer scientists and physicists with the hope of generating initiatives that will have a significant beneficial impact on research doc6336 none This project is investigating the impact that experimentation with nanotechnology has on middle, secondary, and university students learning of science and perceptions about science. The enabling tool of this project is the nanoManipulator (nM), a device to receive visual and haptic feedback from investigations of nanometer-sized objects. In a series of studies involving scientists and students engaged in collaborative guided inquiry experiences, the research team is researching the role of multiple representations (visual or haptic) on the learning of scientific concepts of students with varying cognitive, affective, motivational, and sociological characteristics. The study is also examining the cognitive and affective outcomes on students perceptions of the nature of science and scientists. In addition, members of the project team are exploring the development of a low-cost alternative to the current nM research tool doc6337 none Grunow This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports a collaborative research project between the University of California-Santa Cruz, the University of Texas-Austin, and the Ohio State University to investigate sediment samples recovered from the base of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). West Antarctica is a remote polar region but its dynamic ice sheet, complicated tectonic history, and the sedimentary record of Cenozoic glaciation make it of particular interest to glaciologists and geologists. Glaciologists are concerned with the possibility of significant near-future changes in mass balance of the WAIS that may contribute to the ongoing global sea level rise. Geologists are investigating in West Antarctica the fundamental process of continental extension and are constructing models of a polar marine depositional system using this region as the prime modern example. The subglacial part of West Antarctica has escaped direct geological investigations and all that is known about subglacial geology comes from geophysical remote sensing. Recent acquisitions of new, high-quality geophysical data have led to generation of several enticing models. For instance, subglacial presence of high-magnitude, short-wavelength magnetic anomalies has prompted the proposition that there may be voluminous ( 1 million cubic km), Late Cenozoic flood basalts beneath the ice sheet. Another important model suggests that the patterns of fast ice streaming (~100 meters year) and slow ice motion (~1-10 meters year) observed within the WAIS are controlled by subglacial distribution of sedimentary basins and resistant bedrock. These new geophysics-based models should be tested with direct observations because they are of such great importance to our understanding of the West Antarctic tectonic history and to our ability to predict the future behavior of the WAIS. This research is designed as a pilot study to provide new geologic data, which may help to test the recent models inferred from geophysical observations. The new constraints on subglacial geology and on its interactions with the WAIS will be obtained through petrological and geochemical analyses of basal and subglacial sediments collected previously from seven localities. This investigation will take place in the context of testing the following three hypotheses: (A) the provenance of bedrock clasts in the glacial sediment samples is primarily from West Antarctica, (B) some clasts and muds from the West Antarctic subglacial sediments have been derived by erosion of the (inferred) subglacial Late Cenozoic flood basalts, and (C) the sediments underlying the West Antarctic ice streams were generated by glacial erosion of preglacial sedimentary basins but the sediments recovered from beneath the slow-moving parts of the WAIS were produced through erosion of resistant bedrock. The individual hypotheses will be tested by collecting data on: (A) petrology, geochemistry and age of granitoid clasts, (B) petrology, geochemistry and age of basaltic clasts combined with mud geochemistry, and (C) clay mineralogy paragenesis combined with textural maturity of sand and silt grains. The results of these tests will help evaluate the interesting possibility that subglacial geology may have first-order control on the patterns of fast ice flow within the WAIS. The new data will also help to determine whether the subglacial portion of West Antarctica is a Late Cenozoic flood basalt province. By combining glaciological and geological aspects of West Antarctic research the proposed collaborative project will add to the ongoing U.S. effort to create a multidisciplinary understanding of this polar region doc6338 none Constable Lateral variations in mantle electrical conductivity provide insight into mantle convection, the fate of subducting slabs, the distribution of mantle plumes, and the nature of the transition zone from upper to lower mantle. Mantle electrical conductivity traditionally has been studied using frequency-domain response functions derived from Fourier analysis of permanent geomagnetic observatory time series. This method is limited however by the sparse and geographically irregular observatory distribution. Magnetic satellites, which record continuous spatiotemporal magnetic fluctuations, offer an opportunity to overcome this limitation since they sample the globe completely. The investigators have proposed to develop a time-domain 3D spherical Earth induction code and use data from the MAGSAT and Oersted satellites to investigate 3D variations in upper mantle electrical conductivity doc6339 none Luyendyk et.al.: Bartek: Diebold: This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports a collaborative research program in marine geology and geophysics in the southern central and eastern Ross Sea. The project will conduct sites surveys for drilling from the Ross Ice Shelf into the seafloor beneath it. Many of the outstanding problems concerning the evolution of the East and West Antarctic Ice Sheets, Antarctic climate, global sea level, and the tectonic history of the West Antarctic Rift System can be addressed by drilling into the seafloor of the Ross Sea. Climate data for Cretaceous and Early Cenozoic time are lacking for this sector of Antarctica. Climate questions include: Was there any ice in Late Cretaceous time? What was the Antarctic climate during the Paleocene-Eocene global warming? When was the Cenozoic onset of Antarctic glaciation, when did glaciers reach the coast and when did they advance out onto the margin? Was the Ross Sea shelf non-marine in Late Cretaceous time; when did it become marine? Tectonic questions include: What was the timing of the Cretaceous extension in the Ross Sea rift; where was it located? What is the basement composition and structure? Where are the time and space limits of the effects of Adare Trough spreading? Another drilling objective is to sample and date the sedimentary section bounding the mapped RSU6 unconformity in the Eastern Basin and Central Trough to resolve questions about its age and regional extent. Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) Leg 28 completed sampling at four drill sites in the early s but had low recovery and did not sample the Early Cenozoic. Other drilling has been restricted to the McMurdo Sound area of the western Ross Sea and results can be correlated into the Victoria Land Basin but not eastward across basement highs. Further, Early Cenozoic and Cretaceous rocks have not been sampled. A new opportunity is developing to drill from the Ross Ice Shelf. This is a successor program to the Cape Roberts Drilling Project. One overriding difficulty is the need for site surveys at drilling locations under the ice shelf. This project will overcome this impediment by conducting marine geophysical drill site surveys at the front of the Ross Ice Shelf in the Central Trough and Eastern Basin. The surveys will be conducted a kilometer or two north of the ice shelf front where recent calving events have resulted in a southerly position of the ice shelf edge. In several years the northward advance of the ice shelf will override the surveyed locations and drilling could be accomplished. Systems to be used include swath bathymetry, gravity, magnetics, chirp sonar, high resolution seismic profiling, and 48 fold seismics. Cores will be collected to obtain samples for geotechnical properties, to study sub-ice shelf modern sedimentary processes, and at locations where deeper section is exposed. This survey will include long profiles and detailed grids over potential drill sites. Survey lines will be tied to existing geophysical profiles and DSDP 270. A recent event that makes this plan timely is the calving of giant iceberg B-15 (in March, ) and others from the ice front in the eastern Ross Sea. This new calving event and one in have exposed 16,000 square kilometers of seafloor that had been covered by ice shelf for decades and is not explored. Newly exposed territory can now be mapped by modern geophysical methods. This project will map geological structure and stratigraphy below unconformity RSU6 farther south and east, study the place of Roosevelt Island in the Ross Sea rifting history, and determine subsidence history during Late Cenozoic time (post RSU6) in the far south and east. Finally the project will observe present day sedimentary processes beneath the ice shelf in the newly exposed areas doc6340 none Stern This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports a collaborative research project between the University of California-Santa Cruz, the University of Texas-Austin, and the Ohio State University to investigate sediment samples recovered from the base of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). West Antarctica is a remote polar region but its dynamic ice sheet, complicated tectonic history, and the sedimentary record of Cenozoic glaciation make it of particular interest to glaciologists and geologists. Glaciologists are concerned with the possibility of significant near-future changes in mass balance of the WAIS that may contribute to the ongoing global sea level rise. Geologists are investigating in West Antarctica the fundamental process of continental extension and are constructing models of a polar marine depositional system using this region as the prime modern example. The subglacial part of West Antarctica has escaped direct geological investigations and all that is known about subglacial geology comes from geophysical remote sensing. Recent acquisitions of new, high-quality geophysical data have led to generation of several enticing models. For instance, subglacial presence of high-magnitude, short-wavelength magnetic anomalies has prompted the proposition that there may be voluminous ( 1 million cubic km), Late Cenozoic flood basalts beneath the ice sheet. Another important model suggests that the patterns of fast ice streaming (~100 meters year) and slow ice motion (~1-10 meters year) observed within the WAIS are controlled by subglacial distribution of sedimentary basins and resistant bedrock. These new geophysics-based models should be tested with direct observations because they are of such great importance to our understanding of the West Antarctic tectonic history and to our ability to predict the future behavior of the WAIS. This research is designed as a pilot study to provide new geologic data, which may help to test the recent models inferred from geophysical observations. The new constraints on subglacial geology and on its interactions with the WAIS will be obtained through petrological and geochemical analyses of basal and subglacial sediments collected previously from seven localities. This investigation will take place in the context of testing the following three hypotheses: (A) the provenance of bedrock clasts in the glacial sediment samples is primarily from West Antarctica, (B) some clasts and muds from the West Antarctic subglacial sediments have been derived by erosion of the (inferred) subglacial Late Cenozoic flood basalts, and (C) the sediments underlying the West Antarctic ice streams were generated by glacial erosion of preglacial sedimentary basins but the sediments recovered from beneath the slow-moving parts of the WAIS were produced through erosion of resistant bedrock. The individual hypotheses will be tested by collecting data on: (A) petrology, geochemistry and age of granitoid clasts, (B) petrology, geochemistry and age of basaltic clasts combined with mud geochemistry, and (C) clay mineralogy paragenesis combined with textural maturity of sand and silt grains. The results of these tests will help evaluate the interesting possibility that subglacial geology may have first-order control on the patterns of fast ice flow within the WAIS. The new data will also help to determine whether the subglacial portion of West Antarctica is a Late Cenozoic flood basalt province. By combining glaciological and geological aspects of West Antarctic research the proposed collaborative project will add to the ongoing U.S. effort to create a multidisciplinary understanding of this polar region doc6341 none The goal of this project is to improve our ability to track how students solve mathematical problems. This research will use eye tracking to make real-time inferences about what the student is thinking and fMRI imaging to make inferences about different styles of problem solving. This research is done in the context of both the ACT-R theory of human cognition, which allows us to produce computational models of cognition, and a series of cognitive tutors for mathematics education, which are based on the ACT-R theory. The ACT-R theory is a theory of how the cognitive system adaptively uses procedural and declarative knowledge to achieve its goals. The research will focus on the algebra tutor that is currently in use in high schools and is being adapted for use in middle schools. The research will be concerned with the effect of different mathematical representations on problem solving and with different strategies for mathematical problem solving. There will be three lines of research. One, involving eye movements, will document the instructional opportunities associated with eye movements in the context of the cognitive tutors. It will particularly focus on the eye movements associated with competent use of graphical, tabular, and symbolic representations of functions. The second line of research, involving fMRI brain imaging, will study brain activation markers of the course of mathematical problem solving. It will particularly focus on distinguishing between students who use an informal, verbal form of reasoning with students who use a symbolic, visual form of reasoning. This line will also look at how we can merge information from imaging and eye scanning to make both methodologies more effective. The third line of research will study how one can use the information from fMRI scanning and eye tracking to produce more effective instruction. The three lines of research will converge on a culminating study that attempts to improve the effectiveness of the middle school tutor. It will first use fMRI imaging to identify the learning strategies of individual students and then collect real-time eye movement to guide instruction as students are learning. This will demonstrate how we can use some of the new emerging sensing technology to improve mathematics education doc6342 none The PI will examine extended range seasonal prediction with emphasis on seasonal tropical cyclone activity. He will study four areas: extended-range forecasting of total incidence and US landfalling of tropical cyclones, extended-range forecasting of intraseasonal (month-to-month) tropical cyclone variability, expanded analysis of the nature and role of stratospheric QBO-linked modulation of tropical weather and tropical cyclone activity, and analysis of the role of SST anomalies in the northeast Pacific (West and South of Mexico and Central America) in relation to seasonal trends in Atlantic tropical cyclone activity. This research is important because it may lead to improved predictions on storms and hurricanes. This may lead to an improvement in mitigating the effects of such extreme events both in terms of human lives and the economy doc6343 none Gene flow occurs whenever two human populations come in contact. Thus, virtually all human populations are genetically dynamic, changing in their composition over time. The African-American population is the result of gene flow between two other identifiable biological groups: West Africans and American of European descent. This project will utilize dental characteristics to trace genetic relationship among these three groups. Characteristics of dental morphology, such as shovel-shaped incisors and Carabelli s trait, are useful for this purpose because they are highly heritable, do not remodel during life (although they can be lost to wear or pathology), and can be compared equally among samples from past and present populations. The results of this research will provide new knowledge about human microevolution in a biocultural setting. By analyzing a variety of samples from each biological group, observations will be made on patterns of genetic change through time and space. Additionally, by comparing the information from this study to other analyses of admixture in African Americans it will be possible to extend our knowledge of the history of the American population. Finally, the product of this study will include tables of dental trait frequencies in each of the three groups. This information is not currently available for African Americans and Americans of European descent doc6344 none During the past few decades of oceanographic research, it has been recognized that significant variations in biogeochemical processes occur among years. Interannual variations in the Southern Ocean are known to occur in ice extent and concentration, in the composition of herbivore communities, and in bird and marine mammal distributions and reproductive success. However, little is known about the interannual variations in production of phytoplankton or the role that these variations play in the food web. This project will collect time series data on the seasonal production of phytoplankton in the southern Ross Sea, Antarctica. Furthermore, it will assess the interannual variations of the production of the two major functional groups of the system, diatoms and Phaeocystis Antarctica, a colonial haptophyte. The Ross Sea provides a unique setting for this type of investigation for a number of reasons. For example, a de facto time-series has already been initiated in the Ross Sea through the concentration of a number of programs in the past ten years. It also is well known that the species diversity is reduced relative to other systems and its seasonal production is as great as anywhere in the Antarctic. Most importantly, seasonal production of both the total phytoplankton community (as well as its two functional groups) can be estimated from late summer nutrient profiles. The project will involve short cruises on the US Coast Guard ice breakers in the southern Ross Sea that will allow the collection of water column nutrient and particulate after data at specific locations in the late summer of each of five years. Additionally, two moorings with in situ nitrate analyzers moored at fifteen will be deployed, thus collecting for the first time in the in the Antarctic a time-series of euphotic zone nutrient concentrations over the entire growing season. All nutrient data will be used to calculate seasonal production for each year in the southern Ross Sea and compared to previously collected information, thereby providing an assessment of interannual variations in net community production. Particulate matter data will allow us to estimate the amount of export from the surface layer by late summer, and therefore calculate the interannual variability of this ecosystem process. Interannual variations of seasonal production (and of the major taxa of producers) are a potentially significant feature in the growth and survival of higher trophic levels within the food web of the Ross Sea. They are also important in order to understand the natural variability in biogeochemical processes of the region. Because polar regions such as the Ross Sea are predicted to be impacted by future climate change, biological changes are also anticipated. Placing these changes in the context of natural variability is an essential element of understanding and predicting such alterations. This research thus seeks to quantify the natural variability of an Antarctic coastal system, and ultimately understand its causes and impacts on food webs and biogeochemical cycles of the Ross Sea doc6345 none With the tremendous growth of the Internet and the ability to transport information at very high data rates has come the realization that traditional assumptions on the stochastic nature of network traffic ows are inadequate. A number of recent studies have demonstrated that long-range-dependence is an important characteristic of traffic ows in current networking infrastructures. On the other hand, the performance of networks and their ability to offer Quality of Service (QoS) depend on accurately capturing (and exploiting) probabilistically rare phenomena. Studies of network performance with long-range-dependent inputs are still very much in their infancy, and to-date have addressed only the computation stationary buffer over ow probabilities. In contrast, there is a crucial need to study the rare excursions of the underlying stochastic pro- cesses which capture the salient characteristics of network ows, and to understand how such excursions affect network dynamics. These issues are important from the point of view of transient characteristics of networks. For example the QoS perceived by users depends not only on the magnitude of loss but how it takes place. In some applications consecutive losses even if rare can make transmissions to be severely degraded while in TCP, losing a small number packets often can result in deterioration in performance. To study these effects we must develop new results on the duration of over ows and the amount of information lost during typical over ows. The goal of our research is to provide analytic insights, quantify performance, develop approaches to measure relevant traffic parameters and provide rules-of-thumb for use in resource management and scheduling traffic in networks with long-range dependent characteristics to meet QoS requirements. The specific tasks that will be pursued to achieve our objectives are: Study the buffer over ow asymptotics for multi-buffered systems with heterogeneous longtailed inputs. Develop results for the heterogeneous sub-exponential case. Characterize the transient behavior during over ow periods for systems with longtailed and sub-exponential inputs with a view to understanding actual QoS given to users. Develop methods for differentiating between traffic types and estimating relevant parameters. Incorporate the insights obtained from the above analyses into our overall objective to define engineering rules for resource management and scheduling various types of sessions in networks. As a result of these investigations we will have a complete catalog of results to handle the very diverse types of traffic which are present in networks. By considering both the stationary and transient characteristics we will provide insights on the dynamics of loss which is essential to provide fine tuning in order to deliver QoS at the application user level which stationary analyses do not provide. The research spans fundamental modeling and analysis as well as statistical testing. On the theo- retical side the implications go beyond the traffic engineering context and are expected to contribute to applied probability, queueing analysis and asymptotic approximation. On the applications side, the proposed work will provide insights and results of potential use in next generation networks doc6346 none This project provides for showcases and other related events to promote the NSF CCLI program and projects at targeted computer science and engineering education meetings. The project provides opportunities for presentation and participation at the Frontiers in Education Conferences and and the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) Symposia in and by recipients of CCLI awards. The project builds on pilot activities at both meetings in previous years. This is done to encourage others to adopt and adapt exemplary computer science and engineering models and materials developed through NSF CCLI support. It also promotes awareness of the NSF and CCLI program among conference attendees. It includes mechanisms to assess the impact of the showcase efforts on the attendees and to increase the number of quality CCLI proposals as well as to increase the number of proposals from new investigators doc6329 none A collaborative project: Thickness, Extent, and Basal Conditions of the Scandinavian Ice Sheet Around the Last Glacial Maximum (Proposal Nr. ) by David M. Mickelson and Paul Cutler (Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Wisconsin-Madison) We will reconstruct the thickness, extent, and subglacial environment of the Scandinavian Ice Sheet (SIS) from ~32 ka to ~10 ka. Four still controversial aspects will be considered in the study: First, what was the thickness of the ice sheet at the last glacial maximum (LGM), and did ice-free regions exist in western Norway? Second, is it physically reasonable to interpret geomorphic evidence from the central parts of the ice sheet as indicating a cold-based ice sheet through most of glacial time? Third, what was the extent of the eastern margin of the ice sheet in Russia at 21 ka - a time for which no geomorphic evidence exists, but a key time in GCM simulations of past climates. Fourth, what were the relative contributions of climate and internal cycles to regulating ice dynamics, and what was the role of the SIS in a global context? To answer these questions, we will focus our efforts on two key regions of the SIS (western Norway, and a transect from northern Norway eastwards into Russia) where we will collect samples for preconsolidation tests and cosmogenic dating. The results from field work as well as other available geologic and climate data will be incorporated into a two-dimensional, time-dependent flowband ice-sheet model doc6348 none Galen This project addresses the maintenance of genetically based variation in characteristics related to an organism s fitness. In flowering plants, flower size represents an important trait of this kind. Pollinators typically favor plants with large flowers. Yet in nearly all species that have been studied, genes for small flowers persist. The experiments described in the present study will test whether small-flowered plants persist in nature because their flowers are more cryptic to predators. In particular, the research will test whether escape from insect predation enhances the pollen donation success of small-flowered individuals. Research will focus on a model system for studying floral evolution in the wild, the alpine wildflower Polemonium viscosum. Alpine organisms are considered early warning systems for biotic effects of climate change. By monitoring the intensity of insect predation on flowers of a common alpine wildflower, this project provides data on the severity of insect damage to plants in alpine environments. Findings also have implications for optimizing fruit and seed yield in insect-pollinated crop species including strawberries, apples and cotton. Breeding programs aimed at maximizing pollinator attraction in these crops may have inadvertent negative effects on fruit production due to responses of flower predators doc6309 none Montgomery Reiners The Washington Cascades cast one of the largest climatic rain shadows in North America, with mean annual precipitation in some areas on the west side higher than 4 m yr, and on the east side lower than 0.15 m yr. We are studying the temporal relationships between mountain-building and climate in this regional setting by using a combined approach of low-temperature apatite (U-Th) He thermochronometry in the Cascades crystalline rocks themselves, and stable isotope variations in authigenic minerals in clays and carbonates in paleosols of different ages on the dry, east side of the range. In addition, through combined GIS and He dating work, we are examining the relationship between creation of Cascades topographic relief and Pleistocene-to-recent glaciation in the range, and evaluating the role of relatively recent erosional forces on orogenic exhumation. Our preliminary work indicates that He ages record much younger ages than other radiometric systems in the Cascades, suggesting a relatively recent (late Miocene at the earliest) period of exhumation, which is consistent with paleontological evidence from eastern Washington for the lack of a severe climate contrast until this time doc6350 none Nader This is a two-year proposal submitted by Dr. Richard Nader and Dr. Emily Ashworth, Texas A & M University, to coordinate the U.S. communities involved in the public understanding of science to conduct a two-week series of joint dialogues and site visits, in order to: (1) understand factors impacting public understanding of science in each of the countries, (2) examine current models for achieving public understanding of science, (3) discuss the relative effectiveness of various methods, and (4) identify priorities for future collaboration on public understanding of science. The U.S. communities involved in the public understanding of science will then host a follow-up workshop in the United States. The public understanding of science is an NSF-wide initiative. It is also considered important by our counterpart countries in East Asia. The purpose of these workshops is to build an agenda for public understanding between the United States and its counterpart communities in China and Japan. The Natural Science Foundation of China, the Japan Science and Technology Agency and the NSF jointly support this project doc6351 none Research in theoretical elementary particle physics will focus on the interactions of heavy quarks, namely charm, beauty and top quarks. Among the central mysteries of the so-called Standard Model of Elementary Particle Physics are the questions of how the basic constituents of matter -- namely quarks and electrons -- acquire their masses and why they come in so-called families, which are exact replications of each other except for their masses. The mystery of the mass generation process can be studied in the most sensitive way by studying limitations of time reversal invariance. Violations of this invariance are also an essential ingredient when one tries to understand the observed preponderance of matter over antimatter in the universe as a dynamically generated feature rather than as an arbitrary initial condition. The goal of this research is to calibrate and refine the theoretical tools needed for a proper and accurate interpretation of heavy-quark data which bear on the mysteries of the origin of mass and of violations of time reversal invariance doc6352 none Kubiak This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Clifford Kubiak of the University of California, San Diego and Professor Tasuku Ito of Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. The researchers will be undertaking a study of the effect of intermolecular electron transfer on vibrational spectra. The researchers will continue to develop an understanding of electron transfers that are so fast that they cannot be easily explained by existing theories of electron transfer. They plan to design and synthesize new ligands and complexes that will be used to further test the physical description of dynamic effects on infrared spectra. They will also be working together to optimize simulations of the IR spectra of exchanging systems to obtain kinetic and thermodynamic information. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. The U.S. researchers have expertise in the area of electron transfer and spectroelectrochemistry and their Japanese collaborators are expert in the synthesis of ligand bridged hexaruthenium clusters. The research should result in the development of new spectroscopic methods for the study of charge transfer the rational synthesis of conducting materials, and refinement of existing theories of electron transfer. This research advances international human resources through the participation of graduate students. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of the research in scientific journals and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc6353 none Ducea Ganguly We will quantitatively investigate cooling and exhumation rates of deep crustal rocks from orogenic environments using a new thermochronological method. The basic scientific goal of the application is to asses the relative contribution of normal faulting, ductile thinning and erosion to rock exhumation. This understanding is a fundamental concept to add to our knowledge of continental tectonics. This method permits determination of cooling rates from the age profile or the difference between the core and bulk ages of a mineral by a single radiogenic decay system. We will determine the Sm-Nd ages of central and rim segments of garnet crystals by isotope dilution and thermal ionization mass spectrometry. The ages will be determined from small quantities of samples drilled from the cores of defined dimensions. These data will be combined with conventional thermobarometry based on ion exchange and mineral reactions to constrain the exhumation history of the rocks above 500 oC. Integration of the data derived from the new and conventional thermochronology with petrological observations would permit construction of a more comprehensive picture of the exhumation history of high-grade metamorphic rocks than has been possible so far. The suites of samples are from a collisional orogen, the Himalaya Mountains (Nepal), arc root assemblages from the Sierra Nevada (California), and a subduction complex, the Catalina Island (California doc6354 none Allmendinger The Atacama fault zone can be traced for nearly km in the forearc of the Central Andes. The northern terminus of the fault zone occurs just south of Iquique, Chile, in a series of complex blocks bounded by strike-slip, thrust, and normal faults. Digital topography produced from satellite radar imagery shows that this area is one of the most tectonically active parts of the entire fault system. The area overlies the general region where the Iquique ridge on the Nazca plate is being subducted beneath South America, and correlates well with a seismic gap in the Benioff zone that many seismologists believe will be the site of the next major earthquake on this plate boundary. We are dating these young faults using Ar Ar and Uranium series isotopic methods, and are also studying their kinematics using measurements of slip directions on the well-exposed faults. These field data are being combined and analyzed in a map view block restoration program developed at the Universite de Rennes (France), which will allow us to quantify the strain and rotation in the region. Then, we can evaluate block rotation versus oroclinal bending hypotheses spurred by paleomagnetic data, as well as investigate the origin of proposed arc parallel compression. Finally, our fieldwork and digital elevation model provides a well-documented before picture to compare to the after picture to be obtained following the next great earthquake along this plate boundary, site of the largest earthquake on record. Thus, eventually we will be able to document how the forearc of a major ocean continent convergence system deforms during Benioff zone seismicity doc6355 none RUI: Analysis of an Early-Middle Devonian Ecosystem: Trout Brook, Maine Robert Gastaldo and Robert E. Nelson Ear- The Trout Valley Formation, Maine, preserves one of the few terrestrial ecosystems of the Early to Middle Devonian (Emsian-Eifelian) age. It has been used as the prima facie model of early terrestrial community structure in which a mosaic of opportunist plants populated the landscape. It is thought that these plants were clonal mainly because sexual reproduction in these plants is thought to be relatively rare (based upon the ration between vegetative and sporangium-bearing plants). Within this vegetational mosaic, interactions between plants and animals was restricted to detritus feeding, as deduced from animal morphologies, coprolite distribution, and the nature of plant damage. The interpretation of this landscape is based upon scant published field data, of which the environmental context and depositional setting has been interpreted previously as a brackish delta setting. There appears to be little evidence to support this environmental context, and there are no taphonomic data to support the ecological reconstruction. The proposed research will be conducted by undergraduate majors in Geology as senior independent projects that include both field and laboratory studies. Undergraduates will test four hypotheses focusing on: (1) the stratigraphic sequence of the Trout Valley Formation: (2) the taphonomic signature of plant fossil assemblages; (3) the associated terrestrial macroinvertebrates and early ecosystem structure; and (4) the plant-animal interactions that may be recorded in these assemblages. Students will develop an environmental framework in which the fossil assemblages can be placed for a more accurate understanding of their genesis; constrain the plant and animal taphonomic signatures of the assemblages within the outcrop belt from which a more realistic paleoenvironmental reconstruction can be produced; and investigate the evolutionary level of plant-animal interactions recorded in the Early-Middle Devonian doc6356 none Waddington This award supports a project to develop the techniques for separating net accumulation into precipitation and sublimation in polar firn. The project will use existing models for firn ventilation and models for the transfer of chemical species to firn to create an integrated model of vapor and chemical species transport in firn for suites of species that respond differently to water mass loss. This forward model will predict the dependence of geochemistry on water vapor loss. The knowledge gained from these forward models will then be used to solve an inverse problem to predict the amount of water vapor sublimation and redeposition based on profiles of geochemistry in firn. This project is a necessary first step toward inferring precipitation and evaporation in ancient environments, such as are recorded in ice cores. This project will serve as the basis for a Ph.D. dissertation for a student under the direction of the P.I. Determining how to best extract climate information from firn and ultimately ice cores is the major goal of this project doc6357 none HEID This project is organizing and conducting two, 2-day conferences on research on technology in the teaching and learning of mathematics. The first conference is an in-depth examination of a series of papers which summarize research on the impact of technology in mathematics education. The second conference is a conversation among researchers and authors of reform curriculum to discuss the implications of this research for development of more effective materials. The papers are being disseminated through publication of two books as well as through presentations at professional conferences doc6358 none Essene Mukasa Our research is directed toward developing techniques that will address the geological history of suites of rocks that were once deeply buried during subduction of ocean crust or during subsequent continental collision. The rocks under consideration all were buried to depths of 40-60 km during an ancient mountain-building event, the Taconic Orogeny, in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern North America. This area has undergone a complex tectonic history, with three mountain-building events linked to accretion of oceanic materials or exotic terranes in the Phanerozoic: the Taconic at ca. 450 Ma, the Acadian at ca. 400 Ma, and the Alleghenian beginning at 320 Ma. Some tectonic slices contain materials that were also part of ancient North America and underwent a much older high-grade metamorphism in Grenville time about 1.1 Ga ago. In any such repeatedly deformed, buried and faulted terrane, it is often difficult to identify with certainty the timing of any given event, and robust geochronogical and thermobarometric techniques are needed to identify the growth of minerals rather than their cooling or resetting during some subsequent orogeny. Our work will apply the Lu-Hf isotopic dating technique on minerals with high blocking temperatures for these elements (garnet, clinopyroxene, rutile and zircon) that can be separated from high-pressure rocks (eclogites and garnet granulites) which, in some cases, have undergone subsequent lower grade events (amphibolite facies metamorphism). This effort will be combined with new thermobarometric techniques designed to minimize the problems encountered in high-variance assemblages found in most eclogites. These approaches will be combined with mapping, structural analysis and U-Pb geochronology being done by our collaborators to better establish the timing of the early tectonic history of thrust slices in the Appalachians doc6359 none Chemistry (12) This award is allowing the Department of Chemistry to provide a state-of-the-art educational experience to our undergraduate students by access to a high-field FT NMR. A variety of experiments are being adapted from the research and educational literature and implemented into most courses in the chemistry curriculum. Thus, undergraduate students in many majors, including nonscience ones, are being impacted by the incorporation of the NMR into the curriculum. General Chemistry students are using the NMR in conjunction with IR spectroscopy and molecular modeling to study the implications of Lewis resonance structures to chemical bonding. The Organic Chemistry students are using the NMR, including two-dimensional spectra, to characterize products from several synthetic procedures. Students in Quantitative Analysis are determining the equilibrium concentrations of species present in polyprotic acid solutions as a function of pH. Multinuclear capabilities (11B and 31P) of the instrument, paramagnetic measurements, dipolar shifts, and line broadening are being explored in the Inorganic Chemistry laboratory, additional two-dimensional spectra are being investigated in the Instrumental Analysis laboratory, and relaxation times and isotopic exchange rates are being measured in the Physical Chemistry laboratory. Many students in the General Chemistry and Organic Chemistry laboratories are Biology and or Marine Science majors so the impact of this instrument is strong on other science majors doc6360 none Collaborative Research: Integrated Analysis of the Neoproterozoic Vindhychal Basin, India The latest Mesoproterozoic ( - Ma) and Neoproterozoic ( -543 Ma) eras represent intervals of Earth history marked by profound changes in Earth system processes. These changes include large shifts in atmospheric and ocean chemistry with the build-up of free oxygen; the transition from equable, static climate to variable climatic conditions with the repeated occurrence of low-latitude glaciation; and the evolution of bilateral, multicellular organisms and the innovation of biomineralization. Our understanding of this important interval is currently hampered by the lack of a well- defined and calibrated stratigraphic reference framework, in which data can be integrated at a global scale. This project seeks to tackle this issue by means of a pilot study of portions of the Vindhyanchal basin of peninsular India. This basin appears to preserve a sedimentary record for much of the Meso-Neoproterozoic to Early Cambrian interval, but has received comparatively little attention outside India. Our analysis will place U-Pb geochronology of ash beds and other igneous units in a sequence stratigraphic context that will serve as the temporal and physical framework for future biostratigraphic, magnetostratigraphic, and chemostratigraphic studies doc6361 none Hammer The styles of volcanic eruptions are determined in large part by the ability of volatile components to exsolve and physically separate from the melt when the ascending magma reaches shallow levels. Study of the interrelationships between magma supply rate to the conduit from deep-seated reservoirs, syn-eruptive degassing, and magma discharge rate at the vent is critical to our understanding of controls on eruptive style. Degassing causes H2O-saturated silicate melts to crystallize, and the results of this process may be exploited by volcanologists for greater understanding of magmatic degassing history. In order to interpret pressure-time paths using the groundmass crystal textures of natural volcanic products, we need to understand the kinetics of crystal nucleation and growth under such circumstances, and that is the focus of this proposal. We propose to focus on the intriguing aspects of crystallization kinetics in a multicomponent system of geologic and volcanological significance. We will study nucleation in synthetic and natural glasses to isolate the effects of different factors (such as seeds of the crystallizing phase and minor amounts of nonstoichiometric oxides) on heterogeneous nucleation in natural melts. The relative importance of surface energy and melt viscosity for nucleation rate will be examined using composition as a variable in rapid decompression experiments. The goal of this project is to quantify feldspar nucleation and growth kinetics due to compositional (rather than thermal) supersaturation, compare the results to available theories, and develop models of crystal texture development over a range of pressure-time paths relevant to volcanic processes doc6362 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This project is producing materials for teaching a first undergraduate course in combinatorics where a large number of students learn most of the material covered. The materials are based on a sequence of problems designed to lead students to understand the processes of combinatorial mathematics, abstract these processes to general principles, and apply the general principles. While there is some textual material to provide definitions, explain common themes, and help students reflect on what they learn, the vast majority of the intellectual content is in the problems themselves. An Advisory Board is advising on the selection of topics, critiquing the materials developed, testing or arranging for a test of the materials at their own institutions, and helping introduce the materials to the community at large. The materials developed are being published as a slim book by a commercial publisher, with supplementary material on the publisher s website. There is also an instructor s version of the book that contains complete solutions to the problems as well as protocols for using the materials. The protocols include ways of using group work to enhance students experiences with the materials. Group activities include making sure that the solutions proposed are believable and understandable, assisting students in deciding whether their rewrites of selected problems for resubmission are responsive to instructor comments, and giving group members feedback on problems the instructor chooses only to spot check. The project concludes with a workshop designed to provide a base of instructors who are both eager and well-equipped to use the materials in their own institutions doc6363 none Earth Systems Science (40) Teachers of Geology, Geological Engineering, and Civil Engineering are challenged with the task of teaching students how to apply geological concepts to solve real-world engineering problems. While students receive ample presentation of geological concepts, engineering theory, and case histories, they receive very little practice using their knowledge in ways required in the hazardous waste and geotechnical industries. This project aims to enhance and calibrate a simulator for hazardous waste and geotechnical investigations, to test its effectiveness as a teaching tool for undergraduate and graduate instruction, and to explore its use as a research tool to probabilistically evaluate site conditions. This simulator, called BEST DrillSim, addresses the need for students to receive practical experience designing subsurface investigations and interpreting the resulting data, using the geologic concepts they have learned in class. The simulator uses real or simulated hazardous waste or geotechnical sites. The students select locations for simulated borings, interpret the data returned by the computer, and prepare the next step of investigation. The student s goal is to optimize expenses and the number of borings while determining the limits of ground-water contamination or the range and variability of geotechnical properties at the site. The instructor is provided detailed site information, including three-dimensional gif file animations of site geology, static maps of containment plumes, ground elevations, ground-water surfaces, and tabulated summaries of geotechnical and hydrogeologic parameters for each stratigraphic unit. Version 1 of the simulators, called BEST DrillSim, was developed as part of a series of Basic Engineering Software for Teaching (BEST) produced by the instructional Software Development Center at the University of Missouri-Rolla. The three site databases included in Version 1 offer a variety of geological environments for students to investigate: meandering stream alluvial sediments, coastal and shallow marine deposits, and residual soil over shale bedrock. Each site database contains a 700,000 node array, with each node point associated with a specific geologic unit. Each geological unit has a defined set of geotechnical and hydrogeological properties, which have a random variability about a central value, and which vary with depth. Each site also has associated surface topography, ground-water topography (for as many as three aquifers), and contaminant plume maps. The enhanced version (Version 2) of BEST DrillSim, completed under the current project, automatically generates sites. Hypothetical sites are generated using geological and site constraints input by the instructor, matching the specified conditions to default probability distributions of geological, geotechnical, and hydrogeological parameters, and then randomly selecting values within these probability distributions. The capability to probabilistically generate sites means that an infinite number of sites may be produced, without the labor involved in defining individual sites as in Version 1. This capability also allows exploration of probabilistic simulation of real sites, where various hypotheses about site conditions may be evaluated through Monte Carlo simulation. Evaluation of the simulator is taking place in three classes at the University of Missouri-Rolla, and by independent ers outside of the university. Electronic copies of the simulator will be distributed via CD-ROM through commercial vendors doc6364 none Collaborative Research: A detailed chronology of the Loess-Paleosol Record of the last glacial Interglacial Cycle in the North American Midcontinent Loess deposits represent one of the most important terrestrial records of long-term Quaternary climatic change. High-resolution records of past environmental conditions can be extracted from loess deposits provided that the deposits can be accurately dated. We propose to apply three independent dating techniques (10Be inventory, AMS14C, and Optically Stimulated Luminescence) to develop a high-resolution chronology for loess of the last two glacial interglacial cycles in eastern Nebraska. This chronology will enable us to make accurate estimates of dust flux to the atmosphere over this time period, to evaluate the relative contribution of competing loess sources in the North American Midcontinent, and to determine the length of time represented by the last interglacial (Sangamon) soil in eastern Nebraska doc6365 none Earth Systems Science (40) This project is enhancing scientific literacy through the acquisition of laboratory equipment to create a modern Earth Materials Testing Laboratory. The development of hands-on, inquiry based laboratory activities allows students the opportunity to explore, test and analyze various behaviors and characteristics of earth materials. The project emphasizes experience in field sampling and laboratory experimentation with actual earth materials. This Earth Materials Testing Laboratory accommodates eight lower and upper level science courses, impacting approximately 500 students per semester. This includes students enrolled in classes that satisfy the University s science general degree requirement, education majors (elementary, middle and secondary), students obtaining minors in geography, geology, earth science and natural science, and students obtaining majors in geography and natural science. Laboratory activities focus on five themes related to earth materials testing. These themes include (1) material sampling and description, (2) analysis of grain size distribution; (3) measurement of sediment properties; (4) illustration and testing of material responses to environmental stresses; and (5) illustration and testing of fluvial processes. These themes allow students to develop an inherent understanding of the processes by which earth materials impact their lives through simulation of mass wasting, hydrologic flow, sediment transport and the response of earth materials to stress. These five themes cut across the earth science curriculum and allow students to appreciate the interrelationships between courses in a curriculum. By participating in scientific inquiry, students are gaining a deeper appreciation for the scientific method. These earth science exercises are being augmented using digital video posted to the Internet which allows students to compare and contrast their experimental results. Materials are being adapted from projects at Oklahoma State University, the University of South Carolina, Southeast Missouri State University, and the University of Alberta as well as those described in the Journal of Geoscience Education and other journals in the field doc6366 none Cline & Storm This Gordon Research Conference is one of the premier conferences that addresses the geochemistry of metallic ore deposits. The meeting serves as an international forum for researchers with differing levels of experience from academia, government, and industry to discuss issues concerning the chemistry of metal transportation and deposition in the natural environment. The theme that we have selected for the next conference is The formation, modification and preservation of ore deposits. We have selected this theme to focus on process, rather than metal or ore-deposit type, and to highlight the linkages among the numerous factors involved in ore formation, deposit environment, and the resultant economic processing of ore. We have endeavored to make this meeting interdisciplinary by inviting speakers who are experts in a variety of fields including low-temperature geochemistry, biogeochemistry, climate change, tectonics, structure, geochronology, and numerical modeling. Each of these disciplines can bring insight and information to the understanding of how metals are transported and accumulated in and at Earth s crust. Funding of this proposal will provide partial support for junior level scientists including students, post-doctorate fellows, and assistant professors to attend the meeting, and will provide them with a unique opportunity to meet and interact with recognized experts in a friendly and informal environment. The attendance of junior-level scientists at this meeting is important because they bring new and innovative ideas to the science, and because they are responsible for future research in this field. Attendance at the conference will provide them with the opportunity to learn from and interact with more senior scientists, and to begin collaborative projects with other researchers. These experiences will undoubtedly have a positive impact on their future productivity. Convenors: Jean Cline, Jeff Hedenquist, and John Thompson August 19-24, , Proctor Academy, New Hampshire doc6367 none The purpose of this work is to support the understanding and development of protocols that can provide personal privacy over the Internet. While there have been some protocols proposed and implemented that hide the IP address of network communicators, there has been no systematic study of such protocols, nor have methods of analyzing the anonymity and security of those protocols been developed. A thorough understanding of anonymity is important not only for the development, analysis, and use of anonymous protocols for personal privacy, but also for understanding how network attackers can hide their location and for developing methods to track those attackers. Our eventual goal is to develop new techniques and protocols for anonymity, including a \logic of anonymity similar to those developed for authentication protocols that can be used to describe and analyze anonymous protocols. This proposal considers a number of contributions on this research area. Our first contri- bution will be to take a more general view of anonymous communication than previous work by considering protocols and techniques for hiding the identity of a responder from all other parties, and for providing completely anonymous communication in which both the initiator and responder are anonymous to each other and all other parties. The former technique is useful for anonymous web sites (rather than just anonymous web browsing); the later technique is useful for true two-party privacy over the Internet. Our second class of contributions will be to consider generalized protocol construction. This extends our past work, which de-coupled the forward and reverse paths of anonymous communication, giving rise to a large family of anony- mous protocols. We will continue investigation of those protocols, and examine what network support is available for anonymous communication and what support might best be provided in the future. Our third contribution will be to provide a formalism for anonymous protocols such that beliefs regarding entity identities can be reasoned by stating assumptions and deriving log- ical conclusions from following steps of defined protocols. Fourth, we will consider the network performance of anonymous routing protocols in an in-depth fashion, including not only latency and traffic, but also requirements of streaming media applications and traditional TCP-based bulk-data transfer applications. Finally, we will consider heretofore ignored security concerns of existing protocols, initially considering path analysis attacks and attacks that cause some participants to be unfairly accused by third parties. The formalism provided by our proposed logic of anonymity will be a foundational component of our security analysis work. Collaboration between these our two institutions will allow us to leverage the existing strength in networking at the University of Massachusetts and the existing strength in secu- rity at Purdue. 1 doc6368 none Stein This project addresses one of the fundamental underpinnings needed to understand geologic processes that produce copper-molybdenum deposits associated with magmatism at shallow levels in the earth s crust. This underpinning is the timing and duration of the mineralization process within the broader context of the magmatism and the tectonic and geologic evolution of a terrane. It has been said: No Dates, No Rates! Using the now established Re-Os (rhenium-osmium) method of dating, the only method that directly dates the sulfide ore minerals themselves, this study addresses the time span needed to form so-called porphyry copper-molybdenum deposits. Do they form over tens of millions of years (or more), or do they form in a few hundred thousand years (or less)? Previous attempts at dating the time of ore deposition were limited by techniques that addressed presumably ore-associated minerals and or techniques that do not retain the age of mineralization. For example, one dating technique involves the use of Ar (argon), a gas in its natural state, and although Ar may be found and measured in rocks and minerals, this is not a comfortable site for the element. In contrast, both Re and Os are sulfide-loving, and are naturally concentrated in metallic ore minerals. The results from this Re-Os study will be compared with age results derived from other methods of dating. This study will focus on dating mineralization associated with two young magmatic systems that host giant deposits of molybdenum and copper, the classic Henderson molybdenum deposit in Colorado and the Los Pelambres copper-molybdenum deposit in Chile doc6369 none Tulaczyk This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports a collaborative research project between the University of California-Santa Cruz, the University of Texas-Austin, and the Ohio State University to investigate sediment samples recovered from the base of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). West Antarctica is a remote polar region but its dynamic ice sheet, complicated tectonic history, and the sedimentary record of Cenozoic glaciation make it of particular interest to glaciologists and geologists. Glaciologists are concerned with the possibility of significant near-future changes in mass balance of the WAIS that may contribute to the ongoing global sea level rise. Geologists are investigating in West Antarctica the fundamental process of continental extension and are constructing models of a polar marine depositional system using this region as the prime modern example. The subglacial part of West Antarctica has escaped direct geological investigations and all that is known about subglacial geology comes from geophysical remote sensing. Recent acquisitions of new, high-quality geophysical data have led to generation of several enticing models. For instance, subglacial presence of high-magnitude, short-wavelength magnetic anomalies has prompted the proposition that there may be voluminous ( 1 million cubic km), Late Cenozoic flood basalts beneath the ice sheet. Another important model suggests that the patterns of fast ice streaming (~100 meters year) and slow ice motion (~1-10 meters year) observed within the WAIS are controlled by subglacial distribution of sedimentary basins and resistant bedrock. These new geophysics-based models should be tested with direct observations because they are of such great importance to our understanding of the West Antarctic tectonic history and to our ability to predict the future behavior of the WAIS. This research is designed as a pilot study to provide new geologic data, which may help to test the recent models inferred from geophysical observations. The new constraints on subglacial geology and on its interactions with the WAIS will be obtained through petrological and geochemical analyses of basal and subglacial sediments collected previously from seven localities. This investigation will take place in the context of testing the following three hypotheses: (A) the provenance of bedrock clasts in the glacial sediment samples is primarily from West Antarctica, (B) some clasts and muds from the West Antarctic subglacial sediments have been derived by erosion of the (inferred) subglacial Late Cenozoic flood basalts, and (C) the sediments underlying the West Antarctic ice streams were generated by glacial erosion of preglacial sedimentary basins but the sediments recovered from beneath the slow-moving parts of the WAIS were produced through erosion of resistant bedrock. The individual hypotheses will be tested by collecting data on: (A) petrology, geochemistry and age of granitoid clasts, (B) petrology, geochemistry and age of basaltic clasts combined with mud geochemistry, and (C) clay mineralogy paragenesis combined with textural maturity of sand and silt grains. The results of these tests will help evaluate the interesting possibility that subglacial geology may have first-order control on the patterns of fast ice flow within the WAIS. The new data will also help to determine whether the subglacial portion of West Antarctica is a Late Cenozoic flood basalt province. By combining glaciological and geological aspects of West Antarctic research the proposed collaborative project will add to the ongoing U.S. effort to create a multidisciplinary understanding of this polar region doc6370 none Toward building large-scale switches, the current industry focus is on increasing packet handling capacities of switch fabrics from Gb s to Tb s. Although an increase in packet handling capacities and line card data rates requires a corresponding increase in call handling capacities of switches, this problem has received little attention. This is because most of the work on scalability of packet switch fabrics has targeted connectionless internet protocol (IP) routers, while call handling arises only in connection-oriented networks. However, in the last few years, resource reservation to support Quality-of-Service (QoS) guaranteed flows has gained attention. Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is addressing this issue by augmenting IP routers with connection-oriented capabilities. In a connection-oriented network, the signaling protocol that is used to set up and release connections impacts its call handling capacity. Signaling messages can be complex with many parameters and timers and the state information associated with calls can become unwieldy. Consequently, signaling protocols have traditionally been implemented in software. QoS control solutions are being developed and evaluated based on the premise that call handling capacities do not scale with the packet handling capacities of switch fabrics. This assumption regarding call handling capacities has also relegated circuit-switched networks, including high-speed Wave-length Division Multiplexed networks, to just serve as wires. This proposal challenges this basic assumption by demonstrating call handling capacities in the order of millions of calls sec. Changing this basic assumption regarding call handling capacities would indeed have a far-reaching impact on both QoS control mechanisms for packet-switched networks, and on the use of emerging high-speed circuit-switched networks for challenging new applications. Our solution approach is to implement signaling protocols in reconfigurable Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) hardware. FPGAs can be reprogrammed as signaling protocols evolve while significantly improving the call handling capacities relative to software implementation. To manage complexity, we propose to implement the basic and frequently-used operations of the protocol in hardware, and relegate the complex and infrequently-used operations to software. In contrast to stateless protocols, signaling protocols maintain state information for each call. To manage associated memory requirements, we propose to maintain only the essential state information for each call in hardware. In this project we propose to (i) implement a typical signaling protocol in FPGAs, (ii) design a switch controller board using the signaling protocol FPGAs, and (iii) quantify measures of the implementation to demonstrate achievable call handling capacities doc6371 none PH #37x) INVESTIGATING THE POSSIBLE ROLE OF MAGMATICALLY-DERIVED FLUIDS IN FAULTING IN THE LONG VALLEY CALDERA Mark D. Zoback Department of Geophysics Stanford University The goal of this study is to improve our understanding of the interaction of volcanic and tectonic processes by investigating seismic activity in the Long Valley caldera, Eastern California. Specifically, we are studying the role of magmatically derived fluids in the mechanics of faulting in and near the caldera. It is well known that high fluid pressures may trigger earthquakes by decreasing the normal stress across faults. While scientists suspect that fluid pressures are high above magma chambers due to heating of ground water and exsolution of fluids from magma, a clear link between magmatically derived fluids and triggered seismicity remains elusive. By mapping the stress field and quantifying volcanically influenced pore pressures associated with faulting in the Long Valley caldera we hope to better constrain the relationship between tectonic and volcanic activities at depth. Fluids have been shown to influence a variety of faulting processes. Although earthquake triggering associated with pore fluid migration has been observed in cases of induced seismicity and has been hypothesized to occur along the San Andreas Fault, it has not been possible to quantify or map relative pore pressure changes in detail. Precise mapping of relative pore pressures associated with a spatially and temporally propagating system of earthquakes would help us understand how fluid pressures might be changing with time and diffusing through bedrock to trigger these events. This project is studying these processes in detail doc6318 none This award supports a program of ground-based geophysical measurements to map in detail the spatial variations of ice flow, accumulation rate, internal layering and ice thickness at the sites which have been identified as promising locations to drill the next deep ice core in West Antarctica. The main investigative tools are a high- and low-frequency ice penetrating radar to image the topography of internal layers and the bed, repeat GPS surveys to calculate the present day surface velocity field, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry to calculate the regional velocity field, and short firn cores to calculate present day accumulation rates. The data which will be collected will be used to as input to time-dependent ice flow and temperature models that will predict depth variation of age, layer thickness, and temperature. As well as yielding an estimate of expected conditions before drilling, the mismatch between the model prediction and data eventually recovered from the core will help infer thinning and climate (accumulation and temperature) histories for the region. The Western Divide, between the Ross Sea Embayment and the Amundsen Sea, has been identified as the region which best satisfies the criteria which have been established for a deep drilling site. Preliminary site selection using airborne geophysical methods has identified several potential drill sites on the Western Divide where the climate record should be best preserved. This work will contribute in a major way to the final site selection for the next deep ice core in West Antarctica doc6373 none Whipple Despite many recent advances in our understanding of the tectonic evolution of the Himalaya, perhaps the quintessential collisional orogen, some important controversies remain. One of these centers on the relationship between the dramatic topographic transition separating the high Himalayan peaks from their foothills and the major deformational structures that underlie it. This controversy is fueled in part by the geographic near-coincidence of the trace of the Main Central Thrust (MCT) system with the topographic front. Although the MCT has long been considered dormant by most Himalayan geologists, a number of observations require continued differential uplift and exhumation of the Higher Himalaya and suggest to some an active role of the MCT: (1) crystalline rocks in the hanging wall of the MCT have been the dominant source of sediment delivered to Bengal fan since at least 17Ma; (2) microseismicity clusters on a linear trend that coincides with both the topographic transition and the mapped trace of the MCT; (3) recent geodetic studies indicate rapid differential uplift of the Higher Himalaya; and (4) late Miocene-Pliocene 40Ar 39Ar cooling ages and Th-Pb monazite ages indicate recent deep exhumation and synkinematic metamorphism in MCT zone, respectively. Three alternative models with fundamentally different tectonic implications have been advanced to explain the topographic transition: (1) erosional retreat following Miocene activity on the MCT; (2) fault-bend fold deformation above a crustal-scale ramp in the Himalayan Sole Thrust; and (3) recent (Pliocene) or active thrusting on the MCT. Determining whether the foothills-Higher Himalaya transition is a transient erosional front, the topographic signature of a subsurface ramp, or the trace of an active fault system is critical if we are to understand how the Himalayan orogenic wedge has evolved over the Miocene-Recent interval. Each model predicts distinctive spatial patterns and timing of uplift and exhumation that can be exploited to evaluate their relative merits. This research project is testing these models through a multi-disciplinary study, combining structural mapping, tectonic geomorphology, and topical 40Ar 39Ar and (U-Th) He geochronology to explore the structural and thermal evolution of the foothills-Higher Himalaya transition in the Burhi Gandaki and Trisuli drainages of central Nepal. This combination of geomorphic and geochronologic approaches is designed to provide several independent measures of late Miocene to recent uplift and exhumation patterns -- independent of available geodetic and microseismic data currently used to constrain crustal architecture - and thus to help inform the next generation of evolutionary models for the Himalayan orogenic wedge doc6374 none Pietsch This award supports the participation of American scientists in a U.S.-Japan seminar on biodiversity of the Kuril Island, to be held in Sapporo, Japan from May 18-22, . The co-organizers are professor Theodore Pietsch of the University of Washington and Professor Hideki Takahashi of the Hokkaido University in Japan. The islands of the Kuril Archipelago form the eastern boundary of the Okhotsk Sea and a bridge between Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, and the Russian peninsula of Kamchatka. They are a natural laboratory for investigations into the origin, subsequent evolution, and long-term maintenance of insular populations. This seminar is based on the results of research in this area to date. The project is also known as the International Kuril Island project (IKIP). The Seminar will consist of the following topics: 1) description of the project and history of the biological investigations; 2) geological history and environmental change on the Kuril Islands and present-day physical, geographic, climatic, and ecological conditions; 3) biodiversity of the fungi, lichens, mosses, liverworts and plants; 4) biodiversity of the insects and spiders; 5) biodiversity of the mollusks; 6) biodivedrsity of the fishes and terrestrial vertebrates; 7) analysis and synthesis, distributional patterns and biogeography, dispersal and vicariance; 8) future plans and new directions. The participants will also discuss future collaborations. Two areas of particular significance are 1) continued work on the biodiversity of the Russian Far East and 2) initiation of new investigations in archaeology, paleobiology and cultural anthropology of the Kuril Archipelago. Seminar organizers have made a special effort to involve younger researchers as both participants and observers. The exchange of ideas and data with Japanese experts in this field will enable U.S. participants to advance their own work, and will set the stage for future collaborative projects. Dissemination of information on the seminar will be available at (http: artedi.fish.washington.edu ikip home.html doc6375 none The purpose of this proposal is to request funds to examine in depth data collected during the past three school years ( - ) for the Longitudinal Cross-Sectional Study of the Impact of Mathematics in Context on Student Performance, funded by the National Science Foundation. This study is an example of a research study on student learning of mathematics in complex educational contexts. The research model for the study is a structural model for monitoring changes in school mathematics designed to capture the impact that the dynamic, complex interaction of social context for learning, curricular content and materials, classroom experiments, and pupil motiviation have on student performance and further pursuit of mathematics. The mo9del is composed of 14 variables and their theoretical interrelationships. The study also featured a nonequivalent control-group, quasi-experimental design. about 80% of the students and teachers used Mathematics in Context ; the remaining 20% of the students used conventional curricla already available in the schools. The longitudinal parat of the study involves tracking the performance of the three cohorts of students over the three years of study, and the cross-sectional part includes three cross-grade comparisons by year and three cross-year comparisons by grade. Information from teachers, administrators, and students in grades 5, 6, 7, and 8 in four school districts has been collected and is now being entered into a database. The analyses will be directed toward both the longitudinal and cross-sectional comparisions an dtoward a set of questions about the implementation of standards-based programs, such as: Do students continue to develop number skills in sucha a program? or Are such programs effectivie with students with differing backgrounds? or Do teachers change their pedagogy when presenting content in non-traditional ways? To make the comparisons and to answer such questions the analyses will include exploratory descriptions of information related to each variable in the model, linear regression for a simplified model, structural equations to estimate path coefficients in the complete model, and a series of sub-studies examine in depth some patterns of relationships in the data. Finally, based on these analyses a series of reports are palnned. Currently a set of technical reports are being written on the creation of the data consturction instruments, the indicies for each variable, and the raw data that has been collected. Funds in this proposal would make it possible to report on the cross-sectional and longitudinal findings and our answers to the set of questions about the Mathematics in Context (National Center for Research in Mathematical Sciences Education & Freudenthal Institute, -98 doc6376 none The mobile agent technology offers many novel capabilities for building future generation systems for monitoring and management of large networks. The goal of this research is to investigate and build a system infrastructure using mobile agents for active monitoring of large distributed systems. Mobile agents would be used to perform remote information filtering and control functions, and such distributed and mobile agents could be securely modified to change their monitoring policies and functions. If needed, new agents could be installed at a node to perform functions different from the existing ones. The system would also support use of agent groups for cooperative distributed monitoring and collaborative filtering of monitored information. The proposed infrastructure would provide a set of basic agent types for event monitoring, subscription, and information correlation and filtering. This infrastructure would support experimentation s with different schemes for monitoring, dissemination, and processing of event data. We would develop monitoring functions for different operating system platforms, such as Sun OS, Linux, and Windows NT. We propose to experiment with intrusion detection techniques using this infrastructure. We plan to use logic programming techniques for performing search and correlation operations on event data. The event notification data would be stored in logic databases using Prolog. Mobile agents would be used for performing filtering and correlation functions on data stored in such databases at different nodes. Security and robustness of operations would be an important design requirement for this infrastructure. This system infrastructure would include mechanisms to monitor its own components and perform recovery actions on detecting any failures. We would also develop a security architecture for mobile agents to execute in separate protection domains and at different security levels to minimize the impact of any corrupted or compromised agents. The proposed system would be deployed in the research and instructional computing labs at the University of Minnesota to evaluate the effectiveness of its mechanisms. This system would be implemented using the Ajanta agent programming system. For this purpose, the capabilities of the Ajanta system would be enhanced to support secure agent groups and debugging facilities for large-scale agent based programs. This monitoring infrastructure would be made available to the community for research and education activities doc6377 none Spatial competence is a fundamental aspect of intelligence, important to successful functioning. A high level of spatial skill is critical to the achievement of a technologically sophisticated work force for the twenty-first century. Spatial intelligence plays a major role in effective education in mathematics, science and engineering. The interdisciplinary research we will carry out focuses on understanding of spatial intelligence and establishing methods for maximizing the development of spatial skills. We will study spatial competence at different levels of analysis. At the biological level, we will will investigate the neurological foundations for spatial growth. We will examine the growth and organization of neural connections in areas of the brain that underlie the processing of spatial information. At the behavioral level, we will investigate the mechanisms that are involved in the mental representation of the spatial aspects of the world. We also will study the ways in which children come to understand spatial symbols such as maps and models. We will study how acquisition of these symbol systems affects the development of spatial intelligence. This work will include computational modelling of spatial intelligence. Finally, at the level of educational application, we will investigate the educational input responsible for the differential gains in spatial skill levels children achieve in school. We plan to identify specific teacher practices that are associated with high gains in student achievement. Our research team has expertise in a variety of relevant fields, including neural science, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology,computer science, education, and statistics. This research team has worked together for the past three years on research that has identified core elements of spatial functioning. Our goal now is to further our understanding of how the development of spatial competence can be enhanced .M doc6378 none Robinson The study of tip growth in general and pollen tube growth in particular has been an area of considerable progress in recent years and more and more sophisticated techniques have been brought to bear on the problem. One important conclusion that has emerged is that the pollen tube tip is a highly dynamic structure. Elongation is not steady, but oscillatory, and a number of important physiological variables are also oscillatory, including cytosolic Ca2+, cytosolic pH, net Ca2+ influx, net H+ influx, and net K+ influx. The phase relationships of these variables with respect to growth oscillations are complex, and it is not at all clear how the oscillations are established and maintained, and what are the feedback mechanisms that connect the variables. It is proposed to directly detect vesicle secretion and determine its timing relative to elongation. Attempts to use electrical methods for measuring secretion have proved fruitless, so optical methods are now employed. By these means, accurate measurements of the timing of vesicle secretion will be made. A substantial fraction of the Ca2+ that is required for the oscillations in cytosolic Ca2+ must come from intracellular stores, and the most likely sources are the secretory vesicles themselves. It is proposed to isolate the vesicles and directly determine their ability to take up and release Ca2+. The physiological controls of these events will also be determined. In order to characterize putative Ca2+ channels in pollen tubes, whole cell clamping of pollen grain protoplasts will be done. The working model posits the existence of turgor pressure oscillations, which appear to underlie the growth oscillations. Ultra-high resolution optical measurement by computer vision will be used to determine if the diameter of pollen tubes oscillates due to turgor oscillations. If so, we will determine the phase of these oscillations with respect to other variables. Finally, the production of ROS at the growing tip will be directly observed, using a luminescent probe, pholasin, which increases its light emission by several orders of magnitude in the presence of ROS doc6379 none In this project, a cross-disciplinary team of the University of Maryland Physics Education Research Group (UMD-PERG) and an advisory team of biologists and biology-oriented education specialists is carrying out basic research in science learning among college-level bioscience students. An emphasis on meta-learning frames the approach of the team. This includes metacognition, epistemologies, expectations, and the construction of broad and powerful mental models; in short learning that goes beyond content and helps students understand what it means to learn science and how to learn it effectively. The project is studying student learning of fundamental issues in thinking about science; modifying current best-practices learning environments to make them effective tools for teaching meta-learning in a large-lecture enviornment; and developing survey tools to permit the documentation and evaluation of the state of student meta-learning attitudes and skills in large classes. The laboratory for this research effort is an algebra-based physics course, and the project builds on earlier work of the UMD-PERG in studying student meta-learning in high school and calculus-based university physics classes doc6380 none Waddington This award supports a two year project to develop a new method for measuring vertical strain rates in polar firn. Vertical strain rate measurements in the firn are important because they can aid in the understanding of the dynamics of firn compaction, a key factor in determining ice age gas age difference estimates for ice cores. Vertical strain rate measurements also determine ice advection for borehole paleothermometry models, and most importantly can be used to date the shallow sections of ice cores where ambiguities in chemical dating or counting of annual layers hinder dating by traditional methods. In this project a video logging tool will be used to create a unique optical fingerprint of variations in the optical properties of the firn with depth, and track the movement and deformation of the features of this fingerprint. Preliminary work at Siple Dome, Antarctica using an improvised logging system shows a series of optically bright and dark zones as the tool transits up or down the hole. Borehole fingerprinting has the potential to improve measurements of vertical strain in firn holes. This project represents a unique opportunity to interface with an existing field program where a borehole vertical strain rate project is already underway. A graduate student will be supported to conduct the work on this project as part of a PhD. dissertation on climate and physical processes in polar firn doc6381 none W. Johnson The long-term transport of low concentrations of bacteria in groundwater is important to understand the purpose of protecting groundwater resources, and for interpreting the wide-ranging distribution of bacteria that is observed in the subsurface. In contrast, the bulk of the existing body of bacterial transport knowledge focuses upon the short-term transport of high concentrations of bacteria, and correspondingly on the rate of bacterial attachment to sediment. However, for long-term transport behavior, other aspects of bacterial transport become important, such as the observed slow rate of detachment from sediment that occurs in the absence of any physical or chemical perturbations (spontaneous detachment), and the observed retardation of low concentrations of bacteria in sediment. The impact of spontaneous detachment and retardation on the distance over which bacteria may be transported in groundwater is unknown. The work proposed herein will serve to determine the mechanisms governing spontaneous detachment and retardation of bacteria during transport, and will determine their potential impact on the long-term transport of low concentrations of bacteria in groundwater. Laboratory experiments will be performed using repacked sediment columns to examine changes in kinetic constants that describe bacterial breakthrough, retardation, and extended tailing (spontaneous detachment) with variations in the potential energy profile describing interaction forces between the bacteria and the sediment grain. It is expected that variation in the kinetic constants will illuminate differences in the mechanisms of attachment that control retardation, as opposed to the mechanisms of attachment that control steady state breakthrough. Column experiments and direct visual analyses in parallel plate chambers will examine the hypothesis that spontaneous detachment of bacteria and other colloids from sediment that is observed during elution may be caused by hydrodynamic shear operating at the surface of the sediment grains. The variation in kinetic constants with pore water velocity for equivalent experiments performed with different colloid sizes will indicate whether hydrodynamic shear is important in spontaneous detachment (as indicated by preferential detachment of larger-sized colloids relative to smaller-sized colloids). Experiments will also examine whether spontaneous detachment in response to hydrodynamic shear at the grain surface involves an erosion effect that is corollary to the shadow effect. Experiments will also examine the hypothesis that the observed decrease in probability of detachment with increased bacterial residence time on a grain surface is not necessarily related to bacterial metabolic activity. Concentration of bacteria on the sediment following long and short elution times will be examined in order to observe potential differences in the centers of mass of the attached populations, and to further constrain numerical models. Potential impacts of spontaneous detachment and retardation to bacterial transport over long time periods under different physical and chemical conditions will be simulated with a one-dimensional model using experimentally determined kinetic constants doc6382 none Gaetani The objectives of this project are (1) to identify elements whose concentrations are conserved once incorporated into an olivine-hosted melt inclusion, and (2) to quantify the amount of post-entrapment crystallization that is typically erased by diffusive reequilibration of Fe and Mg in the host olivine. These goals will be achieved by (1) determining experimentally the diffusivities of select minor elements (Ca, Al, Ti) in magnesian olivine, (2) determining experimentally the mineral-melt partitioning systematics of elements present in olivine as minor constituents for which there is currently very little data (Al, Ti), and (3) combining the experimental results with a secondary ion mass spectrometry study of the olivine adjacent to melt inclusions to identify and characterize concentration gradients in slow diffusing minor or trace elements that result from post-entrapment crystallization. The data collected over the course of this experimental and analytical study will provide a better understanding of the effects of post-entrapment crystallization and diffusive reequilibration on the major element compositions of olivine-hosted melt inclusions, increasing their value as sources of geochemical information about the processes of melt generation and extraction in the upper mantle of the Earth doc6383 none Pazzaglia The western U.S. is one of the best places in the world to study continental evolution because there is a preserved unique record of the growth, stabilization, maturation, rifting, and incipient dismemberment of a continent. In particular, we can see how older lithospheric structures (in this case Archean and Proterozoic) influenced younger tectonic events, including development of the huge, presently active, orogenic plateau that dominates the western U.S. and the progressive dismemberment and dispersal of continental fragments along its active western margin. Continents are the long-term record keepers of plate interactions before 200 Ma. However, accumulated modification often obscures the previous record. The western U.S. is unique in that this part of the continent was assembled in the Proterozoic around an Archean cratonic core , then was truncated in the Phanerozoic at a high angle so as to create a new continental margin oblique to the Precambrian structures. The result was the creation of a wide region - the western U.S. - where nature caught all stages of structural reactivation and continental modification. The main goal of the CD-ROM (Continental Dynamics of the Rocky Mountains) Project is to understand the processes of formation and modification of continental lithosphere. Phase 1 of the CD-ROM experiment was a three year project to improve our structural and petrologic knowledge of the lithosphere and to test the hypothesis that the lithospheric structure produced during assembly of southwestern North America has profoundly influenced physical and chemical modification of the continental lithosphere during all subsequent magmatic and tectonic events, including those related to the ongoing asthenospheric flow. The principal investigators studied two Proterozoic structures with a range of seismic and geologic methods: the Cheyenne Belt and the Jemez lineament. Reflection, refraction, and teleseismic investigations are providing crustal - and lithospheric - scale images of major structures. A more complete picture of the evolution of the lithosphere has been added by geologic studies of Precambrian shear zones and Phanerozoic structures, xenolith studies, and geomorphologic and exhumation studies of present landforms. Phase 1 brought together 18 investigators from 14 institutions, including collaboration with a German-funded refraction team. With these awards, one year of funding is provided to continue to process, interpret, and integrate the diverse data sets generated in Phase 1 and to begin developing geodynamic models. The Principal Investigators will also explore new methods of data integration towards the goal of developing a master model for lithospheric structure doc6384 none Joyce This award to Sea Education Association, Inc., of Falmouth, Massachusetts, will provide instrumentation for oceanographic education and research for use on a new sailing vessel presently under construction. SEA, Inc. teaches hands-on programs in ocean sciences to undergraduate students, high school students, and teachers in various programs, as well as orientation programs for graduate students at the nearby Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The instrumentation provided here is jointly supported by the Division of Ocean Sciences and the Division of Undergraduate Education, and is an excellent example of efforts to integrate research and education in environmental sciences. Specific instrumentation to be acquired for shipboard use includes an acoustic doppler current profiler, a remotely operated vehicle, an auxiliary winch for deploying oceanographic instrumentation, CTD instrumentation for both vertical deployment on station and towing, a continuous-flow surface water analysis system, an on-board computer network, a suite of biological sampling nets and a variety of laboratory instruments and microscope systems, as well as other instrumentation. SEA is providing substantial instrumentation with non-federal funds as well, as well as paying the costs to build the vessel. Assistance with instrument maintenance is provided by the technical staff at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The instrumentation supported here will assist students in education and research during and future years doc6385 none Honjo The proposed work will provide and maintain of a deep sea sediment trap mooring in the Polar Frontal Zone south of Australia, which complements a similar Australian sediment trap mooring in the Subantarctic Zone deployed by the Australian Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre. The Australian program has recently been extended; this proposal work will extend the joint work for two years until . The specific objective is to examine the production of particulate matter, remineralization, and export using a radionuclide technique that will allow the evaluation of sediment trap efficiency. A further objective is to document whether intermediate depth water masses that are ventilated at high southern latitudes can provide a temporary reservoirfor anthropogenic carbon dioxide, and to understand the role of this region in the long term trends and interannual variability of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels doc6386 none Knittle The investigators plan to conduct a suite of experiments oriented toward constraining the behavior of volatile elements (especially hydrogen and carbon) within planet Earth. They will assess the elastic and structural behavior of ternary iron-carbon and iron-hydrogen bearing systems at high pressures and temperatures, with the goal of determining whether such compositions could be abundant within Earth s core. With respect to Earth s mantle, they will examine the phase behavior and elasticity of likely Archean volcanic rock compositions, in order to constrain the behavior of subducted material through Earth history. The goal with these studies is to understand whether the processes driving subduction early in Earth history are similar to those that operate today. Finally, the investigators will probe the properties of subduction-related hydrous and carbonated phases at high pressures, focusing on minerals that are either known to be stable in basalt- or oceanic sediment-derived assemblages at high pressure, or those that have actually been observed to occur in mantle-derived xenoliths. The approach is designed to provide an integrative data set to constrain how elements abundant in Earth s atmosphere and hydrosphere are cycled into, retained within, and degassed from Earth s deep interior doc6387 none Jeffries This work is a study of the structure of the solar atmosphere using observations of the velocity and intensity of optical signals from the solar surface. These signals will be used to produce detailed maps of the speed of acoustic waves in the lower part of the solar atmosphere. These maps in turn will be inverted to provide information on how the speed of sound changes with location and time in the solar atmosphere. This project provides an important first step towards being able to map the acoustic and magnetic properties of the Sun s atmosphere in three dimensions. Such data will be invaluable in our quest to understand how the Sun impacts terrestrial processes. Three specific goals will be pursued in the course of this study: (1) to provide the first detailed maps of the sound speed structure in the Sun s lower atmosphere, (2) to examine the short-term variability of the observed structure, and (3) to test and refine current models of the solar atmosphere. The advantages of South Pole station as an observing site include excellent sky transparency, low atmospheric humidity, and long periods of stable seeing conditions. Further, velocity and intensity observations will not require correction for an unwanted signal due to the Earth s rotation doc6388 none The best-effort service model of the current generation Internet is not adequate for evolving and expanding applications such as continuous media, real-time applications, and e-commerce environments. These applications require certain quality of service (QoS) assurance that could be provided through service discrimination in the Internet. Differentiated Services (DiffServ) have been proposed as a viable solution for providing service differentiation in the Internet. DiffServ operates on the aggregate traffic on a per-hop basis and thus avoids the scalability problems associated with the integrated service model. A major component of the DiffServ architecture is the markers that mark packets based on the service level agreements between adjacent Internet domains (interdomain makers) or between the end node and its ver first domain (leaf markers). The Internet core routers route packets discriminatley based on their marking. Thus the marking technique affects the performance of DiffServ significantly. This proposal focusses on the design and implementation of efficient marking techniques for differentiated services in the Internet. The proposed research targets the marking issues at both the interdomain markers and the leaf markers. Our ongoing effort on the marking scheme for interdomain marker addresses random and early demotion and promotion of packets to improve the bandwidth utilization while maintaining fairness between different flows. This approach employs a three-color marking scheme and uses a modified leaky bucket technique for flow control. A detailed performance study, impact of various parameters, usage of multiple precedence levels, and flow control techniques will be investigated using the ns simulator. In the context of leaf markers, we propose to integrate the marking scheme with the TCP layer at the end nodes. Thus in addition to the aggregte level flow control at the interdomain layer, we will also achieve some degree of flow-level service differentiation. Our approach is based on splitting the TCP congestion window logically on the basis of the desired levels of services. During congestion, the splits of the congestion window gets affected corresponding to their relative service level agreements. Such an approach would also make the flow control fair across multiple flows with different service level agreements. Maintenance of proportional fairness has been observed as a difficult task in several prior research. We propose to evaluate the impact of the proposed leaf marker through an experimental implementation. The outcome of the proposed research will have a broader impact on the Internet infrastructure and on its users. Specifically, the proposed techniques will improve the bandwidth utilization in the Internet while providing differentiated services. At the local level, the research will have a positive educational impact on the students of Michigan State University doc6389 none Gee Records of geomagnetic intensity that span time scales appropriate to planetary evolution -- hundreds of millions to billions of years - are important sources of information about the early development of the Earth and of its geodynamo. The paleomagnetism of layered intrusive rocks provides this type of record. Preliminary data suggest that many rocks from layered intrusions retain primary thermoremanence carried by single-domain magnetite -- an ideal situation for paleointensity studies. The slow cooling of large intrusive complexes is likely to average short-term variations in the direction and intensity of the geomagnetic field. Providing that care is taken to account for the effects of slow cooling and remanence anisotropy, layered intrusive rocks will likely yield high-quality determinations of paleointensity. The investigators propose three related sets of experiments on samples from layered intrusions: (1) a more complete study of paleointensity variations using their collection of oriented specimens from the Archean Stillwater Complex (Montana, USA) and drill cores from the Stillwater Mining Company; (2) paleointensity experiments on samples from approximately 15 other layered intrusions; and (3) tests to determine the spatial and temporal scales over which large, slowly-cooled plutons average geomagnetic field variations doc6390 none Labotka The compositions and abundances of minerals in metamorphosed limestone and dolomite rock are commonly used to determine properties of the metamorphic fluid. The important properties are the composition of the fluid, the fluid flux, and terrain-scale patterns of fluid flow. In metamorphic systems, the development of mineral assemblages depends on the relative values of several rate constants, such as hydraulic conductivity, thermal conductivity, diffusion and dispersivity, and reaction progress. In this study, we plan to determine the kinetics of reactions that affect the stability of dolomite in mixed-volatile environments. A common sequence of reactions in dolomitic rocks metamorphosed under H2O-rich conditions is dolomite = calcite + periclase + CO2, followed by periclase + H2O = brucite. Similar reactions occur during metamorphism of ultramafic rocks in mixed-volatile fluids. The dolomite system is ideal for the study of reaction kinetics because the assemblages occur in a variety of silica-poor rocks in contact and regional metamorphic terrains. Our planned set of experiments consists of three parts. First, we will conduct time-series experiments on powdered starting materials in hydrothermal vessels to provide upper limits on mineral and isotope reaction rates. Second, we will observe fast and unquenchable reactions in situ in the hydrothermal diamond-anvil cell with the aid of laser Raman spectroscopy. In the third part of experimental investigation we plan to use cylinders of dolomite rock as starting material to mimic more closely the natural reactions. In all experiments, we plan to use isotopically labeled fluid to determine the rates of not only the mineralogic reactions, but also the isotope-exchange reactions in the same experiments. We will compare the results of the experimental study, particularly of the rock core experiments, with observations of the contact-metamorphosed dolomite from Marble Canyon, Texas, which experienced both the periclase-forming reaction and the brucite-forming retrograde reaction doc6391 none Earth Systems Science (40) This project is adapting an environmental chemistry laboratory course, developed at the University of California, Berkeley, for undergraduate education in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences (SEES). This curriculum is being supplemented with a section on an important environmental pollutant, lead, using lead paint analysis experiments developed at the University of Utah. An atomic absorption spectrometer, a set of field probes for dissolved oxygen, temperature and conductivity, and pH measurements, and a compact incubator are being obtained to complement equipment available in an existing environmental science laboratory which includes an ion-chromatograph and a field UV-Vis spectrophotometer. The project uses a series of experiments involving field sampling, field analysis and laboratory analysis from two field sites. Five groundwater wells that have been recently installed on campus serve as one field site. The second site is Flushing Bay, located about 2 miles from campus. Combined sewer overflows discharge raw sewage during rainstorms into Flushing Bay. Students are comparing the Flushing Bay data with a much larger New York Harbor water quality data set available from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection. Students are also comparing the Queens College campus well data with United States Geological Survey data from monitoring wells at various locations covering a sequence of aquifers, some similar to those at Queens College. This coordinated set of activities is enabling students to investigate parameters characterizing and regulating water quality in ground water and in coastal water systems. The incorporation of the leaded paint experiment is fulfilling three goals that are missing in the Berkeley curriculum. First, an important environmental pollutant found at trace levels but with high toxicity is introduced. Second, the handling of solid samples, an important aspect of environmental analysis, is used. Third, challenges in quantification of trace amounts of elements in a complex matrix characteristic of environmental samples, are presented. The service-learning approach offers an additional advantage in that it provides a connection between the knowledge the student acquire in the classroom and the application of that knowledge in a way that benefits the community at large. By providing undergraduates with training in state-of-the-art equipment and field experience, the project is introducing them to methods and techniques that are commonly used by environmental scientists and environmental consulting professionals. It also challenges and prepares students to pursue careers in environmental sciences and environmental science education doc6392 none Harlan This grant provides support to acquire alternating field, thermal demagnetization, and susceptibility (Spinner Kappabridge) equipment and magnetic shielding to establish a fully functional paleomagnetic laboratory in the Geography and Earth Systems Science Department of George Mason University. The paleomagnetic equipment will complement paleomagnetic instruments and equipment (spinner magnetometer, impulse magnetizer, portable drill and orientation equipment) already acquired by GMU. The paleomagnetic equipment will be utilized primarily by the principal investigator, Stephen S. Harlan and his students, but will also be available for use by individuals from universities and government agencies in the regional Virginia-Washington, D.C.-Maryland area. The Spinner Kappabridge, in particular, will be unique to this region. Current research projects by the principal investigator include the paleomagnetism and geochronology of Proterozoic rocks in the western U.S. and Canada, the timing of fold and thrust belt deformation in the Cordilleran orogenic belt, the nature and origin of magnetic phases in modern and ancient soils and their parent materials, and paleomagnetic, rock magnetic, and magnetic fabric studies of silicic volcanic rocks in the eastern Snake River Plain and Yellowstone National Park. Support for the acquisition of this equipment is shared by the NSF Earth Sciences Instrumentation and Facilities Program (EAR IF) and by George Mason University doc6393 none A permanent exhibition entitled Search for Extraterrestrial Life will engage visitors at the New York Hall of Science in applying the fundamental biology of life on Earth to understanding the search for life elsewhere. The 4,000 sq. ft. exhibition and accompanying programs will engage visitors in learning more about the wide range of conditions that support life on Earth, and how these life requirements shape the search on Mars and other planetary objects for any existing life forms. In addition, the technologies and strategies that scientists are developing to detect any life elsewhere will be highlighted. It is expected that 500,000 visitors each year will participate with the exhibit and its associated programs. Another dissemination plan for the project will be posting fabrication drawings and scripts in readily accessible formats on the Internet. Copies of all computer interactives on electronic media will be available to science-technology centers, museums and other informal learning institutions doc6360 none Collaborative Research: Integrated Analysis of the Neoproterozoic Vindhychal Basin, India The latest Mesoproterozoic ( - Ma) and Neoproterozoic ( -543 Ma) eras represent intervals of Earth history marked by profound changes in Earth system processes. These changes include large shifts in atmospheric and ocean chemistry with the build-up of free oxygen; the transition from equable, static climate to variable climatic conditions with the repeated occurrence of low-latitude glaciation; and the evolution of bilateral, multicellular organisms and the innovation of biomineralization. Our understanding of this important interval is currently hampered by the lack of a well- defined and calibrated stratigraphic reference framework, in which data can be integrated at a global scale. This project seeks to tackle this issue by means of a pilot study of portions of the Vindhyanchal basin of peninsular India. This basin appears to preserve a sedimentary record for much of the Meso-Neoproterozoic to Early Cambrian interval, but has received comparatively little attention outside India. Our analysis will place U-Pb geochronology of ash beds and other igneous units in a sequence stratigraphic context that will serve as the temporal and physical framework for future biostratigraphic, magnetostratigraphic, and chemostratigraphic studies doc6395 none The is a Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) proposal to conduct research on how beginning teachers of secondary school science practice the teaching of science. The investigator, an assistant professor in the school of education at UCSB who teaches science education classes, proposes that her own teaching practices be an object of investigation. The project would study the experiences of students in the science education program at the University of California, Santa Barbara who had taken her course in science education to see how they translate the course materials into teaching practices. One intent of this project is to provide rich textual descriptions of science instruction. It will use a design experiment methodology and thereby provide a valuable example, and evaluation, of that method as an way to intervene in science teacher education. This proposal was submitted as a SGER because the exploratory nature of conducting research on teaching by studying the teaching of one s self, as a means of scientific discovery, generates some negative reaction by reviewers. However, the research method proposed here is also accepted and adopted by other researchers as a ground-breaking way of investigating difficult subjects such as the relationship between teaching and learning. It follows a method used by Maggie Lampert at the University of Michigan to study herself prepare mathematics classroom and her research has been widely cited as a model of research into good teaching practices. Such methods have not been employed at the college level of teaching however, and this project offers the possibility of new insight into how to improve teaching of young new teachers doc6396 none This project will test the effects of an intervention to assist middle school teachers to learn to use rich, in-depth data to improve their teaching. Information about their current instruction, curriculum practices, and student assessment will be gathered, summarized, and given to teachers in a training exercise. Two forms of the intervention will be used: one is based on continuous improvement in which data and formative evaluation are provided to teachers. The other intervention is school-based collaboration and networking aimed at sharing teaching ideas, models, and strategies for improvement. The project will apply an experimental design with treatment and control schools randomly selected from a pool of schools from the same districts. Improvements in curriculum and teaching will be assessed with multiple measures, including teacher surveys, observation, interviews, and analysis of teacher assignments, student work, and student test results. However, the true test of the effect of the interventions cannot occur until a 4th unfunded year. The project will rely on school collected assessments doc6397 none Connelly Carlson Mineral assemblages in rocks exposed in continental collisional belts (orogens) commonly preserve important information about the high temperatures and pressures they experienced on their respective excursions into the deep crust. Understanding crustal dynamics of these belts requires integration of temperature (T) and pressure (P) and ages (t) to derive P-T-t paths for different parts of an orogen. However, P-T-t paths are not easily defined since independent estimates of P, T and t are based on isotopic and chemical distributions that are dependent on reactions or diffusion that stop at different temperatures. This may leave pressure estimates without corresponding temperature estimates and vice versa, thus precluding definition of real points on the actual P-T path. Estimates of the timing of metamorphism are based on minerals that form in poorly understood reactions and may be reset at temperatures that do not coincide with either P or T estimates. Improved P-T-t paths require refined calibrations of the first-order processes that control elemental and isotopic distributions that are used to define, P, T and t in mineral systems. We will examine elemental and isotopic variations in minerals around a high-temperature (+ degrees C) igneous complex of the Nain Plutonic Complex (Labrador, Canada), where pressures were constant and temperatures varied systematically. This work will facilitate calibration of elemental diffusion and relevant mineral reactions as a function of temperature, mineralogy and textural relationships. In turn, this will contribute to our ability to construct more accurate P-T-t paths and thus refine our understanding of the crustal dynamics in collisional orogens doc6398 none Zhong and Wahr Our understanding of the dynamic evolution of the Earth hinges critically on our knowledge of the mantle s viscosity structure. The post-glacial rebound process provides the most important and direct constraints on that structure. In the last three decades, a large number of studies have been devoted to constraining mantle viscosity by comparing model predictions and post-glacial rebound data. Almost all these studies have assumed that the Earth s viscoelastic structure is one-dimensional with dependence only on radius -- a condition that greatly simplifies the modeling process. However, important laterally varying viscoelastic structures exist in the mantle and lithosphere, including lithospheric thickness variations, faulted plate boundaries, continental keels, and other structures implied by a variety of seismic tomography models. The investigators propose to develop spherical finite element models to study the post-glacial rebound process for a mantle with realistic 3-D viscoelastic structures that include continental keels, and other structures implied by a variety of seismic tomography models. They will study the coupling between spherical harmonics with different degrees and orders induced by the laterally varying structure, and will examine the possible effects of that coupling on post-glacial rebound observations. For the proposed research, theywill use a finite element software CitcomS that has been developed to model thermal convection with variable viscosity in a spherical shell. They will also extend CitcomS to incorporate a viscoelastic (e.g., Maxwell) rheology and a deformable grid doc6399 none The efficient digital representation of voice, still images, high quality audio, and video, called lossy source compression, has a host of commercial applications today. These applications include digital cellular telephones, MP3 players, DVDs, HDTV, videoconferencing, Internet telephony, and the transmission storage of still images. The best approaches to source compression in these applications are adaptive in nature and are based upon a technique called nonlinear approximation. However, these compression methods have been designed primarily based on experiments without any guiding theory. This research investigates a new approach to adaptive lossy source compression based upon a mathematical quantity called the spectral entropy. This new approach to source compression, denoted as the SpEnt (spectral entropy) method, offers a fundamentally sound approach to adaptive source compression that has been missing heretofore. This work develops SpEnt-based lossy compression methods for speech, video, and still images that should find applications in many commercial products. The most successful methods for lossy source compression today are sample-function adaptive coders (also called input-by-input adaptive or realization-adaptive). In sample function adaptive coders, not only might the number of parameters transmitted in each block or frame vary from block-to-block (frame-to-frame), but for a given number of transmitted parameters, which parameters are transmitted in each block may vary. For such coders with a fixed set of basis functions, it is usually said that the coefficients corresponding to the best n basis functions are sent, rather than the first n, and this is called nonlinear approximation in harmonic analysis. Campbell derived the quantity that he called the coefficient rate of a random process in , and he showed that the coefficient rate depends on the spectral entropy (the entropy of the power spectral density of the original process). No coding theorems were proved and no possible implications of coefficient rate for source compression were stated. Recent work by the PI and his students produced two new derivations of Campbell s coefficient rate. One derivation allows coefficient rate to be interpreted with respect to a quantity called the effective bandwidth of the process. The other derivation reveals a new approach to source compression based upon coefficient rate that adapts to each realization of the source. More specifically, by studying the dominant terms in the series expansion of the product of terms, it was shown that in a sequence of N samples of a particular coefficient, the number of coefficient samples that should be coded is proportional to the coefficient variances. Thus, whether a particular coefficient is being coded or not is changing from block-to-block, and thus, lossy compression based upon the spectral entropy clearly falls in the class of nonlinear approximation methods. Motivated by these results, this research formulates a new approach to lossy source compression, called the spectral entropy (SpEnt) method, and develops SpEnt based coders for lossy compression of wideband speech (50 Hz to 7 kHz), video, telephone bandwidth speech, and still images. Further, this work examines the role of spectral entropy and Campbell s coefficient rate as fundamental quantities in adaptive coding of a sequence of source realizations doc6400 none Chemistry (12) The overarching goal of this proof-of-concept project is the design and implementation of a junior-level writing course that is synchronous with the proliferation of research opportunities available to today s undergraduate science majors. Colleges and universities engage students in evermore sophisticated research efforts, yet seldom offer adequate instruction in how to communicate these efforts to the larger scientific community. An interdisciplinary team-planned team-taught course is combining the expertise of a chemistry professor and an English professor to introduce chemistry majors to the genres of scientific writing and associated scientific literacy skills. The outcome of the project is a pedagogical approach to scientific writing that moves the student beyond generic laboratory reports and develops writing as a vehicle for organizing, interpreting, and communicating research data. Initiatives in scientific writing, when coupled with initiatives in undergraduate research, are ensuring the highest quality education for students, and are better preparing science majors for the research and writing challenges they will face as career scientists doc6401 none Family Science: Expanding Community Support for Inquiry-based Science is the University of Washington s innovative five-year plan for reaching youth and families in the Seattle school district. This program represents an enhancement of the NSF-funded Family Science program targeting grades K-5 and expansion of this successful program to include middle and high school students. The proposed activities, Science Explorations, Inquiry Science Conferences and Community Celebrations, are designed to help parents understand inquiry-based science instruction while heightening students confidence in their ability to understand science processes. The hands-on activities also support and complement Seattle s Local Systemic Change project by enlisting teachers, parents and community members to champion science education outside of the formal school setting. The implementation strategy includes workshops to train Family Science Lead Teachers and Parent Community Leaders to coordinate Family Science programs. Subsequent partnerships between teachers and community organizations are designed to establish regional clusters of community networks to support programmatic activities during and beyond the funding period. It is estimated that Family Science will result in the presentation of nearly 300 school and community-based events impacting 10,000 individuals doc6364 none Collaborative Research: A detailed chronology of the Loess-Paleosol Record of the last glacial Interglacial Cycle in the North American Midcontinent Loess deposits represent one of the most important terrestrial records of long-term Quaternary climatic change. High-resolution records of past environmental conditions can be extracted from loess deposits provided that the deposits can be accurately dated. We propose to apply three independent dating techniques (10Be inventory, AMS14C, and Optically Stimulated Luminescence) to develop a high-resolution chronology for loess of the last two glacial interglacial cycles in eastern Nebraska. This chronology will enable us to make accurate estimates of dust flux to the atmosphere over this time period, to evaluate the relative contribution of competing loess sources in the North American Midcontinent, and to determine the length of time represented by the last interglacial (Sangamon) soil in eastern Nebraska doc6403 none The aim of this proposal is to investigate new approaches to nurture and cultivate the mathematical imagination of all students. Mathematics as a science to imagine-with is not incompatible with memorizing the multiplication tables, number facts, or shortcuts to operate fractions, but it changes what these memories are part of. It is about imagiining space and time: shapes, patterns, or trajectories; it is about envisioning houw things could be; it is about discriminating the finite and infinite, the discrete from the continuous, and dthe possible from the impossible. The main conjecture of this proposal is that cultivating mathematical imagination is deeply related to enriching bodily action perception. The research we propose intends to investigate this thesis through a series of studies with high school students and pre-service teachers doc6404 none Harris, Robert The investigators at University of Utah will conduct a thermal investigation with the U.S.G.S of the San Francisco Bay Area along the San Andreas, Hayward and Calaveras faults. Thermal measurements will be collected in boreholes currently scheduled for drilling as part of the Mini Plate Boundary Observatory experiment for the emplacement of borehole strainmeters. The field component of the study consists of thermal logging and the collection of drill cuttings and rock samples for the determination of thermal physical rock properties. Thermal physical rock properties will be measured using modern laboratory techniques. These boreholes will be re-logged through time to investigate thermal transients (e.g., fluid flow, ground surface temperature changes, thermal events associated with faulting). The modeling component of this project is aimed at resolving: I ) the nature of heat transfer and variation of heat flow along this complex plate boundary; 2) the thermal conditions at both the lower and upper limits of seismicity; and 3) the thermal influence on deformation transients as determined from geodetic data and viscoelastic models of deformation. The field area is ideal for the proposed work because the San Francisco Bay Area has relatively high heat flow (~85 mW m-2) and high strain rates. These two properties maximize opportunities to investigate relationships between the thermal regime of the crust and aseismic transients doc6405 none This project will attempt to combine the excitement and interest students evince when allowed to interact with open-ended, exploratory computer models, with the structure and explicit pedagogy many require to succeed at linguistically oriented, paper-and-pencil tests. Using BioLogica, a software environment we have developed on a prior NSF grant, we will present students with a sequence of web labs, or computer-based, guided investigations, that will introduce them to multi-level reasoning in the domain of genetics. The web labs will provide the students with challenges of increasing difficulty, monitoring their work, offering feedback and soliciting responses as appropriate. Each will present students with information and questions regarding situations or problems analogous to the ones they have just worked on, offering metacognitive prompts designed to promote transfer from the computer activities to a broader understanding of the underlying scientific concepts doc6406 none This study investigates cognitive models of scientific inquiry skills in middle school science. It creates pedagogical approaches that enable students to develop widely applicable cognitive skills needed for collaborative inquiry and reflective learning. It would investigate a number of hypotheses concerning how to achieve these objectives. The study expects to result in creating a learning theory that links metacognition and reflective practices to the development of expertise in scientific inquiry. The central hypothesis is that scientific inquiry can be taught, or facilitated, through computer tools that support cognitive modeling and reflective practice. The investigators would create a support environment that houses several software advisors that can give strategic advice and guide students as they conduct research projects in science and reflect on their processes of investigation. Also, the investigators would create assessments of students expertise and evaluate the use of these models increases their understanding and performance of scientific inquiry doc6407 none Sharp and Hervig It is proposed to quantify the partitioning of the highly siderophile elements Au, Pt, Ir, and Os between silicate liquid and iron-sulfide liquid in chondritic material quenched from experiments at high pressures and temperatures. Such partitioning data will allow us to better constrain models for the accretion and differentiation of the early Earth. The conditions of the experiments (P = 1 to 25 GPa, T up to C) include values appropriate to a magma ocean presumed to have been generated during the early stages of formation of the Earth. Because the Earth accreted from volatile-depleted chondritic material, we will use a grade 5 or 6 H chondrite as the starting material. The range of conditions proposed will allow us to investigate the effect of pressure and temperature on partitioning for a bulk composition similar to the accreting Earth. Although much high-pressure work has been done on the moderately siderophile elements, little work has been done to measure the partitioning behavior of highly siderophile elements (HSEs) at high pressure. If our results show that the HSEs are not highly fractionated into the iron-sulfide melt, then the present-day abundance of siderophiles can be explained by a homogenous accretion model with metal-silicate equilibration in a deep magma ocean. If our data show strong partitioning of HSEs into the metal-sulfide phase then the mantle abundances of HSEs must be explained by a lack of equilibrium between core and mantle and heterogeneous accretion. In order to estimate the contributions of either homogeneous or heterogeneous accretion models, we must know the partitioning behavior of siderophile elements under conditions appropriate for accretion and core formation from chondritic material. In addition to measuring partition coefficients, we will use high-resolution electron microscopy to characterize the run products to determine if the HSEs are dissolved in the silicate or occur as micro nuggets doc6408 none Salim Hariri University of Arizona CISE Next Generation Program: Workshop on Active Middleware Services This workshop will provide an outstanding opportunity to explore new, Internet-oriented software technologies that will open new research and application opportunities not only for the multimedia and commercial world, but also for the scientific and high-performance computing community. We will invite researcher in active networks, Middleware, mobile and intelligent agents, distributed computing, and intelligent applications to investigate the research issues and opportunities enabled by the development of active Middleware services. The workshop will help in defining the important research issues and challenges that must be solved before we can realize an open framework to the development and the implementation of active Middleware services and the workshop will enable the research community to brainstorm on these issues and define the framework that must be followed to address the research challenges facing the develop0ment of active Middleware services. Contributions will be solicited from well-known researchers in areas related to active middleware services to be presented at the AMS workshop doc6409 none Houghton Vesuvius is perhaps the most dangerous of the world s Decade Volcanoes. 600 000 people live within 10 km of the crater and it has experienced 9 large (VEI 3) and numerous minor eruptions in historical times. This important volcano has been the subject of extensive earlier field and petrological studies by many groups, which supply an underpinning framework for this program. The sustained explosive eruptions, which characterize Vesuvius s history, are highly destructive events in which stable eruption plumes may give way gradually or abruptly to column collapse and or phreatomagmatism. The study focuses on the cause of the abrupt transition from stable Plinian eruption to phreatomagmatic explosions generating highly destructive pyroclastic density currents during the 79 AD eruption. The AD 79 eruption, which destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum (Lirer et al , Sigurdsson et al. , , Cioni et al. ), is generally regarded as the type example of Plinian volcanism. The program links macroscopic parameters describing the changes in eruption intensity and style with microscopic observations of pumice texture and chemistry. The study will (i) characterize the mixture of volcanic rock fragments (pyroclasts) emerging from single eruptive vents at a single moment and (ii) contrast patterns of vesiculation and microlite-crystallization for wide spectra of magma composition, and eruptive style and intensity. Large and small crystals (phenocrysts and microlites respectively) and gas bubbles (vesicles) in pyroclasts freeze in aspects of the history of the parent batch of magma in the chamber and conduit, and represent microscopic windows into the subsurface evolution of the volcano. We will interpret the changes in mean and extreme values of vesicularity and microlite-crystallinity before and after the key change in eruptive style. By using such well-constrained historical eruptions, we expect that the results of this work will have broad application to less well-documented historic or prehistoric eruptions and will greatly improve our understanding of abrupt changes in eruptive style intensity during explosive volcanism, and aid in forecasting not when Vesuvius (and other cone volcanoes) will next erupt but how it will erupt, a question that is equally important from a perspective of hazard management and mitigation doc6410 none Prior NSF supported research has led to several effective methods to polymerize self-organized amphiphilic monomers in a variety of lyotropic mesophases including lamellar, bicontinuous cubic, and inverted hexagonal phases. These studies provide the background for the proposed research into the formation of supramolecular materials from highly ordered columnar assemblies of octasubstituted phthalocyanines (Pc). Strong pi-pi interactions betweeen ordered arrays of the prototype Pc 1, i.e. 2, 3, 9, 10, 16, 17, 23, 24-octakis-((2-benzyloxy)ethoxy) phthlocyaninato Cu(II), control the phase and surface behavior of the Pc. The well ordered discotic columnar unit cells of Pc s similar to 1 will be used to create one-dimensional rod-like polymers, as well as create free standing or surface bound self-assembled Pc aggregates of defined size on the nano scale by enhancing the self-assembly characteristics of octasubstituted Pc. The self-assembled Pc aggregates may be composed of a single Pc or alternating pairs of Pc, in the same sense as alternating copolymers. These goals will be pursued by the preparation and characterization of octasubstituted Pc that incorporate specific self-assembly moieties to facilitate the formation of columnar arrays of alternating pairs of Pc. In addition unsymmetrical Pc will be prepared that are composed of three subunits similar to Pc1 with the fourth having an attached random coil oligomer. The balance between the attractive N-N interactions and the repulsive coil-coil interactions is expected to control the aggregation of these disc-coil oligomers. The synthesis and molecular characterization studies on these new nanomaterials will be complemented by collaborative analytical studies. %%% Supramolecular materials can be created by the design of molecular entities that self-assemble and or self-organize into non-covalently associated ensembles on the nano to micro scale. The organized nature of these materials offer several attractive features for applications in both biological and materials sciences, e.g. catalysis, separations, surface modification, therapeutics, diagnosis, signal transduction, among others doc6411 none This award provides funding to the University of California at Los Angeles, Dr. James C. Liao, Principal Investigator, for a three year Combined Research-Curriculum Development award entitled, A Laboratory Curriculum for Gene Chip Technology. A novel laboratory course for gene chip technology will be developed. The purpose of this course is to educate students in this cutting-edge area of biotechnology. Gene chip technology combines microfabrication processes with biomolecular recognition, and has begun to revolutionize research and application of life sciences and the biomedical industry. This emerging field draws on engineering talents as well as biological knowledge. Engineers have an unprecedented, significant role to play in life science research and related industry. The objective of this course is to impart the basic principles of gene chip fabrication and the processing of gene chip data. Students will apply the technology to investigate the gene expression profiles of E coli, a microorganism of importance to both biotechnology and biomedicine. Results will be published as a database via the Internet. Multi-media and web-based instruction will be used in the course. Expertise in instructional development will be used for course development and evaluation doc6412 none The Fred Friendly Seminars is producing a three-part, prime-time television series about the ethical, legal and social implications of advances in genetic research and technology. The audience for the series is the general public with special emphasis on the scientific and policy-making communities. Each of the programs will begin with a presentation of the basic genetic science linked to a specific ethical and policy issue and then will engage a panel in a Socratic dialogue based on a hypothetical situation related to that issue. The panel will represent a wide range of perspective including scientists, policy makers and people experiencing the dilemmas presenting in the hypothetical situations. Outreach material for the project will be developed by the National Center for Science Literacy, Education and Technology and Exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History. The center will produce a 16-page discussion guide designed for by a variety of informal education organizations that reach the general public. This guide will be available in both print and on the project web site. In addition to the guide, the web site include guidelines about how to use segments of the series as catalysts for discussion, a list of annotated resources on genetics, and a behind-the-scenes look at the genomic research labs of the museum doc6413 none Onasch Water has a profound effect on the deformation of rocks through a number of mechanical and chemical processes. Between C and C there is a transition regime where both processes are thought to operate is complex and as yet poorly understood ways that are affected by water. This project will attempt to identify and quantify the roles of water in facilitating the interplay of solution - related, fracture - related, and dislocation related processes during low temperature deformation of quartz - rich rocks. The approach will include use of techniques to better understand the presence and form of water in natural samples that come from a variety of structural and stratigraphic settings. Results are expected to provide a more accurate model of the role of water during deformation under subgreenschist conditions, and will be applicable to deformation processes in the upper crust doc6414 none The widespread need and ability to connect machines across the Internet, in a world where intelligent objects rather than documents are exchanged, has caused the network to be more vulnerable to intrusions and has facilitated break-ins of a variety of types. Most of the methods currently available to deal with network vulnerability to abuse and attacks are either inadequate, inefficient oroverly restrictive. Compounding the problem is the need to maintain an acceptable level of quality of service (QoS). The proposed research project considers a heterogeneous network environment where servers, which provide different levels of QoS support to clients through a contract protocol, are prone to faults and denial of service attacks. The research project assumes the existence of intrusion detection mechanisms, and aims at investigating new and potentially revolutionary approaches for the development of scalable and efficient service deployment strategies and network resource management schemes to maintain acceptable levels of QoS and security, despite faults. Two types of faults, namely, benign malfunctions and malicious intrusions, will be considered. The former can be caused by a faulty, yet legitimate client that accidentally loses control over its behavior, while the latter occurs with the intent to cause damage, such asDenial of Service (DoS). Both types of faults can severely affect the performance of the network and compromise the integrity and security of its services. These faults can manifest themselves in the form of a protocol breach or a contract violation. The former is exemplified by an authorized clients (impersonation may take place) who attempt to deliberately breach the contract protocol and impact the behavior of the server to eventually cause its failure. Contract violation occurs when a client attempts to acquire a level of service beyond what has been agreed upon in the service contract. In order to protect the servers and the network, we propose two new techniques: fault avoidance, based on the concept of replicated elusive servers, and fault tolerance, based on resource management schemes through the creation of a Virtually Isolated Network (VIN). The concept of replicated elusive servers espouses ideas such as roaming addresses and frequent frequency changes in wireless networks. Replication is coordinated through group communication supported by an underlying multicast mechanism. VINs, on the other hand, provide the basis to achieve both physical and logical separation (in space and time) of the resources reserved for each service, client, or class of clients. Efficient management of network resources is achieved based on an integrative approach which considers network performance, fault tolerance and security asintegral components of a multi-dimensional QoS space. QoS support can then be perceived as a multi-layered optimization process which considers security, fault- tolerance, resource allocation, communication protocol optimization and user level application management as inhabitants of the same QoS spectrum and seeks to exploit tradeoffs in order to reach anoptimal operating point. The techniques developed will be designed to handle multiple coordinated intrusions, clustered in both space and time. A coordinated clustered fault model will be developed and a study of its effect on the developed techniques and algorithms will be conducted. The proposed research will build on a foundation of prior work developed by the PIs which have a strong track record of success in a wide range of research topics related to fault-tolerance, operating system development and resource management for QoS support in wired and wireless networks. It is anticipated that through algorithms development and analysis, simulation and testbed implementations, the results of this project will lead to a better understanding of how to provide efficient support to QoS performance, fault-tolerance and securityin an integrated manner, both in wired and wireless environments. An equally important contribution of this project will be the training of high quality students in a field where expertise is scarce doc6415 none A three-year research project is proposed whose overall goals are to: Clarify the nature of authentic undergraduate research experiences-and their variations-in a sample of science disciplines from the viewpoints of participating and non-participating undergraduates (both as seniors and one year from graduation), from faculty, and from their institutions; Identify and categorize the essential elements of good undergraduate research experiences, the learning gains (cognitive, behavioral, affective, social, and professional) that they produce over time; the conditions and processes by which, these occur; and their relative significance in the achievement of outcomes valued by students and faculty; Identify variations in undergraduate research participation, experiences, and outcomes, and the factors that shape them, for women and men; and for white students and students of color. Hypothesize and test linkages between aspects of undergraduate research experiences and desired outcomes in the shorter and longer term. The research design controls for variations in undergraduate research models, institutional contexts, and academic disciplines by limiting the inquiry to one common type of program (mentored summer research for entering seniors requiring a senior thesis, and or presentation and publication of scholarly work) in a sample of institutions of similar type, with a limited range of science disciplines. Investigation will begin with entering seniors in summer, programs in four liberal arts colleges with a strong history of engagement in undergraduate research. Methods of sampling and inquiry allow for discovery of variations in the experiences and outcomes reported by female and male participants, by students of color compared with white students, and by female participants in single-sex versus mixed-sex research contexts. Samples will also include two comparison groups of non-participants who either chose not to participate in research programs as undergraduates, or who applied, and were not selected. A comparative ethnographic exploration of faculty goals and pedagogical methods, and student accounts of their experiences and benefits over time, will ground the development and testing of instruments to assess the impact of undergraduate research opportunities on the education and post-graduate lives of undergraduates. Interview and survey data from the student cohorts will be compared with those from faculty in order to establish, compare, and rank what each group perceives as the benefits of the research experience, and what factors influence their achievement. Interviews with students who do, and do not, participate in undergraduate research, with faculty research mentors, and with engaged senior faculty and administrators will be conducted in real time. Alumni who do, and do not, participate in undergraduate research will be interviewed one year after graduation to discern longer-term effects. Pilot study findings will also provide a research base for the design of comparable, cross-program evaluation strategies for common models of undergraduate research. Findings and instruments will be disseminated for use by colleagues interested in the development of evaluation strategies for undergraduate research projects through a workshop, presentations targeted to relevant audiences, selected web-sites, and published work doc6416 none Chemistry (12) Mississippi College has striven to improve science education by curriculum development employing spectroscopy and biochemical subject matter for science and non-science undergraduate students. Extending these changes, we are implementing a significant upgrade of nuclear magnetic resonance instrumental capability with broad implications for the chemistry curriculum at Mississippi College and five local two-year community colleges, Hinds, Holmes, Copiah-Lincoln, Jones County, and Southwest Mississippi Community Colleges. Curricular changes range from foundational to specialized courses and improve student skills in stages through the higher three years of the degree program. These changes are made by adapting experiments from the educational and research literature into undergraduate courses. In this project, a first goal is foundational for the second undergraduate year: improving student understanding and practice of magnetic resonance in organic chemistry at Mississippi College, and developing and implementing an outreach to the five local two-year colleges for annual instructor training, ongoing materials development, support and visiting class practice in infrared and nuclear magnetic spectroscopy. A second goal is developmental: introducing students to more searching experiments which take advantage of the wide analytical range of the instrumentation and its specialized applications in biochemistry, organic and instrumental analysis, and chemical dynamics. Supportive internet resources are being developed for both of these goals. A third goal is investigational: improving undergraduate research and honors by providing students with modern spectroscopic means for their synthetic and experimental work. Facilities are available to colleagues at other local four-year institutions. Following the implementation period, the project will support a long-term improvement of basic student skills in organic chemistry locally, and more specialized activities by upper-division students. Each planned element and the off-campus outreach will be evaluated by the end of the first year with annual assessments thereafter. Both intramural and extramural programs are being assessed based on student and faculty evaluation of the methods and experiences. Affected two-year college programs, which presently lack instrumental support, should realize significant science student, faculty, and program improvements. Science students will be better prepared for higher division classes, transfer programs, and for graduate and professional studies doc6417 none This project seeks funds to begin serious planning for a fifth international study of mathematics and science to be conducted by the IEA. Boston College directors, Ina Mullus and Michael Martin, would begin planning meetings and discussions that would lead toward a reconceptualization of the frameworks for the assessments in mathematics and science that make up the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). The experience of the previous 2 assessments, and the needs of policy makers would be discussed at these meetings. The study would be enhanced to address leading issues in mathematics and science education. These plans would cumulate into a study to be conducted in or after doc6418 none Failure to learn hidden skills is a persistent obstacle to students in science, math, and engineering domains. Hidden skills, which include problem categorization, feature detection, and planning, are critical to solving problems in a domain but do not have any immediate, external product for students to see. Unfortunately, it is unclear how best to identify and teach these difficult-to-learn skills. Instructional scaffolding is a popular and effective technique for providing targeted support and guidance while students learn to solve problems in a new domain. Scaffolding has great potential for improving hidden-skill learning. However, the reasons it works and how best to implement it are largely unknown. The proposed research will explain the effectiveness of instructional scaffolding in terms of hidden skill learning. Several hypotheses about the relationship between scaffolding and hidden skills will be tested, and new scaffolding designs will be evaluated. This will lead to a systematic approach to teaching hidden skills that improves students learning and transfer. The four specific aims of this project are: (1) Develop a systematic, efficient method for identifying hidden skills. While methods currently exist for analyzing domain-specific knowledge, these methods are not robust for identifying hidden skills, and they tend to be difficult and slow. This project will develop and test an automated method that combines logistic regression models and heuristic search algorithms to infer where hidden skills lie. (2) Develop a theoretical explanation for why scaffolding works. Although instructional scaffolds often lead to better learning, there has been little theoretical progress in explaining when and how scaffolding works. A sequence of experiments will be conducted to test three hypotheses that offer increasingly concrete levels of explanation for how scaffolding benefits learning and transfer. (3) Develop practical guidelines for the design of effective instructional scaffolding. Three critical questions for scaffolding design will be examined: What level of scaffolding support is sufficient to achieve its main benefit? When and how should scaffolding support be built and faded? And how can human instructors (i.e., TA s) best complement a computerized scaffolded learning environment? (4) Develop novel applications of our results on scaffolding hidden skills. There are at least two novel applications of this work, beyond the scope of learning theory and instructional design. First, the scaffolding designs from Specific Aim 3 will be used to develop new on-line assessments of students understanding. Second, the results from Specific Aim 1 will be used to develop tools that train instructors to see the hidden skills in complex problems and thus better anticipate students learning difficulties doc6419 none The objective of this project is to develop a high-resolution chronologic, stratigraphic, and paleogeographic framework for the southernmost exposed Triassic rift basins in eastern North America, specifically the Deep River and Dan River basins and to a lesser extent, the Richmond, and Taylorsville basins. These basins comprise the only outcropping continental sequences constrained to have been in the equatorial zone of Triassic Pangea. The development of a precise spatiotemporal framework is prompted by the exciting discovery of unexpectedly rich, seemingly endemic tetrapod assemblages from these basins that suggest new interpretations of the pattern of Late Triassic faunal evolution. These faunules contain surprisingly large numbers of synapsids (dicynodonts, traversodonts, and advanced cynodonts) that differentiate these paleoequatorial assemblages from coeval ones of the more northern Triassic rifts, as well as those from the classic Chinle Group of the American Southwest. In addition, elements of these faunules provide conflicting biostratigraphic information requiring independent mechanisms for assessing their age and correlation. We propose to use paleomagnetic and cyclostratigraphic means to place these new and previously discovered assemblages into a tightly constrained paleogeographic and temporal framework correlated to the well-defined Newark Basin time scale developed through previous NSF-funded work. We anticipate that this project will have major implications for the rates and taxonomic and geographic patterns of Triassic terrestrial faunal change, as well as the character and consequences of the Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction doc6420 none The end of the Eocene and the beginning of the Oligocene mark an important change in world climate, when it transitioned from greenhouse to icehouse . The timing and biotic impact of the change has been studied in the continental records of North America, Europe and Asia and they show a response to both local and global influences. As yet, however, no continental mammal and plant sequence has been studied in the Southern Hemisphere. Recent revision of the ages of rock units and biotas in Patagonia has demonstrated that the Sarmiento Fm at Gran Barranca in Patagonian Argentina spans the late Eocene through early Oligocene interval; this is the only known continental vertebrate and plant sequence so far identified from the Southern Hemisphere that spans this interval. Preliminary analysis of the mammalian herbivores suggests that dramatic changes occurred over a comparatively short interval of geologic time. The same sedimentary interval contains plant microfossils that document important change in the plant communities. This proposal requests funding for further study of this terrestrial biotic change. The geochronology of the Sarmiento Fm at Gran Barranca will be refined using radiometric dating, chemical identification of tephra, and paleomagnetism. Stratigraphically-controlled collections will be made of vertebrates and plant microfossils. Climate change and its impact on the biota will be assessed 1) by documenting changes in mammalian community structure (richness, origination and extinction rates and ecological morphology); and 2) by documenting changes in vegetation and floral composition from the study of phytoliths doc6421 none Biological Sciences (61) The goal of this project is to increase student comprehension of and enthusiasm for genetics by developing a Workshop Genetics course to replace the traditional lecture lab format currently in use. Genetics is a highly quantitative subject that is frequently a stumbling block for biology majors. Studies show that students enroll in genetics with misconceptions regarding everything from the cell cycle and mitosis to evolution. Furthermore, students have a particularly hard time relating many genetics concepts to their everyday lives. Nonetheless, most initiatives to improve science education have focused on introductory and general education courses. In order to rectify these problems, the Workshop Biology project, which was developed for a large general education class at the University of Oregon, is being adapted for implementation in the smaller, mid level genetics class. Workshop Genetics consists of four basic types of activities: Class Assemblies, Concept Activities, Investigative Laboratories, and Issues Activities. Additionally, a series of computer-based multimedia genetics problem sets are being developed through collaboration with John Pollack at Cornell University. All of these activities are being implemented with the help of undergraduates pursuing secondary education certification in biology. The success of the project goals will be assessed through collaboration with Dr. Patricia Nelson, Head of the Susquehanna University Education Department. Ultimately, this course will serve as a model for other upper level workshop science courses, will be disseminated via a Workshop Genetics Homepage , and will be presented at ABLE and Strategies for Success Conferences doc6367 none The purpose of this work is to support the understanding and development of protocols that can provide personal privacy over the Internet. While there have been some protocols proposed and implemented that hide the IP address of network communicators, there has been no systematic study of such protocols, nor have methods of analyzing the anonymity and security of those protocols been developed. A thorough understanding of anonymity is important not only for the development, analysis, and use of anonymous protocols for personal privacy, but also for understanding how network attackers can hide their location and for developing methods to track those attackers. Our eventual goal is to develop new techniques and protocols for anonymity, including a \logic of anonymity similar to those developed for authentication protocols that can be used to describe and analyze anonymous protocols. This proposal considers a number of contributions on this research area. Our first contri- bution will be to take a more general view of anonymous communication than previous work by considering protocols and techniques for hiding the identity of a responder from all other parties, and for providing completely anonymous communication in which both the initiator and responder are anonymous to each other and all other parties. The former technique is useful for anonymous web sites (rather than just anonymous web browsing); the later technique is useful for true two-party privacy over the Internet. Our second class of contributions will be to consider generalized protocol construction. This extends our past work, which de-coupled the forward and reverse paths of anonymous communication, giving rise to a large family of anony- mous protocols. We will continue investigation of those protocols, and examine what network support is available for anonymous communication and what support might best be provided in the future. Our third contribution will be to provide a formalism for anonymous protocols such that beliefs regarding entity identities can be reasoned by stating assumptions and deriving log- ical conclusions from following steps of defined protocols. Fourth, we will consider the network performance of anonymous routing protocols in an in-depth fashion, including not only latency and traffic, but also requirements of streaming media applications and traditional TCP-based bulk-data transfer applications. Finally, we will consider heretofore ignored security concerns of existing protocols, initially considering path analysis attacks and attacks that cause some participants to be unfairly accused by third parties. The formalism provided by our proposed logic of anonymity will be a foundational component of our security analysis work. Collaboration between these our two institutions will allow us to leverage the existing strength in networking at the University of Massachusetts and the existing strength in secu- rity at Purdue. 1 doc6423 none Today the World Wide Web is the foundation of e-commerce (including, e-advertisement, e-banking, etc.) Unfortunately, the World Wide Web does not offer good support for anonymity (called privacy in the popular press). While in a mechanical society window shoppers do not need to identify themselves, they implicitly or explicitly do so (to a certain extend) when using the World Wide Web. Privacy concerns may limit the growth and the use of the internet. The state of the art techniques to guarantee anonymity only provide weak security, or are too expensive to be used, or are completely impractical. Moreover, some protocols have been broken. The goals are: 1. to revisit and to (crypt) analyze existing protocols, 2. to study more efficient protocols to achieve robust anonymous communication, 3. to develop protocols to guarantee anonymity even when insiders are trying to break the anonymity, or trying to disrupt the anonymous communication, 4. to address the user-friendly aspect of cookies, without endangering the anonymity of the communication, 5. to enhance very secure (called unconditionally secure) protocols for anonymous communication, 6. to study limited anonymity doc6424 none Everett Lateral variations in mantle electrical conductivity provide insight into mantle convection, the fate of subducting slabs, the distribution of mantle plumes, and the nature of the transition zone from upper to lower mantle. Mantle electrical conductivity traditionally has been studied using frequency-domain response functions derived from Fourier analysis of permanent geomagnetic observatory time series. This method is limited however by the sparse and geographically irregular observatory distribution. Magnetic satellites, which record continuous spatiotemporal magnetic fluctuations, offer an opportunity to overcome this limitation since they sample the globe completely. The investigators have proposed to develop a time-domain 3D spherical Earth induction code and use data from the MAGSAT and Oersted satellites to investigate 3D variations in upper mantle electrical conductivity doc6425 none Geometrical and material heterogeneities of faults have long been viewed as crucial features that affect earthquake behavior. Recently the role of stress heterogeneities has begun to be recognized as a potentially central feature, particularly with the demonstration that stress heterogeneities alone already can produce a remarkably rich and complex set of earthquake-like behaviors on uniform planar faults. What is missing is an understanding of how the two types of heterogeneities, the static geometrical and material heterogeneities, and the dynamic stress heterogeneities, might combine and interact to produce even more realistic earthquake behavior. This research is developing a new approach to modeling geometrically heterogeneous faults. This approach can simulate the unexplored realm of sequences of elastodynamic events on nonplanar faults. Research focuses on applying the models, which involve interactions of stress and geometrical heterogeneities, in ways that are both significant and potentially observable doc6426 none seismic wave propagation generated by these earthquake sources PI s: John H. Shaw, Harvard University This project aims to develop three-dimensional structural models of active fault systems in the Los Angeles basin to study earthquake behavior. The models will incorporate large amounts of formerly proprietary subsurface geophysical data, including seismic reflection profiles and well logs, that were acquired by the petroleum industry. These data, combined with earthquake seismicity, will define the positions and geometries of faults at depth. The models will include both strike-slip and blind-thrust fault systems, both of which are capable of generating destructive earthquakes. Geodetic observations (GPS and InSAR) will be compared with fault displacements to assess the accuracy of modeled fault shapes and slip rates. The new models will be used to examine the mechanical interactions of fault systems in Los Angeles including stress-triggering phenomena. This behavior suggests that major earthquakes on one fault can induce events on adjacent faults, thereby increasing seismic hazard. Finally, the model will be used to simulate earthquake wave propagation from realistic, three-dimensional fault sources for the prediction of hazardous ground shaking. Results from these types of simulations can contribute to improved earthquake engineering, thereby helping to mitigate these natural disasters doc6427 none Connelly Knowledge of the distribution of land masses on Earth during the Late Precambrian has wide ranging implications for plate tectonics, paleoclimate and biological evolution. The Precambrian Hebridean Shield is a small fragment of ancestral North America (Laurentia) that detached during break up of Pangaea to become part of Europe. Prior to assembly of Pangaea, it formed the tip of a major promontory of Laurentia (between the Labrador and Greenland margins) and may thus serve as a sensitive probe of interactions between NE Laurentia and other continents. Although the history of this Scottish promontory is important to understanding global paleogeography in Neoproterozoic and Early Paleozoic times, its tectonic history remains controversial. Isotopic ages and structural complexities in the metasedimentary Moine and Dalradian supergroups of Scotland have long been interpreted to reflect Neoproterozoic orogenic (Knoydartian) episodes overprinted by Early Paleozoic deformation and metamorphism. Yet Neoproterozoic orogeny is unknown elsewhere in NE Laurentia and is instead a characteristic of Gondwanaland. The existence of this anomalous Neoproterozoic event is based primarily on two independent methods of geochronology, but neither appear water tight. Furthermore, we recognize a regional suite of mafic dikes that may serve as a reliable temporal marker that requires metamorphism to have occurred later than is currently presumed. If correct, Neoproterozoic orogeny in Scotland seems doubtful and deformation in these rocks is more likely related to the assembly of Laurentia and northwestern Europe during the Early Paleozoic (consistent with other regions along the Laurentian margin). Field mapping of key lithologies form a framework for detailed geochronology and geothermobarometry that will constrain the timing of magmatism, deformation and metamorphism in this region. Absolute ages of events will be used to test correlations of tectonic events along the Laurentian margin. Discounting Neoproterozoic orogeny in Scotland would simplify the pre-Caledonian history of the Scottish promontory of Laurentia in which Neoproterozoic magmas would relate to two separate phases of protracted rifting during the Riphean (~900-800 Ma) and Vendian (~600 Ma) periods. In turn, this would permit correlation of common events along this entire margin, and thus support a proposed two-stage breakout of Laurentia as a discrete continent during the Neoproterozoic, hypothetically from the Rodinian and Pannotian supercontinents, respectively. Alternatively, confirming the existence of Neoproterozoic orogeny in Scotland may dissociate Scotland from the rest of the NE Laurentian margin, thereby inferring crustal exchange between a Gondwanide continent and Laurentia during the latest Precambrian. Either outcome will resolve the timing and nature of tectonic events along the margin of NE Laurentia, thereby contributing to our understanding of global paleogeography during an important segment of Earth history that includes remarkable biodiversity and anomalous climate events doc6428 none This study will continue previous work on the nature of two reform-based teacher education programs and their impact on prospective teachers. The researchers will follow a number of preservice secondary mathematics teachers into their second year of teaching, in order to study closely how teacher education impacts their learning and development as mathematics teachers. Data will be gathered predominantly through semi-structured interviews, observations, and the collection and analysis of artifacts. The data gathering process will be organized around participants knowledge and beliefs, participants teaching, university teacher education experiences, and public school experiences. Products will be conference presentations, journal articles, and postings to a website doc6429 none Chemistry (12) The importance of Fourier Transform-Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (FT-NMR) spectroscopy in modern chemistry is reflected in the American Chemical Society Committee on Professional Training guidelines for the undergraduate organic chemistry curriculum which recommends hands-on training in 1 H and 13 C NMR for undergraduate students. In addition, more advanced pulse sequences such as 2-D NMR have become increasingly vital tools for the modern chemist. In order to incorporate these recommendations, the Department of Chemistry has purchased a 300 MHz instrument capable of teaching the broad range of experiments that comprise modern FT-NMR. We are infusing this technology across our undergraduate curriculum in a series of experiments, adapted from the current literature (research and educational), that is designed to progressively introduce a series of 1-D and 2-D NMR techniques. In doing so, we are adapting the approach recently instituted at Florida State University (CCLI A&I ), adjusting for the size of our student population and tuned to existing strengths in our curriculum. The instrument is being used first by students in their sophomore-level Organic Chemistry sequence to interpret and to obtain 1 H and 13 C spectra, then in a progressive fashion in Qualitative Organic Analysis, Physical Chemistry, Advanced Synthetic Methods, and Undergraduate Research in which more sophisticated techniques and the multi-nuclear nature of FT-NMR are explored. Outcomes include students with extensive hands-on experience in a variety of NMR techniques. Additionally, we are studying the pedagogy of teaching NMR across the curriculum and are in the process of producing a web accessible database of spectral FID s emphasizing 2-D NMR as a problem-solving tool. The database is providing a unique resource to other universities that may wish to implement 2-D NMR spectroscopy into their curriculum but that lack the instrumental capabilities to do so doc6430 none Biological Sciences (61) It is paramount to the learning of science that students participate in science as active learners and researchers. The use of multimedia technology to facilitate this goal offers an inexpensive way of making materials available to a large number of students and encourages students to be independent learners. This project is developing multimedia courseware that makes a wealth of resources available to undergraduate college students who are exploring the field of developmental biology. This field has gained tremendous importance recently because of its relevance to our daily lives through techniques such as cloning, genetic engineering, assisted reproductive techniques, and our realization of environmental impacts on development. It is important that college students gain an understanding of this field and that educational materials be available that make it both exciting and accessible. The multimedia courseware this project is developing consists of an interactive CD-ROM that interfaces with an interactive Web site. This CD-ROM Web hybrid instructs students on techniques and the biology of organisms used in this field. The courseware is called Vade Mecum, Latin for go with me, which was a term used in the past to designate a manual or handbook, and is used here to refer to the portability of this courseware, aiding its usefulness as the student uses it to explore developmental biology. One of the strengths of Vade Mecum is that it is fully integrated with a laboratory manual and coordinated with a major textbook in the field. This creates a unified package that facilitates both teaching and learning. Vade Mecum uses QuickTime movies, QuickTime Virtual Reality modules, an extensive gallery of labeled photographs, interactive learning sequences, puzzles, questions, and Web links to communicate to students how to create their own investigative tools, how to work with various model organisms, and how to understand the complex life cycles and development of these organisms. Web modules allow and encourage students to post their own work and discussions in the Virtual Poster Session and Virtual Round Table sections. By showing students the methods for low-cost experiments, how to construct their own tools out of common, inexpensive materials, how to adapt an inexpensive microscope to have it perform as an expensive instrument, and by keeping the cost of the Vade Mecum CD to a minimum and making the Vade Mecum Web Site available to all, this course material will be useful to learning at all institutions regardless of their financial status doc6431 none Johnson Magma chambers are an essential component in the construction of oceanic and continental lithosphere, and profoundly influence the thermal and mechanical behavior of the crust and mantle. The mechanical properties of a magma chamber change during cooling and crystallization, as accommodation of deformation changes from magmatic flow to solid-state processes. Thus, to understand the thermo-mechanical evolution of magma chambers, it is crucial to understand the relative importance of magmatic and solid-state flow, and the nature of the transition between them. This project is investigating such a transition preserved in the San Jose pluton, Baja California, Mexico. The pluton postdates the regional deformation, and so the transition from magmatic to solid-state flow reflects internal magma-chamber dynamics. Such transitions are rarely observed in post-tectonic plutons, and our results will benefit others who are working in more complex syntectonic examples. Detailed mapping and collection of spatially oriented samples is taking place along four transects in the pluton. X-ray compositional mapping, microstructural analysis and electron backscatter diffraction studies are being employed to track the chemical evolution of the deforming and crystallizing pluton, and to evaluate deformation mechanisms and the origins of the magmatic foliations. The project is supporting a PhD student, and several senior undergraduates at the University of Maine will participate as part of their Capstone Experience doc6432 none This three-year study will document in depth, and develop explanatory constructs for, practices in four urban schools where the schools and or specific teacher have an outstanding record of placing or sustaining students in college preparatory mathematics: a San Francisco middle school with large numbers of African-American and Latino students, a Boston K-6 pilot school with a similara demographic profile; and a high school feeder school pair in Jackson, MS, with 99% African-American students. The study will use ethnographic methods to examine classroom teachers , administrators , youth interactions, in the context of the school and community. Classrooms and aftershcool learning environments will be extensively videotaped, and interactions will be analyzed. The analyses will detail the development of mathematical ideas as well as the social processes of teaching and learning. As a secondary goal, the researchers will examine dimensions and varibles emerging from the analysis and consider problems of measurement and operationalization for large-scale quantitative research. The research draws on current theoretical perspectives and research methods on learning, including situated learning, integration of social and individual aspects of learning, communities of practice that indluence students learning and identities as mathematics learners, and methods for analysis of discourse, paraticipant structures, and mathematics content. The participating schools are members of the Algebra Project, a middle schyool project founded in the mid80s to increase proportion of minority students who complete algebra siccessfully in late middle school or high school and enter college preparatory studies doc6433 none Sheridan The risk of potential rock avalanches and pyroclastic flows is a problem that public safety authorities around the world face several times a year (Tilling, a). We propose to develop a 3-D computer code to simulate the mass and momentum flow from dangerous geologic avalanches, based on estimates of original volume of the starting materials and their properties and an accurate digital terrain model of the surface. The model will forecast lateral and longitudinal thickness variations in both the moving flow and the resulting deposits. This effort will greatly extend the forecasting products now provided by the successful Flow3D code of Sheridan (Kover, ; Sheridan and Kover, ). This project will contain several elements: 1. a mathematical model for dense grain flows with an air (avalanche) or hot gas (pyroclastic flow) matrix; 2. data constraint based on field studies of several recent avalanches in the Cascade Range and pyroclastic flows at Mount St. Helens and Colima, Mexico; 3. flume and inclined slope laboratory experiments to test the model at a small scales; and 4. simulation of scenarios of potential future events at the study sites. The simulation code will be developed in close concert with laboratory and field studies, providing fidelity of the computer modeling with experimental results. The basis of our simulations will be estimation of source volumes and runout data (deposit profile, thickness, etc.) of actual avalanches and flows and accurate DEMs of current topography. The models will provide velocity histories, flow paths, flow thickness, and planimetric areas of the simulations, all in three dimensions. The output display format will be suitable for interpretation by public safety officials as well as scientists. The results will be back-fitted to pyroclastic flow data from Unzen, Soufriere Hills, Mt. St. Helens, and Volcano Colima and avalanche data from Cascade volcanoes. Based on our benchmarking, the code will allow us to forecast future local hazards at these and other sites including Pico de Orizaba, Mount Rainier, and Mount Adams. The resulting model should help authorities design mitigation plans for specific dangerous areas doc6434 none Henry Kandrup This award will provide partial support for the travel expenses of young post doctoral researchers and graduate students who attend the Workshop on Non-linear Dynamics in Galaxies and Exo-Solar Planets at the University of Florida, Gainesville on 15-17 February, . This support will allow students who would otherwise be unable to attend this workshop to participate in the scientific interchange which is important for the development of both their educational development and the development of this new and expanding field of numerical modeling. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc6435 none An International Symposium on Biological Polyesters will be held from September 11-14thm, , in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This conference focuses on developments in the study of biological polyesters, a field at the interface of chemical, materials and biological sciences with direct applications in biotechnology, medicine and basic biological research. This rapidly expanding field has become the focus of great interest in both industrial and medical sectors, responding to the increasing need for bioinspired and environmentally biodegradable specialty polymers. Discussions during the planned conference include sessions on recent advance in the understanding and manipulation of synthesis and degradation pathways in different biological systems (plants and microbes) and their impact on polymer design and development. Practical applications of biological polyesters in fields of medicine, commodities, and chemicals will also be presented in dedicated sessions. The conference will be attended by approximately 200 academic and industrial scientists from around the world. %%% This award, co-supported by the Division of Materials Research and Bioengineering and Environmental Systems, provides partial support for U.S. participants doc6436 none Derry Integrated study of hot spring and stream chemistry in major tributaries of the Narayani river system of central Nepal, and stable isotope and fluid inclusion studies of associated hydrothermal vein material is underway. Data on the sources of solutes and sediments in Himalayan rivers indicate that active geothermal systems near the Main Central Thrust and in the Thakola graben are important sources of heat and solutes (including Na, K, Ca, Cl, Ge, Si and Sr), and release CO2 from metamorphic decarbonation reactions at depth 13C values from hot spring fluids are as high as +130 00, indicating a metamorphic source of CO2. About 25% of the flux of dissolved K and Sr, 12-15% of dissolved Si, and 90% of Cl at the confluence with the Trisuli river are derived from hydrothermal sources near the MCT. The heat loss from the surface springs is near 80 m W m2 averaged over the area of the High Himalayan Crystalline series in the Marsyandi basin. This data indicate that geothermal activity along the MCT has a significant impact on geochemical and heat fluxes in the Himalaya. Data from hot springs and tributaries in the major tributary drainage of the Narayani (Kali Gandaki, Seti, Marsyandi, Bhuri, and Trisuli rivers) are being used to construct a chemical and water flux mass balance for the hydrothermal systems. Chemical mass balance of conservative tracers including SO4 =Cl- and Ge Se will be used to estimate hydrothernal contributions to river fluxes. Fluid inclusion and stable isotope analysis of undeformed contribution to river Fluxes. Fluid inclusion and stable isotope analysis of undeformed post-metamorphic quartz and calcite veins will be used to estimate reservoir conditions, water-rock ratios, and local geothermal gradients in the convective system. The study is providing important data-driven estimate of geothermal heat flow and carbon degassing from the Himalaya that will help resolve difficulties with current Himalayan river budgets for radiogenic Sr and other dissolved species and new understanding to both our knowledge of Himalayan tectonic processes and how they impact geochemical fluxes doc6437 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Charles Martin Institution: University of Florida The development of arrays of electrochemical sensors based on nanomaterials to detect different analytes is to be demonstrated with biosensors. The unique aspect of this project is that the transduction of the binding event is accomplished directly on the chip. The team will develop processes based on redox sensors and electrochemical oligonucleotide sensors. Technical challenges include confinement of sensing elements to micron dimensions, signal transduction, and device control and signal processing. The proposed work in electrochemical sensor technology will establish an interface between electronics and electrolytes. A means to isolate and confine biochemical processes on chips for making amperometric measurements will be developed. Novel microelectrode configurations, previously developed by the PI, will be utilized in an array format for rapid assay experiments. The development of an on-chip potentiostat is proposed. Integration of an onboard controller, integrated circuit, and sensor is planned. This effort to provide electrical communication between biochemical processes and integrated-circuit technology may have applications in molecular electronics, biosensors, and bioartificial organs. The proposed work will complement the NSF Engineering Research Center at their institution. This project is co-funded by the Engineering Education and Centers Division doc6438 none Rutgers University is developing a large-format, scientific, documentary film about the evolving scientific investigation of deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Volcanoes of the Abyss (working title) will be produced in conjunction with Volcanic Ocean Films and produced directed by Stephen Low. It will examine the communities these vents support and their relationship to the surrounding environment. It also will consider the implications vent discoveries have for our understanding of the evolution of life and our search for life elsewhere in the Cosmos. Much of the filming will be done from on board the Alvin deep ocean research vessel. The companion Educational Outreach Program will reach students in middle and secondary schools and at the college level. Print-based and web-based material also will be designed for use by families. The film and the outreach materials together will be the basis of a substantive educational effort to inform the public about the intricacies and significance of the fascinating, but largely unknown, ecosystem doc6439 none Mathematical Sciences (21) The objective of the proposal is to enhance the learning process for students in Introductory Statistics and Calculus Based Statistics by adapting and implementing several types of pedagogical methods including ActivStats developed by P. Velleman and applets on the internet developed at the University of South Carolina. To implement the project a 32-student classroom was created which included an overhead projection unit and a smart board. The classroom enables multiple types of learning experiences and provides the technology for access to and analysis of real data. The smart board allows the instructor to edit any output coming from the projector as well as provide notes that are stored. The board also allows the instructor to retrieve notes as needed. Also, students work collaboratively and use real application. Hence, they become properly equipped for experiences beyond the classroom. Another important aspect of the project is the ability of the students to communicate their ideas. This is addressed by assigning and emphasizing writing assignments. Using more active learning approaches with real data from many disciplines enables statistics students to better understand concepts and be able to apply them to their fields of study and personal lives. Also, from the writing assignments students gain technical writing experiences and skills. The proposal directly addresses the themes of enhanced student learning, faculty development and integration of technology into education doc6440 none 59 Engineering Other) In this project, we are developing hands-on and visualization tools for introductory engineering courses such as statics and solid mechanics and other engineering courses as a proof-of-concept. The project addresses the need for curriculum improvement in the areas of problem formulation and integration of hands-on force input with computer visualization tools for fundamental engineering courses. Incorporating the sense of touch with computer visualization tools aids students in problem formulation, problem solving and analysis skills. These tools connect the physical systems to visualization and solutions calculated from theory. Specifically, the developed tools help students overcome difficulties in working with forces, moments, displacements and stresses, such as: 1) determination of the reaction forces and moments caused by applied forces; 2) determination of the shear and bending moment distributions in beams; 3) visualization of the deformation of a structure under applied loads; 4) determination of the types of stresses resulting from axial, torsional and bending loads. The tools enhance critical thinking and problem solving skills of students by engaging them in the learning process through individual experimentation doc6441 none Newell The magnetic behavior of multidomain particles is governed by nucleation and disappearance of domain walls and by domain wall pinning. These processes have been studied intensively but never combined in a single self-consistent model. The object of this proposal is to develop a numerical micromagnetic model that includes magnetoelastic interactions with stress fields due to defects. The model will be unconstrained so that domain walls can nucleate or disappear spontaneously and be pinned by the stress fields. Results will be compared with domain observations of stressed magnetite, pyrrhotite and hematite. For each particle that is modeled, a systematic approach will be used to map out all major and minor magnetization curves as a function of applied field and temperature. These curves will be used to simulate a wide variety of isothermal and temperature dependent experiments doc6442 none Connection between Antarctic krill populations from the Antarctic Peninsula region with those at South Georgia is dependant upon: 1) successful recruitment of larval and juvenile age groups at the Antarctic Peninsula, 2) entrainment of Antarctic Peninsula krill into the currents associated with fronts in the southern portion of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, 3) survival of the krill during transport across the Scotia Sea, and 4) successful recruitment to the local krill population at a range of space and time scales. The overall goal of this research is to examine environmental and biological variability associated with each of these components to determine the relative effect on Antarctic krill survival and recruitment. The first research question considers the factors that control influence variability in location of the large-scale circulation features, such as the southern Antarctic Circumpolar Current front and boundary. The rationale underlying this question is that the location of these circulation features affects krill entrainment, the volume of Upper Circumpolar Deep water that is upwelled arrival time of krill at South Georgia, and potentially the extent of the Polar Slope Current outflow from the Weddell Sea. The second research question considers the environmental and biological factors that allow successful transport of Antarctic krill between the Antarctic Peninsula and South Georgia. The third research question considers the physical and biological factors that result in successful recruitment of Antarctic krill to South Georgia populations. The fourth research question is focused on the entire Antarctic Peninsula-Scotia Sea system and is directed at determining the locations and or conditions that result in success or failure in recruitment of Antarctic krill. This question will consider if other locations for krill production and recruitment are possible given the constraints of passive advection, food availability, and recruitment. This study is a joint effort between E. Hofmann and J. Klinck at Old Dominion University and Dr. Eugene Murphy at the British Antarctic Surve (BAS) in Cambridge, England. The study will closely link to the BAS Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics Programme, which is investigating the variability of the South Georgia ecosystem. The research will include analyzing, synthesizing, and integrating the large environmental and krill data sets collected by BAS around South Georgia with those from the Antarctic Peninsula region that are from historical sources, such as BIOMASS and the Palmer Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program, and those from the South Shetland Islands and Elephant Island region obtained as part of the various data sets with biological and circulation models are essential for addressing the research questions and will lead to a greater understanding of the Antarctic Marine Ecosystem doc6443 none Zafiriou Freshwater dissolved organic matter (DOM) strongly affects many important processes, particularly in organic-rich systems. Recent reports show that (1) the major term in the proton balance of the highly colored Satilla River is organic alkalinity, and (2) that photoreactions in this water, catalyzed in part by Fe, consume O2, bleach color, and form CO, CO2 (the major product), and Fe(II). We hypothesized that CO2 arises by Fe-catalyzed photodecarboxylation : DOM-COO-H + O2 + hv_______ Fe DOM-H + CO2 a well-known reaction for simple molecules. The implied massive loss of the principal organic ionizable groups should profoundly influence many important properties of photo-altered DOM (hv-DOM): e.g. metal-binding capacity, acid-base properties, hydrophobic binding, adsorption coagulation, bioavailability, optical properties, and perhaps behavior in water purification (e.g. chlorination). However, an initial study determining and modeling Satilla water s whole pH titration curves before vs. after photolysis (solar simulator) falsified the hypothesis above: for every CO2 formed only ~ 0.1 acidic group was lost; pH decreased (stronger acids formed than were consumed). Furthermore, Fe was involved in the changes observed. Objectives: Hence we are proposing (1) better characterizing the relationships among CO2 evolution, proton binding sites (concentrations and affinities), and other variables: [Fe], pH, [O2], light dose, and wavelength; (2) assessing the generality and environmental variability of these effects by studying other riverwaters, sampled in different seasons; (3) examining the effect of these changes on an important physico-chemical property of hv-DOM: its copper binding strength and capacity, and (4) formulating a better heuristic scheme than the hypothesis above to rationalize the results chemically. Clearly to some extent photo-generated CO2 does not originate simply from -COO - groups. Acidic groups, if lost, seem to be replaced by similar but not identical new acids from DOM photo-oxidation. Work Plan and Methods: This is a collaborative effort among a postdoctoral associate and two PIs with experience in organic inorganic alkalinity-pH-CO2 properties, and DOM photochemistry. We are using optimizations of methods demonstrated to apply to this problem, and well-known Cu-binding study methods. The Altamaha, a more typical second river chosen for study, is also DOM-rich. Its DOM is thought to be derived from both allochthonous and autochthonous sources, in contrast to the Satilla s mainly allochthonous, highly colored DOM. Suwannee River water and well-known isolates of its humic and fulvic acids (SRFA, SRHA) are also being studied, since in organic-rich colored waters these fractions comprise a major portion of the DOM, organic alkalinity, and light-absorbing material. Education: This project contributes to training in environmental science by involving an independent-working postdoctoral associate and graduate students at UGA and WHOI. Societal Impacts: This study increases our understanding of processes potentially affecting water transparency, potability and treatment (e.g. chlorination), aquatic biota, and also the binding, transport, and transformations of agrichemicals and pollutants (especially Cu doc6444 none This award provides funding to Iowa State University, Charles Glatz, Principal Investigator, for a three-year Combined Research-Curriculum Development award entitled, NSF CRCD: Chemicals from Biorenewables. This project will provide a unique and valuable experience for students by giving them an opportunity to work in multidisciplinary teams on cutting-edge problems involving biorenewables, while using novel problem-based learning approaches. The focus of this project will be on bringing important emergent areas from the development of biorenewable sources of chemicals into new and existing courses in the Chemical Engineering curriculum and to let students experience the differences between process and product development. The new material will be added mainly as a laboratory component offered in parallel with three existing and one new lecture course. The educational approach will be one of problem-based learning in multidisciplinary teams doc6445 none for Computed Tomography of Endocranial Morphology in Fossil Cetacea Lori Marino, Principal Investigator Project Director Mark D. Uhen, Co - Principal Investigator The origin and evolutionary history of Cetacea (dolphins, whales, and porpoises) represents one of the most dramatic transformations in the fossil record. Some of the most significant changes that occurred throughout cetacean evolution were in the relative size and organization of the brain. Yet, relatively little is currently known, in any detailed systematic way, about brain evolution in cetaceans. Skeletal fossils document the major evolutionary changes in cranial and post-cranial morphology that occurred. The purpose of this project is to use Computed Tomography scanning technology to image and measure endocranial morphology of eighty-five fossil cetacean specimens, spanning the mid-Eocene to the present, from the Department of Paleobiology at The Smithsonian Institution. Specifically, the objectives of this study are to: 1) measure and document endocranial volume and morphology, along with postcranial indicators of body mass, in individual fossil and modern cetacean specimens, 2) use these data to estimate encephalization level and changes in brain structure in fossil and modern taxa, 3) reconstruct the sequence of changes in brain size and morphology in cetaceans within a phylogenetic context, and 4) test specific hypotheses about brain evolution in cetaceans. This project will provide the first testable database on cetacean brain evolution. In addition, these data also have the potential to inform broader comparative questions about mammalian brain evolution doc6446 none Chave The overall goal of the project is a better understanding of how the mantle participated in the growth and stabilization of Archean cratons, which are the oldest rocks that form the nuclei of the continents. Deep probing natural source electromagnitic studies have demonstrated that they can contribute substantially to this understanding by defining both the base of the lithosphere and by determining structural features within the mantle. Under previous NSF support, the principal investigators augmented a multidisciplinary effort called SNORCLE in northwest Canada (Slave province) that was part of the Canadian Lithoprobe program. This was accomplished by utilizing oceanic magnetotelluric instrumentation deployed in lakes from float airplanes. Due to budget restrictions the funding for this lake-bottom activity did not cover more than a preliminary analysis of the data; in essense, a pilot study. This award will allow the P.I.s to carry out a thorough analysis and modeling effort doc6447 none Matthew Jull The investigators will study the effect of pressure and temperature-dependent density and viscosity on the development of convective instabilities in dense lower-crustal mafic and ultramafic cumulates using a two-dimensional finite element model. Previous work has shown that with an assumption of constant density and viscosity for the lower crust and mantle, Moho temperatures must be ``hot (e.g. 600 C at 1 GPa) in order for dense lower crust to become convectively unstable and sink into the mantle on short timescales (~10 Myr). Variable density and viscosity will allow the investigators to consider (1) viscous entrainment of crustal material during the development of an instability and (2) time-varying crustal geotherms. They propose that (1) could play an important role in initiating subduction at passive margins, where a slowly growing lower crustal root exerts a negative buoyancy force on the plate margin. They further propose that (2) can explain the topographic and magmatic evolution of the Tibetan Plateau, where an initially dense, stable, lower crustal root becomes convectively unstable and sinks into the mantle as radiogenic heating decreases the viscosity of the lower crust and lithosphere doc6448 none Kurz This award supports a project for a detailed laboratory-based study of glacial moraine boulders collected on the flank of Mt. Waesche, a nunatak in the Executive Committee Range, Marie Byrd Land, West Antarctica. Preliminary work on these samples resulted in measurement of past ice sheet elevations in interior West Antarctica. Funds are requested here to measure exposure ages in the remaining samples from the moraine and adjacent volcanic bedrock. The goal is to use a combination of field observations, surface exposure dating (Helium-3, Neon-21 and Chlorine-36) and Argon-40 Argon-39 dating to constrain past elevations of the West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS). The initial study demonstrated that higher past ice levels are recorded by moraines, composed of volcanic debris left behind by receding ice, and that Helium-3 and Chlorine-36 surface exposure dating can be used to constrain the timing of past ice high stands. It is expected that these analyses will refine the initial results pertaining to the last deglaciation and provide a unique record of earlier ice sheet elevations. The primary long-term objective is to provide chronological and elevation data of the paleoglaciology of the interior of the WAIS prior to 10 kA. The unique record of surface ice elevations at Mt. Waesche provides key constraints on the behavior of the ice sheet and its response to climate and sea level change. This information will contribute strongly to determining why the WAIS behaved as it did during the last deglaciation and the previous interglacial, and will help efforts to predict how it will change in the future doc6449 none Garvie Electrical conductivities from laboratory measurements and geophysical data are often at odds, since common crustal silicates are significantly more insulating than are crustal conductivities determined by geophysical models. It has been suggested that the electrical conductivity of these rocks is in part controlled by intergranular C. The nature of this C is poorly known. Electron optical, diffraction, and spectroscopic studies reveal heterogeneous materials, with chemical and structural variations at the nanometer scale. The origin of the intergranular C is also in dispute. The intergranular C contains a host of elements, most notably Cl. It is unknown whether any of these elements are associated with graphite intercalation compounds (GIC), separate discrete mineral inclusions, or as organic compounds. The proposed study will focus on the chemistry and mineralogy of grain-boundary C in mantle xenoliths from alkali basalts, kimberlites, and samples recovered from the German continental scientific drilling site (KTB). Particular attention will be directed towards determining the local chemical composition of the C, with the view of identifying the hosts of the associated elements. It is necessary to ascertain the presence of GICs in the intergranular C because of their significant physical and chemical properties. Understanding the structure-property relationships of intergranular C requires a knowledge of the microstructure, including a quantitative appreciation of chemical bonding and its spatial distribution. Structural information will be revealed by high resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM). The proposal describes studies that rely on the high-energy resolution and brightness of a TEM equipped with a field-emission gun (FEG) electron source and the high sensitivity of the new Gatan 766 DigiPEELS spectrometer. This experimental setup provides nanometer-scale, trace element, analytical capabilities. Electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) with a TEM is an established spectroscopic technique that provides qualitative and quantitative chemical information. EELS is a highly sensitive microanalytical tool, and offers an advantage over energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy (EDXS) for analyzing light elements doc6450 none To understand mathematical cognition both as it develops in the young child and as it is taught in school, one must understand the cognitive systems from which it is constructed and the processes by which those systems are coordinated to produce new concepts and skills. Based on previous research, we hypothesize that elementary school mathematics builds on three representational systems: a system for representing exact small numerosities, a system for representing approximate large numerosities, and natural language with its system of number words and other quantifiers. The proposed research investigates each of these building block systems and their interactions through experiments on human infants, non-human primates, preschool children learning counting, elementary school children learning arithmetic and fractions, and adults. To study the building block cognitive systems directly, experiments investigate spontaneous number representations in human infants and in untrained adult monkeys, using in each population the same three converging behavioral measures: looking time to arrays of different numerosities and to addition or subtraction events (building on the finding that both infants and monkeys look longer at novel arrays or unexpected events), manual search (building on the finding that the number of times that an infant or monkey will search in a container depends on the number of objects it represents within the container), and locomotor approach to containers with different numbers of attractive objects (building on the finding that infants and monkeys will approach the container with the greater number of objects). Further experiments investigate how preschool children assemble these components in learning number words and the counting routine, by using verbal and pointing tasks to assess developmental changes in children s understanding of number words and counting procedures. To uncover the neural substrates underlying mathematical cognition, both behavioral and neuroimaging experiments investigate whether and how human adults use each of the three representational systems in performing numerical comparisons and elementary arithmetic. Finally, experiments investigate number concepts and arithmetic learning in elementary school children. Training studies in which children are taught new facts or concepts and then are tested on a range of related problems will serve to investigate the subsystems involved in this learning, to probe the processes by which those subsystems are assembled to meet new educational challenges, and to explore ways of enhancing mathematics learning in elementary school. This research promises to shed light on the teaching and learning of mathematics through coordinated, laboratory-based studies in which monkeys, infants, children and adults are given the same stimuli and often the same tasks. This coordinated effort should provide a broad portrait of the sources of mathematical thinking, from its phylogenetic and ontogenetic origins to its culmination in educated adults doc6451 none Computer Science (31) This project develops innovative new laboratory materials that give students hands-on experience with wireless networking concepts and technology. The underlying hardware for student projects is the Cybiko, an inexpensive yet powerful multi-functional communications computer. The resulting materials can be used to augment existing computer networks courses, as several of the exercises illustrate traditional networking concepts, or they can form the core of a new upper-level wireless networking course. The tremendous growth of the internet, in both size and significance, makes it increasingly important that undergraduate students be exposed to fundamental networking technologies and techniques doc6452 none Miller This award supports a three year project to acquire data on the concentration of trifluoroacetate (TFA) in Antarctic snow. Trifluoroacetate is a highly persistent, atmospheric degradation product of the halogenated ethane derivatives (HCFC, HFC) that have been introduced as environmentally friendly chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) substitutes. However, there is concern that the widespread introduction of HCFC s and HFC s will lead to the accumulation of TFA in aquatic ecosystems. Current data on pre-industrial, background concentration of TFA in meteoric and surface waters, including Antarctic ice, are ambiguous and the impact of anthropogenic TFA on these background concentrations is unclear. Ice core records can provide proxy records of background and anthropogenic TFA deposition. The primary objective of this research is to use ice cores and snow pits at South Pole to develop a temporal record of TFA deposition spanning ~ years but focused on the past 20 years. The pre-industrial to present record of TFA in near surface snow and ice at South Pole and in West Antarctica will be unique and will lead to a much better understanding of the origin, transport and fate of this contaminant over Antarctica and possibly the globe. In addition, understanding the natural and anthropogenic sources, the regional and long-range movement, and the eventual fate of contaminants is critical to assessing potential impacts on Antarctic ecosystems doc6453 none Chemistry (12) Capillary column gas chromatography (GC) is integrated into several courses that offer multi-week, collaborative, project-oriented laboratory experiences, using experiments which are adapted from standard literature. The Chemistry Department currently offers many of these types of laboratory experiences to students, but feel the addition of several capillary column GC s would greatly enhance the range of projects that could be offered. The Department greatly values multi-week, collaborative, project-oriented laboratories because the skills students develop, such as working as a member of a team, designing experiments, and evaluating data, are central to being a scientist. In addition, offering multi-week projects, which closely parallel a true research experience, inspires more students to seek out undergraduate research experiences. Capillary column GC is a flexible, fast, and quantitative tool that can support many types of projects in introductory, environmental, and organic chemistry. The GC instruments have temperature programming capabilities and are equipped with two detectors, two columns, and an integrator for each instrument. The majority of the GC instruments have flame ionization detectors; however, two of the instruments are each equipped with an electron capture detector. The addition of two electron capture detectors allows two of the GC instruments to support project-oriented laboratories in environmental chemistry courses where the selective detection of halogenated and nitro-substituted compounds, a typical motif for many pesticides and herbicides, are crucial. The majority of the capillary column GC usage occurs in sophomore organic chemistry laboratories where there has been a shift in curricular focus to offering all project-oriented laboratory experiences. Some examples of projects to be offered include the examination of competitive reaction pathways in the dehydration reaction of an alcohol, a study of structure reactivity relationships in the Diels-Alder reaction, and the examination of the enantioselective reduction of an acylnaphthalene derivative. Introductory and environmental chemistry courses at Carleton offer at least one multi-week, project oriented laboratory experience. During this period students usually pick from a menu of possible projects that a team can undertake. In introductory chemistry three projects take advantage of the new capillary column GC s. These projects include an examination of intermolecular forces in several liquids, the investigation of a simulated forensic arson sample, and the investigation of the volatility of fluorinated metal-acetylacetonate complexes. In environmental chemistry a project would call for a student group to examine the distribution of a herbicide in either soil or water in the immediate region around the campus. An additional project is also used to examine pesticides and herbicides in commercially grown fruits and vegetables doc6454 none McCall The elastic behavior of rock and other consolidated materials (e.g., concrete) is nonlinear, hysteretic, and displays log ( t ) recovery to stress and temperature perturbations. The physical mechanisms causing these unusual behaviors is not understood. It is known, however, that the primary elastic properties of a rock are a consequence of the nature of the bonds between grains, rather than of the grains themselves. The bond system within a rock is highly sensitive to changes in temperature, pore fluid configurations, and stress. The goal of this project is to develop an experimental system that will allow steady state and transient measurement of the elastic tensor of a rock sample in well-defined temperature and saturation states. The technique that will be used to determine the elastic tensor of the sample is resonant ultrasound spectroscopy (RUS). RUS has recently been shown to be an efficient and sensitive measurement technique for rock samples. Thus RUS will be used to make a careful exploration of the time, temperature, and saturation dependence of elastic behavior in rock. These data will fuel our understanding of the microscopic mechanisms driving the behavior of the bond system in rock and other consolidated materials, such as concrete doc6455 none The Evolution of Herbivorous Marine Mammals: Ecological and Evolutionary Transitions in the Sirenia and Desmostylia by Paul L. Koch In modern marine ecosystems, mammals play a minor role as primary consumers of marine plants, and the diversity of herbivorous marine mammals (e.g., sea cows) is significantly lower than that of carnivorous marine mammals (e.g, seals or whales). The diversity of marine herbivores in the past was much higher than today. What explains this disparity in the number of marine mammal herbivores between modern and ancient ecosystems? How do the ecological and physiological requirements imposed by a herbivorous diet differ from those faced by marine carnivores? Do these differences contribute to the differences in diversity between these two groups? To answer these questions, we propose to look at the ecological and physiological transitions that occurred during the evolution of two groups - sirenians (i.e. manatees and dugongs) and a related group of hippo-sized mammals called desmostylians. We will examine animals from three time intervals. First, we will examine the ecology of the earliest sirenians and desmostylians from the Eocene (50 Ma), focusing on animals involved in the transition from terrestrial to marine systems, and correlating this change in habitat with changes in physical features, such as body size and limb morphology. Next, we plan to study the interaction of desmostylians and sirenians from the north Pacific during the Middle Miocene to assess how marine resources were partitioned between these groups, and how Pacific ecosystems were able to sustain a higher level of diversity of marine mammalian herbivores than today. Finally, our work in the Pacific will continue by looking at the lineage that gave rise to the Steller s sea cow, exploring what environmental and physiological factors facilitated the evolution of the largest marine herbivore ever. Our study will chiefly rely on three stable isotope systems. First, carbon isotopes will be used as a proxy for diet that will allow us to discriminate between feeding in terrestrial versus marine systems. Second, variability in oxygen isotope values will be used as a proxy for the extent to which early members of each group used aquatic habitats. Mean oxygen isotope values will serve as a preliminary indicator of reliance on marine versus freshwater habitats. Finally, calcium isotopes will allow us to identify trophic level and assess whether early sirenians and desmostylians supplemented their herbivorous diet with a higher energy food resource (e.g, meat) as they overcame potential energetic barriers associated with the transition from land to sea. Together, these three systems will allow us to assess the ecological preferences of these groups, and better understand the factors involved in the evolution of marine herbivores doc6456 none Optical communication networks employing wavelength division multiplexing can support several communication sessions using a limited number of wavelength channels. The employment ofwave- length reuse in different parts of the network contributes to the increase in the number of sessions that can be supported. As such, these networks can provide a means to serve those applica- tions which individually or collectively require large amounts of bandwidth. An important class of services with such property is the class of multicast, or multipoint traffic, which requires the delivery of data from the source to a group of destinations. Although a few studies have addressed packet-switched multicast services in broadcast-and-select optical networks, the topics of routing, wavelength assignment, dimensioning, and performance of circuit-switched multicast services in wavelength routing optical networks have received little attention. This project deals with multicast services in optical networks, with and without wavelength converters. Such applications can be served using wavelength routing networks. The project has several objectives. First, we would like to develop multicast tree construction algorithms for optical networks which take into account the optical network constraints into account, such as thepower budget, wavelength collisions and wavelength continuity, aswell as the cost and type of splitters and wavelength converters. Optimal network provisioning and dimensioning under multicast service, given the traffic demands and cost constraints, is another objective. We also plan to investigate the possibility of formulating a joint problem for the optimal provisioning, and the optimal wavelength converter and splitter placement. It is also planned that routing, and wavelength selection algo- rithms will be developed for multicast services in optical networks. It is also planned to study the effect of these algorithms on the dimensioning and performance of the network. All this requires construction of accurate analytical models for the evaluation of call blocking probabilities under different routing and wavelength selection algorithms. As the efficient support of multicast traffic requires the branching of the traffic at several points in the network, these models are expected to be very involved, especially that several standard independence assumptions cannot be used in this case. In addition to general performance models, bounds on performance will be established, which will provide a guide to the provisioning and dimensioning of networks for multicast service. Such bounds will be established through the identification of extreme network topologies which serve to provide these bounds. The results of this work are expected to advance the understanding of the behavior of optical networks under futuristic, yet more involved, traffic conditions. At the same time, these results will contribute to the design and dimensioning of such networks doc6457 none A major challenge for the implementation of inquiry-based science learning is the implementation of assessment approaches that can capture the rich forms of conceptual learning and strategic reasoning that inquiry learning is designed to foster. To address the challenge, science education reformers are advocating performance assessment approach, in which students are evaluated on the quality of their performance on cognitively demanding tasks. The goal of this research is to identify strategies to support performance assessment with technology, taking advantage of the Progress Portfolio, an inquiry-support tool developed at Northwestern University. The Progress Portfolio was designed initially to foster inquiry by providing tools for learners to create a visible record of their activities as an object for reflection, but prior studies revealed that the features that make the Progress Portfolio effective as a scaffold for reflective inquiry also make it a valuable support for assessment.. Accordingly, this research will conduct a pilot investigation of: a) the design of performance assessment frameworks to take advantage of technology supports, b) the design of technology supports for performance assessment c) the application of these technology-supported performance assessment frameworks in the design of inquiry-based science curricula, d) support for teacher implementation of performance assessment, and e) the effectiveness of the technology-supported performance assessments at capturing student progress and providing reliable feedback to teachers and students. The project will benefit from a collaboration between researchers from Northwestern University with expertise in technological supports for inquiry learning, and researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and SRI with expertise in performance assessment and curriculum development. This project addresses the ROLE themes of Research on SMET learning in educational settings and Research on SMET learning in complex educational systems doc6458 none Cornell University will develop Citizens Science Online. This project will use the Internet to develop ways of allowing citizens, at any level of prior sophistication, to participate in science by gathering data that will contribute to an understanding of the population biology of birds and for managing the natural ecosystems these birds inhabit. The program has five components: (1) software, user interfaces and background resources on an Internet-based program that is accessible to any North American participant; (2) nine existing citizen-science projects will be modified to make online data entry more accurate, to make participation more user-friendly and to facilitate feedback of results to the participants and public; (3) an extensive library of online support materials and tutorials, including photos, audioclips of vocalizations, maps and other information; (4) integration of all of these Internet-based projects and information via a comprehensive Web portal, Citizen Science Online; and (5) testing and modifying of the interactive database tools through partnerships with other organizations doc6459 none We are currently witnessing an incredible transformation in the way we access information and computing power. With small handheld devices such as personal digital assistants, cellular phones, and palmtop computers, users are taking their computers with them more often than not. Fur- thermore, with the developments in wireless technologies, users are beginning to slowly move away from their dependence on wired access to their information. While this trend is building significant momentum, the types of information that are accessed through these devices is still severely lim- ited by the wireless media. Given the bottle-necks associated with today s power-limited portable devices, the limitation due to channel conditions has not yet been felt by the user; however the strain on the underlying wireless network will only get worse. The goal of the proposed research is the construction of high performance algorithms for tetherless access which consider overall system goals through joint optimization across multiple layers. The objective will be to solve problems which connect the physical layer to the application layer. In the past, a classical approach to wireless communication system design was undertaken { a modular approach loosely based on the Open Systems Interconnection reference stack model. For wired communication networks, such a separation of activities led to functioning systems offering solid performance. However, the deleterious effects of the wireless communications channel force the investigation of all possible methods to improve performance. Thus, to provide the desired fidelity and to transport high-data rate information over the wireless medium, joint optimization across multiple communication layers will be necessary. To focus the research, wireless transport of video via Direct Sequence Code-Division Multiple-Access (DS-CDMA) will be considered. In this project, we propose the research and development of video streaming algorithms that are more suited for wireless transmission using DS-CDMA as an access methodology. There are several reasons why this project is necessary. First, current research onmulti-rate detection and estimation algorithms at the physical layer are not tailored for specific application layer data. Second, many of the video transmission schemes over wireless networks have assumed fixed bit-error rates that are introduced by the wireless transmission. In CDMA systems, the bit-error rate is highly dependent on the channel and the number of active users, both of these processes are time-varying; however, this variability in bit-error rates has not been fully addressed at the application layer. Third, the elasticity ofvideo can be exploited to design efficient algorithms which can take advantage of the shape of video streams as well as time-varying channel conditions to offer desired quality-of-service. This research project has three principle goals: Investigation of efficient multi-rate detection and estimation algorithms for wireless physical media transmission. Investigation of video streaming techniques for wireless networks that use underlying network condition feedback to dynamically adjust the forward error correction used to protect the video data. Investigation of the integration of physical layer media characteristics and higher-level video applications to provide the highest quality-of- service to applications doc6460 none Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite systems provide global coverage with short round trip delays. With these properties they will play a crucial role in the global Internet to support real-time and non-real-time applications. Routing and multicasting in LEO satellite systems are the key issues to support these services. Non-real-time applications are characterized by relaxed delay bounds. They are also insensitive to the variations in delay. Thus, datagram-based routing schemes can be used to support this type of traffic. the Semi-Centralized Datagram Routing Protocol (SC-DRP) is proposed to support connectionless routing in LEO satellite networks. The SC-DRP aims to foward the packets in the LEO satellite network on minimum delay paths. SC-DRP utilized LEO and MEO GEO satellites to calculate routing tables, which will increase the reliability and delay performance of datagram traffic in satellite networks, where the data traffic is carried in the LEO satellite network. The Datagram Multicast Protocol (DMP) is proposed to support connectionless multicasting. DMP is based on the SC-DRP and creates shortest path trees. Real-time applications impose strict delay bounds and are sensitive to delay varations. Thus, real-time traffic can be supported by connection-oriented routing schemes. The changing connectivity pattern of satellites affects the estbalished paths in LEO satellite networks. Thus, determining stable paths is very important. The Delay-Coupled Probabilistic Routing Protocol (DC-PRP) is proposed for connection-oriented routing in LEO satellite networks. DC-PRP computes paths conforming to the delay and delay jitter bounds of the connections. The Connection-Oriented Multicast Protocol (LEOCOM) is proposed for the connection-oriented multicasting, which creates delay-constrained multicast trees. The multicast tree length is optimized using a greedy search algorithm doc6461 none Lange The primary goal of this proposal is to measure the zero pressure compressibility of a variety of silicate liquids over a wide temperature range using an ultrasonic acoustic interferometer. Our high-temperature capability will be used to: (1) obtain relaxed sound speeds on liquids that are too viscous for such measurements below degrees C (e.g., dacite and rhyolite), (2) access melts with exceptionally high liquidus temperatures (e.g., peraluminous melts, komatiite, peridotite), and (3) improve constraints on the temperature dependence of melt compressibility by measuring relaxed sound speeds over temperature intervals that span several hundred degrees. In addition, experiments are planned to examine variations in the compressibility of silicate melts undergoing composition-induced coordination change of cations (Al3+, Fe3+, Ti4+) at one bar. These experiments will provide analogies for understanding the consequences of pressure-induced coordination change of cations on melt density. A final application is to silicate melts containing volatile components (fluorine and phosphorous) and a variety of carbonatite liquids. All of the proposed sound speed measurements at zero pressure (one bar) will provide a critical complement to in-situ methods that allow density and compressibility to be derived at pressure doc6462 none The use of multi-beam antenna arrays for transmission and reception allows wireless units to send and receive tens of beams in different directions and using multiple frequency bands. If we deploy a large number of such multi-beam wireless units over a large area, we obtain a highly connected and high capacity wireless network. We call this the All Wireless Network (AWN). Analogous to Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) in All Optical Networks (AON), we propose an analogous Frequency Division (FD) and Space Division (SD) technique for All Wireless Networks (AWN). Unlike point-to-point connectivity of an AON, we argue that massively parallel number of beams with flexibly assigned direction and frequency from wireless multi-beam units can provide unlimited connectivity and bandwidth. We rely on spatial parallelism to achieve an extremely high network throughput. An AWN can be arranged as a spatially distributed multi-stage circuit switch or a fully connected ring, allowing multi-rate and multi-cast capability of a parallel and spatially distributed switch fabric. A single multi-beam wireless unit can receive from multiple beams to achieve a Gigabit per second throughput for an application. The wireless unit can also serve as relay nodes to switch incoming beams of given direction and frequency through a switch fabric onto outgoing beams of different direction and frequency. This is analogous to all optical switching for DWDM in an AON, except we have an added dimension of free and continuous spatial connectivity, rather than fiber-to-fiber connectivity. We shall devise switching and routing theory and techniques for SD FD circuit switching over AWN, taking into account co-channel and adjacent channel interference and various fading factors. We formulate metric for routing that accounts for power consumption, distance covered, and externality induced to other routes. We study social optimality versus individual optimality for such routing techniques. Using the OPNET software package, we shall implement a simulation of the AWN. The transmitted radiation pattern is modeled for each wireless multi-beam unit. We distribute many such units over an area, either randomly or using various wireless interconnection network topologies. Propagation barriers are also modeled. The graphical simulation provides estimation of power and interference level. Various power control and routing protocols will be tested using the simulation software. Theoretical and simulation results will be used to design an Internet Circuit (IC) Router. Routing and switching algorithms will be made distributed with a multiple -path connection set-up using a link state routing table, or using source initiated connection requests. We plan to implement a simple IC Router for the internetworking of wireless multi-beam units for concept demonstration. We believe that the proposed AWN architecture shall be low cost, high performance, and highly flexible for traffic pattern and link node impairments. The high throughput of the AWN will allow high quality multimedia applications to be delivered on-demand entirely by wireless communications doc6463 none Chemistry (12) Mass spectrometry is central to most strategies for solving structural problems in chemistry. The lack of a reliable mass spectrometer in the Department of Chemistry is the weak link in ongoing efforts to adapt and implement discovery-based activities into several laboratories. Specific, multi-week investigational experiments that exploit mass spectrometry (as well as complementary spectroscopic techniques) have been identified in the chemical literature and will be adapted and implemented into our curriculum in core courses (Organic Chemistry I and II, Inorganic Chemistry, Physical Chemistry I and II, and Advanced Analytical Chemistry), advanced elective courses (Advance Organic Chemistry, Organometallic Chemistry, and Spectroscopy and Molecular Structure), and a non-majors course (Chemistry in Context). A modern mass spectrometer will also significantly enhance the undergraduate research program offered within the context of Independent Studies projects and the summer research experience. The recently distributed pamphlet Investigative Experiments for the Undergraduate Chemistry Curriculum is to be expanded to include the new experiments and the current experiments upgraded to include mass spectra doc6464 none Exploring the Role of Emotion in Propelling the SMET Learning Process The proposed research aims to build a computerized Learning Companion that will be sensitive to the affective aspects of learning and that will work with the child to facilitate the child s own efforts at learning. Learning complex ideas in science, math, engineering, and technology and developing the cognitive reasoning skills these areas demand often involves failure and a host of associated affective responses. When learning proceeds via human-human interaction, it is often improved by communication of affective cues (such as frustration, confusion, or interest), and by adaptation of the learning experience to such cues (adjusting pace of presentation, interjecting motivation, offering an additional view, etc.). When learning involves human-machine interaction, the human communication about when, where, how, and how important it is to adapt also often involves emotional information; however, today s computers largely ignore this information. Affective computing has the potential to expand human-computer interaction by extending computing to include emotional communication together with appropriate means of handling affective information. The proposed research aims to bring new tools of affective computing into the reach of educators, to begin to change computer-based learning from a style that ignores emotions to a style that can begin to respond appropriately to student emotions. The initial focus is on building a system that (1) helps students increase their awareness and mastery of the important role that emotions can play in learning and (2) facilitates the child s learning, by occasionally prompting with questions or feedback, and by watching and responding to the affective state of the child-watching for signs of frustration and boredom that may precede quitting, for signs of curiosity or interest that tend to indicate active exploration, and for signs of enjoyment and mastery, which might indicate a successful learning experience. Tools developed for the Learning Companion should also be useful for intelligent tutoring systems, and should help give insight into new theories of motivation and emotion in teaching; however, the Learning Companion is not a teacher or tutor that knows the answers, but a player on the side of the student. The companion will be sensitive to the learning trajectory of each student, helping him or her learn, and in so doing, learn how to learn better. At the same time, the Learning Companion will serve as an interactive system for helping researchers identify and better understand ways in which emotion is expressed, communicated, and handled in successful science, math, engineering, and technology learning experiences doc6465 none Proposal Number: SES 00- Principal Investigator: Stephen Markham This Small Grant project proposes to organize a day and a half workshop conference for presentation and discussion of intellectual property issues between universities and industry in the U.S., and their impact on industry funding of directed R 2. To understand the implications of these issues for universities, industry, and the national R and 3. To develop ideas and recommendations to address the issues. To accomplish the objectives, the workshop will convene presenters representing the viewpoints of researchers, universities, industry and national policy. Panel discussions and case studies will foster exchange of ideas and identification of insights. The workshop will take place at North Carolina State University in conjunction with the semi-annual CIMS Corporate sponsors Meeting. (The Center for Innovation Management Studies is an NSF-sponsored institute that sponsors academic research and relationships between industry and researchers, disseminating research results to practitioners and industry as well as via traditional academic publication doc6466 none Together with three major corporate partners, Texas Instruments, Palm, and Nokia, this project is investigating the impact on everyday classroom teaching and learning of a network of inexpensive hand-held devices equipped with interactive computational media. The effects of this massive classroom connectivity are important to understand in order to inform iterative improvement of i) technologies and classroom practices that support learning and ii) the design of teacher development and support structures. The PI and colleagues are working with teachers in ordinary grade 8-12 classrooms equipped with school-standard graphing calculators and newer devices wirelessly networked to each other and to a teacher s workstation. Three areas of impact are under exploration: (1) Assessment: regular, principled diagnoses of students responses to carefully designed probes and problems submitted to the teacher for analysis and action. (2) Learning: new student activity structures involving (a) teacher-student and student-student challenges, and (b) student contributions to shared and publicly displayed constructs. (3) Teaching: teacher classroom management support for distributing and collecting student work, viewing and annotating student screens, and managing the flow of information in the connected classroom doc6467 none McConnell This award supports a three year project to acquire data on the concentration of trifluoroacetate (TFA) in Antarctic snow. Trifluoroacetate is a highly persistent, atmospheric degradation product of the halogenated ethane derivatives (HCFC, HFC) that have been introduced as environmentally friendly chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) substitutes. However, there is concern that the widespread introduction of HCFC s and HFC s will lead to the accumulation of TFA in aquatic ecosystems. Current data on pre-industrial, background concentration of TFA in meteoric and surface waters, including Antarctic ice, are ambiguous and the impact of anthropogenic TFA on these background concentrations is unclear. Ice core records can provide proxy records of background and anthropogenic TFA deposition. The primary objective of this research is to use ice cores and snow pits at South Pole to develop a temporal record of TFA deposition spanning ~ years but focused on the past 20 years. The pre-industrial to present record of TFA in near surface snow and ice at South Pole and in West Antarctica will be unique and will lead to a much better understanding of the origin, transport and fate of this contaminant over Antarctica and possibly the globe. In addition, understanding the natural and anthropogenic sources, the regional and long-range movement, and the eventual fate of contaminants is critical to assessing potential impacts on Antarctic ecosystems doc6468 none With a growing national facus on the measurement of learning outcomes in science classrooms, states and cities relying increasingly upon assessment methods developed prior to recent advances in cognitive scinece. While alternative and authentic assessments have gained a foothold in school reform, they are considerably more expensive and complex to utilize than traditional standardized tests that rely upon multiple-choice items. Rather than comdemn such simple item forms, the project plans to develop and study diagnostic assessment instrument that reflect advances in understanding conceptualchange in learner, yet are simple to administer and score. The prject will drawon the rich research literature documenting alternative conceptions and construct test items that allow choices between the scientifically correct answer to a problem and the most prevalent alternative conceptions. Earlier work shows that the psychometric profiles of such items depart significantly from those constructed and used by the makers of standardized tests, and that more research is needed before relucant test-makers will adopt items with profiles that depart from their non-cognitive models. Such a study is imperative for the development of standarzed tests that accurately measure progress toward achievement of swtate and national science standards. In addition, analytical methods will be developed and employed to reveal the underlying prerequisite structure of such tests, shedding light on the proper sequence of ideas in K-12 instruction. Results will be publicized through academic publications and papers. A public domain database of diagnostic items will be made available for test developers and educators doc6469 none Eocene floras of the Northern Hemisphere: paleoclimate and implications for large scale floristic interchange Stephen Manchester Detailed first-hand comparisons will be made between selected early and middle Eocene floras of mid-latitude North America, Europe and Asia through collaboration with colleagues in Germany and China as a means of assessing phytogeographic patterns during a time when the climate was warmer than today, and there was potential for high-latitude floristic exchange between continents. PI will compare megafossil floras preserved in the sediments of early and middle Eocene lakes from North America (West Branch Creek and Green River floras, western US), western Europe (Messel and Eckfeld, Germany), and Eastern Asia (Fushun and Huadian, China). The ages of each these assemblages are established through correlations of associated mammal faunas and or radiometrically dated volcanic ashes. Paleoclimate of each of the sites will be compared based on foliar physiognomic analyses to give approximations of mean annual temperature and precipitation. Intra- and intercontinental floristic comparisons will be made to determine the relative proportion of shared vs. endemic taxa between each pair of continents in the early and middle Eocene. The resulting observations will: 1) provide approximations of the mean annual temperature and precipitation of these widely separated lake basins, 2) indicate the relative importance of different routes of intercontinental dispersal in the early and middle Eocene, and 3) facilitate comparison of dispersal patterns in plants with those observed in mammals during the early Tertiary doc6470 none MONEY is a traveling exhibition using the familiar and fascinating subject of money to build math skills and promote economic literacy. The exhibit will provide an engaging and relevant context in which to explore mathematics using experiences such as making change, comparing prices, saving, balancing a checkbook, paying bills or budgeting -- which are all direct applications of math. This exhibit will address the needs of children and their families for economic literacy as they make decisions that shape their futures. Through a mix of hands-on interactives, audio and video components, computer-based activities, graphics, text and artifacts, the exhibition emphasizes the mathematical skills, concepts and problem-solving strategies necessary for economic literacy. Areas in the exhibit will address the history of money, how it is made, prices and markets, and world trade. Within these contexts, visitors will develop computational skills and gain an understanding of concepts such as operations, patterns, functions, algebra, data analysis, probability and mathematical representation. The concepts are highly correlated with -- and build upon -- the NCTM National Standards in mathematics. Families, children and learners of all ages will be able to experience the exhibit during its national tour. There will be ancillary resources in the form of family take-home activities, a teacher s guide with classroom activities, and an exhibit website doc6471 none To improve the communication between students and teachers, particularly in large classes, many universities have begun using technology-based response systems. These systems enable an instructor to pose questions and see, within a few minutes, the students responses to those questions. Another similar approach is to assign homework that is submitted, graded and returned quickly via the World Wide Web. Both of these technology-based systems offer instructors the opportunity to record each student s responses in a database. Thus, the instructor can track students understanding much more completely than with traditional homework and quizzes and can use the resulting data to investigate more deeply how students understand the scientific and mathematical concepts. In addition to seeing the present level of each students understanding the instructor can learn how the students change their thinking by making comparisons of responses throughout the learning process. A present, the analyses of these responses generally tell instructors when the students are obtaining the right answers. However, for students who are not answering correctly, the present systems do little more than indicate that the student is not applying the scientific theories and models correctly. Still missing is an analysis tool that is based on contemporary educational research and can provide robust quantitative information on the students difficulties with the underlying scientific models and theories, and can track how the students understandings of these models change during instruction. These tools must go beyond correct answer analysis and analyze students incorrect answers by incorporating theories of learning into the systems. This project will begin with a model for students conceptual learning processes and with existing work on assessing students conceptual understanding in physics and mathematics. Then, research will be conducted on students applications of scientific models and mathematical concepts, on how the students thinking and applications change during instruction, and methods to present the results of these assessments to teaching faculty who are using in-class, real-time response or on-line homework systems. By constructing sets of questions in which incorrect answers provide insights into the scientific and mathematical models that students are applying, the project s results will lead to a deeper understanding of students abilities to learn physics and mathematics and the contexts in which that learning occurs most effectively. The analysis will also provide insight into students abilities to transfer knowledge between physics and mathematics courses. The major objectives of the project are to measure, with real-time feedback, students understanding of fundamental concepts and the application of those concepts, trace changes in those understandings and applications during instruction, investigate how students conceptual understanding depends on the context in which a new concept is studied, create analysis tools that can be used effectively in many educational environments, provide information about the transfer of knowledge between physics and mathematics, and investigate how students and instructors interact with this teaching environment. The result of reaching these goals will be a system that will have a large impact on the teaching of science and mathematics. The impact will be particularly great in large enrollment classes where instructors are often very detached from their students because, frequently, such information becomes available only after students take an exam. Of particular importance for the instructors is knowledge of when students have begun to change their thinking but still sometimes revert to pre-instructional applications of scientific or mathematical concepts-- a mixture of understanding and a lack of understanding. Such situations are recognized to be an important intermediate step in the learning process. By knowing the extent of this mixture the instructors can plan the next step in the learning process based on the students present physical or mathematical understanding and the contexts which aid fundamental change in students thinking. Thus, the project will provide both information and tools to help science and mathematics instructors learn about the present knowledge of their students and how to use that present knowledge constructively to improve the students scientific and mathematical thinking skills doc6472 none Engineering - Other (59) Cooper Union is creating a new learning environment in the interdisciplinary curricula of fluid mechanics and engineering mechanics. The new environment, based on the classroom-studio concept originally developed at Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute, seeks to better integrate the process of design education into engineering education. Further, in its most innovative aspect, the project involves using the studio-classroom, combined with a prototyping studio, to improve design education. To that end, the Cooper Union is equipping two closely related Learning Laboratories, one for fluid mechanics and one for engineering mechanics. The Learning Labs add an interactive mode to the traditional classroom lecture format, adapting standard, proven bench-scale equipment used in typical engineering education for fluid and engineering mechanics. The new facilities take full advantage of new educational technologies to create a dynamic, engaging learning and teaching environment especially suited to these basic subjects. A third element, a Prototyping Studio to be supplied by Cooper Union, is adding the vital element of fabricating prototypes, which are to be conceived and iteratively tested, analyzed, and redesigned in the Learning Labs. In this way, analysis is more fully integrated into the design process, advancing design education; and practice is more closely juxtaposed with theory. The Learning Labs are providing pedagogical tools to seamlessly integrate conceptualization, analysis, communication, teamwork, and fabrication. They are also promoting research in engineering education and serve as a model for a new teaching methodology in other disciplines as well doc6473 none Atekwana Introduction of pollutants in the soil environment such as Light Non-Aqueous Phase Liquids (LNAPLs) after the physical, chemical, and biological properties of the soil media. Initially, the alteration of the soil properties is primarily physical as the LNAPL occupies pores of the resident soils. With time, the LNAPL undergoes changes driven by microbial-mediated processes that alter soil properties. Geophysical methods are able to detect freshly released LNAPLs in soils because their higher electrical resistivity readily distinguishes from background pore and groundwater. Nevertheless, many resistivity measurements of aged LNAPL spills reveal a decrease and not the expected increase. Hence, the key hypothesis to be addressed in this study is that shifts in geoelectrical signatures from resistive in fresh spills to conductive in aged or biodegrading spills accompany biogeochemical modifications of LNAPL in the impacted media. The work is driven by the need to gain a basic understanding of the dynamics that interrelate biological, chemical, geological, and hydrological processes in LNAPL-impacted soils and how these interrelations translate into measurable changes in the geoelectrical response. The objective is to experimentally document important soil physical and chemical parameters that result from microbial degradation of LNAPL and their role in controlling the soil s geoelectrical properties. Our experiments use sterilized laboratory columns filled with sands from a field site impacted with LNAPL. Some of the columns are layered with LNAPL and inoculated with microbes from the field site. Positive and negative control columns are maintained. Geoelectrical measuremens are obtained using electrodes implanted in the columns. The experiments are designed to: Verify microbial LNAPL degradation by monitoring changes in microbial types, population and community structure, and changes in the presence of potential electron donors; and Document changes in soil physical (grain) properties and in pore fluid geochemistry. Integrating geophysics, geochemistry, and microbiology will: (i) document how microbial degradation of LNAPLs and subsequent biogeochemical modifications of the impact media influence soil geoelectrical responses; (ii) support development of geoelectrical models necessary to quantify these biogeochemical processes; and (iii) provide a basis for extending laboratory geophysical degradation models to field sites contaminated with organic chemicals doc6474 none PI s: L. Seeber and J. G. Armbruster, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory The Mw 7.4 Kocaeli (Izmit) earthquake on 17 August was followed on 12 November by the Mw 7.2 Duzce earthquake, which extended the rupture extent of the first earthquake eastward. We deployed a 10 station network covering the junction between these two ruptures from 1 week after the first earthquake to 3 months after the second, and recorded ~30,000 events. We are leading an effort to form a single phase-data set from all of the stations that were deployed in this study area. This catalog will then be used to map seismogenic faults, monitor regional elastic and poroelastic effects and observe S-wave splitting in space and time. Research objectives include: 1) understanding the role of secondary faults and of strain partitioning in the complex transtensional tectonic regime of the western North Anatolian transform and in the triggering of successive mainshocks in the sequence; 2) testing whether the second mainshock was triggered directly by the first mainshock or whether it was triggered by a strain event closer in space and time to the site of rupture nucleation; and 3) investigating whether S-wave splitting can be used to monitor mechanical changes associated with both rupture and healing of the fault zone and stress changes in the surrounding medium. This study is a collaboration with Kandilli Observatory of Bogazici University and Istanbul University doc6475 none Rubin Information on soil moisture is vital in several areas of scientific research. In hydrology and meteorology, the near-surface soil moisture content is needed for accurately estimating the exchange of heat and vapor fluxes between the surface and the atmosphere, which is a crucial component of global circulation models. Frequent monitoring of soil moisture over large regions could significantly improve our ability to predict soil erosion and mass movement. Shallow soil moisture content is extremely important in determining the migration of contaminants from the ground surface. Soil moisture is highly variable in both space and time. Current instruments for measuring soil moisture, such as neutron probe or time domain reflectometry (TDR), offer reasonable solutions in terms of efforts and accuracy for measurement at a fixed location. These methods, however, become practically useless for collecting data over large areas since they require drilling and sample only small volumes of soil. Additionally, one cannot discount the effects of drilling on the data. Currently, no technique is available to accurately provide soil water content measurements over the spatial and temporal scales necessary for estimating, monitoring and modeling moisture movement in the vadose zone. The focus of the project is to investigate the potential of Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) as a tool for large-scale monitoring of shallow subsurface soil moisture (down to depths of 2-3 meters). The work includes a series of experiments to determine optimal GPR data acquisition parameters, simple interpretation methods, effects of soil texture and moisture variability on the GPR response, and criteria for assessing accuracy and reliability. The experiments will be conducted both under controlled conditions at a constructed test site, at outcrops, and at a naturally heterogeneous field site in Napa Valley, CA. The work will be used to evaluate GPR technology and interpretation methods for various soil types and saturations. The controlled experiments will address (1) the sensitivity of GPR to variations in saturation and to variations (vertical and lateral) in soil types; (2) the effect of erosional surfaces and boundaries between soil horizons on the GPR response; (3) sensitivity to clay; and (4) optimal data acquisition and interpretation techniques. The field experiments will test the method under natural conditions at a geologically heterogeneous site at different times of year. The multidisciplinary team from U.C. Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) is well poised to make significant progress in developing methods that would enable more accurate and extensive estimates of soil water content for use in global circulation models, drought management, vadose zone contaminant transport and geotechnical problems doc6476 none Astronomy (11) A planetarium system is being incorporated into an undergraduate astronomy curriculum. in addition the project provides a basis for outreach programs to local elementary and high schools and the surrounding community. Many astronomy topics are difficult to teach because of: (1) slow occurrence of phenomena in real time; (2) restriction of the observer to the geocentric perspective; (3) restriction of the observer to a single geographical area; (4) lack of a dark nighttime sky in urban or suburban areas; (5) in an outdoor laboratory setting, dependence upon weather conditions. The goals of this project are to solve the above problems by: (1) increasing both the level and pace of student comprehension in the several critical areas in the undergraduate astronomy curriculum which are notorious for their teaching difficulty; (2) increasing the speed of student comprehension, increasing the efficiency of astronomy lectures, allowing more classroom time to be devoted to other topics; (3) providing for activity-based learning experiences, which in conjunction with lectures have been shown to increase student performance; (4) promoting scientific inquiry in the classroom and beyond by encouraging an appreciation of astronomy and of science in general. The planetarium system will achieve the above goals by accomplishing the following objectives: (1) clearly illustrate both the actual and apparent motions of the Earth, Moon, and Sun, from any vantage point on the Earth or from space, in compressed time periods much shorter than actual; (2) demonstrate the causes of the seasons from those motions; (3) demonstrate the causes of the phases of the Moon and the causes of Solar and Lunar eclipses from those motions; (4) present the real and apparent motions of all planets in an accelerated time frame; (5) illustrate the celestial coordinate system used by astronomers by projecting it onto the background of stars; (6) demonstrate the effects of the slow precession of the Earth s axis of rotation in a greatly accelerated time frame; (7) project the positions of stars and of the constellations down to near the human eye limit for a completely dark sky; (8) have the capacity for presenting slide shows, or computer graphics and animations; (9) provide all of the above experiences in an environment that is completely weather-proof; (10)provide for astronomy general education and appreciation outreach programs. These factors are especially important at the college, which resides on the Salt River Pima Maricopa Indian Reservation, affording the local reservation residents ready access to the planetarium public lectures, as well as participation in the campus astronomy curriculum. Uses of the planetarium are being adapted from the literature on using planetaria effectively in the teaching of astronomy doc6477 none This project will investigate the roles of representations and language in learning complex science through technology-based activities. Researchers will conduct a series of design and classroom studies in which students will use representations and language to support the learning of scientific inquiry and complex concepts in genetics. This research will study how technology can support learning in three ways: (1) providing students with simulations in which they can conduct investigations of scientific phenomena, (2) showing multiple representations which students can use to understand the underlying entities and mechanisms that account for these phenomena, and (3) providing structure that scaffolds their explanation of these underlying entities and mechanisms. This technology support will come from integrating two independently developed software programs into an environment called GenTalk. GenTalk will combine features of BioLogica simulations and ExplanationConstructor explanation support to generate an environment rich both in representations and in scaffolding for students explanations and discourse about their investigations. Researchers will collaborate with the designers of these software packages and with high school biology teachers to implement a controlled classroom experiment and look at the impact of these software packages, separately and in combination, on the investigation practices, language use, and science understanding of a range of high school students. They will investigate questions such as: What representational features support student discourse? What rhetorical prompts and software supports increase student talk? How do representations and rhetorical prompts work together to influence student discourse? Methods: This project is a two-year plan of research to investigate the relationship between representations and discourse in technology environments, and the resulting student understanding of scientific causal mechanisms in genetics. The first year will be used for a design of the technology environment and curriculum for genetics up to and including the population level, and the second year will be for implementation of, and research on, the prototype in several classrooms. Potential Impact: This project is a program of fundamental research on the cognitive and social processes of learning science that will have direct implications for the classroom use of technology in the service of curriculum reform and student achievement doc6478 none The MIT Media Laboratory, in collaboration with six museums, will develop the Playful Invention and Exploration (PIE) Network, with the goal of engaging a broader audience in science inquiry and engineering by enabling more people to create, invent and explore with new digital technologies. PIE museums will integrate the latest MIT technologies and educational research into their ongoing public programs. The museums will organize MindFest events, modeled after a two-day event at MIT in , at which youth, educators, artists, engineers, hobbyists and researchers came together to collaborate on invention projects. The PIE Network will disseminate PIE ideas and activities to educators and families nationally doc6479 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This project is improving student learning in precalculus and calculus, providing a foundation for further success and retention in upper level mathematics and science courses, and enhancing student learning outcomes for non-science majors. This addresses four specific problems: (1) limited computer laboratory facilities, (2) low student success rates in precalculus and calculus, (3) low retention of students in mathematics classes, and (4) low enrollment and retention in related science and engineering courses. The overall objective of this project is to make majoring in Science, Math, and Engineering (SME) more accessible through improved student learning in precalculus and calculus, thus empowering students to succeed when they transfer to four year institutions. To achieve this objective the mathematics faculty have established the following goals: (1) adaptation and implementation of exemplary educational materials, and proven techniques of previously funded National Science Foundation projects especially the Connected Curriculum Project and the University of Alabama Integrated Mathematics and Science Curriculum; and (2) establishment on one campus of a Mathematics Laboratory in which to use these new materials, thus creating an effective, interactive learning environment, which also provides Internet access for local students. Activities include the following: (1) requiring all students in precalculus and the calculus sequence to enroll in a mathematics laboratory semester hour class designed to complete mathematics laboratory exercises; (2) enhancing faculty professional development by participation in the Duke University Connected Curriculum Project (CCP) workshops and by consultation with The University of Alabama to adopt and implement effective learning strategies; (3) developing of CCP modules in MATHCAD and MATLAB for use in the mathematics laboratory; (4) developing Internet courses; and (5) collaborating with faculty on other campuses of the college to initiate college wide reform of mathematics education doc6480 none The Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities Program in the Chemistry Division, the Division of Materials Research and the Office of Basic Energy Sciences at the Department of Energy provide continuing support to P. James Viccaro and Stuart Rice of the University of Chicago, Benjamin Chu of SUNY-Stony Brook, Philip Coppens of SUNY-Buffalo and Mark Schlossman of the University of Illinois in Chicago for their research efforts utilizing the ChemMatCARS beamline at the Argonne National Lab Advanced Photon Source. The PIs will complete development and initiate the operations phase at the three stations: chemical crystallography in station 15-1D-B; surface scattering in station 15-1D-C; and small angle- wide angle X-ray scattering (SAXS WAXD) in 15-1D-D. Examples of some of the surface studies include studies of amphiphiles and biological macromolecules at the water-vapor interface; liquid metal interfaces; superflid helium surfaces; polymer surfaces-static structure; dynamics at interfaces; and liquid-liquid interfaces. Chemical crystallography studies include the mapping of charge densities with synchrotron radiation; resonance diffraction studies; and the study of transient species. The SAXS WAXD studies will focus on fiber and filament processing; polymer and fiber stretching; and protein folding and kinetics of complexation. This award will provide maintenance, operation, selected upgrades and continued development of this unique resource as a national user facility for the chemical and materials science community. Presently, the user community includes more than forty principal investigators. By the end of the third year of operations, at least forty-five percent of the total beamtime will be available to the community at large. In addition, this facility provides partial funding of postdoctoral positions and travel support for first time users and graduate students who require an extended stay at the facility doc6481 none OSTRACODE-SHELL LUMINESCENCE DATING FOR QUATERNARY DEPOSITS This proposal intends to build on preliminary feasibility tests, to develop a new luminescence clock for the direct dating of an important Quatemary paleoenvironmental proxy indicator: ostracode shells. Non-marine ostracode shells serve as proxy indicators of paleoenvironmental conditions in lakes, ponds, springs and streams. Presently these shells can be dated directly by radiocarbon methods, but a means to date them directly when older than 35-40 ka would provide opportunities for new discoveries in the worldwide effort to reconstruct details of paleoenvironmental histories from continental sedimentary records. Preliminary work by the PI indicates that ostracode shells have some desired luminescence properties. However, refined sample preparation protocols suitable for luminescence dating need to be developed, and almost nothing is known of their likely useful age range. Natural samples of ostracode shells will be collected from independently well-dated (by 14C) lacustrine beds (late Pleistocene age) from the lake Bonneville Basin (northwestern Utah) and from Mono Lake (eastem Califomia). The foundations for reliable luminescence dating protocols will be established. These protocols will then be applied to one or two samples older than ca. I00 ka, to extrapolate from the developmental tests. This research will form the basis of a graduate student s thesis project doc1226 none Harper Miller Accretionary and subduction complexes are commonly difficult to reconstruct due to subsequent structural complexity and lack of distinctive lithologies, fossils or stratigraphic sequences. Ophiolites, either of ocean floor or back-arc origins, provide unusually robust data that can guide structural and stratigraphic correlations and tectonic reconstructions in areas of controversial histories. This collaborative project will examine the Ingalls ophiolite complex of the north Cascades in order to help discriminate between several regionally important assembly possibilities. The work involves geochemical characterization, age dating and provenance analysis of the Ingalls complex and comparison of the results to other ophiolites that extend for km along the western United States margin. These data will help determine whether the Ingalls complex was formed near its present position, was transported long distances laterally as part of Baja-BC, or is exotic with respect to stable North America doc6483 none The goal of this project is to foster and study the process by which designers, researchers, and practitioners work together, in the same project, but with different schools, geographic areas, and partnerships. These collaborations among researchers will be likely to produce flexible curriculum that other teachers can then customize for use. One goal is to allow the average teacher the ability to make these units work in her classroom; another is to understand the process of abstraction and accumulation of knowledge and practice across education research projects in general. The project would then support the development of a SCALE web portal and two summit meetings of developers, plus work with teachers in using the materials. Each year, the project will support 2-3 small projects doc6484 none Chemistry (12) In order that students achieve a better understanding of the atomic nature of matter and to provide technologically advanced yet increasingly ubiquitous instrumentation for undergraduate laboratories and research, we are integrating atomic force microscopy (AFM) into three facets of the chemistry curriculum. In many academic and industrial settings AFM is becoming a routine tool. With its unique capability for seeing atoms and its ability to image under ambient conditions and in liquids, AFM provides a technologically advanced solution to many problems facing undergraduate chemistry students. The project adapts several experiments from the literature into various levels of the curriculum in order to enhance the study of atomic and molecular structure. At the freshman level, AFM instrumentation is being demonstrated in the laboratory while images are presented and discussed in the classroom to provide a proof of the existence of atoms and to give students a sense of atomic size. This basic foundation in AFM paves the way for hands-on laboratory experiences for upper division chemistry, biochemistry and some biology majors. Mica, silica or graphite are being imaged along with an exotic sample in the instrumental analysis laboratory. As an exciting new use for AFM, an experiment suitable for incorporation into the biochemistry laboratory is being developed. Finally, an AFM provides the instrumentation needed to support three diverse research projects guided by three professors. Undergraduate students are investigating atmospheric particulate matter of environmental concern, modified silica surfaces for use in chromatographic stationary phases, and environmental factors affecting cell surface glycopeptides in the Penicillium mold doc6485 none Late Quaternary history of the Walker River: The tale of a river with a split personality Kenneth D. Adams Desert Research Institute Reno, Nevada The Walker River is one of five major streams that flow into the Lahontan basin of northwestern Nevada and adjacent northeastern California. The behavior of this river since the late Pleistocene is quite unusual because instead of flowing into Walker Lake as it does today, at times during the Holocene it diverted to flow into the Carson Sink. When this happened, Walker Lake became a relatively dry playa whereas the Carson Sink gained a significant new water source. When the river diverted back to Walker Lake, the playa was flooded and lakes in the Carson Sink presumably shrank in size. Paleoclimatic reconstructions based on the behavior and status of lakes in both basins must therefore consider the diversion history of the Walker River. The project-PI will perform an integrated study of the behavior of the Walker River since the last highstand of Lake Lahontan and its effects on the paleohydrology of Walker Lake and the Carson Sink. This research is significant to a host of past, present, and future research efforts in the Great Basin. First, the results of this research will serve to test the hypothesis that rapid isostatic rebound after the last major lake cycle caused the Walker River to change its course. Second, fluctuations of lake levels in the Walker Lake basin may be a function of river diversion, not climatic fluctuations. Third, large short-lived lakes in the Carson Sink that displaced people, animals, and vegetation to the periphery of the Sink in the late Holocene may also be due to river diversion and not climatic fluctuations. Fourth, the results of this research will serve as revised input parameters for isostatic rebound modeling efforts. And fifth, the history and survival of the threatened Lahontan Cutthroat Trout will be placed into a new perspective that may assist recovery efforts. The research is part of a longer-term effort to reconstruct the paleoclimatic and rebound history of the Lahontan region over the last 30 ka. Recognition that rapid isostatic rebound may have invoked large-scale geomorphic and hydrographic effects underlies the importance of refining the isostatic rebound model for the Lake Lahontan basin and documenting these effects on the paleoenvironmental history of the region. The results of the proposed research will lead to a more complete paleoclimatic record from the basin and will also document the interrelationships between climate change, deep Earth processes, and surface processes doc6486 none Kitanidis It is recognized that three-dimensional flow dynamics influence river channel morphology and the movement and distribution of sediment within the channel. In channels with compound cross-section, pool-riffle sequences, and developed meander systems, the influence of three-dimensional velocity fields on secondary flow circulation has a profound effect on both the river hydrodynamics and the movement of sediment. The goal of this project is to develop and validate a three-dimensional hydrodynamic and sediment transport model suitable for detailed field-scale studies to investigate the influence of complex three-dimensional flow structure during high flow events in: (a) pool-riffle sequences, (b) compound channels, and (c) meandering compound channels. This study will investigate the influence of these flow structures on secondary circulation, and the erosion, deposition, and transport of sediment. The project utilizes an existing semi-implicit numerical model for non-hydrostatic free-surface flows on unstructured grids. The model is based on the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations and utilizes a semi-implicit algorithm that is robust, stable, and very efficient. The model will be coupled with a mobile bed model for suspended and bedload sediment transport. A thorough understanding of the flow and sediment regime in complex channels is essential for the planning and development of successful stream restoration efforts. One of the primary causes of failure in stream restoration is the placement of structures or the construction of channel designs that are not suitable for prevailing hydrologic and sedimentologic conditions. Current models cannot accurately predict flow and sediment transport within these channel forms during high flows, which makes it difficult to evaluate potential stability. The contributions of this work include: advancing current understanding of stream stability, channel morphology, flood conveyance, sediment transport, and flow variability in complex river channels, demonstrating the influence of three-dimensional velocity fields on flow and sediment transport in complex channels; investigating the applicability of the velocity reversal hypothesis as a mechanism for understanding sediment transport in pool-riffle sequences during high flows; modeling the influence of secondary circulation in straight and sinuous compound channels to quantify the influence of floodplains on sediment movement and flood conveyance; and demonstrating the capacity of hydrodynamic modeling to improve the planning and design of river restoration projects doc6487 none DC Jewitt AEOS The albedos and sizes of Near Earth Asteroids (NEA) are measured to understand their size distribution, composition and to provide indications of their origins. Determination of sizes is the primary goal. Secondary goals include determination of thermal phase coefficients, an assessment of the diversity of NEO surface types, and address the uestion of the ratio of asteroidal and cometary sources of NEO s. The Advanced Electro-Optical System (AEOS) of the Air Force with the adaptive optics system provides state-of-the-art adaptive optics tools for these measurements. This effort has participation by graduate students and an excellent program for student education doc6488 none The Exploratorium will develop exhibit designs that encourage visitors to become more cognitively engaged with exhibits -- to use exhibits as tools for self-directed exploration, rather than as authoritative demonstrations. To do this, the staff is drawing on new work in the fields of education, visitor research, human factors engineering, computer interface design and interactive exhibit development at other museums. The Exploratorium proposes to conduct evaluative research and exhibit development that maximizes possibilities for visitor-authored questions, activity and discovery, or active, prolonged engagement (APE). The project team plans to create 15 new exhibits and renovate an additional 15 exhibits in the physical sciences. The team will strategically position the exhibits to support active, prolonged engagement throughout the collection. Although the project focuses on physical science -- the most fundamental part of the Exploratorium exhibit collection -- the results will apply to exhibits in nearly all science disciplines doc6489 none This project seeks to conduct research on the types of science assessment measures that provide data on student outcomes that are useful, accurate, and allow valid inferences. The goal of the project is to help Systemic Initiatives to measure the impact of their efforts to improve student learning in science and to use assessment results to inform and improve instruction. The questions addressed by the project are such things as: what types of measures best inform standards-base instruction? Does exposure to inquiry-based science instruction improve scores on some components of standards-based science assessment more than others? How do teachers use results from assessment to inform practice? Will training change instruction? The study will recruit a sample of schools in California at elementary, middle, and high school levels and administer a pre- and post-test, a teacher interview and a student interview and survey questionnaire. These data will be analyzed in a multidimensional item response model doc6490 none Gardner EAR- Volcanic eruptions are driven by the growth of gas bubbles. Many models suggest that magmas either erupt explosively or effuse as lava, depending on the magma s ability to degas efficiently, which is controlled by the melt transferring gas to bubbles. If bubbles and melt fail fall out of equilibrium, over-pressure develops and fragments the magma. Despite the central role that gas bubbles play in volcanism, experimental work has only recently begun to address their growth in silicate melts. This project addresses the dynamics of bubble growth in silicate melts through detailed analysis of the rates of bubble growth and equilibrium between bubbles and melt as a function of pressure drop. Controlled hydrothermal experiments will be used to impose variable decompression histories on gas-melt systems in order to examine how bubbles grow and at what rates of pressure decrease do bubbles-melt fail to remain in equilibrium. These data are crucial in both understanding of eruption dynamics and developing better modeling of conduit flow in eruptions. Experiments will be performed in the Experimental Petrology Laboratory at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and all products will be analyzed in the Advanced Instrumentation Laboratory at the University of Alaska Fairbanks doc6491 none The investigators will develop a full, three-dimensional hybrid code to simulate the dynamics of the coupled magnetosheath-magnetosphere-ionosphere system. The objective is to fill in the gaps in our understanding of space weather phenomena and provide a foundation for a new generation of space weather forecasting systems. The project is an outgrowth of a successful application of a two-dimensional global-scale hybrid code to model the magnetosphere in the midnight meridian plane. The code will make it possible to model the response of the magnetosphere to variations in the solar wind flux and imbedded interplanetary magnetic field. Extensions of the model will allow predictions of magnetic induction effects, which are of importance to the electric power industry. The code will be developed for a massively parallel computer at the Arctic Region Supercomputer Center. The techniques developed will have important spin-offs for simulation of plasmas in laboratory devices and design of microwave devices doc6492 none Geology (42) While qualitative field-based observation remains fundamental to the science of Geology, a more complete understanding of the earth system and its processes, as well as related environmental problems, requires a multi-disciplinary approach including the collection, interpretation, and application of quantitative geochemical data. Students in Geology and Environmental Studies are able to undertake major and trace element analyses of, and explore compositional relationships in, solid rock, mineral, sediment and soil samples by using an automated Wavelength Dispersive X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometer with element mapping and spot analysis capabilities, along with associated sample preparation equipment. Adapting exemplary models from Albion College, Dickinson College, Furman University, and Middle Tennessee State University, and from the literature, we are incorporating inquiry-based exercises using these analytical techniques into courses in Physical Geology, Mineralogy, Petrology, Environmental Geology, Geochemistry, and Chemical Analysis of the Environment. In so doing, we are (1) increasing the involvement of our students in the process of modern scientific investigation, with progressive preparation for independent and student-faculty cooperative research through Independent Directed Study and the Environmental Studies Senior Seminar; and (2) enhancing student understanding of fundamental relationships between chemical composition, mineralogy, rock-type, tectonic setting, and global biogeochemical cycling. An important component of our project is site visits by a team of experienced external evaluators, providing information exchange and assistance in formative and summative evaluation doc6493 none Chemistry (12) This project uses an innovative approach to laboratory instruction in organic chemistry to replace the previous cookbook curriculum. We are adapting the research-based design of Kharas, DePaul University (J. Chem. Educ. , 74, 661) and extending the program to a full year of original research on a class of novel luminescent metalloles. In our program, each student prepares and characterize a unique target molecule. We are incorporating the principles of combinatorial chemistry into the curriculum and, for the first time, are introducing students to experimental organometallic chemistry. The combinatorial technology promises to revolutionize the fields of organic synthesis, drug discovery, and material sciences. The pedagogical shift from the present discovery-based instruction to the innovative research orientation makes our students collaborators in research, as they employ advanced laboratory techniques, working in an atmosphere of genuine scientific inquiry. This approach strengthens our institution s goal of challenging the creativity of students, and helps the students gain independence and self-confidence. We are convinced our research approach linked to the new combinatorial technology is applicable to other scientific disciplines, including biology, environmental sciences, and material sciences. We intend our approach to serve as a model for other institutions. In our one-year pilot program, students demonstrated a greater understanding and appreciation for the nature of scientific research, improved their laboratory skills, and evidenced enthusiasm for the approach. They also learned to design and optimize their experiments. Based on the results of the pilot program, we have refined the curriculum to concentrate on six units, each of which focuses on a specific reaction. During the pilot program, students said they had developed competence in several important characterization techniques. But they said they fared less well in their abilities to perform NMR spectroscopy or carry out inert atmosphere transfers. To address these two critically important techniques, we are incorporating the use of a multinuclear FT-NMR spectrometer and three glove boxes. Following careful evaluation of the project, the results will be disseminated at workshops and through presentations at national meetings as well as by publications in the chemical literature, with students as co-authors doc6494 none Jayne This is a one-year cooperative proposal between Dr. Bruce Jayne of the University of Cincinnati and Dr. Harold Voris of the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History, and Dr. Peter Ng of the National University of Singapore and Dr. Vachira Lehknim of the Prince of Songkal University, Thailand. They proposed to study aquatic and marine snake species in the Malay Peninsula to relating morphological diversity to foraging ecology. The Malay Peninsula has a unique high diversity of aquatic and marine snakes. It is an area well suited to this study. This is also an important scientific question in ecology. The result of this study has a broad impact on the understanding of the integration of organismal design with the environment. The U.S. researchers are experts in this area and well suited to carry out this study. They will also provide seminars to introduce comparative functional studies to their colleagues in Thailand and Singapore. This is a relatively uncommon approach to scientists in Southeast Asia, but could be important in the understanding of evolutionary changes in morphology and performance in diverse tropical systems. The Thailand Research Council and the NSF jointly support this project doc6495 none Christine S. Grant and Jacqueline Krim North Carolina State University Proposal Lubrication for Extreme Environments: An Atomistic Approach to Solving Friction and Stiction in MEMS PROJECT : Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) are an emerging, cutting-edge technology which relies on the microfabrication of small scale mechanical components and the integration of those components with on-board electronic processing. Today s MEMS rely heavily on silicon-based materials and or fabrication processes which were originally developed for the microelectronics industry. While such processes and materials have yielded working devices, the materials choices are largely historical and may ultimately not result in optimal performance and mechanical reliability. With the current impetus towards mechanical system dimensions extending well into the nanometer regime, there is a growing need for concomitant studies of the mechanical, materials and tribological properties of sub-micron to molecular-scale systems. Since it is well-established that the macroscopic laws governing such properties are inapplicable at the molecular scale, the need to carry out new and fundamental research relevant to the development of optimal, or even operational submicron-scale mechanical systems, becomes increasingly pressing. The work funded here involves development of such lubricants for use in extreme MEMS operating environments. It is a direct, and integrated extension of the PI and co-PI s current research programs. The work to be performed will be comprehensive, involving the development of environmentally friendly stiction reducing chemical additives for the final rinse stages of MEMS devices, and the examination of how such treatments affect the tribological properties of the devices while in actual operation. Vapor phase lubricants will be screened by means of modern nanotribological techniques on materials of relevance to MEMS. The most promising candidates will then be directly tested on actual MEMS devices supplied by the PI and Co-PI s academic partner at NCSU, as well as on friction testing-MEMS devices produced at Sandia National Laboratories. The research will be meshed with the PI and Co-PI s ongoing educational and outreach efforts. These include outreach activities to under-represented groups, undergraduate research participation in all aspects of the work to be performed, public lectures on the topic of nanotechnology and friction, and active involvement in undergraduate curriculum development on the topic of fundamentals of friction and lubrication doc6496 none Interdisciplinary (99) The objective of the proposal is to incorporate Geographic Information Systems (GIS) into undergraduate biology, geography, and geology courses. The project is an adaptation of curricular revisions made at Richard Stockton College in their Environmental Studies Curriculum. Learning with GIS enables students to engage in the processes and methods of inquiry, to think rigorously, rationally, and creatively about the acquired knowledge, and to communicate effectively. GIS have traditionally been used to analyze spatial data and problems in field-oriented disciplines like biology, environmental studies, geography, and geology, but it can also be used to study problems in economics, political science, sociology, and urban studies and modeled as a teaching aid in education. The project modifies a core set of inquiry-based courses in biology, geography, and geology in order to infuse GIS methodology in the natural and social sciences and to serve as multiple entry points into an advanced geography course in GIS theory and application. Faculties teaching these lead courses specialize in appropriate areas of GIS theory and application so that they may serve as mentors to interested faculty across campus. The implementation will take two tracks. First, a centralized learning laboratory with sufficient computer hardware and peripheral equipment is created so students are able to take full advantage of campus GIS technology. Also, lead faculty are trained in the use of ESRI s ArcView and ArcInfo relative to their needs and discipline specialties. An important outcome of the project is that the use of GIS extends across the curriculum by providing mentoring opportunities to a self-selected group of faculty that have identified a need and interest in incorporating GIS into their coursework doc6497 none The Antarctic region is typically considered pristine, being distant and largely sheltered from the industrialized world. But concern about the movement of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) throughout the global environment via long-range atmospheric transport has escalated greatly in the last two decades. The potential for POP contamination via atmospheric transport, cold condensation and deposition on sea ice present an intriguing and uniquely polar issue. The overall goal of this proposed work is to understand the interactions among atmospheric deposition, sea ice coverage and melting, solar irradiance and microbial decomposition in mobilizing persistent organic pollutants in Antarctic foodwebs. In cooperation with the Palmer Long-Term Ecological Research program (LTER), the proposed work aims to document the accumulation of selected model POPs in sea ice and the water column along the West Antarctic Peninsula. Furthermore, key physical and biological chemical processes influencing POP removal rates, turnover, and residence times would also be investigated doc6498 none This award provides funding to Clarkson University, for the support of a three-year Combined Research-Curriculum Development (CRCD) Program, entitled, Particle Transport, Deposition and Removal: Combined Research and Engineering Curriculum Development, Dr. Goodarz Ahmadi, Principle Investigator. The main objective of this project is to develop a sequence of two combined senior first year graduate level courses for providing the students with a fundmental understanding of particle transport, deposition and removal in laminar and turbulent flows, in the presence or absence of electrostatic, thermophoretic and capillary forces, with particular emphasis on industrial applications doc6499 none Biological Sciences (61) This project is strengthening the basic science curriculum through use of computerized work stations in the laboratory component of Experimental Neurobiology. Experimental Neurobiology is structured around the laboratory component, and provides a heavily investigative approach. Students learn modern neurobiology techniques including: intracellular recording, extracellular recording, action potential discrimination, neuronal tract tracing, and neuron staining and imaging. These techniques are learned using model invertebrate preparations that allow novice students to successfully record from nervous systems and perform experiments in a three-hour period each week. Many laboratory sessions are adaptations of investigations from the NSF-funded Project Crawdad, and we are developing several new activities based on other invertebrates. Each student designs and carries out an independent four-week investigation culminating in an oral presentation and a web page illustrating their findings. The work stations are also benefiting the laboratory activities in five other physiology cell biology courses. Also, this equipment is greatly expanding opportunities for undergraduates to gain an independent research experience in neuroscience. Finally, the equipment is also allowing us to integrate a neuroscience laboratory experience in two science education courses required for pre-service teachers doc6500 none This award provides funding for a three year project at Clarkson University for a Combined Research-Curriculum Development program entitled, Geotechnical Test Simulator, under the direction of Dr. Dayakar Penumadu. This project is a collaborative effort between Clarkson University and Georgia Institute of Technology. The objective of the proposal is to develop virtual laboratory experiments and use computer simulations (in addition to the existing limited laboratory exposure), to complement and extend conventional components of the education process. This laboratory simulator will have an immediate nationwide impact on the course(s) related to geotechnical engineering which are usually required for all graduating Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) majors and can be easily extended and implemented in different related branches of engineering education (e.g. Geology, Structural Engineering, Hydraulics Engineering, Environmental Engineering etc doc6501 none Mathematical Sciences (21) In this proof-of-concept proposal, a strategy for improving university-level mathematics courses for future secondary math teachers is tested. There is increasing evidence that the mathematical training that secondary school teachers receive in U.S. colleges and universities often fails to impart a deep understanding of the structures that underlie high-school math. Cooperating teams in four Louisiana locations, consisting of college faculty, high-school teachers and college students, work under central support and direction to author and test curriculum materials in algebra, geometry, analysis, or statistics that address this need. Each lesson package concerns a single topic of limited scope, chosen for its mathematical interest and relevance to state and national standards and designed for use in university- level courses. A unique feature of the lesson package is the inclusion of extensive examples of student work. The advantages of this are ensuring that the product is in tune with students thinking, providing teachers with tools to better comprehend students conceptual understanding, and providing a powerful instrument for assessment and evaluation that is built into the system. The project also tests the organizational model under which the lesson packages are produced. A change in faculty culture is achieved by instituting a new form of pedagogical scholarship that is self-sustaining and capable of adapting to future needs doc6502 none Geology (42) The Department of Geology at the University of Akron is adapting and assessing an inquiry-based teaching model for introductory geology courses in a large classroom setting. This project is an outgrowth of NSF-sponsored workshops on Inquiry-Based and Cooperative Learning through FIRST (Faculty Institutes Reforming Science Teaching) and departmental discussions resulting from the small-scale application of inquiry-based learning methods in the PI s courses. We are developing an approach based on peer instruction techniques described in Eric Mazur, Peer Instruction: A User s Manual, (Prentice Hall, ). This method of peer instruction has been a widespread success in improving learning and raising standard test scores for physics students in a variety of institutions. One lecture theater (180 student capacity) at the University of Akron has been fitted with a classroom communication system (CCS) technology sold by EduCue that was designed to support this peer instruction technique. [See www.EduCue.com.] This technology, and the necessary training in its use, is being made available for faculty in other departments. Approximately students per year enroll in an introductory geology course at the University of Akron, over a third (950) are education majors. As we shift to peer instruction, our goals are to improve science literacy among non-majors taking a science elective, and to model inquiry-based learning methods for education majors taking courses to satisfy state licensure standards. We are taking steps to ensure that this method of learning results in improved student learning of specific geological concepts by carefully assessing the retention of key concepts among geology students. A series of inquiry-based learning modules will be developed for a variety of introductory courses aimed at both major and non-major student populations. Conceptual questions addressed to students (ConcepTests) are being used in conjunction with a variety of other proven classroom assessment techniques to generate daily formative evaluations. These evaluations are being used to judge the effectiveness of our teaching and learning strategy. The overall evaluation we are employing includes comparisons of test results, written reports, student interviews, responses to pre- and post-class attitudinal surveys, and a longitudinal study of geology and education majors. This assessment is being guided by faculty from the College of Education s Department of Curricular and Instructional Studies. As part of this project we are also offering seminars and faculty development workshops to other science faculty at the University of Akron, and seminars, workshops, and presentations at regional and national meetings to in-service teachers and geology faculty at other institutions. In addition, all learning materials created for this project will be made available to other faculty through departmental websites and textbook publishers (McGraw-Hill doc6503 none Geology (42) Faculty from geology, biology, and chemistry are incorporating use of a Low-Vacuum Scanning Electron Microscope with Energy Dispersive Spectrometer (LV-SEM EDS) into undergraduate science laboratories and research experiences. Scanning electron microscopy is an accessible technique for undergraduates and provides an important means for hands-on learning. The goals of this project are to: 1) develop students skills of observation and analysis while using technologically-advanced equipment in coursework and research; 2) foster collaborative learning through development and implementation of learner-centered laboratories and experiments; and 3) promote interdisciplinary work and exchange of ideas between and within different groups of student and faculty researchers. To meet these goals, several discovery-based activities involving image and compositional analysis of a variety of specimens (e.g., minerals, rocks, microfossils, semiconductors, plankton, synthetic crystals, and gunshot residue) are being implemented in courses across the curriculum (e.g., introductory through advanced courses in geology, biology, and chemistry). The project adapts curricular aspects of programs at Western Kentucky University, Hamilton College, Middlebury College, and Bowdoin College. Overall, the instrument is being incorporated into 15 courses throughout the science curriculum. Undergraduate students are working closely with faculty to prepare specific laboratory exercises. These student assistants are responsible for aiding the instructor in writing exercises, performing calibrations, acquiring images, and developing laboratory instructions. Exercises focussing on discovery of critical concepts and interpretation of data involve a wide variety of phenomena, including compositional variation in minerals, flow textures in volcanic rocks, plant morphology, surface degradation in fossil remains, microstructures in deformed rocks, peptide-mineral adhesion, and textures of metal oxide films. Students working interdependently on these projects in small, self-selected groups, are seeking a deeper understanding of course material in addition to developing a clear understanding of the physical principles basic to SEM. The results of this project are to be made available to the public and colleagues at other institutions through the world wide web, journal articles, and presentations at professional meetings doc6504 none Engineering - Other (59) With the current need for medical devices that combine mechanical systems and materials with sophisticated electronic components, there is a concurrent need for engineers with a combination of strong traditional and specialized engineering skills. To produce such interdisciplinary engineers, an educational program that provides a comprehensive interdisciplinary engineering background combined with a broad-based education in biomedical engineering (BME)is necessary. This is being implemented via a distinctive undergraduate BME concentration within the framework of the established engineering program at LeTourneau University. In addition, every engineering student in the University gains exposure to BME principles and experience in a BME laboratory. The BME concentration features: (1) 27 semester hours of specialized BME coursework, (2) 2,000 square-feet of BME laboratory space with modern experimental equipment, (3) 20 semester hours life science coursework, and (4) optional scheduling of additional science coursework needed for entrance to medical school; all built upon an ABET-accredited engineering degree. Additional enhancements include collaborations with colleagues at academic and medical affiliates, who provide student summer internships and BME workshops doc6505 none This award provides funding to Texas Tech University under the direction of Dr. Shubhra Gangopadhyay, for the support of a Combined Research-Curriculum Development project entitled, Curriculum Development for the Design, Fabrication, and Utilization of Chip-Based Micro-Analytical Systems. This project will involve the development of curriculum in micro devices and micro sensors geared towards providing both undergraduate and graduate students with as much hands-on and real-world experience as possible. The three-semester sequence will include a semester on the basics of Microsystems and the techniques of microfabrication. The second semester would be an in-depth look at a few Microsystems with an emphasis on gaining understanding through modeling and in-depth process understanding. The third semester would give students the opportunity to design, build, and test their own Microsystem doc6506 none Psychology - Biological (71) In this project, St. Olaf College is revising the cognitive neuroscience laboratory components of three psychophysiology courses and piloting an outreach program to area high schools. The project is developing a series of laboratory exercises that emphasize the quantitative rather than the qualitative aspects of psychophysiology. We are doing this by replacing the analog equipment currently employed in the psychophysiology courses with BioPac digital signal processing equipment and by adapting and implementing the work of faculty in other institutions to upgrade the relevant laboratory exercises for these courses. We have examined prior projects, some supported by NSF, in selecting the exercises to implement or adapt. New BioPac equipment can be employed effectively to allow students to measure their own physiological response data as dependent variables. Using this self-generated data appears to be more effective in teaching students about variability, potential sources of measurement error, and the cost of precision. The following psychology faculty are representative of those that have developed courses that use this approach and have influenced our selections: o Gwyneth Beagley at Alma College (MI) o Wayne Briner at the University of Nebraska at Kearney o Ellis Rolett at Dartmouth College o Cole Barton at Davidson College o Eric Wiertelak at Macalester College o Richard Connett at Monroe Community College (NY) o Randy Cornelius at Vassar College This process of transforming the laboratory components of our psychophysiology courses is seeking to put more emphasis on investigative projects, to pique student interest and excitement in learning, to develop students understanding of the interaction between mental processes and behavior, and to share the experiences of our undergraduate students with high schools students. The high school outreach component of our project is building on our Department s previous outreach effort with area high schools, which we call Psychological Science Day. This is a one-day workshop for 10 area high school psychology teachers and their students. The current project is expanding Science Day into a month-long collaboration between the high school students and the students in our Psychophysiology courses. The college students will introduce the high school students to investigative psychology during a visit to the St. Olaf campus, monitor the results of their work via the internet, and host them for presentations at the end of the month doc6507 none Chemistry (12) The objective of this proposal is to improve the success of UVI students in their first two years of chemistry by creating laboratory environments that interest and intrigue students, that give them individualized, real-world laboratory projects, that create a sense of what chemists do and the tools they use, and that instill professional behaviors and attitudes. Students formerly saw the laboratory portion of these courses as a series of isolated experiences culminating in calculation and reporting exercises that were barriers to overcome. The students often placed little importance on what they were doing and did not develop any sense of the nature of real investigation. Faculty in the Department of Chemistry are adapting and, with appropriate modifications, implementing the innovative laboratory curriculum developed at Hampden Sydney College. The UVI chemistry curriculum now focuses on exposing all chemistry students, including Freshmen, to extended and individualized research experiences using a full range of appropriate chemical techniques including instrumental techniques doc6508 none The Science Museum of Minnesota will develop, test and disseminate Handling Calculus: Math in Motion. At the heart of Handling Calculus is a set of model exhibits and accompanying programs designed to introduce museum visitors to calculus through interactive physical models that illustrate mathematical concepts both kinesthetically and conceptually. The project focuses on three central concepts: (1) how graphs show changes in rates; (2) how summing quantities over time (integration) can provide important information about results of a process; and (3) how the use of parametric functions can provide a simple way to describe a complex motion doc6509 none Lyons This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports a collaborative research program to study low temperature chemical and physical weathering processes in the Dry Valleys region of Antarctica. Chemical weathering is thought to affect global climate by consuming carbon dioxide (CO2) during processes such as silicate hydrolysis. This CO2 buffer can create climate change by controlling the atmospheric concentration of this important greenhouse gas. Because the principle controls on chemical weathering rates have been argued to be temperature and moisture, enhanced chemical weathering is thought to occur in warmer climates. The geochemistry of a number of ephemeral streams in Taylor Valley, Antarctica (~78 degrees) has been analyzed. These streams flow for 4 to 10 weeks per year and are associated with dry-based glaciers. Solutes produced from chemical weathering such as major cations, minor elements (e.g., rubidium, cesium, lithium, strontium, and barium), bicarbonate and dissolved reactive silica, as well as isotopes (87Sr 86Sr) indicate that chemical weathering does occur in these polar desert streams. Although the mechanism process of weathering is unknown, it is hypothesized that either the high coincidence of freezing thawing cycles and or the unusual hydrologic behavior of the hyporheic zone in these streams are responsible for the high chemical weathering rates that have been computed. In this proposal, the plan is to build upon the initial work of the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long Term Ecological Research (MCM-LTER) team and others by better establishing weathering rates and weathering mechanisms by elucidating the role of physical weathering via cryogenic processes on chemical weathering. The suspended matter in streams from the Lake Bonney basin in Taylor Valley, and the Onyx Valley in Wright Valley will be analyzed for their bulk chemistry and compared to rock types in the valleys to establish what materials are being weathered. Emphasis will be placed on the utilization of uranium series geochemistry to better ascertain solute sources. The laboratory experiments will be done to establish the role of microfracturing via freeze-thaw cycles on chemical weathering. Major rock types occurring in Taylor and Wright Valleys will be used for these experiments. All of the data will be used to draw analogies to historic weathering regimes on Earth during colder, drier climatic regimes doc6364 none Collaborative Research: A detailed chronology of the Loess-Paleosol Record of the last glacial Interglacial Cycle in the North American Midcontinent Loess deposits represent one of the most important terrestrial records of long-term Quaternary climatic change. High-resolution records of past environmental conditions can be extracted from loess deposits provided that the deposits can be accurately dated. We propose to apply three independent dating techniques (10Be inventory, AMS14C, and Optically Stimulated Luminescence) to develop a high-resolution chronology for loess of the last two glacial interglacial cycles in eastern Nebraska. This chronology will enable us to make accurate estimates of dust flux to the atmosphere over this time period, to evaluate the relative contribution of competing loess sources in the North American Midcontinent, and to determine the length of time represented by the last interglacial (Sangamon) soil in eastern Nebraska doc6511 none Elliot This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports a project to investigate the initial phase of magmatism associated with the break-up of Gondwanaland. Mesozoic break-up of Gondwanaland was marked by a major magmatic event during which voluminous basaltic magmas were erupted at the surface and intrusive sills and dikes were emplaced at depth within the underlying sedimentary sequence. In Antarctica, the extrusive rocks include thick tuff-breccias (coarse pyroclastic rocks) hypothesized to have formed by subsurface explosive interaction of basaltic magma and water in aquifers. Volcanic fields where rising magmas interact explosively with water in aquifers, or at the surface, are widespread in modern rift settings. In terms of areal extent and thickness of deposits, depth of magma water interaction, and dominance of basaltic tuff-breccia, in comparison with other well documented examples these basaltic pyroclastic rocks in Antarctica constitute a unique volcanic field. Study of the paleovolcanology of these rocks will yield important new information on the origins and emplacement mechanisms of tuff-breccia deposits and on the evolution of volcanic fields in which tuff-breccias form a significant component. The goal of this research project is to understand the processes involved in the formation of these exceptionally thick tuff-breccias. The objectives of the research are to: (1) document the three-dimensional architecture of the basaltic pyroclastic rocks; (2) establish the depth of magma water interaction; (3) evaluate aquifer recharge; (4) establish the nature and extent of the volcanic field and its paleovolcanologic setting; and (5) evaluate the hypothesis that these tuff-breccias are the result of direct eruption from volcanic vents. The large-scale three-dimensional relationships of the pyroclastic rocks will be established by field examination of lateral and vertical changes in facies (rock associations), and relationships to adjacent rock units. Rock samples will be collected for examination of microscopic structures and textures that provide clues to the modes of interaction, eruption and emplacement. Sedimentary rock fragments in the tuff-breccias will be systematically sampled for comparison of the lithology and palynology with that of the underlying rock sequence and thus establish the time-dependent changes in depth of magma water interaction. Building on reconnaissance work, the results of this study are expected to have broad implications for understanding how tuff-breccias are formed by phreatomagmatic processes (the explosive interaction between magma and water) and the tectonic settings in which it occurs. Results are also expected to develop the paleovolcanologic setting of the Transantarctic Mountains during the Jurassic doc6512 none This award provides funding for a collaborative effort between Utah State University and Pennsylvania State University for the development of innovative curriculum in the areas of distributed collaborative manufacturing, including Internet based collaboration and remote manufacturing. A new course is proposed for graduate students in manufacturing engineering curriculum programs. In addition, modules related to these topics will be introduced in senior level manufacturing engineering courses for students in mechanical and industrial engineering programs. This course is a needed addition to existing manufacturing courses as it deals with a subject area that has been revolutionizing the entire manufacturing community worldwide. A changing global manufacturing environment necessitates that engineering institutions educate their students in the associated new concepts principles and help them acquire skills which will enable them to adapt to their changing manufacutring work environments. Students at Utah State and Penn State will work on inter-university collaborative class projects under the framework of an innovative Collaboratory . Multi-media course modules, interactive learning modules and internet based projects will be designed and implemented doc6513 none Psychology - Cognitive (73) Like many introductory science courses, Introductory Psychology on our campus has been structured as a collection of findings that have been discovered through research in a variety of specialized areas in psychology. Often missing, however, is the sense that science and doing science is the glue that holds the various parts of the discipline of psychology together. This project is engaged in enriching the scientific experience of students enrolled in the Introductory Psychology course at the College of St. Catherine (St. Paul campus), a liberal arts college for women. In the revised course, our primary objective is to adapt materials already developed to present psychology as a science seeking answers to important questions that can be pursued with an array of strategies and methods. The methods we are imbedding into our course include group and single subject experimentation, correlation research, naturalistic observation, reviews of the research literature, and analysis of existing data sets available in archives. The course as modified now contains six laboratory experiences. Each of these is scheduled for two 1-hour sessions. They are providing our students with hands-on learning experiences using modern instrumentation (computer hardware and software, physiological recording equipment, data projectors, and video recording and playback equipment). Laboratory experiences are adapting materials such as computer simulations of operant conditioning. The course is integrating the lecture and laboratory portions of the course, using classic studies in psychology as the bridges between theory and practice. To this end, we are drawing on several classic studies in psychology described in R. Hock s Forty Studies that Changed Psychology: Explorations into the History of Psychological Research (Prentice-Hall, 3rd Edition, ). Research methods are being investigated by students in the areas of perception, learning and memory, developmental, social and personality, abnormal, and health psychology. In addition to the benefits of these improvements that are being enjoyed by the roughly 250 students who are enrolling in this revised course each year, we are also anticipating a strong ripple effect through the entire department and undergraduate curriculum. For example, each year a group of upper division psychology majors and minors are given the opportunity to be mentored and trained as laboratory instructors. Students taking advanced psychology laboratory courses are also profiting from the availability of enhanced instrumentation. Each member of the department is contributing their unique expertise to the planning of undergraduate laboratories. This collaborative effort is providing faculty development experiences to our small department. The project is contributing to teacher preparation because all K-12 education majors must take introductory psychology. Students majoring in psychology or secondary education - social studies have the opportunity to engage in training to become laboratory instructors once they have completed introductory courses. The project is also serving to significantly improve the use of technology in our department and to foster collaborative faculty development doc6514 none Prentice This award supports a planning visit to Papua New Guinea to initiate collaboration with researchers at the Department of Geology at the University of Papua New Guinea. The purpose of this collaboration is to plan and conduct research on the paleoclimate records from lake sediments in the region. Funding includes follow-up analyses of core samples in hand, and reconnaissance and preliminary coring of new lakes. The scientific problem to be addressed is the sensitivity of the tropical pacific climate system to the forcing of the Last Glacial Maximum and the deglaciation 18,000 to 10,000 years ago. This is of interest in trying to understand climate variability, and particularly the role of the tropical Pacific doc6515 none Chemistry (12) The purpose of this project is to implement a discovery-based approach in the chemistry laboratory curriculum through the vertical integration of molecular spectroscopy. Six experiments that utilize ultraviolet-visible or fluorescence spectroscopy are being adapted to incorporate the active learning strategies of various NSF-funded initiatives. These experiments are introduced into general, organic, and advanced chemistry laboratory courses. By building upon their experiences and knowledge for each successive experiment, students are exposed to molecular spectroscopy techniques and their concepts consistently throughout their college careers. This vertical integration approach allows students to retain their knowledge of molecular spectroscopy concepts and empower them to apply this knowledge to a variety of scientific applications and problems doc6516 none PI s objective is to develop a high-throughput screening method to efficiently measure and characterize the growth of viruses in cell culture. He plans to evaluate the feasibility of his approach. His approach is based on the idea that (1) viruses confined to grow into linear arrays of host cells will spread at velocities that are useful traits of the specific virus-host pair and (2) the spatial distribution of virus and host components in such propagating infections can reflect characteristic stages of the infection process. More specific aims are to: (1) assess how patterning host-cells affects their viability in culture, (2) measure the spatial distribution of markers for specific early and late components, (3) test whether localized initiations of infection into patterned cells can be used to increase the amount of information that a single sample yields, and (4) evaluate how the patterning of host cells influences viral growth doc6517 none Chemistry (12) A comprehensive laboratory curriculum has been created that mimics the process of scientific discovery and illustrates the scientific method from the introductory organic chemistry laboratory courses to the advanced organic laboratory course. Many of the experiments for the new curriculum have been adapted from the literature and have been tested with small groups of students. Chemical questions are generated in pre-laboratory activities and are explored in the laboratory, the primary method of analysis being nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. The NMR will be equipped with an automatic sample changer that allows the instrument to collect data on a continuous basis, a necessary feature for the curriculum innovations to be applied to a large-enrollment, introductory organic laboratory course. In this way, it is feasible to provide a significant number of spectra, not just one or two, to every student. A second innovative feature of the curriculum is the extensive incorporation of molecular modeling in the experiments using pre- and post-laboratory computational experiments and exercises. The method of distribution of data takes advantage of the campus information technology infrastructure so that students have anytime, anywhere access to their data. As many of the experiments are modifications of familiar experiments, this will facilitate adoption of our modified versions by other educators doc6518 none Kurose, Jame F. University of Massachusetts CRCD: Curriculum Development and Infrastructure for an Advanced Systems Laboratory This project involves collaboration between two institutions, the University of Massachusetts and Smith College. The project integrates current research results and cutting-edge practices in systems, specifically in the fields of operating systems, distributed systems, real-time systems, multimedia systems, and networking. The project incorporates educational modules that are research-driven, laboratory-based, hands-on, experiment-oriented, for both undergraduate and graduate students, in computing curricula. The new course and curriculum project modules are part of a pool of laboratory projects that are integrated into existing courses and serve as the foundations for two new courses. In addition to funding for module development, this project supports a multi-site Advanced Systems Laboratory (including 75 networked PCs and a half dozen routers - one server and PC cluster at Smith College and the remaining servers and PCs at University of Massachusetts) to serve approximately 400 students per year. The role of the laboratory is to permit students to use hands-on modules to implement, instrument, and experiment with hardware and software that integrate recent research results in the core areas of networking, distributed systems, operating systems, multimedia and real-time systems. A standard template guides module development that includes guidelines for module format and module resource (e.g., tools) requirements. The PIs are supported in this effort by the University of Massachusetts Video Instructional Program staff who have expertise in video-based education doc6519 none The New York Aquarium, a subsidiary of the Wildlife Conservation Society, is developing Alien Stingers, a square foot, permanent exhibit featuring Cnidarians, jellyfish and their relatives. This exhibit will showcase species such as the purple stripe, umbrella and lion s mane jellies. Other animals to be presented include colorful sea anemones and live corals. Visitors will learn about Cnidaria and their habitats, ecological roles, adaptations and relationships with other ocean life. Endangered species, human impact on habitats and various conservation efforts will also be highlighted. The exhibit design will create a sense of wonder and mystery using dramatic lighting, music and unique displays. Moveable 3D models, interactive graphics and specially designed cylindrical tanks will result in an exhibit experience that stimulates curiosity and invites learning. The project has a comprehensive, multi-level evaluation plan structured around two exhibit openings. The first round of evaluation will look at the impact of two-dimensional graphics and prototype interactives. A second opening is planned which will add complex prototype interactives that are designed to present more intricate messages. Both layers of evaluation will be used to shape the permanent exhibit graphics and promote self-directed learning. A website with a live jelly-cam supports this exhibit, along with a host of educational programs and materials for various audiences. A family handbook, children s activity guides, visitor guides and a children s book on jellyfish are among the supplemental materials planned. It is anticipated that over 815,000 visitors will view Alien Stingers on an annual basis doc6520 none Mathematical Sciences (21) The objective of the proposal is to enhance the learning process for students in Calculus I and II by adapting and implementing the WeBWork program developed at the University of Rochester. The implementation will take two tracks. First, students are assigned daily prep problems to complete before coming to class. Hence, the students are better prepared to discuss the day s mathematical topic. Second, remedial problem sets are set up for those students who need more practice on certain topics, such as algebra and trigonometry. In both cases, students get immediate feedback after finishing the web assignments and the instructor of the course is sent a report on students web work. Outcomes for this project include increased student performance and better faculty assessment of student performance. Instructors are able to access and review student performance on web assignments and use this information to plan focus areas for each day s class. An additional outcome is to have students effectively using information technology immediately upon enrolling in their first college math course. Finally, the faculty learns how to integrate information technology into their teaching doc6521 none Social Sciences - Other (89) A multi-disciplinary team of faculty is modifying existing foundation courses in the social sciences, by integrating modules that emphasize investigative, reasoning-based learning experiences that will be implemented in a computer lab. These courses collectively strengthen science and mathematics based learning experiences for Queensborough Community College (QCC) students, especially teacher education students, and are serving as a bridge to higher level courses. Courses are being modified so that the material is appropriately tailored for our students. They are being redesigned to be accessible, yet challenging, for the 2-year college student. The project is modifying foundation courses in psychology, economics, and sociology. The courses selected are part of our core requirements for most students including those in our teacher preparation program. In psychology, we are adapting and incorporating observational procedures developed in an NSF-funded psychology project at Macalester College. Also, basic concepts crucial to understanding simple statistical constructs that are central to research methods are being incorporated with modifications from an NSF-supported project carried out by CyberGnostics, Incorporated (award , Visualizing Statistics: An On-Line Introductory Course, a web-based introductory course marketed through Duxbury press). In sociology we are incorporating new materials being developed at San Francisco State University in the Urban Studies Department. The project directors are also developing an interdisciplinary, investigative course targeted for higher-achieving students in order to facilitate an heightened understanding of the relationship between the social, economic, and psychological worldviews and the methods of inquiry in these disciplines. The effectiveness of new materials is being evaluated in a multi-tiered approach, including an assessment of students mastery of concepts, attitudinal and self-efficacy changes, and the breadth of implementation. The materials developed are also being disseminated through presentations at CUNY faculty development seminars, the CUNY-wide disciplinary councils and through the resources of the CUNY WEB-based community. Faculty are presenting findings and writing articles for publication in discipline-specific media doc6522 none Physics (13) The roles of advanced materials in both American society and the economy have grown rapidly over the last quarter century. This project is developing a Materials Physics curriculum to educate students in the principles and practices relevant to high-technology materials by adapting experiments from the educational and research literature. The program prepares undergraduates for careers in semiconductor and other advanced materials industries. The curriculum adds computer programming, chemistry, industrial internships, and new advanced materials courses. As the backbone of the Materials Physics curriculum, this project enables the university to offer a new set of upper-division laboratories. The instrumentation for the new laboratory sequence includes a vapor-deposition module, a photolithography module, electronics for conductivity measurements, an absorption spectrometer, a nitrogen laser, and a dye laser. The laboratories form a holistic series of modular experiments to develop familiarity with techniques relevant to materials processing and characterization. These include a coherent top-to-bottom sequence: creation of thin-films; Atomic Force Microscope imaging of the films; subsequent patterning of the films via industrial techniques used to pattern silicon in microchips; and concluding conductivity measurements of the films over a range of temperatures. In addition, students collect a series of emission and absorption measurements from promising laser materials. Computer interfacing plays a major role in several of the new experiments. After completing these experiments in their junior years, Materials Physics majors are ready for summer internships in local industry doc6523 none Computer Science (31) We are using mobile robots as a unifying theme in an introductory survey course in computer science, for students of all majors. Our breadth-first survey course covers topics in logic circuits, machine organization and assembly-level programming, programming in a higher-level language, computability, artificial intelligence, and social concerns. Breadth-first courses are useful for non-majors as well as computer science majors, but face the problem of providing enough depth and suitable projects to develop real understanding of the material. Our projects involving the design and construction of simple robots provide a means for connecting the different topics of a survey course and enable a pedagogical approach in which students learn by doing (rather than by being told). Interesting problems with multiple kinds of solutions are being used to challenge a broad range of students and encourage participation by those who have been hesitant about their abilities in technology, science, or mathematics. We are building upon work performed at MIT, Swarthmore, Wellesley and Colby where robots have been used to generate interest and make the course material more accessible to students. Our adaption is to take the work from these highly selective institutions and bring it to our students while simultaneously enhancing the content to include machine organization doc6524 none Chemistry (12) General chemistry students at Western Washington University (WWU) were introduced to important quantitative analytical laboratory techniques in the third quarter of the three-quarter general chemistry sequence. This experience was not extensive but it did allow the students to experience and understand quantitative techniques. However, one analytical experience was completely missing for these students. Instruments used in this laboratory allowed only for single analytical measurements. Further, there was no networking capability for the sharing of analytical data. Analysts in modern industrial, environmental, and pharmaceutical laboratories rely on analytical instruments that are configured to provide high sample throughput and are networked to allow wide access to the obtained information. High sample throughput is necessary because of the number of quality control samples which must be analyzed with every real sample. To introduce our students to Quality Assurance Quality Control (QA QC), we are using two atomic absorption spectrometers equipped with auto-samplers and networked to allow easy sharing and export of data. Flame Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy (AAS) is an attractive technique to introduce in general chemistry given the simplicity of the principle, the importance of this modern technique, and its ability to measure metal concentrations in real world and environmentally important samples. Auto-sampling allows samples from an entire class to be interspersed with quality control standards and analyzed overnight. Networking allows students to access and transport all the data into a spreadsheet, prepare control charts to judge reliability, and draw professional conclusions regarding samples. The project is adapting a series of experiments from the Journal of Chemical Education so that they reflect this emphasis on QA QC. The introduction of QA QC in general chemistry is beneficial to students and faculty in several additional courses and programs. Some students continue in chemistry taking Analytical Chemistry and Instrumental Analysis. Others are environmental chemistry majors in Huxley College of Environmental Studies at WWU. The students in these courses and programs are able to advance their understanding and use of QA QC given their introduction in general chemistry laboratory. In addition, significant improvement in laboratory experience is realized in these higher-level courses because more advanced instrument use and more sophisticated experiments are being carried out. For use in these advanced courses, one of the AAS units is equipped with a Graphite Furnace unit with auto-sampler. The total number of students affected is over 900 per year. In addition, the project is strengthening the ties between the Chemistry Department in the College of Arts and Sciences at WWU and the Environmental Chemistry Program at Huxley College of Environmental Studies at WWU doc6525 none Chemistry (12) This project is building a learning community in a 700-person general chemistry course by melding key features of the NSF Chemistry Systemic Initiatives with existing computer-based laboratory facilities and with the unique UNH Preparing Future Faculty programs. The course is intended to help students grow intellectually and personally. We are hoping to demonstrate intellectual growth along three dimensions - conceptual understanding of chemistry, metacognitive ability, and motivation to learn. We are attempting to create an environment in which students feel known, despite the large population, and in which helping each other learn is valued. This may lead to enhanced retention of students in the course, in science disciplines, and in college. Student learning focuses on constructing, visualizing, and articulating an understanding of chemistry by means of inquiry-based activities that occur throughout the scope of student work (lecture, lab, study group, homework). Along with inquiry-based activities of our own design, we are integrating and adapting a number of ChemConnections modules (Berkeley Beloit groups), e.g. What s in a Star , Design of Automobile Air Bag , and Ozone Hole , as motivating contexts for learning chemistry. Our stance is one of constructing knowledge on an as-needed basis. At the same time, we are enhancing one of our traditional course goals - understanding the particulate nature of matter - by means of supportive text and media materials, e.g. Silberberg s text and new animations, and Joel Russell s split-screen multiple representations CD. Lastly, having students articulate and evaluate their understanding is a central pedagogic feature. This occurs through 8-person peer-led discussion groups (CUNY City College Peer-Led Team Teaching model), computer-mediated peer-reviewed writing (UCLA Calibrated Peer Review system), and the discussion associated with the Chem Connections modules. Computers are being used for homework (4 years experience with Spain s ChemSkill Builder), laboratory data acquisition (Labworks computer stations for student pairs), and molecular animations, as well as for routine course information and communication (UNH implementation of Blackboard.com). We also are creating a Pedagogic Field Laboratory - a clinical setting whereby science Ph.D. students involved in the UNH Preparing Future Faculty degree programs and preservice secondary science teachers can observe, participate, and discuss the implementation process, and assess student and faculty responses. Activities in the PFL extend beyond this chemistry project, since there are a number of NSF-funded curriculum projects underway at UNH. The PFF programs are available to students and faculty off campus, especially at partner institutions (Howard Univ., St. Anselm College, Keene State College, UNH-Manchester doc6526 none This award provides funding to Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VPI), Arun G. Phadke, Principal Investigator, for the support of a three-year, Combined Research-Curriculum Development (CRCD) project entitled, Expansion of a Module Based Multimedia Courseware for Curriculum Enhancement in Power System Education. The objective of this collaborative project between VPI and Iowa State University (ISU) is to enhance the existing web-based, modular, multimedia courseware created for the PowerLearn project and improve its effectiveness as a curriculum development tool doc6527 none The heat-shock response (HSR), the enhanced expression of one or more classes of molecular chaperones termed heat-shock proteins (Hsps) in response to stress induced by high temperatures, is commonly viewed as a universal characteristic of organisms. This project will examine the occurrence of the heat-shock response in a highly cold-adapted, stenothermal Antarctic teleost fish, Trematomus bernacchii, to determine whether this response has persisted in a lineage of fish that has encountered very low and stable temperatures for at least the past 14 - 25 million years. The principal investigator has demonstrated that the HSR has been lost in T. bernacchaa and the current proposal is designed to extend this initial and evolutionary significant observation. The proposed studies have two primary objectives. First, to establish how widespread the loss of the HSR might be in the suborder Notothenoioidei, including Antarctic and non-Antarctic members of the group. The second primary objective is to determine the nature of the lesion in gene expression that accounts for the loss of the expression of stress-inducible genes in Antarctic species. For both objectives, experiments will be conducted on closely related cold temperate species from New Zealand waters in order to gain phylogenetic and comparative insight into the nature of this profound change in enviro nmental regulation of gene expression. The results from this proposal will contribute to knowledge of the environmental physiology and evolutionary biology of the Antarctic notothenioid fishes and will extend an understanding of the extreme stenothermality in these fish. If evolution at subzero temperatures has indeed altered the gene expression patterns for molecular chaperones in Antarctic fish, this opens up an entire area of study into how cells respond to temperature at a molecular level. The heat shock response is the quintessential example of the environmental regulation of gene expression and, although the HSR is a well-described cellular phenomenon, there is not a great deal of information regarding how the response is regulated in ectothermic animals in nature. The lesions in the Hsp gene expression in Antarctic notothenioids may serve to highlight aspects of the cellular thermostat and provide key information about the mechanism by which environmental stress is transduced into a molecular response doc6528 none Martin This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports a collaborative research project between the Saint Mary s College of California, the South Dakota School of Mines and technology, and the Argentine Antarctic Institute (Instituto Antartico Argentino or IAA) to investigate the Late Mesozoic vertebrate paleontology of the James Ross Basin in the Antarctic Peninsula region. The Campanian through the Maastrichtian ages (80 to 65 million years ago) is an important time interval concerning vertebrate biogeography (i.e. dispersals and separations due to moving landmasses) and evolution between Antarctica and other Southern Hemisphere continents (including India, i.e. Gondwana). Moreover, the dispersal of terrestrial vertebrates (i.e. dinosaurs and marsupial mammals) from North America to Antarctica and beyond (e.g. Australia) via Patagonia and the Antarctic Peninsula, as well as the dispersal of modern birds from Antarctica northward are important unresolved questions in paleontology. These dispersal events include vertebrates not only in the terrestrial realms, but also in marine settings. Both widely distributed and localized marine reptile species have been identified in Antarctica, creating questions concerning their dispersal in conjunction with the terrestrial animals. The Antarctic Peninsula and Patagonia represent the western-most portion of the Weddellian Paleobiogeographic Province, a region that extends from Patagonia through the Antarctic Peninsula and western Antarctica to Australia and New Zealand. Within this province lie the dispersal routes for interchanges of vertebrates between South America and: 1) Madagascar and India, and 2) Australia. As the result of previous work by the principal investigators, it is postulated that an isthmus between more northern South America and the Antarctic craton has served to bring typical North American dinosaurs, such as hadrosaurs (duck-billed dinosaurs) and presumably marsupials traveling overland, while marine reptiles swam along coastal waters, to Antarctica in the latest Cretaceous. Finally, this region has served as the cradle for the evolution, if not the origin, for groups of modern birds, and evolution of a suite of typical southern hemisphere plants. In order to confirm and expand upon these hypotheses, investigations into the latest Cretaceous deposits of the James Ross Basin, Antarctica Peninsula must be continued. The Cape Lamb and Sandwich Bluff geological units, of the Lopez de Bertodano Formation in the James Ross Basin along the eastern Antarctic Peninsula, exhibit a mixture of marine and terrestrial deposits. The following vertebrates have been recovered from these sedimentary deposits during previous field seasons: plesiosaur and mosasaur marine reptiles; plant eating dinosaurs; a meat eating dinosaur; and a variety of modern bird groups, including shorebirds, wading birds and lagoonal birds. This project will undertake new fieldwork to recover new specimens in order to test biogeographic and evolutionary hypotheses concerning Late Cretaceous vertebrates in Gondwana. Fieldwork is planned in January and to explore the eastern slopes of Cape Lamb, Sandwich Bluff and False Island Point on Vega Island, and the Santa Marta Cove area of James Ross Island. This research will result in important new insights about the evolution and geographic dispersal of several vertebrate species. The results are important to understanding the development and evolution of life on Earth. This is a collaborative research project with Argentinean scientists from the IAA and it continues a productive collaboration that began in . In addition, collaboration with vertebrate paleontologists from the Museo de La Plata, both in the field and at our respective institutions in Argentina and in the United States, will continue doc6529 none Saven This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Jeffrey Saven of the University of Pennsylvania and Professor Shoji Takada of Kobe University in Japan. The researchers will undertake research connected with probing the folding kinetics and stability of proteins with theoretically designed energy landscapes. Protein folding is a fundamental area of research in contemporary molecular science. This project will synthesize recent advances in protein folding theory, protein simulation, and experimental probes of protein folding. The goal of the project is to design and study proteins that fold to a predetermined structure. The proteins will be designed according to different folding criteria so that folding kinetics may be included as an element of the design process. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. The U.S. researcher s expertise is in developing computational methods to address the properties of protein sequences. Their Japanese collaborators have expertise in simulating the kinetics and stability of various realistic models of proteins, in the experimental study of protein structure and stability, in the synthesis of proteins using molecular biology methods, and in the characterization of protein structure and dynamics using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Results of this research should improve our understanding of the means of gene expression, the engineering of proteins for biotechnology, and those genetic diseases involving protein folding and misfolding. This research advances international human resources through the participation of graduate students. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of their research in scientific journals and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc6530 none Blank, Glenn D. Lehigh University CRCD: Development of a Web-based Integrated Learning Environment for Manufacturing Engineering Education This project combines research in inquiry-based learning with emerging concepts in textual content identification and classification to the development of a multimedia learning system. The project applies a multimedia framework to the teaching of introductory and upper-level computer science courses for students with diverse learning styles, gender, and cultural backgrounds. In particular, the project concentrates on one introductory computer science course and two upper-level undergraduate introductory graduate level courses, Object-Oriented Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence with Applications in Textual Data Mining. Applying current research in data mining algorithms and knowledge base creation, a reference-librarian avatar guides learners through course content using a multimedia interface that seamlessly connects learners, networks, knowledge repositories and human instructors doc6531 none Computing - Other (35) The interdisciplinary field of computational science combines simulation, visualization, mathematical modeling, programming, data structures, networking, database design, symbolic computation, and high performance computing with various scientific disciplines. Despite the shortage of computational scientists, a survey found only two undergraduate special degree programs and 15 undergraduate courses in the field. Unfortunately, few computational science textbooks are appropriate for undergraduate science students. After extensive discussions on enhancing computer use in the sciences, Wofford College faculty members designed a curriculum for students majoring in science or mathematics, called Emphasis in Computational Science. A student electing this program will complete a science major, two existing courses (Programming in C++, Data Structures), two new computational science courses (Scientific Programming, Data and Visualization), and a summer internship. This project will create, evaluate, improve, and expand undergraduate computational science course modules that are rich in applications. These materials will be developed in collaboration with scientists and will be tested and evaluated at several institutions. With dissemination over the World Wide Web, the modules will instruct and provide applications that many institutions can use in a variety of courses. The project will provide the materials and will be a catalyst for improving undergraduate computational science education nationally doc6532 none Diebold This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports a collaborative research program in marine geology and geophysics in the southern central and eastern Ross Sea. The project will conduct sites surveys for drilling from the Ross Ice Shelf into the seafloor beneath it. Many of the outstanding problems concerning the evolution of the East and West Antarctic Ice Sheets, Antarctic climate, global sea level, and the tectonic history of the West Antarctic Rift System can be addressed by drilling into the seafloor of the Ross Sea. Climate data for Cretaceous and Early Cenozoic time are lacking for this sector of Antarctica. Climate questions include: Was there any ice in Late Cretaceous time? What was the Antarctic climate during the Paleocene-Eocene global warming? When was the Cenozoic onset of Antarctic glaciation, when did glaciers reach the coast and when did they advance out onto the margin? Was the Ross Sea shelf non-marine in Late Cretaceous time; when did it become marine? Tectonic questions include: What was the timing of the Cretaceous extension in the Ross Sea rift; where was it located? What is the basement composition and structure? Where are the time and space limits of the effects of Adare Trough spreading? Another drilling objective is to sample and date the sedimentary section bounding the mapped RSU6 unconformity in the Eastern Basin and Central Trough to resolve questions about its age and regional extent. Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) Leg 28 completed sampling at four drill sites in the early s but had low recovery and did not sample the Early Cenozoic. Other drilling has been restricted to the McMurdo Sound area of the western Ross Sea and results can be correlated into the Victoria Land Basin but not eastward across basement highs. Further, Early Cenozoic and Cretaceous rocks have not been sampled. A new opportunity is developing to drill from the Ross Ice Shelf. This is a successor program to the Cape Roberts Drilling Project. One overriding difficulty is the need for site surveys at drilling locations under the ice shelf. This project will overcome this impediment by conducting marine geophysical drill site surveys at the front of the Ross Ice Shelf in the Central Trough and Eastern Basin. The surveys will be conducted a kilometer or two north of the ice shelf front where recent calving events have resulted in a southerly position of the ice shelf edge. In several years the northward advance of the ice shelf will override the surveyed locations and drilling could be accomplished. Systems to be used include swath bathymetry, gravity, magnetics, chirp sonar, high resolution seismic profiling, and 48 fold seismics. Cores will be collected to obtain samples for geotechnical properties, to study sub-ice shelf modern sedimentary processes, and at locations where deeper section is exposed. This survey will include long profiles and detailed grids over potential drill sites. Survey lines will be tied to existing geophysical profiles and DSDP 270. A recent event that makes this plan timely is the calving of giant iceberg B-15 (in March, ) and others from the ice front in the eastern Ross Sea. This new calving event and one in have exposed 16,000 square kilometers of seafloor that had been covered by ice shelf for decades and is not explored. Newly exposed territory can now be mapped by modern geophysical methods. This project will map geological structure and stratigraphy below unconformity RSU6 farther south and east, study the place of Roosevelt Island in the Ross Sea rifting history, and determine subsidence history during Late Cenozoic time (post RSU6) in the far south and east. Finally the project will observe present day sedimentary processes beneath the ice shelf in the newly exposed areas doc6533 none Engineering - Other (59) This project is developing a robotic assembly cell, the main components of which will be a six-axis Kuka KR6 robotic manipulator and a PowerCube Programmable Motion System. The robotic assembly cell will be used for three types of projects. The first is focusing on the programming and application of the Kuka manipulator as well as kinematic modeling and control of the PowerCube system. These activities are being incorporated into robotics as well as introductory engineering courses. The second type of project is focusing on automated assembly and robotic applications for use in manufacturing and senior design courses. The third type are interactive robotic and manufacturing application projects being jointly conducted by university engineering computer science students and high school students in Oakland University s existing Remote Design Manufacturing Program. The Remote Design Manufacturing Program currently involves Oakland University s School of Engineering and Computer Science and three southeastern Michigan K-12 school districts doc6534 none PROJECT SUMMARY The rapidly changing world of information, communications, and computation is a stimulus for the development of new models and new concepts lying at the foundation of computer and infor- mation science and their development will require ever-closer connections with many methods of mathematics. The PI will investigate the connections between foundational issues in the computer and information sciences and different branches of mathematics in a series of four working workshops involving both mathematicians and computer scientists, two per year in each of two years. The PIs will de-emphasize formal talks and emphasize discussion time and opportunities to explore new potential collaborations between computer scientists and mathematicians. The workshops willbe followed followed up with opportunities for participants to meet at DIMACS to pursue the research direc- tions identified. The workshops will cover the topics Algebra and the Theory of Computing, Computational Complexity, Entropy, and Statistical Physics, Wavelet Analysis and Digital Ge- ometry Processing, and Algorithmic and Quantitative Aspects of Real Algebraic Geometry in Mathematics and Computer Science doc6535 none McKee This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports a collaborative research program to study low temperature chemical and physical weathering processes in the Dry Valleys region of Antarctica. Chemical weathering is thought to affect global climate by consuming carbon dioxide (CO2) during processes such as silicate hydrolysis. This CO2 buffer can create climate change by controlling the atmospheric concentration of this important greenhouse gas. Because the principle controls on chemical weathering rates have been argued to be temperature and moisture, enhanced chemical weathering is thought to occur in warmer climates. The geochemistry of a number of ephemeral streams in Taylor Valley, Antarctica (~78 degrees) has been analyzed. These streams flow for 4 to 10 weeks per year and are associated with dry-based glaciers. Solutes produced from chemical weathering such as major cations, minor elements (e.g., rubidium, cesium, lithium, strontium, and barium), bicarbonate and dissolved reactive silica, as well as isotopes (87Sr 86Sr) indicate that chemical weathering does occur in these polar desert streams. Although the mechanism process of weathering is unknown, it is hypothesized that either the high coincidence of freezing thawing cycles and or the unusual hydrologic behavior of the hyporheic zone in these streams are responsible for the high chemical weathering rates that have been computed. In this proposal, the plan is to build upon the initial work of the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long Term Ecological Research (MCM-LTER) team and others by better establishing weathering rates and weathering mechanisms by elucidating the role of physical weathering via cryogenic processes on chemical weathering. The suspended matter in streams from the Lake Bonney basin in Taylor Valley, and the Onyx Valley in Wright Valley will be analyzed for their bulk chemistry and compared to rock types in the valleys to establish what materials are being weathered. Emphasis will be placed on the utilization of uranium series geochemistry to better ascertain solute sources. The laboratory experiments will be done to establish the role of microfracturing via freeze-thaw cycles on chemical weathering. Major rock types occurring in Taylor and Wright Valleys will be used for these experiments. All of the data will be used to draw analogies to historic weathering regimes on Earth during colder, drier climatic regimes doc6536 none Earth Systems Science (40) Computers are an increasingly important tool in the Earth Sciences and are used for research in fields such as paleoclimatology, seismology, and hydrogeology. Many students now entering graduate school, embarking on consulting careers, or obtaining jobs with state and federal governments are called upon to use computers to model complex systems or to acquire and handle digital datasets. Others are required to critically evaluate modeling projects reported in the geological literature. Despite these trends, undergraduate geology programs have been slow to initiate courses that develop skills in these emerging areas of study and employment. Furthermore, computer science offerings are not geared toward students in the Earth Sciences. This project is developing a course within the geology curriculum to meet the need for instruction in modeling in the earth sciences at the undergraduate level. This course is making use of the reservoir flux modeling software STELLA(r), developed by High Performance Systems, Inc., to teach the fundamentals of systems thinking and model construction, with application to a wide variety of geological problems. At the same time, students are learning how to program in the FORTRAN 90 computer language and are learning the basics of the Linux Unix operating system. The project is adapting modeling which has been done within a number of different research contexts. The course differs from computer methods courses developed by other university geology departments in that it is teaching students computer skills by focusing on computer modeling of geological and environmental problems. The final products of this project will include a detailed package of course notes, exercises, and debugged STELLA(r) and FORTRAN programs available free of charge to faculty interested in using these exercises in their courses. Colleagues at other institutions will be made aware of the availability of these exercises through an article in the Journal of Geoscience Education and through presentations at the annual Geological Society of America and or Council on Undergraduate Research meetings doc6537 none Bender This award supports a project to continue studies of the triple isotope composition (O-17 and O-18) of oxygen in fossil air trapped in ice cores. This property is of interest because photochemical reactions in the stratosphere induce isotope exchange between oxygen and carbon dioxide that lowers the O-17 of oxygen by the same amount as the O-18 ( mass independent fractionation ). This isotopic tag is anomalous in the sense that other factors influencing the isotopic composition of oxygen change O-17 by 0.5 times as much as they change O-18. Respiration consumes ambient (anomalous) oxygen , and photosynthesis replaces it with oxygen which is normally fractionated. Therefore, the triple isotope composition of oxygen give a measure of the gross rate of photosynthesis on the planet. Preliminary results focussing on the last 60,000 years indicate that the production of the global biosphere during the Last Glacial Maximum was about 90% of that today. Because land production was much less than today, the O-isotope data imply that oceanic gross production was much greater than today. This increase has been attributed to a higher glacial flux of dust (and iron) to the oceans. This project will extend current measurements of the triple isotope composition of oxygen back to 400,000 years in order to derive the curve of the relative rate of photosynthetic oxygen production vs. time. The results, at 1 kyr resolution, will constrain changes in production associated with glacial maxima, interglacials and glacial terminations; with long interstadial events; and with orbital insolation cycles unaccompanied by large changes in ice volume. This work will lead to a better understanding of ways in which the biosphere responds to and influences climate doc6538 none Function and chemical nature of ice-active substances associated with sea ice diatoms Sea ice diatoms of McMurdo Sound, Antarctica, have been previously shown to be associated with extracellular ice-active substances (IASs) that are present both in the ice platelet layer and congelation ice in which diatoms are found. These molecules have large molecular weights and appear to be glycoproteins. Similar molecules have not been found in temperate water diatoms, and so it appears that they have a function related to cold or icy environments. Previous studies have shown that they are widely distributed in the Southern Ocean, occur in both summer and winter sea ice and are associated with many if not all sea ice diatoms. The research will examine additional questions about the function and chemical nature of these unusual substances. Preliminary evidence suggests the IASs have cryoprotective properties. One goal is to explore this possibility using several approaches, including the IASs ability to prevent freeze-thaw damage in a test enzyme (LDH) as well as whole cells, and their ability to inhibit the recrystallization of ice, which is a common measure of antifreeze activity in plant studies. The IASs are known to bind to ice crystals, and so to better understand the binding mechanism additional studies will attempt to determine the specific crystal faces to which they bind. A third part of the study will try to better characterize the chemical nature of the carbohydrate and protein moieties of the IASs, using mass spectrometry, amino acid sequencing and other techniques. Finally, initial attempts will be made to raise antibodies against the IASs, as these will have several uses in determining the origin, seasonality, relatedness and possibly the function of these molecules. The IASs represent a novel type of ice-binding molecule that is distinct from protein and glycoprotein fish antifreezes. Because of their ubiquity in the Antarctic sea ice communities and their absence in warmer regions, they appear to have an important role in these communities. These studies should answer some of the main questions about the nature of these molecules. In addition, the IASs share some properties with fish antifreezes, and so understanding their ice binding properties and chemical structure will make it possible to better understand how this family of molecules interact with ice. Finally, the IASs, unlike the fish antifreezes, are produced in large quantities in Nature, and this may make it feasible for them to be used in other applications doc6539 none This award funds a three year Combined Research-Curriculum Development (CRCD) program, entitled Curriculum in Genomic Engineering, at Columbia University under the direction of Dr. Edward F. Leonard. The overall objective of this project is to develop and operate a course track in Genomic Engineering that is related to research activities in genomic engineering undertaken by the project faculty and their colleagues at Columbia University. The proposed course track is designed to provide a broad understanding of the central ideas and goals of genomic science in an efficient manner. The course track will encrouage the comprehensive focusing of current engineering knowledge on core problems in genomic science and engineering. Broad exposure of engineering and computer science students to genomic science and engineering will encourage sustained commitment to the field and the development of well-founded and broad-reaching, rather than anecdotal or tactical, solutions to problems in genomics doc6540 none Astronomy (11) Project CLEA (Contemporary Laboratory Experiences in Astronomy) is developing an on-line environment that provides discovery-based laboratory exercises to undergraduate astronomy students. The components of the system are: (1) A browser-based On-Line Educational Observatory (OLEO) which realistically simulates optical, radio, and space-based telescopes, along with photometric, spectroscopic, and imaging instruments,. (2) An extensive heuristic database, covering the entire sky, which incorporates selected data on positions, magnitudes, spectra, and other properties of a wide range of real astronomical objects including asteroids, stars, galaxies, pulsars, x-ray and IR sources. (3) Student workbooks and teacher s guides for a variety of exercises using the Virtual Educational Observatory. CLEA materials are made available on a dedicated OLEO Website, as well as on a series of CD-ROMS for installation on mirror sites, local networks, and individual machines. The use of the materials is supported by outreach workshops held at national and regional teachers meetings. A summer training workshop for college teachers will be held on the Gettysburg College campus in the summer of . The curricular impact and pedagogical effectiveness of these materials is being evaluated at a diverse group of institutions (Universities, 4-year colleges, 2-year colleges, and High Schools), by observations by an external evaluator and through the analysis of on-line questionnaires doc6541 none Chemistry (12) Three new lecture laboratory courses have been designed to replace older courses in instrumental analysis, organic analysis, and inorganic synthesis. These new courses cut across traditional disciplinary divisions to focus on separations and spectroscopy, synthesis, and analysis. These courses are taken by upper-level chemistry majors and are incorporating modern techniques of separations, spectral analysis, techniques of synthesis, and product analysis. This award provided funding so that modern instrumentation such as UV-visible spectroscopy, gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry, capillary electrophoresis, and high performance liquid chromatography is now available for the students in these courses. Experiments are being adapted from the research and educational literature and implemented into these courses. Molecular modeling experiments are augmenting the analysis of a variety of experimental data doc6542 none This research focuses on determining the phase behavior of rodlike colloids, and mixtures of rodlike and spherical colloids. Biological examples of rodlike colloids include proteins such as actin and microtubules, DNA, and filamentous viruses. The rodlike colloids on interest in this work consist of genetically engineered filamentous phage fd virus. The spherical particles are , either polystyrene latex or water soluble polymers such as poly(ethylene) oxide. Knowledge gained from these well characterized materials has implications for the fundamental understanding of liquid crystals, colloid-polymer mixtures, and the biophysics of the intracellular environment, as well as the design of composite materials where molecular ordering and self-assembly is important. A primary goal will be determining fundamental properties of the liquid crystalline phase of pure rod suspensions, then mixtures of rod and spheres, mixtures of rods of different lengths, and mixtures of rods of different diameters. Specifically, the angular distribution function of the rodlike colloids, co-existence concentrations, and virial coefficients will be obtained. These experiments are designed to determine the roles of attraction and repulsion in governing phase behavior, as well as to explore further rich and unexpected microphase behavior discovered in mixtures of rods and spheres during the previous NSF grant. The kinetics of phase transformation in mixtures of rods and spheres will be examined, including the identification of metastable phases. Finally, the dynamics of individual rods and spheres seen as tracers will be studied. Students participating in the research receive interdisciplinary training that will prepare them for a variety of careers in academe, industry, and government. %%% This research focuses on determining the states of matter exhibited by rodlike colloids and by mixtures of rodlike and spherical colloids. Rodlike colloids, though less studied than spherical colloids, are of considerable importance. Biological examples of rodlike colloids being proteins such as actin and microtubules, DNA, and filamentous viruses. The rodlike colloids studied in this project consist of genetically engineered filamentous phage fd virus. For spheres, the well known polystyrene latex or water soluble polymer poly(ethylene) oxide are employed. All these colloids are well characterized, uniform particles for which an established theoretical framework exists for understanding their phase behavior. What is learned about these particular systems has implications for the fundamental understanding of liquid crystals, colloid-polymer mixtures, the biophysics of the intracellular environment, as well as the design of composite materials where molecular ordering and self-assembly is important. This research lies at the intersection of chemistry, biology, and physics. Biological molecules and processes are increasingly being understood at a mechanistic level, and physics is making significant gains in understanding non-equilibrium and disordered systems. Thus these two fields, which traditionally have been widely separated, are swiftly growing towards each other. Students participating in the research receive interdisciplinary training that will prepare them for a variety of careers in academe, industry, and government doc6543 none This award provides funding to the University of Arkansas for the support of a Combined Research-Curriculum Development project entitled, Incorporating Recent Developments into the Mixed-Signal Telecommunications Curriculum, under the direction of Dr. H. Alan Mantooth. This project has the following four major objectives: 1) to substantially transform and evolve the mixed-signal and telecommunications curricula at the University of Arkansas; 2) to better prepare graduates for careers in mixed-signal and telecommunications related fields; 3) to have a national impact on the education of mixed-signal and telecommunications engineers, and 4) to establish an innovative model for new course creation that facilitates the incorporation of ongoing research and encourages widespread dissemination doc6544 none Interdisciplinary (99) Students preparing to teach in elementary school do not receive adequate exposure to the sciences they will be expected to teach nor do they learn to integrate mathematical concepts with scientific applications. In response to this problem, the Divisions of Natural Sciences and Mathematics and Computer Sciences, working cooperatively with the Division of Education are developing several new courses integrating mathematics, science and technology (MST). Materials and practices will be adapted from the successful Integrated Mathematics and Science curriculum at La Salle University, which is the cornerstone of La Salle s Institute for the Advancement of Mathematics and Science Teaching. These courses are intended to promote scientific and mathematical literacy, overcome math and science phobias, and allow students to see the connections of these disciplines to their own lives. While these courses are initially targeting elementary education special education pre-service teachers, when fully developed and evaluated, they will become the mathematics and science core required of all non-science students at the college. The MST courses are promoting active learning via proven innovative pedagogies such as inquiry-based cooperative learning exercises and discussions based on selected interdisciplinary themes. Students are designing and implementing investigations as members of collaborative groups and are interpreting these experiments using mathematical concepts and computerized research and analysis tools. They report on their findings in a peer-review forum orally, followed by laboratory reports that reflect an understanding of good scientific writing. Mathematics and science presented in this way, enhanced by use of computer technology and integrated in the college classroom, is enabling pre-service teachers to better integrate mathematics and science with the rest of the elementary school curriculum doc6545 none Biological Sciences (61) Through a major curriculum revision effort and with the assistance of outside consultation, the Department of Biology has implemented the use of current teaching methods and the constructivist learning method by implementing hands-on course experiences across the curriculum. Investment by the university in educational technology and lab instrumentation has moved us toward goal attainment. Through this project, the plant science courses in the department are being updated and revised to meet the institutional goal of providing students with contemporary research experiences in biology. Botany, Plant Physiology and Laboratory Methods in Biology and Biotechnology are being updated to include inquiry-based laboratory experiences performed by peer groups using the techniques of modern molecular biology and plant materials. Each course includes a semester-long project as a means of providing experience in doing science and thus enhancing the confidence of students in their lab skills and content mastery. In this way, we are adapting several research protocols, instruments, and the long-term process of discovery traditionally found only in research laboratories to meet the needs of introductory students and are implementing these student-focused experiments in the introductory biology classroom. These methods are further adapted to meet the needs of upper level students who revisit these plant-focused techniques while completing more complex and independent research projects in more advanced courses doc6546 none Chemistry (12) Geology (42) Atomic absorption (AA) spectroscopy is typically an integral part of undergraduate chemistry education. The processes involved with AA are easily understood by students. An AA spectrometer is being used as a vehicle to introduce sophisticated analytical ideas and interesting challenges into several different chemistry courses. An introductory geosciences course is utilizing the instrument in the study of the geochemistry of natural waters. Finally, the AA is serving as an interdisciplinary bridge between the Departments of Chemistry and Geosciences. Analytical procedures from the educational and research literature are being adapted in order to achieve these objectives. This project simultaneously addresses two main objectives. First, chemistry students have exposure to the AA instrumentation in the first semester, junior level analytical, and senior level instrumental analysis laboratories. Each exposure builds on the previous experience in a way otherwise not possible if students were to encounter AA only once. More sophistication and subtleties are then layered into the advanced labs. Improvements in instruction occur in a manner consistent with the philosophies that real samples should be used when possible, interdisciplinary applications and opportunities should be exploited, effective communication of results is critical, and students should have input into experimental design. Secondly, this instrumentation is serving as a bridge between the Departments of Chemistry and Geosciences. Including geosciences in the implementation of this project realizes several key advantages. The Geosciences curriculum is being enhanced through the addition of sophisticated instrumentation, typically encountered only in chemistry. For those students electing to major in geosciences, it emphasizes the interdisciplinary nature of the geosciences early in their career. By creating a link between chemistry and geosciences courses, both sets of students must exchange knowledge about their respective disciplines in order to better understand the laboratory assignments. Geosciences classes are typically more attractive to non-science, mathematics, engineering, technology (SMET), and education majors than are other SMET classes. Thus, the interdisciplinary link means that the Department of Chemistry is able to reach these students in a small but novel way doc6547 none Interdisciplinary (99) Subsurface archaeo-geophysical survey techniques are being used increasingly in archaeological fieldwork to map ancient remains without excavation. The growth in use is facilitated by the availability of commercial data collectors tailored to archaeological needs. This project is adapting these techniques to create an integrated interdisciplinary curriculum to provide undergraduates with (1) a competent theoretical understanding of basic geophysical processes underlying the survey techniques, (2) some knowledge of the implications of subsurface archaeo-geophysical technologies for research design and methodology, and (3) a working knowledge of appropriate mapping and imaging theory and technology. The project is developing a new interdisciplinary course, upgrading an existing Archaeology Laboratory for subsurface archaeo-geophysical survey, and modifying existing courses offered by the departments of Geology, Archaeology, and Geography to accomplish these objectives. This project is also supporting faculty and student research projects and invigorating a community-based research program at the University of Akron. The project is adapting a design of Web-based instructional modules derived from Geographer Kenneth Foote s Virtual Geography Department, an NSF-supported workshop. It is also adapting field techniques taught at a Field Institutes for Reforming Science Teaching (FIRST) workshop conducted by Biologists Diane Ebert-May and Janet Hodder -- also NSF supported. Both of these adaptations are being used for their skill in supporting active learning by students. The content of the new course and course modifications is being adapted from courses using geophysical methods for subsurface mapping developed and offered to undergraduates at three other institutions. These were a course in Archaeological Field Methods, including subsurface surveying at Vassar College, developed by Lucy Johnson; the archaeological field school at Notre Dame University, which offers courses in geophysical remote sensing techniques; and a series of three courses at Boston University related to archaeological geophysical surveying doc6548 none Biological Sciences (61) Four comprehensive, guided inquiry, investigative laboratory modules are being developed to address fundamental concepts in undergraduate biology instruction utilizing WOWBugs, Melittobia digitata, a harmless parasitic wasp. WOWBugs exhibit unique characteristics including elaborate courtship rituals, reproducible competitive behaviors, short generation times, easily measured heritable traits, and readily distinguishable morphological forms that are dependant upon on developmental conditions. These features make WOWBugs an effective organism for use in illustrating concepts fundamental to animal behavior, ecology, genetics, and developmental biology. Inquiry-based laboratory modules as well as instructional materials are being developed in each of these concept areas. The instructional materials under development include a book, a CD, a broadcast-quality videotape with accompanying teacher s guide, and a dedicated WOWBug newsletter and web support site. All materials are pilot tested at four diverse institutions including the University of Georgia, Hollins College, Morehouse College, and at local community colleges. The instructional materials will be disseminated at national meetings, in dedicated workshops, and through commercial distributors. In support of the curriculum development work, this project has a significant research component through which better and simpler growth medium is being developed to support classroom propagation of WOWBugs. The curricular materials in conjunction with a simple growth and propagation system ensure easy implementation into the undergraduate curriculum and provide students an opportunity to visualize a number of key biological phenomenon and to participate in a variety of innovative, inquiry-based investigations traditionally unavailable in the undergraduate laboratory doc6549 none A picture is worth a thousand words, and the addition of sound and motion can breathe life into a picture. As a result, the use of video in all kinds of multimedia applications has become an important development in the s. In particular, Video on demand (VOD) is a core technology for many important applications such as digital libraries, distance learning, electronic commerce, entertainment, public information systems, etc. The simplest video delivery technique employs a dedicated stream for each service request. Obviously, this scheme is too expensive and has been shown to have little scalability. To vastly reduce this cost, one can leverage multicast technology to allow multiple clients to share a video stream. Unfortunately, today s multicast technology was developed in the 80 s, and was not optimized for such applications. Missing a multicast could mean a long wait until the next multicast. This limitation has recently led to a large body of research looking for remedies at the application level. Application-level solutions, however, cannot address all the drawbacks, particularly traffic congestion caused by too many multicasts. In fact, this proposal is motivated by application-level work done by the investigator in his last NSF project (from to ). The achievements of that project, though significant, were constrained by the limitation of standard multicast. Minimizing the multicast frequency is crucial for any multicast-based applications, particularly those running on a public network such as the Internet. Attaining this goal requires a fundamental change in the multicast concept. The investigator proposes enabling the multicast tree to deliver the entire video to all the receivers who may subscribe to the multicast at different times. This new capability would significantly reduce the number of multicasts necessary, and therefore lower the network resource requirements. At first sight, this seems like a mission impossible. But on the contrary, this can be achieved by allowing the routers on the multicast tree to intercept and cache a video stream passing through. The data can be relayed to subsequent subscribers to further extend the multicast tree. In this project, the investigator proposes to develop a suite of techniques to make such an environment practical for future-generation large-scale multimedia applications. To assess the potential of the proposed idea, the investigator has designed an initial version of his Caching Multicast Protocol (CMP). The preliminary study indicates that this approach has the potential to revolutionize the way in which multimedia information is disseminated. This scheme is much more scalable and less expensive than application-level solutions. The new communication paradigm, however, demands new research at the network level. In this project, the investigator proposes to study issues such as cache organization, cache replacement policies, multicast routing algorithms, congestion control, client and server protocols, etc. In addition, he will implement a prototype, consisting of CMP-capable routers, CMP-compliant servers (sources) and CMP-compliant clients (destinations) to examine the practicality of the proposed techniques. The significance of this project is in advancing multicast technology to enable large-scale deployment of multimedia applications. Although many great advances have been made in the field of information technology, none have had as great and direct an impact on the daily lives of ordinary citizens as multime-dia information systems. As such, the benefits of this research will reach many people in society. In terms of education, this project will help to support three doctoral students. The investigator has a good record of using NSF projects to train students for teaching careers. After these students graduate, they can help to spread the CMP expertise developed from this project to their new institutions. Other graduate students taking our advanced databases course can also benefit from this work by experimenting with various new multicast applications on the CMP testbed. To reach out to members of communities, materials resulting from this research will be disseminated on the investigator s research group website doc6550 none FALK The project extends the electronic community to include those LSC projects which have recently graduated (reached the end of their NSF support). Former projects receive continued access to LSC-Net and participate in research on aspects on sustainability. The project design also includes an annual electronic conference with many special features catered to the needs of districts and educators. The objectives are to continue to provide support and access to LSC-Net; to create additional functionality for, and implement a virtual conference on, sustainability; and to conduct collaborative research on sustainability within an LSC context doc6551 none Gunter, Carl University of Pennsylvania CRCD: Security Laboratory This project involves the design of this university s Security Laboratory and security courses that serve as models for security education. The project integrates research in computer and network security into upper level undergraduate and introductory graduate engineering and computer and information science curricula. The project involves the creation of an instructional laboratory where students have access to and experiment with authentication methods, anti-virus software, encryption algorithms and protocols, firewalls and intrusion detection systems, and the development of network security topics in several courses including Introduction to Networks and Security and Computer Network Security. This project speaks to the widespread concern about security issues on intranets and the Internet, including: privacy policy, security design, security risk assessment, authentication techniques, encryption, incident management, and network architectures for security enforcement. In particular, this project focuses on the development of high-confidence software systems and it is also relevant to several areas of industrial and national importance including wireless information technology, IT research, and scalable information infrastructures. The transfer of this material into undergraduate and graduate courses is important for educating practitioners who develop applications and manage facilities that provide seamless availability of networks doc6552 none Shum The proposed work is an attempt to use radar altimeter data and synthetic aperture radar data in an interferometric mode from ERS-1 and ERS-2 to develop a barotropic model of the ocean tide under the Ross Ice Shelf. A 30-kilometer resolution model will be applied to the entire Ross Ice Shelf, while a higher resolution (30 meters) model will be developed for a 100 square kilometer section of the shelf edge. One expected result of this work is an improved location of the southern grounding line of the Ross Ice Shelf. Ocean tides play a significant role in the complex interactions between the atmosphere, ocean, sea ice and floating glacial ice shelves. Tidal currents creates turbulent mixing at the bottom of the ice shelf contributing to the creation of rifts for the possible detachment of part of the icebergs and can influence heat transport between the ice shelf and sea water. The primary scientific objectives of the proposed investigation include: (1) the development of methodologies to diminish the tidal aliasing limitations and to use repeat-pass synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR) and radar altimeter data from ERS-1 and ERS-2 for the determination of a fine resolution (30-50 m) barotropic ocean tide model in the South Ross Sea region, (2) a coarser resolution (30 km) barotropic ocean tide model covering the floating ice shelf region of the Ross Ice Shelf, (3) the assessment and quantification of errors associated with the resulting tide model, and (4) provide a demonstration of improved determination of grounding line between grounded ice and ice shelf in the South Ross Sea. The approach will make use of the convergence of ERS ground tracks over the southern Ross Sea and the overlapping of SAR swaths to attempt to break the tidal aliasing. The resulting model will be validated for its accuracy and applied to a test case of its potential improvement in the detection of grounding lines in the South Ross Sea Ice Shelf doc6553 none Astronomy (11) This uses astronomical laboratory instrumentation to improve and enrich the educational experience of both undergraduate non-science and science majors. The project involves creation of a comprehensive series of laboratory exercises that are integrated into courses ranging from Introductory Astronomy for non-science majors to advanced highly-technical labs and research projects for physical science majors. Equipment consists of twelve 8-inch optical telescopes to complement the laboratory experience the non-science majors are currently receiving through CLEA labs. Second, an existing Celestron 14-inch telescope is being upgraded with a CCD camera and spectrograph that provide more scientifically and technological focused students the experience of true modern astronomical observation and data reduction. This equipment will also be utilized to incorporate on-site (perhaps real-time) data into the CLEA laboratory exercises. The 8-inch telescopes afford the non-science students hands-on experience in astronomical observations and techniques to enhance the important but cookbook nature of the computer labs at a level appropriate to their abilities and interests. The CCD camera and spectrograph for the 14-inch telescope serve several purposes. One is to adapt the CLEA labs in order to supply local data, and even real-time data when possible, from this rooftop telescope for use by the students. This provides an immediate connection between the students laboratory work and real astronomical observations. It also allows the development of more sophisticated labs and research experiences for the science-orientated students and majors. Students can also use this equipment in their Senior Thesis projects. Future directions will be to modify a subset of the labs developed for the Introductory Astronomy course for use by the William and Mary School of Education in their Earth Sciences teacher development program in association with the Department of Physics doc6554 none Arcone This award supports continued acquisition of high resolution, radar reflection profiles of the snow and ice stratigraphy between core sites planned along traverse routes of the U.S. component of the International Trans-Antarctic Scientific Expedition (U.S.-ITASE). The purpose is to use the profiles to establish the structure and continuity of firn stratigraphic horizons over hundreds of kilometers and to quantitatively assess topographic and ice movement effects upon snow deposition. Other objectives are to establish the climatic extent that a single site represents and to investigate the cause of firn reflections. The radar will also be used to identify crevasses ahead of the traverse vehicles in order to protect the safety of the scientists and support personnel on the traverse. Collaboration with other ITASE investigators will use the radar horizons as continuous isochronic references fixed by the core dating to calculate historical snow accumulation rates. The primary radar system uses 400-MHz (center frequency) short-pulse antennas, which (with processing) gives the penetration of 50-70 meters. This is the depth which is required to exceed the 200-year deposition horizon along the traverse routes. Profiles at 200 MHz will also be recorded if depths greater than 70 meters are of interest. Processing will be accomplished by data compression (stacking) to reveal long distance stratigraphic deformation, range gain corrections to give proper weight to signal amplitudes, and GPS corrections to adjust the records for the present ice sheet topography. Near surface stratigraphy will allow topographic and ice movement effects to be separated. This work is critical to the success of the U.S.-ITASE program doc6555 none Geiger The proposed work will develop a systematic climatology of in situ antarctic sea ice thickness from observations made since . Sea ice thickness is by far the least well known property - horizontal properties such as areal extent and compactness can be observed from satellites - but thickness information is necessary to constrain large-scale climate models. The three-dimensional growth and decay of antarctic sea ice is an important feature of the global climate system as it directly modifies ocean-atmosphere interaction in the Southern Ocean. The four major large-scale sea ice properties that need to be monitored for variability and change are ice thickness, compactness (including extent), movement, and deformation. In large-scale climate models, the lack of sea ice thickness data for validation introduces a free parameter for arbitrary tuning and allows a wide range of results which cannot be checked. Hence it is difficult to ascertain which model physics are correct, leading to divergent viewpoints about the sensitivity of the various parameters. This project will (1) provide an antarctic climatology of in situ sea ice thickness (and secondarily compactness) using the recently recovered 11,000 sea ice property records from 42 voyages between and ; (2) through validation studies, expand the in situ sea ice climatology to include remote sensing information from U.S. National Ice Center ice charts from to , and (3) contribute to the greater knowledge of air-ice-ocean interaction by determining the relationship between an antarctic sea ice climatology, climate variability, and climate trends. The work will serve the community at large by linking the sea ice climatology results into the public NIC web-site for the validation of numerical model outputs, to obtain error-bounded input for data assimilation, to study sea ice processes, and for operational use doc6556 none Interdisciplinary (99) We are developing an undergraduate optics facility to serve as a center for optics instruction and promote an enhanced understanding of optics across several areas in the college of science and math at Cal Poly. The facility is being used in the teaching of upper division physics and chemistry courses and increasingly for student and faculty research projects. The theme of the laboratory is optical metrology. This ranges through interferometric measurement of solid body deformation, optical characterization of surfaces and laser spectroscopy and determination of atomic linewidths. Not only does this tie in with the Polytechnic nature of our university, but by thematically developing the facility we also demonstrate the unity and commonalties of optical methods. For example, the resolution of optical systems and the determination of object deformation by speckle interferometry are both essentially diffraction limited phenomena. For the laboratory we will adopt, modify, and develop new experiments. Experiments that will be adopted include plane wave interference [Catunda et. al. Am. J. Phys. 66, 548 ( )] and photon counting [Kocyk et. al. Am J. Phys. 64, 240 ( )] in physics and radiative properties of ruby [Shoemaker et. al. Experiments in Physics Chemistry 6th Ed., McGraw-Hill ( )] in chemistry. Other experiments will be adapted and modified to suit our student body. For example, in chemistry, beginning with a known fluorescence quenching experiment of the uranyl ion by the chloride ion [Halpern Experimental Physical Chemistry 2nd Ed. Prentice Hall ( )] this experiment will be expanded to include micellar systems [Almgren et. al. Langmuir 12, ( )] which is of relevance to our biochemistry majors. Some well known experiments will be adapted and made more quantitative by the use of modern electronic cameras and computers. Thus, the Abbe-Porter experiment on spatial filtering [Hecht Optics 3rd Ed. Addison Wesley ( )] will be modified so that students can acquire and measure the spatially filtered images. This optics laboratory will also permit us to develop new experiments for the physics and chemistry majors to make use of recent material and technical advances. For example, an experiment to study the modulation transfer function of a liquid crystal light valve will be developed which will allow students to become familiar with this important topic within the confines of a three-hour laboratory. Other experiments that will be developed within this facility include (in chemistry) vibrational modes of molecules which will be measured by Raman scattering and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and compared to computational models and (in physics) measurement of atomic hyperfine structure [Rao et. al. Am. J. Phys. 66, 702 ( )] and atom trapping. Because of the rapid pace of change in optical science and technology and the growing application of optical techniques across the physical and chemical sciences it is difficult to establish and maintain an up-to-date facility containing the instruments of modern optics. However, much of this instrumentation is now used in the workplace or graduate school and it is necessary to provide training in optics to a large number of students from different disciplines. With this facility we will be able to give in-depth training to the students in optics courses (e.g. laser applications), provide experiments for courses with large optics components (e.g. surface science) and give exposure to students in other areas. By centralizing the equipment and flexibly scheduling use of the laboratory we will be able to maximize its impact on the largest number of students and facilitate the interaction of faculty from different disciplines. We estimate that about 200 students year will directly benefit from this facility. Also, because engineering students frequently take upper-division physics and chemistry classes, the facility will have an effect well beyond the College of Science and Mathematics doc6557 none In this research, the photo-physical properties of novel organic dendrimers and metal dendritic nano-composite systems will be investigated. Measurements that probe the dynamics of fundamental excitation decay processes in organic dendrimers will be carried out with ultra-fast time-resolved luminescence spectroscopy. These measurements will compare the dynamics of the excitation decay in homgenous (where core groups are the same as the dendrons) and inhomogeneous (where core groups are different from the dendrons) dendrimer systems. The ultra-fast anisotropic decay of these systems will also be investigated to probe possible energy transfer mechanisms. Time-resolved measurements will be carried out with novel silver(Ag) and gold(Au) dendrimer nano-composites. The decays of the metal clusters and the dendrimer host can be separated and the associated mechanisms of relaxation can be ascribed. The dependence of the metal particle configuration on the emission dynamics of the dendrimer nanocomposite system will be investigated. Dynamics measurements as a function of dendrimer generation number will also be carried out. These studies will probe the fundamental mechanism of emission decay in synthetic dendrimers and give new insights into the interaction of synthetic dendrimers and metal nano-particles when fabricated in a nano-composite structure. %%% Organic macromolecules with important structural properties will play a critical role in future development of optical and electronic devices. Organic dendrimers and metal dendrimer nano-composites are examples of such promising macromolecular architectures. They have potential applications as light emitters, optical limiters, and drug release and delivery systems doc6558 none Interdisciplinary (99) This project is a collaborative effort among faculty members in several departments in the College of Science and in the College of Education of the University of Arizona. These faculty are designing a formative assessment process for a set of newly designed courses for pre-service teachers. Because there is a paucity of comprehensive models that can be used to assess the effectiveness of actual teacher preparation programs, the main goal is to develop such a comprehensive formative assessment model, by adapting and implementing diverse assessment instruments to evaluate five key aspects of the program s student learning outcomes: (1) conceptual understanding, (2) subject-matter structure, (3) teaching and learning beliefs, (4) decision-making skills, and (5) professional performance during the student teaching period in secondary schools. These different assessment tools and practices are drawn from current research in science education and from recent work undertaken in NSF-supported projects known as Collaboratives for Excellence in Teacher Preparation. Through these activities the project team is (1) assembling a set of tested and reliable assessment instruments that will be made available to science and science education teachers; (2) implementing an ongoing evaluation process that will provide information about the effectiveness of the educational practices in the science education and subject-matter courses at the college level; and (3) reporting the evaluation results in a way to foster among faculty an analysis of and reflection on the nature and quality of the subject-matter courses for all the students. Conceptual Understanding of prospective teachers is being measured by developing an instrument that will draw upon research analyzed in Wandersee, Mintzes, and Novak, Research in Alternative Conceptions in Science , in D. L. Gabel (Ed.), Handbook of research in science teaching and learning (pp. 177-210), New York: Macmillan and the NSTA ( ), and Pfundt and Duit, Bibliography: Students Alternative Frameworks and Science Education, Institute for Science Education at the University of Kiel, Germany (March, ). A very well-known example of such an instrument is the Force Concept Inventory designed by Halloun and Hestenes in the field of physics in the s. The acquired Subject Matter Structure of students is a measure of the coherence of their understanding of science disciplines -- the ability to see the big picture and the place of a body of specialized knowledge in that larger framework. Research indicates that secondary science teachers with high scores on Subject Matter Structure have greater skill in selecting topics for inclusion in the secondary science curriculum. Their starting point is the work of G.R. Gess-Newsome and N.G. Lederman, Preservice Biology Teachers Knowledge Structures as a Function of Professional Teacher Education: A Year-Long Assessment, Science Education, Vol. 77, No. 1 ( ), pages 25-45. The work of Simmons et al., Beginning Teachers: Beliefs and Classroom Actions, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Vol. 36, No. 8. ( ), pp. 930-954, is being adapted to measure teaching and learning beliefs. Some prospective teachers still believe that boys are better suited for science than girls, that some students are bound to fail, that learning is passive, that teaching is imparting knowledge to students, and that theory is largely not relevant to teaching. If these beliefs go unchallenged and future teachers are not taught to critically examine their own ideas, ineffective models of teaching are perpetuated. The work of Koballa and Tippins is being used as a starting point to creating instruments for measuring decision making skills. See T.R. Koballa and D.J. Tippins, Cases in Middle and Secondary Science Education, (Merrill Publishers, Upper saddle River, NJ, ). Professional Performance is being measured by adapting James Gallagher s Secondary Teacher Analysis Matrix (Michigan State University, Department of Teacher Education, ) and the Arizona Collaborative for Excellence in Preparation of Teachers Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol doc6559 none Bell This award supports a two year project to address fundamental questions about the mass and energy flux through Lake Vostok, a subglacial lake in East Antarctica, sealed beneath almost 4 kilometers of ice. The project will involve developing lake circulation models, complemented by the analysis of new ice penetrating radar data over the lake and surrounding regions. This project will help to accurately define the regions of melting and freezing within the lake and help to provide an improved estimate of the form of the lake. The combined data analysis and modeling effort will provide a critical framework for developing international plans to sample the waters of Lake Vostok for biota and to recover sediments from Lake Vostok for paleoclimate studies doc6560 none Goldstein This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports a project to investigate the sediment core from the Southern Ocean for paleoenvironmental research. The polar regions are susceptible to the largest changes in climate and are among the least accessible places on Earth. Current concern about the instability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has heightened awareness of the vulnerability of polar regions. This proposal seeks to gain a basic understanding of the isotopic characteristics of terrigenous sediment sources derived from Antarctica in the Holocene and Last Glacial Maximum, and their dispersal into the Southern Ocean. Terrigenous clastic sediments are brought to the ocean from continental sources via rivers, ice and wind, and distributed within the ocean by surface and deep currents. At present there are virtually no isotopic data on circumpolar detritus, save a few strontium (Sr) isotopic ratios in the Atlantic sector. This project will fill part of this gap. From the large range in geological ages of crustal provinces of Antarctica, we would predict that there are large isotopic differences in detritus around the continent. The main objectives are to (1) characterize the strontium-neodymium-lead-argon (Sr-Nd-Pb-Ar) isotope compositions of sediment sources derived from Antarctica, (2) to identify the composition and source ages of major ice rafted detritus (IRD) contributions by analyzing individual grains of hornblende and feldspar in conjunction with bulk isotopic analysis, and (3) track sediment dispersal into the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) during the Holocene and Last Glacial Maximum. Because of the paucity of circumpolar data, this research necessarily has a large exploratory component. Consequently, it will provide a basic database for future studies. Nevertheless there are important hypothesis-driven questions that will be addressed in this primary pass. Can lessons learned in North Atlantic IRD studies be applied toward understanding the history of Antarctic ice sheets? Can the large geological variability around the Antarctic margin be treated as a series of natural tracer injections into the ACC, and thus characterize its trajectory, speed, and interaction with other current systems today and in the past? The proposed study is motivated by an exciting set of results from the South Atlantic, showing that detrital Sr isotope ratios are a sensitive current tracer in that region. This research should serve a basic need across many Earth Science disciplines if the use of long-lived radiogenic isotopes (Sr-Nd-Pb-Ar) as tracers of marine sediment sources is successful in elucidating processes related to changing climatic conditions. The results of this study will fill a basic gap in our knowledge of an important region of the Earth. At the same time, it will provide an essential basis for attempting reconstruction of the ACC during the LGM, as well as for future studies of Antarctic geology, ice sheet history, and the Southern Ocean circulation doc6561 none Chemistry (12) In response to the national discussion on science pedagogy and a school-wide upgrade of computing facilities and networking, we have been carrying out a major redesign of our chemistry curriculum. In lower division courses, the impact of these changes has been most apparent in the so-called lecture portion of traditional lecture laboratory sequences. This project facilitates a complementary development of laboratory-based segments of the first-year principles of chemistry course and the second-year organic chemistry course. We are extending to the laboratory the emphasis on discovery-based and collaborative learning that characterizes our classrooms. We are making lower-division laboratory experiences closer approximations of the real thing and are using the excitement of discovery as the driving force for learning just as it is in the general scientific enterprise. The project adapts in a general way the Project Kaleidoscope Plan for Strengthening Undergraduate Science and Mathematics, and, more specifically, modifies experiments currently used in undergraduate chemistry courses to a discovery format, and incorporates computing in pedagogy following the model of the SCALE-UP Project at North Carolina State University in physics. Incorporation of a set of instrumentation is enabling us to achieve these objectives through the introduction of modern technology that both broadens the scope of what students can do and, as important, frees up time and helps establish a collaboratory capability for thinking about and understanding what is being done. Major items being introduced into the courses include laptop computers with wireless networking capability and expanded molecular modeling support, Vernier instrument kits for data acquisition, fiber-optic diode-array ultraviolet visible spectrophotometers, and an upgrade of our current nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer. We are providing a laboratory environment that allows students to assume direct responsibility in a reasonably efficient way for the broadest range of laboratory work, with the instructor s time as a skilled technician minimized in order to emphasize his or her role as guide and mentor. We anticipate that implementation of this technology will begin to blur the distinction between the lecture and laboratory segments of these courses. Finally, as a women s college, we have played a significant role in increasing the proportion of women entering the science professions. One goal of this project is to increase the number of our students who continue in the sciences beyond their first two years and, also, the proportion of women who elect to pursue post-graduate study in the discipline because their early experience of science at the college level has engaged both their minds and their interest doc6562 none Stearns This is a three-year project to maintain and augment as necessary, the network of approximately fifty automatic weather stations established on the Antarctic continent and on several surrounding islands. These weather stations measure surface wind, pressure, temperature, humidity, and in some instances other atmospheric variables, such as snow accumulation and incident solar radiation, and report these via satellite to a number of ground stations. The data are used for operational weather forecasting in support of the United States Antarctic program, for climatological records, and for research purposes. The AWS network, which began as a small-scale program in , has been extremely reliable and has proven indispensable for both forecasting and research purposes doc6563 none Fainman There is a growing demand for the miniaturization of chemical and biological sensors for environmental, medical and security applications. Of great interest for such applications are low-power, compact, and cost effective micro-systems that combine non-electrical sensing capabilities and electronic processing. The goal of the proposed work is to conduct basic research towards the development of high sensitivity chemical and or biological sensors integrated on a monolithic Si substrate. This multi-disciplinary study will focus on fundamental understanding of nano-scale chemical, biological and near-field optical interactions, leading to the development of design and implementation methodologies for porous silicon (Psi)-based sensor micro-systems. The proposed micro-systems will use optical transducers based on microfabricated optical sources combined with optimized nanostructured resonant optical filtering devices and photodetectors, allowing label-free detection of analytes with significantly higher sensitivity than existing techniques (e.g. surface plasmon resonance or optical interferometry). This technique will be applicable to a variety of sensing problems in environmental monitoring, medical diagnostics, high-throughput screening, and pharmacogenomics applications. The PIs propose to study two complementary aspects of this emerging technology: (a) investigation of the correlation between the modification of the optical properties of PSi and the concentration of different species introduced in the pores, including nerve agents, solvents, or biological molecules; and (b) design, modeling, fabrication and testing of monolithically integrated near-field meso-optic structures built using micro- and nano-fabrication techniques. The proposed research will not only have a significant impact on the development of on-chip monolitically integrated micro-sensor systems, but also result in the development of basic science and technology of near-field linear and nonlinear optical phenomena in nano-scale and meso-scale structures. The proposed studies will also advance basic science and engineering in such multidisciplinary areas as vector field optical wave interactions in near-field nonlinear dielectric nanostructures, quantum and nonlinear optical processes in nanostructured composite materials, and fabrication of such devices using deposition, photochemistry, and ion implantation techniques. The proposed project will also play a unique role in the education and development of human resources in science and engineering at the graduate and undergraduate levels doc6564 none This collaborative project with Handcock ( ) will develop a class of longitudinal data models appropriate for modeling clustering and heterogeneous patterns in such data. This work extends the modeling paradigm of Banfield and Raftery ( ), in which clusters are identified via an explicit statistical model. The extension will incorporate a parsimonious class of models developed by Scott and Hancock ( ) to identify population-level patterns in individual-specific differences. The study will develop algorithms to estimate the models, and will incorporate the approach of Bensmail et al. ( ) to establish a Bayesian model formulation. Inference to assess the validity of the models will be developed, as will information criterion, and Bayes factor approaches. A further outcome of this work will be an extension of the lme software in Splus to incorporate these new methods (Pinheiro and Bates ). An important part of the project will be the development of a case study of long-term trends in wage inequality. This will include comparisons of two important economic periods and will contrast the findings under the new models to results from more traditional mixed effects models. In addition, the implications of the findings for wage inequality and labor market segmentation will be explored and published in an applied journal to provide a bridge for subject matter researchers to this methodology. In much of social, behavioral and biostatistical research, the goal is to understand the structure of the heterogeneity in a population, and in so doing yield insight into social phenomena. In longitudinal studies subjects can become increasingly differentiated over time, and the identification of natural groupings, or clusters, in the subjects has important consequences. They may yield evidence suggesting the presence of several distinct phenomena--that is, different social processes could exist for different subjects. The accurate identification of these clusters depends on the specification of the structure within a subject s responses. Methods that describe this aspect of an individual s profile have been sparse and often hard to interpret substantively. This research will extend the statistical models for clustered longitudinal data developed in Banfield and Raftery ( ) to include a new, parsimonious, and interpretable representation of individual behavior. This extension represents a hybrid population-average and individual-specific approach to modeling the heterogeneity in individual profiles doc6565 none Chemistry (12) The overarching goal of this project is to provide all students with a research-rich instruction and learning environment, to enhance student interest in and increase excitement about learning and practicing chemistry and to strengthen the students problem- solving skills. Experiential learning is enhanced by (a) increasing early exposure to FT-NMR spectroscopy in courses for science majors; (b) giving every science major extensive, direct experience with FT-NMR instrumentation; (c) integrating research opportunities, using a comprehensive variety of experiments, into the chemistry curriculum; and (d) integrating FT-NMR, along with other instrumental techniques, into at least one course for non-majors that focuses on molecular structure and reactivity. Purchase of an Anasazi Instruments EFT-60 system to complement an existing high-field, multinuclear FT-NMR spectrometer and use of experiments adapted from standard literature allow hands-on instrumentation use by science majors at all levels. A course designed for non-science majors also includes a research-rich, hands-on laboratory component using the newly acquired instrumentation. A workshop for local high school teachers and talented high school students is offered, during which participants have the opportunity for hands-on operation of the FT-NMR spectrometers. This exposure to instrumentation at the high school level results in better preparedness for the college-bound science student, increased interest in pursuing a science-related career, and an increased excitement among students about science in general doc6566 none Boston, Nigel University of Illinois at Urbana CRCD: A Cryptography Center for Research and Education This project is concerned with the field of cryptography. This university is establishing the Illinois Center for Cryptography and Information Protection (ICCIP), a multidisciplinary center focused on research and education in fields that influence information protection and are influenced by information protection techniques. This CRCD project lays the groundwork for the educational and curricular aspects of the center. Multidisciplinary groups of upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students (from engineering, computer science and mathematics) are organized into teams attacking problems in modern cryptography. This project also addresses the development of cryptography related courses that are cross-listed in mathematics, engineering, and computer science. The project involves industrial partners who contribute practical problems and interact with teams. Industry, government, and academe need employees with a broad range of skills who can work in this field in inter multidisciplinary teams. For example, attacks on current crypto-systems can be sophisticated mathematical ones or direct physical ones. To counter such attacks takes concerted efforts from team members having different expertise in mathematics, engineering, and computing. The same holds true for the creation of new information protection schemes. Computing and engineering practitioners are faced with physical limitations of circuits, software, and devices in implementing mathematical solutions to information protection. This curriculum produces individuals with broad backgrounds and experience in working in teams on realistic problems in cryptography and the creation of novel collaborations that will advance technological developments much quicker than has historically been the case doc6567 none Krogh, Bruce H. Carnegie Mellon University CRCD: Instructional Modules for Embedded Control System Design This project develops and disseminates a set of instructional modules and laboratory exercises for advanced undergraduate and first-year courses in real-time embedded control systems. Students are introduced to concepts and tools that are emerging from recent research in hybrid dynamic systems, rapid prototyping and haptic interfaces using new commercial tools for computer-aided engineering. The innovative web-based instructional modules provide students with the necessary working knowledge of fundamental and advanced concepts needed to work on state-of-the-research projects in the laboratory doc6568 none Dickerson, Julie A. Iowa State University CRCD: Wireless Multimedia Communications for Virtual Environments This project involves the transfer of research from several areas into an unusual curriculum that serves upper-level undergraduate and introductory-level graduate students at this university. The project integrates concepts from communications, radio frequency (RF) and very large scale integrated (VLSI) hardware and software design, with virtual environments into an interdisciplinary program that teaches students hardware software co-design. The curriculum (that includes three new courses) brings together teams of students and faculty who create solutions to complex problems that combine human factors, real-time systems, compact wearable computers, and highly sophisticated graphics. The three new classes cover software engineering for real-time software, the design of practical wireless devices, and the design of virtual environments. The curriculum developed in this project continually incorporates advanced research topics in virtual reality, sensor design, and wireless multimedia. By providing a venue for interdisciplinary work in communications, VLSI circuit design, and immersive environments, the curriculum offers coordinated experiences in complex system co-design and significantly broadens student skills in this area doc6569 none Chemistry (12) This project is undertaking systematic redesign of the introductory chemistry courses beginning with the general chemistry sequence. The approximately students targeted per calendar year represent a broad cross- section of the entering class and include new students to the College of Engineering, preprofessional students who expect to continue studies in pharmacy, medicine, dentistry, and science education, and majors in the College of Liberal Arts. The redesign makes use of active learning pedagogies and other approaches which address the students different learning styles. The two critical components of the overall curricular redesign are: (1) a mathematics and calculator skills tutorial that is web- based and (2) a chemistry knowledge assessment designed to be taken at both the beginning and end of the first semester course in order to measure the efficacy of student learning from the course changes. The remainder of the redesign elements makes extensive use of materials and pedagogy adapted from several NSF Systemic Initiatives in Chemistry doc6570 none This award provides funding for support of a three year Combined Research-Curriculum Development program entitled, Development of a Discrete Event Dynamic Systems Curriculum using a Web-Based Real-Time Simulated Factory, at Boston University, under the direction of Dr. Pirooz Vakili. The curriculum development component of the proposed project aims at an integrative and innovative approach to curriculum development that departs significantly from the current methods of teaching engineering methodology courses. A course with a focus on manufacturing systems, a prime example of a Discrete Event System (DES), will be developed. Two key innovations will be introduced: (a) the course will have a problem driven focus where industrial case studies will be the basis for the introduction of problems, key concepts, and solution methodologies, and (b) a web-based real-time simulated factory will be used that will serve as an interactive laboratory where students or teams of students will be managing the factory during the semester. These innovations are intended to achieve the following pedagogical objectives: (i) motivate and engage the students from the outset, (ii) introduce a quantum leap in the degree to which students participate actively in the learning process, (iii) introduce team activity, (iv) break out of the limitations of text book and classroom examples, and (v) introduce research results and approaches in a context where their significance and contributions can be best appreciated. The key project outcome will be to create a new model of curriculum development for DES courses. Other outcomes will include research results, development and integration of a new course in the curriculum of the Manufacturing Engineering Department at Boston University, and involvement of graduate students in research and curriculum development doc6571 none Astrachan, Owen L. Duke University CRCD: Modules and Courses for Ubiquitous and Mobile Computing This project educates students in the techniques and technologies required to deploy next generation wireless information systems. Courses developed for this project focus on ubiquitous and wireless computing. And, these same technologies are used in classrooms to deliver the curriculum as a part of the project that supports active learning. The areas of research chosen for migration into the curriculum include mobile code (placement and migration of code to adapt to rapidly changing clients, networks, and service characteristics), transcoding (transforming multimedia web content to save bandwidth and thus energy consumption at the destination device), active name architectures (where resource names are decoupled from specific hosts when resolving services), and energy aware operating systems (where the goal is to make basic interactions of hardware and software as energy efficient as possible for local computation). The project migrates research topics into advanced undergraduate courses and graduate courses, developing modules, assignments, software and curricular support that engage and educate students in the technologies of mobile and wireless information systems. The materials developed are integrated into five computer science courses. The courses apply active lectures, a form of active learning, to deliver content doc6572 none Walsh, Gregory C. University of Maryland CRCD: A Curriculum in Networked and Distributed Systems This project develops an innovative senior masters-level curriculum designed to: (a) bring the important new technologies in Wireless and Networked Distributed Systems into the classroom, (b) make use of novel teaching and evaluation methods to enhance faculty productivity in laboratory and project courses, and (c) improve the educational value of students experiences in laboratory and project courses. The laboratory facilities, which are part of this work, also play a key role in enabling multi-disciplinary research in networks, communications, embedded systems, and controls. The project crosses several disciplinary boundaries and has clearly defined deliverables that expose students to bodies of knowledge in great demand in the workforce. Two leading companies in this emerging area, United Technologies and General Electric, mentor this project doc6573 none The genetic basis of differences among individuals is complex yet has many important implications for all biological systems. One complicating factor is that individual genes can influence more than one feature or trait of an organism. This project investigates how these shared genetic associations, or covariances, are structured and how they change through time. Theoretical population-genetic models will be used to study how patterns of genetic variance and covariance change under genetic drift with different assumptions regarding the mode of gene action. Such analyses provide the basis for comparative studies of the pattern of genetic covariance within and between populations. The genetic processes underlying the function of all organisms generate couplings among the features of those organisms that can have an important influence on evolutionary change. We currently do not have an adequate framework for studying how these genetic associations change through time. Understanding these processes is important for explaining the great diversity observed among living organisms, as well as more applied pursuits such as agricultural selection and the conservation of endangered species doc6574 none Bebis, George University of Nevada Reno Combined Research-Curriculum Development in Computer Vision This project integrates recent and ongoing research in computer vision into this institution s computer science and engineering curriculum. There are several objectives for this project. One is the design, implementation, and testing of innovative approaches for integrating teaching with research, leading to a comprehensive instructional program offering systematic and constant research experiences to as many students as possible. To this end, students are included in summer research programs involving computer vision. Another objective of the project is the integration of computer vision principles into several core courses and the introduction of a new course in mathematical methods for computer vision to support the integration of vision research into core courses. The final objective is the development of a new course in object recognition that includes current research advances and evolving principles of object recognition. The evaluation of the success of educational techniques and the dissemination of the results of this activity are critical elements of the project doc6575 none Biological Sciences (61) Today s biologists need powerful computer applications to tackle the molecular haystacks of information. To prepare biology students for this challenge, the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Wisconsin- Parkside (UWP) is further developing an innovative, multidisciplinary undergraduate curriculum in Molecular Biology & Bioinformatics (MBB). The objective of the MBB program is to give our students hands-on facility with molecular biology laboratory techniques, a grasp of mathematical and physical concepts underlying MBB and the ability to apply them, and a proficiency with computational tools and skills of bioinformatics. The effort is an adaptation of problem-based learning pioneered by the BioQuest group centered at Beloit College. To accomplish these tasks, we are expanding and improving our department s expertise through faculty development, redesigning our curriculum, and improving the infrastructure of the department. New equipment and software essential for the development of our program is being acquired to keep our program at the cutting edge. We are also expanding our faculty development program in the area of bioinformatics doc6576 none This award provides funding to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for the support of a CRCD project entitled, Combined Research-Curriculum Development in Computational Materials Science and Nanoscale Science and Engineering, under the direction of Dr. David M. Ceperley. This project will develop curricular materials for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate-level computational materials science (CMS) courses based on cutting edge, contemporary research, with an emphasis on problems in nanoscale science and engineering. Topics will include numerical methods in computational materials science, parallel and high performance computing, basic simulation methods, simulation of quantum systems, Monte Carlo methods, computational microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), computational molecular biology and computational biotechnology, and scientific visualization doc6577 none Chemistry (12) The goal of this project is to enhance the quality and effectiveness of undergraduate instruction and training by incorporating gas chromatography-ion-trap mass spectrometry into the chemistry curriculum at the institution, using experiments adapted from standard literature. With the addition of a single instrument, the chemistry faculty is able to effectively educate students in the fundamental applications of mass spectrometry, mass spectral interpretation, and multidimensional analytical methods such as gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and mass spectrometry mass spectrometry. In addition, thermochemical concepts are taught in the Physical Chemistry Laboratory in an entirely new and easily understood way. The addition of the GC-ITMS allows the merging of widely applied and relevant scientific instrumentation and technology with chemical education and training. The courses affected are Instrumental Methods for Chemical Analysis, Physical Chemistry Laboratory and Independent Study and Research. The incorporation of GC-ITMS into the curriculum also provides invaluable opportunities for faculty development and improvement through the design and implementation of new exercises that revolve around bench-top mass spectrometry as a teaching tool doc6578 none This award provides funding to the University of Maryland-College Park under the direction of Dr. John Baras for the support of a Combined Research-Curriculum Development project in Systems Engineering. Educators at the Institute for Systems Research at the University of Maryland along with partners from industry and a publishing company will develop, widely disseminate, and evaluate an information-centric systems engineering curriculum. The curriculum will include three graduate level courses, graduate systems certificate courses and industry short courses. The strategy throughout these courses will be to enable multi-disciplinary development and communication through appropriate information abstractions representations. Students will employ sophisticated algorithmic, mathematical and quantitative methods implementable in modern software environments doc6579 none Biological Sciences (61) Completion of a new science facility and the addition of new biology faculty provide the opportunity to evaluate and improve the curriculum of the University of Redlands Biology Department. This assessment has led to the articulation of two goals: (1) to maintain and expand opportunities for students to gain experience with the scientific method through student-designed laboratory projects, (2) to expand coverage of central themes in cell and tissue biology by the addition of new upper-level courses. To meet these objectives, this project is adapting the successful project developed by Dr. Diana Darnell at Lake Forest College ( ) in which students gain experience designing a semester-long project. Using Dr. Darnell s project as a model, this adaptation is incorporating multiple-week, student-designed projects into laboratory sessions of four courses with cell and tissue biology themes. Students are responsible for designing experiments, collecting and analyzing data, and communicating their results to others. These student-designed projects are being incorporated into a current course (Cell Biology) and into three courses that are being implemented as a result of this curriculum reform (Immunology, Plant Physiology and Advanced Topics in Cell and Molecular Biology). An added benefit of this reform will be the better preparation of students for their year-long senior research requirement. Equipment such as compound fluorescence microscopes, a sterile hood, incubators with lighting and CO2 control, and a high-speed centrifuge allow the development of projects involving subcellular localization, cell and tissue culture and cellular fractionation. This equipment is also being used by students with interests in cell and tissue biology to conduct their senior research requirement doc6580 none This award provides funding to Texas A&M University for the support of a three year Combined Research-Curriculum Development (CRCD) project entitled, Development of an Integrated Multidisciplinary Curriculum for Intelligent Systems, under the direction Dr. Dimitris C. Lagoudas. The project will develop both a curriculum track in Aerospace Engineering and a multidisciplinary engineering minor in Intelligent Systems. Both the curriculum innovations will be built around intelligent controlled reconfigurable vehicles, which is currently an area of active research by the project team doc6581 none Physics (13) The objective of this project is to use a multitarget sputter deposition system to enhance the capabilities of a Microfabrication Laboratory and course work. This new laboratory is used to give undergraduate students a fundamental understanding of the processes used in the research, development, and manufacture of microelectronic devices. Moreover, microfabrication technology is continually being adapted for other applications, such as microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), optics, biomedical devices, flat panel displays (FPDs), and sensors. Microfabrication, whatever the device being produced, integrates aspects of physics, chemistry, materials science, and several engineering disciplines into one readily recognized application. Consequently, courses and projects conducted in the Microfabrication Laboratory are natural forums in which to emphasize the value of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary education. The courses and experiments developed at James Madison University, which does not offer engineering degrees, will be designed to insert hands- on, interdisciplinary laboratory experiences early in the undergraduate curriculum through the use of traditional and novel soft lithography techniques. The Microfabrication Laboratory is extensively used for upper level courses and student research projects. The goal is to expose a broad spectrum of undergraduate science and technology students to microfabrication techniques. Equally important is the emphasis on developing teamwork and communication skills in an interdisciplinary environment, with courses and projects pursued by students from multiple departments. Experience with microfabrication techniques at the undergraduate level helps prepare students for further work in this area, whether they enter industry or graduate school. The project also demonstrates the feasibility of implementing microfabrication experiments at other undergraduate institutions and extending them beyond the engineering curricula in which they have previously been incorporated. Many industries will be revolutionized by new and creative application of microfabrication technologies; this revolution begins by exposing a broader audience of students to microfabrication science and technology. Experiments are being adapted from the research and education literature in engineering, physics, chemistry, and materials science doc6582 none of the JiTT strategy, links to JiTT use elsewhere, a complete compilation of the 25 modules we develop, workshop presentations, and our research findings and recommendations. To encourage broader adoption of JiTT strategies in economics, we are publicizing the materials on this Web site and presenting our findings through presentations at workshops and professional meetings, as well as through economic education listservs to which we belong doc6583 none Chemistry (12) Many students have difficulty with the traditional chemistry curriculum involving lecture, laboratory, and recitation. This is evidenced by decreasing enrollments in both majors-level and non-majors freshman chemistry at a significant number of institutions. There also appears to be an increasing need to review fundamental concepts of general chemistry in upper-division chemistry courses, suggesting retention difficulty. This project is allowing the teaching focus to adapt and implement a number of the active-learning strategies developed by the NSF sponsored New Traditions consortium. The program is involving a number of active-learning methodologies (in-class writing and thinking assignments, laboratory experiments involving directed inquiry, the use of molecular modeling) which are providing the students the opportunities to develop skills in analysis methods, data organization, model development, data interpretation, drawing conclusions, and correlation of relationships among the parameters measured. The award provided funding for a smart classroom that is allowing students at all levels (initially freshman, later extended to upper-division) of chemistry courses to participate in inquiry-based instruction doc6584 none This award provides funding to the University of California-San Diego under the direction of Dr. Ahmed-W.M Elgamal, for the support of a Combined Research-Curriculum Development project entitled, Interactive Web-Based Experimental and Computational Learning Environments for Earthquake Engineering Research and Education. This project will integrate state-of-the-art earthquake engineering experimental and computational research into the undergraduate and graduate educational process. The proposed developments will employ Internet web-based technologies to allow for real-time video monitoring, control, and execution of appropriate cutting-edge experimental research efforts in earthquake engineering. Such setups include large shake-table earthquake experiments, centrifuge geomechanics tests, and dynamic tests of actual large buildings. Course modules will be developed to incorporate these unique experiments and associated computational-simulation codes at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Appropriate quantitative instructional measures will be employed to dictate the direction and achieve the most effective educational goals. A multi-disciplinary approach will involve researchers from Earthquake Engineering, and appropriate Internet Networking and Instructional Technology experts. UCSD and Caltech conduct major earthquake experimentaion efforts, and constitutes an optimal environment for development of the proposed education and research objectives. Signicant collaboration opportunities will be facilitated through interaction between earthquake engineering and ongoing Internet-based research at the UCSD San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). On the national scene, dissemination will be facilitated through the the three US national earthquake centers (PEER, MAE, and MCEER doc6585 none This high risk, high potential research is focused on the design and execution of experiments to study a new process in layered manufacturing. The process is based upon bulk sintering of powder layers using radiation, as an alternative to selective laser sintering (SLS). The process is anticipated to present better dimensional control, reduced machine cost, and reduced fabrication time in the production of 3-D structural components. This is a major deviation from the traditional research on powder sintering and poses the risks associated with new and untested phenomena, as it requires sintering inhibition in selected areas doc6586 none Lancaster This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports a project to study eolian processes in the McMurdo Dry Valleys. This research project will use the unique natural laboratory provided by the McMurdo Dry Valleys to study fundamental processes associated with airflow and sediment transport by wind on rough surfaces. The research will quantify the partitioning of wind shear stress between roughness elements (in this case, boulders) and the intervening surface using novel instrumentation (Irwin Sensors) recently developed and tested in field and laboratory wind tunnel experiments. The field data will be used to test existing models of shear stress partitioning and to develop new empirical models for relations between winds, surface roughness element distribution and geometry, and sediment transport rates. The research will extend on-going studies of these relations on sparsely vegetated surfaces to unvegetated rough surfaces, such those found in arid terrains on Earth and Mars. This work will provide fundamental data on shear stress partitioning between the roughness elements and the intervening surface for a range of rocky desert and sand sheet sites. This will enable testing and improvement of existing theoretical models for shear stress partitioning. The research will lead to the development of an improved and universally applicable model for estimating sediment transport by wind on surfaces that are covered by varying densities of non-erodible roughness elements doc6587 none This award provides funding to Portland State University under the direction of Dr. Shu-Guang Li, for the support of a Combined Research-Curriculum Development project enttiled, VIRGE: Virtual Interactive Remediation in the Groundwater Environment-An Action Oriented Curriculum Innovation in Environmental Engineering. The objective of this collaborative project is to develop an innovative, computer-based virtual environment for teaching students how to investigate and clean up contaminated groundwater sites. This system is called Virtual Interactive Remediation in the Groundwater Environment or VIRGE. VIRGE is to be implemented and evaluated in undergraduate and graduate courses in three different academic departments at two universities (Portland State University and Oregon State University). VIRGE incorporates learning theory and cognitive-sciences research that promotes student-based learning styles. Using the practical and engaging context of groundwater remediation, VIRGE integrates the student s education and research roles, and stresses active, collaborative learning with less dependence on lectures. A key goal of VIRGE is to utilize emerging information technologies and network communication to develop each student s practical problem solving skills, critical thinking abilities, and capability to engage in lifelong learning doc6588 none Biological Sciences (61) To fully understand how organisms work, biologists in the post- genomic era must find new ways to incorporate our abundant molecular data into the larger context of cellular and organismal physiology. Towards this end, we are strengthening the physiology curriculum at Harvey Mudd College by adding a new Comparative Physiology Laboratory. This course accompanies a sophomore- level lecture course, Structure and Function, which covers cellular, animal, and plant physiological mechanisms. The laboratory course uses the novel approach of presenting physiology as a set of unique solutions to common problems. Animal, plant and fungal models are being used as systems in which to examine energetics, ionic regulation and signaling. The course is structured to allow both breadth and depth. During the first nine weeks, students perform a wide range of exercises, many of which are adapted from other successful laboratory courses developed at other institutions (e.g., Grinnell College, Swarthmore College, Pomona College, University of New Hampshire). In a second meeting each week, students complete each exercise by developing a testable hypothesis about the system. These hypotheses provide the starting point for self- initiated research projects designed, carried out and presented by students in the final five weeks of the course doc6589 none Biological Sciences (61) The study of the basic unit of life, the cell, in undergraduate education is limited to microscopic or population based observations. The flow cytometer, an instrument that rapidly generates an optical fingerprint of each cell within a population, provides a powerful new approach to the study of cells. This proposal establishes a flow cytometry teaching laboratory, provides faculty development and creates and disseminates inquiry-based curricula for a wide range of instructional environments through the training of university, community college, and present and prospective high school science teachers. In workshops, instructors will develop inquiry-based curricula and interactive workbooks to incorporate hands-on flow cytometry exercises into biology laboratories. Three levels of flow cytometry laboratory instruction are described: 1) basic cell biology and microbiology laboratories that address the principles of flow cytometry through the manipulation of cells and their environment by the students; 2) advanced biology laboratories where students will use molecular probes, cell preparation protocols, flow cytometry instrumentation and software analysis; and 3) individualized hands-on instruction and independent research projects. The high instrument cost and extensive training required in flow cytometry have limited its use in undergraduate teaching. These problems are addressed in this proposal and solved through the use of shared instrumentation, the distribution of experimental results over the Internet and training workshops. Financial responsibility is shared through collaboration between San Jose State University, BD Biosciences, the California State University Program for Education and Research in Biotechnology and the National Science Foundation. Programmatic evaluations are intended to refine flow cytometry workbooks and instruction over the funding period, and dissemination of results and materials through electronic and print media, professional meetings and workshops will lead to widespread inquiry-based instructional activities in flow cytometry doc6590 none Luyendyk et al.: Bartek: Diebold: This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports a collaborative research program in marine geology and geophysics in the southern central and eastern Ross Sea. The project will conduct sites surveys for drilling from the Ross Ice Shelf into the seafloor beneath it. Many of the outstanding problems concerning the evolution of the East and West Antarctic Ice Sheets, Antarctic climate, global sea level, and the tectonic history of the West Antarctic Rift System can be addressed by drilling into the seafloor of the Ross Sea. Climate data for Cretaceous and Early Cenozoic time are lacking for this sector of Antarctica. Climate questions include: Was there any ice in Late Cretaceous time? What was the Antarctic climate during the Paleocene-Eocene global warming? When was the Cenozoic onset of Antarctic glaciation, when did glaciers reach the coast and when did they advance out onto the margin? Was the Ross Sea shelf non-marine in Late Cretaceous time; when did it become marine? Tectonic questions include: What was the timing of the Cretaceous extension in the Ross Sea rift; where was it located? What is the basement composition and structure? Where are the time and space limits of the effects of Adare Trough spreading? Another drilling objective is to sample and date the sedimentary section bounding the mapped RSU6 unconformity in the Eastern Basin and Central Trough to resolve questions about its age and regional extent. Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) Leg 28 completed sampling at four drill sites in the early s but had low recovery and did not sample the Early Cenozoic. Other drilling has been restricted to the McMurdo Sound area of the western Ross Sea and results can be correlated into the Victoria Land Basin but not eastward across basement highs. Further, Early Cenozoic and Cretaceous rocks have not been sampled. A new opportunity is developing to drill from the Ross Ice Shelf. This is a successor program to the Cape Roberts Drilling Project. One overriding difficulty is the need for site surveys at drilling locations under the ice shelf. This project will overcome this impediment by conducting marine geophysical drill site surveys at the front of the Ross Ice Shelf in the Central Trough and Eastern Basin. The surveys will be conducted a kilometer or two north of the ice shelf front where recent calving events have resulted in a southerly position of the ice shelf edge. In several years the northward advance of the ice shelf will override the surveyed locations and drilling could be accomplished. Systems to be used include swath bathymetry, gravity, magnetics, chirp sonar, high resolution seismic profiling, and 48 fold seismics. Cores will be collected to obtain samples for geotechnical properties, to study sub-ice shelf modern sedimentary processes, and at locations where deeper section is exposed. This survey will include long profiles and detailed grids over potential drill sites. Survey lines will be tied to existing geophysical profiles and DSDP 270. A recent event that makes this plan timely is the calving of giant iceberg B-15 (in March, ) and others from the ice front in the eastern Ross Sea. This new calving event and one in have exposed 16,000 square kilometers of seafloor that had been covered by ice shelf for decades and is not explored. Newly exposed territory can now be mapped by modern geophysical methods. This project will map geological structure and stratigraphy below unconformity RSU6 farther south and east, study the place of Roosevelt Island in the Ross Sea rifting history, and determine subsidence history during Late Cenozoic time (post RSU6) in the far south and east. Finally the project will observe present day sedimentary processes beneath the ice shelf in the newly exposed areas doc6591 none This grant provides funding for research aimed at enhancing the functionality of integrated bioanalytical microsystems through the intimate assembly of disparate classes of materials, each chosen to provide a specific function. Each materials subassembly will be prepared on a separate substrate by thin-film deposition processes under optimal conditions for that particular material. Thin-film subassemblies, including gallium nitride heterostructures for blue and ultraviolet light emission, piezoelectric multilayers for mechanical actuation, and polymers for optical components and bio-compatible coatings, will then be combined by bonding and layer-transfer to micromachined glass, polymer and silicon substrates. Film transfer methods utilizing spatially selective modification of materials by pulsed laser and ion irradiation will be employed and modeled with the goal of minimizing thermal and mechanical degradation of the least robust of the materials to be integrated (typically polymers). The materials integration and microtabrication methods developed during the course of this project will be targeted toward the demonstration of fully integrated optical microfluidic bioanalyticai devices based on fluorescence detection. These devices combine the fluorescence excitation source, the aperture actuator mechanism, the microfluidic channel, the optical filter, and the fluorescence detector, all within a volume of approximately a cubic mill (meter). If successful, this project will develop the materials integration processes necessary to fabricate complex, low-cost and portable bioassay microsystems utilizing multicolor arrays of fluorescence detection devices integrated directly with microchannel substrates. The direct integration of the optical excitation and detection system eliminates the need for bulky lasers, optical filters, and photodetectors. Furthermore, the potential for integrating dense linear arrays of these devices along microchannels could enable rapid, single-molecule analysis for applications in genetics and pathogen detection doc6592 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This Mathematics Across the Curriculum (MAC) project is integrating mathematics into curricula that are not typically associated with mathematics. The key problem that this project addresses is students lack of opportunity to deepen and reinforce the mathematics that they have learned in their mathematics classes as well as understand its greater importance and application in their lives. The project is assisting faculty across the disciplines to create, evaluate, and modify projects that incorporate mathematics. The project is adapting and implementing the results and practices of previously funded NSF projects at Dartmouth College and Alverno College. Principal investigators from these projects are serving as consultants and evaluators for the MAC project. Participants include faculty from Washington State community colleges, The Evergreen State College, Western Washington University, and the local school district. Additional support is being provided by the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges; the Puget Sound Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology; the Washington Center for the Improvement of Undergraduate Education; and the GTE Service Corporation. This project is allowing faculty of various disciplines to create activities, projects, and or courses that explicitly incorporate mathematical dimensions of their disciplines. Statewide and national dissemination of best practices are a planned key outcome doc6593 none Biological Sciences (61) The explosive growth of biological sequence information has created a demand for individuals skilled in retrieving, managing, and analyzing scientific data. According to the NIH, Researchers who five years ago spent little time on computers report that they now spend 90% of their research time in front of their monitors (1). Although the need for biologists with computer skills has increased dramatically, the number of undergraduates learning these skills has not. Few students learn how to use computers as a research tool. Biology teaching has lagged behind, largely, through the lack of classroom-ready materials available to college and high school instructors. Through this project, computer-based laboratory experiments are being created in collaboration with the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Prototype instructional materials are being developed to teach students how to use NCBI s databases and bioinformatics tools to perform novel experiments while emphasizing fundamental concepts in biology. It is anticipated that students that use bioinformatics as a tool for inquiry-based research will have a better understanding of modern biology and new research skills. Laboratory exercises are being formally evaluated and tested by faculty from community colleges, four-year institutions, and high schools doc6594 none Astronomy (11) The beginning of the new millennium is an exciting time to be teaching and learning Astronomy. Technological advances are allowing us to observe and understand more of our universe than dreamed possible even a few years ago. This project uses the new technology in observational astronomy, combined with simulations, to enhance the laboratory experience of Gustavus Adolphus College students. By changing the focus of the laboratory and observational components of our two astronomy courses, the project provides students with a better appreciation of the universe and of observational techniques, and better prepares advanced students for graduate work in physics and astrophysics. The observational component takes advantage of a combination of 10 Meade LX- 200 computer-controlled telescopes and Santa Barbara Instrument Group ST7E CCD cameras to provide an introduction to the visible universe through both eyepiece and electronic images. Introductory and advanced students, as well as the many visitors to the Olin Observatory, can explore the solar system, stars, nebulae, and galaxies. With the addition of SBIG spectrometers, filter wheels, and an adaptive optics attachment, the students can make rigorous, quantitative measurements. These measurements, combined with computer simulations, give them a more complete understanding of astronomical research. Approximately 80 students in the general education astronomy course make use of the combination of observation and simulation in the introductory astronomy course each year. About 20 additional students a year benefit when this combination is used at the advanced level in astrophysics in open- ended laboratories and in course-related and student faculty research projects. Other beneficiaries include grade-school and high-school groups who visit the observatory for programs, as well as the general public who attend for open viewing doc6595 none Electrical Engineering (55) The objective of this project is to provide freshman engineering students with a realistic, enticing, and exciting introduction to their prospective profession. Through design and construction of a walking robot, coupled with practical engineering activites (project scheduling, manufacturability, economics, etc.), students develop the physical intuition needed to understand what more advanced courses are trying to accomplish. Skills that are often taken for granted by instructors, e. g., use of hand tools and identifying basic components, are taught, and these introduce students to the essentials of their chosen profession. Expected outcomes include an increased retention rate for traditional, non-traditional, and under-represented freshman engineering students, improved performance in courses, and more qualified graduates. Support is also used to equip a dedicated laboratory as a learning center for team activities doc6596 none Chemistry (12) The Department of Chemistry is in the process of restructuring the organic chemistry laboratories through introduction of Problem-Solving Laboratories (PSL), the addition of microscale experimental techniques, and the introduction of modern instrumentation. Use of a new Fourier-Transform Infrared (FTIR) Spectrometer is being incorporated into the design of new laboratory procedures for two terms of organic chemistry. The PSL approach and individual experiments are being adapted from those used at other institutions and reported in the chemical literature. The new PSL format, facilitated by use of the FTIR spectrometer, is increasing the quality of our laboratory instruction by providing a collaborative learning environment, allowing students time to design experiments and express ideas, and giving students experience with modern instrumentation and techniques. This laboratory design provides students with a more realistic experience of chemistry, challenging and developing their critical thinking skills, and better preparing them to make informed decisions relating to science. It is anticipated that this laboratory modification and style will attract more students, particularly women and under-represented minority groups, to the study of science. Project results will be disseminated at local chemical education meetings, in standard pedagogical journals, and at regional and national meetings of the American Chemical Society and or the Biennial Conference on Chemical Education doc6597 none Chemistry (12) Technology is being incorporated into first and second year chemistry courses via eight ScienceWorks workstations. Incorporation of technology into introductory chemistry is the next step in the continuous reform in the Department of Chemistry. The workstations allow the laboratories to move from traditional recipe experiments to inquiry-based experiments by decreasing the amount of time needed for data acquisition. This allows students more time to analyze, to interpret data, and to develop critical thinking skills necessary to be successful in the work place. Current experiments are being revised and new experiments are being adapted from a variety of sources, including ChemLinks modules, the Middle Atlantic Discovery Chemistry Project (MADCP), and other literature sources, to make full use of the new equipment, such as pH sensors to monitor pH changes in a titration reaction. The workstations also are being used to modify traditional lecture settings to a more active learning environment by using mini lecture experiments, CD-ROMs, and internet sites such as those provided through ChemLinks and others. As a result, professors are able to address the multiple learning styles of our students. For example, difficult concepts such as valence shell electron pair repulsion are addressed by the blackboard, models, and computer simulated 3-D models from websites and CD-ROMS. The workstations also are used for inquiry-based lecture learning using ConcepTests developed by New Traditions and activities from ChemLinks modules doc6598 none Geology (42) This project is incorporating new analytical instrumentation in undergraduate instructional laboratories -- an ICP-AES and an ion chromatograph (IC). With these instruments, we are restructuring the Earth Science curriculum, putting more emphasis on learning geochemical principles and processes, following the recommendations in Ireton, Manduca, and Mogk, Shaping the Future of Undergraduate Earth Science Education (AGU, ). Five key changes are taking place. (1) Upper-level courses in geochemistry are being redesigned to focus on low-temperature and environmental geochemistry. The laboratory component to these courses includes a skills enhancement component and a project component. (2) The project component is teaching students to develop a research proposal with an experimental design, to implement the research, and to analyze the research findings with an emphasis on technical writing skills. This part of our project is adapting the work of Catherine Carlson in designing a hydro-geochemistry course at Eastern Connecticut State University, Field Research as a Pedagogical Tool for Learning Hydrogeochemistry and Scientific Writing Skills, Journal of Geoscience Education ( ) Vol. 47, pp. 150-157. (3) We are adding a project-based component to the introductory geology course, giving students experience in the use of analytical instruments, data collection, and analysis. This feature is adapting the approach developed by Dunnivant et al., A Comprehensive Stream Study Designed for an Undergraduate Non-Majors Course in Earth Science, Journal of Geoscience Education ( ) Vol. 47, pp. 158-165. Students are required to undertake an environmental investigation using locally available groundwater and surface water resources. (4) We are providing enhanced opportunities for undergraduates in the honors program and in independent study to use advanced analytical techniques in their projects. (5) In addition we are providing enhanced opportunities for undergraduates in the senior seminar. We have redesigned this seminar to be a capstone course. The objective is to increase students ability acquire and interpret geochemical data in support of broader earth science concepts and theories doc6599 none Chemistry (12) Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is an indispensable tool for the determination of the structures of molecules, the analysis of chemical mixtures, and the determination of reaction kinetics. Efforts to provide students with hands-on experience using NMR in the laboratory are greatly aided by converting an outdated Varian EM360 continuous-wave NMR spectrometer into a modern multinuclear Fourier-transform instrument (FTNMR). This cost-effective, user-friendly solution allows rapid data acquisition, making student collection of spectra a routine procedure. Adaptation of experiments from the Journal of Chemical Education and incorporation of FTNMR into current experiments allow students at all stages of their chemical education to have access to the instrument. FTNMR is used across the curriculum to demonstrate the power of the technique in Introductory Chemistry, to determine molecular structure in General Chemistry, and to perform multinuclear and two- dimensional experiments in Organic Chemistry. Early and continued exposure to FTNMR reinforces important chemical concepts, engages students, helps develop their problem-solving skills, and exposes them to the uses of technology in chemistry doc6600 none Geology (42) This project has two objectives. One is to provide University of Northern Iowa students with an opportunity to learn the fundamental concepts that explain observed patterns of surface and subsurface water resources pollution. The other is to provide them with opportunities to improve their analytical skills by using modern laboratory equipment. The project is centered on the use of a new ion chromatography system. The installation of this system has enhanced the analytical capability of the undergraduate hydrogeology laboratory in the Department of Earth Science. This new ion chromatograph is being used to monitor water flow and quality using a newly built on-campus monitoring well site. A related dimension of our project is an on-going process of laboratory curriculum improvement. In this project we are implementing the recommendations of Texley and Wild, NSTA Pathways to the Science Standards: Guidelines for Moving the Vision into Practice, National Science Teachers Association, , and following the recommendations of Clough and Clark, Cookbooks and Constructivism: A Better Approach to Laboratory Activities, The Science Teacher, Vol. 61, No. 2 ( ) pp. 34-37. New exercises are being added to the lab component of various courses, such as Hydrogeology, Environmental Hydrology, and Physical Geology. These exercises are providing the students with increased opportunities to develop critical thinking skills and a scientific attitude. Many of these exercises are field-based hands-on experiences designed to facilitate student understanding of the fundamentals of water-rock interactions in subsurface geologic systems. In the impacted courses, students are collecting ground water and stream water samples from polluted and unpolluted areas, from areas of varying land use practices, and from landfill sites. Students are then analyzing these samples using ion chromatography for their common inorganic ion content. Students are also studying groundwater flow by using ion tracers (bromide, chloride, and others) in both simulated lab systems and in the field plots. These exercises are teaching them the concepts of prevalent chemical characters and leachate migration, improving their understanding of how land use practices cause subsurface water pollution, and many of the derivative environmental consequences of subsurface water pollution. This project is making it easier for the students to find a link between their classroom and laboratory learning and the real field situation. This expansion of available laboratory exercises in water-related classes is giving our students more opportunities to prepare for employment in environmental services companies as well as for further study at the graduate level doc6601 none Interdisciplinary (99) This project is introducing and integrating an interdisciplinary materials science emphasis into the undergraduate chemistry and physics programs. The objective of this new materials science and applied technology emphasis is to increase the number of undergraduate students choosing to study chemistry and physics, to foster collaboration, and to prepare students for increasingly interdisciplinary industry or research careers. The project includes development of a laboratory-based, team-taught interdisciplinary materials science course, and introduction of innovative discovery-based projects into the freshman laboratories. The project is adapting an inter-departmental approach utilized at Gustavus Adolphus College as well as specific laboratory projects developed in the materials physics course at Miami University. An upper-level course is using investigative, hands-on projects that model modern research collaborations in physics and chemistry. It is adapting an innovative, expert novice, peer-learning scheme from Miami University in which students from two disciplines learn from each other. The hands-on projects in the course include the study of metals, semiconductors, superconductors, polymers, and other materials science topics presented from the perspectives of both disciplines. The equipment requested for this project is improving the freshman as well as the upper level chemistry and physics laboratory courses, providing a foundation for a materials science applied technology emphasis in both departments. The equipment complements the expertise of the current faculty, and thereby helps to ensure the on-going growth of collaboration between the two departments beyond this specific project doc6602 none Chemistry (12) Mass spectrometry (MS) has become one of the premier techniques for the identification of molecules and macromolecules. Recent developments in MS instrumentation and interfaces have ushered in a new era of chemical analysis that demands that scientists have knowledge of and experience with MS. While gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) is one of the oldest of the hyphenated techniques, it remains one of the better and most cost-effective means for teaching mass spectrometry to undergraduates. This acquisition is allowing the introduction of MS at all levels of the curriculum and to offer experiences in MS never before possible in our program. The new instrument has the following crucial features: (1) an attached autosampler to provide unattended analysis of samples; (2) access to chemical ionization to provide beginning students with less complex mass spectra; i.e., those that contain intense molecular ion peaks for easier molecular weight determination; and (3) an ion trap mass analyzer rather than a quadrupole that makes possible trace analysis experiments that depend upon the selectivity and sensitivity provided by GC-MS-MS. Guided inquiry and discovery-based experiments involving GC-MS that had good success at other institutions are being adapted or directly implemented into six courses in the curriculum by four of our eight full-time chemistry faculty. Students knowledge of mass spectrometry is evolving from simple molecular weight information, introduced in general chemistry, to qualitative and quantitative analysis in the organic and analytical chemistry core courses, to analysis of fragmentation patterns and tandem mass spectrometry experienced in two advanced laboratory courses. Our research efforts with undergraduate students are being enhanced as well. This project is supporting major changes in our local general chemistry program and that may serve globally as a model for the integration of both routine and advanced applications of GC-MS in an undergraduate chemistry curriculum doc6603 none This research is designed to demonstrate that naive speakers in a natural conversational situation reliably use prosody (loosely, the melody in speech ) to structure the information they provide to listeners, and that listeners in turn make use of this prosodic structure to facilitate accurate recovery of the speaker s intended meaning. The broad objective of the research is to develop a psycholinguistic model of sentence comprehension in which prosody plays a fundamental role, often determining the syntactic and semantic interpretation assigned to a sentence. Participants in these experiments will play a cooperative board game that elicits semi-spontaneous productions of syntactically ambiguous sentences. The game involves two speakers, each with a game board the other cannot see, who must use to a limited set of scripted sentences to determine and communicate joint moves. Key utterances contain syntactic ambiguities such as the ambiguous prepositional phrase attachment in Move the square with the triangle, (meaning either push the square with the triangle or move the house-shaped piece. ) To evaluate the production of prosody, players speech will be recorded digitally and submitted to phonetic and phonological analysis. To evaluate the use of prosody in comprehension, the timing and fixation locations of players eyemovements will be recorded as they listen to and comprehend the conversation and implement the game moves. The experiments will use head-mounted eye tracking, a relatively new technology recently shown to be sensitive to prosodic and syntactic factors in experiments with isolated spoken sentences that refer to objects in the listeners visual scene. The apparatus is ideal because it does not restrict movement, does not introduce an additional experimental task, and does not interrupt speaking or listening. There are two novel aspects to this research. The first is that the game task focuses the participants attention on the act of communication rather than on the process of reading, and can provide a more accurate picture of the use prosody in natural conversation between naive speakers. Recent work in language production has argued that speakers use prosody to disambiguate syntax only when they are aware of the ambiguity and are given explicit instructions, implying that although listeners can use prosody, they may have few opportunities to do so. However, speakers in these studies read sentences from notecards. Because the pragmatic goals of a reader differ dramatically from those of speakers in typical conversation, such tasks may misrepresent the nature and extent of prosodic disambiguation. The second is that the combination of the game task with head-mounted eyetracking technology will develop a much-needed novel method that will provide a temporally-precise, on-line measure of comprehension that can be used while comprehension is occurring as part of semi-spontaneous spoken discourse. This will allow Speer to investigate the issues concerning the relative influence of prosodic, syntactic, and situationally-determined discourse variables over the time course of sentence comprehension, which form the core of current work in modeling human language processing. This POWRE grant will allow Speer to purchase a head-mounted system, providing her the opportunity to utilize this new methodology to which she currently has no access, and to conduct exploratory work necessary to begin a new line of inquiry. The availability of such methodology will greatly enhance her ability to provide empirical data relevant to important theoretical questions at the most basic level of her research program and thus will be highly important to the advancement of her career doc6604 none Chemistry (12) NMR has revolutionized the modern study of chemical structure and dynamics and all chemistry students need to understand and experience its manifold capabilities. Therefore, a primary educational objective is to increase and diversify the student s exposure to state-of-the-art NMR so they may discover and apply its versatility to challenging problems they will encounter in their professional workplace. The timely and excellent article of Davis and Moore [Journal of Chemical Education, , and the National Science Foundation Division of Undergraduate Education, Award # ] is serving as a model for curricular changes and, after modifying some of their experiments and adapting results from our own research and published sources (mainly the Journal of Chemical Education), this model is being implemented. A 300 MHz FTNMR spectrometer is being used to introduce students to NMR techniques as freshmen and then to give them progressively more sophisticated experiences as they proceed through advanced courses and undergraduate research. NMR is serving as a central theme in the chemistry biochemistry (14 experiments in 9 courses) and physics (3 experiments in 2 courses) programs. Students are learning about chemical shifts, spin-spin splitting patterns, quantitation using integrated peak intensities, and simple decoupling in their freshman and introduction to organic chemistry courses. NMR characterization of student-synthesized compounds is now routine. In advanced organic chemistry, students are progressing to 2-D COSY and HETCOR techniques. Extension of NMR to solid state and inorganic applications are part of the analytical chemistry course. A metabolic reaction is monitored by NMR in the biochemistry course. The thermodynamics of a keto-enol equilibrium, a gas-phase isotope exchange study, and the spin-saturation technique as an introduction to the kinetics of molecular internal rotation, are investigated with NMR in the physical chemistry laboratory. In physics, students examine the free induction decay of nuclei in an external field, Knight shifts, and the coupling of nuclear magnetic moments with their local environments doc6605 none Computer Science (31) This project is developing materials and techniques for implementing pair learning in undergraduate computer science laboratory exercises and programming assignments. Pair-learning is a technique for educating computer science students in which students work on programs in pairs at one computer. We are conducting educational studies at diverse institutions to measure the impact of pair-learning on our students aptitude for, and attitudes toward, computer science. Based on this experience, we are creating and disseminating educational materials for teachers, teaching assistants, and students to support the transition from solo-learning to pair-learning. These materials include: a textbook, lecture slides, laboratory exercises, a collaborative web site, a web-based data tracking tool, teaching assistant training materials, and journal and conference presentations and publications. We conducting longitudinal studies of the performance of students in classes in which pair-learning is used and in all subsequent computer science classes doc6606 none Engineering - Electrical (55) The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rowan University is configuring a novel method of teaching the junior level Communications (COMM), Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) courses under a common framework. These three courses are taken concurrently during the spring semester of the junior year. The main developed prototype is a laboratory manual. A long term goal is to use this prototype to develop a laboratory oriented textbook. There has been a historical division and separation of the fields of Communications, DSP and VLSI in electrical engineering education. This separation has crept up to the very high professional circles in both industry and university. Engineers specialized in one area find it hard to collaborate with their colleagues, and separate cliques within the department start to form. This type of segregation is no longer acceptable as we must provide an integrative experience at the undergraduate level. This integrative experience enables the students to better comprehend the conceptual relationships of COMM, DSP and VLSI. This is highly beneficial for undergraduate students that enter industry or go on to graduate school. Twelve interdisciplinary experiments that cut across individual course boundaries and that integrate hands-on experience and software simulation are being developed. The first four experiments deal with the very basic concepts. The next four experiments expose the students to multimedia standards approved by industry. The last four experiments deal with various applications that link COMM, DSP and VLSI. Software is integrated with the experiments through MATLAB and SIMULINK, C C++ and Mentor Graphics. Our new laboratory is assessed by comparison with conventional experiments that merely demonstrate the theory taught in the classroom. The regional industrial partners help in assessing our project. The dissemination plan includes journal and conference papers, the creation of a new laboratory manual, use of the World Wide Web and the distribution of material in the form of CD-ROMs and videotapes doc6607 none Computer Science (31) We are creating a course in User-Centered Design for computer science majors. The intent is not to turn computer science students into graphics designers, but to provide them with the background and tools necessary to enable successful participation in a wide range of projects. In particular, web site design offers a key application area for the techniques taught in this course. Products resulting from our project are: a textbook, instructor s manual and web materials. As well, we are offering workshops as the area of user-centered design is new to many faculty. The intent is to provide a turnkey course for faculty use in this new and underserved area of computer science doc6608 none Biological Sciences (61) Through this project, we are implementing a new undergraduate laboratory course in Molecular Cell Biology (MCB). The MCB Lab is an upper division elective providing an intensive, inquiry-based lab. The inquiry-based format enables students to develop an understanding of the research process as a means to investigate cell structure and function. The MCB Lab is available to students in the Biology, Molecular Biology and Microbiology, and Chemistry Departments at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. The lab course integrates technology into the classroom through the use of video microscopy and modern computer imaging systems as well as the use of modern biochemical and molecular techniques and instrumentation. The MCB Lab adapts the use of green fluorescent protein (GFP) constructs to the undergraduate laboratory setting. The course adapts elements of the NSF project DUE# , Developing research-based laboratories in cell biology using green fluorescent protein as a unifying theme and of the research literature using GFP fusion protein markers. During the semester course, students investigate the molecular basis of eukaryotic cell compartmentalization and cytoskeletal dynamics using various GFP fusion proteins as specific markers. This enables students to observe cellular behaviors in vivo using fluorescence video microscopy. GFP fusion proteins can also be detected biochemically and this feature enables students to integrate their view of eukaryotic cell structure and function by correlating microscopic localization with biochemical behavior of the GFP fusion proteins. The outcome of this work is a significant improvement in student learning through inquiry based activities and increased student enthusiasm and thus retention in the life sciences. This project addresses a local need that reflects a national concern: preparing undergraduates in the SMET areas for careers in the sciences, including professional schools, graduate programs, or research positions in academic or industrial settings. The MCB Lab addresses a limitation in the current curriculum by providing a modern inquiry based lab experience to complement lecture curriculum, enriching the undergraduate laboratory curriculum, providing a substantive undergraduate research experience, and preparing students for continued research in faculty research programs doc6609 none Interdisciplinary (99) We are implementing an innovative distance education -based program at Associate Degree colleges of the City University of New York which begins to prepare students to become secondary school teachers of science and mathematics. The project seeks to address the critical shortage of science and mathematics teachers in hard-to staff urban secondary schools, the need to increase the pool of under-represented minorities and women as science and mathematics teachers, and the need to involve two year colleges in the teacher preparation effort. The outcomes of the project will be (1) an increase in the number of students from community colleges and other colleges with Associate Degree programs who are recruited and begin their preparation to become certified science and mathematics teachers for the secondary schools; (2) an improvement in the quality of students learning about science and mathematics concepts and effective educational practice in these subject areas. The longer range goal is an increase in the number of science and mathematics majors who become state-certified teachers in secondary schools with large enrollments of disadvantaged students. The key elements of the project are: (1) use of technology-based distance education to offer Education courses to Associate Degree students at various campuses, and the use of these technologies to foster the sense of an online learning community; (2) faculty liaisons at each partner campus to serve as counselors and mentors to the students, to provide motivational support, and supervise activities designed to create a closely knit learning community of program participants; (3) field-based teaching experiences, with master teacher mentoring, for students as part of their earliest education course; and (4) active recruitment, advisement and transfer orientation efforts to ensure success in meeting enrollment and retention targets and to smooth the transition to a four-year institution doc6610 none Biological Sciences (61) Immunology is an exciting discipline that has been at the forefront of modern biological research. Twenty five Nobel Prizes have been awarded in Immunology in the past century which is a testament to the rapid rate at which our understanding of Immunology advances. Thus, immunology teachers must continually stay abreast of new developments and incorporate them into their lecture and laboratory curricula. The Immunology course at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse (UW-L) contains a laboratory based primarily on traditional antigen-antibody interactions. The PI of this project has been very successful at modifying existing exercises so that they are more inquiry based and emphasize quantitative skills, critical thinking and student design of experiments. Although much of the explosive growth in knowledge and methodologies in immunology has been in cellular aspects of the science, laboratory exercises that focus on cellular immunology are lacking. The objectives of this project are 1) to implement a series of cellular immunology exercises in the UW-L Immunology course and 2) to design inquiry based experiments. Exercises that are being developed provide students the opportunity to design, carry out, and analyze experiments on T cell proliferation, cloning and screening of hybridomas to produce monoclonal antibodies, and flow cytometric analysis of cells of the immune system. These curricular changes are intended to enhance students ability to design experiments using modern technology, enhance their quantitative and computer skills, and provide them with experience in methods widely used in biological research and medical diagnostics. The experiments also aim to enhance students understanding of important concepts of cellular immunology presented in the lecture component of the course. The new laboratory investigations are an adaptation of and reflect recent trends in the clinical and research aspects of immunology, and are modeled pedagogically after contemporary science education literature . The PI has a strong track record in designing inquiry-based laboratory exercises, and has extensive research experience in cellular immunology, but requires additional equipment to accomplish these objectives. This project impacts a large target audience as Immunology is required by all Microbiology and Medical Laboratory Science majors and is a popular elective for Biology Biomedical majors. It is the highest enrollment upper lever course in the Microbiology Department at UW-L with enrollments of 80-120 students per year. This projects is serving as a model for other faculty in the Department and University as they move toward more inquiry-based laboratories doc6611 none Geology (42) The Geology Department at Hamilton is adapting the concept of the studio classroom , which has been used successfully at other institutions to teach physics, mathematics, and engineering, to create a networked studio classroom for polarized light microscopy. The project combines the systematic use of technology within an environment that enables cooperative learning. The studio features clusters of four petrographic work stations configured to promote student group work. Each petrographic microscope has an integrated live video feed networked to a computer at the cluster. The instructor has a central work station with incoming video feeds, one from each cluster, and two outgoing feeds, one to each of two data projectors. The instructor s work station serves as a selection and switching device so that a real- time video image from any of the microscopes can be delivered to either of the data projectors for display on a large screen for student discussion. The classroom allows us to revolutionize teaching of the microscopic study of geologic materials in virtually all courses in the Department and to introduce inquiry- based activities, cooperative learning, and group learning that are difficult in a traditional microscopy lab, where each student works in isolation doc6612 none Principal Investigator: Henryk Temkin Proposal Number: This research will demonstrate a wafer based analytical system capable of detection and identification of a wide range of chemically and biologically active substances. The system will be based on fluorescence excitation and will integrate a number of new technologies, such as deep-blue and ultra-violet light-emitting diodes, advanced microfluidics, and liquid core waveguides. Specifically, we will demonstrate arrays of resonant microcavity light emitting diodes grown on silicon substrates. Fabrication of these devices on silicon will allow for efficient light coupling to the microfluidic system also prepared in a silicon substrate. Difficult problems of surface conditioning will be studied and resolved in order to make this approach feasible. A combination of these technologies will produce a sensitive and highly parallel system, capable of searching simultaneously for a number of agents of interest. The high degree of integration is expected to produce a reliable and easy to use device. Further advances in medicine and biological sciences depend on the availability of fast, reliable, sensitive, and inexpensive diagnostic systems. In order to meet these goals, such systems must be highly miniaturized and endowed with a considerable degree of intelligence. The road to such systems is through the integration of a number of sophisticated components; from novel light sources to advanced electronics to efficient data processing. To accomplish this objective, interdisciplinary scientific efforts are needed. This work brings together a team of scientists with backgrounds from electrical engineering, physics, chemistry, and mechanical engineering capable of producing a miniaturized micro-analysis system. The work will expose our undergraduate and graduate students to a multi-disciplinary team environment and state-of-the-art research and thus, will have a major, positive impact on their education. This award is co-funded by the Division of Engineering Education and Centers and the Division of Chemical and Transport Systems doc6613 none Computer Science (31) By developing modules which integrate foundational mathematical concepts with computer science coursework, we will provide students with motivated development in the mathematics required for success in computer science. We are developing modules which students work with asynchronously at their pace; these modules directly tie mathematics to computer science problems. The modules assume only high school algebra, but will bring students to the maturity and knowledge level that they require in order to succeed. We are adapting peadagogical materials from Crossroads in Mathematics a report by the American Mathematics Association from the classroom environment envisioned in the report to our online, asynchronous approach; and curricular materials from two well-established sources: Gries and the Math-Thinking Group who have developed a heavily mathematics-based approach to computer science education and a text by Aho and Ullman, which emphasizes the mathematical modelling of computer science concepts. This project takes the mathematical material used in these approaches and ties it to the content of early computer science courses doc6614 none Physics (13) The motions of atoms within a molecule or a crystal lattice constitute one of the most fundamental physical phenomena of multi-atom systems, yet few undergraduate physics curricula include experimental studies of vibrational properties. Modern spectrometers can measure frequencies into the far infrared using the Fourier Transform method and are well suited to operation by trained undergraduates. In this project, students are using a far infrared (FIR) Fourier Transform (FT) spectrometer in undergraduate physics experiments, so that they will become familiar with this important technique and see basic physics concepts brought to life. The spectrometer is being used to enhance the laboratory component of the Modern Physics course, to overhaul the Experimental Condensed Matter Physics course, to expand the number of student-faculty research projects, and to engage in collaborations with the Chemistry Department. Students are progressing from studying vibrations of diatomic molecules in the gas phase, to vibrations of large fullerene cages imbedded in a molecular solid, to phonons in simple ionic crystalline lattices. The second year Modern Physics laboratory is incorporating an expanded version of a classic experiment in rotations and vibrations of gas phase HCl. The dual far and middle infrared capability of the instrument allows students to observe excitations of pure molecular rotations at low frequency, and recognize them again as fine structure on top of vibrations in the middle infrared region. Two experiments in FIR vibrational spectroscopy are effecting a major revamping of the advanced Experimental Condensed Matter Physics course. The first, adapted from the research literature and the undergraduate work of students at the L. Eotvos University and the Technical University of Budapest, demonstrates the central role of symmetry in determining vibrational properties of pristine and photo-polymerized c60. The second, based on an experiment that was recently implemented at Reed College, connects a simple 1D lattice dynamics calculation to the observation of optical phonon modes in a real physical system. Another goal of this project to take advantage of an opportunity to reach an unprecedented number of women physics majors at Colby, as indicated by pre-registration numbers for the fall Modern Physics course. By providing an exceptional undergraduate program of experimental physics, we hope to further the careers of these young women, inspire them to become role models for others, and maintain a critical mass of women in the program. Evaluations of the project will consider specifically their impact on female students as well as on student learning in general. Students will disseminate the results at conferences for undergraduates, and in education or research journals, as appropriate for the work doc6615 none Nancy R. Sottos and David A. Payne, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Proposal Number # Additive Patterning of Integrated Functional Materials on a Chip A critical issue for the future engineering of microsystems on a chip is the ability to rapidly pattern dissimilar materials in complex integrated systems. A novel, additive method of patterning is proposed that will enable integration of functional materials (e.g., electrical, mechanical, optical, etc.) on a chip, rather than as a discrete component added into the circuit and system. Specifically, an interdisciplinary investigation is planned to examine additive patterning of integrated electroceramic thin film devices and to develop a better understanding of the complex residual stress development in the films during this process. Integration of electroceramic thin films is a key technology for the realization of future micro electromechanical (MEM) device applications such as miniaturized sensors and actuators, ultrasonic motors and optical elements as well as nonvolatile memory elements and switching capacitors for integrated circuitry. In order to advance this technology for the next generation of electromechanical devices, it is essential to develop a fundamental understanding of the residual stresses generated in the films during patterning, the effects of these stresses on film properties and how to tailor these stresses for optimal device performance. Specific goals of this interdisciplinary investigation include: (i) development of new protocols to pattern thicker electroceramic films and multilayer devices where residual stresses are most critical, (ii) in-situ measurement of residual stress development during patterning, (iii) development of analytical models to understand the role of the substrate, film adhesion, and processing conditions on residual stress, (iv) characterization of the electromechanical properties of patterned films and assess the effects of residual stress on performance, and (v) development of a strategy for tailoring the residual stress state for optimal performance and reliability of the device doc6616 none Engineering - Materials Science (57) The Manufacturing Engineering program at Kettering University is undergoing a revamping of its curriculum to reduce the number of required core courses, while still providing students with experiential learning in materials processing and manufacturing systems. As a part of this restructuring of the curriculum, the program is introducing a new course which focuses on the selection of materials and processing routes for engineered products. Much of the content and pedagogy for the course is being adapted from successful projects at California Polytechnic University San Luis Obispo and at Virginia Tech. The course introduces these concepts in the framework of developing a manufacturing strategy for producing a real product in a team environment. This introduces students to concepts such as material selection, process selection, life- cycle engineering, economic decision making, risk and product liability assessment, engineering communication, project planning and engineering ethics. To implement this change, the faculty are incorporating the use of a graphical material property and processing selection database. The new course is being introduced over a two-year period to provide time for evaluation, assessment and re-design. Outside evaluators familiar with both the technical aspects and with pedagogical methods will assist in developing and implementing assessment tools to evaluate the specific outcomes of the course. By adapting and implementing approaches used at other institutions, this new course will serve as a catalyst for change in courses throughout the university doc6617 none Interdisciplinary (99) This project is forming the foundation for the science curriculum in the Honors College, a brand new liberal arts college being built within the larger Florida Atlantic University system. Through this project the College is developing a discovery-based approach to learning by introducing year-long student projects in first and second year biology and chemistry courses. It is promoting interdisciplinarity by creating educational links among the sciences and between mathematics and the sciences. It is bringing science and mathematics out of the classroom and into the community, using local ponds, lakes, forests and greenways as science laboratories. And for both faculty and students, it is integrating teaching, learning and research in a holistic form of scholarship. The common thread in discovery-based learning, interdisciplinary links, and the community laboratory is long-term environmental research projects in which student and faculty teams study the water quality in the dozens of area ponds, the diversity of wildlife in the more than 250 acres of preserves, and the impact of a growing population on the environment. Such an approach is possible because the College is located in the midst of the planned -- but not yet completed -- community of Abacoa, a mixed residential and urban center which is being built around the college campus. The community projects are bring supported in the laboratory through the use of a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer (GC- MS), which provides a powerful means for detecting and identifying chemical compounds; and a geographic information system (GIS) lab, which provides a variety of tools for spatial analysis and modeling of large heterogeneous data sets. The GIS lab is also providing a computer classroom for team- teaching new, interdisciplinary, linked courses. The effort is an adaptation and expansion of NSF-funded projects that have focused on discovery-based learning and undergraduate research activities as a means of achieving interdisciplinary learning in the sciences doc6618 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This project is focusing on the adoption and enhancement of WeBWork, an internet- based system developed at the University of Rochester for generating and delivering homework problems to students. The project is adapting WeBWork to several areas of the mathematics curriculum, especially at the elementary level. It is also investigating its applications in other disciplines, particularly physics and economics. Once the project enhances WeBWork to a level that will make it easily adaptable and usable in a variety of environments, it will serve as a resource to other clients, including other departments at the university, other universities and several high schools in the state. The project is modifying the interface of WeBWork so that a faculty member with minimal computer skills can manage an entire course independently. It is also developing a default set of homework problems which an instructor can change or select by accessing a database of linked problems. WeBWork now provides only answers to problems. As a much needed aid to the students, this project is developing complete solutions to problems and creating a database, that would be separate from the homework exercises, consisting of tutorials that would provide meaningful hints and step-by-step solutions to problems. Students have indicated a great interest in such a bank of practice problems. At the present time, WeBWork is structured to accommodate only pre-calculus and calculus. Thsi project is adapting it to Finite Mathematics, which covers topics from sets, probability, linear systems, matrices, linear programming and applications to problems from business and the social sciences. WeBWork has many possible applications to courses of this type, but at present it cannot accommodate linear analysis, particularly matrix manipulation. This project is utilizing Maple within WeBWork to analyze and process student answers for this course. This takes WeBWork in a significantly new direction. Overall the project s objective is to make WeBWork easy-to-use, complete and sufficiently flexible to be employed in a variety of environments. To assist in making WeBWork more easily adapted, workshops are being held during the academic year and during the summer months so that potential instructors can more easily see how the program can be implemented and customized for their own particular use doc6619 none Alexander Dalgarno This is a collaborative research project with Drs Phillip Stancil, (the University of Georga, AST ), and Stephen Lepp, (University of Nevada, Las Vegas, AST ). This program will construct models to investigate the formation of the first cosmological objects. These models will describe the history of the first bound objects to form from the primordial gas in the early universe. They will include the coupled evolution of the time-dependent, nonequilibrium chemical, atomic and molecular level populations as well as the nonequilibrium rovibrational level populations of the molecules with contributions due to chemical reactions in the primordial gas. The models can be used to suggest strategies for observing structures in the early universe in the Infrared from space. This program will use astrophysical modeling to investigate the formation of the first cosmological objects. These models will compute the coupled evolution of the time-dependent nonequilibrium chemical, atomic and molecular level population, thermal, and hydrodynamic history of the first bound objects to form from the primordial gas. This will be the first time such extensive, coupled evolution models have been attempted. In addition, this project will investigate the explicit nonequilibrium rovibrational level populations of the primordial molecules with contributions due to chemical reactions, resulting in an improved determination of molecular cooling and the prediction of the emission spectra of primordial clouds. The emission spectra will be used to suggest the most likely ways these objects may be observed with the next generation of infrared space telescopes. The needed atomic and molecular data and derived cooling functions will be assembled and posted on the World Wide Web. The data that is not available, primarily involving rovibrational state-specific molecular collisions, will be computed with established quantum-mechanical techniques. The studies of the primordial gas will be extended to follow protogalaxy and protostar formation under increasing metallicity and radiation field conditions to the beginning of the era of Population II. These studies will be relevant to the interpretation and planning of future space-based observations with NGST, SIRTF, FIRST, and Astro-F and ground-based telescopes. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc6620 none Interdisciplinary (99) This project is focused on disseminating broadly successful strategies and methods for enhancing undergraduate interest in science through stressed stream analysis. Twenty workshops are being conducted for science and engineering faculty who are interested in learning how to design new courses or integrate into existing courses environmental analysis concepts and state-of-the-art techniques (e.g. biotic indices, electrophoresis, geographic information systems, automated water quality analysis, toxic organic chemical detection in environmental samples, and spreadsheet modeling). Admission to these workshops is based on participants plans for incorporating workshop materials into courses and curricula at their home institutions. Participants pay their own travel expenses and the workshops pay all other expenses. These 3-day workshops are teaching faculty how to organize student teams for collecting data needed to prepare environmental impact statements for real, local problems. Participants receive fully documented course materials with easily adaptable sample exercises, work with regional faculty workshop leaders to modify courses and curriculum at their own institutions, and learn how to sustain this process. The workshop activities are also supported by ample opportunities for follow up with faculty leaders and other participants. Fifteen of the workshops are being conducted at regional sites at the rate of 3 per year, and five are being conducted at the national meetings of different scientific societies, at the rate of 1 per year, including at least one national meeting of an organization of minority scientists. The project leaders are offering full travel allowances for under-represented minority faculty doc6621 none Chemistry (12) A Varian 360-L NMR spectrometer which has been converted to a Fourier Transform instrument has become an integral part of the laboratory experience of students at this institution s Department of Chemistry and Physics. It has enhanced undergraduate student research projects and increased interaction between sections of the Department. It is critical to curriculum development as the Department emphasizes the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary nature of science. Students from a local community college are provided access to the instrument doc6622 none Chemistry (12) Hood College, a liberal arts college focusing on the education of women, is introducing capillary electrophoresis (CE) technology into General Chemistry, Analytical Chemistry, and Biological Chemistry courses. The CE applications are being adapted and implemented from the research and educational literature, targeting these applications toward a different audience, our women students. Since the concepts underlying separation techniques are fundamental to research in many areas of science and since capillary electrophoresis is rapidly becoming the separation tool of choice in many modern laboratories, it is important for students to become knowledgeable with this technology. We are incorporating CE separation of caffeine in beverages into our General Chemistry courses and some of these students are using CE separations for their end-of-the-year project. In Analytical Chemistry, students are gaining an understanding of separation parameters through the application of CE technology in the investigation of real world problems such as water pollution. In Biological Chemistry, CE is being used to investigate amino acid charge pH relationships, to sequence a dipeptide, to separate DNA restriction fragments, and to investigate parameters important in protein separations doc6623 none Chemistry (12) To enrich the current undergraduate science education, NMR will be integrated throughout the chemistry curriculum to engage students majoring in chemistry, biology, neuroscience, and other fields. Students will experience the discovery of scientific inquiry through investigation of molecular structure. Extensive use of NMR will begin early in the organic chemistry sequence and will continue through senior student faculty research. Most of the laboratory experiments are adapted from J. Chem. Educ. (JCE) articles or NSF-DUE sponsored work. In organic chemistry molecular symmetry and carbon substitution will be introduced early via 13 C NMR and DEPT experiments as reported by Reeves-JCE 98. Stereoisomers and 19 F NMR will be explored according to the combined work of Branz-JCE 85, Piers-JCE 89, and Rojas- . Homonuclear and heteronuclear correlation, as well as NOESY, spectra will be used to make proton and carbon assignments. These two dimensional experiments will provide hard evidence for spectral assignments in labs, which have suffered from lack of student analysis, see Piers-JCE 91; Mills-JCE 96; Castro-JCE 98; and McDonald, DUE- . The instrumental methods course will explore magnetic susceptibility and anisotropy, see Arnold-JCE 98. Physical chemistry labs will implement variable temperature NMR studies for kinetics and thermodynamic determinations based on conformational isomers according to Brown-JCE 98 and Dwyer-JCE 98. Mathcad exercises will also be employed to help students understand how the Fourier transform process works. Senior courses in biochemistry and advanced organic will further utilize 2D techniques, plus 31 P NMR, for analysis of gramicidin S and adenosine phosphates, see Lee-JCE 96 and Craik-JCE 91. Student faculty research projects will likewise benefit from a modern high field NMR. The new instrument will include gradient capabilities to drastically reduce acquisition times and a higher field strength magnet to improve resolution. A broadband probe is essential for several student faculty research projects. This instrument and the revised curriculum will together help to educate students, excite them about the power of modern NMR spectroscopy, and prepare them for careers in the chemical sciences doc6624 none Chemistry (12) The Department of Chemistry at St. Mary s College of Maryland is developing a more learner-centered curriculum that is supported by appropriate pedagogical practices and technological tools. Inquiry-based laboratory experiences adapted from both the research and educational literature are viewed as an essential element of this effort. The department has purchased a 300 MHz FT-NMR spectrometer that is being used to support the departments on-going efforts to incorporate inquiry-based laboratory work into the chemistry curriculum. With access to the FT-NMR, additional experiments are enhancing courses where inquiry methods have already been introduced and are allowing the incorporation of inquiry activities into additional courses. The set of inquiry-based experiments in the General Chemistry courses are being modified to include an exploration of atomic structure using the FT-NMR. Inquiry activities using the FT-NMR are also being introduced in the organic, inorganic, and advanced spectroscopy courses. Students are incorporating the use of routine FT-NMR for the characterization of products synthesized in their laboratory work. In subsequent courses, they are using sophisticated techniques such as COSY, DEPT, HETCOR and pulse sequences. As a graduation requirement, all students are now required to complete a year-long student research project, the St. Mary s Project. The FT-NMR is especially useful to many students as they explore various aspects of chemical structure and reactivity doc6625 none Mathematical Sciences (21) The objective of this project is to reform mathematics instruction at UTPA by adapting cooperative learning models with technology in a studio classroom environment similar to the ones used at California Polytechnic State for Statistics, and at Dickinson College and Kansas State for physics. Mathematics and its Application in Engineering and Science developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, The Linear Algebra Modules Project developed by Herman, King, Moore, and Pepe, and the Geometry Teachers Activities Kit developed by J. A. Muschla and G. R. Muschla, are implemented in calculus, linear algebra, and geometry respectively. The equipping of two classrooms with computers, software, and other support materials enables faculty to provide a learning environment that emphasizes learning via discovery, exploration of concepts, and visualization. By implementing studio instruction in the gateway courses of calculus, linear algebra, and geometry, the education of pre-service secondary mathematics teachers, mathematics majors and minors, and engineering and science students is effected. Several outcomes are achieved from studio instruction. First there is increased confidence of pre-service mathematics teachers in their use of technology in secondary school classroom instruction. Also, the engineering and science major s ability to apply their mathematics training in their subsequent education is reinforced. And finally, students understanding of geometric concepts in linear algebra and the ties between linear algebra and geometry are improved doc6626 none Porter The objective of the proposed research is the design, development, and evaluation of a new paradigm for chip-scale bioanalytical laboratories. The goal is to uniquely couple the emerging fields of magnetically-based analyte labeling, DNA protein microarray fabrication, microfluidic injection, and giant magnetoresistive sensors, forming a new class of integrated systems that address the enormous demand for high throughput sample screening in the functional genomics and proteomics arenas. These types of assays are also applicable to purity maintenance of public water and food supplies doc6627 none Chemistry (12) This project addresses the need to stimulate undergraduate students to build intellectual bridges between different areas of chemistry and to strengthen their critical thinking skills in a modernized integrated laboratory environment. The proposed merger of physical and inorganic chemistry laboratories provides chemistry majors at the institution with the opportunity to learn in an enhanced environment. The merger extends the approach traditionally used in the physical and inorganic lab courses through a series of projects that progressively evolves from the standard structured approach to a more open- ended approach in a teamwork-driven, self-motivated atmosphere. The approach stimulates the students to synthesize, integrate, and apply concepts from both areas of chemistry while tackling projects designed to replicate a research environment. The request centers on acquiring a laser system, and computer hardware and software to provide valuable experience for the students in a number of modern spectroscopic and computational methods used in concert with instrumentation and methods currently used in our upper division lab courses. The project directors are adapting and implementing experiments from the literature, and are developing several new projects to be used in the new course. Developing this course and the necessary lab course materials provides information that is useful to other educators. This project addresses the DUE themes of integration of technology in education and faculty development doc6628 none Biological Sciences (61) Anticipating society s need for broadly trained global change scientists and ecologists, the Biology Department at Carleton College has initiated a new multidisciplinary, collaborative ecology curriculum that examines the relationship between organisms and their abiotic environment. Three new laboratory courses in ecosystem ecology, plant physiological ecology, paleoecology, and a nonmajors course in global change biology are being offered to complement existing strengths in population ecology and evolutionary biology. Ecology courses at Carleton place strong emphasis on learning science by doing science. Lectures are supplemented with small-group, collaborative-learning case studies based on primary literature. These case studies focus on exciting and controversial issues in ecology, such as clearcutting, rising CO2 and carbon sinks, the effects of climate warming on vegetation, and the effects of biodiversity on ecosystem function. Two of the lab courses, Ecosystem Ecology and Plant Physiological Ecology, emphasize common themes of carbon cycling, nutrient cycling, and vegetation response to global change. Because ecosystem ecology and plant physiological ecology offer an excellent opportunity for examining these themes at different levels of biological organization, a few key pieces of equipment support both courses and provide Carleton undergraduates with advanced training. Using sophisticated instruments, students practice the scientific method while learning about the importance of ecology and developing an understanding of the issues professional ecologists. Course materials are disseminated through professional journals, at scientific meetings, on Carleton s website and the Case Studies in Science website at SUNY Buffalo doc6629 none Mathematical Sciences (21) The objectives of the project are to use a laboratory classroom to implement curricular changes in courses taken by pre-service teachers of mathematics. The objectives are achieved by adapting the Calculus, Concepts, Computers, and Cooperative Learning project developed by Ed Dubinsky of Georgia State University. A major outcome of the project is to create an environment that blends technology into the teaching and learning of mathematics. A main component of the project is the construction of a new classroom with laptop computers connected to a university wide server. This laboratory provides the correct properties needed to help achieve the objectives. The laptop computers have a low profile, which helps to maintain a more balanced classroom atmosphere. The project emphasizes integration of technology in education and teacher preparation. From this project pre-service teachers obtain greater exposure to technology in a setting that exemplifies ways that software and collaboration are used to teach mathematics. An ongoing evaluation and dissemination program is fully integrated into the project doc6630 none Earth Systems Science (40) Undergraduate students in science and engineering curricula are frequently bound by disciplines, taught multitudes of reductionist facts endemic to multiple disciplines, and evaluated by competitive measure. Yet they are expected to emerge into professions that function in interdisciplinary, problem-based modes demanding creative and cooperative decisions. Approaching learning in a constructivist, collaborative manner, using Earth system topics of environmental significance, and applying modern as well as traditional technologies for science data acquisition and analysis can offer students a unique opportunity to develop knowledge, attitudes and skills for 21st century careers in science, engineering and technology. This project is developing, offering and assessing a prototype course for use in higher education institutions and field facilities in coastal areas. As an earth systems sciences course it focuses on relationships among elements of the hydrosphere, atmosphere, lithosphere and biosphere of coastal and offshore areas, and it is driven by environmental questions that link the systems with human society. A combination of high-tech tools are employed, such as satellite imagery, datasheets on line, digital models, as well as traditional field technologies for ground truth measurements and supplements to more global datasets. Processes of instruction are based on construction of learning through experiences, collaborative group process and problem-based learning. Alternative assessment will be used to evaluate course outcomes in non-competitive ways doc6631 none Psychology - Cognitive (73) This is a project to equip 5 multi-use laboratories in experimental psychology. These labs are adopting and adapting commercial SuperLab software designed for research and education in psychology, following the lead of many other departments, including departments in research universities, such as Harvard University and the University of Illinois. The labs have been set up using SuperLab as the core, coupled with compatible data acquisition cards from National Instruments, a photometer, and a sound level meter. These labs have allowed our department to integrate technology into a number of psychology courses in sensation, perception and cognition, and are providing a platform for increased student participation in laboratory research experiences and independent research projects. Students are now routinely participating in the design of experiments; stimulus generation, measurement, and control; and the setup and configuration of scientific apparatus used in psychology research in these areas. Student experiments are being supported from three sources. SuperLab LT provides a pool of existing experiments from which to draw. SuperLab software provides the technology and a bibliographic base of published papers (at www.SuperLab.com papers ) to support adaptations of other experiments for our students. Finally, we are developing new experiments using SuperLab Pro doc6632 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This project is implementing a system delivered through the World Wide Web for strengthening the algebraic and computational skills of students in a large reformed calculus and precalculus program, with an outreach component to help high schools evaluate whether students have the specific algebraic skills needed to succeed in college mathematics while there is time to repair students individual weaknesses before college. This is being done by adapting high quality practices and materials developed elsewhere, in this case the web-based delivery and grading of mathematics exercises using the eGrade software package developed at the University of Nebraska. This software, originally called Webtests, was designed to handle homework and tests in introductory college mathematics courses. In this project this software is being adapted and used in conjunction with other methods of providing and collecting information through the Internet to deliver all of the following across the web: mathematics skill evaluation materials for use in high schools; algebra review and practice modules for use in college and high school; two complete mathematics courses; and a major gateway skill testing program. The project has the following outcomes: (a) Gateway tests are being offered in a computerized testing center in electronic form, with automatic grading and reporting of scores to instructors and immediate feedback to students. (b) Web-based review materials containing eGrade practice problem sets are being written to accompany the gateway tests, so that students who encounter difficulties can review and practice the material between attempts. (c) Web-based readiness tests are being created that can be used under the guidance of high school mathematics teachers to diagnose weaknesses in the specific algebraic skills needed for introductory college mathematics courses. (d) Two web-based courses are being built around eGrade, an algebra and trigonometry skill course for students not quite ready to take precalculus and a brief precalculus course for students not quite ready to take calculus. (e) Extensions to multivariable calculus are being explored in a pilot activity to study ways to convert some existing Calculus III computer laboratory modules for delivery across the web doc6633 none Biological Sciences (61) A long-standing challenge for biology students has been dealing with complex visual information. In research labs and a few advanced courses, traditional film photography has been the method of choice to deal with these visual images. The complexity and expense of this technique, however, has precluded its use in most biology course at the college and pre-college levels. Recent, profound changes in CCD technology and improvements in computer memory storage promise to change this situation. Consumer digital cameras are now widely available and seem to be following the same evolutionary trend seen for computer scanners: increased quality accompanied by an enormous decline in price. The advent of the USB microcomputer bus, wide availability of e-mail and low-priced CD-RW drives has greatly improved the ability to transfer and store digital images. We predict that these technological trends will allow the routine use of digital cameras in biology laboratories. These devices may become as commonplace as student microscopes. In anticipation of this trend this project is: 1) investigating adapting consumer level digital cameras for use in a wide range of student lab activities including microscopy, anatomy, taxonomy, motion analysis and animal behavior, 2) providing student laboratory groups in undergraduate zoology courses with digital cameras at every lab meeting, 3) providing these students with the means for storing pictorial information in disk format or via their e-mail accounts, 4) observing student behavior and their use of these cameras and, 5) measuring changes in student attitudes and learning as a result of using these devices. This project provides a model by which an existing, evolving technology can become a common part of biology courses at the pre-college and introductory college levels doc6634 none Engineering - Electrical (55) This project is developing a photonics curriculum with a relevant laboratory based on an industrial model that implements case studies. The format of the laboratory is being adapted from an existing NSF-supported empty bench model. We extend this format to an industrial model that reinforces relevance by simulating the industry environment of the case study. This model incorporates problem based learning by requiring student construction of all experiments, links cognitive and skills-based learning by linking labs and lectures, and incorporates photonics technology into instruction while stimulating student interest by giving teams control over purchasing decisions. Novel assessment instruments are being employed to measure effectiveness of this methodology doc6635 none Engineering - Civil (54) Representatives from the environmental engineering profession frequently comment that university graduates entering the workforce understand process theory but lack the hands-on experience necessary for a smooth transition into the workplace. The hand-on experience they refer to is a basic working knowledge of the processes used in industry for pollution treatment. At several universities in the US, undergraduate students in Chemical Engineering are given the opportunity to develop a working knowledge of their industry in classes taught at pilot plant facilities operated by the university. The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Michigan Technological University is adapting this hands-on approach to Environmental Engineering education through the implementation of a laboratory with pilot scale environmental treatment systems. The project will be informed by Michigan Tech s own chemical engineering program as well as other programs throughout the country. Undergraduate students taking classes in this Environmental Process Simulation Laboratory (EPSC) are benefiting from this experience in numerous ways including: implementation of the theoretical tools the students learned in previous classes; a better understanding of these theoretical tools; a familiarity with how the real-world treatment unit functions; experience with industrial process controls; an increased knowledge of industrial safety practices; an introduction to pollution prevention strategies; and the experience of working in a multidisciplinary team on a common project. The end result will be students with advanced skills and an improved understanding of the theory and mechanics of treatment processes doc6636 none Interdisciplinary (99) Sweet Briar College (SBC) is implementing a new curriculum leading to the B.S. in Environmental Science (ES). SBC is located on 3,300 acres of diversely used land giving us the potential to develop an extraordinary environmental program. The SBC ES major has depth and breadth in both the life sciences and the physical sciences, requiring intermediate-level courses in biology, chemistry, and mathematics and upper-level courses in environmental science plus at least one other science. Students choose to focus in one of four concentrations. This new curriculum is being adapted from efforts at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, Middlebury College, Brown University, and Rollins College, and has features adapted from strong environmental programs at other institutions as well. Four integrated courses are being implemented. These include three new environmental science courses (Advanced Laboratory in Environmental Science, Senior Research in Environmental Science, and Environmental Risk Assessment) and one existing biology course (General Ecology). ES majors are required to take General Ecology and the Advanced Laboratory in Environmental Science, typically in successive years. Risk Assessment and Senior Research in Environmental Science are usually taken during the senior year. This progression gives us an excellent opportunity to coordinate our courses and build on concepts and acquired skills from course to course. Modifications to the General Ecology laboratory: 1) focus on three field systems, each of which illustrates important ecological principles and environmental concepts; 2) introduce long-term field research; and 3) introduce GIS GPS and weather monitoring technologies. The Advanced Environmental Science Laboratory is an intensive 6-hours-per-week laboratory experience intended to further expose ES majors to hypothesis formulation and testing, data analysis, team-oriented problem solving, and oral and written presentation of results. Students use the sites studied previously during General Ecology along with the terrestrial and aquatic resources of the SBC campus as well as the surrounding central Virginia area. After completing these courses, ES students are prepared to conduct research as part of Senior Research in Environmental Science, a semester-long independent project culminating in the preparation of a paper, a presentation at a college research symposium and, if appropriate, a presentation at a local or regional scientific meeting. Projects are chosen that explore environmental problems using the knowledge and skills acquired from previous coursework. The Environmental Risk Assessment course is a highly-recommended senior elective that shares a philosophy, a focus on technology, and a case history approach with General Ecology and the Advanced Environmental Science Laboratory. Environmental Risk Assessment extensively utilizes the concepts and practical skills emphasized during these two earlier courses and is intended to introduce the student to the practice of risk assessment. The incorporation of advanced technology into this course as a result of this project significantly changes how our undergraduates learn the science and art of assessing risk. This is imperative as environmental risk assessment is increasingly being used in the private and public sectors for decision making and resource allocation. Evaluation of both the courses and the overall curriculum is being conducted doc6637 none Biological Sciences (61) An understanding of the methods used in molecular biology and their application to other areas of biology is critical to the student graduating with a biology degree. Field biology, population biology, evolutionary and organismal biology, physiology and cellular biology all use molecular techniques. The Biology Department has recognized the need to modernize its curriculum, which traditionally has emphasized field and organismal biology, but lacked instruction focusing on molecular biology. Recently the biology department hired new faculty to fill this void in their curriculum. As a result, two new courses dedicated to molecular technology, a molecular biology lecture course and a molecular laboratory course, are now offered. The Molecular Technology Laboratory course adapts the methods presented in Unraveling DNA: Molecular Biology for the Laboratory to the current needs of this open-ended, inquiry based investigative laboratory. The first seven weeks of instruction is devoted to the introduction of standard methods in molecular technology. The remainder of the course is devoted to a project involving the cloning of a gene. Working in teams of 3 or 4, students design and carry out experiments to clone the gene, and then demonstrate that the correct gene has been cloned. At the end of the semester, both written and oral reports are presented. This part of the course is designed to engage students to develop and use problem solving and critical thinking skills. In addition to the revised Molecular Biology curriculum, this project has also lead to the infusion of molecular biology across the curriculum such that students are now introduced to the basic laboratory and molecular biological research techniques as Freshmen and Sophomores that are revisited in Genetics laboratory and ultimately in the Molecular Biology course. Consequently, the introduction of molecular techniques across the curriculum and the development of a sophisticated dedicated molecular biology laboratory has strengthen the whole biology curriculum and improved student performance as they transition to graduate school, professional programs or employment doc6638 none Chemistry (12) This award provided funds to purchase several pieces of equipment for use in the Salish Kootenai College Environmental Laboratory (SKCEL), associated with Salish Kootenai College. This laboratory is providing practical experience for the native American students enrolled in the Environmental Science program as they monitor the environmental quality of tribal lands. The laboratory is adapting research and or EPA protocols for the analysis of inorganic species and implementing the analyses into various courses. The educational and practical experience of the student is being enhanced by the introduction of modern instrumentation and analytical methodology into these courses. The award is also allowing the Principal Investigator to plan an additional course, Environmental Chemistry I, that will become part of an expanded Environmental Science curriculum doc6639 none Interdisciplinary (99) An outstanding environment for undergraduate science requires more than the communication of existing knowledge. It requires faculty to be mentors and role models in stimulating pre-college and undergraduate students in science to explore new frontiers and horizons through their own investigative studies. This project is using an analytical scanning electron microscopic system (SEM-EDS) in a variety of undergraduate courses and independent study, thus providing undergraduates with additional opportunities to develop their analytical skills. Use of this instrument is also engendering interest in science at the pre-college levels in local area schools. After completing a prerequisite Web-based course on microscopic theory and techniques that we have developed, relatively inexperienced students are able to acquire experimental data efficiently and effectively in many diverse and multidisciplinary undergraduate research projects. The project is also adapting the ExCEL model developed at Iowa State University. [See K.P. Constant, et. al., Extended Classroom for Enhanced Learning! at www.mse.iastate.edu excel main.html.] The value of SEM-EDS in the classroom and field is well documented by ExCEL and elsewhere. [For examples, see (1) K. Burton and D.L. Farkas, Telemicroscopy - Net Progress, Nature, Vol. 391 ( ) pp. 540-41; and (2) G.E. Sosinsky, T.S. Baker, G. Hand, and M.H. Ellisman, The Electron Microscopy Outreach Program: A Web-Based Resource for Research and Education, J. Struct. Biol., Vol. 125 ( ) pp. 246-252.] Viewed from a broader perspective, this project builds on our established and successful undergraduate research program that has led to a growing number of student presentations at off-campus events, some student publications, and most importantly, to greatly enhanced opportunities for JSU graduates to pursue graduate study. Collaborative student faculty research is being disseminated through student presentations and or publication in recognized journals. Dissemination of the educational value of using a SEM is being carried out through several expeditionary learning events that include science workshops sponsored by the Alabama Science in Motion Biology, and a Web page promoting Scientific Inquiry Through SEM-EDS doc6640 none Biological Sciences (61) . While the techniques of biotechnology have become quite standard, the application of biotechnology to solve real world problems is widely diverse and sophisticated. Unfortunately, the exposure most students have to biotechnology during their academic career is largely theoretical and is incorporated into lecture courses rather than laboratory courses. Those techniques that are taught in laboratories tend to be routine and lack connection to contemporary research topics of interest to students. This project is focused on adapting the techniques of biotechnology to the special needs of agricultural biology and wildlife management. The animal science curriculum will be expanded to include investigative, hands-on laboratories centered around wildlife management, animal tracking, selective breeding, pathology and disease, clinical animal pathology, small animal management, and dairy and livestock improvement. The establishment of a student molecular biology laboratory will also increase the number of students participating in laboratory courses taught in collaboration with Thomas Jefferson University and researchers from the Thomas Jefferson Center for Biomedical Research located on the Delaware Valley College campus doc6582 none of the JiTT strategy, links to JiTT use elsewhere, a complete compilation of the 25 modules we develop, workshop presentations, and our research findings and recommendations. To encourage broader adoption of JiTT strategies in economics, we are publicizing the materials on this Web site and presenting our findings through presentations at workshops and professional meetings, as well as through economic education listservs to which we belong doc6642 none 7x) PsychExperiments is an online psychology laboratory that offers research opportunities to undergraduates and their instructors. It is now established as a valuable educational resource used by 141 classrooms in the U.S., Canada, and abroad. Based at the University of Mississippi, the site has been featured in two articles in the American Psychological Association s APA Monitor, one article in the American Psychological Society s APS Observer, and has been awarded first-place in the Learning Software Design Competition (non-profit division) hosted by the University of Minnesota. Due to growing use in the United Kingdom, the University of Edinburgh has asked to mirror the site to provide more convenient and economical access. One major benefit of PsychExperiments is that it serves as a replacement or supplement for department-maintained laboratory facilities, thus freeing departments from some of the costs in maintaining computers and software for laboratory student use. This makes it possible for even the most poorly funded 4-year institutions, along with junior colleges and even some high schools to offer quality research experiences. Typical use of the site begins with an instructor asking students to participate in one of the experiments at the site using any Internet-connected computer. Students subsequently download the data they have generated (along with additional data from other classes when one s own class size is too small for meaningful analysis), which they analyze on their own or with the site-provided Excel macros. When students have access to a multi-computer lab, the whole process of research participation, data download and analysis can be completed within 20 to 30 minutes, depending on the experiment, which leaves ample class time for discussing the results and their implications. The technology that serves laboratory class requirements also serves the needs of student and professional researchers who wish to take advantage of web-samples or simply the convenience of off-site data collection. Hence PsychExperiments hosts student and professional research experiments along with laboratory experiments. Furthermore, by serving as an open laboratory, PsychExperiments serves to build community among the group of researchers and instructors who have participated in building the site. This project is continuing to improve and disseminate the collection of PsychExperiments and the prototype. The project consists of three components: (1) dissemination by visits to regional campuses and conventions, (2) enlarging the contributor core through developing training materials to supplement or supplant workshop-based training (a package of multimedia instructional material that will assist faculty and students in creating new experiments), and (3) continued site development and innovation. We estimate that the measurable results of these efforts will by project s end increase the user base from the Spring level of 141 classrooms to at least classrooms, and increase the number of trained contributors from 30 to a minimum of 60. Ancillary goals are expanding the pedagogical focus of PsychExperiments to social and developmental psychology and incorporating technological improvements that are making PsychExperiments more useful, attractive, and engaging doc6643 none Chemistry (12) Teaching through research is a guiding principle in the institution s NSF-AIRE recognized program. A requested ion trap mass spectrometer with electrospray and atmospheric pressure chemical ionization interfaces (LC MS) prepares the students at this institution to be creative, independent, and well-trained scientists. This instrument provides a novel linkage and enhancement of the full chemistry curriculum using experiments some of which are adapted from standard literature. Mass spectrometry is used in general chemistry for characterization of transition metal complexes. In organic chemistry students do natural products isolation and structure characterization. In physical chemistry proton affinities in gas phase and solution are studied. In Instrumental Analysis the fundamentals of the ionization and mass analysis processes are discussed. Biochemistry students use LC MS in protein sequencing. These LC MS-enhanced curricular components allow the introduction of exciting and important new approaches to chemistry, including combinatorial chemistry, solid-phase synthesis, and computer aided molecular design. The program in combinatorial chemistry links the Organic, Physical, Instrumental, and Biochemistry courses to map the active site of the proteolytic enzyme papain. Students in the Organic Chemistry course use solid-phase synthesis to make resin-bound combinatorial mixtures of papain substrates. These mixtures are analyzed in Instrumental Analysis for structure and purity, and in Biochemistry in a kinetic assay. The results of the papain assay are used for QSAR and receptor modeling studies in Physical Chemistry. Beyond curricular developments, the instrument is used to significantly enhance student faculty research opportunities doc6644 none Chemistry (12) A sequence of laboratory experiments is being developed which introduce environmentally responsible techniques of chemical separations and extractions into the undergraduate laboratory curriculum. These laboratory experiments form an integral component of a green laboratory curriculum in chemistry being developed with advice and participation from local government agencies. The project adapts experiments from physical chemistry and analytical chemistry laboratory texts and from the Journal of Chemical Education, and adapts methodology being developed by Lane Regional Air Pollution Authority or the EPA. The goals of the new curriculum are (1) to prepare chemistry majors for a changing emphasis in the chemical industry in which waste management at the source plays an ever more important role in chemical processes and (2) to train chemistry students and others in the analysis of environmentally important field samples such as air and ground water. The laboratory course constitutes an essential component of the new program since it exposes chemistry majors to cutting edge issues in extraction and separation using state of the art instrumentation in an area not traditionally covered in undergraduate chemistry curricula. Students are introduced to green chemistry as they make use of (1) instrumentation to provide cutting- edge analytical techniques such as supercritical fluid chromatography as well as more conventional HPLC capability, (2) facilities for measurements of the physical and chemical properties of environmentally friendly solvents as they pass through the critical point, and (3) a GC MS station for use in environmental monitoring and organic analysis doc6645 none Engineering - Mechanical (56) In this project, concepts of engineering graphics, mechanical design, numerical simulation, rapid prototyping and product testing are integrated in project experiences performed by interdepartmental teams of sophomores, juniors and seniors. The project also provides faculty development in the area of interdisciplinary teaming leading to improved integration of engineering courses. The project includes acquisition and installation of an abrasive waterjet machine tool and a three dimensional printer, both of which can easily import CAD designs for the manufacture of prototype parts. The use of these systems is integrated into interdepartmental team projects in several courses in Mechanical and Industrial Manufacturing Engineering. This project represents an adaptation of several recent NSF supported projects investigating the use of rapid prototyping technologies in undergraduate courses. By integrating the use of these technologies with multidisciplinary team projects involving prototype design, analysis, manufacturing and testing, students experience concurrent engineering and the product realization process. The project assessment is performed by a committee of administrators, faculty, students and industrial representatives who review the project assignments, samples of student work, results of student questionnaires and feedback from course instructors. Several documents are being developed including an overview of project activities, examples of assignments, tutorials for the use of the prototyping software and hardware, and examples of student work. Internal dissemination includes sharing of course materials, faculty development enrichment seminars and laboratory demonstrations. Dissemination to other institutions includes distribution of project documents via a project web page, presentations at conferences, and publications in educational journals doc6646 none James R. Graham First-light science with a coronagraph optimized for the adaptive optics 3.67-meter telescope of the U.S. Air Force Advanced Electro-Optics System (AEOS) will be used to detect and characterize stellar companions and disks with angular resolutions as high as the diffraction limit. A simple coronograph system is used with the current focal plane capabilities of the telescope. Native Hawaiian students and Maui students participate in the observing and data reduction and analysis through a two-week undergraduate astronomy program doc6647 none Biological Sciences (61) Our first- year Biology laboratory is being revised significantly by adapting and implementing A Computer- Based Laboratory for Teaching Investigative Research in Physiology (A. M. Smith, NSF- DUE award # ). This program uses computers connected to instrumentation for laboratories conducted in an inquiry- based framework. Our adaptation of this approach is to make an explicit link to a faculty research program( s) during each lab investigation. Each laboratory is designed around investigation of a central biological principle. Students are given the time and latitude to design experiments, collect, and analyze data related to understanding that principle and to compare this data to that generated in faculty research laboratories. In redesigning these labs, we are working toward the following goals:1) Increased biological literacy among our students, 2) Increased understanding of Science as a Process, 3) Improved student attitudes toward Biology, 4) Increased retention of Biology majors, and 5) Modeling of Inquiry- Based Learning for science education majors. Principles of Biology is a two- semester introductory biology sequence for majors that also enrolls a significant contingent of science education majors. The PI and Co- PI have recently been trained in Inquiry- Based pedagogies through participation in F. I. R. S. T.( Faculty Institutes for Reforming Science Teaching through field stations, NSF award # ). As a result, we have completely changed how we teach our sections of the Principles lecture, from a lecture format to an inquiry- based cooperative learning format. Our preliminary data and anecdotal feedback from students convinced us that this style of teaching is effective and exciting for both faculty and students. This project applies these innovative pedagogical techniques to the laboratory. The infusion of faculty research into the student laboratory classes also feeds our growing undergraduate research program by advertising faculty research to students and by including students in faculty research projects from the beginning of their undergraduate careers. Assessment is under the guidance of a national expert, Dr. Ebert- May, Director of the Lyman Briggs School at Michigan State Univ. Assessment is rigorous, tied to the project s goals, and is both formative and summative. It is our long- term goal to provide Inquiry- Based Learning for every science major at the University of Akron doc6648 none Interdisciplinary (99) Recently much of the interesting research in artificial intelligence has involved mobile robotics and artificial life. Whether the resulting creatures are real (as with mobile robots) or virtual (as with artificial life), it is becoming increasingly clear that apparently intelligent behavior emerges most naturally out of the interactions between a creature and a complex environment. Consequently, research in these areas of artificial intelligence draws on electrical and mechanical engineering, computer science, and psychology, as well as biology and philosophy. Both mobile robotics and artificial life have proven to be highly effective at engaging students in hands-on, collaborative learning about a topic that is inherently interdisciplinary. The use of mobile robots in classrooms includes the Autonomous LEGO Robotics Course at Case Western Reserve University (See eecs.cwru.edu courses lego375), an Artificial Intelligence Course at Bryn Mawr (see mainline.brynmawr.edu courses cs372 fall98), a Robotics Course at Swarthmore College (See palantir.swarthmore.edu ~Maxwell classes e28), and many others. Similarly, artificial life and genetic algorithms have been successful in undergraduate courses recently. Examples are Emergence, Evolution, and Life at Reed College (see reed.edu ~mab courses mals555), Artificial Life Course at Cal Tech (see krl.caltech.edu ~charles cns175), and Topics in Genetic Algorithms Course at the University of New Mexico (see cs.unm.edu ~forrest ga-class syllabus.html). These topics have also been used successfully in classes across the Scientific and Philosophical Studies of Mind (SPM) curriculum at Franklin HandyBoard robot controllers, sensors, and Lego pieces for building 5 additional mobile robots; and software (StarLOGO, CodeWarrior, Brainwave, and InteractiveC) to compile and upload programs to the robot controllers as well as to run artificial life simulations. During the first year of the grant, the PIs are building the necessary sensors and interface boards to create 5 new robot kits as well as to upgrade 5 existing robot kits, and adapt artificial life resources developed elsewhere to the kind of non-UNIX computing environment available at F&M. During the second year, they will integrate mobile robotics with artificial life (in particular genetic algorithms) so as to enable the robots to learn how to respond appropriately to their environments. During the third year, they will refine these implementation of robot learning so as to devise demonstrations and experiments for upper-level artificial intelligence courses in the SPM curriculum. Moreover, during the second and third years, the PIs will reassess the lab in light of student feedback and retool it where necessary. The result is that activities in the lab will allow students to develop conceptual understanding of self-organization, emergence, evolution, embodiment and the neural basis of intelligence, and practical abilities in engineering, robotics and computer programming. Indeed, given the limited resources of a liberal arts college like F&M, creating opportunities for this kind of hands-on, engineering experience is not possible without being linked in this way to fundamental components of a liberal arts education like philosophy, psychology and biology. Moreover, the lab will foster increased interdisciplinary connections among the Psychology, Philosophy, Computer Science, and Physics Departments, both affecting faculty development and increasing substantially the inter-disciplinary content of relevant courses doc6649 none Biological Sciences (61) The Biology Department is implementing a new core curriculum for biology majors consisting of four laboratory courses; 1) Fundamental Processes of Organisms, 2) Evolution and Ecology, 3) Cell and Molecular Biology, and 4) Genetics and Development. These courses replace five required courses, two of which did not have laboratories and only one of which had an experimentally-based laboratory. Laboratories in the new courses include a combination of traditional and inquiry- based exercises. Cutting across the new courses are three, multi- week, thematic, inquiry- based laboratories on microbes, plants and animals that are based on research expertise within the Department. By developing a set of research themes in the core courses students are able to see the strong link between research and education, and are better prepared to conduct research in upper- level courses. Our approach in the inquiry- based laboratories is to have small groups of students first learn about an organism or a process and any technical skills associated with the experimental system or mode of observation. Students then develop hypotheses, conduct experiments or observations, and complete the scientific method including presentation of findings to peers via posters, oral presentations or the Internet. The purchase of technologically-sophisticated equipment allows us to fundamentally improve the content and the means of delivery of the required curriculum. These courses engage students in using the process of science to explore scientific concepts, enhance learning through collaborative experiences, and develop a learning community. The development of student skills in problem solving, analytical methods, scientific writing and the use of computers also better prepares them for upper- level courses and careers in the biological sciences doc6650 none Biological Sciences (61) We are creating an Integrated Histology Laboratory (IHL) that provides hands-on histology experiences for undergraduates majoring in biology, chemistry, environmental science, and science education, as well as those involved in faculty-directed, student research. The IHL includes a JB-microtome and related equipment, a vacuum oven, and fume absorbers. The IHL allows the Biology and Chemistry Departments to further increase student training in the process of science, gives students experiences with modern histological technology, and promote scientific collaboration. Exercises in our organismal courses and some of our senior-level capstone courses are being re-designed to take advantage of the pedagogic opportunities created by the IHL to develop laboratory skills and improve critical thinking. In the Biology Introductory Sequence, students currently use prepared histological slides to understand the relationship of structure and function in a diversity of organisms. Based on that foundation, students in Biology, Chemistry, Environmental Science and Teacher Education are being introduced to the techniques of modern histological analysis and their utility in exploring topics as diverse as mechanisms regulating organismal development to ecotoxicology. At the Senior level, students are expected to conduct independent research projects as part of courses and faculty-mentored research. The projects uses as a foundation an NSF-funded project carried out by the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) group doc6651 none Physics (13) The Physics Department is restructuring its introductory physics classes. This Interactive Physics Classroom Project promotes conceptual understanding through enhanced student interaction within the traditional laboratory and lecture structure by adapting and implementing three nationally-recognized educational practices that have been demonstrated to be more effective than traditional instructional strategies. (1) The project is integrating Sokoloff, Laws, and Thornton s RealTime Physics into the introductory algebra- and calculus-based laboratories to create inquiry-based Microcomputer-Based Laboratories (MBL)s. (2) MBLs are also being integrated into the lectures, adapting Thornton and Sokolov s Interactive Lecture Demonstrations to provide a bridge to the laboratory work. (3) Our current implementation of Mazur s Peer Instruction is being expanded to additional class sections and enhanced with a ClassTalk-style response system. These improvements provide a broad range of science students (approximately 1,800 per year) with a rich learning environment based on active peer-based engagement. These advances are extremely well suited for helping students to adapt to the increasingly technology- oriented world. Evaluation of the program is being done throughout the project period using standard testing instruments, surveys, and interviews. Results are providing on-going feedback for the program participants and are also being disseminated to the general physics and education communities through publications, conferences, and the web. Additionally, to have the broadest impact on the diverse South Florida community, several workshops per year are being held to describe the techniques. Participants are from the local university and community college faculty, as well as high school physics teachers who are in the position to influence potential college students doc6652 none Physics (13) The laboratory part of an introductory physics class can help the students gain a better understanding of basic physical concepts and how these concepts are described mathematically. This project is revising the laboratories for the first- semester course for students who do not plan on going into the physical sciences or engineering to better accomplish these goals. It is adapting major parts of the Real Time Physics laboratories for students at the College. In these laboratories the data are displayed graphically on a computer while they are being taken, and this allows the students to make a mental connection between what is going on in the experiment and its mathematical description. This makes the course a more enjoyable and profitable one for the students and leads to lower attrition rates. While the Real Time Physics laboratories are very good, there is still room for improvement. The project is introducing topics which are not covered in these laboratories, such as elementary error analysis, and additional exercises which enable the students to better understand the physics of the experiment. The project is based on success with these improvements in another physics class which is taught at Hunter College doc6653 none Engineering - Other (59) This project is implementing active, experiential- based learning to improve the education of biomedical engineers at Tulane University. Undergraduate curricular modifications are based upon Kolb s learning cycle, which encourages peer interactions, engages multiple learning styles, and promotes a deep understanding of course material. The project encompasses the entire learning cycle within a large set of basic- to- advanced undergraduate biomedical engineering courses, thereby increasing students capacity to learn complex, interdisciplinary biomedical engineering material. Classroom and laboratory instruction are linked through eight new or substantially- revised courses that span the undergraduate curriculum. These courses combine theory with bench- top and computational laboratory experiences so as to build students intuition of physical and physiological processes. In addition, a core set of courses that bridge from science, math and engineering fundamentals to biomedical engineering applications has been developed to foster the progression from the study of traditional engineering to that of Biomedical Engineering doc6654 none Chemistry (12) Cooperative learning, guided inquiry, and problem-based learning strategies are introduced into the upper-level chemistry lab courses starting the analytical chemistry lab course. Experiments using low-cost PC-driven UV-visible spectrometers, a spectrofluorometer, and a capillatry electrophoresis instrument are adapted from standard literature and implemented using a guided-inquiry and project-oriented instructional format. Program effectiveness is assessed through a process using external evaluators as well as through student group self-assessment and exit questionnaire forms doc6655 none Mendillo This research will use the Advanced Electro-Optical System (AEOS) of the Air Force with its operational adaptive optics to obtain high-resolution images of the potassium in the atmospheres of Io and Europa. This work will provide an analysis and observational verification for the sources and the sinks of potassium. The scattered light performance of the telescope system will be improved by using coronagraphic optics in addition to the adaptive optics. The adaptive optics will sharpen up the satellite images and an occulting disk will be used at the primary focal plane to reduce the bright image of the satellite surface to image the satellite atmosphere against the cold dark space background. The instrument will employ an innovative image slicer recently developed to detect gases in planetary atmospheres doc6656 none Psychology - Cognitive (73) In order to teach students psychology, it is essential to provide them with opportunities to measure and analyze real samples of behavior. In this proof of concept project, we are exploring the use of new technology, namely DVD recordings, to bring behavior samples into developmental psychology courses in a more efficient and structured way than has typically been done in undergraduate psychology classes. Through contacts with researchers in child development, we are obtaining copies of videotaped experimental sessions, and transcribing them on DVDs for ease of use and presentation in the classroom. This project includes three components: (1) technical demonstration of editing, compressing, and transferring laboratory segments of developmental research sessions to DVD with a quality acceptable for use in the classroom; (2) obtaining subject and investigator releases in accordance with intellectual-property and privacy issues that will allow us to expand the project for full development; and (3) obtaining reliable data demonstrating effective educational use of this new format for delivering examples of behavior during standard classes. Although our work in this project is focused primarily on issues in developmental psychology, the considerations we address are general; they could deal equally well with many instructional topics. A critical aspect of this process is depicting a range of behaviors ranging from normal to a variety of abnormal developmental patterns. This is facilitating improved learning by students because they are more fully able to understand the range of behaviors that one sees in studying a particular aspect of development. Psychological research on learning and memory has shown that the greater the range of examples portrayed, the better able students learners are at generalizing what they learn to new circumstances doc6657 none Earth Systems Science (40) Recent trends in science education have emphasized the active engagement of students in learning. In geophysics, this has led to increased emphasis on field courses, especially in the area of environmental geophysics, where employment opportunities are the greatest for new graduates. In this project we are adapting and implementing proven field methods for a new environmental geophysics field course for undergraduate earth systems science majors at The City College of New York. This course is being modeled after published descriptions of those already taught at Smith College, Boston College, and Arizona State University. In addition to geophysical concepts and the use of geophysical equipment, the new course stresses teamwork and engages students in surveys at realistic urban sites. The new equipment purchased for this project, a ground conductivity meter and an Overhauser Magnetometer (and related software), are also being used by undergraduates enrolled in City College s new Environmental Project course. This course is required for all earth systems science majors and involves a semester-long research project doc6658 none Interdisciplinary (99) Chemistry, physics, and education faculty are engaged in designing, developing, and pilot testing a physical science course that is designed to enhance the scientific awareness of nonscience majors. This is being done in a three cycle iterative process where each cycle ends with assessment leading to subsequent improvements. Currently the university required curriculum for non-science majors does not provide direct experiences with the methods and processes of science. This developing course is providing an undergraduate science experience that is inquiry-based and content-relevant to students personal experiences. This is being accomplished by including materials that are contextually familiar and potentially interesting to Michigan students. Students taking the new course are learning the scientific approach to problem solving -- a process that requires basing opinions on facts and observable evidence. Use of peer learning groups in active-learning classroom activities and computer laboratory study are part of the course design. We expect this pedagogical design will prove effective in improving critical thinking and communication skills. The course is also teaching methods for locating information on scientific topics and for understanding and interpreting scientific data. The course is constructed around three modules -- the science of everyday life, science of the microscopic world, and the earth and beyond. These choices are making extensive use of modules developed by two NSF Chemistry Initiatives known as Modular Chemistry and ChemLinks. Each module area is being developed with some flexibility. Eventually there will be a minimum of two alternative module implementations developed in each module area to provide flexibility of choice for the many faculty who are (or soon will be) teaching it. This project is also adapting materials from the textbook Physical Science by J. Faughn, R. Chang, and J. Turk (Fort Worth, Texas: Saunders College Publishing, ), from Workshop Science: Exploring Nature Through Active Learning, by S. Franklin, D. Jackson, and P. Laws, AAPT Spring Meeting, Lincoln, NE ( ), the Integrated Science Program at Cal State - Chico (R. Lederer, A Problem Solving, Simulation, and Teamwork Approach to Teaching Integrated Science, being developed under a NSF grant), and the general education program at UCLA (www.college.ucla.edu ge ). A systematic effort will be made to identify and recruit future secondary science teachers from students entering the university, particularly those who enter with an undecided career. Project products will include modified ChemLinks ModularChem modules, assessment tools to measuring levels of scientific awareness, and a workshop for training faculty and teaching assistants in the teaching and assessment methodologies used in this course doc6659 none Chemistry (12) A gas chromatograph mass spectrometer (GC MS) is used to expand and enhance laboratory experiences in organic, instrumental, environmental and physical chemistry laboratory courses as well as in undergraduate research projects. A series of original problem- based experiments and experiments adapted from the literature increase in complexity as students progress from organic through physical chemistry laboratory courses. The experiments vary in the amount of procedural detail provided to the students. Initially, complete procedures are provided. In upper level experiments, a problem- based approach is taken where students are presented a problem and required to research the literature, develop a method for analysis and work as a team to obtain a solution. This approach develops independent problem-solving skills needed to address the many complex analytical issues facing society. Where appropriate, experiments are related to current real-life problems, such as environmental and energy-related issues. The rationale for this approach is that students become more interested and excited about laboratory experiments if they can relate their assignments to current industrial practices rather than performing cookbook-type experiments. This redirection in laboratory experiences equips graduates to meet the challenges of industry and graduate schools. In addition, this project provides future middle school and high school teachers in the institution s chemistry education program with examples of discovery-based learning topics related to environmental issues doc6660 none Engineering - Electrical (55) The prototype product of this project is a pilot course that integrates lighting design software simulations with qualitative photometric measurement experiments. The course includes a self-consistent data base of computer simulation software, photometric measurement & data evaluation capability, and associated instruction. The course material is formatted so that other educational institutions can remotely access, via the Internet, the physical execution of the experiments and interact in real time as an integral extension of the Cal Poly Pomona laboratories. The pedagogical benefit is two fold. First, any educational institution at any location is potentially capable, through conventional internet access, to offer lighting courses that include the latest comprehensive laboratory capabilities without having to invest in creating their own facilities. Second, there is an expanding trend in education to emphasize computer simulations with diminished attention on physical experience and qualitative verification of actual applications. However, in fields of engineering and science one must ultimately know how to physically construct, test, and use a real product. This course provides an example of the use of computer software while demonstrating its appropriate integration with physical reality. The effectiveness of the approach and format developed for offering this course is assessed by a formal proofing and upgrading process conducted by participating faculty both at Cal Poly Pomona and pier faculty at other schools. Cal Poly Pomona has an established working relationship with several other schools that have varying types of lighting education programs. A designated committee of faculty from these schools are identified to participate in the program. As material is developed it will be distributed to them for critique and recommendations, as well as soliciting their contributions to the material development doc6661 none Engineering - Electrical (55) In this project, a novel Remote Wiring and Measurement Laboratory (RwmLab) allows students to wire up physical electrical and electronics circuits and perform real measurements through internet access. In this way, students gain hands-on experience in a real-world laboratory environment. This work builds from several recent remote-access laboratory projects in Chemistry that received NSF support. The RwmLab acts as a local multi- circuit board on a common distributed panel. A 16- bit data acquisition, data processing and analysis, and graphical unit interface enabled device characterizes the RwmLab. The multi circuit board contains various electronic components such as Power Supplies (AC & DC), Resistors, Capacitors, Inductors, Transformers, Diodes (including Zener), Transistors (including BJT, MOSFET, & JFET), and Op- amps. The 16- bit enabled device allows the connectivity and control of these embedded electronics devices. A data acquisition interface allows measurements to be made at important nodes. The data collected at the nodes are then processed at the host computer. The laboratory is set up in such a way that the student can see what he she is wiring on the host PC. All activities are PC- based and therefore the student has total control over the process of performing his her experiment without relying on any structured steps already pre-designed doc6662 none Interdisciplinary (99) This project is developing a new, two-semester course intended to serve as a foundation for a new environmental literacy minor and a new interdisciplinary environmental studies major at Trinity College. This course, The Science of Environmental Change in the 21st Century, is being designed to become a science laboratory course for many of our pre-service teachers. The goal of this course is to provide non-science majors with the basic interdisciplinary science background needed to understand both global, regional, and local environmental problems. To accomplish this we are adapting and using components of problem-based learning (PBL), discovery-based learning (DBL), and undergraduate research that have been successfully employed at other institutions. We are incorporating cooperative, student-based learning (one component of PBL) by emulating the approach used at the University of Delaware, where Dr. Harold White uses cooperative learning in chemistry and Dr. Deborah Allen uses peer-tutoring in biology. Another component of PBL is using relevant issues to introduce non-science majors to the scientific method and content. To accomplish this, we are adapting the model used in the American Chemical Society textbook, Chemistry in Context, by using current environmental issues as vehicles for students to learn important concepts in biology, chemistry, and physics. In addition, we are adapting examples of issues in environmental justice used Dr. Janan Hayes of Merced College, Dr. Patricia Perez of Mount San Antonio College, and Dr. Barbara Tewksbury of Hamilton College who report that these are of particular interest to women and minority students. We also are adapting and implementing DBL as practiced by Drs. Richard Moog and James Spencer at Franklin and Marshall College where students learn chemistry through guided research or experimentation instead of through transmittal by textbooks or class lectures. We are creating a series of discovery-based lesson plans that include guided discovery worksheets that help students formulate their own questions, identify information they need to answer those questions, and make conclusions based on evidence they obtain. Finally, we are incorporating undergraduate research in our course following a model used at the College of New Jersey. Faculty there have developed a Faculty Student Research Course that focuses on involving undergraduate students in research with well-developed, rigorous curricular objectives. Using this model, we plan to engage students in two types of research projects in our course: carefully controlled mini-projects conducted in the laboratory, and more complex, community-based research activities in the field doc6663 none Engineering - Other (59) This project adapts and builds on the work of the successful Learning Factory developed as a collaboration among Penn State University, the University of Washington, and the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez to close the competency gap among those students who are hired as manufacturing engineers and managers. This adaptation scheme is based on five major tasks: 1) adaptation and implementation of a more practice-balanced hands-on manufacturing engineering curriculum through development of two joint interdisciplinary engineering-business courses, Enterprise Conception and Enterprise Design; 2) enhancement of the Entrepreneurship-Manufacturing Innovation Laboratory Experience (E-MILE) for practice-based learning and innovation; 3) outreach to the academic, manufacturing, and pre-college communities; 4) collaboration with industry partners; and 5) project assessment to evaluate the progress of activities and impact on the learning process and to identify opportunities for continuous improvement. Building upon the Learning Factory model, this initiative is providing a new course of action in how to stimulate creativity and innovation in talented young professionals doc6664 none Biological Sciences (61) This project aims to strengthen the undergraduate curriculum in ecology through the development of an integrative series of laboratory modules for students majoring in ecology and marine biology. The project is an adaptation of a successful model developed at Middlebury College, VT, which strives to increase the integration and cohesiveness among classes through (1) the reapplication and reinforcement of common themes, including experimental design, hypothesis testing, and statistics, across multiple classes, (2) the establishment of common field sites, and (3) the development of a series of inquiry-based laboratory exercises that follow a similar format. The laboratory modules are patterned after the inquiry-based labs developed by Switzer and Shriner ( ), which use teacher-guided exercises and student-designed investigations to mimic the scientific process. Equipment secured through this project enables students to conduct a broader array of field and lab-based experiments and improves the resources available for computer assisted data acquisition and analysis. The primary goal of the project is to provide students with a stronger, more comprehensive background in the fundamentals of ecology while increasing their enthusiasm for learning and their appreciation for the scientific process. Thus, the success and effectiveness of the reform effort will be evaluated by assessing the students ability to think critically, formulate hypotheses, design experiments, and evaluate data. The project results will be disseminated nationally through (1) presentations at scientific meetings, (2) development of an interactive website and instructors workbook, and (3) summer workshops for educators, teachers, and graduate students on creating effective inquiry-based laboratories for high school and college ecology classes doc6665 none Computer Science (31) We are establishing a multimedia robotics laboratory to attract women into the computer information systems major. We believe that providing opportunities to construct and observe robots, as constrasted to typical pure programming, and to explore the combination of artistic and technological skills required in multimedia will be of particular interest to women. We are developing activities to use the new laboratory to verify our beliefs. We are adapting the laboratory projects created by Susan Fox of Macalester College and our multimedia activities are adapted from work by D Arcangtelis, Polack-Wahl and Zaidman and by Ross doc6666 none Political Science (85) Test data compiled by the University of Southern Mississippi indicate that many political science students frequently need direct assistance in developing their statistical and critical reasoning skills. Political science at USM attracts a large number of female students and students who are from under-represented populations. A survey of USM political science students in the Fall of indicated that they wanted opportunities to develop greater expertise in using computers to engage in data analysis. The department of political science has responded by offering two new courses in introductory statistics and research methods. These courses are designed to address their needs and provide them with a greater understanding of the practice of science. This project is an adaptation of classroom methods developed elsewhere. The Principal Investigator developed and used a similar approach at Grambling State University. (See Creating a Critical Thinking Learning Environment: Teaching Statistics to Social Science Undergraduates, PS: Political Science and Politics, , pp. 517-521.) This project is also adapting materials from (1) Beth Chance, Experience with Authentic Assessment Techniques in an Introductory Statistics course, Journal of Statistics Education, Vol. 5, No. 3, ; (2) Sandra Fillebrown, Using projects in an Elementary Statistics Course for Non-Majors, Journal of Statistics Education, Vol. 2, No. 2, ; (3) Gerald Giraud, Cooperative Learning and Statistics Learning, Journal of Statistics Education, Vol. 5, No. 3 ; and (4) Gary Smith, Learning Statistics by Doing Statistics, Journal of Statistics Education, Vol. 6, No. 3, . The project makes extensive use of peer interaction, following the suggestions made by Simon Hooper, Effects of Peer Interaction during computer based Mathematics Instruction, Journal of Educational Research, Vol. 41, No. 2, , pp. 180-189. We are refining a process for teaching statistical analysis, data analysis skills, and critical thinking to undergraduate students in political science in a way that will have a lasting impact. We are using computer-based technology in the classroom and teaching our students exploratory data analysis techniques. (See for example, John Tukey, Exploratory Data Analysis, Addison-Wesley, ; Lawrence Hamilton, Modern Data analysis: A first Course in Applied Statistics, Brooks Cole Publishers, ; James Mullenex, Box Plots: Basic and Advanced, Mathematics Teacher, , pp.108-112; Frederick Hartwig and Brian Dearning, Exploratory Data Analysis, Sage Publications, ; Peter Barbella, Lorraine Denby, and James Landwehr, Beyond Exploratory Data Analysis: The Randomization Test, Mathematics Teachers, , pp. 144-149; and Gretchen Davis, Using Data Analysis to Explore Class Enrollment, Mathematics Teacher, , pp. 104-106.) Our classroom environment is one of both collaborative learning (See, for example, Lois Rubin and Catherine Hebert, Model for Active Learning: Collaborative Peer Teaching, College Teaching, , pp. 26-30) and peer teaching (See, for example, Brian Keller, Chris Russell, and Heather Thompson, effects of Student-Centered Teaching on Student Evaluations in Calculus, Educational Research Quarterly, , pp. 79-93) where students work with a partner who is assigned based upon scores on a course pretest. The focus of this course is an experiential learning model. We are employing data sets drawn from two national social and political surveys used by researchers in political science - the General Social Survey ( to present) and the National Elections Studies Data sets ( to present), preparing samples of each year for use by students both as cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis (the use of real-life data sets has been adopted by a number of university faculty including faculty at Virginia Technical University, West Virginia State College, and Hunter College - CUNY). By using the same data that researchers use in their work, we are able to link research to teaching, and prepare our students to eventually design and carry out their own study using these data sources doc6667 none Engineering - Other (59) The goal of this program is to unify the dynamic systems and controls courses of chemical, electrical and mechanical engineering while still allowing some discipline- specific specialization. The project seeks to create a modern integrated curriculum and laboratory learning environment that promotes critical reasoning and problem solving skills, and applies them to the modeling, analysis, design, measurement, control and management of complex dynamic systems. In developing this curriculum the investigators are seeking to adapt and implement concepts and practices from NSF- supported coalitions, particularly the Foundations and Synthesis Coalitions, as well as other NSF funded CCLI grants. The specific focus of the program is on the development of a common required course, Process & Systems Dynamics, for chemical, electrical and mechanical engineering students, and three discipline- specific laboratory courses. The discipline- specific required courses -- Unit Operations Laboratory for chemical engineering, Automatic Controls for electrical engineering, and Engineering Synthesis Laboratory for mechanical engineering -- allow specialization at the advanced level, but preserve an interdisciplinary perspective by sharing experiments and projects. Students should emerge from the sequence with a firm understanding of the physical principles underlying engineering processes, and practical experience in the design, fabrication and testing of tangible products that synthesize multidisciplinary features doc6668 none Biological Sciences (61) To prepare undergraduate students for research in physiology and the sciences in general, we are providing an environment that simulates investigative research in a laboratory setting. Students are taking responsibility for the design of experiments, undertaking data collection on equipment that is similar to that seen in a working physiology laboratory, using data analysis software typically used in this area of research, and learning to communicate results of research to the scientific community. We are adapting from models introduced with NSF support at Villanova University and utilizing ideas on student-initiated experimental design published in the physiology education literature. As students are working on these projects in small groups of 3 to 4 students, team building and cooperative research skills are being developed that are essential to all scientists entering our field where there is a very strong emphasis on collaborative multi-investigator and multi-disciplinary research. During the first part of this inquiry-based laboratory course students are involved in moderately structured laboratory exercises that allows them to become familiar with the iWORX system - a computer driven data acquisition and analysis station linked with on-line simulation and instructional support. In these introductory exercises students conduct a selection of 4 laboratory experiments that investigate the effect of body mass and temperature on metabolic rate (oxygen consumption) in fishes, the effect of fatigue on muscle contraction, the effect of exercise on cardio-respiratory physiology and the regulation of fluid balance and body composition in humans. During the second part of the course, students design, conduct, analyze and report on one group investigation based on further study of one of the previous laboratory experimental systems or on a comparative model that more closely simulates physiological research in a field setting. One possibility is to investigate the relationships between metabolic rate and diving patterns of marine turtles using indirect calorimetry (oxygen and CO2 gas analyzers) and the most current technology available for the remote monitoring of diving vertebrates (time depth recorders). Alternately, blood chemistry changes during natural fasting of grey seal pups could be studied through the measurement of blood metabolites (spectrophotometric assays). Students are responsible for all aspects of the development of these investigations, from the starting hypothesis to the finishing formal conference style presentations of data at the end of the course. The equipment acquired to support this course is also increasing our ability to support motivated students in more intensive scientific inquiry through senior thesis research projects doc6669 none Interdisciplinary (99) The Colleges of Ceramics and Liberal Arts and Sciences at Alfred University and Alfred State College of Technology are extending their interactions through a multi-institutional and multi- disciplinary collaboration. An extended materials characterization laboratory is the support mechanism for the collaboration. The project is adapted from the Extended Physical Chemistry Laboratory project that has been established between the University of South Carolina at Spartansburg, Wofford College, and Converse College (NSF , NSF and NSF ). The goal of the project is to promote interaction between materials science, chemistry, geology, and environmental science for students and faculty through shared laboratory modules specifically designed to fit into each curriculum. Students with different educational backgrounds are working in problem solving situations in a team setting. The project challenges students to be organized in their interpretation and communication of data. The newly developed laboratory modules are based on experiments utilizing a remote sensing fiber optic module for Fourier transform infrared spectrometer, a simultaneous thermal analyzer (STA), and a gel permeation chromatography unit. Cross-disciplinary experiments are being developed based on examples of other NSF funded programs such as the Incorporation of Environmental Sciences with Chemistry (NSF and NSF ), which are being extended to include materials science. Materials science students are being combined with chemistry students in one classroom, similar to the program at Oberlin College, which set up a program to introduce materials thermal analysis into their chemistry laboratories (NSF doc6670 none Computer Science (31) This project develops and evaluates case study resources as an essential component of undergraduate human-computer interaction (HCI) instruction. The emphasis is on initial development and prototype evaluation. The work is integrated with an HCI textbook project already under development with a commercial publisher. The textbook differs dramatically from current offerings, interleaving the presentation of HCI content with a comprehensive scenario- based framework for the development of interactive systems. A key innovation of the new textbook is its use of a case study to introduce and exemplify the analysis, design, and evaluation framework. The project enhances this case study approach, by developing richer and more flexible online materials, and by building cases from three additional problem domains. The project leverages ongoing research on scenario-based development methods and incorporates the methodology concepts into undergraduate education. It also highlights the use of information technology in undergraduate education, for both content access and student project support doc6671 none Engineering - Materials Science (57) With advances in materials in fields as diverse as microelectronics, mechatronics and intelligent structures, the current undergraduate materials science curriculum falls short of providing students a solid interdisciplinary platform for coping with challenges to come. The project is developing an innovative Materials Engineering Laboratory at Cooper Union to engage students in exploring scientific concepts for all classes of materials in this interdisciplinary field. An objective of this project is to improve the existing materials engineering laboratory at Cooper Union in conjunction with the development of a materials science laboratory course to meet industry s current needs for bachelor s level engineers with an interdisciplinary background. The equipment being adapted by this project is usually found in research institutions or graduate level labs; the complete set is not normally found in undergraduate labs. In a novel step towards implementing a design approach to undergraduate materials science education, the new lab includes a sample fabrication system and electro-mechanical properties testing system, where students can iteratively synthesize and analyze their own samples. The design of the new course promises to fully integrate research in materials science within undergraduate education in an interactive, experiential way. Adding to the traditional undergraduate materials science laboratory course curricula, the project is adapting and implementing new experiments from the Electroceramics Research Group at the Department of Ceramics & Materials Engineering of Rutgers University. The new laboratory will thus advance efforts to establish a unique materials science and engineering laboratory that fosters a close interaction among mechanical, electrical and civil engineering curricula. Students are able to explore the fundamentals for all types of materials including polymers, metals, ceramics and some specific materials used in intelligent structures such as actuators and sensors. Project results will be disseminated through workshops, presentations at conferences, and journal publications doc6672 none Interdisciplinary (99) This project is enhancing the Environmental Studies Program at Gettysburg College by introducing a Spatial Analysis Laboratory and associated curriculum to provide rigorous education and hands-on training in spatial information technologies that are critical to environmental analysis and problem solving. Complex environmental problems are commonly situated in geographic contexts. These problems can be addressed by analyzing spatially referenced data through the use of geographic information systems (GIS), global positioning systems (GPS), and remote sensing (RS). The project goal is giving undergraduate students a strong foundation in the fundamental concepts, methods, and environmental applications of these technologies so that they will be prepared to assume leading roles in environmental research and policy analysis in the private and public sectors and graduate research contexts. The project is adapting three successful programs to fit the needs of undergraduate environmental studies students: programs at Middlebury College and Mount Holyoke College as well as the core curriculum in GIS developed by the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA). The NCGIA curriculum is being modified and extended by including content on GPS and RS. Three new courses are being implemented: (1) Introduction to Geographical Information Systems, (2) Environmental Applications of Spatial Information Technologies, and (3) Remote Sensing of the Environment. Laboratory components of the courses are promoting active and collaborative learning through individual and group projects. Students are examining environmental issues by exercising a student-developed and maintained (with faculty supervision) environmental database for the surrounding region-an innovative feature of the laboratory components. The project also integrates spatial information technologies into undergraduate thesis research. Interdisciplinary instruction and research is being conducted using ArcInfo, ArcView, and Idrisi GIS and image processing software doc6673 none Interdisciplinary (99) This project is adapting from widely used texts and laboratory manuals existing inquiry-based, field-tested laboratory exercises developed for introductory or general education courses in physics, biology, and chemistry. Exercises are being modified so that they can be performed using laboratory equipment specifically designed for middle school use. All lab exercises are utilizing the same basic core equipment, so that students can concentrate on the inquiry and not on learning how to use multiple pieces of highly specialized equipment. The modified lab exercises will be made available for other users, though publication and web-based dissemination doc6674 none Chemistry (12) This award has provided funds to upgrade a Varian EM-390 continuous wave nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer to a modern Fourier transform (FTNMR) instrument and to purchase a new Fourier transform infrared spectrometer (FTIR). These instruments are traditionally used in upper-level courses such as Organic Chemistry and Instrumental Methods of Analysis. However, this award is allowing their use across the entire undergraduate curriculum, including Survey Chemistry, General Chemistry, and Biochemistry as well as the traditional courses. The experiments in each course are being adapted from the research and educational literature and after appropriate modification, implemented into our courses. The experiments utilizing these instruments are capturing the interest of the students, integrating cutting-edge technology into their laboratory experience, and impacting student learning for all students, major and non-major alike doc6675 none NM Schneider AEOS The Advanced Electro-Optical System (AEOS) of the Air Force with the adaptive optics system will be used in conjunction with an available CCD imaging system equipped with special purpose interference filters to observe sub-arc second features in Io s escaping atmosphere. Specifically, the PI plans to accomplish 1. Map the structure of Io s escaping atmosphere, 2. Identify the finest spatial structures in the Io plasma tours, and relate them to the torus supply and transport processes and 3. Make the first simultaneous observations of atmospheric escape and volcanic activity on the satellite surface. Observations will be made at the following wavelengths: 766 nm, 953 nm, 673 nm, 630 nm, 589 nm. Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. Many of the observations of planets outside our solar system are of objects similar to Jupiter. It is important that astronomers understand our solar system s planet Jupiter and its satellites as part of understanding the formation of planetary systems and thus the origins of the solar system. Io is a satellite of Jupiter and of significant interest. It is close enough to the giant planet Jupiter to suffer significant tidal forces that sustain a liquid core and cause significant volcanic activity on the surface. Ionized particles are observed to stream from the satellite into Jupiter. This work will aid our understanding of the interaction of gravity fields between two bodies, the chemistry of planet and satellite formation and the interactions between charged particles and magnetic fields doc6676 none This project adapts tools developed for use in mathematics courses (STELLA, Mathematica) to develop the quantitative skills of students in geology laboratories and courses. Students in upper-level geology courses and one mid-upper-level geology course are using these tools to analyze data and construct dynamic models. Each course emphasizes a different aspect of mathematical modeling: Oceans and Atmospheres (dynamic system modeling with STELLA and EXCEL), GIS, Remote Sensing and Spatial Modeling in Environmental Sciences (spatial modeling, geostatistics, decision making), Modeling in the Geosciences (iterative modeling, self-organized criticality, non-linear responses), and Hydrology (2- and 3-D models of groundwater flow, streamflow, and the hydrologic cycle in watersheds). Modeling projects are also being added to existing courses, such as Geomorphology, Paleobiology, Tectonics, and Structural Geology, and Introductory Geology. Student research projects (required for the geology major) are enhanced by the availability of sophisticated modeling tools and instruction in those tools that emphasize comparing models, testing them with field-collected data, and understanding their limitations rather than simply learning technical computer skills. Project results, including new teaching exercises and research, are being presented at professional meetings and workshops and made available on the Web. Faculty are developing real-world, collaborative exercises incorporating mathematical modeling skills, using examples from previously funded NSF projects and workshops, especially the PKAL workshop on Building the Quantitative Skills of Non-majors and Majors in Earth and Planetary Science Courses and its follow-up publication in the Journal of Geoscience Education (volume 48). As part of a program of faculty development to support these changes, faculty are continuing to participate in on-campus and external training and workshops. The primary courses are taught to twenty to forty students each year; the supplementary material in other courses reach anywhere from 90 (not including Introductory Geology) to 240 students each year (including Introductory Geology). Faculty in the Geology and Mathematics and Computer Science Departments and an external expert are evaluating the project doc6677 none Biological Sciences (61) Recent growth in genomic research and microbiology at Middlebury College has generated interest in the genomic modification of eukaryotic cells and in the visual examination of the phenotypic effects of such modification. Students now use green fluorescent protein (GFP) to naturally tag wild- type and mutant E2F transcription factors, follow their localization and monitor their function in cultured mammalian cells, in an extended laboratory project newly adapted and implemented as a paradigm for the genomic modification of eukaryotic cells. They examine these genomically modified cells using inverted microscopes equipped for fluorescence and differential interference contrast optics in a newly constructed Imaging Facility. They also use a cryostat and this facility, including upright microscopes with fluorescence and DIC optics, for advanced study and course research projects in endocrinology, immunology, and developmental biology as well as cell biology. Additionally, provision of these microscopes with digital capturing, display and storage capabilities allows students to work at each work station in small groups and encourages their active collaboration in data collection and analysis. Procedures implemented in this project are adapted from various sources, including the scientific literature (e. g., Magae et al., ; Kavaler et al., ; Parfitt and Newman, ) and monographs and technical manuals (e. g., Conn, ; Lefkovits, ). The results of this project are evaluated primarily through the analysis of portfolios of student reports prepared before and after they used the Imaging Facility, fluorescence and DIC microscopes, and cryostat and by tracking student outcomes during matriculation and following graduation doc6678 none Mathematical Sciences (21) The purpose of the project is to extend the curriculum reform and the use of computer technology to introductory courses into linear algebra, differential equations, and statistics. The curriculum reform involves a thorough revision and restructure of the three courses and includes the adaptation and implementation of appropriate material for computer-based instruction and extended student projects in these areas. Several programs are adapted and implemented into the curriculum, e.g., the Linear Algebra Curriculum Study Group Recommendations for the First Course in Linear Algebra developed by D. Carlson, C.R. Johnson, D.C. Lay and A.D. Porter, the ODE project developed at Boston University, and ActivStats developed by P. Velleman. Per year, these three courses are offered in 35 sections of about 40 students each, with a campus-wide total enrollment of more than students. To serve these students, a 40-seat classroom laboratory is constructed with networked workstations and audiovisual equipment. About half of the time, this laboratory is used for in-class instruction, while, the remaining time, students work on computer-based projects, often in a collaborative environment. Graduate teaching assistants who are carefully trained in the relevant software and its use in the specific areas staff the laboratory. Workshops for faculty development and graduate student training are designed and offered on a regular basis. These workshops have an important impact on the mathematics education for pre-service and in-service teachers in the region. Materials and results are disseminated both electronically and through publication and presentation. The success of the project is monitored through a variety of fine-tuned evaluation and assessment instruments doc6679 none Chemistry (12) Experiments in molecular biology are added to the students biochemistry laboratory experience to reflect state-of-the-art techniques and procedures. In addition to protein isolation and characterization, enzyme kinetics, and carbohydrate or lipid isolation and characterization, emphasis is placed on such techniques of modern molecular biology as DNA isolation, gene isolation and cloning, the polymerase chain reaction, cell transfection and gene expression. The following molecular biology experiments are among those being adapted from standard literature and implemented in the Biochemistry laboratory. Bacteria are transformed with a plasmid including the gene for green fluorescent protein (GFP). The GFP is isolated using procedures from standard literature and characterized by electrophoresis and fluorescence spectroscopy. The identity of GFP is confirmed using an immunoassay with anti-GFP polyclonal antibodies. The plasmid with the GFP gene is isolated from the bacterial culture and characterized by restriction analysis. Some of the isolated plasmid is reserved to transform cells at the beginning of the semester that follows. An ultracentrifuge is used for DNA and plasmid isolation. A plate reader is used to read the results of the immunoassay and for enzyme kinetics experiments. Multipipettors are used to facilitate the completion of the plate assays doc6680 none Physics (13) A joint University of Virginia physics-engineering task force has recommended on the basis of the ABET criteria a restructuring of the two semester problem session introductory physics labs for 450 engineering students. The results of physics education research in the s indicate that there should be more reliance on computer-based tools and new methods of instruction and grading. The project is adopting the Real Time Physics curriculum as the basis for a new two hour per week workshop laboratory in mechanics, heat and thermodynamics, and electromagnetism. In addition, the project is adapting and implementing as many exemplary commercial products as possible, but utilizing these products in innovative ways. Assessment and evaluation will be crucial in order both to improve the workshop experience for students and to educate them in the best way possible. There previously was no lab experience for the first semester course. The project is combining the former problem recitation session and laboratory (second semester only) into a workshop that consists of a) A pre-workshop activity utilizing the internet based WebAssign program to present a series of conceptual and numerical problems to prepare the students for the two hour workshop. b) Utilizing Real Time Physics as the laboratory experience with computer tools (probes and software) to engage students in active learning. There will be new computers for the cooperative learning groups and probes from PASCO and Vernier. c) A post workshop activity using peer ranking essay questions on WebAssign that test the students understanding of the concepts presented in the workshop doc6681 none Biological Sciences (61) Student learning can be enhanced by engaging the student and by providing an appropriate context for learning. This can be accomplished by developing investigative exercises that require student participation in experimental design and provide realistic research experience. An inquiry-based approach also moves away from the once-standard cookbook approach to teaching experimental protocols. If the student must plan the course of the experiment, s he is required to think about individual steps rather than simply following directions. This project is carrying the investigative approach one step further: linking investigative activities in the laboratory sessions for two courses frequently taken by the same students, Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. These courses form the core of the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology major and minor at Wittenberg University. Co-ordination of the laboratory exercises of these two courses is centered on an investigation of the relationships among gene sequence, protein sequence, protein structure, and protein stability using Staphylococcal nuclease, a small compact, well-defined protein, as a model system. Students identify appropriate regions of Staphylococcal nuclease for mutagenesis, complete mutagenesis and sequence determination of the variants, and sub-clone the variant sequences into an expression vector in the Molecular Biology laboratory. They continue their investigation in the Biochemistry laboratory through protein purification and analysis of the purified mutant protein to determine both activity and stability. Students are given the opportunity to master experimental design, implementation, and data interpretation in a realistic research context. They have the opportunity to develop and then test their own theories of protein structure and learn techniques in the context of a research program. The project is an adaptation of Darwin , using this example as a model for nuclease analysis doc6682 none Engineering - Other (59) This project is an integrated effort by the Faculty of Engineering to develop effective methods for teaching engineering from an applied, multidisciplinary point of view. The project adapts the well-proven pedagogy of reverse engineering , and implements this strategy for the study of the human body, an exquisite combination of interacting systems that can be analyzed using multidisciplinary engineering principles. We have developed a series of eight hands-on modules that introduce chemical, mechanical, and electrical engineering principles through application to the human body. The goals of this project are to: (1) Engage students in the scientific discovery process via exploration of the engineering systems within the human body using exciting hands-on reverse engineering methods. (2) To introduce all of the proposed modules into the multidisciplinary Freshman Engineering Clinic course which is required of all freshmen at Rowan University. (3) To integrate the modules vertically into courses in the Chemical, Mechanical, and Electrical Engineering curricula, and the Health Sciences Department doc6683 none The use of silicon-based technology, originally developed for microelectronics applica-tions, in the fabrication of microelectromechanical and microfluidic structures has ushered in a new era in which complex tasks can be performed by efficient, miniaturized devices. However, one limitation of the current generation of silicon-based technologies is that it is extraordinarily difficult to fabricate devices have a significant number ( 4) of functional layers. The number of potential applications of microdevices would expand geometrically if it were possible to fabricate microdevices that were not constricted by the present layer-by- layer fabrication scheme, but instead were truly three-dimensional. We are proposing to develop and utilize a completely new set of technologies for non-silicon-based microfabrication of true three-dimensional devices. Our scheme takes ad-vantage of multiphoton absorption (MPA) interactions that occur selectively at the tight fo-cus of a laser beam to attain high three-dimensional resolution. The proposed technology begins with a nanoporous matrix that is solidified and etched selectively in different spatial areas, based on MPA, in order to create the three-dimensional template for a microdevice. Localized MPA-driven photodeposition and other MPA-driven photoreactions, photo-chemical processes and photophysical processes are then used to create functional compo-nents within the matrix, with submicron feature sizes. Through these means, it will be pos-sible to incorporate a wide variety of functionalities in a single, monolithic three-dimensional device. Over the proposed three-year project period, we will develop MPA-based technologies to make a broad range of functional fluidic, electronic, optical and mechanical components. These components will be combined to fabricate increasingly complex three-dimensional microdevices that will allow for the miniaturization of technologically important tasks in areas such as combinatorial synthesis and screening of drug candidates and low-temperature device physics. By the end of the project period we expect to be able to inte-grate such devices directly onto silicon-based microchips doc6684 none The miniaturization of devices, components, and systems represents a growing trend in nearly all areas of technology. In particular, this trend is having a significant impact in the areas of biofluidics, imaging, and communications. In this effort we focus on a technology common to each of these applications, namely, spectral filtering. The spectrometers currently used in these applications are typically large in comparison to their companion system. To this end the work addressed in this proposal is targeted at developing such a spectrometer, i.e., a spectrometer on a chip. Our spectrometer consists of a diffractive lenslet array fabricated on the micron-scale, a precision pin-hole, and a focal plane array. The idea is based on the fact that light of different wavelengths, when incident on a diffractive lens, comes to focus at different axial locations. Therefore, by placing a pinhole at the appropriate axial location of a particular spectral focus, one can effectively perform spectral filtering using a spatial filter. Thus, by scanning the pinhole and reading off the response electronically a complete spectral response, spatially registered to a detector array, can be obtained. The proposed system will be realized through the design of meso-scopic diffractive lenses using custom electromagnetic design algorithms, they will be fabricated using multi-level electron beam lithography and RIE etching, and the pin-hole array will be fabricated in a silicon MEMS scanner. The system will be integrated with readout circuitry using flip-chip bonding doc6685 none Tedesco Radiometric measurements of Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) at wavelengths of 0.55 micrometers and 10.6 micrometers are used to derive albedos and diameters to refine asteroid thermal models. NEA population s size frequency distribution enables an accurate estimate of the population density distributoin. The origin and evolution of the NEA s are derived from these measurements. This information is critical to our understanding of the origins and the evolution of asteroids within the solar system provides fundamental research insight into the probability of an asteroid striking the earth. Asteroids striking the earth are now believed to have contributed to several very significant changes in life on the surface of our planet. There appear to be three or four times since life first appeared on the earth that the effects of asteroids striking the earth have eliminated almost all forms of life for thousands of years. This innovative proposal will lay the foundation for future understanding of solar-system interactions. Radiometric measurements are recorfded using the 3.67-meter Advanced Electro-Optical System of the US Air Force in this joint NSF Air Force program doc6686 none Schmittmann This grant supports theoretical research on systems far from thermal equilibrium. The goal is the characterization and understanding of complex behavior in interacting many-particle systems, driven into steady states far from thermal equilibrium. A combination of computational and analytical techniques, formulated on the lattice or the continuum, will be brought to bear on various systems, from Ising-like models to selected experiments. In contrast to Gibbsean ensemble theory, there is as yet no fundamental theoretical framework for a comprehensive classification of nonequilibrium phenomena. Even the study of nonequilibrium steady states, being the simplest generalizations of equilibrium states, is far from complete. Given the ubiquity of such states in a broad range of physical systems, formulating a theory with predictive power remains one of the key challenges of condensed matter physics. Seeking to characterize generic large scale properties and universal behavior, the focus will be on minimal model systems of the Ising type, inspired by the successful role which the latter played in equilibrium statistical mechanics. An external drive, suitably applied, prevents such systems from reaching equilibrium; instead, they settle into nonequilibrium steady states. Energy is injected by the drive and absorbed by the thermal bath so that a non-trivial, steady through-flux is established. Such systems display much richer phenomena than their equilibrium cousins, including generic long-range correlations, novel nonequilibrium phase transitions and unexpected ordered structures. Significant insights have been gained, illustrating the key role played by global currents and basic symmetries, e.g., detailed balance and conservation laws. In contrast to equilibrium systems, however, the dynamics inherently affects steady state properties, so that even minor modifications of the microscopic rules can affect macroscopic behavior in profound, entirely unanticipated ways. The challenge is to craft a reliable theoretical picture which can serve as a guide from the microscopic to the macroscopic. In the first part of the research, investigations will continue on collective behavior of driven lattice gases. Despite their apparent simplicity, these models provide a variety of complex phenomena and pose new challenges. Examples include shape-dependent thermodynamics, new universality classes of critical behavior, anomalous interfacial correlations, novel phases, and peculiar domain growth. Further investigations of these simple models should furnish steps toward the long-range goal: a meaningful classification of macroscopic nonequilibrium steady states based on their underlying dynamics. The second part of the research introduces three new pursuits: polymer crystallization, granular materials, and population dynamics. Governed by nonequilibrium dynamics, these phenomena have been extensively studied experimentally. Being physical systems, these are clearly much more complex than driven Ising models. However, the tools used here, honed in the study of simple models, should serve well in analyzing experimental data and understanding the essence of these systems. In both parts of the research, projects range from well-defined, short-term studies, for which progress is certain, to long-term ventures involving more fundamental and complex issues. Although they require substantial thought and time, the problems in the latter category deserve attention, since they promise deeper insights into the general nature of nonequilibrium steady states. %%% This grant supports theoretical research on systems far from thermal equilibrium. The goal is the characterization and understanding of complex behavior in interacting many-particle systems, driven into steady states far from thermal equilibrium. A combination of computational and analytical techniques, formulated on the lattice or the continuum, will be brought to bear on various systems, from Ising-like models to selected experiments doc6687 none 34) Software Engineering This work develops a project testbed and corresponding hands-on exercises to introduce the software development of event-driven systems, an area of great interest to industry. The testbed uses the theme of a home automation system to introduce the idea of embedded appliances and to motivate students by making the exercises fun and interesting. Student work simulates real world development by providing incremental exercises that together comprise a semester-long project , covering the critical elements in the software development process lifecycle. With a diverse and interesting set of external entities, students observe the effects of changes in the requirements as the instructor introduces real-world problems in concurrency and uncertainty and illustrates the effects of dynamic external entities. The target group includes undergraduate students majoring in computer science and computer engineering. The developed materials can be duplicated easily and inexpensively at other educational institutions. The use of these student projects begins to address deficiencies in software engineering education and better prepares students for a career in software engineering doc6688 none Chemistry (12) Faculty in the Colleges of Science and Education have been working collaboratively for the past three years in addressing problems of student performance and retention in first semester chemistry. During this period, faculty recognized the need to examine their own practice including design of course curriculum, the quality of the problem-solving, in-class activities for students, and the alignment of course components and the importance of addressing problems of achievement and retention from multiple solution paths. The objectives being addressed in the current project include: (1) revision of the course curriculum and BONDing (Building Opportunities for Networking and Discussion) sessions through adaptation adoption of aspects of the NSF Chemistry Initiatives and the integration of technology-based instructional tools and models, (2) professional development of faculty in order to facilitate implementation of these reforms, (3) continually building a professional learning community. The objectives are being accomplished through an action plan in which a cross-disciplinary faculty team simultaneously addresses curriculum revision, meaningful learning, and innovative instructional approaches. Curriculum reform efforts, including use of technology, are well-established methods to improve the learning of under-prepared and or diverse student populations. Mechanisms for extensive collaborations have been established with community colleges in the area through the Region V Area Center for Educational Enhancement doc6689 none Computer Science (31) We are creating and refining materials for a two-course undergraduate sequence in the area of e-commerce to meet two nationwide educational needs in computer science: 1) the lack of tested course materials in the area of e-commerce, and 2) the lack of significant opportunities for computer science students to pursue team work in an interdisciplinary setting. The first course covers web technology for computer science majors and minors; the second is a unique interdisciplinary e-commer course open to students of all disciplines. In the second course, CS students have a different set of requirements than non-CS students as they provide technical expertise learned in the first course to student teams doc6690 none Engineering - Materials Science (57) Five Packaging Science undergraduate laboratory courses that include segments concerned with packaging materials are being modified with the following objectives: to incorporate more science-based learning; to significantly increase the understanding and hands-on experience of undergraduate students with state-of-the-art materials science characterization and investigative techniques as applied to Packaging Science; to maximize collaborative, discovery-based learning; and to ensure that our sophomore, junior and senior level laboratory experiences are appropriately integrated and pyramided. The project is adapting collaborative learning strategies from Millis at the US Air Force Academy and Cottrell at Miami University; Johnson and Johnson at University of Minnesota; and Felder at North Carolina State University, among others. The project objectives are enabled by the acquisition of state-of-the-art materials characterization instrumentation, especially thermal analysis, to augment the existing, extensive gas permeation equipment and new physical testing capabilities. The techniques and interpretative skills of using this instrumentation to understand the inter-relationships of processing, structure and properties of the wide variety of materials used for packaging are well-known. Until now, their integration into the undergraduate Packaging Science curriculum has been rudimentary. With the collaboration of the Clemson Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation, the new laboratory exercises and revised courses are being designed to move from individual, problem-based learning to collaborative, discovery-based learning. The Clemson Web-based Collaborative Learning Environment is being used to promote learning communities within and across classes. Surveys of students and alumni are providing feedback on the effectiveness and usefulness of the changes. The findings and results are being disseminated to other Packaging Science programs, to other interested educators within and outside of the University, and to the packaging industry doc6691 none Mathematical Sciences (21) The proposed project focuses on improving student mathematical achievement at the University of Virginia by expanding a pilot implementation of the WeBWorK online homework system. We will develop comprehensive libraries of WeBWorK problems to be used in Math 111 (Probability Discrete Mathematics), Math 121-122 (Applied Calculus I and II), and Math 131-132 (Calculus I and II), courses with a total annual enrollment of approximately students. These libraries will allow us to easily expand WeBWorK to all sections of the above courses. The problem libraries will be indexed for use at the University of Virginia and other institutions. To provide increased support for student learning, we will also develop an extensive collection of online sample problems with solutions, available in both HTML and as video clips. The project will include two summer workshops for regional postsecondary and secondary teachers interested in learning about the WeBWorK system, and will provide assistance to those interested in implementing the system. An ongoing evaluation and dissemination program is fully integrated into the project doc6692 none Chemistry (12) This project brings a collaborative learning experience to more than 800 students per year in organic chemistry laboratories for non-majors at the institution. Students participate in three-week collaborative learning experiments involving realistic scenarios in which students isolate, characterize, and identify an unknown chemical, using a high-field NMR spectrometer, and present their findings in a poster session. Students use methods employed by natural products chemists in modern laboratories and, as part of the identification process, learn to collect and process NMR and FTIR data using state-of-the-art instruments. The challenge of integrating a hands-on NMR experience into a course serving such a large number of students is met by establishing an open instrument laboratory staffed by teaching assistants and by developing a WWW-based scheduling system for small-group training sessions. The collaborative learning exercises are adaptations of approaches published in standard literature and journals doc6693 none Engineering - Electrical (55) During the last decade, the semiconductor industry has significantly increased its demand for engineering talent, yet the supply of recent graduates with relevant experience has declined, especially in the areas of analog and mixed-signal integrated circuit design. This project addresses the problem by measurably increasing the number of undergraduates with direct experience in integrated circuit design, specifically in the areas of (i) digital, analog and mixed-signal circuit design, (ii) layout and fabrication techniques, and (iii) design for test. Key topics from graduate-level VLSI curricula are being adapted to form a new curriculum targeted towards undergraduates. Course notes and laboratory manuals from VLSI courses offered by Iowa State University and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville serve as the primary source material. The two-course elective sequence focuses on digital and mixed-signal design at the circuit and layout levels. Laboratory experiences reinforce the course material, and encourage students to use commercial-grade CAD tools such as Cadence to implement and simulate designs, and to gain experience with mixed-signal test instruments including mixed-signal oscilloscopes and arbitrary waveform generators. VLSI chips designed by students are fabricated by the MOSIS service and tested in the laboratory. It is anticipated that 30% of each graduating class of Rose-Hulman electrical and computer engineering students will participate in the program. Course notes, lab manuals, and example design projects resulting from the curriculum development work will be disseminated via an Internet web server doc6694 none Interdisciplinary (99) Chemistry (12) Physics (13) Biological Sciences (61) This multidisciplinary project is improving Arizona Western College s (AWC) Chemistry, Biology and Physics Astronomy laboratory curricula and the joint AWC Northern Arizona University-Yuma 2+2 Environmental Science program with new laboratory activities that use ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy (UV-Vis). AWC is designated by the Department of Education as a Hispanic Serving Institution. Experiments and protocols from a wide variety of sources including the research and educational literature are being combined and adapted to create the laboratory activities. In Chemistry courses, students use the UV-Vis to conduct a photoassisted reaction that mineralizes an organic dye, analyze the campus pool s disinfectant capacity, test for lead in Mexican glazed pottery, and characterize the absorption spectra of two thermochromic compounds. Biology students are elucidating the structure-function molecular motif from the absorption spectra of plant pigments chlorophyll a and b, and anthocyanins. Students in Physics Astronomy are studying how particulate matter preferentially scatters more energetic wavelengths and how the interaction between matter and light helps explain red-orange sunsets and sunrises, and cosmological phenomena. Environmental Science students are carrying out a temporal and spatial water quality study of the local desert watershed (Colorado River, Martinez and Mittry Lakes), and analyzing for ammonia and phosphate in both cultivated and uncultivated soils to determine the potential impact for contamination of the local groundwater supply. The multidisciplinary use of the UV-Vis spectrometers: 1) allows faculty to incorporate new laboratory experiments into the curriculum and hence expand topic coverage, 2) allows faculty to teach topics that were previously relegated to lecture because of non-existent instrumentation capacity, 3) gives students hands-on experience with modern instrumentation and methodology, 4) shifts student focus more towards data analysis, and 5) creates undergraduate research opportunities for community college students. The successes and challenges of implementing the spectrophotometric lab activities into the curricula will be shared with the science education community at large via journal submissions and presentations at regional and national meetings doc6695 none Interdisciplinary (99) Chemistry (12) Biological Sciences (61) Physics (13) Essentially all the students at Mercy College who are taking physics and chemistry courses are preparing for medical, health, or bioscience careers. In this era of ever-increasing medical and biological sophistication and technology, these students not only need a firm foundation of physics and chemistry principles but need to be able to apply these principles in the scientific reasoning involved in making decisions and judgements about human and biological systems. There are no physics or chemistry majors at Mercy so we are in a position to devote ourselves to the needs of this particular student audience. We are incorporating computer technology into the physics and chemistry curriculum in a coordinated way in order to better prepare these students for their further coursework and their intended careers. The modifications in physics are based on adapting aspects of Realtime Physics, Workshop Physics, and Tutorials in Introductory Physics to create new experiments designed to provide direct relevance for students majoring in the life sciences. In chemistry, adaptation of computer-interfaced activities developed by the Middle Atlantic Discovery Chemistry Project and of several ChemLinks modules along with other existing laboratory experiments provide the basis for the new work. Through the use of laptop computers, whose portability allows multiple use, we are computerizing the general physics and general chemistry laboratory activities utilizing interface and sensor equipment. In doing so, we are incorporating human biological relevance and inquiry-based pedagogy. The computers also are being used to computerize laboratory activities in the biochemistry course and in the non-science major chemistry course. Finally, a Science Learning Center is being established in which the computers are used as a networked active learning resource. This center is staffed by tutors who offer students support in the use of web-based and CDROM active learning materials, under the guidance of the science faculty doc6696 none Ten Brummelaar The AEOS system with its operational adaptive optics system will observe a large (186) sample of spectral type O and B stars in the I spectral band to detect and characterize multiple stars. The high spatial resolution obtainable with the adaptive optics will enable the measurement of magnitude differences as high as 8 in order to investigate the mass ratio between the stars within a binary star pair. With a B0 spectral type primary, the detection of an early M star companion is predicted. Orbit determination using double-lined spectroscopic binary information from other telescopes and the estimate of the spectral types from the photometric measurements made with AEOS will enable an estimate of mass. These studies are important to our understanding of the formation of planetary systems, and recycling and processing of gas and dust within galaxies doc6697 none Engineering - Chemical (53) The pedagogy of teaching chemical reaction engineering is continually advancing through the use of new computational tools such as POLYMATH and MATLAB; interactive computer applications; and a new emphasis in textbooks on relating theory to industrially relevant chemical reactions. What is currently lacking in this area are chemical reaction engineering experiments that employ realistic reaction engineering systems. Nearly all of the reaction engineering experiments reported in the literature employ simple experiments that can be described using a single overall reaction. In addition, most laboratory experiments do not examine the process fluid mechanics of the reactor and how this effects the product distribution. As a result, students only visualize reactors through theory and do not experience realistic reactor systems in their undergraduate courses. This lack of experience eliminates a major engineering challenge in designing and troubleshooting a reactor in which the yield and selectivity are optimized along with the process economics. This project is developing several experiments that employ the following features currently not being addressed in published reaction engineering experiments: 1) byproduct formation, 2) green engineering, 3) scale-up fluid mechanics and 4) equilibrium limited reactions. A series of experiments is being adapted from the research and educational literature using two chemical and one biological reacting systems. Specific adaptations are based on experiments developed by Wang at the University of Maryland, Bourne at the University of Birmingham, and Keyes at the University of Illinois, among others. These experiments are being vertically integrated through the following series of courses: chemistry, organic chemistry, process fluid transport, chemical reaction engineering, industrial process pathways, biochemical engineering, and unit operations doc6698 none Chemistry (12) A GC-MS is being incorporated throughout the chemistry curriculum. By adapting published experiments from the research or chemical education literature to the unique challenges and opportunities of our institution, we are developing novel pedagogical materials in both our majors courses as well as our non-majors courses. The GC-MS is having a major impact on our analytical instrumental chemistry courses and on an environmental chemistry course for non-science majors. Additional classes that are using the instrument include organic chemistry, natural products chemistry, synthesis techniques and introduction to chemical research. A major theme of this curriculum change is project-based investigations of complex samples that directly engage the students in scientific thinking. Use of the GC-MS allows us to continue a recent change in direction of our analytical program towards the analysis of complex, real world samples. Experiments in the non-majors course are designed with a focus on local environmental concerns such as how the air quality is affected by a local coal-powered steam train. Such hands-on experience is critical in effectively engaging minority groups and prospective K-12 teachers. An additional outcome of this project is that all biology and chemistry students are being exposed to modern analytical instrumentation that enhances their interest in molecular structural and dynamic studies. Research students have access to state-of-the-art instrumental methods, which is strengthening their preparation for graduate studies and industrial laboratory positions and inevitably improving the publication rate of undergraduate majors at our institution. The impact of this instrument improvement project will be felt by more than 800 students over the next five years, including approximately 150 Native American and Hispanic students in our program doc6699 none Biological Sciences (61) As part of a comprehensive reform to create a student-centered natural sciences learning community, we have implemented a new curriculum for Biology majors that stresses hands-on, experiential learning and provides progressively greater opportunities for semi-independent student research. In particular, our introductory biology course utilizes many approaches to assist Freshman students in transitioning to an active learning environment. First, to encourage students to embrace active learning, we have integrated an interactive, Web-based teaching strategy called Just-in-Time Teaching into the lecture component of the Principles of Biology I course. This strategy uses the rapid communication made possible by the Internet to keep students actively involved in the course and to allow the instructor to adjust lessons rapidly in response to student needs. Second, we utilize a desensitization strategy to address our students unfamiliarity with the role of technology in research. By introducing two new experimental packages (instruments and organisms) into the laboratory component of the course in a two-week format, we are able to reduce student anxiety and foster mentoring. These two new experimental packages are based on adaptations of a gene structure and genetic homology laboratory developed at Davidson College and a Sea Anemone energetics laboratory developed at Hood College. Pre-service teachers are involved in all aspects of the projects as Freshman students enrolled in the course and later on as graduate assistants. Saturday morning workshops provide additional exposure to hands-on learning activities for both pre-service and in-service teachers. The combination of active and interactive teaching strategies have particularly positive effects on learning doc6700 none Engineering - Electrical (55) The project, A Remote Wireless Sensing and Control Laboratory, provides an integrated laboratory experience in Electrical and Computer Engineering to Engineering students with a wide range of interests in Computer, Electrical, Civil Environmental, and Mechanical Engineering. Broad-ranging applications of the laboratory include smart sensors and person detection, web-based acquisition and control, and wireless communication system. Two particular applications encompassed by these projects include an intelligent security system, and an energy conservation system resulting from monitoring room usage. Experiments being adapted and extended for more in-depth and multi-disciplinary applications include several compiled in Agilent s Educator s Corner, as well as contributions from Springfield Technical Community College s The Wireless Telecommunications Laboratory Project. This multi- and inter-disciplinary Remote Wireless Sensing and Control Laboratory is being evaluated to determine how it can be most effectively utilized as a pedagogical tool. Assessment is being done by incorporating questions into surveys currently in use by Swarthmore s Engineering Department, including course evaluations, senior surveys, and alumni surveys that provide longitudinal information. Outside evaluators, including Swarthmore s Engineering Council, are also assessing the impact of this work on current students. Results are being compiled for dissemination via articles and presentations to ASEE s Journal of Engineering Education and Annual Meeting, and the Council on Undergraduate Research. Because web-module-development is integral to many experiments, especially those related to the web-based acquisition and control project, extensive use of the web is a critical component of this work. Results will also be posted and linked to sites such as Agilent s Educator s Corner doc6701 none Superfine The goal of this research is to study the control over molecular motors with an engineering applications perspective, exploring ways in which these machines can be used in designed systems, e. g., the synthesis and delivery of pharmacological agents. The specific goals of this research are to: (1) demonstrate the control of the patterning of motor raceways as functioning tracks for the motion of motor proteins, (2) study the two main classes of proteins actin myosin and microtubule kinesin to understand their relative merits towards nanotechnology applications, (3) study the application of single motors and collections of motor proteins, (4) study the coupling of nanotubes to electrical circuitry through electro dielectrokinesis at the nonometer scale, and (5) understand a processing methodology for incorporating nanometer scale ebeam lithography, nanotube placement growth, patterned chemical functionalization and motor binding and motility. This award is co-funded by the Division of Engineering Education and Centers, the Division of Chemical and Transport Systems, and the Division of Bioengineering and Environmental Systems doc6702 none Chemistry (12) Computerized data acquisition is introduced in introductory chemistry laboratories through use of handheld personal computers (HPCs). This is an affordable approach that permits individual computers to be available at each student work station without crowding existing laboratory space. These computers, although much smaller than PCs, are powerful enough for most laboratory applications and operate in manner that closely matches the screen display of conventional computers. They use similar operating systems and programming languages and conventional serial data converters. Software is designed to closely match the conventional graphics windows of PCs and most experiments include Web based prelab and post lab exercises on conventional PCs, including simulations that use nearly identical commands and screen appearance. The goals are to provide a cost effective method to modify existing courses to reflect modern chemical instrumentation and the role of computers in laboratories. The types of experiments included in the curriculum and adapted for use with the HPCS are being expanded, with emphasis on selecting those with a strong visual component, such as where the data appears as a graph in a few minutes. Such short experiments permit multiple runs and allow visual comparisons of the effect of variations in experimental conditions. The program affects approximately students over the next five years and has strong potential to serve as a model at other institutions doc6703 none Physics (13) An Optics for Scientists and Engineers Laboratory Course is being developed and implemented to provide undergraduate students with the fundamentals necessary to enable them to successfully apply optics in their respective disciplines. The course is targeted to a wide cross section of students (electrical engineering, physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering, biology, etc.). An interdisciplinary faculty team from the Electrical and Computer Engineering, Chemistry, and Physics Departments is implementing and teaching the course. The course includes a capstone optics experiment related to each student s academic major. For many students, this is their only optics course. The annual one semester course consists of 30 hours of lecture and 45 hours in the laboratory. Exemplary laboratory experiments developed under NSF auspices at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Boston University are being adapted and implemented. A commercially available fiber optics kit is also being used. The incorporation of extensive hands-on optics experience is a key component of the course. Four laboratory stations are equipped with research grade optics kits. Not more than two students work at each station, and they are expected to select and set-up components from their kit to the maximum extent possible. The goal is to provide graduates capable of putting basic optics principles to work in their careers, e.g. for optical communications, machine vision, spectroscopy, etc. or in graduate school doc6704 none Biological Sciences (61) Chemistry (12) Science faculty at Bowdoin College strive to optimize undergraduate learning by incorporating modern analytical techniques into inquiry-based laboratory exercises that allow for meaningful intellectual and creative input from students, and through their oversight of undergraduate-led research projects. Currently, Bowdoin undergraduates majoring in biology, biochemistry and environmental studies receive little exposure to the essential modern techniques of chromatography and spectroscopy. Chemistry majors, although grounded in the principles of these methods, generally do not gain experience with them in the context of complex analytical problems. This project introduces undergraduates to the principles and applications of chromatography and spectroscopy via high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The project is interdisciplinary in nature and involves undergraduates and faculty from all of the above-mentioned departments. The specific goals of the project are to 1) enable Bowdoin undergraduates across departments to learn the principles, techniques and applications of chromatography and spectroscopy via the use of an HPLC with diode array detection, 2) develop course laboratories designed to convey deep understanding of these modern techniques and also to facilitate inquiry-based learning by enabling students to pursue hypotheses of their own creation in self-designed laboratory projects, 3) foster the use of chromatography and spectroscopy in undergraduate-led research, 4) create informed lesson plans centered on HPLC technology for dissemination among science faculty. Chromatography and spectroscopy are being incorporated into the laboratory portions of five core and upper-division courses, as well as into undergraduate-led research. Experiments are being adapted from the educational and research literature. For example, in the Plant Physiology course, experiments developed at the University of Colorado to expose students to photosynthesis and energy dissipation are being modified to use HPLC instead of TLC for the analysis. Overall, the project is broadening and enhancing the background of Bowdoin undergraduates and is providing those students with first-hand experience with the practice of science doc6705 none Chemistry (12) This project seeks to enhance the undergraduate chemistry curriculum at the institution by incorporating high resolution, computer-controlled ultraviolet-visible-near infrared (UV-Vis-NIR) spectroscopy into three upper-level laboratory courses: Instrumental Analysis, Inorganic Synthesis, and Experimental Physical Chemistry. This is accomplished by adapting several new or classic laboratory experiments from the chemical education literature for use with the computerized Cary-14 and implementing them into the three formal laboratory courses currently taught by the Chemistry Department. The proposed experiments and instrumentation enhance the students critical thinking skills, increase their familiarity with a wide variety of computerized equipment, and expose them to the scientific process of inquiry through investigation. As a result of this formal change in curricula, the students are better prepared to participate in independent research. The institution is a comprehensive, urban, commuter campus with an ethnically diverse student population and the chemistry department reflects that diversity. Funding provides an Aviv Instruments modernization of the current Cary-14 spectrophotometer including a thermoelectrically cooled heater in the cell housing, and release time for the PI and co-PIs to implement and adapt experiments for the Cary-14 and our laboratory courses. This project is for a duration of 33 months, as much of the first year is devoted to the instrument modernization and initial development of the laboratory experiments. These experiments are introduced into the formal laboratory courses in the second year of the grant, then evaluated, revised and reintroduced in the final year. The anticipated outcomes of this proposal include: 1) improved undergraduate laboratory experiments; 2) decreased time for data acquisition; 3) increased time for data interpretation and analysis; 4) increased understanding of digital data acquisition; 5) increased variety and quality of laboratory experiments; 6) increased hands-on-time for each student; and 7) integration of digital methods-instrumental output as well as Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint-into the reporting of experimental results. This project significantly improves the preparedness of our majors for research and future employment in academics and industry. Dissemination of results is accomplished through a web site linked to the chemistry department home page, publication in referred chemical education journals, and presentation at regional and national meetings doc6706 none Greve The goal of this project is the development of low-cost sensing systems capable of multiple simultaneous analyses of biological systems. These sensing systems will be applied to the electronic detection of cell motion and or cell division which are key indicators of the cell function and thus the effect of drugs, cytokines, etc. Information obtained electronically will be used directly or in combination with microscopic techniques. Sensing is based on the use of large-area microelectronic fabrication techniques, which will ensure low cost, disposability, redundancy, accuracy, and high speed data collection. A direct interface with digital electronics will facilitate rapid analysis and throughput at least an order of magnitude higher than existing techniques, leading to improved productivity in pharmaceutical and biological research doc6707 none Interdisciplinary (99) In this project we are adapting problem-based learning and other inquiry-based approaches to create a curriculum where science and education methods are integrated ( science semester ) for elementary teacher education majors. Our goal is to foster integrated understandings of science and pedagogy that future elementary teachers need to effectively use inquiry-based approaches in their classrooms. This project responds to calls to improve science education for all students (AAAS, Science for All Americans, ; Benchmarks for Science Literacy, ) by making preservice teachers experiences in undergraduate science courses more consistent with reforms at the K-12 level (NRC, National Science Education Standards, ; NSF, Shaping the Future: New Expectations for Undergraduate Education in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology, , NSF96-139). The senior personnel in this proposal collectively teach three science courses (biology, earth science, physical science) and an elementary science education methods course that are required for elementary teacher education (ETE) majors. A variety of active, collaborative, and inquiry-based approaches are used in these courses, but their collective impact is weakened by the lack of coordination in the students degree programs. Presently, students take the courses in variable sequences and at widely scattered times. Too many students fail to appreciate the value of science courses to their future careers as teachers, and when they reach the methods course in the junior year they often retain little of the science content studied earlier. These episodic encounters with science make it difficult for students to learn the content, and to translate their understandings of science into effective, inquiry-based teaching strategies. To encourage integrated understandings of science concepts and pedagogy, a coordinated set of science and methods courses are being designed as a junior-year science semester. Traditional subject matter boundaries are being crossed to stress shared themes that teachers must understand to teach standards-based elementary science. The design is adapting exemplary approaches that support both learning science and learning how to teach science. Students work collaboratively on multidisciplinary problem-based learning (PBL) activities that place science concepts in authentic contexts and build learning skills. Lecture meetings are large group active learning sessions that help students understand difficult concepts, make connections between class activities, and launch and wrap-up PBL problems. Investigatory labs include activities from elementary science kits as launching points for in-depth investigations that demonstrate the continuity of science concepts and pedagogies across age levels. In the methods course students critically explore the theory and practice of elementary science teaching, drawing on their shared experiences of inquiry learning in the science courses. Field placements in elementary classrooms are built-in to allow students to ground their studies of science and pedagogy in actual practice. Participating faculty are collaborating with external evaluators to assess the impact of this project. The ability to plan for and use inquiry approaches depends strongly on sound understandings of science concepts, so formative aspects of the evaluation examine students developing science content and pedagogical knowledge (e.g., conceptions of inquiry teaching). The summative aspect of the evaluation will examine whether student teachers who completed the science semester teach science differently than those who complete traditional (stand-alone) courses in science and methods. External evaluators use structured interviews of supervising teachers, survey data from the student teachers, and classroom observations of student teachers sampled from the science semester and traditional groups to examine how they conceive of and use inquiry-based approaches in their science lessons doc6708 none Chemistry (12) Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy (AAS) is an indispensable tool for the quantitative analyses of trace elements critical to environmental health. To provide undergraduates with experience with environmentally relevant AAS, the Departments of Chemistry and Geological Sciences are introducing intensive, hands-on, project-oriented experiments in Instrumental Methods Laboratory, Environmental Chemistry, and Aqueous Geochemistry Laboratory. Students in the upper-division chemistry courses are also performing an analysis of lead in paint chip samples gathered and prepared by General Chemistry laboratory students. Collaboratively, the advanced and beginning chemistry students are preparing a report for the Memphis and Shelby County Health Department summarizing results and assessing the regional scope of the lead-paint risk. Students in the Quantitative Analysis Laboratory are gathering trace metal analysis data and creating a database to be used for teaching the statistical treatment of experimental data. The AA spectrometer, capable of trace-level determinations of metals such as arsenic, selenium, mercury, lead and chromium, is also becoming a significant resource for undergraduate researchers who choose environmental projects in Chemistry and Geological Sciences and for environmental courses in and interdisciplinary research with Physics, Geography, Biology, and Biomedical Engineering Departments and the Groundwater Institute doc6709 none This proposed research focuses on the materials growth, device design and fabrication, and applications of a ZnO monolithically integrated tunable surface acoustic wave (MITSAW) chip. The novel chip integrates acoustic, optical and electrical process in one material system. It uses tunable acousto-electric and acousto-optic interaction between surface acoustic waves (SAW) and a two dimensional electron gas (2DEG) in a ZnO MgxZn1-xO quantum well. ZnO is a multifunctional material possessing unique electrical, optical, acoustical, and mechanical properties. The high electromechanical coupling coefficients of piezoelectric ZnO in conjunction with the low acoustic loss and high velocity of sapphire (Al2O3) offers high frequency and low loss RF applications. Alloying ZnO with MgO forms the ternary compound MgxZn1-xO, which permits band-gap tuning from 3.32 eV to 4 eV. ZnO MgxZn1-xO heterostructures with 2DEG can be integrated with SAW to create a unique acoustic velocity tuning mechanism. The 2DEG interacts with the lateral electric field resulting in ohmic loss, which attenuates and slows the surface acoustic wave. This mechanism is used to tune the acoustic velocity. The high coupling coefficients offered by the ZnO R-Al2O3 systems allows velocity tuning up to 1%. Combined with the optical characteristics of the wide and direct band gap (~3.3eV) semiconductor ZnO and transparent conductive ZnO electrodes, the MITSAW chip can be used for UV optical signal processing. The proposed MITSAW consists of a ZnO MgxZn1-xO quantum well structure grown on a R-plane sapphire (R-Al2O3) substrate using MOCVD. R-plane sapphire is chosen instead of the popular C-plane substrate, as this substrate provides in-plane anisotropy in the ZnO layer. By aligning the device parallel to the c-axis of the ZnO film, Rayleigh type surface acoustic waves are excited, while Love type SAWs are excited when the devices are aligned perpendicular to the c-axis. The Rayleigh wave mode is suitable for gaseous environment sensing, while the Love wave mode, which has no vertical wave component, is ideal for liquid environment sensing. The ZnO MITSAW chip also offers an acoustic-optical dual mode sensing mechanism. Likewise, the optical properties parallel and perpendicular to the c-axis are different, allowing novel optical devices, such as high contrast modulators, to be fabricated. The successful development of the ZnO MITSAW chip technology will provide industry with state-of-the-art new multifunctional chip technologies. It will not only improve the existing devices but also develop fundamentally new approaches to many important application areas, including tunable adaptive communication systems, novel multi-mode tunable chemical and biochemical sensors, and optical signal processors such as delay lines and multiplexers doc6710 none Chemistry (12) Analytical methods incorporating liquid chromatography (LC) and mass spectrometry are an integral part of research in academic, pharmaceutical, and industrial research laboratories. While LC MS is discussed in undergraduate analytical lecture courses associated with Instrumental and Quantitative analysis, undergraduates rarely obtain any hands-on experience with LC MS instrumentation. We are integrating into our undergraduate curriculum three laboratory experiments, adapted from the research literature, that utilize electrospray ionization (ESI) and LC Ion-Trap MS as an analytical component. Chemistry majors are introduced to LC MS in their second semester of organic chemistry where they study the reactivity of various amino acids in solid phase peptide synthesis. Undergraduate biochemistry students use ESI and LC Ion Trap MS to measure the molecular weight of the protein glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase and the masses of its tryptic fragments. Students in our instrumental analysis laboratory compare ESI and Ion Trap MS to ICP-quadrupole MS and other analytical methods for the determination of lead in the local environment. In addition, undergraduate students are using ESI and LC Ion-Trap MS in their research projects doc6711 none Geology (42) The Geoscience Geography Department at New Jersey City University, an urban, culturally diverse, Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), is modernizing its field data acquisition and interpretation capability and utilizing this to improve the quality of science education in undergraduate courses and research projects. Students are now able to use modern technology when they acquire map data and interpret field data. The implementation of this capability is promoting higher levels of experiential learning and fostering the development of creativity, resourcefulness, and critical thinking, all traits that are indispensable for survival and success in the modern workplace. While the quality and relevance of SMET education is improved for all students taking geoscience courses, future science teachers and science majors in particular are benefiting from derivative curricular modernization. Students are developing hands-on expertise with equipment and technology that they will be expected to use professionally. The equipment acquired in this project includes six new computers equipped with GIS software (for GIS lab expansion from 6 to 12 seats); three pieces of digital spatial positioning equipment (2 GPS receivers and one total station); and one digital ground penetrating radar system that is being leveraged to gain access to a full range of geophysical instruments. This new equipment has provided the basis for adapting successful exercises and projects that have been developed elsewhere for student use. Exercises and projects from Houston Community College (GPS and GIS), Western Michigan University (field geophysics), and the New Jersey Geological Survey are being adapted to suit our learning needs (in coursework and in undergraduate research) and physical limitations (geography, geology, and hydrogeology). Field and lab exercises utilizing GPS and GIS are incorporated into a number of courses, including GIS (2 courses), Structural Geology, Stratigraphy, Field Methods, and Geophysics. Field geophysics exercises are being incorporated into the NJCU curriculum as part of an expanded Geophysics two-course sequence, inserted into our Hydrogeology two-course sequence, and utilized in Field Methods. These exercises and projects also serve as catalysts for new single- and multi-discipline undergraduate research projects that are developed in geography, geology, hydrogeology, geophysics, biology, chemistry, and physics doc6712 none Chemistry (12) The goal of this project is to enhance student understanding of NMR spectroscopy through increased laboratory experiences in both the chemistry and biochemistry curriculums. A 300 MHz Fourier Transform Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (FT NMR) spectrometer and additional copies of NMR processing software have been obtained to achieve this goal. Additional coverage of NMR, needed to keep pace with current trends, is being added to five courses or course sequences: (1) introductory (sophomore) organic chemistry; (2) inorganic organic synthesis; (3) biochemistry; (4) advanced analytical chemistry; and (5) undergraduate research. To achieve the stated goals of the proposal, NMR theory and practice is being incorporated at two levels. At the first level, all chemistry, biology, and biochemistry students are being introduced to 1-D and 2-D NMR experiments in the introductory organic chemistry sequence. New experiments from the literature (chemical education and research) are being adapted and implemented. At the second level, chemistry and biochemistry majors in subsequent courses are conducting additional NMR experiments relevant to their areas of interest. NMR experiments from the literature are being adapted and implemented into these five courses as well. Other suitable experiments, most notably in the biochemistry area, are being developed in the Department. Once complete, these experiments will be made available to others through adequate dissemination methods doc6713 none Engineering - Other (59) TeamCoach is a web-based interactive coaching system designed specifically for engineering student design teams. TeamCoach consists of two components: (1) a CD-ROM designed to provide simulated scenarios of issues relevant to the student team s current situation allowing the student to model, practice and receive feedback and (2) a smart internet program designed to record information about individual team preferences and team compositions in order to generate training material specific to each individual on a specific team at a specific stage of development. This research advances current training methodologies by allowing students to practice and receive feedback in private role-play scenarios that are customized to the specific individual and team composition. This methodology also provides documented team skill acquisition for assessment purposes. TeamCoach provides diagnostic assessment and feedback to the teams on an ongoing basis. Summative evaluation questions addressed in this study are: (1) Is there a difference (pre post) in the ways that students understand and value teamwork? (2) What do students perceive as the critical issues facing their team? (3) How effective are the teams in analyzing their current functioning and making appropriate corrections? (4) Do students demonstrate a measurable change in the identified skill set? The results from this research project are being disseminated through the ASEE Annual Conference, journal articles and a user s group web-site where results, trial training modules, ideas for potential training modules and additional research questions are posted doc6714 none Chemistry (12) Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy has attained a preeminent position as a tool for use in chemistry and related fields, such as biochemistry, molecular biology, pharmaceutics, and medicinal chemistry. The closely related discipline of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) extends the reach of this technology into such fields as clinical medicine and material science. Thus, it is important that undergraduate students entering any of these fields be given a clear understanding of the principles basic to NMR. It is doubly important that students who go on to teach physical science at the secondary or post-secondary level should have a firm grounding in this technology. However, meeting this need for a class of several hundred sophomore organic chemistry students is a daunting task, Nevertheless, our Chemistry Department is supporting an initiative to expose all students taking chemistry to sophisticated equipment of the types they are likely to encounter in their future careers. An NMR spectrometer consisting of an existing 9.4 Tesla magnet, a new 400 MHz console, sample handling robot, pulsed-field-gradient system, pulsed-field-gradient probe, and shim system is serving as the basis for this initiative. The host workstation of this spectrometer is connected to the LAN via ethernet. Given this level of automation, a throughput of hundreds of samples per week is entirely realistic. The step that is not being rushed is the interaction of the student with the data. Each student spends as much time as desired processing, examining, and incorporating the data into laboratory reports. Appropriate NMR experiments are being modified from those available in the literature and are being integrated into the large sophomore organic chemistry course, further extending the model at Florida State University for using an NMR in large classes. In addition, the NMR is being used in the qualitative organic chemistry, advanced analytical chemistry, advanced physical chemistry, and biochemistry courses, and by students involved in undergraduate research doc6715 none Chemistry (12) General Chemistry laboratories often consist of traditional experiments with fill-in-the-blank data sheets. Acquisition of 16 computers, each interfaced to a set of Vernier data acquisition probes, will up-grade the General Chemistry laboratories with modern instrumentation which will enable all General Chemistry students to focus on the discovery of critical concepts and the interpretation of data rather than on mathematical algorithms and data collection. The goals of the project are: 1. to increase student interest in chemistry; 2. to expose students to modern equipment and techniques at the General Chemistry level; and 3. to improve student understanding of concepts and develop critical thinking skills. Four courses are currently taught at the General Chemistry level: Chemistry -Environmental Chemistry, for non-science majors; Chemistry - Introduction to General and Organic Chemistry, for allied health majors; and Chemistry - Introduction to General Chemistry, for science majors. This diverse group of students, representing nearly every academic department on campus and totaling more than students for the last academic year, will benefit from early exposure to instrumentation and the new focus in the laboratory portion of the General Chemistry courses doc6716 none Engineering - Mechanical (56) This project aims to dramatically improve the ability of engineering students to solve practical problems by adapting the Professional Decision Making (PDM) process developed by Charlie Wales and his colleagues. The PDM process was taught to freshman and when these students were compared to a control group, the PDM-trained students showed an increase in GPA of 25% and an increase in graduation rate of 32%, suggesting the PDM process is very effective. We are adapting and implementing the PDM process in engineering science courses and in five design courses that span our curriculum, simultaneously adapting and implementing pedagogical methods from the education community. To facilitate the implementation, we are developing curriculum materials on both the PDM process and on appropriate pedagogy delivered using the web. To facilitate best-practice pedagogy, our team includes a master educator from the college of education. This project is providing knowledge of (1) the value of teaching a global problem solving method across a curriculum, (2) pedagogy for teaching problem solving to diverse and developing learners, (3) methods for facilitating teaching of a common problem solving approach, and (4) methods for vertically integrating a curriculum doc6717 none Interdisciplinary (99) This project increases awareness of, interest in and competence at applying Geographic Information Systems (GIS) across a range of disciplines at Richard Stockton College. It addresses a growing need for college graduates who can apply GIS technology to diverse fields. To bring more students to GIS education, we are: 1) increasing awareness among faculty and students of the general and discipline-specific capabilities of GIS and the opportunities in their fields, 2) training faculty to use GIS in their own teaching and 3) teaching students basic geographic and spatial concepts needed to understand GIS and its applications in their particular fields. We are educating the college community about GIS via a demonstration-workshop series to introduce students and faculty at the College to the ways in which spatial data and information contribute to understanding the world and to diverse academic disciplines. We are training faculty via faculty workshops which include a basic introduction to GIS, followed by an individual project in the faculty member s discipline. GIS-trained student mentors assist faculty with projects. Students from many disciplines need an introduction to basic spatial and geographic concepts before beginning GIS. We are developing a laboratory-based, self-paced gateway course in Stockton s General Studies program adapting courses from other institutions and from Stockton, following guidelines of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA). Evaluation and dissemination are key at each stage of the project, highlighted by several visits by outside consultants and by development of the demonstration- workshops as a distance-learning course. This project addresses diversity issues by appealing to non-traditional students. It includes teacher education as one of the key disciplinary areas. Close ties to Stockton s GIS center allows students to become involved in research and independent projects and to pursue advanced certification in GIS doc6718 none Hege The Advanced Electro-Optical System (AEOS) will be used to evaluate an instrument and technique for simultaneously collecting adaptive optics compensated images in 31 spectral bands. This instrument is a computed tomography imaging spectrometer (CTIS) which maximizes telescope throughput to enable simultaneous integration of a 3 dimensional stack of images, where the third dimension of the stack is wavelength. An aperture stop is used at the focal plane to define the chief ray for the edge of the field of view. The system applies a computer generated, two-dimensionally dispersing holographic grating, which produces a 0-order direct image and 1st, 2nd, and 3rd order images. Scientific applications include investigations of extended regions around symbiotic stars, proto-planetary systems, and identification of faint companions doc6719 none Lewis McDonald Establishing dynamic links between rock uplift and long-term patterns and rates of fluvial incision away from plate margins is a major contemporary challenge in tectonic geomorphology. We are engaged in a multifaceted project that addresses fundamental questions about how mountainous topography and fluvial systems evolve following active crustal shortening. The Spanish Pyrenees and adjacent Ebro Basin comprise an outstanding locality for isolating processes that drive rock-uplift (or subsidence) in orogens where active compression and crustal thickening have ceased. A marked feature of the Ebro Basin is the striking variation in stream incision into ~25 million year old sedimentary rocks. Incision is minimal along the axis of the basin, but reaches more than m in the south-central Pyrenees. Our data suggest that long-term patterns and rates of fluvial incision in ranges flanking the Ebro Basin are driven by intraplate phenomena, which form the three competing hypotheses we are testing: Streams in this region incise in response to one, or more, of the following mechanisms: (1) rock uplift by isostatic response to removal of mass from the orogen and adjacent foreland basin; (2) rock uplift driven by upwelling of hot, buoyant asthenosphere perhaps related to adjacent, active crustal extension and volcanism; (3) regional base level lowering, perhaps related to the Messinian salinity crisis, Quaternary eustatic sea level changes, or both. We are developing a precise chronostratigraphy (based on radiocarbon, luminescence, and cosmogenic nuclide dating and soils) of selected stream terraces in the Ebro Basin for which spatial and temporal rates of fluvial incision can be reconstructed. Results will be used to generate a conceptual model for the processes that drive rock-uplift (or subsidence) in orogens where active crustal thickening has ceased. Our multidisciplinary approach requires expertise in structural geology, soil stratigraphy, geochronology, tectonic geomorphology, geodynamic modeling, and regional geology. We focus on the central Pyrenees for this work, but our methodology has direct application to both modern and ancient mountain ranges throughout the world doc6720 none Physics (13) Entanglement of particles is one of the most strikingly non-classical features of quantum mechanics and gives insight into the questions of quantum measurement and quantum nonlocality. In addition, schemes to exploit entanglements have applications in cryptography, communication and computation. Due to their high cost, controlled sources of entangled particles have historically been limited to the research laboratory. Recently, advances in downconversion source efficiency have opened the possibility of generating entangled photons at undergraduate institutions. This project will adapt these new techniques to the undergraduate physics laboratory to develop a relatively low-cost downconversion source. An immediate application of the source will be the demonstration of quantum nonlocality by violation of Bell s inequalities. This work will actively involve undergraduates at Reed College and will introduce into the undergraduate laboratory curriculum concepts and technologies from a very active research field. The source that we develop will be usable at a variety of undergraduate institutions doc6721 none Physics (13) The Physics Department at Portland State University, in collaboration with the School of Education, is transforming its Teaching Methods course and General Physics laboratory courses in order to improve (1) student learning of physics principles and practice, (2) pedagogical preparation of General Physics graduate teaching assistants and lecture faculty and (3) recruitment of physics majors into a teaching track. To better attend to Portland State s diverse urban student audience, the project addresses improved student learning in the labs by consolidating varied learning styles rather than relying solely on one method, such as the traditional cookbook format that has been implemented in the past. The revised lab courses incorporate modern instructional resources that encourage active exploration of physics concepts. Specifically, in the past year, the department has begun to include in Fall term lab the Socratic Dialogue Inducing techniques from Richard Hake of Indiana University and Physics by Inquiry components from Lillian McDermott s group at the University of Washington. These ideas are being be phased into the other two quarters as the project progresses. In addition, the project plans to incorporate Real-Time Physics lab curricula from David Sokoloff et al. The environment in which these complementary elements are being implemented is adapted from David Gosser s Workshop Chemistry Project (CCNY). An integral part of that project is the weekly teaching assistant meeting seminar with professor partners wherein issues such as dominant and passive students, weak and strong students, gender and race, and collaborative learning are discussed. Such discussions, along with group leadership training and clinical interviews, constitute the principal improvements to the Teaching Methods course that is currently required of all graduate teaching assistants who supervise lab sessions. One of the most important efforts of the proposed project is fostering a closer connection between the General Physics lab and lecture courses by sponsoring two-day summer workshops in which lecture professors and teaching assistants discuss goals and teaching methods, and lecture professors will have the opportunity to examine the lab setups and experiment with them. In order to ensure continuing dialogue, similar two-hour meetings are arranged at least once per quarter at mid-term. The department, with the strong support of all physics faculty members, has begun and plans to continue developing the laboratory courses along these lines in the coming years with the expectation that all students will begin to experience the excitement of science and that both students and teachers will be better prepared and motivated to solve world problems in a cooperative way. As a result of the teaching methods course that will devote special attention to questions of diverse learning styles, resulting in better modeling of good teaching by the graduate assistants, it is expected that more undergraduate students will be drawn to the teaching of science as a respectable and rewarding career doc6722 none Engineering - Civil (54) In this project, we are developing multimedia teaching modules on concrete, steel and wood for a course in strength of materials. Modern communication technologies that include interactive animations, sound, graphics and virtual laboratories are used to educate both undergraduate students and the relevant community (homeowners, building contractors, etc.) on the properties and use of concrete, steel and wood. The modules feature active learning through interactive animations, electronic quizzes and interactive problem solving. Using the Internet, the laboratory exercises are made available at remote locations. The benefits of these modules include enhanced learning, retention and transfer of learning, and improved connection between theory, experiments and applications doc6723 none Engineering - Electrical (55) The Power Engineering Group at the University of Puerto Rico is integrating laboratory practices within courses in order to illustrate fundamental concepts of the course, and is increasing opportunities for undergraduate research in power engineering to spark student interest and desire for scientific exploration. The effort draws substantially on successful learning tools developed at other power engineering programs, and adapts these tools to tailor a program based on learn-by-doing and cooperative learning concepts. Notably, the PowerLearn multimedia modules for power system education, as showcased at a NSF Workshop, are utilized. These experiences are improving student learning and ensure that there will be qualified professionals to meet the ever-growing energy demands of the U.S. and Puerto Rico. New instrumentation for the study of power system components is being used to implement these strategies, and is combined with the Electric Machines laboratory to form the new Energy Systems Instrumentation Laboratory (ESIL). The ESIL provides both students and professors an environment to explore engineering ideas and concepts, fundamental principles as well as current issues and new research areas in power engineering. Activities and resources at ESIL motivate students to learn more about energy principles, cultivating a desire for life-long learning. Professors are able to combine teaching and research, and develop new teaching methods for the improvement of undergraduate education. Activities at ESIL include traditional laboratory practices, laboratory practices integrated within courses, undergraduate research projects, demonstrations, seminars and short-courses. The use of technology and collaborative cooperative learning techniques is a key element at ESIL doc6724 none Biological Sciences (61) This project establishes a model for adapting and implementing ecological research methodologies traditionally restricted for use in the research laboratory to an integrated, field-based ecology curriculum. This new curriculum involves undergraduate students (freshman to seniors) in state-of-the-art research in population, community and ecosystem ecology. The core of this project is a new field-based quantitative laboratory course for General Ecology, a required course in which students conduct research along a m elevational gradient spanning desert to tundra ecosystems as a natural experiment. Additionally, this project enhances other introductory biology courses by adding field exercises along the gradient which introduce students to the experimental system they revisit more comprehensively in General Ecology. The project also adds advanced exercises involving the gradient to existing laboratories of a number of upper division courses in ecology including Entomology, Plant Physiology, Mammology, Microbial Ecology, Ecosystem Ecology, Stable Isotope Techniques, and Field Ecology. Thus, this project substantially revises and provides a unifying theme to the ecology curriculum in that students visit the same sites in different courses and in different years. Students learn how the same systems and gradients can be approached from different perspectives and used to address some of the major ecological, environmental and conservation challenges of our time. Through this project, equipment has been purchased and curriculum has been developed to promote active student involvement in integrated research in ecology doc6725 none Chemistry (12) In , a pilot program in which chemistry and physics majors were exposed to semiconductor processing, integrated circuit fabrication, and device characterization was begun. The goal of the new curriculum was to prepare physics and chemistry majors for constructive participation in an industrial internship program, and ultimately for productive careers in the semiconductor manufacturing industry. The program clearly illustrated to the students the means by which basic chemistry and physics are essential to the preparation of integrated circuits. This pilot program was an overwhelming success, partly indicated by the fact that all student participants were offered permanent positions as process engineers by semiconductor companies located in Oregon. An essential component of this new program is the laboratory that is providing hands-on exposure to technologically important techniques not traditionally covered in undergraduate physics or chemistry curricula. The funds from the NSF-CCLI program are allowing the further development of this laboratory by the addition of a mask aligner, probe stations, and other measurement equipment. The project shares with the Division of Undergraduate Research the goal to prepare students for the technological workplace and to provide more effective linkages between higher education and industry doc6726 none Chemistry (12) Thermal analysis involves monitoring the behavior of a compound as a function of temperature, and techniques such as differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) are used extensively as characterization tools in materials science research. We are adapting experiments from the research and educational literature and are developing new experiments, all of which utilize thermal analysis techniques that can be carried out using our new DSC and TGA instruments. These experiments are being implemented in laboratory courses across our chemistry curriculum (organic, physical, inorganic, polymer, and biochemistry). For example, students determine the kinetic parameters associated with polymer degradation using TGA in physical chemistry, and analyze protein denaturation using DSC in biochemistry. Our goal is to have students gain experience with thermal analysis techniques, and develop an appreciation for the applicability of these techniques to a wide range of problems. Students also are using the DSC and TGA instruments in their undergraduate research projects. Evaluation of the project is occurring in a number of ways, including pre- and post-exposure assessment in the affected courses, and compilation of data from exit interviews of our senior majors. Procedures for the new experiments are being made available on the internet, and tested experiments also will be published in the appropriate journals doc6727 none Geology (42) Burlington County College (BCC) of New Jersey is adapting, enhancing, implementing, and disseminating a geospatial technology program. To accomplish this goal, BCC is drawing upon the experiences and knowledge of geo-spatial technology curriculum projects at: San Mateo Community College of California, Lewis and Clark State College of Idaho and Brevard Community College of Florida. BCC is also utilizing the expertise of an Advisory Board and community based program partners: Burlington County Federal Soil Conservation District, Burlington County Data Processing Center, Rutgers University Geomantics Program, and Ann Johnson of ESRI. BCC is offering the following: An interdisciplinary Geospatial Technologies Associate of Applied Science (A.A.S.) degree program and Geospatial Technologies Certificate Program that consists of a sequence of introductory courses in geographic information systems (GIS), global positioning systems (UPS), and remote sensing (RS) at the two-year college level. Interdisciplinary courses in natural resources management, human ecology, and statistical and mathematical modeling that emphasize the application of geospatial technologies to a broad range of issues such as sustainable population growth, land use management, transportation route planning, and water-quality management. Experiential education opportunities that place students in meaningful and productive roles as technicians and researchers within the local community as part of community campus course project teams or as interns, volunteers, and employees. Strategies to build faculty and staff capacity in GIS technology doc6728 none Biological Sciences (61) The complexity of human movement has led to teaching practices that compartmentalize physiological systems. Current research has identified the need to take a more integrated approach when solving problems by accounting for interactions between physiological systems. This project is adapting innovative research tools and implementing problem-based pedagogical strategies from the science education literature that enable undergraduate Kinesiology students to discover and develop a clearer understanding of how human physiological systems interact to achieve human movement. Equipment is being acquired to create hands-on inquiry based laboratory experiences that focus on muscle metabolism and force generation in relation to human movement. Web-based software, multimedia, computational tools, and technical expertise is being used to create a student friendly interactive interface that enables students to explore real world problems, make multilevel connections between concepts, and think laterally through self-directed manipulation of multimedia source data and physiological system simulations. The integration of experimentation and multimedia tools in the curriculum engages the students in real world problem solving and enables the students to apply scientific principles, discover relationships using inquiry based experimentation, and critically assess and communicate the implications of the results. Students solve problems independently, as a group and with community groups and gain multimedia, computational, communication, and literacy skills through their interaction with instructional technology doc6729 none Biological Sciences (61) In an effort to engage students in critical thinking and to encourage them to act as independent investigative scientists, the department of biology has increased the amount of laboratory time devoted to investigative work and interpretive data analysis across the curriculum. A series of investigative labs with a particular focus on digital data collection are being developed and implemented in a number of biology courses including cell biology, organismal biology, histology, introductory biology and ecology. The long-term process of data collection, photodocumentation and on-going data analysis common to the research environment is being adapted to the needs of inexperienced undergraduates and implemented across the biology curriculum. Eight digital imaging workstations have been purchased and are being utilized by students to collect static and moving images and to facilitate complex data analysis. In addition, students use these workstations to create and maintain digital and print portfolios which reflect the student s undergraduate laboratory experiences and summarize connections between the student s experiences in a variety of courses. The portfolio enhances student ownership of the laboratory experience and increases retention of material from one course to the next. Senior portfolios are evaluated by a committee and five portfolios are selected each year for posting on the World Wide Web. In addition to serving biology majors, this project serves pre-service teachers and in-service teachers through workshops that model inquiry-based instruction, enhance faculty skill in microscopy and image capturing, and integrate the use of technology in education. Partnerships with Native American K-12 students, in-service teachers, and pre-service teachers are centered around the development of pictorial field guides of indigenous plant and animal species thus demonstrating the use of technology in education doc6730 none M. Brown This award will support research to determine sites of cloud formation of Titan, and from detection of clouds determine the tropospheric wind field and set limits on the frequency of methane rainfall. It will use adaptive optics and four filters to resolve Titan spatially and analyze atmospheric effects spectrally. The main goal is to obtain the first images of Titan s methane clouds and follow their evolution and motion over time scales of hours to weeks. Six observing nights are awarded to accomplish this, with supporting funds for instrumentation (filters), travel, and publications doc6731 none Interdisciplinary (99) In the Fall of the Division of Sciences and the Division of Education at Keene State College instituted a new degree program. This degree program, called the General Science Degree, provides approved New Hampshire certification in Elementary or Middle School Science. Three capstone courses were created for this degree: The Web of Science I, The Web of Science II, and Phenomenal Science. The objectives of this project are to expose K-8 pre-service teachers to the discovery and inquiry approach of teaching science to elementary and middle school children. The objectives are achieved by adapting exemplary materials to the capstone courses. Designing Inquiry Based Courses in Mathematics and Physics developed by Aubretch and McEnnis at The Ohio State University and the Kites Project developed by Knisely and Kowalczky are adapted in the Phenomenal Science. Furthermore, Full Option Science Systems (FOSS) developed by Lowery at UC Berkley, NSRC STC developed by Worth and Sandler, and Insights developed at the Educational Development Center are adapted in the Web of Science I and II. It is not uncommon for elementary teachers to avoid teaching science, a goal of the project is to help break this pattern and to free them from relying solely on textbooks for instruction. In addition to science content, these courses provide pre-service teachers with hands-on experience with discovery and inquiry based activities where students interact as scientists in cooperative groups. The pre-service teachers, and consequently their students, learn to question, share ideas, experiment, observe, predict, keep records, and explain ideas with evidence. Students learn that science is not just a collection of facts and new vocabulary, but also a process of inquiry and discovery. They develop productive scientific attitudes and scientific thinking with skills that spill over into other aspects of the curriculum, including reading and mathematics. After the pre-service teachers have internalized both the content and the pedagogy of discovery and inquiry based activities, they then take these adapted and modified lessons to local schools. The project directly addresses the themes of enhanced student learning, faculty development and integration of technology into education. After completing these three courses, pre-service teachers are able to plan effective inquiry based lessons doc6732 none With the recent progress in microelectronics and micromechanics, integrated, small footprint combinations of sensors, wireless transceivers, and energy sources are now becoming reality. This offers an unprecedented opportunity for such devices to be widely applied in controlling the environments in large buildings, and to provide tremendous improvement in how well and how energy-efficient buildings are operated. First-order estimations indicate that an energy-conscious building management approach could reduce source energy consumption by 2 quads (quadrillion British Thermal Units or BTUs) in the U.S. alone. This project proposes to develop novel, non-traditional applications of chip technology that will revolutionize environmental control in the building industry, where chip-based devices are virtually not utilized at all today. An integrated sensor wireless communication energy source node will be developed, that supports multiple sensoring front-ends including, but not restricted to, temperature, light, and localization, a seamless wireless network interface, and an integrated energy source, which allows the node to be self-contained and to operate independently for at least five years. The module will integrate the individual components using both single chip integration, and advanced packaging techniques. The node will support all the functionality needed to configure, operate, query, and maintain the network. The networking approach employed will have the capability to deal with individual node failure through redundancy. To address the multi-disciplinary nature of this research, the project combines the efforts of four research centers in Berkeley, each with a very specific area of expertise essential to the success of the program (1)The Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC); (2) The Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center (BSAC); (3) The Center for the Built Environment (CBE); and (4) the Integrated Manufacturing Lab (IML). This award is co-funded by the Civil & Mechanical Systems Division and the Engineering Education and Centers Division doc6733 none Principal Investigator: Stephen R. Quake, CalTech Proposal Number: : In this research, chips will be fabricated by monolithic integration of replication molded fluidics with optics and active detectors. These devices will consist of flow channels, including valves and pumps, made from silicone elastomer. In the simplest design, these will be aligned onto micro-optic detector chips with filtered p-n diode detectors and diffractive optic lenses for coupling light into and out of the chip in order to perform fluorescence measurements and manipulation of sub-nanoliters volumes of fluid. The integration of optics with replication molded microfluidics is expected to lead to the construction of very compact but versatile biological testing systems. The main application for these chips will be rapid analysis of cellular information, either of gene expression pattern by RNA analysis or of protein levels through antibody assays. It is also anticipated that this effort will enable the construction of inexpensive and disposable multifunctional bio-sensor chips compact enough to ultimately be implanted into a host. Since valves and pumps are already integrated into the microfluidic system, the resulting chips can concentrate and measure pathogens or toxins as well as deliver drugs in-situ to the host, or perform complex chemical and biological analyses doc6734 none Biological Sciences (61) This project is developing and implementing a Laboratory Investigations in Neurobiology (LIN) course. This course is providing undergraduate students with a hands-on, inquiry-based experience in modern neurobiological techniques. This course addresses a widespread problem of overcoming conceptually difficult material in neuroscience that can be experimentally addressed by students. The course provides students an opportunity to develop technical skills that will lead directly to increased educational and occupational opportunities. The LIN course complements an existing lecture course in neurobiology and provides an inter-disciplinary link for undergraduate students in other departments. The primary objectives of the project are: 1) acquisition of fundamental knowledge and technical skills, including data analysis and report writing, in an active, inquiry-based learning environment; 2) application of acquired knowledge and technical skills to design and test hypotheses based upon a background of primary literature in neuroscience; 3) access to neuroscience training within the biology curriculum for a large population of under-represented students at the university; 4) make a significant contribution to faculty and curriculum development. These goals are being achieved by the development of a LIN course in which students first acquire fundamental skills and knowledge and then apply these skills to develop an independent project suitable for presentation to the scientific community. The topics covered include nerve cell bioelectricity, sensory and motor neurophysiology, neuroanatomy and neurotransmitter identification. The modules to be developed are adaptations of experimental protocols published in commercially available lab manuals. The expected outcome of this project is a new laboratory course with a detailed, student-centered laboratory manual for future use in the course. The results of the project will be disseminated via a CSUH website and presentations at national meetings doc6735 none Engineering - Chemical (53) This project is adapting and implementing a Bioprocess Engineering Laboratory (BEL) which is helping to integrate the education of science and engineering students and provide them with the expertise necessary to be hired by the biotechnology industry. The curriculum is an adaptation of that developed at the University of California at Davis (NSF ILI-LLD) by Dr. Karen McDonald, with modifications to both the laboratory and multi-disciplinary team development components of the curriculum. Specifically, the latest developments in process technology utilized by pharmaceutical and other biotechnology industries are being added to the laboratory course, and additional courses in Microbial Physiology, Bioinformatics and Biochemical Engineering are being developed to enhance the interface skills between science and engineering students. The objectives of the project are to: utilize industry participation to develop the experimental components of the BEL; facilitate the utilization of engineering scientist student teams in five courses; develop ten bioprocess engineering experiments (for the two laboratory courses); develop five demonstrations for biochemical engineering, biochemistry and microbiology courses; assess the effectiveness of the BEL in meeting the stated goal doc6736 none Biological Sciences (61) In we initiated the biology chemistry double major with a biotechnology emphasis that introduces students to research-based experiences and culminates in a senior research experience. Unfortunately, many students have had difficulty transitioning from the lower level courses to the upper level courses that require a greater level of independence in the laboratory. In order to develop a stronger, more comprehensive program, we are now adapting the Project Kaleidoscope model and curricular materials from Ferris State University and Bates College to our courses in biotechnology. Utilizing the principal investigator system of investigative labs, we are integrating authentic research experiences and creating a community of scholars beginning in the first courses of the program. Courses are being designed to foster the sequential development of undergraduates by employing laboratory exercises that build upon one another from course-to-course and year-to-year. Five sophomore and junior level courses including plant physiology, cell biology, vertebrate systems, biochemistry I and biochemistry II are being revised to incorporate faculty research interests and to involve students in independent research projects much earlier in their academic career. This provides students a more comfortable transition from investigative laboratories to full research driven laboratories. In each course, students use sophisticated instruments to collect and analyze data and ultimately present their results to each other and the scientific community. In order to develop an enhanced sense of community we have developed an annual Biotechnology Welcome experience, a Biotechnology Awards Banquet, and Biotechnology Discussion and Advising Groups. These opportunities mimic professional meetings and informal scientific exchanges and allow students to interact with each other and with the faculty members in the program on a more consistent and less formal basis doc6737 none Sociology (86) This is collaborative project at CUNY-Queens and UCLA. It is developing multimedia and web-based visual and map enabled software tools that will depict the growth and change in two major metropolitan areas in the United States, New York and Los Angeles. It builds upon a project that created web-based map enabled tools to examine change in New York City from using Census and other data, in a way that eases faculty creation of curricular exercises and experiences for students and others. The web component is being augmented by multi-media tools developed at UCLA that allow the visualization of virtual neighborhoods, as well as easy access to text, pictures, and video images to illustrate a variety of important sociological concepts and themes. These virtual neighborhoods make it possible to incorporate 3-D animation with realistic environments creating an interactive urban context composed of representative buildings, landmarks, and neighborhoods of the geographic area. The current neighborhood is simulated, and then it is recreated for several earlier periods. The students are able to visit and explore these neighborhoods and, using the mapping software, understand how these specific neighborhoods fit into the wider area of New York or Los Angeles, while exploring transportation or ethnic and racial change, for example. CUNY and UCLA are developing these complementary tools in common and distributing them widely over the web, by CD-ROM, and in unison with an undergraduate textbook we are publishing: New York and Los Angeles: Politics Society and Culture, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in mid to late . Students and others can use these materials to examine and understand the dramatic changes in population, race, ethnic ancestry, family status, housing and living conditions, and income and wealth that have occurred in these two major metropolises. Related exercises that are being developed allow students to compare and contrast the growth of the two regions, to explore the changing patterns of economic and ethnic inequality, and to study the immigration history of New York and Los Angeles and the migration paths of recent immigrant groups in the cities and the suburbs. Other exercises are focusing on occupational structure, educational systems, social welfare, riots, and the location and situation of those in the artistic fields in the two regions. (We are also exploring how to generalize these tools to other locales.) The materials are being pilot tested at the PI s home campuses and in courses at a variety of other colleges and universities in the United States. Workshops scheduled at professional meetings and at CUNY and UCLA are assisting faculty at other institutions in using these materials doc6738 none Physics (13) This project involves a major upgrade to the Advanced Undergraduate Physics Laboratory at Caltech. Specifically, six new experiments are being developed -- The Integer Quantum Hall Effect, Superconductor Phase Diagrams, Heat Capacity, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Optical Pumping, and Gamma-ray and X-ray spectroscopy. Each of the experiments is adapting the work of both classic papers in the research literature and contemporary applications to the undergraduate lab. The first three experiments are completely new and are designed to add condensed matter experiments to the course. These experiments are all performed in a commercial cryogenic apparatus that is well suited for undergraduate teaching. The last three experiments are major upgrades of existing experiments, aimed at injecting more modern experimental techniques and equipment into the lab. In all cases the experiments are designed to demonstrate modern physics and experimental techniques that provide a useful learning experience for the student doc6739 none Earth Systems Science (40) This project is responding to the needs of undergraduates and K-12 teachers by introducing a more hands-on, inquiry-based, field-oriented, interdisciplinary science courses into an Earth Systems Field School. This 6-week summer course in the Subarctic and Arctic environments of Alaska uses three two-week modules focusing on coastal, boreal, and tundra ecosystems in sites such as Prince William Sound, the Chugach Mountains, and Denali National Park. The Field School is generating new excitement about interdisciplinary, hands-on science and is promoting ongoing faculty teamwork and collaboration across science disciplines and departments. The lessons learned from the adaptation project are being disseminated over the internet and through the Project Kaleidoscope network. Adapting the Columbia Earth Systems Field School provides an exemplary, proven model of interdisciplinary, inquiry-based learning. This model teaches students to understand landscapes in an integrated fashion, by using the disciplines of ecology and geology together and witnessing their dependence on each other. Students build their own conceptual and numerical models of ecosystem processes by collecting field data and using it to test models. They are learning techniques for mapping, identification, description, and analysis, all within the context of understanding current environmental problems. The conceptual framework of the Earth Systems Field School is being piloted the summer of . The full six-week program is being offered in summer . The program builds on existing course offerings, research programs, and community partnerships. In addition to transporting the curriculum from desert to taiga, the project is vigorously adapting the curriculum to better serve K-12 teacher candidates (and non-science majors generally) and equipping them with transferable science literacy and science enthusiasm. The program is also being restructured to increase its accessibility to older students who make up a large proportion of the University of Alaska s student body and to Alaska Natives who are under-represented in the preK-12 and liberal arts student populations doc6740 none Biological Sciences (61) Although research suggests that investigative laboratories are more effective in teaching science process skills and in achieving higher order learning than are traditional cookbook laboratories, and even though microbiology is especially suited to investigative laboratories, microbiology laboratory manuals are generally quite traditional. This may be because laboratory skill acquisition is central to the microbiology laboratory. We are developing a multimedia electronic laboratory guide that provides students with a first exposure to new laboratory techniques outside of class time. The guide is not a laboratory manual, but an integrated, hyperlinked presentation of essential methods and equipment used in microbiology laboratories. The guide is used to introduce new, investigative, laboratory activities into the courses on our campus. Video clip demonstrations of many basic techniques and instruments are being incorporated into a web-based electronic guide that contains, in addition to the videos, information about the theory behind basic laboratory practice and techniques, helpful hints related to laboratory methods, safety instructions, and questions to assess student readiness to perform the technique in the laboratory setting. Our institution is a Hispanic Serving Institution, with a majority of students of color and a large proportion of first generation college students. We feel that this application of instructional technology increases students confidence in their laboratory skills, their willingness to work independently, and their ability to perform successfully in the laboratory setting such that they can focus more on the research and the data and less on the mechanics of performing basic laboratory techniques doc6741 none Biological Sciences (61) Understanding biology at the molecular level is a daunting challenge for many students because it is abstract and not tangible. They are asked to make inferences about systems with which they have no experience and to provide answers to questions they have never asked. We are developing an inquiry-driven approach to help make the molecular world real and relevant to students, including those whose interests and career goals may lie outside the sciences. Our approach is based on the integrated use of computer visualization software and unique, 3-dimensional physical models of proteins, nucleic acids, and other biomolecular structures created by state-of-the-art rapid prototyping technology at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. These physical models are used by students to make predictions about structure-function relationships that can then be tested experimentally. We are carrying out a multi-level evaluation of the synergy of physical and computer modeling to enhance student understanding of molecular structure function relationships. This project builds upon the success of a CCLI proof-of-concept grant awarded to the PI and his co-workers to test this approach in a limited set of undergraduate biology and chemistry classrooms. We are now broadening the spectrum of educational settings in which this approach being field-tested, to include test sites that are diverse in terms of (i) institutions, ranging from a large research university (UW-Madison) to small liberal art colleges, a private engineering school, and a 2- year technical college, (ii) course diversity, including chemistry, biology, biochemistry, molecular biology and integrated science, (iii) level of instruction and diversity of student populations, ranging from introductory courses for majors and non-majors to advanced courses for biology and chemistry majors. This project also provides faculty development through participation in the design and construction of physical models specific to course needs and the sharing of their classroom experiences in an annual summer workshop doc6742 none Chemistry (12) Biological Sciences (61) The primary objectives for this project are to enhance the laboratory experience of students in ultraviolet and visible spectroscopy with the introduction of a new protein chemistry course, and to expand the laboratory experiences involving UV visible spectroscopy in chemistry, biology, and molecular science courses. In addition, we are providing access of UV visible spectroscopy to the wider educational community in Cedar Rapids through existing outreach programs. We are basing these changes on the addition of eight, single wavelength UV visible spectrophotometers and three scanning UV visible instruments. Students have the opportunity to use more sophisticated techniques with the inclusion of more research based laboratory experiences that begin in introductory laboratories and continue through advanced courses. The new protein chemistry course in being adapted from one developed by John Markwell at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, while changes in the other courses include the adaptation of a wide range of experiments from the research or educational literature doc6743 none Biological Sciences (61) This comprehensive project is integrating new microscopic and imaging technology into the undergraduate biology curriculum. In addition to the incorporation of phase contrast microscopy into our first year curriculum, we are incorporating experiments using techniques such as single excitation wavelength epifluorescence, dual wavelength fluorescent ratio imaging, and other types of microscopy in studying the ecology, physiology, and cellular processes of cells. We are developing new experiments for our Introductory Biology lab series as well as in Bacteriology and Cell Physiology and other upper-level labs in the department. We believe that improving our courses focusing on cells will make a needed connection for the students in understanding how the molecules relate back to the cells and eventually to the organism. A major component in current understandings of cells and how they function is the use of epifluorescence microscopy and imaging analysis. This equipment is being used in a variety of courses starting with the introductory labs where we have many prospective biology majors, nursing majors, physical education majors as well as students involved in both the environmental science and molecular biology biochemistry collateral majors. We are also using the microscopes in the Microbiology, Bacteriology, and Cell Physiology. The equipment will also be used in an Environmental Microbiology course being developed for Biology majors and the Environmental Science collateral and in a new course for non-majors called Life at the Extremes. The effort is motivated by recommendations of the American Society of Microbiology from which suggested approaches are adapted, as well as techniques culled from the scientific literature doc6744 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This project addresses the absence of textbooks and courses for prospective K-8 teachers that provide an introduction to discrete mathematics and how it can be used both to help prospective K-8 teachers achieve a better understanding of mathematics and to help their students achieve state and national standards in mathematics. The project develops an interactive discrete mathematics textbook for prospective K-8 teachers, changes prospective K-8 teachers views of mathematics by exposing them to a college-level mathematics course which is taught interactively, and conducts high-quality professional development workshops for college faculty members who teach mathematics to prospective K-8 teachers. The project builds on the materials developed in a previous NSF-funded professional development project for K-8 teachers doc6745 none Electrical Engineering (55) The design of embedded systems is inherently complex. A key aspect of embedded systems is that they typically require the operation of numerous individual functions to complete their overall application. Some of these functions may be performed either in software executing on a dedicated microprocessor or on dedicated hardware designed specifically to perform the needed function. During the design process, the designer must decide which functions are to be implemented in software and which are to be implemented in hardware. In addition, embedded systems also must be designed to meet constraints not only in terms of performance, but also in terms of cost, weight, power, area, and many other factors. As might be imagined, designing an embedded system incorporating all of the above aspects is quite challenging. Numerous design alternatives must be considered in the design process. A number of successful tools and techniques for constructing and analyzing performance models of hardware software components for embedded systems have been developed. Unfortunately, the use of performance modeling to analyze design alternatives for hardware software systems has not been part of the standard undergraduate curriculum for computer engineering, where embedded systems designers are trained. This project addresses this problem by developing the materials necessary to teach the techniques and benefits of performance modeling for the exploration of design alternatives in a senior undergraduate course in advanced digital design. The result is that undergraduate computer engineering graduates are much better prepared to take on the challenge of designing efficient, effective solutions for the embedded systems applications of the future doc6746 none Anthropology (81) The Society for American Archaeology (SAA), the Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA), the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and the Archaeological Institute of American (AIA) have acknowledged a crisis in current approaches to the training of undergraduate archaeology students. Funding shortages and shifts from academic to private sources, dramatic increases in site destruction and looting worldwide, emerging political activism among descendant and local communities, complex new government oversight and regulation, technological innovations, and dramatic increases in the scientific knowledge base have outpaced the ability of educators to accommodate these changes with their teaching strategies. [See K. A. Pyburn, Altered States: Archaeologists under Siege in Academe in Teaching Archaeology in the 21st Century, Edited by S. J. Bender and G. S. Smith, SAA, .] To address this issue the SAA established an inter-societal Task Force on Curriculum, and provided support for a workshop made up of a diverse and committed set of educators from across the nation. This Task Force produced a set of core principles and guidelines for teaching archaeology that are crucial to the survival of the discipline of archaeology into the 21st century. The Task Force is working with the SAA, the SHA, the AAA, and the AIA to initiate implementation of these guidelines across the discipline with renovated curricula as rapidly as possible. Smith and Bender ( ) summarized these principles as Stewardship, Diversity, Social Relevance, Ethics and Values, Communication, Critical Skills, and Social Science Problem Solving. This is a three-year project encompassing the design, testing, and evaluation of core aspects of a new curriculum based on these principles at eight academic institutions across the United States. It is engaged in producing a complete set of flexible course materials suitable to replace or redesign extant curricula in any higher educational setting. The project goal is to make recommended course content and proven teaching techniques available as efficiently as possible without cost to the broadest possible audience of educators. Participants on the development team were chosen from faculty who have demonstrated a commitment to both education and research. Further, there were selected to be representatives of particular fields of expertise foregrounded by the principles, to represent a variety of institution types (community colleges, public four year programs with and without graduate programs, and private colleges), and to provide regional diversity. (The institutions are located in eight different states.) These faculty developers are being assisted by three education experts. In addition, an Advisory Board of eight archaeologists, each specializing in a separate area of the seven principles, are assisting with course development and assessment. Student evaluators are also participating in crucial stages of the project. Each participant is first developing two separate courses at their home institution in collaboration with nationally recognized specialists and technical consultants. Overall, 16 different courses are being designed, taught, and evaluated. We have estimated that this project will impact some 700- students in the participating institutions over the three-year course of this project. In addition, course materials are being made available to the 340 existing undergraduate programs in the U.S. offering undergraduate majors or minors in anthropology or coursework in archaeology. Beyond the 3-year grant period, this project has the potential to impact all 30,000 declared undergraduate anthropology majors nationwide, and an estimated 500,000 - 600,000 students who enroll in undergraduate anthropology classes yearly as electives doc6747 none Physics (13) Physics education research has shown that many students are leaving their introductory college- and university-level physics courses with little understanding of the fundamental concepts of physics. Whereas much of the research has studied in-class methods of alleviating the problem, this project focuses on students out-of-class activities as a complementary means of improving learning. The goal of this project is to develop and test a prototype of freely available, Internet-accessible instructional software for algebra- and calculus-based introductory physics - software focusing on students out-of-class learning that can be used by instructors (through homework assignments) or by students (through self-study) to supplement in-class or textbook discussion of basic physics concepts. The principal investigator has created a limited set of explanatory exploratory assessment Java applets for introductory kinematics and dynamics. Preliminary surveys and experiments indicate that even in its present form the software is well received by and helpful to students in learning physics. This project is developing a more complete prototype including: Additional applets to provide more complete coverage for the kinematics and dynamics prototype; System CGI software to simplify the administrative details of student logins and recording of scores, and to allow students to check their scores on-line; An instructor s guide describing the prototype and providing assignment suggestions; Independent, formal assessment of the software by faculty other than the author. This project should provide a clear picture of the effectiveness of this means of complementing in-class instruction with out-of-class learning activities. This information can then be used to determine the desirability of developing a full version of the software doc6748 none Chemistry (12) The chemistry department at Friends University, as a part of developing learning outcome goals for our students and the resulting assessment of our program, has begun making major changes in our curriculum to improve our program. The next step in our curriculum improvement is to integrate the use of a modern computer interfaced FTIR instrument into a number of courses. A number of experiments from the Journal of Chemical Education are being adapted for this purpose. The FTIR is being introduced throughout the curriculum to increase student interest, to involve students in independent projects, and to serve as a complementary tool to other instrumental techniques already available for undergraduate use. In the beginning classes, the speed and ease of use of the FTIR and the simplicity of interpreting spectra as molecular fingerprints allows students to collect high quality data and to make decisions based on the results. The FTIR is making possible major changes in upper level laboratory courses by allowing development of new experiments and studies. The instrument also is used in Summer Workshops for secondary teachers and for high school students involved in the Junior Academy of Science and our Summer Science Program doc6749 none Biological Sciences (61) Because of the significant advances in biology now being made at the biochemical level we have created a Biochemistry Major, which has been enhanced recently with the addition of a developmental biologist who studies developmentally-driven changes in gene expression. The courses within the biochemistry major are designed so that as students progress through the major they become less dependent on their textbooks and more comfortable with primary literature sources. Gradually, students become genuine participants, not just consumers, in the classroom until finally, in their capstone seminar course, students and faculty are cooperative learners together. This course has brought a new level of excitement for both students and faculty. The current project aims to change the laboratory design and instrumentation available to Biochemistry majors so that these students achieve a similar high level of curiosity, independence, and confidence in the laboratory. We are incorporating three project-based laboratory experiences that allow students to investigate the same questions in the laboratory that they find exciting in the classroom. One project extends through several courses and demonstrates how several disciplines collectively contribute to the understanding of a single biological process. Another project reveals how new biochemical tools are being employed to answer age-old questions in developmental biology. A third project demonstrates how organic chemistry has become increasingly important to our understanding of regulatory processes in organisms. Highly sensitive non-radioactive assays are being widely used in basic research. These are being adapted and being introduced into new areas of investigation for undergraduate laboratories in biochemistry. Access to state of the art research and committed faculty enables students to develop communication and teamwork skills that will be highly valued in their postgraduate careers doc6750 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This project develops materials for an introductory statistics class from a sports emphasis. The class covers the basic aspects of beginning statistics using examples and datasets from sports. The first introductory course is developed based on baseball. A text is developed which presents topics from data analysis, probability, and inference from a baseball perspective and students learn statistical concepts by working on baseball datasets. In the second stage of the project, a text is written focusing on applications of statistics to sports. By understanding the benefits of statistics in sports settings, the student retain the knowledge of statistical concepts and they are able to apply this knowledge to problems outside the realm of sports doc6751 none Sociology (86) This is collaborative project at CUNY-Queens and UCLA. It is developing multimedia and web-based visual and map enabled software tools that will depict the growth and change in two major metropolitan areas in the United States, New York and Los Angeles. It builds upon a project that created web-based map enabled tools to examine change in New York City from using Census and other data, in a way that eases faculty creation of curricular exercises and experiences for students and others. The web component is being augmented by multi-media tools developed at UCLA that allow the visualization of virtual neighborhoods, as well as easy access to text, pictures, and video images to illustrate a variety of important sociological concepts and themes. These virtual neighborhoods make it possible to incorporate 3-D animation with realistic environments creating an interactive urban context composed of representative buildings, landmarks, and neighborhoods of the geographic area. The current neighborhood is simulated, and then it is recreated for several earlier periods. The students are able to visit and explore these neighborhoods and, using the mapping software, understand how these specific neighborhoods fit into the wider area of New York or Los Angeles, while exploring transportation or ethnic and racial change, for example. CUNY and UCLA are developing these complementary tools in common and distributing them widely over the web, by CD-ROM, and in unison with an undergraduate textbook we are publishing: New York and Los Angeles: Politics Society and Culture, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in mid to late . Students and others can use these materials to examine and understand the dramatic changes in population, race, ethnic ancestry, family status, housing and living conditions, and income and wealth that have occurred in these two major metropolises. Related exercises that are being developed allow students to compare and contrast the growth of the two regions, to explore the changing patterns of economic and ethnic inequality, and to study the immigration history of New York and Los Angeles and the migration paths of recent immigrant groups in the cities and the suburbs. Other exercises are focusing on occupational structure, educational systems, social welfare, riots, and the location and situation of those in the artistic fields in the two regions. (We are also exploring how to generalize these tools to other locales.) The materials are being pilot tested at the PI s home campuses and in courses at a variety of other colleges and universities in the United States. Workshops scheduled at professional meetings and at CUNY and UCLA are assisting faculty at other institutions in using these materials doc6752 none This project is creating new active-learning curricular materials, labeled active learning packets (ALPs), for the topics of stoichiometry, acids and bases, thermochemistry, kinetics, gas-phase equilibria, acid-base equilibria, and electrochemistry. The motivation for the creation of the ALPs is research on student learning that suggests instruction utilizing only lecture, recitation, and laboratory experiments produces only small increases in the understanding of fundamental concepts in chemistry. The ALPs are incorporating techniques, including McDermott s guided inquiry framework, visualization and inquiry simulations, and writing-to-learn strategies that research has shown will improve conceptual learning. The active learning materials are being designed to both elicit common student difficulties regarding the topics under study and to lead students to confront these difficulties head-on with a tightly focused and strategically sequenced series of exploratory activities, questions, and exercises. For each topic, three or four discrepant events, phenomena that lead to an unexpected outcome and often produce conceptual conflict, are included. A discrepant event sufficiently surprising or contrary to an expected or predicted outcome captures the attention of the student and encourages rethinking. An integral feature of the proposed learning activity exercises is the requirement that students explain their reasoning process with written statements. In the course of working through these inquiry activities, students are being guided to resolve their difficulties and confusion and to attain a firm grasp of the targeted concepts. The activities consist of a tightly linked set of (1) brief textual expositions in highly interactive format, (2) concept-oriented questions for use with classroom communication systems in large classes, (3) a structured series of questions that lead students to elicit and then resolve conceptual difficulties, and (4) exploratory visualization and inquiry simulations and hands-on activities and writing-to-learn exercises to strengthen understanding. The activities are emphasizing qualitative understanding, reasoning, and mastery of fundamental concepts. They are encouraging students to develop multiple representations of concepts in pictorial, diagrammatic, and graphical formats and to relate these representations to symbolic and macroscopic representations. The effectiveness of the ALPs is being rigorously assessed by continual in-class use and redesign, in conjunction with evaluation of student learning gains doc6753 none Physics (13) Reform movements in calculus and in physics education have shown the advantage of active methods in lively applications for improving students conceptual understandings. Research has shown that the learning of diverse groups of students is enhanced by the use of multimedia. The Mathematics Across the Curriculum projects supported by the NSF have shown the efficacy of embedding mathematics within other disciplines. This project brings all of these insights together with interesting human applications of physics to reform the algebra- based physics course. This project is developing a complete set of course materials and background physics notes that can be used in a wide variety of institutional settings to offer a reformed algebra-based physics course to diverse student audiences. In addition to the human applications, the interactive learning methods encouraged by these materials are especially helpful to enable the students to learn by methods of inquiry. The project co-PIs at UNL, Texas Tech University, Mercy College and Doane College are developing content topics with the help of a mathematics consultant. The materials are being field-tested and assessed in cooperation with the evaluation consultant. Materials developed at each institution are being field-tested at the other cooperating institutions, and tested materials will be made available for commercial distribution. By the end of the project completely reformed algebra-based physics course materials featuring human applications supported by interactive multimedia and mathematical modeling will be available for use across the nation. Faculty enhancement institutes will be held using these materials. The use of these materials for the learning of physics concepts by inquiry methods will be advocated. The appropriateness of the multimedia and mathematical modeling materials for a wide range of students will be demonstrated doc6719 none Lewis McDonald Establishing dynamic links between rock uplift and long-term patterns and rates of fluvial incision away from plate margins is a major contemporary challenge in tectonic geomorphology. We are engaged in a multifaceted project that addresses fundamental questions about how mountainous topography and fluvial systems evolve following active crustal shortening. The Spanish Pyrenees and adjacent Ebro Basin comprise an outstanding locality for isolating processes that drive rock-uplift (or subsidence) in orogens where active compression and crustal thickening have ceased. A marked feature of the Ebro Basin is the striking variation in stream incision into ~25 million year old sedimentary rocks. Incision is minimal along the axis of the basin, but reaches more than m in the south-central Pyrenees. Our data suggest that long-term patterns and rates of fluvial incision in ranges flanking the Ebro Basin are driven by intraplate phenomena, which form the three competing hypotheses we are testing: Streams in this region incise in response to one, or more, of the following mechanisms: (1) rock uplift by isostatic response to removal of mass from the orogen and adjacent foreland basin; (2) rock uplift driven by upwelling of hot, buoyant asthenosphere perhaps related to adjacent, active crustal extension and volcanism; (3) regional base level lowering, perhaps related to the Messinian salinity crisis, Quaternary eustatic sea level changes, or both. We are developing a precise chronostratigraphy (based on radiocarbon, luminescence, and cosmogenic nuclide dating and soils) of selected stream terraces in the Ebro Basin for which spatial and temporal rates of fluvial incision can be reconstructed. Results will be used to generate a conceptual model for the processes that drive rock-uplift (or subsidence) in orogens where active crustal thickening has ceased. Our multidisciplinary approach requires expertise in structural geology, soil stratigraphy, geochronology, tectonic geomorphology, geodynamic modeling, and regional geology. We focus on the central Pyrenees for this work, but our methodology has direct application to both modern and ancient mountain ranges throughout the world doc6755 none Sociology (86) This is a collaborative project with the American Sociological Association (Award ). This collaborative project is working with individual faculty and whole departments in order to introduce scientific reasoning systematically into the undergraduate curriculum. The project is pursuing the goal of improved scientific literacy among undergraduate students in the social sciences by providing teachers and whole departments with tools and expertise to integrate data analysis and analytic rigor more widely throughout the curriculum. This collaboration is building upon two already successful approaches that complement each other. The Social Science Data Analysis Network (www.SSDAN.net ) project at the University of Michigan has worked with a nationwide network of faculty to co-produce engaging, wide-ranging curricular materials with US Census Bureau data. SSDAN encourages and facilitates individual faculty to integrate specially tailored, data analysis modules into substantive social science courses at all levels. The American Sociological Association s (ASA s) Minority Opportunities through Structural Transformation (MOST) Program has worked with entire departments to alter their curriculum in ways that ensure structural change toward improved research training of minorities and all students. This project is introducing SSDAN approaches as department-wide interventions in a critical mass of courses in the curriculum of 16 sociology departments. A core goal is to transform the curriculum and thus give students a more sequenced and pervasive exposure to scientific reasoning and data analytic skills. Workshops, follow-up visits, interactions with the Michigan and ASA staffs along with departmental websites are being utilized to support the full implementation and evaluation of this intervention. The project is also significantly revising and updating the SSDAN website and data analysis module creation features used by faculty across the social and behavioral sciences. New datasets from the US Census, historical censuses, CPS (Current Population Survey), and GSS (General Social Survey) are being added, and additional formats for analysis by SPSS, SAS, STATA, GIS packages, and new interactive data analysis features are also being provided. The project is working on a Guide that instructs chairs and deans how to implement departmental interventions across different types of departments and diverse disciplines. In addition, a published workbook updating earlier SSDAN publications and an expanded bank of downloadable datasets, course modules, and networking capabilities via the website is being produced doc6756 none Interdisciplinary (99) We are developing three technology-enhanced, textbook-independent, multi-week laboratory exercises on environmental topics that fit the goals and needs of a general education audience in Interdisciplinary Science. The laboratory exercises are grouped into modules that examine one environmental topic for 4-6 consecutive weeks, providing in-depth examinations of each topic. Each module synthesizes traditional wet lab exercises with computer simulations of environmental topics, online quizzing communication, and computerized data laboratory instrumentation. These exercises focus on environmental issues of concern to students and utilize real data as collected by the students themselves (e.g., water quality studies), or gathered from internet-based databases (e.g., levels of air pollutants). This approach avoids the inherent predictability of most traditional laboratory exercises, which simply seek to demonstrate basic scientific principles through time- tested (i.e., predictable) exercises. This combination of original data and local issues makes the laboratory experience complement the course content and greatly improves student interest in the laboratory component of the course. Further, by emphasizing the personalized nature of these exercises (analysis of personal impacts, original data, voicing personal opinions on controversial issues in case studies), the laboratory experience is uniquely tailored to each individual student. The modules contain abundant multimedia content that engages student attention with digital video clips in laboratory introductions, takes students on virtual field trips to local sites, enables students to quickly calculate and analyze their personal contributions to regional environmental impacts, and presents compelling case studies with digitized interviews. Further, igitized video clips demonstrating proper laboratory techniques are invaluable in open-scheduled laboratories, where students complete laboratory exercises at a time of their choosing and do not have the benefit of in-class demonstrations by laboratory instructors doc6757 none Biological Sciences (61) The Biology Department of Baker University is conducting a significant improvement of our physiology laboratory experience, and the enhancement of research opportunities for undergraduates. The current physiology program has not kept pace with technology and provides only limited opportunities for gaining hands-on experience using modern physiological techniques. The laboratory approach has been traditional in that cookbook experiments are conducted with little room for student-designed investigations. We are correcting this problem by revising the program to offer an effective laboratory component that emphasizes modern physiological approaches to solving biological problems. The effort is an adaptation of an project at Bates College. The objectives of this project are 1) to promote independent learning by applying computer technology to the study of physiology, 2) to teach students scientific inquiry methods, and 3) to engage students in undergraduate research projects. These objectives are being accomplished by conducting fewer traditional experiments and having students design and carry out their own investigations, then present their results in the form of a scientific paper. We are using the BIOPAC physiology teaching system interfaced with computers to facilitate data collection and analysis in real time, and provide access to interactive, multimedia presentations of physiological processes. The new equipment is also being used for independent research projects in the cardiovascular physiology of the chick embryo in shell-less culture. Our aims are to 1) improve conceptual understanding of physiology, 2) stimulate student experimentation, critical thinking and problem solving, 3) improve understanding of scientific methodology, and 4) increase student participation in research and presentations at national meetings. The use of new technology in our curriculum reform is impacting the education of approximately 40 students per year in Comparative Physiology and Human Anatomy and Physiology classes doc6758 none Computer Science (31) The WebBook project demonstrates the feasibility of using the Web to deliver next-generation, inquiry-based, active learning educational resources. A prototype hypertextbook blending standard text, graphics, interactive animations of key concepts, voice, and sound into a seamless whole is developed and formally evaluated. Standard Web-site creation technologies are used to ensure that the prototype can be used with any of the usual Web browsers on all platforms, making it accessible to anyone in the world without the need to purchase special software or hardware. The prototype encompasses the basic topics in theory of computing. As key concepts are encountered, animations are presented in seamless fashion that allow the learner to explore the concept while controlling parameters that drive the animation. The prototype is designed to serve as a general model for the development of hypertextbooks, inspiring the creation of similar resources in other science and engineering disciplines doc6759 none Chemistry (12) This project addresses the needs of undergraduate engineering students. Educational materials are being developed which target materials chemistry, the chemistry of energy processes and environmental chemistry. More specifically, this curriculum is linked to a theme-based approach that draws from real-world examples centered around the ubiquitous automobile. A compendium of materials entitled Chemistry and the Automobile is being assembled to serve as a faculty resource guide to permit other faculty to teach their engineering students using this curriculum theme. It will be made available to the chemistry education community at large. This Proof of Concept project is intended to show 1) that this curriculum, coupled with the overarching theme of Chemistry and the Automobile, provides a more appropriate foundation in Chemistry for engineering students than the traditional General Chemistry curriculum; and 2) that the audience is more receptive to the subject matter because they see relevance in what they are doing. This curriculum theme is being adopted at the University of Michigan-Dearborn to coincide with the launching of a new two-semester General Chemistry course specifically for engineering students doc6760 none Engineering - Civil (54) The pressures on undergraduate science, math, engineering, and technology (SME&T) education and the recommended actions to overcome these problems are well-documented. Miller and Cooper, in work at the University of Washington under the auspices of the Engineering Coalition of Schools for Excellence in Education and Leadership (ECSEL), have developed a multi-faceted suite of educational materials for engineering mechanics courses that incorporates many of these suggestions. This project at Louisiana State University is: 1. adapting and implementing the University of Washington Mechanics of Materials educational suite 2. evaluating the effectiveness Miller and Cooper s various components 3. institutionalizing these materials to ensure sustainability 4. disseminating all findings and materials to the engineering education community This project adds to Miller and Cooper s materials by introducing a wireless network of laptop computers into the classroom. Having computers distributed throughout the classroom affords greater flexibility in developing hands-on activities. Also, multimedia modules are modified and improved, hands-on activities are expanded, and student presentations are expanded to incorporate digital movie making. The results of these modifications and the effectiveness of the various components of Miller and Cooper s approach are being assessed by mixed mode (quantitative and qualitative) evaluation instruments developed in conjunction with this project doc6761 none Physics (13) Traditional introductory physics courses typically fail to significantly improve students conceptual understanding of, and attitude towards, physics. Recently, several groups have documented significant improvements in these areas by applying insights from physics education research to improve curricular content and instructional methods for lectures, labs and recitation sections. This project addresses the remaining critical component of undergraduate physics education-the homework problems-with a careful integration of technology and instruction, based on knowledge gained from physics education research. The primary goal of the project is to create instructional materials that students in introductory physics courses can use to develop problem-solving strategies based on conceptual analysis. In particular, the project is creating a complete set (about 60 total) of research-based Interactive Examples (IEs) that can be used in introductory calculus-based physics courses in undergraduate institutions. These IEs are web-based exercises that actively engage students in a Socratic dialog designed to help them develop a concept-based strategy to solve a homework problem. The problems developed address documented student difficulties and are guided by collaborations with researchers at the University of Massachusetts and the University of Washington. These new IEs also exploit the lessons learned from previous successful development of IEs for introductory algebra-based physics courses. Quantitative evaluation is being done of the effectiveness of the new IEs in improving students functional understanding of basic physics principles. Initial dissemination of these IEs will be to community colleges and peer institutions, and further dissemination is being refined during the course of the project doc6762 none Chemistry (12) Fluorescence spectroscopy is widely used in research, industry, medicine, forensics, and other technological areas as a tool for investigating chemical structure and properties, chemical interactions, biomolecular structure and function, lifetime imaging, quantitative analysis, atom-tagging in immunoassays, metabolic monitoring via luminescent reporter genes, and many other applications. The ability to use fluorescence spectroscopy in the science curricula is enhancing student learning by 1) allowing for the development of practical skills in the operation and collection of fluorescent measurements and 2) using real data to help students understand spectroscopic theory by assimilating the underlying principles of quantum mechanics and electronic energy transitions. This project is focusing on the immediate adaptation and implementation of experiments from the research and educational literature into the curriculum at all levels: general, analytical, instrumentation, biochemistry, and physical. The Environmental Science department is adapting and implementing fluorescence spectroscopy into the curriculum for their Site Monitoring and Analysis track. This fluorometer is also an integral part of undergraduate research projects as part of a capstone experience cooperatively administered through the Biology and Chemistry departments. After this initial implementation, fluorescence spectroscopy will be integrated into new curricular offerings at Carroll College, including a new Forensic Science emphasis within the Chemistry major, a newly proposed Biochemistry major, and a restructured, modular instrumentation course offered jointly with Biology doc6763 none Interdisciplinary (99) The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC physics through the study of the challenges of nuclear disarmament or hypotheses about the origins of the universe; chemistry through the study of air pollution, water quality, or crime; and mathematics by examining the reliability of statistics, studying risk benefit analysis, or decision-making. The outcome for students is connected learning. SENCER seeks to promote large-scale reform in undergraduate SMET education through intensive faculty professional development, a strong focus on local systemic change, and the use of improved assessment practices. SENCER faculty are learning to use an assessment instrument developed with partial support from several NSF initiatives to improve undergraduate education. This instrument is known as Student Assessment of Their Learning Gains (SALG) and is freely available for public use at WWW.WCER.WISC.edu NISE CL1. There are four key pieces of the SENCER project. SENCER Institutes are the core activity. These are team-based residential institutes for faculty, administrators, and advanced graduate students planning to initiate SENCER approaches. SENCER Clusters are both disciplinary and issue-oriented groups of faculty and administrators that operate to provide ongoing support and sustain reform efforts arising from participation in the Institutes. The SENCER Virtual Community links innovators together and supports dissemination of resources to support reform. The SENCER Leadership Initiatives are focusing national attention and recognition on exemplary initiatives in order to build additional support for this approach doc6764 none Biological Sciences (61) This project is using inquiry-based cooperative learning and research training in a culturally diverse setting to 1) improve undergraduate preparation in Molecular Biology; 2) enhance application of the scientific method; and 3) encourage team projects that promote interactions among culturally diverse learners. Funds are being used to upgrade a sequence of two courses and undergraduate research facilities. Specifically an existing course in Molecular Biology is being modified to involve students in an inquiry based cooperative learning project where students learn from their peers and the professor serves as a facilitator in the process. The effort is an adaptation of a laboratory manual Unraveling DNA, developed with NSF support. The laboratory component of the course is being expanded to include subcloning and sequence analysis of the luxA gene from the Lux operon that is cloned in the existing course. Students, working in groups, use the polymerase chain reaction and DNA sequencing and analysis to study their clones. In the second course, Advanced Topics, cooperative learning continues as students read and discuss original research articles that assist them in applying the principles and techniques of molecular biology and the scientific method to a novel situation. Students develop and submit a research proposal to external sources or the established University student faculty research program for funding consideration. Students complete the proposed research as an undergraduate research project and present the results at the annual student symposium as either a poster or an oral presentation. The goals of the project are consistent with the department s mission that promotes cooperative learning and undergraduate research as a capstone course. Funds are being used for instrumentation, course development and evaluation doc6765 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This project adapts a proven online Web-based learning system for the mathematics curriculum and develops curricular materials for the first calculus course. The system provides electronic homework, allowing instructors to easily create assignments that help students understand and master the material covered in class. It has already been extended in chemistry to support more interactive learning activities such as guided discovery and intelligent tutoring. The products of this project include a suite of basic online homework activities that cover the curricula of the first semester of the calculus course sequence, interactive guided discovery modules focused on topics and concepts where animation and simulation can be employed to support learning, and intelligent tutors that focus on difficult but key concepts in the curriculum and adaptively assist students in developing their understanding of them. All interactive activities are integrated into the basic online system, which records student progress for instructor review. A computer laboratory is created to support students doing online learning activities. Math faculty will create content for the homework system and interactive activities. Project staff modify the system to better support mathematics, train instructors in system use, help design interactive activities, and implement many of these activities. This project addresses a critical national need to improve the mathematical preparation of undergraduates from a wide variety of disciplines doc6766 none Geology (42) The preeminence of visual content makes petrography an ideal subject for multimedia instructional modules. We are exploring the utility of digital image technology for teaching petrology, beginning with the test case of siliciclastic petrography at the undergraduate level. A virtual petrography tutor is being designed to expose students to images and interpretive content comparable in amount to that included in traditional sedimentary petrography laboratory exercises. The curriculum materials differ markedly from existing image atlases (both paper copy and digital) in terms of the high density of interactive interpretive content that accompanies the images; the comprehensive level of treatment proposed is also a significant departure from the types of petrographic data currently available on the World Wide Web or on CD. Practical aspects of tutorial design and construction learned during this project will have application in all fields of petrology as well as in other fields which utilize data in the form of images (e.g., metallurgy, histology). Undergraduate and graduate students are participating in the development of the tutorial, allowing them to gain experience in methods of digital imaging and multi-media authoring. Initial application and formal assessment of the tutorial will take place during two semesters of an undergraduate course in sedimentary rocks (involving a projected 120 to 160 students). The development and assessment tasks proposed here are envisioned as the first step in a more ambitious project to create a full version of this tutorial for distribution and, ultimately, a digital library of petrographic images based on the large, highly documented, and well-maintained petrology collections at the University of Texas at Austin doc6767 none Computing - Other (35) This project develops curriculum and supporting materials for a course in experimentation for senior computer science majors. The capstone course provides students with opportunities to explore issues experimentally, design realistic experiments, collect data and draw conclusions based on the results. Experimental exploration, the centerpiece of the traditional scientific method, can provide new insights, eliminate unproductive approaches and validate theories and methods. The course materials are centered around a textbook that has two types of chapters, content chapters that develop experimental design concepts and project chapters that apply these concepts to particular problems. The project chapters are in the form of paper case studies or simulation. This approach provides a much needed introduction to computer science research in the undergraduate curriculum. The most extensive projects are based on simulations of different aspects of computer system performance, because this venue allows the student the most flexibility in forming and testing hypotheses. Interactive simulations are written in Java and run through a standard browser. The materials are disseminated through presentations and workshops at computer science conferences and via the Web doc6768 none Sandra Troian Princeton University Initiatives to miniaturize and integrate multiple functionalities for chemical analysis and synthesis into a hand held device have generated a quest for efficient methods to transport ultra small volumes of liquid through networked arrays. We recently discovered a non-electronic phenomenon that ideally lends itself to the construction of a complete chemical reactor on the surface of an integrated circuit (IC). The open architecture design uses a thermally based process for routing and reacting nanoliter to picoliter volumes of liquid along selected pathways of a chemically micropattern surface. The pathways and reaction sites can be actively addressed from an underlying integrated chip whose design is well matched in size and output voltage. The phenomenon relies on thermocapillary transport of liquid on a surface of structured wettability produced by micropatterning a self-assembled monolayer. Not only does this design couple the benefits of microelectronic circuitry functionality on a single chip. The goal is to use on-chip active matrix circuits to switch subsurface heating elements on and off by addressing individual pixels. This proposed technology for routing and reacting microvolumes of liquid is low voltage, low-current and has no moving parts. Such a reactor design will find a multitude of users ranging from automated studies of fluid flow in digitally reconfigurable surface channels to the identification of complex mixtures in learnable reaction sequences - all on a single chip. The configuration allows for the eventual development of wristwatch mounted devices for rapid sensing and analysis of bodily fluids or airborne chemical agents. The development and design of this integrated wet chip requires a high degree of fundamental understanding of the fluidic transport and wafer integration. The program combines complementary skills form several groups to build a strong experimental and theoretical effort. Experimental techniques for manipulating rectilinear, bent and split streams as well as discrete droplets. Integration of microelectronic circuitry with open architecture microfluidic. Theoretical understanding of the capabilities of thermocapillary transport from a continuum and molecular viewpoint. The collaboration includes investigators from chemical and electrical engineering, chemistry and physics. The principal investigators have a strong record in attracting and advising a diverse group of graduate students at all levels, many of whom have won departmental and school-wide awards for their research projects. These investigators are also well situated in an area of New Jersey in which there are many industries specifically focused on emerging biofluidic technologies. Several companies have already requested samples of the proposed chip for tests of biological assays doc6769 none Engineering - Electrical (55) Engineering education is closely linked to advances in Internet, global communication systems, computers, etc. There is one area in engineering education, however, that is still dominated by classical teaching learning methodology: the laboratory. The purpose of an engineering laboratory course is to teach future engineers to interact with the real hardware in all its imperfection. Any attempt to replace the real hardware in a student laboratory with the most elaborate simulation software results in the loss of realism and prevents students from gaining important practical skills and experiences. The technology in this project utilizes advanced space-qualified laser positioning hardware equipped with computer interfaces facilitating remote operation and status display of its components. All aspects of operation of this hardware are controlled by a designated computer through a number of actuators and extensive monitoring data acquisition. We gain global accessibility of the real hardware via the Internet thus allowing remote users nationwide to perform any experiments in real-time and collect feedback information representing properties of the actual devices. This brings to a student laboratory the most valuable aspects of the real hardware -based experiments. The choice of laboratory, laser steering and position control systems for space communication make it attractive to many engineering programs. Successful implementation of this technology can upgrade engineering laboratories nationwide to the level of leading engineering schools and result in significant improvement of the quality of engineering education and reduce variability between universities. SUNY Binghamton has a well-established record of successful research in the area of pedagogy of university education. Its distance learning facility, Enginet, operates within a network made up of a consortium of five State University of New York campuses. These resources are utilized for effective dissemination of the results of this project. Being prompted by revolutionary changes in information technology, this project is realizing the integration of this technology in education. Implementation of the Internet-accessible laboratory will not only give students access to the most advanced hardware, but provide them with an additional opportunity to utilize Internet, computer graphics, and digital imaging, thus preparing them for the challenges of their profession doc6770 none Interdisciplinary (99) An interdisciplinary approach for science and technology education opens new opportunities for increasing research-related impacts among undergraduate students. This project is creating a unified common framework for sharing ideas and knowledge across disciplines. The focus of the project is to develop a prototype of six educational modules based on three premises commonly shared across disciplines: (1) the concept of patterns, which is fundamental to visualizing information; (2) modern computing tools as an effective aid in presenting and animating graphical patterns for understanding data; and (3) cross disciplinary expertise and data sharing to leverage individual efforts in enhancing SMET education. Educational materials are being developed to introduce and illustrate this concept of patterns as an interdisciplinary approach. In addition, an internet-based community forum is being developed to share these educational materials and exchange ideas and knowledge across disciplines doc6771 none Engineering - Mechanical (56) The objectives of this project include the development of a data acquisition (DAQ) Laboratory, a required freshmen Experiments course, and a upper level required two-course sequence in Experimental Projects for Fluids and Heat Transfer. This effort will be modeled after Drexel s Engineering Test, Design, and Simulation Laboratory and Colorado School of Mines Multidisciplinary Engineering Laboratory sequence, which have both been successfully adapted by other schools. The experimental skills gained in the freshmen year will be reinforced throughout the curriculum in classroom demonstrations, required open- ended projects, senior design projects and undergraduate research. The project addresses the need to improve the way in which we teach the art of experimentation to undergraduates. In the open-ended laboratory, students participate in multidisciplinary projects and co- op opportunities involving electrical and computer components, sensors, data acquisition software or controls. Introducing hands- on experiments, especially in the first year, addresses the high attrition rate often found among women and minorities, who may lack the mechanical tinkering experience of traditional engineering students doc6753 none Physics (13) Reform movements in calculus and in physics education have shown the advantage of active methods in lively applications for improving students conceptual understandings. Research has shown that the learning of diverse groups of students is enhanced by the use of multimedia. The Mathematics Across the Curriculum projects supported by the NSF have shown the efficacy of embedding mathematics within other disciplines. This project brings all of these insights together with interesting human applications of physics to reform the algebra- based physics course. This project is developing a complete set of course materials and background physics notes that can be used in a wide variety of institutional settings to offer a reformed algebra-based physics course to diverse student audiences. In addition to the human applications, the interactive learning methods encouraged by these materials are especially helpful to enable the students to learn by methods of inquiry. The project co-PIs at UNL, Texas Tech University, Mercy College and Doane College are developing content topics with the help of a mathematics consultant. The materials are being field-tested and assessed in cooperation with the evaluation consultant. Materials developed at each institution are being field-tested at the other cooperating institutions, and tested materials will be made available for commercial distribution. By the end of the project completely reformed algebra-based physics course materials featuring human applications supported by interactive multimedia and mathematical modeling will be available for use across the nation. Faculty enhancement institutes will be held using these materials. The use of these materials for the learning of physics concepts by inquiry methods will be advocated. The appropriateness of the multimedia and mathematical modeling materials for a wide range of students will be demonstrated doc6773 none Interdisciplinary (99) In , PKAL will sponsor two summer institutes (16 workshops at each) and a select number of other workshops to enhance the skills, understandings and capacities of undergraduate faculty seeking to strengthen SME&T learning of their students. Planned and facilitated by leading national agents of change, the design of these PKAL activities is to model the discovery-based, research-rich, collaborative learning environment that works to attract students to and enable them to succeed in SME&T disciplines. Benefiting from a hands-on experience with some of the best practices in undergraduate SME&T education, participants will leave with an agenda for immediate action on their home campuses and with a plan to keep connected to their workshop peers facilitators, regional and national colleagues and to PKAL for support in continuing reform efforts. Related PKAL efforts, including an expanded web presence, print publications, a consulting service, the Faculty for the 21st Century and the evaluation of the impact of PKAL involvement on participating individuals and institutions, will support these workshops and institutes doc6774 none Interdisciplinary (99) The World Wide Web has become a major medium for distance learning. Web technologies are now being extended into laboratory science by making instruments accessible via the Web and even controllable remotely. Science students can thereby use instruments that would be otherwise unavailable or of much more limited availability. These technologies have been developed for undergraduate science instruction in the physical sciences and engineering but have been relatively little used in other scientific disciplines. The best known examples of these efforts have involved teams of scientists and programmers with considerable technical expertise. This project is extending the range of disciplines in which these technologies are being used. We are teaching environmental and ecological science to chemistry, biology, and psychology students using instruments that are accessible and controllable with a Web browser. We are broadening the types of experiments that students can do by using computers to automate data acquisition, especially to investigate phenomena that occur over a period of time that is much longer than a standard laboratory session. Making these instruments accessible on the Web allows regular monitoring of experiments without being in the laboratory. Students both on and off campus are able take advantage of these capabilities, thus widening the audience for laboratory instruction in these areas. We are using LabVIEW and AppletVIEW software to make our instruments available on the Web. We find these software packages relatively easy to use for both science students and faculty with little formal training in computer science. Hence, we can accomplish our goals without additional highly trained personnel. Web-accessible instruments are being used in environmental chemistry to measure the changes involved in the natural regulation of pH in fresh waters. Environmental science students are measuring the biological health of aquatic systems (monitoring dissolved oxygen, nitrate, carbon dioxide, etc.) after perturbations for which humans are often responsible, such as temperature elevations, addition of nutrients, or contamination with pollutants. Students studying animal behavior are monitoring the allocation of effort among various behavioral alternatives for obtaining food, thus measuring choice and its role in the efficiency of foraging over time. Students in all these courses are actively involved in the design of experiments and use computers to analyze and graph the resulting data. Advanced undergraduates are being used to assist in programming and supervising these experiments. Because high school students, recruited through a collaborative arrangement with an education service center, are also taking these courses, these advanced undergraduates are engaged in teaching roles that will give them valuable pre-service teaching experience. They also have opportunities to interact with high school science teachers. Interactions among students at a variety of levels of education are creating numerous opportunities for students to teach each other and, thereby, to enhance their own learning. While they are learning the subject matter of science, students at all levels are also appreciating the remarkable possibilities in contemporary technologies of computerized data acquisition and remote access to instruments doc6775 none Chemistry (12) This award has allowed the acquisition of a Fourier Transform Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometer (FT- NMR) and its incorporation into courses across our entire curriculum. This instrument is significantly enhancing student laboratory experiences, incorporating modern technology into the classroom, and expanding course offerings. Experiments adapted from the research and educational literature and implemented into our curriculum are focusing on the multinuclear capabilities of the instrument, the ability to record 2-dimensional spectra, and the ability to do quantitative analysis through line-broadening experiments. Curricular changes are evolving as the NMR is incorporated into a new spectroscopy course, merged from a portion of three (currently ) separate courses, and it is becomes essential for the development of modular, Special Topics courses and new integrated laboratories. Students at all levels are readily obtaining their own spectra and thus are gaining valuable, hands-on experience with an instrument that has wide applicability in a modern research and or quality control laboratory doc6776 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This is a three-year project aimed at mathematical sciences departments to provide excellent mathematical instructions for a verity of students studying undergraduate mathematics. The joint project of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematicians and Education Reform Forum is an integrated program of six national workshops, networks of mathematical sciences departments, programs at national meetings, and publications. Two workshops are held each academic year, one in the fall and the other in the spring. Participation in the workshops is department based with each participating department represented by a faculty team of 2 to 4 members. Workshops are held at college campuses in cooperation with the mathematical sciences departments. While highlighting the needs of particular student groups, the program also focuses on critical issues that cut across all institutions. The calculus reform movement provides momentum for continuing reform efforts throughout the undergraduate curriculum. Reform efforts are put in the context of the institutional role of mathematical sciences departments and their relationships with partner disciplines. The project builds a network of mathematical sciences departments, including a significant number of departments in doctoral granting institutions, which are building strong undergraduate programs for the diverse groups of students they instruct. For more information contact Naomi Fisher at ndfisher@uic.edu doc6777 none Engineering - Other (59) There is a growing need for accessible design (AD) products and services for individuals with disabilities. Relevant laws mandating accessibility apply to jobs, public facilities, public transportation, public sources of information including public internet services, telecommunication products and services, and the full spectrum of electronic and information technologies. These laws and others not only mandate accessibility, but in many cases they mandate the use of AD principles in the design process. However, the lack of designers and engineers with knowledge of and expertise in AD principles is a national problem. Faculty, and hence students, are not aware of the need for more coverage of AD principles and issues. To address this need, we are developing curricular material on AD principles and issues that is modular and hierarchically structured in cooperation with business and academic partners. The hierarchical approach means that the material is designed for use in introductory engineering courses as well as in advanced theory and design courses. The modular approach allows integration of the material in small parts: a lecture topic, homework problems, course demonstration or laboratory experiments. The long-term goal of this project is to have accessible design material integrated into the undergraduate engineering curricula of colleges and universities throughout the United States doc6778 none Chemistry (12) As part of a continuing effort to improve the laboratory experience of chemistry majors, Raman spectroscopy is being incorporated into the undergraduate, upper-level laboratory curriculum with the purchase of an instrument that combines the optics for Raman, fluorescence, emission, and absorption spectroscopy with CCD camera detection. Although somewhat sparse, experiments focusing on Raman spectroscopy are being adapted from the research and educational literature and are being implemented into the physical chemistry, inorganic chemistry, and instrumental analysis laboratories, with each emphasizing a different aspect of the theory and use of Raman spectroscopy. Raman spectroscopy is already presented in the lecture portion of these courses but prior to this award, no instrumentation to illustrate its applications in the laboratory was available. Recent advances in instrument and detector design have made Raman spectroscopy more valuable in industrial and research laboratories, providing a strong motivation to make undergraduate students knowledgeable about the technique. Laboratory experience with Raman spectroscopy is not common in most undergraduate laboratories so the experiments being adapted and implemented are likely to be transportable to other undergraduate programs doc6779 none Engineering - Electrical (55) This project is developing a real-time computer controlled Power Electronics and Drives Laboratory that consists of object-oriented software based experiments, modular based hardware experiments, and state-of-the-art industrial drives from Allen-Bradley. Specific practices and products that are being adapted are the use of object-oriented modeling of components from RPI and Virginia Tech, and hardware implementation through power electronic building blocks from Technical University of Munich. The main features of the laboratory include PC software, DSP-based control hardware, signal conditioning units and device drives and opto-isolation for power electronic converters. Object-oriented modeling and visual programming employ computer tools such as Saber and PEMag. Students are learning through hands-on experience in graphical modeling and simulation, design, analysis, and prototyping of power electronics experiments, the operation of industrial grade drives, and through web-based and CD-ROM modular materials doc6780 none Computer Science (31) We are developing NaturalJava, a natural spoken language interface for writing and editing Java programs. This system makes programming far more accessible to vision and motor impaired students. A unique feature of the system is the method of structured editing for fixing errors and or making additions. Spoken language is converted to an abstract syntax tree which is displayed. Vision impaired students then access the displayed tree via commercial products. The system is being tested with student programs, including novices and vision and motor impaired doc6781 none Engineering - Other (59) The environment and expectations facing graduating engineers have changed dramatically in the past decade. Graduate engineers are expected to contribute immediately in competitive environments with system engineering skills, information technology skills, and soft skills in addition to traditional engineering fundamentals. The ability of engineering education to produce graduates meeting these market demands will dictate its prominence and viability in the increasingly competitive technical education market, as well as directly impact our long term influence as a nation. This proof-of-concept project is addressing the growing and preeminent need for engineering capability in two areas: Systems Engineering and Information Technology (SE IT). The project is focused on the design, implementation, and evaluation of part of an engineering curriculum integrated through a virtual enterprise. The virtual enterprise is a full scale manufacturing supply chain, integrated using information technology, and producing actual product. Departmental laboratories are organized as business departments. The virtual enterprise is supported by the institution with required hardware funded and purchased. The project uses this virtual enterprise as a practical and consistent means of developing systems engineering, information technology, and soft skills in engineering students. The primary outcome of the proposed project will be two modules: one in manufacturing processes and one in manufacturing execution systems. Benefits to this approach include the broadening of engineering education to appeal to a larger population, including minorities that are severely under-represented in engineering doc6782 none Interdisciplinary (99) This project is developing a two-course sequence of integrated physical science and mathematics to prepare preservice elementary and secondary teachers to teach at the middle school level. Students tend to lose interest in mathematics and science at the middle school level, a loss often attributed to ill-prepared teachers. The lack of preparation is two-fold: elementary teachers teaching at the middle school lack content in the physical sciences, while secondary teachers lack appropriate pedagogical models for teaching at the middle school level. Realizing that teachers teach as they were taught, this two-course sequence is designed to develop pedagogical models embedded in content knowledge development of preservice teachers. The objectives of the project are to: 1) Develop comprehensive knowledge of the physical sciences and applications of mathematics in the study of science in preservice middle school teachers; 2) Develop a core of university faculty who have facility in modeling teaching styles appropriate for the preservice middle school teachers; 3) Develop a curriculum package that can be adapted by other universities for the instruction of preservice middle school teachers. The objectives are being achieved by having a team of four science and one education faculty adapt proven teacher-enhancement materials in the physical science and middle school curriculum into a two-course sequence. Key elements of this adaptation are the integration of mathematics, and a research investigation that extends throughout the course so that students develop a sense of doing real science. The project is adapting materials from Operation Physics, Operation Chemistry, Project Astro, Project Earth Science, Powerful Ideas in Physical Science, and Mission Mathematics: Linking Aerospace and the NCTM Standards. These materials are being modified by including explicit mathematical applications within the science materials as has been done within Mission Mathematics. The faculty are receiving training on teaching with the learning cycle, cooperative learning, and community building. Participation in this two-course sequence provides a model for future teachers to adapt to their classrooms. Students enrolling in these courses are at the junior level and have completed the general education science and mathematics courses: one laboratory course from any science, statistics, college algebra, and two other courses selected from biology, chemistry, geosciences, mathematics and computer science, or physics. Special efforts are being made to recruit women, minority, and non-traditional students from rural western Kansas into the new course sequence doc6783 none Physics (13) The project is adapting problem-based learning and infusing modern technology and modern teaching methods into the required first two years of undergraduate laboratories for physics majors. These courses lay the foundation of experimental physics methods and techniques for majors. A thorough examination of the construction of the current courses reveals that significant improvements can be made by implementation of social psychological principles, modern educational methods and modern experimental techniques. In the laboratories, instead of being told what to measure, the students are given modern equipment and taught experimental techniques to enable them to construct their own measurements. Students do projects where the results are used later in the course or in other courses, connecting the activities of the laboratory to real situations. Preliminary efforts in this direction have produced strongly positive results. To evaluate this ambitious and non-traditional approach, there is a sophisticated assessment strategy to be administered by outside assessors. The success of this program will not only benefit one institution, but others dedicated to undergraduate laboratory education doc6784 none Biological Sciences (61); Engineering (59) Academic and commercial research teams are rapidly approaching a new generation of devices that will interact with, incorporate, and or emulate living nervous systems. Neural prostheses to restore sight, hearing, or mobility will offer a wider range of function; robotic devices will become more effective with neuromorphic control systems. Neural Engineering is the intellectual force behind these developments, supported by recent advances in cellular neurobiology, microfabrication and neural modeling. Student training in this evolving area must emphasize the cellular and molecular interfaces between biological and artificial systems. With a growing industrial investment in Neural Engineering technologies, and the increasing number of Neural Engineering research centers and graduate programs emerging across the country, it is both appropriate and advantageous to now train undergraduate students in this area. Training in Neural Engineering at the undergraduate level has been slow to develop, impeded by the compartmentalization of the requisite skills in traditionally separate curricula (Neuroscience and Engineering). The UIC Departments of Bioengineering and Biological Sciences have addressed this problem in a two-year cross-college effort to establish one of the first undergraduate Neural Engineering programs in the country. In consultation with advisory committees, we have organized a Neural Engineering curriculum which culminates in a new capstone course [BioE BioS 475]. This course was taught by the PI CoPI as a pilot in Spring with a minimal laboratory component. We are now adapting engineered neural systems and measurement techniques from contemporary research efforts for use in this undergraduate learning environment. This will provide hands-on experience and technical training exemplary of current trends in Neural Engineering. Specifically, we are developing two new learning modules exemplary of current issues in neural engineering. The course objective is to emphasize application-driven design of neural systems. Concordantly, the themes for each module are being adapted from faculty research involving: a) Neurons cultured on a microelectrode array, demonstrating fabrication and principles of biosensors and implantable neuroprosthetics, and b) Neural circuits patterned on an inorganic substrate, illustrating progress toward neuromorphic devices for biocomputation and complex hybrid prostheses. An important goal is to enable students to make cellular-level measurements from these engineered neural systems. We expect that 1 3 of bioengineering students and an equal number of biology students will follow the Neural Engineering course track, with approximately 40 students taking the capstone course during the initial grant period. Evaluation of pedagogy and attainment of course goals are being undertaken by the UIC Survey Research Laboratory. All of the training innovations initiated by this grant will become a permanent part of our curriculum, will be disseminated to other universities, and will be used to enhance training of secondary level science teachers through collaboration with the UIC Institute for Math and Science Education doc6785 none Psychology - Cognitive (73) There has been an explosion of interest in matters relating cognition, brain, and behavior in the undergraduate curriculum. New courses in cognitive science are being introduced, while standard courses in neurobiology and psychology are being infused with material from cognitive science. Learning is most effective when students actively engage the subject. Thus psychology textbooks have traditionally used visual illusions to stimulate interest. Although compelling, such demonstrations are static and necessarily limited in scope. Ideally, students would not only experience illusions, but actively perform experiments, test modalities other than vision, and experience material from all areas of cognitive science. In general, it is not practical to provide full-fledged laboratories for large lecture courses such as introductory psychology, introductory neurobiology, or the emerging cognitive science courses. However, such courses often have discussion sections that would be enriched by experiments and interactive demonstrations. This project addresses these needs by development of a CD-ROM of experiments and demonstrations that can be used by students at their own computers or by instructors with projection equipment. Computers are now standard tools in the psychology research lab, and can be similarly used in teaching. Although many fine examples of illusions are scattered across the internet, they are heavily weighted toward vision, often lack explanation, and engage one only as a passive observer. This CD-ROM goes much further, using interactivity for experiments as well as demonstrations. Furthermore, it goes beyond vision to cover hearing, and beyond perception to allow students to replicate classic experiments in all areas of cognitive science. The CD-ROM covers several broad areas, including vision, hearing, language, learning and memory, attention, cognition, and practical applications. There are several modules devoted to each broad area. Each module generally includes (1) a demonstration of the phenomenon, taken from the real world where possible, (2) a demonstration with the salient features isolated, (3) a self-experiment to quantify the phenomenon, and (4) questions that stimulate students to form hypotheses and test them using the CD-ROM. Most modules are suitable for students at all levels, with introductory students simply viewing the demonstrations, and advanced students doing experiments and testing their own hypotheses. At all levels, the approach is open-ended and exploratory rather than strictly didactic. Faculty from Cornell s Department of Psychology and Cognitive Studies Program are active researchers in these fields and are available to assist us in choosing appropriate topics and recent experiments that are not yet covered in textbooks. Faculty from Cornell and elsewhere are also active in evaluating the CD-ROM during its development, both from their research expertise and by testing beta versions in their classrooms. Preliminary contacts with faculty from a variety of colleges and universities indicate considerable interest in this material. In addition, several publishers have shown interest in this project, making nationwide dissemination certain doc6786 none Chemistry (12) Governors State University is developing a model Student Environmental Contract Laboratory( SECL) to improve instruction in the Environmental Chemistry course. The Environmental Chemistry course is required in two curricula, the BS in Chemistry with a Teacher Education Certificate (secondary school endorsement) and the BA in Elementary Education with Chemistry Teaching Specialization, and also is an advanced elective in the American Chemical Society approved BS in Chemistry curriculum. The SECL adapts the curriculum developed in at Coastal Carolina University in order to analyze environmental samples generated by the students enrolled in the class and for clients , including GSU biology courses and local high school teachers and high school student projects. The SECL is equipped with a new an atomic absorption spectrometer with flame and graphite furnace atomization with autosampling automation and PC control. A block digestion system facilitates greater volume of student analyses. An autosampling accessory of the university s existing GC MS also equips the SECL. The students enrolled in the environmental chemistry course create the SECL, perform USEPA regulatory methods, develop appropriate QA QC procedures, and are evaluated during a mock laboratory audit. Their experiences enhance student preparation for the entry level positions in the industrial workplace. Such preparation is critical for GSU students since the BS in Chemistry majors are non- traditional students (29.9 average age), returning to the classroom to complete professional education or to change careers. Over 80% of the chemistry majors attend GSU part-time, enrolling in the late afternoon, evening and Saturday course offerings. The new instrumentation also provides remote access to the instrumentation for operation by regional high school teachers. This remote access allows participating high school teachers to enhance their effectiveness in the classroom, with enrichment of curriculum, in extracurricular activities such as clubs, and in student projects and guided inquiry. The collaboration with high school teachers and their high school students was developed based on experience gained through our CCLI A&I project , A Regional WWW-Based FT-NMR for Chemistry Improvements doc6787 none Engineering - Other (59) In this project we are developing, producing, evaluating and disseminating a series of interactive modules for the teaching and learning of fluid mechanics for undergraduates in science and engineering. The modules focus on fundamentals and have impact across the curricula of Chemical, Mechanical, Petroleum, Aeronautical, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Oceanography, Meteorology, Geophysics, Applied Mathematics and Applied Physics. The primary objectives are to enhance student learning in the areas of (i) problem solving, (ii) intuition about complex flow phenomena, and (iii) retention of knowledge. These objectives are met by providing experimental visualizations and computational simulations of fluid flow phenomena in an interactive medium. An extensive set of experimental and computational facilities has been used to produce videos, simulations, and applications programs to demonstrate fluid phenomena. The format, navigation, and multimedia environment closely resembles that used in our previous NSF DUE-sponsored project, Multi-Media Fluid Mechanics (MMFM I), recently published by Cambridge University Press, but takes advantage of new technologies in programming environments, data compression, digitization, and applications software. In the current project (MMFM II) we are producing modules on the topics of Control Volume Balances, Similarity and Scaling, Interfacial Flows and Phenomena, and Turbulence doc6788 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This project enhances, implements and disseminates a technologically innovative software application, WeBWorK. WeBWork, an Internet-based system for generating and delivering homework math problems to students, was developed at the University of Rochester and is in use at several other major universities. This project adapts WeBWork to meet mathematics content and populations specific to the institution. It also enhances the tool so that other faculty can use it easily and can contribute to the database that supports the tool. The goals of this project are to improve mathematical literacy for undergraduate math students, to enhance the educational effectiveness of homework in a wide variety of lower division classes, to improve the content and capabilities of the national WeBWorK database program, and to pioneer the extension of WeBWorK throughout the university system and to community high schools. The project broadens the base of faculty who can author problems by developing additional software tools for instructors that will enable them to create mathematical problems to be used on WeBWorK without writing code. The project includes development of WeBWorK instructor s guide and web-based teaching guides for distribution to university and high school faculty members from the community. The final enhancement is development of a mechanism to enable faculty to conduct a keyword search of the database for searches on the national database doc6789 none Physics (13) The primary goal of the project is the improvement of learning for all students who take undergraduate physics. To help achieve this goal, the Physics Education Group will produce a suite of mutually reinforcing instructional materials for: (1) introductory physics courses for science and engineering majors (calculus-based and algebra-based), (2) lower and upper division courses for physics majors, (3) physics courses for future K-12 teachers, (4) physics courses for non-science majors, and (5) courses for students underprepared in science and mathematics who aspire to science-related careers (especially those from under-represented minority groups). The project consists of three interdependent components: (a) development and assessment of curriculum, (b) research on the learning and teaching of physics, and (c) faculty development. The first component consists of the development of two interrelated types of instructional materials: Tutorials in Undergraduate Physics and Physics by Inquiry. Both draw upon and expand on previous curriculum developed by the group that have been shown to be effective with different student populations in a variety of instructional settings. The project responds to the need for additional tutorials for undergraduate instruction in physics and modules for the preparation of K-12 teachers. The primary materials in the tutorial part of the project are: versions of Tutorials in Introductory Physics suitable for the algebra-based, calculus-based and honors physics courses; Tutorials on Problem-solving in Introductory Physics; and Tutorials beyond Introductory Physics. The primary materials in the part of the project that pertains to the preparation of K-12 teachers are based on topics in the National Science Education Standards that are not included in the published version of Physics by Inquiry. The new modules include topics in classical physics and physical science, revisions of existing modules, and new modules on topics in modern physics. Secondary instructional materials are being developed concurrently that increase the adaptability of the primary materials to different student populations and instructional settings. Ongoing assessment of student learning will characterize every stage of the curriculum development process. Results from research will not only inform the development of curriculum in this project but will also contribute to a research base that serves as a national and international resource. Commercial publication will ensure that the curriculum produced will be nationally distributed. Systematic faculty development will enhance dissemination of the materials and provide assistance to instructors in adopting the materials doc6790 none Biological Sciences (61) The Faculty Institutes for Reforming Science Teaching project (FIRST I) enabled 92 faculty teaching 322 courses at 27 colleges and universities to use active, inquiry-based science teaching, thus providing more opportunities for all students to gain scientific understanding. We are expanding FIRST I into a national dissemination project, called FIRST II, which provides large-scale, long-term professional development program for biology faculty, postdoctoral and graduate students from universities, four-year, and community colleges. The FIRST II project is providing widespread dissemination of instructional practices and materials that give faculty the ability to help all students learn science using active teaching methods and inquiry. The FIRST II project is being implemented and sustained by teams of scientists faculty centered at eight biological field stations throughout the United States. The field station teams are working with faculty from colleges and universities in their region in a series of workshops that model active, inquiry-based science teaching both in the classroom and the field. FIRST II is also enabling faculty to learn and use multiple assessment strategies that provide evidence of student learning which their peers accept. We are exploring ways in which teaching can be recognized, evaluated, and rewarded within institutions. In FIRST II we are gathering evidence for the impact of both changes in faculty teaching and improvements in students learning. The networks of faculty centered at each field station, and the national dissemination network hosted by the Long-Term Ecological Research Network office are facilitating collaboration among faculty about their reforms toward achieving excellence in science teaching, and about the emerging criteria and strategies for the scholarship of teaching doc6791 none Interdisciplinary (99) This project creates public, interdisciplinary science education Web-based instructional modules that combine core, interdisciplinary science lessons with interactive multimedia material, research reports, historical biographies and other excellent Web resources to present students with a high-quality, inquiry-based learning experience. These modules are launched in an education Web portal, Visionlearning, which allows science instructors to combine a custom set of these modules with their own course content, such as a syllabus, to easily create a personal Web classroom. This project helps to overcome the barriers that prevent widespread use of the Web in science education by providing a content-rich yet fast and easy-to-use system to introduce instructors to educational technology. This project provides free interdisciplinary science Web lessons, promotes faculty use of instructional technology, creates bilingual science resources and quantitatively evaluates all of the resources developed doc6792 none Biological Sciences (61) Faculty from the Departments of Biochemistry and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology are developing an integrated pair of biology methods courses for pre- service teachers. One course focuses on topics related to cell biological, molecular, and biochemical topics; the other highlights topics and approaches in teaching about ecology and evolution. Both focus on a level of understanding appropriate for middle and high school biology teachers and provide considerable exposure to biological content as well as teaching methods. The two courses are offered separately, but are integrated by a common conceptual theme of life in the desert. All topics are considered from the point of view of adaptations to the desert environment, from the whole organism to the cell and molecular level. Extensive use is made of both campus and off-campus resources that help students better understand life in the desert. Computer-interfaced field instruments and sensors facilitate investigative field research projects that are designed and carried out by students who are also student teachers. Both courses engage students in dialogue about the common misconceptions about the natural world, and how an interdisciplinary, hands- on teaching approach can help to identify and clarify misconceptions. Our goal in focusing on misconceptions is to model how teachers can best help students learn difficult concepts and how to genuinely assess learning and understanding. The focus on misconceptions also creates an environment in our courses where questioning and intellectual thought are valued, where a lack of understanding is an impetus for further exploration, and where students are encouraged to learn from each other and to value a diversity of styles of teaching and learning. Students work through exemplary activities and discuss the techniques that foster student involvement in biology laboratory activities. Both courses are mapped to Benchmarks for Science Literacy (AAAS, ) and the National Science Education Standards (NRC, ) and both adapt practices from a number of resources including Great Explorations in Math and Science, Full-Option Science Series programs, Science and Technology for Children, Bottle Biology, and the American Chemical Society Chemistry in the Community . A practicing secondary school teacher is a valued collaborator in course design and teaching to ensure that both courses are as relevant as possible to the actual classroom teaching situation doc6793 none Atmospheric Sciences (41) Understanding transport in the Earth s stratosphere is an important foundation for atmospheric science. Transport in the stratosphere plays a crucial role in determining the seasonal and spatial distributions of many trace gases in the atmosphere. The intrinsic complexity of the atmosphere precludes the exclusive use of analytic solutions. As a result, numerical models are standard tools for studying the atmosphere. This project is adapting the Atmospheric and Research short numerical modeling program for use as an educational tool to teach undergraduates how trace chemicals are transported in the atmosphere. Subsequently, an accompanying set of 8 lesson plans will be developed, which will provide a framework of how the software can be used. The model provides hands-on experience simulating transport in the stratosphere with the ability to compare model results to satellite and other observations. The AER short model is a mature Fortran code developed in the early eighties with funding from NASA, Air Force and industry and has been continuously improved through its applications in scientific research in the past 15 years. It is one of five models that were developed and maintained by institutions in the United States and have remained active over the past 15 years doc6794 none Biological Sciences (61) Chemistry (12) Due to the nature of doing molecular biology at a primarily undergraduate institution, there are several challenges faculty face in providing students with the training they need to compete successfully for jobs in the growing biotechnology industry and the training required to perpetuate this knowledge to future generations. These challenges include limited funding, space, and time. This project supports the development of a shared interdisciplinary molecular facility that will be used in undergraduate and graduate level courses in Chemistry and Biological Sciences, individual student research projects, and summer research experiences for talented middle school children. The facility enables the integration of state-of-the-art molecular techniques into the curriculum of over 14 courses at the California State University, Sacramento (CSUS) including those for prospective K-12 teachers. Over 52% of the students at CSUS are represented by minorities. Additionally, most of the CSUS students are non- traditional - in their mid to late 20s, and work an average of 25 hours a week while attending college. Use of this facility enables CSUS students, through course-centered, inquiry-based projects, to learn cutting- edge technological methods that significantly raises their preparation for entry into careers in biotechnology and science education. The project is an adaptation of a similar facility developed with NSF support at California Polytechnic State University, and adapts research methods from the primary research literature doc6795 none Computer Science (31) This project develops four problem-generators on programming languages topics. The problem generators are designed to generate problems as parameterized instances of a problem template. Their performance and use is evaluated over four semesters. The problem generators are expected to promote active learning among students and to improve the problem-solving skills of students. Problem-based learning improves long-term retention. Researchers have advocated the use of self-paced exercises, practice to build problem-solving skills, and the use of frequent, graded assignments in a course. Faculty are increasingly turning to the use of technology to provide practice problems to students. They are developing programs to generate problems, and making them available to students for practice. But, such programs that provide students with frequent, self- paced exercises have been infrequently attempted for computer science topics, because problems in computer science are not always quantitative, and they often depend on the structure of arbitrary computer programs. This project investigates the potential for use of problem-generations in computer science topics in light of the unique constraints of the computer science curriculum doc6796 none Biological Sciences (61) This proposal describes the development of instructional materials for an innovative course, entitled The Molecules of Life, which is aimed at undergraduate non-science majors. The project addresses an urgent need to improve science education for students who do not specialize in science but must be scientifically literate in order to make informed decisions as citizens in their personal lives and future careers. The target audience for the course includes undergraduates in the liberal arts, business majors, and students training to be teachers. The Molecules of Life uses modern topics such as protein structure, drug design, and the immune response to convey our understanding of biomolecular function and how this knowledge is applied in combating human disease. Existing resources for biochemistry instruction are not suitable for this course since they are designed for science majors or students studying for health professions. Therefore, we are developing three types of educational materials for The Molecules of Life: written instructional modules; an interactive web site incorporating molecular graphics exercises; and multi-week, inquiry-based laboratory projects on enzyme structure and function. The instructional modules are being written in collaboration with NYU research faculty, thereby enhancing faculty development and connecting research and teaching activities. Utilizing sophisticated graphics software in a course for non-science majors is a creative application of a technology that is currently underutilized in this context. Laboratory projects are being designed with the assistance of graduate students who then teach the laboratory sections, a combined experience that enhances their training as teachers. Instructional materials are evaluated by faculty both within and outside NYU, and the effectiveness of the course is assessed from student evaluations. The materials and course results are disseminated via commercial publication, workshops, and articles in science education journals doc6797 none Engineering - Engineering Technology (58) Programmable logic controllers (PLCs) are an essential part of manufacturing automation. Thousands of these devices have been used in manufacturing plants for such applications as monitoring security, managing energy consumption, and controlling machines and automatic production lines. However, because of limitations in equipment availability, it is often difficult for students to gain the experience needed to become proficient with PLCs. This is a proof-of-concept project to develop an integrated virtual learning system for programmable logic controllers. The system is initially being utilized as an instructional laboratory aid within the Manufacturing Engineering Technology program at Texas A&M University. This system is integrating the strong educational emphasis of an intelligent tutoring system with the technological innovation of a PLC emulator and the attraction and motivation of a game. Each component is being developed and evaluated both internally and externally. Evaluation criteria includes instructional effectiveness and lesson content appropriateness. Results are being disseminated within the academic and industrial communities via the Internet. If the concept is proven, the methodology will be replicable and applicable to several other types of equipment and technical laboratory courses doc6798 none Chemistry (12) The proposed project has three goals: (1) to increase the retention rate for students in basic organic chemistry courses, (2) to enhance the ability of students in these courses to use scientific reasoning, and (3) to drive innovation in the teaching of organic chemistry. These are accomplished by creating interactive learning software delivered to students over the web by a versatile platform called OWL developed at the institution and now used in general chemistry. The software consists of guided discovery modules and intelligent tutors. Using guided discovery modules, students run virtual experiments, interpret data, and then form, test, and revise hypotheses. The students scientific reasoning ability is enhanced while gaining an appreciation for the experimental basis for the organic chemistry they are learning. Using intelligent tutors, students explore topics like SN1, SN2, E1, & E2 reactivity and synthesis. Students receive immediate feedback, tuned to each individual s level of mastery. Combined with regular electronic homework, also delivered by OWL, students are prompted to keep current in their courses by participating actively in their own learning. Student participation in all components of this system, called Organic OWL, is encouraged by allotment of credit for passed homework and completed modules and tutors. The learning power of the software will be enhanced significantly by a provision for students to draw and to submit their own structures using the ChemDraw and ChemFinder programs, in cooperation with CambridgeSoft Inc., Cambridge, MA. The materials are text-independent, and the OWL delivery platform are to be available commercially within one year of the start of the project doc6799 none Engineering - Other (59) An overview of solid waste management is an important component of most undergraduate civil and environmental engineering curriculum. The solid waste field encompasses a wide range of principles derived from mechanical engineering, economics, optimization, chemistry, mathematics, hydraulics, hydrology, geotechnical engineering, etc. Traditionally it is taught using a combination of lectures, homework exercises, engineering design experiences, and the very occasional field trip. However, the concepts involved are best grasped through actual experience with the processes. This project is enhancing learning of engineering principles and fundamentals through the development of supplementary electronic digital teaching materials. Specifically, we are developing a compact disc containing video and audio clips, slides and other visual aids demonstrating management strategies for municipal solid waste, and providing students with hands-on learning experiences responsive to diverse learning styles. In addition, we have formed a collaboration among the College of Engineering and Computer Science, College of Education, and K-12 at-risk schools to engage students in learning about MSW management. The compact disk will also be made available to engineering programs adopting a new text, Solid Waste Engineering, through a distribution plan to be arranged with Brooks Cole, Inc doc6800 none Engineering - Chemical (53) Chemistry - (12) This proof-of-concept project is an integrated effort between the faculty of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry departments at Rowan University. The primary objective of this project is to develop new laboratory experiments that utilize a series of chemical processes and analytical techniques that are not traditionally covered in chemical engineering and or chemistry curricula, but that are commonly encountered in industry. Using chemicals derived from food grade raw materials, intrinsically safe new laboratory experiments are being created for chemical engineering and chemistry courses. Laboratory modules based on each step of the olive oil manufacturing process are being developed. These modules range in complexity from fundamental engineering and science principles shown in gravity decantation of immiscible liquids to more complex principles required to describe filtration theory. Within these experiments, students are relating product qualities of flavor and aroma with chemical components. Advanced technology is being integrated into the project by using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and gas chromatography to identify these compounds. The biomedical focus of these laboratories is to identify and quantify the presence of oleic and linoleic acids. Students conducting these laboratories are developing high level thinking skills by identifying the relationship between process variables and the resulting oil properties doc6801 none Noble SGER: Novel mathematical approaches for determining ecosystem structure and dynamics This SGER proposes to investigate the organizational properties of ecosystems with novel mathematical approaches. The investigators will conduct complexity, dimensionality and entropy analyses using established mathematical techniques and apply them to a multi-variable, long-term ecological data set for an estuary. The state variables (ammonia, chlorophyll a, and salinity) will be evaluated for how they change with respect to each other and with time. The objective is to define the organizational properties of these ecosystems in such a way that changes in microbial community structure can be related in quantitative and predictable ways to changes in the trajectories and connectivity of the state variables. Ultimately, this work may lead to a better understanding of the processes responsible for harmful algal blooms and other emergent phenomena doc6802 none ion. These virtual experiments are integrated with traditional hands-on laboratory experiments in a course in electronic materials. The educational challenge is to help undergraduates develop intuitions about how electrons move inside a crystal, how they interact with each other, and how they are affected by applied voltage, light and heat. In contrast to many educational applets, which are merely animations of the pages of the textbook, we use simulations based on the linear response theory and Boltzmann transport equation. This allows students to explore the microscopic origin of many electron transport phenomena without understanding the sophisticated mathematics typically covered in an advanced graduate course. This technology demonstrates how the Web can be used to bridge the gap between lectures and laboratories, reach students with different learning styles, and facilitate active learning in a classroom context doc6803 none Chemistry (12) This project is a joint effort by four chemistry departments in the University of Alaska system to improve the access of UA chemistry students to modern computational chemistry tools. Chemistry faculty at these sites, which include UA campuses at Fairbanks, Anchorage, Juneau, and the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, do have some experience using molecular modeling software. However, most of these small chemistry departments by themselves lack experience using molecular modeling in the teaching setting, they lack colleagues within their sub-disciplines to discuss specific molecular modeling issues, and they lack the financial resources and technical background to install the necessary hardware and software on a department-wide scale. Thus the UA consortium was formed to provide mutual technical support concerning how to solve specific molecular modeling problems, to exchange ideas and methods for incorporating molecular modeling in the chemistry curriculum, and to choose the best hardware and software for installation in undergraduate computer labs. The PIs settled on a common hardware standard and the HyperChem molecular modeling system to facilitate communication throughout the UA system. Communication also is fostered by setting up a Web site (www.hyperalaska.edu) as a centralized information exchange site for Alaska chemistry faculty, or others nationwide, regarding teaching or research applications of molecular modeling. UA chemistry faculty are adapting molecular modeling methods in their curricula in various ways. These are designed to: (1) enhance the mental picture of molecularity among introductory level students (Jones, ChemConf 96), (2) create unifying cross-disciplinary connections among upper division students enrolled in discipline-specific chemistry and (in some cases) biology classes (Martin, J. Chem. Ed., 75, 241, ), and (3) critically benchmark computational chemistry results against experimental results, such as those obtained in NMR, IR, thermochemical, chromatographic, kinetic or other experiments (Yarger, J. Chem. Ed., 74, 243, ; Wolfson, J. Chem. Ed. 73, , ). The across-the-board implementation of molecular modeling described here is expected to significantly strengthen chemistry learning by providing new motivation for students to undertake learning, a new conceptual route to learning, and significant and interesting learning goals for both students and teachers doc6804 none Computer Science (31) This project demonstrates that robotics (in particular, the LEGO Mindstorms platform) can be a cost-effective and widely-applicable tool for teaching a significant proportion of the ACM IEEE Computing Curriculum (CC ) Body of Knowledge. We are developing an extensible set of 30-40 assignments and laboratory exercises that use LEGO Mindstorms robot kits to motivate and support active student learning across applicable knowledge areas of the CC . Examples of such knowledge areas include concurrency in Operating Systems, distributed systems in Networking, and agent design in Artificial Intelligence. Secondly we create new software tools and adapt existing freeware packages available in the Mindstorms user community for our more advanced purposes doc6805 none Engineering - Mechanical (56) Operating like an engineering company, the Creative Design Workshop (CDW) embodies four mini-courses offered in the Mechanical Engineering Department. It provides students with a collaborative, inquiry-based learning environment of exploratory hands-on reverse engineering projects coupled with formal instruction in communication, teamwork, teaching methods, and learning styles. Participation in the CDW gives students a good feel for how mechanical devices work and the rationale behind their design. In addition, the formal instruction in teaching and their teaching experience within the CDW may increase students level of interest in seeking a faculty career after graduation. Integration of technology is addressed through student use of computers and multimedia software as part of their reverse engineering projects. Formative evaluations are performed several times during the life of the project through focus groups and self-administered surveys. Groups of students not involved in the CDW, but with similar academic backgrounds, are used as control groups. Comparisons of evaluations between them and those students in the CDW provide a measure of the effectiveness of the CDW in meeting its stated objectives. A full description of the project and the materials used in each project component are available on the CDW website. Results from the summative evaluation at the end of the project will be made available through conference and journal publication doc6806 none SMITH Over the next three years, an annual conference of developers of comprehensive K-12 science and mathematics curricula and national implementation sites recently funded by the National Science Foundation will be held. The goal of these conferences is to provide a forum for developers to discuss and find solutions to common issues of materials development, evaluation, adoption and implemenetation of reform-based curricula. The conference allows the participants to exchange information, interact with experts and build relationships begun in previous meetings. A conference report and evaluation is publisehd on the web. Each meeting builds uon the previous one doc6807 none Computer Science (31) Despite many efforts, the typical introductory course in computer science still does not present the software development process the way modern software is actually implemented. Our approach is to combine an object-first style with such normally advanced topics as animation, concurrency and event-driven programming. The mechanism for doing so is the use of an extensive library of routines which provides an environment in which students solve interesting problems using simple versions of advanced techniques. By gradually reducing the support provided by this library, we introduce students to deeper issues in computer science naturally motivating advanced material. The results of our work include the library which enables animation, concurrency and event-drive programming at the introductory level; a self-contained tutorial for this libary; an extensive suite of sample programs and exercises which make use of this library; and a textbook. Each of these materials will be evaluated at a variety of institutions ranging from college preparatory to highly selective doc6808 none Mathematical Sciences (21) Physics (13) There is a vector calculus gap between the way vector calculus is usually taught by mathematicians and the way it is used by other scientists. This material is essential for physicists and some engineers due to its central role in the description of electricity and magnetism. But the traditional language used by mathematicians to teach this material is so different from the way it is used in applications that students are often unable to translate. A major part of the problem is the traditional mathematics emphasis on Cartesian coordinates to describe vectors as triples of numbers, rather than emphasizing that vectors are arrows in space. This leads to the dot and cross products being memorized as algebraic formulas, rather than statements about projections and areas, respectively. The traditional approach has the one big advantage of providing a single framework for handling quite general problems. But most practical applications, including virtually all at the undergraduate level, fall into a small number of special cases, such as those with spherical or cylindrical symmetry. Problems with a high degree of symmetry become much more intuitive when the computations are done in appropriate coordinates, using a vector basis adapted to those coordinates. This emphasizes the geometry of the problem, rather than a brute force algebraic computation. This project is developing supplemental materials, especially small group activities, which emphasize the geometry of highly symmetric situations, some of which are intended for use with an otherwise traditional vector calculus course, and some of which are intended for use in a new, upper-division physics course on related material. Such activities introduce students to the types of problems and methods of solution which they encounter in their chosen specialization, while at the same time increasing their understanding of traditional vector calculus and its applications, thus bridging the vector calculus gap doc6809 none Interdisciplinary (99) This proof-of-concept project is designing an interdisciplinary curriculum to educate students from diverse disciplines about environmental management systems (EMS). The primary goal is to help students understand the importance of environmental issues through an integrated approach drawing on science, business economic, legal, social, and engineering concepts. EMS are next generation responses to pollution prevention that go beyond environmental regulatory compliance by integrating science, quality management and systems engineering practices to improve environmental performance. As such, the project applies selected science, business and engineering applications to an issue of broad public interest and concern. The first core activity of the project is the development of a model curriculum so that students can better understand the benefits of environmental management in real-world settings by interacting with faculty from diverse disciplines and with professionals from engineering, sciences, and business. Working with a group of universities and companies, the project team is designing and testing interdisciplinary learning modules on EMS. These learning modules are being designed for face-to-face as well as web-based delivery and include a variety of active learning strategies such as class discussions, case studies, and internships. The project advisory group, composed of faculty from academic institutions, and business and environmental practitioners, play a central role in the design, evaluation, and dissemination of the materials. The project is engaged in both formative and summative evaluation activities, including evaluations by the advisory group, students, practitioners, project evaluators, and participating partners. A second core activity is designing outreach efforts to diverse student populations. To facilitate outreach, project deliverables are being disseminated through a variety of means including the project website, presentations, publications, advisory group follow-up, and informational sources doc6810 none Engineering - Electrical (55) The objective of this project is to produce educational materials for an electrical engineering service course that motivates mechanical engineering students by presenting the content of electrical systems in the context of mechanical engineering. Motivating students and engaging their interest is the one element vital for the success of any course and is, unfortunately, the element too often lacking in such service courses. This problem is addressed by presenting topics in electrical systems from the viewpoint and in the context of the discipline being served. The study of electrical systems is embedded into major components of mechanical engineering, thus allowing students to construct a knowledge of electrical systems that is well integrated with their existing base of knowledge. This approach can be extended to other engineering disciplines that need knowledge of electrical systems. Delivery features include studio format, a variety of active learning strategies, and Web-based learning and assessment tools including Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT), ConcepTests, multimedia simulations, and hypertext informational documents. Throughout the project, a review board of nationally-recognized experts in engineering education and assessment is evaluating the educational materials developed, providing information for continuous improvement, and assuring that the materials developed can serve as a model for the development of service courses in electrical systems. Dissemination will be through a published textbook, journal articles, conference presentations, and faculty workshops doc6811 none Physics (13) This project is developing and testing for large enrollment introductory physics courses a unique multifaceted epistemological learning system-Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) - that replicates systematic discovery methods used by practicing scientists. The goal of this system is to bring a scientific way of knowing into the process of learning physics. A complete set of curriculum materials (published innovative textbook, student study guide, and instructor s guide including suggestions for experiments) is being developed for the algebra-based physics course taken primarily by biology majors and pre-medical students. In addition, resource materials, feedback formative assessment instruments, and recommendations on practical implementation of the ISLE are being prepared as supplements for this course and for the calculus-based introductory physics courses in which traditional physics texts are used. ISLE is being tested in algebra-based physics courses, in a bridging course for under prepared engineering students, and in regular and honors calculus-based physics for engineering students. The ISLE is based on research in physics education, cognitive science, and learning-outcome requests from the 21st century workplace. It is being used in several institutions-Ohio State University, Rutgers University, Chico State University and a two-year college. Students can be active learners rather than objects of teaching. Students construct the understanding of physics themselves following the same general pattern for each concept-devising and experimentally testing qualitative and quantitative explanations of the phenomena that they observe. Various proven thinking and learning strategies-multiple exposures, multiple representations, and multimedia-enhanced learning-are used. Students are active participants in all parts of the course, and they solve complex problems and apply their knowledge for practical purposes. After taking the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) physics course, students should be better skilled in the techniques of scientific investigation, experienced in designing their own investigations and in decision making, able to construct their understanding of new concepts, and used to working collaboratively in groups to solve complex real life problems. They leave instruction with conceptual knowledge and procedural knowledge structures doc6812 none A laser scanning confocal microscope will significantly enhance and expand the research capabilities of a group of molecular, cellular, and integrative biologists at the College of William and Mary. Currently, these investigators use conventional light and epifluorescence microscopy which, due to certain inherent limitations, precludes certain types of studies. Confocal microscopy can produce optical sectioning of biological specimens and this series of optical sections can then be tomographically assembled using computer reconstruction to produce extremely precise three dimensional images that could be optically viewed through any plane. This allows for imaging fluorescent signals in both living tissues and in thick biological specimens. Confocal microscopy is extremely well suited for visualizing multiple fluorescent signals in the same cell simultaneously and allows for an accurate quantitative measurement of colocalization. The investigator can detect weak or faint images while dramatically increasing the resolution of the image compared to standard epifluorescence. Moreover, even subcellular structures or signals can be localized within a cell in the context of a tissue slice or a living embryo. The acquisition of a confocal scope will enable these investigators to conduct their current research projects more efficiently and productively as well as extend their research in new directions. This instrumentation will have a major impact on seven different research projects including (1) understanding the molecular and cellular mechanisms governing the development of brain vasculature, in particular the tissue interactions and genetic responses that give rise to the brain vasculature ; (2) investigating subnuclear trafficking of nuclear hormone receptors; (3) determining the physiological and genetic mechanisms regulating reproductive responsiveness and inhibition in prairie deermice; (4) uncovering genetic variation underlying photoresponsiveness in the white-footed mouse; (5) investigating the metaphase to anaphase transition during mitosis and meiosis in C. elegans, particularly the role of the anaphase promoting complex; (6) analyzing the functional morphology of thermoregulatory neurons in the hypothalamus in order to understand how organisms regulate their temperature; and (7) determining the genetic mechanisms regulating the activity of the Pax-5 transcription factor during B cell development. In addition, additional investigators from the Biology Department as well investigators from other disciplines including BioPsychology, Kinesiology and Applied Science, will also utilize the confocal microscope. The acquisition of this instrument will have a profound effect not only on the research capabilities of the investigators but will also have a significant educational impact at the College of William and Mary. This technology will be integrated into the cell biology, molecular biology, and neurobiology courses. A substantial number of both Master s degree students and undergraduates will utilize the confocal microscope in the course of their research doc6813 none LeBoeuf The objective of this project is to develop a user-friendly, fundamental finite-element and finite-difference based discrete numerical model to more fully evaluate a number of proposed mass-transfer limitation processes. This model will be used by students, faculty and researchers to investigate and understand more fully the effects of mass transfer limitations on the distribution, transport, reaction and transformation of contaminants within natural or engineered environments. This project addresses a single particle in a two-phase system comprised of water and the particle; future work would address gas-phase and, eventually, three-phase (gas-solid-liquid) behavior. The system developed will be made available to interested parties via an interactive web-based environment using Prometheus, further enabling prompt, two-way communication between the user and the principal investigators doc6814 none for One of the fundamental problems in Number Theory is that of determining the number and distribution of integral or rational points upon curves of positive genus. Falting s theorem indicates that the number of such points is finite if the genus exceeds one, but, in general, one has little specific information available. The investigator studies a variety of techniques, principally from Diophantine approximation, which may be applied to quantify Falting s theorem in special situations. In particular, Bennett considers approaches based upon rational function approximation to systems of hypergeometric functions (the generalized hypergeometric method), lower bounds for linear forms in logarithms of algebraic numbers, local methods and computational Diophantine approximation. These are applied to study families of quartic equations, Thue equations, polynomial-exponential equations and integral points on given models of elliptic curves. The investigator also discusses two effective methods for finding such ``integral points on higher genus curves, where the aforementioned ones fail. These involve, respectively, extensions of an old technique of Chabauty and arguments exploiting the modularity of certain Frey curves. Number theory, one of the oldest branches of mathematics, has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years. On one hand, the remarkable proof of Fermat s Last Theorem by Andrew Wiles has reaffirmed Number theory s position as a central one in modern mathematics. On the other, numerous and striking applications to such diverse problems as data encryption and signal transmission have demonstrated the utility of the field, both for industrial and governmental purposes. In the project at hand, the investigator studies a number of questions in the subfield of Diophantine equations, including some stemming from work of Wiles. The techniques employed allow the complete resolution of a number of classic problems in this area. These equations are connected to the theory of error-correcting codes which, in turn, are of crucial importance to, for example, data processing from satellites, cd and dvd players, cell phones and smart cards doc6815 none for proposal The primary objective of this research is to develop a new analytic method for investigating certain types of height functions. The main height function considered by the principal investigator is the Mahler measure. Traditionally, the Mahler measure of a monic polynomial with complex coefficients is the product of the absolute values of those roots of the polynomial which occur outside the closed unit disk. In the present context, however, it is convenient to regard the Mahler measure as a distance function on a real or complex Euclidean space. More precisely, a vector in Euclidean space is identified with the vector of coefficients of a polynomial and so the Mahler measure of the vector is simply the Mahler measure of the corresponding polynomial. Viewed in this way the Mahler measure is a continuous function and homogeneous of degree 1. That is, the Mahler measure is a distance function in the sense of the geometry of numbers. Also, the Lebesgue measure of the set of points in Euclidean space where the Mahler measure is less than a real parameter, is a distribution function of the parameter. This distribution function is then subject to analysis by means of the Mellin (or Fourier) transform. Although the Mahler measure is a very complicated function of the coordinates of a vector, the distribution function is shown to be surprisingly simple. In particular, the principal investigator observes several unexpected arithmetical properties of natural geometric objects associated to the Mahler measure. For example, the volume of the unit ball with respect to the Mahler measure is a rational number. And the surface of the unit ball can be parameterized by polynomial maps with integer coefficients. The principal investigator hopes to attack the well known conjecture of D.H. Lehmer concerning small values of Mahler s measure by a modification of the methods described here. A further project is to discover analogous results for the elliptic Mahler measure. The Mahler measure is a technical tool used in a variety of investigations in analytic and algebraic number theory. And it has practical importance in certain computer algorithms for factoring large polynomials. This is because the Mahler measure of a polynomial gives information about the number of irreducible factors of the polynomial, and so immediately provides a limit to the complexity of any factoring algorithm. Polynomials form a very basic and important class of mathematical objects which appear in a wide variety of applications. The Mahler measure of a polynomial gives useful information about the polynomial, but its precise usefulness depends on the particular application. For example, the Mahler measure can be used to determine the entropy (a rough measure of complicatedness) of certain dynamical systems. The research of the principal investigator is motivated by a desire to better understand the Mahler measure and also to seek new applications in number theory and in applied mathematics doc6816 none This award continues an extremely productive program in the theoretical treatment of electron collisions with atoms and ions. The main approach, the R-matrix with pseudostates method, is used to examine electronic excitation, the calculation of Stokes parameters and electron impact ionization of both simple and complex atomic targets. Close collaboration with other theorists and experimentalists in North America, Europe and Australia enable a comparision of methods as well as providing experimental validation of the overall approach. The PI has been extrordinarily successful in training undergraduates in atomic physics doc6817 none In this project, we study two separate sets of problems from the theory of Partial Differential Equations, using the techniques of Harmonic Analysis. In the case of the first set of problems, which will be treated in collaboration with John L. Lewis and Kaj Nystrom, we will attempt to understand the relationship between the geometry of the boundary of a non-cylindrical (i.e. time-varying) domain, the regularity of parabolic measure with respect to a fixed point in the domain, and the boundedness, on Lebesgue spaces, of parabolic singular integrals defined on the parabolic boundary. The second set of problems involves the study of the square root problem of Kato, its ramifications, and related questions in the perturbation theory for divergence form elliptic operators including those with complex coefficients. Interestingly, we have recently made significant progress on the second set of problems, using in part some techniques from the work of Hofmann and Lewis on the first set. Partial differential equations of parabolic type, which are the subject of study in first set of problems mentioned above, arise in the mathematical theory of heat conduction, and also in other so-called diffusion processes, including those which occur in fields as diverse as economics, population biology, and the flow of ground water. For example, in previous work, Hofmann and Lewis have solved a classical problem of heat conduction under new circumstances (which circumstances are really the crux of the matter in the problems under consideration in the present project). The problem is that of determing the temperature at any point inside an object, given that one can measure the temperature everywhere on the surface of the object. The new circumstance which we consider, is to take the realistic point of view that the shape of the object may change over time. Certainly, this is often the case when objects are heated or cooled. The second set of problems alluded to in the first paragraph, namely, the so-called Kato problem (or square root problem) and related questions, has its origins in two papers written by Tosio Kato in and . Kato s work concerned the regularity of solutions of certain hyperbolic (i.e., wave-like) partial differential equations. Roughly speaking, he was trying to show that the smoothness (or regularity) of these generalized waves has a mathematical correlation with the smoothness of the initial disturbance which causes the wave. Kato observed, in his paper, that the regularity which he sought, for solutions of these hyperbolic equations, could be deduced from a certain technical property of the ``square root of a partial differential operator related to the original equation. This technical property, if true, would enable one to reduce matters to results which he had already obtained in his earlier paper. To prove that this technical property actually did hold turned out to be extremely difficult, and the quest to do so (for a somewhat more general class of operators than Kato s original wave problem actually required) has become known as the ``Kato Problem doc6818 none The investigator continues his investigation of applications of double Dirichlet series to the study of automorphic L-series and number theory. He and various collaborators have been developing the theory of double Dirichlet series for several years. It offers a simple replacement for the Rankin-Selberg method in many instances. For example, it provides a very short proof of the entirety of the symmetric square L-series of a generic automorphic form on GL(2). The investigator hopes to extend this technique as far as possible to understand higher symmetric power L-functions and the collective behavior of higher order twists of standard L-functions. As an additional source of input for trying to guess potential applications of the double Dirichlet series method, the investigator studies the Mellin transforms of certain generalizations of metaplectic forms. These are constructed from other non congruence subgroups. The theory of these forms is correspondingly rich and should contribute further insights into applications of double Dirichlet series. The study of L-series has been an essential part of the development of mathematics over the last 100 years. For example, certain L-series provided vital links in the chain that led to the recent proof of Fermat s last theorem. The study of double Dirichlet series is leading to an improved understanding of L-series which in turn leads to further knowledge of some very deep areas of mathematics. It is impossible to predict the ultimate impact of this investigation, but potential areas of application include cryptography doc6819 none The P.I. studies problems in scattering theory. Some involve resonances, complex numbers which for many problems on noncompact domains are natural analogs of eigenvalues. Of particular interest to the P.I. are lower bounds on the number of resonances and the existence of asymptotic expansions of solutions to the wave equation in terms of resonances when there is trapping. The investigator will also study the problem of determining the asymptotic expansion of a perturbation of a stratified sound speed from knowledge of the scattering matrix at fixed energy. Another problem of interest is understanding the relationship between the sojourn times of geodesics and the scattering matrix for manifolds with cylindrical ends. The investigator studies questions that are related to wave propagation. Resonances can be viewed as giving the energy and rate of decay of waves. The P.I. studies the distribution of resonances and their relationship to the long-time behaviour of waves. Another area of interest to the P.I. is inverse scattering theory, which involves recovering information about a an obstacle or perturbation from measurements made far away of waves affected by the obstacle. Taken in a broad sense, this has found many applications, including radar, medical imaging, and underground exploration doc6820 none Junge The aim of this research is the investigation of the following different aspects of non-commutative spaces of p-integrable functions. If p is 1 such a space is the predual of von Neumann algebra and reflects important properties of the underlying operator algebra. We recall, that it is still open whether preduals of von Neumann are finitely represented in the space of trace class operators. Here, we focus on isometric characterization of finite dimensional spaces embedding into the predual of a von Neumann algebra and its connection to the theory of Lie-algebras and (non-commutative) stochastical processes. The investigation of the latter uses martingale inequalities based on recent progress by Pisier and Xu. We are interested in the non-commutative version of the Rosenthal Burkholder inequality and Doob s maximal inequality. Maximal inequalities are also known as a useful tool in (stochastical) analysis. The more recent theory of operator spaces delivers the right framework for these investigations and reveals surprising properties of the non-commutative space of p-integrable functions associated to free groups. Non-commutative probability provides one possible framework for the probabilistic viewpoint in quantum mechanics. This theory combines fundamental concepts of algebraic nature with analytic insight and methods with roots in calculus. The non-commutative analogue for the spaces of p-integrable functions has a long tradition in the theory of operator algebras and provides a fruitful framework for understanding classical tools in probability. It is most challenging to reveal or overcome substantial differences between the commutative and non- commutative theory. This area enables the interaction between different streams inside the mathematical community and mathematical physics. This kind of interaction is one of the most important resources for new development in mathematics doc6821 none This is a project in Arithmetic Algebraic Geometry comprising two parts. The first part deals with the study of values of L-functions of varieties (motives) over number fields. In previous work the investigator and his collaborator have extended the conjectures of Bloch Kato, Fontaine, Perrin-Riou to motives with (possibly noncommutative) coefficients. At the same time they have established a precise link between these conjectures and classical Galois module theory, thereby generalizing various conjectures and theorems in this latter area to arbitrary motives. With the conjectural picture firmly in place, the main task now is to prove more cases. What seems within reach of current techniques are Tate motives over number fields, CM elliptic curves (with CM by non-maximal orders) and the adjoint of a modular form (with action of the integral Hecke algebra). The last two are currently looked into by students of the investigator. Equally within reach seems to be a proof of the compatibility of the equivariant special value conjectures with the functional equation of the L-function. The second part of the project is a rather concrete question in deformation theory (of schemes, vector bundles or representations of profinite groups). Using the theory of the cotangent complex one can define higher Kodaira Spencer maps and the investigator proposes to study the injectivity of these maps. In degree 1 this is known and leads to a criterion for smoothness of the deformation ring. The case of most interest is degree 2 where a similar injectivity would lead to a simple criterion for the deformation ring to be a local complete intersection. This is a project in number theory which has been part of the mathematical heritage ever since the Babylonians discovered that there can be triangles with all sides of integer length and one angle of ninety degrees. By the theorem of Pythagoras this gives integer solutions of an algebraic equation. Modern number theory still looks for integer solutions of algebraic equations but this search is informed and enriched by much deeper connections with ideas from geometry and topology than the ones alluded to in this introductory example. The theory of special values of L-functions is a case in point. While defined by counting solutions of equations modulo prime number it turns out that values of these functions can sometimes be expressed in terms of integrals of differential forms, or volumes of certain lattices. Nobody knows exactly why such a relationship should hold. The examples one can prove all seem to rely on some happy coincidences, although they follow a pattern that leads one to guess ( conjecture ) what happens in general. This is much like the situation in an experimental science. The investigator and his collaborator have generalized this picture to situations where the system of equations has some additional symmetries and they now try to collect further evidence for (or indeed falsify!) their conjectures. As far as applications are concerned, number theorists would probably agree that L-functions are a key concept in their field. On the other hand, number theory as a whole no longer needs to be defensive about its applicability, with much of cryptography and coding, on the internet and otherwise, being based on its results doc6822 none The 600 MHz NMR will be used by many researchers at the University of Kansas and neighboring institutions for a wide variety of studies. Researchers in the Department of Chemistry will use the instrumentation to characterize humic substances, and to analyze the speciation, metabolism, and fate of herbicides in the environment. Structural studies of designed hemoprotein models and studies of novel transition metal catalyzed methods to complex phosphorous and sulfur compounds are also planned. Researchers in structural biology, in the Department of Molecular Biosciences and the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, will use the instrumentation for studies of biomolecules and interactions of biomolecules. Planned studies include the study of the structure and dynamics of proteins and protein complexes involved in transcription initiation, studies of the proteins comprising intercellular junctions, studies of the structural and functional aspects of protein oxidation, studies of proteins involved in bacterial secretory systems, and studies of ATPase protein subunits. The instrumentation will include an actively shielded Oxford 600 MHz magnet and state-of-the-art Varian INOVA electronics console and peripherals. This will include 4 radio frequency channels, complete waveform generation capabilities on all channels, triple axis pulsed field gradient capabilities and deuterium decoupling capability. The shielded magnet will allow the system to be housed in newly renovated space with a new 500 MHz instrument. A major benefit of the instrumentation will be the direct enhancement of graduate and postdoctoral study in the chemical and biochemical sciences at the University of Kansas, as the research programs of many of these young scientists are dependent on such instrumentation, as does their education. Undergraduate research and training will likewise be enhanced significantly, as many undergraduate students, including the numerous student fellows in the very active summer research programs, are involved directly in research which will utilize the instrumentation. Furthermore, the University of Kansas is committed to fostering an environment that encourages diversity and the education of under-represented groups, particularly in the sciences, and this instrumentation will have a significant impact on this commitment. The undergraduate teaching mission of the University will also be impacted through integration of results of research utilizing the instrumentation into classroom discussion and problem solving. Finally, the instrumentation will have a significant impact on faculty recruitment and retention, and the ability of faculty to compete effectively for extramural support doc6823 none LI Research in two areas of nuclear theory will be carried out to study properties of nuclear matter at extremely high temperatures, densities and neutron to proton ratios. The first area concerns the study of a new form of strongly interacting matter, the Quark-Gluon-Plasma (QGP). Knowledge about this matter is crucial for our understanding about the evolution of the early universe and the mechanism of supernova explosions. Collisions between two heavy nuclei at ultra-relativistic energies are predicted to produce in the laboratory the QGP. Dedicated experiments searching for evidence of the QGP formation will soon be carried out at the Brookhaven National Laboratory s Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC). I shall further develop a multi-phase transport model for ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The model will be useful for interpreting experimental data from RHIC, testing signatures of the QGP formation, and extracting properties of the QGP. The second area of my research concerns the study of neutron-rich matter by using nuclear reactions induced by radioactive beams having large neutron to proton ratios. I shall investigate several novel properties of the neutron-rich matter. In particular, the isospin-dependence of the nuclear equation of state (IEOS). Knowledge about the IEOS is relevant to type II supernova explosions, to neutron star mergers, to the cooling rate of protoneutron stars, and to the stability of neutron stars. Results of my research in this area can also be tested at several available radioactive beam facilities and the proposed Rare Isotope Accelerator (RIA doc6824 none Professor Koch is investigating critical behavior in Hamiltonian systems and models from statistical mechanics. Such behavior appears to be attributed not to individual systems, but to manifolds of systems. In the renormalization group approach to these phenomena, one attempts to identify these manifolds as the invariant manifolds of a transformation acting on the space of systems considered. Such a renormalization group transformation , acting on Hamiltonians, was introduced in a previous project. It is expected to have a nontrivial fixed point, whose stable manifold describes the critical breakup of certain invariant tori. One of the main goals is to prove the existence of such a fixed point. The proposed method involves the use of a computer, to carry out the large number of estimates that will be needed. Another goal is to use the known or anticipated properties of the fixed point in order to describe critical invariant tori and nearby periodic orbits. Extensions of renormalization group methods to other (problems in) Hamiltonian systems will be investigated as well. Some interesting formal connections with quantum field theory and statistical mechanics also suggest new ways of approaching old problems in these areas. One of the long term goals in this area is to gain a better understanding of the critical behavior of Ising type models. The approach here is to find and study suitable improvements of the corresponding hierarchical model. Other interesting questions concern the hierarchical model itself, and two fixed point problems relevant to disordered media. Much of this project is related to the question of stability in classical Hamiltonian systems. Examples are coupled oscillators, certain plasma beams, and models from celestial mechanics. In the case of two degrees of freedom, quasiperiodic orbits that trace out smooth invariant tori divide phase space into regions from which other trajectories cannot escape, thus adding to the stability of the system. The breakup of such tori, as system parameter are varied, can cause the dynamics to become locally unstable or chaotic. Numerical studies reveal that this happens in a highly universal way, with certain measurable quantities taking exactly the same values, within a large class of systems. The standard explanation of these findings is based on the assumption that there exists a nontrivial Hamiltonian system that is invariant under a suitable renormalization group transformation . The goal here is to prove that this assumption is correct. Part of the proof will be carried out by a computer. This work should yield valuable insight into the mechanism behind the observed phenomena, and at the same time, advance the state of the art in computer-assisted proofs -- a technique that will undoubtedly play an important role in the future of mathematical research. Similar universality phenomena are associated with phase transitions in condensed matter physics, and models from several other areas in mathematics and physics. A more general form of universality -- the fact that macroscopic descriptions are possible without the exact knowledge of microscopic details -- is in fact at the heart of physics and other sciences. The projects under investigation are part of a long term effort to understand such phenomena, and to describe them mathematically. A correct mathematical description can also be expected to lead to significant improvements in numerical algorithms doc6825 none This RUI award continues research into the collisional interactions of three, exotic charged particles. Calculations on positron H atom collisions, electron positronium collisions and systems of interest in muon catalyzed fusion, will be undertaken. The PI has been extremely successful in training undergraduates in atomic physics doc6826 none Haxton This project will allow the continuation of the national Summer School in Nuclear Physics, now in its 12th year, for an additional five years. This annual school is intended for advanced graduate students and beginning postdoctoral researchers in theory or experiment, and consists of several courses of introductory lectures by leading nuclear physicists. One main goal is to provide nuclear physics students with a broad perspective on the field, thereby combating the specialization that often occurs within focused research groups. NSF funding for the school covers the expenses of the lecturers and a portion of the local costs of the students who attend. More information on this year s school can be found at http: int.phys.washington.edu NPSS NPSS.html doc6827 none The aim of this project is to investigate the dynamics and intermolecular interactions in complex condensed matter molecular systems. A wide variety of materials will be studied, including glasses, supercooled liquids, liquid crystals, hydrogen bonded clusters, micelles, reverse micelles, polymers, and polymer micelles. Cynamics in complex molecular systems can span a wide range of time scales. Therefore, the experiments ae directed toward observations over a sufficiently wide range of times to provide a detailed picture of the dynamics. Ultrafast infrared vibrational echo experiments combined with infrared pump-probe experiments will be used to study vibrational dynamics which reflect the dynamics of the medium in which the vibrational oscillator is embedded and the nature of the intermolecular interactions that couple dephasing dynamics to be extracted from systems that are inhomogeneous, and, therefore, cannot be studied with convention linear spectroscopy. The vibrational echo studies will be extended to include other vibrational coherence experiments including stimulated vibrational echoes and various types of two dimensional vibrational echo experiments. Stimulated vibrational echoes will provide information on longer time scale dynamics, i.e., vibrational spectral diffusion. The first tow-dimensional vibrational echo experiments, Vibrational Echo Spectroscopy, was demonstrated in the previous grant period. This technique, which provides a method for the suppression of unwanted background absorptions in a vibrational spectrum, will be developed further. Two time 2D experiments that probe the coupling between different mechanical degrees of freedom will also be developed. Vibrational echo experiments, and the related non-linear vibrational coherence experiments, will be used to study dynamics in high temperature glass, supercooled liquids, water in the core of reverse micelles, hydrogen bonded clusters of water and alcohols in solvents, pure liquids, and proteins. Transient grating optical Kerr effect experiments, heterodyne amplified optical Kerr effect experiments, and a new method, density induced heterodyne amplified rotational dynamics, will be applied to the study of dynamics in complex molecular systems over vast ranges of time, from tens of femtoseconds to milliseconds and longer, Work during the current grant period has shown that a combination of these techniques, which provide tremendous dynamic range in signal and time, can provide fundamentally new information about the nature of complex systems. The techniques will be applied to supercooled liquids, micelles, polymer micelles, polymers, and liquids crystals. The emphasis in this study is on complex condensed matter systems such as supercooled liquids, micelles, polymer micelles, polymers, and liquids crystals and on the optimization of materials processing for applications such as optical flat panel desplay devices and structural materials doc6828 none Research focussed on quantitative investigations of the strong nuclear forces will be performed. The study of the strong forces among elementary particles using quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the strong force, is of critical importance in interpreting the results of experiments using high energy accelerators and in testing the validity of quantum chromodynamics as a central component of the Standard Model of elementary particles. The planned research, which will approximate space by a discrete lattice of points and use computers extensively, will also contribute to the important national goal of extending the capabilities of massively parallel supercomputers and of building a pool of mathematical physicists skilled in state of the art of computational physics doc6829 none Core models are generalizations of Godel s Constructible Universe. Jensen s pioneering work on the fine structure of core models and on techniques for constructing core models with large cardinals has led to many applications in diverse parts of set theory. More recently, Martin, Mitchell, Steel, and others have extended earlier work on core models to the level of Woodin cardinals. The investigator s questions concern 1) the combinatorial structure of core models, 2) the application of core model techniques in determining the large cardinal consistency strength of various set theoretic statements, 3) the application of core model techniques in descriptive set theory, 4) problems in infinitary combinatorics, forcing, and model theory that were in part inspired by his earlier work on core models. The most widely accepted theory (system of axioms) of sets is known as ZFC. Kurt Godel is famous for having shown that if ZFC is consistent, then ZFC is incomplete in the sense that there are statements which are neither provable nor refutable in ZFC. This is particularly striking since all of mathematics can be expressed in the language of sets and most mathematicians work exclusively within ZFC. There are important open questions that are not decided by ZFC. The most famous example is Georg Cantor s Continuum Problem, which Godel showed cannot be answered negatively in ZFC and Paul Cohen showed cannot be answered positively in ZFC. (Cohen received a Fields Medal for this work.) There are many interesting extensions of ZFC and the relationships between them are quite complicated. The investigator s project has to do with a natural hierarchy of axioms known as the ``large cardinals . Many beautiful results, including some longstanding conjectures, were proved by a number of researchers using ZFC and large cardinals in the s and 90 s; further success is anticipated. And, also, details of how the various theories of sets are related have been discovered by comparing these theories with the large cardinal hierarchy doc6830 none This proposal requests support for the research program of the high energy physics group at the University of Rochester. This group has concentrated on electron-positron colliding beam physics, working within the CLEO collaboration at the CESR electron-positron storage ring located at Cornell University and supported by the NSF. Past studies by this group have focussed on b quark decay. During the previous three-year CGI award, members of the Rochester group have played leadership roles in CLEO, as Analysis Coordinator and as CoSpokesman. As part of the NSF-sponsored upgrade of the CESR accelerator and CLEO detector to CLEO III, they have helped in the design and construction of a new drift chamber for finding and measuring charged particles. In physics analysis of CLEO II data, they have studied the decay of the b quark to charm and anticharm quarks, a study which helps explain why the measured b quark decay rate to electrons or muons is smaller than expected theoretically. During the three-year period of this proposal, the group plans two major physics analysis projects. The first is a study of charmless semileptonic b decay, i.e., b u l n, which should lead to a measurement of the CKM matrix element V(ub) to an accuracy of 10%. The actual measurments will be of the decays B p l n and B r l n which cover a large fraction of the b u l n phase space. The second project is a search for and study of the rare b decay processes b s g, b s l+ l-, and b s n n-bar down to levels predicted by the Standard Model of quarks and leptons in order either to find evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model, e.g., supersymmetry, or to place severe constraints on such models doc6831 none Proposal: PI: Andas N\methi : An invariant of a normal surface singularity is topological if it is a 3-manifold invariant of its link, or equivalently, if it can be determined from the combinatorics of its minimal resolution graph. The driving question of the proposal is: when are the geometric genus and the Hilbert-Samuel function topological? The proposal has three parts. The main message of the first part is that for those Gorenstein singularities whose link is a rational homology sphere, the work of Artin and Laufer on rational, respectively on minimally elliptic singularities can be continued. The optimism is partly based on the author s recent work on Gorenstein elliptic singularities with rational homology sphere links. For these singularities the author proved among other facts that their geometric genus is topological: it is exactly the length of the elliptic sequence (in the sense of S. S.-T. Yau). The first step in any general investigation is the testing of the conjectures in some non-trivial particular cases. In the second part of the proposal the case of suspension singularities is discussed in more details. The third part of the proposal deals with higher dimensional generalizations of the Artin-Laufer program. Local analytic spaces are defined by locally defined analytic functions, in particular they carry a lot of analytic invariants. A very important question in their classification is the following: can these analytic invariants be determined from the topological description of these spaces? In the case of complex surface singularities, the topological structure is determined from the link of the singularity which is an oriented 3-manifold. The goal of the project is to describe some of the analytic information of the singular space in terms of this 3-manifold (in those cases when it is possible doc6832 none Recently, we have developed a new point of view towards general relativity, where the analogy with electro-magnetic fields completely breaks down. The primary variables are no longer conventional fields but are instead non-local structures; in particular, they are three dimensional surfaces in space-time with the special property that light can travel along these surfaces, the surfaces are referred to as null or characteristic surfaces. It has been possible (though it was not at all obvious how to do so) to give a formulation of GR where the basic equations are for the determination of these surfaces. In turn, when these surfaces are determined the geometry of the space-time turns out to be identical with the conventional view derived from Einstein s general relativity. In other words, general relativity has been reformulated as a theory of three dimensional surfaces. We plan to continue working on the elucidation of these ideas and in particular to develop an approximation scheme to examine the differential equations defining these surfaces. An additional project ? closely related but distinctly different from the theory of surfaces - is the application of GR to the astrophysically important subject of gravitational lensing. Almost always GR has been applied to lensing via a rather radical simplifying approximation - the so-called thin lens approximation using linear theory on a simple background. We have developed an exact formulation of lensing with an associated perturbation theory that is an improvement over the thin lens version. We strongly believe that there will be observationally relevant corrections to the thin lens predictions both in intergalactic lensing and in galactic microlensing. Preliminary papers on this have already been accepted for publication. In the context of the exact approach to lensing we also plan to study image distortion by lenses in a nonperturbative fashion. Both our two projects, the reformulation of GR as a theory of 3-surfaces in four space and the theory of gravitational lensing rely heavily on the study of properties of null geodesics. This in turn has led us, in a peripheral project, to study and work on Penrose s Theory of Twistors and their application to GR doc6833 none This award will support the investigator s ongoing research in the field of number theory. For example, the investigator will continue his study of the interplay between the theory of modular forms and partition theory. He will also study the Gaussian hypergeometric series and their relationships to elliptic curves, modular forms, p-adic analysis, arithmetic geometry, and combinatorics. In addition, the award will enable the investigator to expand his efforts in undergraduate education and research. Number Theory is a very old branch of mathematics which has its roots in the study of the whole numbers. In modern times it has become an important tool in many applied endeavors. For example, cryptosystems which enable secure transmission of data over the internet are based on Number Theory, as are error correcting codes for reliable data transmission doc6834 none Perry Y. Li, University of Minnesota Proposal number: Instability and Passivity Concepts for Fast and Safe Electrohydraulic Systems Electrohydraulics play an important role in many industries, such as construction, material testing, robotics, aerospace. The market place for electrohydraulics is demanding 1) higher bandwidth, lower cost and better reliability, and 2) safer and better human friendliness, especially for applications that require interaction with the environment and direct operation by a human. This project addresses these two needs by introducing the concepts of instability and passivity to the design of electrohydraulic valves. Firstly, a new class single stage valves (which are inherently cheaper and more reliable than multistage valves) with improved performance will be developed - by making the spool unstable, so as to exploit the agility afforded by the unstable flow forces. Secondly, a new class of electrohydraulic valves that possess a passivity property will be developed. Although passivity is well recognized to improve safety and to enhance human friendliness, it has not been previously exploited in electrohydraulic systems. Theory for the design and control of the new unstable valves and passive valves will be developed. The new valves will be prototyped. The unstable valves will be demonstrated in typical force and position tracking tasks. The usefulness of the passive valves in safety critical, human operated applications will be demonstrated in the context of a hydraulically actuated teleoperated surgical tool. This research will enable hydraulic systems to be more cost effective, more reliable, have better performance, and to be safer and more user friendly. These advances will expand hydraulics into a larger segment of industry and to new applications doc6835 none The project outlines scientific activity in three directions. The first is the theory of coupled map lattices (CML) where research is focused on the thermodynamical limit for infinite-dimensional SRB measures (in the sense of Sinai); stability of traveling wave solutions, and transition from CMLs to PDEs via traveling waves. It also includes the study of some well-known PDEs (for example, Swift-Hohenberg equation which is of great interest in neurobiology). The second direction is concerned with the dimension theory of dynamical systems and includes the multifractal analysis of Birkhoff averages with applications to some problems in number theory as well as the multifractal rigidity phenomenon for conformal expanding maps. The third direction of research deals with some recent advantages in smooth ergodic theory. In particular, it is proposed to construct some new examples of volume preserving diffeomorphisms with non-zero Lyapunov exponents (on any Riemannian manifold and with countable number of ergodic components). It is also proposed to effect a multifractal formalism for two-dimensional hyperbolic measures. The main goal of the proposed research is to develop further the mathematical theory of chaos. It deals with various aspects of this theory including the appearance of chaotic motions in dynamical systems (which are mathematical models of various phenomena in physics, biology, economics, etc. ) and the interplay between chaotic regimes and fractal geometric structure of the space. It is proposed to study some macro-characteristics of chaotic behavior (such as entropy and Lyapunov exponents) and relate them to fractal dimension of the space. It is also proposed to construct some new examples of chaotic systems both conservative and dissipative, finite-dimensional as well as infinite-dimensional. These examples may serve as models of such extremely complicated phenomena as turbulence in hydrodynamics, neuron and memory activity in neuroscience, plant growth in plant biology, etc doc6836 none The principal investigator proposes to study three problems in the area of partial differential equations, namely the nonlinear two-phase elliptic free boundary problem, symmetrization for diffusion equations with bounded measurable coefficients and symmetric behavior of solutions of nonlinear parabolic equations. These problems defy the standard treatments which succeed in solving linear problems or equations in divergence form because of their nonlinear or non-divergent structural nature. Therefore, solution of these problems will not only contributes knowledge about these partial differential equations, but also inspires new ideas which will most probably prove useful in studying other nonlinear partial differential equations or equations of other types. The suggested methods in this proposal either successfully solved part of the problems or are motivated by the ideas that are most likely to lead to the solution of these problems. The study of the theory of nonlinear elliptic and parabolic partial differential equations and diffusion processes becomes increasingly important in the area of partial differential equations. The problems studied by the principal investigator in this project motivate ideas that lead to the creation of some methods that might succeed in treating other partial differential equation problems as well. Solving these problems gives affirmative answer to the question of the well- posedness of these mathematical models which originate in physics and other disciplines. In addition, the theoretical treatment of these problems will shed light on the numerical solution of these and related problems. Taking into account the origins of these problems, one is liable to believe applications of the theory about these problems can be sought in disciplines other than mathematics doc6837 none In this project the PI intends to conduct research on a wide class of problems in the theory of partitions and q-series. In collaboration with Alexander Berkovich, the PI first proposes to obtain a four dimensional extension of a deep partition theorem of Gollnitz and study the consequences. A second direction of investigation is to search for new weighted partition identities based on earlier research of the PI. In addition, the PI intends to conduct a systematics study of a fundamental but unexploited partition invariant, and obtain multiparameter extensions of various important q-series identities. The theory of partitions which deals with the representations of whole numbers in terms of other whole numbers, is an exciting area of research owing to its interaction with many fields within mathematics and with allied disciplines. The subject is a part of the Number Theory and Combinatorics which deal with discrete structures. In the mid s, major discoveries involving partitions were made in studies in statistical mechanics which had important applications. More recently, partitions have been used in fundamental ways in the study of various models in conformal field theory in physics. With the availability of powerful computer algebra packages in the last few years, many new combinatorial identities have been found. The goal of this proposal is to discover new and deep partition identities, as well as new relationships among well known partition functions, motivated by questions arising from different branches within mathematics, and some from physics. Progress on these problems would yield new mathematical perspectives and might lead to significant applications outside of mathematics doc6838 none Chemistry (12) As environmental awareness has grown, modern chemical research and development has increasingly focused on the discovery of methods for environmentally benign chemical synthesis and processing ( Green Chemistry ). Through this project, educational materials are being developed which bring modern green chemical approaches, techniques, and thought processes to the large-enrollment undergraduate organic chemistry teaching laboratory. With the extensive involvement of undergraduate students at the University of Oregon and at selected institutions across the country, new experiments teaching the essentials of practical organic chemistry, complementing the content of typical organic chemistry lecture courses, and illustrating the principles of green chemistry, are being devised and tested. These materials will be disseminated internationally through a variety of vehicles, including a published green organic chemistry laboratory textbook, workshops for teachers from all levels of educational institutions (K-12, community college, four-year college, and university), a Web-centered database of green chemical experiments, and versatile complementary materials for organic chemistry lecture courses. Both development and evaluation of experiments, as well as evaluation of written pedagogical materials, are being assisted through collaborative arrangements with four-year colleges, community colleges, and high schools. An international panel has been organized to provide periodic advisory input. The project is funded by the Division of Undergraduate Education within the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, with significant co-funding from the Chemistry Division within the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities within the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences doc6839 none Physics (13) Nearly forty years ago Richard Feynman issued an invitation to students of science and engineering to enter a new field called nanotechnology. The mission of this new field was the study of nanometer-sized materials, with the long-term goal of establishing the technology needed for future electronic and optoelectronic devices. The new field would enable lighter, stronger, faster, smarter, cheaper, and cleaner products. Today we can see that many students in the different disciplines of both science and engineering have accepted Feynman s invitation. University research in the field of nanotechnology is on an exponential rise. There is little doubt of either the beckoning need to successfully compete internationally or the exciting contribution this field will make in the years ahead. It is possible for us to envision a new generation of materials that will result in lighter transportation vehicles, surgical instruments that could operate on cells, tiny nanometer-size machines and faster, smaller computers. Despite the early pervasiveness of this field little has been done to bridge the educational experience that we offer to our students, to this new dynamic science. This is unfortunate, since the study of nanostructures is a beautiful way to learn many old and new concepts in bulk and surface material science. As teachers, we are moved when we see the gleam in a student s eye while controlling and observing structure on a nanoscale. This project helps to build this bridge as a new educational approach to teaching the science of materials. Students are participating in an educational experience built around a new molecular beam epitaxy -scanning tunneling microscope facility at the University of Arkansas. The goal is to educate undergraduates who are prepared to contribute to the advancement of nanostructures and their applications as the next generation of electronic and photonic devices doc6840 none Mathematical Sciences (21) For this project the Mathematical Association of America is offering a series of workshops for advanced graduate students and college faculty at all levels of experience. The workshops are of two types: Five-day twenty person on-site workshops directed by experienced leaders with a history of effective innovative teaching and distance-learning workshops which are designed for faculty who are unable to attend the on-site workshops. The six summer workshops are being held across the US. Sites include Seattle, Boone in North Carolina, Ithaca (New York), Lancaster (Pennsylvania), Durham (New Hampshire) and Indiana (Pennsylvania). Workshop topics include geometry, mathematics and art, physics, calculus, statistics, and elementary education. Eight on-site workshops are planned for the summer of and seven for the summer of . The goal of the project is to address the rapid and significant changes in undergraduate education. The project also addresses the specific needs of faculty at various stages of their professional careers. Thus, the project is designed to meet the needs of faculty with respect to changes in their environment and in their careers. For more information contact Tom Rishel at trishel@maa.org doc6841 none Sociology (86) This is a collaborative project with the University of Michigan Population Studies Center (Award ). This collaborative project is working with individual faculty and whole departments in order to introduce scientific reasoning systematically into the undergraduate curriculum. The project is pursuing the goal of improved scientific literacy among undergraduate students in the social sciences by providing teachers and whole departments with tools and expertise to integrate data analysis and analytic rigor more widely throughout the curriculum. This collaboration is building upon two already successful approaches that complement each other. The Social Science Data Analysis Network (www.SSDAN.net ) project at the University of Michigan has worked with a nationwide network of faculty to co-produce engaging, wide-ranging curricular materials with US Census Bureau data. SSDAN encourages and facilitates individual faculty to integrate specially tailored, data analysis modules into substantive social science courses at all levels. The American Sociological Association s (ASA s) Minority Opportunities through Structural Transformation (MOST) Program has worked with entire departments to alter their curriculum in ways that ensure structural change toward improved research training of minorities and all students. This project is introducing SSDAN approaches as department-wide interventions in a critical mass of courses in the curriculum of 16 sociology departments. A core goal is to transform the curriculum and thus give students a more sequenced and pervasive exposure to scientific reasoning and data analytic skills. Workshops, follow-up visits, interactions with the Michigan and ASA staffs along with departmental websites are being utilized to support the full implementation and evaluation of this intervention. The project is also significantly revising and updating the SSDAN website and data analysis module creation features used by faculty across the social and behavioral sciences. New datasets from the US Census, historical censuses, CPS (Current Population Survey), and GSS (General Social Survey) are being added, and additional formats for analysis by SPSS, SAS, STATA, GIS packages, and new interactive data analysis features are also being provided. The project is working on a Guide that instructs chairs and deans how to implement departmental interventions across different types of departments and diverse disciplines. In addition, a published workbook updating earlier SSDAN publications and an expanded bank of downloadable datasets, course modules, and networking capabilities via the website is being produced doc6842 none Computer Science (31) We are developing a radical recombination and restructuring of introductory level computer science courses that pools resources, differentiates knowledge levels in each subject area to fit the needs of different students, allows variable paced learning (not self-paced ), and uses IT both as a teaching tool and to handle course administration. We are developing Web-based learning modules covering the course material at three Bloom s taxonomy levels of technical knowledge: a more minimal level suitable for the needs of information systems and digital media majors; a more technical level for computer engineering majors; and the highest technical level for computer scientists. These modules engage students in active, participatory learning activities in a supervised environment. Simultaneously we retain many traditional elements in course delivery, such as group problem-solving sessions and supervised labs, office hours, and weekly deadlines. Course management tools are used to organize on-line materials, track student work at varying levels and paces, and provide student feedback through automated quizzes, surveys, and data mining. Online submission of homework and return of graded homework minimizes the administrative efforts involved in administering large courses and allows faculty to focus more on the students and their learning doc6843 none Mathematical Sciences (21) The project implements an interactive learning strategy for students of lower level mathematics courses utilizing computer assisted instruction in five institutions of higher education, representing varied students and differing goals. The techniques have been used for several years with classes of elementary algebra students in the setting of a comprehensive university. These techniques encourage a mastery approach to education requiring the active participation of each student. Students practice problems with the help of tutorial assistance from both the computer and the instructor. The project is expected to improve the learning of lower level mathematics and in turn increase the success rates in these and subsequent courses dependent on mathematics. The immediate objective of this project is to modify the interactive modular teaching materials for a variety of settings and to validate the pedagogical advantages of this approach to the teaching of college algebra, pre-college algebra and finite mathematics. The more comprehensive goal is to use the results of this project to prepare for the national dissemination of these materials and thus contribute to raising the standard of mathematics literacy and problem solving nationwide doc6844 none Gillis The objective of the proposed research is to replace the patch-clamp pipette with an aperture on a microchip and to replace the carbon fiber with electrochemical electrodes fabricated on microdevices. The specific objectives are to: (1) record the current through the cell membrane using microchip technology, (2) measure secretion from individual cells with high time resolution using electrochemical electrodes constructed on a microchip, and (3) automatically target individual cells to electrophysiological probes on the microchip. This award is co-funded by the Division of Engineering Education and Centers, the Division of Chemical and Transport Systems, and the Division of Bioengineering and Environmental Systems doc6845 none Mathematical Sciences (21) Biological Sciences (61) This Proof of Concept project is developing an integrated mathematics and biology course that teaches linear algebra concepts in the context of biological case studies. This course is being team-taught to a mixture of junior biology students and sophomore mathematics students and is intended to supplement, not replace, current courses in linear algebra for the mathematics majors and current courses in ecology for the biology majors. The course is designed to strengthen the mathematical skills of biology students, expose mathematics students to mathematical models used in biology, teach students how to collaborate with people trained in different scientific disciplines, and teach students how to critically read research papers. Biology and mathematics students working together on case studies, group projects, and presentations form an extensive part of the course. The case studies, based on accessible biological research papers that incorporate mathematical models, are being written jointly by mathematics and biology faculty. Homework assignments and supplemental reading material for the course are also being created. The mathematical topics in the course include matrix algebra, bases, eigenvectors, eigenvalues, systems of linear difference and differential equations, and ill-conditioned matrices. The biological topics include population matrices, elasticity and sensitivity, nutrient flow in aquatic systems, spread of infectious diseases, and genetics. These materials are being modified for dissemination to disciplinary faculty who wish to supplement existing courses in ecology, conservation biology, or linear algebra and for institutions who wish to design a similar integrated course doc6846 none Engineering - Mechanical (56) It is essential for the modern engineer to have a high degree of technological sophistication and computer literacy, and so learning commercial engineering analysis software packages has become a significant part of many engineering courses. Although the use of these commercial software packages may aid in teaching fundamental concepts to students, it can often have the opposite effect when valuable course time is taken up in teaching students the basics of using the software. The primary objective of this project is to put students in a position where they can quickly and easily learn necessary software, and then use that software to reinforce course concepts. This is being accomplished through the development of full-screen, audio-visual, interactive tutorials for software that is used extensively in four Mechanical Engineering courses, beginning with a freshman course (Engineering Graphics) and continuing in three upper-level courses (Measurements and Instrumentation, Kinematics and Dynamics of Machines, and Computer-Aided Engineering). In addition, a Faculty Multimedia Tools Development Toolbox is being assembled to facilitate development of software tutorials and interactive instructional tools by faculty in any discipline. The Principal Investigator for this project previously developed interactive computer tutorials, games, and quizzes for a freshman Engineering Graphics course, which has been recognized and awarded regionally and nationally for excellence in instructional courseware. In the first year of the three-year grant, the Engineering Graphics materials are formatively evaluated, enhanced, and implemented at the University of Texas-Pan American (UTPA), and development begins on materials for the other three project courses. In the second year, the Engineering Graphics course is implemented and evaluated at other cooperating institutions-South Texas Community College (in McAllen, Texas), North Central Technical College (in Mansfield, Ohio), and the University of Nevada-Reno. UTPA is a minority institution, with a population that is 85% Hispanic. Implementing and assessing the materials at multiple institutions verifies that it is effective for diverse audiences. Furthermore, in the second year, the materials developed for the other three project courses are implemented and assessed at UTPA. In the third year, the materials developed in the first two years are published and tested at other institutions and the Faculty Multimedia Tools Development Toolbox is created. This Toolbox , created out of the experience of the investigators in developing such tools for diverse courses and diverse audiences, allows faculty in other locations and other disciplines to create similar software tutorials and teaching aids for their own applications with minimum effort. The course materials and Toolbox will be published and distributed through a major publisher of academic materials doc6847 none Engineering - Other (59) The goals of this project are to develop and test materials that (a) show engineering students the integration of theory, practice, and information technologies that occur in the real-world, (b) improve their higher-level cognitive skills, and (c) provide examples of teams of engineers and managers working together using information technologies to solve problems. The project is based on an earlier proof-of-concept effort, built around the case study entitled Crist Power Plant , which helped engineering students to understand how expert systems are used in the real-world to solve complex problems that involve many criteria and several alternatives. In the present project, eleven companies are working with us to create new case studies. We are also developing background competency materials, instructional manuals, multimedia CD-ROMs, web sites, and videos to support the case studies. The instructional materials are being tested with engineering students at three minority serving institutions as well as at four other Universities. In addition, as a pilot project, the concept of a case emporium is being evaluated. This case emporium provides student teams at Auburn and Mercer Universities an opportunity to work together in a virtual environment doc6848 none Earth Systems Science (40) Industrial development, urbanization, and population growth continue to put increased strain on environmental and natural resource systems. Engineers and scientists trained in environmental science disciplines such as hydrology, watershed management, and soil and water quality are needed to address critical environmental issues that involve interconnections between the Earth s water, energy, and biogeochemical cycles, as well as the interrelationship between these cycles and human activities. The purpose of this proof-of-concept project is to create, develop, evaluate, and disseminate student-centered and inquiry-based online learning modules that involve students in meaningful explorations in earth and environmental science disciplines, with a focus on watersheds. The project addresses the national call for inquiry-based instructional learning materials in environmental science and engineering at the undergraduate level that are adaptable to a variety of instructional approaches and learning modalities. Within the learning modules, there are interactive learner-centered materials (e.g., lecture notes), Java-based simulation and three-dimensional visualization tools, a digital data library for five major U.S. watersheds, problem-solving exercises, and case studies related to watersheds and environmental management. These components are being created and adapted from advanced scientific modeling and visualization capabilities that utilize rapidly evolving desktop computing capabilities and the Internet and World Wide Web. The learning modules are housed within an active learning environment, a server-side software infrastructure, to support local and distance educational opportunities and to promote collaborative learning among students. The online learning environment and learning modules emphasize active group learning, inquiry-based constructivist learning on issues related to watersheds and the environment, and the interdisciplinary nature of watershed management. In accordance with the proof-of-concept status of this project, seven learning modules are being developed to provide state-of-the-science treatment of important topics in watershed science, watershed engineering, and watershed management. Each learning module (1) is Web-based, easily accessible, and cross traditional discipline boundaries; (2) is appropriate for introductory earth and environmental science courses; (3) reinforces scientific methodology; (4) is interactive, intuitive, and inquiry-based; (5) is self-contained and vertically scalable for easy implementation by faculty; (6) aims to increase students spatiotemporal and quantitative reasoning skills within the framework of already established environmental science and engineering content standards; and (7) aims to increase student awareness and understanding of watershed science and issues related to the environment. The expected immediate audience is approximately 500 students per year in several geoscience, biological, ecological, and environmental science courses at Iowa State University (ISU), plus an additional estimated 700 students in classes at other institutions that will be involved in the implementation plan. The long-term audience is students in environmental and earth science courses that include watershed science topics and adult learners at resource management agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture. The expected outcome will include a learning environment and set of learning modules that address national demands for watershed education and training. The evaluation utilizes standard tools for formative and summative evaluation in conjunction with educational rubrics for assessing students learning outcomes. In addition to implementing and evaluating a prototype environment and learning modules to a diverse population of ISU students, the project is developing the framework for implementation and evaluation at four national and international institutions. Dissemination of the products of the project will be accomplished by involvement of faculty from other local and national institutions on an advisory board; presentation of papers at workshops and national conferences; creation of an Internet repository for the electronic discussions of interested faculty; and publication in educational journals, newsletters, and CD (or DVD)-ROM media doc6849 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This project tests the educational feasibility of introducing mathematics and science students to mathematical problems whose numerical solution is made possible through the use of distributed computation. Distributed computation, one form of parallel computation, is the process of finding numerical solutions to mathematical problems by distributing the computation over a cluster of processors connected together via an inexpensive network such as a high-speed ethernet network. Recent developments in low-cost computer networking technology have for the first time made the capabilities of distributed computation an economic possibility for mathematics departments at undergraduate institutions. The promise of parallel computing power at an inexpensive price has also led to distributed computation being used increasingly in many fields which have traditionally been clients of the mathematical sciences. The project develops a prototype consisting of educational materials for two new courses in the current curriculum. The courses introduce students to the fundamentals of distributed computation with as few prerequisites as possible. The first course provides an introduction to numerical analysis and uses the native programming language of Mathematica. The second course introduces students to the mathematical problems that are solvable by means of distributed computation. It uses the native distributed computing capabilities of Mathematica and distributed computing libraries accessible through higher-level programming languages. The project includes development of a computing laboratory to support distributed computation projects doc6850 none Engineering - Civil (54) It is well-known that knowledge is acquired through diverse learning styles, with each student usually having certain preferred styles. These styles are typically grouped into four scales: sensory to intuitive; visual to verbal; inductive to deductive; active to reflective; and sequential to global. The objective of this project is to develop a repertoire of educational materials that cater to a mix of learning styles of undergraduate engineering students. The repertoire includes computer-based lecture support notes, tutoring modules, simulation models, and assessment tools; physical demonstration devices; and, a compilation of unique riddles, fallacies, and problems. Some materials are for in-class use, some for out-of-class use, and some for a combination of the two; some are for small group use; while others are for individual use. The materials target undergraduates at the junior senior level in the fields of civil, mechanical, and chemical engineering, pursuing engineering or technology degrees. The subject area of hydraulics fluid mechanics was chosen for this project, because it is an area common to many different engineering disciplines. It is anticipated that these tools will optimize teaching efforts and improve student achievement by: increasing student-faculty and student-student interactions; enhancing the learning experience; stimulating critical thinking; and cultivating problem solving skills doc6851 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This project creates new educational material for the instructor that uses a formulation of math reform that is textbook and curriculum independent. The goal is to prepare students for the 21st century technological workplace by creating a potent and attractive integrated learning environment in mathematics by stressing the descriptive, numerical, graphical, and symbolic delivery of mathematical concepts. This project researches, tests, refines, and disseminates a formulation of mathematics reform that is textbook and curriculum independent. The project focuses on exponential and logarithmic functions, materials that are found in both a precalculus and a calculus course. The developed resource materials allow dissemination of reform to occur naturally, which can help alleviate the departmental calculus textbook debates doc6852 none Chemistry (12) The Caltech Chemistry Animation Project combines the technical skills of faculty and students at Caltech with Emmy-award winning sound editors, Oscar-winning sound supervisors, Emmy-winning film editors, professional narrators, film score writers, computer graphics personnel from the Hollywood special effects industry, and advanced computer workstations to prepare instructional materials that are being used worldwide, at the high school and college levels, to allow students and teachers to understand better the fundamental concepts in their chemical world. The initial stages of this project have been highly successful, with distribution of materials currently proceeding in seven countries to audiences in excess of one million students. The continuation of this project is allowing us to complete a series of approximately 15 video tapes, comprising a library of fundamental concepts in the chemical sciences, for use by teachers and students worldwide. New videos being produced include: Atoms, Molecules, and Moles; Chemical Thermodynamics; Spectroscopy and Molecular Motion; Point Groups, Symmetry and Group Theory; Binary Crystals; and DNA RNA Proteins. These will complement the existing video titles covering the topics of Atomic Orbitals, VSEPR, Crystals, Stereochemistry, Nucleophilic Substitution, the Diels-Alder Reaction, Periodic Trends, and Molecular Orbitals doc6853 none Earth Systems Science (40) According to the National Science Foundation s report Shaping the Future, the overarching goal for undergraduate students is to directly experience the methods and processes of inquiry. At present, at many colleges non-science majors tend to meet general education science requirements by taking lower division content-based science courses designed for majors. Students in these types of general education classes seldom have the opportunity to experience open-ended inquiry geared towards developing scientific reasoning or to investigate locally significant, scientifically relevant questions at the earth systems level. We need a curricular framework that can be used as the foundation for understanding and analyzing scientific concepts at the earth systems level which can be incorporated into the earliest stages undergraduate education. Our vision of a science curriculum for non-majors is one that synthesizes scientific concepts and reasoning using standard industry technology and computer programs within the context of earth system processes. This project focuses on bringing technology to the general education science classroom. An interdisciplinary technology-based curriculum is being designed and assessed, which engages undergraduate non-science majors in earth systems level inquiry and research. Recent work at Portland State University in their general education program (UNST) has shown that Geographic Information Systems can be an engaging and useful tool for teaching earth systems to undergraduate general education students. The problem encountered though is the lack of a unified database of coverages for watersheds that is tied to an easily understandable curriculum. Until now, instructors searched for then clipped individual coverages and worked the available information into classroom activities. Our objectives are to research, select and geo-reference appropriate environmental coverages within the Columbia River Basin and to produce and evaluate a curriculum to determine its ability to advance students towards a systematic understanding of watersheds and water quality. The outcome will be a CD ROM with appropriate coverages, data sets, modular instructions and a teacher s curriculum. The Columbia River Basin (CRB) was chosen because there are a series of general education courses within UNST that center around the CRB and a large target audience for testing the curriculum within PSU and region wide. Upon successful completion of this phase of the project, similar coverages and curriculum can be developed for national dissemination for additional large watersheds within North America through partnerships with other institutions doc6854 none Engineering - Civil (54) This project is producing an integrated educational framework to expose construction management students to the complexities of the construction site. The project is accomplishing this important goal through the development of a prototype web-based construction management gaming system - called WebProject - that integrates construction estimating, construction scheduling, and construction project management courses. Students entering the sequence of construction core courses receive a hypothetical construction project generated by WebProject that is utilized in the three courses. Teams of students undertake the role of construction management companies to perform construction estimating, construction scheduling, and construction project management functions by using the services of hypothetical trade contractors generated by WebProject doc6855 none Engineering - Electrical (55) We are developing an educational resource center focused around the area of optoelectronic microsystems by integrating technology into education. The purpose of this resource center is to attract undergraduate students into this newly emerging technology and to be a key component in providing a well-rounded education to students in this area. Our goal is to satisfy the need of the local and nationwide industry for engineers knowledgeable in optoelectronics, microelectronics and the newly emerging field of microsystems. To this end we are developing eight multimedia educational modules and combining them into a multimedia resource center for use in a technology-enhanced educational learning environment. The development of the modules is guided by experience gained from previous projects, where we identified both the content and form of effective multimedia modules. The modules are constructed using existing software packages and combine text, figures, audio and video with computer generated animation within an interactive environment with a professional look and feel. The individual modules are being field-tested by embedding them into our existing courses and curriculum, where they link the subject material across course boundaries and are improved based on the feedback received through the assessment process. We also testing and evaluating the modules at a remote site in a distance-learning environment. Finally, we will disseminate the resource center nationally through our website, the NSF Digital Library, mass mailing of CD-ROMs and a commercial publisher doc6856 none In it was proposed that nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometry with sensitivity at the level of a single proton might be achievable through mechanical detection using scanned probe techniques similar to AFM. Achieving this degree of sensitivity would constitute a truly revolutionary advance; it would permit three-dimensional atomic-scale imaging, with chemical specificity. Mechanically-detected MRI, often called Magnetic Resonance Force Microscopy (MRFM) is now many orders of magnitude more sensitive than conventional MRI. The mechanical detection technique has clearly provided staggering advances, and it is clear that significant additional gains are on the horizon for MRFM. We project that MRI with atomic resolution will be attained in just a few years. The PI and co-PI propose as an ultimate goal MRI instruments with single-nucleus resolution, will require a radically new approach, one that involves single-chip integration of hybrid electro magneto opto mechanical devices. Realizing such devices would be an important departure from the path being taken by all current workers, worldwide, in this new field of MRFM. This new research direction is what has been proposed in this submission. This grant, if awarded, will allow the PI to leverage his current efforts in, and facilities for, Nano Electro Mechanical Systems (NEMS) toward making important headway on the engineering and science of novel integrated systems (nanochips) for MRFM. When fully implemented, the magnetic resonance force microscope will become a unique scanned probe instrument offering the high spatial resolution of atomic force microscopy (AFM), while simultaneously offering three dimensional visualization capabilities of MRI within the engineering sciences it will enable new, high resolution studies of the microscopic subsurface properties for a broad range of new materials and electronic devices based upon buried interfaces. It is a technique that is both non-destructive and chemically specific doc6857 none Oceanography (43) The WWW provides exciting, new opportunities in distributed learning in higher education. This project is building on our previous work in technology-mediated learning by bringing the excitement of sea-going research into a college-level oceanography course through the construction of a virtual oceanographic voyage. The virtual voyage of courseware aims to combine elements of experiential learning with the anytime, anywhere access of the WWW to stimulate inquiry-based learning in the ocean sciences. The voyage is synthesized from the vast catalog of recent ocean research supported by major initiatives of NSF, NOAA and the USGS waters of the eastern Pacific, and along the coasts of California and Oregon over the past decade. We are simulating the sea-going experience (sans seasickness of course) by compiling photographs and video of sea-going expeditions from within our community of research colleagues in academia, the USGS and NOAA. Virtual shipboard experiments are patterned after actual cruises and include the technologies of data acquisition and data analysis as well as providing insight into the thought process of scientists through short (8 minutes of less) streaming audio video interview segments. We are also including subsequent shore-based analyses as part of the voyage. The WWW-based courseware contains 2-D and 3-D graphics, animations, text and streaming audio video. Real-time data for monitoring the marine environment is embedded in each module as are methods of learning assessment and self-testing for the students. The project takes advantage of the natural interest through a geographic focus of California and the eastern Pacific, since more students are enrolled in college-level oceanography courses in that state than in any other state in the union (private institutions, UC, CSU system, community colleges and high school). Once fully developed, the virtual voyage will be used as the basis for entire oceanography courses, both through WWW-based modules and online discussions, especially in the growing number of online courses offered through distributed learning. The modules will have a uniform interface, internal mechanisms of learning assessment and span the breadth of oceanography, in addition to showing the linkages between the scientific disciplines of oceanography. In this project we are developing four out of the planned 12 modules of the virtual voyage with testing assessment at two campuses of the CSU systems (SJSU and SFSU), as well as at least two community colleges (College of Marin and one other to be selected, probably San Jose City College or Ohlone College doc6858 none Engineering - Electrical (55) Arizona State University is fully developing and evaluating a web-based undergraduate laboratory tool in the areas of undergraduate digital signal processing(DSP), communications, image processing and controls. We have already developed and successfully tested a prototype laboratory tool (J-DSP) for use in the undergraduate DSP class. This web-based prototype supports capabilities for online signal processing simulations and provides laboratory experiences to distance learning and on-campus undergraduate students. The tool is based on a collection of novel Java applets that support a user-friendly object oriented environment. This exemplary Java software supports a simulation environment that enables students to establish and execute experiments from any computer platform that is equipped with a web browser. This work provides significant extensions of the laboratory prototype to the other areas (communications, image processing and controls), an assessment and dissemination strategy that includes test sites, and a plan to sustain development, dissemination, and evaluation after the CCLI project. The prototype lab and the proposed extensions represent perhaps the first comprehensive effort to provide on-line lab experiences in distance learning environments. We anticipate that this novel concept can be extended to different types of subjects at different levels of education, e.g., on-line experiments at levels and topics ranging from high-school physics to community college science labs and college-level engineering subjects. The prototype J-DSP along with its proposed extensions to hot systems topics such as communications, image processing, and advanced controls will enable new web-course developers to seamlessly integrate online experiments to their web-course content doc6859 none Engineering - Other (59) The purpose of this project is to build upon a successful pilot project (EPTTS or Engineering Project Team Training System, which included the development of a student training module about cognitive style differences; a faculty training workshop which assisted instructors in adapting the module for their own classes; and an extensive assessment base which included qualitative data from focus groups and quantitative survey results from BESTEAM developed evaluation tools) and develop an integrated and longitudinal (involving students across their entire engineering education experience) engineering curriculum model to improve learning in project team environments. A primary goal of this effort is to design supportive faculty tools aids (called modules) of team training skills that can be flexibly integrated into virtually any existing engineering program. A second major outcome of our efforts will be extensive faculty training via workshops and summer retreats in the adaption of the materials for use in their own classes. In addition, this project seeks to add to the literature base of engineering education by investigating how social cognitive career theory-SCCT- can help explain aspects of individual and team s behavior. Finally, by focusing on team skill building and related process skills , we expect that the BESTEAMS curriculum will act as a positive intervention in the retention of minorities and women in engineering doc6860 none of the object breaks down because of the singular nature of the flows. High-speed photographic studies will probe the nature such singularities. There will also be a study of the spout formation using the geometry of selective withdrawal. The use of this phenomenon for coating particles, including cells for medical applications, will be explored. The students involved in this research will receive excellent training with novel instruments and measurements on highly interdisciplinary scientific topics doc6861 none Bierwert & Hunt This pilot project studies how African women s health-seeking, reproductive and maternal strategies are changed due to migration to an urban context in the United States. Fertility is quite highly valued in Ghanaian and Nigerian cultures, the primary origins for most of the women in the study, and is somewhat less important in the US. Two cultural anthropologists will survey 600 immigrant households in Detroit, set up focus groups and select a sub-sample of women for in-depth interviews on how they negotiate their own health and reproductive needs, and those of their daughters, depending on their class status and social networks. The tension between values appropriate to the country-of-origin and values appropriate to the US will be studied as they affect cross-generation relationships. The nature of the social networks available to women of different socio-economic and educational backgrounds is hypothesized to be a major factor in their access to resources. The knowledge to be created by this project will be useful to help health professionals design programs to improve health and ameliorate problems of immigrant women doc6862 none This award supports a Science Management Office (SMO) for the Ocean-Atmosphere-Ice Interactions (OAII) component of the Arctic System Science (ARCSS) Program. The SMO will facilitate planning and outreach activities that address OAII goals as described in a Science Plan written by the Science Steering Committee (SSC) and reviewed by the research community. The award supports continued planning by the OAII SSC, maintenance of a web page for outreach to both the scientific community and the public, publication of planning documents, and organizing semiannual All-Hands meetings. The SMO is an important activity to the planning and integration of interdisciplinary research projects addressing US Global Change Research Program goals in the Arctic doc6863 none Biological Sciences (61) As part of the college s plans to enhance the research experience in the natural sciences for our undergraduate students, we are expanding the educational opportunities for students interested in neuroscience. This project is establishing a senior level research course entitled Molecular and Cellular Research in Neuroscience. For students interested in molecular and cellular neuroscience, this course represents the culminating experience of a new neuroscience major that is to be developed and offered at Rhodes. This new course provides students with more current state-of-the-art research opportunities and experiences, and the new neuroscience major program will stand out as a unique curriculum in the Mid-South region for new undergraduate students of neuroscience. This new research course follows an already successful research-based neuroscience course at Rhodes that employs the more traditional research techniques of cell culture and intracellular and extracellular microelectrode recordings. The new course is based around four fundamental research experiences that have already been developed and published in the neuroscience lab manual Discovering Neurons: The Experimental Basis of Neuroscience (Paul et al., ). The first laboratory focuses on neurons in development, and involves the measuring of newly expressed ion channel currents in wild type and transfected pheochromo- cytoma (PC12) and COS- 7 cells using whole cell voltage clamp technology. The second laboratory focuses on neurons in communication, and involves the identification of multiple neurotransmitter receptor sites in leech ganglia with dual in situ immunocytochemical labeling techniques. The next laboratory involves neurons forming connections, and incorporates techniques of tract tracing dye injection in the living brain as a method to learn about the afferent and efferent projections in the mammalian cerebrum. The last laboratory is centered on neurons and higher order cognition. In this lab, students research the cellular mechanisms of the synaptic plasticity long- term potentiation by studying synaptic communication in mammalian brain (hippocampal) slices. In this way, students learn how cellular phenomena can result in higher order cognitive process such as learning and memory. Each of the four laboratory experiences offer ample opportunity for further research that can be continued as individually designed independent research experiences doc6864 none This planning grant will enable the transition to larger-scale, more rigorous testing of a technology and curriculum project (SimCalc) whose aim is to make generally available the mathematics of change and variation by incorporating dynamic, computer-based representational tools into the classroom experience of middle-school children. SimCalc s aim is to make mathematical concepts such as rate become available to students without an algebra prerequisite, and push the boundaries of what K-12 learners can master. SimCalc was developed and tested in variety of settings including some of the lowest performing districts in two states, and one class in which English was a first language for only 35% of the students. The collaborations in the planning process will help design rigorous experiment that will analyze how to produce the desired effects with diverse students in varied educational settings and with teachers who vary in their sophistication about and comfort with technology. Findings from the long-term research could influence an understanding of what high expectations are possible to achieve for all students, and the role of technology, curriculum, and teacher support in reaching those expectations doc6865 none This grant provides funding for the research and development of reconfigurable Frequency Selective Surfaces (FSSs). FFSs are periodic structures that can provide frequency filtering to electromagnetic signals from wireless and satellite communication systems. With the proper design of the size and spacing of an array of conductive dipole elements, one is able to select the overall frequency response and bandwidth of the structure. Although FSSs have been studied rigorously over the years, FSSs have experienced tremendous growth in the last ten years with new applications emerging. The primary utilization of they has been as frequency filters (diplexers) in high-performance reflector-antenna systems, advanced radome designs, and smart surfaces for stealth applications. In many of these applications it is highly desirable to be able to adaptively reconfigure the frequency and bandwidth response of the FSS. However, a fundamental challenge has been to develop methods of achieving significant high-speed reconfigurability without compromising filtering performance. Although FSSs are typically made with static in-plane elements, it has been observed that rotating the dipole elements out of the plane of the surface strongly alters the frequency response of the surface. In addition, recent advances and developments in micromachining and MEMS technologies provide a new approach to this problem. The reconfigurability of the FSS proposed here, is enabled by the integration of novel magnetic microactuator arrays positioned in the x-y plane of the surface and capable of large out-of-plane rotations (0 degrees to 90 degrees) that tune its frequency bandwidth response. To maximize magnetic microactuator performance, permanent magnetic materials will be integrated into the array by newly developed electrodeposition processes. The goal of this project is to design, fabricate, and test micromachined reconfigurable FSSs for signals at K-band (26-40 GHz), Q-band (40 GHz), W-band (60 GHz), and higher frequencies doc6866 none Schall This LTREB project will continue long-term studies on the ecology and evolutionary biology of malaria parasites of lizards. These studies take place at sites in California and the Caribbean. The systems have been under study for the past 9 to 22 years. Three interwoven studies will be pursued that all depend on the long-term data and blood samples obtained during the study. The first study will address parasite prevalence. Prevalence patterns at all four sites do not follow predictions emerging from standard epidemiological models for malaria. These differences are explained by the habitat heterogeneity hypothesis. The second study focuses on life-history traits. Infections in all four lizard species vary significantly in all their life history traits. In this case, two traits will be studied maximum parasitemia and first production of gametocytes. The clonal diversity and stress hypotheses will be tested with additional long-term data. Finally, the project will assess gametocyte sex ratio. The local mate competition hypothesis predicts that gametocyte sex ratios within infections will depend on the genetic diversity of those infections. Two mechanisms related to this hypothesis will be investigated. Together these three foci will expand our understanding of the spatial and temporal dynamics of host-parasite ecology. Results from this project have direct and important implications for understanding the natural history and ecology of emerging infectious diseases that affect animal populations, including humans doc6867 none 00- Naiman SGER: Long-term recovery of riparian structure and ecological processes following flooding in savanna landscapes In early , floods in Southern Africa inundated large areas of the Mozambique coastal plain. Rivers draining Kruger National Park experienced flows of ~8,000 m3 s (~150 year return interval), causing widespread removal of riparian vegetation and extensive alterations to channel geometry. The floods caused widespread human suffering but also provided a truly unique research opportunity. For the first time in nearly a century there is the possibility to describe and manipulate the long-term recovery of riverine forests. This project will involve the construction and equipping of large animal exclosures to investigate the recovery of the vegetation and soils over long periods in areas with and without the influences of megafauna, and under experimental water, nutrient, and fire regimes. Research questions are related to the effects of large animal browsing (e.g., elephant, buffalo, hippopotamus) on vegetative recovery, the type and role of nutrients involved in recovery, the extent and role of exotic plants after a major disturbance, and the effects of natural wet and dry climate cycles on the vegetation. The need for the exclosures is urgent and immediate since the South Africa growing season begins in September, doc6868 none This award is for Travel to participate in the 20th anniversary Symposium on Earthquake Hazard Mitigation in accordance with Annex III US-PRC Protocol of Cooperative Studies in Earthquake Engineering and Hazards Mitigation doc6869 none This proposal requests support for research by the Stanford University high energy physics group on the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) experiment currently under construction at Fermilab. The MINOS collaboration was formed in October , and currently it includes about 250 scientists and engineers from 30 institutions in five countries. The experiment has as its goal the search for and study of neutrino oscillations in the range 10-3 Dm2 10-2 eV2 . This is the mass-squared difference region indicated by the recent results from the SuperKamiokande experiment, and supported by data from the Soudan and MACRO experiments. To obtain the required level arm , the MINOS experiment will use the beam of neutrinos produced by the Main Injector accelerator at Fermilab and detect them in the Soudan mine, about 730 km away. In addition, a second smaller detector will be built close to the neutrino source at Fermilab to study the properties of neutrinos before they have had a chance to oscillate. Presence of oscillations would exhibit itself as a difference in the nature and rate of interactions in the two detectors. The Stanford group has been involved in the experiment from its inception and has played a major role in its intellectual leadership and management. The current spokesman of the experiment is the PI of this proposal. The major technical contributions of this group have been in software development and simulations. It is intended to continue these efforts and to become involved significantly in the future in detector installation and some aspects of the beam hardware and beam monitoring system doc6870 none The National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT) will hold a two-day planning workshop to discuss strategies and develop an action plan for increasing the participation and leadership of two-year institution faculty in the geoscience education community. It is critically important to increase the participation of two-year institution faculty in efforts to reform geoscience education. Nearly half of all undergraduate students currently studying sciences and mathematics are enrolled at two-year institutions. Furthermore, two-year institutions are critically important in the science and mathematics preparation of future K-12 teachers, in the professional development of in-service teachers, and in increasing the participation of under-represented minorities in the geosciences. Beyond this, the development of the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) presents many opportunities for the entire geoscience community and the larger integrative science community, and the two-year institutions need to be full partners in these efforts. However, participation of two-year institution faculty in the geoscience education community has been limited. Given the important role of two-year institution faculty in geoscience education, they must be better integrated into the geoscience education community, both in terms of participation and in terms of leadership. The planning workshop will provide a forum for bridging two-year institution faculty and four-year institution faculty to discuss and develop strategies that will result in greater integration of two-year institution faculty in the geoscience education community. The workshop will provide an opportunity to share the challenges and opportunities of the professional life of two-year institution faculty members, identify specific strategies that would reduce the professional isolation felt by some two-year institution geoscience faculty members, develop plans to increase the professional development and leadership opportunities of two-year institution faculty members in geoscience education, discuss successes (and failures) of collaborations with four-year institutions and universities faculties, consider strategies for fostering communications to two-year institution faculty, and plan a leadership conference for two-year institution faculty that would be held in the following year. The workshop will also include brief presentations by representatives from other professional societies regarding their approach to two-year faculty issues. Prior to the planning workshop, all participants will discuss electronically the major issues faced by two-year institution geoscience faculty, discuss strategies for increasing participation and leadership in the geoscience and geoscience education community, and respond to the workshop agenda. The participants in the planning workshop will leave the workshop with an action plan for increasing the involvement of two-year faculty in various activities of the larger geoscience education community doc6871 none of the PADI assessment development framework, (2) one or more prototype assessment tasks conforming to the framework, and (3) the conceptual design of the PADI assessment development support system doc6872 none This project is aimed at understanding the behavior of polymeric solutions in strong flows beyond the linear viscoelastic limit, and for concentrations and molecular weights at which the polymers are sufficiently entangled that reptation-based theories are expected to be applicable. The project is based upon the use of transient shear and other homogeneous flows ranging from near-shear to a planar extensional flow, under conditions in which the conformation of polymer chains is far from the equilibrium state. This includes cases at sufficiently high shear rates that there can be significant chain stretch. This general class of problems is intresting because it provides a basis for testing the predictions of theoretical models, and also because an understanding of the relationship between flow and polymer configuration is an essential component in the dsign of processing systems that can lead to optimization of marcroscopic materal properties. The research proposed is dominantly experimental in nature, and is based on the use of novl flow cells that are coupled with transient optical measurement systems. These include both two-color and phase-modulated birefringence, as well as dynamic light scattering and Piv. This combination of experimental tools provides data on the transient configuration of polymer segments between entanglement points, as well as a complete characterization of the flow. Standard rheological tests (primarily linear viscoelasticity) are also used to characterize the fluids. The fluids to be studied are solutions with a bimodal moleclar weight distribution, and solutions of star polymers. These two studies represent a first step toward the consideration of polydispersity and polymer branching. Finally, recent extensions of the basic Doi-Edwards theory will be evaluated, and where possile improved, including particularly recent proposals for the incorporation of convective constraint release(CCR). %%% This research is aimed at achieving the fundamental understanding that is necessary for the design and development of processing strategies for the production of precision polymeric parts for structural and other applications, and for optimizatiton of the material properties by manipulation of molecular structure during processing. The ability to control design and optimize polymer processing is essential to the development of products with a high added value above the raw materials costs doc6873 none Biological Sciences (61) The aim of this project is to establish a basic molecular biology lab that, in the context of a new course in Molecular Biology, will implement research-based experiments into the curriculum. The project intends to adapt the NSF-supported Classroom Guide to Yeast Experiments to an interesting, unknown research question that serves as a starting point for molecular biology students. The experimental approaches provide students with hands-on training in key molecular biology protocols that are applied to a research problem regarding transcriptional control and the evolutionary conservation of important molecules. The Molecular Biology lab is designed in a manner that enables students to analyze genes at three fundamental levels, namely, DNA, RNA, and Proteins, using both in vitro and in vivo approaches, as well as produce student learning outcomes. The course emphasizes the importance of understanding methodologies, molecular approaches, and instrumentation that have revolutionized biology and are key to diagnosis and prevention of disease, as well as allow the students to debate the ethical considerations that some of these new technologies pose. The equipment being acquired is also being used to improve the laboratory component of other biology courses, namely Genetics, Cell Physiology, and Biochemistry, thereby modernizing the Biology curriculum at UOG. Specific equipment like the PCR Thermal Cycler and gel electrophoresis apparatus is being used for the non-major Human Biology course offered as a general education requirement, in order to demonstrate applications of molecular biology in forensic sciences, paternity cases, anthropological and archaeological investigations doc6874 none The mosses (Division or Phylum Bryophyta) comprise the second largest group of land plants, after the highly successful angiosperms (flowering plants), and are important components of virtually all terrestrial ecosystems. Tremendous progress has been made in the last five years toward an understanding of phylogenetic relationships among the mosses and this project will build significantly upon that foundation. Information contained in DNA sequences acquired from multiple chloroplast and nuclear genes will be used to reconstruct genealogical relationships across the full spectrum of moss diversity, sampled from nearly all 865 currently recognized genera of mosses. In turn, the genealogical findings will then be used to investigate historical and ecological factors that affect patterns of moss diversity on a global scale. A novel aspect of the research will be the integration of different approaches to the measurement of biodiversity. In particular, the investigators will compare so-called taxic diversity, the numbers of species recognized by traditional taxonomic studies, to so-called phylogenetic measures of diversity (PD: phylogenetic diversity) based on variation (mutational diversity) at the DNA level. Such measures of phylogenetic diversity have recently gained prominence in conservation biology, and the research will extend such applications to the study of global biodiversity patterns in a major group of terrestrial organisms. Collaborating investigators Dr. Jon Shaw at Duke University and Dr. Bernard Goffinet at University of Connecticut will seek to test specific hypotheses about relative levels of biodiversity in tropical versus high latitude ecosystems, and between communities in different types of habitats. The work will therefore contribute to a broader understanding of the underlying mechanisms that control the world s biodiversity. This funding will also contribute significantly to the training of young biologists at Duke University and the University of Connecticut doc6875 none This Collaborative Research Activities in Environmental Molecular Science (CRAEMS) Award to the University of Kentucky is supported by the Special Projects Office in the Chemistry Division, and is in support of the work of Gerald Huffman and his collaborators in environmental chemistry. Support is also provided to J. David Robinson at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and Ronald Pugmire and Adel Sarofim at the University of Utah through subawards. The research will focus on fine airborne particular matter (PM) of less than 2.5 microns in diameter, derived from the combustion of fossil fuels in both stationary and mobile sources. These particulates are complex mixtures of ammonium sulfate, ammonium nitrate, carbon, both elemental and organic, and inorganic constituents, particularly metals. The program will have three goals: (1) to identify molecular structure and microstructure, relevant for source apportionment; (2) to identify components that have significant effects on human health; and (3) to achieve, through laboratory experiments and modeling, a basic understanding of the formation mechanisms of critical structures identified. Molecular and microstructures will be characterized by a variety of spectroscopic and microscopic techniques including XAFS, GC-MS, 13C-NMR, SEM, TEM, XRF and Mossbauer spectroscopy. Samples will be obtained from large-scale combustion facilities and diesel truck sampling, laboratory experiments and ambient air sampling. The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed new regulations for fine airborne particulates. The knowledge generated by this research will be valuable for both the establishment of appropriate regulations for particulates and for compliance with those regulations doc6876 none Through an interdisciplinary collaboration between a program that has achieved extensive validation of a theory of student learning and a program that has gained wide recognition for using Internet technology as a real-time resource in science classrooms. The triarchic theory of human intelligence will provide a systematic methodology for the study of student learning achievement levels of roughly middle school and high school students as they pursue lessons in the context of four different instructional conditions. The four conditions are: (1) traditional teaching using paper-and-pencil; (2) traditional teaching with (non-Internet ) computer use; (3) triarchically enhanced teaching using archived data but no computers; (4) triarchically enhanced teaching using real-time data via Internet. Each of the four conditions will be implemented in three different classroom settings: (1) the study of earthquakes and seismic phenomena by 7th and 8th grade students; (2) the study of air quality and pollution by 11th and 12th grade students; and (3) the study of velocity vectors used in navigation by 11th and 12th grade students. Strong emphasis will be placed upon recruiting teachers from urban schools, suburban and rural schools. Instructional conditions will be assigned randomly by school. Since Stevens Institute of Technology is pursuing teacher professional development programs involving more than 15,000 teachers in the states of Arizona, Florida, New Jersey and Ohio, recruiting schools in these four states will ensure diversity. The research will be conducted over a five-year period. Prior to Year 5, all teachers will be informed about interim research results concerning the efficacy of the triarchic approach, the use of real time Internet resources in instruction and the synergies between these two efforts to enhance learning doc6877 none This Collaborative Research Activities in Environmental Molecular Science (CRAEMS) Award to Worcester Polytechnic Institute is supported by the Special Projects Office in the Chemistry Division. Barbara Wyslouzil is supported by this award for the fundamental study of nanoparticle formation in air pollution. Support is also provided to Doug Doren, Murray Johnston, Hai Wang, and Anthony Wexler at the University of Delaware through subawards. An integrated experimental and theoretical program will be carried out to understand, at a molecular level, the processes of nanoparticle formation that are relevant to air pollution. The topics that will be addressed are (1) nucleation in aqueous systems, (2) soot inception, and (3) the interaction between soot and metals during combustion. Water, water alcohol and water nitric acid aerosols will be generated in a supersonic nozzle and characterized by small angle neutron scattering and FTIR. Molecular simulation techniques will be applied to calculate nucleation rates and to address important non-equilibrium effects. Soot particles will be generated in a flat flame burner and characterized by sampling with a scanning mobility particle sizer. Size distributions will be compared to those derived from small angle neutron and x-ray scattering experiments. Molecular composition of the particles will be determined by mass spectrometry. The reaction between metals and soot will be studied by generating particles from ethylene-oxygen flames, seeded with ferrocene. Mathematical models will be developed that incorporate molecular mechanisms of metal oxide particle formation and carbon deposition. Particle nucleation is a key step in many environmental and industrial processes. Refractory particles are formed in combustion and metallurgical processes, while acid-water droplets are produced in stack gases, volcanic plumes and in photochemical reactions in the atmosphere. This research will help define the mechanisms by which they are formed and the role they play in air pollution doc6878 none The Sixth International Conference on Bacterial Locomotion and Signal Transduction (BLAST VI) will be held January 14-19, , in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The conference, which is expected to have 200-250 participants, will focus on the molecular mechanisms of sensing and response in several bacterial systems. The meeting format is designed to foster extensive discussions of recent developments and ideas among researchers from the United States and abroad. Approximately 60 oral presentations and 100 posters will be included in the program, allowing virtually all laboratories working in this rapidly moving field to present their key findings. Scientific sessions will compare and contrast the sensory and locomotor systems of a variety of prokaryotes, focusing on each fundamental step in their signal transduction pathways: (a) transmembrane signaling by chemo- and photo-receptors; (b) signal transmission by intracellular phosphorelay cascades; (e)sensory control of cellular motility, gene expression, and development; and (d) the mechanics of cell motility. Bacterial sensory systems have important functions in microbial ecology and in pathogenesis, and also provide useful models for understanding analogous signaling systems that occur in many eukaryotes. The BLAST meeting has become the principal forum for most investigators in this field to present their current findings and to discuss emerging concepts and generalizations concerning bacterial sensing and motility. A review of BLAST VI will be published, which will summarize key findings presented at the meeting and provide a readily accessible overview of the present state of the field doc6879 none Meisel, Mark This U.S.-Slovak research project between Mark Meisel at the University of Florida, Gainesville, and his partner Alexander Feher of P.J. Safarik University, Kosice, features an investigation of the thermodynamic and magnetic properties of a variety of novel low-dimensional inorganic magnets. Know and new materials, including powders and crystals of a variety of compounds constituting model spin chain and ladder systems, will be characterized by combining a blend of macroscopic and microscopic probes that span a range of temperature, magnetic field and pressure. Subject materials include: spin ladders, alternating spin chains, alternating exchange chains, single-ion bound states, and low-dimensional ising dipolar systems. Results are expected to improve our basic understanding of the properties of several low-dimensional magnetic systems and, potentially, the pairing mechanisms in exotic superconductors. This condensed matter physics project fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc6880 none Anthropology (81) This project is an invited session at the American Anthropology Association national meeting during November 15-19, . It is sponsored by the General Anthropology Division and features ten papers and demonstrations of online courses along with critical discussion of computer-mediated teaching and learning. The session is entitled: Internet Dreaming: Information Technology and the restructuring of Post-Secondary Education . This session will serve the purpose of providing maximum exposure to new developments in computer mediated teaching and learning in undergraduate anthropology doc6881 none This Environmental Molecular Science Institute (EMSI) Award to Ohio State University is supported by the Special Projects Office in the Chemistry Division, and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate. Patrick G. Hatcher and Samuel J. Traina supported by this award will study the role of environmental molecular interfaces on the chemical and biological activity of atmospheric, water and soil processes. This multidisciplinary program also supports sixteen other faculty members from different departments of Ohio State University. In addition, support is also provided to Paul Davidovits (Boston College), Satish Myneni (Princeton University) and Elizabeth Guthrie (Univ. of Tennessee) through subawards. Two major technical thrusts will be studied, 1) atmospheric processes at air water organic interfaces and ice interfaces, and 2) interactions of pollutants with water solid interfacial processes in soils, sediments and aquatic media. Ice core studies at molecular level will provide an understanding of past and future chemical processes. These studies will have broad impact on issues related to ecosystem impairment and degradation, and long term deleterious impact on human and natural biota. In support of the technical thrusts, is a sizable effort in the use and development of advanced analytical methods. Staff from Argonne National Laboratory will provide expertise in laser desorption mass spectrometry, x-ray absorption spectrometry, solid state and spatially-resolved Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometry, and isotopic labeling studies. Industrial collaborations with Aerodyne Research on aerosol and cloud chamber chemistry, and Exxon and Ciba Specialty Chemicals on targeted contaminated sites have been established and expanded. Outreach training programs proposed involved undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate students to attract young people to careers in environmental molecular sciences. In addition, the outreach program at Ohio State University will be coordinated with Argonne National Laboratory. This fundamental multidisciplinary research will advance our understanding of the role of environmental molecular interfaces on the chemical and biological activity of atmospheric, water and soil processes. The studies will also provide information at molecular level, the interactions of pollutants with water solid interfacial processes in soils, sediments and aquatic media. The outreach programs including the web site proposed will provide training in and information about environmental molecular sciences doc6882 none Hanson This award supports Ronald Hanson and students from Stanford University in a collaboration with Juergen Wolfrum of the Department Physical Chemistry at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. The research funded by this award will focus on developing laser-based diagnostic measurements during high-pressure combustion. One area to be addressed is the need for quantitative laser-induced fluorescence measurements of nitric oxide at high pressures where pressure broadening of the spectral lines produces interference from whatever molecular oxygen is present. This problem will make use of the German group s expertise in high-pressure burners and a new experimental facility at Stanford. A second problem to be worked on is the characterization of molecular fuel tracers for fuel air mixing to systems under high pressure. Each research group will use molecular tracers with different chemical structures, and the collaboration will allow direct comparison or the two different approaches. The opportunity this joint, collaborative research effort presents junior researchers is substantial, and the work done on this proposal will help institutionalize the relationship between the German and U.S. research groups doc6883 none The Special Projects Office in the Chemistry Division supports this Collaborative Research Activities in Environmental Molecular Science (CRAEMS) Award to Penn State University. This award supports Bruce Logan, Darrel Velegol, Jon Chorover and James Kubicki to study macromolecule-surface interactions in bacterial adhesion in natural and engineered aquatic systems at the molecular level. In addition, the award supports Menachem Elimelech at Yale University through a subaward to study theoretical and experimental aspects of bacterial cell motion and adhesion near interfaces. The underlying hypothesis is that cell-surface interactions are dominated by the interaction of cell-surface polymers (exopolymers), and natural organic matter, such as humic and fulvic acids, with the surface. Atomic Force Spectroscopy, FTIR, electro-hydrodynamic techniques, and molecular modeling will be employed to probe polymer size, strength, and conformation as a function of solution chemistry, surface charge, and surface composition. The goal is improved methods and models that describe interactions between particles and surfaces that are irregularly shaped at atomic levels in the presence of bonded and soluble macromolecules. This research is designed to improve our understanding of bacterial adhesion in natural systems and in engineered environments. It has important implications for restoration of contaminated groundwater, water treatment, and wastewater reclamation, which will become increasingly important as availability of fresh water becomes a global environmental and human health concern. Outreach programs educate students of the local school system in environmental problems and approaches doc6884 none This project will develop a realistic model, based on extensive experiments with 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional foams, to describe liquid foam coarsening and draining. Optimal industrial application of foam can only be achieved wen these two phenomena are properly understood. Current theories, developed for unrealistic motionless and or ideal dry foams, omit the important interdependence of coarsening and drainage and local dynamic effects, like interfacial elasticity, viscous dissipation, surfactant transport, film rupture, bulk bubble motion rearrangements, etc. The Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) facility at the University of Notre Dame offers a non-invasive, high-resolution imaging technique for large ( 200 bubbles) domain of 3D foam. MRI will provide complete information about global changes in foam structure in experiments on drained stabilized foam coarsening and wetting front propagation. Experiments on flowing 2D, bi-disperse foam and drainage from a single soap film will capture local film and vertex dynamics. Acquired data will be integrated into a dynamic foam model that will be used to correlate 3D coarsening and wetting front dynamics imaged by MRI. Graduate students involved in the project will receive training in physics and fluid mechanics and will get hands-on experience with MRI. Due to MRI s broad medical, scientific and engineering applicability, this training will prepare them for a range of careers in academia or industry. %%% Many technological processes, like secondary oil recovery, control of polluted ground water, industrial filtration, separation, etc. exploit foam stability and mechanical transport properties which are strong functions of foam spatial patterns. As a result, optima industrial application can only be achieved when texture coarsening and drainage of liquid foams, which fundamentally changes their spatial patterns, are properly understood. Current theories, developed for unrealistic motionless and or ideal dry foams, omit the interdependence of these phenomena. The aim of this project is to develop a realistic model, based on extensive experiments with 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional foams, that captures local film dynamic effects on global coarsening and drainage. The Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) facility at the University of Notre Dame offers a non-invasive imagin technique sfor a large domain of 3D foams. Upon successful completion of the research project, the foam models will be disseminated to the scientific community and to the chemical petroleum industry via the principal investigators websites and through a workshop conference at the University of Notre Dame. Graduate students involved in the project will receive training in physics and fluid mechanics and will get hands-on experience with MRI. Due to MRI s broad medical, scientific and engineering applicability, this training will prepare them for a range of careers in academia or industry doc6885 none This Collaborative Research Activities in Environmental Molecular Science (CRAEMS) Award to Johns Hopkins University is supported by the Special Projects Office of the Chemistry Division. The award supports studies by Gerald Meyer, Howard Fairbrother, David Goldberg, Kenneth Karlin and A. Lynn Roberts of dehalogenation chemistry by combining their expertise in synthesis, homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis, biomimetic and bioinorganic chemistry, electrochemistry, surface science, and environmental chemistry. Specific goals of this multidisciplinary program are: 1) the development of new reductive and oxidative dehalogenation chemistries and the elucidation of their fundamental mechanisms; 2) application of these new findings to the sensing, remediation, and determination of the environmental fate of organohalide pollutants; and 3) provide a pedagogical platform that informs and educates the next generation of environmental chemists. The fundamental studies will emphasize oxidative and reductive cleavage of organohalides by copper (I) and metalloporphyrin complexes. Both stoichiometric and electrocatalytic processes will be studied. Photo-triggered and electrochemical dehalogenation will also be examined. Dehalogenation by bimetallic reductants and metal sulfide minerals will be explored. Finally, electron-beam-induced chlorocarbon reductive cleavage will be examined in water and ice media. Collaborations include those with two National Laboratories (Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) and with two industries (KDF Fluid Treatment Inc., and Environmental Technologies Group Inc.). To develop an understanding of environmental principles and processes at the molecular level, a new graduate course will be developed and taught. An outreach program involving under-represented undergraduate researchers from nearby universities (Howard University and Morgan State University) will be implemented. Seventeen of the top twenty-five organic pollutants in the U.S. are organohalides. Volatile organohalides also deplete ozone and change global climate. This interdisciplinary work aims at a molecular-level understanding of redox-mediated dehalogenation, from which greener chemical processes can be developed and pollution problems due to organic halides can be obviated. The educational aspects of this multidisciplinary program, in collaboration with government laboratories and industries, is designed to increase the awareness of students concerning real-world environmental problems and to provide hands-on experience doc6886 none This Collaborative Research Activities in Environmental Molecular Science (CRAEMS) Award to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is supported by the Special Projects Office in the Chemistry Division. This award supports the studies Timothy Eglinton, John Hayes, and Christopher Reddy at the Institute to determine natural and introduced isotopic labels carried by specific contaminants such as hydrocarbons and chlorinated organics, and to trace their passage into macromolecular environmental organic matrices, such as humic and fulvic substances. In addition, they examine the bioavailability of organically bound contaminants and determine the long-term fate of these compounds compared with their free, unbound counterparts. Carbon-14 measurements, in tandem with 13C-, 2H-, and 15N- labeling techniques, are used to detect pollutants and their metabolites in impacted sediments and soils and to follow the carbon into biological pools. Isotopic labels are tracked by both NMR and mass spectrometric techniques in both laboratory incubation and field studies of contaminated sites. In addition to providing new insights into molecular-level processes, this work aims to develop new molecular-isotopic tools to study environmental problems. Support is also provided for Michael Freitas at Ohio State University through a subaward. Understanding the mechanisms that control binding and release of contaminants into the environment is of critical importance to human health. These studies are designed to develop a quantitative understanding of the fate of a range of semi-volatile pollutants sequestered in complex environmental matrices doc6887 none This project will implement a research agenda that will provide a rigorous longitudinal evaluation of the effectiveness of a scalable, school-wide model of reading improvement (Reading--FIRST). The research will provide information on a number of related theoretical and practical questions related to teacher thinking, school change, student learning, parent involvement, educational supervision, and the use of technology in the professional development of teachers. The results of the study will provide insights into how large scale interventions work in a wide variety of school contexts. Reading--FIRST was developed for grades K-12); this project covers only grades K-5). It addresses major alterable factors related to instructional improvement that have been identified in prior studies, including increasing the amount of instruction, improving essential content coverage, and fostering greater continuity within schools. Reading--FIRST has been field-tested in more than 200 schools. An interdisciplinary team of educators, psychologists, statisticians, and technology experts will conduct the series of related research studies, using quantitative and qualitative data drawn from students, teachers, principals, and parents doc6888 none R&D competitions, election campaigns, litigation, sport competitions, and all-pay auctions all have a common theme. In these situations individual agents or groups of agents compete with one another by expending limited resources in an attempt to win an exogenously determined prize. Contributions to the theoretical literature on such contests come from economics, political science, organizational theory, marketing, and strategic management. In contrast to the rapidly growing body of theoretical literature, there have been very few empirical studies designed to test the implications of the various models. We propose extending the theoretical literature as well as experimentally testing the implications of our models. Six experiments are proposed. Two experiments on multi-player contests extend our previous investigation to n (n 2) firms competing in the development of a new technology product. Both the cases of symmetric and asymmetric firms are examined. Two additional experiments on multi-level contests extend the investigation to situations that allow simultaneously for within-group conflicts and between-group competitions. These situations occur frequently in inter-organizational conflicts that elicit free riding within the competing groups. We propose to investigate the effects of different rules for sharing the prize on the level of individual contribution, and the effects of unequal group sizes. The final two experiments on multi-stage contests extend the investigation in yet another direction to within-group competitions with shortlisting in which the number of contestants decreases from stage to stage (e.g., NBA championship). Our research program is mostly driven by the game theoretic solution concepts of Nash equilibrium and subgame perfect equilibrium. The insights gained from analyzing the behavioral patterns uncovered in the proposed experiments should help in 1) assessing the descriptive power of these solution concepts, 2) stimulating new theoretical and experimental research, and 3) applying the findings to the design of optimal contests doc6889 none This proposal will fund the planning of Modeling Across the Curriculum, a major program on the use of computer-based modeling on student learning and inquiry skills in secondary science. The goal of the planning grant is to develop detailed partnerships, research design, and organizational and technical plans needed for a successful large-scale longitudinal study. The Modeling Across the Curriculum project will conduct a longitudinal study of the impact of highly interactive modeling tools and associated learning materials on secondary level student science problem solving, reasoning, and performance on standardized tests. The program, a large-scale collaboration integrating software and curriculum development, and significant data analysis tasks, will build on smaller-scale studies of the educational value of using, modifying, and building interactive computer-based models when supported with appropriate materials and teacher professional development. In addition, it will afford a unique opportunity to combine prior developments into a coherent curriculum multi-year strand with a common format and set of tools. A detailed analysis of the reliability, validity, and appropriateness of measures will be conducted in two urban partner schools and then will expand to include approximately 50 districts nationwide doc6890 none This Collaborative Research Activities in Environmental Molecular Science (CRAEMS) Award to the University of California-San Diego Scripps Institute of Oceanography is supported by the Special Projects Office in the Chemistry Division. In addition to the support to Bradley Tebo at the Institute, the award also supports Thomas Spiro at Princeton University, John Bargar at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory and Garrison Sposito at UC-Berkeley, through subawards. The award will address the issues of how bacteria oxidize manganese, how the resulting manganese oxides influence the chemistry of other metals in both terrestrial and marine environments and how they affect chemical and biochemical degradation of natural and xenobiotic organic molecules. The project will encompass (1) cloning and expressing the gene products associated with the Mn (II)-oxidation system of bacteria and characterizing these proteins using biochemical and spectroscopic methods in order to elucidate the mechanisms of manganese oxide formation; (2) investigating cross-reactivity with other metal ions and with organic molecules, in order to evaluate the environmental influence of Mn (II) oxidation systems; (3) exploring how metal ion co-contaminants are sequestered during manganese oxide biogenesis by whole cells; and (4) characterizing the reactivity of biogenic manganese oxide surfaces with respect to metal ion sorption and dissolution, and the alteration of organic substrates for microbial metabolism. A variety of microbiological, chemical, and spectroscopic techniques such as x-ray absorption spectroscopy, resonance Raman and FTIR will be utilized. Microbially produced manganese oxides are ubiquitous in the environment and have high capacities to transform organic and inorganic pollutants including aromatic hydrocarbons and hydrogen sulfide. Understanding the steps along the environmental trajectory of manganese oxides, from biochemical mechanisms, to cross-reactivity with metals and organics, to the influence of the oxides on metals immobilization and on biodegradation pathways, will be useful in elucidating biogeochemical cycles and designing remediation strategies for metal and organic pollution doc6891 none 00- Rejmankova Linking ecosystem processes and community structure along salinity and nutrient gradients in tropical marshes Accelerated land use change in the tropics is increasing nutrient loading to aquatic ecosystems. This is resulting in changes in species composition and ecosystem functions such as primary production and nutrient cycling. The aim of this research is to obtain a mechanistic explanation for an ecosystem level response to increased nutrient input along a salinity gradient. Dr. Rejmankova and colleagues propose that there is a context (salinity) dependent switch between phosphorus (P) and nitrogen (N) limitation in tropical marshlands. This project will use P-limited wetland ecosystems in Belize as a model system on which to document how nutrient limitation can be shifted along a salinity gradient through different constraints on individual components of plant communities. A short-term mesocosm experiment will evaluate response of individual marsh components to different levels of salinity, P and N. A long-term experiment involving additions of nutrients to a replicated set of marshes of different salinity will verify the predictions of the ecosystem-level response. In addition to the intellectual merit of a better understanding of these ecosystems, the project has immediate relevance to conservation of wetlands, and may provide data that will be relevant to malaria control in Belize doc6892 none This Collaborative Research Activities in Environmental Molecular Science (CRAEMS) Award to Stanford University is supported by the Special Projects Office in the Chemistry Division. Gordon Brown, Scott Fendorf, and Alfred Spormann supported by this award will study the chemical and microbial interactions at environmental interfaces among solids, aqueous solutions, natural organic and plant matter, microorganisms and atmospheric gases. Support is also provided to Satish Myneni at Princeton University through a subaward. Model systems of increasing complexity will be studied with molecular-level probes to explore (1) geometric and electronic surface structures of environmentally relevant hydrated solids; (2) the structure of water at solid-aqueous interfaces and in the vicinity of nonpolar organic molecules absorbed on solid surfaces; (3) the mode of interaction of metal ion cations and oxoanions with these surfaces and with organic ligands and microbial organisms; (4) the structure and bonding of aqueous and surface complexes of these ions; (5) the rates of abiotic and biotic reaction pathways of redox-sensitive metalloids such as arsenic, selenium and uranium; (6) the hydrophobic interactions of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons with environmental solids at the molecular level; (7) the effects of microbial biofilm coatings on solids on the adsorption and transformation reactions of heavy metal and organic pollutants; and, (8) genomic-level interactions of microorganisms with mineral surfaces and organic and inorganic pollutants. Model studies will be coupled with laboratory studies of natural contaminated systems. Advanced spectroscopic methods, particularly those based on tunable synchrotron radiation, computational chemistry and molecular genomic technologies will be utilized. This fundamental interdisciplinary research will advance our understanding of the role of sorption precipitation transformation at environmental interfaces in sequestering heavy metal and organic pollutants and will lead to the development of new remediation methodology. The affiliation with the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory will also introduce environmental scientists and students to synchrotron-based studies in environmental chemistry doc6893 none This project will use knowledge about best practices of early literacy education to target teacher education, and by using case-based, anchored instruction. We will provide multimedia, case-based materials on CD DVD-ROM and over the Internet, making visible the richness and complexity of best practice instruction to teacher educators, pre-service teachers, and classroom teachers. An extensive set of studies will use the digital, multimedia resources available at our site to study the use of a case-based approach to pre-service teacher education. We plan to accomplish three central objectives: (a) raise pre-service teachers understanding of best practices of early literacy education; (b) increase pre-service teachers use of best practices in the classroom when they first begin teaching; and (c) significantly raise young children s reading achievement. The project is based on two main assumptions: first, that sufficient research is available about best practices to teach reading and writing effectively; and, second, that technology can play a key role in improving reading achievement. Specifically, this project identifies instructional practices which are supported by scientific research and which have stood the test of time in exemplary teachers classrooms. These best practices will be used to enhance pre-service teacher education through cases-based, anchored instruction, and establish guidelines and best practices for use of technology for K-3 classroom reading instruction. This pre-service delivery system and subsequent classroom instruction will be tested through a broad-based research program that assesses effects on teacher candidates as well as on children s literacy achievement, and disseminated through a Best Practices in Literacy Web Site and other means. Years 3 - 5 involve widespread experimental intervention studies with collaborating Southeast Literacy Consortium members (70 researcher teacher educators at institutions in the southeastern U.S.) at 25-30 sites doc6894 none This project will focus on identifying, quantifying, and describing teaching strategies that result in high elementary student performance in reading and high elementary student performance in science. In today s environment of high stakes tests and increased accountability, elementary teachers are under pressure to devote increasing amounts of classroom time to reading and mathematics. Research on the relationship between reading and inquiry science may provide teachers with strategies for improving both the teaching of science and reading and for including science as a core subject. The long-term project will critically analyze teachers who are currently demonstrating success or failure in both reading and science (by measures such as standardized tests accepted by the state) and carefully document classroom practice and pedagogical strategies. Successful instructional approaches and common themes and patterns will be tied to a general theory of effective instruction. The project will have as partners two or three states that administer state-wide standardized tests in both language arts and science and have other supporting elements of systemic reform in place (e.g., standards and supporting policies doc6895 none the purpose of this proposal is to support the activities of the Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment (BICE) of the National Research Council, National Academies. The request is for $55,000 out of a total of $185,000 for the one-year period from 1 October through September 30, . BICE proposes to continue its function of providing an independent forum where expertise from a wide variety of scienfific and engineering disciplines can address issues and opportunities concerned with infrastructure and the built environment. BICE has and will continue to respond to specific requests from government, and, as appropriate, act on its own initiative with public and private support. During the coming year, BICE will broaden its activities in natural and technological hazards to incorporate extreme events events whose impacts, effects or outcomes are significant, in this context, to the infrastructure and the built environment. A colloquium on the topic is planned during the period of the grant doc6896 none This investigation addresses the challenge of implementing effective instruction for reading comprehension in the elementary grades, based on a cognitive-motivational model of reading comprehension. From this framework, we developed Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI), which combines reading strategy instruction and inquiry science. The goals of the interdisciplinary team are to: (1) scale-up CORI to the district level in the later elementary grades, (2) compare the effectiveness of CORI to strategy instruction (SI) and traditional reading instruction (TRI) for increasing reading comprehension, reading motivation, and science knowledge, (3) examine the variables influencing the scalability and sustainability of CORI, and (4) use technology for student learning, assessment, and teacher development. In a three-year longitudinal design, we are phasing-in CORI and comparison groups with a target sample of students across grades 3, 4 and 5 in 144 classes in 16 schools in one district. Effects of treatments are analyzed cross-sectionally and growth curve modeling is conducted longitudinally with Hierarchical Linear Modeling. Computer-based technology is used for: student learning (Internet web sites, computer tools, and CD-roms); student assessment (science knowledge); teacher professional development (preparation, collaboration, and monitoring); and dissemination doc6897 none Ricklefs. The proposed research uses molecular and genetic techniques (DNA sequencing and PCR-based RFLP assays) to characterize the distribution of blood parasites (Plasmodium and Haemoproteus) in species of birds on islands in the Lesser Antilles. Isolated island populations of birds and other animals are vulnerable to infection by introduced pathogens, which may influence population size and the habitat distribution of their hosts. Indeed, the extinction of a number of endemic species of birds in the Hawaiian Islands has been attributed to the introduction of malaria and pox viruses. The extent to which exotic host species can influence native species, and the composition of local communities, in part depends on the likelihood of host-switching. Although host-switching has been examined in the medical literature for some diseases, it has not been addressed from a community perspective across a broad region, such as the Caribbean. This project builds on massive collections of blood smears and buffered blood samples obtained from almost 2,000 birds representing 37 species, and the complete phylogenetic appraisals of island populations of each avian host species. Research will correlate community relationships and geographic distributions of both host and parasite in a contemporaneous fashion. Fieldwork will substantially increase the sampling of host individuals in the West Indies to determine seasonal, habitat, and annual variation in parasite infections. Laboratory determination of parasite gene sequences will allow an accurate description of host- and parasite-sharing within island communities of Antillean birds. In addition, it will facilitate an understanding of patterns of colonization and endemism in a regional parasite fauna, as well as a quantification of the association between phylogenetic patterns in hosts and parasites. This history may reveal generalizations about potential emerging diseases in wildlife species doc6898 none Sick This award supports a third year of funding for Dr. Volker Sick and students from the University of Michigan in a collaboration with Christoph Schulz of the Department of Physical Chemistry at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. The research funded by this award will improve laser-spectroscopic methods for the non-intrusive measurement of fuel and temperature distributions in direct-injection gasoline engines. The collaboration brings together the unique expertise of the two groups. The Heidelberg group has strong expertise in laser spectroscopy and quantitative diagnostic tools, and the Michigan group has fundamental knowledge and research experience in engine technology. The PI also has strong contacts in the automotive industry, which is interested in the results of the research. Much of the research will be performed by a graduate student from the PI s group working in Heidelberg. Exchange of junior researchers is emphasized to add an international dimension to their training and to allow them to establish international connections early in their careers doc6899 none The goal of this research is promoting science learning, particularly focusing on science inquiry, and literacy development for linguistically diverse as well as mainstream students. The research addresses the following questions: What are developmental trajectories in conducting science inquiry by linguistically diverse elementary students? What is the process of instructional intervention as teachers provide effective scaffolding on the nature of science and literacy with students language and cultural experiences and the teacher explicit to student exploratory continuum? What is the impact of the instructional intervention on teacher change and student achievement over time that can be sustainable and scalable across diverse groups of students and teachers? How do state and district policies influence the implementation of the intervention? What are similarities and differences in the process and impact between two intervention conditions: (a) design experiments and (b) focused intervention? This 4-year research will be conducted at two sites, Miami-Dade County Public Schools in Florida, the nation s fourth largest school district and San Francisco Unified School District in California. The research will involve grades 3, 4, and 5 elementary students at 6 elementary schools representing diverse ethnolinguistic backgrounds in each district. The research will include a total of 12 elementary schools, about 150 teachers, and about 4,500 students each year. Teachers will receive support for professional development in science and literacy instruction as well as diversity in language and culture. Instruction will focus on two units at each grade level, including the topics of measurement, states of matter, the water cycle, weather, the solar system, and heat energy. A key aspect is a longitudinal design with cohorts of teachers and students. Data collection will involve multiple sources across schools, teachers, and students. Patterns of change in teachers knowledge, beliefs, and practices, as well as student achievement, will be analyzed doc6900 none Laboratory experiments on atmospherically relevant chemical reactions involving clusters will be performed. These clusters mimic conditions in on liquid or solid aerosols (ice crystals). Since both neutral and ionic reactions can be studied, the role of acid catalyzed or ionic mechanisms will be studied. An example is the stratospherically relevant reaction of chlorine nitrate with water on ice crystals, the exact mechanism of which is still under debate. Other experiments will include studies of photochemical reactions on clusters, the unimolecular dissociation of small organic compounds on clusters, ammonia solvation, and reactions relevant to sea salt particles. This project is supported jointly by the Atmospheric Chemistry Program and the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program doc6901 none This proposal requests support to plan and develop a Data Research and Development Center (DRDC) at National Opinion Research Center (NORC) and the University of Chicago. The mission of this Center would be improving the research capacities of individuals engaged in the conduct of interdisciplinary work in the areas of learning, instruction, and achievement. Substantive and methodological changes over the past five years in conduct of research are challenging researchers as they design, analyze, and disseminate their results. Investigators must produce findings that are generalizable to populations beyond small purposive samples and that are replicated across other data sets. Investigators are often unaware of how their findings relate to work in other areas or how their findings are consistent or inconsistent with larger samples. Creating a center where investigators are provided with information on other data sets and opportunities to learn how to access and analyze such information accomplishes two important objectives. First, it would be possible to link results across several data sets to produce more robust compelling evidence than if we had to rely on the results of a single study. Second, it would increase the capacity of individual investigators to replicate their findings more systematically and efficiently using a variety of data sets and methods. To accomplish these goals, we envision our Center as having four main objectives: (1) training, (2) research, (3) dialogue, and (4) data archiving and dissemination doc6902 none This award funds the activities of the Global Analysis, Integration, and Modelling Task Force (GAIM) Office of the International Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP). The goal of GAIM is to advance the study of the coupled dynamics of the Earth system using data and models. The challenge of the GAIM office, housed at the University of New Hampshire, is to initiate and facilitate activities that will lead to the rapid development and application of a suite of Global Prognostic Biogeochemical Models. A major new focus for the next three years of GAIM activities will be to enhance the scientific community s capability to address the Earth system as a whole using model coupling and integration. The first challenge will be to coordinate the development of Earth-system Models of Intermediate Complexity (EMICs) by research groups throughout the world. These models show great promise for highlighting critical feedbacks and interactions that control the stability and sensitivity of the Earth system to anthropogenic perturbations. Next, models with system-level integration will be developed that integrate full-complexity subsystem models into Comprehensive Earth System models. Such models pose a different set of challenges to researchers in terms of space, time scale, and boundary conditions doc6903 none Smouse Fragmentation and population declines jeopardize the survival of many species. Excessive reproductive isolation can cause a loss of valuable alleles, decrease genetic variation, induce inbreeding depression, reduce demographic fitness, and lead to reproductive failure. When tree populations are reduced to scattered and clustered individuals, pollen movement is critical to connectivity. This project develops a novel approach that can cover landscape-scale areas and can be integrated into spatially explicit simulation modeling of landscape changes. These new tools are deployed to investigate a threatened tree species, California Valley oak (Quercus lobata). Using allozyme and microsatellite genotypes, the investigators examine three objectives: (1) They will characterize reproductive isolation of individual trees in landscapes with variable conspecific density. (2) They will examine the impact of adult genetic structure and temporal heterogeneity of pollen pools on estimates of pollen movement. (3) They will incorporate estimated parameters into geographic models to simulate the impact of historical and future population decline. This project represents an excellent case study of the evolutionary dynamics of gene flow and its landscape scale conservation restoration consequences. It will be applied to a critical California tree species experiencing habitat loss and degradation from residential and agricultural development, a situation in need of information for future management and policy decisions. This research will dovetail issues from evolutionary biology, conservation biology, geography, and public policy of the threatened species doc6904 none Astronomy education researchers require a validated content assessment instrument. The Collaboration for Astronomy Education Research has designed a 21 question test (the Astronomy Diagnostic Test, ADT) for undergraduate non-science majors that covers selected astronomical topics likely to be included during undergraduate non-science instruction. This instrument is intended to be given as a pre-test and as a post-test. The ADT was administered to approximately students at 26 different institutions during . Approximately fifty video and audio interviews, and thirty written responses for each questions were collected during and . Preliminary statistical analysis and validation tests have been done for the ADT. This project would complete the validation process through consultation with a psychometrician, disseminate the results, construct a dedicated web site providing access to the instrument along with databases for comparison of results with other similar institutions, and explore the needs of the community for a next generation ADT doc6905 none This project will focus on the early learning of foundational skills and study how highly successful 4th and 5th grade teachers help students achieve above predicted rates, an o help close the achievement gap between highest and lowest performing students. We will ascertain if there is consistency among different indicators of teaching quality: nominations, classroom observations, and student learning gains, using multiple criteria (statistical significance, percentile distributions, and effect sizes) to select teachers on two different dimensions of high-quality teaching: academic excellence and equity. We will not presume that teachers who are unusually effective with their students on-average are the same ones who narrow the achievement gap without holding back high achievers. Nor will we presume that measures of effectiveness from student gain scores will correspond to measures of effectiveness that are embedded in observation instruments. Two researchers will observe teachers over one or two years using both standardized and open-ended protocols. Teachers and other school-based educators will be interviewed; key lessons in mathematics and reading will be videotaped. The planning grant will be used to refine the research design, questions and methodology; explore the feasibility of a comparative analysis; select the teacher sample through a database analysis; determine the final composition of the research team; collect, modify, and develop observation instruments; and establish a data management system doc6906 none While hundreds of schools are implementing reform models through the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration (CSRD) program, most implementations they do not meet all nine CSRD criteria. There is growing concern that the models being delivered through the CSRD program have not adequately reached isolated, rural schools in poor communities. The purpose of this planning grant is to develop a rigorous, research study proposal that will test the effectiveness of a prototype model (the Promising Futures Model-PFM) that meets the criteria for comprehensiveness and is designed to target middle schools located in isolated rural, high-poverty communities. The planning award will allow, the partners and collaborators to set the stage for a three-phase, five-year study to test the effects of a fully implemented PFM on teaching and learning in rural, high-poverty middle schools. As part of this proposal planning effort, an Interdisciplinary Research Team (IRT) will be formed. This team will include scientists and scholars representing diverse disciplines and perspectives, including economists and rural sociologists. A Delivery Team (DT) will be formed to refine the model to be tested and to ensure that the study proposal adequately addresses the complexity of implementing comprehensive school reform in diverse contexts. In addition to the IRT and the DT, an Advisory Committee will be formed to bring additional expertise (e.g., practitioners, national organizations, and stakeholders) to bear on the study proposal. The objective of the one-year planning grant is to fully develop a study proposal that incorporates a three-phase, five-year study to answer the following research questions: How does the PFM differ in implementation in diverse contexts with different kinds of teachers? Can the PFM be implemented in any rural community with fidelity? What does it cost? Is it affordable in the rural context? Does the PFM significantly raise student achievement in mathematics and science doc6907 none This project will develop a large-scale professional development strategy in mathematics and science to support pre-service and beginning K-12 teachers in mathematics and science. As part of the planning effort, the research team will formalize partnerships with major education organizations and engage in prototype development and feasibility research to develop models for courses, activities, and tools that will support the preparation of new teachers. The proposed professional development model would be most appropriate for college students in their junior and senior years or in post-baccalaureate programs, as well as for those in their first two years of teaching. The outcome of the planning grant will be a fully developed plan, with supporting research and evidence data, for the full scale implementation of the proposed effort doc6908 none Caton In the last few years a number of planets have been discovered around other stars. Most of these discoveries have been made using recently developed high precision spectroscopic techniques. Other methods, based on detecting eclipses of some of the light of the parent stars by transits of a planet, have been suggested in the literature. Studies are under way to look at large groups of stars with the hope of observing an eclipse. However, this depends on some of the planets having their orbital plane pointed at the Earth and the eclipse occurring when the system is being observed. In this project, the search for planets will be optimized by choosing stars more likely to have planets with the Earth in their orbital plane and with eclipses that occur at times that we may be able to approximately predict. The optimization of the orbital alignment will be achieved by looking at eclipsing binary system stars orbiting in pairs with the Earth close to the orbital plane, as indicated by our observations of periodic eclipses. The risky, exploratory nature of this project is the supposition that the planets may have a tendency to form and stay at special points of stability in the actual stellar orbits where, if there are no other perturbing bodies, they may remain. This leads to predictable planetary eclipse times with respect to the stellar eclipse times. While the theory of the restricted three-body problem was verified with the remarkable discovery of the Trojan asteroids, no examples of this type in other star systems are yet known to exist. A number of eclipsing binary stars will be systematically monitored to search for subtle eclipses of the light due to transits of Trojan planets in the system. Measurements will be obtained from observations of several passes across the same orbital phase for each system, and the data will be averaged from all the observations to reduce the observational noise. Initial experiments have shown that it should be possible to detect millimagnitude changes in brightness caused by planets larger than Jupiter. Early results in the data obtained by observing V442 Cassiopeia hint at the possibility of a detection. The facilities and equipment to be used were obtained by previous funding from the National Science Foundation. The project will involve undergraduate and graduate students in the acquisition, analysis, and publication of the data. This is the first major NSF supported research project in the astronomy program at the Appalachian State University s Dark Sky Observatory. This project is funded by the Division of Astronomical Sciences doc6909 none Christie-Blick This is a one-year cooperative proposal between Dr. Nicholas Christie-Blick of Columbia University and Professor Sun Weiguo of Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology, Chinese Academy of Science. This project proposed to carry out a sampling trip to China to examine the stratigraphic and chemostratigraphic sequence of the Neoproterozoic Yangtze platform in South China. The great thickness of carbonate strata makes the Neoproterozoic Yangtze platform a unique place for this research. This project can provide the data to examine whether there is a strong relationship between negative excursions in carbon isotope and glaciations. The Chinese Academy of Science and the NSF jointly support this project doc6910 none Stern This award supports David Stern and students from the Boyce Thompson Institute of Cornell University in a collaboration Andreas Weihe of Department of Biology at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. The project will focus on plant organelle ribonucleic acid polymerases (RNAPs) of apparently viral origin. The collaboration brings together unique expertise and facilities: the German laboratory specializes in the requisite molecular tools and the U.S. laboratory in organism-specific techniques. The project was begun by the isolation of an RNAP gene from Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, and initial data indicates that the species might not contain a viral RNAP in its chloroplast, but only in the mitochondria. The specific objective of the research in the next couple of years will be to determine definitively the subcellular localization of the protein encoded by the already cloned nuclear gene, to search for additional homologues, to see conclusively if a viral type RNAP exists in Chlamydomonas chloroplasts, and to investigate transcriptional regulation in mitochondria. Exchange of junior researchers is emphasized to add an international dimension to their training and to allow them to establish international connections early in their careers doc6911 none This project will plan a data collection center (DCC) to coordinate measurement instruments, facilitate research design planning and problem-solving, and coordinate the analysis of data from multiple projects within designated subject areas; it will also provide assistance in dissemination and utilization of research project results. We propose to focus upon: (a) designing a national data base (IERI Data Base), (b) designing an interactive portal to facilitate research collaboration (IERI Portal), and (c) designing an analytic workbench that performs selected data analyses (IERI Workbench). The project will consider a database that includes all IERI funded projects proposed measures and student and teacher demographics; and guidelines for investigators to follow to compile their data for analysis and for reporting research results. The project is also considering an IERI Portal to provide IERI investigators, IERI program officers, and the scientific community with a collaborative environment for learning about ongoing and proposed research issues. The last consideration is an analytic workbench of software tools that specializes in (a) meta-analyses of intervention approaches and outcomes, (b) qualitative analyses of promising interventions and approaches, (c) selected secondary analyses of the planned national data base, and (d) identification and recommendation of future research directions doc6912 none The objectives of the proposed research focus on the design, discovery and characterization of new solid-state reactions. First, expansion of an initial set of target molecules to include groups with terminal double bonds as well as cationic metal complexes with neutral unsaturated ligands will both (a) promote the discovery of new processes, and (b) aid in the efficient selection of those materials likely to produce stereoregular products. Crystallographic studies, as well as full product characterization, will develop understanding of the geometrical and chemical mechanism associated with each process. Second, when single crystals are not available, structures will be determined by powder diffraction techniques. In addition to studies of new materials, powder X-ray structure determination of extant solid-state polymerization systems, such as potassium acrylate, will provide significant new information for a structure-reactivity database. Third, analysis of the diffuse X-ray scattering observed during the course of a solid-state reaction will provide new information on the disorder observed to occur at intermediate stages of solid-state reactions. Fourth, a series of molecular solids ranging from cinnamic acids to metal complexes will be irradiated in the low-energy tail of the absorption band of the corresponding chromophore. This avenue of research promises to produce single crystals of dimers, oligomers and polymers. Finally, newly-synthesized metal salts of acetylenedicarboxylic acid promise to be excellent prospects for new applications involving radiation dosimetry. %%% Solid state reactions offer exceptional opportunities for chemospecific and stereo specific synthesis leading to the production of new oligomers and polymers, and the discovery of novel applications for new materials in technological areas such as dosimetry and solid phase peptide synthesis are viewed as high priorities in industry doc6913 none Being able to read fluently is a critical developmental step in all young children s education. Reading fluency is neccessary for learning from science and social studies texts in later grades. The objectives of the proposal is to investigate the devleopment of fluency and automaticity in early elementary school reading. The research will refine existing programs for the development of fluent reading in classrooms and remedial reading settings. The study has three goals: (a) to develop and validate pedagogical approaches to developing reading fluency, specifically repeated reading and wide reading approaches; (b) to determine the effectiveness of approaches to providing remedial support for low-achieving children including decoding instruction, speeded word identification strategies, and repeated reading strategies; (c) to develop an empirically-based model of the development of fluency in beginning readers, particularly obligatoriness, spped, and resource availability aspects of fluent reading. Strand 1 will train classroom teachers in Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction (Stahl, Heubach, & Cramond, ) and Wide Reading approaches in their classrooms in schools in Atlanta, Rural Georgia, and New Jersey. The development of fluency in children in these classrooms will be measured through standardized and experimental methods both immediately following the intervention and a year later, and these children will compared to development of fluency in children receiving a traditional reading instruction. Effective methods will be implemented and disseminated. Strand 2 will examine remedial aspects of reading instruction designed to promote the development of fluent and automatic reading in struggling readers. This strand will examine the effectiveness of both Phonological and Strategy Training, Speeded Word Retrieval, and Repeated Reading strategies, both singly and in combination. The effectiveness of these will be compared to a traditional remedial instruction control. Both immediate and long term follow-up measures, on both standardized achievement and experimental measures, will be conducted to follow the progress of these children. Strand 3 will examine how the apects associated with automatic reading: obligatoriness, speed, and resource availabilty change together during the development of fluent reading during the second grade. Both a cross-sectional and two-year longitudinal study are planned. By examining all of these aspects together in a single ongitudinal study, a richer description and theoretical based for the development of fluent reading skill will be obtained. The strand will also develop the experiemtal measures of reading fluency to be used in other strands, The research conducted will add valuable knowledge regarding the ways to foster fluent automatic reading in young elementary school children doc6914 none Kintsch The project will plan for the creation and assessment of an ambitious program to improve reading and writing achievement with the participation of Boulder Valley School District (K-12) and the State of Colorado Department of Education. The project brings together a team of cognitive scientists, speech scientists, educational researchers, computer scientists, administrators and educators to work to design an program that uses state-of-the-art language technologies to help students learn to read fluently and to write effectively and creatively. Specific objectives of the planning phase include (a) establishing the full interdisciplinary team, (b) working with administrators and educators in Colorado schools to create an integrated program in which interactive learning tools optimally complement and enhance existing teaching methods, (c) developing an evaluation plan that will assess the effectiveness of the program. The work will be performed in close collaboration with teachers, including the design of an initial program in which reading tutors will be used to recognize and interpret students reading and writing behaviors and provide feedback to improve phonological awareness, reading fluency, comprehension and composition skills. Though much of the current work of members of the team is focused on early reading instruction; some of the methods (e.g., the comprehension-based methods that facilitate reading to learn) are also relevant for later grades doc6915 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This project is adapting and implementing the Contemporary College Algebra (CCA) program by incorporating problems dealing with Native American culture. CCA was originally developed by a consortium of 10 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) led by Texas Southern University. In this effort five tribal colleges (Dull Knife Memorial College, Stone Child College, Ft. Peck Community College, Little Big Horn College, and Salish Kootenai College) are joining together to adapt the CCA materials, conduct faculty development workshops and retreats, and disseminate the program to other colleges. The college algebra course is the first mathematics course that carries college credit; however, large drop-out rates often characterize such courses. This project is designed to improve course retention and attitude in this course by assuring that students understand the relevance of the materials to the Native American culture. The first goal of the project is to adapt and design materials that prepare students to contribute in an information rich, technological society. The course incorporates small group projects; a strong technology component; communication skills such as reading, writing, and presenting; and actvities to develop students mathematical self-esteem and confidence as problem solvers. The second goal is to change the culture of the college algebra course by incorporating native American culture in the examples, developing a sense of ownership by the teaching faculty in the college algebra program, energizing faculty to develop modes of instruction that engage students in their own learning, and developing a sense of involvement by faculty in other disciplines which require college algebra doc6916 none The problem addressed by this project regards high-school students understanding of and ability to learn from difficult science texts. The first purpose of this project is to examine high school students and teachers knowledge about metacognitive reading strategies to better ascertain the need for strategy interventions, as well as teachers ability to provide such training to students. The second purpose is to compare the effectiveness of three reading interventions and to thereby identify more effective methods for improving students comprehension skills. The third purpose is to determine whether the benefits of reading interventions depend on students skills, knowledge, or cultural environment. The fourth purpose is to develop a computerized training program that adaptively assigns a student to an appropriate training regime, and interactively provides reading training. Hence, this project bridges the two focus areas of the IERI initiative concerning reading skill acquisition and students understanding of increasingly complex scientific ideas. Within these areas, this project will address issues regarding instructional practices in reading, the role of teacher learning and performance on student learning, optimal interventions for students at-risk of reading or academic failure, the development of better assessment techniques of knowledge and skill, and the use of technology to improve assessment and learning doc6917 none This project concerns the study of phases of condensed matter systems and their stability and metastability with respect to applied stresses. The goals of the present project are: (1) to identify metastable phases by calculation; and (2) to stabilize them at room temperature in the laboratory. The theoretical search for new phases has become possible within the last few years by modern electronic-structure computer programs that can calculate total energies for any configuration of atoms in the unit cell of a crystal. Hence the programs can search for configurations that minimize the energy. Moreover, the calculations are made from first principles, i.e., require no empirically determined quantities, and are equally reliable for all configurations. The metastable phases thus found will be stabilized by coherent (pseudomorphic) epitaxy on suitable substrates. Each phase will be made as an ultrathin film with nanoscale thicknesses of perhaps 10 to 20 atomic layers. Usually the film will be strained away from its equilibrium state, since the much thicker substrate strains the surface mesh of the film to the surface mesh of the substrate. If ten or more layers can be grown, inner layers are strained bulk layers independent of surface effects, and are examples of the new metastable bulk phase. The crystal structure of these bulk layers will then be determined by quantitative low-energy electron diffraction and compared with the theoretical predictions. Probably there are many more metastable than stable phases, since even for pure elements all minima in a many-dimensional space are being sought. This research will be conducted with graduate students who will be trained for future employement in an active area of materials science %%% many materials the atoms are arranged in regular, periodic arrays which form a crystal. Crystals occur in nature with a particular atomic structure which is stable with respect to impressed forces. A given material may have different atomic structures, which have limited stability and which may have very different properties; such structures are said to be metastable. The word ``metastable means that if we only disturb it gently (for example, slightly deform it) the structure persists, but if we apply large enough deformations then the structure collapses. Some materials are found in nature both in a stable form (e.g., graphite) and in a metastable form (e.g, diamond), but most materials exhibit naturally only the stable form. Their metastable structures are mostly unknown, and, if known, can be fabricated only by special processes which stabilize them. Stabilization can be achieved, for example, by forcing the material to grow in the form of an ultra-thin film on top of another, stable, crystal (called the substrate). Metastable structures are far more numerous than stable ones, and their properties can be potentially very useful. The goals of the present project are: (1) to find metastable forms of several metals and alloys by calculation; and (2) to try to make and stabilize them experimentally in the laboratory. The former goal is made possible by modern electronic-structure computer programs, which can test any possible structure of a given material; the latter goal will be reached by growing nanoscale films with thicknesses of 10 to 20 atomic layers on suitable substrates in specially evacuated chambers. The structure of the films will be determined by well-tested electron-diffraction techniques and compared to the calculated structures. This combined experimental-theoretical project involves graduate and undergraduate students. They will receive training in an advanced area of contemporary materials science and are thereby prepared to enter scientific technological workforce of the next few decades doc6918 none Between fourth and eighth grade, American students achievement and understandings of complex science decline relative to their peers internationally. For urban students these declines are even more pronounced and, in many cities, standardized test scores remain among the nation s lowest. Through BioKIDS, late elementary students will embrace a coordinated curricular sequence that will support them as they grapple with complex science questions of their own design early, often, for multiple years, in multiple contexts and with the support of technologies tailored to their own needs and goals. Student learning and beliefs in biodiversity and other topics will be tracked over multiple years to profile in-depth and sustained inquiry learning. Standards of evidence will be used to provide compelling examples of late elementary inquiry that can compliment high-stakes testing. Hybrid technologies will serve as change agents for learning and will be embedded into many aspects of the learning activities. Interdisciplinary teams will converge on effective means of representing complex science for inquiry activities at different ages. Existing multi-year relationships with urban Detroit and schools nationally will serve as essential partners in the study of teacher support for innovation and scaling towards large impact doc6919 none This project will lay the groundwork for a methodologically rigorous five-year study that on ways to improve the use of telecommunications in the teaching of high school. During this phase, the project will look at variables that enhance the effectiveness of telecommunication technologies in teaching and learning science. The project will also identify or plan a psychometrically sound measure of student learning achievement in accordance with tms science standards. On that basis, the project will design one or more appropriate professional development interventions and an experimental design on to determine their effectiveness in enhancing student achievement in science. Teachers, by and large, are unprepared to create effective technology-rich learning environments. The five-year study will focus on how professional development and other interventions help teachers improve their ability to evaluate and integrate telecommunication tools and related curriculum and instructional materials into effective science instruction in secondary science. Student achievement will be measured against national science education standards (American Association for the Advancement of Science ; National Research Council ). schools doc6920 none Gruebele This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Martin Gruebele of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and Professor Hiroshi Kihara of the Kansai Medical University in Japan. The researchers will be undertaking a study of the early event of protein folding. The research will bring together experimentalists and theorists from both countries to study early events during the folding of three proteins: apomyoglobin, a ubiquitin mutant, and beta-lactoglobulin. Their efforts will be combined to extend the folding phase diagram to low temperature and high viscosity conditions. The theorists will be fully involved in the project beginning with the earliest experimental stages. The research will broaden our knowledge of folding by exploring the energy landscape under a wide range of external conditions. At very low temperatures and high viscosity very fast folding events will be slowed down considerably and the dependence of the kinetics on external conditions will be studied. Recently developed theoretical models will be used to simulate these conditions, and the experimental data will allow parameters in the theory to be constrained. The proteins to be studied sample a wide class of alpha, alpha beta and mostly beta proteins. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. The U.S. researchers provide T-jump fluorescence expertise, while the Japanese provide expertise in X-ray scattering at the Tsukuba Photon Factory. This research advances international human resources through the participation of a graduate student. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of the research in scientific journals and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc6921 none Innovative video-based techniques are opening new windows on the processes involved in teaching and learning. Yet experiences with using video examples as a method of providing instruction about teaching suggests that there are important obstacles to be overcome before this technology can serve as the basis for improving education. This proposal will address the problems involved in developing effective ways to use video records of classroom processes as a means to help teachers reflect on the processes of teaching and learning. The research has two major related goals: 1) studying the cognitive processes involved in learning from video and developing effective combinations of materials and tasks that promote teacher understanding of classroom processes, and 2) developing new methods for producing and disseminating video records of classroom processes that overcome some of the major limitations of current techniques. The proposed studies will describe the problem space of video materials and viewer tasks to find an optimal set of procedures for effectively using vignettes taken from classroom video as an educational technique. To promote generalization of results, the proposed studies will include children at two grade levels (1 & 4) and focus on two central topics in elementary school mathematics (learning about number representation and place value in grade 1, and learning about fraction representation and equivalence in grade 4). The system will be tested for its impact on teacher understanding, teaching practices, and student learning. The system will use the Internet to develop and implement teacher learning communities. Experience in developing and testing these materials will also facilitate extending the approach to other grades and domains doc6922 none This planning grant is designed to serve as the foundation for a full-scale proposal to the IERI. During planning grant the project will run a pilot study which begins to integrate the existing activities in order to collect preliminary data on barriers to vertical integration, and will work with a second geographical location as a site for studying the replication of the vertical integration model system. The major goal of the long term research project is to identify the institutional and social arrangements necessary for the successful vertical integration of proven after-school educational K-12 programs. Currently, these programs operate independently at the pre-school, elementary school, middle and high school levels. Our goal is to bring together an interdisciplinary team to design a vertically integrated system of such activities and to develop a set of methodological tools which will be useful for studying and integrating after-school programs more generally. This vertical integration will constitute an effective pipeline for educational achievement in SMET. Such integration is necessary for the development of individual students, for the mutual support of after-school and school activities, and for sustaining these design efforts doc6923 none The project will expand the work of a teacher-researcher collaboration in the area of early literacy development, particularly early identification of and intervention for children at-risk for reading failure. The objectives of this work are threefold: (a) refine and pilot test the efficacy of a comprehensive literacy assessment and accompanying interventions to be used with at-risk children in kindergarten and first grade in preparation for a future large-scale efficacy study, (b) use the software tools developed by TIMSS Video-R project and LessonLab to create a digital video library of illustrations of literacy assessments and interventions, and to document changes in instructional practices in the classroom as a result of implementing the literacy assessment and intervention, and (c) using information from the pilot efficacy study and the digital library, begin to develop a model program for literacy assessment and intervention to be used in teacher professional development. The pilot efficacy study involves two treatment conditions and one no-treatment comparison condition. One of the treatment groups uses the assessment and interventions with full support from the project team for formative evaluation purposes, a second is supported only by the web-based (digitized materials to examine the assessment s use under anticipated future implementation conditions. If successful, this study will show that it is possible to affect change in reading out comes for at-risk children by providing teachers with assessment tools and intervention choices focused on early literacy development. Results of the study will aid in the design and implementation of the large-scale efficacy study and the development of a model program for early identification and intervention that can be disseminated electronically doc6924 none Evans This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Edward Evans of the Utah State University and Professor Hironori Yasuda of Yamagata University in Japan. The researchers will undertake a study of the impact of introduced lady beetles on prey and other predators in both the old and new world. Species invasions around the globe are accelerating, in part from purposeful introductions by humans as in the practice of biological control. Through effects on biodiversity of invaded communities species invasions may have fundamental consequences for ecosystem functioning. Diversity often provides an important stabilizing measure of species redundancy within ecosystems, wherein reduced activity by a single species is counterbalanced by compensatory responses by other species. Predators introduced to enhance biological control may compromise the capacity for species redundancy in prey suppression if pre-existing predators are driven to low numbers or extinction. The researchers will study two invasive lady beetles in particular (Coccinella septempunctata and Harmonia axyridis) both in their native Japan where they have coevolved with other predators attacking aphids, and in Utah, where they now interact with native North American lady beetles and other aphid predators. They will attempt to determine the degree to which assemblages of predators (either longstanding and coevolved, or newly created are characterized by species redundancy in their capacity to reduce prey. They will also assess the root causes and consequences in habitats such as alfalfa of declining diversity of native lady beetles in North American associated with the establishment of Old World lady beetles. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. Results of this research should enable the researchers to address whether and how invasive insect predators may alter basic predator-prey relationships in invaded communities. This research advances international human resources through the participation of graduate students. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of their research in scientific journals and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc6925 none Mathematical Sciences (21) The purpose of this project is to develop a virtual library of Java objects for use by teachers and students in probability and statistics. Applets are small, self-contained programs designed to illustrate important concepts and methods. An applet can be dropped into a web page by a teacher with no programming expertise and then surrounded by expository text, data sets, and other elements to create custom web-based course materials. Components are building blocks of applets, and are of three basic types: virtual versions of physical objects (such as coins and dice), virtual versions of mathematical objects (such as probability distributions and data structures), and custom interface objects (such as special graphs and data tables). The components are used by teachers and students with some programming experience to create new components and applets with relative ease. The probability statistics object library is available on a web site maintained by the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The objects are freely available under the General Public License, so that teachers and students can download the objects, modify them, use them in projects, and redistribute them. A significant part of the project is the construction of an object model that describes the hierarchy of objects and how they relate to each other, and specifies certain basic properties, methods, and exception handling for the objects. The object model helps ensure that the objects in the library are carefully documented, that they work well with a variety of platforms and browsers, and they have a consistent user interface. There are two levels of evaluation for the library. A top-level board will function like an editorial board, particularly in the design of the object model. A larger, less formal group of peer reviewers evaluates the objects in the library in terms of performance and pedagogical value. Special efforts are made to link the library to nationally known sites, particularly those that function as larger virtual libraries or mathematical portals. An ongoing evaluation and dissemination program is fully integrated into the project doc6926 none Physics (13) The LivePhoto Physics project is developing a collection of digital video analysis materials for introductory physics courses, using research-based development methods that were refined through projects such as Tools for Scientific Thinking and Workshop Physics. These materials include videos, lecture demonstration sequences, homework assignments, instructor notes, and software. In digital video analysis, students use computers as laboratory instruments to make measurements on video images of real events. These techniques are being used increasingly in physics courses, and there is evidence that they are effective in teaching physics concepts. In spite of the wealth of mass-media and educational videos available that can be used in laboratories or student projects, very few existing videos are ideal for analysis by students. The LivePhoto Physics project is meeting this need by producing a collection of digital videos that span many of the topics covered in a one-year physics course, including videos made with high- speed slow-motion equipment that is not available at most teaching facilities. An innovative aspect of the project is that the topic selection is being guided by the results of physics education research. Written curricular materials using the videos in Interactive Lecture Demonstrations, distance-learning exercises and extended homework problem sets are being produced and classroom tested in a three-year research-based development cycle. Field testing is taking place at two-year colleges and four-year colleges universities with diverse student audiences. Computer software that extends the display and visualization capabilities of digital video analysis is being developed during the project. The final set of videos, curricular materials and software will be published in the form of a CD. The LivePhoto Physics project is addressing the need for faculty development and the integration of technology in education by sponsoring six workshops on the use of digital video analysis in physics teaching doc6927 none Multidisciplinary (99) Although the National Science Education Standards recommend that science instruction should be universally accessible, individuals with disabilities are seriously under-represented in science and have poor scientific literacy due to inadequate preparation accommodations at all educational levels. This project aims to address the needs of persons with disabilities for adequate education in the sciences through faculty development, better preparation of pre-service teachers, and adaptive technology. The current effort is an expansion of a project previously funded by NSF that pilot-tested the concept and focused on biology. This project, Creating Laboratory Access for Science Students (the CLASS Project), which was titled Making biology laboratories effective learning environments for students with disabilities: a national model for undergraduate instructors and grades 7-12 school teachers, is a collaboration at Wright State University (WSU) between the Department of Biological Sciences (College of Science) and the Teacher Education Department (College of Education) and the Office of Disability Services (ODS, Student Services). WSU was constructed in to be architecturally barrier free and has gained a national reputation for curricular programming for students with disabilities. The CLASS project has developed five disseminable products: (i) a Sourcebook (printed and electronic) to assist science teachers in designing and implementing universally accessible lab and field exercises, (ii) an accessible and interactive website (http: biology.wright.edu labgrant index.html) where workshop applications can be completed on line and where prior workshop participants can discuss issues or access the PowerPoint presentation, (iii) human resource development for educators via a two week residential workshop at WSU where they acquire necessary skills, (iv) human resource development for high school students with severe disabilities via a one week residential science camp where they work one-on-one with educator participants in experiential science activities, and (v) published scholarly articles and presentations at professional meetings. The CLASS project is now extending these proven educational materials and strategies across all natural and physical sciences, helping to systemically reform the science education of students with disabilities. Objectives of the project are: 1. To develop a broader external audience. This is being accomplished through production of media as follows: (a) a Leadership Series of 5-minute discussion-generating videos that will be used at national and regional professional meetings of educators (college university science faculty and educators in science and math) to train cadres of educators (300 per year) in dealing with disability issues in their laboratories through problem based learning (b) a Tutorial Series of short videoclips in analog and electronic (QuickTime) format that will be available on the web for use in pre-service teacher training (regular classroom and distance learning) as well as by individuals working at their computers (potentially impacting over educators per year) and (c) a promotional video for the CLASS summer residential workshop for recruitment purposes. Expanded website capabilities support these initiatives, including a bulletin board with topical forums. 2. To develop more comprehensive programs on site. The scope of the residential CLASS summer workshop at WSU is being broadened to include other natural and physical sciences and mathematics. 3. To become a model for excellence in accessible science education. This is being accomplished through integration of CLASS goals and disseminable products into the science education curriculum at WSU (pre-service teachers; pedagogy and content courses). Through interdisciplinary approaches (broadly encompassing lab field issues common to basic physical, natural and mathematical sciences) aimed at targeting multiple levels in the educational pipeline (college and university faculty, training of pre-service teachers) the CLASS project aims to significantly increase access to laboratory science education of students with disabilities doc6928 none Engineering - Other (59) This is a proof-of-concept project which is demonstrating the feasibility of using the Web to deliver next-generation, inquiry-based, active learning educational resources for biofilm engineering and science. A prototype hypertextbook blending standard text, graphics, interactive animations of key concepts, voice, and sound into a seamless whole is being developed and formally evaluated. Standard Web-site creation technologies is being applied to ensure that the prototype can be used with any of the usual Web browsers on all platforms, making it accessible to anyone in the world without the need to purchase special software or hardware. The prototype will serve as a general model for the development of hypertextbooks, inspiring the creation of similar resources in other engineering and science disciplines. Such hypertextbooks will be made available on CD-ROM or DVD media, obviating the need for excessive download time over the Internet. Biofilm engineering and science has been the subject of intense research efforts by a growing number of professionals over the past decade, led by the NSF-supported Engineering Research Center at Montana State University. Biofilms are of great concern to many industries, as the cost of dealing with them involves billions of dollars each year. Yet educational opportunities in biofims are currently nonexistent. The Center (now called the Center for Biofilm Engineering, or CBE) is beginning a focus on education in parallel with its continuing mission of biofilm research. Web-based educational tools-represented by the prototype of this project-will allow students in traditional settings to learn better and at their own paces, will support distance or self-taught learners, and will allow institutions with no resident experts in the subjects to provide the opportunity to learn important, new concepts doc6929 none Physics (13) A new, innovative physics course, The Science of Information Technology (ScIT). ScIT has been developed and piloted in the studio format in Rensselaer s physics department. ScIT is unusual because (a) it is an upper-level physics course with no prerequisites, (b) it is topically-based, combining discussions of fundamental physical principles with information system applications that interest students, (c) it brings world-class researchers with several different specialties into a classroom of non-majors to talk about the current state of research, and (d) it attracts students from diverse concentrations, with performance in the course essentially independent of physics background. The course does not have a suitable textbook, and supporting materials must be either newly created or drawn from a variety of non-traditional sources. This project supports for the creation, refinement, testing, and national distribution of materials for the course, such as text, multimedia guest lectures, and appropriate in-class activities. The Science of Information Technology covers several topics, such as atomic structure, fiber optics, semiconductor properties, and quantum physics, that are not covered in most traditional introductory courses yet are crucial to the working of information systems used daily by students. Furthermore, the course covers these topics without requiring advanced calculus or prior physics experience from the students, making the course accessible and attractive to the entire student body, as an elective should be. The contributed guest lectures by prominent researchers gives the students insight into the obstacles facing further development and some possible ways to overcome those challenges. This combination of features give ScIT the potential to increase the level of scientific literacy among the rapidly growing population of information technology consumers and users, fostering a greater appreciation for science in general, and physics in particular. A variety of materials are being developed. These include (a) a textbook, which will provide a measure of uniformity to the course; (b) illustrations of the concepts covered within the course, best done with animated graphics, such as Java applets or Shockwave presentations; (c) interactive inquiry-based activities. Existing activities are being refined, and all activities are being evaluated for learning, relevance, and soundness. In addition, guest lectures by researchers are being videotaped, digitized, and integrated into the course materials. Activities and lessons are also being used in and tested for the enrichment of K-12 teachers. Once the course materials have been fully developed and evaluated by respected experts in the relevant fields, they will be distributed nationally through a publisher and an on-line distributor like WebCT. In this way, ScIT is being developed from a pilot offering of a novel science elective to a well-organized, pedagogically-sound learning experience bringing both technology and cutting-edge research into the classroom of non-science majors doc6930 none Mathematical Sciences (21) The project is providing for a large-scale, multi-stage effort to redesign the entire quantitative curriculum based on the existence of CAS (Computer Algebra Systems) technology. There is adaptation of materials from several texts including Mathematics in Action, Functioning in a Real World, and Interactive Differential Equations. Educational technology is being incorporated into every course. The project stages include: The development of appropriate materials to implement a detailed and comprehensive plan that has already been developed and agreed to by all the faculty for full integration of CAS technology into all appropriate courses in mathematics and related courses in the sciences and technology. The direct use of CAS is being incorporated into all courses at the calculus and higher levels. All courses below calculus (including developmental mathematics, algebra and precalculus, as well as all related courses in the sciences and technology) are being completely redesigned to reflect the existence of CAS and its use in the higher courses. A faculty development and training program, especially for part-time faculty, to prepare for the mplementation. The actual implementation, evaluation, and several stages of revision of the new curriculum. Full scale evaluation of the project. Development of a project web site. A variety of regional and national dissemination activities to acquaint the various professional communities with the results of such an extensive rethinking of the entire curriculum doc6931 none Oceanography (43) It is rare for courses in fluid dynamics to be remembered as defining educational experiences in large part, we believe, because laboratory experimentation and demonstration seldom play a central role. In recent years we have been developing laboratory-based courses at MIT in which artfully chosen experiments based on research classics demonstrate principles of rotating fluid mechanics, cultivate physical intuition and nurture and develop experimental skills. Students and faculty have found it a very rewarding experience. This project is developing a) a prototype undergraduate laboratory course for use in teaching of rotating fluid dynamics, b) non-invasive methods to obtain quantitative measurements from experiments, and c) a laboratory guide to help faculty and students at other schools learn fluid mechanics in a laboratory-based setting. The undergraduate course, which is now recognized by MIT as an Institute Laboratory , provides the context in which, we are developing and evaluating the experiments and teaching methods. Our target audience is sophomores, juniors and seniors majoring in earth science or environmental engineering. But a wide range of students from other science or engineering disciplines are also benefiting doc6932 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This project is producing a video-based, team oriented set of activities designed to provide skills for students taking their first college level mathematics course, thus enhancing their chances of succeeding in the course as well as improving their learning in the course. The basis for this project is that students must be actively involved in teaching themselves, and therefore require training to more effectively do so. The Excellence Through Mathematics Communication and Collaboration project is providing such training. Students are assigned to Focus Teams of 4 students who are given a set of 10 projects to be completed outside of normal class time involving the soft skills of learning mathematics such as note-taking skills, homework techniques, test preparation skills, and other basic mathematical skills (i.e., organization, logic, notation, and the ability to communicate mathematics verbally.) Each project is a self-contained unit. Projects are being presented on videotape and include written instructions, team exercises, and reports to turn in. Students are held accountable for attendance and participation. Outcomes from the project include (a) a set of 10 video-based projects along with written instructions, worksheets, and web components; (b) a guidebook with detailed instructions for faculty; (c) a pilot test of the project; (d) an evaluation assessment plan for effectiveness of the project and a report of the results; and (e) dissemination of the project to the professional community doc6933 none Computer Science (31) This project produces curricular materials for a course in event driven programming. The materials include two standard course modules and two case studies. These are pilot tested at the developing institution and at a number of other institutions over a two year period. A prospectus is developed for a textbook that treats event driven programming from a computer science perspective and helps to provide computer science graduates with a better understanding of the event driven paradigm and its application. Event driven programming is becoming a significant factor in the design of new information and industrial systems and in integrating legacy systems with interactive technologies. Future graduates of computer science programs need to have a strong technical and conceptual background in event driven programming, and computer science faculty need to be able to teach these techniques and concepts effectively. The project includes professional development for computer science faculty, through tutorials at national and international conferences and through dissemination on the Web, to gain familiarity with event driven programming and its importance in the CS curriculum doc6934 none Physics (13) The problem-based learning (PBL) program initiated at the University for reforming undergraduate science teaching is being expanded beyond the University by the development of instructional models and materials made accessible to faculty worldwide through an online clearinghouse. The project is developing a database of problems, instructional models, evaluation tools, and web-based resources that effectively incorporate PBL across the content framework of introductory undergraduate physics courses. Materials are being collected and reviewed for a wide variety of introductory physics courses, for both science majors and non-science majors, across all levels of instruction and class enrollment. In addition to collecting existing problems and material, teh project is implementing problem-writing workshops as an important element in developing the collection of PBL materials needed to cover the different curricula of physics at the college level. Selected clearinghouse problems will also be adapted to the high school setting doc6935 none Engineering - Other (59) In this project, we are refining, expanding, and rigorously assessing an existing interactive, multi-media, self-paced computer-based learning prototype for introductory engineering thermodynamics. The prototype includes all topics in a typical introductory engineering thermodynamics course and incorporates several active learning techniques such as laboratory simulations, exposure to thermodynamic equipment, animation of concepts, instantaneous feedback, positive reinforcement, and others. In order to improve the instructors understanding of student learning, we are adding electronic data gathering to the prototype. These data measure usage patterns (e.g., time on task, distribution of study time, and frequency of screen visits) and user performance (e.g., grades on internal mini-examinations, in-class examinations, and instructor evaluation of students). Student perceptions (e.g., questionnaires and student interviews) are also being assessed. These results are analyzed to refine and improve the existing prototype, and to identify those active learning techniques that work best in the computer-based-instruction (CBI) mode doc6936 none Computer Science (31) The database course is a standard offering within computer science programs, yet the material remains inaccessible to many students because concrete examples and illustrations are too often lacking. The flat format of a paper text is not optimal for providing such materials. Therefore we are creating courseware for the database course that includes both animations and other materials to assist student learning of data modeling, SQL, query optimization and transaction processing. Students will be able to follow query processing through these animations rather than relying on theoretical abstractions. These materials will be valuable irrespective of the text chosen for a particular course. The materials will be evaluated at several different sites in order to judge their value and to optimize them doc6937 none Chemistry (12) A consortium consisting of institutions including Georgia State University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Georgia, Emory University, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Williams College, James Madison University, Millersville University, the University of California at Riverside, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Utah State University, and Washington State University is offering five-day intensive workshops in the following areas: Chemical Education, Chemistry of Art, Chemometrics, Combinatorial Chemistry, Computational Chemistry, Environmental Chemistry, Forensic Science, Laser Technology, Metals in Biology, Molecular Genetics, Multidimensional Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Organometallic Chemistry, Phototchemistry, and Polymer Chemistry. These workshops include extensive hands-on experience for the participants. Materials that can be readily incorporated into participant instructional activities are being provided. The target audience for these activities is primarily faculty from undergraduate institutions, plus conservators and forensic, biomedical and public health scientists with significant educational responsibilities. The goals of the workshop program include: (1) augmentation and upgrading of participants knowledge in selected areas; (2) the integration of chemistry and biochemistry into other fields; (3) exposure of participants to new or emerging scientific fields derived from current research activity; and (4) development of new approaches for the implementation of workshop materials into the vocational mission of the participants. The program consists of twelve yearly workshops and two annual reunions over a three-year period. Approximately 850 participants will be served by the program; a total of 3,600 participant-days of instruction will be generated. Some workshops are being scheduled in conjunction with national or regional American Chemical Society meetings. A key goal is the rotation of those workshops that are mobile among the consortium sites in order to serve a geographically dispersed pool of participants doc6938 none Psychology - Cognitive (73) The realm of the mind is mental process: thinking is not an object, but an intricate activity carried out by the brain. Traditional educational forums (classroom lectures, books) cannot readily depict the dynamic and reactive character of human thought; instead, they merely describe these processes. An alternative approach is to use computer-mediated educational materials that enable students to experience human thought processes. In previous work, sponsored by NSF, we created some educational units for an interactive website known as epsych. Epsych provides students with interactive demonstrations, experiments, and models designed to reveal our current understanding of the dynamics of thinking. Previous units include vision, hearing, decision-making, and learning. Now we are extending this site by adding units on language, problem-solving, brain and mind, consciousness, social processes, memory, and comparative psychology. These units incorporate a number of modules, each of which includes Java programs that allow students to conduct experiments, interact with psychological models, and experience demonstrations about psychological processes. From these experiences, students acquire a better understanding about how human thinking works, as well as a better appreciation for the role of experimentation in illuminating psychological processes. Several aspects of the site make it both user-friendly and learner-friendly. The site incorporates a number of indexes that allow for fast access to individual demonstrations, experiments, simulations, and units. A consistent look-and-feel across the site also facilitates user interaction. To sustain student motivation, the site challenges students with puzzles, allows them to manipulate and control interesting models of thought, and provides information on their own performance vis-a-vis other students. National dissemination is currently being performed via the World Wide Web. Instructors nationwide have access to a mailing list that shares new developments, bug reports, comments, and invitations to participate in beta testing of new modules or provide comments about modules under developments. To provide long-term support, we are seeking contacts with publishers as a way to transition the site to commercial support. The site is compatible with CD-ROM publication or with a password-protected web site doc6939 none Biological Sciences (61) The Virtual Biochemistry Laboratory is a comprehensive, fully interactive, three-dimensional laboratory course (on CD-ROM) in biological chemistry for college undergraduate students. This virtual laboratory provides the opportunity for students to conduct virtual experiments, thus it acquaints students with laboratory techniques and procedures enabling them to perform the same or similar experiments in an actual laboratory. Secondary benefits include precautionary training in the handling of dangerous and or expensive reagents. More than this, however, the virtual laboratory offers a warehouse of parts within which students can work independently to explore essential questions about biological systems and seek answers to these questions by means of experiments they design and conduct. The Virtual Biochemistry Laboratory uses the programming language Java, including Java 3D and JavaBeans and is based on the component model of software design. The design of the Virtual Laboratory provides total independence to the student user for the planning and execution of experiments and the analysis of the resulting data. The software is sufficiently general that it can be adaptable to any typical biochemistry laboratory experiment. This generality and flexibility permits students to ask essential questions about biological systems, to define subsidiary questions that elaborate on the essential questions, and then to use the warehouse of parts in the virtual laboratory to design experiments that will provide answers to those questions. In this way, under guidance from the instructor and via collaboration with peers, students learn to problem-solve, not only via the application of the scientific method, but also via the processes of self-reflection, trial and error, and the construction of a body of knowledge that emerges as students link practice and theory while integrating lectures, labs and readings in the process of doing virtual experiments doc6940 none Biological Sciences (61) The Electronic Biochemistry e-book is a fully interactive, digital resource that transcends the limitations of the two-dimensional printed page and demonstrates the natural richness of the biochemical world in the three dimensions of space and the fourth of time. Through this project, interactive learning modules are being developed and tested and learning environments are being created that prompt students attention. The e-book utilizes three software technologies including Chime, a molecular modeling plugin; Java, an object-oriented programming language; and Flash, software that creates animations in the HTML environment using streaming vector graphics. The e-book is compatible with PC and Apple Macintosh computers. The investigators are also developing, in partnership with publishers, software developers and industry liaisons, a standard computing tablet e-book reader platform of sufficient power and features to facilitate better e-book delivery for this and other textbooks. The Electronic Biochemistry e-book is not the result of a simple transfer of text and figures from a paper textbook to an electronic format, with the addition of molecular modeling, Java applets, and animations. Rather, it is a rich and extensive biochemistry sandbox , in which students can play, learn, imagine, problem-solve, and create, with few limits doc6941 none Geography (88) This is a 5-year project of workshops and seminars supporting a long-term, broad-based improvement in the learning and teaching of geography in higher education. This is being accomplished by providing junior faculty and advanced doctoral students with the theoretical and practical knowledge needed to excel in the lecture hall, seminar room, and laboratory. Participants are learning methods of active pedagogy, inquiry-based learning, teaching with technology, and topics often overlooked in today s graduate curriculum -- course planning, student assessment, discussion leadership, lecturing skills, field study, and evaluation methodologies. Key objectives of the project are to foster a culture of support and success for young faculty, to help them understand the fundamental interconnections between their teaching and research, and to advance the scholarship of teaching and learning across the entire discipline. To this end, the workshops are being led by some of geography s most accomplished scientists, scholars and teachers. These senior scientists, who also comprise the project s advisory board, are also assisting in establishing a mentoring network for participants in the project. To reach these goals, two workshops of one week duration are being held each summer for five years ( - ), with each workshop enrolling twenty participants. In addition, follow-up seminars, panel discussions, and paper sessions are being scheduled at the annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers and the National Council for Geographic Education to broaden the impact of the project, both to other faculty and institutions, and to K-12 teachers. A longitudinal evaluation research component is assessing the value of this training to young faculty, particularly during the tenure review process. A final component involves publishing the workshop materials as a stand-alone course for use in graduate geography programs doc6942 none Interdisciplinary (99) The Rice Virtual Lab in Statistics (RVLS) is an integrated collection of simulations, case studies, routines for data analysis, and explanatory text and is designed to implement reforms in statistics education that were proposed in the early s. These reforms include (a) placing less emphasis on mathematics and more emphasis on data analysis, (b) developing simulations to make abstract concepts more concrete and to allow students to discover important principles themselves, (c) increasing the use of real data, and (d) including hands-on activities or active learning tasks (learning by doing). Measured by its use over the internet, the RVLS has been successful in providing resources for classroom instructors. Its major limitation, however, is that it does not provide a complete and autonomous curriculum. Specifically, it does not contain stand alone teaching modules that allow students to learn autonomously without the guidance of the formal classroom setting. To remedy this, we developed an on-line multimedia textbook in statistics, incorporating and extending the materials in the RVLS. The textbook consists of modules that integrate lecture segments, simulations, self-testing exercises, and real data from case studies. Its lectures are available as audio overlays of blackboard presentations (in addition to a pure text option). Students performances on exercises at the end of each chapter are recorded (optionally) as evidence of mastery of particular topics. The textbook is freely available on the internet. The project embodies a collaborative effort between Rice University and the University of Houston-Downtown Campus. This collaboration ensures that the materials are appropriate for students with varying degrees of mathematical background. It also serves to broaden the participation of under-represented groups since the University of Houston-Downtown Campus serves primarily minority students doc6943 none H. Dwyner, U of Cal Davis This project consists of a set of experimental and numerical modeling studies of multicomponent arrays of droplets. Alkane fuels containing ethanol additive are studied. The addition of ethanol introduces processes not present in undoped alkane fuels, and these are the focus of the study. They include nonideal liquid effects in the droplet, Marangoni forces along the droplet surface, preferential diffusion of the additive into the gas phase, and real-gas influences on thermodynamic properties. The study includes isolated droplets, droplets in arrays and groups, and interactions of droplets with hot and cold walls. The results are relevant to the use of fossil fuels in fuel-injected engines and the control of pollutants doc6944 none Sork Fragmentation and population declines jeopardize the survival of many species. Excessive reproductive isolation can cause a loss of valuable alleles, decrease genetic variation, induce inbreeding depression, reduce demographic fitness, and lead to reproductive failure. When tree populations are reduced to scattered and clustered individuals, pollen movement is critical to connectivity. This project develops a novel approach that can cover landscape-scale areas and can be integrated into spatially explicit simulation modeling of landscape changes. These new tools are deployed to investigate a threatened tree species, California Valley oak (Quercus lobata). Using allozyme and microsatellite genotypes, the investigators examine three objectives: (1) They will characterize reproductive isolation of individual trees in landscapes with variable conspecific density. (2) They will examine the impact of adult genetic structure and temporal heterogeneity of pollen pools on estimates of pollen movement. (3) They will incorporate estimated parameters into geographic models to simulate the impact of historical and future population decline. This project represents an excellent case study of the evolutionary dynamics of gene flow and its landscape scale conservation restoration consequences. It will be applied to a critical California tree species experiencing habitat loss and degradation from residential and agricultural development, a situation in need of information for future management and policy decisions. This research will dovetail issues from evolutionary biology, conservation biology, geography, and public policy of the threatened species doc6945 none Despite a widespread belief that low phosphorus (P) availability is a strong constraint on ecosystem dynamics in many tropical forests, direct tests of this belief are rare, and understanding of tropical forest biogeochemistry remains relatively poor. To test this assumption, a phosphorus fertilization experiment will be conducted in lowland moist tropical rainforests located on extremely old soils in southwest Costa Rica. Preliminary work has shown that P availability is poor in these systems, and that low P availability appears to limit the activity of soil microorganisms. This research will follow up on these preliminary data through the use of long-term P fertilization plots which span gradients in soil age and which include at least 3 different dominant canopy trees in these forests. Each individual plot will contain a mature canopy tree at its center, and the trees will contain permanent climbing ropes to provide access to live canopy leaves. In addition to the effects of fertilization on canopy chemistry, the research will monitor processes within the soil and on the forest floor, including soil respiration, litter decomposition, analyses of microbial function and composition, and a suite of soil biogeochemical analyses. This work will advance understanding of how P availability regulates ecosystem processes in lowland tropical forests, with an emphasis on the poorly understood microbial communities. In addition, the investigators seek to maintain these fertilization plots for the long term, and to facilitate collaboration from other scientists interested in using them doc6946 none P.I. William Detrich As the Southern Ocean cooled during the past 25 million years, the fishes of Antarctic coastal waters evolved biochemical and physiological adaptations that maintain essential cellular processes such as cytoskeletal function and gene transcription. Their microtubules, for example, assemble and function at body temperatures (-1.8 to +1 oC) well below those of homeotherms and temperate poikilotherms. The long range goals of the proposed research are to determine, at the molecular level, the adaptations that enhance the assembly of microtubules, the function of kinesin motors, and the expression of globin and tubulin genes. The specific objectives are three: 1) to determine the primary sequence changes and posttranslational modifications that contribute to the efficient polymerization of Antarctic fish tubulins at low temperatures; 2) to evaluate the biochemical adaptations required for efficient function of the brain kinesin motor of Antarctic fishes at low temperatures; and 3) to characterize the structure, organization, and promoter-driven expression of globin and tubulin genes from an Antarctic rockcod (Notothenia coriiceps) and a temperate congener (N. angustata). Brain tubulins from Antarctic fishes differ from those of temperate and warm-blooded vertebrates both in unusual primary sequence substitutions (located primarily in lateral loops and the cores of tubulin monomers) and in posttranslational C-terminal glutamylation. Potential primary sequence adaptations of the Antarctic fish tubulins will be tested directly by production of wild-type and site directed tubulin mutants for functional analysis in vitro. The capacity of mutated and wild-type fish tubulins to form cold-stable microtubules will be determined by measurement of their critical concentrations for assembly and by analysis of their dynamics by video-enhanced microscopy. Three unusual substitutions in the kinesin motor domain of Chionodraco rastrospinosus may enhance mechanochemical activity at low temperature by modifying the binding of ATP and or the velocity of the motor. To test the functional significance of these changes, the fish residues will be converted individually, and in concert, to those found in mammalian brain kinesin. Reciprocal substitutions will be introduced into the framework of the mammalian kinesin motor domain. After production in Escherichia coli and purification, the functional performance of the mutant motor domains will be evaluated by measurement of the temperature dependence of their ATPase and motility activities. Molecular adaptation of gene expression in N. coriiceps will be analyzed using an a-globin b-globin gene pair and an a-tubulin gene cluster. Structural features of N. coriiceps globin and tubulin gene regulatory sequences (promoters and enhancers) that support efficient expression will be assessed by transient transfection assay of promoter luciferase reporter plasmid constructs in inducible erythrocytic and neuronal model cell systems followed by assay of luciferase reporter activity. Together, these studies should reveal the molecular adaptations of Antarctic fishes that maintain efficient cytoskeletal assembly, mechanochemical motor function, and gene expression at low temperatures. In the broadest sense, this research program should advance the molecular understanding of the poikilothermic mode of life doc6947 none Downie Dr. Stephen Downie of the University of Illinois will lead an international collaborative effort to study the evolution and classification of the Apiaceae (carrot family) tribe Oenantheae, a group of plants not recognized in any traditional classification of the family but clearly showing close relationship among themselves from DNA sequence comparisons. Many of these plants have tuberous roots, spongy thickened fruits, and often highly simplified leaves in association with their semi-aquatic growth. Some are economically and ecologically important, including the genus Cicuta, water hemlock, reputedly the source of the poison used by Socrates. The overall goal of the project is to produce a comprehensive phylogenetic tree for all 120 or so species in the group, using new DNA sequence data and traditional fruit anatomical and morphological characters. Molecular data will be obtained from the nuclear ribosomal DNA internal transcribed spacer region and from five chloroplast introns, the latter not yet fully exploited for their ability to help resolve genealogical relationships. In collaboration with specialists Krzysztof Spalik in Poland and Mark Watson in Scotland, and with colleague James Affolter at University of Georgia, detailed anatomical and morphological investigations will be made of fruit and leaf structures, to assess features reliable for classification and to chart likely trends of evolutionary change in association with the plants adaptation to aquatic habitats. Tribe Oenantheae contains many edible, medicinal, or highly toxic members, exhibits a complex and diverse natural-products chemistry, includes three species that are federally listed as endangered, and can serve as a model system for the study of plant-insect interactions. A phylogenetic framework for the group will serve further studies of phenotypic character evolution, ecological associations, conservation biology, and historical biogeography. The results will also provide an independent evaluation of the utility of traditional taxonomic characters of fruit and seed in the family, long considered of importance in classification doc6948 none J. Wernegreen Dr. Jennifer Wernegreen of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, MA, has been awarded a grant to study unique features of the genomes of bacteria that live permanently in the tissues of certain insects. Bacterial species show a wide variation in rates and patterns of DNA sequence evolution in their genomes, but few comparative studies have explored the mechanisms that produce this variation. Distinct patterns of molecular evolution may result from mechanisms related to changes in habitat, genes present in the genome, and or other natural genetic processes. The objective of this project is to distinguish how these different mechanisms contribute to how and why genomes evolve in the ways that they do. This project focuses on Candidatus, a bacterial symbiont of carpenter ants, and Buchnera, a bacterial symbiont of aphids, as model systems to explore the molecular evolutionary consequences of this unusual lifestyle. These obligate bacterial symbionts are closely related to free-living bacterial species such as Escherichia coli. Wernegreen s lab group will sequence several protein coding genes from multiple, diverse lineages of Candidatus, Buchnera, and E. coli to compare patterns of molecular evolution in each group. This will permit them to test for different phenomena that might be responsible for evolutionary changes in the genomes of Candidatus and Buchnera. Analyses will include contrasting the symbionts and E. coli with regard to rates and patterns of protein and DNA sequence evolution. The results of this project will provide a framework to understand the vast diversity of evolutionary rates, compositions and architectures of bacterial genomes doc6949 none Kilper This three-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research involves Daniel C. Kilper, University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Guy M. Stephan and Pascal Besnard at the Ecole Nationale Superieue de Sciences Appliquees et de Technology in Lannion, France. The objectives of this collaboration are to develop disk and ring optical microcavities and to combine common research on theory and application of microsphere resonators. Experiments and calculations will be conducted. The collaboration takes advantage of complementary expertise and facilities. The US investigator brings to this collaboration expertise in quantum optics, laser noise, and use of passive microcavities for laser frequency stabilization. This is complemented by French expertise in microsphere lasers, microcavity fabrication techniques, and semiclassical laser theory. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator and graduate student. The CNRS will support the visits of French researchers to the United States. The collaboration will advance fundamental understanding of microcavity devices, which have potential for communication, optical sensing and biomedical applications doc6950 none This project focuses on the role that ecological context plays in determining the impact of pesticides on non-target organisms in nature. The overall goal of this proposal is to determine the ecological and evolutionary effects of long-term exposure to a pesticide on amphibians, a group of global conservation concern. The first objective of the research is to examine effects of exposure time on lethality of pesticide exposure. For this preliminary objective, eight species of larval amphibians will be subjected to carbaryl, a common pesticide, for varying lengths of time. The second objective of this study is to determine how the biotic and abiotic ecological environment interacts with pesticide exposure to affect fitness traits. Laboratory studies suggest that changes in pH and the presence of predator cues can make pesticides much more deadly, but it is unknown if these dramatic effects occur under natural conditions. Additionally, the toxicological focus has been on lethal effects with less of a focus on nonlethal effects such as changes in individual traits. However, we know from ecological studies that trait changes can have dramatic effects on how an individual interacts with other species. To achieve the second objective, the investigator will rear larval amphibians in pond mesocosms and examine the interacting impacts of pesticides, pH, and predator cues on individual survival and individual traits. It is predicted that the inclusion of natural differences in ecological conditions will have a substantial impact on the pesticide-induced traits and pesticide-caused mortality. The third objective of this study is to examine the evolution of pesticide resistance in amphibians. There is a vast literature on evolved resistance in many pest species, but investigations of evolved resistance in non-target species are noticeably lacking and studies of evolved resistance in amphibians appear to be nonexistent. To investigate the process of evolved resistance in amphibians, the investigator will take a three-pronged approach that examines differences in resistance among populations that differ in historical pesticide exposure, the heritability of pesticide resistance, and a multi-generation selection experiment to determine if amphibians exposed to pesticides can eventually evolve resistance to pesticides. The expectation is that there is genetic variation in pesticide resistance in natural populations and exposure to pesticides will favor the evolution of resistance in amphibians. Collectively, this research is expected to show that ecological context is critical for understanding the ecological and evolutionary impacts of pesticides in non-target organisms doc6951 none This U.S.-Hungarian research project involving William Zajc of Columbia University and Tamas Csorgo of the Hungarian Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics features collaborative work at the Brookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The goal is to unify experimental and theoretical efforts to discover and characterize quark-gluon plasma (QGP). This pursuit involves the study of several important aspects of relativistic heavy-ion collisions, properties of hadrons in hot and dense matter, and signals of the QGP formation. By building upon Hungarian expertise in measuring zero-degree spectra in heavy ion collisions, this international team intends to define an event characterization method common to four complementary RHIC experiments (BRAHMS, PHENIX, PHOBOS, and STAR). Special attention will be directed toward interpreting complex signatures of quark deconfinement obtained by the PHENIX detector which Zajc heads. If successful, findings should prove the existence of a new state of matter, Quark-Gluon Plasma, with a full characterization of underlying physical phenomena. Results are expected to improve our basic understanding of the early universe and properties of massive stars. This international project in nuclear theory fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the Untied States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc6952 none This research focuses on different kinds of organisms that live in intimate association. Parasitism describes the most familiar pattern, in which a smaller organism lives on or inside a larger organism--the smaller parasite causing some harm to the larger host. Parasitism is just one end of a continuum of associations. In many cases, the larger host requires smaller, beneficial partners such as bacteria in order to digest special types of food or to provide essential nutrients. This theoretical research synthesizes the diverse ways in which organisms live together, identifies unanswered puzzles about how such associations arise and evolve, and proposes models to explain these puzzles in terms of ecological and evolutionary principles. The mathematical and computer models are developed in a way that new laboratory and field studies can be designed to test the ideas and gain further insight into the biology of both parasitic and beneficial associations. This work contributes to understanding why parasites vary in the amount of harm they cause to their hosts. In addition, this research provides a broad conceptual framework for understanding interactions between microbes, such as populations of viruses or bacteria living within a host doc6953 none Terpenoids constitute the largest family of natural products and are extremely diverse in structure and biological function. Most terpenoids are formed by a common core pathway in which an initial cyclization reaction defines the basic structural type and subsequent cytochrome P450-mediated hydroxylation reactions determine the oxygenation pattern(s) of the derived family of metabolites. The oxygenation reactions play primary roles in the diversification to terpenoid end products and it is the oxygenated terpenoids, rather than their hydrocarbon precursors, that most often possess the relevant biological properties. The P450 heme-thiolate enzymes represent a very large class of catalysts important in both biosynthetic and catabolic processes, as well as in detoxification reactions. Eukaryotic forms of these enzymes have proven difficult to characterize, and the physical definition of active site structure has been precluded by a size too large for NMR-based approaches and by the recalcitrance of the solubilized membranous enzymes to yield suitable crystals for X-ray diffraction. A uniquely informative model system, that exploits a set of regio and stereospecific monoterpene hydroxylases from very closely related mint species, has been developed under the prior NSF grant, and these recombinant enzymes provide the foundation for the next phase of the research which involves synthetic, biochemical, molecular, modeling and spectrometric tools to address fundamental questions concerning active site structure-function relationships of this important enzyme class. The objectives of this project are: 1. to develop a functional overexpression system for the wild-type and mutant hydroxylases; 2. to optimize the preparation of the recombinant hydroxylases for spectrometric evaluation; 3. to determine substrate binding geometry at the active sites of the different hydroxylases using spatially defined fluorinated and deuterated substrate analogs and electron-nuclear double resonance (ENDOR) spectrometry; and 4. to employ model-guided mutagenesis, coupled with the use of kinetic probes, to determine the minimum change in active site structure required to alter hydroxylation regio and stereochemistry. Completion of these experimental objectives will test the hypothesis that subtle differences in active site topography underlie alterations in the regiochemistry and stereochemistry of production formation, and will provide a detailed level of structural understanding that has not been possible with other types of P450 enzymes. Additionally, the ability to exploit and redesign these important biosynthetic enzymes will permit their use in green chemistry for difficult synthetic transformations and will provide an unprecedented opportunity to engineer terpene metabolic pathways in plants. The latter has broad implications for the manipulation of economic factors in plant performance, ranging from the generation of novel products, such as pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals and synthetic intermediates, to disease, insect and herbicide resistance doc6954 none Dobson Understanding the diversity of nature and managing our natural heritage require detailed knowledge of the ways in which plant and animal populations interact with their environments. In turn, such interactions depend primarily on characteristics of life histories: patterns of reproduction, survival, and growth. This research examines the evolution of reproduction, specifically the number of offspring born into litters, in a model study species (Columbian ground squirrels of the Rocky Mountains). Experiments that cross-foster different numbers of offspring among mothers will reveal the basic principles of how mothers care for young during the important period of lactation, when young depend on milk. The experiments will reveal how mothers and young grow and survive under conditions of larger and smaller litters, and under conditions of limited and abundant food resources. The results will determine whether, as evolutionary theory predicts, there is an ideal ( optimal ) number of young in litters, either among all mothers or for each individual mother. Also, the long-term success of mothers that exhibit different levels of investment in reproduction and survival will be revealed. From these tests of theory, a better explanation of the evolution of life histories should emerge. In turn, the research will provide us with improved understanding and better management of natural populations doc6955 none Geiser Fungi in the genus Fusarium are extremely important as agents of disease in plants and animals, as producers of toxins that poison food and animal feeds, as creative producers of chemicals with potential pharmaceutical uses, and even as food for human consumption. Despite their importance, identifying fusaria is very difficult, because they offer relatively few morphological characters that are useful for discrimination. This has led to a taxonomic system where extremely diverse sets of evolutionarily distinct lineages (judged on the basis of their inability to mate and form spores) are lumped together. This project by Dr. David Geiser at Pennsylvania State University and his USDA colleague Dr. Gary Samuels focuses on the Fusarium solani species complex, a cosmopolitan group of approximately 50 diverse evolutionary lineages that has most often been considered a single species. These lineages include asexual lineages, lineages that are capable of self-fertilization, and lineages that can only cross-fertilize. Also represented are seven known mating populations, groups of isolates that can potentially interbreed, each of which may represent a distinct evolutionary lineage. This diversity includes groups of isolates that are known to cause a wide variety of diseases of plants and animals. In this project, DNA sequences from four different nuclear genes will be gathered and analyzed, to identify evolutionary lineages based on shared mutations, and the lineages so recognized will be compared with the groups defined by mating compatibility and morphological distinctness. Field work in Asia and South America with foreign colleagues will provide new collections to augment the cultures and laboratory stocks maintained at the Fusarium Stock Center by Dr. Geiser. The result of the work will be a detailed phylogenetic tree for this species complex, which can be used to find taxonomically reliable characters and to predict the likelihood of biologically interesting traits such as asexuality and pathogenicity on different hosts doc6956 none Ford This three-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research in marine environment involves Susan E. Ford and Eric N. Powell of Rutgers University s Haskin Shellfish Research Laboratory, researchers at the Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography at Old Dominion University, and Christine Paillard and her group at the Institut Europeen Universitaire de la Mer. The objectives of their project are (1) to construct a numerical model of a marine disease and (2) to test the modeling techniques developed for protozoan parasites on diseases caused by bacteria, such as Brown Ring Disease of marine clams. The US and French investigators bring to this collaboration complementary expertise in ecology and numerical modeling. The project also takes advantage of a long-term database, developed by the French, on Brown Ring Disease of marine clams, which will be integrated into a new model. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigators. The CNRS will support the visits of French researchers to the United States. The collaboration will advance fundamental understanding of complex interactions among host, parasite and environment. More broadly, it will contribute to understanding the role of short and long-term climate variations on the fluctuation of disease of marine molluscs. Results could be valuable to environmental regulators in both countries doc6957 none Doyle and Brown With his CSIRO-Australia colleague Tony Brown, Jeff Doyle at Cornell University is continuing his highly rated studies on gene markers and genetic consequences of polyploid evolution in the perennial species of soybean, Glycine, related to the cultivated annual G. max. Polyploidy, or whole-chromosome duplication, is common in plants, and especially prevalent among the major crop plants of the world. The 17 named diploid perennial soybeans and their numerous polyploid derivatives are distributed in Australasia and the southeastern Pacific islands, and are extensively represented in the CSIRO soybean germplasm collection. One major goal is to explore in wild species, with genomic tools, ideas about gene silencing and nucleolar dominance formulated from studies on wheat and cabbage polyploids, and to extend such studies to several single- or low-copy nuclear genes, using species complexes where the parent diploids have been identified (and parent tetraploids for hexaploid and octoploid derivatives) and where multiple origins of the same polyploid can be documented with molecular markers from both nuclear and chloroplast genomes. Studies of the fate of duplicated (homoeologous) loci will be pursued through cloning of the PCR products, but the investigators are also exploring use of denaturing chromatographic methods to screen numerous polyploid samples for the presence of novel alleles (heteroduplexes from annealing of alleles that differ in length or sequence separate, producing diagnostic elution profiles). Preliminary data are in hand for a nuclear histone gene (H3-D), for nuclear glutamine synthetase, for cox2 (transposed from the mitochondrion in many legumes), and the ribosomal RNA genes. In collaboration with Julie Vogel at DuPont, with access to DuPont s 200,000 soybean cDNA clones, the investigators also plan to screen for candidate nuclear genes showing silencing (through differential hybridization with diploid and polyploid DNAs), and concentrate on those that function in the chloroplast or mitochondrion (and hence where the paternal homoeologue is thought likely to be silenced doc6958 none By identifying natural selection at the level of DNA sequences, it possible to address questions regarding molecular evolution and to identify genomic regions or sites in the DNA sequence of special functional importance. In this project new statistical methods for identifying and interpreting patterns of selection will be developed. A Bayesian method based on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) will be developed that will provide a more powerful and versatile tool for identifying selection at the level of the DNA sequence. Methods for estimating the age of a mutation, for estimating the distribution of selection coefficients and for detecting correlated evolution in DNA sequences will also be developed The new methods will be applied to several data sets, particularly data sets of viral sequences such as HIV-1 sequences. One of the questions that will be addressed is how often compensatory mutations occur in the evolution of drug resistance in the HIV-1 virus. The new methods will be applicable in many genomic studies, particularly for identifying regions or sites of functional importance doc6959 none Allen This grant supports theoretical research on models which mimic the behavior of real three-dimensional solids. Recent developments in mesoscopic physics have provided powerful new computer algorithms for studying electrical or heat transport in strongly disordered systems. The phenomenon of resistivity saturation will be studied, in order to test the hypothesis that band-mixing effects are involved and cause the excess conduction beyond the naive prediction of Boltzmann transport theory. A series of models will be studied numerically with increasingly complex band structures. An analog problem in lattice heat transport is the thermal conductivity of glasses. A realistic atomistic model for amorphous silicon will be treated using the tools of mesoscopic physics. There are many important oxide materials with the perovskite (ABO3) or related crystal structures, including ferroelectrics, high temperature superconductors, ionic conductor electrolytes, etc. Although most perovskites are insulators, a few are metals, and quite a few have metal-to-insulator transitions as a function of doping or of temperature. The systems Ba1-xKxBiO3 and La1-xCaxMnO3 are particularly nice examples. The pure end-member (x=0) compounds are prototype examples of materials which are insulating because of a broken symmetry in the ground state, namely charge ordering in BaBiO3 , orbital ordering in LaMnO3 . Both systems become interesting metals when the doping level x increases to a critical value 0.2-0.4. Good models exist for the electons which participate in this metal-to-insulator transition. It is proposed to study self-trapped states in these materials. In particular, the opposite end-member (x=1) CaMnO3 , when lightly doped with electrons (x=1-epsilon) will be chosen as a model system for study of the competition between spin-polaron effects and lattice-polaron effects. The lowest electronic excitations of both BaBiO3 and LaMnO3 in this model are self-trapped excitons. These will be studied and their novel optical properties (adsorption spectra, resonant Raman spectra, etc.) will be predicted. When more heavily doped, holes should self-organize into planar anti-phase boundary charged defects (the three-dimensional version of stripes ). These will be studied and the properties predicted. The metal-insulator transition as a function of doping (polaron-glass collapse) will be modeled and carefully characterized. %%% This grant supports theoretical research on the electrical and thermal properties of oxide materials which are of great fundamental interest due to their complex behavior as the temperature and or concentration of additives is changed. These materials exhibit a wealth of effects including ferroelectricity, high temperature superconductivity and ionic conduction which may lead to widespread applications doc6960 none Pigliucci This project aims at studying the evolution of plants responses to two environmental factors, daylength and spectral light quality, using the weedy species Arabidopsis thaliana. The problem is to understand how plants integrate different environmental signals and if they respond appropriately by adjusting their life history to maximize their fitness. Daylength and light quality were chosen because they are important cues the plant uses to assess environmental conditions. Daylength is an indicator of seasonal changes, and can be used by plants to determine the optimal period of flowering during the spring or summer (depending on the latitude). Light quality (measured as the ratio between red and far red light) has been demonstrated to be an indicator of the density of the surrounding vegetation, and presumably the intensity of competition for light. This research will include a field component during which plants will be studied and collected from their natural environment along a latitudinal gradient from southern to northern Europe (the natural habitat for Arabidopsis). A molecular analysis will then be carried out to estimate how closely related the collected populations are to each other. Finally, a series of greenhouse experiments will be conducted to measure how the plants react to different combinations of daylength and light quality. This kind of study is important to understand if and how natural selection can match a plant s appearance and life history to the challenges posed by the environment. Because Arabidopsis has been intensively studied from a molecular perspective, knowledge of its ecology and evolution can be integrated with already published studies to achieve a better comprehension of the biology of the whole organism. Since this plant is also a close relative of economically important species such as broccoli, cauliflower and mustard, the knowledge gained by studying Arabidopsis may have direct applications for crop improvement doc6961 none This U.S.-Argentina dissertation enhancement grant will support Esteban G. Jobbagy, under the direction of Dr. Robert B. Jackson of Duke University, to work with Professor Osvaldo E. Sala at the University of Buenos Aires. The researchers will investigate plant controls on the vertical distribution of soil nutrients using grassland forest ecosystems in South America that have been little impacted by anthropogenic inputs. The research will address four specific hypotheses regarding the role of plants in mediating the accumulation and vertical distribution of belowground resources in terrestrial ecosystems. The research has the potential to answer the question of how plants alter soil nutrient pools and their distribution. This topic is important for terrestrial ecology and biogeochemistry and has relevance for plant community changes associated with altered patterns of land-use and other aspects of global change. In a broader sense this work contributes to understanding how the soils of the world have developed under the separate influences of vegetation and climate doc6962 none Davis Fragmentation and population declines jeopardize the survival of many species. Excessive reproductive isolation can cause a loss of valuable alleles, decrease genetic variation, induce inbreeding depression, reduce demographic fitness, and lead to reproductive failure. When tree populations are reduced to scattered and clustered individuals, pollen movement is critical to connectivity. This project develops a novel approach that can cover landscape-scale areas and can be integrated into spatially explicit simulation modeling of landscape changes. These new tools are deployed to investigate a threatened tree species, California Valley oak (Quercus lobata). Using allozyme and microsatellite genotypes, the investigators examine three objectives: (1) They will characterize reproductive isolation of individual trees in landscapes with variable conspecific density. (2) They will examine the impact of adult genetic structure and temporal heterogeneity of pollen pools on estimates of pollen movement. (3) They will incorporate estimated parameters into geographic models to simulate the impact of historical and future population decline. This project represents an excellent case study of the evolutionary dynamics of gene flow and its landscape scale conservation restoration consequences. It will be applied to a critical California tree species experiencing habitat loss and degradation from residential and agricultural development, a situation in need of information for future management and policy decisions. This research will dovetail issues from evolutionary biology, conservation biology, geography, and public policy of the threatened species doc6963 none B. Khomami, Washington University This is one of two identical proposals submitted by Washington University and Stanford University. A combined experimental and numerical study is proposed to examine the effect of elasticity on the stability of fluid-fluid displacement interfaces-sometimes known as the ribbing instability. Such instabilities limit either the speed or the quality of production of adhesive coatings in industrial processes. This is a collaborative effort between Bamin Khomami of Washington University and Eric Shaqfeh of Stanford University with the numerical part being carried out mainly in the former institution while the experimental part mainly at the latter institution. Preliminary experiments performed by the PI s showed the dramatic onset of such instabilities. It is hypothesized that the instability is caused by the unstable stress gradient created by the extensional finger flow near the displacing front. The research plan is to obtain quantitative experimental data of such instability flows using modern instrumentation, to carry out linear and nonlinear stability analysis of the flows, and full three-dimensional simulations of the unstable elastic fluid interfaces to test the hypothesis. In addition, the possibility of enhancing the stability of the system by introducing time-periodic parametric forcing will be examined by simulations doc6964 none Manson This is award to develop and extend the theory of surface scattering of atoms and small molecules. The thrust of the work in this proposal is toward developing a theory in the semiclassical and classical regime that includes the exchange of energy with the lattice vibrations of the surface, the rotational excitation of the molecule, and the excitation of internal vibrational modes of the molecule. The resulting theory will provide information on scattering, sticking, and desorption of molecular projectiles and will help in understanding the dynamics that lead to elementary chemical reactions on the surface. The focus of this work will be to determine the influence of more realistic interaction potentials in atom scattering and to extend the approach to develop a fully self-consistent theory of molecular scattering with surfaces. Extensive numerical calculations will be performed to compare the theory with experiments. Calculations for specific systems include: state-to-state scattered distributions and sticking coefficients of small molecules like CH4 and C2H2 from LiF(001) surfaces, metal substrates, and adsorbate covered surfaces; heavy rare gases scattering from liquid surfaces with the aim of exploring the ability of such experiments to give information on the surface composition of liquid metal alloy mixtures; photodesorption probabilities of alkali atoms and small molecules such as NO with an aim to extract information on the effects of temperature through lattice vibrations. %%% This is an award involving participation of graduate students and undergraduate students to develop a quantitative theory of atomic and molecular scattering from surfaces. The application of such a theory will enable extraction from experiments, of basic physical information on the interaction of specific atoms and molecules with surfaces, on defects and adsorbates on surfaces, and on the surface itself. This information is potentially useful for a wide variety of applications including the construction and characterization of robust nanoscale structures on surfaces doc6965 none Mayden and Roe Based on the fossil record, the greatest diversity of jawless vertebrates (agnathans) occurred during the upper Silurian and Early and Middle Devonian geological periods, approximately 420 to 380 million years ago. The majority of agnathans became extinct by the end of the Devonian (360 million years ago) with one or more lineages surviving to give rise to modern jawless vertebrates. Lampreys represent one of the two surviving groups of agnathans (hagfishes are the other group). Living lampreys are classified in the order Petromyzontiformes, which includes 40 extant species. The geographic distribution of lampreys is notable in that they are found in both Northern and Southern hemispheres, but are almost entirely absent from tropical regions. It has been hypothesized that this distribution of lampreys is the result of the breakup of the supercontinent Pangea and the post-Pangean continents of Laurasia and Gondwana. In addition to their interesting geographic distribution lampreys are also remarkable for several reasons: 1) they represent a transitional stage between invertebrate chordates and vertebrates that possess jaws, and as such allow the testing of hypotheses concerning the evolution of characters considered to be unique to vertebrates; 2) they possess a complex life history that involves metamorphosis from a sedentary, filter feeding larval form termed an ammocete, to a sexually reproducing adu and 3) they can be divided into two groups based on whether the species are parasitic or non-parasitic. Parasitic lampreys include both anadromous species and those restricted to streams and rivers. Species with non-parasitic life-cycles are similar to those with a parasitic life-cycle except that the adults do not feed. Historically, morphological similarities between parasitic and non-parasitic species have been interpreted as evidence that extant non-parasitic species evolved independently on several occasions from different parasitic species. These hypothesized sibling species have been termed paired species or satellite species. Despite agreement among lamprey researchers as to the validity of the satellite species hypothesis, no explicit phylogenetic analysis has been conducted to support such relationships. Drs. Richard Mayden and Kevin Roe at the University of Alabama are seeking to test these hypothesized relationships, and thereby test one of the most remarkable cases of multiple convergence ever suspected in vertebrates. The study will produce phylogenetic hypotheses for all lamprey species using both morphological and molecular (DNA sequences) data sets. Specific objectives are to test hypotheses concerning (1) the evolutionary origins of the parasitic and non-parasitic life histories, (2) the relationships between the various species and genera and families within Petromyzontiformes, (3) the biogeographic history of Petromyzontiformes with reference to the history of the earth and other taxa having similar distributions, and (4) the proposed relationship between lampreys and jawed vertebrates. The project is international in scope, and includes the collection of specimens on several continents (North America, South America, Europe and Australia), and involves collaboration with three acknowledged experts in lamprey biology and systematics: Drs. I. Potter and H. Gill of Murdoch University, Perth, Australia and Dr. C. Renaud from the Canadian Museum of Nature, Ottawa, Ontario, who have primary responsibility for the collection of additional specimens (important for morphological characters and molecular analyses) and the development of morphological data sets. These data will be combined with the molecular data sets based upon the complete DNA sequences of several mitochondrial genes doc6966 none Whittle This award supports Andrew Whittle and students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a collaboration with Stavros Savidis of the Department of Civil Engineering at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany. The research focus is on new methods of analysis for predicting ground movements caused by excavations. The MIT group has extensive experience in analyzing clay soils of the type present in the Boston area, whereas the German group has expertise modeling sandy soils common in the vicinity of Berlin. Together, the two groups will have the unique opportunity of comparing developments in constitutive modeling and laboratory characterization of different soil types in order to refine and enhance current models. The results of this research will lead to improved tools for mitigating damage to adjacent structures and utilities caused during excavation phases of large building and transportation projects. This joint collaborative research effort also presents junior researchers with the opportunity to work internationally, and the work done on this proposal will help institutionalize the relationship between the German and U.S. research groups doc6967 none Feller This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Steven Feller, Coe College and Professor Sejji Kojima of the University of Tsukuba, Professor Kodama of Sojo University and Professor Tsutomu Mashimo of Kumamoto University. The researchers will be undertaking a study of new insights to borate glasses: structural changes induced under high pressure; and short range and intermediate range order deduced from spectroscopy and properties. The objective of the study is to systematically characterize the physical properties and atomic arrangements in these glass systems. Density, thermal properties, optical transmission, time of flight mass spectroscopy, infrared, Raman, NMR, NQR, and neutron scattering measurements have been performed on glasses to learn about the atomic arrangements present and the quantitative relationships of the physical properties to the structure. The understanding of the novel processing technique (solution chemistry, rapid cooling, and shock compression) on the values of the intrinsic physical properties contributes to revealing the structure of the glass network. This combined with looking at the intermediate range order by spectroscopic observation has a potential of good insight into the glass structure. Undergraduate students in both the U.S. and Japan will be involved in the joint research. The project brings together the efforts of four laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of the research in scientific journals and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc6968 none During the past decade it has become clear that natural selection has major effects on patterns of DNA sequence variation across entire chromosomes of organisms as diverse as Drosophila, mice, humans, and tomato. However, the extent to which the levels and patterns of molecular variation reflect adaptive Darwinian evolution versus purifying selection of deleterious mutations remains a mystery. The studies proposed here will take advantage of the highly structured nature of Drosophila ananassae populations in Southeast Asia to estimate the extent to which limited gene flow, local adaptation, genetic drift, and recombination influence the architecture of the genome. A dense set of molecular markers will be used to scan the genome for genes involved in local adaptation in populations along a latitudinal cline representing different climatic regions in Southeast Asia. Genetic and physical maps will provide a means to examine the effect of natural selection across broad expanses of the genome. Studies will also be performed to examine the patterns of polymorphism at genes in population samples of D. ananassae from the ancestral range of the species to estimate the geographic boundaries of natural selection on DNA sequence variation. These studies explore the fundamental mechanisms shaping genome variation and diversity in structured Drosophila populations, providing insight into the processes responsible for molding genome diversity in other organisms with structured populations such as humans. The research involves international collaborations between the United States and Germany, and training opportunities for undergraduate students doc6969 none William Murdoch A central objective of contemporary ecology is to understand the highly complex interactions between plants, plant-feeding insects, and their natural enemies. These direct and indirect interactions have profound impacts on natural and managed populations and communities. William Murdoch and his colleagues at the University of California-Santa Barbara are conducting long-term investigations to understand how parasitic wasps maintain populations of citrus-feeding California red scale insects at low population densities. Understanding how this biological population control occurred so quickly, while remaining stabile, is the primary objective of the project. Several hypotheses will be tested empirically, such as a corresponding increase in parasitism rates, and parasitoid interference, as scale densities rise. This research is considered by many ecologists to be one of the best studies of insect population dynamics and biological control. The project has strong theoretical and empirical components and blends modeling with hypothesis testing at multiple temporal and spatial scales. Although this work is focused on a specific plant-insect-enemy model, the principles underlying the ecological interactions and population dynamics are broadly relevant for other natural and agricultural systems. This basic ecological research has direct applications for agronomy, as well as the quality of human life. Knowledge gained from this project can help reduce pesticide use and establish more environmentally friendly methods of controlling major crop and orchard pests doc6970 none Daniel Hare Individual plants within populations vary widely in their ability to resist attack by herbivores. Understanding this variation, and how different resistance traits evolve and coexist, is a major focus of contemporary ecology. Because resistance traits are costly to maintain, the strength of selection for resistant and susceptible phenotypes can vary with herbivore intensity, and or other forces such as environmental conditions or competitive interactions. Furthermore, some resistance traits may be genetically linked with plant life-history traits that increase fitness, resulting in the conservation of resistance traits even when herbivores are absent. This empirical study will use field experiments to discern the indirect and direct costs and benefits of trichome polymorphism in Datura wrightii. The study has three primary objectives. Objective one and two will use greenhouse experiments to 1) evaluate the impact of herbivory on plants with and without the resistant traits, and 2) assess competitive interactions between plant phenotypes in the presence and absence of herbivores. The third objective will use field observations to determine the extent of herbivory, the identity of herbivores, and their fitness consequences in natural Datura populations. This work uses the Datura model, but the underlying principles are applicable for diverse insect-plant interactions and have relevance for both basic and applied science doc6971 none Hovy, Eduard University of Southern California Digital Government: dg.o Workshop and Publicity This grant will support a series of three annual workshops for the grantees of the Digital Government Program, their Federal government research partners, and other interested parties (local, tribal, state government representatives, the press, industry). The purpose of the workshops are for grantees to share their most current research findings, for agencies to contribute their problems and mission interests, and to begin to form a community for those interested in information technology research and development related to government information services doc6972 none Columbia University The goal of the proposed research is to investigate the formation of surfactant aggregates in mixed systems and particularly the dynamics involved. As the experimental system is complex the strategy involves use of multi-pronged approach, combining several techniques such as ultra-filtration, analytical, centrifuge, micro-calorimetry and AFM, with advanced spectroscopic techniques including Surface Plasmon Resonance Spectroscopy, fluorescence and ESR. The goal is to determine the relationship between structures of surfactants and their properties as determined by the shape, composition and structure of mixed micelles and hemimicelles. Based on these results a recent theoretical model will be refined to enable prediction of the formation of surfactant aggregates in their mixtures and changes in them. Surfactants to be studied in this proposal will include environmentally benign sugar-based and pyrrolidone-type surfactants. The investigators have seen that these surfactants do show unusual selectivity in their adsorption on solids, but the reasons for the selectivity are not known. Similarly, another important example is the synergy observed between the thiol surfactants in flotation, which is not well understood. Study of their synergy will be a collaborative effort between us and the University of Cape Town, South Africa group which has been studying the issue from a thermodynamic point of view. The proposed research will enable the investigators to advance the frontiers of surfactant colloidal chemistry by acquiring new information on the formation of surfactant aggregates in their mixtures. Such information will make it possible to develop opportunities to fully utilize the unique nano-environment provided by mixed surfactant aggregates for particle processing, ultra-purification, reactions in nano-domains as well as controlled release from such domains doc6973 none The study of phylogenetic relationships among species of vertebrate animals relies heavily at present on analyses of mitochondrial gene sequences, and less so on analyses of nuclear genes. Dr. Gavin Naylor of Iowa State University is exploring several candidate nuclear genes, presumed to be single-copy or from small families (duplications) of genes, in order to find sources of reliable characters for phylogenetic analysis of vertebrates. From initial surveys of over genes in gene-sequence databases, ten or so candidates will be selected, amplification primers constructed to extract and amplify the segments, and the genes then sequenced for several model taxa of fishes, birds, and mammals. In comparing mutational differences between gene sequences from different organisms, such properties as nucleotide base compositional evenness, the proportion of sites free to vary, the among-site rate variation, and codon usage will be evaluated in tests using a known phylogenetic tree for the model taxa. Not all genes are equally likely to yield informative results in phylogenetic analyses, but there has been little explicit testing of properties of candidate genes, to determine beforehand useful gene sources. The work to be carried out will identify genes with properties that predispose them to be phylogenetically useful and will provide empirical tests of their utility. As sequencing technology improves and as more genomes are sequenced in their entirety, bioinformatics will turn to comparative genomics to mine information that is buried in the comparison of whle-genomes. This endeavor will be greatly enhanced with an accurate understanding of the phylogenetic relationships among the genomes being compared, and in turn robust, reliable phylogenies will depend upon data drawn from several nuclear as well as mitochondrial genes doc6974 none Sherry Understanding the biology of small migratory animals is hampered by the difficulties involved in tracking individuals and integrating ecological impacts year-round. The work proposed here addresses seasonal linkages in two migratory bird species. This study will test the hypothesis that reproductive success depends on habitat quality occupied in the prior tropical winter period in contrast to the conventional alternative that breeding conditions alone matter. Winter habitat signatures will be identified in breeding birds using stable carbon isotopes sampled in blood tissue. Reproductive success will be measured and assessed according to winter habitat occupancy patterns and to indices of breeding territory quality and individual condition. Food manipulations in winter will assess the mechanisms linking habitat quality in winter to breeding events. The abundance and diversity of migratory birds comprise a spectacular natural phenomenon. Such species control insect pests, modify plant communities via seed dispersal and pollination, and stabilize ecosystems upon which humans depend. This research will contribute fundamental new insights into how the abundance of migratory birds is limited and regulated year-round, thereby helping structure seasonally linked population models more accurately. Population models are crucial to understand these animals responses to human impacts on global habitat quantity, quality, and climate change doc6975 none Turner This award supports Joseph Turner and students from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in a collaboration with Walter Arnold of the Fraunhofer Institute for Nondestructive Testing in Saarbruecken, Germany. The project will focus on the relation between ultrasonic absorption and scattering and fatigue damage. Two new techniques will be investigated, one developed by Arnold, and the other by Turner, will be used to analyze identical specimens. The collaboration will make possible an exchange of techniques which make use of the complementary expertise available from the German and U.S. groups, thereby leading to new techniques for measuring and monitoring fatigue damage of structural components used in building and manufacturing. Exchange of junior researchers is emphasized to add an international dimension to their training and to allow them to establish international connections early in their careers doc6976 none Bigi This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Ikaros Bigi of the University of Notre Dame and Professor Ichirou Sanda of Nagoya University in Japan. The researchers will be researching the theory of heavy flavor decays in the era of beauty factories. CP (Charge Particle) violation constitutes one of the central mysteries of the successful Standard Model of high-energy physics. CP is the violation of the combined conservation laws associated with charge conjugation (C) and parity (P) by the weak nuclear force, which is responsible for reactions such as the decay of atomic nuclei. Parity, or space inversion, is the reflection in the origin of the space coordinates of a particle or particle system (in three dimension). Parity conservation means that left and right and up and down are indistinguishable in the sense that an atomic nucleus throws off decay products up as often as down and left as often as right. For years it was assumed that charge conjugation and parity were exact symmetries of elementary processes, namely those involving electromagnetic, strong, and weak interactions. Thirty-six years after it was discovered that parity was violated in the weak interaction beta decay, it has not yet been established in any other system. At the same time it is of great cosmological significance as essential for generating the baryon number of the universe. Since theory predicts large CP asymmetries in the decays of beauty hadrons, dedicated experiments are starting to collect data in both the U.S. and Japan. New theoretical technologies have been developed to deal quantitatively with the weak decays of beauty hadrons. One crucial element in this progress has been maintaining close contact with experiments. The promise of this strategy has grown even stronger with huge amounts of new data. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. The researchers goal is to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon of matter-antimatter asymmetry, so obvious in nature, but not quite understood. Results of the research could impact on some discovery in the field of B-hadron physics. This research advances international human resources through the participation of graduate students. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of the research in scientific journals and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc6977 none Under this award, the PIs will study the climatology and interannual variability of African easterly wave disturbances as simulated by a 50 km resolution Regional Climate Model (RCM). Multiple 4-month RCM simulations will be undertaken. The PI will examine the physical processes responsible for the Atlantic sector African climate variability and predictability on seasonal, interannual and decadal time scales. The RCM will be used in a purely predictive mode with persistent SSTA and GCM-predicted lateral boundary conditions. Work will be undertaken in collaboration with the Niger Meteorological Service. In the final phase of the project, the climate response to greenhouse gas buildup will also be studied. The work is important because it will increase our knowledge of west African climate variability and predictability. This could have important societal impacts doc6978 none Marra Understanding the biology of small migratory animals is hampered by the difficulties involved in tracking individuals and integrating ecological impacts year-round. The work proposed here addresses seasonal linkages in two migratory bird species. This study will test the hypothesis that reproductive success depends on habitat quality occupied in the prior tropical winter period in contrast to the conventional alternative that breeding conditions alone matter. Winter habitat signatures will be identified in breeding birds using stable carbon isotopes sampled in blood tissue. Reproductive success will be measured and assessed according to winter habitat occupancy patterns and to indices of breeding territory quality and individual condition. Food manipulations in winter will assess the mechanisms linking habitat quality in winter to breeding events. The abundance and diversity of migratory birds comprise a spectacular natural phenomenon. Such species control insect pests, modify plant communities via seed dispersal and pollination, and stabilize ecosystems upon which humans depend. This research will contribute fundamental new insights into how the abundance of migratory birds is limited and regulated year-round, thereby helping structure seasonally linked population models more accurately. Population models are crucial to understand these animals responses to human impacts on global habitat quantity, quality, and climate change doc6979 none Nora Underwood. Considerable ecological research has documented the way in which herbivores respond to mean characteristics of their food; however, little is known about the way in which variability in food quality affects individual herbivores or populations of herbivores. The proposed research will quantify the way in which variance in quality among plants affects the movement of individuals, as well as the population dynamics of insect herbivores. A spatially explicit model will be used to examine how herbivore movement influences the interaction between the variance in plant quality and population dynamics in time and space. This model will then provide a framework for understanding how variance in quality among phenotypes, genotypes, or species of plants affects insect demographics. Field experiments will examine how variability in the genetically based quality of strawberry populations affects the movements and population dynamics of the strawberry aphid. Short-term experiments will quantify the way in which the movement of individual aphids is related to population-level variance in forage quality. Longer-term experiments will relate the dynamical response of aphid populations to different kinds of variance in food quality, ranging from that characteristic of plant monocultures to that characteristic of mixed cultures of two to six different genotypes. This approach will facilitate a critical examination of the hypothesis that agricultural mixtures of plant varieties (genotypes) support lower population densities of pests than will monocultures. Finally, linking the genetic variance in plant quality to the demographics of herbivores provides a critical synthesis of ecological and evolutionary perspectives in understanding plant-herbivore dynamics doc6980 none Musfeldt This three-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research in materials research involves Janice L. Musfeldt and her group at the State University of New York in Binghamton and Alexandre Revcolevschi and his group at the Universite Paris XI. Their collaboration is aimed at investigations of growth and spectroscopic response of lightly doped CuGeO3 (copper-germanium-oxygen) crystals as a function of temperature and high magnetic field. The US group brings to this collaboration expertise in far-infrared spectroscopy. This is complemented by the French investigator s expertise in crystal growth. He will be responsible for growth of lightly substituted single crystals using the floating zone technique. Experiments at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida will be carried out jointly. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigators and graduate students. The CNRS will support the visits of French researchers to the United States. The collaboration will advance fundamental understanding of novel magnetic materials (CuGeO3) which have similarities to the superconducting copper oxides and other doped transition metal oxides. The work will be of general interest to the solid state materials community doc6981 none Glasmacher This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Thomas Glasmacher of Michigan State University and Professor Hiroyushi Sakurai of the University of Tokyo in Japan. The researchers will be undertaking a study of nuclei far from stability with exotic structure. The research proposed will be the largest systematic study of neutron-rich nuclei with complementary methods to date. They will combine the experimental methods and techniques developed at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL) at Michigan State and by their Japanese collaborators to make efficient use of the world-class exotic ion-beams available at RIKEN in Japan and at the NSCL. They will study the changes in the structure of neutron-rich nuclei as they become less and less bound when approaching the neutron-dripline. The experiments will measure theoretically relevant and calculable quantities such as excitation energies, reduced transition matrix elements, and spectroscopic factors. These results will then be used in the theoretical models. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. Combining the Japanese quantum Monte Carlo codes, which currently allow the largest-scale shell model calculations in the world, with the effective nuclear forces developed at the NSCL will greatly enhance the theoretical perspective in the proposed collaboration. It is expected that the research will significantly advance our understanding of the evolution of nuclear structure from stability to the most neutron-rich nuclei with charge Z=28. This research advances international human resources through the participation of postdocs, graduate students and undergraduate students. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of the research in scientific journals and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc6982 none This award is for support of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) to provide the leadership and management structure for the coordination of U.S. research activities in connection with the Earth System History (ESH) Project of the United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). The ESH Secretariat at AGU will provide support services for the ESH Steering Committee and a point of interaction and contact with the international effort in Past Global Changes (PAGES) of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP). These efforts will include supporting activities of the ESH Steering Committee and other activities designed to generate paleoscience community input to ESH Project priorities and objectives. Workshops, planning meetings and publications will insure that the goals of the project are met and that implementation of the project is carried out in an effective manner doc6983 none Over the past quarter-century, many studies have shown that the characteristics of tundra nitrogen cycles play a major role in controlling the response of tundra carbon cycles to climate change and disturbance. This research will determine how the characteristics of nitrogen cycling influence carbon accumulation and loss at 1- to 10-year time scales in an arctic Alaska watershed. The PIs will (1) measure N inputs and outputs such as atmospheric deposition, fixation, and losses in streams, (2) perform a 15N -labeling experiment to identify major N sinks, quantify their turnover rates, and trace downslope N fluxes, and (3) model C-N interactions, focusing on N limitation as a constraint on change in the C cycle. The investigators intend to use the models that are developed to compare C-N interactions in arctic tundra with other ecosystem types. The research is important because nitrogen is a key regulator of carbon cycling in most terrestrial ecosystems, including arctic tundras, but relatively little work on C-N interactions has been done at the watershed scale. Understanding C-N interactions is key to understanding long-term responses of ecosystems to climate change. Turnover and retention of nitrogen in watersheds are also key ecosystem services in a world where the annual nitrogen turnover rate has doubled globally due to human activity doc6984 none Kenneth Schmidt. Predation rates and the subsequent impact of predators on prey are thought to be determined mostly by the population density of predators. Nonetheless, much predation by generalist predators may occur when secondary prey types are encountered coincidentally by a predator while searching for its primary prey. Such incidental predation is determined by the behavioral responses of individual predators to the abundance and distribution of alternative prey types, as well as to features of the predator s environment. Incidental predation may be extremely common in generalist, and to a smaller degree in specialist predators. Because such weak interactions potentially stabilize community structure, they are of considerable importance. More specifically, the rate of incidental predation may be related to amount of enemy-free space (areas unutilized by predators). Understanding this mechanism is critical because of its relationship to the strength of the predator-prey interaction, as well because enemy-free space influences the stability of predator-prey dynamics and the coexistence of multiple prey species. The proposed research examines incidental predation in a community of breeding songbirds, whose eggs and nestlings are preyed on by small mammals, primarily the white-footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus). It focuses on predation from the perspectives of individual behaviors and population dynamics, as well as their repercussions to community-level phenomena. The approach combines theoretical, observational, and experimental components, ultimately to test explicit underlying mechanisms. More specifically, the research involves (1) monitoring the density of common vertebrates (white-footed mouse, eastern chipmunk, gray squirrel) which are nest predators of songbirds (2) monitoring nest predation rates using artificial songbird nests, and (3) monitoring the success of natural nests of selected songbird species, (4) testing if enemy-free space is a key control of incidental predation, (5) evaluating the utility of giving-up densities as indicators of ecological patterns and processes at multiple spatial scales, and (6) estimating the influence of population density and individual behavioral responses of predators on the survival of nests of songbirds doc6985 none This is a US-Polish collaborative research project on non-local charges in supersymmetric integrable physics. The principal investigator is Dr. Ashok Das from the University of Rochester. His Polish collaborator is Professor Ziemowit Popowicz from the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Wroclaw. The researchers will combine their different areas of expertise to try to solve some of the outstanding problems in the area of integrable models. In particular they will investigate the following three distinct but related problems in supersymmetric integrable systems: non-local charges, miura transformation and bi-Hamiltonian structure. Through this research they expect to provide further information on chemical and physical tuning in organic molecular solids. This project in theoretical physics research fulfills the program objectives of bringing together leading experts in the U.S. and Central Eastern Europe to combine complementary efforts and capabilities in areas of strong mutual interest and competence on the basis of equality, reciprocity, and mutuality of benefit doc6986 none Fitzgibbon This three-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research involves William E. Fitzgibbon of the University of Houston, Jeffrey J. Morgan of Texas A&M University, Pierre Fabrie of the University of Bordeaux I, and Michel Langlais of the University of Bordeaux II. The project addresses mathematical analysis of systems of reaction diffusion equations that exhibit a high degree of spatial heterogeneity. The investigators propose to study systems involving diffusive fluid transport and those which feature diffusion along concentration gradients. Systems of this nature arise in a variety of situations in engineering, chemistry, biology, and physics, specifically, as realistic models for processes in epidemiology, environmental chemistry and biorestoration. The US researchers bring to this collaboration expertise in reaction-diffusion models and their generalizations. This is complemented by French expertise in mathematical biology and analytical and computational work in spatial heterogeneity. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover the expenses of visits of members of the US research group and graduate students. The CNRS will support the visits of French researchers to the United States doc6987 none Under the direction of Dr. Olivier De Montmollin, Mr. Roberto Lopez Bravo will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will conduct archaeological excavation at the site of El Lacandon located in Mexico s Peten Peninsula. This site dates to the Classic Period when Mayan polities reached their greatest areal extent and, while not a major center itself, is important because of it s ties with Palenque located 18 km away. Epigraphic and archaeological data indicate that during Classic times Palenque expanded and established control over a large region which included El Lacandon. Because the latter existed as an independent entity before Palenque s expansion it is possible to determine how social, political and economic organization was altered after incorporation into Palenque s sphere and to reconstruct the method of governance. While many large Mayan kingdoms have been studied, archaeologists do not agree on the means of political integration employed. Some believe that outlying areas such as El Lacandon were controlled through direct intervention and that tight centralized authority was exercised. Under this scenario such regions were tightly integrated into a broader economic system. Other archaeologists however postulate a much looser arrangement in which pre-existing local elites, if they recognized their secondary status, were allowed to remain in power and that, other than the payment of tribute, pre-existing systems remained essentially unchanged. To examine this question, Mr. Bravo will excavate a series of both commoner and elite habitation areas which incorporate both pre and post Palenque periods. He will also excavate in central ceremonial areas to determine whether a period of new construction coincides with the power structure change. The patterns he observes will provide insight into the structure of El Lacandon - Palenque relations. This research is important for several reasons. It will shed new light on the functioning of one of the largest Mayan prehistoric kingdoms and provide data of interest to many archaeologists. It will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc6988 none Clay Janzen and Connell described ecological mechanisms by which host-specific natural enemies promote community diversity by facilitating the proliferation of heterospecifics in the vicinity of the focal host species. This negative feedback theory forms the conceptual framework of this investigation testing plant and soil-microbe interactions, which have been overlooked for years by ecologists. Soil microbes have numerous negative and positive effects on plant fitness, and their fundamental importance to plant populations and community structure is now widely accepted but poorly understood. This project is a continuation of research into the negative feedbacks of soil-borne fungal pathogens on black cherry recruitment and population dynamics. Field surveys will be conducted to determine the survival of black cherry seedlings in early, mid, and late successional sites. To assess the degree of host-specificity of the fungal pathogen (Pythium), seeds from black cherry and other plant species will be germinated in the laboratory in sterile and Pythium-inoculated agar. Similarly, seeds from ten plant species will be germinated in sterile and inoculated soils under greenhouse conditions. Results from the field, laboratory and greenhouse studies will be compared with data collected on natural plant distributions in the field. The ultimate objective is to determine the role played by soil-borne pathogens in seedling establishment, spatial distributions, and successional change. This research can substantially advance our limited knowledge about how these complex and long-overlooked interactions influence community diversity and succession doc6989 none Under the direction of Dr. Douglas Price, MS Shawn Murray will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. She will continue her participation in archaeological excavation at Dia, located in the Middle Niger Delta in Mali. The site includes a series of mounds with rise above the Niger floodplain and evidence indicates that the earliest levels date to ca. 900-500 BC. The site is particularly significant because plant remains are extremely well preserved and rice is abundant in the earliest occupations. This may well represent a domesticated African species (Oryza glaberrima) and constitute the earliest known examples but because visual distinction between grains of wild and domestic rice is difficult, other means must be employed. To this end, lipid and DNA analyses will be conducted. If lipid analysis is successful it may provide a less costly alternative to DNA analysis for species identification. A preliminary study has successfully shown the presence of DNA in the Dia grains. The domestication of plants and animals occurred independently within the last 10,000 years in many parts of the world and this change from hunting and gathering to a more productive resource base set the stage for the rise of civilization. Because different crops were involved in widely differing areas, this transformation or Neolithic Revolution was not due to historical happenstance but rather results from a single underlying process. To understand this fundamental change, archaeologists employ a multi-case method: individual regional sequences are reconstructed and then compared and in this way fundamental similarities can be determined. Although Africa has not normally be considered such a center, in fact many plants were domesticated in the broad band which lies immediately South of the Sahara desert. While Southeast Asia served as one center for rice domestication, Africa served as another and wild progenitors grow in the region today. MS Murray s research will contribute to understanding of the evolution of African rice. It will likely document the earliest occurrence of domestic rice in the continent and shed light on the social and subsistence context within which domestication occurred. This research is also important because it will help to develop a less costly alternative to DNA analysis in this range of species and, if successful, lipid analysis will be widely used. MS Murray s research will also record rapidly vanishing agricultural practices in the Middle Niger Delta region, such as traditional crop harvesting and processing and will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc6990 none Saros Because of human intervention, the amount of atmospheric nitrogen deposited into alpine lakes has doubled in the last century. This alteration in aquatic nutrient concentrations may have been accelerated by increased precipitation in these regions. This study investigates the effects of nitrogen deposition and climate change on the community composition of sedimentary diatoms in montane lakes of Colorado and Montana. The interactions between anthropogenic nitrogen and precipitation are complex and their effects on diatom communities probably vary regionally. This project will use in situ experiments and field surveys to test the hypothesis that changes in the ratios of nutrients (e.g., nitrogen, phosphorus) have altered the structure of aquatic communities. Furthermore, the research will integrate paleobiology of fossil diatoms and elemental analysis, to reconstruct the composition of ancient communities, and the resources available to them. This study has potentially broad implications for understanding global change, and the mechanisms causing rapid shifts in the community structure of aquatic ecosystems doc6991 none Wiley Long-term experiments performed at large spatial scales are costly, logistically difficult, and, as a consequence, seldom well replicated. But because smaller-scale experiments may not readily scale up to larger contexts, large-scale experiments may be critically important in understanding the processes influencing ecological communities in natural ecosystems. This LTREB project will continue the study of a naturally replicated, whole-ecosystem perturbation brought about by disease-induced reductions in populations of a dominant herbivore, the caddisfly, in cold water streams in Michigan and Maine. Maintenance of caddisfly populations at low levels by repeated outbreaks of a host-specific pathogen was first observed in the late s in several hydrologically stable streams in Michigan s Lower Peninsula that were already the subject of long-term monitoring. Results to date from these systems indicate that biotic processes play a major role in organizing their communities. In the mid- s, a foundation was laid to assess the generality of these findings through the addition of study streams in two regions (western Upper Peninsula, Michigan, western Maine) having similar communities as the Michigan Lower Peninsula sites, but where hydrologically-derived disturbances should be more pronounced and frequent. This study will continue monitoring of biotic communities in streams in all three regions that have had, or are likely to have, substantial pathogen-induced variation in their caddisfly populations over time. These data series will allow the investigators to (1) discriminate among mechanistic models of trout stream community dynamics, (2) determine whether the long-term interactions between caddisfly and its pathogen is cyclic or stable, and (3) assess whether the relative importance of biotic and abiotic processes in affecting trout stream communities varies over a gradient of hydrologic stability doc6992 none Naumann This award supports Christoph Naumann and students from Indiana University-Purdue in a collaboration with Eva-Kathrin Schmidt of the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Munich, Germany. The research focus is on development of appropriate artificial membrane architectures to allow studies of specific interactions of encoded proteins. There will be a great demand for such studies once the human genome has been mapped. This project uses the complementary facilities and expertise of the U.S. and German groups: the U.S. side provides detailed knowledge about state-of-the-art membrane architectures for transmembrane proteins and the equipment necessary to make pertinent measurements; the German counterpart has expertise related to the preparation and characterization of the transmembrane proteins to be used in the research. This joint collaborative research effort also presents junior researchers with the opportunity to work internationally, and the work done on this proposal will help institutionalize the relationship between the German and U.S. research groups doc6993 none This application requests funds for a conference of chemosensory scientists from universities in the Intermountain Region including Utah, Idaho, and Colorado. The conference will meet on February 9-12, at Jackson, Wyoming. Two outside speakers using novel functional imaging techniques will be invited. The meeting will be organized around three objectives: 1) presentation of innovative experimental techniques; 2) small group brain storming sessions to focus on identifying new directions for chemosensory studies applying the techniques described in the first objective; 3) establishment of collaborative projects. The outcome of this meeting will be to establish new strategies for recording the functional activity of chemosensory neurons. Synthesis of cutting edge research findings from scientists studying organisms ranging from insects, cephalopods, amphibians, fish, mammals, and man will lead to exciting new advances in the field. A small number of participants with ample time for formal presentations and informal interactions will foster new collaborations and general sharing of expertise. Graduate students, post-docs and research associates will have full access to faculty and be encouraged to actively participate in all sessions. Efforts will be made to actively involve women and minorities in all aspects of the meeting doc6994 none AST- Wheeler The 20th Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics and Cosmology will be held in Austin, Texas on December 10-15, . The Texas Symposium has gained the reputation as the major international meeting on topics in relativistic astrophysics, including the physics of compact objects, high energy cosmic rays, active galactic nuclei, the early universe, and observational cosmology. The meetings are held in alternate years and attract a large audience of theorists and experimenters working in astrophysics and related interdisciplinary areas, including particle and nuclear physics. The symposium is sponsored by the Extragalactic Astronomy and Cosmology program at the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the U.S. Department of Energy doc6995 none Lundberg With ichthyological colleagues from Argentina, Brazil, France, and Venezuela, Dr. John Lundberg of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences is studying the systematics, evolution, and biogeography of the 90 or so species of tiger stripe catfishes of the family Pimelodinae of South America. They are a morphologically and ecologically diverse group of highly valued food fishes that range throughout the vast river basins of eastern South America, including the Amazon, Orinoco, and Parana drainages, with species also known from trans-Andean rivers. All 31 described genera in the family will be sampled, with the help of South American colleagues, and the expected 70-80 species thus acquired will be analyzed for DNA sequences from mitochondrial and nuclear genes, for the construction of phylogenetic trees from comparisons of the mutational differences among species. Morphological studies of these samples and of museum collections will complement the molecular phylogenetic analyses, and French and South American colleagues will also add studies of the fossils for this group, of which 20 are currently known, from deposits dated back to Eocene times but suspected to extend back to the Cretaceous. The dated phylogeny of pimelodine catfishes will be integrated with biogeographic data and reconstructions of the history of South America s large rivers and basins. The temporal patterns and rates of diversification within subclades of these fishes, and their time sequence relationships with Earth history events, will provide tests of suspected causal agents in South American biotic evolution. Significant components of the research involve colleagues from Argentina, Brazil, France, and Venezuela, many of whom will travel to Philadelphia for focused work sessions to integrate the molecular, morphological, and paleontological information doc6996 none David R. Lindberg Dr. David R. Lindberg at the University of California at Berkeley has received funding to sequence complete mitochondrial genomes of 50 species of gastropod mollusks. Although the evolutionary history of gastropods has been long studied and the group has an excellent fossil record, the branching patterns at the base of the gastropod tree are poorly understood because of morphological convergence and the uninformative nature of the genes that have been previously analyzed. This project will examine mitochondrial gene order, a promising new data set for mollusks, and use these data to reconstruct the relationships within the Gastropoda and between gastropods and other mollusks. In the past complete sequencing of mitochondrial genomes has been so time consuming that few mollusks have been studied. However, with the completion of several major sequencing initiatives, high-throughput sequencing facilities are becoming available. This project will use the high-throughput Drosophila Genome Sequencing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the data analyzed by a collaboration of researchers in the USA, Germany and Australia. Specific aims of this project include the identification, analysis and evaluation of gene, rRNA, and tRNA placement within the mitochondrial genome, secondary structures, and sequences for reconstructing relationships. The fossil record will also be used to correlate first appearance data and evaluate the resolution potential of each gene in different gastropod groups, and provide important insights into macroevolutionary patterns that are currently suggestive, but limited by our current lack of understanding of the relationships among the earliest gastropod molluscs. It will also provide preliminary and exploratory data for countless invertebrate zoologists, molecular biologists, bioinformaticists, and molecular evolutionists, and will serve as a pilot project for the evaluation of partnerships with high-throughput sequencing centers such as those housed at Lawrence Berkeley and other National Laboratories, and explores their potential role in reconstructing the Tree of Life doc6997 none FRIEDMAN The proposed project develops and pilots an experimental module on knot theory for students in grades 3-5. As part of the piloting process, a few teacher workshops are being provided to help pilot teachers understand the mathematics and learn how to use the module effectively. The effects of the module would be assessed in terms of student use of visualization, spatial reasoning and geometric modeling to solve problems. The module would be disseminated by placement on the web and through future workshops with teachers doc6998 none Mischaikow This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Konstantin Mischaikow of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Professor Hiroe Oka of Ryukoku University in Japan. A perennial challenge in science and engineering is the determination and description of coherent behaviors in systems with large (perhaps infinite) numbers of degrees of freedom. Given the ubiquity of dynamical systems as models for physical processes, it is perhaps not surprising that the primary obstacle to a coherent, effective program of dynamical systems applications is the deeply entangled manner in which low-dimensional phenomena are embedded within high-dimensional systems. The goal is to extend and develop new and effective topological techniques for extracting coherent low-dimensional dynamical phenomena from potentially high-dimensional systems. The investigators primary tool is the index theory of Conley, which collates the topological features of the expanding portion of the dynamics into algebraic-topological data structures (e.g., homology and cohomology). The three areas of cooperative research for the theory are: 1) construction of an effective topological singular perturbation theory for reducing the dynamics of a fast-slow system to the slow manifold; 2) adaptation of the index theory to the context of complicated flows with an emphasis on particle paths and embeddings; and 3) reconstruction of dynamical information from time-series data, particularly as a tool for rigorous numerical integration of systems with noise. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of their research in scientific journals and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc6874 none The mosses (Division or Phylum Bryophyta) comprise the second largest group of land plants, after the highly successful angiosperms (flowering plants), and are important components of virtually all terrestrial ecosystems. Tremendous progress has been made in the last five years toward an understanding of phylogenetic relationships among the mosses and this project will build significantly upon that foundation. Information contained in DNA sequences acquired from multiple chloroplast and nuclear genes will be used to reconstruct genealogical relationships across the full spectrum of moss diversity, sampled from nearly all 865 currently recognized genera of mosses. In turn, the genealogical findings will then be used to investigate historical and ecological factors that affect patterns of moss diversity on a global scale. A novel aspect of the research will be the integration of different approaches to the measurement of biodiversity. In particular, the investigators will compare so-called taxic diversity, the numbers of species recognized by traditional taxonomic studies, to so-called phylogenetic measures of diversity (PD: phylogenetic diversity) based on variation (mutational diversity) at the DNA level. Such measures of phylogenetic diversity have recently gained prominence in conservation biology, and the research will extend such applications to the study of global biodiversity patterns in a major group of terrestrial organisms. Collaborating investigators Dr. Jon Shaw at Duke University and Dr. Bernard Goffinet at University of Connecticut will seek to test specific hypotheses about relative levels of biodiversity in tropical versus high latitude ecosystems, and between communities in different types of habitats. The work will therefore contribute to a broader understanding of the underlying mechanisms that control the world s biodiversity. This funding will also contribute significantly to the training of young biologists at Duke University and the University of Connecticut doc7000 none 00- Whiting RUI: Effect of climate change on carbon cycling within the discontinuous permafrost zone of Canada Over most of the Earth s land surface, the quantity of carbon sequestered in soil organic matter is greater by a factor of two or three than the amount stored in living vegetation. The quantity of organic matter in soil plays a critical role in the earth s geochemical carbon cycle. High-latitude peatlands represent only about 11% of the global land surface area, yet contain an estimated 25 to 30% of the world s total soil carbon pool. Much of this carbon is stored in the frozen peat soils within the permafrost layer. The goal of this research is to determine the effect of a changing climate on carbon cycling in Alberta, Canada. Recent evidence indicates that permafrost is degrading in response to elevated temperatures and changing moisture input. As the permafrost melts, the peat surface subsides to the level of the water table and becomes saturated. Early results suggest that these melt areas produce 100-200x greater methane emission than the nearby unmelted bog. Dr. Whiting and students and collaborators plan to study these melt features to determine the origin of the carbon in the methane (ancient vs. new) and to find out if the age of the melt feature affects methane emissions doc7001 none Wolfe Parasitic plants, ones which have lost all photosynthetic ability and exist by absorbing nutrients through haustorial (usually root) connections from other nearby plants, are known in several lineages of angiosperms. Hyobanche (in the family Orobanchaceae) is one such group, a small genus of eight or so species native to southern Africa, and thought to be related to the photosynthetic genus Harveya. There is considerable confusion regarding species delimitation, abundance, host associations, and pollination for Hyobanche, which has not been studied in the field in any detail. Dr. Andrea Wolfe of Ohio State University is studying the systematics, evolution, and biology of this group of plants, by combining field collecting and observation with laboratory work on morphology and DNA sequencing to acquire new characters for phylogenetic and population-genetic analyses. Because the genus is small and is restricted in distribution to a narrow geographic region, a thorough sampling of many individuals from populations of all the species is planned. Nuclear and chloroplast gene markers are expected to provide sufficient characters for robust phylogenetic resolution of the species, in combination with morphological features. A taxonomic monograph of the genus is projected as one product of the investigation, which will include detailed geographical distributions to aid in conservation efforts. A valuable component of the project is a detailed molecular investigation of the DNA sequences and flanking regions for the chloroplast photosynthetic gene rbcL, which preliminary data suggest to be mutated into a nonfunctional pseudogene in these plants. Hyobanche offers an excellent system for examining in a phylogenetic context the pattern and rate of pseudogene formation following the loss of photosynthesis doc7002 none Gustafson This three-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research in chemistry involves Terry L. Gustafson, Ohio State University, Guy Buntinx and Olivier Pozat of the Universite des Sciences and Technologies de Lille, Lille, France. The objective of their collaboration is to conduct systematic investigations of photophysical properties of several related monomers, oligomers, segmented block co-polymers, and polymers in solution and as thin films. The U.S. investigator brings to this collaboration expertise in model oligomers and conducting polymers. This is complemented by French expertise in the photophysics of molecular systems. The project also takes advantage of complementary instrument methodologies. The US group will utilize ps time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy and ns time-resolved infrared spectroscopy. The French group are experienced in fs and ns transient Raman spectroscopy and absorption spectroscopy. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator and graduate student. The CNRS will support the visits of French researchers to the United States. The collaboration will advance fundamental understanding of electroluminescent conducting polymers, in particular, the conduction process, the control of radiative and non-radiative pathways, and the nature of interactions at the interfaces between polymers, and between a polymer and metal doc7003 none Irwin Ecologists and evolutionary biologists are fundamentally interested in the ways in which organisms interact to shape their abundance and design. Although the complexity of interactions within a community has long been recognized, our understanding of how a multitude of organisms ultimately shape the ecology of plant communities and the evolution of floral traits is still in its infancy. Pollination biologists have demonstrated the importance of pollinators in governing floral design, while recognizing that antagonistic organisms also play a role in the ecology and evolution of flowering traits. However, the effects of antagonists, such as herbivores, nectar robbers, and seed predators, on plant-pollinator mutualisms have often been considered in isolation. To fully understand the interplay and outcome of multiple species with their host plants, we must account for the complexity of interspecific interactions, and do so across communities that differ in resource availability and plant composition. The integration of simultaneous direct and indirect selection pressures from abiotic and abiotic factors will ultimately shape plant reproduction and plant traits over ecological, microevolutionary, and macroevolutionary scales. The aim of this research is to understand the simultaneous importance of interactions among several antagonists with their host plants and mutualist pollinators, and how resource availability and community composition affect the outcome of such interactions. Experiments will examine the combined effects of a nectar-robbing bumblebee, a pre-dispersal seed predator, an ungulate herbivore, and plant community composition on the reproductive success of the subalpine plant, Ipomopsis aggregata. This work is novel in integrating the effects of multiple antagonists on the outcome of plant-pollinator mutualisms under different environmental conditions. Understanding the complexity of plant-pollinator-antagonist interactions will provide a deeper knowledge of how species are ecologically and evolutionarily linked in biological communities doc7004 none Ewing This three-year award for US-France cooperative research in earth sciences involves Rodney C. Ewing at the University of Michigan and Georges Calas and Thierry Allard of the Universite de Paris VI and VII. The project addresses long-term radiation effects in minerals and materials. They will study several research problems: the effects of radiation damage on chemical reactivity and surface reactivity of minerals; and radiation effects on the structure and chemical reactivity of sheet silicates, including clays that can be used as geologic dosimeters. They will also continue radiation studies of zircon, an important mineral with potential use for disposing plutonium. The US investigator brings to this collaboration expertise in studies of radiation damage in minerals, mostly through X-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopy. This is complemented by French capabilities in spectroscopic studies used to characterize radiation defects at the atomistic level. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator. The CNRS will support the visits of French researchers to the United States. The collaboration will advance understanding of radiation effects in complex ceramics and materials. The research has practical importance and may contribute to better methods for storage of nuclear and radioactive waste materials doc7005 none Hallerberg This award supports Mark Hallerberg and students from the University of Pittsburgh in a collaboration with Juergen van Hagen of the Center for European Integration Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany. The research focus is on causes and consequences of fiscal crises that can occur at the local-government level, which poses a greater problem in an era of increasing decentralization. The project will examine crises in the two traditional federal systems in the U.S. and Germany, and, in particular, the intergovernmental relations between the state and local levels. The treatment of local fiscal crises in existing federal systems cans serve as models for other countries as the decentralize. This joint collaborative research effort also presents junior researchers with the opportunity to work internationally, and the work done on this proposal will help institutionalize the relationship between the German and U.S. research groups doc7006 none James M. Turbeville Dr. James Turbeville of the University of Arkansas has been awarded a grant to study the phylogenetic relationships of invertebrate animals by using gene rearrangement data. The animal groups lacking a body cavity (acoelomate phyla) have been considered the most primitive bilaterally symmetrical animals and have played a central role in theories of animal evolution. These animals (e.g., flatworms and ribbon worms) are an important component of animal biodiversity, yet their position in the tree of life (phylogenetic position) remains uncertain after years of intensive research. Mitochondria are structures in cells (organelles) responsible for energy production. They possess a small genome (DNA) which contains 37 genes encoding proteins and structural components involved in energy generation. Recent studies have indicated that mitochondrial gene rearrangements will yield reliable features for clarifying the relationships of major animal groups (phyla). To further evaluate the potential of this approach for estimating the phylogeny of animals, mitochondrial genomes of the acoelomate flatworms (Platyhelminthes), ribbon worms (Nemertea) and the enigmatic Xenoturbella will be sequenced and the arrangements of genes determined. These data will be compared with mitochondrial gene arrangements available for other multicellular animals (metazoans) using appropriate methods to reconstruct a phylogeny for these groups. The data will allow a test of many long-standing hypotheses of animal relationships. The results of this study will contribute to our knowledge of these poorly understood animals, by increasing our understanding of patterns of diversification and providing insight into the evolution of morphological traits, patterns of gene evolution, developmental mechanisms and body plans doc7007 none Ferguson and Patterson The North American genus Phlox (family Polemoniaceae), with about 64 species, has been the object of numerous ecological and evolutionary studies for many decades, but the taxonomy of the group has relied upon a now-50 year old monograph written before methods were available for clear, explicit analyses of phylogenetic relationships. Dr. Carolyn Ferguson at Kansas State University, with her colleague Dr. Robert Patterson at San Francisco State University, is studying molecular (DNA) and morphological patterns of variability in all the species of the genus, in order to construct a phylogenetic tree for the group, and thereby examine questions about evolution of pollination relationships, life history, geographic migration and ranges, and polyploidy and hybridization. Phlox is the largest genus in the family, and like all temperate genera in the family has its center of diversity in western North America. Efforts are underway to sample all of the species for molecular analyses of nuclear and chloroplast DNA sequences and for restriction-enzyme mapping of the chloroplast genome, as sources of mutational characters for phylogenetic analysis. Field and herbarium studies will also add new data from morphology, and for re-examination of published descriptions. Hybridization has been reported in a number of species complexes in Phlox, and has been confirmed in the pilosa and glaberrima groups, and will be the focus of combined nuclear and chloroplast analyses. The combined molecular and morphological studies of the genus will facilitate writing of major taxonomic treatments for the species for the ongoing Flora of North America project, as an additional contribution doc7008 none Morava This award supports the participation of American scientists in a U.S.-Japan seminar on quantum geometry in dimensions 2 and 4, to be held at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore from March 18-24, . The co-organizers are professors Jack Morava of the Johns Hopkins University and Professor Shigeyuki Morita of the Tokyo University in Japan. These are two of the most vital and rapidly developing subjects in mathematics. Mathematical physicists are conscious of deep similarities between two and four-dimensional quantum field theories, but although mathematical research in two and four-dimensional geometry has been strongly affected by ideas from physics, these fields have separate roots and separate histories. In dimension two, classification is easy, and research is concerned with families of objects. In dimension four classification is difficult, and the construction of new tools to study that topic is very active. For historical reasons, research on (families of) two-manifolds has been dominated by ideas from algebraic geometry; but while ideas from the theory of algebraic surfaces have had great impact in four-mainfold theory, the deeper developments there have been based on techniques from nonlinear analysis and gauge theory. The population of researchers interested in these subjects is thus sociologically very diverse. However, the two fields share common foundations in topology, and by keeping these fundamental issues in focus, the organizers hope for a broadly accessible program of deep interest. Seminar organizers have made a special effort to involve younger researchers and graduate students as both participants and observers. The exchange of ideas and data with Japanese experts in this field will enable U.S. participants to advance their own work, and will set the stage for future collaborative projects. Dissemination of information on the seminar will be available on the World Wide Web doc7009 none Kaska This award supports a third year of funding for William Kaska and students from the University of California-Santa Barbara in a collaboration with Hermann Meyer of the Department of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Tuebingen in Germany. The research funded by this award will develop rhodium and iridium phosphourous-carbon-phophorous (PCP) Pincer molecules which are stable up to 200 degrees centigrade. This is significant for two reasons: they catalytically dehydrogenate alkanes to alkenes which is important for commercial objectives; they produce hydrogen gas, which is potentially useful for fuel cells. Both sides have unique expertise and facilities necessary to a successful outcome of this joint research project. Exchange of junior researchers is emphasized to add an international dimension to their training and to allow them to establish international connections early in their careers doc7010 none Species in eight families of flowering plants form symbiotic relationships with nitrogen-fixing bacteria of the actinomycete genus Frankia, in which the prokaryotic symbionts inhabit nodules on the plants roots. Phylogenetic analyses have suggested that such symbiotic relationships, known as actinorhizal associations, have evolved and or been lost numerous times over the course of evolution, both within Frankia and among the plant families involved. One of these plant families is the rose family, Rosaceae, a large group with considerable economic importance and evolutionary interest. Within Rosaceae, members of five genera (Cercocarpus, Chamaebatia, Cowania, Dryas, and Purshia) are known to form actinorhizal associations. Recent molecular evidence has shown that these five genera, although traditionally classified in different tribes or subfamilies, instead form a monophyletic group within the family. Nucleotide sequence data from the actinomcyete strains infecting several of these species have shown that they all belong to one of the three known monophyletic groups of infective Frankia. Neither the actinorhizal Rosaceae nor their Frankia symbionts, however, have been the subject of thorough phylogenetic study. The relatively small number of plant species (total of about 30) in this group makes it an ideal system in which to study patterns of coevolution between the two participants in the actinorhizal symbiosis. Dr. Daniel Potter of the University of California-Davis and his colleague at University of Connecticut, Dr. David Benson, and their associates will use macromolecular data to evaluate genetic diversity and generate hypotheses of phylogenetic relationship within and among taxa of actinorhizal Rosaceae and their Frankia symbionts. Fieldwork in the western U.S. and by colleagues in Mexico will be devoted to the collection of leaves and root nodules from all species of the five actinorhizal genera of Rosaceae and leaf material from several outgroups. Wherever possible, multiple populations, and multiple individuals per population, will be sampled from throughout the geographic range of each species. Nodules from non-rosaceous actinorhizal plant species occurring at the same localities will also be collected. Nucleotide sequence data will be obtained from appropriately variable regions of the genomes (both chloroplast and nuclear in the case of the plants) of the host plants (from DNA extracted from leaf material) and their symbionts (from DNA extracted from nodules). Broad geographical sampling of multiple populations will enable investigation of host specificity of Frankia strains and promiscuity of the plant species with respect to their symbionts. The data will be analyzed phylogenetically and the resulting phylogenetic trees will be compared in order to examine the extent and patterns of coevolution and to address the question of the taxonomic level at which coevolution has occurred. What are the relative contributions of geography and phylogeny in determining the symbiont strain(s) infecting a particular host at a particular locality? The data from the plant genomes will also be used to evaluate taxonomic delimitation of species and genera in this group. The primary significance of this study will be in improving our understanding of the evolution of symbiosis in general and of ecologically important nitrogen-fixing symbioses in particular. The study will also extend our knowledge of the taxonomic and geographic distributions of actinorhizal associations and will contribute to clarifying the classification of this group of plants, most of which occur in western North America doc7011 none Tabakin This award for U.S.-France collaboration between Frank Tabakin of the University of Pittsburgh and Bijan Saghai of the Centre d Etudes de Saclay, French Atomic Energy Commission, involves the development of the coupled-channel approach to meson photoproduction. The work is largely motivated by the development of intense photon and electron accelerators in the GeV region which has made possible experiments on the production of the elementary particle - mesons, pions, eta mesons, and kaons. The US and French investigators bring to this collaboration complementary expertise and will utilize new computer codes on the coupled channel approach in their analysis of experiments performed at Pittsburgh and Saclay. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator. CNRS will support the visits of French researcher to the United States doc7012 none Christopher H. Dietrich Dr. Christopher Dietrich of the University of Illinois Illinois Natural History Survey has been awarded a grant to study aspects of the evolution of reproductive behaviors in insects. This research should help explain the extraordinary success of this group of animals and may suggest improved methods for managing economically important species. Modern phylogenetic methods have greatly improved understanding of evolutionary processes at the level of genes and individual traits, but the processes by which multiple coordinated traits, or adaptive syndromes, evolve remain poorly understood. This project examines the evolution of several morphological, behavioral, and physiological traits related to the unique egg-laying (oviposition) syndrome of proconiine leafhoppers (Insecta: Hemiptera: Cicadellidae). Unlike most leafhoppers, which insert their eggs into plant tissue without coating the egg scars, certain proconiine species coat their egg scars with specialized secretory particles called brochosomes. In most leafhopper species, brochosomes are used primarily to provide a water-repellant coating on external surfaces of the body. In proconiines, brochosomes have assumed a new function in the protection of egg masses. Pregnant female proconiines store brochosomes in globs on their forewings and, after oviposition, scrape them off the wing and onto the egg scar using the hind legs. The brochosomes of ovipositing females differ from those of males and non-ovipositing females and corresponding modifications are found in the legs and forewings. By estimating the phylogenetic relationships among proconiine species using morphological and DNA sequence data, this project will address the question of whether the various traits related to the unique oviposition syndrome were acquired all at once or in a stepwise fashion. The project will provide training for a Ph.D. student and post-doctoral fellow in field sampling, data collection, morphological and molecular genetic methods. The project will also improve collaborative ties between U.S. and Brazilian researchers and will yield improved tools for identifying leafhopper species doc7013 none Janzen In contrast to the sex-determining mechanisms of most vertebrates, sex in many reptiles is determined by environmental temperatures determined during embryonic development. The unusual nature of this sex-determination system, with its potential to produce strongly-biased sex rations, has generated considerable interest in its evolutionary origin and biological significance. Nonetheless, little is understood about the importance of many aspects of this temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD) that could lend insight into these fundamental questions. In particular, the impact of long-term climatic variation on crucial demograpic parameters, namely offspring and population sex ratios, is unclear in reptiles with TSD. Furthermore, the role of nest-site choice in this system is virtually unexplored, especially across the long reproductive lifespans that characterize these taxa, despite its significance in most theoretical models of sex-ratio evolution. Predation, biased or otherwise, also occupies a significant role in theoretical models of population dynamics but its impact on offspring sex ratio is unknown. Organisms with TSD are ideal model systems with which to explore the impact of these major factors on population dynamics and sex-ratio evolution in nature. The proposed LTREB research will investigate several significant aspects of the evolutionary ecology of TSD in a natural population of long-lived painted turtles, which has been studied in detail since . First, how does long-term climatic variation covary with annual cohort sex ratio and thus influence population demography and the evolution of TSD? Second, do females with TSD exhibit long-term ontogenetic repeatability of nst-site choice with respect to available thermal environments and thereby provide a target for evolutionary response to sex-ratio selection imposed by rapid climate change and human habitat modification? Third, what are the long-term spatio-temporal dynamics of nest predation and offspring sex ratio in a natural population with TSD and thus their impacts on population demography and sex-ratio evolution? Obtaining answers to such questions assumes greater urgency given rapid climate change and human habitat modification doc7014 none Genomic technology makes it possible to understand the role of many different genes in the process of species formation. By taking advantage of genome-wide research programs on model organisms, the investigators can conduct targeted studies on additional species, thereby discovering the genetic footprints of key evolutionary processes. They will use emerging genomic data on sea urchins to elucidate patterns and processes of molecular evolution acting during rapid species formation. They will target genes involved in reproductive success by 1) sequencing cDNA libraries from testes of the tropic urchin Echinometra oblonga, and comparing to the related species Strongylocentrotus purpuratus; 2) comparing proteins from the morphologically divergent sperm of two E. oblonga sub-species: and 3) screen a genomic library from S. purpuratus to find and sequence the chromosomal region surrounding the bindin gene, known to be central to reproductive isolation. The power of genomics is the discovery of many genes. The power of the comparative method is the elucidation of gene function and evolution through well-chosen examples of divergent species. This study applies both approaches to understanding the genes involved in reproductive success in a system in which fertilization is extremely well understood. The combination of classic knowledge about sea urchin fertilization, powerful new evolutionary models, and the burgeoning of genomics will provide rapid advances in functional and evolutionary biology doc7015 none Gubbins This three-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research involves Keith E. Gubbins of North Carolina State University and Roland J.-M. Pellenq of the Centre de Recherche sur la Matiere Divisee in Orleans, France for studies of disordered porous materials, in particular, glasses and carbons. These materials are widely used in the chemical, oil and gas and pharmaceutical industries as adsorbents for chromatography and as catalysts and catalyst supports. The collaboration addresses the development of realistic atomistic models to better characterize porous materials and to study phase changes and adsorption. The investigators will use molecular simulation techniques combined with experimental studies of the structure of these materials. The US investigator brings to this collaboration expertise in applying molecular simulation methods to porous solids. This is complemented by French expertise in experimental structure measurements and reconstruction methods. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator, postdoctoral researcher and graduate student. The CNRS will support the visits of French researchers to the United States. The collaboration will advance understanding of adsorption in disordered materials doc7016 none Invasions of exotic organisms have disrupted many biotic communities worldwide. A unique example of an invasion that has undergone a reversal for unknown reasons is that of the browntail moth, Euproctis chrysorrhoea, that was accidentally introduced to North America near Boston from Europe in . It became an important defoliator of many tree species throughout New England and was also a human health hazard due to severe skin rashes caused by irritating hairs from the larvae. Beginning around , however, browntail populations receded gradually to coastal enclaves at the tip of Cape Cod and on islands in Casco Bay in Maine, where high densities have persisted ever since. Little research of any kind has been done on browntail moth in North America and no studies have explained why it declined and why it persists in coastal enclaves. In recent years the populations in Casco Bay have expanded once more onto adjacent mainland areas and are a major concern. No studies have evaluated its potential to spread or to become established in other coastal areas in North America. Our proposed research will help fill this void. The decline of browntail moth in North America coincided with the introduction and establishment of several parasitic flies that attack browntail moth. These included browntail specialists and the generalist Compsilura concinnata that was introduced against gypsy moth. Our research will test the hypothesis that browntail moth is confined to coastal enclaves because of lower levels of parasitism by C. concinnata or lower mortality from other natural enemies doc7017 none Sang Rice, Oryza sativa, is the world s most important food crop. It is one of two cultivated species (with African cultivated rice, O. glaberrima) in a genus with 21 additional wild species, distributed in Asia, Africa, Australia, and Latin America. Both diploid and tetraploid species are known (plants with double the number of chromosomes), the latter suspected to be stabilized hybrids of various combinations of diploid (2n=24) rices. With colleagues in the U.S. and China, Dr. Tao Sang is addressing four major goals related to the evolution and classification of rice species: (1) reconstruct a phylogeny of the 23 species of Oryza and nearby grass relatives from gene sequences from 12 nuclear single- or few-copy genes plus the chloroplast matK gene; (2) determine with nuclear and chloroplast molecular markers the likely species parentage of the tetraploid rices, including the likely maternal parent; (3) add new single-copy or low-copy nuclear genes to the systematist s toolkit for species-level phylogenetic resolution; and (4) integrate genomic methods with modern systematic practices, particularly in the analysis of hybrids and polyploids. Dr. Sang has accumulated preliminary comparative data for 7 nuclear genes already, thought to mark 5 different linkage groups (chromosomes) of rice; the goal of the 12 genes is to represent nearly all 12 chromosomes in combined-genes analyses, to determine congruence and distinguish gene phylogenies from species phylogenies. Collaboration with Dr. Song Ge at the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences has ensured representative sampling of all species of Oryza and of several outgroup taxa, usually from multiple accessions. Special efforts are being made to detect cases of gene silencing or deletion at homoeologous loci in the tetraploids, and to search for patterns in such changes that may prove of general significance in the evolution of polyploid plants doc7018 none Schneider This three-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research in astronomy involves Stephen E. Schneider of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Chantal Balkowski of the Observatoire de Paris. The investigators will conduct joint observations using the Nancay and Arecibo radiotelescopes. The complementarity of these instruments will allow for: (1) new measures of the combined stellar and gaseous baryonic content of galaxies; (2) searches for gas-rich galaxies dominated by old, red populations of stars; (3) detection of large-scale structures into deep regions of the universe beyond our Galaxy; and (4) examination of motions of galaxies relative to large-scale structure. The project is part of the 2-Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) which generates images of the entire sky at near-infrared wavelengths. Faint and low surface brightness galaxies in the 2MASS survey are the foci of this collaboration. The project takes advantage of complementary expertise of the US and French investigators, combines data generated by the 2MASS and the 21 cm radio observations at Nancay. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator and undergraduate student. CNRS will support the visits of French researchers to the United States. The collaboration will advance fundamental understanding of the mechanisms of star formation in normal galaxies and low surface brightness galaxies doc7019 none Maureen Stanton. Understanding the mechanisms, which facilitate the coexistence of species, is a focal area of contemporary ecology. The proposed project addresses such issues by examining the factors that allow four species of ants, which are obligately associated with swollen thorn acacias in Kenya, to co-exist on a single species of acacia, Acacia drepanolobium. A series of alternative hypotheses will be examined using observational, manipulative, and modeling approaches. The first hypothesis is that the likelihood of coexistence is enhanced to the extent that a trade off exists between colonization and competitive ability. Preliminary data suggest that the two competitively dominant species of ants are limited colonizers that principally extend into new areas via colony expansion, whereas colonization by the two competitively inferior species is accomplished by foundress queens. Proposed research will elucidate the differential role of colonization and local competition in determining coexistence. The second hypothesis is that coexistence is enhanced if subordinate ant species have an advantage conferred by temporal priority. Planned experiments will determine the benefit derived from persistence, which is associated with host tree modification by subordinate ant species. The third hypothesis is that coexistence is facilitated because competitively dominant species are at greater risk from natural enemies than are less abundant subordinate species. Preliminary data suggest that this is less likely because rates of parasitism and predation are generally low for all four species of ant. The fourth hypothesis is that differential exploitation of patchy resources in a heterogeneous environment increases the likelihood of coexistence. Preliminary data suggest that dominant species replace subordinant species in high quality patches, whereas subordinant species are more common in low quality patches. Planned experiments will assess whether the outcome of competitive interactions is dependent on patch quality. Results from these experiments will be integrated into a matrix projection model, which will assess the stability of ant communities and the role of spatio-temporal variation in long-term community dynamics doc7020 none Aldo Migone This proposal describes several sets of adsorption isotherm measurements that will be performed to characterize the systems formed by gases physisorbed on carbon nanotubes and on carbon nanohorns: 1) We will search for, and investigate the characteristics of, the one-dimensional (1-D) phases which can be present for gases adsorbed on bundles of single walled nanotubes (SWNTs). Our preliminary data indicate that 1-D phases are, indeed, present for Xe and CH4 on SWNT bundles. We will study further these two systems; 2) we will establish whether or not H2 can adsorb in the interstitial channels (ICs) of nanotube bundles, by comparing the area determined, on the same sample, using H2, and using a larger adsorbate. While this question remains open for H2, our results show that Ne, Xe and CH4 can not penetrate into the ICs; 3) we will determine the binding energies of H2, Ar, Kr and CF4 on close-ended and on open-ended SWNT bundles, and on agglomerations of carbon nanohorns. Our results for Ne, CH4, and Xe indicate that the binding energies on close-ended SWNT bundles are approximately 1.75 times larger than on graphite, in excellent agreement with theory. However, we have very preliminary (and quite intriguing) evidence that suggests that the binding energy for H2 may be considerably higher; and 4) we will investigate the adsorption of Xe, H2 and Ar on carbon nanohorns. We will determine the potential of carbon nanohorns for gas storage applications. All of the proposed experiments will be performed on high-sensitivity, in-house-built, computer-controlled setups, which have already been thoroughly tested in previous adsorption experiments. This work will be done with students who will be prepared to enter the scientific technical work force of the next few decades. %%% This project deals with the characteristics of the systems formed by gases adsorbed on two new forms of carbon: nanotubes and nanohorns. Nanotubes have diameters which are ten thousand times smaller than a human hair. The walls of the nanotubes we will use in our studies are only one single atom thick (single-wall nanotubes). Gases adsorbed on nanotubes allow the physical realization, in the laboratory, of matter in one dimension. One-dimensional systems behave quite differently from three-dimensional matter; this makes these adsorbed systems interesting from a fundamental perspective. From a practical point of view, adsorption on nanotubes and on nanohorns (a related, form of carbon), has significant potential for applications in gas storage technology. This project consists of several parts: 1) An investigation of the different one-dimensional phases (i.e., the one-dimensional analogs of solids, liquids and gases) that are present in systems formed by gases adsorbed on nanotubes and nanohorns; 2) a determination of how tightly hydrogen, krypton, xenon, argon, and freon are bound to these two new forms of carbon; and 3) a determination of the effective area available for adsorption on carbon nanohorns for different gases. These quantities are determined by measuring, at several fixed temperatures, the amount of gas adsorbed on the carbon substrates, as a function of the pressure of the surrounding vapor. These measurements will be conducted on fully automated, high-sensitivity, adsorption setups. These experiments will be performed with the aid of students who thereby gain valuable experience in an area of current technological importance and who will be prepared for employment by industry, academia, or government doc7021 none This project is concerned with the evolutionary forces that lead to genetic variation within populations and the genetic differences between species. Genetic variation within populations, which is often manifest as observable differences between individuals, is due to a delicate balance of forces: mutation injecting variation into populations and natural selection and or random factors removing variation. Genetic differences between species are due to these same forces, although natural selection is the only cause of evolutionary adaptations. The proposed research will explore the nature of these forces, focusing in particular on the random factors that remove variation, on the mutations that caused physical differences between individuals, and on the mutations that cause different species to produce sterile or inviable offspring. The methodology for this research involves the mathematical analysis and computer simulation of models of evolution followed by a comparison of the properties of these models to data that has been obtained by others. The broader significance of this work concerns our understanding of the implications of genetic variation in such important human traits as disease susceptibility and in agricultural traits of economic importance. In addition, this work will have a profound impact on our understanding of human origins and the recent patterns of human migration doc7022 none The interaction between the solar wind and Earth s magnetosphere is often manifested by transient variations in magnetic field, plasma and energetic particle parameters. Such transient events are commonly observed by spacecraft in the vicinity of the dayside magnetopause. The proposed study is an investigation of the distribution patterns and the scale sizes of these events using spacecraft at geosynchronous orbit. The results will provide a connecting path from the solar wind through the magnetosphere to Earth s ionosphere as well as information on the decay and evolution of these events. The project has two primary objectives. The first objective is to obtain a better understanding of the relationship between transient magnetic signatures in the dayside magnetosphere and in the ionosphere. The second objective is an investigation of magnetospheric transient events using simultaneous observations by two GOES spacecraft and the AMPTE CCE during late . Since this project is complementary to earlier work on the motion and distribution of transient events, the overall result will be a comprehensive survey of the properties of magnetospheric transient events. As with previous projects performed by the principal investigator, this study will involve the active participation of undergraduate students. A strong emphasis will be placed on learning and independent thinking. The importance of research in the educational process will be stressed doc7023 none Grosky This award supports the participation of American scientists in a U.S.-Japan seminar on MLabNet -advanced multimedia systems and applications, to be held in Karuizawa, Japan from October 10-12, . The co-organizers are professors William Grosky of Wayne State University and Professor Frederic Andres of the National Institute of Informatics (NII) in Tokyo, Japan. MlabNet is a virtual multimedia research framework between various institutions in the United States, Japan, France, Italy and Thailand and has existed since April . Two important projects being investigated under this framework are the Very Large-Scale Hypermedia Delivery System (VLSHDS) and MediaSys, which provides an extensible interface for multimedia management. The proposed seminar will include research presentations, posters, and demonstrations. It will assess the research cooperation inside MLabNet in the context of these projects, as well as address issues in information access and sharing multimedia content between the involved countries. They will also address issues in cultural heritage, in the context of future research issues related to the National Science Foundation framework, the Japanese Ministry of Education framework, and the Fifth Framework set by the European Union. Seminar organizers have made a special effort to involve younger researchers, postdocs and graduate students as both participants and observers. The exchange of ideas and data with Japanese experts in this field will enable U.S. participants to advance their own work, and will set the stage for future collaborative projects. Dissemination of information on the seminar will be available on the World Wide Web doc7024 none Kohler Long-term experiments performed at large spatial scales are costly, logistically difficult, and, as a consequence, seldom well replicated. But because smaller-scale experiments may not readily scale up to larger contexts, large-scale experiments may be critically important in understanding the processes influencing ecological communities in natural ecosystems. This LTREB project will continue the study of a naturally replicated, whole-ecosystem perturbation brought about by disease-induced reductions in populations of a dominant herbivore, the caddisfly, in cold water streams in Michigan and Maine. Maintenance of caddisfly populations at low levels by repeated outbreaks of a host-specific pathogen was first observed in the late s in several hydrologically stable streams in Michigan s Lower Peninsula that were already the subject of long-term monitoring. Results to date from these systems indicate that biotic processes play a major role in organizing their communities. In the mid- s, a foundation was laid to assess the generality of these findings through the addition of study streams in two regions (western Upper Peninsula, Michigan, western Maine) having similar communities as the Michigan Lower Peninsula sites, but where hydrologically-derived disturbances should be more pronounced and frequent. This study will continue monitoring of biotic communities in streams in all three regions that have had, or are likely to have, substantial pathogen-induced variation in their caddisfly populations over time. These data series will allow the investigators to (1) discriminate among mechanistic models of trout stream community dynamics, (2) determine whether the long-term interactions between caddisfly and its pathogen is cyclic or stable, and (3) assess whether the relative importance of biotic and abiotic processes in affecting trout stream communities varies over a gradient of hydrologic stability doc7025 none Atmospheric methane contributes substantially to the greenhouse effect and has increased dramatically in the past century because of expanding agriculture and industry. Bacterial consumption of methane in soils is an important regulator of atmospheric methane concentration. The significance of the soil sink lies in its potential to mediate long-term, anthropogenic effects on atmospheric methane through its response to disturbances such as agriculture, forest clearcutting, drought, and soil warming. Because the amount of atmospheric methane consumed annually in soils is comparable to the annual increase in atmospheric methane, the cumulative effects of disturbance on the soil methane sink over time could contribute significantly to methane accumulation in the atmosphere. However, the biology of the soil sink is poorly understood because researchers have yet to identify and fully describe the soil bacteria that actually oxidize atmospheric methane in situ. In this project, Dr. Steudler and colleagues will investigate the physiology and molecular ecology of atmospheric methane oxidizers in five temperate and taiga forest ecosystems where disturbance effects on atmospheric methane consumption are well characterized. Their goal is to assess the role of cross-site diversity among the methane oxidizing organisms in controlling the soil methane consumption response to disturbances, including N fertilization, drought and soil warming. This research will provide an estimate of microbial diversity among soil atmospheric methane oxidizers across geographically distant and ecologically distinct forest ecosystems, examine how this diversity is distributed in nature relative to biogeochemical process dynamics and ecological gradients, and assess how important this diversity is in controlling the ecosystem-level response of soil methane consumption to disturbance and climate change doc7026 none Many characteristics in organisms have a complex genetic basis, so statistical methods must be used to study their behavior under natural or artificial selection. Often, observations are longitudinal; for example, repeated measurements taken on a tree, whether or not an animal is infested with parasites at a number of episodes, litter sizes during reproductive history. This project will develop techniques for studying quantitative genetics of complex longitudinal characters using Bayesian inference and robust distributions. Bayesian analysis uses probability to describe uncertainty about unknowns, e.g., a future observation or the mathematical form of a model. Robust distributions aim to protect from making incorrect assumptions in statistical models. Focus will be on three types of longitudinal data: 1) continuous (exercise in mice, milk yield in sheep), 2) discrete (presence of a cattle disease) at each of a number of measurements, and 3) counts (litter size of pigs). Computer simulations will examine the performance of the robust models under several genetics scenarios. Results will extend and improve the battery of statistical methods employed for genetic analysis of complex traits. The methods will draw exact inferences in small samples obtained from experiments or surveys generating longitudinal information doc7027 none Brian M. Wiegmann Drs. Brian Wiegmann and Jeffrey L. Thorne of North Carolina State University have been awarded a grant to study phylogenetic relationships of an economically important instect group. With nearly 60,000 described species, the Eremoneura, or higher-flies (Insecta: Diptera: Brachycera), are among the largest and most successful of Mesozoic-aged insect radiations. Conflicting morphological interpretations have fueled a debate over the relationships of the major subgroups within Eremoneura. The basal lineages of the two major eremoneuran groups, Empidoidea and Cyclorrhapha, have been particularly controversial. Despite recent attention, no molecular studies have yet addressed eremoneuran classification. This collaborative project will synthesize morphological and molecular evidence to reconstruct the timing and pattern of basal eremoneuran evolution. Recently proposed methods for estimating divergence times from nucleotide sequence data do not require the biologically implausible assumption that rates of molecular evolution are constant over time. Such methods for estimating divergence times are promising but have not yet received adequate evaluation or refinement. Eremoneuran relationships that are elucidated within this project, and recent compilations of fossil evidence will serve as a test system for the ability of new methods to estimate divergence times. Analyses will be carried out to: 1) test published hypotheses for the basal family-group relationships of Eremoneura, 2) test the monophyly of the Empidoidea and its position as proposed sister-group to the Cyclorrhapha, 3) reconstruct eremoneuran divergence times and test the robustness of divergence time estimation methods to differing genes and tree topologies, Molecular phylogenies and a reconstructed time scale for eremoneuran Diptera will be extremely valuable because Diptera are model systems for genetic, developmental, and evolutionary biology. Integration of molecular and morphological evidence on brachyceran phylogeny will ultimately provide a framework for uncovering patterns and causes associated with major Mesozoic-aged insect radiations doc7028 none Aga This award supports Diane Aga and students from the University of Nebraska-Kearney in a collaboration with Rudolf Schneider of the Department of Agricultural Chemistry at the University of Bonn, Germany. The project is coordinated with the PI s existing CAREER award from the Chemistry Division and will focus on the role of stereochemistry in the degradation of metolachlor, a commonly used herbicide in Europe and the U.S. This is a highly complementary collaboration because the PI brings analytical strength and soil-science expertise while Dr. Schneider has expertise in plant metabolism and can provide actual plant-grown test samples. The project also fosters education and training of junior researchers by providing them international experience early in their careers doc7029 none Molecular advances have made it possible to study wildlife populations by extracting and analyzing DNA from shed material such as hair or scat and from museum specimens. The familiar forensic practice of DNA fingerprinting can be used on samples of hair or scat to capture, count and track individuals without ever handling or observing them. Unfortunately, these materials contain low quantities of DNA that introduce sporadic errors and inaccuracies into genetic data. Errors also occur when multiple individuals share the same DNA fingerprint or when one clump of hair, in fact, contains hair from two individuals. In this project, a set of statistical methods will be developed to assess the probability that a given sample contains each of the different possible errors. This leads to an efficient strategy for finding and removing errors by focusing further data acquisition on the most unreliable samples. Finally, the statistical framework will be packaged into a computer program and be made available to all researchers via the internet. Forensic, non-invasive and historical genetic information on wild populations can be used to address questions that are impractical or impossible to address by non-genetic methods. This research project will make a major contribution to accessing this type of information because it directly addresses two issues of paramount importance, accuracy and efficiency. But just as with forensic DNA evidence in a court of law, this information must be reliable for the conclusions to be accurate. Because collecting genetic information is also expensive, its acquisition must be efficient doc7030 none Sorenson The African indigobirds (genus Vidua) are obligate brood parasites, reproducing only by laying their eggs in the nests of other species. Indigobirds are highly host-specific and the young parasites precisely mimic the mouth colors and patterns in the young of their respective hosts. As adults, male indigobirds mimic the songs of their hosts. This behavior results in the genetic cohesion of indigobird species because females also imprint on the host species and choose their mates based on song. These same behavioral mechanisms, however, may result in reproductive isolation and rapid speciation after the colonization of a new host species. This research will use molecular genetic markers to investigate the evolutionary history and genetic structure of indigobird species and populations using samples from over 500 indigobirds collected throughout Africa. In addition, an intensive field study in Cameroon will directly evaluate the incidence of ongoing hybridization and genetic introgression among indigobird populations using different hosts. The indigobird system is a remarkable example of rapid evolutionary diversification and adaptive evolution and represents one of those unusual situations in which the evolutionary process can be studied in progress. This research will contribute to a renewed interest among evolutionary biologists in the mechanisms of speciation and the roles of natural and sexual selection in generating biodiversity. A clear understanding of the evolutionary history and genetic structure of indigobird populations will also lay the groundwork for future analyses of the genetic and developmental mechanisms underlying mouth mimicry, the key genetic adaptation of these host-specific brood parasites doc7031 none Hohn This award supports Keith Hohn and students from Kansas State University in a collaboration with Olaf Deutschmann of the Physics Department at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. The research funded by this award will involve detailed modeling of the partial oxidation of methane at millisecond contact times. Modeling of high flow-rate conditions will lead to better understanding of the complex interaction of gas and surface chemistries and of mass, heat, and momentum transport, and thereby to a better understanding of short contact-time reactors. The U.S. group will obtain experimental data suitable for modeling at high flow rates, while the German group will perform simulations with newly modified computer codes. The opportunity this joint, collaborative research effort presents junior researchers is substantial, and the work done on this proposal will help institutionalize the relationship between the German and U.S. research groups doc7032 none interpretation. The project will also benefit from interaction with European industry which tends to be ahead of the US in utilization of formal approaches to system design. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator. The CNRS will support the visits of French researchers to the United States. The collaboration will advance fundamental understanding of component based development of software systems and may lead to new understanding about the refinement and composition approach to managing complex and huge software systems doc7033 none Michael D. Sorenson Dr. Michael Sorenson of Boston University has been awarded a grant to construct a comprehensive phylogeny or evolutionary tree for the avian family Anatidae (the ducks, geese, and swans) by comparative DNA sequence analyses. Found on all continents except Antarctica, the waterfowl are economically and culturally important due to their popularity with sport hunters, birders, aviculturalists, and artists. Waterfowl have also figured prominently in evolutionary biology and more recently have become flagships for wetlands conservation About 5,000 base pairs of DNA sequence data will be collected for each of the ~150 species of waterfowl. These molecular data will be combined with previously published information on their morphology and behavior to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships among waterfowl species, genera, and sub-families. Preliminary results suggest significant conflict between morphological and molecular evidence and point to a substantial revision of current views of waterfowl phylogeny. This conflict appears to be largely the result of convergent evolution in morphological characters associated with diving. The ecological and behavioral diversity of waterfowl combined with an extensive body of existing comparative data present unparalleled opportunities for the study of molecular, behavioral, morphological, and life history evolution. The realization of this potential, however, relies on the availability of a robust and well-corroborated phylogeny which allows one to discriminate between shared ancestry and adaptation to common environmental conditions as alternative explanations for similarities between species. Comparative analyses will lead to a better understanding of the ecological adaptations of waterfowl and thereby inform the efforts of wildlife managers and conservation biologists. The research also will provide systematists with an exemplary data set for the development of new doc7034 none Anticipated rapid climatic change over the next decades to centuries raises the concern that plant populations will be unable to migrate fast enough to track changing environmental conditions. Migration rates depend on dispersal of seed and on barriers to population spread, such as mountain ranges, large water bodies, and patterns of urban and agricultural land use. Range expansions at the end of the last ice age provide evidence that populations tracked global change in the past, but current evidence does not indicate the speed of these migrations. The proposed research will determine the pathways of past population spread and provide insights into rates of corresponding migrations. We will construct and analyze maps of chloroplast DNA variation across the ranges of common eastern North American tree species. Such maps reveal the genetic fingerprint of late-glacial refugia and post-glacial migration routes, and complement existing data for fossil pollen. The maps of post-glacial migration we will provide a framework for analysis of population expansion. Results will be used to test hypotheses concerning how growth of trees and dispersal of seeds affect the potential of plants to track rapid environmental change doc7035 none Gowdy This award supports a third year of funding for John Gowdy and students from the Rensselaer Polytech Institute in a collaboration with Bernd Hansjuergens of the Department of Economic and Sociological Research at the Umweltforschungzentrum (UFZ) (Center for Environmental Research) in Leipzig, Germany. The research funded by this award will make it possible for the German and U.S. researchers to share and compare research findings on two projects, one in the Hudson river watershed and one in the Elbe river watershed, each of which examines the connections between economic activity, land use changes, and their impact on the ecology and on sustainable development policies. The end result will be a process that provides a rigorous analytical foundation for the pursuit of regional sustainability. The opportunity this joint, collaborative research effort presents junior researchers is substantial, and the work done on this proposal will institutionalize the relationship between Renssealer and the UFZ Department of Economics and Sociological Research doc7036 none 00- Silver Dissimilatory and assimilatory controls on nitrogen retention and loss: Oxygen and nitrate dynamics in tropical forest soils In humid tropical forests, the combination of abundant rainfall, soils with high water-holding capacity, and high metabolic activity can lead to conditions where oxygen is rapidly and completely consumed in the soil. These conditions also increase the potential for nitrogen trace gas loss and leaching. In a global context, tropical forests currently have the highest N2O emissions, and can exhibit large nitrogen losses to groundwater relative to temperate forests. Despite this high potential for nitrogen loss, tropical forest plant productivity is not generally nitrogen limited. Dr. Silver and colleagues propose to combine field and laboratory experiments to study nitrogen retention (via dissimilatory nitrate reduction to ammonium, and plant and microbial uptake) and nitrogen loss (via leaching and denitrification) in forests of Puerto Rico. This research will contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms controlling nitrogen dynamics in humid tropical forests, and improve our ability to predict the effects of anthropogenic nitrogen deposition and global change on nitrogen cycling doc7037 none Walmsley This award supports Ian Walmsley and students from the University of Rochester in a collaboration with Werner Vogel of the Department of Physics at the University of Rostock, Germany. The project will focus on the nature of entangled states and their relation to the measurement of non-classicality. The two groups will join forces to produce and study the entanglement of short biphotons and multimode squeezed light pulses. They will also look at coupled anharmonic systems such as the vibrational and rotational states of molecules. The investigations will require both theoretical and experimental work, which will make extensive use of the complementary expertise available from the German and U.S. groups. Exchange of junior researchers is emphasized to add an international dimension to their training and to allow them to establish international connections early in their careers doc7038 none Hall This three-year award for US-France cooperative research involves Bronwyn Hall of the University of California at Berkeley and the National Bureau of Economic Research, Paul David of Stanford University, Jacques Mairesse of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and Dominique Foray of the Universite Paris-Dauphine. They will conduct comparative US-France studies of resource allocation in scientific institutions and impact on research productivity. The objective is to test a simulation model and understand its econometric properties, using data from the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). These two organizations use different resource allocation systems to support research and scientific institutions. In addition to this project, the investigators will continue their studies on the econometrics of investment and the heterogeneity of behavior of US and French manufacturing firms. The US and French investigators have complementary expertise. Hall and Mairesse will focus on the econometrics of investments; and all four investigators will work on the comparative studies of resource allocation and productivity of scientific institutions. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the CNRS. NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigators and graduate students. CNRS will support the visits of the French researchers to the United States doc7039 none Luthey-Schulten This award supports the participation of American scientists in a U.S.-Japan seminar on protein folding, function and funnels, to be held in Honolulu, Hawaii from January 13-19, . The co-organizers are professors Peter Wolynes and Luthey-Schulten of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Professor Shoji Takada at Kyoto University in Japan. The topic of protein folding is extremely important. In recent years, protein folding has begun to be viewed in the context of a statistical mechanics-based, energy landscape theory. This theory provides a framework in which quantitative treatment of complex dynamics of protein folding can be analyzed. The theory starts with the statistical mechanical treatment of random polymer systems and proceeds by linking characteristic features of ensembles of proteins at various stages of folding to features and properties of the energy landscape of foldable proteins. A major practical result of the energy landscape approach to protein folding has been a major advance in the success of algorithms for the prediction of protein structure from sequence, an important part of the post genomic paradigm of biology. They are also important in their function, especially in the area of gene regulation. The exchange of ideas and data with Japanese experts in this field will enable U.S. participants to advance their own work, and will set the stage for future collaborative projects. Dissemination of information on the seminar will be available on the World Wide Web doc7040 none John Silander. This proposal addresses two long-standing, fundamental, and interrelated questions in biology: (1) what are the environmental factors that determine the distribution of species, and (2) what are the ecological and biogeographic mechanisms that cause spatial variation in species richness? To answer these questions, the proposed research takes advantage of a well-documented database concerning the species-rich Protea flora from the Cape Floristic Kingdom of South Africa, a global hot spot of biodiversity. The PIs will integrate distributional data into a geographic information system (GIS), and subsequently analyze them from two quantitative perspectives, including hierarchical or Bayesian models and hybrid models based on cellular automata and simulation. Modeling will be expansive and include considerations of environmental variables, species attributes (including phylogenetic relationships), explicit spatial location (not simply ranges), and population dynamic (e.g., vital rates of birth, death, and migration) as well as evolutionary characteristics (e.g., speciation) of taxa. The full analytical protocol will include model construction, validation, and comparison. Modeling will facilitate a mechanistic understanding and the prediction of where a particular species will occur, and how such species-specific mechanisms give rise to broader-scale patterns of species richness doc7041 none 7 Glebov This three-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research in optical materials for high-power lasers involves Leonid B. Glebov and Oleg M. Efrimov of the University of Central Florida and Dr. Laurent Sarger of the Unviersity of Bordeaux I and the Center for Molecular, Optical and Oscillation Physics. The proposal addresses problems related to the selffocusing of laser beams that result in damage to the laser s optical components. One of the most important parameters of optical materials used in multi-channel laser systems is the nonlinear refractive index (n2), which drives the selffocusing process. Materials, which have low n2 values, such as fused silica, may reduce damage during laser beam transport and focusing. In this collaboration the investigators will compare the nonlinear refractive index for samples of fused silica fabricated with different technologies and the linear optical and spectral properties of the samples. They will also determine the features of linear and nonlinear optical properties fluctuations. The project takes advantage of US and French complementary expertise in the fields of linear and nonlinear optical properties, laser-induced breakdown, structure, and technology of silicate glasses. The joint efforts will advance understanding of the principle of high quality fused silica selection for optical components in multi-channel high-power laser systems. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover the expenses of visits of US investigators. The CNRS will support the visits of French researchers to the United States doc7042 none Earl Werner. Interactions multiple species create and sustain natural communities. Trophic cascades, species diversity, and community vulnerability to exotic invaders can be indirectly influenced by predator-prey interactions. This project builds upon and extends a substantial database gathered on the interactions between odonate predators (Anax and Tramea), bullfrog and green frog tadpole prey, and the detritus periphyton resources the tadpoles rely on. Each species (e.g., predator, prey, parasite) plays a complex role in food webs, and exhibits behaviors that are influenced by interactions with the environment, and with other species in the community. Understanding these interactions is one of the most fundamental objectives in ecology. For example, competition between predators can affect the traits and behaviors of prey, such as prey foraging rates. Such predator-mediated modifications of prey feeding behaviors can have short and long-term effects on food web dynamics. To investigate these community interactions, this project will use field experiments and modeling to test the central theory that phenotypic variation in trait-mediated indirect interactions (TMIIs) can have profound and unexpected effects on the community. This project has strong theoretical and empirical components and blends modeling with hypothesis testing at multiple temporal and spatial scales. Although this work is focused on how predators affect food webs, the underlying principles are applicable for investigating diverse types of functional relationships between species doc7043 none Becker This three-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research involves Michael F. Becker, John W. Keto, and Desiderio Kovar at the University of Texas, Austin, and Philippe Pernod and his group at the Ecole Centrale de Lille in Lille, France. The objective of the research is the development of integrated actuators using nanoparticle based thick film materials and MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical Systems) theory and design. Piezoelectric and magnetostrictive actuators will be produced by using supersonic jet deposition of nanoparticle derived films. The US group brings to this collaboration expertise in the preparation of special nanoparticle generation, materials design and testing of MEMS actuators. This is complemented by the French group s expertise and experience in actuator manufacturing and materials. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigators and graduate students. The CNRS will support the visits of French researchers to the United States. The collaboration will advance fundamental understanding of nanoparticle generation and the development and engineering process for new MEMS actuators doc7044 none Lucchese This three-year award for US-France cooperative research in chemistry involves Robert R. Lucchese at Texas A&M University, Danielle Dowek and Georges Raseev at the Universite de Paris Sud in Orsay, France. Their collaboration addresses theoretical and experimental studies of the photoionization process and development of a methodology for comparison and for application to small molecular systems. Photoelectron angular distributions in photoionization is the project s principal focus. The US investigator brings to this collaboration theoretical expertise in molecular photoionization processes. This is complemented by the French group s experimental expertise on photoionization and experience computing molecular frame photoelectron angular distributions. The project also provides access to a specialized synchrotron light source in Orsay. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator and graduate students. The CNRS will support the visits of French researchers to the United States. The collaboration will advance understanding of fundamental processes in photoionization. Studies of photoionization probe the nature of highly excited states of molecules. These states have applications to many fields from astrophysics and atmospheric chemistry to biology and materials processing doc7045 none P.I. Kirk O. Winemiller Institution: Texas A & M University Proposal Number: This research addresses the importance and strength of mechanisms involved in feedbacks and interactions among major components of lower food webs in floodplain river ecosystems. The work will explore how temporal heterogeneity due to seasonal flood pulses influences these food webs. Floods lead to a nutrient pulse into aquatic ecosystems that varies over time and over space. These floods may cause time lags in the reciprocity of consumer resource interactions, so that donor-control does not dominate the system continuously. A series of fish exclosure enclosure experiments will be used to explore fish effects on alge and particulate organic matter over the annual hydrocycle. Experiments will be conducted during three phases of the hydrocycle. The research will be completed in South American tropical riverine floodplains. The work will be significant in enhancing scientific understanding of the relative effects of donor vs. consumer control in relation to ecosystem dynamics and it will help elucidate how ecosystems link species to landscapes doc7046 none Balents This three-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research in condensed matter theory involves Leon M. Balents and his group at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Pierre Le Doussal and his group at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, France. The investigators propose to extend and apply elastic models of materials that describe: vortex lattices in type II superconductors; pinned charge density waves and Wigner crystals; domain walls in ferromagnets; and quantum Hall bilayers. Functional normalization group methods, quantum transport methods and inclusion of topological defects will be utilized. The objective is to develop more realistic descriptions of coarsening and aging of experimentally relevant systems and use the models to explore transport, dissipation, non-linear and glassy dynamics in the quantum region. The US group brings to this collaboration expertise in disordered systems. They will focus on quantum transport and applications of low-dimensional conductors and other effects. This is complemented by expertise of the French group in disordered systems and their new techniques to describe topological defects. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF s Division of International Programs and Division of Materials Research will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator, postdoctoral researcher and or graduate student. The CNRS will support the visits of French researchers to the United States. The collaboration will advance fundamental understanding of interactions and disorder in modern materials and the coarsening and aging process of materials doc7047 none The project will examine biogeochemical and hydrological mechanisms that influence the extent of N limitation in alpine and chaparral ecosystems of the Sierra Nevada, California. These ecosystems exhibit large, episodic losses of nitrate and their future integrity is threatened by climate change and nearby human activities. The investigators hypothesize that a key factor controlling N-losses in these ecosystems is the effect of transitions between growing and non-growing seasons on microbial populations and biogeochemical processes in soils during non-growing seasons. Seasonal transitions in Mediterranean climates, like those of California, are characterized by abrupt shifts from dry to wet conditions, warm to cold temperatures and from low to high runoff periods. These transitions induce changes in soil moisture and temperature that mediate flushing of nitrate. Over the long-term, nitrate losses during seasonal transitions may be a primary mechanism by which N limitation is maintained in alpine and chaparral ecosystems. The project will take a watershed approach to studying N dynamics in alpine and chaparral ecosystems and will utilize a combination of innovative techniques, including plot-scale studies, isotopic and chemical tracers, watershed mass balances and ecosystem modeling. Results from these investigations will help explain a major question in terrestrial ecology: Why are plant communities N limited? Additionally, the work will provide an understanding of the connections between hydrology and biogeochemistry during seasonal transitions, which is needed to predict how California s montane ecosystems will respond to anticipated global change doc7048 none There is a growing realization that spatially- structured dynamics are an important consideration for many ecological systems. This is particularly true when local interactions among individuals of a sedentary species are intense. Intertidal communities often display intense local interactions among individuals, and the dense populations, small spatial scale, and striking distribution patterns of the communities suggest that this system is especially apt for investigations of spatially-structured dynamics. Despite this fact, little work has been done to develop a spatially-explicit theory for intertidal benthic communities. This area of ecology is ripe for the development and testing of mechanistic spatially-explicit dynamic models. The first objective of this study is to develop a spatially-explicit multi-model approach to the study of predation in benthic communities. Research will focus on populations of the intertidal mussel Mytilus califonianus, an important dominant competitor along rocky shores of the Pacific coast, and its predators, the sea star Pisaster ochraceus in the Northwest and the spiny lobster, Panulirus interruptus, in Southern California. Three classes of spatially-explicit models will be developed and analyzed: (1) cellular automata, (2) analytical models consisting of partial and ordinary differential equations, and (3) individual -based models. Comparison and cross-validation will occur among models in order to take advantage of the strengths and that each has to offer. Whenever possible, model parameter values will estimated from field and laboratory data, model predictions will be compared to fine-scaled distributional data being collected in the field, and the model simulations will be used to suggest novel field experiments. The second objective is to provide a rich interdisciplinary training experience for master s students who are interested in applying the tools and techniques of mathematics and computer science to ecological problems. Project funds will be used to provide full-time support to three graduate students who will be recruited from the ethnically-diverse student body at Cal State LA and neighboring institutions. A postdoctoral research associate will be hired to develop the individual-based models and assist with student mentoring. Interdisciplinary programs of study will be designed for each student and training will include participation in an NCEAS workgroup and a summer field experience. This project will advance our knowledge of how nearshore marine benthic communities develop and are maintained and will contribute to the training of the next generation of ecologists doc7049 none Research will examine on how trophic interactions (i.e., feeding relationships) influence succession using a natural biological invasion in which a native plant (lupine) and its associated specialist herbivores are recolonizing Mount St. Helens. Efforts will quantify the extent to which spatial variation in the dynamics of trophic interactions influences the pace and pattern of primary succession. This will afford a unique opportunity to unravel complex connections between consumer-resource interactions over a large landscape. Indeed, the Mount St. Helens landscape provides a unique but fleeting opportunity to study an herbivore-mediated transition between successional phases. Three questions will be answered in detail. First, do resource or consumer gradients associated with patches of lupine drive spatially structured herbivore dynamics during primary succession? Second, do lupines and lupine herbivory affect the community dynamics of plants? Third, how is this complex tritrophic reinvasion progressing and influencing primary succession? The detailed investigations will constitute a key case study of how sequential spatial advance of components of a parasitoid-herbivore-plant system can influence the dynamics of species change at the landscape scale of analysis doc7050 none With National Science Foundation support Drs. Douglas Kennett and Barbara Voorhies will conduct one season of archaeological excavation at sites located on and near the Pacific coast in southern Mexico. Previous work in this area has indicated the presence of sites which span the Archaic through Early Formative periods from ca. 7,500 to 2,700 years before the present. Shell middens located along the coast indicate that Archaic period hunters and gatherers made extensive use of fish and shell fish, and botanical evidence suggests that these groups may have had access to domestic maize. They also collected wild plant and animal resources from a variety of resource zones and probably foraged out from central base camps located on the forested coastal plain. By the beginning of the Middle Formative Period, ca 2,700 years ago these settlements were transformed into sedentary agricultural villages which dotted the landscape. Inhabitants depended primarily on maize agriculture. The goal of this research is to gain insight into this poorly understood and crucial transformation in human subsistence and settlement patterns, because this basic change, from reliance on wild to cultivated resources occurred independently in many parts of the world and set the stage for the development of complex societies. Tentative evidence suggests that early Archaic peoples had access to maize but it is unclear how this domesticate was incorporated into their diets and how this altered subsistence and settlement strategies. Previous research in the area on this crucial transformational time span has indicated the presence of abundant sites but has failed to define shifts in land use, changes in human interactions and regional variations in human behavior. Drs. Kennett and Voorhies believe that these changes may best be understood in the context of larger land use patterns. While many sites have been discovered along the Pacific coast much less is known about adjacent inland mountainous regions. Survey has indicated that a series of caves and rock shelters are present and quite likely were inhabited by Archaic peoples. Because of the shelter they offer from rain, such sites often provide excellent protection for plant remains and Dr. Kennett and Voorhies wish to conduct test excavations to recover archaeological and botanical materials. They will also excavate later coastal Formative agricultural sites to gain additional insight into subsistence practices. To reconstruct possible seasonal movements the investigators will carry out isotopic analysis of shells because variation in the ratio of oxygen isotopes provides insight into the season in which they were harvested. They will focus also on trace element studies of ceramics in an attempt to link finished products to clay sources and thus reconstruct the movements of goods and the corresponding economic links between groups of people over time. This research is important for several reasons. It will provide data on a poorly known archaeological region and this will be of interest to many archaeologists. The work will also increase understanding of the transition from foraging to farming in Mesoamerica and offer insight into the processes which led to the rise of an important New World civilization doc7051 none PI: Barbara L. Peckarsky Effects of recruitment and post-recruitment processes on abundance of stream insects: a comparative approach This study will help us understand how multiple factors interact to affect the abundance of plants and animals in nature. The goal of this proposal is to explain patterns of abundance of stream insect populations by conducting observations and experiments under realistic field conditions. Experiments in natural streams will test whether the abundance of larvae of two mayfly species is determined by the number of eggs laid by adults or the amount of food or predators in the larval habitat. The two mayfly species differ in egg-laying behavior, vulnerability to trout predation and behavior when faced with the risk predation and low levels of food (algae). First, in collaboration with Dr. Stephen Ellner we will use simulation models to predict how recruitment (egg-laying), presence of predators, and amount of food should affect the relative abundance of each mayfly species. Second, we will measure egg-laying, larval dispersal behavior (drift) and mayfly abundance in natural fish and fishless streams with different levels of food (algae). Third, in large-scale field experiments we will add or remove rocks and logs used by one of the mayfly species for egg-laying to test directly whether abundance of larvae is a function of recruitment. Fourth, we will drip water from containers with trout into fishless streams to determine whether drift of mayflies in response to trout chemicals can explain patterns of abundance in fish and fishless streams. Finally, we will manipulate multiple factors in experiments carried out in stream-side, flow-through chambers to determine whether drift of mayflies in response food and predators can explain larval abundance. Specifically, we hope to determine whether interactions with predators and resources override recruitment to explain the abundance of mayfly larvae in streams. This research can be generalized to apply to populations of other organisms that live in open systems and have one or more highly mobile life stages doc7052 none Bruice The desire to understand the primary tenets, which provide the naturally occurring enzyme catalysts such high efficiency, has been pervasive for half a century. Most attention has been paid to the proposals that: (i) the enzyme binds, and thereby stabilizes, the transition state (Pauling, ); (ii) that the binding of substrate and transition state by enzyme freezes out molecular motions and thereby increase the entropy of activation (Jencks, ); and (iii) the enzyme holds the substrate in a conformation which closely resembles the transition state (Bruice, ). Recent experimental and computational data remove tenet (ii) from contention. This project is to differentiate the importance of tenets (i) and (iii). This is made feasible by recent advances in computational chemistry, the increased performance of current computers, and the advancements in determining the structural coordinates of enzyme substrate species (E S) by x-ray crystallography. By application of kinetic isotope effects and combinations of quantum mechanics along with molecular mechanics (QM MM) one can obtain from E S the coordinates for the enzyme transition state complex (E TS). Long term molecular dynamic simulations (MD) of the motions in E S and ETS provide all the structural variations in time for these two species. For any given enzyme, data analysis allows a choice between preferential enzyme binding of the transition state (i) rather than the ground state and or conformers of ES which resemble closely the structure of ETS. This procedure has been used this laboratory for a number of enzymes. Our project is to extend these investigations to the enzyme reactions chorismate to prephenate by chorismate mutase, the hydrolysis of NAD+ by diptheria toxin and nucleoside hydrolysis by Crithidia fasciculata nucleoside hydrolase. These enzymes have been chosen on the basis of the simplicity of their catalytic reactions (first order processes without covalent intermediates) and availability of high resolution X-ray structures. The establishment of any generalization requires many explorations doc7053 none Buy, Ugo University of Illinois Chicago Workshop on Digital Government: An Urban Research Agenda This grant will support a workshop to define the information and computer science research agenda related to urban government issues. It will involve a consortium of 17 urban universities (listed on page 4 of the proposal) called the Great Cities Universities, of which the University of Illinois Chicago is one. Information and networking technologies now have the potential to affect a variety of domains of interest in an urban environment including land use, criminal justice, digital governance and democracy, GIS-supported issues such as housing and business locations, social welfare services, education, and many more. This is a rich area of applications which should be of great interest to the computer and information science community. This will be a joint effort of UIC s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and UIC s College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs; both disciplines will be essential to the an effective workshop doc7054 none DEB- Thomas C. Emmel Keith R. Wilmotte A collaborative grant has been awarded to Dr. Andrew Brower at Oregon State University and Drs. Thomas Emmel and Keith Willmott at the University of Florida to conduct an integrated phylogenetic analysis of relationships among the ithomiine butterflies. These tropical butterflies have been of interest to evolutionary biologists and biogeographers for more than a century, because they participate in complex, geographically varying mimicry rings. Different species of ithomiines, along with representatives of various other butterfly groups, have evolved similar-looking, brightly-colored wing patterns that make them memorable to predators. Because the butterflies are poisonous, the bright color pattern serves as a warning to avoid similar looking individuals, and thus there is a great benefit to sharing in the common signaling system. The result of this complex adaptation is that unrelated species may look virtually identical, complicating efforts to understand the relationships among species and genera in the group. Willmott and Emmel will conduct cladistic analyses of adult morphology and chromosome variation. Brower will complement that effort with study of additional characters from DNA sequences. The goal is to produce a robust phylogenetic hypothesis for relationships among the 50 or so genera based upon combined analysis of morphology, chromosomal structure, and molecular data. This will provide a model system for addressing similar complex situations among many other groups of animals and plants, and will allow a better understanding of how biodiversity on our planet has developed doc7055 none This CISE Information Technology Workforce (ITW) proposal requests funds to find a statistical methodology for dealing with the limitations of data sets with small sample sizes for special subgroups of interest. The data sets to be used for the study are the Current Population Survey (CPS) and the NSF s SESTAT database. The researchers propose to study, develop, and demonstrate methods of statistical inference that will provide improved inferential conclusions than currently appear in the literature. These methods will address questions of whether or not, after taking into account all the relevant background characteristics such as education and experience, there are disparities in salary, promotion rates, and job responsibilities among women and under-represented minorities in IT. They will also attempt to identify unique characteristics of successful women and under-represented minorities in IT careers. This project has the potential to provide improved methodology for researchers using the CPS and SESTAT data sets as well as insights about women and under-represented minorities who pursue IT careers doc7056 none The purpose of this project is to undertake the first book length study of the ethical and moral dimensions of restoration ecology, the science and technological practice of restoring damaged ecosystems. Following a detailed study focusing on the value of public participation in such restorations, the objectives of the project are to (1) articulate the moral foundations of restoration practices in opposition to philosophical objections concerning the conceptual foundations of restoration, (2) investigate the relationship between the moral foundations of restoration and the scientific questions involved in restoration such as the necessity of eliminating exotic species to make room for the restoration of native ecosystems, (3) ascertain whether establishment of the moral foundations of restoration assists in resolving ethical quandaries which have arisen over the science and technology involved in restoration, (4) determine whether ethical arguments exist for maintaining, where possible, public participation in restoration activities, and (5) question whether findings from objectives 1-4 should impact the way practitioners are trained to do restorations. In addition to undertaking a complete survey of work on (1) the role of public participation in environmental decision making in general and (2) the moral foundations of restoration ecology, both in the philosophical literature and in the scientific and social scientific literatures, completion of the project will also involve several site visits to restorations in Chicago, New York City, and several other locations involving substantial restoration activity, such as Madison, Wisconsin. The role of the site visits will be to test my philosophical intuitions on the benefits and hazards of public participation in restoration projects. As this will be the first book length treatment of the potentially positive values of restoration, the potential impact of this project is significant for (1) advancing understanding of the complexity of restoration as a scientific and technological practice beyond the current state of knowledge in the field and (2) creating a framework through which future work on the human resource elements of restoration can be understood. Restoration ecology is arguably one of the most important environmental practices currently engaged in toward the goal of achieving long-term environmental sustainability. This project will restore an absent moral dimension to discussions of this practice doc7057 none J. L. Anderson, Carnegie Mellon University Electrophoretic deposition is the procress where charged colloid particles are driven by an applied electrical field towards the surface of an electrode and deposited there. Under certain conditions, the particles will still be mobile and self assemble before being depositedat a fixed surface location. There is a variety of desirable applications for this procedure, depending on the colloids, the electrodes and also the applied electrical field; in particular, the results obtained differ radically for direct currents and for alternating ones. The goal of this proposal is first to assess the currentlyavailable theoretical models (e.g. electrohydrodynamic, electrokinetic) and their limitaions. It is then to develop a theory and perform experiments which would include all the aspects of self-ordered aggregation for the alternating current case (e.g. Brownian motion, electrokinetice, colloid forces). Specifically, the expected to increase accuracy substantially above what has been obtained elsewhere with layer-averaged modeling doc7058 none This CISE Information Technology Workforce (ITW) proposal requests funds for a large-scale study of the role of social networks in the underrepresentation of women in the IT workforce. Multiple cohorts of undergraduate and master s degree students in a leading MIS program will be surveyed at five points in time to identify their patterns of communication, trust, advice, friendship, and voluntary association in organizations. Their work roles on project teams, in student organizations, and in first jobs after graduation will be tracked. Background information will also be collected. The differential positions of women students in the networks, roles, and job placements will be analyzed using the techniques of network analysis as well as standard techniques of statistical inference. The influence of background characteristics, such as work experience and prior organizational affiliations will also be investigated. This project has the potential to provide significant insights about the degree to which personal networks contribute to the success of women in IT education and employment doc7059 none The chloroplastic carotenoid, zeaxanthin, has been identified as a blue light photoreceptor in guard cells. This SGER award addresses the early events in the sensory transducing cascade that follows the photoexcitation of zeaxanthin, using a recently discovered blue-green reversibility of stomatal movements as a diagnostic probe. Specific experiments include the characterization of zeaxanthin isomerization in a reconstituted pigment-protein system, using UV VIS, Raman, and FTIR spectroscopy, and the study of possible conformational changes of zeaxanthin binding protein(s) in the antenna bed of the chloroplast. Other experiments will examine whether chloroplast movements in Arabidopsis leaves are also blue-green reversible. All experiments demand the introduction of new techniques to central aspects of this research program. Success in this research would dramatically enhance our understanding of the early events in the sensory transduction of blue light in guard cells. The intrinsic high risk of the experiments and the high impact that would ensue from success in their implementation, make this appropriate as a SGER doc7060 none This award is for the partial support of the conference in the field of Approximation Theory at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. The conference will concentrate on various topics including classical approximation theory, wavelets, mutivariate splines and nonlinear approximation. The conference will be the tenth in a traditional triennial series of such conferences, held earlier at UT Austin, Texas A&M and Nashville doc7061 none Haas This is a CAREER award that supports research on strongly correlated electron systems and quantum magnetism with a computational thrust. The following problems will be attacked: (1) excitation spectra of complex spin liquids, such as the spin-orbital chain and multi-leg Heisenberg ladder, (2) the effect of doping two-dimensional and quasi-one-dimensional quantum spin liquids with static vacancies and mobile holes, and (3) spatial patterns of bound states in anisotropic superconductors. Dynamical DMRG, stochastic series expansion quantum Monte Carlo, and exact diagonalization methods will be used to carry out most of the work. The education component involves an outreach and support program for Los Angeles high school science teachers which includes: (1) a monthly colloquium, (2) training seminars and labs in the summer, and (3) regular faculty visits to the schools. The objective is to improve the quality of high school education in the inner cities. %%% This is a CAREER award that supports theoretical and computational research in low-dimensional materials with exotic magnetic properties. These materials are related to the high temperature superconductors and are important in the understanding of quantum magnets and materials with competing ordered ground. The award supports an ambitious educational activity that leverages existing infrastructure with the aim of improving the quality of high school education in the inner cities. The program aims to provide a home base for high school science teachers and to help improve the science qualifications of teachers, the connections between high schools and institutions for higher-education, and working conditions doc7062 none Chan This is a three year cooperative proposal between Dr. Chiu-Shui Chan of Iowa State University and Dr. Suchun Wan of Beijing Polytechnic University to develop an interactive visualization tool for city planners to manage urban growth and for designers to explore planning codes. This project will involve six U.S. researchers, including five faculty members and one student of Iowa State University, and two Chinese scientists, one from the Beijing Polytechnic University and one from the Beijing City Planning and Administration Bureau. They plan to design a tool in virtual reality (VR) environments including a digital city and a set of planning regulations. The user will be able to navigate through the city, select a property lot, determine planning issues, input data, visualize three-dimensional graphic guidelines, and animate surroundings to see the potential impact caused by the context. This project is unique, in that it will develop a tool that can support the inputs of new building designs, can use of the framework of local government building codes in the analysis, and can evaluate designs using aesthetic and functional bases. The project presents a rare collection of expertise across both disciplinary and international boundaries. The tool produced could become a part of the educational toolkit for urban design uses by architecture departments and colleges. The results of this project could have substantial impact on teaching and training of future urban planners and architects, and could have significant societal benefit. The Natural Science Foundation of China and the NSF jointly support this project doc7063 none Andrew V. Brower A collaborative grant has been awarded to Dr. Andrew Brower at Oregon State University and Drs. Thomas Emmel and Keith Willmott at the University of Florida to conduct an integrated phylogenetic analysis of relationships among the ithomiine butterflies. These tropical butterflies have been of interest to evolutionary biologists and biogeographers for more than a century, because they participate in complex, geographically varying mimicry rings. Different species of ithomiines, along with representatives of various other butterfly groups, have evolved similar-looking, brightly-colored wing patterns that make them memorable to predators. Because the butterflies are poisonous, the bright color pattern serves as a warning to avoid similar looking individuals, and thus there is a great benefit to sharing in the common signaling system. The result of this complex adaptation is that unrelated species may look virtually identical, complicating efforts to understand the relationships among species and genera in the group. Willmott and Emmel will conduct cladistic analyses of adult morphology and chromosome variation. Brower will complement that effort with study of additional characters from DNA sequences. The goal is to produce a robust phylogenetic hypothesis for relationships among the 50 or so genera based upon combined analysis of morphology, chromosomal structure, and molecular data. This will provide a model system for addressing similar complex situations among many other groups of animals and plants, and will allow a better understanding of how biodiversity on our planet has developed doc7064 none Shulman, Stuart W. Drake University Digital Government: SGER: Citizen Agenda-Setting in the Regulatory Process: Electronic Collection and Synthesis of Public Commentary This planning grant will support initial examination of the impact of new communications technologies, such as the Internet, on public involvement in the regulatory rule-making process, leading to more sophisticated and manageable information systems for citizen government interaction. A related topic of interest is to explore the degree to which electronic avenues make public comment more difficult or less effective for the citizen. The partner agency is the National Organic Program (NOP) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As the project progresses, it will promote further collaboration between social scientists, federal agencies, and information scientists. Recently, the NOP received over 275,000 comments via email, fax and postal mail in response to a proposed regulation. It is difficult to draw conclusions from such a large and heterogeneous set of responses without the assistance of information technologies. NOP has provided the PI a sample data set of 20,000 responses to begin this project doc7065 none A small grant is requested for exploratory research leading to the possible demonstration of a critical element for a nanoscale universal quantum gate. A novel gate structure will be electrochemically self assembled by sequential electrodeposition of ferromagnetic and semiconducting layers inside the pores of a self-assembled porous film with ~ 10-nm sized pores. A qubit will be encoded by the spin polarization of a single electron injected into the depleted semiconductor layer from the ferromagnetic contact and trapped there by Coulomb blockade. Single qubit rotations will be effected by modulating the spin splitting energy in the semiconductor layer with an external electrostatic gate potential, utilizing the Rashba effect. The uniqueness of this approach is that it utilizes a self-assembled structure (thereby obviating the need for complicated lithography; some lithography is needed for input output connections and gate contacts) and it relies on electrical control of the qubit as opposed to magnetic field control envisaged in other comparable schemes. Since electrical switching is faster and more convenient on a chip, this paradigm has distinct advantages. The risk involved in the project is the uncertainty of coherent spin injection across a ferromagnetic semiconductor interface. The risk is however mitigated by the fact that spin injection is easier across small area interfaces and there exists experimental evidence of spin injection across the interface of carbon nanotubes and ferromagnetic metals which is of a quality comparable to or worse than what we expect in our fabrication scheme. If successful, this project will lead to the only self-assembled, all-electric spintronic quantum gate. A self assembled spintronic quantum gate will ultimately allow the creation of a self-assembled quantum circuit with quantum connectors linking different gates, as well as quantum memory elements. Since the self assembled structures are extremely dense, it is expect a qubit density of more than 10E11 cmE2 that translates to a storage density equivalent to that of 2 {10E9} classical bits in a 1-cmE2 area which exceeds the storage capacity of all the hard disks that could be made with all the material in the universe over the life of the universe doc7050 none With National Science Foundation support Drs. Douglas Kennett and Barbara Voorhies will conduct one season of archaeological excavation at sites located on and near the Pacific coast in southern Mexico. Previous work in this area has indicated the presence of sites which span the Archaic through Early Formative periods from ca. 7,500 to 2,700 years before the present. Shell middens located along the coast indicate that Archaic period hunters and gatherers made extensive use of fish and shell fish, and botanical evidence suggests that these groups may have had access to domestic maize. They also collected wild plant and animal resources from a variety of resource zones and probably foraged out from central base camps located on the forested coastal plain. By the beginning of the Middle Formative Period, ca 2,700 years ago these settlements were transformed into sedentary agricultural villages which dotted the landscape. Inhabitants depended primarily on maize agriculture. The goal of this research is to gain insight into this poorly understood and crucial transformation in human subsistence and settlement patterns, because this basic change, from reliance on wild to cultivated resources occurred independently in many parts of the world and set the stage for the development of complex societies. Tentative evidence suggests that early Archaic peoples had access to maize but it is unclear how this domesticate was incorporated into their diets and how this altered subsistence and settlement strategies. Previous research in the area on this crucial transformational time span has indicated the presence of abundant sites but has failed to define shifts in land use, changes in human interactions and regional variations in human behavior. Drs. Kennett and Voorhies believe that these changes may best be understood in the context of larger land use patterns. While many sites have been discovered along the Pacific coast much less is known about adjacent inland mountainous regions. Survey has indicated that a series of caves and rock shelters are present and quite likely were inhabited by Archaic peoples. Because of the shelter they offer from rain, such sites often provide excellent protection for plant remains and Dr. Kennett and Voorhies wish to conduct test excavations to recover archaeological and botanical materials. They will also excavate later coastal Formative agricultural sites to gain additional insight into subsistence practices. To reconstruct possible seasonal movements the investigators will carry out isotopic analysis of shells because variation in the ratio of oxygen isotopes provides insight into the season in which they were harvested. They will focus also on trace element studies of ceramics in an attempt to link finished products to clay sources and thus reconstruct the movements of goods and the corresponding economic links between groups of people over time. This research is important for several reasons. It will provide data on a poorly known archaeological region and this will be of interest to many archaeologists. The work will also increase understanding of the transition from foraging to farming in Mesoamerica and offer insight into the processes which led to the rise of an important New World civilization doc6898 none Sick This award supports a third year of funding for Dr. Volker Sick and students from the University of Michigan in a collaboration with Christoph Schulz of the Department of Physical Chemistry at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. The research funded by this award will improve laser-spectroscopic methods for the non-intrusive measurement of fuel and temperature distributions in direct-injection gasoline engines. The collaboration brings together the unique expertise of the two groups. The Heidelberg group has strong expertise in laser spectroscopy and quantitative diagnostic tools, and the Michigan group has fundamental knowledge and research experience in engine technology. The PI also has strong contacts in the automotive industry, which is interested in the results of the research. Much of the research will be performed by a graduate student from the PI s group working in Heidelberg. Exchange of junior researchers is emphasized to add an international dimension to their training and to allow them to establish international connections early in their careers doc7068 none Harwood This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports a micropaleontological investigation of Pagodroma Group sediments to complement and enhance prior stratigraphic and paleoenvironmental studies of these Cenozoic glacial deposits of East Antarctica. Preliminary results indicate the presence of Oligocene (?), middle Miocene, upper Miocene and Pliocene-Pleistocene glaciomarine strata that have the potential to contribute significantly to our understanding of the past fluctuations in the extent and character of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS). These strata were deposited in a glacial system involving EAIS drainage through the Lambert Glacier and repeated marine incursion and ice margin grounding line retreat across a distance of more than 800 km. Paleontological and sedimentological information present within these strata have the potential to provide baseline climate information bearing on the history of the EAIS. The Pagodroma Group sequences will provide a Neogene record of glaciomarine deposition on the continental interior that will expand what is already known from drill cores and outcrops in the Dry Valley region and the Vestfold Hills. These deposits are dated biostratigraphically by the occurrence of in situ diatom and foraminifera assemblages that occur in laterally-continuous beds of diatomaceous marine mudstone within a sequence of diamictite. These fossils provide direct age correlation to Southern Ocean and Ross Sea biostratigraphic schemes. Open marine diatom production and in situ diatom sedimentation is noted in several deposits of the Pagodroma Group that are at least 300 km inland from the current coastline. This new research will focus on establishing the age of different deposits of the Pagodroma Group through the study of in situ and glacially reworked microfossil assemblages. This will aid in the reconstruction of a composite history of the EAIS-Lambert Glacier-Amery Basin-Prydz Bay system. Primary objectives of this proposal are: (1) to develop a temporal and spatial record of Neogene EAIS variability, and (2) to test hypotheses that predict future changes in the EAIS in response to elevated global temperatures with geologic data. In addition, biostratigraphical and paleoecological analyses can reveal sea-surface temperature, sea level and sea-ice conditions, among other environmental parameters at the time of deposition. The ability to date and interpret these paleoenvironmental conditions is improving steadily through continued study of Cenozoic Antarctic diatom-bearing deposits, yet much remains to be done. Analyses will be undertaken on 250 Pagodroma Group samples collected during the 98 field season. Currently 116 samples are available from deposits on the Amery Oasis, which is 250 km inland from the modern coast; 5 samples from Mt Stinear, 500 km inland; and 84 samples from Mt Menzies, which is 600 km inland. The bulk of this project will be conducted by a post-doctoral scientist, who will continue to improve the biostratigraphic and paleoecological use of diatoms and further extend his education and experience in Cenozoic Antarctic diatom paleontology. Future stratigraphic drilling programs that are planned for the Antarctic shelf and margin by numerous international Antarctic programs will require the skills of several experienced diatom paleontologists to provide age and environmental control for recovered materials. In summary, this project will provide further experience and training for a postdoctoral researcher on important materials that will help to answer current questions about Neogene variability of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and the likely response to elevated global temperatures in the future doc7069 none This research seeks to determine the role of plant-microbe interactions on the production and fate of key trace gases in the atmosphere, particularly carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen (H2). Recent observations have revealed that the roots of all plants produce CO, and that the roots of nitrogen-fixing plants (Fabacae, commonly legumes) produce large amounts of both CO and H2. Production of these gases provides the basis for an interaction of plant roots with soil microbes that oxidize CO and H2. Field and greenhouse studies will involve a variety of cultivated and non-cultivated legumes and other plant taxa. Experimental analyses will include measurements of gas exchange in situ, measurements of root gas production, isolation and characterization of trace-gas utilizing microbes, and applications of molecular techniques based on the use of 16S rRNA and rubisco genes. The research will lead to insights about the controls of atmospheric trace gas composition and the impacts of land use and agricultural practices doc7070 none This award supports international travel for fifteen U.S. graduate students who would not otherwise be able to attend the Second AgentLink European Agent Systems Summer School being held in Saarbrucken, Germany, from August 14-18, . AgentLink, Europe s ESPRIT-funded Network of Excellence for agent-based computing, organizes the school (http: www.agentlink.org). It is a world-class event that will bring together internationally recognized researchers in the area of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems to present introductory and advanced courses in the theoretical and practical aspects of agent-based computing. The objective of this award is to encourage and enable U.S. graduate students of outstanding merit who are interested in research in agent systems but have no current funding to attend this event. This travel grant will cover their travel, hotel, registration fees, and some subsistence. The Europeans are giving similar support to their graduate students (i.e., those at European universities who are registered AgentLink members). This travel grant allows a strong and diverse group of US graduate students to attend EASSS rather than just a small group of elite researchers. Further, because the summer school is in Europe, it provides a unique opportunity for American researchers to have direct contact with their European colleagues doc7071 none MacAyeal The recent calving of a large iceberg (B15) from the Ross Ice Shelf presents a unique opportunity to measure the processes which control the drift of large tabular icebergs including, wind-driven and thermohaline currents, tides, sea ice, and winds. The calving of such an extraordinarily large iceberg within the logistics reach of the US Antarctic Program, is rare. Thus the calving of B15 offers an exciting opportunity to study iceberg drift, and all of the other aspects of iceberg behavior which are associated with the long-term stability of the Antarctic environment. The extraordinary freshwater volume of large tabular icebergs has in the past been identified as a natural resource of human economic value (e.g., for water poor regions of the earth). Feasibility studies of iceberg towing to water-poor regions have largely been poo-pooed as science fiction. Nevertheless, tabular icebergs commonly travel thousands of miles as a result of natural processes which, if understood, could perhaps be harnessed for human economic and social value. We propose to make direct measurements of the drift of icebergs B15a, B15b and a smaller iceberg (either B16, B17 or B18, depending on circumstances) to: 1. observationally constrain parameters that will improve the models of iceberg drift, e.g., by determining drag coefficients appropriate to atmospheric and oceanic interactions, including drag induced by sea ice, 2. improve our ability to predict calving events and the subsequent iceberg drift trajectory, 3. compliment ongoing remote sensing study of the iceberg and its behavior 4. measure the progress of the berg(s) toward logistically sensitive areas. The last point reflects the fact that interest in B15 s drift over the next year(s) is not restricted to the realm of basic science. It is conceivable that B15 and its progeny (it is now in two pieces and has caused smaller bergs to calve from the Ross Ice Shelf) poses a complication to normal shipping to and from the US s main research and logistics station in Antarctica. While this proposal represents the broad scientific interests of several investigators at several institutions, its focus is narrow. Support is requested for assembly and deployment of instruments to observe the weather conditions and the drift of B15 doc7072 none Axe The objectives of this award are to understand the effect of competing ions on contaminant adsorption in model systems, develop mechanistic models for their interactions with mineral surfaces, determine transport and thermodynamic parameters to describe their behavior and test the ability of resulting models to predict their behavior in soils and sediments. Although a number of researchers have studied the adsorption of heavy metals on goethite and other hydrous oxides, only a limited number of studies have dealt with heavy metal adsorption competition on hydrous oxides macroscopically. In contaminated systems, the presence of multiple contaminants is more frequent than the existence of only one contaminant; heavy metals and dissolved minerals, along with plant nutrients, exist in the subsurface environment. Using molecular-scale and macroscopic sorption data, the overall goal of this collaborative research activity is to develop surface complexation models that can be applied and integrated into fate and transport models for predicting speciation and mobility of toxic trace metal ions in groundwater, soils and sediments when competing ions are present. The heavy metals will include those most freequently found at Superfund and DOD sites, i.e., Ni, Pb and Zn. By using macroscopic and spectroscopic measurements to evaluate the adsorption mechanisms, the types of sites of the goethite surface will be probed along with the adsorption capacity and competition for the different types of sites. Mechanistic, microscopic models of metal interactions will be developed including competition at the goethite surface. These models, along with tranport and thermodynmic parameters determined through the proposed collaborative research, will provide the ability to accurately model contaminant mobility and bioavailability. Results of this work will be applied in actual treatment and remediation problems at DuPont; this will serve as a useful calibration mechanism for validating the relevance of the fundamental research and for designing future experiments. This research project is awarded under the NSF GOALI (Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry) program and represents a collaborative effort with researchers from DuPont, which is providing support for one of the two graduate students supported by this grant doc7073 none Schaefer, Jacob The primary goal of this research is the application of solid-state NMR to three problems of importance in plant biophysics: (1) the identification of possible allosteric binding sites of the CO2-fixing enzyme, ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase-oxygenase or Rubisco; (2) the characterization of the local conformation of a regulatory hormone-protein complex with a promoter DNA binding region; and (3) the determination of mechanisms of cross-linking for plant cell-wall proteins and pectins. The principal technique to be used to solve all three problems will be stable-isotope labeling with rotational-echo double-resonance (REDOR) detection. REDOR methods have been under development now for a decade. This project represents an effort to extend the range of applicability of REDOR to more difficult problems than have yet been attempted. This laboratory presently has four multi-frequency solid-state NMR spectrometers suitable for REDOR structural biology problems, and a proposal pending for funding to build two more. Most plant science is done in industrial or academic biology laboratories where there is no access to solid-state NMR. A secondary goal of this work is to make the plant-science community aware of the capabilities of solid-state NMR to solve problems in structural biology. The long-range societal importance of this research is the safe, efficient production of more food. Plants provide approximately 90% of the calories and 80% of the protein for human consumption. This has been true for at least the last 13,000 years and is likely to continue to be true in the future. An often-stated goal of biotechnology in modern agriculture is the improvement in crop yield to feed the hungry. In many cases the hungry live on marginally arable land coming under cultivation for the first time. Of prime importance in this situation is the efficiency of the carbon assimilation by Rubisco. Rubisco catalyzes the conversion of substrate sugar and CO2 to -CH2O- (photosynthesis and carbon assimilation), and of substrate sugar and O2 to CO2 (photorespiration). This destructive competition is inevitable because of the nature of the primary reaction site of Rubisco, which is highly conserved in all photosynthetic bacteria, algae, and plants. After several billion years of evolution, however, higher plants have become capable of discriminating against the photorespiratory pathway in favor of the carbon assimilation pathway, even though O2 has grown to 21% of air and CO2 is only 0.03%. Thus, plants grow aerobically whereas photosynthetic bacteria only grow anaerobically. The control of Rubisco by plants may include alterations in the activity of the primary site caused by non-substrate small-molecule binding at one or more secondary sites. The first research goal is to demonstrate the presence of such an allosteric effect by in vitro and in vivo experiments using 15N{31P} REDOR of uniformly 15N-labeled Rubisco in the presence of various sugar phosphates. The existence of allosteric control of photosynthesis photorespiration might offer the possibility of altering photorespiratory control in plants like soybeans by genetic modification of secondary sites of Rubisco. The motivation for such an effort would be to adapt the plant to the conditions of high temperature, low water, and high external CO2 expected to be common in the future. The goal is to demonstrate that solid-state NMR can reveal structural details of allosteric binding sites not seen in crystal structures, and that solid-state NMR therefore has the potential to direct biotechnology in the modification of the photosynthesis photorespiration selectivity of plants for improved carbon assimilation. The millions of acres of farmland in the US currently planted with transgenic soybeans, corn, potatoes, and cotton now support plants that express foreign protein products (herbicide catabolizing enzymes and insecticides) continually. Transgenic plants with expression switched on off by application of an innocuous diffusable signal molecule are possible. The second goal of this research is to develop solid-state NMR technology that can be used to help direct the design of the regulatory switch. Finally, we recognize that a useful transgenic crop plant must be a highly integrated system of carbon, nitrogen, and water management in a mechanically sound structure. The third goal of this research is to use solid-state NMR to gain an understanding of the architecture of the plant cell wall doc7074 none The objectives of this study are to enhance our understanding of medium-range synoptic meteorology and to improve medium-range weather predictions. The focus is on the dynamic evolution of the upper-tropospheric weather systems such as troughs and cutoff cyclones. Theoretical wave stability and propagation analysis and potential vorticity diagnostics are applied to four different aspects of the problem: the mechanism associated with midwinter suppression of storm activity in the North Pacific; mechanisms for the formation and dissipation of coherent vortices; upper-tropospheric control on the severe storm environment; and the propagation of mobile Rossby wave packets in the upper troposphere doc7075 none Throughout the evolutionary history of land plants there have been repeated invasions of aquatic environments by terrestrial plants from distantly related lineages. In order to survive these very different physical conditions, these plants have been selected to modify their vegetative, reproductive, and dispersal systems. Few living ferns are aquatic; most are terrestrial and homosporous (bearing a single spore type). The exceptions are the heterosporous ferns, the semi-aquatic Marsileaceae and aquatic Salviniaceae, which belong to a single evolutionary lineage. The five extant genera of heterosporous ferns have been little studied, but the fossil record of their ornamented spores is relatively good for these ferns, showing a Cretaceous diversification contemporary with the rise of the flowering plants. In a collaboration between fern specialists Kathleen Pryer and Harald Schneider at Duke University and paleobotanist Richard Lupia at University of Oklahoma, the researchers will integrate morphological and molecular studies on the rates and sequences of evolution of all the known species of water ferns, to understand the history of adaptations to the aquatic environment. A comprehensive phylogeny of all the species will be constructed from DNA sequence comparisons, integrated with morphological studies. Spore ultrastructural characters will be studied with the electron microscope to investigate developmental features of spore wall construction and ornamentation, in order to interpret and integrate fossil spores known for the group. Numerous morphological trends have been proposed on the basis of the relative order of appearance in the fossil record, and the explicit phylogeny constructed for the group will allow testing of these ideas about character evolution in water ferns. The investigators bring complementary skills to the study from fields of morphology, DNA sequence analysis, phylogenetic methods, paleobotany, and quantitative analyses. The study provides an ideal opportunity to test hypotheses about the adaptive radiation of the modern fern flora from the Cretaceous to the Recent, the colonization of aquatic habitats, and genetic models of developmental change doc7075 none Throughout the evolutionary history of land plants there have been repeated invasions of aquatic environments by terrestrial plants from distantly related lineages. In order to survive these very different physical conditions, these plants have been selected to modify their vegetative, reproductive, and dispersal systems. Few living ferns are aquatic; most are terrestrial and homosporous (bearing a single spore type). The exceptions are the heterosporous ferns, the semi-aquatic Marsileaceae and aquatic Salviniaceae, which belong to a single evolutionary lineage. The five extant genera of heterosporous ferns have been little studied, but the fossil record of their ornamented spores is relatively good for these ferns, showing a Cretaceous diversification contemporary with the rise of the flowering plants. In a collaboration between fern specialists Kathleen Pryer and Harald Schneider at Duke University and paleobotanist Richard Lupia at University of Oklahoma, the researchers will integrate morphological and molecular studies on the rates and sequences of evolution of all the known species of water ferns, to understand the history of adaptations to the aquatic environment. A comprehensive phylogeny of all the species will be constructed from DNA sequence comparisons, integrated with morphological studies. Spore ultrastructural characters will be studied with the electron microscope to investigate developmental features of spore wall construction and ornamentation, in order to interpret and integrate fossil spores known for the group. Numerous morphological trends have been proposed on the basis of the relative order of appearance in the fossil record, and the explicit phylogeny constructed for the group will allow testing of these ideas about character evolution in water ferns. The investigators bring complementary skills to the study from fields of morphology, DNA sequence analysis, phylogenetic methods, paleobotany, and quantitative analyses. The study provides an ideal opportunity to test hypotheses about the adaptive radiation of the modern fern flora from the Cretaceous to the Recent, the colonization of aquatic habitats, and genetic models of developmental change doc7077 none The American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) is developing a pilot project focused on improving undergraduate mathematics instruction for prospective elementary school teachers. The project design is based on the hypothesis that changing university teaching strategies is best accomplished when both faculty and the senior academic leadership of a university work together to develop and implement activities supporting comprehensive reform. The proposed project involves several key elements: the active leadership and involvement of the president and chief academic officer, including the participation of the chief academic officer on campus teams of faculty and administrators; individualized campus plans tailored to and responsive to the unique context of specific campuses; an initial week-long summer teaching seminar for teams of faculty and administrators from AASCU campuses in the summer of , focusing on research-based best practices in teaching mathematics; a year-long implementation process on individual campuses; and a concluding two-day follow-up seminar the subsequent summer to discuss successes and challenges doc7078 none As scientific data becomes larger and more complex, the problem of presenting data effectively is joined by another, potentially more difficult one - how to extract presentable data from the flood of raw information. This problem is equally difficult for results from large simulations and data from high-resolution instruments. Thus, the field of scientific visualization becomes intimately tied to more traditional studies of data analysis, including image processing, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, and computer vision. However, in contrast to those fields, visualization explicitly includes the user in the process of filtering, extracting, and rendering meaningful data. The goal of this project is to make level-set modeling - a useful but computationally expensive visualization technique - interactive for use in 3-D visualization of biological data sets. Technically, the project has three components. The first is the design and implementation of a hardware and software system for interactive level-set surface model computation and display. This system will use off-the-shelf PC hardware and graphics boards and new algorithms and software to reach its interactivity goals. The second component will create the human-computer interface that allows users to interact with the level-set models. This will require mapping user input onto the mathematical descriptions controlling surface motion and deformation in the models. Finally, the third component will be the application of the techniques to visualize large biological data sets by researchers in this project. This is a collaborative project between the University of Utah and the doc7079 none This study will investigate how the need for coalition formation during within-group and between-group competition shapes social bonds among male chimpanzees. The question will be addressed by testing predictions of grooming models originally proposed to study the connection between coalition formation and female bonds in primates. Because male chimpanzees are similar to many female primates in using coalitions for competition within and between groups and in sharing access to limited resources, application of the grooming models will illuminate the role of the two forms of competition in shaping male bonds. This study is important because it will enhance knowledge about how competitive pressures shape social relationships among male chimpanzees and among male primates in general. Furthermore, because chimpanzees are so closely related to humans, they are an important referential model for reconstructing hominid behavior. Results of this study will provide insight into the evolution of coalitions and competition and their influence on male bonding in humans. The habituated Kanyawara community of chimpanzees at the Kibale Forest National Park, Uganda will be studied. In order to determine the distribution of male bonds, continuous social data will be collected during 30-minute focal animal follows of the 3 sub-adult and 10 adult males. Ad libitum data on all occurrences of grooming involving adult or sub-adult males will supplement the focal data. In the event of important, but relatively rare events, such as coalitions and intergroup encounters, focal samples will be abandoned in order to collect detailed ad libitum data on these events doc7080 none Activities in Mathematics at the University of Georgia This project will capitalize on the traditional strengths of the University of Georgia s Mathematics Department and take advantage of recent improvements and innovations to vertically integrate the activities of faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students and undergraduates. These groups will meet in teams centered around specially designed VIGRE seminars and programs. The half-a-dozen disciplinary VIGRE seminars will be complemented by a broadly focused Mathematics of Computation seminar which will expose participants to many areas of mathematics from a computational focus. The 4 postdoctoral fellows will be given time to enhance and broaden their research programs working with an appropriate faculty member, while upgrading their teaching and communication skills. The 10 graduate traineeships are designed to produce, in five years, well-qualified new doctorates, with significant experience in the classroom, and a broad view of available career options. Appropriate undergraduates will get a first exposure of research by participating in a VIGRE seminar, while selected freshmen and sophomores will be encouraged by a summer research experience to major in mathematics. The department s traditions of dedication to undergraduates, careful stewardship of graduate students and mentoring of postdoctoral fellows, provide a natural environment for VIGRE activity doc7081 none Iron is an essential nutrient in almost all living organisms. However, iron can also be toxic to cells in high concentrations, and therefore organisms must maintain the proper balance of this nutrient. This project aims to understand how cells sense the availability of iron in the environment and regulate its concentration in cells. The research focuses on iron homeostasis in Bradyrhizobium japonicum, a bacterium important to agriculture and a good model for studying the metabolic regulation of gene expression. Most bacteria contain a protein called Fur, which senses and binds to iron, and regulates genes involved in iron metabolism. The model for Fur function is that binding to iron confers on the protein the ability to negatively regulate genes by recognizing specific target DNA sequences. However, the Fur protein from B. japonicum (BjFur) has unique properties that indicate novel cellular roles. In particular, BjFur binds to DNA sequences recognized by other Fur proteins, but also binds specifically to a DNA element not recognized by Fur from other bacteria. In addition, recent evidence strongly suggests that BjFur can function under iron limitation, which has not been reported in other organisms. These observations lead to the hypothesis that Fur is functionally more diverse in its activities and roles than is generally assumed. Experiments will be carried out that address the novel features of the B. japonicum Fur protein. This work will involve the training of graduate and undergraduate students, and will strongly encourage participation by women and under-represented minority trainees doc7082 none A recently completed project (PHOBEA, Photochemical Ozone Budget of the Eastern North Pacific Atmosphere) will be extended in this work. The chemistry of the background North Pacific atmosphere will be investigated from the Cheeka Peak Observatory in Washington State, from a small aircraft, and at a newly established ground site at Mt. Ashland, Oregon. This work will focus on ozone, its precursors, and fine particles with the goal of understanding the sources for these compounds, and specifically what fraction of them may have been transported from Asia. A mesoscale model will be used to help determine the meteorological flow patterns during the observation period doc7055 none This CISE Information Technology Workforce (ITW) proposal requests funds to find a statistical methodology for dealing with the limitations of data sets with small sample sizes for special subgroups of interest. The data sets to be used for the study are the Current Population Survey (CPS) and the NSF s SESTAT database. The researchers propose to study, develop, and demonstrate methods of statistical inference that will provide improved inferential conclusions than currently appear in the literature. These methods will address questions of whether or not, after taking into account all the relevant background characteristics such as education and experience, there are disparities in salary, promotion rates, and job responsibilities among women and under-represented minorities in IT. They will also attempt to identify unique characteristics of successful women and under-represented minorities in IT careers. This project has the potential to provide improved methodology for researchers using the CPS and SESTAT data sets as well as insights about women and under-represented minorities who pursue IT careers doc7084 none The investigators will build an advanced modular hased-array radar with pulse-to-pulse steering capability and with sufficient sensitivity to perform limited incoherent scatter measurements of electron density profiles with an integration time of one hour or less. In particular, the investigators will build, calibrate and test a limited array of 24 x 24 antenna element units, each of which consists of a power amplifier, transmit recieve circuitry, and control and monitoring electronics. With this modular approach, individual elements are relatively inexpensive and the costs for an incremental system are determined by the number of antenna elements purchased. Furthermore, the hghardware purchased at each phase can be used in building a bigger, more sensitive system. This proposal builds on an earlier SRI proposal to build a small protype radar ( ) and is the next logical step toward the construction of a fully functional relocatable upper atmospheric radar doc7085 none P.-K. Yeung, Georgia Tech Fundamental insights into the governing mechanisms for turbulent flows have typically been obtained using advanced experimental methods. More recently, Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) of the Navier-Stokes equations permit such insights to be derived from computations. The fundamental limitation for the latter is the number of grid nodes that can be utilized. This limitation effects the Reynolds number in terms of the ratio of the largest to the smallest scales of the motion. The PI will exploit, along with his student, a unique opportunity to carry out DNS computations at significantly larger R-values than those previously available. It is expected that significant insights into scaling effects, Lagrangian transport and scalar mixing will result doc7086 none The long-term consequences of acid rain on nutrient cycling in terrestrial ecosystems are not clearly understood, despite the widespread occurrence of acid rain in Europe and the eastern United States. This study provides a unique opportunity to document the effects of acidic deposits on northern forest ecosystems by comparing archived samples of forest soil with modern samples collected at the same locations ~100 and ~50 years after the original sampling. The historical samples, thought to be the oldest archived soil samples in the world, were collected in Eastern Europe and Russia before the onset of strong acidic deposition. The researchers will evaluate changes in soil-vegetation systems in northwestern Russia through analysis of base cations, different forms of aluminum, and other elements in soils and trees. In addition to advancing knowledge of the effects of acid rain, this research is important for understanding forest health under future global climate changes, increased concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and continuing anthropogenic pollution of the atmosphere with sulfur and nitrogen oxides doc7087 none This CISE Information Technology Workforce (ITW) proposal requests funds for a research program aimed at addressing fundamental issues underlying the effective utilization, retention, and upward mobility of women and minorities in the IT workplace. The project takes a multidisciplinary approach to the design and implementation of three studies aimed at better understanding these issues. The first study adopts a total rewards perspective in analyzing the IT workplace success and retention of women and minorities. The second study uses social network analysis to study interaction patterns among members of an IT organization and their impact on women and minorities. The third study longitudinally tracks students graduating from undergraduate programs in IT to learn more about how early perceptions and subsequent experiences influence career success and retention for women and minorities. This project has the potential to provide valuable insights about the retention and advancement of women and under-represented minorities in IT careers doc7088 none The endothelial cells that line fish blood vessels secrete a suite of signaling molecules (termed paracrines) that control the tension in underlying vascular smooth muscle cells. Of these paracrines, endothelin (ET), nitric oxide (NO), and two prostanoids (PGI2 and PGE) are the best studied in fishes, as well as in mammals, where the same signaling systems are present. The fish gill has a complex vasculature that has been shown to play a vital role in regulating such important processes as gas exchange, ion and acid-base balance, and excretion of nitrogen. It has been demonstrated that ET can control the pattern of perfusion in the fish gill lamellae, suggesting that paracrines may play an important role in gill perfusion. It also has been shown that ET, NO, and PGI2 PGE can control the movement of ions across epithelial cells in mammals via interactions with specific transport proteins that mediate active transport. These proteins are also found in the fish gill epithelium and control the net extrusion of salt by various groups of marine fishes, including jawless fishes (lampreys and hagfish), sharks, and bony fishes. Preliminary studies in this laboratory have demonstrated that ET, NO, and PGE inhibit salt transport across the killifish opercular skin, a standard model for the salt-transporting epithelium of the marine fish gill. Thus, the principal investigator hypothesizes that ET, NO, and PGI2 PGE play a fundamental role in the control of fish gill function by regulating gill perfusion and ion transport. To test this hypothesis, an integrated series of physiological, pharmacological, and molecular techniques will be used in four species of fishes, representing the major fish groups. The objective is to describe the evolution of these gill paracrine control systems in the early vertebrates. Specifically, recordings will be made of blood flow changes in the gill during infusion of these paracrines in cannulated fishes, using videomicroscopy, and tests of their effects on gill ion transport will be performed, using the killifish opercular skin as a model system. In conjunction, the principal investigator will determine if the gill tissue itself generates ET, NO, and PGI2 PGE by chemical and immunoassays and localize the cellular sites of synthesis by immunohistochemical (light and confocal microscopy) techniques. Immunological (Western blot) and pharmacological techniques (radio-receptor analyses) will be used to confirm the presence of and to characterize the receptors for ET and PGI2 PGE that are expressed in the gill. Localization of ET and PGI2 PGE receptors in specific gill cells will be accomplished using immunohistochemical techniques. To provide protein sequence for future production of homologous antibodies and information on the evolution of the specific gene structure, the genes encoding fish nitric oxide synthase and ET as well as receptors for ET, PGI2, and PGE will be cloned in collaboration with the Molecular Services Core of the University of Florida s Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research. This integrated approach will provide clear evidence for the presence, evolution, and roles of these paracrine signaling pathways in fish gill function doc7089 none New species arise when populations diverge sufficiently to become reproductively isolated. Is this isolation initiated by barriers to mating and fertilization or by post-fertilization genetic incompatibility? Recent theory suggests that reproductive mode may be a critical factor, with the intimate mother fetus relationship characteristic of live-bearing (viviparous) species making them far more vulnerable to post-fertilization genetic incompatibility than species that lay eggs. This study will exploit unique reproductive features of a model viviparous invertebrate, the false scorpion Cordylochernes scorpioides, to investigate the role of reproductive mode in speciation. Using population pairs spanning a range of genetic divergence, the research will encompass interpopulation crosses, behavioral experiments, and molecular analyses designed to partition reproductive isolation into mating, gametic, and post-fertilization components to determine the precise sequence through which the various forms of reproductive isolation evolve. This research will represent the first comprehensive study of speciation mechanisms in a viviparous animal and will shed light on one of the most striking but poorly understood patterns in speciation, namely that lineages differ profoundly in the relative rates at which pre- and post-fertilization isolation evolve. An increased understanding of the evolutionary and mechanistic causes of reproductive isolation in live-bearing species promises to contribute not only to speciation theory but also to studies aimed at identifying and preserving biological diversity doc7090 none DEB 00- Christine M. Simon Dr. Chris Simon and colleagues at the University of Connecticut have been awarded a grant to test classical hypotheses concerning the influence of landscape and climate changes on speciation using cicadas. In addition to creating an evolutionary tree (genealogy) for related New Zealand (NZ) Australian (AU) and New Caledonian (NC) cicada genera, this project will: 1) Describe unknown species and enlarge our sound library for species identification; 2) Use new Bayesian statistics to estimate molecular clock dates of speciation events; 3) Create an electronic field guide to the cicadas of NZ, and related AU revision of the NZ cicada genera; a deep-level evolutionary tree of cicada tribes and of the insect order Hemiptera; and an analysis of the role of sexual signal evolution in speciation doc7091 none Visual Signal Design, Perception, and Mating Success in Bowerbirds John A. Endler Sexual Selection can result in males with remarkably complex secondary sexual traits, and may be important in speciation because mating preferences drives it. Most studies of sexual selection have concentrated on the signal content rather than the design. By analogy with radio or TV transmission, animal signals consist of a carrier (e.g. a color pattern) or signal design and the content (e.g. advertising direct or genetic benefits to the female or her offspring of mating with a particular male). Although very general predictions about the evolution of signals can be made considering only signal content or genetics these models do not allow specific predictions about the details of the signals, nor do they predict how the carrier should evolve. For visual signals (color patterns), a knowledge of microhabitat, time, weather, viewing conditions during signaling and eye properties allows specific predictions about which colors and patterns should be used under specific conditions. This approach allows specific predictions about animal signals, regardless of signal content. In most animals, the visual signaler has little or no control over the appearance of its signals. In bowerbirds (Ptilonorhynchidae) males construct and decorate bowers, which are used visually to attract mate. The fact that the bower is constructed rather than fixed means that the visual signal (bird + bower) is constrained only by what the birds can find, and makes it possible to examine the consequences of experimental manipulation of the signals in unrestrained animals in the field, and thus test hypotheses about visual contrast, perception, and fitness in natural populations. This project will study the design of Bowerbird visual signals using current models of early visual processing. Experiments will investigate: (1) whether or not visual contrast is maximized by bower design and location relative to diurnal patterns of light, shade and ambient light spectra; (2) the choice of objects in relation to Passerine bird vision, and whether or not male bowerbirds select objects which maximize the visual contrast to female bowerbirds of the bower and bird visual signal; and (3) whether bower visual contrast perceived by the birds successfully predicts mating. These approaches will be integrated in order to understand the function, design and evolution of visual signals. The study will also illuminate some aspects of the basis for color preferences. This will be the first fully integrated study of visual contrast, microhabitat choice, and function of a visual signal and should provide new insights into the direction of evolution of visual signals doc7092 none DeSimone This three-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research involves Joseph M. DeSimone of the NSF Science and Technology Center for Environmentally Responsible Solvents and Processes at the University of North Carolina and Patrick Lacroix-Desmazes of the Ecole Nationale Superieure de Chimie, Montpellier, France. The project addresses the synthesis of novel fluorinated block copolymers using nitroxides, their characterization in supercritical carbon dioxide solution and subsequent use in the dispersion polymerization of styrene, methacryaltes, acrylates and copolymers. The US investigator brings to this collaboration expertise in using supercritical carbon dioxide as a polymerization solvent. His group will characterize the solution properties of the fluorinated co-polymers; and perform static light scattering studies. This is complemented by French expertise in the synthesis of copolymers. The French laboratory will make the copolymers by a living free-radical polymerization process based on the use of nitroxides. Fluorinated block copolymers, a class of industrially important polymers, are typically insoluble in traditional organic and halogenated solvents. The proposed collaboration will advance understanding of characterization of fluorinated block copolymers and the use of super critical carbon dioxide as an environmentally benign method for producing them. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover the expenses of visits of members of the US research group. The CNRS will support the visits of French researchers to the United States doc7093 none This CISE Information Technology Workforce (ITW) proposal requests funds to study the barriers that discourage women from taking courses in IT and the causes of their low retention in IT. The project will consist of three studies. Study 1 uses a test-retest experiment to assess the impact of female IT role models on stereotypes and level of knowledge about IT. Study 2 is longitudinal; undeclared students course taking patterns in IT will be followed from their first semester to the end of their third year. Study 3 is also longitudinal and examines predictors of undergraduate women s retention in IT. This research will look at interest in IT along a continuum ranging from complete lack of interest, to lukewarm interest (taking a general level course which does not carry credit toward the major), to more serious interest (taking an introductory course designed for potential majors), to committed interest (declaring the major). Likewise, the study of attrition will look not only at female IT majors who drop out of IT but also at women who leave the IT pipeline after taking only one or two courses. This project has the potential to provide significant insights about the recruitment and retention of women in IT majors doc7094 none This CISE Information Technology Workforce (ITW) proposal requests funds to address the disproportionate loss of women from undergraduate programs in computer science. The objectives are to profile the top-producing U.S. computer science departments, to identify the departmental characteristics and practices that affect equal retention of male and female computer science majors, and to disseminate this information and make recommendations for action based on the study results. One component of the project will be a survey of chairpersons and faculty from 227 computer science departments. Fifteen of these departments will be randomly selected for on-site interviews of chairpersons, faculty, and students. This project has the potential to provide significant insights about what kind of educational environment is likely to retain female students in computer science at rates comparable to male students doc7095 none The aim of this project is to investigate the adsorption of thiophene oligomers on well-characterized aluminum surfaces are proposed. X-ray and ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS and UPS) studies at a variety of temperatures will be performed to examine the organic layer aluminum interface formed by exposing clean, single crystal and polycrystalline aluminum surfaces to gas phase, vacuum-sublimed, or x-ray-formed oligothiophenes. XPS will provide information regarding chemistry that is occurring at the interface, and UPS will be used to determine the electronic valence structure of the metal and how it changes upon oligothiophene adsorption. These results will be correlated with work function and optical spectroscopy measurements. Adsorption of a variety of substituted thiophene oligomers will also be studied at different temperatures on single crystals of aluminum, and low energy electron diffraction (LEED) and photoluminescence will be performed to search for evidence of oligomer ordering. Surface photovoltaic spectroscopy measurements will also be carried out to investigate changes in the position of the Fermi level that occur upon absorption of light. Oligothiophene coadsorption on oxygen-dosed aluminum surfaces and on aluminum oxide will also be investigated to determine how adsorption on these surfaces differs from on clan aluminum. Weaker chemical interaction is expected on the oxygen-expose surfaces, and possibilities should exist for oligothiophene alignment. Thermal desorption spectroscopy and LEED will be used to assess adsorption desorption behavior and ordering of the adsorbed oligomers. %%% Aluminum is commonly used as an electrode material for polymeric light-emitting diodes (LEDs), field-effect transistors and photovoltaics, and substituted thiophenes are an important class of polymers for these types of devices. Device materials are of significant importance to industry, and students trained in these areas compete well in the job market. This project is being jointly supported by The Solid-State Chemistry Program in The Division of Materials Research and The Advance Materials and Processing Program in the Chemistry Division doc7096 none This CISE Information Technology Workforce (ITW) proposal requests funds to study how students learning strategies and behaviors affect their performance in undergraduate computer science programs. Since programming is one of the first skills that computer science students learn, and a stumbling block for many, the study will focus on students programming learning strategies. The study will consist of three main activities. The first will be the identification of learning and programming behaviors that distinguish successful from unsuccessful CS students; and the determination of which behaviors, if any, are more characteristic of males than females (and the reverse) and Caucasian students than African American students (and the reverse). The second activity will be the development and evaluation of an intervention to train effective learning and programming behaviors. The third activity will be a survey of students and successful computer scientists to determine whether certain pre-college experiences predict effective learning behaviors and success in computer science. This project has the potential to provide valuable insights into the recruitment and retention of women and under-represented minorities in computer science majors doc7097 none This CISE Information Technology Workforce (ITW) proposal requests funds to investigate the attraction, retention, and promotion issues of women in IT by comparing female and male professionals who hold degrees in Computer Science Computer Engineering (CS CE) and who work in software and Internet companies. A major component of this investigation will be a survey of male and female CS CE degree holders from 800 Massachusetts software Internet workplaces. A second major component will be qualitative interviews with a sample of 100 female and 100 male IT professionals drawn from the survey respondent pool. This project has the potential to provide significant insights about factors affecting the recruitment, retention, and promotion of women who pursue IT careers doc7098 none This CISE Information Technology Workforce (ITW) proposal requests funds to determine if an early intervention program promotes students interest in pursuing a career in IT. More specifically, this project will focus on the factors affecting students decisions to enter the IT workforce in Mississippi s agricultural industry. The target population will be students, especially under-represented groups and females, enrolled in a new curriculum in Agriculture and Environmental Science and Technology (AEST). The schools using the AEST curriculum are primarily small, rural, comprehensive high schools and have an average of 45% minority student population. AEST program schools will be matched with non-AEST schools with similar demographics. This project has the potential to provide valuable insight about the impact of a culturally relevant intervention program on the interest of women and under-represented groups in pursuing IT careers doc7099 none This CISE Information Technology Workforce (ITW) proposal requests funds to study the underrepresentation of females and minorities in IT careers. The study will use a theoretical framework based on expectancies, values, and achievement behaviors. It was developed to study why females are under-represented in mathematics, physics, and engineering. For the past 17 years, this framework has been used to study educational and occupational choices among children, adolescents, and young adults, using longitudinal survey designs that include multiple indicators from children, their parents, teachers, and school records. As a result, there are three longitudinal data sets that will be used in the study. In addition, the necessary supplementary IT-related data will be collected and added to the Michigan Study of Adolescent Life Transitions (MSALT) data set. Part of this data will be collected via surveys and the rest via interviews. This project has the potential to provide valuable insights into the underrepresentation of women and minorities IT careers doc7100 none Cracraft and Donoghue Phylogenetic groupings of organisms are the basis for predictive classifications and biological information systems. Organizing biological knowledge and their parallel hierarchies according to phylogenetic relationships has become increasingly important for many segments of science and society (i.e., genetic databases such as GenBank). Yet, our understanding of the tree of life is still very incomplete at all taxonomic levels because phylogenetic hypotheses are typically characterized by inadequate taxon samples, and the data themselves are often variable across the included taxa with respect to kind, quantity, and quality. In addition, methods of analysis vary in their appropriateness and applicability, thus making comparison of phylogenetic trees difficult. These impediments need to be addressed if we are to have a tree of life for the major groups of organisms within a reasonable time frame. Equally important will be to ensure that phylogenetic knowledge is accessible and useful to researchers, institutions, and the government agencies who need it. This proposal seeks to bring together approximately 25-30 leading systematic biologists and nonsystematists interested in phylogenetic research and informatics (phyloinformatics). The workshop will attempt to identify the research needed to assemble the tree of life and make that information available to the global user community within a reasonable time frame. The workshop will formulate recommendations designed to promote institutional changes within the systematic research community to accelerate phylogenetic understanding, identify research efforts that will result in large-scale increases in phylogenetically informative data and improve data analysis, and specify research, technological advances, and infrastructural needs to store, retrieve, and manipulate large amounts of phylogenetic information and make it widely avail doc7101 none Cate Brinson, Michael Peshkin, Bruce Wilson Northwestern University Shape memory alloys (SMAs) have been used in a variety of actuation, energy-absorbing, and sensing applications. The key feature of this material is its ability to undergo large seemingly-plastic strains and subsequently recover these strains when a load is removed or the material is heated. This unique ability occurs due to a reversible thermoelastic phase transformation between austenite and martensite. The key feature allows SMAs to serve as very compact actuators. As SMAs can be used for both material-stiffening and energy-absorption, they have generated much interest in the smart structures field. Further, no other material or device can generate significant tensile forces over a large displacement while occupying such a small volume. A second useful feature of many SMAs is a change in resistivity with a change in strain. The change in resistivity as an SMA undergoes strain has enabled investigators to use them as coarse position sensors. The coarseness is due to a complex relationship between resistivity and the material state and its coupling with mechanical load and temperature. Given the material characteristics above, economical, power-dense self-sensing-actuation (SSA) can be achieved with shape memory alloys. However, the nonlinear nature of SMA actuation and sensing, incomplete understanding of SMA thermomechanical response and the lack of suitable models for control result in an under-utilization of this useful material as an actuator, sensor, and SSA. In this research, a focused effort will be targeted at (1) improving the characterization of SMAs for a sensing and control context, (2) refining material modeling, (3) developing model-based control algorithms, and (4) demonstrating these in hardware to advance the understanding and range of applications of SMAs as actuators, sensors, and SSAs doc7102 none Jakubowski Living organisms possess error-correcting mechanisms which assure accurate synthesis of their proteins according to the genetic information contained in DNA. One such mechanism involves editing of the non-protein amino acid homocysteine . Homocysteine, an obligatory precursor of the protein amino acid methionine, is misactivated in the cell by some tRNA synthetases at a high frequency. Incorporation of homocysteine into cellular protein is prevented by an error-correcting mechanism of the synthetases which convert misactivated homocysteine into a thiolactone. Different cellular pools of homocysteine are not equally accessible to each synthetase, suggesting compartmentalization of homocysteine metabolism. The present project will determine the physical biochemical basis for compartmentalization of homocysteine editing in the bacterium Escherichia coli. A role for the carboxy-terminal region of methionyl-tRNA synthetase in editing will be examined and component(s) of the methionine biosynthetic pathway which interact with methionyl-tRNA synthetase will be identified using biochemical and genetic approaches. Studies of molecular details of homocysteine editing are important. This project will elucidate a major aspect of the extraordinary accuracy in the flow of genetic information, i.e., the molecular basis of metabolite channeling in an amino acid biosynthetic pathway that limits the need for editing by tRNA synthetases doc7103 none This CISE Information Technology Workforce (ITW) proposal requests funds to assess whether women are more attracted to careers in Information Systems (IS) because of the perception that it is more people-oriented than other computer-related fields. Both men and women undergraduate students will be surveyed as to their work values, beliefs, and attitudes related to IS, and job preferences in order to test a model of the underlying factors driving gender differences with respect to career choices. This project has the potential to provide significant insights about factors affecting the recruitment and retention of women in IT majors doc7104 none This CISE Information Technology Workforce (ITW) proposal requests funds to examine the effects of pair-programming on female students perceived self-confidence and interest in computer science as well as their retention and achievement in these courses. Approximately, 400 students enrolled in introductory computer science courses will complete a series of programming assignments in pairs (same and mixed gender pairs) or independently. It is hypothesized that women who program in pairs will produce better programs in terms of functionality and readability, report greater confidence in their solutions, enjoy programming more, and have higher retention rates in computer science and related areas than women who program independently. This project has the potential to provide valuable insights into the retention of women in computer science doc7105 none This CISE Information Technology Workforce (ITW) proposal requests funds to study whether women and under-represented minorities either trained in IT or employed in IT careers have different rates of retention and advancement. The study also examines whether the rate by which individuals not trained in IT are absorbed into IT jobs differs by gender and minority status. The study will use the NSF s SESTAT database, which is a comprehensive, integrated database containing information over time on the employment, educational, and demographic characteristics of scientists and engineers who possess at least a bachelor s degree. This project has the potential to provide valuable insights about the retention and advancement of women and under-represented minorities in IT careers doc7106 none Andrea L. Houston Louisiana State University Attracting Women into the Information Technology Workforce through Technology Immersion This CISE Information Technology Workforce (ITW) proposal requests funds to investigate IT immersion on the college major and career choices of young women. The IT immersion program is modeled on the total immersion method of learning a foreign language. In the IT immersion program at Saint Joseph s Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school, entering freshmen receive a laptop computer the summer before they enter the Academy. They are required to take two weeks of summer school to learn to use their laptop and software that will be used in the classroom. Information technology has been totally integrated into the curriculum, and teachers are evaluated on the degree of information technology integration in their classes. This research project will use a longitudinal case study approach including observation, interviews, and biannual surveys focussing on the current 9-11th grade young women at the Academy (using the IT immersion curriculum) and comparing them to the current 12th grade and alumni from the Academy (using a similar curriculum without IT immersion). The student using the IT immersion curriculum will also be compared to another private high school which does not use the IT immersion curriculum. This project has the potential to provide valuable insights about factors that both motivate and discourage young women from choosing IT majors and careers doc7107 none This CISE Information Technology Workforce (ITW) proposal requests funds to study the role that non-traditional educational pathways play in the education of IT professionals, in particular, their role in preparing under-represented minorities and women for IT careers. The study will consist of four primary tasks. The first task will be the collection of demographic data and statistical information to characterize non-traditional students and educational pathways. The second task will be the collection of detailed information on the education and careers of non-traditional students in the Virginia-Maryland-D.C. region through surveys of former students and interviews with educators, employers, and employees. The third task will be data analysis. The final task will be a science policy conference to develop a policy agenda for federal and state governments based on the results of the first three tasks. This project has the potential to provide valuable insights into the education of underrepresentation of women and minorities for IT careers doc7108 none This CISE Information Technology Workforce (ITW) proposal requests funds to study the factors that contribute to the small numbers of women and under-represented minorities who obtain degrees in computer science (CS) and computer engineering (CE) at a major research university. Both quantitative and qualitative protocols will be used to determine why diverse students do not elect to follow academic career paths in CS and CE fields. Specifically, the project will consist of five parts: the Academic Career Pathways Study, the Student Perceptions and Perspective Study, the Student Beliefs and Attitudes Study, the Course-taking Pattern and Retention Study, and the Faculty Perceptions and Attitudes Study. The first four studies will also look at the influence of program interventions such as the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program and the Women in Science and Engineering Residence Program. This project has the potential to provide valuable insights into the recruitment and retention of women and under-represented minorities in IT majors doc7109 none Kiani The specific aims of this proposal are to: (1) Develop drug carriers which bear ligands to adhesion molecules expressed on irradiated endothelial cells. The carriers will be made of polystyrene (model carriers), as well as pharmacologically relevant biodegradable polymers. (2) Quantify the extent of selective and specific adhesion deposition of drug carriers on irradiated endothelial cells under in vitro flow conditions that stimulate flow conditions present in vivo. (3) Demonstrate the feasibility of this targeted delivery technology in vivo in a mouse closed cranial window model doc7110 none Interconnect has been recognized one of ten hardest problems in nano technologies. A basic observation underlying this project is that nano-interconnect issues are much similar to that in real-world communication. Much research has been conducted to ensure the reliable, fast and secure communication over a noisy and stochastic environment. Therefore, the research is exploiting communication-theoretic principles and developing innovative signaling concepts in solving the stochastic nature of nano interconnect. The primary focus is on nano silicon technologies in CMOS with feature sizes below 100nm, and the goal is to explore ways to achieve reliable and fast signaling over the noisy and stochastically limited nano-interconnect environment. The specific objectives are 1. to develop realistic-yet-simple communication models for various nano interconnect scenarios, 2. To study fundamental signaling limits dictated by communication theory (estimates of achievable rates indicate up to Tbits sec.), 3. to demonstrate interconnect design techniques for nano-signaling that can potentially approach the theoretical signaling limits This is being made possible by a combination of several innovations that include (i) multi-wire (differential) full-duplex signaling, (ii) signal modulation, coding and equalization, and (iii) utilization, instead of avoiding, very-deep-submicron (VDSM) effects such as wave transmission for potential signaling doc7111 none This 12-month planning phase will prepare the Exploratorium to develop a major collection of exhibits and activities on human thought and behavior. Because of the abundance of dramatic, new scientific research in human cognition and how this topic can be explored in an informal setting by the public, the institution will perform a one-year research and planning project. The team will investigate work by other science centers through site visits, conduct audience research on their needs in learning about cognitive science, consult with advisors, develop and test exhibit prototypes and evaluate the process doc7112 none This CISE Information Technology Workforce (ITW) proposal requests funds to examine the factors that cause women to select and remain in IT educational programs, in the context of three programs at the University of Colorado at Boulder. One is the recently developed multidisciplinary Technology, Arts and Media (TAM) undergraduate certificate program that is attracting a very high percentage of women. Another is the traditional undergraduate computer science major that is sparsely populated by women but taking steps to amend this situation. The third is a Virtual Development Center supported by the Institute for Women and Technology that is specifically intended to involve women in formulating and conducting IT projects. The overarching goal of this research is to gain knowledge that will lead to greater participation in and retention of women in higher education IT programs by identifying program features that appeal to women. This project has the potential to provide valuable insights about the recruitment and retention of women in IT majors doc7113 none Brian V. Brown Dr. Brian Brown of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History has been awarded a grant to revise the genus Melaloncha, commonly known as the bee-killing flies, a large group of phorid flies. All species are found in South and Central America, and all parasitize bees: bumble bees, stingless bees and the introduced western honey bee, Apis mellifera (thus they are potential agricultural pests in tropical countries). Thirty-two bee-killing fly species have been described, but many more have been collected and it is estimated that re-examination of this fascinating group will ultimately involve as many as 100 species. Relationships among the species will be investigated using structural characters of adult flies. This analysis will be used as a framework for examining host-parasitoid specialization, host switching and other behavioral traits. Field work to make further collections of Melaloncha associated with their host bees will be conducted in Bolivia, Costa Rica, Panama, and Brazil. Collecting of specimens in the field will result in knowledge of host-parasitoid relationships, allow males and females of Melaloncha species to be associated and will uncover further new species. Results from this study will include a taxonomic revision in two parts, including descriptions of species, relationships, keys for the identification of species, and color images on CD-ROM. Products on the World Wide Web will be the following: a web-based interactive identification key, web pages for each species, a web page for phorid-bee relationships (which will be extremely useful to beekeepers and bee ecologists), a digital image archive, a host-parasitoid list and a catalog with literature doc7114 none Institution: University of Minnesota Proposal Number: PI: Karen Chapple TITLE: Mediating Careers: The Role of Labor Market Intermediaries in Facilitating in the Entry, Retention, and Advancement of Women and Minorities in the Information Technology Workforce This CISE Information Technology Workforce (ITW) proposal requests funds to explore the role of labor market intermediaries (LMIs) in facilitating the entry, retention, and advancement of women and minorities in the IT workforce. The project builds upon previous work by the research team that shows the considerable success of non-profit LMIs in placing economically disadvantage women and minorities into IT occupations. The study targets women and minorities in IT occupations who come from five broad educational groups: four-year college degree programs, two-year college degree programs, short-term public or private job training programs, graduate degree programs, and high school education. The study focuses, in particular, on the new community-based institutions and community colleges engaging in workforce development. Because these programs target disadvantaged adults, they are placing a disproportionately large share of under-represented minorities into occupations. This project has the potential to provide valuable insights about the recruitment, retention, and advancement of women and under-represented minorities in IT careers doc7115 none This research focuses on the strategic choices made by campaign contributors who seek to make donations to winning candidates. In this project, the investigator uses computer experiments to present subjects with a simulated election and rewards them for contributing to the winner. The main theses investigated involve the use of information and the extent and range of learning. What cues do subjects use to identify winners, and how effective are they at doing so? The primary dependent variable is the performance of the human subjects in solving the contribution problem. The manipulated experimental conditions include the number of candidates, the number of (simulated) contributors, the predictability of the simulated contributors decisions, and the payoff subjects receive for selecting the winner. Research into the choices made by campaign contributors lags behind that on other political actors such as voters and candidates. Despite recent advances in this area, the discipline knows relatively little about why individuals choose to contribute to candidates, how they choose candidates to support, and what impact money has on elections and policy. Although research into contribution choice can be informed by the literature on vote choice, the decisions are not analogous. Unlike votes, campaign contributions are fungible, that is, they can be applied to many other purposes. Money not invested in (or spent on) a candidate can be invested (or spent) elsewhere. Contributors can give to multiple candidates, or even to every candidate. Unlike votes, contributions can be made at different times, i.e. early or late in the campaign. The question underlying the research is essential to understanding the decisions of political actors: how do people make strategic choices? This POWRE grant provides the investigator valuable resources with which to further her professional development. It enables her to advance her skills in computer experimentation, an area of the discipline in which women are significantly under-represented. It also enables her to undertake this major research project and to involve students in her research as she begins her first tenure-track position. Completing this research will, in turn, suggest additional avenues for investigating the choices of campaign contributors, a central focus of the PI s research agenda. In short, this POWRE grant allows the PI to make significant progress on her research agenda at a critical stage in her professional development doc7116 none Proposal : SES 00- Sahotra Sarkar The Norm of Reaction and Phenotypic Plasticity: A Philosophical and Historical Analysis The concept of a norm of reaction was introduced in by Richard Woltereck as both a theoretical concept and a visual depiction to capture phenotypic plasticity: the variability of the phenotypic response of genetically identical organisms subjected to different environmental regimes. The new concept was also supposed to reconcile Mendelian variation with Darwinian selection and help resolve a sometimes virulent dispute about the nature of evolution. The norm of reaction largely disappeared from Western genetics for the next thirty years, though its use flourished in the Soviet Union until the suppression of genetics there during the Lysenko era. Repatriated to the West by Theodosius Dobzhansky in , the norm of reaction began to be used sporadically in the West after and until the s, when its evolutionary etiology emerged as a locus of significant theoretical research and controversy. In the s molecular techniques began to be deployed to resolve the question whether reaction norms arose as a result of direct selection for genes for plasticity or whether they arose as a result of selection on other traits. Meanwhile, the precise conceptualization of the term norm of reaction went through at least three significant shifts. The main objective of this project is to trace the history of the norm of reaction from to , and to investigate why its use flourished or disappeared in different intellectual and social contexts, why its meanings shifted, and what methodological lessons can be gleaned from the controversy over its evolutionary etiology. The key questions include: (i) whether the ambient conceptual framework of genetics in different research traditions (especially in the case of Soviet evolutionary genetics) can explain these changes; (ii) if so, what intellectual and other factors (for instance, dialectical materialism) may be responsible for these ambient frameworks; (iii) whether the choice of model organisms (especially animal models instead of plants) can explain some of the mentioned changes in the popularity of the use of reaction norms; (iv) to what extent the disputes over the evolution of phenotypic plasticity and reaction norms were over substantive issues and to what extent they were methodological; (v) why specific modeling strategies (such as optimization and quantitative genetic techniques as well as explicit genetic models) were introduced, and sometimes rejected, while exploring the evolutionary etiology of reaction norms; and (vi) whether molecularization is similarly leading to shifts in the meaning and scope of the term. Besides one paper by Raphael Falk (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Dr. Sarkar s preliminary work, there is almost no historical or philosophical analysis of the norm of reaction. This project seeks to remove this lacuna in the history of genetics and evolutionary biology. Dr. Sarkar intends to produce a number of historical and philosophical papers, and the results eventually will be synthesized into a book-length monograph doc7117 none The Arctic tundra on the Northslope of Alaska is increasingly impacted by human land use. Areas around and within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge have been designated as part of the National Petroleum Reserve and may potentially experience oil exploration and development. The ability of the tundra to recover from construction and disturbance will be investigated here. Sites that were disturbed in the s- s will be resampled to see how fast tundra vegetation recolonizes opened soil surfaces and to explore the mechanisms which promote recolonization. These results would improve our understanding of the sensitivity of the tundra to human impacts doc7118 none This CISE Information Technology Workforce (ITW) proposal requests funds to study why so few male and female African American and Hispanic students are studying computer science at the high school level. Specifically, the study will examine the decisions of college-bound African American and Hispanic students to take (or not take), persist (or not persist) in computer science courses beyond the introductory level. The research model considers the interplay between the high school educational environment and the psychological and cultural factors that affect male and female under-represented minority students interest in learning computer science. The sites of the investigation are schools within the Los Angeles Unified School District. This project has the potential to provide valuable insights about how to attract under-represented minorities to IT classes in high school and college doc6988 none Clay Janzen and Connell described ecological mechanisms by which host-specific natural enemies promote community diversity by facilitating the proliferation of heterospecifics in the vicinity of the focal host species. This negative feedback theory forms the conceptual framework of this investigation testing plant and soil-microbe interactions, which have been overlooked for years by ecologists. Soil microbes have numerous negative and positive effects on plant fitness, and their fundamental importance to plant populations and community structure is now widely accepted but poorly understood. This project is a continuation of research into the negative feedbacks of soil-borne fungal pathogens on black cherry recruitment and population dynamics. Field surveys will be conducted to determine the survival of black cherry seedlings in early, mid, and late successional sites. To assess the degree of host-specificity of the fungal pathogen (Pythium), seeds from black cherry and other plant species will be germinated in the laboratory in sterile and Pythium-inoculated agar. Similarly, seeds from ten plant species will be germinated in sterile and inoculated soils under greenhouse conditions. Results from the field, laboratory and greenhouse studies will be compared with data collected on natural plant distributions in the field. The ultimate objective is to determine the role played by soil-borne pathogens in seedling establishment, spatial distributions, and successional change. This research can substantially advance our limited knowledge about how these complex and long-overlooked interactions influence community diversity and succession doc7120 none The objective of the Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research and Science (SOARS) program is to create a pipeline that brings academically talented African American, American Indian, Hispanic and Latino Americans, and women into careers in the atmospheric and related sciences, including engineering, mathematics, and social sciences. The goal is to increase the number of students from these groups enrolled in a graduate programs in the atmospheric and related sciences, which will lead to an increase in their representation as scientists in the future workforce doc7121 none This grant provides funding for the development of a test bed, Advanced Diagnostic Vehicle Agent Network System(ADVANS) for automotive engineering fault diagnosis. The ADVANS will be used to investigate the feasibility of an innovative engineering diagnostic model, Distributed Diagnostic AgentS(DDAS). The proposed DDAS model consists of a number of signal diagnostic agents(SDA) and a device diagnostic agent(DDA). A SDA is responsible for the fault diagnosis of one particular signal using either a single signal or multiple signals depending on the nature of the signal. Each SDA will be developed using a common framework that incorporates technologies in signal segmentation, automatic signal feature selection, and machine learning. Some of the agents contain information concerning the cause of faults for other agents, while other agents merely report symptoms. Together these signal agents present to the device agent a full picture of the behavior of the machine currently under diagnosis. The DDA applies case based reasoning techniques to the output of the SDA s to obtain the fault diagnosis of a machine. The initial test bed, ADVANS, will consist of three SDA s implemented within the application area of automotive engineering diagnosis, EngineCoolantTemperature (ECT), Throttle Position (TP) and Engine RPM. ADVANS will be used to study the following research issues related to the DDAS model: signal features meaningful for fault diagnosis, signal diagnosis at three levels of details, fuzzy learning from normal samples only, and feasibility of a distributed agent architecture for engineering fault diagnosis. The results of this research will lead to a full investigation of the DDAS model. The success of the fully developed DDAS model will provide a powerful and reliable engineering fault diagnostic technology to a broad range of US industries. Speedy, reliable and cost effective product service will significantly increase the global competitiveness of the U.S. manufacturing and service industry doc7122 none Dear Professor Pang, Here is the abstract in text form. Ronnie Sircar. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Asymptotic and Statistical Analysis of Volatility and its Implications for Derivative Pricing and Risk Management Proposal Number: PI: K. Ronnie Sircar Department of Operations Research & Financial Engineering Princeton University. In modern financial markets, investors are increasingly faced with exposure to changing and uncertain volatility. This project concerns mathematical models in which volatility is a stochastic process, and their use in derivative pricing and risk management. The main aim is to develop an efficient and robust framework in which models are calibrated from observable market data and then used to design risk-minimizing strategies that hedge a portfolio against the potentially serious consequences of changing volatility. This problem is important for investors from large trading institutions to individuals with pension funds. The spectacular growth in the size of the derivatives market over the last twenty-five years (currently it has a turnover of trillions of dollars in the US) plus recent infamous (and equally spectacular) risk (mis)management disasters, such as the Barings, Orange County and Long Term Capital Management fiascos, have created an urgent need for smart mathematical and computational models to quantify the respective risks and rewards of such investments. This project aims to build on the methodology introduced by Black, Scholes and Merton, to take into account the fluctuating nature of market volatility. Mathematical tools are combined with statistical analysis of past prices to produce formulas and software that accurately capture the potential losses and gains in today s vast derivative market doc7123 none 00- Reich Linking leaf and root traits to ecosystem structure and function in a common garden study of 14 temperate tree species Natural ecosystems are dynamic, not static. For instance, plants themselves alter properties of soils and ecosystems. Thus, the characteristics of different plant species influence important ecosystem functions such as soil fertility, soil development and plant productivity, and thus in part control ecosystem functioning. The specifics of these controls, however, are very poorly understood due to difficulties in separating effects of climate or soils from those of vegetation. To explore the way in which plants can influence their own environment, the investigators will use a common-garden experiment of 32-year old monoculture stands of 14 temperate tree species in Poland. This is the only such experiment in the world. The long-range goals of the overall effort include examining: above and belowground tissue physiology and productivity; decomposition; soil N and C cycling; soil chemistry and pedogenesis; and integrated modeling. This project will focus on measuring the phenology of roots and foliage, and the associated turnover rates and fluxes doc7124 none Recent research shows that children with disabilities benefit greatly from deep involvement in mathematical thinking. Major mathematics education committees such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and the National Research Council have emphasized the importance of high level mathematical thinking and reasoning for all students, especially those students with special needs who have not had access to this kind of mathematics. This project is based on the assumption that when students with disabilities engage in a variety of NCTM Standards-based activities that support their strengths, they can learn to think mathematically. Children with disabilities will learn to think about, strategize, and solve mathematical problems in the manner recommended by the NCTM Standards. To explore ways in which students with disabilities can be supported to successfully develop mathematical thinking, researchers at TERC will work collaboratively with a group of 12-16 teacher-researchers who are implementing an NCTM standards-based curriculum, grades 1-5. The teachers will be chosen in pairs of one mainstream classroom teacher and one special education teacher who work with the same students as they engage with standards-based mathematics curricula. The teacher pairs will work together to look closely at and find ways to improve the mathematical thinking of students with disabilities. All of the teachers will meet regularly in an action research group with TERC researchers during two years of the project. They will present and discuss episodes from their classrooms about teaching mathematics to children with disabilities, plan next steps in their investigations of students learning, and document and disseminate the strategies that are successful in developing the mathematical understanding of students who have disabilities. In the last year of the project, teachers and TERC researchers together will write articles to disseminate their findings to other teachers. They will describe the ways in which the special education and classroom teachers work together to improve the mathematics learning of children with disabilities and will document successful strategies that other teachers can use. These research findings will be useful to teachers because they will be grounded in classroom practice. The work of this project will include: 1. Implementation of a teacher research group of classroom and special education teachers to develop their skills in planning and implementing classroom research and to report on and receive feedback on their own research. 2. Research by the teacher pairs to learn how particular students with disabilities learn mathematics best, and what is needed to support their learning. 3. Communication of this classroom-based body of research through publications, existing websites, and presentations to others-especially to other practitioners-in a way that helps others see more deeply into students mathematical thinking. 4. Documentation and description of the collaboration among the special education and classroom teacher pairs in their schools to suggest approaches that can be used by others doc7125 none Si This award supports theoretical research focused on: (1) how electron-electron interactions, possibly acting in concert with disorder, give rise to low-energy excitations that are distinctly non-Fermi liquid in character in high temperature superconductors, heavy fermion materials, dilute two-dimensional electron gases in Si-MOSFETs, and in other mesoscopic structures, and (2) elucidating the elementary excitations in real materials where non-Fermi liquid behavior has apparently been observed. Four specific projects are proposed involving quantum critical behavior in heavy fermions, interacting electrons in disordered two-dimensional systems, probing spin-charge separation in the high temperature superconductors, and non-Fermi liquid behavior in mesoscopic systems. %%% The investigator will perform theoretical research that seeks to understand the nature of unusual low-energy electronic excitations observed in experiments on a variety of (usually low dimensional) materials. These excitations are not like those of ordinary metals and thus do not fit the standard textbook inspired expectation of a Fermi liquid. The mechanisms that can produce these kinds of excitations are poorly understood. Part of this proposal seeks to manipulate quantum dots to produce novel non-Fermi liquid states predicted by theory and may have bearing on developing electronic devices for a future technology. This research lies at the frontiers of condensed matter theory and will contribute to the development of new theoretical techniques and to the training of the next generation of scientists in state-of-the-art methods for materials with strong electronic correlations and disorder doc7126 none Sieradzki New approaches are employed to electrodeposit atomically flat heteroepitaxial overlayers of quality similar to that obtained by ultra high vacuum techniques at elevated temperature. An important issue covered in this grant is the generality of these new electrodeposition techniques. A number of heteroepitaxial metal metal and metal semiconductor systems are examined to address issues related to substrate orientation and electrolyte composition. A sensitive in situ stress monitoring technique is employed to study stress relaxation during growth. Using data from in situ measurements of stress evolution, important thermodynamic parameters are determined such as interface stresses that characterize overlayer substrate systems. A special high speed (25 images per second with image sizes of at 300 x 300 pixels) scanning tunneling microscope (STM) is used to investigate details of the atomic scale kinetic processes that allow defect and surfactant mediate growth to operate. Theoretical work uses Kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) techniques that incorporate elastic interactions to model growth and the defect-surfactant mediated growth. The results obtained from harmonic and atomic models and experimental kinetic results (high speed STM) are integrated into the KMC modeling. The role of elastic interactions in determining the evolution of superstructures during metal metal adsorption processes is examined. The lateral interaction energies of adatoms in superstructures are accurately extracted from experimental adsorption isotherms using Monte Carlo techniques. These results are compared to elastic models of superstructures in order to determine whether the experimentally determined magnitudes of lateral interaction energies are consistent with elastic interactions. %%% This work could lead to new approaches of electrodeposition that produce atomically flat heteroepitaxial overlayers of quality similar to that obtained by ultra high vacuum techniques at elevated temperature. In one approach the metal of interest is co-deposited with a reversibly deposited mediator metal. The mediator is periodically deposited and stripped from the surface and each cycle creates new nuclei leading to layer-by layer growth. In another approach, a prescribed fraction of a monolayer of surfactant is used that floats on the surface of the depositing metal. The surfactant promotes an interlayer terrace exchange of the depositing metal that minimizes intralayer adatom diffusion. This serves to significantly increase the nucleation density of the adlayer, leading to flat two-dimensional growth doc7127 none This grant examines cyclic deformation, or fatigue, at a fundamental level. Metal fatigue is poorly understood, partly because the dislocation dynamics and internal stress-states during reversed deformation have not been characterized. The details of dislocation motion and interaction and the internal stress-state are critical to this process. In this research a detailed description of cyclic deformation, including the Bauschinger effect, the substantial reversible strains with reversal of the direction of deformation, and the eventual saturation of the flow stress, will be accomplished, using advanced experimental techniques. Conventional dark- field (DF) transmission electron microscopy (TEM) will be used on Cu single crystals to assess dislocation dipole spacings and distributions, which will allow a determination of the local stress-state during cyclic plasticity. Experiments will include convergent beam electron diffraction (CBED) in the TEM that can probe small (20-nm diameter beam) areas to assess changes in the lattice parameter in unloaded foils as well as in-situ, or under load. This will allow direct assessment of the local internal stress with relatively high accuracy. The dislocation dynamics will be studied by in-situ deformation in the high voltage transmission electron microscope (HVEM). The role of screw dislocations will be investigated, including the existence of pile-ups and cross-slip. The details of dislocations associated with anelasticity on unloading will also be studied. Specially oriented foils will complement earlier reversed deformation experiments in the HVEM to especially determine the nature of screw dislocation dynamics during fatigue. %%% In the past there has been only limited success with direct observation of dislocations during cyclic deformation, such as with in-situ cyclic or reversed plastic deformation tests such as in the transmission electron microscope. Also the internal stress-state has not been adequately determined. Internal stresses are widely suggested to exist in the vicinity of dislocation heterogeneities in cyclically (as well as monotonically) deformed microstructures. The heterogeneities include edge dislocation dipole bundles (veins) and the edge dipole walls of persistent slip bands (PSBs). The understanding developed from this project will aid in the design of thin film devices that undergo cyclic stresses doc7128 none PI: Christine S. Grant Institution: North Carolina State University Proposal Number: This grant will provide funding for a workshop aimed increasing the representation of minority faculty in chemical engineering and related disciplines. The workshop will bring together faculty and advanced Ph.D. candidates and will have two express goals: 1. Provide a forum for aspiring minority faculty currently in Ph.D. programs to network with mid-career minority faculty and to meet program officers at NSF and other agencies in the DC area. 2. Provide a forum for mid-career minority faculty to initiate collaborative research with aspiring minority faculty, with each other, and with various funding agencies. The workshop will also provide information on career options for mid-career faculty. It is anticipated that this forum will help alleviate fears and concerns among aspiring minority candidates about the recruiting process and encourage them to pursue careers in academia. They will also be presented with information about the rigors and trials of an academic career before they start working and the tenure clock starts. The program is being designed by and for minority faculty so that they can help each other and reduce the disparity between minority and majority faculty at various stages of their careers. The workshop will consist of: 1. Panel discussions 2. Research presentations and poster sections 3. Meetings with NSF and other funding agency program directors 4. Overview presentations of research funding opportunities at NSF and other funding agencies 5. Presentations and discussions of results of a Participant Career Development Survey 6. Structured opportunities for mentoring and collaboration doc7129 none This dissertation research by an anthropological linguist studies the language used by Jewish and Palestinian Israeli and West Bank Palestinian woman peace and political activists. While the rhetoric used appeals to gender unity, the actual practices of coalition building reveal divisions of inequality both within and between groups. The focus of the research will be on how people manipulate specific linguistic structures (how things are said) and not simply semantic content (what is said) in order to negotiate identities and goals. The student will record speech in organizational meetings and public events, as well as interview activists, individually and in small groups, to gather demographic information, gender and national ideologies. She will test hypotheses concerned with how women s attempts to create a cohesive women s activist community correlate with their ability to maximize gendered language practices within Israeli Hebrew and Palestinian Arabic; and with how code-switching (switching between two or more languages or dialects) is used to attain personal and political goals. The research should advance our understanding of how linguistic structure and practice affects political activity and will further our understanding of the ways in which Israeli and Palestinian women peace and national activists translate international phenomena, such as peace treaties and global feminism, into local realities of building or failing to build bridges across boundaries of difference to achieve common goals. In addition it will add to our knowledge of this important region of the world doc7130 none Parker The Water Science and Technology Board of the National Academies provides a focal point for studies related to water resources and the role of environmental engineering in this context. The Board s objective is to provide information to improve the scientific and technological basis for resolving important questions and issues relating to management of water resources. A major function of the WSTB is to conduct studies and sponsor workshops and conferences that can be utilized for program planning purposes. In this way, the WSTB provides a means for coordination of research plans with other Federal agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers doc7131 none Dr. Binford and his colleagues will address a number of basic questions regarding the organization of cultural systems and why they change thru time. They will organize ethnographically documented information on hunter-gatherer material culture into data sets germane to exploring archaeologically patterning in the spatial and temporal distribution and association of items of material culture ( eg. Tools, containers ornaments, and clothing). This work will provide a link between the items of material culture archaeologists regularly record and previous research establishing relationships between such properties as mobility patterns, food procurement, groups sizes and varying scales of leadership hierarchy and both environmental and systems states variability (Binford ). We will use a well proven means of coding ethnographically described tools (Oswalt , ) used in food procurement. We will expand the data on technology to include fabrication and processing tools. The latter have clear archaeological implications (See Binford : ) and may be easily related to the already documented data on the actual practices of food procurement (Binford ). We will specifically research containers. A pre-study has already shown that when the first ceramics to appear in a sequence are simple bowls, the makers are invariably heavily dependent upon grain foods. We know that early ceramics from many different places may be large pointed bottom pots (Japan, parts of North America, and Scandinavia), small mug like containers (Greece), small round jars or other forms. We want to know why such variability occurs in the form of early ceramics. Therefore, we will document the uses of all containers. That is whether wooden, bark, or other containers are used and what such use is correlated with environmentally or culturally. It is hoped that such a knowledge of non-ceramic container alternatives will be demonstrably related to fabrication tools as well as changing use of containers in the context of varying subsistence strategies. These are all exciting possibilities which should change the way we interpret archaeologically observed innovations in technology. We will develop codes for documenting the types of clothing employed and the forms of body decoration employed by each ethnic group previously studied (Binford ). We anticipate exciting results, relating clothing to the frequencies of stone tools used in clothing manufacture and both should vary with climatic variables. We expect to learn why some hunter-gatherers invest heavily in body decoration and personal items, which may end up as grave furniture, and others do not. This is particularly important since the appearance of beads and body ornaments are currently accepted by many as the earliest evidence for fully modern behavior on the part of Homo-sapiens yet not all modern Homo Sapiens use beads or other ornaments.!Other archaeologists see grave furniture and included personalities as evidence for social ranking! Among the questions this research seeks to answer are whether these assumptions are accurate and whether we can explain variability in the use of such items among hunter-gatherer peoples doc7132 none A number of projects in theoretical gravitational physics will be completed. In the first set, issues pertaining to black holes will be analyzed using a new paradigm, introduced recently by Ashtekar s group. In particular, physical information will be extracted from numerical simulations of black hole mergers in regions where gravity is so strong that effects of Einstein s general relativity dominate. In the second set, mathematical issues pertaining to the structure and solutions of Einstein s general relativity will be resolved using ``Twistor theory introduced by Roger Penrose and developed by his research group. The third set contains a number of projects pertaining to quantum gravity, the theory that will unify general relativity with quantum physics. Suitable approximation methods will be developed by the research groups of Ashtekar and Pullin to better understand the structure of a quantum gravity theory, that is being developed by the PIs and others, and to make physical predictions which could be tested in the near future. These projects interlink several fields: general relativity, computational physics, astrophysics, quantum theory and several branches of geometry. For example, the first set of projects is based on Einstein s equations of general relativity but the accurate estimates of the mass and spin of the final black hole and of the energy radiated in the process, obtained from them, will have impact on astrophysics in general and to gravitational wave physics in particular. The second set will use novel techniques from algebraic geometry to solve Einstein s equations. Unification of general relativity and quantum physics is perhaps the most outstanding open problem in fundamental physics today. The proposed projects in the third set combine sophisticated techniques from modern mathematics and theoretical physics to probe the nature of space-time geometry at the smallest scales conceivable today. Through his general relativity theory, Einstein proposed that geometry is a physical entity. Some of our projects are aimed at elevating Einstein s vision to the quantum world showing, in particular, that matter, radiation and geometry can be converted in to one another through quantum processes involving gravity. Other projects will use astronomical observations of gamma ray bursts from ongoing NASA missions to directly probe the ramifications of these novel quantum effects. This will be among the first systematic efforts at confronting the rather abstract quantum gravity theory with concrete experiments doc7133 none This action is for a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) to support the acquisition of a state-of-the-art MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) sensor system, and to integrate it into a real-time natural hazards monitoring system. MEMS is the integration of mechanical elements, sensors, actuators, and electronics on a common silicon substrate through the utilization of microfabrication technology. While the electronics are fabricated using integrated circuit (IC) process sequences, the micromechanical components are fabricated using compatible micromachining processes that selectively etch away parts of the silicon wafer or add new structural layers to form the mechanical and electromechanical devices. The opportunity exists to buy into a prototype run of MEMS high fidelity digital accelerometers being developed by Integrated Micro Instruments Inc. (IMI), a small start-up company developing MEMS devices under research contracts with DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)and AFOSR (Air Force Office of Scientific Research). This device provides an extremely linear, sensitive, and rugged 3-dimensional accelerometer in a single chip package. Since the output data stream is digitized inside the chip, there are no attendant signal processing issues or costs. Professors Steven Glaser and Nicholas Sitar have access to these chips in the prototype stage. This project is exploring just one of many potential applications of MEMS-based sensors to research and practice in civil and mechanical engineering. It is a novel application to directly integrate the micromechanisms and electronics directly into the monitoring needs of civil and mechanical engineers. There is a special synergy since Professor Glaser is directly involved in the design and construction of the Macro-Mote being developed at the NSF-sponsored Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center (BSAC), and the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC). Specifically, this project involves:The acquisition of 10 sensor devices left over from an AFOSR-sponsored research project; The acquisition of 50 improved DXL05HR devices from a fabrication run currently being sponsored by DARPA; Demonstrating a large-scale wireless MEMS dynamic monitoring system with dense instrumentation of large-scale test structures with 50 accelerometer devices doc7134 none The PIs are exploring issues relating to the development of viable systems that would allow programmers to create Java programs via spoken English input. They have to this end designed and implemented a proof-of-concept prototype called NaturalJava which supports user input of simple Java programs via written English sentences. Their ability to improve the prototype is limited at present both by software architecture shortcomings and by a lack of understanding of how real users would prefer to interact with a spoken programming interface. What kinds of written and spoken English sentences would they use? What type of navigation editing model would be effective in such an environment? To answer questions such as these, the PIs plan to conduct a Wizard-of-Oz user study in which they will invite Java programmers to write programs under controlled conditions. Subjects will write programs using a system that behaves like an improved version of NaturalJava; half of them will use a written English interface, and the other half will use a spoken English interface. A hidden expert Java programmer will play the role of NaturalJava, reading (or listening to) the commands and creating the source code. The PIs expect to learn a great deal by recording and transcribing the sessions, interviewing the programmers, and examining the resulting Java programs. At the end of the year the PIs expect to have acquired a solid understanding of the issues, so that they will then be in a position to detail and pursue their long-term agenda which, if successful, would prove especially valuable to people with certain kinds of disabilities. The research team will include a graduate student who is blind, and for whom most of the NSF funds are allocated; the PIs are not charging for their time doc7135 none Award: Principal Investigator: Steven A. Bleiler This award will provide partial support for speakers and others at semiannual conferences in the series known as the ``Cascade Topology Seminar, over a three-year period beginning in . These conferences will be held at various universities in the northwestern United States and southwestern Canada, including the Universities of Oregon, Washington, and Puget Sound, and Boise, Portland, and Oregon State Universities. Typically there will be half a dozen principal speakers on topics ranging widely over geometry and topology, the majority from outside the home institutions of the Seminar, and more than fifty participants altogether, roughly half of them faculty and half of them graduate students, as well as an occasional undergraduate student. Participation by younger mathematicians, by women, and by under-represented minorities is encouraged. The mathematics presented in meetings of the Cascade Topology Seminar ranges widely over topology and geometry. Topological issues include algebraic and geometric methods for describing and characterizing spatial problems such as the challenge of recognizing whether two knotted curves in three-space are essentially identical. Geometric topics addressed in the Seminar include differential geometry, which emphasizes measures of the curvature of spaces and the consequences of curvature for analytic problems, as well as algebraic geometry, which has its roots in the study of families of solutions to polynomial equations. Award: Principal Investigator: Steven A. Bleiler This award will provide partial support for speakers and others at semiannual conferences in the series known as the ``Cascade Topology Seminar, over a three-year period beginning in . These conferences will be held at various universities in the northwestern United States and southwestern Canada, including the Universities of Oregon, Washington, and Puget Sound, and Boise, Portland, and Oregon State Universities. Typically there will be half a dozen principal speakers on topics ranging widely over geometry and topology, the majority from outside the home institutions of the Seminar, and more than fifty participants altogether, roughly half of them faculty and half of them graduate students, as well as an occasional undergraduate student. Participation by younger mathematicians, by women, and by under-represented minorities is encouraged. The mathematics presented in meetings of the Cascade Topology Seminar ranges widely over topology and geometry. Topological issues include algebraic and geometric methods for describing and characterizing spatial problems such as the challenge of recognizing whether two knotted curves in three-space are essentially identical. Geometric topics addressed in the Seminar include differential geometry, which emphasizes measures of the curvature of spaces and the consequences of curvature for analytic problems, as well as algebraic geometry, which has its roots in the study of families of solutions to polynomial equations doc7136 none Harris The factors that affect growth and decline of populations in nature remain elusive, in part because the importance of social interactions has been underestimated. The purpose of this study is to investigate joint nesting behavior in a salamander species and relate that behavior to changes in population size over time. For example, populations that contain a high percentage of joint nesters may be larger in size than populations that contain a high percentage of solitary nesters. In addition, whether nesting behavior is influenced by individual condition and whether populations differ in frequency of nesting behaviors will be studied. Methods will include experiments in large laboratory terrariums and extensive field observations. Results from this project may indicate that existing predictive models of population growth and decline that treat all individuals as identical are inadequate and that the incorporation of individual behavioral variation among individuals into predictive population models may be a necessity. Furthermore, data derived from this detailed population study may provide insights into possible causes of an alarming decline in amphibian populations in many areas of the world. Active participation of undergraduate students in all aspects of this research will prepare them for research careers in the environmental sciences doc7137 none This research will identify intracellular mechanisms involved in the initiation of development after fertilization by determining the mechanisms responsible for Ca 2+ oscillations in fertilized eggs. Eggs of the marine invertebrate, Chaetopterus, will be used as a model to study ligand-gated Ca 2+ release mechanisms and to perform correlated in vivo and in vitro studies to identify which is are responsible for Ca 2+ oscillations in fertilized and parthenogenetically- activated eggs. Synthesis of the endogenous ligands for these channels will also be studied. The results of these studies may have great significance for the control of fertility because they will contribute important information to our understanding of mechanisms by which sperm initiate the development of the egg. They will directly test hypotheses concerning the mechanisms by which Ca 2+ becomes available to activate eggs and other cells in response to extracellular signals. Since the organism to be studied is evolutionarily very distant from frogs and sea urchins, the results will provide important data as to the general applicability of mechanisms of egg activation. These eggs undergo Ca 2+ oscillations upon fertilization as do those of mammals and many, possibly most, other organisms with the exceptions of frogs and sea urchins. Therefore, these data are more likely to inform us of mechanisms of fertilization in other organisms, including mammals, than would data obtained from sea urchin and frog eggs. Lastly, since these Ca 2+ release mechanisms are also involved in other cells in response to other signals, these results will also have broad relevance to mechanisms by which other cells respond to extracellular signals. The hypotheses to be tested are: 1) that inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate is responsible for Ca2+ oscillations and egg activation at fertilization, and 2) that other small ligands such as cyclic ADP-ribose or nicotinic acid adenine dinucleotide phosphate also contribute to these oscillations. The procedures to be used will include: 1) fluorescence spectrometry to assay Ca2+ release and sequestration in vitro, 2) fluorescence and confocal microscopy to examine the movements of Ca 2+ within eggs as a function of activation by sperm or parthenogenetic agents, 3) immunofluorescence microscopy to localize endogenous ligand-gated Ca2+ release channels in the eggs, 4) western blotting to identify the proteins that make up these channels, and 5) light microscopy as a means to determine the extent of egg activation and development. This study will also integrate research and education as well as broaden the participation of under-represented minorities (African-Americans) in scientific research. The applicant institution is a historically Black university, and the supported graduate student will be African-American. This individual s training will be enhanced by exposure to the environment of the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA doc7138 none Lewis This award supports Professor John L. Lewis, Department of Mathematics, University of Kentucky, to conduct collaborative research with Professor Hi Jun Choe of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in the area of nonlinear partial differential equations. This joint study will investigate the regularity and uniqueness of solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations. Because many physical problems can be described in the language of partial differential equations, theoretical study of such equations can lead to a variety of technological advances. Exchange visits by Professors Lewis and Choe to each others departments will allow them to combine complementary skills and expertise in addressing this important mathematical problem doc7139 none This proposal aims to contribute to understanding decentralized forest management by examining, the role of social capital in the success or failure of the decentralization efforts in comparative perspective. In addition, my objective is to analyze the links among decentralization, development, and forest conservation. I do so through a focus on three questions. The first question involves how the level of social capital influences decentralization in forest management in the communities. This question allows us to relate interaction among people and networks to the efficient functioning of organizations. I refer to this as the operational level. The second question pertains to the importance of linkages between organizations in the two domains of forest management and development planning for the functioning of forest-related committees. The important point here is that the specialized forest-related committees are nested within more generalized development planning committees. Answering this question allows us to explore and analyze whether the de facto linkages between the two bodies are beneficial to the smaller and more specialized organization. I refer to this as the complementary level. The third question asks how inter-departmental linkages at higher levels in the state government hierarchy affect the performance of the decentralized forest management bodes. This question helps us to move from the operational level to the collective choice level. Many studies show that the operational rules are important to overcome collective action problems. However, there has been very little inquiry into the links between the operational and collective choice level. The third question attempts to undertake this inquiry. The research is conducted in Jalpaiguri and Darjeeling districts in North Bengal, India doc7140 none The proposed request ito support participation in an Italian cruise to the Ross Sea, Antarctica in January-February, . The cruise invitation for this ship of opportunity was received in late spring, and hence was too late to request funding via normal funding venues. It is a joint physical-biological-geological cruise that will sample a broad range of environments in the Ross Sea (e.g., the continental shelf break off Cape Adare, the Ross Sea ice shelf, the coastal waters near Terra Nova Bay, and the central Ross Sea). The proposed research will focus on two scientific topics: aggregate formation and iron limitation of phytoplankton photosynthesis. The process of aggregate formation and flux, a mediator in the flux of organic matter will be determined using a photographic technique. The dependence of photosynthesis in a variety of environments will be assessed in the Ross Sea by a novel fluorometric method. These near real-time estimates of photosynthesis irradiance relationships are sensitive indicators of iron limitation. This request is in response to a recent invitation to participate and provides a unique opportunity to sample the Ross Sea with novel techniques. The research opportunity made available builds on recent results from the southern Ocean and extends international collaborative efforts. In the past, scientific coordination with Italian investigators in the Ross Sea has been spotty and somewhat tentative. This collaboration (i.e., the offering of bunk space and scientific collaboration) is a big move forward in expanding the coordination of international activities. This is also an opportunity to utilize the only ship available for scientific research in the Ross Sea in -01. The data provided by the PI will employ two relatively new techniques to look at questions of iron limitation and aggregate formation. The proposed work will provide the first opportunity to field test a novel and potentially ground-breaking instrument in the assessment of iron limitation and bring that expertise to the US Antarctic Program doc7141 none Darling Integrated study of hot spring and stream chemistry in major tributaries of the Narayani river system of central Nepal, and stable isotope and fluid inclusion studies of associated hydrothermal vein material is underway. Data on the sources of solutes and sediments in Himalayan rivers indicate that active geothermal systems near the Main Central Thrust and in the Thakola graben are important sources of heat and solutes (including Na, K, Ca, Cl, Ge, Si and Sr), and release CO2 from metamorphic decarbonation reactions at depth 13C values from hot spring fluids are as high as +130 00, indicating a metamorphic source of CO2. About 25% of the flux of dissolved K and Sr, 12-15% of dissolved Si, and 90% of Cl at the confluence with the Trisuli river are derived from hydrothermal sources near the MCT. The heat loss from the surface springs is near 80 m W m2 averaged over the area of the High Himalayan Crystalline series in the Marsyandi basin. This data indicate that geothermal activity along the MCT has a significant impact on geochemical and heat fluxes in the Himalaya. Data from hot springs and tributaries in the major tributary drainage of the Narayani (Kali Gandaki, Seti, Marsyandi, Bhuri, and Trisuli rivers) are being used to construct a chemical and water flux mass balance for the hydrothermal systems. Chemical mass balance of conservative tracers including SO4 =Cl- and Ge Se will be used to estimate hydrothernal contributions to river fluxes. Fluid inclusion and stable isotope analysis of undeformed contribution to river Fluxes. Fluid inclusion and stable isotope analysis of undeformed post-metamorphic quartz and calcite veins will be used to estimate reservoir conditions, water-rock ratios, and local geothermal gradients in the convective system. The study is providing important data-driven estimate of geothermal heat flow and carbon degassing from the Himalaya that will help resolve difficulties with current Himalayan river budgets for radiogenic Sr and other dissolved species and new understanding to both our knowledge of Himalayan tectonic processes and how they impact geochemical fluxes doc7142 none James has been exploring the arithmetic properties of the Fourier coefficients of modular forms of integral and half-integral weight from a theoretical and a computational point of view. His research has been especially focused on problems related to the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, Goldfeld s conjecture and to the Lang Trotter conjecture. He has been successful in proving results toward Goldfeld s conjecture and toward a weak form of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. In addition, along with K. Ono he has been successful in proving a result concerning the behavior of the Selmer groups of quadratic twists of an elliptic curve. Recently, K. Murty and James have been conducting extensive investigations into certain generalizations of the Lang and Trotter conjecture from both a numerical and statistical point of view. James is planning to continue to explore the connections between modular forms and arithmetic geometry. In particular, he hopes to better understand the structure of Tate-Shafarevich groups of elliptic curves and the distribution of the coefficients of modular forms of integral and half-integral weight. James plans to proceed with both numerical and theoretical investigations into these matters doc7143 none The digestive cells of the sea slug, Elysia chlorotica, have an endosymbiotic association with chloroplasts from the alga, Vaucheria litorea. These chloroplasts, obtained from ingested Vaucheria, remain viable and functioning within the sea slug for months. The PIs have previously demonstrated that the captive, functional plastids synthesize proteins, including those that seem to be coded for in the slug genome. They have recently identified some of those proteins as belonging to the light harvesting complex I (LHCI) and have developed preliminary molecular evidence for the presence of the LCHI gene in the slug genomic DNA. For this proof-of-concept award, the PIs will conduct experiments designed to identify plastid protein genes in the host cell genome. Such transfers of genes from the symbiont into the host cell nucleus must certainly have been associated with the mechanism of the widely accepted endosymbiotic origin of intracellular organelles, such as mitochondria and chloroplasts. If a successful interspecies gene transfer between an alga and a slug mediated by an endogenous virus can be demonstrated in the case of E. chlorotica, then an exemplary mechanism for this process will have been provided doc7144 none Wolbachia are inherited bacterial parasites of a large number of invertebrates. There has been an upsurge in research interest in these organisms in recent years because of their newly appreciated wide host range together with the array of newly discovered effects they have on the hosts they infect. These include inducing developmental defects such as cytoplasmic incompatibility in young embryos, overriding chromosomal sex-determination, inducing parthenogenesis and even selectively killing male hosts. This proposal plans to provide a research infrastructure to support this newly established and rapidly growing field of scientific research. This will be done through the establishment of an internet-based research resource for Wolbachia workers. This web site will collect and distribute data and resources for the international community of scientists working with this system. In addition this proposal will help to fund a series of scientific meetings aimed at bringing established workers in this field together with new investigators. This project will help to provide an important infrastructure to this emerging research area. It will allow for the global dissemination of data and resources as well as provide a forum for scientists worldwide to meet and exchange data. This infrastructure will promote the rapid development of this young and emerging area of biological research doc7145 none Jacoby This is a proposal for a planning visit for Dr. Roxanne Jacoby to visit engineering schools in the Philippines, Thailand, China and Korea to develop collaborations between Cooper Union College and the engineering schools in these countries. Cooper Union is outstanding in its engineering education programs. This trip will provide a good opportunity for Dr. Jacoby to develop additional collaborations in engineering education with Asian schools doc7146 none The project facilitates operation of a Science Management Office (SMO) for the Land-Atmosphere-Ice Interactions (LAII) component of the Arctic System Science (ARCSS) Program. The SMO will facilitate planning and outreach activities that address LAII goals as described in a Science Plan written by the Science Steering Committee (SSC) and reviewed by the research community. The award supports continued planning by the LAII SSC, maintenance of a web page for outreach to both the scientific community and the public, publication of planning documents, and organizing annual All-Hands meetings. The SMO is an important activity to the planning and integration of interdisciplinary research projects addressing US Global Change Research Program goals in the Arctic doc7147 none data types or annotations are used to side-step very difficult or impossible dependency-analysis needed to justify the desired code transformations. This work should also stimulate research into new high level numerical methods and architectures, both of which are limited by the lack of highly tuned kernels doc7148 none Kitching This award supports John Kitching and students from the University of Colorado in a collaboration with Robert Wynands of the Applied Physics Department at the University of Bonn, Germany. The research funded by this award will study ways to increase the signal strength of dark-line resonances in three-level atomic systems, which are significant for both magnetometry and atomic clock research. Problems associated with the measurement of the small absorption limits the stability of clock reference frequencies and magnetometer sensitivities. The results of this research will be of benefit to the magnetometry work at Bonn and to the atomic clock research at the University of Colorado and at NIST, since both fields rely on the physics of exciting and measuring hyperfine transitional in alkali atoms. Not only will this collaboration lead to a better understanding of the underlying physics, but will also lead to a practical exchange of technological methods now used in each field individually. The opportunity this joint, collaborative research effort presents junior researchers is substantial, and the work done on this proposal will help institutionalize the relationship between the German and U.S. research groups doc7149 none The International Technology Education Association (ITEA) has developed and distributed the Standards for Technological Literacy. The National Academy of Engineering has supported this effort and has convened a committee to make the case for teaching technological literacy in schools, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers has convened conferences on this issue. Two year colleges are developing programs to alleviate the major shortages of technologically competent people to work as technicians. Yet the average citizen has little appreciation for the importance of a basic understanding of technology, its development and history and its effect on society and society s effect on technology. This project is collecting information and ideas on the concepts technologically literate citizens should know from a leaders in the technology community. The information will be used to publish a book on technological literacy aimed at a general audience doc7150 none Research Coordination Network: Biosphere-atmosphere stable isotope network (BASIN) Stable isotope analyses play an important role in improving our understanding of the carbon cycle at both ecosystem and global scales. Ecologists and atmospheric scientists have formed the Biosphere-Atmosphere Stable Isotope Network (BASIN), with several goals: development of common measurement approaches to allow cross-site data comparisons; development of integrated products such as global maps of variations in the isotopic composition of CO2 that can be used for better constraining predictions of global carbon cycle models; workshops to advance understanding and share knowledge; promotion and coordination of regional cross-site studies and web-accessed databases; and opportunities for cross-site training of both beginning and under-represented investigators in the latest methodologies and analytical approaches. BASIN is part of an international effort (Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems, IGBP) to foster, promote, and encourage integration of stable isotope measurements into carbon cycle studies at ecosystem, regional, and global scales doc7151 none The researchers are working to develop general tools to diagnose end-to-end performance problems of advanced network applications on high-speed research networks. This tool development will be grounded in addressing the needs of two representative applications, one with bulk throughput requirements and one with interactive requirements. The researchers capitalize on the existing Surveyor infrastructure and will work with other NSF-funded projects (both applications and measurement), coordinating closely with the Internet2 End-to-End Performance Initiative to ensure the results continue to be used past the expiration of this grant for problems facing higher-education doc7152 none Peter Stiling Identifying the mechanisms that structure communities is an important goal of ecology, and considerable controversy surrounds the importance of resources (bottom-up) versus predators (top-down). The proposed research seeks to understand the ecological contexts in which alternative mechanisms predominate in structuring herbivore communities in salt marsh ecosystems, and will do so based on both observational and manipulative experiments. In particular, the extent to which data support four competing hypotheses (bottom-up control vs. top-down control vs. joint control vs. environmental stress) will be evaluated with respect to a gradient in productivity. Factorial field experiments will test if bottom-up effects on herbivores are stronger on low productivity plants whereas top-down effects on herbivores are stronger on high productivity plants. Modifying densities of parasitoids will control top-down effects and modifying plant quality through additions of nitrogen and labile carbon will control bottom-up effects. In addition, the proposed research will ascertain the conditions under which the effects of parasites cascade through the food web and affect plants, and the circumstances in which bottom-up effects on plants alter the rate of predation on herbivores by natural enemies doc7153 none This award is concerned with a broad range of research in gravitational physics. Some of the research deals with issues that have arisen in attempts to formulate a quantum theory of gravity, such as issues involved in the calculation of the wavefunction of the universe . Other projects involve investigation of the effects of strong gravitational fields on the quantum properties of matter, such as the extent to which certain positive energy properties continue to hold in the presence of gravity. Yet other research projects concern the nature and properties of classical gravitational fields in the theory of general relativity. Some of the latter projects---such as the determination of forces on bodies associated with their emission of gravitational radiation---have direct implications for astrophysics and cosmology. Although the proposed research includes a wide range of topics in a number of different areas, there is a common theme to the main goals of the research: To obtain a deeper understanding of the mathematical and physical properties of the gravitational field as described by the theory of general relativity, and to make progress toward the formulation and development of a quantum theory of gravity. The development of a quantum theory of gravity is currently at the forefront of fundamental research in theoretical physics doc7154 none The PI is exploring applications of decision theory to large, complex systems, both from the theoretical and practical point of view. From the theoretical end, he plans to use his previously-introduced concept of plausibility measures as a tool for exploring qualitative decision making. Plausibility measures generalize probability measures, and provide an elegant framework for understanding what properties of an uncertainty measure are necessary to use that uncertainty measure for various purposes (e.g., as a model of belief revision or to apply the techniques of Bayesian networks). The PI hopes plausibility measures will enable him to fine-tune approaches to decision making in applications where one does not have complete probability distributions and only rough utilities. As far as practical applications go, the PI plans to extend his initial work on applying decision theory to query optimization in databases. When a user poses a query, there are in general many different plans that can be used to compute the answer. While all the plans will compute the answer correctly, they may differ wildly in running time. What will be the best plan will in general depend on the values of certain random variables (how much memory the system has available when the query is run and the selectivity of various predicates). Current query optimization algorithms just use a particular value (e.g., the expected value) for these variables. The PI has previously shown how to modify these algorithms to allow for there being a probability distribution associated with each of these variables in order to compute the plan with the least expected running time. In theory, this approach should substantially outperform the competition, but it remains to be determined experimentally whether the theoretical results hold up in practice doc7155 none This proposal is to fund a US-Korea Joint Workshop on Digital Libraries. This small planning workshop is the first with an Asian country. The globalization of the internet and associated information infrastructure now offers the promise of creating international digital libraries whose resources are distributed and are capable of managing content originally created in multiple languages, formats, media, and social and organizational contexts. The barriers to achieving progress in worldwide development of digital libraries are particularly difficult between nations with very different languages and cultures. To achieve this next level of knowledge infrastructure requires collaborative efforts in research areas including: (1) multi-lingual information systems, cross-language retrieval systems, language translation, and language teaching software; (2) multi-national content development including sound, data, image, ultimedia, and software; (3) interoperability and scalability technology to permit extremely large world-wide collections; (4) metadata techniques and tools The workshop has three primary goals. First, it will work to identify ways to reduce the barriers to increased collaborative efforts between US and Korean researchers. Second it will explore technical advances and research environments needed to facilitate US-Korea collaboration related to digital libraries research and educational applications. Third, it will attempt to produce generalizable strategies and approaches for extending and employing digital libraries technologies across radically different textual and cultural materials doc7156 none Computational models of networks of neurons in the brain usually are based on following the details of activity patterns in large numbers of individually explicit neuronal elements and their synapses. Simulations of activity in functional units based on hundreds or even thousands of such neural units, such as a column within the sensory cortex, can take hours of computer time to model seconds of real time. The goal of this project is to develop new techniques to facilitate large-scale modeling of neural networks in the mammalian brain. The theory of probability (population) density function, borrowed from the field of statistical mechanics, uses large numbers of elements to advantage. In the population density method, similar neurons are lumped together in a population, and one tracks the distribution of neurons over state space in each population. The state of a neuron is determined by the dynamic variables in the underlying single-neuron model, to allow deriving a population firing rate from a flux of probability across a particular surface in state space, taking into account coupling between neurons by excitatory and inhibitory input events at stochastic synapses. The present project will extend the population density theory by incorporating realistic synaptic kinetics. This consequent increased computational complexity will lead to developing and testing new simulation methods to compare with conventional direct simulations for accuracy and speed. Population density methods will be applied to the well known primary visual cortex, including interactions among cortical layers and columns, to account for physiologically known features such as sensitivity to orientation of visual bar stimuli, and the relation of responses to stimulus contrast levels. Results will have an impact on visual neuroscience as well as computational neuroscience, and on understanding information processing in the brain in general. These new methods could accelerate network simulations by orders of magnitude, with the promise of applications in computer and information sciences. Cross-disciplinary graduate training is an important added feature of this project doc7157 none This project involves fieldwork on relative clauses (RCs) in two Uto-Aztecan languages, Hiaki (Yaqui) and O odham (Papago), as part of a dissertation project on the syntax and typology of pre-nominal and post-nominal relative clauses. Pre- and post-relatives differ systematically. In general, only postrelatives employ finite verbs, relative pronouns, and the complementizer used in sentential complementation. The proposed study will investigate the correlations between pre- and postrelatives and the correlations between them and other types of RCs that have been identified in the literature. Central questions are: 1. Why do these correlations exist? 2. What criteria determine the choice of prerelative versus postrelative across languages? Of special interest is the existence of languages whose RCs do not fit neatly into the typology that seems adequate for the majority of languages studied to date, languages whose RCs show properties characteristic of both pre- and postrelatives. The analysis of these languages will help to understand the true shape of the typology, and the reasons the facts are what they are. Hiaki and O odham are mixed languages in this sense. O odham uses both pre- and postrelatives. Hiaki employs postrelatives with all the properties typical of prerelatives. The proposed project will investigate the RCs of both languages by conducting fieldwork and analyzing native texts. The results of this research are necessary prerequisites for the theoretical objective of the project. Hiaki and O odham are endangered languages. The description of their RC-constructions gained by fieldwork and text-analysis will also be used to develop teaching materials. All fieldwork data will be recorded digitally. They will also be used as data for the webbased dictionary-project on O odham, Navajo, and Hiaki that is currently underway at the University of Arizona doc7158 none Identity politics refers to claims for resources and rights based on assertions of cultural difference, rather than claims based on social class or political party. This dissertation research project involves a cultural anthropologist from the University of Texas studying how ethnic mapping projects affect the natural resource claims of indigenous groups on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua. The student will study how local Miskitu and Creole communities, in conjunction with NGOs and other organizations, advance claims over territory and natural resources. The project will pay special attention to the impact these claims have on gender relations and other forms of intra-community inequality. The tensions between indigenous and black communities, the relations between these communities and the state, and the intersecting variables of gender and class will also be studied. The methods to be used include family and oral history interviews, participant observation and archival research, as well as GIS-based mapping. This research will advance our understanding of the so-called new social movements, bringing into focus a range of theoretical approaches, from post-structuralist analyses of identity formation to more conventional theories of ethnic and racial politics. The new information to be gained from this case study will help us to understand similar processes of identity politics occurring throughout the world, from the former Yugoslavia to Chiapas, Mexico doc7159 none The investigators will study the impact of dynamic changes in the geosynchronous plasma sheet populations by modeling a range of magnetic storm sizes and steady magnetospheric convection events. Understanding the ways in which energy moves into and through the inner magnetosphere or is dissipated with the magnetosphere-ionosphere system in response to solar wind inputs provides the key to predicting the resulting effects on Earth s atmosphere. The study will address the role of density and temperature changes in the plasma sheet population, the role of penetration electric fields and long duration magnetic storms, the relation between convection events and small storms, and the contribution of the ring current to the storm energy budget and decay time scales. A major goal of this study is the quantification of how the electrodynamics of the inner magnetosphere responds to the solar wind drivers. Furthermore, the connection with ground-based magnetometer measurements, ionospheric current systems, and the global magnetosphere-ionosphere energy budget will be investigated doc7160 none With the advent of automated, high-throughput experimental protocols and data collection techniques, research and discoveries in many areas of science and technology have become increasingly data driven and computation intensive. The applications motivating the research in this project arise from molecular biology, biotechnology and neural science. The rapid accumaulation of experimental data in these areas have outstriped scientists ability to analyze them, and advanced statistical methods are needed to automate the analysis process and to exploit the complex data structure and extensive scientific knowledge underlying such studies. Computational inference refers to statistical modeling and inference procedures that rely on intensive computation to extract information from large scale data and knowledge-based models. The board, long term goal of this project is to advance the methodologies of computational inference and apply them towards the solution of several important problems in the aforementioned scientific areas. A critical step in almost all large scale computational inference procedure is the study of the posterior density through Monte Carlo sampling (or the related problem of studying the likelihood function). Successful sampling leads immediately to the inference of any parameter or prediction of interest to the investigator. Thus the first specific goal of this project is to develop Monte Carlo simulation methods that are effective in sampling complex, multimodal distributions. Advances in this core computational problem will not only facilitate effective computational inference, but will also be of interest to other scientific tasks such as simulation of molecular structures and combinatorial optimization. Three approaches will be investigated: a) an evolutionary Monte Carlo approach where a population of structures are evolved and individual structures, including recombinant ones, are continuously competing for survival in the population, b) further development of sequential importance sampling and dynamic importance sampling through better methods to handle skewed weight distributions, c) multi-level computational models. Hybrid algorithms combining the above approaches will also be investigated. Some of these methods will be used to investigate the grand-challenge problem of understanding the energy landscape of protein conformation. The second specific goal of this project is the development of computational inference tools for two further scientifc problems: i) multiple alignment and clustering of DNA and protein sequences based on hidden Markov models, and the use of these in the analysis of human genome coding regions, ii) the development of hierarchical computational models for low-level vision task such as texture recognition and primal sketching. If successful, the methods developed in this project will enable the wider application of computational inference and will also result in direct contributions to three problems of considerable importance in the current scientific frontier doc7161 none The natural environment varies considerably from place to place, and in time. Some of this variation is natural (e.g., altitudinal and latitudinal gradients in temperature) and some of it is induced by human activities (e.g., urban temperature effects, global climatic changes). This study will investigate the ability of a model insect, the striped ground cricket Allonemobius socius, to plastically adjust its life cycle to meet the challenges of climatic variation in space and time. This study will also determine the genetic basis for this plasticity. Genetic variation will be investigated both among populations along altitudinal and latitudinal clines and within populations that are expected to vary in their ability to plastically respond to environmental change. This study will provide valuable information concerning adaptive evolutionary responses to past environmental changes. In addition, by characterizing the amount of genetic variation that exists within populations it will be possible to predict the rate of adaptive response to future changes in climate doc7162 none With support from the National Science Foundation an American and Chinese team led by George Rapp and Zhichun Jing from the American side and Wang Wei and Tang Jigen from the Chinese side will continue archaeological research at Late Shang site of Anyang in the Chinese Province of Henan. This multidisciplinary research focuses on the co-evolution of human societies and landscapes in the capital territory of the Late Shang state. With prior NSF support the project located and is excavating a major new site, now called Huanbei Shang City [Huanbei means north of the Huan River ], that fills in an important chronological gap in our knowledge of the Shang peoples. This site bridges the critical gap between the Zhengzhou phase of the Early Shang and the Yinxu phase of the Late Shang. This site was discovered by systematic geoarchaeological core drilling that was undertaken to determine the third [vertical] dimension and nature of the archaeological deposits in the central region of the Late Shang Dynasty. The team will now continue its excavation of Huanbei Shang City, its archaeological and geoarchaeological surveys, and its studies of environmental change in relation to the operation and final collapse of the Late Shang state. Further excavation at Huanbei Shang City should clarify its political status, including the question of its possible status as the capital during the reign of Pan Geng and two succeeding kings. Complex societies developed in many parts of the world apparently independently and roughly at the same time. Given similarities among individual cases, researchers believe that the emergence of civilization results not from historical accident but from an underlying developmental process which is amenable to scientific description. To gain insight, use of a comparative approach allows individual cases in different parts of the world to be examined for common features and trends. Given intensive archaeological research over many decades a great deal is known about cradles of civilization in Middle and South American and the Near East. Unfortunately the prehistory of China is less well understood and the work of Dr. Rapp and colleagues will help to fill a major gap in the Central Chinese sequence doc7163 none This study will examine a leisure activity that appears to have all but faded from American culture, an agricultural encampment and fair in central Pennsylvania that has existed since . The project involves dissertation research by a student in the leisure studies department of Pennsylvania State university. The project will describe and document the culture of the fair, and to understand why participants attending the fair chose to do so. Thirty-six informants will be sampled from three age cohorts. Data from participant observation and semi-structured, in-depth interviews using the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique will be used to create a mental map of the fair for each informant. The new knowledge to be created will further our understanding of expressive culture and its significance to a rural American community. In addition the research will contribute to the training of a young social scientist doc7164 none Case, David This grant provides partial support for the Gordon Research Conference on Computational Aspects of Biomolecular NMR, to be held May 6-11, , at the conference center Il Ciocco , in Barga, Italy. The conference chairs are Drs. David Case and Michael Nilges. The purpose of the conference is to bring together scientists working at the forefront of biomolecular NMR, to foster the free exchange of cutting-edge, pre-publication work, and to establish directions for exploiting computation to solve difficult problems in the field. Gordon Conferences provide a valuable means of disseminating information and ideas in a way that cannot be achieved through the usual channels of communication, that is, publications and presentations at large scientific meetings. This meeting is the second of what is intended to be a biannual conference. Computation plays a crucial role in virtually every aspect of biomolecular NMR, from data acquisition and analysis to structure determination. In order to reflect the full breadth of the field, a broad, multinational representation of scientists engaged in both experiment and computation has been assembled. Central themes of the conference will be the interdependence of experiment, theory, and computation, and the contributions that computation can make to advancing the frontiers of biomolecular NMR. Sessions will be devoted to new sources of structural and dynamical information, computer-aided assignment, treatment of dynamic disorder and structural heterogeneity, intermolecular interaction and drug discovery, and NMR and structural genomics doc7165 none The long-term goal of this project is to define the mechanism of energy coupling (e.g., ATP hydrolysis) to N2 reduction in the metalloenzyme complex nitrogenase. The availability of fixed forms of nitrogen (e.g., ammonia) is essential to all living organisms, where it is used to make proteins, DNA, and a range of other biomolecules. The reduction of N2 from air to ammonia represents the largest input of bioavailable nitrogen in the biosphere, with biological nitrogen fixation accounting for most of the N2 reduction. Biological nitrogen fixation occurs in a large number of microorganisms that can be called diazotrophs, being catalyzed by a highly conserved metalloenzyme called nitrogenase. The specific objective of this research program is to address one of the significant unknowns about the nitrogenase mechanism, namely understanding how MgATP binding and hydrolysis are coupled to N2 reduction. Progress over recent years has revealed that nucleotide binding and hydrolysis control several steps in the nitrogenase mechanism including electron transfer from the Fe protein component to the MoFe protein component, substrate reduction on the MoFe protein, and dissociation of the two component proteins following each electron transfer event. Importantly, it is clear that nucleotides exert their influence at a distance through long-range protein conformational changes. In this project, three outstanding questions about how nucleotides participate in the nitrogenase mechanism will be considered: 1) What are the contributions of two peptide stretches within the Fe protein (termed switches I and II) in communicating from the nucleotide binding sites to influence the MoFe protein? 2) How do nucleotides regulate electron transfer from the Fe protein to the MoFe protein? 3) What are the individual contributions of two MgATP binding and hydrolysis events to the overall nitrogenase mechanism? A multidisciplinary approach will be used that utilizes x-ray structural information, in conjunction with site-directed mutagenesis and biochemical and spectroscopic methods, to unravel details of the nucleotide mechanisms. It is expected that the results from this project will contribute to a detailed understanding of the functions of nucleotides in the nitrogenase mechanism and will have broader implications in understanding the mechanisms of other nucleotide-coupled energy transduction proteins doc7166 none This project examines an area largely overlooked in the literature on genocide by focusing on two questions. What is the psychology underlying the early detection and comprehension of the threat of genocide? What factors facilitate the refusal to be victimized and the drive to protect oneself and family? The Principal Investigator examines the psychology underlying the resistance to genocide through a narrative analysis of interviews with German Jewish exiles who fled the Third Reich before the Holocaust. The work addresses five important substantive questions. (1) What is the relationship between cognition, ontological security and ethnic violence? (2) Are basic personality factors more important than contextual or situational influences in an individual s ability to withstand the psychology of victimization that accompanies genocide? (3) How social is the construction of identity, and how is our ethical-political action in turn shaped by our perceptions of others? (4) Was there something particularly virulent in German anti-Semitism, or can the kind of ethnic violence that occurred during the Holocaust occur elsewhere, given similar background conditions and social-psychological factors? And finally (5) can work on identity help formulate a theory of moral action that subsumes rational actor theory by encompassing that theory into a broader theory of human flourishing? Why is this research appropriate for a SGER? The work meets 4 requirements for a SGER: urgency of data collection, dissemination of raw data, exploration of innovative research methodologies, and applying new approaches to an established research topic. (1) Urgency of data collection. There is an urgent need to collect raw data from this particular group of people, before their memories are lost because of death or health problems as a result of aging. Despite extensive work on the Holocaust, this sample represents one group that has rarely been interviewed, yet the investigator s few preliminary interviews suggest they provide unusual insight on this period. (2) Dissemination of raw data. The investigator s work on cognitive frameworks has broken new ground in our understanding of how identity and perceptions of self constrain choice. Detecting the subtleties of this process requires a particular skill and access to subjects. By publishing the full interviews, the investigator will be releasing valuable data to the social science community, thereby providing access to an unusually rich data source so others can perform the kind of technical analyses no one scholar can have either the time or skills to execute. (3) Exploration of innovative research methodology. Mixing survey with narrative and interpretive data is innovative. This methodology is highly promising and congenial to improvements in interviewing in ways that might reconcile important methodological and ethical issues concerning interviewing on sensitive topics, such as genocide and racism. (4) Application of new expertise or new approaches to an established research topic. Knowledge about individuals whose identities were threatened, in multiple ways, and yet who managed to flourish, personally and professionally, can yield important insights. This investigation promises to enhance substantially our understanding of this topic and provide a valuable database for other scholars doc7167 none Liu This award supports Professor Clark C. Liu, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Hawaii, to conduct collaborative research with Dr. Jae-Woo Park of Ewha Womans University in Korea. The joint study will investigate problems associated with desalination of water using wind-powered reverse osmosis. Principal objectives of the project include development of a feedback control sub-system and investigation of fouling mechanisms associated with wind-powered reverse osmosis desalination. Fresh water is a major factor in limiting the sustainable development of many remote regions. The problem is compounded for many islands and other remote locations where a short supply of electricity does not allow the use of electricity for desalination. Thus, development of desalination technology that utilizes wind energy for the reverse osmosis process holds great potential. This project will combine the complementary expertise and facilities of the American and Korean laboratories to advance our mutual understanding of the problem doc7168 none This award provides NSF support for a planning grant to help New Mexico set priorities for the improvement of its basic science and engineering infrastructure. Planning activities will include 1) construction of databases to document the current and potential state of research competitiveness in New Mexico s six universities, 2) cataloging of barriers that must be surmounted for promising University programs in science and engineering to develop into nationally and internationally recognized centers of excellence, 3) developing a ten-year implementation strategy to improve New Mexico s science and engineering research base. This planning grant will collect data, establish a state steering committee, select targeted EPSCoR research themes and subprograms, and develop a process for selecting a state EPSCoR Project Director(s). The planning activity is excepted to result in submission of an EPSCoR Implementation Proposal for sustainable infrastructure improvements which will enable New Mexico researchers to more effectively compete for federal and private R&D funding doc7169 none Comaroff Monterescu This dissertation research by an anthropology student from the University of Chicago studies how Palestinian and Jewish Israelis living in mixed towns understand and express their identity. Arab Israelis live in a democratic state that excludes the possibility of their full citizenship, yet at the same time they are territorially, demographically and politically peripheral in the Arab world at large. Palestinian Israelis are caught between the Israeli state and the Palestinian nation, neither of which is capable of providing full commitment and membership. As a collective this group lives a paradoxical existence: the more it remains intact in its traditional place and asserts a right to sovereign determination, the more it finds itself disconnected and excluded from nationhood and citizenship. The project will study this paradox in the nationally and ethnically mixed urban contexts of Jaffa, Haifa, Acre and Ramla. Ethnographic research in Jaffa will study the effects of accelerated gentrification involving affluent Jews and poor mixed neighborhoods as well as the process of change involving Arab inhabitants moving into formally Jewish neighborhoods. Using participant observation in Jaffa the student will study Muslim and Christian Palestinians as well as three sub-groups of Jewish inhabitants: old lower-class immigrants, new wealthy gentrifiers, and young students. Using archival research the student will document the comparative history of Jaffa and Haifa, Acre and Ramla as mixed towns. This research is important as it will advance our understanding of the sources and nature of the intergroup tensions in this important area of the world, as well as providing training for a young social scientist doc7170 none Livingston A crucial step during embryonic development is the formation of the three tissue layers that make up the basic animal body plan: ectoderm, endoderm and mesoderm. The Livingston laboratory is investigating how the endoderm, which gives rise to the digestive system and associated organs, is formed during development. Specifically, Dr. Livingston studies how endoderm-specific genes are regulated at the level of transcription using sea urchin embryos as a model system. This involve studying both the segments of DNA involved in controlling gene expression and the proteins that bind to these DNA sequences and regulate transcription by RNA polymerase. Spfkhl, a gene that encodes a winged helix transcription factor that is centrally located in the cascade of gene regulation leading to endoderm differentiation, will be utilized as a starting point. In Specific Aim 1, the Livingston laboratory will examine the cis-regulatory sequences that control Spfkhl expression using powerful techniques that have been developed in sea urchins for studying gene regulation using reporter constructs. In Specific Aim 2, the Livingston laboratory will examine the role of the Spfkhl protein in endoderm formation. This will be accomplished using injection of either full length mRNA encoding Spfkhl to assess the effects of overexpression of this gene on endoderm development, or dominant-negative forms of Spfkhl mRNA, which will assess the effects of the loss of Spfkhl function on endoderm development. In Specific Aim 3, the Livingston laboratory will isolate and characterize genes that are regulated by Spfkhl, and will begin to analyze the function of these genes in endoderm development. These studies should allow the Livingston laboratory to learn more about the interactions of transcription factors on an endoderm-specific gene regulatory region, including both positive and negative regulators and the importance of context on the role of these factors. Such studies, when compared to studies on other endodermal genes in a variety of organisms, will allow Dr. Livingston to begin to dissect the conserved mechanisms in endodermal gene expression. Identification of novel regulators of this gene, and targets of this gene, will identify new molecules that play a role in endoderm development. These can then be studied both in the sea urchin model system as well as in other species doc7171 none 00- Hershey RUI: A geomorphic trophic hypothesis for arctic lake productivity Studies of controls of lake productivity have historically focused on the water column-the pelagic zone, emphasizing either bottom up physiochemical constraints, or top-down food web constraints. Neither paradigm is fully adequate to describe many small lakes of the world, because in shallow lakes, substrate-associated (benthic) primary production is important. This project will test the hypothesis that Arctic lake algal, invertebrate, and fish production, and the distribution of production between benthic and pelagic compartments, can be predicted based on landscape criteria, lake geomorphology, and food web configuration. A complete understanding of the relationships between landscape features, lake geomorphology, and trophic structure in determining both benthic and pelagic productivity is lacking for any system of lakes. This work will contribute substantially to the understanding of these relationships for shallow lakes, which are common in lake districts worldwide. The University of North Carolina at Greensboro is primarily an undergraduate institution with a substantial minority population. The proposed work will actively include undergraduates, providing them with opportunities to perform supervised projects for which they will have primary responsibility, involving them in all aspects of field work, and engaging them in the overall scope of the larger project doc7172 none Automation of a given design process requires an algorithmic analysis of it. The availability of fast and easily implementable algorithms is essential to the discipline. This proposal focuses on the physical design problems and their interaction with higher and lower-levels of the design hierarchy. Two classes of problems are being studied. First, the interaction between various cost functions in the placement problem is being investigated. In particular, relationship among net-cut, wirelength, congestion, and timing is being researched. Next, the class of algorithmic predictors and statistical predictors are being studied. One goal of this project is to show that it is possible to obtain accurate prediction very fast using floorplan and placement predictors. CAD tools associated with the above projects are under development doc7173 none Collaborative research between investigators at Miami University and Ohio State University will focus on physiological and ecological mechanisms used by insects for winter survival. Many overwintering insects are exposed simultaneously to cold and desiccating conditions. Since both freezing and desiccation subject cells to drying, the goal of this research is to determine whether physiological responses to these stresses are similar. Using two insect models, one species that cannot tolerate freezing (a flesh fly) and one that tolerates extensive internal freezing (a gall fly larvae), the investigators will conduct a series of field and laboratory studies to determine the limits of organismal and cellular survival in relation to protective physiological responses including ion regulation and stress proteins. The results of these studies may indicate whether adaptations protecting against desiccation stress could have given rise to the evolution of insect cold-hardiness. Furthermore, this work may provide new tools both for the disruption of insect pest populations, and for the long-term storage of insects and other organisms at low temperature doc7174 none In order to fully understand how human-environment interactions have evolved we must learn how humans conceptualize environmental resources in the absence of western scientific technology. This project, involving the dissertation research of an anthropology student from the University of Georgia, will study how the Tzeltal Maya Indians of Chiapas, Mexico understand the healing actions of plants. Folk models for the actions of 24 commonly used medicinal plants will be constructed during interviews with a range of Tzeltal-speaking informants. A survey will then assess whether the folk models are shared by the general Tzeltal population. The data generated by the research will be used to test hypotheses about human-environmental interactions, such as that the biological activities of compounds found in the plants will correlate with the folk models. The student will provide local translations of her findings so the intellectual property rights of the Indians will be supported. The new knowledge to be created will be useful to health care workers as it will facilitate communication about health issues between local Mayan and Western biomedical practitioners. This research will add to our knowledge of naturally-evolved folk biological models, our socio-cultural knowledge of this important region of the world and as well as help train a young social scientist doc7175 none Modern computers have multi-level memory hierarchies in which the cost of data access may increase by an order of magnitude or more from one level to the next. On these machines, a program that touches a large amount of data runs well only if it exhibits locality - that is, if most of its references are satisfied by the highest level of the memory hierarchy. Unfortunately, many programs do not exhibit locality. For 2-level memory hierarchies, the numerical linear algebra community has addressed the problem by implementing libraries of blocked codes such as LAPACK. For multi-level memory hierarchies, they are developing libraries of block-recursive algorithms. The problem with any library is that it is not general-purpose - for example, the BLAS and LAPACK libraries cannot be used for obtaining good performance on finite-difference codes. This research will develop a general-purpose restructuring compiler for synthesizing block-recursive codes from standard iterative ones. The compiler is general-purpose in the sense that in principle, it can restructure any program in which dense arrays are accessed by affine array references. The technology proposed has already been used successfully to restructure iterative codes into LAPACK-style blocked codes. The approach to be taken consists of: --- converting the problem of generating code that touches data in a block-recursive order into the problem of generating code that walks over a certain iteration space called the product space in a block-recursive or space-filling order. This enables standard techniques from dependence analysis to be used to synthesize the appropriate restructuring transformations. - switching to an iterative code once the problem size becomes small enough. The threshold problem size at which this transition should happen may be difficult to determine analytically. In our system, the compiler will estimate this size using a simple abstraction of the underlying machine architecture. For frequently used codes however, the system will use a new approach called empirical optimization - whenever there are free cycles on the machine, our system will experiment with different threshold values, remember the best threshold value for each input size, and use that value when that code is run again. - developing a symbolic analysis technique called fractal symbolic analysis for verifying the legality of transformations on codes like LU with pivoting (since it is well-known that dependence analysis is inadequate for restructuring codes such as LU factorization with pivoting). However, it is not yet known how to synthesize the right locality-enhancing transformations from information provided by fractal symbolic analysis. Such techniques will be developed and integrated with dependence-based techniques doc7176 none This project on Nuclear magnetic Resonance (NMR) studies of liquid crystals will involve two new thrusts: (1) the use of carbon-13 NMR to measure long range dipolar coupling constants, and (2) the use of liquid crystals for NMR quantum computing. Regarding area (1), the existing pulse sequence being used with newly developed methods in solid-state NMR will be modified to improve performance, and other types of liquid crystals will be synthesized and studied to provide the most stringent experimental criteria for judging the success of theoretical models, especially molecular dynamics simulations. In area (2), the premise of NMR quantum computing requires that pseudopure quantum states, for which the populations of all energy levels but one are equal, be used instead of pure quantum states. To prepare these pseudospure states for systems with three or more quantum bits, new approaches will be developed to overcome the existing methods for elaborate pulse sequences with many steps that make these experiment very difficult. Multifrequence radiation will be used to prepare the pseudopure states via population transfer to greatly reduce the number of steps needed. Another method to be explored is the use of pairs of pseudopure states and their extension to study liquid crystal systems with 4 to 7 qubits. The main emphasis will be the development of NMR, methodology and the search for proper spin systems rather than devising algorithms to solve problems requiring complicated quantum computation. %%% This liquid crystal research project is very multidisciplinary involving a broad scope of training opportunities for students in areas that include synthetic chemistry, quantum physics, and modeling and simulation, as well as applied technologies involving liquid crystals as optical materials for displays and for quantum computing. Because these areas of high priority in industry, these students are highly competitive in the job market doc7177 none In response to a request to CSTB from the United States Government s Chief Counselor for Privacy, CSTB has framed an assessment of emerging approaches to authentication in computing and communications systems that focuses on the implications of authentication technologies for privacy. This assessment of authentication technologies would examine the state of the art and relevant trends. It would put the technology into a larger context: it would consider technical and nontechnical trends, addressing both the nature of capabilities and their implementation, and the nature of procedural and other nontechnical protections and their enforceability. It would examine differences in concerns associated with public sector versus private sector uses of authentication technologies. Attention would be paid to the likelihood of different mixes of options (e.g., diverse techniques to accommodate, a diverse population and set of needs versus narrower standardization for economic reasons. A report will be produced by the committee and subject to NRC approval. It will describe authentication technologies, the interplay of technical and nontechnical aspects of authentication, and the implications of alternative approaches for privacy; it will make recommendations about fostering relevant research and shaping appropriate policy. It will be distributred to the computer science and privacy communities, associated organizations, consumer organizations, and government agencies and the congress. Web distribution, briefings, discussions at key conferences and in relevant National Academies venues, and articles and announcements in journals and newsletters would be important to getting the word out and furthering discussion. The dissemination process would be launched by a public briefing about the report doc7178 none This award renews partial support for the Bacteriology Collection of the American Type Culture Collection. The Collection, which currently consists of approximately 15,400 bacteria and bacteriophage, is perhaps the most diverse assemblage of Prokaryotes in the world. Approximately a third of the Collection s holdings have been accessioned using the support provided by NSF since . Sample cultures of the collected organisms are provided to the scientific community on request for a modest charge. Although support is provided by other federal agencies as well as by NSF, user fees represent the largest single source of income for operation of the Collection. The sample cultures provided to researchers, educators and others are used in a variety of applications in basic and applied research, education and manufacturing procedures. Authentication and internal quality control activities represent a significant portion of the activities connected with collection maintenance. The majority of the strains have been identified and verified extensively by a suite of physiological, morphological, cytochemical, and genotypic characteristics specific to a given species doc7179 none Brent Mishler An award has been made to Dr. Brent Mishler of the University of California at Berkely to direct a research coordination network of plant phylogeneticists and genomicists to develop integrated research activities between these two botanical disciplines over the next 5 years. The green plants represent one of the biggest branches of the tree of life -- more than 1 2 million species -- a clade at least 1 billion years old. Their morphological and chemical diversity, ecological dominance, and importance in human affairs (for food, shelter and medicine) are paramount among life s lineages. A recently improved understanding of their phylogeny (evolutionary history) generated from the efforts of the Deep Green collaboration not only allows the intellectual satisfaction of discovering the roots of this major component of the world s biotic diversity, but also has important practical benefits as well. Likewise, the recently completed Arabidopsis genome, and similar ongoing genomic studies of diverse crop plants provide an unprecedented opportunity for comparative genomics to identify, isolate, and determine the function of plant genes that are associated with both vegetative and reproductive phenotypes. These two areas of research have so far proceeded entirely separately, but are poised for a synthesis. Both groups of researchers would benefit greatly from increased communication and collaboration. The goal of this project is to establish a new research coordination network to explore the ways in which comparative phylogenetic studies can inform genomic studies, and vice-versa. The group proposes a series of professional meetings, workshops, training activities for K-12 teachers, undergraduates, and graduate students, and a web site that will contain information for professional scientists as well as educational materials for the general public. The project will result in a newly well-coordinated, cohesive scientific community that will be able to use this phylogenetic and genomic information for such new applications as predicting the evolution of biochemical pathways, identifying gene duplications and promoter evolution contributing to morphological changes, predicting useful chemicals for pharmacology, selecting promising genes for biotechnology studies, and carrying out comparative functional and genomic studies. The fruits of such collaboration could include: new tools for assessing plant relationships, new comparative approaches to functional questions combining data from phylogeny and genomics, and enhanced training of scientists at all levels doc7180 none In the presence of combined nitrogen, filaments of the photosynthetic bacterium Anabaena are comprised wholly of vegetative cells. When deprived of combined nitrogen, 5 to 10% of the cells, at semi-regular intervals, differentiate into N2-fixing heterocysts. Anaebena offers a rare opportunity to study how a prokaryote forms a multicellular pattern (the spacing of heterocysts), and an infrequent opportunity to analyze how prokaryotic cells differentiate. The following mechanism of pattern formation is generally agreed on: mature and developing heterocysts inhibit the differentiation of nearby cells into heterocysts by elaborating a differentiation-inhibiting substance that moves outward along a filament. To date, few of the genes and processes that contribute to spaced heterocyst differentiation are known. The genomic sequence of Anabaena PCC , nearly finished, provides a tool of great value to help elucidate the detailed mechanisms, and overall strategy, that regulate differentiation. That tool will be used to try to identify the estimated 100-200 genes that are required specifically for pattern formation and cellular differentiation. Analysis of these genes, once they are identified, will be crucial for understanding the mechanisms that underlie differentiation. Mutagenesis and global analysis of transcript abundance by hybridization to DNA arrays constitute complementary approaches to identifying the desired set of genes. Hybridization has the potential to show increases or decreases in a great number of RNA transcripts simultaneously. However, because hybridization is correlative, it requires mutagenesis to demonstrate which genes are necessary for development. Also, mutagenesis can, but hybridization cannot, recognize the developmental importance of constitutively expressed genes that are required specifically for development. Mutation of genes whose products participate in the intercellular inhibition of differentiation could lead all cells to initiate differentiation. Because such mutations might prevent vegetative growth, they are being sought separately by conditional mutagenesis. Heterocysts, normally 5-10% of total cells, presumably contribute a like percentage of total mRNA. Measurements of hybridization normally resolve differences of over 2-fold in transcript abundance between two conditions. Therefore, unless developing heterocysts can be isolated without loss of mRNAs, they must produce more than 20-fold more of an mRNA than does an average vegetative cell for the difference to be detectable by hybridization. For these reasons, our primary approach will be by mutagenesis, but hybridization analysis will also be performed. This project builds on the small number of development-specific genes already identified. In particular, available mutants bracket developmental stages. Focus will be on hybridization analysis on genes that are expressed specifically during, and so may be specifically required for, these stages. For example, whereas genes activated in a hetR mutant are candidates for involvement in non-developmental responses to nitrogen deprivation, genes activated in a hetC mutant but not in a hetR mutant are candidates for genes involved in pattern formation and the initiation of differentiation. Similarly, genes activated in hepK and devA mutants and in mutant a71 but not in a hetC mutant are candidates for involvement in all but the earliest stages of morphological differentiation. Derivatives of transposon Tn5 mutagenize Anabaena highly effectively, and without heretofore discerned site-specificity. Such transposons will be used to isolate mutants that can grow on combined nitrogen but not on N2, map them by sequencing, and test their sites of insertion for developmental relevance by complementing the mutations with mapped clones. The developmental roles of the genes identified will be discerned and integrated doc7181 none This grant will provide the resources to establish three communications media to foster the progress of bone research. The three communication interaction media structures proposed are (a) a monthly Seminar Series at a site across the street from the Empire State Building, very near the major transportation hubs in New York City, (b) an Annual Workshop on a topic related to the mechanosensory system in bone and (c) the development of a Website that supports and sponsors a Bulletin Board, Cyberspace Bone Journal Club, Cyberspace Bone Seminar Series and other types of networking communications. The impact of the proposed monthly Seminar Series and the Website will be very broad in the spectrum of people they reach, from undergraduate to senior research professor. The Annual Workshop, on the other hand, is more focused on the active researcher, but students who are active researchers will make presentations as they have done in the past in these workshops. Thus, these three media structures are layered in levels of specialization corresponding to level of professional training. Moreover, the impact desired is different at the different ends of this people spectrum. The impact desired with the younger of our participants is to develop in them a lifelong interest in the subject, although they may not make research in this area a livelihood. The impact desired with the already committed researcher (both national and international) is to have these media become a part of his her daily research life, like listening to the weather report. The primary objective of this proposed communication activity is to create interest, a sense of community, and enhanced understanding in bone research amongst all the participants, especially the involved graduate and undergraduate students. This will be achieved by assimilating information and making this information accessible and useful to participants, researchers farther afield, and the public at large. With respect to the people doing research, the objective is not to dictate research directions, but to stimulate research thinking by posing well-framed research questions. Thus, each year certain research questions will be formulated by the core participants and these research questions will be carefully developed in the communications media. The core participants are Adele Boskey (Head of the Mineralized Tissue Section at the Hospital for Special Surgery and Professor of Biochemistry at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University), Timothy Bromage (Director of the Hard Tissue Research Unit and Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College of CUNY), Stephen C. Cowin (PI, Director of the New York Center for Biomedical Engineering (NYCBE) and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the City College of the City University of New York (CUNY)), Susannah P. Fritton (Director of the Tissue Mechanics Laboratory, New York Center for Biomedical Engineering and Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the City College of CUNY), X. Edward Guo (Director of the Bone Bioengineering Laboratory and Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at Columbia University), Clinton T. Rubin (Director of the Musculo-Skeletal Research Laboratory and Professor in the Departments of Orthopedics and Mechanical Engineering at SUNY Stony Brook) and Mitchell B. Schaffler (Director of Orthopaedic Research and Professor of Orthopedics, Cell Biology and Anatomy at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine). Each of these people represents a community consisting of senior bone research people, graduate students and, in most cases, undergraduate students doc7182 none Future changes in the global carbon balance and associated feedbacks to climate will depend on ecosystem responses to multiple, interacting drivers of global change, such as elevated CO2, temperature, N deposition and changes in the amount and timing of precipitation. Efforts to predict these interactions with modeling approaches have been limited by a lack of relevant experimental data, as well as the absence of mechanisms for rapid communication between modelers and experimentalists. This grant will establish a network of global change scientists in an initiative on Terrestrial Ecosystem Responses to Atmospheric and Climatic Change (TERACC), with the aim to (1) integrate and synthesize existing whole-ecosystem research on ecosystem responses to individual global change drivers, (2) foster new research on whole-ecosystem responses to the combined effects of elevated atmospheric CO2, warming, and other aspects of global change, and (3) promote better communication and integration between experimentalists and modelers. TERACC activities will focus primarily on a series of directed, interactive workshops, but will also include database management and educational activities doc7183 none Liebl Liebl and Seeger will use the fruit fly model to detail some of the molecular machinery involved in creating a functional, correctly wired central nervous system during embryogenesis. They are investigating molecular events that occur at the tip of growing axons as they navigate through the central nerve cord and out to innervate the body. Specifically they will address whether an established key player, the Abl protein, works in concert with two other newly identified proteins, Trio and Amalgam. Genetic experiments from the Liebl and Seeger labs have shown suggestive interactions between Abl and Trio, and Abl and Amalgam. Using cell biological, biochemical and further genetic methods, they ask whether these proteins have any direct or indirect physical and or biochemical interaction. This work will clearly deepen our understanding of the different roles the Abl protein plays in axon tips as the central nervous system is first forming. Much similar work from fruit fly studies has been shown to be directly analogous to processes that occur in mammalian nervous system development. Thus by using fruit flies to pursue such fundamental questions as establishing the key players in central nervous system development and understanding their interactions, these researchers are likely laying the groundwork for a fuller understanding of the complex processes that occur during mammalian central nervous system development doc7184 none In a world full of inequality, rapid transportation and communication, citizenship as a social status is a valuable resource in wealthier places. In the western world problems of citizenship tend to be colored by ethnic and nationality differences. This dissertation research by an anthropology student from Harvard University will study citizenship in Hong Kong, where migrants from the People s Republic of China have the same ethnicity and nationality, yet face serious problems of attaining citizenship. Using methods of ethnographic research, analysis of court cases, archival research with government documents, newspapers, participant observation, and interviews with government functionaries as well as long-time citizen residents, the student will study the lived experiences immigrants. The time-consuming bureaucratic delays and barriers to adaptation and integration, which have been exacerbated by the recent economic crisis in Asia, will be analyed as they have developed since colonial days. This research will contribute to general theory about entitlement and migration, will add to the PIs knowledge of this important region of the world, and will help train a young social scientist doc7185 none Complex, distributed systems are those in which the components are highly interconnected and individually non-linear in operation. We have little understanding of how such systems operate. Nervous systems are highly complex and non-linear, and this lack of understanding is an impediment to understanding nervous system function, and to designing computational devices that can mimic nervous system capabilities. Experimental and computational studies of advantageous animal models have led to some useful advances. This proposal describes such an approach using a small network of nerve cells (neurons) called the pyloric neural network, part of a larger complex called the stomatogastric ganglion, which generates rhythmic activity in the gut of crustaceans. This network generates a suite of behaviors and is small, extremely well understood, and very amenable to experiment and computational modeling. These investigations have been done in many different laboratories, with a far broader scope than any one or two labs could approach, and this Research Coordination Network is established to coordinate their efforts. The Pyloric Model Group is set up to construct a computational model of the pyloric network, to supervise a postdoctoral fellow who will help fill critical gaps and construct the model, to sponsor annual meetings to share the knowledge of the pool of labs that conduct stomatogastric ganglion research, and to share the results of the collaboration with the broader scientific community by Web and CD distribution. This project will have an impact on the fundamental understanding of the neurobiological basis of behavior, will provide insights into the function of complex distributed systems in general, will promote cross-disciplinary collaborations including small colleges with major universities, and will broaden the experience of students in a cross-disciplinary environment doc7186 none Inadequate long-term durability of civil engineering infrastructure has been a major problem with enormous economic loss to many countries. So far, progress towards solving the problem has been hampered by the lack of mathematical approaches among classical-type durability researches, and lack of interest or understanding of the qualitative mechanisms among mathematician and mechanicians. The Workshop will stimulate dialog between these two groups. The workshop will be held at Czech Technical University, Prague, in March or April . Duration of the Workshop is planned to be 2.5 to 3 days. About 40 participants are expected, of which 15 to 20 will be from the U.S. Complementary funding from NATO and from local sources in Prague will be applied doc7187 none The objective of this project is to recover fossil monkeys in middle Tertiary rocks in Argentina and Bolivia and to place known and new specimens within a more refined chronological framework. Recovery of older monkeys from South America (SA) will contribute important new information to the adaptations of early SA monkeys (also called platyrrhines). New material will shed light on how the relationship of species of monkeys from South America and African. Also, new fossil remains will help to refine our understanding of the origins of the major kinds of platyrrhines, all of which trace back to a common ancestor thought to have lived about 20 million years ago. Finally, new fossil primates may further constrain the time of entry of platyrrhines into South America. The researchers will collect in three areas: 1) the 26 million-year-old rocks of Bolivia which yield the oldest known South American primates; 2) a newly discovered 25 million-year-old locality in the southern Altiplano of Bolivia; 3) Patagonian sites dated at around 20 million years old that contain monkeys and other small mammals; and 4) earlier fossil sites in Patagonia and northern Argentina that preserve small mammals (but not monkeys, as yet) but had a favorable paleoclimate for the occurrence of monkeys and are presently inadequately explored. Rock samples will be collected for 40Ar 39 age determination doc7188 none This project will develop and pilot test a participatory technology assessment method that incorporates systematic attention to technologies effects on democracy. Scenario workshops use several competing scenario narratives -- each describing the role of alternative infrastructural technologies and institutions in advancing an important social objective (such as environmental sustainability) -- as their starting point. Diverse groups of stakeholder participants: (1) critique and revise each scenario; (2) use the refashioned scenarios as one basis for developing preferred future visions for their own community or society; (3) identify barriers (e.g., cultural, institutional, technical, economic, and legal) to realizing their preferred visions; and (4) craft action plans for overcoming these barriers. This project will modify the scenario workshop process to incorporate the participatory application, evaluation, and refinement of a set of technological design questions derived from democratic criteria developed in Democracy and Technology, a book published by the co-principal investigator in . To demonstrate and evaluate these methodological innovations, the project will conduct a pilot scenario workshop in the ethnically diverse city of Lowell, Massachusetts, involving approximately 40 local stakeholder representatives. The project will evaluate the workshop process, as well as its follow-up impact within the city of Lowell. The methodological innovations resulting from this project have the potential to: (1) assist societies in coming to terms with the crucial but often-neglected effects of technologies on social and political structure; (2) find applicability in a wide variety of science, technology, and environmental decision-making contexts; (3) stimulate other scholars to pursue research into socially important but neglected democratic implications of technologies; and (4) provide one practical alternative to economistic methodologies -- such as cost-risk-benefit analysis and applied neoclassical welfare economics -- that, despite numerous recognized limitations, today dominate the discourse of technological decisions in public and private arenas alike doc7189 none This project seeks to understand how muscles function to power the flight of birds. Changes in muscle power requirements are expected over a range of speeds based on aerodynamic theory. By studying how muscles are activated to develop force and shorten under the dynamic conditions of flight, the predictions of flight performance based on aerodynamic models can be tested. These measurements will be obtained from ring-neck doves (Streptopelia risoria), cockatiels (Nymphicus hallandicus) and crows (Corvusbrachyrynchos) that have been trained to fly over a range of steady speeds (1 to 20 meters second) in a low turbulence wind tunnel. The results obtained from these experiments will be used to evaluate whether the requirements for muscle performance are greatest during slow- and very fast-speed flight, compared with the lower costs predicted by aerodynamic theory at intermediate flight speeds. Comparisons among the different species will also allow the effects of differences in wing shape and body weight to be evaluated in relation to muscle function and flight performance. In addition to studies of the function of bird flight muscles, the project will also involve obtaining detailed recordings of the three-dimensional movements and shape changes of the wings (kinematics) during the wing beat cycle. These recordings will be obtained using three high-speed (250 frames per second) digital video cameras . Movements of the wings and changes in their shape and orientation will be examined over a range of flight speeds in the wind tunnel to evaluate whether the birds use distinct aerodynamic gaits to fly at slow versus fast speeds, similar to the change in gait that a human uses when increasing speed from a walk to a run. By correlating movements of the wing with the recordings of flight muscle function, the nature of neuromuscular control of wing motion and its resulting importance to the aerodynamics of lift force production for weight support and thrust can be better understood. The results from these studies will be important for assessing the flight costs of birds under natural field conditions, for understanding muscle design in relation to the high mechanical power output required for flapping flight, and for determining whether novel lift generating mechanisms operate in birds which favor their ability to maneuver and modulate flight behavior in ways that are not possible for fixed-wing, human-engineered aircraft doc7190 none PROJECT SUMMARY A Plant Cell Wall Biosynthesis Research Network (WallBioNet) will be established. The goals of WallBioNet are to: (1) Create and maintain a web site to serve as an information resource for researchers studying plant cell wall biosynthesis. (2) Coordinate and partially support the acquisition of substrates needed for polysaccharide biosynthesis as well as for other enzymes involved in the overall process of plant cell wall biosynthesis. (3) Develop a mechanism for the exchange of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers between laboratories that use different techniques to study plant cell wall biosynthesis. (4) Organize and provide partial support for small workshop-symposia to develop and define the goals and direction for wall biosynthesis research for the next decade. (5) Establish a group that will suggest nomenclature rules for the naming of authentic plant cell wall biosynthetic genes and mutants. The WallBioNet web site will be coordinated and managed by the PI at Michigan State University. The production and distribution of donor and acceptor substrates will be coordinated and managed by the Co-PI at the Complex Carbohdyrate Research Center. Decisions regarding the content and format of the WallBioNet web site, the allocation of funds, nomination of a nomenclature committee, and organization of the WallBioNet workshop-symposium will be made by a Steering Committee whose members represent diverse areas of cell wall biosynthesis. The WallBioNet will encourage researchers from diverse disciplines to work together to identify wall biosynthetic genes and to understand how the multiple enzymes work together to synthesize the plant cell wall. Core Participants: Daniel Cosgrove, Penn State Univ; reorganization of the wall matrix by expansins Deborah Delmer, University of California, Davis; cellulose biosynthesis Kenneth Keegstra, Michigan State Univ; xyloglucan biosynthesis Debra Mohnen, Univ of Georgia; pectin biosynthesis Chris Somerville, Carnegie Institute of Washington; genetic and genomic approaches Mary Tierney, University of Vermont; biosynthesis of wall structural proteins doc7191 none Dr. Douglas E. Soltis The flowering plants, consisting of approximately 300,000 species, are by far the largest group of land plants, yet their origin and early diversification have long been problematic. However, extensive collaborations among plant scientists using molecular tools are clarifying the major lineages of flowering plants and their relationships. At the same time, numerous breakthroughs have also occurred in the field of paleobotany, and views of early angiosperm diversity have greatly improved through the recent description of numerous fossils. Integrating these fossils into the tree of living taxa remains essential for understanding both the origin of living flowering plants and the origins of morphological features. Such attempts at integration have been rare for any group of organism; there has been surprisingly little communication between paleontologists and plant scientists who study the relationships of living organisms (i.e., systematists). This RCN grant will facilitate, coordinate, and stimulate research at the interface of paleobotany, geology, and systematics phylogenetics. Scientists in the network will explore the ways in which flowering plant fossils can be appropriately integrated into the tree of life that is now available for living organisms, with the ultimate goal of forming a comprehensive family tree of relationships for both living and fossil flowering plants. They envision five components for discussion: (1) Careful evaluation of the fossil record, including the establishment of a priority list of the best fossils for detailed study; (2) Critical appraisal of the age of fossils; (3) Construction of a morphological data set for fossils and extant flowering plants; (4) Integration of fossils into the flowering plant tree; and (5) Calibration of the times at which major groups of flowering plants diverged. The group will implement annual meetings, workshops, student travel awards, student research training awards, and website development. With the recent developments in both paleobotany and the study of relationships among living flowering plants, the timing is appropriate for integration of these fields. The theory and methodology developed will be applicable to the integration of paleontology and living organisms on a broader scale doc7192 none Mailloux The IEEE AP-S URSI Symposium on Antennas and Propagation, co-sponsored by the IEEE Antenna and Propagation Society and URSI, will be held from 8 to 13 July in Boston, MA, USA. The purpose of this conference is to provide an opportunity for the exchange of ideas between academia and industry. This purpose will be accomplished in two ways: by providing a firsthand look at the latest developments in the antenna industry and by providing a forum to discuss up-to-date problems and solutions in antennas and propagation in general. The conference will feature oral presentations, poster sessions, exhibits, and workshops. Approximately papers are expected to be presented. The exhibits will be provided by 20 companies focused strictly on antennas and propagation. Six to seven workshops and nine special sessions are currently planned. The intention of the conference is to provide an international forum for the discussion of all aspects of antennas and propagation including novel antennas, propagation modeling and applications. Topics to be considered will include (but are not limited to) the following: .Adaptive, Active, Signal Processing & Imaging Antenna .Biomedical Applications .Broadband and Multifrequency Antennas .Mobile and PCS Antennas .Electromagnetic Education .Application of Photonics in Antennas Systems .Microstrip Antennas .Phased Array Antennas .Numerical Methods for Analysis of Antennas .Propagation In addition, the following Commissions of the URSI will have sessions at the conference: .Commission A Electromagnetic Metrology .Commission B Fields and Waves .Commission D Electronics and Photonics .Commission F Wave Propagation and Remote Sensing .Commission G Ionospheric Radio Propagation .Commission H Waves in Plasmas .Commission K Electromagnetics in Biology and Medicine doc7193 none Allison, David In what tissues are specific genes expressed? What circumstances alter a gene s expression levels? Which genes co-express as functional families? Microarrays can measure expression of thousands of genes simultaneously in tissues of any organism, providing unprecedented power for studying gene expression. However, many questions about microarray technology and the resulting data remain unanswered. Questions surround sample size requirements, measurement quality, testing for group differences in expression levels in the face of vast multiple testing, and optimal grouping (clustering) methods. Few scientists with theoretical quantitative science expertise are addressing these questions and those that are still struggle for answers. This program offers an interdisciplinary inter-institutional Network of scientists opportunities to work synergistically on such questions. Goals are: a) Facilitate communication and brainstorming among interested scientists who may be geographically or otherwise isolated; b) Stimulate methodological developments in microarray analysis; c) Provide increased opportunities for dissemination of developments to the scientific community; and d) Support entry of new and established quantitative theoretical scientists into this area. The Network includes computer scientists, geneticists, statisticians, bioinformaticists, measurement theorists, and microarray technology experts plus microarray users. It has two primary activities: a) an annual retreat at a secluded location; b) an inter-institution scholar exchange. Investigators with varying backgrounds but common interests in microarrays will interact in settings facilitating open and contemplative communication. Supplementary activities will disseminate information to the broader scientific community. This program can greatly enhance the practice of microarray analysis thereby generating new basic biological knowledge impacting fields ranging from forestry to agriculture to medicine doc7194 none Wilson This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports activities of the Antarctic Working Group for Geology and Geophysics during - . This group affords a broad conduit for exchange of information between the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics program within the US Antarctic Program (USAP), and the diverse parts of the broadly-defined Antarctic earth science community. As such, it is a forum for discussion of the future goals of Antarctic geology and geophysics research, and the future needs of researchers for operational support through the USAP. More specifically, the Working Group brings to the program ideas about new scientific and technical opportunities, programmatic needs, and programmatic opportunities as perceived by the wider earth science community. The Working Group also provides an important mechanism for the flow of information from the program out to the community. The Working Group further serves to provide feedback to the program on logistical support questions relating to the USAP. In providing this function, the Working Group constitutes a useful management tool to help integrate science goals with operational portions of the USAP. The budget of this proposal primarily includes funds to cover travel costs for members of the Working Group and invited experts to attend a meeting at NSF headquarters. Funds are requested to cover salary and wages for development and maintenance of an improved web site to provide information to the Antarctic earth science community. The PI of this award will serve as Chair of the Working Group through August, doc7195 none Blackwell, Spatafora, Taylor Mycologists embraced molecular phylogenetics early, and some of the techniques pioneered for use with fungi have proved equally useful in other organisms, including plants, such as the nuclear ribosomal Internal Transcribed Spacer (ITS) regions. During the last decade great progress has been made toward constructing a single phylogenetic classification of fungi, but the current data sets rely upon DNA sequences from only 800 or so fungal taxa, out of an estimated 80,000 described species of fungi, or about 1% representation. Furthermore, some mycologists have argued that there may be over a million species of fungi still to describe, especially from tropical and other regions of the world poorly surveyed for microbial and fungal diversity. This Research Coordination Network (RCN) award will facilitate expanded interactions among current workers in the field and help to attract new researchers to the effort, to construct a phylogeny of the Kingdom Fungi, in turn to facilitate the discovery, identification, and incorporation into a taxonomic framework of novel fungal taxa across all four major phyla of fungi, Chytridiomycetes, Zygomycetes, Basidiomycetes, and Ascomycetes (and their asexual and lichenized relatives). A non-exclusive, gender (10 women of 31 named participants) and age (27-80 years) diverse group of mycologists will create the research and education network, to execute three goals: (1) promote fungal phylogenetics; (2) make available identification aids for fungi; and (3) provide a phylogeny and educational materials to mycologists and teachers. Participants will meet at least twice a year in each of the five years of funding to develop a set of exemplar taxa for phylogenetic analysis, choose morphological and molecular characters for study, discuss analytical methods appropriate to these characters, foster cooperation and collaboration for collection and vouchering of large data sets (including with European colleagues in the FungalNet consortium), and coordinate educational initiatives. Efforts are underway to bring increased numbers of postdoctoral associates, graduate students, and undergraduates into the enterprise, along with foreign colleagues. Rapid communication will be accomplished by electronic means and through public access to a web site established for the RCN activity. Phylogenetic research on fungi will benefit numerous fields like biomedical and pharmaceutical research, animal and plant pathology, food science, bioprospecting, and environmental analysis and monitoring doc7196 none This project will link the U.S. research assessment community to world discussions of the problems and prospects of new ways of viewing the management of research. The indicator systems that are currently in use for research programs around the world will not yield much useful information in the end, because they are too closely tied to current management information systems and therefore to input, process, and output measures. The next generation of assessments must get a better handle on outcomes in order to meet the demands of legislatures for broader public accountability. This project will bring together those who are beginning to develop a new generation of measures and approaches. The project will first work on identifying world resources in this area and make that information available on a Web site. The centerpiece of the project is a three-day retreat, envisioned for spring , that will involve the key crafters of new approaches to research assessment, from both the U.S. and other countries. Leading up to the workshop, the project will re-establish network connections among researchers and agency assessment staff in the United States, through a series of network meetings in Washington. The main products will be a research agenda for the area; a U.S.-based network, with international connections, bringing together academic researchers from different fields with agency staff; and elements of training for a new generation of assessment professionals doc7197 none McRoy This award supports Dr. Susan W. McRoy, Department of Computer Science, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, to conduct collaborative research with Dr. Yong Se Kim, Department of Mechanical Engineering, SungKyunKwan University, Korea. The objective of the joint project is to develop an intelligent instructional software system for visual reasoning which can adaptively support different student learning needs, track students progress, and give an active critique. The intent is to provide a learning system with which a student can develop visualizing and spatial reasoning capabilities in a self-paced series of exercises related to solid modeling. The ability of an engineer to visualize and reason about geometric aspects of physical objects and processes is crucial to the success of the activities of the engineer. The visual reasoning capability forms the essential foundation for engineering education in all disciplines. This project will combine the complementary skills and expertise of the American and Korean researchers educators students to advance these educational tools doc7198 none The PI will address several problems involving general relativity, the generation of gravitational radiation, relativistic hydrodynamics, radiative transport, and stellar dynamics. A common thread uniting the different theoretical topics is the crucial role of gravitation, especially relativistic gravitation as described by Einstein s field equations of general relativity. Compact objects (black holes and neutron stars) will provide the principal forum, and the understanding the dynamics of matter in a strong gravitational field will be a major theme. Some of the topics that will be investigated include the inspiral and coalescence of binary neutron stars and black holes, the generation of gravitational waves from binaries and other promising astrophysical sources of gravitational radiation, gravitational collapse, the stability of rotating neutron stars and supermassive stars and the final fate of unstable stars, and the formation of supermassive black holes in the cores of galaxies and quasars. Most of the topics that will be addressed represent long-standing, fundamental problems in theoretical physics requiring large-scale computation for solution. Hence the approach will involve to a significant degree large-scale computations on parallel machines, as well as analytical modeling. Many of the numerical calculations will be carried out using the computational resources of the UIUC s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Utilizing and developing new algorithms for these computers and visualization tools will help advance state-of-the art computing in the US. The results of the calculations will have an important bearing on forthcoming astronomical observations, including those planned for gravitational wave interferometers, such as LIGO and LISA. The theoretical modeling of gravitational waveforms which will be performed by Shapiro and his group will provide essential input for the identification of sources of gravitational radiation by these instruments doc7199 none The Center for Tropical Forest Science (CTFS) - a global network of rainforest research plots - compares data from tropical rainforests from around the globe to better understand the questions of why this ecosystem is the most diverse in the world and how this extraordinary diversity can be maintained. CTFS monitors over three million trees, managing a database of more than 10% of all tropical tree species. CTFS maximizes the potential for analyzing and synthesizing this enormous database of rainforest trees by increasing training and analytical capacity within the network. This Research Coordination Network, based on CTFS, will organize a series of month-long analytical and training workshops over five years, with the objective of: (1) building the technical expertise of US and developing world scientists in data analysis and modeling, and (2) developing generalizations about forest dynamics and the maintenance of species diversity in the tropics. The value of rainforests far exceeds even their great wealth of species; they are the largest terrestrial source of carbon storage in the world, provide storehouses of genes for drug and agricultural development, and provide local communities with environmental services such as watershed protection and local climate control. Yet rainforests are also one of the most threatened ecosystems in the world. The global standardized dataset from the CTFS network provides a unique resource for scientists to improve our global understanding of how these forests can be best managed and conserved doc7200 none Richard G. Olmstead Dr. Richard Olmstead at the University of Washington has been given an award to study the systematic relationships among the major groups of living seed plants and land plants. The proposed research addresses the question of the early diversification of plants following their adaptation to life on land by comparing carefully chosen gene sequences selected for their slow evolutionary rate, which makes them well-suited to study ancient plant diversification. Determining the pattern of early diversification of land plants and seed plants has implications for our understanding of what the earliest land plants may have looked like and for what the course of evolution in reproductive and vegetative features may have taken. Several prior DNA-based studies examining individual genes have yielded conflicting results or have been unable to resolve relationships among the extant representatives of lineages that diverged over 200 million years ago. The experimental approach will be to determine DNA sequences for 17 chloroplast genes totaling approximately 13,000 nucleotides for each of approximately 50 plant species chosen to represent previously identified critical lineages of land plants. This work builds upon Dr. Olmstead s prior work on the early diversification of flowering plants. This will provide a 3-fold increase in the data pertaining to the problem and should provide a substantially improved picture of the early radiation of living land plants doc7201 none Post Occupancy Evaluations have been used to provide technical feedback to designers, developers, owners, operations, tenants and researchers following completion of newly constructed buildings and provide a basis for identifying research needs. They are an invaluable source of information for improving the design and performance of buildings. Surveys allow designers, developers, owners, operators and tenants to objectively gauge which building services and design features are working and which aren t. This project will evaluate whether a new, web-based survey instrument can provide these groups with a more robust performance analysis at a lower cost than existing methods doc7202 none Institutions are defined as the rules of the game that govern interaction among players in a social structure. Successful economic development relies on appropriate institutions and beneficial institutional change. This dissertation research by an anthropology student from Washington University-St. Louis will study institutional change among Kenyan pastoralists and farmers in two locations of Samburu district, Siambu and Mbaringon. Using traditional ethnographic participant observation and sample surveys as well as newer techniques of experimental economics, the student will examine the changes in cooperation and self-serving behavior associated with changing land tenure. Commonly managed land is being converted into privately owned and managed land at the same time that the authority of the traditional elders is being challenged. Hypotheses will be tested about the relative use of ideology and persuasion, social capital from existing social networks, and selective incentives as motivators of political support for changing social and economic institutions. The process is well underway in Siambu and barely begun in Mbaringon so the comparison will shed light on the process. This research will advance our understanding of economic development, the welfare effects of privatization, and the impacts of privatization on individual behavior and adherence to social norms. At the same time it advances our knowledge of this important area of the world and contributes to the training of a young social scientist doc7203 none The goal of this study is to develop a general theory of the spread and maintenance of communicable diseases in spatially heterogeneous populations. The theory will be developed and tested in the context of bovine tuberculosis (BTB) in the African buffalo population in the Kruger National Park (KNP), South Africa, as well as the spill-over of this disease to cattle and humans living on the boundaries of KNP. The study involves collecting BTB prevalence and strain data from sputum and blood samples taken from immobilized buffalo, some of which will be marked and collared for radio tracking studies of the movement of individuals between herds and the movement of herds over the landscape. The data will be incorporated into a spatially explicit and ecologically detailed predictive model that will then used to test theory and evaluate management alternatives such as vaccination, removal of infected individuals, and the maintenance of different strains of the diseases under particular treatment regimes. The study will provide further insights into tuberculosis, which is a serious problem in humans that is exacerbated by the current AIDS epidemic in Africa and the emergence of drug resistant strains. It will also provide insights into factors controlling the spread of other communicable diseases such as HIV itself doc7204 none Endospore formation in bacillus bacteria represents a simple differentiation in which the bacterium undergoes a series of physiological and morphological changes to generate a dormant cell form. At an early state in sporulation, Bacillus subtilis partitions itself into two unequal compartments, which are destined for unique developmental fates. The smaller forespore compartment becomes the spore. The larger mother cell compartment engulfs and nurtures the forespore, then lyses to release the mature spore to the environment. Each compartment s program of gene expression is controlled by the sequential appearance of unique transcription factors. SigmaE is the first of the mother cell-specific transcription factors. SigmaE is synthesized in the predivisional cell as an inactive proprotein (pro-sigmaE ), but becomes active only in the mother cell compartment. The mother cell specificity of sigmaE is likely due to two complementary mechanisms: the sequestration of pro-sigmaE to the mother cell side of the sporulation septum and the degradation of residual sigmaE in the forespore. This project will examine the sequestration element of this process. Mutational analyses will be used to identify the regions of pro-sigmaE and its processing enzyme which target them to the forespore septum. Once identified, these regions will be used as biochemical and or genetic probes to identify the septal components responsible for sequestration to this site. Regulation of cellular processes by the spatial distribution of proteins is emerging as an important feature of prokaryotic biology. The Bacillus sporulation system is a well studied and tractable model which can be exploited to determine the mechanisms that underlie this phenomenon doc7205 none A regional system of collaborative geoscience interpretation for the Finger Lakes region of New York State will be undertaken. The Museum of the Earth (MOTE) will be the interpretive hub and partnerships with six Finger Lakes State Parks, Cornell University and the Paleontological Institute are in place to provide field sites and geology content information. The integrated interpretive system of signage and related exhibits will be assessed as to reaching the needs of the target audience by way of extensive front end evaluation. The development of the geoscience content and prototyping of the signage will continue throughout the planning period doc7206 none Cognitive performance degrades with residence in Antarctica and mood alteration fits a seasonal change during extended residence in Antarctica. Although these changes suggest psychological response to certain physiological adaptations to cold and dim light, the exact mechanism linking these two sets of processes are poorly understood. This project has two objectives. The first is to determine whether long-term exposure to cold temperatures and or to dim light, both of which are characteristics of polar winters in high latitude environments, are associated with significant changes in cognitive performance and emotional well-being. The specific aim is to determine whether physiological adaptation to cold, reflected in measures of core body temperature and thyroid hormone levels, and or adaptation to dim light, reflected in measures of melatonin production, are independently or synergistically associated with decrements in cognitive performance and emotional well- being. An additional goal is to determine whether personnel at South Pole Station (latitude 90o S) experience greater physiological adaptation to cold and dim light and decrements in mood and cognitive performance than personnel at McMurdo Station (Latitude 77o 51 S) The second objective is to determine whether decrements to mood and cognitive performance can be effectively prevented or minimized. The project will involve the development of a management and informational infrastructure for the integration of research activities on the etiology and prevention of environmentally induced performance decrements in high latitudes. The project will involve graduate level training in human adaptation to polar environments. This project will lead to an improved understanding of the specific environmental conditions and physiological mechanisms that affect behavior and performance in the Antarctic and other high latitude environments doc7207 none Mourou This award supports continuation of a US-France cooperative research project on ultrafast lasers between the NSF Science and Technology Center for Ultrafast Optical Science (CUOS) at the University of Michigan, directed by Gerard A. Mourou, and the Laboratory for Applied Optics, French National Center for Scientific Research at the Ecole Polytechnique, directed by Daniele Hulin. The groups will continue to collaborate on the development of next generation ultraintense lasers, in particular, aspects of high peak power, spatial and temporal beam quality, and new amplifying media. In this next phase, the groups will: (1) extend and characterize harmonic generation to the water window with good efficiency; (2) combine their efforts on electron acceleration and injection using Laser Wakefield Acceleration techniques. The collaboration will be pursued through an exchange of US and French postdoctoral researchers. Both sides will benefit from complementary expertise and facilities and will advance applications of ultrahigh laser intensities to new fields of physics research. This award is co-supported by the Division of International Programs in the Directorate for Social, Behaviorial, and Economics Sciences and by the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences doc7208 none Until recently, it has commonly been accepted knowledge that fish and other aquatic species excrete ammonia as the waste product following a meal. Ammonia is ultimately toxic, primarily to the brain, so fish and other aquatic species rid their bodies of ammonia as soon as it is produced, and its harmful effects are immediately diluted by the infinite sink of the surrounding water. However, when animals evolved to live on land, and did not have the diluting effects of a surrounding water environment, they needed to adopt alternate means of ridding their bodies of this toxin. So, terrestrial animals excrete alternative waste products (urea and uric acid) which they can store in their bodies at higher concentrations without harmful effect until they are able to consume enough water with which to excrete them. However, in recent years, the PIs have discovered that a common fish in the Southeastern US, the gulf toadfish (Opsanus beta) is an exception to this rule, excreting urea instead of ammonia under certain stressful circumstances. Thus the goals of this research project are to understand how this fish species is able to make and excrete urea, and to understand the ecological and evolutionary reasons for why it does so. The ability to make urea and uric acid requires a great deal of energy, which would otherwise be spent on predator avoidance, reproduction, etc., so it is reasonable to assume that the ability to make and excrete urea is selectively advantageous, and contributes to the fish s ability to survive and propagate. The investigators will take three approaches to understanding the mechanisms and significance of urea excretion in fish. One portion of the study will employ biochemical and molecular biology techniques to understand how the fish shifts from making ammonia to making urea, focusing on enzymes of the liver. A second part of the study will focus on physiological studies of how urea is excreted at the gill. A third part of the study, will focus on field experiments that test the hypotheses that urea production is important to the survival of the fish because the fish lives in an environment with high ammonia concentration, and or that urea excretion helps the fish to be better at chemically camouflaging itself from predators. This research will elucidate how rapidly aquatic organisms are able to adapt to changing environments on both an individual and an evolutionary time scale. This type of information becomes more and more valuable as our environment changes due to man s influence. Furthermore, since ammonia is one of the most important byproducts in aquaculture that must be removed, results of these studies may have implications for fish production doc7209 none Cohen This award supports Professors Claude Cohen and Michael L. Shuler, Department of Chemical Engineering, Cornell University, to conduct collaborative research with Professor K.D. Suh of Hanyang University and Dr. J.Y. Kim of Samchok National University, Korea. This joint project aims to synthesize and physically characterize the properties of ionomer polymer networks. Incorporation of a small concentration of ions into the chemical structure of polymer chains can greatly influence physical behavior. This study on the effects of precursor molecular weight, ion content, nature and concentration of the solvent during crosslinking, and pendent defects will serve as a basis for a fundamental understanding of the structure-property relations of ionomer networks and for the synthesis of new materials. The researchers will then work to synthesize nano-particles of cross-linked ionomer polymers for application to soil remediation. The Cornell researchers provide expertise in polymer physical science and engineering, while the Korean strengths in industrial chemistry and materials science provide the tools of chemical synthesis needed for production of the novel materials to be investigated. The complementary expertise and facilities of the American and Korean laboratories promise synergistic advances in the research doc7210 none Septins are a conserved family of cytoskeletal proteins. Proteins of this family are required for cytokinesis in both fungal and animal cells. During cytokinesis, and in post-mitotic cells, septins are often located near regions of active membrane extension. However, the molecular role of septins in membrane growth remains obscure. The prospore membrane is an intracellular membrane formed during sporulation in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which packages the haploid nuclei produced by meiosis into spores. Septin behavior during prospore membrane formation resembles that of septins in higher cells; septins follow the leading edge of the membrane as it grows. This project focuses on illuminating the function of septins during formation of the prospore membrane. A combination of cell biological, genetic, and biochemical methods will be used to investigate this problem. The possible co-localization of septins with the protein phosphatase, Gip1p Glc7p, as well as with proteins required for vesicle fusion will be examined. Additionally, proteins that can bind to both septins and the Gip1p subunit of the phosphatase will be sought. These experiments will shed light on the molecular function of septins in promoting the growth of the prospore membrane and the development of spores. Because of the evolutionary conservation of septins, insights gained into the function of these proteins in sporulating yeast cells may provide insight into septin function in higher cells doc7211 none This award provides renewed support for the Mouse Mutant Stocks Center (MMSC) at The Jackson Laboratory (TJL). For many years, the laboratory mouse (Mus musculus) has been the principal model organism used for experimental genetic studies of vertebrate animals. The MMSC maintains and distributes mutant stocks of Mus musculus and several other species of Mus to the scientific community, and also discovers and characterizes new spontaneous mouse mutations of potential interest to the scientific community. The collection currently contains 109 stocks and inbred strains carrying 125 spontaneous mutations on defined genetic backgrounds, 18 inbred specialty strains derived from wild populations, and 13 inbred strains and F1 hybrids. Mutant strains are bred in sufficient number to meet the demand for their use in research; in addition, all strains are preserved as frozen embryos and as genomic DNA. As part of its discovery program, the MMSC identifies new spontaneous mutations arising in the large TJL breeding colonies; because of their size, these colonies provide a rich source of new mutations. Mutations are initially identified by their effect on appearance or behavior. Further characterization includes assessment of the mutation s inheritance pattern and chromosomal location, as well as its potential value for basic research as judged by genotypic and phenotypic properties. The MMSC provides information about established and newly developed mutants through the Laboratory s catalog, special newsletters and Web site. Researchers who request one or more stocks of mutant mice from the MMSC are charged a modest fee based in part on the difficulty and expense of maintaining the particular lines requested doc7212 none PI: Andreas Linninger and Richard Colberg Institution: University of Illinois at chicago Proposal Number: Planning of waste reduction and pollution prevention efforts for multi-purpose batch manufacturing sites is concerned with the mindful use of resources such as raw materials, mass separating agents and energy to support the production of chemicals. It is a dynamic open-ended problem, since strategies should anticipate emerging trends in future business operations, availability of new technologies beyond current manufacturing practices or environmental concerns. Uncertainty stems from a continuous sequence of production campaigns, each lasting from weeks to months. Plant-wide waste management typically builds on existing site infrastructure such as solvent recovery plants, incinerators, chemical treatment technologies, and biological treatment. The retrofit situation in the presence of uncertainty contrasts the deterministic grass-roots design approach predominant in dedicated plants used in the bulk commodity business. This research consists of developing optimal design methodology for plant-wide waste management for a fixed planning horizon. Due to the multi-faceted nature of the problem, a synergistic academic-industrial collaboration (GOALI project) is planned. The PIs plan to develop a new technique they call combinatorial process synthesis, which uses a two-phase solution approach. In phase one, superstructure generation, a knowledge-based reasoning mechanism searches for a superstructure of technically feasible recovery and treatment options. Non-linear balance and constitutive equations are enforced to safeguard the consistency of the evolving state task network. In step two, superstructure optimization identifies plant-wide waste management strategies subject to plant-specific logistic, capacity and emission constraints. Optimal strategies also suggest investment decisions such as new recycle technologies or treatment options to simultaneously increase economic and ecological performance or to address more stringent environmental standards. The major advantage of the combinatorial process synthesis method lies in its ability to render an algorithmic solution to open-ended problems via a combination of informed search and mathematical programming doc7213 none Savage Current understandings of cell differentiation and pattern formation in animals have largely been based on data obtained from model systems such as the fruit fly Drosophila melanogastor. The extent to which developmental mechanisms operating in the fly are conserved in other phyla is at present unknown. This question will be addressed by examining annelid homologues of fly developmental regulatory genes and their role in the diversification of body plans. In all animals that have been studied to date, the Hox gene cluster is responsible for determining regional identity along the anterior-posterior body axis. The upstream regulation of this gene cluster points to a potential source of morphological variation between body plans. Knowledge of Hox gene regulation beyond Drosophila is limited. Therefore, the specific aim is to identify in annelids homologues to fly genes which have been shown to regulate Hox gene expression. The homologues to two Drosophila segmentation genes, hunchback and caudal , in both leeches and in polychaetes will be characterized. This comparative approach will allow us to differentiate between general developmental mechanisms and phylum-specific ones, in so doing providing novel insights into the formation and regional specification of the annelid embryo doc7214 none Yuriko Renardy, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University The PI proposes to use an advanced numerical code developed by the PI and her group to perform simulations of rheologically-complex two-fluid systems. The code is based on the volume-of-fluid method for interface tracking with additional elements for solving the Navier-Stokes equations and for modeling the interfacial tension. The code will be applied to investigate drop evolution in pipe flow, the evolution of bicomponent flows through channels, the flow of polymer dispersions, and the breakup of droplets. Collaboration with a number of experimental researchers both in this country and abroad is planned doc7215 none The objective of the proposed study is to understand how to control or direct the process of morphology development in polymeric materials using external influences or molecular triggers . As we move towards more specialized polymeric systems with more demanding properties specifications more refined and powerful methods to control morphology will be required. Fibrous proteins provide a convenient bridge between biological organization and synthetic polymer design and are therefore useful models to fill this need. To achieve the objective, protein-based triggers will be designed into silk consensus repeats. Based on preliminary data, the molecular triggers (chemical oxidation reduction of methionines and enzymatic phosphorylation dephosphorylation) function as intended - the phosphorylation trigger strongly alters conformation but a high degree of crystallinity is attained, whereas the methionine trigger preferentially blocks crystallization but b-strand conformation persists to moderate oxidation levels. Therefore, triggers that are conformation- versus crystallization-selective and separately initiate different length scales in self-assembly are available to be incorporated into the polymer designs to control complex pathways of assembly. Using these features the PI expects to be able to direct polymer assembly depending on placement of the different triggers in relation to the sequence motifs, as well as using external triggering of these blocks on a temporal basis. These features may allow generation of distinct material morphologies from the same polymer sequence, as well as formation of gradient structures. A series of synthetic peptides with systematic variations in the location and nature of molecular triggers will be used to assess impact on assembly, including insigts into triggering kinetics, distribution of secondary structures (in solution and in the solid state), crystallization kinetics, crystal structure and solubility. Subsequently, longer sequence combinations will be constructed by genetic engineering and assessed in a similar fashion. A variety of analytical tools, including MALDI, FTIR, CD, X-ray, TEM diffraction analysis will be used to assess structure formation at different length scales. In the final stages of the project, these concepts will be utilized to assemble materials with gradient morphologies. %%% This project is in a growing area at the interface of polymeric materials science and biotechnology. The ability to control the pathway of polymer assembly in more precise ways, from the molecular level to macromolecular architecture, will provide important processing avenues in the fabrication of new materials with tailored structure morphologies doc7216 none Nationwide there are only a few opportunities for upper-level undergraduates and beginning graduate students to gain experience in summer courses in neuroscience research. To make an opportunity available in the southeastern United States, a summer course was started at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama in , which can exploit the availability of simple marine organisms for introductory experiments. This lab has excellent classroom and laboratory facilities with a research-quality library, and dormitory living. The summer course provides an introduction to neuroscience and behavior, and has enrolled 10-15 students per year. This award provides funds for additional laboratory equipment for the course to meet the increasing student demand. The impact of this course upgrade will be in enabling more students in a new geographical area to gain experience with laboratory research techniques, and in fostering their potential career choices doc7217 none Wormley This award is to The Pennsylvania State University to support the activity described below for 24 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners for this award include the Pennsylvania State University; Pennsylvania Nanofabrication Manufacturing Technology Partnership, which includes the Pennsylvania State University, industry in Pennsylvania, 14 Community Colleges, and several public school districts. Proposed Activities The activities for this award include formation of an associates degree to train associate degree workforce in nanotechnology, biology, and medicine for the biomedical industry; assessment of the needs of industry for their workforce; curriculum development; research for industry. Proposed Innovation The innovation goals for the program include training a well-qualified workforce for the emerging nanotechnology field (biological and medically related). The range of academe involved goes from high school to community colleges to the Pennsylvania State University. The proposed effort should stimulate economic activity in the private sector creating jobs and economic well being in the state. Potential Economic Impact The potential economic outcomes include a trained workforce to attract and enable biotech industry; research infusion to provide technical assistance to new and emerging companies; state-of-the-art facilities for research and education. Potential Societal Impact The potential benefits to society include creation of new high tech jobs for all levels and all classes of people in the state and general economic well being in the state in emerging biotechnology and biomedical fields doc7218 none PI: Dr. Myron C. Baker Dr. Baker will conduct research on the cultural evolution of a songbird vocalization to obtain an understanding of the key features of social evolution in animals that exhibit cultural traits. In songbirds, culture is manifest in vocal signals used in communication. These learned vocal signals are inherited across generations by young birds copying the vocalizations of adults, similar to the way speech patterns are transmitted in human populations. A general theory of cultural evolution broadly applicable to both man and animals will derive from studies that explain the diversity, maintenance, and change of cultural traits, studies such as those planned in this research program. In the proposed research, several questions about the process and consequences of vocal learning in a model species of songbird are addressed. This species, the black-capped chickadee, exhibits population dialects in one of its common vocalizations, a vocal signal used in aggressive interactions with other individuals. The properties of this vocalization, and its use in behavioral interactions, will be studied both in the natural context of wild populations as well as in experimental settings in the laboratory. Questions to be addressed are: (1) In what ways do the properties of this vocalization differ between populations? (2) What is the rate of change in vocal dialects over time? (3) What behavioral processes lead to the adoption of the local dialect by young birds and immigrants? (4) What are the benefits of adopting, and the costs of not adopting, the characteristic vocalizations of the local population? (5) How does the use of this vocalization influence the outcome of aggressive encounters? Answers to these and related questions will contribute fundamental building blocks to a general theory of cultural evolution doc7219 none This project focuses on the molecular events that occur after a plant recognizes a bacterial pathogen and which result in increased expression of defense-related genes. To investigate these events, resistance in tomato to bacterial speck disease caused by Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato is studied. Resistance to speck disease occurs in a gene-for-gene fashion when the tomato plant expresses the Pto resistance gene and the bacterium expresses the avrPto avirulence gene. Recognition of AvrPto protein by the product of the Pto gene, a serine-threonine kinase, leads to the rapid induction of many pathogenesis-related (PR) genes (among other defense responses). With previous NSF support, two transcription factors, Pti4 and Pti5, were identified that interact with the Pto kinase and which bind a DNA regulatory element present in the promoter of many PR genes. The Pti4 and Pti5 genes are induced in tomato leaves by Pseudomonas infection, and Pti5 expression is further increased during a Pseudomonas-tomato interaction involving AvrPto-Pto. Furthermore, the Pti4 protein is phosphorylated by the Pto kinase and its binding to the GCC box is thereby enhanced. Overexpression of Pti4 or Pti5 in plants leads to constitutive expression of certain PR genes. Thus, Pti4 and Pti5 appear to define a molecular link between the disease resistance gene Pto and activation of PR genes. Amino acids of Pti4 that are phosphorylated by Pto will be identified and the role of this phosphorylation in Pti4 activity will be determined. Genome-wide gene expression changes that occur in tomato and Arabidopsis plants overexpressing Pti4 and Pti5 will be elucidated, and these plants will be tested for alterations in disease resistance. To understand the Pto-mediated induction of Pti5, the Pseudomonas-responsive promoter elements of this gene will be determined and their cognate transcription factors will be identified. Finally, new plant loci that are required for Pti4-mediated expression of PR genes will be discovered. These studies will elucidate key steps in the regulation of transcription factors associated with plant disease resistance doc7220 none An important means of regulating a protein s activity is to regulate its abundance. A family of multi-protein complexes, called SCF complexes, target protein substrates for degradation. The substrate recognition component of an SCF complex is called the F-box protein. Different F-box proteins are present in a cell, and form distinct SCF complexes that will recognize different protein substrates. SCF complexes are evolutionarily conserved, being found in a wide range of organisms, and play key roles in diverse biological pathways, such as cell division and metabolism. Although SCF complexes play a crucial role in biology, little is known about how their activity is regulated. F-box proteins are substrates for degradation, suggesting that their abundance regulates the activity of their respective SCF complex. Indeed, the abundance of the F-box protein Met30p appears to regulate the activity of the SCFMet30p complex. This research project is directed towards understanding how the abundance of Met30p is controlled . The SCFMet30p complex regulates the process of sulfur uptake and metabolism. Sulfur is found in many molecules essential for life, such as the amino acid methionine. Fungi such as yeast have the ability to take up elemental sulfur and, through a series of metabolic steps, convert it to methionine. Through this process of sulfur fixation, methionine and other sulfur-containing molecules can be synthesized. The SCFMet30p complex negatively regulates the process of sulfur fixation. In the presence of methionine, the SCFMet30p complex inhibits sulfur uptake and metabolism. Preliminary data support the hypothesis that methionine availability plays a role in regulating Met30p abundance in yeast . An immediate goal of this project is to monitor the abundance of Met30p, SCFMet30p substrates and the activity of genes involved in sulfur metabolism as cells make the transition from an environment containing methionine to an environment lacking methionine. This work will test the hypothesis that SCFMet30p complex activity is regulated by Met30p abundance, which is in turn regulated by methionine availability. Furthermore, this work will describe the process regulating sulfur uptake and methionine synthesis. Additional aims of this research project are to: i) identify genes that are involved in regulating Met30p abundance and ii) identify amino acid residues within Met30p that target it for degradation. This work will describe how changes in environmental conditions are sensed and permit the modulation of Met30p abundance in order to regulate SCFMet30p complex activity. SCF complexes, present in fungi and in other multi-cellular organisms, coordinate cellular responses to a diverse range of environmental signals. The abundance of the F-box proteins associated with these SCF complexes appear to be regulated. This research program will improve the understanding of a process that may be fundamental to all cells doc7221 none The goal of this project is to synthesize and characterize new block and gradient copolymers prepared by controlled radical polymerization methods. Block and gradient copolymers tend to microphase separate and may form various periodic and continuous nanostructures. Three groups of copolymers will be prepared and characterized. They include copolymers composed of a-butyl acrylate (BA) and methyl methacrylate (MMA) which may have good adhesive properties, amphiphilic blocks for study as surfactants and end-functional polymers for potential use as blend additives. Various block and gradient copolymers will be made by precisely controlling the dimension, composition and functionality in the copolymer chains. Preliminary results on the BA MMA copolymers indicate that the mechanical properties of the blocks containing a gradient structure in the outer blocks are dramatically different from the pure triblocks. Various di- and triblock copolymers will be prepared in which the overall composition, molecular weight and sequence distribution along the chain will be varied. In addition, the effect of the polydispersity and the gradient distribution on the mechanical and thermal properties of the copolymers will be studied in order to draw a structure-property correlation for the obtained polymers. Preliminary results for the surfactants composed of polystyrene (PS) and poly(acrylic acid) (PA) demonstrated that by controlling and systematically varying the composition and topology of the polymer chains, it was possible to design surfactants and to correlate the copolymer structure (AS, ASA, SAS, trifunctional SA) with its surfactant properties. Extension of this study will include the preparation of new amphiphiles containing a random and or gradient hydrophobic segment and non-ionic surfactants and probing the effects of the alterations on the stability of conventional emulsions and water-borne ATRP. The final project will involve preparing end-functional copolymers and evaluating their efficacy as blend additives. A comparative study of block, random and gradient copolymers will be performed. %%% It is anticipated that through precise control and systematic variation of the structure of block and gradient copolymers, it will be possible to understand and predict how structural variations affect the thermal, mechanical and other properties of the targeted materials. More efficient adhesives, elastomers, surfactants and blend additives may be developed based on this type of structure-property correlation doc7222 none The shoot meristem of flowering plants is a multicellular organ that provides the capacity for indeterminate growth of the shoot. The research team will investigate how the cells in the shoot meristem and its derivative organs are coordinated during development by continuing our study of the jointless-1 mutation of tomato. In jointless-1 mutants, the inflorescences revert to vegetative growth after forming only one or two flowers and terminate with a vigorous, leafy shoot. jointless-1 mutants also form flower pedicels that completely lack an abscission zone. Thus, the JOINTLESS-1 gene of tomato is involved in two important developmental processes, the maintenance of the inflorescence meristem state and the formation of the pedicel abscission zone. By analyzing periclinal chimeras it was found that internal (L3) cells of the meristem control both inflorescence meristem determinacy and pedicel abscission zone formation. Cloning of JOINTLESS-1 revealed that it is a MADS box gene. The investigations of coordination of cells during the processes of maintaining the inflorescence meristem and development of pedicel abscission zones will be continued. 1. In situ hybridization will be performed using JOINTLESS-1 probes on wild-type and jointless-1 mutants and on the six periclinal chimeras to learn more about the nature of the cell coordination that occurs during inflorescence development and abscission zone formation. 2. Patterns of JOINTLESS-1 expression will be examined in various mutants that we have found to show genetic interactions with jointless-1 from double mutant analysis. Such studies will provide a clearer understanding of the interactions of these genes that result in different types of meristem activity. 3. Sets of periclinal chimeras will be constructed between wild-type plants and macrocalyx, another mutation that affects both abscission zone development and inflorescence meristem maintenance, and between macrocalyx and jointless-1. The hypothesis that macrocalyx is involved in the reception of the signal produced by L3 cells that are wild-type for the JOINTLESS -1 gene will be tested. 4. A lineage analysis will be identified for the developing pedicel to determine the patterns of cell divisions that give rise to the various regions of this organ (proximal pedicel, abscission zone, and distal pedicel) in wild-type and jointless-1 mutant plants. With these experiments more should be learned about the cellular and genetic interactions regulating abscission zone formation and inflorescence development to elucidate the relationship between these two developmentally interesting and agriculturally important processes doc7223 none Maleki This award is to South Dakota State University to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners are South Dakota State University; Daktronics, Inc; Falcon Plastics, Inc; MTR, Inc. Proposed Activities The activities of this award include support for education; product development; research in rapid prototyping; technology transfer; developing a rapid prototyping facility at the university; product design; assistance in rapid prototyping to small industries in the region. Proposed Innovation The innovation goals include transfer of the latest research in rapid prototyping to medium and small manufacturing firms in the state. The proposed activities will bring an important capability to a region that needs to develop more technology-based manufacturing. This activity will make the region more attractive to businesses and manufacturing firms and make the existing firms more competitive nationally. The educational component will provide a technologically literate workforce at the engineering level. Potential Economic Impact The rapid prototyping facility will provide a laboratory for education of engineers in South Dakota, provide the economic benefits for small companies in the region who cannot afford to own the facilities, provide technical support for emerging small manufacturing firms in the region. The facility should be self-sustaining by year four by membership fees. Potential Societal Impact The activity will provide more high tech manufacturing jobs for the state, and raise income in a region that has lagged the nation doc7224 none Harris This award is to the University of Central Oklahoma to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners in this award include the University of Central Oklahoma; Edmond Economic Development Authority; Oklahoma Technology Commercialization Center; Pinnacle Business Systems, Inc; Main Street Enterprises; Executive Women s Forum; Edmond Public Schools; Capitol Hill High School; Latino Community Development Agency. Proposed Activities The activities in this award include education of a workforce in computer technology-related fields; enhancement of faculty technology skills for information technology; summer internships for faculty and students in private sector; scholarships to the University of Central Oklahoma for high school students for technology training and internships in industry. Industry will provide mentors for interns. Proposed Innovation The innovation goals for the award are to provide increased computer-related skills for high school and college graduates for central Oklahoma to enable innovation in information technology. Hispanics, women, and African American student populations will be targeted. Interactions with industry partners will make the education and training relevant to the needs of the private sector in central Oklahoma. Potential Economic Impact Potential economic outcomes include thirty percent more technologically-competent students, including 20% more women and or minorities will complete a higher-education offering technological training for high tech industry, as well as training for computer skills for non-computer majors at the University of Central Oklahoma. Potential Societal Impact Potential benefits to society from this activity include increased skills for under-represented groups to allow them to compete in the job market in information technology. Resulting economic activity will increase available jobs in the area doc7225 none E. Shaqfeh, Stanford University This is one of two identical proposals submitted by Washington University and Stanford University. A combined experimental and numerical study is proposed to examine the effect of elasticity on the stability of fluid-fluid displacement interfaces-sometimes known as the ribbing instability. Such instabilities limit either the speed or the quality of production of adhesive coatings in industrial processes. This is a collaborative effort between Bamin Khomami of Washington University and Eric Shaqfeh of Stanford University with the numerical part being carried out mainly in the former institution while the experimental part mainly at the latter institution. Preliminary experiments performed by the PI s showed the dramatic onset of such instabilities. It is hypothesized that the instability is caused by the unstable stress gradient created by the extensional finger flow near the displacing front. The research plan is to obtain quantitative experimental data of such instability flows using modern instrumentation, to carry out linear and nonlinear stability analysis of the flows, and full three-dimensional simulations of the unstable elastic fluid interfaces to test the hypothesis. In addition, the possibility of enhancing the stability of the system by introducing time-periodic parametric forcing will be examined by simulations doc7226 none DeLoach This award is to Morgan State University to support the activity described below for 24 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners for this award include Morgan State University; Maryland Technology Development Corporation; Baltimore Development Corporation s Emerging Technology Center; Chesapeake Bay Regional Technical Center of Excellence; Prince George s County Economic Development Corporation. Proposed Activities The activities include technology transfer; business incubation; education and workforce development; strengthening local economies in targeted economically distressed communities; utilization of science and technology of federal laboratories in Maryland. Proposed Innovation The innovation goals are creation of economic wealth through technology transfer of research and development in the universities and federal laboratories in Maryland to create new companies and new jobs; creation of infrastructure to enable innovation; strong emphasis on education and training. Potential Economic Impact The activities will provide general economic well being in both rural (Maryland Eastern Shore) and urban (Baltimore and Prince George County) areas to reach under-represented groups. Potential Societal Impact The potential benefits to society include involvement of under-represented groups in the innovation enterprise in both rural and urban areas by creating new companies and new jobs for the disadvantaged and provision of the needed training to enable innovation and empower people to create economic well being; higher paying jobs in the region doc7227 none Mahaffey Hox genes encode homeodomain-containing transcription factors that specify body pattern during embryogenesis in all metazoans. In the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster these genes are located in the Antennapedia- and Bithorax-Complexes. Each individual hox gene is expressed in a specific anterior posterior domain wherein the encoded protein specifies regional identity through activation of a specific set of target genes. However, the DNA binding properties of the different hox proteins are quite similar This has lead to the hypothesis that interactions with cofactors play an important role in target gene selection by the hox proteins, though few cofactors are known. Recent results from the Mahaffey lab indicate that regionally-expressed zinc finger transcription factors are likely cofactors for the Deformed (Dfd) and Sex combs reduced (Scr) hox proteins. Loss of the two, redundant zinc finger genes, disconnected (disco) and disco-related (disco-r) causes a phenotype similar to loss of Dfd and Scr. Dr. Mahaffey proposed that an interaction between the hox and zinc finger proteins supplies the additional specificity that is required for selection and activation of hox target genes. Further, he proposes that this may be a conserved mechanism that governs body plan specification in other regions of the embryo and in other animals. This hypothesis leads to several predictions that Dr. Mahaffey will test. Dr. Mahaffey will ectopically co-express Disco and Dfd in Drosophila to determine whether both proteins will cause a broader transformation than that of Dfd alone. He will investigate the possibility of molecular interactions between Disco and Dfd, including protein-protein and protein-DNA binding studies. He will also search for Disco Disco-r response elements at known Dfd target genes, and, if found, he will undertake molecular characterizations of these response elements. To examine the possibility that this is a conserved mechanism, he will use RNAi to eliminate the disco disco-r function(s) from beetle Tribolium to test whether this causes a homeotic transformation similar to that observed due to loss of Tc-Dfd and Tc-Scr doc7228 none In this project in the Advanced Materials and Processing Program of the Chemistry Division, Dr. Michael Krische of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry of the University of Texas at Austin will design and synthesize conjugated macromolecular structures formed by interstrand hydrogen bonding. Co-facial alternate stacking of bis-thiophene and fluorene chromophores will produce stable conducting materials with efficient charge transport properties. Using other starting materials, duplex macromolecular materials may be synthesized for applications in molecular storage devices, catalysts and self-replicators. Planned centralized organic chemistry centers with virtual (on-line) and real accessibility will provide the undergraduate students with instructional materials and career development opportunities including graduate programs and job openings. Abiotic duplex polymer structures modeled after DNA will be synthesized using different starting materials. These macromolecular structures formed by inter-molecular hydrogen bonding will be useful as conducting materials with high charge transfer properties. Centralized learning centers in the chemistry department with on-line accessibility will be a new instructional tool to students in materials chemistry doc7229 none This project has four objectives related to the application of geometric morphometric methods. These methods are concerned with new mathematical and statistical methods for analyzing variation in the shapes of biological structures and their covariation with other variables (such as size, environmental variables, etc.). This approach allows one to treat the shape of an entire configuration of landmarks and or a set of outlines as a single mathematical object that can be analyzed statistically. The specific objectives are as follows: (1) A study of the comparative method (statistical methods that take into account an expected lack of independence of observations due to phylogenic relatedness). The generalized least-squares technique will be used to extend several types of standard multivariate statistical analyses (e.g., two-block partial least-squares and principal components analysis) and the application to reticulate evolution. The phylogenetic autocorrelation method will also be studied. (2) Because morphometric data is sometimes incomplete, methods for the imputation of missing coordinate data will be investigated. These will include mean-value substitution, regression estimation, spline relaxation, and hot-decking. (3) Work will start on building a database on the morphometric diversity of Near Eastern human populations. These data will be useful for the two objectives described above. (4) New methods (described above) that we find most useful will be implemented in the tps series and the morpheus software so that these techniques will be freely available to others. Software for phylogenetic autocorrelation analysis will also be developed doc7230 none Lay ( ) The means by which large numbers of neurons (ensembles) effectively interact is not well understood. Recent findings demonstrate thousands of hippocampal neurons participating in specific fast-frequency patterns [theta-modulated gamma (40-100 Hz) and sharp wave modulated ripples (200 Hz)]. These in vivo patterns likely support the memory functions performed by the hippocampus and interconnected structures (e.g. medial septum). Local application of drugs into the medial septum of rats will be used to manipulate both memory formation and hippocampal electrophysiology. This project will determine the role of septal neurons in regulating gamma and ripple frequency patterns and the relation between these ensemble patterns and memory. The medial septum and the hippocampus are brain structures critical for episodic memory formation. While the functions supported by particular brain structures are fairly well understood, how large numbers of neurons effectively interact to support emergent function is not. The hippocampus exhibits specific patterns of activity during which thousands of neurons discharge in transient gamma (40-100 Hz) and ripple (200 Hz) frequency patterns. These patterns may play a role in organizing the discharge of individual neurons into ensemble patterns, similar to the manner in which the precise timing of miniature lights on a large scoreboard can create a coherent message or picture. What role these organizing patterns actually play in memory formation is not yet known. This project will manipulate gamma and ripple frequency patterns, and determine the effect on memory formation. The results are likely to advance understanding of the function of fast-frequency ensemble patterns doc7231 none The Alaska Native Science Commission was created to bring together research and science in partnership with Native communities. The Commission provides information, referral, and networking services for researchers seeking active partners among Alaska Native communities. This cooperative agreement will provide a continuation of services to Native communities, scientists, and researchers. The Commission s concerns include Arctic climate systems and ecosystems, environmental change, links between environmental change and human activity, and the inclusion of Native people in the planning, implementation, and interpretation of scientific research doc7232 none This award is to The University of West Virginia to support the activity described below for a period of 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnernerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners University of Akron; Kansas West Virginia Structural Composites, Inc.; West Virginia Department of Highways; Transportation Research Board; U.S Department of Agriculture Proposed Activities The proposed activities include: develop, manufacture, implement, field-test, and market novel honeycomb fiber-reinforced polymer sandwich composite materials for applications in civil infrastructure and aquaculture industries, with particular emphasis on highway bridge decks, guardrail systems, and modular fish culture tanks for use with impaired mine water supplies in rugged terrain. Kansas West Virginia Structural Composites, Inc is in the process of establishing a manufacturing plant close to the West Virginia University campus. The program will include cost-effective innovations for manufacturing technologies; concurrent optimization of materials and design; prototype development and evaluation; product implementation and marketing; work-force training and curriculum development; technology transfer. The initial effort will emphasize development and marketing of bridge decks, guardrail systems, and modular fish culture tanks. Feasibility studies and field implementation studies are being supported by West Virginia Department of Highways, Transportation Board, and U.S. Department of Agriculture. Proposed Innovation The proposed innovation includes: technology transfer of new knowledge of composite materials to improve highway civil infrastructure and to create technology for aquaculture for economic enterprise (fish farming) and food production, as well as education of engineers in design with new materials for civil infrastructure. Potential Economic Impact Estimated income from fish aquaculture is $12M annual sales ($4.6M annual income) and includes approximately 300 new jobs. Highway materials are targeted to a potential percentage of the $1T civil infrastructure market. West Virginia estimates that 40% of the highway bridges are in immediate need of repair. Potential Societal Impact Potentail societal impact includes increased food production, jobs, and improved highway safety doc7233 none Scott This award is to Ilisagvik College to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners for this award include California Virtual Campus, Bay Area Region 1; Lewis-Clark State College; Northwest Indian College; Phillips Community College; Arctic Slope Regional Corporation; North Slope Borough Office of the Mayor; Alaska Growth Capital; Arctic Development Council; Central Council Tlingit Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska; Interior Athabascan Tribal College; Tanana Chiefs Conference. Proposed Activities The activities for this award include delivery of post-secondary education to Alaska Natives living in intensely rural villages, typically far off the road system, with unemployment rates 3-5 times the national average; develop, test, and refine a situational model for distance education that takes into account variables for indigenous communities; combine distance learning with technical assistance for entrepreneurs and job placement services to develop Alaska s rural economy; assess occupational demand in the region; determine the skill levels of the workers; design and deliver two rounds of distance learning; provide small business training and technical assistance; assess the emerging model and disseminate the learnings. Proposed Innovation The innovation goals for the award include providing distance training to prepare workers for job demands in remote Alaska; providing small business training and technical assistance; research and development of models for remote education in rural indigenous populations; enablement of increased business and job opportunities in rural Alaska. Potential Economic Impact The economic outcomes for this award include increased skills and technical assistance for small business in rural Alaska, as well as increased jobs and business training and opportunity. Potential Societal Impact The potential benefits to society from this award include involvement of indigenous tribal population in a rural environment in job training and opportunity, plus creation of increased wealth in remote Alaska doc7234 none In nature, bacteria exist as members of complex communities. Cells interact in these communities, sending signals to each other and changing their behavior in response. These groups of bacteria play a vital role in recycling carbon, nitrogen, and other elements in the global ecosystem. Often, the mixed population of bacteria is on or in another living organism, and interacts with its host. Understanding how bacteria interact with each other and with their hosts is a fundamental challenge in biology. Myxococcus xanthus provides a very attractive experimental system to elucidate the molecular mechanisms of interactions between bacterial cells. Swarms of these bacteria glide over solid surfaces, secreting substances that kill and digest prey bacteria. When starved, M. xanthus cells move to aggregation centers and construct a nascent fruiting body. Within the fruiting body, rod-shaped cells differentiate into spherical, dormant spores. This spectacular developmental process is regulated by cell-cell interactions. M. xanthus is very amenable to genetic and biochemical analyses at the molecular level. In contrast, molecular analysis of cell-cell interactions in mixed populations of bacteria is extremely difficult. As methods to study complex communities improve, research to understand their mechanisms of signaling and response will be facilitated by the paradigms learned from model organisms like M. xanthus. Studies of C signaling during M. xanthus development are establishing a new paradigm for how bacterial cells can interact. C signaling involves CsgA, a protein produced in the developing cells that becomes associated with the cell surface. CsgA appears to have enzymatic activity, but the substrate is unknown. It has been proposed that either CsgA itself or the product of its enzymatic activity is exchanged upon end-to-end contact between cells. C signaling induces several responses in recipient cells. It appears to maintain the stringent response, preventing cells from resuming growth on amino acids that are produced early in development, so these amino acids are instead used for macromolecular synthesis during development. C signaling also regulates cell movements, allowing macroscopic patterns called ripples and aggregates to form, and it regulates developmental gene expression and sporulation. Intriguingly, the different responses to C signaling require different levels of CsgA, and the level of CsgA rises during development because C signaling stimulates CsgA production. Extensive end-to-end contacts between cells in the nascent fruiting body have been proposed to allow efficient C signaling. The high level of CsgA that results within the fruiting body may trigger sporulation. This research aims to determine the molecular mechanisms of developmental gene expression in response to C signaling. Preliminary studies have characterized the DNA regulatory regions of two loci that depend partially on C signaling for expression and one that depends absolutely on C signaling. All three regions have one or more sequences matching the consensus CAYYCCY (called the C box; Y means pyrimidine) near the transcriptional start site. The one that depends absolutely on C signaling also has an upstream repeat sequence that is needed for expression. Mutational analyses will be used to define the sequence features of the C box and the upstream repeat that are important for expression. To identify proteins directly involved in the regulation of C signal-dependent genes, several approaches will be used. Preliminary results showing that the FruA protein binds to promoter regions of C signal-dependent genes will be extended in collaboration with L. Sogaard-Andersen, using in vitro footprinting and electrophoretic mobility shift assays. The technique of in vivo cross-linking and immunoprecipitation will be adapted for use in bacteria to examine FruA binding to promoter regions. Yeast one-hybrid screens will be performed to identify proteins that bind specifically to DNA sequences shown by mutational analyses to be important for expression. Transcription of a C signal-dependent gene will be reconstituted in vitro to identify the form of RNA polymerase involved and its associated sigma factor. Insights gained from research in this area should find application in environmental cleanup, industrial and agricultural practices doc7235 none The genetic architecture of honey bee sucrose response thresholds Robert E. Page, Jr. The long term objective of this project is to better understand variation in behavior. Behavior is a consequence of the genetic makeup, development, and environment of an individual. Observed differences in behavior between individuals can be a consequence of any of these factors, or the interactive combination of any or all of them. There is relatively little known about the underlying causes of variation in behavior for any organism. Honey bees afford a unique opportunity to study behavioral variation because their behavior is stereotypic and well known, they live in social groups, they undergo age related changes in behavior, they have very high rates of genetic recombination that facilitate the genetic mapping of their genes, and many genetic studies of their behavior have been performed. For this proposal, a detailed genetic map will be constructed in order to map major genes associated with a sensory trait, the perception of sugar and water. It has been clearly demonstrated that this trait correlates with important behavioral decisions of worker honey bees with respect to foraging. A detailed map will provide a test of the hypothesis that the same genes previously mapped for pollen hoarding behavior (the storing of surplus pollen in the nest) also effect sensory perception. It will also identify new genes associated with sensory perception and will lead to a better understanding of how genes interact and affect behavior. Finally, sets of genetic markers will be developed that are close to the mapped genes that can be used in future studies of gene and environment interactions that affect the behavior, and for use in population studies of this naturally varying behavioral trait doc7236 none Smith, Paul E. Cosolvents can have dramatic effects on the properties of peptides and proteins in solution. They are often used to enhance the stability of proteins or to denature them in order to study protein folding. Exactly how cosolvents affect peptides and proteins is unknown. An understanding of these effects will greatly improve our current ideas concerning the nature of the denatured state of proteins. In turn, this will help to clarify the protein folding process by providing a well defined initial state from which one can rationalize the effects of temperature or denaturants. Experimental studies of the denatured states of proteins are limited due to the many conformations available to the protein, and an inability of techniques to determine the interactions between proteins and cosolvent molecules with atomic level resolution. In principle, computer simulations can provide atomic level resolution of denatured proteins and their interactions with cosolvents. However, computer simulation experiments are only as reliable as the force fields which describe the interactions between the different species. In this proposal, it is shown that current cosolvent force fields need to be improved in order to quantitatively reproduce the experimental properties of cosolvent mixtures with water. A combination of molecular dynamics simulation and the Kirkwood-Buff theory of mixtures will be used to provide sufficient data for comparison with experiment, and to ensure the quality of the force field. Both effective pair potentials and polarizable models will be investigated for sodium chloride, guanidinium chloride, urea, and 2,2,2 trifluoroethanol; which represent common cosolvents displaying a range of effects on peptides and proteins. The improved force fields will then be used to fully characterize, with atomic detail, the properties of these solutions. This is the first step in determining their different effects on proteins, and is absolutely essential if one is to have any confidence in computer simulation results for these systems doc7237 none H. Jaeger, University of Chicago It is proposed to operate jointly two diagnostic techniques to elucidate the property distribution of three-dimensional time-resolved granular flows. These are Magnetic Resonance Imaging (for velocity) and x-ray tomography (for particle density, position and orientation). So far, the MRI system available to the PI has yielded velocity fields with 100-micron resolution (i.e. 1 10-grain diameter). On that basis, it is possible to reconstruct mass flow rates. However, a full account (including particle spin, etc.) requires the synergistic use of X-ray tomography, which is also available to the PI from the new Advanced Photon Source at the DOE Argonne Laboratory (550-nm resolution). Special attention will be focussed on particle shape, contact interaction, ultrasmall ( nano ) particle dynamics, and system evolution with time. The outcome of this research should provide some understanding of the settling process, and of the role of volume exclusion in reaching a final non-equilibrium distribution ( jamming ). The contribution of shape anisotropy and of cluster formation to this less-than-optimum package of particles, will be tested against the proposed accurate experiments and the recently available theories. Emphasis will be brought on three-dimensional geometry, oscillatory shear, particle interaction and mixtures (e.g. rod spheres), ultrafine powders doc7238 none In with support from the Division of Polar Programs and the Informal Science Education Program of the National Science Foundation, Sesame Workshop created Antarctica, a 20-page full-color booklet for students and teachers. This interdisciplinary resource, which was revised and expanded in , was created for use in formal and informal settings in conjunction with a week of 3-2-1 Contact programs about Antarctica. It includes information about Antarctica s geography, climate, plant and animal life, the scientists who work there, explorers, ongoing research, adaptation to the cold, and international cooperation. Both the National Science Foundation and Sesame Workshop have widely distributed the booklet at national and regional conferences of science and mathematics teachers, as well as at dozens of science workshops conducted by the Sesame Workshop School Services group, and the supply of these booklets has been seriously depleted. Because the booklet continues to be popular and requests keep coming in, the Office of Polar Programs of the National Science Foundation requested that Sesame Workshop (formerly Children s Television Workshop) prepare a proposal to update and expand a four-color interdisciplinary booklet for eight-to-twelve year-olds about Antarctica and to create a simple website that supports the booklet doc7239 none Most living beings we observe in nature breathe oxygen, a prerequisite for the existence of aerobic organisms, including humans. In many lake and river sediments or waterlogged soils oxygen is not available, yet many bacteria thrive in such oxygen-depleted (anaerobic) environments. Instead of oxygen, anaerobic bacteria use other compounds to drive respiration, compounds such as nitrate, sulfate, or, as recent discoveries have demonstrated, chlorinated chemicals. Respiration using chlorinated compounds destroys those chlorinated chemicals, and hence, diminishes toxicity to humans. This project will elucidate distribution, abundance, diversity, physiology, and ecological function of bacterial populations that respire with chlorinated compounds. The PI will characterize the enzymes involved, explore the diversity of dechlorinating enzyme systems in these bacteria, and explore the evolution of these systems. Samples from a variety of geographically distinct locations (including Antarctica, Siberian permafrost, the deep subsurface, hydrothermal vents, and hot springs) will be examined, and bacterial populations of interest will be studied in detail. State-of-the-art nucleic acid-based tools will be used and improved to detect, monitor, and quantify these organisms. Because man-made chlorinated compounds (e.g. pesticides, solvents, etc.) are major environmental pollutants, this project, aimed at understanding the basic biology and ecology of chlororespiring bacteria, can provide a basis for exploring how these specialized organisms can be exploited to assist in clean-up efforts at contaminated sites. This is a CAREER award, integrating research and educational activities. Undergraduate and graduate students will be involved in this research project. To improve minority participation and faculty interaction, a Visiting Student Researcher Development (VSRD) program with the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez will be initiated. In addition, high school teachers (and their students) will be given an opportunity to experience new technologies by participating in a summer program of scientific inquiry doc7240 none Newman The objective of this project is to test a hypothesis for how the cells of the vertebrate limb bud generate the quasi-periodic array of cartilage rods and nodules that serve as the primordia of the limb skeleton in all such species. The hypothesis is that the self-organizing properties of limb mesenchymal cells that lead them to generate spatiotemporally arranged precartilage condensations and cartilage nodules in vitro are also utilized in vivo in the generation of the limb skeletal pattern. To test this idea key gene regulatory processes will be identified that are intrinsic to limb bud mesenchyme which provide the basis for its ability to generate precartilage condensations in a spatiotemporally-controlled fashion. Because the extracellular matrix protein fibronectin is a major mediator of precartilage cell condensation both in vitro and in vivo, DNA constructs will be designed to contain the chicken fibronectin gene promoter linked to a readily visualized reporter molecule, Green Fluorescent Protein. The length of normal promoter sequence that directs authentic condensation-associated gene expression in vitro and then mutate the minimal promoter to determine which cis-acting sites are essential for this activity will be identified. This will permit the delineation of candidate sites for action of developmentally relevant transcription factors such as Fast-1. The response of these constructs to added growth and differentiation factors such as TGF-B2, and FGF-2, -4 and -8 will be used to help identify endogenous factors that regulate fibronectin expression. Once the relevant determinants have been characterized in vitro, they will be introduced into embryonic limbs by electroporation or detergent-mediated transfection to ascertain whether or not the establishment of fibronectin prepatterns for the skeletal primordia in vivo employ the same fibronectin regulatory pathways utilized in the self-organizing processes responsible for the generation of these patterns in vitro doc7241 none Marsilea vestita is a water fern that makes motile spermatozoids. Each of these gametes possesses ~140 cilia and a complex cytoskeleton. The gametes are formed in a rapid process that is initiated by placing dry microspores (meiotic products) into water, in a process known as imbibition. Spermiogenesis is synchronous in populations of microspores, and a distinctive feature of gamete formation in this organism is the de novo formation of basal bodies in cells that lack preexisting centrioles. In each spermatocyte, a discrete particle known as a blepharoplast forms approximately 4 h after imbibition, and during the next two hours the blepharoplast splits and functions as a centrosome for the last mitotic division in the gametophyte, and then it matures. Each blepharoplast produces approximately 140 basal bodies. Dry microspores contain large quantities of stored protein and stored mRNA. The translation of specific mRNAs at particular stages of spermiogenesis is necessary for gamete maturation, including formation of the blepharoplast and basal bodies. The translation of centrin is essential for blepharoplast formation in these gametophytes, and centrin and b-tubulin can be detected immunocytochemically in blepharoplasts (where they serve as marker proteins for the organelle), which form 4 h after imbibition. This project will focus on aspects of spermiogenesis in M. vestita that extend ongoing work and utilize probes and procedures this lab has developed in the past several years. Studies on essential proteins that participate in the de novo formation of basal bodies will be expanded. Reverse-genetics with RNAi will be used to perform a series of translational knockouts to see how Xgrip109, RanBPM and other members of the g-tubulin ring complex participate in the basal body formation. Then, ongoing studies with mago nashi (a polarity gene in embryogenesis in a variety of organisms) will be extended to examine its role in the early segregation of cytoplasm in the gametophyte into spermatogenous and sterile domains as the single-cell gametophyte develops and forms its two distinct types of progeny - sterile somatic jacket cells and spermatogenous cells. The movements of stored mRNA and proteins will be monitored, and actomyosin as a driving force for some of these events will be examined. This project will potentially provide new insights into the roles played by various proteins as cells assemble new basal bodies, the site in all eukaryotic cells where the growth of cilia and flagella initiates. Also, new perspectives will be provided into how cells differentiate their cytoplasm into functionally distinct regions, a process of central importance in the growth and development of all cells doc7242 none Gomez This award is to the University of Puerto Rico to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners for this award include the University of Puerto Rico; Inter American University of Puerto Rico; Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico; Industry University Research Consortium; Chamber of Commerce; Puerto Rico Manufacturers Association; venture capital; incubator facilities. Proposed Activities The activities for this award include workforce development; improved access to new knowledge for companies; creation of infrastructure for innovation; development of a strategic plan for innovation for Puerto Rico. Proposed Innovation The innovation goals include development of entrepreneurial skills in the workforce; integration of research and education; technology transfer to create new companies; creation of the infrastructure for innovation in Puerto Rico; development of a strategic plan for innovation in Puerto Rico; creation of new jobs and a technologically literate workforce. Potential Economic Impact This activity should have the following outcomes: general economic well being with new start-up companies and new high tech jobs for the citizens of Puerto Rico. Potential Societal Impact This activity should provide new jobs and economic well being for under-represented groups doc7243 none Shivakumar This award is to North Carolina A 3-TEX Inc.; General Electric Aircraft Engine Group (Cincinnati, OH); NASA Glenn Research Center Cleveland, OH) Proposed Activities The activities include commercial technology development and work-force advancement; commercial development; attract minority students to graduate programs; launching new start-up companies; licensing technology for transfer to existing businesses. Proposed Innovation Carbon carbon composites are being developed for ion thruster optics and other ion thrusters for deep space flight engines, bearing cages for large and small aircraft engines, valves for internal combustion engines, textile products, and sports equipment. Potential Economic Impact The current market for these materials is not known at this time, but the potential market for engines for commercial aircraft is very large. The combination of small business to manufacture the components, a large aircraft engine manufacturing company, and NASA produces a partnership that has the potential to sustain the economic enterprise for the short-term future. Once manufacturing produces a product for a reasonable market price, additional applications may arise. Potential Societal Impact North Carolina A&T is a historically African-american institution. The program would increase the number of African-american engineers with BS and post-graduate degrees in the US. The economic activity has the potential to create new markets and new jobs doc7244 none Byron This award is to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst to support the activity described below for 24 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners for this award include the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Massachusetts Ventures Corporation; Springfield Technical Community College; Economic Development Council of Western Massachusetts; Kollmorgen Aerospace and Defense Group; Rexam Image Products; Western Massachusetts Electric Company; Western Massachusetts Software Company; Mass Ventures Equity Fund; National Collegiate Innovators and Inventors Association. Proposed Activities The activities for this award include: establishment of enabling innovation networks; technology exchange; entrepreneurship activities; commercialization; workforce development; capitalization on the strengths in research in polymer science, computer science, chemical engineering, environmental technology, and electrical engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst to integrate research and education and transfer technology. Proposed Innovation The innovation goals for the award are to capitalize on the strong intellectual output from the University of Massachusetts to start new economic activities in western Massachusetts, which has not benefited from the economic well being of the eastern part of the state and to establish new businesses in telecommunications, and manufacturing. Potential Economic Impact The potential economic outcome includes formation and fostering of early stage companies; to establish a collaborative infrastructure to help isolated companies; to increase public and private investment in targeted areas. Potential Societal Impact The potential benefits to society include creation of new wealth through creation of new companies and new jobs, training of a technologically literate workforce with higher paying job opportunities doc7245 none Kohn This award is to Rutgers University to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners are Rutgers University; University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, New Jersey Institute of Technology; New Jersey Center for Biomaterials, which includes 15 industrial members. Proposed Activities The activities in this award include implementation and evaluation of better models for academic-industrial partnerships; improved business assessment and planning tools for the innovation process; development of marketable technology from underutilized intellectual property within the industrial sector; engage faculty from business school entrepreneurship programs and public policy departments; education of graduate students in innovation and entrepreneurship. Proposed Innovation The innovation goals are the implementation and evaluation of better models for innovation including Technology Enablement Partnership (TEP) and Virtual Research Organization (VRO). TEP model is for more efficient utilization of underdeveloped intellectual property within the academic sector by improved business assessment and planning. VRO is for development of marketable technology from underutilized intellectual property within the industrial sector by novel interactions with academia. Business schools and public policy departments are participating, as well as scientific and engineering departments from academia. Business and government agencies complete the partnerships with their traditional strengths. The models and their evaluations will be disseminated through normal channels plus a public Innovation Workshop. Potential Economic Impact Workforce needs for innovation in the form of graduate student education will provide the infrastructure to enable innovation in the biomaterials sector. The models will be evaluated and the results will be disseminated. Any business enterprises from the commercialization activities will also have economic impact. Potential Societal Impact Biomaterials have many applications that will be important to medicine and public health. In addition, new jobs in the technology sector will be a benefit in New Jersey doc7246 none Poole This award is to Fisk University to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners Fisk University; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL); Coherent Technologies Incorporated (CTI) Proposed Activities Fisk University will grow crystals; LLNL will evaluate the crystals; CTI will build the laser systems. Proposed Innovation The primary application for these laser devices is as transmitters for eyesafe active remote sensors. These sensors are used for a variety of commercial applications including pollution monitoring, atmospheric trace gas monitoring and meteorological studies and wind sensing (lidar systems for aircraft to detect clear air turbulence). CTI has a proposed plan to obtain funding for development of markets for future developments with these laser materials. Potential Economic Impact The proposal does not assess the economic impact, although the potential applications and companies that could participate in the marketing of the products are identified. The primary applications for these lasers is as transmitters for eyesafe active remote sensors used for pollution monitoring, atmospheric trace gas monitoring, meteorological studies, and wind sensing (clear air turbulence). The potential applications range from aircraft safety to air quality and pollution monitoring and control. Education of African American students, especially in engineering is another strong benefit to society. Potential Societal Impact The technology will contribute to public safety, air pollution monitoring etc. In addition, the number of African Americans with both undergraduate and graduate degrees will increase. The strength of the research and education of this institution will be increased doc7247 none Cell walls are carbohydrate and protein structures that surround and separate plant cells. As plant cells expand in a regulated fashion they must necessarily modify and enlarge their cell walls to permit the subsequent increase in volume. The cell wall itself might influence this expansion process. Thus the cell has the potential to influence almost every aspect of plant function simply because of its position and physical properties. For this reason many have speculated on its role in a plant s development and response to the outside world. Cell growth can occur in many dimensions, such as the polarized expansion of a pollen tube tip, the creation of elongated cells characteristic of many vegetative tissues, the establishment of a meristem, or even the jigsaw-like arrangement of cells at the leaf surface. Currently the understanding of how cell wall architecture is coordinated with programmed and hormone regulated cell expansion events during development is not well understood in angiosperms. Recent studies have identified a number of proteins at the cell surface that could directly regulate cell wall functions, and the Cell Wall Associated Kinases, or WAKs, are among these. There are five cell wall associated kinases in Arabidopsis and representatives in other angiosperm families. WAKs each have a cytoplasmic serine threonine protein kinase domain, span the plasma membrane and extend a domain into the cell wall. WAKs physically link the plasma membrane to the carbohydrate matrix and are unique in that they have the potential to directly signal cellular events through their kinase domain. The WAK extracellular domain is variable between the five isoforms, and collectively the family is expressed in all organs. WAK1 and WAK2 are the most ubiquitously and abundantly expressed of the five tandemly arrayed genes, and their messages are present in vegetative meristems, junctions of organ types, and areas of cell expansion. They are also induced by pathogen infection and wounding. The WAK1 but not WAK2 cell wall domain binds to a glycine rich protein (GRP) of the cell wall in in vitro assays. WAK1 and GRP can be co-immunoprecipitated from leaf or seedling extracts, and this WAK is phosphorylated. Recent experiments demonstrate that antisense WAK expression leads to the loss of cell expansion, and preliminary results indicate that antisense GRP production causes an enhancement of cell expansion (and eventual cell death). Thus GRP may be a negative regulator of WAK activity. A large amount of WAK is also covalently linked to pectin, and most of WAK that is bound to pectin is also phosphorylated. The data support a model where WAK1 is bound to GRP as a phosphorylated kinase, and also binds to pectin. How WAKs are involved in signaling from the pectin extracellular matrix in coordination with GRPs will be key to the understanding of the cell wall s role in cell growth. WAKs are poised to provide a direct signal from the cell wall to the cytoplasm of many cell types during the development of Arabidopsis. In order to characterize the associations and roles of GRPs and WAKs in plants it will be necessary to generate additional (partial) loss of function alleles of the two predominant WAKs and of GRP. These alleles can then be used to determine the relationship of WAK mediated cell expansion to other known signaling pathways. WAK kinase substrates will be also identified and used to assay the activation of WAK by wall components and developmental cues, and eventually mutant alleles of these substrates will help in the analysis of WAKs and cell elongation. The goal is to understand how WAKs in association with GRP and pectins regulate cytoplasmic components so that the cell wall is coordinated with processes of cell growth doc7248 none Jeelani This award is to Tuskegee University to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners are Tuskegee University; Auburn University; Nanotek Instruments; Advanced Composites Technologies and Associates (ACTA). Proposed Activities Nanotek will supply nano particles and fibers. Auburn University will develop process technology and microstructural characterization of the materials. Tuskegee University will incorporate the fibers and particles into composites and characterize the materials performance. ACTA will assist Tuskegee and fabricate isogrid cylinders through filament winding. The sole use for these cylinders at this time is for space applications via NASA. Proposed Innovation The proposed innovation is development and commercialization of high tech nano composites for isogrid cylinders for space applications. Potential Economic Impact The Space industry is the sole market at the moment. However, there are other potential applications if the current partners expand their vision and mix of partners. Potential Societal Impact The lead institution is a historically african-american institution. Involvement in the economic enterprise would have a good impact, especially if the partners pursue other potential applications. Increasing the number of african-american scientists and engineers with graduate degrees will be a major outcome doc7249 none Norcum Aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases control fidelity of protein biosynthesis by accurate pairing of amino acids and transfer RNAs. Nine of these enzymes and three auxiliary proteins are isolated from multicellular eukaryotes as a macromolecular complex. The major biological function of the particle is likely organization of the translational machinery. One of its constituents is the precursor of a cytokine released during apoptosis and so the multisynthetase complex may also link biological signaling, programmed cell death and inflammation. This project will test and refine the three domain model of the rabbit reticulocyte multisynthetase complex. Its three-dimensional structure will be calculated from electron microscopic images of frozen, unstained samples. The reference volume obtained by random conical reconstruction methods will be refined by projection mapping. Toward the overall goal of mapping the full protein topography within the particle, this project will focus on a subset selected to provide a broad test of the working model. Using natural tRNAs or in vitro transcripts of synthetic tRNA genes as specific probes, at least one enzyme within each domain will be located. Work will begin with the arginyl-, leucyl- and glutaminyl-tRNA synthetases. Electron microscopy will provide general protein locations, which will be refined by difference mapping of control and labeled structures. Probes will be visualized directly or by combination of chemical labeling with reporter molecules. So that positions within at least one domain are confirmed and oriented, electron microscopy will be combined with fluorescence resonance energy transfer measurement of distances between pairs of bound fluorophore-labeled tRNAs. Work will begin with the base , which contains leucyl-, isoleucyl- and bifunctional glutamyl- prolyl-tRNA synthetases. This project s results are fundamental to understanding eukaryotic protein biosynthesis at the molecular level and to elucidation of principles underlying intracellular organization. The information obtained will also provide information about differences between prokaryotic and eukaryotic protein biosynthesis, a mechanism of autoimmunity, and a route to cell death doc7250 none The Earth s aurora emits a wide range and variety of radio waves at low, medium, and high frequencies, which are signatures of the interaction between the auroral electron beam and the ionospheric plasma. Such interactions and their results, for example plasma wave generation mechanisms, are currently not well understood. This project will deploy a versatile electromagnetic wave form receiver at South Pole station, and focus on several types of signals detectable at ground level. An Antarctic location is essential for this study because in the Northern Hemisphere the low and medium frequency spectrum is obscured by broadcast bands. The clean Antarctic spectrum improves the effectiveness of automatic wave detection algorithms which are a necessary part of the data management protocol. This receiver will form part of a network of receivers located in the Automatic Geophysical Observatories operated by the US. Antarctic program and by the British Antarctic Survey, thus providing coverage at a wide range of geomagnetic latitudes doc7251 none McGrath This award is to Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University to support the activity described below for 24 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners are Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; Virginia Commonwealth University; Newport News Shipbuilding (NNS); Acadia Elastomers; United Technologies; ChemFab; Dais Analytic; BPAmoco; Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL); Grambling University; Hampton University. Proposed Activities The activities in this award are systems engineering analysis of membrane electrode assembly of fuel cell stacks; predictive modeling of materials durability; synthesis and characterization of new polymers for electrodes; summer intern education programs; modeling and reliability testing; scale-up from materials, models, processing to prototype; technology transfer to industrial partners; commercialization. Proposed Innovation Fuel cells have been in existence for over one hundred years, but they are not economical or reliable enough for commercialization. Materials that operate at higher temperatures and increased efficiency for thousands of hours are needed. Reliability modeling and lifetime prediction models are being investigated. This will allow expansion of the technology to other systems. Once fuel cells become economically competitive, the potential commercialization is enormous. Quiet, clean, reliable, mobile power generation will have a huge range of applications with a large potential economic market. Potential Economic Impact Fuel cells have potential for clean generation of electrical power, but the materials available currently are not adequate for reliable, long-life high temperature economic operation. Inclusion of under-represented minorities in graduate programs is important. Long-term sustainability is assured if economic, reliable fuel cells can be made. Potential Societal Impact Two of the partners are historically african-american colleges. An increase in the number of african-american scientists and engineers with graduate degrees would be a major outcome. Clean generation of electrical power would be a major societal impact doc7252 none Bashford This award is to Arizona State University to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners are Arizona State University; Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing; Home Building Association in Central Arizona; Del Webb Corporation; Pulte Homes; Eagle Homes; Trend Homes; Maracay Homes; Gateway Community College. Proposed Activities The partners are doing the following: identification of challenges faced by home builders where technology could change the process significantly; identification of technologies to address the challenges; research on new materials, products, and processes (especially where manufacturing can lower cost and increase quality); modeling and simulation of home construction; develop prototypes and work techniques to apply them; education training of a workforce to use the new building technology developed. Proposed Innovation Housing is the industry that missed the innovation revolution in America. The industry is mature and extremely fragmented, making innovation very difficult. The proposed innovation activities include research and a management plan to incorporate new materials, manufacturing practice with obvious economic and quality control benefits, training of skilled craftsmen, energy savings, and modification of building codes could modernize the house construction industry with enormous savings for the US economy. Potential Economic Impact The following economic impacts are likely: improve durability and reduce maintenance costs for new homes by 50% by ; reduce cost of new homes by 20% by ; reduce energy costs by 50%; increased safety of construction workers. The housing industry is a huge driver in the national economy. Potential Societal Impact Active recruitment of Hispanics through chamber of commerce activities and Gateway Community College will help provide opportunity for this group to participate in the program. Affordable and maintainable housing will provide obvious benefits to all Americans, especially Americans who can afford custom homes doc7253 none Boyd This award is to the Rochester Institute of Technology to support the activity described below for 27 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners for the award include Rochester Institute of Technology; the City of Buffalo; the City of Rochester; High Tech of Rochester; IP.com; State University of New York at Buffalo; University of Rochester; Western New York Technology Development Center. Proposed Activities The activities of this award include creation of an infrastructure for commercialization; creation of business start-ups; encouragement of academic patenting; establishment of regional practices to foster innovation; training of entrepreneurial experts who understand intellectual property, formulation of business start-up models; and development of community economic development resources; establishment of the infrastructure to connect university researchers, administrators, technology transfer offices, business builders, and venture capitalists to enable the innovation process. Proposed Innovation The innovation goals are to build the infrastructure to enable innovation connecting the universities to all of the other key elements in the innovation process; to train leaders in innovation; to start new businesses to create regional wealth. Potential Economic Impact The potential economic outcomes include increased patents and business start-ups (10-15 new ones); increased collaborative research; assessment of invention potential; education on intellectual property. Proposed Societal Impact Potential benefits to society include creation of new jobs and new regional business; involvement of under-represented groups in leadership positions in the economic enterprise of the region doc7254 none MacQuarrie This award is to the University of Missouri Kansas City to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners include the University of Missouri Kansas City; University of Kansas Medical Center Research Institute; Kansas City Life Sciences Institute; University of Missouri Columbia; Midwest Research Institute; Center for Business innovation. Proposed Activities The activities in this award include training scientists, business people and graduate students in technology-based entrepreneurship; developing and implementing a system for identifying and evaluating new discoveries and technologies that may have commercial value; developing a supporting infrastructure to foster and sustain innovation; commercialization. Proposed Innovation The innovation goals include education of scientists, businesspeople, and graduate students in technology-based entrepreneurship and creation of a regional partnership for innovation that enables transformation of knowledge in life sciences into innovations that create new wealth. A system to identify ideas that have commercial potential will be developed. A supporting infrastructure to foster and sustain innovation to commercialization will also be developed. Potential Economic Impact Education of personnel plus technology transfer that might lead to economic activity will have significant economic impacts. Proposed Societal Impact Innovations that benefit health care will result. Training of personnel for high tech jobs in the health care industry and new jobs in the health care industry will result doc7255 none In contrast to the short-lived model organisms most frequently studied by biologists (e.g., worms, flies, and mice), clonal colonial animals are relatively persistent and long-lived, occupying a given habitat for long periods of time. Such longevity presents environmental challenges not faced by more ephemeral organisms. Food supply, for instance, may vary in space and time in such habitats, and adjusting the timing and spacing of feeding structures (polyps) and gastrovascular connections may represent a major challenge for animals such as colonial hydroids. Signaling by redox state (e.g., the relative oxidation or reduction of mitochondrial electron carriers and of the NAD+ NADH pool) is a reliable mechanism by which such an environmental signal can be transduced into pattern-forming gene activity. For instance, if a growing hydroid colony encounters an area locally rich in food, polyps in the food-rich area will experience a surfeit of nutrients. These nutrients will trigger contractions of polyp epitheliomuscular cells and resulting gastrovascular flow, and the colony s local redox state may be altered relative to that outside the food-rich area. If such a metabolic gradient can differentially affect the timing of polyp and stolon tip development, adaptive changes in the local pattern of colony development can result. Using image analysis to assess colony development, polarographic measures to quantify oxygen uptake, fluorescent microscopy of NAD(P)H to measure redox state, fluorescent microscopy of 2 , 7 -dichlorofluorescin diacetate to visualize reactive oxygen species, and video microscopy to quantify gastrovascular flow, this proposal will elucidate the role of redox control in adaptive development of colonial hydroids. This work promises a clearer understanding of redox signaling and animal diversity. Generally, the animal model systems of modern biology are short-lived, sexually reproducing, and aclonal. Such organisms are unlikely to use redox signals to iterate and pattern themselves in the fashion described here. Thus this work on simple, primitive, colonial animals can provide insight into redox signaling when it does occur in more derived animals, as for instance in the human vascular system doc7256 none Chen This award is to the University of Texas Pan American to support the activity described below for 24 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners for this award include the University of Texas Pan American; Michigan State University; Instituto Technologico Y De Estudios Superiores de Monterrey; General Electric Engine Services; Bissell; TRW; Automation Tooling Systems; Alpine Electronics. Proposed Activities The activities for this award include a University Industry Economic Development Partnership to facilitate the process of taking academic research into product design and development. The target region is the US Mexico border near Brownsville, Texas (predominantly Hispanic population with high unemployment-up to 20%), which is rapidly evolving from agriculture to industry. The program provides internship for students in industry for design projects, virtual international design teams, technical support for small and medium businesses, experience and expertise in rapid product development, interdisciplinary teams (computer science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and manufacturing engineering), and experience for students in a global environment. Another goal is promotion of economic development in an impoverished region with a large under-represented minority population. Proposed Innovation The innovation goals for this award include integration of university research and education to provide technical assistance for small and medium industry, education of a technologically literate workforce at the university level to enable innovation, creation of new industries, creation of new jobs, providing economic well-being in an impoverished region Potential Economic Impact The potential economic outcomes include producing graduate engineers with experience in rapid product development in an international setting; creation of new industries and new jobs; providing technical assistance to small and medium companies. Potential Societal Impact This activity has the following potential benefits to society: economic wealth, jobs and workforce training to increase wages in an impoverished region, increased participation of Hispanic persons in the economic enterprise doc7257 none Avery The goal of this project is to identify the causes of differences in feeding behavior among bacteria-eating soil nematodes. The organ responsible for getting food into the worm is the pharynx. It has its own nervous system of 20 neurons. Feeding behavior has been studied in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. In this project the feeding behavior of other nematodes will be compared to that of C elegans. The structure and function of Panagrellus redivivus pharyngeal neurons will be determined and compared to the known structure and function of C elegans pharyngeal neurons. The effects of differences in feeding behavior on the foods the two species can eat will be explored. Feeding behavior and the structure and function of the pharyngeal nervous system in several other bacteria-eating soil nematodes will be explored, to see if the lessons learned from C elegans and P redivivus can be extended. Different animals behave in different ways. For instance, dogs are fairly sociable animals, while cats are more solitary. Closer to home, chimpanzees behave very differently from humans in many ways, even though chimpanzees are genetically similar to humans and have quite similar brains. The long-term goal of this project is to find out why different animal species behave differently. More precisely, the goal is to find the genes that cause different behavior. In the even longer term, the researchers hope to get some idea of how behavior has evolved by comparing behavioral and genetic differences with the evolutionary history of the nematodes doc7258 none Lea This award is to the University of North Carolina System to support the activity described below for 24 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners include the University of North Carolina System; Centennial Venture Partners Fund; Longleaf Venture Fund; NC Technological Development Authority; NC Biotechnology Center; Research Triangle Institute; NC Board of Science and Technology; NC Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology; NC Economic Development Regions. Proposed Activities This award has the following activities: education; invention prospecting; technology assessment; intellectual property management; business development planning and fundability assessment; license negotiations; venture capital networking; strategic planning for involving the entire University of North Carolina system. Proposed Innovation The proposed activities will study technology transfer in a multi-institutional setting to develop models for improved tech transfer methods. It will involve characterization of successful technology transfer, develop a training program to facilitate faculty understanding of technology transfer, enhance innovation, develop a model to optimize the capability of each campus type to work with the state s science and technology infrastructure to manage intellectual property for the economic development of the state. Potential Economic Impact General increase in economic well being in North Carolina plus more involvement of the University of North Carolina System in the innovation process will occur. Potential Societal Impact Potential societal impacts include more economic growth for the region; jobs for university graduates; higher salaries for the underdeveloped regions of the state doc7259 none Loewer This award is to the University of Arkansas to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners in this award include the University of Arkansas; several venture capitalists; Arkansas Science and Technology Authority. Proposed Activities The activities in this award are creation of business start-ups at the campus incubator; advancing discovery and education in microelectronics and photonics; technology transfer; providing technical and business expertise to start-up companies. Proposed Innovation The innovation goals include providing the infrastructure to fill the gap between university research and commercialization in the form of an on-campus incubator in nano and microelectronics and photonics, and education of students in entrepreneurial activities. Potential Economic Impact The potentials economic impacts include increased success for small start-up ventures because of nurturing of small companies by faculty expertise; a workforce trained in entrepreneurial activities; an active partnership between the schools of engineering and business. The number of small businesses and jobs in the region will increase. Potential Societal Impact Small firms will be able to utilize the resources of the university including space, facilities, faculty and students. The workforce in the region will become technologically literate and have more jobs available for their skills. The number of african-american graduates in science and engineering will increase doc7260 none Ho, PuiShing This research is designed to characterize the conformational determinants and the potential significance of a new form of the DNA double-helix induced by cytosine methylation (d m5C) or bromination (d Br5C). This novel conformation was discovered in the single-crystal structure of d(GGCGm5CC)2 and d(GGCGBr5CC)2 . The obvious questions that arise with any new conformation of DNA discovered by X-ray crystallography include: 1) what are the sequence requirements for its formation, 2) does this form exist in solution, and 3) is the structure relevant? The long-term goal is to use this structural information to locate E-DNA in genomic sequences and, consequently, place the conformation in a broader biological context. The first objective of this project is to define the types of sequences beyond the parent sequence d(GGCGm5CC)2 that can adopt this novel conformation. The second objective is to determine whether E-DNA exists in solution by defining a spectroscopic signature that links the conformation in the crystal with its formation in aqueous solution. The third objective is to test the hypothesis that E-DNA is a discrete intermediate in the pathway that leads to A-DNA. The studies will start with the complete set of crystal structures from B-DNA to A-DNA for the sequence motif d(GGCGCC)2 , and use these structures as a basis for molecular simulations to map the thermodynamics for the B-DNA to A-DNA transition. The results will be confirmed by stopped-flow transient kinetic studies. The final objective is to test the hypothesis that the conformation and solvent structure of E-DNA facilitates the deamination reaction that ultimately leads to the rapid mutation of dm5C to dT nucleotides. The incorporation of 18O from isotopically enriched water into the crystals of A-DNA, B-DNA, and E-DNAwill be monitored doc7261 none Murray This award is to to support the activity described below for 30 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners Partners for the partnership include ; Art Center College of Design; State government through Business Technology Center incubator; private industry. Proposed Activities The activities for this award include creation of post-degree entrepreneurial fellowships with the goal of preparing students previously trained in science or design to adapt their skills to the development of commercial products in the start-up environment; training in entreperneurialship (business plan, develop engineering prototypes; financial sources, etc); industrial partner mentor program. Proposed Innovation The innovation goals for the award include education of entrepreneurial leaders who have primary graduate and post-graduate education in science and engineering; formation of start-up high tech companies; development of educational modules for entrepreneurial courses for export to other universities. Potential Economic Impact The potential economic outcomes include teaching modules for export to other schools; spin-off companies; network of entrepreneurs and industry partners; graduates in science and technology with entrepreneurial training for leadership roles in the private sector. Potential Societal Impact The major benefit to society from this award will be the creation of high tech jobs and an education methodology for training future leaders in an innovative society doc7262 none Behavioral Functions of Vocal Imitation in Parrots PI: Georg F. Striedter co-PI: Nancy T. Burley Why do some animals imitate complex sounds? This question has most frequently been addressed in songbirds, which learn their songs primarily to defend a territory and or attract a mate. These explanations may not hold for the parrots, however, because parrots have evolved their remarkable imitative abilities independently of the songbirds. So, why do parrots imitate sounds? Recent data from the Striedter laboratory suggest that parrot vocal learning plays a role in pairbond formation. Specifically, when male and female budgerigars are placed in pairs, the males consistently imitate the contact calls of the females with whom they are paired, while the females retain their original calls. This sexual asymmetry in imitative behavior suggests that males imitate females in order to influence female mate choice. If this hypothesis is correct, then three predictions should hold: 1) Sexual selection should have led to an asymmetry in the vocal learning abilities of male and female budgerigars. This hypothesis will be tested by comparing how quickly all-male and all-female groups of budgerigars develop shared contact calls. If males are better at vocal learning, then vocal convergence should occur more quickly among males than among females. 2) Males should preferentially imitate females whom they are courting. This hypothesis will be tested by determining whether the time it takes for a male to learn a female s call is inversely correlated with his interest in this female, as measured by the frequency of other, well-known courtship behaviors. The female s attractiveness will be manipulated by painting her cere, which is brown in mature females but pale blue in immature females. 3) Female budgerigars should associate preferentially with males that have learned to imitate them. This hypothesis will be tested by determining whether females give more courtship displays towards unfamiliar males that already know their call (because they were tutored by another female that shares the test female s call) than towards males that do not yet know the test female s call. In a complementary experiment, some male budgerigars will be rendered imitation-impaired by selectively severing the connection between their auditory and vocal motor systems. The proposed experiments could significantly impact the field of sexual selection and female choice because most prior studies focused on female choice for overt physical traits - not learning ability. The proposed experiments also pave the way for a more mechanistic analysis of why male budgerigars imitate female calls doc7263 none Autographa californica M Nucleopolyhedrovirus (AcMNPV) is the best-studied species of the Nucleopolyhedrovirus (family Baculoviridae), a genus comprised of viral pathogens that infect caterpillars (i.e., larvae of butterflies and moths in the order Lepidoptera). AcMNPV has been studied extensively as a potential microbial pesticide because it can induce fatal infection in a wide range of pest species that cause billions of dollars worth of damage each year (e.g., corn, tobacco, tomato, cotton). The unusually wide host range of AcMNPV suggests that its infection strategy is highly efficient at overcoming the defensive responses of many larval lepidopterans, one of which is sloughing infected midgut cells. AcMNPV requires two different forms to complete its natural infection cycle. One form, called ODV, is eaten by caterpillars and infects the midgut cells lining the gut lumen. The second form, budded virus or BV, transmits infection beyond the midgut to nearly all other host tissues causing death within a few days. AcMNPV has two traits that are highly unusual for a virus. First, most ODV particles contain multiple nucleocapsids which all enter a single midgut cell; because a midgut cell can be successfully infected by virions containing only one nucleocapsid, this infection strategy appears inefficient. Second, the synthesis of the major BV envelope protein, gp64, begins early during infection. Typically, structural proteins are only made late during infection, so this early synthesis of gp64 is highly unusual. gp64 is essential for BV infectivity, and because it is absent from ODV, it must be synthesized in midgut cells in order for infection to progress. The hypothesis to be tested is that after infection of a midgut cell by ODV containing multiple nucleocapsids, some of the entering nucleocapsids invade the nucleus where they express gp64 (and other viral genes) while others bypass the nucleus and bud from the basal plasma membrane containing newly synthesized gp64. Thus, early expression of gp64, coupled with packaging of multiple nucleocapsids in ODV, may accelerate the onset of systemic infection and thereby counter the caterpillar s defensive midgut cell-sloughing response. This hypothesis will be tested by comparing the pathogenesis of an AcMNPV recombinant (Ac-wt) that exhibits the normal, wild type (early and late) gp64 synthesis with that of a recombinant that that can only synthesize gp64 late during infection (Ac-late). Both of these viruses contain a reporter gene permitting temporal and spatial tracking of the viral infection as it moves through the tissues. Dose mortality relationships for Ac-wt and Ac-late will be determined in larvae of the Tobacco Budworm and the Beet Armyworm, two major agricultural pests. If the hypothesis is correct, Ac-late should be slower in establishing systemic infection and also should require larger dosages to yield mortalities comparable to Ac-wt. Additionally, ODV nucleocapsids of both recombinants will be radiolabeled to determine, directly, whether and when they are transported into secondary target tissues. Finally, an AcMNPV recombinant lacking the ability to synthesize gp64 will be used both to confirm that gp64 is essential for systemic infection of the two insect species, and to quantify rates of midgut cell sloughing by these hosts. This research is designed to answer basic questions about the evolution and ecological significance of baculovirus infection strategies and the defense responses of caterpillars. The results will integrate the disease ecology of AcMNPV at the molecular and organismal levels, adding to our basic knowledge of baculoviruses and their utility in controlling agricultural pests doc7264 none Hatch This award is to the University of Idaho to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners include the University of Idaho; Clear Springs Food; Rangan Feeds; SeaPac; Fish Breeders of Idaho; Tribal Fish Commission; US Fish and Wildlife Service; Idaho Department of Fish and Game; Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife; Boise State University; Idaho State University; Washington State University; University of Idaho at Hagerman. Proposed Activities The activities include research on aquaculture; development of broodstock for specific aquaculture needs; development of feeds that meet requirements of environmental protection and aquaculture; technology transfer; education and training in biology, nutrition, genetics. Proposed Innovation The collaborating representatives involving scientists from universities, native American tribes, industry, and government all associated independently with different aquaculture affiliated programs or products will bring the components that supply, produce manage, regulate, and market fish, fish feeds, and recreation to resolve the problems facing aquaculture to create an expanded industry. Potential Economic Impact Fish products account for $11B in the US trade deficit (the US imports 65% of the annual fish food consumption). The world supply of fish products is limited, requiring aquaculture to meet the growing demand. Environmental concerns over wastes from current aquaculture will be costly and will need addressing. Sport fishing and fish for aquarium hobbyists also have a large economic base that can benefit from the results of this innovation activity. Potential Societal Impact Increased capacity to provide fish as a foodstuff will require aquaculture for an increasing societal demand. Clean water from the waste products from the aquaculture industry will have environmental impact. Sport fishing for recreation is another societal benefit doc7265 none James R. Garey A grant has been awarded to James R. Garey of the University of South Florida to support a symposium entitled The Lesser Known Protostome Taxa: Evolution, Development and Ecology . The symposium is to be held on January 4, as part of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) meeting in Chicago, IL. The purpose of the symposium is to encourage the use and study of animal groups such as onychophorans, nematomorphs and kinorhynchs in research and teaching, and to showcase the importance of broad systematic study of animals. The symposium is timely insofar as these lesser known phyla are becoming important in testing new hypotheses of animal phylogeny, studying the evolution of developmental patterning, and as important organisms in comparative genomics, physiology and ecology. Results of the symposium will be published in the American Zoologist doc7266 none Taste information travels from the mouth to the brain within nerves that terminate in a part of the medulla oblongata called the nucleus of the solitary tract (NST). The NST is interconnected with another part of the brainstem called the parabrachial nucleus (PBN). Both the PBN and NST act as processing and distribution centers for taste information. They send some taste information to higher brain centers so that the taste quality can be perceived. The PBN and NST also send outputs to motor centers in the brainstem that produce motor responses to the taste input. Within the PBN, there are two distinct regions that respond to taste input. One of these regions (CM VL) responds best to salt on the anterior tongue while the other (EM EL) responds best to bitter taste on the posterior tongue. Due to this difference in responses to taste input, it is hypothesized that the two PBN areas control different motor responses. Specifically, it is hypothesized that CM VL controls ingestive behaviors (like mouth movements and tongue protrusions) while EM EL controls aversive behaviors (like gapes). Undergraduate Biology and Psychology students and their faculty mentors, will address these hypotheses by stimulating discrete areas of the PBN while observing motor responses. This procedure will allow the construction of a functional map of the PBN. Specifically, CM VL and EM EL will be stimulated in separate groups of conscious rats using implanted electrode-cannula systems. First, these areas will be electrically stimulated while oral motor behaviors are videotaped. Following electrical stimulation, injection of glutamate (an excitatory neurotransmitter) through the cannula into the same location within the PBN will occur. The combination of electrical and chemical stimulation will allow accurate assessment of the specific neural elements responsible for the behavioral effects. The motor responses will be correlated with the histological localization of the stimulation sites. As mentioned, based on previous findings, it is hypothesized that stimulation of CM VL will generate ingestive behaviors, while stimulation of EM EL will evoke aversive responses. This study employs a straightforward strategy to define the effects of taste-responsive PBN regions on oral motor behaviors. The potential impact of the project on the understanding of central processing of taste input and the function of the PBN is substantial. Specifically, elucidation of a functional topography (map) within the PBN would significantly improve the understanding of the central mechanisms producing oral motor responses to taste input doc7267 none Mitochondrial function is essential for plant metabolism and male fertility, yet little is known of the mechanisms regulating mitochondrial gene expression, in particular the role of the nucleus. Because mitochondria contain few genes, the vast majority of its proteins are nucleus encoded, including all factors required for the first committed step in gene expression, transcription initiation. This project addresses the role of nuclear gene products in mitochondrial transcription and by extension, the role of mitochondrial gene expression during vegetative and reproductive stages. The organism chosen for this work is maize, an important crop species for which appropriate genetic and molecular resources are available. The project was initiated using in vitro transcription to define promoter regulatory elements. Subsequently, a gene encoding the core subunit of the RNA polymerase was identified and the product, RpoTm, was found to be related to those of phages such as T3 and T7. Because RpoTm alone cannot recognize mitochondrial promoters, a search for possible transcription specificity factors was carried out, and four candidates were obtained. These include three genes that encode DNA binding proteins, and an ortholog of bacterial sigma-70. One possibility is that each of these proteins lends a particular specificity to the polymerase and if so, this would allow a fine-tuning of mitochondrial function during development and gametogenesis. This need for flexibility could explain why plant mitochondrial transcription would be more complex that the cognate systems in fungi and animals. To determine the form(s) and composition of mitochondrial RNA polymerase, and the role of each of these in plant function, experiments will be conducted that use reverse genetic and biochemical approaches. Reverse genetics will entail the phenotypic and biochemical characterization of Mutator transposon insertion loss-of-function alleles of rpoTm and one or more of the possible transcription factors. If technology permits, an antisense approach will be used to obtain results more rapidly. Mutant plants have already been obtained for RpoTm and will be analyzed first. In addition to direct measurements of transcription products, there may be specific developmental responses to the mutations. For example, the loss-of-function allele of rpoTm may reduce pollen vigor and the frequency of embryo development, but has no apparent effect on the viability of female gametophytes. Therefore, pollen morphology and competitiveness will be examined in segregating plants, as well as embryo structure. To analyze effects in vegetative tissues, mosaic plants will be constructed that will develop mutant sectors in an otherwise wild-type background. A second and parallel objective is to reconstitute the RNA polymerase using the proteins described above, following expression in bacterial or insect cells. This will lead to a greater understanding of the mechanism of promoter recognition, and aid in interpreting the mutant phenotypes. The concomitant use of genetic and biochemical techniques will provide broad training to those involved in the project. In addition, undergraduate students will be involved in the genetic aspects, giving them early exposure to plant biology that may encourage them in this career path, or at least dramatically improve their scientific literacy doc7268 none The electrical activity of many organs is shaped by potassium selective ion channel proteins. Defects in potassium channels produce several types of electrophysiological disturbances including cardiac arrhythmias and epilepsy. These channels are the targets of many therapeutic drugs including the Class III anti-arrhythmic compounds. While many types of potassium channels have been cloned, many of their most basic properties, including ion discrimination and permeation, remain poorly understood. This project is designed to probe the mechanism of the interaction between tetraethylammonium ions (related to some Class III drugs) in the pore in these channels. This will be accomplished through a combination of molecular biological techniques with electrophysiological recordings and measurements of radio-labeled unidirectional ion fluxes. An additional component of this work will be the development of new forms of ion permeation models. These models will be developed as quantitative descriptions of the ion permeation mechanism but, more importantly, will be used to design new experiments and test competing mechanisms. A Web site will be established in order to facilitate wide distribution of these models for teaching and scientific uses. The results from this work will aid the understanding of selectivity and permeation in ion channel proteins. Since many therapeutic drugs interact with the pore in these channels and with ions in the pore, understanding the mechanisms of permeation and block may lead to the development of better drug therapies. The modeling tools that will be developed and broadly disseminated will help educate students and other scientists about these fundamental properties of ion channel proteins doc7269 none Marie Petracek The ability to recognize and respond to extracellular cues is essential for all living organisms. In plants, one of the most important cues is light, which regulates growth and development through transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation of nuclear and chloroplast gene expression. One of the best examples of post-transcriptional regulation of a nuclear-encoded mRNA is that of the pea Fed-1 gene, which encodes the chloroplast ferredoxin protein. Fed-1 is regulated by light at the levels of mRNA stability and translation. A decrease in photosynthesis results in a rapid decrease in the cytoplasmic translation of Fed-1 mRNA followed by degradation of the Fed-1 mRNA. Importantly, the polyribosome association of a subset of other nuclear-encoded mRNAs also declines rapidly in the absence of photosynthesis, suggesting that photosynthetic regulation of cytoplasmic translation, and perhaps subsequent mRNA decay, is an important mechanism for light regulation of nuclear gene expression. Further analysis of the light-responsive properties of Fed-1 mRNA will yield important information on how the translational apparatus responds to changes in photosynthesis, on how specificity of these translational changes is conferred on a subset of mRNAs, and on how translation and mRNA degradation are coupled. For Fed-1, light-regulated mRNA stability and translation appear to be conferred by two separate elements. The first element, necessary for destabilization of the mRNA in the dark, is within a region of the Fed-1 5 UTR that contains a (CATT)4 repeat. The (CATT)4 repeat and the surrounding region will be mutated to delineate the mRNA instability element, to test if the function of the instability element is position dependent, and to determine if the element is sufficient to destabilize non-light-regulated mRNAs. To identify proteins involved in regulated Fed-1 mRNA degradation, the instability element will be used as a bait in a yeast 3-hybrid screen. The second element in Fed-1 mRNA, required for light-regulated translation, may be in the Fed-1 mRNA coding sequence. The translational control element will be further delimited by mutagenesis and, once characterized, the element will be added to non-light regulated mRNAs to determine the minimal sequence sufficient to repress translation in response to darkness. It is possible that the Fed-1 translational control element is an mRNA localization element rather than an element that directly controls translation. To determine if the translational control element is an mRNA localization sequence, Fed-1 mRNAs that are wild-type or mutant for translational regulation by light will be localized using a GFP system adapted to plants. These studies will extend our rudimentary knowledge of post-transcriptional gene regulation in plants and provide a foundation to uncover the mechanism of photosynthetic control of cytoplasmic translation in plants doc7270 none Donald P. Butler and Zeynep Celik-Butler Southern Methodist University Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER): $70,000 - 12 mos. Sensors on Flexible Substrates for Smart Skin This is a one-year Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER). This project concerns the development of suspended, micromachined sensors on flexible substrates. The project s results will form a basis for the production of other micromachined sensors such as pressure strain sensors, hair-like touch and flow sensors, and accelerometers on flexible substrates. Flexible substrates can serve as the basis of a sensitive skin for humans and robots where sensors are distributed over the skin to provide the sense of touch or monitor the physiology of the wearer. A major obstacle in the development of vanadium oxide bolometers or lead titanate and similar oxide pyroelectric detectors on flexible substrates is the incompatibility between the thermal budget required by the detector material and the low maximum temperature of the flexible substrate. This work will solve the incompatibility between the two thermal budgets by the use of the PI s patented microbolometer material: semiconducting Yttrium Barium Copper Oxide (YBaCuO). The deposition temperature for this infrared sensitive material does not exceed 150 C. High quality nanocrystalline, semiconducting YBaCuO films can be deposited using rf sputtering at ambient temperature. Since there is no requirement for crystallization, high-temperature annealing steps are not necessary. The funding for the project is provided by two NSF divisions, as follows: IIS CISE - $50,000 ECS ENG - $20,000 doc7271 none In order to understand a sentence or discourse, readers and listeners must use their implicit knowledge of the grammar of their language to put the meanings of its words together. A great deal has been learned about how this process takes place during reading, but less is known about the aspects of the process that are specific to listening. This research will explore how a listener uses the prosody of a sentence (informally speaking, its rhythmic and melodic structure) to determine its message. The specific goals of the research are to work toward identifying precisely what aspects of the prosody of a sentence affect a listener s comprehension and to examine the cognitive processes that enable a listener to use prosody. Broader goals include working toward the development of a theory of spoken language comprehension that specifies how prosodic descriptions are arrived at and how they interact with other sources of information about language; this could potentially enable technological improvements in communication, for instance in human-computer spoken interaction. The research will explore just which aspects of a sentence s prosody listeners use in identifying its structure and meaning. It will evaluate the thesis that a listener constructs a global prosodic representation of a sentence, rather than simply relying on local prosodic cues. This thesis makes it crucial to address the question of what in the global prosodic representation is actually effective in guiding sentence comprehension. Some of the experiments will examine how ambiguous phrases can be attached to different points in the phrases that precede them. For instance, in a sentence like Sammy learned that Bill telephoned after John visited, the adjunct phrase after John visited could modify either learn or telephone. Such a phrase should be more likely to attach high (early in the sentence), modifying the main clause verb learn, if it is preceded by an intonational boundary that is signaled by pitch movement and temporal changes. The experiments will investigate whether different types of intonational boundaries have different effects and evaluate the claim that only an informative boundary will affect interpretation. They will evaluate a definition of informative that claims a boundary is informative if it is phonologically larger than certain structurally-defined earlier boundaries. The experiments will provide several different tests, using several different grammatical constructions, of whether prosodic boundaries that are informative under this definition encourage high attachment of ambiguous phrases. Other experiments will address the hypothesis that listeners take unusual ( marked ) prosody to indicate an unusual interpretation of a sentence. This markedness strategy has been proposed a number of times, and several pieces of experimental evidence seem to be consistent with it. However, the markedness strategy may be only a crude approximation to reality. The experiments, which will study the interpretation of pronouns, reflexives, and quantified noun phrases, will attempt to determine whether the phenomena described by the markedness hypothesis actually reflect simpler, more general prosodic principles of focus and accent doc7272 none This laboratory has recently cloned and undertaken the first functional characterization of Arabidopsis thaliana cyclic nucleotide (cNMP) gated K-conducting ion channel ( AtCNGC2 ). Cyclic nucleotide gated (nonselective) cation channels (cngc s) (in animals) are ligand-gated, conduct K, Na, and Ca, and are regulated by cytosolic levels of Ca, calmodulin, and cyclic nucleotides. Cngc s typically function in signal transduction pathways, providing a mechanism by which external signal perception invokes signaling cascades that in turn alter cellular functions. The role that cAMP and cGMP play in specific signal transduction systems in animals is well known. However, their involvement in specific signal transduction systems in plants is not well understood. AtCNGC2 is apparently a member of a large gene family in plants: Database searches have identified 10 sequences in the A. thaliana genome which encode putative cngc s. The deduced amino acid sequences of these plant cngc s differ from the animal cngc sequences in regions that are critical for function. The electrophysiological properties of this plant class of ion channels have not been elucidated. AtCNGC2 and other plant cngc s will be expressed in heterologous systems amenable to patch voltage clamp analysis (Xenopus laevis oocytes, and or HEK293 cell cultures). Some of the AtCNGC2 homologs will be expressed in oocytes for functional characterization. The primary objective of this work will be an electrophysiological structure-function analysis of AtCNGC2 and homologs, focusing firstly on the selectivity filter of the pore and secondly on the cyclic nucleotide binding domains of these channels. These studies will include site-directed mutagenesis of AtCNGC2, followed by voltage clamp analysis of oocytes expressing the mutated channels. A detailed analysis will be undertaken of differences in ion selectivity profiles of these channels, and also differences in affinity for cAMP and cGMP. This research objective should allow for a comparison of how differences in the primary protein structure of members of this plant channel family correlate with differences in function and regulation. As other members of this large gene family are cloned, Northern analyses using coding sequences as a probe will be undertaken to monitor expression patterns of different members of this gene family in Arabidopsis. This research project will generate new information about one of the most intensively studied areas of ion channel characterization: The molecular basis of ion selectivity. A landmark study by others led to the first X-ray crystallographic analysis of a K-selective ion channel. This pioneering work confirmed that a triplet of amino acids ( GYG ) in the pore selectivity filter of K channels is absolutely required for channel conductance to favor K over Na. Modeling of the AtCNGC2 pore selectivity filter indicates that the amino acid triplet AND is associated with this unique channel s ability to conduct K and specifically select against Na, indicating that AtCNGC2 selects for K over Na conductance in a manner heretofore unknown in biology! This finding suggests that current understanding of the molecular basis for ion selectivity profiles of channels should be reappraised. The significance of this project is supported by the following: a) the primary sequence differences amongst this channel family in functional domains suggests different channel properties; b) the availability of a large family of cloned plant channels for study at the molecular level is unprecedented; c) the channel properties (e.g. K and Ca conductance, but not Na) may be a unique biological paradigm that may provide valuable insights into how protein architecture affects channel properties; and d) this family of proteins requires cAMP and cGMP for activation and these studies may provide insights into how cyclic nucleotides regulate ion channels in plant cells doc7273 none Most plant-associated bacteria can move, even though motility uses much energy and may elicit host defense responses. The ability to move is known to help bacteria pathogenic to animals, but the role of bacterial motility in plant pathogenesis is largely unexplored. Two well-characterized nonmotile mutants of the plant pathogen, Ralstonia solanacearum, caused significantly less disease on tomato in a realistic soil invasion virulence assay, showing that this trait does contribute to virulence. The goal of this project is to combine genetic, histopathological, and ecological approaches to comprehensively describe the role of motility in the life history of this plant-associated bacterium. The first objective is to determine how motility contributes to organismal fitness. The investigators will microscopically examine tomato roots infected with fluorescent motile or nonmotile bacteria to compare the behavior of these strains during the early stages of pathogenesis. These experiments will test the hypothesis that motility plays a key role early in host invasion and colonization. To test the hypothesis that motility late in disease development is actively disadvantageous, the investigators will measure the virulence of a regulatory mutant that is always motile. Because motility is likely to affect bacterial fitness outside the plant as well, they will compare soil survival of motile and nonmotile strains to test the hypothesis that motility increases saprophytic survival in soil and decaying plant material. The second objective is to separate the effects of bacterial movement from those of the flagella themselves, because flagella may mediate attachment to plant surfaces and recognition by the host. To determine if flagella attach bacteria to plant surfaces, investigators will compare attachment of non-flagellated and flagellated but paralyzed mutants to tomato roots. Analysis of plant biochemical responses and defense gene expression will reveal whether host plants recognize purified R. solanacearum flagella or their component flagellins. The third objective is to explore how R. solanacearum regulates its motility. This trait is likely controlled by a complex hierarchy involving an internally responsive flagellar regulon, known virulence factor regulators, and host plant signals. Investigators will use reporter gene fusions and regulatory mutants to define motility gene regulation in this species. Because R. solanacearum motility in culture does not reflect the behavior of the pathogen in its natural habitat, gene expression studies will be conducted in planta. Collectively, the experiments proposed here will yield an integrated understanding of how the ability to move helps, and possibly hinders, this bacterium throughout its complex life cycle doc7274 none Simcox The Drosophila EGF receptor (EGFR) is required for a number of developmental processes involving distinct cell responses. Receptor activity is governed by four agonists including Spitz and Vein. The ligands may be deployed for particular developmental events because they induce a certain strength or duration of signaling and hence elicit the desired cell response. Individual and comparative analysis of the ligands will be required to develop this idea. The focus of this proposal is analysis of the neuregulin-like ligand, Vein, and a comparison of Vein with the TGF-a-like ligand, Spitz. There are 3 specific aims: 1) Genetic and biochemical approaches will be used to identify factors that control the biological activity of Vein. 2) The transcriptional control of vein will be investigated by determining if the gene is a direct target of four signaling pathways with which it is known to interact. 3) Differences between Vein and Spitz will be analyzed by comparing the profiles of target-gene induction using DNA microarrays and testing the developmental consequence of substituting the spitz EGF motif for that of vein using homologous recombination. Together, the experiments address a fundamental issue in development concerning how different cell responses are elicited through a single signaling pathway. EGFR (ErbB) tyrosine kinases and their ligands are highly conserved and play important developmental roles in many organisms. Thus, the results found here will have implications beyond Drosophila doc7275 none Colgan It is now known that microbial species in culture poorly represent their natural diversity-which dwarfs conventions established for the visible world. This was revealed over the last decade using newer molecular tools to explore environmental diversity and has sparked an explosive growth in microbial ecology and technologies that may profit from the bounty of natural biochemical diversity. Several colloquia and meetings have helped formulate policy recommendations to enable sustained research programs in these areas. The primary objective of the proposed workshop is to provide a forum to address science opportunities and research challenges recently made evident. How will we take genome sequence information back to the environment? The environment is the context in which genomes evolved, function, and continue to evolve. It is the only context in which they can be fully understood. We suggest that we explicitly evaluate possible new roles of microbial systematics. What role will microbial systematics play in providing order to the immense amount of genomic information now being generated? How is genomic information packaged in the environment? What is the relationship between genome sequence and phenotype? What is comparative genomics telling us about the basic mechanisms of evolution and adaptive radiation? These questions must be addressed before we can move forward in this field doc7276 none Visual processing in the mammalian brain is not done simply with several parallel channels leading to higher areas. We now know that visual input pathways diverge into multiple processing streams, with feedback at all levels in each stream and crosstalk between streams. The visual cortex can be seen in this view at a dynamic system of interconnected areas interacting flexibly in different combinations at different stages of processing. This renewal project builds on technological advances and analytical tools for with high spatial, temporal and frequency resolution, developed from prior support. These comprehensive advances make it possible to monitor multi-area functional interdependency patterns that arise in the cortex, and to measure and analyze how one cortical area can affect others. The novel approach in the current project is to examine the mesoscopic scale of functional brain organization, offering a complementary level between the microscopic recording of single cell activity in a local area or layer, and the macroscopic derivation of images from whole brains using scanning technologies such as PET and fMRI. Results will have an impact by providing new insights into the dynamics of functional interdependency in the visual cortex, and going beyond visual neuroscience to make available digital signal processing tools potentially useful for a handling large-scale neural systems in a range of cognitive studies, and potentially leading to designing better complex artificial neural networks. This project also provides excellent cross-disciplinary training opportunities for students doc7277 none for Lay Audience -Routtenberg Perhaps the most unnerving experiences in our intellectual lives is the frustration of forgetting. It is the over-arching view of the proposed research that why we forget has to do with the faulty chemistry of the brain connections that form the memory network. Indeed we have recently discovered using a model system of brain memory that we can prevent memory storage and its retrieval. Then, by giving a drug that activates a signalling pathway that our laboratory described, we can reactivate the memory. Put another way, the key that turns on memory and its retrieval may be like that used in the car s ignition. What we have done is moved to the next stage and hot-wired memory processes, by-passing the initial switch. This pathway is thus critical to memory formation and retrieval. Our studies employ gene targeting methods in transgenic mice to modify the switches and signalling mechanisms (gene products or proteins, one and all) that regulate both the chemistry of the brain connections and as a consequence the memory storage process. We study the most widely used physiological model of memory, long-term potentiation, which monitors the events that occur at the synapse at the time when model memories are being stored. We complement the gene targeting with pharmacological tools that allow us to confirm with converging lines of evidence the identified sequence of events involved in the storage of information. Since gene manipulation is not feasible in humans, this complimentary approach provides the basis for drug discovery in the context of current molecular biological technologies and suggest novel strategies in the war against cognitive and memory disorders doc7278 none Cytokinesis ultimately ensures the proper partition of chromosomes and cytoplasm into two daughter cells. In animal cells, this is achieved by the formation of a cleavage furrow that bisects the mitotic (or meiotic) spindle between segregated chromosomes. Failure in, or improper positioning of the cleavage furrow may lead to cancer or birth defects. It is known that the mitotic apparatus defines the cell cleavage plane. However, it is not clear how the mitotic apparatus initiates the cleavage furrow due to our lack of in-depth understanding about the source and nature of the furrow signal. Each part of the mitotic apparatus; namely asters, central spindle (microtubule arrays and spindle midzone), and chromosomes, has been found capable of inducing a cleavage furrow in certain cell types. Yet it is uncertain which part is the essential source of the signal and whether all parts act in concert. The specific aims of this project are to: 1) determine which spindle constituent is the essential source of furrow signal by testing furrow induction with each single spindle constituent in the absence of all the others; 2) distinguish the role of spindle midzone (or telophase disc midbody) from microtubules by dissecting the central spindle into discrete parts (the telophase disc and the remaining microtubule arrays), and testing their independent role in furrow initiation. These experiments combine micromanipulation with digital-enhanced polarization microscopy and epifluorescence microscopy, in which mitotic spindles in living cells are mechanically dissected and rearranged as desired, which allows real-time observation of the resulting effect on furrow positioning in living cells. Incorporation of micromanipulation into epifluorescence microscopy permits direct microneedling of fluorescently-labeled microtubules and actin filaments while observing their dynamics with respect to contractile ring formation during furrow initiation. In addition, micromanipulated cells will be fixed at moments of interest and stained for confocal or EM microscopy to better determine the distribution of microtubules, actin filaments and other factors involved in cytokinesis. Through dissecting independent and or overlapping roles of the spindle constituents in furrow initiation under these stringent conditions, the currently most attractive models for cleavage furrow positioning will be scrutinized. These models include astral stimulation by signals from the asters acting on equatorial cortex, polar relaxation by signals from the asters acting on polar cortex, and equatorial stimulation by signals from the spindle midzone (telophase disc and or chromosomes) acting on the equatorial cortex. The project aims to provide new insights towards understanding of the impact of spindle microtubules, either from asters or the central spindle, chromosomes, and the telophase disc on the organization of actin filaments during furrow positioning doc7279 none Organelle identity and development rely on a complex set of intracellular protein trafficking systems that mediate the specific targeting of nuclear-encoded proteins to their proper subcellular compartment. Although protein targeting systems have been described for all organelles, the mechanisms of signal recognition and protein translocation at boundary membranes remain major topics of investigation in cell biology. The long-term goal of the research is to understand the mechanism of protein import into plant chloroplasts as a model for protein targeting and organelle biogenesis in eukaryotic cells. Chloroplasts are subdivided by three non-contiguous membrane systems into at least six suborganellar compartments that serve to segregate and organize a number of essential metabolic functions, most notably the reactions of photosynthesis, and aspects of fatty acid and amino acid metabolism. Although the chloroplast contains its own small genome, the vast majority of its protein components are encoded by nuclear genes and must be imported into the organelle after translation in the cytoplasm. As a consequence, protein import plays a central role in the differentiation and maintenance of chloroplasts during plant growth and development. The import of the majority of nuclear-encoded proteins is directed by an intrinsic, N-terminal transit sequence, and is mediated by the coordinate action of protein translocon complexes in the outer (Toc apparatus) and inner (Tic apparatus) envelope membranes of the chloroplast. This project focuses on the roles of the Tic machinery in preprotein translocation at the inner envelope membrane. The Tic apparatus performs three key functions. First, it physically associates with the Toc apparatus to facilitate the direct translocation of preproteins from the cytoplasm to the stroma. Second, it forms a selectively permeable protein-conducting channel across the inner membrane. Third, it coordinates the association of soluble stromal factors (e.g. molecular chaperones) with the translocon to facilitate the processing and folding of newly imported proteins. Three inner membrane proteins (Tic20, Tic22, and Tic110) have been identified which directly or indirectly associate with preproteins during import across the envelope. Tic22 is a peripheral membrane protein that is bound to the outer face of the inner membrane. Tic22 can be chemically cross-linked to preproteins as they emerge from the outer membrane translocon and thus might coordinate the association of the Toc and Tic machinery by guiding the preprotein to the Tic machinery. The availability of Arabidopsis mutants in which expression of Tic22 is disrupted permits direct testing of this hypothesis in vivo, with isolated chloroplasts and at the biochemical level. Similar approaches will determine whether Tic20, an integral inner membrane protein is a component of the protein conducting channel of the inner membrane. In addition, oligomeric complexes containing Tic20 from pea chloroplast envelope membranes will be purified and analyzed with the goal of identifying additional components of the Tic machinery. The third Tic component, Tic110, is an integral inner membrane protein with a large (~90 kDa) stromal domain. Potential roles of this protein in concentrating the ATP-dependent chaperone ClpC at import sites in the stroma and in stabilizing the insertion of preproteins across the inner membrane will be tested through in vitro binding studies of Tic110 to preproteins and ClpC. In addition, the preprotein and ClpC binding domains of Tic110 will be mapped using deletion analysis. As with the other proteins, the function of Tic110 will also be examined in vivo through characterization of plants in which its expression has been blocked. Overall, the synergistic use of biochemical and genetic approaches in this project should provide new insights into how cells assemble their organelles doc7280 none A common behavior among animals is aggression, which can occur during competition for food, mates, or other limited resources. As a consequence of winning or losing fights with other individuals in the same social group, subsequent behavioral patterns change, as winners can dominate losers. A biochemical compound, the amine serotonin, is known to be important in aggression, but other hormonal substances also have been implicated including peptides and steroids, which may interact with amines. The lobster is a social crustacean that shows complex stereotyped behavior, and offers the opportunity to examine the hormonal modulation of behavior at the level of single identifiable cells in the brain. Specific sets of cells containing amines have been mapped, and a group of neurons containing stress-related peptides has been identified that interact with the amine neuron sets. This project examines the cellular networks of the lobster neurons containing and responsive to serotonin and certain peptides and steroids. Electrophysiological recordings and morphological analyses will reveal how the systems are activated, and detail the synaptic interactions and circuitry involved. Results will be important for behavioral neuroscience as well as neuroendocrinology, in clarifying cellular mechanisms underlying the hormonal regulation of aggression, which is an important behavior in humans as well as animals. This project also will have an impact through its excellent integration of education and training with research, including worldwide collaborations and outreach to under-represented groups doc7281 none Many interesting questions in biology involve initial data preparation steps that can turn out to be very cumbersome and time-consuming. Specialized and general public molecular biology data repositories continue to grow in size and number. Many emerging research questions require access to multiple data sets for use in specific research situation, usually using only a subset of the data from each repository. Access and querying of these multiple sources presents a very real problem to researchers. A complicating factor is the erroneous nature of some annotation data associated with sequence. The creation of a BioExtract Server for consolidating and serving curated data extract from public databases will be developed initially for subsets of GenBank and ZmDB to be of use to maize and other plant researchers. The Server will provide automated curation and identification of misalignment in the sequence repository. Accessed over the web, users will be able to select a specific set of techniques, make flexible queries, specify resources to use and name and keep their selections for reuse. In addition to providing educational opportunities for both graduate and undergraduate students, there will also be summer internships available. Tutorial packages for various levels of expertise will be prepared for users to enhance the accessibility of the Server to as wide a range of users as possible doc7282 none Regulation of proteolytic processes is important in many kinds of physiological adaptations, in development, and in diverse pathological states, including wasting and atrophy in skeletal muscle, and hypertrophy or atrophy in cardiac muscle. Muscle proteolysis is well-known to be promoted by fasting or chronic starvation, by disuse or denervation, in sepsis and in cancer cachexia. Conversely, reduced proteolysis (in addition to increased synthesis) may contribute to cardiac hypertrophy. The mechanisms by which intracellular or extracellular signals are transduced to regulate proteolytic processes in muscle are poorly understood. This project aims to increase our understanding of these processes using the simplest genetically tractable model system available for studying innervated muscle, the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. The methodology uses transgenic animals in which the level of a 8-galactosidase fusion protein reports on proteolysis specifically in 95 body-wall muscle and 8 sex-muscle cells. The reporter protein is completely stable in fed animals, but is degraded under conditions of starvation, denervation, mutational activation of the homolog of the Ras proto-oncogene, or mutational hyperactivation of a fibroblast growth factor (FGF) receptor homolog. This research will determine whether control of muscle protein degradation by activated-Ras signals is mediated by the Raf MEK MAP kinase pathway, determine how it is affected by activity of the P13 kinase pathway, and determine if the relevant signals from activated FGF receptor are transmitted by way of the Ras Raf MEK MAPK pathway. The roles of intramuscular calcium and diacylglycerol and the possible roles of calcium-activated protein kinases will also be explored. These questions will be approached by epistasis analysis of mutant strains in which one or two signal-transduction proteins are inactivated or hyperactivated, combined with the use of selective inhibitors of individual steps in signal transduction. Analysis of these signaling mechanisms in this simple system will provide paradigms for investigating the signaling pathways that control muscle proteolysis in more complex organisms doc7283 none The major goal of this project is to develop a new base calling technique that will improve the efficiency of the DNA sequencing process. This will be achieved by increasing the average length of error-free sequencing and enhancing the base identification process at the beginning and end of sequences. This will increase sequencing throughput and reduce the cost of DNA sequencing. Previous work by the PI has demonstrated the ability to extend the error-free read by 30%. This was achieved through work on cross-talk filtering, baseline adjustment, base-spacing prediction and development of a fuzzy base-calling algorithm. Further adaptive capabilities as well as full development and implementation of the methodology is planned. The software will be tested on a large number of DNA sequences and remove specific hardware and operating system requirements, as well as be exploitable over the web. Accurate, inexpensive genomic DNA sequencing will be a cornerstone of 21st century biology doc7284 none This project investigates how social experiences involving aggressive interactions interact with stress to change how aggressively an individual responds in future social interactions. The project will first document how aggressive tendencies and stress responses change over repeated bouts of social aggression over several days. Changes in hormonal state during this period will also be documented. Experiments will then follow to test whether two hormones are important in regulating the changes in aggressive behavior that follow this experience. These hormones are the androgen sex steroid hormones (testosterone and dihydrotestosterone), and the stress steroid hormone corticosterone. The project will also use a neuroanatomical functional imaging technique, cytochrome oxidase histochemistry, to identify brain areas that change their metabolic, or functional, properties as a result of aggressive interactions and as a result of chronic changes in hormone levels. These neuroanatomical data will be correlated with the behavioral data to identify key brain changes that underlie the shift from less to more aggression and that differentiate dominant from subordinate status. The results from all parts of the project will ultimately be used to model the interrelationships of behavioral experience, hormone level, and brain metabolic profiles using a statistical technique called structural equation modeling in order to test hypotheses about causal interactions among all three classes of variables. The results of the project will provide new information about the factors leading to individual differences in aggression and other responses to social challenges doc7285 none Considerable evidence supports the hypothesis that the gene products and mechanisms that control flower development in different flowering plant species are largely conserved. Many plant developmental control proteins contain a conserved DNA binding domain called the MADS domain. The MADS family in Arabidopsis consists of more than 30 genes. MADS proteins are involved in diverse aspects of plant development including flowering time control, meristem specification, floral organ identity, and fruit development. Despite the importance of these MADS proteins in plant development, little is known about how these proteins function and interact. This proposal focuses on the floral organ identity MADS proteins APETALA3 (AP3) and PISTILLATA (PI) in Arabidopsis thaliana. AP3 and PI function to direct the development of petal and stamens in the Arabidopsis flower. All MADS proteins bind to DNA either as heterodimers or homodimers. Most MADS proteins in Arabidopsis are capable of forming both homodimers and heterodimers with a variety of partner proteins. AP3 and PI, by contrast, are unable to homodimerize and form an obligate heterodimer. The AP3 PI heterodimer is highly specific and is evolutionarily conserved as evidenced by a similar interaction between the AP3 and PI homologs in the distantly related plant species Antirrhinum majus. This project is focused on identifying the amino acids and subdomains in the AP3 and PI proteins that mediate the highly specific heterodimer interaction between AP3 and PI; this will be done both by site-specific mutagenesis and by utilizing reverse yeast two-hybrid approaches. Through this research, we hope to be able to define the rules for dimerization of this importance class of plant developmental regulators. A second focus of this research centers on an unusual allele of PI called pi-5. Unlike all other ap3 and pi mutants, pi-5- exhibits phenotypic defects only in a single whorl of the flower. The PI-5 protein exhibits defects in protein-protein interaction with a wild-type AP3 partner protein. Genetic experiments with pi-5 suggest that whorl-specific factors modulate the activity of PI-5. Using both genetic and molecular approaches, whorl-specific factors that affect floral organ identity will be isolated and characterized doc7286 none Object Perception and Representation by Echolocating Dolphins Principal Investigator: Louis M. Herman Ph.D. This research continues the investigation by this laboratory of the ability of the bottlenosed dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) to perceive the shape of objects through its echolocation sense. How does the dolphin represent objects it inspects through echolocation? Does it perceive only the raw echoes returning from ensonified objects or, like vision, does it directly perceive the shape of the object? The prior-published studies used a cross-modal matching-to-sample procedure to demonstrate that a dolphin could spontaneously recognize objects across the senses of echolocation and vision. The results suggested that object shape is directly perceived though the echolocation sense, and that the representations of objects obtained through echolocation are coordinated with or closely integrated with the representations obtained through vision. These conclusions strongly revise previous views of dolphin echolocation that postulated that discriminations among different objects were based on learning to associate the raw acoustic cues of returning echoes (e.g., amplitude, highlight structure, or spectral composition) with things seen or with reward received. The continuing investigations now ask how faithfully the dolphin s representations preserve the spatial structure of the object being ensonified, and what mechanisms can support the construction of a shape percept through echolocation. Other questions include whether the dolphin s perception of shape though echolocation is invariant with changes in the orientation of the object, with changes in material composition of the object, and with changes in object size. In each manipulation, object shape will remain constant, but the sound reflection properties of the object will vary. The cross-modal matching technique will continue to be used, as well as intra-modal techniques in which object recognition performance is examined within the senses of echolocation and vision rather than across the senses. The issues considered in these studies and the findings obtained establish links with issues and findings in object-based perception and in intersensory perception in infant and adult humans, and in nonhumans. The studies also make contact with general issues in memory and representation in human and nonhuman animals doc7287 none REDUCED COST BLOOD FACTOR PRODUCTION -MODEL MOLECULE, PROTEIN C Duane F. Bruley University of Maryland Baltimore County NSF Proposal Number This research is a joint effort between The American Red Cross(ARC) and the University of Maryland Baltimore County(UMBC) to study Immobilized Metal Affinity Chromatography(IMAC) as an alternative process to replace Immuno Affinity Chromatography for the separation of high-molecular-weight, homologous blood factors. The source material of interest is blood plasma Cohn Fraction 1V-1, which is a complex mixture of blood proteins including the Vitamin K Dependent Proteins (VKD) that are essential to insure blood hemostasis. Initial studies via an NSF-SGER grant verified that IMAC is a highly selective separation technology that might be able to achieve the desired separations on a preparative scale. The mechanism of IMAC includes the use of appropriate metal ion chelating agent combinations that have affinity for specific amino acids that occur in blood. Evidence shows that matching the IMAC substrate with the number and the placement of biomolecule histidine units can lead to efficient separations when the appropriate buffers are used. This research project includes investigations of the surface histidine concentration on some of the critical VKD blood proteins, the determination of equilibrium isotherms for Protein C on selected IMAC columns, and the use of experimental-design techniques to determine optimal chromatographic operating conditions that will allow the separation of milligram quantities of Protein C for post-award animal studies. There is an urgent need for the production of a variety of human blood factors in large quantities at low cost for therapeutic applications . The blood factors are linked together in a very complex way so that under normal conditions the blood will clot to stop bleeding. When an imbalance of coagulants and anti-coagulants occurs, two pathologic states can develop: (a) the patient is a hemophilic, or (b) the patient is a clotter. Our model blood factor is Protein C, which is the pivotal anti-coagulant in the human coagulation cascade. Protein C deficiency can result in deep vein thrombosis (DVT) with the possibility of pulmonary embolus ,which is a life-threatening complication for the patient. It should be noted that abnormal clotting disorders are the leading cause of death, over AIDS and cancer. Present treatments with Heparin or Coumadin are effective but with dangerous side effects possible. High-volume, low-cost Protein C products could provide inexpensive, safe treatment for patients with Protein C deficiency doc7288 none Research is proposed to investigate the extent and roles of polypeptide signaling in plants. Animals and yeast utilize polypeptide signals for regulating a host of physiological processes, including stress, reproduction, development and defense, and many others. Until , when this laboratory discovered the first polypeptide signal in plants, the accepted dogma was that plants did not utilize polypeptide signals, but used small chemical hormones such as auxin, cytokinins, gibberillins, ethylene and abscisic acid as regulators of physiological processes. Since the first isolation of a polypeptide signal in , four new polypeptide signals have been identified in other laboratories, and five more have been identified and purified in our laboratory. The signaling polypeptides in plants reported to date are involved in defense, development, and reproduction. Thus, we expect many more to be identified in the near future. We have developed a novel, rapid assay to identify polypeptide signals in plants using suspension-cultured cells, which respond to receptor-mediated polypeptide signals by causing the pH of the cell culture medium to increase. Using the assay to monitor the signaling polypeptides during purification, we have identified five receptor-mediated polypeptide signals from tobacco, tomato and alfalfa and are utilizing the assay to investigate the presence of polypeptides throughout the plant kingdom. We have extensively studied the first discovered polypeptide defense signal that is released upon herbivore and pathogen attacks. It is an 18 amino acid polypeptide isolated from tomato, that is derived from a 200 amino acid precursor. We have published extensively on its signaling pathway in plants and have identified and isolated its receptor on tomato cell membranes. We are currently isolating the receptor gene for studies of the structure and function of the receptor in tomato cells. We are also seeking the genes for the new polypeptides we have isolated to determine their precursors, the mode of release and action, and their localization in plants. We will continue to identify and isolate the receptors of these polypeptides and begin to learn the broad fundamental principles that underlie polypeptide signaling in plants. Our studies of signaling polypeptides and their receptors in plants will provide an entirely new understanding of plant signaling for defense and development, with important relevance to ecology and agriculture doc7289 none Striated muscle is a remarkable tissue. Within the cytoplasm of each muscle cell is a highly organized cytoskeletal lattice where actin and myosin are assembled in perfectly ordered, interdigitating arrays of thin and thick filaments. The architecture of the sarcomere is extraordinarily well designed to generate force for work and locomotion, as evidenced by its strong evolutionary conservation across animals of many phyla. The way in which myosin motors assemble into bipolar filaments of specific and uniform length, a requirement for proper muscle function, has long been a topic of great interest but few concrete answers have been found. An important goal of this research is to address this fundamental question in muscle biology through the investigation of the functional properties of Drosophila flightin. Previous work from this lab has shown that Drosophila indirect flight muscle (IFM) thick filaments assemble to abnormally long lengths in the absence of flightin. This project will combine in vivo and in vitro approaches to establish the mechanism by which flightin participates in thick filament length determination during IFM development. A central thesis of this work is that flightin is a myosin binding protein. The first aim will be to test the hypothesis that flightin binds to two sites in the myosin rod region. Recombinant fragments representing distinct parts of the myosin heavy chain protein will be tested for flightin binding using four different biochemical assays. The second aim will be to explore the role of flightin phosphorylation in thick filament assembly. Competing hypotheses, that phosphorylation is or is not required for proper assembly, will be tested using transgenic flies that express phosphorylation-site mutant flightin. Electron microscopy will be used to assess the effect of mutant flightin on sarcomere and thick filament length. These studies will be accompanied by experiments in vitro that will test the effect of flightin on myosin polymerization. The combination of classical and molecular genetics with biochemistry, cell structure and physiology biophysics will result in a coherent, integrated view of the functional roles of flightin and provide valuable insight into the mechanism of thick filament assembly and the mechanism of stretch activation doc7290 none Survival of the mammalian neonate is highly dependent on its ability to process sensory information and then adapt to changes by choosing an appropriate behavioral and physiological condition. Because the mother normally comprises the prime source of sensory input, she essentially determines the infant s psychobiological state. Previous work from this laboratory has shown that the loss of certain tactile cues from the mother initiates in the rat pup and human infant a shift from a growth strategy to one of energy conservation and growth suppression until contact with the mother is re-established. Overall the specific goals of this project are 1) to define the roles of CNS Bata-endorphin and bombesin in mediating how tactile stimulation by the dam regulates cell development in the pups and 2) to determine the molecular mechanisms by which maternal tactile deprivation (MTD) suppresses peripheral organ responsivity to the growth-promoting hormones GH and prolactin. Growth-related molecular parameters i.e. DNA synthesis and expression of the ornithine decarboxylase (ODC) gene in developing organs will be assessed and used as indices of the altered maturation resulting from MTD. The similarities between MTD syndrome in rat pups and human babies suggest a common etiology. Hence, identifying the underlying mechanisms by which maternal-infant interactions optimize growth potential in the neonate is essential in order to advance our understanding of the basic principles governing normal mammalian development. As ODC activity is obligatory for normal cell replication and differentiation, these mechanisms represent an important control point at which nurturing touch regulates neonatal development. Such a mechanism can explain the maladaptive consequences of disrupting mother-infant tactile interactions as occurs in isolated premature and in non-organic failure to thrive human infants doc7291 none Chemistry (12) This project promotes activities and ideas originating from efforts in the analytical sciences funded by the Division of Undergraduate Education. The report, Curricular Developments in the Analytical Sciences, issued in , recommends changes in the undergraduate analytical sciences curriculum, including moving to a strong emphasis on problem-based learning. Analytical science covers not only analytical chemistry but also its applications in many disciplines ranging from biotechnology to microelectronics. This project facilitates dissemination of the results of these new curricular efforts through symposia, short courses, and workshops at professional meetings such as the Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy, the Federation of Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy Societies, the Eastern Analytical Symposium, and national and regional meetings of the American Chemical Society doc7292 none The aim of the proposal is to identify candidate genes that control neuronal plasticity during postnatal critical periods in neocortex. The proposed studies will utilize the most understood model of neuronal plasticity, the postnatal critical period in visual cortex. To date, studies aimed at identifying molecular mechanisms of visual cortical plasticity have concentrated on the signaling pathways from the cell surface to the nucleus. Dr. Mower s studies will extend this analysis to the output of transcriptional processes in the nucleus, the changes in gene expression which produce the long term structural and functional changes that underlie neuronal plasticity. The strategy capitalizes on the well- established finding that rearing animals in total darkness slows the entire time course of the critical period and prolongs neuronal plasticity far beyond its normal age limits. Prior electrophysiological results in Dr. Mower s laboratory indicate that the effect of dark rearing is to slow the entire time course of the critical period, such that at young ages normal animals are more plastic than dark reared, while at later ages dark reared animals are more plastic. Thus, a stringent criterion is that genes that are important for plasticity in visual cortex will show differences in expression between normal and dark reared animals that are of opposite direction in young vs. older animals. In preliminary work, Dr. Mower s laboratory has completed a differential display PCR (ddPCR) screening of all of the expressed genes in the visual cortex of normal and dark reared animals to directly identify candidate plasticity genes (CPGs) which are differentially expressed according to the above criterion. A manageable number (20) of CPGs were identified. These CPGs will be confirmed by northern blots of visual and frontal cortex from normal and dark reared animals, cloned and sequenced to determine homology to known genes, and analyzed at a cellular level by in-situ hybridization studies. Future uses of the candidate plasticity genes will include experiments to block their expression and determine effects on cortical plasticity in-vivo and in-vitro. The application of differential screening techniques is a novel experimental approach to analyzing critical period plasticity. The identification of effector genes that control development and plasticity would be a major leap in the state of knowledge regarding molecular mechanisms of the visual cortical critical period and neuronal plasticity. Such information is essential to our understanding of processes such as brain development, learning, and memory doc7293 none Claudy A workshop will be convened for geoscience educators and employers to determine guidelines for the design, content, and implementation of geoscience human-resources surveys. The workshop will focus specifically on what human-resources data are needed and by whom, the best methods to obtain the data, and how to disseminate the data most effectively. Workshop participants will b selected from the following groups: college and university geoscience faculty (representing institutions that are public and private, large and small, undergraduate and comprehensive, and regionally diverse), college and university deans and university career counselors, traditional employers of geoscientists (petroleum industry, mining and minerals industry, federal and state governments, environmental consulting firms, and academia), non-traditional employers of geoscientists (law, journalism, finance, computer Information Technology), representatives fro, other science societies with ongoing survey programs, representatives from professional geoscience societies, and students doc7294 none Molecular biology and genomic sciences are dependent on bioinformatics for access to data, analyses and knowledge bases. IUBio Archive is an internet information resource for biology data and software. It will be expanded and enhanced to include open-source sequence analysis tools, phylogenetic tools, a framework for analysis tools on a web server and continued archiving of Bionet news. Until now, this has been an entirely volunteer effort. BIO-Mirror is an international collaboration for high-speed world-wide mirroring of public bioinformatics data set using Internet2 infrastructure. In addition to the 30 Gigabytes of DNA and protein sequence and structure data, new additions will include metabolic pathways and structures. The server tool extension will be modular and portable, so that other bioinformatics centers may use them doc7295 none A tandem repeat is an occurrence of two or more adjacent, often approximate copies of a sequence of nucleotides. Tandem repeats have known functional roles, including coding with loss of function, switching, and acting as modifiers of gene expression. Tandem repeats are primary components of chromosomal structures. They are useful for genetic linkage analysis, bacterial strain typing, DNA fingerprinting and studies of changes in DNA over short time scales. Identification of tandem repeats has been made easier by new software that processes the entire genome. The rapid analysis permits identification and annotation of repeats, clustering into families for further study. A multi-genome Tandem Repeats Database will bring together information about repeats as well as serving as the platform for development of new tools. These include algorithms to compare and cluster repeats, as well as for identifying predictive criteria for copy number polymorphisms. This will further enable annotation of repeats and of repeat families, including genomic environment, copy number polymorphisms, whole genome properties and family properties. All of this will be available through a web site with integrated data visualization and data model specification for transfer to other formats doc7296 none LTREB: Ecology and evolution of cooperative breeding PI: Walter D. Koenig The acorn woodpecker (Melanerpes formicivorus) is a common bird in California that exhibits some of the most complex social behavior of any vertebrate. Group composition consists of anything from a simple breeding pair to groups containing up to 7 males sharing breeding status (cobreeders), 3 females laying eggs in the same nest cavity (joint-nesters), and a variable number of nonbreeding helpers that are offspring of the breeders from prior years. Prior work has revealed that up to 3 males and 3 females may contribute genetically to a single nest. The degree to which one of these individuals monopolizes parentage within a group, known as reproductive skew , is low among joint-nesting females but high among cobreeder males. That is, within a nest, one male usually sires all or nearly all the young. This high degree of reproductive skew among cobreeder males is predicted by current theory given the apparent advantages to living in groups and the difficulty of leaving a group and going off on one s own. By comparing paternity in first and second nests of groups with 2 cobreeder males, the proposal will test the alternative hypothesis that cobreeder males have equal chance of siring young, but that paternity of individual young within a brood is an all or none phenomenon rather than independently determined for each nestling. If so, this would imply that females, rather than one of the cobreeder males, are in control of paternity, counter to a major assumption of reproductive skew theory. The proposal will also extend prior results by examining behavior and paternity in groups containing 3 or more cobreeder males and in groups with both cobreeder males and joint-nesting females doc7297 none The plant mitochondrion represents a wonderfully multifarious and dynamic cellular compartment that directs processes associated with energy metabolism, cell stress responses, several biosynthetic functions, and ultimately programmed cell death. In higher plants, the genetic information contained within the mitochondrial compartment is organized in a multipartite, highly redundant configuration such that relative copy number of various DNA molecules can vary dramatically. The process of copy number shifting within the plant mitochondrial genome is the subject of this project. Experimental approaches are directed at determining the differences in the organization of mitochondrial genetic information that is inherited and mitochondrial genetic information that is contained in the vegetative tissues of the developing plant. Likewise, investigations are focused on the nature of the genome structure that allows dramatic copy number changes to occur. Because this laboratory has already cloned a nuclear gene that directs the copy number shifting phenomena in plant mitochondria, CHM, it should be possible to deduce the role of this gene by characterizing mitochondrial genome shifting processes. This research is likely to have implications not only for the manipulation of the mitochondrial genome in crop improvement and hybrid seed production, but also in deducing processes involved in mitochondrial inheritance, an area of great interest in human genetics as well doc7298 none The goals of this research are to assess the effectiveness of an activated anti-herbivore chemical defense system in algae, and to identify geographic trends in these defenses. In this defense system, dimethylsulfonioproprionate (DMSP) produced by the algae is converted with the enzyme DMSP lyase, to dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and acrylic acid when the plant is damaged by herbivores. Both DMS and acrylic acid can be potent feeding deterrents. Because grazing pressures are generally thought to be higher at lower latitudes than at higher latitudes, the PI will measure the production of DMSP and DMSP lyase from algae in four regions: the temperate northeastern Pacific region, the temperate Southern Pacific region, the tropical Pacific region, and the tropical Atlantic region. In each region, the investigators will assess the effectiveness of the DMSP activated defense system on local herbivores and the effects of changes in environmental factors such as temperature, nutrients, and ultraviolet light, on the production of DMSP and DMSP lyase. The results of this study will provide information on how chemical defenses and plant-herbivore interactions have evolved in different parts of the world, how they vary over space and time, and how they are affected by changes in the environment. This research will provide training opportunities for several undergraduate and master s level students during each year of the project. Over a dozen students will be involved in all aspects of the work and will receive valuable training in state-of-the-art analytical methods, experimental design concepts, statistical analyses, and the use of computer programs for analyzing data and presenting the results of their work to other scientists doc7299 none The cell was discovered in the C17th by the Dutch scientist van Leeuwenhoek when he invented the microscope. The use of lenses and microscopes to make scientific observations has had a profound effect on man s history and his understanding. The discoveries of Galileo, Newton and Einstein are the best examples of this. The s were declared the decade of the brain and by coincidence, in a new microscope was invented which allowed scientists to see far deeper and more clearly into (brain) tissue than ever before. This grant is concerned with the development of new chemical compounds that will exploit the unique advantages of this microscope for the very first time. Specifically, we will use organic chemistry to make the neurotransmitters that are biologically inert until they are activated by light. These molecules can be used to release the neurotransmitter deep inside cells and so stimulate a single synapse in the brain in a reproducible and precisely controlled way. The synapse is the basic unit of all the electrical circuits in the brain. The ability to use these chemicals to stimulate single synapses in living brains (from mammals such as rats or mice) will allow us to start to develop realistic theories of the basic molecular and cellular mechanisms which underlie neuronal network formation, learning and memory doc7300 none Alan Borning University of Washington TITLE: Software Architectures for Microsimulation of Urban Development, Transportation and Environmental Impact Patterns of land use and available transportation systems play critical role in determining the economic vitality, livability, and sustainability of urban areas. Transportation interacts strongly with land use; different kinds of transportation systems induce different patterns of land use, while at the same time, different kinds of land use induce demands for different kinds of transportation systems. Both land use and transportation have substantial environmental effects, in particular on emissions, resource consumption and open space. Government policies and investments affect patterns of land use and transportation in many complex and sometimes unintended ways. This proposal will develop a fully disaggregated Microsimulation system for modeling urban development and government investments and policies related to transportation, land use and environment. Technical support can play a critical role in fostering informed civic deliberation and debate on these issues by allowing urban planners and stakeholders to be able to consider different scenarios-packages of possible policies and investments-and then, based on these alternatives, model the effects of these scenarios on patterns of urban growth and redevelopment, of transportation usage, and resource consumption, over periods of twenty or more years. This proposal will concentrate on two related computer science areas; the software engineering issues that arise in the design and construction of such a large, complex model, and the human computer interaction issues that arise in using it. A set of government partnerships is an integral part of this research. At the federal level, there are commitments from the Federal Highway Administration and the Federal Transit Administration (both units in the Department of Transportation), and at the local level, from the Puget Sound Regional Council, the governmental organization charged with land use and transportation planning doc7301 none This project will investigate the role of parts in the visual perception of objects. Roughly half of the cortex of the human brain is engaged in visual perception, and much of this cortex is devoted to constructing objects and their properties. The importance of objects extends beyond visual perception, because objects are central in human thought and language. Substantial evidence suggests that human vision represents many objects in terms of parts and structural descriptions. These parts are computed early in the stream of visual processing, and they dictate or influence the perception of figure and ground, the appearance of transparency, the judgment of shape similarity, the perception of symmetry and repetition, the classification and recognition of objects, and the learning of names for objects and their parts. This project will build on prior work to study several questions: How exactly does human vision divide objects into parts? How does it represent the qualitative and metrical structure of each part? How does it use parts to determine transparency, shape similarity, and object identity? Are different parts and part representations used for 2D silhouettes than for 3D objects? Are parts used for recognizing faces? How do parts influence language learning? Does object recognition employ viewpoint-dependent or viewpoint-invariant representations? The approach taken will be broad-based and multidisciplinary. Precise differential-geometric definitions of parts will be tested in psychophysical experiments with human observers. The psychophysical experiments will use both objective and subjective methods to assess the human perception of objects and parts. The resulting data will be used to create mathematical and information-processing models and to inform neural-network models. The information-processing models will be implemented in computer programs whose performance can then be compared against that of human observers, allowing further empirical testing of the models and refinement of the theories. This research will enhance understanding of a central aspect of human visual cognition. It will contribute valuable models and algorithms toward the construction of automated robotic vision systems that can see and recognize objects. It will constrain neural models and inform physiological experiments which explore the neural basis of biological vision doc7302 none This project continues development of computer methods for translating experimentally charted maps of genetic interactions into realistic, detailed, formal mathematical models that allow biologists to explore whether and how genes, interacting in regulatory networks, lay down striped spatial patterns of proteins which prefigure the segmented body plan that later develops. Approximately person-years of experimental research, in many labs worldwide, have culminated in a detailed understanding of how the so-called segment polarity genes cross regulate each other in early fruit fly embryos. This project synthesizes those data into a systems-level model that quantifies how the interactions between these genes, characterized principally in fruit flies, but thought to be shared by all higher animals, act synergistically to endow this network with astonishing robustness. That is, the systems level model predicts that the network can continue to perform its task correctly even when the strengths of all the interactions between its genes change greatly. The project entails refinement of that case study, and creation of a new model of another gene network (the neurogenic network). The project will ascertain whether this robustness, found in the first network so modeled occurs also in other experimentally well studied networks. It will use computer modeling to ascertain how such robustness could have evolved. The research will include experiments on real fruit fly embryos to find out whether the robustness, which the computer model predicts the gene network could have, actually exists in real embryos. Do, and how do, gene networks in living embryos contend with genetic and environmental variation? Do embryos actually experience significant amounts of developmental noise , and if so, how do developmental mechanisms either exploit or insulate themselves from such variation? This cross-disciplinary project will try to answer such questions using a blend of experimental developmental biology, computer-implemented 3-D analysis of laser scanning confocal micrographic data, implementation of detailed realistic mathematical models, computer algorithms for solving differential equation systems and searching visualizing their associated high-dimensional parameter spaces doc7303 none Bogomolni Plant photoreceptors mediate a broad spectrum of responses to light, ranging from the physiological through to the biochemical and molecular levels, and are present throughout plant development from seed germination through virtually all phases of vegetative growth to flowering and senescence. Currently well-known photoreceptors are phytochromes, cryptochromes, and phototropins. Phototropins represent a new and previously uncharacterized class of photoreceptors. These dual chromophoric photoreceptors, binding two molecules of FMN, are unlike any of the known classes of photoreceptors , and operate through an initial photochemistry that is unique and leads to autophosphorylation. The present project is focused on the chromoprotein phototropin (nph1) and the various nph1-like proteins described to date. These proteins are expressed in heterologous systems as the chromophore-binding domains and as the full length proteins. The expressed proteins both the native constructs and those with site-specific mutations are in the photoactive form. We plan to undertake a limited biochemical and detailed biophysical characterization of the various isolated chromophore-binding domains and of the full-length protein. The biochemical studies will emphasize the use of mutant constructs to probe the initial photochemistry. The latter will focus on studies probing the molecular mechanism by which light activates the photochemistry and its consequences at the protein level. These studies will involve time-resolved optical and vibrational spectroscopy. The chromophore-binding domains are closely related to domains (so-called PAS domains) in a diverse range of proteins from archaea through mammals, and should provide a new dimension to our understanding of the functions of these domains doc7304 none Regulation of reproduction is controlled by hormones, and an important one for all vertebrates is gonadotropin-releasing hormone, GnRH. Studies in recent years on the jawless vertebrate called the lamprey, representing the most primitive lineage of vertebrates, show that its GnRH has more than one molecular form. This project utilizes molecular techniques and immunocytochemical staining to isolate and characterize the genomic sequences that encode two of these forms, and the molecular receptor molecules on cells in the brain that respond to GnRH. Results will tell whether lamprey GnRHs share common functional and developmental features with the GnRH found in other vertebrates, and how these multiple forms of GnRH are used by lampreys to regulate reproduction. The comparative approach allows inferences about how the control of reproduction arose in the evolution of vertebrates. This project will increase our understanding of reproductive control and how it evolved, and so will have an impact beyond neuroscience on endocrinology and vertebrate biology in general. This project also has potential for developing controls for a predatory animal that affects commercial fisheries, has strongly integrated educational and training opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students, and has a strong component of international collaboration doc7305 none This project provides 20 scholarships the first year and 40 scholarships the second year for students majoring in computing engineering. Thus the first cohort of scholars receive continued support if they maintain their eligibility in the program. During the third year, scholars can participate in industrial internships or on-campus research projects. Recruitment into the program focuses on graduates of community technical colleges, undecided engineering students, and those interested in transferring from other disciplines into computer engineering. Computer engineering faculty serve as advisors for the scholars, while academic support services such as peer mentoring and tutoring are available through the Institute of Teaching and Learning at the University of Connecticut doc7306 none SUMMARY: Both the tumor suppressor p53 and ceramide have been implicated in the cellular response to stress, and specifically, the regulation of apoptosis. Whereas, the ceramide pathway has been shown to be conserved in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, neither p53 nor any genetic homologs are. This implies that the ceramide stress response evolved at an earlier stage compared to p53. The stress response pathways regulated by these two molecules have common features. These include the ability of both pathways to induce cell cycle arrest, senescence, and apoptosis in response to adverse stimuli. Additionally, these two pathways share some downstream targets that are key regulators of the cell cycle and apoptosis (e.g. the retinoblastoma protein and caspase-3). It was recently demonstrated that p53 functions upstream of ceran-tide in the genotoxic stress response leading to apoptosis. It was found that p53 up-regulation in response to y-irradiation led to the gradual accumulation of cellular ceramide occurring over several hours. It was also shown that ceramide can function in a p53-independent manner where it can induce apoptosis even in the absence of p53. Importantly, we recently found that the majority of the accumulated ceramide following p53 up-regulation occurs in a caspase-dependent manner. The work in this proposal aims at investigating the signaling pathways and the molecular events by which p53 up-regulation results in ceramide accumulation. First, p53-activated apoptotic pathways will be investigated in two cell models of p53- dependent function. Based on the preliminary data, the focus will be on those pathways that either directly or indirectly involve caspase activation. p53 functions as a transcription factor in the induction or repression of a large number of genes. Thus, the expression and activity of a number of key modulators of apoptosis in response to p53 up-regulation will be examined. These will include caspases, death receptors (which couple to caspases via adapter proteins), and several p53-induced genes that were recently shown to induce apoptosis when overexpressed (Bax, Noxa, PERP, and PIG3). Second, the order by which the different genes become expressed, or their proteins activated, in response to p53 and in relation to ceramide accumulation will be studied. Candidate regulators of downstream ceramide accumulation will be identified by virtue of their modulated expression or function prior to ceramide accumulation. The functional relationship between p53-activation of specific pathways and ceramide accumulation will be explored. Specific apoptotic modulators that are candidate regulators of ceramide will be individually examined with regard to their ability to induce ceramide accumulation. The essentiality of these candidates with respect to ceramide accumulation and apoptosis will be explored by using various approaches to inhibit their function and examining the effects on ceramide accumulation. Third, the biochemical pathways that are activated to generate ceramide in response to p53 up-regulation will be investigated. Specifically, the contribution of sphingomyelinase activation, which generates ceramide from hydrolysis of membrane sphingomyelin, and de novo synthesis of ceramide by activation of ceramide synthase will be studied. The specific metabolic pathways leading to ceramide accumulation will then be linked to specific apoptotic modulators that are activated by p53. These studies will help us understand the molecular network by which p53 exerts it pro-apoptotic function and may shed some light on how these two major stress response pathways (p53 up-regulation and ceramide accumulation) became linked during evolution doc7307 none The objective of this research project, carried out by Professor Gary Blanchard and his coworkers at Michigan State University, is to develop ways to control the density and distribution of reactive functional groups at interfaces. A synthetic approach using polymeric molecular layers is used to control the density and distribution of interface functionalities. Optical probes, including picosecond lifetime measurements, molecular reorientation and isomerization measurements, and surface second harmonic generation intensity and imaging measurements are used to characterize the synthesized interfaces. With the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, the results of this research provide an enabling foundation for future understanding of the chemistry of structurally complex surfaces. Synthesis and characterization of complex interfaces is the focus of this research project carried out with Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program support. Polymeric synthetic approaches coupled with state of the art optical characterization provides detailed fundamental information about the distribution, type, and density of chemical functionalities at these complex interfaces doc7308 none Edwin S. Gould of Kent State University is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program in an ongoing program of research dealing with oxidation-reduction reactions involving main-group centers. One part of this proposal deals with oxidations of strongly reducing main-group species, including In(I), Ga(II), and Ge(I). The study aims to elucidate factors that favor one-electron or two electron processes, and to clarify in what way and for what reasons reactions of these reductants differ from reactions of more usual inorganic reductants. A second part of the proposal concerns the effect of metal ions on reactions of the peroxynitrite ion. The goal of this section is to understand how and why metal ions change the rates and selectivities of peroxynitrite reactions. Reactivity patterns of the elements on the right side of the periodic table (the so-called main group elements) are of central importance the functioning of biological systems and in the fabrication of solid state electronic devices, as well as in many other socially significant scientific and technological areas. Nevertheless, some aspects of the chemistry of these elements have received much less attentions from inorganic chemists than corresponding reactions of other elements. In particular, the peculiar reactivity patterns of lower oxidations states of the semi-metals indium, germanium and gallium have only recently been started to be explored. This research aims at gaining understanding of the factors that account for the unusual chemical features of these low-valent species. This will be important in future applications of these elements, and also help to sort out aspects of other complicated oxidation-reduction processes. The oxidation-reduction chemistry of compounds of nitrogen and oxygen is also being studied in this program. These reactions have been recently identified as having great biological and medical importance doc7309 none The proposed research will seek to develop new bond-forming methodology by investigating the reactivity and selectivity of nucleophilic carbenes. The synthetic applications of this novel methodology will be illustrated by synthesis of several polycyclic compounds. Efforts to develop solid support-based synthesis using nucleophilic carbenes as key elements are also planned. With this award, the Organic Synthesis Program is supporting the research of Professor James H. Rigby of the Department of Chemistry at Wayne State University. Professor Rigby s studies are directed towards the development of new bond-forming reactions with precise control over the detailed three-dimensional structure (stereochemistry). This new synthetic methodology will add to the roster of bond-forming reactions available to the synthetic organic chemist and is most likely to be useful in the preparation of pharmaceutical and or agricultural agents. Students trained in this area will learn skills to solve problems pertaining to synthetic organic chemistry in the specialty chemical or pharmaceutical industries doc7310 none Juvenile hormone esterase (JHE) helps to regulate the titer of juvenile hormone and, hence, larval development in insects. JHE is actively removed from hemolymph by athrocytes that maintain appropriate hemolymph composition, and is degraded in lysosomes. A binding protein, P29, binds JHE in athrocytes and appears to be important for appropriate processing of JHE in these cells. Dr. Bonning aims to identify the mechanism(s) by which P29 affects the trafficking and degradation of JHE. To do this she will use both the tobacco hornworm Manduca sexta and the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster in experiments designed to determine the intracellular location of P29, and the location of interaction of P29 with JHE. The specific functions of P29 with respect to JHE will then be elucidated by using mutant lines of D. melanogaster and RNA interference to prevent the interaction of the two proteins. The effects of disruption of P29 binding to JHE on the clearance and turnover of JHE will be observed. New knowledge about the nature and function of P29 will enhance our knowledge of protein trafficking and could facilitate development of novel approaches to insect pest control doc7311 none The long term objective of this study is to determine how nuclear morphology is regulated during the cell cycle and what role nuclear components may play in establishment of the mitotic spindle. Towards this end, the investigators have identified a novel nuclear protein in Drosophila, Skeletor, which reorganizes from chromosomally associated structure at interphase to a spindle-like structure at metaphase. Double and triple labelings of Skeletor, tubulin, and DNA indicate that the Skeletor spindle may precede the establishment of the microtubule spindle. When this structure is perturbed by anti-Skeletor antibody injection, the investigators observe deterioration of nuclear morphology and a significant decrease in nuclear division. Thus, the investigators hypothesize that there exists a nuclear structure that reorganizes during the cell cycle which plays an essential role in mitotic spindle assembly and or function yet is distinct from the microtubule spindle. This hypothesis is strengthened by the observation that embryonic preparations treated briefly with nocodazole and which are void of microtubules still show an intact albeit somewhat deformed Skeletor spindle. The investigators plan to test this hypothesis by performing a number of experiments designed to answer the following key questions: 1) Do anti-Skeletor antibodies identify a previously undescribed nuclear structure? 2) How does this structure reorganize during the cell cycle and does it provide a guide for establishment of the mitotic spindle? 3) Is Skeletor an integral or associated component of this nuclear structure? 4) Does Skeletor function in signaling or effecting the nuclear reorganization events during the cell cycle? 5) What is the effect of perturbing this structure genetically or by other means? 6) What other components interact with or regulate this structure? The information obtained from these experiments will provide major new insights into nuclear architectural remodeling during the cell cycle and microtubule spindle assembly and function during mitosis doc7312 none Zechiedrich Topoisomerases are ubiquitous, essential enzymes that pass DNA strands through each other to affect nearly every aspect of nucleic acid metabolism. Topoisomerase IV has been shown by the P.I. and others to be required for segregation of daughter chromosomes and modulation of DNA supercoiling in E. coli. The objectives of this project are to continue determining, using assays developed by the P.I., the roles and molecular mechanisms of DNA topoisomerases and to assess the consequences of unresolved topological structures in E. coli. Biochemical and genetic approaches with unknotting assays using site-specific recombination and topoisomerase inhibition allow us to test the hypotheses that topoisomerase IV unknots DNA and that persistent knots in the cell are lethal. Specifically, the objectives of this project are: (1) To ascertain which topoisomerase unknots DNA in vivo; (2) To determine how topoisomerase IV distinguishes different topological forms; and (3) To assess the consequences of unresolved DNA knots. E. coli is studied because it is well characterized with regard to topoisomerases, and biochemical and genetic analyses are straightforward with the genome sequence known. Results from the research will reveal how topoisomerases untangle rather than tangle DNA and how they distinguish problematic DNA knots or catenanes from beneficial DNA supercoils doc7313 none With this renewal award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the work of Dr. Ronald Breslow in the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University in New York City. The work proposed includes both the extension of previous work and exploration of new areas, including: 1) extending regioselective steroid hydroxylation to include terpenes such as beta-carotene, 2) exploring bis-cyclodextrin metal catalysts for ester hydrolysis, 3) preparing catalysts which can bind to substrates both at the metal and at attached cyclodextrin rings, and 4) using computer calculations to investigate transition state geometries and their dependence on hydrophobic effects. The aim of the work to be carried out by Dr. Breslow is to understand and develop organic reactions in water solution, for example the selective hydroxylation of steroids using synthetic mimics of cytochrome P-450 enzymes. The molecular recognition which is required for regiospecificity and stereospecificity is based on hydrophobic (water avoiding) interactions of the substrate with the catalyst in the aqueous environment. The work could lead to useful pharmaceutical applications, and is expected to provide excellent training for those working under Dr. Breslow s direction doc7314 none Rp1 is a complex disease resistance locus of maize that has been extensively characterized genetically. The Rp1 haplotypes in different maize lines are composed of variable numbers of members of an NBS-LRR gene family. This class of gene is thought to function by recognizing ligands from pathogens and then activating defense responses. Recent genetic studies have indicated the different rp1 family members mispair and recombine frequently in meiosis, and the crossover events are typically intragenic and occur throughout the genes. A large collection of novel rp1 haplotypes has now been generated which confer a variety of novel phenotypes. These phenotypes include new race specificities, presumably by the ability to recognize novel pathogen ligands. They also include nonspecific resistance to multiple rust species, lesion mimic and necrotic phenotypes. Progress has been made in characterizing these variant haplotypes and recombinant genes have been isolated from haplotypes conferring lesion mimic phenotypes or modified resistance. Recombinant genes will now be expressed in transgenic plants to verify they confer the novel phenotypes. Recombinant genes from haplotypes with novel race specificities and necrotic phenotypes will be isolated and compared to their parental genes to examine the mechanism by which they arose. These experiments will elucidate the mechanisms in which complex resistance loci like rp1 evolve and provide a framework for how these genes might be manipulated to engineer effective and durable disease resistance doc7315 none Edward Schmidt The TATA-binding protein, TBP, is a component of the basal transcription machinery. Comparison of tbp gene sequences from diverse species reveals a C-terminal core that is highly conserved in all phyla. In addition, all tetrapod vertebrate animals share a nearly identical N-terminal domain that is either absent from or unrelated to sequences in other eukaryotes including pre-vertebrate deuterostomes (e.g. echinoderms). The hypothesis of this project is that the TBP N-terminus co-evolved with a novel set of structural genes and their transcriptional regulators to allow acquisition of some vertebrate-specific function. Using targeted mutagenesis, a line of mice lacking most of the TBP N-terminus has been generated. This region of the protein is dispensable for cell survival, proliferation, differentiation, and the assembly of most tissues and organs; however, development of mutant embryos arrests in mid-gestation. In this project, the genetic pathways acting through the TBP N-terminus will be characterized. The PI s laboratory is in a unique situation to address these questions because, when candidate members of the pathway are identified, the mutant mice provide the ideal system within which to verify expression and activity. Perhaps the three most important advances that occurred between early chordates and tetrapod vertebrates are: 1) evolution of the vertebrate body plan; 2) evolution of the adaptive immune system; and 3) specializations for terrestrial life. The spontaneous abortions in the mutant mice are consistent with defects in any of these three processes. Global analysis of differential gene expression between mutant and wild type embryonic fibroblasts, embryos, and placentas is being performed on samples harvested at a stage immediately preceding manifestation of the pathological phenotype. The expression of candidate target genes is being verified by direct analysis in mutant and wild type embryos. As a result of these analyses, this project will first, further resolve the evolutionary timing of acquisition of the TBP N-terminus, and then determine what genes are mis-regulated in mice lacking this region. This study is expected to provide important advances toward an understanding of vertebrate evolution, gene regulation, and the mechanisms of transcription doc7316 none The long-term goal of this research is to use Arabidopsis thaliana as a model system to determine the signaling events leading to systemic acquired resistance (SAR). SAR is a secondary pathogen resistance which can be induced after a local infection. SAR is broad-spectrum and long-lasting. Through genetic screens, NPR1 has been identified as a key positive regulator of SAR; mutants of the NPR1 gene are nonresponsive to SAR induction. NPR1 encodes a novel protein with functionally important protein-protein interacting domains, the BTB domain and the ankyrin-repeat domain. Recent data show that nuclear localization of NPR1 is essential for its function. In the nucleus, NPR1 may affect the activities of the TGA subclass of bZIP transcription factors as well as the WRKY transcription factors, which have been implicated as transcriptional activators and repressors of pathogenesis-related (PR) genes, respectively. A genetic screen for suppressors of npr1 has led to identification of sni1, a mutation that restores systemic induction of PR genes in npr1. The wild-type SNI1 is believed to be a negative regulator of SAR whose inactivation requires the function of NPR1. It is hypothesized that NPR1 induces SAR by activating the TGA transcription activators and inactivating WRKY transcription repressors, and relieving the negative control of SNI1. In this project, molecular genetic and biochemical experiments are designed to (1) determine the functional significance of the interaction between NPR1 and WRKY transcription factors in SAR; (2) determine the mechanism by which SNI1 functions as a negative regulator of SAR; and (3) identify components in the NPR1-complex. Because NPR1, SNI1, and WRKY transcription factors are either novel or plant-specific proteins, characterization of these components may unveil new mechanisms of signal transduction. Understanding molecular mechanisms of disease resistance in plants will lead to the development of technology in enhancing plants innate defense to control infection. Such technology has the potential to reduce the use of hazardous pesticides without using non-plant genes. Therefore, the study of plant-microbe interactions is of interest to advancement of basic science as well as to protection of the environment and improvement of human life doc7317 none A hallmark of the enormous diversity of vertebrate animals is extensive variation in the structure and function of the pectoral appendage, which is fin-like in fishes and forms the upper limb in land vertebrates. How does this key feature of vertebrate design function, and what have been the major evolutionary pathways that lead to the forelimb that characterizes mammals? This proposal is designed to address these questions by directly measuring the function of pectoral appendages in water. Although pectoral function has been the subject of speculation for over 100 years, and nearly every textbook in comparative anatomy and paleontology discusses hypotheses of pectoral function, the difficulty of quantifying the effect of pectoral motion in water has prevented any direct experimental tests of these ideas. This grant will apply a novel engineering technique (Digital Particle Image Velocimetry) which allows the reconstruction of three dimensional flow patterns and direct measurement of the force that limbs exert on the water. For the first time we can quantify the function of structures working in fluids, and test long-standing hypotheses about how animals control their movement in water. This research will demonstrate the utility of applying novel engineering approaches to the study of vertebrate structure and function. The planned experiments will test old hypotheses and generate new ideas on which to base interpretations of evolutionary and functional patterns in the vertebrate forelimb doc7318 none Bacterial virus Mu, by virtue of its being both a virus and a transposon, is unusual among transposons in its large size and its high frequency of transposition. Amplification of the 37.2 kb Mu DNA during the virus growth cycle occurs by a series of replicative transposition events which take place within the bacterial nucleoid (DNA and associated proteins), despite the constraints imposed by the complex structure of that body. Interest in the long-range DNA interactions involved in synapsing the ends of prophage DNA within the nucleoid, an early step in the transposition process, led to studies which uncovered a strong gyrase binding site (SGS) in the center of the Mu genome that is required for efficient replication. An earlier model postulated that the SGS promotes synapsis of the Mu prophage termini, and that it does so by organizing the topology of the supercoiled prophage DNA to form a plectonemically interwound loop with the SGS at the apex of the loop and the termini at the base. Experimental tests of predictions of the model have offered strong support for the proposed role of the SGS. While a similar site was found in a second transposing virus, an extensive search found no chromosomal or plasmid sites which could replace the SGS in Mu replication. To determine the unique features of the site, a genetic analysis of the SGS was performed. A region downstream of the core of the gyrase site was identified that is responsible for imparting to the SGS the ability to promote Mu replication. This project focuses on two important questions raised by the model: 1) Why is a novel mechanism required for promoting the synapsis of Mu prophage ends; and 2) How does the SGS function in promoting synapsis of the Mu prophage ends? The first question will be addressed by exploring the factors that are responsible for the long delay in Mu replication in the absence of the SGS. A recently developed sensitive assay for detecting the early stages of the first round of transposition after induction of a lysogen will be used to examine factors including the constraints imposed by the domain structure of the bacterial nucleoid, the topological consequences of transcription, and the role of Mu and host encoded proteins. The second question will be addressed by a combined structural and functional analysis of the SGS, with emphasis on the downstream region which imparts to the SGS the ability to promote replication. The analysis will include studies of the binding of gyrase to the SGS and to other gyrase sites and studies on the effects of genetic alterations of the SGS right arm on synapsis of prophage ends. These studies will further understanding of the mechanism of Mu replicative transposition and provide insights into the structure of the bacterial nucleoid (the DNA has to be compacted several thousand fold to fit into the bacterial cell, yet still has to be able to replicate and be transcribed) and the biochemistry of DNA gyrase. Work with this genetically tractable system should provide insight into transposons and viruses of plants and animals that move in and out of their hosts chromosomes doc7319 none A symposium titled New Frontiers in Functional Morphology of Molluscs, will be held at the second meeting of the World Congress of Malacology, in Vienna, Austria, in August . The symposium will honor Drs. Vera Fretter and Ruth Turner, two outstanding women scientists who made significant contributions to the study of form and function of molluscs and laid the groundwork for a growing field of functional morphology research. The goal of the symposium is to focus attention on the vast potential of the use of molluscs as model systems in the study of form and function by providing a forum for putting forward new ideas and approaches, and proposing directions for future study. Symposium topics will range from bivalve and gastropod feeding processes to swimming mechanics in squid. This symposium will draw attention to the study of functional morphology, highlight new, innovative areas of research, and rejuvenate the field among the international group of malacologists who will be attending the World Congress doc7320 none Filamentous fungi grow as a cellular syncytium where individual cells are interconnected by perforate crosswalls. Cell lysis in these systems triggers a rapid mechanism of septal pore sealing that is mediated by a dense-core vesicle known as the Woronin body. The Woronin body has been observed in over 50 species but its origin in the peroxisome and function associated with the cellular response to cell lysis have only recently been defined at the molecular level (Jedd and Chua, ). In the model system Neurospora crassa, the Woronin-body core is comprised of Hex1, a protein that is both necessary and sufficient for Woronin-body core formation. Deletion of the HEX1 gene eliminates the Woronin body from the cytoplasm and produces hyphae that bleed cytoplasm following cell lysis. Thus, Hex1 defines a novel peroxisomal vesicle that functions in the cellular response to cell lysis. The goal of this research is to understand basic mechanisms of Woronin body biogenesis and function. As part of this effort, the following specific aims will be addressed. i) Woronin-body associated proteins will be identified. The Woronin body will be biochemically purified and associated proteins identified by amino acid sequencing. Corresponding genes will then be cloned and analyzed to assess their role in the biogenesis and function of the Woronin body using genetic, biochemical and cell biological techniques. ii) The conservation of Woronin body structure and function will be determined by analyzing HEX1 and recently identified HEX1 alternative-splicing variants in several model ascomycetes using genetic and cell biological techniques. iii) A mechanism of Woronin body formation will be determined by analyzing the phenotype of Woronin-body-associated protein deletion strains and by reconstituting Woronin body formation in yeast cells using heterologous expression of Hex1 and protein interactants. In addition, the crystal structure of Hex1 will be determined and used to identify amino acid residues that mediate Hex1 self-assembly. Mutations in these residues will then be used to determine how Hex1 self-assembly influences Woronin body biogenesis. iv) The importance of the Woronin body for the pathogenicity of disease-causing fungi will be determined by deleting HEX1 from the genome of the rice blast fungus Magnaporthe grisea. The deletion strain will then be examined with respect to infection-related morphogenesis and host colonization. Results from this study will enhance our understanding of basic mechanisms governing vesicle formation and define a previously unrecognized pathway for protein sorting in the peroxisome. In addition, the possibility that the Woronin body functions as a pathogenicity factor in disease-causing fungi may define new strategies for combating fungal pathogens in both plants and humans doc7321 none The project goal is to identify genes whose induction is necessary for an effective hypersensitive disease resistance response in cotton. Two valuable plant resources are available for this work: Im216, an Upland cotton line whose level and breadth of resistance to bacterial blight are exceptional, and a set of near-isogenic cotton lines (isolines) possessing three individual, race-specific B genes for bacterial blight resistance in combinations of 0, 1, 2, and 3 genes (a gene pyramid). Also, a subtracted, normalized cDNA library enriched in sequences that are induced during the hypersensitive response of Im216 to Xanthomonas campestris pv. malvacearum (Xcm) has been prepared. The first objective is to prepare a similar cDNA library from the pyramided isoline with 3 B genes and to isolate from the two libraries a set of 500- distinct clones of genes that are induced by Xcm race 1, which has at least one avirulence gene that is recognized by each of the B genes in these lines. The second objective is to array the chosen cDNAs and screen them with RNA-derived probes prepared from inoculated plants to identify genes that are induced during the hypersensitive responses elicited by Xcm race 1. Since Im216 and the pyramided isoline each have two B genes that are absent from the other line, results will show whether there are genes whose induction is regulated by specific B genes. Results will also identify genes whose induction is triggered by all three individual B genes of the isoline pyramid and genes whose quickness of induction correlates with the number of B genes in a given cotton line. The third objective is to isolate and sequence full-length cDNA clones of genes that meet one or more of the following criteria: (i) induced by all B genes, (ii) quickness of expression correlates with level of resistance, (iii) deduced protein sequence and time of induction suggest they code for enzymes of phytoalexin biosynthesis. This set of genes will be available as a resource to the scientific community. Inducible resistance responses are the most economical defense that is known against plant disease. They require no application of agrichemicals. They cost the plant little energy, since the responses are produced only when and where an infection occurs. They are relatively safe, since anti-microbial substances accumulate mainly near infection sites and are non-persistent doc7322 none Mature CD4+CD8- and CD8+CD8- (single positive or SP) T lymphocytes develop from immature CD4+CD8+ (double positive or DP) thymocytes during transit through the thymus. The transition of cells from the DP to the SP stage is governed by signals generated by interactions between the T cell receptor (TCR) and MHC antigen complexes encountered in the thymus. Depending on the affinity of the interactions, and involvement of select co-stimulatory molecules, DP cells will either mature or undergo cell death (apoptosis). In particular, high affinity signals mediated by the TCR induce the death of immature DP thymocytes. However, once they mature to the SP T cell stage, they respond quite differently to high affinity TCR stimulation. Instead of inducing apoptosis, SP T cells are induced to proliferate. This project reflects an interest in the molecular basis for this difference in response to TCR signals between precursors and product cell populations. During the previous NSF funding period, a marked cellular difference in the response of immature and mature T cells to TCR signals was demonstrated. The investigators found that, unlike mature SP T cells, immature DP thymocytes failed to recruit lipid rafts to the site of TCR stimulation. Lipid rafts are specialized subdomains in the lipid membrane that are enriched for a variety of critical signaling molecules and targets that can modulate quantitatively and qualitatively TCR signaling. The data further indicated that lipid raft recruitment required PI 3-kinase activity in mature SP T cells and led the investigators to advance a mechanistic model for raft recruitment. The investigators postulated that immature DP thymocytes failed to recruit lipid rafts because they failed to optimally activate the lipid kinase, PI-3 kinase, in response to TCR signals. Further, they suggested that the failure to recruit rafts increased the susceptibility of DP thymocytes to TCR- induced cell death by compromising the activation of a critical regulator of survival and proliferation, Akt PKB. These hypotheses will be directly addressed by this research doc7323 none The nucleus forms a discrete compartment in eukaryotic cells. This allows gene expression to be regulated by altering the nucleocytoplasmic distribution of transcription factors in response to external stimuli. This project explores various aspects of the molecular mechanisms regulating nuclear localization and subcellular distribution of the thyroid hormone receptor (TR), a transcription factor, which either activates or represses the expression of its target genes in response to thyroid hormone. Thyroid hormone is essential for normal growth and development as well as for the regulation of a variety of metabolic pathways. Recent studies of TR subcellular trafficking yielded a number of intriguing results: 1) novel alternative pathways exist for TR import in Xenopus oocytes: nuclear entry occurs by passive diffusion or by a signal-mediated process; 2) TR undergoes nucleocytoplasmic shuttling in Xenopus oocytes and mammalian cells, revealing an additional checkpoint in control of gene expression by TR; 3) there is an energy-requiring step in the nuclear retention export phase of shuttling; 4) a phosphorylated form of TR is present in the nucleus of Xenopus oocytes but not in the cytoplasm, suggesting a role for phosphorylation in TR nuclear localization; and 5) three dominant negative variants of TR, the DNA binding mutant C122A, the transactivation mutant G121A, and the oncoprotein v-ErbA, have distinct subcellular distribution patterns compared with TR. Such dominant negative TR variants provide important, novel tools for tracking the subcellular pathway of TR. In the proposed studies, the following questions will be addressed: 1) Does TR follow both passive diffusion and signal-mediated nuclear import pathways in mammalian cells? Permeabilized cell in vitro nuclear import assays, which allow for controlled reconstitution of nuclear import, will be used to determine the general mechanism of import of TR monomers, homodimers, and heterodimers. 2) Do dominant negative variants of TR that are defective in ligand binding or transactivation associate with specific subcellular compartments? Does interaction with these variants alter the subcellular distribution of TR? These questions will be investigated using green, yellow, and red fluorescent protein (GFP, YFP, and DsRed)-receptor fusions co-expressed in mammalian cells. Colocalization to cytoplasmic compartments and subnuclear domains will be visualized by staining with compartment-specific probes. 3) Does phosphorylation regulate nucleocytoplasmic shuttling of TR? Site-directed mutagenesis studies will be used to investigate the effect of phosphorylation on nuclear localization of TR. Shuttling characteristics of phosphorylation site mutants will be analyzed by Xenopus oocyte microinjection and mammalian cell heterokaryon assays. In summary, these studies will not only increase understanding of the normal cellular response to thyroid hormone, but should also provide important insight into modulation of gene expression through both compartmentalization and dominant negative transcription factors. The proposed research makes use of techniques that, although sophisticated, are quickly mastered by competent undergraduate and graduate students, and will provide the invaluable opportunity for a diversity of students to gain hands-on experience with the scientific process doc7324 none Professor Frantisek Turecek, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Washington, is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his research on transient intermediates of chemical reactions in the gas phase. The objectives of the proposed research are to (1) generate in the gas phase elusive and highly reactive radicals relevant to the high-energy chemistry of peptides, nucleic acids, and organometallic compounds, (2) investigate the stabilities, dissociation kinetics, and photoexcitation of the transient species, and (3) use high-level quantum chemistry calculations combined with RRKM theory to obtain relative, dissociation, and activation energies for the transient intermediates and gauge the dissociation kinetics. The basic experimental method is neutralization-reionization mass spectrometry (NRMS), using a non-chemical means to generate transient species. In NRMS the short interaction time between ion and target results in maintaining both bond connectivity and geometry in the nascent neutral species generated. New methods are proposed to extend the NRMS methodologies to study transient intermediates from polar compounds and allow for measurements of fast dissociations. The potential impact of these studies is in providing new insights into the complex chemistries of highly reactive polyatomic species that are formed transiently by high-energy processes. These studies, complemented by computational analyses, address the stabilities and reactivity of these transient intermediates, shedding light on the fundamental events that occur during high-energy processes. The reaction of atmospheric oxygen with molecules containing sulfur occurs on a scale of one million tons per year globally making it of considerable environmental importance. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program Professor Frantisek Turecek will generate and study in the laboratory the many products from these and related reactions. In addition to studying these smaller molecules that are of great significance to the environment and sustaining life on this planet, Professor Turecek s research focuses on larger molecular systems relevant to nucleic bases. Radicals derived from nucleic bases are presumed to occur as short lifetime species that can cause the modification of RNA and DNA, especially in radiation damage caused by exposure to sunlight, background radiation, or other high-energy processes. Characterization of transient intermediates represents a formidable challenge to the experimental and theoretical methods of chemistry. This inquiry into the processes and dynamics of transient intermediates has the potential for practical usefulness in peptide sequencing doc7325 none The chloroplasts in green algae and higher plants are predicted to contain around - different proteins, corresponding to 10-12% of the total plant proteome. Chloroplasts possess thylakoid membranes with four multi-subunit protein complexes, comprising together at least 66 different proteins and carrying out the photosynthetic reactions. Assembly of these complexes involves targeting, insertion, processing as well as ligation of cofactors, and requires regulation at transcriptional, translational and post-translational levels. At least 100 proteins involved in such biogenesis related processes should be present in the thylakoid membrane, but only a few have been identified so far. With the completion of the Arabidopsis thaliana genome and the improvement of 2-dimensional electrophoresis and mass spectrometry (MS), a systematic characterization of the thylakoid proteome has become feasible. The objective of this project is to systematically characterize the thylakoid proteome of Arabidopsis thaliana. This characterization includes a global identification of most thylakoid proteins and their protein-protein interactions. Highly reproducible 2-dimensional electrophoresis, non-denaturing biochemical separation techniques, and state of the art mass spectrometers will be employed to obtain this characterization in a time-effective manner. On-line MS will be carried out for the notoriously difficult identification of small proteins or very hydrophobic integral membrane proteins. Together this will give a unique overview of the thylakoid proteome. In addition, it will also enable more rational design (reverse) genetic strategies for studies of thylakoid biogenesis and maintenance. A successful realization of the project could serve also to deepen our general understanding of organelle biogenesis, as well as inner membrane biogenesis of prokaryotes. In summary, the objectives of this project are:I. Systematic identification of soluble and peripheral thylakoid proteins by mass spectrometry from gel-separated proteins from 1-dimensional and 2-dimensional gels. II. Identification of integral thylakoid membrane proteins by fractionation in organic solvents and on-line tandem mass spectrometry (reverse phase HPLC). III. Selected identification of (low abundant) thylakoid protein complexes and protein-protein interactions by non-denaturing purification methods and mass spectrometry. IV. Analysis of chloroplast targeting signals and feedback to prediction programs and analysis of putative discrepancies between predicted protein sequences (from cDNA or genomic DNA) and experimental determined protein sequences. V. Development of a professional custom built proteomics LIM (laboratory information management) system, including a web interface doc7326 none Hua Guo of the University of New Mexico is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to develop efficient numerical methods to enable better understanding of molecular spectra and dynamics. Two research areas, the spectroscopy and dynamics of small gas-phase molecules and photon electron-stimulated surface processes, will be pursued. First, several efficient numerical methods will be developed and applied for the recursive solution of the Schrodinger equation. These methods take advantage of the sparsity and factorizability of the Hamiltonian and have minimal storage requirements. They will be used to elucidate highly excited vibrational spectra and nuclear dynamics of several tetraatomic systems. The second project is concerned with a quantum description of dissipative dynamics on solid surfaces by the recursive solution of the Liouville-von Neumann equation. The concern of this work is understanding the spectroscopic and dynamical properties of large molecular systems, in the gas phase and on surfaces. The details of photo-induced chemistry, in general, and of photodissociation, in particular, depend on the interaction energies among the atoms in the system. However, it is not simple to correlate these to the identity of the reaction products and to the energy distribution over these products. The studies being carried out in this project will enhance the understanding of the relevant relationships and stimulate new experimental explorations doc7327 none Contact-dependent cell-cell signaling is essential for development of organisms from prokaryotes to humans though the mechanisms are poorly understood. The objective of this project is to examine the molecular basis of C-signaling, which is essential for fruiting body development of Myxococcus xanthus. C-signaling is initiated by contact between cells and leads to changes in gene expression that mediate multicellular morphogenesis. CsgA, the only known protein involved in C-signal production, contains consensus motifs found in the short chain alcohol dehydrogenase (SCAD) family. Serine appears to be a substrate for the enzyme. It is likely that either CsgA or its enzymatic product is transferred between cells to initiate C-signaling, but the compartmentalization of the signaling components remains unclear. The enzymology of CsgA will be examined with regard to the range of substrates utilized. The chemical product(s) of each reaction will be assayed, identified, and purified. The biological activity of the products will be examined to determine whether they rescue development of csgA mutants. Finally, NAD+ analogs that inhibit CsgA enzyme activity in vitro will be used to determine whether CsgA enzyme activity is essential for C-signaling in vivo. The subcellular location of CsgA and its interaction with other proteins will be determined by biochemical and genetic approaches including inner and outer membrane separation, microscopy, and the use of the yeast two hybrid system to identify interacting proteins. Finally, a model will be developed to explain C-signaling. This project is expected to advance our knowledge in several important areas including prokaryotic development and contact-dependent cell interactions. The project will also result in laboratory training of graduate and undergraduate students, some of whom will be minority and female students. The results will be disseminated through presentations at meetings and publication in journals. The major benefits will be an improvement in the scientific literacy of a segment of the population, and an improved understanding of prokaryotic biology and diversity doc7328 none Professor Steve Leone of University of Colorado is supported by the Experimental Physical Chemistry program to perform experimental studies on alignment and control of small molecules. The work involves use of shaped ultrafast laser pulses for phase and amplitude control of electron dynamics within bonded species. This proposal seeks to continue development of experimental methods in this area, this time utilizing triatomic molecules, e.g. SO2. In addition, high rotor states of the Li dimer will be utilized. Sophisticated genetic algorithms will be explored as a means of tailoring matter-field interactions to optimize a desired outcome. The work will provide much needed data for theoretical advances in this area. The ability to control molecular processes utilizing lasers could have implications in areas such as quantum information science. This pioneering study will explore the capabilities and limitations of laser control of molecular events in diatomic and triatomic species doc7329 none Calcium Signalling in the Regulation of Flagellar Beating in Sperm In mammals, fertilization takes place deep within the female reproductive tract, in the ampulla of the oviduct. When sperm are recovered from the ampulla and observed swimming on microscope slides, they swim vigorously in circles. This swimming pattern is termed hyperactivation. In the environment of the oviduct, hyperactivation is not so useless as it might seem; in fact, it assists sperm in reaching the oocyte and in penetrating the cumulus matrix and zona pellucida. Hyperactivation is switched on by an increase in Ca 2+ at the flagellar axoneme in the core of the flagellum. The goal of this project is to determine how Ca 2+ reaches the axoneme to switch on hyperactivation. Pharmacological agents that induce release of Ca 2+ from intracellular stores (thapsigargin, thimerosal, and caffeine) were found to initiate hyperactivation in bull sperm. There are two families of Ca 2+ stores in cells, the inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate receptor stores (IP3 R) and the ryanodine receptor stores (RyR). Antibodies against IP3 R revealed the presence of a store in the flagellum. This store may be the redundant nuclear envelope (RNE), an organelle located at the base of the flagellum. The RNE arises during spermiogenesis, when condensation of the nucleus of the spermatid leaves behind excess nuclear envelope. Rather than being discarded, as are all other superfluous cytoplasm and organelles, the RNE is retained and packaged neatly as a scroll of membranes at the base of the flagellum. It is proposed that the RNE is retained to serve as a Ca 2+ store. In addition to providing Ca 2+ to the base of the axoneme, the RNE could release Ca 2+ to mitochondria to stimulate ATP production. The RNE is quite closely associated with mitochondria at the base of the flagellum. These mitochondria are terminal members of the tightly-wrapped helix of mitochondria that surrounds the axoneme in the flagellar midpiece. The helix forms a barrier in the midpiece between the plasma membrane and axoneme; therefore, the mitochondria are also in a position to regulate Ca 2+ in the axoneme. Given this unique organization of RNE and mitochondria with respect to the axoneme, the following 4 hypotheses were developed to test how these organelles play a role in initiating hyperactivation. Bull sperm (Bos taurus) will be used to test the hypotheses. Hypothesis 1: The intracellular store that provides Ca 2+ for hyperactivation is gated by both IP3 and ryanodine receptors. Our preliminary evidence implicates both types of receptors in releasing Ca 2+ to initiate hyperactivation. Highly specific agonists of the receptors will be used to confirm these findings. If the hypothesis is correct, it would mean that the amount of Ca 2+ released can occur at two or three levels, depending upon which receptor is activated: IP3 R alone, RyR alone, or the two in combination. Such a mechanism can control the intensity of hyperactivation, such as to increase flagellar bending during penetration of the zona pellucida. Hypothesis 2: The intracellular Ca 2+ store in the flagellum is the RNE. It is proposed that this unique structure, which has been ignored in the past, is responsible for providing Ca 2+ for hyperactivation. Localization of the IP3 R and or RyR to the RNE should tell us whether this hypothesis is correct. Hypothesis 3: A Ca 2+ rise in mitochondria is involved in switching on hyperactivation. The picture of Ca 2+ signalling that has been emerging for other cells is that mitochondria pick up Ca 2+ released from intracellular stores and respond by increasing ATP production. ATP levels are doubled in hyperactivated guinea pig sperm. Therefore, experiments are proposed to test whether release of Ca 2+ from intracellular stores results in increased levels of Ca 2+ , NADH, and ATP in flagellar mitochondria. Hypothesis 4: Mitochondria regulate flagellar Ca 2+ and hyperactivation. The tight wrap of mitochondria around the flagellar axoneme separates it from the plasma membrane; therefore, mitochondria are in a position to affect Ca 2+ levels at the axoneme in the site where the flagellar bend develops. Blockers of mitochondrial release of Ca 2+ will be applied to sperm before using pharmacological initiators of hyperactivation to determine whether hyperactivation can be prevented. The testing of these 4 hypotheses should provide a picture of how Ca 2+ turns on this movement pattern that is essential to fertilization doc7330 none It is widely assumed that the regulation of gene expression by sequence specific DNA-binding proteins involves interactions between these proteins and cognate cis-regulatory sequences of their downstream target genes. However, DNA binding-independent regulatory activities have now been described for a number of different transcription factors. This project uses a combination of molecular and genetic approaches to investigate a novel, DNA-binding independent pathway of repression by Runt, the founding member of the Runt domain family of transcriptional regulators. Quantitation of the in vivo potency of a DNA-binding defective form of Runt reveals differential requirements for DNA-binding in the regulation of different downstream target genes. DNA-binding is not required for repression of the odd-numbered stripes of the segment polarity gene engrailed, but does contribute to Runt s role as a regulator of sloppy-paired another downstream target gene in the pathway of segmentation. DNA elements that are responsible for generating the odd-numbered engrailed stripes will be identified by examining the in vivo expression of reporter genes containing different segments of engrailed cis-regulatory DNA. Reporter gene constructs that express the odd-numbered engrailed stripes will be examined for their ability to respond to Runt-dependent repression. Functional dissection of minimal elements that mediate the response to Runt will provide a platform for further studies at the molecular level. Regions of the Runt protein that are specifically required for repression of engrailed will be identified and Runt deletion derivatives will be examined for their regulatory activities in transgenic Drosophila embryos. This approach is based on previous observations on the modular organization of the conserved regions of Runt. A comparison of the relative potency of different deletion derivatives on engrailed and other target genes will reveal if specific regulatory properties can be attributed to the different conserved regions of the Runt protein. Finally, genetic screens will be carried out to identify other factors that participate in the DNA binding-independent repression of engrailed by Runt. Preliminary genetic screens have identified a maternally-expressed DNA-binding protein encoded by the tramtrack locus that cooperates with runt to repress engrailed.. The extension of the genetic screens for runt-interacting factors will provide a rigorous framework for future studies on the molecular mechanism of DNA binding-independent regulation by the Runt protein. These studies will provide new information on the context-dependent activities of Runt domain proteins and may provide fundamental insights into the regulation of gene transcription in eukaryotic systems doc7331 none Sera This award is to Texas A Edgewood ISD, San Antonio School District; Our Lady of the Lake University; TEKSA Innovations Corporation; San Antonio Day Care Providers. Proposed Activities The award supports the following activities: formation of minority-lead entrepreneurial teams to form and assist small businesses; provide e-commerce capability for small business; job training (computer training) for at-risk students; provide business management tools, including incubation support, to small minority-owned small businesses. Proposed Innovation The innovation goals of this award include formation of minority-led entrepreneurial teams to assist formation and growth of small business in the San Antonio area; enablement of economic growth by providing e-commerce capability of small businesses, especially minority owned businesses; providing incubator services where needed; providing workforce training for at-risk under-represented groups and providing job opportunities for them in small companies. Potential Economic Impact The potential economic benefits from this award includes a wide range of outcomes, such as job training and job placement for under-represented, at-risk of poverty groups by creation of new business and new jobs. Potential Societal Impact The potential benefits to society include education and training for at-risk under-represented minorities; creation of business opportunities for minority-owned small businesses; creation of new employment opportunities for minorities doc7332 none This proposal will study neural and behavioral correlates of auditory learning using song in songbirds. Song learning occurs during a sensitive period early in development, and a song derived from what was learned is produced by male songbirds throughout adult life. Song is a mode of communication, in which the receiver must be able to decode the message of the sender. In many species, males sing to females. While much is known of conditions for song acquisition and of the neural system which supports song production in males, little is known of song perception in general and, in particular, of how the brains of females learn about, process and respond to song. The experiments in this proposal use complementary behavioral, anatomical and functional methods to study the role of early experience in development of song perception and its neural substrate in females. They also assess whether brain effects of abnormal early experience can be reversed by providing appropriate experience to older animals. The experiments will address important issues in neurobiology. First, does learning during early sensitive periods use the same brain mechanisms as later, more conventional learning? Second, which brain areas are used for complex auditory learning? Related to this, are the changes in these areas more evident in females than in males (since the females make decisions based on this information that seem more precise than decisions made by males)? Third, are the effects of this early learning (or lack of it) permanent, or can the information (and the brain areas that store it) be modified later on? Female songbirds are an ideal system in which to study these issues doc7333 none A fundamental question in neuroscience is how natural sensory stimuli are encoded for information handling by the brain. Invertebrate animals often offer systems that are in some ways simpler than those of mammals, and including such features as identifiable single cells in networks of relatively few numbers. This collaborative project exploits a sensory system called the cercal system of the cricket, in which small appendages on the rear of the body contain fine hairs that are used to detect, identify and localize behaviorally relevant air current movements, such as those produced by a predator. The input from roughly receptor cells converges on 30 local interneurons and only 20 output interneurons that lead to behavior such as escape. Three collaborators at two institutions use computational and mathematical analyses of a database of anatomical and physiological measurements on the dynamic map that does the central processing in the brain of the peripheral signals. The goals are to characterize the representation of dynamic sensory stimulus parameters at two processing stages within the mapped sensory system, and to examine the mechanisms that transform the representation at the interface between these two processing stages. Results will be important for our understanding of information representation in nervous systems, particularly in dynamic processing. The project also will enhance the independent career of a woman faculty member in mathematics, and students will receive multi-disciplinary, highly quantitative training related to biology, in two states that do not currently have high profiles in federally funded research doc7334 none Lay abstract Daily, or circadian, rhythms of biochemistry, physiology and behavior are observed in a wide variety of organisms. In mammals, the capacity to generate an endogenous circadian rhythm is dependent upon a discrete ensemble of neurons referred to as the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN). The SCN, located deep within the brain, form a biological clock that is entrainable to external stimuli, such as light. Over the past several years, advances at the molecular and genetic level have revealed that SCN rhythmicity results from autoregulatory feedback loops of so-called clock genes . Through as yet unidentified molecular events, these feedback loops couple to output pathways that in turn initiate circadian rhythms of physiology and behavior. Importantly, external stimuli, such as light, are thought to entrain the circadian clock by resetting these loops. The main goal of this study is to determine the cellular signaling events that mediate rhythmic gene expression in the SCN. Towards this end, mouse SCN tissue will be utilized to 1) identify intracellular signaling pathways activated by light, 2) determine how light-activated pathways affect rhythmic expression of core clock genes, and 3) determine how genetic feedback loops initiate events that drive output from the clock. An understanding of the molecular events that drive SCN rhythmicity should provide new insights into how circadian-controlled behaviors, such as the sleep-wake cycle, are regulated. Furthermore, given the commonality of signaling events thought to mediate long-term adaptive changes in nervous system physiology, the data collected and approaches used in this study should be of relevance to neurobiologists examining a wide array of behavioral processes doc7335 none Thomas Keyes of Boston University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to continue his studies of liquid state dynamical theory, using a unified approach based on instantaneous a normal modes (INM), the topology of the potential energy surface, and molecular dynamics simulation. This work seeks to improve understanding of diffusion mechanisms and other slow processes in supercooled liquids, and the difference between strong and fragile liquids, with Arrhenius and stronger-than-Arrhenius temperature dependence of relaxation. Simple liquids, atomic mixtures, carbon disulfide, water, and silica will be studied, covering fragile and strong systems. A comprehensive nonequilibrium simulation INM project will be launched on femtosecond fifth-order scattering, making contact with current experimental efforts. The outcomes of this project are expected to lead to new theoretical and simulation methods, and to physical insights into liquids based on intuitive INM potential energy surface ideas. Supercooled liquids exist at temperatures below the ordinary freezing point to become solid. Outcomes from this work are expected to enhance the understanding of supercooled liquids, which play an important role in crystallization processes and the production of amorphous solids. As well, the research methods explored in this work have the potential to enhance theoretical research in the understanding of protein folding and structure rearrangements in clusters of molecules doc7336 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project focuses on developing technology for semi-automatically creating wrappers that extract data from semi-structured web pages. The key innovation is a bootstrapping method for wrapper generation, so that experience in wrapping previous sites can be automatically re-used to minimize the effort required to wrap new sites. The proposed technology will make it practical to create thousands of highly accurate wrappers almost completely automatically, creating new opportunities for web-based information integration. The proposed technology will enable Fetch Technologies to scale our current wrapper generation technology far beyond what his now practical. Thousands of Internet services create value for their users by aggregating and integrating information from Internet sources. The proposed technology will make these types of services radically simpler to implement. Applications include portal sites, comparison shopping services, auction sites, finance integration, and competitive intelligence-gathering services doc7337 none This award will provide funds for the support of a workshop on thermobaric instability in the ocean, to be held at the Naval Postgraduate School in October . Thermobaric instability refers to the fact that the compressibility of sea water is a non-linear function of pressure, so that a colder and fresher layer overlying a warmer and saltier layer may be statically stable, but become unstable if it is disturbed. That this effect is theoretically possible has been known for a long time, but only recently has it been considered as an effect that could actually occur in the Southern Ocean, specifically as the potential explanation of the episodic occurrence of polynyas in the Weddell Sea. The objective of the workshop is to bring together a group of oceanographers with expertise in the thermodynamics of sea water on the one hand and experience in studying the structure and characteristics of the Weddell Sea on the other hand, to explore the relevance of thermobaric instability to antarctic upper ocean dynamics, and to test it along with competing theories in explaining the observed ice and ocean phenomena of the Weddell Sea. Observations from recent oceanographic cruises, particularly those of the Antarctic Flux Study of , when integrated into a simple upper ocean ice model, have indicated that much of the eastern Weddell Sea is susceptible to thermobaric instability by the end of the austral winter. It follows that thermobaric effects may play an important role in the overall water column stability in the Weddell Sea and other regions of the Southern Ocean, may feed into the multi-year time scale of the Antarctic Circumpolar Wave, and may affect the overturning and ventilation of the high latitude ocean at even longer climatic time scales. A formal workshop on this specific aspect of antarctic oceanography has not been convened before doc7338 none The primary focus of this project is upon the problem of how the functions of biological macromolecules are governed by their structures. The research plan focuses upon this problem in the context of RNA enzymes (or ribozymes), with the hope of discovering the properties of biological catalysis that are so fundamental that they are shared by all enzymes, whether composed of RNA or protein. The overall goal of this proposal is to develop a fundamental understanding of how biological catalysts function, be they proteins or RNA. Two catalytic RNA systems will be investigated using both static and time-resolved X-ray crystallography to elucidate their structural properties and reaction mechanisms. These, in order of increasing complexity, include the hairpin ribozyme, and RNase P. The hammerhead ribozyme structure has been solved and time-resolved crystallographic experiments have been initiated. The more complex ribozymes have been crystallized and will be used in static and time-resolved crystallography in an effort to elucidate their reaction mechanisms. The principle objectives of this research are: (1) to determine the three-dimensional structure of the hairpin ribozyme, and to initiate determination of the structures of reaction intermediates of hairpin ribozyme cleavage and ligation using the techniques developed for the hammerhead ribozyme; and (2) to initiate determination of the three-dimensional structure of RNase P.. The primary goal of this research is to develop a fundamental understanding of the principles of catalysis that enable RNA molecules to be enzymes. This knowledge will lead to the understanding of how the three-dimensional structure of an RNA enzyme determines its catalytic properties. By learning how RNA enzymes work, this project will discover what properties are so fundamental to biological catalysts that they are invariant with respect to both RNA and protein enzymes doc7339 none Steroid compounds are well-known as hormones, and they have several actions in the brain itself. Recent discoveries showed that steroid hormone synthesis occurs in the central nervous system, and that steroid products regulate development and functional maturation of neurons (nerve cells) in the brain. The genes for synthesizing steroids in the brain are differentially generated compared with those in the adrenal gland or gonads. This project uses molecular and genetic approaches, including novel genetic knock-out mouse strains, to examine in vivo how some of the genes in the brain are regulated that encode steroidogenic enzymes, and how some of the steroids regulate neuronal development and function in rodents. Results will be important for a better understanding of the molecular mechanisms regulating cellular differentiation during brain development, and so will have an impact beyond neuroendocrinolgy to developmental biology. The project also provides excellent training some of using the latest genetic technology doc7340 none The plant hormone auxin is involved in many aspects of growth and development, yet little is known about exactly how this hormone causes changes within plant cells. It is known that when plant cells are exposed to auxin, certain genes are activated: without auxin, they are not expressed (i.e., their protein products are not made), and with auxin they rapidly become expressed at high levels. It is also known that specific DNA sequences within the promoters of these genes (i.e, the parts of the genes that control when and where the genes are expressed) are needed for this response to auxin. An unknown number of molecules are involved in recognizing auxin after it enters the plant cell, and causing these genes to be activated. The goal of this project is to identify some of the molecules involved in this auxin signal transduction process. The genetic approach taken in this project involves making mutants in the model plant Arabidopsis that show aberrant expression of auxin-responsive genes. Towards this end, transgenic plants were generated that carried engineered selectable marker genes controlled by auxin responsive promoters. The transgenic plants were mutagenized, then seeds from these plants were grown under conditions that allowed for the selection of plants that showed aberrant expression of the selectable marker genes. One of the selectable markers used was a gene that confers resistance to the antibiotic hygromycin. Non-mutant, transgenic plants were killed by the antibiotic, because they did not contain enough auxin to switch on the resistance gene. However, a few mutant plants were able to grow, because the resistance gene was expressed more highly in them than in non-mutant plants. The other selectable marker used was a gene encoding the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH). ADH converts allyl alcohol to a toxic substance, acrolein. Non-mutant transgenic plants that were treated first with auxin, then with allyl alcohol, were killed because the ADH gene was switched on by the auxin treatment. However a few mutant plants survived the treatments because the ADH gene was expressed at lower levels in them. One hypothesis is that these mutant lines contain alterations in the molecules involved in responding to auxin. For some of the mutants, this hypothesis has been tested by seeing if other auxin responsive genes, in addition to the selectable marker genes, show altered expression in the mutants. One goal of thsi project is to continue identifying new mutants that show altered expression of auxin-responsive genes. A few of these mutants will be analyzed in detail, and the mutant genes will be cloned in order to discover what molecules they encode. This work has great potential to enhance our understanding of both plant hormone biology, and signal transduction processes in plants doc7341 none Tidor An important goal of molecular biochemistry is a detailed understanding of how enzymes bind their ligands with correct affinity and specificity to catalyze appropriate reactions while not accelerating inappropriate ones. While there is clearly a key role for affinity in many molecular binding and recognition events, specificity is also essential in many biochemical contexts. For example, enzymes often must discriminate between correct substrates and closely related molecules. Likewise, there is a compelling literature implicating differential binding of transition state over substrate as a fundamental principle of enzyme function. While tremendous progress has been made in advancing our understanding of the molecular determinants of affinity and specificity, the current state of the art is still significantly incomplete. While rationalization of relative affinities and specificities is possible given high-resolution structural information, the knowledge obtained from such studies has been insufficient to allow for routine rational ligand design or enzyme engineering. New approaches are needed to expand our fundamental understanding in this crucial area. The project involves the study of two tRNA synthetases, the glutaminyl-tRNA synthetase (GlnRS) from Escherichia coli and the aspartyl-tRNA synthetase (AspRS) from the hyperthermophilic archaeon Pyrococcus kodakaraensis. Research activities include the application of current and novel approaches using theoretical and computational techniques to understand more thoroughly the molecular basis for ligand binding affinity and specificity by these highly evolved enzymes. Molecular mechanics, molecular dynamics, and continuum electrostatics will be used to analyze determinants of binding in the enzyme active sites and in the ligands. The research will expand our fundamental understanding of binding affinity and specificity by two tRNA-synthetase enzymes. The principles learned are expected to have broad applicability to enzymes and other molecular catalysts. They will contribute to the growing foundation that is essential to produce enabling technologies in the key areas of molecular design and enzyme engineering doc7342 none Jockusch Insect wings and imaginal discs are two key innovations that have contributed to the spectacular success of the clades that they characterize. However, the developmental basis for the origins of these traits remains poorly understood. The work proposed here is a comparative analysis of wing development in two species of insects that retain morphologically more ancestral modes of wing development, the beetle Tribolium castaneum and the grasshopper Schistocerca americana, and a parallel analysis in one primitively wingless hexapod, the thysanuran Thermobia domestica. These comparisons will be used to address two significant questions in insect evolution: Did the origin of imaginal discs require major changes in both primordium allocation and disc patterning or did it result from more limited developmental changes? Are wings homologous to dorsal branches of ancestral arthropod legs or did they arise de novo from the dorsal thorax? Presently, most of what is known about wing development comes from a single species, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. At a morphological level, wing development in Drosophila is derived. This grant proposes to use comparative molecular data to determine in what respects Drosophila wings develop by retained ancestral mechanisms and to what extent by novel mechanisms that may be related to the evolution and early allocation of imaginal discs. This work has three specific aims: (1) to examine the conservation of the Drosophila appendage allocation mechanism (involving, in part, interactions among the genes wingless, ecapentaplegic, and distal-less) in other insects using studies of gene expression and function; (2) to compare the expression of four genes important in Drosophila wing development- snail, escargot, apterous and wingless- in the developing wings of Schistocerca and Tribolium, and in the thoracic lobes of Thermobia to establish whether the mechanisms that pattern the wing are broadly conserved; (3) to identify the embryonic source of wing cells in these species using a combination of lineage tracing and laser ablation techniques doc7343 none Rhythmic biological phenomena which recur at approximately 24 hour intervals in the absence of environmental time cues are termed circadian rhythms, and their timing is regulated by an endogenous biological clock. Circadian rhythms are widespread both within any given organism and among diverse taxa. Genetic and molecular biological studies, primarily in a subset of model organisms, have begun to identify the components of circadian systems. Although plants have provided many examples of rhythmic outputs and our understanding of photoreceptors of circadian input pathways is well-advanced, plants have lagged in the identification of components of the central circadian oscillator. Increased understanding of plant responses to environmental input and to endogenous temporal cues has agricultural importance, in particular because both environmental cues and the circadian clock contribute to the photoperiodic decision to flower. In addition, there is temporal variation in the response to biotic and abiotic stresses, which may prove particularly relevant to attempts to increase agricultural productivity. Arabidopsis mutants affected in clock function, termed circadian timing defective (ctd) and out of phase (oop), have been isolated using the circadian rhythm in resistance sensitivity to SO2 exposure that results from circadian rhythms in stomatal aperture and gas exchange. For example, oop1 and oop2 represent novel alleles of the photoreceptors PHYTOCHROME B and CRYPTOCHROME 1, respectively. The determination of the molecular mechanisms by which phyBoop1 and cry1oop2 affect circadian phase will afford insight into this integral but poorly understood aspect of circadian rhythmicity. phyBoop1 and cry1oop2 affect both blue and red light signaling in a semi-dominant manner, suggesting that the mutant proteins titrate components common to red and blue light signaling pathways that provide photic input to the clock. The identification of proteins interacting with phyBoop1 and cry1oop2 represents an important goal in the elucidation of this pathway. A second goal is the cloning and the genetic and molecular characterization of a long period mutant, ctd2. Although it has not yet been established that the CTD2 gene encodes a component of a central clock oscillator, the characterization of the ctd2 mutant and the isolation of the CTD2 gene will contribute to the elucidation of the mechanisms of clock function. Potential functions for the CTD2 gene and its product include roles as a component of the central oscillator, as a component of input pathways that provide environmental information to the clock, as well as a component of output pathways that transmit temporal information from the clock to the overtly rhythmic phenomena doc7344 none The plant primary cell wall is a highly dynamic and complex structure that plays a critical role in numerous examples of plant growth and development. Despite its importance in regulating cell expansion and differentiation, many aspects of wall synthesis, assembly and disassembly remain poorly understood. For example, wall restructuring during cell expansion is highly regulated and while a number of divergent families of wall-modifying proteins have been identified, the mechanism by which they act in concert to achieve wall loosening in a controlled manner is unknown. Furthermore, many new classes of wall-modifying proteins remain to be identified, or cannot currently be assigned a biochemical function. To understand the process of wall reorganization, an important objective is therefore to identify all of the enzymes involved. The need for a systematic approach to the identification and characterization of cell wall protein populations has recently become a realistic consideration in the form of the developing field of proteomics, or the study of the protein complement of the genome. The research outlined in this proposal describes a proteomics approach to the characterization of protein populations in the cell wall and surrounding apoplast, or cell wall continuum, during tomato fruit development. This will provide valuable insight into biochemical processes occurring in the apoplast cell wall, including the regulation of wall modification during rapid fruit expansion and ripening. Broad questions to be addressed include: 1) What are the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the protein populations present in the tomato fruit cell wall? 2) How do the patterns of apoplastic protein expression change qualitatively and quantitatively during fruit ontogeny? Cell wall protein populations will be separated by high-resolution 2-D gel electrophoresis and individual polypeptides analyzed by mass spectrometry, leading to the identification of the corresponding genes. The proposed research will: (i) provide detailed and unprecedented insight into the patterns of expression and regulation of apoplastic cell wall proteins; (ii) facilitate the identification of groups of proteins that are required for cell expansion or fruit softening (iii) complement existing research initiatives at Cornell, allowing parallel studies of gene expression at the mRNA and protein levels; (iv) demonstrate the utility of proteomics as a tool to study the biology of the cell wall and apoplast; (v) identify new cell wall proteins with potential practical applications for plant biotechnology doc7345 none David Stern Chloroplasts, the site of photosynthesis, are derived from a cyanobacterial ancestor and have progressively transferred most of their genetic information to the nucleus. Because chloroplasts contain up to 5,000 proteins, today the vast majority are of nuclear origin. Among these proteins are a myriad which are required for correct expression of the genes which remain in the chloroplast. This project focuses on nucleus encoded proteins which regulate messenger RNA lifetime in the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, as well as on how chloroplast ribosomes recognize the site at which protein synthesis must be initiated. This project will further earlier analyses which revealed that at least 5 nuclear genes encode products which affect the stability of petD mRNA, which encodes subunit IV of the cytochrome b6 f complex, an essential protein for photosynthesis. One of these genes, Mcd1, has been cloned and the details of its interaction with the petD mRNA will be elucidated. Another gene whose product may form part of a multiprotein complex with Mcd1 will also be studied. This gene, mcd4, was identified through a genetic screen based on photosynthetic capability. Mcd4 has been targeted because it appears to have unique attributes with respect to other nuclear genes involved in chloroplast biogenesis. The second aspect of the project concerns translation initiation, and in particular the interaction between the initiator tRNA and the nucleotide upstream of the translation initiation codon of petA, which encodes cytochrome f. The generality of this interaction will be investigated, as well as the role of the so-called Shine-Dalgarno sequence, whose functionality in bacterial protein synthesis is well-established, but whose role in chloroplasts is somewhat controversial and clearly variable. Overall, this project will elucidate mechanisms of communication between different compartments of eukaryotic cells, a fundamental issue in understanding intracellular regulation doc7346 none Intensive industrial and agricultural activity over the last 150 years has imposed a large burden of heavy metals on the environment. Phytoextraction, the use of plants for environmental cleanup of pollutants, including toxic metals, from soils, holds the potential to allow the economic restoration of these contaminated sites. For phytoextraction to be a viable alternative to existing soil remediation strategies it will require the existence of high biomass, rapidly growing metal-accumulating plants. Unfortunately, plants do not exist at present that have all these desirable characteristics. There are, however, a limited numbers of plants, collectively termed hyperaccumulators, that grow on soils naturally enriched in various metals including Zn, Ni and Se. These plants have the ability to naturally accumulate these metals to between 0.1 and 3% of their shoot dry weight; this is at least -fold higher than most other plants. This unique ability makes these plants an ideal starting point for the development of phytoextraction crops. One way to develop such crops is to identify the genes responsible for metal accumulation in these hyperaccumulator plants. Once identified and fully characterized these genes could be transferred into high biomass, rapidly-growing plants to generate crops ideally suited for phytoremediation. This grant will fund the identification of such metal hyperaccumulation genes from the nickel hyperaccumulator Thlaspi goesingense. Once identified, the usefulness of these genes for phytoremediation will be rapidly assessed by their transfer to Arabidopsis thaliana, a convenient model plant. Genes identified for enhanced metal tolerance and accumulation in this model plant will then be selected for transfer to plants more suited to phytoremediation applications doc7347 none Exclusive offspring care by females is the norm among mammals, but among a small set of species, males and other group members also play an important and potentially crucial role in the nurturing of dependent offspring. Among marmosets and tamarins, primates of the New World, care by all group members, including the mother, father, and nonbreeding juveniles and subadults, is the norm for social groups. Results from previous NSF funding have revealed important differences in levels of effort in infant care by mothers and fathers, with mothers playing a large role in infant care in the first two weeks of life, and fathers and helpers playing a central role in the 3rd and 4th weeks of infant life and beyond. These changes are associated with variations in testosterone (T) concentrations in mothers and fathers: T is reduced in mothers in the first 2 weeks post partum and in fathers during the second 2 weeks post partum, which corresponds to the highest rates of infant care. The studies outlined in the current proposal will utilize both observational and experimental approaches to the possibility that variation in testosterone concentrations helps regulate responsiveness to infants in marmosets, and whether T mediates a trade-off in effort in infant care versus reproductive and or aggressive behaviors, which may be incompatible with infant care. The results will shed light on the possibility that complex affiliative and caregiving behaviors in social primates may, in part, be influenced by biological states, as well as experience-related factors doc7348 none This project will examine the molecular basis of variation in muscle contractile performance in a model organism, the dragonfly, and will assess the impact of such variation on the organism s ecological success. One primary focus is to determine how variation created by alternative splicing of genes at the RNA level affects performance at the cellular, tissue, and whole-organism levels. Knowledge of these mechanistic pathways will be used to determine how muscle performance is adjusted in response to environmental variation, and to the presence of gregarine parasites that infect the gut and reduce energy intake. Further, differential effects of the resultant muscle performance on flight performance will be assessed, and, in turn, effects of flight performance on male mating success and the ability of males to defend desirable territories will be assessed. Together, these results will greatly enhance our knowledge of mechanisms that create variation in muscle and locomotor performance, and the ecological context in which these mechanisms operate doc7349 none The long-term goals of this project are to understand the structure and function of the Himar1 transposase. A series of in vitro and in vivo E. coli assays and screens will be used to determine the amino acids responsible for mediating the several activities of Himar1 transposase that constitute transposition. In vitro mutagenesis will be used to create a series of C-terminal truncations of transposase each of which will be screened by gel shift assays to determine how much of the protein can be deleted before DNA binding activity is eliminated. Random and specific point mutations in the DNA binding domain will then be introduced and the mutations assayed for their effects in vivo and in vitro. The boundaries of the catalytic domain, the part of the protein responsible for the DNA breakage and joining reactions, will be mutated randomly and at conserved positions based on an alignment of many mariner-family transposons and the mutants screened for the ability to either excise the transposon or insert it into a target. The motif responsible for mediating target site TA dinucleotide identification will be localized with an E. coli screen which will allow the identification of randomly mutated Himar1 transposase constructs that complete insertion into improper target sequences. Finally, the DNA sequence of the inverted terminal repeat (ITR) will be mutated to determine the minimum sequences required for transposition. High-resolution chemical footprinting will be carried out to determine which base pairs are specifically contacted by transposase. Finally, a random mutagenesis screen will be performed to determine the effects of each position in the ITR on transposition frequency. By understanding the structure and function of this transposable element it is hoped that its utility in a variety of species will be dramatically improved doc7350 none Marks The development of hairs, called trichomes, on the leaf surface of Arabidopsis plants is being used as a model to study the control of cell fate and differentiation. The model has both basic and practical attributes. Understanding the basic mechanisms that control cell fate and differentiation in multicellular organisms is a key goal in biological research. Given that the mechanisms that control the cell cycle are similar in plants and non-plants, it is possible that the information obtained in studying trichome development will lead to a better understanding of how other cell types differentiate. The model is of practical importance because the trichomes on many plants form the first line of defense against hostile environmental factors. Many crop plants only have a sparse covering of hairs and the information obtained from this research could lead to new strategies to improve crop plants. In wild type Arabidopsis, leaf trichomes are uniformly spaced over the leaf surface; less than 0.5% of the trichomes develop adjacent to one another. Previous analyses have shown that trichome spacing is not controlled by chance but by a developmentally regulated spacing program. Such analyses indicate that the spacing program involves cell to cell communication that prevents neighboring cells from becoming trichomes. It has been found that the GL1 gene, which is required for trichome initiation, actually inhibits trichome initiation when overexpressed. This inhibition of initiation is not due to co-suppression, as it has been found that 35S::GL1 plants overexpress both GL1 mRNA and protein. It is proposed that overexpression of GL1 results in the production of a leaf-wide lateral inhibition program in which neighboring cells inhibit each other from becoming trichomes. To test this hypothesis, a mutational analysis is being used to identify mutations that can suppress the 35S::GL1 phenotype and increase leaf trichome initiation. One such interesting mutant, called cot, has been extensively characterized. In 35S::GL1 cot plants, many of the cells that surround a trichome enter the trichome pathway. In addition to 35S::GL1 cot, other 35S::GL1 mutants have been identified that can suppress the 35S::GL1 phenotype. These new mutants will be characterized, and the most interesting genes will be targeted for positional cloning. Although the original 35S::GL1 mutant population was isolated from chemically mutagenized seed, to facilitate cloning of subsequently identified mutant genes, a new population of 35S::GL1 mutants is being induced by T-DNA tagging. In addition to the above studies, another gene hypothesized to be a negative regulator will be characterized. This gene, called CPC-like 1 (CPL1), also appears to limit trichome initiation when expressed at high levels. It is predicted that the CPL1 mechanism of inhibition is distinct from the mechanism resulting from GL1 overexpression. This will be tested. Finally, it will be determined if microarray analysis using gene chips can detect genes that are differentially expressed in plants overexpressing either GL1 or CPL1 doc7351 none The interactions of plants and disease-causing pathogens generally fall into two types: compatible and incompatible. Incompatibility leads to resistance while compatibility leads to disease. In the absence of a resistant response, disease symptoms can spread, leading to severe damage or death of the plant. Analysis of mutants unable to synthesize ethylene, salicylic acid (SA) or jasmonic acid (JA), defined a multistage sequence of disease symptom development during a compatible tomato:pathogen interaction. Synthesis of all three phytohormones is essential for complete symptom development. The spread of disease is associated with an ethylene-dependent accumulation of SA. The position of JA within this cascade of events has yet to be determined. We intend to elucidate how these three hormones control symptom development. Experiments will define at a molecular genetic level the roles of ethylene, SA and JA in symptom development in tomato. Through a combination of hormone quantitation and add-backs, the order of action of the three hormones relative to one another will be determined. Microarray analyses will be performed to identify components of the progression from infection to cell death. These experiments will be complemented by work involving Arabidopsis:Xanthomonas interactions. In Arabidopsis, there is differential attenuation of disease symptoms with ethylene insensitive mutants in the various hormone receptors. This result suggests distinct functions for the five ethylene receptors. Molecular and genetic approaches will be used to define the differential responses. These experiments have the potential to identify unique functions for what has heretofore been considered a redundant receptor family doc7352 none Structure and Function of the T-cell Receptor Zeta Chain Cytoplasmic Domain T cells are activated upon encounter with another cell that carries on its surface a peptide antigen bound to an MHC protein, as part of the process by which foreign material in the body is recognized and cleared by the immune system. The interaction involves specific recognition of the MHC-peptide complexes by clonotypic T-cell receptor (TCR) subunits, as well as antigen-independent interactions between adhesion molecules and other cell surface receptors from the T cell and the antigen presenting cell. Clustering of TCR complexes at the T-cell surface using antibodies or multivalent antigens can induce T cell processes characteristic of interaction with an antigen-presenting cell, suggesting that clustering or aggregation of TCR components is important for initiation of T-cell activation. Cytoplasmic domains of the TCR gamma, delta, epsilon, and particularly zeta subunits are responsible for transmitting extracellular binding signals into the T cell. Unlike other cell surface receptor systems activated by oligomerization, TCR cytoplasmic domains do not appear to carry intrinsic or associated enzymatic activities. Membrane-bound and cytoplasmic kinases interact with TCR cytoplasmic domains upon antigen engagement, triggering cytoplasmic signaling cascades. Despite intensive study, the mechanism by which clustering of T-cell surface receptors can leads to cytoplasmic signaling is not clear and is a major outstanding problem in the field. In the proposed research, the structure and function of the TCR zeta chain cytoplasmic domain will be investigated. Specifically, a newly discovered lipid-binding activity will be characterized. Lipid binding induces a structural alteration in the TCR zeta chain cytoplasmic domain, and the conforynational change controls accessibility to src- family kinases in vitro. Possible roles of this lipid binding activity and conformational change in the T-cell activation pathway will be investigated. The specific objectives or the proposed research are to determine the requirements for inducing the lipid-dependent conforrnational change, to produce a detailed structural description of the lipid-bound structure, to investigate the confon-national change of cytoplasmic domain in the context of the full-length zeta subunit protein, and to evaluate the importance of the conformational change in signaling processes in vivo. These objectives will be pursued through a variety of spectroscopic studies of purified receptor cytoplasmic domains in complex with various detergents and lipids, and biochemical assays of signaling processes in vitro and in vivo doc7353 none This projects requests support for the core activities of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. The Board conducts a variety of activities such as: monitoring and promoting the health of computer science including research, human resources, and infrastructure; initiating studies involving computer science and national economic strength; responding to requests from government for expert input; fostering interactions between computer science and other areas of science and technology; and providing a forum for the exchange of information related to computer science, computer technology, and telecommunications doc7354 none Plant mitochondria possess a cyanide-resistant alternative oxidase pathway in addition to the cytochrome c oxidase pathway. During respiration, the alternative oxidase reduces oxygen to water, but releases the generated energy as heat, rather than storing it. The pathway is widespread among plants, leading to a search for the role of the alternative oxidase in plant metabolism. The plant enzyme is dimeric, consisting of two identical subunits, and is inactivated if the subunits are united by a disulfide bond. If this regulatory bond is reduced, the enzyme can then be fully activated by small metabolites, a-keto acids. An alternative oxidase is also present in fungal mitochondria, but is monomeric and is activated by purine nucleotides rather than alpha-keto acids. One goal of this project is to determine which regions of the plant and fungal proteins are responsible for their different structural and regulatory features. To accomplish this, chimeric proteins will be created using recombinant DNA technology and their properties examined. The second goal of the project is to address whether the regulatory properties demonstrated in isolated mitochondria are important for the function of the alternative oxidase in vivo. In one approach, the behavior of the protein s regulatory disulfide bond in an isolated membrane system under experimental conditions will be observed and compared to its behavior in more complex environments (mitochondria, cells, and leaves). A second approach will use transgenic Arabidopsis plants that express either very high or low levels of normal alternative oxidase, or high levels of a mutated alternative oxidase that is permanently activated. These plants will be examined for their responses to a variety of environmental variables to determine conditions under which the presence or absence of the alternative oxidase and its regulatory features is beneficial or detrimental. The outcome should increase understanding of how important the regulatory features are to its function in vivo and of the alternative oxidase s involvement in plant responses to the environment. Because the alternative oxidase wastes energy in mitochondria, which are major energy-producers in the cell, it had been thought that this enzyme s activity could lead to reduced plant productivity. Increasing evidence, however, indicates that the oxidase may instead be important for the plant s ability to survive a wide range of biotic and abiotic stresses. The project described here will add to this knowledge through its investigation of the nature and role of alternative oxidase regulation in plant metabolism doc7355 none Venkat Gopalan The long term goal of this research is to understand RNA-protein interactions in Escherichia coli RNase P, an enzyme essential for the processing precursor tRNAs (ptRNAs) to their mature forms. E. coli RNase P, a ribonucleoprotein (RNP) complex, consists of a catalytic RNA subunit (M1 RNA) and a protein cofactor (C5 protein); both subunits are essential for its catalytic activity in vivo. The role of C5 protein in RNase P catalysis is distinct from other protein-facilitated RNA-catalyzed reactions in that it enhances the catalytic efficiency and versatility of a catalytic RNA which acts in trans on numerous substrates. Recent studies have demonstrated that the protein not only enhances the affinity of the substrate for the catalytic RNA subunit but also increases the rate of the RNA-catalyzed cleavage reaction. Several questions with regard to the mechanism of action of this unique catalytic RNP complex remain unanswered. In this project, a combination of biochemical and biophysical approaches will be used to determine the role of C5 protein in assembling a functional RNase P complex. The first objective of this study will be to employ structure-based mutagenesis and a genetic complementation assay to identify amino acid residues in C5 protein that are essential for its function in vivo. The second objective is to dissect the mechanisms by which the protein cofactor can exert effects on substrate recognition as well as catalysis. Lastly, by rational design of C5 mutants bearing cysteine residues at various positions in the protein molecule and modifying the cysteine residues with thiol-specific crosslinking, footprinting and spectroscopic probes, low resolution information regarding contact sites between (i) C5 protein and M1 RNA, and (ii) C5 protein and ptRNA substrates, will be obtained and used to gain structural perspectives critical for elucidating the mechanism of action of RNase P. RNA-protein interactions play an important role in numerous regulatory systems in vivo (e.g., translational control of gene expression). Results from this study will serve as a paradigm for understanding intermolecular interactions in other RNPs that control various prokaryotic and eukaryotic cellular processes. Most of the experiments described above are in progress and will rapidly furnish valuable insights. In addition to integrating laboratory research and education for several undergraduate and graduate students, this project has already helped renew and nurture several academic collaborations doc7356 none Mathews, F.S. Electron transfer between biological macromolecules is fundamental to many biological processes. It usually occurs within a transient complex in which the participating redox centers and the intervening protein are optimally configured to promote and regulate electron flow between the centers. Such complexes are difficult to study structurally since they are intrinsically unstable and usually cannot be crystallized. Methylamine dehydrogenase (MADH), amicyanin and cytochrome c551i from Paracoccus denitrificans form one of the best characterized physiological electron transfer complexes and is the only complex of three soluble redox proteins for which a high resolution structure is available. MADH is an .2 .2 heterodimer of 124 kDa and contains the unusual redox cofactor tryptophan tryptophylquinone (TTQ). Amicyanin is a blue copper protein of 12.5 kDa which interacts specifically with MADH. Cytochrome c551i is a 17.5 kDa protein which can accept electrons from amicyanin and transfer them via another cytochrome to a terminal oxidase. Aromatic amine dehydrogenase (AADH) from Alcaligenes faecalis is similar to MADH in size and quaternary structure and also contains TTQ as it redox cofactor. However, its specific electron acceptor is an azurin and neither MADH nor AADH will efficiently reduce the alternative acceptor protein, azurin nor amicyanin, respectively. The aims of this proposal are (1) to refine the structures of oxidized and reduced amicyanin at both pH 5.5 and 8.0 at atomic resolution (1 .or below), (2) carry out structural studies of additional redox and pH variants and catalytic intermediates of the MADH amicyanin and MADH amicyanin c551I complexes, (3) structurally characterize mutants of amicyanin and of MADH within these complexes, (4) further analyze redox and cation-bound states of MADH from Methylobacillus flagellatum KT and Methylobacterium extorquens AM1, and (5) complete the structure analysis of AADH and of the binary complex between AADH and azurin. The proposed studies of the MADH and AADH enzyme systems will help identify structural features that are important for electron transfer, including those involved in partner recognition, control of electron transfer and determining paths for electron flow within the complexes. In addition, the structural studies of the mechanism of substrate oxidation by the TTQ cofactor will help shed light on how this cofactor functions in vivo and how it differs from other, more common redox cofactors. TTQ is unusual because it is obtained directly from the fusion of two amino acid side chains coded by genomic DNA rather than from a separate biosynthetic pathway. The MADH and AADH systems are well suited to provide an understanding of these important processes at the molecular level doc7357 none Han and Kamdem Rubber (cis-1,4-polyisoprene) is produced in varying quantities and qualities by about 2,000 plant species. This isoprenoid polymer has no identified physiological function in plants, but it has many important industrial uses due to its elasticity, flexibility, and resilience. Although natural rubber is present in many species, only that from the tree Hevea brasiliensis is used commercially. This is due to its combination of high quality, high yield, and ease of harvest. Rubber biosynthesis in plants presents three interesting questions: 1) Why do plants make this metabolically expensive polymer? 2) How is rubber synthesized? 3) What determines the chain length of rubber molecules? The answers to these questions are of keen commercial and scientific interest, but our ability to answer them hinges on the cloning of the rubber polymerase gene(s). Several groups have tried unsuccessfully to clone the gene using conventionally available methods. The recent advances in genomics, however, offer a new opportunity. This project uses a simple but innovative concept to clone the gene(s) encoding rubber polymerase. The investigators will first generate about 1,000 EST s from a subtracted cDNA library that is enriched for latex genes. These will represent a catalog of the genes abundantly expressed in the rubber-producing tissue of H. brasiliensis. The EST s will then be compared with annotated public databases and will be assigned putative functional identifications if possible. The EST s with homology to any genes that are known to function in processes unrelated to the rubber biosynthetic pathway (i.e., the isoprenoid pathway) will be eliminated from further experiments. The remaining cDNA clones will be introduced into an array of yeast strains, each of which will then bear a plasmid expressing a latex cDNA. Yeast already have all the components of the isoprenoid pathway leading to rubber biosynthesis except for the gene(s) encoding the rubber polymerase itself. Ectopic expression of the rubber polymerase gene(s) from Hevea trees may enable the yeast cells to produce natural rubber. The investigators will use two approaches to determine this. In one they will directly test each transformed yeast strain for the ability to synthesize rubber. If, however, yeast require more than one H.brasiliensis gene product for rubber biosynthesis, this approach will not work. Because of that possibility, they will also prepare pools of extracts of the yeast strains, with each pool containing extracts from numerous strains. These pools will then be assayed for in vitro rubber biosynthesis. The investigators will progressively narrow down any pool(s) showing positive results until they identify the individual strain(s) expressing the polymerase gene(s). This pooling elevates yeast complementation to a genomic scale. Natural rubber is an extremely important product with a vast range of uses. It is superior to synthetic, petroleum-based versions for many applications. Unfortunately, its ready availability could be endangered by numerous events such as crop failure or political turmoil. If successful, this novel project will provide society with an efficient and simple alternative: natural rubber harvested from yeast cultures. It will also enable scientists to learn more about natural polymerization and to engineer rubber compounds with special chemical features doc7358 none SUMMARY Polyphosphorylated inositol lipids provide a means for plants to transmit signals within and between cells as well as being key regulators of cellular metabolism in their own right. Plants as sessile organisms respond to most environmental stimuli by altering their pattern of growth. Sustained increases in PI metabolism correlate positively with cell elongation in maize pulvini and with pollen tube growth, and yet little is known about the regulation of plant inositol phospholipid biosynthesis. Phosphatidylinositol 4 monophosphate (PtdIns4P) is the most abundant of the polyphosphorylated lipids in plants. Thus the investigator hypothesizes that it is a key regulator of plant signal transduction. There are two genes encoding PtdIns 4-kinase (PtdIns4K), the enzyme that synthesizes PtdIns4P. One isoform, PtdIns4Kalpha, copurifies with F-actin in plants and has a PH (pleckstrin homology) domain. This preliminary results lead to the hypothesis that the PH domain regulates PtdIns4Kalpha activity and coordinates membrane signaling with actin filament formation. The molecular and biochemical tools are available to test these hypotheses. The goals of this project are: 1. To isolate PtdIns4Kalpha knockout mutants of Arabidopsis, to characterize them biochemically and genetically (micro-array profiling) and to monitor their response to osmotic stress; 2. To identify plant proteins which bind specifically to AtPtdIns4Kalpha. These data are essential to understand how plants as sessile organisms use the PI pathway to sense and respond to external stimuli. By identifying proteins that interact with the lipid kinases, this research will begin to build a network of interacting signaling doc7359 none Plant pathogenic fungi have developed traits that allow their entry and pathogenesis on specific host plants. A key adaptation is the regulation of these traits so that they are expressed at the appropriate time and level, as well as on the correct host. This project focuses upon fungal recognition a host-specific compound for the regulation of its virulence traits. Pisatin, an antimicrobial isoflavonoid, is produced specifically by garden pea (Pisum sativum) as a phytoalexin. Nectria haematococca (anamorph Fusarium solani), a pathogen of pea, is able to recognize and respond to the presence of this host compound. One pisatin-induced trait is the expression of the pisatin demethylase gene (PDA1), which encodes a cytochrome P450 that detoxifies pisatin. Other traits involved in pea pathogenicity are also induced by pisatin, suggesting that pisatin acts as a host-selective cue to coordinate expression of these different traits. Previous NSF-supported research identified a 40 bp regulatory element on the PDA1 promoter that provides the pisatin-response. Manipulation of regulatory elements in the promoter showed that pisatin is the major signal controlling PDA1 expression during pea pathogenesis. A gene encoding a DNA-binding protein that specifically binds the 40 bp pisatin-responsive element was identified using the yeast one-hybrid system. The goal of this project is to test if the encoded DNA-binding protein is a direct determinant of pisatin-responsive PDA1 expression. Transformation will be used to perform targeted gene disruption of this gene in N. haematococca. The effect of disruption upon the pisatin-inducibility PDA1 will be determined. A loss of pisatin-responsive expression will be significant in indicating direct function in pisatin signaling. This will allow future experiments to test if the same DNA-binding protein controls other pisatin-induced pea pathogenicity traits as well. Overall, these results will provide a model of a signaling pathway through which this soilborne plant pathogen is able to chemically detect its host and trigger the traits needed for pathogenesis of that host. This is important for not only understanding the components needed for host-adaptation in plant pathogenesis but for developing future controls of plant disease doc7360 none Beltz The primary goals of these studies are to understand how serotonin, nitric oxide and life-long neurogenesis contribute to the development and maintenance of the olfactory pathway, using in vivo and in vitro methods. The lobster Homarus americanus is used as the experimental system because of the presence of giant serotonergic neurons that innervate the olfactory areas from early embryonic development, and because neurogenesis in the olfactory pathway persists throughout the animal s life. Prior studies have shown that serotonin influences the proliferation of newborn olfactory interneurons and promotes the branching of olfactory projection neurons. Additionally, newborn projection neurons transiently take up serotonin within the first few hours after their birth. There are 4 specific aims of our current studies: 1. The functions that are mediated by the transient serotonin uptake into newborn olfactory projection neurons will be defined using pharmacological agents that block the serotonin transporter, while testing for effects on proliferation and outgrowth of the olfactory interneurons. 2. Preliminary studies in the lobster suggest that nitric oxide (NO) also may be important in the development and maintenance of the olfactory pathway. The NO system will be defined by examining the temporal and spatial regulation of NOS in the brain using immunocytochemical methods. Further, NO levels will be altered experimentally in order to test for effects on the rate of neurogenesis among olfactory interneurons. 3. An in vitro system will be established to test hypotheses emerging from our in vivo studies. The goal of this effort is to successfully culture olfactory interneurons in order to perform three major experiments: to co-culture olfactory projection neurons with the serotonergic dorsal giant neuron, to introduce serotonin into cultures of projection neurons in order to visualize effects on branching, and to have the potential to directly manipulate the NO cGMP pathway and observe whether cultured projection neurons are NO sensitive. 4. One test for our hypotheses regarding the importance of neurogenesis in the development and maintenance of olfactory centers, is to look at these issues in crustacean species that have determinate growth and a defined lifespan. We will therefore ask whether there is persistent proliferation in the olfactory areas of these species before, and then after, a terminal molt. These studies are relevant to developmental mechanisms in higher organisms because there are many parallels between the organization of olfactory pathways and processing even in phylogenetically distant species. In addition, these studies are exploring basic mechanisms involved in the development and maintenance of neural circuits, which may be applicable in a spectrum of other systems doc7361 none Sexual reproduction in most organisms requires two major processes that change the number of chromosome sets (ploidy level), meiosis and fertilization. Meiosis converts diploid somatic cells into haploid gamete cells, the sperm or egg cells. At fertilization, the union of chromosomes from the sperm and egg nuclei restores the diploid state. Not only is meiosis therefore essential for genome maintenance through reproduction, but it is also the stage at which chromosome shuffling and recombination occurs, producing genetic diversity. Although the role of meiosis in establishing the rules of inheritance is well understood and conserved across most higher organisms, relatively little is known about the molecular processes that govern the shuffling and assortment of genetic material during meiosis. The specialized ends of linear chromosomes, the telomeres, cluster together on the nuclear envelope at meiosis in an arrangement now referred to as the bouquet. The work summarized here uses maize (Zea mays, corn) as a model system to investigate the role of telomeres in meiosis. Genetic mutants are being screened by telomere-staining microscopy to permit examination of the relationship between telomere clustering and chromosome segregation during meiosis. This project will result in the identification and characterization of telomere-binding proteins from maize. These telomeric proteins are likely to mediate some aspects of meiotic chromosome behavior. The genes encoding maize telomeric proteins will be molecularly cloned and analyzed for information related to their possible function at meiosis. The proteins encoded by these cloned DNA segments will be tested for their ability to bind specifically to double-stranded telomeric DNA. This work will advance knowledge of the basic mechanisms of meiosis and the biological function of telomeres doc7362 none Prince The Hox genes set up pattern along the anteroposterior axis of developing metazoan embryos. Hox cluster duplication events accompanied vertebrate origins and provided additional patterning information, likely allowing for more complex body plans to arise. Recent work from the P.I. and others has established that in the teleost lineage an additional genome duplication event has led to significant differences between the Hox organization and complement of tetrapods and teleosts. This study will focus on zebrafish hox genes in the anteriorly expressed paralogue group (PG) 1 as a paradigm to compare and contrast gene function and regulation in different vertebrate groups and hence to investigate Hox gene modification during evolution. Preliminary studies have shown that the zebrafish PG1 hox genes are significantly different in terms of organization, expression, and potential function, from those of the tetrapod vertebrates such as mouse. Thus, zebrafish hoxa1a is expressed in a completely different manner to the orthologous mouse Hoxa-1 gene, having a novel anterior expression domain in the ventral midbrain. Furthermore, midbrain expression is shared by medaka, a distantly related teleost species. This study will take a broader comparative approach to determine when in vertebrate evolution this anterior expression arose. Conversely, the zebrafish hoxb1b gene has an expression pattern remarkably similar to that of the non-orthologous mouse Hoxa-1 gene. Preliminary experiments have established that mis-expression of PG1 genes causes a classic posteriorizing homeotic transformation of the hindbrain. Together these data suggest the hypothesis that zebrafish hoxb1b is functionally equivalent to mouse Hoxa-1; this hypothesis will be tested directly using a novel loss-of-function approach based on antisense morpholino RNAs. A similar approach will be used to test redundancy or synergy of function with the duplicate gene hoxb1a doc7333 none A fundamental question in neuroscience is how natural sensory stimuli are encoded for information handling by the brain. Invertebrate animals often offer systems that are in some ways simpler than those of mammals, and including such features as identifiable single cells in networks of relatively few numbers. This collaborative project exploits a sensory system called the cercal system of the cricket, in which small appendages on the rear of the body contain fine hairs that are used to detect, identify and localize behaviorally relevant air current movements, such as those produced by a predator. The input from roughly receptor cells converges on 30 local interneurons and only 20 output interneurons that lead to behavior such as escape. Three collaborators at two institutions use computational and mathematical analyses of a database of anatomical and physiological measurements on the dynamic map that does the central processing in the brain of the peripheral signals. The goals are to characterize the representation of dynamic sensory stimulus parameters at two processing stages within the mapped sensory system, and to examine the mechanisms that transform the representation at the interface between these two processing stages. Results will be important for our understanding of information representation in nervous systems, particularly in dynamic processing. The project also will enhance the independent career of a woman faculty member in mathematics, and students will receive multi-disciplinary, highly quantitative training related to biology, in two states that do not currently have high profiles in federally funded research doc7364 none Many vertebrate animals develop differences in body structure between males and females, known as sexual dimorphism, which traditionally is considered to be regulated by the hormones estrogen and testosterone. Some recent evidence shows that molecular analogs of vitamin A called retinoids, including the metabolite retinoic acid, also play a role in many endocrine pathways. Retinoic acid exerts its effects by binding to molecular receptor molecules in the cell nucleus. This binding activates complex programs including development, cell differentiation and cell death, and is thought to control sequential expression of the homeobox genes which are crucial in the timing of patterns of development. A central question is how amounts of retinoic acid are spatially and temporally controlled during development. This project uses as a model a teleost fish species with prominent post-embryonic development of a sexual dimorphism in skeletal structure and spinal cord. The hypotheses are first, that retinoic acid is differentially synthesized and catabolized in the spinal cord of the nervous system, and second, that the consequent gradients of retinoic acid establish coordinates for developmental control of genes producing the sex-specific pattern of particular vertebrae, spinal ganglia and motor neurons within the spinal cord. Biochemical and molecular approaches are used to determine when, where and how two specific enzymes control the synthesis (retinaldehyde dehydrogenase, RALDH) and degradation (retinoic acid hydroxylase, CYP26) of retinoic acid, thus allowing retinoic acid to be manipulated to study its effects. Results are expected to establish for the first time a link between retinoic acid and sexually dimorphic post-embryonic development and differentiation of the body plan and nervous system. The findings will have an impact beyond neuroendocrinology to developmental biology and physiology. Additional impacts come from promoting the career of a young scientist from an under-represented group, and training students also largely from under-represented groups, in a state institution eligible for the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR doc7365 none The long-term objective of the this research is to develop a gene transfer system for the N2-fixing actinomycete Frankia. However, aspects of Frankia growth and genetics present challenges to the development of gene transfer methods. Among the potential barriers is the slow growth rate of Frankia in laboratory culture. To compound the problem, strains such as strain CpI1, often form tightly packed mycelial masses (pellets) in liquid culture. Pellet morphology may deny sub-populations of cells within the pellet access to nutrients and subsequently limit growth. Pellet formation may also inhibit gene transfer in Frankia by limiting the number of viable target cells available, or by suppressing the growth of genetically altered mycelia. The immediate goal is to clarify and improve on the physiological state of laboratory cultures of Frankia. The results of preliminary growth studies have shown that the anionic polymer, Carbopol 941 (carbopol; BF Goodrich, Cleveland, OH) encourages dispersed growth of Frankia in liquid culture. The PI will investigate the effects of carbopol concentration on the growth rate and morphology of Frankia and, concurrently, test the usefulness of the fluorescent cell impermeant dye Sytox Green (SG; Molecular Probes, Eugene, OR) in determining Frankia viability. SG selectively stains dead or dying cells on the basis of cell membrane integrity. Because the condition of the cell membrane impacts cellular processes, cell viability can be inferred from the staining patterns with SG. The viability of Frankia mycelia and differentiated vesicles growing in the presence and absence of carbopol will be assessed using SG and epifluorescence microscopy. The rationale for this work is that if carbopol can lengthen the exponential growth phase and facilitate dispersed growth, its use in media to prepare recipient cells, or to grow genetically manipulated cells, may increase the potential for introduction of DNA into Frankia, and subsequent expression of recombinant traits doc7366 none GRODZICKER This intense four-day international conference will address current studies into the biological basis of how both animals and humans learn and remember. Rapid advances are being made in this field of neurobiology, revealing underlying mechanisms of learning and memory shared across much of the animal kingdom. Research into learning and memory is being carried out in many laboratories around the world, at many levels (molecules, cells, networks of cells, brain regions, as well as at the level of the whole brain), and in a variety of human and animal systems. Ongoing research is providing new insights into how the brain acquires and processes novel information, and how that newly acquired information is stored and retrieved in the form of memory. Repeatedly, scientists are finding common neurobiological themes emerging across a wide range of organisms; progress gained in a variety of systems, and using a plethora of differing techniques, is rapidly becoming integrated into a comprehensive view of how information acquisition and storage are handled in the brain. This conference seeks to bring together both established and young scientists working in this broad field, and to provide a forum for integrating traditionally separate areas of research. For example, scientists who study this problem in invertebrates such as flies and worms, using classical neurobiological and genetic techniques, will meet together with scientists working with human subjects, using non-invasive imaging techniques such as functional MRI. These interactions will benefit scientists working at every level in this field doc7367 none Robert Reenan Adenosine-to-inosine (A-to-I) pre-mRNA editing hydrolytically deaminates A-to-I in target messenger RNA through the action of adenosine deaminases that act on RNA (ADARs). Inosine is interpreted as guanosine during translation, and the resulting non-templated recoding of the genetic information can introduce single amino acid changes that have dramatic effects on protein function. The process of A-to-I pre-mRNA editing itself has been demonstrated in both invertebrates and vertebrates, primarily in transcripts encoding voltage- and ligand-gated ion channels and receptors of the nervous system. It is the goal of this project to utilize Drosophila and other insect genera to create a natural history of RNA editing. Such a record will be used to directly address three important areas of this evolutionarily conserved but mysterious process. First, DNA sequence data from different species will be compared to identify the most highly conserved sequence elements necessary to form an ADAR substrate in a pre-mRNA and to determine the distribution of editing sites among species. Secondly, because each editing site is modified at a different frequency, levels of editing for given sites between species will be quantitated, and editing efficiency will be correlated with structural elements. Lastly, these data will be employed to genetically modify editing of particular sites or subsets of sites in vivo. Such experiments will address how the modification of individual editing sites affects organismal behavior and nervous system function. The project summarized here will not only provide molecular systematic data of a novel kind, but promises to deliver a deeper understanding of the process and purpose of RNA editing. Also, a detailed phylogenetic study of RNA editing such as this may also provide ammunition for new population genetic and molecular biogeographic studies into the distribution of variation in the editing process. Moreover, such advances will serve to assist in developing methods that would apply not only to Drosophila, but also in identifying and studying RNA editing sites in humans doc7368 none This proposal describes several problems that involve organic molecules containing silicon, the atom just below carbon in the periodic table. The presence of silicon offers several advantages and, in fact, is the key component of all these problems. First, the high strength of the silicon-oxygen bond enables complex molecules to be self-assembled. Large rings with nanometer-sized cavities are designed to serve as hosts. Molecular recognition of the Si-O bond will demonstrate that organic-silicon compounds can have an interesting and useful aqueous chemistry. A new family of reagents will exert control on reactivity so that a single mirror image product is favored (enantioselectivity). Second, silicon is used to construct new molecular spherical and hemispherical cavities. Cyclodextrins and calixarenes will be attached to an organosilicate network to prepare microporous structures capable of binding with small molecules. An entirely new cavity-containing system that derives from a central silicon atom will be prepared. Third, electron transfer will be characterized along an all-silicon molecular backbone, that is, a silicon wire. This study will be the first attempt to characterize a molecular-sized wire based on an entirely non-carbon pathway. Fourth, new systems will be prepared in which silicon is positively charged and attached to only three other groups (silylium cations). And, fifth, silicon reagents will be used to prepare, at room temperature, new systems containing positively charged carbon (carbocations). With this renewal award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Joseph B. Lambert of the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University. Professor Lambert will focus his work on incorporating silicon into normal analogues of carbon compounds or into novel structures to create molecules with potentially important properties. The properties may be of theoretical interest or they may offer new practical applications. The scope of the project is increased by exploiting one of the reactions to devise a new method to add the silicon-hydrogen bond to carbon-carbon double bonds (hydrosilylation) in a process that is catalytic but avoids the use of precious metals necessary in the current process doc7369 none All organisms must regulate metal homeostasis, which involves metal uptake, transport, storage, and distribution. The goal of this research is to gain insight into the basic mechanisms by which heavy metal homeostasis is regulated in plants, particularly in the chloroplast. The chloroplast is the location of photosynthesis, the process that drives all life on earth. This complex process involves a set of enzymes and pigments, many of which require specific heavy metal ions as cofactors, e.g. copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, and zinc. Although these metals are necessary components of the photosynthetic machinery - as well as of other enzymes in the cell - they are toxic when present in excess. Therefore, chloroplast copper homeostasis is vital for plant heath and productivity. This project focuses on two Arabidopsis thaliana genes, PAA1 and AtCUTA, both thought to be involved in metal homeostasis. Judged from the presence of putative chloroplast import sequences, both gene products are predicted to be functional in the chloroplast. Based on similarities with genes cloned from other sources, Paa1 protein is likely involved in copper transport, and AtCutA protein in the regulation of copper tolerance. These hypotheses regarding the location and functions of these proteins are analyzed in this project. The mRNA levels of both genes will be analyzed with respect to tissue distribution, developmental stage, and environmental conditions such as metal toxicity or metal deficiency. The intracellular location of the proteins encoded by the genes will be determined. To investigate the functions of the genes in vivo, Dr.Pilon will analyze plant lines that have T-DNA insertions and plant lines that overexpress the genes. They will be studied with respect to metal homeostasis and assembly of the photosynthetic apparatus. Finally, the metal binding properties and metal specificity of the encoded proteins will be determined. The results from this project will provide much-needed fundamental knowledge about heavy metal homeostasis mechanisms in chloroplasts, a largely unexplored field of research. In addition, this work may lead to the development of strategies to manipulate metal tolerance and accumulation in plants. This, in turn, may be used to increase crop yields and nutritional value of plants, or to help clean up metal-contaminated sites doc7370 none PROJECT SUMMARY The nucleolus is a highly dynamic sub-organellar compartment whose diverse roles are now only beginning to be understood. One such function involves the assembly of spliceosomes, a function poorly understood. This project will determine the pathway and mechanism by which the U6 snRNA travels through the nucleolus prior to its assembly into spliceosomes. The results of this project should thus provide new and important insights into this aspect of nucleolar function. The sequences required for nucleolar localization or nucleolar export of U6 snRNA will be identified by injection into Xenopus oocytes of fluorescein-labeled transcripts of U6 snRNA carrying various mutations with subsequent analysis of nucleolar preparations by microscopy. A mini-construct containing the identified nucleolar localization elements (NoLEs) of U6 snRNA fused to unrelated sequences will reveal if the sequences identified as NoLEs are not only required but also sufficient for nucleolar localization. A fusion construct of U6 nucleolar export sequences and the snoRNA Box C D terminal stem motif will be studied. Primer extension assays will be employed to elucidate if nucleolar localization of U6 is required for its modification (2 -O-methylations and pseudouridylations). Modification will be examined for endogenous U6, and for synthetic wild type U6 and synthetic mutant U6 (that cannot localize to nucleoli) which have been injected into oocytes depleted of endogenous U6 snRNA. A mini-construct containing a fusion of the region of U6 which becomes methylated by the guide snoRNA mgU6-77 with 40 nt of unrelated sequence will be tested for nucleolar localization after depletion of the guide snoRNA to investigate whether guide snoRNAs play a role in U6 snRNA nucleolar localization. Synthetic copies of fluorescein-labelled U4 or U5 snRNAs will be injected into Xenopus oocytes to examine if they localize transiently in nucleoli. If so, antisense oligonucleotide mediated depletion of U6 snRNA will reveal if U4 and U5 snRNA nucleolar localization require the presence of U6, or, conversely with depletion of U4 or U5 snRNAs, if U6 nucleolar localization requires U4 or U5 snRNAs. The same set of experiments will also be carried out at longer time points after injection to inquire if the nucleolar export of U6 snRNA requires U4 and or U5 snRNP, and to analyze if export occurs only after the di-snRNP and or tri-snRNP have formed. A candidate protein that may mediate the nucleolar localization of U6 snRNA by binding to its NoLEs is the La protein. La binds to the 3 end of U6 snRNA, within the region that is required for nucleolar localization. The 3 -OH of synthetic U6 snRNA will be converted to a 3 phosphate to prevent association with La, thus allowing analysis of whether La binding is required for U6 snRNA nucleolar localization. If so, the specific region within La that targets this protein to the nucleolus will be determined, and whether the state of La phosphorylation is important for transient localization to the nucleolus doc7371 none Ferrari This project will test the general hypothesis that calcium (Ca 2+ ) transients within the presomitic mesoderm (PSM) and forming somites are necessary for somitogenesis (SMG). The specific aims are to 1) determine if somite formation is directed by Ca 2+ transients and, 2) examine the relationship between somitogenic gene expression and Ca 2+ transients. The morphogenetic movements which produce somites have been described, but the cellular control mechanisms have remained elusive. However, recent observations indicate that several genes are expressed with spatiotemporal patterns corresponding to somite formation. For example, the bHLH transcription factor c-hairy-1, a pair-rule segmentation gene, is transcribed such that the time for a single oscillation equals the time to form one somite. These patterns have generated much excitement, as they are consistent with theoretical models based on a clock and wave somite formation mechanism. However, the biochemical or molecular nature of this segmentation clock remains unknown. This proposal will test the hypothesis that Ca 2+ transients may form part of the clock mechanism and or serve to entrain cell populations via intercellular Ca 2+ waves. Ca 2+ signaling appears to play an important role in SMG. In both zebrafish and Xenopus, a high degree of Ca 2+ transient activity exists in the PSM and forming somites, and when this activity is blocked SMG is disrupted. Since somites are produced with high regularity, significant correlations between this process and Ca 2+ signals are possible. This regular patterning allows even subtle defects to be detected after experimental manipulation of Ca 2+ signaling. A large array of fluorescent compounds exist for observing and modulating both intra- and intercellular Ca 2+ signals. These fluoroprobes are used in conjunction with high-resolution fluorescence microscopy of living Xenopus embryos and explants. Of particular utility are a number of caged compounds, which can be photoactivated with temporal and spatial specificity to control Ca 2+ dynamics. Using these compounds, experiments are planned to determine if transients are part of an epigenetic signaling pathway responsible for somite patterning. For example, transients will be inhibited in specific regions of the PSM by photoreleasing BAPTA, a high affinty Ca 2+ chelator. These regions will then be examined for the ability to form somites and produce the correct pattern of somitogenic gene expression. The proposed work may further our understanding of how epigenetic signals can control and modify morphogenetic events doc7372 none Temperature controls plant growth and development and is ultimately one of the most significant factors limiting crop productivity. As temperature goes above or below a plant s optimal range plant growth is affected. The effects of temperature and methods for reducing damage by both high and low temperature has been the topic of a Gordon Research Conference every other year for a little over 10 years. In this conference will be held again so that researchers can share the latest research in this field. The topics to be covered in the conference were selected from topics suggested by previous participants and past chairs of this conference. In addition, the co-chairs searched recently published papers to see where interesting work was being reported. Two general themes emerged. Past participants wanted to hear about genomic approaches to studying temperature stress and they wanted to hear about industry efforts. One of the most important outcomes from a Gordon Conference is the interaction between early career and more established scientists. This is of benefit both to the early career scientists, who become known in the field, and to the established scientists, who hear new ideas and innovative research that might otherwise have trouble getting noticed. At this conference one session will be set aside for presentations from early career scientists. Speakers for this session will be selected from among those applying to present posters. Winners will receive funding from this grant to allow them to attend this conference. The winners will be announced at least three weeks ahead of the meeting giving winners time to prepare talks. The competition will be announced on the meeting web site and in an email message to everyone who attended the last two conferences. The conference vice chair will be responsible for selecting the winners and working with the winners to help make the most of this opportunity doc7373 none Vincent Catalano of the University of Nevada at Reno is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program in research on design, synthesis and characterization of a new class of metal-containing cage complexes. These complexes are called metallocryptates. Synthesis of a large number of phosphine-based ligands will be followed by study of the binding of various d10 metal species (such as Ag(I) and Au(I)), and of anions, with those ligands. Spectroscopic and photochemical studies will be carried out on the complexes thus produced, in order to clarify important new effects (including special features of metal-metal bonding) made possible by this mode of complex formation. Previous NSF-funded work by this research group has demonstrated that molecular structures that have metal ions as components can serve to encapsulate yet other metallic species, and further that this mode of complex formation can generate phenomena that are not otherwise observable. For example, when cations of gold (aurous ions) are incorporated as guests into metal-containing host molecules, intense luminescence due to gold-gold interactions develops. In this case, the encapsulating ligand protects the gold dimer from disruption. In the current phase of the work, promising leads will be followed up, and new phenomena sought doc7374 none Lecomte, Juliette Cyanobacteria are oxygenic prokaryotes now known to produce a hemoglobin (Hb) related to certain bacterial and protozoan hemoglobins. Although in nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria, hemoglobin appears to protect the nitrogenase complex from oxidative damage, in non-nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria, such as Synechocystis sp. PCC , the role of hemoglobin remains a mystery. The immediate goal of this project is to study the relationship between structure and reactivity in the hemoglobin of Synechocystis. Biophysical methods (NMR spectroscopy, optical spectroscopy, centrifugation, redox potential measurements) and biochemical methods (genetic manipulations, immunostaining techniques, phenotypic characterization, site-directed mutagenesis) will be applied to 1) investigate Synechocystis Hb in vivo; 2) determine its three-dimensional structure in solution; and 3) analyze the molecular determinants of its heme coordination and electrochemical properties. Comparison will be made to other hemoglobins to develop an atomic level understanding of heme reactivity in cyanobacterial globins and situate these proteins in their evolutionary context. The globin family of proteins has representatives in practically all kingdoms of organisms. In vertebrates, hemoglobins and myoglobins are responsible for the transport and storage of oxygen but in primitive organisms, the functional roles of globins include oxygen scavenging, delivery, sensing, and detoxification, and management of nitrosative stress. Cyanobacteria such as Synechocystis can be manipulated experimentally like other prokaryotes and subjected to genetic methods. Thus they are ideally suited for studies of ancient hemoglobins. A description of the function of cyanobacterial hemoglobins is expected to provide fundamental insight in the biochemistry of organisms essential in the global cycling of carbon and nitrogen. The project will serve as a support in teaching activities such as a biological chemistry course and an NMR course. It will provide excellent opportunities for undergraduate and graduate student training in biophysical and biochemical methods and foster multidisciplinary interactions doc7375 none Proposal PI: Keshishian, Haig : One of the ways a nervous system undergoes change is to modify the connections between nerve cells. This often requires the action of specialized secreted enzymes, which degrade or otherwise modify the local cellular environment, thus permitting modifications in the connections between neurons and their targets. An important class of these secreted enzymes is the serine proteinases . These proteinases are widely conserved in evolution, and have been shown to be important in both the establishment and modification of neural connections during development, as well as in the later modifications associated with learning and memory. Serine proteinases are in turn regulated by a special class of proteins known as serpins (serine proteinase inhibitors). The serpins and serine proteinases, therefore, function as an interdependent system of secreted proteins of key importance in regulating nervous system change. In order to understand these proteins better Dr. Keshishian will examine their biological functions in a model genetic system, Drosophila. In Drosophila Dr. Keshishian has already identified the key neuroserpin of the nervous system, and has noted that it is expressed at connections between motoneurons and muscles. The major goal is to examine its functions at the developing neuromuscular connections, and to test the effects of both its loss and overexpression. The Drosophila neuroserpin is closely related to its mammalian counterpart, and insights gained in Drosophila about its function and regulation will be of value in understanding how the serpins influence nervous system development in general doc7376 none Communication between individuals is ultimately dependent on the functioning of sensory organs, such as eyes or ears, and is affected by a variety of factors, ranging from the physics of signal transmission in the microhabitat, to the neural characteristics of peripheral receptor organs. Although mate choice scenarios have been thoroughly investigated, the evolutionary links between the environment and sensory systems remain virtually unexplored. Notable exceptions occur in fairly advanced vertebrate groups such as frogs and fish. However, the vertebrate central nervous system is almost certainly more plastic than is the peripheral nervous system, and changes in sensory characteristics at this level are difficult to evaluate. In contrast, sensory change in invertebrates is considerably more concentrated at the periphery, thus invertebrates may provide useful model systems. Bladder grasshoppers (Orthoptera, Pneumoridae) are highly specialized for long distance (~2 km) acoustic signaling and presently occupy a range of contrasting sensory-ecological environments. This small family, in which each individual has a dozen ears of two distinct types, offers a unique opportunity to investigate the role of sensory biology in evolutionary processes. The contributions of environmental constraints and ear structure and function will be explored in this ancient group. To determine whether habitat is a significant selection pressure for divergent calling songs, a series of acoustic playback experiments will be performed to compare the efficiency of sound transmission in forest, grassland and desert habitats. The detailed morphological structure of both a tympanate- and pleural ears will be compared across species, and microscanning laser vibrometry will yield relative estimates of ear tuning and sensitivity. These will indicate to what extent ears are matched to the frequency spectra of species-specific calls, and the potential for sensory partitioning across different habitats. Finally, the evolutionary history of the pneumorid family will be reconstructed using DNA sequencing of the mitochondrial 16S rRNA gene to provide the infrastructure for integrated comparative analyses. This project involves international travel, and will be carried out in collaboration with several undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral associates. The results of this study will provide insight into the complex associations that exist between the environment and sensory systems, and the potential role of these interactions in the speciation process. Moreover, evolved features of these unique invertebrate ears may be relevant in the design of small, highly sensitive hearing devices doc7377 none The ciliated protozoa possess an unusual genome organization that effectively divides the labor of somatic and germline genetic functions between two distinct nuclei. The micronucleus is the germline nucleus, divides mitotically during vegetative growth, is diploid (2N = 10 for Tetrahymena), and is transcriptionally silent. In contrast, the macronucleus is the somatic nucleus, divides amitotically, contains multiple copies of all genes, and is transcriptionally active. Sexual reproduction, or conjugation, is a tightly controlled process in Tetrahymena whose progression follows a predictable pattern over approximately twelve hours. Soon after two Tetrahymena cells of opposite mating type form a conjugating pair, the micronuclei undergo a series of meiotic and mitotic divisions. Following these nuclear divisions, conjugants exchange haploid nuclei, which then fuse to produce a zygotic, diploid nucleus. Late in conjugation the parental macronuclei are destroyed, and a new macronucleus develops from a copy of the zygotic micronucleus. Macronuclear development proceeds in a pre-programmed and controlled manner that involves a series of site-specific chromosome breakage and DNA deletion events. A functional study of the highly conserved DNA strand transfer protein Rad51 (the eukaryotic homolog to the bacterial recA recombinase) from Tetrahymena thermophila has been initiated. Tetrahymena RAD51 expression varies under a number of different environmental conditions and developmental stages. RAD51 expression increases following exposure to DNA damaging agents. In addition, RAD51 levels vary during both the vegetative cell cycle and conjugation. Disruption of the somatic RAD51 locus results in failure of conjugating cells to complete meiosis, and in vegetative cell cycle defects that lead to an accumulation of hypodiploid cells. Conjugation of germline, homozygous rad51 null strains lead to a block of the first vegetative cell division following conjugation, resulting in an arrest at the exconjugant developmental stage. In order to more precisely decipher the role of Rad51p during conjugation, a conditional, temperature sensitive (t.s.) allele of Tetrahymena RAD51 will be identified. Plasmid-encoded Tetrahymena Rad51p will be tested for complementation of a yeast rad51 null strain. Successful complementation will make it possible to directly screen for Tetrahymena RAD51 t.s. alleles in yeast. If the Tetrahymena RAD51 homolog fails to complement a yeast rad51 null strain, plasmid-encoded yeast RAD51 will be mutagenized, introduced into a rad51 null strain, and screened for a t.s. allele. Missense mutations of conserved amino acid(s) that confer a t.s. phenotype to the yeast Rad51p will be introduced to the Tetrahymena homolog, which will subsequently be expressed in Tetrahymena rad51 null exconjugants. A RAD51 conditional mutant that can be inactivated during conjugation at the restrictive temperature will provide insight into how developmentally controlled genome rearrangements in Tetrahymena, including those leading to rDNA palindrome formation, are mediated. A more complete understanding of these developmentally controlled recombination will provide insight into how similar processes are achieved in other organisms, such as the rearrangement of vertebrate immunoglobulin genes. Mechanisms by which DNA sequences are rearranged can be more easily explored and understood using a single-celled model organism such as Tetrahymena doc7378 none This project is concerned with the mechanisms generating genetic diversity among ascomycete fungi enabling them to adapt to a broad array of habitats as saprophytes and pathogens. While gene duplication and divergence are presumed to play an important role in evolving an array of chemical weaponry for this purpose, the hypothesis is that many toxins, enzymes and antibiotics are of bacterial, specifically streptomycete origin, and have been acquired by horizontal gene transfer. An expressed sequence tag project (http: TEGR.umd.edu) on the ascomycete insect pathogen Metarhizium anisopliae identified 15 genes encoding enzymes and toxins that have counterparts in various streptomycetes. Some of these genes have so far been found only in M. anisopliae among eukaryotes, while others have also been found in some related plant and insect pathogens. To date, available sequence data derives from a small number of species, insufficient to conduct a comparative analysis on the evolution of gene diversity. This project will employ PCR techniques to sample representative fungal lineages to confirm the origin and identify recipients of these streptomycete-like sequences. Phylogenetic modeling will be used to deduce the number and timing of any transfer events, the direction in which they occurred and the extent to which genes have been lost from different fungal lineages. To investigate the role of gene duplication and divergence in a large family of pathogenicity-related genes, a comparison of subtilisin-like protease sequences among genotypic classes of M. anisopliae to elucidate the relationships of these genes and determine how orthologs have diverged through recent selection on different hosts will be conducted. By calculating rates of mutations the extent to which the subtilisins comprise a rapidly duplicating multigene family and whether they are diversifying by strong selective pressure (positive Darwinian evolution) or random fixation of neutral mutations will be determined. Together, these experiments will provide important new information on fungal genes that contribute to ecological diversification and could lead to reinterpretation of ascomycete gene diversity in the context of streptomycete gene diversity and gene transfer doc7379 none Cook Enzymes are powerful catalysts that increase the rate of a biochemical reaction up to -times compared to the reaction in the absence of enzyme. To modulate an enzyme s activity or to design a new catalyst, it is of import to understand how enzymes catalyze their reaction. A number of enzymes catalyze their reaction via several steps. Thus, overlaying the catalytic role of the enzyme in each of the individual chemical steps is the ability of the enzyme to orchestrate the overall reaction as it proceeds from one step to the other. Research will be conducted to determine information on the advantages derived from acid and base catalysis, Lewis acid catalysis, and substrate binding energy for the metal ion dependent malic enzyme (ME) and the metal ion independent 6-phosphogluconate dehydrogenase (6PGDH). The overall goal will be achieved via the following specific aims. 1. The rates of individual steps along the reaction pathway will be estimated for both enzymes. 2. The analog 2-deoxy-6PG rapidly undergoes the first (but not the second) step of the 6PGDH reaction. It will be used to separate the 6PGDH reaction into individual steps. In addition, mutant 6PGDHs and MEs with impaired catalytic groups will be used to produce defects along the catalytic cycles of the respective enzymes, allowing isolation of each of the chemical steps. 3. Site-directed mutagenesis will be used to identify enzyme residues involved in catalysis and binding in the ME and 6PGDH reactions. For both enzymes, all mutants will be characterized with respect to their structural integrity, binding of reactants, and kinetic and chemical mechanism doc7380 none In contrast to the acid stomach of vertebrates, the anterior stomach of mosquito larvae is very alkaline (pH10). More acidic conditions are restored in the posterior stomach. These observations suggest that, while the animal is feeding, the stomach epithelium continuously recycles alkali between the gut of the animal and its physiological interior. Disturbance that causes the animal to stop feeding and initiate escape behavior interrupts gut alkalinization, suggesting a tight neural and or endocrine control of the process. It is already clear that some transport proteins characteristic of other well-studied acid or alkali secreting cells are present in the cells of the mosquito larval stomach. Although this group of researchers has identified a vacuolar-type H+ ATPase and at least one anion exchanger, other transporters involved in this system are not known. The gut is innervated by axons that express immunoreactivity to the neurotransmitter serotonin and to nitric oxide synthase, the enzyme responsible for synthesis of the transmitter nitric oxide. The gut epithelium contains endocrine cells that show immunoreactivity to peptide hormones belonging to the FMRFamide family. The effects of serotonin on the anterior stomach have been partly described, and it appears that it, plus an additional messenger or messengers, constitute a sufficient stimulatory signal for gut alkalinization. It is probable that there are also inhibitory signals that come from the CNS and or the gut itself. The major questions of the project are aimed at the cellular mechanisms that drive alkalinization of the anterior gut, reacidification in the posterior stomach, and the identity of the neural and endocrine control pathways. Development of isolated, perfused preparations of the stomach by this team of investigators was a critical basis for the projected studies, because they allow experiments that would be impossible in the whole animal: electrophysiological characterization of transport mechanisms by measurement of the transepithelial voltage of the tissue, the intracellular voltages and ionic concentrations using ion-specific intracellular microelectrodes, and the transepithelial ionic fluxes using isotopes. The perfused preparations also will be used to assay the activities of candidate control neuropeptides. In a parallel experimental approach, the presence and cellular locations of known transport proteins will be determined by fluorescence immunohistochemistry, a technique in which antibodies generated against defined molecular targets are localized by fluorescently tagged secondary antibodies. Mosquitoes are by far the world s most medically significant insects. They are potential vectors for approximately 100 arboviruses that cause human disease, including yellow fever, dengue and a number of forms of encephalitis. They also transmit nematodes that cause elephantiasis, and plasmodia that cause malaria. The larval mosquito is an aquatic form that feeds on detritus. Although the larval form does not transmit disease, it may be more vulnerable to 3rd generation control measures than adults, because larvae are generally concentrated in aquatic breeding sites whereas the winged adults disperse widely. Gut alkalinization is believed to protect the animal from infection by killing ingested microbes and viruses. Weakening of this mechanism by a specific attack on the cellular processes, or their control signals, could make the larvae more susceptible to endemic or applied microbial pathogens. This project could provide the knowledge base for such an approach doc7381 none Beck, Warren F. Photosynthesis is responsible for most of the biological energy and oxygen on this planet. The first event in photosynthesis is primary charge separation at the reaction center chlorophyll pair. This research program will employ femtosecond coherent Raman spectroscopy to study the excited-state vibrational motions of bacteriochlorophyll dimers. The experimental focus is on the pair of bacteriochlorophylls in the B820 subunit of the purple bacterial light-harvesting protein LH1. B820 shares many of the structural features of the primary electron donor P of the purple bacterial reaction center. The research plan is designed to test the hypothesis that bacteriochlorophyll dimers undergo a nearly barrierless adiabatic surface crossing to a charge-transfer state following excitation of the lower exciton state. The main idea is that certain normal modes of vibration of the bacteriochlorophyll monomer and possibly collective modes of the bacteriochlorophyll dimer serve to mix electronic charge-transfer states with the neutral dimer exciton states. Femtosecond coherent Raman spectroscopy will be conducted with impulsive pump-probe and transient grating methods to detect the vibrational modes that mix the neutral and charge-transfer excited states of the bacteriochlorophyll dimer. The Raman spectra that are obtained with the B820 system will be compared with those that are observed in B777, the monomeric species that is prepared by splitting B820 into single bacteriochlorophyll-polypeptide complexes. In addition, synthetic alpha and beta polypeptides will be used to prepare pure systems containing alpha, beta and beta2 hosts for bacteriochlorophyll dimers. The research program will address how photosynthesis involves paired chlorophyll structures. In broader terms the work will address the role of vibrational coherence in fast chemical reactions in proteins doc7382 none Maintenance of genomic integrity is of utmost importance to living organisms. An intricate system of enzymes has evolved to deal with the tremendous task of replicating chromosomes once and only once per cell division cycle while maintaining genetic information with great accuracy. Among those enzymes are a group of DNA polymerases which catalyze the polymerization of nucleotides during the replication process. However, those enzymes are associated with a large complex of accessory protein known collectively as the replication complex . The components of that complex are required not only for DNA replication, but also for editing errors, organizing topology, and regulating progression through the cell division cycle. The mechanisms that restrict cell cycle progression, including mitosis, when DNA is incompletely or improperly replicated are known as checkpoints. DNA polymerase epsilon (Pol epsilon), one of the three major replicative polymerases, appears to play roles in all of these processes. Defects in those processes can lead to an increased mutation rate and genomic instability. This project is directed at understanding the roles of Pol epsilon. This enzyme is involved in DNA replication, repair, checkpoint regulation of cell cycle progression and in cell viability. It is not unexpected that, as a major replicative polymerase, Pol epsilon is essential. Yet, surprisingly, recent evidence has shown that the essential function of this enzyme does not require its enzymatic activity but instead involves regions of the protein of unknown function. This project will extend those studies to elucidate the essential function of this domain of the protein and, thereby, the essential function of DNA Pol epsilon. The experiments employ a wide array of molecular, genetic, and cell biological techniques including recombinant DNA technology, protein biochemistry, mass spectrometry, flow cytometry, chromatin immunoprecipitation, and targeted proteolysis, among others. The project will employ both postdoctoral trainees and graduate students, training them in eukaryotic microbial genetics, biochemistry and modern molecular and cell biology. It is anticipated that the discoveries made in the context of this research will contribute to the general population in the form of improved understanding of a basic biological process, DNA replication doc7383 none Singel The discovery by Furchgott of an endothelium-derived relaxing factor (EDRF) and its subsequent identification with NO raise an intriguing problem: in regulating vascular tension and blood flow, how does NO avoid being hoarded or destroyed by well-known reactions with hemoglobin (Hb) to form Hb-heme-iron(II) nitrosyl complexes or nitrate? The recent discovery, by Stamler and co-workers, of an S-nitrosylated derivative of hemoglobin (SNO-Hb) in vivo, and the ongoing elucidation of its biological activities, suggest a means to evade both such fates. Evidently, the previously unsuspected NO Hb reaction channel - S-nitrosylation - can effectively compete with the Hb-Fe(II)-NO and nitrate forming reactions. Moreover, these studies suggest a dynamical cycle in which the NO-group is alternatively largely sequestered (Hb-Fe(II)-NO) or made available for delivery (Hb-SNO), in response to the cyclic variation in oxygen tension during the arterial venous transit. The implicated iron-to-sulfur NO-group transfer chemistry appears to be linked to the cooperative oxygen delivery function of Hb. The broad aim of this project is to generate experimental results that test these ideas, and provide critical observations for further development of the model. A direct competition (competitive kinetics) method recently introduced by Gow et al. will be utilized to characterize the relative rates of the reactions that occur upon exposure of oxygenated Hb to NO and its congeners. The experiments are designed to detect the dependence of the relative kinetic behavior on the oxygen-saturation of Hb, and to probe the link between this behavior and the allosteric state of Hb. The reaction competition is assessed by detection of the heme-iron(II) nitrosyl-Hb, SNO-Hb, Fe(III)-metHb, and nitrate products through EPR (electron paramagnetic resonance) spectroscopy, UV VIS spectroscopy, and chemiluminescence techniques. The chemical behavior will be characterized over a range of conditions -temperature, pH, CO2 tension, organic phosphate concentration - that: 1) focus on the standard physiological conditions relevant to testing the biological significance of the NO Hb chemical pathways; but also 2) embrace non-physiological conditions that have assumed a standard role in studies of Hb allostery. Experiments designed to demonstrate that iron(II)-nitrosyl complexes in Hb can serve as a labile, accessible reservoir, rather than a sink of NO-groups (alpha-heme-iron(II) nitrosyls) will also be undertaken. EPR and chemiluminescence methods will be utilized to monitor the migration of the NO-group during variation of hemoglobin ligation state (oxy, deoxy, met). This reactive behavior will also be studied under conditions of physiological significance and under conditions known to affect the allosteric behavior of Hb doc7384 none DNA damage repair is essential for the maintenance of genetic integrity in all organisms. Unrepaired or imprecisely repaired DNA can lead to DNA alterations, cell death, or transformation of cells. DNA damage specifically in the form of chromosomal breaks can occur both from treatment of cells with DNA damaging agents, as well as from normal metabolic processes such as DNA replication. Mammalian cells were initially thought to repair DSBs almost exclusively by a process in which the broken ends are joined using little or no sequence homology, i.e., by a process that does not recognize if the DNA sequence at the ends are highly related to each other. However, recent studies have demonstrated that repair of chromosome breaks occurs frequently also by homologous recombination. In this process, an identical or nearly identical DNA molecule provides the sequence information for the repair of the broken DNA molecule. Experiments that examin the repair of chromosome breaks in mouse cells in which two different chromosomes were involved has begun. Repair events involving two chromosomes have the potential to cause genomic rearrangements, including translocations. This project is aimed at understanding break repair in terms of the role of different repair mechanisms in maintaining genomic stability doc7385 none The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae has been a powerful model system for the study of many fundamental processes in cell biology. One important unsolved cell biology problem is how cells sense and defend themselves against chemical attack by other cells. To directly study this problem, this research will develop a yeast-mouse macrophage co-culture system to uncover and analyze the signaling pathways and genomic responses of yeast to specific noxious chemicals, e.g., nitric oxide and superoxide anion, released by macrophages. In previous results, it was demonstrated that the osmostress sensing MAP kinase pathway called the HOG pathway also functions to sense and respond to oxidants. The goals of this research are: 1.) a combination of two different approaches will be used to identify the yeast signaling pathways activated by macrophage-produced superoxide, nitric oxide, and non-oxidant attacking chemicals, respectively. First, genome-wide analysis of mRNA expression using hybridization to DNA microarrays will be used to define the different sets of yeast genes that are specifically induced by macrophages producing nitric oxide and not superoxide or producing superoxide and not nitric oxide, etc. Second, yeast strains with deletions of putative defense signaling pathway genes will be analyzed and compared to a wild type strain for changes in gene induction and survival in response to macrophage-produced superoxide, nitric oxide, and non-oxidant attacking chemicals, respectively. 2.) the transcription factor target of the HOG pathway involved in the oxidant response will be identified by three complementary approaches. The promoter sequences necessary for HOG pathway-dependent, oxidant-induced expression of the thioredoxin gene TRX2 will be identified by mutational analysis of a TRX2-lacZ reporter gene. The HOG pathway dependent, oxidant-induced set of yeast genes will be identified using hybridization to DNA microarrays. Finally, yeast strains with deletions of putative HOG pathway transcription factors will be analyzed and compared to a wild type strain for changes in oxidant-induced TRX2-lacZ expression and genome-wide changes in gene expression doc7386 none Molecular Mechanisms of Receptive Field Formation and Adaptation in the Vertebrate Retina PI: Robert Paul Malchow, Ph.D. Vision begins with the absorption of light by photoreceptors, which is followed by extensive processing of visual signals by cells within the retina. This cellular processing is absolutely essential for normal visual perception to take place. The molecular mechanisms responsible for such processing in the outer retina remain unclear, but it has been suggested that hydrogen ions and nitric oxide may play important roles in this process. The current proposal seeks to use newly-developed self-referencing electrodes, with greatly heightened sensitivity and stability, to measure the release of these substances from retinal cells and to study their modulation. This work will provide much needed information on the basic cellular and molecular mechanisms used by retinal cells to contribute to normal vision, and will provide a groundwork to understand abnormalities in vision that occur when these processes fail to function normally. This work will also offer training opportunities for students, including women and minorities, at the graduate and undergraduate level, to learn about newly developed experimental methods employed in the study of sensory processing doc7387 none PIs: Suflita and Wall Institution: U of Oklahoma and U of Missouri Proposal #: The PIs request a travel grant to support up to 10 US early career scientists (postdocs) for up to 6 months in European laboratories. While there, they would learn the latest bioremediation techniques being developed in the labs and participate in research and seminar activities. A counterpart EU proposal has been submitted to the appropriate European institution to support the travel of up to 10 European postodcs to labs in the US for a similar purpose. This young scientist exchange program grew out of the US EC Task Force on Biotechnology activities in the area of Environmental Biotechnology. It follows up successful multi-national workshops held in Brussels in and Granada in and an intensive training course held at Rutgers University in . The two PIs who will manage the travel grants have been active members of the Environmental Biotechnology Working Group that has developed the activity agenda following the workshop doc7388 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at North Carolina State University will acquire a a Superconducting Quantum Interface Device (SQUID) magnetometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) synthesis and characterization of open-shell molecules and materials; b) crystalline and liquid crystalline metal halides; c) magnetic susceptibility in metalloproteins; and d) development of novel contrast agents for magnetic resonance imaging. A SQUID magnetometer is critical for studying the magnetic properties of materials, particularly for weakly magnetic small moment samples. In a DC magnetization measurement, one measures the magnetic moment as a function of applied DC magnetic field (and or temperature). Using DC magnetization experiments, one can determine magnetic moments or a hysteresis curve, or identify magnetic phase transitions. In such a fashion, complete magnetic characterization of single crystal samples and films is possible. These types of measurements are essential in order to understand polymers and thin films doc7389 none Photosynthetic organisms use a twofold strategy to capture and store solar energy. An antenna system first collects light and then transfers the energy to an electron transfer system that converts electronic excitation into redox energy that can be used for cell growth. In most photosynthetic systems, the antenna and electron transfer functions are located on separable complexes and can be studied independently. However, in Photosystem I of oxygenic photosynthetic organisms, the antenna and electron transfer functions are fused into a single large complex that serves both functions. Experiments are proposed to improve our current fragmentary understanding of the energy trapping processes, primary photochemistry and early secondary electron transfer reactions in this important class of photosynthetic reaction centers. Overall goals of the work are to understand the coupling of the antenna system to the electron transfer system and the pathway of the early electron transfer processes. Specific experiments in this project include: 1) Studies on Photosystem I mutants in the quinone and pigment binding regions, 2) Separation of the Photosystem I reaction center complex into antenna and electron transfer domains using protein engineering and 3) Analysis of Photosystem I energy trapping and electron transfer in a newly-discovered chlorophyll d-containing organism, Acaryochloris marina. This project will increase our understanding of how plants and other photosynthetic organisms convert the energy of sunlight into chemical energy. The process of photosynthesis supplies all of our food and most of our energy needs. This project is designed to give detailed knowledge of the chemical mechanism of this essential biological process doc7390 none Cohen Virtually all cells are polarized and need to be in order to carry out their programmed functions. The mechanisms by which cells acquire, maintain and elaborate polarity have been well conserved through evolution. In general, cell polarization begins at the cell periphery when an asymmetric cue induces local remodeling of the actin fibers, generating an actin patch. Members of the Rho family of GTPases are recruited to these patches and activate secondary signaling molecules that propagate the cellular response by reorganizing the actin and microtubule cytoskeletons, and polarizing the plasma membrane and intracellular membrane trafficking pathways. There is a growing body of evidence that feedback loops are built into this basic pathway to reinforce and amplify the response. For example, disruption of Rho activity in epithelial cells causes a loss of cell-cell contacts, implicating these GTPases in the maintenance of the same adhesion complexes that recruit and activate them in the first place. The recent discovery that Rab11, a conserved member of the membrane recycling pathway, is required for microtubule organization and RNA localization in Drosophila oocytes would appear to reveal another such feedback loop. Specifically, it is proposed that Rab11, in response to an asymmetric cue and Rho CTPase activation, polarizes the plasma membrane, thereby enhancing reception of the asymmetric cue, Rho GTPase activation and downstream polarization events, such as microtubule organization and RNA localization. Here, a candidate gene approach is described that seeks to identify markers of Drosophila oocyte membrane polarity. In particular, a number of adhesion molecules and other proteins that define polarity of other plasma membrance systems will be examined immunocytochemically for asymmetric distribution along the oocyte s plasma me doc7391 none Gershon Recently, the P.I. collaborated in determining a high-resolution crystal structure for a prototypical nucleic acid sugar methyltransferase complexed with its cofactor and RNA substrate. This enzyme, vaccinia virus protein VP39, methylates messenger RNA at the 2 OH of a ribose within the 5 end cap structure. The structural data afford an unusual opportunity to identify the chemical processes underlying nucleic acid ribose methylation. Atomic-scale examination of the enzyme s catalytic center with bound substrate and cofactor suggests a mechanism whereby the charged oxygen generated by deprotonation of the target ribose hydroxyl attacks the trivalent sulfur of the methyl-donating cofactor (S-adenosylmethionine), effecting displacement of cofactor-product (S-adenosylhomocysteine). Although the sidechain of VP39 residue Lysine 175 is well-positioned to effect deprotonation of the hydroxyl, lysine 175 s pKa would need to be depressed ~three orders of magnitude. The sidechain of a neighboring residue, arginine 209 may cause this depression to occur, and aspartate 138 may act as the proton sink (assuming a pKa elevation in the aspartate 138 sidechain). To determine whether the target hydroxyl is indeed deprotonated in the context of VP39, NMR will be used to investigate hydroxyl-deprotonation of the VP39-bound isotope-enriched RNA substrate. Next, VP39 sidechain pKa values will be examined after (1) modification of a unique-cysteine-175 substitution mutant with an isotope-enriched aminoethylation reagent and or (2) generating proteins in which lysine 175, arginine 209 or aspartate 138 each comprise half of a uniquely 13C 15N enriched dipeptide. In combination with mutagenesis, these selective labeling strategies will facilitate the determination of sidechain pKa in the presence and absence of cofactor-product doc7392 none Weisblat Glossiphoniid leeches such as Helobdella robusta, are useful for studying developmental processes for two reasons: first, they are relatively simple animals with large, accessible embryos that are suited for combined cellular and molecular techniques. Second, since leeches belong to the phylum Annelida, an otherwise poorly studied group, the results obtained are useful for making interphyletic comparisons. Such comparisons are essential to distinguish general developmental processes from phylum-specific ones, and also to learn how evolutionary modification of developmental processes leads to the appearance of diverse animal types. For example, annelids and arthropods resemble each other (and differ from mollusks) in that they both have segmented body plans. But the early Helobdella embryo is strikingly different from the early Drosophila embryo and similar to molluscan embryos. Thus, the question of how cell fates are determined in the early leech embryo is of considerable interest. The experiments to be undertaken fall into two main areas. Most of the proposed effort will go into continuing investigations of cell fate determination and differentiation, combining reverse genetic approaches with embryological techniques for which the Helobdella embryo is well suited. Specific topics to be investigated include: 1. The mesoderm-ectoderm fate decision. Dr. Weisblat and his research group will test the hypothesis that maternally inherited transcripts of Hro-nos, the nanos homolog in Helobdella, are translated only at the animal pole of the embryo, and that inheriting high levels of HRO-NOS protein causes the animal daughter of macromere D to assume an ectodermal fate. 2. The origins of the germline. Hro-nos is also transcribed zygotically. The hypothesis that Hro-nos is associated with primordial germ cells in leech, as in other bilaterians will also be tested. 3. Signalling by HRO-HH, a hedgehog-class gene product in gut formation. Preliminary results indicate that HRO-HH signaling from endoderm is critical for gut formation in leech as in vertebrate. Experiments will be undertaken to confirm this result and look for downstream targets of HRO-NOS signaling. The second part of the work entails investigations of the dynamics of cells and cellular processes. Specific topics to be investigated include: 1. The regulation of cell-cell fusion. An early step in leech midgut formation entails the fusion of macromeres A and B , a process which is regulated by signals emanating from the D quadrant of the embryo. Blastomere isolation and recombination experiments will be performed to pinpoint the timing and source of the signal. 2. The dynamics of early WNT signalling. Dr. Weisblat s group has recently discovered that a WNT signalling pathway is operative in the 2-cell embryo of the leech, and serves in part to regulate cell-cell adhesion following the first cell division. This is the earliest possible example of intercellular embryonic signalling. The experiments proposed are designed to determine whether WNT expression is regulated at the level of transcription, translation, or post-translational processing doc7393 none In most animal cells, the centrosomes, or microtubule organizing centers (MTOC), play akey role in chromosome segregation during nuclear division. They consist of a pair of centrioles encompassed by a complex protein matrix. In most organisms, the centrioles are paternally derived from the sperm basal body and the surrounding components are primarily derived from the maternal cytoplasm. Organisms that undergo parthenogenetic development provide an opportunity to study natural variants in centrosome formation and structure. The insect order Hymenoptera (this includes ants, bees, and wasps) is characterized by haplodiploid parthenogenesis, whereby unfertilized eggs develop as males and fertilized eggs develop as females. Although the genetics, behavior, and ecology of species within this order have been intensively studied, surprisingly few studies have directly focused on issues pertaining to the centrosome. Preliminary results for one species within this order, the jewel wasp Nasonia vitripennis, demonstrate that centrosomes form despite the lack of a sperm-derived basal body. Numerous cytoplasmic asters form in both fertilized and unfertilized eggs after the completion of meiosis. In unfertilized eggs, two of these cytoplasmic asters are captured by the female pronucleus and these function as the zygotic centrosomes while the unassociated asters disappear. In fertilized embryos, the sperm derived centrosomes function as the zygotic centrosomes and the cytoplasmic asters disappear. Because unfertilized eggs develop into males and fertilized eggs into females, this is the first system described in which centrosomes are reciprocally inherited. This project seeks to further characterize centrosome inheritance and structure in Nasonia. These studies are likely to yield novel mechanisms of organizing MTOCs and also provide new insights concerning the evolution and developmental consequences of parthenogenesis. The three specific aims of this project are: 1. To further characterize the behavior of the cytoplasmic asters in fertilized and unfertilized embryos through live fluorescent microscopy. 2. To characterize the centrosome inheritance pattern in Nasonia strains in which development of unfertilized or fertilized eggs is specifically disrupted. 3. To characterize the composition and structure of the asters and centrosomes in fertilized and unfertilized embryos through immunofluorescent analysis and thick section electron microscopy doc7394 none Many genomes have already been sequenced and more will follow. However, for many research questions, the most important information in a genome is its translation products, not simply the nucleic acid sequence. Despite significant effort in experimental biology, high throughput sequencing, and bioinformatics, it is still difficult to answer the question, What are the structures of all the genes and the amino acid sequences of the translation products? . The work here will use orthologous genomic sequences to assist in annotating the genomic sequence of other organisms. Specifically, the already assembled sequence of yeast, fruit fly, flat worm, and the first plant sequence, Arabidopsis, and orthologous shotgun sequence or EST sequence to help in identifying new gene structures. The system uses a probability model based on Hidden Markov Models and an optimization algorithm. This is a generalization of a project for comparing assembled orthologous sequences doc7395 none Rod and cone photoreceptors in the vertebrate retina provide the organism with two complementary signaling cells that support the full behavioral range of the visual system. In general, the response of rods defines night vision: the cells are slow in their response to light, extremely sensitive and adapt over a restricted range of intensities. Cones, in contrast, are faster in response, less sensitive to light and adapt over a much wider range of intensities: they serve day vision. The long-term objective of this research is to understand the molecular mechanisms that explain transduction in retinal photoreceptors and to understand the functional differences between rods and cones. Phototransduction arises from the activation of a linear sequence of enzymatic reactions, whose end-point is the lowering of cytoplasmic cGMP and closure of cGMP-gated ion channels. In parallel with the changes in cGMP, cytoplasmic Ca2+ is also lowered. This Ca2+ change imposes regulation of the enzyme cascade and, therefore, controls the features of transduction: its speed, sensitivity and adaptation. Some of the functional differences between rods and cones, we now know, arise from differences in the light-dependent changes in Ca2+. The specific aim of the research proposed here is to investigate the features of Ca2+ modulation of the transduction cascade in cones, a process expected to differ from that in rods and about which very little is known. The results of this research will answer fundamental question on the molecular events that underlie the normal function of retinal photoreceptors. The research, however, also has a potential clinical impact: cones and rods are the principal cells to degenerate and die in a host of human retinal degenerative diseases, some genetic (i.e. retinitis pigmentosa) some not (i.e macular degeneneration). It now is know that this is a collective of molecular diseases, each generally associated with a defect in one of the many enzymes in the transduction cascade. Further investigation and discoveries on the function of these enzymes will help answer the riddle of retinal degenerations. The research will support, in part, graduate student traineeships. An identified candidate at this time is a woman graduate student. Also, UCSF, hosts a number of summer training programs aimed specifically at increasing access of under-represented minorities and women in basic biomedical sciences. This research program will be among those that available to this pool of graduate students doc7396 none Project - Lamppa The long term goal of this project is to understand the pathway of protein import into the chloroplast, and to elucidate at the molecular level the components involved and how they function. The chloroplast is the site of photosynthesis and also houses an amazing array of biosynthetic pathways needed for normal plant growth and development. As a multifunctional organelle, it participates in the synthesis of fatty acids, branched and aromatic amino acids, plant hormones, tetrapyrroles, terpenoids, as well as being required for nitrogen and sulfur reduction. The biogenesis of the chloroplast, and plastid function in different organs, depends on the correct targeting and transport of nuclear-encoded proteins from the cytoplasm. Typically, these proteins are synthesized with an N-terminal transit peptide that facilitates multiple steps in a general import pathway. Ultimately, transit peptides are removed as precursors enter the stroma, releasing mature proteins for incorporation into the biological complexes of the organelle. Because of its critical role in chloroplast import, and thus organellar biogenesis, the studies of this project will focus on the nature of the proteolytic machinery needed for precursor maturation. A stromal processing peptidase (SPP) that removes the transit peptides from precursors targeted to the chloroplast was previously characterized. It is a member of a new class of metallopeptidases that share a signature His-X-X-Glu-His motif at the catalytic site, yet all recognize very different substrates. The first objective of this proposal is to understand how SPP recognizes and interacts with the transit peptide targeted to the chloroplast. It has been demonstrated that SPP has a high affinity binding site for the transit peptide, and a major goal is to identify this site on SPP. The hypothesis that SPP has a distinct domain for transit peptide recognition, separate from the conserved catalytic domain, will be tested. A new in vitro binding assay will be used that depends on SPP expressed in E. coli as a recombinant enzyme. The hypothesis that the transit peptide also contains special structural features which facilitate this protein-protein interaction will be examined. The second objective is to investigate a new function of SPP that has been discovered. SPP binds the transit peptide, and then after release of the mature protein, SPP converts the transit peptide to a subfragment form that it no longer binds. A new degradative activity in the chloroplast has been identified that degrades the subfragment, and thus, is involved in transit peptide turnover. The degradative activity is ATP- and metal-dependent and is distinguishable from SPP itself. It appears that a regulated sequence of events occurs as SPP functions in the general import pathway in which SPP recognizes, binds and cleaves the transit peptide before its release for degradation. The third objective is to characterize the properties of the ATP-dependent degradative activity using biochemical methods. Selective degradation of proteins that are recognized as abnormal, or unfolded, or those at the termination of a pathway which are no longer functional is now considered an essential quality control mechanism for maintaining cellular homeostasis and normal development. It is likely that transit peptide turnover is equally important for chloroplast biogenesis. These studies are significant for a number of reasons. First, understanding how different components of the import machinery carry out their functions provides insight into how the chloroplast is assembled and maintained. Second, the chloroplast is one of two energy-producing organelles found in eucaryotes, the other being the mitochondria. However, the chloroplast carries out the unique role of converting light energy into ATP and reducing power. Given that most of the proteins required for photosynthesis and the other biosynthetic pathways of the chloroplast are imported, and must be cleaved to release functional products, the specificity and regulation of transit peptide removal is undoubtedly of critical importance to chloroplast biogenesis. Finally, given the central role of the chloroplast in plant development and the enormous amount of protein that must be imported during chloroplast biogenesis, transit peptide removal is one of the most significant posttranslational modification events that occurs in a plant cell. Work on this project will provide both research and educational opportunities at the postgraduate, graduate and undergraduate student levels in the field of cell biology, and the plant sciences. An important contribution will be made to the training of undergraduate students who participate in the Career Research Opportunities Program to enhance their success as professionals, and those eligible for the Work Study Program at the University of Chicago, which makes available matching funds for their work in research laboratories doc7397 none Locomotion in vertebrates and arthropods is a complex behavior, and the neural mechanisms that coordinate their limbs during locomotion are not well understood. The abdominal swimmeret system of the crayfish provides a relatively simple and accessible system to study the intersegmental coordination of movement. Within each segment of the tail, the swimmeret paddles show an alternating power stroke and a return stroke, as in most locomotor appendages, and the strokes of adjacent segments show specific timing relationships. There are small circuits of neurons (nerve cells) within each segment that have known identifiable single cells driving particular motor movements, and three types of interneurons that are involved in coordinating the movements. It is particularly useful that the crayfish ventral nerve cord and swimmeret system can be isolated in vitro and still show the intersegmentally coordinated swimming pattern. This project uses a combined physiological and computational modeling approach to define the dynamic circuitry for the pattern. A cellular model of the nerve cell physiological properties and network connections is used to predict the phase patterns of bursts of nerve impulse activity of the relevant neurons in the system. These predictions are compared with the activity patterns and connectivity in individual neurons recorded physiologically in the living circuit, including the small electrical potentials at synaptic connections between pairs of single neurons as well as the impulse traffic between segments. The relative importance of local and intersegmental pathways are assessed by stimulating individual coordinating interneurons when the intersegmental pathways are intact and when they are blocked. Intracellular dye fills anatomically confirm physiological connecting pathways. Refinements of the model by the experimental findings will yield a thorough description of how the dynamics of the interneurons contribute to stable intersegmental coordination, and how the properties of the synapses contribute to normal locomotion. This work will have an impact beyond crustacean locomotion research, by leading to new insights about neural mechanisms that underlie the much more complex vertebrate circuits for locomotion. The integration of computational modeling with physiology will also have an impact on needed multi-disciplinary training of students and postdoctoral researchers in neuroscience and physiology in general doc7398 none Ronald B. Emeson and Carlyle B. Storm A Gordon Research Conference on RNA Editing is planned for January 21-26, at the Doubletree Hotel in Ventura, California. RNA editing is the co- or post-transcriptional modification of RNA which results in the insertion, deletion or substitution of nucleotides. RNA editing can therefore correct, extend or diversify the information encoded within the corresponding genomic sequence and can dramatically alter the function of the modified RNAs. For example, editing events within the mammalian central nervous system can increase the diversity of neurotransmitter receptor expression and serve to effectively modulate neuronal signaling pathways. Equally significant is the cellular regulation of many of the RNA editing processes which provides for developmental, tissue-specific and metabolic fine tuning of protein function and biochemical pathways. The understanding of molecular mechanisms underlying RNA editing and their biological occurrence has reached a critical stage where cross-fertilization of hypotheses and experimental approaches is essential for focus in the next decade of research. The biological significance of RNA editing is a recurring theme throughout all aspects of the conference. There are many common questions and experimental goals among investigators of RNA editing despite the diversity of organisms wherein editing occurs, and the apparent dissimilarities in sequences which are modified. Important to the understanding of every editing system is a basic description of the RNA substrates that are modified by these processes. Similarly, questions of general interest concerning the mechanism, specificity, fidelity and processivity of RNA editing can be addressed with a combination of biochemical and molecular biological techniques coupled with the development of in vitro editing systems. The cellular and molecular aspects of RNA editing regulation are also broadly being pursued at the level of evolution as well as the occurrence of editing activities in different tissues and during development. Finally, information about other forms of RNA processing is likely to have implications for understanding RNA editing mechanisms, and vice versa doc7399 none Chlamydomonas reinhardtii exhibits two distinct photomotility responses to light: phototaxis migration and the photophobic avoidance response. These are mediated by retinal-containing receptors ( rhodopsins ). Both behaviors may be governed by the same receptor or by two different receptors. For both behaviors, photoactivation has been localized in the eyespot organelle of the cell and results in a cascade of transmembrane electrical currents, which ultimately alter calcium concentration in the flagella and induce alteration of their beating. The generation of a photoreceptor current is the earliest event in this cascade, which is a combination of at least two kinetically distinct electrochemical processes in the photoreceptor membrane. Using pulsed laser excitation to analyzed the electrical responses of the cells, it was demonstrated that the faster component is calcium-independent, is induced within three microseconds of photon absorption, and must be attributed therefore not to a secondary calcium flux but to an early photoreaction of a photoreceptor protein. The objectives of this project are to identify the rhodopsin protein(s) and elucidate their signaling mechanism. The approach is to identify and characterize Chlamydomonas gene(s) encoding the receptors and components of the photo-signaling pathway by insertional mutagenesis, selection for loss of each of the two responses by capillary selection techniques, and subsequent testing of the mutants for the presence of rhodopsin-mediated photocurrents. In parallel, the two photoreceptor currents will be analyze to elucidate their ion dependencies and distinguish whether (1) they represent consecutive steps in the signal transduction chain mediated by a single photoreceptor; (2) there is parallel activation of the two currents by a single bi-functional photoreceptor; or (3) the two currents derive from multiple photoreceptors with different effects on transmembrane ion fluxes. Two classes of rhodopsins are known: (1) visual pigments in animals and (2) archaeal rhodopsins, ion transport, and photosensory proteins studied primarily in halobacteria, and recently demonstrated as well in eukaryotes (fungi). PCR and reduced-stringency Southern hybridization, and the Chlamydomonas genome project will augment the search for genes in Chlamydomonas encoding either of the two types. The results will significantly expand our knowledge of mechanisms of photosensory transduction mediated by rhodopsin proteins, and also may clarify their evolution doc7400 none Urbanization, flooding, drought and salinization of soil are diminishing landmass needed to supply food for an expanding world population. Together with contined global efforts to safeguard agricultural land for future food production, it is important to understand how plants function so that they can be bred or modified to survive the harsher environments. A critical aspect of plant function is ion, water and nutrient movement across membranes. This research focuses on receptors, ion channels, transporters and the mechanism(s) by which they are regulated. The Xenopus oocyte system is used for functional expression of plant mRNA. The source of mRNA is guard cells because they play a critical role in controlling water loss and gaseous exchange. V. faba is the experimental plant choice because research on ion channel and signal transduction of V. faba guard cells is extensive. The two electrode voltage clamp (TEVC) technique is used for the assay. Preliminary results have shown that oocytes injected with V. faba guard cell mRNA (GC mRNA) express a GC specific ABA receptor that inhibits activity of the inward rectifying K + channel, KAT1. This research will test the hypothesis that: ABA modulation of KAT1 is via an extra-cellular facing plasma membrane receptor. A cDNA clone for this receptor will be isolated. The identification of a GC-specific ABA receptor will lead to the identification of one sub-type of the ABA receptor. It may be possible by conservation of homology among receptors to isolate the other subtypes. Sequencing information from the isolated clones will allow use of bioinformatics to identify other proteins in the databases with related functions. The long-term goal of this research is to understand how ABA controls ion uptake during the exchange of water and carbon dioxide in photosynthesis. The research outlined will permit student training in molecular biology, electrophysiology and bioinformatics. The identified plant genes will provide targets for genetic modification and herbicide or chemical manipulation of plant function, thus allowing plants to survive in inhospitable environmental conditions doc7401 none Jeffrey Dahlseid Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) accelerates the degradation of mRNAs that undergo premature translation termination due to a nonsense mutation. NMD exists in all eukaryotes thus far examined, from yeast to man, and safeguards cells against the accumulation of potentially deleterious protein fragments encoded by so-called nonsense mRNAs. In budding yeast, the UPF1, UPF2, and UPF3 genes are required for NMD. These genes also affect the accumulation of hundreds of wild-type mRNAs, which suggests that NMD is an important part of the natural cellular repertoire for regulating wild-type gene expression. The primary objective of this research is to study the role of NMD in regulating the expression of wild-type genes. NMD affects the mRNA accumulation of several wild-type genes that encode proteins involved in chromosome transmission and stability. The mRNAs for CTF13, which encodes an essential protein of the CBF3 kinetochore complex, two additional kinetochore proteins, and five proteins that affect telomere function are elevated in upf mutant yeast strains. The three specific aims of this research are to determine if NMD directly affects the stability of these mRNAs, to characterize the recognition and degradation of any that are wild-type mRNA targets of NMD, and to investigate potential coordinate regulation of wild-type gene expression by NMD. Analysis of expression from promoter-reporter gene fusions and measurement of mRNA decay and transcription rates will be used to determine whether NMD directly affects mRNA stability or exerts indirect influence upon mRNA transcription. Decay of many wild-type yeast mRNAs involves deadenylation followed by decapping and 5 - 3 exonucleolysis, whereas nonsense mRNAs bypass deadenylation but then undergo the same decay. Analysis of deadenylation rates and susceptibility to decapping and 5 - 3 exonucleolysis will be used to determine whether NMD degrades wild-type mRNAs through deadenylation-dependent or -independent decapping and 5 - 3 exonucleolysis or some other mechanism. Sequences or structures necessary for recognition of wild-type mRNAs by NMD will be identified using deletion mutations and gene fusions. The possibility that kinetochore- and or telomere-related genes may be coordinately regulated by NMD will be investigated through analysis of mRNA from synchronized cell cultures and genetic approaches to identify putative regulatory genes, which may encode mRNA targets of NMD. This project serves as an important starting point to increase understanding of the cellular role of NMD in regulating the expression of wild-type genes and, ultimately, the mechanism for recognition and decay of specific wild-type mRNAs by NMD. In summary, protein molecules are functional components of nearly all the molecular processes in biological systems. Instructions for protein formation are stored in the DNA of genes and are provided as a chemical information intermediate, known as messenger RNA (mRNA), when genes are expressed. To achieve normal growth and development, cells must regulate the expression of genes. Selectively degrading the mRNA of a wild-type gene is an important mechanism for cells to regulate its expression. This research aims to increase understanding of the cellular role for specialized mRNA degradation pathways in regulating wild-type gene expression and the mechanisms involved in recognizing specific wild-type mRNAs for selective degradation doc7402 none Torii Body size of multicellular organisms depends on the coordinated interplay of cell proliferation and differentiation of the developmental program. In higher plants, organ formation occurs throughout the life cycle by continual activity of the shoot meristem. Because plant cells lack motility due to rigid cell walls, spatio-temporal patterns of cell division and cell expansion are thought to ultimately determine plant body size. Although the cell cycle machinery that drives cell division has been extensively studied in plants, little is known about how the machinery acts in the context of growth and development of a plant as a whole. A goal of this proposal is to elucidate the connection between plant morphogenesis and cell proliferation by investigating roles of cell cycle regulators in specifying organ cell numbers, and therefore the organ size. Drs. Torii, Comai, and Roberts have identified eight Arabidopsis genes similar to the mammalian cyclin kinase inhibitor (CKI) p27kip1, which acts as a negative regulator of the cell cycle. Preliminary analyses of the Arabidopsis thaliana CKIs (AtCKI) suggested that mRNA suppression of the AtCKI causes enlargement of mature organs, presumably due to both an enlarged shoot meristem and delayed cessation of the meristematic competence of developing organs. The research in the present project period is intended to: (1) Biochemically characterize the AtCKI, (2) Analyze the relationship between cell proliferation and organogenesis by characterizing plants altered in the AtCKI levels, (3) Examine functional redundancy among different AtCKIs, and (4) Understand interplays between AtCKI-mediated cell proliferation and characterized developmental regulatory pathways. These experiments should provide a novel insight into developmental mechanism controlling plant organ size and define the roles for cell cycle control in plant organogenesis. Moreover, this research should lay the foundation for designing desirable organ sizes through genetic manipulation doc7403 none This research investigates cardiopulmonary (heart, lung, and circulatory) function during elevated metabolism. Previously, physiologists could only induce substantially elevated metabolism in ecotherms by exercising them. Hence, it was not possible to separate the elements of cardiopulmonary function associated with elevated metabolism per se from those elements specific to exercise. Recent experiments with reptiles have demonstrated that digestion may increase metabolism to levels equal to those during maximal activity. Elevated metabolism stimulated by exercise induces hyperventilation. Elevated metabolism stimulated by digestion induces hypoventilation. The investigators will undertake experiments to determine the physiological basis for hypoventilation during digestion. In other experiments, the investigators will measure gas exchange, blood gas and acid-base status, cardiac shunting and blood flow distribution simultaneously. They will compare animals subjected to various combinations of resting, exercising, feeding, and fasting to determine how the conflicting demands of digestion and exercise are resolved. This research will permit an understanding of the match between supply and demand in metabolic gas exchange and the identification of those elements that are stereotyped and state-independent from those that are flexible and state-dependent doc7404 none In yeast, a family of protein complexes termed the SCFs (Skp1-Cullin-F-Box) are required for the degradation of cell cycle regulatory proteins, including the cyclins Cln1, Cln2, and Cln3 and the CDK inhibitor Sic1. The inability to degrade either the Cln s or Sic1 alters the normal progression of cells through the cell cycle. SCF complexes also regulate the choice of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur source of a yeast cell by targeting specific transcription factors for degradation in yeast. SCF complexes act as ubiquitin ligases for the ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme Cdc34. Each SCF complex contains Skp1, Cdc53, and Rbx1. The substrate specificity of each SCF complex is derived from the F-box protein present. SCF associated F-Box proteins include Cdc4, Met30, and Grr1. A major hypothesis of this research is that changes in the abundance of a specific SCF complex lead to changes in the rate of degradation of specific protein substrates. That is, substrates of SCFCdc4 will be more stable under conditions where SCFCdc4 is less abundant. This hypothesis will be tested by determining the in vivo level of SCFCdc4 vs SCFMet30 under conditions requiring specific SCFs. Determinations of the half-life of proteins degraded by the SCFs under different growth conditions will also be made. Mutants that are sensitive to changes in the levels of SCF components will be examined to determine whether they are defective in switching from one SCF to another. Finally, SCF composition will be tested for changes under different growth conditions. The implications of understanding how SCF complexes are regulated are wide ranging. SCF homologs exist in higher eukaryotes and are critical for the degradation of proteins regulating development, cell proliferation, and the stress response. The central hypothesis of this research is that differences in specific SCF levels will occur under repressing and derepressing conditions for amino acids or sulfur. A second hypothesis is that different nutritional conditions will change the level of a specific SCF activity leading to changes in the stability of its substrates doc7405 none Professor Philip Reid of University of Washington is funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry program to perform experimental studies on the effects of solvent on chemical reactions relevant to the environment. Halooxide photochemistry is important in the atmosphere; while the gas phase photoreactivity has been well studied in the laboratory, not much is known about photoreactivity of these compounds in the condensed phase (e.g. rain droplets). The PI proposes to continue detailed studies on OClO photochemistry in both gas and condensed phases using resonance Raman spectroscopy (intensity and time-resolved) as well as femtosecond pump-probe measurements. The PI then proposes to study ClOCl, nitrosyl halides and alkyl nitrates in a similar manner to establish general trends in these systems. A successful outcome of this proposal would be a model for the prediction of solvent effects on the photoreactivity of small molecules. The proposed work is especially timely because of recognition by atmospheric chemists that heterogeneous reactions can contribute significantly to overall processes, and therefore must be included in models of the atmosphere doc7406 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oregon in Eugene will acquire a mass spectrometer with atmospheric electrospray and chemical ionization sources, an interfaced liquid chromatography instrument and a central computer controller with data analysis software. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) novel aromatic and metalla-aromatic systems; b) small-ring metallacycles; c) organic and medicinal chemistry; d) studies of radical cage effects in photochemically degradable polymers; e) solid-state inorganic materials; and f) molecular organization of conjugated polymer solids and two-dimensional peptide crystals. Mass spectrometry is a technique used to probe intimate structural details and to obtain the molecular compositions of a vast array of organic, bioorganic, and organometallic molecules. The results from these studies will have an impact in a number of areas including medicinal, polymer and solid-state chemistry doc7407 none This research project, supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, examines the detailed interaction of metal ions and solid surfaces. Hyperthermal aluminum, silicon, and nickel ions are scattered from metal and semiconductor surfaces prepared and characterized in ultra-high vacuum. Both symmetric (ion and surface same element) and asymmetric (ion and surface different element) scattering measurements are carried out. Direct measurement of the charge state distribution and the probability for inelastic excitation of the incident ion is accomplished. Professor Jory Yarmoff and his collaborator Professor Zdenek Sroubek at the University of California-Riverside combine experimental studies of these ion-surface interactions with molecular dynamics and electronic structure calculations to interpret the detailed results. This information is important for a number of ion based analytical and process applications. The scattering of metal and semiconductor ions from metal and semiconductor surfaces is the focus of this research project. Charge exchange and electronic excitation of the incident ion is examined, both experimentally and computationally. Clean and adsorbate modified surfaces are examined in these studies. The results of this work are important to surface analytical and materials processing applications doc7408 none Hardings Recently, Dr. Harding s laboratory discovered a family of cell surface proteins called AT4 receptors. These receptors appear to be important regulators of the fine structure and thus, the function of tissues and organs. One such organ where the activation or blockade of AT4 appears to dramatically impact function is the brain. Here it was found that compounds (developed in the Harding laboratory) that bind AT4 receptors can markedly alter learning efficiency, memory consolidation, and recall. These findings correlate with the high concentration of AT4 receptors in the brain areas associated with cognitive function. The goal of this project is to understand the mechanism by which AT4 receptor modulation influences cognitive function. Specifically, the investigators wish to identify critical cellular processes and molecules that participate in AT4 receptor-dependent effects. The long-term goals of this project are twofold. First, to clarify the basic mechanisms responsible for learning and memory development and to clarify how the AT4 receptor system fits into the big picture. Second, we wish to identify likely processes and molecules that can contribute to cognitive dysfunction in diseases like Alzheimer s disease. A corollary to this second goal is to determine whether drugs directed at AT4 receptors might serve as useful therapeutics in individuals with cognitive disorders doc7409 none Bryant This project concerns a novel family of polypeptide growth factors (Adenosine Deaminase-related Growth Factors or ADGFs) recently discovered as a component of conditioned medium from insect cells, and as products of the larval salivary gland in several insects. They show strong sequence similarity to the enzyme Adenosine Deaminase and are predicted to be secreted, but have several alterations leading to the prediction that they may not be deaminases but have a different catalytic or non-catalytic function. A human family member has been implicated in the genetic disease Cat-Eye Syndrome. We have identified five members of the family in Drosophila by genomic and cDNA sequence analysis, and shown that one of them, ADGF-A, which is strongly expressed in the embryonic mesoderm, promotes progression through the S phase of the cell cycle in imaginal disc cells. ADGF-A is expressed throughout development, and data in the literature suggest that the main source may be the salivary gland. Other family members are also expressed at most developmental stages, but more weakly than ADGF-A. We will complete our analysis of the expression patterns of these genes in vivo, test whether their expression is regulated by nutrition, and determine whether any Drosophila cell lines produce ADGFs during medium conditioning. The mode of action of the ADGFs will be investigated using cultured imaginal disc cells, including tests for binding to candidate cell-surface receptors, identification of the signal transduction pathways that are activated, and an investigation of how cell-cycle parameters are controlled by these and other growth factors. The possible catalytic activity of these proteins on adenosine will be tested biochemically, and a collaborative study will be launched to analyze the three-dimensional structure of ADGF-A. The project will contribute to our basic understanding of growth regulation, and to the underlying mechanisms leading to human genetic disease doc7410 none Schroeder Hyperthermophlic archaea inhabit volcanic environments such as hydrothermal vents or hot springs that may resemble conditions when life on earth originated. The hyperthermophilic, marine Archaeon Pyrobaculum aerophilum belongs to a deep branch of the phylogenetic tree suggesting that this organism is relatively ancient. The objective of this research project is to study the mechanism of denitrification in the Archaeon P. aerophilum. Denitrification is a unique prokaryotic pathway that allows the microbe to convert nitrate into dinitrogen gas. It is the only pathway in nature that generates nitrogen gas from fixed N oxides and thus it is essential for the maintenance of the global nitrogen cycle on earth. Respiration of nitrate is coupled to the generation of energy that fuels cell propagation. The pathway is found in both the domain Bacteria and the domain Archaea suggesting that denitrification evolved most likely before the last common ancestor. P. aerophilum represents the oldest denitrifier isolated thus far and provides the opportunity to compare an ancient process with that found in today s modern microbes. The denitrification pathway is well described in Gram-negative bacteria, where two membrane-bound and two soluble enzyme complexes as well as several soluble electron mediating proteins are required. Based on previous results in the PI s laboratory a different mechanism for denitrification is proposed for P. aerophilum: Four membrane-bound enzyme complexes exist that all interact with a menaquinone pool to reduce nitrate to N2 gas. A combination of biochemical, biophysical and molecular techniques will be employed to test this hypothesis and further our understanding of the physiology of hyperthermophlic Archaea. The objectives of this project are to further characterize the nitrate reductase enzyme, which is interesting because of its novel membrane anchor. To obtain a more complete picture of the denitrification pathway, two additional denitrification pathway enzymes, the nitrite reductase and the NO reductase, will be purified and characterized. To facilitate future structural analysis of the nitrite and NO reductases the nir and nor genes will be cloned and overexpressed. Since the DNA sequence of P. aerophilum will be available in the near future a selected set of genes involved in the denitrification pathway will be analyzed for their differential expression in response to selected and defined environmental growth conditions. The results from this research will further our knowledge about respiratory processes that are essential functions of life. The study of an ancient Archaeon may give insight into how electron transfer reactions have evolved. The investigation of the denitrification process in diverse organisms will further our ability to understand, predict and deal with global environmental changes that include the nitrogen cycle doc7411 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project addresses the need to improve the success rate at which new technologies can be introduced into the workplace. A methodology and service, ATTAIN(TM), has been conceived to accelerate the integration of technology by rapidly and aggressively identifying critical processes and practices in the organization and shifting them in value-added ways at the level of worker cognition and operational specifics. This method has been shown to be highly successful, but is labor intensive, expensive, and requires highly skilled practitioners. Furthermore, the method upon which ATTAIN is based is not sufficiently targeted. That is, more often than not, businesses have only 3-4 workplace processes or practices that need to be changed in order to increase the company s competitiveness. The original method does not single these out as more important than other elements of the workplace. To date, increasing the effective incorporation of new technology by changing workplace practice and worker cognition through specialized simulation training, but not at identifying the most appropriate target for the technology implementation or change has been very successful. The work of Phase II will involve integrating the current methods with those of another company. Their method has been shown to identify the vital few practices that mitigate a company s overall competitive survival and which are the most appropriate targets for change. Phase II has two goals. First, a hybrid method that is quicker and more targeted will be developed. Second, a practitioner training approach and supporting materials that make it possible for professionals without extensive experience to deliver the method in a high quality manner will be developed. Training and licensing practitioners in a hybrid method of workplace learning will contribute significantly to the problem of efficient and successful technology integration and implementation of new technologies doc7412 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is focused on developing nanotechnology reagents and tools for the emerging field of proteomics. The technology is modular. This means that universal reagents are produced to which an end-user can, in a simple step, attach any protein or antibody for a variety of biological assays. The detection technology under development is electronic. Electronic detection can be readily multiplexed for high throughput assays. Large numbers of experiments can be simultaneously analyzed, over short periods of time, using state of the art electronics techniques like time-division multiplexing. Since the output of the technology is electronic, massive data sets can be directly transferred to bioinformatics systems for automated analysis and storage. The technology uses cheap off the shelf components coupled with proprietary state of the art, nanotechnology reagents. The speed and multiplexing capabilities of the technology make it orders of magnitude less expensive than existing or competing technologies. The technology will be tailored to the special needs of proteomics: the study of the function of the gene products, proteins. With the sequencing of the human genome nearing completion, the need for tools to facilitate the study of proteomics is a high priority near-term application. Pharmaceutical companies would use this technology to identify families of proteins that are implicated in disease and construct databases that define networks of interacting proteins to determine points of intervention and potential drug targets. End-users will prefer to use the proposed technology because it will be more cost effective, sensitive, faster and flexible enough to adapted to many user applications doc7413 none Odor plumes are generated by turbulent mixing of odor from a source of release with clean air or water. The result is a series of flavored eddies intermingled with non-flavored eddies. The spatial distribution of these flavored eddies contains a statistically reliable gradient of information that animals may use to locate distant odor sources. Therefore, they need sensors whose filtering capabilities enhance those signal parameters that provide the best spatial gradients. Both chemical and hydrodynamic dispersal patterns must be considered. Previous NSF funding supported experiments from which it was determined that for chemical gradients the concentration slopes of odor patches provide good directional information. Neither the equivalent hydrodynamic information nor to which degree these two signal features are actually used by animals and under which circumstances are known. The primary sensory processes of chemo-hydrodynamic signal detection will be studied. The lobster and its well-studied lateral antennule will be used as the model of choice for linking primary sensory information in both modalities. Electrophysiological recording of action potentials from the antennular nerve, which carries chemical and mechanical information to the brain, will be used. The excised antennule will be exposed to independently controlled chemical and hydrodynamic stimuli with high-resolution measurement of both. The chemical response properties of the antennule are relatively well known. Its hydrodynamic responsiveness now will be determined and the possibility of peripheral bi-modal signal processing will be explored. Any form of bi-modal chemo-hydrodynamic interaction would have consequences for the detection of flavored eddies . Invertebrates often appear to have hard-wired sensory filters in their peripheral sensory systems. The results of this work may find application in the design of sensors and algorithms for automated odor plume tracing in such tasks as detection and localization of sources of chemical pollution, both under water and in air doc7414 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) program investigates a novel software tool for integrating multiple 3D images. Three-dimensional (3D) modeling of physical objects and environment is an essential part of the challenges for many multimedia tasks. However, most physical objects self occlude, and no single view 3D image suffices to describe the entire surface of a 3D object. Multiple 3D images of the same object or scene from various viewpoints have to be taken and integrated in order to obtain a complete 3D model of the 3D object or scene. This process is called the 3D mosaic . The primary objective of this SBIR effort is to develop a fully automatic and intelligent software tool that is able to mosaic (i.e., align and merge) multiple 3D images of the same object taken from different viewpoints, without a priori knowledge of camera positions. The main innovations of this proposed effort are threefold: (1) an intelligent alignment method that is able to register multiple un-calibrated 3D images without needing any priori knowledge of camera location and orientation; (2) a seamless merge method to stitch together the aligned 3D images using the fuzzy logic principle; and (3) an intelligent 3D image compression algorithm that preserves 3D image geometric features while achieving high compression ratio. The 3D Mosaic technique to be developed under this SBIR program has enormous commercial applications, including industrial design and prototyping, reverse engineering, manufacturing part inspection, part replacement and repair, animation, entertainment, 3D modeling for WWW documents, archiving, virtual reality environment, education, virtual museum, commercial on-line catalogues, etc. It will become an important part of future 3D TV technology doc7415 none Professor John Lombardi of City University of New York, City College is supported by the Experimental Physical Chemistry program to perform experimental studies on metal dimer binding. A specialized facility has been developed over the years at CUNY to mass select and deposit metal dimers and trimers in matrices and study them using Raman spectroscopy. This proposal seeks to expand previous work by including heteronuclear dimers, and to examine gold-M clusters (with M= La, Lu, Ce) which are relevant to the catalysis of proplyene oxide, an important industrial process. Collaboration with a theorist allows quantum chemical approaches to be brought to bear on the interpretation of these results on metal-metal binding. The gold clusters will also help theorists to understand relativistic effects. Increasing the importance of metal cluster studies is the recent effort by scientists to manipulate matter using nanotechnology. Metal clusters are also of interest in the field of catalysis. Understanding metal to metal binding is relevant to inorganic chemical synthesis and the production of new materials. CUNY City College is a Hispanic Serving Institution doc7416 none The Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, supports the work of Dr. Brian Hoffman (as the PI) of the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University, and Anthony Barrett (as co-PI) of Imperial College, London UK, for their collaborative work on star porphyrazines (pzs). Specifically, they will (i) investigate multi-metallic pzs and pz multimers that will exhibit macrocycle-mediated spin coupling among the localized moments in the metal ions; (ii) examine porphyrazine assemblies and metal-linked pz ribbons that incorporate redox-switchable conduction and or spin coupling; (iii) explore metal-porphyrazine systems as contrast agents in optical tumor imaging; (iv) examine charged pzs containing an active central metal ion (e.g. Fe or Mn) as possible catalysts for peroxynitrite decomposition; and (v) explore the usefulness of porphyrazines with peripheral substituents designed to bind redox-active metals in applications as sol-gel incorporated optical sensors and or as dual opto electrochemical metal-ion sensors. The work supported by this award will have significant impact on a variety of scientific and technological applications. The class of compounds known as star porphyrazines will be highly useful as contrast agents in bio-imaging of tumors, and in such applications as sol-gel incorporated optical sensors and or as dual opto electrochemical metal-ion sensors. Students and post-doctoral associates will gain fundamental and diverse skills not only in syntheses and physical characterization of these compounds, but also in exploring the potential application of the resulting products in catalysis, bio-imaging, and sensors doc7417 none With this renewal award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program continues its support for the work of Dr. Robert A. Moss of the Department of Chemistry at Rutgers University New Brunswick campus in New Jersey. The research involves fundamental studies of carbenes and related reactive intermediates generated by laser flash photolysis, and followed by UV and IR absorption. Of particular interest is the study of the fragmentation reactions of alkoxyhalocarbenes (ROCX), where the rates and pathways are expected to depend on the natures of the R group and the halogen X. Quantum mechanical tunneling in intramolecular rearrangements will be studied using the cyclopropylmethyl carbenes C3H5CH2CCl and C3H5CD2CCl. High level computational studies carried out in collaboration with theoreticians will accompany the experimental work. This ongoing research involves fundamental studies of carbenes - short-lived and reactive intermediates with only two groups attached to carbon rather than the usual four - which can be generated in solution by very short laser flashes. The concentrations of the intermediates can then be followed by their absorption of ultraviolet or infrared light. This is classical physical organic chemistry, and is expected to provide excellent training for the students and colleagues involved, through the rigorous scientific approach used and the variety of strategies and techniques involved doc7418 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project focuses on the development and optimization of a continuous, easily scalable and economical synthesis of reactive nanoparticles (RNPs); characterization and control of physical and chemical properties of these materials; development of flexible synthesis approaches for production of complex nanoparticle metal oxides; and identification and establishment of quality control procedures. This effort is critically needed in order to develop commercially viable nanomaterials for applications in both civilian and military markets. As demonstrated during the Phase I research, nanomaterials, produced using the proprietary continuous process, possess the same chemical and physical properties as those prepared in a batchwise mode. The research is broad and spans a number of significant markets including decontamination technologies for military and civilian applications, improved catalysts and catalytic supports, industrial gas scrubbing, and active ingredients for high efficiency air and water purification systems. Each of these market applications represents an initial subset of the market opportunities for these highly reactive nanomaterials doc7419 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is aimed at achieving the first ever 350W (cw) output power in a high brightness and diffraction-limited laser beam from a multicore phase-locked fiber laser array. Under Phase I, the feasibility of the unique power combining concept has been demonstrated by phase-locking a group of 7 Yb-doped single mode fiber lasers, embedded in a common cladding. In addition, a theoretical model has been developed, providing a deeper understanding of physical mechanisms responsible for phase-locking of a multicore fiber laser array. These results clearly indicate that this extremely challenging goal for Phase II can be accomplished. Nevertheless, there remain several obstacles that need to be removed before embarking on commercialization. First, a significant improvement of the laser performance must be made. This can be accomplished by exploring various parameters, which include fiber length, cavity finesse, gain saturation, temperature and stress distributions, as well as fiber structural parameters, such as core separation and the V-value. In addition, an order of magnitude improvement for efficient coupling of pump power into the clad must be made. To advance this technology, various pumping techniques will be explored, in particular the side-pumping of the fiber laser from the cladding walls, instead of the fiber end facets. If successfully developed, this could be the most viable way to obtain the maximum output power without causing catastrophic damage. Finally, the reliability of the device when operating at very high power level must be established by raising the power damaging threshold. High power diode-pumped multicore fiber lasers can be very competitive in the market place as compared to high power diode-pumped solid-state lasers and C02 lasers presently employed by automotive, aerospace and ship-building industries for precision drilling, high-speed cutting and welding of metals and composition materials doc7420 none This starter grant is awarded by the Chemistry Division to Georgia Tech in support of the research of Charles D. Sherrill. Ab initio electronic structure methods will be used to provide a more detailed and quantitative understanding of the photophysics of heteroaromatic complexes of Cu(I) which have potential roles in energy conversion applications and as analytic probes. Geometrical relaxation and electronic distribution in the excited state will be elucidated doc7421 none Briggs Plant photoreceptors mediate a broad spectrum of responses to light, ranging from the physiological through to the biochemical and molecular levels, and are present throughout plant development from seed germination through virtually all phases of vegetative growth to flowering and senescence. Currently well-known photoreceptors are phytochromes, cryptochromes, and phototropins. Phototropins represent a new and previously uncharacterized class of photoreceptors. These dual chromophoric photoreceptors, binding two molecules of FMN, are unlike any of the known classes of photoreceptors , and operate through an initial photochemistry that is unique and leads to autophosphorylation. The present project is focused on the chromoprotein phototropin (nph1) and the various nph1-like proteins described to date. These proteins are expressed in heterologous systems as the chromophore-binding domains and as the full length proteins. The expressed proteins both the native constructs and those with site-specific mutations are in the photoactive form. We plan to undertake a limited biochemical and detailed biophysical characterization of the various isolated chromophore-binding domains and of the full-length protein. The biochemical studies will emphasize the use of mutant constructs to probe the initial photochemistry. The latter will focus on studies probing the molecular mechanism by which light activates the photochemistry and its consequences at the protein level. These studies will involve time-resolved optical and vibrational spectroscopy. The chromophore-binding domains are closely related to domains (so-called PAS domains) in a diverse range of proteins from archaea through mammals, and should provide a new dimension to our understanding of the functions of these domains doc7422 none Yan B. Linhart Multiple Roles and Consequences of Intra-specific Chemical Variability This project will explore the role of plant secondary compounds such as monoterpenes as important mediators of biotic interactions such as herbivory and competition. The research will ask 1) can there be multiple consequences associated with synthesis and storage of a specific compound? 2) to what extent do results obtained in experiments apply to natural settings? The plant to be studied is Thymus vulgaris, which is a plant with odor and taste primarily defined by one monoterpene. In southern France, where much of the work is to be done, individuals belonging to one of six chemical phenotypes (or chemotypes) each has its own specific monoterpene. Terpene synthesis is under genetic control. They chemotypes show variable deterrence against herbivores and influence germination and growth of competitiors differently. Individuals of all six chemotypes will be exposed to herbivory, or competition, or a combination of both in experimental field work. The relative fitness of chemotypes will be studied. Comparisons will be made of survival and reproduction in various environmental settings doc7423 none This Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) Phase II project will develop a fully functional, cost-effective, prototype sensor for carbon monoxide and volatile organic contaminants in air. Phase I results suggest that a sensor array based on catalyst-doped, nano-crystalline metal oxide films will provide a marked improvement in detection of contaminants, such as formaldehyde, and thereby upgrade control of indoor air quality. Phase II will develop this sensor technology with objectives of long-term use, low cost, high sensitivity, and sufficient selectivity for commercial applications. These applications include indoor air quality monitoring, environmental air monitoring, oil refining, chemical manufacturing, automotive emission control systems, and industrial process doc7424 none This award to Dr. Roger Leblanc of the University of Miami is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemsitry Program. The research focuses on the development of surfaces, based on Langmuir-Blodgett techniques, which have high specificity for target biomolecules, and would be used for sensor development. The research is multi-disciplinary and will include the areas of synthesis, interfacial chemistry and analytical chemistry (sensor development and characterization). The key qoals of the project are 1) synthesis of a lipid organic monolayer at the water air interface using combinatorial chemistry, 2) determine the monolayer specificity toward target biomolecules, 3) determine whether the specificity of the monolayer be enhanced by using target templates during the synthesis, and 4) use the sensor with actual biological systems. This is a novel research proposal at the frontier of biosensor development. It has a degree of risk, however, the investigator makes a concerted effort to address the potential problems. The potential for involvement of minority students is high. The impact of this research will be felt in the areas of combinatorial synthesis, biochemistry, surface chemistry and sensor development. In the future, there is potential for societal impact if sensor applications develop in biological systems doc7425 none The ability to perceive and respond to the changing light environment is a fundamental feature of land plants. Light affects many aspects of development of a young dicotyledonous seedling. In Arabidopsis, de-etiolation is regulated by two types of photosensory receptors: the red far-red light receptors phytochromes and blue UV-A light receptors cryptochromes. It is well known that cryptochromes and phytochromes, which are evolutionary unrelated, co-act to bring about the similar photomorphogenic responses. Although the mechanism underlying the photoreceptor co-action is not known, it has been proposed that some photoreceptor signaling molecules might be involved in the action of both cryptochromes and phytochromes. . Consistent with this hypothesis, a novel photomorphogenic mutant, sub1 (short under blue light and far-red light), and the SUB1 gene that encodes a calcium-binding protein has been isolated. The current project is aimed to (1) characterize the cellular localization of SUB1 and light-regulated expression of SUB1; (2) investigate the significance of the calcium-binding activity in the function of SUB1; and (3) characterize the additional sub loci for possible involvement of the corresponding genes in the cryptochrome phytochrome co-action. Completion of this research will improve understanding of the molecular mechanism of light-regulated plant development doc7426 none Nagy The mud snail Ilyanassa obsoleta has long been a model for the study of developmental mechanisms because it provides a spectacular example of localization of cytoplasmic determinants. Ilyanassa has a distinctive pattern of cell division known as spiral cleavage, which it shares with several other phyla. In addition, it extrudes a cytoplasmic bulb - the polar lobe- during its first two cleavages. When the polar lobe is removed, the embryo lacks a dorsal-ventral axis and has a radial symmetry. Not only are the direct physical descendants of the polar lobe - the D quadrant cells - missing in polar lobe ablated embryos, but lobeless embryos lack structures known to descend from other quadrants. Thus, through a process of cytoplasmic localization, the polar lobe provides one or more cells in the D quadrant with the ability to induce the fates of non-D cells. The localization of polar lobe determinants thus specifies the D quadrant as the organizer of the Ilyanassa dorsal-ventral axis. Although it has been nearly 100 years since the discovery of the effects of the polar lobe, (Crampton, ) the molecular mechanisms underlying the localization of the organizing activity to the D quadrant, as well as the nature of the organizing activity itself, remain unknown. Dr. Nagy and her lab have identified the first known component of the molluscan organizer: a localized activation of mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) that spreads from the 3D macromere to all cells that require the D quadrant signal for normal development. Based on their results, they propose that the activation of MAPK in 3D results from inheriting polar lobe determinants, and that MAPK is a component of a signaling pathway that transduces the inductive signal from 3D to specify cell fate in other lineages. The aims of this grant are to probe the mechanisms by which MAPK is activated in the 3D macromere, the mechanisms by which the D quadrant signals to the rest of the embryo and the mechanism by which MAPK specifies cell fates in other lineages doc7427 none Oppenheimer Plant cell shape plays a crucial role in plant cell function. Because of this relationship, understanding how plant cell shape is controlled is of fundamental importance to our understanding of plant cell biology. In addition, understanding how cell shape is controlled may allow the manipulation of cell shape, and hence cell function, in important crop plants for agricultural benefit. One of the best model systems for studying the control of plant cell shape is the trichome, or plant hair, on the higher plant Arabidopsis thaliana (mouse ear cress). It is well established that the cortical microtubule (MT) array plays a large role in controlling the direction of plant cell expansion which is the major determinant of plant cell shape. However, the mechanisms that organize the cortical MTs during a change in the direction of cell expansion (such as initiation of root hairs or trichome branches) remain an unresolved problem in plant biology. We are using a genetic approach to identify the genes (and ultimately the proteins) that participate in a specific, localized cell expansion event-the initiation of trichome branches. Arabidopsis trichomes are large, single cells consisting of three or four branches on a stalk. This proposal focuses on four newly discovered loci (the ASYMMETRIC BRANCH [ASB] loci) that control trichome branch position and length. Recent evidence suggests that the MT cytoskeleton plays an important role in trichome branch initiation, whereas the actin cytoskeleton plays a leading role in trichome expansion. The immediate goals of the proposed research are to test hypotheses concerning the organization of the actin and MT cytoskeletons in ASB mutants, and to determine the genetic relationship of the ASB genes (which control branch position) to the genes that control branch number. The cytoskeleton studies, along with the genetic analyses, will provide a framework for a functional dissection of the ASBgene products once the genes are cloned. Accomplishing the objectives of the proposed research will provide critical information about the mechanisms by which cell expansion is controlled. Because plant cells share cell walls and thus cannot migrate large distances during development like animal cells, the direction of cell expansion is a primary determinant of plant morphogenesis. Therefore, mechanisms by which plants control the precise spatial pattern of localized cell expansion is central to our understanding of plant development doc7428 none PI: Yinlun Huang Institution: Wayne State University Proposal Number: Automotive coating operations involve paint applications of several thin layers. The topcoat, including basecoat and clearcoat, is most critical to the durability and appearance of vehicle coatings. In operation, very thin defect-free topcoats should be uniformly applied, layer by layer on the entire vehicle surface. In practice film uniformity is often poor and various defects may appear in the coatings, due to improper paint spray, drying and curing. It is unclear how paint spray parameters, spray booth air condition, paint rheological properties, and oven radiative and convective parameters are related to film topology, solvent evaporation, crosslinking reaction and defect generation. Process control is essentially open loop to coating quality; and, energy efficiency and paint material consumption are often higher than expected. This research is therefore the development of a systematic methodology for planning and controlling paint application for such systems. The main focus will be on (i) the establishment of cause effect relationships between process and performance parameters, and (ii) the development of system optimization strategies that can determine the optimal settings of spray, drying and curing parameters as a function of operational mode. The PI plans to develop integrated, plant wide models using various modeling technologies, and a two-layered hierarchical optimization strategy using large-scale systems theory. The work will be done in collaboration with the Ford Motor Company and DuPont Automotive Company. The experimental tests will be performed in their simulation labs and then a Ford plant. The end product should be a systematic methodology and a computer-aided tool for process analysis and operation improvement that may be applicable to other than automotive-coating processes. Wayne State University has the largest minority population among all non-HBCU s in the U.S. This project will provide valuable training for some of these students with exposure to local industries and thus potential future professional job opportunities doc7429 none Professor Tara Y. Meyer, Department of Chemistry, University of Pittsburgh, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, for her project in catalyzed imine metathesis. Specifically, the project objectives will focus on (i) synthesizing second generation catalysts, (ii) on preparing a new class of imine metathesis catalysts based on phosphorous compounds, and (iii) on synthesizing new monomers. Realization of the specific objectives will not only result in the preparation of new monomers, catalysts and polymers, but will also provide a greater understanding of the fundamental nature of metal-nitrogen bonding. This topic is central to a diverse range of applications including metal-nitride precursor synthesis, ammoxidation of propylene, nitrogen fixation and metal-catalyzed carbon-nitrogen formation in organic syntheses. Both undergraduate and graduate students will be mentored and will gain broad chemical skills in an area of organometallic catalysis so crucial to the well being of the nation s chemical industry doc7430 none Tarduno This award provides funding support for the development of a novel technique to measure the intensity of the earth s magnetic field in the past at the time of cooling of volcanic rocks. The method is based on the Thellier-Thellier analysis of magnetism in single grains of plagioclase feldspar crystals formed during cooling. A new CO2 laser heating system will permit in situ step-heating of single feldspar grains in petrographic thin sections during the analysis of paleomagnetic intensity and represents an advance in the reliability of the paleomagnetic measurement. Determining the intensity and direction of the earth s paleomagnetic field is a necessary tool for reconstructing past tectonic plate motions and gaining an understanding of past processes in the metallic core of the earth doc7431 none Proposal No.: Proposal Type: Investigator Initiated Principal Investigators: Michael Tsapatsis Institution: University of Massachusetts Amherst Towards High Selectivity Molecular Sieve Membranes through Microstructural Optimization The objective of this project is to relate the microstructure of polycrystalline zeolite films to membrane separation performance. The project involves the study of two classes of films of the same zeolite (high-silica MFI) with distinctly different microstructure, stability and separation performance. These films are prepared by the secondary growth technique. Optical and electron microscopy are combined with X-ray diffraction to unravel the microstructural differences of these films at the nanometer level. The structural information is used to relate these differences to membrane properties like selectivity and susceptibility to membrane cracking. Approaches for avoiding crack formation and methods for selective crack sealing are being investigated. Zeolites and related molecular sieves are crystalline materials with microporous frameworks capable of filtering molecules at the subnanometer level. The formation of crystalline molecular sieve membranes enables separations of molecules with similar physicochemical properties that are difficult to separate by other methods. As a result, efforts towards zeolite membrane preparation are receiving increasing attention worldwide. Recent advances have resulted in commercialization efforts and suggest new opportunities for applications in gas, liquid and vapor separations. Potential applications include separations of specialty chemicals, hydrocarbon isomers, and permanent gases as well as water alcohol solutions by pervaporation. In order to sustain the initial success of first-generation zeolite membranes, and to find uses in new processing strategies unattainable with the current membrane technology (e.g., isomerization membrane reactors, chiral separations, etc.), research efforts are required that will combine synthetic innovation with fundamental understanding of the synthesis-microstructure-performance interrelationships. This work emphasizes the microstructure-performance issues. Its outcome will contribute to the development of rational rather than trial-and-error strategies for the formation of high performance molecular-sieve membranes tailored to specific separation applications doc7432 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will create web-based courseware featuring software (the Urn Sampler ) built around the simulation resampling method in statistics which focuses on the process of formulating a statistical test. This courseware will also feature a statistics text (Statistics: Making Sense of Data by Stout, Marden and Travers), self-assessment tools, a Virtual Professor help system, a Virtual Statistics Consulting Lab, and entry-level spreadsheet-based statistical software. The target market is students in introductory statistics courses, who will purchase the product just as they now purchase texts. The courseware aims to leverage the latest and most standard web technologies that are anticipated to be in place at the conclusion of the project s development phase. The plan combines the power of a web-based structure with the new resampling techniques to create a unique learning environment for statistics students. The Urn Sampler will be an open and flexible lab tool that will let teachers create exercises to supplement class lectures and other course materials. It will make it easy to teach the new compute-intensive resampling methods that have proven successful in teaching statistical inference. It addresses a diverse audience, including undergraduate and graduate students taking a required course in quantitative reasoning or statistics, students taking an undergraduate major or minor in statistics, and graduate students studying statistics and continuing education students. Additional product sales will come through purchases of parts of the web product by students whose instructors have adopted a text other than the Stout, et al. text doc7433 none Plants use sunlight as a source of energy for photosynthesis and as an environmental cue to coordinate their development to the ambient light conditions and seasonal cycles. A number of photoreceptors are responsible for detecting these light signals. The most influential are the phytochromes, a family of chromophore-bearing proteins that absorbs red and far-red light. They act as light-regulated switches for a number of agriculturally important processes, including seed germination, chloroplast maturation, pigmentation, stem growth, flowering, and senescence to name a few. Despite their importance, we still do not fully understand how phytochromes allow plants to sense the intensity, direction, and duration of the light signal. A major barrier to this understanding has been the dearth of simple genetically-tractable models for the study of phytochromes without the complications of other photoreceptors and photosynthesis. We have simultaneously overcome these problems with the recent discovery of a single phytochrome-like photoreceptor system in the non-photosynthetic bacterium, Deinococcus radiodurans [Davis et al. ( ) Science 286: - ]. Like phytochromes, the D. radiodurans bacteriophytochrome photoreceptor (BphP) absorbs red and far-red light. Studies on BphP suggest that it acts as a protein kinase that begins light sensing by phosphorylating other proteins. Ultimately this signal stimulates the bacterium to produce carotenoids, pigments typically used to protect plants from high light conditions. The goal of this project is to study the D. radiodurans BphP phytochrome to understand its structure and mechanism of action. The BphP photoreceptor will be characterized at the biochemical level to determine the identity of its natural chromophore and the way it is linked to the protein. The pathway that synthesizes the chromophore will be determined. Attempts will be made to crystallize the protein so that its structure can be defined. Via a number of methods, the biochemical steps that lead from BphP to light-stimulated carotenoid production will be defined. Completion of this work will begin to provide the first description of a phytochrome signal transduction pathway that can then be used as a framework for understanding how phytochromes work in crop plants doc7434 none The Rieske iron-sulfur protein of the chloroplast cytochrome b6 f complex has essential roles in energy transduction, redox-sensing, and in biochemical signaling to regulate photosynthesis. A unique movement of the iron-sulfur cluster domain is necessary for catalytic activity and probably for signaling. The research will investigate the role of protein structural features in signal transduction, catalytic activity, and assembly. Modified Rieske proteins will be studied in the alga Chlamydomonas, in isolated complexes, and as overproduced proteins in vitro. Specific objectives are: 1) Mutational investigations in vivo and in vitro of the role of the Rieske protein N-terminus and inflexible hinge domains in signal transduction and catalysis. Included are cysteine insertions to attach fluorescent probes to isolated complexes for assessment of possible Rieske N-terminal movement in signaling. 2) Mutational studies in vivo of an N-terminal Lys-Arg motif and its possible role in .pH-dependent, Rieske protein translocation across the thylakoid membrane. 3) Analysis of overproduced, modified Rieske proteins (such as those lacking the disulfide bridge) by spectroscopic methods to characterize structure function relationships. Proteins of particular interest may be purified for structure determination. 4) In vitro reconstitution of overproduced Rieske proteins with Rieske-depleted cytochrome b6 f complex. Success would allow in vitro studies of Rieske protein interactions with neighboring subunits and possible LHCII kinase activation in signaling. The research is multifaceted, relies on stimulating collaborations, and will provide important new insights into fundamental mechanisms of photosynthesis and membrane proteins. It will contribute to complementary research and teaching activities at UW-Oshkosh and will provide excellent training opportunities for MS and undergraduate students doc7435 none What is the likely price of the Dow next year? How long can the patient expect to live? How many lives are likely to be lost in a looming military campaign? Questions such as these confront decision makers every day. The proposed research seeks to understand, and ultimately improve, the precise psychological processes by which such judgments are made. Often such judgments are made by adjusting from some initial starting point. The Dow is at 10,500 right now, so one might estimate it will be at 11,000 next year. The last patient with the same symptoms lived for 6 months, so one might estimate a survival time of one year. Psychologists, economists, and marketing scholars have investigated such anchoring and adjustment processes during the past twenty-five years and have found that a person s ultimate judgment tends to be too close to the initial value-i.e., the initial value serves as an anchor that biases the ultimate judgment. The present research seeks to build on existing knowledge of anchoring and adjustment processes by pointing out (with empirical justification) an important misunderstanding in the current literature. The proposed experiments are designed to show that the psychological processes invoked by real-world problems like those above are quite different from those invoked in the standard paradigms used to investigate anchoring and adjustment. Real-world problems like those above involve explicit adjustment from the initial value; the standard anchoring paradigm involves simple priming of anchor-consistent information. By directing the field to the true source of anchoring effects in real-world contexts, the proposed research promises to point the way to strategies that can be used to improve the accuracy of important real-world forecasts doc7436 none Serine carboxypeptidase-like (SCPL) proteins have been identified in organisms ranging from yeast to humans. Although the Arabidopsis genome alone is estimated to encode approximately 50 SCPL proteins, the functions of these enzymes, and similar proteins throughout the plant kingdom, are essentially unknown. Sinapoylmalate and sinapoylcholine are two of the major phenylpropanoid metabolites in Arabidopsis thaliana and are found in leaves and seeds, respectively. A TLC-based screen identified several mutant lines that accumulate the biochemical precursor of these compounds, sinapoylglucose, in their leaves and seeds in place of sinapoylmalate and sinapoylcholine, respectively. These mutations have been named SNG1 and SNG2 for sinapoylglucose accumulator. The SNG1 gene has been cloned and shown to encode sinapoylglucose:malate sinapoyltransferase (SMT), an SCPL protein. In order to begin to understand how proteins of this type can catalyze reactions of this type, an in-depth analysis of SMT and the reaction that it catalyzes will be conducted. Additional mutants have also been isolated in which SCPL genes flanking SMT are deleted. These mutants have novel biochemical phenotypes associated with the absence of these genes. In this project, the compounds that are affected by these mutations will be identified, the pathways by which they are synthesized will be elucidated, and the enzymes required for their accumulation will be characterized. Finally, the map-based cloning of the SNG2 gene is nearing completion and provides strong evidence that it encodes sinapoylglucose:choline sinapoyltransferase, yet another SCPL protein. The characterization of the reactions catalyzed by these enzymes will provide new insights into how these enzymes function. Ultimately, these experiments may lead to the ability to alter plant metabolism, and potentially enable the design of enzymes with novel catalytic abilities doc7437 none Interest in computational cell biology has expanded in recent years. A good indicator is the attendance at a workshop on the topic, at the Biophysical Society meeting last year, which drew 600 scientists. In Japan, the E-CELL project is attempting to incorporate the entire genome of a unicellular organism into a model. In contrast, this database emphasizes models as building blocks for understanding cell biological events. Models are a collection of hypotheses and facts that are brought together in an attempt to understand a phenomenon. VCELLDB, the Virtual Cell Database, will be a web-accessible electronic repository of physiological models. Built on a prototype that already includes intracellular calcium dynamics, nuclear envelope breakdown, mitochondrial respiration and RNA trafficking, employing easy-to-use interfaces, the expanded database would include computational and data resources, such as a thesaurus, links to other databases and built-in math functions so that scientists could create consistent models. It will also have a community data curation feature that will permit the database to expand with a peer review mechanism, a sort of online publication mechanism that would lead to a self-sustaining public electronic model repository doc7438 none During development of multicellular organisms, regulatory systems governing cell proliferation and developmental programs regulating the formation of specific organs, tissues or cell types, have to interface to ensure that an appropriate number of cells are generated for every tissue and organ. Equally important is the regulated termination of cell proliferation and initiation of lineage appropriate differentiation. A substantial body of work has provided a rather detailed picture of the regulatory systems controlling cell proliferation and cell cycle arrest. In contrast rather little is known, how tissue or lineage specific developmental programs functionally interact with cell cycle regulatory system. In the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, the pan-neural expressed neuronal precursor gene prospero (pros) is critical for proper termination of cell proliferation and initiation of neuronal differentiation during embryonic neurogenesis. In this role, pros activity is required for the proper transcriptional regulation of multiple key cell cycle regulatory genes, including the cyclin dependent kinase (cdk) inhibitor gene dacapo, the cdc25 gene string, E2F and cyclin E. Two additional pan-neural neuronal precursor genes, deadpan (dpn) and asense (ase), have been shown to be critical for cell proliferation during larval optic lobe development and proper expression of the cdk inhibitor gene dacapo. This group of pan-neural transcription factor encoding genes represent, or are part of, a critical regulatory link between neuronal lineage specific developmental programs and cell proliferation and or neuronal differentiation. Experiments conducted under this project will firstly determine, using a range of developmental-genetic approaches, the regulatory capacity and genetic interactions of Pros in the regulation of cell proliferation and differentiation during embryonic and larval neurogenesis. Secondly, functional in vivo and in vitro analysis of transcriptional regulatory regions of dacapo, string and cyclinE will be performed to determine the specific sequence motifs involved in the pros mediated transcriptional regulation of these genes. To this end reporter gene constructs will be used to map and functionally define Pros response elements in transgenic flies. In vitro DNA binding analysis and in vitro mutagenesis experiments will complement the in vivo approaches. These experiments will provide an initial understanding of the functional mode and interactions of this newly emerging regulatory system. As all genes involved in this study are evolutionarily conserved from Drosophila to humans, the information gained from this analysis should have direct relevance for the understanding of similar developmental processes in a number of other organisms doc7439 none This investigation is to examine a series of related questions concerning young children s development of empathy, utilizing data from three independently conducted studies. Broadly stated, these questions consider: 1) the role that gender and gender-specific parenting practices may play in the development of empathy in young children, and 2) the differences and similarities that may be observed in empathic development among children living in low income families across three subcultures within the U. S., namely European-American, Mexican-American, and African-American. The objective is to enable data analyses that elucidate the developmental pathways of males and females in relation to earlier emotional development, parenting experiences, family ecology, and ethnicity by scoring videotaped responses of children to distress simulations that were identically conducted in the two of the three studies. This project extends knowledge of operant processes in emotional development of males and females including socialization of empathy. It will provide new insights into cross-ethnic similarities and differences in early emotional development. Each study makes a unique contribution to the investigation of empathic development. The three studies are longitudinal, beginning observational assessments of children s emotion regulation as young as age six months and assessing mothers attitudes and the ecology of her living circumstances as early as pregnancy. Observation of empathy began as early as 18 months. Two studies are part of a program of research on the impact of early nurse home visitation on family development. The first study, the New Mothers Study was conducted in Memphis, TN, where the enrolled sample of 739 women was almost entirely African-American. The second study, Home Visitation (HV ) was conducted in Denver, CO where two-thirds of the 735 enrolled women were either Mexican-American or African-American. All women in both samples had low incomes at the time of enrollment, during pregnancy, and were randomly assigned to treatment and control conditions. Observations of the Memphis children were gathered when they completed kindergarten; their responses to story beginnings that permitted the incorporation of empathic themes were videotaped. In Memphis, questions concerning the antecedents of empathy will focus on the role of gender in the experience of African-American children in relation to early and concurrent contextual risk, empathic maternal attitudes, and maternal reports of temperament and behavior problems. Observations of the HV children s response to empathy-eliciting distress simulations occurred at 21, 24, and 48 months of age. Observations of the children s reactivity to laboratory-based emotion challenges were conducted at 6, 15, and 24 months of age. Questions concerning antecedents of empathic development in HV will concentrate on the role of gender and ethnicity in continuities in early emotion regulation styles with later empathic responses. In addition, questions will be addressed concerning early antecedents in contextual risk factors, mother-child relationship, and maternal report of temperament and behavior problems. The third study includes a low-income sample of 309 children enrolled before their first birthday in a study of Early Head Start (EHS) interventions. The ethnic sample distribution is similar to that of HV . Observations of empathic responses to distress simulations were conducted at 18, 30, and 36 months of age. Observed emotion regulation began when children were eight months old utilizing similar procedures as in the HV study and were repeated at 18 and 30 months. A unique opportunity of this study is to replicate findings from the HV sample and examine the role of two additional features: 1) the role of family routines and 2) early language skills. In all three studies, treatment status will be incorporated into analytic models and retained as a factor as needed. The products of the proposed investigations will include a series of peer-reviewed papers that consider findings from each of these samples independently and a final monograph in which the material is synthesized across studies doc7440 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II Project is designed to develop and demonstrate a new in situ treatment technology for the destruction of methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE) in groundwater. The gasoline additive MTBE is the second most prevalent groundwater contaminant in the United States, and there are currently no economical technologies for its removal from the water supply. This technology utilizes a novel bacterium of the species Hydrogenophaga flava (ENV735) for the remediation of MTBE. This bacterium, which was recently isolated by Envirogen scientists, is one of only two bacterial strains discovered that are capable of growth on MTBE. Phase II experiments will be conducted to: (1) assess the movement and distribution of the bacterium in the subsurface; (2) develop an adhesion-deficient strain for improved aquifer distribution; and (3) optimize commercial-scale growth, shipment, and injection of the bacterium for field application. A field demonstration will be conducted to fully test the technology under in situ conditions. The bioaugmentation with ENV735 has broad potential as an in situ remediation technology for MTBE-contaminated aquifers. If the results of the field trial are positive, commercialization of the bioaugmentation technology is anticipated in the short term doc7441 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project describes an innovative combinatorial approach to the discovery of new electrocatalysts for electrochemical ozone generation. Ozone is increasingly being used in water treatment, as a sanitizing agent in the food industry and is preferred over chlorine and its derivatives. Electrochemical ozone generation, where ozone is generated by electrolysis of water, can potentially offer several cost and process advantages over the conventional electrical discharge methods of ozone generation. However, existing methods for generating ozone electrochemically use electrodes, which offer low Faradaic (i.e., current) efficiencies and have limited materials stability. In Phase I, ozone electrocatalysts were screened using a combinatorial approach, and two novel electrocatalysts for ozone formation were identified. A new rapid screening approach was also devised and will be used to evaluate focussed combinatorial arrays in Phase II. Phase II will identify the precise stoichiometries of the new ozone electrocatalysts using the techniques pioneered in Phase I. The catalysts will then be synthesized on a macro scale and evaluated in ozone cells using existing ozone electrocatalysts as a benchmark. The catalysts identified during this project will enable a more cost-effective generation of ozone with applications in municipal water treatment, point-of-entry and point-of-use water treatment, food sanitation, medical waste treatment and medical sterilization. Ozone could also be utilized in the chemical industry as a replacement for chlorine in a variety of processes, e.g. paper and pulp bleaching doc7442 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop a seismic processing system that enables the delivery of leading-edge seismic services over the Internet and Intranets. Internet-based seismic processing (INSP) enables exploration companies to directly control their critical seismic imaging projects, without the need of purchasing and maintaining expensive hardware and software. INSP is a complete processing system that includes a client-based Java GUI, and server-based processing and database modules. The computationally intensive modules run on shared-memory parallel computers and Linux clusters. Phase I implemented the essential functionalities for a useful product, demonstrated concept feasibility, and laid the groundwork for the Phase II project. Phase II will add functionality to the product, and implement all security and data management aspects necessary for Internet deployment. INSP ushers in a paradigm shift for the upstream oil and gas industry. Commercial potential is significant because INSP makes digital information and compute-intensive technology accessible to a large client base that wishes to outsource its non-core competencies to an application service provider, while maintaining control of projects. INSP greatly increases interaction between the client and contractor, thereby increasing the quality of the final seismic image, and reducing exploration and development cost doc7443 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project describes a novel laser-based technology for large-scale analysis and processing of living cells. One application of this technology is the detection and elimination of contaminating tumor cells from autologous hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) transplants for cancer patients. Published studies have shown that: (1) contaminating tumor cells contribute to cancer relapse; (2) successful tumor purging provides a clinical benefit; and (3) current purging methods are inadequate. Therefore, technology that reliably eliminates tumor cells from transplants, while leaving HSCs undamaged, is needed. A patented innovative approach integrating fluorescence scanning cytometry, real-time image analysis, and specific laser-induced killing of individual cell targets will be used. The Phase II project will complete the clinical-scale prototype instrument, leading into clinical trials. The instrument design will then be configured for successful commercial manufacturing, and further improvements in capabilities will be pursued in order to maintain market leadership and expand into other markets. The studies conducted in the Phase II project will lead to commercialization of a method to eliminate detectable tumor cells from an HSC transplant with a several hour automated procedure. The resulting instrumentation will also be useful in a number of other clinical and research applications that require cell analysis and purification with high purity, yield and speed doc7444 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop a short-exposure imaging sensor for measuring and controlling particle temperature and velocity of thermal sprays. Thermal spray is a rapidly growing element of the metals processing industry, which needs process control. Currently, there are no direct particle condition controls, for lack of a sensor to provide real-time measurements. This imaging sensor technology will continuously view the entire particle stream, utilize the entire emission across the spectral range of the sensor, and employ fast image processing algorithms to obtain on-line measurements. Phase II will develop a sensor response model, hardware and software design, and prototype sensors will be constructed and calibration tested. These sensors will be incorporated in process control systems and operated in an industrial environment. Thermal spray technology is changing and improving the way high quality metal parts are manufactured for the automotive, aerospace, energy, and heavy equipment industries. Sensor and thermal spray controls will provide new levels of cost efficiency and consistency to challenges in material processing, namely thermal, wear and corrosion, by coating the surface with metals and ceramics doc7445 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project concerns the development and implementation of seismic imaging and inversion methods and parallel computer algorithms to estimate subsurface fluid-flow properties from time-lapse seismic data. In recent years, there has been exponential growth in time-lapse seismology project activity. These projects have yielded seismic difference anomalies that result from monitoring time-variant changes in the earth s subsurface related to fluid flow. However, such anomalies are often qualitative and ambiguous--what causes the anomalies, and what do they mean? The proposed Phase II research will enable the capability to make quantitative estimates of the 3D distribution of subsurface fluid pressure and fluid saturation changes that cause the seismic anomalies, using wave-equation seismic imaging and inversion techniques, coupled with rock physics analysis. The research consists of three parts: optimized parallel software and computational design, amplitude preserved seismic imaging and impedance inversion, and robust rock physics inversion to estimate pressure and saturation. The software and services generated by this Phase II research will be invaluable to help guide new wells and optimize reservoir management decisions in the 70+ oilfields world-wide that are being actively monitored with time-lapse seismic data. Near-term commercial applications of the proposed research include petroleum industry mapping and monitoring of commercial oil reserves, monitoring of costly injected fluids (water, steam, CO2, miscible gas), and imaging pressure compartmentalization and the leaking or sealing properties of faults and fractures. Non-petroleum applications may include monitoring groundwater reserves, near-surface monitoring of contaminant plumes and environmental clean-up projects. Potential far-market applications may include sub-sea acoustic imaging, synthetic aperture radar satellite imaging, and medical imaging doc7446 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop a prototype high speed, non-invasive, optical probe for electric fields, and hence waveforms, in semiconductor devices. The technique is designed to work on any semiconductor regardless of its crystal structure and can be used for both imaging and single point detection without degradation of temporal resolution. Because the technique is optically based, no parasitic capacitance is added to the device being measured. A femtosecond laser probes the device to be measured, and temporal resolution is several orders of magnitude faster than the time resolution required to probe present devices. Bandwidths of greater than 10 terahertz should be possible. This non-invasive probe technique will be applied to silicon-based devices. In their production and testing in the semiconductor industry doc7447 none The American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) hosts a workshop on U.S.-Australia Interactions in Biological Informatics to take place on July 10-12th at the ATCC Headquarters in Manassas, Virginia. This workshop, jointly sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Australian Academy of Science, convenes a panel of about forty biologists and computer scientists to discuss enhancement of U.S.-Australian collaborations in four major focus areas: 1. Microarray (biochip expression data informatics) 2. Large DNA databases 3. Automated identification of organisms 4. Biodiversity legacy data from biological collections It is expected that this meeting will foster research information exchange, development of new applications and lead to new collaborative research doc7448 none An integrated program of experiment and theory is proposed whose objective is fundamental progress in the closely coupled fields of Free Radical Polymerization (FRP) and Polymer Reactions Kinetics. Physics and chemistry play equally central roles in these phenomena. Correspondingly, the program unites and coordinates the efforts of an experimental photochemist (NJT) and a theoretical polymer physicist (BOS) with extensive experience in reacting polymer systems. In the accomplished research during the previous funding period, experiment. theory, chemistry and physics have been inseparable. The complex processes in FRP involve many fundamental aspects of polymer science and radical chemistry. A crucial role is played by reactions between growing polymers carrying radical end groups, known as living chains or macroradicals. For this reason, FRP and the general field of polymer reaction kinetics are deeply intertwined. Since the living chains in a FRP have short lifetimes, their molecular weight distributions (MWD) have never been measured. In the previous funding period a method was developed to measure FRP living MWDs for the first time. Laser photolysis is used to photocopy the transient living population into a fluorescence-labeled dead chain population, which can be analyzed by standard methods. In the proposed research, living MWDs of linear FRP will be photocopied in pre-prepared dead chain backgrounds of known length and concentration. Photocopies and other spectroscopic measurements will be made of steady state FRP, and of non-steady state FRPs evolving from highly novel initial conditions created by flash photolysis. Theory will attempt to predict the outcome of these experiments, extending the theory developed in the first funding period dealing with very dilute dead backgrounds. The experiments enable direct examination of fundamental unresolved issues in a way, which has not been possible until now. For example, photocopying in entangled and unentangled dead matrices, respectively, will provide a unique examination of the role of entanglements in FRP and the nature of the celebrated gel effect. A second family of projects will address fundamentals of polymer reaction kinetics. If successful, these measurements will have significant impact on the field of reacting polymer systems and polymer physics in general since virtually all theoretical predictions on k and k(t) have never been tested. With this award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Professors Nicholas J. Turro and Ben O Shaughnessy of the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University. This research is unique in that it provides an opportunity to apply theoretical and experimental efforts to understanding the mechanism of free radical polymerizations. FRP is of enormous technological importance in the polymer industry, used to synthesize a great number of polymeric materials. The expertise of an experimental photochemist will combine with that of a theoretical polymer physicist to provide an interdisciplinary environment where the students involved will be trained in both aspects of the research doc7449 none The Computer Science and Engineering Technology (CSET) Scholars program is providing scholarships in computer science and engineering technologies, with special consideration to under-represented groups (women and minorities) from the community s federally designated enterprise community and state designated enterprise zone. Participants are pursuing associate of applied science degrees in webmastering, e- commerce, computer programming, computer networking, computer maintenance, digital media design, electrical and computerized control systems, robotics, laser electro- optics, chemical technology, semiconductor manufacturing, biomedical equipment, medical imaging, facilities maintenance engineering, drafting and design, manufacturing engineering, machine shop operations, and other applied engineering programs. Program objectives are recruitment of qualified students, implementation of support systems to aid in retaining students once enrolled, course instruction, and job placement upon graduation. A support system provides mentoring and tutoring services to CSET Scholars, with additional support as required provided by the Deaf and Disabled Student Services Office and the Women s Resource Center. Participants meet biweekly with a small advisory committee comprised of representatives of these campus support offices, with each meeting designed to address unmet needs and troubleshoot problems which may be preventing the CSET Scholar from achieving success in his or her area of study. Job placement at the program s conclusion is being facilitated through the major course of study, as each department has an industrial advisory committee and other liaisons with industry which assist with graduate employment. Evaluation of program success is based on grade point average, attendance, completion rates, survey responses, and graduation placement doc7450 none This award provides renewed support of the Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center (ABRC). The Center collects, preserves, reproduces and distributes diverse seed and DNA stocks of the flowering plant, Arabidopsis thaliana. The ABRC provides access to lists of its stocks and other materials online, and uses a forms-based online ordering system to minimize the difficulty of identifying and ordering seeds and DNA reagents. Since the ABRC was established in , Arabidopsis has become the model species of choice for basic studies of flowering plants. The ABRC serves a dynamic community of plant researchers involved in cutting-edge biology that impacts the fundamental understanding of the basic functioning of plants as well as applied research aimed at crop improvement. The value of the collection has been enhanced by the recent completion of the sequencing of the Arabidopsis genome, and demand for the services of the ABRC is expected to grow as interest in functional genomics increases. On an annual basis, the Center currently distributes approximately 50,000 seed and 20,000 DNA stocks to over 7,000 scientists worldwide. This award will provide 70% of the ABRC s operating budget, with the remainder coming from institutional funds and user fees doc7451 none DELTA (Description Language for Taxonomy) is a widely used program written to manage morphological data for taxonomy. Taxonomy is a basic part of biology, involving the classification of the Earth s biota. Cataloging and understanding biodiversity is dependent on good taxonomy. DELTA has grown through the years but has also developed problems reflecting scalability, data format consistency, and a lack of user-friendliness. DELTA will be reworked from scratch, with the best features of the present system plus new features of data management and functionality. Such tools have been identified by the community as necessary for sharing information about taxonomic characters. The software will be distributed through the web. In addition to streamlining the gathering, standardizing and distribution of morphological data on fossil and living taxa, the software will be a teaching tool for systematics doc7452 none Hanan Samet University of Maryland Digital Government: Scalable Data Collection Infrastructure for Digital Government Applications This project in collaboration with the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Justice, and the US Census Bureau will explore the collection of data over wide-area networks. Of particular interest are situations with high submission volume from a variety of sites to one agency (hot spots); e.g. the submission of electronic tax forms to IRS in the April 14-14 timeframe. Within that context, research issues will include scalability, and privacy integrity. Other possible government applications include submissions of proposals at deadlines, such as the NSF Fastlane system, and voting in digital democracy. The technology to be developed will work at the application layer of TCP IP, implementing a small set of primitive services doc7453 none During development, neurons extend axons along very specific pathways to their target cells. Steering decisions are made as surface receptors at the tip of the axon (the growth cone) detect molecular guidance cues and convert them into intracellular signals that regulate growth cone movement. The long-term goal of this work is to understand how intracellular signaling pathways orchestrate the motile response underlying guidance decisions. The development of the embryonic nerve cord of Drosophila provides a unique opportunity to identify these intracellular signaling pathways. The ladder-like axon scaffold of the fly embryo is formed as axons decipher attractive and repulsive cues that dictate which axons may cross the midline. Several of the genes involved in this decision have been identified including three key intracellular signaling molecules: Calmodulin, Son-of-Sevenless (Sos) and Profilin. Interestingly, each of these molecules regulates key aspects of actin and myosin dynamics underlying motility. Thus it is hypothesized that a growth cone s response to midline guidance cues is tightly linked to its ability to regulate actin and myosin dynamics. To test this hypothesis, Dr. Van Berkum will define the role of downstream targets of both Calmodulin and Sos which may regulate actin and or myosin processes during a midline guidance decision. Specifically, Dr. Van Berkums s work will focus on Myosin Light Chain Kinase, a target of Calmodulin, and three monomeric GTPases (Rac, Rho and Cdc42) known to function downstream of Sos. To investigate the role of Profilin, each of the three functional domains of Profilin will be neutralized by selected point mutations in order to determine which domain of Profilin is required to cross talk with Calmodulin dependent processes during axon guidance. In all cases, proteins are expressed in the developing embryo and midline guidance choices assayed by antibody staining. Given the essential role of Profilin, Sos and CaM as regulators of actin and myosin dynamics, this work will provide insight into how axon pathways, and thus nerve connections, are formed. Similar mechanisms will undoubtedly be used to regulate cell motility and or contraction in a variety of other cell types doc7454 none Information technologies continue to grow at an enormous rate and are used for civil infrastructure systems to an increasing extent to plan these systems and manage operations. Areas of research need to be identified that integrate information technologies and civil infrastructure systems to ensure these systems are designed for the services they provide. This project is a workshop to develop a research agenda for integrating the areas of information technology and infrastructure. The workshop will be conducted by the Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems (ICIS) at New York University s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. ICIS is a multidisciplinary partnership of four universities that focuses on infrastructure services for communities, users, and infrastructure managers. The workshop will be held in the fall of over a 2-5 day period. A draft white paper will be prepared to focus the workshop discussion. It will bring together professionals in various fields who will prepare summary papers prior to the workshop. The location will be in Washington, DC in order to maximize attendance by observers from government agencies and organizations that are national to scope. Final results will be disseminated in the form of a paper and electronic report to help shape research agendas that link infrastructure and information technology doc7455 none With this renewal award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program continues its support for the work of Dr. William E. Billups in the Department of Chemistry of William Marsh Rice University in Houston. The work will include the synthesis of new elusive compounds, using a vacuum gas-solid reaction method developed by Dr. Billups to prepare small ring alkenes and bicycloalkenes from beta-halocyclopropylsilanes. Aromatic compounds to be prepared will include cycloproparenes, fullerenes, buckytubes, and functionalized fluorinated single-wall nanotubes. Low temperature reactions of Os atoms with ethylene oxide and of Rh atoms with diazomethane will be carried out to complete studies of low temperature reactions of metal atoms with organic molecules. Structures of gas hydrates will be determined by low-temperature x-ray crystallography. Dr. Billups research covers a wide variety of areas in physical organic chemistry, including the synthesis and properties of small ring alkenes and bicycloalkenes, fullerenes, fluorinated single-wall carbon nanotubes, and products formed from the reactions of transition metal atoms and small organic molecules at low temperatures. Work will be initiated on the nucleation, growth, and structures of methane hydrates, with the goal of finding inhibitors for their formation. These hydrates can cause serious problems in long distance natural gas pipelines doc7456 none How the brain extracts information to from the environment and stores that information as a memory is a fundamental but unanswered question in behavioral neuroscience. The brain structure that is most intimately associated with memory in humans and other animals is the hippocampus. Damage to this brain area produces amnesia, or loss of memory, that shares many features in all mammals. This project focuses on two of these commonalties. One is that memories that were acquired shortly before hippocampal damage are lost but older memories remain. This pattern of memory loss is called temporally graded retrograde amnesia. Retrograde amnesia in rats will be examined by making very precise damage to the hippocampus after various times after rats are trained on a task that is not normally forgotten. The task is fear conditioning, where rats show an emotional reaction to stimuli that have previously predicted that they will receive a brief mild electric footshock. Another feature of the amnesia that stems from hippocampal damage is that certain types of memories are lost and others are completely spared. For example, if people with hippocampal damage are taught a new motor skill like tennis, their tennis playing ability will continual improve but they will have no memory of ever playing tennis. They remember how to play without being able to remember that they played. One form of this selective memory loss will be examined. If a tone predicts shock, hippocampal lesions may or may not cause amnesia for the relation between tone and the learned emotion. If the tone and shock overlap in time the hippocampus is not necessary. However, if a brief period of time is placed between tone termination and shock onset the hippocampus is necessary for memory. This type of conditioning is called trace conditioning and retrograde amnesia for trace conditioning following hippocampal damage will be examined. Amnesia for trace conditioning is unusual because it differs from other forms of memory for which the hippocampus is needed. Usually rats with hippocampal damage have problems with memory for spatial locations or for stimuli that are composed of several different components. In this project it will be determined whether retrograde amnesia for trace conditioning and complex configurations stem from the same or different functions of the hippocampus. It will also be determined if various manipulations that alter the ability of normal animals to learn trace conditioning can alleviate the amnesia for trace conditioning. By investigating and contrasting these forms of memory it is hoped to find exactly what the hippocampus is extracting from experience and more precisely define what is lost and preserved in amnesia doc7457 none Nancy Wiegand University of Wisconsin Digital Government: Integrating Metadata Development XML, and DBMS Search and Query Techniques in a State of Wisconsin Land Information System This project will involve several state, local and national agencies in developing a query able database of heterogeneous spatial and textual data. The data will continue to be held in various local and other databases, but will appear to be integrated though the system to be developed. Automated development of Metada and semantic conversions will be required. Three technical thrusts are i) to locate and search data sources, and to support user manipulation of the data. XML will be an important technical tool in the project in expressing Metadata doc7458 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Bruce Benz will conduct detailed analyses of maize (Zea mays L. subsp. Mays) collected in archaeological excavations in the Tehuacan region and in Ocampo Cave, Mexico. Through the study of its evolution he plans to document the complementary roles of intentional human selection and environmental inducement in the domestication of maize and its emergence as the principal staple in Mesoamerica from ca. years ago until the time of the Spanish Conquest. Through detailed morphometric analysis, radiocarbon dating and oxygen and hydrogen isotopic analysis of selected samples he will address the following questions: 1. During what time periods did morphological change occur and how fast or slow did the maize ear change in shape and productivity during the period ca. BC to AD ? 2. What proportion of morphological change in the maize ear can be attributed to natural selection and what proportion to random genetic drift? 3. What effect did fluctuations in temperature and effective moisture have on maize s morphological change and productivity? 4. At what time and for what reasons did subsequent diversification processes operate to give rise to the numerous extant races of Mexican maize? The Neolithic Revolution - the domestication of plants and animals - constituted a fundamental turning point in human development because the productivity and reliability of these resources provided the stable subsistence base which gave rise to complex societies and civilization. In the North and Middle America maize, in conjunction with squash and beans, provided the basis for this change and therefore understanding the processes with led to its domestication is essential for reconstructing how prehistoric societies developed. Evidence to date indicates that maize was domesticated in Middle America and subsequently spread both North and South. While abundant well preserved samples have been recovered in cave sites in Mexico much of this material remains unstudied and Dr. Benz s examination of several stratigraphic sequences and their synthesis will constitute a major research contribution. Many researchers, biologists and archaeologists alike, wish to understand the interactions among plant species, human behavior and environment (changes in temperature and rainfall) which resulted in the apparently independent domestication of many species at roughly the same time in many parts of the world and thus the potential significance of Dr. Benz s research is broad doc7459 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop novel nano-structured solvent free polymer electrolytes for solid state Li-ion batteries. The important characteristics of these electrolytes are that they are of high ionic conductivity and have excellent mechanical strength. The combination of these properties results from an ordered structure on the nanometer scale, consisting of a co-continuous network of an epoxy scaffold and a polymer electrolyte. This unique structure is obtained by self-assembly during curing of the epoxy in the presence of a partially emersiable block copolymer containing the ion-conducting phase. Polymer electrolyte batteries based on the new electrolytes promise great configuration flexibility in design and substantially increased energy density. The new polymer electrolytes will permit fabrication of high performance Li- ion batteries for use in portable consumer products such as cellular telephones, portable power tools, video cameras and laptop computers. Other applications include dye sensitized solar cells , and electrochromic devices doc7460 none Choi, Soonja The relation between semantics and cognition: a crosslinguistic study of spatial categorization from the preverbal stage to adulthood This project investigates the relation between language-specific word meanings and conceptual classifications of spatial relations in English and Korean, from infancy to adulthood. The two languages differ significantly in the way they divide up spatial relations for purposes of language. For example, whereas English has words such as IN and ON to distinguish between containment (e.g., putting an apple IN a bowl) and support (e.g., putting a cup ON a table), Korean does not have such terms. Instead, Korean has words that distinguish between loose fit (e.g., apple in a bowl) and tight fit (e.g., video cassette in its case; ring on a finger) regardless of containment and support. The research explores two interrelated questions that arise from this finding: (1) How do children learn such language-specific word meanings so early?, and (2) how do these early-acquired word meanings influence spatial concepts at later stages? These questions will be studied by investigating the ways in which children and adults distinguish various types of spatial relations. More specifically, the studies ask whether infants who do not yet talk initially begin learning language with a more extensive set of spatial categories than is needed for the language they are learning, and whether older children and adults maintain sensitivity to the same extensive set of spatial categories or, as preliminary work suggests, they channel their attention primarily to distinctions they learned in acquiring their first language. Preliminary experiments suggest that preverbal infants (9, 11, and 14 months) are able to distinguish a wide range of spatial features, including those not relevant for the language being learned, but that over time, the language channels their attention to a more limited set of linguistically relevant features. The proposed work examines this possibility further with a set of spatial features involving containment and support. The studies employ a preferential looking design that measures the amount of time the participant looks at a particular scene, given a choice between two scenes. This method can be used with both young children (starting from 9 months) and adults, thus allowing systematic comparisons of the two populations. In addition, adult participants are asked to perform a classification task which requires that they verbally explain their decisions. This research will provide insight into the mechanisms that enable children to acquire language-specific word-meaning systems at a very young age, and the kinds of interactions that take place between language and concept formation in infants, children and adults doc7461 none Ohio State University Rongxing Li TITLE: Digital Government: Digitalization of Coastal Management and Decision-Making Supported by Multi-dimensional Geospatial Information and Analysis With the continuing trend of increasing population and economic activities in the coastal zone, a sustainable coastal environment is crucial to the well being of human, wildlife, and properties in the zone. Recently, the coastal zone has been directly or indirectly affected by a series of problems such as global warming, climate change, seal level raising, coastal erosion, environmental contamination, and overpopulation. Coastal management and decision-making involve extremely comprehensive and critical operations across multiple governmental organizations, where the above problems and impacts have to be dealt with. Geospatial information and analysis can be used to coordinate and support multi-agency operations include a) federal government: coastal erosion monitoring, coastal resource management, coastal forecasting, coastal development permission, and residential erosion awareness and watching system. The goal of this research is to investigate and develop technologies that will greatly enhance operation capabilities of federal, state, and local government agencies for coastal management and decision-making using multiple spaceborne, airborne, and in situ remotely-sensed measurements, spatio-temporal databases, and geospatial analysis tools. The objectives of this research project are: a) develop a strategy and technologies for utilizing geospatial information of all level of government agencies in coastal management and decision-making. b) develop and integrate technologies of space- and airborne and insitu spatial data acquisition, spatio-temporal data modeling and analysis, hydrological modeling and forecasting, and web-based information systems for digital government operations, c) develop and test an integrated coastal management and decision-making system that incorporates the spatial analysis and hydrological modeling technologies that will examine historical coastal environment and future changes based on desired or proposed scenarios, d) test and implement the above strategy and the system to demonstrate the significantly improved interagency operations of coastal decision-making through a pilot project in the primary site in Lake Erie area and another test site in the Tampa Bay area, and e) disseminate coastal geospatial data and coastal erosion information to end users including coastal residents in erosion areas and to assist them in making their decisions such as property protection measures, property purchasing selling, and small community planning activities. If successfully implemented, this project will significantly enhance our capability of handling spatio-temporal coastal databases, build a fundamental basis of coastal geospatial information for inter-governmental agency operations, and provide innovative tools for all levels of governmental agencies to improve efficiency and reduce operational costs doc7462 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop the automated tool support that will enable engineers to deploy powerful and mathematically rigorous, yet easy-to-use and cost-effective, techniques to model, analyze and implement correct and reliable reactive software systems. Such systems are intended to maintain an ongoing interaction with their environment in order to provide appropriate responses to stimuli the environment generates. Examples include the embedded software found in medical, automotive, aeronautical, consumer-electronic, e-commerce, and telecommunications applications. Many of these are safety- or business-critical. Providing an enabling technology for the cost-effective development of correctly functioning reactive systems would thus be of great social and economic benefit to the nation. The main tangible outcome of the proposed effort and the flagship product will be the React tool environment. React will allow reactive-system designers to create mathematical models of their systems; validate models via simulation and automatic verification; and automatically generate implementations or test suites from models. The key innovation of the proposed technology is its reliance on powerful formal techniques, developed by RSI for modeling systems and validating properties of these models in a fully automatic fashion doc7463 none Prior to implantation of the mammalian embryo, a sequence of changes takes place in the mother s uterus in response to the female sex hormones estrogen and progesterone. The actions of estrogen and progesterone are necessary for stimulating the maternal environment to become receptive for the implanting embryo. Estrogen and progesterone elicit changes in the uterus by binding to specific receptor proteins, thereby altering the rates of transcription (synthesis) of target genes. Although many of the target genes in the mammalian uterus have not been identified, evidence indicates that several of the candidates are involved in the control of cell proliferation and differentiation. Mammalian cells use a family of proteins called cyclin and cyclin dependent kinases to regulate cell proliferation. Cell proliferation involves an orderly sequence of events in which the cellular contents are duplicated and then the cell divides in two. This cycle of duplication and division is known as the cell cycle. Progression of cells through the cell cycle involves the temporal and sequential activation of cyclin genes, as well as the inactivation of a series of crucial checkpoints. Cellular differentiation requires cessation of cell cycle transit, cell cycle exit, and selection of the differentiation pathway. The integration of positive and negative regulators, and the means by which they control cell cycle progression, are the major challenges for understanding the sequence of molecular events linking cell cycle transit with cellular differentiation. Elucidating these hormone-dependent cell cycle regulatory interactions in the maternal cells of the uterus is the central objective of this research project. The first goal of this research is to determine the temporal and spatial expression patterns of the key cell cycle regulators during hormone-induced stromal cell proliferation in the rat uterus. Time course analysis of the appearance and cell-specific distribution of the key regulatory proteins will be mapped using immunohistochemical techniques. Transit through the cell cycle will be assessed in these same rat uterine samples by measuring the entry of cells into DNA replication (duplication) and mitosis (chromosomal division). This information will be extended by studying the formation of active cyclin-cyclin dependent kinase complexes in cultured uterine stromal cells stimulated to synchronously re-enter the cell cycle by estrogen and progesterone. The function of cell cycle inhibitory proteins on cell cycle regulation will be determined by assessing the temporal appearance and changes in the amount of inhibitory proteins in hormonally stimulated stromal cells in both the uterus and in culture. These hormone-sensitive changes in cell cycle activators and inhibitors will identify the mechanistic actions of estrogen and progesterone on the formation and activation of protein complexes required to control cell cycle transit. With this information in hand it will be possible to investigate the mechanisms by which differentiation signal transducers, acting in conjunction with estrogen and progesterone, alter the progression of stromal cells through the cell cycle and re-direct cellular transit into the differentiation pathway. Completion of this study is expected to increase the current knowledge about estrogen and progesterone action in target cells. The results are also expected to provide important, new information about the endocrine control of cell proliferation and differentiation in the mammalian uterus, thereby impacting both domestic animal and wildlife reproduction doc7464 none Teresa Harrison Rensselaer Polytech Institute Digital Government: Connected Kids: Designing Database Software for Web Based Info Dissemination to Multiple Audiences In this project, computer and social scientist will collaborate with the city of Troy, NY. The focus will be on youth service educational and non-profit organizations to develop community information systems relevant to the topic area. Many sectors (youth, education, government, non-profit) will be involved in the project. A software package named CIRCLE will be developed to enable design, authoring and maintenance of multimedia applications by multiple and non-technical content developers and user groups. Various focus groups will be used to test CIRCLE s abilities and potential. In addition to computer science, an important research element will be to study the social processes associated with the construction and use of information systems for community audiences doc7465 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will lead to a breakthrough in the use of laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) for chromatographic detection. Commercial standalone LIF detectors are based on CW lasers and collect data at a fixed wavelength. Consequently, they add minimal capability for resolving complex mixtures beyond that inherent in the chromatographic separation itself. On-the-fly fluorescence lifetime measurements at a single emission wavelength have been proposed as a better way to resolve the signals of co-eluting species. Our approach is far more powerful because it provides lifetimes on-the-fly and at several wavelengths simultaneously. A new prism flow cell fiber optically coupled to the emission spectrograph was introduced in Phase I. In addition, two different algorithms strategies for analyzing the multi-dimensional fluorescence data were developed and demonstrated. In Phase II a diode-pumped laser will replace the flashlamp pumped excitation laser, thereby providing 100 times higher pulse repetition frequency, 10 times shorter pulse duration, and 10 times better shot-to-shot stability. New digitizer technology will be incorporated to accommodate the laser s high repetition frequency. Important Phase II activities include fluorescence methods development to extend the range of applications to drugs and drug metabolites and elaboration of the chemometric algorithms. The instrumental approach to be realized through the Phase II research will have a profound impact on QA QC assessments of drug purity, bioequivalence and pharmacokinetic studies, and research investigations in humans and animals. Sales of several hundred units per year to pharmaceutical manufacturers, contract research organizations, and universities are anticipated. The technology will later be adapted for faster and more accurate DNA sequencing doc7466 none FELLER Biological membranes are inherently heterogeneous and disordered in the physiologically relevant liquid-crystalline phase, thus atomic-level structural data is difficult to obtain experimentally. In this project, molecular dynamics simulations will be carried out on membranes containing a variety of phospholipids, as well as small solutes, nonionic surfactants, and peptides. These simulations will complement the existing body of experimental data from NMR. Specifically, many of the analyses will extract bilayer properties that aid in the interpretation of experimental data on lipid and lipid-solute interactions, and on complex membranes incorporating lipids with detergents, small solutes, membrane-bound peptides, and trans-membrane proteins. This research will extensively involve undergraduate students as co-workers. In addition to testing simulation methods, carrying out simulations, and analyzing interpreting simulation results, students will present their results to the campus community and national and regional scientific meetings. These presentations will prepare them for careers as scientific researchers and will demonstrate exciting opportunities available to prospective science majors. Additional enhancement of undergraduate education will come through the development of molecular modeling exercises that can be utilized throughout the chemistry curriculum, and the use of p-chem portfolios . This career development plan includes an integrated program of research and teaching centered around the use of molecular dynamics computer simulation to probe the structure and dynamics of lipid bilayer membranes. This research program will have significant impact on undergraduate instruction through the transfer of molecular modeling techniques from the research laboratory to the chemistry curriculum at Wabash College, as well as via the research internships that will be available to numerous students during the academic year and summer doc7467 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project continues research and development aimed at demonstrating the feasibility for automatic video tracking of the motion of animals and humans in unconstrained environments. The Phase I study succeeded by designing low-level intelligence into predictive search algorithms that were able to confine their search for the correct position in a succeeding image to specific, small regions predicted by the system. The objective is to create a software system, easily operable by an unsophisticated user that can quickly and accurately track multiple points or regions of a moving animal or human through a sequence of video images. This tracking can be done despite background clutter and intermittent occlusion, and without attaching any distinguishing markers to the subject. In Phase I, a user interface was designed that allowed the user to choose a skeletal template to be tracked with a pointing device (a mouse) by selecting vertices of closed polygons and connected rotation points. By sensing the direction and speed of motion of the system, the model-based tracking algorithm told the search mechanism where it should look in the next image to match a trailing template derived from previous locations and orientations of the template. In Phase II, more sophisticated modeling and prediction algorithms, including supervised learning of constructed models, and a pyramided coarse-to-fine scale-space, constructed at video load time, will be brought to bear that will increase speed and efficiency of the tracking algorithm and improve the robustness of the model-based approach. At the same time, the user interface will be redefined to improve the look and feel and give it a more intuitive structure. Applications for this software have a ready market demand. Present commercial tracking technology of biological motion requires the placement of intrusive control targets at critical positions on the subject. The commercial need for tracking and characterizing general biological motion will be exploited, including tools for animal behavior analysis, and predicting and improving motion efficiency in athletes. In addition, this technology has applications in diagnostics and medicine health applications, surveillance, and other uses ranging from NASA s space research, to ergonomic design, to the fingering of musical instruments doc7468 none This dissertation enhancement grant will support Ana C. Carnaval under the direction of Dr. John M. Bates of the University of Chicago, for a detailed study of phylogeography and population genetics of two species of forest frogs in northeastern Brazil. Thirteen populations of tree frog and ten of the litter frog will be compared for the effects of geographic distance, fragment age, and size on local levels of genetic diversity. The main goal of these studies is to assess the impact of natural and human-made forest fragmentation on the population genetics of these species, by assessing levels of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA polymorphisms. These frog species being examined inhabit fragments of Atlantic rainforest, an important vegetational type that may be more endangered than the familiar Amazonian forest. The study will elucidate patterns of genetic diversity in Brazilian forests, and the research has the potential to shed light on the history of this region and inform local conservation practices. The results likely will have relevance to conservation biology, population genetics, and systematic biology doc7469 none This Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) Phase II project will develop optical sensors, called optrodes, and their systems for monitoring environmental water quality. Phase I research demonstrated the ability of optrodes to gather long-term environmental water quality data in harsh environments. Phase II technical issues are concerned with: (1) analyte specific probe chemistries; (2) optical coatings; and (3) optical configurations. With respect to systems, Phase I found lifetime phase-base measurement systems superior to traditional intensity-based systems. Phase II will develop an integrated phase-based analyzer capable of: (1) resolving dissolved oxygen, dissolved carbon dioxide, acidity, and temperature; and (2) transmission by remote data telemetry. These innovations in optrode technology will: (1) improve mapping of geophysical fields; (2) substantially reduce direct labor costs associated with conventional monitoring technologies; (3) produce robust data for enhanced modeling capabilities; and (4) enable other technology for protecting natural resources doc7470 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will complete development of a production Smart Variable Geometry Socket (SVGS) for transtibial amputees (TTAs) and will test it with a clinical study. This non-electrical system is a simple means for ensuring and maintaining a good socket fit, with security and stability increased over the state of the art. Poorly fitting sockets, which cause pain and skin lesions, are responsible for a significant portion of TTAs rejecting a prosthesis. The SVGS TT utilizes suction retention, which provides an important benefit, particularly to diabetics, by increasing blood circulation in the residual limb. The unique SVGS system consists of multiple, liquid-filled bladders placed by the prosthetist during socket fitting and a control for maintaining appropriate pressures on the residual limb at selected locations, all contained within the dimensions of a conventional prosthesis. The SVGS can be applied by the prosthetist with existing equipment and conventional art, thereby minimizing implementation cost. This attribute will enhance market acceptance. Phase I demonstrated feasibility; Phase II will measure efficacy and acceptance by TTAs. Phase II results will be the catalyst for successful commercialization doc7471 none The goal of this project is to use a two-dimensional (latitude-height) chemical-dynamical model to investigate the reasons for wide variations in the mean-age of stratospheric air in model simulations. The mean-age conveys information about the parcel transport time scales in the lower stratosphere in the presence of diffusion, when photochemical processes occur along parcel trajectories. The impact of horizontal mixing, stratospheric oscillations (quasi-biennial and semi-annual), and mesospheric photochemical destruction on the mean-age of stratospheric air will be examined. Dr. Zhu s theoretical and modeling analysis will help clarify the physical and mathematical basis for the age-of-air concept, and lead to its more accurate estimation. The Large-scale Dynamic Meteorology Program funds this award doc7472 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is directed at improving the capabilities of high resolution x-ray imaging systems. The enabling technology in this approach is a novel x-ray detector formed from transparent scintillation crystals. A prototype developed in Phase I demonstrates a spatial resolution of six microns. This surpasses the resolution of commercial systems based on microfocus x-ray sources, and is 4-6 times better than current x-ray detectors. Based on these results it is anticipated that a resolution of 1-2 microns can be achieved in Phase II. If fully successful, the end result of Phase II will be a commercialized x-ray microscope with five to ten times the resolution of existing products. High-resolution x-ray imaging is used in many fields, including manufacturing, medicine, and scientific research. The product developed in Phase II will have better technical performance and be lower in cost that presently available systems doc7473 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will advance full-field, three-dimensional image correlation measurement technology to a level far beyond the current state-of-the-art. The research will produce a prototype commercial measurement system that will present a cost effective solution to a wide range of deformation measurement problems. The four areas of research for this project are: system calibration, algorithm development, distributed computing and system validation. The completion of this project will result in an easy-to-use, real-time measurement system applicable to a wide range of size scales with high accuracy and a known level of uncertainty. The unique ability to simultaneously measure surface shape, displacement and strain with high accuracy meets industrial measurement demands in many areas. The method is ideally suited for structural evaluation, computer model verification, non-destructive testing, material property measurement and shape measurement. Among others, the technology has applications in the following industries: automotive industry, commercial aviation manufacturers, space vehicle manufacturers, academic research institutions, government laboratories, and the biomedical and electronic packaging industry doc7474 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II Project develops a new class of chiral materials, the dioxolanes, which provide unprecedented helical twisting power. When added to a nematic liquid crystal, a concentration of only a few percent is required to twist the nematic phase into a tight helix with a periodicity of the wavelength of light. Because of the low concentration, the chiral additive does not dilute important physical properties of the nematic material required to optimize Cholesteric displays for brightness, contrast, speed and low operating voltages. Being simple molecular structures, dioxolane derivatives can be synthesized in both left and right hand moieties to enable, for the first time, Cholesteric displays that nearly double the reflective brightness to where it approaches that which we are used to seeing from paper. Phase II research has both a basic and an applied component. The basic component studies the helical twisting power and its relationship to the molecular structure of the chiral compounds and host mixtures. The applied component uses this information to design and develop chiral additives for advanced Cholesteric displays for use in electronic books and other handheld devices. The chiral materials will be used in display products primarily used in handheld devices whee low power, sunlight readability, and wide angle viewing of high resolution, full color images are important. Devices targeted are electronic book, cell phones, pagers, etc doc7475 none Robert Carlitz Information Renaissance Digital Government: The Rulemaking Universe This award will support planning for a larger project in the area of Federal on-line rulemaking, an important part of the Federal regulatory process during which the Internet and the Web will serve to support the consultative dialog between interested parties and agencies developing or modifying rules. Several Federal Agencies are potential partners in the larger project, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Transportation, and the National Marine Fisheries Services doc7476 none The investigators will work toward a quantitative understanding of the energetic particle structure of the heliosphere and the fundamental processes that govern that structure. The main effort concentrates on theoretical studies of the interactions of energetic particles with the solar wind. The studies will be broad-based and include solar energetic particles, galactic cosmic rays, interstellar pickup ions, shock-accelerated particles such as the corotating ion events, and the solar wind itself. The investigations will include both the global spatial and temporal distributions of the energetic particles, and the microprocesses governing their interactions with the ambient plasma, including wave excitation by the energetic particles. Analytical methods will be emphasized where possible. The studies will also emphasize comparisons between the theoretical predictions and ground-based and spacecraft observations, including specifically those by ACE, SOHO, Cluster, Wind, Ulysses and Voyager. Specific topics of research include an analytical theory for the acceleration and transport of solar energetic particles at an evolving coronal interplanetary shock including proton-excited waves and magnetic focusing, which propels ions from the turbulent sheath adjacent to the shock into interplanetary space. The investigators will construct an improved theory of ion acceleration at corotating interaction regions in the solar wind including injection mechanisms, a sheath of proton-excited waves, and azimuth asymmetry of the accelerated interstellar pickup ions. They will also investigate of the evolution of the proton and minor ion distribution functions in the solar wind due to gravity, the ambipolar electric field, magnetic focusing and scattering by ion-cyclotron waves doc7477 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will provide a commercial software tool that integrates reactor scale, (pre)sheath transport, and feature scale models for comprehensive analysis of thermal chemical vapor deposition and low pressure plasma processes in integrated circuit fabrication. Phase II will focus on development of (pre)sheath models, a feature scale simulation tool, a charging model, and the supporting infrastructure in proprietary software, called CFD-ACE+, to integrate these models. (Pre)sheath models from Phase I will be enhanced to address additional common plasma reactor operating conditions. A feature scale simulator, based on the multi-physics models of the existing proprietary software and embedded in the reactor model, will be developed. The model for surface charging will be integrated with the (pre)sheath and sheath models for ion transport and the feature scale models. The software infrastructure will be extended to simplify the model definition steps common to all feature scale simulators. This tool will provide engineers in the semiconductor industry with a means to predict the effect of both reactor designs and process conditions on the size, shape, and quality of the device components they are producing. It will extend the CFD-ACE+ commercial reactor scale modeling software to interface properly with feature scale simulators doc7478 none Stephen E. Reichenbach University of Nebraska-Lincoln Digital Government: A Geospatial Decision Support System for Drought Risk Management This project will develop and integrate new information technologies for improved government services in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Risk Management Agency (RMA). The mission of the RMA is to strengthen the safety net for agricultural procedures (farmers) through sound risk management programs and education. Rick management in agriculture is critically important to producers, their communities, and the nation s economy, but it involves many complex problems. Our objective is to improve, through research and advanced development, the RMA s risk assessment services in three important ways: To speed risk assessment with automation To enhance risk assessment with increased spatial and temporal resolution and additional input variables To extend risk assessment to forecasts and economic analyses doc7479 none Judith Klavans Columbia University Digital Government Research Center (DGRC): Bringing Complex Data to Users In partnership with the Federal Energy Information Agency on the topic of trade data, Columbia University and the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California will work in three areas of relevance to the Agency mission: 1. Main memory query processing, which provides extremely fast querying of multiple statistical data sets, an area of concern to all statistical agencies which must provide aggregated data which maintains the confidentiality of the citizens and businesses which contributed the data; 2. Multilingual question and answering, which will explore the possibility of providing automated translation and querying from English to Spanish and Chinese, and perhaps one other language. As the US population becomes increasingly multi-lingual, natural language processing as a service of gov t web sites will become more and more expected. 3. Usability testing of components developed in this and in another grant to this team under the Digital Government program doc7480 none Francis J. Harvey University of Kentucky Digital Government: Bringing Government and Citizens Together: A Metadata Extension Test-bed for the Kentucky Spatial Data Infrastructure (KYSDI) Clearinghouse. The planning grant will enable us to undertake research on developing a Metadata extension for spatial data integration involving citizens and government. We propose to focus on establishing the parameters for improving citizen involvement in the project and developing a prototype application to assess technical issues. These activities will be the basis for emphasizing four key themes: semantic interoperability, human-computer interaction, inter-agency collaboration, and citizen access in a revised submission to the digital government program doc7481 none Harrison Communication between cells is a vital factor in proper development and maintenance of multicellular organisms. The number of molecules that serve as signals is enormous, yet the mechanisms by which cells can respond to signals are much more restricted. A finite number of signaling pathways have emerged as reutilized intracellular signaling cascades that initiate appropriate cellular responses. The long term objectives of this research are to elucidate mechanisms of cellular communication and to understand how different signals are integrated and interpreted to regulate developmental events. One conserved intracellular cascade that has been found in organisms from slime mold to human is the Janus kinase (JAK) signaling pathway. In vertebrates, JAK signaling is the primary mechanism for response of cells to a wide array of cytokines and growth factors. The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, was chosen to study JAK signaling because it uses the JAK pathway in the same manner as humans, yet is amenable to genetic and developmental manipulation. The only known activator of JAK signaling in Drosophila is the Unpaired (Upd) protein. Previously funded research ( ) focused on the molecular and biochemical characterization of upd. The Upd protein bears no recognizable similarity to previously identified mammalian proteins, but is similar to a protein from a closely related fruit fly species, Drosophila ananassae. Both Om(1E) and updgenes are found in both of these Drosophila species. Furthermore, the recent release of the Drosophila genome sequence has identified two additional, less conserved predicted proteins that have homology to Upd. The functions of these three new genes will be investigated, as well as the relationships of these genes to upd and to one another. Understanding of the molecules and mechanisms of JAK pathway activation in Drosophila will likely provide insights into developmental signaling in many multicellular organisms. The primary goals of this research are to: (1) characterize, molecularly, biochemically, and phenotypically, the Drosophila melanogaster Om(1E) gene, (2) determine the functional relationships between Om(1E) and upd, (3) characterize, molecularly and phenotypically, two other proteins with homology to Upd, and (4) identify additional components of JAK signaling and related pathways using genetic screens doc7482 none The goal of this project is to develop a comprehensive model of protein adsorption at solid liquid interfaces, based on statistical mechanics and supported by experimental data. This model will be used to calculate protein density profiles and orientations at solid surfaces. Four new aspects of this research include the following: (1) the solvent (water) will be treated explicitly in order to capture solvent mediated forces, (2) finite concentrations (as opposed to infinite dilution) of proteins and peptides will be studied, (3) both conformational changes induced by the surface and sequential adsorption of various proteins will be investigated, and (4) experiments with deuterated block polypeptides will be performed to provide direct evidence of layer thickness, gross morphology and orientation, as well as indirect evidence of surface-induced conformational changes. The results of this research could provide useful information for many important application including, as examples: (a) cell adhesion on implants, the clogging of artificial arteries, and haemofiltration membranes, (b) the fouling of biosensor membranes, and (c) the fouling of heat exchangers in food processing operations and membranes in protein purification devices doc7483 none Somasundaran This two-year award, which supports U.S.-Italy cooperative research on interactions of nanoparticles of dendrimers liposomes with polymers and surfactants, involves Ponisseril Somasundaran of Columbia University and M.F. Ottaviani of the Institute of Chemical Sciences in Urbino, Italy. The objective of their research is to enable the use of electron spin resonance to monitor conformation of polymers and surfactants at interfaces. The U. S. principal investigator brings to this collaboration his group s expertise in identifying the best conformation of polymers and proteins for determining the interactions between nanoparticles and dendrimers with surface active species. The US co-PI provides experience with applied supramolecular structure-function and structure-reactivity relationships toward understanding the behavior of adsorption at interfaces. This work is complemented by the Italian investigator s expertise in the use of electron spin resonance probes for examination of adsorption at interfaces. The results of this research are expected to contribute to knowledge of the behavior of vital industrial systems doc7484 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II project is to develop a new type of atomic force microscope that can image nanometer scale features, in real time, in the physiological environment. In all of its forms, the microscope is probably the most widely used tool in the investigation of biological structure and function. The introduction of the atomic force microscope (AFM) to biology created much excitement because the AFM fills a gap in the capabilities of the microscopes that are available to biologists. The study of living and moving biological systems, on time scales of seconds, with nanometer scale resolution, is becoming increasingly important in biological research. Self-assembled monolayers, proteins, and cellular processes all fall into this category. Existing AFMs fall short of the requirements for these applications because of speed and sensitivity limitations in fluid operation. The project is based on the AFM, for nanometer scale imaging of biological samples that is orders of magnitude faster than current AFMs. Additionally, the new system will be optimized for fluid operation in order to give researchers active control over imaging dynamics. This composite system will allow researchers to probe nanometer scale biological phenomena at speeds never before accessible. The technology could dramatically increase biological imaging in two ways: (1) faster imaging and (2) higher resolution in fluid. The increase in speed and resolution will help facilitate projects to provide faster results to researchers doc7485 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is designed to develop and commercialize our electrically controllable, dynamic-focusing liquid crystal microlens microlens array device for 3D optical media readout and writing. The device will be the worlds first compact, electrically controllable, dynamic focusing liquid crystal (LC) microlens reading writing device for 3D data storage, and has the potential to revolutionize optical data storage and retrieval. The device will dramatically increase both the reading and writing speed of conventional CD DVD systems and multi-layer DVDs and will be the enabling component in the next generation of truly 3D data storage technologies. In Phase I, the feasibility of the technology was demonstrated and tested various dynamic liquid crystal lens structures to gain an understanding of the issues of design, fabrication, and optical properties of LC microlenses. Building on this success, Phase II is dedicated to the optimization of the LC microlens structures and the development of a fast-switching dynamic focusing LC microlens with large variable focal length range and numerical aperture. Finally, a microlens array to develop parallel reading writing devices will be designed and built. A prototype 3D reading device will be demonstrated. In Phase III, Reveo will commercialize the new technology. Optical storage offers higher capacities, removable platters, and more durable media than magnetic disk storage, but it is limited by slow access speeds and higher costs of drives and media. The first product to be developed from the microlens technology will be an electrically-controllable, dynamic-focusing liquid crystal microlens device for integration into the data reading system of current DVD players and other optical storage drivers. The device will maximize retrieval efficiency of current optical storage media so customers can immediately enjoy the benefits of 3D data storage technology doc7486 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is designed to develop and commercialize high-durability UV polarizer optics with unprecedented performance. The breakthrough polarizers are made from stacks of oriented, birefringent thin film layers, which are obtained by vacuum deposition at an oblique angle. The film material itself is optically isotropic, but the birefringence arises from the nanostructure of the layers in the film stack. Films can be constructed from a single material, relieving the conventional constraints on material transparency and enabling a wider operating wavelength range. Using LiF as the film material, for example, could extend the operating range down to 110 nm. Extension to the far UV and extreme UV appears possible with materials such as silicon carbide or boron carbide. The deposition technique thus offers an exciting opportunity to engineer unique film properties. In Phase II, the investigator proposes to enlarge the database of film materials for UV chiral film polarizers and design, fabricate (using a customized deposition system), and characterize UV chiral film polarizers for practical applications. The investigator will then develop high-speed deposition techniques to ensure the polarizers are low-cost. Commercialization activities will accelerate in Phase III. The inorganic UV polarizer films may have several advantages over conventional polarizer components, and become key devices in many important industrial manufacturing processes, including systems for chemical synthesis, drug development, and liquid crystal alignment for LCDs doc7487 none Bioseparations using Coupled TPP and Electrostatic Forces Victor G.J. Rodgers (University of Iowa) Andrew L. Zydney (University of Delaware) Membrane processes have great potential for use in the downstream purification of a wide range of biological products. However, current devices are limited by a lack of selectivity and problems associated with protein fouling. The goal of this work is to examine the development of an enhanced membrane separation technology that combines the use of interfacial electrical interactions to enhance the overall selectivity with transmembrane pressure pulsing (TPP) to reduce membrane fouling and increase flux. Initial experimental studies are using well-defined protein solutions containing either one or two proteins and standard ultrafiltration membranes with well characterized properties. Batch-cell and crossflow ultrafiltration (UF) experiments will be performed to evaluate the transport of model single-component solutions and binary mixtures of proteins with and without TPP. Data obtained over a range of buffer conditions indicate the efficacy of using membranes with different surface-charge characteristics to exploit electrostatic interactions on the separation. Protein charge is determined by capillary electrophoresis, and the membrane charge is analyzed both before and after each run by measuring the streaming potential. Post-operative solution analysis and membrane hydraulic permeability data are used to determine quantitatively the extent of membrane fouling as a function of operating conditions, membrane surface characteristics, and protein properties. The data analysis employs factorial design and analysis of variance (ANOVA) to discern the most significant factors in improving solute sieving, solute flux, and overall purification factor. These experimental studies are complimented by theoretical analyses of bulk and membrane transport phenomena, including the effects of both the electrostatic interactions and the transmembrane pressure pulsing. The combination of dynamic TPP with the proper exploitation of electrostatic interactions has the potential to provide significant enhancements in protein-separation membrane performance. In particular, the use of electrical interactions to repel selectively like-charged species should enable very high resolution separations to be accomplished with commercially available membrane materials. Transmembrane pressure pulsing will allow these devices to be operated at much higher throughput while minimizing membrane fouling. The net result is that this technology should be able to improve dramatically the overall yield, purification factor, and throughput characteristics of membrane systems, allowing these devices to be used for an entirely new range of applications in the biotechnology and biomedical industries. For example, because membrane processes are inherently cost effective and cause little damage to fragile biological components, successful implementation of this technology could enable processes for the production of new therapeutic proteins and nutraceuticals from natural sources like milk and plasma, the development of new biomedical devices for removal of auto-antibodies from plasma, or the treatment of life-threatening diseases with dynamic mass-transfer-based artificial organs doc7488 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will build upon the exciting results of Phase I, which demonstrated that whispering gallery mode (WGM) resonances of a microsphere can be tuned over a significant range by sweeping the microsphere s temperature. It is intended to employ this effect to produce a temperature-tunable optical filter suitable for development of a next-generation optical spectrum analyzer (OSA) for remotely monitoring dense wavelength division multiplexed (DWDM) networks. Such a device will greatly benefit the telecommunications industry by providing a means of embedded real-time monitoring of system operation and signal quality. This capability has the potential to virtually eliminate costly system failures. The plan for reaching the project goal is to develop a first-generation prototype and use this prototype to demonstrate the expected capabilities of a next-generation OSA. The initial application for the technology is as an embedded test and monitoring system for telecommunications fiber networks. The major customers are optical network installers and service providers doc7489 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II Project aims to develop novel nano-layered coatings for high-temperature tribological applications, specifically cutting-tool coatings that perform well at elevated temperatures (up to degrees C). There is a high level of interest in these coatings because of the desire to cut at higher rates and due to increasing environmental concerns over the use of coolants during machining. Traditional coating materials do not perform well under these conditions, primarily because their hardnesses decrease rapidly as temperature rises. Research in Phase I developed a new class of coatings, combining many alternating nanometer-thick layers of metals and nitrides, which show substantial hardness enhancements. Hardnesses up to 44 gigapascals (GPa) were maintained after high temperature annealing, demonstrating the feasibility of these new materials as high-temperature stable coatings. Strong dislocation confinement in nano-layers is likely to yield higher high-temperature hardness than in monolithic coatings, providing improved wear resistance. In Phase II, nano-layered coatings will be developed that optimize key properties including hardness, thermal expansion match with the substrate, stability against dissolution into different workpieces, and oxidation resistance. Nano-layered coated cutting tools have the potential to make dry-cutting a practical alternative, and to improve wet-machining performance doc7490 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop giant-magnetoresistive (GMR) sensing devices that yield superior hysteresis performance over existing bridge sensors and GMR signal isolators and provide intrinsic self-biasing without using affixed magnets or power consuming coils. Phase I demonstrated that edge pinning techniques can be used to fabricate low hysteresis push-pull and shielded bridge sensors with designed bias points. Before the technology can be commercialized, Phase II research must: (1) develop hard edge resistor elements that minimize hysteresis and maximize signal; (2) optimize hard edge processing and implementation; (3) determine the viability of alternate pinning strategies; (4) develop specification, architecture, and physical designs for prototype sensor or isolator products; (5) fabricate target devices; and (6) characterize devices for magnetic and electrical responses. A fully developed magnetic field sensor and or signal isolator is expected, one that is ready for commercialization. Potential commercial applications are discrete low hysteresis bridge sensors and isolators, improved digital magnetic switches, and ultra-low field sensors employing integrated circuit (IC) based feedback amplifiers doc7491 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop prototype Spin Dependent Tunneling (SDT) devices by combining high-speed magnetic thin films and low-RC SDT structures achieved in Phase I. These devices will be fabricated using standard microelectronic photolithography and packaging techniques, suitable for volume production. Sub-nanosecond switching will be demonstrated with these devices which are integrated with integrated circuit (IC) electronics. Fast IC electronics will be implemented using low voltage differential signaling (LVDS). SDT devices exhibit large signal, low switching field, and high resistance, which lead to high sensitivity, low power consumption, and small size and weight, when compared with giant magnetoresistive (GMR) devices. Fast SDT devices will require improvements in both magnetic speed and electronic speed, while existing attractive static properties need to be maintained. Phase II is expected to produce integrated SDT devices with state-of-the-art properties and switching time less than one nanosecond. Potential commercial applications for this research are expected in high-speed isolators, high-speed magnetic field and current sensing devices, fast magnetic random access memories (MRAM), reconfigurable magnetic logic, read heads, and gigahertz (GHz) inductor transformers, as well as their derivative products doc7492 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will meet the demand from the microelectronics industry for an improved micro x-ray fluorescence instrument for thin film measurements. A new technique, monochromatic micro x-ray fluorescence (MMXRF) analysis using doubly curved crystal optics can meet this significant market need. A toroidal crystal can focus characteristic x-rays from a microfocus x-ray source based upon diffraction. The focused beam is monochromatic and the beam size is expected to be significantly smaller than that of current MXRF systems. This technique will provide high sensitivity and enhance excitation of low Z elements with the selection of beam energy. In addition, this technique will significantly increase the speed of high-energy x-ray measurements. A prototype MMXRF system will be developed that incorporates a modular dual beam system to probe samples with two energies simultaneously. The initial application of the technology is in the area of semiconductor manufacturing. As semiconductor manufacturing moves to larger wafers and higher levels of integration, a single wafer may require hundreds of steps. These wafers are expensive to produce and very difficult to repair. The instrument under development would provide elemental and thickness analysis to identify defective thin film deposition at the earliest opportunity, avoiding the considerable loss associated with rejections at the end of the production line doc7493 none How does a single cell divide to become two cells? This is a fundamentally important and yet unsolved biological question. In prokaryotes, this essential cellular process is initiated and directed by the tubulin-like FtsZ protein, which forms a polymeric ring, called the Z-ring, at the division site during the initial stages of cytokinesis. The Z-ring then contracts, persisting at the leading edge of the invaginating cytoplasmic membrane throughout the division process. FtsZ is present in the three major biological kingdoms-bacteria, archaea, and organelles.in eukaryotes. Because very little is known about cell division or cellular organization in the archaea, the goal of this research program is to gain insight into the mechanism of archaeal cell division and how FtsZ coordinates this process. Halobacterium salinarum is the system of choice to study FtsZ-based cell division in the archaea for several reasons. First, relatively sophisticated genetic and cytological tools, such as a salt-resistant green fluorescent protein (GFP), have been recently developed for this organism. Second, H. salinarum grows at convenient temperatures in air, and thus can be cultivated without any special equipment. Third, its complete genome sequence has recently been completed, making H. salinarum the best archaeon in which to apply functional genomics. Fourth, H. salinarum harbors five copies of ftsZ: ftsZ1 and ftsZ2 are highly similar to ftsZ orthologs from other species, whereas the other three are more divergent but are nevertheless clearly ftsZ homologs. This unprecedented complexity promises to reveal interesting and novel aspects of FtsZ function. Fifth, despite the potential complexity of FtsZ interactions, there are no other homologs of bacterial cell division proteins in this organism (which is also true for other archaea). This, along with the presence of a relatively simple S-layer instead of a peptidoglycan cell wall, suggests that cell division in H. salinarum may be more streamlined than that of the bacterial model systems and therefore potentially easier to solve. Finally, the rod shape and relatively large size of H. salinarum cells greatly facilitates cytological analysis. The objectives of this project are to (i) define the roles of the five FtsZ homologs, in particular the two most conserved copies, in H. salinarum cell division; (ii) understand what regulates assembly and placement of the Z-ring in H. salinarum, with potential candidates including the two MinD homologs present in the proteome; and (iii) identify other factors involved in cell division and in a potentially novel cytoskeleton in this organism. These objectives will be addressed by construction of gene knockouts, protein overexpression and purification, assays for GTP binding and hydrolysis, self-assembly measurements, and in vivo protein localization and quantitation using GFP fusions and immunodetection. These studies should make a major contribution to our understanding of cell division mechanisms, protein targeting and dynamics, and cellular organization of archaea, and should complement studies of cell division in bacterial and organellar model systems. Moreover, genome sequence of H. salinarum, coupled with its accessibility, affords a timely opportunity for students to develop an in-depth research project on the cell biology of an archaeon doc7494 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will further develop, validate and demonstrate a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tool for plasma equipment processes using a non-statistical Boltzmann solver for the analysis of charged particle kinetics. Phase I implemented a new Boltzmann module and clearly demonstrated the feasibility of coupling a Bolzmann solver to the company s plasma simulator for efficient kinetic description of low-pressure plasma reactors used in semiconductor manufacturing. The Phase II project will focus on: (1) the development of elliptic representation of the velocity distribution function (VDF) valid for arbitrary anisotropy of the VDF; (2) full integration of the Boltzmann solver with a commercial software; (3) kinetic simulations for industrial plasma systems; and (4) interfacing the Boltzmann module with plasma simulation codes developed by different research groups. Using an elliptic representation will extend the applicability of the Boltzmann solver to problems with arbitrary VDF anisotropy such as electron beams, ion kinetics, etc. The goal of Phase II will be to validate the new CAD tool for wide variety of plasma technologies and expand the software usage to new industries. The total commercial markets of plasma etch and Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) equipment is currently in excess of $2 billion per annum with strong projections for growth. Commercial application of the proposed software tool will allow optimization of the performance of all hardware equipment of this market and to smartly design new equipment. It is projected to save millions of dollars of equipment and process development costs to Plasma Equipment Manufacturers and to semiconductor chip producing companies doc7495 none This CISE Information Technology Workforce (ITW) proposal requests funds to analyze, through six unique surveys (i.e. alumni, recent graduates, enrolled, changed to a non-IT program, stopped-or dropped-out), the environmental, educational, and workforce issues faced by over 8,500 adult females and 8,900 minority students. The goal of this research is to obtain an understanding of the backgrounds, motivations, preferences and support systems that adult women and minority IT students express upon entrance and exit from a non-tradional university. This project has the potential to provide valuable insight about how to educate and provide support services to women and under-represented groups who are interested in pursuing IT careers doc7496 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will build on results of Phase I research to fully demonstrate an early warning system for potential failure of ceramic matrix composite (CMC) materials. In Phase I, a novel detection technique called Composite Failure Onset Response Test (ComFORT (TM)) was demonstrated for use with high temperature CMCs. ComFORT (TM) is a composite failure detection technique whereby proprietary thermally stable electrically conductive ceramic fibers are selectively placed, together with regular reinforcing fibers, and are then processed into a dense ceramic composite. Once in place, existing hardware is used to monitor the condition and the health of the electrical signal, while an especially designed algorithm minimizes false negatives during use. As the ceramic composite begins to fail, the failure of the fiber reinforcement is preceded by the failure of the conductive coating, which is recognized through a weakening or loss of electrical conductivity. This novel technique lends itself to a powerful early warning system, whereby the conductive fiber can be designed to fail before catastrophic failure of the composite itself. Proper placement of these conductive fibers enables tracking of even minute levels of breach within the composite. Moreover, through a novel design, it may be possible to extend the performance to detect matrix cracking. The lack of reliability and little to no warning before catastrophic failure has prevented a more widespread use of CMC s. The smart fiber system to be developed in this project will allow the use of CMC s in more demanding applications with greater certainty of success. The successful commercialization of the proposed technology will lead to the insertion of continuous fiber reinforced composites into power generation, energy, air, space and missile applications, where high temperature, lightweight, and mechanically reliable materials are needed, and the cost of part failures is high. Ceramic composites can be used in a larger number of these applications, if part reliability can be assured. Substantial benefits in operating efficiency of gas turbine, automotive and rocket systems can be realized with increased operating temperatures doc7497 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will continue to develop a solder self-assembly process that was the concept explored in Phase I. It will build upon the successful Phase I results that demonstrated the use of solder to self-assemble two-dimensional surface micromachined Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) into useful three-dimensional structures. This concept is a next step in the evolution of MEMS assembly. The overall objective of Phase II is to move the technology from the lab environment to a commercial production process that is well understood and has excellent yield. Research personnel from industry and education are involved and state-of-the-art equipment will be utilized. A number of promising commercial applications have been identified and discussions with potential commercial partners suggest interest in commercializing this technology doc7498 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project focuses on the development of an enabling technology for computer- directed high-throughput screening of proteins with improved properties. Xencor s Protein Design Automation (PDA) predicts all the possible amino acid sequences that will fold into the three-dimensional structure of a protein. There should be molecules among those sequences that have the structure and function of the parent protein, together with additional novel properties such as increased thermo-stability or alkaline pH optima. In Phase I the company addressed this possibility using xylanase as a model protein. After targeting the active site of the enzyme for PDA re-design, the company found sequences that were more active than the wild-type protein and one that had a different pH profile. These results were achieved by testing only 260 of a possible 110,592 sequences. In Phase II the company will develop a high-throughput assay system that will allow testing the majority of the predicted sequences. The research will also improve electrostatic functions of the PDA algorithm, and then use this version of the program to re-design the entire xylanase molecule instead of just the active site, thereby finding mutations located away from the active site that effect the protein s characteristics. The PDA technology improves enzyme efficiency and expands the reactions and process conditions where they can be applied. Major markets include polymer manufacturers, value extraction from waste streams and food processing doc7499 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will build on Phase I results to take advantage of an exciting opportunity to revolutionize the way people interact with the machines they encounter in everyday life. Visual displays have progressed remarkably in past decades. Aircraft cockpits that used to have hundreds of gauges and dials now have just a few color displays that provide rich visual information that changes depending on the situation. Yet physical interfaces--knobs, buttons, sliders, etc.--remain as primitive as ever. Regardless of context, these interfaces always feel the same and can serve only a limited number of functions. Phase I results demonstrated the potential human factors benefits of Smart Instrument Controls with programmable feels-- operator performance improved, especially when visual attention was critical, such as during a driving simulation task. These systems also could simplify interfaces by reducing the number of separate controls. One control could operate several functions, each function having a distinctly separate feel . Phase II will continue human factors studies and expand to include research into novel sensor and actuator technologies for Smart Instrument Controls in order to develop a technology that simplifies elaborate system interfaces while improving or maintaining operator performance. Immersion Corporation proffers a man-machine interface technology that enhances an operator s experience and in many cases can improve performance by leveraging the underutilized sense of touch. These benefits have attracted companies doc7500 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop screen reading software (used by the visually disabled to access computers) that responds to changes in task context. The proposed software will allow screen readers to automatically generate task-specific scripts--sophisticated macros that determine the behavior of the screen reader in response to the current state of an application--based on an analysis of the user s actions while performing a specific task. The end result of this project will be a functioning prototype screen reader (based on Henter-Joyce s JAWS (Job Access With Speech) screen reader) with the ability to observe the user s actions, identify the user s goal based on those actions (referred to as plan recognition), and then either create a script that automates the task of achieving that same goal in the future or remind the user that such a script already exists. Throughout the course of the project, feedback will be sought from members of the visually impaired community through user trials, focus groups, and formal experimentation. While investigators will work exclusively with the JAWS screen reader during Phase II, many of the algorithms developed during this project will be applicable to other screen readers. The software developed will be licensed to others to improve the performance of existing and new screen readers. The enhanced screen reading software will provide a number of significant benefits. First and foremost, the visually impaired will have significantly improved access to computers for both personal and job-related activities. They will be able to use computers for tasks that were previously impossible or impractical, and they will be able to perform their current activities faster and more effectively. Second, employers will be more open to employing the visually impaired because of the reduced cost in time and effort of job training and the increased level of productivity; visually impaired employees will be able to do more jobs, will be able to learn jobs faster, and will be able to do their jobs better than before doc7501 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project studies holographic data storage in a new ion-exchanged photochromic glass disk. It is well known that holographic data storage can significantly increase data storage capacity and reduce access time. However, the technology maturity of holographic data storage is believed to be impeded by: the lack of good holographic material that can be erased and recorded optically with almost unlimited rewriting cycles, with large index modulation for large capacity multiplexed data recording, and with long lifetime and immunity to destructive readout for archival applications. As demonstrated in Phase I the new ion-exchanged photochromic glass can satisfy all above requirements. In addition, it does not require developing or fixing after hologram recording making it an attractive candidate to replace other holographic materials in holographic storage applications. The Phase II research will first explore techniques to increase the recording volume thickness. The holographic performance parameters will again be determined after the thickness improvement. A compact holographic storage system will then be designed and constructed to show the effectiveness of disk type storage application. High capacity storage will be demonstrated. Commercial development will be explored with some major storage companies. Using the new ion-exchanged glass can significantly improve the holographic data storage technology for commercial and military applications such as computer data storage, on-line storage, library archival applications, image storage and processing for medical applications and military target identification, and fast access to large intelligent databases doc7502 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop a computational Problem Solving Environment (PSE) for the creation, optimization, testing, and application of reduced chemical kinetic mechanisms. Inclusion of detailed chemistry into 3D simulations with turbulence-chemistry interaction will be computationally intractable for the foreseeable future. Practical simulation of reacting flows requires reduced mechanisms tailored to the application and conditions of interest. The PSE created in Phase I allows the user to rapidly create reduced mechanisms, set up multi-parameter test problems for comparison to detailed chemistry, and interrogate and visualize the results more thoroughly than was previously possible. Human effort for reduced mechanism validation is reduced from days to hours. Rigorous testing is necessary to make reduced mechanisms a reliable commercial product. In Phase II the PSE will be extended to automatically optimize reduced mechanisms to the users specification, and produce reduced mechanism modules for a variety of applications that seamlessly integrate into a variety of Computational Fluid Dynamics codes. These technologies will have commercial value due to the ever-increasing need to include more detailed chemistry into the design and analysis software used by scientists and engineers. The problem solving environment provides the engineer with the ability to rapidly create reduced mechanisms, set up multiple test problems covering a multidimensional parameter space for comparison to detailed chemistry, and efficiently interrogate and visualize the results doc7503 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II Project proposes the construction of a miniature object recognition and color segmentation system on a chip. This chip will be tuned to recognize various predefined targets in natural environments. The chip will use an object recognition model, color histogramming, originally derived from research in cognitive neuroscience. Taking advantage of recent advances in Neuromorphic Engineering, the company will implement the basic sensing and computational elements directly in silicon using mixed analog digital processing. In contrast, implementing the same model or algorithm with conventional microprocessor technology would require that the basic computations be simulated as an intermediate step. The removal of this intermediate step will result in an intelligent sensor with dramatically lower cost, smaller volume, and reduced power usage-achievements not possible using competing microprocessor-based technology. The applications for this technology include intelligent toys and prosthetic devices. A toy might be made to recognize, and therefore be able to respond to, the presence of another toy or specially designed environment. More advanced and elaborated versions of the chip might be used as an aid to the blind by assisting them in finding standardized (i.e. specially colored) objects. For example, a blind person might be assisted in localizing a coffee mug, distinguishing between two similar items of clothing differing only in color, or finding a standardized EXIT sign in a building. The broader impact of this technology is that it will help bridge the gap between the natural, unstructured environment and computing technology doc7504 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II project will develop and optimize a novel bioassay tool for routine low-cost biomonitoring of water quality. Submitochondrial particle (SMP) toxicity bioassays, based on the in vitro responses to toxicants of the integrated enzyme functions in oxidative phosphorylation, are good predictors of conventional whole organism tests, yet can be completed in minutes. Phase I research proved the concept that SMP technology could be streamlined and semi-automated, enhancing their convenience and commercial potential. In Phase II, prototypes of two dedicated instruments will be developed to accommodate both the cuvette and 96-well microplate-based formats. Accessory liquid and cuvette handling tools will be developed to increase sample throughput. Features will be added to computer software developed in Phase I for running the tests, including support for other protocols; better error detection; statistical treatments and graphical presentation of data. SMP production methods and quality control procedures will be improved and standardized. The software and instrument prototypes will be tested at four independent laboratories to establish assay variability and to gain additional information on appropriate applications of the tests. If successful, this project will provide affordable tools that will allow for screening of water quality and wastewater discharges by industry and municipalities doc7505 none This Small Business Innovative Research Phase II project will further the development of the electrochemical chlorine purification process and conduct a pilot trial with a 0.5 square meter cell at a chlor-alkali plant. During the Phase I phase, densities as high as 0.5 A cm2 (at room temperature) were demonstrated for this process, with a potential of less than 300 mV at the highest current density. A pilot scale MP-cell with 100 cm2-electrode area was successfully demonstrated to purify chlorine in the flow through electrode mode using anion exchange membranes. Chlorine purity at the outlet was 100%. A complete mass balance was carried out for the chlorine gas and the chloride ion. The objectives of the Phase II program include (a) study and understanding of the mechanism of chlorine reduction in concentrated hydrochloric acid, (b) investigation of catalysis of both the chloride oxidation and chlorine reduction processes in concentrated HCl, (c) building a 0.5 square meter pilot cell, and (d) conducting field trials in a chlor-alkali plant with the pilot cell. At the end of Phase II, a detailed economic analysis would have been completed to enable commercialization efforts. The world chlor-alkali industry is projected to grow from the current production capacity of 42.1 million tons to 49 million metric tons in the year . The total amount of tail gas to be processed is 562 million dollars through the year for a technology that replaces third stage liquefaction. The market for the second stage liquefaction is approximately 1.7 billion dollars. The U. S. market size for a low cost, energy efficient technology such as electrochemical purification is approximately 160 million dollars through doc7506 none With advances in wireless communications, medicine, and biocompatible electronics, novel ideas to seamlessly integrate information technology and bioelectromagnetics toward the development of wireless implantable biomedical devices need to be explored. Bioelectromagnetic phenomena are intrinsic to the vital function of all living tissues, and a thorough understanding of both the internal electromagnetic fields and the coupling of external electromagnetic fields to the human body represent a challenge that will significantly contribute to the development of new biomedical devices for the 21st century. The objective of this proposal is to bring about fundamental advances toward the development of novel wireless transcutaneous electromagnetic devices for biomedical applications by integrating in the same framework macro- and micro-scale phenomena. The study will start from considering the development of suitable antenna systems for power and data telemetry between units internal and external to the human body, to reach the level of understanding how induced and spontaneous electrical signals can be meaningfully used in the development of biomedical devices. Macro-scale interactions of exogenous and endogenous electromagnetic fields in the human body will be interfaced with microbioelectromagnetic modeling, with the focus on characterizing exposure and excited electrical activity at the cellular and molecular level. Such studies will help in understanding and elucidating the mechanisms of interaction of electromagnetic fields with biological tissues, with potential applications to neural responses to electromagnetic excitations. Full-wave Finite-Difference Time-Domain based numerical methods will be used for this complete modeling effort, with integration of quasi-static methods for the low frequency modeling of neural responses. Experimental systems to test the performance of the developed implantable wireless links will be fabricated, while computational models of the neural responses will be validated through collaboration with researchers at Johns Hopkins University. The impact of the proposed research activity will extend from the development of a epiretinal prosthesis to restore sight in over 10,000,000 visually impaired to the development of wireless devices for sensing the daily evolution of cancer. Collaborations with the Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute and biomedical companies are already in place to provide the necessary medical help and expertise. This project will offer a unique research environment with strong interdisciplinary and multi-institutional collaborations that will provide graduate and undergraduate students an unprecedented exposure to innovative technologies for the 21st century. New educational approaches aimed to present a broader system-oriented view of the role of electromagnetics and bioelectromagnetics in today s and tomorrow s technology will be pursued to expose students early in their career to a new and timely perspective of careers in engineering electromagnetics and bioelectromagnetics doc7507 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project addresses the next generation data networks which will require terabit information handling capability. Future networks must be reconfigurable, highly secure and easily upgraded in both bit rate and number of nodes. The company will apply its extensive fiber optic expertise and its proprietary wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) technology to the development of a reconfigurable high-speed fiber-optic backbone structure that supports the transmission of multiple data protocols between multiple network stations. The approach is based on the company s all-fiber, static and dynamic WDM network access designs which offer high efficiency, compactness and low cost. In Phase I a three-node, two-wavelength system was constructed with static access modules to demonstrate the feasibility of simultaneously transmitting different protocols such as ATM and Ethernet. Phase I formed a basis for Phase II engineering development where the reseacher will employ dynamic access modules and expand the network to 8 nodes and 4 wavelengths to demonstrate network reconfigurability and scalability. The market for fiber-optic networks is growing at a rate of over 20% per year and is expected to exceed $18 billion in . Multi-protocol fiber backbones have applications in commercial platforms, such as enterprise networks, ships, airliners, automobiles, and integrated manufacturing equipment. Each optical fiber can replace hundreds of wires resulting in substantial drop in costs, component weight, and an increase in performance. The project will integrate well with the Internet-II, and SuperNet programs for the government-wide Next Generation Internet (NGI doc7508 none This award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program will assist the Department of Chemistry at Howard University to acquire a 400 MHz nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas such as the following: (1) organic synthetic method development, (2) studies of guest-host, coordination and charge-transfer complexes, (3) studies of new synthetic polymers and surfactants, (4) studies of relaxation behavior in paramagnetic systems, and (5) the study of novel biomaterials. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. In addition to serving the needs of researchers at Howard University, the instrument will also be used for collaborative efforts with researchers at Morgan State University in Baltimore MD and at George Washington University. The instrument will be made available for solid-state and or high field NMR studies to as many as 4 other universities in the Washington DC area without these capabilities. Howard University continues to be the largest of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) that possesses a Research Level I certification. The Chemistry Department is one of the largest producers of African American Ph.D.s in Chemistry in the world. The acquisition of this instrument will insure that training for all of its students is up to today s academic and industrial standards. Students involved in the new NSF sponsored Howard University Science Engineering and Mathematics Program (HUSEM) will utilize the instrument as part of the undergraduate experience. The HUSEM program is designed to increase retention in undergraduate training and to increase the number of African American students going on to graduate training doc7509 none The science of psychology has produced a large body of outstanding research on behavioral and social phenomena. In terms of public awareness, however, the potential of psychology may be among the best kept secrets in science, among the public, policymakers, and other scientists. The American Psychological Society is launching a new journal to address this problem. Psychological Science in the Public Interest (PSPI) will present the best scientific evidence on issues of public interest. This grant will broaden the dissemination of PSPI reports to the public doc7510 none In the last fifty years, linguists and psycholinguists have produced a large body of work on language processing in adults and language learning in children. Most of our knowledge in this domain has come from studies of Indo-European languages, in particular, English. Such results are usually interpreted as universal properties of language, and generalized accordingly. In recent years, however, there has been a surge of interest in the study of non-Indo-European languages. This interest to a certain degree reflects a paradigm shift , a reconceptualization of the role of cross-linguistic variation, in place of an emphasis on linguistic universals. The psycholinguistic study of Chinese represents one very important step in this direction. The phonological, orthographic, lexical, and grammatical structures of the Chinese language differ significantly from those of Indo-European languages on which major theories of linguistics and psycholinguistics are based. One the one hand, Chinese presents a major challenge to psycholinguists who attempt to understand the dynamics of language processing and language acquisition; on the other hand, it also presents new windows on cognitive processes and new opportunities for psycholinguistic analyses. In the last two decades, researchers have used a variety of theoretical and experimental paradigms to examine Chinese language processing and its acquisition. More recently, they have used Chinese as a crucial test case, applying neural and computational approaches to examine core problems in psycholinguistics. These new approaches have not only examined the psycholinguistic processes of Chinese, but also attempted to shed new light on language processing and language acquisition in general. The specific aim of this project is to advance our understanding of the psycholinguistic processes and mechanisms in Chinese language processing and language acquisition by organizing a workshop as part of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Summer Linguistic Institute (to be held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, July 13-15, ). The workshop draws together eminent scholars who have done pioneering work in Chinese psycholinguistics. It provides an ideal forum for researchers to disseminate and integrate their exciting new ideas and share their aspirations for future directions doc7511 none Estrogenic endocrine disrupters are chemicals in the environment that are either naturally occurring, such as plant estrogens in foods (e.g., soybeans) ,or residues in the environment from pesticide use. These chemicals have been blamed for reproductive abnormalities in wildlife. On the other hand, plant estrogens (e.g., genistein) are recommended as a nutritional supplement for increased health and relief from menopausal symptoms. Because development of the brain is very sensitive to disruption, research in this area is vitally important to understand the potential consequences. The symposium will focus on research concerning exposure to estrogenic compounds and the resulting effects on brain anatomy and behavior in developing and adult animals. The participants are scientists with research programs that examine exposure to such compounds. The goal of the symposium is to promote collaboration and exchange of information between endocrinologists or those who study hormonal systems and toxicologists or those who study the effects of toxic exposures to chemical. This particular symposium is significant because while many recent meetings have focused on endocrine disrupters, none has devoted itself to the developing organism s brain and behavior. A meeting of the minds will bring together scientists from many disciplines to exchange ideas and views doc7512 none CAREER: Social behavior and genetics in a fission-fusion society. Susan C. Alberts Focusing on a wild population of African elephants, the proposed project will test critical hypotheses about the evolution of social behavior, using both behavioral data and genetic techniques. These hypotheses address (1) the causes of differences in mating success among males, (2) the extent and mechanisms of inbreeding avoidance, (3) the extent to which social relationships are determined by kinship, and (4) the impact of behavior on the genetic structure of populations. The questions addressed in this proposal are of both general importance for understanding the evolution of social behavior, and of particular importance for understanding the relationship between behavior and genes in a well-studied population of a threatened species. The work will involve the African elephant population in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, which has been the subject of ongoing behavioral and demographic studies since . Elephants, like many social mammals, exhibit long-term associations among female relatives, and mating behavior that favors a class of socially dominant males. However, unlike most mammals, elephants exhibit a very fluid form of fission-fusion society, in which an individual elephant may associate with almost every member of the population in a given year. This raises unique questions about inbreeding avoidance where relatives encounter each other unpredictably, about cooperation in unstable social settings, and about genetic differentiation and gene flow within and between fluid societies. The genetic component of the project will include a large-scale microsatellite analysis and a study of mitochondrial DNA, focusing on 400 individuals. These genetic data will be used to establish (1) paternity for a subset of calves, (2) levels of relatedness between breeding females and males, (3) levels of genetic relatedness between females in focal families, and (4) the distribution of maternal and paternal kin networks within and across families. The educational component of the project includes graduate and undergraduate course development, as well as the development of a workshop for Durham area high school biology teachers, who have expressed a pressing need for additional course content for their classrooms. Durham area public schools have a high ( 60%) minority enrollment as well as a strong commitment to science education, including the teaching of evolution. The workshop aims to provide course content in behavioral ecology, and to capitalize on the strong popular appeal of this sub-discipline in order to increase interest in basic biological research among Durham s diverse student population doc7513 none This collaborative project between Michigan Technological University (MTU) and Southwest Texas State University (SWT) focuses on the fabrication and testing of photonic crystals in magnetic oxides for novel integrated photonic device prototyping. The project responds to the growing interest in photonic crystals for device applications based on their unique optical band gap properties. While various novel optical band-gap structures have been fabricated in non-magnetic dielectric media for highly efficient waveguiding, filtering and resonator applications, very little work has been done on photonic crystals in magnetic systems. One-dimensional structures have received some attention, although this work is still very limited and remains mostly theoretical. Higher dimensional systems have not been investigated at all. Given the novelty of the field of magnetic systems in photonic crystal applications, the proposed project will consist of a one-year exploratory effort to assess the applicability of magnetic materials in photonic band-gap structures. The non-reciprocal properties of magnetic oxides, such as yttrium iron garnet (YIG), make these materials a unique choice for optical isolator and circulator fabrication. Optical fiber telecommunications have developed to the point where the monolithic integration of different optical components is a serious issue to reduce costs in local area networks and long-distance data transmittal. In particular, noise suppression at the source is an important driver for the development of on-chip optical isolators. However, conventional systems utilizing non-planar geometries are both bulky and expensive. Photonic crystal structures provide a novel alternative to address this problem since they can significantly enhance the Kerr and Faraday response, making it possible to build smaller and cheaper isolators and circulators A program to develop photonic crystal devices based on magnetic systems is a high-risk high- payoff undertaking. It is high-risk because the use of photonic crystals in magnetic systems is a completely new and virgin field. Most of the work developed thus far has been theoretical, although a few experimental successes have been reported. Certain aspects of the sputtering work required for the fabrication of one-dimensional magnetic photonic crystals remain partly unexplored and may require particularly careful fine-tuning of the sputtering conditions. In particular, special attention must be paid to the formation of highly smooth interfaces in the magnetic photonic crystal stack given the large number of layers that make up these structures. The essence of the innovation presented by the use of photonic crystals in magneto-optic isolators is that of a tremendous reduction in length in the polarization rotator afforded by a corresponding enhancement in Faraday rotation. However, the impact of this program, if successful, would not be just the development of ultra-short isolators but the enabling of actual on-chip commercial integration of magneto- optic isolators. This is because the integration of these devices onto planar structures has been hindered by the presence of linear birefringence in optical waveguides. The difficulty arises because waveguide dimensions comparable to the optical wavelength induce a phase mismatch between transverse-electric (TE) and transverse-magnetic (TM) modes, degrading the isolation efficiency. The qualitative reduction in device length envisaged by the use of photonic crystal structures promises to eliminate the phase matching stumbling block to the integration of isolators into photonic circuits. In that sense, this program has the potential to revolutionize optical communications technology, by allowing the on-chip fabrication of a critical component for communications systems doc7514 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project seeks to implement a Combustion Chemical Vapor Deposition (CCVD) process for the production of anode electrocatalyst layers for Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) applications requiring reformate fuel feed gas. In Phase I it was demonstrated that fabrication of Pt:Ru electrocatalysts as unsupported, metallic nanoparticles is possible using CCVD. These electrocatalyst layers behave electrochemically in a similar manner to commercially available Pt:Ru electrocatalysts prepared on carbon supports using wet chemical methods, but can be deposited directly onto both gas diffusion media and proton exchange membranes. The Phase II project would involve optimization of catalyst composition, continued development of web coating technology for mass production of membrane electrode assemblies (MEAs) and commercialization of the technology through construction of production equipment and licensing. Fuel cells are of huge interest to the marketplace, as illustrated by sizable investments in the technology and market capitalization of fuel cell companies. For example, Daimler Chrysler has targeted the year for planned production of fuel cell vehicles, and has slated more than $1.4 billion in investments to reach that goal. However, for commercial viability, performance and cost of the electrocatalyst layers must be improved. MCT, if successful, could contribute in both arenas doc7515 none Haimes The proposed ninth Engineering Foundation Conference on risk-based decision-making represents the natural growth of the field and the culmination of the theory, methodology, and applications in risk assessment and management of water resources and natural and man-made hazards. The most striking observations is that the objection and goals set forth for the first conference in September in Asilomar, California, and the issues raised in the preface of the proceedings are as relevant and as timely today as they were then. Our past conferences continued to reinforce the Socratic culture that has evolved over the last decade-and-a-half in these meetings. Although some of the papers covered topics presented previously, the discussions were more substantive and in greater depth. Methodologies were more closely related to theory, and at the same time the relevance of their applications to emerging natural and man-made hazards became stronger and more convincing. Such topics as uncertainties in data, models, and forecasts and their influence oin risk analysis have, in some sense, an eternal life of their own; yet, the level of discussion epitomized the growth and maturity in the field. The eighth (last) Engineering Foundation Conference on Risk-Based Decision-Making, held October 12-17, in Santa Barbara, California, augmented the technical discussion with policy issues and the implications of recent legislation initiatives in risk assessment. This conference attempted to address the connectedness among emerging trends and ideas as the management of our environment, physical infrastructure, response to possible climate change, the desire to embrace the concept of sustainable development in its broader sense, and the explosion of communications opportunities and their impact on informed decision making doc7516 none Johnson This award is to Tennessee Technological University to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners include Tennessee Technological University; Austin Pea University; East Tennessee State University; University of Memphis; Middle Tennessee State University; Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Tennessee Biotechnology Association; Cumberland Emerging Technologies; TenneSeed; Tennessee Board of Regents. Proposed Activities The activities for this award include screening new ideas for suitability for commercialization; new courses in entrepreneurial training; spin-off companies for students; development of an electronic communication system to track developments and offer assistance to small spin-off companies; connecting the research, knowledge, discovery of the universities to the generation of new patents, and licenses, stimulate new economic growth and economic well being in the state. Proposed Innovation The innovation goals for this award include creation of intellectual property by the universities in the state, transfer of new knowledge to the private sector, creation of new economic enterprise, raising the economic well being of the entire state (most of the economic wealth is in the eastern part of the state). This activity will also provide the necessary workforce training to support the new business and industry. Potential Economic Impact The economic outcome will be the general economic well being of the region. Potential Societal Impact The societal benefits include increased economic well being for the region and participation of under-represented groups in the enterprise doc7517 none With this Research in Undergraduate Institutions (RUI) award, the Organic Dynamics Program supports the research of Dr. Dale F. Shellhamer of the Department of Chemistry at Point Loma Nazarene College. Professor Shellhamer explores the reaction conditions required to cause an ionic reaction of halogens, interhalogens and other halogen systems with various unreactive terminal perfluoroalkenes. A thorough understanding of addition reactions to perfluoroalkenes and perfluorohydrocarbons alkenes is necessary for the development of new polymerization processes and synthesis of new monomers.This study is designed to supply data that will provide a thorough understanding of halonium ions derived from a variety of substituted terminal perfluoroalkenes. The relative symmetry of the halonium ions in a series of substituted perfluoroalkenes will be compared to related data reported for halonium ions of analogous hydrocarbons. The applications of fluoropolymers cover broad areas such as: water, fuel and oil repellency, thermal stability, resistance to chemicals, UV radiation and weathering, and lubricants with a low coeffficient of friction retaining high thermal stability. The advantages of those materials offset the disadvantage of high unit cost. The research is designed to enhance the understanding of the reactions of fundamental fluorine chemistry which should have applications in many commercial processes. This project is well suited for undergraduates. They will carry out syntheses and use modern instruments to characterize a large number of compounds generated from this study. Students are encouraged to suggest mechanistic interpretations of the experimental data and to propose control experiments to confirm an ionic pathway and ensure that kinetic products are being reported. The undergraduate research program at Point Loma Nazarene College also serves as a recruitment tool for outstanding high school students interested in various branches of science doc7518 none This project is devoted to investigating the influence of dimensionality on the physical properties of a new class of materials by tuning the dimensionality with pressure. The goal is to achieve an understanding which will provide the basis for tailoring materials for special applications . The project is a combination of materials synthesis, the application of high pressure techniques and theoretical modeling . In addition to the use of conventional diamond anvil cells and large volume pressure cells for hydrostatic pressure studies, a newly developed device for the simultaneous application of hydrostatic pressure and uniaxial stress will be employed. These will permit the control of parameters like lattice constant, bond length, and interaction strength in a manner not possible before. These experimental methods combined with theoretical modeling will lead to a better understanding of the structure - physical properties relation. The result will be improved tailoring of materials for applications by replacing the external pressure of our measurement by chemical pressure (substitution of atoms) or by growing thin films on substrates which are not lattice matched. Specific attention will be devoted to: 1)The synthesis of new materials of fundamental and technological importance and the investigation of their physics and chemistry at ambient and high pressure; 2) employ a new device for the application of pure strain which will allow transport and optical measurements at low temperatures and in a magnetic field; 3) develop collaborations concerning theoretical modeling with staff of the Los Alamos National Laboratory; and 4) provide interdisciplinary educational opportunities for graduate students. %%% This project is an experimental and theoretical program in materials research and education. The experimental studies will be conducted at the Colorado State University while the theoretical work will be done in collaboration with staff of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The scientific problems that confront chemists and physicists in expanding their abilities to control smaller and more complex electronics will be elucidated through careful studies of low-dimensional materials which will be especially synthesized for this purpose. These materials, which display constrained dimensions, may behave as efficient, new semiconductor wires or sheets of atomic dimensions or nanodevices. In order to understand the physical phenomena associated with low-dimensional materials, very controlled studies will be performed whereby the research team will carefully apply pressures along predetermined directions in materials in order to correlate environmental and dimensional changes with electronic responses. By understanding the fundamental physical phenomena in low-dimensional materials, new, perhaps more efficient materials can be designed that will improve upon the conventional, commercial electronic materials. An important feature of the program is the multidisciplinary, international research team that is assembled. Research will be performed by students who will be part of a team of chemists and physicists in academic, National, and international laboratories. Students will participate in the synthesis, characterization and design of new materials and will travel to National research facilities at the Los Alamos and Argonne National Laboratories to utilize the latest, state-of-the-art instrumentation and will interact with the Nation s best chemists and physicists doc7513 none This collaborative project between Michigan Technological University (MTU) and Southwest Texas State University (SWT) focuses on the fabrication and testing of photonic crystals in magnetic oxides for novel integrated photonic device prototyping. The project responds to the growing interest in photonic crystals for device applications based on their unique optical band gap properties. While various novel optical band-gap structures have been fabricated in non-magnetic dielectric media for highly efficient waveguiding, filtering and resonator applications, very little work has been done on photonic crystals in magnetic systems. One-dimensional structures have received some attention, although this work is still very limited and remains mostly theoretical. Higher dimensional systems have not been investigated at all. Given the novelty of the field of magnetic systems in photonic crystal applications, the proposed project will consist of a one-year exploratory effort to assess the applicability of magnetic materials in photonic band-gap structures. The non-reciprocal properties of magnetic oxides, such as yttrium iron garnet (YIG), make these materials a unique choice for optical isolator and circulator fabrication. Optical fiber telecommunications have developed to the point where the monolithic integration of different optical components is a serious issue to reduce costs in local area networks and long-distance data transmittal. In particular, noise suppression at the source is an important driver for the development of on-chip optical isolators. However, conventional systems utilizing non-planar geometries are both bulky and expensive. Photonic crystal structures provide a novel alternative to address this problem since they can significantly enhance the Kerr and Faraday response, making it possible to build smaller and cheaper isolators and circulators A program to develop photonic crystal devices based on magnetic systems is a high-risk high- payoff undertaking. It is high-risk because the use of photonic crystals in magnetic systems is a completely new and virgin field. Most of the work developed thus far has been theoretical, although a few experimental successes have been reported. Certain aspects of the sputtering work required for the fabrication of one-dimensional magnetic photonic crystals remain partly unexplored and may require particularly careful fine-tuning of the sputtering conditions. In particular, special attention must be paid to the formation of highly smooth interfaces in the magnetic photonic crystal stack given the large number of layers that make up these structures. The essence of the innovation presented by the use of photonic crystals in magneto-optic isolators is that of a tremendous reduction in length in the polarization rotator afforded by a corresponding enhancement in Faraday rotation. However, the impact of this program, if successful, would not be just the development of ultra-short isolators but the enabling of actual on-chip commercial integration of magneto- optic isolators. This is because the integration of these devices onto planar structures has been hindered by the presence of linear birefringence in optical waveguides. The difficulty arises because waveguide dimensions comparable to the optical wavelength induce a phase mismatch between transverse-electric (TE) and transverse-magnetic (TM) modes, degrading the isolation efficiency. The qualitative reduction in device length envisaged by the use of photonic crystal structures promises to eliminate the phase matching stumbling block to the integration of isolators into photonic circuits. In that sense, this program has the potential to revolutionize optical communications technology, by allowing the on-chip fabrication of a critical component for communications systems doc7520 none Plant growth and development, as well as plant responses to stress, are orchestrated by several hormones. The action of the hormones within the plant and within individual cells depends on proteins that transmit the hormone signals to evoke both biochemical and transcriptional changes. This project has the objective of analyzing an Arabidopsis transposon insertion mutation, designated hyponastic leaves (hyl1), that alters the plant s responses to several hormones simultaneously. Preliminary evidence suggests that the mutant gene encodes a nuclear protein that binds to double-stranded RNA. Mutant plants are short, slow to flower, have curled leaves, produce few seeds, and have slow-growing roots that do not respond to gravity normally. Mutant plants show a reduced sensitivity to the auxin and cytokinin hormones and are hypersensitive to the hormone abscisic acid (ABA). Genetic and molecular experiments in the project are designed to understand how the protein encoded by the HYL1 gene participates in the plant s perception and response to different hormones. The importance of these experiments is that they will contribute to our understanding of how plants coordinate their responses to the multiple hormone signals that impinge on their cells. Although the experiments are being performed in the model plant Arabidopsis, knowledge gained in such a system can be transferred readily to crop plants because higher plants use the same or similar systems to regulate growth and stress responses. Such knowledge will be very important in future efforts to improve the ability of agricultural plants to maintain productivity under adverse conditions doc7521 none Jahanian The objective of this project is to develop a novel, economical and reusable permeable reactive barrier that effectively removes lead and mercury form contaminated water. Specifically, the research will investigate the possibility of using permeable reactive barriers (PRBs) made with alkali activated fly ash (AAM). The AAM, currently in the developmental stage, is a new and novel material made from fly ash in combination with sand, coarse aggregates, water, sodium hydroxide, sodium silicate and a foaming agent. Preliminary results have demonstrated that an AAM PRB effectively removes cadmium and chromium from aqueous solution. The purpose of this research is to determine whether such a barrier material will remove lead and mercury and to investigate the mechanisms and conditions of such removal. Further studies will study the methods for recycling and reusing the barrier material. If successful, the results of this project could lead to advances in the remediation of contaminated groundwaters, while at the same time, utilizing a resource that otherwise would be disposed of in landfills doc7522 none This award to Professor Wilfred Tysoe of the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee is jointly supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program in the Division of Chemistry and the Civil and Mechanical Systems Program in the Engineering Directorate. The goals of the research project are 1) to elucidate the relationship between the surface chemistry of tribological films, 2) to characterize the film structure and 3) to define the film s tribological properties. Prior research by this investigator has shown that tribological films grown in ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) conditions are identical to those formed under tribological conditions. A fundamental understanding of the friction and wear behavior of the thin films will lead to safer, more effective lubricants. The research project demonstrates an excellent integration of education and research. This fundamental research could have direct impact on society in the immediate future by providing lubricant chemists information needed for improving lubricant formulations. Additionally, the current additives used in lubricants are being phased out due to environmental regulations and it is critical to discover new, effective additives. Lubricants are used in metal working processes to reduce waste, optimize final product and increase productivity. Thus this research is significant and timely doc7523 none An expanding research and clinical literature indicates that a strong association exists between light stimulation and a variety of affective, behavioral, and cognitive functions. At present, little is known about the neural circuitry whereby environmental light stimulation may influence the serotonin system, one of the oldest and most widespread neurochemical systems in the brain. Recently, the existence of a direct retinalpathway to the large, serotonergic dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) of the brainstem has been described in a number of different vertebrate species. The DRN has widespread projections to the forebrain and contains the greatest proportion of serotonergic neurons in the brainstem. Several neuroanatomical studies conduct by the PI indicate that the retinal-DRN project is substantially large in diurnal than in nocturnal species. At present, the functional correlates of this direct optic pathway to the DRN are unknown. Several exploratory studies are proposed to investigate the functional correlates of optic input to the DRN and serotonergic system using Mongolian gerbils, a highly visual diurnal rodent with a well-developed retinal-DRN projection. Major research objectives include the following: (1) Experiments utilizing the 2-deoxyglucose (2-DG) metabolic technique should reveal whether visual stimulation alters 2-DG uptake in the DRN, and if so, where the greatest uptake occurs. Several kinds of visual stimulation will be presented: (a) exposure to a sustained, high-intensity stimulus, (b) exposure to a flashing light presented at different flash frequencies, (c) exposure to a large-field, random-dot moving pattern presented at different velocities. Experimental animals will be compared with controls exposed only to dim illumination. The effects of electrical stimulation of the optic nerve on 2-DG uptake in the DRN also will be investigated. (2) A second set of experiments will involve application of 5-HT microdialysis techniques in the gerbil DRN to determine whether extracellular 5-HT varies in the DRN over the 24-hour, light:dark cycle. In addition, experiments will be conducted to determine whether a 30-minute presentation of high intensity light stimulation presented at different times of the 24-hour light:dark cycle will alter baseline, extracellular 5-HT levels, particularly in regions of the DRN where optic terminal occur with highest density. These studies should contribute substantially advances in fundamental knowledge about this direct optic pathway to the serotonin system and facilitate a variety of future experiments to determine the effects of DRN stimulation on efferent target structure such as the intergeniculate leaflet, superior colliculus, and visual cortex, all of which receive serotonergic projections from DRN doc7524 none This project investigates how brain systems coordinate the sequential order of natural patterns of behavior (i.e., action syntax). Coordination of normal sequential patterns is crucial both to human action skills and to the instinctive behavior patterns of animals. Similar brain systems appear to be involved in sequential coordination for humans and other mammals. In particular, the brain s neostriatum and its dopamine inputs play a crucial role. The contribution of this brain system will be studied by this project using a neuroethological approach, which uses natural behavioral patterns to reveal normal brain functions, combined with neural manipulations. One goal of this project is to better understand which subtypes of neostriatal dopamine systems control grooming syntax (i.e., which neuroanatomical subregions and which neurochemical receptor types). The ability of microinjections of selective dopamine agonists to enhance specific patterns of action will be compared across neuroanatomical sites within the neostriatum and a related brain structure. An additional goal is to understand the actual nature of the contribution that the neostriatum makes to behavioral sequencing - that is, how it helps or what function it contributes. Experiments will quantify rapid changes in sensorimotor modulation in response to sensory stimuli during sequences, to examine how hierarchical sensorimotor modulation by the neostriatum contributes to sequence implementation. The results of these experiments will improve our knowledge of how natural coordinated sequences of behavior are produced by the brain in humans and in other animals doc7525 none This project consists of all aspects of the annual evaluation of applications submitted to the Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships program of the Division of Mathematical Sciences at NSF. The major steps of the evaluation process include the collection of applications materials during September and October, the processing and distribution of the application materials for review by a panel of 15 senior mathematical scientist, the arranging of a face-to-face meeting of the full panel in early December to evaluate the applications, and the reporting of the results of that evaluation to NSF before the end of December. Members of the panel are appointed by the presidents of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics. This project is funded as a cooperative agreement between the NSF and the AMS for the period from through doc7526 none Professor Terry Gullion of West Virginia University is supported by the Experimental Physical Chemistry program to further develop solid state NMR methods applied to amorphous solids. The systems to be studied include molecularly doped polymers relevant to xerography. The PI is coinventor of REAPDOR and REDOR methods and in this proposal he will further enhance the utility of these methods. For REAPDOR, he proposes to derive a universal calibration curve so that costly quantum calculations are not necessary for the interpretation of the signals. Development of NMR methods affords opportunities to study amorphous solids, which are otherwise difficult to study. Once the field matures, the methods have the potential to be applied broadly to problems in solid state physics, chemistry and materials science. The application here, the structure of molecularly doped polymers, is relevant to xerography doc7527 none Becker The intriguing flavoprotein, PutA, performs two mutually exclusive functions in Escherichia coli. First, in the cytoplasm, PutA autorepresses transcription of the putA and putP (a proline transporter) genes of the proline utilization (put) regulon. Secondly, PutA associates peripherally with the cytoplasmic membrane where it performs the two-step oxidation of proline to glutamate. The overall goal of this research is to define the mechanism by which PutA switches from a transcriptional regulator to a membrane-associated proline dehydrogenase. The working hypothesis is that the flavin redox state governs PutA macromolecular associations and thus the intracellular location and function of PutA. The objective of this project is to establish the relationship between the flavin redox state and the macromolecular associations of PutA. The first two aims are to investigate the influence of the flavin redox state on the transcriptional regulatory function of PutA and PutA-membrane interactions. The final aim is to correlate conformational changes in PutA with flavin reduction and establish primary structure-function relationships. Experimental approaches will combine spectroelectrochemistry and biophysical methods to provide unique and critical insights into the regulation of PutA. This project will clearly define the influence of the flavin redox state on PutA functions and contribute pivotal understanding into the regulatory mechanism of the multifunctional PutA protein. Studies of proteins that have multiple functions such as PutA are important because they will provide knowledge of a how a particular structural scaffold is used for different purposes. The overall educational goal is to establish an interdisciplinary biochemistry degree program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. The first step toward this goal is to augment biochemistry curriculum with advanced courses and new laboratory techniques and to broaden research opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. The study of PutA will promote incorporation of research discoveries and applications into the curriculum doc7528 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Rochester will upgrade a picosecond UV-vis-NIR pump-probe transient absorption spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in the following areas: 1) quantum amplified isomerization; 2) mechanistic investigations of group 14 cation radical reactions; 3) nature and decay dynamics of photogenerated interchain species in conjugated polymers; 4) decay kinetics of ion radical pairs to determine return electron transfer rate constants; 5) studies of charge transfer processes in platinum diimine complexes; and 6) carbon nanotube electronics and interface vibrational dynamics. A picosecond laser provides ultrafast pulses of coherent visible or infrared light, which enables researchers to obtain important information about fast occurring chemical reactions. Its use may enable breakthroughs in our understanding of the properties of reactive and nonreactive molecules. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas including polymer chemistry doc7529 none The aim of the University of Utah VIGRE program is to quickly immerse undergraduate and graduate students in research, to provide effective mentorship for them and for postdoctoral instructors, and to foster interchange of ideas and expertise among all three groups and the faculty. Its aim is for all to be prepared 1. in effective communication of the ideas and applications of mathematics in a range of contexts; 2. in depth to carry out work or research creatively and independently; 3. in breadth to interact with students or subordinates, with peers and with the public; 4. for leadership in a broad range of careers, inside or outside of academia. The program will draw larger numbers of talented high school students into mathematics through a summer program which gives them early experience in learning by discovery; followed by a challenging honors curriculum culminating in a senior research thesis supported by summer research programs. Graduate students will pursue a year-round program which ensures timely completion of the degree through early immersion in research and seminars, summer workshops and tutorials, and close interaction with faculty and postdoctoral fellows. Postdoctoral fellows play an active role in all phases of the program and work closely with faculty mentors doc7530 none Harwood This award, provided by the Office of Polar Programs, allows a US investigator to join a geological field team of the Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition (ANARE) in the Prince Charles Mountains of East Antarctica. The purpose of the fieldwork is to investigate past fluctuations of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet that are recorded in glacial strata of the Pagodroma Group in the region. The mountains flank the sides of the Lambert Graben, through which the largest catchment area of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet drains into Prydz Bay. Preliminary fieldwork on the Pagodroma Group has been conducted by the Russian Antarctic Expeditions and the ANARE. Field and laboratory work has identified several marine fossiliferous in situ stratigraphic units and other units that contain glacially reworked marine sediments 300 km inland from the current coastline. These sediments were deposited during ice sheet and ice shelf retreat, during the Miocene and Pliocene-Pleistocene, and were dated through diatom and foraminiferal biostratigraphy and amino acid racemization. Paleoenvironmental conditions during these times of glacial retreat and open marine deposition are determined from in situ marine microfossil data. In contrast, erosional and ice grounding features evident in the strata represent intervals of glacial advance. This award will facilitate collaboration between the principal investigator and Australian colleagues on geological field research during ANARE - and will support subsequent preliminary laboratory analysis on recovered Pagodroma Group materials in order to establish age and paleoenvironmental relationships. Prior field reconnaissance in the area and air photo interpretation of potential new deposits will direct the initial field activities during the coming field season. Chief areas of study are in three regions: the Amery Oasis area, the Lanyon Meredith area and, if logistical support is available, along the eastern low margin of Fisher Massif. Recent discussions about the Neogene history of Antarctic glaciation center on the age of the Sirius Group and mode of emplacement of marine diatoms in these strata. Preliminary results from coeval strata of the Pagodroma Group support interpretations of significant variation in volume of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet during the Late Neogene. The abundance of diatoms in some intervals of the Pagodroma Group (up to3.5% biogenic silica) and the stratigraphic position of in situ marine diatomaceous laminites prevents contrary discussions about wind-derivation of these marine microfossils. Significant basic documentation of stratigraphy (in the field) and paleontological content (in the laboratory) is required to place the disparate deposits into a temporal and stratigraphic framework and enable correlation within the Prince Charles Mountains and into other areas of Antarctica. If preliminary examination of the recovered materials identifies productive samples for micropaleontological analysis, a follow-up proposal will be prepared to support further study of these materials doc7531 none Collins Point defects in intermetallic compounds are studied using perturbed angular correlation of gamma rays (PAC). Local environments of dilute indium probe atoms are resolved through measurement of characteristic quadrupole interactions. Two kinds of environment are studied: probe atoms as solutes on inequivalent lattice sites in a compound or mixture of phases, and probes bound in complexes with lattice vacancies. Research is in three areas that are natural extensions of recent work. Preferences of solute atoms for different lattice sites in compounds or in two-phase alloys are determined through measurement of fractions of probe atoms in the different sites. Sublattice sites are identified by comparing measured quadrupole interactions with those in a series of compounds having the same structure and with computations of quadrupole interactions. The goal is to develop a more systematic understanding of site preferences. The effect of applied pressure on the quadrupole interactions of probes bound in complexes with lattice vacancies are studied at room temperature using a diamond anvil cell. The expectation is that there will be large relaxations of atoms near vacancy complexes. Pressure dependencies will be correlated with temperature dependencies and with computations of the structures and electric-field gradients of the complexes. The goal is to understand how the shape and volume of vacancy clusters change under the influence of pressure and temperature. Four processes involving point defects will be studied: defect formation, binding of vacancies to probe atoms, conversion between different structural point defects in non-stoichiometric compounds, and vacancy migration. Activation volumes for the first three processes will be determined through measurement of site fractions of probe-vacancy complexes. The activation volume for vacancy migration will be determined from the pressure dependence of signal relaxation caused by stochastic jumping of vacancies near probe atoms. %%% These measurements will provide fundamental information about point defect processes. These will be the first high pressure PAC studies carried out using a diamond anvil cell and the first at high temperature. Results in this area should be useful to researchers studying increasingly complex systems using PAC and similar methods doc7532 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop a new class of cement-steel interfaces for high performance steel reinforcing bars for concrete. In Phase I the project demonstrated a bar coating system that can protect against corrosion of steel in concrete structures and has improved adhesion characteristics between steel reinforcement and the cement matrix. Phase II continues to refine the properties and techniques for producing this new class of High Performance Non-corroding Steel-Reinforced Concrete. Improved corrosion resistance of steel reinforcement in concrete structures could address a major infrastructure problem that has been estimated to require up to $3 trillion for repair. The potentially cost effective coatings to be developed and commercially applied during production runs in steel mills would result in a value added product of major importance for managing the infrastructure. Improvements in adherence and corrosion resistance would be highly beneficial, for example, in corrosive highway deicing environments and marine structures doc7533 none This proposal uses new and original data from Picard, a little-known regional language of France, in an effort to develop a socially realistic linguistics . For this study, Vimeu, a region located in the western part of the Somme department of France, was selected as a focus of investigation. Over the past five years, an extensive corpus of oral and written data was gathered. Transcription of the corpus constitutes the first objective of this research proposal. The second objective consists in providing detailed analyses of many grammatical constructions of Picard. These analyses will be carried out using an approach which combines a sociolinguistic methodology and the analytical tools provided by generative grammar. This approach will shed new light on many longstanding issues within Romance and general linguistics (e.g., pronominal clitics, subject doubling, verbal negation), contribute crucial new data from language change in progress and grammaticalization processes (e.g., how demonstrative determiners turn into definite articles), and address new questions concerning constructions little known in the literature (e.g., why does Vimeu Picard have two subject neuter pronouns?). The third and fourth objectives concern variation, both crosslinguistic and language-internal. Comparison of Vimeu Picard features with those of other varieties of Picard, other Gallo-Romance languages, and varieties of French will contribute significantly to the search for a better understanding of the limits Universal Grammar imposes on crosslinguistic variation. Finally, the issue of language-internal variation will be considered using recent developments in two different areas of Optimality theory, namely the study of phonological variation and that of morphosyntax. The goal is to propose a model of grammar which generates variable morphosyntactic patterns and predicts relative frequencies of use for linguistic variants. This project will contribute to bridge the gap that currently exists between sociolinguistics and formal approaches to the study of language doc7534 none The objective of this work is to study chemical reactions in, and the physical barriers that microcapsules establish. The PI s goal is to demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages of microencapsulation in photoprocesses. Basic studies of the transport of reagents and intermediates from a microcapsule to the surrounding environment and vice versa, are proposed. The experiments will prioritized as follows: Initially the research will polystyrene and onium salts. The objective will be to encapsulate photoreactive compounds that produce catalysts and cause their decomposition in the capsule. Experiments are proposed to follow reagent escape from the capsule or its reaction with the capsule walls. Preliminary experiments suggest this will be a fruitful subject. Though more details will emerge as the experiments proceed. Depending on the initial results, the project shall proceed to the electron transfer experiments, to the experiments to determine migration of reagents across capsular walls and to capsule capsule and capsule bead experiments. %%% This award is in the area of novel, environmentally-friendly processes for forming polymers via photopolymerization, and is relevant to technologically important materials such as photoresists and optical-fiber coatings doc7535 none Bronzino The Biomedical Engineering Alliance for Connecticut (BEACON) is presenting a Symposium on Avances in Biodynamics and Ergonomics, October 27, . The several objectives of the meeting are to: 1) present insights into new research in Ergonomics and Biodynamics highlighting the important emerging roles for biomedical engineers, ergonomists, and health care workers 2) present examples of successful academic industrial collaborations in the areas of Ergonomics and Biodynamics, 3) provide information about funding opportunities, including those for academic-industrial collaborations in these areas, and 4) provide an opportunity for students from engineering, ergonomics, and the health sciences to learn about Ergonomics and Biodynamics. It is anticipated that the convening of academic and industrial professionals from the various disciplines involved in Ergonomics and Biodynamics (e.g. engineering, ergonomics, medical science and health care) will facilitate interdisciplinary networking and collaborations that can enhance innovation in these areas. Results of the meeting will be disseminated on the BEACON WEB site (http: www.beaconalliance.org ) and in a printed publication for which funds are being provided by the National Science Foundation doc7536 none Georgian is a member of the Kartvelian (South Caucasian) language family, spoken in the Republic of Georgia, formerly part of the U.S.S.R. The research will focus on certain synchronic and diachronic aspects of the structure of complex words in Georgian because some seem to pose a challenge to current theories of word structure. For example, although it is generally held that words do not contain conjunctions, units that appear to be words routinely do contain da and in Georgian, such as oc-da-or-i [20-and-2-NOM] twenty-two . Though it is accepted that in general phrases cannot form the basis of words, in Georgian units that have the characteristics of words can routinely be based on postpositional phrases, such as umlaut-amde-li [umlaut-until-ADJ-NOM] before umlaut (ADJ) , where the suffix -(e)l forms an adjective, from umlaut-amde until umlaut , headed by -amde until , which appears to be a postposition, not a case suffix. While it is generally accepted that words are anaphoric islands, in Georgian units such as u-sen-o you-less are routine, where sen you (SG) is a fully referential pronoun, and u--o is a circumfix (prefix-suffix combination). This project is intended as a contribution to the description of synchronic and diachronic universals of language; the specific goals of the project are the detailed description of anaphoric islandhood, phrasal recursivity, and coordination inside words in Georgian; the description and explanation of the origins of circumfixes in Georgian and the Kartvelian languages; and the exploration of possible origins of apparent violations of the constraint on phrasal recursivity. Research on synchronic phenomena will take place in the Republic of Georgia and will be conducted in Georgian through one-on-one consultations with native speakers. The primary research methods involve consultants reading aloud written Georgian words (for syllabification, stress, and other phonological phenomena) and sentences, together with consultants commenting on or correcting Georgian words, phrases, and sentences read aloud by the P.I. Research on diachronic phenomena will include close reading of Old Georgian texts and other comparative and historical documents, reading of materials in libraries in the Republic of Georgia, and discussion with colleagues there. The significance of the project is not limited to the analysis and explanation of phenomena particular to Georgian; rather, these phenomena will be related to proposed universals of word structure. It is expected that the project will provide: testing of claims made in the recent literature on universal characteristics of the word; a study of the origins of circumfixes; and study of the origins of apparent phrasal recursivity doc7537 none Working within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar, we will examine how the semantic structure of predicates guides the acquisition of verb morphology, and how predicate structures are mapped onto syntactic structures. We refer to the basic methodology of this project as predicate tracking . Utilizing tests of lexical aspect, we identify different types of predicates within the child s lexicon, e.g., activities versus accomplishments, and we trace the emergence of their tense aspect and agreement morphology. For each predicate, we determine the history of the emergence of minimal morphological pairs. We intend to base this analysis on existing data from children learning Polish and English that are found in the CHILDES archives. Based on our pilot research, we anticipate the following outcomes: 1) The precise pattern in the acquisition of tense aspect morphology will be different for telic, e.g., to fall, versus atelic, to play, predicates demonstrating the fundamental role of semantic structure. Hence, we expect to find that the acquisition of the inflectional system is not an autonomous syntactic phenomenon. 2) We expect to find that tense is likely to be productive prior to viewpoint aspect, and that this pattern will be more pronounced in English than Polish. A tense-aspect sequence would constitute an anomaly for the genetic programming of the prototypical X-bar structure and the application of the economy principle. 3) In Polish, where finite and non-finite forms are morphologically distinct, we expect that infinitives will be found in complex sentence constructions of the form (I want) +verb+INF, i.e., they will not be optional. 4) In Polish, there is agreement in person and number across the tenses, and it is possible to determine if the acquisition pattern exhibits a piecemeal or an across-the-board trend. Finally, we intend to evaluate the relationship between predicate structure and agreement as a means of determining the nature of the concept of subject in child language doc7538 none Currently available instrumented bioreactors are expensive and bulky, thus making bioprocess development inefficient, as large numbers of simultaneous experiments simply cannot be conducted. The project objectives are to construct a low-cost instrumented micro-bioreactor and to demonstrate the feasibility of constructing a small-scale research module using optical sensor technology. The proposed work aims to extend the micro-bioreactor scale down to 250 microliters working volume in a 96 well microplate platform so that 96 fermentations can be carried out and monitored simultaneously. The PI proposes to design and construct such a device that will enable parallel monitoring and analyses of large number of fermentation and cell culture parameters. They anticipate that at about the cost of a bench top bioreactor ($20,000) they will be able to construct the instrumented micro-bioreactor platform. It is anticipated that the impact of this proposed work would be significant. This research result will remove a major bottleneck in bioprocess development and allow for much speedier and efficient optimization of fermentation and cell culture processes doc7539 none Members of the linguistics profession are faced with two urgent situations: the number of languages in the world is rapidly diminishing while the number of initiatives to digitize language data is rapidly multiplying as a result of the increasing availability and sophistication of web technology. The latter might seem to be an unalloyed good in the face of the former, but there are two ways things may go wrong without adequate collaboration among archivists, field linguists, and language engineers. First, a common standard for the digitization of linguistic data may never be agreed upon; and the resulting variation in archiving practices and language representation would seriously inhibit data access, searching, and cross-linguistic comparison. Second, standards may be set without guidance from the people who best know the range of structural possibilities in human language-descriptive linguists who have done fieldwork on poorly described languages. Metalanguage or metadata guidelines which are designed on the basis of well-known western languages will not be adequate to the urgent task of archiving as much linguistic data as possible in the face of widespread language attrition and loss. If linguistic archives are to offer the widest possible access to the data and provide it in a maximally useful form, consensus must be reached about certain aspects of archive infrastructure. This is the proposed topic of a 3-day workshop which will be held in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute and will involve experienced field linguists, computational linguists, and language archivists. The objective of the workshop is to bring field linguists and computational linguists together with two primary goals: (1) to educate one other about the very different challenges field linguists and computational linguists anticipate in the establishment of an archive for endangered language data, and (2) to solicit recommendations about two essential elements of archive infrastructure: text markup and metadata doc7540 none Edwards This grant provides partial support of the costs of acquiring an Atomic Force Bioscope (AFB) for the P.I. s laboratory at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). Numerous other researchers in the Woods Hole area, at WHOI or affiliated with the Marine Biological Laboratories (MBL), will also have access to this equipment. This AFB will represent the highest resolution imaging tool available to researchers in the Woods Hole area. It will be mounted on, and used in conjunction with for many studies, the P.I. s existing Zeiss Axiovert 100 inverted fluorescent microscope. This will allow simultaneous and in-line fluorescent and atomic force images to be collected. Uses for the AFB will be quite varied; it will be used both as an analytical tool and an imaging system. In the P.I. s laboratory, the AFB will be used primarily for quantitative determinations of interfacial forces between microbial cells and mineral surfaces, microbial mineral dissolution studies, and simultaneous in-situ phylogenetic identification of microorganisms combined with morphological and structural analysis of naturally occurring microbial populations. Other researchers will use the instrument to analyze the physical and chemical properties of surfaces that dictate frictional strength of rocks, determine cytoskeletal structures and function in non-mammalian vertebrates, analyze structural interactions of ion channels with large high-affinity peptide neurotoxins, and spatially map plasma membranes while making concomitant electrochemical measurements. Support for this grant is shared between Divisions of Earth and Ocean Sciences doc7541 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Virginia Commonwealth University will acquire an Electrospray Ionization Quadrupole Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) electron transfer reactions between cytochrome c, cytochrome c oxidase and dioxygen; b) characterization of chemical dynamics in complex systems; c) biomimetic-supported catalysts for oxygen- and peroxide-dependent oxidations; d) assessment of antibody-based sensors for trace analysis of environmental contaminants; e) lanthanide(III) macrocyclic complexes as luminescent bio-markers; and f) resonance Raman of oxidized peroxidases. Mass spectrometry (MS) is a technique used to probe intimate structural details and to obtain the molecular compositions of a vast array of organic, bioorganic, and organometallic molecules. The results from these studies will have an impact in a number of areas including environmental chemistry and biochemistry doc7542 none PROPOSAL NUMBER: TITLE: Dynamic and Randomized Load Distribution for Tree-Structured Parallel Computations on Static Interconnection Networks PI: Keqin Li This three-year project will investigate the performance of the class of random-walk-based algorithms for dynamic tree embedding to support tree-structured parallel computations on various static networks. The research will be conducted within the framework of the product of four spaces, namely, the embedding algorithm space, the tree model space, the static network space, and the performance measure space. The overall research objective is to thoroughly investigate and understand the behavior of randomized tree embedding produced by random-walk-based algorithms in static networks to the largest extent. The methods include devising embedding algorithms, proposing random tree models, developing analytical tools, formulating mathematical equations, generating numerical data, observing and proving general properties, and simulating dynamic embedding. The project is motivated by the fact that there are a wide spectrum of tree-structured applications in computer science and engineering and the wide availability of distributed memory multicomputers with static interconnection networks. The significance of the project is reflected by its wide coverage of various randomized tree embedding algorithms, a number of deterministic and probabilistic tree models, a wide range of static interconnection networks, and different performance measures. Algorithms and methods obtained from this project will be readily used to support dynamic load distribution for tree-structured parallel and distributed computing, and will have great impact on various applications on a variety of multicomputers and distributed systems doc7543 none Gilbert The Division of Developmental and Cell Biology and the Division of Evolutionary Developmental Biology of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology will convene a Symposium on Ecological Developmental Biology: Developmental Biology Meets the Real World. The symposium would be conducted during the annual meeting of that society on January 6-10, , in Anaheim, California. The goal of this symposium is to resurrect interest in an important area of developmental biology that has been ignored by developmental biologists until very recently: ecological developmental biology. This field includes such diverse areas as larval ecology, environmental sex determination, predator-induced polyphenisms, dietary polyphenisms, social insect caste determination, egg ecology, proximate causation for phenotypic plasticity, and teratogenesis. The work in the intersection of developmental biology and ecology is important for several reasons. First, conservation biology needs to know about the survival and development of the embryonic and larval stages of development as much as it does about the adult stage. (This point was made very clear when it was shown that turtle conservation biology programs had been incubating embryos at temperatures that only produced only one sex of offspring). Second, environmental chemicals which we had been thought harmless (at least to adults) may be dangerous to the developmental stages of organisms and may threaten the fertility of adults. Third, the discipline of developmental biology has centered around model systems that had been selected for their independence from environmental conditions. This has supported the genetic approach to development and has fostered the thinking that all development is regulated from inside the egg (or even from inside the nucleus). The studies of ecological developmental biology show how important the environment is to the production of particular phenotypes. Fourth, we think that in the emerging field of evolutionary developmental biology, the ecological component is necessary. If the first SICB symposium on evolutionary developmental biology focused on the phylogenetic, non-adaptive and macroevolutionary questions of evo-devo, then this symposium would highlight the ecological, adaptive, and microevolutionary issues of evolutionary developmental biology doc7544 none The research award to Dr. Isiah Warner and Dr. Robert Strongin at Louisiana State University entitled Studies in Organized Media is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program. The project goal is an improved fundamental understanding of the chemistry involved in chromatographic separations. In particular, the research will examine the molecular recognition capabilities of specifically designed media used in both liquid chromatography and capillary electrophoresis. The media to be studied include a variety of polymeric surfactants and cyclodextrins. The results of this research will be applied to the development of improved separation capabilities and new analytical methods which will impact significant environmental analysis problems. This research project may have a significant impact on the development of new materials used in separations. The research will also result in new methods of analysis with important environmental applications. Additionally, the investigators will have a significant impact on the mentoring of minority students and providing students with experience in high quality, systematic experimental design and implementation. The research project may also have an important impact on society through the development of improved environmental methods doc7545 none The role of mating preferences in shaping interspecific divergence in mating signals in mollies (Poeciliidae: Poecilia: Molliensia). Margaret B. Ptacek The importance of female mating preferences in shaping the features of male mating signals within a species is well established. However, the influence of female mating preferences within a species on the divergence of these mating signals between species is just beginning to be explored. This project is designed to explore the role of female mating preferences in generating and maintaining the behavioral and morphological changes associated with divergence between sailfin and shortfin mollies (Poeciliidae: Poecilia: Mollienesia). Mollies are an ideal model system for such a study because they exhibit enormous diversity in male secondary sexual characteristics and mating behaviors both within and between species. Differences in the two major species complexes of mollies (sailfin and shortfin species) are associated with divergence in their mating systems. Males of sailfin species have a greatly enlarged dorsal fin that they fan in front of females in a characteristic courtship display used to elicit female cooperation in mating. Males of shortfin species show neither the enlarged dorsal fin nor perform courtship display behavior. Previous studies have shown that females of sailfin species use particular features of the enlarged dorsal fin and courtship display to distinguish both between different males of their own species and between males of their own species and males of shortfin species. Such a pattern of similar female mating preferences at both the intra- and interspecific levels argues that sexual selection may have played an important role in promoting the divergence in these traits between sailfin and shortfin species of mollies. In addition, the phylogenetic (genealogical) relationships of the entire molly group have been determined. This phylogeny will provide a framework upon which to study the origin and direction of change in male secondary sexual traits and behaviors as well as the origin of female preferences for these traits in a number of sailfin and shortfin molly species. The research proposed here will determine how female mating preferences can shape the divergence of male mating signals both within and between species. Few tests of the relationship between sexual selection and species recognition have been performed and mollies offer an ideal system in which to investigate this link. The results of the proposed studies will provide an important model for how sexual selection might lead to the evolution of premating reproductive isolating mechanisms and eventual speciation in a group of poeciliid fishes for which much is already known about behavioral, ecological and life history trait evolution doc7546 none Moudrianakis The goal of the this research is to elucidate the properties that govern the relations between the structure of the nucleosome and the functional remodeling (transitions between assembly and disassembly) that occurs during the cell cycle. The approach is based on integrated applications of classical biochemistry and biophysical chemistry with those of molecular genetics. This approach addresses the basic properties of both nucleosomal DNA and the octameric histone core within a dynamic structure. New evidence from the PI s laboratory (based on molecular dynamics calculations) suggests that the nucleosome is very dynamic, exhibiting large breathing motions in the nanosecond time scale and that the contact interfaces between the protein subunits show time-dependent fluctuations. The protein core is an articulated endoskeleton around which the DNA wraps in a generic, non base-specific way for most of its length, with relatively few site-specific contacts. Such a fragile arrangement serves the needs of regulation well; it is mediated to a large extent by the subunit contacts within the core histone octamer. These studies are examining a range of conditions that affect the intrinsic (molecular types) and extrinsic (microenvironment) parameters of native heterodimers and their assembly potential. This is important because a thorough understanding of the functional transitions of the nucleosome chromatin entailed during chromatin remodeling, replication and transcription depends on the exact knowledge of the energetics and specificities of these interfacial contacts. Techniques to be employed are: analytical ultracentrifugation, high-resolution multi-angle light scattering and microcalorimetry as well as contemporary methods of analytical chemistry doc7547 none The hippocampus, a part of the mammalian brain involved in cognitive functions, is also sensitive to the steroid hormone estrogen. Estrogen is known to influence the sexual differentiation of the hippocampus, but the molecular mechanisms for this development are not clear. Numbers of estrogen receptor (ER) molecules in the hippocampus increase during development, triggered by transient expression of both the alpha and beta forms of ER, which suggests a possible novel critical period for estrogen action. The transient expression of ER-beta is predominantly of an isoform splice variant termed -delta 3 (-d3), which acts through a unique molecular mechanism to regulate target genes, unlike the classically described estrogen-response element (ERE). This project uses molecular biology to examine the function in vitro of these -d3 splice variants of ER-beta. Transient transfection, reporter gene analysis, and other transcription and trafficking assays will determine how -d3 variants drive transcription and interact with other regulatory proteins and other ER receptor types. The project also bridges the effects seen in vitro with those normal physiological events seen in the living animal. Results will clarify a novel mechanism of how estrogens affect hippocampal development, and will be important beyond neuroendocrinology, on developmental biology and potentially on cognitive neuroscience. The project also involves training undergraduates and graduate students in an excellent laboratory research environment doc7548 none ELLIS The Museum of Science in Boston is conducting a workshop symposium that will focus on the question of how best to address the issue of enhancing public understanding of major, on-going research efforts. The workshop will begin a critical discussion among researchers and some of the most prominent practitioners of informal public education in the areas of science, engineering and technology. The discussion will explore possible directions that might be taken in regard to disseminating information about research to the public and in increasing the public s understanding of the role and possible implications of this research. Issues to be examined include: The scope and aspects of research upon which to focus The present obstacles to public understanding The advantages and disadvantages of different approaches for disseminating information Costs and time frames of different approaches How to encourage and implement collaboration and networking among institutions that have the goal of increasing public understanding. The general goal of the workshop is twofold: to provide feedback that will inform the creation of new programs to address the issue of enhancing public understanding of research and to share ideas among institutions that have a common purpose doc7549 none Visual object recognition occurs at different levels of abstraction ranging from categorical levels, e.g., dog, to the more specific individual level, e.g., my English hound. Moreover, we can develop expertise at one of these levels for a given category; for instance, bird watchers are experts at the species level. This research will continue to investigate the roles of level of categorization and perceptual expertise in the development of cognitive and neural mechanisms selective for object categories (such as faces or birds). Because different methods offer different strengths and weaknesses, this research will involve converging evidence, including behavioral psychophysics, functional brain imaging (fMRI), and event related potentials (ERPs) in normal humans, as well as extending these techniques to brain-injured individuals. The research program is divided into four sections addressing different questions: 1) How do people become perceptual experts? A first set of experiments will manipulate whether subjects rely on their own observations or require feedback and supervision. A second set of studies will examine whether non-visual knowledge about objects contributes to the learning process and affects the organization of category-specific areas. Other experiments will test the plasticity of the brain regions, which support object recognition, investigating whether damage to one area can be compensated for by reorganization of other areas. 2) What are the computational roles of different brain areas within the network that mediates expertise with visually-similar objects? Experiments using a combination of fMRI, ERP, and behavioral measures will investigate how different category-selective brain areas support identification at the categorical, subordinate, and individual levels. 3) What is the capacity of perceptual expertise? Experiments will test whether one can become an expert with many different classes of objects (e.g., birds, dogs, cars, faces, flowers, etc.), as well as whether there is interference when objects from different expertise domains are processed at the same time. 4) Can perceptual expertise be acquired more easily with some object geometries? In particular, adaptive pressures for accurate face recognition may have biased the system to prefer face-like configurations. By manipulating the visual structure of stimulus objects, behavioral and fMRI experiments will investigate the geometric constraints on the acquisition of expertise. Overall, these experiments should help us to better understand the nature of visual object recognition, elucidating how a single system can support the wide range of recognition tasks we are able to perform. The implications of these findings vary from possible protocols for the rehabilitation of brain-injured individuals to the better education of learning-impaired children (e.g., as in autism) to the development of more effective and robust machine vision systems for face and object recognition doc7550 none Meinke The titan (ttn) mutants of Arabidopsis exhibit dramatic alterations in mitosis and cell cycle control during seed development. The common feature among these mutants is that endosperm nuclei become enlarged and highly polyploid. Mutant embryos differ in cell size, morphology, and viability, depending on the locus involved. Three titan mutants with distinct phenotypes were first identified in the Meinke laboratory 4 years ago. During the previous grant period, 10 additional titan mutants were recovered and 5 TITAN genes cloned in collaboration with Novartis (Syngenta). Several of these genes encode condensin (SMC) proteins required for chromosome condensation and dosage compensation. Another gene product is related to the ARF class of GTP binding proteins associated with vesicle trafficking. The remaining genes are involved with other cellular processes. What remains to be determined is how these diverse proteins interact to influence nuclear division and cell viability during seed development. This project will make it possible to continue the analysis of titan mutants and determine the relationship between gene function, nuclear dynamics, and cell growth during seed development. Emphasis will be placed on the SMC class of titans because these proteins appear to be most directly linked to the mutant phenotype. Project objectives are to identify the remaining SMC gene knockouts through reverse genetics, characterize nuclear and cytoskeletal defects in more detail through fluorescence and electron microscopy, analyze phenotypes of multiple SMC knockouts, and determine how SMC functions in plants compare with those established in other organisms. The ARF class of titans will be examined first by attempting to complement ttn1 with an ARF-GAP that maps to the TTN1 region. This should complete a map-based cloning effort initiated during the last grant period. The other class of titans will be examined in part by analyzing more tagged endosperm mutants from the Novartis collection, including those that have intermediate titan phenotypes. These additional mutants will be compared with existing titans to establish the complex network of genes that influence endosperm development. The titan phenotype demonstrates that Arabidopsis endosperm tissue provides an ideal environment for proliferation of aberrant nuclei defective in mitosis and cell cycle control. Detailed analysis of these mutants should provide valuable insights into novel features of nuclear dynamics during endosperm development and evolution. The long-term goal is to understand the complex mechanisms that regulate endosperm formation in angiosperms doc7551 none To interact successfully in the environment, people must remember the locations of important objects accurately enough to find these objects when they are no longer in view. Otherwise, keys, shoes, and hats would be lost forever in the clutter of the typical home or office. The majority of research investigating the characteristics of location memory has focused on WHAT people represent in memory. For instance, do people represent that a set of keys is two inches to the left of a computer, or do they represent that the keys are one arms-length away? Although what is represented is a fundamental question, this research will examine a different, but equally important question: HOW do people maintain location information in memory? This question is timely because recent studies with non-human primates have identified several brain regions that contribute to the maintenance of location information in memory. Thus, there is a growing understanding of how the brain keeps location information active in memory. Nevertheless, few studies with humans have interfaced with this emerging knowledge base. This research will establish a link between behavioral studies of how humans remember locations and the literature on brain function. Central to this research is how people use perceptual cues from second-to-second to help maintain information in memory. Evidence from a variety of studies suggests that people rely on visible reference axes, e.g., the edges of a table, the edges of a computer screen, to help them remember the locations of target objects. Use of such perceptual cues can help keep remembered information in the right ballpark (the keys are near the left edge of the table and not over by the computer). Nevertheless, there is a cost, in that memory is systematically distorted near reference axes. Specifically, when people are asked to reproduce the location of a hidden object, they exaggerate the distance between the reference axis and the actual location of the object. These memory errors are particularly informative because they increase in magnitude as memory delays increase. Thus, errors away from reference axes provide a window into the second-to-second processes that serve to maintain location information in memory. This research will test a mathematical model of these maintenance processes, a model that specifies how a network of neurons can give rise to the types of memory errors humans make. Nine experiments will test this model of how location memory works. The first five experiments will test specific predictions of the model. These experiments will establish whether people make the particular types of memory errors predicted by the model, and whether these errors do, in fact, result from the use of reference axes. The final four experiments will examine the generality of the model to novel situations. For instance, do adults make the same types of memory errors when they are forced to attend to non-target locations during a memory delay? When completed, this project will provide the first formal model of the processes that maintain location information in memory over short-term delays. This model and the associated empirical data may have broad implications. For instance, the model will provide insights into what cues most effectively maintain information in memory. This could lead to an informed re-structuring of the environment for people who have difficulty maintaining information in working memory, such as elderly participants and patients suffering from Alzheimer s Disease. The model could also predict what patterns of error are most likely when people are unskilled (e.g., early in development), and what processes might be most severely disrupted under conditions of stress or strain (e.g., sleep deprivation, impaired visual processing, brain injury doc7552 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Arkansas State University will acquire a high performance liquid chromatograph. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) characterization of bio-organic compounds in oxalate rock coatings; b) rare earth element geochemistry using capillary electrophoresis for environmental risk assessment studies; c) development of new post-column chromatographic methods for measuring chemical species in drinking and natural waters; and d) determination of the effects of phystoestrogens on mammalian reproduction. High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is an extremely powerful technique used for the separation and analysis of complex mixtures. The results from these studies will have an impact in a number of areas including geochemistry, environmental chemistry and biology doc7553 none This Ethnographic Research Training award allows the department of anthropology at the University of Georgia to support students in fieldwork experience over a period of five years. After a thorough course of training in theory, research design and methodology, focusing on ecological and environmental anthropology, students will be supported in pilot research before their dissertation research begins. This activity is important to improve the training of social scientists, so that the new cohort of social researchers will be capable of advancing our knowledge of contemporary problems as well as of basic research issues doc7554 none This research project, carried out at Carnegie Mellon University in the laboratory of Professor Andrew Gellman, is supported in the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program. It is focussed on the understanding and thermodynamic characterization of the transition state for surface catalyzed reactions. Using substituent effects on organic reactants, the nature and thermodynamic stability of the surface reaction transition state is probed for a series of test reactions. Varying degrees of fluorine substitution affects the activation energy and stability of the transition state for probe reactions including dechlorination of chlorofluorocarbons, deprotonation of carboxylic acids, and O-H bond cleavage in alcohols. Experimentally measured energetics are compared with the results of high level electronic structure calculations to interpret the nature of the surface reaction transition state. A detailed understanding of the transition state in surface catalyzed chemical reactions is useful in catalyst design and process optimization. By using physical organic concepts such as substituent effects on reaction rates, Professor Gellman and his coworkers are probing the nature of the surface transition state for a series of probe reactions. Results from these measurements are compared with calculations, in order to develop a general understanding of the nature of the surface reaction transition state doc7555 none The proposed research addresses several main goals within the context of cyclopentadienyl metal complexes. Efficient synthetic methods will be developed for the synthesis of known cyclopentadienyl ligands and complexes as well as new chiral cyclopentadienyl and indenyl metal complexes. Chiral indenyl and cyclopentadienyl ligands bearing tethered donor ligands will be synthesized and coordinated to metals. Finally, the activity of the chiral complexes in enantioselective carbon-carbon and carbon-hydrogen bond forming reactions will be explored. Ligand syntheses will be effected through exploitation of the cross-coupling reactions of 2-bromoindenyl complexes, the ring closing metathesis reaction (yielding indenes from phenyldienes), and the chromium(II) nickel carbonyl addition method to convert bromoarenes or bromoalkenes and ketones or aldehydes to substituted indenes and cyclopentadienes. With this award, the Organic Synthesis Program is supporting the research of Professor Ronald L. Halterman of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Oklahoma. Professor Halterman s studies are directed toward the synthesis of new catalysts designed to effect the formation of carbon-carbon and carbon-hydrogen bonds with precise control over the detailed three-dimensional structure ( stereochemistry ) of the products. These studies, focused largely on the synthesis of new stereochemically defined scaffolds to support catalytically active metal centers, are of direct relevance to the synthesis of pharmaceuticals and polymeric materials, endeavors in which the need for stereochemical control continues to grow doc7556 none Derry This grant provides technical support for operations of the thermal ionization mass spectrometry and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry facilities in the Department of Earth and atmospheric sciences, Cornell University. NSF funds and Cornell University funds will be used to support the salary of Dr. Linda Godfrey, laboratory manager. Dr. Godfrey has the primary responsibility for overseeing the operation and maintenance of the instrumentation and associated clean laboratory facilities. Currently implemented analytical techniques include strontium, neodymium and lead isotope analysis by TIMS, and a variety of trace element analyses by ICP-MS, including hydride generation. In addition to supporting a range of ongoing projects funded by NSF and other sources, Dr. Godfrey will be improving or developing analytical protocols for the new high resolution magnetic sector ICP-MS for Pb isotope analyses (current applications include tracing anthropogenic and aerosol inputs of Pb in soils), Ca isotope dilution analysis (current applications include tracing Ca transfer across the placenta in pregnant mammals), and U isotope analysis (current applications include understanding weathering processes and mass balance for U in soils). Current research projects (funded) that will be supported include 1) application of trace element and Sr, Nd and Pb isotope data to delineate atmospheric(including anthropogenic) vs. weathering inputs to Hawaiian ecosystems; 2) chemical and isotopic study of geothermal and stream waters along the Main Central Thrust, Nepal, to study role of geothermal circulation in extracting heat and volatiles from tectonically active crust and their impact on stream fluxes; 3) use of Ge Si ratios to estimate aerosol fluxes of silica to the global oceans; 4) Ge Si ratios as a tracer of weathering fluxes and plant-soil interactions; 5) Sr, Nd and Pb isotopic data on subduction-related volcanism in Patagonia; 6) trace element distributions in archaeological wood as an indicator of eruptive chronology in the eastern Mediterranean; 7) fate and transport of metals (Cu, Zn, Ag) in peatland soils; 8) speciation and behavior of dissolved Al in tropical soils.; 9) authigenesis of silicate phases during early diagenesis; 10) isotopic (Sr, Nd, Pb) constraints on sources of plume volcanism, Galapagos hot spot doc7557 none In the last few years a greater emphasis on causality has enhanced the expressiveness of logic-based action representations. An example of this is the causal theories formalism of McCain and Turner, which can be used to conveniently describe action domains in which: (a) actions have indirect, nondeterministic, and or delayed effects; (b) things change by themselves; and (c) concurrent actions have interacting effects. Although causal theories are nonmonotonic, they are mathematically simple. In fact, in their most commonly used form they have a concise translation into classical propositional logic. This last fact is particularly significant in light of the remarkable success of the satisfiability planning method of Kautz and Selman, which has greatly influenced recent AI planning research. While most current work on satisfiability planning involves propositional encodings of STRIPS-like action descriptions, the expressiveness of causal theories will support satisfiability planning in relatively complex action domains. For example, there has been little progress in AI planning for action domains in which concurrently executed actions may have interacting effects. Causal theories can be used to describe them, and the resulting descriptions can be used for planning by the satisfiability method. A unifying goal of the current research is to broaden the applicability of AI planning by means of contributions in the following areas: (a) mathematics of causal theories and related formalisms; (b) representations of complex action domains as causal theories; and (c) automated planning and reasoning about actions doc7558 none Thomas Miller. Understanding patterns of community organization requires a focus on multiple scales of time and space. A metacommunity perspective in its most simple form distinguishes mechanisms that operate locally, such as competition and predation, from those which operate at broader spatial and temporal scales, such as migration and extinction. Although the conceptual basis and ramifications of such scale-dependence are well developed, few empirical or experimental tests have been undertaken to address aspects of metacommunity theory. The proposed research uses inquiline (tenant or dweller) species, which live in water-filled leaves of pitcher plants to quantify the effects of the rate and spatial scale of dispersal on the local and regional structure of communities. Inquiline communities contain mosquito and chironomid larvae, as well as copepods, cladocerans, aquatic mites, rotifers, protozoa, and bacteria. The primary source of energy to this aquatic system comes from dead invertebrates that are captured by the host plant rather than from photosynthetic production. These communities are convenient natural microcosms because of the ease with which they can be manipulated and replicated in field conditions. They are especially appropriate for studying metacommunity dynamics because interactions clearly can be distinguished between those of local (e.g., predation, competition, resource availability) and regional (e.g., migration and disturbance). More specifically, the rate and scale (local versus regional) of migration of species among individual pitcher plant communities, as well as the productivity of the system as a whole will be manipulated to conform to a factorial design, thereby facilitating statistical analyses. Weekly monitoring of the entire community will permit the estimation of the abundance and growth rate of constituent species, as well as the composition and diversity of communities. In tandem, these experiments and observations will allow a deep understanding of the extent to which local and regional mechanisms affect community characteristics, and the degree to which such results are predicated on the production of the system doc7559 none Sir Ronald A. Fisher ( - ) is most widely known for his contributions to statistics, including the analysis of variance, and for his work in genetics, especially his genetical theory of natural selection. Less well known is his major contribution to experimentation, the role of randomization in experimental design. This dissertation research project will explore Fisher s actual development of the concept of experimental randomizing, how he conceived it and what led him to recognize the need for it. The second part of this project is an examination of Fisher s promulgation of randomization, the impact it had then and in later years, and the ways in which Fisher answered his critics, some of whom viewed randomization as unnecessary. Of special interest are the volunteer workers who came to Rothamsted Agricultural Station in England to work with Fisher and who stayed for periods of from three weeks to three years. These visitors, many of them international, returned to their respective countries and institutions carrying Fisher s methods of experimental design with them. Within two decades, randomized experimental design as first put forth by Fisher came to be not only accepted but also required in many areas of research doc7560 none Professor Royce Murray and his colleagues at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill are examining the chemistry and electrochemistry of metal nanoparticles containing a few hundred atoms and coated with a monolayer of thiolate ligands. With the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, this project focusses on the synthesis of these monolayer protected clusters, and their characterization using various chemical and electrochemical means. In addition, this group studies electron transfer dynamics in mixed valent molecular molten salts. The goal of the work is to understand the basic properties of nanoparticulate matter and electron transfer dynamics in these systems and in the semi-solid molecular molten salts. The synthesis and characterization of a novel class of molecular nanoparticles is the goal of this research project at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Using thiolate ligands to protect metal particles of a few hundred atoms, materials that can be manipulated and characterized using electrochemical methods are being developed. This research project also includes the study of electron transfer processes in mixed valent molecular molten salts. Both aspects of the research are directed to a basic understanding of charge transfer in nanomaterials and solids doc7561 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of South Alabama will acquire a Circular Dichroism Spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) CD spectroscopy of the solution structure of synthetic antifreeze polypeptides; b) conformational analysis of the heme-containing subunits of lumbricus hemoglobin; c) the role of sequence differences on the shape of the protein folding energy landscape; d) asymmetric catalysis; and e) exciton chirality investigations of isotopically substituted oligosaccharides. Circular dichroism spectroscopy is an extremely useful tool in modern analytical chemistry. It provides a very reliable and sensitive method for assigning absolute molecular configurations. The results from these studies will have a strong impact in biochemistry and other areas doc7562 none Hervig This award supports research with the goal of determining the optimum conditions for secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) studies of geological materials. This goal will be accomplished by 1) measuring the sputter yield (atoms removed primary ions striking the sample) of silicate glass bombarded by primary ion beams of O2-, O-, K+, and Cs+ at impact energies ranging from ~22.5 to ~5 keV and 2) measuring the useful yields (ions detected atoms sputtered) of ~60 trace elements in silicate glass with the different primary species and impact energies, Additional samples (sulfides and glasses implanted with platinum group elements and hydrogen, respectively) will also be studied. These fundamental data will be recast into a general handbook of optimum analysis conditions and will allow researchers applying SIMS to problems in trace element and isotope ratio microanalysis to get the highest sensitivity at the lowest cost in terms of sample consumption doc7563 none This program of research builds on the concept of situated cognition , which includes the ideas that cognition evolved to direct adaptive behavior, and that motivation and emotion are properly considered a part of cognition. Integration of this novel viewpoint with the sophisticated theoretical and empirical knowledge of mainstream social psychology leads to two projects addressing different substantive areas. The projects use multiple methods, including computer simulations of connectionist networks, and empirical laboratory-based studies with human participants. One project works toward increasing understanding of the mental representation of attitudes and stereotypes. One set of studies uses computer simulations to investigate how the functional properties of attitudes (their role in the guidance of action) relate to their representational properties such as evaluative priming, a link that has not previously been drawn. Empirical studies with human participants will test the hypothesis (flowing from the situated cognition approach) that attitude representations link attitude objects to the self. Additional studies will test the hypothesis that representations of social groups emphasize not the groups intrinsic qualities (such as personality traits), but rather their relationship to the perceiver s own in-groups. A second project is aimed at understanding interrelationships of individual mental representations and communication processes. The situated cognition perspective holds that cognition occurs not just in an isolated individual mind, but through social interaction and communication. These studies specifically address the role of language in implicitly communicating aspects of mental representations from one person to another. The broader goals of this research program are to contribute to the integration of the situated cognition perspective with mainstream social psychology, and, to enhance scientific understanding of such socially important phenomena as attitudes, stereotypes, interpersonal communication, and social influence doc7564 none The question of whether infants and older toddlers differentiate the world of objects into fundamentally similar kinds of categories has persisted for decades, largely due to the absence of methods for assessing categorization that are effective across a wide variety of ages. The concepts of preverbal infants must be examined through techniques that are independent of language, while language production and comprehension typically are vital to the assessment of toddlers early concepts. Determining whether younger and older infants possess similar types of concepts is relevant to broader questions concerning the degree to which cognitive development is continuous or discontinuous. On the one hand, differences between the category extensions of infants and older toddlers may be due to different methods of assessment or to different levels of experience with objects. Even within a single age group, infants may produce different patterns of category extension across different categorization tasks because the tasks vary in terms of attentional and other information-processing demands. On the other hand, fundamental differences may exist between prelinguistic infants and older infants who know names for things because they possess qualitatively different representational systems. By this account, within-group variations in categorization emerge because different procedures tap different categorization processes. This research will introduce a new method, a comprehension measure of associative generalization, that is intended to help determine the basis for between-group and within-group variations in categorization during infancy. In this method, preferred looking will serve as an index of infants understanding of conceptual boundaries and will correct for methodological problems associated with production-based responses such as imitation and labeling. Throughout three consecutive phases of the project, the comprehension measure of associative generalization will be used to explore infants understanding of the toy replicas often used in studies of early categorization as symbols for the corresponding real objects, and to differentiate among three alternative developmental sequences in the emergence of concepts: (1) Domain-first: Infants early concepts are global in nature (e.g., at the level of animal or vehicle) and broad concepts control infants associations of category properties; (2) Basic-first: Infants initial concepts are at the basic level (e.g., dog, cat, car, or truck), and domain-level generalizations obtained through production-based imitation tasks are attributable to overextensions of basic level categories; and (3) Variable specificity: Infants possess rudimentary knowledge that different types of properties are aligned with categories at different levels of specificity. The last would imply that certain properties are generalized at the basic level, and others are generalized at the domain level; such awareness would constitute evidence for rudimentary understanding of the asymmetry of class inclusion relations. The development of a comprehension-based analog to productive imitation measures has tremendous potential to serve as a methodological bridge between tasks appropriate for younger infants (e.g., habituation) and tasks suitable for older toddlers (e.g., naming, successive touching). Such a tool will enable researchers to sensitively test the degree to which categorization processes remain stable throughout the first two years of life and will provide useful data for the development of intervention programs aimed at facilitating early lexical development doc7565 none Professor Sylvia Ceyer and her colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are investigating the detailed dynamics of the etching of silicon surfaces by XeF2 and F2 etchant molecules. With the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, this group is testing the hypothesis that large local lattice vibrational excitations on collision with the silicon surface lead to the enhanced reactivity of XeF2 etchant molecules, as compared to F2 or F etchants. Comparisons of the molecular beam scattering of XeF2 and van der Waals bound Xe(F2) complexes are made, and the details of the energy transfer and reaction process are mapped out. These dynamic surface reactivity studies are designed to provide fundamental insights into the process of silicon etching. The effect of local lattice vibrational excitation on the reactivity of XeF2 for the etching of silicon is examined in this research project. The enhanced reactivity of XeF2 compared to F2 may be related to the lattice excitation that results on collision of the massive XeF2 species with the silicon surface. Direct comparison of the dynamics, using molecular beam scattering methods, allow Professor Ceyer and her group at MIT to probe this hypothesis doc7566 none Game theory provides the basis for rational behavior in situations involving multiple agents. It provides the means for modeling the objectives of agents and the information available to them, and specifies notions of optimal strategic behavior. However, the practical use of game theory has hitherto been limited by the lack of efficient algorithms for computing optimal strategies, and of software tools for game analysis. In this project, several approaches are explored to develop effective game-theoretic solution algorithms. The approaches are unified in their use of structured representations. Similarities between game states are exploited by abstraction-based approximation methods; regularities in the creation and revelation of information are exploited by information-based decomposition methods; and the decomposition of a complex situation using a set of weakly interacting variables is exploited by factored representations. In addition to the new algorithms, software tools are developed for the representation, solution and analysis of games. An innovative course on computational game theory is also developed. The impact of these methods, tools and educational materials will be to transform game theory from a theoretic tool for analyzing prototypical situations to a practical tool for designing strategic agents for real-world problems doc7567 none The study of Cajun French in Louisiana sponsored by NSF ( ) has revealed a central fact about French-speaking communities: language shift has been taking place rather dramatically over the last three generations. These communities have moved from monolingual French to bilingual French-English and are now moving rapidly to monolingual English. Situations of shift offer a unique opportunity to study language change in progress. The Louisiana French communities are interesting for two reasons: 1) shift to English began when both French and English were heavily stigmatized but the attitudes towards things French changed to positive during the course of the shift and 2) the social differences between Cajuns (white) and Creoles (African-Americans) leads language change and linguistic identity along separate paths. The sociolinguistic effect of language shift has been the development of two ethnolects (Cajun English and Louisiana African American Creole English), i.e., varieties of a language in which the expression of ethnic identity is maintained in an adopted language after loss of the ethnic language. Preliminary analysis of Cajun English has revealed four change processes in the development of selected sociolinguistic variants in the ethnolect: the origination of the variant in the accented English of the oldest generation; the adoption of local regional variants of English by the middle generation, the recycling of the accented English by the young and or the persistence of particular features over two or more contiguous generations. The sociolinguistic patterns associated with these processes are complex and intimately tied to the sociohistory of these communities. The Cajun and Louisiana African American Creole French communities of southern Louisiana provide a unique opportunity for a comparative sociolinguistic study of the process of language shift. There are many points of comparison between the Cajun and Creole communities: they are from the same locale (Southern Louisiana), have the same languages interacting during the same historical period; many commonalities in their sociohistory (long term occupation of the land; oppression by English-speaking whites; both are stigmatized social groups; both have a recent history of linguistic integration under government pressure (no French in schools) followed by belated attempts to encourage the use of French, largely for tourism economic reasons.) The major difference between the two groups is race; the developing ethnolects - Cajun and Louisiana African American Creole English - will help to sort out the problem of the linguistic origins of ethnolectal variants (in the accented variety of second language learners or adoptions from the same or different regional variants). The social setting of the Cajun and Creole communities which has led to the development of English dialects will be compared through the examination of their recent sociohistory in order to identify the similarities and differences in the social forces guiding language change and dialect development. The overall goal of the study is to construct a model of the development of ethnolects which takes account of geographical location, ethnic racial identities, sociohistory and linguistics and to compare this model with the current understanding of language change in progress doc7568 none This award supports the development and flight of four balloon payloads over mesoscale convective complexes located in the central region of South America. The purpose of these flights conducted through the support of the Brazilian balloon launch facilities is to obtain measurements pertaining to the production of Bremstralung X-rays that might be produced in the course of sprite events. Detection of these X-rays would determine the importance of runaway electrons in the development of sprite emissions, a basic assumption in current models that has not been verified through measurements. Additional balloon measurements would acquire a determination of the background distribution of vector electric and magnetic field distribution generated by the thunderstorm activity. Optical documentation of sprite events would be achieved through the application of high speed optical imaging of sprite emissions that would be flown on a Brazilian aircraft that will be located some 50 to 200 kms away from the thunderstorm activity. These results would be compared with model predictions of sprite events as revised to correspond to the electrical characteristics of the storm observed doc7569 none Peroxisomes are ubiquitous subcellular organelles that possess a diverse array of enzymes and other protein contents that vary with developmental stage, and in response to environmental cues. The overall goal of this project is to identify Arabidopsis genes coding for peroxisomal membrane proteins (PMPs) involved in the biogenesis and functioning of peroxisomes, and then determine the specific function of the gene products. Peroxin genes code for a set of proteins (peroxins) that participate specifically in peroxisomal biogenesis (organelle replication and differentiation). Most peroxins are PMPs. To date, 15 Arabidopsis orthologs of 23 eukaryotic peroxin genes have been identified, but a function has been determined for only 4 of these 15 orthologs. Public access to this information will be available at ( A HREF= http: lsweb.la.asu.edu rtrelease http: lsweb.la.asu.edu rtreleaseq A ). The function(s) of these PMPs will be determined experimentally through a multi-pronged approach, i.e., elucidation of their subcellular localization, intracellular sorting pathways, and molecular sorting signals in suspension cells from wild type and mutant plants, and developmentally through interactions of RNAs with increasingly available ESTs on microarrays. Also, phenotypic and functional complementation results obtained with available T-DNA knockouts will be examined. Experimental results will be presented by students and postdoctoral persons attending local and national meetings, and will be published in refereed journal articles. The research is expected to elucidate the function of at least 10 genes related to the biogenesis and functioning of peroxisomes in Arabidopsis; this is consistent with the Objectives of the Project. Since peroxisomal mutations are lethal in humans, and peroxisomes are essential for seedling establishment and photo-autotrophic growth of oilseed and other crop plants, the knowledge obtained for functions of Arabidopsis peroxisomal genes can and very likely will be applied to biotechnological improvements of agriculturally-important crop plants, and to possibly speed therapeutic resolution of peroxisomal biogenetic diseases in human infants doc7570 none Standardized test scores and grade point averages indicate that, on average, racial minority students do not perform as well as White students. Although factors such as socioeconomic status and quality of education are often suggested as explanations for this difference, laboratory research in social psychology suggests that individuals who are highly distinctive in their social environments tend to show weaker memory and problem solving skills. Thus, minority college students may be hindered in their performance because in most college environments they experience high social distinctiveness. This research planning grant will investigate the process by which racial distinctiveness negatively affects academic performance among minority, but not majority, group members. It is proposed that being the only member of one s race present in the environment (an experience termed solo status ) may change one s perception of the self (i.e., one s self-construal ). This is expected to happen differently for African-Americans and Whites. It is predicted that when an African-American is the only Black person in a testing situation, being Black becomes a greater part of that person s self-construal, and the person feels more representative of and more accountable to members of their racial group. Whites, on the other hand, are not predicted to adopt this group-based self-construal. A White person may perceive the self in individualistic terms, and not feel representative of or accountable to other Whites as solos. Two experiments will be conducted in a laboratory setting, using appropriate comparison groups, to test 1) whether solo status induces a more group-based self-construal for African-Americans than for Whites; 2) whether African-Americans in solo status perform more poorly than a control group because of the added pressure of representing their race; and 3) whether African-Americans in solo status avoid highly challenging tasks compared to a control group, to avoid the potential of being a poor representative of their race. This research will help us understand why Whites and Blacks perform differently in school even though they may have comparable educational preparation. This research will be useful in designing programs to stop the negative effects of solo status for racial minorities in the classroom, and will have implications for job performance in business settings as well doc7571 none Berloff Transport and mixing in the ocean will be studied using a sequence of models. Initially, a quasi-geostrophic model will be used to produce true velocity fields. The resultant turbulent velocities will be used to transport Lagrangian particles throughout the domain. The results will be compared to modeled dispersion using a sequence of Markov models (orders 0, 1, 2, and 3). These allow for diffusive, ballistic, sub and super diffusive behavior. These studies will also be used to understand the phenomenological behavior of the models. Results of the stochastic models will be compared with observed float characteristics from different regions of the ocean. More realistic, primitive equation models will also be investigated. Effects of low-frequency variability in flow structure, wind-forcing variability, eddy-induced flows, three-dimensional flows, and sources will be investigated. Two other questions of interest are the impact of rough topography and the impact of non-Gaussian forcing in the Markovian models. Incorporation of stochastic terms in the Eulerian partial differential equations, to simulate the role of the Markov models, is contemplated towards the end of the project doc7572 none Farley This grant provides funds for two years of partial salary support for technician Lindsey Hedges in the helium dating facility at Caltech. The last few years have seen rapid progress in the development and application of (U-Th) He dating, and He ages have been shown to provide quantitative new insights to a range of important Earth science problems. Hedges has been an integral part of He dating efforts at Caltech, particularly in promoting collaborations and in dissemination of the details of the techniques we have developed. This Phase II award will allow her to continue to 1) retain responsibility for day-to-day maintenance of hardware and supplies in the He dating laboratory, 2) educate new users from within Caltech and in the outside community in how to prepare and analyze He age samples, 3) analyze samples supplied by collaborators, and 4) prepare, distribute, analyze, and evaluate a small number of mineral standards for distribution within the rapidly growing He dating community doc7573 none Brooks, III Charles L. Energy landscape theory was the springboard for development of the new view of protein folding. This framework is responsible for our growing quantitative understanding of protein folding mechanism and detailed connections to experiments probing the folding process. Parallel development of landscape theory in the study of clusters and glasses has also significantly shaped understanding in this field. The interchange of ideas and concepts between these two distinct areas has added to the growth of each. However, more detailed exchanges and forums for discussion and presentation of underlying ideas and questions will aid continuing development of both areas. The goal of this symposium is to provide this forum for a discussion of common themes between folding and glasses and cluster phenomena, to promote the exchange of ideas between these communities, to survey the advances that have hallmarked each area, and to point to the challenges that remain in both. The exciting new advances that have taken place in these areas of investigation would have been impossible without the integration of the new theoretical and experimental advances in computational chemistry and physical chemistry that have been successfully applied to molecular biology and biochemistry. In this symposium, we will integrate the different groups that have taken part in shaping the successes this interdisciplinary persuit aimed at a quantitative understanding of the folding problem. The ACS Spring Meeting in at San Diego will provide the appropriate forum for this event doc7574 none Holzapfel The proposed work will continue a study of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies and the Sunyaev-Zel dovich effect (SZE) with the ACBAR (Arcminute Cosmology Bolometer Array Receiver) instrument, operating at South Pole station. Because of its stable atmosphere and extremely low water vapor, the South Pole is the best known terrestrial site from which to carry out this program of observations. The instrument itself is a sixteen element bolometer array, operating at 0.03 deg K, designed specifically for observations of CMB anisotropy and the SZE. It will operate in atmospheric windows spanning millimeter to submillimeter wavelengths; extending the spectral range over which observations of anisotropies are made is necessary to separate cosmic microwave background signals from foreground contamination. The combination of sensitive detectors, high angular resolution, and broad frequence coverage the instrument will advance cosmology research on several fronts. The project will determine cluster peculiar velocities (the motion of galaxy clusters with respect to the rest frame of the CMB), extend measurements of primordial CMB anisotropies to small angular scales, and serve as a natural complement to balloon and satellite missions at larger angular scales doc7575 none Eiler This grant provides three-years partial salary support for a research technician in the laboratories for stable isotope geochemistry at the . This is a Phase I technician support grant under the Instruments and Facilities (IF) Program. The stable isotope geochemistry technician at Caltech, Nami Kitchen, will provide the following contributions to our facility: 1) training of students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scientists in the use of instruments within this laboratory, 2) maintenance of gas-source mass spectrometers and other experimental apparatus; 3) processing samples through established analytical procedures in support of research conducted by users of this laboratory; and 4) construction and refinement of components of new analytical apparatus. Her greatest specific scientific contributions will be to provide continuous productivity and quality control for two semi-automated analytical methods developed in our laboratories over the last two years: 1) laser fluorination of minerals and glasses, applied to projects in petrology, mantle geochemistry, paleoclimate studies, and geobiology; and, 2) on-line reduction and D H ratio measurement of trace quantities of water released from geological and meteoritic samples. This second analytical method is a relatively recent development that we anticipate will be a foundation for an innovative and productive research program over the time-scale of this grant doc7576 none The goal of this research project is to investigate human motor skills and their representation in a spatio-temporal database management system. The challenges involved are multi-faceted. First, the captured data is continuous media and must be rendered in a timely manner in order to simulate a movement. If a system delivers the data at a slower rate than its pre-specified rate without special precautions (e.g., prefetching), the user might observe logical errors that result in undesirable behavior, e.g., with chop-sticks, either one or both sticks might fall out of place. Second, the movement of a limb -- say a hand -- when performing the same activity is slightly different across multiple repetitions of that activity. The approach to the first challenge is to explore design and implementation of real-time spatio-temporal database management systems that represent an activity as a multi-level presentation. The approach to the second problem is to investigate Envelope of Limits (EoL) to capture the essence of a movement. In addition, this research strives to develop a framework that detects spatio-temporal patterns that represent hypotheses about the physical constraints that govern movements. The results of this project will advance real-time spatio-temporal databases in support of haptic devices. This is a high-risk research, because it spans multiple fields, with a potential to emerge as a new discipline. If successful, a high payoff can be expected, as the results will have an impact on applications in broad areas such as health-care, education, and entertainment doc7577 none The 8th International Symposium on Nitrogen Fixation with Non-Legumes will bring scientists throughout the world to Sydney, Australia, for five days of discussion about the potential to use nitrogen fixing bacteria for supplying the essential element, nitrogen, to non-leguminous plants. While the legume plants such as peas and beans are known to gain significant amounts of N from association with nitrogen-fixing bacteria called Rhizobia, much less is known about symbiotic nitrogen fixation in different families of plants. Recent developments have now made it more likely that the some nitrogen-fixing bacteria might play a role in making the growth of grass species (and cereal production) less dependent on chemical fertilizer which is expensive and a major pollutant of agricultural run-off water. These bacteria are called endophytes because they live inside (endo) plants (phyte), not in a differentiated structure like legume root nodues but within the intercellular spaces and vascular system of their plant host. Scientists in the USA, Brazil, Australia, Argentina, Germany, Israel, India, and The Phillipines are studying different aspects of endophytes. Also to be reviewed and discussed is the idea of transferring nitrogen fixation genes from bacteria into plants such that plants could themselves fix nitrogen one day, by-passing the need for bacterial symbionts or endophytes. Recent work from the UK on the transfer of a few nitrogen fixation genes (from among the 22 or so needed) into a primitive plant called Chlamydomonas represents a step in this direction. At the conclusion of the Symposium, a summing up of the state of the art will be disseminated to the public as well as to the scientific community. The grant from the National Science Foundation will support the travel of 8 USA scientists to Sydney. All of them are invited plenary or session speakers or are young scientists (post-docs) for whom attending a symposium such as this will help advance their careers doc7578 none Peltzer This grant provides partial support of the costs of acquiring a multi-processor computer and workstations to set up an interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) processing facility for solid Earth geophysical research within UCLA s Earth and Space Sciences Department. The PI, Gilles Peltzer, is a recent addition to the ESS department faculty at UCLA, after having spent 10 years as a research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In addition to G. Peltzer s group including post-doctoral scholars and graduate students, the system will be used by a larger group of faculty including, but not limited to, Profs. J. Vidale, D. Jackson and collaborating scholars engaged in processing and analysis of massive data sets and CPU-intensive physical modeling. The computer server will allow processing and analyses of large sets of InSAR data for research aimed at understanding sub-surface processes involved in the generation of earthquakes, the relaxation of the stress following these events, volcanic eruptions, and more surficial effects including the surface deformation produced by crustal fluid extraction and reinjection. The observations made possible using InSAR (providing spatial continuity of sampling) ideally complement those made with permanent GPS arrays (temporal continuity). The ability to rapidly analyze and interpret both sets of geophysical data will be immediately useful for geodetic and seismological research conducted by several scientists within the Earth and Space Science department of UCLA doc7579 none The goal of the Alabama EPSCoR initiative is to create three multi-campus Centers of Excellence reflecting research programs in biological and environmental sciences, materials science and technology, and information science and technology. The Centers include: (1) the Alabama Structural Biology Consortium (ASBC) which will create a critical mass of scientists in structural biology from the University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH), the University of South Alabama (USA), and the University of Alabama, Birmingham (UAB); (2) Integrated Micro-Electromechanical Systems (IMEMS) Center will combine the efforts at University of Alabama, Huntsville, the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Auburn University and Tuskegee University to develop the infrastructure required to integrate optical elements and nanostructures within Micro-Electromechanical (MEMS) devices. The IMEMS Center will offer continued growth of information technology and development of novel computer and telecommunications devices. (3) Large Scale Electromechanical Systems (LEMS), a consortium of composed of the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Auburn University, University of Tulsa, Shelton State Community College, and the Alabama School of Mathematics and Science along with six industrial and two federal partners. The LEMs Consortium will focus on system integration in conjunction with improving performance, reliability, and efficiency while decreasing costs and environmental hazards through use of electromechanical systems. Infrastructure support of the Centers will include numerous education and outreach activities that will broaden the reach and impact of the proposed project. In addition, An Internet2 initiative will further develop the state s information technology infrastructure. The initiative will provide the interconnective high speed networking infrastructure necessary for communication and collaboration of all the universities operating as cohesive Centers doc7580 none During the past several decades, poverty in the U.S. has become more urban and more spatially concentrated, particularly among racial and ethnic minorities. In this proposal, we outline a strategy designed to assess the effects of residential location in high-poverty neighborhoods on child learning and development, and to illuminate the basic mechanisms through which these effects occur. To execute this strategy, we propose to utilize the research platform provided by the Moving To Opportunity (MTO) demonstration program, developed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). MTO used a random lottery among housing-project residents in five of the nation s largest cities to offer rent subsidies that could be used to move to lower poverty neighborhoods. Data collected from children and their parents will be used to examine the effects of neighborhoods on child outcomes, and on the role of family and neighborhood factors that may lead to these outcomes. The randomization of the subsidy will be used to identify the causal effect of residential location on child and family outcomes using a more scientifically credible research design than has been used in previous research. This experimental design will be used to solve the fundamental selection problem in non-experimental research, where comparisons between individuals living in different neighborhoods may be biased by the fact that families choose their residential location. Furthermore, we will be able to minimize potential survey attrition bias, because substantial tracking has been done to keep sample location information current. Preliminary research has been conducted at several MTO sites. In Boston, a survey designed by Kling and his colleagues was completed approximately two years after random assignment with 520 of 540 sample households, for a 96% response rate. Moves to lower poverty neighborhoods induced by MTO subsidy offers appear to have produced significant improvements in the problem behaviors of boys, the physical health of boys and girls, and the overall and mental health of household heads, without substantially worsening social isolation of participating families. Analyses by Brooks-Gunn and Leventhal of initial data from the New York site suggest similar results. Research by Duncan and his colleagues using data from the Baltimore site suggests reductions in criminal behavior among adolescent boys. Additional research is needed, however, to directly assess educational achievement of children, to understand the mechanisms through which neighborhoods affect learning, and to see if initial program benefits persist. Larger sample sizes will also facilitate analyses of particular subgroups, by age, race, gender, or time since random assignment. This proposal provides a plan to expand MTO research to include an in-home interview with up to two children ages 5 to 11 per household (and a parent), for an approximate sampling universe of children and with a survey response rate target of 90%. Data will be collected on children s educational achieve-ment; children s behavior problems and delinquency; social networks, peer deviance, and exposure to violence; future expectations and efficacy in school, community, and family; home environ-ment, family routines, primary caregiver characteristics, and child care arrangements; and the economic and demographic situation of the family. This research is designed to complement HUD s concurrent policy evaluation centered on MTO household heads, and will enable a much deeper exploration of the relationship between children and their neighborhoods. The analysis will provide critical evidence on basic environmental factors that influence key developmental outcomes such as knowledge and skill acquisition and social behavior doc7581 none This research adopts an approach-avoidance model of attitude position and change and focuses on the avoidance gradient. In many cases, a request, an offer, or a suggestion creates two opposing reactions. The recipient of an offer wants to agree, wants to enjoy, wants to participate in fulfilling the request, but at the same time the recipient may be resistant to the expense, to the effort, and or to the commitment that comes with fulfilling the request. The dynamics of this approach-avoidance conflict may be changed either by augmenting the approach forces or by diminishing the avoidance tendencies. Many theories of social influence focus on the approach side of this conflict, and suggest ways of adding to the number or quality of reasons for taking action. This research focuses on ways to reduce resistance to persuasion as a means of increasing compliance. Two related programs of research are included, one investigating how resistance can be disrupted, the other investigating how resistance can be depleted by use. The first program of research focuses on disrupting resistance. The investigator s Disrupt-then-Reframe method of social influence uses a subtle disruption to lessen resistance to reasons for accepting the offer. A slight unexpected element in an offer, such as stating the price of note-cards in pennies rather than dollars or reversing the normal order of two words, makes more persuasive the subsequent reasons or reframes for accepting the offer. Three studies investigate whether a disrupting phrase increases evaluative scrutiny, disrupts elaborative thinking, or interferes with evaluative consideration. The second program investigates whether resistance is a consumable resource. Four studies investigate whether resisting an offer will diminish one s capacity to resist future offers. Together these studies clarify the role of resistance in compliance and attitude change and establish several new strategies for persuasion doc7582 none This award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program will enable the Department of Chemistry at The University of Arkansas to acquire a 9.4 Tesla Fourier Transform Ion Cyclotron Resonance Mass Spectrometer equipped with both electrospray and matrix assisted laser desorption ionization. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas, including a) investigations of the structure and dynamics of proteins; b) rapid and accurate characterization of bacteria; and c) analysis of synthesis polymers. Mass spectrometry is a technique used to probe intimate structural details and to obtain the molecular compositions of a vast array of organic, bioorganic, and organometallic molecules. The acquisition of this capability in mass spectrometry will have a significant impact in the areas of polymer chemistry and biochemistry doc7583 none Birds have excellent visual acuity, color vision, pattern discrimination ability, and visual memory, all of which are almost equal to, or sometimes superior to, these same abilities of the highly visual primates. Although the overall pattern of brain organization is similar among all vertebrates, the neural substrates responsible for these visual abilities appear to be different between birds and primates. How is it possible that anatomically different brains solve similar biological problems of visual information processing? This project focuses on the tectofugal pathway in the pigeon brain, which is critical for many visual discrimination tasks. Anatomical, lesion, and molecular techniques will be used to study the organization and function of the pathway in mate recognition. In particular, a computer-animated pigeon-- virtual pigeon -- will be presented to male pigeons to investigate how a complex natural signal is processed in the tectofugal pathway. Comparative research data from the distinct systems of birds and primates will contribute to understanding the general and specific principles of the two neural systems. Such information in turn will be important to increase the understanding of the origin and evolution of these abilities in different species doc7584 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Rutgers University in New Brunswick will acquire a X-ray diffractometer with CCD detector. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including the following: a) organo-lanthanum chemistry; b) solid state chemistry; c) biodegradable polymers; d) organometallic chemistry; e) studies of high-K dielectrics; and f) synthesis of complex nucleoside antibiotics. The X-ray diffractometer allows accurate and precise measurements of the full three dimensional structure of a molecule, including bond distances and angles, and it provides accurate information about the spatial arrangement of the molecule relative to the neighboring molecules. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, including materials science and biotechnology doc7585 none The Western Aleutians Archaeological and Paleobiological Project, conducted by an international team (U.S.A., France, and Russia) of archaeologists, ecologists, zoologists, paleoethnobotanists, and geomorphologists, provides new information about the colonization of the Near Islands, sizes of Near Island settlements, communication between Near Island groups, and subsistence strategies of prehistoric populations. The project has two primary goals: 1) to examine the nature and characteristics of the western Aleutian culture in order to assess its particularities and the degree of cultural exchange with politically and culturally independent neighboring Aleut subgroups, and 2) to document Holocene environmental change in Beringia and determine, to what extent, these changes impacted prehistoric human communities. The project s past contributions include extensive documentation, mapping, sampling, and analysis to provide a chronological and ethnographic framework. During the new phase, The international team will return to Austin Cove, Attu Island, where archaeologists ecologists will excavate different features including: 1) a chief s house, 2) a non-elite dwelling, 3) a Russian Period house, and 4) different types of storage features, to understand the timing of cultural changes which resulted in increasing complexity and study the environmental variables bracketing such changes. A thorough understanding of Holocene environmental change in the region should provide clues in how prehistoric Aleuts adapted to their maritime world. Additionally, some of the most dramatic social and political changes occurred during the Russian Aleut contact period. The excavation of the Russian period house feature should provide information on social economic changes which resulted from this cultural integration doc7586 none This project is investigating the atmospheric hydrogen (H2) budget using isotopic measurements. H2 is the second most abundant reactive gas in the troposphere and is directly tied to the cycling of carbon monoxide (CO), methane (CH4), and non-methane hydrocarbons via the photochemical formation and destruction of formaldehyde (HCHO). Currently, the global H2 budget is balanced only to within about 50%. Measurements are being made of the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen (D H) in marine locations, in areas during biomass burning, and in H2 produced by the photolysis of HCHO, and during soil uptake of H2. The degree of enrichment of deuterium in these samples will indicate the relative importance of the soil and the photochemical sinks for H2. This work is helping to resolve the current discrepancies in the global budget of H2 and contribute to the overall understanding of the importance of increasing concentrations of CO, CH4, and H2 in the troposphere. Also, if H2 becomes an important energy source in the future, it will become even more important to understand its global budget doc7587 none Horenstein Glycosyltransferases are enzymes that catalyze the creation of glycosidic bonds to sugars. These enzymes are responsible for the creation of an incredibly diverse and important group of compounds that range from cellulose and starch to the heterogeneous oligosaccharides that are found at the surface of cells. The mechanisms by which these enzymes work are not well characterized. The research described here is aimed at elucidation of glycosyltransferase mechanisms, in particular the sialyltransferase and trans-sialidase enzymes. These enzymes catalyze formation of glycosidic bonds to N-acetylneuraminic acid, a negatively charged sugar often located at the non-reducing termini of oligosaccharides on the cell surface. The four specific aims of this work are to measure oxygen-18 isotope effects for sialyltransferase and trans-sialidase, use mutagenesis to perform chemical rescue of trans-sialidase, analyze the isotope effects with ab-initio computational techniques, and synthesize novel inhibitors of sialyltransferases. The results of these studies will allow for a deeper understanding of how these enzymes function and provide information required for manipulation of their activity. Further, the mechanistic information dovetails into the synthetic work by providing the basis for logical inhibitor design doc7588 none The investigators will fully assess their newly developed concept regarding the mechanism that generates type III radio emission in the solar corona. The main effort is to produce a detailed ray tracing analysis of the Bernstein-to-fast wave mode-conversion process, as well as a concrete demonstration of the pitch-angle scattering process of energetic electrons, the relation between the level of intrinsic hydromagnetic turbulence and the degree of pitch-angle scattering. The analysis will also consider other crucial observational aspects related to type III emissions such as the low-frequency cutoff problem and the relevance of the mechanism to type V emissions. The scientific objective of the research program is to investigate the radio emission process, particularly the type III bursts in the solar corona, in terms of an instability mechanism excited by a beam of energetic electrons propagating along the ambient magnetic field in the presence of intrinsic hydromagnetic waves. This mechanism involves the excitation of thermal electron cyclotron harmonic modes, known as the Bernstein modes in the literature. The excitation of these waves occurs at the expense of free energy in the electrons whose momentum distribution function possesses positive perpendicular slope. Such a feature results from the pitch-angle scattering of streaming electrons by low-frequency hydromagnetic turbulence, as they traverse along the open magnetic field line. The excited Bernstein waves are then mode-converted into free-space X and O modes, and observed as the fundamental and harmonic type III bursts. This model is very different from the standard emission mechanism for type III bursts, which rely on beam-generated Langmuir waves, which are nonlinearly converted to electromagnetic waves. There are many difficulties with the standard emission mechanism, especially when applied near the corona. The new mechanism appears to be promising with respect to many of these problems doc7589 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will acquire an LC Ion-Trap Mass Spectrometer for Interdisciplinary Chemical Analysis. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) the sequencing of peptides and characterization of synthetic small-molecule protein cofactors; b) separation and identification of oligonucleotides synthesized on clay; c) prostaglandin and leukotriene separations and identification of free radicals trapped with nitrone spin traps; d) analysis of lake and river surface microlayers; e) structural elucidation of combinatorial biocatalysts; and f) structure determination of photodegraded environmental pollutants. Mass spectrometry (MS) is a technique used to probe intimate structural details and to obtain the molecular compositions of a vast array of organic, bioorganic, and organometallic molecules. The results from these studies will have an impact in a number of areas including biotechnology and environmental chemistry doc7590 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of New Hampshire will acquire a 500 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) characterization of new cycloadducts of C60 with polyacenes and tetrazines; b) characterization and dynamic NMR studies of polyamines and derivatives, including compounds with strong potential as diagnostic imaging agents and anti-HIV agents; c) development of a novel zinc carbenoid chain extension reaction that will facilitate the inclusion of ketomethylene isosteres as part of combinatorial libraries; and d) studies of supramolecular clusters formed from hybrid ligands. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometry is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry, biotechnology and nanotechnology doc7591 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Seton Hall University will acquire a 400 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) proteins and peptides in a bicontinuous lipidic cubic phase; b) synthesis of novel dendritic and hyperbranched polymers; c) preparation of new materials for microlithography; d) synthetic carbohydrate chemistry; e) conformational analysis of polysaccharides; and f) interactions of fluoropeptides with DNA. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometry is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry and biochemistry doc7592 none David Gross Heterochromatin is a condensed form of chromatin found within all eukaryotic (nucleated) cells. It is responsible for X-chromosome inactivation in mammalian females, position-effect variegation in the fruit fly, and cell-type determination in budding yeast. While heterochromatin has long been associated with genetic inactivation, the precise mechanism by which it represses gene transcription is unclear. To investigate this, a powerful model system has been developed. In this system, a dynamically regulated, stress-inducible yeast gene (HSP82) has been placed under control of a heterochromatin-inducing protein complex termed SIR (Silent Information Regulator). This model system will be used to address the following questions. First, which proteins bind to the promoter DNA of the SIR-repressed gene? Using a powerful new technique, chromatin immunoprecipitation, the presence of both positive and negative regulatory proteins will be examined in living cells. These include the sequence-specific activator, heat shock factor (HSF), components of the basic transcriptional machinery (including RNA polymerase), and the heterochromatin-binding proteins Sir2p and Sir3p. Second, the question of whether silencing of HSP82 occurs in each cell in the population will be investigated. Is silencing stably inherited from parent to daughter cell, or is heterochromatin-mediated repression variegated (seen in some cells of a population but not in others), as is the case in fruit fly? Third, what are the collaborators of HSF which permit it, when activated by stress, to override the repressive heterochromatic structure established by SIR? A gene knock-out approach will be taken to answer this question. Finally, what is the mechanism of a second global repression system, mediated by the Ssn6-Tup1 protein complex? A yeast strain will be genetically engineered so that the HSP82 gene promoter is targeted by the Ssn6-Tup1 protein complex. Parallel expression, structural, and genetic analyses to those described above will then be carried out, allowing a direct comparison between the two repression systems. Given the degree to which transcriptional mechanisms are evolutionarily conserved, these studies have the potential to unravel the means by which heterochromatin works not only in yeast but also in other eukaryotes, including human doc7593 none Nebraska EPSCoR, in cooperation and collaboration with research universities in the state of Nebraska, seeks to build research infrastructures in several areas of informatics. The effort will be directed at three primary areas that are consistent with the Nebraska EPSCoR Strategic plan as well as plans and strategic directions of the participating universities including: (1) development of wired and wireless network technologies that will more effectively link ongoing inter-campus efforts within a secure distributed information infrastructure, (2) development of a test-bed to research next generation Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems architectures that are viable and efficient for e-commerce through collaboration with the private sector, (3) development of inter-campus capabilities in newly emerging research areas of bio-informatics and computational biology. The proposed infrastructure initiative in informatics complements the developing information technology industry in the state, involves scientists and engineers from four university campuses (University of Nebraska, Lincoln (UNL), University of Nebraska Medical Center, University of Nebraska, Omaha (UNO), and Creighton University. It provides for an integrated plan to accomplish goals that are considered crucial for establishing competitiveness in computational-based informatics research within the state of Nebraska. In addition to the major development effort for the interdisciplinary informatics infrastructures, the proposed project will greatly enhance the computational capabilities available to a broad range of fields of research and instruction. Additional components of the project will support educational activities and research experiences for under-represented groups, internships for science and technology students to work in private industry, a small grants program for faculty early in their careers, technical assistance and faculty travel, and outreach to other Nebraska colleges and universities doc7594 none This project studies the influence of culture on individual adaptation through investigating cultural, social-psychological and dietary influences on individual differences in physiological and psychological adaptation. Individual differences in variables such as blood pressure, serum lipids, anxiety and depression have most often been attributed to individual-level factors such as diet or stressful experiences. This project will use contemporary culture theory and methods to examine how cultural models construct shared meanings, which in turn affect the behavior of individuals and their health status. The research hypothesizes that high cultural consonance, the degree to which individuals approximate shared cultural models, will be associated with better physiological and psychological adaptation, as measured by lower blood pressure and other variables associated with stress and distress. The research will be done in Ribeirao Preto, Brazil, a community with a considerable amount of socio-cultural and dietary variability. The research will take place in four diverse neighborhoods in three stages: unstructured interviewing will be used to elicit cultural domains; then cultural consensus analysis will be used to test for shared knowledge; and finally data on individual psycho-biological adaptation will be collected from a survey sample. The research will contribute to our understanding of how individuals adapt in their cultural setting as well as advance our knowledge of this important region of the world doc7595 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of California in Riverside will acquire a Hybrid Quadrupole Orthogonal Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) regiochemistry of ring assembly; b) fragments from chemical cleavage of proteins; c) isotopic labeling of steroids and seco-steroids; d) particulate formation in smog chamber simulations; e) synthesis of heterofullerenes; and f) deuterium exchange on platinum surfaces. Mass spectrometry (MS) is a technique used to probe intimate structural details and to obtain the molecular compositions of a vast array of organic, bioorganic, and organometallic molecules. The results from these studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry, polymer processing and biology doc7596 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin in Madison will upgrade their computer system to a 60-node parallel cluster. This equipment will enhance research in the following areas: a) spectroscopic and computational studies of metalloenzyme structure and function; b) studies of bonding, electronic and vibrational properties of chemisorbed molecules and molecular thin films; c) mechanistic organic chemistry of relevance to the interstellar medium; d) time- and frequency-domain vibrational spectroscopy of carbon monoxide bound to myoglobin; e) validation and application of new NBO- and QCE-based ab initio methods; and f) static and dynamic properties of polymers and complex fluids. This upgrade will provide a massively parallel processor system for fast computation and the ability to distribute many types of computations. The massively parallel processor will form the backbone for a new Facility for Integrated Research in Computational Chemistry, a networked system of 24 computers to be used for research and graduate-level instruction in computational chemistry methods. The research to be carried out using this resource will have a significant impact in a number of areas, including biochemistry and materials sciences doc7597 none This project involves an investigation of the spatial and functional logic of the motion-picture industry in Los Angeles. Particular attention will be paid to locational agglomeration and dispersal tendencies in the industry, to the organization of production as a dualistic system of majors and independents, and to the role of distribution in sustaining the economic vibrancy of the entire motion-picture production system. The goals of the project are not only to understand the complexities of this particular case, but to contribute more generally to the our knowledge of cultural industries and their basis in globalizing urban-based production systems. Three major lines of inquiry will be pursued: (1) How is the motion-picture industry of Los Angeles organized in terms of the changing social division of labor? What are the geographical forces that keep the industry locked in to the central agglomeration of Hollywood? Conversely, what is the current level of runaway production from Hollywood, and what factors encourage this phenomenon? (2) What are the roles of majors and independents, their relations, and their impacts on the economic and locational dynamics of the industry? (3) How is the distribution of the products of Hollywood s motion-picture agglomeration organized and how does the distribution system help to consolidate (or undermine) the competitive supremacy of this agglomeration? The project will conduct a mail and email survey of over motion-picture companies, followed by interviews of selected company representatives. This research will provide a comprehensive and reasoned description of one of America s largest and most enigmatic industrial agglomerations. It will show, in particular, how the dynamics of a major industrial cluster are shaped by global markets, and conversely, how global markets themselves can be contested on the basis of competitive advantages residing for the most part in localized clusters of production doc7598 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania will acquire a X-ray diffractometer with CCD detector for small molecule diffractometry. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including the following: a) synthesis and chemical and bioactivity properties of metallatricarbaboranyl and isoelectronic metallaheteroatomboranyl complexes; b) control of radical polymerization of olefins by metalloradical and atom transfer mechanisms; c) transition metal complexes of organosilicon and -germanium compounds: new structures and catalysts; d) conjugated porphyrin-based assemblies for biomimetic energy transduction and catalysis; and e)elucidation of catalyst structure and function. The X-ray diffractometer allows accurate and precise measurements of the full three dimensional structure of a molecule, including bond distances and angles, and it provides accurate information about the spatial arrangement of the molecule relative to the neighboring molecules. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, including the preparation of more efficient catalysts, materials chemistry and biotechnology doc7599 none Friedrich Studies of insect compound eye development have focussed in great detail on the model Drosophila melanogaster but very little is known about this process in other insect species. This is particularly notable as the eyes are formed during postembryogenesis from imaginal disc tissue in the holometabolous fruitfly Drosophila, whereas eye development initiates during early embryogenesis in most other animal species. Drosophila eye development thus represents an evolutionarily highly derived process associated with an advanced form of insect metamorphosis. The PI has begun to study eye development in the more primitive grasshopper Schistocerca americana, which represents a hemimetabolous species with embryonic eye development. Comparing Drosophila with Schistocerca makes it possible to reconstruct the ancestral patterning mechanisms of insect eye development and to identify molecular-developmental changes associated with the evolution of insect metamorphosis. This proposal specifically addresses the roles of the wingless, decapentaplegic and hedgehog genes in the grasshopper eye. In Drosophila, these signaling factors orchestrate the global patterning of the eye field in a multitasking manner. Gene expression pattern comparisons indicate that only some of the respective patterning functions are conserved while others are specific to either Drosophila or Schistocerca. The functional relevance of patterning gene expression in the grasshopper eye is being investigated by pharmacological and Sindbis virus mediated perturbation of gene activity in cultured embryos doc7600 none Jonathan Arias Biotic and industrial activities result in the environmental accumulation of organic toxins. Cellular protection against such xenobiotic stress agents is afforded by increasing the rate of transcription of nuclear detoxification genes, through changes in the activity of basic leucine-zipper (bZIP) transcription factors. Key structural and regulatory features of xenobiotic-responsive bZIP factors of animals and yeast have been elucidated. By comparison, less is known about their functional counterparts in plants. The long-term goal of this research is to understand how transcription involving a tobacco bZIP factor termed TGA1a is regulated by cellular and stress cues. Recently it has been shown that xenobiotic stress induced by 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid can stimulate DNA-binding and trans-activation functions of TGA1a. A nuclear TGA1a-binding protein termed p120, with properties of a co-repressor, is strongly implicated in stress-responsive regulation of these transcription activities. The PI s laboratory will investigate the mode of action of the p120 co-repressor, through in vivo functional studies with its cloned gene. TGA1a and its cognate as-1-type cis-elements have been implicated in the regulation of a number of plant detoxification and host-defense genes. Thus, elucidating the molecular basis of this transcriptional response pathway is important for advancing basic knowledge of cellular detoxification processes, and for developing effective genetic strategies to manipulate natural protective genes of plants. Because xenobiotic toxins accumulate in crop plants and retain significant latent activity, research aimed at understanding plant transcriptional control of detoxification pathways may have important implications for human health doc7601 none Advanced database applications like Decision-Support Systems (DSS) and data mining use existing database technology (relational databases and their query language, SQL) to extract high-level information from large amounts of data. Since SQL is a declarative language (it allows the user to specify what is needed, not how to obtain it), and most SQL queries can be implemented in different ways, a process of optimization is carried out which chooses the most efficient implementation known to the system for each query. However, as both the amount of data to be processed and the complexity of the queries used grow, optimization is becoming more difficult and more important. This project explores a novel approach to the optimization of complex SQL queries, called the For-loop approach, which goes beyond the relational framework to try to find more efficient implementations. The results of this project will provide insight into the strengths and limitations of optimizations for SQL. The new approach has the potential to provide significant performance improvements over current techniques for a restricted (but important) class of queries, including queries with subqueries where the FROM and WHERE clause of query and subquery exhibit significant overlap (these queries are not uncommon in DSS environments). The results of this research will be actively disseminated by the PI in order to attract collaboration with industry and with other researchers doc7602 none With the support of the Organic Synthesis Program, Professor Jeffrey S. Moore, of the Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is exploring the synthesis and properties of chain molecules that adopt ordered conformations in solution ( foldamers ), analogous to the behavior of proteins and nucleic acids. Professor Moore s studies target the molecular recognition properties of foldamers and the development of approaches for the synthesis and selection of functionally active foldamer sequences. Phenyl piperazine substrates are designed to be accommodated in the helical cavities of oligomers, while alternative functionalization of the oligomers provides fully encapsulated cavities with end capping groups capable of further pi-pi stacking and hydrogen bonding interactions. Proteins and nucleic acids adopt ordered three dimensional structures in solution, with the details of their structures critical to their biological function. With the support of the Organic Synthesis Program, Professor Jeffrey S. Moore, of the Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is exploring the properties of synthetic molecules ( foldamers ) which are designed to fold into specific three dimensional structures. By studying methods to bring about the formation of desired, compact structures, complemented by the development of new techniques for the efficient synthesis of large molecules (macromolecules), Professor Moore is addressing the structural features responsible for the adoption of specific structures by foldamers. This information, in turn, is providing insight into the factors responsible for the binding of small organic molecules by macromolecules. Since macromolecular structure dictates many of the properties of polymers, these studies promise a better understanding of polymer chemistry and materials science, and, in addition, may enhance our understanding of the structure and properties of biological macromolecules doc7603 none This exploratory research grant provides the support for studies, with respect to fundamental facets as well as practical facets, of manufacturing processes of three-dimensional components in the micro-scale. Moreover, the study will include factors required to have components, so fabricated, to work together as three-dimensional micro-actuators. Letting a length-measure to represent the size of component, it is known that the volume of the component is proportional to the cube of the length-measure, and the surface of the component is proportional to the square of the length-measure. Given this fact, as one move from the much better understood macro world of manufacturing to the relatively unknown world of manufacturing in the micro world, surface dictated behavior as a part of the component would be much more important than the volume dictated behavior of the component. As such this research will place special emphasis on surfaces along with the material whose surfaces are be studied. As these components are expected to work together reliably when assembled to form actuators, materials as a factor also looms large in the studies. Other factor to be studied are method of measurement, handling, storage, among others, of micro-scale components. If successful, the results of this exploratory research will improve the fundamental understanding of processes of manufacturing three-dimensional components in the micro-scale as well as factors which need to be taken into account when these components are assembled to form micro-actuators. A dominant factors in the fundamental understanding, which will be the bases for successful application, is reliability. The hope is that the aforementioned knowledge will lead to requisite methodologies for manufacturing in the micro-scale, especially in the truly three-dimensional world doc7604 none R. Stephen Berry of the University of Chicago is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to carry out research that combines computation and analytic theory to address understanding the dynamics of increasingly complex systems at the microscopic level. The research falls into the following areas: (1) correlation of electrons in atoms, (2) structures and dynamics of small clusters and nonrigid molecules, (3) the relation between chaotic or regular dynamics and the kinetics of such systems, (4) the phase and phase changes of small systems, and how these are related to the phase transitions of different orders in bulk systems, (5) the topographies of many-dimensional potential surfaces and how these topographies determine the glass-forming or structure-seeking character of the substance, and (6) the application of the concepts and results of the preceding topics to the dynamics, folding, and relaxation of proteins. The overall objective of this project is to enhance the understanding of and application to systems comprised of tens to hundreds of thousands of atoms. The goals of this study include developing a picture of how clusters, nanoscale particles, and proteins or collections of proteins undergo changes, such as melting and structural changes, magnetic-to-nonmagnetic transitions, or reorganization associated with very controlled annealing that can optimize the yield of a desired morphology. Clusters are special forms of matter that lie between isolated atoms and molecules at one extreme and solid materials at the other extreme. Properties of clusters are important because they bridge these two limits, and can enable understanding of why and how substances organize into highly selective structures such as crystalline materials or properly-folded proteins. The outcomes of this research are anticipated to deepen the understanding of commonplace properties of matter, and impact applications in disciplines such as materials science and biology doc7605 none The brain integrates and coordinates neural processing across multiple levels of organization to produce behavior. This project takes the neural control of breathing as a system for computational modeling of cross-level integration of cellular, network and systems neural mechanisms. The overall objective is to build a united multi-level model of neural control of respiration, within a uniform framework to incorporate existing data and current hypotheses on respiratory control. It remains controversial whether respiratory oscillation is produced primarily by endogenous cellular pacemaker activity, or instead by properties of excitation and inhibition within a network circuit. This project models membrane activity for single respiratory neurons to investigate bursting activity; models the whole circuitry of the central pattern generator (CPG) network to investigate how connectivity can result in a steady respiratory rhythm with realistic firing patterns and changes from external perturbations; and elaborates the CPG model to generate a pacemaker-driven rhythm under simulated conditions. Mechanisms and conditions for the transition between pacemaker-driven and network-based states for generating rhythms are investigated in computational models and directly compared to experimental biological data from other laboratories. Results will clarify fundamental aspects of the important topic of respiratory control, may settle a current controversy, and will have an impact beyond basic neuroscience, eventually to biomedical work including control-systems analysis of physiology. The complex multi-scale approach is novel, and will provide valuable postdoctoral and student training doc7606 none Saltman This VIGRE project showcases a rapidly expanding commitment by the Department of Mathematics to foster multidisciplinary education and research activities, as a natural part of our dedication to excellence in mathematics. This commitment is behind the ever increasing partnership between the Department of Mathematics of the University of Texas at Austin (UT) and the Texas Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics (TICAM), an independent unit with participation from a large number of engineering and science departments. The VIGRE project s central goal is to improve the quality of training that future mathematical scientists, from undergraduate mathematics majors to postdoctoral researchers, experience at UT. In keeping with the department s commitment, many of the UT VIGRE activities have a pronounced multidisciplinary flavor. By placing greater emphasis on how mathematics interacts with the larger intellectual, scientific, and public communities, we hope not only to provide aspiring mathematical scientists with a firm grounding in the subject s core, as we have always done, but also to give them a glimpse of (and better prepare them for) the multitude of career opportunities that now present themselves to members of the work force commanding highly developed mathematical skills. With the aid of VIGRE funding, the department will stimulate the formation of a local educational landscape in which activities that successfully exploit the combined talents of undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty members are striking features. Running the gamut from new courses and seminars to research experiences, the program will aggressively promote increased cooperation on the UT campus between mathematics and other disciplines. UT is a comprehensive research institution whose charter contains the explicit constitutional mandate to be a university of the first class. Superimposed upon that mandate is UT s stated mission of serving all the citizens of an enormous state with an extremely diverse population. In its continuing endeavor to contribute to this mission, the Department of Mathematics has assembled a world-class team of scholars and teachers. To a large extent, this faculty represent in their research interests the traditional core areas of mathematics, where the strength of the department has historically resided. On the other hand, recent faculty appointments reflect our decision to dedicate a significant portion of the department s resources to the interdisciplinary side of mathematics. Developments in this direction received a major boost from the creation of TICAM, in whose operation the department is deeply involved. But the department s commitment to interdisciplinary mathematics goes beyond the founding strengths of TICAM, to embrace financial mathematics, computational and mathematical biology. Training of students, both graduate and undergraduate, are the focal points of this VIGRE project. The framework in which such training takes place should be a set of programs geared to move students as effectively as possible toward their degrees. A prime objective of the UT VIGRE Graduate Traineeship component is to lower our average time to the doctorate to five years. Given the high quality of our recent students, we believe that we can achieve this end by the obvious means; namely, by freeing more of our Ph.D. students from hour-consuming teaching duties. At the same time-and it requires a delicate balancing act to get the desired results here without upsetting the five-year-to-the-Ph.D. applecart-we have engineered certain VIGRE activities to increase opportunities for graduate students to explore realms of the mathematical sciences that extend well beyond their areas of specialization. Some of the specific activities that will be initiated to add scientific and professional value to the UT graduate experience of VIGRE trainees are the following: participation in a junior research seminar, where graduate students, undergraduates, and postdocs will give presentations under the supervision of a senior faculty member; participation in a multidisciplinary research proseminar directed at first-year graduate students that will provide them with an informal overview of the variety of mathematical research that is being done locally by faculty, postdocs, and advanced graduate students; serving as the member of a vertically integrated team supervising an individual VIGRE undergraduate research project; serving as a facilitator in the VIGRE summer REU program, in which our sister schools in the UT system have been invited to participate; involvement in a VIGRE computational finance research program (which will also have undergraduate and postdoctoral components). The department s baccalaureate degree programs have in great measure been shaped by the dictates of the educational agenda at a major state university (e.g., we are expected to train a large number of mathematics teachers for Texas s elementary and secondary schools). We now have in place a strong core curriculum designed to give our majors a command of mathematics at a level that allows them either to pursue graduate degrees in the mathematical sciences or to secure mathematics related employment. VIGRE funding will enable us to enrich and enliven the undergraduate experience with research opportunities of various types: wide scale involvement in individual research projects; participation in research-oriented seminars, including a new multidisciplinary research proseminar that will be a clearing house for undergraduate research projects; participation in the multidisciplinary summer REU program cited in the previous paragraph; improved access to the Dean s Scholars Program, a nationally recognized interdisciplinary honors program in the College of Natural Sciences. Each of these activities will be encased in a vertically integrated structure. The VIGRE summer REU programs, in particular, are geared to expand the mathematical horizons of students. The topics slated to be treated in these programs over the life of the award are: wavelets and signal processing, mathematical biology, mathematical finance, computational number theory and cryptography. Although UT is presently one of the largest universities in the country, the size of the department s tenured or tenure-track faculty is quite modest, numbering fifty-two in Fall . The UT Administration, not wishing to see the research activity of a small but distinguished faculty totally overwhelmed by instructional duties, compensates for this disproportion in size by giving the department a generous supply of postdoctoral positions. Each year our faculty includes roughly two dozen new or very recent Ph.D. recipients who are appointed to Postdoctoral Instructorships or Research Lectureships, with teaching loads the same as those of regular faculty members (i.e., at most two classes per semester). Most of the postdocs who have held these positions over the years have departed from UT with well-established research programs and highly developed teaching skills. Through the use of VIGRE funds, we will improve the UT postdoctoral experience by decreasing teaching loads for selected instructors, thereby releasing more time for them to devote to research, and by creating opportunities for all postdocs to participate in a rich array of vertically integrated professional development activities. For example, virtually all of the graduate and undergraduate VIGRE activities indicated earlier will find VIGRE postdocs involved in an integral way. Our goal, and the goal of this VIGRE project, is to help our postdocs, as well as graduate and undergraduate students, grow intellectually and mathematically in a way that allows them to take advantage of a mathematical world enriched and energized by its connections to the larger world of science, engineering, and society doc7607 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Emory University will acquire a 400 MHz Solid State NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) macromolecules and macromolecular assemblies; b) inorganic organic clusters and crystals; and c) synthetic organic chemistry. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometry is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry doc7608 none The South Dakota Rushmore Initiative for Excellence in Research will feature infrastructure enhancements in three targeted areas: (a) The Center for Biocomplexity Studies will be a collaborative, interdisciplinary effort to study the ecosystems of the Northern Great Plains and their sensitivity to internal and external forcings; (2) Materials and Processes of the 21st Century will focus on microelectronic materials and devices, structured nanocomposites and photodynamics; and (3) Molecular and Cellular Biology Core Facilities will build expertise in bioinformatics and proteomics. In addition, a Scientific Visualization and Information Technologies Core will be established, providing a visualization network to the participating universities. South Dakota State University, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, and the University of South Dakota will collaborate in the various activities and programs to implement new strategies designed to build public support for research and integrate it into the state s technological future. Infrastructure support for these targeted areas will include new faculty start up packages, postdoctoral and graduate student fellowships, support for undergraduates, conference support and various outreach activities in education and economic development to involve a broader constituency in the process of science and discovery. The combination of these activities will contribute to enhancing South Dakota s research competitiveness doc7609 none The VIGRE program of the Department of Statistics at Iowa State University is designed to benefit the statistical sciences by bringing together working groups consisting of undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty. The structure of the program will provide students with the opportunity to incorporate esearch and interdisciplinary problem solving into their educational experience at an early stage in the process. It will provide postdoctoral fellows experience and professional practice. And, it is designed to increase the level of interdisciplinary research opportunities for faculty, both across areas of research in statistics and mathematics, and across boundaries of the mathematical and applied sciences. The core of the VIGRE program consists of work groups that focus on areas of statistical investigation and application. Work groups exist in the areas of Bioinformatics, Environmental and Ecological Statistics, Engineering Statistics, Probability and Mathematical Statistics, Sampling Methodology, and Statistics in the Social Sciences. Each work group will conduct research and write proposals for external funding of their activities, participate in the VIGRE workshop, work with others to plan undergraduate summer research experiences, and present research results at meetings and through publication outlets in both statistics and subject-oriented scientific journals. Many departments at Iowa State University have supported the VIGRE concept in the Department of Statistics, and involvement of researchers from a broad range of scientific disciplines in work group activities is expected to further increase the historical strength of applications and methodological development in statistics at Iowa State doc7610 none Chronic wasting disease (CWD) of the deer family is a member of a group of infectious diseases caused by transmissible proteins called prions. Similar diseases include scrapie in sheep and goats, bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cattle ( mad cow disease ), and Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease in humans. The only place in the world where these diseases are known to occur in free-ranging wildlife is in northeastern Colorado and southeastern Wyoming, where an epidemic of CWD has been ongoing in populations of mule deer and elk for at least two decades. Our project will study this epidemic to better understand how CWD is transmitted, to develop mathematical models predicting its spread, and to evaluate ways to contain the disease. Chronic wasting disease poses a potentially catastrophic threat to members of the deer family throughout Western North America. Expansion of the current epidemic could reduce the abundance and distribution of deer and elk throughout the region and, in so doing, could cause enduring harm to recreation-based economies of the West. Moreover, although direct threats of this disease to human health have not been established, they have not be ruled out. CWD is currently localized, but similar diseases affect animals and people worldwide. It follows that limiting the spread of CWD represents a fundamentally important challenge for protecting the health of natural and human dominated ecosystems throughout the region, and, in the fullness of time, throughout the world doc7611 none Denson Small electrical signals are critical to normal brain function. The signals arise because of the movement of electrically charged particles called ions into and out of nerve cells (the most common ions are sodium, potassium, and chloride). Ion movement into and out of nerve cells is controlled by special proteins on the surface of nerve cells that act as switches and are called ion channels. We can measure the ion charges that move through one ion channel at a time using sensitive recording methods. One ion channel type switches on movement of potassium ions: a function that is important for rhythmic activity of repetitively firing nerve cells. Such cells control repetitive activities like breathing, heart rate, and wakefulness. This project will investigate two ways by which these potassium ion channel switches are turned on and off. First, some lipids activate the channels while some do not; we hope to find out why. Second, molecular biological methods have shown that potassium channel switches appear to vary slightly among different types of nerve cells, but the difference is enough to allow for the interaction of some potassium channels but not others with other cellular proteins that make turning on the ion channel switches easier. We hope to investigate the differences and the way that the extra proteins affect potassium channels. This work is important for two reasons. First, this research will provide an understanding of how fats and other lipids could alter brain function. Second, this research will describe how some potassium channels are controlled and, therefore, provide an idea of how rhythmic activity in the brain (and its consequences) are regulated doc7612 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Delaware will acquire a X-ray diffractometer with CCD detector for small molecule diffractometry. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including studies of a)polymorphs and superlattices; b) coordination and bioinorganic chemistry with sulfur ligands; c) paramagnetic chromium alkyl complexes; d) bioinorganic copper and heme-copper dioxygen chemistry; e) helicenes as potential asymmetric catalysts; f) molecular shaped directed crystal engineering; and g) microporous aluminosilicate materials: structure and formation mechanism. The X-ray diffractometer allows accurate and precise measurements of the full three dimensional structure of a molecule, including bond distances and angles, and it provides accurate information about the spatial arrangement of the molecule relative to the neighboring molecules. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, including the preparation of more efficient catalysts, materials chemistry and biochemistry doc7613 none Van Keken This grant provides partial support for the installation of a linux PC cluster in the department of Geological Sciences at the University of Michigan. The PI, Peter van Keken, is an assistant professor specializing in geodynamics. In addition to Van Keken, the facility will be used by Lars Stixrude, Carolina Lithgow-Bertelloni and Larry Ruff. The cluster will be used extensively for modeling of Earth s structure and dynamics with focus on thermochemical convection, chemical mixing, Earth s thermal evolution and ab-initio crystal structure calculations. Computational methods are based on parallel domain decomposition of 2D and 3D finite element applications, parallel Fourier transforms and Monte-Carlo investigations of multi-parameter spaces. This facility will support collaborative projects with investigators at several institutions that include Purdue, Arizona State, Minnesota, and Yale. The cluster will be integrated with the geophysics computational and visualization facilities doc7614 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln will acquire a 400 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) novel ligands and complexes; b) polar hydrophobicity; c) asymmetric synthesis of alpha-vinyl amino acids; d) metal-catalyzed cyclizations; e) preparation and study of very high-spin organic polyradicals; f) mechanistic and synthetic studies on highly reactive metals; and g) characterization of bio-lanthanide contrast agents and polyproplyene microscruture. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometry is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry and biochemistry doc7615 none Bedinger In higher plants, the sperm in the male pollen are delivered to the egg in the female pistil via a growing pollen tube. For fertilization to occur, there must be very specific pollen-pistil recognition between compatible species. The work focuses on proteins in the pollen tube called Pex proteins. The structure and location of the Pex proteins suggest that they are recognition molecules. A series of genetic and molecular biology experiments will test whether or not this is the case. These studies will have an impact on the development of improved crop species in two ways. First, it is imperative that we understand the nature of reproductive barriers in plants because of valid concerns about cross pollination of genetically engineered crop plants with neighboring plant species. Second, future experiments will focus on manipulating Pex proteins to selectively circumvent reproductive barriers between plant species in order to introduce desirable traits, for example from wild species into domesticated species doc7616 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the State University of New York in Buffalo will acquire a High Resolution Mass Spectrometer with HPLC. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) the synthesis and development of new catalytic methods; b) development of hydrogen-bonded molecular duplexes with sequence-specificity and adjustable stability; c) design of catalysts for hydrolytic cleavage of nucleid acids; and d) studies of the structure and function of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase ribozyme. Mass spectrometry (MS) is a technique used to probe intimate structural details and to obtain the molecular compositions of a vast array of organic, bioorganic, and organometallic molecules. The results from these studies will have an impact in a number of areas including biochemistry and development of catalysts for industrial processes doc7617 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Duke University will acquire a time-resolved, step-scan Fourier-transform infrared spectrometer. This instrument will support research in a number of areas, including a) characterization of the intermediates in the photoreactions of melanins; b) electron distribution in MLCT states and photo dynamics of heme proteins; c) excited state electronic structure of novel ruthenium (II) complexes used for probing DNA electron transfer; d) investigation of second-coordination shell dynamics in iron (III)-siderophore chelation reactions; e) evaluation of the formal redox state of nitric oxide in s-nitrosated hemoglobins; and f) protein folding dynamics. The general effectiveness of Fourier transform spectroscopic techniques in academic and industrial research has been firmly established. Many advanced spectroscopic courses now routinely include the teaching of FT spectroscopy. The time-resolved capability is one of the most important recent developments in FT spectroscopy that is rapidly being explored for all kinds of research. Recent applications include biological, polymer, and environmental studies. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, especially biochemistry doc7618 none This investigation will explore natural design for high performance locomotion in marine fishes. The principle goal of this work is to determine how specialized muscle anatomy in tunas (Family Scombridae) and lamnid sharks (Family Lamnidae) enhances their swimming performance. Ongoing studies of tunas have led to the hypothesis that, compared to other bony fish, the uniquely internal and more anterior location of the red muscle used for sustained swimming provides an advantage for locomotion, not a mechanical disadvantage as previously thought. Tunas and lamnid sharks, although separated for four hundred million years in their evolution, have many similarities in body form. Thus, it is further hypothesized that functional similarities in muscle contractile properties occur also, and that compared to other sharks the lamnids are indeed high performance swimmers. A comparative study of the mechanical design for locomotion will be undertaken using the short-fin mako shark (Isurus oxyrinchus). Live makos approximately 1 m in length will be collected locally, and placed in a large circular holding tank with flow-through sea water. For biomechanical studies, individual sharks will be transferred to a large water tunnel treadmill, built at the Scripps Institution, which allows fish to swim steadily against a current at controlled speeds while remaining in a fixed location relative to observers. State-of-the-art techniques will be employed to study muscle performance during swimming. Fish will be instrumented with fine wire electrodes to record muscle activation patterns. In addition, 2mm diameter sonomicrometer crystals will be implanted into red and white muscle to obtain measurements of local muscle shortening at different longitudinal positions. This digital sonomicrometry system will permit measurement of muscle deformation in three dimensions, and quantification of differential shortening and shearing between adjacent red and white fibers, which is hypothesized to occur. Coupled with these measurements will be kinematic analysis of digital video images to quantify the properties of the wave of bending that travels along the body of the shark with each cycle of muscle contraction. The resulting data set will allow a direct comparison of swimming kinematics with tunas as well as non-lamnid sharks. Also it will provide the details of muscle shortening and activation timing that are needed for in vitro muscle contraction experiments. Mechanical analysis of swimming muscle performance will focus on power production under simulated in vivo operating conditions. This will be done using the work-loop technique, in which isolated samples of muscle fibers are forced to contract cyclically as length, frequency and activation patterns are varied, and power production is measured. The novelty of this research is evident, since there are no detailed studies of muscle function in swimming of any lamnid shark. The new data will contribute substantially to the meager body of knowledge on such animals. The existing facilities, expertise, and the local availability of experimental animals together present a unique opportunity to study the locomotor biomechanics of one of the most intriguing but poorly understood marine oceanic predators doc7619 none BASIC MECHANISMS AND EVOLUTION OF ACOUSTIC COMMUNICATION HOWARD CARL GERHARDT, JR., PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR (Name used as an author: H. Carl Gerhardt) Communication affects the reproductive success of signalers and receivers. Thus, communication plays a critical role in evolution and speciation, and differences in signals are often reliable indicators of the status of populations that have diverged little, if at all, in their physical appearance. Mutual selective pressures exerted by senders and receivers might be expected to generate precise matching between signal properties and the selectivity of the sensory system. The reason is that senders that produce very different signals are unlikely to attract mates, and receivers that have very unique preferences may not find any male of their own species acceptable. However, some exceptional examples have been found in which receivers are more effectively stimulated by signals that are not produced by members of their own species (=conspecific males), but by those of closely related species (=heterospecific males). These novel preferences have been called hidden preferences, and a phylogenetic analysis sometimes shows that the preference predates signals in evolutionary time and can hence such preferences can be considered pre-existing biases. This project is a comparative study of the matching of signal properties and receiver preferences in a complex of nine closely related North American treefrogs. Male treefrogs produce simple, stereotyped sounds, and females respond to these sounds or to synthetic, computer-generated sounds by approaching a speaker that emits them. Playback experiments using synthetic calls will identify the key physical properties (=preference criteria) used by females to select among signals. These experiments will determine for each species whether females respond best to signals with properties typical of conspecific males or whether calls or call-elements of other species might be more attractive or might enhance the attractiveness of conspecific calls. It might be found that matching to conspecific call properties is good in all nine species, that mismatches are prevalent in all species, or that matching occurs in some species but not in others. Regardless of the results of these experiments, a phylogenetic analysis - which will rely on morphological and molecular characters of all nine species - will be used to suggest the order of evolution of preferences and signals. This particular group of treefrogs also has two features that could help to explain a pattern in which matches occur in some species and mismatches in others. First, some species in the group routinely form mixed-species choruses with close relatives having similar calls. Here it might be expected that matching of senders and receivers will be strong in order to prevent mating between species. Other species in the group have been isolated from any other species with similar calls for long periods of time whereas others. These are the best candidates for finding mismatches ( hidden preferences and pre-existing biases ) because these biases might be ancestral traits that can be expressed without the risk of mating with another species. Second, it has been found that some species in the group have twice the number of chromosomes of the other species and that changes in chromosome number affect call properties. Such a change in chromosome number might also affect female preferences in ways that could either track the changes in the calls or result in mismatches of senders and receivers. This hypothesis will be tested by studying the preferences of frogs with experimentally induced extra sets of chromosomes doc7620 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois in Chicago will acquire a Stopped-Flow Equipped Circular Dichroism Spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) studies on folding kinetics of designed peptides that form beta sheets in solution; b) fast folding events in secondary and tertiary structure formation of RNA; c) studies of sequence dependent context effects in duplex DNA; d) chemical biology studies of novel protease mechanisms; and e) protein and peptide folding and conformational studies. Circular dichroism spectroscopy is an extremely useful tool in modern analytical chemistry. It provides a very reliable and sensitive method for assigning absolute molecular configurations. The results from these studies will have an impact in a number of areas, especially biochemistry doc7621 none The Montana EPSCoR Infrastructure project targets three research areas to enhance Montana s research infrastructure: (1) Integrative Analysis of Complex Biological Systems, which will integrate the traditional players in environmental sciences with expertise in the physical and social sciences at the University of Montana and Montana State University; (2) Nanotechnology, which will combine and leverage existing Montana State University s expertise in optical technology, electrical engineering, physics, chemistry and life sciences on issues of nanotechnology; and (3) Biological Structure and Function, which will integrate biological researchers from several University of Montana departments, centers and institutes to provide a forum for collaboration and reserach emphasis. The goal is to increase the competitiveness of these institutions in obtaining multi-investigator research awards from a variety of sources. Infrastructure enhancements in these areas will build on the strengths of the institutions. In addition, Montana will expand the quality and number of graduate students in each of the target areas, increase the direct involvement of undergraduates in research, and establish new initiatives in education and outreach that will have significant regional and national impact doc7622 none VIGRE The Department of Mathematics of Indiana University will implement an integrated program of three-year postdoctoral fellowships, three-year graduate traineeships, and undergraduate research assistantships. Graduate trainees and postdoctoral fellows will participate in special mentoring programs, both for teaching and for career development. Graduate trainees will also participate in a special jump-start summer program at the beginning of their traineeships. Undergraduates will pursue research projects guided by faculty. All participants will be involved in activities specifically aimed at enhancing their communication skills in a variety of contexts. The development of interactions among the members of the different groups will be specifically encouraged. The overall goal is to provide broad training at multiple levels for a successful career in the mathematical sciences, all within a context where mathematical research, education, and communication are enhanced doc7623 none The objectives of the Louisiana EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement project are focused on improving Louisiana R&D competitiveness, building partnerships among EPSCoR universities and establishing collaborations between the academic and private sectors. To accomplish these objectives, Louisiana proposes the Micro Nano Technologies for Advanced Physical, Chemical and Biological Sensors Initiative. Nine universities and several businesses, divided into three teams will collaborate to develop a multi-disciplinary research initiative within the state. The universities will form a Research Consortium. The member institutions are the University of New Orleans, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, Tulane University, Xavier University, Southern University, Louisiana Tech University, Grambling University and the University of Louisiana at Monroe. The proposed scientific program of the three Consortium teams will focus on the design and fabrication of electromagnetic materials with enhanced properties using nanometer-scale material structures and ultra-thin films. Team 1, Nanomaterials, will develop nano-scale functional materials that provide the critical building blocks enabling sensor technologies in integrated microsystems to be developed for rapid chemical processing and analysis. Team 1 will fabricate and process nanomaterials in different environments for subsequent use by Teams 2 and 3. Team 2, Microfabrication, will focus on integrated combinatorial, microscale systems for rapid (bio) chemical synthesis and materials discovery. This team will collaborate with Team 1 to develop nanoscale materials and sensors that can be integrated into emerging microsystems and with Team 3 to develop nanoscale sensors and arrays for studying neural function. Team 3, Neural Signaling, will address fundamental issues of cell-to-cell communication and inter-cellular communication using nanotechnology magnetoliposomes and novel microsensors. This latter effort will expand the neurosciences capability of the biological education and research programs at Xavier University and of the Teams 2 and 3 participants. Video conferencing capabilities will enable monthly meetings of the Consortium participants. In addition, multi-institutional courses will be offered via the existing video conferencing capabilities, allowing all institutions in the state to benefit from the Consortium s research doc7624 none Freeman This grant provides three years of partial salary support for technical assistance in the stable isotope geochemistry laboratories at Penn State University. Technical help will operate and maintain a facility consisting of six gas-source stable isotope ratio mass spectrometers and associated peripherals (i.e. gas chromatographs, elemental analyzers, vacuum lines). Additionally, technician will train new users and students and develop new techniques utilizing continuous flow technology for compound specific analysis of Hydrogen, Oxygen, Carbon and Nitrogen isotope ratios of geological samples including atmospheric gases occluded in ice cores and organics and carbonates in modern and lithified marine, estuarine and freshwater sediments. Research that will be facilitated at this lab is focused on studies of the biogeochemical cycling of carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen and the feedbacks between greenhouse gases, global climate, and terrestrial and marine ecosystems doc7625 none With support from the Chemical Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln will acquire an X-ray diffractometer with CCD detector for small molecule diffractometry. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including the following: a) development of synthetic routes to novel materials based on rare-earth nitrides and carbides; b) design, synthesis and characterization of chelate monomers; c) studies of novel ligands and complexes; d) polar hydrophobicity; e) asymmetric synthesis of peroxide natural products; f) mechanism-based inactivation of cysteine proteases; g) iron (IV) chemistry; h) tin (IV) chemistry; i) Mo W polyoxoanion clusters; and j) Zn(II) box and dibox catalysts. The X-ray diffractometer allows accurate and precise measurements of the full three dimensional structure of a molecule, including bond distances and angles, and it provides accurate information about the spatial arrangement of the molecule relative to the neighboring molecules. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, including the preparation of more efficient catalysts, materials chemistry, and biochemistry doc7626 none The State Science & Technology Institute (SSTI) annual conference, Beyond the Hype: Tools for Building Tech-Based Economics , will focus on practical applications of successful techniques employed for science and technology policy. The conference will include a series of sessions tailored to examine the role of universities in today s economy. The conference will help serve as forum for nurturing the alliances between university and economic development officials necessary for regions to compete in New Economy. One third of the sessions will be geared to topics addressing investment in universities and commercialization of university research. A proposed series of university-related sessions would be incorporated into SSTI s promotional and marketing materials for the entire conference doc7627 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, Texas A b) metal-RNA interactions, metal-peptide complexes and dinuclear manganese (II) centers; c) the magnetic properties of clusters and materials; d) tetrahydropterin-dependent enzymes; e) boron-boron and boron-carbon one-electron sigma bonds; and f) EPR of acetyl-CoA synthase. An electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectrometer is an instrument used to obtain information about the molecular and electronic structure of molecules. It may also be used to obtain information about the lifetimes of free radicals which are often essential for the initiation of tumor growth and or a variety of chemical reactions. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, in particular biological chemistry and materials sciences doc7628 none This project examines cultural variation in the understandings, experience, and operation of human agency with a focus on models of agency. People everywhere regard themselves as agentic and have a sense of themselves as an I who is doing something, but what they experience themselves as doing can vary dramatically because they engage different models of agency. For those engaged in independent cultural contexts, agency is often experienced as individualized or disjoint, as primarily a result of one s own desires, goals, and intentions. For those in interdependent cultural contexts, agency is frequently experienced as conjoint, a consequence of the engagement of the person with others and of the awareness of reciprocal obligations and expectations. In this research, the focus is on the nature of the active I who is doing something. Although agency is often thought to be synonymous with autonomy and free will , it is increasingly evident that agency assumes culture-specific forms. The project is organized around three specific hypotheses: 1. In relatively independent cultural contexts, actions will be associated with normatively good outcomes when one s own interests and intentions are experienced and understood as the source of these actions. In relatively interdependent cultural contexts, however, actions will be associated with normatively good outcomes when the interests and intentions of relevant others are experienced and understood as the sources of these actions. 2. Independent cultural contexts are characterized by the pervasive distribution of disjoint models of agency that promote and require a focus on one s own interests and intentions, whereas interdependent cultural contexts are characterized by the pervasive distribution of conjoint models of agency that promote and require a focus on the expectations of and obligations to others. 3. In relatively independent cultural contexts well-being is associated with a sense of disjoint agency, whereas in relatively interdependent contexts well-being is associated with a sense of conjoint agency. The research addresses classic theoretical issues concerning freedom, responsibility, and the role of others in individual behavior. The results should have important implications for basic research on the mutual constitution of culture and psychological process, and for further analyzing the relationship between mental health and sociocultural context doc7629 none Donald Truhlar of the University of Minnesota is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to study electronically nonadiabatic reactive collisions in the gas phase and nonequilibrium solvation effects on liquid phase reaction rates, using methods in theoretical and computational chemical physics. In the treatment of electronically nonadiabatic reactions, issues to be emphasized are: (1) development of accurate quantum mechanical scattering theories to calculate well converged state-to-state reaction probabilities of systems governed by coupled potential energy surfaces, (2) development of new semiclassical methods based on improved treatments of decoherence and continuous surface switching, (3) testing of semiclassical methods against accurate quantum mechanical scattering results for a variety of systems, (4) development of new methods for diabatic representations of coupled electronic wave functions and coupled potential energy surfaces, and (5) use of these methods to study electronically nonadiabatic systems for which experimental data are available. In the treatment of nonequilibrium solvation effects, issues to be emphasized are: (1) delineating the range of applicability of generalized Langevin solvents coordinates for treating organic reactions in solution, and (2) application of new methods to the reactions of diphenylmethyl chloride and bromide. This research will impact our molecular level understanding of chemical dynamics and solvation, which in turn will have implications in areas such as atmospheric and environmental chemistry doc7630 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Southern California will acquire an X-ray diffractometer with CCD detector for small molecule diffractometry. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including the following: a) studies on metal hydride complexes and other metal compounds; b) covalent fluoride, oxofluoride and nonmetal main group chemistry; c) studies of long lived carbocation salts and related studies; d) studies on organic light-emitting diodes; e) ruthenium complexes as polymerization catalysts; and f) synthetic and mechanistic organotransition metal chemistry. The X-ray diffractometer allows accurate and precise measurements of the full three dimensional structure of a molecule, including bond distances and angles, and it provides accurate information about the spatial arrangement of the molecule relative to the neighboring molecules. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, including the preparation of more efficient catalysts and materials chemistry doc7631 none Garnero This grant provides three-years of partial salary support for a computer systems administrator within the Department of Geological Sciences at Arizona State University (ASU). The technician will be responsible for oversight and maintenance of departmental wide computing facilities including a newly established Geophysics computing commons, the ASU CAMECA 6f ion microprobe facility computers, the active tectonics research facility, the computational geochemistry lab, the mineral physics computing lab and support of a soon-to-be acquired 8-node broad band seismic array (ASUArray). This is a Phase I technician support grant under the Instruments and Facilities (IF) Program doc7632 none The Growth of Flexible Problem Solving: Lewarning to Adapt to Changing Verbal and Non-Verbal Tasks Gedeon O. Deak How do children adapt to changing problems and tasks? The proposed research will investigate preschoolers ability to shift problem-solving strategies in response to changing task demands. There is evidence that this is difficult for many 2- to 6-year-olds, and this has implications for early education because success in school-even in kindergarten-requires adapting to changing tasks. Three cognitive processes might be critical determinants of preschoolers problem solving flexibility: deciding what information is relevant to the task-at-hand, monitoring changing task demands, and suppressing responses that are no longer appropriate. This raises several questions. First, is flexible problem solving a general skill that rests on these three processes, or does flexibility vary domain by domain according to specific skills and knowledge? This investigation will utilize a new non-verbal flexibility test-a non-verbal analogue of existing, verbal tests-to assess generalized developmental changes in children s flexibility. Second, are there pervasive individual differences in children s flexibility? Do they reflect stable cognitive profiles? Children will complete a battery of flexibility tests, as well as several tests of cognitive skills that might predict problem solving abilities. Third, can we influence children s flexibility by manipulating their strategic response when task demands change? Several studies will experimentally influence, for example, the salience of contextual cues that a task has changed. A related study will train preschoolers to notice changes in task demands, and assess their ability to generalize this strategy to new tests of flexibility. Together these studies will illuminate the development of a critical high-level cognitive skill: Ability to adapt to changing problems doc7633 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Arizona State University will acquire an instrument for ultrafast fluorescence and multipulse transient absorbance. Research will focus on a) artificial photosynthesis, such as studies of biomimetic reaction centers coupled to artificial antenna systems; b) oxidative damage in DNA; c) redirecting electron transfer in photosynthetic reaction centers of purple nonsulfur bacteria; and d) ultrafast spectroscopic studies on photosynthetic pigments, antennas and reaction centers. Transient absorption spectroscopy is an extremely versatile tool that can be used to probe fundamental photophysical and photochemical processes. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, in particular biochemistry doc7634 none This award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program will enable the Department of Chemistry at The University of California in Los Angeles to acquire a Fourier Transform Mass Spectrometer equipped with electrospray, electron ion and laser desorption sources. This equipment will enhance research ranging from singlet oxygen damage to biological tissues, to modification and synthesis of fullerenes, to dendritic based host molecules with multiple ligands for cell binding, to gated carcarands. Mass spectrometry is a technique used to probe intimate structural details and to obtain the molecular compositions of a vast array of organic, bioorganic, and organometallic molecules. The acquisition of this capability in mass spectrometry is essential for carrying out frontier research in many fields of chemistry doc7635 none The Alaska Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) project will feature infrastructure enhancements in three research focus areas as well as strengthen research competitiveness through S High Latitude Environments Contaminants Consortium, which will involve engineers, biologists and chemists developing analytical facilities and expertise to address water, ground and atmospheric contaminants that accumulate at high altitudes; and Integrative Approaches to Environmental Physiology which will use physiological adaptations of Alaskan animals to extreme, highly seasonal environments as platforms for addressing general physiological questions. Infrastructure enhancements in these areas build on strengths of the three participating campuses of the University of Alaska (Fairbanks, Anchorage and Juneau) and are consistent with on-going program development and strategic plans. Education and human resource programs will support undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral students. Partnerships with colleges and rural high schools having predominantly native student populations will be expanded. Outreach to the Alaska business community and state agencies will provide opportunities for planning and development of the state s science and engineering capacity. The infrastructure improvements will greatly enhance the range and depth of research projects and improve the state s research competitiveness doc7636 none With this award from the Chemical Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wyoming will upgrade a 400 MHz Solid State Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) zeolite catalyzed reaction chemistry; b) amorphous materials characterization and polyamorphic dynamics; c) spider silk and other biopolymer elucidation; d) ion diffusion in fuel cell and battery materials; e) solid state luminescence matrix characterization; and f) optical pumping and detection enhanced spectroscopy. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometry is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry, battery research, and catalysis doc7637 none How do bilinguals select the appropriate language? Some have suggested that selection of the appropriate language involves some sort of functional switching mechanism. However, the question remains whether this switching mechanism is specific to switching across two languages, whether the same mechanism is used in switching within one language, or whether it is an instance of a general switching mechanism that is used across any cognitive domain. This project will address that question by investigating language switching and task switching in bilinguals. Switching is a fundamental process that is necessary when one has to disengage from one activity to engage in another. This process requires executive function, a form of focused attention that helps one to manipulate information temporarily. Although these processes are fundamental, they are also very fragile. Damage to the frontal lobes, either through dementia, normal aging, or stroke, leads to a reduction in executive function and consequently in the ability to switch between tasks and between languages. This research will use functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural substrates responsible for switching in bilinguals across two languages, within a single language, and with a non-verbal task. Previous neuroimaging studies have documented the role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and other associated areas (the supplementary motor area, and the posterior parietal lobe) in executive function. In addition, previous studies by Hernandez have found increased activity in these same areas when switching between two languages. The findings of this research are expected to parallel previous results. Specifically, switching, relative to not switching, will reveal activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, supplementary motor area, and the posterior parietal lobe. Furthermore, the results will demonstrate whether the increased activation when switching across all three tasks involves the same neural structures. In a second experiment, event-related fMRI will be used to look more closely at switching into the dominant language relative to switching into the non-dominant language. It is predicted that activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the supplementary motor area, and the posterior parietal lobe will be larger when switching into the non-dominant language. The results from this project may confirm further the notion that executive function is necessary for switching across domains. Furthermore, it may also confirm that level of executive control depends on the fluency in the language. This approach will also help to further elucidate whether selective access involves neural structures that are general to any cognitive domain. As a Minority Research Initiation project, this research will aid Hernandez in expanding his expertise in neuroimaging. Furthermore, it will provide both graduate and undergraduate students in his laboratory with additional training in cognitive neuroscience doc7638 none The purpose of the BIO AC workshop will be to provide advice that will help crystallize NSF s role in The Microbe Project. The workshop will summarize the accomplishments, challenges, and opportunities in the microbial genomics field that are relevant to the NSF, provide some direct advice (such as criteria for selection of microbes that should be sequenced with NSF support), and also identify issues that should be addressed in greater detail in future workshops or other venues (e.g. informatics, standards for annotation, infrastructure needs, etc). The workshop will be held at the J. Erik Jonsson Center of the National Academy of Sciences in Woods Hole, MA from August 10 (all day) until noon on August 11, doc7639 none The aim of this project is the synthesis and characterization of a new class of electro-photonic oxides. Enhanced electro-photonic materials behavior will be achieved through cooperative structural and electronic distortions. The primary emphasis will be on the synthesis of new materials to include a new class of double perovskite compounds. The students involved in this research will be trained in solid-state techniques that will enable them to synthesize materials as both pure powders and single crystals. In addition to the standard solid-state synthetic techniques, a radio-frequency induction furnace will be utilized to grow large (5mm) crystals of the new materials. The new materials will be structurally characterized by powder and single crystal X-ray diffraction. These diffraction measurements will provide the students with a solid foundation in crystallography and crystallographic techniques. Variable temperature powder X-ray diffraction measurements will be undertaken in order to investigate phase changes, as well as elucidate the structural changes that occur during a ferroelectric to paraelectric phase transition. Once the materials have been structurally characterized, electro-photonic experiments will be performed. Second-harmonic generation and ferroelectric experiments will aid in deriving structure-property relationships. The relationships will impart to the students an understanding of materials properties with respect to synthesis and crystal structure. %%% Electro-photonic compounds find uses in dynamic random access memories (DRAM), frequency doubling (SHG), and Pockels cells. This integrated research and education project will provide graduate students with a thorough education in solid state materials chemistry areas such as synthesis, diffraction, and physical property measurements. The students wil be highly competitive in the job market as these materials and materials characterization areas are of significant importance to the industrial community doc7640 none The transition metal catalyzed [2+2+2] and [4+2+2] homo Diels-Alder reactions of norbornadiene lead to highly caged products with the creation of as many as nine new stereocenters from achiral precursors. Use of chiral bisphosphine ligands imparts significant stereoselectivity to these reactions. The proposed studies focus on the expansion of this chemistry to functionalized dienes and dienophiles and to other homoconjugated dienes, including bicyclo[2.2.2]octadienes. In addition, regiocontrolled cleavage reactions of the caged adducts will be developed, affording access to bicyclic targets. Synthesis of portulal and related diterpenes will illustrate the effectiveness of this methodology. Formation of carbon-carbon bonds represents an essential component of the synthesis of the complex molecules displaying biological or pharmacological activity. Certain classes of reactions result in the formation of multiple carbon-carbon bonds in a single synthetic step, and in addition, such cycloaddition reactions are often highly selective, forming only one of many possible isomers of the product. With this award, the Organic Synthesis Program supports the studies of Professor John K. Snyder, of the Department of Chemistry at Boston University. Professor Snyder is developing and exploring the use of an unusual type of cycloaddition reaction for the synthesis of complex polycyclic structures. Additional investigations of the chemistry of these complex structures lead to the development of novel and efficient strategies for organic synthesis, as illustrated by the synthesis of a plant growth regulator, portulal doc7641 none Title --- CAREER: A Statistical Approach to Estimating 3D Manifolds From Range Data PI --- Ross T. Whitaker Institution --- University of Utah This project addresses the question of how to automatically generate 3D computer models of objects and scenes using data from a range finding device, such as a laser range scanner, sonar, ultrasound, or radar. Such 3D computer models are important in a wide range of applications including defense surveillance, forensics, teaching, and medicine. Range measuring devices typically sweep a beam of energy to gather many millions of 3D measurements from surfaces of objects but they have some limitations. First, because not all object are visible from a single point of view, a single sweep is incomplete. Second, each individual range measurement is not necessarily accurate because the measurement process is inherently noisy. The strategy is to systematically fuse together many measurements from different points of view in order to create accurate, complete 3D models. This project examines some of the fundamental mathematical questions pertaining to this process and then studies how to implement and demonstrate this theory on real data. Range-finding devices measure distances to objects by reflecting energy off of the interfaces between different types of materials, but they provide a noisy, mathematically complex, and highly nonlinear transformation from a collection of surfaces to a set 2D depth maps. This project will develop statistical methods for estimating manifolds from this kind of data, thereby generalizing the current state of the art in estimation theory, which is primarily concerned with estimating functions or fields. Thus, the goal is to provide a general, complete, and practical foundation for 3D surface reconstruction. The strategy is to find the surface that maximizes the posterior probability conditional on a collection of range measurements taken from different points of view. The reconstruction framework is Bayesian; it includes a sensor model as well as prior knowledge about the characteristics of the object or scenes being modeled. This work will address a number of important issues pertaining to this statistical methodology for building 3D models, including better sensor models, high-order priors, fast and robust algorithms, and broader applications. These developments will comprise a fundamental scientific result: the generalization of the basic principles of estimation theory to the challenging and timely problem of 3D surface reconstruction doc7642 none Amphibian metamorphosis provides a unique opportunity to understand the changes necessary to adapt from an aquatic to a terrestrial environment. Within a single lifetime, an amphibian must undergo structural and physiological changes that allow it to make the transition that took our ancestors millions of years. The goal of this project is to determine the structural and molecular features of the amphibian nose that adapt it to smelling in air vs. water. In this study, the detailed structure of the nose in larvae and adults of a representative salamander, caecilian, and frog, and lungfish (the closet living relative of tetrapods) will be examined by histology, scanning electron microscopy, and transmission electron microscopy. In addition, the genes that code for odorant receptor proteins (the proteins that actually bind and respond to smells) will be cloned from each of these species and the stages and regions of the nose in which the genes are expressed determined. Finally, experiments with vital dyes will be used to determine which regions of the nose are exposed to water vs. air in living animals. The results from this study will provide the first broad overview of metamorphic changes in the amphibian olfactory system, and of adaptations of the adult nose for smelling water. This research will significantly enhance our understanding of the changes in the olfactory system that occurred in the ancestry of amphibians, and thus in our own ancestry; in addition, this research at an undergraduate institution (RUI) will provide an important opportunity for undergraduate to gain the experience, skills and perspective needed to attract them to, and prepare them for, a career in science doc7643 none Plant development requires the coordinated activity of many gene products, which can be regulated at both the levels of protein synthesis and degradation. Many regulatory genes controlling flower development encode putative transcription factors, but few are known to regulate proteolysis. Work supported by an NSF grant indicates that the Arabidopsis ASK1 gene regulates vegetative and flower development and encodes a homolog of the yeast and human SKP1 protein. SKP1 is a subunit of SCF ubiquitin ligase complexes that catalyze the third step of a pathway that covalently links ubiquitins to target proteins, mediating the degradation of proteins. ASK1 interacts with UFO genetically to regulate flower development and the expression of the floral genes APETALA3 (AP3) and PISTILLATA (PI). The working model is that UFO and ASK1 are components of a SCF ubiquitin ligase that facilitates the degradation of a negative regulator of AP3 and PI expression. Furthermore, ASK1 is essential for homolog separation and segregation during male meiosis I. In meiosis I, specific proteins must be degraded at the metaphase anaphase transition to allow the separation of homologs. Therefore, the simplest hypothesis is that ASK1 regulates such a proteolytic event. Arabidopsis possesses at least 20 SKP1 homologs, named ASKs. The functions of the other ASK genes are not known. The fact that the yeast SKP1 gene is essential for mitotic growth suggests that other ASK gene(s) probably have redundant functions that together control essential cellular processes. Therefore, understanding other ASK gene functions should provide new insights into the role of regulated proteolysis during development. In this project, the ASK1 function in regulating flower development will be further analyzed using genetic and molecular approaches, including the interaction between UFO and ASK1 in the context of regulation of AP3 and PI expression. In addition, the role of ASK1 in controlling homolog separation in meiosis I will be investigated using microscopic procedures. Moreover, additional ASK genes will be characterized by expression studies, by functional comparison with ASK1, and some of those ASK genes expressed in the flowers will be tested for function using reverse genetic approaches. These experiments will likely provide new insights about how plant reproductive development is regulated by genes, potentially benefiting agriculture and the environment. The study of gene functions when the Arabidopsis sequencing has is just been completed is both timely and beneficial. The results from these experiments will also likely provide the starting points for future research by many in the community of plant scientists as well as those studying non-plant organisms doc7644 none The female reproductive system is sensitive to its environment, and ovarian function is often suppressed when confronted with a stressor. Suppression of reproductive function is generally proposed to be an adaptive response in that it channels resources towards vital functions while diminishing the likelihood of conception at a time when a successful reproductive outcome is marginal. But while such an effect is well documented for energetic stresses such as low dietary intake, high physical activity or both, the evidence in support of a direct effect of psychological stress on ovarian function is inconclusive. Although some studies have found a relationship between psychological stress and suppression of ovarian function, this interaction could be mediated by energetics, that is, by changes in activity or eating patterns that result from the psychological stress. This project is designed to determine if psychological stress influences ovarian function independent of energetic stress. The proposed project is designed to investigate 1) the relationships between psychological and energetic stress and 2) the individual and combined effects of psychological and energetic stresses on bio-markers of metabolism and ovarian function. Behavioral (food intake and physical activity), physiological (urinary c-peptide, salivary estradiol, progesterone, and cortisol), psychological (anxiety, depression and perceived stress) and anthropometric data will be collected and analyzed to investigate the relationships between psychosocial stressors, energetic stressors, metabolism and female reproductive physiology over the menstrual cycle doc7645 none The longitudinal measurement of total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) is an important component of research in anthropology, nutrition, and related disciplines. Flex-HR is a method of measuring TDEE based on the monitoring of heart rate. It is well-validated, powerful, and practical in both field and laboratory settings. Flex-HR, however, is seldom used in longitudinal research because it requires participants to undergo a cumbersome lab-based calibration routine within one week of each measurement of TDEE. Frequent repetition of this calibration routine would become overly burdensome and could significantly alter the normal activities of research participants. This study will determine the validity of a modified flex-HR method in which the calibration routine is less frequently applied during longitudinal studies. The project will employ a repeated measures design in which the TDEE of 24 participants will be measured, with the full calibration routine, at bi-weekly intervals for four months with seven and ten month follow-ups. During analysis it will then be possible to determine what the effect would have been of having forgone multiple iterations of the calibration routine. All laboratory measurements will be carried out in the Anthropology Laboratory at Pomona College and participants will be drawn from the student bodies of the Claremont Colleges. Consistent with the goals of the NSF Research in Undergraduate Institutions (RUI) program, this project will promote undergraduate research and training. In addition to facilitating independent research by students, it will provide research assistants with hands-on training in the theory and methods of energetics research. The project will also strengthen research facilities in the Pomona College Department of Anthropology, and generate a database and other materials that will enhance instruction in nutritional anthropology and research methods doc7646 none The PIs proposes to hold a workshop to bring together leading environmental biologists, mathematicians, and statisticians to identify research opportunities for collaboration in environmental sciences. Further, they will identify cultural inhibitions to collaboration, and possible programs to help foster collaboration. The workshop will be held at the San Diego Supercomputing Center on the University of California campus, on September 7-9, . The participants will produce a report and publication that will be broadly available to the community. These documents will discuss the research opportunities and new modes of interdisciplinary interactions that the participants identify doc7647 none This project will explore the following chemical strategies for the general synthesis, organization and integration of nanoscale building blocks: (1) the development of gas-phase and solution-phase chemistry for the synthesis of nanowires, nanorods and molecular wires with well-defined sizes and aspect ratios; (2) the development of suitable chemical functionalization chemistry for the self-assembly and integration of these 1D building blocks; (3) the investigation of the thermal and chemical stability of these 1D nanostructures. The three types of 1D nanoscale building blocks (nanowire, nanorod and molecular wire) in this project share common structural feature---one-dimensionality, but differ in their length scale, aspect ratio, and rigidity, conseuently also differ in their assembly behaviors and physical properties. The interdisciplinary nature of the research will benefit the postdoctoral researchers, graduate students and undergraduate students involved in the project. Associated educational activities will include exploring new means of introducing materials chemistry research into the curriculum for both undergraduate and graduate courses. %%% One-dimensional (1D) nanostructures are of both fundamental and technological interest. They not only exhibit interesting electronic and optical properties intrinsically associated with their low dimensionality and the quantum confinement effect, but they also are potentially the critical components in the nanoscale device applications. This project will train students in the important field of nanoscience and foster their scientific development in a cross-disciplinary environment. This area is viewed by industry as high priority, and students trained in this area of nanoscience and technology compete very well in the job market and make significant contributions to an area of high national interest. This project is funded by the Solid State Chemistry Program of the Division of Materials Research and the Advanced Materials and Processing Program of the Chemistry Division doc7648 none This award is for an exploratory operation to investigate the possibility of obtaining continuous ice cores from the Puruogangri ice cap on the Tibetan Plateau. It is an international collaborative operation in which the Chinese will provide considerable logistical support, and the Ohio State group will supply their expertise and specialized ice-coring equipment. If this exploratory operation is successful, it will lay the groundwork for obtaining the best ice-core record of climate and environmental history yet obtained from Tibet doc7649 none Soffa This research program studies the nature of the phase transformation involved in the formation of the ferromagnetic tau-MnAl (L1o) phase in MnAl-base magnetic materials. The evolution of microstructure and defect structure which governs the development of magnetic properties in bulk alloys and thin films is examined. The research builds on the revelation that the metastable tau-MnAl phase emerges as the product of a massive transformation and that the microstructure and defect structures which evolve depend critically on the mechanistics of this phase transformation. The goal of this investigation is to use the fundamental knowledge of the transformation mechanism as a pathway for the design of new alloying strategies, heat treatments, and processing schemes to tailor the structure-property relationships in these materials. This research should also contribute to our understanding of an important genre of solid-state transformation. %%% These magnetic materials have tremendous potential in futuristic permanent magnet applications and for thin film devices including magnetic recording media. The full potential of the MnAl-base ferromagnets will only be realized when the evolution of microstructure and defect structure can be systematically controlled since their magnetic properties are extraordinarily sensitive to the structural state of the tau-MnAl phase doc7650 none Exponentially increasing multimedia information content has become a problem at the heart of modern communication networks. This is a paradigm shift from traditional com- munication networks, where the primary function is information transmission, and where quality of service improvements are attainable through better dimensioning of bandwidth and switching resources. However, in networks where information storage plays a central role, major improvements in quality of service can not be successful without the help of caching, prefetching and or mirroring of information. It can be argued that even if an unlimited amount of free bandwidth were available, the concentration of information on a small number of servers would cause server overloads, resulting in unacceptable download latencies. This general problem has created the explosion of research studies that are to be found in the network systems engineering literature on Web caching. Although this work has contributed important engineering solutions, much of it is ad hoc and informal. Indeed, in the large literature on caching research, it is rare to find papers dealing with mathematical foundations, especially those underpinning stochastic models. Also, one rarely finds proofs in a rigorous setting of nontrivial stochastic or average-case properties of caching structures and algorithms. It is our thesis here that more systematic approaches are needed. This proposal describes a project to meet this need; more generally, we outline a systematic treatment that focuses on fundamental design issues, one that, in dealing with these issues, integrates experimentation, analysis and statistical measurements. Network cache design objectives are reductions in access latency, traffic congestion, and server loads. These objectives can be attained only through a thoughtful design that ad- dresses many important and challenging research topics. Some of the fundamental questions that remain without definitive answers include: dynamic caching and caching with expiration times; design and analysis of easily implemented heuristic algorithms; impact of locality in request sequences on caching performance; caching and prefetching in low bandwidth access environments, with a special emphasis on wireless Web accesses; cache allocation and sizing problems; and Web-graph performance modeling. Extending the knowledge base and deep- ening our insight into these and several other equally fundamental caching system design problems is the main theme of this proposal. The ultimate goal is to utilize this improved knowledge base to develop an experimental testbed for achieving practically feasible and efficient network caching systems. The inherent complexity of the research topics identified here, and the network caching problem as a whole, necessarily call into play all available research tools. Thus, methodologi- cally, the scope of the proposed research ranges from mathematical modeling and analysis to statistical measurements and experimentation. The impact of our results, by their interdis- ciplinary nature, will not just be limited to designing multimedia network caching systems, but will potentially lead to improved problem solving techniques in related fields of computer algorithms, software engineering, probability theory, and operations research doc7651 none With this GOALI award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program in the Chemistry Division and the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities supports the work of Dr. Hilkka I. Kenttamaa of the Department of Chemistry at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana and Dr. David Aaserud of the Lubrizol Corporation. A high-risk high-gain research project involving Purdue University and Lubrizol Corporation is proposed for the study of optoacoustic desorption as a means to evaporate neutral molecules into mass spectrometers. The goal is to determine whether the combination of laser-induced acoustic desorption (LIAD) with gas-phase ion-molecule reactions involving mass-selected reagent ions provides benefits in mass spectrometric characterization of thermally labile and or nonvolatile molecules. Preliminary experiments confirm the feasibility of the concept, demonstrate high predictability and reproducibility, and suggest some intriguing possibilities. For example, the ability to bring neutral (not ionic) nonvolatile and or thermally labile molecules into the gas phase would allow a variety of fundamental thermochemical, structural and reactivity studies that currently cannot be carried out. Further, this simple approach may provide an attractive complement to MALDI in qualitative analysis. A matrix should not be necessary, which may lead to better predictability. The physical separation of the evaporation and ionization events should permit the use of many different types of ionization reactions, thus providing control over reaction products and thermochemistry, and access to a variety of information for a given analyte. Finally, this approach should allow mass spectrometric characterization of some compounds that are currently not amenable to such analysis. Dr. David Aaserud, the Co-PI on the award, will commit 5-10% of his time and resources to the proposed work where he will jointly advise participating graduate students and provide polymer characterization expertise to the project. Interaction will include monthly progress reviews and the supervision of one or two doctoral students during work at Lubrizol. The students will be exposed to Lubrizol s analytical capabilities and to an industrial environment. Lubrizol will provide relevant samples and access to any appropriate additional analytical information, including GPC, LC, and NMR data. In the technology transfer stage, the laboratories at Lubrizol will be accessible for applications of the new technologies to industrial samples. The Lubrizol Corporation has provided financial support to graduate students and research projects in Professor Kenttamaa s laboratory over several years. Lubrizol is committed to continue this funding as part or their cost sharing. Lubrizol views the collaborative effort as a continuation of its interaction with Professor Kenttamaa s group with a significant increase in the commitment of resources. The proposed research is at the frontiers of mass spectrometry in studies of the selective transfer of molecules from the solid phase to the gas phase. Lubrizol s interest in derivatized polyalphaolefins arises from the fact that these substances are important components of many lubricant additives. The development of new and better methods to characterize hydrocarbon polymers and their functionalized derivatives will allow a better understanding of these materials and help Lubrizol to better predict product performance. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program and the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities, the PI is able to perform potentially ground-breaking research as well as work with an industrial partner to explore real-world applications of the research. Professor Kenttamaa has a large group of undergraduate and graduate students who are female or from under-represented groups. For them the research is expected to provide a valuable educational experience doc7652 none The eight Phase II Statewide Systemic Initiative (SSI) states, consisting of Louisiana, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, Texas, and Vermont believe that the substantial investments in systemic reform made by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other key partners must become more networked and optimized. In order to move in this direction, the SSI states developed A Blueprint for Systemic Reform in Science and Mathematics, which describes the essential elements of an empirical theory of reform that would inform the work of the SSI states in the immediate future. The Blueprint includes the following recommendations to ensure effective networking within the SSI states, with NSF, and other states and local districts undergoing systemic reform in science and mathematics: 1. Collaborate with researchers at the national level to articulate a generalized model of systemic reform within the context of the evolving empirical theory of systemic reform. 2. Synthesize, organize, and disseminate numerous reform products, such as instructional materials for standards alignment, standards-based curricula, assessment instruments, algebra materials, self-assessment tools, and strategies for aligning allocation of resources, and governance with the systemic reform that have been tested and developed by the remaining eight SSIs. 3. Conduct collaborative research on the elements within the generalized model of systemic reform in areas, such as equity, standards-based curricula, assessment, pedagogy, and leadership. 4. Provide academic and technical assistance to national organizations, industries, businesses, and foundations investing in education to help them to understand and use a comprehensive systemic approach in improving student performance in science and mathematics. 5. Provide academic and technical assistance to education systems that want to undertake systemic reform with emphasis on standards and on reaching a commitment to reach all students in their systems. In coordination with the Eisenhower Regional Alliance of the Northeast and Islands, the eight SSI states propose to demonstrate the effectiveness of a systemic support network by collectively initiating the implementation of these recommendations. The SSI states will serve as a Systemic Practices Resource Network to supply successful practices and tools to newly funded NSF grant recipients, resulting in a support collaborative consisting of mature systemic partners with empirical experience that can work with existing or new programs doc7653 none of behavior is provided by a differential equation, while behavior near rest points is approximated by a diffusion. A new finite player model with aggregate noise is then developed. In this model, imprecision in the information obtained by players from some central source creates aggregate behavior disturbances. The model admits a global diffusion approximation, which can be used to study macroeconomic fluctuations. The educational component of this CAREER award develops a new curriculum for undergraduate statistics courses offered in economics departments. The curriculum is distinguished by a thorough introduction to probability theory and its economic applications. Because probability and statistics are given equal emphasis, students are better prepared to obtain a solid understanding of basic statistical tools doc7654 none The investigator studies problems in algebraic geometry related to families of higher dimensional varieties. The main goal of the project is to find good definitions of compact moduli functors, with special regard to the moduli theory of surfaces. As part of the moduli theory project special efforts are devoted to reflexive sheaves and their behavior with respect to morphisms in an effort to develop a theory that includes many results for reflexive sheaves of rank 1 that are similar to results already known for line bundles. This is very important in order to develop a moduli theory of singular varieties, which in turn is essential for geometrically meaningful compact moduli spaces. Another problem the investigator is studying is generalizations of Shafarevich s conjecture and its applications to the case of higher dimensional bases, in particular the problem of boundedness and rigidity for families of varieties of general type. This research is in the field of algebraic geometry, one of the oldest parts of modern mathematics, but one that blossomed to the point where it has solved problems that have stood for centuries. Originally, and still in its simplest form it treats figures defined in the plane by polynomials. Today, the field uses methods not only from algebra, but also from analysis and topology, and conversely it is extensively used in those fields. Moreover it has proved itself useful in fields as diverse as physics, theoretical computer science cryptography, coding theory and robotics. A central problem in algebraic geometry is the classification of all geometric objects. In turn an important part of classification theory is the theory of moduli. The latter s core idea is that one does not only want to understand these objects, but also understand the way they can be deformed. Moduli spaces play a very important role in theoretical physics. Studying curves on moduli spaces provides information on how an object is changing in space-time. This project focuses on compact moduli spaces. Those are extensions of moduli spaces in general and they give additional information about singular deformations, ones that are essentially different from others. Presently the existence of compact moduli spaces is known for low dimensional problems. The investigator is studying the higher dimensional case. As part of the project, but somewhat independent of the above, the investigator and his graduate students are running a website that works as a forum for graduate students and young researchers in algebraic geometry. Users of this website can pose questions that are likely to be known to experts but not available in the literature. The main goal of this project is to open a new venue for a larger number of students to access the knowledge of experts in the field helping to achieve a more equal opportunity environment. In addition, the collected database provides references to results that are too small to occupy an entire article, but too important to ignore, as well as a collection of potential research problems for graduate students doc7655 none In areas of the world with strong patriarchal systems the low status of women has implications for general development as well as children s health. Female participation in wage work frequently raises women s status in the household, but this relationship is not simple or invariable. This project involves the dissertation research of a cultural anthropology student from Southern Methodist University. The project will study the impact of female participation in wage work in Calcutta, India, in a patriarchal community of poor families. The process of male-female negotiation about family decision-making will be studied through an analysis of data from a sample of households varying in women s engagement in the wage labor market. Life histories of married women will also be collected to enrich the understanding of how women interact with the community and their families. The student will test hypotheses relating female wage income and mobility to household decision-making power and resource control, kinship obligations and self-esteem. This research will contribute to an understanding of the impact of wage earnings on women s status. The new information to be collected will be important for planners, administrators and social workers in order to identify problems and formulate policies for the improvement of conditions faced by women in the developing world doc7656 none Graves, David E. The long-term objective of this research is to gain biophysical insight into the key aspects of sequence selective interactions of small molecules with nucleic acids. The model system that has been studied thus far involves the sequence-specific DNA binding agent, actinomycin D. This compounds shows a marked preference for DNA binding at the d(GpC) step through intercalation of the phenoxazone chromophore between the adjacent G and C base pairs. Concomitant with this intercalative binding is the interactions of the two cyclic pentapeptide sidechains with the floor of the DNA minor groove. This laboratory has recently demonstrated the bases that flank this intercalation site play a major role in directing the thermodynamic mechanism for complex formation. If the 5 -flanking sequence is T (-TGCA-), the change in binding enthalpy has been measured to be -2.5 kcal mol. In contrast, when the 5 -flanking base is C (-CGCA-), the change in binding enthalpy is found to be -5.8 kcal mol, nearly 3 kcal mol more favorable than the other flanking sequences. 5 Historically, the binding of actinomycin D to DNA has been reported to be enthalpy driven as signified by large positive (favorable) binding enthalpies and binding enthalpies of near zero or -1 kcal mol. These recent results from this laboratory indicate that the thermodynamic binding properties of actinomycin D to oligonucleotides with specifically designed single binding sites are quite varied, depending on the sequence of bases flanking the actinomycin D binding site. Based on the variances observed in the enthalpy and entropy components associated with complex formation, linkages between thermodynamic binding mechanism(s) and structural features of the actinomycin D-DNA complexeswil be explored. Specifically the structures of the actinomycin D complexes formed with the -TGCA- duplex and the -CGCA- duplex will be examined by high-resolution NMR methods to discern differences in the structural features of the complex that may explain the enhanced enthalpy contribution toward actinomycin D binding to the CGCA- duplex. The use of non-self complimentary deoxyoligonucleotides was serendipitous toward the finding of sequence selective interactions of actinomycin D to single-strand DNA. The influence of DNA base sequence on the energetics and structural properties of actinomycin D-single strand DNA interactions is being examined. These observations could be of considerable benefit in gaining insight into how proteins bind single-strand DNA in a sequence-selective manner and expanded to biological roles of single-strand DNA interactions. The in vivo interactions of actinomycin D to double stranded DNA are characterized by high affinity and slow dissociation and have been suggested to carry out their biological function of specifically inhibiting transcription through blocking the progression of the RNA polymerase along the DNA template. With the recent findings of a high affinity of actinomycin D for single-stranded DNA, additional caveats may be added to this proposed mechanism, including the possible binding of the drug to single-strand DNA within the open complex, and or to inhibiting reannealing of the single-strand DNA doc7657 none This project explores the question of whether American state supreme court justices vote strategically or sincerely. The study will investigate, in particular, the agenda-setting stage and the decision-on-the-merits stage of judicial review. Several hypotheses will be tested: 1) whether institutional rules that make retaliation more likely affects judges likelihood of voting strategically; 2) whether strategic behavior varies in response to changes in federal-state relations and across areas of law with varying degrees of saliency; and 3) whether competing risks for judges are created by multiple actors who pose electoral and policy threats to state supreme court justices. Cases from eleven years of state supreme court decisions will be collected in four areas of judicial review cases (campaign and elections, workers compensation, unemployment compensation, and welfare). Data also will be collected on judge biographical characteristics, state elite and citizen ideology, as well as institutional rules, constitutional designs, and other state and court characteristics for each year during the - period. In addition to these data, interviews will be conducted with state supreme court justices, members of the legislature, and the state governor in twelve American states with variation across institutional rules, formalized legislative-judicial relations, and political contexts doc7658 none One of the five largest development projects currently under construction in the world today, the Lesotho Highlands water Project (LHWP) in Southern Africa has a major impact on the lives of people affected by the project. This dissertation research by a cultural anthropologist from the University of California-Irvine will study the effects of the project in Lesotho through the lens of gender relations. The differential impact (usually negative) of development projects on women has given rise to studies in the various traditions of Women in Development , Women and Development and Gender and Development . These glosses describe different approaches to understanding and examining women s significance in society and in development. Employing a feminist political ecology approach, the student will conduct multi-site ethnographic research involving three dam sites at different stages of construction and implementation (resettled, impacted, and non impacted), with two waves of structured surveys and semi-structured interviews to examine the ways project-affected populations are experiencing development. Gender, class, age, and other socio-economic and socio-cultural categories will be examined to investigate the social consequences of the LHWP on communities and households. The new knowledge to be created will be valuable to development planners as well as to students of river basin projects and of southern Africa. In addition the project helps to train a young social scientist doc7659 none With this CAREER award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the work of Dr. Jeehiun K. Lee in the Department of Chemistry at Rutgers University New Brunswick in Piscataway, New Jersey. The purpose of the work is twofold: 1) to understand the intrinsic hydrogen bonding ability of nucleic bases through a combination of gas phase mass spectroscopic acidity measurements and theoretical computations, and 2) to illucidate the enzymatic transformation of orotic acid to uracil, catalyzed by 5 -monophosphate decarboxylase, using kinetic isotope effects. Dr. Lee plans fundamental studies to understand the fundamental chemistry determining the bonding between the pairs of bases of DNA and RNA, the molecules in biology which store and transmit the genetic code. Studies of the enzyme which transforms orotic acid to uracil, one of the bases in RNA, could lead to improved antitumor agents. In addition to her own research and teaching, Dr. Lee is developing a mentoring network, the Rutgers Women In Physical Sciences Network, to increase the number of women choosing and surviving in careers in the physical sciences at Rutgers doc7660 none This project investigates the categorization of emotional ingroup and outgroup faces, using event-related functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). The goal is to compare the hemodynamic response to emotional ingroup versus outgroup faces. An investigation of the brain regions common to both types of processing will be informative regarding the existence of general emotional processing and facial processing pathways. A rich set of stimuli composed of targets drawn from a number of racial backgrounds will be viewed by subjects drawn from an equally diverse population. By assessing ingroup outgroup processing differences across a much broader range of racial groups than have been examined in previous research, this study will extend understanding of the neural substrates of emotional and social facial categorization. Moreover, the use of event-related fMRI will enable comparisons with previous psychophysiological (ERP) studies examining the processing of outgroup emotional faces. This is a small grant for exploratory research, as part of the behavioral and cognitive science emphasis on cognitive neuroscience doc7661 none Dr. John W. Faller, Chemistry Department, Yale University, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program for studies related to asymmetric and regioselective synthesis and catalysis using metal complexes. New strategies will be developed for asymmetric synthesis based on the use of readily available racemic precatalysts treated with an inexpensive chiral poison. The poison selectively deactivates one enantiomer of the racemic mixture. The remaining active enantiomer is used to catalyze an asymmetric reaction. This general strategy has been demonstrated for asymmetric hydrogenations and Lewis acid-catalyzed Diels-Alder reactions. More effective poisons will be developed and will be applied to the preparation of chiral catalysts for a broad range of asymmetric reactions. Pseudo-enantiomeric complexes, which are composed of bimetallics containing different chiral ligands, will be explored. Hemilabile ligands will be used to control the stereochemistry in catalytic intermediates. The racemization of chiral 16 electron intermediates can potentially decrease the selectivity of asymmetric catalysts. This racemization process and methods of controlling it will also be studied. An object which is not the same as its mirror image (e.g. a left compared to a right handed glove) is said to be chiral. Many pharmaceutical and agricultural chemicals are chiral and often only one of the two mirror image molecules is effective. Since it is difficult to obtain a single mirror image, the production of such molecules is an important goal in contemporary chemistry. In this project new strategies toward solving the problem of asymmetric synthesis will be applied to a broad range of reactions and new, more economic preparations of important molecules will be developed. In addition to the chemical research, this project has the important objective of training young scientists in the areas of metal catalysis and asymmetric synthesis doc7662 none Working memory capacity is associated with activation of information from long term memory for the purposes of completing a current computational task. In the proposed model of emotion generation, emotions are emergent phenomena that are the result of applying complex emotion knowledge from long term memory to core affective feelings. Thus, working memory capacity should be involved in emotion generation, and should be directly related to emotional granularity. To study the role of working memory in the emotion generation process, it is necessary to first determine whether cognitive and emotional tasks operate via distinct systems of working memory. The proposed investigation would be an initial step towards addressing this question. This is a small grant for exploratory research, as part of the behavioral and cognitive science emphasis on cognitive neuroscience doc7663 none Professor Daniel Higgins of Kansas State University is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry program and Solid State Chemistry in the Division of Materials Research to perform highly spatially-resolved experiments on polymer dispersed liquid crystals. The tiny droplets of liquid crystals studied here are of interest from standpoints both fundamental (for the new physics involved) and practical (optical device technology). This work seeks to elaborate on previous studies in which near field spectroscopy was used to generate a local field to reorient molecules in the liquid crystal. The dynamics of electric-field induced liquid crystal reorientation and ion generation, migration and recombination are to be studied using new time-resolved forms of NSOM and multiphoton-excited fluorescence microscopy. Droplet sizes will be controlled using latex sphere-produced templates. Work on new aspects of liquid crystals is especially timely because of its applicability to new materials for diffractive optics, switchable holograms and photorefractive devices. The work is also related to nanotechnology and biologically important effects doc7664 none Barker This grant provides funds for the acquisition of Ground-penetrating Radar equipment, including a data acquisition system, antennas at a number of frequencies, a mounting cart and odometer wheel, a field computer and processing software. This equipment will support current and planned research in a wide range of fields, including environmental geophysics and hydrology, sedimentary geology, archaeology and electrical engineering. Some applications will use standard antenna configurations and signal processing; for these, ease of use is essential. Other applications will make use of alternative antenna configurations and new developments in signal processing and interpretation; for these, we require flexibility in the system and access to raw data. While the proposed equipment is intended primarily to support research, there is also a very important educational component. Undergraduate and graduate students in geology, geophysics, archaeology and electrical engineering will gain experience in GPR data acquisition, processing and interpretation. In doing so, they as well as their faculty will gain an understanding of the usefulness and the limitations of this powerful tool for their own current and future research. Support for this grant comes from the Earth Sciences Instrumentation and Facilities Program (EAR IF), with 50% cost sharing by Binghamton University. The equipment will be housed in and maintained by the Department of Geological Sciences and Environmental Studies doc7665 none Rob Coalson of the University of Pittsburgh is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program and the Molecular Biophysics Program to study fundamental aspects of the dynamics of ion permeation and biopolymer translocation in protein channels, using a variety of novel numerical and simulation methods. The three-dimensional Poisson-Nernst-Planck theory developed by the PI will be extended to include systematically a series of improvements on the description of ion and ion-solvent interactions. A Monte Carlo lattice-hopping model of ion permeation will also be explored, and results from both approaches will be compared. The related area of biopolymer translocation through protein channels will be investigated, exploring the effects of various levels of approximation. The advances in numerical solution procedures for computing simple ion currents and passage times for biopolymers that will result from this effort are expected to lead to software that enables computer aided design of protein channels with desired properties, such as large or rectified ion currents or enhanced chemical sensitivity for distinguishing DNA RNA nucleotides. The permeation of ions and polymers through biological channels is an area characterized by important unanswered fundamental questions whose solution will have a direct and significant impact in medicine and biotechnology. By allowing ions to pass through otherwise impenetrable cell walls, protein channels contribute to the regulation of many physiological processes. They are blocked by toxins, degenerated by diseases, and stimulated by drugs. Therefore, an understanding of ion permeation is relevant to medical applications. It is also possible to flow strands of single stranded DNA and RNA through certain wide ion channels with an electric field, a property that may be exploited to generate chemical sensors with potential impacts in biotechnology doc7666 none This project is an investigation of methods for assisting with the navigation of large, complex information spaces. Although results from these studies are relevant to a number of research areas, interest will be focused on construction of a navigation system designed to help viewers visualize, explore, and analyze large, multidimensional datasets. Methods to assist with the analysis and navigation of these types of datasets was specifically cited as an important open problem by the joint DOE NSF panel on future research in visualization. The work will combine a detailed local display and a high-level global overview of the locations and structure of areas of interest within the dataset. The local view will use perceptual cues to harness the abilities of the low-level human visual system. The global overview will be built in two separate stages. First, elements of interest will be identified using a combination of: (1) explicit rules provided by the viewer, and (2) implicit rules built by watching what viewers select, where they move, and what they examine. Next, the elements will be clustered into one or more areas of interest. The use of graph construction techniques like planar triangulations and minimum spanning trees will be investigated to link the elements together. An underlying graph that: (1) supports efficient navigation via the application of graph traversal algorithms, and (2) provides an effective global overview to visualize the areas of interest and the relationships that exist between them will be sought. A set of validation experiments will be designed to identify the strengths and limitations of our navigation techniques. Datasets from the oceanography and e-commerce domains will be used to test the system in a practical, real-world environment. The first set of experiments will work with domain experts, in part to provide anecdotal feedback on our system, and in part to identify fundamental navigation and exploration tasks performed during visualization. These tasks will then be integrated into a controlled experiment that studies the performance of our system vis-a-vis a system without navigation aids, and existing focus+context visualization techniques specifically designed to display these types of large, complex datasets. The research in visualization, navigation, perception, and automated inference of viewer preferences provides a unique opportunity to design a multidisciplinary course curriculum that includes instruction in computer graphics and scientific visualization, cognitive psychology, and a variety of real-world application areas. The education plan includes the construction of an instructional visualization laboratory, the identification of collaborators from academia and industry, the design of a self-contained course curriculum, and the creation of a collection of real-world visualization projects to encourage student participation in our research programs. The laboratory will include state-of-the-art graphics workstations, as well as visualization-specific hardware and software.The priority is to expose students to emerging research issues and real-world visualization problems. This will be accomplished in part by building course projects that introduce students to active research programs, both in our visualization laboratory and in academic and industrial research centers located on our campus.The curriculum will instruct students in areas of cognitive and perceptual psychology that impact scientific visualization, computer graphics, computer vision, and artificial intelligence. The result will be a collection of courses that introduce students of psychology, egineering, natural science and other disciplines to both the theoretical and practical issues of perception and assisted computation techniques, and their relationship to scientific visualization and computer graphics doc7667 none The performance of a disinfection system in wastewater secondary effluents is typically evaluated by measuring the response of a targeted organism to various doses of the applied disinfectant. Coliform bacteria are the most widely used indicator of disinfection performance in the United States and their surviving numbers form the basis for most discharge permits. At low doses of the applied disinfectant, the response of the targeted organism (typically coliform) follows first-order kinetics. Deviations from first-order kinetics are commonly observed in secondary or tertiary wastewater effluents at moderate to high doses of the applied disinfectant. Deviations at moderate to high doses, herein referred to as tailing, are characterized by a reduced rate of inactivation of the targeted organism with increasing values of the applied disinfectant. The number of particles containing coliform bacteria has recently been demonstrated as a significant parameter influencing the performance of a disinfection system in the tailing region (Emerick et al ., b). For coliform bacteria to be a suitable indicator of the inactivation of other targeted organisms (e.g., bacterial and viral pathogens), the other targeted organism of interest would have to be associated at roughly the same frequency and in the same location within wastewater particles as coliform bacteria. Additionally, the comparative efficiencies of various disinfectants are dependent on the ability of a particular disinfectant to penetrate into wastewater particles. The overall objective of this proposal is to couple novel and innovative research in public health engineering with a comprehensive educational program. The strategic plan for the integration of research and education is a multi-faceted approach that couples research with outreach and educational activities, as well as outreach activities with education. Outreach activities will focus on developing collaborative partnerships with research centers, national laboratories, industry, and government agencies for participating in educational endeavors, exchanging research ideas, and the field implementation of research findings. Findings from the proposed research will be transferred to the appropriate industry counterparts, including municipalities and their consultants, to aid in the design and optimization of upstream treatment processes to improve the performance of downstream disinfection systems. The recipients of the outreach activities will then be brought into the classroom to provide a practical and hands-on perspective of how research activities are incorporated by local, state, and national agencies and organizations into current industrial and environmental problems. In this manner, the recipients of outreach from the proposed research will serve in an advisory role to evaluate the success of the strategic plan implemented by the PI for the integration of research and education. The educational plan will be continually updated and modified based on comments received from the advisory panel doc7668 none Expressed sequence tags (EST s), are short nucleotide sequences determined from the cDNA copy of mRNA in a given cell, tissue, organ, or organism. EST s are widely used and equally widely generated, providing information about gene identity, expression and distribution for a wide range of organisms. Although it is relatively easy to generate the sequence information of an EST, there are a number of problems associated with storing and using the information. The software platform proposed here integrates a database, a biological ontology, or structured language, and sequence analysis functions for an EST knowledge base. This knowledge base addresses three problems faced by a biologist: storage of the data, analysis and archiving of the results, and integration into a cumulative database. The system is designed to permit a typical biologist to install and operate it. In order to do this, the system will provide user-friendly interfaces for additon of sequences, automated running of assembly and analysis programs, a query and alert system for complex searches, and a data sharing arrangement for geographically separate laboratories to permit integration. As a prototype, a knowledge base on the chicken will be developed. This is particularly useful since the chicken is often used as a comparative species for contrasting with mammals such as mouse and human. In developing the system, a range of training opportunities will be offered to undergraduates, graduates and postdoctoral scientists doc7669 none People often encounter, observe, and interact with collections of other people. Such collections can vary in the extent to which they seem like single, unified entities. For example, a baseball team seems more group-like than an audience at a movie. The term entitativity is used to refer to the degree to which an aggregate possesses the features of a single, unified entity. This project examines the ways in which a group s degree of perceived entitativity affects the judgments that perceivers make about the group and its members. More specifically, the project looks at whether judgments of members are biased by the perceived entitativity of the group to which the members belong. Two studies test hypotheses regarding the role of perceived entitativity in the implicit judgments that are made of groups and group members. Study 1 tests the hypothesis that high perceived group entitativity increases the speed and likelihood of comparative judgments between group members. The expectations of coherence and unity that exist for highly entitative groups are predicted to lead to intragroup assimilation effects (perceiving group members as being more similar to each other than they really are), which can then facilitate comparative judgments along a focal dimension. Study 2 examines attentional and encoding biases produced by a group s perceived level of entitativity. It is proposed that expectations of high entitativity may lead perceivers to pay greater attention to shared versus non-shared features of group members. In addition, perceived entitativity may bias the encoding of new information about the group such that information that is consistent with perceivers representation of the group (i.e., information that contributes to the belief that group members are similar and unified) will be more readily learned and retained in memory. By examining the role of perceived entitativity in group perception and judgment, it will be possible to gain greater understanding into both the conscious and non-conscious factors that influence perceivers judgments of group members. This research also has implications for how higher-order social judgments of group members are formulated and the biases that may be present in these judgments doc7670 none Margaret Werner-Washburne This research project will examine gene expression as cells exit from stationary phase. The dynamics of mRNA accumulation, including rates of mRNA turnover, will be determined using microarray analysis. Data analysis will be carried out using the clustering and visualization program, VxInsight, to identify specific patterns of regulation. The relative abundance of selected transcripts will be confirmed by northern analysis. To determine if genes induced during this process are essential for exit from stationary phase, strains carrying deletions of genes that are highly induced during stationary phase and reproliferation will be analyzed for growth-phase specific defects and other stress-related phenotypes. This will be done by both microarray and more classical growth analyses of strains carrying deletions in genes whose mRNAs are most abundant during these processes. This work will contribute to our understanding of microbial physiology at the genomic level and provide insights into the dynamics of quiescent cells doc7671 none This research endeavors to consolidate and extend gains in the systematic processing of nanostructured polymeric materials. Most specifically, for electro-optic materials, attention will be paid to improving thermal photochemical stability and material optical loss, while continuing to improve electro-optic activity and material processability. This will be accomplished by incorporating free radical scavenging moieties and effecting more systematic crosslinking exploiting the structural features of dendritic supramolecular building blocks. Chromophores will continue to be improved exploiting lessons learned from previous research. Moreover, the development of improved octupolar, as well as dipolar, chromophores will be undertaken. Chromophore ligands will be used to develop new two-photon polymeric materials exhibiting record levels of optical nonlinearity, which can be exploited for sensor protection, optical circuit fabrication, medical imaging, and ultrafast all-optical switching. Dendritic ligands will also continue to be developed to further refine light harvesting relevant to optical amplification and solar cell applications. %%% This research is tied together by a common theoretical basis and by a modular approach that permits material components to be applied to several applications. The development of multiple use materials and nanostructural construction concepts my enable a relatively small, but focused, materials research effort to have high impact on a number of diverse technologies doc7672 none This research will explore the mechanisms of memory supporting the ability of people to remember the details of their experiences. Previous research has indicated that there are different memory systems in the brain that support different types or forms of memory. Considerable recent research has been directed at attempting to characterize these systems. One form of memory that has been identified, declarative or relational memory, is associated with the operation of a particular brain system, the hippocampal system. This system is thought to be critical for remembering one s experiences by enabling memory for the relations among the elements of the events, situations, or scenes encountered in daily life (or in the laboratory). This form of memory maintains information about what people and or what objects were part of a given experience, in what context they were encountered, where they were located with respect to the scene and to each other, who did what to whom in that experience, and so forth. This research will take advantage of a new research approach and a set of converging methods to examine the specialization of different memory systems for different aspects of memory processing, operating simultaneously. In doing so, it will provide a test of the idea that the hippocampal system is specialized to support relational memory processing, and it will provide a more detailed characterization of the nature of this relational form of memory. The research will use an eye-movement-based methodology to assess memory for items and memory for relations among items, both in normal control subjects and in amnesic patients with profound memory deficits following hippocampal system damage. The research methodology will allow this assessment to take place separately and simultaneously. It is expected that amnesic patients will be selectively impaired on measures of memory for relations among items, across a range of different types of relations, while simultaneously being intact on measures of memory for (repetition of) individual items. Additional studies will assess brain activation during memory performance of normal human subjects using functional neuroimaging methods. It is expected that activity of the hippocampal system will be associated selectively with measures of memory for relations among items, again across a range of different types of relations, while activity of other brain systems will be associated with measures of memory for (repetition of) individual items. Taken together, such results will provide critical information about the nature of relational memory, its dependence on the hippocampal system, and its impairment in amnesia. By furthering understanding of how we form and maintain memory for relations among items, this work will provide insight into that form of memory most critical for the ability to remember our experiences and to learn relational information. Such insight holds enormous promise for guiding the teaching of any domain of knowledge involving fundamentally relational material, from structural relations to the relations among high-level concepts doc7673 none The project considers sandwich structures consisting of a relatively thick and weak but light core, sandwich between two strong and stiff composite material skins. The emphasis in on large structures such as ship hulls and wind turbine blades. The research includes development and refinement of: -a new smart manufacturing method -an ultralight sandwich for aerospace use, developed mainly for general aviation aircraft such as the Cirrus SR_20 -a new heavy duty sandwich core, tailored for applications such as the US Navy s DD21 destroyer. The research encompass analytical and numerical analyses and optimization, experimental testing, and post-mortem evaluations. The new knowledge generated will be transferred to the industry via an industrial board and to academia via both in-house courses and via intimate collaboration with two local undergraduate colleges doc7674 none Tyburczy This grant provides partial support for the costs of acquiring an electrochemical impedance analysis system for the Mineral and Rock Physics Laboratory at Arizona State University (ASU). The PI is Professor of Geology at Arizona State University and will utilize this equipment for studies of the electrical properties of earth materials. Magnetotellurics and geomagnetic depth sounding have revealed zones of anomalously high electrical conductivity in a variety of crustal and mantle environments. In order to properly invert and interpret magnetotelluric response functions, the electrical response of Earth materials over a suitable frequency range must be determined in the laboratory. The equipment purchased will consist of an impedance analysis system consisting of a frequency response analyzer (FRA), a potentiostat, a personal computer and specialized software for data acquisition control and data analysis modeling. The equipment will be interfaced with a high temperature gas mixing furnace, with a multiple anvil high pressure device, and with other types of furnaces and pressure vessels. Studies to be pursued with this equipment include 1) the influence of melt composition and texture at low melt fraction on the bulk electrical properties of partially molten systems 2) effects of combined pressure and temperature on electrical properties of anhydrous minerals and rocks of the crust and mantle, and 3) the influence of hydrogen in hydrous and nominally anhydrous minerals on electrical properties. The results will be interpreted in terms of equivalent electrical circuits that can be related to models of ionic processes. The results of these studies will be important for the interpretation and modeling of magnetotelluric data and will also shed new light on physical transport processes in a variety of geological environments. The ultimate benefits will be more detailed understanding of the temperature profile and physical state of matter at depth in the Earth s interior doc7675 none The nucleophility of imidazole and benzimidazole carbenes will be explored. Novel achiral and chiral [2.2] imidazolophanes will be synthesized and their nucleophilic reactivity investigated. The educational component of the plan will introduce a form of collaborative learning into an honors organic chemistry lab course. Students will be divided into small groups and visit several stations (self-contained experiments) during their lab periods. Outreach to elementary schools in terms of demonstrations and hands-on activities is also part of the educational plan. With this CAREER award, the Organic Synthesis Program is supporting the research and educational activities of Professor Steven T. Diver of the Department of Chemistry at the State University of New York, Buffalo. The fundamental chemistry of a class of compounds known as imidazole carbenes will be studied. Encapsulation of these carbenes into a rigid framework which may confer unusual properties onto these molecules will also be accomplished. The educational portion of the plan will continue the PI s visits to elementary schools to give demonstrations and allow the implementation of the PI s cooperative learning modules into an honors organic chemistry lab course doc7676 none Professor Larry Viehland of Chatham College is funded by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry program to perform theoretical studies on a new separation method based on ion mobility spectrometry (IMS). IMS is based on measuring the average drift velocity of different ions through a neutral gas under the influence of an electrostatic field. The PI is conducting a two pronged approach to the theoretical study of a new aspect of IMS, namely the use of asymmetric applied fields (FAIMS). First, simple extensions of methods employed for similar projects involving drift tube mass spectrometers will be applied to questions about peak shape, ion transmission efficiencies and model cross sections. Undergraduates will be involved in this portion of the research. Secondly, the PI will himself develop new kinetic and dynamic calculations allowing, for example, the calculation of transport cross sections from a set of potential energy surfaces. Separation methods based on ion mobility pervade analytical chemistry, and IMS has become an important technique for the detection of chemical and biological compounds in the field due to its high sensitivity, amenability to miniaturization and ruggedness in operation. Improvements in this method are likely to be rapidly assimilated in applications such as industrial quality control and environmental sampling. This work is to be conducted with undergraduate students at Chatham College, a women s college doc7677 none Jack Schultz. This grant provides partial support for the Gordon Research Conference on Plant Herbivore Interactions, to be held in Ventura, California from 25 February to 1 March . The conference was organized to be forward-looking, and stresses new and emerging approaches and topics related to the interactions between plants and their herbivores. Indeed, an agreement has been reached with all of the speakers, limiting presentations to issues at the frontiers of science. The conference will feature 24 speakers. To maximize the likelihood of including novel coverage, 23 of the invitees have not spoken at the conference in the last 6 years. Nine are from outside the US and four are female. Moreover, a broad cross section of ages is represented in the suite of speakers. The lead presentation will be by the founding director of the Max Plank Institute for Chemical Ecology, Ian T. Baldwin. Diverse topics will be considered at the conference, including herbivore-induced defenses, herbivore-pathogen communication, community and multi-trophic interactions, mechanisms at the plant-herbivore interface, interactions at large scales, and evolutionary issues. The consequences of deploying transgenic herbivore-resistant plants will be the topic of a special session. A poster session in the middle of the conference is organized to facilitate participation by the scientific community at large, and especially students. Formal sessions are scheduled in the mornings and evenings, allowing the afternoons as a time for informal meetings and discussions. The conference likely will set the tone for the study of plant-herbivore interactions during the coming years of the 21st century doc7678 none The Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division is supporting Dr. Richard Eisenberg, Chemistry Department, University of Rochester, for research on the chemistry of platinum group element complexes relating to homogeneous catalysis and bond activation. Part one of the project is a series of mechanistic studies involving applications of parahydrogen induced polarization (PHIP) to new organometallic systems. This method can permit the detection of new hydride intermediates and may help elucidate the mechanism of hydrogen addition. The activation of hydrogen by oxidative addition to a variety of metal centers will be investigated, including rhodium and iridium complexes capable of intramolecular C-H and C-C activation and early transition metal hydrides. The addition of hydrogen to metal-nonmetal multiple bonds contained in alkylidene, alkylidyne, imido and sulfido complexes will also be studied in an effort to provide proof for a concerted 4-center addition. Catalytic reactions that will be investigated by PHIP include asymmetric hydrogenation and hydroformylation. Part two of the project focuses on the bond activation and catalytic reactions of organometallic systems that exhibit electrophilic or radical character. Cationic diphosphine complexes of Ir(III) and complexes with specifically designed tetradentate ligands will be synthesized. These complexes will have two adjacent labile sites for substrate binding, activation, and coupling. Related electrophilic complexes of Pt and Pd with new diimine and diamine ligands will also be studied. These and related complexes will be screened for reactivity in reactions that include H D exchange, isomerizations, C-H bond activation, and olefin polymerization. Bond activation by odd electron complexes will be studied with new d7 Rh(II) and Ir(II) Schiff base complexes that contain tetradentate N and S donor ligands. The metalloradical reactions that will be studied most extensively are those involving C-H activation of methane, toluene, alkanes, and zylenes, and radical driven polymerizations. A program of research on the chemistry of platinum group element compounds relating to homogeneous catalysis and bond activation will be conducted. Platinum group element complexes include the most widely used catalysts in industry today, and developments in the past decade, particularly with regard to asymmetric catalysis and polymerization catalysis, suggest that this role will increase in the future. This program will advance our understanding of the fundamental transformations that take place at the metal and will help in the design of new important catalysts for the chemical and pharmaceutical industry doc7679 none Landslides can cause extensive damage; hence early detection, monitoring and assessment of potential problem areas are critically important. The ability to recognize impending slide locations would assist mitigation, thereby reducing major landslide development, disruption of services and possible loss of life. The first step in the characterization of a landslide prone area is the contour mapping of its surface. However, due to the varied topography, standard surveying techniques rarely provide contour intervals smaller than 3 m (10 ft). Unfortunately, this resolution is unsuitable for delineation of future landslide development and remedial measures. However, recent advances in microcomputers, lasers and GPS positioning technology, have resulted in the development of a compact, lightweight, airborne laser mapping system that can be operated from a small airplane. It allows one to map 100 square kilometers in a single hour, and ultimately create a three-dimensional surface map made up of data points spaced 1-meter apart. In addition to rapid data collection, vertical accuracies of 5 to 10 cm. (2 to 4 inches) are usually possible. During a flight, the laser sends out pulses that hit the ground surface and are reflected back to the plane. By measuring the time it takes the pulses (10,000 per second) to complete the roundtrip determines how far away each point is from the aircraft. Then, by knowing where and how high the aircraft is, allows one to compute the absolute height and coordinates of the ground surface. Several GPS systems both in the aircraft and on the ground (ground crews) provide precise location information of the aircraft s position at all times. The goal of this research is to assess the accuracy and capability of airborne laser swath mapping (ALSM) to identify and map landslide areas. Selected areas in South Dakota s Missouri River valley will be used as test sites. A series of measurement and mapping strategies will be performed to determine the most efficient, highest sensitivity, and cost effective approach to assess and monitor landslide areas. Once this is accomplished, an evaluation of the data will then be performed to establish those pertinent parameters necessary to characterize landslides doc7680 none PROJECT SUMMARY. The maintenance of plastid populations is essential to the viability of photosynthetic eukaryotes and dependent on plastid replication. Yet, the molecular mechanisms underlying plastid division remain undetermined. In recent years, two nuclear gene families have been identified in higher plants, FtsZ1 and FtsZ2, each encoding homologues of the key bacterial cell division protein FtsZ. Bacterial FtsZ, a GTPase related to tubulin, polymerizes at the onset of cytokinesis to form a ring structure at the division plane that constricts the cell. Antisense repression of specific FtsZ1 and FtsZ2 family members from Arabidopsis, AtFtsZ1-1 and AtFtsZ2-1, has demonstrated essential and functionally distinct roles for both gene families in mediating plastid division in higher plants, and firmly established the endosymbiotic origin of the plastid division machinery. Further, antibodies highly specific for AtFtsZ1-1 and AtFtsZ2-1 have been generated and used in immunofluorescence microscopy to show for the first time that both FtsZ1 and FtsZ2 co-localize to membrane-associated rings at the plastid division site. Based on experiments demonstrating that FtsZ1 but not FtsZ2 is imported into chloroplasts in vitro, a model has been proposed for the macromolecular organization of the plastid division apparatus wherein FtsZ1 and FtsZ2 assemble into rings on the inner and outer surfaces of the chloroplast envelope membranes, respectively, and act in concert to constrict the organelle. However, the discovery of a second FtsZ2 gene in Arabidopsis, AtFtsZ2-2, suggests this model may be incomplete. The overall goal of the project is to rigorously test and expand upon the model by probing more fully the functions of the three FtsZ proteins in Arabidopsis and by identifying and analyzing the functions of additional components of the plastid division apparatus. The first objective is to determine the precise localization of FtsZ2. In partial support of this model, it was recently determined that both AtFtsZ1-1 and AtFtsZ2-1 and their orthologues in other plants localize to membrane-associated rings at the plastid division site. Although the precise localization of each FtsZ in relation to the envelope membranes has not been resolved, evidence that FtsZ1 resides in the stromal compartment is compelling. Immunoelectron microscopy and protease protection experiments will be employed to determine in which compartment FtsZ2 is localized: stromal, cytosolic, or intermembrane space. The findings will be critical in evaluating and expanding upon the model and will significantly influence the design and interpretation of other experiments related to the composition, assembly, organization and mechanics of the plastid division apparatus. The second objective is to test the function of AtFtsZ2-2 in relation to that of AtFtsZ2-1. AtFtsZ2-2 shares over 80% amino acid identity with AtFtsZ2-1, strongly implicating it in plastid division but suggesting the two proteins may be functionally redundant. In contrast, preliminary data suggest that AtFtsZ2-1and AtFtsZ2-2 may be functionally distinct. To resolve this apparent contradiction, transgenic plants expressing antisense and sense constructs of AtFtsZ2-2 will be generated; their phenotypes will be compared to those of the corresponding AtFtsZ2-1 transgenic plants. Knockout mutants for both genes will also be isolated for genetic and cytological analyses of the mutant phenotypes singly and in combination. If plastid division defects are observed in the single mutants, the capacity of each of the two gene products to complement the other will be determined. Attempts to distinguish the roles of AtFtsZ2-1 and -2 will also include localization studies with isoform-specific anti-peptide antibodies and expression pattern analyses with gene-specific probes and reporters. The third objective is to identify proteins that interact with plant FtsZs. The well characterized and biochemically tractable pea chloroplast system will be used in conjunction with several immunoaffinity and crosslinking strategies to identify proteins that interact specifically with FtsZ1 and FtsZ2 proteins in higher plants. Studies beyond the scope of this proposal will apply the biochemical insight gained from the pea system to continued genetic analysis of chloroplast division in Arabidopsis. This project should provide significant new insights into the composition, assembly, organization and mechanics of the plastid division apparatus. In addition, because of recently revealed mechanistic parallels between the processes of chloroplast and mitochondrial division, these studies will complement and may have relevance for understanding mitochondrial division doc7681 none This proposal addresses the applicability of high-speed communication networks to replace on-chip global and semi-global interconnects. Macrocells with the limited number of gates and wires are connected through the communication network. Limiting the number of gates per macrocell is shown experimentally to reduce the number of metal layers needed for circuit implementation. Additionally a basic research on 3-D interconnect standard cell design for predictability of interconnect related parameters is proposed. This is a combined educational and research effort. The goal is to overcome the limitations imposed by ultra-large scale integrated (ULSI) interconnects. Basic research is being conducted is in: (1) the applicability of high-speed on-chip communication networks to replace dedicated semi-global and global interconnects for use in microprocessor, ASIC, or SoC designs; (2) the incorporation of new 3-D interconnect standard cell design for capacitance and inductance predictability and hence timing, power, and area predictability; and (3) educational tools for grades 5-12 that promote student discovery in the problems and opportunities in present and future microprocessor design doc7682 none THE DEVELOPMENT OF HEADING PERCEPTION IN INFANCY Rick O. Gilmore Department of Psychology Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA When moving around the environment, animals generate a pattern of visual motion called optic flow. Optic flow provides information about where and how fast the observer is moving. This information is crucial for safely moving through the environment. Despite its importance, very little is known about how the ability to perceive optic flow develops early in life. This project will examine how young infants develop the ability to determine which direction they are moving or heading through the environment. It will examine the role that changes in visual factors, such as acuity or sensitivity to motion, play in the ability to perceive one s heading. The project will examine how infants emerging abilities to crawl and walk shape their perceptual capacities. The project also will examine how infants develop the ability to use visual information to maintain balance and control posture. The results will provide new information about the development of a perceptual skill that is critical for maintaining balance, avoiding collisions, and moving safely through the environment. In turn, the results will lay the groundwork for future research into the impact of postnatal brain development on other aspects of perceptual and motor development. Finally, this CAREER project will incorporate educational activities that will help to train a new generation of students in the emerging field of developmental doc7683 none CAREER: Using Caves in Tectonic and Climatic Geomorphology Darryl E. Granger Caves form as water flows underground, dissolving tubes and canyons that mark the water-table elevation at the time of cave development. Relict cave passages and their sediments can thus be used to decipher the history of regional water-table lowering, which is often regulated by river incision or tectonic uplift. The protective environment in a cave can preserve fragile sediments and minerals for millions of years, during which time the surface may be sculpted by erosion and tectonic forces may uplift entire mountain ranges in which the caves lie. PI proposes to use caves and cave sediments in three distinct projects, each with important implications for regional climatic and tectonic geomorphology. Cosmogenic 26Al and 10Be will be used to date sediments in a suite of large caves along the Cumberland Escarpment of Tennessee and Kentucky, which appear to record a pulse of regional river incision related to glaciation in the Ohio River basin. PI will survey and date cave mineral deposits that mark ancient pools in the Sierra Nevada, California, to constrain tectonic tilting of this mountain range. Beach-deposited sediments preserved in caves that are now high in the mountains of New Zealand will be dated to determine uplift rates in this tectonically active region. In addition, PI will use this work to educate students and the public about caves and their unique hydrology through workshops, teacher training and educational literature provided to the National Park Service doc7684 none This project focuses on Ethylenediaminetetraacetate (EDTA), an anthropogenic chelating agent widely used in industrial processes, household cleaners, and consumer food and health products. EDTA can persist in the environment when biodegradation by microorganisms is slow. Environmental effects of chelating agents have not been fully explored while uses (particularly in chlorine free bleaching applications) are increasing rapidly. The plan focuses on understanding the interactions of chemistry and biology that control the fate of EDTA and on expanding public understanding of environmental systems and non-biodegradable contaminants. The specific objectives of the plan are as follows: Evaluate the effect of co-contaminant metals on the biodegradation of EDTA. Investigate the effect of intermediate formation on the biodegradation of EDTA. Increase understanding of the knowledge and skills of environmental engineering among undergraduate and graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University. Enhance the awareness of secondary teachers to the fundamentals of environmental engineering and the scientific method. Encourage women and minority students to pursue environmental engineering. Develop a national reputation as a strong researcher and dedicated educator. The research, education, and outreach objectives are designed to be integrative. Results in the laboratory and in modeling methodologies will be used as examples and case studies in undergraduate classes, as problems in advanced graduate classes, and as discussion points in outreach activities with secondary teachers. The interactions with teachers and students during outreach activities will be used to raise the awareness of future engineers about their role in advancing scientific literacy. The P.I. s training and experience as a high school teacher will allow the use of interactions with educators at all levels to enhance teaching skills and continue development of creative classroom activities. Activities that are unique to this project include development of a course module on the use, regulation and environmental effects of anthropogenic chelating agents, and hosting high school teachers for summer research in my laboratory doc7685 none Synchrotron x-ray surface scattering and Brewster angle microscopy will be used in a program of research and education to investigate fluctuations and structure at the liquid-liquid interface. Students will be trained to use cutting-edge synchrotron techniques to study interfacial phenomena. This research addresses the poorly understood area of molecular ordering and structure at liquid-liquid interfaces. This interdisciplinary area has important consequences for understanding inhomogenieties in condensed matter systems, and molecular organization at soft interfaces. The results will be relevant to a range of chemical and biological systems. The areas of study are: (1) Molecular ordering and phase transitions in surfactant monolayers at the water-oil interface, (2) Test of a recent hypothesis about the role of capillary waves and intrinsic structure in determining the interfacial width between water and alkanes, (3) Determination of the interfacial Hamiltonian through the study of fluctuating interfaces interacting over short distances in thin wetting films; and (4) Development of a new model system suited for structural studies of the adsorption of larger biomolecules to lipid membranes. Surfactant molecules preferentially adsorb to the interface between two liquids, such as oil and water. The surfactants act as a bridge that connects two types of materials that would, otherwise, not mix. These surfactants play an important role in many domestic products, such as shampoos, paints, and plastics. More importantly, surfactants form the basis for biological cell membranes that support the formation of life on earth. From the point of view of condensed matter physics, it is important to understand how large numbers of molecules arrange themselves at interfaces because the makeup of these interfaces determine many important properties of materials. Chemists and biologists are also interested in the way molecules arrange themselves and transport through liquid interfaces. This is important, for example, in the separation of toxic from non-toxic chemicals and in controlling which biological molecules can enter different parts of cells or the liquid region between cells. Due to the importance of these systems they have been studied for many years. However, an understanding of the structure on the molecular length scale is lacking. During the past three years, NSF support has enabled the development of powerful x-ray scattering techniques that directly probe the organization of molecules at the liquid-liquid interface. The present grant supports the training of students in the further development and application of these techniques to areas of physical, chemical, and biophysical interest doc7686 none Philosophers, artists, and scientists for centuries have thought about how people organize the continuous flow of information reaching our sensory organs into discrete, individuated perceptual objects. As advances have been made in understanding vision, this topic has reemerged in cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience. An object is individuated when the observer (1) perceives its features as belonging to a connected unit, (2) perceives its features as separate from things that are not part of the object, and (3) perceives that it is or is not something that was present sometime in the recent or distant past. An object that is believed to be the same even when it undergoes changes exhibits what is called object constancy. Much of what we know about object individuation and constancy in adult perception has been based on self-report methods. This research will explore the nature of object individuation and object constancy in tasks in which observers are attending to an object but are unlikely to be reasoning about its individuality or constancy. The research will employ a variety of tasks that have been developed in recent years to demonstrate ways in which attention to objects differs from attention to the space that objects occupy. The research will determine whether attention to objects is affected by disruptions to identity continuity or spatiotemporal continuity (i.e., the degree to which it is consistently present and moves through space in a physically possible way). By exploring which discontinuities disrupt attention to objects, the research will establish which continuities are critical to object constancy. In real scenes, spatiotemporal and identity discontinuity rarely are independent of each other. In contrast, this research will take advantage of media special effects that can dissociate them. For example, spatiotemporal discontinuity will sometimes be accomplished by an identifiable object disappearing unexpectedly and reappearing abruptly, and identity discontinuity will sometimes be accomplished by one object morphing smoothly into another. One part of the project will build on previous findings that once one part of an object is attended, it is easier to detect a subsequently presented target feature when it is elsewhere within the attended object rather than equidistant from the attended location but in another object. This project will investigate what disrupts this same-object benefit. For instance, spatiotemporal changes or identity discontinuities will be introduced to the cued or uncued object between the time the cue is presented and the time the target is presented, to see if the same-object benefit is disrupted. The research will also look for disruptions in speed and accuracy of responses to the display. Finally, it will also explore how eye movements are affected by the discontinuities. The direct goal of this research is to understand the fundamental nature of object constancy and individuation. However the results of the research will also have implications for engineering robotic systems that use machine vision to guide manipulation of dynamic objects. Such robotic systems need to differentiate which parts of visual information belong to coherent objects and which belong to different objects. In a different realm, knowledge of what sorts of changes distract people who are processing dynamic displays will aid designers of videos understand how special effects can be used to guide people s attention doc7687 none The research goal of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER)project is to develop operations management models that incorporate issues such as product variety, product line selection and pricing. Two problems will be considered: assortment planning and product line selection. In assortment planning, the retailer makes decisions regarding the number of styles of each product to offer and how much inventory to carry. This problem is difficult because of the possibility of substitution between products. Stochastic inventory models that incorporate demand substitution will be developed. In the product line selection problem, the retailer must select a subset of products from a set of potential products and determine the price of each product. This research will take a stochastic approach, assuming preferences of consumers are not known exactly. For both problems, the research will start with stochastic models developed by the Principal Investigator. These models will be extended to consider: (1) shelf-space and or inventory constraints; (2) demand rates that are a function of the level of product variety; (3) preferences that vary by market segment; and (4) tailers manufacturer coordination. The educational goal of this CAREER development plan is to expand the educational experiences of students to include issues of importance to the service sector, such as supply chain management. The educational plan consists of three components: a graduate course in supply chain management; graduate student research projects on the problems described; and undergraduate research opportunities. If successful, this research will lead to the development of models and decision rules for addressing the joint product line selection, pricing and inventory management problem. These models will provide easily implementable decision rules that can be used by retailers to improve their management of product variety, allowing retailers to reduce inventory levels while satisfying a variety of customer preferences. In addition, these models will provide useful insights into the value of retailer manufacturer coordination in managing product variety doc7688 none Yang The specific goals of this project are to understand site-specific calcium binding properties of EF-hand loops and identify the key factors contributing to calcium affinity of EF-hand motifs in proteins. Calcium binding is essential for the biological functions of EF-hand proteins in controlling cellular calcium levels and in regulating many cellular processes through calcium-induced conformational change. Site-specific information about calcium binding properties of individual EF-hand motifs is essential for defining the sequence for the calcium binding process and the contribution of each EF-hand motif to the conformational change of the intact protein. In this research, the PI will investigate the intrinsic calcium binding affinity of isolated EF-hand motifs by engineering a single EF-calcium-binding site into a scaffold protein. This approach focuses specifically on the intrinsic binding ability of an individual EF-hand motif without the complexities encountered in cooperative, multi-site systems of natural EF-hand proteins. To obtain site-specific information about calcium-binding properties of EF-hand loops, the building blocks of EF-hand motifs will be systematically introduced into the host scaffold. To identify contributions of charged ligands to calcium affinity of EF-loops, the number and geometric arrangement of negatively charged ligands in isolated EF-loops will be also varied doc7689 none Stock It has been hypothesized that a key feature contributing to the capacity of organisms to evolve is the organization of their overall morphology into independently varying units, or modules, that develop under the control of independent genetic pathways. The proposed research uses the vertebrate dentition to examine whether such modular organization applies to meristic systems, i.e. those composed of multiple similarly-constructed parts. The specific hypothesis to be tested is that regions of the dentition of fishes known to evolve independently develop under the control of different sets of genes. Developmental genetic analyses of the dentition will be carried out in two species, the zebrafish (Danio rerio), and the Mexican tetra (Astyanax mexicanus). The former species, a popular model system for developmental genetic studies, possesses teeth only in the pharyngeal region, while the latter possesses both pharyngeal teeth and teeth lining the margins of the oral cavity. The objectives of the project are to determine the extent of modularity in the genetic control of tooth development in oral and pharyngeal regions, and to characterize the mechanism(s) by which the zebrafish lineage has lost oral teeth while retaining pharyngeal teeth. The genes to be examined are members of the Fgf (fibroblast growth factor), Hh (hedgehog), and Bmp (bone morphogenetic protein) signaling pathways known to be involved in the development of the mammalian dentition. Modular genetic control of the the dentition will be investigated by comparisons of oral and pharyngeal regions within both species. These comparisons will include gene expression patterns, the effects of pharmacological inhibition of Fgf and Hh signaling, and (in the zebrafish) the consequences for morphology and gene expression of mutations in components of each signaling pathway. Potential outcomes include the use of identical genetic pathways triggered by separate initiation signals in the two types of teeth versus the existence of extensive differences throughout the pathways.Further insight on modularity in the dentition can be gained by an understanding of the mechanisms of region-specific tooth loss. Evolutionary loss of oral teeth in the zebrafish lineage will be investigated by comparison of gene expression patterns between the oral regions of both species. Genes exhibiting differences in oral expression are likely to have been involved in the independent evolution of oral and pharyngeal teeth. The data to be collected in the proposed research will suggest mechanisms for the development and evolution of members of other meristic systems such as scales and limbs doc7690 none With the support of the Organic Synthesis Program, Professor Huw M. L. Davies, of the Department of Chemistry, State University of New York at Buffalo, is studying the use of high symmetry catalysts in organic synthesis. Coordination of several identical low-symmetry ligands around a central metal core leads to high-symmetry chiral complexes. Thus, dirhodium complexes bearing two C2-symmetric binaphthylphosphate ligands are D2-symmetric, while those with four binaphthylphosphate ligands are D4-symmetric. Three basic reaction types catalyzed by such complexes are under investigation. Highly stereoselective asymmetric C-H activation is effected by means of intermolecular carbenoid-induced C-H insertion. Combined C-H insertion Cope rearrangement protocols lead to carbon-carbon bond formation with potential control of stereochemistry at two stereogenic centers and two double bonds. Finally, [3+2] cycloaddition between vinylcarbenoids and vinyl ethers generates highly functionalized cyclopentenes with excellent stereocontrol at three stereogenic centers. Many of the complex organic molecules displaying desirable properties as pharmaceutical agents contain groupings of atoms with precisely defined geometric ( stereochemical ) relationships. These molecules may differ from undesired compounds through as seemingly subtle a relationship as that between one s left and right hands (i.e., mirror images), and the development of methods for the selective synthesis of such molecules remains a significant challenge. Professor Huw M. L. Davies, of the Department of Chemistry, State University of New York at Buffalo, is supported by the Organic Synthesis Program for his studies of new methods for the selective synthesis of such organic molecules. By the preparation of catalysts with carefully designed symmetry, Professor Davies effects a variety of reactions, particularly those involving the insertion of new carbon centers into carbon-hydrogen bonds, which allow for the construction of more complex products with a high degree of stereochemical control doc7691 none This award in the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program supports Lawrence Sita, University of Maryland College Park, for work on amidinate-based olefin polymerization catalysts. Compounds such as cyclopentadienyl dimethyl zirconium acetamidinate are activated with borate cocatalysts to provide an active species that promotes the stereospecific living Ziegler-Natta polymerization of olefins and the living cyclopolymerization of non-conjugated dienes. New catalysts will be designed, synthesized and evaluated. Kinetic analyses will probe the detailed mechanism, including identification of factors that control the stereochemistry of the growing polymer chain. Polyolefins are a large class of commercial plastics that includes polyethylene and polypropylene. Block copolymers often show desirable properties such as elasticity, crystallinity, thermoplasticity and solubility. These new specialty plastics are used in the packaging, electronics and textile industries. Metallocene and amidinate catalysts provide routes into new and useful polyolefins doc7692 none David Son, Chemistry Department, Southern Methodist University, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program for developing new synthetic routes to cyclic and polymeric silazanes and carbosilazanes. The synthetic chemistry will be applied to the synthesis of novel organosilicon dendrimers and hyperbranched polymers containing -SiNSi-motifs. Repeated halogenation of monomers such as N(SiMe2H)3 followed by condensation with difunctional units such as HN(SiMe2H) can lead to cyclic oligomers or polymers depending on reaction sequencing and conditions. The syntheses of cyclic and ethynyl-substituted oligomers will be investigated to determine ring size preferences and the reactivity of these unusual molecules. The small strained rings will also be characterized to determine their unique bonding characteristics. In addition to their fundamental interest, these polymers and dendrimers may be useful hybrid inorganic organic materials for ceramic films, degradable polymers, and other specialty applications. By participating in this project, undergraduates and masters students will develop expertise in polymer synthesis and characterization doc7693 none PI s objectives are to establish a biomedical engineering research and training program dedicated towards the development of novel artificial cells as drug protein gene delivery systems. He hypothesizes that encapsulation of naturally occurring cytoskeletal polymers along with naturally occurring regulatory cytoskeletal severing and cross-linking proteins inside liposomes will induce the formation of an artificial cell. Use of these regulatory proteins will allow me to engineer cytoskeletal polymer length, and crosslink density. This will consequently influence the three dimensional cytoskeletal network s structure, and mechanical attributes. The resulting encapsulated cytoskeletal network s structure will impart its mechanical stability to the vesicle bilayer making it mechanically stable. These mechanically strengthened hybrid vesicles will have the unique ability to dynamically respond to externally generated shear forces through rearrangement of their cytoskeletal network. In essence these vesicles will self-heal themselves if sheared past their yield strain. The educational component of his goals is to train under-represented African-American Undergraduate students with this award. Students will have the ability to participate in all aspects of the proposed research activities. Currently, there exists a shortage of minorities in the biomedical sciences. This proposal will help reverse this deficit doc7694 none Stern The diapycnal heat and salt flux in an unbounded ocean with Prandtl number of 7, Lewis number of 0.01, and various density ratios between 1 and 2, will be determined by a combination of numerical calculations from the three-dimensional and two-dimensional Boussinesq equations, The undisturbed state of the model consists of a uniform temperature and salinity gradients, wherein salt fingers form and eventually lead to a statistically steady state. The non-dimensional heat flux, i.e., the Nusselt number, and the heat salt flux ratio then depend only on the Prandtl number, Lewis number and density ratio. The numerical results will be compared with observations taken in the Central Atlantic based on dye dispersion and on the Cox method for interpreting thermal microstructure. The numerically obtained flux laws should also be locally applicable to regions of the thermocline containing relatively larger vertical gradients in thin lateral intrusions of temperature and salinity on isopycnal surfaces doc7695 none This proposal seeks modest support for two senior researchers in the field of photosynthesis, who wish to collaborate with others several others in the preparation of plans for a special issue of the journal Photosynthesis Research devoted to the history of this field of biology. One of the PIs (Govindjee) has for 13 years edited a feature of the same journal entitled Personal Perspectives, which are prepared by investigators describing their careers and activities. Twenty-six of these perspectives have appeared. The proposed volume will build upon this record with other recollections and additional information in seeking to provide a historical overview of research in photosynthesis. One PI (Govindjee) is especially well prepared for this project by his previous forays into history; the other (Gest) is also well-recognized. Their careers give them personal experience and knowledge of many of the key events and people that they intend to examine. The PIs have been invited to spend time at Scripps Institution of Oceanography where they will work with two other senior scholars and researchers in this field (Andrew Benson and George Feher) to fine tune their plans for the special historical issue on photosynthesis research doc7696 none Elmore This award provides funding for the construction and testing of a new high-intensity cesium sputter ion source to be installed in the accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) system at Purdue University. The new ion source is expected to improve the precision, detection limits and sample handling capacity of the Purdue AMS facility. The facility measures extremely small concentrations of 10Be, 14C, 26Al, 41Ca, 129I and other radionuclides that are used in research as tracers or in dating for a wide-range of research applications such as archeology and anthropology, paleoclimatology, landscape evolution, glaciology and paleoseismology doc7697 none An important issue that bears on all practical economic analysis is the extent to which we can expect to understand economic phenomena by the process of developing a theory, taking observations and fitting a model. An especially relevant question in practice is whether there are limits on how well we can predict future observations using empirical models that are obtained by such processes. Finding quantitative expression for these limits is the main subject of the project. A primary limitation on empirical knowledge is that the true model for any given data is unknown and, in all practical cases, unknowable. This is because even if the formulated model were correct it would still depend on parameters that need to be estimated from data. Often, the data is scarce relative to the number of parameters that need to be estimated, and this is especially so in models that have some functional representation that necessitates the use of nonparametric or semiparametric methods. In such situations one might expect that the empirical limitations on modeling are greater than in finite parameter models. Using reasoning that was pioneered by Jorma Rissanen in , the author has shown in collaborative work with Werner Ploberger in that there is a quantitative bound on how close an empirical model can get (in terms of its log likelihood ratio) to the true model. This bound depends on the data itself as well as the model that is being used. A discovery that seems important in applications to economic data is that the magnitude of the bound depends on the presence and nature of trends in the data. In particular, the achievable distance is greater for trending data than when the data are stationary. This result gives quantitative expresssion to the intuitively appealing notion that trending data is harder to predict than data that does not trend. The project develops and extends limitation results of this type to models where there are local and gross errors of specification, to nonparametric situations where the dimension of the parameter space is infinite or where it may grow with the sample size, that is, in situations where modeling becomes more ambitious as more data becomes available. The project also seeks to develop explicit representations of the forecast error divergence so that the limits on empirical forecasting capability are quantifed. The intent of this project is to develop the theory to a stage where the limits will be useful to empirical researchers, especially in terms of the implementation of model determination criteria that are designed to achieve the empirical bounds. In subsidiary wings of research that relate to this main theme, the project studies more explicit issues of trend regression, where the order of magnitude of the trend is not specifed but has to be estimated, where there is long memory in the data which is possibly nonstationary and the memory parameter must be estimated semiparametrically, and where there is nonstationary explanatory data but a limited dependent variable. The latter study is relevant to market intervention policy by the Federal Reserve and Treasury. Thus, monetary policy intervention is a binary decision (intervene or not), yet the explanatory variables that determine it involve a host of economic data, much of which has nonstationary features, like the growth characteristics of industrial production and the random wandering behavior of stock prices. We seek to learn how various characteristics in the explanatory data translate into the probability law for the binary variable and, hence, market intervention. Can these probability laws explain, for instance, the tendency of market intervention to lapse into long periods of little intervention broken by periods of regular intervention doc7698 none Makinene, Marvin W. The structural basis of catalytic action of the class B, Zn2+-containing, CcrA metallo-beta-lactamase of Bacteroides fragilis will be assigned through an experimental approach employing cryoenzymology, electron nuclear double resonance (ENDOR) spectroscopy, and computer-assisted molecular modeling. Reaction intermediates of the CcrA metallo-beta-lactamase will be determined kinetically with use of cryokinetic methods, fluid organic-aqueous cryosolvent mixtures, and synthetic spin-labeled penicillin or cephalosporin substrates as spectroscopic probes. Reaction intermediates will be stabilized for ENDOR data collection by freeze-quenching of the solution in a manner similar to that employed in freeze-quenching of protein crystals for cryo-crystallography. Active site residues of wild type recombinant enzyme will be enriched with isotopes by hydrogen deuterium exchange or biosynthetic incorporation of fluoro-tryptophan for ENDOR spectroscopy. The principal hyperfine coupling components of isotopically labeled nuclei in active site residues and on the substrate will be measured by ENDOR to determine their through-space (dipolar) hyperfine coupling components and to estimate corresponding electron-nucleus distances. The dipolar electron-nucleus distances will be used as constraints to assign active site structure and substrate conformation by computer assisted molecular graphics analysis. To assign the structural roles of the active site Zn2+ ions and of metal-coordinated water, paramagnetic Zn2+ Co2+ and Zn2+ Cd2+-hybrid enzymes will be used. The Co2+-center will serve not only as the paramagnetic site for determining the presence of inner-sphere coordinated water through use of H217O but also as a chemical probe to identify metal-linked ionizations governing kcat and kcat KM. By determining substrate conformation, active site structure, and metal ion coordination geometry in a reaction intermediate of the CcrA enzyme, correlated with the pH profiles of steady-state kinetic parameters to assign metal-linked ionizations, the mechanism of the enzyme catalyzed reaction will be determined and the chemical and structural roles of the Zn2+ ions and metal-coordinated solvent will be assigned. The ENDOR methods have been shown to yield estimates of electron-nucleus distances with less than 5% uncertainty in the 3-11 A range for nitroxyl spin-labels and in the 3-8A range for VO2+. The catalytically competent structure of the active site of the enzyme will be assigned through molecular graphics analysis constrained by ENDOR determined electron-nucleus distances. The combined results will lead to a detailed understanding of the structural and chemical roles of the active site binuclear metal ion cluster in the hydrolysis of beta-lactam antibiotics catalyzed by the CcrA beta-lactamase and how the mechanism of the bi-nuclear metallo-beta-lactamases differs from that of their serine hydrolase counterparts doc7699 none Pre-industrial indigenous societies organized economic production on a subsistence level, based on the family and different from that of market-based industrial capitalism. In the modern world culturally distinct indigenous societies move fluidly between institutions and transactions on both sides of the subsistence-market divide. This Career project involves the ethnographic research of a young investigator at Colorado State University. Research on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota will analyze how economic production occurs both in family networks and through market transactions. The project will investigate how households integrate the market and the social economy using methods of time allocation and ethnographic participant observation. The project will study consumption and social networks, cash requirements, responses to new economic opportunities, and the relationships of gender, class, race and ethnicity to build models of labor time allocation and household consumption. The data will allow hypotheses to be tested relating wage labor, gender and social networks. Students from the University and Oglala Lakota College will work in teams to assist with the research. The research will advance our theoretical understanding of the subsistence-market distinction, will train students in research design and methods, will add to the skills of a young investigator, and will help local Lakota students to consider advanced studies at the university doc7700 none Chawla This CAREER program examines novel, environmentally benign solders in bulk form and at small length scales. The research plan includes experimental investigations coupled with computational modeling of the mechanical behavior and microstructure of promising Pb-Sn solder replacement alloys (Sn-Cu, Sn-Ag, and Sn-Ag-Cu). The role of evolution of microstructure, including coarsening of the solder microstructure and solder substrate interactions, is examined with respect to the creep and thermal fatigue behavior. The evolution of microstructure is modeled using the novel, microstructure-integrated, Object Oriented Finite Element Method (OOF), recently developed at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST). Novel micromechanical testing techniques will be developed to characterize thermomechanical behavior at the solder ball level. Conventional FEM techniques, using accurately measured constitutive behavior derived from micromechanical testing, will be used to develop life prediction methodologies. In addition, an outreach program will be implemented through the Office for Minority Engineering Students (OMEP) and the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) program at Arizona State University. High school teachers will spend a summer in the PI s laboratory to gain experience with cutting edge research. Also, part-time students from industry will take part in new and revised courses dealing with the subject of materials for electronic packaging, including physical and mechanical metallurgy of solders. %%% Given the widespread use of Pb-Sn solder in the manufacture and assembly of circuit boards, the development and reliability of new Pb-free solders is crucial for the successful substitution of these materials in the electronic systems. The subject of Pb-free solders is of great interest to local companies such as Intel, Motorola, and Onsemiconductor and close interaction with industry is expected throughout the course of this career development program. It is believed that the education outreach effort will contribute to an increase in the number of undergraduate students majoring in materials science. This is particularly important given the high demand for engineers with materials backgrounds in the microelectronic packaging industry doc7701 none This action is for partial support of a field survey of the Marquesas Islands to identify evidence of the April 1, Aleutian tsunami, such as possible watermarks from the tsunami when it impacted the Marquesas. During a recent survey of a tsunami in the island of Fatu Hiva, large rocks were discovered that had reportedly moved inland in at about the time of the Aleutian tsunami, some as much as 300m. The objective of this joint US France expedition is to document these findings, take measurements, and investigate other anecdotal reports of similar tsunami rocks in other islands in the Marquesas, and assess the local impact of the April 1, . tsunami This work is very timely, as the exact generation mechanism of the April 1, Aleutian tsunami remains controversial -- it is often speculated that there was coseismic tsunami generation due to a massive landslide. The existing hydrodynamic inundation data from Hawaii are not sufficient to perform meaningful hydrodynamic inversion to identify the likely source mechanism. Discovering if a landslide was involved in the Aleutian tsunami is quite important now, as inundation maps for Hawaii are currently being re-evaluated, and inundation maps for the Pacific states of the US mainland are being developed for the first time. Tsunamis from the Aleutians are a concern that needs to be carefully reassessed, particularly in view of the landslide potential. The findings may also help re-evaluate the work in progress on landslide generation of tsunamis, which since the PNG event has helped refocus global tsunami hazard mitigation efforts doc7702 none This is a high performance scientific computing project. It will develop a class of robust scalable preconditioning techniques for solving large sparse linera systems, using multilevel recursive incomplete LU factorization techniques preconditioning techniques to achieve robustness. This research will benefit sectors of American industry using large scale numerical simulations, such as aerospace engineering and nuclear reactor simulation doc7703 none In this effort, the fundamental fluid mechanics and chemical kinetics that control acoustic radiation from flames are investigated, and, using this knowledge, the capability is developed for using acoustic measurements as a high-bandwidth diagnostic of heat release in turbulent flames. Detailed flow- and flame-characterization studies are performed over a wide range of Reynolds and Damkohler numbers. Experiments include two- and three-dimensional velocity field characterization, hydroxyl (OH) planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) to determine flame-front characteristics, and high-frequency pressure and temperature measurements using microphones and fine-wire thermocouples. Measurements are made for different burner diameters and flow velocities to systematically assess turbulent velocity and length-scale effects on flame-generated noise, and also over ranges of equivalence ratio, inlet air temperature, and fuel type in order to assess the effects of laminar flame velocity, laminar flame thickness, and Lewis number on acoustic properties doc7704 none In this US-Brazil experimental project, John Malin of the American Chemical Society (ACS) will initiate a pilot program of traveling seminars in Chemistry. In this project a group of first-rank U.S. scientists will visit several Brazilian institutions over a period of a month. During this time the group will give colloquia in their specialty areas and interact with Brazilian colleagues and their students. The mission to Brazil will be scheduled during the period June-August, . In cooperation with the Sociedade Brasileira de Quimica and the Associacao Brasileira de Quimica, the American Chemical Society will coordinate visits at key research universities in some five locations. Participants will help develop a new climate of research interactions between the U.S. and Brazilian chemistry by establishing new personal contacts, assessing the chemical research environment of the institutions visited, and identifying special scientific opportunities. The visit and the participants report will establish a new basis for enhanced U.S.-Brazilian cooperation in the chemical sciences and also provide a model for interactions with other countries doc7705 none The purpose of the conference is for individuals from leading edge projects who are creating ways to focus professional development on actual classroom practices and, more specifically, using video as a tool for professional development, to: share lessons they have learned about video tape design, platforms and software that facilitates video case study, and the use of videos with teachers; and identify issues that still need to be addressed related to the use of video to improve instruction. Researchers and Developers of such video programs will convene for three and one-half days to consider these lessons and issues, using four of five cases of video development and use to focus the discussion. Based on these discussions, a monograph in print and web-based formats will be produced, which discusses the important challenges faced by professional development leaders as they develop and use videos in their own settings. The monograph will capture the lessons learned about overcoming these challenges and about using videos successfully in a side range of settings doc7706 none Basic research is an activity whose social benefits exceed private benefits, thereby justifying financial support by the federal government. Today, at least ten federal agencies play a significant role in funding research at U.S. universities, representing, on average, more than 60 percent of total research expenditures. Although this percentage has not changed significantly in the last 20 years, the distribution of federal research funding to universities that have historically received low levels of funding has increased substantially. Federal funding is allocated via peer-reviewed and competitive processes as well as through processes that may not utilize as rigorous analysis of the quality of the research to be undertaken. Two such processes are known as earmarking and set-aside programs. These processes have different effects on both the types of research conducted and the distribution of funding across universities. This project will explore the effect of earmarking and set-aside programs on the distribution of federal research funding across universities and on research productivity. This is an important area to study for two primary reasons. First, research and development is considered an important contributor to economic growth. Thus, understanding the role the federal government plays to promote R&D both nationally and regionally needs further exploration to understand the benefits and costs of federal R&D funding. Second, given universities must allocate scarce resources across research, instructional, and other activities, it is important to understand the impact of the different avenues for obtaining federal funding on the research produced by the university, as well as the role of research funding in the distribution of other forms of revenue. A theoretical framework will be developed that will explore the motivations of universities to seek earmarked funding instead of (or as a complement to) funding allocated under a more competitive process as well as the motivations of Congress to allocate funding via earmarks. Using this framework, the distribution of earmarked funding across universities between and the present will be explored empirically to discern which of the theoretical predictions are supported by the data. Next, the effect of earmarked funding, alone and in conjunction with total federal research funding, on research productivity will be explored. With respect to set-aside programs, the research will focus on those universities that have benefited from these programs. Whether and how the research productivity of these universities has changed as a result will be explored. Implicit in the project is the development of a framework that explores several complex relationships and the development of an extensive data set. This project will involve a research assistant to help in all aspects of the research. In addition, the assistant will be supervised in an independent research project by the principal investigator, especially with respect to helping to develop high quality research skills doc7707 none This research applies software understanding and reengineering techniques to the problem of retargeting embedded image processing software to emerging parallel architectures that are capable of efficiently exploiting the inherent data parallelism in these applications. Image and video processing software is found in a wide range of embedded devices. There is a significant demand for low-power, compact imaging devices, e.g., for smart cameras, wearable computers, and autonomous vehicle vision systems. Migrating image and video processing programs to new or extended hardware platforms that support data parallel execution will greatly enhance the image processing capabilities and sophistication of embedded devices. This research seeks to automatically expose the inherent data parallelism in these applications to fuel a new generation of high performance, high efficiency embedded processing systems. Software understanding techniques are being used to provide a deep model of what computation is being performed so that a broader set of parallelization transformations can be accomplished and more opportunities for parallelization can be identified. This work also integrates software reengineering more fully into the education of computer engineers and scientists, and help students learn parallel processing concepts. It will support interactive application of parallelizing transformations and allow students to sharpen their discovery and problem solving skills doc7708 none Paige Plant responses to herbivory can be divided into two components, plant defenses and tolerance. Tolerance refers to the ability of plants to regrow and reproduce following herbivore damage; i.e., the ability to compensate. Yet little is known about how tolerance evolves, with most studies to date focusing on plant defense. Over the past fifteen years studies have been conducted on a specialized case of tolerance in a biennial perennial herb, scarlet gilia, where plants have been observed to achieve greater reproductive success by overcompensating for tissues lost to herbivory. However, scarlet gilia s compensatory response is not universal; exhibiting tremendous variation both within and between populations. To assess whether there is a genetic basis to population differences in compensation, as well as whether selection on plant traits related to compensation differ between populations and locations, reciprocal transplant experiments and selection analyses will be conducted. These studies will be conducted within each of four populations that have been subjected to very different historical levels of herbivory; two of these overcompensate and the other two do not. Studies on the relative importance of genetic versus environmental factors and selection in different environments should contribute to our understanding of the evolutionary response of plants to herbivory, and add general understanding to the factors that do and do not lead to enhanced reproductive success following herbivory. If the mechanisms of overcompensation are genetically based, such responses to herbivory should be of great interest to agriculturists who, through recent advents in molecular genetic technique, might incorporate these traits into crop plants doc7709 none With this renewal award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the work of Dr. David A. Jaeger in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. The proposed research involves the synthesis, isolation, and characterization of two series surfactants based on Co(III) chelates, using ligands related to ethylenediamine tetraacetic acid and nitrilotriacetic acid. The structures of the surfactants will be established using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR of 1H, 13C and 59Co) , UV vis, FT-IR, and single crystal x-ray diffraction. Aggregate morphologies in water will be characterized by Krafft temperature and measurements of critical aggregation concentration, NMR, dynamic light scattering, differential scanning calorimetry, optical microscopy, and electron microscopy. Monolayers on water will be characterized by surface pressure-area isotherms. Of particular interest will be the dependence of aggregate morphology and monolayer behavior on surfactant stereochemistry. Dr. Jaeger s research involves surfactants - surface active agents that prefer to be at the interface between phases (such as air and water) - in which binding of chelating ligands to cobalt +3 ions plays an important role in fixing the structure of the resulting surfactant molecule, and in giving different properties from what they would be in the absence of metal binding. By systematically changing the ligand structure, he hopes to understand the factors controlling the structure and properties of the resulting surfactant. This new class of molecules might have several applications including redox-switched systems, site-specific protein and DNA cleavage catalysts, and catalytic hydrolysis of amides and esters. The work is expected to provide valuable training for the students doing the work because of the variety of experiments and instruments involved doc7710 none Professor Daniel Neumark of University of California Berkeley is supported by the Experimental Physical Chemistry program to perform experimental studies on time resolved dynamics in molecular and cluster anions. One of the goals of the work is to understand the significant differences in the gas phase and solution dissociation dynamics of solvated anions, paying particular attention to the effects of the excess electron. The work continues studies using femtosecond photoelectron spectroscopy and also will include new investigations into photoelectron angular distributions. The fundamental study of anions in clusters will lead to insights about solvation of these species, which are of great importance in electrochemical and biochemical processes, as well as in chemical synthesis. Understanding the changes that occur in reactivity when a process is transferred from the gas to the solution phases will allow us to better utilize decades of gas phase data in applications in the condensed phase, where most industrial applications occur doc7711 none Goodwin Clemente This project involves the dissertation research of a cultural anthropology student from the University of California Los Angeles. The project investigates how children growing up in a multicultural setting (Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain) use communication as a way to create, resist or contest new identities and social roles as cancer patients. Using methods of micro-ethnography, qualitative cross-sectional study of 20 children and longitudinal study of four children, the student will study the children s use of both verbal and non-verbal communication in three discursive practices, teasing, joking and concealing. The project will examine how children negotiate and transform their Catalan and Spanish identities and social roles imposed by parents and caregivers in the context of their life-in the cancer ward of a hospital. The project will advance our understanding of bilingualism as well as communication of emotion in this institutional setting, will bridge linguistic and medical methodologies by examining emotion, in particular pain not only as a subjective phenomenon experience but also as an intersubjective experience emerging in interaction. Finally, the project contributes to the ethnography of children, who are relatively unstudied, advances our knowledge of this region of the world, and contributes to the training of a young social scientist doc7712 none Professor Dor Ben-Amotz of Purdue University is supported by the Experimental Physical Chemistry and International programs to perform experimental and theoretical studies on solvent effects on chemical reactions. These studies combine pressure and temperature dependent Raman measurements with Monte Carlo simulations, quantum calculations and the development of new theoretical approaches to solvation modeling (based on molecular hard sphere and generalized mean field approximations). Experimental studies include conformational reactions, such as the gauche-trans isomerization of alpha, beta-dihaloalkanes, and addition reactions, such as the condensation of methanol and acetone. The pressure work utilizes diamond anvil cells, making very high pressures possible. The theoretical component involves collaboration with Dr. Igor Omelyan of the National Academy of Science, Ukraine. The PI seeks a global model to quantify the effects of solvation on chemical reaction and partition thermodynamics. Solvation has extremely important industrial and biological applications, and studies of reactions in solution are much less advanced than those of reactions in the gas phase. A more complete theoretical understanding of this phenomenon could have an important impact doc7713 none R. Lueptow, Northwestern University The 12th International Couette-Taylor Workshop will be held at Northwestern University in September with Dr. Lueptow as the organizer. Besides Couette-Taylor flow, the research topics to be discussed in the workshop will include non-linear dynamics, instability, Goertler Dean vortices, and other vortical flows. It is anticipated the workshop will have 80-100 participants with 50-60 contributed papers. It provides an excellent opportunity for fluid dynamicists in this field of research to have an open exchange of ideas doc7714 none Exploratory environments - virtual worlds in which users interact with a simulation of a physical or abstract space to form, pursue and achieve their goals - have shown great success in applications ranging from education and training to entertainment to social interaction. A principal limitation of these systems, however, is that users activities within them are typically greatly over- or under-constrained. To address this problem, the PI will develop new plan-based models for the structure of user interactions within exploratory environments. Planning techniques will be used to create novel activity within the environment that encompasses both the system-controlled characters, the environment and the actions of the user. The PI will build on his prior work in plan generation and plan-related communication to develop an architecture for creating, monitoring and controlling interaction in intelligent exploratory environments. This architecture will integrate: planning algorithms that create plans for interaction in virtual worlds whose structure is readily understandable by users; discourse generation algorithms that effectively communicate the currently unfolding plan-based activity; and execution monitoring algorithms that mediate the execution of actions between the user interface and the virtual world, intervening in appropriate ways when actions that the user intends to perform deviate from the system s current plan structure. If successful, the work will greatly increase our ability to produce engaging, novel and effective virtual environments in which users domain- and task-oriented learning are enhanced across a range of applications and contexts doc7715 none In this project, trading agents---software programs that participate in markets---will be designed to ascertain the rules of auctions of interest and dynamically construct a decision representation. A strategy generation engine is the component of a flexible trading agent that converts the inputs (user preferences, auction rules, and models of other agents) into a decisionable format. Game theory and Markov Decision Processes are techniques that will be applied to making decisions in these markets. Previous research in the area of trading agents assumes that the market configuration is predetermined. However, the Internet marketplace is far more fragmented; a particular product will often be offered for sale in a variety of auction formats. Thus, flexible trading agents are necessary. The software programs will be made publicly available as Web-based learning materials for e-commerce courses. These materials will enable instructors in e-commerce and artificial intelligence courses to use trading agent games for class projects doc7716 none The goal of this research project is to develop agent-based systems--for electronic commerce, automated manufacturing, or supply-chains, for example--where the agents adapt their behaviors so as to maximize their individual rewards. A general predictive theory is developed, which can determine expected emergent behaviors from initial agent capabilities and interaction protocols. A methodology for the engineering of utility-based adaptive multi-agent systems is derived from these studies. Finally, the theories are applied to the development of an incentive-compatible information exchange protocol and its implementation in a prototype information exchange multi-agent system. Information serves as a currency in the protocol, and its value is determined via the agents adaptive behavior. The aggregate of all the users knowledge, opinions, and biases are immediately accessible to all users. Such research is critical to begin to predict the emergent behavior of systems and to move in the direction of integrating multi-agent systems theory and practice. New graduate curricula with an emphasis on decentralized systems and an undergraduate course on agent-based software engineering will be developed doc7717 none Singer : One of the most difficult aspects of the application of theoretical methods to practical systems lies in the translation of a real-world problem into a manageable theoretical model. Often there are a number of aspects of the problem that are either difficult to model concisely, or that are completely unknown. For example, in many commercial and military applications, compact, efficient devices are desired that can operate in a wide range of possible environments. This research is developing a framework for explicitly dealing with such uncertainties in a number of important areas such as wireless and underwater acoustic communications, signal estimation and detection, and forecasting. In particular, this research leverages some of the new and exciting methods for dealing with uncertainty and complexity from the information theory literature. Problems of uncertainty and variability are being addressed through the development of robust signal processing methods motivated by contemporary applications in lossless source coding and competitive on-line algorithms. Such universal algorithms can provide a particularly effective means for handling uncertainty in a variety of adaptive estimation problems. These include universal estimation and equalization strategies which without prior knowledge of the signal or channel can asymptotically achieve the performance of the optimal filter tuned to the signal or channel in use. These algorithms can be practically implemented and integrated into larger systems with relatively low complexity through the use of graphical models and iterative processing techniques used in the study of turbo codes and low-density parity check codes. Iterative algorithms such as factor graphs provide a natural framework for the joint optimization of a variety of tasks typically treated separately. Motivated by the near-capacity achieving performance of iterative decoding and turbo-codes, this research is developing practical, efficient iterative algorithms for joint detection, estimation and decoding of digital communications over single and multi-user channels with inter-symbol interference. The educational component of this research program includes significant curriculum development at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and a strong investment in the mentoring of graduate students. A key aspect of this research includes the active involvement of undergraduates in ongoing research. Singer LEVEL OF EFFORT STATEMENT: At the recommended level of support, Andrew Singer will make every attempt to meet the original scope and level of effort of this project doc7718 none Sinha Leaves of higher plants are the primary photosynthetic structures and account for energy exchanges on a global scale and are responsible for plant survival. While two types of leaves, simple and complex, can arise from any given shoot apex, the developmental and evolutionary basis of these divergent leaf morphologies is not known. The phylogenetic relationships in higher plants suggest that complex leaves arose multiple independent times during the evolution of land plants. Do simple and complex leaves differ at the level of some basic cascade of processes or are new genes and regulatory networks involved in generating each independent event of leaf complexity? The role of well-defined genes like the KNOTTED-Like HOMEOBOX Class 1 genes (KNOX1), LFY. PHAN in the generation of leaf complexity needs to be defined. Further, as yet unknown loci that regulate the process also need to be identified. The proposed research will utilize gene expression analyses in unrelated families with complex leaves, differential gene expression analyses in clonal individuals exhibiting contrasting leaf forms, and the cloning of factors that regulate leaf complexity in related species. The goal of this research is to identify the genes that regulate leaf shape and form, and to help us understand how leaf form is developed to uniquely suit the photosynthetic function that leaves perform doc7719 none This CAREER project addresses the formation, strain relaxation, and morphological evolution of metamorphic buffer layers and their impact on the properties and performance of device applications specific to the wireless communication industry. Buffer layers based on Sb-containing alloys will be studied to achieve flat and low defect layers. Layer designs that reduce roughness and threading dislocations will also be studied. Properties will be characterized using a in situ (Multi-Beam Optical Stress Sensor, Reflection High Energy Electron Diffraction, Scanning Tunneling Microscopy)and ex situ (triple axis x-ray diffraction, transmission electron diffraction, photoluminescence, Hall measurements) techniques to assess microstructure and morphology, and their impact on electronic and optical properties. Additionally, MHEMT devices will be fabricated based on optimized metamorphic buffer layers, tested, and performance compared to the state-of-the-art devices. The project will be integrated into educational activities that include undergraduate and graduate curriculum development, undergraduate research opportunities, and outreach to young women. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in a topical area of materials science having high technological relevance. The research will contribute basic materials science and physics knowledge at a fundamental level to important aspects of electronic photonic materials. The scope of the project will expose students to challenges in materials synthesis, processing, and characterization. An important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, outreach to young women, and the integration of research and education doc7720 none Chamberlin One evolutionary theme that can be derived from the field of molecular developmental genetics is that diversity in morphology among species is achieved with a remarkably similar set of regulatory proteins. In the context of this similarity, current models suggest that diversity results from precise alterations in the functions of developmental regulatory genes. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying evolutionary changes in gene function are poorly understood, and they are difficult to derive from comparisons of divergent species because divergent species are the product of a large number of changes. In contrast, comparisons between closely related species may provide a sufficiently similar genetic and developmental background for the mechanism responsible for a specific change to be studied. In the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, the lin-48 gene encodes a zinc finger transcription factor. lin-48 is important in the development of hindgut (rectum) cells and the excretory duct cell, and is expressed in these cells. Expression of C. elegans lin-48 transgenes is conserved when they are introduced into the closely related species C. briggsae, except the excretory duct expression is absent. This project will investigate regulation of lin-48 as a model for a precise change in a gene s specificity. A first objective is to identify the source of this change by functionally comparing regulatory elements from the promoters of C. elegans and C. briggsae lin-48 genes. A second objective is to investigate changes in lin-48 function between the two species. In C. elegans, lin-48 functions redundantly with other genes in the development of the excretory duct cell. Accordingly, the hypothesis that C. briggsae excretory duct development has shifted to rely on the function of one of these redundant genes will be tested. Graduate student mentoring will be integrated into these first two objectives. A third objective is to survey other Caenorhabditis zinc finger genes for differences in expression pattern between species. This objective will be carried out as part of an undergraduate research program. A fourth objective is to increase problem solving opportunities, peer tutorials, and active learning in a molecular genetics course for non-majors to encourage an interest in, and understanding of, genetics among non-specialists doc7721 none domains. In music, for example, long pauses serve as a kind of gateway denoting a change in movements. The PI, who first introduced the gateway construct, has proposed that the kinds of gateways found in an environment can significantly impact human performance within the environment. A deeper understanding of this relationship will impact the evaluation and design of environments ranging from music to web sites to courses. The research will take place at an undergraduate liberal arts college, and will provide students with the opportunity to participate in advanced research and to gain hands-on experience with robots doc7722 none This PECASE award is a longitudinal study of how elementary teachers learn to teach science. Of particular interest is supporting new elementary teachers--preservice teachers and teachers in their first four years ofteaching--in learning to teach inquiry-based science, and investigating how these teachers learn from a supportive, integrated, technology-mediated instructional resource and learning environment. The research will characterize teacher learning and propose a mechanism explaining that learning; investigate ways that specific supports provided using technology and contextual features of their larger environment are related to that learning; and identify links among teachers learning, their practice, and their students learning. Research objectives will be met through interrelated series of longitudinal learning studies, design studies, community studies, and context studies. As a context in which teacher learning and ways of supporting that learning can be investigated, an integrated instructional resource and technology-mediated learning environment for teachers called CASES will be developed. CASES will provide teachers with curricular materials they need in their first years of teaching, and will help them make sense of the complex ideas about science teaching in the context of their practice. The development of CASES will be based on a theoretical foundation grounded in current sociocognitive approaches to teaching, learning, and technology design. The teaching plan involves integrating the CASES learning environment in the researcher s elementary science methods courses for undergraduate and masters students preparing to be elementary teachers. The work will also be discussed in a doctoral course, and doctoral students will serve as mentors for new teachers doc7723 none SUNY-Albany Sharon S. Dawes Digital Government: A Multinational Investigation of New Models of Collaboration for Delivering Government Services The intention of this research is to enhance understanding of multi-organizational partnerships in the innovative delivery of government services. Studies will include not only cross-sector partnerships, but also partnerships between government agencies. Collaborating in the project s leadership is Canada s Centre Francophone d Informatisation des Organisations; several other countries around the world are also participating in the study. Questions to be addressed by the project include: 1. Which political, socio-economic and cultural factors promote successful interorganizational collaboration? 2. What are the characteristics of organizations that engage in such partnerships? 3. What are critical success factors? 4. Which technologies offer the most promise? 5. What are the advantages and disadvantages of different forms of collaboration doc7724 none With this Accomplishment Based Renewal award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program continues its support for the work of Dr. Bart E. Kahr in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Washington in Seattle. The research involves the study of the intermolecular interactions which take place during crystal growth, and will use a variety of light measurements, including absorbance, luminescence, linear dichroism, linear birefringence, and circular birefringence (optical rotation). The influences of crystals on light will be used to image actively growing crystal surfaces and measure effective electrical charges. Eventually it may be possible to provide a catalog of luminescent molecules for identifying particular crystal growth processes. Combining effects from various optical methods, including optical rotation imaging, will make it possible to learn much about these changing heterogeneous samples. Eventually it may be possible to design mixed crystals with prescribed optical properties, and to understand the role of mixed-crystal growth in the success of matrix assisted laser desorption ionization in mass spectroscopy doc7725 none Hanson This research investigates how computer automation is contributing to changes in the status, conceptualization and use of knowledge in American society by means of a case study of legal information. The researcher, a cultural anthropologist from the University of Kansas, will investigate the impact of artificial intelligence in the form of expert systems for automated processing of legal procedures and computer assisted legal research. The difference between the traditional conceptualization of the law as a hierarchical, taxonomic form of knowledge and the more contemporary computer-influenced conceptualization of computerized keyword searching, which implies a more horizontal, loosely structured network will be studied for its impact on the practice of law. Methods include a literature search and inventory of legal expert systems, open ended interviews with legal theorists and practitioners in law firms and courts, and comparative research in Europe and Australia where the use of legal expert systems is more advanced than in the USA. The research will plot the number of citations to non-legal sources in opinions issued by selected state Supreme Courts and Federal District Courts over the past forty years, as well as perform other quantitative analyses to assess the permeability of the boundary between the law and other disciplines. This research should advance our understanding of the impact of computerized information technologies on legal institutions. The new knowledge to be created will be valuable to theorists as well as practitioners of the law doc7726 none Development, Understanding, and Control of Aligned Nanofiber Nanotube Polymer Composites for Engineering Applications. This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award supports two main projects devised to shorten the gap between scientific understanding and engineering of nanofiber nanotube reinforced polymer composites. The first project will focus on the enhancement of properties by nanofiber tube alignment, where the composite can then be further processed with conventional composite manufacturing technologies providing for high performance structures. This project will be conducted along with studying the effects of the aligned nanofibers tubes on the morphological, mechanical, thermal, and electrical properties of the developed composites. The second project will center on the study of the rheology involved in the system. The development of relationships between rheological properties (i.e. viscosity and relaxation modulus) and molecular structure, composition, temperature, time, and pressure will promote the understanding of the composite system and will relate it to process optimization. For the education component, the PI will develop and teach courses and labs in polymer engineering and polymer processing. A significant component of the education plan will be the supervision and mentoring of undergraduates at UTPA, 85 percent of whom are Hispanics, first generation college bound who have had limited experiences with scientific research. The opportunity to actively participate in cutting edge research will be an invaluable tool for our students and will foster the desire to continue in research careers. An outreach to middle school students exposing them to a Magic and Science Show is also part of the education component. It is designed to encourage and stimulate an interest in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SME&T) related courses doc7727 none Synapses are the nodes of communication between cells in the nervous system. Their precise position and function enables us to perform tasks as simple as moving our limbs, and as complex as formulating new memories and ideas. The neuromuscular junction, or synapse between a spinal cord motor neuron and a muscle cell, is by far one of the largest and simplest to study. During development, proper synapse formation requires ongoing nerve-muscle electrical activity. Without this activity, synapses fail to form properly. The purpose of Dr. Loeb s project is to determine what are the molecular factors that regulate the formation of synapses and how normal synaptic activity orchestrates these factors. Dr. Loeb s hypothesis is that regulatory factors are released both from the muscle cell and the neuron in response to the degree of electrical activity of the synapse and that these factors, in turn, have regulatory effects on each other that ultimately bring together necessary synaptic building blocks. It will be studied how disrupting electrical activity of the synapse during synapse development modulates the production of two families of regulatory factors: the neuregulins, expressed in neurons, and the neurotrophins, expressed in muscle. Dr. Loeb will also use a model system in the chick embryo that prevents the development of the limb on one side to see the effects of neurotrophic factors derived from that limb on the expression of neuregulins in neurons. From these studies, Dr. Loeb hopes to generate a unifying hypothesis of how synapses are formed and how this process is fine-tuned during development doc7728 none Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) are a method of computing via quantum effects. QCA are arrays of quantum-dot cells with each cell containing a regular arrangement of quantum dots and a limited number of electrons. The electrons are allowed to tunnel between dots. The particular arrangement of cells reflects the computational problem, while the lowest energy distribution of electrons reflects the computational result. QCA have garnered much attention because they seem to be physically realizable with slight improvements in current fabrication techniques. Advantages include faster computation, denser circuits, and extremely low power consumption. In a QCA circuit composed of primitive QCA logic devices, the state of downstream devices can adversely affect the state of upstream devices. A partial solution stems from redesigning the primitive elements. One aspect of this work is to quantify the cost of redesigned elements, to devise more cost-effective solutions, and to determine the risks of using uncorrected devices. The second aspect involves designing QCA for higher operational temperatures via architectural changes. The third aspect concerns investigation of QCA-like devices with smoother energy spaces for eliminating meta-stable states. The education plan includes the development of a new CS EE graduate course, entitled New Architectures for Computing. The course will feature theory and practice concerning QCA, pure quantum computing, DNA computing, and other novel architectures. The theory portion will include modules stemming from portions of the research plan. Students will chose a topic, perform a small but significant amount of original research, and submit a paper to an appropriate venue doc7729 none Rudolph Marcus of the is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to carry out theoretical research on chemical reaction rates and related problems in the areas of ozone formation, ion transfer, and electron transfer. The unusual mass-independent isotope effect in ozone formation will be investigated, along with related experimentally observed pressure and temperature effects of the phenomenon. The recent theory of ion transfer across immiscible liquid-liquid interfaces will be further developed, along with theory for the approach of an ion to nano- and macro-surfaces, using the singular hydrodynamic behavior as a benchmark with comparison to available experiments and computer simulations. Finally, work on electron transfers at semiconductor liquid interfaces will be extended with the aim of obtaining a simple local analytical or quadrature expression. This will provide a basis for examining existing phenomenological models, and enable testing of a perturbation approach for long-range electron transfer in DNA, plant photosystems, and other materials. All of these theoretical studies are motivated by current experimental results. The outcomes from this theoretical project are expected to impact several scientific and technological disciplines. The isotope studies will lead to improved insights into chemical reactions in the earth s atmosphere and other planetary atmospheres. Nanotechnology gains are expected with improved understanding of electrochemical processes. This research also has implications for electronic device construction and the understanding of chemical corrosion doc7730 none Rapid emerging information technologies (IT), new sensors, wireless communications, and high tech controls will likely form a foundation for the next generation of transportation systems. To jump-start the evolutionary process a technology oriented basic research program is needed. This project outlines a plan for developing such a program centered around a workshop titled A Basic Research Program for Surface Transportation Systems. The workshop will bring together 25 to 30 leaders in technology and transportation from academia and industry to structure the research program and draft a research project solicitation. The purpose of this proposed activity is to develop a 10-year basic research vision with a 25-year focus to be implemented through a partnership between the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Transportation. It will incorporate the technologies noted above that are not traditionally included in transportation research. The objective to identify Areas of Influence and impacts of science and technology on transportation from the perspective of those supporting disciplines. The goal of this program is to support basic research that provides the science and technology to ensure the following: 1. The use of IT to make our surface transportation system safer, more reliable, and more productive. 2. The impact on our human and natural systems of the use of IT to sustain and revitalize our transportation system must be understood well enough that we can capitalize upon the opportunities it presents to improve performance, as well as to identify and mitigate any unwanted consequences. 3. Knowledge must be made available that will support managing both the complexity and the vulnerability of surface transportation systems. Products from the workshop will include a report documenting a proposed 10-year research vision and the rationale behind the development of such a sustained program doc7731 none This project is providing scholarships to low- income, academically talented students who show interest and promise in majoring in computer science, engineering, and mathematics. The college is providing a student- support infrastructure through its Center for Science Excellence (CSE), thus facilitating the successful graduation of students with an associate- level degree and transfer to a four- year college or university. The college s student- support infrastructure coordinates formal study, work experience in science and technology, and various science- and technology- based activities through a social support system. It provides academic support in the form of mentoring, academic workshops, tutoring, internship opportunities, leadership development, scientific seminars, and field trips. Through active recruitment efforts in CSE and a competitive application process, the college is selecting 40 financially disadvantaged, academically talented students interested in computer science, engineering or mathematics who meet all the eligibility requirements. The scholarship awards are being distributed during the recipients second year of enrollment at the College and during their first year of transfer. Scholarship recipients will enroll as full- time students, be expected to maintain a minimum 3.0 grade point average, and follow an educational plan prescribing a sequence of courses that is enabling them to graduate and transfer to a baccalaureate- granting institution. Experience shows that gaining access to a coordinated support system of mentoring, internships, and enrichment activities along with high academic expectations is an important contribution to students success doc7732 none The issue of evaluation for mathematics and science education programs has been a concern for the field of evaluation and NSF for several years. The pool of qualified evaluators is not large enough to keep pace with the growing need for and interest in evaluation. To this end, in the AERA Grants Program created the Evaluation Training Program (ETP), designed to train doctoral students in state-of-the-art evaluation theory and practice, and to stimulate the development of evaluator training programs at four select higher education institutions. As the ETP winds down, there exists a window of opportunity to evaluate the program and use the experience gained to assist NSF in developing new programs to train qualified evaluators for mathematics and science education programs. This proposal includes a formal evaluation of the ETP, meetings of ETP students and PIs and the creation of an Advisory Panel to assist NSF staff as they consider the next steps for NSF-funded evaluator training doc7733 none 00- Hungate CAREER: Ecosystem responses to rising CO2 and climate change: Feedbacks through the nitrogen cycle Scientists now agree that concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere are increasing, and that this is causing temperatures to rise around the globe. Yet, how these changes will affect ecosystems, particularly processes that occur below ground, is not at all well understood. Nitrogen is required by plants, and both rising CO2 and climate warming could profoundly alter rates of nitrogen cycling in ecosystems and the ability of plants to acquire the nitrogen they need. For example, both warming and rising CO2 could change the way water moves through ecosystems, and thereby alter the process of decomposition through which soil microorganisms make nitrogen available to plants. This CAREER project combines research on how rising CO2 and warming will affect nitrogen cycling in soil, education of undergraduate and graduate students about the significance of these issues, as well as efforts to convey the findings of this research project to the public doc7734 none The proposed career development plan seeks to integrate research and education to pioneer innovative techniques for comprehensive characterization of disinfection processes. This research will use Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) models as a numerical tool to: a) design and assess the overall disinfection process and b) develop an interactive disinfection education module that will be integrated into the civil and environmental curricula as well as into two new courses, a one-day introductory course for high school students and a four-day course on enhanced-disinfection analysis tools for practicing engineers. The EPA is considering extensive revisions to the disinfection by-products (DBP) regulations. At the same time, water treatment professionals are faced with the challenging task of improving drinking water quality and reducing the risk of waterborne disease outbreaks. Under the Surface Water Treatment Rule (SWTR), the EPA has published disinfection regulations for treatment of surface water sources. The basic assumption in this rule is that a specific combination of disinfectant concentration and contact time (CT) will lead to a certain degree of inactivation of the target microorganism. However, these techniques used by EPA to quantify the amount of microbial inactivation have not only been found to be too conservative but may also promote DBP formation. This research program proposes to use CFD to I) develop and evaluate alternative disinfection models for the prediction of effluent microbial inactivation through continuous flow systems and II) assess the impact of disinfectant injection methods and multiple disinfectant injection points on microbial inactivation and DBP formation. A planned set of pilot- and full-scale testing will help validate the numerical results. Another major component of this research is the development of a protocol that will help engineers customize CFD models for a specific water treatment plant with unique raw water quality conditions and pre-disinfection processes. The educational plan involves the development of a CFD disinfection-education module. The education module will be built on the foundations of the CFD disinfection model. However, students will not be required to learn CFD modeling. The CFD disinfection-education module will be designed around a graphical user interface (GUI) that will be the primary mode of communication between the user and the CFD model. The education module is composed of three sections: I) power point video-based disinfection process-lecture series, II) solved disinfection problems and simulated tracer tests, and III) team-based disinfection design projects. Furthermore, a short course on disinfection using a portion of the disinfection-education module will be developed for high school students as well as another course on enhanced disinfection analysis tools for practicing engineers. A dynamic partnership involving consulting engineers, water treatment-plant professionals, and academics will help ensure the success of the various phases involved in this research doc7735 none Many recent innovations in science education are designed to embed science learning into meaningful contexts. These task-structured curricula are organized around specific projects, goals, or issues that cut across multiple content areas at varying levels of depth, unlike content-structured curricula that are organized around disciplinary topics. The content covered in these new curricula has different properties when compared to content-structured curricula, which makes the description and measurement of learning difficult. This project aims to develop theoretical frameworks and methodological strategies that can be used to characterize conceptual change in task-structured curricula. The project will result in three outputs: (1) an assembly of theoretical frameworks and methodological strategies referred to as the Conceptual Dynamics program, (2) application of the program to analyze existing task-structured curricula, and (3) development of resources for teaching students in the learning sciences doc7736 none The central theme of this research plan is to formally study numerical issues concerning algorithms for continuous optimization. A primary goal is to address central topics in numerical analysis - such as perturbation theory, conditioning, and sparsity - in the continuous optimization context. A second objective is to gain further insight into interior point methods for convex programming. Special attention will be paid to numerical aspects such as the solution of the linear equations arising at each main iteration and the effects of limited precision in arithmetic computations. Properties of the central path and local convergence results will be studied. Applications of the analytical perspective for convex optimization in probability and discrete optimization will be explored. The educational plan involves activities both at the master and doctoral levels. At the master level, further development of courses in quantitative methods and applications of operations research will be pursued. Special emphasis will be placed on the role of mathematical models in a variety of industrial applications. At the doctoral level, exposure to interior point methods, semidefinite programming, and real model computation will be provided through the graduate nonlinear programming course, seminars, and reading courses doc7737 none A wide variety of techniques exist for conditional inference on exponential families arising from discrete distributions. Normal theory methods, which rely on the approximate multivariate normality of the joint distribution of summary statistics from the data set, are often inaccurate for small data sets, and their quality can often be poor for summaries that indicate large parameter effects. They also ignore discreteness in the data. More sophisticated approximation techniques, known as saddlepoint techniques, are often used in cases when normal theory methods are inadequate. These techniques often do not account for discreteness in data, and hence are suboptimal in their unmodified forms. Exact inferential techniques are also available, but these techniques apply only to a limited number of models, require proprietary software, and fail when sample size reaches a moderate size. Extensions to this software that employ Monte Carlo techniques for larger sample sizes are not yet commercially available. These Monte Carlo techniques have the further disadvantage of delivering a variety of results for the same data set. The techniques proposed use saddlepoint approximations in a way that accounts for discreteness in the data while avoiding most of the computationally intractable aspects of exact calculations. Some of the projects proposed in this grant application involve new approximations, such as for approximating higher--dimensional distribution functions, and others involve modifications to existing approximations to avoid numerical instabilities. Other projects involve formulating confidence regions to make accurate calibration easy, and modifying the conditioning event to obtain a more powerful analysis, and performing diagnostics to ensure that the proper approximations are used. These methods will be general enough to apply to any canonical exponential family supported on a lattice, and hence to any generalized linear model with canonical link, observations supported on a lattice, and design matrix whose entries are confined to a lattice. Examples of models that will be accommodated are logistic regression, Poisson regression including log linear models for contingency tables, and multinomial models. Regression models with more exotic error structures, including positive Poisson and negative binomial distributions, will also be accommodated. This proposed research is intended to aid in statistical inference on multiple parameters, in the presence of other nuisance parameters that are not of direct interest, when the distribution modeled is discrete. For example, the probability that a cancer patient will stay in remission can be modeled as a function of a variety of factors. Some of these effects, like which treatment a patient received or whether the patient had other cancer--related pathologies, may generalize to other populations, and others, like the effect of a particular center where the patient was treated, may not generalize. Thus one might be interested in describing the possible values that the parameters of interested take on, without being required to simultaneously estimate the remaining parameters. Typically one treats information associated with nuisance parameters as held fixed, and performs inference conditionally on this information. That is, one assesses the the evidence concerning the parameter of interest by comparing experimental results to the population of possible results such that the information about nuisance parameters is held fixed. The research agenda proposed here presents methods for doing these calculations, which balance high computational costs of exact methods against potential inaccuracies of approximations, and introduces and combines new methods for both exact and approximate calculations. These new methods will make the analysis of small discrete data sets, commonly occurring in applied sciences, quicker and more accurate doc7738 none s that are needed for understanding complete life processes. The quantification of amplitudes of internal motion provides insight into mechanistic details of protein function that might be missed in static representations of structure. The target systems for testing the methodology include a number of well characterized proteins such as myoglobin and rubredoxin, but also include recently identified electron transfer partners of a rubredoxin from a thermophilic organism. In terms of general impact, this project will provide training opportunities for undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students. Development of methods and training in the use of methods that can define protein function at a molecular level is becoming increasingly important in a post-genomic era. Vast quantities of protein sequence information can have an impact on the development of new biotechnology products, and the treatment of disease, but only with an adequate understanding of protein function doc7739 none The project focuses on integration of two learning paradigms for modeling stochastic visual patterns, and on developing a computational paradigm for effective stochastic inference. The work will strengthen the move from descriptive to generative models. Algorithms for learning and inference stronger than those existing today will be developed. A few order of magnitude improvement is expected for the mew methods. There is a good education program that includes improvement in the curriculum and design of new courses. Strong collaboration with industry and governmental labs will provide students with interesting experience doc7740 none F. Jaberi, Michigan State University The PI proposes to study the following two areas: one is the development of Sub-Grid Scale (SGS) models for the implementation of the Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of turbulent reacting flows, and secondly, the exploratory research on monitoring indoor air quality and multiphase & multifluid transport. In both areas of the research, the PI proposes to use the filtered mass density function (FMDF) developed by the PI for the closure methodology in LES application. He also plans to incorporate more realistic chemical kinetics in the turbulent combustion problem. Advances in simulation of turbulent combustion will result in improvements of combustion efficiency and better prediction of pollution production. A better monitoring of indoor air quality will lead to a healthier living environment doc7741 none Photonic devices are critical to the development of next generation information and telecommunications technologies. Mechanical strain induced in processing and service of the devices has wide ranging effects on functional properties from the atomic scale up to the continuum scale. This CAREER program will develop coupled mechanics, physics, and materials models to address these multiscale phenomena. Computational and analytical methods will be used to study the following problems: (i) defect and interfacial strain effects on electronic structure in optoelectronic materials, (ii) mismatch strain effects in arrays of self-assembled quantum dots, and (iii) process strain-induced curvature in thin, free standing optical MEMS devices. The research program will be complemented by a comprehensive educational plan, with the goal of motivating students to study micro- and nanomechanics. A freshman level mini-course in nanomechanics will be instituted as part of the Intro to Engineering series in the College of Engineering. A journal club for students of all levels interested in micro- and nanomechanics will be organized. A student chapter of the Materials Research Society will be founded and will allow students to take advantage of the proximity of the University to the fall annual meeting held each year in Boston doc7742 none The Strut-and-Tie Method (STM) is an emerging and rational design procedure that has the potential to revolutionize the way that engineers design D-(Discontinuity) Regions in structural concrete. D-Regions are those portions of a structure in which there is a complex variation in strain, such as in joints, corbels, and deep beams, as well as in regions near a concentrated force, opening or another discontinuity. This research project will consist of three activities that are focused on overcoming barriers that stand in the way of the STM s advance in the educational and practicing communities. (i) Much-needed experimental research will be conducted to help assess the dimensions, stiffness, and strength characteristics of struts, ties, and nodes. (ii) A computer-based design program will be developed that eliminates the cumbersome design tasks of making repetitive calculations of truss geometry, member dimensions, and stress values. (iii) Educational resources will be created to aid teachers, students, and practitioners in the understanding and use of this unfamiliar design methodology. The results of this research will be disseminated on a project web site www.ce.uiuc.edu kuchma strut&tiehttp: www.ce.uiuc.edu kuchma strut%26tie. Through the advance of the STM, students and engineers will be able to design all types of D-Regions by simply focusing on the flow of forces in a truss. This will result in the construction of more reliable and efficient D-Regions in our civil infrastructure doc7743 none One of the primary, and often the most important, goals of any computer system is good performance. So it is for communication networks-throughput is the primary evaluator and impetus for new network research and development. In this proposal, we identify a new paradigm for thinking about distributed algorithms that exploits a shift in the engineering environment, the availability of high-precision globally synchronous clocks with cheap hardware. Many research projects are investigating the limits of precision and uses of precise time for traditional, e.g., operating system, algorithms. We propose to build on this research, focusing on improved performance of application-level algorithms and targeting distributed, real-time databases support for e-commerce applications. The career development plan outlined in this proposal focuses on the principal investigator s efforts to integrate core research and educational objectives. The research project addresses a number of important issues in the discovery and analysis of precise time-based algorithms for distributed, real-time systems. The ultimate goal of the proposed work is and estimate of the benefit of precise globally synchronous time for a wide variety of applications. The objective is to not only develop and analyze new time based network protocols, but to characterize the impact of globally synchronous time on distributed algorithms in general. to achieve this, we introduce the concept of a timed stream and propose to investigate how to best implement and use timed streams to achieve high performance distributed, real-time applications. The educational component is closely related to the research plan. Students at the undergraduate and graduate level, as well as industrial participants, will use the software produced and data gathered during the research activities detailed in this proposal. The tools (e.g., new Web server technology) will serve as a research engine to collect performance data for the purpose of performance-based analysis of distributed algorithms. The education plan also includes development of e-commerce curriculum and courses, integrating the proposed research at all levels, and using the basic scientific principles of the research, as well as the PI s enthusiasm, to encourage young (K-12) scientists doc7744 none Song Functional MRI (fMRI) is a new method that can non-invasively study brain function. Since its inception nine years ago, it has seen rapid progress both in the technical development and in vivo applications. However, there are still limitations in the acquisition methodology that may affect the reliability and sensitivity of fMRI. The need for more reliable, efficient and innovative imaging acquisition strategies that improve the sensitivity and specificity is urgent. In the meantime, the educational curriculum concerned with this new field is relatively limited and teaching materials addressing some current and critical issues are few. In this proposal, we plan to develop new data acquisition methods and to create educational curriculum for fMRI. The first goal requires the development of fMRI acquisition methods that are reliable, sensitive and efficient. Specific emphasis will be placed upon improving the specificity of the functional signal to better co-localize with the neuronal activity, improving the sensitivity of fMRI to subtle changes, and recovering signal from brain regions that experience signal drop-out from large-scale susceptibility artifacts. The second goal requires the creation of undergraduate course work on MRI and fMRI and graduate research program for fMRI. The new educational curriculum will build a solid foundation of the MRI and fMRI knowledge for the students and also educate them with the latest development in the literature, thus better preparing them to participate in and contribute to this rapid evolving research field doc7745 none In , the researcher applied for graduate schooland wrote that global network access would change the way people work and that people would use the network to plan travel, pay bills and access libraries of information . A decade later, the Internet and Web applications made these network applications a reality. As we look to the future, the next major evolution in technology will be to make it possible for users to access information and interact with all devices in their environment through ubiquitous wireless networks and simple inexpensive computing devices such as PDAs [81]. The popular approach to achieving this future vision has been to move the applications and network services available on the Internet onto the simple mobile devices and the wireless network infrastructure. However, innovative network services and protocols will be necessary to operate such networks and applications efficiently. The objective of this NSF CAREER proposal is to examine the services that this new generation of mobile applications need from the network and to carefully adapt the design and implementation of these services to the environment s demands. The unique requirements of this environment include: Power Awareness. Most mobile devices will be battery operated and thus require energy efficiency. Wireless Link Characteristics. Wireless links are slower due to limited spectrum availability, are prone to loss and disconnection, and are often connection-oriented or stateful. Network Evolution. Since users will not upgrade all their small devices simultaneously, the future system must support automatic upgrading, multiple simultaneous versions and or backward compatibility. Dynamic Network. The members of a network are dynamic due to mobility and range of network. Isolation. A group of wireless devices should be able to operate in isolation from any infrastructure. Simple Devices. Many of the devices that participate in such a network may be extremely simple. Scale of Operation. The future network will have billions of small devices. New Applications. Applications in this environment may need very different services from the network. The objective of this CAREER proposal is to design a new networking and operating system infrastructure for this next generation of ubiquitous computing applications. The research plan consists of three major stages. In the first stage, the researcher plans to build some of these next generation applications to improve the understanding of their requirements. The next stage consists of developing protocols and operating system services based on these new requirements. The project is especially interested in 1) improving the bandwidth and power efficiency of network protocols, 2) making it possible for applications and protocols to adapt to the availability of power, availability of bandwidth and other environmental conditions, 3) designing service discovery approaches that can handle the query types that are likely for mobile applications, and 4) making this environment support the easy introduction of new link technologies, network protocols and applications. Finally, the research will be evaluated by modifying our test applications to use these new services. If successful, this project will significantly change how wireless networks and mobile applications of the future will be structured and built. The education plan proposes to use educational applications such as shared note taking [24] and intelligent classrooms [1] among the early target applications to be used. In addition, the researcher plans to incorporate mobile and wireless education into the already existing mainstream undergraduate and graduate networking classes doc7746 none of the stability of pulses in a wide variety of lasers and devices where nonlinearity plays a key role. Optical parametric oscillators have tremendous potential application for tunable coherent radiation, pattern recognition, and optical information processing. This work will establish regions of control for the pulse and front structures in these optical devices, facilitating practical implementation of the technology. Bose-Einstein condensates, which have been only recently realized experimentally, are expected to have applications in quantum logic and matter-wave transport. Trapping the condensate and sustaining it for long time periods are fundamental for making the Bose-Einstein condensates a viable technology. This research will focus on various periodic trap configurations that can stabilize the condensate in both attractive and repulsive states doc7747 none Duggan The Sixteenth Conference of the Application of Accelerators in Research and Industry will take place on the campus of the University of North Texas November 1-4, . The conference will be attended by participants from over 50 countries. The topics covered in the conference cover a wide variety of basic and applied uses of accelerators. There will be a medical symposium within the conference. This award will be used to support participation from graduate students and junior investigators doc7748 none The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, has an acute sense of smell that permits it to locate sources of food with great accuracy. Fruit flies strongly prefer fermenting fruit as a food source. The overall goal of this project is to understand how their olfactory system permits these insects to recognize and discriminate the vast number of odorants in the environment, and thereby locate their preferred food source. Proteins called odorant receptors are present in the nerve cells of the antenna, and these are thought to be responsible for relaying olfactory information from the outside world into the fly s brain. Each such nerve cell, or olfactory receptor neuron, expresses a different odorant receptor, permitting it to identify odorants in the environment. Interestingly, a single odorant receptor, called Or83b, is present in all olfactory receptor neurons. As such, its role is at odds with the antenna s function to distinguish among different odorants. This proposal asks what role this unique odorant receptor plays in the olfactory system of the fly. Will flies that lack this protein be unable to respond to olfactory stimuli? Knowledge gained from these experiments may prove to be useful in mitigating the effects of deleterious insects on the environment. Pest insects locate food crops and animal hosts largely through olfactory cues. Understanding the function of Or83b in Drosophila may result in strategies to control the olfactory behavior of deleterious insects that attack agricultural crops and act as human disease vectors. The education component of this CAREER award involves a course entitled Evolutionary Biology of Brain Morphology and Function, which targets pre-graduate students who come to the Rockefeller University campus under the auspices of the University s Science Outreach Program. The course will provide students with hands-on experience in molecular neurobiology, supplemented with outside lectures, and will ask if species-specific behavioral differences have a basis in brain morphology doc7749 none As the complexity of dynamic systems and networks grows through the continuous deployment of embedded systems and the availability of novel sensor and actuator technologies, the likelihood of temporal or permanent failures at certain components or communication links increases significantly and the consequences can become highly unpredictable and severe. Even within a single digital device, the reduction of voltages and capacitances, the shrinking of transistor sizes and the sheer number of gates involved has led to a significant increase in the frequency of so-called soft-errors, and has prompted leading semiconductor manufactures to admit that they may be facing difficult challenges in future. The occurrence of failures becomes a major concern when the systems involved are life-critical (such as military, transportation or medical systems), or operate in remote or inaccessible environments (where repair may be difficult or even impossible). The synergistically developed research and educational programs of this project aim at obtaining systematic approaches for modeling, detecting, identifying and correcting failures in order to ensure the proper functionality of discrete-time dynamic systems or networks. Unlike traditional control where the goal is to stabilize a given dynamic system (while perhaps maintaining some sort of optimality in the applied control input), a fault-tolerant design aims at ensuring that any deviation from the expected system behavior is confined within a small time interval (usually one discrete-time step). In addition, the designer of a fault-tolerant system needs to account for the possibility of failures in the sensors or communications links, or even in error detecting correcting mechanism itself. This project takes a system-theoretic viewpoint towards the design of fault-tolerant dynamic systems. The main goals are to obtain resource-efficient fault-tolerant implementations and to characterize their fundamental limitations by jointly exploiting system-, coding-and information-theoretic techniques doc7750 none U. of Washington Shaoyi Jiang An integrated research and education plan is proposed for the career development of the Principal Investigator (PI). The proposed research work focuses on exploring and controlling nano-scale chemical, structural, frictional, and biological properties of thin films formed either by self-assembly or by surface reaction. The strengths of this proposed work lie in the integration of simulation and theory with experiment and the complement of molecular simulation with ab initio quantum chemistry, continuum mechanics, advanced simulation algorithm, and high performance computing. The first objective of the proposed work is to explore and control nano-scale frictional properties of thin films. It consists of two components: (a) rigorous interpretation of scanning force microscopy experiments on self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) by a hybrid simulation method and (b) exploration of novel organic monolayers on silicon for applications in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). The success of this work will advance our knowledge of interfacial dynamics and facilitate efforts to develop novel lubricating systems for applications, such as car engines, MEMS, and magnetic data storage devices. The second objective of the proposed work is to explore and control nano-scale biological properties of mixed SAMs. The work includes (a) the study of protein adsorption on molecular-scale uniform mixed SAMs using a combination of scanning probe microscopy, surface plasmon resonance, and molecular modeling methods, and (b) the development of functionalized surface coatings for biosensors. The success of this work will advance our understanding of interactions between protein molecules and surfaces at the molecular level and facilitate efforts to develop biomaterials with superior biocompatibilities and biosensors with high selectivity and sensitivity. All components in the proposed work are complementary and are centered on the application of nano-scale simulation, theory and experiment to both fundamental and engineering problems involving interfacial phenomena. The success of the proposed work will have far-reaching implications for the field of interfacial phenomena and a broad impact on new technology. The existing collaborations with various groups in academia, industry, and national laboratories will greatly enhance the success of the proposed work. The proposed education plan aims at reaching out to high school students, particularly under-represented groups, providing research opportunities to undergraduate students, and integrating molecular concepts and methods into the chemical engineering curricula with focus on development of the high school outreach. Education and training of a new generation of skilled work force is necessary for rapid progress in nanotechnology. To accomplish this goal, educational activities must involve students at all levels (college and precollege), and should include a general effort to popularize nanotechnology. The outreach activities will include giving motivational talks to precollege students, developing and implementing educational modules in math and science at the high school level, and involving high school students in research and or module development. The proposed outreach activities will inspire high school students to consider careers in science and engineering, specifically in nanotechnology. Undergraduate research opportunities will better prepare students to use their education in the rapidly changing world and to keep learning for the rest of their lives. The introduction of molecular concepts and methods into the chemical engineering curricula will broaden the students view beyond the classical approach to a problem doc7751 none This action is to support a field reconnaissance of the devastating landfill failure (wasteslide) on 10 July at the Payatas Landfill in Quezon City, Philippines. This landfill was reported to have been as high as a 7-story building prior to the failure. This failure resulted in extensive loss of life and injuries. Initial reports indicated that the failure was very fast (such as a debris flow) and triggered by heavy rainfall during the Typhoon Kai-Tak. This failure is important because other documented landfill failures have been primarily along interfaces (Kettleman Hills) or caused by foundation failure (Beriolis, Spain and the Rumpke, Cincinnati waste failure). The Dona Juana Columbia failure was due to improper (pressurized) leachate recirculation, and little is known about a landfill failure in Turkey. To date, there is not a well-documented case of a failure of a landfill through the waste. If this were the failure mode, it would be important since the back-calculated strengths would provide data on the static strength of municipal solid waste landfills and on the impact of excess pore pressure on waste shear strength. As leachate recirculation and bio-reactor technology move from a few isolated test cells to widespread use in US landfills, and as urban development encroaches on existing landfills, characterization of the mechanical behavior of municipal solid waste and the impact of excess pore water pressures on shear strength becomes increasingly important. The US reconnaissance team is travelling to Quezon City for field reconnaissance of the failure site. This investigation is being coordinated in the Philippines with a team of engineers from the University of Philippines - Diliman (UPD). Data being gathered by the combined group includes: pre- and post-failure geometry, slide plane identification, subsurface conditions, waste type and consistency, method of compaction, rainfall records, and other information that will allow an effective stress analysis of the failure to be performed. Identification of the pore pressures is a major challenge in the analyses. One important finding will be to assess the relevance of this failure to US practice. The US reconnaissance team will provide full documentation of the failure, including geology, geometry, waste and compaction type, and weather conditions. The report will be broadly disseminated via hard copy and the Internet. Form 7: ; Scott M. Merry, U. of Arizona This action is for a SGER award, and is therefore exempt from peer review. The support of post-failure reconnaissance teams to recover ephemeral data requires urgency consistent with the SGER criteria. This action is a further step in the ongoing effort to obtain full-scale data from major damaging events such as earthquakes and tsunamis. But while NSF has provided support for many post-earthquake and post-tsunami reconnaissance teams, this is the first support that I am aware of for a post-landfill failure reconnaissance. The PI contacted me shortly after this landfill failure in the Philippines to discuss a possible NSF-supported reconnaissance investigation. He also received input from the NSF Division of International programs. Given that events such as this landfill failure in the Philippines can be regarded as full-scale experiments that cannot be duplicated via controlled experiments in the laboratory or in the field, the cost of recovering and disseminating data obtained by reconnaissance efforts is minuscule compared to the cost of computer, laboratory or field simulations. It is essential that these reconnaissance efforts be supported. It is recommended that this SGER request for support be approved doc7752 none The PI s objective of the proposed research activities is to examine the mechanism of gene transfer from a tissue engineering scaffold by developing a novel system designed to deliver the DNA directly to the cell microenvironment. Gene therapy approaches have expanded into applications for wound healing and tissue regeneration, but therapies are limited by the inability to efficiently delivery DNA. Tissue engineering scaffolds have demonstrated an enhanced delivery; however, an understanding of the mechanism of gene uptake would provide fundamental design parameters necessary to optimize gene transfer. His hypothesis to be tested is that delivery from the scaffold to which cells are adhered enhances uptake due to direct release into the cell microenvironment. To test this hypothesis, they propose to ionically complex non-viral DNA with a cationic peptide and to subsequently localize the DNA to the adhesion surface by tethering the peptide to a hydrogel. The development of a system with controlled, efficient gene delivery would impact the fields of wound healing, tissue engineering, and gene therapy, and would find application to basic studies of cell processes. The objective of the proposed educational activities is centered on the development of educational tools for elementary, high school, and college students, which can be widely distributed through an established infrastructure at Northwestern. Cellular processes and biological systems serve as the basis to attract student interest. At the elementary level, events are designed for a Science Olympiad in which students apply the scientific method and get hands-on experience. The events are phrased in terms of biological phenomenon; however, the concepts are centered on the physical sciences, which is an area in which students frequently struggle doc7753 none Professor William Geiger of the University of Vermont is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry program to study organometallic compounds electrochemically in novel electrolytes. Of particular interest are noncoordinating fluoroarylborate anions. These substances afford increased solubilities and conductivities in low-to-medium polarity solvents including fluorous solvents. Work in fluorous solvents is attractive because of possibilities of product reactant catalyst separation. There are electrochemical advantages which allow the study of ion-pairing interactions in these systems. The PI also proposes to study rhodium-based complexes electrochemically for the purpose of developing new synthetic pathways. The outcomes of the work will be relevant to many areas including electroanalytical chemistry, materials and sensor development, synthetic and industrial chemistry employing homogeneous inorganic or organometallic catalysis and in efforts to replace toxic organic solvents with environmentally benign substitutes doc7754 none This CAREER project combines a research component--designing a practical approach to program termination verification that includes both theoretical study and actual implementation--with an educational component--undertaking the enhancement, for both undergraduates and graduates, of programming language education. The research on termination verification recognizes that, in practice, the programmer often knows for some reasons that a particular program should terminate if implemented correctly and would therefore find great value in a termination checker able to detect program errors that cause non-terminating program execution. Unfortunately, termination checking in a programming language that supports general recursion is often prohibitively expensive. In order to design a termination checker for practical use, the project explores some recent results on the use of dependent types in practical programming, allowing the programmer to encode into dependent types the metrics needed for ensuring program termination and then use type-checking to verify that the provided metrics indeed suffice. The research focuses on providing a mechanism that truly can be applied in practice doc7755 none Predicting and mitigating the effects of climate warming requires an integrated program of teaching, research, and community outreach. This research program focuses on understanding the interactions among vegetation, climate change, and disturbances in northern biomes. Interactions among these variables will likely produce complex vegetation dynamics over the next century that are different than models assuming simple correlations between climate and vegetation. This work across a broad climatic gradient in Manitoba, Canada, examines long-term records in peat and lake sediments to reconstruct the temporal and spatial interactions of these processes at local, regional, and subcontinental spatial scales. This research will be integrated into a new global change ecology curriculum at Carleton College, including courses in ecosystem ecology, paleoecology, global change biology, and plant physiological ecology. Innovative teaching methods, such as case studies, inquiry based labs, and community service learning, are being developed for these courses and will be disseminated online for science educators nationwide doc7756 none This research program investigates the impact of high-temperature microstructural changes in Low Pressure Chemical Vapor Deposited (LPCVD) polysilicon on microscale thermal transport phenomena in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). An application of thermal conduction physics, materials science, and silicon micromachining is made for generating new scientific knowledge needed for the design of polysilicon-based thermal sensors and actuators, and for their reliability predictions. To achieve studies at high-temperatures, a novel on-chip instrument is developed using MEMS techniques. The instrument is to measure thermal transport property of polysilicon films and allows for in situ observation of grain size evolution. Based on the acquired experimental data, theoretical work is performed to model thermal transport by accounting for grain size, grain configuration, impurity concentrations, and microstructural kinetics. The developed model is to serve for understanding scaling laws and design rules for polysilicon-based MEMS devices and CMOS transistors. The education program addresses the significant demands on heat transfer education for MEMS engineers with the purpose of preparing students for optimizing a product design. Using on-campus information technology resources, this program develops a new heat transfer course based on a MEMS thermal design competition. The thermal design project asks student teams to propose a MEMS design that should yield a better figure of merit for a particular device, which is strongly influenced by heat transfer phenomena. The course is designed for senior and graduate students from various engineering programs. A web-page-based instruction is implemented for this course to promote effective communications among the participants doc7757 none The goal of this project is to develop a unified framework for developing fault-tolerant systems; this unified framework will provide the structural continuity to developers of fault-tolerant systems while they perform several tasks such as design, synthesis, testing, verification, and refinement. The unified framework will be based on the use of two fault-tolerance components, namely detectors and correctors. Dr. Kulkarni has identified these two components as being necessary and sufficient for adding fault-tolerance to a rich class of systems. The use of detectors and correctors will permit efficient implementation as the knowledge of application-specification is used in computing the specification of the required components. Also, by permitting the reusability of fault-tolerance components, the framework will help in reducing the development cycle for a system. To simplify the reuse of the fault-tolerance components, Dr. Kulkarni will develop a component-template language to specify templates --which will be instantiated by the developers of fault-tolerant systems-- for commonly used components. Dr. Kulkarni will also develop heuristics to reduce the complexity of automating the addition of fault-tolerance. Finally, these heuristics and the component-templates will be used to develop a tool for automating the addition of fault-tolerance doc7758 none The project centers on hybrid systems of Al AlOx Al tunnel junctions coupled with semiconductor heterostructures. Arrays of Al AlOx Al tunnel junctions are known to form a system with macroscopic degrees of freedom that behave quantum mechanically. By fabricating such a system of tunnel junctions on a GaAs AlGaAs heterostructure with an electron gas located near the top surface of the heterostructure, we can directly control the dissipation independently of other parameters, something not previously possible in any quantum system. One of the goals of this project is to implement this control over dissipation in various structures in order to study fundamental tunneling processes and quantum phase transitions. On the semiconductor side, the hybrids also make feasible many unique and potentially important experiments. In particular, we will use the hybrids to study two of the most basic aspects, the charge and the statistics, of the excitations of fractional quantum Hall liquids (FQHLs). Remarkably, the excitations of the FQHLs, also called Laughlin quasiparticles, are predicted to carry fractional charge and obey unusual fractional statistics different from that for fermions or bosons. Measurement of fractional statistics, which we hope to tackle using Al AlOx Al tunnel junctions, has been a longstanding challenge in the field of fractional quantum Hall effect. The research will be accompanied by a nationwide outreach program, in which high school students across the country will do collaborative measurements to determine the position of the North magnetic pole. Doing a measurement on such a global scale will provide an interesting and genuine scientific experience, which we hope will excite students about science in general. %%% Typically macroscopic objects, such as dust particles, billiard balls, and planets, obey Newtonian, or classical mechanics. Microscopic objects, such as electrons, atoms, and molecules, on the other hand, obey a different set of rules and behave quantum mechanically. Tunnel junctions composed of aluminum and aluminum oxide layers are unique, in that they are macroscopic objects, yet they have certain macroscopic features that behave quantum mechanically. By coupling such tunnel junctions to semiconductors, we can control the environment to which this quantum system is coupled to, something not previously possible in any quantum system. One of the goals of this project is to implement this control over the environment in various structures in order to study fundamental quantum processes that are relevant to a rich variety of systems. Tunnel junctions can also be used to make a new a kind of detector, known as a single electron transistor (SET), which are million times more charge sensitive than commercially available transistors. This extreme charge sensitivity of SETs makes feasible many unique and potentially important experiments. In particular, we will use the hybrids with SETs to study some of the remarkable properties of a new state of matter, known as a fractional quantum Hall liquid. New kinds particles arise in this new state matter with very unusual properties. Our research will take advantage of the extreme charge sensitivity of SETs to investigate these unusual properties of these new particles, which have been a longstanding challenge in the field of fractional quantum Hall effect. The research will be accompanied by a nationwide outreach program, in which high school students across the country will do collaborative measurements to determine the position of the North magnetic pole. Doing a measurement on such a global scale will provide an interesting and genuine scientific experience, which we hope will excite students about science in general doc7759 none Kohn unc-13 and Synaptic Neurotransmission in C. elegans The long-term objective of this research is to better understand the regulation of neurotransmitter release in the nervous system. Many of the proteins involved in neurotransmitter release are known, but the mechanisms regulating the release process are not fully understood. The gene unc-13 in Caenorhabditis elegans codes for several protein products that are necessary for proper release of neurotransmitters at synapses. The roles of these proteins will be examined by (a) determining the subcellular localization of UNC-13 proteins using indirect immunofluorescence, (b) exploring regulation of unc-13 expression through GFP fusions to putative promoters, and (c) identifying proteins that interact with UNC-13 using genetic screens and the two-hybrid system. The broad impact of this research project will be a more thorough understanding of the function of the nervous system. The study is scientifically important, because it will increase our knowledge of how a neuron sends a signal to another neuron, or to a muscle. Similarities between the nervous system of the worm, C. elegans, and more complex animals, including mammals, make C. elegans an excellent model organisms for exploring the details of neuronal regulation. Laboratory techniques that would be prohibitive with mammals are straightforward in C. elegans. This CAREER research project will engage undergraduate students, including minority students, in cutting edge research. Some students will pursue independent research projects, while others will utilize research tools developed in the laboratory in their coursework. The research program will have an impact on basic scientific knowledge, and on the future careers of undergraduate students doc7760 none This award to Washington University is a renewal of an earlier one, and is supported by the Advanced Materials and Processing Program in the Chemistry Division and the Solid State Chemistry Program in the Materials Research Division. In this project, William Buhro will develop refined solution-liquid-solid phase-separation methods to prepare nanowires and tubes from semiconductor alloys. Nanowires with controlled composition, narrow diameter and quantum confinement regions will be prepared from indium and gold-gallium eutectic alloys at low temperatures for potential applications in blue and green light emitting diodes. In addition, the project will study detailed mechanisms that affect light emission from the nanowires prepared from different semiconductor alloys. Under the award, nanowires and nanotubes with defined size, shape and composition will be prepared from semiconductor alloys for potential applications in high performance blue and green light emitting diodes and lasers. The broader impact of the project is the understanding of the formation of nanowires from semiconductor alloys to be fabricated at lower temperatures with enhanced electrooptic properties at reduced cost. In addition, the research program will provide a rich multidisciplinary education and training opportunity in materials chemistry to graduate and undergraduate students doc7761 none Technology is clearly changing the way children live and learn. What is not clear is how our classrooms will change in the future due to these new technologies. Today there are numerous questions when it comes to infusing technology into the classroom environment, particularly when it involves early childhood education environments. What will our pre-school classrooms look like with new technologies? What, if any, are appropriate new technologies for young children? Will early childhood teachers approach teaching in the same way? Will children learn differently because of these technologies? In this research the PI will explore issues relating to the development, evaluation, and dissemination of new technologies and infusion methods in early childhood education. The goals are: to understand the unique needs of young children (ages 3-6) in learning environments; to develop new technologies in partnership with children and teachers; To develop new strategies for teaching in a technology-infused early childhood education environment; to understand the impact these technologies can have on young children and their early childhood educators; and to understand when technology is an appropriate catalyst for early childhood education. The research will be an important demonstration of new approaches in interfaces, technologies, and design practices for and with children, and will further offer new educational tools that can have a broad impact on how we educate our children in our classrooms of the future doc7762 none This action is taken within the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, NSF 00-89, to support a research education career project in the use of geosynthetic-reinforced soil structures to resist strong earthquake shaking. Geosynthetics provide a cost-effective solution in reinforced soil technology for many civil engineering structures. They have been applied widely as geosynthetic-reinforced soil retaining walls (GRS-RW), especially modular block GRS-RW that has gained wide popularity because of its pleasing esthetics. But structurally, these and other uses of geosynthetics serve a much more critical purpose in resisting seismic activity. While the performance of such geosynthetic-reinforced soils under routine (static) loads, and even minor earthquakes, has been good, recent experience indicates that improved knowledge and performance is needed regarding their response under strong earthquake shaking. In the Taiwan earthquake that produced large acceleration together with a large vertical component of that acceleration, several geosynthetic-reinforced soil structures collapsed. Clearly, available analysis and design procedures did not account for such severe dynamic loading. It is this shortcoming that is addressed in this research and education program. The project builds upon prior experimental and numerical research, and international cooperation with researchers in Japan undertaken by the PI. State-of-the-art shaking table facilities in Japan are used to test models under complex dynamic loading conditions, including vertical acceleration, in order to understand better the failure modes. The result is an improved characterization of the soil, the geosynthetic reinforcement, and their interaction. Additional parametric studies will result in a simplified procedure that enables GRS-RW to be designed based on permanent displacement. In addition to the technical value to the design community, this research program also provides a valuable tool for education. Two specific educational applications are addressed. First, the courses on geosynthetic waste containment and geotechnical earthquake engineering will use the results directly, as will the web based home page that already presents the PI s current research. In addition, a web based software package (Java Geotech) will be developed, and will join the currently active Geotech Forum for undergraduates. Second, this project, which involves applications in currently appealing areas of earthquake resistance and environmental remediation, will serve to encourage high school students, and especially minority students, to pursue studies relating to these areas. This will be accomplished through two Columbia University related programs to encourage interest in science and engineering among minorities: the Double Discovery Center and the Salvadori Education Center. Working through these Centers, teaching modules on reinforced soil structures and waste containment systems can be presented through lectures and laboratory demonstrations in high schools and through field trips, such as to JFK International Airport that is currently undergoing expansion, and to Columbia s Biosphere doc7763 none Dynamic optimization is a newly emerging area of computer systems research that offers good potential for large advances in computer performance. The crux of dynamic optimization is the incorporation of dynamic information available only at execution time into the optimization process. Examples of potentially useful dynamic information include the likely behavior of branches and the likely values of operands. More immediate access to run-time information gives dynamic optimizers a notable edge over traditional static optimizers. The rePLay Framework is a set of microarchitectural components for supporting dynamic optimization. RePLay contains hardware that allows the dynamic optimizer to run in parallel with program execution thereby reducing the large overheads associated with dynamic optimization. RePLay contains hardware for identifying candidate regions, for optimizing these regions, fetching regions, and sequencing between them. Furthermore, this microarchitecture creates a tight coupling between the optimizer and hardware that detects run-time events. Initial results indicate that dynamic information can be used to create very long (approx 100 instructions) atomic, single entry, single exit regions of code for optimization. The research focuses on the development of the rePLay Framework, specifically in the development of hardware-based optimizations and hardware schemes to support potentially speculative value-based optimizations doc7764 none Morozov This grant provides one fourth support of the costs of acquiring digital data sets for nine deep seismic sounding (DSS) profiles from the Center GEON in Moscow. The other 3 4 of the costs will be borne by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). The Russian DSS data sets are a truly unique source of seismic data which image the upper mantle structure below a large fraction of the Eurasian continent. These data sets are unique in that they were produced using well controlled and powerful seismic sources, i.e. peaceful nuclear explosions (PNE) equivalent in size to M 5 earthquakes and chemical explosions. Nine continental transects were produced using over 20 PNEs and 300 chemical explosions recorded at over 200 sites. These data contain structural information about the Earth s interior in the intermediate depth range (0- km) between what can be learned from earthquake seismology and conventional controlled source seismology. In addition, these are data sets that are likely never to be reproduced. The data sets will be digitized and quality-controlled by Center GEON scientists in Moscow, transferred to University of Wyoming scientists for further QC, and finally reformatted and delivered to the IRIS Data Management Center where the data will be freely accessible to all interested academics scientists. The project should be complete in four years doc7765 none Proof is central to the discipline and practice of mathematics. In school mathematics proof is rarely encountered outside the realm of Euclidean geometry. Recent reform efforts in mathematics education call on schools to provide all students with opportunities and experiences throughout the mathematics curriculum. Yet little is known about the ways grade school students learn to conjecture, to justify and to prove mathematically. More specifically, the grade-levels where least is known are 6th through 8th. With this in mind then, the objectives of this middle school proof study are as follows: Understand the development of students competencies in justifying and proving: To understand the conditions and pedagogy necessary to promote the development of those competencies; and To develop teacher preparation and professional development materials designed both to enhance teachers understandings of proof and to support them in fostering the development of students competencies in justifying and proving doc7766 none This is a very strong proposal in an important field with great potential for impact. Two applications proposed, one to composite materials processing and the other to cryopreservation. The application to cryopreservation is less focused but more exploratory; however, strong collaboration with other investigators in the latter area is noted. May want to consider how to obtain interfacial properties (measured or predicted from microscopic models such as the molecular dynamics method). How to account for asymmetry of dendrites? Two-dimensional modeling may have to evolve to three-D eventually in order to more accurately capture various phenomena doc7767 none Cellular electrical activity controls neuronal activity. Multi-subunit membrane proteins called ion channels are directly responsible for cellular electrical activity. In addition to ion channels, many other proteins are composed of multiple subunits. Multi-subunit proteins have evolved to exhibit regulation by mechanisms that include phosphorylation. Stoichiometric analysis refers to the study of how the relative number, composition, and structure of different subunits influences the activity of a multi-subunit protein. Such analysis has been applied spectacularly to the study of the oxygen-carrying blood protein hemoglobin. Our understanding of hemoglobin provides a vivid example for introducing students to the beautiful intricacies of the relation between protein structure function and physiology. In contrast to our deep knowledge of hemoglobin, relatively little is known about the stoichiometric behavior of multi-subunit ion channels. Thus, such approaches applied to the study of ion channels may provide a deeper understanding of how these important proteins work. An powerful array of molecular and computer-based bioinformatic tools has been combined here to reveal answers to evolutionary and physiological questions of how ion channels work. The thrust of this CAREER proposal emphasizes the unity of biology on many levels, thus benefitting both classroom and laboratory inquiry. New information gathered in the laboratory will be carried into the classroom. In turn, teaching helps inform which questions to ask in the laboratory doc7768 none Erlebacher This grant looks at the formation mechanism, coarsening behavior, and applications of nanoporous gold (NPG). NPG is formed by dissolving silver from gold silver alloys in acid, a dealloying process that leaves behind an open sponge of nearly pure gold. By varying the experimental conditions such as the pre-alloyed composition and post-dealloying annealing time, the size of the spongy ligaments is tunable over length scales from 5 nm to many microns. For this research NPG is a model system for studying nanoscale surface kinetics. NPG films will be grown by electron beam evaporation, and the time evolution of the porosity will be characterized by SEM and TEM. Coarsening behavior will be examined to measure surface diffusivity as a function of chemical environment. The research includes refinement of a general-purpose atomistic simulation program. %%% NPG holds great promise in applications where high surface open structures are advantageous, e.g. sensors and electrodes. A simple MEMS hydrogen fuel cell will be built with NPG coated with platinum catalyst as the electrodes doc7769 none Reinhardt Modern medical imaging scanners can acquire high-resolution multi-dimensional data sets of the human body. These data sets can be analyzed to non-invasively study anatomic structure and measure regional physiologic function. There is a growing need for well-trained medical imaging engineers with a background in human anatomy and physiology, engineering, and biomedical computing, and who are familiar with the unique problems encountered when acquiring and processing large image data sets. This proposal describes a long-term career development plan focused on strengthening the curriculum, educational environment, and research program in medical imaging in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Iowa. The research aims of this proposal are to develop a comprehensive suite of software tools for pulmonary image analysis and use these tools to evaluate regional lung mechanical behavior and lung tissue material properties. By detecting unusual mechanical behavior or abnormal tissue material properties, we hope to detect early disease and track the progression of disease over time. These tools can be applied to disease processes such as lung cancer, emphysema, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The educational objectives of this work are to actively involve undergraduate students in medical imaging research, and enhance the undergraduate and graduate medical imaging curriculum by introducing new courses focused on developing well-qualified medical imaging engineers and image processing software programmers. Top-notch undergraduate biomedical engineers will work for an extended period on a pulmonary imaging research project. This will be a unique opportunity for undergraduates to have a focused, hands-on experience in medical imaging research. Proposed curricular changes include the development of a new, required undergraduate core course on biomedical imaging, and the introduction of a new graduate elective course covering advanced topics in medical image processing doc7770 none Professor Shaowei Chen is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry CAREER program to study electron transfer through ordered films of monolayer protected nanoclusters. Exchange reactions will be used to insert alkanethiols into the organic protective layers supported on gold particles. Electrochemical studies of the electron transfer kinetics will be carried out, as well as spectroscopic studies. The discrete electron-charging properties of monolayer protected nanoclusters will be studied, providing insight that might lead to applications as building blocks for single-electron transistors in nanocircuits. The educational component of this award involves integrating nanoscale research into the undergraduate curriculum and undergraduate research programs doc7771 none In the past fifteen years, researchers have developed new algorithms for machine learning (computer programs that learn from experience) that have excellent theoretical guarantees on their error. These so-called multiplicative weight update algorithms receive inputs (like an image taken by a robot), and make a prediction as to whether or not that image came from a particular location. The theoretical error bounds imply that the number of mistakes made by these algorithms is guaranteed to be very small. However, many applications of these algorithms require an enormous amount of time to learn and predict. Thus special techniques must be employed to make them efficient. The investigators study new, general, theoretical techniques to make these algorithms faster. This research also involves empirically evaluating such algorithms in new areas, including computational biology, which is studied extensively at the investigators university. Applying theoretical techniques to real problems creates a better understanding of the real-world problems and helps direct future theoretical work, guiding the transfer of results from theory to practice. Specifically, the investigators study multiplicative weight-update algorithms such as Weighted Majority (WM) and Winnow, which have on-line mistake bounds with a logarithmic dependence on N, the total number of features. This attribute efficiency allows them to be applied to problems where N is exponential in the input size, yielding great flexibility in their application areas. Such areas include pruning decision trees, pruning ensembles of classifiers, learning finite geometric concepts, learning DNF formulas, and using pseudo-Bayesian predictors over finite hypothesis spaces. However, a large N requires techniques to efficiently compute the weighted sums of these algorithms. This research explores methods to overcome this difficulty, including exploiting commonalities among the features, and the more general approach of using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to estimate the total weight contribution without the need for special structure in the problem. The investigators also are applying their algorithms to various problems in computational biology, including drug activity prediction, analyzing microbial population dynamics, and identifying special types of human genes doc7772 none With the rapid emergence of Internet related applications, providing integrated services such as data, voice, and video in mobile computing systems has become increasingly important. However, mobile communication systems such as cellular networks are primarily designed for supporting voice. Due to the different workload characteristics and quality of service (QoS) requirements of integrated services, prior resource management techniques may not be efficient for handling the increasing demand of emerging applications. To address this issue, the research focuses on the design and evaluation of (1) bandwidth management schemes to provide QoS guarantees and efficiently utilize the frequency spectrum; (2) cache management mechanisms to reduce the bandwidth and power consumption; and (3) efficient protocols to allow mobile devices to power off most of the time. The research proposes to integrate these three components to provide a resource management infrastructure that can efficiently support integrated services in mobile computing systems. The research results will be used and emphasized in the wireless networks and mobile computing courses developed in this project doc7773 none This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant will investigate business-to-consumer (B2C) online auction mechanisms that are being engineered by online merchants. Auctions were traditionally used for selling single items with a wide dispersion in valuations among buyers. However, electronic markets have enabled a new economic environment where commodities are now bought and sold using a wide array of mercantile processes that include a variety of auction mechanisms. The goal of this research is to study this new market environment from both consumers and sellers perspectives. Typically, on-line auctions require sellers to choose from various parameters. Given the characteristics of the product and the consumer population that will be attracted to these auctions, each auction can be designed to maximize the revenue generated from that auction. On the other hand, consumers can choose certain strategies to maximize the chances that they purchase products at the lowest possible prices. The study will develop analytical models of various types of online auctions, both for sellers and consumers. The analytical results will be validated by experimental studies. The results of the study will be used in undergraduate and graduate management classes to enhance students understanding of incentives of various agents in the economic environment. The results will also be made available to scientific community through publications in refereed journals and conferences doc7774 none Most words in natural language have multiple possible meanings. This simple fact causes no end of difficulties for computer systems that seek to understand and generate natural language. The semantic ambiguity of words impacts natural language subtasks such as prepositional phrase attachment and pronoun reference resolution, as well as large-scale applications such as machine translation and information retrieval. Automatic methods that resolve ambiguity in word meaning have the potential to advance the state-of-the-art in natural language processing as a whole, but most approaches to word sense disambiguation have proven difficult to deploy on a wide scale because they are dependent on the availability of specialized sources of knowledge that do not exist across a range of domains. The PI s goal in this project is to develop techniques that will ease and ultimately eliminate knowledge acquisition bottlenecks for word sense disambiguation. He will achieve this by pursuing three specific objectives: 1) develop methods that automatically identify the most relevant contextual features for determining the sense of any ambiguous word; 2) develop disambiguation algorithms that learn from just a few manually created examples; and 3) develop unsupervised methods that allow any set of word meanings to serve as the target of the disambiguation process. The combined effect of meeting these objectives will be to liberate word sense disambiguation from dependence on particular knowledge sources and thereby simplify their integration into natural language processing systems doc7775 none This project aims to study the nature of ordering (or disordering) interactions occuring at the interface between liquid crystals and polymeric surfaces. It will involve a systematic survey of modified phase transitions of liquid crystals and mesogenic polymers to understand the influence of the perturbations caused by the non-mesogenic material in the form of confining porous media or as colloidal dispersions. The role of topology or randomness connected with these perturbations will be studied, and the influence of randomness and boundary conditions with induced elastic deformation will be addressed. Given the experimental challenges of this project, new spectroscopic tools needed to advance calorimetric techniques necessary for studying the wide range of systems under investigation will be developed. Liquid crystal materials are important to practical applications areas that include optical displays and switches for communications, and biomedical areas such as the development of new materials classes for drug delivery. Students trained in these areas are likely to be highly competitive in future job markets doc7776 none PI: Bridget Rogers Institution: Vanderbilt University Proposal Number: Successful replacement of SiO2-based metal-oxide-semiconductor field effect transistor (MOSFET) gate dielectrics by a high-permitivity dielectric is a critical step in the continued drive to build smaller, faster, lower-power, more-integrated circuits. The planned research addresses this challenge by integrating studies of extremely thin ( 10nm) Al2O3 ZrO2 alloy film deposition, synthesis and evaluation of precursors, determination of reaction mechanisms and kinetic expressions, characterization of material properties of the deposited films, and measurement of the films electrical properties via testing of capacitor and transistor structures. The goal of the CAREER project is to develop a material system that has the proper materials and electrical properties that are required of a gate dielectric and that can meet the processing and integration challenges of a microelectronic device process flow. The educational component of the work will involve integrating the MOSFET process, developed as part of the research program, as laboratory modules into an existing course on semiconductor materials processing. It will also be used to design a new laboratory course for Vanderbilt s Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Materials Science doc7777 none Under the direction of Dr. Thomas Dillehay, Mr. James White will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will conduct archaeological research in a 50 km. square region in the modern desert North of Monterey Mexico. Located just South of the Rio Grande river on the western edge of the Sierra Madre Oriental this region has received almost no professional archaeological attention. The goal of the research is to locate sites which date to the early human occupation of the New World - around and slightly before 10,000 years ago - and on this basis reconstruct subsistence and settlement adaptations. The advantage of the selected region lies in its wealth of closely juxtaposed micro-zones which provide a wide range of spatially discrete resources. Sites, unlike most US counterparts have not been subjected to surface collecting and dry desertic conditions, likely dating to the last 7,000 years, are conducive to the preservation of fragile faunal and floral remains. The research will proceed in three stages. The entire 50 km area will be surveyed on foot and all surface materials noted and mapped. On this basis a sample will be selected for limited excavation and the material obtained will be analyzed. With these data in hand, more extensive excavation will be undertaken at the most promising sites. A geologist will place the material into relevant geomorphological context, radiocarbon dates will provide absolute ages and a series of specialist analyses will provide faunal, floral and pollen identifications. Archaeological evidence demonstrates that by 10,000 years ago humans had spread across the Americas and their presence is well documented in both continents. Based on the association between carefully worked stone lance points and the remains of giant buffalo, mammoth and mastodon it is clear that humans utilized these food resources. However there is little agreement on whether these Paleo-Indian peoples were primarily specialized large game hunters, whether they pursued a more generalized subsistence strategy and incorporated large game as only one element of a broader diet or whether some groups adopted one approach and other groups another. Mr. White correctly argues that this question can only be addressed effectively through intensive region-specific studies in which comparison of multiple sites from the same time period permits the reconstruction of settlement and subsistence patterns. He has selected an excellent area for such research. This project is important for several reasons. It will shed light on a little known region of the Americas and provide data of interest to many archaeologists. It will provide insight into the adaptations of early Native Americans and also assist in training a promising young archaeologist doc7778 none PI proposes to study the Shared Mental Models of Teams, the knowledge structures that evolve over time as team members individual mental models converge through interaction. Shared knowledge structures are seen as crucial for effective performance of project teams. This carefully phased study proposes, first, to establish a potential set of measurable constructs to guide later phases. Next, in Phase 2, to explore the preliminary conceptualization through interviews and observations to validate the conceptualization and investigate the notion of convergence. Phase 3 will develop and validate a shared mental model measurement instrument through a triangulation process of interview, archival and questionnaire data collected from industry partners teams for comparison (250 subjects). Phase 4 will formulate further research hypotheses based on the earlier work, construct a questionnaire and pre-test it. Phase 5 will expand the questionnaire data collection and analyze the results (100 project teams). A diagnostic tool and associated intervention techniques will be created in Phase 6 based on research results. In the final phase, dissemination of results will take place through a seminar; presentations to participating organizations; scholarly and practitioner publications, and professional conference presentations doc7779 none The research objective of this proposal is to design, implement, and evaluate a scalable and adaptive network service platform. Supporting sophisticated new applications, such as multi-party conferencing and streaming media transmission, over the Internet poses serious technical challenges for the underlying infrastructure. However, adding some processing inside the network enables new network-based services that substantially improves the end-to-end performance of these applications. The continual exponential decrease in the cost of processing makes network services viable, while the increases in application complexity makes it necessary. Link capacities, however, have been increasing at rates even faster than increases in processing capacity, and current network service platforms are incapable of sustaining non-trivial service to multiple flows at line speeds. In this proposal, the researcher outlines research whose goal is to develop and evaluate adaptive processing techniques to scale the number of flows supported by network service platforms. Adaptive techniques control degradation in service quality when aggregate demand exceeds available resources, and can be applied within a single node or across multiple cooperating nodes. The research focuses on the development of general adaptation techniques that are applicable across a wide range of node architectures and applications. The proposed work is grouped into three major thrusts: design of the adaptation mechanisms themselves and underlying control and resource management mechanisms and interfaces required to adapt processing on-line; development of a single- and multi-node policy framework to trigger adaptation; and the development of an analytic model of adaptive network processing that will allow on-line evaluations of possible adaptations. The researcher will evaluate these techniques using a combination of analysis, simulation, and experimentation with a number of example services and policies implemented over the Odyssey network service platform. The success of the Internet derives from the spectrum of applications it supports. As a new generation of Internet applications emerge, a pivotal challenge is to design a scalable and flexible network service platform that can sustain processing for multiple end-applications at high speeds; otherwise, end-to-end performance will be limited by the processing constraints imposed by the network. This research explicitly addresses the issues of network processing scalability by using adaptive techniques. By reducing, and in some cases eliminating, network processing bottlenecks, the work will enable new classes of applications to be supported on a large scale over the Internet. The educational objective is to design a set of core networking courses that introduce students to current developments in the field while emphasizing the fundamental concepts and to train students to understand how large networks, complex programs, and realistic systems can be built by composing relatively small, simple, and modular components. The core networking curriculum consists of an undergraduate, a graduate, and a research course. The undergraduate course teaches the basics of networking with an emphasis on the fundamentals. Students learn by building substantial parts of different network layers, and by experimenting with real-world applications with which they are already familiar. The aim of the graduate course is to understand core network protocols in detail, to appreciate the philosophy behind the current Internet protocols, and to introduce students to new research ideas in networking. The goal of the research course is to try to bridge the gap between theory and implementation: understand the overheads incurred in implementing complex protocols and devise mechanisms to mitigate their effects. The unparalleled success of the Internet has made it essential that every CS student understand the basics of networking. This curriculum will fill this need for general CS students and will motivate students interested networking to pursue further research in the field doc7780 none Odde Optical forces provide a means of noncontact manipulation of microscopic particles, but their full potential in microfabrication and engineering applications has not been realized. A likely reason is that microfabrication with an optical trap is tedious, requiring repeated cycles of particle capture and deposition on a surface. An alternative approach is to user laser-guided direct writing, a technique invented by the principal investigator and Dr. Mike Renn (Optomec Design Company) that uses a weakly focused laser beam to generate a steady flow of particles that are optically guided along the beam axis. When the beam is directed toward a target surface, the optically guided particles are deposited on the surface with each particle piling on top of the previously deposited ones. By translating the beam axis relative to the target surface, a steady line of particles is effectively written on the surface. This process, called laser-guided direct writing (LGDW), has been used by the principal investigator and Dr. Renn to optically deposit a wide range of materials including electronic materials, optical materials, and living cells with particle sizes ranging from 100 nm to 10 mm. This novel fabrication microfabrication technique is now being applied to microelectronics fabrication by Dr. Renn and co-works at Optomec Design Company. However, LGDW can be equally well applied to biotechnology an this project will use LGDW to address key issues in tissue engineering. A major objective of tissue engineering is to reconstitute in vitro the well-defined three-dimensional organization of multiple cell types that is characteristic of native organs, which in turn tends to promote more native-like function in engineered organ equivalents. However, no method currently available permits arbitrary three-dimensional patterning of multiple cell types with single cell positioning precision. Based on the recent work of the principal investigator and Dr. Renn where arbitrary two-dimensional patterns of ~100 embryonic chick spinal cord cells were directly written on glass substrates, it appears that LGDW has this capability. At the same time, rapid advances are being made in the use of stem cells for tissue engineering applications. At the University of Minnesota, Professor Catherine Verfaillie (Department of Medicine) has developed a procedure for isolating multipotent adult stem cells (MASCs). These bone marrow-derived cells are then differentiated into a wide range of cell types including muscle cells, neurons, epithelial cells, and endothelial cells. In addition, these cells are derived from humans, thus obviating the need for animal or human embryonic fetal tissue. A key issue in effectively developing this application is the proper spatial and temporal induction of differentiation in a cell culture environment. In particular, to achieve the required functions of the engineered tissue, it will be necessary to recapitulate the native tissue architecture. To develop a microfabrication approach to achieve this goal, the proposed research will investigate the use of LGDW for two-dimensional patterning of MASCs and determination of MASC viability after guidance as a function of wavelength, intensity, and duration of exposure used for patterning. These studies will explore the application of LGDW beyond the current microelectronics applications to encompass stem cell technology, one of the most promising areas of biomedical research doc7781 none The goal of this project is to produce an accurate, contiguous, well annotated genome sequence for the most commonly used laboratory strain of the bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens. The overall project involves a partnership between investigators at the University of Washington and the DuPont Company, although all funded activities will be carried out at the University of Washington. DuPont scientists will have produced a rough-draft sequence of the genome at the start of the project. The University of Washington investigators will convert this rough draft to a finished sequence, which will be publicly released starting early in the project and deposited into GenBank once the project is complete. A. tumefaciens is of central interest in basic plant biology and in agricultural biotechnology because of its ability to transfer DNA from a bacterial plasmid into the nuclear genome of diverse plant species. Most genetic engineering of plants depends on this natural DNA-transfer mechanism. Aspects of this mechanism are well understood after several decades of analysis of the bacterial plasmid that contains the transferred segment of DNA. However, relatively little is known about the roles of non-plasmid genes scattered throughout the remainder of the A. tumefaciens genome in plant pathogenesis and DNA transfer. The genome sequence will allow identification of all A. tumefaciens genes. During genome annotation, it will be possible to assign tentative functions to a majority of these genes by comparing their sequences with the sequences of all bacterial genes of known function. Hence, the annotation of the genome is likely to provide immediate insights into the genetic basis of A. tumafaciens remarkable ability to transfer DNA and proteins into plant cells. In addition, the genome-sequence data will lay the groundwork for subsequent systematic studies designed to establish the functions even of the many genes for which the initial computational analysis is uninformative. The data generated with this project will facilitate understanding of interactions between bacteria and both plant and animal host cells. They will also be of general interest in ongoing efforts to understand the interplay between genetic complexity, metabolic capabilities, and the functional characteristics of bacteria. A. tumefaciens is of special interest with respect to these issues because it has a large genome (5.9 Mbp), is a free-living organism with complex habitats including soil and plant tissues, and can sense and respond to chemical indicators of plant-tissue damage. Most early studies of bacterial genomes have focused on bacteria with small genomes that live in highly specialized environments. In contrast, analysis of the A. tumefaciens genome will provide insights into bacteria that have large genomes and live in environments that make up a substantial portion of the biosphere. Finally, the A. tumefaciens genome sequence will stimulate improvements in the genetic engineering of new strains with improved DNA-transfer characteristics, thereby stimulating both basic plant science and agricultural biotechnology doc7782 none The idea virtual communities has captured popular, as well as scholarly, attention. This interest takes place in an America that is increasingly concerned about the loss of face-to-face community. Advocates of online communities hope that by leveraging technology, we can recreate a we that has steadily eroded into many isolated I s. Educators are exploring the value of employing a community model for supporting learning. The idea is that through participating in a community, novice learners can learn through collaboration with others and work with more experienced old-timers. Much like in an apprenticeship, learners observe old-timers, and then gradually begin to adopt the practices of the community. In this model, learning is not abstracted from useful activity, but a part of it. By making learning immediate, practical, and real, educators hope to overcome the historical problems of engaging students and teachers in meaningful learning, and the contemporary problems of students who are disaffected by school. The community-based approach to learning has enormous theoretical and practical potential, but it is imperative that these environments be studied empirically. What is the educational value of a community approach to learning? Can learning through participation in a community help students overcome the historical barriers to entering math, science, and technology, and promote the development math, science, and technology skills? Does it have a special role in fostering deep learning? Are their gender differences and how can we develop online communities that do not exacerbate the digital divide? While this grant will learn from other successful projects (e.g., Tapped In, Math Forum, etc.), this work will primarily focus on the research and design of three different learning environments designed to support learning about math, science, and technology. Each one of these projects is substantial and offers a unique contribution to our understanding of learning through community participation. However, a thorough cross-project analysis will leverage the unique aspects of each situation while at the same time allowing us to make scientifically grounded claims across cases. We will systematically research both the effectiveness of this community approach in terms of learning as well as the processes through which such communities form. For each setting we will emphasize different types of evidence. First, the Inquiry Learning Forum project entails a Web-based professional development network for improving pedagogical practices of preservice and inservice math and science teachers. We will use discourse analysis to examine the quality of their online discussions, interviews and questionnaires to assess their conceptions of pedagogy, and visits to their classrooms to observe actual practice. In the second online community targeted toward children learning math and science, we will conduct pre- and post-tests on their understanding of math and science, interviews to test the depth of their understanding of these content areas, and we will use content rubrics to examine the richness of the artifacts they produce as part of community participation. Third, in the technology course for preservice teachers, we will analyze class assignments, use rubrics to examine portfolios of teaching with technology, and observe their classroom practice. Central to all this work is a commitment to not only producing scientifically credible knowledge about building online communities to support learning math, science, and technology skills, but also to providing a community service that takes part in and facilitates change doc7783 none The proposed research enables computers to attain higher speeds, at a time when even slight performance gains are increasingly difficult to achieve by conventional means. The first key discovery is that many instructions specified by a computer program are not strictly required for producing the correct answer. That is, a much shorter program can be constructed that produces the same output in a much shorter period of time. A novel method is proposed for creating a shorter program on-the-fly by completely bypassing parts of the program predicted to be unnecessary. By skipping parts of the program, however, the processor cannot verify that it was alright to do so (because the program has been transformed). The second key discovery is that the full program can be run concurrently with the short program, in order to verify the short program is correct, without noticeably slowing down the short program. The proposed method is called the Slipstream Paradigm, after a technique in auto racing where two cars collaborate aerodynamically to speed up both cars (slipstreaming). Similarly, a slipstream processor finishes two redundant copies of the program sooner that a conventional processor finishes a single copy. Redundant execution is also transparently leveraged for fault tolerance with no additional support. Finally, the Slipstream Paradigm is implementable on emerging multithreaded processors without fundamentally reorganizing their architecture doc7784 none Daniel Andresen Kansas State University CAREER DESPOT: Enhanced Dynamic Process Management for Beowulf Clusters on the Grid Current systems for managing workload on clusters of workstations, particularly those available for Linuxbased (Beowulf) cluster, are typically based on traditional process-based, coarse-grained parallel and distributed programming. In addition, most systems do not address the need for dynamic process migration based on differing phases of computation. As we have outlined in the proposal, the DESPOT project will first build a sophisticated thread-level resource-monitoring system for computational, and network resources. This information will be used in an intelligent scheduling system to perform adaptive process thread migration within the cluster doc7785 none The combination of device complexity and design diversity point towards systems that will be constructed from components that are both inherently and observably heterogeneous. What is needed is a new design discipline that accounts for inherently erratic component behavior, and facilitates the design and implementation of robust and predictable systems. The necessary infrastructure for robust application development is being developed within the context of a new system for cluster programming known as Ice. Research proceeds along four axes: the creation of fully robust data-transfer mechanisms, the exploration of advanced techniques for adaptation, new approaches to automation and ease-of-use, and development of the theoretical underpinnings of robust systems. The overall goal of this work is to develop a fundamental understanding of how to build scalable clustered systems that ``work well , even when some of the underlying components do not. Such truly robust systems are predictable, reliable, and available, perform well in spite of fluctuations and failures of constituent components, and require no human intervention. One of the main advantages of such systems is the reduction of the burden of administration: new components are simply added and utilized to their full capacity doc7786 none We will develop and calibrate a model of polyether polyurethane solid foams for the realistic computational simulation of occupant-seat interaction in automotive engineering. The project involves theoretical, experimental, and computational work at the forefront of research on materials governed by nonconvex potentials. This will be a cooperative effort with the Safety Research & Development Group at Ford Research Labs and the computational mechanics group of Prof. Cuitino (Rutgers).We will perform measurements of displacement fields using a novel, finite element-based image correlation technique. A set of tests on rate effects and hysteresis will be performed at Ford. We will also undertake an unprecedented factor analysis of microstructural features. The results will serve to calibrate the computational model, which will be based on nonlinear, homogenized periodic cell structures doc7787 none de los Reyes III The research and teaching efforts in this CAREER proposal will be directed towards examining fundamental activated sludge microbiology using novel molecular techniques. Specifically, the research will focus on the most important component of the most widely used wastewater treatment process: the separation of solids from the effluent in the activated sludge process. This separation leads to the production of a clear effluent in activated sludge and depends on the intricate balance between the populations of filamentous and floc-forming bacteria. However, despite over 80 years of experience with the process, the main parameters affecting the microbial selection of floc-formers over filaments are not thoroughly understood. Consequently, methods for controlling excessive filamentous growth that causes settleability problems (bulking) are empirical. A unified theory of microbial selection is thus necessary to provide a sound basis for designing control technologies The research component of this project will combine molecular, modeling, and reactor studies to integrate theories of microbial selection of floc-formers over filaments and develop design guidelines for reactor design and operation. The education component involves the training of undergraduate and graduate students in the principles and practices of molecular techniques, the integration of treatment process modeling in graduate water quality courses, the development of a teaching module on applications of molecular methods in environmental engineering, the integration of full-scale treatment plant exposure experiences in undergraduate and graduate courses, and participation in the Video- Based Engineering Education program at North Carolina State University doc7788 none The objectives of both the research and educational components of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project are to improve the efficient scheduling and control of large-scale production systems. Rapid advances in information technology have led to unprecedented visibility into each of tile stages of production and distribution networks this has served to highlight the need for efficient algorithms and systems to assist managers with the effective allocation of resources, and for educational programs that help current and future managers effectively use these algorithms and systems. This CAREER research involves rigorous analytical analyses of several classes of large-scale production scheduling models. Novel tools will be developed in order to analyze both the structure of various large-scale production scheduling problems, and the solution approaches which are typically employed. This analysis will increase understanding of these systems, and lead to new, efficient, robust algorithms for production scheduling, with a particular focus on models which involve due date related objectives, including those in which due dates are determined within the context of the model. Additionally, these techniques will be applied to models which capture complexities inherent in manufacturing processes which encompass several plants, factories, or sites. The education portion of this proposal focuses on conveying the concepts and intuition which will enable students to effectively employ the algorithms and systems which result from this research. This includes the development of new courses, and the development of computer games which help to illustrate important intuitive concepts about production and distribution networks, and supply chain scheduling. These models involve scheduling and controlling production and distribution across a supply chain, and will enable the exploration of the tradeoff between the costs associated with holding semi-finished goods between production stages at different facilities, the efficient utilization of these facilities, and the minimization of transportation costs doc7789 none This research focuses on devising practical methods for high-level design validation of microprocessors and supporting CAD tools based on explicit design error modeling, design error simulation, model-directed test generation, and design error correction. Specifically, the research concentrates on the following issues: (a) the development of a high-level design error simulation method based on a new high-level critical path tracing approach; (b) the establishment of high-level controllability and observability measures that can be used to guide the test generation for design errors; (c) the development of high-level test generation algorithm(s) that generate instructions to detect modeled and actual high-level design errors in microprocessors; (d) the development of high-level design error location, diagnosis, and correction methods that pinpoint the error location and suggest ways to correct it; and (e) the formation of a set of guidelines that facilitate design for validation and post-silicon validation doc7790 none Douglas Emlen This project entails a five-year program of research and education. Research focuses on the development and evolution of extreme shapes in animals. Dung beetles of the genus Onthophagus (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) often produce extraordinary horns not unlike the enlarged antlers of elk or moose. Horns in beetles generally are produced by males, and are used in aggressive contests over reproductive access to females. Here, building on almost ten years of prior research with these animals, the PI will integrate approaches of development, genetics, evolution, and behavior to eludidate mechanisms underlying the evolution of diversity in horns of beetles and to examine how functional costs of horn production may constrain their evolution. This research program is designed to provide meaningful research experiences for motivated undergraduates at all levels of the scientific process (design and implementation of experiments, analysis, writing, and dissemination of results). The PI will design a course on evolution that builds on this research program, as well as others at the University of Montana, so that immediate and tangible research projects provide vehicles for conveying major concepts in biology. This research- and concept-based approach to teaching evolution will also entail student internships in local high school biology classrooms, as part of an existing outreach program between the biology department at the University of Montana and the community at large doc7791 none The proposal addresses research issues of distributed vision. In particular, new techniques will be developed to vertically integrate vision algorithms that enable loosely configured large networks of cameras to be treated as a single logical sensor. The proposed work includes: 1) calibration of large heterogeneous sensor networks; 2) wide-area object tracking and recognition; 3) a cooperative processing framework; and 4) development of new distributed multimedia courses and a community outreach program doc7792 none Proposal: An Integrated Cyclostationary Signal Processing Framework for Optimized and Robust Wireless Communications PI: Dr. Erchin Serpedin : The successful evolution of the future high-speed wireless communication networks requires significant advances in adaptive signal processing algorithms that are currently employed for synchronization, estimation and equalization of time-varying channels. This research involves the development of a general and novel framework for designing robust and optimal spectrally efficient channel estimation, synchronization, and equalization algorithms. Key elements of the work include development of a unified framework for designing and analyzing non-data aided joint carrier frequency-offset Doppler shift and symbol timing estimators in time-selective and flat-fading channels, development of a robust non-data aided framework for estimation and equalization of time- and frequency-selective fading channels, and development of a robust non-data aided space-time signal processing framework for synchronization and estimation of multipath signals arriving at an antenna array. The proposed research offers a wealth of innovative educational projects for course and laboratory instruction. Level of Effort Statement: At the recommended level of support, the investigator will make every attempt to meet the original scope and level of effort of the project doc7793 none for Cummer A CAREER development plan for the integration of research and education in the area of upper atmospheric remote sensing at Duke University is proposed. The research component focuses on the development and implementation of a new broadband radio technique designed to detect radio signals from lightning bolts. The analysis of these observations would examine the frequency dispersion of these signals to study the horizontal and vertical distribution of ionospheric plasma by a tomographic inversion using a three dimensional model of the propagation of broadband signals through the ionospheric waveguide. The educational component is aimed at curriculum development, graduate and undergraduate student training and mentoring, and incorporating elements of the proposed research into classroom and laboratory teaching doc7794 none Laura A. Katz Dr. Laura Katz of Smith College (Northampton, MA) has been awarded a CAREER grant to explore evolutionary relationships among ciliate protozoa in the class Phyllopharyngea and teach principles in biology using a phylogenetic (evolutionary) framework, while encouraging students to develop broadly applicable skills in writing and oral presentation. Ciliates are a diverse group of microorganisms found free-living in a wide range of soil, freshwater, marine habitats as well as in association with numerous animals. Unlike many plants and animals, which have well understood family trees, the evolutionary relationships among ciliates are only beginning to be explored. Advances in molecular biological and genomic methods will enable these relationships to be determined for the first time. This is essential for describing the biodiversity of microorganisms on earth, and for understanding the components of complex microbial communities that help to clean the water, purify the air, and sustain the biosphere. The phyllopharyngeans are a vastly understudied group of ciliates; only a handful of classification systems based on cell structure exist, and there are virtually no genetic data on these organisms. This proposal will identify members of this class and analyze relationships among the subclasses of phyllopharyngeans. To accurately assess relationships, genealogies will be inferred using comparative analyses of DNA sequences from four genes (small subunit rRNA, alpha-tubulin, the largest subunit of the RNA polymerase II and histone H4). The same markers will then be used to test the appropriateness of the classification of suctorians, one of the subclasses of phyllopharyngean, based on the mode of reproduction (budding). The CAREER plan also will use an evolutionary framework to teach principles of biology in the classroom and laboratory. This comprehensive educational experience will provide undergraduate students with a basis in the facts while also stimulating them to develop and test hypotheses. Testing hypotheses about the evolutionary relationships among ciliates will expose students to diverse techniques and theories. The critical thinking, and training in written and oral skills in the educational plan will provide students with tools that carry beyond biology classes and school laboratory work, preparing them to make important contribuions in many facets of American society doc7795 none Digital information has become an inseparable part of our daily life due to significant advances in affordable high-speed internetworking technologies, high performance computer and peripherals, and the World-Wide Web. The explosive growth of the Web has imposed a heavy demand on networking resources and Web servers, resulting in long delays when requesting remote Web services. This project will develop an integrated research and education program that investigates various effective and efficient strategies for caching information on distributed system such as Web caching to reduce service delays and wide-area-network bandwidth consumption. The research work will focus on (i) gaining a deep understanding of important and unexplored characteristics of Web usage; (ii) developing accurate performance models of these characteristics to measure the effectiveness of existing and newly developed caching strategies; (iii) designing novel load-balancing techniques that best utilize the aggregated capabilities of distributed systems including cache servers and client machines; and (iv) developing scalable technologies for video caching. Performance of these techniques will be measured via simulation and experimentation. The research efforts will have a significant impact on the evolution of the Web. The education part of the program is centered around various strategies to motivate and retain potential students for the graduate program that emphasizes quality research. Through a healthy synergy of both research and education efforts, the PI will influence students through teaching and student mentoring, contribute to the research community, and impact the general public doc7796 none This research will focus on galectins-1 and -3 as pre-mRNA splicing factors. Galectins are a family of saccharide-binding proteins that (i) has a specific affinity for galactose lactose and (ii) shares a characteristic amino acid sequence in the carbohydrate recognition domain. In terms of cell biology, several galectins share another intriguing feature - dual localization. Some galectins are found in both the extracellular and intracellular compartments. This laboratory previously demonstrated that galectin-3 was a new and novel splicing factor and documented that another family member, galectin-1, exhibited nuclear localization and functioned as a splicing factor. Thus, the splicing activities of galectins-1 and -3 appear functionally redundant. The requirement of galectin-1 or -3 in pre-mRNA splicing indicates a second biologic role for these proteins in addition to their carbohydrate-binding activity. Are the two activities connected or autonomous? A galectin-1 mutant incapable of binding lactose is splicing competent in an assay carried out in the presence of lactose to inhibit endogenous galectins. These preliminary results hint that the splicing and carbohydrate-binding activities of galectin-1 are independent. Recently, using a yeast two-hybrid screen, this laboratory identified Gemin4 as an interacting partner for galectin-1 (and, by inference, galectin-3). Using an in vitro assay, the laboratory determined that both galectins directly bind to Gemin4. Gemin4 is a component of the SMN (survivor of motor neurons) complex - a large macromolecular machine containing at least 12 polypeptides found in the nucleus and the cytoplasm. The nuclear SMN complex localizes to subnuclear structures termed gems and functions to supply snRNP particles to the splicing apparatus. Preliminary immunoprecipitation experiments using anti-SMN and anti-galectin-1 antisera showed that both SMN and galectin-1 proteins are in a nuclear complex which also contains galectin-3, Gemin2, hnRNP C and Sm B B and D polypeptides of the snRNPs. These data provide in vivo evidence that galectins interact with a macromolecular complex involved in pre-mRNA splicing. An emerging theme in cell biology proposes that biosynthetic processes are orchestrated by complex macromolecular machines that are dynamically changing and interconnected. The convergence of the SMN complex and galectins-1 -3 on the spliceosomal H-complex makes it essential to characterize the various nuclear machines complexes in detail. Thus, the specific objectives of this project include: (1) delineate and characterize components and interactions of nuclear complexes in which Gemin4 and galectins-1 and -3 have been found, (2) define the step(s) in which galectins-1 and -3 participate in splicing and, (3) define the role of the carbohydrate-binding site of galectins-1 and -3 in pre-mRNA splicing activity. An emerging concept in cell biology is that biosynthetic processes are orchestrated by complex, dynamically changing machines composed of many individual molecules, at least some of which can associate with and dissociate from the machine in response to changing cellular needs. This research promises to advance the understanding of this important process doc7797 none The traditional model for engineering is finding an efficient solution to specific problems, with the human consumer as the focus and economics as the primary driving force. This model often leads to a reductionist approach toproblems and fails to take into account factors that lead to sustainable solutions. Sustainability requires the consideration of longer-term effects from multiple points of view, environmental, social and economic. The effective engineer is capable of bringing together these resources and combining them with technical innovations to provide solutions that will last and do no harm to the generations to follow. Remediation and destruction of persistent pollutants, development and use of renewable energy sources and resources, and development of processes and system that significantly reduce or altogether prevent pollution are three of the primary requirements for environmental sustainability. Social sustainability requires both justice and consideration of the cultures of concern. In order to obtain economic sustainability a process or system must exhibit long term profitability or at minimum, no considerable loss of income or negative effect on the quality of life for the persons and or entities involved. These issues must be considered in a holistic framework and problems must be approached systemically. While these considerations and requirements are not inclusive, they provide a good starting point for dealing with the issues of sustainability. The goal of this study is to evaluate the efficacy of solar photochemical treatment, including electrically enhanced photochemical treatment, for such applications, with emphasis on stormwater runoff and septic systems. The overall goal of the proposed education activities is to provide opportunities at the University of South Carolina for pre-college, undergraduate and graduate students to learn about sustainability and develop an understanding of necessary multidisciplinary concepts. Particular emphasis will be placed on students in civil and environmental engineering. This research program will consist of four phases. In the first phase, the concentration will be on the development of an immobilized catalyst that is easy to prepare, inexpensive and can act as an anode for electrochemical reactions. Laboratory and solar simulation studies will be used in the second phase to evaluate the effect of electric field enhancement on the photochemical process and determine kinetic parameters. A series of experiments will be conducted in various flow regimes, plug-flow, batch and completely mixed flow, using model contaminants resulting in kinetic flow models. Reactor design will take place in the third phase. The two or three most promising reactor schemes, selected based on the kinetic flow model, will be designed built, tested and optimized. One of the reactor designs of phase several will be selected for the pilot evaluations in the fourth and final phase doc7798 none Prasad L. Polavarapu of Vanderbilt University has support from the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program to continue his spectral studies using vibrational circular dichroism. During the three-year award period, he will undertake the following investigations: a) the elucidation of guest-host interactions for molecules encapsulated in cyclodextrin cavities; b) the determination of absolute configuration of chiral suboxides; c) the determination of structural changes in peptides; d) the determination of the structure of bioactive peptides in membrane environments; e) the structural characterization of peptides that adopt b-hairpin structures; and f) the determination of conformations of chiral herbicides. The principal investigator will also undertake ab initio theoretical calculations in order to fully analyze the experimental observations. These studies will advance knowledge and understanding in a number of fields: chemical, biochemical and environmental. The activities will not only advance scientific knowledge in these areas but also promote training, teaching and learning. One of the more practical impacts of this work will be in the development and design of new herbicides with greater specificity and cost-effectiveness doc7799 none The research component of this proposal focuses on designing a methodological framework that, ultimately, will lead to the estimation of origin-destination matrices for freight movements, using secondary data, gathered through Intelligent Transportation Systems. These methodologies will improve transportation modeling by adding another layer of realism to the modeling process; and they will improve the efficiency of traffic management by ensuring proper consideration of freight movements, significant contributors to urban congestion. Furthermore, enhanced consideration of freight transportation will benefit the transportation planning process as a whole, making it truly multimodal in its scope. Such approaches will bypass two major obstacles in freight planning: the significant cost associated with conducting surveys to obtain origin-destination patterns, and the reluctance of freight providers to provide information they consider commercially sensitive. The research plan has the following three objectives: 1) to develop a framework for the synthesis of origin-destination matrices in real-time, based on information gathered through Intelligent Transportation Systems in transportation networks; 2) to create a platform for the display of estimated freight movements; and, 3) to develop methodologies for the integration of real-time information on freight movement into the evaluation process and the analysis of traffic control strategies. The proposal considers the use of the Integrative Freight Market Simulation (IFMS). The IFMS attempts to depict a comprehensive picture of freight movements, in which both the user side, i.e., commodity flows, and the logistic side, i.e., vehicle-trips, are considered. The uniqueness of freight transportation requires the use market equilibrium concepts to depict the competition process among freight transportation providers, and a subset of routing problems to represent the actions of these companies when picking up and delivering the goods. The IFMS entails a bi-level approach in which the top level corresponds to the estimation of the provision of service consistent with a Cournot-Nash equilibrium, while the bottom level focuses on the construction of tours that satisfy the Cournot-Nash solution and the remaining system constraints, in a context of a large scale optimization problem. Although a multitude of issues need to be solved before this concept becomes operational, the IFMS has the potential to enhance freight modeling. An integrated educational plan is included as part of this proposal. The educational plan is intended to achieve the following objectives: a) to provide students with leadership experience in addressing complex problems, such as those in freight transportation; b) to create an atmosphere of cooperation among stakeholders; c) to provide both undergraduate and graduate students with the tools they need to analyze freight transportation problems; b) to provide the students with a thorough understanding of the interplay between transportation and the environment, and the role of transportation in the betterment of local communities; c) to provide the students with the foundations for a life long search for excellence; d) to provide the students with the opportunity to tackle real-life problems and to contribute to their solution; e) to provide meaningful and stimulating career choices for minority students and women. Achieving these objectives will: a) lead to the creation of a new generation of transportation professionals with a wholistic view of the interactions between freight transportation, the environment and economic development; b) lead to a transportation planning process sensitive to, and responsive to, community concerns, and economic development issues; c) enhance the quality of research and education by incorporating real-life problems and challenges into the class room interactions; d) promote retention among minority students and women; e) introduce students to the potential benefits of using modern information technology in multi-disciplinary settings doc7800 none Fields The goals of this project are to test the consistency between predictions of the primordial abundances of cosmic baryons from the big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) theory and the measurement of these abundances obtained from an analysis of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) observations planned for the future satellite missions MAP ( ) and PLANK. ( ). The work is divided into three phases, before, during, and after the release of the MAP results. In Phase 1 Fields will develop and hone the tools needed for this comparison, refining the Monte Carlo methods in current use by improving their treatment of the nuclear reaction uncertainties involved in the calculations. He will also improve the nuclear database used in the calculations, introducing a set of thermonuclear reaction rates and temperature-dependent errors in a user- friendly, publicly available form. In Phase 2, Fields will use the MAP determinations of the baryon density, to accurately compare the BBN and CMB measures of cosmic baryons, having developed the statistical tools to compare the results prior to the MAP mission. Finally in Phase 3 the MAP measurement of the baryon density will be used to remove the last free parameter from the BBN theory and permit its use as a probe of the early universe and basic nuclear physics by setting a limit on such parameters as the number of light neutrino species as well as such astrophysically interesting quantities as the rate of Galactic evolution, AGB star nucleosynthesis, dwarf galaxy evolution, and globular cluster ages and stellar rotation and evolution. In addition, Fields will develop a new course in Astronomy for Teachers, designed for K-12 science and mathematics teachers, that will include both a survey of astronomy, and activities to bring this information to the classroom. Initially held as a summer course on campus, it will eventually be offered in a distance learning format, and will use the Web as a resource for curricular material and activities developed by the teachers who take the course doc7801 none Professor Kathleen P. Howard of Swarthmore College is funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry CAREER program to develop novel NMR and EPR techniques for oriented samples, and to apply these methods to problems in membrane protein structure and dynamics. The nature of transmembrane helical interactions within bilayer lipids will be probed using advantages of orientation in liquid crystalline states of those lipids. Professor Howard plans to improve chemistry instruction at her institution at all levels, to be involved in national education and outreach activities through the Biophysical Society and to involve undergraduates in her research program doc7802 none Meyer The orthopedic community would benefit from knowing the ratio of the various constituents contained in the synovial fluid of patients with total hip and knee replacements before the onset of complications leading to revision surgery. Aspirating the joints of patients with indications is recommended most specifically prior to revision surgery. It is the aspirate from these patients that will be used as the basis for the proposed set of experiments. The ratios of the constituents to each other may be used by physicians as one of several tools in the decision whether to perform revision surgery. There may also be instances in which surgery will not be recommended based in part on the particulate ratios, in which case benefits to both the patient and the economy may be realized. The clinical relevance would be that the surgeon now has a quasi-inside look at the prosthesis before surgery, offering some information about what area(s) of the implant may require revision. This is not information that can be readily seen in x-rays or by other visual means. An SGER award supports research to examine the feasibility of using a technique called Bio-Ferrography to separate the various types of wear particles which form in total hip and knee replacements as they wear. The PI has access to a unique collection of over one hundred well-documented samples of synovial fluid aspirate which has been obtained from total hip and knee replacements prior to revision surgery. The primary wear particles are ultra high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) from the acetabular cup, metal particles such as stainless steel or cobalt-cromium-molybdenum from the femoral head, particles of bone cement used for fixation of the prostheses at the bone implant interface, and bone particulate itself. The particles will be tagged with magnetic tagging molecules which make it possible to sort them by the magnetic field in the bio-ferrograph. Identification of suitable tagging molecules, sorting of the particles by material and size, and relating the nature and amount of wear particles to observations made of the worn joint during and after surgery will be the main components of the study doc7803 none Computing is rapidly moving away from traditional computers. Programs in the future will run on collections of mobile processors that interact with the physical world and communicate over ad hoc networks. We can view such collections as swarms. As with natural swarms, such as a beehive or ant colony, the behavior of a computational swarm emerges from the behaviors of its individual members. This project focuses on developing methods for creating, understanding and validating properties of programs that execute on swarms of computing devices. The work builds foundations to create and reason about swarm programs in principled ways. A promising approach is to construct swarm programs by combining primitives. The functional and non-functional behavior of a primitive is described using formal notations. The project investigates techniques based on both experimental and analytical approaches for predicting the functional and non-functional properties of compositions of swarm primitives. Although the practical applications of swarm computing are in their infancy, there is great potential for useful applications. Successful swarm programming will depend on our ability to reason about swarm programs and construct device programs based on high-level goals. This Project establishes the first steps towards that target doc7804 none Traditionally economists have spent a lot of time studying the creation of capital. In particular, the profession has been interested in the creation of physical capital (e.g machinery and other productive assets) and human capital (e.g. education). However, as the study of economic issues becomes more interdisciplinary, investigators have become interested in how social forces (e.g. social norms) impact economic outcomes. For example, one might ask how does the social norm of fairness, a concept appearing in most cultures but differently in each culture, interacts with economic institutions to form outcomes? Historically, such questions have been largely ignored, but recent studies have begun accounting for the influence of social capital. At the core of this concept are those characteristics of individuals including trust, trustworthiness, reciprocity, and generosity that make economic activity possible when it is hard to write and enforce contracts. Social capital can be defined as a kind of interpersonal grease lubricating economic transactions, but is hard to measure. For example, what does it mean for one group to have twice as much trust as another? As a result, social capital has not so far been widely accepted as important by policy makers. My research seeks to: 1) develop new tools based on social-psychological experiments to make meaningful measurements of social capital; 2) undertake the measurement of social capital in five distinct field locations (Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, the United States, and Columbia) where participants are confronted with important economic dilemmas on a daily basis; and 3) investigate whether the decision rules used by people in important economic situations can be used in computer simulations to predict long-run behavioral patterns consistent with real economic outcomes. If so, such simulations would be useful for policy analyses that account for social capital doc7805 none The goal of this research project is to enable the manag. The project addresses four XML data management tasks: XML publishing from relational databases, transport of XML data over the Internet, storage of large amounts of XML data, and stream processing XML data.ement of XML data on the Web to be done efficiently In XML publishing, a declarative mapping is specified from a relational database to XML. The project develops techniques for efficiently translating XML queries on the view back into SQL queries on the relational database. For XML transport, the project creates new compression techniques that exploit patterns and datatypes in a given XML data instance. Today, it is difficult to store XML data in a relational database system, because XML differs radically from the relational model. This project creates new methods for splitting XML data optimally into relations to be managed by a relational database system. Finally, the project develops alight-weight XML query processing method, by providing a set of tools for simple XML transformations that can be combined into pipelines performing complex processing. Several software tools will result from this project, and will be made available in the public domain, with an expected impact both on the research community and on the industry. Parts of this research project will be integrated in the database course being offered at the University of Washington doc7806 none Foster, Mark P. The objective of this CAREER project is to reveal how molecular motions affect enzyme function. The limited knowledge of structure motion function relationships severely limits our ability to predict molecular behavior. This knowledge is critical both for understanding catalytic mechanisms and for the design of modified enzymes that catalyze novel chemistries or specific high-affinity ligands. In this project, functionally important molecular motions in bacteriophage l-Integrase are characterized with an integrated approach involving nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), pre-steady state kinetics, thermodynamics, computation and site-directed mutagenesis. Biochemical and biophysical evidence suggests that large amplitude concerted loop motions are essential to the function of this enzyme, which catalyzes site-specific DNA recombination via the formation of a Holliday junction intermediate. To study these motion function relationships the project includes: (1) Comparison of the equilibrium structures, dynamics and thermodynamics of the free and DNA-bound enzyme in order to identify the nature of the conformational changes required for catalysis. (2) Measurement of the kinetics and thermodynamics of DNA binding and cleavage with NMR, mass spectrometry, fluorescence and calorimetry. (3) Obtaining a physical description of relevant internal motions from molecular dynamics simulations. (4) Probing the dependence of function on internal motions by use of site-directed mutagenesis and alternate DNA substrates. The educational component of this CAREER award involves development of descriptive tools to enable scientists and educators to effectively communicate to students the dynamic nature of macromolecules. Currently most didactic treatments of molecular structure function are limited to static pictures that provide little insight into the nature of the motional processes that interconvert functional substates doc7807 none Carnegie-Mellon Lynnm Walker I have three career goals; to develop an active research program aimed at answering fundamental questions about the dynamics of complex fluids and the influence of those dynamics on macroscopic phenomena, to develop a strong complex fluid rheology and polymer processing component in the chemical engineering curriculum at Carnegie Mellon, and to develop strong links between local industry and the undergraduate and graduate programs in an effort to expose students to the types of problems faced by the polymer processing and complex fluids industries. Carnegie Mellon provides an optimal environment for me to develop these research and education goals through its variety of interdisciplinary research and education programs. I provide the rheology expertise to the Center for Complex Fluid Engineering (CFE) research center and Colloids, Polymers and Surfaces (CPS) education program. In this proposal, an exciting extension of current work on micelle dynamics in my research group to the polymerization of wormlike surfactant assemblies is outlined. The polymerization of counterions condensed on the surface of wormlike micelles (or surfactant aggregates) offers a novel approach to the formation of anisotropic nano-particles in solution. These cylindrical particles have radii of a few nanometers and lengths ranging from a few to hundreds of nanometers. The amphiphilic nature of these polyelectrolyte-surfactant aggregates allows them to solubilize hydrophobic compounds into aqueous media. This property is vital for applications in detergency, drug delivery, separations and water purification. The novel feature arising from the length of these anisotropic particles is that they have the potential to act as rheological modifiers, be cross-linked to form amphiphilic gels and to form liquid crystalline or higher order phases when concentrated. None of these potential applications can be realized without the ability to control the morphology of the nanoparticles through reaction. The hypothesis that drives the proposed research is that that counterion composition can be used to control the structure of wormlike micelle solutions and that control can be utilized to generate novel high aspect ratio polymer-surfactant aggregates through polymerization of counterions. The goal is a quantitative understanding of the relationship between counterion composition of wormlike micelle systems and properties of the polymerized aggregates. Secondary goals of the research are investigations of the feasibility of controlling polyelectrolyte structure and ionomeric copolymer composition using this mechanism and the development of a series of novel charged, anisotropic nanoparticles for colloidal and structural studies. Carnegie Mellon is clearly committed to excellence in education and I strive to continue that trend. In all courses, I stress the application of fundamentals to modern engineering problems and expose students to the computational tools necessary to enter into the chemical engineering field. A specific educational goal is to utilize my background in complex fluid rheology and polymer processing to fill that gap in the curriculum. I am incorporating polymer processing and rheology into the curriculum through undergraduate laboratory modules, development of advanced courses and undergraduate research . I am exposing undergraduate chemical engineering students to industrial polymer processing through industrial links for the laboratory modules and, in my own laboratory, through industry-driven undergraduate research projects doc7808 none Animation is a tremendously powerful medium of expression. Ideas that would be complex or even impossible to express with still images or words can easily be conveyed using animated sequences. Unfortunately, even when the concept to be conveyed via animation is simple, the process of producing the animation is inordinately difficult. Indeed, this is one of the reasons computer animation has become so dominant - it holds the promise of automating, and thus significantly simplifying, the production process. Sadly, the process of transferring ideas into computer animations is still far from simple. For example, the animated feature film Toy Story 2 required extremely hard work by as many as 200 highly skilled computer and animation experts for more than three years. My career goal is to develop the concepts and algorithms that will enable effortless, rapid development of realistic animations that effectively convey the creator s purpose. This research hopes to create the theoretical and experimental foundation for building much more powerful animation tools than exist today. Such tools will sharply reduce the production time needed by skilled animators and, more importantly, enable average computer users to express their ideas through animation. Such tools will also help educators teach more effectively and allow each one of us to become creators and directors of personal and fictional stories. Only when animation production is easier will animation be as commonplace on the web as images and text are today. Moreover, intuitive methods for creating realistic human motion will further enable the creation of human avatars in tele-presence applications, new anthropomorphic human-computer interfaces, and realistic digital actors in feature films and video games. Computer animation will not achieve its full potential until 1) animation tools require little or no skill, 2) an animator s creativity is not stifled by the limitations of the animation tools, and 3) the animation systems are available to every person with a computer and a story to tell. I hope to significantly contribute towards these goals. At the heart of this research is the observation that the animator s creativity will not be fully realized until it becomes easier to produce realistic motion sequences. This problem is tremendously challenging because the underlying physical models of motion are difficult to create and control. I believe that the solution lies in the creation of highly-flexible realistic motion libraries, together with tools to modify them intuitively and extensively. The power of libraries stems from the ability to reuse already existing high-quality motion, reducing the need for animation skills. In this paradigm, the process of animation turns into selecting the specific motion library, and modifying a set of motion properties that transform the original motion into a final animation. In my research, I propose to develop a methodology for creating and using realistic motion libraries flexible enough to be used in a wide range of applications. In , I proposed the use of motion transformation as new way to create animations - a method fundamentally different from the traditional way of creating animations from scratch. This transformation approach is particularly useful for modifying realistic motion data captured from real-world actors. Unfortunately, during the transformation process, much of the realism tends to be lost. Recently, I published a novel transformation approach which demonstrates that animations can be intuitively transformed into a wide range of new sequences without violating the fundamental dynamic properties of motion. The realism is preserved by maintaining a model of the dynamic and biomechanic properties of the animated character. In the future, I will further develop mathematical models that can be combined with real-world data to create reusable motion libraries. Aside from preserving the realism of motion, the most important requirement for effective motion libraries is the flexibility with which the libraries can be adjusted to meet the needs of an animator. I plan to achieve this flexibility by decomposing a character s motion into a fundamental component and a style component in a way that allows us to independently transfer these components to new characters. For example, the animator can produce a child s cheerful run sequence by starting with a running motion library extracted from the captured human run. This motion can be modified by applying a happy, exuberant motion style, which is then transferred to an animated character of a small child. Such decoupling of the fundamental motion, style, and performing character provides an extremely powerful and flexible animation paradigm that can produce a wide range of animations from a very small motion dataset. The main goal of the educational component of this proposal is to demonstrate the utility of advanced animation tools in education and story-telling. I am particularly interested in introducing these new animation tools to Seattle high-school students to verify that our research does indeed empower every story-teller with an accessible medium of expression. I am also planning a project-oriented animation course intended for undergraduate and graduate students involved in animation research, as well as in art and music. Together, the students will work on using our tools to create an artistic short film project. This synergistic effort will expose the artists to the latest animation technology and provide direct user feedback to students involved in research. In addition, the created motion libraries as well as the animation tools, will be freely distributed through the web and CDs with the hope that they will help animation become an effective communication medium across educational, economic and cultural boundaries doc7809 none This project investigates how informal collaboration in the workplace can be supported by calendar information available via personal digital appliances. The goal is to retain the flexibility and individual usability of personal devices while also enabling collaborative sharing of data, such as schedule and location information. However, the leap from personal use to group collaboration is not trivial, as individuals must assess what information they are willing to share, how they currently use that information, and how they value the benefits of collaboration. To explore these issues, the research will use probabilistic reasoning techniques to ascertain the likelihood of finding a colleague at a scheduled event. The system will analyze and distribute personal calendar information to faculty, staff and students at the PI s institution. Different visualization techniques offer trade-offs among precision, privacy, self-explanation, aggregation and effort in obtaining information. By analyzing the feasibility, adoption, use and social norms formed in response to these new capabilities, we contribute to the growing interest in informal collaboration, interfaces for serendipitous information, and the use of Bayesian networks doc7810 none The objective of this project is to develop and implement new and efficient optimization methods for robust and discrete optimization problems. The applications of interest to us are in the fields of financial engineering and network design. The robust optimization framework is an attempt to correct for the modeling uncertainties that are inevitable in engineering. Optimization problems are especially susceptible to modeling errors since, in trying to exploit the constraints, the optimal solutions typically amplify the errors several fold. In the robust framework, the perturbations are modeled as unknown, but bounded, and optimization problems are solved assuming worst case behavior of these perturbations. Robustness to modeling and estimation errors is an issue of critical importance for financial optimization problems because of the serious consequences of making wrong bets! Surprisingly, however, robust optimization has not been widely explored in financial engineering. The research proposed here formulates robust dynamical models for financial problems and develops semidefinite rogramming based methods for solving them. These models systematically account for parameter uncertainty and robustly update error-bounds as more information becomes available over time. In addition, the project extends the semidefinite relaxation methodology to probabilistically robust optimization problems that naturally emerge in the financial context. The other research focus of this proposal is on developing semidefinite models for graph theoretic problems such as the traveling salesman problem and network design. These models employ linear matrix inequalities (LM ) to represent geometric constraints, such as graph connectivity, specified number of edge vertex disjoint paths, etc. The optimization problems resulting from these LM models are, typically, mixed integer semidefinite programs, i.e. semidefinite programs where some of the decision variables are constrained to be integers. Currently, mixed semidefinite programs are appproximately solved by relaxing the integrality constraints. However, as computational ower increases and the interior point methods for solving semidefinite programs become more efficient, the PI expects that there would be a push for developing systematic methods of tightening the relaxations - as in the case of linear programming relaxations of mixed integer programs. As a first step in this direction, the PI proposes to develop several cutting lane strategies for mixed semidefinite programs. Although the problems of interest to the PI belong to disparate application areas, they are linked in that linear matrix inequalities and semidefinite programming provide the necessary tools to efficiently model and solve them. The education component of this proposal includes developing a sequence of graduate courses on engineering applications of optimization. These courses would fill an important gap in the curriculum of the Deppartment by providing students with a firm theoretical and practical grounding in optimization. The World Wide Web will be extensively used in these courses. All the teaching material will be available on the web. The PI will develop Java-based applets for all the examples used in the courses which would allow students to experiment with these examples in real time. Also, the optimization resources on the web will be integrated into the curriculum. This should be particularly useful to students from industry who would take the courses over the Video Network. To expose undergraduate students to research, the PI plans to organize an interdisciplinary research program in optimization and its applications. To facilitate industry outreach, the PI plans to implement the results of the proposed research into a software package and publish expository articles on the applications of the new techniques. The PI expects that the availability of a user friendly software will spur further applications and encourage industrial collaboration doc7811 none This is a computer graphics project that will research the interactive rendering of large-scale geometric datasets. This is an increasingly crucial problem because model sizes grow faster than the hardware speeds up. Specifically, this project will study: - perceptually-based simulation, - out-of-core and distributed simplification, and - dynamic simplication. The material will also be used to design and teach computer graphics courses, in order to foster student talent and interest doc7812 none The goal of this project is to develop a large-scale parallel data mining system (PDMS), which can manipulate very large scientific databases. The research pursues an application-oriented approach with input from three scientific domains: bioinformatics (protein structure prediction), astronomy (rare object identification) and materials informatics ( virtual material design). There are two conflicting objectives that must be satisfied: genericity and specificity. The PDMS toolkit must be generic in that it can support a range of common data mining tasks such as associations, sequences, classification and clustering, yet to be usable it must support specificity or domain-specific customization. The PDMS system is based on a novel three-tiered architecture consisting of a front-end interface and query tool, a middle layer of common high-level mining algorithms, and a back-end system consisting of a core set of data mining primitive operations , tightly integrated with a database system, and delivering peak parallel or distributed performance. The application-oriented approach produces excellent opportunities to advance inter-disciplinary educational efforts, and encourages the cross-fertilization of ideas and algorithms across these areas. New courses will be offered on the design of large scale data mining systems as well as applications of data mining in scientific domains. The results of this project will aid research in developing more generic data mining tools that are able to leverage high performance parallel and distributed techniques in all the phases of the knowledge discovery process, and in developing customized tools for important scientific applications like bioinformatics, astronomy and materials science doc7813 none This project has two main objectives: 1) to understand the current communication and coordination activities in the Hospital Operating Room (OR), focusing on the surgical team as the center of activity, and 2) to develop and test a theory of situated learning of decision skills. The first objective will be met through observations of surgeries and interviewing key personnel. We will collect video data, audio data, and code the communication activities between personnel in the room using verbal protocol analysis. We will also conduct a series of structured interviews with surgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists and OR staff to specifically ask these personnel about communication and coordination practices. The second objective will be met by developing a part-task simulation of the surgical environment using computer-based training, and measuring the ability to teach key situation assessment skills for various surgical cases with this simulation. This research will impact our understanding of surgical decision making, and provide a tangible means to train surgical decision making in a safe, simulated environment. The impact of this research will be to reduce medical error, improve training practices, and improve team communication and coordination in the OR doc7814 none Support for multiple quality-of-service (QOS) levels in mobile, distributed, packet radio networks is required for many commercial wireless applications. Mobile radio networks (or ad hoc networks) are required in situations where the network itself must be highly mobile and where access to a fixed infrastructure of base stations is not available. To meet demands of portability and low-power operation, it is desirable for a single ad hoc network to service the traffic demands of a wide range of applications, including examples such as all-informed multicast voice, real-time video, large file transfers, and interactive web browsing. Each class of traffic has specific service requirements and these QOS levels must be provided from a mobile and distributed network that operates with battery power only and with very limited bandwidth. The Wireless Communications Program at Clemson University has recognized that strong interaction among different protocol layers in ad hoc radio networks is not only desirable but in fact essential. A single protocol layer cannot guarantee a specific quality of service for a traffic type, but there must be coordination among the routing, queuing, traffic scheduling, congestion control, channel-access, and adaptive-transmission protocols. We have already demonstrated that information from the physical and link layers can be effectively utilized by the routing protocol to dramatically improve the end-to-end network performance and reduce the total energy expended by the mobile radios. The proposed research and education plan is based on our previous results that show that strong coupling among the protocol layers is vital for wireless communications networks that must interconnect highly mobile users and link them reliably to a fixed infrastructure. This career plan is structured to extend previous results through collaborative research that is focused on the link and network layers, and to explore a new topic area by applying the advances discovered in our previous work to new research into the interaction between the network and transport layers. The proposed career plan is centered on both undergraduate and graduate student participation. The topics are organized so that students with a range of experience levels can make significant contributions. A key priority of the research plan is to include students with a variety of career goals and motivate them to strive for the highest levels of scientific and engineering excellence throughout their careers. Ample opportunities are planned to encourage and develop promising undergraduate students to pursue graduate school. An important component of the educational plan is to incorporate research tools in the classroom. Animation tools that illustrate the performance of our distributed protocols have increased our understanding our research and they will prove to be equally valuable in the classroom and laboratory. Rather than simply reading about networking protocols in a textbook, students will implement distributed protocols within a discrete event simulation program and see the performance implications of the various protocols doc7815 none problem solving. New educational units will emphasize important problem-solving skills, such as checking answers, testing assumptions, and developing conceptual models. Activities with the investigator s research group will include student-led discussions of important problem-solving texts, hands-on model development workshops, and a student-led K-12 outreach program where graduate students supported by the project conduct problem-solving workshops with elementary and high school students doc7816 none Dr. Sonya Franklin, Department of Chemistry, University of Iowa, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program, Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, through a Career Award for her work on the design of artificial endonucleases as biological probes of gene regulation and transcription that will lead to an understanding of embryonic developmental processes. Specifically, small metalloproteins, chimeras of the Ca-binding EF-Hand motif, and the helix-turn-helix motif of homeodomain transcription factors will be designed as selective and tunable endonucleases. In the educational area, a new graduate level bioinorganic special topics course will be developed, modern bioinorganic experiments will be incorporated in upper-level undergraduate laboratory courses, and freshman and sophomore students will be exposed to a survey of bioinorganic chemistry. Exploiting the well-established recognition of DNA-binding proteins to deliver hydrolytic metals for site-specific cleavage will have significant and broad-reaching potential in molecular biochemistry. Students will gain experience with oral and written presentation of literature and research topics in group meetings and at scientific conferences; bioinorganic chemistry will be the basis to expose students to lateral thinking, to thoughtful analysis, to gain confidence in problem solving, and to improve communication skills doc7817 none Erik Sontheimer It has been known for over two decades that functional messenger RNA is not a raw copy of DNA but is instead a highly edited molecule wherein non-functional portions (introns) are precisely spliced away. The faithful expression of genetic information requires that intron removal occur with remarkable accuracy. The splicing machinery consists of five RNA molecules that (along with several dozen proteins) comprise an extremely dynamic complex in which multiple RNA interactions form, break, and rearrange. Despite intensive efforts, the mechanistic principles that underlie this structural plasticity have remained obscure, largely because of the inability to control individual rearrangements directly and specifically. In the research component of this CAREER project, the investigator will develop a new biochemical technique that allows the reversible covalent fixation of RNA structure within a complex protein-containing environment. This approach takes advantage of the high affinity between arsenic and sulfur atoms. Incorporation of two sulfur atoms into each strand of an RNA duplex will generate a four-sulfur binding site for a compound containing two arsenic atoms ( biarsenical ). The investigator will then develop biarsenical compounds that can crosslink the modified RNAs in a way that can be reversed upon addition of an excess of antidote containing two sulfur atoms. Once the crosslinking system has been developed and characterized, it will be used to trap dynamic RNA interactions within the splicing machinery. This will then permit the biochemical characterization of splicing complexes that are stalled at discrete stages of the splicing pathway. The reversibility of the crosslinks will allow the investigator to define the roles of enzymes thought to control RNA rearrangements in the spliceosome, including proteins previously implicated in promoting accurate splice site selection. The techniques developed in the course of this project will be applicable to many other systems that involve nucleic acid rearrangements. Over the past twenty years, it has also become clear that many central workings of the cell involve large macromolecular assemblies that dwarf many of the enzymes that have been so well characterized structurally and mechanistically. To understand gene expression at a similar depth, the challenges presented by this size and complexity must be faced. Much of the biochemistry curriculum required of sophomore- and junior-level biology students provides a solid grounding in relatively simple and well-defined biochemical systems, predominantly from intermediary metabolism. The processes of eukaryotic gene expression, however, have often been taught in a more descriptive and less quantitative and mechanistic fashion. As the field of gene expression progresses beyond the parts list phase, undergraduate biochemistry courses should reflect this, to incorporate the most exciting current research and to spur interest in addressing some of the great challenges that remain. In the educational component of this CAREER award, the investigator will develop a junior-level biochemistry course that (as before) covers the fundamentals of macromolecular structure, function, and energetics, but that draws many of its illustrations and examples from areas of molecular and cell biology that are the subjects of intense current investigation. The intended goal of this approach is to emphasize the current excitement in the field, to prepare students for the exploding opportunities that await biochemists in the post-genome era, and to impress upon them the creativity and interdisciplinarity that will be necessary to tackle the workings of larger and more complex systems doc7818 none Qiu Plants are primary producers on the earth, supplying our food directly and indirectly, creating the habitat we live in, and providing many other materials for everyday life. However, our knowledge of plant evolution remains scanty. Improvement of crops and understanding the roles of plants in our environment partially hinge on our knowledge of plant evolution. Revolutions in molecular biology, phylogenetics, and computer science have made it possible for the first time in history to reconstruct accurately the phylogeny of plants. In this project by Dr. Yin-Long Qiu at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, three different approaches will be employed to understand both organismal and molecular aspects of land plant evolution. First, several genes from all three plant genomes (nucleus, chloroplast, mitochondrion) will be sequenced and analyzed in combination with the data available from the public domain to reconstruct a multigene land plant phylogeny. Second, several genomic structural features from the mitochondrial genome, such as intron acquisition, intron transposition, and gene cluster disintegration, will be investigated independently to evaluate critical parts of the sequence-based phylogeny and at the same to understand mitochondrial genome evolution in early land plants. Last, a few mitochondrial genomes will be sequenced to gain an in-depth look at mitochondrial genome evolution during early land plant radiation and to provide more genomic structural characters for assessing robustness of the relationships resolved through gene sequence analyses among major lineages of early land plants: liverworts, mosses, hornworts, and vascular plants. Plant science is at the dawn of a new era. After two decades of separate development along distinst lines of morphology, systematics, genetics, physiology, and ecology, these sub-disciplines begin to integrate into a new comprehensive plant biology. Thus, this project also aims to reach two educational goals. One is to train several graduate students and postdoctoral associates in the newly emerging field of evolutionary genomics. They will fill in a knowledge rift between traditional systematics and modern genomics that is developing in many biology departments. The other is to develop three courses, Plant Evolution, Evolutionary Genomics, and Phylogenetics, which are emerging fields with a recent explosion of new information. These courses will serve the function for both undergraduate and graduate education. In summary, the five lines of work outlined in this project are likely to enhance significantly our knowledge of land plant evolution doc7819 none Throughout his career at Colorado State University (CSU), Dr. Vivanco will integrate plant biology education and research to the mutual benefit of both endeavors and will further the land-grant mission of CSU with community outreach activities. The long-term research goal of Dr. Vivanco s program is to understand the biology of plant Ribosome-Inactivating Proteins (RIP s). This knowledge can be used to develop strategies to increase broad-spectrum pathogen resistance in crops such as potato. Such strategies include enhanced breeding programs that promote RIP incorporation, the use of chemical or biological elicitors of RIP expression, and transgenic technology. Although much work has been done to dissect the enzymatic and antiviral mechanisms of RIP s, relatively little is known about the antifungal activity and biology of these proteins in plants. Root-specific RIP s from Mirabilis expansa will be used to study these reputed properties. RIP s may function in processes associated with disease resistance and tolerance, such as cell-specific hypersensitive responses and pathogen-induced cell death. Furthermore, these proteins are likely to be involved at many stages of plant growth and development, and thus their role in the underground organ will be studied. Because of the molecular and genomic technologies available for model plants such as tobacco, the isolation of RIP genes in these plants will provide the tools to determine the specific roles of RIP s in the disease resistance cascade and to identify novel physiological functions for these proteins. Finally, the enzymatic activity of certain RIP s will be targeted against viroids to provide novel control strategies. In addition to studying RIP s in plants, Dr. Vivanco will introduce innovative courses and education techniques into the classroom and will continue to integrate undergraduates into his program. Through this project he will also work to increase the number of under-represented minorities working in plant biology and to educate public school students and teachers about the wonders of plants doc7820 none Now that numerous genomes have been sequenced, a significant challenge confronting biologists is to determine the functions of the genes contained in these genomes. One aspect of understanding the function of a given gene is to determine the conditions under which it is active, the mechanisms responsible for controlling its level of activity, and the interactions it has with other genes. Toward this end, in the current project the PI will develop new computational approaches to uncovering the regulatory mechanisms and interactions of genes in a given organism. In particular, the focus is on developing new machine learning methods which are able to predictively identify various regulatory elements of a genome, using well-characterized aspects of the genome as training data. The expected impact of this research is twofold: it will produce new methods and software that can be applied by molecular biologists to gain insight into the regulatory apparatus of the cell; and it will advance the state of the art in machine learning by developing new methods for problem domains that involve (i) multiple inter-related learning tasks, (ii) rich and varied sources of data including sequence and text data, and (iii) the need for rich representation languages, such as stochastic context-free grammars and relational rules doc7821 none Future generation wireless systems and data storage systems will certainly take advantage of the recent developments in coding theory and signal processing. In the last decade, concatenated coding and iterative processing have emerged as powerful paradigms in coding theory and signal processing. Both wireless communications and magnetic recording systems place particular constraints and limitations. In wireless communications, maintaining high power and spectral efficiency is key. In addition, in some systems, it may be necessary to maintain a constant envelope for the transmitted signals. Digital magnetic recording systems can tolerate very little redundancy and require very low end to end bit error rates. It is crucial to develop an understanding of the potential and limitations of concatenated coding and iterative processing for use in these systems. While exact analysis of concatenated codes with iterative decoding is difficult, a recently proposed technique called density evolution is a powerful tool that permits analysis of iterative decoding and offers considerable insight. Using this technique or, a variation thereof, this research aims at furthering the design and analysis of iteratively decodable codes with applications to wireless communications systems and digital magnetic recording systems. This research emphasizes two main ideas - irregular codes and the design of codes matched to iterative decoding. Based on these ideas, three specific areas are addressed. They are 1) Design and analysis of irregular parallel and serial concatenated codes including non-binary codes and irregular turbo trellis coded modulation, 2) A comprehensive study of concatenated coding and decoding strategies for modulators with memory (such as CPM), their performance analysis for AWGN, flat Rayleigh fading and inter-symbol interference channels, 3) Design and analysis of codes for digital magnetic recording - particular emphasis is given to the design of concatenated codes in the presence of an outer Reed-Solomon code, evaluating novel high rate codes and on low complexity receiver structures when the overall desired bit error rates are of the order of 10^{-15 doc7822 none Charles Yanofsky This research will focus on three principle objectives. The first objective is to characterize the YczA regulatory protein of Bacillus subtilis and determine how it inactivates the TRAP regulatory protein. The TRAP protein regulates transcription of six of the tryptophan biosynthetic genes, it regulates the seventh trp gene translationally. The YczA protein is produced by the yczA-ycbK operon, an operon of previously unknown function. This operon is regulated by transcription attenuation; it is transcriptionally activated in response to the accumulation of uncharged tRNATrp. The second objective is to continue studies on the detailed features of the mechanism of transcription attenuation used by E. coli and other bacterial species to regulate expression of the degradative tryptophanase(tna) operon. Tryptophan addition to E. coli cultures induces expression of the tna operon. Induction leads to inhibition of cleavage of a leader peptidyl-tRNA and this inhibition stalls the translating ribosome. The stalled ribosome prevents Rho mediated transcription termination in the leader region of the tna operon. The PI s laboratory has successfully reproduced the regulatory features for this operon in vitro and now plan to examine in detail exactly how peptidyl-tRNA cleavage is blocked. The third objective is to use DNA microarray analyses with the entire genome of Bacillus subtilis to determine which genes are selectively transcriptionally activated and transcriptionally inhibited in response to changes in tryptophan metabolism, as the PI recently did with the genome of E. coli. These findings should allow the comparison of expression of the genes of tryptophan metabolism in two microorganisms that are preferred subjects for experimental analysis doc7823 none The Computer and Engineering Technology (CET) Scholars Program is designed to provide scholarships to 50 students studying in the areas of Computer Information Technology, Computer-Aided Drafting and Design, Microcomputer Electronics, Electronics Engineering Technology and Robotics and Automated Systems Technology. These majors are all considered advanced technology careers in the state of Pennsylvania. In addition to excellent career opportunities in the region for graduates, these programs offer transferability into baccalaureate programs at local four-year colleges. Working through the Affirmative Action Office of the college, multiple sources are used to contact interested young people, especially women and minorities. High school counselors, scout troops, church youth groups, a web site, and school and group presentations are some of the methods used for recruitment. Factors used by the scholarship selection committee are group diversity, financial need, grade point average (2.8 or higher for selection), letters of recommendation describing career potential, and commitment to career advancement. Working with the Financial Aid Office to build a complete package, the CET Scholars are awarded up to $2,500 per year toward their school expenses. Regardless of major, all CET Scholars complete a common one-year core of Technical Mathematics and Technical Physics designed specifically to enhance the use of these topics by the technology majors, encourage collaborative work, and to stress mastery of conceptual topics. A unique feature of the program is that all CET Scholars complete an external Work Keys Assessment Process. This assessment certifies, to the student, the employer, the school and the funding agencies, the quality of the education and training received. National Work Key Assessment Profiles are available for the careers being targeted by this project doc7824 none As more and more people use computer networks to exchange confidential data and perform business transactions, public key cryptography is rapidly becoming one of the most critical tools in today s electronic world. Using cryptography it is possible to perform many important tasks ranging from electronic voting, to digital contract signing, secure virtual conferences on public networks and many more. All these applications ultimately rely on the security of the underlying cryptographic primitives (i.e. the fundamental building blocks using which all other more complex cryptographic applications are built). This research involves the study of computational problems from an area of mathematics called geometry of numbers that can be used both to design new cryptographic primitives, and to test old ones and assess their security. The investigators study the complexity of point lattices. These are geometric objects that can be described as the set of intersection points of a regular n-dimensional grid. This research involves both the identification of hard lattice problems, and the search for better algorithms to solve lattice problems that admit efficient solution. Hard lattice problems are subsequently used to design new cryptographic functions, while new lattice algorithms are used to design new cryptanalytic attacks against existing cryptographic primitives doc7825 none Parallel computing has long offered the promise of very high performance, but it has delivered only in a narrow range of applications. Exploiting parallelism at the level of large distributed-memory systems is hampered by the cost of message-passing, while shared-memory systems remain mostly small-scale. With the advent of symmetric multiprocessors (SMPs), however, shared-memory on a modest scale is becoming an available commodity. High-performance gigabit networks allow scalable applications to run on large clusters of SMPs. Over the next five to ten years, clusters of SMPs will likely be the predominant architecture for scalable high-performance computing; however, little work has been done to date to support effective parallel computing on these SMP clusters. Preliminary work we have conducted indicates that it is possible to improve upon current programming methods for SMP clusters. In this career award the goal is to develop, implement, assess, and refine algorithms for SMP clusters for irregular (e.g., string-, tree-, and graph-based) computations that will deliver significant speedups on typical configurations of SMP clusters and scale gracefully with the number of processors. The research will investigate new algorithms and a library of basic routines to support irregular computations, mostly tree- and graph- based, along with new insights on how to leverage the theoretical research in PRAM algorithms. Science-driven problems in genomics,bioinformatics, and computational ecology will provide the focus for this research. The education component of this project includes mentoring high school and minority students, diseminating research results through talks and papers, and presenting tutorials at key conferences and workshops. Prior mentoring has produced several individual and group teams that have won first place in both local and national competitions and mentoring will continue activities with minority groups, such as the National Society of Black Engineers and Native American Pueblo student groups doc7826 none While current circuit testing techniques are limited by the increasing circuit size, the proposed research explores a new concept of spectrum-based test generation to tackle testing of increasingly large and complex circuits. A state-of-the-art spectrum-based technique for chip functional testing is being explored that achieves extremely high fault coverages in short execution times. In this approach, the circuit is viewed as a system identifiable by its input-output characteristics instead of a traditional netlist of primitives. Spectral characteristics are extracted and analyzed for the input output signals of the system under test, and the resulting data are used to predict and construct intelligent test patterns. In addition, this functional spectral knowledge also provides new means for built-in-self-test (BIST), applicable also for system-on-a-chip. This research addresses the relevant issues in the spectrum-based testing framework: (a) the development of various techniques for spectral extraction for a given circuit; (b) the analysis of different spectral bases (orthogonal and non-orthogonal) and how they can influence spectral characteristics for testing; and (c) the application of transform domain to identify dominant frequency components to generate intelligent patterns doc7827 none Le This award supports a planning visit by Thuy Le and Donald Kirk, San Jose State University, to Vietnam. The purpose of the planning visit is to determine the potential for joint long-term research and education cooperation, including distance education, between Vietnam and the US. Through visits to universities and research institutes in Hanoi and in Ho Chi Minh City, the US PIs will explore the status of higher education in engineering in Vietnam, and investigate barriers to distance learning. Information gathered during the trip will be available through a website following the visits doc7828 none The design and implementation of a modern microprocessor presents many reliability challenges. Designers must verify the correctness of large complex systems and construct implementations that work reliably in varied operating conditions. The research examines the role that speculative execution could play in improving the quality and reliability of future microprocessor designs. A novel processing paradigm, called dynamic verification, is proposed that pushes speculation into all aspects of program processing. The approach couples a traditional core processor design with a simple checker processor that verifies its computation. The resulting core processor design has significant resistance to permanent and transient errors. The proposed research examines the design of the checker processor, with emphasis on minimizing its cost and impact on core processor performance. The educational component of this work seeks to better prepare the student for coming challenges in computer system design. The VeriSimple Processor tool kit will provide students with a unified computer design experience, starting with high level design in undergraduate classes, to microarchitectural design in advanced undergraduate classes, and finally research-oriented design in graduate coursework. The tool kit will be incorporated into the SimpleScalar tool set (simulator tools developed by the PI) and freely distributed to other institutions doc7829 none This integrated research and education proposal describes a new server-centric approach to computing based on the premise that advances in network speed and ubiquity have created the conditions in which a computer utility can be used to deliver computational services over the Internet to end users. The computer utility model described is one in which users entire computing environment, including all applications, data, and the window system, reside on professionally-managed servers. Users can then access their computing environments from any Internet-enabled client device. The proposed research will focus on three areas: (1) remote display technologies to enable remote graphical access to applications without requiring any application modifications, (2) server resource management mechanisms to deliver guaranteed levels of performance to large numbers of interactive users, and (3) server cluster resource management that will effectively load balance, allocate, and reliably provide computing resources from a cluster of servers to users and groups of users. The proposal also describes how the research will be applied and integrated with curriculum development efforts to develop an IT distance learning education laboratory for teaching systems courses, particularly operating systems doc7830 none The Synthetic Organic Program is awarding a grant to John Montgomery at the Department of Chemistry, Wayne State University. This grant will continue his research into asymmetric nickel-catalyzed cyclizations. Mechanistic studies and the development of new catalytic, enantioselective processes will be pursued. The preparation of a number of (poly)cycles to illustrate the utility of the methodology will be carried out. Professor Montgomery s research provides an excellent training ground for students in organic and organometallic chemistry. These students then enter the pharmaceutical and chemical workforce, as well as academia. This research into nickel-catalyzed cyclizations to form new cyclic compounds is most likely to find applications in the preparation of pharmaceutical agents doc7831 none Dean Roddick, University of Wyoming, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program for continued work on organometallic compounds in superacidic environments. Using fluorinated chelating phosphines such as di(perfluoroethylphosphino)ethane (dfepe), Roddick has prepared platinum alkyls such as (dfepe)Pt(Me)(OTf) and [(dfepe)Pt(Me)(CO)]+ that are stable in superacidic solutions. A range of alkyls will be prepared to determine the relative proteolytic stability. The chemistry will be extended to explore carbenium ion chemistry in the coordination sphere of a metal. Hydrides, polyhydrides and dihydrogen complexes will also be studied in this unique environment. High pressure NMR and ATR-IR will be used to survey the interactions of these very electrophilic compounds with weak bases such as methane, xenon, nitrogen and oxygen. This work explores the limits of organometallic chemistry in the extreme superacid environment. The superelectrophilic metal complexes provide insight into alkane transformations on metal surfaces. Such transformations are critical in petroleum cracking and other important industrial processes doc7832 none Describing and understanding the distribution of fishes across whole river basins is a central issue in landscape ecology, population biology, and invasive species research. The PI proposes to develop methods to detect aquatic species by PCR amplification of DNA from cellular materials in stream water. The project focuses on determining the presence or absence of salmonid fishes (trout and char) in streams by amplification of species-specific DNA sequences from cells shed by fish into the water. The particle concentration and assay sensitivity required for this work appear feasible based upon recent use of filtration and PCR methods to detect protozoan parasites (giardia, cryptosporidia) in public drinking water. However, the extreme dilution of biotic materials in clear mountain streams may be problematical because the quantity, fate and condition of cellular debris shed by fish into the water are unknown. In addition, the optimal methods to separate these materials from plankton, algae, and decaying plant materials that may compete with salmonid DNA in assays and may inhibit PCR also need to be developed. The proximate goal is to develop a procedure to detect fish in remote and inaccessible streams, without resorting to laborious and inefficient field methods. Applications of the methods developed will have much greater range, however, as the results will suggest modifications for assays of many other aquatic species doc7833 none Despite the growing complexity of the storage landscape, tools to architect new storage systems are practically nonexistent. The purpose of this CAREER grant proposal is to develop a long-range program of research and education in design and performance analysis of storage systems, with a specific emphasis on emerging probe-based storage technology. The main question this research proposal asks is: How do we design probe-based storage to give optimal performance for a workload with certain characteristics? Answering this question requires a long-range research plan with thrusts in several areas, including creating physical models for the device, developing tools and methodologies for optimizing design based on a specific workload, and novel research in workload characterization to generalize our conclusions. Although our initial focus is on probe-based storage, we envision creating a parameterized, plug-and-play performance environment in which many other models may be used. The education component of this proposal represents a philosophy of curriculum development to increase awareness of storage systems, and a general emphasis on fostering active learning skills doc7834 none With the trend toward denser and cheaper memory, database servers in the near future will have large main memory configurations and a significant number of datasets will reside in main memory. In this configuration, the performance of the database system is limited by how fast the memory subsystem can feed instructions and data to the processor. Traditional data storage and query processing techniques are optimized to minimize access to disks and do not effectively utilize the processor caches, resulting in poor query performance. The goal of this research project is to investigate, and experimentally evaluate, data storage and query processing techniques that can effectively utilize the processor caches. The approach consists of novel data storage techniques that can incrementally and transparently adapt the layout of data to better utilize the processor caches, cache-conscious indexing techniques for both traditional alphanumeric data and richer data types such as spatial data, and cache-conscious query evaluation and scheduling techniques. A prototype database system, called Quickstep, is being developed to experimentally evaluate the proposed techniques. The results of this project will produce techniques for efficient query evaluation in environments where the data is mostly resident in main-memory, with possible application in high-performance database servers powering Internet sites and future network routers that will require query processing for providing application-specific routing services. The education component of this project aims to introduce material in the graduate-level database course to expose students to the emerging confluence of databases and architectural technologies. The systems-building effort of this project provides an environment for training both undergraduate and graduate students in database implementation and performance evaluation techniques doc7835 none The Evolution of Massive Stars as a Function of Metallicity: Closing the Loop Observationally in the Local Group AST- Although massive stars are rare, they have an importance far beyond their scant numbers. Through action of their strong outflowing winds and their eventual explosive destruction as supernovae, they provide much of the energy input into the interstellar medium. With short lifetimes of only a few million years and high mass-loss rates, they are primary sources of heavy element enrichment in a galaxy. Dr. Massey is presently concluding a survey for red supergiant, blue supergiant and Wolf-Rayet stars in nearby galaxies of the Local Group. This project is scheduled for completion during the current calendar year. Follow-up observations are now required and, during the period covered by this new award, stars found in the survey will be observed with large telescopes to obtain spectra and photometry. It will be possible to learn how the evolution of massive stars varies with mass, age and heavy element content without the observational biases that have plagued this type of investigation in the past doc7836 none This research develops efficient cryptographic tools which offer provable security guarantees. Such tools rectify the widely-recognized deficiency associated with extant provably-secure cryptosystems: their prohibitive computing demands. Indeed, despite the highly amplified security offered by provably-secure systems, efficiency considerations have prevented their widespread adoption; as a result, tools in common use typically involve ad-hoc methods designed with speed, rather than security, as their first priority. This re-search resolves this difficulty, constructing cryptographic tools (like encryption engines, digital signature schemes, and pseudo-random generators) which can simultaneously boast provable security guarantees and competitive efficiency. This program is undertaken in concert with an educational initiative which develops security and general information technology course material at the University of Connecticut. Security in provably-secure constructions is generally accumulated by repeated application of some underlying cryptographic primitive (a one-way function, for example). For a fixed underlying primitive, the computing time required to generate enough security to, say, encrypt a long message, depends essentially on (i.) the quantity of security which can be quickly extracted from a single application of the underlying primitive, and (ii.) the total quantity of security necessary for the encryption process. This research ad-dresses both of these issues, developing provably-secure frameworks for cryptography which fully exploit the security capacity of underlying primitives and utilize this distilled security in the most effective manner. Issue (i.) is addressed by the development of quantitative bounds for the security capacity of one-way functions and bounds on the computational complexity of extracting security from general one-way functions. Issue (ii.) is addressed by the development of a new family of cryptographic primitives, balancing provable security and competitive efficiency. For encryption, a focal point of the research, this is attained by coupling strong (information-theoretic) pseudo-random constructions with semantically secure encryption machinery. Such methods have direct applicability to encryption, cryptographically strong hashing, and pseudo doc7837 none This CAREER proposal seeks to establish a fundamental understanding of the molecular level mechanisms and dynamics of cholesterol crystal nucleation and growth using in situ atomic force microscopy (AFM). The chemical functionality and microstructure of cholesterol monohydrate crystal faces will be established using chemical force microscopy and phase imaging techniques. In situ AFM growth experiments will afford direct information on crystal growth mechanisms (kinetics and anisotropy) and the characterization of molecular level defects under a variety of solution and well-established model bile conditions. Crystal nucleation and growth will additionally be investigated in the presence of epitaxial mineral substrates and rationally designed inhibitors. Educational aspects of this plan include the development of a new undergraduate organic laboratory experiment concerning crystal growth from gel media, and the establishment of the first annual East Coast Graduate Student Organic Materials Symposium. %%% This is an area of solid state chemical biology that is of high relevance and importance to the medical industry. Students trained in the area of solid state organic chemistry are very competitive in the job market in areas such as pharmaceuticals doc7838 none Over the past decade, our ability to produce graphical images has improved to the extent that we can create imaginary scenes that are virtually indistinguishable from reality. Digital humans have been called the last frontier in this march to graphical realism, and the area of human animation has also seen dramatic developments. Increasing use of motion capture data and new techniques for manipulating that data allow us to reproduce human motion at an extremely high level of fidelity. Graphically generated characters in video games and films can seem uncannily real. Pending the development of easy-to-use tools for directing digital humans, we should soon see digital humans as plausible user interfaces, and animated characters will become much more prevalent in education, demonstration, and training applications. If digital humans are the last frontier in realistic computer graphics, the last frontier in realistic digital humans is generating believable hand motion. Human hands are beautiful and complex mechanisms, amazing in their utility and adaptability. It is argued that it is our hands that make us human, and that hand evolution was a primary factor in the development of intelligence. Hand use in autonomous digital human characters, however, is generally quite unconvincing. Hands may be placed in a single frozen pose, and interaction between characters and objects is avoided when possible. The main problem is that geometric models of the human hand have far too much flexibility. This flexibility makes working with hands difficult even for trained animators, and it poses a tremendous challenge for creating autonomous characters that must interact with their environment. I believe that the key to making further progress in hand motion for digital characters is much more detailed consideration of the anatomy of the human hand. In analysis of human grasps, for example, critically important considerations include the amount of contact between finger pads, palm, and object; the ability of muscles to produce or resist task force; and the stabilization roles of fingers and muscles, yet none of these issues have been explored in grasp synthesis research in either the robotics or computer graphics communities. In pursuit of the goal of believable hand use for digital characters, we propose an anatomy-based model of human grasping. In particular, we propose a tendon-based quality measure for humanlike enveloping grasps, and we plan to evaluate this quality measure (1) for ability to discriminate between grasps, (2) as a predictor of grasp forces, and (3) for use in modeling grasp acquisition. Because of the strong emphasis on human anatomy, this research has the potential for additional impact outside graphics and animation in areas including ergonomics (tool design), robotics (robot hand design), and anthropology (research in human hand evolution and tool use). The educational portion of this proposal focuses on teaching and mentoring of undergraduates. The research ideas, techniques, and results will be incorporated into a course at Brown that attracts both un-dergraduate and graduate students, and will provide them with an opportunity to learn and experiment in a problem domain that is a nice mix of computational geometry and numerical optimization, grounded in human anatomy and supported by data. A special effort will be made to include undergraduate women in the research program, for example, through the CRA Distributed Mentor Program. Research results will include a library of example grasps and applied forces, as well as a tool for adapting the examples to new hand and object geometries. Once this research is published, the data and tools will be made available to other researchers on the web, and should serve as a useful resource for creating digital characters for education, entertainment, and training applications doc7839 none M. Solomon, University of Michigan Studies of the structure and dynamics of complex fluids, particularly in the presence of flow, address fundamental questions of engineering science in fluid physics, rheology and colloidal science. Direct visualization techniques of confocal laser scanning microscopy and epifluorescence microscopy promises new development in these areas by capturing actual pictures of colloidal particle positions and displacements in three and two dimensions, respectively. We propose an integrated program of research and education with the research aim of using these methods to directly observe complex fluid structure and dynamics during flow. The materials studied will be colloidal particulate gels and associative polymer solutions containing colloidal particles. The work will impact the areas of ceramics, paints, inks, digital storage media and DNA sequencing. In addition, our recent scattering and rheological studies of these materials have identified research questions in which direct visualization methods generate opportunity for unprecedented discovery. The research plan involves the use of a specially designed and constructed shear cell that will be mounted on a confocal laser scanning microscope and an epifluorescence microscope. Experiments will encompass transient and steady shear flow in both linear and non-linear regimes. Associated polymers and fluorescent colloids necessary for the work will be synthesized in house by previously tested methods. Training for two graduate students, and research opportunities for a number of undergraduates, will be provided. The research efforts will also synergistically promote parallel efforts in education and outreach. An undergraduate elective in polymers will be redesigned to teach the skills necessary to manipulate polymeric complex fluids at the molecular level. A research project requiring original analysis will be instituted that will reinforce this new educational material. A graduate course in complex fluids will be incrementally revised to include new results of direct visualization methods, as they become available, thereby providing a conduit between the research program and graduate education. In an outreach project, hands-on complex fluid projects will be developed for a program in which middle school students from groups traditionally under-represented in engineering come to the department for tutoring and instruction doc7840 none Langreth This theoretical project is comprised of several related topics. One of them is density functional theory of both long-range and short-range interaction between microscopic and mesoscopic bodies. Another looks at a theory of electronic dissipation, non-adiabatic charge transfer and potentials and rates for atoms and molecular species moving and reacting at a solid surface. A third component is the theory of transport in quantum dots using techniques previously developed for non-adiabatic charge transfer. This work is related to the properties of metals and insulators at a surface. It explores the new physical phenomena which are seen as an electron, an atom, or a molecular species moves near a surface. These include very subtle, long-range and technologically important questions of forces between small bodies and between a small grain and a surface. They include complex questions of charge transfer, dissipation and energy transfer, when do they happen and how. Finally there are attempts to understand transport in single electron transistors, consisting of very small artificial structures embedded in metallic layers on semiconductor surfaces. %%% This is a theoretical project comprised of a number of related topics including ones dealing with the interactions of small objects (electrons, atoms, molecules) with larger ones (surfaces and quantum dots). Included are fundamental issues related to nanoscale phenomena and nanodevices doc7841 none Despite the ubiquitous use of interactive web services, the technology for programming such services has remained low-level, tedious and insecure. The overwhelmingly common method of extending web servers with external applications is to use the Common Gateway Interface protocol, which, while conceptually simple, has several known security loopholes. The primary goal of this research is to establish type systems as the fundamental methodology for reasoning about interactive web services, and as a basis for designing and implementing tools that guarantee security and reliability of these services. Some objectives of the research are to: (a) Provide tools to create secure programming environments for interactive web services by building on existing tools and infrastructure, notably the bigwig tools for interactive web services developed at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. (b) Implement prototype tools that check the satisfaction of security policies (e.g., type-safety, memory-safety, secure information flow) for interactive web services, and that provide feedback about failures. (c) Foster fundamental progress in the area of modular program analysis; this is not only essential for interactive web services (and more generally, mobile software) because of their componential nature of construction, but also has the potential to impact scalability and efficiency of more conventional optimizing compilers as well doc7842 none Until recently, performance has been the single most important issue in the design of hardware and software. However, with the proliferation of battery-powered embedded and portable devices and the ever-increasing clock frequencies of general-purpose processors, the problem of effective energy optimization has become very important for a wide variety of architectures. The goal of this project is to design and implement an energy-aware optimizing compiler framework that take as input a source code written in a high-level language, energy and performance constraints, architectural description and technology related parameters, and generates as output an energy performance optimized executable and an estimation of energy consumption. Some key contributions include (i) high-level energy models that can be used by a compiler, (ii) a simulator infrastructure to validate compiler output, (iii) new, energy-oriented compiler optimizations, and (iv) investigating the necessary os and architectural support for effective cooperation between the compiler, os, and architecture so as to address the growing energy problem in a unified manner. The proposed energy performance-aware approach represents a radical shift from pure performance-oriented strategies used so far in optimizing compilers, and will open new avenues of research in computing in a world that is increasingly becoming more energy-conscious doc7843 none Leon This award supports the participation of American scientists in a U.S.-Japan seminar on advanced stability and seismicity concepts for performance-based design of steel and composite structures to be held in Kyoto, Japan from July 24-27, . The co-organizers are professors Roberto Leon of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Professor Eiichi Watanabe of the Kyoto University in Japan. The last decade has witnessed some of the most damaging earthquakes to urban areas in the last century. Beginning with the Northridge and Kobe Earthquakes, and concluding with the Chi-Chi (Taiwan) and Kocaeli (Turkey) ones, these events have exposed the vulnerability of both older and modern construction to near-field ground motions, and reinforced the need to mitigate and limit direct and indirect economic damage from earthquakes. These earthquakes have led to extensive research efforts in both the U.S. and Japan. The seminar will focus on advances in the state-of-the-art achieved in the last six years, with major emphasis on achievements resulting from (a) experiences of, and research subsequent to the Northridge, Hanshin, Kocaeli, and Chi-Chi earthquakes and (b) the development of performance-based specifications for seismic design of steel and composite structures. The final output from the workshop will be a monograph that discusses the current state-of-the-art in seismic design of steel building, and identifies weaknesses and voids in current American and Japanese practices. It will also focus attention on new technologies that are promising for improving seismic performance. Seminar organizers have made a special effort to involve younger researchers and postdocs as both participants and observers. The exchange of ideas and data with Japanese experts in this field will enable U.S. participants to advance their own work, and will set the stage for future collaborative projects. Dissemination of information on the seminar will be available on the World Wide Web doc7844 none The goal of this career development plan is two-fold. Research in developing fast and accurate high-level energy-estimation tools and their use in designing new software and architectural techniques for energy efficient Java execution. The PI will also concentrate on formulating and developing an educational plan to provide a strong foundation in interaction of hardware and software systems and hardware system design for undergraduate and graduate students. The proposed research will provide an understanding of how to design energy-efficient systems from a holistic viewpoint considering both hardware and software components. In particular, it will provide new insights into exploiting the interaction of hardware and software optimizations in reducing energy consumption. The first part of this research will focus on developing high-level energy estimation tools that are essential for designing the energy-efficient architectures and energy-conscious software components to support Java execution. The second part of this research will focus on providing a set of architectural techniques to reduce the energy consumption. The final part of this research will provide techniques for designing the software components of the Java runtime system to better exploit any energy-saving features present in the underlying hardware doc7845 none Dr. Gammie will carry out a research program in theoretical and computational astrophysics that focuses on building numerical models of plasmas flows around black holes. The release of gravitational binding energy in black hole accretion flows is thought to power quasars and active galactic nuclei, and, in our own galaxy, the black hole X-ray binaries. Dr. Gammie will lead an effort to develop a new code for general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics, together with a postdoctoral researcher and students. This code will be able to address some of the fundamental unsolved problems in the field, related to how jets are launched and under what circumstances energy may be extracted from a rotating black hole. In teaching, Dr. Gammie will develop a digital demo room to aid in astronomy and physics instruction. The numerical models available in this demo room will focus on topics in stellar evolution, supernovae, star formation and galactic structure. The demo room will be based around a web interface, which will be tuned to give students access at introductory, intermediate, or advanced levels. The demo room will be developed with the participation of undergraduate students in astronomy, computer science, education, graphic design and physics doc7846 none Chernoff This award is to Indiana University Purdue University-Indianapolis to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners include Indiana University Purdue University - Indianapolis; Indiana University; Terre Haute Center for Medical Partner Organizations; Indiana University School of Medicine; Eli Lilly Indiana 21st Century Fund for Research and Technology; Indiana Business Modernization and Technology Corporation. Proposed Activities The activities for this award include innovative research in regenerative biology; technology transfer leading to development of therapies; training the workforce for regenerative biology. Proposed Innovation The goals of this innovation are research on regenerative biology to understand the regeneration process and identify proteins of therapeutic value for healing, and technology transfer to private companies for healthcare delivery. Potential Economic Impact The potential economic impacts are creation of an estimated new jobs over the next 10 years from the partner companies alone (10% of these will be in Indiana), and increased participation of minorities in the health care industry. Potential Societal Impact The development of therapies for injured and degenerating tissues will have medical and health benefits to society beyond anything known today. The plan also includes strong involvement of minorities in the workforce training programs with subsequent participation in the anticipated expanded healthcare job market doc7847 none Absent an adequate language to talk about change and the direction of change, science curricula are fundamentally constrained to over-emphasize static constructs like taxonomies and memorized sequences of events. In contrast with these over-simplified, statics-based curricula, the world students live in is complex and dynamic. A fundamental disconnect is created between what learners know of their world and the current statics-based science they are taught in school. In addition to moving toward a math of change strand in school curricula and early university curricula (e.g. early non-calculus sciences), a full dynamics-based curriculum needs to address the directed-ness we experience in the world around us. When we get up in the morning, energy always flows from our warm feet to the cold floor and never the other way around. The second law of thermodynamics the entropy law is the only law of science that allows learners to understand the directed-ness of physical process. Replacing statics-based curricula with a full dynamics-based reform depends vitally on being able to talk about change but also on being able to talk about the direction of change. Recent educational innovations related to the early introduction of the math of change e.g. the use of motion detectors and powerful simulation software are starting to find their way into significant curricular reform. Unfortunately, entropy related fundamental research, materials development, and course-work aimed at advancing the dynamic-based understanding of all learners is all but non-existent. This grant is aimed at addressing this critical missing element in pursuing dynamics-based reform. Over a decade of entropy-based research and innovation leads me to believe that entropy ideas can be incorporated into learning about energy dynamics early on in science education, that entropy can be taught in a way that is cross-disciplinary and cross-level (from the very small to the very large), and that moving in this direction not only advances student understanding of entropy but that the ability of all students to better understand and succeed, at virtually all levels of their science learning, is significantly advanced. Although I intend for this entropy-focused work to impact science learning from late elementary through the wide range of undergraduate science courses, my primary focus will be on two critical junctures in students lives relative to formal science learning: early high school and early university level work. Coming into these junctures many students are still in the game and are interested in further science study. Coming out of these junctures many students decide to leave, especially students from under-represented groups. Courses taught at these levels will serve both as testbeds for the efficacy of entropy-based learning and as research settings. In schools, I will focus primarily on the state-mandated, ninth-grade Integrated Physics and Chemistry course. At the university level I will focus on a newly developed undergraduate science course titled Entropy and Energy that I will co-teach with a research physicist who is also Co-Director of the completely restructured and rapidly growing new secondary certification program called UTeach. Domain courses, such as this, in the new UTeach program are to model Standards-based teaching at the university level. Research insights related to student learning as such learning with entropy will be integrated with my newly developed Knowing and Learning course that is the first required education course for all the UTEACH students. Through the establishment of a work circle of teachers in schools, through the establishment of a brown-bag seminar series at the university, through research presentations and publications, and through the development of a Learning Entropy and Energy (LEEP) website, this project is intended to support a larger conversation related to the efficacy and significance of learning about and with entropy as a vital part of moving towards a dynamics-based curriculum for all students doc7848 none Because general-purpose deduction in first-order languages is undecidable, it has been difficult to incorporate into practical relational concept learning. In this project the PI will explore the use of powerful polynomial-time deductive reasoning procedures to benefit relational learning systems. The research introduces a new learning setting called learning from immediate consequences which is parameterized by a polynomial-time deductive reasoning procedure that can be viewed as defining the immediate consequences of any set of formulas relative to a query. The learning goal in this setting is to take as input a set of examples that are not currently immediate consequences of the background knowledge, and induce a definition of the target concept such that the positive examples become immediate consequences but the negative examples do not. A rough analogy can be drawn between immediate consequences and those consequences that are obvious to humans. When given a query, a human is able to determine immediately whether or not the answer to it is obvious, in the same sense that a low-order polynomial-time inference procedure can quickly answer the same question. Given this analogy, the proposed learning setting can be viewed as learning a target concept that makes the positive examples obviously covered while the negative examples remain apparently uncovered. Formal representation languages other than classical predicate calculus will be considered, which are designed to facilitate discovery of useful immediate consequences quickly; the resulting learning system can express and learn target concepts in a language that is strictly more expressive than the standard Horn clause language. This approach stands in contrast to that used by perhaps the most well-known efficient relational learning system, FOIL, which avoids the undecidability of general-purpose deduction entirely by requiring that all background knowledge be extensionally specified, and making no attempt to go beyond that specification deductively. In spite of the contrast between the PI s approach and that of FOIL, it is feasible to integrate many of the ideas from FOIL and other relational learning systems into this new learning setting, with the intention of retaining the advantages of those systems. The potential impact of this work includes improved induction and data-mining algorithms for use in many industrial contexts. These algorithms will be particularly advantageous in situations where the data to be analyzed are highly structured, and thus are not ideal for current state-of-the-art attribute-value learning techniques. This work will provide means to recognize rich structure in data without using expensive theorem-proving techniques and or assuming an extensionally represented background knowledge base. Natural language text databases on the world-wide web form a central source for learning problems that will benefit from such efficient use of structured representations doc7849 none This project will explore the use of novel learning-based intelligent control to meet the challenge of controlling Active Magnetic Bearings (AMBs). If they can be controlled more effectively, AMBs have the potential to make it feasible to use advanced flywheel energy storage systems to signigicantly improve the efficiency of hybrid electric vehicles; this, in turn, could measurably ease the world s transition to higher oil prices. The challenge of controlling AMBs more effectively is well-known to be the main obstacle which needs to be addressed, in order to make this all happen. The development of brain-like learning systems-systems which output contols or actions, as organic brains do-is general fundamental scientific importance. AMB control will be used as a testbed for benchmarking the capabilities of more brain-like designs compared with more traditional designs, and for studying the characteristics of existing brain-like design with an eye to possible improvements. Because the AMB problem is very nonlinear and difficult for traditional methods, there is a significant possiblity that novel methods will perform better (after considerable analysis) and that results of this project could assist in the difficult paradigm shift to learning-based nonlinear approaches doc7850 none Jandhyala Computational electromagnetics (CEM) is a diverse field that sees several new applications each year. Owing to advances in computational algorithms and hardware, it has become feasible to analyze progressively more complex electromagnetic (EM) problems. Indeed, the development of future generations of computers will itself be heavily dependent on the availability of efficient, integrated CEM tools for chips and interconnects. With the enhanced global emphasis on high-speed systems of unparalleled complexity, it is evident that EM effects are becoming increasingly dominant. Wireless networks are expanding at a dramatic rate in the United States and in several parts of the world. High-speed systems-on-chip are now the focal points in myriad commercial, defense, and research areas. Several critical current and future domains with unprecedented potential including the next-generation internet, battlefield communications and intelligence, and large-scale distributed computing do or will rely on complex wireless networks and systems-on-chip. These areas will have a massive impact on the increasingly information-based economy and defense of the United States, and on the global high-technology economy of the future. The design and development needs of these complex systems and structures have led to a critical requirement for accurate, hierarchical EM analyses. These simulations are necessitated in order to develop new designs and paradigms, and to save on the exorbitant costs and time requirements of iterated physical prototyping and testing. The sheer complexity of the simulations is such that the possibility of achieving even moderately accurate results with reasonable computing resources and time did not exist until recently. While evolutionary advances in CEM are omnipresent, the Electromagnetic-Simulation: Instruction and Research (EleXIR) approach in this proposal presents paradigm-shifting, physics-based, revolutionary CEM methodologies that exhibit the potential to render feasible, over the next few years, the accurate, efficient, and integrated EM simulation of large-scale structures and systems. These approaches will lead to the development of advanced tools with the ability to perform rigorous and automated three-dimensional full-wave EM simulation with the ease and transparency of present-day circuit-level modeling. The resulting advances will have a strong potential to affect several simulation aspects of present and future EM applications, including wireless-based network and system-on-chip issues, such as: Propagation through random media and scattering from rough surfaces Signal integrity analysis for high-speed radio-frequency circuits and systems-on-chip Computation of radar cross sections of complex targets Design and analysis of novel antenna arrays Analysis of modem electromechanical, optical, and quantum devices These applications, while not being exhaustive, are extensive and varied. To address these, a unified class-oriented approach is proposed that relies on physics-based, redundancy-extracting approaches to hierarchical integral-equation modeling of EM problems. A combination of efficient integral equation formulations, fast algorithms tuned to the physics of specific classes of problems, and hierarchical and reduced-order modeling schemes, is the paradigm presented here for the development of revolutionary new CEM tools for several system-on-chip and wireless-related EM applications over the next few years. Along with the advances in such techniques comes the necessity and challenge of creating a pool of talent with the critical mass necessary for sustainable research and development in these high-technology areas, which will be addressed through new integrated curricula incorporating new CEM methods in a top-down manner in areas of interest i.e. classical EM, high-speed circuits, wireless communications, and devices. These crucial requirements in research, instruction, and technology-transfer that are of strategic importance to the United States and to global economics form the focus of the EleXIR approach proposed here. The general goals of EleXIR include the development, teaching, and technology transfer of seamless topdown approaches to modem CEM in high-technology areas where it is necessitated, or will be necessitated in the near future, including wireless and high-speed circuit applications doc7851 none The goal of this research is to provide a set of formal and semiformal techniques for system-level power performance analysis that can help the designer to select the right platform starting from a set of target applications. By platform we mean a family of heterogeneous architectures (which consist of both programmable and dedicated components) that satisfy a set of architectural constraints imposed to allow re-use of hardware and software components. Following the principle of orthogonalization of concerns during the design process, this methodology is based on the key idea of making a clear distinction between applications and architectures. Our approach to system-level analysis has three main objectives: 1) Application and platform modeling 2) Performance model evaluation 3) Performance model validation. Although the proposed methodology is completely general, our initial focus is on portable embedded multimedia systems (e.g., slim hosts like PDAs, network computers). For these systems, as opposed to the reactive embedded systems used in safety critical applications, the average behavior is far more important than the worst-case behavior. The proposed methodology complements the existing techniques for extreme-case performance analysis by incorporating the environment characteristics into system performance evaluation. Being targeted at system-level, the results of this analysis are not confined to any particular hardware software implementation. Taken together, our proposed techniques will allow media systems designers to explore architectures more rapidly, estimate the impact of different design choices more robustly, and use large multimedia data benchmarks more effectively doc7852 none Pollak This research addresses various problems of extracting information from digital signals and images. A prototypical example is that of image segmentation: given a picture stored on a computer as an array of numbers (e.g., a medical image), the objective is to design an algorithm to automatically partition the image into meaningful regions (e.g., into a tumor and healthy tissue). More generally, this research is motivated by many applications---for example, in the areas of medical imaging and remote sensing---which are characterized by high complexity and poor quality of images (due to, for instance, noise, blurring, or clutter, which are caused by imperfections of the imaging process).Extracting and restoring objects from such images are challenging and important problems. Since good models of the intervening degradations are often very complex or even unavailable, these problems must be addressed in such a way that the resulting algorithms are insensitive to the precise structure of degradations. When precise modeling is possible, however, the algorithms should be flexible enough to take advantage of it. In addition, the large quantity of data in many applications of interest makes methods that are fast particularly valuable. This project is developing develop a novel scale-space estimation framework applicable to such problems. Built on the foundation of recent non-linear scale-space approaches to image analysis, it is making important links with optimal estimation and sliding-mode control, thereby producing efficient methods for segmentation and restoration of 1-D signals and 2-D images. Theoretical analysis of these methods reveals their robustness, their applicability to a wide range of problems, and the fact that they admit fast numerical schemes. A number of practical image processing problems are being pursued, in particular, analysis of dermatoscopic imagery (magnified pictures of skin lesions used to improve the accuracy of screening for skin cancer doc7853 none Cytoplasmic dynein is a minus-end-directed microtubule motor protein that uses ATP and an accessory complex, dynactin, to move vesicles along intracellular microtubule frameworks. In neurons, it is required for moving vesicles at neuronal synaptic terminals back to the cell body, a process termed retrograde transport . Cytoplasmic dynein has also been implicated in other cellular activities, such as spindle assembly, formation and positioning of the Golgi complex, proper distribution of the endosomes and lysosomes in mammalian cells and nuclear migration in fungi. Although cytoplasmic dynein is involved in multiple cellular functions, little is known about how its intracellular targeting is regulated. The filamentous fungus Aspergillus nidulans is an excellent genetic model system to study the in vivo function and regulation of cytoplasmic dynein. In A. nidulans, cytoplasmic dynein is required for the process of nuclear migration along the growing hyphae. Components involved in cytoplasmic dynein function have been and will continuously be isolated as the nud (nuclear distribution) gene products. Several of the nud genes we have previously characterized encode subunits of the cytoplasmic dynein and dynactin complexes. For example, the nudA gene encodes the heavy chain of cytoplasmic dynein that contains the motor activity. Potential regulators of cytoplasmic dynein not in the dynein dynactin complexes have also been isolated, which include the nudF gene product that is homologous to the human protein LIS1 required for neuronal migration during brain development. Recently, the investigator has made an exciting observation that both NUDA (cytoplasmic dynein heavy chain) and NUDF (LIS-1-like protein) localize to the dynamic ends of microtubules. This observation was made in living cells by using the green fluorescent protein (GFP) tagged NUDA and NUDF constructs that are functional in vivo. How NUDA and NUDF get targeted to this cellular location is an important cell biological question. To identify which nud gene products are required for the localization of NUDA and NUDF to microtubule ends, the nudK gene that encodes the Arp1 (the actin related protein) protein in the dynactin complex, and the nudI gene, which encodes an intermediate chain of cytoplasmic dynein were cloned. The in vivo localization as well as the requirement for other NUD proteins will be investigated. Finally, other gene products which may regulate the function of cytoplasmic dynein will be sought out. Results obtained from these studies will be analyzed in relationship with the microtubule-end-targeting of NUDA or NUDF to reveal novel aspects of dynein dynactin and NUDF targeting in vivo. This work to be carried in a fungal model system will potentially lead to insights of general significance into the control of dynein doc7854 none Many important non-numeric applications are data intensive; hence, they will experience performance degradations as the gap between future processor and memory speeds widen. Unlike scientific workloads, non-numeric applications perform unstructured computations that exhibit low control-flow and address stream predictability, and low instruction and thread-level parallelism. These attributes limit the effectiveness of existing techniques for improving memory performance on non-numeric applications. This CAREER award addresses the memory gap problem for non-numeric applications through an integrated research and education agenda. In research, several novel latency tolerance techniques will be developed to target unstructured computations. First, techniques for guiding prefetch instrumentation through runtime profile information will be studies to address unpredictable program behavior. Second, pointer prefetching techniques that aggressively schedule serialized memory operations will be developed to expose memory parallelism in pointer-intensive computations. Finally, code-space prefetch scheduling techniques will be investigated to enable prefetching along the multiple paths of execution commonly found in unstructured computations. In education, the topics and tools developed through research will be integrated into a curriculum that emphasized a learn-by-doing philosophy. In addition, undergraduate research programs and graduate student workshops will be created. Together, these education activities will produce students with a strong background in experimental systems doc7855 none Storage systems have evolved from simple disks under the control of file servers to large, indepen- dent disk-array systems connected to the network using Network-Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Network (SAN) technology. A unique feature of these storage systems is that they are directly accessible by applications running on independent computers without the intervention of file servers. A downside, however, is that these systems are very difficult to manage because of the increased de- mands placed on them by data intensive applications and the number of storage devices connected to the network. We propose to improve the management of such storage systems by automating the storage management tasks and incorporating performance techniques to provide the system with the \intelligence to adapt to varying storage and workload conditions. In essence, this storage manage- ment software system will control and manage all access to storage devices on the network, much as an operating system manages and controls all access to a computer system. The storage manager will allow applications to express their response time, availability, and bandwidth requirements, and then use this information along with its knowledge of device behaviors and application access patterns to decide how best to map data to devices such that application constraints and storage system goals are met. Based on this work, we anticipate the development of user-friendly, self-managed storage systems that are more cost-effective, efficient, and available than current systems that are configured and managed manually. Our education goal is to integrate performance evaluation tools and techniques into the Computer Science curriculum at the University of New Hampshire. Students who will work on the storage management system will require performance evaluation skills and our education plan addresses this issue. Our long-term goal is to coordinate with industry and other institutions to implement a self-managing storage system and make itavailable for research and educational purposes doc7856 none The ubiquity of communications technology is becoming more evident every day. As the number of customers grows within each market, along with their demand for higher and higher data rates, the need to use available resources such as power and bandwidth as efficiently as possible becomes paramount. Typically a communications system that is operating near theoretical limits requires a receiver whose computational complexity is prohibitively large. To reduce complexity, it is common to linearize a portion of the receiver but this can severely reduce system performance relative to theoretical potential. However, there is a class of nonlinear receivers known as decision-feedback receivers whose complexity is essentially no more than that of linear receivers but whose performance is often much closer to that of optimal receivers. This research explores the decision-feedback receiver structure as a practical means of realizing resource-efficient communications systems. The research is also integrated into educational activities at all student levels. Aspects of the research are purposefully introduced to undergraduate students in the classroom, during summer work programs, and through senior-level thesis advising. This prepares them both technically and motivationally to enter industry or to pursue further studies in graduate school. Graduate students are provided an environment conducive to doing quality research in the exciting field of communications, whether they choose careers in industry or academia. The technical aspects of the research involve three components. First, it is determined, at least in principle, how to combine a decision-feedback receiver with error-control coding for a variety of important communications channels. Then, within these decision-feedback frameworks analytical relationships between available resources and system requirements are derived, and resource-efficient systems are designed. Lastly, the transition is made from theoretical random codes to actual encoders and decoders that are simulated in software. Together these investigations provide communications systems that are highly efficient in regard to their conservation of resources, yet with low enough complexity to be amenable to implementation doc7857 none The goal of this project is to develop database technologies that address the demands of data-intensive applications, which handle distributed, spatial and multimedia data sources. The research effort focuses on: (1) the development of new spatial query processing algorithms that can be dynamically and flexibly reordered and adapted during query execution to address the fluctuation in response time and the unexpected delays from the various input web-based spatial data sources; (2) the development of indexing techniques and technologies to facilitate the embedding of non-traditional spatial and high-dimensional indexing structures into database systems; and (3) the development of disk scheduling algorithms that scale up towards achieving multiple quality of service requirements for multimedia applications. The techniques generated by these research tasks will facilitate the efficient support of modern applications in database systems and will allow database systems to match the dynamically changing demands of these applications. The education effort focuses on: (1) the involvement of both undergraduate and graduate students in hands-on research activities and experimentation; (2) the development of several curriculum elements including two courses and three educational tools, and the introduction of these tools into the existing and newly developed courses; (3) the development of a multimedia database and information systems laboratory to facilitate the integration of research results and education; and (4) facilitating industrial interaction for students. The outcomes of this project -- including newly developed database technologies, research tools, and curriculum elements -- will be publicly disseminated and shared with colleagues, students, and industrial collaborators in the database systems area doc7858 none Combinatorial optimization is concerned with finding optimal arrangements from within some finite space of arrangements. The theory of NP-completeness has shown that numerous combinatorial optimization problems that arise frequently in computer science and other fields are not likely to have polynomial time algorithms. One approach to overcome this fundamental intractability has been to shift focus from computing exact solutions to approximate solutions. This CAREER project involves research and teaching efforts aimed at developing our understanding of the approximability behavior of combinatorial optimization problems. The research component of this project has two broad directions. One direction is to obtain tight bounds on the approximability of some basic problems in the areas of graph optimization, network design and routing, and scheduling theory. Some representative examples include the graph k-coloring problem and the preemptive weighted flow time problem. The second direction is to build on our understanding of central problems and develop unifying frameworks that highlight inherent connections among seemingly unrelated techniques and results. The goal here is to identify minimal characteristics that determine the approximability of optimization problems. The educational component of this project will introduce an advanced undergraduate graduate course on Approximability of Combinatorial Optimization Problems. Such problems routinely arise in almost all areas of computer science, including databases, networking and systems. Practitioners and researchers in these areas would benefit from learning the various powerful theoretical techniques and results for optimization problems. The PI will also introduce a freshman course on Mathematical Thinking and Reasoning to help undergraduate students develop their ability to write concise formal proofs doc7859 none PI: Johannes G. Khinast Institution: Rutgers University Proposal Number: This CAREER grant combines research and educational initiatives in the area of chemical reaction engineering, with a special emphasis on pharmaceutical and fine-chemical manufacture. The research portion focuses on the development of experimental and modeling techniques that allow a complete characterization and a fundamental understanding of multi-phase flows and their impact on selectivity and yield in complex reactions. The first specific aim is to create a new experimental system for the complete and concurrent characterization of flow fields, mixing patterns, and complex reactions throughout a reactor, using techniques such as planar laser-induced fluorescence, in-situ FTIR, and particle-imaging velocimetry. The selective hydrogenation of p-isobutyl acetophenone, a catalytic route developed by Hoechst to produce ibuprofen (an anti-inflammatory drug) will be used as a test reaction. The selectivity of this reaction depends strongly on the hydrodynamics. Based on experimental data, advanced multi-phase CFD tools will be developed that integrate bubble coalescence, mass transfer, catalyst distribution, and complex reaction chemistry. Another objective is the development of experimental and simulation tools that enable analyses of very fast reactions at gas-liquid interfaces. Finally, the effects of flow-regime transitions in multi-phase reactors, which are known to have strong influence on the reactor performance will be studied. The overall goal of the educational component is to provide a state-of-the-art education for students with wide varieties of backgrounds, to integrate - on all levels - research into education, and to extend outreach to the numerous companies and high schools in New Jersey. The first specific aim is the development of a graduate reaction engineering course that reflects modern developments critical to the discipline (computational molecular sciences, nanotechnology, membrane reactors, etc.) and which is designed to strengthen the ties between Rutgers and Hew Jersey s industry. Another objective is to develop a short course in pharmaceutical reaction engineering reflecting the rapid development of pharmaceutical technology, which calls for better training of next-generation pharmaceutical engineers doc7860 none Information theory is the science of quantifying, encoding, and extracting information. The research proposed in this career development plan consists of work designed to strengthen the theoretical foundations and empirical applicability of computational learning through the development of a rigorous, information-theoretic framework for investigating this discipline. Specifically, an information-theoretic framework, based on communication theory, is proposed for investigating the probably approximately correct (PAC) model of machine learning. This framework is shown to be robust and extensible; new learning algorithms, general measures of performance, and analysis techniques are all proposed and demonstrated. In addition to providing a means for strengthening the theoretical foundations of computational learning, this framework also provides a mechanism for developing and rigorously analyzing new learning algorithms. New algorithms for hypothesis boosting, document classification, document filtering, and meta-search are all proposed. The proposed applications work has both theoretical and experimental components: all new algorithms are to be analyzed, implemented and tested using benchmark data. Teaching and education are an integral part of this career development plan. Both graduate and undergraduate students are introduced to topical research, both theoretical and applied, through the projects proposed. New courses on learning and information retrieval, accessible to both graduate and undergraduate students, are also proposed doc7861 none The focus of this project is the investigation of the performance limits and the devel-opment of an algorithmic framework for resource-efficient encoding, communication, and fusion of measurements in wireless networks of distributed sensors and actuators. Such networks are attractive solutions for a broad spectrum of applications due to the inherent sensor actuator mobility, the spatial flexibility these networks allow in taking actions and collecting measure-ments, and consequently the quality of the data they can provide. In particular, they find use in smart-space type applications, target tracking and surveillance for robot navigation and radar applications, and data gathering for weather forecasting and environmental applications. The research focus of the project is the development of low-power minimal-delay algo-rithms for encoding noisy information-bearing signals at the sensors, bandwidth-efficient tech-niques for communicating the encodings over the common RF bandwidth to a host, and reliable methods for host data fusion. A key component of this effort involves the development of a hierar-chy of sequential encoding algorithms at each sensor for a large class of signal-in-noise models and under various processing complexity and delay constraints. These are to be complemented with the development of resource-efficient algorithms for synchronous and asynchronous multisensor communication of the sensor encodings to the host over fading channels, and associated signal estimation algorithms for data fusion at the host. The teaching component of the work uses the project investigation as a vehicle for encouraging the involvement of students into research while exposing them to the fields of wireless communication and data fusion. In particular, it involves incorporation of various components of the proposed research objectives into graduate and un-dergraduate education through the development of an experimental wireless simulation testbed, whose role is to allow students to implement and test a select subset of the algorithms developed in the research part of the project doc7862 none Air quality computer models are widely used investigation tools in environmental research; many physical and chemical processes are modeled and their integrated impacts on atmospheric pollutant concentrations studied. These models are also important tools for regulatory and policy communities, and are used to develop optimal emission control strategies for atmospheric pollutants, as required by the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. The level of confidence in modeling results depends critically on the accuracy of numerical methods employed, as well as on the robustness of the underlying implementation. This research will develop state-of-the-art computational methods and software techniques for use in air quality modeling work on time stepping methods. Special purpose algorithms will be developed for simultaneous treatment of box model processes, including aerosol dynamics, gas and liquid phase chemistry and interphase mass transfer. Higher accuracies and lower computational times are targeted. Particulate matter (aerosol) processes have recently became a priority focus area in environmental science. Incorporating aerosol processes in the models leads to an order of magnitude increase in the overall computational time. The research will extend into the area of solving the integro-differential equations that govern particle evolution; specifically, the proposed work will improve the theoretical framework and will build fast and reliable numerical techniques for aerosol dynamics-chemistry simulations. Together with the physical chemical process understanding and numerical algorithm design, software tech- nology is an important component of these models. Another objective of the project is to explore software design techniques and tools that will make the modeling software easier to use, to maintain and to develop. The resulting object-oriented version of a generic Eulerian model will illustrate the new approach to soft- ware construction and will constitute an ideal environment for developing and testing specialized numerical methods. The educational goal is to enhance interdisciplinary education in computationally-oriented disciplines. Since much of the science and technology of the future and many of the new industries will cross the boundaries of traditional disciplines, interdisciplinary education becomes increasingly important. Some of the newest high demand areas involve computing and information technology together with other fields: teaching and research will support the development of cutting-edge computationally-involved B.S. programs at Michigan Technological University, and continue to contribute to the Ph.D. program in Computational Science and Engineering doc7863 none ions, and find novel e-commerce applications for a wide range of cryptographic techniques. The research is focused on four main areas: (1) Secure multi-party protocols -- How can mutually mistrustful agents cooperate? (2) Anonymity and privacy mechanisms -- How can the protection of sensitive information be guaranteed by design? (3) Fraud detection and prevention -- How can illicit profit be systematically reduced? (4) Secure content distribution -- How can virtual classrooms, concerts and bookstores be streamlined? Deeper connections are sought by combining ideas from these areas. Within the area of secure multi-party protocols, the researchers are exploring efficient special-purpose protocols for e-commerce functions of practical importance, to improve on the powerful but inefficient completeness theorems of Goldreich et al. ( ), Ben-Or et al. ( ), and others. Anonymity and privacy mechanisms under consideration include new methods for deniable payment mechanisms. For fraud detection and prevention, the investigators examine adversary models such as malicious-but-rational and malicious-but-uncoordinated faults, and new uses of lightweight cost functions. The research in secure content distribution includes new traitor tracing schemes, and new applications of zero knowledge proofs doc7864 none This Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) grant supports an integrated research and education project in the area of automated design of multi-piece molds for manufacturing geometrically complex heterogeneous objects. Its goal is to develop underlying algorithms that will enable development of computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD CAM) systems for automatically designing multi-piece molds. The research effort will focus on: (1) characterization of the new design space enabled by multi-piece molds; (2) development of geometric reasoning algorithms for decomposing molds into manufacturable components; and (3) development of geometric reasoning algorithms for incorporating assembly features into mold components for facilitating mold assembly. The education effort will focus on: (1) introduction of rigorous algorithmic foundations into CAD CAM courses; (2) familiarizing students with the challenges in the CAD CAM system development; and (3) providing students an opportunity to develop prototype CAD CAM systems for design and manufacturing of multi-piece molds. Outreach projects will be initiated to expose high school students to the CAD CAM field and give them an opportunity to make a more informed career choice; and, allow industry to learn about new CAD CAM and heterogeneous object manufacturing technologies. If successful this project will have the following impacts. First, it will lead to the development of new geometric reasoning algorithms in manufacturability analysis and manufacturability-driven spatial partitioning areas. In addition to mold design, these algorithms will be useful in several other CAD CAM applications. Second, it will provide a commercially viable method for making geometrically complex heterogeneous objects. The ability to manufacture geometrically complex heterogeneous objects economically will significantly expand the design space and will allow development of new products in many different areas. Finally, integration of geometric reasoning principles into the mechanical engineering curriculum will help in creating a new generation of engineers who will have exposure to geometric algorithms in addition to traditional mechanical engineering curriculum. This exposure is expected to help in preparing engineers for participating in the development of the next generation CAD CAM systems doc7865 none The goal of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project at Rutgers University is to investigate the effects of intrinsic nanoscale inhomogeneities on the bulk properties of several important oxide systems. These inhomogeneities appear to play a crucial role in the technologically important properties of these materials, such as superconductivity, magnetoresistance, and ferroelectricity. For this purpose, x-ray and neutron scattering techniques will be combined with bulk-property measurements. State of the art scattering techniques, such as resonant x-ray scattering, will be utilized to study the domain structure of the multiphase states, charge and orbital ordering in these states, and the nature of the structural, charge- and orbital fluctuations in the states not exhibiting phase separation. In many cases, simultaneous scattering experiments and in-situ transport measurements will be carried out to characterize metastable states and time- and history-dependent effects. The knowledge gained as the result of this project is expected to facilitate the understanding of correlated oxide materials, as well as to aid in the design of novel materials with technologically useful properties. This project also contains an integrated educational part. In particular, development of the modern science course for non-science majors and the utilization of feedback techniques in student education will be implemented. %%% As the advancement of technology pushes the characteristic device size beyond 100 nm (one hundred-thousandth of an inch), microscopic inhomogeneities begin to play a crucial role in a number of technologically important materials that include silicon-based structures used in computer chips, magnetic memory media, and ferro- and piezoelectrics. Many of these materials belong to the family of the so-called transition-metal oxides with strong correlation effects. The goal of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project at Rutgers University is to investigate the microscopic inhomogeneities and their connection to the physical properties of these materials. For this purpose, state of the art experimental techniques, including x-ray and neutron scattering combined with other experimental techniques will be used. The research will be carried out at the leading national research laboratories, as well as at Rutgers University. The knowledge gained as the result of this project is expected to facilitate our understanding of the materials used in modern technology, as well as to aid in the design of novel materials with technologically useful properties. This project also contains an integrated educational part. In particular, development of the modern science course for non-science majors and the utilization of feedback techniques in student education will be implemented doc7866 none The phenomenal growth of the world wide web has made it the most popular Internet application today. Web proxy caching is an important vehicle to mitigate web traffic explosion. Current web caching services are becoming increasingly inefficient for two reasons. First, the continuous increase in dynamically generated content makes an increasing fraction of web-based media uncacheable. Second, the increasing diversity of web traffic requires a QoS-aware caching infrastructure while the current caches are best-effort. In this project we shall design, implement and evaluate an active caching replication architecture that resolves the aforementioned major limitations. The service augments web caches with the ability to replicate not only static data but also data sources in a demand-driven QoS-sensitive fashion. The cache acts as a QoS-aware retailer that imports whatever active content is in local demand at the current time. Demand-driven data source replication allows dynamic content to be generated on the cache. Hence, it shifts the need for computing power from centralized origin servers to proxies in the vicinity of end-users thereby improving scalability and allowing cache-assisted customization of user-perceived information access performance. By offering data source location as a dimension to manipulate, the architecture achieves better solutions for the web performance optimization problem that are well-suited to diverse end-user needs doc7867 none This study addresses the evolutionary significance of the production of nonfertilizing sperm. In in many organisms (including fruitflies and humans) males produce many fertilization-incompetent sperm. The effect of these nonfertilizing sperm on successful reproduction is unknown. Two types of experiments will be performed in a common fruitfly, Drosophila pseudoobscura: 1) replacing its existing mating system with decreased and increased opportunities for mating with multiple partners and subsequently measuring the affect this alteration has on the production of sterile sperm, and 2) a comparison of sibling species, some of which produce sterile sperm, of life history and mating system. The teaching component of this work focuses on the scientific method and the nature of science, and improving the understanding of evolutionary processes. Two components, primarily focused on middle and secondary school teachers, provide this emphasis: 1) pre- and in-service workshops on the nature of science and evolution for middle and secondary school teachers geared to Nevada Science Content Standards, and 2) summer research experience for in-service teachers. The research proposed examines fundamental processes of reproduction, primarily evolutionary factors affecting the production of sterile sperm. To that end, this project will elucidate a vexing and common occurrence in animal taxa; the deliberate production of nonfertilizing sperm. The teaching component will contribute to the understanding the nature of science and incorporating knowledge of evolutionary processes, such as antibiotic resistance, that will be critical for individuals to make decisions about issues affecting their personal lives, society and the environment doc7868 none Zangari Process control in electrochemical deposition (ECD) is a challenging task. A fundamental understanding of the processes involved in film formation is needed to develop a predictive, quantitative model for the effects of deposition variables on film microstructure. In this CAREER grant a comprehensive investigation of nucleation and growth processes of a representative set of electrodeposition systems is undertaken with the objective to develop such a model and thus provide better tools for ECD fabrication of metallic films. Electrochemical techniques, which yield spatially averaged information on the growth process, and microscopy structural methods, that provide morphological data at the microscopic scale, are coupled to yield a comprehensive description of the electrocrystallization behavior of the model systems. These two techniques are uniquely combined by monitoring in-situ and in real time the electrical response and nucleation and growth processes of metals into micro- and nano-electrodes fabricated by lithographic methods. The experimental effort is integrated with a kinetic Monte Carlo simulation of the nucleation and growth process to quantify the effects of metal type, electrolyte chemistry, and deposition variables on the microstructure of the resulting films. The experimental results are used to validate and improve the numerical simulations, and the resulting models are utilized to develop a quantitative description of electrocrystallization phenomena in electrolytic solutions. The theory, research and practice of ECD will be integrated into the undergraduate and graduate materials engineering curricula at the University of Alabama with the objective of enhancing skills and creative thinking of students in the area of ECD technology and applications. Students at the undergraduate level will be exposed to laboratory projects in this field. Attention will be devoted to recruitment and retention of minorities as well as economically and socially at risk students. Graduate students will have the opportunity to attend a highly interdisciplinary course on the theory and practice of ECD, wherein the lectures will be complemented by laboratory sessions and simulation tools. Multimedia modules developed using these tools will be employed in lectures and made available to the general public through web publishing. %%% ECD techniques are widely employed for fabrication of thick coatings and for deposition through lithographic patterns. ECD processes have unique capabilities to monitor and control the nucleation and growth of coatings. This makes ECD ideal for the synthesis of high performance metallic coatings for microelectronics, magnetic recording, and MEMS applications, where control of microstructure and texture over a wide range of length scales is essential doc7869 none The proposed CAREER development program is an integrated research and teaching effort in MOS transistor reliability physics. The research component of this CAREER proposal focuses on fundamental study of mechanisms for the MOS device degradation and its isotope effect. The MOS transistor degradation is caused by Si-H (hydrogen) bond breaking at the SiO2-Si interface due to the energetic hot electrons. The current theory and experiments suggest that the Si-H bond breaking is caused by two competing processes: the excitation due to the energetic hot electrons and the de-excitation by energy coupling between the vibrational modes of the Si-H bonds and the phonon modes of the Si lattice. The energy coupling between the Si-D (deuterium) bonds and the Si lattice (TO phonon) is much more efficient than that between the Si-H bonds and the Si lattice. Therefore the Si-D bonds are more robust than Si-H bonds, which is the so-called isotope effect. Based on this principle, the deuterium-treated MOS transistors exhibit much longer hot-carrier lifetime (over 50 times) than the traditional hydrogen treatment. Evidence shows that there is a potential for further improvement of MOS transistor lifetime by over 100 times, if the mechanisms for degradation and its isotope effect are understood. The characterization of the efficient energy coupling between the two vibrational modes is that their frequencies are the same or very close. The study of the energy coupling is vital to understand the mechanisms for degradation and its isotope effect. The proposed research program will focus on two thrusts: 1) Degradation mechanisms for deep-submicron MOS transistors from fundamental point of view and 2) Study of dynamic hot-carrier degradation of MOS devices in CMOS inverters. In the first thrust, I will use Raman and Infrared (IR) spectroscopy to study the vibrational modes of the Si-H and Si-D bonds. The ultimate goal of the research program is to develop predictive principles from which the processing can be designed to achieve the maximum lifetime improvement for MOS transistors. In the second thrust, I will study the deuterium isotope effect for transistors under the dynamic stress or AC stress, because the transistors are operating in AC conditions in the real circuits. The proposed research builds upon and expands the research work that the PI is already undertaking. The educational component of this CAREER program seeks support for development of a new experimental course, integrated circuit device fabrication, and focused educational outreach activities in Appalachian communities (under-represented groups). With the support from the State of Kentucky through the Research Challenge Trust Fund (RCTF), a Device Fabrication Facility is under construction at UK. A new experimental course focused on fabrication of integrated circuit devices will be developed, which is equivalent to similar courses in other universities in the US. The class is a hands-on lab course where students have the opportunity to build semiconductor devices for integrated circuits. This class will first be taught in the Fall for senior undergraduate students and graduate students. The multidisciplinary nature of this program will provide students with a unique environment for research and learning. The goal is to build bridges between these traditional disciplines such as physics, materials science, and electrical engineering by conducting research and teaching through an integrated approach. The other component of the educational objectives involves the educational outreach activities targeted for high school students from Eastern and Southern Kentucky including Appalachian communities. One of the objectives is to encourage those high school students to pursue high-tech career by presenting a series of seminars in microelectronics. Another one is to offer an experimental project to teach them to build some useful digital circuits. The high school students will be recruited from the already established program, the Rogers Scholar Program organized by the Center for Rural Development, which the PI already participates doc7870 none CAREER: Point-Based and Image-Based Volumetric Rendering and Detail Modeling For Volume Graphics This project will advance and promote the emerging field of volume graphics for science, engineering, medicine, education, and entertainment. It will develop new data representations, rendering techniques, and modeling schemes that are all geared toward making the processing of volumetric datasets more feasible and realistic in a wide range of application domains. Volumetric data - essentially, stored values for every point in a volume - has been most popular in computational science and medicine. For example, a mathematical simulation in computational fluid dynamics produces pressure and speed of the fluid at every point. Similarly, medical scanners like MRI, PET, SPECT, and CT produce a value at every point in the body that they scan. Recently, the size of these datasets has grown at an alarming pace. Medical datasets of over one billion volume elements (voxels) have become frequent, and simulations will soon produce datasets that require terabytes to petabytes of storage. The need to develop efficient visualization methods for these has been identified as an immediate national interest. Technically, this project addresses two critical issues in the larger field of volume visualization. The first is the persistent lack of interactive volume rendering, which is hampered by the immense computational requirements of even moderate-sized datasets. The other is the inherently discrete nature of volumetric datasets. This is important because it establishes a boundary between reality and model, and pushing this boundary therefore provides increased realism in applications. More concretely, the work includes: Point-based representations of data, Point-based volumetric objects, Image-based rendering to assist in volume rendering and, Subdivision volumes with detail-on-demand. This research agenda is accompanied by a solid education plan that provides students with comprehensive knowledge in fields pertinent for visualization, volume rendering, and volume graphics. These fields are rather diverse, ranging from image processing to user interfaces to computer vision. Teamwork among the participating students is promoted by integrating all the research into a common application doc7871 none There is a tremendous market for tetherless and ubiquitous network access, and a great demand for nomadic computation and communication. A major component of such a system is a high speed robust wireless local area network (WLAN) that provides services for a limited geographical area. This limited geographical area enables a large density of access points as well as high power tranmissions and opens up the possibility of high rate robust multimedia communications comparable to wired systems. Even though the bandwidth is still scarce, the spatial dimension can now be exploited: The size of typical WLAN devices, such as laptops and hand-held computers, enable proper spacing of multiple antennas to provide diversity and coding gains. This research is aimed at a complete system design for multiple antenna methods in the WLAN environment including coding, modulation, channel estimation and power control strategies specifically tailored for the slow fading environment of a WLAN channel. In particular, high-rate multiple antenna coded modulation techniques and multiple transmit antenna joint source and channel coding strategies are developed. The issue of channel estimation along with feedback is investigated and power control based on limited feedback is adressed. A general approach to multiple transmit antenna methods is explored by providing a theoretical foundation for spatially separated antennas in WLAN environments. The education plan is closely aligned with the research work and emphasises the use of internet and computers in education by making use of Polytechnic University s newly installed WLAN system on campus. Curriculum development addresses specific needs of Polytechnic s professional masters program and is based on an integrated, end-to-end approach to communication systems doc7872 none Maintenance and stabilization of surficial slope failures represent a tremendous, but often overlooked, economic and manpower burden for many infrastructure maintenance organizations (Transportation Research Board, ). Because of the benign appearance of most shallow slope failures, little research has been performed to determine the true life-cycle and overall organizational costs of maintaining these slides and how these slopes can be most effectively maintained. Maintenance and repair measures are currently selected more on the basis of tradition than for technical or economic reasons. As a result, repair methods tend to be quick fixes rather than long-term solutions with slope maintenance efforts tending to be repetitive occurrences at many sites. A relatively new technique that shows great promise for cost effective maintenance and repair of surficial slope failures is the use of small diameter, in-situ reinforcement similar to soil nails and micropiles. These techniques have been successfully used for stabilization of slopes both in the U.S. and abroad. However, the current level of knowledge of how loads are transferred in these systems, how closely spaced members interact, and how these systems can be optimized is rather limited (Bruce and Juran, ). Designs for stabilization of slopes with these techniques, therefore, remain very conservative, even to the extent of eliminating the techniques from consideration in many cases based on excessive cost. This is particularly true in applying in-situ reinforcing systems to stabilization of surficial slides since the overall costs that can normally be justified for repair of surficial slides are low. However, there are currently a number of novel installation methods and reinforcing materials that offer significant promise for use in stabilizing surficial slides. Consensus among designers and researchers alike is that significant fundamental research is needed to develop a better understanding of these systems so that more cost-effective designs and new innovative installation methods and materials can be technically and economically justified. An integrated suite of eight research and educational tasks will be undertaken to expand the state of knowledge in the area of slope stabilization using small diameter in-situ reinforcement and to improve surficial slide maintenance and repair operations. A large-scale tilt apparatus will be developed, constructed, and calibrated, and a series of tests will be performed with this device to evaluate the effectiveness of several alternative in-situ reinforcement strategies and materials for stabilization of surficial slope failures. Testing activities will be facilitated by numerical modeling efforts, which in turn will lead to development of a procedure for predicting the performance of reticulated reinforcement for slope stabilization. While focused on surficial slope failures, the results of this work will also provide direct and immediate benefits for application to larger slides as well. A reliability based decision-making framework will also be developed to assist maintenance personnel and infrastructure managers in making decisions regarding repair of earth slopes. Three integrated educational tasks will be undertaken to facilitate understanding of slope stabilization and repair problems, to introduce young persons in the exciting field of geotechnical engineering, and to disseminate and publicize the results of this project. A series of classroom scale physical models demonstrating key slope stability and soil-structure interaction concepts will be developed for use in college level undergraduate and graduate courses as well as for demonstration to K-12 students. An interactive, internet-based course module on soil-structure interaction in slope reinforcement applications will also be developed based on the results of the research to complement the physical models and provide for widespread dissemination of the research results. In addition, the large-scale tilt apparatus developed for this project will be utilized for predictive design exercises and a design contest for students across the country. Use of the apparatus in this way will serve to demonstrate numerous fundamental slope stability and reinforcement concepts to a broad audience and is expected to enhance the visibility of the geotechnical engineering profession doc7873 none As network performance has increased, the high-performance computing community has begun to turn to distributed systems to meet their performance needs. Research that combines the concurrency management techniques from parallel computing with scalable and adaptive distributed systems design has resulted in a new software architecture known as the Computational Grid . Its main tenet is that user programs should be able to draw computational power from a distributed resource pool the way electrical appliances draw electricity from a power utility: ubiquitously, seamlessly and reliably. This project will investigate a novel approach to building software systems that implement the Computational Grid model of computing and how to foster new curricular directions based on this investigation. As vehicles for this proposed work, two research thrusts will be combined in the form of EveryWare and G-commerce to define a new programming methodology for the Grid. EveryWare is a software toolkit for building robust, high-performance distributed applications that can use existing Computational Grid middleware as building blocks. An EveryWare program is structured as a set of application customizable services that use the EveryWare toolkit as an adaptive server framewirk while leveraging the functionality provided by existing Grid systems. G-commerce is a computational economic system that allows applications to purchase resources from computational suppliers. A key feature of G-commerce is that it is a macro-economic system which provably achieves economic equilibrium and market stability. By combining these two we will define a new and powerful approach to programming Grid applications. To do so we will: .extend and implement the EveryWare software toolkit, .study and develop economic formulations that will form the basis of G-commerce based resource allocation strategies, .develop a computational exchange for implementing resource economies an infrastructure for empirical G-commerce resource scheduling studies and, .verify our results using non-trivial Grid applications in live Grid settings. The research approach of this project is both analytical and experimental. It will approach the problem of ensuring resource allocation stability and equilibrium theoretically and using simulation. Then implement promising economic formulations using the computational exchange, and test their validity with EveryWare implimentations of Grid applications. At the same time, EveryWare will be enhanced so that it enables the aplication programmers and schedulers to consider computational price when making resource allocation decisions. EveryWare and G-commerce will also serve as the basis for new directions in curriculum development. A course sequence will be designed that combines distributed computing techniques, statistical analysis of load conditions, and economic modeling methods from the literature with practical implementation using Computational Grids. The resulting multi-disciplinary course will allow students to compare and combine different strategies easily for the purpose of making quantitative evaluations, which will be a primary focus of each sequence. Practica will also be organized in which students from different Universities will be invited to participate. Each practicum will focus on the implementation of a chosen application using different Computational Grid infrastructures. Students will compare different techniques and use the EveryWare toolkit and G-commerce to combine those that are the most effective doc7874 none XML has become the prime standard for data exchange on the Web and is increasingly used to represent data currently residing in databases. With this comes the need for a full treatment of integrity constraints for XML such as key, foreign key, functional, inclusion and inverse constraints, which are commonly found in databases to convey an essential part of the semantics of the data. The goal of this project is to develop XML specifications with constraints, to advance understanding of consistency and implication of XML constraints, and to explore applications of constraints in XML data transformations including information preservation, constraint propagation and normalization of XML specifications. In pursuit of this goal, methods for specifying and reasoning about XML constraints are developed, and transformation techniques and tools in the XML context are implemented and evaluated. An important application of these tools and techniques involves the use of constraints in the specification of biomedical data and the conversion of such data to XML. The educational goal aims at the development of a database curriculum at Temple University that integrates data management for semistructured data, XML and traditional databases in a uniform framework of semantic specifications. An important component of this curriculum involves the research and implementation opportunities provided by the project. Results from the project are expected to yield insight into integrity constraints for hierarchically structured data, including but not limited to XML. They will also provide methods, techniques and tools to facilitate semantic specification, data integration and query optimization doc7875 none ZHANG Cognitive functions of the nervous system depend largely on the integrity of neuronal communication. This process includes the release of neurotransmitter from synaptic vesicles, activation of postsynaptic receptors, and recycling of synaptic vesicles. The recycling step is crucial for continuous synaptic transmission. However, our understanding of vesicle recycling and its regulation remains rudimentary. Dr. Zhang will exploit the power of genetics, molecular biology, and electrophysiology in the fruitfly Drosophila to investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying vesicle recycling. Recently, Dr. Zhang and his colleagues revealed that clathrin-mediated endocytosis, a major vesicle recycling pathway, is tightly regulated by LAP (like-AP180), a putative fly homolog of the mammalian clathrin assembly protein AP180. Dr. Zhang will test whether LAP is a functional homolog of AP180 and determine precisely how LAP regulates vesicle reformation. He will also identify structural motifs critical for clathrin coat assembly and determine their roles in synaptic transmission. The results from these studies have broad biological and clinical significance because clathrin is commonly used for endocytosis and intracellular protein trafficking. Dr. Zhang s research is also closely integrated with training of students and outreach to local schools. He will develop new curriculum for both undergraduates and graduates at his University. He will also expand an on-going annual workshop to familiarize local elementary and high students and their teachers with basic neurobiological research. Through these education and outreach efforts, Dr. Zhang hopes to inspire more young students to pursue careers in biological research and education. This CAREER award will not only advance our understanding of synaptic transmission, but also help develop programs benefiting future neurobiologists doc7876 none information visualization, study of fidelity measures and summarization techniques not necessarily inspired by knowledge of perception in the natural world. While many technical solutions have addressed the issues of measuring similarity and summarizing complex data, only a few of them have been evaluated in rigorous usability studies. This research will fill this gap, producing knowledge, guidelines, heuristics and software that will improve the usability of interactive 3D graphics applications doc7877 none CAREER: Improving Scalability of Finite State Verifiers Software quality assurance is a critically important and expensive task. Finite State verification (FSV) is a family of automated approaches for proving that a given software system does not have errors of a specified kind of exposing such errors if they exist. Unfortunately, computing resources needed by FSV techniques are often prohibitive for systems of realistic size, impeding acceptance of FSV in software practice. This research is aimed at improving scalability of FSV techniques. It seeks to generalize the existing optimizations beyond the scope of the FSV techniques for which these optimizations were originally proposed. In addition, new optimization techniques are being developed. The research evaluates, both analytically and experimentally, the impact of each optimization on the scalability of the FSV techniques to which it can be applied. Successful completion of this work will produce scalable and effective SFV techniques. In turn, use of these techniques in software practice can result in improvements in software quality and reduction in software development costs. In addition, case studies with large software systems performed in the course of this work provide valuable experience in applying FSV techniques to real systems in form of guidelines and heuristics doc7878 none It is widely recognized that linear control laws are inadequate to account for severe nonlinearities and uncertainties that many physical systems possess. Two examples of such systems, that will be studied in this project, are underactuated mechanical systems and communication networks. The issue of designing performance-aimed nonlinear controllers with robustness to significant uncertainties has drawn attention of many researchers in the last 20 years. Phase I of this project will continue the study of nonlinear systems with dynamic uncertainties, initiated in our earlier work, and provide further insights into the inherent limitations on achievable performance caused by (input) dynamic uncertainties. Despite many elegant results in the recent literature of nonlinear control, their direct application to decentralized nonlinear systems with complex interconnecting structures seems to be limited from a practical point of view. On the basis of the new framework of nonlinear ISS (input-to-state stability) small-gain theorems, we will develop nonlinear feedback design tools for important classes of decentralized nonlinear systems with applications to communication networks. Phase II of this project is to address some interesting nonlinear control problems in communication networks. The study of hard saturation nonlinearities and time-varying uncertain propagation delays in such systems will generate new decentralized nonlinear control problems as applications for the basic research in Phase I. We expect that our contributions from the nonlinear control perspective will enhance the NSF s existing investment in this active application area. The educational element of this CAREER development plan is closely linked to the research work. We will enhance the current control curriculum at Polytechnic by incorporating ``nonlinear thinking into the classical feedback control courses where ``linear methods are now the focal point, and by developing Web-based educational tools and tutorials. The specific goals of the educational plan include: (1) developing a new graduate course {\em Nonlinear Systems Theory} to report on recent developments in nonlinear systems and control; (2) setting up a Laboratory for Robust Nonlinear Control for research and education, which strengthens the Department s activities in control; (3) promoting hands-on experiments and involving undergraduate students in research-oriented and application-driven projects; and (4) developing interactions with practicing engineers for technology transfer and dissemination of new theory through seminars, workshops and continuing education programs doc7879 none Increased connectivity to information networks and the widespread availability of high bandwidth links are expected to result in much increased interest in digital image and video applications providing very high quality and advanced processing and compression options. This research is geared toward addressing this need by providing more accurate representations, modeling, processing and compression for digital images and video. The main objective is the development of localized, multiresolutional models and the design of related estimation, optimization, and processing strategies. The developed techniques are specifically targeted at digital images and video depicting natural scenes, which are characterized by localized singularities separating regions of uniform smoothness texture in the camera plane. Statistical multiresolutional models for the singularities combined with global optimization techniques constitute the foundations of the research track. The developed techniques are utilized in a variety of applications including compression, estimation of missing data, noise removal, segmentation and resolution enhancement. The results of this research are expected to have an impact in a variety of areas, such as wireless communications and multimedia applications over the Internet. Modern engineering education involves many courses that assume students are familiar with detailed technical background material. The educational component of this is geared toward addressing significant variations in student background by allowing the students to enhance their learning experience at their own pace. Educational objectives include the development of computerized, multimedia assisted course material, including problems and example solutions with rich annotations. Extensions of this material to distance learners, including outreach to broader communities of learners over information networks, are expected doc7880 none This grant will support a one-day workshop in connection with the GeoEng Conference, to be held in Melbourne, Australia in November, . The primary objective is to identify Geo-Engineering research areas of mutual interest between U.S. and foreign investigators and to recommend to NSF ways to enhance international collaborative research efforts. Approximately 15 U.S. investigators will participate in the workshop. The majority of the participants will be relatively young investigators interested in international collaboration. Foreign contacts, and therefore the resulting information and collaboration, are anticipated to be primarily from Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia due to the location of the workshop and GeoEng doc7881 none Many emerging Internet and broadband wireless network services such as real-time stock quotes and information services, pay per view, and dynamic coalition for collaborations are based on group communications. Innovative new networking specifications such as Bluetooth ( ), WAP ( ), and SWAP ( ) allow multiple devices with different capabilities to form groups and take advantage of each other s capabilities. Emerging from these innovations is the potential for developing group communication at the level of embedded systems, which has enormous ramifications both academically and commercially. The most relevant enabling network technology for group communications is the multicast which supports the requirements of the service providers as well as the end users. However, research into secure multicast communications has been emerging only recently. The extensive efforst addressing reliable data delivery, guaranteed quality of service provision, congestion control and resource allocation for conventional and multi-rate multicast indicate the importance of multicast for Internet applications. However, the adaptation of multicast communications into commercial and selective applications depends on the ability to secure the multicast communications so that only the intended receivers have access to the data. Due to the untrusted nature of the network medium used for multicast communications, securing multicast communications requires cryptographic methods. In particular, generating, storing, distributing, deleting and updating of the cryptographic keys used for secure group communications from the core of the key management problem. This career proposal contains the following three components: Key Distribution: Research into new key distribution schemes that will be significant improvements over the currently available methods and will be efficient with respect to user and or sender key storage, and rekeying messages whil preventing user collusion with the focus of this effort. PI previously answered a conjecture related to the optimality of a key distribution scheme and demonstrated security flaw of a secure multicast key distribution scheme. Group Key Generation: Group key generation schemes allow a set of members to jointly generate cryptographic keys. Permitting group membership changes, preventing illegal collaboration among members trying to steal secrets or bias the final joint key are some of the features that need to be considered in designing new group key generation schemes. The proposed work will be based on the current work of PI in the area of distributed key generation. The past work has resulted in a pending national and international patent and is currently being commercialized by a collaboration with Lockheed Martin Global Telecommunications under Maryland Industrial partnership program. (Dr. Roger Mancuso, CTO, LMCO) Education: PI will develop and introduce two new undergraduate courses at University of Washington Seattle and an advanced network security laboratory that will house the course related projects and basic research. Since there is a strong presence of Information Technology companies in Seattle, the university-industry collaboration will help to provide strong research and educational background to UW students and lead to higher return on investment to the academia, industry and the NSF. PI has been in contact with the research and development groups of security at Microsoft to establish close ties. (Dr. Sekar Chandrasekaran, Lead NT security manager, MSFT doc7882 none Valuable predictions of hydrophobic organic compound fate and transport in lakes and fresh water estuary systems can be obtained by using this unique proposed collaborative research and teaching approach of combining fate processes (e.g., biodegradation, photodegradation, and sorption desorption processes) with an appropriate hydrodynamic model. By identifying and understanding components that contribute to the fate processes, and by developing ways to identify these components in natural waters, more efficient remediation assessment of the contaminated environment is possible. Understanding how hydrophobic organic compounds influence the contaminated environment is critical to 1) assessing fate processes; 2) developing accurate models; 3) developing accurate analytical methods; and 4) predicting remediation alternatives when contamination does occur. The environmentally-relevant hydrophobic organic compound, benzidine, will be used as a model system to provide new insight into the fate and transport of hydrophobic organic compounds in general. Like many hydrophobic organic compounds, benzidine partitions preferentially to (sediment) particles in lake systems. As such, its behavior in these systems is significally affected by the movement of sediments (e.g., hydrodynamics of the lake). The basic knowledge obtained is likely to be of long-lasting value. The general long-term implications include advancement in the design of new transport models that take into account fate processes, as well as prediction of hydrophobic organic compound movement via point-source release and implications thereafter. Therefore, this could be used as a tool for the prediction of the effects of remediation alternatives on the ecosystem which surround the area of contaminated sediment. In addition, the economic benefits of predicting remediation alternatives will include increasing the ability to predict contaminant accumulation spots, better and more accurate monitoring of the accumulation of hydrophobic organic compounds in lakes, and lastly being able to target more accurately the costly sediment remediation procedures within the lake area. The PI will train undergraduate and graduate students from several different disciplines (e.g., environmental engineering, chemical engineering, chemistry, earth and environmental sciences, and biology) to this interdisciplinary research. She has volunteered to organize and advise Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute s new, dual-organization student chapter of the Air and Waste Management Water Environment Federation (A&WMA WEF). Additionally, high school students will be exposed to environmental engineering and especially women and minority students in high schools will be mentored to encourage careers in environmental engineering and to improve the enrollment of traditionally under-represented groups in engineering fields doc7883 none A fundamental question in developmental biology concerns the mechanisms by which cells and tissues assume their proper forms and positions in a developing organism. Morphogenesis is typified by the developing nervous system, where neurons extend cellular processes called axons that make specific contacts with other neurons to form an axon scaffold upon which functional neuronal connections are made. How are axons guided to their targets in the nervous system? Recent studies have identified genes that encode sensor molecules, transmembrane receptor proteins on the surface of the axon that detect information about guidance. However, the genes and mechanisms involved in translating a guidance signal into a morphological change in axon structure, mediated by the cellular scaffolding, remain largely a mystery. Dr. Lundquist s research aims to identify and analyze genes involved in the mechanisms of translating axon guidance information into axon morphological change. A molecular-genetic approach utilizing the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans will be taken to characterize new genes involved in axon morphogenesis. To this end, the role of lip-1 in axon pathfinding and unc-115 function will be determined. Furthermore, Dr. Lundquist will initiate a genetic screen for new mutations that disrupt axon morphogenesis. Genes involved in the regulation of the actin cytoskeleton will be targeted by screening for mutations that synergize with mutations in the unc-115, a gene encoding a novel actin-binding protein that is active during axon morphogenesis. New genes defined by these mutations will be isolated to determine the nature of the genes function in morphogenesis. These studies will be greatly aided by the completely known C. elegans genome sequence. Similar studies using C. elegans and the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster have uncovered fundamental mechanisms of cellular function, including mechanisms of cell fate determination and cell signaling during development. The studies described here will identify new genes and mechanisms used by neurons to translate guidance information into axon morphological change. Indeed, the roles of these genes will most likely be conserved in tissues other than neurons and in organisms other than C. elegans. Therefore, these studies will elucidate fundamental aspects of cellular morphogenesis during development and provide insight into the processes by which the rather unformed single-celled embryo develops into a complex organism. By incorporating these research activities into classroom and laboratory teaching, Dr. Lundquist will provide many opportunities for undergraduate and graduate student training in modern molecular genetics and genomics as well as in the skills of critical thought doc7884 none This proposal was submitted in response to the CAREER Program Announcement and contained both scientific and educational goals. The ultimate scientific goals of this proposed study are to understand how physical and biological processes (bioturbation) interact to produce indificual sedimentar units and the sedimentary record in general. The project will collect a wide variety of environmental data at four (4) selected sites in the Gulf of Mexico, and samples to examine the sedimentary record, physical processes of sedimentation, and bioturbation. The four (4) sites vary significantly to terms of rates of deposition and rates of bioturbation. Finally, the results will be compared with quantitative forward models that attempt to quantify the effects of physical and biological variables, and with mesocosm laboratory experiments in which benthic fauna interact with sediment in the lab. The educational aspects of the proposal included: undergraduate outreach to students at regional HBCU s curse development, student participation in proposed research efforts, and adopting the models developed for use as teaching aids doc7885 none This project extends current interests of the P.I. in new directions, in both research and education. The project aims at the development of wavelet methods as well as at their use in interdisciplinary research efforts. Wavelets, the P.I. s Ph.D. thesis subject, have become increasingly popular in many scientific fields since the discovery of orthonormal wavelet bases by Daubechies and Mallat in . The work that the P.I. intends to do over the next five years addresses the application of wavelet methods in four different but interrelated areas: i) nonparametric density estimation; ii) time series; iii) dimension reduction in curve regression, and iv) interdisciplinary research in biology. Specific contributions include the development of nonparametric wavelet-based hypothesis tests; the wavelet estimation of parameters of random processes, with emphasis on long-memory; Bayesian wavelet component selection techniques and, finally, applications of wavelet methods in the analysis of proteins and genomes. In addition to the research component, the P.I. will develop a course on wavelet methods. Theory will be interlaced with applications in many areas of practical interest and lectures integrated with computer demonstrations. The course will be at the advanced graduate level, for statistics and non-statistics majors. The goal will be to train students that may subsequently do their dissertation work on wavelets. The course will also produce students capable of bringing wavelet methods in research fields other than statistics doc7886 none Jianshu Cao of MIT is supported by a CAREER grant from the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to explore the competition of multiple time-scales in single molecule kinetics and model the role of anharmonic molecular couplings in vibrational dynamics. This research is strongly motivated by recent experiments measuring reaction dynamics with single-molecule resolution and on time scales ranging from femtoseconds to seconds. As part of his education plan, Cao will develop a statistical mechanics course for the general student which will include computer-based tutorials, scientific computing, and integration of his own research topics. Advances in optical spectroscopy and microscopy have made it possible to monitor directly the motion of individual molecules at room temperature. Accurate theoretical tools are required to address deviations from classical models now detected by new experiments. To prepare students for these challenging new research directions, effective teaching practices will be coupled with new curriculum development doc7887 none PROJECT : SES 00- Mathias Frisch Philosophy and Classical Electrodynamics This proposal is to allow Frisch to complete a book entitled Philosophy and Classical Electrodynamics. He investigates several philosophical issues arising in classical electrodynamics, a theory that to date has received relatively little attention from philosophers of science. Frisch argues that philosophers unjustifiably have taken the theory to be conceptually unproblematic and that an in-depth philosophical investigation of classical electrodynamics can shed new light on a number of important general problems in the philosophy of science, such as that of the role of laws, symmetries, and models in scientific theorizing; the question of the role of a theory s domain; and the problem of causation. Frisch proposes to complete a manuscript of the book, which brings together several relatively independent philosophical investigations. The common philosophical thread in the book is Frisch s claim that most traditional accounts of scientific theories have overemphasized the role of laws in scientific theorizing. According to traditional accounts there is a simple mapping function from the mathematical models of a theory s laws onto the phenomena and the scientists and philosophers interpretive work is exhausted by identifying this mapping function and describing the possible worlds that with its help can be constructed from the laws mathematical models. By contrast, Frisch argues that the representational content of a theory ought to be located in low-level representational models, which need not in general satisfy the theory s laws and which are embedded into a much richer interpretive framework than traditional accounts permit doc7888 none Error correcting codes (channel codes) are on e of the key elements to optimize digital communications systems. Traditionally, the design of good error correcting codes assumes memoryless channels. In this context, turbo codes and the rediscovery of low-density parity check (LDPC) codes represent two of the most significant advances in channel coding in recent years: Iterative decoding of these codes makes it possible to achieve performance close to the theoretical limits for memoryless channels. However, in most of the applications, the channel is not so simple. This research focuses on the study of iterative decoding for more realistic channels, such as wireless communications channels, characterized by having memory. The objective is to achieve reliable communications, close to theoretical limits, for these types of channels. This will have a direct application in the design of realistic communications systems (including wireless communications), allowing a reduction in the transmitter power requirements for a given quality of service, and a better use of the available bandwidth. In order to achieve the best possible performance when the channel has memory, the statistical properties of the channel must be exploited in the decoding process. This will be accomplished in a two-fold process: First, statistical models, such as hidden Markov models and stochastic grammars, the iterative decoding schemes will be modified to incorporate the statistical models in the decoding of turbo codes, LDPC codes, and concatenated space-time codes. Both steps are completely interwined. The idea is to jointly design the statistical models and the decoding modifications, taking the decoding performance for the real channel as the real channel as the optimization criterion. Moreover, when possible, this process should work adaptively, with no a priori knowledge of the channel required: when the communications system is used in an unknown channel, a convenient statistical model of the channel should be obtained jointly with decoding (in either a completely blind fashion if possible or by using pilots). In every iteration such a model should be used for the decoding and be conveniently refined doc7889 none This CAREER award supports research to develop a new theory of the tunneling density of states in strongly correlated electron systems. One thrust of the research aims at reconciling theory and data from experiments on tunneling into quantum Hall edges. The PI will also work on the related problem of tunneling into fractional quantum Hall effect systems with smooth edges. The educational component of the research involves creating a work-study program to effectively expose undergraduate physics majors to theoretical materials research. Well-conceived projects that are integrated into the PI s research provide vehicles for one-on-one and peer interaction. This CAREER award supports theoretical research and education in condensed matter physics. The PI will use advanced theoretical methods to study tunneling into exotic non-Fermi liquid states that occur in quantum Hall systems. The research may contribute to the theoretical foundation underlying future nanoelectronic devices. The educational component of the research involves creating a work-study program to effectively expose undergraduate physics majors to theoretical materials research. Well conceived projects that are integrated into the PI s research provide a vehicle for one-on-one and peer interaction doc7890 none Over the next few years, large high resolution displays and immersive displays will enable and popularize new kinds of interactive applications that will drive a vast increase in the demand for computational and communications resources. These demands will be met by using increasingly wider area distributed computing environments such as computational grids. Unfortunately, there is a mismatch between the aperiodic soft real-time requirements of these distributed interactive applications and the shared, unreserved, highly dynamic and competitive environments they will run in. To achieve responsiveness these applications will have to adapt their behavior to the vagaries of their execution environments. A number of adaptation mechanisms have been developed or proposed, but there is comparatively little work on how to control these mechanisms to achieve soft real-time constraints. The goal of this project is to develop a control system that can competently advise an application as to how to make use of its adaptation mechanisms to achieve such constraints. The approach is to apply rigorous statistical prediction techniques to predict both how the application s resource demands will vary over time and how the environment s resource availability will vary over time. Such predictions, which are computed on demand at run-time, can then be used by the application or other user-level middleware services to choose an appropriate mapping for the application s tasks with which they can meet their constraints with high probability. The contributions of this project will include a statistical characterization of the dynamic behavior and predictability of the demand for CPU and network resources in distributed interactive applications, a statistical characterization of the dyunamic behavior and predictability of the availability of these resources in distributed computing environments, practical tools for predicting resource demand and availability online and providing application-level performance predictions and adaptation advice to distributed interactive applications, and courses that will introduce graduate students and undergraduates to statistical prediction techniques and data analysis within the context of computer systems research and practice. The project will also produce at least two Ph.D. dissertations. This project will build on the researcher s earlier work, which has shown , for a simplified problem, namely scheduling compute-bound real-time tasks using time series predictions of host load, that the approach described in this proposal can work and can lead to the kinds of contributions described above. In addition to producing scientific results, software artifacts, and educating students, the researcher believes that the path shown here will develop his reputation as the authority on prediction-based services for distributed interactive applications within the high performance distributed computing community doc7891 none Garcia The research and education activities of this proposal focus on cellular receptor-ligand interactions and the engineering of surfaces to control the binding of adhesion receptors and cell spreading to direct cell function. Cell adhesion to extracellular matrices is primarily mediated by the integrin family of adhesion receptors. In addition to anchoring cells, integrins provide signals that regulate cell function. Due to its central role in cell function, cell adhesion is crucial to many biotechnological and biomedical applications, including in vitro culture systems, biomaterials and tissue engineering. The overall research objective of this project is to engineer bioadhesive surfaces inspired by fibronectin, an essential and ubiquitous extracellular matrix protein, to direct cell function. Specifically, synthetic micropatterned surfaces will be engineered to present specific domains of fibronectin that bind to particular integrins and control cell spreading. Cell adhesion to these engineered surfaces will be analyzed in terms of integrin binding, adhesion strength, intracellular signaling, and focal adhesion assembly. The effects of specific integrin binding and cell spreading on the differentiation of osteoblasts, bone-forming cells, will then be examined. By focusing on a mechanistic analysis of adhesive interactions, this project will provide a deeper understanding of cell function and novel biomolecular strategies for the rational design of bioactive surfaces. The educational component of this project focuses on the development of interactive Web-based software modules to model receptor-ligand interactions. Simulation modules will be developed for middle school science courses to illustrate fundamental concepts of receptor-ligand interactions using highly animated graphical interfaces. Another modeling platform will be developed for a graduate-level cellular engineering course to provide a graphical interface for the in depth examination of receptor-ligand interactions, including parametric analysis, time-dependent simulations, and analysis of experimental data. These instructional tools allow for the integration of research into the educational experience and permit virtual experimentation that is not possible in conventional laboratory settings. Finally, the Web-based format of these modules allows for wide spread dissemination and outreach doc7892 none Finite-Field Wavelets for Cryptography and Error-Control Coding Faramarz Fekri Today s success is increasingly dependent on being able to access, share and use information whenever and wherever needed. The widespread availability and transmission of such information demands new approaches to cryptography and error-control coding. Notions of complexity, scalability, and adaptability are becoming critical challenges for error-control coding and data security. This research explores wavelet transform over finite fields and their applications to convolutional coding and data security. It investigates a rich set of signal processing techniques that can be exploited for the construction of new coding and security schemes. The research is not evolutionary. It defines a new research area on the boundary of three very large research fields; namely digital signal processing, communications, and computer science. It impacts 1. basic science, 2. technology and products, and 3. education and learning. This research explores the intersection of finite-field wavelet transforms, error-control coding and data encryption. The primary focus of this research is to advance the study of wavelets and filter banks over finite fields and their applications to error -control coding and data security. It develops the theory of wavelet transforms over finite fields which provides a general wavelet decomposition of sequences defined over finite fields. This is an approach that has a rich history in signal processing for the representation of real-valued signals, but it has been lacking in the finite-field case. In particular, the research explores multiresolution wavelets and overcomplete filter banks over finite fields. Along with wavelet theory on finite fields, this work investigates the first application of the finite-field wavelet theory to new types of time varying convolutional codes that have unusual trellis structures with reduced complexity. Using multiresolution decomposition of wavelets, the researchers intend to construct rate-compatible wavelet convolutional codes for handheld devices to support flexible data rates (voice, fax, video,...). To address security issues with handheld devices, this research exploits the finite-field wavelet as a unifying framework for effective joint design of data encryption and error control coding. In this framework, the public and secret keys of the user determine the wavelet system and the security is tied to the length of the wavelet basis function. The goal of the research is centered around the development of innovative coding security protocols for handheld devices doc7893 none The project focuses on geometry-based robotic manipulation and motion planning. The proposed research includes development of algorithms for manipulation, motion planning, and design of articulated objects with many degrees of freedom. Example objects include cardboard cartons folded from blanks, and ``pop-up 3D micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) made from 2D hinged elements. In contrast with work on rigid object manipulation, this research will enable robots with only a few degrees of freedom to manipulate non-rigid articulated objects with many degrees of freedom. Applications include eliminating repetitive stress injuries due to carton folding during packaging, and batch fabrication of 3D micro-optical MEMS devices for optical networks. The education plan closely complements the research program and includes development of new courses, mentoring graduate students, involving undergraduates in research, and organizing robotics workshops doc7894 none s by others, and present their results. As the course progresses, lectures, readings, and discussion help to teach the art and craft behind each of those steps. The research group is derived from three research groups the PI participated in during during education: a primarily undergraduate group at Brown, a primarily graduate group at Caltech, and a second Caltech group that is primarily postdocs. The group combines aspects of all three to provide an environment that it is believed will be conducive to learning how to do multi-disciplinary research at many levels. The research is multi-disciplinary and fits well into the research group. Computational tools for capturing geometric shapes, representing them, and calculating with them will be developed and applied to problems from two disciplines: assembly of ancient pottery sherds in archaeology and modeling of wrist motion in orthopaedics and bioengineering. In both cases, shape will be captured from sampled volumetric CT medical imaging data. It will be represented implicitly using sampled signed-distance volumes and explicitly using manifold surfaces. The two representations compliment one another, together offering the strengths of both. For the archaeology application, we will develop a software architecture for decoupling the process of reasoning about artifact shapes from the understanding of their geometry. A probabilistic interface will separate the two parts. For the biological modeling application, we will develop models for bones, ligaments, and cartilage that will predict motion. We will validate the model with motion that we have already acquired and then use it to examine motion in patients with deficits that have thus far eluded an understanding. The impact of this research will be in both application areas and the computational domain. If we are successful, pottery assembly, a process that is estimated to take over 50% of the time an excavation team spends outside of excavating, will be automated. We anticipate that this speedup will enable significant new archaeological results to emerge. A better understanding of the biomechanics of the arm and wrist and the abnormal conditions that can affect them could impact many Americans. This understanding will likely have applications in biology, bioengineering, medical applications, animation, and robotics. The numerical methods we will develop for simulating joints are likely to apply to simulations of other biological systems. Because the algorithms and tools for geometric modeling will be applied to two specific problems, they are likely to be more widely applicable. Perhaps the most significant impact will be not in the scientific results, but in a better understanding of what makes multi-disciplinary research projects succeed or fail and in the new scientists that will emerge from Brown doc7895 none Wireless communications systems free users from physically attaching to access points, while the Internet provides the universal accessibility to information services of many kinds, thus the marriage of the wireless and the Internet will be tremendous, making ubiquitous communications possible. However, in wireless network segments, resources (frequency, time and code) are extremely limited, thus, overdimensioning of such a network is equivalent to poor capital investment, while congestion at busy hours could mean lost calls and lost revenues. Therefore, the cost-effective dimensioning and management of wireless network resources to handle users demands have to be carefully investigated. Compared to the vast resources of its wired counterpart, wireless segments become the bottleneck for integrated systems (wireless internet). Thus, intelligent resource management in the wireless mobile networks becomes a critical issue. This proposal will investigate the intelligent resource management and performance evaluation for wireless mobile networks. This research is motivated by the following observations: (1) a lot of information available in network operations has not been effectively used in resource management; (2) co-operative network operations (such as information sharing) among the wired communications entities (such as base stations or mobile switching centers) can significantly improve the overall network performance, incurring signaling traffic over the wired segments is a good tradeoff. For example, if we could predict a mobile user s movement based on his her movement history, the network could make appropriate resource reservation around the moving trajectory to overcome the potential call drops. If traffic information and mobility information are shared among a group of neighboring base stations, then potential congestion can be avoided or early actions can be taken. If the traffic type of a call connection can be passed to a lower layer (say, radio resource layer), then better transmission schemes can be designed. Thus, in this proposal the researcher will investigate intelligent resource management by accomplishing the following few tasks: _ Propose a Virtual Management Network to coordinate the information exchanges; _ Develop new mobility management schemes using location tracking and location prediction; _ Investigate various call admission control and intelligent call handling schemes and provide guidelines for choosing the appropriate schemes for specific applications; _ Study the resource reservation schemes in combination with mobility prediction; _ Provide a general framework for performance evaluation of wireless mobile networks under various resource allocation schemes. The significant difference between the proposed work and the previous work in the open literature is that the research considers the wireless networks with call connections requiring different amounts of resources, and also considers the mobility factors in its analysis. This research will be important for future telecommunications design, particularly for wireless Internet. In conjunction with the proposed research, the PI will integrate the research on wireless networks and mobile communications into teaching. Based on his expertise s in various areas in electrical engineering, computer science, systems engineering and mathematics, the PI is planning to help build up a strong networking program in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Florida. He will strive to bring his diversified expertise s, particularly the mathematical thinking process, into the classroom, to teach students how and why by going through the creation process of new concepts or results in combination with associative learning and critical reading, to provide students with the new developments in the current research fronts and industrial practices and to develop a collaborative learning environment. The ultimate goal of his teaching is to help students to develop a life-long learning ability. The PI also realizes that the area of the wireless networks and mobile communications provides a better place for cooperation between electrical engineers and computer scientists, the proposed research and educational plan could bring this cooperative mode into the classroom doc7896 none Decades of genetic research have established the destructive influence endogenous mobile DNA elements have on genomes. Relatively little, however, has been learned about the strategies that have evolved to combat the disruptive influence of transposable elements. Disruptions in DNA methylation have been directly associated with activation of mobile elements, and it has been theorized that methylation s primary purpose is to keep mobile elements silent. We have observed a dramatic change in DNA methylation and consequent mobile element activation in hybrid marsupials. This observation suggests that, antithetical to their deleterious effects, transposable elements may confer genetic variability within populations. This project focuses on interspecific hybrids known to exhibit genomic instability, and investigates the breakdown of DNA methylation and the activity of mobile elements in the face of hybridization-induced genomic stress. Likewise, the genomic alterations observed in interspecific hybrids known to exhibit disruptions in methylation are being characterized more fully in order to ascertain the molecular mechanisms underlying genomic instability. These experiments promise to broaden our understanding of the mechanisms that maintain the integrity of karyotypes once they are fixed in a species. The molecular biological and cytogenetic techniques utilized in this study are uniquely suited for broadening the educational experience of molecular biology students at the University of Connecticut. An Applied Genomics Initiative in the department of Molecular and Cell Biology has been instigated with the primary goal of teaching students the latest conceptual and technical advances in functional genomics. As part of this CAREER project, new curricula is being developed that offers graduates, undergraduates, underprivileged secondary school students and continuing students from the private sector the opportunity to learn these topics. In newly designed lecture and laboratory courses, as well as in independent research projects, students learn about genome structure and the de-stabilizing influence of hybridization. Not only can students gain technical knowledge through hands-on experience at the bench, but also through observation and sample collection in the field doc7897 none Voss During the last decade, concepts and techniques from various biological disciplines have yielded new tools for studying patterns and processes of evolution. Accordingly, it is becoming increasingly important to pursue evolutionary questions that draw upon interdisciplinary concepts and research skills. In this Career Development Plan, evolutionary research, education, and service objectives are proposed to introduce undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty at Colorado State University (CSU) to the emerging, interdisciplinary nature of evolutionary biology. The overall goal of the research component is to integrate genetic and genomic approaches into an existing evolutionary research program that focuses on salamander biology. The specific objectives are to construct the first comparative genome map of any amphibian and pursue quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping of ecologically, evolutionarily, and developmentally important traits. A comparative gene map will allow identification of homologous chromosomal segments between salamanders and other vertebrates, thereby providing the first amphibian perspective to vertebrate genome evolution. This objective will be accomplished by determining the genome location of approximately 600 protein coding loci using existing material from an interspecific mapping cross (Ambystoma mexicanum x A. mexicanum A. tigrinum tigrinum). The second research objective will be accomplished by performing comparative QTL analyses of two unique urodele traits: metamorphic failure (paedomorphosis) and limb regeneration. Background data are presented to show the feasibility and significance of the research objectives. The specific objectives of the education component are to: (1) Coordinate the development of a new, required course for undergraduate Biology majors at CSU: BZ220: Introduction to Evolution , (2) Further develop a course for upper division undergraduates and graduate students entitled BZ478: Molecular and Developmental Evolution. , (3) Establish a recurrent graduate seminar that focuses on evolutionary biology, and (4) Provide research opportunities for undergraduates through the REU program. Finally, the specific objective of the Service component will be to serve as a meeting organizer of the annual meeting of The Society for the Study of Evolution, which will be hosted by CSU in . Taken together, accomplishment of these research, service, and education objectives will further strengthen the program in Evolutionary Biology at CSU doc7898 none Nold, Stephen Univ Wisconsin -Stout CAREER and RUI: Capture Probing to Link Methanotrophic Species with Ecological Function in Acidic Northern Wetlands Progress in ecology is limited by our inability to associate individual microbial species with the ecological functions they perform in nature. The PI will conduct research to link microbial species with ecological function by measuring the synthesis of ribosomal RNAs. This grant will support research that establishes a new approach to understanding microbial activities in nature. By measuring the incorporation of 13C into species-specific ribosomal RNAs, it will be possible to assign activities to natural microbial populations. This tool will be used to understand the ecology of methane oxidizing bacteria. These organisms are responsible for slowing the release of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from acidic northern wetlands. Some methanotroph genera (Methylomonas, Methylococcus) appear to be adapted to high oxygen and low methane concentrations, while other species (Methylosinus, Methylocystis) prefer the converse. 13C-capture probing will be used to investigate the activity of methanotroph populations in nature. By better understanding the ecology of these organisms, it will be possible to predict and perhaps control the release of methane from a globally significant source. This is a CAREER award and the PI will develop novel courses and devote a significant effort toward community outreach. The PI will use cooperative learning as an alternative teaching approach to maximize student interaction and increase achievement and retention. This grant will provide leadership training to promote cooperative learning in science education. Course improvements will act as a catalyst for reform across the curriculum. This grant will create a research and education infrastructure to attract and build relationships with a growing biotechnology industry in the region. This grant will also support active recruitment and mentoring of under-represented student groups to retain them in the sciences doc7899 none CAREER: Fast Efficient Adaptive Filter Banks and Applications in Digital Multimedia Coding Processing Tran Project With the recent emergence in popularity of the Internet, the demands for and the interests in digital multimedia are growing exponentially. A high-performance filter bank is typically at the heart of every state-of-the-art digital multimedia system. For example, current international image video compression standards JPEG, MPEG, H.261 and H.263 are all based on the 8x8 Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), an 8-channel 8-tap orthogonal filter bank. Of great importance is the ability to design a filter bank that can fully exploit (i) the statistical properties of a particular signal or class of signals; (ii) the goals of the applications; (iii) the computational resources available at the processing systems. Particularly, fast, efficient, and low-cost transforms have played a crucial role in revolutionary advances throughout the history of digital signal processing. This research involves the development of next-generation fast efficient adaptive filter banks for applications in digital multimedia coding processing. The implementations are VLSI-friendly, entirely integer-based, possibly even multiplier-free, while still maintaining a high level of coding performance. Moreover, all of the filter banks are constructed from modular cascades of similar building blocks where the same basic components are employed repeatedly in a highly regular fashion, resulting in smaller chip area and lower power consumption. The investigator incorporates as many desirable transform properties onto the structure as possible, leading to a much smaller space of free parameters and hence improving the effectiveness of optimization algorithms, especially in real-time adaptive systems. Well-proven techniques in optimization, linear prediction, and adaptive filtering theory are being applied toward the lattice structure optimization. The new family of filter banks is expected to provide versatility, flexibility, and adaptivity in time-frequency mapping, coding performance, cost of implementation as well as integration into modern digital multimedia processing communication systems. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Level of Effort Statement. At the recommended level of support, the PI will make every attempt to meet the original scope and level of effort of the project. Trac D. Tran doc7900 none This research is on an interconnect-centric layout design methodology incorporating on-chip inductance into the methodology. Specifically, the following problems are explored: (1) accurate modeling and analysis techniques for multiple coupled RLC interconnects; (2) efficient algorithms for interconnect synthesis to optimize performance and signal integrity for coupled RLC nets; (3) efficient algorithms for pre-layout interconnect estimation considering a comprehensive set of interconnect optimization techniques, and application of estimation results to interconnect architecture planning; and (4) efficient algorithms for pre-layout estimation of maximum switching current for functional blocks followed by optimization of the power supply structure using the RLC model. In addition, this project investigates an innovative computer engineering curriculum incorporating interconnect and System-On-Chip (SOC) considerations, and development of Web-based interconnect planning tools for use in innovative teaching and for outreach beyond the campus doc7901 none The goal of this research program is to develop compiler optimization technology for emerging software applications. Compared to the current state-of-the-practice, the new software applications will be written in type-safe languages (e.g., Java), will contain millions of lines of code, will often be built from components distributed across multiple machines, and will run on processors that will have multiple threads of control, but will take hundreds of cycles to access the main memory. Modern software will require modern optimizations that will need to be scalable in three ways: with the size of the program, with the number of distributed components, and with the growing memory latency. This research proposes to achieve scalability by exploiting radically novel forms of speculation, profiling, demand-driven analysis, run-time checks, and hardware support. To develop these technologies, three specific efforts will be undertaken: elimination of array-bounds checks, demand-driven pointer analysis, and prefetching for pointer-based data structures doc7902 none Next generation computer systems will be characterized by pervasive networked devices interconnected by a variety of networks and organized in loose and dynamically changing confederations. This research addresses the question of how to program these new computer systems. In particular, foundations and implementation techniques for programming heterogeneous distributed systems are being investigated. Specific results are expected in the following areas: Trusted Software Composition: This research focuses on developing a security infrastructure for software composition consisting of a policy meta-language and language-level enforcement mechanisms such as type-driven static enforcement and automatic wrapper code generation. Mobile Calculi: The project will investigates the foundations of a core Internet programming language with a good algebraic theory, a natural mapping into a distributed implementation, and expression of security properties as types. This work is expected to have applications in a variety of fields; from distributed applications with high information assurance requirements to active networks and distributed system monitoring and administration doc7903 none Professor Elliot R. Bernstein of Colorado State University is supported by the Experimental Physical Chemistry program to perform experimental and theoretical studies on small radicals and their reactions in the gas phase. The fundamental question pertains to the detailed description of bimolecular reactions. In order to achieve the desired level of detail, it is required that the dimensionality of the reactive coordinates be reduced, and the PI proposes an experimental means to do so. Small radicals such as NCO and NO3 will be complexed with hydrogen-containing coreactant species in a beam, and the reaction is photoinitiated. The ensuing hydrogen abstraction products are analyzed using laser induced fluorescence or mass-resolved excitation spectroscopy. Ab initio theory will be employed to follow the reaction on the reactant complex excited electronic state potential energy surface to find the path for the generation of the product radical. In addition to advancing fundamental knowledge about bimolecular reactions, this research will contribute to a fuller understanding of the role played by such complexes and excited electronic states in atmospheric and combustion chemistry doc7904 none The project addresses development of systems that interact autonomously with their environment in an intelligent way. Applications range from intelligent home environments to autonomous mobile robots to software agents. Over the recent years, the use of probabilistic methods has led to development of reliable mobile robot systems. However, despite tremendous potential benefits of collaboration between robots, some fundamental issues in the context of probabilistic methods for multi-robot collaboration remain unexplored. The goal of this project is to bridge the scientific gap between probabilistic methods for single-robot systems and those for collaborative multi-robot systems. The research is expected to have a strong impact on the area of collaborating mobile robots. On the education side, in order to teach the skills needed to understand and develop such complex systems, a new undergraduate course on mobile robotics will be designed, which will follow a hands-on approach to teaching, involving students in investigative work with mobile robots doc7905 none The hypothesis underlying this project is that, with increasing interactivity and personalization of computing systems, just-in-time information retrieval agents (JITIRs) which proactively retrieve and present information based on a person s local context in an accessible yet non-intrusive manner, and which are implemented on wearable computers, will become a feature of the next stage of computing. To recover the user s context, the physical proximity of wearable computers to the user will be leveraged in designing perceptual systems that see and hear from the user s perspective. To these ends, the PI will create a Wearable Computer Workshop for rapid prototyping of new wearable sensors and systems. Although the mobile environment is extremely harsh for perceptual systems and algorithms that have been developed in the laboratory, systems that use standard video and audio for input will be preferred because they afford advantages such as automatic creation of new media databases for search, ease of annotation, availability of sensors, and applicability of results to other fields. The PI expects to adapt and exploit promising results from prior research in other domains, including face recognition algorithms, recognition of sign language gestures, hand movements involved in interacting with objects or performing tasks, gestures made in discourse, and user location systems. To support the desired model-based recognition systems, a new form of annotation derived from prior work in analyzing narration will be developed for the data collected during a user s everyday life. Ultimately, the PI will create a community of everyday users of his systems and perform studies to determine how access to JITIRs affects the wearer s use of knowledge. The PI expects this work to have broad impacts, including the development of radically new customizable wearable platforms with the ready ability to interface to new sensor technology, a sensor package directed at capturing a user s everyday life, prototype wearable face recognition and gesture recognition systems, and the expansion of traditional information retrieval algorithms to loosely defined multimedia query searches doc7906 none To investigate the teaching undergraduate mathematics that strives to allow students to develop personally meaningful understandings of the mathematics in typical undergraduate curricula through a case study of one teacher; and To develop a professional development program for graduate teaching assistants from a theoretically based perspective. In addition, this teaching assistant certification program will be a site for research in teacher development through a teacher development experiment. In particular, the work on this project is toward developing models of teaching at the undergraduate level that both extend and inform what is known about teaching at the K-12 level. These models then form a basis for implementing professional development programs that can affect reform at the undergraduate level, leading to a cohesive K-16 mathematics education program. The first phase of the project, underway in the - academic year is an intensive case study of one mathematics faculty member, teaching calculus, noted for innovative instruction that leads to meaningful mathematical participation among his students. The case study involves daily interviews with the instructor on his plans and the results of his interactions with the students in class, which are also videotaped and observed. The focus of the analysis on this teacher looks at: ways in which this teacher uses his content knowledge in practice; ways in which he incorporates technology into teaching calculus, and the ways in which he deals with the dilemmas of teaching in the university setting. In addition, analysis of student work provides insight on the possible impact that instruction has on student learning. The second phase of the project is the developmental research on graduate teaching assistant professional development. Using a Teacher Development Experiment [TDE] (Simon, ) model and emergent and situative theoretical perspectives, the research and development focuses on developing and testing instructional tasks used with graduate teaching assistants in a university-sponsored Teaching Assistant Certification Program. The results of this research lead to both a better understanding by the field of the processes involved in teaching at the university level, in understanding the professional growth as teaching assistants of future faculty, and in materials to use to foster growth of future faculty doc7907 none The emergence of new technologies for content distribution including content delivery networks (CDNs, end system multicast, distributed content exchange and application-level anycast are fundamentally changing the relationships between consumers and producers of digital content. Whereas traditional approaches to content delivery are predicated on point-to-point connections from a client to a single origin server, these new mechanisms for content distribution fundamentally undermine the assumptions inherent in that model. For example, CDNs redirect clients to a number of equivalent replica servers, while end system multicast goes further and blurs the distinction between client and server by requiring that every participant who wishes to access content serve content as well. To illustrate this point, consider the access graph plotting the flow of TCP connections serving a popular document through the network at an instant in time. Until very recently, this graph could easily be characterized as forming a hub-and-spoke topology with the hub at the origin server; now its complex structure is little known except perhaps to network engineers within the CDNs themselves. Broadly, the researcher s interests lie in characterizing the impact that new and increasingly distributed content delivery mechanisms will have on network traffic, resource management and the design of network protocols. In the research component of the researcher s career development program, he focuses on strategies for addressing the challenges and opportunities that distributed content delivery mechanisms will place on reliable transport protocols. In particular, the complex one-to-many and many-to-many relationships between consumers and producers of digital content will place strain on transport protocols such as TCP, as those protocols are not designed to accomodate the fluid interactions which will take place when users have a multiplicity of service options. The researcher argues for lightweight reliable transport services designed for maximum flexibility which can accomodate connection preemption, connection suspension, connection migration and connection aggregation. While these considerations are fundamental , they have not been carefully studied in the context of TCP because of daunting technical hurdles, complexity, and absence of a driving need. The researcher brings new techniques to bear on the problem, as the proposed work leverages his experience with fast forward error correcting coding techniques which he has applied in the domain of reliable multicast [11] and downloading digital content from multiple mirror sites in parallel [10]. In some of the settings considered, such as dynamic server selection and redirection, the flexibility which the proposed techniques afford can be considered to be a performance optimization, but in other settings, such as providing reliability for end system multicast, the researcher argues that the flexible services proposed are essential to delivering high performance. The proposed educational aspect of the researcher s career development program focuses on enhancing the undergraduate and graduate student experience in his department and building a stronger basis for industrial and inter-institutional networking research collaborations in the Boston area. Proposed activities center around ongoing projects to promote undergraduate involvement in networking research; to enhance the department s networking curriculum; and to encourage students to participate in the computer science community outside of the university, whether by volunteering at a community outreach program or by becoming involved in local organizations of computer scientists. An exciting initiative which the researcher is e actively involved in and which will help achieve these goals is the institution of a center for networking research at Boston University doc7908 none The design and implementation of a national computing systems grid has become a reachable goal for both computer and computational scientists. In order to better use this suite of resources, consisting of geographically disperse machines, instruments, and data storage, better scheduling and resource management techniques are needed. This project concentrates on the issue of matching the requirements of an application to the capabilities of a resource or set of resources on the grid. This is often referred to as determining the affinity of an application for a resource. The research will formalize the folklore currently used in order to increase the accessibility of the grid to those application scientists that have less experience than current users. Work will continue in the development of a language specification to describe both applications and resources as needed today, but with the extensibility needed for future applications as well. This will then be used as an indexing structure into a case-based reasoning expert system. This project also has an extended educational portion to it. As a part of the effort to expand Northwestern s Computer Science education in the systems area and a cross-school initiative, we plan to offer a course in experimental systems using ideas in parallel distributed scheduling as the basis for a larger view into practical systems, experimentation, and teamwork. This project-oriented class will be focused around teaching students about current parallel distributed scheduling efforts and applications. In addition, a new seminar series will be started featuring women researchers in computer science to help encourage female students to continue with careers in computer science doc7909 none As the interconnect characteristics dominate in deep-sub-micron regime, we are developing an interconnect-centric high-level synthesis (HLS) framework in which delay, power, and routability, can be optimized. We are investigating two approaches: (1) Incremental approach: HLS is performed iteratively by taking into account net-level estimates obtained from a detailed floorplan and global route information; and (2) Composite Approach: HLS tasks (scheduling, allocation, and binding) as well as physical design tasks (placement and routing) are unified into one composite step. The novel features of the HLS framework are: (1) use of detailed interconnect timing models (moment-based, Elmore-delay based) in HLS flow; (2) routability driven HLS; and (3) usage of Rent s exponent as a routability metric. As part of education plan, we are: (1) developing a two course sequence (dual-level); (2) experimenting in VLSI education with the case-based (Harvard Business school) teaching style (popularly used the MBA field); (3) involving undergraduate minority students in VLSI EDA research; and (4) exposing K11-12 students to the field of VLSI chip design automation doc7910 none As the Human Genome Project nears completion the need grows for functional genomic analyses which in addition to the primary genomic sequence involve other types of data such as gene expression measurements from microarray hybridization experiments. Research in functional genomics involves a range of computational problems including visualization, clustering, classification, regression, knowledge representation, and predictive modeling. This project will touch on each of these areas, but the primary focus will be on developing machine learning techniques that learn to place genes into discrete functional categories in order to simplify and render more tractable the problem of inferring gene function from genomic data. To the end the PI will build on his prior work which showed that a support vector machine (SVM) can be successfully trained using DNA microarray expression data to recognize various gene functional categories, and will develop methods for combining coding sequence, promoter region, gene expression, and other types of genomic data in SVM-based learning algorithms. The research will lead to improved understanding of the ability of various machine learning techniques to recognize different types of gene functional classes, and will also yield new techniques for learning simultaneously from multiple types of data. Learning from heterogeneous data sets is a core issue in artificial intelligence and machine learning; the ability to combine knowledge from various types of genomic data is critical for understanding the cell at the molecular level, and should lead to important insights into gene function doc7911 none How limited resources are allocated to different functions has strong consequences to growth rates and survival of organisms at both individual and population levels. Fast growth is inherently incompatible with high survival potential, a trade-off strongly suggested in recent studies of regeneration of trees in tropical and temperate forests. Shade tolerant species recruit saplings through maintenance of slow-growing seedlings that tolerate various biotic and abiotic stresses in the understory. In contrast, light-gap dependent species colonize with abundant and well-dispersed seeds and fast-growing seedlings having low tolerance of biotic and abiotic stress. The simplest yet most general hypothesis for such a trade-off relationship is that species allocating more resources to storage and defense survive better, but exhibit slower growth (at least in a short term). In plants, higher allocation of carbon (i.e., photosynthetically captured energy) to construction of new leaves leads to a compound return of carbon income and fast growth rates. However, this allocation pattern must come at the cost of relatively less carbon allocated to storage (i.e., energy savings as non-structural carbohydrates) and defense (e.g., tough support tissue, and chemical toxins that resist against herbivory and disease). Consequently, species that employ allocation strategies for fast growth should suffer from high mortality rates because these species are more vulnerable to herbivory, pathogen attack and physical disturbance. Kitajima will test this overall hypothesis through a series of comparative studies of carbon storage and carbon-based defenses in seedlings of tropical tree species in Panama. Seven family pairs of species exhibiting contrasting growth rates and survival will be raised under standardized conditions in a greenhouse for comparison of allocation to energy storage in stems and roots, and carbon-based defenses (lignin and other phenolic compounds). In a second experiment, this researcher will test the ecological role of storage allocation in the field by examining growth and survival of seedlings of species displaying contrasting degrees of storage allocation as they respond to shading and simulated herbivory treatments. In the third study, patterns of allocation to storage and defense will be examined to elucidate their relationship to longer-term growth and survival in naturally recruited seedlings in the forest understory. Whole-plant carbon budgets (total gross and net carbon gain, proportion of carbon gain to respiration, tissue construction, storage, and root exudate) will be quantified for two species of plants in the wild-coffee genus (Psychotria) in the final study. This research will be integrated with educational activities. The philosophical implications of the physiological constraints in ecological interactions go beyond purely biological interactions. Ecological models based on allocation-based trade-offs are important in training not only those students anticipating professional careers as ecologists, but also for those students pursuing studies in non-scientific disciplines that affect the societal responses to ecological and environmental issues. Allocation trade-offs, thus, will be emphasized in Kitajima s teaching in both undergraduate- and graduate-level courses. Her research and teaching will be most directly integrated in the course Summer Research Experience in Tropical Ecology, in which undergraduate students will have an outstanding educational experience as hands-on participants in this research in Panama doc7912 none This research explores full-wave simulation techniques to facilitate the application of such tools to high-performance VLSI system design. It also investigates new design methodologies for system-level power delivery structures and on-chip interconnects for next-generation VLSI design. Computational work builds on an advanced full-wave simulation method: finite-difference time-domain (FDTD). The research focuses on 1) full-wave simulation algorithms to enable VLSI system-level full-wave simulation, 2) effective use of the full-wave simulation engine to investigate power fluctuation and signal integrity issues for VLSI interconnects, 3) exploration of time-of-flight effects, frequency-dependent behavior, and electrical and magnetic cross-coupling at the chip level, 4) investigation of power dip ground bounce for the purpose of identifying design blocks that are vulnerable to power fluctuations, 5) evaluation of the impact of decoupling capacitors on power delivery doc7913 none The project focuses on deepening of our understanding of the process of distributed manipulation. A representative set of three types of distributed manipulation systems will be considered: 1) an actuator array (a fixed planar array of many small stationary elements which cooperate to manipulate a large object); 2) a superposition of planar potential fields to manipulate objects (here air flow, using potential field theory); 3) snake-like or tentacle-like robots to wrap, fully or partially, around the manipulated object. On the education front, a wide effort on bringing mechatronics into the mechanical engineering curriculum will be made doc7914 none Ensuring that high assurance systems meet their reliability requirements prior to deployment is essential. The research focuses on combining the strengths of formal verification methods and program testing. The cornerstone of this unified, quantitative software reliability assessment framework is the use of Bayesian inference. Subjective probabilities of software failures are obtained through formal or informal verification. Statistical testing can either corroborate that the required reliability level is met, or it indicates that the subjectively established failure probabilities are not realistic, prompting the need for rework and improvement. Several combinations of verification techniques and statistical testing are based on program structure. Research objectives include the identification of program designs, which make software reliability assessment feasible, and demonstration of their suitability for high assurance applications. Educational activities accompanying the research theme include research experience for undergraduate and graduate students, and curriculum development. The goal of educational activities is to expose students to the development and assurance of complex systems through their participation in experiments and case studies. Participating students form multidisciplinary teams including computer science, computer engineering and electrical engineering majors doc7915 none Strategies Developed by Chemistry Graduate Students in Pedagogical and Empirical Content Knowledge. The study investigates the professional development of graduate students in two distinctly different areas, pedagogical content knowledge or PCK, and empirical content knowledge, ECK. Empirical content knowledge is defined as the knowledge of strategies, knowledge of research tools, and content knowledge that define successful research practice in a field. The definition of PCK for successful teaching is the knowledge of teaching strategies , the particular student population, areas of common difficulty, and teaching tools. The context for study of both areas is one of situated learning as graduates students work in teaching laboratories and research laboratories. Inquiry also concerns the characteristics of the learning environment for new graduate students, particularly learning conversations about research and or pedagogy. Since problem solving is the essence of successful research or teaching practice, one assessment of strategies will originate from solution-pathway analyses created by graduate students as they solve problems authored by the research & teaching directors in a virtual learning environment doc7916 none This research investigates the creation and use of configurable adaptable components as Intellectual Property (IP). The research proposes novel algorithms for: (1) choosing an optimal configurable component composed of one or more configurable fabrics, and for (2) synthesizing hardware-independent run time managers. The algorithms are explored in the context of a minimal adaptive component that provides on-demand services to clients (algorithms). This minimal component is comprised of hardware synthesized from different configurable fabrics, and a run time manager. The manager provides on-demand services, such as security checks, buffering, configuration caching, and an API that facilitates utilizing and programming the configurable component doc7917 none The research goals of this CAREER project are to identify novel routes of catabolic carbon flow and to isolate and characterize regulated genes following a switch from a photoautotrophic to a photo-or dark heterotrophic growth in a blue-green (cyanobacteria) alga, Synechocystis sp. Target genes that are under control of a cyclic-AMP receptor protein will also be identified in this facultative heterotrophic cyanobacteria. Both biochemical and genetic methods of analysis will be used to gain a deeper understanding of the metabolic potential of Synechocystis. Understanding the basic physiology of cyanobacteria and the genetic regulation of physiological changes in response to environmental stimuli could lead to formation of new beneficial plant interactions or biodegradation of xenobiotic compounds from surface waters. The project s teaching goals are intertwined with the research component. Enhanced scientific thinking and research experience will be provided at the pre-college level through the use of Synechocystis as a classroom model. High school teachers will be teamed up with graduate students for summer laboratory research, resulting in the development of physiological and genetic experiments appropriate for high school students. Laboratory equipment will be assembled by the high school teacher graduate student teams, enabling area students to perform hands-on experimental research in the classrooms of these trained teachers. Partnerships with local schools will provide original biological research experience to students and promote an interest and passion for science. The undergraduate educational focus is to involve students in original research experiences. Research utilizing mutagenesis, molecular genetics and computer assisted sequence analysis will be incorporated into the appropriate microbiology laboratories and into a new upper division microbial genetics laboratory course. The focus on graduate student education will provide the skills required for research on genetic, biochemical and physiological aspects of biology and will provide opportunities to share these skills doc7918 none Butler The National Research Council estimates that between 300,000 and 400,000 sites with soil and ground-water contamination exist in the United States, and that up to $1 trillion will be spent to clean up these sites over the next 30 years ( 1 ). To be effective, this cleanup effort will require a variety of remedial technologies. While natural attenuation is a demonstrated technology for the remediation of certain contaminated sites, the processes that constitute natural attenuation, including sorption, biodegradation, and abiotic transformation, are only generally understood. The least studied of these processes is probably abiotic transformation of organic pollutants by minerals, both alone and in the presence of natural organic matter--the focus of this proposed research. Abiotic transformations are likely to be particularly important under conditions inhospitable to microbial growth, such as high pollutant concentrations and low temperatures. Since these conditions prevail at many contaminated sites, it is important to quantify to the fullest extent possible the contribution of mineral mediated transformations to pollutant natural attenuation. The specific objectives of this research are: (1) identification of the pollutants and pollutant classes likely to undergo significant abiotic transformation in the presence of minerals and compounds representative of natural organic matter (NOM), (2) correlation of reaction rates with the molecular properties of the pollutant and NOM model compound, and with solution conditions such as pH, ionic strength, and temperature, and (3) identification and evaluation of techniques for enhancing abiotic pollutant natural attenuation. While there is international recognition of the need for interdisciplinary research on complex environmental problems such as pollutant natural attenuation, there is no consensus on how best to train scientists and engineers to conduct interdisciplinary research. The educational activities described in this proposal seek to train students in these strategies, and to identify effective practices for teaching environmental scientists and engineers to be interdisciplinary. Specific objectives include (1) implementation of an interdisciplinary undergraduate research program in which students from chemistry and environmental science and engineering departments serve as visiting researchers in each others laboratories and (2) development of an interdisciplinary graduate course addressing pollutant natural attenuation. A suite of techniques will be employed to assess the effectiveness of these educational activities, including student portfolios and written self-assessments, student questionnaires, and interdisciplinary peer and faculty review of student reports and presentations doc7919 none As we enter the so-called information age of global networks, ubiquitous computing devices, and electronic commerce, computer security is of increasing importance. One of the greatest challenges in computer security today is the software assurance problem: How do we deal with the fact that our most trusted software, even our security software itself, is often buggy? This research will study two aspects of the software assurance problem: ensuring first that bad things do not happen, and second that good things do happen. The project will explore vulnerability detection of legacy software, focusing on detecting the types of security bugs that pervade systems built before security became as serious a concern as it is today. Also this work will study infrastructural support for building new systems that need to be secure. The enabling technology is a mix of lightweight formal methods (such as static program analysis) coupled with domain-specific heuristics, and a main goal will be to build tools that can be used in practice. In each case, a key selling point of the approach is that it allows us to proactively eliminate or neutralize security bugs before they are exploited doc7920 none The long-term goal of my integrated research and educational plan is to develop interactive virtual environment sys-tems supporting realistic aural visual simulation of large 3D models containing multiple interacting users. Research Plan The main objective of the proposed research project is to develop efficient algorithms for simulating the propagation of light and sound waves through a virtual environment by scattering at surfaces of a 3D model. This research problem is central to providing a realistic experience in an immersive virtual environment, as its solution enables global illumination and sound spatialization. It is also significant for several other applications, including motion planning, inverse modeling, scene capture, heat transfer, radio power prediction, fire propagation, and traffic analysis, which are all important in fields beyond immersive virtual environments. For simulations of both lighting and acoustics, the fundamental problem is to compute a solution to an integral equation expressing the wave field at every point in terms of the wave field on surrounding surfaces. The main difficulty is that the wave field has discontinuities due to occlusions, caustics, and specular highlights, which induce large variations over small portions of the integration domain (i.e. surfaces or directions). Previous integration methods based on radiosity and Monte Carlo path tracing are generally not practical for typical virtual environments. I plan to investigate a hybrid beam tracing and path tracing approach. The general strategy is to trace beams that partition the space of rays into topologically distinct bundles corresponding to different sequences of scattering events at surfaces of the 3D scene (reverberation sequences), and then use them to guide sampling in an interactive path tracing algorithm. The motivation for this approach is that attributes of a relatively small number of beams traced during the first phase can provide useful information about the wave field that can be used to guide and accelerate evaluation of samples during the second phase. This approach enables efficient methods for: 1) enumeration of reverberation sequences, 2) decomposition of integration domain, 3) conservative approximation, 4) spatial coherence in ray intersections, 5) sampling of reverberation sequences, 6) progressive refinement, and 7) off-line precomputation. The challenge is to develop methods that trace beams through 3D models quickly and reap the benefits of the traced beams in useful applications. My research plan is to investigate hybrid beam tracing and path tracing approaches to solve classical problems for virtual environments. The new research contributions will be made at four levels: theory, algorithms, applications, and experiments. First, I plan to investigate new theory for modeling wave propagation as a discrete set of reverber- ation paths incorporating multiple scattering effects including diffractions. Second, I plan to develop new algorithms that efficiently find significant reverberation paths with general types of scattering in general 3D models. Third, I plan to investigate new applications where the proposed approach for computing reverberation paths can be used to solve classical problems. Finally, I plan to perform experiments to evaluate the results of computed simulations both quantitatively and qualitatively in comparison to measured wave fields. The overall outcome of this research will be a computational framework and a suite of methods for computing general reverberation paths in general 3D models and evaluating them in interactive applications. Throughout this project, I plan to investigate the synergies between sound and light and to apply the lessons learned from one wave phenomenon to the other. Based on historical precedent, I believe that it will be possible to develop better simulations of virtual environments by studying both sound and light together. Educational Plan The objectives of my educational plan are to teach students and to develop new methods for education. In particular, one special goal of mine is to enable the use of interactive virtual environment systems in the educational process. I plan to investigate this novel media for education by designing new interdisciplinary courses that will allow students and teachers from widely varying backgrounds to learn about and experiment with virtual environment systems. I also plan to develop new educational materials (textbook, course notes, software tools, and 3D models), to mentor students (graduate, undergraduate, and K-12), and to develop outreach programs for disadvantaged people (mentoring under- privileged students and deploying handicap-assisting applications). By both developing interactive virtual environment systems for research, and investigating their use for teaching, my research and educational activities are uniquely integrated doc7921 none CAREER Award: Murine gammaherpesvirus 68 persistence and interaction with host chemokine networks. The evolutionary interactions of viruses and their hosts reflect diverse adaptive strategies. Herpesviruses exemplify a co-evolutionary strategy in which host innate and adaptive immune defenses and cellular signalling are balanced by virus induced modulations that typically result in an altered homeostasis facilitating permanent association of the virus and the multicellular host. While this balance is maintained, there is usually little cost in fitness for the host. The large DNA genomes of herpesviruses encode numerous accessory genes unnecessary for viral replication but critically involved in virus persistence through modulation of host responses. Gammaherpesviruses, which are capable of persistence in lymphoid cells, contain a particularly impressive variety of genes apparently acquired through molecular piracy of host genes relevant to immune recognition and response, cell cycle control, complement-mediated killing, and apoptotic responses. Prominent within the genetic repertoire of gamma-2-herpesviruses (or rhadinoviruses) are genes encoding products that interact with host chemokine networks which are critical in regulation of cell traffic under both homeostatic and inflammatory conditions. Conserved within several rhadinovirus genomes is a G-protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) gene encoding a putative CXC-chemokine receptor homolog most closely related to CXCR2. Studies of gammaherpesvirus latency and persistence together with functional analysis of the viral CXC chemokine receptor encoded by ORF74 of murine gammaherpesvirus 68 (MHV-68) will be pursued in these studies with extensive student participation. Interaction of MHV-68 with murine hosts is highly accessible to investigation using powerful genetic tools making this system ideally suited for advancing understanding of gammaherpesvirus biology including mechanisms of gammaherpesvirus latency and persistence. The MHV-68 genome has been fully sequenced and can be manipulated using conventional in vitro recombination methods. Availability of genetically defined mouse strains (including transgenic strains and those with specific gene knockouts) affords unparalleled opportunities to query the nature of the virus-host association using manipulations of both virus and host genetics. These investigations of MHV-68 persistence and interaction with host chemokine networks will exploit the advantages of this virus-host system. The intriguing nature of known gammaherpesvirus-host interactions, the elegance of appropriate experimental methods including those that are standard to molecular biology, and the abundance of unanswered questions together provide a research framework that is well suited for integration into educational activities involving graduate students, undergraduates, and pre-college students and their teachers. Studies of cloned MHV-68 genes using common molecular biological methods will continue to provide an inquiry-based context for introductory and advanced molecular biology laboratory courses. Drawing upon the extensive experience of the principal investigator in construction of recombinant rhadinoviruses for study of gene function within the viral context, graduate student projects will include construction of MHV-68 recombinants useful for understanding virus-host interactions. Both graduate and undergraduate students will perform studies of MHV-68 gene function in vitro using cloned viral gene expression constructs. Ongoing interactions with regional high school students and their teachers will provide opportunities for selected students to participate in small, well defined laboratory research projects utilizing basic molecular biological methods doc7922 none This CAREER computational geometry project will conduct research in several areas: - kinetic data structures for collision detection, - geometric range searching data structures for both static and moving points, - Delauney and other triangulations for well-spread point sets, and - intersection and convex decomposition of smooth polyhedra doc7923 none This project investigates aspects of reliable communications for very different types of network variability. The first part of the project is concerned with capacity and robustness of networks to permanent failures such as removal of a link or node. The approach in this project moves away from a pure graph-theoretic approach, based purely on routing, to consider network capacity using an algebraic framework. Capacity is considered as the characterization of the set of connections that can be supported by a network in which the nodes are not only capable of traditional routing functions, but can also perform processing of the data that arrives to them. Such processing is considered as a code over the network. Coding is also applied to recovery to maintain certain connections in a network even after failure of a portion of the network, for instance after the disappearance of a link in the network. The second part of the project considers robustness in channels where fading varies over both time and frequency, especially over ultra wide frequency bands. The goal of this part of the project is to establish theoretical results that relate capacity, peak power, energy, bandwith and probability of error in such a way as to characterize the practical achievable performance in wide band wireless systems. The first part of this project investigates the reliability of networks under normal and failure conditions when coding is used to ensure continuity of connections. This project shows that traditional methods of recovery in networks, such as rerouting, are subsets of network coding and establishes coding methods to increase the realibility of networks under failure conditions. Moreover, the projects investigates the issue of network management, where network management represents the information needed to modify the behavior of the network, defined as the code of the network, in response to failures. The algebraic approach taken in this project allows some characterization of the fundamental limits of the number of bits required to effect changes on the network code and of the portions of the network that require knowledge of failures. The second part of the project considers capacity of very wide band channels and the applicability of different types of signals and codes to achieve performance at or near the theoretical maximum. In particular, it explores to what extent very high peak power symbols, which are known to achieve capacity in the limit of very large bandwidths, are necessary to achieve capacity. The project also explores the ranges of bandwidth in which ultra-wideband results are achievable. This work bridges the theoretical limits of the channel (capacity) with the applicability of the techniques that achieve capacity by providing an explicit bound to the probability of error in terms of rate, bandwidth and peak power of the signal. Finally, the project consider the applicability, in the range of moderate to large bandwidths, of traditional spread spectrum approaches, such as direct-sequence code-division multiple access, that perform poorly in the limit of very large bandwidths doc7924 none of the software in a high-level manner frees developers from worrying about hardware details and operating system interfaces. This decoupling provides benefits for server developers, and will spur new research in parallelization techniques, operating system interfaces, and software architectures doc7925 none The goal of this research project is to develop a new generation of algorithms and systems for mining distributed and heterogeneous data for ubiquitous computing environments. This research involves development of a distributed principal component analysis (PCA), distributed randomized projection techniques, clustering algorithms based on these distributed representation construction techniques, and a distributed decision tree learning technique based on Fourier analysis. This research is integrated with promotion of education in the data mining area through hosting undergraduates, K-12 students and teachers, organizing workshops, maintaining virtual presence, working with under-represented groups in collaboration with the University of Maryland Baltimore County Shriver Center, and the development of research instructional laboratories. The results of this project will provide a new generation of data mining algorithms that minimize the cost for maintaining the ubiquitous presence. It will also enhance the awareness among the students at different levels about the importance of data mining education doc7926 none Energy consumption is a key constraint in the design of modern microprocessors, limiting battery life in portable devices and achievable performance in high-performance systems. Modern instruction set architectures such as RISC or VLIW are based on extensive research into how instruction set design affects performance, and provide a purely performance-oriented hardware-software interface. Implementations of these ISAs perform many energy-consuming microarchitectural operations during execution of each user-level instruction and these dominate total power dissipation. Because modern architectures pipeline and parallelize this microarchitectural work, it has little effect on the latency and throughput of user instructions, thus there is no incentive to expose the micro-operations in a purely performance-oriented hardware-software interface: energy consumption is hidden from software. The project will develop new energy-exposed microprocessor architectures that give software much greater control over the microarchitectural components used to execute each operation. The research will develop new integrated hardware and software energy-saving techniques by simultaneously considering all levels of processor design, including VLSI circuits, microarchitectures, instruction sets, compilers, and operating systems. The project will also be used to bring energy-efficiency into the curriculum of existing undergraduate and graduate computer architecture courses doc7927 none PI: Meberg, Peter During the development of the nervous system individual neurons must extend their axons and form synaptic contacts with other neurons or muscles. The growing tips of axons, the growth cones, are able to navigate to their appropriate synaptic targets by responding to extracellular cues. This growth cone motility and navigation is regulated by the directed assembly of actin filaments. Many extracellular matrix proteins, growth factors and other signaling molecules can regulate actin dynamics, but the intracellular effectors that link signal transduction pathways to actin reorganization in neurons are not well characterized. Actin depolymerizing factor (ADF) and related proteins may be important targets of these signals since: 1) ADF is essential for actin-dependent motility in other simpler systems; 2) ADF is present in growth cones; 3) ADF activity is regulated by many signal pathways; and 4) increased ADF activity increases the extension of axons. The first objective of Dr. Meberg and his students will be to determine how changes in ADF activity affect growth cone structure and dynamics in primary neuronal cultures. Changes in ADF activity will be accomplished though antisense suppression of ADF expression as well as the expression of mutant forms of ADF and LIM kinase using recombinant adenoviruses. LIM kinase inhibits ADF activity by phosphorylation. Dr. Meberg will then ascertain if growth cone responsiveness to extracellular cues involves changes in ADF activity. This will be accomplished first by assaying if changes in the phosphorylation state activity of ADF are locally or globally induced within growth cones and neurons by guidance cues normally present in the nervous system. Finally, they will perform assays to determine if signaling through ADF is required for responsiveness to discrete extracellular cues, using the ADF and LIMK mutants that prevent signaling through ADF phosphorylation. Such studies are essential for determining whether ADF simply stimulates outgrowth in general or if it is also an integral component for growth cone navigation. These studies will not only extend our understanding of how actin dynamics are regulated in growth cones, but also how neurons grow and are able to form appropriate connections during brain development. The integration of the proposed research activities and facilities with teaching responsibilities will enhance graduate and undergraduate education at the University of North Dakota by direct student involvement in the research project together with increased capabilities in the teaching labs doc7928 none All too often, decisions about whom to trust in computer systems are driven by the needs of system management rather than data security. In particular, data storage is often entrusted to people who have no role in creating or using the data--through outsourcing of data management, hiring of outside consultants to administer servers, or even collocation servers in physically insecure machine rooms to gain better network connectivity. SUNDR is a network file system designed to run on untrusted servers. SUNDR servers can safely be managed by people who have no permission to read or write data stored in the file system. Thus, people can base their trust decisions on who needs to use data and their administrative decisions on how best to manage the data. Moreover, with SUNDR, attackers will no longer be able to wreak havoc by compromising servers and tampering with data. They will need to compromise clients while legitimate users are logged on. Since clients do not need to accept incoming network connections, they can more easily be firewalled and protected from compromise than servers doc7929 none This project studies new architectures for verifiably safe execution of software. The first area of research is the production of a new generation of compilers, called verifying compilers, that can only compile safe code according to pre-determined safety policies, such as protection of private information and resource-bounded computation. The second area is the production of code accompanied by formal proofs guaranteeing that code s compliance with pre-determined safety policies, in the style of Proof-Carrying Code (PCC). Typed languages guaranteeing different notions of safety criteria, including assembly languages and machine code, will be defined, studied, and modeled. These languages will be relevant to both the design of verifying compilers and the PCC project. One approach will be using dependent type systems to define powerful intermediate and assembly languages. Furthermore, a prototype verifying compiler will be built by extending an existing compiler with a verifying module, using a type-theory based approach to program safety. Representative safety policies will be implemented, and examples developed to show that malicious code cannot be certified. The research component will be adapted for inclusion in the graduate curriculum. Furthermore, a student will be supervised towards a PhD in state-of-the-art compiler technology doc7930 none This Faculty Early Career Development ( CAREER) project integrates research and educational initiatives focusing on micro- and nano-scale processing of biodegradable polymers using laser techniques for biomedical and bioMEMS applications. Research focusing on laser micro- and nano-scale processing with parametric studies using both a UV excimer laser and a femtosecond laser to produce controlled micro-features on polymer surfaces will be addressed. Biodegradable polymers hold immense promise as new materials for implantable biomedical micro-devices due to their biocompatibility and ability to naturally degrade and disappear in tissues over a desired period of time. This degradability eliminates a second surgery to retrieve the implanted micro-devices. The CAREER project will: (1) develop an advanced laser technique with a near-field beam delivery system to produce controlled micro- and nano-scale patterns on biodegradable polymer surfaces; (2) develop an experimental system and a numerical model to investigate the transient laser-material interaction process on extremely small time and length scales; and (3) implement the research into the development of biodegradable micro- and nano-devices. This research will make significant contribution to the emerging and interdisciplinary field of micro- and nano-manufacturing science and technology, bioengineering, and polymer science. The integrated education plan will focus on curriculum development in micro- and nano-manufacturing at the undergraduate and graduate levels by infusing emerging and multi-disciplinary research into the classroom. This plan also encourages women students in research and adopts cooperative learning techniques in teaching. The PI also incorporates a learning plan for himself in new methods of educational pedagogy and curriculum development doc7931 none People who are quadriplegic and nonverbal, for example from cerebral palsy or traumatic brain injury, often have great difficulties communicating their desires, thoughts, and needs. A video-based human-computer interface system will be developed to provide such people access to computers. The interface system will detect and track their limited voluntary motions to help them communicate with family, friends, and care providers. A set of cameras with pan, tilt, and zoom mechanisms will be pointed at the computer user. Computer vision algorithms will recognize the movements of a finger, foot, or facial feature in real time and interpret them as a communication of the computer user. Augmentative communication software will be developed that uses these interpretations to provide access to commercially available or custom-built application software. The system will be trained and tested by several non-speaking children with cerebral palsy and other serious disabilities. This research is expected to advance the state-of-the-art in the fields of computer vision and assistive technology with new video interpretation algorithms and innovative real-time system design. It will help people with severe disabilities gain access to a computer and thereby obtain a tool for communication, which in turn will enable them to actively acquire knowledge, to partake in increased recreational activities, to surf the internet, and to use computer-controlled technologies such as automated wheelchairs doc7932 none Computational geometry arose out of the need for many science and engineering applications of geometric computing. Over the last two decades, the field has emerged as a rich, mature, and mathematically rigorous discipline. However, despite its impressive achievements well-received in the theoretical computer science community, computational geometry has had limited impact in the practical areas of geometric computing. As advocated by the recent Computational Geometry Task Force Report, it is important to reorient the field towards providing more practical solutions to the specific needs of the applications that use geometric computing, and towards focusing on new bottleneck problems of identifiably important practical areas. In this proposed career plan, we intend to develop our research career toward this goal, by working on the full computational pipelines of some important real-world applications of geo-metric computing, including air traffic management (conflict prediction), graphics and scientific visualization (I O-efficient isosurface extraction, I O- efficient direct volume rendering, external-memory view- dependent surface simplification), and manufacturing (maximum scatter traveling salesperson problem (TSP)). An important aspect of the work is to examine the full computational pipelines of the practical applications to identify and formulate critical tasks into new algorithmic questions, extend computational geometry methodologies to devise novel solutions, and finally implement and integrate the developed algorithms into the pipelines to evaluate their practical ef-fectiveness in the original real-life applications. Key components of the plan are the expected rich interactions between theory and practice, and the aim of designing simple, easy-to-implement geometric algorithms that are efficient both practically and theoretically. In the long term, we expect to be able to have real impact on these important practical areas of geometric computing, and at the same time enrich the knowledge body of the field of computational geometry. The proposed educational plan includes introduction of new courses, involvement of both graduate and undergraduate students in the proposed research projects, participation in an outreach program, and further development of a research laboratory doc7933 none New technology for capturing shape data from the real world requires new algorithms to interpret and use it. Building on new ideas about reconstructing a surface from a set of points in three-dimensional space, we consider algorithms for computing different shape representations, and for aligning point sets to each other. We look for simple, effective yet provably correct algorithms, using tools from computational geometry but drawing on the huge body of previous work in computer vision and graphics. This work complements our teaching in graphics and algorithms, and helps us train graduate students in research doc7934 none Inan The proposed work is a three year effort to establish and operate a very low frequency (VLF) beacon transmitter at South Pole, for the continuous measurement of solar effects on the Earth s mesosphere and lower ionosphere. Specifically the transmitter will produce data on solar proton events, relativistic ( 300 keV) electron precipitation from the Earth s outer radiation belts, and energetic electron precipitation and Joule heating components of high latitude polar cap magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling processes. The relativistic electron population as measured at geosynchronous orbit exhibits pronounced fluctuations in association with substorm and solar activity. During an event, these highly energetic electrons can penetrate to altitudes as low as 30-40 km, producing ionization, x-rays and possibly affecting chemical reactions involving ozone production. The extent of relativistic electron precipitation will be observed by means of amplitude and phase variations of the South Pole VLF signal as received at various Antarctic stations. The South Pole beacon will synergistically enhance other antarctic upper atmospheric research efforts, such as the Automatic Geophysical Observatory programs and the southern hemisphere coherent HF radar network (SUPERDARN). The proposed program also strongly complements ongoing satellite based measurements of trapped and precipitating high energy electrons both at low altitudes (SAMPEX) and high altitudes (POLAR). The beacon will transmit at approximately 20 kHz, radiating 1 kW of total power with a ~6.25 km (tip-to-tip length) long horizontal dipole antenna. It will be operating under computer control with a synoptic schedule of about 1 min out of every 15 minutes doc7935 none Complex geometry becomes increasingly common in applications arising in diverse areas. Plastic surgeons use computer models to plan and perform operations. Mechanical engineers virtually assemble and test cars and planes. Animators create complex characters and effects indistinguishable from reality. Geometric modeling has found its way into art conservation: it is now feasible to create computer models of sculptures capturing the most subtle of details. Increasing complexity of geometric data calls for new efficient representations and algorithms. The goal of our long-term research plan is to study representations of complex geometric data, surfaces in particular. We plan to launch a broad and fundamental program to explore three types of representations: piecewise-smooth surfaces, multiscale surfaces and combined volume-surface representations. Our approach to designing complex surface representations is based on the concept of subdivision, a powerful technique for modeling smooth surfaces. Subdivision algorithms, while being more flexible and general, retain a number of useful properties of splines. Most importantly, the surfaces generated by these algorithms have a natural hierarchical structure and are computed using efficient local rules; subdivision algorithms can be easily extended to represent multiscale data. The general goal of our research is to design representations supporting efficient algorithms for construction, rendering, manipulation, processing, transmission and storage of surface data. We will explore in close coordination both theoretical properties of these representations (regularity, convergence rates, fairness, stability) and their practical applications. The specific goal of the proposed project is to generalize to surfaces the signal processing tools that were designed and are extensively used for images. The research program is integrated with the education plan, which has three main goals: (1) prepare graduate students for research in computer graphics and related areas, (2) incorporate the latest advances in research into curriculum at all levels, including undergraduate, and engage motivated undergraduate students in research (3) transfer knowledge about latest research advances to professionals in the industry doc7936 none Darlene D. Judd Dr. Darlene D. Judd of Oregon State University has been awarded a five-year CAREER grant that will support a novel research and training program for two Ph.D. students and two M.S. students to undertake systematics research on four families of understudied flies of prime relevance to human health. Each student s research will focus on one of the families in the Culicoidea (Diptera: Culicomorpha), or a small natural group within a family, for which we have little understanding of relationships. Monographs will provide comprehensive global coverage of each group and will include treatment of nomenclature, descriptions of species for all life stages, illustrations of informative character systems, and distribution and life history information. Identification keys and specimen digital image databases will be made available on WWW. Each of these studies will contribute morphological and molecular character data that will be combined and analyzed using cladistics methods. These four fly families were chosen because the combination of characters they display suggests their positions within the Culicomorpha (the most important vectors of human disease) are unstable, yet of fundamental interest to higher classification and questions focusing on the evolution of blood-feeding in flies. Flies are one of the most successful taxonomic groups on the planet and figure prominently in discussions of agricultural pests, issues in human and animal health, nutrient cycling and biodiversity. Despite their importance, relationships among flies and their close relatives are controversial. Morphological studies to date in the primitive flies (e.g. mosquitoes, gnats, black flies, punkies) have relied heavily on groundplan coding in phylogenetic analyses, while molecular studies are often plagued by problems in taxon sampling. This CAREER grant will integrate modern methods in taxonomic research, graduate education and natural history collections into a program that provides a firm foundation for solving problems on one of the most important lineages of pestiferous flies doc7937 none Hing, Mei The broad objective of this research is to elucidate membrane protein structure and dynamics using advanced solid-state NMR spectroscopy. Membrane proteins regulate cellular transport and cell signaling, thus they are essential for cell survival. Knowledge of their three-dimensional structures is crucial for understanding their functions. Solid-state NMR is a promising method for studying the molecular structure of membrane proteins in their native environment of lipid bilayers. In this CAREER project, the structure and dynamics of a 22 kDa membrane-bound protein, colicin Ia channel domain, will be investigated using NMR techniques suitable for extensively isotopically labeled proteins. a-helical and b-sheet segments in colicin will be identified and specific structural constraints will be measured using chemical shift anisotropies, correlated dipolar couplings, and 1H-1H internuclear distances. The depth of insertion of the protein into the lipid bilayer will be determined by 1H spin diffusion techniques. The dynamics of the colicin backbone and sidechain will be characterized using anisotropic couplings, lineshapes, and relaxation time constants. These studies should provide insight into the mechanism of conformational changes of colicin Ia and other proteins that refold to accomplish their functions. Related to these research objectives are educational initiatives to modernize the undergraduate chemistry curriculum. A protein structure module for general chemistry will be designed to integrate research with teaching, and create web pages for undergraduate physical chemistry courses. The participation of women in chemistry will be encouraged by recruiting women summer interns into the laboratory doc7938 none The long-term goal of this research is to develop computational methods for predicting protein-protein interactions at a genomic level. Protein-protein interactions play a central role in how an organism functions, and computational methods for predicting these interactions will be key to understanding functional pathways within biological systems. The vast amount of biosequence data in a genome makes sophisticated computational analysis a necessity. While computational methods have already proven to be a useful first step for rapid genome-wide identification of putative protein function and structure, research on the problem of computationally determining biologically relevant partners for given protein sequences is just beginning. This project looks at the problem of predicting protein-protein interactions from two complementary viewpoints. For both approaches, the constraint of genomic-level analysis favors development of fast, informatics-based methods. The first part of this proposal focuses on a specific well-characterized structural motif that mediates protein-protein interactions: the parallel, 2-stranded coiled coil. The goal is to develop novel computational techniques that can predict whether two coiled-coil proteins interact with each other. The second part will extend several existing non-structural whole- and cross-genome methodologies that were initially designed for inferring protein function to the problem of predicting protein-protein interactions mediated by particular protein interaction domains. The educational goals of this project include: (1) bioinformatics curriculum development, including a graduate computing certificate for molecular biology graduate students; (2) development of interdisciplinary bioinformatics courses at the introductory level and at the graduate research seminar level; and (3) dissemination of instructional material via the internet doc7939 none A number of new applications have recently emerged that require the storage, maintenance, and analysis of massive amounts of data. Examples such as web search engines, data warehouses, and large scientific data repositories often involve multiple terabytes of data that are simultaneously searched and explored by many users. This research project investigates fundamental algorithmic problems arising in the context of such large data sets, studies the complexity of these problems, develops new techniques for their efficient solution, and experimentally validates proposed techniques in the appropriate system and application context. The main focus is on problems arising in databases and in searching and analyzing the World-Wide Web. More precisely, the research focuses on problems concerning the storage, maintenance, partitioning, indexing, and approximate representation of very large data sets, and the efficient exploration, analysis and precise and approximate querying of such data. The types of problems that are studied can be grouped into two categories, one consisting of problems motivated mainly by applications in the database area, and one motivated by applications in web search and analysis. In the first category, the project studies multi-dimensional data partitioning problems arising in selectivity estimation and indexing, feedback-based approaches to selectivity estimation, association rule mining problems, and the approximate and precise evaluation of complex queries on large data sets. The problems studied in the second category are concerned with online search on the web, the study of random graph models for the web, and efficient computing with large web graphs and hypertext collections doc7940 none Digital data can occur in diverse forms; it may occur as database records with numerical fields, as raw text documents or image files, or as website traffic log files. Data mining is the automatic discovery of interesting patterns, associations,changes, anomalies, rules, and statistically significant structures and events in data. A key feature, often an overwhelming feature, of the data is its sheer magnitude. The rapidly expanding internet already contains more than 1 billion web pages, and typical warehouse and web traffic data can occupy terabytes of disk space. It is clear that data mining tools must be efficient and scalable if they are to serve any practical purpose. Parallel computing can help in satisfying the demands on computing cycles and memory storage imposed by these large data sets. The main focus of this project is to develop scalable solutions for large-scale data analysis. The main thrust is in exploring and developing efficient, parallel, mathematical and statistical methods that can mine large data sets and deliver results in a timely manner. In particular, new clustering techniques that partition data into disjoint partitions, the new method of concept decompositions for dimensionality reduction, improved computation of principal components analysis, efficient classification schemes for folding in newly arriving unlabeled data into known classes, and effective visualization of multidimensional data will be investigated. Another focus is to adapt the data analyses tools developed to the application area of text mining. A completely parallel text mining system that is capable of (a) efficient preprocessing of text data into numerical data, (b) clustering large unlabeled document collections, (c) classifying unlabeled documents into a known concept hierarchy and (d) visualization of document we hope to process up to 100 million documents on a 128-processor cluster of workstations. Many of the text mining algorithms we develop will scale linearly with the size of the data. In this scenario, it becomes important to avoid I O bottlenecks, exploit memory hierarchies of modern processors and hide network latencies. The educational plan consists of three components: (i) a teaching philosophy that emphasizes the scientific method in undergraduate and graduate education, by incorporating new technologies for in-class and web-based offline instruction; (ii) a focus on multidisciplinary education with a commitment to develop centralized web-oriented primers designed to quickly acquaint students with desired pre-requisites; and (iii) curriculum development for two courses; the first, a scientific computing course for non-CS undergraduates as part of UT Austin s new Elements of Computing program, and the second, a new course on large-scale data mining for graduate students doc7904 none The project addresses development of systems that interact autonomously with their environment in an intelligent way. Applications range from intelligent home environments to autonomous mobile robots to software agents. Over the recent years, the use of probabilistic methods has led to development of reliable mobile robot systems. However, despite tremendous potential benefits of collaboration between robots, some fundamental issues in the context of probabilistic methods for multi-robot collaboration remain unexplored. The goal of this project is to bridge the scientific gap between probabilistic methods for single-robot systems and those for collaborative multi-robot systems. The research is expected to have a strong impact on the area of collaborating mobile robots. On the education side, in order to teach the skills needed to understand and develop such complex systems, a new undergraduate course on mobile robotics will be designed, which will follow a hands-on approach to teaching, involving students in investigative work with mobile robots doc7942 none Genetic and Phenotypic Variation in Foraging Behavior of African and European Honey Bees Principle Investigators: Jennifer H. Fewell and Jon F. Harrison, Arizona State University A fundamental question in integrative biology is how genetic variation relates to variation in an animal s survival and reproductive strategies. One way to answer this is to determine the genetic basis for behavioral differences between animal populations and then assess the ecological effects of those differences. This project examines foraging strategy differences between neotropical African-derived (Apis mellifera scutellata) and European (Apis mellifera ligustica) honey bees. It addresses to the questions of: (1) how genetic variation between African and European workers influences foraging strategy, and (2) how variation in worker foraging strategy affects differences in colony growth rates between the two subspecies. Population-level research suggests that African honey bees out-compete European bees primarily through faster rates of colony growth and reproduction (swarming). Because honey bees are social insects, these differences in colony strategy are generated by collective differences in the behavior of the colony s individual workers. Prior research by the investigators suggests that a major behavioral difference between African and European workers is in foraging. African workers show a higher tendency than European workers to collect pollen. Because pollen is the primary food source for developing brood, this difference can have profound effects on colony growth. The first objective of this research is to understand the mechanisms producing individual differences in pollen and nectar foraging. The investigators will test the hypothesis that differences in resource choice between African and European foragers are driven by differences in their sensitivity to stimuli affecting pollen collection. They will determine whether co-fostered African workers respond more readily to stimuli known to affect pollen foraging, and examine differences between African and European workers in genomic regions (quantitative trait loci or QTL s) known to be associated with pollen foraging behavior in European bees. Preliminary data also suggest that African and European workers differ in work effort during foraging, and that this variation may be mediated by differences in metabolic capacity. The second objective is to test the hypothesis that variation in metabolic rate between African and European honey bees is genetically based, and is linked to differences in resource preference and foraging effort. The researchers will compare metabolic rates, foraging load sizes and foraging rates of co-fostered African, European and hybrid workers to determine how these traits are inherited. Then, quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping will be performed to locate genomic regions influencing variation in flight metabolic rates. These will be compared to known loci affecting body size and preference for pollen versus nectar collection. The third objective is to determine whether variation in individual foraging behavior affects colony-level growth rates. The investigators will: (a) measure pollen intake rates and colony growth rates in African and European hives, and (b) experimentally manipulate the genotypes of the foragers in a hive (African versus European), to measure the effect of forager genotype on brood production. This research integrates behavior, physiology and genetics to generate a more complete understanding of the proximate mechanisms generating complex behavioral traits such as foraging. It also examines the consequences of individual behavioral differences on the ecological success of these competing subspecies doc7943 none The goal of the proposed research is to develop a comprehensive understanding of the spatial aspect of distributed computing in mobile systems. Traditionally, events in a distributed computation are ordered by time. Scalar and vector clocks are used to represent logical time and causal dependencies. However, the mobility of nodes injects a new spatial dimension into the problem. The physical and network distances between nodes in a mobile network are not correlated. Moreover, some wireless links in a mobile network may be unidirectional. Hence, unlike physical distance, the network distance between nodes is not a symmetric relation. Finally, if requests of two mobile nodes are being prioritized on the basis of their respective distances from a third (resource) node, their relative priority can change with time. This is in contrast to the immutable relative ordering of events based on time. Hence, if distance is one of the criteria for ordering requests, existing solutions for problems like mutual exclusion (using logical clocks) cannot be efficiently used for resource allocation in mobile computing. We will develop a new formal representation of the spatial-temporal relationship between events in mobile computing. Space-time vectors are a step in this direction. A theory for a possibly immutable ordering of events based on their spatial-temporal coordinates will be developed. Such an ordering of requests could be used for resource deadlock free, starvation free and fair resource management. New protocols will be developed at the MAC sub-layer enabling nodes to communicate using unidirectional wireless links. We will develop new routing protocols that utilize this MAC sub-layer protocol, and can correctly route packets in a wireless mobile network with a combination of unidirectional and bidirectional links. Subsequently, the performance of these solutions will be evaluated through simulation experiments and prototyping. Graduate and undergraduate students will actively participate in every stage of the project doc7944 none Vikram S. Adve Univ. of Illinois CAREERS: Techniques and Application of Dynamic Compilation Compiler-based program optimization is fundamentally important for current and future computing systems. Static optimization, the predominant approach, will always be essential but is becoming increasingly insufficient for many reasons. These include the popularity of high-level, object-oriented languages, the proliferation of portable, interpreted languages like Java, and the increasing complexity of processor architectures. All of these trends imply that dynamic compilation (including runtime program analysis, runtime optimization, and runtime code generation) is likely to be extremely important technology for achieving high performance in current and future application. The infrastructure developed through this work will support a broad career plan that integrates teaching and research. The software will contribute to the PI s educational efforts through class projects in introductory and advanced classes and through recruiting undergraduates for these research efforts doc7945 none This is the first year funding of a 5-year continuing award. Current core speech recognition technology is inadequate in several important situations, where high error rates often render the technology unusable. This project will advance the state of the art through use of graphical models, a relatively new statistical technique comprising formal methods for reasoning about random processes, and sets of algorithms for making probabilistic data-driven decisions in computationally efficient ways. All existing statistical techniques used in automatic speech recognition (and many more) appear to be representable using graphical models; no other known abstraction has such a property. The PI will design and build new freely available open-source software for speech recognition research and education. This infrastructure will provide the tools needed to successfully investigate different graphical-model based speech recognition algorithms, and will include tools for both computing with a specified model and for searching for new ones. The infrastructure will be used for curriculum development at the University of Washington (both at the graduate and undergraduate level), and will be released, along with course materials, on the Internet for free use by anyone doc7946 none Cryptography has gained interest from the industry as a result of the increasing electronic commerce market. The secure utilization of electronic devices in business transactions frequently involves cryptography in order to protect or verify the authenticity of the information being transferred by these devices. For several applications, the hardware implementation should not only be fast, but also to have features such as low power, reduced area, and scalability. This project involves the investigation and development of scalable structures for arithmetic operations for cryptography. Scalability is defined here as the capability to compute any long-precision result using fixed precision arithmetic units. These arithmetic units are adjustable to the available area, organized for concurrent execution, and reused as needed to obtain any desired precision. This project explores new computer arithmetic algorithms and design strategies for basic operations in cryptographic applications, leading to reusable, scalable, and efficient implementations. The utilization of design alternatives such as digit codes, scheduling techniques (space and time), and system organization will be considered in detail. The PI looks into operations in Galois Fields GF(p) and GF(2^m). These operations are used in classical cryptographic algorithms and the more recent Elliptic Curve cryptography, which offers a higher degree of security doc7947 none Professor William Breckenridge of the University of Utah is supported by the Experimental Physical Chemistry program to perform experiments on the activation of C-H bonds in gaseous clusters containing metal centers. This proposal seeks to discover mechanisms by which C-H bond breaking occurs in gas phase clusters mimicking two situations: side-on interactions of metal electrons with C-H bonds as would occur in organometallic compounds, and C-H bond activation on the surfaces of metal oxides. The clusters will be studied using various laser probes such as laser-induced fluorescence, and multiphoton ionization spectroscopy. The problem of structure and dynamics in simple metal-hydrocarbon systems is made quite relevant in this proposal by the comparison to real world problems in catalysis. The breaking of C-H bonds is of great interest in a variety of important technological processes such as hydrocarbon cracking, catalysis, synthesis of chemicals from natural gas, hydrogenation and organic synthesis doc7948 none Hooper The objectives of this research include understanding the catalytic mechanism of (a) The monoheme cytochrome P460, (b) the multiheme c-cytochrome, hydroxylamine oxidoreductase (HAO). (c) the tetraheme cytochrome c554, (d) the monoheme cytochrome c552 and (e) the di-c-heme cytcperoxidase. These are reactive cyochromes which participate in the energy-generating reactions of the autotrophic bacterium, N. europaea. The bacterium catalyzes a step in the nitrification pathway of the global nitrogen cycle. Its activity is key in agriculture, waste water treatment, on-site bioremediation of environmental pollutants, greenhouse gas formation and ozone depletion. The active site of the hydroxylamine oxidizing enzyme contains a novel heme-like macrocycle, heme P460, a derivative of a c-heme which has a unique, covalent crosslink to a protein tyrosine. A similar crosslink, but to a lysine, is observed in another hydroxylamine oxidizing enzyme from N. europaea called cytochrome P460. Both heme P460s have similar unique optical properties. . Catalytic hemes play critical roles in many cellular processes functioning as either reductases or oxygenases. HAO, on the other hand, catalyzes a biologically relevant dehydrogenation reaction, a function unprecedented among catalytic cytochromes, and rarely observed in metalloproteins in general. The mechanism to be tested includes: deprotonation of substrate; involvement of the cross-linked tyrosine or lysine in catalysis; and facilitation of electron removal by c-hemes. Specific goals are as follows. (a) Cytochrome P460. To purify the existing site directed mutant proteins K70A, K70R and K70Y and characterize their catalytic, optical-, EPR- and Raman-spectra and their redox potentials. To work on the X-ray crystallographic structure will continue. (b) HAO. To develop an expression system for the hao gene and make site-directed mutants. To identify by proteolysis and MALDI residue(s) which are derivatized by trinitromethane or which are modified in the native protein. To complete the X-ray structure. (c) Cytochrome c554. To characterize the existing site directed mutant F156A. (d) Cytochrome c552. To purify and characterize the existing v63 deletion site directed mutant and establish the structural basis for the HALS signal. (e) Cytochrome c Peroxidase. To complete analysis of the crystal structure and prepare site-directed mutants doc7949 none Albert A very low-field (VLF) MRI system employing the signal from hyperpolarized 3He and 129Xe will be developed in order to investigate the human lung, and to explore the potential for a low-cost, portable research and diagnostic tool for the detection and staging of pulmonary diseases. The vastly enhanced signal from such hyperpolarized species is strong enough to permit high speed imaging of the gas-space they occupy, makes them intriguing MR probes. The field has developed considerably in the past five years, since the PI and collaborators invented hyperpolarized noble gas MRI by acquiring MR images of a mouse lung that had been inflated with hyperpolarized 129Xe. Of special importance is the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) achievable in hyperpolarized noble gas MRI, at very low-field (VLF). VLF MRI becomes feasible since the level of polarization of the nuclei is set by the hyperpolarization process, and is independent of the static magnetic field. VLF noble gas MRI may lead to inexpensive, portable imaging systems. The development of a VLF MRI system is proposed using a custom-made resistive magnet of 100-200 Gauss. Gradient, shim, and RF coils will be developed and interfaced to a commercial low frequency MRI console. A spatial resolution on the order of 0.1 mm is planned over a field of view of 30 cm DSV, the typical size of human lungs. Preliminary human lung imaging studies will be conducted. A long term objective is the development of a low-cost portable unit that can be used for lung screening in a variety of clinics, physician s offices and nursing homes, and perhaps even for space-based pulmonary function research in microgravity environments. The education component of our proposed program contains four primary elements: (i) the development of an outreach program to precollege students and a teacher training program; (ii) the development of course lectures at the Center for Engineering in Medicine at Harvard Medical School on the principles and use of imaging modalities in biomedicine and tissue engineering; (iii) the training of graduate and undergraduate students and postdoctoral fellows as researchers; and (iv) the development of a teaching module on how basic principles of physics are applied to lasers and magnetic resonance, and can yield serendipitous applications to biology. Secondary educational activities include participation in seminar and lecture series in the MR Division at BWH, contributions to education and training infrastructure, and the establishment of industrial internships and partnerships. The development of an outreach program in biomedical engineering to precollege students and a teacher training program, supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, is designed to make science and science activities more accessible to the young people who will become future scientists. Through these efforts, teachers and students alike are encouraged to participate in hands-on training and to share what they learn with others. In a collaboration with Boston University, a new graduate course on special topics in bio-photonics is being created, as part of their NSF-CRCD program, which will develop lectures on optical pumping for hyperpolarized xenon and helium MRI. Included among researchers and students in our program s projects are under-represented groups and women pursuing advanced degrees in science and engineering doc7950 none The Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics is an annual conference designed to encourage undergraduate women math majors to go to graduate school and to help increase their success in graduate school. The conference brings together women undergraduate math majors from all over the United States. It includes two plenary talks by distinguished women mathematicians as well as panel discussions relating to graduate school and career development. The main part of the program is a series of talks by the undergraduate women about their own research, showcasing the speakers achievements and encouraging others to emulate their success. Successful conferences have already been held in and at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), with about fifty and seventy-five undergraduate women attending, respectively. The UNL Mathematics Department has a strong record of helping talented women to succeed in mathematics, as recognized, for example, by the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring doc7951 none Infrastructure Management: Inspection, Assessment, Deterioration forecasting, and Decision Making P.I. Mishalani, Rabi, Ohio State University Transportation infrastructure systems are long-lived and large-scale in nature. Deteriorating infrastructure can thus have serious, widespread, and prolonged negative impacts on social, industrial, and economic activities of society. The overall objectives of the proposed research plan are to contribute to the knowledge base of the behavior of infrastructure systems to use to guide the development of methods for improving their management. The research aims to provide an integrated view of the entire infrastucture provision process, including: 1) multivariate condition assessment and deterioration modeling; 2) spatial sampling strategy selection; 3) modeling the effect of initial design and construction decisions on deterioration; 4) optimal design-build-operate-maintain strategy selection; 5) modeling agency behavior. The elements will be addressed on a data-driven basis, i.e., as information is gleaned. Statistical and operations research methodologies will be employed. The education plan involves advocates a systems approach to civil infrastructure and disseminating the results to graduate and undergraduate courses and research, professional development offerings for engineers and researchers. Miriam Heller Program Director, Information Technology and Civil Infrastructure Systems doc7952 none A distributed space system is a collection of physically separated, multiple space vehicles whose states are coordinated to achieve a local or global objective. The distributed spacecraft paradigm shifts the complexity of the space system design, traditionally associated with the control of large flexible structures,to problems in planning, coordination, inter-spacecraft communication and sensing, and control. The objectives of this project are to (1) develop a hybrid control design methodology which captures the interaction between inter-spacecraft communication and sensing on the one hand and the admissible distributed spacecraft control strategies on the other, and (2) develop autonomous maneuver planning and control for distributed space systems. This research leads to novel analysis and synthesis techniques for a class of hybrid dynamic systems that is tailored to capture the interdependence of communication, sensing, and control of a distributed system.It also examines a paradigm and a new set of techniques in the matrix inequality approach to path planning and control. The education plan is implemented through course and curriculum development, undergraduate and graduate mentoring, and an outreach effort. The undergraduate course focuses on control theory and its applications in the design of space systems,and emphasizes its interdependence on communication and computing technologies. Two graduate courses, Hybrid Systems and Optimization in Systems Sciences, emphasize the recent advances in the modeling, analysis, and design techniques for a specific class of dynamic systems, and lays out a rigorous framework, based on optimization theory and computational techniques, for general dynamic system analysis and synthesis. The outreach effort focuses on an interactive Internet website and two teachers workshops, through which concepts of control and space system engineering are communicated to the high school students and grades 9--12 teachers doc7953 none Emerging infrastratureless wireless networking technologies such as MANET [1], sensor networks [31], and bluetooth [2] will seek to support advanced applications such as smart environment, zero conf teleconferencing setups, collaborative learning, wireless access to Web services, and emergency rescure operations. This class of applications is mission critical, and the network has to address a number of critical issues in order to cope with the anticipated design requirements of such applications. In an infrastructureless wireless network, no underlying infrastructure, such as cellular layout and central control units e.g. base stations, is available for networking support. A large number of networking devices are allowed to communicate with one another over the shared wireless medium in an ad hoc manner. Some unique design challenges posed by such networks include fully distributed and localized design, sustained quality of service (QoS), efficient network resource utilization, unconstrained scalability and robust system performance. State-of-the-art solutions are inadequate to address these issues and meet the applications requirements. A fundamental problem is that an infrastructureless wireless network is a large-scale distributed system that may consist of a very large number of wireless networking components (e.g. thousands, even millions in a sensor network), which have limited power and computing resources and are prone to channel errors and failures. Therefore, any feasible system solution must be fully distributed and localized, scalable, and robust. In some sense, the microscopic behavior of each individual node may not be very critical, but network nodes must collectively achieve the desired global macroscopic property. In this project, we propose a novel self-organizing protocol and algorithm design approach for such networks, in order to meet the challenges posed by applications as well as the network itself. In a self-organizing design approach, local decision makers self-organize themselves and coordinate among one another, in order to collectively achieve the desired global property. We apply our proposed design methodology in two largely unaddressed problem domains: fair packet scheduling in multihop wireless networks, and robust report forwarding in sensor networks. Toward this end, we present four self-organizing packet-scheduling algorithms and a novel report forwarding protocol that we have developed recently [22, 24, 35, 36, 46, 47]. The key innovations of this work are: A model-referenced self-organizing algorithm and protocol design approach. A suite of self-organizing packet scheduling algorithms for infrastructureless wireless networks that provide QoS performance bounds in terms of fairness, throughput and delay, maximize channel spatial reuse, and arbitrate the conflict between achieving fairness and maximizing channel utilization. A novel self-organizing data forwarding protocol that allows for unconstrained scalability, supports robust message delivery along the optimal forwarding band, and ensures efficient power consumption in the context of sensor networks. The expected research results from this project include a formal investigation of self-organizing design approach, and a detailed design, analysis, and evaluation of the self-organizing algorithms and protocols for packet scheduling and report forwarding. The resulting software will be freely available to the research community. The education plan in this proposal includes offering a new graduate course, reinventing an undergraduate networking course, recruiting more students into undergraduate research programs, and setting up an undergraduate networking laboratory doc7954 none Winfree, Erik PECASE: Foundations of Autonomous Biomolecular Computation The project is developing autonomous, programmable biochemical systems that operate in a microscopic drop of liquid to achieve chemical tasks, such as nanostructure fabrication. Theoretical models of autonomous biomolecular computation to implement these models experimentally using DNA molecules, and to quantitatively characterize individual molecular logic components and the larger systems built from them are being performed. Beyond the specific context of DNA, this research is creating a prototype of autonomous biomolecular computing systems and explore fundamental robustness issues in nanoscale computing, such as cross-talk between species and stochastic events due to thermal noise and diffusion. The project is aiming to leverage their advanced control over biochemical systems to begin establishing a broader foundation for reliable molecular computing. Two new courses are being developed introducing students to the necessary concepts and tools required to begin work in biomolecular computation. This research is establishing an experimental system for exploring computation by biological molecules, and is providing fundamental knowledge and principles for nanoscale computation, such as models of computation, molecular algorithms, physical limits, errors and error correction. Although biomolecular systems are massively parallel, asynchronous, stochastic, and hard to design, the PI is researching on new programming principles, leading to a science of molecular computation doc7955 none Configuration management (CM) is a software engineering discipline that centers on managing the evolution of the artifacts that are continuously produced and changed over the course of a software development project. The combined move towards developing software out of sets of components and managing software after it has been delivered to its customers radically changes the nature of CM, breaking several of its fundamental assumptions. Addressing these issues, the objective of this research is to develop and empirically evaluate the models, policies, and tools that will lay the foundation for the creation of the next generation of configuration management systems---those capable of managing, in a seamless and continuous fashion, component-based software throughout its life time. The research hypothesizes that architecture description languages are the key to providing this functionality: they create a single abstraction through which all CM functionality can be provided. Specifically, we propose to build architecture-based CM models, associated new development and deployment policies, and the supporting tools necessary for demonstration and evaluation. Parts of the research will be used to seed the educational aspects of the proposal: to establish the undergraduate research factory in which teams of undergraduate students will be educated in carrying out research projects doc7956 none The objective of this project is to develop research based frameworks for understanding the mathematical reasoning of students enrolled in transition mathematics courses at the college level, that focus on the introductory aspects of mathematical logic, and proof (e.g., Linear Algebra). This study of student reasoning will look at issues associated with student justification and explanation as they relate to students learning of proof. Further, the researcher will investigate the progressive mathematization of students, as these students struggle intellectually with notions of symbolism and definition in the context of mathematical proof doc7957 none The nature of distributed work is changing as mobile and ubiquitous technologies are being used increasingly to enable collaboration anywhere, anytime. The success of distributed teamwork depends on the ability of collaborating partners to communicate essential social and task information, referred to as awareness information. Thus, the design of next generation mobile and ubiquitous technologies need to be based on a deep understanding of social and task requirements. The purpose of this project is to investigate how technology can support awareness requirements as people s environments change during distributed work. Empirical studies of physically collocated and distributed collaboration will be done to develop a theoretical framework for how awareness information is conveyed and utilized in these different settings. Five field sites have been selected in domains where distributed work is commonplace: space mission design, aerospace, software development, microprocessor development, and disk storage technologies. Prototype awareness mechanisms will be developed based on the requirements obtained in the field studies. These technologies will be evaluated both in the field and the laboratory to test the theoretical framework of how awareness information is utilized in distributed work. This research will be integrated into a graduate study program focused on computer-supported collaborative work and human-computer interaction doc7958 none Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) made with semiconducting (conjugated) polymers now have quantum efficiencies as high as 4 % and operating lifetimes of 50,000 hours. Several companies are developing flat panel displays with these LEDs. One of the limitations of polymer LEDs is that triplet excitons are non-emissive. Initial steps towards solving this problem by transferring energy to phosphorescent molecules and rare earth complexes have recently been taken. One of the goals of this project is to optimize energy transfer and charge transport in doped polymer films so that high quantum efficiencies, low operating voltages and high device stability can be obtained. Another limitation of current polymer LEDs is that most of the emitted photons are trapped in the device by total internal reflection and that the photons which do escape cannot conveniently be collimated into a beam or coupled into a waveguide. The second major goal of the project is use photonic crystals, e.g. one-dimensional dielectric stacks and two-dimensional gratings, to control the directionality of emission. Previous attempts to do this have not been fully successful because it was not possible to make photonic crystals with a photonic band gap wide enough to completely control the emission of conjugated polymers, which have an emission spectrum with a width of more than 100 nm. By using rare earth-doped polymers, which have emission bandwidths of less than 4 nm, it will be possible to use photonic crystals to control the directionality of emission. This project will not only increase the efficiency and functionality of polymer-based LEDs, but will also provide a convenient light source for developing the science and technology of photonic crystals. The project provides many excellent research opportunities for students. They will work with a team of chemists to design new rare earth complexes and learn the quantum mechanics that regulate energy transfer, charge transfer and light emission. They will interact with members of industry to learn how to optimize polymer LEDs. They will use computer modeling to design one-, two-, and three-dimensional photonic crystals to control the emission of light. They will also get to interact with a team of researchers at 3M and have the opportunity to push polymer-photonic crystal science and technology into new directions. Most of the research will be done by two graduate students, but there will be many opportunities for undergraduates and M.S. students to take on short-term projects. New courses on nanotechnology and organic optoelectronics will be developed to prepare students for research. The course on nanotechnology is designed to make students in several departments aware of the opportunities in this exciting area and to foster multidisciplinary research. The course on organic optoelectronics will have several lab sessions in the PI s labs so that students can reinforce what they learn in class. High school teachers will visit the labs during the summer and be trained to use a kit of optical equipment so that they can demonstrate photonics experiments to their students doc7959 none This program focuses on the recruitment of under-represented populations to mathematics and computer science, and the retention of majors through the critical first year of study. Approximately one third of the scholarships are committed to recruitment of community college graduates and the remaining scholarships are committed to recruiting freshman. In both cases special attention is given to under-represented populations. Retention is addressed using a combination of peer mentoring, tutoring, and mathematics oriented socialization. Members of the mathematics honor society serve as peer mentors. These exemplary students are role models for the freshman and junior transfers. Each of these individuals forms the core of a study group that includes one junior transfer and two freshmen scholarship recipients. Development of proper study habits is an essential element of the mentoring process doc7960 none The present widespread interest in the use of computers for online learning at all levels from primary school to university and adult education presents an unprecedented opportunity for leveraging the computational medium s strengths for learning. Along with this opportunity comes profound responsibility to adopt these technologies in ways specifically proven to support learning. Research on learning shows that social processes such as collaboration and mentoring play an important role. Likewise, many disciplines make use of rich forms of visual representations, and research has shown that proper use of visual representations can impact on learning. Yet, existing software for online learning provides only primitive support for manipulation of representations other than text, and there is a lack of research on how representational tools and online discussion tools may be constructively combined. The Collaborative Representations project is exploring ways to design interactive software in which learners can easily collaborate online while learning with rich representations. The project is also studying how the representations themselves may be designed to guide learners into knowledge-building discourse. Software for online learning is being developed in collaboration with teachers and scientists to help ensure suitability for instructional objectives. Controlled experiments are being undertaken to refine the software design and to assess the effects of the representations on discourse processes and on learning outcomes. Instructional and assessment strategies are being developed in the context of authentic research projects involving students, teachers and scientists, and will be disseminated to teachers through professional development activities. Continued work in this area will contribute to a scientifically tested theory of representationally rich collaborative learning, and inform the design of the next generation of software and associated instructional and assessment strategies for online learning. This work is being undertaken with the assistance of graduate students who are receiving training in methodologies for the design and evaluation of educational technologies. Additionally, new courses are being proposed for our degree program, courses specifically designed to expose future information technology workers to the importance of addressing the human dimension of information systems, particularly in educational and training applications doc7961 none Sept. 6, David R. Burgess Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) This award to the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) enables the organization to recruit approximately 100 Latino and Native American undergraduate students to participate in the SACNAS National Conference. This meeting will be held in Atlanta, Oct. 12-15, . At the conference the students will present research results in the Undergraduate and Graduate Student Poster Session. The students will also participate in a number of workshops and seminars to prepare them for the graduate school application process. To complement those activities, a number of graduate school representatives will be available to the students in an exhibit hall. These representatives will be talking to the students about their graduate programs and collecting their resumes. Historically, the SACNAS National Conferences have focused on students from chemistry, biology, and health-related disciplines. In recent years SACNAS has been expanding its scope to include engineering as well as other science-related fields. Thus, the SACNAS program is beginning to reflect the funding profile of NSF. This renewal award provides support to continue that broadening process. Short-term goals of this activity include an increase in the number of SACNAS conference attendees with interests in the non-biomedical sciences and engineering. In the longer term, increases in Latinos and Native Americans in NSF-relevant science and engineering activities are expected. This award is supported jointly by the Directorates for Engineering; Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences; and Mathematical and Physical Sciences doc7962 none Costello As we begin the 21st century, we do so with the realization that the traditional engineering of previous decades is changing at a rapid pace. To keep in line with the advances in technology, we are constantly adapting, improvising, and developing new strategies that enable us to approach engineering research and education as an integrated system in touch with the technological advances around us. The goal of this CAREER proposal is to use the interdisciplinary background of the PI to address the multi-faceted needs of today s engineer by engaging them in research and education at the interface of engineering and science. Work in the PI s lab is focused on the application of molecular and microbiological techniques to the study of natural and engineered systems. The PIs model system is the methane oxidizing bacteria, or methanotrophs. Methanotrophs are ubiquitous throughout terrestrial and aquatic environments and are important in the global carbon cycle, climate change, and the remediation of hazardous wastes. Because of this, they provide an interesting framework within which to ask questions that integrate science and engineering in both research and education. In this proposal, the PI has developed a long-term educational plan that coordinates directly with her interests in the research of methane oxidizing bacteria. The PI will redesign a suite of core classes in the Civil and Environmental Engineering department that will focus on educating engineering students in the concepts of modern biology by integrating biology into the curricula in the context of engineering topics. In addition, she will foster collaborative, multi-disciplinary educational and research interactions with engineering and science departments at Syracuse University. The effectiveness of these undertakings will be measured using a number of assessment tools and an independent advisory board established by the PI. In addition to educational initiatives, this project will enable students to carry out interdisciplinary research characterizing population shifts in methane-oxidizing bacteria in response to soil acidification. A combination of molecular biology and environmental engineering tools will be used to test the hypothesis that natural acidic deposition (acid rain) exerts selective pressure on methanotrophic diversity and is a significant factor in controlling changes in the methane oxidation characteristics of natural populations of these bacteria. Specific questions to be answered include 1) What are the dominant methanotrophs present in soils of the Adirondack mountains and 2) How do natural methanotroph populations respond to acidification of their environment? Answering these questions will expose students to various theories, techniques, and experiences that span both engineering and science disciplines doc7963 none This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant provides funding for the development of a research and education program in environmentally benign design and manufacturing (EBDM). The EBDM research program will be focused on developing environmentally benign metalworking fluid systems. Metalworking fluids (MWFs) are ubiquitous in manufacturing, comprise a major percentage of process costs, and contain significant environmental and health hazards. This funding supports a major new initiative to eliminate these liabilities by researching the relationships between MWF chemistry, machining performance, system economics, and the effectiveness of state of the art MWF re-use technology. These relationships will be researched in four phases: (1) physicochemical characteristics of MWFs will be classified based on their ability to affect machining performance; (2) optimal MWF application rates will be established; (3) the fundamental mechanisms of MWF deterioration will be determined; and (4) the effectiveness of re-use technologies in addressing MWF deterioration mechanisms and health hazards will be modeled. The knowledge generated by these research tasks will be fully integrated into tangible process planning, monitoring, and control technologies that will achieve cost-effective and environmentally benign MWF systems. The educational component of this program will focus on outreach and transfer of EBDM strategies to manufacturing stakeholders. This includes transfer of advanced research in environmental product design and manufacturing, as well as basic education regarding how to achieve simultaneous improvement of economic and environmental performance. The EBDM education program will engage a diversity of stakeholders, including university students, practicing engineers, and governmental providers of technical assistance. At the university level, several original curriculum elements will be developed, including two EBDM courses, two web-based EBDM educational tools, and a modular EBDM sequence for undergraduate design and manufacturing programs. The Environmental and Sustainable Technology Research and Teaching Laboratory (EAST RTL) will be established to facilitate the integration of EBDM research and education, and will be exclusively dedicated to furthering the integration of manufacturing and environmental technologies doc7964 none PI s objectives are to: (1) Investigate the kinetics of PMN-tumor cell aggregate formation as a function of shear rate, and states of PMN tumor cell activation. These data will be analyzed using a mathematical model based on Smoluchowski s two-body collision theory that will provide numerical estimates of an important cellular property termed adhesion efficiency, which reflects the binding affinity of interacting cells. (2) Elucidate the fundamental molecular and signaling mechanisms of PMN-tumor cell adhesive interactions using function blocking monoclonal antibodies and highly specific enzymes will, (3) Track individual PMNs in shear flow and delineate the dynamics and pattern of their interactions with surface-anchored tumor cells using a perfusion chamber coupled with an epifluorescence videomicroscopy system. For the educational component of this proposal, the PI aims to develop an innovative university-wide curriculum in Cellular Engineering at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. This goal will be met through the development of a cohesive set of lecture courses and the establishment of a capstone laboratory course in which students will obtain valuable hands-on experience, by being exposed to a wide array of experimental tools and techniques used in bioengineering research. To promote exposure of Bioengineering to high-school students, an outreach program will be developed in parallel. The strategy involves the educational enrichment of regional high-school teachers and the development of an internet-based module using animation and audio video clips on selected topics of Cellular Engineering in an effort to introduce this material as a section in an advanced science course doc7965 none Pham The next generation of electronic integration will require a technology that can combine solid-state integrated circuits (IC), functional microelectromechanical devices (MEMS), passive components, and sensors into a package. The demand for this multiple device integration poses substantial challenges at microwave and millimeter wave frequencies. Furthermore, a major factor that must be addressed for millimeter wave applications is the development of integration techniques to miniaturize electronic components. The author proposes to develop an organic micromachining technique which provides revolutionary concepts to address the need for future millimeter wave integration (28-40 GHz). The organic micromachining technology will provide a platform for integrating solid-state ICs, functional MEMS devices, passive components, and sensors into a system on a package. The compatibility of this technology with multilayer polymer thin-films is key to integrate ultra-light weight, small size and portable components. The major tasks of the proposed research include (1) Development of micromachined, 3-dimensional (3-D), polymer-based transmission lines to achieve ultralow loss, (2) Development of micromachined vertical interconnects to transport signals in 3-D multi-layer structures, and (3) Integration of multiple device technologies into the organic micromachining platform to develop future communication systems at millimeter wave frequencies. This integration scheme represents a packaging paradigm known as a system-on-a-package (SOP). The proposed tasks involve collaborative efforts with industry and national research centers including General Electric (GE CRD), Agilent Technologies, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Center for Advanced Engineering Fibers and Films at Clemson University, and the NSF Packaging Research Center at Georgia Tech. These collaborative efforts provide infrastructure and skills to study multiple aspects of the organic micromachining technology. The results of this research will lead to innovations and fundamental understanding of the next generation micromachining technology developed in a multilayer organic platform. Based on this effort, significant impact is expected upon the development of future communication systems by providing a means to combine unique functionalities of heterogeneous components. These systems will be able to sense, compute, and communicate through a wireless sensor network. Furthermore, this organic micromachining system, which is processed with conventional spin-coating and optical lithography to achieve high resolution and high aspect ratio, can be applied to the development of functional MEMS devices (switches, resonators, and tunable filters) and their integration with conventional solid-state ICs. The PI s teaching plan addresses the education from grade school to graduate studies. He has begun and will continue to develop a research program to assist students in transitioning from high school to college and from college to graduate studies. He would like to extend the opportunity to the disabled and under represented students who may have been traditionally left out of college and graduate studies. He has strong interests in developing R-F Wireless design and laboratory courses integrating into the department s on-going wireless program at Clemson University. He will incorporate a web-based technology to broadcast interactive laboratory experiments to outreach high school students and college freshmen doc7966 none This is an investigation of the subgrid-scale (SGS) mixing of conserved scalars which play a critical role in large-eddy simulation (LES) of nonpremixed turbulent combustion. Mixing of conserved scalars is generally considered to be dominated by a large-to-small-scale cascade process based on Kolmogorovs hypothesis. Current mixing models give qualitatively incorrect results for flows where the cascade process should dominate. Also, it is now recognized that large-scale velocity and scalar fields have significant influence on small-scale scalar mixing. In this project, the effects of the large-scale structure and of the cascade process on the filtered density function (the SGS distribution) of a conserved scalar is studied. High-resolution measurements of velocity and of conserved scalars are made in high-Reynolds-number turbulent jets with isotropic grid turbulence. Hot-wire and cold-wire arrays, particle image velocimetry (PIV), and planar laser Rayleigh scattering are used for the measurements. Issues in modeling the filtered density function of a conserved scalar and the filtered joint density function of a conserved scalar and its gradient are investigated. Both conventional statistical analyses and those based on conditional sampling and averaging are performed to investigate the effects of turbulent advection, turbulent strain and rotation, and molecular mixing on the filtered density function and other variables doc7967 none The PI proposes experiments to identify ATPS polymers and operating conditions so that tagged DNA will strongly partition to one phase, leaving polar proteins and untagged DNA in the other phase. By proper molecular design, the PNA amphiphile will dissociate from the DNA product upon heating the system above the melting transition temperature (Tm) of the PNA-DNA recognition complex. He will also describe a series of theoretical and experimental techniques that will be used to design PNA amphiphiles so that they specifically bind plasmid DNA, but have Tm in a useful range for ATPS. In addition to the development of a useful biochemical process, molecular-level design of the PNA amphiphile-DNA binding complex proposed here should also shed light on the contribution of intermolecular forces to the structure and function of biomolecular materials. His education plan aims to cultivate molecular-level insight in the chemical engineering curriculum by a series of short modules to be assigned in core chemical engineering courses. Molecular modeling and experimental results of the research proposed here will be integrated into the modules, which are designed to predict fundamental engineering properties such as thermal conductivity, viscosity, and vapor-liquid equilibrium from molecular parameters. Another educational effort he proposes is a two-week mini-course for a colloid interfacial engineering course that emphasizes the connection between biotechnology and colloid science doc7968 none The investigator s previous work on elliptic curves and Galois representations leads in the direction of several questions which are ultimately concerned with understanding the nature of Galois representations, either from the point of view of geometry or deformation theory. One such problem is to find a conceptual moduli-theoretic interpretation of the Coleman-Mazur eigencurve. The investigator also proposes to study the problem of incorporating conditions such as semi-stability (in the sense of Fontaine) in the deformation theory of Galois representations, continuing a line of development growing out of the work of Wiles. In a somewhat different direction, Buzzard has recently observed in numerous examples that the slopes of eigenforms seem to possess much more structure than conjectured by Gouvea-Mazur. These surprising observations do not fit into any general framework, and the investigator proposes to determine the general nature of such phenomena. In addition to studying these problems, the investigator continues his efforts in the direction of supporting active student interest in mathematics at the high school level. Through personal contacts at a local school, he arranges regular meetings in which he leads informal group discussions with students on an assortment of interesting mathematical ideas (taken from a wide variety of disciplines: number theory, geometry, probability, etc.). The idea is to expose students to important and interesting concepts which are not usually encountered in the classroom but which can be presented in an elementary context. The investigator also provides these students with information about summer math programs and research opportunities, in order that they can experience mathematics as a living field of scientific inquiry. Number theory is the branch of mathematics which is concerned with the properties of whole numbers. It abounds in deep and unsolved problems, particularly concerning properties of prime numbers and geometric objects called elliptic curves. Prime numbers and the theory of elliptic curves also lie at the heart of modern cryptographic systems, without which secure diplomatic transmissions and Internet commerce would be impossible. The RSA cryptosystem and the elliptic curve factorization algorithm are two such prominent applications in this context. Improvements in our theoretical understanding of elliptic curves is expected lead to further applications along these lines. The investigator s scientific work is concerned with several questions naturally arising from the theory of elliptic curves, and partly aims to continue the development the techniques that were used to recently settle the Shimura-Taniyama Conjecture, one of the most important problems in the theory of elliptic curves. The investigator also regularly visits with local high school students, showing them important mathematical ideas that are not usually encountered in school, such as the inner workings of the RSA cryptosystem and the role of probability in the design of medical tests for rare diseases. The investigator also provides these students with nformation about summer opportunities for education, research, and work in mathematics, and offers guidance for students who wish to take part in several prestigious high school science research competitions. The Faculty Career Development Program makes it possible for the investigator to continue his scientific work while at the same time enabling him to give some high school students a deeper appreciation for mathematics and its important role in modern society doc7969 none This research program will investigate hermetic coatings designed to limit the diffusion of water and hydrogen into optical fibers in order to improve fiber resistance to fatigue and hydrogen-induced attenuation. An improved hermetic coating will be found by fundamentally understanding the transport phenomena involved in the manufacture of such films by chemical vapor deposition. Guided by new experimental and theoretical analyses, this project will develop a better understanding to manufacture superior hermetic optical fiber coatings using fundamental knowledge of process property relationships. Fundamental knowledge gained from this project will be used to link process parameters such as draw rate, fiber temperature, and reactant gas concentration to the coating phase, structure, hermeticity, and deposition rate. Since these relationships will be able to identify new methods and optimal conditions to improve hermetic fiber performance, results from this study are expected to enhance fiber performance and reliability, and hence improve our information technology infrastructure doc7970 none Lee An integrated research and education program that is centered on the development of novel RF microwave MEMS passive components and a method of their integration onto circuit containing substrates is proposed. Since the demand for wireless communication is ever increasing, very small communication channel spacings are desirable to ensure increased capacity in limited bandwidth. High performance passive elements are key components of wireless communication systems. Traditionally, off-the-chip passive components were used for RF microwave applications mainly due to their high performance. However, they are bulky and power consuming. MEMS technology enables innovative high performance integrated RF microwave passive elements that were not possible by traditional technologies. South s only synchrotron radiation source, the Center for Advanced Microstructures and Devices is located and belongs to the PI s institution. Using such unique facility, high performance novel high aspect ratio RF microwave passive components will be developed by LIGA and or LIGA-like techniques. They include 3-D on-chip solenoid inductors, tunable capacitors, microstrip lines, coplanar waveguides. Unconventional high aspect ratio microstructures could yield high quality factor, high coupling efficiency passive components, and 3-D integration which will save precious real estate in many portable wireless communication system applications. Massively parallel passive component transfer techniques using plastic replication techniques will be developed to integrate high performance RF microwave MEMS passive element modules onto circuit containing substrates in low cost mass production manner. Wafer-level flip-chip assembly technology will also be developed to integrate multiple numbers of high performance RF microwave components. The educational component of the proposal is centered on the development of web-based interactive educational materials for MEMS education. Specifically, Java Applets for MEMS fabrication processes and modeling of a variety of MEMS sensors will be developed and they will be disseminated through the internet. Such educational resources will provide active interfaces for students to learn MEMS technology. Development of a senior graduate laboratory class with collaborators in other departments is also planned. Such class will give students hands-on design and fabrication experience on LIGA and or LIGA-like MEMS technology for multidisciplinary applications. Development of an industrial short course with collaborators in other departments is also planned to give participants first-hand processing experience on LIGA-based MEMS technology and its applications to RF MEMS and biomedical MEMS (BioMEMS). An extensive use of computer-aided modeling will be introduced to traditional instructional courses in graduate and undergraduate levels to enhance the quality of the classes and prepare the students to meet today s leading edge industrial needs doc7971 none This paper proposes the development of a research and educational program to further the knowledge and understanding of nanotechnology through laboratory, classroom, project, and demonstration experiences. A directed effort toward the development of nanowire devices and circuits is proposed, utilizing the self-assembly of nanowires through the vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) technique. The merit of this work is in the investigation of an additional control mechanism through the use of electrostatic forces to join individual nanowires, and the development of a procedure for epitaxially interconnecting to the nanowires from macroscopic electrodes. Investigations will include nanowire p-n junctions, field effect transistors, light emitting diodes, and heterojunction devices. Using the VLS technique to fabricate nanowire interconnects may also prove a viable method of interfacing to molecular electronic circuits, for the fabrication of scanning probes used in scanning tunneling microscopy, or atomic force microscopy, and for making micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) such as electrical conductivity probes. This proposal outlines three methods of extending the scholarly impact beyond the students directly involved in the research, to include other graduate students, undergraduate students, and local area schools. A course has been developed around future directions in semiconductor devices including nanotechnology that will be further expanded upon. Second, scanning probe tips will be fabricated as part of this effort, and a group of undergraduates will be assisted in building a working scanning probe microscope (SPM). The third outreach effort includes using the fabricated SPM for both on-campus and off campus demonstrations at local high schools and middle schools doc7972 none The objective of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award is to develop, implement, and teach a systematic and generic methodology for diagnosing product and process variation in a modern data-rich manufacturing environment. The methodology developed in this CAREER plan will provide a means of effectively utilizing the measurement data for manufacturing variation reduction, leading to higher quality manufactured products that boost the competitiveness of our nations industries. The primary focus of the research is on representing, characterizing, and quantifying the precise nature of the temporal and spatial patterns. The intent is that graphical displays of the variation pattern characteristics will serve as powerful diagnostic aids which facilitate the identification and elimination of root causes of variation by human operators. The methods that will be employed have a strong multidisciplinary emphasis. Temporal and spatial representations of variation, which are based on underlying physical and engineering principles, will be incorporated into the proposed statistical diagnosis algorithms in order to effectively extract and interpret meaningful information from the data. Linear and nonlinear spatial representations and joint time-frequency temporal representations will provide general, yet descriptive, characterizations of process variation. As the structure of in-process measurement data becomes increasingly dense, methods developed for signal and image processing applications gain importance as tools for statistical process control (SPC) of manufacturing variation. Concepts from sensor array processing and time-frequency analysis will be used extensively in the research plan. The proposed education plan emphasizes the need for this multidisciplinary approach to SPC. The curriculum will provide training in the physics and modeling of complex manufacturing processes (from a mechanical engineering perspective) and sensing and signal processing technology (from an electrical engineering perspective), as well as in the statistical fundamentals of SPC. Virtual plant tours and case studies from the results of the research plan will be used to illustrate the complexity of advanced manufacturing processes, the prevalence of in-process measurement technology, and the multidisciplinary methods needed to effectively utilize the data. The methodology developed in this CAREER plan will provide a concrete basis for integrating systematic diagnosis strategies into SPC, which will advance the body of scientific knowledge on SPC for manufacturing variation reduction. To reach a wide audience, the results will be broadly disseminated in applied statistics, quality control, signal processing, and manufacturing conferences and journals. The multidisciplinary emphasis will strengthen the link between the signal processing and SPC disciplines and help to attract students and researchers from other academic areas to the field of manufacturing quality control, bringing with them an infusion of new ideas. The plan involves close collaboration with major representatives of two industries that are vital to the US economy - automobile and electronics manufacturing. Both have demonstrated a strong commitment to ensuring the success of this CAREER plan, and their manufacturing facilities will serve as testbeds for directly implementing the results. It is expected that the results will be broadly applicable in a variety of manufacturing industries doc7973 none The goal is a new computational method for the design of controllers for hybrid robotic systems. The method will be based on algorithms for extracting piecewise-linear approximations of nonlinear hybrid systems, and will be applied to two problems in robotics: 1) stability of limit cycles for hybrid systems; and 2) passivity analysis of hybrid systems. Stability criteria that exploit concepts of partial order and multiple Lyapunov functions will be adapted to piecewise-linear systems, and used with the proposed computational method to characterize passivity of hybrid systems. On the education side, the PI will develop a robotics curriculum that emphasizes close interaction between engineering and computer science; hybrid robotic systems will be used as motivating examples. The curriculum will underline the importance of interdisciplinary education for solving new technological challenges doc7974 none Given the increasingly stringent water quality standards and public concern over environmental issues, environmental engineers must aggressively pursue innovative, selective, and versatile treatment technologies for solving current pollution problems and preventing new ones. Carbon fibers (CFs) are, perhaps, the most innovative and successful carbon material developed within the past forty years. Although their applications in the control of environmental pollution are limited, today carbon fibers are used from sporting goods to aircraft structures. CFs pose an attractive alternative to traditional granular (GAC) and powdered (PAC) activated carbon treatment methods because their properties are superior to GACs and PACs. Research Objectives. The use of CFs in drinking water and industrial wastewater treatment applications offers exciting possibilities. Therefore, the primary goal of the research component of this CAREER proposal is to systematically investigate the efficacy of using carbon fibers for removing priority pollutants from aqueous solutions so that efficient treatment systems can be developed for use in environmental engineering applications. Specific objectives to address this goal are: 1) investigation of the mechanisms of adsorption of small-molecular weight organic chemicals and organic macromolecules by carbon fibers in aqueous phase, 2) investigation of the mechanisms of competitive adsorption, including preloading effects, on carbon fibers, and 3) assessment of the feasibility and efficacy of carbon fibers for use in environmental treatment systems. Teaching Objectives. The primary educational goal of this proposal is to develop computer animations for teaching fundamentals of physicochemical processes to undergraduate and graduate students. Several such products have already been developed for basic science courses, however there is practically no material for environmental engineering education. Relatively well-known principles of physicochemical processes are one of the most suitable areas to describe and demonstrate using computer animations and visual-aids. In addition, graduate level curses on water treatment design and on surfaces and interfaces in the aquatic environments will be developed to meet the needs in the Department of Environmental Engineering and Science at Clemson University. The research findings will be employed in these courses and they will be incorporated directly into the PI s educational activities doc7975 none Recent advances in low-power integrated circuits, wireless technology, and silicon micromachining have provided strong tools for fabricating miniature wireless microsystems for biomedical applications. These microsystems are particularly useful in ophthalmology where limited anatomical space requires miniature surgical instruments and implants. The main research objective of this career award is to develop a group of implantable wireless microsystems for diagnosis and management of glaucoma using silicon micromachining and state-of-the-art wireless powering and readout techniques. The two specifically targeted microsystems are: I) a wireless microsystem for long-term (up to one year) monitoring of intraocular pressure, and 2) a non-invasively adjustable microvalve for the drainage of aqueous humor (aqueous shunt). Although this proposal targets a specific disease, the science to be investigated and the technologies to be developed will be beneficial in many other applications involving implantable wireless microsystems. The educational component of the project responds to the current crisis faced by many electrical engineering departments in attracting undergraduates towards hardware oriented and cross-disciplinary fields. Due to its multidisciplinary nature, the research is intimately tied to the educational component in order to address this problem. The educational plan includes active outreach and mentoring of undergraduate electrical engineering students in order to enhance and stimulate their interest in multidisciplinary technical careers with particular emphasis on microsystem technology and its applications in biomedical engineering. The plan includes incorporating research activities into undergraduate courses, involving undergraduates in the research, and developing inter-session short courses and seminars for sophomores and juniors. These short courses target the widest possible undergraduate audience by requiring the minimum prerequisites (physics, chemistry, biology, and math) and are intended to emphasize the current multidisciplinary research in biomedical microsystems and other related areas doc7976 none Colin A. Wolden This career project features a combination of materials discovery, undergraduate research experience, and curriculum development organized around the common theme of electronic materials. Electronic oxides are distinguished from common ceramics by their unique ability to conduct charge. Transparent conducting oxides (TCOs) are key components in nearly all display and photovoltaic devices. A second class of oxides conduct and react with ions, a process called intercalation, which is central to electrochromic windows and rechargeable batteries. As technologies reliant on these materials continue to advance, it has become clear that oxide quality is beginning to limit final device performance. This career project will be directed at the synthesis, processing, and characterization of novel oxides using plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD). Optical interrogation of the plasma and fundamental evaluation of the films electrical, optical, and structural characteristics will guide the experimental effort. Concurrent measurements will be used to develop processing-structure-property relationships. Expanded research opportunities for undergraduates and continued enhancement of our electronic materials curriculum will advance educational goals. Electronic oxides have been synthesized to date primarily by physical vapor deposition (PVD) techniques. PECVD offers significant advantages over PVD with respect to the development of new compounds, effective doping, and the production of functionally graded materials. The most interesting TCOs are either alloys (indium tin oxide, ITO) or doped materials ZnO:AL, SnO2:F), and their conductivity is invariably n-type. Our efforts will be directed at the discovery and characterization new n-type alloys with improved properties, as well as the synthesis of p-type TCOs. The development of p-type oxides will enable the formation of transparent p-n diodes and the advent of oxide-based electronics. The large bandgap and chemical stability of oxides make them attractive candidates for high temperature harsh environment applications. Low resistivity p-type TCOs will be pursued through the use of co-doping, a kinetic process in which a donor atom (e.g. Ga) and two acceptor atoms (e.g. N) are simultaneously incorporated into the film. A second aspect of this career project will involve the use of undergraduate researchers to study the synthesis of oxides that are ion conductors. Tungsten oxide (WO3) is leading electrochromic material whose transparency is reversibly altered by reactions with small ions (H+, Li+). Device performance is often limited by cation transport through the film, which in turn depends strongly on film stoichiometry and microstructure. The physical properties and the transient electrochromic response of PECVD tungsten oxide will be investigated as a function of plasma operating conditions. The final phase of this career project is directed at the continued development of the electronic materials curriculum at CSM. The PI has created, with NSF-ILI support, a new laboratory course in silicon processing. The interdisciplinary lab, which features cooperative learning and curiosity-driven experiments, was successfully offered last year to 20 seniors from four departments. The PI will continue the expansion of this laboratory, creating a more advanced course for graduate students. Finally, computational tools will be incorporated into the undergraduate curriculum in order to promote higher order thinking skills doc7977 none This CAREER project systematically explores the electrical and optical properties of cation-substituted delafossite structures. The electrical and optical properties of AgInO2 can be attributed to certain unique features of the delafossite structure; it consists of a two-dimensional array of monovalent A-atoms (Cu, Ag, Pd, or Pt) sandwiched between layers of B 3+ O6 octahedra. It is the linearly coordinated O-A-O structure in these materials that is the key to their conduction mechanism. The experimental objective of this project is to determine crystal chemical relationships that influence orbital overlap between metallic A-atoms and the crystal field splitting of 3d or 4d states. With cationic substitutions on the A- and B-sites, it may be possible to manipulate the A-A and O-A-O distances in the delafossite structure. It is expected that these modifications to the structure will be manifested in variations in the conductivity, mobility, band gap, and optical transmission in the visible spectrum. The research themes will be related to the K-12 classroom with the help of a collaborating K-12 science teacher. The collaborator will work with the research group during the summer, thereby, receiving practical experience in materials science. He or she will use this knowledge in the classroom in the following school semester. In addition, a summer science program will be initiated at a local residential facility for children with emotional and behavioral disorders. A combination of hands-on experiments with materials, one-on-one instruction, and an internet-based scanning electron microscope (SEM) will be used to capture the children s attention and stimulate their interest in science. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in a topical area of materials science having high technological relevance. The scope of the project will expose students to challenges in materials synthesis, processing, and characterization. An important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education doc7978 none This investigation takes a comprehensive approach to evaluating experimentally and theoretically the effects of both membrane and colloid properties on membrane fouling. The overall approach is to couple the extended DLVO theory with transport and deposition equations appropriate for crossflow membrane filtration. The specific goals are to develop methodology and to evaluate several fundamental membrane and colloid characteristics; to develop a particle deposition model that incorporates short-range acid-base forces of both the membranes and colloids; to perform a systematic experimental investigation to evaluate the overall impact of physico-chemical factors on membrane fouling; and to compare the theoretical predictions with experimental results. Additionally, particle deposition will be directly observed using AFM, and the extent of deposition will be related to flux decline using a deposited layer resistance model. Colloidal fouling will be considered within the framework of particle deposition, that is, the capture of colloidal particles from flowing suspensions by solid surfaces. From a broader perspective, an understanding of the principles governing the transport and interaction of colloidal particles in flowing suspensions is extremely important to many disciplines of science and engineering. Therefore, this research has numerous implications for other fields in which particle deposition plays a crucial role. Within the framework of membrane processes, this project has direct application to reduction of colloidal membrane fouling. Possible measures include optimization of feed stream pretreatment (to change the colloid characteristics), modification of the membrane surface, and selection of the most appropriate membrane based on feed stream characteristics. The CAREER education plan involves the development of a science and technology outreach program for 8th grade girls. The main objective of the program is to encourage the understanding that math and science are important and relevant to the girls lives and to actively support the girls in pursuing education and employment in these areas doc7979 none With this CAREER award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the work of Dr. Anna D. Gudmundsdottir in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cincinnati in Cincinnati, Ohio. The research involves forming, detecting, and investigating the reactivity of alkyl nitrene intermediates in solution and in the solid state, emphasizing triplet nitrenes formed in the photolysis of alkyl azides. The azides to be studied, using a combination of vis uv and IR spectroscopies and product analysis, include azidoacetophenone, beta-, gamma-, and delta-azidoarylketones, benzyl azide, and fluorinated 2-azidoethyl benzene. Dr. Gudmundsdottir proposes to study the spectroscopic properties and reactivity of a class of highly reactive organic molecules which contain a saturated carbon atom bound to an unsaturated nitrogen atom. These nitrenes will be generated in solution or in crystalline solids using laser flash photolysis, and may contain two electrons with parallel or antiparallel spins (triplet or singlet electronic states), often leading to different products. Better understanding of these reactions in the solid state is expected to lead to better design of organic crystals for new materials. Possible applications include photolithography, photoaffinity labels for biological molecules, and organic magnets. Students will learn both from carrying out the research and by participating in a seminar course where they will be exposed to a number of successful scientists, including representatives from industry and from under-represented minorities. The seminars will help the students decide what career paths to follow once they leave the University of Cincinnati doc7980 none This research project focuses on a set of scanning tunneling microscope (STM) experiments employing discrete molecules of hydrogen, silicon, and oxygen (H8Si8O12 and H10Si10O15). The STM-tip cluster silicon interaction at the heart of these studies is roughly analogous to a metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) capacitor. However, the proposed model has a controllable coupling between the metal (STM-tip) and oxide (cluster). In these studies, the structure of the insulator can be independently determined to a much greater degree than is possible for the insulator in actual MOS capacitors. The results of these studies will provide a foundation for understanding STM images taken of device interfaces and the basic mechanism of the hydrogen-silicon bond breaking event that leads to device failure. Understanding of structure and failure mechanisms are key for optimizing the next generations of transistors for microelectronic devices. The silicon silicon oxide interface is a crucial part of the modern transistor. Over the past decade, the thickness of the silicon dioxide insulating layer has shrunk by more than two orders of magnitude and is now approximately10 Angstroms in the smallest research devices. As the thickness of the insulating layer has approached molecular dimensions, the average stoichiometry and physical properties of the silicon oxide undergo important changes that must be understood in order to optimize, or even successfully build, the next generations of silicon-based transistors. Students trained in these areas are likely to compete very well for jobs in various communicatons technology sectors. This research project is jointly supported by the Solid State Chemistry Program of the Division of Materials Research and the Advanced Materials and Processing Program of the Chemistry Division doc7981 none Jacobsen This grant supports the acquisition of a frequency quintupled (193 nm wavelength) deep ultraviolet (DUV) laser to be interfaced with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometers (both a quadrupole and a multicollector) in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) at Harvard University. The laser ablation system will allow continued studies requiring in situ and spatially resolved isotopic analysis of geological and extraterrestrial materials. The laser system will support research by several faculty members at Harvard including Stein Jacobsen (crust-mantle geochemistry and cosmochemistry), Dan Schrag (marine chemistry and paleoceanography), Paul Hoffman (Neoproterozoic tectonics and climate) and Heinrich Holland (evolution of Earth s early atmosphere) as well as their graduate students and postdocs doc7982 none Award: Principal Investigator: Christopher T. Woodward The principal investigator plans to develop the theory of group actions on symplectic manifolds and geometric invariant theory, and extend applications to certain 2d conformal field theories and algebraic combinatorics. In particular, he will investigate the theory of loop group actions, group-valued moment maps, and relations to the Wess-Zumino-Witten model in conformal field theory and cohomology pairings on moduli spaces of flat connections; the asymptotic limit of the quantum 6j symbols; and decomposition of products of conjugacy classes in disconnected compact groups and twisted forms of quantum cohomology. He will integrate his research with a variety of educational projects, such as dynamical systems in the calculus and linear algebra sequence at Rutgers; strengthening the joint major with computer science; laboratory activities in the undergraduate curriculum and evaluation of their effectiveness. Symplectic geometry is the mathematical framework for the study of classical mechanics, and in particular Hamiltonian dynamical systems. Woodward will undertake a number of projects to develop the field and its role in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum. He will seek to understand symmetries, especially of infinite dimension, in this setting. Possible applications outside of mathematics are the development of new computational techniques in conformal field theory, an important topic in recent high-energy theoretical physics, and improvement of the efficiency of wireless communication, via the construction of better packings in the unitary group doc7983 none Ehrman Much recent progress has been made towards the development of techniques for the controlled synthesis of nanoparticles. A need now exists for methods of creating functional materials from nanoparticles while preserving their small grain size. In this project, a hybrid high temperature particle synthesis low temperature interconnection process will be developed for production of mechanically strong porous films. With this process, porous films will be produced with no grain growth, thus preserving properties associated with nanoparticle size. The initial focus will be on porous films of titania, with applications to photovoltaic materials and chemical sensors. This general technique may also be applicable to the production of porous films of many other materials such as silica or tin oxide. %%% The research component will lead to an improved understanding of the mechanisms of particle transport and processing structure property relationships for nanoparticle-based materials. This will be integrated with the educational component through the development of an undergraduate elective in the area of particle science and technology, and by incorporating numerical methods used for this research into the required graduate level transport phenomena course, in the form of project-based team activities. Outreach activities will consist of visits to high schools and junior high schools in Washington, D.C., as these students are now able to attend the University of Maryland as in state students. These visits are directed towards increasing the number and diversity of qualified applicants to the College of Engineering, and towards increasing the awareness of chemical engineering as a career option doc7984 none Rodriguez The proposed Career Development plan seeks to establish a balanced research and teaching program for the professional development of Dr. Rafael A. Rodriguez Solis, in the area of microwave antennas at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez (UPRM). The research activities proposed have been carefully structured to advance the performance of planar, broadband, microwave antennas for wireless communications applications, taking advantage of the NSF MRI grant funding the UPRM Radiation Laboratory. The proposed research and education efforts will count with the collaboration of several faculty from The Pennsylvania State University, University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Massachusetts, the Arecibo Observatory and UPRM. The increasing demand for interactive multimedia applications in wireless communication networks requires larger bandwidths made available for such services; at the same time, smaller antennas are desired in wireless applications in order to keep the size of the mobile terminals small. In the future, mobile terminals will tap to a variety of wireless services provided at different frequency bands, and it will be of interest to have only one antenna to cover the different bands. This will help to reduce the coupling and interference between different antenna structures and to reduce the space required by the antennas. The slot-like antennas and arrays to be studied through this grant are planar, conformal, compact, structures that can provide large impedance and pattern bandwidths. The research plan is focused in studying ways of improving the impedance bandwidth of slot, folded slot and slot ring antennas and arrays of such elements. Also, log-periodic arrays of the aforementioned elements will be studied. The antenna elements will be characterized following using Design of Experiments techniques and statistical modeling. The antenna models developed will be used in the development of a procedure for the array design and in the development of pattern synthesis procedures for arrays of log-periodic structures. Because of the importance of smart antennas in the new generation of wireless systems, digital beam-forming techniques for these antennas will be studied. The proposed educational activities are centered in the revision of the engineering electromagnetics two-course sequence to combine these courses into a 4 credit-hour course with an integrated laboratory. The results of the proposed research activities will help in the introduction of slot antennas in the Antenna Theory and Design undergraduate course and in the Microwave Antenna Engineering graduate course. The mentoring of graduate and undergraduate students and their engagement in research projects and the development of an Applied Electromagnetics Workshop to be offered to high-school students participating at the pre-engineering summer program at UPRM are also part of the educational activities proposed. This educational plan seeks to enhance the teaching and evaluation techniques of Dr. Rodriguez Solis and to integrate his research activities into the classroom doc7981 none Jacobsen This grant supports the acquisition of a frequency quintupled (193 nm wavelength) deep ultraviolet (DUV) laser to be interfaced with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometers (both a quadrupole and a multicollector) in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) at Harvard University. The laser ablation system will allow continued studies requiring in situ and spatially resolved isotopic analysis of geological and extraterrestrial materials. The laser system will support research by several faculty members at Harvard including Stein Jacobsen (crust-mantle geochemistry and cosmochemistry), Dan Schrag (marine chemistry and paleoceanography), Paul Hoffman (Neoproterozoic tectonics and climate) and Heinrich Holland (evolution of Earth s early atmosphere) as well as their graduate students and postdocs doc7986 none This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant provides funding for an investigation of the latest industrial trends in integrated logistical management. The major concentration is on recent supply chain initiatives enabling the integration of transportation and inventory decisions. The specific initiatives of interest include Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI), Third Party Warehousing Distribution (3PW D), and Time Definite Delivery (TDD) applications. Under these initiatives, substantial savings are realizable by carefully incorporating a shipment strategy with inventory replenishment decisions. The impact is particularly tangible when the shipment strategy calls for a consolidation program where several smaller deliveries are dispatched as a combined load realizing the scale economies inherent in transportation. Recognizing a need for analytical research in the field, this project concentrates on analysis of integrated policies where shipment consolidation and inventory control decisions are coordinated under VMI, 3PW D, and TDD agreements. The research objective is to develop a modeling framework and theoretical understanding of integration issues in the context of these supply chain initiatives. The goal is to address the question of under what conditions integration works and to render insights into distribution policy design and operational control. The research agenda of this career plan has been developed in collaboration with industry. Hence, if successful, the results will provide a better understanding of real-life integration problems in supply chain practices. On the educational side, in response to a growing demand for a new generation of logistics engineers, this career plan builds on industrial collaboration. In partnership with industry, new educational materials and courses that unify the practice and theory of integrated logistics will be developed, and new student projects will be designed to satisfy the needs of students in pursuit of careers in this emerging field doc7987 none Powers The proposed research and educational program under a CAREER award consists of using the techniques and ideas of fundamental engineering science to study problems of biological growth, shape, and movement. The research will focus on the mechanics of biological filaments, ranging in scale from DNA to multicellular fibers. In particular, the investigator will study the formation and growth of supercoiling colonies of bacteria, the motility of cells, and the mechanics of DNA transcription. These problems require the development of mechanical theories in new directions, such as coupling of growth with elasticity and chirality for understanding the writhing instability of bacterial fibers. The work will be largely theoretical at first, but an essential component is the development of a micromanipulation laboratory to characterize the material properties of the growing fibers and to test the theory. The research will be integrated with curriculum development at Brown University in the newly established biomedical engineering program, and also in efforts to meet the emerging need for training biology students in methods of quantitative reasoning. Some of the proposed experiments, such as twirling flexible macroscopic helices in glycerol to model bacterial flagella, lie within the grasp of talented undergraduates and thus blend naturally into the educational program of bringing the methods of engineering to biology. Three new courses are planned. The first is an undergraduate course which focuses on the mechanics of cells, muscle, and other tissue. The second course, also at the undergraduate level, develops the continuum mechanics of fluids and solids within the context of biomedical engineering. Finally, the third course is a graduate course which introduces students in the physical sciences and engineering to aspects of molecular and cell biology with a focus on the mechanics of molecular motors, single biopolymers such as DNA, and cell membranes doc7988 none This project examines the forces that shape international migration in the shadow of American immigration law, documenting how and why mail order bride migration has emerged as an issue for governments and nongovernmental organizations. Three questions will be addressed: Is the international marriage market an indicator of global feminism ? How have governments of the U.S. and the sending countries responded to this migration? What businesses or organizations encourage or discourage bride migration? In examining these questions, this project builds on previous migration research in economics, politics, foreign relations, law, and feminism. Data will be collected in the U.S., Russia, and the Philippines. Interviews with marriage agents, immigration officials, and men and women seeking foreign mates will provide information about the business, government policies, and perceptions of the process by those involved. The findings will have implications for U.S. immigration policy, foreign relations between countries involved in this industry, and feminist international migration theory doc7989 none Northern wetlands store large quantities of carbon and are significant sources of atmospheric methane. Impending climatic changes may greatly affect the role of these environments in the carbon cycle. Decomposition of organic matter occurs anaerobically in these wetlands. However, recent findings suggest that the terminal methanogenic step in northern wetlands is altered relative to more southerly systems, with acetate acting as a terminal product even though methane production continues via hydrogen utilization. If this phenomenon is ubiquitous, then acetate is not a significant intermediate in northern wetlands, but serves as a terminal product of decomposition; one that is ultimately degraded aerobically to CO2 rather than methane. Acetate accumulation in northern wetlands represents a paradigm shift in our understanding of anaerobic decomposition. It is possible that warming in the north will shift this process toward what occurs in more southerly wetlands. If so, then methane production in the north will increase greatly over what might occur from warming alone. This work will test the hypothesis that northern wetlands do not support significant methanogenesis from acetate and that acetate formation and accumulation is an important terminal step during anaerobic degradation of organic matter. This phenomenon is being investigated by a multidisciplinary team that will utilize field and laboratory investigations and microbiological, molecular biology, geochemical, pedological, and stable isotope approaches. The objectives of the project are: 1) assess the ubiquity of the acetate-accumulating phenomenon by examining acetate concentrations and production rates, geochemical conditions, and by applying isotopic and molecular techniques to a variety of northern wetland types representative of the major circumpolar arctic, subarctic and northern boreal environments; 2) Provide a temporal framework for determining variations in controls on methanogenic pathways and acetate cycling by conducting seasonal studies; 3) determine the effects of physical and chemical parameters on terminal decomposition using laboratory manipulations of incubation conditions; 4) determine if the bacterial populations are distinct compared to other wetlands and other anaerobic habitats. Incubation assays, radiotracer analyses, stable isotopes and natural radiocarbon abundances will be used to address pathways of decomposition in field and laboratory experiments. Molecular approaches including PCR-DGGE and hybridization probing will be used to determine bacterial diversity and population structure. A demonstration that biochemical pathways of methane formation in these wetlands are unique compared to their more southerly counterparts, has tremendous implications for our ability to predict the what the role of these wetlands will be in contributing methane to the global atmosphere and in their ability to degrade stored carbon. Acetate may serve as a primary organic end product, which would thus constitute a separate terminal decomposition pathway occurring simultaneously with methanogenesis. The multi-disciplinary study proposed here will delineate the important details of these processes and will serve to demonstrate their spatial significance doc7990 none The CAREER proposal will develop a framework to characterize durability of composites in civil infrastructure by integrating fiber-optic embedded sensors with damage mechanics models and life prediction methods. To tackle this problem, a combined analytical and experimental methodology is proposed, as follows: 1) Integrate embedded sensors in composites fabrication by VARTM and filament winding; 2) Implement strain, temperature, moisture and chemical degradation fiber-optic sensors; 3) Evaluate the embedded sensor system with controlled damage; 4) Develop a damage mechanics model and life-prediction methodology for durability analysis based on interrogating senors; 5) Assess reliability of sensor data and scale to composite structures (bridge decks and pipe walls); and 6) Validate the durability methodology and synthesize into a health-monitoring protocol. The educational approach is two-fold encompassing student recruitment and advanced graduate education. First, and educational collaboration is being developed with an applied technology center at a high school in Maine. The objective is to introduce high school students to the engineering experience by collaborating with civil engineering juniors in a composite bridge design and fabrication project. Second, an advanced graduate course on composites in civil engineering will be developed doc7991 none Self-regulation is the cornerstone of adaptive behavior, and nowhere is the capacity for self-regulation more critical than when it comes to emotions. Emotion regulation provides the basis for success at work and in interpersonal relations. Sustained attention at work requires that people put out of mind emotional impulses, and good interpersonal relations require that people judiciously monitor which emotions they express and how they express them. In the past two decades, emotion researchers have begun to rigorously examine emotion regulatory processes. However, further theoretical and empirical progress requires a deeper understanding of the neural substrates of emotion regulation. In this two-study exploratory project, state-of-the-art autonomic and central monitoring procedures will be used to examine the up- and down-regulation of approach and withdrawal tendencies, which together represent the basic elements of motivated behavior. These studies have two specific aims: (1) To determine the autonomic, behavioral, and subjective correlates of the regulation of approach- and withdrawal-related impulses; specifically, hunger and disgust. (2) To determine the neural correlates of self-regulation of approach and withdrawal, using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and simultaneous autonomic physiological recording. The first study will address Specific Aim 1 by recording autonomic, subjective, and behavioral responses from experimental participants who are regulating disgust and or hunger under a variety of stimulus presentation conditions. The second study will address Specific Aim 2 by recording brain activity, autonomic physiology, and subjective experience in participants who are regulating their experience of disgust- and hunger-related stimuli selected on the basis of the results of Study 1 doc7992 none Edwards The overarching goal of this Faculty Early CAREER Development project is to integrate research on beta-gallia-rutile (BGR) intergrowths with undergraduate and graduate education and outreach. The goal of the research project is to develop a fundamental understanding of the ionic transport in beta-gallia-rutile intergrowths. Expressed as Ga4Mn-4O2n-2 (M = Ge, Ti, Sn, n 5), the BGR intergrowths possess one-dimensional tunnels, which are suitable hosts for small-to-medium sized guest cations. Because the BGR intergrowths form two homologous series in which the density and spatial arrangement of the tunnels can be controlled, the intergrowths provide a unique opportunity to systematically investigate ion transport in one-dimensional tunneled oxides. In this work, novel materials based on parent BGR intergrowth structures will be synthesized by incorporating univalent cations (Li+, Na+, K+,and Ag+) into the one-dimensional tunnels and by replacing host-structure cations with various M3+ and M4+ cations to tailor the size and arrangement of the tunnels and to facilitate ionic exchange (storage) and ion conduction. The work will define the phase stability of the intergrowths with respect to the univalent tunnel cations as well as the trivalent and tetravalent framework cations and will correlate structural features such as tunnel size, spatial arrangement, and chemistry to the resulting transport behavior. Both polycrystalline and single-crystal materials will be studied. Phase stability and structure will be determined by X-ray diffraction, neutron diffraction, and electron microscopy. The ionic transport behavior will be elucidated using electrochemical insertion techniques, AC impedance spectroscopy, and DC electrical measurements. Expected outcomes of the research are 1) an increased understanding of phase stability in complex oxide systems, 2) an improved understanding of ion transport in one-dimensional oxide systems, and 3) the development of new materials that may find applications as solid-electrolytes, reversible ion electrodes, ion separators, chemical sensors and catalysts. The educational component of the project involves engaging undergraduate and graduate students in challenging research projects, developing a laboratory course on electronic materials that incorporates team work activities and utilizes open-ended problems, and developing a demonstration module that can be incorporated into Alfred University s Summer Institute for Science and Engineering High School Juniors. %%% Ionic transport is an underlying phenomenon in many important devices including fuel cells for energy conversion, batteries for energy storage, and sensors for environmental monitoring. Ionic transport involves the movement of mobile cations within pathways that may be 1-dimensional tunnels, 2-dimensional layers or a 3-dimensional network of channels. Understanding the factors that affect cation transport through these pathways is critical to developing new and improved materials. The knowledge gained in the project will advance the fundamental understanding of ionic transport, which will ultimately result in improvements of existing devices and the development of new materials. In terms of educational benefits, the project will expose high-school students to opportunities in science and engineering and will engage future scientists and engineers in a challenging research project that will foster creativity and innovation doc7993 none Lu With the increase of the integration density of millimeter-wave microwave circuits, electromagnetic interactions among circuit components and devices become important factors that affect the signal integrity and system electromagnetic compatibility (EMC). There are growing demands for numerical methods that will accurately and effectively predict and analyze the interactions, and eventually provide means for optimum design and prototyping to meet both performance and EMC requirements. This project proposes a mixed mesh, hybrid integral equation approach for the accurate and efficient simulation of microwave circuits. A unique feature of this new model is to use mixed triangle-tetrahedron mesh (or quadrangle-hexahedron mesh) to discretize the geometry. This allows the conformal and accurate modeling of both the metallic surface and the dielectric regions in a complex structure. The hybrid surface and volume integral equations are formulated and solved using the method of moments. The investigation of system condition reduction and convergence sped-up will be an important part of the proposed research in order to ensure stable and error tractable solution. The multilevel fast multipole method will be implemented to achieve computational efficiency. The successful implementation of it will bring the full-wave microwave circuit simulation to circuit board-level and eventually to system-level. Moreover, as many objects are essentially made up of conductors and dielectrics, the mixed mesh and hybrid integral equation approach developed from this research will also be suitable for a wide range of other applications such as EMC EMI simulation, radar scattering calculation for material coated targets, and predicting the electromagnetic interaction of radio frequency devices and human bodies. The research will be integrated with the PI s academic teaching activities through the establishment of a virtual experiment lab for students to perform interactive simulation of various electromagnetic scattering and radiation problems. The teaching activities are designed to encourage the participation of undergraduate students in engineering design and simulation, and will be used as demos to attract the interest of young people (who are tomorrow s potential engineers). The success of this project will lead to a new and unique tool for future CAD design and prototyping of high-speed and microwave printed circuits. It will also provide a new opportunity and a unique tool for university students to explore and understand the characteristics of microwave printed structures doc7994 none Increasingly, households are investing in common stock-from to the number of households investing directly in equities grew by over 30 per cent. At the same time many investors are eschewing professional advice--from through mid , investors opened 12.5 million online brokerage accounts. The importance of self-directed investing will only grow in future years as more and more households are handed responsibility for their own retirement investments through defined contribution plans and, possibly, through discretionary personal social security accounts. Individual s trading decisions affect not only their own welfare but, through their influence on market prices, the welfare of others. Yet little is known about what motivates the trading decisions of individual investors. The goal of my research is to increase our understanding of individual investors and of their influence on markets. I have obtained from various brokerage houses anonymous trading records for over one million individual investors. With these records, I can document how investors behave in real life investment situations and I can test theories of investor behavior. For example, I can test the hypothesis that investment success leads many investors to become overconfident. Based on the trading records in my databases, I plan to develop a computer simulation of financial markets in which individual investors interact with institutional investors and market-makers. The individual investors in this simulation will follow rules estimated from the databases. This simulation will model how the trading of individual investors changes stock prices and how this process affects investor wealth. I will also run experiments that test whether access to more information leads investors to become overconfident and, as a result, to trade excessively. Finally, I will survey investors to see whether aggressive trading by individual investors is more often the result of unrealistically optimistic beliefs than high tolerance for risk. In addition to increasing academic understanding of individual investors, these studies will provide guidance for investor education efforts doc7995 none The goal of the proposed research is to develop and use nonlinear optical techniques to study solid-liquid catalytic reactions important for fine chemical synthesis. The proposed research is a central part of an effort to study surface chemistry of heterogeneous fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals catalysis with modern in-situ spectroscopic techniques. The two approaches that will be used are sum frequency spectroscopy (SFS) and second harmonic generation (SHG). Both techniques are purely surface-selective, in that only the catalyst surface and the molecules adsorbed on it are detected. Two different types of experiments are planned. The first involves the study of model supported metal catalysts by total internal reflection (TIR) SFS and SHG. The second type of experiment will attempt to extend SHG (and eventually SFS) studies to catalyst particles in solution. Both methods will constitute the first application of nonlinear optical techniques to solid-liquid catalytic systems. Surface-enhanced Raman and infrared spectroscopic measurements will provide additional information regarding the state of catalyst surfaces. Parallel reaction rate measurements will be made in order to correlate surface in interface properties with catalytic rates and selectivity, and reaction mechanisms will be proposed. Fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals represent a rapidly expanding sector of the chemical industry. Heterogeneous catalysis shows promise for facilitating a smooth transition to more environmentally benign processing doc7996 none The research aspect of this CAREER proposal focuses on a novel and fundamental approach for fabricating and engineering tunable band gap and lattice constant multi-component semiconductor substrates for optoelectronic, photonic, high speed electronic, spintronic, micro-electro-mechanical systems and photovoltaic applications. The proposed substrate engineering technology is based upon several advanced concepts recently developed in the areas of ternary and quaternary bulk crystal growth from melts, thermodynamic modeling of multi-component alloys, and interfacial defect generation by the principal investigator. As a part of this career award, a new Substrate Engineering Reactor will be designed and installed for compatible multi-component substrate growth and hetero-epitaxy. Multi-component engineered substrates of III-V compounds and related device structures will be fabricated by employing the new fundamental approach. The integration of the proposed research with undergraduate and graduate education at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will include: (a) development of new introductory level interdisciplinary course for undergraduates in the area of compound semiconductor materials and device structures with specific focus towards microelectronics, optoelectronics, and spintronics, (b) development of a graduate level course on emerging materials and high performance device technologies, (c) research opportunities for at least two doctoral students and several undergraduate and master s students in the areas of substrate engineering and device fabrication on multi-component alloys with specific focus towards new device architectures. The introduction of the above topics into the undergraduate and graduate curriculum is in synergy with Rensselaer s educational plans and will enable and enhance student s exposure to rapidly growing modern and future semiconductor technologies doc7997 none This research project, supported in the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, addresses the development of an effective methodology for the synthesis and characterization of ordered mesoporous silica materials. Surface functionalization of these materials, determination of type, bonding density, and uniformity of surface coverage of the surface functionalities, and the determination of the size of pore windows in these materials are the main objectives of this research. Characterization methods developed in this research have applicability to a broad range of high surface area materials, and are not limited to the mesoporous silica materials that are the focus of Professor Mietek Jaroniec s research at Kent State University. The development of methodologies for the determination of surface coverage and type of modifier is the focus of this research project supported in the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program. Synthesis of mesoporous modified silica materials, followed by characterization using the methodologies developed here, is the goal of the work. These methodologies will have wide applicability beyond the modified silicas that form the main topic of research doc7998 none Abstact: In this career plan we propose to use computational approaches that integrate atomistic simulation tools with mesoscale methodologies to tackle problems relevant to nanotechnology. The proposed work on modeling of interactions and dynamics of steps on crystal surfaces and dislocation-obstacle interaction in semiconductor heterostructures will provide guidance to experimental work in the areas of nanostructure fabrication on vicinal surfaces, stress measurements in nanoscale structures and growth of relaxed epitaxial semiconductor thin films. The educational part of the career plan aims at developing curricula that fosters transfer of information among disciplines. Specifically, we propose to provide opportunities for undergraduate research projects in nanoscience and to develop senior-level graduate courses that focus on modeling of mechanical phenomena on nanoscales. The courses will incorporate methods and models of modern statistical mechanics with emphasis on their application to defect mechanics in nanostructures doc7999 none Over the past decades, comparative and ecological physiologists have succeeded in describing numerous marvelous ways in which organisms from a variety of habitats are specialized for life in those habitats. However, the great majority of these investigations have been performed in the laboratory, where animals and their environments are under control and manipulable. An important direction in which comparative and ecological physiology is now proceeding is to explore physiological function under natural conditions and with ecological context in mind. Toward that end, the PIs have assembled a panel of speakers who are pushing forward the ability to measure and interpret physiological function of free-living animals. These speakers will focus on vertebrate animals and will approach this topic from several directions. First, they will address a variety of physiological systems; presentations will focus on energy, body condition, temperature regulation, digestion and metabolism, osmoregulation, reproduction, stress, and others. Second, they will explore a variety of methodological approaches; presentations will focus on endocrinology, telemetry, stable isotopes, phenotypic engineering, immune testing, evaluation of tissue and body fluid composition, and more. Third, they will discuss a variety of vertebrate types; authors will speak on migratory birds, marine mammals, nectarivores, and others. This symposium will be held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (Chicago, IL, January ). Together, it is anticipated that these presentations will provide an overview of conceptual and methodological advances in the investigation of physiological systems under natural conditions with a view to answering questions of ecological importance. In the process, they will continue to enhance our appreciation of how animals survive under varied and stressful circumstances. Moreover, they will help to provide insights into ecological questions such as what limits the distributions of animals on Earth, and how this might be affected by patterns of environmental change doc8000 none This project will focus on monitoring of electrical insulation with mobile sensors. Their network will accommodate a full range of spatial and temporal resolution requirements posed by power quality sensitive customers and a highly competitive yet cost-conscious deregulated power industry. Several most relevant sensor technologies will be combined in a single system to nondestructively evaluate aging status, presence of incipient faults, and exact location of failing sections in insulating cables and power equipment. A mobile micro-manufactured platform will be used for periodic comprehensive and need-driven longitudinal scanning of insulation status, whereas traditional of stationary sensors will provide systemwide information for multi-sensor diagnostics. The project will lead to a new concept of distribution power systems, especially for underground cables, in which the entire network will be periodically tested by automatic crawlers . Prime sensing mechanisms will include fringing electric field dielectrometry, acoustic sensing, and infrared sensing. Additional sensors are likely to be installed once the first prototype of the mobile platform is complete. Communication links and source of power for device operation would determine maximum range and miniaturization aspects of mobile platforms doc8001 none The objective of this CAREER project is a comprehensive education and research program aimed at the development of next-generation devices using functional perovskites by providing atomic-level understanding of interface properties relevant for practical applications. Materials science research will be pursued research toward: (a) mixed ionic-electronic conducting (MIEC) perovskite oxides for electrochemical devices, and (b) ferroelectric thin films for capacitors and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). In these devices, interface structure and properties play a key role in determining materials and device properties. Providing a fundamental understanding of transport mechanisms across interfaces will enable more energy-efficient, cost-effective devices, and aid the design of thin film electrochemical devices. Ferroelectric perovskites have a host of properties that enable further development of technologies such as microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). The physical properties of ferroelectric perovskite thin films are drastically different from those of bulk materials, for reasons that are currently poorly understood. Establishing the role of interfaces in observed behavior is expected to allow development of optimized microstructures for applications in MEMS and electronic devices. The method developed in this project will concentrate on interfaces with known atomic arrangements and defect chemistry. These will be obtained by controlled thin film growth experiments and by utilizing unique capabilities of high-resolution transmission electron microscopy in combination with electron energy-loss spectroscopy. Macroscopic measurements of transport properties of oxide interfaces and of the physical behavior of ferroelectric thin films is being studied to establish fundamental limits of interfacial properties, relevant for all applications of functional perovskites. In addition, this research is intended to set the stage for atomic level calculations that will need the true atomic structure as input. Part of the research on thin film electrochemical devices will involve an established collaboration with industry, as well as interdisciplinary research with national and international university researchers in the areas of electrochemical transport and electrical characterization. An important feature of the project is the training of students in interdisciplinary, industrial and international collaborative activities, in technologically important research areas. A main goal of the project is to thoroughly integrate research into educational activities. Emphasis will be placed on (a) participation of undergraduate students in research early in their studies (b) interdisciplinary and international training, and (c) mentoring of students of under-represented groups with the goal to encourage them to pursue graduate studies in materials science and engineering. Course development plans include strengthening the core curriculum to emphasize conceptual understanding of the course material for a broad interdisciplinary audience, and to incorporate new technologies. Conceptual testing as a method to evaluate the success of the educational activities will also be developed. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in a topical area of materials science having high technological relevance. The scope of the project will expose students to challenges in materials synthesis, processing, and characterization. An important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education doc8002 none The overall goal of this project is to improve the recruitment and retention of low-income, academically capable students, especially women and African-Americans, in computer science. In addition to existing programs and support structure, new activities, based on research related to these issues, are helping to improve the campus climate for the students. Support activities include weekly visits of scholarship recipients with their advisors, peer study groups, tutoring, group projects, positive classroom climate and faculty training workshops. The training workshops foster faculty awareness of, and sensitivity to, the difficulties that women and African Americans face in computer science, mathematics and physics, while encouraging faculty to generate specific ideas for enhancing the learning environment. When the scholarship funding ends, students go on to intern and co-op positions with local businesses and industries doc8003 none Kleppa This research examines alloys of transition metals and lanthanide metals and compounds formed between these metals and the noble metals as well as lower melting metals indium and lead. The research includes gallium alloys and compounds of gallium with the lanthanide metals. The investigation of the noble metal compounds is carried out by direct synthesis calorimetry at degrees C. The gallium and indium compounds are studied by the same technique at degrees C and the lead compounds at 900 degrees C. %%% The thermodynamic data developed in this program is of value to scientists designing new metal alloys doc8004 none This CAREER proposal is aimed to develop a smart materials and structures academic program at The University of Akron. This proposal includes four major components: 1) Conduct innovative research in smart materials and structures. The PI will focus on: (1) Compensation of hysteresis in smart actuators using neural networks and sliding-mode based robust controller. (2) Precision tracking control of Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) actuators. (3) Position control of SMA actuators without a position sensor. (4) Active control of a composite plate with embedded SMA wire actuators. (5) Precision shape control using piezo patch actuators. (6) Vibration damping using controllable backlash. 2) Develop a state-of-art Smart Materials and Structures Laboratory to support research. 3) Establish a novel smart materials and structures curriculum, including new courses and a teaching laboratory. 4) Integrate research, lab development and the curriculum with undergraduate teaching, minority programs, women engineering programs, and outreach programs. The significance and impact of this Career Development Plan are multifold: 1) Contribute to the advance of technology development in smart materials and structures. Hysteresis exists in almost all smart actuators. The proposed control approach has potential to compensate for hysteresis and significantly increase control accuracy and stability of smart actuators and widen their applications. The elimination of the position sensor in a SMA servo system will dramatically decrease its cost and widen SMA s application. The proposed active shape control will significantly increase accuracy and robustness of precision system such as space reflectors. The smart composite beam with embedded SMA actuators will enable many potential applications for active shape control and vibration damping. Vibration damping using controllable backlash can be applied to many cantilevered flexible structures. 2) Strengthen research and teaching at The University of Akron. 3) Benefit under-represented students to participate engineering research. 4) Benefit high school students to pursue higher education and careers in engineering. 5) Benefit local industries and government agencies by supplying students with knowledge of this emerging technology doc8005 none Billard This three-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research in applied mathematics involves Lynne Billard at the University of Georgia and Edwin Diday of the University of Paris, Dauphine, and the Institute for Research in Informatics and Applied Mathematics (INRIA) at Rocquencourt, France. The investigators will focus on developing methodologies for analyzing symbolic data. The approach involves scientific computing in conjunction with numerical and statistical analysis concepts. This project addresses the twin goals of developing methodologies for symbolic data analysis, extending it to more general and complex data, and the reviewing of current methods for areas that need further research. Mathematical foundation and robustness of these methods will also be studied. Symbolic data are useful for summarizing large data sets to render them manageable for analysis. Few methods currently exist to analyze symbolic data and will be needed as the demand for large scientific data sets increases and symbolic data become more prevalent. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Institute for Research in Informatics and Applied Mathematics (INRIA). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator and graduate student. INRIA will support the visits of French researchers to the United States. The project takes advantage of the French investigator s computational expertise. He has developed the basic concepts involved in symbolic data. This is complemented by US expertise in statistics and statistical analysis doc8006 none Haenn Colonization of agricultural frontiers is a crucial factor driving global deforestation. Tropical forests house valuable biodiversity which contributes to the health of the global environment. This project by a cultural anthropologist from Arizona State University examines the micro-political processes shaping settlement of Mexico s tropical frontier to assess how these processes contribute to land use decisions by swidden farmers. The project focuses on the ejido, or communally managed farm community, to examine how village power dynamics affect migration and farming practices. The project studies Calakmul, Campeche, Mexico, home to 25,000 migrant farmers and the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, Mexico s largest protected tropical ecosystem. Preliminary studies show that village conflict affects farming decisions. Calakmul residents distinguish between landed and non-landed farmers, the latter having no voice in ejidal assemblies that formulate local policies. The project will employ a team of researchers from a regional university and local communities to conduct village and household level surveys in 10 communities over a period of five months. The surveys, coupled with archival information, will document the range of variation in inequality in the area. Hypotheses will be tested relating the political status of newcomers and the quality and quantity of land available to them, as well as the focus on cash rather than subsistence crops, intercropping and input levels of labor and fertilizer. Given the recent growth of Calakmul as a site of in-migration, and changes in Mexico s ejido legislation, this research will provide valuable information on the nature and sources of change in local environmental practices. This new knowledge will be relevant to other situations of threats to biodiversity in tropical areas of expanding population doc8007 none The focus of this CAREER project is to study and exploit polarization-induced electric fields in AlGaInN-based heterostructures for the development of strain-engineered electronic devices. These devices offer the potential to further expand the performance range of GaN-based electronics to higher frequency and power. Metalorganic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE) will be used for epitaxial growth of group III-nitrides in this program. An in-situ optical technique will be developed to probe the evolution and magnitude of thin film stress and strain during heterostructure growth. Alternative nitrogen sources for MOVPE growth will be investigated as a potential route to improving the quality of indium-containing alloys. The techniques and tools will be used to fabricate strain-engineered AlGaN InGaN AlGaInN high electron mobility transistor structures. Post-growth characterization (x-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscopy, photoluminescence, Hall measurements) will be combined with real time stress measurements to study stress relaxation and its impact on the microstructural and electrical properties of the heterostructures. Device fabrication and testing will be carried out in collaboration with government and industrial device development groups to provide a pathway for rapid evaluation and transfer of this technology into device and systems applications. The educational goals of the project are closely integrated to the research. A virtual MOVPE laboratory will be developed and used in course assignments to provide a novel learning tool that connects material properties with processing conditions in an intimate and interactive fashion. Additional educational activities include undergraduate and graduate curriculum development, undergraduate research opportunities, and outreach to young women doc8008 none This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award supports the development of a mechatronic framework for magnetic suspension technology, which has the potential to significantly impact both manufacturing and transportation systems by providing an actuation principle with several attractive advantages: frictionless interaction of moving parts, high precision positioning at high speeds, high resolution and repeatability, and dust-free operation. These systems are virtually maintenance-free because they are not subject to wear, are mechanically simple and easy to assemble and manufacture, and can provide higher accelerations and velocities than other conventional actuator technologies. Several unresolved issues have relegated magnetic suspension technology to a few practical applications. Magnetic servo levitation (SML), the actuation principal based on electromagnetic attractive forces, is inherently unstable, highly nonlinear, and difficult to model and control. This project is devoted to provide the theoretical basis for accurate and robust control of this actuation principle. The proposed approach is an extension of recent experimental results by the investigator that suggest two key elements involved in achieving robust and accurate control of these systems: to minimize the use of approximate electromagnetic relationships, and the use of a novel nonlinear control algorithm that is robust to model uncertainties and does not require the system to be affine in the control input. The technology will be used to develop two applications in areas of broad impact: a multi-DOF high-precision positioning machine for semiconductor manufacturing, and a design test bench for active control of superconductive levitation for transportation systems. Levitated positioning machinery is expected to be the next generation of positioning technology for semiconductor manufacturing. On the other hand, magnetically levitated transportation systems are at the core of technology currently under investigation by NASA to develop spaceport capabilities for the operation of space shuttles. The proposed work will also contribute to develop a framework for analysis and design of a family of nonlinear problems that are nonaffine in the input, such as automotive active suspension systems, autonomous underwater vehicles, etc. Magnetic suspension technology integrates knowledge from several areas: physics, mechanical design, power electronics, control theory, instrumentation, data acquisition and computer programming. This makes it an ideal ground for a novel, interdisciplinary, integrative educational experience for undergraduate and graduate students across several fields: mechanical and electrical engineering, physics and computer engineering. The educational plan of this grant is centered on providing students increasing degrees of competency in knowledge integration by cultivating problem-solving skills in a multidisciplinary environment doc8009 none Pachavis A symposium entitled Biomaterials for Drug Delivery is being conducted by the Materials Research Society (MRS) in Boston, MA from November 27-December 1, as part of its Fall National meeting. This award provides funds for partial support of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and assistant professors to attend the Symposium. A major purpose of the meeting is for leading international scientists to discuss advances in the areas of biomaterials, drug delivery, and biocompatibility. The choice of the symposium topic derives from recent demands placed upon biomaterials performance that have paralleled the growth in applications and driven the development of sophisticated formulations with improved biocompatibility as well as superior mechanical and interfacial properties. The symposium addresses both the fundamental science of biomaterials and the advances in their applications to drug delivery. To bring new ideas to these topics, the meeting includes a strong multidisciplinary program through joint sessions with three other symposia, Orthopedic Dental Biomaterials , Cardiovascular Biomaterials , and Neurologic Biomaterials . Biomaterials and biological interfaces are expected to play a key role in promising areas of biotechnology such as cardiovascular neurological applications. The Symposium on Biomaterials for Drug Delivery covers the development of novel biomaterials, improved evaluation, and utilization of existing biomaterials for controlled and targeted delivery of bioactive agents. The symposium will address current challenges in biomaterials synthesis, characterization, and biocompatibility issues with respect to drug delivery devices. Ways to design intelligent controlled release systems and studies combining characterization of physical chemical properties of biomaterials and their impact on drug delivery performance will be emphasized doc8010 none This action is taken within the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program NSF 00-89, to support a research education career plan in geoenvironmental engineering, with emphasis on innovative soil remediation. The research component investigates the use of electroosmosis for transport of oxygen (produced by electrolysis) into fine-grained soils in order to stimulate in situ bioremediation of trapped organic contaminants. The educational component integrates the technical tasks of the project into the broader aspects of teaching in geoenvironmental engineering so as to reach students at different levels. Oxygen delivery is generally the limiting factor for in situ bioremediation due to low soil permeabilities and preferential flow paths. The use of electric currents is being investigated to overcome oxygen injection problems. Application of a direct current (dc) results in controlled oxygen production by water electrolysis at the anode. Electroosmotic flow then delivers oxygenated water into contaminated silt and clay layers to stimulate bioremediation of trapped organic contaminants. This process is complex and involves as-yet-undetermined hydrogeological, electrochemical and biogeochemical interactions, such as microbial behavior under electric fields. The research focuses on (a) rates of oxygen production and transport in fine-grained soils by dc electric fields, (b) impact of electric fields on microbial growth and transport in porous media, (c) stimulating in situ degradation of organic contaminants in fine-grained soils by electrochemical production transport of oxygen, and (d) enhancing degradation in heterogeneous soils. The goal of the education component is to incorporate the findings of this project in a new undergraduate geoenvironmental engineering course being developed by the Principal Investigator. Undergraduate students will participate in the research through the Northeastern University Cooperative (Co-op) education program. The PI will also reach out to high school students by developing an educational CD-ROM that will (a) demonstrate the link between the basic sciences and engineering applications (geotechnical and environmental engineering in particular) and (b) attempt to promote civil and environmental engineering as exciting fields of study and practice. The PI will also partner with CONNECTIONS, a NSF funded project that is designed to help women transition into careers in science, engineering, and math (SEM). The PI will provide opportunities for high school girls, girl scouts and undergraduate women, sponsored by CONNECTIONS, to learn about geotechnical and environmental engineering, evaluate the educational CD-ROM, and participate in the research and educational tasks of this project. Graduate students will participate in the research and gain an excellent experience in cutting-edge, practice-oriented geoenvironmental research. A final goal is to further the PI s development as an educator by adopting innovative teaching and assessment techniques. A WEB site will be developed and continuously updated to present the research and educational components of this project doc8011 none James Mahoney This CAREER research project explores the relationship between Spanish colonialism and long-run development in Latin American. The project falls with the comparative-historical research tradition. Comparative-historical analysis is particularly well studied for addressing broad questions of national development in which macro processes and temporal sequences are central to the explanation. Historical data from 15 Latin American countries will be used to investigate the intriguing negative correlation between Spanish colonial penetration in the eighteenth century and levels of economic, social, and political development in the twentieth century. Those regions of the Spanish colonial empire that were the most heavily penetrated during the colonial period, such as Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, and Guatemala are hypothesized to have emerged as the least developed countries of Latin American in the 20th century. In contrast, those regions that were the least penetrated by the Spanish, such as Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and Costa Rica, are hypothesized t have become the most developed countries of Latin American during the 20th century. This relationship will be testing by using existing quantitative data sources to measure level of colonial penetration and level of development for the different countries of Latin America. Measures of colonial penetration include statistics on trade, population, bullion production, budgets and salary. Measures of development include statistics on gross domestic product per capita, infant mortality rate, life expectancy at birth, and democracy. Extensive readings on the historiography of late colonial Latin America will also be completed. The education component of the proposal consists of providing research opportunities for students as research assistants; creating a mentor program which links undergraduate with graduate students; and developing a new seminar course on Colonial Legacies and integrating sections of the project into a current course on methodology and development doc8012 none Steven Quartz BCS: The Mechanisms of Cognitive Development This integrated research and education CAREER development program centers on a basic question: How do human cognitive skills emerge from the developing brain? In recent years, developmental cognitive neuroscience has begun to construct integrative frameworks that bring together neurobiology and psychology to begin to address this basic question. The addition of computational modeling has facilitated this integrative framework by offering promising tools to characterize the dynamics of development. This career development program will build on these advances in developmental cognitive neuroscience. Over five-years, it will integrate psychology, neurobiology, computational modeling, and robotics to create a neurocomputational framework for investigating human cognitive development. Specifically, this project has two major research components: Constructive learning: An Investigation of the interplay between learning and neural development: Human cognitive development rests on a complex interaction between biological mechanisms and processes of learning. This research component will construct a computational framework to investigate how learning guides the construction of the brain circuits underlying human cognitive function. With this framework, it will be possible to address such critical questions as: What are the neural substrates of cognitive development, what processes regulate their development, and how does change at the neural level correspond to change at the cognitive and behavioral level? To investigate these issues, this framework will be applied to a variety of cognitive developmental phenomena, including Piagetian developmental tasks, the development of executive function, and outstanding issues in developmental plasticity. Active development: A computational investigation of midbrain dopamine systems in the development of executive function: Converging evidence suggests that midbrain dopamine systems constitute a behavioral system that fuels the child s active exploration, a critical but poorly understood component of development. This research will apply a computational model of midbrain dopamine projections to the development of human executive function, which underlies flexible behavior. Specifically, this project will construct a computational framework to investigate the crucial but poorly understood developmental links between dopaminergic systems and prefrontal cortex in the emergence of working memory, behavioral inhibition, and executive function. This research will develop alongside both an undergraduate and graduate educational program that will include the creation of a new graduate program in Cognition in the Computational and Neural Systems Program at the . Caltech has recently made a strong commitment to fostering interdisciplinary research and education in the cognitive and behavioral sciences, making it an ideal environment in which to pursue this career development plan doc8013 none The proposed research is a fundamental investigation of biological polyelectrolyte brushes and their interaction with polyelectrolytes in solution. In addition, the research aims to build an important bridge between biotechnology and the field of polymer science, which is increasingly contributing vital insights to biological systems. A huge past research effort has investigated synthetic polymer brushes, consisting of arrays of polymers tethered by one end to a surface. When these polymers are charged (polyelectrolyte brushes) many basic questions remain unanswered: theory has predicted a complex diagram of states but relatively little experiment exists. The research proposed here advances fundamental understanding of polyelectrolyte brushes by focusing on brushes of the single most important charged biological polymer, DNA. Experimental investigations of DNA brushes placed in contact with free DNA solutions will be carried out, with emphasis on measuring equilibrium and kinetic aspects of the penetration of the free DNA into the brush and its attachment ( hybridization ) to complementary regions of the tethered DNA. Theory will be simultaneously developed to approach a comprehensive, molecular-based understanding of the mechanisms involved. If successful, this work will: (i) advance basic understanding of polyelectrolyte brushes, (ii) reveal to what extent theoretical frameworks developed for synthetic polyelectrolyte brushes may be carried over to this biopolymer system, (iii) establish how equilibrium and kinetics of the hybridization process reflect internal organization of the brush, and (iv) result in a systematic understanding of the mechanisms involved in the functioning of modern medical and biological technologies such as DNA microarrays. The primary experimental tool will be confocal fluorescence microscopy, with modulated ellipsometry, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and X-ray reflectivity serving as key secondary characterization tools. %%% DNA brushes are at the heart of a biotechnology of enormous importance: the processing of genetic information for disease studies and medical diagnosis by use of DNA chips and microarrays. Since these methods work on the principle of hybridization between surface-tethered and free nucleic acids, the planned research provides the fundamental guidance needed to reduce the current empiricism in their use and optimization. The research program also closely integrates with multiple educational initiatives, including: (1) stimulating intellectual growth by providing research opportunities for students from high school through graduate levels, (2) forging links with the broader educational community through development of a series of experimental units for high school science courses that demonstrate scientific and engineering principles using common supermarket materials, and (3) developing new pedagogical structure for the core undergraduate laboratory that will teach students to learn through research-type, objective-driven projects. Successful accomplishment of the research and educational goals of the proposed plan is supported through strategic partnerships, which include George Washington High School, an urban school in the Manhattan School District, and industrial and institutional research collaborations doc8014 none Hespanha In this proposal we delineate a five year-research and education plan in the area of Automatic Control. The overall objective of this plan is to build the foundation for a career devoted to scientific research and its integration in the educational program at the University of Southern California. Our research and education efforts will be focused in the area of hybrid control systems, i.e., systems that combine continuous dynamics with discrete logic. We are particularly interested in supervisory control algorithms that utilize discrete logic for the purpose of online learning and adaptation. The use of logic in this context was proposed in the control literature more than fifteen years ago. Most of the early work was of a theoretical nature, motivated by the desire to construct universal controllers capable of stabilizing very large classes of systems. The universality of these controllers was achieved at the expense of very poor performance and the resulting algorithms could not be used in most practical applications. Since then a great deal of progress has been made in this area and now supervisory control is actually proposed as a technique to attain very high performance and robustness to sudden changes in the process or the control objectives. The scientific goal of our research is to develop a framework to expedite the analysis and design of learning algorithms that utilize switching and logic. Towards this end we will isolate the fundamental issues that arise in the design of supervisory control algorithms and explore them in a systematic fashion. We show in this proposal that although many of the algorithms proposed in the literature originate from fundamentally different approaches, they share key structures and exhibit several common properties. A common framework will provide a better understanding of their key features and limitations. We isolate here two specific topics that we judge crucial for the wide establishment of supervisory control: 1. Extend the domain of application of these algorithms to the control of complex nonlinear systems. In particular, when only output-feedback is available and or when there is significant measurement noise and unmodeled dynamics. 2. Develop theoretical tools to optimize the performance of these systems. Here, performance should be understood both in a transient and in an asymptotic sense doc8015 none D. Hitt, University of Vermont The PI proposes to study experimentally the flow of complex fluids at the microscale. The specific problems are the steady and pulsatile converging flows containing solid or deformable particulate suspensions. These flows are important in biological fluid mechanics and in applications of micro-fabrication. The PI is well qualified for this work and has most of the required equipment in his laboratory. The issues that are to be addressed by the proposed research can serve as the foundation for the PI s professional development. In addition, The PI has proposed an excellent educational plan including an introductory engineering course with weekly lectures and experiments taught by faculty and graduate students of various discipline and people from industry, the use of internet-based remote-control fluid mechanics laboratories, and high school outreach programs doc8016 none Objectives: The PI s research objectives are: to develop a multiscale modeling approach to help elucidate: (i) the way in which amino acid sequence and binding affinity of antibodies are correlated and evolve during the humoral immune response to specific antigens, and (ii) to explore the role of somatic mutation and antigen pressure on the evolution of specific B-cell cancers, in particular, of follicular lymphomas. His educational objectives include: (1) undergraduate students are exposed to and trained in molecular modeling techniques, (2) graduate students are trained in multidisciplinary approaches to interdisciplinary problems, (3) the use of disparate length-scale modeling approaches is emphasized, and (4) the educational objectives are well integrated with the research activities doc8017 none Toxic contaminants continue to persist in the environment, threatening the health of humans and ecosystems. For example, the United States has a stock pile of 30,600 tons of chemical warfare agents (NRC, ). These chemical agents are extremely hazardous and the Army is under law to dispose of the stockpile by . However, the baseline technology, incineration, faces considerable organized opposition due to air pollution concerns forcing the Army to look at alternative technologies. Advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) show considerable promise as a potential solution to these problems because, similar to incineration, pollutants are destroyed eliminating future risk, yet no air pollution is formed. However, development of AOPs that are less costly and more effective for the degradation of pollutants at relatively high aqueous concentrations is needed. In this project, photoactivated periodate will be explored generally as a potential AOP and particularly for the destruction of chemical warfare agents. This study will investigate the kinetics and mechanism of destruction of a range of pollutants with differing expected reactivities with radicals formed by photoactivated periodate. Detailed studies of the organic decomposition products and inorganic iodine stable and transient intermediates formed will be used to gain insight into the pathways of degradation. For the education component of this proposal, the PI plans to stimulate learning by emphasizing the bridges between research and teaching and incorporating real world case studies into courses. Mentoring school aged and pre-freshman female students is another important component to be cultivated by involvement in summer workshops at OSU. The Women In Engineering Summer Workshop brings 50 pre-freshmen women to campus in the summer to orient them to engineering principles and the different disciplines of engineering. Hosted for a day of environmental engineering, they are guided in an experiment to determine nitrate and phosphate removal by wetlands. With funds from this proposal, the PI will develop a similar week-long workshop for eighth-grade girls. Undergraduate students and faculty will be recruited to participate in guiding girls while they explore various facets of engineering. Both mentoring activities are expected to increase enrollment and retention of women in engineering doc8018 none Watkins The program is an experimental study of the intrinsic defects (lattice vacancies and host interstitial atoms) in wide bandgap semiconductors using magnetic resonance techniques. The primary emphasis is on GaN, but other wide bandgap semiconductors of current interest (AlN, ZnO, SiC, diamond, etc.) may also be studied. The broad purpose of the program is to identify the intrinsic defects, and to probe their electronic and lattice structures, their diffusional properties, and the nature of their interactions with other defects in the material. The experimental techniques include electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) and electron-nuclear double resonance (ENDOR), detected primarily by optical methods (ODEPR and ODENDOR), but also by conventional EPR methods, where appropriate. The experimental approach is to produce the intrinsic defects by 2.5 MeV electron irradiation for study by the magnetic resonance techniques. These studies include irradiation in situ at 4.2 K in a special facility at Lehigh, unique in the world, which allows ODEPR study of the pristine vacancies and interstitials which are produced, prior to warm-up. Subsequent annealing allows the determination of the kinetics of the migration of each and the nature of its resulting interaction with impurities and other defects as it becomes trapped by them. Room temperature irradiation is also utilized to study the intrinsic defects that are stable at this temperature, as well as the various defects produced by trapping of the intrinsic defects which are mobile at lower temperatures. Lattice vacancies (missing atoms) and interstitials (extra atoms) are always present in an otherwise perfect crystalline semiconductor. Labeled intrinsic defects , they therefore play a vital role in all of the myriad processing steps involved in modern semiconductor device manufacture, as well as in determining the technologically important properties of the final device. Essentially nothing is presently known concerning the properties of these important defects in the currently widely studied wide bandgap semiconducting materials, such as gallium nitride, which promise advances for optical applications into the visible and ultraviolet spectral regions, as well as for microelectronic applications at elevated temperatures. The broad purpose of the present program is to determine these properties for the first time. The experimental approach is to produce the defects by high-energy electron irradiation, where a lattice atom is directly knocked out of its lattice site when the electron has a near collision with its nucleus. The irradiation is done at a low enough temperature to freeze the resulting interstitial and vacancy into the lattice for direct spectroscopic study. The spectroscopic methods employed involve the various magnetic resonance ones, which are uniquely capable of unambiguously identifying the defects, and probing the properties of interest -- their electronic and lattice structures, their migrational properties in the lattice, and the nature of their interactions with other defects present in the material doc8019 none Z. J. Wang, Cornell University The proposed research is a computational study of insect flight, a problem which has been studied mostly by experimental means heretofore. Unlike aerodynamics of conventional wings, the present problem deals with flow over flexible wings at low Reynolds numbers. It is always unsteady, involves simultaneous generation of lift and thrust by the wing, and strong interactions between the large vortices shed from the leading edge and the rest of the wing. The PI proposes to carry out the simulation by using the Submerged Boundary Method and vortex dynamics models. Successful methods developed for biomimetics will be useful for simulating aerodynamics of micro air vehicles doc8020 none E. Cowen, Cornell University The PI proposes an integrated research and educational program to examine the effect of air-water interface contamination on turbulence and gas transfer. Gas exchange processes across interfaces are fundamental to environmental, biological, and industrial fluid mechanics. Experiments will be conducted in a water tank with grid generated turbulence with and without surfactants. Velocity and CO2 concentration will be measured by digital particle tracking velocimetry (DPTV) and Laser Induced Fluorescence (LIF) techniques to obtain the vortical transport of fluid and flux of CO2 at the interface. The ultimate goal is to use the experimental data to develop an analytical model for gas transfer at the interface doc8021 none Karen Burg Research and development of engineered tissue has potential widespread medical application, including lumpectomy reconstruction, liver repair, cartilage replacement, or other conditions. Tissue engineering involves taking a small number of healthy cells from a patient, growing the cells into large numbers in a laboratory environment, combining them with an absorbable (similar to biodegradable) material that has been sculpted into the anatomical shape of the injured part, allowing the cells to develop, implanting the cell-material system into the patient, and then allowing the cells to grow and acquire the original anatomical shape. The material gradually breaks down, is absorbed by the body, and is thus removed. The proposed 5-year work is a focus on the basic science of breast tissue engineering for cancer patients who have undergone a mastectomy or lumpectomy. The effort will be to develop a program in tissue engineering, encompassing the research and development of new injectable materials and training of graduate and undergraduate students. It also will promote public awareness of bioengineering and critical thinking through the development of a K-12 educational outreach program, a program developed through the combined efforts of the Department of Bioengineering and the Department of Education at Clemson University. The mission of the proposed research is to present and justify a new materials approach to tissue engineering. It is hypothesized that by providing a two-phase, composite, injectable material, cell growth and tissue development may be enhanced within a clinically viable solution. Previous studies by the applicant have demonstrated general efficacy of such systems, but have not encompassed a careful assessment of the components. A selection of crafted materials of varying proportions will be addressed and the research will be conducted using a comprehensive battery of mechanical and chemical tests to assess the systems. The success of the basic research concept relies on a well-orchestrated research plan, as well as on education of the involved scientists and future scientists. The science and technology derived from this work will be transferred to other clinical applications presenting similar requirements doc8022 none Barron A current frontier in bioengineering is the design of non-natural, sequence-controlled polymers that can effectively mimic some of the structures and activities of natural proteins, but that are non-immunogenic and stable as in vivo therapeutics. This exploratory research requires an integration of principles and paradigms taken from biochemistry and biophysics with methods of biochemical and biomedical engineering. A focused, medically-relevant research project is proposed that, even if only partially successful, will have far-reaching, fundamental implications for the new field of biomimetic polymer engineering, An important and tractable problem is chosen: The criticalneed for improved synthetic analogs of the human surfactant proteins SP-B and SP-C. Preliminary data is shown and new strategies are proposed towards the development of novel SP-mimics based on polypeptoids: non-natural polymers based on a peptide backbone, yet differing in that sidechains are bonded to backbone nitrogens rather than to a-carbons. N-substituted peptoids with proteinogenic sidechains previously have been shown to be extremely protease-resistant, and further to raise only very low-level immune response in vivo. In the investigator s lab and elsewhere, some peptoid sequences have been shown to adopt stable, helical secondary structure in aqueous or organic solution. Sequence-specific peptoids can be synthesized easily, at substantially lower cost than peptides, with facile access to diverse sidechain chemistries. Natural lung surfactant coats the internal surfaces of mammalian lungs and enables normal breathing. It is a complex mixture composed of 95% lipids and 5% surfactant-specific proteins (SP). Both protein and phospholipid fractions play critical roles in lung surfactant s physiological properties, providing a decrease in the work of breathing by regulating surface tension at the air-liquid interface of alveoli as a function of their surface area. The amphipathic, helical surfactant proteins SP-B and SP-C (79 and 35 amino acids, respectively) promote rapid phospholipid adsorption to the air-liquid interface, facilitate respreading of the phospholipid monolayer throughout the respiration cycle, and regulate the phase behavior of the monolayer to yield the lowest possible alveolar surface tension. The absence or dysfunction of lung surfactant on alveolar surfaces leads to respiratory distress syndrome (RDS) in which lungs are incompliant and vulnerable to collapse. Patients with severe RDS cannot be mechanically ventilated without damage to lung tissue, and require immediate surfactant replacement therapy. Premature infants ( 30 weeks) are born with immature lungs lacking surfactant, and often suffer from severe RDS. These patients typically receive surfactant replacement therapy at birth with an animal-derived surfactant formulation. Synthetic formulations exist, but are significantly less efficacious than natural surfactant in enabling proper lung functioning, primarily because they lack effective functional mimics of SP-B and SP-C. Medicines sourced from animals raise concerns about a possibility for cross-species pathogen transmission and also for immunogenicity. Therefore, the development of an effective synthetic biomimetic surfactant replacement is a present need. Aims to address this need, as well as to carry out important fundamental research are: (1) To design, synthesize, purify, and characterize the secondary structure of peptoid-based mimics of the helical, amphipathic lung surfactant proteins SP-B and SP-C. Methods include organic synthesis, analytical and preparative HPLC, mass spectroscopy, and circular dichroism (CD); (2) To confirm and further characterize the in vitro biophysical functioning of peptoid-based SP-B and SP-C mimics as spreading agents for biomimetic phospholipid admixtures. Experimental approaches include both pulsating bubble surfactometry and Langmuir-Wilhelmy surfactometry. (3) Based on these carefully-repeated preliminary results, to prepare another proposal to the NSF Directorate of Bioengineering to continue the research project thereafter doc8023 none Li A CAREER development award will support the integration of research and education on ferroelectric composites into undergraduate and master graduate levels at Cooper Union. The research plan includes the analytical and experimental investigations on electromechanical coupling behavior of ferroelectric composites by considering the microstructure of the systems. The outcome of the proposed study will give a solid fundamental basis and guidance to the design of smart materials using ferroelectric composites. The education plan involves the development of a new senior course on smart materials and integration of the proposed research into senior design projects. The undergraduate materials science curriculum will be upgraded to include the concepts of ferroelectrics and ferroelectric composites, and hands-on experiences on the fabrication of PZT samples and measurement of electromechanical coupling behavior of ferroelectrics. The PI will develop her academic career around analytical and experimental methods to advance the basic understanding of nonlinear electromechanical coupling of ferroelectrics and ferroelectric composites. In particular, the analytical prediction will involve micromechanics of heterogeneous materials, evolution of microstructures, irreversible thermodynamics, and physics of domain switch. The experiments will start with the fabrication of PZT samples and PZT composites, and the electromechanical testing of such samples. This work will lead to the development of a robust predictive methodology of nonlinear electromechanical coupling behavior of ferroelectric composite materials. Understanding and accurately describing the nonlinear behavior of a ferroelectric material due to the domain switch will lead to the improvement of design methodologies in smart materials and structures using ferroelectrics. Since the PI s research endeavors and educational program are closely integrated, the educational goals are: 1) to increase the undergraduate student involvement in the ongoing research projects through out the engineering school by promoting research transfer into classroom, 2) to establish summer research programs for undergraduate students and research internship for pre-college students in materials science through outreach program, 3) to develop a new upper-level undergraduate graduate course in smart materials, 4) to update the current materials science curricula by including the new concepts and research discoveries in the area of smart materials, and 5) to modernize the materials engineering laboratory and course curriculum. A career development grant will be a significant factor not only in boosting the prospect of PI s contributing significantly to her research field, but in expanding at Cooper Union the involvement of undergraduates in research and its applications to significant new technologies doc8024 none PECASE: Novel Approaches for Integration of Vertical Si Nanoelectronics Veena Misra This proposal will investigate novel approaches in the integration of high-K dielectrics and metal gates with vertical CMOS devices. This integration offers low temperature compatibility since high-K gatestack formation in vertical devices can be performed after the source drain regions are defined, thus avoiding any high temperature exposure. This offers tremendous opportunity for achieving ultimate CMOS performance. Within the integration scheme, several novel approaches will be evaluated. Thin layers of metals placed on grown SiO2 layers will be used to convert SiO2 to a high-K layer. Chemical vapor deposition of low metal content SiO2 layers will be evaluated for their high dielectric constant, low leakage current, and excellent mobility. Metal gates will be integrated using CVD processing and workfunction modulation will also be explored. The integration knowledge obtained will be evaluated on a novel self-assembled device in which both channel length and channel thickness are lithography independent. In the education plan, several initiatives will be pursued such as: a) organization of a workshop on integration challenges of vertical devices, b) development of a new course (classroom and web-based) in EE at NCSU entitled Beyond Bulk CMOS , c) development of a 30-min video tape on nano-chip technology, and d) development of a nano-chip kit that will include a microscope, Si wafer, discrete MOSFET, an integrated circuit chip, human hair and cross-sectional scanning and transmission electron micrographs of nanoscale feaures. The goal here is to excite young students (K-12) about nanotechnology by providing them with an early exposure to this fast growing field doc8025 none In recent years, countries on every continent have embraced biotechnology and incorporated it into national priorities, policies and planning. The goal of this Career Development project is to develop integrated models of research, teaching and pre-college outreach initiatives addressing issues of ethics, values and equity relating to biotechnology in a worldwide context. Specifically, the research component of this project will identify and compare key ethics, values and equity issues relating to biotechnology in a number of developed and developing countries (India, South Africa, Switzerland and the United States) using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies to identify the ethics, values and equity issues influencing the promotion of or resistance to biotechnology around the world. The education component of this project involves high school teachers in a cross-cultural science education exchange, both to participate in data collection and to share strategies relating to biotechnology education. Findings from the research will be presented at national and international meetings and submitted to journals in a variety of science and social science fields. Informed by results from the cross-cultural research, curricula at the graduate and undergraduate and pre-college levels will be developed. Findings will also be made available to representatives in the host countries, and cooperative arrangements for curricular exchanges developed. A website about the project and its results will be maintained at Portland State University doc8026 none A major objective of the Gordon Conference in Chemical Oceanography is to bring together every two years leading members of the scientific community, along with post doctoral fellows and graduate students, to discuss new and exciting research in an informal setting. In , the Gordon Conference in Chemical Oceanography will discuss research activities in three main areas: (1) The Climate Connection to Chemical and Atmospheric Chemistry Present and Past; (2) Chemical Processes in Marine Sediments; and (3) Analytical Developments and their Applications. The Gordon Conference has become recognized as an important venue to exchange ideas in the interdisciplinary field of marine chemistry and forge new scientific alliances. For this reason the National Science Foundation, along with the Office of Naval Research and the Gordon Research Conference, will co-sponsor the participation of 20 graduate students and 33 session chairs and speakers in the Gordon Conference in Chemical Oceanography doc8027 none Dr. David W. Wright, Department of Chemistry, Duquesne University is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program of the Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, for his work under a Career Award whose principal focus is the development of functional interfaces for inorganic nanostructures. Specifically, the main objective is the use of synthetic combinatorial approaches to design, synthesize and characterize a molecular toolbox of scaffolds for the synthesis of new materials inspired by biomineralization processes. Following the multidisciplinary nature of the research activities, the award also supports development of an integrated laboratory concept for upper-class undergraduates and a practicum for first year graduate students. To the extent that this multidisciplinary research cuts across such fields as material science, the environment, chemistry, biology and nanotechnology, graduate students and post-doctoral associates will be trained in diversified disciplines and sub-disciplines. The integrated laboratory concept and the pedagogical goal to have students think with their heads and do with their hands will provide undergraduate and graduate students with basic skills and a philosophy that will expose them to innovative approaches for independent research doc8028 none LaPlaca The overall objective of the integrative research and education career plan is to utilize basic engineering principles (cell mechanics and electrical interfacing technology) and biological principles (neurobiology) to optimize neuronal culturing techniques for examining neuropathological conditions and create a interdisciplinary approach to solving problems and advancing the field of neuroengineering. The initial goal of the research component is to further develop three-dimensional (3-D) cultures of the signaling cells of the brain (neurons) by manipulating the cellular support matrix that surrounds the neurons. The optimized 3-D cell cultures will be used to determine how external physical stimuli (from the physiologic to the pathologic injury range) are transduced from the support matrix to the cellular organelles. In this controlled system, specific mechanisms of mechanically-initiated cell signals will be sorted out in order to develop cellular thresholds and mechanistically-based pharmacologic interventions. In addition, the introduction of 3-D microelectrodes will be incorporated into the cell cultures for purposes of measuring neuronal activity. Educational efforts will be concurrent with the research activities and stem from the research projects. Undergraduate students will be introduced to problem solving and technological approaches in neurobiological interfacing with microsystems through problem-based learning classes. In addition, the PI will expand a graduate course in bioengineering laboratory principles to modules that can be used for undergraduate research experiences and training of high school science teachers doc8029 none Fantini This project combines (1) a research plan aimed at the development of novel improved techniques for optical spectroscopy and imaging of biological tissues, and (2) a multidisciplinary educational plan that includes hands-on experience and active learning approaches. The objective of this project is to synergistically develop the research and educational components in a mutually beneficial way. The research component of this project consists of the development of new improved methods and instrumentation for biomedical applications of near-infrared spectroscopy and imaging. The research field devoted to the optical study of tissues has recently lead to a number of clinical pilot studies in areas such as optical mammography, optical imaging of the brain, tissue oximetry, and diagnosis of vascular diseases. This project aims at further advancing the field by developing novel experimental and instrumental approaches aimed at (1) improving the spatial resolution of diffuse optical imaging, and (2) performing accurate and quantitative tissue spectroscopy over a wide spectral region covering the visible and near-infrared. Our long-term goal is to exploit these new developments towards novel and more powerful applications of optical spectroscopy and imaging for the biomedical field. One initial application, namely the spectral characterization of tumors in an animal model in vivo, is planned during the course of this five-year project. The proposed research plan is complemented by the educational component of this project, which consists of: (1) the development of a new course on the principles of medical imaging; (2) the design and implementation of new teaching laboratory experiments for two courses on medical optics; (3) the development of short-term research projects suitable for undergraduate summer internships; and (4) the implementation of active and collaborative learning approaches. With regards to the multi-disciplinary nature of this project, our vision is that engineers who have a good scientific knowledge of the targeted application will be most effective at devising innovative instruments to advance the field. Conversely, clinicians who understand the technical capabilities and limitations of the instrumentation they use, will be in a better position to excel doc8030 none CMS Knowledge Discovery in Databases and Data Mining as New tools to Support Research and Educational Advances in Modern Construction Management PI: Lucio Soibelman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The construction industry is seeing an explosive growth in its capabilities to both generate and collect data. Advances in scientific data collection, the introduction of bar codes for almost all-commercial products, new sensor technologies, wireless computing, and new laser scanning technologies, have generated a flood of data. These advances coupled with advances in data storage technology, such as faster, higher capacity, and cheaper storage devices, better database management systems, and data warehousing technology, have increased the availability of computerized construction data. However, in most cases, these data are used only for communication purposes and stored in a file or a database without being analyzed. This project intends to study this increasing amount of available data by applying data mining and knowledge discovery in databases. Knowledge discovery in databases and data mining are technologies that combine techniques from machine learning, artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, statistics, databases and visualization to automatically extract concepts, concepts interrelationships, and patterns of interest from large databases. The objectives of this CAREER program are to: 1) Generate improved methods to obtain novel knowledge from large construction databases developing model-building templates and wizards to guide novice construction knowledge model builders through the process of creating models based on their own data; 2) Improve access to past construction management experience and knowledge by practitioners and students; 3) Use active learning techniques to improve education of students at all levels by developing an educational simulation game with the knowledge generated during this research; and 4) Teach civil and environmental engineering graduate students the process of knowledge generation through the application and development of data mining, machine learning and artificial intelligence tools. Given the importance of the construction industry in the U.S economy and the large amount of money wasted in litigation due to project delays, impractical budgets, and projects that neither satisfy quality requirements nor meet performance expectations, improved management tools are critically needed. This research promises to result in valuable management tools for improving project planning and control, which, if applied to large-scale infrastructure projects, may result in substantial cost savings nationwide. These research benefits can be extended to all sub-fields of construction management doc8031 none This research and education Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project seeks to: (1) advance understanding of how e-commerce and electronic exchanges impact supply chains and to develop decision technologies that will aid companies in effectively utilizing new opportunities provided by e-commence; and (2) better prepare undergraduate and graduate students for today s digital economy and to disseminate new technologies developed through research. The proposed research will develop and investigate techniques to match buyers and sellers in exchanges, analyze dynamic pricing mechanisms that are currently used in or being developed for business-to-business e-commerce, and investigate the impacts of spot markets made possible by e-exchanges on supply chain coordination and performance. It is also planned to implement techniques developed in industrial settings. A closely integrated education effort will develop new undergraduate and graduate courses on e-commerce technologies, and prepare case studies based on real industrial practice doc8032 none Arsenic is a toxic and carcinogenic metalloid that presents a major human health threat. The potentially very high cost of meeting the new U. S. Environmental Protection Agency standard necessitates the development of more cost-effective methods for arsenic removal. The research objective of this CAREER proposal is to develop an innovative arsenic removal process using membrane-enhanced sorption with iron-based materials (IBM) as sorbents. The hypothesis is that membrane-induced concentration polarization effects will concentrate arsenic species in the concentration polarization layer and the higher arsenic concentration will result in more sorption onto an iron-based material. The proposed system could result in significant cost savings for arsenic treatment due to less chemical use, prolonged operation between backwashes, and less wastes for handling and disposal. Experimental and modeling work will be completed in order to select the most suitable membrane and a particulate iron-based material, and a bench-scale pilot system will be optimized for effective arsenic removal and cost analysis. The integrated CAREER educational activities focus on K-12 science teacher training for the State of New Mexico through an integrated teaching-research-curriculum development program. Science teacher training for those from historically under-represented groups in science and engineering or those who teach students from those groups is critically needed in New Mexico. Since science and engineering are best taught to the K-12 science teachers and their students through hands-on, inquiry-based experiences, laboratory and field projects on arsenic measurement and treatment will be implemented as part of the program. In addition, New Mexico Tech has a high percentage of minority undergraduate and graduate students. While all students would benefit form research participation, the CAREER support will provide historically under-represented minority students with critically-needed research opportunities in science and engineering doc8033 none Boahen This project will advance the core of a new emerging area of crossdisciplinary research called neuromorphic engineering, originally pioneered by Carver Mead of CalTech. Neuromorphic engineering builds a new bridge between neuroscience and the development of new microchips which try to replicate the capabilities of the hardware of the brain; it also attempts to improve our understanding both of information processing and of hardware issues (like energy dissipation, precision, and nanoscale operation) in the brain itself. Neuromorphic engineering is still at a very early stage, but it has the potential for revolutionary benefits both to engineering and to neuroscience sometime in the future. This project will focus particularly on reverse-engineering the higher visual system of the brain, using hardware capable of emulating spiking neurons in the brain, and addressing issues such as attention or awareness and consciousness. It will also include substantial work in developing the new educational base required to allow serious progress in this kind of crossdisciplinary work doc8034 none Recent and pending Federal air pollution regulations for particulate matter (PM) require the development of continuous emissions monitors to measure the size and composition of airborne particles. Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is a promising method for real-time measurement of joint size and composition of primarily inorganic airborne aerosol particles in the size range 100 nm - 10 nm. These nanoparticles have been shown to be linked to a series of significant health effects, including decreased lung function, increased incidence of asthma, alterations in lung tissue and structure, increased hospital admissions, and premature death. In LIBS, a high-energy pulsed laser is utilized to create a spark, or breakdown, in the sample media. Recent field trials of this technique on incinerators and thermal treatment units show that LIBS measurements follow trends of emissions well and can capture transient events that are not observed by extractive, integrating type samplers. Due to the possibility of joint particle composition and sizing, LIBS also is attractive forsource apportionment, that is, determination of the source of particular particles in an airshed by compositional fingerprinting. The primary objectives of the proposal are: 1) to understand the joint influences of the particle matrix, of the gas matrix, and of plasma size and temperature on the LIBS measurement, 2) to determine the upper and lower size limits for particle measurements using LIBS, and the variation in optimal laser power, optimum spark size and temperature, and optimum detector gate delay and width for various particle sizes, 3) to model the particle plasma interaction for typical particle compositions, as enabled by the previous two objectives, 4) to perform real-time, accurate, full-spectrum LIBS measurements of ambient aerosol, as enabled by the previous three objectives. The career development plan includes a strong educational component involving both high school students, high school teachers, and college students. It is suggested that some of the attrition among promising young science students is due to a perceived lack of connection between current scientific problems and the basic science classes that dominate high school early college years. The proposed educational plan involves the creation of interactive, web-based teaching tools that use illustrations from familiar atmospheric phenomena such as photochemical smog, the ozone hole, acid rain, and migration of airborne aerosol particles to teach basic science concepts linked to real problems. Undergraduate engineering and science students from the University of Maryland with an interest in teaching would be recruited to assist AP Chemistry and AP Environmental Science teachers from local high schools in curriculum development and computer web programming to develop interactive learning modules for the AP classes. It is hoped that these efforts promote promising high school students to remain motivated to study science, while some college students with a teaching aptitude may have a rewarding experience that stimulates interest in science education. We plan to tie the education plan with the research plan by bringing the LIBS unit to schools to make ambient aerosol measurements as part of an aerosol curriculum module in the 4th and 5th years of the project doc8035 none Billions of dollars are invested world wide for the remediation of soil and groundwater contamination, making it important that appropriate remedial strategies be selected. In situ technologies are proving to be economical and popular remediation alternatives. One such technology is in situ bioremediation. For in situ bioremediation to be used successfully and economically, additional fundamental research is required to allow for more informed field implementation. The CAREER award will provide an opportunity for the continued development of the PI s research goals in the application and evaluation of in situ bioremediation technologies, as part of a balanced and integrated program of research, education, and scholar practitioner partnerships that will broaden and enrich the PI s capabilities and contributions. Research: Intrinsic and engineered in situ bioremediation are made technologically challenging by the physically and chemically heterogeneous nature of the subsurface environment. Indeed, subsurface heterogeneities have been identified as an important factor impacting the success of in situ bioremediation since its first application. Despite this, the understanding of the impact of heterogeneities on in situ biodegradation is still relatively limited. The main hypothesis of this research is that a quantitative framework based on a set of dimensionless coefficients can be de eloped that will capture the effects of the competing interfacial- and bio-kinetic processes and define limits on the successful application of in situ bioremediation. This research proposes to rigorously evaluate this hypothesisby developing such a framework and testing it using a combination of numerical modeling and experimentation. Specifically, a systematic and integrated set of modeling and laboratory experiments will be performed. The proposed research will improve the fundamental understanding of the impact of subsurface heterogeneities on in situ bioremediation and will be a step toward the development of a practical, relatively easy to use tool to help practitioners in the field define when in situ bioremediation will work and, if so, whether an engineered or intrinsic approach is best. Education: The overall goal of the proposed education activities is to work to develop the potential of undergraduate and graduate engineering students. Specifically, the educational efforts are focused into two objectives: (1) to test instructional strategies that enhance the problem solving and decision making skills of students, and (2) to develop and promote research activities and productive scholar practitioner partnerships that provide opportunities for students to develop as researchers and practitioners. To achieve the first objective, a variety of instructional strategies will implemented and tested including: assessment of student learning styles and development of approaches addressing those styles; increased use of cooperative learning via small group discussions featuring controversy, case studies, ethics, and role playing; increased use of experiments, field trips and demonstrations; improved use of technology for Web-based activities and asynchronous learning; and incorporation of research results into classroom teaching. The second objective will be achieved through the continued pursuit of undergraduate research opportunities and improved mentoring of students involved with research. In addition, scholar practitioner partnerships are being developed that will provide interesting industry-based cases for class discussions and projects, and provide an opportunity for student work experience doc8036 none The field of information hiding includes steganography, where a message is concealed in another data stream, and watermarking, where ownership data is included in a digital object to be protected. A third field of information hiding is the field of data embedding, wherein additional information is incorporated in the transmitted data stream by using a key and distorting (slightly) the original object. The embedded information cannot be reconstructed without the key. We propose an entirely new approach to data embedding based upon the method of types and universal receiver design. In our approach, a new data sequence is embedded in the original data stream using the method of types, and the embedded data is extracted using a type-based universal receiver. The choice of type and rate for the embedded data is based upon an analysis of portions of the original data stream. The universal receiver learns the type from the received data alone, and hence, there is no side information as in previous data embedding techniques. The embedding process and the receiver are both data adaptive, so the original data stream can be reconstructed without error. We investigate the fundamental limits of this approach to data embedding by analyzing the characteristics of the original data stream that facilitate data embedding, by studying which techniques allow the highest data rates to be embedded, and by examining the tradeoffs between embedded data rate and errors in the embedded data. This approach to data embedding offers the possibility of expanding the delivered data rate of many existing telecommunications links, both wired and wireless, without changing allocated bandwidths doc8037 none Professor Vladimir Bulovic recently demonstrated a new general method for tuning the energy level structure of organic materials by adjusting the strength of the local electric field inside the organic films with intermolecular dipole-dipole interactions. His group will now apply this solid state solvation (SSS) effect to demonstrate practical, efficient organic optoelectonic devices such as organic LEDs, lasers, and solar cells, and develop a theoretical understanding of this phenomenon. The SSS effect is present in every molecular organic solid, but is most clearly observed in strongly polar materials and composites. It originates from dipole-dipole interactions between neighboring molecules that generate strong local electric fields, stretching the intramolecular bond lengths and deforming charge distributions on molecules. This physical change in the molecular structure is manifested in the modified energy level structure for the molecule, which we can utilize to optimize performance of organic optoelectronic devices. Prof. Bulovic previously demonstrated that local electric fields generated in dipole-dipole interactions between polar organic molecules in a solid thin film can result in a shift of molecular energy levels by more than 0.25 eV, tuning the luminescence of the same molecular species from yellow to orange to red. In this program his group will extend the initial studies and utilize dipole-dipole interactions to tune the carrier injection properties at organic heterojunction interfaces, modify exciton energy transfer rates from the host to the dopant in mixed organic layers, and access triplet energy levels in efficient phosphorescent organic materials. These effects will be optimized to improve luminescence efficiencies of organic LEDs, lower lasing thresholds of organic lasers, and increase photogeneration efficiency of organic solar cells. The theoretical framework quantifying intermolecular interactions in molecular organic thin films is not presently known and will be developed within this program. Findings discovered in the course of this program are fundamental in nature and will have a strong impact on practical applications of molecular organic solids in optoelectronic devices. They will enhance the understanding and the applicability of the vast field of molecular organic materials, influencing treatment of organic thin films, heterojunctions, multilayers, quantum wells, and nano-patterned organic materials. These findings will be incorporated in the graduate Seminar on Organic Optoelectronics that Prof. Vulovic is presently preparing for the MIT graduate curriculum doc8038 none This PECASE award combines multi-disciplinary, multi-scale, research and education programs to study the innovative use of shape-memory alloys (SMAs) as seismic dampers in Civil engineering structures. Shape memory alloys are a class of alloys that display several unique characteristics, including high damping characteristics. The research program ranges from micro-scale studies to full-scale proof-of-concept experimental tests. The research plan has the following tasks: (1) Determine the effects of thermo-mechanical heat treatment on the mechanical properties of shape memory alloys; (2) Develop SMA-based passive dampers for use in seismic resistant design and retrofit; (3) Develop analytical models for SMAs; (4) Conduct full-scale tests of structures with SMA dampers; and (5) Develop code procedures for using shape memory alloy dampers. The integration of research and education is accomplished through a Research Experience for Undergraduates program in the area of smart materials. Students from interdisciplinary fields such as materials science, mechanical engineering, as well as civil engineering will work collaboratively on both experimental and analytical aspects of the applications of smart materials. The research will provide a unique database of experimental results on large-scale shape memory alloy material, which can be used as a basis for the development of a new family of innovative energy dissipating devices. The research will also lead to the development of analytical tools and methodologies to allow practicing engineers to determine potential benefits of a variety of applications of shape memory alloys. Finally, the research will lead to code development and implementation for using shape memory alloys in Civil Engineering structures. In light of the recent economic losses in major earthquakes, this research will lead to innovative, simple, and highly effective methods for seismic rehabilitation of structures doc8039 none Dr. David Tyler of the Department of Chemistry, University of Oregon (Eugene), is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Division of Chemistry to investigate (i) the chemistry of radical species and (ii) the chemistry of molybdenocenes in aqueous media. In the first part the PI will examine radical pathways in mechanisms and in syntheses, that are a dominant theme in organometallic chemistry. Specifically, he will investigate cage effects in radical chemistry and explore the role of the solvent cage so as to achieve a fuller understanding of radical systems. He will employ femtosecond laser pump-probe techniques to probe the short-lived radical cage pairs and to assess cage reactivity. In the second part, the PI will investigate the reactivity of molybdenocenes in aqueous solutions to study the catalysis of vinyl polymerization reactions, nitrile hydrolyses, hydrogenation reactions, ethylene glycol synthesis, and Reppe chemistry. Students working on the projects will gain excellent training in a diverse set of skills such as syntheses, laser spectroscopy and dynamics, photochemistry, among others.They will be well equipped to make significant contributions to research and education. The results of the first part of the project will help improve our overall understanding of radical reactions; results from the second part will have a great impact on future developments of green chemistry doc8040 none P. Mather, University of Connecticut This proposal presents new experimental approaches, combined with carefully prepared model polymers, whose aim is to definitively answer outstanding questions of orientational stability for flows of thermotropic polymers. A third-generation controlled environment microheometer will be designed and assembled to allow direct measurements of both first normal stress differences and various measures of local and global orientation (birefringence, UV dichroism, IR dichroism, and wide-angle x-ray scattering) for the series of model materials is proposed. By examining the influence of TLCP chain flexibility on the linear Leslie-Ericksen tumbling parameter, and the evolution of microscopic (orientational defects) and macroscopic (birefringence) orientations in shear transients, we will significantly improve the understanding of TLCP dynamics, enabling both quantitative comparison with present polydomain models and further molecular modeling developments. An education plan is proposed to combine outreach to local teachers in Connecticut with the development of a new undergraduate chemical engineering elective, Our World of Complex Fluids. In particular, the planned outreach efforts will feature the development of a pilot summer internship program for high school teachers. Polymer Links, in which high school teachers are teamed with chemical engineering faculty to conduct hands-on science projects (4-6 weeks) designed specifically to develop laboratory experiments in polymers and other complex fluids for use in the high school classroom. The complementary undergraduate course will first introduce students to a wide range of industrially relevant complex fluids, including foodstuffs, pharmaceuticals, and plastics along with biological fluids, including synovial fluid and cartilage. Then, this elective will expose students to underlying physical properties, microstructures, and quantitative descriptions of substances ranging from polymeric fluids to colloidal suspensions and from surfactant solutions to glasses doc8041 none PI: Melissa M. Rieger Institution: University of Oklahoma Proposal Number: This CAREER grant combines research and educational initiatives in the area of electrochemical engineering. The research plan focuses on nanomaterials and electrochemistry for use in energy storage and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). Carbon nanotubes offer promise for chemical sensing, chemical processing, electrochemical storage and mechanical manipulation. This research is intended to further the understanding of carbon nanotube electrochemistry and materials science. The PI intends to study the electrochemical behavior of carbon nanotubes for use as intercalation electrodes for lithium batteries and potential chemical sensors. The project will be divided into three main areas: (1) electrode fabrication and carbon nanotube growth, (2) electrochemical evaluation, and (3) surface morphology and chemical modification. Techniques such as cyclic voltammetry and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy will be employed to characterize the chemical and physical structure of the carbon nanotube electrodes. Also, the physical and chemical structure of the electrode materials will be studied and related to the chemical mechanism for intercalation and surface adsorption. Complementing the research plan is the PI s commitment to women in engineering. As faculty adviser for the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), she is working with other women engineers on the primary issue of recruiting and retaining women in engineering. To increase retainment of undergraduate women in engineering, a Women in Engineering Orientation for freshman and a Women in Research Seminar Series will be implemented. Through contacts with SWE, one female engineering student will also be recruited to serve as undergraduate assistant in the PI s lab. The PI is working with teachers and students involved with Oklahoma Network for Excellence in Education (ONE) on education in engineering and science. The plan is to build partnerships between local elementary schools and the College of engineering. These partnerships will be coordinated through SWE and ONE to promote science and engineering principles in surrounding elementary schools doc8042 none Tolbert Electric power production in the 21st Century will see dramatic changes in both the physical infrastructure and the control and information infrastructure. A shift will take place from a relatively few large, concentrated generation centers and the transmission of electricity over mostly a high voltage ac grid to a more diverse and dispersed generation infrastructure that also has a higher percentage of dc transmission lines. This change in the physical infrastructure combined with a more deregulated electric power industry will result in more parties generating power - or distributed generation. The advent of high power electronic modules has also encouraged the use of more dc transmission and made the prospects of interfacing dc power sources such as fuel cells and photovoltaics with an ac power system more easily attainable. A modular, scalable power electronics technology that is ideal for these types of utility applications is the transformerless multilevel converter. The use of a multilevel converter to control the frequency, voltage output, and real and reactive power flow at a dc ac interface provides significant opportunities in the control of distributed power systems and or as an enabling technology for dc energy sources such as photovoltaics, fuel cells, and rectified wind generation. In power engineering, traditional educational curriculum for both undergraduate and graduate students has courses in two distinct areas: power systems and power electronics. However, power electronics are increasingly being integrated into power systems as interfaces with distributed generation sources and for such applications as high voltage dc transmission, active power filters, static var compensation, and large medium voltage motor drives. Research and education in power engineering needs an integrated approach in the study of power systems and power electronics by considering the interactions that these two technologies have on each other and how power quality and reliability can be maintained and even improved in the uncertain future of distributed generation. This proposal calls for new research into the use of multilevel inverters in a distributed generation environment as an enabling technology to more quickly bring about the use of renewable or other efficient energy sources and as a technology that promotes ancillary services such as voltage support, harmonic mitigation, and power factor correction. In addition, an integrated power systems and power electronics curriculum at the undergraduate and graduate level will be developed as part of this proposal. Proven effective teaching techniques such as active learning and cooperative learning will be used so that students can gain a deeper understanding and better mastery of power engineering concepts. These teaching techniques will be used to provide students with a richer learning environment and to help integrate research into undergraduate and graduate classes. University of Tennessee undergraduate and graduate students will be encouraged to participate in national power engineering competitions and to work with researchers at nearby Oak Ridge National Laboratory to gain a higher-level understanding of the issues in the field of power engineering doc8043 none This CAREER award will focus on active material systems for power generation, sensing, actuation, and control. The integrated program will combine research in ionic polymer material systems with undergraduate- and graduate-level curriculum development. The hypothesis of this research is that the chemoelectric and electromechanical transduction properties of perfluourinated ion-exchange membranes can be modeled with a unified theory that models ion transport and water transport. The research objectives are: Develop a unified multidimensional model of chemoelectric and electromechanical energy conversion in ionic polymer materials. Determine the physics that limit the response time of ionic polymer materials in beam and plate structures. Correlate these models with experiments on representative material configurations. The educational component of this CAREER plan is the development of a senior-level undergraduate and first-year graduate course entitled, Analysis and Control of Active Material Systems. The course will be based on a topological description of active material systems and will emphasize the five fundamental aspects: sensing, control, actuation, energy storage, and power flow. The impact of this research is the development of a new class of active materials that seamlessly combine energy storage, sensing, and actuation. These new material systems will have application in motion control, noise and vibration suppression, and the development of autonomous biomimetic systems doc8044 none The PI s research objectives are to define new strategies for improving the production properties of Streptomyces coelicolor in a rational and efficient manner. The PI s work will be one of the first attempts in an academic setting to conduct genomic analyses of natural product production in Streptomyces. Her laboratory is uniquely positioned to carry out such studies, since she has direct experience in both genomics and Streptomyces natural products research. The PI plans to establish DNA microarray technology in-house, which will be a fundamental component of her research program. The PI s initial experiments with the S. coelicolor production system will provide a comprehensive set of genomic data from which new hypotheses about natural product generation can be formulated. These exploratory studies should then suggest how genes and cellular pathways might be engineered to improve the properties of the production strains, and will be followed by experiments that test and further build on these hypotheses. The PI s research will contribute to various educational efforts in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University. The graduate students conducting these studies will gain expertise in genomic methods, and will be able to seed DNA microarray technology in other research settings in their post-graduate careers. In addition, the PI plans to incorporate DNA microarray technology into the undergraduate chemical engineering laboratory course, so that their undergraduate students also gain exposure to these new genomic methods. Finally, she will establish the technology as a resource for interdisciplinary research between biological and non-biological research groups in the department. Thus the presence of DNA microarray technology should foster a wide range of interdisciplinary activities, spanning both research and education objectives, in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Stanford doc8045 none This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award supports research efforts focusing on numerically modeling the relationships between the thermal transients caused by single- and dual-laser machining and the complex stresses that ultimately lead to premature fractures. A probabilistic fracture model will be integrated with the stress calculations to help quantify the time and location of fracture as the laser progresses along the cutting path. The resulting models will then be used with laser machining experiments to develop and optimize a process of simultaneously scoring the surface to help control the path and quality of the final fracture. Another intriguing method that will be studied involves the use of the dual-laser to actively stress the fracture prone region into a state of thermoelastic compression to lower the probability of premature fracture. The research program will also have a strong educational component that will provide high school and undergraduate students with hands-on research experience through focused outreach efforts. All of the research and the evolving laser manufacturing methodology will be integrated with the curricula at three Washington State University campuses using the Washington Higher Education Telecommunications System (WHETS) and video. As a result, the new methodologies will be able to reach a wide variety of individuals by using a blend of kinesthetic and visual methods that include numerous hands-on experiences combined with live and video demonstrations. The overall goals of the project are to develop more efficient laser machining techniques for ceramics while at the same time helping to create and foster a positive image of engineering and manufacturing doc8046 none University of Southern Mississippi Allan Guymon The unique ordering presented by polymerizable lyotropic liquid crystalline (LLC) systems provides a wide variety of structures for a number of potentially important applications. The major obstacle in using polymerized LLC materials, however, is the ability to remain and control this structure throughout the polymerization. Typically, thermodynamically driven phase separation occurs during polymerization, leaving little or no liquid crystalline order. The theme of the research planned by the PI is to use the photopolymerization kinetics as a nanoscopic probe to predict and control the nanostructure of LLC systems. Two fundamental and complementary questions will be addressed using a combination of polymerization of LLC monomers and LLC templated polymerizations. First, what role do order and the degree of order have in influencing the polymerization behavior? The photopolymerization of materials spanning the gamut of LLC phases will be monitored to understand changes that occur during polymerization. Factors that may influence phase behavior and structure control including temperature, LLC phase structure and stability, composition, polymerization time scale, and mobility will be examined. Second, what influence does the polymerization have on structural evolution and the ability to control this structure? Factors influencing phase behavior, phase separation, polymer structure and anisotropy will be examined extensively before, during and after polymerization. Results for both questions will be related forming a complete model of the factors, both kinetic and thermodynamic, governing the ultimate polymer structure. Tangible outcomes of this research are (1) development of a complete understanding of the polymerization and the mechanisms governing ultimate polymer structure and (2) establishment of the principles and methods for the molecular level design of LLC systems with controllable and adjustable nanostructure designed for particular applications. A prevailing theme in this PECASE project will be student education. Extensive involvement of undergraduate and graduate researchers in a discovery learning environment will be emphasized. As a means to attract the best and brightest students to polymer science and engineering, a polymer module for high school chemistry is a primary element of the educational component. In collaboration with Petal High School, a three-week module will be developed that presents the fundamentals, applications, and research opportunities in the field of polymer science. Lecture, demonstration, laboratory, and testing materials will be correlated to emphasize the importance of polymers in everyday life. Virtual labs, web-based materials and hands-on experiments will be incorporated. The curriculum will involve extensive planning and involvement from the school district, the university, and local industry. After successful implementation, the module will be brought to the Hattiesburg and Oak Grove school districts. From these experiences a two-day instruction course will be developed for high school chemistry teachers throughout the state. Special focus will be placed on involvement of districts with high percentages of under-represented groups in science and engineering. The module will also be modified appropriately for introductory chemistry courses at both junior colleges and universities doc8047 none Hasler This project will develop a new class of chips capable of high-thruput learning on the chip itself, implementing new concepts of neural network learning which should allow the chips to learn how to control manufacturing plants or vehicles in a very generalized way, applicable to a wide class of tasks. As a testbed, the project will develop neural network learning algorithms and chips to improve the performance of advanced semiconductor fabrication designs being developed by the PI s collaborators at Georgia Tech. If successful, this work could significantly accelerate the use of learning systems for engineering applications in general. It could eventually allow a substantial improvement in effective computational throughput per chip, above and beyond the improvements possible through Moore s Law (the increase in the physical feature density and speed of chips), for a very broad range of information processing tasks. This project builds on the PI s prior work developing analog computable memories, or analog computing arrays, where instead of storing the analog values to be used by external processors, he uses the memory element itself to perform the computation. These systems are based on arrays of dense floating-gate transistors that provide nonvolatile storage, compute a product between stored weights and inputs, allow for programming that does not affect the computation, and adapt over time based on the information flowing through the chip. In principle, this technology permits the development of general purpose chips with throughput comparable to that of dedicated analog ASIC chips, but with a kind of universal flexibility due to the adaptation of the weights and the universal approximation capabilities of the underlying architectures doc8048 none The overall goal of the research and education program is to design component-based patient monitoring technologies for the home. To realize this goal, the principal investigator (PI) will create a new Medical Component Design Laboratory, which will function as a bi-directional conduit to funnel lessons learned between research projects and a set of closely related engineering courses. Light-based sensors have been chosen as the initial vehicle to demonstrate continuous and unobtrusive monitoring of diverse patient data. The two-pronged program will target (1) the design of smart, plug-and-play software and hardware components that function within a distributed medical information infrastructure, and (2) the development of novel, light-based ambulatory sensors that can acquire meaningful physiological data from a patient. Specific technical objectives include: 1) develop a secure, distributed infrastructure for home-based monitoring systems that utilizes plug-and-play component interoperability standards, 2) build hardware software components that support smart medical device operation in the home, 3) demonstrate secure interaction between medical devices and electronic patient records, 4) create and clinically validate new algorithms for extracting diagnostic parameters from continuous physiological data acquired with wearable, owner-aware, light-based sensors, and 5) apply research methods for using continuous physiological data to determine and predict state of health doc8049 none Ferre-Pikal The PI proposes a five-year career development program that integrates research and educational activities in the area of radio frequency (RF) and microwave electronics. The research plan includes a comprehensive study of sources of 1 f noise phase modulation (PM) noise and amplitude modulation (AM) noise in heterostructure transistor amplifiers and oscillators. The educational plan includes curriculum development in the area of RF and microwave electronics, in addition to participation of undergraduate students in the research activities. A mentoring program to improve retention and recruitment of women in the college of engineering is also included in the educational activities. PM and AM noise in oscillators limit the performance of wireless communication systems, precision navigation systems, and radar systems. In receivers, the PM noise of the local oscillator is very important since it degrades the receiver s sensitivity and the rejection of adjacent channels. In oscillators above 500 MHz, the main source of PM noise is the noise in the electronics (amplifier). In recent years, there have been an emerging number of heterostructure transistors that promise to have a large impact on the electronics of communication and radar systems. These devices have shown improved injection and transport characteristics, and thus an improved performance over homojunction devices. In addition, these devices are potentially low noise. A study of 1 f noise up-conversion into PM and AM noise about the carrier frequency in heterostructure transistor amplifiers and oscillators is proposed. Both heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs) and heterostructure field-effect transistors (HFETs) will be included in the study. The studies will be made in amplifiers and oscillators at carrier frequencies of 500 MHz, 1 GHz, 2 GHz, and 4 GHz. This investigation will identify the advantages and disadvantages of the different technologies and will determine the optimum technology for low noise amplifiers and oscillators in communication systems and radar applications. In addition, transistor parameters affecting the noise up-conversion will be identified and this information will lead to improvements in the design of heterostructure transistors. As part of the educational plan, the PI will enhance the curriculum in the area of high frequency electronics. The PI will develop a two-course sequence in microwave and RF electronics. The University of Wyoming does not have formal courses in this important and growing area. Some of the topics included in this sequence will be transmission line concepts, scattering parameters, matching networks, amplifiers, filters, mixers, and oscillators. The PI will also develop a graduate course on noise in high frequency devices. This course will cover sources of noise in devices such as diodes, mixers, amplifiers, and oscillators. In addition, it will include a discussion of PM and AM noise concepts and measurement systems. This course will make the University of Wyoming one of the very few universities that address the problem of precision frequency control. The educational plan also includes a mentoring program to improve recruitment and retention of women in engineering. The PI will organize an annual reception for women entering the engineering program, as well as informal lunches for electrical engineering female students in which issues concerning the students will be discussed. The PI will also organized visits to middle schools and high schools to talk to female students about the exciting field of engineering doc8050 none The general concept of energy production and the various forms of energy are easy for most students to grasp. In fact, environmental groups have effectively worked with K-12 science programs to make today s children aware of and concerned about the environmental consequences of energy production in the U.S. and around the world. Today s students have also been exposed to energy efficiency and conservation, and can relate to the fact that changes come with economic consequences. Therefore, various engineering concepts can be introduced to students at all levels using a forum that they can visualize, but more importantly, see the practical connection that is often needed for a student to fully comprehend a concept. The PI proposes to integrate his research on thermodynamic and economic modeling into the classroom. The thermodynamic modeling proposed deviates from the traditional approach of maximizing energy efficiency by focusing on optimizing exergy losses and economic efficiency while minimizing the environmental impact. Results from the modeling are used to identify novel concepts and future research areas that will be required to overcome barrier issues that currently limit the optimization of the electric power industry. While the PI is a new PhD, his modeling efforts will draw on over 20 years of experience on advanced power systems accumulated while working for a contract research organization doc8051 none J.M. Parrish & K.A. Stevens The long necked, gigantic sauropod dinosaurs appear to have been the largest animals that ever lived. Because of the large size, great weight, and fragile nature of sauropod fossils, their biology, and specifically their modes of feeding and locomotion, have been difficult to study. In this project, we will use a new computer program, Dinomorph, to digitally animate detailed images of the elements of the skeletons of several sauropods, allowing us to assess the ranges of movement of their necks and limbs, and to examine alternate scenarios for their feeding, posture, and locomotion. We will also compare the bony and soft tissue structures of the shoulder region and neck of representative birds and crocodilians (the two closest living relatives to sauropod dinosaurs) through both dissections and CT scans in order to assess which elements they have in common that might also have been present in the sauropods. We will also study neck mobility and muscle-bone connections in the necks of the two extant long necked mammals: giraffes and camels. These data will be used to help constrain parameters in the model. The resulting estimates of maximum range of motion for sauropods will be useful for understanding how these dinosaurs interacted with their environment and, therefore, what types of impacts they might have had on their environments doc8052 none In a highly disordered medium, light may be localized in small regions of the size on the order of an optical wavelength. So far most experiments on photon localization are performed on the macroscopic level. We propose microscopic studies of photon localization using a near-field scanning optical microscope and a scanning electron microscope. The interplay of light localization and coherent amplification is a fascinating new field of research. We will investigate the effect of optical gain on light diffusion in a random medium. In addition to experimental studies, we will simulate photon localization numerically with a new approach based on the finite-difference time-domain method. The proposed interdisciplinary research will make a significant impact on condensed matter physics, optics, and laser physics. The proposed educational activities include: (1) establishment of a new multidisciplinary course, Applications of Optics in Medicine and Environmental Science; (2) initiation of an outreach program through the World-Wide-Web; (3) involvement of undergraduate students and high school science teachers in leading-edge research work. %%% Light scattering is a common phenomenon, occurring in clouds and human tissue. The behavior of light in disordered media is of great interest not only to physicists, but also to biologists. One extraordinary phenomenon is photon localization: light can be trapped in a micrometer-sized random medium. So far there has been no direct evidence of photon localization. With the recent advance of nanotechnology, we propose to use nanometer-sized tips to directly probe localized photons. In addition to experimental studies, we will calculate photon localization with a new numerical simulation method. By comparing the simulation result with the experimental data, we will gain a deep insight of photon localization and its difference from electron localization. The proposed interdisciplinary research will make a significant impact on condensed matter physics, optics, and laser physics. The proposed educational activities include: (1) creation of a new multidisciplinary course, Applications of Optics in Medicine and Environmental Science; (2) initiation of an outreach program through the World-Wide-Web; (3) involvement of undergraduate students and high school science teachers in leading-edge research work doc8053 none The proposed research focuses on understanding the interaction between control and information, and applying the findings to the problems of control over communication networks, dynamic vision, and autonomous vehicles. These applications have in common the constraint that there is a cost associated with information, which, due to finite resources, limits the available information for control. These applications are examples of hybrid systems. Understanding how the limited information affects the performance achievable by control systems is a primary goal of this research. If we can learn how to systematically quantize the information without loosing stability or performance of the closed loop system, we can devise new methods of analysis, control, and design of hybrid systems, and directly impact many application fields. These new problems require a multidisciplinary approach that relies on the rich experience in control of uncertain systems, adopts the new advances in optimization methods, and merges them with information theory concepts. Preliminary research based on this approach has led to new system theory results for stability and performance guarantee with quantized state information for linear systems. These results are very promising and indicate that vast advances can be made by this study. The mix of motivating applications and new theoretical problems offers a unique educational opportunity to the students that will be involved in the program. The multidisciplinary nature of the research program will provide material and motivation for two courses that will be developed. The first one, intended for undergraduates, concentrates on system design, particularly on the integration of control, communication, and microprocessors systems. The second one focuses on optimization methods for system design, analysis, and control, and presents optimization theory and computational methods as unifying tools across Electrical Engineering disciplines doc8054 none As the device size continues to shrink and integration density continues to increase, the size and spatial confinement effects on heat removal become increasingly important. A rapid emergence of nanotechnology as a nation s high-priority field and renewed interest to thermoelectrics add significance to the research on thermal management of nanoelectronic devices and circuits proposed in this NSF-CAREER project. Beside its fundamental science value, investigation of phonon transport at nanoscale is crucial for future progress in electronic and optoelectronic device technologies. The goals of this project are (i) comprehensive investigation of heat conduction in nanoscale semiconductor structures, devices and circuits; (ii) derivation of new thermal management rules applicable to scaled-down devices; (iii) fundamental study of the effects of phonon confinement and boundary scattering on phonon propagation; and (iv) improvement of reliability of nanoelectronic devices and circuits. The proposed education plan aims at jump-starting a new engineering specialization - Devices and Circuits with emphasis on nanotechnology and nanodevices. It will be accomplished by active course development, increase of the laboratory component of the curriculum, and student involvement in research. The cross-disciplinary nature of the project will allow students to gain a variety of skills required in a contemporary high-tech job market. Investigation of thermal management of nanodevices will be carried out in a newly established Nanoelectronic Materials and Device Laboratory. The outcome of this research will add to the core knowledge of nanostructures, phonon transport, and quantum confinement. It will lay down the foundation of the novel enabling technology utilizing active phonon engineering doc8055 none Soil improvement is a central issue to many of today s projects where land is scarce, good quality materials are in short supply, and developed sites are often congested or contaminated. Among the many in situ techniques available to improve soils, permeation grouting is historically the most commonly used in geotechnical engineering. Traditionally, applications of permeation grouting involve (a) reducing or controlling seepage through geologic formations and structures and (b) strengthening soil. More recently, the injection of cementitious grouts into soil is used to construct in situ barriers to contain contaminated leachate and to encapsulate hazardous waste. Research will focus on cement grouts (both Portland cement-based and slag cement-based varieties of primarily microfine cement and to a lesser extent ordinary cement) because they are perhaps the most widely used due to their economic feasibility, permanence, and inert characteristics. The problem is that often cement grout cannot be successfully injected, although the grout exhibits appropriate rheological properties and sufficiently small particles by traditional filter criteria. Consequently, the issue is why the grout was unable to be injected as predicted. One of the primary thrusts of the research is to distinguish the effects of mechanical filtration, chemical filtration, rheology, and applied gradient on the injectability of cement grout. These factors are interrelated (some very strongly) and governed by a number of variables. An extensive series of parametric and phenomenological studies at both the microscopic and macroscopic level are undertaken to accomplish this objective. Essential concepts from the fields of cement chemistry and transport processes will be synthesized to better understand and interrelate the early age microstructure of a cement grout to its injectability and deposition in the voids of a soil. Emphasis is placed on the role of applied gradients on the flocculation behavior of the grout and the resulting morphology of the grout soil matrix. Cement grouts that exhibit significantly different chemical and rheological behavior will be injected into one-dimensional and three-dimensional sand-filled columns . During the injection process, pressures will be monitored, grout samples will be collected from various sampling locations along the length of the column, and effluents will be collected. Immediately subsequent to grouting, the cement content of the grouted soils will be assessed to quantify the mass of cement particles deposited in the soil matrix. The improvement in the engineering properties of permeability and strength will be determined for hardened grouted soil samples. The pore morphology of the grouted soil will be studied to correlate the microstructural behavior of a grout in response to pressure gradients applied during the injection process with the macrostructural behavior of soil improvement. Microscopy of both wet grout and hardened grouted soils will be conducted. The morphology of the grouted pores will strongly govern the resulting permeability of the soil and the extent or degree of improvement will be influenced by (a) the presence of preferential flow paths, (b) pore interconnectivity, (c) pore size and distribution, and (d) interfacial pores that may be attributed to the wettability of different pore fluids and ion concentrations relative to the grout. Possible ways to improve injectability such as by mix additives, mixing sequence, preconditioning the soil, or injecting under deaired conditions will be explored. The results from the variety of injection experiments will be used in the development of models to reasonably predict injectability and the extent of permeation grouting by knowledge of both the grout and soil properties doc8056 none Micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) have grown from scientific speculation to commercial success. Still, a number of technical challenges remain which cannot be addressed by the private sector. One of these challenges is the integration of the power supply into the MEMS device. It is a further challenge to build the power source, using only the processing technology that was used to build the micromechanical elements and the electronic elements of the device. We address the technical issue of obtaining energy from the environment to power MEMS devices, rather than powering the device through external batteries or power supplies. Examples from horology provide inspiration for scavenging both mechanical motion and thermal energy. While a number of energy scavenging schemes based on capturing vibration have been proposed, we intend to take advantage of the high potential energy densities of thermal systems. We will develop scaling and design methods for thermally scavenged systems, and demonstrate a mechanical micromachine actuated by changes in ambient temperature. This technology may be used in the future development of autonomous microrobots or microsatellites. A problem facing higher education and high technology industry is the dearth of students and graduates. This is an especially acute problem for interdisciplinary fields such as MEMS. Upper-division students require cross-disciplinary education to become skilled contributors to MEMS research, and there are not enough upper-division students. We therefore must attract more students into the technical fields. The NSF CAREER program leverages on existing curriculum development efforts by turning curriculum development into science engineering outreach. Project-based courses will have their final presentations in secondary schools, where high school students will have the opportunity to evaluate engineering projects. Similarly, we will develop sections of project-based engineering courses targeted for science teachers, with the objective of integrating teachers into engineering development teams. New courses will be modularized, so that topics can be offered as short courses or tutorials, and published with distance education technology. NSF funding will enable students to actually fabricate and test the designs their teams have designed and simulated through the NNUN or other multi-user foundries. The research results, and the research program needs, are intertwined with the educational development. Research findings and educational assessments will be used to revise and refine curriculum development and teaching methods. Similarly, project ideas for the courses will be drawn from the research problems. All of these efforts are leveraged through existing programs designed for outreach to disadvantaged and under-represented groups in the sciences at the University of New Mexico and in New Mexico doc8057 none This proposal outlines an empirical research and teaching agenda for analyzing the economics of several dynamic phenomena, relevant to the study of Industrial Organization. The three research projects and educational activities studies are intended to improve our understanding of the specific industries involved and, more broadly, to help assess the relevance of a number of economic theories. The first two projects construct and estimate a dynamic model of consumer choice in order to study the effects of temporary prices reductions ( sales ) and coupons, respectively. The third model studies brand introduction using a multi-agent model of industry dynamics. The educational component of this project proposes several activities that connect to the research projects. The first project focuses on temporal price reductions, so called sales , which are a common practice in many industries. There are several potential explanations of sales, but here the focus is on intertemporal price discrimination. More specifically, the PI models the consumer s dynamic problem when she has an expected stream of future demands, is able to store a consumption good, at a cost, and faces price movements. In this model, the consumer will purchase the product either because she wants to consume in the current period or because she believes the difference between the current price and the expected future price is lower than the cost of storing the inventory. To the extent that the latter effect is important, it has implications for the use of demand elasticities, computed from a static demand model, in merger analysis, valuation of new goods, as well as other policy relevant issues. The PI uses data on the purchases of 1,000 households of 24 products over 104 weeks, in order to examine correlations implied by the model and to estimate the model directly. The focus of the second project is coupons, which economists generally consider as a textbook example of a price discrimination tool. In a recent paper Nevo and Wolfram ( ) suggest that in order to fully understand the economics of coupons, a model richer than the standard static monopoly theory is needed. They also find some evidence that the patterns of couponing are consistent with: (1) models of price discrimination in oligopoly settings, which suggest that coupons are mainly used to induce switching from competing brands, and (2) the use of coupons to promote repurchase. In order to examine these issues further, the PI constructs a dynamic model of consumer choice allowing for brand loyalty. The model is estimated using a combination of the coupon data used in Nevo and Wolfram ( ) and the household purchase data described in the first project. The third project focuses on firm dynamics. In previous work the PI studied price competition and mergers in the ready-to-eat cereal industry (Nevo, a, b) using static models of competition, taking as given the brands offered by the firms. However, brand introduction is an important dimension in this industry, as well as in other industries. In this project the PI analyzes a multi-agent dynamic model, in which firms can introduce new brands, discontinue old brands and impact the perceived quality of their existing brands by investing. The investment, which can be thought of as advertising, yields a random outcome. The PI examines the Markov Perfect equilibrium of the model. The predictions of the model, under different assumptions, can be compared to actual brand introduction in order to better understand the brand introduction process. Furthermore, the model can be used to simulate the industry structure under different scenarios. The latter is particularly important to anti-trust policy in an era when innovation, rather than price fixing, seems to be the focus. In terms of education, the PI develops a graduate curriculum and student workshop, both of which will train students in the above methods, and more broadly assist them in writing a thesis in industrial organization. Finally, the proposal demonstrates how the proposed research can also feed into teaching and advising at the undergraduate level doc8058 none Livesay This CAREER project is to establish a productive, integrated research and educational program with a focus on the multi-scale mechanics of soft tissues. One promising approach for the analysis of materials possessing microstructure is homogenization, involving the analysis of a repeating microstructural unit coupled to a macroscopic level analysis. However, the applicability of this strategy to biologic soft tissues is currently limited, since it has thus far been restricted to linear elastic media. Further research and development are needed to extend the homogenization approach for anisotropic and non-homogeneous media. This project will develop a research and educational program on the multi-scale mechanics of soft tissues, through the following specific objectives: 1. Implement and optimize a homogenization approach for computational analysis of multi-scale mechanics under finite deformation. 2. Perform experimental validation of the homogenization approach using synthetic tissues created with known microstructure. 3. Extend the homogenization approach for the analysis of synthetic tissues possessing both directional and spatial variation in material properties. 4. Determine the multi-scale mechanical environment within biological soft tissue under simple loading. 5. Integrate active learning experiences into existing undergraduate and new graduate Biomedical Engineering courses. The fundamental research will develop critically important tools for the analysis of the multi-scale mechanics of biological soft tissues. The complementary educational improvements will increase student learning retention and encourage further study of multi-scale mechanics, thus enhancing the quality of biomechanics education and research doc8059 none This project will test the recruitment limitation hypothesis in unprecedented detail and at both large spatial scales (reefs 100 s of meters in diameter) and large temporal scales (an entire generation). Preliminary work has shown that the bicolor damselfish (Stegastes partitus, Pomacentridae), having a generation time of about 3 years, is a superb species for this test, and that the Caribbean Marine Research Center at Lee Stocking Island, Bahamas, is an ideal study area. The recruitment limitation hypothesis will be tested in two ways: (1) by long-term monitoring of demographic rates at four large reefs that naturally undergo vastly different rates of larval settlement, and (2) by experimental manipulations of rates of larval settlement to these sites. Sites with low settlement-either natural or experimentally induced-should corroborate the hypothesis, as suggested by baseline demographic monitoring over the past 2 years. Detailed demographic data will be used to construct empirically based size-structured open-population models. Elasticity analysis of these models will determine the relative importance of different demographic rates in driving changes in local population size. The combined observational-experimental and empirical-theoretical approach of this study will provide a novel large-scale test of the recruitment limitation hypothesis for marine fish. Additionally, this project may provide insight on the effects of human-induced global climate change on coral reefs. Baseline demographic monitoring has detected a region-wide 3-year decline in bicolor damselfish populations correlated with the bleaching and death of the corals they inhabit. This project will determine whether this population decline is a long-term, multi-generation trend doc8060 none The research objective of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project is to develop a theory of sequencing, routing, and admission control, based on fluid relaxations. The techniques developed in this project, and the algorithms derived from them will have the potential to improve the practical performance of several real-life systems. This research will address a variety of questions such as: (1) How should a resource optimally allocate its effort to competing jobs? (2)How do the presence of additional physical and technological constraints affect system performance? (3)What are the methodological connections between deterministic and stochastic scheduling models? (4) What effect does the stochastic nature of the system parameters have on the optimal policy? The results of this research will provide insight into how scheduling interacts with other operational and strategic decisions such as due-date setting and pricing. The work will also contribute to the development of dynamic optimization, and to our understanding of continuous linear programming problems. The main objective of the education plan is the introduction of the exciting recent developments in the area of scheduling in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum. To that end, two courses on scheduling and its applications will be developed. The first course will be at the undergraduate level and will serve as an introduction to scheduling problems that arise in production planning. This course will cover basic concepts in deterministic and stochastic scheduling, and will conclude with an examination of the role of scheduling in other areas, including logistics and supply chain management. The second course will cover algorithmic and structural results in deterministic and stochastic scheduling, with an emphasis on recent research. Graduate students will have an opportunity to read and present research papers, participate in problem sessions, and or work on a research problem. In addition to the development of new courses, the education component of this plan will result in the involvement of undergraduates in research, and in outreach activities through the dissemination of expository articles. Deterministic and stochastic scheduling models have been successfully used to analyze and control complex systems in which several classes of jobs compete for a limited number of shared resources. Examples include manufacturing systems that produce different types of products, shared computer systems, and telecommunications systems where heterogeneous traffic types (e.g., email, file transfers, video) share common resources (e.g., buses in a local area network, routers). In spite of the similarities in the motivating problems, the methods used in analyzing deterministic scheduling models have little in common with those of the stochastic scheduling literature. The central aim of this career development project is to develop a unified approach to analyze both deterministic and stochastic scheduling models arising in diverse application domains doc8061 none Damiano A combined theoretical and experimental study of the macromolecular glycocalyx surface layer on the luminal side of capillary endothelial cells is planned. Using brightfield and fluorescence microscopy, mechanical and electrostatic deformations of the glycocalyx will be observed in vivo in order to obtain estimates of the permeability properties and fixed-charged density of the layer. Combined with these experiments, a multi-dimensional mechano-electrochemical model of the glycocalyx will be developed using continuum mixture theory. These investigations are aimed at providing a quantitative theoretical framework to explore the biophysical role of this structure in such diverse and important processes as immune response, cell adhesion, mass transport, and mechanotransduction of flow. In addition, an integrated educational plan will be implemented to facilitate students deep and thorough understanding of engineering fundamentals, in the areas of fluid dynamics, continuum mechanics, and biomechanics, by fostering active learning through the development of interactive instructional Mathematica notebook modules doc8062 none This project provides 20 scholarships to talented, low- income students pursuing associate degrees in computer science, computer information systems, engineering, or mathematics. Special consideration is given to women, ethnic & racial minorities and persons with disabilities. The implementation and management plan for this project is clear and effective, strengthened by its leadership and participation of faculty and staff from Women s Programs and Services for Students with Disabilities. This group has developed a unique plan for individualized support and thorough planning for each scholarship recipient, including the development of an Individualized Success Plan, a Faculty Mentor Program and opportunities for internships with local employers. Strong collaborations with private business and industry are an important component of the program doc8063 none Solna The investigator analyzes how a propagating wave pulse behave in a medium with rough variations. Predicting the evolution of the wave pulse from information about the `roughness of the medium is a problem of deep mathematical and practical interest, as is the inverse problem of deducing information about the medium from measurements of a transmitted pulse. Most often a detailed description of the (fine scale) variations of the medium is not possible, only a description of their statistical character. Hence, the investigator considers the fine scale medium variations as a realization of a stochastic process. This entails analysis of differential equations with randomly varying coefficients. The project has three specific objectives: First, obtain a characterization of the transformation of sound pulses propagating in a medium with a continuum of length scales, a medium defined in terms of a random fractal. Second, extend and use theory about the transformation of a wave pulse in some specific inverse problems, in particular, high contrast seismic imaging and time reversal mirrors. Third, derive strict bounds for how an electromagnetic pulse can be affected by the medium heterogeneity without knowing the details of these variations. The main question the investigator addresses is: How does a propagating wave behave in a medium that varies when the variations are not small? For instance, when a laser beam propagates through the turbulent atmosphere how is it affected by intense, turbulent, variations in the local speed of propagation? When such medium variations are smooth, say with a constant speed of propagation, the problem is well understood. For rough medium variations, as in the above example, the interaction of a wave pulse with the medium heterogeneities is a fundamental yet largely open question. This problem, predicting the evolution of signal or wave pulse that propagates in a rough medium, is of deep mathematical and practical interest. In addition to wave propagation in the turbulent atmosphere there are many other applications. In reflection seismology the earth s crust is probed with a wave pulse and the reflected pulses are used to infer knowledge about macroscale variations in the medium. It is then important to know how the rough microscale variations in the medium affect the probing pulse. Remote sensing, ocean acoustics, and medical imaging provide similar examples. In communication systems, it is important to be able to describe how medium imperfections and variations affect the propagating signal. In the theory of composite materials, it is important to optimally construct a complex material so that it has some desired propagation properties doc8064 none Applications utilizing microelectromechanical system (MEMS) components are becoming increasingly more numerous and important. A hallmark of MEMS is that unlike merely miniaturizing existing designs and ideas, it provides an innovative technology which will enable experiments in biology, nanotechnology, materials, and physics which have not been previously achievable. However, to make these devices robust, and improve on the sensitivity of existing sensors, new ideas must be employed in sensor design, as well as in calibration, test and characterization, and fabrication. The research goals of this proposal are to design, build, and test dynamic MEMS sensors for mass (chemical) and pressure which possess high sensitivity due to unique dynamic effects; to extend the understanding of parametric oscillators to coupled systems, and develop tunable filter applications. An integrated educational program is also proposed that uses the aforementioned sensors in internet-based experiments geared toward eighth grade students, and uses the above sensors as demonstration and teaching modules in the newly formed MEMS undergraduate curriculum at UCSB. One important class of devices, on which this proposal is based, is dynamic MEMS. Vibratory sensors can often provide higher sensitivity than that shown with static, or quasi-static devices. In this proposal, the PI plans to achieve important results in fundamental understanding of the dynamics of microsystems. Unique designs for resonant MEMS having applications in bio (chemical) sensors, tunable mechanical filters, switches, and pressure sensors are proposed, as well as the fundamental science which enables them. As well as studying single oscillators, studying systems of coupled oscillators will lead to a deeper understanding of electrostatic and mechanical coupling between nearby elements, which also has widespread benefit. MEMS and Nanoelectromechanical Systems (NEMS) provide a unique opportunity to introduce people to science at varying degrees of complexity. Using the internet (www), interactive modules are proposed which aim to interest potential young scientists about the future in micro-engineering. Web modules also provide a non-gender specific way of presenting interesting science to students. The novelty of MEMS devices can draw and maintain the interest of young people, and illustrate fundamental physics principles, as well as give students an idea about what makes engineering an exciting career choice. Through existing programs at UCSB, a middle school teacher will spend part of the summer in the PI s research lab developing the web-based experiments, and learning the necessary skills to teach the material in the classroom. Dynamic MEMS provide an engaging educational medium, as well as tools which will lead to important advances in sensing, filters, and data storage. This proposal aims to address some of the fundamental issues in micro-sensor development, as well as use the simplicity and novelty of micro-devices to encourage middle school students to pursue exciting areas of science doc8065 none The objective of this effort is to provide a rigorous understanding of atmospheric-pressure glow discharges (APGD). This new class of plasmas can produce large amounts of active chemical species near room temperature and atmospheric pressure and has potential to revolutionize plasma-based processing technologies. The research activities have the following components: (1) a computationally fast, one-dimensional physical model for prediction of APGD axial structure; (2) a two-dimensional model for investigating bulk flow plasma dynamics interactions; (3) analysis of the electron energy distribution function using a homogeneous, time-dependent electron Boltzman solver; (4) a bench-scale APGD experiment to assist in model validation and to explore the discharge phenomena, including visual characterization of discharge modes to establish stability boundaries as a function of discharge geometry and operating parameters, and electrical characterization of the discharge; and (5) investigation of a novel APGD-based silicon oxidation process with potential application in ultrathin integrated circuit gate-oxide formation doc8066 none 00- Preston Stanford Underdetermination, Real Antirealism, and a New Induction on the History of Science Existing challenges to Scientific Realism [the position that our scientific theories should be understood as (at least approximately) true descriptions of the inaccessible domains of nature] have made extensive use of either the claim of the Underdetermination of Theories by Evidence (i.e. that our evidence is invariably insufficient to favor existing theories over alternative possibilities equally well confirmed by that very evidence) or of the Pessimistic Induction over the many past scientific theories that have turned out to be false despite exhibiting the same evidential and practical virtues that we might take to confirm present theories. Dr. Stanford proposes to challenge the framework of the existing debate and to pursue a new defense of Antirealism by developing the following line of argument in a series of connected papers forming the core of a future book. First, Dr. Stanford argues that it is a mistake for existing discussions of underdetermination to focus almost exclusively on the existence and status of putative empirical equivalents to existing theories: popular algorithms for generating such equivalents simply trade in the problem of underdetermination for familiar philosophical chestnuts (in particular, Cartesian skepticism or the problem of spurious confirmation), while the few convincing examples of empirical equivalents simply will not support the intoxicating morals that champions of underdetermination have hoped to draw. Stanford argues, however, that Realism is no less threatened by the prospect of empirically inequivalent hypotheses that are nonetheless equally well-confirmed by all the actual evidence we have in hand as are existing theories, so long as such a transient underdetermination predicament recurs for each theory and body of evidence we consider. Furthermore, he appeals to a New Induction on the History of Science to argue that this predicament of recurrent, transient underdetermination is our own. Rather than simply pointing to the falsity of past successful theories, the New Induction points out that we have, throughout the history of scientific inquiry and in virtually every scientific field, repeatedly occupied an epistemic position in which we could conceive of only one or a few theories that were well-confirmed by the available evidence, while subsequent inquiry has routinely revealed the existence of further theories just as well confirmed by the totality of evidence then available as were those we accepted on the strength of that very evidence. He defends this New Induction against potential objections and argue that the distinctively holist claim of underdetermination influential in the science studies literature is best seen as supporting a version of this same New Induction. Finally, Dr. Stanford defends both the New Induction and the original Pessimistic Induction against the recently influential Realist reading of the history of science which finds the true features or aspects of past theories to be those responsible for their success, arguing in reply that this match is virtually guaranteed by the fact that the Realist appeals to a common point of reference (our current theoretical beliefs) in judging both what a past successful theory got right and what features were responsible for its success doc8067 none The proposed research will investigate stereoselective cycloadditions of chiral allenamides and ynamides. Applications of chiral allenamides to the total synthesis of natural products in the castanospermine family and of chiral ynamides to the natural products, the perhydrohistrionicotoxins, will be explored. The educational component of this plan will introduce a group concept into the undergraduate organic chemistry lab course. Students will be divided into teams where each student makes one structural analog of a common synthetic sequence of 3-4 steps. With this CAREER award, the Organic Synthesis Program is supporting the research of Professor Richard P. Hsung of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Professor Hsung s research will explore the chemistry of new types of organic molecules, the allenamides and ynamides, as building blocks to form more complex cyclic compounds. These studies are relevant to the synthesis of pharmaceuticals and agricultural chemicals. The teaching plan will introduce a team concept into the undergraduate organic chemistry lab course, wherein teams of students will synthesize several structurally similar compounds using similar sequences of synthetic reactions doc8068 none PI: Jorge G. Zornberg Institution: University of Colorado at Boulder : The overall objective of this PECASE initiative is to investigate the mechanisms governing the performance of alternative, evapotranspirative cover systems for waste containment applications while, at the same time, to develop alternative educational modules that will expose a wide range of populations (pre-, post-, and college students) to the challenges of environmental geotechnics. It is expected that this integrated research and education initiative will provide significant contributions through advancements in: (1) basic understanding of complex unsaturated flow processes, (2) combined centrifuge and numerical modeling, (3) design of waste cover systems in arid and semi-arid environments, (4) integration of research into engineering education, (5) teaching of design and of environmental geotechnics, and (6) outreaching strategies for minority high school students and the profession. Even though field monitoring programs and numerical simulations have provided invaluable insight into the behavior of earthen cover systems, the important task of validating predictive numerical tools remains, at best, incomplete. The research plan herein is then to use centrifuge modeling as an additional source of geotechnical data in order to gain further understanding into the complex unsaturated processes that take place in evapotranspirative covers. Centrifuge modeling will allow systematic control of the relevant variables, combination of weather and soil conditions critical for design, and significant reduction in the time needed for acquisition of experimental data. Of major relevance is the fact that, instead of generic soils, actual soils from two of the nation s most significant hazardous waste sites (California s OII Superfund Landfill and Colorado s Rocky Mountain Arsenal) will be used in the centrifuge models. These two sites are, respectively, currently implementing and seeking implementation of evapotranspirative cover systems. Rather than attempting to replicate actual prototype covers in the centrifuge, this research pursues validation and calibration of analytical tools used in cover analysis. Consequently, comprehensive unsaturated flow numerical simulations of the centrifuge experiments will be undertaken, followed by a careful parametric evaluation of generic prototype covers. This investigation will capitalize on the PI s past experience as centrifuge modeler and as designer and numerical modeler of the evapotranspirative cover at the OII Superfund site. Some of the major issues to be investigated through combined centrifuge and numerical modeling include the proper representation of surface flux boundary conditions, the sensitivity of the cover behavior to hysteresis in soil hydraulic properties, and the appropriate selection of the lower boundary condition in numerical simulations. Two educational modules, which are significantly related to and draw major strength from the research plan, will be developed as part of the education plan. The very same two modules will be used to achieve four specific engineering educational goals relevant to different populations. This effort will attempt to bring the site to the campus by developing: (i) a Multimedia Case History Series, and (ii) a Field Alternative Cover Demonstration. These educational modules will be used to address the needs for: (1) enhanced design experience for civil engineering undergraduate students, (2) curriculum development in environmental geotechnics for graduate students, (3) effective recruitment of under-represented minority high school students into engineering programs, and (4) active outreach to the professional community, both locally and internationally. Through implementation of alternative, though still structured programs, the education plan will not only promote current advances in geoenvironmental engin doc8069 none The PI s proposed activities involve the creation of new algorithms and software for simulating the interactions of large biological molecules. The algorithms will overcome the difficulties associated with the wide range of length and time scales inherent in such systems. The resulting software will have different levels of sophistication and computational intensity, ranging from serious scientific research to simple illustrations suitable for high school students. It will be useful for researchers trying to understand biomolecular interactions at the atomic level and to predict rates and equilibria of interactions. It also will be useful for high school, undergraduate, and graduate students seeking to understand these interactions. In order to bring the fruits of the research into the classroom, a user-friendly interface will be developed for the software mentioned above. This will allow students to choose diverse biological molecules and experiment with interactions among them. The educational activities will also proceed along three fronts - graduate, undergraduate, and high school. In the near future, the PI will develop a graduate-level course, which will explore the molecular basis for transport and thermodynamic phenomena in biological systems doc8070 none This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project plans to put design optimization and product and process simulation into the core of polymer composites processing research. The focus on the integration of the fundamentals of materials processing and design via a new, comprehensive framework is promising for both manufacturing education and product realization in polymer composites processing. Today s successful engineering organizations continue to make progress towards incorporating manufacturing demands during a product s design. It is unfortunate, however, that at a time when computer simulation has revolutionized the way new products emerge, designers continue to employ ad-hoc methods to ensure that a product accommodates its manufacturing process and vice versa. This research seeks a new approach that places product specifications and materials processing requirements on a common basis where product and process simulation and multidisciplinary design optimization methods are central. The focus is on short fiber reinforced thermoplastic products manufactured by the injection molding process where a product s structural performance is defined by it s fiber orientation, that is itself determined during production. Optimal designs will be computed based on mold filling simulation, fiber orientation prediction, and structural evaluation. Large-scale industrial products common to automotive design are to be considered. Additionally, this research recognizes the increased design emphasis in today s undergraduate engineering curriculum and will, therefore, study decision making through the merging of multidisciplinary design into the educational pedagogy. Educational activities include undergraduate and graduate instruction on multidisciplinary design, integration of computational design into student competitions, and an effort to make K-12 teachers more familiar with modern design methodologies doc8071 none Oleg Prezhdo of the University of Washington is supported by a CAREER grant from the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to develop and employ nonadiabatic molecular dynamics to study differences in chemical reactivity between gas- and solution-phase due to nonradiative relaxation. Applications include the photoisomerization and cyclization of cis-stilbene, and the photochemistry of chlorine dioxide relevant to stratospheric ozone depletion. As part of his education plan, Prezhdo will equip undergraduate physical chemistry courses with lecture templates and computational exercises in statistical mechanics, develop a graduate-level special topics class, and collaborate with Eastern European universities on distance learning. Molecular mechanisms of energy flow associated with chemical events in solution will be investigated by theoretical methods developed to treat condensed phase simulations. These studies will reveal the importance of quantum dynamical effects in processes of relevance to materials and biochemistry. This research is closely aligned with complementary educational activities including course development and international cooperation doc8072 none PI proposes to apply directed evolution to a novel direction of research: the improvement of viral gene delivery vehicles for gene therapy. In addition to generating vectors with enhanced performance, their approach may yield further insights into the biology of retroviruses. They plan develop both the lecture and laboratory course curriculum of the biotechnology focus of the undergraduate chemical engineering major to reflect the growing importance of diversity and directed evolution. In addition, they will create a graduate elective course in bioengineering that covers combinatorial chemistry and directed evolution, as well as the thematically related area of bioinformatics. Developing this curriculum would be part of our overall goal to train graduate and undergraduate students in the methods and practice of research. Their specific objectives of this proposal are: 1) To determine whether evolution of retroviral proteins can improve the efficiency and ease of production of retroviral vectors 2) To examine if evolution of non-coding retroviral regions can overcome problems associated with safety and stability of expression after gene delivery 3) To develop the undergraduate biotechnology option lecture and laboratory course material to cover the importance of diversity in bioengineering and biotechnology 4) To develop a graduate elective course that integrates the topics of bioinformatics, biodiversity, combinatorial chemistry, and directed evolution doc8073 none This is a proposal to design, build, and evaluate photonic crystal nanophotonic waveguide components and optical systems. The broad goals of this program are to develop a practical nanophotonic technology, and to incorporate knowledge of the advancements in photonics technology into the classroom. There has been a great deal of research into photonic bandgap structures in the last few years. All of this work, however, has been done either as basic research on the optical properties of different dielectric lattices or on single photonic components. My research at USC contains several programs in which the goals are to develop individual nanophotonic devices or to engineer a particular feature of one of these devices. This proposal is intended to build on work ongoing in those programs and to integrate the results into an integrated optical communication technology. Waveguides, of course, are important in their own right, but they are also one of the key elements necessary to combine devices to form functional optical circuits. In doing this, care must be taken to minimize coupling and insertion losses as well. There are several key questions to be investigated in this program. What is the origin of photonic crystal waveguide loss? How do we design efficient guiding in thin patterned films? What are the trade-offs between one-dimensional and two-dimensional periodic guiding structures? How do we go from single devices to an integrated optics technology using photonic crystals? What modeling algorithms can handle these structures efficiently, and are there system level modeling algorithms possible doc8074 none Re-engineering of Construction Processes and Education for Sustainable Development. This reserch focuses on sustainable construction and entails developing models and methods for defining and quantifying the environmental effects of specific construction processes (excavation, cast-in-place concrete, structural steel erection, structural wood, and demolition). The impacts will be traced through the related life-cycles and supply chains for material and energy inputs, water comsumption, wastewater generation, hazardous and non-hazardous waste generation, heavy metal discharges, and greenhouse gas as well as particulate matter emissions. Standardized life-cycle assessment methods will be coupled with existing construction process models. This information augmented with private and social cost estimates of the impacts will serve to identify environmentally preferable or improved construction processes. The broader implications of the research are the promise of global environmental improvements in construction, one of the largest and most important sectors or the US economy. The research plan complements an innovative education plan involving explicit integration of research results into existing courses and professional education, case studies, a role-playing game, workshops and seminars for private sector partners, special institutional undergraduate and minority-owned construction business programs and high school doc8075 none This Career Development Plan is a project of career-launching activities focused on the synergistic integration of structural health monitoring (SHM) and smart damping technologies to provide more reliable structures that respond better to natural hazards and are less-costly to maintain. Effective prioritization of post-disaster actions, as well as long-term safety monitoring, requires that the health of civil structures be well characterized. Yet, global SHM methods are largely ineffective in detecting local damage, whereas local methods require a cost-prohibitive number of sensors to monitor large civil structures. The thrust of this project is an innovative approach using variable stiffness and damping devices (VSDDs) to cause incremental changes in structural characteristics, multiplying the available information without adding additional sensors-a result not readily accomplished in a conventional structure. VSDDs can also effect significant vibration mitigation; thus, through this integration, VSDDs can serve multiple purposes, as well as strengthen their performance through more accurate updated models of structural characteristics. An outreach program to enthuse and interest future engineers will be developed using hands-on demonstrations and structural design competitions centered around small-scale seismic simulator exhibitions in K-12 classrooms. Further, animations and interactive virtual experiments will be designed using state-of-the-art programming languages like JAVA and MATLAB to demonstrate key concepts in structural dynamics, monitoring and control in a manner not possible with static media such as paper or chalkboard. This project will significantly impact the PI-challenging him to grow and mature as a professor, to learn and to mentor. Further, the project will facilitate the development of the next generation of intelligent civil engineering structures doc8076 none Objectives: The PI s research goal is to combine cultured living cells with microfluidic devices in order to 1) recreate, in vitro, the size range and variety of interactions between the cell and its environment as found in vivo, and 2) simultaneously analyze large numbers of cells and culture conditions at a single-cell level. As described in detail later, the long-term focus will be to answer central neurobiology questions which are unapproachable with present cell culture technology because they require the interrogation of large numbers of single cells and the microengineering of their environment. His educational objective is to teach instrumentation and novel technologies to bioengineers and biologists with a strong emphasis on understanding the underlying scientific principles on which the instrument operates, on interactive laboratory classes, and on creatively measuring phenomena encountered in everyday life. Included in this educational endeavor will be a comprehensive introduction to microfabrication technology as an enabling tool for bioengineers and biologists at the graduate and undergraduate level, as well as a web-based K-12 outreach effort doc8077 none Professor William Simpson of the University of Alaska is funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry and Atmospheric Chemistry programs to perform experimental laboratory and field studies using the ultrasensitive method, cavity ring down spectroscopy (CRDS). This CAREER proposal seeks to combine instrument development aspects with educational aspects, with the goal of introducing sensitive methods for atmospheric field study of the Alaskan troposphere. Oxidation by nitrates, profiles of methane using near-IR CRDS and photochemistry of organic nitrates are the topics of interest. The PI has a joint appointment at the Geophysical Institute and the Chemistry Department at the University of Alaska. Instrument development for ultrasensitive atmospheric measurements is needed as our understanding of the atmosphere is refined. This information is required for accurate modeling and prediction of global climate changes. Methods such as cavity ring down spectroscopy, developed within the physical chemistry program, should be exploited to the maximum extent possible for these applications. However, further work is needed to understand the limits of these methods in terms of spectral congestion, interferences, etc. Professor Simpson s educational efforts include outreach to Native American students in the Fairbanks area. His education plan incorporates the development of visual exercises for physical chemistry laboratory classes doc8078 none Ongoing research at Lawrence Technological University (LTU) have lead the City of Southfield, Michigan, to authorize the construction of the first CFRP prestressed concrete bridge in the USA. The conceptual design of this bridge system is based on research investigations funded by NSF and conducted at LTU. Parallel to this innovative Bridge, a three-span bridge will be constructed using conventional materials. The objective of the proposed investigation is to provide the undergraduate student research team with the opportunity to experimentally compare, and verify the design approach and the performance of various structural components of both bridge systems. The investigation will result in valuable information that can be adopted in the construction of future CFRP bridges doc8079 none This CAREER project aims to advance fundamental understanding of organic interfaces, and to provide a unique environment to prepare students for careers in the rapidly growing area of or-ganic optoelectronics. In devices such as light emitting diodes, thin film transistors, photodiodes and photorefractives, a primary problem limiting the ability to improve performance and stability is lack of a fundamental understanding of the interface between organic materials and metal electrodes. Achieving a fundamental understanding of carrier transport across these interfaces, identifying and understanding the primary mechanisms of degradation at these interfaces, and then utilizing this understanding to improve the electrical properties are the scientific engineering issues being addressed in this project. A series of experiments seeking to elucidate the mecha-nism of charge injection at metal organic interfaces and leading to improvement of the perform-ance and stability of metal organic contacts will be conducted. The approach is to first establish the dependence of injection on electric field, temperature and materials parameters such as layer thickness, dielectric constant, energy barrier and the presence of traps, at model metal organic interfaces. These interfaces will be formed by depositing organic materials with well-characterized charge transport properties on properly chosen metals. Second, doping of the or-ganic will be induced by the introduction of appropriate thin conducting layers at the interface and its influence on injection investigated. A variety of experimental techniques will be used to probe the nature of these interfaces and contact properties. Finally, the stability of both pristine and doped interfaces will be studied with accelerated aging tests in order to deduce primary modes of degradation and determine their influence on injection. The research project will be closely integrated with an education and outreach program incorpo-rating both conventional courses and extensive mentoring. New courses will be developed to provide undergraduate and graduate students with a solid background in organic optoelectronics. In addition to graduate research assistants, undergraduate students will be intimately involved in the research program - providing them with a unique opportunity to complement their theoretical training with hands-on research activities. A greater community focusing on organic optoelec-tronics will be assembled from diverse groups across the campus and other universities, which will give students the opportunity to experience a truly multidisciplinary environment. Also, an extended outreach program aimed at K-12, female minority colleges, and industry, will be devel-oped to extend these benefits to the broad community. The proposed program will create a center of excellence in research and education at Cornell that will benefit the field of organic optoelec-tronics and society at large. The broad education and outreach plan will establish a unique envi-ronment expected to attract students to sciences and nurture the researchers that will shape the future of organic optoelectronics. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in a topical area of materials science having high technological relevance. The scope of the project will expose students to challenges in materials synthesis, processing, and characterization. An important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education doc8080 none Dr. Sarajedini will carry out a study of the stellar populations of galaxies in the local neighborhood of the Milky Way out to about 5 Mpc, with the aim of understanding the star formation and chemical evolutionary histories of galaxies with a range of morphological types. Particular attention will be paid to the interplay of dynamical interactions, star formation, and chemical enrichment in these galaxies. Work in a number of research areas will provide observational data to study the effects of environment on galaxy formation and evolution. His research plan includes studies of clusters in the galaxy and nearby Magellanic Clouds to develop a grid of color-magnitude diagrams that cover a range of metallicity and age. These will be used as fiducials against which the stellar populations of dwarf galaxies can be determined. He will also investigate the effects of dynamical interactions on star formation by studying the local examples of the Sagittarius dwarf and the Magellanic Clouds. He also plans to compare and contrast the stellar populations in the Milky Way, M33, and M31 using a variety of data. As larger and more efficient telescopes become available, these techniques and types of observations will be extended further into and beyond the local group. He will also carry out a suite of educational and outreach activities over the next 5 years, which range from outreach to local K-12 classrooms and public talks for the Gainesville area, to designing a new undergraduate course. His research program naturally includes opportunity for undergraduates and graduate students to be highly involved and significant contributors doc8081 none Hanson, Margaret University of Cincinnati Dr. Hanson will carry out an extensive observational and theoretical research program to develop a quantitative spectroscopic analysis capable of directly studying the physical environment and characteristics of massive stars at their birth. The spectroscopic analysis will be developed and applied entirely at near-infrared wavelengths, from 1.5 to 2.5 microns. This unprecedented view will allow astronomers to directly detect young stars while they are still entirely shrouded in their birth clouds. The PI seeks to find critical signatures present in the spectrum and environment of the star which yield clues to the formation process of massive stars. Quantitative spectroscopic analysis will yield information on the properties of these young stars, such as temperature, gravities, abundances, and rotation, nearly a million years before they would be observed optically. The study also includes very deep, near-infrared images of the fields of these massive young stars, to investigate cluster properties. The research program will emphasize the involvement of undergraduate and graduate students. This award will also support Dr. Hanson s involvement in a community outreach program designed to bring science and science education to Cincinnati youth. Middle and high school students will be given lessons on a series of hands-on physics projects, where they will have the opportunity to learn and work the projects themselves. They will then present these projects as a lesson to younger children. The youth science program represents a joint effort with the Division of Teacher Education in the College of Education and the Department of Physics at the University of Cincinnati. Although every student involved will benefit from the program, the aim is to uncover young people who might go on to become high school teachers doc8082 none Conventional electronic devices exploit the property of electron charge. Yet, recent efforts seek to utilize the electron spin as well, promising unique device functionality. Toward this aim, this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project at Ohio University will investigate spin-dependent mesoscopic transport in high-mobility semiconductor heterostructures. The spin-orbit interaction leads to energy splitting in the bandstructure of carriers confined to a quantum well, which in turn results in two populated spin sub-bands, each featuring individual carrier dynamics. The dynamics can be probed directly by utilizing ballistic magnetotransport in mesoscopic structures, where the spin subbands each yield separate ballistic orbits. The ballistic orbital effects will be exploited as a unique probe to study spin phase coherence, mesoscopic spin transport, and spin-orbit coupling in quantum wells. Besides investigating these fundamental aspects, the work aims to apply the orbital effects to realize spin transistor structures. The semiconductor fabrication knowledge present in this work forms fertile ground for a cooperative education program that will be established with students of nearby two-year technical colleges. These students will be presented with the opportunity to acquire skills the region presently does not offer, improving their participation in a high-technology area. %%% Conventional transistors exploit the property of electron charge to encode information. Yet, the electron also possesses the quantum mechanical property of spin, and research has been initiated to utilize the electron spin as well, in the quest for superior electronic devices. Toward this aim, this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project at Ohio University will investigate spin phenomena in thin semiconductor layers, where the spin modifies the electron s motion, offering the exciting possibility of spin-controlled transistors. The project will study the mechanisms and magnitude of the spin s motional effect in different semiconductors, and new spin-controlled transistors will be fabricated and tested. To use the electron motion directly, avoiding electron scattering mechanisms, the semiconductor devices planned in this project have to be very small, and such nanoscale devices fit naturally in the ongoing electronic miniaturization trend. The advanced semiconductor fabrication knowledge present in this work forms fertile ground for a cooperative education program that will be established with students of nearby two-year technical colleges. These students will be presented with the opportunity to acquire skills the region presently does not offer, improving their participation in the growing high-technology area of nanoscale electronic devices doc8083 none This project focuses on the hydrolysis of glutathione (gamma-Glu-Cys-Gly) and glutathione-S-conjugates in plants, a poorly understood pathway that likely plays a central role in at least two important physiological processes. The first is detoxification of xenobiotics (e.g., herbicides), initiated when they are conjugated with glutathione. Glutathione-S-conjugates are processed after their formation. However, the processing pathway and enzymes are not known with certainty, nor is it known what role processing plays in xenobiotic detoxification. Similarly, although glutathione has been hypothesized to be a major transport storage form of cysteine in plants, how cysteine is released from glutathione is not well understood. Cleavage of the unique gamma-glutamyl bond of glutathione by a gamma-glutamyl transpeptidase may be the first step in degradation of glutathione and modification of glutathione-S-conjugates. Arabidopsis thaliana contains four putative gamma-glutamyl transpeptidase genes, GGT1, GGT2, GGT3 and GGT4. GGT1 and GGT2 share high coding-sequence homology and exon-intron structure. GGT3 differs markedly from GGT1 and GGT2 in that it lacks the exons encoding the amino terminal ~half of the proteins. GGT4 shares less than 60% coding sequence homology with the other three GGT genes. The functional roles of the structurally different GGT genes and the function of the GGT proteins are the foci of this research. The catalytic properties of recombinant GGT proteins will be studied to determine how the missing amino terminal domain of GGT3 and the divergent coding sequence of GGT4 affect enzymatic function. Transgenic Arabidopsis expressing GGT constructs carrying a tagged sequence will be used to determine whether the amino terminal domain of GGT3 affects its subcellular compartmentation. The hexa-His sequence will also serve as a tag for purification of individual GGT proteins from the plant as a means to explore the subunit composition of gamma-glutamyl transpeptidase. The physiological role of GGT proteins will be explored using two complementary strategies. First, spatial and temporal expression will be studied to determine in which tissues and subcellular compartments the enzymes are expressed. Then, as time and funding permit, the consequence of altering the expression of individual GGT s in transgenic Arabidopsis will be studied. This research should increase our understanding of how plants process foreign compounds such as herbicides and how they maintain the proper internal balance of nutrients doc8084 none The research objective of this grant is to understand and exploit the consequences of high surface to volume ratios in nanoscale systems, such as carbon nanotubes. Because of their high surface to volume ratio, the local chemical environment has a large impact on single wall nanotube properties. Self-assembled monolayers will be used as chemically adjustable surfaces on which to lay carbon nanotubes. Controlling the surface chemistry will allow control of semiconducting nanotube resistance and doping. Surfaces will be patterned with different chemistries at different locations. Nanotubes stretched across the boundaries of these regions will have patterned doping, leading to the formation of controlled nanotube devices. If successful, these experiments offer the potential for large-scale nanotube device fabrication. In addition to such potential applications, it is scientifically important to understand how local chemical environments affect nanotube resistances. Closely related experiments will study nanocrystal arrays. The consequences of local variations in the electronic environment of the array will be understood and exploited to control the array properties. The goal of both these groups of experiments is to better control the properties of nanoscale materials, using an integrated view of the ultra-small material and its surrounding environment. The educational objective of this project is to increase the number of women who pursue science past high school. The transition from high school to college has been identified as a time when students needs can be better addressed. In particular, mentor-type interactions will be used to better explain the importance of, and the opportunity offered by beginning a science curriculum early in the undergraduate years. A program to enable these interactions will be developed which leverages existing outreach in order to better serve high school juniors and seniors. The program will provide practical career information through both personal contact and web-based interactions. %%% The research objective of this grant is to better control the electrical properties of carbon nanotubes. Nanotubes will be placed on surfaces with well controlled chemical properties. We will use the interaction of the nanotube with the surface to control the nanotube resistance. Changes in the surface chemistry will be used to change the nanotube properties. By creating patterns of different surface chemistry, we will create patterned electrical properties in nanotubes placed on these surfaces. If successful, this patterning will enable a new method to create transistors in nanotubes. This new process has the potential to produce a higher density of transistors than currently possible. It is also a step towards a solution to the problem of connecting many ultra-small transistors together - the interconnect problem. In closely related experiments, we will study the effect of the local electrical environment on nanometer-size crystals of metal. As is the case with the nanotube experiments just described, the goal of these nanocrystal experiments is to better understand how to control the electrical properties of nanometer-scale materials, using an integrated view of the ultra-small electrical device and its surrounding environment. The educational objective of this project is to increase the number of women who pursue science past high school. The transition from high school to college has been identified as a time when students needs can be better addressed. In particular, mentor-type interactions will be used to better explain the importance of, and the opportunity offered by beginning a science curriculum early in the undergraduate years. A program to enable these interactions will be developed which leverages existing outreach in order to better serve high school juniors and seniors. The program will provide practical career information through both personal contact and web-based interactions doc8085 none Dr. Lisa Berreau, Department of Chemistry, Utah State University, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program, Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, through a Career Award for her work in which a new class of chelating nitrogen sulfur ligands containing hydrogen bond donors will be developed. Complexes with zinc hydroxide, alkoxide and bicarbonate stabilized by internal hydrogen-bonds will be synthesized and characterized to determine structure function relationships for several metalloenzymes toward design of new catalysts for the oxidation of alcohols, hydration of carbon dioxide, and hydrolytic cleavage of amides. In the educational front, a new bioinorganic chemistry course utilizing cooperative learning techniques, and two new undergraduate laboratory courses also incorporating bioinorganic chemistry elements will be developed. Students will receive a broad-based training in inorganic chemistry with significant insights into the chemistry of biological systems. The catalysts that will be developed are of technological importance doc8086 none With this CAREER award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the work of Dr. Marcey waters in the Department of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The work consists of a series of studies to better understand the role of pi-pi stacking interactions in macromolecular recognition in both DNA and proteins. She will measure the rate constants of rotation around biaryl bonds using NMR line-width analysis, and will also use NMR NOESY measurements to determine the extent of beta-sheet formation and assess pi-pi stacking interactions in a two stranded beta-peptide. These systems will probe the roles of electronic effects, solvent, surface area, and heteroatoms in the aromatic rings. The research and teaching goals of this proposal are to understand biological structure and reactivity through physical organic chemistry studies, particularly using nuclear magnetic resonance methods. The relationship between biological systems and nonbiological organic molecules will be emphasized at both graduate and undergraduate levels, including experiments in sophomore organic chemistry laboratory doc8087 none The Brockport Mathematics, Computer Science and Computational Science ( BMACS ) Scholarship Program consists of a comprehensive plan that includes high quality educational programs, and a strong plan to manage and administer the program using the talents of highly skilled faculty members assisted by industry- related Advisory Boards. The program has the full backing of a committed administration and the support of a strong student infrastructure that enhances existing campus programs ( such as the McNair and CSTEP programs) without supplanting them. This program aims to significantly increase the number of talented, but economically disadvantaged students in the three majors who can successfully complete a degree in a timely manner and go on to employment in their field or graduate school doc8088 none Professor Feng Gai of the University of Pennsylvania is supported by the Experimental Physical Chemistry CAREER program to study protein folding dynamics. The principal objective of this work is to study protein spontaneous fluctuations and folding dynamics at both single molecule and ensemble levels. Laser-induced temperature-jump methods for rapid refolding unfolding initiation and two-dimensional time-resolved infrared correlation and fluorescence spectroscopies, some in confocal geometries, will be used to study the early folding events. Secondary structure formation in alanine-based helical peptides, helix-helix interation in GCN4-p1 and other helical bundles, and the folding mechanism of an all-beta-sheet protein, the E. Coli major cold shock protein A, will be studied. Isotope editing will be used in order to achieve high structural resolution. Many modern biophysical techniques are appropriate for undergraduate research. The PI plans to include undergraduates in this work, and also will be involved in public science education through special summer programs designed for local high school students at the University of Pennsylvania doc8089 none PROPOSAL NO.: PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Bart, Philip INSTITUTION NAME: Louisiana State University 2) the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS); and 3) the Antarctic Peninsula Ice Cap (APIC). The distinguishing characteristics include significant differences in: 1) ice volume; 2) substratum elevation; 3) ice-surface elevation; and 4) location with respect to latitude. Various lines of evidence indicate that the AISs have undergone significant fluctuations in the past and that fluctuations will continue to occur in the future. The exact nature of the fluctuations has been the subject of many lively debates. According to one line of reasoning, the land-based EAIS has been relatively stable, experiencing only minor fluctuations since forming in the middle Miocene, whereas the marine-based WAIS has been dynamic, waxing and waning frequently since the late Miocene. According to an alternate hypothesis, the ice sheets advanced and retreated synchronously. These two views are incompatible. The first objective of this proposal is to compare the long-term past behavior of the WAIS to that of the EAIS and APIC. The fluctuations of the AISs involve many aspects (the frequency of changes, the overall magnitude of ice-volume change, etc.), and the activities proposed here specifically concern the frequency and phase of extreme advances of the ice sheet to the continental shelf. The project will build upon previous seismic-stratigraphic investigations of the continental shelves. These studies have clarified many issues concerning the minimum frequency of extreme expansions for the individual ice sheets, but some important questions remain. During the course of the project, the following questions will be evaluated. Question 1) Were extreme advances of the EAIS and WAIS across the shelf of a similar frequency and coeval? This evaluation is possible because the western Ross Sea continental shelf (Northern Basin) receives drainage from the EAIS, and the eastern Ross Sea (Eastern Basin) receives drainage from the WAIS. Quantitative analyses of the extreme advances from these two areas have been conducted by Alonso et al. ( ) and Bart et al. ( ), respectively. However, the existing single-channel seismic grids are incomplete and can not be used to determine the stratigraphic correlations from Northern Basin to Eastern Basin. It is proposed that high-resolution seismic data (~ kms) be acquired to address this issue. Question 2) Were extreme advances of the APIC across the shelf as frequent as inferred by Bart and Anderson ( )? Bart and Anderson ( ) inferred that the APIC advanced across the continental shelf at least 30 times since the middle Miocene. This is significant because it suggests that the advances of the small APIC were an order of magnitude more frequent than the advances of the EAIS and WAIS. Others contest the Bart and Anderson ( ) glacial-unconformity interpretation of seismic reflections, and argue that the advances of the APIC were far fewer (i.e., Larter et al., ). The recent drilling on the Antarctic Peninsula outer continental shelf has sampled some but not all of the glacial units, but the sediment recovery was poor, and thus, the glacial history interpretation is still ambiguous. The existing high-resolution seismic grids from the Antarctic Peninsula contain only one regional strike line on the outer continental shelf. This is inadequate to address the controversy of the glacial-unconformity interpretation and the regional correlation of the recent ODP results. It is proposed that high-resolution seismic data (~ kms) be acquired in a forthcoming (January ) cruise to the Antarctic Peninsula to address these issues. The second objective of this project is 1) to expand the PI s effort to integrate his ongoing and the proposed experiments into a graduate-level course at LSU, and 2) to develop a pilot outreach program with a Baton Rouge public high school. The Louisiana Department of Education has adopted scientific standards that apply to all sciences. These standards reflect what 9th through 12th grade-level students should be able to do and know. The PI will target one of these standards, the Science As Inquiry Standard 1 Benchmark. The PI will endeavor to share with the students the excitement of conducting scientific research as a way to encourage the students to pursue earth science as a field of study at the university level doc8090 none Dr. Robert P. Houser, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Oklahoma, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program, Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, through a Career Award for his work on the synthesis and characterization of functional model complexes of metalloprotein active sites using an array of novel ligands that combine the utility of traditional multidentate ligands with biologically relevant amino acids. Attention will be focused on modeling (i) the copper containing nitrite reductase, (ii) the mononuclear non-heme iron enzyme isopenicillin N synthase, and (iii) the unusual four-copper cluster Cu(z) active site from nitrous oxide reductase. In the educational front, the focus has a three-pronged approach: (a) improve student learning, (b) develop a graduate course in bioinorganic chemistry, and (c) provide a research environment and research opportunities for undergraduate chemistry majors and gifted high school students. These fundamental studies will provide insight into the metal-ligand interactions that influence enzymatic catalysis. Students will be trained in the exciting interdisciplinary field of bioinorganic chemistry doc8091 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Fort Valley State College will acquire a stopped-flow UV-VIS spectrophotometer. Research will focus on the following studies: a) the biological interaction of gold colloidal particles in antibody-antigen reactions; b) stability of laboratory peptide-DNA hybrids; and c) the photodegradation of organic water pollutants by visible irradiation of photosensitizing catalysts. . Absorption spectroscopy using ultraviolet or visible light (UV-VIS) is one of the most standard methods in modern chemistry for quantitative and qualitative analysis. These studies will have an impact in a variety of areas including environmental sciences and biochemistry doc8092 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: CAREER: Macroscopic properties of heterogeneous media and development of the applied mathematics curriculum Grabovsky The unifying idea of this project s research is the general Hilbert space approach to homogenization due to Milton. There are three major issues based on this approach that will be investigated. One concerns the exploration of the convexity properties of G-closures with the goal of developing new numerical approximations to the elusive set. This approach may lead to the new analytic results in several basic cases, where the G-closure is still not known. The second issue is to make use of the new formula for effective tensors in terms of the W-transformation of Milton for studying effective behavior of the random media. That formula provides a new series expansion for the fields and effective tensors of the random composites. The new expansion is shown to converge rapidly even for a relatively high contrast media. Finally, we will develop a new and exciting idea of space-time composites proposed recently by Lurie. The space time composites refer to composites whose electromagnetic properties change rapidly in time. These temporal oscillations may be a result of high frequency vibrations of the composite specimen or of an active nature of the material itself. This project s research is centered on the investigation of properties of complex and smart materials. Examples of such materials include composites (used in spacecraft, airplanes, cars, skies, golf clubs, etc.), random media like rock, clay or bone, novel active materials that are used in sensors and actuators. This grant provides funding for a variety of research and educational activities that includes a small elasticity demonstration lab. The main purpose of the lab will be to heighten students interest in mathematics through the inclusion of experiments and demonstrations. The lab will also facilitate involvement of undergraduates in mathematical research and interdisciplinary interaction throughout the College of Science and Technology at Temple University. The grant will also support a multi-prong applied research program unified by the common mathematical tools used in this research. One of the goals of this project is the prediction of properties of composite materials. Success in this direction may make it possible to reduce or eliminate expensive and time-consuming measurements of elastic properties of composite materials by providing good theoretical predictions. Another application is to the study of high-contrast disordered media, of interest in hydrology for prediction of the permeability of large volumes of sedimentary rock based on local measurements. The permeability is a crucial property of soil that determines how ground water, oil or pollutants propagate underground. Yet another application is to the novel field of space-time composites: composite materials whose components are in rapid relative motion or whose components have the ability to change their properties rapidly in time without mechanical motion. The success of this part of the project will be essential for designing and understanding the new generation of smart materials that are able to respond quickly to a changing environment doc8093 none With this new award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the work of Dr. Robert A. Flowers at the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio. The research aims to develop a fundamental understanding of the equilibria and kinetics of the reactions involved in the use of Sm(II) reagents as reducing agents in organic chemistry. The work will involve determining the structures and aggregation states of SmI2 reducing agents in solution, and the influence of cosolvent (ligands) on the reactivity of the reagents, as well as developing a bulk electrolysis method to make the reductions catalytic in Sm. A variety of physical methods will be used, including vapor pressure osmometry, isothermal titration calorimetry, vis uv absorption spectrometry, stopped flow kinetic methods, electrochemistry, and x-ray crystallography. The proposed research involves studies to understand the behavior of an important class of reducing agents based on Sm(II) which are used by organic chemists to carry out useful syntheses. The work is expected to lead to improved reaction conditions with higher yields of desired product and less undesired byproducts, and may lead to new reducing systems using electricity and only very small (catalytic) amounts of samarium. The work is expected to provide excellent training for the students involved doc8094 none Dr. David Goldberg, Department of Chemistry, Johns Hopkins University, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program, Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, through a Career Award for his work on the synthesis and characterization of novel corrole macrocycles that will incorporate and stabilize high-valent oxidation states of transition metal ions such as iron(IV), nickel(III), and copper(III). Metal-oxo species such as (corrole)Fe=O will be isolated, characterized and exploited as possible catalysts for the dehalogenation of chlorocarbons. In the educational front, a series of Chemistry Workshops will be developed for the Ingenuity Project, an outreach program for advanced inner-city students focused on mathematics and science. Also, a new graduate level bioinorganic chemistry course will be implemented in which critical reading of primary literature and presentation skills will be emphasized. The new corrole macrocycles will find applications in activating molecular oxygen and hydrogen peroxide, and in their mediating reductive dehalogenation of environmentally significant organohalide substrates such as the recalcitrant carbon tetrachloride found in many groundwaters. Students involved in the Ingenuity Project will have access to potential role models and will help them discover the excitement of doing chemistry, and science in general doc8095 none This CAREER project focuses on synthesis of dilute magnetic III V compound semiconductors. These materials are expected to be used in next generation electronics-spintronics, where both the spin and charge properties of electrons perform functionality. This represents a major materi-als science challenge because incorporation of high concentrations of magnetic ions in host semi-conductors causes phase separation and destruction of material integrity. The approach to over-come this difficulty is utilization of low temperature molecular beam epitaxy. Using a combina-tion of epitaxial growth, in-situ and ex-situ measurements, direct correlation between atomic scale processes occurring during epitaxial growth and electronic magnetic properties of the films will be investigated. Two candidate material systems, GaMnAs and GaMnN, will be examined. Epitaxial thin films will be grown by molecular beam epitaxy, and their physical properties di-rectly characterized in situ with atomic-scale precision by variable-temperature scanning tunnel-ing microscopy (STM), reflection high-energy electron diffraction and cross-sectional STM. In conjunction, structural, electrical and magnetic characteristics will be determined by ex situ tech-niques such as transmission electron microscopy, high-resolution x-ray diffraction, and magneto-transport measurement. A model of low temperature growth of diluted magnetic III V compound semiconductors will then be developed. This may help to create new manufacturing methods that are compatible with existing compound semiconductor processing. This project also emphasizes the enhancement of educational experiences for students at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Substantial curriculum development for a new focus area in spintronics is proposed. Particularly, courses on the concepts and techniques of condensed matter at nanoscale will be developed. A sense of commitment to the education of the students also ex-tends to assisting them in finding a career where they can utilize their skills and knowledge ac-quired in school. New initiatives in industrial and educational outreach will be instituted. Spe-cifically, an industrial advisory and career committee will be formed to help foster industrially relevant activities and opportunities for students including internship and industrial research ex-periences. Outcomes of the educational effort of this project are expected to bring new concepts and techniques into the classroom and outstanding opportunities for students for future employ-ment in industry. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in a topical area of materials science having high technological relevance. The scope of the project will expose students to challenges in materials synthesis, processing, and characterization. An important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education doc8096 none Anna Krylov of the University of Southern California is supported by a CAREER grant from the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to develop electronic structure methods for excited states to treat spin-orbit coupling, non-adiabatic coupling, and spin-forbidden relaxation. Applications include halomethyl radicals and singlet diradicals. As part of her educational plan, Krylov will employ in her courses multimedia demonstrations, problem-solving software, and mini-research problems using a new computer lab specifically designed for the integration of teaching and research. Accurate theoretical modeling of electronically excited molecules is a current challenge, and is needed for a detailed understanding of chemical processes such as those found in the environment and in materials synthesis. This research program is directly related to a teaching program at the undergraduate and graduate levels, which includes innovative uses of computer-based learning systems doc8097 none Professor Lisa A. Holland of Kent State University is funded by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry CAREER program to study phospholipid bicelles as immobilized partitioning media for electrokinetic capillary chromotography. The work involves the characterization of the bicelle media in detail as a function of temperature, mixed micelle ratios, concentration and composition. Then the sieving capabilities of this material will be optimized for separation of polypeptides, proteins and DNA. The ability of bicelle solutions to incorporate receptor systems based on biotin-avidin chemistry will be utilized. The educational component of this work focuses on the use of distance learning to initiate a research program in separations at Haskell Indian Nations University. The interest is in screening traditional tribal medicines for receptor affinity doc8098 none Research in theoretical elementary particle physics will focus on the extremely early universe, including the implications of fundamental physics and superstring theory for cosmology, and the role of cosmology as a testing ground for new ideas. Superstring theory is a way to unify all forces, including gravity and electromagnetism, and an understanding of its cosmological implications is crucial to extending our knowledge of the earliest times in the universe. This research will investigate how specific models of new physics account for the evolution of the universe, and how we may read their fingerprints on the sky today. Cosmology has proven to be an important way to experimentally probe particle physics, and the discovery of a signal of new physics in cosmological data would fundamentally change our understanding of the universe doc8099 none David Liu The ability of chemists and biologists to manipulate molecules of increasing complexity has exerted a profound influence on our understanding of the processes driving life. Nature employs a powerful version of generating variants of molecules and correlating their new structures and functions in the form of molecular evolution. The dominance of proteins and nucleic acids among solutions to complex chemical problems, despite the limited chemical functionality of these molecules, is a dramatic testament to the power of iterated cycles of diversification, selection, and amplification. Researchers have recently harnessed this power to artificially evolve proteins and nucleic acids with new properties. This CAREER project seeks to expand the scope of molecular evolution by addressing two current limitations. First, because each cycle of molecular evolution relies on the diversification of molecular structure, the development of general methods to more intelligently sample the vast sequence space of a biopolymer would represent a major advance in the ability to evolve all types of biopolymers. Second, the development of methods to apply molecular evolution to more types of biologically important macromolecules such as protein-RNA complexes may lead to advances both in the basic understanding of these molecules and in the ability to generate new molecules with tailor made properties. Molecular evolution is representative of chemical biology, a term used to describe the manipulation of structures and functions of molecules to study biological phenomena. Although chemical biology is having an enormous impact on many areas of science, the rapidly changing and multidisciplinary nature of chemical biology together with the effort required to depart from standard textbooks in biological chemistry have resulted in its under-representation in curricula at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Early and in-depth exposure to chemical biology is now a prerequisite for any complete modern education in chemistry or biology. As part of the education component of this CAREER project, a course for graduate students and advanced undergraduates has been constructed from more than 800 recent papers covering many of the most important and cutting-edge topics in chemical biology, including genomics, proteomics, combinatorial chemistry, chemical genetics, protein design and engineering, and molecular evolution doc8100 none The proposed research focusses on the total synthesis of two classes of natural products, the cyathins and the viridins. Construction of key intermediates via an electrochemical ring closure will be investigated in both cases. The cyathins have been shown to upregulate the synthesis of nerve growth factor while the viridins are inhibitors of phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase, a key signaling enzyme linked to cell growth and cancer. The design and synthesis of analogs of both classes of natural product will be carried out and their biological activity will be evaluated by collaborators of Professor Wright. Professor Wright will organize his undergraduate organic chemistry class into learning communities of 5-8 students. These groups will meet for one hour per week outside of lecture for problem-solving workshops. A further innovation will be to have the student groups design a short (3-5 step) synthesis of a potential drug candidate that would then be carried out for Professor Wright s research group. With this CAREER award, the Organic Synthesis program is supporting the research of Professor Dennis Wright of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Florida. Professor Wright s studies are directed towards the synthesis of two classes of natural products, the cyathins and the viridins. The cyathins (and possibly their analogs) stimulate nerve growth factor (NGF) synthesis and could potentially be used in place of exogenous NGF administration. The viridins (and possibly their analogs) inhibit an enzyme associated with cell growth and could potentially be used as antitumor agents. The education component of the project will introduce problem-solving and synthesis design sessions into the undergraduate organic chemistry course doc8101 none With this CAREER award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the work of Dr. Babek Borhan of the Department of Chemistry at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. The purpose of the work is to develop a set of host molecules, containing linked tetraaryl porphyrin zinc complexes, which can coordinate to a guest chiral Lewis base (such as an amine) in such a way that the circular dichroism spectrum of the assembly indicates the chirality of the base. The Exciton Coupled Circular Dichroism (ECCD) involved gives a bisignate CD spectrum, which is positive or negative depending only on the absolute stereochemical orientation of the electric transition dipole moment of the interacting chromophores. Dr. Borhan hopes to develop a spectroscopic reporting system which can be used to rapidly determine whether chiral organic compounds (compounds whose mirror images are different, like left and right hands) are left or right handed. This capability could be quite important, especially in view of the importance of chiral compounds in pharmaceuticals and biology. In addition to the graduate students who will be involved in the research, Dr. Borhan will establish an American Chemical Society affiliated SEED program, which will bring high school students from financially disadvantaged families into the lab for summer research experiences doc8102 none The career development plan described in this proposal focuses on diblock copolymers, a class of hybrid macromolecules that represent an extremely interesting set of self-assembling materials with a wide variety of applications. Diblock copolymers are simple macromolecules consisting of two segments of chemically distinct monomers connected by one covalent bond. This one bond prevents macrophase separation of the two polymeric segments and leads to the formation of a variety of nanoscopic assemblies depending on the nature of the monomers, the molecular weight of the chain, and minority component volume fraction. While their uses as thermoplastic elastomers, pressure sensitive adhesives, and compatibilizing agents are wide spread, it has only been recently that the nanoscopic compositional heterogenties have been exploited for the preparation of other nanostructured materials. A strategy for the preparation of nanoporous materials using ordered block copolymers templates will be investigated. The ultimate of this research goal is the preparation of polymeric monoliths that contain aligned nanopores with a narrow pore size distribution and an extremely high pore density. Two general strategies for the preparation of porous materials starting from ordered block copolymers are presented. One utilized block copolymers with a degradable block and the other utilized block of an array of interesting nanomaterials. The work described in this proposal depends on the combination of polymer synthesis, supramolecular self-assembly and characterization, and solid-state chemistry of ordered block copolymers. %%% The science and technology of structures on the nanometer length scale is central to many research initiatives. The research described in this proposal addresses an area that will have significant impact on the development of nanostructured templates and scaffolds for the design and synthesis of new nanomaterials. The target materials will have remarkable potential as nanostructure scaffolds, separation media, and optical devices. Furthermore, this plan also includes a section on integration research and educational activities. There are two primary aspects the proposed educational plan. The first is focused on graduate education in the field of polymer science, and the second is centered around undergraduate education at the Freshman level and adult continuing education doc8103 none This CAREER project centers on nanoheteroepitaxy of SiGe on Si for future optoelectronic applications. Integrating nanostructure architectures into manufacturing poses numerous engineering challenges such as selective deposition of SiGe on Si and ideal pattern transfer with minimal critical dimensional loss. The strategy here is to understand fundamentally interfacial phenomena occurring on SiGe surfaces. The approach utilizes in situ real time infrared and Raman spectroscopic techniques. The real time diagnostics provide a means to capture the dynamic SiGe surface response to deposition and etch precursors. In this regard, the detection sensitivity and the polarization dependence of attenuated-total-reflection Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and attenuated-total-reflection surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy will be exploited. The two techniques will help distinguish sidewall surface phenomena from trench bottom phenomena during plasma etching of SiGe. It is also intended to extract the ion energy distribution function in etch plasmas from experimentally measured time-varying plasma and substrate potentials. Capacitive divider and Langmuir probes can measure these potentials. The distribution functions will be correlated to resulting etch profiles. The salient information gained from the comprehensive diagnostics is expected to bring improved understanding of deposition and etching mechanisms of SiGe as well as ion neutral transport inside the SiGe trenches. The knowledge gained will also facilitate ideal pattern transfer, help realize novel applications of SiGe, and guide development of computational profile simulators. Three educational activities will be pursued: (1) develop new elective courses in semiconductor processing, (2) provide close mentorship and career counseling through research, and (3) initiate a high school outreach program. These educational activities will draw strongly from the research. Courses in chemical vapor deposition and plasma surface diagnostics will be developed to provide students alternate venues to prepare for a career in the electronics industry or related research fields. In addition to graduate students, undergraduate students will actively be involved in the research. High school seniors will be aggressively recruited using the outreach program to inform prospective high school students of the research-oriented educational opportunities at UNM. The outreach program additionally serves to improve the percentage of high school students pursuing post-secondary education and particularly to increase the enrollment of Hispanic-descent students. The latter goal meets an institutional interest of UNM, a federally recognized Hispanic-serving institution. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in a topical area of materials science having high technological relevance. The scope of the project will expose students to challenges in materials synthesis, processing, and characterization. An important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education doc8104 none CRHSP-28 is a novel Ca 2+ -sensitive regulatory protein, abundant in epithelial cells that are specialized in exocrine protein secretion. This includes Paneth cells that secrete antimicrobial peptides, chief and pancreatic cells that secrete digestive enzymes, lacrimal cells for corneal function and goblet cells that secrete mucin for tissue barrier protection. Introduction of recombinant CRHSP-28 into permeabilized acinar cells completely reverses the decreased Ca 2+ -dependent secretory capacity caused by the leakage of cytosolic proteins from the cell interior, indicating a direct role for CRHSP-28 in the secretory pathway. Consistent with a coiled coil interaction motif near its amino terminus, CRHSP-28 exists as a dimer in cytosolic extracts, and is associated with a large molecular complex in membrane cytoskeleton fractions. Further, CRHSP-28 is concentrated around secretory granules in the apical regions of exocrine cells, and specifically associates with a 70 kDa binding protein (pp70) that co-purifies with secretory granule membranes. Significantly, soluble forms of this binding protein associate with taxol-stabilized microtubules when analyzed in the absence of Ca 2+ ; however, when exposed to elevated Ca 2+ , pp70 undergoes a complete translocation to an actin-rich detergent insoluble fraction. Based on biochemical and immunohistochemical data, CRHSP-28 and its associated proteins are proposed to regulate the delivery and movement of secretory granules through the subapical actin cytoskeleton in a Ca 2+ calmodulin dependent manner. The triggering mechanism for this effect is theorized to entail the acute serine phosphorylation of CRHSP-28 by the multifunctional CaM kinase II. Thus, the primary objective of this project is to elucidate the precise biochemical and molecular mechanisms by which this novel CRHSP-28-mediated pathway regulates Ca 2+ -stimulated exocrine secretion. The Specific Aims of this project are: 1). To test the idea that the Ca2+ calmodulin regulated phosphorylation of CRHSP-28 is a key signaling mechanism by which the protein modulates secretion. Experiments will first address the identity of the Ca 2+ -sensitive serine phosphorylation sites on CRHSP-28. Phosphorylation sites will be mapped in vitro and in intact cells, and verified by transfection of phosphorylation mutants into cultured T84 cells. The effects of normal and mutated forms of CRHSP-28 will then be evaluated for their ability to alter secretagogue-stimulated mucin release from these cells. Similarly, CRHSP-28 mutants will be expressed and purified in bacteria and tested in permeabilized acinar cells to assess their effects on digestive enzyme secretion. 2). To evaluate the concept that CRHSP-28 functions in the secretory pathway of exocrine cells through dynamic interactions with other key regulatory proteins. These studies will be centered on identifying the molecular identity of the 70 kDa CRHSP-28 binding protein that copurifies with secretory granule membranes, binds to taxol-stabilized microtubules, and translocates to detergent-insoluble cytoskeletal fractions in the presence of elevated Ca 2+ . CRHSP-28 affinity chromatography and cDNA library screening will be used as purification techniques. Following cloning, tagged proteins will be expressed in cells to characterize the molecular interactions of CRHSP-28 with itself (as a dimer) and the 70 kDa binding protein using coimmunoprecipitations and dual immunofluorescence labeling. This approach will allow for identification of the specific sites that mediate these interactions, as well as the effects of second messengers and phosphorylation in regulating binding. Complementary studies will be conducted using tagged recombinant proteins for in vitro binding assays. Identification and characterization of CRHSP-28 protein interactions within the cell is key to understanding its regulatory function doc8105 none This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project at the University of Pennsylvania will study magnetic instabilities related to the carrier density in strongly interacting (correlated) electronic systems using state-of-the art ultrafast optical experiments. Short ( 100 fs) laser pulses will modulate the carrier concentration in colossally magnetoresistive oxides and weakly ferromagnetic divalent hexaborides, thereby perturbing their complex many-body states. A variety of time-resolved optical techniques will be utilized to obtain a multi-dimensional view of the ensuing magnetic, charge and lattice dynamics. If successful, the insight obtained may help guide the discovery of related materials of use in technological applications involving magnetoresistance and the optical control of ferromagnetic order. The educational component of this project will prototype and deploy captivating and entertaining internet-based experiments that introduce high school students to the process of scientific discovery. Students arriving at a web site will be given the opportunity to remotely grab the controls of an apparatus and to experiment with them. Considerable attention will be paid to experimental design considerations, including educational value, scalability, integration with course content, and target age groups. %%% New and poorly understood magnets have been discovered recently, and this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project at the University of Pennsylvania aims to clarify their behavior using short laser pulses. The unusual properties of these magnets create the possibility that, with proper materials design, light could be used to control their magnetic strength and the positions of their north and south magnetic poles. Another potential use is in magnetic recording, where related materials could serve as sensors in computer hard disk drives. This project aims to provide a foundation of knowledge for such efforts by capturing a variety of material responses to brief laser excitation. The educational component of this project will prototype and deploy captivating and entertaining internet-based experiments that introduce high school students to the process of scientific discovery. Students arriving at a web site will be given the opportunity to remotely grab the controls of an apparatus and to experiment with them. Considerable attention will be paid to experimental design considerations, including educational value, scalability, integration with course content, and target age groups doc8106 none The primary aim of this project is to develop a unified theoretical framework for addressing network dynamics problems in the social sciences. A successful approach to the subject must necessarily be highly interdisciplinary, both intellectually and socially. The research itself draws upon techniques that are well established in physics, applied mathematics and computer science, but applies them to problems about which sociologiest and economists have much to teach their natural science counterparts: the large scale structure of social networks, potential differences in structure between new economy organizations and their industrial era predecessors; the contagion structure of viral epidemics, financial panics, or word-of-mouth recommendations. These problems and many others in economics and sociology exhibit complex network structure, as specified by the pattern of interactions between actors or agents in a distributed system such as a friendship network, a large firm or the international banking system. Although the study of social networks is more than 50 years old, the statistical analysis of large social and economic networks is only just becoming feasible, due to the recent, but rapidly increasing availability of large data sets and the computational capacity to analyze them. Further, the subtle relationship between a system s interaction structure and its global behavior has been largely overlooked by both economics and sociology. Thus the research proposed holds promise of fundamental contributions by uniting newly available data, newly enhanced computational methods and an interdisciplinary perspective. This focus provides considerable opportunity for interdisciplinary education as well as research. Thus this career proposal aims to integrate the cutting edge of network research into curriculum for specialists, as well as into general courses in complex systems and mathematical modeling that focus on applications in the social sciences doc8107 none This project consists of an integrated research, outreach, and educational effort on the flow of complex fluids, performed in the W. G. Pritchard Laboratories of the Department of Mathematics of Pennsylvania State University. The research part combines an experimental study of macromolecular fluid dynamics with the mathematical study of the modeling equations. The flow of fluids such as polymer solutions and melts near a boundary is among the most interesting and challenging problems in the field of non-Newtonian fluid dynamics, particularly at free, deformable interfaces. The research will explore several different phenomena: interface dynamics of rising bubbles in polymer solutions, stress-induced oscillations of wormlike micellar fluids, and the long filaments formed by falling drops. These experiments involve a number of different fluids including charge-screened polyelectrolyte polymers and wormlike micellar solutions. Quantitative measurements will be made of the flow and interface using video imaging, as well as of the local velocity and birefringent stress of the fluid. The results of these measurements will be correlated with the rheological properties of the fluid. The investigator hopes to elucidate the connection between the macroscopic fluid flow and the microscopic character of its component molecules. The outreach effort has two components. In the first, the continuing education of secondary school mathematics teachers is pursued through weekend workshops which include minicourses, informal discussions, and interactive experimental demonstrations. The second part consists of the involvement of a high school mathematics teacher in a summer laboratory research project as part of a pilot Research Experiences for Secondary School Teachers program. The educational element of this project includes the development of an advanced undergraduate course on modeling, which includes a laboratory component. The purpose of this course is to expose students to the true cycle of research, from modeling to analysis and measurement and back to modeling. These activities also include continuing the one-on-one teaching involved in undergraduate research in the Pritchard Lab. This project consists of an integrated research-outreach-educational effort on the behavior and properties of complex fluids. The study of flowing fluids which possess a complex microscopic structure is not only of great technological importance to the food, plastics, and other industries, but it also presents a challenging mathematical problem. The work combines the experimental study of complex fluids with the mathematical study of the equations which model them, performed in the W. G. Pritchard Laboratories, an experimental facility in the Mathematics Department of Pennsylvania State University. The research explores several aspects including the shape dynamics of bubbles rising in polymer solutions, and the behavior of polymer-like detergent fluids. Quantitative measurements of the flow and boundary shape will be correlated with the fluid properties, in an attempt to elucidate the connection between the macroscopic flow and the microscopic character of the fluid molecules. This project s outreach effort consists of two parts. The first part addresses the continuing education of secondary school mathematics teachers through weekend workshops which include minicourses, informal discussions, and interactive experimental demonstrations. The second component involves a high school mathematics teacher in a summer laboratory research project. This is part of a pilot program Research Experiences for Secondary School Teachers, inspired by the NSF s summer program for undergraduates. The educational element of the proposal involves the development of a new undergraduate course on modeling which includes a laboratory component, and the one-on-one teaching involved in undergraduate research doc8108 none This project will integrate the investigator s research program with student active education to advance our understanding of the interdependency of biological, chemical, and physical processes in marine habitats. This goal will be achieved through interdisciplinary field and laboratory studies, and through the development of participatory educational programs at the university and K- 12 levels. The motivation for the proposed research is to understand the role of burrowing infauna on nutrient processes in sedimentary habitats. Many animals create burrows in the soft mud and sand that cover the vast majority of the sea floor. The water that is expelled as the animal feeds or ventilates its burrow is often enriched in ammonium, silicate, phosphate, and other important nutrients. While some important geochemical and ecological effects of bioturbation and bioirrigation have been demonstrated, quantitative studies of the production and fate of nutrient plumes have never been conducted. Over the next five-years, Dr. Finelli and his students will study the effects of nutrient release by two species of thalassinid shrimp from Louisiana coastal habitats, the estuarine ghost-shrimp Lepidophthalmus louisianensis and the beach ghost-shrimp Callichirus islagrande. Using thermistor flow meters and portable pumps, they will measure the daily and seasonal patterns of burrow ventilation, nutrient concentration of burrow water, and burrow morphology. Detailed measurements of plumes in the laboratory and field will then be used to examine how rapidly nutrient plumes are dispersed by turbulent water flow. These measurements are critical to predicting the effects of nutrient plumes on primary production. Finally, algal pigment concentrations and measurements of photosynthetic efficiency from the areas surrounding the burrows will test if the elevated nutrients in burrow plumes influence benthic production. This research will lead to fundamental advances in our understanding of nutrient cycling, benthic-pelagic coupling, and the ecology of sedimentary habitats. In addition to being researchers, science faculty members are educators who pass on established knowledge and provide students with the cognitive skills to identify and solve problems. The importance of this latter role is underscored by recent calls for increased teaching from funding agencies, state and federal governments, and the tax-paying public that are spurred by the pervasive role of science and technology in our daily lives. Two themes have been emphasized in the recent discussions of science education reform. First, all people need a minimal level of scientific understanding to participate in a technological society. Second, leaming is best accomplished by observation and manipulation of study subjects, not by memorization and recitation. Both of these themes are addressed in the education plan. At the university level, Dr. Finelli will support and supervise undergraduate and graduate research, and teach courses that emphasize hypothesis formation and data collection. However, it is at the K- 12 level that a real opportunity exists to better serve the students who visit LUMCON annually. The investigator is part of a collaborative team that is developing a field experience for grades 7-12 that is guided by state and national science education standards. This effort consists of annual teacher workshops that are designed to help local teachers use LUMCON as a resotirce for science education. In addition, these workshops will serve as a mechanism for formative evaluation of the field program. The field experience requires students to collect water chemistry samples in the field, analyze data in the lab, and interpret their results. Data from all classes will be available online to encourage yearlong participation. The objective of this exercise is to teach students about physical and chemical processes in the salt marsh, while exposing them to the scientific process doc8109 none Zeng This CAREER award supports theoretical research on the thermodynamics of disorder-dominated systems. The PI seeks to develop a framework in which combinatorial algorithms are used to study disordered systems, and from the resulting analyses of disordered systems, new combinatorial algorithms of greater utility can be designed. There are three components to the proposed work: (1) combinatorial algorithms will be used to study dislocation loops, and the roughness and statistical topography of glassy interfaces that are important to materials science, with the aim of investigating universal features at random criticality. (2) Large scale simulations on mesoscopic vortex systems using a new finite-temperature transfer matrix sampling technique will be performed to investigate: anomalous scalings of thermodynamic variables, universal sample-to-sample variances for non-self-averaging quantities, and the scaling forms of probability distribution functions. (3) A disordered fully-packed-loop model defined on a square lattice will be studied with a focus on difficulty of computing ground states as a function of loop fugacity. The aim is to locate a phase transition between P (polynomial and easy) and NP (nondeterministic polynomial and hard). The educational component of this award involves the development and implementation of multidisciplinary science courses. The primary focus will be a graduate course Combinatorial Optimizations in Natural Science with a novel implementation that includes a diverse range of topics from bioinformantics to condensed matter physics. %%% This CAREER award supports theoretical research and education on statistical physics and combinatorial algorithms. The focus of the research is on the equilibrium properties of systems dominated by disorder with the aim of contributing to a unified theory of the thermodynamics of disordered systems. Materials motivated examples include vortices in type II superconductors that are pinned by random disorder, polymer absorbtion on disordered substrates, and conformation of compact proteins with random residue sequences doc8110 none Egolf This is a CAREER award for a program of large-scale computation to study the properties of far-from-equilibrium dynamical systems that exhibit temporally-chaotic, spatially-disordered behavior. This persistent, complex dynamical behavior found in a wide variety of systems such as fibrillating heart tissue, large aperture lasers, planetary atmospheres and oceans, fluid turbulence, and environmental ecosystems is currently not well understood due to the strong nonlinearities and the lack of an extremal principle in these systems. The grant goals are to develop new tools for analyzing these complicated dynamical systems and to use these tools to achieve an understanding of the important internal dynamical processes. Such an understanding could ultimately lead to a unified statistical theory for describing the macroscopic properties of these systems without detailed knowledge of the microscopic behavior. Through computational studies of experimentally relevant equations and simpler model equations, three questions will be answered: (i) What are the sources of chaotic behavior in these systems and how do these deterministic sources lead to loss of predictability and the effective stochastic nature of the systems? (ii) What are the appropriate mesoscopic degrees of freedom in a reduced description of the dynamics? (iii) Which properties of equilibrium statistical mechanics can we salvage for a description of the long-wavelength properties of far-from-equilibrium systems with differing microscopic physical processes? The results of this work will lead not only to a better understanding of the behavior of far-from-equilibrium systems, but will provide new tools for analyzing and simulating other highly complex scientifically and commercially important phenomena. Also, as part of this project, new interdisciplinary courses will be developed in computational science for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students in the industrial physics program at Georgetown. Through performance of the research described above, undergraduates and postdoctoral fellows will develop skills in large-scale computing and modeling and in analyzing complex phenomena, which will serve the students and postdoctoral fellows well in careers in a wide variety of scientific fields. Also, an outreach program will be developed to bring the fast-evolving field of computational science to high school students and teachers. The PI and others at Georgetown will provide guidance and mentoring for students preparing computational science projects for science fairs and the Intel Science Talent Search. %%% This is a CAREER award for a program of large-scale computation to study the properties of far-from-equilibrium dynamical systems that exhibit temporally-chaotic, spatially-disordered behavior. This persistent, complex dynamical behavior found in a wide variety of systems such as fibrillating heart tissue, large aperture lasers, planetary atmospheres and oceans, fluid turbulence, and environmental ecosystems is currently not well understood due to the strong nonlinearities and the lack of an extremal principle in these systems. The grant goals are to develop new tools for analyzing these complicated dynamical systems and to use these tools to achieve an understanding of the important internal dynamical processes. Also, as part of this project, new interdisciplinary courses will be developed in computational science for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students in the industrial physics program at Georgetown. Through performance of the research described above, undergraduates and postdoctoral fellows will develop skills in large-scale computing and modeling and in analyzing complex phenomena, which will serve the students and postdoctoral fellows well in careers in a wide variety of scientific fields. Also, an outreach program will be developed to bring the fast-evolving field of computational science to high school students and teachers. The PI and others at Georgetown will provide guidance and mentoring for students preparing computational science projects for science fairs and the Intel Science Talent Search doc8111 none Cortez The investigator develops, analyzes, and applies computational techniques for the motion of elastic filaments embedded in an incompressible fluid. This general situation arises in many physical contexts, including the motion of microorganisms, swimming of aquatic animals, fluid flow around elastic bodies, bubble motion and more. The project encompasses the development of numerical methods for flows corresponding to a wide range of length scales. The methods are based on the use of a force field along filaments made of localized but smooth terms rather than delta distributions. Regular expressions for the fluid and filament velocities induced by the forces are then derived as the basis for the methods. Important properties of this approach are that it eliminates the singularities that would normally be present if the forces are assumed to be delta distributions, the volume of fluid within elastic boundaries is conserved extremely well, and high accuracy can be achieved. The work is aimed at extending well-known numerical techniques to three-dimensional flows driven by forces along filaments and to the full range of length scales. Analysis of the methods is carried out to establish and improve their stability, convergence and accuracy properties. The applications that are pursued include a wide variety of flagellar motions, the motion of flexible membranes around obstacles, and others. The motion of microorganisms in a liquid and the flow of blood in capillaries are two examples of phenomena that can be studied with computational methods. Computer techniques that can accurately simulate motions of this type are very valuable because they can be used to determine how arteries become obstructed or how flagellated organisms perform specific functions in the human body and the effects of defects in this mechanism. From a mathematical point of view, these computer simulations are not ready for scientists to use; there is a need to improve the accuracy with which the underlying equations are being solved and increase the reliability of the methods. This project is aimed at developing computational methods for fluid flows interacting with elastic structures. The goal is to develop high-accuracy methods, improve on their mathematical properties, and apply them to problems from biological sciences doc8112 none Over the past fifty years, the suburban portion of the population has nearly doubled and today one in two Americans calls a suburb home. Sub urbanization has changed fundamentally the types of political communities where most Americans live: rather than being crowded in diverse central cities or isolated in rural towns, they now live in specialized municipalities that are often highly singular in their economic and racial composition and land-use. Despite the enormity of this change, we have little understanding of how these suburban social contexts are influencing citizens perceptions of community or their attitudes towards government. Many critics bemoan the alienation and hostility to government that suburbs putatively foster, but little research has either adequately defined suburbs or tested their effects. Consequently, there is little systematic theory to explain whether or why suburbanites may be different, not just from residents of large cities but also from other people who live across the vast diversity of suburban locales. This CAREER project fills this information gap with the first-ever comprehensive Study of the Suburban Citizenry (SSC). It has three interrelated components. First, by collecting survey data from more than 2,400 respondents from 40 locales across six states and doing intensive field studies of suburban election campaigns, this project advances and tests a conflict theory of local democracy. This theory promises to link disparate areas of research on local political attitudes and provide a systematic explanation for how social contexts influence citizens views on local government and community. This research focuses on how social diversity and conflict in suburbs (or the lack thereof) structures people s political beliefs, the nature of campaigns, and voting behavior. Utilizing computer assisted survey technologies, the study contains both questions specifically tailored to each locality and standard items asked of all respondents. Using data from the Census, other sources, and field research, information is appended to the survey about each locality s social composition, political institutions, media sources, and other important contextual factors. Second, this project provides a valuable resource for scholars both within American political science and social studies at large. Using these data, scholars can examine many questions such as whether suburban citizens act as consumers of public services, how voters make decisions in low information, non-partisan elections, and how social environments influence political attitudes. The availability of good, geo-coded data that measure community attachments and attitudes helps further multi-level analysis. Finally, as a CAREER investigation this project contains a strong educational component. It develops a community based learning curriculum for undergraduate teaching at Princeton. As part of their coursework, undergraduates will conduct intensive studies of the municipalities chosen in the survey instrument, particularly in the week before their elections. Their research will be utilized in the creation of contextual variables and their reports will be collected and published in an edited volume on suburban political campaigns. This project allows for advances in graduate student research, linking the study of local politics with that of survey research, two areas doc8113 none The scientific component of this CAREER activity focuses on experiments and theoretical approaches that explore the importance of noise and randomness in two biological systems: (i) the actin propulsion engine and (ii) stochastic gene expression in bacteria. The goal of the first project is to unravel the biophysical mechanism of force generation and self-organization of polymerizing actin filaments. Theoretical efforts will focus on developing realistic models that incorporate the recent biochemical data of actin propulsion engines. In a synergistic manner, experiments will be performed that explore the propulsion of well-defined cargo such as polystyrene beads, phospholipid vesicles, and micro-fabricated cylinders. The main goal of the second project is to quantitatively understand stochastic gene expression in prokaryotic cells. Using analytical and numerical tools, stochastic expression will be modeled theoretically. The theories will be tested by exploring stochastic gene expression of single genes and simple genetic networks in prokaryotic cells using fluorescent reporter proteins. The educational component of the activity focuses on the development of an infrastructure for biophysics at MIT thorough a number of different mechanisms, including a new seminar series, new courses, and journal clubs. This award is jointly supported by the Division of Physics in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences and the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences in the Directorate for Biological Sciences doc8114 none This project is supported under the Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER). For the research component, two-dimensional gas chromatography (GC x GC) will be developed as a tool for characterizing the volatile organic composition of the atmosphere. The technique will be compared side-by-side with the GC MS method (gas chromatography mass spectrometry). In addition, laboratory and field studies will be performed to determine the significance of n-aldehydes in the troposphere. The PI will in particular investigate the hypothesis that the oxidation of unsaturated fatty acids in natural waters, such as lakes and river, is a major source of these compounds. The education part of this project will include the involvement of graduate and undergraduate students in this research, the development of an atmospheric chemistry course, and outreach activities for local high school teachers doc8115 none The proposed research focuses on asymmetric biaryl oxidative coupling reactions. Combinatorial type screening of ligands with transition metal oxidants will be undertaken to identify new, useful catalysts. A variety of substrates and issues of chemo- and regioselectivity will be examined. The educational component of this plan introduces graphics and internet examples into the undergraduate organic chemistry course as well as computional chemistry using CSC Chem3D Ultra. Graduate and undergraduate students in the principal investigator s research group also receive training in computional chemistry. With the CAREER award, the Organic Synthesis Program is supporting the research and educational activities of Professor Marisa Kozlowski of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Kozlowski s research applies concepts from computional and organic chemistry to design and synthesize new molecules which are useful as ligands for new catalysts or as building blocks for certain natural products. The educational portion of the plan is directed towards using computional chemistry methods as a teaching tool at both the undergraduate and graduate level doc8116 none This award will create a publicly accessible database of tree ring-based chronologies from the Himalayas and the Indian subcontinent regions that will help reconstruct climate over the past few centuries. It will also fund expeditions to India and Bhutan to further expand the tree-ring network and provide support to statistically analyze new tree ring data from these field expeditions. Such data from this climatically sensitive region is critical for understanding global climate variability on annual to century timescales. In the process of building a database of unique climate information, the research effort will also build collaborations with international colleagues working in this previously inaccessible region through cooperative research and the organization of an international workshop to share scientific data and ideas doc8117 none The research component of this CAREER proposal involves the design and nanomechanical testing of biomimetic, modular polymeric systems with highly controlled mechanical properties at the molecular level. A general design strategy for improving the molecular toughness of synthetic macromolecules is proposed which involves the nonspecific, noncovalent complexation of a synthetic host polymer with smaller, nanometer-size, shape-persistant guests. The research will begin by studying a model system which involves the well-studied complexation of poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO), -[CH2-CH2-O]n- and the small globular protein, human serum albumin (HSA). Chemical attachment of one PEO chain end to a surface and sufficiently low chain grafting densities will be achieved using a mixed monolayer technique involving the co-chemisorption of mono(thiol)-functionalized PEO and a self-assembling alkanethiol monolayer (SAM) on gold. The PEO substrates will then be incubated in an HSA solution to form surface-immobilized macromolecular complexes. High-resolution force spectroscopy will be employed to tether the individual macromolecular complexes to a probe tip via nonspecific, physisorption interactions and the extensional nanomechanical properties (e.g. force, F, versus separation distance, D) will be measured in aqueous solution. A variety of parameters will be studied in order to control the molecular elasticity and toughness, such as the host polymer molecular weight, the length of host chain segment between two neighboring guests, pH, and ionic strength. In the long-term, this research project will be expanded to include other general classes of guests including dendrimers, SAM-functionalized nanoparticles, and complementary oligomer-clothed nanoparticles. %%% The educational activities described in this CAREER proposal are strongly integrated with the research objectives and will expose materials science students to the molecular origins of material properties and behavior. A secondary goal is to show students from a variety of disciplines some of the latest, most exciting scientific discoveries in the field of nanotechnology and to encourage them to take up undergraduate research projects, apply to graduate school, and or pursue a career in research and academia. This will be achieved through the continuing development of a new semester-long undergraduate course entitled Nanomechanics of Materials and Biomaterials, the creation of a special 4-week undergraduate course during our independent activities period entitled Nanotechnology Science and Engineering, the creation of a week-long, graduate-level laboratory summer course entitled High-Resolution Force Spectroscopy, and outreach to high school teachers doc8118 none The Advanced Materials and Processing Program in the Chemistry Division support this CAREER award to Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. In this project, Professor Daniel Dyer of the Department of Chemistry will study the formation of noncentrosymmetric organic thin films from self-assembling monolayers formed by hydrogen bonding. These self assembled liquid crystal polymers with acceptor and donor groups at the opposite ends may have applications in electrooptic devices. The second part of the research will be the deposition of oriented dipole polymer brushes on gold or glass surfaces by free radical or anionic polymerization to provide polar stability and processability to thin films. The long-range goals of this research are to study structure-function relationships, to determine binding interactions and to control the self-assembly in organic thin films. The educational component of this program involves the development of a new course work in materials chemistry at graduate and undergraduate levels with summer internships in industrial laboratories. This research will impact the fields of polymer-based nonlinear optics, piezoelectricity and pyroelectricity, and the development of thermodynamically stable thin films for electrooptic devices of commercial interest. The educational component of the award with industrial partnership will provide interdisciplinary education and industrial training opportunities to graduate and undergraduate students doc8119 none Lewis This CAREER award focuses on three topics: (1) the study of the exchange of matter between the surface and bulk of transition-metal-oxides mediated by defect diffusion using density functional theory and kinetic Monte Carlo techniques, (2) ab inito molecular dynamics will be used to investigate the effect of lattice defects on transition-metal-oxide surface chemistry, and (3) the study of transition-metal-carbide and -oxide nanocrystals. The educational component involves developing virtual labs and introducing them into the undergraduate physics curriculum. Web-based software modules that provide a student friendly environment for simulating fundamental physical phenomena would be developed in three areas: (1) coupled oscillators, (2) activated processes, and (3) waves. %%% This is a CAREER award to support fundamental theoretical research and education on transition-metal-oxide surfaces and clusters of atoms, specifically transition-metal-carbide and -oxide clusters. Computational electronic structure methods together with atomistic simulation techniques would be used to carry out the research. The PI will also develop web-based simulation modules that illustrate fundamental physical principles. These will be integrated into the undergraduate curriculum doc8120 none Porte-Agel Measurement and prediction (from hydrologic, weather and climate model) of regional-scale fluxes of heat and water vapor are subject to substantital errors associated with our limited ability to understand and account for the effect of land-surface variability. For example, numerical weather models use boundary conditions based on similarity theory, which assumes homogeneity of the land surface and ignores subgrid-scale variability. This study addresses these limitations by advancing our understanding of the complex two-way coupling between land-surface heterogeneity and atmospheric turbulence through a novel combination of wind tunnel experiments, remote-sensing field measurements, and three-dimensional transient numerical simulations (large-eddy simulations). The wind tunnel experiments study the physics governing the relationship between instantaneous surface characteristics (shear stress) and air flow properties (wind velocity) in order to develop physically more realistic boundary conditions. A new generation LES will be developed to incorporate the improved boundary conditions, as well as new subgrid-scale turbulence. Performance for boundary layers over heterogeneous surfaces will be evaluated using wind tunnel experiments and field measurements from remote sensing. The model is used to study how land-surface variability propagates upwards and affects the atmospheric boundary layer. These results are expected to substantially improve our ability to parameterize land-atmosphere exchange processes and, consequently, the accuracy of hydrologic, weather and climate models. The education innovations are to: (1) Develop a new education tool that exploits the potential of LES to provide 3-D transient information of the turbulent flow above the land surface. (2) Develop and solidify curriculum to incorporate the motivation and fundamental ideas behind our research as they achieve pedagogical maturity. (3) Mentor and engage Ph.D, M.S., and undergraduate students in interdisciplinary research based on the coupling and feedback between the state-of-the-art experimental, numerical, and theoretical approaches. (4) Outreach through workshops for high school teachers and students, with special emphasis on students from groups traditionally under-represented in science and engineering doc8121 none Professor Jeffrey Yarger of the University of Wyoming is funded by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry program as a CAREER award to perform experiments aimed at developing a new understanding of phase transitions in polyamorphic solids. To date, the only demonstration of polyamorphism is in solid water. Because of the importance of water, it is therefore of great interest to understand polyamorphism and to seek other examples. The PI will look for such effects in other tetrahedrally bound systems such as BeF2. The approach is to use cutting edge NMR and light scattering methods such as Brillouin spectroscopy. The PI will also introduce laser based light scattering into the physical chemistry laboratory class, with an emphasis on making the experiments relevant to biochemistry students. The increasing need for novel material properties provides some of the motivation for study of amorphous materials and their phase transitions. Additionally, this research could help us to understand some of the unusual properties of water. The training of biochemistry majors in physical methods will be of great benefit as biological advances depend to a greater extent on sophisticated technology doc8122 none The aim of this research project in biomimetic materials chemistry is to apply low temperature, aqueous-based processing methods towards the development of new techniques for crystal engineering and in situ fabrication of organic-inorganic composites. This project will examine the physicochemical aspects of a recently discovered crystallization process, termed the Polymer-Induced Liquid-Precursor (PILP) process. In the PILP process, anionic polypeptides that mimic the acidic proteins found in biominerals are used to sequester ions in crystallizing solutions of calcium-based salts to induce this unusual liquid-liquid phase separation process. Rather than precipitating nuclei of the inorganic salt, microscopic liquid-like droplets of a mineral precursor are formed. Because liquids take the shape of their container, the liquid-phase mineral precursor can conceivably be molded into various shapes, providing materials engineers with a new tool for regulating crystal morphology. A new outreach program for Materials Chemistry will be established at the University of Florida. This summer research program will recruit undergraduate students from some of the women s colleges in the northeast and historically black universities in Florida. The projects will provide an opportunity to those students who would like to explore the applications side of materials chemistry. %%% Advances in the area of biomineralization will have important medical implications dealing with the formation of bones and teeth, as well as pathological biominerals such as kidney stones, biomaterial encrustation, and atherosclerotic plaque. It is anticipated that the benign processing conditions of the biomimetic PILP process will be particularly advantageous for applications that require the incorporation of organic, polymeric, or biological components into ceramic materials, and thus could be useful for the fabrication of biosensors, biocatalysis, bioseparations, and hard-tissue engineering. Students trained in these areas compete well for a range of jobs in the medical industry doc8123 none These scholarships support low- income students who are majoring in math, computer science, or any engineering discipline. The overarching goal of the program is to help low- income students in the targeted disciplines to successfully complete a stage within the degree program which is documented as a point of unusually high attrition at the Unviersity of Rochester. The program aggressively supports and retains low-income students within the first and second years, leading up to the declaration of the major during the second semester of sophomore year. The Program seeks at least a 50% participation rate for women and members of minority groups. Unique learning communities of small groups of first and second year students are established in each of the targeted disciplines. Each learning community is guided by a graduate student, and meets weekly for study, enrichment activities, and group- building events. The full group of scholarship recipients meets on a monthly basis with members of the Steering Committee. Each student recieves intensive support services aimed at keeping the student in the major doc8124 none Wiezorek This CAREER award is aimed at a quantitative, mechanism-based description of the processing-microstructure-property relationships and annealing behavior in reversibly ordering metallic systems. Model alloys based on the ferromagnetic L10- and L12-ordered intermetallic phases in the Fe-Pd system undergoing severe plastic deformation (SPD) processing will be the focus of the research. The main experimentation techniques are differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), vibrating-scanning-magnetometers, mechanical testing, and in-situ and post-mortem microstructural observations by transmission electron microscopy and x-ray diffraction. Strategies for property optimization and microstructural control will be devised based on the mechanistic models of the processes responsible for the observed microstructural changes. Unique exploitation of reaction processing of heavily deformed reversibly ordering alloys will be used to control microstructures at the nanoscale. The educational component centers on the development of Web-based educational tools and their implementation into upper-level MS&E undergraduate and graduate courses. These new tools will incorporate results and experimental capabilities developed from the research and they will be made available to the public cost-free. The national and international collaborations that will be fostered through this award offer unique opportunities for interaction with outstanding researchers in the field of intermetallics and physical metallurgy of advanced materials. %%% This research facilitates a systematic study of scale-related effects in truly bulk nanostructured functional intermetallic alloys with commercial potential. There is considerable interest in these functional intermetallics for advanced permanent magnet technologies, e.g. thin film media, data storage and futuristic micro-devices. Refinement of the microstructure to the nanoscale offers enormous potential for property improvements. Future success of these and many other intermetallics requires a detailed knowledge of the synergistic interplay between competing solid-state reactions during processing doc8125 none Proposal: Date: March 18, PI: Michael C. Fitzgerald Institution: Duke University This PECASE award to Professor Michael Fitzgerald of Duke University is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program in the Chemistry Division. The primary research objective is to develop a mass spectrometry based method to examine protein stability and folding. The experimental technique of hydrogen-deuterium exchange combined with matrix assisted laser desorption ionization mass spectrometry has several advantages over existing techniques for studying protein folding. The long-range goals of this research are to develop a method to study complex binding interactions between multiple proteins and DNA. The educational component of this program is both innovative and well developed. Dr. Fitzgerald presents a program focused on a summer workshop for high school science teachers. He collaborated with the school district science specialist in the development of the plan, which has also received the support of eight regional principals. This research will impact the fields of mass spectrometry and biochemistry. Compared to established methods, this method is not limited by sample purity and will have greater sensitivity. It is designed to be automated and fast. Future applications of this line of research could impact the study of both disease state and normal human health doc8126 none This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project seeks to enhance research and education in the areas of modern optics and condensed matter physics at the College of William and Mary. The objective in research is to apply the newest techniques in ultrafast pump-probe laser spectroscopy, including frequency-dependent and time-resolved magneto-optical Kerr effect and magnetization-induced second harmonic generation, to answer questions regarding spin polarization and spin and magnetization dynamics in ferromagnetic thin film multilayers. Such multilayers are showing great promise in technological applications, but are limited by incomplete knowledge of electron spin lifetimes and the sources of spin scattering and spin-flipping. Systems to be explored include magnetic multilayers displaying giant magnetoresistance, half-metallic materials and metal semiconducting systems. This work will continue to develop non-destructive, fast and straightforward nonlinear optical techniques to measure parameters crucial for spin-based devices. The educational goal of this project is the development of a series of laboratory modules which will be used to introduce modern optics and the physics of materials to undergraduates at the College as well as be used in outreach programs to the local community. %%% This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project seeks to enhance research and education in the areas of modern optics and the physics of materials at the College of William and Mary. In research, ultrafast pulsed laser techniques (with laser pulses less than one-trillionth of a second in duration), will be used to measure how the magnetic properties of thin-film ferromagnetic multilayers evolve in time. In these techniques, a pump beam is used to excite the material under study while a second pulsed beam probes or takes a snapshot of the state of the system later in time. Such techniques have been successfully used, for example, to study chemical reactions as they occur, and have only recently been applied to magnetic materials. The study of the ultimate speed of magnetic processes and what determines the magnetic and electrical properties of magnetic thin films is extremely important for the design of electronic and magnetic devices such as hard drive read heads, nonvolatile computer memory and the next generation computer devices based on electron spin (dubbed Spintronics or Magnetoelectronics ). The educational goal of this project is the development of a series of hands-on laboratory modules which will be used to introduce modern optics and the physics of materials to undergraduates at the College as well as be used in outreach programs to the local community doc8127 none What does the neural representation of a complex, temporally structured auditory event look like? When we listen to a symphony or a speech, what neural processes allow us to maintain a stable attentional focus? How do the requisite auditory representations form, how do they adapt to unexpected nuances, and how do they reorganize to accommodate structural change? This research will test a theory of auditory perception and attention that focuses on complex, temporally structured events, such as speech and music. The theory holds that the mental representation of an auditory event is a self-organized, dynamic structure whose neural correlate is a spatiotemporal pattern of neural activity. The primary function of this hypothesized spatiotemporal structure is attentional: it enables anticipation of future events and thus the targeting of perception and the coordination of action with external events. The stability and flexibility properties of attention in this theory both arise through nonlinearities in the underlying pattern-forming dynamics. Furthermore, the hypothesized dynamic representations in the theory function in auditory communication. It is known empirically that transient stimulus fluctuations, such as intonation and rate changes observed in both speech and musical performance, communicate intention, emotion, and structural information. The theory holds that these communicative gestures are recognized as deviations from temporal expectations embodied in the attentional structure. This theory explains how people maintain a stable attentional focus over temporally extended events while adapting flexibly to transient temporal fluctuations. It provides mathematical models of dynamic structural representation, using the tools of nonlinear dynamical systems. It makes predictions about neural correlates of auditory representation, attention, and communication. Finally, it applies to complex, temporally structured event sequences, explaining how people respond to the auditory complexity of the real world. The experiments will use music, as well as simpler music-like sequences, to model temporally extended events. Theoretical predictions will be tested using behavioral and neuroimaging techniques. Behavioral experiments will assess predictions in four areas 1) formation and stability of structural representations, 2) real-time tracking of temporally structured sequences, 3) the role of rhythm in attention, and 4) the role of expectancy in auditory communication. Neuroimaging techniques (EEG, MEG) will measure temporal and spatial aspects of neural function in auditory perception and attention, to further assess theoretical predictions. Modifications to the theory will be based on comparison of experimental results with predictions of computer simulations, and extensions to the general theory will be developed. This research will advance our basic understanding of auditory perception and attention by enhancing our knowledge of the role of structure in perceiving and attending to complex events. The results have potentially wide applicability from the development of more robust computer algorithms for speech recognition and music processing, to deeper clinical understanding of recovery from neural trauma, such as aphasic stroke doc8128 none Dr. Chaboyer will carry out a program of research and education that focuses on studies of stellar evolution through the development and distribution of improved stellar models and isochrones. His research plan involves two broadly defined areas. First, he plans to construct improved stellar models and isochrones for stellar systems with ages greater than 1 Gyr. These models will incorporate advances in our understanding of rotation, mixing, and convection. He will apply and test these models using a combination of helio- and astro-seismology, abundances of the light elements lithium, beryllium and boron, and luminosity functions of globular clusters. In a second area of research, he will apply these models to arrive at new estimates of ages for the oldest globular clusters, investigating the effects of the uncertainties in the distance scale and the models themselves, and carrying out a detailed Monte Carlo study of the errors involved. He will bring much of this research activity to students and the public by developing computer animated videos and web-based access to the stellar structure calculations and will use these tools to develop introductory astronomy labs doc8129 none This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project at New Mexico State University will focus on strongly-correlated-electron systems that exhibit non-collinear arrangements of the magnetic moments. Non-collinear order can be perturbed by the application of sufficiently high pressures or high magnetic fields, where different dependencies would allow separating direct and indirect exchange interactions as well as contributions due to coherence, Zeeman and crystal-field terms. A better understanding of the magnetism in strongly-correlated-electron systems will provide indispensable information on the complicated hierarchy of interactions between magnetic moments, the limits of validity of standard models, and the pre-conditions for long-range magnetic order. The project will use the neutron-scattering and high-magnetic-field user facilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and a substantial portion of the studies will be performed under multi-extreme sample-environment conditions (low temperatures, high pressures, high magnetic fields) that cannot be achieved elsewhere in the world. Graduate students will gain in-depth expertise in the field of magnetism and they will acquire skills in cutting-edge neutron-scattering and high-magnetic-field techniques, which are currently in great demand for forefront research. In addition, this project fosters efforts toward a strong Materials Science Program (a fast-growing field with many rewarding career opportunities) in the predominantly Hispanic communities in Southern New Mexico and Western Texas. %%% Magnetic materials are of extraordinary importance for many technological applications. The development and design of new magnetic devices requires a detailed understanding of the magnetic properties of the material under investigation. Materials with strongly interacting electrons exhibit a variety of fascinating properties, many of which are not completely understood. In these so-called strongly-correlated-electron systems, various interactions can cause the magnetic moments to arrange in an unusual non-collinear fashion. This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project at New Mexico State University will focus on the properties of such non-collinear magnets at world-record external conditions (high pressures and high magnetic fields). The results are expected to provide indispensable input for modeling the magnetism in strongly-correlated-electron systems. Graduate students will be trained in performing world-class research, and this will help to prepare the next generation of leading scientists in Academia, National Laboratories and Industry. In addition, this project fosters efforts toward a strong Materials Science Program (a fast-growing field with many rewarding career opportunities) in the predominantly Hispanic communities in Southern New Mexico and Western Texas doc8130 none Furman The research component of the project concerns with various aspects of rigidity in Ergodic theory, Lie groups and Hyperbolic Geometry. The common theme of the proposed research projects is the analysis of group actions on spaces endowed with a measurable, topological or geometrical structure. More specifically, in the context of Ergodic Theory the proposed problems address the structure and invariants of ergodic equivalence relations on probability spaces generated by measurable actions of lattices in Lie groups. In the context of Hyperbolic geometry the goal is to study negatively curved Riemannian structures on compact manifolds through coarse-geometric point of view on the fundamental group. Generally, the research component of the project is focused on dynamics and geometry of various systems which have a rich group of symmetries in the search of special phenomena occurring due to these symmetries. The educational component of the project is aimed to contribute to the graduate studies program via special designed Workshop in Mathematics Seminar and advanced Topic courses. The goal is to engage students in small scale self discovery projects via sets of challenging problems, to encourage independent thinking and to expose students to a wide spectrum of current research doc8131 none Professor Robert Walker of the University of Maryland College Park is supported by the Experimental Physical Chemistry CAREER program to perform experiments using nonlinear optical probes of the solid liquid boundary. Questions of structures of solvents near solid surfaces will be examined systematically through the use of solvent dependent shifts in chromophore absorption spectra. Complementing the equilibrium measurements will be ultrafast time-resolved studies of the mobility of molecules next to surfaces. The results could have impact in many fields such as catalysis, geochemistry and biology. A pilot program will be implemented to introduce motivated first year students to independent research opportunities in physical and analytical chemistry doc8132 none The aim of this project is to study the synthesis and processing of colloidal inorganic nanocrystals. Inorganic nanocrystals are fragments of corresponding bulk crystals with at least one dimension in the range of one to tens of nanometers. A fully controllable synthetic scheme will be designed for all types of colloidal nanocrystals by focusing on a systematic and quantitative study of the growth process of semiconductor nanocrystals. The ultimate goal is to develop safe, reliable, fully controllable (size, morphology and distribution), and quantitatively programmable synthetic chemistry for high quality colloidal nanocrystals. A fundamental study of growth mechanisms together with the development of a green chemistry approach to synthesizing high quality semiconductor nanocrystals will be emphasized. Even though this country will need a large number of nano-scientists and nano-engineers in the near future, the current curricula in most universities have not yet reflected this urgent demand. The aim of the teaching plan is to address this need. This philosophy will be incorporated into regular courses to be taught as well as the development of new courses such as materials chemistry with a strong emphasis on nanomaterials and nanofabrication. %%% Colloidal inorganic nanocrystals are of great interest for both fundamental research and industrial applications because of their phenomenal size dependent properties, excellent processibility, and high specific surface area. This well integrated research and education project addresses current needs for a large number of nano-scientists and nano-engineers to be trained in areas of high priority to industry doc8133 none Electrochemical ceramics encompass a variety of present and emerging technologies, including gas sensors, fuel cells, gas-separation membranes, and membrane reactors. Of critical importance to modeling the properties of electrochemical ceramics, and developing new materials with improved performance, is a strong understanding of electronic structure. Since most electrochemical ceramics possess complex intermediate-length scale order, their properties often defy explanation when viewed from traditional paradigms invoking localized or collective viewpoints of electronic structure. In order to gain a more complete understanding of electronic structure in electrochemical ceramics, we propose to measure the populations of localized and delocalized electrons in transition metal perovskites having general composition LaSrCoFe oxides (LSCF) using a novel high-sensitivity Faraday balance. These measurements will be used to interpret parallel studies of electrochemical properties, including electron transport, ionic defect structure, chemical expansion and stress, and catalytic activity. In addition, the PI is currently developing a new program of undergraduate laboratory experiments that integrate research and teaching. This program provides undergraduates with formal opportunities to contribute to Ph.D.-level research in modern growth areas of chemical engineering, producing real data that will be published (not just put into a lab report). In this way research and undergraduate education are on the same track, with a complementary agenda. The proposed project will contribute one experiment to this educational program, which is linked (and feeds directly into) our research program in electrochemical ceramics. Students will screen new materials for electronic structure using high-temperature magnetic susceptibility measurements and Taguchi analysis methods. %%% This project will contribute broadly to our understanding of electronic structure in complex materials. The results are of general interest to all branches of materials science, including solid-state electrochemistry, electronic materials, ceramics, as well as inorganic chemistry and physics. This project will also provide specific information about electronic structure in one class of materials, of immediate value to workers developing reaction separation membranes and solid-oxide fuel cells. The principal investigator has 8 years academic and 4 years industrial experience in this field, bringing a strong mix of fundamental and practical perspectives. This work is highly original, and contributes several novel advances to proven experimental techniques. The experimental plan is well organized, and the proposing institution has a world-class infrastructure for work in this cross-disciplinary field. In addition, the career development plan of the PI will help establish a strong fundamental research and educational program in a new, exciting, area of technology. This program will not only educate individual scientists in its field, but will also tightly integrate research and teaching in a way that benefits both, and opens new opportunities for undergraduates (many of whom, at CWRU, are women and minorities) to participate in cutting-edge research on a broad scale. This approach provides a new template for teaching that other higher-educational institutions may benefit from. Knowledge gained from both research and educational development will be disseminated broadly through the literature, and directly through strong ties of the PI to industry and the American Society of Engineering Education doc8134 none The Computer Science, Engineering and Mathematics Scholarship Project provides 55 scholarship awards of $895 per semester to full-time, academically talented, Pell-eligible students who are enrolled in programs leading to the Associate in Applied Science (AAS) or Associate in Science degree in computer information systems, electronics computer technology, electronics manufacturing technology, networking technology, computer science, engineering, or mathematics. The CSEMS project is being implemented at the partner colleges of Glendale Community College (GCC) and South Mountain Community College (SMCC), two schools who have led systemic reform initiatives in mathematics and science curriculum through the ACE (Achieving a College Education) Program. First implemented in the s, these ACE 2+2+2 programs target low income, first generation, and minority students beginning in their sophomore year of high school and have been nationally- recognized for success in retaining at risk , predominately Hispanic, students in the pipeline which leads to associate and baccalaureate degrees. The CSEMS project adapts from the ACE program these primary student support strategies: 1) Individual Education Plans (IEP); 2) academic support services (i.e., tutoring, study strategies); 3) faculty industry representative mentors for students; 4) ongoing monitoring tracking with early intervention services as required; 5) monthly special events activities that provide student interaction with faculty industry representatives and applicant ion-oriented experiences (i.e., field trip s to high tech workplaces);and 6) job placement services as appropriate. Project evaluation includes ongoing monitoring of performance outcomes, annual student mentor surveys, and post-graduate placement of students in either jobs or continuing higher education programs doc8135 none The ability to establish orderings among objects and make comparisons between them according to the amount or degree to which they possess some gradable property is a basic component of human cognition. Natural languages reflect this fact: all languages have syntactic categories that express gradable concepts, and all languages have constructions that are used to make comparisons. Gradable adjectives like tall , bright , beautiful , and so forth are canonical examples of such expressions, and have formed the central empirical domain for studies of grading in natural language. An important conclusion of this work is that natural language semantics must make reference to abstract representations of measurement, or scales . A question that has not been seriously addressed, however, is whether scalar representations underlie the semantic properties of categories other than adjectives. This study will address this question through a systematic and comprehensive investigation of the role of scalar representations across categories. The primary focus will be on relations between adjectives and verbs, both because their core semantic properties are well understood, and because preliminary research points towards a regular relation between scale structure in adjectives and event structure in verbs. The study will also explore scalar representations in the prepositional and nominal domains. The empirical domain of the project will provide the foundation for an integrated three-quarter sequence in lexical semantics, formal semantics, and pragmatics, as well as a freshman seminar focusing on linguistic, cognitive, and philosophical questions about meaning. The project will also support graduate and undergraduate researcher assistants, providing an opportunity for supervised independent research on a topic that allows a range of variation in individual research focus. Finally, the project will introduce students and colleagues directly to contemporary research by bringing in outside scholars for guest lectures, and through a workshop on scalar representations in natural language doc8136 none Dr. Francois Gabbai, Department of Chemistry, Texas A&M University, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program of the Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, for his work under a Career Award whose principal focus is to prepare and explore the chemistry of non-toxic organometallic polydentate cryptate and macrocyclic Lewis acids that will incorporate elements of group 13 as active sites. The educational objective will expose undergraduate students to a broader range of experiences thereby fostering personal growth by having students spend one or two semesters abroad through establishment of a departmental international exchange program with European universities. The studies will provide insights into developing new catalysts of potential interest to the pharmaceutical industry, and will provide graduate students and post-doctoral associates with skills for better prospects in the job market. Undergraduate students who spend time abroad under the exchange program will benefit both socially and professionally from their experiences in a foreign institution doc8137 none This CAREER project addresses a comprehensive research and education study of functional thin-film metal-oxides based on combinatorial methods. The combinatorial approach will be used to survey large compositional variations in individual experiments. New materials phases will be explored through fabrication of thin-film combinatorial libraries and composition-spread samples. The method for fabricating samples is a newly designed combinatorial pulsed laser deposition system. Scanning probe microscopies will be used to perform rapid characterization of the samples. In particular, a scanning evanescent microwave microscope, a ferromagnetic reso-nance microscope and a scanning SQUID microscope will serve as the main screening tools. Sample quality will be addressed by using various microanalysis tools, which allow spatially re-solved composition and phase mapping. The immediate focus will be on microwave materials for wireless communications applications and various magnetic materials including ferrites and half-metallic systems. In addition to searching for new compositions with enhanced physical proper-ties, composition-spread experiments will be conducted to systematically study composition-property relationships in materials that had previously only been made in bulk samples. Experi-mental tasks required in the proposed program span fundamental materials synthesis to develop-ing novel characterization techniques, and this multidisciplinary research environment will serve as a model educational background to train a new generation of students. In collaboration with other faculty a lab-based Combinatorial Materials Research and Education Course using mostly preexisting equipment targeting senior-level undergraduates will be devel-oped. Many of the course activities will mirror the actual research techniques developed in the research activities, thus directly linking research with education. The ability of combinatorial ex-periments to rapidly cover a range materials with large compositional variation in a single ex-periment will be used to provide hands-on experience that conveys the breadth of materials sci-ence to students. The emphasis on search and discovery in combinatorial research makes this method particularly exciting and effective as an educational tool. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in a topical area of materials science having high technological relevance. The scope of the project will expose students to challenges in materials synthesis, processing, and characterization. An important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education doc8138 none This CAREER project, supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, focusses on the interfacial adsorption, diffusion, and reaction of hydrogen halides with hydroxy-functionalized organic surfaces. Professor John R. Morris and his coworkers of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State Univeristy will examine reactions of interest in a number of environmentally important processes. Molecular beam scattering from functionalized self-assembled monolayers will be used to examine these interactions. The translational energy of the scattered product species will be monitored by TOF analysis, and reflection-absorption infrared spectroscopy will be used to identify the surface adsorbed reaction products. Gas-surface energy transfer, interfacial reaction probability, and the role of coadsorbed solvent molecules on the surface reaction process will be examined. This research effort will be integrated with the development of an introductory analytical chemistry course at VPI incorporating inquiry based cooperative learning methods. Examples will be drawn from real world environmental problems, and will be tied to the basic research underway in the P.I. s laboratory. This CAREER project focusses on the basic understanding of the interfacial chemistry of hydrogen halides, using detailed dynamic experimental methods. This surface chemistry is of considerable interest in a number of environmental applications, and the educational component of this project will focus on these environmental connections in the integration of this research with the education of graduate and undergraduate students. Inquiry based learning methods will be incorporated into the introductory analytical course offerings as part of this project doc8139 none This project aims to develop a semi-quantitative understanding of the relationships between composition, crystal structure and the electronic structure in extended solids. The focus is on oxide and oxynitride materials. The motivation is to use this knowledge to design new materials, or rediscover existing materials, with interesting optical, electrical and or catalytic properties. Specific emphasis is given to the development of new materials where both the electrical and optical properties are important, such as photocatalysts and transparent conductors. The development of a photocatalytic material that can efficiently utilize visible light would have far reaching implications in the areas of environmental remediation and hydrogen generation. There are two aspects to the educational plan. The first element involves improving the way general chemistry is taught by incorporating more aspects of active learning and group work into the recitation and laboratory sections. The second aspect of the educational plan is to develop a series of modules for use in teaching solid state chemistry at the graduate advanced undergraduate level. The combined research and education components described here were chosen to enhance our understanding of structure-composition-property relations in solid state chemistry. The need for new transparent conductors is driven by the increasing popularity of optoelectronic devices, such as flat panel displays, light emitting diodes, and solar cells. Students trained in the areas have a significant chance of competing well in these high-technology job markets doc8140 none This project will determine role of the subsurface chlorophyll maximum as a site of alkenone export production in an oligotrophic subtropical ocean environment. Analyses of sediment trap time series samples and water samples will be used to determine seasonal production of alkenones and the depth at which they are produced doc8141 none The aim of this project is to investigate the synthesis and physical property characterization of nanoparticles with coupled magnetic and electronic properties. Two types of systems will be studied, both based on III-V semiconductors: (1) Diluted magnetic semiconductors (DMS s) and (2) Heterostructured core-shell nanoparticles with a magnetic:semiconducting interface. Such materials are expected to combine the information storage ability of magnetic devices, with the processing ability of semiconductor devices. The miniaturization of circuits is expected to provide an economic impetus for such dual use devices. III-V based nanoparticle DMS s will be prepared through modified co-precipitation reactions of manganese and iron salts with indium or gallium in the presence of a pnictogen source such as phosphorous or arsenic. These materials will be characterized using standard techniques for structural and particle size determination of nanoparticles and the physical properties will be evaluated by magnetic susceptibility, absorption luminescence spectroscopy, and coupled magnetic optical techniques. The structural and physical properties of DMS nanoparticles will be compared to heterostructured nanoparticles consisting of a magnetic transition metal pnictide core and a semiconducting main group pnictide shell. Techniques have been developed for producing transition metal pnictide nanoparticles (cores) and to be used as substrates for the nucleation precipitation of indium or gallium pnictide phases (shells). %%% The diluted and heterostructured magnetic semiconductor materials prepared in the course of this research are expected to impact industries focused on information storage transmission and development of magnetoresistive sensors. Accordingly, an important educational goal is to illustrate the relevance of materials research to technological advances by fostering interactions between students and local industry. Additionally, modules emphasizing materials chemistry and nanotechnology will be incorporated into traditional inorganic courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels doc8142 none Dr. Jonathan Wilker, Department of Chemistry, Purdue University, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program, Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, through a Career Award for his work on marine adhesives. Specifically, the work will investigate the protein adhesive precursor that contains high levels of 3,4-dihydroxyhenylalanine (DOPA), a known metal chelator produced by barnacles, mussels and reef-building worms. On the educational front, a new inorganic laboratory course will be designed to increase student enthusiasm and student learning outcomes; groups of students will conduct a laboratory and subsequently will teach the material that emphasizes synthesis and spectroscopic techniques to their classmates. Understanding the role of metals in marine adhesives will aid in the design and development of new medical adhesive materials, antifoulants (of potential interest to the Navy), underwater adhesives, and rustproof coatings. Students involved in the self-teaching teaching laboratory course will appreciate the art and science of teaching and perhaps generate an interest in pedagogy to potential science educators doc8143 none This CAREER award to Professor Samuel Gilman of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program in the Chemistry Division. The primary focus of this research is the use of capillary electrophoresis for the study of aggregated proteins. Both laser light scattering and fluorescence detection will be utilized. There is a substantial scientific and biomedical interest in the fundamental aspects of protein self-assembly and aggregation. A model system of amyloid proteins will be studied. The educational component involves the creative use of animated tutorials (created by senior students) for the education of junior students. These internet and CD based tutorials will be widely disseminated and will enhance student education. Protein aggregation and self-assembly are known to occur during normal and disease state biological functions. Abnormal protein aggregation is implicated in aging and in neurological disorders. The research includes components of instrument design and fundamental chemical studies on separations of compounds with biomedical relevance doc8144 none Peter Gegenheimer The transfer RNA (tRNA) species in a cell or organelle are synthesized as large precursor molecules. Their subsequent maturation is accomplished by enzymes that recognize and break a single, specific bond in each precursor RNA, thus separating the functional tRNA from the nonessential fragments. One of these enzymes, ribonuclease P (RNase P), is present in bacteria and archaea, and in the nuclei, mitochondria, and chloroplasts of all eukaryotic cells. The RNase P enzymes from all known bacteria contain a large RNA molecule and a small protein; it is the RNA component which performs the essential reaction. Although chloroplasts evolved from a cyanobacteria, which possess a bacterial RNase P, the spinach chloroplast enzyme appears to consist exclusively of protein. Recent studies demonstrated that the chloroplast enzyme uses a different catalytic mechanism than the bacterial RNase P. Transfer RNA maturation in chloroplasts is the first example of a single biochemical reaction that is catalyzed in different organisms by a protein or by an RNA enzyme. The goal of this project is to complete the characterization of this extraordinary enzyme. The major polypeptide associated with chloroplast RNase P activity is a novel nuclear-encoded RNA-binding protein that is related to bacterial signal transduction proteins as well as to the superfamily of dinucleotide-binding proteins. Preliminary modeling studies indicated a possible mechanism for proteins of this class to bind tRNA. This project will test this hypothesis by completing the biochemical purification of chloroplast RNase P. By treatment of purified enzyme preparations with antibodies specific for each of the polypeptides in this preparation, the investigators will identify which polypeptides are necessary for RNase P activity. cDNAs encoding these polypeptides, as well as cDNAs able to restore activity to a bacterial strain lacking RNase P, will be isolated and the respective proteins over-expressed and characterized in vitro. The results of these investigations will provide insight into how a single biochemical reaction can be accomplished by an RNA enzyme or by a protein enzyme doc8145 none This award supports a career development plan that will integrate research programs that produce and use state-of -the-art astronomical instrumentation with University of North Carolina s (UNC) mission to train graduate and undergraduate students in observational astronomy. The main educational objective is to develop, over a 5 year period, a set of pedagogical hardware and software tools that will allow students in observational astronomy to deepen their understanding through direct experimentation with working instrumentation and reduction software. The second objective is to fund graduate and undergraduate student participation in ongoing research programs that involve producing new and innovative astronomical instrumentation. Funds provided in this award will also support ongoing research programs that involve innovative instrumentation. These include seismological studies of white dwarf stars and investigations of the mass-radius relation on the lower main sequence. The former will make use of the state-of-the-art spectrograph under construction at UNC and the second will employ an automated telescope and camera already built and deployed. Both of these projects involve graduate students in the development of astronomical instrumentation doc8146 none The plasticity of glassy polymers, in spite of its considerable industrial importance, continues to represent a major frontier of materials science and condensed matter physics. Although phenomenological models of the mechanical properties of polymer glasses at large strains do exist, the underlying mechanisms are unkown. The proposed work aims at identifying the elementary processes of plasticity at the nanometer length scale, thus uncovering the relationship between molecular structure and plastic properties. In order to meet this goal, a comprehensive approach is adopted, including molecular simulation as well as experimental work. Modeling efforts will shed light on the role of the topological constraints caused by the entangled polymer chains in determining the spatial extension of the elementary relaxation processes that are activated by plastic deformation. A second target of computer simulation will be the interplay between physical aging and plastic deformation in molecular glasses. Experimental work, in complement to the simulations, will also focus on the role of molecular entanglements. Compatible polymer blend systems offer the opportunity to vary the density of entanglements by simply varying composition. This will be exploited for a systematic solid-state NMR study of how the amount and character of molecular alignment that results from plastic deformation depends on the entanglement density. In addition, the connection between entanglements and the shear activation volume, a key parameter of the plastic response that is linked to the spatial extension of its elementary processes, will be explored. Together, the results from these studies have the potential to take understanding of plasticity in amorphous polymer solids onto a new level. Knowledge of the relation between molecular structure and plastic properties will foster the optimization and development of novel polymer materials and applications, opening many opportunities for further research. By virtue of its interdisciplinary nature between physics, chemistry and materials science, the proposed research program will open a multitude of opportunities for students from several different departments, graduate as well as undergraduate, to become involved. In turn, this will generate a highly stimulating learning environment for fields as diverse as NMR spectroscopy, computer modeling at electronic, molecular and continuum length scales, polymer science, and solid mechanics. %%% Although glassy polymers are ubiquitous in today s technology, many important aspects of their mechanical behavior are not yet well understood. The present project seeks to establish the molecular origins of the ductility of such materials. Advanced magnetic resonance spectroscopy as well as computer simulations will be used for this purpose. The insight gained from this work will be helpful to guide the development of novel materials for structural as well as medical and optoelectronic applications doc8147 none Conventional wisdom and decades of research in American psychology have suggested a link between the provision of choice and intrinsic motivation, which in turn has been correlated with numerous psychological benefits, including better performance and higher levels of satisfaction. Conversely, the absence of choice has been shown to detrimentally affect intrinsic motivation and performance. So ingrained is the assumption that people will find choice intrinsically motivating, that psychologists have rarely paused to examine the more general applicability of these findings. Rarely have circumstances been considered in which the provision of choice(s) may not be intrinsically motivating. Considered even less, is the possibility that having others make the choice may, in certain contexts, inspire greater intrinsic motivation and increased commitment to the chosen activity. Moreover, it has been implicitly presumed that the phenomena demonstrated in laboratory experiments with primarily European American participants will generalize cross-culturally. This research explores the mediating mechanisms underlying the relationship between choice and intrinsic motivation by examining for the first time circumstances in which people may actually exhibit greater intrinsic motivation when their choices are limited rather than expanded, or might even prefer to have others make their choices for them. By employing multiple methodological approaches including cross-cultural field, laboratory, and ethnographic studies using multiple dependent measures, the resulting mosaic of studies examines cultural, individual and situational differences in choice-making perceptions and goals. In particular, this research compares the motivational consequences of choice among individuals in the extent to which they perceive choice-making to involve the fulfillment of personal preference matching (i.e. identifying the choice most suited to personal interests) or to involve duty fulfillment (i.e. identifying the choice which is in accordance with others expectations). The relevance of this research can be observed across a wide array of choice-making settings. In organizational settings, this research examines the way correlates of employee motivation and performance vary across culture and vary across their choice-making perceptions and goals. Financial 401k decisions may be influenced by choosers perceptions of their choice-making goal in that people striving to identify the personally most optimal 401k retirement plan option may actually prefer to opt out of the choice-making process, even when doing so is sub-optimal. Similarly, interviewees perceiving employment options as involving the identification of the personally most optimal preference may in the choosing process examine more options, and yet experience greater dissatisfaction resulting in reduced tenure in their jobs of choice, as compared to interviewees searching for the employment choice which enables them to fulfill their obligations to others. Furthermore, ethnographic studies conducted cross-culturally examine consumers preferred choice-making methods and subsequent satisfaction with their choices as a consequence of their initial choice-making perceptions and goals. In short, because these studies include corporate, consumer, financial, and job interview contexts in addition to laboratory settings, they both enrich a theoretical understanding of choosers responses to various choice-making contexts and provide better information about important aspects of choice in complex real-world settings doc8148 none This CAREER project, supported in the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, addresses the detailed interactions of reactive radicals with well characterized semiconductor surfaces. Using molecular beam scattering methods, the interaction of hyperthermal ions and radicals with the Si(100) and (111) surfaces will be examined. Effects of rotational steering in interhalogen reactants, chemical selectivity in the reactions, atom abstraction processes, and reactions with adsorbed layers will be studied to provide insight into these reactions of fundamental importance to semiconductor processing. A program will be developed to include high school teachers in the basic research associated with this project, in order to foster increased understanding of current technology and its application. This program will impact high school teachers and their students through participation in cutting edge research during the summers, and follow up with classroom activities throughout the school year. The fundamental interactions of small reactive ions and radicals with semiconductor surfaces forms the research basis of this CAREER project. Involving local high school teachers in the basic research effort during summers, and outreach to their classrooms during the academic year, forms its educational basis. Molecular beam scattering methods coupled with spectroscopic characterization of silicon surfaces will allow the research group of Professor Sean Casey at the University of Nevada-Reno to examine the fundamentals of these surface reactions which are of significant importance to the area of semiconductor processing doc8149 none Meixner Biogeochemical watershed models have become disconnected from rigorous hypothesis testing due to a lack of available evaluation tools, thereby limiting the usefulness of these models. I propose to improve the utilitty of biogeochemical watershed models by developing improved techniques of hypothesis testing using recently developed multi-criteria calibration techniques. Three questions will be addressed: (1) What are the benefits of distributed models of catchment biogeochemistry? (2) How do we incorporate multiple fluxes and state variables into our judgment of how well a model is performing? (3) How do we use different types of data in evaluating what is wrong with a model? Preliminary results with multi-media methods have shown promise in solving the hypothesis-testing challenge of biogeochemical watershed models. I will foster the development of these methods through both education and fundamental research into these techniques. I will develop an innovative group project on watershed mass balance models for the general hydrology course I teach. The graduate education portion of the project will involve lecture and collective learning in small groups using a simple bucket model of watershed processes. The group project will take the students from the rudiments of model construction to the tools available for model calibration and model evaluation of lumped as well as distributed hydrologic models. This course will form the foundation for the biogeochemical watershed modeling group I hope to create. The research I propose will focus on the development of multi-criteria model calibration and evaluation tools for multi-process biogeochemical watershed models. The proposed work includes testing the AHM model of the Emerald Lake watershed using true (testing for parameter uniqueness and identification) and real data sets using the available multi-criteria evaluation tools. Model calibration will be conducted for several scenarios comparing the level of spatial aggregation, time series duration, and the kinds of data available (outflow time series in addition to spatial data of soil conditions). These studies will investigate the utility of distributed biogeochemical watershed models and what sort of data is needed to properly parameterize and evaluate these models. I will also conduct similar modeling studies with agricultural non-point source models with the assistance of a post-doctoral associate trained in agricultural engineering. Finally, I will establish a biogeochemical watershed processes field site at the San Diego Experimental Forest doc8150 none Stacey This CAREER program effort is a long-term study of estuarine fronts in San Francisco Bay. Over a series of years, during the summer months, moored ADCPs will be deployed in regions where fronts of different type are known to exist. Short, one-day experiments will be performed using shipboard mapping, microstructure profiling, and dye studies of dispersion in and around the fronts. The dominant question to be asked is to what extent do fronts influence mixing and transport in estuaries ? Fronts limit mixing and cross-frontal transport, they encourage along-front transport, and they may enhance mixing during frontolysis. The proposed work will identify the relative importance of these processes. The educational component will include development of a display and visual experiments at the San Francisco Exploratorium and development of field opportunities for graduate students interested in environmental fluid dynamics doc8151 none PROJECT : SES 00- Ellen Herman Kinship by Design: Adoption Science and Scientific Adoption in Modern America This project explores science in action by interpreting child adoption as a scientific enterprise in the 20th-century United States. It investigates the work of those individuals--in psychology, behavioral genetics, sociology, social work, and the human sciences generally--who reimagined an ancient institution in modern terms: as an experimental basis for the science of human nature, or as a series of technically demanding operations devoted to the systematic architecture of identity and belonging. In a transaction that turns biological strangers into kin, scientific professionals have seen an unusual experimental opportunity, a challenging social laboratory, and a series of intricate operations that promise intellectual discovery as well as hope for children in need. Why did researchers turn to adoption and insist that science was central to a social institution that had never been scientific before? What scientific questions did adoption answer? How were adoption studies conducted and how did the knowledge extracted from them change over time? Understanding how adoption was transformed into a science illuminates how science works. Understanding how adoption was transformed by science illuminates why science matters. Individuals selected for study span the entire century, are drawn from a range of human science disciplines, and have left significant legacies for science and social welfare. Two distinctive but interrelated research trajectories are usefully distinguished: adoption science and scientific adoption. Adoption science refines knowledge of human nature by making adoption serve the scientific world, while scientific adoption aims to enhance child and family welfare by making science serve the adoption world. Adoption scientists have used adoption as an opportunity to explore the nature nurture problem, to ask how and why human beings turn out as they do. Advocates of scientific adoption have asked how adoptees turn out in order to design families more effectively. By examining representative work in these two fields of inquiry, this project will contribute new content--examples of kinship by design--to the scholarly conversation about the modern human sciences at the same time that it adds a much-needed scientific dimension to studies of adoptive kinship. There currently exists no historical study that explores the various ways 20th -century American human scientists have utilized adoption data, nor has anyone considered adoption itself as an important case of social design and engineering. Yet adoption exemplifies the modern tendency to view social arrangements as de facto experiments that invite the exacting discipline of science into the most ordinary, intimate, and private corners of modern life--from family dynamics to sexual orientation and self-esteem--all in the name of knowledge paired with the public good. This is what makes adoption an original vantage point from which to consider the moral careers of modern scientific professionals, the intersections of science and questions of value, and the social course of scientific rationalization. This study, which will result in a book, has particular potential to contribute to our understanding of social engineering, ideologies of nature, border-crossings between the biological and social sciences, the complex relationship between basic and applied science, and the selective utilization of scientific knowledge and research by policy-makers and the public at large doc8152 none This proposal concerns research and education on adaptive regression when the random errors are dependent. Many procedures have been (and will be) proposed for nonparametric regression based on different assumptions. In applications, a difficulty a user often faces is the choice of the best method for the data at hand. This is specially the case for high-dimensional function estimation, where to overcome the curse of dimensionality, various parsimonious models such as projection pursuit, CART, neural nets, additive models, MARS, etc. are proposed according to different characterizations of the target function. A main interest in this research is to construct adaptive estimators by combining a collection of candidate procedures. The goal for the combined procedure is to perform automatically as well as (or nearly as well as) the best original procedure without knowing which one it is. The random errors will be assumed to be generally dependent, including both short- and long-range cases. The effects of dependence on adaptation capability will be studied. It is anticipated that theoretically proven and computationally feasible algorithms will be proposed to combine regression procedures targeted at various characteristics of the regression function and different dependence structures for the random errors. Function estimation is an important statistical tool that tries to understand accurately the functional relationships between variables based on data and it has applications in many disciplines for successfully addressing scientific questions. In reality, observations are always subject to random noise (error) from different sources. When the random errors are dependent on each other, the dependence may disguise the functional relationship of interest. Long-range dependence refers to a situation where the errors are still highly correlated even when they occur at times or locations that are far away from each other. It is known that such a long-range dependence makes the estimation of the target function much harder. In applications, the degree of dependence between the errors is usually unknown, which makes the function estimation problem even harder. In this proposal, we intend to develop methods that adaptively handle different degrees of dependence among the errors so that the function of interest can be estimated optimally without knowing the dependence structure of the errors. The research results and related work by others on long-range dependent data will be brought to students at various levels in several statistics courses. Collaborations will be conducted with several professors at Iowa State University and their students in atmospheric science, electrical engineering, agronomy and possibly other fields to appropriately address long-range dependence phenomena, which have been encountered often and known to cause problems in data analysis with the existing statistical methods doc8153 none Research in theoretical particle physics will include work on superstring theory, and quantum field theory. Techniques which do not require approximations will primarily be used to explore the structure of both superstring theory and quantum field theory: particularly through the use of symmetry, and via the interplay between superstring theory and quantum field theory. Quantum field theory is the conventional framework for describing elementary particles and their interactions. On the other hand, superstring theory is the exciting candidate for a quantum theory of gravity, which also provides a unified framework for all the fundamental forces. Understanding the complete structure of superstring theory is of central importance in our attempt to answer basic questions about the nature of space-time and gravity doc8140 none This project will determine role of the subsurface chlorophyll maximum as a site of alkenone export production in an oligotrophic subtropical ocean environment. Analyses of sediment trap time series samples and water samples will be used to determine seasonal production of alkenones and the depth at which they are produced doc8155 none This CAREER project addresses the molecular level structure of water at the liquid solid interface in the presence of adsorbed protein molecules. Professor Paul Cremer and his coworkers at Texas A&M, with the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, will examine the interactions of water, protein molecules, and solid silica surfaces. An understanding of these types of systems is important to a variety of applications, including biocompatibility, biofouling in the food and pharmaceutical industries, and in the development of biosensors and catalysts. Infrared-visible sum frequency generation methods will be used to probe the structure of substrate associated water in the presence of adsorbed protein. Time resolved studies will be implemented to follow structural changes upon adsorption of protein molecules at the solid surface. Educational aspects of this project include the development of a bio-physical chemistry course for upper level undergraduates, and the implementation of undergraduate research projects in the field of protein surface interactions. The interaction of protein molecules with surfaces is important in the development of biosensors, in enhancing biocompatibility for medical implants, and for understanding the process of biofouling in food and pharmaceutical process machinery. The structure of adsorbed water in these systems provides the detailed information that can be used to design surfaces with desired protein adsorption properties. This CAREER project uses state of the art surface spectroscopic methods to probe this structural question. Integration of this basic research with educational goals in the training of bio-physical scientists and in the development of course materials in this area is the focus of the educational aspect of this project doc8156 none Dr. Yun Wang will carry out a program of research and education that focuses on studies in cosmology. Her research plan is centered on exploring the use of two independent cosmological data sets, the type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) and the cosmic microwave background anisotropy (CMB) to provide model-independent constraints on fundamental physical parameters. SNe Ia provide us with a unique probe into the unknown energy content of the universe, the dark energy. Using innovative techniques, Dr. Wang will study the constraints they provide on the equation of state of the dark energy, as an arbitrary function of time, from current and future SN Ia surveys. CMB data allow us to probe the physics in the very early universe. Dr. Wang will improve and expand on her previous work on the determination of the spectrum of the primordial matter density fluctuations, parameterized as an arbitrary function of wavelength. Using new analytical methods and numerical tools, she will analyze current and future CMB observations that will provide observational guidance for constructing the correct inflationary model to describe physics in the early universe. Dr. Wang will take advantage of the unique opportunities at the University of Oklahoma in integrating her research into educational activities. She will involve undergraduates in research by presenting a series on cosmology at the honors college, designed to attract outstanding students to the field at an early age, by engaging students from the honors college and other universities in research through the University s Research Experiences for Undergraduates program, and by including undergraduate students in her research team. She will also develop a cosmology course for graduate and upper level undergraduate students, and will offer public lectures in cosmology to the local community doc8157 none This grant supports the design and fabrication of a novel instrument for studying the atmospheric aerosols that serve as condensation nuclei for the formation of cloud droplets. The instrument consists of a differential mobility analyzer (DMA), which separates the aerosol particles into a narrow range of sizes, followed by a cloud condensation nucleus separator (CCNS), which separates the more hygroscopic particles from the less hygroscopic ones. It is the hygroscopic particles that can serve as condensation nuclei. The CCNS consists of two concentric cylinders, between which an electric field is applied. The annular region between the cylinders is basically a thermal gradient diffusion chamber. The inner and outer walls are maintained at different temperatures and at water saturation by means of wet filter paper, so that the space between them is supersaturated. The particles are charged when they leave the DMA, and the field applied to the CCNS causes them to migrate slowly towards the inner wall as they move with the air through the chamber. The electrical mobility of the particles is reduced as they grow by condensation. Hence the particles that grow large have less chance of migrating to the inner wall than those that remain small. From the initial population of near-equal sized particles that enter the CCNS, the less hygroscopic ones are thus deposited on the inner wall, and those that serve as CCN at the applied supersaturation pass through. The two-stage instrument therefore makes it possible to study the nucleating properties of aerosol particles in different size ranges. As a further step in the analysis, the chemical composition of the CCN that exit the instrument may be determined using a single-particle mass spectrometer. Results of the research are relevant to the basic physics of cloud formation and to the question of aerosol effects on the solar reflectivity of clouds. The educational component of this CAREER award consists of a summer course for undergraduate students on techniques, applications, and practical aspects of meteorological and atmospheric chemical measurements. The culmination of the course is a week-long field campaign in Marina, CA, centered on airborne observations with the research facilities of the Center for Interdisciplinary Remotely Piloted Aircraft Studies (CIRPAS doc8158 none The Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program of the Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, supports Dr. Shannon Stahl, Chemistry Department, University of Wisconsin at Madison, for his work under a Career Award. The project will involve (1) mechanistic studies designed to clarify how palladium couples the oxidation of organic substrates to the reduction of dioxygen, and (2) application of mechanistic insights into developing novel oxidation catalysts. The award also supports development of a new freshman sophomore course in introductory inorganic chemistry that will integrate modern research developments into classroom teaching, including such topics as transition metal catalysis, green chemistry, fuel cells and batteries, and elements of bioinorganic chemistry. To the extent that selective oxidation of organic molecules lies at the heart of commodity and fine chemical industries, this work will facilitate the design of new, more efficient and selective oxidation catalysts. Graduate students and post-doctoral associates will be trained in an active area of current interest in catalysis. Undergraduate students will be exposed to and taught elements of chemistry that are currently of high research priority in the important spheres of green chemistry and energy doc8159 none This award entails a comprehensive program for the synthesis of novel core-shell hybrid nanoparticle materials (HNM) containing (HNM) a polymer shell and an inorganic core and the development of two materials applications. The polymer shell of the nanoparticles can be created with exquisite control in functionalities, composition, thickness, and uniformity using Ring-Opening Metathesis Polymerization (ROMP) chemistry. The inorganic core can be made from either metals, semiconductors, or insulators, and can be either magnetic or nonmagnetic. The resulting nanoparticle composites can then be formed to possess the best combination of physical properties that can be utilized in a variety of diagnostic, deliveries, and sensing applications. %%% The proposed research will allow the Northwestern researchers to synthesize core-shell hybrid nanoparticles materials and elucidate their fundamental behaviors. This knowledge can then be used to tailor these materials for device-based applications in electronic- and health-related fields. Examples of potential applications include: thin-film radiation detectors, ultrasensitive redox-amplified DNA detection, and targeted delivery of polymer-based anticancer drugs. A comprehensive approach to education, which includes not only graduated and undergraduate, but also K-12 and community outreach, is an integral part of this award doc8160 none Dr. Robert G. Bergman, Chemistry Department, University of California at Berkeley is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division for studies of organometallic reaction mechanisms in homogeneous solution. Efforts will be focused on three projects. The first is a systematic development of the synthesis of late-metal-heteroatom complexes and studies of the mechanisms of the reactions of these compounds with organic substances. Fundamental chemistry of metal-oxygen and -nitrogen single bonds, hydrogen heteroatom transfer reactions, and the basicity of the electronegative atom in metal-heteroatom complexes are among the topics to be investigated. The second section is a detailed study of the rhodium catalyzed hydroformylation of epoxides. The hydroformylation of other three member ring systems will be included with hopes of developing new, convenient routes to a variety of useful organic products. Thirdly, the reactions of organometallic compounds with free atoms and metastable diatomics will be investigated. The emphasis will be on species that have opened new pathways in organic chemistry, but have not been much applied to organometallic systems. Chemical reactions involving organic molecules and transition metal complexes are fundamental to the understanding of important catalytic and biological processes. This research will expand the fundamental chemical understanding of metal-organic interactions, be applied to more complicated systems, and aid the development of new practical applications in synthetic and catalytic chemistry doc8161 none The objective of this project is to produce a dictionary of the Jicarilla Apache language. Jicarilla, an Eastern Apachean language, is spoken on the Jicarilla Apache reservation in northern New Mexico. Approximately 21% of the population is fluent in the language. Other Eastern Apache languages, Lipan and Plains Apache, are nearly extinct. To date, no large-scale dictionary or grammar has been produced for any of the Eastern Apachean languages. The dictionary will consist of a single database, but different programming features will allow it to be printed out in many different formats. We intend to produce versions in two formats for this project period: 1) a linguist s version, in which 4,000 - 5,000 words (verb bases, nouns, adverbs, and particles) will be organized by root into approximately 1,000 entries in its Jicarilla-English section, and 2) a native speaker learner s version organized by semantic field. Data will come both from direct elicitation and from recorded texts and conversation. The database will be available for creating dictionaries in other formats, e.g. a native-speaker version organized alphabetically by word-initial segment, a CD ROM version. Participants on the project have been working as a team on language revitalization projects in the community, including a daycare immersion program. This project will complement the ongoing language work and will take advantage of an already-established team of Jicarilla Apache elder educators and academic linguists who have been working together successfully for several years. The project also will bring an expert in Jicarilla morphosyntax for consultation on the grammatical analyses presented in the dictionaries and in the grammatical introductions. This project represents a rare opportunity to make language documentation efforts a major part of an already existing language revitalization program. It will make invaluable data available for comparative and historical linguistic research on the Athabaskan language family as well as providing information for the study of polysynthetic languages in general. It combines this benefit for academic scholars with a program designed to empower a Native American community in their desire to revitalize their endangered language doc8162 none For the past twenty years, the theoretical literature on international cooperation has focused on overarching questions about whether cooperation is possible and how important it is. Now, this literature must address more focused questions about how the institutions of cooperation work and how they change state behavior. Moreover, after over fifty years of intense realist-antirealist debate in international relations (much of which turns on the question of the value and function of international agreements), no one has systematically collected data on important dimensions of international agreements. Hence, it is also time to collect such data to use them to confront both old and new theories. The first aspect of my research program develops a theoretical framework that explains international agreement design in terms of a set of logically derived and empirically testable hypotheses. The framework is based on a rational choice perspective in which actors purposefully design agreement and institutions to advance their joint interests. The theoretical aspect continues the line of work already established by Koremenos and others. The second aspect consists of collecting data on the characteristics of a large sample of international agreements drawn from the United Nations Treaty Series. I focus on four types of provisions: flexibility provisions, such as planned renegotiations and escape clauses, monitoring and compliance provisions, agreement scope (the number of issues covered), and references to other international agreements. These dimensions are motivated by important (and interesting) theoretical questions in the existing literature. The datasheet allows reseachers who study international cooperation to test their theories in much the same way as the Correlates of War and Militarized International Disputes datasets enable researchers who study international conflict to test their ideas. The data are available to the research community once assembled. As such, the project represents an important contribution to the research infrastructure of international relations. The feasibility of the proposed project is demonstrated by a successful test sample already drawn by the principal investigator. This sample reveals systematic variation in agreement provisions across issue areas. The third aspect consists of statistical analyses of the collected data. Given that this is the first data collection effort of its kind, this basic descriptive work represents an important contribution to the literature. Furthermore, and in contrast to the existing literature, which mainly illustrates theories of how states cooperate with case studies., these data allow researchers to test theories. The proposal also contains a substantial undergraduate and graduate teaching component. I expect several graduate students to add to and use the datset in their dissertations. I develop both undergraduate and graduate courses on research design, with a particular focus on how to collect data that can be used to test empirically predictions from formal theory. These courses cover all aspects of the problem, with a special focus on the challenge of operationalizing theoretical variables. I also modify my existing undergraduate seminar course to focus on the systematic empirical analyses that emerge from this project. My research agenda includes theoretical development, major data collection, and systematic empirical testing of the theory. To date, funding from UCLA and from the University of California for the collection of the test data has been insufficient to allow me to pursue the project on the scale proposed here doc8163 none Chiba abstract An organism s ability to flexibly adapt its behavior based on the learned associations of environmental stimuli can be critical to the survival of that organism. Among other issues, successful adaptation relies on both appropriate modulation of attention and an accurate appraisal or evaluation of the affective significance of environmental stimuli. Two distinct anatomical divisions of the amygdala, the central nucleus and the basolateral complex, are thought to play a role in adaptive behavior under many experimental conditions that depend on associative learning. Numerous subcortical and cortical anatomical projections allow the amygdala access to basic sensory and somatic information, and also position it to affect the output of behavior. The proposed body of work is aimed towards the investigation of the role of the central nucleus and the basolateral complex of the amygdala and their constituent corticopetal cortical systems in modulating attention and affective evaluation during learning. A combination of behavioral tasks, neural recording (single units) neurochemical manipulations, and lesion techniques will be used to gather data investigating these issues. Once the data are gathered, techniques for alternative analysis of the neural firing properties will be pursued in a collaborative effort with computational modelers. Additionally, this research program will be used as a vehicle to provide research opportunities for students at multiple academic levels (high school through post-doctoral). A critical component of this approach will include training researchers to do science while providing them with the skills and opportunities to teach others. Ultimately, this will result in a community outreach effort aimed towards providing unique scientific opportunities and information that may serve to draw a more diverse group of young people to the sciences doc8164 none Total syntheses of alleopathic (compounds implicated in the chemical interaction of plants) natural products isolated from the sunflower, the heliannuols, and related natural products will be synthesized based on a biomimetic phenol-epoxide cyclization strategy. Bioassays on synthetic intermediates and target molecules will be carried out to evaluate their activity as potential herbicides. The teaching component of the plan will result in the development of a new medicinal chemistry course for majors and the introduction of simple research projects into the undergraduate organic chemistry lab course. The students must design portions of the experiments themselves by performing online literature searches thus giving them a more research-like experience. With this CAREER award, the Organic Synthesis Program is supporting the research and educational activities of Professor James R. Vyvyan of the Department of Chemistry at Western Washingtion University, a primarily undergraduate institution. Professor Vyvyan s research is directed towards the synthesis of chemicals isolated from the sunflower and the evaluation of their ability to inhibit the growth of troublesome weed species. The educational portion of the plan will develop new research-based laboratory experiments for the organic chemistry lab course and emphasize the relevancy of agricultural and medicinal chemistry in lecture courses doc8165 none Evaluation of the financial and real effects of policy reforms is important, because there is a paucity of facts about the effects of policy reform on financial markets and the impact of financial market fluctuations on the real side of emerging economies. For example, the opening of emerging stock markets to foreign investors in the late s and early s coincided with a boom in emerging market equity prices. The conventional wisdom is that these stock market liberalizations caused the booms. However, with a myriad of other economic events happening concurrently, it is not obvious that the stock market liberalizations were responsible for the boom. It is also fashionable to blame the recent emerging markets crises in Asia and Latin America on liberalized stock markets, but this view ignores the fact that stock market liberalization took place almost ten years before the onset of the crises. By evaluating and documenting the facts about the effects of policy reform on the financial and real side of developing economies, this research program makes substantive contributions to economic knowledge. In addition to increasing the general state of knowledge, this research also has the potential to make a significant contribution to general economic welfare. This project evaluates the real and financial effects of economic policy reform in emerging markets. The goal is to systematically document a coherent and reliable set of facts about the effects of policy reform on financial markets and the impact of financial market fluctuations on the real side of emerging economies. The investigator s past research on stock market liberalization and on inflation stabilization has made progress in this direction using aggregate data. CAREER funding will permit the investigator to build on, and extend, his existing research by constructing an extensive data set on emerging market firms. Systematic use of firm-level data is central to obtaining more robust conclusions about the financial and real effects of policy reform in emerging markets. The educational activities disseminate the findings of this research to business practitioners and public policy makers. The educational activities also train future scholars to work in this area of research, with a particular emphasis on increasing the participation of under-represented minorities through an undergraduate research initiative. Finance theory and macroeconomic theory are used to generate sharp predictions about the financial and real effects of economic policy reform. These predictions are tested against the data using event study techniques. A major component of the research program to date is the construction of a time series of major economic events that coincided with the economic policy reforms. This list of events is used to isolate the impact of the economic policy reforms from the potentially confounding effects of other economic events doc8166 none Recent breakthroughs in mesoscopic materials have reinvigorated the science of solid-liquid interfaces and shifted its emphasis from bulk thermodynamic descriptions to intermolecular forces. The goals of this project are to establish a central facility for the measurement and mapping of intermolecular and surface forces by atomic force microscopy (AFM) and, through student research, to discover the role of solid surfaces in directing interfacial order formation in an adjoining liquid phase (liquid phase epitaxy). First, the nucleation and overgrowth of a solid phase over a different substrate will be investigated by in-situ imaging in metastable solutions. Studies will focus on differences in growth morphology (wetting vs. island nucleation vs. needle growth) as a function of compatibility between substrate and overlayer. Second, force measurements and soft contact imaging will explore the interfacial self-assembly of surfactant solutions and the templating of lyotropic phases by interfacial micelles. Observed interfacial morphologies will be correlated with theoretical calculations based on optimizing the net interaction energy of the micelle lattice and substrate. The role of temperature in structural phase transitions will be explored using an existing temperature-control cell that operates over the aqueous range of temperatures. The students participating in this research will be trained in a contemporary area of condensed matter physics and will thereby be prepared to enter the scientific technical workforce. %%% The partial ordering of a liquid film in contact with a solid surface is central to interfacial processes ranging from crystal growth to mesoscopic materials synthesis to boundary layer lubrication. The goals of this project are to uncover the mechanisms of interfacial order formation by the measurement and mapping of intermolecular forces by atomic force microscopy (AFM). This technique uses a sub-microscopic tip or stylus to measure intermolecular forces and to image surfaces at atomic scales by mapping force variations across the surface. Student experimentalists will use force measurements and imaging in liquid environments to investigate the role of solid surfaces in nucleating solid and liquid crystalline phases from solutions. Crystal growth of one mineral on a second, closely matched solid will be imaged in real time and at molecular resolution in supersaturated solutions. Studies will focus on differences in growth morphology versus the degree of mismatch between the atomic structure of substrate and overlayer. The nucleation of liquid crystalline phases of surfactants or detergents by solid surfaces will also be investigated. The observed structures of interfacial layers will be correlated with theoretical calculations, based on optimizing the net interaction energy of the surface and surfactant aggregate layer. The effects of temperature on these phases will be investigated using a special sample cell currently under operation. These results are expected to shed new light on interfacial processes such as detergency and the synthesis of advanced materials by self-assembly. This research will be conducted with students who will be prepared for scientific technical employment in academia, industry, and government doc8167 none The project will improve our understanding of the evolution and predictability of the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO). MJO is a key component of intra-seasonal variability, and plays a significant role in modulating the circulation and precipitation variability in the global tropics and the mid-latitude Pacific North American region. MJO also influences the Asian-Australian summer monsoons and possibly even El Nino--Southern Oscillation (ENSO) variability, thereby extending its impact on major climate systems. MJO remains a notable and somewhat intractable simulation deficiency in extant general circulation models, and one in need of an urgent fix in view of its substantial impact on both weather and climate. Drs. Duane Waliser (SUNY, Stony Brook) and Charles Jones (Univ. of California, Santa Barbara) will collaboratively investigate the extent of ocean s influence on MJO evolution from modeling experiments with a thermally and dynamically responsive ocean model. They will also estimate the limit of forecast predictability of the MJO and its implications for medium-to-extended range weather prediction and intraseasonal-to-interannual climate variability using the NASA GSFC and NOAA GFDL general circulation models. Dr. William Lau of NASA GSFC and William Stern of NOAA GFDL will be collaborating on some of the project tasks doc8168 none This RUI award to Professor Alice Deckert of Allegheny College entitled Investigation of the Kinetics and Mechanism for Covalent Binding of Proteins to Thin Films is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program. The goal of the research is the comprehensive study of the kinetics and mechanism of protein binding to thin films. Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) and microgravimetric (Quartz Crystal Microbalance) analyses will be used to help understand these reactions. The research will focus on improving the development of biosensors. Both Langmuir-Blodgett protein thin films and self-assembled monolayers will be examined. The research is interdisciplinary and will impact the fields of surface analysis, analytical chemistry and biochemistry. This research, to be performed by undergraduates, will be scientifically significant and educationally rich. The results will impact society in furthering the development of biosensor technology doc8169 none For fishes, the availability of dissolved oxygen in the water can limit habitat quality and dispersal pathways. Oxygen-scarce (hypoxic) waters play a similar role to the absence of water for some fish species, creating a barrier to movement or limiting selection of alternative habitats. Oxygen scarcity has led to the evolution of varied morphological and physiological adaptations in fishes (e.g., development of air-breathing organs, large gills). These adaptations have associated costs and benefits that should affect the ability of fishes to colonize, inhabit, or disperse through deoxygenated waters. Despite great interest in the evolution of physiological and morphological adaptations to deoxygenation, the role of oxygen-scarce waters as barriers or biological filters and their impact on fish diversification is not well understood. This research program considers the evolutionary role of oxygen-scarce wetlands in fish faunal diversification by addressing the question of whether or not hypoxia acts as a strong selective force contributing to variation among populations of East African fishes. Oxygen scarcity is widespread in tropical fresh waters, particularly in dense wetlands, floodplain pools, and flooded forests. In East Africa, extensive hypoxic wetlands dominated by papyrus harbor air-breathing fishes like the African lungfish. Some non-air-breathing (water-breathing) fishes also occur, and these tend to be species with extremely efficient oxygen uptake mechanisms (e.g., very large gill surface area) or species inhabiting the edge of the swamp where interaction with open waters elevates the oxygen content of the water. Despite low numbers of fish species within dense wetlands, these habitats may be very important in the maintenance of fish diversity. For air-breathing fishes, wetlands are not likely to limit dispersal. However, for water-breathing fishes that cannot tolerate low oxygen conditions in the water, large swampy divides may isolate populations and lead to diversification and speciation. Even for some water-breathing fishes that can survive in dense swamps, habitat use and dispersal may still be limited by dissolved oxygen availability and oxygen uptake efficiency in the species. This may result in differences between swamp and open-water populations (i.e., neighboring populations of the same species may diverge in morphology or genetic makeup when one population lives in dense swamp and other populations live in well-oxygenated streams and rivers). Earlier studies by L. Chapman and colleagues demonstrated that swamp populations of three water-breathing African fishes have larger gills than populations of the same species in nearby well-oxygenated waters. Further studies on one of the species revealed differences in respiratory behavior and physiological characters between fish from swamp and fish from nearby well-oxygenated streams and rivers. However, the evolutionary mechanisms controlling these patterns of interdemic (between-population) variation are unknown. This research program uses a combination of field studies in Uganda and laboratory studies at the University of Florida to examine the degree to which oxygen scarcity contributes to interdemic variation in the respiratory biology of water-breathing East African fishes, and whether their respiratory biology is limiting habitat use and performance. The program focuses on one species from each of three major lineages of water-breathing fishes that inhabit both hypoxic swamps and well-oxygenated lakes and or rivers: Barbus neumayeri (a minnow), Pseudocrenilabrus multicolor victoriae (a cichlid) and Gnathonemus victoriae (an electric mormyrid fish). This research expands on earlier studies of these species by evaluating the relative contribution of genetic and environmental influences on respiratory characters as well as physiological and behavioral performance under oxygen stress. A major question is how much of the variation in respiratory traits (e.g., gill size, hemoglobin concentration) between swamp and open-water populations is the result of genetic differences, and how much of the variation is due to phenotypic plasticity (change in characters in response to the environment that does not involve genetic change)? The project also considers whether the variation is adaptive, whether change in gill morphology impacts non-functionally related characters (i.e., do large gills constrain adjacent muscles such as those involved in feeding?), and the potential for interactions between phenotypes (large- and small-gilled fish) in the field. The evaluation of these questions will provide insight into how environmental patchiness (the swamp-open water mosaic) fosters evolutionary diversification of African fishes, and enhance our understanding of adaptive phenotypic plasticity versus local adaptation doc8170 none In this project, Mitchell investigates two cases of biological complexity: social insect societies and ecological systems. She argues that a new perspective on the relationship among scientific theories is needed to replace both reductionism and isolationism. Integrative pluralism is a view that acknowledges the partial autonomy of the scientific study of different levels of organization and analysis, but nevertheless supports integration in the generation of explanations of concrete, complex phenomena. In the two case studies Mitchell aims to detect patterns of integrative strategies used in contemporary biology and to further articulate an analytic framework for understanding the complex relations in which the variety of theories and explanations stand doc8171 none This research will elucidate the role of polydnavirus (PDV) genome structure in generating viral gene variants. PDV genome structure appears to promote variability within viral gene families, facilitate alteration of the level to which genes are expressed and allow for acquisition of novel genes. Evidence in support of this hypothesis the: 1) identification of functionally significant variants in PDV genomes, 2) conservation of PDV genome and segment structure and 3) functional specialization among segment types. The preliminary data suggest that regulation of gene expression by changing copy number in ichnoviruses is but one part of a larger PDV organizational paradigm. These data support the more general hypothesize that PDV genome segmentation not only influences gene expression levels but also facilitates production of gene variants and acquisition of novel genes from the host genome. This hypothesis is tested under three research objectives intended to: 1) determine if Campoletis sonorensis ichnovirus (CsIV) genetic variation impacts virus function and parasite host range, 2) To determine if the structural organization of CsIV is representative of other ichnoviruses, 3) To determine if integration-competent segments support gene entry into viral genomes. Polydnaviruses must suppress host immunity and alter other host physiological systems in support of parasite development for the virus to be vertically transmitted. A parisite s ability to counter evolving host resistance mechanisms may require continual production of functional variants that enable continued host exploitation or invasion of new host species. In wasp parasites, where host and parasite life cycles are synchronized, PDVs may provide a highly mutable genome co-opted by the parasite to allow continual production of immunosuppressive gene variants that confer a sustainable evolutionary advantage. In a broader context, this work will elucidate some of the critical contributions of captive genomes to the evolution of highly variable traits in eukaryotic organisms. Transposable elements, retroviral and non-coding sequence comprise over 90% of the DNA in humans and other organisms but this type of DNA is often described as junk DNA because its functional role is not clearly understood. This research may also elucidate the role of viral and non-coding sequences in the evolution of biologically relevant traits in polydnaviruses and thereby contribute to a better understanding of these apparently non-essential sequences in other organisms doc8172 none James Boncella (University of Florida) is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program for his work with early transition metal imido amido compounds. The presence of several pi donors in the coordination sphere and the two electron change between M(IV) and M(VI), where M= Mo or W, provide an opportunity for unusual reactivity. Complexes such as (N,N-bis(trimethylsilyl)-o-phenylenediamide)M(=NPh)(arene) show olefin polymerization and hydrogenation activity. The arylimido and -amido ligands will be modified to determine the effects on bonding and reactivity, particularly oxidative addition. The complexes will also be used to model hydrodesulfurization using sulfur-containing substrates such as thiophene and hydrodeoxygenation chemistry using oxygenated aromatics. This fundamental study will explore the effects of subtle changes in a metal complex. Study of these organometallic species may lead to a new understanding of industrial processes such as olefin polymerization, hydrogenation, hydrodesulfurization and hydrodeoxygenation doc8173 none PI: David S. Sholl, Lorenz T. Biegler and Steinar Hauan Institution: Carnegie Mellon University Proposal Number: This is an equipment grant to provide funds to purchase a 32 node Beowulf cluster to support research in advanced computing to be used by three research groups at Carnegie Mellon University. Beowulf clusters represent an advantageous architecture for advanced computing: they are inexpensive to construct, flexible to configure, and provide a powerful computing environment for a broad variety of scientific computing tasks. The three research groups that will share the cluster will be conducting research on molecular dynamics and computational chemistry, modeling and visualization to support process synthesis and large-scale discrete and continuous process optimization. The cluster will thus serve computations that require high peak performance on time scales of minutes and hours, along with sustained computational performance on time scales of days. These complementary profiles mean that by sharing the cluster, its capabilities will be used more fully than they would be by any group individually. The cluster can also easily be operated in a way that distributes resources between different usage modes without significant computational overhead. The cluster will initially increase the PIs computational capabilities by about a factor of three and will be expandable over succeeding years and will increase their computing power by over an order of magnitude within the next five years, without rendering existing nodes obsolete. Specifically, the research of the three groups consists of the development of new algorithms for: Calculation in computational chemistry, particularly in molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo simulations to determine macroscopic material properties from details of atomic-scale structure; Accurate process modeling for process design and synthesis that includes phase equilibrium, representation and evaluation of process alternatives and visualization of design insights; and Optimization of large-scale steady state and dynamic processes that involve both discrete and continuous decisions along with advanced decomposition strategies doc8174 none Nutrient and iron addition experiments are a basic oceanographic tool that has resulted in major advances in our knowledge of controls on oceanic productivity and carbon cycling. However, most of the shipboard and in-situ work carried out to date has involved additions of limiting nutrients that are one to two orders higher than ambient levels, resulting in massive blooms that are not typically observed in the natural ecosystems being investigated. For this reason, it is necessary to understand the consequences of continuous iron and nutrient inputs at realistic concentrations on phytoplankton community structure and oceanic carbon cycling. The principal investigators from the University of Delaware and the University of Charleston will carry out this type of experiment in the Southern Ocean utilizing their natural community chemostat system. This system delivers iron and nutrients at natural levels to incubated shipboard experiments at continuous flow rates that simulate real-world vertical advection processes. The specific goals of the proposed research is to address the following four questions: (1) How does phytoplankton species composition respond to changes in iron concentrations in upwelled water?; (2) What effect will variability in upwelling rates at a give iron concentration have on community structure?; (3) How does iron chemical speciation affect the composition of phytoplankton communities?; and (4) How will a changing iron supply affect the production of biogenic sulfur doc8167 none The project will improve our understanding of the evolution and predictability of the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO). MJO is a key component of intra-seasonal variability, and plays a significant role in modulating the circulation and precipitation variability in the global tropics and the mid-latitude Pacific North American region. MJO also influences the Asian-Australian summer monsoons and possibly even El Nino--Southern Oscillation (ENSO) variability, thereby extending its impact on major climate systems. MJO remains a notable and somewhat intractable simulation deficiency in extant general circulation models, and one in need of an urgent fix in view of its substantial impact on both weather and climate. Drs. Duane Waliser (SUNY, Stony Brook) and Charles Jones (Univ. of California, Santa Barbara) will collaboratively investigate the extent of ocean s influence on MJO evolution from modeling experiments with a thermally and dynamically responsive ocean model. They will also estimate the limit of forecast predictability of the MJO and its implications for medium-to-extended range weather prediction and intraseasonal-to-interannual climate variability using the NASA GSFC and NOAA GFDL general circulation models. Dr. William Lau of NASA GSFC and William Stern of NOAA GFDL will be collaborating on some of the project tasks doc8176 none This program provides funds to math, engineering, and computer science students for one and two year scholarships. This enables the students to complete their academic programs in a more timely manner. This program also includes industry mentors for each student, one-on-one faculty advisors, second year industry- based cooperative education and service learning opportunities, professional development activities, and strong student support services. This scholarship program provides broad opportunities that enable the participation of talented, but low-income students, under-represented minorities, and person with disabilities the opportunity to complete an associate degree and to enter the workforce in this area of national need doc8177 none Landau Computer simulations are a powerful tool for obtaining fundamental information about wide ranging problems in statistical physics and to complement traditional theoretical and experimental methods. This grant supports a broad program on computer simulations of statistical systems. As part of this effort, large scale simulation methods will be developed and refined for the study of phase transitions in systems which are difficult to treat analytically. Techniques to be used include diverse Monte Carlo and Spin Dynamics simulations which have been exceedingly well refined. Models to be examined will be relevant to magnetic materials (including systems which exhibit colossal magnetoresistance), binary semiconductor alloys, growing films, and disordered media. Several of the systems include particles which may move continuously in space and which are subject to elastic interactions, whereas others will be confined to rigid lattices (including classical spins with continuous degrees of freedom) with discrete near-neighbor interactions. In many of the systems finite geometries and or the presence of walls are responsible for behavior which is different than that which is found in the bulk. Both static and dynamic critical phenomena for systems in equilibrium will be carefully examined, and simple non-equilibrium models related to film growth and superionic diffusion will be studied using Monte Carlo and Kinetic Monte Carlo methods. Where possible, results will be compared with analytical theory and or experiment. %%% Computer simulations are a powerful tool for obtaining fundamental information about wide ranging problems in statistical physics and to complement traditional theoretical and experimental methods. This grant supports a broad program on computer simulations. Computational techniques will be developed and refined, and these techniques will be applied to a variety of physics systems doc8178 none Funds are recommended for holding a US-Mexican workshop on the theme of Rupture of Continental Lithosphere as exemplified by the Gulf of California Salton Sea Region. The workshop is to be held in Puerta Vallarta, Mexico, on the Gulf of California in October . The Gulf of California Salton Trough System has been chosen as one of the two focus sites under the MARGINS initiative and the workshop will bring together scientists from the two countries over two days to discuss the state of our knowledge about the area and to plan future research in this rupturing system. Between 50 and 60 US and Mexican participants will attend the workshop doc8179 none The physiology and behavior of animals that live in diurnal environments-- environments where there is a daily rhythmic change in light and darkness-- are controlled in large part by signals that arise from an internal, 24 hour (circadian) clock. The impact of circadian clocks on humans is particularly evident in shift workers and as jet lag in long-distance travelers when the internal clock becomes out of phase with the external light-dark cycle. The mechanisms by which the clock regulates physiology are largely unknown. This proposal seeks to understand, at a molecular level, how environmental signals and the circadian click, separately and in combination, impact vision. How the retina, the tissue in the eye that contains the cells which detect light (photoreceptor cells), begins to process incoming visual information, and transmits this information to the brain for further processing will be studied. The retinas of animals living in diurnal environments typically undergo daily rhythmic changes in structure and function that optimize the retina for functioning in bright light during the day and in dim light during the night. These day-night changes, which are critical for normal vision, are produced by the separate and combined effects of biochemical reactions that are driven by the circadian clock and by light. The American horseshoe crab Limulus polyphemus is used because in its eyes, the effects of the circadian clock are particularly dramatic. For example, when signals from the circadian clock reach the eyes at night their structure and function change such that they become one hundred thousand times more sensitive to light. For Limulus, increased visual sensitivity at night is thought critical for reproduction. Two specific aims of the current research are designed to determine the separate and combined effects of clock- and light-driven biochemical cascades on the expression of genes encoding proteins that are required for the detection of light (opsin) and for the appropriate response of photoreceptors to light (arrestin). Changes in the levels of mRNAs encoding these proteins will be assayed. A third aim is to examine the function of a photoreceptor-specific protein (myosin III) which, in Limulus, is modulated by both light- and clock-driven cascades. This protein is of particular interest because: 1. it is critical for the survival of at least some invertebrate photoreceptors. 2. similar proteins are found in the photoreceptors of a wide variety of invertebrate and vertebrate species, and thus the protein may be critical for the function and or maintenance of all photoreceptors. 3. in Limulus, it may integrate the signals from both light- and clock-driven biochemical cascades. Limulus myosin III has been expressed in this laboratory in an insect cell system and produced in large quantities. This provides the unique opportunity to study its structure and function in detail. This research will have a number of outcomes important for sensory and cell biology. Since environmental cues and the circadian click influence virtually all cells, the results should further a general understanding of how these factors impact the cell biology of animals exposed to natural lighting conditions, including human shift workers. These studies of myosin III will provide specific new information about a protein that is hypothesized to be critical for the structure and function of all photoreceptors. Furthermore, the research will involve undergraduates and pre-collegiate minority students, a long tradition in this laboratory. The materials and information generated also will be used in a variety of K-12 outreach programs run by the Whitney Laboratory. Thus the research will contribute toward developing the next generation of scientists and a scientifically literate citizenry in a region of the nation where access to scientific activities of any kind is limited doc8180 none This project provides 40 scholarships for financially disadvantaged students in the areas of computer science, mathematics and engineering technology. Recruitment efforts feature a special focus on under-represented minorities and women. Student support activities are leveraged with funding from several other federal programs, providing scholars with outstanding academic and social opportunities that include peer tutoring, a colloquium series, and summer research. There are ample opportunities for scholars to participate in meaningful internships and excellent prospects for professional employment in the indicated disciplines. A special emphasis is placed on urban science which relates directly to the environment of the institution doc8181 none We experience the visual world subjectively as a full-color panorama of visual detail. This experience naturally leads to the belief that the human visual system generates a complete and truthful internal copy of the outside scene, similar to a detailed color photograph. Consistent with this intuition, past research has demonstrated that human visual memory for scenes can be exceptionally good. At the same time, it is well known that visual detail and rich color are only available where the eyes are directly pointed. To compensate for this constraint, our eyes flit from place to place over a scene in a series of very fast eye movements called saccades. Interspersed among these saccades are brief pauses, called fixations, and it is only during these fixational pauses that visual information is actually acquired from the scene. Therefore, if our visual system does in fact create a complete internal representation of the external world, as experience suggests, then this representation must be stitched together from the individual snapshots taken during each fixation. In contrast to this intuitively appealing view, there is a good deal of recent evidence that the human visual system does not construct such a high-fidelity copy of the world. For example, a remarkable recent discovery is that human viewers are often very insensitive to dramatic changes in the visual world that take place from one moment to the next. This finding suggests that despite experience and intuition, a photographic image of the entire scene is not concurrently available for comparison to the current state of the world. What, then, is the nature of the internal representation that is generated and retained over time by the human visual system? The main objective of this research is to understand the visual representations that arise as the human viewer examines the world dynamically over extended time. The research will be directed toward discovering the principles that underlie human visual perception, visual cognition, and visual memory. The research will use sophisticated methods that combine fast and powerful graphics manipulation and presentation systems with a highly accurate eyetracking system. Using these instruments, complex scenes will be changed in real time contingent on a specific eye movement within the scene, and the sensitivity of the visual system to such changes will be measured under a variety of conditions. The results of this work will expand our understanding of how the human brain gives rise to perceptual experience and visually guided performance and will help guide the design of new human-computer interfaces. The results will also help guide scientists in building the next generation of artificial vision systems doc8182 none Eastern Kentucky University primarily attracts students from central, eastern, and southern Kentucky. Many of these students (about 40% qualify for Pell Grant) have financial problems, which forces them to try to work full time and go to school full time. This affects the retention rate, graduation rate, and also affects the major that they pick. The number of mathematics and mathematics teaching majors has been very low now for many years. As a result of this there is a shortage of secondary teachers of mathematics in the state of Kentucky and especially in this region. The forty scholarships are helping to solve many of the problems in attracting, retaining, and graduating academically talented students in computer science and mathematical sciences. Outcomes of the project will be an increase in enrollment, graduation rate, and quality of the programs doc8183 none This scholarship program provides funds to prepare computer science and mathematics students for graduation within two years of acceptance into the program and for successful entry into a career field related to their discipline or graduate study in computer science or mathematics. The objectives of this scholarship program are to increase the number of low income, academically qualified students obtaining undergraduate degrees in computer science and mathematics and to increase the number of advanced study and career and employment opportunities for participants in the program. The target group of candidates for this scholarship program is transfer students from community colleges. Support includes services provided by the Learning Center, Career Center, the Director of New Students and Retention and the Office of Multicultural Affairs. The Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics, in conjunction with various campus offices, provides one-hour seminars each semester for participants on topics related to academic life and planning and preparing for entry into a career or advanced study doc8184 none This is a dissertation research study of science and scientific practices within and beyond late-Victorian and Edwardian country houses. Country house laboratories, observatories, botanical gardens, and museums thrived well into the last third of the nineteenth century, challenging in some ways the middle class visions for professional science put forth in mid-century by figures such as T.H. Huxley, J. Tyndall, and N. Lockyer. The production of scientific knowledge in these private contexts involved a complex network of aristocratic intellectuals, distinct country house values shaped by characteristic religious, political, and social norms, and a social process of research involving collaboration of family members, hired staff, and visiting scientific colleagues. The results of research in these sites contributed significantly to scientific knowledge whilst earning practitioners high reputations among their peers. Despite the political and social conservatism often found in these circles, gentlewomen experienced a high degree of flexibility to pursue their intellectual interests and make original contributions in science during a time when new professional norms, undervalued their participation in more public arenas. Rich collections of documents pertaining to the work and affairs of scientific aristocratic families reveal in detail the operations of these country house laboratories amidst domestic and professional norms. Several well-documented cases demonstrate how such contexts proved to be crucial both for the construction of scientific knowledge and the influence of aristocratic values on new institutions of science. Particularly influential were the scientific households managed by the Rosses, Balfours, Rayleighs, and Sidgwicks. The research funded allows the researcher to undertake a detailed analysis of these cases, as well as several others involving families in related same circles, in order to demonstrate the complicated networks of scientific practices shaped by country house norms which had significant consequences for gender roles and scientific institutional developments. This study thus reinterprets our historical understanding of the developments in late-Victorian science, about which historians have more often emphasized new university and industrial research facilities. The study will show the continuing importance of privately sponsored research well into the Edwardian period. It promises a broader impact both for the public understanding of science, as in the museums at Darwin s Down House and Lord Rosse s Birr Castle, and for a fuller understanding of the way in which the sciences-especially the physical science-have become gendered, relevant to initiatives that encourage women s successes in the sciences. Funds will allow the researcher to conduct archival research of collections still largely unexplored in England, Scotland, and Ireland doc8185 none Lay The mechanisms underlying rhythmic behaviors such as walking, talking, and breathing will be studied. These are vital activities controlled by processing systems within the central nervous system. For locomotion (walking) the circuits are within the spinal cord. These circuits, called central pattern generators, create the oscillating signals that extend and flex the legs in patterns needed for walking. The process of generating rhythmical output is found in most multicellular animals, from terrestrial vertebrates to the simplest nematode worm. Behaviors are created by the sum of activity of connections between nerve cells (neurons), the properties of the neurons and the properties of their connections with other neurons (synapses). Mechanisms that affect the strength and timing of activity at synapses modulate the processes by which the brain distributes information and learns. The means by which the nervous system controls information flow across synapses will be studied to understand how that control is used to generate locomotion. The lamprey fish will be used because the circuitry responsible for creating locomotor patterns is accessible. Sophisticated imaging and electronic recording techniques will be applied to synapses within an intact and behaviorally relevant spinal cord. The work has implications affecting a wide range of fields. Understanding the means by which information flow is controlled at the synapse is the foundation of understanding many behaviors. At the level of locomotion improving comprehension of the underlying biological systems will improve understanding of problems as wide ranging as robot design to alleviating problems associated with spinal cord injury doc8186 none The long term goal of this research is to explore the molecular mechanisms that bacteria use for inter-cellular communication. This project focuses on a study of quorum sensing in the model bioluminescent marine bacterium Vibrio harveyi. It has been demonstrated that V. harveyi has two quorum sensing circuits (Signaling System 1 and Signaling System 2) that converge to regulate light production (Lux). Each system is made up of a two-component sensor-auto-inducer pair: LuxN AI-1 for System 1 and LuxPQ AI-2 for System 2. Both sensors transduce information to a shared phosphorelay protein, LuxU, which in turn conveys the signal to the response regulator protein LuxO. Phospho-LuxO is indirectly responsible for repression of luciferase production at low cell density, because it activates the expression of a negative regulator of Lux. A transcriptional activator protein, LuxR, is also required for expression of the luciferase structural operon (luxCDABEGH). Results suggest that V. harveyi uses Signaling System 1 and AI-1 for intra-species communication and Signaling System 2 and AI-2 for inter-species communication. Many bacteria including a number of clinically important pathogens produce AI-2. The goal of this project is to identify and characterize components of the V. harveyi multi-channel quorum sensing signalling pathway, to determine the functions and interactions of the different signalling proteins, and to determine the mechanism of signal integration by the two systems. The analysis of this regulatory network will lead to a molecular understanding of how bacteria integrate, process and transduce sensory information to control gene expression in response to inter-cellular communication. Analysis of this circuit should be valuable for understanding how bacteria perceive and react to their environment, how they communicate with one another and with other species of bacteria, and how they architect elaborate community structures. Since the regulatory process is complex and involves intra-cellular, inter-cellular, intra-species and inter-species signal transmission, interesting new mechanisms could be revealed doc8187 none The effects of infectious disease epidemics on the demographic history of Aboriginal peoples of the Americas were strongest at different times in different regions of the hemisphere. In northern Canada, substantial changes in demographic structure and disease experiences occurred during the 19th century and extend well into recent historical times, providing a wealth of documents on these changes. The primary focus of this research is to explore the health transitions in the 19th and 20th centuries in four Western James Bay Cree communities (Moose Factory, Fort Albany, Attawapiskat and Kashechewan) in the central Canadian subarctic and to address the question: what was the relative impact of infectious diseases on the health of these communities and how consistent and homogeneous were changes in health and disease in Aboriginal communities during this time? This research addresses this issue through a broad examination of the historical interaction of environment, behavior and mortality in the four communities. The project has two primary components: historical analyses of records for the four Cree communities (funded separately) and development and analysis of mathematical models that can be used to explore factors leading to changing mortality patterns in these communities from to . Data and results from the first component will be used in the mathematical modeling activities, which focus on assessing the effects of changes in social structure, economic activities, and environment on both infectious disease transmission and on general health of the four study communities. This project brings together researchers from the United States and Canada with differing expertise in the areas of demography, ethnohistory, mathematical epidemiology and ethnography. The project allows not only for the exploration of the patterns of mortality over time in several Western James Bay Cree communities, but also for the proposal and testing of specific hypotheses regarding the principal mechanisms for these changes. The multifaceted approaches of the project will provide significant contributions to understanding the importance of shifts in economic and social activities on the health and well-being of aboriginal populations. The project will result in opportunities for students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels to learn specialized and useful techniques not commonly found in anthropology curricula, especially in the areas of mathematics and statistics. It also facilitates an ongoing international institutional collaboration between McMaster University and the University of Missouri-Columbia and extends that collaboration to the University of Manitoba doc8188 none The National Science Foundation Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics (CSEMS) project is providing scholarships for low income, academically talented students, enabling them to pursue degrees in computer science, computer technology, engineering, engineering technology, and mathematics. There are two complementary aims of the program. The two- year degree program prepares students to make the transition to a four- year degree program. In addition, associate and certificate programs provide opportunities, not only for pursuing additional degrees, but also for workforce placement in an area with high unemployment but strong occupational demand for people with the training and education in these technical areas. Recruitment, retention, matriculation, graduation, and continuing education placement are the focus of students participating in the program. Well-established academic support and mentoring programs strongly embedded in the management philosophy and college vision provide strong retention support to assure that students complete the programs. The program has four goals: improved education for all students in the stated disciplines, increased retention to degree achievement, improved professional development and employment for participating students, and strengthened partnerships between institutions of higher education and related employment sectors doc8189 none The Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Scholarship (CSEMS) Opportunity Program is designed to provide an innovative pathway for academically talented, low- income students to enter an educational track in computer science, engineering, or technology; graduate with an associate degree, transfer to four-year colleges, or directly enter the workforce. This is being accomplished through the implementation of a structured mechanism that moves students through critical junctures in the educational process. With an inclusive team of educators, industrialists, scientists, and concerned public officials, the project is using the following goals to guide an educational path for continuing excellence: 1) To include diverse student groups who are academically- talented and low- income into the National Science Foundation s Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Scholarship Program. 2) To build a coalition of scientists, educators, and concerned industrialists, with the purpose of enhancing the degree of active participation and success of CSEMS students. 3) To institute an inclusive student support services system that enhances each learner s rate of active persistence, continuing scholarly performances, appropriate placement in four- year colleges and or employment, and overall satisfaction with college experiences. 4) To enhance the degree of student- college fit , and therefore academic survival and success, of the first- time and full- time enrollees in CSEMS Opportunity Program. 5) To establish a continuous system of documenting the impact of the CSEMS program in assisting students to successfully achieve desired outcomes doc8190 none In recent decades many new diseases have emerged. In some cases existing disease organisms jumped to novel hosts with sometimes devastating effects. In a new strain of Mycoplasma gallisepticum (MG), a bacterium common in poultry, appeared and spread very rapidly through the house finches of eastern North America. This caused house finches to decline within 2-3 years by 100-200 million birds, stabilizing at 40% of pre-disease levels. The researchers will continue to monitor MG prevalence and house finch abundance across the entire continent, involving large numbers of volunteers; carry out intensive fieldwork to gather information about the ecology and behavior of both infected and non-infected house finches; and perform controlled aviary experiments to measure the rate of transmission of MG among house finches. Emphasis will be placed on identifying human-related factors that modify the spread and maintenance of the disease. This information will be used to develop and validate general predictive models that can be applied to similar systems. Understanding which factors are responsible for the emergence of new diseases, which factors favor for their spread, and how they affect their hosts is essential to the control of new diseases doc8191 none This research project is concerned with a unifying solution approach, namely the Reformulation-Linearization Convexification Technique (RLT), that has been developed for generating tight relaxations for large classes of discrete combinatorial and continuous nonconvex programming problems. The various contributions addressed in this project involve the development of both general theoretical and algorithmic concepts, as well as specialized procedures for several important applications, along with the investigation of related implementation issues accompanied by extensive computational tests. For linear mixed-integer 0-1 problems we explore the design of effective RLT relaxations, enhanced by conditional logic implications, and embedded within a dynamic Lagrangian relaxation constraint generation scheme. In the context of continuous nonconvex problems, we propose the study of various strategies for generating tight manageable relaxations for devising computationally effective global optimization RLT approaches to solve a wide class of factorable nonlinear programs. In order to effectively cope with the size and structure of the relaxations that are typically generated by RLT, various Lagrangian dual relaxation, aggregation, penalty function, trust region, and conjugate deflected subgradient methods are suggested for investigation. These ideas are proposed to be further explored in the context of a variety of specific applications including radar pulsing and bit-mapping problems, machine scheduling problems, two-stage stochastic mixed-integer problems involving integer recourse decisions, ship design problems, and various operational and strategic planning air traffic management problems faced at airports as well as in the enroute airspace. Discrete and continuous nonconvex programming problems arise in a host of practical operational, strategic planning, and system or engineering design applications. Several recent advances have been made in the development of algorithms for solving such classes of problems. At the heart of these approaches is a sequence of linear (or convex) programming relaxations that drive the solution process, and the success of such algorithms is strongly dependent on the strength or tightness of these relaxations. This research project is concerned with a unifying solution approach, namely the Reformulation-Linearization Convexification Technique (RLT), that has been developed for generating tight relaxations for not only constructing exact solution algorithms, but also to design powerful heuristic procedures for large classes of discrete combinatorial and continuous nonconvex programming problems. The various contributions addressed in this project involve the development of both general theoretical and algorithmic concepts, as well as specialized procedures for several important applications. The impact of this study will be the development of a comprehensive technology that unifies many important concepts and offers insights into problem structures and modeling strategies, as well as provides a construct for generating tight relaxations doc8192 none This proposal is to support two workshops on the important topic of Secure Campus Infrastructures. Security in general and secure campus systems in particular is a topic that has been discussed for years. It is now becoming critical to information flow into, across, and out of the campus network infrastructure that some consensus be reached on some security solutions and a basic implementation strategy be defined and executed. The goal of the workshop will be to combine information dissemination with design and practice collaboration to meet the following objectives: (1) To facilitate communication between schools at the forefront of implementing these new technologies with those schools in the beginning or planning stages, (2) To engage in dialogue leading to a consensus of an initial set of best practices and policies in the design and development of authentication and authorization services, and (3) To facilitate communication with content providers of core and complementary academic and research resources to ensure interoperability and usage of leading resources and applications doc8193 none There are two primary goals for this dissertation research project. The first is to provide a close examination of the career of Christiaan Huygens ( - ) by looking at his publication practices. Huygens was a central figure in the seventeenth century; therefore, a better understanding of his career, and how it developed across intellectual, social and political lines, would significantly add to the history of science in this period. By looking at the individuals with whom he shared his work through the circulation of presentation copies, this project will follow the transitions and movements Huygens made from one peer group to another, including the Royal Society of London, and the French Royal Academy. Not only will this elucidate Huygens intellectual and social migrations, but more generally it will reveal a great deal about how natural philosophy functioned in this period. The second aim of this project is to use Huygens career as a case study for understanding how dedicatory copies of texts could be distributed, and what strategies were involved in the presentation of such gifts. Correspondence exists which records the recipients Huygens selected for most of his works, and letters from many recipients are extant as well. These lists will be examined for each of Huygens works, and the recipients evaluated and compared in an attempt to understand what audiences he was targeting. Huygens was not alone in his efforts to construct audiences for his books through careful distribution patterns. Thus, his efforts will be compared to others from the period, including Tycho Brahe, Galileo and Newton. From this a more complete picture of the various roles of dedicatory texts will emerge doc8194 none Eglinton In recent years, molecular organic proxies have become an integral component of paleoclimate research. As for other proxies, there is an ever-growing need to develop continuous, high temporal resolution records from sediment and ice cores to document short- and long-term climate variations. Typically, however, organic geochemical measurements lag behind other proxy measurements in part due to the laborious analyses involved, and because of relatively large sample size requirements. This grant provides partial support for the acquisition of a gas chromatograph time-of-flight mass spectrometer (GC TOF-MS) system that overcomes many of these present limitations. The key feature of the new instrumentation is the acquisition of full-scan mass spectral data at unprecedented rates, paving the way for very rapid sample analysis at high sensitivity. In addition to its direct application as a tool to develop detailed, high resolution molecular stratigraphic records, we will also configure the GC TOF-MS instrument for two new modes of analysis. The first involves sorptive extraction of organic compounds from aqueous matrices and subsequent sample introduction via a thermal desorption unit. We plan to use this approach for the measurement of trace semi-volatile organic species in ice-core samples. The second involves configuration of the GC for comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatographic separations. The latter enables detailed characterization of highly complex geochemical matrices. Overall, we believe the new instrumentation offers unique capabilities that will open up new frontiers for the development and application of molecular organic proxies in paleoclimate studies doc8195 none Regulation of Potassium and Calcium Channels in Drosophila Regulation of potassium and calcium channels plays an important role in several cellular functions. The investigators have identified mutations, in two genes, that disrupt the regulation of K+ and Ca2+ channels in Drosophila. The proposed research will identify these two genes and clone them. The project uses P-element mutagenesis and X-irradiation to generate additional mutant alleles of each of the two regulatory genes. Some of these new alleles will be tagged by the presence of the P-element or a chromosomal breakpoint . These tagged alleles will be used to facilitate the isolation and characterization of the two genes. Sequence analysis of the wild-type and mutant alleles will identify the mutations present within each of the mutant alleles. Past research experience has clearly demonstrated a strong evolutionary conservation of mechanisms involved in the regulation of ion channels. Identification of the two genes under study, and subsequent analysis of how the encoded gene products regulate the K+ and the Ca2+ channels, will provide valuable insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying the regulation of Drosophila ion channels. These regulatory mechanisms would be expected to be applicable to other systems. Since ion channels share regulatory pathways with other cellular functions, these studies will also provide useful information on general cellular regulatory pathways doc8196 none This Postdoctoral Fellowship allows the co-PI to apply the combined methodological tools of structural engineering, industrial archeology, and architectural history to examine the engineering of nineteenth-century American steel works buildings. Working with an advisory committee of civil engineers and architectural historians at The Pennsylvania State University, the co-PI is engaging in the intensive study of structural analysis using buildings from historically important steel works as exercises. Training includes a focus on the graphical methods widely used during the 19th and early 20th centuries --the steel industry s most innovative period of building design. The c0-PI is augmenting his experience in documenting historic bridges with a workshop in documenting historic structures. Using these new skills as a foundation, the co-PI is analyzing selected structures through both field observations and archival materials. This methodology is intended to familiarize the co-PI with the range of choices and constraints confronting designers. Comparison with the actual decisions made by the designers - as found in the building themselves - demonstrates the frequency with which engineers and designers made decisions that based, not on clear-cut and mathematical calculations, but on a complex interplay among cultural values, economic considerations, intuitive hunches, and technological knowledge and experience. The study broadens the historiography of industrial architecture and the study of industrial and other non-high style buildings with a scientifically informed approach. The results of the study help the historic preservation community as it seeks to assess, preserve, and interpret the few remaining early structures of a heavy industry central to the rise of the United States as an industrial power. In addition, the project seeks to impact engineering and architectural education. The co-PI s plans to interact with undergraduate engineering students at the host institution and to use the fellowship to focus his career on teaching engineering and architecture students about both the technical and social aspects of their own milieus. Finally, the co-PI intends to present findings at the host institution, conferences, and ultimately incorporate them into a monograph on the architecture and engineering of the American steel industry doc8197 none Twenty-five lower-division undergraduate and fifteen graduate students in computer science, statistics or mathematics are being supported via financial aid, internships, group sessions, and outside speakers. As they enter the program, they receive an intensive orientation. As they progress through the program, they receive close monitoring to ensure their success via bi-weekly meetings with the PI and monthly group meetings. Students are organized into peer study groups to encourage performance in computer science and mathematics courses doc8198 none A research program is described that uses previous experience in the area of semicrystalline polymers and the use of NMR spectroscopy to advance the characterization and structural properties of polyolefins. The research is also projects to improve our understanding of the development of crystalline structure from the non-oriented isotropic melt or during annealing a previously crystallized system. The PI plans to build upon the base of pervious NSF funded programs that allowed training in the use of solid-state NMR, to extend a novel NMR method to obtain the crystallite thickness distributions and mean average thicknesses of narrow fractions of linear polyethylenes previously characterized with other techniques. The method will also be tested in polypropylenes using AFM, SAXS and TEM data to build the required calibrations. A combination of NMR, DSC and AFM will be used to establish the role of a specific lamellar morphology and or chain conformation in the amorphous regions, in the unique isothermal melting observed in polypropylenes. The kinetics of this process will be also studied. The proposal also includes a research program to assess the nature of the structural changes that take place with time upon annealing previously crystallized polyolefins. Changes will be evaluated in relation to the initial crystalline morphology. Emphasis is given the NMR investigation of relaxation properties of the chains in the intercrystalline regions and WAXS analysis of the halo of well characterized metallocene type polyethylenes and polypropylenes. %%% The FAMU-FSU College of Engineering is a jointly managed program of the Florida State University, a Research I institution with an enrollment of 35,000, and Florida A&M University, a Historically Black University with and enrollment of 12,000. Faculty hold joint appointments at both institutions, and students from both universities enroll in the same engineering classes. The present enrollment at the College of Engineering consists of approximately 50% minority students and over 25% women, making it unique in several respects. The proposed work includes active participation of graduate students and training in current techniques of characterization of polymers. These activities parallel the commitment of the PI to education of students in the area of Polymer Science and Engineering. The PI plans to take advantage of recently NSF funded instrumentation (NMR spectrometer and AFM) to FAMU and FSU at the College of Engineering to expand on characterization and the details of the crystalline state of novel polyolefins doc7549 none Visual object recognition occurs at different levels of abstraction ranging from categorical levels, e.g., dog, to the more specific individual level, e.g., my English hound. Moreover, we can develop expertise at one of these levels for a given category; for instance, bird watchers are experts at the species level. This research will continue to investigate the roles of level of categorization and perceptual expertise in the development of cognitive and neural mechanisms selective for object categories (such as faces or birds). Because different methods offer different strengths and weaknesses, this research will involve converging evidence, including behavioral psychophysics, functional brain imaging (fMRI), and event related potentials (ERPs) in normal humans, as well as extending these techniques to brain-injured individuals. The research program is divided into four sections addressing different questions: 1) How do people become perceptual experts? A first set of experiments will manipulate whether subjects rely on their own observations or require feedback and supervision. A second set of studies will examine whether non-visual knowledge about objects contributes to the learning process and affects the organization of category-specific areas. Other experiments will test the plasticity of the brain regions, which support object recognition, investigating whether damage to one area can be compensated for by reorganization of other areas. 2) What are the computational roles of different brain areas within the network that mediates expertise with visually-similar objects? Experiments using a combination of fMRI, ERP, and behavioral measures will investigate how different category-selective brain areas support identification at the categorical, subordinate, and individual levels. 3) What is the capacity of perceptual expertise? Experiments will test whether one can become an expert with many different classes of objects (e.g., birds, dogs, cars, faces, flowers, etc.), as well as whether there is interference when objects from different expertise domains are processed at the same time. 4) Can perceptual expertise be acquired more easily with some object geometries? In particular, adaptive pressures for accurate face recognition may have biased the system to prefer face-like configurations. By manipulating the visual structure of stimulus objects, behavioral and fMRI experiments will investigate the geometric constraints on the acquisition of expertise. Overall, these experiments should help us to better understand the nature of visual object recognition, elucidating how a single system can support the wide range of recognition tasks we are able to perform. The implications of these findings vary from possible protocols for the rehabilitation of brain-injured individuals to the better education of learning-impaired children (e.g., as in autism) to the development of more effective and robust machine vision systems for face and object recognition doc8200 none This project is designed to increase opportunities for students to successfully complete degree programs in engineering, telecommunications engineering, electronics technology, mathematics, and computer science. Objectives of the CSEMS project are to increase the matriculation, retention, and graduation rates of students enrolled in five degree programs, establish new and enhance existing support programs for students, increase the awareness of high school students about the opportunities in the CSEMS fields, increase partnerships with industry and government agencies for internships and permanent hires of the CSEMS scholarship graduates, and create assessment tools that will be used to monitor the impact of the CSEMS project on the community. Internships are an important component to the CSEMS project. Special effort is being given to strengthening existing relationships with industry and identifying new sources of internships for CSEMS students in the private and government sectors. Forging new partnerships with the private sector enhance CSEMS students opportunities for terminal employment doc8201 none Do people invest differently in groups than as individuals? Do men invest differently than women? This project looks at both issues by analyzing the stock portfolios of approximately investment clubs throughout the U.S. The issues at stake are important to scholars as well as to business managers and people in the financial industry. In the business world, most investment decisions are made in groups; in fact, some of the most important market movers are groups, such as the Federal Reserve Board. Yet little is known about how group settings affect investment decisions or performance. One of the most important aspects of group process is gender composition; for example, it has long been known in sociology that people behave very differently in same-sex groups versus mixed company. By incorporating these insights, this study will build a more accurate theory of the social underpinnings of economic behavior doc8202 none The enzyme pyruvate,orthophosphate dikinase (PPDK) is most well known as an enzyme of the C4 photosynthetic pathway where it catalyzes the formation of PEP (phosphoenolpyruvate), the primary CO2 acceptor molecule, from pyruvate. Because it is a key enzyme in the C4 pathway, PPDK activity is highly regulated so the overall pathway can function optimally in CO2 assimilation. This regulation is conferred by reversible phosphorylation of a PPDK active-site threonine, with the enzyme being inactive in the phosphorylated state. A single bifunctional protein kinase phosphatase enzyme, PPDK regulatory protein (RP), catalyzes this regulatory phosphorylation and dephosphorylation. PPDK is also present in C3 plants although it does not participate in photosynthesis. Further, it is present in all tissues of the plant but in very low amounts. Its function in C3 plants is essentially unknown, although it is proposed to participate in cellular metabolism and guard cell function. Recently, it was demonstrated that PPDK in leaves of C3 plants undergoes light dark mediated regulatory phosphorylation similar to C4 leaf PPDK. The major aim of this project is to further characterize C3 plant PPDK regulatory phosphorylation by identifying organ, tissue, cellular, and subcellular sites of regulatory PPDK phosphorylation. Further, the C3 RP or RP-like activity mediating reversible phosphorylation of PPDK in C3 plant tissue will be scrutinized in vitro for understanding its biochemical nature. Finally, this project seeks to clone the gene for C4 PPDK RP from a maize cDNA library. This will provide the ultimate tool for resolving the perplexing riddle of how this uniquely bifunctional enzyme is regulated in C4 plants, as well as the requisite gene probe for understanding its precise expression in C3 and C4 plants. In summary, the experimental outcomes of this project will enable the hitherto unknown metabolic function(s) of PPDK in C3 plants to be elucidated doc8203 none This scholarship project is a collaboration between Horry-Georgetown and York Technical Colleges. Both institutions have nationally recognized, advanced computer and engineering technology curricula and have a specific need to assist academically prepared students to complete their two- year degree in the prescribed time. All of the participating programs are academically strenuous and require a full summer semester between the freshman and sophomore years. Through the implementation of the Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Scholarship (CSEMS) program, the colleges are identifying up to forty students of academic merit who are at risk of not completing their degree requirements due to financial need, and to support and insure their graduation. The goals of the project include increasing the retention rate of students enrolled in the programs, improving the higher education placement rate of participating students, and strengthening partnerships between the colleges and the area industries who employ the graduates. This project is extending a one-year award from the prior year doc8204 none SES 00- Andrew Pickering The History Of Cybernetics: Ashby, Beer And Pask Cybernetics increasingly commands serious interest amongst historians of science, in part, no doubt, because of a sense that it has sought to grasp the world in an interestingly different way from the more familiar natural and social sciences-holistically rather than reductively, to put it crudely. Most historical interest has focussed on the World War II founders of cybernetics-Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, Warren McCulloch, Claude Shannon-and the series of Macy conferences ( -53) in which their views were propagated. And most attention has been paid to the conceptual singularity of cybernetics-cybernetics as a theory of negative feedback and control, or as a world-view or ideology. This project extends our understanding of the substance and history of cybernetics along several axes. First, it examines new characters and a later period. Based on research over the past couple of years, the PI believes that some of the most fascinating and original work in cybernetics was done from the early s onwards by a group of British scientists-foremost amongst them W. Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask. Second, while I am, of course, interested in the ideas of these men, I am also interested in what they did-the practice of cybernetics, a largely unexplored topic. This leads, third, into the material stratum of cybernetics. Like Wiener s before them, the cybernetics of the English group referred directly to a constellation of fascinating material systems and artefacts. The singularity of cybernetics, the PI argues, resides at least as much at this level as it does at the level of ideas. The interest in practice also leads, fourth, into the social structure of cybernetics. We are familiar with the usual academic disciplinary centering of the traditional sciences, but cybernetics was not like that. The cyberneticians have typically been wanderers or vagrants, moving readily between institutional bases that we generally think of as distinct, including the university, but also the arts, business, industry and the military. This social level constitutes another, hitherto not well recognised, aspect of the singularity of cybernetics. This proposal for a sabbatical year supports preparation of a book on the British cyberneticians, especially the research on Beer and Pask. (The PI s a graduate student is already working intensively on Ashby). Key informants have agreed to be interviewed and furnish documents in their possession. The book seeks to emphasise that, in its specific entanglements of the material, social and conceptual, cybernetics was a different kind of historical formation from the reductive sciences-a new and fascinating kind of object for study by the STS community that may increasingly command much wider scholarly and popular interest. Certain theoretical concerns of the PI go along with his interest in cybernetics, which he intends to open up in the last chapter of the book by locating cybernetics within a larger body of cognate work, including current work on complexity and his own work on the mangle of practice. The project contributes significantly to theoretical discussions within and beyond science and technology studies. The PI also explores the relevance of such discussions for contemporary work in artificial intelligence, information technology and cognitive science doc8205 none KORF WGBH is at the initial stages of developing TeachingTeachers.org. This project will utilize WGBH s extensive broadcast, video and interactive programming resources to support teacher education and student learning in science at the K-12 grade levels. As currently conceived, the result will be a searchable, Web-based repository of no-cost, high-quality materials that teachers can easily access for their own professional development as well as to support classroom activities with students. They are seeking immediate support to study the viability, usefulness, and functionality of the proposed model. The Principal investigator reports that they have made significant progress in developing the concept over the past year. With NSF support they will be able to complete the design of a prototype, test its component parts with target users, and explore options to keep the resources free of commercial agendas doc8206 none People often wonder whether their perceptions are accurate or appropriate. For example, jurors are asked to disregard inadmissible evidence, and people in hiring positions are responsible for ensuring that their evaluation of candidates is free from racial or gender bias. This project seeks to understand how and when people attempt to avoid or remove bias in their judgments and perceptions. The Flexible Correction Model (FCM) addresses such issues and forms the theoretical basis for the experiments. In contrast to past theories addressing bias correction, the FCM conceptualizes bias correction as guided by individuals naive theories (beliefs) about which biases are at work in a given setting. Some biases might be made salient for a particular judgment (e.g., when a judge instructs jurors not to use a particular piece of inadmissible evidence), whereas other potential biases might be salient for an individual across many settings (e.g., if a person has seen many past instances of racism). Whether active attempts at bias correction do or do not occur is also determined by the levels of motivation and ability people have to avoid the bias. For instance, juries might use inadmissible but condemning evidence because they are motivated to convict the right person. In other situations, people may not be able to avoid bias because they are distracted with other activities or because they do not have time to consider the biases at work. Fourteen experiments examine the variables that can influence which biases are most likely to be noticed and corrected by social perceivers, investigate the consequences of efforts to remove or avoid bias, and compare the belief-based corrections outlined by the FCM with alternative theories of avoiding bias. By utilizing a variety of research domains, including persuasion, stereotyping, and impression formation, the experiments will demonstrate how the FCM can help to organize our understanding of corrections in such varied settings as hiring decisions, courtroom judgment, advertising, and education doc8207 none The Appalachian College Association (ACA), a consortium of 33 private liberal arts colleges in central Appalachia, was formed to maximize the efforts of these colleges by facilitating their ability to share resources. Central Appalachia needs computer scientists, engineers and mathematicians, but most of the colleges graduate only a small number of students in these areas. This projects provides forty scholarships a year for two years to qualified third or fourth year students from the Appalachian area attending one of 31 ACA schools. Awarding these scholarships through the ACA office allows small schools to take advantage of the National Science Foundation initiative even if they have only one or two students interested in these programs and allows the schools to provide a support structure for the students that may not be available on an individual campus. Scholarship recipients are invited to the fall meeting of ACA Academic Deans. Here they have the opportunity to interact with fellow students and to meet graduate school deans and industry leaders. The presence of the scholarships encourages more students to consider majoring in these areas and the support structure provided for the recipients supports their success in their academic programs while in college, and success in jobs or further education doc8208 none This project focuses on the graduate level because of a severe projected shortage of workers in the next decade who can fill positions of high complexity in the technology sector, such as scientists and system analysts. It is especially important because there is a dearth of U.S. nationals in the graduate pipeline to fill these high-end technology workforce needs. Recruiting and retention activities emphasize the value of a graduate degree, with the help of representatives in industry. Individual monitoring and coordination with faculty ensures that recipients feel integrated with the department and are satisfied with their progress doc8209 none This project supports students of high ability and financial need to pursue studies in Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics (CSEM) . The objective of the program is to provide academic opportunities to students who otherwise might not be able to achieve these goals, to provide an improved education with academic support courses, and to improve their retention rate by lowering their employment load. A committee of key personnel from the CSEM departments at the university, Bakersfield (CSUB) oversees this program and develops the academic support structure which is necessary to provide encouragement to the students as they move towards graduation in their chosen fields doc8210 none Understanding the ways in which primates use their jaws during chewing is of great importance to physical anthropology because chewing has a major influence on the form of the skull. Knowledge of the influences on skull form helps anthropologists interpret the evolutionary history and behavior of extinct primates and understand the relationship between anatomy and function in living primates. The goal of this study is to determine whether, for the chewing muscles, variation in fiber type is linked to muscle activity during chewing. This research will (1) document the proportion and cross-sectional area of the Type I (slow) and Type II (fast) fibers in the chewing muscles of adult male and female macaques and baboons using histochemistry and electrophoresis, (2) determine whether sexual dimorphism in fiber type is present, and (3) determine how the proportions of fiber types are correlated with electromyographic activity during chewing in these animals. The hypothesis that the proportion of fast fibers is directly related to the rapid production of large bite forces during chewing will be tested. This research is important because little is known about the relation between muscle fiber type and activity during chewing, and it will provide new information about structure-function links in the skull. Furthermore, the data will resolve the controversy over whether there is sexual dimorphism in the fiber type of the chewing muscles. If sexual dimorphism is present, the data will provide a baseline for understanding the functional implications of sexual dimorphism doc8211 none Accurate prediction of precipitation amounts (quantitative precipitation forecasting; QFP) is a difficult forecasting problem, but one that has a potentially high societal benefit. For this reason, the U.S. Weather Research Program has identified QPF as a high priority research area. The primary objectives of this project are to use high-resolution field observations to verify and improve the numerical representation of microphysics in mesoscale models and to document the three-dimensional structures and physical mechanisms of orographic precipitation. This research is motivated by the fact that QPF continues to be a difficult problem for numerical weather prediction models. Recent studies have suggested that increasing horizontal resolution to a few kilometers often does not lead to more accurate precipitation forecasts, even over areas of complex terrain such as the Pacific Northwest, where the mesoscale flow is highly deterministic and the precipitation is mostly stratiform. There is growing evidence suggesting that these problems are associated with deficiencies in model microphysics. Therefore, a major objective of this project is to use remotely sensed (radar) observations, in situ aircraft data, and ground measurements to verify and improve the bulk microphysical schemes in mesoscale models. In order to evaluate the model microphysics for different types of environmental conditions, this study will utilize field data from IPEX (Intermountain Precipitation EXperiment) over northeast Utah, PACJET (PACific Landfalling JETs) along the West Coast, and IMPROVE (Improvement of Microphysical PaRameterization through Observational Verification Experiment) over the Oregon Cascades. These field studies also provide an opportunity to study the detailed three-dimensional structures and physical mechanisms associated with orographic precipitation. For example, radar and in situ aircraft data will illustrate how the orographic cloud and microphysics are modified by blocking and mountain wave dynamics as well as latent heating cooling within the cloud. These observational results will also be compared and augmented with high-resolution model simulations. Overall, understanding these sensitivities combined with improvements to the bulk microphysical schemes will help improve quantitative precipitation forecasting doc8212 none The Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Scholarship Program is providing scholarship support to talented students who demonstrate financial need to encourage and enable academic achievement and to increase the number of graduates in areas of national need. This program provides scholarships to junior and senior level undergraduates pursuing degrees in computer science, computer technology, engineering, engineering physics, engineering technology, and mathematics. The program has a structure for supporting, developing, and retaining minority and women students in these degree areas toward increasing the number graduating for the high- tech industrial workforce or for continuation for advanced degrees. Much of the student- support infrastructure necessary for the successful graduation of scholars comes from existing programs at North Carolina A& T State University. The new NSF- funded TALENT- 21 Project at the University provides some of the student- support infrastructure for scholars, and the TALENT- 21 Project goals and objectives are inclusive of those of the NSF CSEMS Program doc8213 none The Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academy of Sciences proposes to explore the intersection of computer science and biology in order to find new interdisciplinary opportunities and new directions for expanding information technology research. New emphasis areas for resrach program planning by NSF, DARPA and NIH will also be developed. Using workshops and minisymposia, the Board will produce a report, reviewed through the National Research Council process, that will be distributed through a variety of mechanisms and media. The dissemination process will by initiated by a public briefing on the report doc8214 none This project will build a comprehensive model to simulate interactions between energy, water, and carbon dioxide using data collected from tundra regions in northern Alaska. The model will be used to examine the role of global climate change on terrestrial ecosystems in an area that is predicted to be the first to feel the greatest effects of global warming. The project will utilize satellite images and data, data collected from recent field programs, and output from other models of the individual environmental components. The project will develop a regional simulation of climate impacts on terrestrial ecosystems and address the questions of energy and water balance in the Arctic system. The research will identify critical gaps in the understanding of climate-sensitive variables in the Arctic terrestrial ecosystem as well as the exchange of carbon dioxide with the atmosphere. Therefore, the project will be an important contribution to understanding the biocomplexity of the environment in an area undergoing rapid climate change at present doc8215 none This project provides a vibrant Pathways to the Baccalaureate Scholarship Program with a focus on increasing equity and access through our recruitment and retention efforts, the development of relationships with on- and off-campus constituents, and specified program goals. The program targets students in their junior and senior years in computer science, computer information systems, computer engineering technology, civil engineering technology, electrical engineering technology, mechanical engineering technology, industrial engineering technology, and applied mathematics. The primary program goals include the provision of an enriched learning environment for students, assisting students with exploration and preparation for entry into Pathways- targeted professions and graduate school, and the creation of structured career development and planning experiences that can be utilized by students throughout their entire careers doc8216 none This project combats the shortage of mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers by supporting 40 academically talented, low- income students who are making the transition from a two- year to a four- year institution. We provide these students with a strong support infrastructure and resources they need to graduate and find rewarding careers in engineering, mathematics, and computer science. Supporting activities take place in the student s final year of study at the community college and continue in his her first year at the four- year institution, including: faculty mentors; forums promoting interaction with faculty, industry representatives, and other students; and academic tutoring. Students are encouraged to take part in professional societies, co- op experiences, and research opportunities. We will assist graduates with job placement and or application for graduate school doc8174 none Nutrient and iron addition experiments are a basic oceanographic tool that has resulted in major advances in our knowledge of controls on oceanic productivity and carbon cycling. However, most of the shipboard and in-situ work carried out to date has involved additions of limiting nutrients that are one to two orders higher than ambient levels, resulting in massive blooms that are not typically observed in the natural ecosystems being investigated. For this reason, it is necessary to understand the consequences of continuous iron and nutrient inputs at realistic concentrations on phytoplankton community structure and oceanic carbon cycling. The principal investigators from the University of Delaware and the University of Charleston will carry out this type of experiment in the Southern Ocean utilizing their natural community chemostat system. This system delivers iron and nutrients at natural levels to incubated shipboard experiments at continuous flow rates that simulate real-world vertical advection processes. The specific goals of the proposed research is to address the following four questions: (1) How does phytoplankton species composition respond to changes in iron concentrations in upwelled water?; (2) What effect will variability in upwelling rates at a give iron concentration have on community structure?; (3) How does iron chemical speciation affect the composition of phytoplankton communities?; and (4) How will a changing iron supply affect the production of biogenic sulfur doc8218 none Drawing on research into the cultural construction of technology and research on the objectification of culture in heritage movements, this dissertation research project examines the industrial romanticism which underlies the restoration of World War 11 airplanes, known as warbirds. Industrial romanticism is seen as a contrast to traditional, pastoral romanticism that characterizes most heritage movements. Through an ethnographic investigation of warbird groups and airshows, this project will examine warbirds inversion of traditional romanticism s anti-modernist view of technology. This project will therefore shed light a new form of romanticism by examining the remaking or reinvention of an obsolete technology as an objectification of the past. Ethnographic research will be conducted in mostly Southern California, in the maintenance hangars of warbird groups, in the workshops of warbird restorers, at warbird museums, and at airshows. In addition to participant observation in these sites, the researcher will interview private owners of warbirds and other types of people involved in warbirds outside of the main research sites doc8219 none This award will support increased participation of students and young researchers in the 8th International Conference on Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology (ISMB) to be held August 19-23 in San Diego. The ISMB conference provides a general forum for disseminating the latest developments in bioinformatics, and is noteworthy for bringing together scientists from computer science, molecular biology, mathematics and statistics. Using the funds provided by this award, the ISMB organizing committee will provide stipends to graduate students, postdocs and other young scientists who have authored or co-authored a paper to be presented at the conference. Other criteria including financial need and the diversity of individuals and institutions will be used to select recipients and establish the amount of the stipend. It is expected that a minimum of 25 stipends will be offered. The term intelligent systems refers to software which goes beyond straightforward, closed-form algorithms or standard database technologies. Typically, such software views data in a symbolic fashion, learns from examples, consolidates multiple levels of abstraction, or otherwise synthesizes results in ways that make them more readily understood. Biological areas of great current interest include structural biology, genomics, molecular sequence analysis, evolution and phylogenetics, molecular interactions, metabolic pathways, regulatory networks, and control of development. Emphasis is on practical applications in the biological sciences, and on development of novel computational techniques. Attendance at the ISMB conference, which is held annually, has increased 5-fold since the first was held in . The conference purposefully alternates its venue between North American sites and sites in other hemispheres to foster international exchange and cooperation doc8220 none This project will continue cosmological observations with the Degree Angular Scale Interferometer (DASI) at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station. The DASI instrument is currently providing measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation anisotropy over a range of scales that span the first three acoustic peaks in the CMB power spectrum. The shape of the power spectrum, in particular the spacing of the peaks, provides a potentially clean measure of the geometry of the universe. Other DASI studies include the measuring of currently undetected polarization of the CMB anisotropy. This information will provide a critical test of the early structure of the universe. Also, the receiver will be reconfigured for higher frequencies in order to measure the fine scale anisotropy and the tail of the CMB anisotropy power spectrum. Education and outreach efforts will proceed in parallel with DASI reconfiguration, testing, observing, and analysis; an undergraduate hands-on course on radio telescopes is being developed as part of this work, with a teachers workshop planned for the first year of this renewal. All reduced and calibrated data, fully described, will be publicly available within one year after the completion of the project doc8221 none This project provides scholarships for low income, academically talented students, including twenty- five (25) undergraduate students majoring in Mathematics, Computer Science or Information Technology (MTH CSC IT) and fifteen (15) graduate students enrolled in the Master of Science in Computer Information Science Program (M. S. CIS). The twenty- five (25) undergraduate recipients include ten (10) new students transferring into La Salle s MTH CSC Department as juniors from community colleges or from the University s unique associate degree program for Latino students (the BUSCA Program) and fifteen (15) returning MTH CSC IT majors who are entering their junior years at the University. The fifteen (15) M. S. CIS students include six (6) new students entering the program and nine (9) students already enrolled as Master s degree candidates. At least 30% of the funded students are women, and at least 10% are minorities. In addition to scholarship assistance for the student recipients, funds are also used for project management, for tutorial assistance for the undergraduate CSMES recipients, and for a special Career Exploration series of guest speakers who are employed in professional positions in Mathematics, Computer Science and or Information Technology doc8222 none This research examines how low income communities and neighborhoods make use of Internet access being provided through public access channels. Public access is a policy and programming strategy embraced by government and private sector organizations, that puts high-speed links to the Internet in publicly accessible places, primarily in low income communities. There are more than 200 such networks in the US, facilitated through community technology centers and other access points. This project will explore whether and how community competence develops through this public access and the role of community technology centers (CTCs) in assisting this development. The research plan involves the senior researchers and graduate students at the LBJ School of the University of Texas in ethnographic case studies of a variety of CTCs in low income neighborhoods in Austin, Texas. The team will also track the deployed technologies in the target neighborhoods, and collect data on uses of the Internet in these settings by low-income people and families. The research strategy is participatory; the people who are the staff and volunteers and neighborhood residents in the CTCs will help to shape and carry out the research. The working hypothesis is that democratic processes help define the extent and degree to which CTC participants engage with and learn from each other, thereby influencing the development of community competence. Examining a number of CTCs that differ mostly on this dimension should help to test this hypothesis. To this purpose, several measures of democratic processes and technological use have been identified. The results of this research should include project reports presented at professional meetings, training conferences, and articles in peer reviewed publications doc8223 none This project examines change in international norms and rule systems. In particular, this study investigates the evolution of international rules against art plundering in wartime, focusing on the period from the Napoleonic Wars to the present. Although until victors in war seized the art treasures of the vanquished, international rules prohibited the destruction or removal of artworks during war by the latter half of the twentieth century. An endogenous theory of norm change, built on the interactions among rules, actions, and discourses, generates testable propositions about the evolution of international rules. One implication of this theory is that victorious powers will act in accordance with new norms as these become internalized by incorporation into domestic law and policies. This stands in contrast to the realist tradition that suggests that great powers make rules to suit their interests, and therefore that international rules have no independent causal force. Evidence is provided by critical episodes in the evolution of norms against plunder. The research will show how actors interpreted normative tensions and ambiguities, how they sought to resolve them, and how their interactions altered the rules. Using secondary as well as primary and archival sources, the project will reconstruct the discourses, both between and within governments, that drove the evolution of rules. This research will also inform the understanding of other international norms governing the conduct of war (e.g., treatment of prisoners and civilians doc8224 none This project features the implementation of a coordinated campus- wide academic program for CSEMS scholarship recipients. The program provides enhanced access to academic resources, peer and faculty mentoring, and leadership and professional development. Scholarship recipients participate in the Master Student II course as a formal transition to UMR. Each student is assigned to a faculty mentor as part of the strategy to develop a significant measure of accountability and ensure that students are utilizing support resources while completing their academic program. Scholars are guided to utilize beneficial academic resources as well as to participate in leadership and professional development activities. Academic advisors assist in monitoring student academic progress doc8225 none Very few academic intervention programs for women in science and engineering have foucsed on graduate students and junior faculty. Yet, attrition rates for women doctoral students are significantly higher than those for men and numbers of female faculty in SMET areas remain very low. Research indicates that women increasingly want to pursue academic careers in science and engineering, but experience prolbmes in these fields due to institutional factors such as gendered organization patterns and overt subtle discrininatory preactices. We propose to organize a primarily regional conference of Mid-western land-grant colleges and universities on the Iowa State University campus to bring together women s studies facutly and others doing research on women in SMET fields, and faculty and graduate students in science and engineering, in order to exchange relevant research findings on the barriers to graduate and faculty women s full participation in science and engineering fields and to develop strategies and action plans aimed at retaining women graduate students and facutly in science and engineering. A unique aspect of the proposed conference is that it aims to bring together scientists and women s studies scholars-two groups that seldom interact and yet have a great deal to learn from each other-in terms of 5-7 persons from about 20 academic institutions. These teams will be exposed to the current research on women ins SMET fields, exchange information, and work collaboratively to develop ideas for potential retention programs at theri universities. Each team will be expected to construct a plan of action for its own institution, to implement it in the successive months, and to report on it ata a follow up forum a year later. The proceedings of the conference and follow up activity will be disseminated on the web and in print doc8226 none Ann Beyer The long term goal of the project is to contribute to an understanding of the complex process of ribosome biogenesis. Ribosomes are of obvious interest and importance as the protein synthesis machinery of the cell. In an actively growing yeast cell (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), ribosomes are made at a rate of ~ per minute in a process that has turned out to be surprisingly complex. Indeed, more than 60 trans-acting components are known to function in yeast ribosome biogenesis, and it has not proven possible to assemble ribosomes from purified components. This research will provide a new perspective on early events in ribosome synthesis, which are important to the successful assembly of the mature ribosome. The project combines two powerful approaches that have not previously been exploited simultaneously. Specifically, these are yeast genetics and the Miller chromatin spreading technique for electron microscope (EM) visualization of active genes. The basic idea is to visualize ribosomal RNA genes in yeast cells that have mutations in the trans-acting factors that function in early steps in ribosomal RNA processing. The three largest rRNAs are synthesized by RNA polymerase I as a single large 35S precursor RNA and are extensively modified (mainly by pseudouridylation and ribose methylation) and separated by nucleolytic cleavages. During the 5-6 minutes required to synthesize this rRNA, the nascent transcripts are accessible for EM visualization in the characteristic tandemly repeated Christmas-tree gene configuration. These rRNA transcripts are packaged into large ribonucleoprotein complexes that occur at nonrandom positions. By asking if and how this RNP structure changes as various components are deleted or mutated, combined with knowledge as to effects of the mutation on rRNA processing, information will be obtained regarding the structural framework of processing, molecular interactions in processing, and the timing and order of these events. In addition, three rRNA processing events can be visualized co-transcriptionally, at low frequency but reproducibly. The three events visualized are thought to represent removal of the extreme 5 end of the transcript (the 5 ETS), separation of the bulk of the transcript from the extreme 3 end (the 3 ETS), and cleavage about midway through the transcript, which presumably corresponds to cleavage in ITS1 separating the 18S rRNA precursor from the rest of the precursor. These predictions will be tested using mutations in known required components, and if correct, effects on these specific processing steps will be tested in a structural setting. Components to be tested include both RNA and protein components of the two major classes of snoRNPs involved in rRNA modification (Box H ACA and Box C+D), with an emphasis on the snoRNPs required for the early RNA cleavage steps, as well as non-snoRNP proteins involved in these steps. Completion of these experiments will provide important new information on early steps in ribosome biogenesis doc8227 none 00- Trumbore SGER: A whole-ecosystem isotope labeling experiment: History and research opportunities The investigators are tracing excess radiocarbon that was released in late summer to determine the rates of exchange of carbon between the atmosphere and a hardwood forest in eastern Tennessee. The radiocarbon is measurable only with very sensitive techniques and the investigators state that it is not associated with environmental risk. Dr. Trumbore is investigating how long it takes for the excess 14C fixed by trees in July August to move through leaf, roots and woody plant tissues, soil organic matter, fungi and decomposer organisms, and CO2 produced in the soils. The work is being performed in collaboration with a group of researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The understanding of rates of carbon uptake and release by ecosystems gained from this study will be relevant to basic ecosystem science (understanding tree physiology and carbon allocation) as well as to predictions of the capacity of forest ecosystems to sequester carbon doc8228 none This research will develop statistical methods for modeling and analyzing categorical responses having clustering, most commonly due to repeated measurement. The main focus is generalized linear mixed models and extensions for multinomial responses and for mixtures of categorical and continuous responses. The issues to be studied include (1) modeling repeated ordinal and nominal responses using a distribution-free approach for the random effects, (2) addressing related misspecification and efficiency issues, (3) extending standard models for association and conditional association to allow heterogeneity of odds ratios by using random effects in binomial logit and Poisson loglinear models, (4) incorporating a wide variety of random effects models for categorical responses in an extended class of generalized loglinear mixed models, and (5) modeling repeated measurement of multivariate responses that are mixtures of discrete and continuous responses using random effects. Related work includes modeling of repeated compositional data, developing summary measures for comparing non-nested models for handling repeated measurement data, developing improved small-sample confidence intervals for parameters summarizing repeated measurement data, and writing survey articles on topics related to modeling clustered, categorical data. This project will study and develop a type of model that is increasingly popular for applications in which standard statistical methods are inadequate because observations are not independent. The lack of independence occurs, for instance, when the same subjects are measured repeatedly over time or when observations occur in clusters such as families. The models are also useful for the study of subjects opinions expressed on a battery of related questions in a survey -- for instance, opinion about whether government spending should increase, remain the same, or decrease, measured separately for defense, education, health, and the environment. This project will formulate new models, develop inferential methods for them, and illustrate them with social-science related data sets. Potential applications include comparing responses to similar questions on a survey, modeling survey questions in which respondents can select more than one outcome category, and summarizing how effects vary among groups that are sampled from some larger set of groups (e.g., schools, hospitals doc8229 none Professor Julian Tyson of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Dr. Gerhard Schlemmer of Perkin-Elmer Corporation are funded by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry program and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities for collaborative research on trace analysis involving instrumentation. This Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) grant addresses trace element uptake by marine plankton, the fate of arsenic in soils, the anti-cancer properties of selenium-enriched yeast, the uptake of trace elements by marine organisms, the fingerprinting of lead, copper, and gold, and the human metabolism of arsenic, selenium, and mercury. Efforts in the area of sample pre-treatment include microwave and ultrasound-assisted extractions, supercritical extraction, solid phase extraction and liquid liquid extraction. Specific investigations of flow injection (an area of expertise in the Tyson laboratory) include the evaluation of cationic surfactants on hydride generation and reaction with arsenic and selenite, and development of manifolds for synthesizing volatile organometallic compounds. The PIs propose to develop an interface for HPLC-ICP-MS and liquid-liquid extraction pretreatment. The collaboration will provide industrial experience for students who will spend at least one summer each at Perkin-Elmer in Norwalk, Connecticut or Uberlingen, Germany. Trace element detection is enormously important in the biological, medical and environmental sciences. The difficulty of detecting small amounts of key metals in matrices such as biological fluids and soil still limits our ability to understand transport and function in these media doc8230 none Kadanoff This grant is funded jointly by the Materials Theory Program in Division of Materials Research and the Mathematical Physics Program in the Physics Division. The research is part of a broader program involving experiments, computation and mathematics. The following projects will be undertaken: development of computer codes aimed at understanding the similarity solutions occurring near singularities; further application of the methods of statistical physics to the development of dynamical theories for the motion of interfaces, particularly the interfaces between two fluids; the development of models for chaotic and turbulent behavior, particularly the continuation of studies of turbulence in extended systems while addressing the problems related to the chaotic behavior of dynamical systems models with many degrees of freedom; and, the study of granular materials, with particular reference to their chaotic dynamical behavior. %% This grant is funded jointly by the Materials Theory Program in Division of Materials Research and the Mathematical Physics Program in the Physics Division. The research is part of a broader program involving experiments, computation and mathematics. Theoretical research will take place on a variety of topics including singularities, interfaces, turbulence and chaos in fluids, and the chaotic behavior of granular materials doc8231 none This research examines the role of faculty in the increasing trend for U.S. universities to engage in patent licensing. The focus is on the characteristics of individual inventors and the role of licensing in the conduct and dissemination of their research. Since , the Bayh-Dole Act has allowed U.S. universities to own and license results from federally funded research, and license-related activity has increased dramatically. Universities cite increased licensing activity as evidence of their increasing contribution to the economy while skeptics question the impact. Critics claim that potential financial returns from licensing have diverted faculty from more basic to applied research. This research is based on a panel database of the research and licensing activity of six to seven thousand faculty members in major U.S. research universities, including Cal Tech, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Harvard, MIT, Pennsylvania, Penn State, Purdue, Stanford, Wisconsin, and Texas A&M. These universities have been selected because of their status as major research universities and their commitment to provide data. Most data cover at least the period - . With these data, one can examine the evolution of faculty behavior over time and the extent to which it is related to individual characteristics or to environmental factors. Differences in patterns across universities and disciplines can be examined. Three major issues are addressed: i. Does the increase in university licensing over the last decade reflect a shift away from fundamental research and or an increased willingness of faculty to participate in licensing as well as publish the results of their research? ii. How is the propensity of faculty to disclose inventions (i.e., file a report with the university when they believe a research result has commercial license potential) re-lated to individual characteristics (e.g., publication record, research sponsorship) and other characteristics (e.g., academic discipline, university and or department effects)? iii. What is the life-cycle behavior of inventors with respect to research, publication, and license-related activity? The basis of the research is a life-cycle model in which faculty can choose to engage in basic or applied research and where licensing activity as well as publication is possible. This theoretical model suggests three empirical models of research productivity. One deals with publication activity, while the other two deal with licensing activity and basic relative to applied research over the life cycle. For each model empirical results are based on annual data for individual scientists and engineers. The method of analysis is Tobit and logit regression analysis. Preliminary results based on 602 Purdue faculty over the period -96 tend to support the theoretical model. Further, there appear to be changes over time in licensing activity, but little or no changes over time in publication activity or the basic applied nature of faculty research. Results will be reported in publications and relevant professional meetings doc8232 none Burnett, Roger M. We will explore the principles by which viruses are constructed from their constituent proteins, and advance ways of imaging very large biological structures at high resolution. The molecular structures of two very large virions will be obtained by combining two independent imaging methods. Cryo-electron microscopy (EM) will yield three-dimensional reconstructions of adenovirus and bacteriophage PRD1, and their mutants. Difference imaging will use the known X-ray structures of the two major coat proteins with the EM reconstructions to define the molecular envelopes and locations of proteins at the vertex and others acting as capsid cement. We want to understand the molecular interactions determining the architecture and stability of adenovirus and bacteriophage PRD1, and to develop our hypothesis that they have evolved from a common ancestor. How can two dsDNA viruses have large pseudo T=25 virions with quite different sizes, although they are formed from similar major coat proteins? Both proteins have double viral barrel subunits to give trimers with pseudo-hexagonal shapes that can closely pack. How are these and other similarities, such as in DNA organization and replication, maintained while the viruses have evolved? They infect very different hosts, and PRD1 has an unusual internal membrane. The role and evolution of cementing proteins will be studied by imaging viral mutants. These proteins are important in large macromolecular assemblies as they resolve the conflicting requirements for weak interactions to ensure accurate assembly of major components, and the strong bonding necessary for stability doc8233 none This research award to Professor James Reilly of Indiana University - Bloomington, entitled Characterizing the Reactions of Surface-bound Biological Molecules by Mass Spectrometry is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program. The goal of the research is to explore the fundamental chemistry of protein binding to surfaces. The surface interactions will be probed using mass spectrometry. In particular the following problems will be examined: 1) the cause of reduced chemical activity of bound enzymes compared to free enzymes 2) structural changes which affect the location and number of binding sites in bound proteins 3) the effect of the surface structure on the enzyme activity. The research has the potential for high impact in the areas of surface and interfacial science as well as for mass spectrometry and biochemistry. This research is creative but high risk. It will provide the opportunities for students to work on an interdisciplinary project involving analytical chemistry and protein biochemistry. The outcome of this research could impact the fields of biotechnology, protein diagnostics, protein structure and modeling and immunoassay techniques doc8234 none In the twenty years since researchers at IBM Zurich introduced the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to the world, scanning probe microscopy (SPM) has become one of the most valuable tools available to physicists, chemists, electrical engineers, materials scientists, biologists, and others seeking to understand the nanoscale features of surfaces. The rich history of SPMs, rooted in the technologies of postwar surface science, has become steadily more diverse as an alphabet soup of instruments and techniques, beginning with the atomic force microscope (AFM) and the scanning capacitance microscope (SCaM), has arisen for measuring and picturing a wide variety of material properties at very high resolution. This dissertation research project seeks to record the history of the development of these laboratory artifacts, and the practices surrounding them, as well as to contribute an ethnographic understanding of how SPMs are used in the ordinary conduct of laboratory life. The project therefore has two parts: an historical component, involving documentary research and interviews with most of the principals in the development of SPMs; and an ethnographic component, involving participant-observation with groups of materials scientists who currently use various SPMs. Each component will shed light on, and raise questions for, the other doc8235 none The main goal of this program is to facilitate graduation in computer science and mathematics for low- income persons, in particular, students from under-represented groups and persons with disabilities. Recruitment targets students from two distinct populations, transfer students from community colleges who plan to attend the institution as juniors and currently enrolled students entering their junior or senior year at the college. A collaborate actively is planned with the community colleges in the state to recruit eligible computer science students to participate in the program. The program provides a challenging opportunity with high expectations where designated faculty members will work as faculty mentors monitoring academic progress and supervising research projects or internships. It also provides an enriched course environment in which students have an opportunity to deal with problems they encounter with the material and with the hands-on projects. Each student is assigned a peer mentor in his her own field. The program features an internship experience in which the student integrates material from the classroom with learning from the real world. In addition, this prepares students for transitioning to the workplace environment, and provides realistic expectations on work for the student doc8236 none Collaborative research: Rhizosolenia mats as a source of nitrogen flux into the surface waters of the Pacific Ocean: Fe stress, N excretion and basin scale distribution patterns This project will quantify nitrogen cycling dynamics in the euphotic zone by vertically migrating Rhizosolenia mats, and will provide the first physiological data on mats below diver accessible depths. These macroscopic diatom assemblages sink below the euphotic zone to acquire nitrate, store it in their vacuole, and then return to the surface for photosynthesis. This new production is based entirely on a biologically, rather than physically mediated transport of N. These fragile associations require specialized collection techniques such as SCUBA and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). As a result, their biology and biogeochemical importance has been largely overlooked. Other taxa also vertically migrate, and this project will conduct the first enumeration of this entire community in order to understand the broader role of vertical migration in oceanic nitrogen cycling. In-situ video imaging techniques will be used to quantify mats in the eastern central N. Pacific gyre. Depth specific (MOCNESS) sampling will be used to quantify the remaining taxa. A ROV will be used to collect mats below diver accessible depths in order to compare deep mats with surface mats. An existing computer model will be used to calculate transport flux rates with these revised estimates. In addition to transporting N, Rhizosolenia mats under Fe and or light stress may excrete both inorganic and organic nitrogen. This will be evaluated using both laboratory and field Rhizosolenia. Based on previous results, oceanic Rhizosolenia mats in nature appear to be chronically Fe-stressed. However, ferredoxin, a common and convenient in situ marker of cellular Fe status, may not be produced in these oceanic taxa and thus may not be a valid means of characterizing Fe stress in open ocean Rhizosolenia. As part of our research, we will evaluate this indicator for Fe stress in Rhizosolenia isolated from the Pacific Ocean. Our goals are to assess the Fe quotas of rhizosolenid diatoms, document the validity of the ferredoxin index as a measure of Fe stress in large oceanic diatoms, and determine N excretion rates by these taxa. A migration model will be rigorously tested by examining deep mats. These data will provide additional insight into the synergistic relationship between trace nutrient limitation and macronutrient acquisition and assimilation, an important developing theme of modern biological oceanography. The rates of biological N import and release for the eastern half of the central N. Pacific gyre by the entire migrating community will be assessed. This is a fundamental to understanding oceanic N cycles, and has direct relevance for both carbon and nitrogen cycling in the upper ocean doc8237 none This project provides 40 scholarships to increase the recruitment, retention, and graduation rates of economically disadvantaged and historically under-represented students in Computer science, Engineering and Mathematics. Activities include a summer program, mentoring, a career awareness center, corporate and college partnerships, counseling, corporate alumni advising, faculty involvement, and undergraduate research. Scholars maintain continuous contact with faculty and staff who provide academic advising, career counseling, and graduate school exploration workshops. The project aims to prepare engineering, computer science, and mathematics undergraduates for successful careers in technical professions doc8238 none This project seeks to investigate robotic control and assembly of objects in the millimeter and nanometer range, respectively. Specific topics of research include developing motion control techniques and algorithms for atomic force positioning and force-feedback manipulation systems and for micro and nano-robotic systems that include micro and molecular scale actuators (e.g., motors, pumps, etc.). Various proposed designs for these actuators will also be investigated, and realistic physical models will be formulated for such systems, including (i) environments on flat surfaces, and (ii) fluid environments (e.g., micro-fluid-MEMS architectures, and robotic systems that move in fluid environments). As one application, the development of a MEMS scale Babbage machine will be investigated, which is a micro-scale mechanical computing machine, with the long term aim of building nano-scale programmable machines. The proposed research is of high risk due to the uncertainty in all the essential properties of the molecules to be manipulated and lack of a complete characterization of the physical properties of the manipulation systems at this micro and molecular scale doc8239 none Stacey The proposed work will integrate a new direct detection imaging spectrometer (SPIFI = South Pole Imaging Fabry-Perot Interferometer) into an existing telescope at South Pole station, in order to study the physical conditions, dynamics, and composition of the interstellar medium and its relationship to star formation in galaxies. SPIFI is designed for use in the far-infrared and sub-millimeter windows available to the 1.7 m Antarctic Submillimeter Telescope and Remote Observatory (AST RO) at the South Pole; it has been tested in similar windows at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. SPIFI s detector is a 5 x 5 element array of monolithic silicon bolometers cooled to 0.06 deg K in an adiabatic demagnetization refrigerator. The current version of the instrument can be tuned to any frequency in the 350 micron window, and continuously scan 13 spectral resolution elements at any given wavelength. SPIFI will be used to study the excitation conditions of molecular, photodissociated, and ionized interstellar matter in the so-called central molecular zone of the galaxy; the physical condition of interstellar matter in nearby galaxies, and the low metalicity environment of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds to see whether these mimic protogalaxies - a key to understanding the star formation process in the early universe doc8240 none This project provides educational opportunities to low income, academically talented students through scholarships that promote full- time enrollment and degree achievement in computer science, engineering, and mathematics. The project includes an established priority ranking that focuses on funding for Native Americans and other under- represented populations. The recruiting plan includes using well-established organizations such as the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) and the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native American (SACNAS). Scholarship recipients academic progress is monitored and information on mentoring and career opportunities is provided. Students are required to establish a degree plan and monitor progress within that plan. The overall goal of the project is to implement a scholarship program where 40 scholarship recipients receive an associate or baccalaureate degree in one of the project s disciplines or transfers from an associate to a baccalaureate degree program. The project also includes a mentoring plan. Through this project, 40 students from across the United States will have the opportunity to participate in a program encouraging them to pursue associate and baccalaureate level degrees in computer science, computer technology, engineering, engineering technology, or mathematics doc8241 none Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methodology recently emerged in statistics and engineering fields promises to solve a wide class of nonlinear filtering and optimization problems, opening up new frontiers for cross-fertilization between statistics and many areas of applications. A distinctive feature of SMC is its ability to adapt to the dynamics of the underlying stochastic systems via recursive simulation of the variables involved. Although special forms of SMC date back to s, the general use of the method appeared only recently and its many key properties have yet been well understood. This research group will focus on three major theoretical issues regarding the design of effective SMC-based computational tools and three important application areas, namely, wireless communications, computational biology, and business data analysis. In the theory part, they will study approaches of generating better Monte Carlo samples for tracking system dynamics; investigate roles of resampling which is critical to the effectiveness of SMC; and propose system reconfiguration strategies for more efficient SMC algorithms. In the application part, they plan to design novel signal processing and network control algorithms for wireless multimedia communications; develop better multiple sequence alignment models and SMC-based optimization method for protein structures; and build SMC-based modeling and analysis tools for business data. It is anticipated that the proposed research will culminate in the formulation of novel SMC methodologies and will bring the promise of the SMC paradigm into the practical arena of many emerging applications. Stochastic dynamic systems are routinely used in many application fields such as automatic control, engineering, and finance. The statistical analyses of these systems are crucial. However, except for a few special cases, quantitative analyses of these systems still present major challenges to researchers. Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) technique recently emerged in the field of statistics and engineering shows a great promise on solving a wide class of nonlinear filtering, prediction, and optimization problems, providing us with many exciting new research opportunities. The name Monte Carlo was coined in s by scientists involved in designing atomic bombs and it refers to a technique in which computer is used to simulate and study a complex stochastic system. The technique was named after the famed gambling resort because its procedures incorporate the element of chance. A distinctive feature of SMC is its ability to sequentially simulate the system by considering one variable at a time. The general use of SMC appeared recently and its invasion into many fields of science and engineering has just begun. Researchers including people in this research group have demonstrated that SMC can be successfully adapted to solve chemistry, engineering, and statistical problems. Understanding its theoretical properties and extending the use of SMC to other fields are the main focuses of this project. More specifically, this research group will focuse on three major theoretical issues regarding the design of effective SMC-based computational tools and three important application areas including wireless communications, computational biology, and business data analysis. These applications are not only important by their own merits, but also essential as the test ground for the new theories being developed and as the sources of stimulation for new research directions for SMC. It is anticipated that this research will culminate in the formulation of novel SMC methodologies and will bring the promise of the SMC paradigm into the practical arena of many emerging applications. In particular, this research will bear fruits in the following areas: novel designs of signal processing and network control algorithms for wireless multimedia communications; developments of better algorithms analyzing biological sequence and structure data; and a SMC-based tool for business data analysis and prediction doc8242 none This grant provides support for the development of a graduate training program focused on the ethical and value issues raised by food and agricultural standards (FAS) including quality, food safety, labor and environmental standards. FAS determine who benefits and who participates in the global exchange of agrifood commodities. They embody many important social and ethical issues, including: What should be the relationship between states and markets? What can science tell us about risk and safety? How can democracy be (re)constructed? What is the proper role of global trade in socioeconomic development? What should be the scope of WTO jurisdiction? Can environmental values be reconciled with economic values? No existing US-based graduate program offers students the opportunities to explore the issues and develop the skills needed to deal with these complex normative and empirical issues. This grant will help to build an internationally recognized graduate program that enhances state-of-the-art discipline-based training with specialized learning opportunities, allowing students the opportunity to incorporate interdisciplinary perspectives and skills and preparing them to grapple with normative issues in an increasingly global and differentiated food and agricultural system. Additionally, it will help students to integrate normative issues into the theoretical frameworks and practices of their respective disciplines. FAS issues cut across sociology, law, economics, ethics and policy analysis, and play themselves out in five dimensions: (1) standards formation, modification, implementation and enforcement, (2) access to markets for input factors and output products, (3) public and private roles with respect to standards, (4) risk, (5) consequences of standards for different groups in an industry and for society as a whole.These five dimensions form the basis of this research theme and ongoing research program. Participants in this grant will engage in research and training on one or more of these topics. In order to address these questions, faculty and students will draw upon approaches and disciplinary skills in rural sociology, institutional economics, international and food law, ethics and philosophy, and institutional and policy analysis in political science. The training program will permit three graduate fellows and a postdoctoral fellow to engage in research and formal course work focused around the topics above, in each of three years. Over the course of the training program, fellows will interact and develop collaborative relationships with the variety of stakeholders in systems of FAS. They will also participate in a rigorous program of coursework and research on themes currently under investigation by the principal investigators. The postdoctoral associate will bring new skills to the research team as well as help in team teaching the proseminar in FAS and in managing the overall research program. As a result of their training, fellows will be well situated to integrate these normative issues in their training and research careers. They will also have the knowledge and skills to develop collaborations with stakeholder groups at the local, national and international level. They will be able to work with a full range of stakeholders so as to help create socially desirable and equitable FAS from which all parties can benefit doc8243 none This project focuses on achieving significant increases in the skill development of students selected for the program and implementing strategies and activities to increase the students academic performance, retention, and graduation rates. The students are being selected based on financial needs as well as other characteristics such as motivation and communication skills. Special emphasis is being made in the selection process to ensure proper representation of low- income groups including ethnic minorities, women, and students with disabilities. Formal collaboration with the local business community and two K- 12 school districts further strengthen the program. The specific objectives of the Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Scholarhsip (CSEMS) program are the following: (1) To select 40 students who have financial constraints that inhibit them, but do not prevent them, from continuing their college education, and who demonstrate a motivation to succeed. (2) To reduce the rate of attrition of students in the CSEMS field by developing strategies that foster retention. The strategies include individual student counseling and advisement, tutoring, career planning and placement services, and guest speakers from universities and industries. (3) To develop formal agreements with private industries in the area to provide student workstudy opportunities during summer months. (4) To improve the professional skills and marketability of the CSEMS students for entering the workforce or articulating to a four- year university or college for a higher degree. An evaluation is being conducted including both formative and summative components. The evaluation criteria measures the outcomes of the goals established under this program, such as increased retention and graduation rates, improved academic preparation and performance of students entering and progressing through the CSEMS pipeline, and increased representation of minorities, women, and students with disabilities doc8244 none This project undertakes an ethnographic examination of the development of digital scientific infrastructure, following two scientific teams - environmental hydrology, and chemical engineering, as they build and implement computational models intended to provide layered access to specialists and broader audiences. These infrastructural models will allow users to access advanced tools for data mining, analysis, visualization, tutorials, and problem solving, using remote supercomputers, arguably constituting the scientific problem-solving environment of the 21st century. The goal of this research project is to develop an empirically and theoretically informed understanding of how ethical, epistemological and social and political values emerge in the interactions of various actors and agencies and get written into technical systems. The research proceeds by infrastructural inversion, that is, by opening to observation and analysis computational and other elements that underlie knowledge development, but are usually hidden from view. It involves observing scientific practices at the respective laboratories of the environmental hydrology and chemical engineering teams, as well as those of the enabling technology teams working with them to create the infrastructure. The observations allow the researchers to outline an analysis of the disciplinary networks through which the contributors to the digital science infrastructure are moving, the technical and symbolic commitments that have become crucial to their work, and the justifications they provide for developing infrastructure in the particular ways that they do. Site visits will include formal and informal interviews with laboratory members about their specific practices and their contributions to the digital scientific infrastructures. The researchers will record, transcribe, code and analyze all the interviews, interlacing the analyses with analysis of the technical decisions being written into the infrastructure. Results will be reported at relevant scientific modeling conferences, at professional society meetings, in journals, and in a book doc8245 none This project provides 20 scholarships per year for two years to computer science students in the junior and senior year. A strong mentoring program is a key element for the scholarship students, with both faculty and student mentoring. Senior level students who are second year scholarship recipients will be selected as mentors. Scholarship recipients are required to participate in at least one cooperative education experience, or to undertake a research project under faculty supervision. Native Americans and Hispanics are a target population for this program doc8246 none Bier Dr. Bier intends to study the role of a multi-pass integral membrane protein known as Rhomboid (Rho) in promoting signaling via the Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor (EGF-R) in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. The EGF-R is a member of the widely used receptor tyrosine kinase (RTK) family, which activates the RAS MAP-Kinase pathway. Rhomboid functions in conjunction with a single pass transmembrane protein (Star) to activate EGF-R signaling by a mechanism involving the production of a diffusible extracellular signal. The specific goals of this project are to: 1) analyze the function of domains of Rho that are predicted to lie inside or outside of the cell, 2) examine the basis for the intimate interaction between Rho and Star in promoting EGF-R signaling, and 3) determine whether Rho and Star participate directly or indirectly in producing a diffusible EGF-like signal. Dr. Bier anticipates that this study will lead to the formulation of specific mechanistic models for how Rho and Star activate EGF-ligands. More generally, this project should broaden our understanding of fundamental mechanisms for regulating the production and range of action of RTK ligands during development. Since RTK signaling pathways play a central role in development and regulation of cellular proliferation in vertebrates and invertebrates alike, these insights should have general implications for understanding cell-cell communication, which is also highly doc8247 none Hartzell Studies of the soil-dwelling bacterium Myxococcus xanthus have broadened our understanding of prokaryotic biology. M. xanthus uses gliding motility to forage for nutrients in relatively dry environments and to form a fruiting body containing quiescent spores in the absence of nutrients. We have discovered independent sets of genes encoding homologs of the E. coli transmembrane TolBQRA protein complex that are essential for gliding motility during growth. Surprisingly, the Tol proteins are not needed for gliding per se during development, because disruption of any of the tol genes does not affect aggregation or fruiting body formation. However, the spores produced by tol mutants fail to mature, showing that the Tol proteins are required at a late stage of spore differentiation. We will test the hypothesis that the Tol proteins are involved in the transport of biopolymers needed for gliding motility during growth and spore maturation during development. Important clues to the function of the Tol complex have come from the study of one tol operon, the gidA- aglU (tolB1) operon. AglU, a homolog of TolB, is predicted to be an outer membrane lipoprotein. Like TolB, AglU contains WD-repeat motifs that form B-propellar structures that mediate protein-protein interactions with the TolQRA proteins located in the inner membrane. The gidA gene encodes a homolog of the E. coli glucose-inhibited division protein, a protein of unknown function present in many prokaryotes. Purified M. xanthus GidA absorbs at 450nm and has features showing that it is a flavoprotein. The gidA mutant does not aggregate and cells do not differentiate into spores. Moreover, the gidA mutant releases a substance that inhibits the development of wild-type cells. The inhibitor is likely exported via the Tol complex, because a second mutation in aglU prevents the release of this toxic substance. Analysis of the inhibitor, purified from the gidA mutant, may provide clues to the nature of the material secreted through the Tol complex doc8248 none Although laboratory and field studies suggest that isotopic analyses of alkenones show great potential as a CO2 proxy because cell geometry may be estimated, the relationship between specific growth rate and carbon isotopic fractionation in natural samples has not been well defined. For this reason, the principal investigators will develop and evaluate a novel method based on combining 13C labeling and isotope-ratio-monitoring gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to determine in situ growth rates of Emiliania huxleyi and Gephyrocapsa oceanica in the ocean. The objectives of this research are to define the range of growth conditions where the 13C-alkenone-labeling technique gives reliable estimates of growth rate and to identify under what conditions bias may be anticipated. In additions, the principal investigators will evaluate the effects of nutrient and light limitation on carbon isotopic fractionation and explore how culture techniques affect 13C labeling and the relationship between carbon isotopic fractionation, growth rate and aqueous CO2 concentrations using dilute batch versus continuous culturing experiments. Lastly, in a select suite of experiments, the rate of incorporation of 13C into alkenones will be compared with other lipids for E. huxleyi and G. oceanica to provide insight into the physiological function(s) and biosynthetic pathway(s) of alkenones. A field component will be carried out to compare directly the fractionation relationship in natural alkenone-producing algae with those developed in laboratory experiments. Results from this study will help calibrate and validate the use of carbon isotopes in alkenones as a CO2 proxy, essential knowledge if the paleoceanographic community is to use this proxy to better understand mechanisms of climate change doc8249 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Ivan Sag will conduct three years of linguistic research on multiword expressions (MWEs). MWEs are a problem that must be solved on the route to robust and natural natural language technology. Fixed expressions can be entered into a lexicon as words-with-spaces, but this is inadequate even for cases like part(s) of speech and kicks kick kicked kicking the bucket ( die ). Further, some semi-fixed expressions exhibit positional variation (e.g., look up the answer look the answer up ), while others of equal semantic idiosyncrasy do not (e.g., falling off a log falling a log off ). Some patterns appear rule-governed, but contain unexpected exceptions (e.g., call ring phone telephone someone up ). Decomposable phrasal idioms allow even greater syntactic flexibility: Kim pulled the strings that got Pat the job and The strings that had been pulled in order for Pat to get the job were more extraordinary than those pulled to get Chris employed . Linguistic research has not yet provided an adequate theory of the diverse phenomena that populate the space between truly fixed expressions and syntactically flexible phrasal idioms. This project will fill that gap, developing a mathematically precise and computationally tractable theory of various classes of MWEs. The research team will analyze and computationally manipulate corpus data, integrating discrete and frequentistic methodologies into a hybrid theory of the different kinds of MWEs. The methods include complex word structures, lexical selection, partially similar grammar rules organized into construction hierarchies , idiomatic construction rules - a new technique for analyzing constructions where idiomatic expressions may be separated from one another by considerable distance. Compositionally structured, institutionalized phrases like traffic light and phone booth will be treated as purely statistical dependencies. The most recent extraction techniques will be used to develop stochastic constraints and integrate them into fundamentally discrete, constraint-based grammars. Since there is at present no comprehensive account of MWEs, this research on MWEs will contribute to both basic grammatical theory and our understanding of lexical knowledge. Because the analyses are mathematically precise and implemented within open-source software, the results will be of immediate utility for the development of robust language processing technology in a variety of constraint-based frameworks currently being explored in the field. Natural language processing applications will benefit from the results, including those involving language understanding, language generation, machine translation, and speech-related systems of various kinds (including speech prostheses for individuals with certain disabilities). All such applications involve scaling grammars up; and scaling grammars up to deal with MWEs will necessitate finding the right balance among various analytic techniques. Of special importance will be finding the right balance between symbolic and statistical techniques, a difficult problem whose solution this project s results bear on doc8250 none This project provides 40 scholarships to low- income, academically- talented college students majoring in computer science, mathematics or engineering. The project provides each recipient with a faculty mentor, and academic and career support. The scholarship program is composed of three phases: Recruitment, Selection, and Evaluation. The Recruitment phase includes making individuals aware of the program (visiting departments on campus, visiting student clubs, paper and electronic advertisements, and visiting local junior colleges) and identifying potential scholarship recipients. Phase two, Selection, begins with screening applications to verify basic eligibility. Phase three, Evaluation, consists of multiple assessments to determine how well the program s objectives are being met. Tutoring is available through the Academic Resources Center and the Math and Science Support Services. Specialized support services are available through the federal TRIO programs, the Office of Academic Support, and the Minority Affairs Office. The Career Services Office provides information about jobs, career search strategies, and graduate school. These existing forms of support are supplemented for scholarship recipients under this program. A scholarship recipient is required to attend weekly instructional sessions for each mathematics, computer science, or engineering course in which he or she is enrolled. Further, a scholarship recipient is required to submit periodic progress reports for these classes and to meet with his or her academic advisor and faculty mentor on a regular basis doc8251 none This project provides 50 scholarships for low-income students to obtain associate degrees in Computer Science, Mathematics, pre- Engineering, or Electrical Engineering. The project also provides academic enhancement and mentoring, along with career exploration and placement activities. Scholarship recipients receive $1,000 per semester, renewable for up to four semesters, which covers tuition, fees, and most books for a 12- hour semester. The project is designed to help and encourage scholarship recipients to matriculate into four-year institutions or to become gainfully employed in an SMET area doc8252 none This project provides scholarships to qualified majors in computer science, engineering and mathematics. Awardees are determined by a four step process emphasizing minority status, recommendation of the faculty, sophomore and junior level, Pell eligibility, and a screening committee. Mentoring and monitoring of the scholars progress is led by faculty advisors in their respective disciplines. A component of the mentoring process involves the development of course of study responsive to the career goals of the individual scholars. In addition, each scholar is provided with an internship opportunity with local industries doc8253 none The Engineering Education Partnership Scholar Program is an innovative, interdisciplinary two- year scholarship program that seamlessly integrates professional development, community service, and technical education for low income engineering, computer science and applied mathematics undergraduates. Selected Partnership Scholars experience an intense and integrated educational program leading to an undergraduate degree in either engineering, computer science or applied math and an education minor resulting in initial New York State Teacher Certification. Scholars are provided with multiple advising and mentoring tracks starting in their second year. During the summer of their sophomore and junior year, they participate in special workshops designed to support professional development. In the summer between their junior and senior year, they work with secondary school students as mentors themselves as part of their teaching hours for the education minor. These major elements of the project combine to create a comprehensive development model for low- income students providing them with an integrated set of educational experiences leading to successful completion of both an engineering degree as well as initial Teacher Certification in New York State. A secondary and important objective of this program is the creation of a sustainable teacher- training model that significantly infuses technology- competent teachers into urban school systems doc8254 none The Computer Science, Engineering and Mathematics Scholarships (CSEMS) afford the College the opportunity to encourage academically talented students who are economically disadvantaged to pursue degrees in engineering technology. The CSEMS also can provide more insight into the College s retention issue through the program s use of various assessment tools such as student satisfaction surveys and student-based logs. Finally, the CSEMS are increasing student employment in technology-based jobs. Incoming freshmen pursuing an associate s in applied science degree in aeronautical technology and an associate s in applied science degree in computerized design and animated graphics, and College students who have already completed 64 credits toward a bachelor s of science, are eligible to compete for the scholarships. Admission into the program is based on the following criteria: grade point average, class standing, recommendations, Scholastic Aptitude Test scores and an interview. The College provides support for the CSEMS recipients in their pursuit of a degree in engineering technology. There are programs such as faculty mentoring and a technology seminar series devised to assist the recipients to achieve academic success. In addition, the College sponsors many activities such as faculty recipient socials, which reinforce the objectives the College hopes to accomplish through CSEMS. Finally, the College is providing the recipients many opportunities to interact with industry representatives, both on and off campus, through internships, job fairs and industry- recipient luncheons doc8255 none for (Price, Frink) The village of Chevak, Alaska, is home to a community of Cup ik Eskimos who still practice a subsistence-based economy. The inhabitants of Chevak are connected to three archaeological village sites that have been sequentially occupied by many of the present members and direct ancestors of Chevak residents. Preliminary archaelological and oral historic data have indicated changes between the sites in general settlement pattern and location, specifically the loss of the men s house and intra-site tunnels, and changes in storage facility size and distribution. It is hypothesized that the shifting patterns reflect socail and economic transitions as a result of European contact. This dissertation research will use both archaeological and ethnographic methods to document and explain settlement pattern variation at the three village sites doc8256 none Many primates habitually feed on tree gums and saps. Some of these tree exudate feeders actively elicit exudate flow by biting trees with their anterior teeth. Many researchers hypothesize that this tree gouging behavior involves relatively large jaw forces and jaw gapes. Further, some scientists argue that gougers have skulls adapted to these jaw forces and gapes. In reality, we know almost nothing about the jaw forces and gapes during gouging. The researchers will quantify the jaw forces and gapes that common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) use during gouging using an apparatus they designed to record these data. They will analyze the magnitude and timing of jaw forces and gapes during gouging of different tree types in a male and female marmoset. This will allow them to assess the relative magnitude of the gouging data by comparing gouging jaw forces to the forces marmosets create during transducer biting and gapes during gouging to gapes during chewing. Their results will provide the first empirical data on primate jaw forces and gapes during gouging. The pilot data collected on these two animals will be used to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach and justify collecting data on a larger marmoset sample. The results will be applied to test hypotheses of skull adaptations to gouging in marmosets doc8257 none Elster Both in electric power systems and in physics, the use of extremely high voltages -- many millions of volts -- has become increasingly common. For example, the Department of Energy has funded several large efforts to implement High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) systems designed to operate at 10 million volts. The design and analysis of such systems normally assumes that the ambient voltage (the A0 field) will not affect the behavior of power semiconductors or other systems. It assumes that the effects of high voltages are entirely based on the difference in voltage across a chip, rather than the ambient level of voltage as such. However, preliminary theoretical calculations, related to the Bohm-Aharonov paradox of quantum theory and the renormalization of propagator terms in quantum field theory, suggest that there may be direct effects as well, particularly when the ambient voltage levels reach 10-200 million volts DC. It is possible that some of these effects may be hazardous while others may provide positive technological opportunities, but it is far too early to know whether this is in fact true. The goals of this exploratory project are: (1) to perform more complete theoretical calculations, based on alternative models, to analyze the nature of these effects; (2) to evaluate options for future experiments, in order to test competing models and open the door to more complete analysis doc8258 none Laboratory studies of the visible and near infrared photochemistry of a number of nitrates (nitric acid, peroxynitric acid, and peroxyacetyl nitrate) will be performed. These compounds are formed via the recombination of nitrogen radicals with organic or odd hydrogen radicals, and can be transported over long distances. Photolysis of these compounds regenerates radicals which influence the production and destruction rate of ozone in the troposphere and stratosphere. It is possible that the importance of photolysis of these nitrates compared to other sink processes has been underestimated in the past doc8259 none This project provides 40 scholarships per year for two years to enhance opportunities for academically gifted, low-income students enrolled in the Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science, Electronic Engineering Technology, and Manufacturing Engineering Technology majors at Minnesota State University, Mankato. The NSF Scholars Program targets students at the junior and senior years. Student support infrastructure includes the TRIO Program, an extensive bridging program with five community colleges, and mentoring doc8260 none This program provides scholarships to undergraduate and graduate students in mathematical and computer sciences. Targeted undergraduate students are in their final two years of baccalaureate studies, and graduate students are in M. S. degree programs in the two disciplines. Scholarship recipients are mentored one-on-one by faculty and by peers from both departments. They participate in ongoing research projects, professional forums, and industry-related activities. Their progress in their chosen curricula is monitored closely and a wide range of campus resources are available to ensure that they successfully finish their degrees within the project s two-year time frame doc8261 none This project provides 5 scholarships for talented, but financially challenged students pursuing baccalaureate degrees in computer science, engineering and mathematics. The students are strongly encouraged to participate in undergraduate research and to present their results to related academic and professional organizations. Additional, they are encourage to become mentors in the Upward Bound Math Science program and to assist local industry partners in solving specific problems related to their course of study. Each scholarship recipient receives enhanced student support, in the form of mentoring opportunities and a targeted job fair, in addition to the college s existing support through the residential house system, freshman advising program and academic honor system doc8262 none This project is implementating the Technology Scholarship Program which provides scholarships to 30, full- time pell- eligible, computer and engineering technology students, each year, based on academic merit and demonstration of professionalism. The project is designed to increase retention, full- time enrollment, graduation among the students enrolled in these programs, and employment after graduation. The recruitment of project participants includes both enrolled and prospective engineering and computer technology students. The project includes a detailed plan for recruiting and selecting students who demonstrate academic merit and professionalism. Participants receive assistance from the Project Team in completing their degree, academic success, and upon graduation, obtaining a job in their field doc8263 none This workshop proposal was not reviewed externally, but is considered to fall under the provisions of the NSF Proposal and Award Manual Section 122.3b. The award is for NSF co-sponsorship of a three-day conference focused on assessing the magnitude of the digital divide in thirteen southern states and on ameliorating the gap in access and computer literacy among southern populations. About 450 researchers, policy makers, community and business leaders and interested citizens are expected to attend. NSF sponsorship will enable the research and production of the report associated with the conference and it will provide some stipends for the speakers doc8264 none Our overall goal is to understand the structural characteristics of cells of chemosensory organs, smell and taste, in relation to chemosensory functioning, and to inform about the impressive architecture of the subcellular structures where smell and taste recognition takes place. For olfactory (smell) systems this includes vomeronasal olfactory signaling, i.e., the signaling of a special olfactory organ particularly involved in conspecific and prey recognition. For a long time it was assumed that apical structures of the chemosensory receptor cells that line the nasal cavity, cilia and microvilli in olfactory and vomeronasal system, respectively, are the subcellular organelles specialized for capture and recognition of chemosensory stimuli. Thus it was assumed that these structures contain the main subcellular sites of chemosensory signal-transduction. However, firm proof for this was lacking. Cilia and microvilli are tentacle-shaped processes that sprout from receptor cell surfaces, but that have different internal cytoskeletal (=scaffolding) structures. Their elongated shape likely serves to increase the surface-to-volume ratio to enhance chances that odor molecules reach the receptor cells. We want to construct a graphical image of proteins important in the chemosensory signaling-cascades from the special membrane proteins thought to receive incoming odor molecules -- a family of proteins that resemble, e.g., the visual pigment rhodopsin -- to current generating ion channels, as well as of molecules involved in signal modulation and signal termination. For this we use a technique called immunocytochemistry that makes use of antibody markers which can, with appropriate tags, help to identify molecules of interest. In combination with ultrastructural methods using electron microscopy, immunocytochemistry is used to localize such molecular components in their exact subcellular position. With this approach we showed that the distal parts of the olfactory cilia contained most, if not all, components in the signal-onset cascades, from odor receptor to current-generating ion channel. We began similar studies on vomeronasal olfaction. The new project serves to continue research on the location of signal-onset molecules involved in vomeronasal olfaction, while in both main and vomeronasal olfactory systems molecules that are involved in other parts of the signaling cascades, modulation and termination, will be localized. Apart from the relevance to continued structural research in chemosensory signaling, my efforts are also important to advance and improve on ultrastructural methods for research in biology in general. While maintaining my research in a non-tenure track position I kept a small, but well equipped, electron microscope imaging facility alive at Northwestern University at minimal expense. Many such facilities have been closed, which is not good for biological research at large. During my stay at Northwestern several students participated in my projects. One such collaboration resulted in several publications. Perhaps, more important, I helped many colleagues and their students in their projects in case these projects required my special expertise in fine structural research. Whenever possible, I will continue such efforts during my stay at Northwestern. I also lectured widely at various schools, institutions and conferences, in the US as well as abroad, and organized seminars and special lectures, and hope to be able to continue such activities doc8265 none This project provides comprehensive support to complement a scholarship program for low income undergraduates completing their baccalaureate degrees in engineering, computer science, and mathematics. A constellation of support services are provided through existing programs at the University including: recruitment and outreach, tutoring, mentoring, advisement, career planning and exploration opportunities, research and internship placements, summer enrichment and work- experience programs, study abroad and cooperative education opportunities, work preparedness, and job placement. The program interfaces with a large number of campus organizations and programs. The program integrates with successful existing programs at the University and comprises the following components: Implementing recruitment, outreach, selection, and monitoring strategies with particular attention directed at under-represented minorities, women, and students with disabilities. Developing a network of CSEMS scholars and of support services including tutoring, mentoring, small group academic focus sessions, and advisement to ensure student retention and success. Providing career planning, practical experience, and career exploration opportunities through research and internship placements, study abroad, and cooperative education opportunities. Developing a monitoring and evaluation process to ensure program success and degree completion of scholarship recipients doc8266 none Klibanov This project is to expand the scope of nonaqueous stereoselective biocatalytic conversions to include oxidoreductases, another biotechnologically promising class of enzymes. It will include the investigation of asymmetric oxidations of organic sulfides (thioethers) to chiral sulfoxides and reductions of chiral hydroperoxides to chiral alcohols catalyzed by the model enzyme horseradish peroxidase (HRP) in organic solvents. For both of these enzymatic processes, the rates and stereoselectivities will be kinetically examined as a function of the solvent in order to identify the solvent s most influential parameters. In these studies, HRP will be suspended in organic solvents either as a lyophilized powder (the most common mode of enzyme use in nonaqueous media) or as lightly cross-linked crystals (in which enzymes tend to retain their native structure in organic solvents). The cross-linked crystal mode will allow a test of the hypothesis that the solvent dependence of HRP s stereoselectivity is primarily due to the differential energetics of substrate desolvation in the corresponding enzyme-bound transition states. This will be accomplished by combining the kinetic analysis with structure-based molecular modeling, followed by semiempirical thermodynamic calculations. Additional complementary strategies for enhancing HRP catalysis in organic solvents will be explored, including bioimprinting with a variety of ligands and temporarily engaging the substrate in reversible molecular complexes doc7989 none Northern wetlands store large quantities of carbon and are significant sources of atmospheric methane. Impending climatic changes may greatly affect the role of these environments in the carbon cycle. Decomposition of organic matter occurs anaerobically in these wetlands. However, recent findings suggest that the terminal methanogenic step in northern wetlands is altered relative to more southerly systems, with acetate acting as a terminal product even though methane production continues via hydrogen utilization. If this phenomenon is ubiquitous, then acetate is not a significant intermediate in northern wetlands, but serves as a terminal product of decomposition; one that is ultimately degraded aerobically to CO2 rather than methane. Acetate accumulation in northern wetlands represents a paradigm shift in our understanding of anaerobic decomposition. It is possible that warming in the north will shift this process toward what occurs in more southerly wetlands. If so, then methane production in the north will increase greatly over what might occur from warming alone. This work will test the hypothesis that northern wetlands do not support significant methanogenesis from acetate and that acetate formation and accumulation is an important terminal step during anaerobic degradation of organic matter. This phenomenon is being investigated by a multidisciplinary team that will utilize field and laboratory investigations and microbiological, molecular biology, geochemical, pedological, and stable isotope approaches. The objectives of the project are: 1) assess the ubiquity of the acetate-accumulating phenomenon by examining acetate concentrations and production rates, geochemical conditions, and by applying isotopic and molecular techniques to a variety of northern wetland types representative of the major circumpolar arctic, subarctic and northern boreal environments; 2) Provide a temporal framework for determining variations in controls on methanogenic pathways and acetate cycling by conducting seasonal studies; 3) determine the effects of physical and chemical parameters on terminal decomposition using laboratory manipulations of incubation conditions; 4) determine if the bacterial populations are distinct compared to other wetlands and other anaerobic habitats. Incubation assays, radiotracer analyses, stable isotopes and natural radiocarbon abundances will be used to address pathways of decomposition in field and laboratory experiments. Molecular approaches including PCR-DGGE and hybridization probing will be used to determine bacterial diversity and population structure. A demonstration that biochemical pathways of methane formation in these wetlands are unique compared to their more southerly counterparts, has tremendous implications for our ability to predict the what the role of these wetlands will be in contributing methane to the global atmosphere and in their ability to degrade stored carbon. Acetate may serve as a primary organic end product, which would thus constitute a separate terminal decomposition pathway occurring simultaneously with methanogenesis. The multi-disciplinary study proposed here will delineate the important details of these processes and will serve to demonstrate their spatial significance doc8268 none This project provides scholarships for mathematics and computer science majors. The program includes a mentoring seminar to be held two evenings per month, internships at major local companies, and the opportunity to work on research projects with faculty members. The recruiting plan includes working with a local community college to bring in more Native American students. Support structures incorporate existing programs which serve under-represented groups as well as nontraditional age students. The program is designed to be not only a scholarship award but a concerted effort to keep these students from falling through the cracks doc8269 none This project provides low-income, academically talented students with scholarships for tuition, fees and equipment. The objectives are to increase retention of students through gateway classes to their majors and prepare them for industry and government internships that enhance their academic experience. Advising and group study activities address personal barriers to continuation through academic support via one-on-one interaction with computer science and mathematics faculty. Career counseling and workshops help to increase the students competitiveness in the job market doc8270 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Thomas J. Katz, of the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University continues work to synthesize rigid chemical structures in which electrons can move easily on helical paths of a single handedness. Heretofore such molecules had hardly been studied because they were preparable in only very tiny amounts and with substituents that were neither useful nor easily elaborated to be so. The procedures developed in the PI s laboratory are producing such compounds in large amounts, easily, and with useful functional groups. The work has two goals. One is to design and synthesize helical conjugated molecules that should aggregate spontaneously into giant corkscrew-shaped structures and in consequence exhibit exceptional optical properties. The second goal is to design and synthesize helical conjugated molecules with large chiral clefts that should endow the molecules with two benefits. First, some of the examples synthesized should act as superb asymmetric catalysts, providing a way to make chiral medicines and other physiologically active compounds selectively and in the desired mirror image forms. Others should act as much more sensitive probes to analyze the amounts of mirror image forms in these and other samples, even when the constituent molecules have centers of asymmetry that are very remote from any functional groups to which reagents can attach. This very important research of Professor Thomas Katz is being supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program to allow his unique methods of synthesis and analysis to deliver new materials and to make them available to the wider scientific community. Among the reasons this research is important is that approximately 40% of chiral medicines (themselves about half of all drugs) are stereochemically inhomogeneous, even though contamination by undesired stereoisomeric impurities could be deleterious. Although an international effort is being devoted to synthesizing molecules in a single handed form (for example, similar to making a number of keys to fit a specific lock), these efforts have not been matched by methods to analyze the degree of handedness the syntheses achieve (determining how many keys are perfect and without defects). The helical molecules to be studied in this project promise to be far more sensitive than any now available doc8271 none W. Schultz, University of Michigan A novel method, by which the classroom instructor becomes the ally of the student in his her preparation for examination questions provided by a consortium of faculty members (fluid dynamics) has been proposed. This workshop, and its follow-on efforts, has also gained the support of the DUE Program Directors. It is expected that the evolved structure can become a model for other undergraduate courses in the engineering sciences doc8272 none The University of South Alabama is implementing a Computer Science, Engineering and Mathematics Research (CSEM) Scholars Program. Goals of this program include improving the quality of educational programs and increasing the number of students in these disciplines that complete academic degrees or pursue further education or successfully gain employment with U. S. industry in demanding technical positions. The cornerstone of this program is the selection of up to 40 full time students to receive financial support. Recipients participate in a didactic career seminar series conducted by career training specialists and professionals from industry. Further, students spend a minimum of 6 hours week gaining practical experience in their major while conducting research supervised by a faculty mentor. Participating faculty have an organized research plan for aspiring scholars to review for potential research projects. Selected faculty are not only accomplished researchers but also have demonstrated the ability to effectively mentor undergraduate students towards accomplishment of career goals or the pursuit of higher education. Students participate in a monthly research seminar series and a Student Research Forum each semester. Annually, the research projects judged to be most promising are selected for presentation at an appropriate regional or national conference. CSEM Research Scholars also participate in a specialized series of career development forums. A CSEM Research Scholars Coordinating Committee administers selection of students, monitoring, reporting and assessment. Selection of faculty mentors, projects and conduct of forums is administered jointly with the existing University Council on Undergraduate Research (UCUR). CSEM Research Scholars are being particularly monitored for success rates relative to other campus - wide retention programs and for accomplishment of the CSEM program goals doc8273 none The project entitled Advancing Diversity and Excellence in Mathematics and Computer Science enhances existing retention and graduation programs in mathematics and replicates these successful activities in the program in computer science. The goal is to increase the percentage of ethnic minorities and women who enroll in the two target disciplines at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and who graduate in a timely manner with a Bachelor s degree. The focus is on junior transfer students who enter these two majors and on the overall number of female who select one of these majors. In addition to the scholarship assistance provided by the grant, the project institutes a program of mentoring by faculty and staff and a series of presentations by individuals representing the local industries that hire many of the institution s graduates. A center for computer science majors is developed; this is based on a model that has enjoyed success in the mathematics program. On- campus employment in various labs and tutoring centers is arranged for those students interested in gaining additional practical experience, and the program rewards and recognizes excellence in its students by placing as many as possible in summer research experiences. The ultimate goal of the project is the training and entry into the workforce of individuals who for reasons of poverty, cultural background, or gender might not otherwise enter or complete programs in the fields of mathematics and computer science doc8274 none This project is increasing educational opportunities for low-income, academically talented students by providing scholarships and academic and student support services for full-time students in associate s degree programs in computer science, engineering, and mathematics. Support services include mentoring, advisement, peer tutoring, a required one-week summer orientation and career-identification experience, and informal learning opportunities. Objectives are the recruitment, enrollment, and graduation, transfer or work placement of increased numbers of students, particularly under-represented groups in science and engineering. Progress is guided by a six-member Advisory Board including a financial aid officer and student services counselor, two representatives of local business, industry or government partners of the targeted programs, a coordinator or department head from one of the targeted programs, and the project director. A nine-member Scholarship Board awards 40 scholarships per year in accordance with financial, cognitive, and non-cognitive guidelines for the selection process doc8275 none This project provides scholarships to fulltime undergraduate and graduate financially disadvantaged students who are talented in mathematics and computer science. The program also provides strong support for these students with the following objectives: (1) to increase academic achievement, ensure retention, and reduce the time to obtain a degree; (2) to provide forums and other opportunities in which practitioners, theoreticians, students and faculty will interact; and (3) to prepare scholars for graduate study and careers in academia, business, and government agencies. Specific activities in support of these objectives include providing students with technical and tutorial support, conducting colloquia which present current research, and providing internships for scholars in banks, hospitals, industries, and high- tech companies doc8276 none The project is fostering individual attention and mentoring leading to graduation and successful employment in the fields of engineering, mathematics and computer science through a National Science Foundation Scholars Program. The primary objectives of the program are to (1) broaden enrollment diversity within these disciplines to include more low- income persons, African Americans, and women (2) increase retention to degree rates in the targeted disciplines (3) strengthen collaborative partnerships with other higher educational institutions and industrial sectors employing graduates in these fields and, (4) improve professional development and career choice opportunities for the targeted low- income students in related fields. Expected outcomes include increased enrollment of low- income, academically talented students in engineering, mathematics and computer science fields, enhanced persistence and performance, successful degree completion and direct application of learned skills in employment. The scholarship program prepares participants for either graduation within two years of entry into the program or attainment of significant achievement within respective areas of discipline. Academic experiences are being enhanced through required participation in seminars and workshops and interaction with faculty mentors and professional peers in related industries. Program activities include individual and group meetings with the Program Director, site visits to regional industries, workshops, seminars, research projects with a faculty mentor and or external sponsor, and peer group study sessions. Program success is measured on academic achievement, retention to graduation rates, number and percentage of students passing license examinations, and number gainfully employed upon graduation. Dissemination of program activities are both internal and external via conferences, workshops and outreach initiatives doc8277 none Forty scholarships are provided to full- time, low- income, academically talented students, with special consideration given to minority and women students, in support of the following goals: 1) improved education for students in the computer science and engineering technology programs; 2) increased retention of students in those areas to degree achievement; 3) improved professional development and employment or further higher education placement of participating students; and 4) strengthened partnerships between institutions of higher education and related employment sectors. In addition to providing financial assistance, this CSEMS project provides a solid student support infrastructure that includes innovative multidisciplinary sessions, peer tutoring, effective networks with local businesses and industries, and operative articulation agreements with four- year institutions. CSEMS scholars complete academic testing to determine readiness for academic mathematics and science courses prior to enrolling in these courses. Appropriate developmental education is provided for those students who need additional background before entering science and technology courses. The CSEMS program provides professional development opportunities for students to increase student confidence and readiness for the workforce doc8278 none Scholarships are provided to support low-income students in the Associate of Arts degree program in computer information systems and in the first two years of the Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics. Midway is a women s college that attracts both traditional aged students and older students in transition or interested in second careers. Student progress is monitored closely and support services are recommended as needed. Support services include assistance in the college s mathematics lab, writing lab, and individually arranged tutoring doc8279 none This project provides scholarships for low-income, academically talented students in computer science and mathematics. It is also fashioned to directly effect and subsequently increase retention and graduation rates in computer science and mathematics. Furthermore, the Scholarship Program improves and enhances the networking of students with potential future employers as well as strengthens relationships between Huntingdon College and the related employment sector and graduate schools. Additionally, a versatile scholarship model is created that will serve as an example to other liberal arts colleges who desire to enhance their computer science and mathematics departments. Finally, this program promotes mathematics and computer science as dynamic areas of study to college-bound students and gives Scholars (i.e. Scholarship recipients) teaching and instruction experience. All scholarship recipients are assigned to faculty mentors who meet with their Scholars on a weekly (in some cases daily) basis to evaluate, plan, and assess student projects and matters within the program and departments. Scholars participate in specialized training to prepare them to serve as peer mentors to one or two underclassmen (i.e., freshman or sophomores majoring in computer science or mathematics). They present lectures or demonstrations in local elementary, junior high, and high school classrooms. In addition, Scholars engage in contemporary issues debates and forums. Scholars also participate in co-curricular opportunities including research with department faculty members as well as observe and work with professionals in the discipline-related professions. This unique scholarship program improves education for students in computer science and mathematics, increases retention of students to degree achievement, improves professional development, and strengthens partnerships in the employment sectors doc8280 none Georges Belfort Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Photo-induced Grafting of Filtration Membranes: Principles and Applications The goals of this work are to determine the underlying principles of photo-induced graft modification of poly(ether sulfone) (PES) membranes and to use this understanding to modify the surface of commercially available PES membranes so that they exhibit less fouling during ultrafiltration of protein solutions. Ultraviolet (UV)-assisted graft polymerization of hydrophilic monomers is the modification technique chosen for this study because it is simple and easy to scale industrially. PES ultrafiltration membranes are selected because they are widely used in the biotechnology industry, but they are relatively hydrophobic, exhibit severe protein fouling, and are intrinsically photoactive. The specific aims are: 1. To investigate the mechanism of the photo-induced grafting of PES with a view towards elucidating the identity of the photoactive chromophore(s) and to identify the optimal irradiation conditions. 2. To evaluate a series of hydrophilic vinyl monomers in lieu of N-vinyl-2-pyrrolidinone (NVP), the most well-studied monomer to date. We postulate that other commercially available hydrophilic monomers could offer advantages over NVP. 3. To demonstrate the efficacy of using our new surface-modification technology by developing an affinity membrane with low protein adsorption and high cation-exchange capacity. 4. To evaluate the chemical and physical stability and lifetime of the most promising modified PES membranes. There is an urgent need in the biotechnology, food and beverage, and wastewater- treatment industries for better, low-biofouling synthetic membranes. The current most widely used membrane, poly(ether sulfone), exhibits high non-specific protein fouling and needs to be replaced. However, developing new polymeric materials with appropriate surface or functional characteristics as well as mechanical properties for diverse membrane-filtration applications involves great effort and expense. As a result, over the past 30 years, few polymers have been used for membrane production. In this comprehensive three-year research program, an alternate route, i.e. the facile modification of commercial PES membranes, is offered. The new method proffers a relatively inexpensive, simple, scalable, and well-tested modification procedure for producing poly(aryl sulfone) membranes with improved properties doc8281 none This program provides scholarships annually for two years to low-income undergraduates in computer science, computer technology, engineering, and engineering technology majors. The primary goal of the program is to increase the number of talented but financially disadvantaged residents of the region who achieve higher education degrees in computer science, computer technology, and engineering. This project focuses on the recruitment and retention of these students to degree achievement. The primary objectives include increased participation and retention of academically talented, low income students and under-represented groups; increased grade point averages of students; enhanced professional development opportunities for students; and improved placement of participating students in baccalaureate transfer programs and related employment. The scholars participate in a wide range of retention-related activities utilizing an exemplary student services program. Scholars also have an opportunity to participate in an engineering and information technology summer institute which includes field trips to engineering and information technology industries in the region and to four- year schools with whom the institution has an articulation agreements in engineering and information technology majors. This project serves as a model for other community colleges in areas where high unemployment has forced entire regions to change their economic base doc8282 none The project will examine in greater detail the depth of thawing of the soils in northern Alaska. Climate change is increasing the depth of thaw and eroding permafrost with concomitant impacts on vegetation, the hydrological balances, and human structures. This research will refine existing methods for mapping the depth of thaw on local and regional scales. The shallow thermal regime will be evaluated across a spectrum of spatial scales in order to elucidate the role of soil structure on heat transport. The impact of heavy snow loading on the thaw depth will be examined based on manipulative experiments. Also, the project will also examine the role of the heat island affect by a community in northern Alaska doc8283 none Funding is requested to conduct a high resolution study of late Pleistocene and Holocene ocean temperature and hydrographic variability archived in deep sea cores collected in within the Indo-Pacific warm pool region as part of the international paleoceanographic project IMAGES. This project will produce the first records of climate variability in the tropical warm pool region at resolutions high enough for direct comparison with both high and low latitude ice core records. This will allow testing of the hypothesis that the warm pool did not cool more than 2 degrees C during the last glacial. A Multiproxy (staple isotope, alkenone, Mg CA) approach will be used to reconstruct sea surface temperatures, as well as deep and intermediate water temperatures for the last 150kyr doc8284 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Ian Suni Institution: Clarkson University The objective of this proposal is to investigate the electrodeposition of gold particles onto hydrogen terminated silicon surfaces using atomic force microscopy, second harmonic generation (SHG), and UV-visible extinction spectroscopy. Gold nanoparticles will be deposited onto silicon substrates by both electrodeposition and by galvanic displacement from hydrogen fluoride solutions. The electrodeposition of metal nanoparticles of a relatively uniform size can be accomplished by using a large transient overpotential so that instantaneous nucleation occurs. Nanoparticle size can be controlled by regulating the duration of the nucleation transient. An alternative method of nanoparticle growth is to apply a highly cathodic voltage transient as a nucleation strike, followed by particle growth at a low overpotential so that further nucleation does not occur. The optical studies involve development of in situ tools for studying nucleation and particle growth during the initial stages of thin film deposition. Gold nanoparticles have unique optical and catalytic properties that might lead to novel applications. The recent emergence of gold nanoparticles as effective oxidation catalysts is an area where this work may have relevance. In addition, this work may lead to novel methods to rapidly characterize the average size and structure of metal nanoparticles over micron-sized length scales doc8285 none This project provides financial assistance to eligible students in the computer science degree program. A panel of instructors evaluates each applicant s potential for success in completion of the computer science degree and selects the participants. Selected participants receive tuition and books paid for by the grant. In addition to financial assistance the scholarship recipients meet with the computer science advisor mentor on a bi-monthly basis during the semester. This helps monitor their progress and assure their success in the program. A series of workshops are held to assist the students throughout the program. The project capitalizes on the strengths of the Mentoring Model to work with students as they move through the computer science degree program doc8286 none This program increases the opportunities for academically talented, but financially disadvantaged, students to succeed. The scholarship recipients work with a specially designated advisor who to maximize the effectiveness of the existing university support programs in the following areas: financial aid planning, including securing additional aid, academic program planning, achievement progress and supplemental assistance, and career planning through a selected in- field experience such as co- op or internship programs, or academic activities with faculty. The program represents one component of the ongoing efforts at the institution to improve the education of students in engineering, mathematics and computer science, and to increase the retention of students to degree attainment doc8287 none The Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, supports the work of Dr. James N. Demas of the Department of Chemistry, University of Virginia, and Dr. Ben A. DeGraff of the Department of Chemistry, James Madison University, VA, which will explore fundamental and applied aspects of sensors and probes based on luminescent metal complexes. Specifically, new ligands, new metal complexes, and new polymer supports will be designed and synthesized in a rational manner to gain a fundamental understanding of the photophysics and photochemistry of the luminescent complexes, to examine the interactions between the sensor molecules and polymer supports, to test certain hypotheses, and to further enhance sensor performance. With the results from this study, the principal investigators will improve and enhance sensor performance designed to test for changes in pH and the presence of carbon dioxide. Several undergraduate students will be involved in this study at both institutions, and together with graduate students will receive unparalleled training in syntheses, reactivity, characterization, photochemistry and photophysics of new luminescent materials and polymer supports doc8288 none These scholarships target recruitment and retention of low income, high achieving high school and community college students to study computer science, engineering and technology (CSET) at Texas A& M University. Eighty scholarships are funded over the two year program. The Program combines financial aid, industry mentors, peer mentors, and seminars. These support activities offset deficiencies in financial and social capital that negatively impact recruitment and retention of high academic potential, high financial need students in CSET fields in the university doc8289 none Lerch This regional award provides support from the Division of International Programs and the Division of Materials Research for a workshop organized by Dr. Irving A. Lerch of the American Physical Society and Dr. Cylon Goncalves da Silva, Director of the Brazilian Association for Synchrotron Light Technology (ABTLuS). This workshop on the Use of Synchrotron Radiation for Research will be held at the National Synchrotron Light Laboratory (LNLS) in Campinas, Brazil in February and includes a Symposium on Nanotechnology. The scientific participants come from the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, as well as from countries outside the Western Hemisphere. The workshop will be short, focused and research-oriented in specific areas of synchrotron research and nanotechnologies. Two or more specialized symposia are organized around atomic and molecular spectroscopy, surface physics and catalysis, soft matter and polymers, x-ray structural studies, and nanotechnologies. The symposium will be used to train several postdoctoral students from the hemisphere and also bring in more users to the LNLS facility. Workshops such as this nurture future international collaborations and help unify the global community. They also expose young scientists to international science and expand their horizons. This workshop will help increase the user base in Latin America for the seven major synchrotron facilities in the U.S doc8290 none We are targeting students pursuing associate or bachelors-level degrees and include a number of measurable objectives, including an increased retention completion rate for CSEMS students. Scholarship holders are encouraged to seek internships or work place experiences with regional industry, as appropriate for their disciplines. These internships experiences may take place either during the academic year or summer doc8291 none This project is increasing the enrollment, retention and graduation rates in associate degree programs in computer science, engineering technology, and mathematics (CSEM) for low- income, academically talented students, particularly those from under-represented populations. The project consists of three major components: (a) recruitment of students into CSEM programs, in partnership with school districts and community agencies, with an emphasis on populations that are typically under-represented in CSEM fields; (b) academic support, through existing programs and targeted initiatives, to assist CSEM students in persevering and succeeding in their chosen academic programs and careers; and (c) provision of scholarship assistance to enable high ability, low- income students to pursue full- time studies in CSEM associate degree programs. These objectives are being accomplished through a network of existing programs, services and resources, as well as through the addition of new academic support initiatives. New initiatives include expanded partnerships with area schools, business and industry and agencies serving under-represented populations to assist in recruitment of non- traditional students; the creation of a student ambassador corps to assist in recruitment of high school students; provision of targeted supplementary peer tutoring for students in barrier courses; peer mentoring by senior CSEM students for students enrolled in developmental courses; and provision of up to 40 scholarships per year for high- ability, low- income CSEMS students. The CSEM scholarship project is being implemented under the aegis of the New Jersey Center for Advanced Technological Education (NJCATE doc8292 none The goal of the Computing, Mathematics and Engineering (CMET) Capstone Scholars program is to provide opportunities to low-income, academically talented students that strengthens their academic connections to the university and thereby fosters their continuing full-time enrollment and degree completion in computing, mathematics, and engineering technology. Each scholar works with a faculty mentor, and participates in existing support activities as well as a new series of seminars related to their discipline area; these activities lead to a required capstone experience. Special tracking services enable the scholars to stay on target academically doc8293 none The University of Kentucky (UK) and Lexington Community College (LCC) are providing undergraduate scholarships for low- income, academically talented students in computer science, engineering, and mathematics (CSEM). Through the partnership between the UK College of Engineering, UK Mathematics Department, and the UK Lexington Community College Computer Information Systems and Engineering Technology programs, this project supports the pipeline of students from the associate s and bachelor s degree levels to the graduate degree level and into science and technology employment opportunities. Forty students will be selected into the program each year, and will be expected to complete a degree within two years of being awarded a scholarship. Objectives of the program include: reducing the time students need to spend on non- academic employment in order to meet their financial obligations; enhance academic success by making an integrated range of services and activities available to the scholars; and increasing the number of students who transfer from the associate s degree level to the bachelor s degree level. These objectives are being achieved by: providing scholarships to reduce the burden of academic expenses; coordinating student support services, providing research experiences, and developing focused enrichment activities to promote academic success and foster interest, expertise, and enthusiasm for the CSEM fields; and provide bridging activities for LCC students who wish to transfer to UK doc8294 none Increased demands for skilled labor in the fields of computer science, engineering, and mathematics (CSEM) have heightened the need for community college participation in the recruitment and education of such majors. As a nation that is growing more and more dependent on technology degrees, the need to recruit and train nontraditional students such as minorities and women is critical. The primary objective of this project is to provide scholarships to help increase the number of academically talented but financially disadvantaged persons, particularly Hispanics and women, enrolling full- time in CSEM associate degree programs and completing their degrees as preparation for CSEM careers and further higher education. The project uses a combination of expanded scholarship opportunities, a rigorous recruitment plan, mentor- designed workshops on student success, student pairing- up ( buddy system ), industry involvement, and a student support structure delivering services such as advising and tutoring to create growth in the programs, help students complete their studies within two years, decrease the attrition point for students between the first and second years, and have the scholarship awardees either transfer to a four- year institution or enter the workplace. A distinctive feature of this bridging the gap program is the partnership between the NSF student awardees and community. Colonia development agencies are helping to develop a link between the colonias and the NSF students so that both colonia residents and the students (sometimes colonia residents themselves) benefit from tutoring and learning opportunities. Further, NSF students have direct contact with employers, allowing them to see how their learned skills work in the community doc8295 none This workshop explores opportunities and directions for increased interaction between the geospatial and mainstream information technology (IT) research and development communities. Its goal is to illuminate directions for future research that would enhance the accessibility and usability of geospatial information and explore how geospatial applications can influence IT design and research. Topics include research and development areas and associated development implementation issues, including trends in the enabling information technology, the nature and roles of the potential information contributors (information providers and validators), system builders, and users. The workshop report will synthesize the ideas and viewpoints expressed at the workshop, supplemented as necessary by additional material developed by the committee, including findings and recommendations on opportunities for collaboration between the geospatial and information technology disciplines as well as other research, development, and implementation issues, and may make suggestions for appropriate follow-on activities that would examine these issues in more depth. The report will be widely disseminated and available on-line. http: www.cstb.org doc8296 none This project uses the educational and research infrastructures of eight partner institutions as support systems for financially disadvantaged under-represented minorities in the areas of computer science, engineering and mathematics. The program provides a mentor support system through problem- solving workshops, Drop- in Centers, Computer learning Centers and peer mentoring programs. Industrial and government partners provide outstanding cutting- edge research opportunities throughout the nation. Directed research and internships permit students to take part in a variety of research projects, establish mentoring relations with research faculty, and professionals and extend their classes into real- world tests doc8297 none This project provides 40 scholarships to academically talented low-income students in computer science, engineering and mathematics. These students attend University of Central Oklahoma (lead fiscal agent), East Central University, Oklahoma City Community College, or Southwestern Oklahoma State University. The partner institutions provide faculty mentoring, research and design opportunities, and interaction with industry to encourage students into the CSEM fields. The main objectives of this project are to increase participation and retention of academically talented, low-income students and under-represented groups in computer science, engineering and mathematics and to improve the student s educational experiences. The project also seeks to increase the student s awareness of employment opportunities and to increase successful transitions from high school to community college and from community college to four-year institutions doc8298 none This program provides financial and academic support for talented low-income students in computer science and mathematics. The recruitment and retention of under- represented minorities and women is a priority with an expectation of doubling the graduation rates for these students. These students participate in scholarship activities including monthly meetings; conversations with other students, graduates, faculty and representatives from industry; mentoring; internships; and research with faculty. The student support structures are constructed specifically to meet the needs of students at the university and to assist them in finishing their education, choosing a career, and obtaining successful employment or placement in graduate school doc8299 none Game theory is one of the prime contenders for becoming the central theory in economics and related social sciences. Broadly speaking, a game is an interactive situation in which everyone s incentives depend on their own and others actions. Games have been used to model a wide variety of environments, such as collective action problems, market pricing, auctions, committee voting, family decisions, organizational behavior, and contract law negotiations. The Nash equilibrium, which has been the central solution concept in game theory since its introduction about fifty years ago, is one of the most commonly used constructs in economics. Game theory is increasingly being applied in political science and management science. Its relevance in many non-market interactions, however, is limited by the extreme rationality assumptions that underlie standard solution concepts. This project will bring together a group of social scientists that incorporate behavioral and cultural factors into the analysis of strategic interactions. Cross-cultural studies of non-economic motivations are naturally supplemented with controlled experiments, some of which will be implemented using a portable wireless laboratory or web-based software to connect participants at different locations. Although game theory has been successfully applied in some settings (for example, the design of the FCC spectrum auctions), the inclusion of behavioral elements and limited rationality is essential to ensure a major impact on the study of a wide array of social interactions. One goal of this project is to coordinate web-based teaching, research, and programming activities through a virtual collaboratory involving the investigators and other researchers who decide to post and share their work. The central website will contain a set of useful computer programs and a data base of interdisciplinary experimental results, which will be structured to stimulate further theoretical work that is guided by carefully documented empirical regularities. The web-based programs that control these strategic interactions will be made available for general use and adapted for classroom instruction, for large classes and groups of students at different universities. A series of annual workshops on classroom experiments, held at different locations, will facilitate the dissemination of the teaching and research insights across disciplinary boundaries doc8300 none The Engineering Division is providing financial support to 45 students over a two- year period. These funds are used in conjunction with existing college programs to accomplish three goals: (1) increase enrollment of under-represented groups in the engineering division, (2) improve retention rates among women and minority students within the engineering division, and (3) establish a stable cadre of women and minority students in the engineering division. In order to achieve these goals, Lafayette s Engineering Division is implementing five programs designed to complement the existing support programs. The new programs include (1) facultyalumni- administrator mentoring teams individually assembled to meet the needs of each CSEMS scholar, (2) enhanced academic support services, in particular, a big sister brother program, which are undertaken with the assistance of student members of the Society of Women Engineers, the Minority Scientists and Engineers Club, and Tau Beta Pi, the national engineering honors society, (3) targeted experiential engineering educational opportunities including internships and student- faculty research, (4) increased interactions with the career services staff during the students first and second years at Lafayette, and (5) a new seminar series featuring prominent Lafayette engineering alumni doc8301 none This program provides extensive support to students in an effort to significantly increase the number of low- income students earning degrees in computer science, computer technology, engineering, engineering technology, and mathematics by providing scholarships to talented but financially disadvantaged students. The project has four major objectives: 1) increasing the number of low- income, academically talented students studying computer science, engineering, and mathematics at the associate degree level; 2) improving the rate of academic success for students in these fields of study; 3) facilitating transfer of CSEMS graduates to employment or the baccalaureate level; and 4) strengthened partnerships between educational institutions and related employment sectors. These objectives are met by providing students with a comprehensive network of support services including tutoring in the Learning Achievement Center; academic, personal and career counseling in the Counseling and Advisement Centers; and Student Success Seminars. In addition, CSEMS scholars participate in The Pre- College Summer Institute and Enrichment Seminars to strengthen math and science skills, to study special topics in the CSEMS disciplines, and to develop the mindset necessary to study computer science, engineering, or mathematics doc8302 none Scholarships are offered to low-income, academically talented students to promote full-time enrollment and degree achievement in computer science, engineering technology or mathematics. Preference is given to eligible students who enter college for the first time, and then to those eligible students who will complete degree requirements within the time frame of the grant. We retain our students to degree achievement by supporting students through critical periods. Support programs are in place through the Office of Multi-Cultural Affairs, orientation and advising programs, and mentoring of students in the first math and physics courses. Strong industrial partnerships aid the scholars through their critical period of being employable before the degree is complete through workshops, and co-op and intern programs doc8303 none Building upon the achievements of the current academic support infrastructure, Drexel University is implementing a comprehensive Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Scholarships (CSEMS) program to increase the recruitment, retention, and graduation rates of economically disadvantaged and historically under-represented students. The program serves students throughout the calendar year. Activities include a summer program, mentoring, a career awareness center, corporate and college partnerships, counseling, corporate alumni advising, faculty involvement, and undergraduate research. Students maintain continuous contact with CSEMS staff who provide academic advising, career counseling, and graduate school exploration workshops. Specifically, this project is preparing engineering, computer science, and mathematics undergraduates for successful careers in technical professions doc8304 none This project targets low-income computer science, mathematics, engineering or engineering technology lower-division students and 1) increases the number of low- income, academically talented SDSM& T students in CSEMS fields, who successfully enter the major after completing two years of undergraduate study, 2) increases the number of these students qualifying for departmental scholarships, 3) increases awareness of and interaction with industry among these students, 4) provides these students with opportunities for relevant employment experience while undergraduates, and 5) increases the supply of qualified graduates to technology based industry, especially to local and regional employers. The project provides upper- level student mentors to work with CSEMS Scholars to ensure that they maximize their use of available support resources. Student mentors are responsible for conducting monthly coordination sessions, scheduling individual conferences as needed, providing assistance with issues problems, assisting in identifying academically related employment opportunities, keeping documentation records and tutoring directing students. Four specific activities ensure that CSEMS Scholars are introduced to the profession and are given opportunities to obtain relevant work experience while in school. These are 1) industry seminars, either on- site or via teleconferencing, 2) an alumni mentoring program, 3) activities with recruiters, and 4) local employment and co- op opportunity promotion doc8305 none Huang The main objective of this project is to explore the fundamental structure of the wind-driven gyre and its associated climate variability on decadal time scales. A hierarchy of models will be used in the study, including multi-layer ventilated models with and without a mixed layer; a model for a continuously stratified ocean; an analytical solution with continuous stratification; and oceanic general circulation models. The goals are: (1) to study the structure of the wind-driven circulation in a single hemispheric basin; (2) to study the transient response of the thermocline to decadal climate variability, in particular, the three-dimensional structure of the decadal variability in the thermocline; (3) to study mixed-layer properties and the associated climate variability, using simple analytical models and oceanic general circulation models with a mixed layer; (4) to use inverse methods to study the structure of the thermocline in order to understand the dynamic processes that set up the wind-driven circulation and control the climate variability; and (5) to study water mass formation (subduction and obduction) in the world ocean doc8306 none The University is operating an NSF Computer Science, Engineering and Mathematics Scholarships (CSEMS) program to support 80 students for the academic years 02 and 03. The CSEMS program supports a cohort of beginning first year students and beginning community college transfer third year students for each academic year in one of the designated majors: computer science, computer technology, engineering, engineering technology or mathematics. First year students are primarily recruited from high schools in the southeast Texas region and the Houston Independent School District. The third year transfer students are recruited primarily from the Houston Community College System. The community college transfer students are required to have completed the associate degree in science, mathematics, engineering or technology (SMET). Under the CSEMS Program students are awarded the scholarships from the NSF grant during their first academic year at the University. Through the Honors Program and other financial aid sources these awards are supplemented to ensure full- tuition for the first year and subsequent years through graduation in one of the designated majors. Mentoring and exposure to professionals in the field has proven to be very important for retention and graduation of students in SMET undergraduate majors. The CSEMS program provides students with professional mentors and summer internship in industry or research experiences in University laboratories or off campus. Industrial and external sponsorship of the TSU CSEMS program and students are significant doc8307 none When we look around the world, we see objects that are separate from one another, each of which is defined by a unique size, shape, surface pattern, and distance. Our ability to perceive coherent objects overcomes incomplete input to the visual system, which is actually fragmented across space and time. That is, most objects we see are partly occluded by other, nearer objects, and may go in and out of sight as they move or as we move. Commonsense notions of object permanence, the knowledge that objects persist when away from direct perceptual contact, are central to this experience. Origins of object concepts in children have long been a source of interest among philosophers and researchers. Most notably, the pioneering studies of the eminent child psychologist Piaget provided evidence that object concepts develop only after months of experience handling and reaching for objects. More recently, some researchers have challenged Piaget s account on the grounds that it relies too much on reaching as an index of object concepts. Reaching may be difficult for infants, and may underestimate true object knowledge. Infants object concepts, instead, have been proposed to be rooted in innate knowledge structures, such as object continuity, the understanding that an object, seen to have become occluded, maintains its existence and location or trajectory when out of sight. Such concepts are claimed to be revealed when looking time methods are employed, and an event is presented to an infant that violates some expectation of object permanence (this attracts longer looking than would be expected normally). Such accounts, however, have themselves come under fire for failing to furnish viable explanations of developmental mechanism: Even if some ability is innate, it must have developed somehow. In addition, these violation of expectation methods have been criticized as leading to ambiguity in interpretation. In general, then, there is much disagreement about the origins of fundamental kinds of object knowledge in infants. The present proposal investigates this question by testing the role of specific visual cues in young infants perceptions of object motions, as well as recording eye movements and reaching patterns in response to occlusion displays. The results are expected to yield important information on infants perceptual and cognitive development, by providing converging evidence from multiple methods including assessments of object continuity, intermodal (visual-auditory) object perception, object identity (the ability to distinguish objects on the basis of appearance, location, and movement), and depth perception. It is anticipated that these findings will provide evidence and accounts that elucidate fundamental mechanisms of development, and it is hoped that such work will help guide theorizing on vital questions of the emergence of object concepts in infancy doc8308 none With this award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the work of Drs. Richard M. Pagni and Robert N. Compton of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The work has two objectives: 1) producing high enantiomeric purity organic compounds in solution using multiphoton photochemistry with circularly polarized light, and 2) producing chiral crystals by carrying out crystallizations in the presence of electrons or positrons. Making chiral (left or right handed) molecules and crystals with high purity is becoming increasingly important in a number of areas, including pharmaceuticals and advanced materials. The PIs have proposed some novel ways to do this using circularly polarized light, or particles (electrons or positrons) with opposite spins. While the work is high risk, it could potentially have a large impact, including shedding light on the origins of chirality in biological molecules like aminoacids doc8309 none This program provides both financial and academic support to low-income students with special consideration given to new transfer, female, and under- represented minority students. Primary objectives of this program are to 1) increase the number of low-income students obtaining undergraduate degrees in computer science, engineering and mathematics; 2) increase the number of women and under-represented minorities obtaining undergraduate degrees in computer science, engineering and mathematics; and, 3) to increase retention and graduation in these fields. In addition to financial assistance, CSEM recipients participate in a variety of activities designed to support their success including faculty mentoring, academic advising, faculty research or internship experiences, and enrollment in a special seminar focused on career and graduate schools information doc8310 none The goal of this project is to enhance support of low-income, academically talented computer science, engineering and mathematics (CSEM) students through scholarships and expanded student-support programs as part of the CSEM Scholars Program. The associated objectives are to increase the retention of students in the computer science, dual degree engineering and mathematics programs through graduation; to increase the number of students from under-represented groups studying computer science, engineering and mathematics; to increase the participation of students in professional development opportunities; to strengthen partnerships between the university and local industry; and to strengthen partnerships between the university and local community colleges. Forty scholarship recipients are selected based on their academic record, financial need, a recommendation from an instructor, counselor or employer, and a brief essay. The scholarships are awarded to students in the computer science, engineering and mathematics programs in ratios that approximate the department s student population. Selected students receive the National Science Foundation scholarship, and Texas Instruments, Inc is matching the amount. In addition each student is assigned faculty, industry, and peer mentors. Students in the CSEM Scholars Program participate in departmental student organizations, campus-wide student organizations, student research opportunities, cooperative education opportunities, campus-wide professional development workshops, campus-wide graduate school preparatory workshops, visits to local professional association meetings, and travel to professional conferences. In order to increase the number of CSEM students and the pool of applicants, recruitment efforts are being expanded through increased cooperation with area community college faculty and staff, faculty and staff of universities serving as partners to the 3+2 Dual Degree Engineering Program and the university admissions office. The program is evaluated by monitoring retention and graduation rates, growth in the number of undergraduate and graduate students within the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, and the participation rate of students in departmental and university professional development opportunities. In addition, participating students are tracked to follow job placement and advanced degree achievement doc8311 none Identity and Violence: Crime, Competition and Changing Traditions in Unangan Villages of the Eastern Aleutian Region The problem of interpersonal violence and violent crime is a complex issue and subject of considerable debate across disciplines. Causes cited for violence in indigenous communities have included acculturation stress, inadequate social support systems, economic hardships, restrictions on tradition, and lack of educational opportunities. However, violence cannot be understood as a single problem with a single solution; it must be investigated in the context of conditions that promote it as a solution to social problems over other outlets of conflict resolution and management. This dissertation research project uses a combination of rigorous theoretical and empirical inquiry to investigate particular aspects of violence and crime in a group of Unangan (Aleut) communities on the lower Alaska Peninsula and eastern Aleutian Islands. Variable levels of morbidity and mortality have been quantitatively established for this region but no individual-based research has been conducted there, or anywhere else in the western Arctic, which seeks to investigate the actual conditions in which violence occurs. The project explores the explanatory potential of biologically, socially, and culturally driven models of interpersonal violence. These models, which are rarely used in conjunction, may well serve to illuminate each other as well as the complexities of Unangan social problems. Ultimately, the goal is to address issues of social and cultural change, combined with universal and local issues of violence and aggression, and test these findings against crime data. The project will examine the contexts for various forms of interpersonal violence and violent crime and will encompass human-environment interaction, processes and consequences of social, cultural and economic change, and cultural vitality. This study will have strong theoretical and applied implications and broaden the context in which anthropologists study violence doc8312 none The expressed purpose of this project is to understand the relationship of base periodicity to the overall structure of information in prokaryotic genomes. The longer-term goal of the research is to use an understanding of the total information in chromosomes to construct and test mathematical models that simulate the dynamics of information evolution and exchange in prokaryotes. The objectives are to characterize the origins, organization and fate of genomic information in prokaryotes by developing and applying methods for system identification to track genes and the integrity of their information over time. A longer term goal is to model the content, structure, and behavior of information in prokaryotic chromosomes by characterizing signals from the frequency and organization of sequence and genes over multiple scales of measure. The scales of measure will vary from a few nucleotides to an entire chromosome. Protein-coding nucleotide sequences characteristically tend to repeat bases at three-step intervals, thereby producing short-range periodicity. Prior work from our lab established that Fourier analysis of signals from nucleotide periodicity revealed a tendency for genes from the same prokaryotic chromosome to exhibit similar patterns of short-range nucleotide periodicity. At the same time, long-range base periodicity and models of gene clustering patterns suggest that prokaryotic chromosomes have a fractal structure of base-repeat and gene clustering information. A fractal information structure for a chromosome is one in which the pattern of information for a large segment is similar to the pattern for a smaller unit used to build the larger structure. This research seeks to determine whether and to what extent a common information infrastructure exists in a genome and methods to measure it. New and established pattern recognition methods are being developed to study the structure of periodic information by analyzing the records of base periodicity in a set of prokaryotic genomes to compare with the signals from four other parameters of total information that influence periodicity. Other parameters will include measures of: ii) relative nucleotide frequency; iii) relative nucleotide arrangement; iv) relative codon frequency; and v) relative codon arrangement. Overall research objectives are designed to study: 1) signal variation in chromosomal gene and ORF (Open Reading Frame) populations; and 2) fractal structures of information in chromosomes. This study will probe the history and structure(s) of information in bacterial genomes. Potentially, the expected results could be used to build a theoretical framework to explain the early history of bacterial chromosome formation doc8313 none This program supports 45 scholarships for upper division students in computer science and mathematics and graduate (M.S.) students in mathematics. Priority is given to students traditionally under-represented in the computer science and mathematics fields such as women, ethnic minorities, and persons with disabilities. Enriched experiences for these students include activities such as faculty mentoring, peer mentoring, honors program, industry internships, and research experiences doc8314 none This project implements academic success strategies: accelerated learning groups, supplemental instruction, industry mentoring, and self- efficacy training in order to measurably increase student success. The Accelerated Learning Groups consist of the NSF scholars and an equal group of overrepresented computer science and engineering students. The broad evaluation plan ranges from simple statistics on retention and GPA to measures of motivation and the tools are chosen to aid student success, and to provide data publishable in peer- review journals doc8315 none This project provides scholarships to talented but financially disadvantaged students to assist them in attaining higher education degrees in computer science, engineering technology and mathematics. Appropriate consideration is given to under-represented minorities, transfer students, women and students with disabilities. Scholarships are provided to students across the four- year curricula in the targeted disciplines. Freshman and sophomores receive scholarships to help increase retention, which is a documented area of concern for the targeted areas. Scholarship awards are incremented to provide a weighted allocation to juniors and seniors. The project resources are incorporated within a web of complementary university programs. The project encompasses several activities and services to support the development of its scholars, which includes: recruitment, faculty and peer mentors, dedicated tutorial services, internships and research opportunities, preparatory summer workshops to support continued academic growth and grooming for career development and exploration doc8316 none The Technology Tomorrow Scholarship Program is designed to attract more students to two- year technical programs in the computer science, computer technology and engineering technologies. The project focuses on low-income, first time students who are not necessarily college directed or oriented but who have the talent to succeed in technical programs based in computer science, computer technology or engineering technologies. The project provides the opportunity for financial assistance to students in the West Texas Region, an area marked by vast distances between metropolitan areas and a large percentage of economically disadvantaged students. The program combines scholarship assistance with student services, including a specialized mentoring program, designed to promote success in college, success in job placement, and success in the workplace doc8317 none The objective of this grant is to provide support for a series of workshops aimed at bringing focus to critical manufacturing technology challenges and fostering cooperative activity between government agencies, industry and academe. Support for the workshops will be provided by NSF together with the Department of Defense, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Energy, and industry. The workshops will address topics including shared knowledge repositories and learning systems; knowledge-based design; integrated, interoperable enterprises, especially web-based; science-based modeling and simulation for manufacturing; emerging manufacturing technologies and processes; web-enabled manufacturing; and intelligent controls. The workshops will invite broad representation from all manufacturing domains to develop a comprehensive suite of goals and requirements for use in focusing manufacturing research and development. If successful, this project will foster cooperation among government, industry and academe, and it will provide focus for Federal participation in manufacturing research and development doc8318 none This program provides scholarships to engineering and computer science students in the lower divisions of Portland State University and Portland Community College, who have a co-admission policy. These scholarships increase the number of full-time, under-represented students in the engineering and computer science programs. Students participate in planned support activities, including a two-week summer high school-to-college bridge program, monitoring student progress, and cohort-building events. Building on the existing NSF Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Scholarships Program for the upper division, these scholarships provide an integrated scholarship program from high school and community college through college graduation doc8319 none This project provides scholarships to qualified minority students enrolled in computer science, engineering, and mathematics disciplines. The program leverages the activities of an existing Minority Engineering Program in support of the scholars. Scholars are mentored by both upper class students and alumni, participate in regular group meetings, and are encouraged to become involved in student activities within the college. Students at risk of failing physics are provided with an economic incentive to enroll in a special preparatory course and in the follow- on optional tutorial sections which feature state-of-the-art educational technologies that have been integrated with innovative pedagogy. Preliminary results show that the approach can significantly reduce the failure rate in the standard calculus-based physics course. By combining special classroom experiences with supportive services, the program seeks to retain talented, financially disadvantaged minority students pursuing in bachelor s degrees in computer science, engineering and mathematics doc8320 none The Scholarships for Women and Minorities in Engineering Technologies (SWMET) program is providing financial, academic and social support for thirty low-income, academically talented women and minorities seeking associate degrees in Engineering Technologies (ET). Each student is receiving a scholarship and participating in activities such as mentor relationships, co-op experiences, interview skills workshops, and a SWMET Scholars Club. The program is also developing a dynamic web page that is not only a storehouse for information; but also a clearinghouse for necessary program communications for students, faculty, and administrators involved in the program. The SWMET Club uses graduates of the SWMET Club to serve as mentors immediately upon graduation. These mentors, who have entered the workforce, represent their new employers, serving to strengthen relationships with area businesses. Area business and industry representatives are also serving in an advisory capacity doc8321 none This scholarship and support program is designed to increase the number of women, especially women of color, who graduate with baccalaureate degrees in computer science and mathematics. A secondary focus of the program is to help meet the need for college-educated workers with technological capabilities in Wisconsin. The program provides 35 scholarships each year to junior and senior students majoring in computer science or mathematics. During each student s junior and senior years, a comprehensive array of support programs on the campus are available on an as-needed basis and, when necessary, are tailored to her needs. Mechanisms already in place on the campus for referral to services and a campus culture which supports collaboration help ensure student success doc8322 none Students are provided with services and activities that are designed to promote the following: improve the undergraduate educational experience of students in relevant disciplines; 2) increase the number and percentage of students completing the first stage of the baccalaureate study and those student receiving degrees in relevant disciplines; 3) improve the likelihood of Program Scholars post- baccalaureate placement in employment or graduate programs in technical or related disciplines; and provide the opportunity to further strengthen partnerships with employers and the institution. Each scholar is paired with a mentor who is a member of the Program Scholars discipline area in which he she is pursuing his her baccalaureate degree; the mentor serves as an advocate for the scholars academic and career success. Activities that some of the scholars are involved in include: tutorial assistance, visitations to research laboratories and graduate programs, career counseling, attendance and or participation in national professional conferences within their discipline and national student research conferences, writing assistance, and professional work experiences. The program focuses on students in engineering and engineering technology doc8323 none This project provides 25 scholarships to talented low-income students in computer science, computer networking, computer network technology, and computer information technology. The project includes guest lectures and other interaction with industry representatives. In addition to the college s student support system, scholarship recipients have access to project supported peer tutoring doc8324 none This project offers scholarships to full-time students majoring in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. The goals of the program include increasing the number of women and minorities in these fields, shortening the length of time required to complete the program by increasing the number of full-time students, and providing experiences with professionals in the field. In order to be eligible for a scholarship, students must be academically talented and demonstrate financial need as defined by the U.S. Department of Education Pell Grant. Each student receiving a scholarship is assigned a mentor and is required to shadow a professional in their major field each semester. Scholarships are automatically renewed for a second semester provided that eligibility requirements are maintained doc8325 none The fundamental objective of this project is enabling talented but financially disadvantaged students pursuing careers in computer science, mathematics and engineering (CSEM) to achieve higher education degrees. Our objectives include 1) increasing the number of math, engineering, and computer science scholarships available to individuals who are under-represented in these fields; 2) increasing the awareness of the variety of job opportunities available for advanced degree graduates; 3) facilitating a mentoring relationship between the scholar and a person already working in their chosen field; and 4) encouraging scholars to gain leadership experience by acting as peer mentors. The primary participants are 40 CSEMS students each year for two years who receive scholarships based on financial need and academic excellence. Targeted recruiting efforts as well as a myriad of student support services and advanced pedagogical practices including clubs and organizations, application oriented experiences for students, a project-based Capstone course, and internship field experiences, and an active-learning curriculum result in improved recruitment and retention rates of CSEMS student. A strong Tech Prep partnership program allows student to enter this program in the 11th grade and transition seamlessly to the associates degree program. Students are encouraged to transfer to 4-year institutions to complete a bachelor degree in their chosen discipline doc8326 none This project provides scholarships and reduces economic barriers to full-time enrollment for up to 40 full-time, Pell eligible students majoring in engineering, computer science or mathematics at Montgomery College each year. These students, known as Montgomery College NSF CSEM Scholars, are provided with a challenging and supportive program that prepares them for majors in engineering, computer science or mathematics at a four-year college. Selected students participate in a paid internship program the summer before transferring to a four-year institution. In addition to grade point average, selection criteria includes a student essay and letters of recommendation from individuals such as teachers, counselors or job supervisors who can address the applicant s potential to succeed in engineering, computer science or mathematics. The centerpiece of support services for Montgomery College NSF CSEM Scholars is an expanded, comprehensive mentoring program that provides students with interdisciplinary faculty mentor teams composed of faculty from computer science, mathematics, engineering, and the basic sciences. This mentoring process continues at the four-year institution with a continuing mentor from Montgomery College during the student s first year after transfer. At Montgomery College, student s mentoring team may include a faculty member from a four-year institution once a student has decided upon a transfer institution. Scholars are required to enroll in a one credit course that includes seminars by scientists and engineers as well as resume writing, interviewing, preparing for transfer and graduate school and applying for internships. Scholars have many opportunities outside of the classroom to interact with their peers, faculty and business leaders. As these opportunities are evaluated, the college develops models of pathways that lead to bachelor s degree completion in engineering, computer science or mathematics for students who start their college education at a community college doc8327 none This project provides funds for computer science, engineering, and mathematics majors. It includes collaboration between a university and community college to recruit talented community college students to complete technical degrees at the four year institution. This program provides scholarships to increase the number of talented, but financially disadvantaged students, graduating and entering the workforce in the defined technology areas. The project provides professional development programs to facilitate experiential learning through industrial internships, academic progress monitoring and mentoring programs for students. These are established ongoing programs. This scholarship program aims to increase educational opportunities for qualified students, improve retention to degree by removing financial barriers, and provide improved student professional development doc8328 none This project provides 40 students with a scholarship sufficient to cover tuition, fees, and books, and a comprehensive set of academic support services to ensure that each recipient attains a 4-year degree and is prepared for graduate studies and or placement in an appropriate workplace. These academic support services include: admission and matriculation assistance, workshops, access to a study center, advisement and counseling, tutoring, support in joining and participating in professional organizations, eligibility to compete for additional grant funds reserved for engineering, computer science, and math students, support in securing appropriate internships and summer employment, professional activities, job placement assistance, and involvement in a social support network. A comprehensive summative evaluation is planned doc8329 none The university is operating a CSEMS scholarship program for students in aviation-related fields as well as computer science, computer engineering, and electrical engineering. The program involves aggressive recruitment, primarily at community colleges, of academically superior, low-income students; a plan to orient, motivate and ready the students for rigorous academic performance; a plan to support the students through a professor-mentor and advising program; and a plan to help them gain employment in their degree fields, or be accepted in graduate school. The university is using its contacts with a number of aerospace and electronics firms, which afford special opportunities for its students for summer research, co-operative assignments, and new graduate hiring. In addition, the university has made a substantial financial commitment to the NSF program, agreeing to augment the NSF funds with major institutional scholarships, offering material leverage to NSF funding doc8330 none This project aims to develop a new direction in chalcogenide research concerned with the exploitation of hybrid metal chalcogenides composed of both organic and inorganic components. The goal of the research is to explore and develop effective solvothermal routes towards controlled synthesis of new, functional hybridized materials; to characterize and modify their structural, chemical, electronic and physical properties and to understand the correlation between these properties; and finally to acquire fundamental knowledge regarding the chemistry of inorganic-organic composite materials. The focus will be on (a) open-framework structures involving organic templates, and (b) inorganic-organic networks built upon chalcogen(Sulfur, Selenium, and Tellurium)-containing inorganic fragments that are interconnected by organic spacers via coordinate or covalent bonds. %%% Organic-inorganic hybrid composite materials are likely to combine superior electronic, magnetic, optical properties, and thermal stability of inorganic frameworks with the structural diversity, flexibility, high processability, and light-weight of organic molecules to further enhance and strengthen their functionality. The educational component of this proposal will be to continue to develop the Materials Initiative Program recently established at our campus and to involve a large number of both graduate and undergraduate students in the materials chemistry learning and in hands-on research training processes doc8331 none This program provides scholarships to financially disadvantaged students, particularly those from under-represented groups, at the freshman and sophomore levels in the fields of Computer Science, Engineering, and Engineering Technology. The program includes early identification and preparatory activities, summer bridge program, community building, time on task study groups in calculus and physics, faculty staff student interaction, and special topic courses including Cooperative Learning Calculus and Physics. Faculty from the College of Engineering including the computer science department and faculty from the College of Applied Sciences Engineering Technology Programs serve as faculty mentors doc8332 none This project is to establish a scholarship program for low- income, academically talented students enrolled fulltime in one of the degree programs offered by the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. There are forty awards per year. Students may apply for a second year of funding. The selection process includes indicators of academic merit and likely professional success. Support structures, which are already in place at the college assist in recruiting, placement, and retention of scholarship recipients. Several options are available to the students who receive a scholarship: a research project mentored by a senior faculty member, participation in already established college projects, and internships in New York City programs for academic assistance to high school students. A goal of the project is to attract academically sound students to the computer science and mathematics majors at the college doc8333 none This project is: (1) Improving education for students in computer science, engineering and mathematics, (2) Increasing retention of students to degree completion, (3) Improving professional development, job placement and further higher education placement of participating students, and (4) Strengthening partnerships between institutions of higher education and related employment sectors. Students receive benefits from participating with ongoing academic enhancement and training activities which offer collaborative research activities and internships with various information technology associated firms. The project includes both undergraduate and graduate students doc8334 none The Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Scholars (CSEM Scholars) program is increasing the number of students completing certificate programs, obtaining associate degrees, or transferring to four-year institutions in the areas of computer science, computer technology, engineering, engineering technology, or mathematics. The scholarships are for traditional age college students from public and private county high schools. The targeted students are being identified with the help of high school guidance counselors and teachers. The program seeks to identify minority populations, especially women and persons with disabilities, who meet the scholarship eligibility requirements. The specific program goals include recruiting graduating high school seniors to attend the college with a declared major in computer science, computer technology, engineering, engineering technology, or mathematics; identifying and recruiting female or disabled students; providing a summer institute and job shadowing for incoming scholarship recipients; developing new joint ventures between the public schools and the college; increasing the number of county residents with skills to meet high tech needs of business and industry, and developing a comprehensive assessment plan to evaluate the effectiveness of planned activities doc8335 none Wheeling Jesuit University has created the Women in Math Computer Science Scholarship Program (WIM CS) to encourage women in the Appalachian region to continue their studies at the baccalaureate level. This program provides ten scholarships per year to women graduates of community or technical colleges who hold the A. S. degree in math or computer science to complete the bachelor s degree at Wheeling Jesuit. Taking advantage of its quality programs, its supportive faculty, and the presence of three technology centers on its campus, Wheeling Jesuit provides WIM CS scholars with a strong academic program and technology- related internship opportunities on its campus. The scholarships open new opportunities for women in math and computer science and also offer new talent to technology- related businesses and public school classrooms in the region doc8336 none This project is providing students from economically disadvantaged areas with the financial assistance necessary to participate in a comprehensive educational program in Engineering Technology. The Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Scholarships (CSEMS) program allows eligible students to advance their knowledge of engineering and science, earn an Associate degree or Bachelor degree in Engineering Technology, enhance their career marketability, and prepare to enter the region s engineering technology workforce. The mission of the college is to deliver through traditional and innovative programs an education that prepares students to prosper in their chosen professions and thrive in a society characterized by diversity and change. The CSEMS program provides an educational opportunity to students who would otherwise not consider higher education or need a higher degree to maintain job security doc8337 none The college is a public, Hispanic -serving, two year associate degree granting college charged with advancing the state s economic development by educating a skilled workforce. This project is creating a National Science Foundation Scholarship (NSF) program for five computer related technologies. Students receive, upon completion of study, an associate of applied science degree in one of five areas: Computer Science Technology, Computerized Drafting and Design Technology, Computerized Digital Imaging Technology, Computerized Network Information Management Technology, and Computer Maintenance Technology. Scholarship recipients are being selected on the basis of a submitted application, interviews, a written statement on choosing a computer related field, and assessment of career goals. The scholarship awards are being integrated into the overall recruitment and retention efforts of the College which includes specific initiatives for outreach and recruitment to Hispanic families. Intensive retention strategies such as assessment methods using the Noel- Levitz Retention Management System, intrusive academic advising, a structured first year student success course, supplemental instruction, tutoring and mentoring, and the establishment of learning assistance centers provide scholarship students with a strong retention infrastructure for student success as measured by persistence until graduation doc8338 none This project seeks to increase the number of students, especially minority students, graduating with degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from New Mexico Highlands University. The program provides 10 scholarships the first year, and 20 scholarships the second year to junior and senior students. Student-based tutoring and mentoring services are offered from graduate students, upper division students, and the local student chapter of the ACM. Other support structures include faculty workshops, and presentations from alumni about career opportunities in computer science and mathematics doc8339 none This project provides 44 scholarships to outstanding and under-represented undergraduate students of Computer Science, Engineering Technology, and Mathematics, as well as graduate students of Computer Science and Mathematics. In addition to providing scholarships that enables students to successfully attain degrees, the project also provides and requires of each recipient of an NSF Scholarship group research experiences that enables them to be more successful as students and after graduation. Scholars are required to work 10 hours per week on a research project; work with a project faculty member, who serves as the student s mentor, for a semester research assignment; attend a bi- weekly research colloquium; present at least one progress report per semester at a bi- monthly colloquium to other scholars and mentors; and submit a written report at the end of each semester of funding. Additionally, these students are encouraged to present papers or posters at regional and or national conferences. The University also commits to finding a technically related job on campus for every undergraduate NSF Scholar who wants a job during his her senior year. The Department commits to placing every graduate student in the program in either a graduate assistantship or funded research assistant position until completion of degree doc8340 none This program awards scholarships to economically disadvantaged students, with a special emphasis on students from under-represented groups in engineering and science. Recruitment targets three groups: 1) incoming freshmen, 2) incoming transfer students, and 3) continuing students at the junior level. This group includes students from majors in Berkeley s College of Engineering, chemical engineering majors in the College of Chemistry, and students in the computer science or mathematics majors in the College of Letters and Science. Scholars participate in a variety of retention- related activities tied to the existing student support infrastructure of CUES, the EECS Center for Undergraduate Matters and other partner programs. This includes faculty advising, academic excellence workshops, tutoring, mentoring, advising, internships in industry and or research experience, and assistance with graduate school applications or job placement doc8341 none This project attracts high ability minority students in engineering and computer science and subsequently retains them at the university through financial aid packages and supplemental scholarships. To accomplish this objective, a two-tier approach is used. First, they attract high ability high school students with scholarships. Second, they offer scholarships to beginning sophomores who have demonstrated good academic performance in their freshman year. Finally, they retain high ability students with a Six Sigma approach to engineering and computer science education (improvement of the process quality by constant monitoring and adjustment). Other retention activities include comprehensive faculty mentoring, tutorial programs, advising and counseling, involvement in research, and summer internships doc8342 none This project provides scholarships to talented low-income students to complete degrees in computer science, computer or electrical engineering, or mathematics. A learning community and seminar course help to support scholarship recipients in their academic and career prepartion. Specific goals are to link the scholars with each other and with other students, faculty and business leaders. The focus of the program is on low-income women and minority students, qualified transfer students from community and state colleges, and underemployed students whose education has been interrupoted by the need to work. The program seeks to achieve an 100% placement rate for graduates entering appropriate positions in the workplace or advanced education doc8343 none This program provides an opportunity for talented but financially disadvantaged individuals to acquire a higher education degree in the fields of math, engineering, or computer science. More specifically, this program increases the number of associate degree graduates in these fields, with significant numbers transferring to four- year institutions to pursue baccalaureate degrees, and others ultimately earning graduate degrees. The institution is committed to providing the student support services necessary to ensure the retention and graduation of the scholarship recipients and, when desired, their successful transfer to four-year colleges. Overall, the institution fosters an institutional climate supportive of the recipients success. Ten program objectives have been formulated to meet these needs: Identification and selection, assessment, retention, achievement, career awareness and counseling, service-learning, enrichment, graduation, transfer, and employment. In support of these goals, there is a comprehensive student support services program that includes personal and academic counseling, academic advising and assistance in course selection, enrichment seminars and activities, academic programs, instruction in study skills, mentoring program, career awareness, services for the disabled, transfer initiative, computer literacy, tutorial services, service-learning placement, and employment services and placement. Specifically, the program impacts both the recipients and the community as a whole through the realization of the following outcomes: improved education for students in the stated disciplines; increased retention of students to degree achievement; strengthened partnerships between institutions of higher education and related employment sectors; improved professional development and employment; and further higher education placement of participating students doc8344 none We are promoting the achievement of baccalaureate degrees in computer science, computer technology, engineering, engineering technology, and mathematics by academically talented but financially disadvantaged students by: 1) Providing financial aid to low income, academically talented students through 40 scholarships annually over a two- year period 2) Improving education in these disciplines by creating supportive environments for these students through changes in organizational culture and practices 3) Increasing retention of students to degree achievement by encouraging preparation for information technology careers through student development initiatives 4) Improving professional development and employment of students by providing enriched research experiences, mentoring, and support in employment placement 5) Strengthening university- industry partnerships through collaborative implementation doc8345 none The specific project objectives of the program include: (i) promoting diversity and increase the numbers of minority students enrolling in, and completing degrees in computer science, engineering and mathematics; (ii) expanding the pool of minority talent that have suffered from a long- standing under- utilization for industry, government, and academia (i. e., Ph. D. holders); (iii) improving the educational experiences of students through connections of academic content to the work environment and building new industry partnerships; (iv) increasing enrollment of academically- gifted students from community colleges; (v) encouraging scholarship recipients to pursue advanced degrees; and (vi) providing mentor programs that allow students to devote more time to their degree programs as opposed to working on non- discipline jobs. The goals of the program are being accomplished by: (i) Recruitment; (ii) Academic support to provide participants the tools necessary to succeed; (iii) A retention program, which relies heavily on the positive impact of mentors and academic contracts that include professional development of the scholars; (iv) Building on the existing infrastructure for student and industry support within the University as well as local community colleges; (v) Establishing faculty mentors in every department to provide one- on- one mentoring by experienced faculty and peers; (vi) Requiring the Scholars to participate in research and design projects for presentation at professional meetings and industry- sponsored workshops; (vii) Maintaining records on the Scholars: progress toward degree, research experiences, design projects, resume, career goals, work portfolios, mentoring activities, professional development opportunities, job interviews, graduate school applications, the change in the number of minority students transferring in; and (viii) Initiating an exit interview process to evaluates the effectiveness of scholarship programs. The grant award acts as a catalyst to reinforce other curricula enhancement programs. The scholarship program provides leadership training and experience, and a controlled academic process for low- income students to insure successful graduation and entrance to graduate school when desired. The scholarship program builds on several existing programs that help students achieve academic success doc8346 none Small-area census data are the primary source for studying such critical issues in social science research as suburbanization, the decline and rebirth of central cities, residential segregation, immigrant settlement patterns, rural depopulation, agricultural consolidation and population shifts from the rust belt to the sunbelt. These issues cry out for chronological analysis, but because historical small-area data are inaccessible, most studies are static. Researchers who address change over time in spatial processes must either confine their analyses to local areas because broader studies are simply too expensive or they must adopt large units of analysis, such as states and metropolitan areas, which preclude the nuanced detail needed for full understanding. This Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Infrastructure award will support the work to make the census accessible to researchers within the framework of a comprehensive National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS). A multidisciplinary research team will bring together approximately 670 gigabytes of data covering the period through that currently are scattered across dozens of archives and stored in incompatible formats on different media. This project will consist of three major components. (1) The data and documentation component will gather all extant machine-readable census summary data, fill holes in the surviving machine-readable data through data entry of paper census tabulations, harmonize the formats and documentation of all files, and produce standardized electronic documentation according to the recently developed Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) specification. (2) The mapping component will create consistent historical electronic boundary files for tracts, minor civil divisions, Counties, and larger geographic units. (3) The data-access component will create a powerful but user-friendly, Web-based browser and extraction system based on the new DDI metadata standard. The system will provide public access free of charge to both documentation and data and will present results in the form of tables or maps. The census constitutes a fundamental underpinning of social science and policy research. It also represents an exceptional untapped resource for secondary and higher education in the social science, statistics, and history. This project will allow all users -- from high school students to research scientists -- to adopt a comparative and historical perspective. The NHGIS database will open a new range of powerful approaches to familiar problems, broadening the scope of local and regional analyses to explore variations across time and space simultaneously. The database will have even broader application when combined with other sources. The census provides basic denominators for an array of studies across the social sciences, including such diverse fields as political science, criminal justice, and epidemiology. The availability of small-area data and geographic boundary files will allow such analyses to incorporate a chronological as well as a spatial dimension. Furthermore, social scientists have become increasingly aware that individuals life changes, choices, and attitudes are shaped not only by their own characteristics but also by the characteristics of their neighbors and communities. The NHGIS will encourage and greatly simplify the use of techniques such as multi-level analysis that draw upon such insights. These aggregate-level census data will dovetail with and complement widely used micro-level datasets, such as the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, the American Community Survey, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and other specialized surveys. The NHGIS database will democratize access to the census. The database will be a resource that can be used widely for social science training, by the media, for policy research at the state and local levels, by the private sector, and in secondary education doc8347 none As a cloud droplet grows by condensation, water molecules flow from the vapor surrounding the droplet to its surface and the heat released by condensation flows away from the droplet. Classical theory treats the environment of the drop as a continuum, so that the heat and mass transfer are described by the diffusion equation. This is a valid approximation for drops that are much larger than the molecular mean free path, which is about 0.06 mm for normal sea level conditions. However, newly formed cloud droplets have sizes typically between 0.1 and 1 mm, for which the classical, continuum theory must be modified to include gas kinetic effects. The modification introduces two new parameters that characterize the transfer of heat and mass, the accommodation coefficient and the condensation coefficient, denoted respectively by a and b. The accommodation coefficient may be thought of as the fraction of the molecules bouncing off the surface of a drop that have acquired the temperature of the drop. The condensation coefficient may be described as the fraction of the molecules hitting the surface of the drop that stick to it. In general, a and b are not equal and must be determined experimentally, because there is no known way to derive their values theoretically. Though there have been previous attempts to determine the coefficients, the results are quite variable. There are several reasons for this. First, it is no easy matter to measure the rate of growth of a micron-sized droplet in controlled conditions. Second, a and b are linked in such a way that a given droplet growth rate can be explained by many combinations of a and b. Third, there is evidence that the values of the coefficients may be influenced by small amounts of impurities in the water. This project aims to determine a and b separately by taking advantage of their different dependence on atmospheric pressure. The rates of growth of small droplets are observed under different conditions of temperature and pressure by illuminating them with a laser and employing the known peaks in the Mie scattering curve for water droplets to determine drop size. Experiments with drops formed on aerosols of different chemical composition will indicate the possible influence of contaminants on a and b. There is already some evidence that impurities lower the values of these coefficients. The effect of lower values is to reduce the growth rates of small droplets. A consequence of smaller droplet size is a greater reflectivity of the cloud for solar radiation. Therefore pollution aerosols may have the effect not only of increasing the number of small cloud droplets but also retarding their early growth by condensation. The correct treatment of the effects of clouds on solar radiation may therefore require accurate knowledge of the accommodation and condensation coefficients doc8348 none This program targets talented but financially disadvantaged youth by providing financial support, academic assistance, and student support services. The objectives and corresponding activities are carefully designed to create a comprehensive program by supplementing programs and structures already in place at St. Scholastica with the creation of new activities. The program includes activities that focus on providing the support and encouragement that students need to remain in school through graduation. Activities include faculty mentoring, tutoring, summer research opportunities, internship opportunities, and individual counseling sessions with the Program Administrator. Through individual discussions with the Program Administrator and the College s Career Counselor, students receive both guidance and support as they consider the next step in their careers. Many of the same activities that lead to higher levels of degree attainment, such as mentoring, internships, and summer research opportunities also contribute to greater levels of preparedness as students move on to graduate school or employment. In addition, a series of workshops are provided for program participants that address such topics as graduate school exploration, professionalism, resume preparation, and research skills. By coordinating with local businesses, state agencies, and the College s Career Center Counselor, the Program Administrator creates new internship research opportunities for program participants. Activities for this objective center on a structure of support and evaluation to ensure that the students, partnering businesses, and members of the College community all gain from these relationships doc8349 none This research project, supported in the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, addresses the question of the reactivity of organic molecules with the surface of liquid sulfuric acid solutions. Instrumentation is developed that allows the study of surface reaction, diffusion and bulk partitioning of reactant products, and identification of desorbed product species, under conditions relevant to atmospheric acid aerosol chemistry. Kinetics and mechanisms of these organic molecule reactions as a function of surface temperature, water vapor pressure, acid composition, and organic reactant flux are examined. A basic understanding of the physical chemistry of gas-liquid interactions, and tropospheric aerosol chemistry is the outcome of this project carried out in the laboratory of Professor Jeffrey Roberts at the University of Minnesota. Very little is known about the mechanisms and kinetics of gas-liquid surface reactions. This research project addresses the kinetics and mechanisms of organic molecule reactions with the surface of sulfuric acid liquids, using an apparatus directly developed for these studies. The results of these investigations are relevant to an understanding of tropospheric aerosol chemistry doc8350 none Dr. Philip P. Power, Chemistry Department, University of California - Davis, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program, to study low valent compounds of group 13, 14, and 15 elements. Ortho-Terphenyl and related ligands will provide a protected cavity which will allow low coordinate metal species to exist under conditions where they would normally be unstable. Metal-metal bonded species will be formed from these complexes. The results are expected to support the emerging viewpoint that a lack of hybridization rather than inherently weak pi interactions is the primary reason multiple metal-metal bonding is rarely encountered in the heavier p-block metals. The systems will be explored by a range of physical techniques including x-ray diffraction, multinuclear and dynamic nmr, uv-visible, infrared, and epr spectroscopies. The question of the nature of an element s chemical bonds is one of the most basic in chemistry. This project will probe the ability of aluminum, gallium, indium, germanium, tin, phosphorus, arsenic, antimony and bismuth to form double or triple bonds. In general these elements prefer single bonds, but in some cases can be induced to participate in multiple bonding. The results of the study will define the sorts of compounds these elements can form and will contribute to the design of, e.g., catalysts or advanced materials that are based on them doc8351 none The Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics, Scholarship Program at Arizona State University provides scholarships and a support infrastructure that enables academically talented, financially disadvantaged lower division students to maintain fulltime enrollment and progress toward degree completion into upper division status where attrition rates are reduced. Targeted fields include engineering, engineering technology, mathematics, computer science, and computer technology. The program offers a supported summer bridge program for recruited high school seniors (entering freshman) across the state and a variety of carefully designed activities to enhance learning and career opportunities. The program also expands and enhances the continuum of services available to students of diverse gender, ethnic, social, and economic backgrounds, clearly supporting the university s commitment to provide a high quality education to all students doc8352 none This is a scholarship program for academically talented students in computer science, mathematics and engineering, with a special emphasis on African-Americans. Recruitment efforts involve pre-college programs such as Upward Bound and the Packard Program, along with area community and two-year technical colleges, and students enrolled in CSEMS areas. Objectives of the program include: (1) increased representation of persons from this group among students studying for undergraduate and first graduate degrees in the above disciplines; (2) increased retention through graduation of participants; (3) development of a sense of belonging in the represented disciplines; (4) involvement of participants in a peer support network; and, (5) provision of mentoring and counseling opportunities to assist participants in coping with college life and preparing for graduate and professional opportunities. Scholars are formally recognized during the opening convocation in the fall and at the Academic Awards Day in the spring doc8353 none California sea lions (CSL) have an unusually high incidence of cancers, the most frequent of which are aggressive urogenital tumors in both males and females. The foraging biology of CSL, which differs between age and gender classes, brings them into contact with pollutants that accumulated in their tissues. Some of these are known to cause cancer. However, more than one factor is needed to cause cancer and a CSL herpesvirus has been identified that may also contribute. Intrinsic factors (age, gender, genetic makeup), environmentally acquired factors (tissue contaminants, other infectious agents), as well as population natural history factors (feeding behavior and foraging ranges) are expected to influence the susceptibility of CSL to herpesvirus infection and cancer. Animals captured and released on California breeding grounds and in Puget sound and stranded animals in rehabilitation centers will be tested for antibodies, viruses, bacteria, genetic markers, blubber contaminant levels and comparisons made between age classes, genders and CSL with and without tumors. Satellite telemetry will be used to track juvenile females and to resample individual CSL. A model will be developed to assess factors important in the ecology of herpesvirus infections and cancer. California sea lions live and feed in the Pacific coastal ecosystem in which people work and recreate, eating many of the same seafood. They are important sentinels for ecosystem health. The high incidence of cancers in sea lions is alarming. Understanding factors causing these cancers will help assess risks to human health as well as to other coastal wildlife including threatened Steller s sea lions, Guadalupe fur seals and southern sea otters doc8354 none This project is providing scholarship grants to talented low- income students who are enrolled full- time in a program leading to an associate degree in mathematics, pre- engineering, computer science, or computer technology. The overall goal for this program is the successful attainment of a degree and subsequent employment in the degree field, or transfer to a four- year institution to obtain a baccalaureate degree in the chosen field. The college is developing a pool of program applicants through a recruitment process directed primarily at high schools. Particularly encouraged to apply are individuals from groups under-represented in these disciplines (minorities, women, and the disabled). This recruitment process solicits the assistance of teachers at the high schools, and involves informational seminars for interested students. Applications are being reviewed and rated by a College Selection Committee composed of faculty from the program disciplines involved, using criteria developed specifically for this program by the College. The college is providing retention and support services for participating students. These services include required attendance at two group meetings each semester. The initial meeting is an orientation meeting to review continuing eligibility requirements, clarify scholarship disbursement processes, and to orient participants to services available (counseling, tutoring, mentoring, and faculty- student conferences). The second meeting occurs at mid- semester to identify academic problems and secure participant feed- back on general or program specific problems. These meetings also serve to encourage mutual support among this student group. Implementation of this program provides career opportunities for program participants and also increases the numbers of under-represented individuals in the targeted professions. Further, as the community moves from a minimum- wage manufacturing based economy to a higher wage technology based economy, this program contributes to the technologically skilled employee pool that is needed doc8355 none Martindale There is considerable debate about the origin of segmental body plans in metazoan evolution. Arguments have been made that the protostome-deuterostome ancestor was already segmented, while others argue that segmentation evolved independantly in the three major clades of segmented organisms: the annelids, arthropods, and chordates. While there is alot known about the development of some arthropods and chordates, virtually nothing is known about the development of annelids. The little cellular and molecular information available comes almost exclusively from a few species of the highly derived group of freshwater clitellate annelids, the leeches. The marine polychaetes are the most diverse and speciose group of basal annelids and are clearly a critical group to study when considering the evolution of segmental development in the annelids, yet not a single intracellular fate map has been published on any polychaete embryo. This proposal describes a comprehensive and integrative cellular and molecular dissection of the origins and development of the segmental body plan in polychaetes. Rather than focusing on a single polychaete species, the investigators will examine three species of polychaetes with different life history characteristics to gain an appreciation for the diversity of mechanisms within this group of animals. Modern cell lineage analysis will be utilized in conjunction with molecular studies of two distinct patterning pathways, the formation of a segmental body plan, and the diversification of that body plan into distinct regions. Specific Aim #1: Utilize cell lineage techniques to follow the embryonic and larval origins of segmental tissues in three species of polychaetes with distinct life histories. Specific Aim #2: Examine the spatio-temporal deployment of the segmentation genes engrailed, armadillo, even-skipped, runt, and hairy in three species of polychaete embryos and larvae. Specific Aim #3: Complete the expression studies with our previously isolated Hox genes in the heteronomous species Chaetopterus and contrast the deployment of Hox genes with two species of homonomous polychaetes (Capitella and Hydroides). The proposed work will provide critical information about how the segmented body plan is generated in a basal group of annelids. This information is crucial before any kind of comparison about the homology of segmentation can be made with other metazoan phyla doc8356 none The conduct of advanced research involving biological materials from nonhuman primates requires open access to high quality, well documented samples. Until now, access has been opportunistic and quality control highly variable. This Infrastructure Award will establish an Integrated Primate Biomaterials and Information Resource that will be developed through a collaboration among Coriell Institute for Medical Research (Coriell), the International Species Information System (ISIS), Princeton University (PU), the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), and the Zoological Society of San Diego (ZSSD). The Resource will provide primate biomaterials such as DNA and cell lines for research that takes advantage of emerging genetic technologies and the human genome sequence to probe questions of human origins, primate phylogeny and biogeography, conservation, and human behavior and cognition. With policy and priorities guided by a broadly based Scientific Advisory Committee, the Resource collaboration includes institutions that bring expertise in biomaterials banking, bioinformatics, information access, and in primate conservation, behavior, and ecology. Resource priorities include high levels of quality control and wide accessibility to researchers who would not otherwise have access to necessary materials for research, conservation, and capacity-building. The collection will seek to provide a balance among diversity and depth of sampling combined with maximal associated information or other available with samples doc8357 none Many invertebrates and fishes use selective tidal-stream transport (STST) for horizontal movement. STST is based on a vertical migration pattern, in which animals leave the bottom and enter the water column during one phase of the tide and remain on or near the bottom during the other phase. One remarkable but unstudied aspect of STST within a species is the reversal in the direction of migration at different life history stages. Migration of the blue crab Callinectes sapidus, involving a reversal in STST direction following spawning, is the focus of this multidisciplinary research. During spawning migration, ovigerous females use ebb-tide transport to move seaward from estuaries. After releasing larvae, they reverse direction and undergo flood -tide transport to re-enter the estuary. The specific goals of this research are to: use biotelemetry to observe and characterize the pattern of movement and physical conditions during the spawning migration; simulate observed physical conditions and migratory pathways and extrapolate these results in time and space using a coupled bio-physical model; determine whether the behavior underlying STST is mediated by an endogenous rhythm in activity or by behavioral responses to exogenous cues; and determine the cues mediating the onset of ebb-tide transport by females with mature eggs and flood-tide transport of post--spawn females. The study integrates the fields of biological and physical oceanography and will expand our understanding of the cues, behaviors, and physical mechanisms underlying STST, a common life history trait among many marine and estuarine species that is essential for continuation of populations. Specifically, combining results from field observations and laboratory experiments with a circulation model will allow researchers to predict hydrologic and meteorologic conditions that promote or impede female blue crab migration to and from spawning sites and estimate the relative contribution of larvae released from different areas of an estuary to the supply of developing larvae in coastal waters doc8358 none Language data is central to the research of a large social sciences community - not only linguists, but also anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and sociologists interested in the culture of indigenous peoples. Members of this research community are currently faced with two urgent situations: the number of languages in the world is rapidly diminishing while the number of initiatives to create digital archives of language data is rapidly multiplying. The latter might seem to be an unalloyed good in the face of the former, but there are two ways things may go wrong without adequate collaboration among archivists, linguists, and language engineers. First, a common standard for the digitization of linguistic data may never be agreed upon. And the resulting variation in archiving practices and language representation would seriously inhibit data access, searching, and cross-linguistic comparison. Second, standards may be implemented without guidance from the people who best know the range of structural possibilities in human language-descriptive linguists who have done fieldwork on poorly described languages. If digital archives of language data and documentation are to offer the widest possible access and to provide information in a maximally useful form, consensus must be reached about certain aspects of archive infrastructure. As the largest linguistic organization in the world and the central electronic publication of the discipline, The LINGUIST List http: www.linguistlist.org is organizing a collaborative project with a dual objective: (1) to preserve endangered languages data and documentation and (2) to aid in the development of infrastructure for linguistic archives. One outcome of the project will be a LINGUIST List digital archive housing data from 10 endangered languages. But the focus on infrastructure will produce other, equally important results. In the first place, The LINGUIST archive will function, not only as a repository, but also as a showroom of best practice. The archive will offer endangered languages data marked up and catalogued according to community consensus about best practice; furthermore, the archive will disseminate reference material delineating best practice and software tools supporting it. Another outcome will be the establishment on the LINGUIST List site of a central metadata server for the discipline; this server will organize information on all the language-related resources residing at distributed sites, not just endangered languages information alone. Other infrastructure-related outcomes include (1) the involvement of the linguistics community in establishing best practice, (2) the widespread dissemination of the resulting recommendations, and (3) the hands-on training of a substantial core of linguists and language archivists in the implementation of the guidelines. Although the data collection efforts will focus initially on endangered languages, the metadata server, the recommendations for best practice, and the distribution of supporting software will have a significant impact on all empirical research in linguistics. The project will thus add value to many other language-related projects currently planned or underway doc8359 none With support from the Chemical Instrumentation Program and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities, Jeffrey I. Steinfeld of Massachusetts Institute of Technology will convene an NSF Instrumentation for Environmental Science, Workshop. The focus of the workshop will be on identifying key measurement needs in environmental science and emerging measurement technologies that could have a significant impact on environmental measurements. Some unique challenges that may be further discussed at the workshop include (i) finding the signal in the noise; (ii) the highly complex sample environment; and (iii) in situ versus remote sensing, among others. The overall goal is to assist NSF in planning its programs and funding priorities for analytical instrumentation that will provide reliable, cost-effective environmental measurement techniques. The workshop will be held on November 10-12, , in Dedham, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. Approximately 40 scientists from academia, government and industry will participate. The workshop will prepare a report and present its findings at the Pittsburgh Conference in March, doc8357 none Many invertebrates and fishes use selective tidal-stream transport (STST) for horizontal movement. STST is based on a vertical migration pattern, in which animals leave the bottom and enter the water column during one phase of the tide and remain on or near the bottom during the other phase. One remarkable but unstudied aspect of STST within a species is the reversal in the direction of migration at different life history stages. Migration of the blue crab Callinectes sapidus, involving a reversal in STST direction following spawning, is the focus of this multidisciplinary research. During spawning migration, ovigerous females use ebb-tide transport to move seaward from estuaries. After releasing larvae, they reverse direction and undergo flood -tide transport to re-enter the estuary. The specific goals of this research are to: use biotelemetry to observe and characterize the pattern of movement and physical conditions during the spawning migration; simulate observed physical conditions and migratory pathways and extrapolate these results in time and space using a coupled bio-physical model; determine whether the behavior underlying STST is mediated by an endogenous rhythm in activity or by behavioral responses to exogenous cues; and determine the cues mediating the onset of ebb-tide transport by females with mature eggs and flood-tide transport of post--spawn females. The study integrates the fields of biological and physical oceanography and will expand our understanding of the cues, behaviors, and physical mechanisms underlying STST, a common life history trait among many marine and estuarine species that is essential for continuation of populations. Specifically, combining results from field observations and laboratory experiments with a circulation model will allow researchers to predict hydrologic and meteorologic conditions that promote or impede female blue crab migration to and from spawning sites and estimate the relative contribution of larvae released from different areas of an estuary to the supply of developing larvae in coastal waters doc8361 none The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) is a longitudinal study since of a representative sample of U.S. individuals and the family units in which they reside. The study s long-term span, innovative genealogical design, and comprehensive content have been critical to the fundamental understanding of a wide variety of key social science issues, including those involving life course effects. With thirty-plus years of data on the same families, the PSID can justly be considered a cornerstone of the infrastructure support for empirically based social science research. Through its long-term measures of economic and social well being, and based on its representative sample of U.S. families, the study has compelled both researchers and policy makers to confront and learn from the dynamism inherent in economic processes. The enormous usefulness of decades of data on the same families has made the PSID one of the most widely used social science data sets in the world. The project currently delivers 6,500 customized data sets a year to researchers via its Internet Data Center. Since , over 2,000 journal articles, books and chapters, dissertations and other works have been based on PSID data. And the study has been named one of the National Science Foundation s `Nifty Fifty most notable research efforts. The - funding cycle represented a major transition period for the PSID, in which the project implemented several important changes. In response to concern about dramatic growth in sample size, maintenance of representativeness, and fiscal constraints at the federal level, the project added a refresher sample of post- immigrants and suspended a number of families from the original Census Bureau oversample of low-income families. Most importantly, the study moved to a bi-ennial data collection schedule, with consequent changes to the instrument in order to collect interwave information on key variables. All of these changes returned the study to a steady state that maintains a sample of about the same size, attains national representation inclusive of new entrants, and has proved less costly to run-while maintaining the study s traditionally high data quality. In addition, to facilitate greater use of the data set, content was expanded in six major areas (intergenerational studies; savings and consumption; technology and capital formation; health and aging; child development; and immigration). In the - funding cycle, the PSID stabilizes and maintains this new state of the study. In contrast to the pre- state, the study s interview periodicity is now longer and its content is greatly expanded. The project focuses on improving the measures in areas affected by the longer periodicity, assessing the research value of the newly added content domains, and improving the processing and delivery of the data that is collected. Specifically, the project: 1. Expands content to facilitate investigation of current research questions and policy issues; 2. Continues the - cycle s data collection design changes, including biennial interviewing, with the associated cost reductions and productivity increases; 3. Integrates event history calendar methodology into the Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI) application to ensure data quality despite the greater time between interviews; 4. Maintains and improves several new systems for data editing, processing, and documentation; 5. Ensures that the study is the Gold Standard for income information through redesign of the CATI data collection instrument based on an Income and Wages Project; and 6. Improves and expedite data delivery through enhancements of the PSID web site Data Center. The renewal permits the PSID to perfect and assess the research value of the wider content areas and further facilitate usage of the study s data through improved data collection and processing. These efforts strongly reinforce the infrastructure value of the study in terms of the range of topics that can be addressed with the data and the ease of use for an ever-broadening range of social science scholars doc8362 none This grant supports a continuing collaboration between atmospheric scientists at the University of Wyoming and electrical engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the development and improvement of a 95 GHz (3.2 mm wavelength) radar and its application to studies of clouds and precipitation. The radar is ordinarily used in the Wyoming King Air research aircraft. Unlike ordinary weather radars, its short wavelength gives increased sensitivity to small drops and enables the radar to detect nonprecipitating clouds. Called the Wyoming Cloud Radar, it is capable of Doppler and polarimetric measurements. It will be mounted temporarily in the NCAR C-130 research aircraft for the DYCOMS-II project in July (Dynamics and Chemistry of Marine Stratocumulus). The data will give details on the cloud structure at the mixing region near cloud top and will also indicate the presence of drizzle, which is believed to have an important effect on the dynamics of the marine boundary layer. The capabilities of the WCR will be expanded by the addition of a second antenna in the King Air, which will permit dual-beam transmission for fine-scale observations of the horizontal wind field in convective clouds. The ideas will be tested in a field program in the High Plains (Colorado and Wyoming). The main research topics to be investigated are as follows: 1. Relationships between CCN counts, drop concentration, and updraft speed. 2. Horizontal wind field in different kinds of clouds. 3. Entrainment in cumulus clouds. 4. Drizzle formation in marine stratus clouds. 5. Refinement of an attenuation-based method ( stereorad ) for estimating cloud water content. Results are relevant to fundamental cloud physics, atmospheric remote sensing, and the parameterization of cloud effects in large-scale numerical models doc8214 none This project will build a comprehensive model to simulate interactions between energy, water, and carbon dioxide using data collected from tundra regions in northern Alaska. The model will be used to examine the role of global climate change on terrestrial ecosystems in an area that is predicted to be the first to feel the greatest effects of global warming. The project will utilize satellite images and data, data collected from recent field programs, and output from other models of the individual environmental components. The project will develop a regional simulation of climate impacts on terrestrial ecosystems and address the questions of energy and water balance in the Arctic system. The research will identify critical gaps in the understanding of climate-sensitive variables in the Arctic terrestrial ecosystem as well as the exchange of carbon dioxide with the atmosphere. Therefore, the project will be an important contribution to understanding the biocomplexity of the environment in an area undergoing rapid climate change at present doc8364 none Bats can be reservoirs for viruses that transmit to humans. As urban sprawl replaces natural colony sites with building roosts, the potential for public contact with bats as possible disease vectors increases. Rabies is the foremost example, but there is little credible information on rabies in bats from public health agency records. Less is known about rabies infection in free-flying urban bat populations, or on factors that affect transmission among individual bats and colonies. The project will develop empirical models of the influence of bat population dynamics and movements on rabies transmission rates. The study will emphasize sampling and recapture of marked big brown bats in Fort Collins, Colorado, a rapidly sprawling area. Bats will be sampled for rabies virus and antibodies, and other factors that may influence disease transmission will be determined using information-theoretic methods. Buildings with roosts will be characterized, and movements among buildings modeled using Geographic Information Systems. This work will improve understanding of the ecology of disease transmission in bats and provide a unique molecular-based characterization of rabies virus dynamics. The study will provide a more sophisticated and predictive evaluation of the transmission and spread of bat-borne diseases in growing urban areas doc8365 none This research award to Professor Troy Wood of SUNY-Buffalo entitled Durable Emitters for Nanoelectrospray Mass Spectrometry is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program. The goal of the research is the development of new technology for interfacing capillary electrophoresis (CE) with mass spectrometry (MS) through the fabrication of an improved interface. The emitters developed will be more durable than those currently available and they will be coated with a conducting polymer to enhance their operation. Additionally, the conducting polymer surface will be characterized using a variety of techniques such as FTIR, x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The surface characterization results will be correlated with emitter performance. This research is significant because mass spectrometry provides a highly sensitive method of detection for biomolecules and CE provides the high specificity separation needed to deal with the molecular complexity found in biological samples. The research will also support undergraduate students from Puerto Rico, which will greatly enhance the education of minority students. The proof-of-principle will be shown through three collaborative projects which have significant, real-world applications doc8366 none Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS) is designed to accomplish six goals: 1. to provide numerous social scientists with new opportunities for original data collection: 2. to promote innovative experiments; 3. to increase the precision with which fundamental social, political and economic dynamics are measured and understood: 4. to increase the speed and efficiency with which advances in social scientific theory and analyses can be applied to critical social problems: 5. to maximize financial efficiency by combining otherwise separate studies, thereby radically reducing the average and marginal costs of each study: 6. to create an Internet portal for people who want to learn about social science experimentation -- a place where teachers and students at many levels can easily benefit from these collective accomplishments. TESS will accomplish these goals using two large-scale, cooperative data collection instruments. Both the internet-based and telephone-based instruments will allow researchers to run novel experiments on a national random sample of American households for the purpose of examining substantive or methodological hypotheses. Scholars across the social sciences will compete for time on one or both instruments. A comprehensive review process will screen proposals for the importance of their contribution to science. The co-PIs. assisted by leading researchers from Economics, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology. Communication, Cognitive Science and related disciplines, will oversee the review process, drawing on reviews solicited from within each proposer s discipline. Because the data collection instruments will be in the field on a continuous basis, accepted experiments can be conducted quickly. Technologically, TESS combines the proven power of computer-assisted telephone interviewing with the new possibilities of computer-assisted Internet interviewing. Each approach allows researchers to capture the internal validity of traditional experiments while realizing the benefits of contact with large. diverse subject populations. Researchers can also use TESS to conduct experiments across interviewing modes. Such studies will reveal the extent to which phone and laboratory-based experimental findings are robust to interview contexts that can be created on home computers across the country. Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences provides new opportunities, both methodological and substantive, to a wide range of researchers. During the grant period TESS will open new research opportunities for over 150 individual researchers or research teams. By capitalizing on numerous economies of scale and having multiple experiments share time on each data collection instrument, TESS will allow numerous researchers to collect data tailored to their own hypotheses at an extraordinarily low cost per study. As a consequence, TESS will provide many social scientists with increased incentives to design innovative experiments. Moreover, by providing data collection instruments that are in the field on an ongoing basis, TESS will accelerate the pace at which research can be done and allow researchers to design studies that respond to current events. Education and training are integral parts of TESS. The website for this project, ExperimentCentral.org, is the core of an educational strategy. In addition to coordinating the submission and review process for TESS proposals. ExperimentCentral.org will allow students and teachers at many levels to learn about the many benefits of past and present social science experimentation. The site, in addition to providing quick and easy access to TESS data and analyses, will make it easier for many internet users to find experimental websites from the social sciences. The educational strategy also includes substantial graduate student training throughout the five-year project. In sum, Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences offers new opportunities for both substantive and methodological advances. The key to TESS is multiple studies from different disciplines sharing common observational platforms, all exploiting the inferential power and measurement efficiencies of experimental designs. This time-sharing on data collection platforms is also the key to economic efficiencies of TESS. By distributing the costs of sampling, interviewing, and instrument collection over a large number of studies, the marginal cost of each study can be reduced by orders of magnitude, indeed, often to a tenth or less of what each would cost if done on its own doc8367 none The project will investigate the dynamical interactions and tracer transports between the tropics and midlatitudes, especially during Northern winter. The equatorial upper troposphere is occupied by a belt of easterlies during much of the year, except winter, when westerly winds are present over the central eastern oceans. The easterlies are an effective barrier for equatorward propagating stationary Rossby waves, and the wintertime westerly duct thus presents an opening that allows vigorous tropical-extratropical interaction. Dr. Waugh will conduct a dynamically oriented analysis of meteorological fields and water vapor observations to understand how tropical-extratropical interactions through this conduit impact tropical convection, and the upper tropospheric distribution of water vapor (a major component in global warming), ozone, and trace gases. These trace substances exert a profound control on the earth s climate, directly through radiative impacts, and indirectly, through the altered balanced circulation. Dr. Waugh will use a range of dynamical and transport models to provide context for his observational findings doc8368 none The investigators seek funding to continue a National Data Program for the Social Sciences, namely the General Social Survey (GSS). The GSS has been monitoring social change in the United States, examining sub-groups in society, and studying social processes since . Over this period 23 cross-sectional surveys of the US adult household population have been completed, involving face-to-face interviews with approximately 41,000 respondents. Surveys seek to document fundamental social change in areas such as uses of technology, social and cultural capital, neighborhoods and communities, social networks and racial and gender attitudes. The GSS has six components, a replicated core set of questions, modules developed on topical subjects, cross-national modules, experiments and reinterview and follow-up studies. This grant will allow the GSS to continue these basic features and plans to conduct surveys in years and doc8369 none Tesanovic The investigator seeks to combine phenomenological and microscopic approaches to the problems of high temperature superconductors with the ambitious aim of constructing a theoretical framework capable of accounting for the known features of cuprate and other correlated superconductors, and of predicting new ones. The new approach would incorporate essential physics of strong correlations obtained from microscopic approaches that are absent from traditional phenomenological approaches. The initial focus of the work will be on the role of vortices in thermal and quantum fluctuations, the interaction of quasiparticles with vortices and their effect on critical behavior, and the interplay of fluctuations and correlations in the pseudogap regime of high temperature superconductors. %%% This proposal involves theoretical research and education in condensed matter theory with a focus on high temperature superconductors. A new attack will be mounted on the difficult problem of understanding the mechanism of superconductivity and elucidating the specific properties of high temperature superconductors that lead to the unusual and potentially technologically important phenomenon of high temperature superconductivity. The theoretical arsenal will include a new synthesis that combines essential elements from microscopic theories and phenomenological approaches doc8370 none Snyder Forman This is a collaborative proposal between the University of Illinois-Chicago and Bowling Green University. The Principal Investigators propose to decipher the glaciation history of northeastern Kola and Kanin peninsulas, Russia. This region, situated near the presumed last glacial maximum (LGM) confluence of the Scandinavian and Barents Sea ice sheets, is very important to the reconstruction of both ice masses. However, recent published glacier reconstructions of the region propose a variety of different interpretations. In particular, uncertainty exists on the glaciation of Kanin Peninsula during the LGM and on the presence and extent of an independent Ponoi ice cap on eastern Kola Peninsula during deglaciation. Much of the uncertainty in this region results from a lack of chronological control on features associated with glaciation and deglaciation of the region. To test these conflicting hypotheses, the Principal Investigators will undertake a broad glacial geologic field program which emphasizes the collection of data to provide an improved chronology of deqlaciation. They will do complementary geochronologic methods rock surface exposure dating utilizing the accumulation of cosmogenic 36Cl and 10Be and radiocarbon dating of basal organic materials preserved in lakes. Surface exposure samples will be collected from exposed glacial erratics and glacier-scoured bedrock surfaces. Radiocarbon samples will be obtained by coring glacier-scoured lakes, abundant in the region. In addition, new basic data on glacial geology, such as ice-flow-direction indicators and glacial stratigraphy, will be collected and integrated with previous observations in the region to provide a geomorphic and stratigraphic framework for their investigations. This research should lead to significant improvements in our knowledge of the extent of Late Weichselian glaciation and the chronology and patterns of deglaciation in the region. Better knowledge of the existence and timing of an independent Ponoi ice cap will provide a means to assess regional climatic gradients during the Younger Dryas and earlier late-glacial climate events. Furthermore, improved reconstruction of Late Weichselian glaciation and deglaciation of the region will aid the broader scientific community by providing more realistic data to improve models of global climate, Earth rheology and sea-level change doc8371 none Professor Joseph Pesek of San Jose State University is sponsored by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program via a RUI grant for research on fabrication, characterization and applications of new separation media. The research will lead to the development of new substrates for HPLC, capillary electrophoresis (CE), capillary electrochromatography (CEC), and solid phase microextraction (SPME) for the purpose of improved separations. The first part of the work focuses on chemical modification of silica and other oxide surfaces with organic moieties, especially alkynes. Chemical modification will also be achieved with liquid crystal compounds. The second part focuses on etching processes for the purpose of increased surface area, and subsequent application of these materials to open tube CEC separations (OTCEC) and SPME configurations. OTCEC will be developed for improved separation of proteins, peptides and pharmaceuticals. The ability to separate biological compounds is of great importance in medical research and genomics, as well as in chemical and pharmaceutical industry. Exposure to this work will enable San Jose students (many of whom are from under-represented groups) to enter technical positions in these areas of national need doc8372 none Dissemination This project is a communication dissemination project for teachers, administrators and teacher educators to improve their knowledge and familiarity with resources for the teaching science to students with disabilities. The project will continue an existing alliance with NSTA to enhance equity for all students in science. The mode of delivery will be a two-day pre-conference program presented at the NSTA Annual Meeting in St. Louis, Missouri on March 20-25, , a sectional presentation at the NSTA meeting, and maintaining an exhibit booth in the exhibition hall throughout the conference. This project will educate professionals providing services to students with disabilities about effective resources, and teaching assessment strategies. The disability areas addressed will include motor orthopedic impairments, deaf and hard of hearing, visual impairments, learning disabilities, cognitive impairments, and behavioral disabilities. Information in the areas of assistive technologies, teacher education, research on effective teaching, methods of instruction, materials and programs, evaluation and assessment, and educational organizations and agencies will be disseminated to participants in the pre-conference and to those visiting the exhibit booth. The proposed effort will address responsibilities of educators contained in legislative mandates (i.e. Disabilities Education Act, ; Americans with Disabilities Act, , Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, ), inequities reflected in the literature concerning opportunities in science for students with disabilities, and informational needs of teachers and teacher educators in making science instruction responsive to students with disabilities doc8373 none This is a twenty-four month standard award to support an extended, computer-mediated workshop on technical, cognitive, and social processes and infrastructures for distributed collective practices (DCP). DCP is conceptualized along the dimensions of social organization, cognitive processes, and technical infrastructures. A fourth crosscutting area of considerable emerging importance is the development of very large distributed, shareable information bases, community memory projects, and data warehouses, that create computer-mediated collective memory practices. This workshop brings together computer scientists, cognitive scientists, library and information scientists, artificial intelligence researchers, and social scientists, with the aim of strengthening and focusing the emergent multidisciplinary, international research community in this area. The workshop will be structured as a two-year web-based discussion, punctuated with two face-to-face meetings. The first year will establish a seed community, elaborate an international research program, and involve international scientific communities and the general public. The second year will assess progress, synthesize the results of discussions and joint work, develop and refocus the program s objectives, and produce documentation. This project involves four participating groups from France and the US, including the CNRS Laboratoire d Informatique pour la Mecanique et les Sciences de l Ingenieur (LIMSI); the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications (ENST); the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). Collaborative funding is being provided by the UNESCO Management Of Social Transformations Program and the Societe Francaise des Sciences de l Information et de la Communication doc8374 none Visual scenes contain far more information than can be perceived consciously at any given instant. The information that does reach visual awareness is selected by attention. However, since attention has very limited processing capacities, it constrains severely the amount of visual information accessible for visual perception. Surprisingly little is known about the circumstances under which attention limits perception and about the neural substrates that underlie these restricted attentional capacities. By using a combination of behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments, this research will examine the behavioral conditions under which attentional capacities are strained, and it will map out the brain regions that are responsible for these capacity limits. The research will use the attentional blink (AB) paradigm as a model for understanding the neural correlates of attentional limits to visual perception. The AB refers to a severe but transient (about half a second) impairment in detecting the second of two target objects presented amidst a rapid sequence of objects. The blink occurs when attentional mechanisms are consumed by the processing of the first target, leaving little attention available to perceive the second target, which hence may go undetected. Thus, the AB can be used as a measure of attentional capacity limits. One series of experiments will determine the conditions that trigger the attentional blink. While it is well known that the presence of multiple objects in a visual scene can compete with a target for attentional resources, this research will determine whether other conditions that render a target less discernable may also drain attentional resources. Another series of experiments will examine whether increasing the difficulty in perceiving an object, such as by decreasing its visibility, is sufficient to increase attentional demands and generate an AB. The research will also determine the generality of the capacity-limited process revealed by the AB. Do various forms of attention, namely task-driven (top-down) and stimulus-driven (bottom-up) attention, show similar capacity limits? Do other sensory modalities, namely the auditory system, also show capacity limits like the visual AB, and do they tap on the same attentional resources as the visual system? And finally, are the attentional resources necessary to perform perceptual tasks such as letter identification the same as those required when performing motor tasks, such as response selection? The experimental approach will be first to determine behaviorally whether different forms of attentional processes show capacity constraints, and then to carry out a series of fMRI experiments to determine the neural substrates which mediate these capacity-limited processes. A massive amount of visual information can be processed in parallel in the initial stages of visual information processing. However, soon the information enters some capacity-limited stage(s) that severely limit the amount of visual information that can reach conscious perception. These experiments will reveal the behavioral conditions that produce bottlenecks, and fMRI data will determine where the bottlenecks occur along the visual information-processing pathway in the human brain. This research should therefore reveal important insights into the neuro-architecture of human visual information processing, and it will also advance our understanding of the link between attention and visual perception doc8356 none The conduct of advanced research involving biological materials from nonhuman primates requires open access to high quality, well documented samples. Until now, access has been opportunistic and quality control highly variable. This Infrastructure Award will establish an Integrated Primate Biomaterials and Information Resource that will be developed through a collaboration among Coriell Institute for Medical Research (Coriell), the International Species Information System (ISIS), Princeton University (PU), the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), and the Zoological Society of San Diego (ZSSD). The Resource will provide primate biomaterials such as DNA and cell lines for research that takes advantage of emerging genetic technologies and the human genome sequence to probe questions of human origins, primate phylogeny and biogeography, conservation, and human behavior and cognition. With policy and priorities guided by a broadly based Scientific Advisory Committee, the Resource collaboration includes institutions that bring expertise in biomaterials banking, bioinformatics, information access, and in primate conservation, behavior, and ecology. Resource priorities include high levels of quality control and wide accessibility to researchers who would not otherwise have access to necessary materials for research, conservation, and capacity-building. The collection will seek to provide a balance among diversity and depth of sampling combined with maximal associated information or other available with samples doc8376 none This research is an historical study focused on the introduction from Europe of two major innovations into the concrete construction industry of the United States: thin shell concrete structures and prestressed concrete. These two European innovations came to the United States during the first half of the 20th century and subsequently had major impacts on American engineering. Each has a different history on this continent and those differences are important for this project as their similarities. Both cases reveal central aspects of twentieth century American construction and shed light on how American technological culture differs from that in Europe. The background for this scholarly work includes the experience of the principal investigator first in the history of technology, second in connecting scholarship to teaching, and third in both of the innovations to be studied. Since the principal investigator has focused a central part of his scholarship on historical studies. During the s the principal investigator worked for the leading figures in each case and has since collected archival documents relating to both thin shells and prestressing. The study examine the thin shell concrete roof structures and long-span roofs and bridges in prestressed concrete from the period to . The main focus falls on the influence of two European-trained engineers who introduced these new ideas into American engineering practice: Anton Tedesko ( - ) for thin shells and Gustave Magnel ( - ) for prestressing. The results of this study are to be three lengthy essays each of which will be submitted to a scholarly journal. A short essay on these two men, given as a lecture (in November ) upon receipt of the Sarton Medal from the University of Ghent, presents a preliminary sketch of the final works in this program and will be published by Ghent University in . The PI also plans a series of shorter articles in such journals as the American Scientist, Scientific American, The Journal of the Structural Division of ASCE, and Structural Engineering International. Also sets of teaching materials will be prepared for use at Princeton and in other schools doc8377 none The investigators will study the basic transport processes of the magnetospheric convecting plasma. The effort concentrates on the electric current, momentum and heat flows in the magnetosphere and interaction between the magnetosphere and ionosphere. Because the motion of a charged particle is described by a more accurate approximation than the guiding center approximation and each species of the plasma is treated separately, this study will provide new insight into magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling. The ultimate aim is to improve on the traditional guiding field line approach to describing the motion of particles in electric and magnetic fields. The project will also strengthen the newly established space research program at Prairie View A&M, a historic black university, and increase minority participation in space research doc8378 none Researchers studying evolution and development consider questions regarding the origins, development, and transitions of fins to limbs, digits and external reproductive structures to be one of the fundamental issues in their discipline. Although there are several theories regarding these issues in the transition of paired fins (pectoral) to fore limbs and paired fins (pelvic) to hind limbs, there are no theories regarding the transition of the median unpaired fin (anal) to external reproductive structures. However, the body of research on paired fins to limb transitions in a variety of biological systems is sufficient enough that investigators should begin to synthesize what is known about the transitions of paired fins and extend that knowledge to the transition of the median unpaired fin to external reproductive structures. A symposium entitled Starting from Fins: Parallelism in the Evolution of Limbs and External Reproductive Structures held at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Conference in January will provide a forum for a group of scientists whose work focuses on the evolutionary, developmental, physiological, and phylogenetic parallelism between fins, limbs, digits and external reproductive structures. Speakers will address issues of parallelism in development (i.e., the occurrence of analogous anatomical structures, genes, and developmental programs that present striking similarity of appearance). They will address issues in serial homology (the repetition of morphologically identical segments and genes within individuals). Finally, they will address changes in genes, anatomical structures, and developmental programs that may be linked to changes in function and habitat during an individual life history. The overall objectives of this symposium are to 1) elucidate common evolutionary mechanisms in the development of fins, limbs and external reproductive structures and 2) provide presenters and participants an opportunity to begin a dialog on big picture questions regarding parallelism, serial homology, and transitions doc8379 none This project consists of a three-step strategy for supporting collaboration among diverse research communities with the goals of encouraging the research-based analysis of molecular visualization and defining the role of molecular visualization in the teaching of chemistry . An invitational workshop on molecular visualization in the teaching of chemistry will provide a forum for lead chemists, cognitive scientists, and chemical educators to define directions for new research and development in this field, in particular with respect to modes of interaction with visualizations of molecular structure and dynamics. The project also provides travel support for 20 teachers, school administrators, college and university faculty, and graduate students attending the Gordon Research Conference on Science Education and Visualization: International, August 5-10, . In order to encourage continuing collaboration among In order to continue emerging collaborations that form at the Gordon Research Conference on Science Education and Visualization, participants will be invited to apply for five minigrants of $5,000 each to continue interdisciplinary collaborations formed to conduct research or development work in molecular visualization in science education doc8214 none This project will build a comprehensive model to simulate interactions between energy, water, and carbon dioxide using data collected from tundra regions in northern Alaska. The model will be used to examine the role of global climate change on terrestrial ecosystems in an area that is predicted to be the first to feel the greatest effects of global warming. The project will utilize satellite images and data, data collected from recent field programs, and output from other models of the individual environmental components. The project will develop a regional simulation of climate impacts on terrestrial ecosystems and address the questions of energy and water balance in the Arctic system. The research will identify critical gaps in the understanding of climate-sensitive variables in the Arctic terrestrial ecosystem as well as the exchange of carbon dioxide with the atmosphere. Therefore, the project will be an important contribution to understanding the biocomplexity of the environment in an area undergoing rapid climate change at present doc8381 none With this renewal award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the work of Dr. John I. Brauman of the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. The work seeks a fundamental understanding of the equilibria, kinetics, and optical and infrared photochemistry of ions in the gas phase. Experimental methods include ion cyclotron resonance spectroscopy, high pressure and flowing afterglow mass spectrometry, and optical and infrared photoexcitation, using both conventional and laser light sources. The work seeks to understand some of the most fundamental issues in organic chemistry, by studying the reactions of reactive intermediates in the gas phase using a variety of experimental techniques. Correlating structure with reactivity and comparing gas phase and solution phase behavior provides insights into the roles solvents play in influencing the outcomes of chemical reactions. The work is expected to provide excellent training for graduate students in both teaching and research doc8382 none David Hendrickson of the University of California, San Diego is supported by the Inorganic Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program in continued research on lattice dynamics and bistability of electronically labile complexes. The main focus of the research is on polynuclear Mn, Fe, V, and Ni complexes that function as single molecule magnets (SMMs). Valence tautomers of cobalt complexes will also be investigated. In SMMs, magnetism does not arise from interactions between molecules but from the circumstance that each individual molecule has a high-spin ground state with negative magnetoanisometry. The major goals of the research are: 1) to identify SMMs that operate at higher temperatures, 2) investigate the mechanism of resonant magnetism tunneling, 3) clarify the influence of the magnitude of ground state spin, 4) elucidate the influence of isomerism of duodecamanganese complexes, 5) investigate the influence of magnetic counterions, 6) prepare half-integer ground state SMMs, 7) discover ways to orient SMMs on a surface. An additional goal is to determine whether interconversion of semiquinone complexes of cobalt involve quantum mechanical tunneling. During the period of this grant, collaborations will be established in order to design and fabricate useful microelectronic devices. Single molecule magnets (SMMs) are molecular nanomagnets. SMMs are widely recognized as having great potential in the development of devices useful in ultra-micro electronics. This field is being actively investigated in Japan and Europe. Research produced by this group under prior NSF support has set a high standard of quality and productivity. This laboratory is ranked as the world s premier center of research and education in magnetochemistry. The science has progressed to the point that development of specific useful devices seems feasible doc7989 none Northern wetlands store large quantities of carbon and are significant sources of atmospheric methane. Impending climatic changes may greatly affect the role of these environments in the carbon cycle. Decomposition of organic matter occurs anaerobically in these wetlands. However, recent findings suggest that the terminal methanogenic step in northern wetlands is altered relative to more southerly systems, with acetate acting as a terminal product even though methane production continues via hydrogen utilization. If this phenomenon is ubiquitous, then acetate is not a significant intermediate in northern wetlands, but serves as a terminal product of decomposition; one that is ultimately degraded aerobically to CO2 rather than methane. Acetate accumulation in northern wetlands represents a paradigm shift in our understanding of anaerobic decomposition. It is possible that warming in the north will shift this process toward what occurs in more southerly wetlands. If so, then methane production in the north will increase greatly over what might occur from warming alone. This work will test the hypothesis that northern wetlands do not support significant methanogenesis from acetate and that acetate formation and accumulation is an important terminal step during anaerobic degradation of organic matter. This phenomenon is being investigated by a multidisciplinary team that will utilize field and laboratory investigations and microbiological, molecular biology, geochemical, pedological, and stable isotope approaches. The objectives of the project are: 1) assess the ubiquity of the acetate-accumulating phenomenon by examining acetate concentrations and production rates, geochemical conditions, and by applying isotopic and molecular techniques to a variety of northern wetland types representative of the major circumpolar arctic, subarctic and northern boreal environments; 2) Provide a temporal framework for determining variations in controls on methanogenic pathways and acetate cycling by conducting seasonal studies; 3) determine the effects of physical and chemical parameters on terminal decomposition using laboratory manipulations of incubation conditions; 4) determine if the bacterial populations are distinct compared to other wetlands and other anaerobic habitats. Incubation assays, radiotracer analyses, stable isotopes and natural radiocarbon abundances will be used to address pathways of decomposition in field and laboratory experiments. Molecular approaches including PCR-DGGE and hybridization probing will be used to determine bacterial diversity and population structure. A demonstration that biochemical pathways of methane formation in these wetlands are unique compared to their more southerly counterparts, has tremendous implications for our ability to predict the what the role of these wetlands will be in contributing methane to the global atmosphere and in their ability to degrade stored carbon. Acetate may serve as a primary organic end product, which would thus constitute a separate terminal decomposition pathway occurring simultaneously with methanogenesis. The multi-disciplinary study proposed here will delineate the important details of these processes and will serve to demonstrate their spatial significance doc8384 none The human brain has been considered the most complex object in the universe known to man. Trillions of neurons are wired together precisely through thousands of times more connections. In this immensely complicated network, neurons are interconnected through wire-like processes called axons. How does this complex organ develop? What are the molecular signals that direct the formation of axon pathways and guide the growing axon tip toward proper target? These questions have fascinated scientists for centuries. Recent studies from our laboratory and the laboratories of others indicated that a family of cell surface molecules, termed receptors, that sense extracellular signals, play key roles in guiding axons. This project utilizes several molecular techniques to examine how the Eph receptors and their signaling partners regulate the formation of corpus callosum, an axon fiber that connects the two cerebral hemispheres, and is important for left and right coordination. Experiments examine where these molecules are located, how they affect axon growth and migration, and what are the effects on corpus callosum formation in development when these molecules are inactivated. Results from these studies will reveal the molecular mechanism of axon guidance and help to understand how this extremely complex organ, the brain, is wired together doc8214 none This project will build a comprehensive model to simulate interactions between energy, water, and carbon dioxide using data collected from tundra regions in northern Alaska. The model will be used to examine the role of global climate change on terrestrial ecosystems in an area that is predicted to be the first to feel the greatest effects of global warming. The project will utilize satellite images and data, data collected from recent field programs, and output from other models of the individual environmental components. The project will develop a regional simulation of climate impacts on terrestrial ecosystems and address the questions of energy and water balance in the Arctic system. The research will identify critical gaps in the understanding of climate-sensitive variables in the Arctic terrestrial ecosystem as well as the exchange of carbon dioxide with the atmosphere. Therefore, the project will be an important contribution to understanding the biocomplexity of the environment in an area undergoing rapid climate change at present doc8386 none The PIs will measure trace elements (Ba, U, Mo, Mn, and Ge) in Jahnke s existing benthic flux chamber samples dating back to . The goal is to establish bottom boundary conditions governing the regeneration and burial of several tracers used to interpret past ocean chemistry, circulation, productivity, carbon flux and redox conditions. Existing sites include a wide variety of oceanic environments. The samples will be screened with low-precision ICP-MS methods and subsets of selected samples will be analyzed with high-precision ID-ICP-MS. Selected pore water samples will also be screened and analyzed. These data will be used to understand processes controlling transfer across the sediment-water interface and quantitative relationships with other parameters doc8387 none Dubcovsky This U.S.-Hungarian research involves Jorge Dubcovsky of the University of California, Davis, and Gabor Galiba of the Hungarian Agricultural Research Institute, Martonvasar, and features the isolation and characterization of genes affecting frost tolerance in wheat. The researchers will combine the genetic models and tools for diploid wheat, Triticum monococcum, developed at Davis with the characterization procedures for frost tolerance and vernalization developed at Martonvasar. Their goal is to determine how to cone the genes responsible for frost tolerance in wheat. Using a combination of positional cloning and differential display approaches, their joint research plan includes: 1) construction of a detailed chromosomal map for a new found gene affecting frost tolerance in wheat, Fr-Am2, on the chromosome 5AmL of T. monococcum; 2) mapping the regulatory loci of winter hardiness, cor14b, a cold-inducible expression on T. monococcum; and 3) mapping the stress induced genes, identified by differential display and deletion and substitution of chromosome 5A in hexaploid wheat. Successfully identified cDNA clones will be incorporated into T. monococcum maps. Molecular markers tightly linked to the frost tolerance genes will be used to screen the Bacterial Artificial Chromosome (BAC) library of T. monococcum to characterize the complete genes and their regulatory elements. Results are expected to relate controlling loci to inducible genes. If successful, the new information may contribute to our basic understanding of the physiological and biochemical bases for freeze tolerance, which is an agriculturally important plant trait. This international project in plant genome research fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the Untied States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc8388 none Jimmy Doll of Brown University and David Freeman of the University of Rhode Island are supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program for research that addresses theoretical issues concerning the prediction, characterization, and control of the structure and dynamics of cluster-based precursors. This effort seeks to invert the logic of the minimization problem, by undertaking to reshape energy landscapes and thereby to exercise control over selected physical systems. In particular, this research aims to learn to stabilize and or chemically trap cluster conformers that are otherwise either unstable or metastable. The project goals are to (1) identify possible approaches for achieving thermodynamic and kinetic control of selected cluster structures, (2) establish those observables that provide the most sensitive signatures of relevant cluster structure and dynamics, and (3) assist in the interpretation of experimental data relevant to those observables. To promote the interplay between experimental and theoretical observations, collaboration with experimentalists at Argonne National Laboratory is planned. Computer simulations have proved to be useful tools that aid in predicting the properties of new materials. With the development of new synthetic methods that use nanoscale clusters as fundamental building blocks, computational studies of clusters are expected to grow in importance. The outcomes of this research are expected to provide the necessary experience and background to help determine methods for controlling structures and properties of the component parts for materials composed of clusters, with likely applications in chemistry, biology, and materials science doc8389 none Andreas Albrecht has support from the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program to continue his studies on nonlinear vibronic and electronic spectroscopy of molecules in the condensed phase. He will use theoretical and experimental methods to investigate nonlinear measurements of chirality. The systems are in isotropic media and measurements are at the electric dipole level. Specifically he will study fifth order odd-wave mixing as an ultrafast optical analog to 2D NMR. Chiral systems are central in chemistry and physics. These studies will yield information about systems that support chirality that is otherwise non-attainable. Especially noteworthy is the fact that these methods will have the time resolution required to resolve biological dynamics. Due to the applications to biologically-interesting molecules in solution, these studies will have a significant impact in areas well beyond chemistry or chemical physics doc8390 none Curry In the late s and early s the source of Labrador Sea Water (LSW) became colder, fresher and denser during a persistent high phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation. This provided an anomalous signature which could be used to track deep water as it flows south in the Deep Western Boundary Current (DWBC) of the North Atlantic. This project will analyze data collected from a series of sections across the deep western boundary current in and near the tropical Atlantic, including some that were recently made under a Small Grant for Exploratory Research. One aim is to determine the speed with which the anomalous LSW signal is traveling along the western boundary of the North Atlantic. This will provide an estimate of how rapidly climate signals associated with adjustments in the ocean s meridional overturning circulation can propagate from high to low latitudes. This is an important parameter in many scenarios of climate change and one that can be used to test the fidelity of climate models. A second aim is to determine the dynamical effects on the DWBC of the passage of this anomalously low potential vorticity doc8391 none Helfrich This project addresses the dynamics of buoyant coastal plumes of the sort produced by fresh-water river discharge. The main goal is to provide a quantitative description of buoyant coastal currents over a sloping bottom. The structure of such currents will be explored with a combination of analysis of existing observational data, laboratory experiments and numerical modeling. Existing theoretical estimates of the width of the current, the depth of the offshore edge, and the speed of advance of the nose of the current will be tested. The observational data are from an experiment in the Chesapeake Plume. The laboratory data will come from experiments in a rotating tank. The numerical model is a version of the Princeton Ocean Model (ECOM3d doc8392 none Spall - A series of numerical model experiments will investigate the cause of intense recirculation gyres observed along the boundaries of the Irminger and Labrador Seas, their structure, and their influence on the formation and export of Labrador Sea Water. Labrador Sea Water is an important component of the decadal scale variability of the oceans. The MIT Circulation Model will be used in a hydrostatic configuration with partial cell resolution in the vertical. Initial, small-scale studies will use idealized topography with wind and buoyancy forcing. Grid size will be small enough to allow development of eddies. Later, regional scale modeling will allow incorporation of large-scale circulation patterns and more realistic topography. Results of these studies will be compared with field observations doc8393 none The PIs will measure trace elements (Ba, U, Mo, Mn, and Ge) in Jahnke s existing benthic flux chamber samples dating back to . The goal is to establish bottom boundary conditions governing the regeneration and burial of several tracers used to interpret past ocean chemistry, circulation, productivity, carbon flux and redox conditions. Existing sites include a wide variety of oceanic environments. The samples will be screened with low-precision ICP-MS methods and subsets of selected samples will be analyzed with high-precision ID-ICP-MS. Selected pore water samples will also be screened and analyzed. These data will be used to understand processes controlling transfer across the sediment-water interface and quantitative relationships with other parameters doc8394 none The goal of U.S. Global Ocean Ecosystems Dynamics (GLOBEC) research is to understand the potential impacts of climate change on ocean ecosystems. U.S. GLOBEC has matured into a multi-regional program with ongoing or planned studies in the Georges Bank Northwest Atlantic region, the California Current off Oregon and northern California, the Coastal Gulf of Alaska, and the Southern Ocean. These study sites have been specifically chosen to afford opportunities to examine the potential impacts of climate change on key physical processes affecting recruitment of marine populations. In order to continue these research programs, this grant will provide support for the Coordinating Office for the U.S. GLOBEC Scientific Steering Committee. The national office provides coordination and support for the regional programs, scientific planning and review, and communication. As the program has developed into a functional multi-regional program, the emphasis of the Scientific Steering Committee has shifted from scientific planning for the local field programs to an emphasis on coordination and planning for comparative studies and for integration within and between regional studies. The Coordinating Office will assume data management responsibilities for the U.S. GLOBEC program as a whole. This effort will supplant and expand the role currently played by the Georges Bank Data Management Office. It will ensure standardization of data sources and will provide ready access to all data sets according to the U.S. GLOBEC Data Management Policy. The Coordinating Office will be relocated to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and will remain in place for the duration of the U.S. GLOBEC Program. The principal advantages of a fixed location for the GLOBEC Coordinating Office at WHOI include greater stability in funding and time horizon for office personnel and ease in establishment and maintenance of a central data hub for each of the U.S. GLOBEC study sites doc8395 none Programmed cell death (PCD) is a normal part of the life and death of a cell. PCD can be triggered by a wide variety of stimuli, such as growth factor deprivation, exposure to mutagenic agents, ionizing radiation, etc. whose stimulus is mediated by a member of the tumor necrosis factor receptor (TNFR) superfamily. A subset of TNFRs, termed death receptors (DRs), are responsible for transducing a death signal into a cellular response. DRs are characterized by the presence of a C-terminal six-helix bundle known as the death domain (DD). The DD is the focal point of the assembly of an oligomeric complex around which assemble a group of proteins that sense the death signal and transmit the signal to send it down a signaling cascade. One of the most important DRs is the Fas CD95 receptor. Fas plays a role in the regulation of the immune response and in the control of peripheral B and T cell survival that is critical to immune cell homeostasis. Fas-mediated PCD is implicated in the maintenance of immune privilege in the eye and testis as well as in attenuating immunosurveillance of certain types of tumors. In response to a stimulus, Fas is thought to oligomerize through the DD and recruit the effector FADD. Like Fas, FADD contains a DD at its C-terminus and binds, albeit with unknown stoichiometry, to the receptor DD. On the N-terminus of FADD is a second protein-interaction domain, the death effector domain (DED), which recruits the initiator caspase-8 to the growing signalling complex. The Fas FADD caspase-8 complex is known as the death-inducing signalling complex (DISC) and represents the minimal complex necessary for induction of PCD. Although the structure of the FADD-DD and FADD-DED have been solved in truncated forms by NMR, there is yet to be a clear description of the binding surface, binding affinity or binding stoichiometry of FADD to Fas in an activated state. Indeed, this information is lacking for all DRs identified to date. This project will conduct a series of biophysical studies aimed at defining the molecular architecture of FADD in the Fas signaling complex. Specifically, the relative orientation of the FADD DD and DED will be determined from completion of the full-length 3D structure of FADD in solution. The stoichiometry of the Fas FADD interaction will be measured by gel-filtration, analytical ultracentrifugation and isothermal binding calorimetry of the complex using a soluble form of the Fas receptor. It will further be determined whether the DD is sufficient for DISC assembly by construction of a soluble receptor mimic with a defined oligomerization state for the Fas-DD. Finally, mutagenesis in combination with isothermal binding calorimetry and analytical ultracentrifugation will define the binding surface of the Fas FADD complex and determine the binding affinity. Collectively these data will provide new insights into the architecture of the Fas DISC. The outcome of this study will provide a molecular insight into the mechanism of programmed cell death doc8396 none The end products of the phenylpropanoid pathway play important roles in plant structure and plant growth and development, as well as in plants defenses against biotic and abiotic stresses. Phenylpropanoid pathway-derived metabolites are important in both human health and in agricultural contexts. An important gap in our understanding of phenylpropanoid metabolism is represented by p-coumarate 3-hydroxylase (C3H), the only enzyme of the pathway that has not been characterized, and the enzyme encoded by the only gene of the pathway that has not been cloned. The 3-hydroxylase is an enigmatic enzyme. It has eluded all attempts over the last thirty years to unambiguously characterize it in detail at the enzymatic level. This research project focuses on a new mutant of Arabidopsis that is likely to be defective in the gene encoding this enzyme. Past research has shown that Arabidopsis is an excellent model plant for the isolation of previously unidentified phenylpropanoid pathway genes. By screening for plants that fail to accumulate soluble fluorescent phenylpropanoid secondary metabolites, a number of new Arabidopsis mutants that display a reduced epidermal fluorescence (ref) phenotype have been identified. One of these mutants, ref8, is defective in C3H activity. The identification of the ref8 mutant provides a unique opportunity to isolate the gene encoding C3H. A preliminary phenotypic characterization of the ref8 mutant has been conducted, and the C3H gene has been cloned. C3H is a cytochrome P450-dependent monooxygenase, the activity of which has been verified by expression of the wild-type gene in yeast. The goals of this project are to characterize this poorly-studied enzyme, to clarify its role in the phenylpropanoid pathway, to identify when and where the protein is expressed, and to determine why ref8 mutations lead to alterations in plant growth and development doc8397 none White Atmospheric methane is an important chemical component of the stratosphere and troposphere and is a major contributor to the anthropogenic enhancement of the greenhouse effect. Quantifying the budget of methane is difficult because of the wide range of source types and locations from which it is emitted. Measurements of the atmospheric concentration and the carbon isotopic composition of methane have given us a better understanding of the controls over the modem methane budget. We can gain insights into the modern methane budget, which is heavily influenced by anthropogenic effects, by studying the methane budget just prior to and during industrialization and the emergence of large human populations. This research project is designed to add to our understanding of the paleo-methane budget by measuring the 13C:12C ratio of methane(d13CH4 )trapped in polar ice of the last millennium. Over the past few years, the University of Colorado Stable Isotope Lab (SIL) at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) has made nearly high precision d13CH4 measurements on very small samples of ambient air from the NOAA CNML Global Air Sampling Network. With minor modifications, this analysis system will be ideally suited to measure d13CH4 on the small amount of CH4 available from air bubbles trapped in ice cores. This research is a collaborative effort between the SIL, the NOAA Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory (CMDL) Carbon Cycle Group (CCG) in Boulder, Colorado and the Gas Consortium of NorthGRIP (with Swiss, French, German, U.S., Danish, and Japanese participation). The Principal Investigators will examine and compare high-resolution methane concentration and isotopic histories during the last millennium as recorded in ice from the NorthGRIP area in Greenland. They will make pilot measurements of d D values of methane to explore the usefulness of this isotope and to make measurements of d13C in CO2 (d13CO2) in the trapped air to help understand why PCO2 measurements made on Greenland ice have so far been unreliable. The Gas Consortium of NorthGRIP will provide field and experimental expertise for the extraction of air from the ice cores and firn as well as measurements of concentrations and isotope ratios in other gases in the cores. SIL will provide expertise on isotopic measurements of very small air samples and make isotope measurements on methane and carbon dioxide. NOAA CCG will assist in the calibration of standards and analyze gas concentrations in firn air samples. The goal is to improve our understanding of the modem methane budget and how humans impact and modify that budget, now, in the past, and future doc8282 none The project will examine in greater detail the depth of thawing of the soils in northern Alaska. Climate change is increasing the depth of thaw and eroding permafrost with concomitant impacts on vegetation, the hydrological balances, and human structures. This research will refine existing methods for mapping the depth of thaw on local and regional scales. The shallow thermal regime will be evaluated across a spectrum of spatial scales in order to elucidate the role of soil structure on heat transport. The impact of heavy snow loading on the thaw depth will be examined based on manipulative experiments. Also, the project will also examine the role of the heat island affect by a community in northern Alaska doc8370 none Snyder Forman This is a collaborative proposal between the University of Illinois-Chicago and Bowling Green University. The Principal Investigators propose to decipher the glaciation history of northeastern Kola and Kanin peninsulas, Russia. This region, situated near the presumed last glacial maximum (LGM) confluence of the Scandinavian and Barents Sea ice sheets, is very important to the reconstruction of both ice masses. However, recent published glacier reconstructions of the region propose a variety of different interpretations. In particular, uncertainty exists on the glaciation of Kanin Peninsula during the LGM and on the presence and extent of an independent Ponoi ice cap on eastern Kola Peninsula during deglaciation. Much of the uncertainty in this region results from a lack of chronological control on features associated with glaciation and deglaciation of the region. To test these conflicting hypotheses, the Principal Investigators will undertake a broad glacial geologic field program which emphasizes the collection of data to provide an improved chronology of deqlaciation. They will do complementary geochronologic methods rock surface exposure dating utilizing the accumulation of cosmogenic 36Cl and 10Be and radiocarbon dating of basal organic materials preserved in lakes. Surface exposure samples will be collected from exposed glacial erratics and glacier-scoured bedrock surfaces. Radiocarbon samples will be obtained by coring glacier-scoured lakes, abundant in the region. In addition, new basic data on glacial geology, such as ice-flow-direction indicators and glacial stratigraphy, will be collected and integrated with previous observations in the region to provide a geomorphic and stratigraphic framework for their investigations. This research should lead to significant improvements in our knowledge of the extent of Late Weichselian glaciation and the chronology and patterns of deglaciation in the region. Better knowledge of the existence and timing of an independent Ponoi ice cap will provide a means to assess regional climatic gradients during the Younger Dryas and earlier late-glacial climate events. Furthermore, improved reconstruction of Late Weichselian glaciation and deglaciation of the region will aid the broader scientific community by providing more realistic data to improve models of global climate, Earth rheology and sea-level change doc8400 none and The process of dissolved organic matter (DOM) transport toward export regions has been inferred mostly from a few sections showing surface accumulation of enhanced dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentration and penetration to depth. Decomposition during flow from source regions to export sites has not been studied, nor has the accompanying transport of dissolved organic nitrogen and phosphorus (DON and DOP). In this project, researchers at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences will observe the transport of accumulated DOC, DON and DOP during the spring phytoplankton bloom in the NE Atlantic Ocean, the region previously studied in the JGOFS North Atlantic Bloom Experiment. They will track the transport and simultaneous decomposition of both the overwintering and newly-produced DOM as it flows through the NE Atlantic toward a site of bottom water formation to the northeast of the U.K. in the Norwegian Sea. This project will take advantage of an opportunity to participate on a detailed hydrographic survey of the NE Atlantic in spring aboard the U.K. research vessel RRS CHARLES DARWIN with colleagues from the George Deacon Division of the Southampton Oceanography Centre (SOC), U.K. A principal cruise objective is to calculate volume transports, from which mass transport of DOM can be estimated. While the broad outlines of these processes have now been sketched in, there have been no detailed studies in which DOM transport has been explicitly studied in the relevant hydrographic framework, and none in which simultaneous estimates of underway decomposition have been determined. This study, a collaboration among biogeochemists, microbial ecologists, and physical oceanographers would be the first to provide synoptic data on DOC, DON and DOP concentrations, volume transports and decomposition rates, from which mass transport of DOM components can be assessed doc8357 none Many invertebrates and fishes use selective tidal-stream transport (STST) for horizontal movement. STST is based on a vertical migration pattern, in which animals leave the bottom and enter the water column during one phase of the tide and remain on or near the bottom during the other phase. One remarkable but unstudied aspect of STST within a species is the reversal in the direction of migration at different life history stages. Migration of the blue crab Callinectes sapidus, involving a reversal in STST direction following spawning, is the focus of this multidisciplinary research. During spawning migration, ovigerous females use ebb-tide transport to move seaward from estuaries. After releasing larvae, they reverse direction and undergo flood -tide transport to re-enter the estuary. The specific goals of this research are to: use biotelemetry to observe and characterize the pattern of movement and physical conditions during the spawning migration; simulate observed physical conditions and migratory pathways and extrapolate these results in time and space using a coupled bio-physical model; determine whether the behavior underlying STST is mediated by an endogenous rhythm in activity or by behavioral responses to exogenous cues; and determine the cues mediating the onset of ebb-tide transport by females with mature eggs and flood-tide transport of post--spawn females. The study integrates the fields of biological and physical oceanography and will expand our understanding of the cues, behaviors, and physical mechanisms underlying STST, a common life history trait among many marine and estuarine species that is essential for continuation of populations. Specifically, combining results from field observations and laboratory experiments with a circulation model will allow researchers to predict hydrologic and meteorologic conditions that promote or impede female blue crab migration to and from spawning sites and estimate the relative contribution of larvae released from different areas of an estuary to the supply of developing larvae in coastal waters doc8402 none The Land Model Working Group of the Community Climate Systems Model (CCSM) has completed a prototype core single-column land model, designated the Community Land Model (CLM), and has demonstrated its success, as well as identified areas for further improvement. One of the areas that requires immediate improvement is runoff. The PI has developed an improved treatment of grid-scale run off by accounting for topographic influence on soil moisture heterogeneity and run off characteristics. Preliminary testing on regional and global scales shows the model performs satisfactorily. Under this award, the PI will complete testing finalizing of the runoff scheme in CLM, and ensure its successful implementation in CSM. The work is important because it should provide a strong diagnostics underpinning to the CCSM project from a university based group engaged in dynamical diagnosis of observed climate variability doc8403 none Oleinick This is a collaborative proposal between the California Academy of Sciences and Florida Atlantic University. Shallow-water marine molluscan faunas in Alaska and Kamchatka are the northernmost empirical evidence of early middle Miocene global warming in the high-latitude North Pacific. The Principal Investigators will document the degree of shallow-water marine warming and paleoseasonality in this region during the Climatic Optimum (14.5 to 17 million years ago), based on new and existing mollusk collections and stable isotope analyses of selected mollusk species from Alaska and Kamchatka. They will also provide stratigraphic and age constraints for the four or more Climatic Optimum warm-water episodes evidenced in stratigraphic sequences in these regions. This project will focus on faunal and stable isotope studies of two shallow-water molluscan faunas that exhibit clear evidence of the early middle Miocene Climatic Optimum, in the Narrow Cape Formation of Kodiak Island and the Kavranskaya Series in northwestern Kamchatka. Analyses of mollusks previously collected by the Principal Investigators from the Bear Lake Formation on the Alaska Peninsula will be incorporated into the study. The common occurrences in these formations of the warm water bivalves Anadara, Dosinia, Glycymeris, Macoma and Nutiallia, and the gastropods Fulgoraria (Musashia), Gibbula, Nassariuv, Turritella, and Tyrannoberingius will provide a basis for paleotemperature estimates using both faunal and isotopic criteria. The research should establish the degree of warmth and paleoseasonality at the northern limit of the Climatic Optimum in the Pacific and put this paleoclimatic event in bio-and chronostratigraphic contexts. These data will make it possible, for the first time, to include the shallow-water marine climate of the high-latitude North Pacific region into numerical climatic and oceanographic models doc8404 none B. Khomami, Washington University This is one of two identical proposals submitted by Northwestern University and Washington University. A combined experimental and computational study is proposed to examine the entangled polymers in a time-dependent inhomogeneous flow generated by periodic forcing of a viscoelastic fluid past an axisymmetric stagnation point. This is a collaborative effort between Wesley Burghardt of Northwestern University and Bamin Khomami of Washington University with the experimental part carried out in the former institution while the computational part in the latter institution. These two investigators have collaborated successfully in an earlier study, with NSF support, of steady axisymmetric stagnation flow of viscoelastic fluids. They are proposing to extend their work to time-dependent flows in order to test the best molecular rheological models in more complex flow situations doc8405 none In this project, investigators at the University of Washington will quantify the physical mechanisms controlling the rates of biological carbon export and the uptake of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) in the North Pacific Ocean using a basin-wide general circulation model (GCM). The proposed model is operational and has already been used to evaluate mechanisms of subduction and water mass formation in the North Pacific and is currently being tested using chlorofluorocarbon tracers (CFCs). The approach will be first to incorporate bomb-produced 14C into the model to validate its advective and diffusive fields. By adding this carbon-based tracer the model will then have been verified with both CFCs and 14C -- two tracers with different boundary conditions and time histories. Next, the three-dimensional distribution of biological carbon export and remineralization rates will be determined by using the observed distributions of several biological productivity tracers, specifically nitrate and phosphate (and their dissolved organic counterparts DON and DOP), three dissolved atmospheric gases (oxygen, argon, and nitrogen), and the 13C 12C ratio of the dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC). The PIs would then simulate the anthropogenic CO2 perturbation and utilize independent reconstructions of the anthropogenic DIC and 13C 12C changes in the North Pacific to validate model predictions. Finally, the model response to decadal variability in forcing would be examined. There are several important reasons to choose the North Pacific Ocean as the site for a basin-scale modeling study. There are three JGOFS time-series sites that yield observed carbon fluxes and anthropogenic CO2 signals to compare to model predictions. The lack of deep-water formation at its poleward boundary simplifies the meridional circulation compared to the North Atlantic and southern oceans and justifies shorter model runs. Finally, the North Pacific has been the site of intensive chemical tracer measurements, specifically CFCs, 14C and 13C 12C, over the last 10 years. The investigators will focus their modeling efforts on quantifying physical processes that likely control tracer, nutrient and CO2 fluxes in the upper ocean: 1) equatorial-subtropical and subtropical-subpolar exchange, 2) thermocline ventilation and isopycnal transport both with and without eddies, and 3) diapycnal mixing and the influence of eddies in the upper thermocline, and 4) the impact of decadal variability on biological carbon export doc8406 none Species richness in coral communities has traditionally been explained in terms of processes operating within the local community over relatively short periods of time. Recent studies of other assemblages have made it clear that communities can be organized by a variety of processes operating at different spatial and temporal scales. Since coral communities are imbedded in larger geographic regions, regional historical phenomena and local processes may jointly influence local richness and should be analyzed simultaneously. This study will sample corals in six island groups along a gradient of increasing regional species richness across the Pacific Ocean and in three different habitats at local sites to quantitatively evaluate the relative influence of regional and local processes on local richness. The Pacific Ocean gradient is the best possible choice for this test because of the large unequivocal trend in regional richness. Traveling from west to east, regional richness drops from over 450 species in the Philippines and Indonesia to fewer than 100 species in eastern French Polynesia. A hierarchical sampling design will be employed to measure variation in species richness, composition, and relative abundance at four spatial scales spanning 5-6 orders of magnitude (among replicate samples at a site, among sites on an island, among islands in a region, among regions). Data will be collected on species presence and relative abundance as well as on habitat breadth and depth range of selected species. This information will be used to test the effects of the increasing regional pool on local richness, evenness, habitat compression and habitat overlap at different scales. Percent cover of colonizable substrate will also be quantified and used to test the effects of the openness of local assemblages on their sensitivity to regional influences. The hierarchical design will provide a powerful framework for quantifying the proportion of total variation among samples that is attributable to each spatial scale and thus will permit a rigorous estimate of scale-dependency in patterns of diversity and abundance. This synthesis of regional and local perspectives will have relevance not only for basic studies of community ecology but also for applied problems associated with species extinctions, habitat loss and fragmentation, and ecological restoration doc8407 none There is a growing awareness that globalization, particularly the opening up of previously closed financial systems to global markets. has the potential to increase the exposure of financial systems to new and greater risks. The classical theory of risk sharing treats risks as exogenous (e.g., as states of nature). The new risks associated with globalization are largely endogenous. The traditional tools of financial economics can be used to describe and analyze these risks, but new models and new kinds of analysis are needed. Economists are now in a position to address questions about the optimal design and regulation of potentially unstable financial systems. This project addresses several problems in the area of economic policy, regulation and institutional design arising out of the recent work on financial crises. One difference between this work and much of the rest of the literature is that this project focuses on the microeconomic properties of financial institutions and markets that are crucial for understanding the phenomenon of financial fragility and endogenous instability. For the most part, first-generation models of financial crises analyze the behavior of a single representative bank, are partial equilibrium in nature and consist of a contracting problem followed by a coordination problem. In order to understand the origins of financial crises, we need models that describe complex, decentralized financial systems comprising both financial institutions and financial markets. This project develops such models of complex financial systems and uses this approach to explore four issues: optimal provision of liquidity when financial intermediaries are opaque; the relationship between aggregate uncertainty, financial fragility, and contagion; the relationship between monetary policy and asset prices; and the design of optimal currency areas doc8408 none The architecture of a plant organ primarily depends primarily upon the plane of cell division. The orientation of cell division is determined during the G2 phase of the cell cycle and is followed at cytokinesis by building a cell plate in the center of the phragmoplast, a cytoskeleton held structure . The cell plate is built by the fusion of Gogi-derived vesicles but the detailed mechanism how this structure is formed and how polysaccharaide biosynthesis commences is not known. Understanding the two key events, i.e. fusion of cell plate vesicles and the activation of callose synthase, during cell plate formation is of paramount importance. The PI has earlier demonstrated that a novel dynamin-like protein, Phragmoplastin, is involved in building the cell plate. Phragmoplastin appears to generate dumbbell-shaped vesicle-tubule-vesicle (VTV) structures which fuse at their ends to create tubulo vesicle-network. They have isolated two proteins that interact with phragmoplastin. These are cell plate-specific callose synthase and a novel UDP-glucose transferase and have been able to purify callose synthase complex. This project is aimed at determining the precise role of Phragmoplastin by measuring its GTPase activity and its regulation by calcium ions and phospholipids. The regulation of phragmoplastin will be determined by measuring its phosphorylation state and GTPase activity during cytokinesis. They have recently cloned the gene encoding the cell plate-specific callose synthase (CalS), a key enzyme involved in building the cell plate, and will study regulation of this enzyme, including its interaction with Phragmoplastin, and UDP-glucosyl transferase (UDP-GT). The isolation of callose synthase gene has allowed them to establish that callose synthase and cellulose synthases are two separate enzymes. An understanding of the mechanism of cell plate formation may help modify the plant architecture, and may allow to regulate polysaccharide biosynthesis, including both callose and cellulose. Since cell plate formation is unique to plants, this study has potential biotechnology applications by developing herbicides with cell plate as a target to control plant growth, and modify a plant organ or plant architecture at-large to increase plant productivity. Thus this study has application in both agriculture and forest industries doc8409 none and This project examines local perceptions of sociocultural and economic changes often associated with globalization processes in three subsistence-oriented Inupiat societies in the north Bering Strait region of Alaska. The study focuses on three ethnically related but sociopolitically, culturally, and economically distinct Inupiat communities: people from Ingaliq on Little Diomede Island; from Wales, on the northeastern Bering Strait coast; and from King Island. The study addresses change components that have influenced identity in the areas of foraging technologies and traditions. It relies on a variety of methods, including participant observations and multigenerational family interviews. The researchers will collaborate with a wide spectrum of residents in each community and will employ local adults and students as consultants, research assistants, and interns in an effort to provide locally meaningful research experiences doc8410 none This grant supports laboratory experiments designed to simulate the growth of convective clouds and their interaction with the air surrounding them. A major distinction between clouds in the atmosphere and ordinary laboratory jets is that the condensation occurring in a growing cloud is a steady source of heat and buoyancy. In the experiments, condensation is simulated by an electrical grid that heats a jet as it ascends in a water tank. Laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) is employed for flow visualization and particle image velocimetry (PIV) for measuring the velocity field of the jet. Whole-field temperature measurement (WFT) is achieved by using thermochromic liquid crystals. The study is motivated in part by earlier results using flow visualization that showed the effect of heating was to reduce the amount of ambient fluid entrained into the jet. This is contrary to intuition, but may explain why natural clouds do not expand with increasing height as rapidly as laboratory jets. The experimental work is complemented by direct numerical simulation (DNS) of turbulent jets, done in collaboration with researchers at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands. The goal of the work is to achieve a better physical understanding of the mixing processes that occur at cloud boundaries doc8411 none Photosynthesis provides the energy that drives all plant growth, productivity and life on earth. A marine sea slug, Elysia chlorotica, has acquired the ability to carry out photosynthesis like a plant as a result of forming a symbiotic association with chloroplasts of the alga, Vaucheria litorea. Juvenile sea slugs feed on the filamentous alga and retain only the chloroplasts, incorporating them into cells of the digestive epithelium. The chloroplasts in the now dark-green animals are functional, i.e. they evolve oxygen and fix carbon dioxide and actively synthesize proteins from DNA contained in the chloroplasts. Once the symbiosis is established, the animal can live and reproduce in culture without eating for the rest of its normal life span of nine to ten months. About 90% of all the proteins required to keep chloroplasts functioning and carrying out photosynthesis are encoded by DNA in the nucleus of the plant or alga. These proteins must be continually synthesized in the cell and transported into the chloroplast to sustain activity. Thus, considering that the sea slugs only acquire the algal chloroplasts and not any other part of the algal cell including the nucleus, the level of sustained chloroplast activity observed in the sea slugs is unique and quite remarkable. Understanding how these chloroplasts are able to remain photosynthetically active outside of their normal cellular environment for months when higher plant chloroplasts survive only a few hours in isolation, forms the basis of the specific objectives of this proposal. These include: 1) Characterizing the structural and functional long-term stability of isolated plastids, the stability of plastid proteins, and the activity of chloroplast proteases in sea slugs vs. algae, 2) Determining if the sea slug nuclear genome codes for and targets any proteins to the symbiotic chloroplasts and elucidating the general mechanism of protein import in chloroplasts, and 3) Characterizing the genetic autonomy of the chloroplasts by mapping and sequencing the chloroplast genome of the alga. This symbiotic organism provides a unique opportunity to determine how the chloroplasts from one organism (alga) can form a long-term functional photosynthetic union with the cell of an extremely divergent organism (sea slug). This represents a process molecular data indicate occurred repeatedly over evolutionary history resulting in the diversity of plants and algae on earth today. On a much broader scale, this project possibly represents lateral gene transfer between two diverse organisms and endosymbiosis in action. The Solar-Powered Sea Slugs are a fascinating teaching tool eliciting excitement and curiosity from people all around the world from scientists of several disciplines to graduate and undergraduate students discovering them in their readings in journal clubs, to young children who have seen these crawling leaves on the Internet or researched them for science fair projects. The endosymbiotic theory has generated and continues to generate much interest at all levels, but to actually observe a symbiotic association in a potentially evolving situation and imparting such a major new function to the other partner, is indeed rare and a unique opportunity for study doc8412 none Moment based estimators such as Generalized Method of Moment estimators (GMM) are routinely used in estimation of economic models. This project analyzes the small sample properties of such estimators. Approximate formulas for small sample bias and variance are sued to evaluate different estimation methods. Bias corrections based on these formulas are obtained to improve the small sample behavior of existing procedures. Typically, economic models imply an infinite number of moment conditions. A selection rule has to be adopted to decide which moments to match. An early literature on efficient GMM estimation established that in prinicple all available moments should be matched asymptotically in order to achieve the most efficient use of the information contained in the data. More recent research on the other hand, has found that inclusion of more and more moment conditions usually is associated with bad small sample performance. The research will include extensive simulation experiments that will shed light on the quality of higher order approximations and the performance of different refinements in small samples. Ultimately this line of research is intended to give applied researchers guidance in choosing the most appropriate statistical tools for a given modeling situation doc8413 none The Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program provides continued support for photochemical research by Dr. Peter C. Ford,Chemistry Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. The photochemical mechanisms of nitric oxide (NO) generation as well as the dynamics of thermal reactions between NO and metal centers of bioinorganic interest will be studied. Flash and continuous photolysis of various mononuclear metal nitrosyl and metal nitrito complexes will be conducted, placing particular emphasis on the molecular design of compounds that may serve as precursors for the photochemical delivery of NO to desired targets on demand. Antennas constructed of porphyrins or other chromophores that absorb red light will be coupled to the precursors to allow for low-energy excitation of the metal nitrosyl part of the compound by single photon or two photon absorption mechanisms. The chemistry will also be extended to systems that generate nitrosyl hydride (HNO) and nitroxyl anion (NO-), two species that also may have biological importance. When light is absorbed by a molecule, the energy that the molecule acquires sometimes initiates a chemical reaction. In this case, a precursor molecule disintegrates to release nitric oxide (NO) plus a metal-containing byproduct. Because NO is a bioregulator of the cardiovascular system as well as participating in immune responses, the controlled release of this molecule has many potential medical benefits. This fundamental study may lead to new strategies for photodynamic therapy and other uses of nitric oxide. Several graduate students will be trained in this important new area of inorganic chemistry doc8414 none Marincovich This is a collaborative proposal between the California Academy of Sciences and Florida Atlantic University. Shallow-water marine molluscan faunas in Alaska and Kamchatka are the northernmost empirical evidence of early middle Miocene global warming in the high-latitude North Pacific. The Principal Investigators will document the degree of shallow-water marine warming and paleoseasonality in this region during the Climatic Optimum (14.5 to 17 million years ago), based on new and existing mollusk collections and stable isotope analyses of selected mollusk species from Alaska and Kamchatka. They will also provide stratigraphic and age constraints for the four or more Climatic Optimum warm-water episodes evidenced in stratigraphic sequences in these regions. This project will focus on faunal and stable isotope studies of two shallow-water molluscan faunas that exhibit clear evidence of the early middle Miocene Climatic Optimum, in the Narrow Cape Formation of Kodiak Island and the Kavranskaya Series in northwestern Kamchatka. Analyses of mollusks previously collected by the Principal Investigators from the Bear Lake Formation on the Alaska Peninsula will be incorporated into the study. The common occurrences in these formations of the warm water bivalves Anadara, Dosinia, Glycymeris, Macoma and Nutiallia, and the gastropods Fulgoraria (Musashia), Gibbula, Nassariuv, Turritella, and Tyrannoberingius will provide a basis for paleotemperature estimates using both faunal and isotopic criteria. The research should establish the degree of warmth and paleoseasonality at the northern limit of the Climatic Optimum in the Pacific and put this paleoclimatic event in bio-and chronostratigraphic contexts. These data will make it possible, for the first time, to include the shallow-water marine climate of the high-latitude North Pacific region into numerical climatic and oceanographic models doc1545 none This research develops a theory of large policy change, with specific application to conflict resolution of international rivalries. The theory of large policy change is itself part of the punctuated equilibrium approach to policy. The model will first address two key concepts in the conflict resolution and policy literature namely ripeness and window of opportunity. The research formalizes and tests models that incorporate window of opportunity variables and uses the window of opportunity concept to conceptualize ripeness. From the general policy model, the investigators derive a sub-model that applies to the resolution of long-standing interstate conflicts which yields testable propositions that can be examined in the context of enduring rivalries and a representative sample of lesser state rivalries. Specific outcomes of the project include: 1) a formal theory of punctuated equilibrium models; 2) a specific model of large policy change; 3) rigorous specification of the window of opportunity and ripeness concepts; 4) a punctuated equilibrium model of international rivalry resolution; 5) new data on conflict resolution compatible with the most widely used data set on interstate rivalries; and, 6) a series of empirical analyses on the conditions associated with conflict resolution in rivalries over the period - . This investigation promises to enhance substantially our understanding of the topic and to provide a database for use by a large number of scholars interested in the topic doc8416 none The use of gravitational waves to study the universe is entering a new stage, as LIGO, VIRGO, and GEO will soon begin their first scientific data runs. This meeting will bring researchers from the gravitational wave, astronomy, astrophysics, and numerical relativity communities together to communicate to each other where things stand, in particular the capabilities of the instruments involved, and what directions are being proposed. It will provide a forum to generate new strategies, collaborations, and directions doc8417 none This research would investigate the correspondence between change in the Central Yup ik culture of southwestern Alaska and woven basket design, composition, and style. Over the last century, this culture has been dramatically impacted by association with western culture. The extent to which cultural impact alters basic life patterns will be investigated in this research. One of the prominent cultural activities of this group has been the production of woven baskets, and several museums have collections covering the last 100 years. The project will examine, categorize, and statistically analyze the design, construction and style of woven baskets collected over this time period. The investigator will conduct in-depth interviews with basket makers to develop data on the linkage between basket making and cultural change. As few written records document cultural change in this ethnic group, this work may lead to insight into cultural adaptation in response to changing and prominent western influences doc8418 none Deshler A more complete quantitative understanding of polar stratospheric ozone loss requires further work in several areas. The microphysics of the nucleation, growth, composition, and sedimentation of particles in polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs) is one of these areas. PSC particles provide sites for the heterogeneous chemistry required to activate chlorine, which then destroys ozone. The pivotal role played by PSC particles is most evident in the Arctic where ozone loss is essentially modulated by temperature, a surrogate for PSCs, from year to year. The frequency, duration, and timing of PSC occurrence determines the extent of chlorine activation and denitrification in the stratospheric polar vortex, and thus the amount of ozone loss. Removing some of the present uncertainties concerning PSC formation temperatures, particle composition, and particle phase will permit more careful modeling of the amount of chlorine processed by PSCs and the extent of denitrification. The activation of chlorine and ultimately ozone loss is dependent on all of these factors. This work takes advantage of invitations from several European colleagues to collaborate on joint measurements of PSC particles during the winters of and . The European institutions and their measurements are: Max-Planck-Institut fur Kernphysik - Heidelberg, particle composition CNRS-Laboratoire de Meteorologie Dynamique - Paris, gas phase water vapor concentration; CNR - Istituto di Fisica dell Atmosfera - Rome, aerosol backscatter and depolarization; and Danish Meteorological Institute - Copenhagen, aerosol backscatter and microphysical mesoscale modeling. Under previous support these four instruments, plus the particle counters used in this work, have been integrated onto one balloon gondola which will simultaneously measure, in situ, PSC particle composition, concentration, size, depolarization, backscattering, and gas phase concentrations of water. This gondola was flown for the first time in January in the Arctic. This grant will complete four more Arctic PSC measurements with this unique set of instruments. Two instruments will be used to measure the ambient concentration of condensation nuclei and of aerosol with radii =0.15 - 10.0 mm in 12 size classes. From these measurements size distributions can be estimated. To provide estimates of the volume of the condensed nitric acid and water in the PSCs, a second aerosol counter will be included to measure the background stratospheric aerosol. This instrument will be fitted with an inlet heater, thus sampling aerosol after they have been exposed to an inlet wall temperature of 250 K for ~ 0.1 s prior to sampling. In addition to providing aerosol size distributions and estimates of condensed volume for the joint measurements, the work will continue to focus on methods to infer particle index of refraction, which is a function of composition, through comparisons of our size distribution measurements with in situ optical scattering measurements at a number of wavelengths. Estimates of particle index of refraction which result from these comparisons will be used in the interpretation of particle composition measurements. These new joint measurements will follow the first successful set of measurements by this configuration of instruments in January . The January measurements constituted the first direct measurements of single particle composition within a PSC, coincident with a characterization of aerosol size, concentration, phase, and optical properties. These measurements revealed a PSC composed of layers of liquid droplets interspersed with layers of nitric acid hydrates. The agreement amongst the various instruments in capturing the fine layered structure of the cloud was impressive. Many layers of the cloud fit well within our thermodynamic understanding of PSCs while some new HNO3 rich particle types were observed doc8362 none This grant supports a continuing collaboration between atmospheric scientists at the University of Wyoming and electrical engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the development and improvement of a 95 GHz (3.2 mm wavelength) radar and its application to studies of clouds and precipitation. The radar is ordinarily used in the Wyoming King Air research aircraft. Unlike ordinary weather radars, its short wavelength gives increased sensitivity to small drops and enables the radar to detect nonprecipitating clouds. Called the Wyoming Cloud Radar, it is capable of Doppler and polarimetric measurements. It will be mounted temporarily in the NCAR C-130 research aircraft for the DYCOMS-II project in July (Dynamics and Chemistry of Marine Stratocumulus). The data will give details on the cloud structure at the mixing region near cloud top and will also indicate the presence of drizzle, which is believed to have an important effect on the dynamics of the marine boundary layer. The capabilities of the WCR will be expanded by the addition of a second antenna in the King Air, which will permit dual-beam transmission for fine-scale observations of the horizontal wind field in convective clouds. The ideas will be tested in a field program in the High Plains (Colorado and Wyoming). The main research topics to be investigated are as follows: 1. Relationships between CCN counts, drop concentration, and updraft speed. 2. Horizontal wind field in different kinds of clouds. 3. Entrainment in cumulus clouds. 4. Drizzle formation in marine stratus clouds. 5. Refinement of an attenuation-based method ( stereorad ) for estimating cloud water content. Results are relevant to fundamental cloud physics, atmospheric remote sensing, and the parameterization of cloud effects in large-scale numerical models doc8420 none Wuttig A thermodynamical model of defects in crystalline solids which includes a novel field induced defect property tensor accounts for the known variation of the excess magnetostriction in Fe-Al and Fe-Ga alloys. Specifically, the model suggests that next nearest neighbor substitutional- substitutional pairs of tetragonal symmetry are responsible for the effect. The studies are directed to determine the model parameters self-consistently through measurements of the relaxed and unrelaxed magnetostrictive, elastic and magnetic anisotropy constants as well as lattice constants. In an effort to generalize the model the studies will be extended to Fe-C-Al and Fe-C-Ga and possibly additional alloys containing defect pairs of tetragonal symmetry. The studies will lead to a basic understanding of the significant magnetostriction in body-centered iron-base alloys. They will at minimum systematize the excess magnetostriction and maximally establish criteria for the development of novel alloys with a significant magnetostriction. %%% Materials with a magnetostriction as large as . are of significant technological interest. The studies will identify the nature of the magnetostriction in body centered cubic iron base alloys and establish criteria for the search of additional magnetostrictive alloys doc8421 none Mountain, Manley, Wright proposals Much of the world s deep ocean water acquires its chemical and physical characteristics in the northern North Atlantic and adjacent regions. Surface water sinks in the North Atlantic and flows southward to mix with other sources of deep water in what is known as the global conveyor belt. This deep water flow erodes sediment and ultimately deposits it in large drift deposits. These deposits record the history of deep water formation, which in large part reflects changes in the earth s climate. The present project will undertake a detailed study of the seismic architecture of two large drift deposits in the North Atlantic. Specific aspects of the project are to obtain seismic reflection data with which to interpret the early history of drift formation and to examine modern processes that shape and modify the drift deposits. These data will provide critical new information on these drifts and will also be used in planning future drilling to sample drift sediments directly. This is a cooperative study involving investigators at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Rutgers University, and Middlebury College. Field data will be acquired on a cruise of the RV Knorr in mid- doc8422 none This award provides support for development of hardware and software needed for ultra-high resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging (f-MRI) of the mouse brain. Efforts will focus on design of miniature radio-frequency coils and on design of pulse sequences tailored for the unusually small volume element of the mouse brain. Additional work will implement fMRI data processing methods for time-domain analysis and reproducibility optimization to create maps representing changes in functional neuroenergetics at both high spatial and temporal resolution and in both normal and transgenic mice. The proposed tools will facilitate functional molecular physiology studies of a type not now possible with the mouse. Such studies are possible with larger animals such as the rat where the ability of MRI and related techniques to monitor cerebral energetics and hemodynamics has shown that high resolution maps of cerebral energetics provide a direct measure of neuronal function. The existence of techniques that can be used to produce gene knockouts and transgenic animals has made the mouse an attractive target for studies of organismal function at all levels, from that of the gene to that of the whole organ. The ability to combine use of the two technologies should lead to significant advances in detailed understanding of the physiology of the mouse brain and, by extension, brains of other mammals doc8423 none Interannual and interdecadal climatic variations strongly affect the structure and function of marine ecosystems. Long-term studies of the California Current system in the northeast Pacific have shown that climate-ocean variations have disturbed and changed the marine ecosystems off the West Coast of North America. However, in the context of climate-ocean change we know nothing about how phytoplankton, an extremely important component of the food web, are affected. To help fill this gap we propose to build an 8-year time series ( - ) to study variability in the biodiversity and abundance of diatoms and thecate dinoflagellates from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO; 32 50 N, 117 10 W) pier in La Jolla Bight, California. This project will develop a biological database structured to follow Ocean Biogeographical Information System (OBIS) standards for eventual inclusion in the Census of Marine Life (CoML) program. This time series will also provide a high quality record of diatom and dinoflagellate species that can be used to evaluate harmful algal blooms in the region. This dataset will include: (1) a complete list of diatom and dinoflagellate species; (2) updated nomenclature including complete Latin names, synonyms for each species and authorship; (3) a bibliography; (4) species abundance data; (5) documentation on identifications including light microscopy illustrations and to a limited extent scanning electron micrographs. Prepared specimens will also be retained for reference and archiving. The Scripps Pier site is a historical sampling platform with a wealth of information on oceanographic properties measured continuously for two to eight decades. Diatoms and dinoflagellates, are the most completely characterized components of the phytoplankton in the Southern California Bight. A unique historical baseline of information on planktonic diatoms and thecate dinoflagellates is available for the SIO pier, based on W. E. Allen s collections between and , and additional information is available from semi-continuous surveys during - , and . Thus, this project builds on a unique historical data set for plankton and hydrography of the central California coast. This project will be important in creating a solid, long-term phytoplankton time series dataset that will set the groundwork for future studies related to assessing the effect of climate change on marine phytoplankton populations doc8424 none This proposal suggests a new fast learning, on line method for the prediction of power system transient instability and an example of its application to a single machine and infinite bus. The proposed algorithm is adapted from a proven robotic ball-catching algorithm, which includes fast learning. For instability prediction, the ball location is replaced by the measured relative generator rotor angle. Using the measured relative rotor angle, the control algorithm predicts the rotor angle at a future time. The relative rotor angle is sampled at a rate of 600 times per second. This new fast learning algorithm will predict the rotor angle 500- milliseconds into the future. The increase of the predicted generator relative rotor angle beyond a predetermined threshold is a prediction that loss of synchronism will occur. When loss of synchronism is predicted a protection scheme can initiate a stability aid such as generator tripping, braking resistor and or fast valving. Preliminary investigation shows that the ball-catching algorithm may be applied for transient stability prediction. This proposal requests funding to prove the feasibility of this method doc8425 none This project is designed to recruit talented students with limited financial resources, to offer support and programs to help these students complete their degrees in a timely manner, and to encourage the students to continue to employment or a higher degree. The goals and objectives which extend quality programming and support services include (a) an aggressive recruitment of women and minority students, (b) a comprehensive system of orientation, and (c) internships, mentoring, and job placement programs. A cluster approach to scheduling promotes small group and peer interaction. To enhance the educational experience, students are attending professional seminars in their program area. A special arrangement with the New Jersey Institute of Technology provides students with a smooth transition to baccalaureate studies. The added dimensions of academic support and work experience promise to produce students who can also easily transition from college to the workplace doc8426 none of dispersive Alfven waves, the investigators will verify the physical model and its numerical implementation on a large set of well-controlled, comprehensive experimental data. In particular, the effort involves testing the results of theoretical models with laboratory plasma experiments performed on the Large Plasma Device at UCLA. Results of the study will be applied to further the capability to interpret intense fields, currents and particle fluxes measured in the auroral zone on rockets and satellites as well as to advance understanding of laboratory plasma experiments doc8427 none This project investigates the impacts of public provision of information infrastructure on the diversification of online population, the adoption of information technology by population segments without previous Internet experience, and the development of skills and networks which can assist small city communities in an increasingly information-driven economy. The project will address these topics through an assessment and evaluation of online usage, non-usage and consequences in the City of LaGrange, Georgia. Through public provision of easy-to-use Internet access, the city aims to increase its online population and overcome economic, social and psychological barriers to online take-up. The city also seeks to spur a greater proportion of its residents to develop information access and Internet skills that can contribute to its new information-based economic strategies. The project will analyze and assess the effects of LaGrange s ambitious information infrastructure initiative using varied methodological approaches. A panel of household users and nonusers of the WorIdGate public information utility will be tracked and comparisons will be made with online users in the city who access the Internet in other ways. Particular focus will be placed on understanding effects among users with no prior Internet experience, versus those with prior experience and nonusers who did not take up the service. Detailed case studies will be conducted with a smaller subset of households to support in-depth learning of how the system is used and to guide subsequent questionnaire design. Interviews will also be conducted with city officials, community and business leaders, and the information utility managers to probe the city s decision-making processes, expectations, experience, and learning in offering a public information utility. There is an increasing concern in the United States about people and communities who are on the wrong side of the digital divide and, in response, a growing number of experiments to find ways to bridge this. In this context, the project will provide guidance for decision-making regarding the development, deployment and use of information technology. The project will allow a detailed exploration of current, divergent theories and perspectives on the effect and benefits of information technologies. Results will include presentations and publications to academic, policymaking, and practitioner communities doc8428 none This project represents a collaboration of US and the Kola Science Center (Apatity, Russia) investigators for the purpose of examining the impacts of reduced environmental stress on the watershed ecology and the value of integrated modeling on consensus-building by decision-makers in the region. The investigators will conduct a workshop in Russia to examine the effect of decreased industrial and human activity on the ecological health or resilience of a watershed on the Kola Peninsula that has been severely affected by industrial use. The researchers will use modeling to assess economic and social development of the region and possible scenarios under changing global conditions, such as global warming. The workshop and an initial pilot project will be used to examine the value of the models for application to the integrated assessment of other watersheds on the Peninsula doc8429 none Dramatic changes in economic activity around the world and new approaches and methods for studying the geographic dimensions of global economic change have made recent decades exciting ones for economic geographers. Much progress has resulted from the work of researchers who have sought to employ an enlarged concept of the economic and build upon new developments in social theory and the philosophy of science. Major questions remain regarding many facets of global economic change, however, including expanded analysis of the scalar dynamics of global economic change, and especially of economic globalization processes per se; integration of nature-society and space-society research traditions through the study of global economic change; and increased engagement by economic geographers with policy processes, and more generally issues of governance. This project will facilitate communication among economic geographers through three related sets of activities designed to stimulate and facilitate future work on global economic change. The three sets of activities are (1) the discussion and development of research protocols for the study of global economic change, which will be undertaken by a virtual research community over the Internet; (2) a focused workshop (to be held in November at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts) to present initial research, discuss use of the protocol, and consider ways to build up from individual studies to broader synthesizing statements on global economic change; and (3) ongoing maintenance of a Web site as a depository and clearinghouse for linked research projects. This project will bring many different economic geographers together to follow-up on prior agenda-setting activities through more coordinated efforts that assist in the organization of research and that provide feedback on initial studies by both new and established researchers. In additional to addressing issues of theoretical and conceptual framing, the network of scholars who will engage in this activity will address methodological and institutional obstacles by developing research protocols that facilitate comparative research on the complex, multi-scalar processes associated with global economic change as well as the diversity of attendant geographical outcomes. Through these activities, more meaningful research on the geographic dimensions of global economic change will be evident through both collaborative research and through more meaningful studies by individual researchers doc8430 none This award in the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program provides continued support for research on weakly coordinating anions by Dr. Christopher A. Reed, Chemistry Department, University of California at Riverside. The goal of the project is to develop the chemistry of partially chlorinated carborane anions. These anions are non-nucleophilic and non-oxidizing, providing a non-reactive least coordinating anion . Acids such as H(CB11H6Cl6) are superacidic yet otherwise gentle reagents. This combination of properties makes it possible to study protonation of very weak bases such as buckminsterfullerenes, hydrocarbons, and noble gases. The superacid chemistry will be extended to supermethyl and superoxidant reagents. Acid-base reactions are among the most fundamental and important reactions in chemistry and biology. This research explores the extremes of acid behavior. Development of this chemistry has implications for numerous chemical processes, including olefin polymerization, petroleum cracking, boron neutron capture therapy and battery technology. It may lead to new chemical reagents and selective catalysts doc8431 none Most economic relationships (employer employee, buyer supplier, etc.) have some contractual element. The success of any particular relationship depends on how well contracts can be enforced. Contract enforcement is facilitated by several different institutions. The most visible institution is the public court system. In addition, there are many less formal institutions --- involving arbitrators, mediators, and other intermediaries --- that play a role. For instance, it is becoming more and more common for contracts to require parties to resolve disputes through binding arbitration, rather than using the court system. However, even if parties agree to such alternative dispute resolution, the court system is still in play since the courts are ultimately needed to enforce the judgments of arbitrators. Parties in long-term relationships sometimes can enforce agreements on their own, but they still count on external institutions to some extent. Thus, the institutions that enforce contracts (e.g., the public courts, private arbitration systems, and informal convention) generally overlap and influence one another. This project focuses on the relative merits of, and the interaction between, enforcement institutions. It develops an understanding of how institutions determine the scope of contracting and how economic activity is impacted. The project has two components. The first component involves developing the theoretical tools necessary for economists to explicitly study the constituents of contract enforcement, to analyze the strategic aspects of contracting, and to compare features of various institutions. For example, institutions differ on the basis of renegotiation and enforcement costs and regarding the kind of information that can be utilized by authorities. This project produces a flexible, game-theoretic framework that makes explicit these costs and informational constraints. Specifically, the project shows how to combine cooperative game theory (which focuses on negotiation and the alternatives available to groups of people) with non-cooperative game theory (which focuses on individual incentives). The project also develops the concept of layered contract, which describes how various institutions overlap. While the first component of the project is mainly geared toward economic theorists, the second component of the project involves detailed analysis of some actual contracting environments and legal systems. In particular, the project explores how the ability of parties to renegotiate their contracts influences whether their relationships will be successful. Renegotiation is partially controlled by institutions. For example, the U.S. court system generally supports efforts of parties to renegotiate their contracts, although there are instances where renegotiation is not allowed. This project examines the strategic effects of the ability of agents to recontract in an ongoing relationship. Moderate recontracting costs (rather than renegotiation being free or totally barred) are shown to have value in many contractual relationships, a fact which has important implications for the optimal design of legal rules. In addition, the project explains why different contractual relationships use different enforcement institutions (some use arbitrators, others use the courts, etc.). The project also studies optimal contractual arrangements in the face of constraints on allowable contract terms. For example, courts do not always enforce contracts verbatim, but often push aside provisions that clash with legal principle. Implications for the design of governance systems, specialized dispute resolution systems, and non-legal intermediation systems are explored. The research yields direct policy implications, informing the debate on how to structure the legal system and encourage the appropriate development of less formal enforcement institutions doc8432 none One of the most widely used statistical tools in empirical social sciences is regression models. By its very nature, social science and economic data is non-experimental and this leads to a host of statistical issues that are not encountered with data generated from controlled experiments. In particular, in cross section models a common problem is non-constancy of error variances across observations (heteroskedasticity) while in time series regressions a common problem is serial correlation (correlation across errors). It is now a well known textbook result that in regression models with heteroskedasticity and or serial correlation, ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation of regression parameters often yields good estimates (e.g. unbiased). The problem is that the usual formulas for standard errors are invalid. This means that hypothesis tests (e.g. tests of statistical significance) are also invalid. This fact has long been known in the econometrics literature and over the past 20 years there has been intensive research devoted to finding ways of computing standard errors that are valid in the presence of heteroskedasticity or serial correlation of unknown form. Such standard errors are very useful to applied practitioners because the form of heteroskedasticity or serial correlation is rarely known in practice. Standard errors valid for regressions with heteroskedasticity (White standard errors) are now widely implemented in statistical programs and are covered by undergraduate econometrics texts. The appeal of White standard errors is that they are easy to compute and work for very general forms of heteroskedasticity. In models with serial correlation, computing robust standard errors is more difficult in practice. The practical problem with these standard errors is that the practitioner is required to make choices of so-called tuning parameters. According to the standard asymptotic theory (approximation theory) these choices are, for the most part, arbitrary. This leaves room for one researcher to use one tuning parameter while another researcher uses a different one. These researchers could very likely draw different conclusions from the same regression model. Unfortunately, there is no established standard for the computation of serial correlation robust standard errors. (The statistical packages SAS and E-Views, for example, use different tuning parameters). This project develops a new asymptotic theory that explicitly captures, in a practical sense, the choice of tuning parameters. This new theory allows a systematic treatment of the tuning parameter choice and has the potential for developing a standard of practice for the computation of serial correlation robust standard errors. The research generated from this project will make inference in regression models more reliable and easier to implement for practitioners. This will lead to higher quality empirical studies in economics and other social sciences doc8433 none Fast unimolecular rectifiers of electrical current, at the ultimate molecular, i.e. nanometer-scale limit, should occur in molecules that satisfy, in our opinion, three conditions: (1) They should belong to the types D-pi-A or D-sigma-A (D = one-electron donor, pi = covalent pi-electron bridge or sigma = covalent sigma-electron bridge, A = one-electron acceptor), (20 They should undergo large changes of their dipole moment between their intramolecular intervalence transfer transition. We have demonstrated that a zwitterionic D=pi-A molecule, hexadecylquinolinium tricyanoquinodimethanide (where there is internal electron transfer from D to A in the ground state), is indeed a unimolecular rectifier, between 370 degrees Kelvin and 105 degrees Kelvin, by both nanoscopic methods (scanning tunneling microscopy in air) and macroscopic methods (electrical measurements on aluminum | monolayer | aluminum sandwiches, and also gold | monolayer | gold: sandwiches). %%% For that work, we relied on Langmuir-Blodgett film assembly technology (using a long-chain alkane termination), whose advantage is that it forms compact, well-packed layers, which however may be metastable in orientation, especially under intense electric fields. To make the rectifiers more sturdy and less likely to reorient, we propose to (1) use covalent self-assembly (add silane terminations in the molecule for attachment to OH-covered Si substrates); (2) incorporate polymerizable groups in the molecules. We also propose (3) a molecular transistor, by interspersing between two D-sigma-A or two D-pi-A molecules an electrically addressable gate film, or a gate electrode with a suitable geometry, and thus provide the world s first three-terminal unimolecular device with electronic gain doc8421 none Mountain, Manley, Wright proposals Much of the world s deep ocean water acquires its chemical and physical characteristics in the northern North Atlantic and adjacent regions. Surface water sinks in the North Atlantic and flows southward to mix with other sources of deep water in what is known as the global conveyor belt. This deep water flow erodes sediment and ultimately deposits it in large drift deposits. These deposits record the history of deep water formation, which in large part reflects changes in the earth s climate. The present project will undertake a detailed study of the seismic architecture of two large drift deposits in the North Atlantic. Specific aspects of the project are to obtain seismic reflection data with which to interpret the early history of drift formation and to examine modern processes that shape and modify the drift deposits. These data will provide critical new information on these drifts and will also be used in planning future drilling to sample drift sediments directly. This is a cooperative study involving investigators at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Rutgers University, and Middlebury College. Field data will be acquired on a cruise of the RV Knorr in mid- doc8435 none W. Burghardt, Northwestern University This is one of two identical proposals submitted by Northwestern University and Washington University. A combined experimental and computational study is proposed to examine the entangled polymers in a time-dependent inhomogeneous flow generated by periodic forcing of a viscoelastic fluid past an axisymmetric stagnation point. This is a collaborative effort between Wesley Burghardt of Northwestern University and Bamin Khomami of Washington University with the experimental part carried out in the former institution while the computational part in the latter institution. These two investigators have collaborated successfully in an earlier study, with NSF support, of steady axisymmetric stagnation flow of viscoelastic fluids. They are proposing to extend their work to time-dependent flows in order to test the best molecular rheological models in more complex flow situations doc8400 none and The process of dissolved organic matter (DOM) transport toward export regions has been inferred mostly from a few sections showing surface accumulation of enhanced dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentration and penetration to depth. Decomposition during flow from source regions to export sites has not been studied, nor has the accompanying transport of dissolved organic nitrogen and phosphorus (DON and DOP). In this project, researchers at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences will observe the transport of accumulated DOC, DON and DOP during the spring phytoplankton bloom in the NE Atlantic Ocean, the region previously studied in the JGOFS North Atlantic Bloom Experiment. They will track the transport and simultaneous decomposition of both the overwintering and newly-produced DOM as it flows through the NE Atlantic toward a site of bottom water formation to the northeast of the U.K. in the Norwegian Sea. This project will take advantage of an opportunity to participate on a detailed hydrographic survey of the NE Atlantic in spring aboard the U.K. research vessel RRS CHARLES DARWIN with colleagues from the George Deacon Division of the Southampton Oceanography Centre (SOC), U.K. A principal cruise objective is to calculate volume transports, from which mass transport of DOM can be estimated. While the broad outlines of these processes have now been sketched in, there have been no detailed studies in which DOM transport has been explicitly studied in the relevant hydrographic framework, and none in which simultaneous estimates of underway decomposition have been determined. This study, a collaboration among biogeochemists, microbial ecologists, and physical oceanographers would be the first to provide synoptic data on DOC, DON and DOP concentrations, volume transports and decomposition rates, from which mass transport of DOM components can be assessed doc8437 none This project will examine the success of the woman suffrage movement. Supplementing data previously collected for the 22 western states with data from the 26 States located east of the Mississippi River, the project will identify factors associated with suffrage successes in the West and the subsequent diffusion of suffrage initiatives throughout the other states. More specifically, the study will explore the influence on suffrage success of organizational forms and characteristics (e.g., constitutional conventions and territorial founding dates), changing gender norms and access to the public sphere, diffusion and legitimation, and social movement organizing. Data will be collected for the eastern states by visiting state archives, reading legislative journals and proceedings of state constitutional conventions, and collecting secondary histories of the suffrage movement. In addressing this question, the project will contribute to the understanding of social movement resource mobilization and political opportunity, incorporating them within new institutionalist paradigms of political science, economics, and sociology. The study also incorporates current gender theories that view gender as more than an inborn feature of individuals. Gender is a social institution that orders the social processes of everyday life. As such, gender is incorporated into the new institutionalist paradigm as both constraining and providing opportunities for action doc8438 none Technology is rapidly becoming the enabler of the new economy. Significant advances in technologically- oriented industries have created new infrastructure for both business and social interaction while transforming the way we live, learn and work on a day- to- day basis. These advances will continue to have a profound impact on the supply and demand for skilled labor in the new millennium. Indeed, approximately 50% of all jobs in the United States are expected to be either in or closely related to information technology (IT) and telecommunications products and services, by the year . Consistent with the demographic composition of the surrounding community, our campus serves a non- traditional, ethnically diverse student body. This project enables low- income, minority and or female students who meet established academic criteria to obtain Associate in Arts or Associate in Science degrees in computer science, mathematics or engineering. These students are eligible for transfer to an upper- division school or to enter the workforce directly in their chosen field. Thus, the goals of this project include: (1) Increasing the number of low- income, minority and or female students obtaining degrees in computer science, mathematics and engineering; (2) improving the overall quality of education for all students majoring in computer science, engineering and mathematics and; (3) enhancing the professional development and career choice opportunities of participating students. Over the two- year project period, scholarships are being distributed to students in computer science, engineering and mathematics. Measurable criteria including grade point averages, retention rates and graduation rates are utilized to determine the degree of academic achievement, retention and professional development graduation among scholarship recipients versus non- recipients doc8439 none The proliferation of Application Service Providers (ASPs) and software developed through the Open Source Software (OSS) approach offer enormous potential to non-profit, community-serving organizations. OSS could allow these organizations to share their limited software development resources while ASPs could allow for more reliable, lower cost and sustainable information technology infrastructures to be developed and shared by them. Together, they offer important synergies in increasing the effectiveness of community-serving organizations. However, the barriers to sustainable infrastructure are particularly acute in smaller non-profit organizations due to their limited financial and technical resources. Further, generating the requirements for shared systems is difficult. The PI and graduate students will engage in preliminary field studies with agencies delivering social services to the elderly in Detroit. These agencies are considering the use of ASPs and OSS applications and need to develop requirements. Aside from the direct and practical impacts this research may have on those agencies, new, generalizable approaches will be developed for requirements generation for information infrastructures for community-serving organizations doc8440 none Recent research suggests that the network structure in which individuals interact may have important economic consequences. For instance, while cross-country linkages between financial markets can be beneficial for diversification it also opens up the possibility of contagion of bad outcomes. In general, the network structure may determine which of several possible economic outcomes or `equilibria are chosen and it may also affect the speed with which coordination on a particular equilibrium occurs. Besides studying behavior for a given network structure, the endogenous emergence of efficient network structures has also become an important theoretical research topic. To date, however, there has been little research of an applied nature. In this project we empirically test this theoretical work using controlled laboratory experiments with paid human subjects. These experiments advance our knowledge of whether network structures matter for equilibrium selection, and whether and when certain network structures arise endogenously. These are critical questions that lie at the heart of many poorly understood issues including the susceptibility of financial and other systems to ``panics , sorting by gender, race or ethnicity, the emergence of trading patterns and trade agreements, technological adoption and ``lock-in to inferior technologies, and organizational design doc8441 none This project investigates the role of patient information concerning multiple aspects of quality in the health sector of Tanzania, and how this information changes and is updated when quality changes. In Tanzania, as in most African countries, patients, even the poor, have a number of choices when they seek care. Although it may involve significant additional expense, patients frequently bypass one facility to seek care at a more distant facility. Differences in quality can explain this phenomenon. However, it is widely held that patients cannot directly evaluate many aspects of quality in health care. Patients know that one facility is cleaner or has a more polite staff, but they do not know the quality of their consultation or prescription. They seek the services of a professional because they do not know what professionals know, and this leaves them unable to fully evaluate the services they receive. This project collects a unique data set in which patient choices are matched with objective measures of a variety of aspects of quality as evaluated by other physicians. Though patients cannot directly evaluate all aspects of quality, another doctor can. The data depicts patients willingness to incur additional travel cost for different objective aspects of quality. Preliminary analysis of an earlier round of data collection has shown that patients know about unobservable aspects of quality. The additional round of data quantitatively characterizes the method by which patients learn about something that they cannot directly observe. The data depicts quality that varies between facilities, between the various organizations that provide health services in Tanzania, within these organizations and over time. Using this data, the project reveals whether patients assign reputations to organizations, management practices within organizations, individual facilities, or even individual doctors. It addition, it depicts the speed with which patients update their information about quality. The manner and speed with which patients learn and update information about quality has important implications for the future of decentralization, privatization and regulation of health services in Tanzania and Africa in general doc8442 none A workshop is proposed to investigate the potential benefits of using smart sensor technology to monitor the performance of civil engineering systems. Promising applications will be identified for structural health monitoring under service load conditions and after natural or human-caused disasters (i.e. earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, explosions). Current barriers to implementing this technology will be identified, and a research agenda will be developed to promote implementation within the civil engineering community. The workshop will be held in Austin, Texas in April . Twenty researchers from around the US will be invited to participate doc8443 none Progress in our understanding of yeast chromosome structure, and the mechanisms and control of chromosome replication and segregation continues to proceed at a rapid pace. To bring together leading and new scientists that work in this area, The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) will sponsor a research conference on Yeast Chromosome Structure, Replication and Segregation to be held August 19-24, , at Snowmass Village, Colorado. This conference will represent the sixth iteration of what has become the most successful and important meeting of this field. This conference succeeds in several essential areas. First and foremost, the findings presented are always on the cutting edge , as each of the five previous meetings have upheld a strong tradition of presenting primarily unpublished results. Second, the meeting is attended by most of the leaders in the yeast chromosome transmission field, and in striking contrast to many meetings, Principal Investigators are present and actively participate for the entire meeting. The conference also provides a good balance of students, postdoctoral fellows, junior and senior researchers, with an informal atmosphere that contributes greatly to interactions between younger and older scientists. For students, this serves as an essential aspect of their scientific education, and for Principal Investigators, the conference keeps them abreast of the latest findings and stimulates collaborative efforts. Participation of women and minorities, both as organizers and as session speakers has been excellent for the past five meetings, and remains a strength of this current meeting. Finally, this is the only conference that is specifically devoted to this topic. Therefore, for scientists working on chromosome structure and transmission, this meeting has served as a critical vehicle for the dissemination of important findings and a major source for generating scientific interactions. The objectives for the meeting are to bring together both leaders in the field as well as new investigators, to continue the extremely high level of excitement and scientific excellence that has characterized the past five conferences doc8444 none The discipline of functional morphology is dedicated to understanding the relationship between form and function in living animals. Historically, this field has been dominated by comparative anatomists who have described animal form, and inferred function. More recently, functional morphologists have added modern tools such as high-speed imaging and electromyography to quantify animal behavior and to correlate behavior with muscle activity patterns. Currently, there is a small but growing awareness that techniques from other fields, which have not traditionally been used to study animal form and function, and can make great contributions to our understanding of the mechanistic basis of animal performance. At the Society of Integrative Biology Meetings, to be held Jan 4-7 in Chicago, IL, experts from various fields will present talks detailing the modern, fully integrative nature of the field of functional morphology in the symposium: Molecules, Muscles, and Macroevolution: Integrative Functional Morphology . The primary goal of this symposium is to present current innovative research that extends past the bounds of what is often considered traditional functional morphology. Though the topics covered will be necessarily diverse, all the speakers in the symposium will address the following issues: (1) What new information is gained by combining the techniques of the other discipline with those of functional morphology? and (2) How can functional experimental approaches inform the other discipline? The speakers are all young scientists who combine functional morphology with approaches from various other disciplines. This symposium will highlight the innovations that these individuals are incorporating into their research programs and promote the careers of these up-and-coming scientists. This symposium is also meant to promote interactions among researchers in diverse specialties, encourage intellectual cross-fertilization among functional morphologists in various sub-disciplines, and inspire comparative anatomists who have relied on traditional approaches to expand their research program to include new techniques and conceptual frameworks. The proceedings of the symposium will be published in the American Zoologist, the official journal of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology doc8445 none Papapolymerou Microwave and mm-wave circuit technology that offers high-performance, low cost, small size and high profit is essential for today s cost driven commercial and military industries. In order to meet the above requirements, the research community during the last five years has been focusing on entire system-on-a-chip solutions, where both passive and active components are monolithically integrated on a single semiconductor substrate (Si, GaAs, SiGe) for dense, miniature lightweight and highly reliable microwave systems. The above solutions will also lead to analog, digital, MEMS and microwave circuits co-existing on a single chip that is capable to sense, think, act and communicate. This concept can be used for the development of microwave mm-wave circuit-to-circuit interconnects that overcome many of the problems associated with traditional interconnect techniques and address future demands for feature sizes less than 100 nm. Currently, wire bond and flip chip interconnects are large compared to dimensions used in microelectronic fabrication technologies and cannot meet the signal delay and clock speed requirements beyond the 100 mn node. Guided-wave interconnects using metal traces also pose serious limitations due to propagation delay, signal distortion, noise and losses. Furthermore, they impose a serious limitation on circuit density and cost and can introduce parasitic reactances that degrade circuit performance. Wireless interconnects, on the other hand, eliminate the need for increased wire density and do not suffer from loss related to finite interconnect conductivity. Parasitic effects, such as crosstalk, are reduced and time delays can also be minimized if a fast conversion scheme that translates the base signal to an RF one is used. In this project, the PI proposes to investigate both theoretically and experimentally the basic microwave components of a wireless chip-to-chip interconnect system operating between 30 and 35 GHz. These components will reside on top of a low resistivity (CMOS) silicon wafer covered with a thin dielectric layer such as polyimide. The microwave circuits will be designed with Finite Ground Coplanar (FGC) line elements that can support TEM mode propagation and have a loss that is predominantly ohmic. The philosophy of the system is the following: An oscillator at 30-35 GHz will feed a planar phase shifter that utilizes MEMS bridges to change the phase of the microwave signal that is then transmitted by a slot antenna. The digital bit stream is applied as a positive modulating voltage to the MEMS phase shifter producing a microwave signal with BPSK modulation. At the receiving chip the phase of the incoming microwave signal (received with a slot antenna) will be compared to a reference signal via a phase detector (mixer) that will demodulate the BPSK microwave signal. A bandpass filter is used right after the receiving slot antenna to isolate the frequency of interest. Due to the high risk nature of the proposed research, the study of three passive components (slot antenna, MEMS phase shifter and bandpass filter) on CMOS silicon wafers will be pursued under an SGER grant. The three microwave circuits will be characterized experimentally with on-wafer measurements and theoretically with full-wave simulations. The main research effort will focus on understanding the properties and performance implications and limitations of the three passive microwave circuits residing on top of a low resistivity silicon substrate, with a goal to optimize their response. For the phase shifter, the characteristics of the MEMS switches on top of a CMOS wafer will also be explored and their interaction with it will be analyzed. It is anticipated that the proposed research will result in significant contributions to the area of integrated microwave and digital systems-on-a-chip and wireless interconnects, as well as provide valuable insights for the design of FGC microwave circuits on CMOS substrates used for digital circuitry doc8446 none Roemmich Funding is requested for a 3-year renewal of the NSF portion of the Pacific High Resolution XBT XCTD (HRX) network. This an ocean-spanning set of repeated eddy-resolving upper ocean transects with the objective of observing interannual variability in ocean circulation and the transport of mass, heat and freshwater. The program has now nearly a decade of quarterly repeat sections. Sampling will be continued with 800-m Deep Blue XBTs plus supplemental sampling with new -m T-12 XBTs to determine deep geostrophic shear in Western boundary currents and on basin-wide scales. The HRX network is an important element of the Pacific plan developed by the CLImate VARiability and predictability Program (CLIVAR). Planned analyses during the next three years will focus on basin-wide synthesis of the HRX data and comparison with results from related data assimilation and modeling efforts doc8447 none Family policies play a critical role in lowering poverty rates for families with children, in particular for single parent families, and affect whether women pursue employment when children are young. Why do some countries provide more generous support for families than others? How do these policies relate to female work, gender equality, and religious values of nations? This project answers these questions through the study of the development of family policy in three conservative regimes (France, Germany, and the Netherlands) that profess a strong commitment to the support of families. Taking a comparative-historical approach, it analyzes similarities and differences in these three family policy traditions in order to understand better both the origins and outcomes of these traditions. In so doing, it addresses debates over the causal importance of social Catholic ideology, pro-natalism, political parties, and women s movements to public polices. Specifically, the project analyzes family policy legislation (both successful and failed) in France, Germany, and the Netherlands from through . By gathering data on family allowances, parental leave, child care, tax benefits, child support, and benefits to single parents, the analysis provides a history of family policies in each nation, compares family policies across the three nations, and estimates quantitative time-series models of changes in policies over time. The methods thus test for possible causes of family policies across the nations, and the project contributes more broadly to the understanding of the sources of public policies doc8448 none There is widespread agreement that technical progress is the engine of economic growth. Despite a large literature investigating determinants of technical progress, there is relatively little work on what factors shape the incentives to develop different types of technologies. For example, the general consensus among economists is that technical change throughout the past two centuries has been labor-augmenting, in the sense that it increased the productivity of labor more than that of capital. Similarly, technical change appears to have been skill-biased at least for the past 50 years, in the sense that it has benefited skilled and educated workers more than unskilled and less educated workers. Despite these well-established patterns, we know little about the reasons why technological developments have taken these particular forms. This project investigates the incentives for firms and the society to develop and implement different types of technologies. It demonstrates that the size of the markets that technologies command and relative factor prices shape these incentives: there will be more effort devoted to develop technologies that save on more expensive factors and command a greater market size. It shows how these factors explain the broad patterns we observe in the data. The project draws implications for this type of technical change for cross-country income differences. For example, skill-biased technical change will increase the income gap between rich countries that are abundant in skilled workers and poor countries that are scarce in skilled workers. Similarly, depending on how substitutable capital and labor-intensive products are, labor-augmenting technical change may also increase this gap. The project also investigates how differences in the scarcity of labor may affect the growth rate of the economy, and offers an explanation for why countries with greater labor scarcity may have been the first ones to industrialize during the 19th century doc8421 none Mountain, Manley, Wright proposals Much of the world s deep ocean water acquires its chemical and physical characteristics in the northern North Atlantic and adjacent regions. Surface water sinks in the North Atlantic and flows southward to mix with other sources of deep water in what is known as the global conveyor belt. This deep water flow erodes sediment and ultimately deposits it in large drift deposits. These deposits record the history of deep water formation, which in large part reflects changes in the earth s climate. The present project will undertake a detailed study of the seismic architecture of two large drift deposits in the North Atlantic. Specific aspects of the project are to obtain seismic reflection data with which to interpret the early history of drift formation and to examine modern processes that shape and modify the drift deposits. These data will provide critical new information on these drifts and will also be used in planning future drilling to sample drift sediments directly. This is a cooperative study involving investigators at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Rutgers University, and Middlebury College. Field data will be acquired on a cruise of the RV Knorr in mid- doc8450 none Fratantoni Ninety-seven years of hydrographic data from two large data sets will be used to study the continuity, response to topography, and seasonal and interannual variability of the shelf break system (jet and front) from the Denmark Strait to the Middle Atlantic Bight. Since the flow is primarily geostrophic, the dominant transport signal will be captured by the temperature and salinity data without need to focus on the rarer direct current measurements from the system. Outliers will be removed through an iterative procedure. Data will be binned in space-time for analysis. Where repeat sections occur, these will be analyzed using standard techniques doc8451 none This is a proposal to analyze for trace elements and isotopes, many hundreds of samples from Iceland, and the MAR. An important goal is to create a large data set of samples that all have major elements, trace elements and Sr, Nd, Pd, and Hf isotopes determined for each sample. With this data set, the PIs will try to answer a variety of specific questions hypotheses related to the interaction of the Iceland plume with the MAR over a variety of spatial and temporal scales. These questions concern issues related to diverse mantle components, their origin and evolution, and discrimination between various components as mixing participants in the Icelandic and MAR lavas doc8452 none Housing for rodents used in research has changed little in the past 75 years. Typically rats are paired two per cage in plastic cages not much larger than shoe boxes, and cages are held on upright wheeled metal racks having four or five shelves, with four or five cages per shelf. Such caging provides little opportunity for exercise or either cognitive or social stimulation, yet alternatives are limited without radically altering housing facilities. This proposal will create and evaluate two alternative group housing modes, both based on the existing rack configuration and hence consistent with current housing facilities. Both types of facility will be compared to existing caging in terms of cost as well as ease of identification and capture of the rodent. More importantly, these alternative group-housing facilities will be assessed for their effects on the rat occupants. Fighting, activity levels, body weights, health status and housing effects on cognitive development will be assessed and compared to standard two per cage housing. Benefits to be realized from this project are substantial. Research involving environmental enrichment and social behavior in rats will profit from design and evaluation of practical, standardized and sanitary housing environments that will fit into the standard rodent vivarium. Secondly, and of far greater importance, this project has the potential to substantially improve standard rodent housing facilities without greatly increased costs or vivarium space requirements. Such an improvement would have positive consequences both for research and for the quality of life of the rodents doc8453 none The Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division is supporting Professor Kenneth Stevenson, Chemistry Department, Indiana-Purdue University at Fort Wayne, for the study of the excited state reactivity of copper(I) complexes in solution.The ultraviolet excitation of aqueous solutions of copper(I) complexes containing donor ligands, such as halide, cyano, amido, and alkyl, results in the formation of reactive species that include exciplexes, i.e. complexes formed between excited state and ground state species, and possibly excimers, i.e. excited dimers formed by excited and ground-state species. In some cases the exciplexes or excimers may form a bond through a bridging ligand; in other cases the bonding in the aggregated excited species may have metal-metal bonding, a very rare phenomenon. The goal of this project is to expand the understanding of these excited-state species, and to search for new complexes that generate them. A systematic study of the photochemistry and photophysics of copper(I) complexes will be conducted utilizing laser flash photolysis and time-resolved and steady-state spectrofluorimetry. The rates of formation and or decay of the various excited state species will be determined and the various intermediates and energy relationships will be determined. Copper has many important applications in electronics. This study will concentrate on the way copper complexes interact with very short bursts of intense laser generated light. This will provide information on the ways that copper compounds can effect the conversion of light energy to chemical energy and how they can mediate the generation of electrical energy by the absorbtion of light. A particularly significant part of this project is the heavy involvement of undergraduate students. The project will introduce these students to research at an early stage in their educational experience doc8454 none This award is in support of the Tenth International Conference on Phonon Scattering in Condensed Matter. The scientific objective of this conference is to serve as the main international forum on the physics and interactions of phonons. This is the first conference held in the USA since . Topics included in the conference agenda are disordered systems and glasses, lattice dynamics, Raman scattering, neutron scattering, quantum fluids, electron-phonon interactions, and phonon spectroscopy. Also included are the cross-disciplinary and emerging areas of particle detectors, photon detectors, coherent phonons, and new techniques to generate and detect monochromatic phonons. The conference will also have sessions devoted to phonon properties of micro- and nanostructures. Examples include carrier-phonon interactions in quantum wires and dots, the fundamental quantum of thermal conductance and its connection to information flow, ultrasensitive calorimetry, the thermal properties of carbon nanotubes, and the mechanisms of energy dissipation in high frequency micro-mechanical resonators. This award serves to support the attendance and participation of young scientists, post-doctoral fellows and senior graduate students. %%% This award is in support of support of Phonons , the Tenth International Conference of Phonon Scattering in Condensed Matter. It is the fourth such meeting held in the United States, the last one having been held at Cornell University in . The objective of the conference is to serve as the main international forum on the physics associated with the vibrational motion of the atomic and molecular constituents of materials. Understanding, modeling, and possibly engineering the vibrational motion are important because the vibrational properties impact the development of new electronic and optical devices. The topics covered by the conference include the properties of materials, such as glasses and crystals, as well as recent advances in the areas of nanostructured materials. The conference will also cover techniques to detect high-energy particles and photons by sensing vibrational energy changes in materials. This grant award also serves to support the development of the next generation of young scientists and engineers. Young faculty, post-doctoral fellows and senior graduate students are helped and encouraged to attend the conference so that they can participate in the scientific discussions with recognized leaders of the field doc8455 none Land surface and atmospheric alteration by urbanization leads to the development of distinct urban climates, which ultimately due to differences in the budgets of heat, mass, and momentum between the city and its pre-existing landscape. This study, through measurements and simple modeling, will enhance current understanding of surface - atmosphere exchanges in cities and their spatial variability at the local or neighborhood scale. This work will be conducted in two inter-related parts. First, a multi-city urban hydro-meteorological database consisting of surface energy balance fluxes, standard meteorological variables, and detailed spatial information on surface cover (materials and morphology) will be developed. This will be achieved by integrating results from previous studies, published and unpublished, and by conducting new long-term flux measurements at three carefully selected sites (Baltimore, USA; Lodz, Poland; Marseille, France). Second, simple parameterization schemes to simulate each of the surface energy balance fluxes in urban areas will be developed and evaluated. The objective is to develop a scheme with broad utility, thus it will be based on routinely collected meteorological data and simple surface parameters. Schemes for the individual fluxes will be evaluated separately and then integrated into a model called Local-scale Urban Meteorological Parameterization Scheme (LUMPS). The new data compiled and measured will be used to independently evaluate LUMPS. Urban areas represent a location where a large and ever-increasing proportion of the world s population live, and where a disproportionate share of natural resources are used. The data collected in this study will enhance current understanding of the fundamental physical processes involved in the generation of urban climates and their spatial variability. The integrated model developed from this research (LUMPS) will be capable of simulating the spatial variability of energy balance fluxes within and between cities. Given the easily-available data inputs of LUMPS (standard meteorological data and surface characteristics), it promises to be a tool of practical utility for the broad group of scientists interested in understanding, predicting, and mitigating urban climates doc8456 none Although marine geochemists have known for some time now that sedimentary organic matter is bound primarily as organic-clay aggregates, little is known about the physicochemical nature of these clusters. In this project an organic geochemistry research team at the University of Washington will conduct a systematic survey of coastal zone sediments with varying oxygen exposure times to examine the organic-particle association. Density fractionation techniques will be used to quantify organic-clay aggregates, and the organic matter composition of the density fractions will be determined. The analytical techniques used to characterize the aggregates will include X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) and Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization Time of Flight Mass Spectroscopy (MALDI-TOF-MS) because these techniques offer unique views on organic matter quality and because they complement traditional measurements (CHN, amino acid hydrolysis, etc.). Laboratory experiments will be conducted in which different mineral and organic materials are mixed in a controlled fashion, and the formation and subsequent microbial degradation of organo-clay aggregates will be monitored. The information gathered from these two sets of studies will then be used in the field off the coast of Washington, where organic-mineral interactions will be evaluated for fresh materials collected in the water column and at the sediment-water interface. Special emphasis will be placed on examining the degradation patterns observed for proteins, peptides and amino acids because these components are observed in both the reactive and refractory pools of sedimentary organic matter. The application of XPS and MALDI-TOF-MS to the investigation of sedimentary organic matter diagenesis and organic-mineral interactions will allow appraisal of how both the bulk characteristics of surface-associated organic matter change as well as yield detailed information about the reactivity of proteins and peptides in the experimental systems. The ultimate goal is to quantify the functional relationship between mineral and organic matter and thus better determine how the relationship can be used to understand organic carbon cycling in the marine environment doc8457 none This is a proposal to carry out experiments in a new high-pressure research lab at Caltech. The lab is equipped with two multi-anvil presses. Asimow proposes to use this equipment to carry out experiments on the solubility of water in mantle systems under conditions of less-than-water-saturated ( damp conditions with water 50-500 ppm levels). These are probably realistic for the in situ mantle undergoing melting below ridges and hot spots. This is an ambitious project and consists of numerous elements. Among these are to determine the solubility of H2O in mantle phases olivine, Opx, Cpx, Ga and eclogite phases (Cpx, Ga, rutile) and how solubility changes as a function of T, P, and system composition, including fO2. Actual melting experiments will be carried out to 5-6 GPA in order to determine the melt chemistry at small melt fractions and small H2O contents. These experiments may be applicable to the mantle s low-velocity zone at pressures of ~6 GPA (~200 km depth) The experiments will be done by the diamond aggregate technique and include determination of a range of mantle solidi under variable water conditions. The proposal is for two years and comprises post-doc salary for Jed Mosenfelder and supplies needed to carry out the experiments. The PI is aware that two years is not enough time to carry out the full program of work proposed- the goals are listed for illustrative reasons only doc8458 none High levels of ammonia are discharged from hydrothermal vents at sedimented (Guaymas Basin) and sediment-starved ridge systems (Endeavour Segment on the Juan de Fuca Ridge). This ammonia may be an important substrate for the chemolithoautotrophic production of organic carbon, yet little, if any, attention has been focused on understanding the biogeochemistry of this hydrothermally-derived ammonia. For this reason, the principal investigators working in collaboration with a scientist from Florida International University, plan to determine the rate of NH4+ removal and ascertain what fraction of this hydrothermally-injected NH4+ is consumed via oxidation by nitrification relative to assimilation by heterotrophic bacteria. In collaboration with a scientist from the University of Hawaii Biomedical Research Center, the population dynamics of the relevant nitrifying bacteria in an evolving hydrothermal plume will be determined. The principal investigators also plan to assess the contribution of NH4+ oxidation to organic-C production in hydrothermal plumes doc8459 none Dazzo Description: This award is for support of a US-Egypt Workshop on Microbial Ecology to be held in Cairo, Egypt, May . The US organizers are Dr. Frank Dazzo and Dr. James Tiedje, Center for Microbial Ecology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan. The Egyptian co-organizer is Dr. Sherif Eissa, President of the National Research Center in Cairo. The purposes of the workshop are to discuss jointly selected important topics in the area of microbial ecology and to identify specific areas where research collaboration will be mutually beneficial. Individual workshop sessions will be dedicated to microbial diversity in natural and managed systems, biosafe microbial inoculants for agriculture, microbial remediation of pollutants, and microbial ecology of extremophiles. The proceedings will highlight areas recommended for collaborative research. Scope: This award will support a US-Egypt workshop in an area that is increasing in importance both in the United States and in Egypt. The understanding of the diversity of microorganisms is becoming more important as it is widely recognized that less than 0.1% of the microbial diversity on Earth has been discovered. Moreover, how these unknown organisms exist, or coexist, in widely diverse and, in some cases, extreme environments is unknown. An understanding of the metabolic and physiological processes, as well as the genetic plasticity and ecological requirements which allow these organisms to survive in extreme and ever-changing environments is essential for many reasons in both industrially developed nations and less industrialized countries. The workshop participants will identify potential cooperative research and joint projects between American and Egyptian scientists. US participants come from several academic institutions and include several junior scientists. The Egyptian participants will represent academia, government, and the private sector. The Egyptian coorganizer is the president of the primary government research organization in that country. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting US-foreign scientific collaboration in areas of mutual benefit. Funding for this project is provided by the Division of International Programs, through the US-Egypt Joint Fund program doc8460 none This award to Pennsylvania State University is a renewal of an earlier one, and is supported by the Advanced Materials and Processing Program in the Chemistry Division and the Solid State Chemistry Program in the Materials Research Division. In this project, Thomas Mallouk will study a solution-based formation of bonded perovskite thin films and nanocrystalline tubes by layer-by-layer growth and exfoliation at different reaction conditions. Topochemical dehydration and reduction reactions of the lamellar solids will be used to prepare three-dimensional bonded perovskites with three-dimensional epitaxial ordering. These supermolecular assemblies from transition metal oxides will be evaluated for ionic, electronic, colossal magnetoresistance and ferroelectric properties. The research program will also provide education and training opportunity in materials chemistry to students. Under the award, three-dimensional thins films and nanotubes with defined size, shape and composition will be prepared from metal oxides for potential applications in molecular electronics, nanoscale machines and related applications. Synthesis of these supermolecular assemblies using wet chemistry methods, once fully developed, may provide alternate cost-effective methods to the traditional procedures such as chemical vapor deposition and laser ablation. In addition, the research program will provide education and training opportunity in materials chemistry to students doc8461 none The University of Texas Institute for Geophysics maintains a seismic reflection archive containing data collect by UT investigators between and . Additional data will be added from more recent UT investigations. All data wil be archived on a web-based, SQL-searchable database. The primary objective is to organize the field data, processed sections, navigations and images in a form that will be useful to investigators at UTIG and elsewhere doc8462 none An important recent application of economic theory has been to the design of markets. For example, the design of the spectrum auctions in the United States and around the world has been much influenced by recent developments in auction theory and the theory of mechanism design. However, much of the theory has been developed with a simplified view of (1) how different market participants value the objects for sale; and (2) what they believe other market participants beliefs. Such simplifying assumptions have been made for the sake of tractability and the resulting theories have been highly successful. However, one concern of practitioners and theorists alike has been that the optimal mechanisms derived from theory are sometimes too complex to be implemented in practice, which has lead for a search for simpler mechanisms that seem to be more robust to the underlying description of the environment. Our project will use new developments in game theory, allowing for richer types of market participants (including richer beliefs) to provide a theoretical justification for the use of simple mechanisms. The project addresses two separate but linked objectives. First, we examine how robust received mechanisms are to allowing the richer type spaces. In particular, researchers often argue that solution concepts stronger than Bayes-Nash equilibrium, such as dominance solvability and ex post equilibrium, are desirable because they are robust, although the exact notion of robustness is not always described. One way of formalizing robustness is to examine whether results continue to hold on richer type spaces. In our proposal, we discuss various type spaces in between the naive type space and the universal type space, and examine how different mechanisms performances vary as we vary the type space. Our second objective is to develop new optimal mechanisms for particular type spaces, intermediate between the standard space of all payoff-relevant types and the universal type space. Optimality in this context refers to the objective of the mechanism designer, which may coincide with social efficiency or simply be a revenue maximization problem for the designer. When the objective of the mechanism designer requires him to maximize an expected value, it will be appropriate to consider subspaces of the universal type space, which can be generated from a prior distribution function doc8463 none This project examines whether prosecution of misdemeanor domestic violence, accompanied by counseling and advocacy services for its victims, has a greater deterrent effect on recidivism than prosecution alone. Several hypotheses will be tested, the most critical of which is whether there is a subsequent decrease in intimate violence and an increase in self esteem, empowerment, and quality of life when victims receive counseling and advocacy services from Kings County (New York) District Attorney s Office social workers following a domestic violence incident and throughout the criminal case. More specifically, the project will compare victims residing in one geographic area, who receive a Prosecutor Plus Counseling and Advocacy condition, with closely matched victims in a second area who receive a Prosecutor Only condition. The subjects will be evaluated immediately following the perpetrator s arrest and at 3-month intervals throughout the duration of the criminal case and following its resolution for a total of 12 months. The study provides a unique opportunity to conduct a field experiment in Brooklyn s predominantly African-American and Caribbean community to evaluate the effectiveness of counseling and advocacy services in reducing domestic violence recidivism doc8464 none This objective of this study is to collect living and fossil deep sea corals from the New England Sea Mounts that will provide a depth transect from about 900 to meters. The corals will then be used in a multiproxy study to deduce deep water circulation changes and relate changes in deep water circulation to climate changes inferred from ice core data doc8465 none This work will integrate magnetic anomaly, geochemical, and paleointensity data to address a variety of ridge crest processes. The working hypothesis is that coherent features in the magnetic anomaly inversion records, especially within the Brunhes including the Central Anomaly Magnetic High, are most probably due to geomagnetic intensity variations. A magnetic study of submarine and rock core samples from the East Pacific Rise near 9 degrees north will be conducted to corroborate the geomagnetic origin of critial features in the anomaly patters with glass paleointensities, establish if there is indeed a link between the glass paleointensities and basalt magnetizations, and explore the utility of the glass paleointensities as a dating tool doc8466 none The objective of this project is to investigate the use of longitudinal panel data methods to combine forecasts for different cohorts and series used in Social Security forecasting. Forecasts of the Social Security system rely on forecasts of two components, demographic variables and economic variables. The demographic variables, for example, include mortality, fertility, and immigration; the economic variables include labor productivity, labor force participation, and inflation. Because they are from different functional areas, the forecasts of each component tend to be done in isolation of the other. Moreover, series often are decomposed into cohorts, generally by age and sex and sometimes marital status, and then forecast individually, that is, each cohort is forecast in isolation of the others. The project will use Bayesian and empirical Bayesian methods to combine, in a disciplined manner, information about neighboring cohorts with expert opinion of the future and currently available data. This modeling strategy, together with data from selected series, will be used to construct and validate the proposed forecasting techniques. As with almost every developed country, the U.S. government maintains a large financial security system that provides partial protection for its constituents in the event of adverse contingencies. The largest portion of the U.S. Social Security system is the Old-Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program, which provides protection against loss of earnings due to retirement, death, or disability. The Social Security Trustees Report forecasts that by the year revenues to fund this program will be exhausted. The magnitude and timing of this predicted shortfall heavily influences numerous academic and public policy debates concerning program reform. This project will supplement the forecasting methods used by the Social Security Administration and provide insights regarding the reliability of the predicted shortfalls. By combining information from different sources, the research will achieve more reliable (efficient) forecasts and forecasts of components that are integrated and consistent with one another. Moreover, the stochastic prediction methods will allow us to quantify the uncertainty in the forecasts in a probabilistic manner. This is not possible with the current deterministic forecasting system employed by the Social Security Administration. This research is supported by the Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics Program under the Mid-Career Methodological Opportunities Fellowship Announcement doc8467 none Global climate change affects the long-term availability and short-term variability of water resources. Potential regional impacts could include increased frequency and magnitude of droughts and floods, and long-term changes in mean renewable water supplies through changes in precipitation, temperature and other factors. Given the tremendous uncertainty that exists regarding the impacts of global climate change on regional water supplies, it would be of great value to identify institutional means of increasing the responsiveness of water demand to changes in scarcity. This study expands the growing climate change literature to address the critical question of water resource response strategies. This project analyzes water system flexibility by estimating the effects of higher prices, alternative price structures and non-price utility conservation policies on water demand in 12 U.S. cities. While price is theoretically the more cost-effective tool, in a second-best world, price increases sufficient to induce water conservation are not always politically feasible; efficiency and watersavings comparisons of price and non-price tools, and among various non-price tools, are therefore critical. This research assesses the potential of price and non-price water conservation policies as climate change response strategies and scarcity management tools. More specifically, the project econometrically estimates household responsiveness to changes in water price, conservation incentives, regulations and education programs, controlling for differences in consumers economic, social and climatic environment. To that end, the research team has obtained the first specific data on residential end-uses of water in multiple U.S. cities, which precisely disaggregate all household water uses (i.e., shower, indoor faucet, toilet, dishwasher, leak, swimming pool, hot tub, sprinkler) from total metered consumption. The proposed approach models demand for each specific end use individually, using seemingly unrelated regression estimation (SURE) techniques. Finally, the project will estimate the portion of cross-city variation in price elasticity that is due to factors beyond the control of policymakers, like income or family size, as well as that portion that can be highly sensitive to policy, like appliance choices. The research provides an approximate upper bound on the magnitude of water conservation achievable through reasonable price and non-price policies in the urban residential sector. These results will provide information critical to utilities, governments and society at large, which face increased variability and scarcity of water resources due to climate change. The research establishes reliable estimates of the price elasticity of demand for water in specific household activities. With this information, household water uses can be ranked according to their price-responsiveness, an indicator of both the value of specific water uses and the extent to which savings are possible in these uses. Having identified the water uses that consumers, themselves, will reduce, given the shift in budget constraint caused by a price increase or change in price structure, the project determines which types of non-price policies most closely resemble price changes, in terms of their effect on water demand. This is the first attempt to identify specific potential efficiency improvements in non-price utility conservation programs. The research also augments the conflicting evidence available on the absolute and relative effectiveness of non-price water demand policies doc8468 none The investigators will study wave turbulence and associated transport of heat and mass in filamentary structures in magnetized plasmas. Filamentary structures are encountered in many space plasmas, including the solar corona and the auroral ionosphere. In general, filamentary structures are a manifestation of self-organization in magnetized plasmas and their presence can have a profound impact on the global transport properties of the medium. The methodology is to study the dynamics of temperature, density and current filaments under controlled conditions in the laboratory and to relate the results to theoretical and modeling studies that permit the generalization of the observed behavior to situations encountered in naturally occurring plasmas. Experiments are to be performed in the Large Plasma Device (LAPD) at UCLA. The experimental program focuses on narrow magnetic field-aligned structures in density, temperature, and current created by various techniques. The unique environment available in the new LAPD device for the exploration of these topics will allow for a critical scrutiny of the models used to interpret data acquired by a new generation of spacecraft having increased spatial and temporal resolution. The research will shed light on problems related to basic plasma physics. Plasmas are ubiquitous in space and have many practical applications. Understanding the behavior of natural and artificially created plasmas is essential to solving fundamental scientific problems as well as improving the performance of plasma-based systems on earth doc8469 none Since its publication in , Gosta Esping-Andersen s The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism has been perhaps the most frequently cited comparative study of the welfare state. His typology of three distinctive welfare regimes, based on empirical measures of the outcomes of social policy, has been referenced and reproduced in numerous studies, serving as a critical starting point for subsequent work. Yet the empirical data Esping-Andersen used in developing his popular typology (specifically, the de-commodification index and regime stratification measures) is outdated and inadequate for contemporary research needs. It is based on a cross-section of social program characteristics in a single year, . Even for that year, the results have not been replicated. It is indeed surprising, then, that prominent work continues to reproduce (somewhat uncritically) Esping-Andersen s empirical data to describe and characterize welfare state regimes almost twenty years later. This investigation develops a cross-national and time series data set of comparative welfare state outcomes in 18 OECD countries based generally on EspingAndersen s programmatic criteria. In addition, the investigators collect data that take steps towards overcoming a gender-bias in the original three worlds typology. The project collects and makes public to the international scholarly community annual data on the components of welfare state regimes and outcomes from to the present. Future updates will keep the data set as current as possible. The data set contributes to the systematic comparison of welfare state programs in advanced capitalist democracies. It will be a valuable tool in developing and testing theories of welfare state development as well as how public policies operate and evolve, and constitute a basis for advancing systematic comparative scholarship on the welfare state beyond its current reliance on program expenditure data. The project: o provides an important update and history of the characteristics of national welfare states in a way that is empirically consistent with Esping-Andersen s seminal work o allows researchers to test theories of social policy dynamics-- e.g., convergence or crisis arguments linked to demographics or globalization, and path dependency or new politics arguments--that the available expenditure data cannot o incorporates important features of how welfare states provide benefits to liberate and assist women in traditional roles of social reproduction, i.e., care-giving. The investigation promises to enhance substantially our understanding of the topic and produces a dataset that will be used widely by scholars interested in the topic doc8470 none This project seeks to assess the impact of the major economic events and institutional changes during the first half of the twentieth century on the economic welfare of black, white, and immigrant workers. Quantitative analysis of the economic progression of black workers from to is largely a missing chapter in U.S. economic history. The combination of the World Wars, expansions, and the Great Depression offers an opportunity to examine the impact of a wide variety of settings on the economic progress of various racial and ethnic groups. The data from the Census and the IPUMS has helped scholars make a significant start on our understanding. However, there are significant gaps in our knowledge of the impact of business cycles and specific policies that can only be filled with annual data. The goal of this project is to seek out and analyze such data from the reports of the various state labor departments. The funds obtained from the NSF will enable me to travel to libraries, collect data from state reports, and enter the data into a computer-readable format. The analysis of this data will help fill the gaps in our understanding of the economic history of black, white, and immigrant workers during this important and dynamic period of history doc8471 none Chung This grant deals with the fundamental issues surrounding the moisture-induced embrittlement of intermetallic alloys with a focus on (Ni,Fe)Ti. In spite of the reactivity of individual components to water, (Ni,Fe)Ti alloys are not embrittled by moisture, as long as the Fe concentration is less than 9 a o. However, they become severely embrittled by moisture at higher Fe concentrations. This calls for a detailed re-examination of the traditionally accepted mechanism of moisture-induced embrittlement of intermetallics. That is, in addition to the dissociation of water to produce atomic hydrogen on intermetallic surfaces, what other factors are required to produce moisture-induced embrittlement? Using a surface science approach, this study looks at the water vapor reactivity of single crystal (Ni,Fe)Ti surfaces of different orientations and Fe concentrations. The objective is to determine whether or not water dissociation to produce atomic hydrogen occurs, and, if so, how strongly the atomic hydrogen is bound to the intermetallic surface. Most important to improved understanding is a quantitative determination of the diffusivity of hydrogen on these surfaces using electron-stimulated desorption. These investigations should provide the necessary atomic scale details to explain the inter-relationships among moisture-induced embrittlement, surface reactivity, and mobility of atomic hydrogen in intermetallic alloys. %%% Intermetallic alloys offer promise as high temperature structural metal alloys. One potential problem is the reactivity of intermetallics with the environment. This grant explores one facet of this problem doc8472 none Alford This project involves the study of thermohaline intrusions in Puget Sound. The study seeks to determine the relative contribution, to heat and salt fluxes at the edges of the intrusion, of shear-generated turbulence and doubly diffusive processes. The work will involve a two-ship survey of an intrusion within the Sound and subsequent data analysis. It is anticipated that the work will provide information about a basic question in geophysical fluid dynamics, the way in which two distinct processes, shear turbulence and double diffusion, contribute to small scale mixing when both are present. The work will also provide information on the structure and evolution of a type of feature, a thermohaline intrusion, known to be present in many oceanic situations, particularly near thermohaline fronts, but not yet well studied. Last, the work will evaluate an experimental approach for possible future use in the study of thermohaline intrusions in a more oceanic setting doc8473 none Two geochemists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will conduct a study to gain a better understanding of the chemical transformations that take place in a subterranean estuary. Groundwater, nearly 97% of the Earth s freshwater reservoir, may contribute significant fluxes of dissolved chemical species to the oceans via transport through subterranean estuaries . Subterranean estuaries are mixing regimes of seawater and fresh ground water that underlie many coastal regions). Since little is known about chemical reactions and fluxes associated with submarine groundwater, quantifying its impact on the coastal oceans requires a focused and in-depth study of an enclosed estuary that receives a well documented flux of ground waters. The investigators have identified Waquoit Bay, Massachusetts -- part of the National Estuarine Research Reserve system -- as an ideal location for an initial study of these processes. The project will consist of two parts: o Establishment of the temporal variability in chemical compositions across the subterranean estuary. External forcing functions such as tidal-pumping as well as rainfall recharge of the aquifer will likely play important roles in the location and structure of the groundwater seawater interface. o Study of the geochemical reactions and transformations in subterranean estuaries of three important classes of elements - (1) redox sensitive elements (Fe, Mn and U), (2) scavenged elements (P, Th isotopes) and (3) mobile elements (Ra isotopes). How significant are the addition and removal processes operating on these three classes of elements in subterranean estuaries? Is the formation of an Fe Mn Curtain in the sediments of a subterranean estuary an important process with respect to the transport and transformation of scavenged and mobile elements? Particular focus will be on the redox chemistries of Fe and Mn and on the systematics of U-Th-Ra series isotopes. This project combines relevance to important societal problems with the study of fundamental oceanographic and geochemical problems associated with the transport and reactivity in a complex interface doc8474 none This ocean science technology development project involves the design, construction, testing, and installation of a seafloor geomagnetic observatory at the Hawaii-2 Observatory (H2O) site located midway between California and Hawaii in m of water. The geomagnetic instrumentation to be installed meets INTERMAGNET standards for data accuracy and timing. It will consist of a delta Idelta D magnetometer, a gyrocompass for absolute direction measurement, a set of suspended magnet variometers, auxiliary environmental sensors, and a separate geoelectric observatory utilizing electrode chopping techniques. Power will be supplied by H2O and real-time, two-way communications will allow both control of the observatory from land and transmission of data to the user. The data from this site will be made freely available to the scientific community through INTERMAGNET. The geomagnetic observatory will also be a prototype for future installations at other sites doc8475 none TERC will collaborate with Vcom3D, Inc., and staff from the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), on use of the SigningAvatarTM accessibility software to sign the web activities and resources for two Kids Network units; evaluate the extent to which the addition of signing promotes achievement of standards-based learning outcomes; report the lessons learned about best practices for using the SigningAvatarTM characters to sign most web-based science materials; and create a more robust sign facial expression body space library for use in SigningAvatarTM enabling other science curricula. The collaboration brings together three organizations uniquely suited to conduct the proposed program of work. Units from the award-winning Kids Network series (developed previously by TERC with NSF funding) were selected for the project because repeated controlled evaluations have shown that hearing students who use the units make significant gains in standards-based learning outcomes. Vcom3D s staff embarked in on a course of research and development directed toward using visualization technologies to assist education of deaf and hard of hearing students. The SigningAvatarTM software is the result of this work. NTID, a college of Rochester institute of Technology (RIT), is known for its leading-edge research in the use of technology and technical signs for science instruction. Building on the partners collected knowledge, products at the end of three years will include: 1. Kids Network Weather in Action unit adapted for students in Grades 3-6 who are deaf or hard of hearing - Teacher s Guide with SigningAvatarTM enabled online activities, resources, and implementation strategies to meet the needs of the target population. 2. Kids Network Are We Getting Enough Oxygen? Unit adapted for students in Grades 6-8 who are deaf or hard of hearing - Teacher s Guide with the addition of the SigningAvatarTM enabled online activities, resources, and implementation strategies to meet the needs of the target population. 3. Summative evaluation report - Soft copy documentation of the extent to which the addition of signing to the web-based components of each unit promotes achievement of specified standards-based learning outcomes. 4. Report of lessons learned - Soft copy documentation of best practices for using the SigningAvatarTM technology to make most web-based science materials accessible to students who are deaf. 5. New vocabulary of technical signs for the Avatar characters sign facial expression body space lexicon - Words and terms primarily in the areas of earth and space, life, and physical science; communication; and data sharing, display, and analysis. TERC will have project oversight and responsibility for the tasks of curriculum-related modifications to the web activities and resources, the controlled evaluation, and the report of lessons-learned. Vcom3D will add new technical signs to the SigningAvatarTM library and SigningAvatarTM enable each unit. Consultants from NTID will assist in the selection and appropriate use of signs. An Advisory Committee and an outside Project Evaluator further enhance the capacity to ensure that students who are deaf or hard of hearing have increased and ongoing access to quality, age-appropriate science materials doc8476 none The investigators will perform a number of activities related to space weather educational and outreach efforts. The confluence of a number of successful space weather related missions and research programs makes this an ideal time to inform the public about the drama of space weather and the value of space weather research. The project will build on the success of previous accomplishments such as two museum exhibits called Electric Space and the Space Weather Center, a Space Weather brochure, the Solarscapes curricular module for middle school students, the Space Storms module for high school students and the Space Weather Center web site. The investigators will continue these efforts with a Space Weather Education Network for educators, a program to educate teachers and parents about major space weather events, and an expanded web site to better serve a broader segment of the space weather community doc8477 none Collaborative research: Rhizosolenia mats as a source of nitrogen flux into the surface waters of the Pacific Ocean: Fe stress, N excretion and basin scale distribution patterns This project will quantify nitrogen cycling dynamics in the euphotic zone by vertically migrating Rhizosolenia mats, and will provide the first physiological data on mats below diver accessible depths. These macroscopic diatom assemblages sink below the euphotic zone to acquire nitrate, store it in their vacuole, and then return to the surface for photosynthesis. This new production is based entirely on a biologically, rather than physically mediated transport of N. These fragile associations require specialized collection techniques such as SCUBA and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). As a result, their biology and biogeochemical importance has been largely overlooked. Other taxa also vertically migrate, and this project will conduct the first enumeration of this entire community in order to understand the broader role of vertical migration in oceanic nitrogen cycling. In-situ video imaging techniques will be used to quantify mats in the eastern central N. Pacific gyre. Depth specific (MOCNESS) sampling will be used to quantify the remaining taxa. A ROV will be used to collect mats below diver accessible depths in order to compare deep mats with surface mats. An existing computer model will be used to calculate transport flux rates with these revised estimates. In addition to transporting N, Rhizosolenia mats under Fe and or light stress may excrete both inorganic and organic nitrogen. This will be evaluated using both laboratory and field Rhizosolenia. Based on previous results, oceanic Rhizosolenia mats in nature appear to be chronically Fe-stressed. However, ferredoxin, a common and convenient in situ marker of cellular Fe status, may not be produced in these oceanic taxa and thus may not be a valid means of characterizing Fe stress in open ocean Rhizosolenia. As part of our research, we will evaluate this indicator for Fe stress in Rhizosolenia isolated from the Pacific Ocean. Our goals are to assess the Fe quotas of rhizosolenid diatoms, document the validity of the ferredoxin index as a measure of Fe stress in large oceanic diatoms, and determine N excretion rates by these taxa. A migration model will be rigorously tested by examining deep mats. These data will provide additional insight into the synergistic relationship between trace nutrient limitation and macronutrient acquisition and assimilation, an important developing theme of modern biological oceanography. The rates of biological N import and release for the eastern half of the central N. Pacific gyre by the entire migrating community will be assessed. This is a fundamental to understanding oceanic N cycles, and has direct relevance for both carbon and nitrogen cycling in the upper ocean doc8478 none Eriksen This project is aimed at demonstrating the effectiveness of gliders to observe boundary currents and describe an annual cycle of eastern boundary current evolution at the terminus of the West Wind Drift. Seagliders are small, reusable autonomous vehicles designed to glide from the ocean surface to as deep as 200 m and back while collecting profiles of physical, chemical and bio-optical properties. Two Seagliders will be deployed in successive missions up to 7.5 months long off the Washington coast to resolve the seasonal cycle of the California Alaska Current system. All the data, about a thousand profiles of temperature and salinity will be transmitted in near-real time so that the progress of the gliders and current oceanic conditions can be monitored. Oxygen and bio-optical sensors will also be on the gliders. The work proposed is intended as a step forward toward learning to observe boundary currents over long time periods doc8479 none This is a proposal to develop a method to analyze the rare earth elements in small samples (1-4 ml) of sediment pore water, using a new high resolution ICPMS instrument available at SIO. The technique, if successful, will help in fundamental understanding of the behavior of REE in sediments, an important goal. In addition, with shiptime provided by Scripps, the PI will collect sediment cores from the California borderlands, where there exist large differences in the redox state of surface sediments. Analysis of pore waters in these cores will thus be useful for investigating the chemical behavior of the rare earth elements (REE) in sediment pore waters under different redox conditions doc8480 none Insects and other arthropods are vectors of numerous parasitic diseases of medical and veterinary importance, including malaria, trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness, Chagas disease) filariasis (eye worms, elephantiasis), and dog heartworm. Knowledge of the factors that regulate the infection process in the insect vector is essential for the development of counter strategies to protect humans and livestock from the adverse effects of insect-vectored parasites. Insects possess effective innate cellular and humoral immune mechanisms that exhibit striking parallels between the innate immune responses of mammals, suggesting a common ancestry for these critically important processes. With the exception of studies documenting and characterizing various immune effector responses for several insect species, little or nothing is known of the mechanisms underlying the initial non-self recognition response, or the identity and mode of action of killing molecules used by immune activated cells. The proposed research is designed to elucidate the nature of the cytotoxic components generated by insects that specifically target and destroy their internal parasites. The researchers plan to study the cellular defence responses made by the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster against the metazoan parasite Leptopilina boulardi, and the cytotoxic responses of the reduviid bug Rhodnius prolixus against the protozoan parasite Trypanosoma. Using these two insect-parasite model systems, the production of various reactive oxygen intermediates (superoxide anion, hydrogen peroxide, and the hydroxyl radical) will be monitored, as will the production of reactive nitrogen intermediates (e.g., nitric oxide and peroxynitrite), and the activity levels of two important enzymes, NADPH oxidase and nitric oxide synthase. To investigate the changes in biochemistry and enzyme activity that occur during the immune responses elicited by Drosophila and Rhodnius against their respective metazoan and protozoan parasites, the investigators will employ high performance liquid chromatography with electrochemical detection, spectrophotometry, fluorometry and molecular techniques. This comprehensive approach for positively identifying specific cytotoxic molecules and the enzymatic mechanisms by which they are produced during insect immune responses will be extremely useful by providing important insights concerning cell-cell signaling and immune recognition in insects doc8481 none Cenedese - The role of geostrophic eddies in setting the stratification and meridional transport of a circumpolar current will be explored through experiments in an unique laboratory configuration. Buoyancy flux and mechanical mixing will be allowed to act simultaneously to develop a thermocline and eddies. Preliminary efforts are complete. The portion of buoyancy flux stress parameter space to be investigated includes the Antarctic Circumpolar Current characteristics. Later studies will include a cape to model the effects of Drake Passage and a sloping lid in an effort to model beta plane effects doc8482 none Investigations in Number, Data and Space is an elementary school mathematics curriculum which reflects research on, and best practices in, learning and teaching mathematics in grades K-5. NSF funded the development of the original curriculum, starting in . This revision of the Investigations curriculum will focus on the integration of algebraic thinking throughout the curriculum, the development of comprehensive assessment tools, and the strengthening of the number and operations strand. This work is informed by feedback from the field, as well as by recent recommendations for improving the mathematics curriculum. These revisions will be carried out and tested in an established network of school system partners, teacher collaborators and educational leaders. In addition to revising the curriculum, the project will develop materials to support teachers as they implement the curriculum. Additional materials will be developed for parents and administrators. The summative evaluation of the project will include longitudinal student achievement data, following two groups of students for three years each. Cost sharing will include substantial contributions from the publisher, Scott Foresman, and the developer, TERC doc8483 none The energetics of larval development has received considerable attention in life-history models. Numerous theoretical considerations of the allocation of maternal energy to offspring have been published to describe the important implications of egg-size for determining the size and age of the larvae-juvenile at metamorphosis. However, the maternal allocation of energy to eggs is only one half of the developmental energetics equation. The other half is the actual amount of energy that a larva will utilize as it develops from an embryo to a juvenile, and this aspect of developmental energetics has received far less attention in the literature. The key to understanding the selective advantages or disadvantages of allocating lots of energy to a few big eggs (producing a large non-feeding larvae), or very little energy to lots of little eggs (producing a small feeding larvae), lies in an accurate assessment of the energy costs of development of each of these larval forms within a specific environment. The comparison of developmental energetics between different larval forms can be easily confounded by the phylogenetic distance between different larvae. However, a few invertebrate species produce multiple developmental forms and provide an ideal system for comparative developmental energetics. This project focuses on describing the energy costs of development in the feeding and non-feeding larvae of a single species, the spionid polychaete Streblospio benedicti. An investigation of the metabolic energy costs of development in the polychaete Streblospio benedicti will address four levels of biological function that determine energy utilization during larval development: developmental mode (feeding and non-feeding), individual variability (genotype), environmental variability (temperature and food), and protein metabolism (proteomics). Understanding these four determinants of developmental energy costs will provide a comparative framework for considering the selective advantages and disadvantages of feeding and non-feeding larval forms in current life-history models that incorporate estimates of larval metabolic requirements into the estimates of larval age and size at metamorphosis. This project will produce the first examination of a discrete biochemical mechanism (protein turnover) to account for differences in energy metabolism during development (both in terms of individual and envirom-nental variability) and potentially indicate an underlying genetic component of metabolic regulation involved in the evolution of feeding and non-feeding modes of development in marine invertebrate larvae doc8283 none Funding is requested to conduct a high resolution study of late Pleistocene and Holocene ocean temperature and hydrographic variability archived in deep sea cores collected in within the Indo-Pacific warm pool region as part of the international paleoceanographic project IMAGES. This project will produce the first records of climate variability in the tropical warm pool region at resolutions high enough for direct comparison with both high and low latitude ice core records. This will allow testing of the hypothesis that the warm pool did not cool more than 2 degrees C during the last glacial. A Multiproxy (staple isotope, alkenone, Mg CA) approach will be used to reconstruct sea surface temperatures, as well as deep and intermediate water temperatures for the last 150kyr doc8485 none Embedding Assessments in the FAST Curriculum is a feasibility study on the impact of formative student assessment on student performance. The project develops a framework to create a set of formative and summative assessments from the FAST middle school science program. The assessment-embedded unit will be evaluated in a small, randomized experiment focusing on both student learning and teacher implementation. If the feasibility study demonstrates that the framework and methods impact teaching and learning, a full-scale research and development effort to link assessments with curricula will be proposed using FAST and other middle school programs doc8486 none Award Sellers often have or may acquire proprietary information about the value of the object to be sold. A conventional wisdom from auction theory is that a seller at auction will increase revenues on average by adopting a policy of always revealing all her available information about the object s value. Our project demonstrates that a seller will often do better by revealing no information. More generally, a policy of partial information revelation is better than both no revelation and full revelation. Full revelation policies unambiguously enhance revenue only under special circumstances. Despite this limitation, full revelation has been routinely advocated and adopted by sellers. For instance, a full revelation policy was adopted by the FCC in its design of spectrum auctions. Similar policies were subsequently implemented by other nations selling spectrum rights. We demonstrate that quite generally the seller can increase her expected revenue by carefully crafting a policy that conceals part of her information. We describe a procedure for crafting such a policy doc8487 none El Abbadi This three-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research involves Amr El Abbadi, Divyakant Agrawal of the University of Santa Barbara and Jean-Michel Helary, Achour Mostefaoui, and Michel Raynal of the IRISA project at the Institute for Research in Informatics and Applied Mathematics (INRIA) and University of Rennes in Rennes, France. The US and French research teams will address issues in the management of data in distributed systems. They will explore distributed data warehouse problems and problems of replication. In the former, local data are maintained and updated in various sites. A data warehouse is then required to maintain aggregate information summaries. Information is incorporated into the warehouse in an incremental manner, and message passing is used to calculate the incremental changes. In the replication problem, various copies of different objects are stored on sites in a distributed system. The goal is to execute transactions locally at each site, and then propagate the updates while maintaining the ability to serialize. The US team at Santa Barbara brings to this collaboration expertise in the area of distributed databases and replication. This is complemented by the IRISA INRIA team s expertise in solving distributed systems problems using causality, checkpointing and consensus. The project will advance understanding of methods and techniques for managing large amounts of data in distributed systems. It may result in significant efficiencies and better understanding of the interplay between ordering of events and semantics of events in distributed systems. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Institute for Research in Informatics and Applied Mathematics (INRIA). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigators and graduate student. INRIA will support the visits of French researchers and graduate student to the United States doc8488 none In this study, researchers at the University of Washington will determine the in-situ rates of gross and net primary productivity in the North Pacific Ocean using measurements of the isotopic composition and saturation level of dissolved oxygen. Marine productivity affects a wide range of fundamental properties of the earth from, for example, the concentration of CO2 and O2 in the atmosphere to the magnitude of potential fisheries harvests. Within the near future, potential climate change-induced alterations of ocean productivity could feedback into changes in the rate of anthropogenic CO2 build up in the atmosphere. All in all our ability to quantify rates of marine productivity is critical to our understanding of how earth s carbon cycle has changed in the past and will change in the future. Primary production (PP) rates in the ocean have historically been determined from rate measurements made in bottles. However, bottle measurements of PP suffer to an unknown extent from the inequality between in vitro and in situ conditions. Furthermore 14C uptake derived estimates of PP, by far the most common in vitro method, suffers an additional uncertainty about whether the rates represent gross or net PP. In a classic comparison, estimates of carbon export rates derived indirectly from subsurface estimates of oxygen utilization rates were twice the 14C-based measurements of primary production rates (Jenkins and Goldman, ). These uncertainties emphasize the need for PP rate determinations using methods that do not rely on bottle incubations. Recently a new technique has been developed to estimate both gross and net PP in the ocean (Luz and Barkan, ). It depends on extremely precise measurements of the isotopic composition of dissolved O2. The advantage of this method is that it does not require bottle incubations. In this study, the principal investigator will use this oxygen isotope method to determine in situ rates of gross and net PP in the N. Pacific and compare these rates to bottle measurements of PP made using 14C and 18O labeling techniques. The research team will make these measurements at two JGOFS time series sites in the subtropical (Station ALOHA) and subpolar (Ocean Station Papa) North Pacific. Both these sites have 10 or more years of 14C-based productivity data with which to compare in situ PP estimates determined by this new method. The time history of PP rate measurements at these two sites, the several estimates of carbon export made at these sites over the years (e.g., sediment traps, O2 budgets, DIC budgets, 234 Th budgets, etc.), and the contrast in biogeochemical regimes of these two sites (high vs. low nutrient) make the North Pacific an excellent choice for extending the application of the oxygen isotope method doc8489 none Benthos of the Cariaco Basin: Is the Eukaryotic Community Similar to that of the Santa Barbara Basin? The Cariaco Basin, the second largest known anoxic body of water known on Earth, has been extensively studied for its water-column processes and sedimentary record, but virtually nothing is known about the benthos of the oxygen-depleted and anoxic regions of the basin. An abundant community of metazoans and protists has been described from the sedimentary anoxic-oxic interface in the Santa Barbara Basin, and this study will examine the possibility that the Cariaco Basin supports a similarly rich benthic consortium. The broad objective of the proposed project is to describe the eukaryotic benthos of the Cariaco Basin. We will: 1) quantify the eukaryotic community using Percoll gradient extraction and fluorogenic staining; 2) examine the eukaryotes for prokaryotic associates using DAPI staining and ultrastructural examination; 3) identify the benthic foraminiferal assemblage using various viability indicators (i.e., fluorogenic probes, ultrastructure, conventional rose Bengal staining); and 4) determine changes in the benthic foraminiferal community composition across the anoxic oxic interface. These specific aims will be addressed using material collected on one short cruise to sample the Cariaco Basin using the Venezuelan ship RV Hermano Gines in May . Replicate multicores will be taken at each of 8 sites in the northeastern sector, at one site located in the eastern sub-basin, and at one site on the saddle between the two sub-basins. Bottom-water oxygen concentrations will be determined with microwinkler analysis. Results will impact the areas of benthic ecology, biodiversity and biogeography, and paleoceanography. Cell biology and evolutionary biology may also benefit if novel symbioses or adaptations to this extreme environment are identified doc8490 none Organizational culture is a familiar concept to both researchers and managers. It is frequently cited as the source of a firm s efficiency or as the cause of problems in firm adaptation or mergers. However, in spite of its familiarity, it has been difficult to capture exactly what organizational culture is and how it affects firms. We propose a series of studies that use an experimental procedure to create something very similar to culture in the laboratory. The basic elements of culture, based on common threads in the research literature, are that it is something that arises through shared history and understanding between members of an organization, that it depends on the organization s history and can therefore vary greatly between firms, and that it allows members of a firm to coordinate activity and therefore perform more efficiently. Our experiments use a task that allows firms consisting of two or more subjects to develop culture through repeated interaction. In our experiments, language serves as a metaphor for culture - subjects need to develop a way to refer to unknown and complex objects using simple, short phrases in order to perform a task quickly. These cultures that subjects develop end up being based on the group s shared history in performing the task (what aspects of the objects did they focus on initially?), they end up being idiosyncratic and varying greatly between groups (as an example: one group came to refer to an object as Macarena while another group referred to the same object as coffee cups ), and they end up allowing the groups to coordinate and improve efficiency (the one word descriptions allowed groups to jointly identify objects quickly). Our initial experiments investigate what happens when two groups that have developed culture independently - and have become efficient at performing the task - are merged. Not surprisingly, differences in cultures lead to decreases in the efficiency with which the merged group performs the task. In addition, subjects are not aware of how difficult it will be to integrate even these simple cultures, leading them to overvalue the merged firm. Finally, once culture conflict arises, subjects blame the source of the failures on incompetence on the part of other subjects rather than on the difficulty in integrating different cultures. Future experiments will further explore the last phenomenon by more closely examining the extent to which subjects place the blame for merger failure on others rather than on culture incompatibility. One implication is that managers may fire employees too frequently, blaming low performance on their incompetence rather than on the need for cultural integration. We will also explore how cultural integration is related to whether members of an organization have common or opposed incentives doc8491 none A field experiment is proposed, which will provide multi-year time series of salt, heat, and mass transports from the Agulhas retroflection region into the South Atlantic subtropical gyre. The program will deploy inverted echo sounders, both with and without pressure sensors and near-bottom current meters. The in situ data will be complemented with satellite data, both SST and altimetry. Historical data will also be included in the data analysis. The success of the program is based substantially on a new technique, GEM-ETTA, for analyzing IES (inverted echo sounder) and PIES (pressure and inverted echo sounder) data. Analysis of the field data in conjunction with reanalysis of historical data will provide the first long-term time series of these inter-basin fluxes on interannual scales doc8492 none Industrial sectors are continually evolving in terms of the variety of products they offer, the mix of their active producers, the prices these producers charge, and their productive efficiency. Using plant-level panel data from developing countries, this project characterizes the way that these evolutionary processes respond to trade policy reforms and to changes in the exchange rate regime. The analysis is based on structural models of industrial evolution that highlight producer heterogeneity, firm-specific productivity shocks, new firms start-up costs, and uncertainty about the future. By moving away from representative plant analysis, the project captures many micro features of industrial sector responses that the existing trade literature misses. The basic model used in this project quantifies an industry s dynamic response to changes in the intensity of import competition. It characterizes the time paths of firm-level capital gains and losses, entry and exit patterns, price-cost mark-ups, job creation and destruction, average productivity, productivity dispersion, and the menu of product varieties available to consumers. Generalizations of the basic model are also analyzed. These allow firms to export some of their output when it is profitable for them to do so, and or to make investments that expand their capacity or imperfectly control their productivity shocks. The generalized models address additional issues, including the question of how import competition or exporting opportunities might induce or discourage investment and productivity growth. All versions of the model quantify the role of expectations and policy credibility in shaping responses to policy reforms. The models are econometrically fit to large data sets that the principal investigators have acquired from Colombia, Morocco, and Taiwan. For each country, these multi-year data sets contain detailed plant- or firm-level information on sales revenues and input costs. Augmented by data on tariffs, the exchange rate, and the total value of imports, this cost and revenue information supports estimation of the basic model. For the extended models, data on export revenues and on productivity-enhancing expenditures (like fixed investment, worker training and technician salaries) are also used. The methodological contribution of the project is to adapt applied industrial evolution models to an open economy setting, and to implement these models using available micro data. In so doing the project breaks new ground concerning the measurement of sunk start-up costs and firm-specific productivity trajectories. The project also facilitates policy debates by quantifying many dimensions of industrial responses to policy reforms in a single integrated framework. The consequences of commercial policy reforms that are of interest to business and labor (changes in profitability, capital gains or losses, and job creation or job destruction) are measured and compared to the consequences of interest to consumers (changes in prices and the available menu of product varieties doc8493 none This research aims to get a better understanding of the interactions between the magnetic domain walls and the crystallographic intervariant boundaries as well as these aspects in various phases in shape memory alloys. The proposed study addresses the physical and magnetic microstructure and properties of Ni-Mn-Ga-Al alloys, with an emphasis on compositions with near room-temperature transformations. The magnetic microstructures are systematically investigated by means of Lorentz microscopy augmented by phase reconstruction techniques, and domain configurations are analyzed in terms of micromagnetics modeling efforts. Microstructural and micromagnetic observations are augmented by magnetic property measurements. Single crystals are grown at CMU and at the Naval Research Laboratory while polycrystalline bulk and thin film samples are produced at CMU. Thin films are grown by means of pulsed laser deposition techniques. Since magnetic actuation can provide large displacements with relatively simple driving circuitry, future actuator devices may include ferromagnetic shape memory films based on the NiMnGa alloy system. Educational efforts of the proposed program are directed towards the teaching of advanced materials characterization techniques, and involves website development (with the aid of undergraduate students) and the creation of a new course in collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh. %%% Magnetic actuator devices could potentially have a large impact on Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS). Applications of ferromagnetic shape memory alloys in actuators will only be possible if an in-depth understanding of the microstructural and micromagnetic features is obtained. The primary goal of this research is to obtain such an understanding doc8494 none Plumb This project is aimed at the development of a closed theoretical formalism for the analysis and modeling of time-mean flows in the presence of eddies. On the assumption of balanced flow, the approach is focused on eddy transport of potential vorticity and of tracers. Balance assumptions will allow necessary approximations to be made in the divergence (or momentum) budgets in order to close the entire system of equations around a single parameterization for the transport of potential vorticity and of tracers. It is intended that this work will produce not only a scheme for the parameterization of eddy transports in global ocean models, but also a set of conceptual tools for the analysis of the ocean circulation. Eddy resolving models will be used to guide the theoretical development, and to provide testbeds against which to compare results from lower resolution models with parameterized eddies doc8495 none Project Description for The Evolution of Bargaining Conventions by Herbert Dawid and W. Bentley Macleod Legal scholars and economic historians have long recognized the importance of social conventions and norms for the efficient and smooth operation of the economy. For example, if an employee feels that his or her employer is fair, then conflict is reduced, and the individual will invest more into the relationship. However, it is extremely difficult to precisely define the notion of a fair convention. One approach is to study the evolution of coventions in an explicit bargaining problem where individuals have to decide how to divide the gains from trade. The current literature has shown that the 50 50 split is a stable convention in a variety of situations. That rule however does not reward individuals who may contribute more to a relationship, a point that Grossman and Hart argue may explain why ownership is structured to make one party a residual claimant to the profits of a firm. What has not been studied, and is the object of the current project, is the evolution of bargaining conventions in the presence of relationship specific investments. We show that that the addition of relation specific investments can result in social conventions that are very different from the 50 50 split. Moreover, this research addresses an important open question raised by Henry Hansmann and Reinier Kraakman, namely why is it efficient for ownership to be concentrated in the hands of a single individual or group. We show that depending upon the information structure, both ownership and the bargaining conventions evolve to a fair rule that encourages efficient relationship specific investments, and low levels of conflict. In particular, we demonstrate that it depends crucially on complementarities between the specific investments of the individuals whether such fair and efficient conventions are developed. This work is theoretical and uses an abstract framework that might not be directly applicable in its current form. However, it does study the conditions that give rise to norms which encourage efficient behavior in a decentralized, anonymous economy. Understanding the structure of efficient social norms may also have implications for the efficient running of exchange mediated through the internet. Elucidating the type of information needed to ensure efficient exchange in these cases may help us better understand the rules that need to be used in New Economy to ensure its continued success and growth doc8496 none This project estimates the social costs of the welfare system that operated in England prior to the Poor Law Reform of . The old system gave all persons a legal entitlement to a subsistence income if they could not support themselves. Since the subsistence allowance for married workers with children was often greater than the available wage, it was feared the old system created great economic losses by reducing the work incentives and limiting labor mobility. The reform retained the right to subsistence, but subsistence was to be delivered in a much less attractive form to the able bodied - in a workhouse under close supervision. The reforms led to reduced welfare payments per head of the population after . We measure whether these cuts produced the efficiency gains predicted by looking at what happened to the rental value of property in parishes where their were more poor relief recipients before the reform. We also test whether the reforms speeded migration from low wage rural parishes to high wage urban parishes. As part of the project we combine data on poor payments and land rents with a database on parish characteristics constructed by Clark under an earlier NSF grant to create a rich source of characteristics of parishes in England in the years -51 that will be useful to future economic and social historians. We find that the Old Poor Law, despite its apparent deficiencies, served mainly as a transfer of income from land owners to the poor with little extra costs in the form of reduced labor inputs, labor effort, or labor mobility. These results that it was possible for many years to run a welfare system that guaranteed subsistence, and that more than 10% of the population in rural areas participated in, without creating great social costs. In future research we will explore what overlooked features of the old system kept social costs down doc8497 none This objective of this study is to refine and test bioproductivity variation over the last 140,000 years in the eastern equatorial Pacific. Focus will be on analyzing cores in the Panama Basin and along the east Pacific rise, to the west and south of cores for which we already have data doc8498 none The scalability of the Internet hinges on our ability to tame the unpredictability associated with its open architecture. This project investigates the development of basic control strategies for reducing traffic burstiness and improving network utilization. Such strategies can be applied through Traffic Managers (TMs)-special network elements strategically placed in the Internet (e.g., in front of clients servers or at exchange peering points between administrative domains). We believe that the incorporation of such control functionalities will be key to the ability of the network infrastructure to sustain its own growth and to nurture the Quality-of-Service (QoS) needs of emerging applications. Although there have been some recent advances in building network elements capable of wire-speed processing, there is a need for fundamental research into the basic QoS control capabilities that these TMs should implement. This set of capabilities have to be identified and implemented in a programmable, scalable architecture that allows for the easy and effective composition of services. Such a flexible architecture is highly desirable as the Internet continues to evolve and users demand new kinds of service for their applications. TMs should be capable of quickly inspecting and classifying packets as they go by (e.g., marking packets into precedence classes), and should control the transmission of these packets (e.g., through pacing, scheduling, or selective dropping) to ensure desirable properties (e.g., satisfaction of jitter requirements, compliance with TCP friendliness, or improved fairness across flows). In this proposal, we will address the design of dynamic dos control programmable TMs. We focus on basic capabilities that could be employed at different levels of the control architecture. These capabilities include differentiated, aggregate and proxy controls. The following are examples of how such control strategies would be employed by TMs. Differentiated Control enables TMs to route flow aggregates with divergent characteristics on separate communication paths. Unlike traditional routing, our routing metrics will respect bursitis measures, such as self-similarity and traffic correlation: Aggregate Control enables TMs to use congestion control mechanisms for collections of flows that share the same bottleneck. Unlike traditional congestion control, Congestion-equivalent flows are identified based on measures of relationship (such as cross-correlation and cross-covariance) and managed as a set; Proxy Control enables TMs to filter out variability (e.g., loss, delay jitter) at shorter time-scales. Such a functionality is crucial for improving the stability and effectiveness of control mechanisms that operate over longer time-scales (e.g., end-to-end). Unlike traditional a-hoc proxy approaches, our approach will take into account the length and characteristics of the control loops that get formed between the TM and the end-systems. Our design will be based on mathematical foundations from control theory and wavelet analysis. These methods enable thorough analysis and control of system dynamics at different time-scales and an understanding of the complex interactions among them. Specifically, functionality s at different levels of a TM architecture will be developed based integrated control-theoretic models. These models will account for nested control loops that are driven by system characteristics, which are identified using wavelet analysis of passive measurements. TMs that are designed in such and integrated fashion, could increase flow throughput, reduce flow jitter and response time, and improve the stability, utilization, and scalability of the network. We plan to implement our dos controls in a tested deployed in a controlled local setting as well as over the Internet. Our implementations will be based on emerging technologies, such as Diffserv and MPLS, and will be stressed by bandwidth-and QoS-demanding applications. Our testbed will provide a programming interface to softservices, in which capabilities can be turned on or off and control parameters can be dynamically adjusted. To this end, we have secured the support of industrial research laboratories and start-up companies-namely Lucent s Bell Labs, Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks, and Quarry Technologies. Specifically, we intend to use Lucent s Network Element for Programmable Packet Injection (NEPPI). NEPPI provides an ideal foundation upon which to implement the control policies we propose to develop. This project is a collaborative efforts between Boston University (Is: Ibrahim Matta, Azer Bestavros, and Mark Crovella) with expertize in characterization, measurements and control of Internet traffic, and University of Arizona (PI: Marwan Krunz) with expertize in traffic modeling, multimedia and wireless QoS doc8499 none This project focuses on microporous and zeolitic materials with negatively charged frameworks, regularly spaced pores and channels of molecular dimension that possess cation-exchange properties that can sometimes discriminate between ions and or gases based upon size and shape. Apart from formulating strategies for the discovery of new materials with these characteristics, it is important to understand the structural basis for any selectivity. Recent structural results, obtained using synchrotron radiation, suggest strategies to increase ion exchange capacity. It is hypothesized that low valent metals can replace common higher valent ones in framework structures, lithium for silicon for example, thereby producing highly negatively charged frameworks with enhanced ion exchange capacity and selectivity. The crystal chemistry of lithium makes it ideal in this regard and investigations of several new lithosilicates indicate a rich structural chemistry. Syntheses to expand the range of materials with Li in the framework will be pursued, including attempts to tailor the exchange properties of pure silica and aluminosilicate molecular sieves. This will be coupled with studies of the relationships between the sorbtive and catalytic properties of these new materials. An extension of Li-substitution into tetrahedral networks is the substitution of Na into octahedral networks. This effectively lowers the cationic charge on the framework and increases the number of extraframework cations and so ion exchange capacity. The structure of the first example of this synthetic philosophy is an Octahedral Molecular Sieves (OMS) based on the chemistry Na4[Na8Nb12.8Ti3.2]O44.8(OH)3.2o8H2O. We are planning to expand the catalogue of such materials and to seek the structural basis for their selectivity toward strontium. These classes of materials are potentially useful in separation, contaminant removal and sequestration applications. They are important to environmental technologies that improve remediation and mitigation, and decrease future cleanup costs by emphasizing pollution avoidance and novel approaches to the measurement, assessment, and feedback for the optimization of pollution avoidance and prevention. It will also impact industrial ecology by providing materials that can be applied to improve manufacturing processes and their environmental impact. Students trained in these areas of high-technology will likely be very competitive in the future job market doc8500 none As information technology has become more widespread, it is now increasingly possible for decision makers, such as CEOs and legislators, to obtain advice from a variety of experts with di!ering areas of expertise. Conventional wisdom suggests that, as a result, the decision maker will reach better decisions. This, however, ignores the fact that experts may withhold or distort information in the hope of influencing the decision in a direction favorable to them. Thus, a decision maker needs to consider how the structure of communication -- the conversation --affects how informative is the advice received from experts. This project investigates how the structure of communication a!ects the quality of decisions. The first part of the project concerns conversations between an uninformed deci- sion maker and an informed expert. When the expert sends a written report, unac- companied by any dialogue, this results in substantial information loss. A face-to-face meeting between a decision maker and an expert, however, leads to an improvement in the informativeness of expert advice--even though the decision maker is completely uninformed. Both the decision maker and the expert benefit from the conversation. This leads us to examine the following questions: How much information can be cred- ibly transmitted in a face-to-face meeting? Is it possible to induce the expert to fully disclose his information? In many situations, the decision maker himself may be knowledgeable about some aspects of the decision. As an example, an entrepreneur may have detailed knowl- edge about the growth prospects of his product, but still require financial expertise in taking his company public. The second part of the project concerns communication in such situations--where both the decision maker and the expert have some rele- vant information. Once again, the structure of communication can critically affect the amount of information exchanged. For instance, there are many circumstances where back-and-forth communication does not lead to information gains--even if the decision maker is informed--and we identify these circumstances. This leads us to ask the following questions: Is the situation improved by adding more rounds of com- munication? Is a face-to-face meeting superior to a back-and-forth exchange, such as via E-mail? The third part concerns situations where decisions are multi-faceted and informa- tion is dispersed among many specialist experts. For instance, a piece of legislation may impact both employment and the environment. Different lobbying groups are likely to possess expertise in each of these areas. We study whether providing experts with an opportunity to communicate with one another improves the informativeness of their advice. Is the situation improved if the decision maker also participates? Is the situation improved if there is overlap in the experts specialized knowledge doc8501 none Smyth Direct numerical simulations of turbulent overturns will be extended to case more directly relevant to the ocean thermocline. The present results based on simulations of turbulence developing and decaying in an unforced shear layer show that mixing is more efficient in the pre-turbulent developing phase than in the fully turbulent decaying phase. The speculation is that the observed difference in mixing efficiency among the various ocean flow regimes depends on the relative time spent in the pre-turbulent phase as opposed to the fully developed turbulence. If so, then the nature of the forcing may determine the efficiency of mixing, a valuable simplification. A series of experiments with steady and episodic forcing will conducted to test this conjecture. In addition, numerical simulations will examine differential diffusion in unforced and forced overturns to determine under which circumstances it is most important doc8502 none This research adds to an understanding of the Arab fertility transition by investigating the existence of spatial patterns of fertility differentials and change over time in urban and rural settings in two Arab nations: Egypt and Jordan. The research is guided by a conceptual framework that explains the fertility transition as a combination of human capital changes in local contexts (the supply-demand framework) and the spatial diffusion of ideas and behavior regarding family size (the horizontal component of the cultural diffusion perspective). The major thrust of the research is oriented toward the exploration of the spatio-temporal component of fertility change in rural and urban areas in Arab countries, predicated on the more general hypothesis that reproductive behavior is a function of both who you are and where you are. The project extends the work that the researchers have already begun incorporating an explicitly spatial component to the analysis of the Arab fertility transition. This spatial component has two important aspects: (1) measuring the extent to which where you are influences reproductive behavior, net of who you are; and (2) quantifying the environmental context in which reproductive decisions are being made. These objectives will be accomplished by applying techniques of remote-sensing, geographic information system (GIS), and local indicators of spatial association and combining them with census data for study sites in Egypt and Jordan. The satellite imagery offers the ability to generate otherwise unavailable information about the ecological environmental context of the local areas in which reproductive behavior is occurring. The incorporation of these variables into a GIS with the census data offers a way to statistically analyze the information using emerging spatial-statistical techniques. These techniques permit the quantitative assessment of spatial clustering of low and high fertility, and they also permit the calculation of spatially filtered regression models which are able to distinguish between variability in the dependent variable (fertility) that is due to the spatial component (where you are) and that which is due to the non-spatial component (who you are). Although the project is not individually pioneering the use of any of these techniques, no demographers have yet put all of these pieces together in this way. Since these techniques are still quite new in demographic research, the conduct of and products from this research project will provide models for advancing the role of spatial perspectives and methods in demographic education and research. The project will demonstrate that an understanding of regional fertility transitions requires an understanding of the way in which fertility levels and their change over time exhibit spatial clustering, and of the way in which spatial clustering is related to specific social ecological environments. The methods employed offer a model of how an increase in local prediction could increase the effectiveness of locally applied policies that may influence reproductive decisions. At the broader societal level, the substantive results will help to guide intelligent use of always-scarce resources in improving reproductive health in developing countries doc8503 none Arrison The Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable (GUIRR), established in , provides a unique forum for dialogue among top government, university and industry leaders of the national science and technology enterprise. GUIRR is sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and is guided by a Council that develops the Roundtable agenda and oversees plans and activities of various Working Groups appointed to examine additional topics in depth. In recent years the Roundtable has sponsored numerous projects such as Removing Barriers to Industry-University Research Collaboration and Stresses on Research and Education at Colleges and Universities. GUIRR is the convenor of the Federal Demonstration Partnership (FDP). The FDP, through meetings and issuance of reports, serves as an ongoing cooperative effort among sixty-five universities or research institutes and eleven Federal Agencies to address means to improve management of federally funded research. Primary core support is received by each of the major federal research and development agencies. In , GUIRR created an affiliated University-Industry Partnership program as a supplemental component of its funding doc8504 none This project consists of an analysis of the intermediate depth circulation in the South Atlantic. The analysis will combine information from a variety of quasi-Lagrangian float data collected during WOCE and other contemporary experiments. The project will produce an internally consistent set of float velocity data from the various deployments, establish an estimate of the mean intermediate depth flow field and its variance, and estimate the mean and eddy fields of kinetic energy. This data set and these derived fields will be used, together with available hydrographic and current meter data, to develop an understanding of the intermediate circulation in the South Atlantic and estimates of the heat and salt transports associated with it doc8505 none The Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, supports the work of Prof. George W. Flynn, Department of Chemistry, Columbia University, for his work on elucidating the factors that control self-assembly, molecular structure, and functional group conformation in chiral and achiral molecular films physisorbed at liquid-solid interfaces. A rather unique Scanning Tunneling Microscopy approach will be developed and used to determine chemical structure and dynamics at these interfaces. The results of the study will be of fundamental interest and of practical importance in the design of self-assembled interfaces. The observation, control and manipulation of these interfaces will be significant in the development of next generation microscopic optical and electronic devices, chemical sensors, and biomedical monitors that function on the nanoscale dimension. Undergraduate and graduate students, and post-doctoral associates will acquire considerable experience and skills in a variety of physical methods in the developing field of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology doc8506 none The existence of racial residential segregation in United States cities means that blacks often lack the access to schools, parks, and other opportunities enjoyed by whites. Some argue that residential segregation and the geographical isolation of blacks from whites in large metropolises has contributed to the emergence of an underclass, and to racial differences in earnings, schooling, and single parenting. Using the decennial censuses, the only source of information about residential segregation, researchers have done much to understand the causes and consequences of this form of racial and ethnic inequality. This project extends such research using data on the distribution of racial and ethnic groups down to the city block from the Census. It produces three papers based on computing multiple indices of residential segregation for American cities. One describes segregation levels in and their correlates. Another explores and measures the implications of the new race categories for the analysis of segregation, and a third tests hypotheses about changes in segregation since . The findings from this project describe baseline information about the levels of racial residential segregation in American metropolises in , how the new multi-race census question confounds the measurement of segregation, and how residential segregation has changed in the recent past. Moreover, the analysis tests several hypotheses in the literature by examining how levels and changes in city size, housing stock, size of minority populations, economic status of minority groups, and industry employment affect segregation. The results have important implications for housing and discrimination policies, and for theories of racial inequality and urban change doc8507 none The goal of Exploring Earth is to weave into a tightly integrated package the revised textbook, in depth student investigations of core topics in Earth sciences, and a web site of Earth science images, animations and other visualizations. The project is a collaboration between the publisher (McDougall Littel) of the most widely used high school Earth science textbook and TERC. The investigations serve as challenging and stimulating entry points into or extensions from major topics, providing opportunity for student-guided applications to real-world scenarios. They include investigations at local study sites, design of experiments, working with visualizations, and real-time data and experimenting with models and simulations. The website features images from space, real-time data, and information about theories, data and recent events to extend and deepen student learning. Students develop an understanding of Earth and space science and of Earth as system by experiencing Earth and space science as a process of inquiry, exploration and discovery; by observing, exploring and monitoring the environment around them; and by learning to use the tools of modern technologies. The project builds upon previous work of both parties to provide all teachers a pathway for easier change to the increased use of inquiry and electronic technologies. The materials contain a guide for professional development of teachers and workshops are held to support learning Earth science in urban environments. The evaluation includes pilot and field testing the materials and evidence of student learning doc8508 none Kelly This project will analyze the transport and storage of heat in the upper ocean in the western North Atlantic. A particular effort will be made to determine the interannual variability of these quantities and identify the mechanisms responsible. The project will be based on historical data and use both in situ measurements and satellite-derived surface fields. The work will examine the roles of both surface buoyancy forcing and advective heat transport, focusing on the Gulf Stream and the adjacent recirculations. Goals include developing a better understanding of the relations between variations in circulation and in sea-surface temperature, in sea-surface height and in heat storage, and between anomalies in heat storage and in sea-surface temperature. The work will provide a better understanding of an important part of the climate system, the transport of heat between low and high latitudes by the ocean in the North Atlantic. It will also provide an observational baseline against which ocean and climate models can be tested doc8465 none This work will integrate magnetic anomaly, geochemical, and paleointensity data to address a variety of ridge crest processes. The working hypothesis is that coherent features in the magnetic anomaly inversion records, especially within the Brunhes including the Central Anomaly Magnetic High, are most probably due to geomagnetic intensity variations. A magnetic study of submarine and rock core samples from the East Pacific Rise near 9 degrees north will be conducted to corroborate the geomagnetic origin of critial features in the anomaly patters with glass paleointensities, establish if there is indeed a link between the glass paleointensities and basalt magnetizations, and explore the utility of the glass paleointensities as a dating tool doc8510 none DasSarma and Schreier In this project, a combination of genetic and biochemical approaches are being used to investigate purple membrane synthesis in a salt-loving archaeon, Halobacterium NRC-1. The purple membrane is a specialized region of the cell membrane that contains a two-dimensional crystalline array of a single chromoprotein, bacteriorhodopsin (BR). BR is composed of a 1:1 complex of the protein moiety (bacterio-opsin) and chromophore (retinal). When fully induced under microaerobic and high illumination conditions, purple membrane can cover up to 50 % of the cell s surface and is able to support a period of phototrophic growth. Previously, transcription of the bop gene was shown to depend upon an upstream gene, bat, and found to be sensitive to DNA supercoiling. Additionally, the minimal bacterio-opsin gene (bop) promoter was extensively mutagenized and shown to contain an essential upstream activator sequence (UAS), a TATA box deviating from the archaeal consensus, and a DNA supercoiling-sensitivity site within an alternating purine-pyrimidine region. The likely regulator, Bat, contains homologies to the PAS-PAC (or LOV) redox sensing domain, a GAF light-responsive domain, and an AraC type helix-turn-helix (HTH) DNA binding motif. Three other genes (crtB1, blp, and brp) containing UAS elements similar to the bop gene, and clustered immediately upstream of bop, showed similar or identical regulatory characteristics, and six TATA-binding protein (tbp) genes and seven TFIIB (tfb) genes were found in the genome sequence. The major goal of this project is to understand the mechanism of coordinate regulation of bacterio-opsin and retinal at the genetic level. Specifically, the project will (1) identify the proteins binding to the bop promoter, (2) define the mechanism of action of the pleiotropic regulator, Bat, in concert with other transcriptional factors, and (3) establish the members of the purple membrane regulon. The long-term goal is to better understand the mechanisms of coordinate regulation of multigene systems in archaea, which should shed light on the evolution of regulatory mechanisms across all branches of life doc8511 none Many multivariate problems of practical interests are intractable in the worst case setting. Such intractability could be removed by either identifying new properties (i.e., classes) that allow for efficient algorithms or by switching to the average (or probabilistic) settings. This is often referred to as breaking intractability. A substantial part of the proposed research will deal with breaking intractability of a number of important problems. This will lead to deeper knowledge of the complexities of multivariate problems and will result in new efficient algorithms for a host of important problems. Related to the average case study are path integrals. The research will be a continuation of a recently initiated study on the complexity of path integration and will provide additional complexity bounds and new efficient algorithms. A number of important problems deal with classes of functions of unbounded domains. However, there are but few corresponding complexity results and, in practice, commonly used algorithms are ad hoc and are not optimal. Significant part of the proposed research will deal with problems defined for classes of functions with unbounded domains; both the worst case and the average case settings will be studied. This will enrich understanding of the complexity of such problems and will provide new algorithms that are optimal (or almost optimal). The theoretical work will yield new and efficient algorithms for a host of important problems. These algorithms will be developed and thoroughly tested. Graduate students will be involved in both theoretical and development phases of the research doc8451 none This is a proposal to analyze for trace elements and isotopes, many hundreds of samples from Iceland, and the MAR. An important goal is to create a large data set of samples that all have major elements, trace elements and Sr, Nd, Pd, and Hf isotopes determined for each sample. With this data set, the PIs will try to answer a variety of specific questions hypotheses related to the interaction of the Iceland plume with the MAR over a variety of spatial and temporal scales. These questions concern issues related to diverse mantle components, their origin and evolution, and discrimination between various components as mixing participants in the Icelandic and MAR lavas doc8513 none Sponges, gorgonians, and ascidians are important components of benthic marine communities, particularly coral reefs. Organic extracts of their tissues have yielded a wealth of unusual chemical compounds that are not involved in primary metabolism, and their biological functions are mostly unknown. One commonly held theory is that these compounds are distasteful to potential predators, but they may also protect from fouling or overgrowth. This study is a continuation of a very successful RUI research program designed to assess the defenses of Caribbean sponges, a group whose taxonomy and chemistry is fairly well described. Because reef sponges, gorgonians and ascidians are abundant, sessile, elaborate putative structural and chemical defenses, and are subject to grazing from generalist and specialist predators, they provide a useful group for testing fundamental hypotheses proposed by terrestrial ecologists about plant defensive mechanisms. Investigations of antipredatory structural and chemical defenses will be extended from the previous study to include Caribbean gorgonians and ascidians, using the successful techniques previously applied to sponges. In particular, optimal defense theory will be tested with ascidians, which elaborate both inorganic and organic chemical defenses. Metabolites of invertebrate species that have yielded deterrent crude extracts will be identified by bioassay-directed fractionation, resulting in a better understanding of the structure-function relationships of chemical defenses. Intraspecific patterns of metabolite expression will be examined to determine whether they conform to optimal defense theory. Hypotheses regarding resource allocation between defensive chemistry and growth, reproduction, and regeneration will be tested by manipulating chemically defended and non-defended reef sponges in the field. The hypothesis that fish predation limits sponge distributions on reefs will be tested by comparing transect data from reefs where sponge-eating fishes are abundant (Bahamas, Florida Keys) to reefs where fish predators are rare due to natural (Bermuda) or anthropogenic causes (Jamaica, Barbados). The hypothesis that sponge secondary metabolites function as antifouling and anti-overgrowth defenses will be further tested in the field and laboratory with gel-based assays, and these techniques will be used to isolate the active metabolites. Field experiments will be conducted to determine the rates at which active metabolites are expressed by sponges onto their surfaces or into seawater. Overall, this research program will continue to develop one of the most systematic and complete investigations of chemical defenses of tropical invertebrates, while at the same time providing important educational opportunities for students at an RUI institution. The results will be useful in judging the general applicability of chemical defense theories derived from studies of terrestrial ecosystems, while advancing our understanding of the complex relationships between benthic invertebrates, their predators and their competitors in coral reef environments doc8514 none This proposal is for the creation of 20 modules of instruction that would be based on technology education, problem-solving activities that are part of the curriculum of the Technology Student Association (TSA), and that are consistent with standards for technological literacy as published by the International Technology Education Association (ITEA). Science and mathematics content would be added to these TSA activities. The grade levels would be middle and high school. For the middle school level units include Cyberspace pursuit, Dragster design challenge and Flight challenge. At the high school level units include electronic systems, manufacturing prototype and radio-controlled transportation. The project will extend over four years. Materials will be piloted and field-tested by TSA and non-TSA teachers, in North Carolina, Florida, Oklahoma and Virginia doc8486 none Award Sellers often have or may acquire proprietary information about the value of the object to be sold. A conventional wisdom from auction theory is that a seller at auction will increase revenues on average by adopting a policy of always revealing all her available information about the object s value. Our project demonstrates that a seller will often do better by revealing no information. More generally, a policy of partial information revelation is better than both no revelation and full revelation. Full revelation policies unambiguously enhance revenue only under special circumstances. Despite this limitation, full revelation has been routinely advocated and adopted by sellers. For instance, a full revelation policy was adopted by the FCC in its design of spectrum auctions. Similar policies were subsequently implemented by other nations selling spectrum rights. We demonstrate that quite generally the seller can increase her expected revenue by carefully crafting a policy that conceals part of her information. We describe a procedure for crafting such a policy doc8516 none This objective of this study is to provide estimates of long-term changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations from the Eocene through the Oligocene. The study will utilize carbon isotope measurement of alkenones and carbonate microfossils along with oxygen isotope measurements in carbonate microfossils. Measurements will be done on 6 discreet time slices representing the early, middle, and late Eocene and the early, middle and late Oligocene. Sample resolution will be approximately 250 to 500ky. In addition records will be established prior to and following distinct climatic episodes such as the Eocene Oligocene transition and the apparent rapid deglaciation at the end of the Oligocene doc8517 none Many egg-laying reptiles lack sex chromosomes, depending instead upon the incubation temperature of the egg to determine the sex of their offspring, a process known as temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD). How temperature both stimulates and inhibits genetic cascades to determine the type of gonad and direct sexual differentiation is the focus of this application. This investigator and his colleagues have developed the red-eared slider turtle (Trachemys scripta elegans) as an animal model system to study TSD. These researchers have demonstrated that male and female gonadal development are the result of separate genetic cascades influenced by steroid hormones, and that specific enzymes activate or inhibit steroid hormone effects on sex determination. In the red-eared slider system, female (or ovary) determination involves estrogens whereas male (or testis) determination involves nonaromatizable androgens. Mammals and turtles share a common evolutionary history and recent findings indicate that despite a difference in the trigger (environmental temperature vs. sex chromosomes), the red-eared slider shares many characteristics of sexual development with the mammalian system, including the same genes involved along the sex determination pathway. Experiments are designed to identify the genes involved in testis formation and then to determine how temperature and sex hormones accomplish this feat. For example, relative levels of gene expression will be measured using quantitative reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and Northern blot analysis. Localization of gene expression will be analyzed with in situ hybridization. The ability to manipulate sex in a primitive vertebrate species by incubation temperature, exogenous hormones, and other agents provides unparalleled experimental control, thereby enabling more detailed analysis of the normal pattern of gene expression during sex determination than is possible with other amniotes (reptiles, birds and mammals are known as the amniote or higher vertebrates) having sex chromosomes. This work is important for several reasons. First, it has long been assumed that steroid hormones of maternal or embryonic origin are not involved in gonad formation in mammals and birds. The work with TSD reptiles indicates that this conclusion may be premature. Second, since TSD may represent the evolutionary precursor to sex chromosomes, potential temperature and steroid effects in sex determination may be present, but partly or wholly masked, in warm-blooded vertebrates. Third, temperature has not been adequately investigated as a factor in steroid hormone action at the genetic level in warm-blooded animals despite numerous studies documenting how both hormone responsiveness and hormone action are markedly dependent on temperature doc8518 none This objective of this study is to more carefully constrain the timing of the shift in sulfur isotope ratio during the late Paleocene and determine the relationship of that shift to changes in carbon and oxygen isotopes. The study will also establish the relationship of the sulfur isotope shift to variations in Sr Ca ratio in barite and phosphorous content of bulk sediment doc8519 none The determination of the price level and inflation has long been a central concern for macroeconomists. This reflects the widespread view that the control of inflation is important for economic welfare. In view of its central importance, it is perhaps surprising that the basic determinants of the price level and inflation continue to be under dispute. Recently, this dispute has become more heated with the arrival of the fiscal theory of the price level which puts a new twist on the debate. The traditional, monetarist view has highlighted the importance of an independent central bank and has held that high inflation can only be ultimately fueled by high rates of money growth. In this view, the fiscal policy is important, but mainly so because excessive deficits may eventually force the central bank to monetize. According to the fiscal theory, the government can instead target directly the price level using fiscal variables alone, such as the present value of future surpluses and the current level of nominal debt. These two views stem from important differences in the equilibrium concept different researchers have in mind. The failure to reconcile these differences follows from the fact that a key feature of the economy, the price-formation mechanism, is left implicit. This project uses game theory to fully specify how prices arise from the actions of the government and the private players in the economy, without resorting to the fiction of a Walrasian auctioneer. In this environment, it is plainly impossible for the government to commit in advance to a sequence of primary surpluses deficits that is independent of the actions of the private sector, except in a very special case. However, this negative conclusion on the key assumption of the fiscal theory of the price level does not extend to its key result: the price level can still be pinned down by the fiscal policy. When money is explicitly modeled, the traditional result linking inflation to high money growth rates is restored; however, the fiscal theory leads to a unique equilibrium even with an interest rate peg, which was previously commonly associated with price indeterminacy. Spelling out completely the assumptions on the government strategy that lead to a fiscal theory of the price level is very important for policy advice. Previous papers on the subject claimed that price stability could be achieved by a firm commitment by the government to ignore any debt crisis and pursue a policy of exogenous and fixed surpluses deficits. This project shows that in a debt crisis a fiscal adjustment is forced onto the government. The appropriate advice for achieving price determinacy through the fiscal side of the economy calls for more taxes during the crisis without any tax cut ever. Such a strategy would make the expectations of a debt crisis self-defeating, but both the ability to commit to it and the credibility of such a commitment might be much more problematic than what is needed for the policy rule advocated by previous papers. From a theoretical perspective, the approach developed here is valuable for a wider class of problems. This project shows that there is a fundamental tension between the description of a policy rule, which specifies how the government should react under all contingencies, and the definition of a competitive equilibrium used in macroeconomics, that only describes equilibrium allocations and prices. A game-theoretic description of the economy can thus be useful to revisit the vast literature that studies how the adoption of a particular policy rule can avoid or cause equilibrium indeterminacy doc8520 none This project consists of two parts. The first part addresses the role of laws in changing people s behavior. Laws do not directly change agents payoffs. With the standard equilibrium concepts, the role of laws is then one of coordination. Different people or groups have differing abilities to coordinate effectively, and any given person will not be able to coordinate equally well in all situations. A person or group has authority in a particular situation if there is an equilibrium in which they can coordinate behavior for that situation. We analyze the characteristics of people and of problems that allow authority in this sense to obtain. The second part continues previous work by the principle investigators incorporating social arrangements into economic models. Previous findings revealed that when there is some incompleteness in markets there will typically be an indeterminacy in outcomes, and that what might be called social arrangements arise because of this indeterminacy. In previous work, what might be called social assets played a role. Social assets are assets that are irrelevant from any productive standpoint, but have value in equilibria when particular social arrangements govern. The current research lays out a model in which social assets arise, and investigates the determinants of potential social assets doc8521 none This project develops a new framework for the analysis of monetary theory and policy. This model integrates desirable features of several models in the literature. In particular, it has the microfoundations of search-based monetary models; it shares many of the interesting theoretical implications of overlapping generations models; and it allows one to analyze relevant policy issues as one does in cash-in-advance models. Since the new model is explicit about the micro market structure that gives rise to a role for money in the first place, it allows detailed study of the generality and robustness of predictions from reduced-form approaches like cash-in-advance models. At the same time, the model goes well beyond most existing theories based on detailed micro structures, like the search-based models, in that those models typically assume very severe forms of inventory restrictions (e.g., agents can hold at most a very small amount of money). Those restrictions were imposed in this literature purely for technical reasons. The new framework does not need any such restrictions. Hence, it is well suited for macro policy and empirical analysis even though it has an explicit micro foundation. At the same time, even without technical restrictions on inventories, the new model is extremely tractable - one can derive many analytic results for fairly general specifications doc8522 none Productivity follows a hump shape over the lifecycle. Economists have developed models of lifecycle human capital accumulation to explain this pattern the incentive to invest in human capital is greatest at young ages when the remaining career is longest. Psychologists have noted the same lifecycle pattern but have attributed it to lifecycle variations in the ability to assimilate and produce new ideas. According to this view, at first exposure to a field, individuals thought patterns are highly flexible, but as exposure (measured by experience in an area) accumulates, existing thought patterns become reinforced making it increasingly difficulty to think in different ways. Thus, if economists attribute lifecycle variations in productivity to changes in the incentives to acquire new skills, psychologists have emphasized variations in the ability to assimilate new concepts. Building on our previous work, a pilot analysis shows that across a range of fields, creators whose work evolved through experimentation, do their most important work at older ages, but that those whose contributions were conceptual, did theirs while quite young. While the late peaks are consistent with the human capital model, it is impossible to reconcile a peak at the beginning of the career with the human capital model. For someone in their 20s or 30s, the finiteness of the career has a trivial effect on the incentive to invest in new skills. Nor does the human capital model provide a natural explanation for the striking differences between these groups. This proposal presents a new model of lifecycle productivity that draws on a declining ability to change thought patterns. According to this model, theorists most important contributions are most common at the beginning of their careers because their work is based on quick re-conceptualizations, which are most likely before existing thought patterns have become reinforced. Empirical work (of equal importance) derives from the gradual accumulation of a body of knowledge, so the ability to re-conceptualize issues continually is less important. We will test these predictions using data collected under funding on a range of disciplines, including the sciences, arts, and business. With the increase in educational attainment and the greater reliance of science in production, the ability to innovate is becoming an increasingly important determinant of earnings relative to human capital, making this analysis timely. The ability to adapt to change affects the response to changes in work brought on by technological change. The model implies that the adoption of new technologies that require re-conceptualizations of work will be greatest among young workers, but that old workers will heavily adopt new technologies that draw on existing knowledge. A decline over the lifecycle in the ability to adapt to change represents a new form of vintage human capital effect, which we will test against traditional vintage effects using data on computer adoption. The proposed model also provides new explanations for gender differences in the occupation structure and for the occupational mobility of older workers doc8490 none Organizational culture is a familiar concept to both researchers and managers. It is frequently cited as the source of a firm s efficiency or as the cause of problems in firm adaptation or mergers. However, in spite of its familiarity, it has been difficult to capture exactly what organizational culture is and how it affects firms. We propose a series of studies that use an experimental procedure to create something very similar to culture in the laboratory. The basic elements of culture, based on common threads in the research literature, are that it is something that arises through shared history and understanding between members of an organization, that it depends on the organization s history and can therefore vary greatly between firms, and that it allows members of a firm to coordinate activity and therefore perform more efficiently. Our experiments use a task that allows firms consisting of two or more subjects to develop culture through repeated interaction. In our experiments, language serves as a metaphor for culture - subjects need to develop a way to refer to unknown and complex objects using simple, short phrases in order to perform a task quickly. These cultures that subjects develop end up being based on the group s shared history in performing the task (what aspects of the objects did they focus on initially?), they end up being idiosyncratic and varying greatly between groups (as an example: one group came to refer to an object as Macarena while another group referred to the same object as coffee cups ), and they end up allowing the groups to coordinate and improve efficiency (the one word descriptions allowed groups to jointly identify objects quickly). Our initial experiments investigate what happens when two groups that have developed culture independently - and have become efficient at performing the task - are merged. Not surprisingly, differences in cultures lead to decreases in the efficiency with which the merged group performs the task. In addition, subjects are not aware of how difficult it will be to integrate even these simple cultures, leading them to overvalue the merged firm. Finally, once culture conflict arises, subjects blame the source of the failures on incompetence on the part of other subjects rather than on the difficulty in integrating different cultures. Future experiments will further explore the last phenomenon by more closely examining the extent to which subjects place the blame for merger failure on others rather than on culture incompatibility. One implication is that managers may fire employees too frequently, blaming low performance on their incompetence rather than on the need for cultural integration. We will also explore how cultural integration is related to whether members of an organization have common or opposed incentives doc8524 none Political scientists have long attempted to measure and describe the modest and contingent effects of party on the behavior of members of Congress and on policy choices. They have done so without specifying models that reflect the multiple ways in which parties might influence choice. In this investigation, the researchers: 1) directly model alternative forms of party effects; 2) extend the analysis for the entire post-Civil War period in order to encompass the various rules and partisan regimes that might be associated with different forms of party influence; 3) compare preference and party effects in different institutional contests (House and Senate); and, 5) compare preference and party effects in must pass legislation and in bills where a sizable contingent prefers the reversion point. This project enhances substantially our understanding of the topic and produces a database that will be of use for numerous other scholars interested in the topic doc8525 none In a joint project USGS, University of Mississippi and the DOE gathered single-channel seismic and ocean bottom seismometer data from the Gulf of Mexico gas hydrate environment. Initial results show free gas beneath a hydrate-bearing mud diapir but lacks a bottom-simulating reflector (BSR). The PIs propose to further develop an existing seismic tomography code to handle reflecting interfaces and converted shear waves in a self-consistent way. The code will be initially applied to an interesting gas hydrate problem from the Mississippi Canyon area in the Gulf of Mexico. The new technique will be used to learn: 1) how far does the shallow hydrates extend beneath the seafloor?, 2) does free gas exist beneath shallow hydrates and if so, what traps it?, 3) why is there no BSR present. The existing 3D data will be optimized and a method will be developed for 3D PS-NMO based on tomographic inversion doc8526 none The linkages between the mechanisms and pathways of water movement through landscape, and the human ecosystem processes controlling terrestrial-aquatic nutrient loading, have not been clearly understood. This area of research has been cited as a priority need in geographic, hydrologic, and ecosystem sciences. This project specifically assesses and quantifies the role played by the spatial organization and connectivity of watershed hydrologic and ecosystem form and process on the dynamics of nitrogen cycling and export in urbanizing watersheds. The work will include both natural and human modified landscapes, focussing on areas we are currently monitoring as part of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, an NSF funded Long Term Ecological Research site. The project includes field sampling of soil moisture, stream discharge, and nutrient concentration patterns. An integrated spatial hydroecological data and simulation system (i.e., a geographic information system GIS) and a set of indices will be developed to predict and explain the sensitivity of ecosystem and catchment export of nitrogen to alterations in surface cover and hydrologic flowpaths. The project will develop important data, theory, and techniques assessing the impacts of human modification of integrated hydrologic and ecosystem processes at the landscape level (e.g., small catchments or neighborhoods). The GIS modeling system represents and simulates the pattern of ecosystem, water, carbon, and nutrient storage and cycling along drainage flowpaths at the hillslope scale (ridge to stream). These drainage sequences in turn influence catchment export efficiency of nutrients at the scale of typical subdivisions in urbanizing watersheds. This project augments and complements the long term monitoring components of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study by providing higher spatial and temporal resolution information focussing on hydrologic and ecosystem processes within small watersheds that are amenable to design and restoration efforts. The research will generate a better understanding of the role of natural and designed landscape patterns on cumulative watershed impacts, a capability to evaluate alternative watershed development and restoration scenarios, and tools to rapidly screen existing development patterns for nutrient export potential doc8527 none Wang This project focuses on a fundamental study of aluminum bimetallic clusters, transition metal carbide clusters, and gallium, indium and thallium clusters in the gas phase using photodetachment spectroscopy and theoretical calculations, and on the use of these clusters as building block materials for the synthesis and characterization of solid state nanometerials. The work will describe the electronic structure and chemical bonding of clusters in a search for structurally or electronically stable ones that can be used in the synthesis of nanomaterials, and ultimately to be able to connect molecular properties with bulk properties. %%% The goal of developing protocols for the design, synthesis, and engineering of novel nanomaterials a priori with predicted and tailored properties is an area of significant interest to the commercial sector. The nanomaterials to be studied in this project will be of high interest to the aerospace and electronics industries, and students trained in these areas are likely to compete very effectively in the job market doc8528 none Liu The intent of this project is to develop an improved capability for modeling wave run-up on a beach, i.e. the swash zone. One of the major effects that the project will tackle is how to combine modeling of the free flow over the beach with the effects of exchange with flow within the permeable beach. The approach will combine numerical modeling efforts with comparisons to data from field experiments in the swash zone on Californian beaches and from laboratory experiments to be conducted at Cornell. The modeling approach is to combine a RANS model, presently used for flow over an impermeable beach, with a model for flow through a permeable beach. An effort will be made to improve the modeling of flow within the beach by applying an analogue of the Reynolds averaging technique to flow in porous media. In addition a depth averaged version of the RANS model will be modified to include parameterizations of the interaction with permeable beaches. The laboratory work will look at the interaction of solitary waves and periodic wavetrains with several types of planar beach including smooth impermeable, rough impermeable, and porous beaches. The field results that will be used to guide the model development are from experiments at Scripps Beach and Torrey Pines Beach in San Diego. These latter experiments were carried out by B. Raubenheimer who is collaborating in this project on a sub-contract from Cornell to WHOI doc8529 none This proposal addressees fundamental questions related to the origin of the earth s mantle and atmosphere, the history of mantle flow and present mantle processes, and the nature of mantle melting and the interaction of mantle plumes with ambient mantle. More specifically, the goals of the proposal are to understand the processes of mixing and mantle flow that accompany the interaction of a mantle plume with the normal mantle below mid-ocean ridges. The approach of this proposal is to look at volatile abundances and isotope ratios, especially H, He, Ne, Ar, and CO2 and H2O. Well-characterized dredged samples are available from UK investigators for the Reykjanes Ridge between 57 and 63 degrees north. Preliminary 3He 4He and He abundance data show that degassing is an important process north of 61 degrees, where shoaling eruption depth results in extensive degassing and low He abundances. There are five individual hypotheses that can be tested with the data to be collected, most having to do with the intrinsic processes that happen in combination with apparent 2-component mixing of plume and MORB mantle seen with other components. The noble gas data will be collected by crushing, stepped combustion and with a laser probe, a new and promising method doc8530 none While mid-ocean ridge basalts provide wide-spread samples of the oceanic upper mantle and the chemistry of these rocks potentially constrains mantle temperature and composition, interpreting these constraints requires inversion using petrogenetic models that specify mangle mineralogy, temperature, geochemistry, and dynamics. Oxygen-isotope variations in these basalts have the potential to add important new constraints because oxygen-isotope composition of subducted oceanic crust differs from that of common mantle peridotites such that subduction of crust into the uppermantle can create domains that are both compositionally compositionally enriched in basaltic and sedimentary components and anomalous in delta 018. Detailed sutdies of suites selected to examine the influence of crystallization-differentiation, crustl assimilation, and sub-solidus alteration on the delta 018 of mid-ocean ridge basalts doc8531 none 2) they can provide insights into the effect of anthropogenic influences, such as sewage sludge emplacement and persistent organic pollutants (POPs) on the marine environment; and 3) their potential roles as stepping stones for sulfophilic species in the deep-sea. The proposed work will continue to develop radiochemical methods (using thorium, radon and lead isotopes) for estimating the ages of seafloor whalebone communities. Preliminary measurements, using radiochemical methods, performed on known age bone samples yield isotopic ages that are in good agreement with known ages. The proposed work will undertake the following: 1) establishment of a final protocol for the dating techniques previously developed and make this product available to the scientific community; 2) initiate the study of lipid content and lipid characterization on dated bone material to assess the residence time of lipids within fallen whale skeletons; 3) attempt to assess a record of pollution, particularly persistent organic pollutants (PCB, DDT) within well-dated skeletal remains of whales; and 4) determine rates of development, patterns of succession, and persistence times of whale-fall chemoautotrophic communities doc8532 none McCreary This project will determine the role played by low-latitude boundary currents in seasonal to decadal variability of the tropical Pacific. First, historical observational and model data will be analyzed to obtain descriptions of the mean and varying structure of the upper and intermediate-depth circulation in the tropical western Pacific. From these, the oceanic processes involved in seasonal to decadal variability of the region will be diagnosed and hypotheses about dynamical role of low-latitude western boundary currents will be developed. Ideas about low-latitude western boundary current dynamics will be tested with numerical models of the tropical Pacific doc8533 none The objective of this proposal is to explore the effectiveness of iron-exchanged zeolites as catalysts for the selective catalytic reduction (SCR) of nitrogen oxide (Nox) species. In preliminary work the PI has found that several zeolites including ZSM-5 are much more active than the commercial vanadia catalysts currently used in many stationary SCR systems. Also, these new catalysts are more resistant to deactivation by sulfur oxides and water. A series of iron-exchanged zeolites will be prepared using four different methods: conventional solution ion-exchange, improved aqueous ion-exchange, chemical vapor deposition, and solid-sate ion exchange. Zeolites with small pores and low Si Al ratios were found to be most effective and will be used in this project. Rare earth cations and oxides will be studies as promoters. Catalysts will be characterized by neutron activation analysis and other surface analysis techniques. Steady-state kinetics and the mechanism for NO reduction will be studies in parallel with ammonia oxidation. Nitrogen oxides resulting from combustion remain a major source of air pollution. This study will provide a fundamental understanding of the catalytic reaction mechanism for NO reduction by ammonia on Fe-zeolites, leading to the development of superior SCR catalysts doc8534 none Chant - A series of dye studies and associated hydrographic and current measurements are proposed. Dye will be released in the bottom layer of the Hudson River estuary and tracked in order to quantify diapycnal transport processes, secondary circulations, and horizontal transport in a stratified estuary. Of particular interest will be the contributions of secondary circulations to vertical and horizontal exchange and their ultimate influence on the along-estuary momentum balance and dispersion rates. The field study and analysis phases of the program will be complemented by numerical studies. These efforts will test hypotheses concerning the failure of classical theories of estuarine circulation to explain observations doc8535 none To date, virtually all analyses of an international nature have relied on data deriving from national or political boundaries. This research project will develop and analyze economic data on a geophysical (latitude and longitude) basis. By developing data on a geophysically gridded basis, it will be possible to promote insight and understanding into the relationship between socioeconomic data and geophysical data. The central task of the research will be to develop a global, geophysically scaled data set on economic output. This data set is called the Geophysically Scaled Economic Data Set (GSEDS). The GSEDS will be a gridded data set a 1 degree latitude by 1 degre longitude resolution. This scale is approximately 100 by 100 km, which is somewhat smaller than the size of the major subnational political entities for most large countries. The economic activity concept will be gross value added (gross regional product) measured both at market exchange rates, and at purchasing-power parity exchange rates. The utility of the GSEDS will be to open up a wide range of research that is currently not possible with existing data. By linking economic and geophysical data, it will be possible to examine the environmental impacts of economic activity as well as the economic dimensions of geography and geophysical phenomena doc8536 none J. Katz, Johns Hopkins University The goal of this proposal is the determination of the critical conditions for the onset of cavitation in high Reynolds number turbulent boundary layers and shear flows. This is an important problem in industrial applications involving flow of liquids. To accomplish this goal, it is proposed to use new experimental techniques including triple-exposure 2-D PIV and 3-D Holographic PIV to measure the instantaneous pressure and velocity fields simultaneously. The experimental results will be used to guide and validate the development of numerical codes for the prediction of the critical conditions for cavitation inception doc8537 none This project seeks to develop a class of statistical models for the analysis of data having skewed distributions, especially data arising from hierarchical or multi-level settings. Skewed distributions are ubiquitous in the social sciences. Often, the higher-order characteristics of the distribution, such as the scale (variability) and shape, can provide important insight into substantive issues and provide for significant theoretical development. In addition to having skew, these distributions typically have variability at several levels. For example, businesses may be clustered by economic sectors and completion time data may be clustered by participant. Data in these contexts often are analyzed with linear models such as regression or ANOVA. Although these methods can account for the hierarchical nature of the data and often are well-suited to analyzing differences in means, it is difficult, if not impossible, to perform inference on higher order characteristics. The researcher team will develop a Bayesian approach to analyzing a broad class of models in which statistical inference about location, scale, and shape is both possible and practical. Bayesian statistics is adopted because it is ideally suited to hierarchical models. Bayesian analysis depends on the researcher s informed knowledge of experimental conditions -- the prior distribution. In some cases, Bayesian analysis is relatively insensitive to this prior; however, in other cases subtle errors in prior specification can lead to erroneous inference. For these reasons, the research team will develop appropriate noninformative priors. The project will produce software tools so that other researchers can perform Bayesian analysis on these hierarchical models. In the social sciences, researchers have a well-developed set of statistical tools for analyzing the overall effects of manipulations on outcomes. For example, experimental psychologists study how practice (a manipulation) improves performance (an outcome). Current statistical tools are well-suited for assessing the overall (e.g., average) improvement with practice but are ill-suited for assessing whether practice affects the variability of performance or the skew in the pattern of performance (skew would occur if performance is good on many trials and poor on a few). The goal of the project is the development of statistical tools for assessing differences in variability and skew of outcome measures as well as overall effects due to manipulations. The results will lead not only to better understanding of the data but, more importantly, to better theoretical development. For example, learning theories which predict that practice affects the variability of performance can be rigorously tested. The developed statistical tools would be broad and applicable to many social science fields such as psychology, education, economics, and other social sciences doc8538 none This proposal is for the creation of two units of instruction in technology education, yielding ten modules for the fifth and sixth grades. The units are titled Design and Innovation, and Technology Systems, and would seek to interpret the recently published standards for technological literacy. Modules include: Communication--Better ideas in history; Power and Energy--Circuits in a city; Manufacturing--Keeping food fresh; Transportation--People and goods in motion; Health--Fighting disease in the air; Ecosystem--Energy from the sun; Construction--Keeping the heat in and out; Innovation--people making things better; Invention--Creating the new thing; and Environment--Changing waste. Units will be piloted and field-tested in eight states by exemplary teachers doc8539 none Blooms of the toxic red tide dinoflagellate, Gymnodinium breve, are an important feature of the Florida Shelf ecosystem. Blooms appear to initiate and develop in an oligotrophic, mid-shelf region 18-75 km offshore of west Florida. However, these waters are characterized by low concentrations of both dissolved inorganic and organic nitrogen (DIN and DON), and it is unclear how G. breve blooms meet their N demand for growth. Ambient N concentrations, model predictions, and stoichiometric calculations of nutrient requirements for growth based on observed biomass suggest that N inputs from riverine, upwelling and in situ N regeneration are insufficient to support the observed G. breve blooms in this region. Furthermore, unpublished research, anecdotal information and historical red tide monitoring data suggest a correlation between the timing and magnitude of G. breve blooms and the occurrence of the filamentous, N2 fixing cyanobacteria, Trichodesmium spp. in both the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coastal waters. Little is known about the fate and significance of new N inputs derived from recently fixed N2 or of the pathways of trophic transfer whereby this new N is assimilated into oligotrophic marine ecosystems. It is critical to determine the fate of new N in oligotrophic systems and the effects of N inputs from N2 fixation on the community structure and function so that we can accurately assess the impact of new N on regenerated and export production. We propose that the oligotrophic west Florida Shelf ecosystem, which is characterized by large blooms of these species, is an ideal model system in which to examine the fate of new N inputs from N2 fixation by Trichodesmium spp. and the pathways facilitating the trophic transfer of this N. We also suggest that that blooms of G. breve in west Florida shelf waters are supported by the release and regeneration of DIN and DON from N2 recently fixed by co-occurring or preceding blooms of Trichodesmium spp. The present project will examine these hypotheses with a three-year program consisting of laboratory and field studies to: 1) determine the capacity for and kinetics of N uptake and regeneration by G. Breve; 2) determine whether direct or indirect regeneration of NH4+ and DON from recently fixed N2 by Trichodesmium provides sufficient N substrates to support the observed growth of G. Breve; and 3 identify associated communities and examine trophic pathways whereby newly fixed N2 derived from Trichodesmium spp. stimulates production in otherwise oligotrophic waters. There will be active collaboration with modeling projects focused on both Trichodesmium and G. breve blooms in the west Florida shelf region doc8540 none This research project concerns how time is valued in social interaction. Our approach is based on three premises: (1) We argue that emotion is critical to temporal evaluation in social contexts. As research shows, people often get anxious in response to time compression, and people often experience anger in response to delays. (2) We argue that people place a value on the experience of flow and momentum across events -- people have pacing goals in social interaction. (3) We posit that people innately value feeling in-pace with others -- they have an in-synch preference. The degree to which this preference is met in interaction affects cognitive and emotional processing, as well as the actual outcomes and relationships that emerge through interaction. Thus, in our research, we predict that when feeling in-synch (that is, when people have the same pacing goals), people will experience the highest levels of satisfaction and function most effectively in interaction. When feeling out-of-synch, negative emotions will be triggered, cognitive functioning will falter, and diminished joint performance will be observed. We have designed four series of studies to test these propositions. When our research is complete, it will offer new insights (a) into how time is valued among social actors and (b) about group and organizational dynamics during times of turbulence and change doc8541 none This study will examine the social organization and social processes of opium cultivation, heroin production, drug use, and drug distribution within an area of the Golden Triangle, which consists of the area where the borders of Burma (Myanmar), Thailand, and Laos meet. In particular, the project will examine the history, culture, and political economy of the Wa area and explore the factors that have caused it to become a major opium-growing area. The project will explore the key players on the supply side of the drug trade and the dynamics of supply, organizational patterns of the global heroin trade (i.e., hierarchical structure or adaptive networks), and the social and political conditions that foster the drug trade. Data will be collected through extensive fieldwork in a major opium-producing area, the Wa territory of Burma, plus face--to-face interviews with opium growers, opium heroin traders, and opium heroin users. Other subjects to be interviewed include Wa soldiers and officers, Wa leaders, and Asian and U.S. law enforcement authorities. Findings from this study will inform the public, as well as government and drug enforcement officials, on little-known aspects of the drug trade in the Golden Triangle and help policymakers to develop more effective measures to reduce the production of opium and the refining and trafficking of heroin doc8542 none The goal of this experimental study is to understand the relation between deformation and melt migration in partially molten rocks and to find out how melt actually moves as a function of varying temperature, stress, lithostatic pressure, magma pressure, strain rate, and time. Partly molten rocks will be tested in hydrostatic melt extraction experiments under conditions of varying pressure, with one or two solid phases, and with melt of variable amount and viscosity, which will result in significant differences in permeability in different experiments. Triaxial deformation experiments will also be carried out at variable temperatures, melt percents, and strain rates. Samples will be carefully examined before and after the experiments to evaluate physical properties. Permeabilities will be measured directly in some of the experiments. Results will be evaluated in light of previous experiments and theoretical considerations doc8543 none Constructing Understandings of Earth Systems (CUES) is a comprehensive treatment of the Earth and Space Science Content of the National Science Education Standards for middle school students. The materials address fundamental Earth Systems content. The Earth evolves as a synergistic physical system of interrelated phenomena, processes and cycles that may be affected by human activities. To support the integration of subject matter knowledge and the nature of science, students engage in guided and student-driven inquiry and use CD-ROM or Web-based tools to gather data and promote their explorations through photographs and visualizations. Students are expected to make informed decisions about science-based personal and social issues. The topics covered include the stucture of the solar system, cycles within Earth Space Systems, flow of matter and energy in and on Earth and in ecosystems, plate tectonics and its effects, the water cycle and weather, fossils, processes that shape the land, change, renewable resources, and resource management and sustainability. The textbook is accompanied by content video, a teacher s guide, professional development materials and a website. The variety of assessments include discovering pre-conceptions, embedded assessments, standardized tests, and open-ended questions doc8544 none Blooms of the toxic red tide dinoflagellate, Gymnodinium breve, are an important feature of the Florida Shelf ecosystem. Blooms appear to initiate and develop in an oligotrophic, mid-shelf region 18-75 km offshore of west Florida. However, these waters are characterized by low concentrations of both dissolved inorganic and organic nitrogen (DIN and DON), and it is unclear how G. breve blooms meet their N demand for growth. Ambient N concentrations, model predictions, and stoichiometric calculations of nutrient requirements for growth based on observed biomass suggest that N inputs from riverine, upwelling and in situ N regeneration are insufficient to support the observed G. breve blooms in this region. Furthermore, unpublished research, anecdotal information and historical red tide monitoring data suggest a correlation between the timing and magnitude of G. breve blooms and the occurrence of the filamentous, N2 fixing cyanobacteria, Trichodesmium spp. in both the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coastal waters. Little is known about the fate and significance of new N inputs derived from recently fixed N2 or of the pathways of trophic transfer whereby this new N is assimilated into oligotrophic marine ecosystems. It is critical to determine the fate of new N in oligotrophic systems and the effects of N inputs from N2 fixation on the community structure and function so that one can accurately assess the impact of new N on regenerated and export production. The oligotrophic west Florida Shelf ecosystem is an ideal model system in which to examine the fate of new N inputs from N2 fixation by Trichodesmium spp. and the pathways facilitating the trophic transfer of this N. This project will examine the idea that blooms of G. breve in west Florida shelf waters are supported by the release and regeneration of DIN and DON from N2 recently fixed by co-occurring or preceding blooms of Trichodesmium spp. The present project will examine these hypotheses with a three-year program consisting of laboratory and field studies to: 1) determine the capacity for and kinetics of N uptake and regeneration by G. Breve; 2) determine whether direct or indirect regeneration of NH4+ and DON from recently fixed N2 by Trichodesmium provides sufficient N substrates to support the observed growth of G. Breve; and 3 identify associated communities and examine trophic pathways whereby newly fixed N2 derived from Trichodesmium spp. stimulates production in otherwise oligotrophic waters. There will be active collaboration with modeling projects focused on both Trichodesmium and G. breve blooms in the west Florida shelf region doc8545 none This project widens the scope of inquiry into twentieth century African-American economic progress by examining the political economy that underpinned the adoption of a variety of race-related policies and then by measuring the impact of those policies. The investigation focuses on the to period when anti-discrimination legislation pertaining to labor and housing markets was debated and enacted at municipal, state, and federal levels of government. To this point in time, the economics literature has focused primarily on assessing the impact of the federal legislation. Consequently, economists understanding of the emergence of race-specific policies is empirically weak; the effects of sub-federal legislation remain under-explored; and the connections between African-American mobility, political participation, and economic status remain dimly lit. Thus, economists and policymakers have an incomplete picture of how and how much government policy has contributed to the economic status of African-Americans. The project begins by exploring empirically the economic, political, and social forces that combined to promote anti-discrimination policies. This is accomplished by exploiting variation across states and cities in the timing of policy adoption, by assembling detailed studies of the internal political economy of particular states, and by identifying potential interactions across localities and across layers of government (municipal, state, and federal). The project then integrates consideration of the policies origins with evaluations of the policies impacts on labor and housing markets. Again, variation across locations in the timing of policy change provides a useful basis for the measurement of policy impact. Ultimately, the project seeks to achieve a more complete and more coherent assessment of the connections between government policy and African-American economic progress in the twentieth century doc8546 none This project will explore the use of haptic (touch) interfaces, in concert with conventional visual and audio interfaces, to enhance communication and learning of spatial concepts in science and engineering. Graphical means of expressing spatial concepts provide the most clear and concrete representation of spatial ideas, but are often the most difficult for people to use. In contrast to existing approaches that use only vision, the project will seek non-visual means of expressing and communicating spatial ideas and data. The approach also differs from recent attempts to reproduce 2D visual graphs or pictures as 2D haptic or tactile artifacts for the visually impaired. Such approaches depend on projections of 3D objects onto viewing planes, a technique that is only marginally accessible to blind people. Technology exists that can enable people to draw effectively in 3D without depending on vision or vision-like projections of the 3D object or idea. The project will explore the integration of a 6 degree of freedom (DOF) haptic interface with new software tools that produce a variety of direct 3D drawing capabilities, including the capability to instantly review and correct the concept as it is created. Investigators will explore the benefits of non-visual (haptic and audio) feedback for drawing. We believe non-visual interaction with drawing tools can make graphical representations of spatial constructs, relationships, and ideas much easier to generate and share, promoting clearer discourse in fields that depend on spatial concepts. The ability to create precise 3D drawings would provide a mode of communication for visually impaired people opening new opportunities in fields that require an ability to communicate using spatial representations. The technology to be developed and test consists of a desktop workstation that provides capability for visual, audio, and haptic interaction with computer-generated spatial constructs. The tools will consist of software programs that allow users to easily draw in 3-dimensions with visual, haptic, and audio feedback. A suite of rendering drawing modes will also be developed to enable users to create and interpret 3-dimensional objects or drawings. The existing visual haptic interface facility at the University of Colorado will be augmented with audio capabilities similar to those currently used in the University of Colorado Assistive Technology Lab. This augmented workstation will be used as a testbed during years 1 and 2 of the project, where work will focus on the development and testing of particular modes of drawing and rendering spatial objects and data, and of particular pedagogic approaches to learning spatial concepts. The resulting rendering modes will be evaluated by students with learning and or visual impairments as well as non-impaired students who are interested in science and engineering doc8547 none The proposed Clearinghouse On Mathematics, Engineering, Technology, and Science (COMETS) will serve as a major resource for information dissemination. The Project will also build a network of many professionals who will use the resources for systemic reform, and will evaluate its information dissemination strategies with these audiences. The goals of the project are to: 1) develop a comprehensive resource to provide synchronous information through interactive components to eight target audiences of professionals, parents, and students available on the World Wide Web and in print: 2) field-test the applicability of the information and the dissemination strategies in both formal and informal professional development activities; and 3) develop a network for systemic reform through information dissemination in the education of deaf students in science, education, mathematics, and technology. The revolution in computer technologies shows promise for enhancing information dissemination to students who are deaf or hard of hearing and the professionals responsible for their education. In particular, the World Wide Web has been shown to be successful in an experimental prototype project as part of a previous NSF-funded teacher preparation project. Abundant evidence shows that many of the needs of professionals serving deaf students in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) areas can be met through quality, interactive resources that are made available on the World Wide Web. With quality control associated with individual and institutional authority, the Internet can be a credible change agent in an information dissemination program for systemic reform in science and mathematics for deaf students. COMETS, based at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), a college of Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), is an interactive Web site. Project staff will present educational research findings and draw implications for teaching, curriculum development, and the provision of support services in SMET areas. The application of the information will be field tested in formal professional development activities. The quality of the information to be shared will be high, extracted from periodicals refereed by national experts. The project will also include a comprehensive evaluation of information dissemination and the findings regarding the most effective evaluation strategies will be shared with others through presentations and publications. An existing network will be expanded from approximately 400 teachers to include administrators, support service professionals, parents, and representatives from organizations critical to systemic reform in the education of deaf students. The acronym COMETS presents an appropriate metaphor. As with the so-named astronomical bodies, this project will leave a trail of material and energy which will be available for a long time to come doc8548 none This project will develop and test a field deployable Laser-Induced Fluorescence (LIF) formaldehyde (HCHO) detection sensor to be used in both airborne and ground-based tropospheric measurements. The sensor has the potential to significantly improve the detection limits for formaldehyde in the atmosphere. Improved measurements of HCHO will be helpful in understanding ozone production and in designing control strategies that will have broad applications to air pollution problems in many areas doc8549 none This research project focuses on resolving the vigorous debate over the importance of long distance dispersal versus very local dispersal of larval reef fishes. Most coral reef fish and invertebrates have a dispersive larval stage preceding a relatively sedentary juvenile and adult stage. Understanding the spatial scale at which larval dispersal operates is fundamental to understanding the connectedness of populations. Most older work suggests that wide dispersal is the dominant force, so all populations are well connected. Some recent work however, shows how oceanographic details and larval behavior may combine to favor very limited dispersal. The present research project is designed to show at what spatial scale dispersal is occurring by detecting genetic differentiation among populations. In addition to resolving this ongoing controversy, this activity will aid in the design of marine reserves by helping to identify sources and sinks of reef fish species in areas slated for protection. It may also be useful for other conservation purposes, such as the definition of separate management stocks of coral reef fish in the Caribbean and elsewhere, even in the absence of reserves Through choice of sampling sites, focal species, and genetic approach in experimental design, the likelihood of detecting population differentiation and therefore scale of dispersal has been maximized. Sampling sites have been arranged hierarchically, small sites (reefs) within larger areas (islands) within regions (groups of islands linked by large-scale currents). The three study species differ in duration of the larval stage likely to disperse: from long pelagic larval duration in bluehead wrasse to short in blue-striped grunts. Genetic analyses will involve genotyping individuals at microsatellite loci. These loci have been shown to detect subtle differentiation among fish populations where other approaches have failed. Analysis of genotype data will show at what spatial scale populations are differentiated, reef, island, or region, indicating the scale of larval dispersal. Comparison of results among species will indicate the generality of results, or their dependence of life history traits doc8550 none The focus of the proposed measurements is to better constrain temporal changes in passive tracer chloroflurocarbons (CFCs) and anthropogenic CO2 penetration into the complex water mass transformations undergone by surface and near-surface waters regions of the Southern Ocean. The rate at which the Southern Ocean takes up anthropogenic CO2 is of broad interest to the global carbon inventory and future climate change. Current global ocean 3D general circulation models (OGCMs) do not compare well in the Southern Ocean and often suggest higher CO2 inventories than observations allow. Investigators form the University of Washington will join scheduled hydrographic cruises to be undertaken by Australian researchers (CSIRO- Marine Research, Hobart) on two Southern Ocean sections, and will specifically measure chloroflurocarbons (CFC s) and ocean carbon system parameters (TCO2, TA). Data analysis of the CFC numbers will be aimed at assessing recent changes in surface ventilation rates in known water masses. Temporal changes in CO2 will be analysed using the quasi-conservative tracer DC approach doc8551 none The primary objective of this project is the assemblage of an extensive and definitive database on the personal, career, and political attributes of commissioners and board members who have been appointed to independent federal agencies since . The database will include qualification and background variables, such as political party affiliation, gender, race and ethnicity, age, education, and prior and subsequent employment for the entire history of a broad collection of important federal agencies. In addition, the database will include the temporal sequence of prior and subsequent career experiences, and the timing of all relevant appointment, reappointment, and term expiration dates. This information, together with the careful documentation of seat numbers that will also be included in the dataset, will allow detailed analyses of membership change and transitions. The near-term product arising from this project will be to facilitate studies of appointment patterns to independent agencies. The longer-term objective of this project is to allow linking to voting data for commissioners, and the development of commissioner-based research on decision-making at independent agencies. The dataset is expected to document approximately distinct appointments (or 800 distinct appointees) at 15 independent agencies between and . This database will be used widely by other scholars interested in this topic doc8539 none Blooms of the toxic red tide dinoflagellate, Gymnodinium breve, are an important feature of the Florida Shelf ecosystem. Blooms appear to initiate and develop in an oligotrophic, mid-shelf region 18-75 km offshore of west Florida. However, these waters are characterized by low concentrations of both dissolved inorganic and organic nitrogen (DIN and DON), and it is unclear how G. breve blooms meet their N demand for growth. Ambient N concentrations, model predictions, and stoichiometric calculations of nutrient requirements for growth based on observed biomass suggest that N inputs from riverine, upwelling and in situ N regeneration are insufficient to support the observed G. breve blooms in this region. Furthermore, unpublished research, anecdotal information and historical red tide monitoring data suggest a correlation between the timing and magnitude of G. breve blooms and the occurrence of the filamentous, N2 fixing cyanobacteria, Trichodesmium spp. in both the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coastal waters. Little is known about the fate and significance of new N inputs derived from recently fixed N2 or of the pathways of trophic transfer whereby this new N is assimilated into oligotrophic marine ecosystems. It is critical to determine the fate of new N in oligotrophic systems and the effects of N inputs from N2 fixation on the community structure and function so that we can accurately assess the impact of new N on regenerated and export production. We propose that the oligotrophic west Florida Shelf ecosystem, which is characterized by large blooms of these species, is an ideal model system in which to examine the fate of new N inputs from N2 fixation by Trichodesmium spp. and the pathways facilitating the trophic transfer of this N. We also suggest that that blooms of G. breve in west Florida shelf waters are supported by the release and regeneration of DIN and DON from N2 recently fixed by co-occurring or preceding blooms of Trichodesmium spp. The present project will examine these hypotheses with a three-year program consisting of laboratory and field studies to: 1) determine the capacity for and kinetics of N uptake and regeneration by G. Breve; 2) determine whether direct or indirect regeneration of NH4+ and DON from recently fixed N2 by Trichodesmium provides sufficient N substrates to support the observed growth of G. Breve; and 3 identify associated communities and examine trophic pathways whereby newly fixed N2 derived from Trichodesmium spp. stimulates production in otherwise oligotrophic waters. There will be active collaboration with modeling projects focused on both Trichodesmium and G. breve blooms in the west Florida shelf region doc8553 none Rhines The project addresses two questions associated with the spin-up of rotating, stratified fluids like the ocean. The first concerns the effect of nonlinear coupling between the Ekman pumping induced by wind stress curl and the vorticity of the interior geostrophic flow generated by the Ekman pumping. The second concerns the generation of convective and inertial instabilities by the advection of horizontal density gradients in the Ekman layer by Ekman fluxes, together with the vertical mixing these instabilities produce. The work consists of the development and study of analytical and numerical models of three-dimensional representations of these phenomena together with experiments to reproduce these phenomena in the laboratory and to test the theoretical and numerical predictions. Numerical simulations will be extended to a model of coastal upwelling. The work builds on two-dimensional theoretical and numerical models of these processes doc8554 none A series of dye studies and associated hydrographic and current measurements are proposed. Dye will be released in the bottom layer of the Hudson River estuary and tracked in order to quantify diapycnal transport processes, secondary circulations, and horizontal transport in a stratified estuary. Of particular interest will be the contributions of secondary circulations to vertical and horizontal exchange and their ultimate influence on the along-estuary momentum balance and dispersion rates. The field study and analysis phases of the program will be complemented by numerical studies. These efforts will test hypotheses concerning the failure of classical theories of estuarine circulation to explain observations doc8555 none The PI will use the funds to double the resolution (3-5 ky) of the Oligocene through early Miocene benthic foraminiferal stable isotopic record at the subantarctic ODP site that has yielded an excellent paleomagnetic record. This will allow direct calibration of the two sets of data and develop an astronomically tuned time scale for the interval. If successful, the site could become a type section for chronostratigraphy of this interval doc8556 none This project explores critical, yet poorly understood aspects of Japan s entrepreneurship as the economy shifts from industrial to the informational economy. Although entrepreneurship has been a focus of numerous studies in economic development, there is no consensus on its definition, process of formation, and how it can be effectively promoted. Furthermore, entrepreneurship is seldom examined with a cross-national perspective, and as a result, important foundations, such as regional tradition, cultural norms, and business practices, have largely been ignored as drivers of entrepreneurship. This project addresses the changing role of regional-cultural contexts for entrepreneurship, through historical as well as contemporary studies of three distinctive regions in Japan. The project seeks to 1) examine risk-handling and incentive-generating characteristics of entrepreneurs in the information sector; 2) analyze how different regional contexts (industrial networks, social interactions, and cultural practices) function as catalysts for entrepreneurs; and 3) assess the role of entrepreneurship promotion policy for the 21st Century. The project will involve interviews of firm mangers and governmental officials in each region, and the data will be analyzed with a focus on those factors relating to the socio-cultural foundations of entrepreneurship and the geographical ties to the region. The research will provide empirical evidence that could lead to the development of a theoretical framework that integrates economic and cultural incentives in the study of entrepreneurship. The project will also generate a foundation for comparative research on the development of informational economy between regions and countries. In practical terms, understanding the dynamics of entrepreneurship in the world s second largest economy has implications on the growth and stability of the global economy doc8557 none This project brings together two of the central questions facing scholars and policymakers in international relations- how can we form successful cooperative agreements under anarchy, and how can we enhance prospects for peace through security cooperation? The investigator contends that understanding the causes and effects of international agreements requires an appreciation for the variance in their content. All military alliances are not equal; they vary in the breadth of their applicability, the strength of their obligations, and the intensity and formality of their collaborative links. This project collects information about this variance and uses it to advance understanding of the causes of war and peace. The investigation answers the following three questions: Are military alliance commitments reliable? Under what conditions are leaders likely to violate past alliance commitments? Do alliances influence the initiation of war? All three studies share a common genesis in an argument regarding the efficacy of leaders in designing reliable agreements. In the process of negotiating treaties, national representatives specify particular conditions under which cooperation will occur and design means to encourage compliance with treaty provisions. Through the process of designing their contracts, leaders manage to make credible promises. This argument leads to the following expectations: (1) Once we take into account the specific conditions to which they apply and the actions required when they are invoked, we will discover, contrary to previously reported empirical evidence, that most alliance commitments are fulfilled. (2) While most alliance agreements are reliable when they are formed, major changes in conditions (for instance in power status or in domestic political organization) after an alliance is formed may result in a state abandoning prior commitments. Alliances featuring more highly institutionalized military collaboration, however, are less likely to be abandoned when changes in conditions occur than those that do not. (3) All else equal, aggressive leaders are less likely to attack countries with allies who have promised to intervene, especially if the potential aggressors judge the alliance commitments to be reliable. This argument emphasizes the importance of the design of cooperative agreements, and to evaluate this argument, the researcher collects information about the obligations and provisions included in alliance treaties. With support from her home institution, the investigator has developed a coding scheme and collected data covering the period - . She has conducted some preliminary studies based on early data collection, and they have produced evidence commensurate with her expectations. The current investigation extends the data to cover the Cold War years, - . While this period is much shorter than that covered in phase one of the data collection, the proliferation of countries in the post WWII era means that there are as many alliance treaties signed between and as in the entire period from through . Extending the data collection will make it possible complete the proposed studies and to continue this research program after the grant period ends. The results of this research will enhance our understanding both of the causes of war and of the effects of international institutions on behavior. This research probes motives to commit to international agreements and institutions, to comply with past promises, and to react to deterrent threats. Means of designing effective cooperation and effective deterrent threats are of central interest to both theorists and policymakers in international relations today. This research promises to provide guidance on both of these issues and produces a dataset that will be used widely by other scholars interested in the topic doc8558 none Empirical work on pay for performance shows little support for the available theories. This proposal reasons why this is so. First, agency theory predicts that pay for performance should be less common in uncertain environments. However, the data do not seem to support this assertion. I argue that when workers operate in certain settings, the activities that they should engage in are well known, and firms are content to assign tasks to workers and monitor their inputs. By contrast, when the situation is more uncertain, firms know less about how workers should be spending their time. As a result, they delegate responsibility to workers but, to constrain their discretion, base compensation on observed output. Second, agency theory has had little to say about the control of bureaucratic corruption. I argue that standard means of relating pay to bureaucratic performance are unlikely to be successful and that instead, oversight occurs through independent investigations. This project outlines a series of behavioral responses to the use of investigations that limit the use of incentives for bureaucrats doc8559 none This research is concerned with the statistical analysis of large-scale standardized educational and psychological tests. The data from these tests are commonly analyzed using the item response theory (IRT) paradigm. Many IRT based procedures rely on the assumptions that testing data can be modeled as if it measures a single ability or dimension (unidimensionality), and that the responses to the questions on the exam are independent of one another once the examinee s ability level is known (local independence). The standard procedures for verifying that these two assumptions hold suffer from a variety of weaknesses. In particular, they either require additional assumptions about an underlying parametric statistical model or an ad-hoc correction for statistical bias. This research will refine recently proposed methods for verifying these assumptions by using the parametric bootstrap procedure and nonparametric regression. The research will expand the theory of the parametric bootstrap and nonparametric regression from other areas of application to IRT. This will be done both for tests whose items are scored simply as correct or incorrect as well as for those that allow for partial credit. The end result of this research will be a theoretically justified, computationally feasible method of verifying the assumptions of unidimensionality and local independence without need of a specified parametric model or an ad-hoc bias correction. The role of standardized tests has been ever increasing in education in the United States. They are used for everything from determining college admissions decisions to attempting to judge the effectiveness of schools and school districts. As such, it is vital to continually improve the statistical methods used to insure the accuracy and fairness of these standardized tests. Many of the statistical procedures currently used to insure the reliability of these tests are based on some underlying technical assumptions that can be difficult to verify. The result of this research will be methods that the practitioner can use to insure that the procedures for verifying the accuracy and fairness of the standardized tests are performing as expected. Given the historically close interaction and spirit of collaboration between the large national testing companies, university researchers, and state and local departments of education, these results will be immediately disseminated to agencies which directly affect every student in America. In addition to this immediate application, this research also will provide insights into the future development of reliable methods for insuring accuracy and fairness of standardized tests even when the desired underlying technical assumptions are not met doc8498 none The scalability of the Internet hinges on our ability to tame the unpredictability associated with its open architecture. This project investigates the development of basic control strategies for reducing traffic burstiness and improving network utilization. Such strategies can be applied through Traffic Managers (TMs)-special network elements strategically placed in the Internet (e.g., in front of clients servers or at exchange peering points between administrative domains). We believe that the incorporation of such control functionalities will be key to the ability of the network infrastructure to sustain its own growth and to nurture the Quality-of-Service (QoS) needs of emerging applications. Although there have been some recent advances in building network elements capable of wire-speed processing, there is a need for fundamental research into the basic QoS control capabilities that these TMs should implement. This set of capabilities have to be identified and implemented in a programmable, scalable architecture that allows for the easy and effective composition of services. Such a flexible architecture is highly desirable as the Internet continues to evolve and users demand new kinds of service for their applications. TMs should be capable of quickly inspecting and classifying packets as they go by (e.g., marking packets into precedence classes), and should control the transmission of these packets (e.g., through pacing, scheduling, or selective dropping) to ensure desirable properties (e.g., satisfaction of jitter requirements, compliance with TCP friendliness, or improved fairness across flows). In this proposal, we will address the design of dynamic dos control programmable TMs. We focus on basic capabilities that could be employed at different levels of the control architecture. These capabilities include differentiated, aggregate and proxy controls. The following are examples of how such control strategies would be employed by TMs. Differentiated Control enables TMs to route flow aggregates with divergent characteristics on separate communication paths. Unlike traditional routing, our routing metrics will respect bursitis measures, such as self-similarity and traffic correlation: Aggregate Control enables TMs to use congestion control mechanisms for collections of flows that share the same bottleneck. Unlike traditional congestion control, Congestion-equivalent flows are identified based on measures of relationship (such as cross-correlation and cross-covariance) and managed as a set; Proxy Control enables TMs to filter out variability (e.g., loss, delay jitter) at shorter time-scales. Such a functionality is crucial for improving the stability and effectiveness of control mechanisms that operate over longer time-scales (e.g., end-to-end). Unlike traditional a-hoc proxy approaches, our approach will take into account the length and characteristics of the control loops that get formed between the TM and the end-systems. Our design will be based on mathematical foundations from control theory and wavelet analysis. These methods enable thorough analysis and control of system dynamics at different time-scales and an understanding of the complex interactions among them. Specifically, functionality s at different levels of a TM architecture will be developed based integrated control-theoretic models. These models will account for nested control loops that are driven by system characteristics, which are identified using wavelet analysis of passive measurements. TMs that are designed in such and integrated fashion, could increase flow throughput, reduce flow jitter and response time, and improve the stability, utilization, and scalability of the network. We plan to implement our dos controls in a tested deployed in a controlled local setting as well as over the Internet. Our implementations will be based on emerging technologies, such as Diffserv and MPLS, and will be stressed by bandwidth-and QoS-demanding applications. Our testbed will provide a programming interface to softservices, in which capabilities can be turned on or off and control parameters can be dynamically adjusted. To this end, we have secured the support of industrial research laboratories and start-up companies-namely Lucent s Bell Labs, Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks, and Quarry Technologies. Specifically, we intend to use Lucent s Network Element for Programmable Packet Injection (NEPPI). NEPPI provides an ideal foundation upon which to implement the control policies we propose to develop. This project is a collaborative efforts between Boston University (Is: Ibrahim Matta, Azer Bestavros, and Mark Crovella) with expertize in characterization, measurements and control of Internet traffic, and University of Arizona (PI: Marwan Krunz) with expertize in traffic modeling, multimedia and wireless QoS doc8561 none This award provides partial funding for the FASEB Summer Conference on Autoimmunity to be held on June 30, - July 5, at Vermont Academy in Saxtons River, Vermont. The conference is held under the auspices of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology ( FASEB). There will be 9 major oral sessions, each including, on average, three 30 minute talks and two 15 minutes talks per session. There will be two poster sessions, each lasting two days. The topics for discussion are: Central and Peripheral Tolerance, Autoantigen Responses in Autoimmunity, Role of Infection in Autoimmunity, B cell Activation and Autoimmunity, Mechanisms of Peripheral Counter-Regulation, Antigen Presenting Cells in Shaping Pathogenic T cell Repertoire, Role of the Innate Immune system in Autoimmunity, Cytokines and Autoimmunity and Immunotherapy. The purpose of the meeting is to bring together biochemists, biophysicists and geneticists to share information. The field is progressing rapidly and providing important new information on structure and mechanisms at the molecular level. This is the sixth conference on the subject. They are held every year, the first in , and all are very well attended doc8562 none Hospitals stand at the center of the U.S. health care system, with hospital spending comprising 4.6 percent of total GDP. Hospital services are provided by all levels of government, as well as by for-profit and nonprofit organizations. Despite their importance, there has been little quantitative research done that examines the historical development of the U.S. hospital industry and its impact on public health. This study bridges this gap in our knowledge by focusing on two primary lines of inquiry: What factors have influenced the historical diffusion of hospitals in the United States, and to what extent has access to hospital care improved the well being of Americans over the course of the twentieth century? Understanding these issues is critical in understanding the effect of modern policy changes on the health care system. To make informed policy decisions now, policy makers must have a solid sense of what factors led to the current system. This study identifies the forces that determined the relative diffusion of for-profit and nonprofit hospitals in the U.S. and examines how these forces have changed over time. Identifying these factors is important because of the possible relationship between hospital quality and ownership, as well as because of the tax advantages of the nonprofit form. The study also measures the effect hospital care had on public health over the course of the twentieth century, and examines the extent to which access to medical care influenced morbidity and infant mortality. An important part of this analysis is to examine the extent to which access to health care differed for black Americans and how racial differences in the provision of health care affected the health of blacks relative to whites. To investigate these issues, the study relies on several newly identified data sets, including a panel of hospital level data from - . The hospital data provide information on hospital size, ownership and location, as well as several other detailed statistics. To shed light on how the hospital industry developed, these data are combined with data on state and local taxes and other variables to identify the factors that influenced hospital diffusion. By linking the hospital level data with county-level data on black and white infant mortality, as well as morbidity data from the state of New York, the study measures the effect of hospitals on public health. Of particular importance in both studies is how government spending on hospital construction has affected the industry. A key factor in determining the distribution and ownership of hospitals is the Hospital Survey and Construction Act, commonly known as the Hill-Burton program. This program provided money to states to build public and nonprofit hospitals in underserved areas. How did Hill-Burton affect hospital provision? Since the law provided funds only to public and nonprofit institutions, what was its effect on for-profit hospitals? This study provides a first-time analysis of Hill-Burton at a disaggregated level to fully explore the answers to these questions. The Hill-Burton program is also important because from - it contained a clause that enabled hospitals to build segregated facilities as long as there was equal provision of facilities for all population groups. Was separate really equal under this provision, which was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in ? By combining data on Hill-Burton funding with infant mortality data and other public health variables, the study examines the extent to which equal access to publicly funded health care existed for all Americans doc8563 none Some of the most significant problems of an urbanizing globe are environmental externalities created by modern city dwellers in the course of their daily lives. These problems are notable for extreme complexity, being aggregated into larger scales but formed from the disaggregated choices of individuals. The very ordinariness of these daily decisions, moreover, makes them easy to overlook, so that problems in urban ecology remain under-analyzed. An exemplary case of such a problem, and an extremely serious non-point source of water pollution in its own right, is the deposition by American households of herbicidal, insecticidal, and nutrient chemicals in management of their property. These chemicals are applied to lawns in the United States at a rate per hectare that matches, and often exceeds, that of modern agriculture. Despite environmental awareness and education, such deposition continues to increase. This research examines the problem of chemical application and management using both intensive and extensive methodological components. The research will first conduct a national phone survey, using an instrument pre-tested in an earlier statewide survey, to quantitatively assess economic and demographic factors that explain variations in chemical use. This will be accompanied by an intensive interview-based municipal survey that evaluates the relationship of homeowner behaviors to environmental aesthetics, consciousness, opinions, and feelings. The research will also analyze the lawn chemical industry by focusing on their marketing practices and conduct an assessment of lawn cover nationally. By creating an extensive and intensive research protocol for analysis of this urban environmental problem, the research forms the foundations of a research program in urban ecology. It pursues an explanation not only of lawn chemical practices but more generally of why individuals participate in activities with far-reaching, if invisible, environmental impact. It queries what the driving social and economic forces are behind their logics and seeks to link their behaviors to larger patterns of environmental change. The work will therefore aid in formulation of a unified human environment research program that connects the actions of city dwellers to broader patterns of global change doc8564 none for Persons with Disabilities (KISMET) The County College of Morris (CCM) is an established leader in associate degree level science education. Annual surveys of SMET graduates from -98 with very high response rates show that over 91% report being employed, enrolled in 4-year institutions, or both. In , CCM created its Horizons Program dedicated to the needs of students with learning disabilities (sld), that has grown from 35 participants to over 500 with 38% coming from 9 other counties. CCM has also developed a successful system for providing tailored services to students with physical disabilities (spd) and an active Disability Awareness Committee. Adaptive equipment and software are used to make its state-of-the-art SMET classrooms and laboratories accessible, and special tutoring is provided as needed. An analysis of the limited individual data available on CCM s sld and spd reveals that CCM is providing SMET programs that are attractive, but they point out issues that deserve investigation relating to noticeable clustering of these students in a very limited number of SMET programs. The overall goal of the proposed project is to create increased inclusionary SMET education opportunities for students with disabilities (swd) that should attract more of these students into SMET programs and careers. The various components to accomplish this are in-place (i.e. quality SMET programs and faculty, an established Tech Prep Consortium of secondary schools, and proven assistance programs for swd). The specific objectives of the proposed KISMET project are to: Upgrade CCM s capacity to provide SMET education to students with disabilities by: (1) improving articulation and transition coordination with secondary schools, (2) orienting faculty toward inclusionary thinking regarding this population, and (3) increasing the availability of support services and assistive equipment. Develop more swd friendly delivery of SMET curricula, including training faculty in identified successful techniques. Improve the tracking of swd SMET enrollees and their progress at CCM as a means to both learn what works for this population and better serve individual swd. Increase first-time enrollments, retention and persistence to graduation by swd in SMET programs, including decreased abandonment of SMET for non-SMET majors. The project will use a New Transition Coordination Outreach Initiative to Secondary Schools, a Special Recruitment Effort, a Faculty Task Force to Improve SMET Curricula Delivery, Faculty Staff Development activities, and Additional Direct Assistance doc8565 none Considerable effort has been spent investigating the political consequences of the federal aid system. Previous research, has sought to link the formation of grant-seeking coalitions to the electoral fortunes of incumbents. The theoretical explanation and subsequent empirical tests of these relationships have centered almost exclusively on national and congressional politics. Missing in these studies has been a persuasive account of how the federal aid system has altered politics across levels of government. It is the supposition of this research team that by embedding state and local officials in networks of dependent relationships, the growth and changing character of the federal aid system has altered the electoral fortunes of elected officials at all levels of government. The investigators contend that changes in federal aid policies, by remaking relationships among stakeholders in federal aid programs, have had a significant affect on the career trajectories of elected officeholders, at both the congressional and subnational levels. The goal of this investigation is to examine the impact of changes in the federal aid system on the electoral trajectories of office holders at both the congressional and subnational levels. The investigators want to understand who runs, for what offices, and with what outcomes. The goal is to understand electoral trajectories in metropolitan areas across electoral offices. including congressional districts, county executives, and mayors offices. The reason for this is straightforward and compelling. Metropolitan areas reflect organic patterns of social and economic interactions . These interactions give rise to spillovers and the incentives and disincentives for inter jurisdictional cooperation, and thus create the potential for linking the electoral paths available to aspiring politicians. To accomplish these goals, the investigators update and extend the data series on federal domestic aid programs and their subnational distribution that they initiated in under a grant from the National Science Foundation. This database has been used by a wide cross-section of social scientists, and the researchers have received numerous requests for contemporaneous data on the status of domestic aid program attributes and their subnational distribution. Current data on the flow of federal aid does not adequately reflect structural changes resulting from devolution in the relationship between the federal and subnational governments. Devolution of federal policy responsibilities to subnational governments creates the need for a different type of data on the flow of federal aid moneys to recipients and beneficiaries. This project closes this information deficiency and creates a database that will be used widely by other scholars interested in the topic doc1671 none This project will examine mistaken eyewitness identifications as a principal source of erroneous convictions. Although a growing body of empirical research by psychologists provides insights into the factors contributing to mistaken identifications, and with increasing frequency, psychologists are called upon to provide courtroom testimony about those factors. Such expert testimony, however, is often criticized as unreliable. This project will examine the empirical questions of reliability and generalization of findings using a meta-analysis of existing studies of face recognition, in both the eyewitness and laboratory research paradigms. In particular, the project will examine the strength and reliability of research findings concerning a large number of factors thought to influence identification accuracy and the relationships among research methods and the magnitude of effects produced by manipulations of substantive variables. Factors to be addressed include stable (e.g., sex, race) and malleable characteristics (e.g., stress, disguise) of both participants and targets, as well as situational (e.g., exposure duration) and procedural (e.g., lineup presentation) variables. Careful attention will be given in the meta-analysis to the different types of study characteristics, independent variables, and their operationalization employed in the research. The project, as a result, will identify research and theoretical domains where findings are on the strongest and weakest footings and, most importantly, will test a series of hypotheses about methodological and substantive factors that enhance or limit the generalizability and theoretical implications of research results doc8567 none Funds are recommended for a 3-year project to study the seismic and density structure beneath the Bermuda hotspot swell. A combined refraction and reflection seismic survey is planned for year 1 and analysis of the data in years 2 and 3. The study will try to address a fundamental question in geodymanics, i.e., what is the reason for large areal relief associated with some hotspot volcanics? The survey will determine what portion of the swell is supported by crustal underplating and how the existence of the underplating may have influenced the history of the vertical motion for Bermuda doc8568 none The northern boundary of the Galapagos microplate is defined by a relatively recent Incipient Rift that is a slow-spreading new rift oriented orthogonal (along a flowline) to the active East Pacific Rise (EPR). The PIs propose to map this incipient rift completely with multibeam, to conduct basalt sampling by wax coring and dredging, and to run some towed camera traverses within the rift. Based on samples from a pilot study, the incipient rift offers the opportunity to sample the behavior of the EPR melting regime in the across-axis dimension and to examine changes in the amount of melting that takes place as one moves farther from the active EPR axis. The mapping and camera work will help to locate good sampling sites and will also help to determine whether the 800m scarps of the incipient rift expose deeper rocks, potentially a useful complement to studies of Hess Deep and the nature of young crust formed at the EPR. The proposed study would be carried out on a large UNOLS vessel ( 23 days of Melville requested), with subsequent laboratory study of samples, and laboratory study of camera and multibeam results doc8569 none Glass shards in ash layers from ODP cores show that the Marianas and Tonga arcs produced magmas with high B Be simultaneously at 3-4Ma. High values of B Be are thought to be due to a high proportion of slab-derived fluid. This proposal is to analyze more glass shards from new areas, Bonin and Japan, to determine whether this high B Be is also present in these areas at 3-4 Ma. These new analyses will help determine whether the high B Be signal is regional or local and also to evaluate the unlikely possibility that the high B Be is secondary (due to alteration). This study will also indirectly shed light on whether slab volatile flux is mostly controlled by convergence rate and not other factors like the type and amount of sediment that is being subducted doc1632 none In post-war data real exchange rates have been highly volatile and have deviated widely and systematically from their purchasing power parity values. Since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, real and nominal exchange rates are highly positively correlated. This fact is widely cited as (indirect) evidence of nominal price rigidities, such that real exchange rates are driven entirely by shocks to the nominal exchange rate, while relative national price levels are relatively smooth. Partly as a result of this evidence, the predominant theoretical frameworks for analyzing exchange rates are characterized by nominal rigidities. Such frameworks have been successful in replicating many features of international business cycle and exchange rate facts. The investigator and Caroline Betts have obtained preliminary results that are difficult to reconcile with the idea that real exchange rates are driven solely by shocks to the nominal exchange rate. They have shown that real exchange rates are also very highly correlated with the relative prices of nontraded to traded goods, however, suggesting that real factors are key determinants of real exchange rates. Furthermore, they show that a multicountry, multisector real business cycle model is capable of generating relative price behavior at both the sectoral and aggregate level that matches Mexico-US data. They develop a class of business cycle models that can address these puzzling empirical features of exchange rate behavior. The research would extend this work through the introduction of a role for national monies. A key goal is to reconcile the evidence of high correlations between real and nominal exchange rates with that of high correlations of real exchange rates and the relative price of nontraded to traded goods across countries. Another goal is to replicate other key features of international business cycle data. Much this research would be joint work with Caroline M. Betts of the University of Southern California. The research would extend the empirical analysis of Betts and Kehoe on the relationship between the Mexico-US real exchange rate and the relative prices of traded to nontraded goods. The analysis to date has used annual gross output deflators to measure sectoral relative prices, and we propose to investigate other sources and frequencies of price data. It would also extend the analysis to the other countries and to explore the empirical behavior of nominal exchange rates and nominal prices for this group of countries. The proposed, multicountry, multisector, business cycle models depart from traditional theories of real exchange rate determination in that the outputs of different sectors, rather than being either tradable or nontradable, have differing degrees of tradability. The degree of tradability is determined by the sort of trade costs emphasized by Obstfeld and Rogoff . The models incorporate considerable sectoral detail, and some allow roles for national monies. Real and monetary shocks drive international fluctuations. Preliminary results for a model without money are encouraging: One does not need nominal rigidities to account for the size or even most of the persistence of real exchange rate fluctuations. Country-specific demand shocks calibrated to match the variability and persistence of aggregate output are sufficient to capture international relative price movements by sector. Further, the model can account for the high volatility of the real exchange rate compared to the relative price of nontraded to traded goods across countries, despite the absence of monetary features in the model. Despite these successes, nonmonetary versions of the model are silent on the relationship between real and nominal exchange rates and the role of nominal shocks. Proposed research would introduce the simplest possible quantity equation model in which the real side of the economy is unaffected by money. In addition, we propose a cash-in-advance variant in which money can give rise to a distortion in the leisure-labor choice. Key features of the data that we would want any monetary model to replicate is the high correlation of real and nominal exchange rates and the behavior of relative prices shown in our empirical work doc8571 none A researcher from the University of Delaware will participate in two cruises to the Black Sea to conduct a biogeochemical study of the stoichiometries, rates and microbial involvement for reactions of reduced sulfur compounds with Mn (III, IV) and Fe (III) phases and for chemo-denitrification reactions (NO3- with Mn2+ and NH4+ with Mn3+, Mn4+) in suboxic ocean regions. The PI also will carry out similar experiments in Chesapeake Bay to evaluate these reactions in a suboxic anoxic environment where Fe concentrations are comparable with Mn values and thus can compete with Mn N S interactions. Research from this study will result in high resolution nutrient, Mn Fe and sulfur species data in suboxic and anoxic zones of the Black Sea and Chesapeake Bay using an in-situ voltammetric analyzer that can measure the redox species simultaneously. In addition, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Washington and from Scripps, the PI will link the presence of chemical parameters to in-situ microbes by determining the distributions of sulfur oxidizing, nitrifying, denitrifying and anaerobic ammonium oxidizing bacteria doc8567 none Funds are recommended for a 3-year project to study the seismic and density structure beneath the Bermuda hotspot swell. A combined refraction and reflection seismic survey is planned for year 1 and analysis of the data in years 2 and 3. The study will try to address a fundamental question in geodymanics, i.e., what is the reason for large areal relief associated with some hotspot volcanics? The survey will determine what portion of the swell is supported by crustal underplating and how the existence of the underplating may have influenced the history of the vertical motion for Bermuda doc8464 none This objective of this study is to collect living and fossil deep sea corals from the New England Sea Mounts that will provide a depth transect from about 900 to meters. The corals will then be used in a multiproxy study to deduce deep water circulation changes and relate changes in deep water circulation to climate changes inferred from ice core data doc8574 none This project will examine the influence of spatial associations on perceptions of the fairness in the American legal system. In particular, the project will investigate the effect of dissimilarities between a respondent s community with adjacent neighborhoods. Perception of the legal system may vary among residents of two neighborhoods with similar socioeconomic characteristics and racial composition because the experiences with the legal system differ as a result of their adjacent communities. This project addresses this gap in the conventional analysis of perceptions of the legal system by explicitly incorpo-rating characteristics of adjacent and close-by neighborhoods. The principal data source will be the National Black Politics Study (NBPS), a national survey of African Americans. NBPS provides items on perception of fairness in the legal system and among the police, as well as individual-family characteristics and the census tract of the respondents. The census tract information will be used to merge the NBPS data with Census File data on neighborhood information, such as median income, education, poverty, population density, land use, housing occupancy, building vacancy, percent renters and owners. In addition, the project conducts a second contextual analysis by examining the impact of local crime and arrest rates by offense type of perceptions of injustice. The research will broaden the understanding of neigh-borhood effects on perceptions of inequality and fairness in the legal system. The project also will highlight potential costs of expanding arrest rates in terms of perceptions of fairness and ultimate cooperation with legal authority. The results from this work should significantly inform several important debates relating to neighborhood factors, community policing, broken windows, and quality of life policies. Finally, the project will produce two data sets with a host of neighborhood level information merged with attitudinal responses to questions relating to politics, religion, and the law doc8575 none This grant will fund a special conference session on world-situated language use in natural dialog , held in conjunction with the 14th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. The conference, held March 15-17, , at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, is the most prominent U.S. conference for the interdisciplinary study of human language understanding. On an annual basis, it brings together roughly 250 linguists, psycholinguists and computational linguists interested in detailed processing accounts of language comprehension and production. The special session, entitled Approaches to Studying World-Situated Language Use: Bridging the Language-as-Product and Language-as-Action Traditions, is designed as a step toward linking conversational discourse research with the formal linguistic and mechanistic approaches typically found at the CUNY conference. Five prominent researchers working in this bridging area have been invited to give talks and participate in a panel discussion. In addition, peer-reviewed submitted talks and posters on this topic will be presented in accompanying sessions. It is hoped that by holding this symposium at the CUNY Conference, timely cross-disciplinary discussions will occur so to inspire a new generation of psycholinguistic and computational research on questions such as how natural utterances with disfluencies are processed, how information from context, gesture and linguistic input are combined in real-time processing, how interlocutors coordinate attention, and how these coordination processes impact real-time language processing commitments doc8576 none Marsha Lester of the University of Pennsylvania is supported by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program to perform experiments that examine reaction pathways of fundamental chemical reactions, including the reversible reaction of OH + CO to form HOCO with subsequent decomposition to H + carbon dioxide, and the reaction of OH + HCl to form water + Cl. The potential energy surface along the reaction pathway from the entrance channel to the transition state will be mapped via infrared spectroscopy of intra- and inter-molecular vibrational modes of the reactant complexes. The transition state region(s) will also be characterized by vibrational overtone studies of the HOCO reactive intermediate, which will access theoretically predicted predissociative resonances of HOCO. The complexes and reactive intermediates will be generated photolytically, and their vibrational overtone spectra will be obtained using various laser pump-probe methods. The structure and stability of the reactant complexes are expected to reveal their role in the reaction dynamics, and may explain unusual temperature behavior observed for these reactions. Vibrational activation of the complexes and reactive intermediates will supply sufficient energy to induce inelastic and or reactive scattering dynamics, providing a complementary way to explore the reactive potential energy surfaces. The lifetime of the vibrationally excited complexes and intermediates will be determined by direct time-domain measurements or by spectral line broadening in the frequency domain. Quantum state distributions of inelastically scattered fragments and reaction products will be examined, as well as the branching between these decay processes. Intra-and or inter-molecular mode selective excitation and isotopic substitution will be utilized to prepare initial states that preferentially decay by chemical reaction. There have been many advances in experimental and theoretical investigations of chemical reaction dynamics over the past decade. These studies focus on directly evaluating the influence of long-range forces on chemical reactions, exploring processes that are of practical importance in atmospheric and combustion chemistry doc8577 none Nitric oxide (NO) is made in mammalian cells for a variety of physiological reasons. For example, it can serve as a vascular mediator, a cytotoxic cytostatic species and a neurotransmitter. The biological chemistry associated with many of the actions of NO is, for the most part, extrapolated from purely chemical and or in vitro systems. Thus far, determining the intimate chemical details responsible for the biological activity of NO has been difficult due to the limitations of in vitro or in vivo mammalian systems. However, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae offers an ideal experimental system in which NO chemistry can be delineated in a whole cell environment. Due to the fact that S. cerevisiae grows and survives under anaerobic or aerobic conditions, the effect of dioxygen on the chemical interaction of NO with specific proteins can be examined. The ease of genetic manipulation of yeast allows the ability to control intracellular conditions in predictable and important ways. Thus, the effects of NO under a variety of cellular conditions can be examined. Moreover, since many of the protein relationships have been fully elucidated, alteration of protein activity by NO can be monitored by examining an overall effect on yeast cell biology. This project involves a systematic examination of the chemical and biochemical interaction of NO with two yeast metal metabolism proteins, Ace1 (a copper-responsive transcription factor) and Fre1 (a membrane spanning metal reductase). These proteins were chosen for study since they represent two important classes of proteins which are known interact with NO; metal-thiolate proteins and heme proteins. The intimate details of the NO-protein interactions will also be examined using chemical model systems and purified proteins. In this way, the cellular biochemistry of NO can be validated doc8578 none PI: H. J. Viljoen Institution: University of Nebraska at Lincoln Proposal Number: Certain solid materials, outside the class of classic explosives, can react in an extremely violent manner if they are hydrostatically compressed. The elastic potential energy in the solid s lattice is unlocked in an avalanche-like manner and if this energy release is synchronized with a chemical reaction, a shock wave of extraordinary intensity could form in the solid structure. The existence of solid phase detonation becomes a real possibility. The conditions in such a shock front could be contemplated: presses in excess of one million atmospheres and shock wave velocities of 5-10 km s. Although such pressures and velocities are routinely reached in implosion experiments and conventional explosive, energy density in a solid phase detonation exceeds conventional processes by several orders of magnitude. This high-energy wave constitutes a non-equilibrium state of the material, but simultaneously it finds a harmonic interaction across atomic, mesoscopic and macroscopic scales. It is the goal of this project to investigate events of energy transfer on these three scales. A hierarchical approach is planned. Small clusters of single element compound of a few thousand atoms will be studies by molecular dynamics simulation. Energy distributions and characteristic times to equilibrate are calculated for a variety of dynamic and hydrostatic loadings. Clusters of different compounds introduce chemistry as an additional form of potential energy to the system. When pre-compressed clusters are brought in contact and lattice collapse is initiated at one face, the symbiotic interaction between chemistry and elastic potential energy release will be elucidated. The mesoscopic models are used to study energy transfer on a particle level. Although time scales are still small enough to study non-equilibrium states, atom-atom interaction is limited to nearest neighbors to expand the length scale. Waves begin to build up across several atomic layers. When sufficient energy is supplied during build-up, a soliton is created. This particular wave type traps elastic potential energy. At heterogeneities some energy is transferred to thermal energy, but local spalling also occurs and lattice collapse is initiated. The inverse scattering theory will be employed to analyze formation of solitons. Contiuum models need refinement, because kinetics depends not on the concentration of reactants, but on their surface area. Combinatorics provides expectation values of common surface area and dependency on surface area due to soliton action, melting and inhibition by condensed phase products. Descriptions of the state of species must be included: particle size and surface area. This links the macroscopic model with mesoscopic models. In addition, a series of experiments are planned to test the proposed mechanisms. Reactive mixtures are loaded in a Bridgman anvil. The amount of potential energy loaded in the system is varied and beyond critical load a fast reaction with active participation of the elastic potential energy in the reaction process is anticipated. Metal oxide and metal non-oxide systems with different physical properties will be explored. The electrothermal explosion method will be combined with the Bridgman anvil to study kinetics under pressure doc8579 none This project is to establish an international center for research on giga-scale system-on-a-chip (SOC) designs. It involves researchers from U.S., Taiwan, and China. The center is being supported by the National Science Council (NSC) in Taiwan and the Chinese National Science Foundation (CNSF) to support the activities by researchers from Taiwan and China respectively. Focus of the project is on innovative design methodologies, tools, and algorithms that enable efficient giga-scale SOC integration in nanometer technologies. Research activities include investigation and development of efficient SOC synthesis tools and methodologies, SOC verification, test, and diagnostic technologies, and an SOC design driver that motivates and validates various synthesis, verification, and test techniques developed during the course of this research project. The design driver is a SOC design of a network processor, which includes embedded CPUs, DPSs, FPGAs, and various kinds of memory components. The research on SOC synthesis tools and methodologies includes design specification, design partitioning, synthesis and optimization for embedded DPSs and FPGAs, physical synthesis for full-chip assembly, and synthesis techniques for design re-use. The research on verification and test focuses functional verification, self-test using on-chip programmable logic, analog and mixed-signal self-test, and test for embedded memories doc8580 none The objectives of this research program are to use Rydberg atoms as a novel tool to study non-linear dynamics in impulsively driven systems, to investigate the control and manipulation of atomic wavefunctions, to probe ultra-low-energy electron molecule scattering, and to examine the behavior of atoms near a solid surface doc8581 none Pam Green Gene expression is a multi-step process fundamental to all phases of plant growth and development. The first step in the process, transcription, has thus far received the most attention and therefore is the most well understood at the molecular level. However, it is clear that post-transcriptional events can have profound effects on gene expression. One prominent post-transcriptional event is that of mRNA degradation. In plant and other eukaryotic cells, the number of genes considered to be regulated at the level of mRNA stability is increasing rapidly. Despite the importance of mRNA stability in gene expression, the enzymes that catalyze mRNA decay in cells of plants and other multicellular eukaryotes have yet to be identified. This project will address the function of several potential mRNA degrading enzymes (mRNases) in Arabidopsis using functional genomic and biochemical analysis. The hypothesis is that these enzymes catalyze different steps in mRNA decay: AtPARN removes the poly(A) tail, AtDCP1 with co-factor AtDCP2 removes the cap, and AtXRN4 degrades the remainder of the RNA starting from one end. Although the DCPs and XRN1 facilitate the latter two steps of most cytoplasmic mRNAs in yeast, their functions in multicellular eukaryotes such as mammals and plants remain an open question because plants and mammals exhibit differences in mRNA decay compared to that in yeast. Nevertheless, the presence of homologous genes in plants and animals, as well as other observations, suggests that yeast will provide some clues about components common to all eukaryotes. Therefore, what is needed is a careful analysis of the general mRNA decay machinery in a multicellular eukaryote to elucidate the fundamentals of how mRNA stability is controlled in complex systems versus yeast. Arabidopsis has been chosen as the model system because of the experimental tools available and the importance of mRNA stability in establishing plant gene expression levels. To further understanding of the mRNA decay roles of AtPARN, AtDCP1, and AtXRN4, and their potential substrates genome-wide, this project will 1) characterize the enzymes biochemically and examine their intracellular locations, 2) obtain knockout or conditional knockout mutants in the corresponding genes, and 3) analyze the most informative of these mutants via DNA microarray analysis and other RNA analyses to identify mRNA substrates. The roles and potential targets of these putative mRNases have never been studied on a global scale nor have the corresponding genes been inactivated in any multicellular eukaryote. Therefore, these experiments should have broad significance. Moreover, for some of these enzymes, characteristics unique to plants have been discovered; thus this work has the potential to pinpoint aspects of mRNA decay that are novel and plant specific doc8582 none Makarov A two-year program to investigate transmitting, scattering, and focusing phenomena of finite rectangular volume metal grids is proposed. The grid cell sizes are on the order of a wavelength or smaller. The project results will make a contribution to the development of large-scale antennas, including base station antennas, satellite antennas, and radars. One of the impacts could be the replacement of a reflecting metal sheet or a tiny metal texture by a specially designed 3D metal grid with frequency-selective reflectivity properties. Numerical and theoretical analyses will take up 65% of the project work while experimentations will consume the remaining 35%. Today, numerical modeling of finite metal grids (and of any finite photonic crystals) constitutes considerable difficulties and is very time consuming. The speed issue of a numerical solver is a most critical parameter for the design process: many hundreds of trials may be necessary to identify a proper metal grid structure. As part of this proposal, a new iterative solver for magnetic electric field integral equations will be developed. Its idea is to convert the primary equation to the normal (energy) form and then apply a generalized minimum residual (GMRES) optimization. The current solver performance is reported in the project description. Preliminary studies indicate that the solver is fast and requires a few tens of iterations for complicated metal grid structures. To date the solver uses the simplest (piecewise-constant) basis functions and none of the special anti-resonant techniques. The first goal of the project is therefore a modification and further development of the solver in order to be able to compute resonant volume metal grids with 100-225 cells and with 2 x 10 to the fifth power - 1 x 10 to the sixth power boundary elements in 20-40 iterations. Next, extensive numerical modeling will be performed with respect to three grid parameters: cell spacing, thickness, and depth. The fourth parameter is grid curvature for curved meshes or a shaping factor for shaped grids. The objectives of the proposed modeling efforts are: i. Roadmaps of transmission spectra for various grid patterns. ii. Search for shaped grids providing unusual transmission focusing properties, including higher focusing gain than equivalent solid reflectors or lenses. The first objective is becoming the standard step in the development of photonic metallic dielectric filters. The desired pass band properties for the present project will beidentified using industrial links. The second objective is more questionable, but, as explained in the project description, may offer significant benefits. The experimental part of the work includes fabrication of the metal grids, transmission spectra measurements using a network analyzer and two small horn antennas, and surface current distribution measurements on the grid using an infrared detection system and a high-power microwave feed. The proposal includes a substantial educational component geared toward general antenna theory. The teaching plan foresees one graduate (two years) project on a fast method of moments for antenna design, one or two short undergraduate projects, and incorporation of antenna-related materials into undergraduate and graduate courses, with particular emphasis on genetic optimization algorithms. As a result of the teaching plan, an introductory inantenna toolboxla for Matlab will be created. The toolbox will include receiving and transmitting (delta gap feed) antenna elements such as wires, rectangular meshes of wires, plates, and possibly convex reflectors doc8583 none The Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT) is charged with the care of two large and very important orphaned herbaria: the Lloyd H. Shinners Collection in Systematic Botany, formerly housed at Southern Methodist University, and the Vanderbilt University Collection. Although a young institution, BRIT has grown significantly, and a new facility to house it will be constructed by . This facility will allow for expanding programs in education, allow for increase of library holdings, enhance the conduction of taxonomic research, and expand space for editorial offices for BRIT s scholarly publications. Currently an additional square feet of space are being leased to house the Vanderbilt collection and ease crowding for the other collections. The current project will allow for the purchase of 400 additional herbarium cases for this space for the Vanderbilt collection, which will eventually be housed in the new facility doc8584 none Ahmed H. Zewail of the is supported by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program to continue his studies on femtosecond dynamics of intramolecular vibrational relaxation (IVR) and reactivity in complex systems. During this period he will focus on the following areas: a) experimental and theoretical studies of complex systems; b) studies under complex solvation: gas vs. liquid; and c) transition states and IVR: control of reactivity. Techniques to be used include picosecond and femtosecond lasers in conjunction with molecular beam machines equipped with time-of-flight mass spectrometry; photoelectron and laser-induced fluorescence chambers. In addition, the condensed phase studies will exploit transient absorption and fluorescence up-conversion techniques. In addition to the education of graduate students and post-doctoral coworkers, this work has fundamental significance that is likely to translate into applications. Understanding the chemistry of complex systems lays the ground-work for attempts to make better materials and alter complex biological chemistry doc8585 none The atmospheric concentration of nitrous oxide (N2O), one of the major greenhouses of Earth, has increased since the beginning of global industrialization. The reasons for the increase are not understood, but evidence suggests that as much as 50% the input to the atmosphere derives from the ocean. There is a clear need to constrain the sources and fluxes of marine N2O. In this project researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the National Center for Atmospheric research will conduct a model and data analysis study of ocean N2O production, nitrification, and denitrification. The study aims to provide an updated estimate of the ocean N2O source using newly available surface N2O data and gas transfer methods. Both the magnitude and distribution of the ocean source will be examined in this analysis, with particular attention to the importance of coastal and suboxic regions. A second goal of the study is to explore the relationships among ocean N2O, O2 , and nutrients in global and regional data sets. The ocean N2O source predicted by this modeling investigation will be compared to that estimated from surface N2O data using gas transfer methods. Nonconventional mechanisms, including denitrification and N2O production in anoxic microzones of sinking organic matter, will be tested as well. Additional goals of the biogeochemistry transport model study include estimating how ocean N2O emissions may have changed under past climate conditions and examining how links between the biogeochemical cycles of nitrogen and carbon may lead to correlated variations in ocean N2O and CO2 fluxes doc8586 none With this renewal award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the work of Dr. Richard G. Weiss of the Department of Chemistry at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. The work involves a broad program of research in the area of liquid crystals, organogels, and polymers, including the use of phosphonium salts for carrying out selective photochemical reactions and as NMR solvents, the study of the photo-Fries reaction of optically active substrates in polymer matrices, the use of polymer films as reaction media for promoting diastereoselective photoreactions, intramolecular photocyclizations, the preparation of high energy intermediates, and the use of high energy particles to induce selective chemical reactions normally caused by photons. A variety of experimental techniques will be used, including single-crystal and powder x-ray diffraction, differential scanning calorimetry, polarizing optical microscopy, static fluorescence and phosphorescence, time-correlated single photon counting, and dipolar nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Dr. Weiss work covers a variety of subjects at the interface of organic chemistry and materials science, with the unifying theme of static and dynamic molecular interactions in anisotropic environments, i.e. in environments where the material has different properties in different directions, such as in an oriented liquid crystal or a stretched polyethylene film. The new devices and materials which might result include sensors, membranes which separate molecules on the basis of size and shape, and ordered ionic liquids that may be useful as green solvents for selective organic reactions, or permit 3D structures of solutes to be determined by nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. The work is expected to provide excellent training for the students, each one of whom is assigned a research project rather than a technique, and who may participate in a number of international collaborations doc8587 none This project is to develop a new statistical methodology to address the problem of measurement error in regression covariates. The method is embedded in a very general quasilikelihood framework that only requires specification of the mean and variance of a response variable y given covariates (u,w), thereby encompassing a broad class of models. The covariate u is not observed directly, but rather is measured through a surrogate x. Similarly to y, a model for the mean and variance of x given (u,w) is also posited. In the first phase of the project, the covariates u will be treated as a fixed nuisance parameters --- quantities that are not of interest to the researcher, but are required to fit the model of interest. The research will exploit recent developments in the statistical methodology for eliminating nuisance parameters in estimation functions (M-estimators). An alternative approach is to treat the mismeasured covariates u as unobserved random variables. This approach holds potential to increase statistical efficiency, but may be sensitive to assumptions made about the distribution of u given other covariates w. A second phase of this project will develop a robust approach to errors-in-covariates wherein a working model for the distribution of u given w is employed to increase efficiency, while protecting against bias due to misspecification of that distribution. This work will be an extension of the nuisance parameter approach. The main area of application for the project is non-linear regression models, and models for longitudinal data will receive particular attention. This will be accomplished by exploiting the natural connection of generalized estimating equation models for longitudinal response data to quasilikelihood models for univariate responses. A very large proportion of statistical methods in use today are based on regression models which express the average value of a response variable as a function of given values of other co-variables. Questions of scientific interest can then be formulated in terms of how the average response varies across a range of values of the covariates. In standard regression models, noise in the data is assumed to occur as unexplained variability in the response around its mean value, and the covariates are not considered to be subject to such variability. For example, age and sex are usually measured very accurately. However, it is often the case that some covariates are prone to considerable errors of measurement. Errors-in-covariates arise especially in observational studies which often rely upon self-report or other imperfect measures for variables such as dietary or alcohol intake, workplace or environmental exposures, clinical measures (e.g., blood pressure), and measures of income and wealth. Errors may be due to reporting biases, variability in recall, laboratory variability, intra-individual variability over time, inter-informant error, or differences in perspective of respondents. This research project will develop a new method for estimation of non-linear regression models when one or more covariates are subject to error. The project is important because (i) it represents the first application of a new technique for doing statistical estimation in a broad class of problems, which includes errors-in-covariates as a special case; (ii) the technique requires fewer modeling assumptions than those previously developed; and (iii) the approach will be extended to longitudinal data analysis, for which the problem of errors-in-covariates has received relatively little attention. Many problems in social sciences and public health require longitudinal data, so advanced regression methods for the analysis of these data are critical to furthering these inquiries doc8588 none Photo-remineralization of (DOM) in seawater can occur both directly through the photoproduction of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) as CO2 and CO, and secondarily through coupled photochemical and biological pathways acting on other photoproducts. Based on their observed CO and CO2 (DIC) photoproduction rates, the PIs currently estimate that some 0.2-1.5% of DOM (measured as DOC) may be directly remineralized daily, yielding a photochemical half-life for DOC in surface seawater of between 46-347 days. Half-life estimates of DOM are further reduced when photochemically enhanced microbial respiration of photoxidation product substrates is considered. The research to be undertaken in the current proposal is directed at better constraining these estimates and evaluating their biogeochemical significance compared to levels of primary production and microbial activity. Research cruises to a range of coastal and open ocean environments are to be undertaken to better estimate the photochemical carbon flux doc8589 none This project begins to fill a puzzling gap in the scientific literature by undertaking a comparative study of wealth accumulation patterns of black and of white households, as can be learned from the manuscript schedules of population for and . To better identify undercurrent of movement and their possible explanations, a longitudinal dataset is being compiled that links samples of Mid-Atlantic households recorded in the US census manuscript schedules. Modern statistical methods will be used to estimate models of socioeconomic differences in wealth ownership and wealth mobility. The research findings will be valuable to: (1) economists who seek to understand historical aspects of wealth inequality; (2) social scientists analyzing the relationship between socioeconomic differences and social outcomes; and (3) policy makers who want to address socioeconomic differences in wealth accumulation patterns doc8590 none s. Extensive poster sessions provide breadth to the meeting and encourage cross-talk among investigators and students. Meeting topics include the role of RNA-binding proteins in the following processes: post-transcriptional RNA processing (such as splicing, editing, nuclear transport and mRNA decay), transcriptional termination, the function of ribozymes in-vivo, enzymatic RNP molecules, translation, developmental control, viral replication and human disease doc8591 none This action provides support for four U.S. researchers to participate in, and contribute to, the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) workshop, to be held 8-11 October in Beijing, China. They are scheduled to give keynote addresses and invited lectures, and will form the backbone of the U.S. representation at this important workshop. The U.S. participants will contribute several articles on the workshop to U.S. technical publications in construction (Engineering News Record), civil engineering (Civil Engineering Magazine), and the oil and gas industry (Offshore Magazine). The workshop addresses best practices in the assessment and management of aging offshore oil and gas platforms and floating production facilities - a major environmental risk in the APEC Region that has over 1,000 offshore oil and gas structures. The workshop promotes private sector and public sector partnership by bringing together a mix of experts from oil and gas regulators, academia, consultants, oil and gas companies, and certification bodies. The goals of the workshop include strengthening intra-regional cooperation among APEC economies, and contributing to the quality of coastal waters by helping APEC oil and gas producers to identify facilities that are no longer structurally sound. The end product of the workshop will be publication of a recommendation paper, distribution of papers presented at the workshop, and continued development of an APEC directory of specialists on this topic doc8592 none P.I. David Kadko The first discovery of chemoautotrophic community living on a seafloor whale-fall carcass was made in the Santa Catalina Basin in . Subsequent discoveries in the Pacific and the fossil record confirm that such communities are widespread in the modern ocean and have occurred over evolutionary timespans. The communities supported by the whale-fall environment bear taxonomic similarities to other deep-sea reducing environments, such as hydrothermal vents, and may occur with an average spacing of an order of magnitude smaller than that for vent fields. Whale-falls are of biogeographical significance for the following reasons: 1) they enhance the biodiversity of the deep-sea; 2) they can provide insights into the effect of anthropogenic influences, such as sewage sludge emplacement and persistent organic pollutants (POPs) on the marine environment; and 3) their potential roles as stepping stones for sulfophilic species in the deep-sea. The proposed work will continue to develop radiochemical methods (using thorium, radon and lead isotopes) for estimating the ages of seafloor whalebone communities. Preliminary measurements, using radiochemical methods, performed on known age bone samples yield isotopic ages that are in good agreement with known ages. The proposed work will undertake the following: 1) establishment of a final protocol for the dating techniques previously developed and make this product available to the scientific community; 2) initiate the study of lipid content and lipid characterization on dated bone material to assess the residence time of lipids within fallen whale skeletons; 3) attempt to assess a record of pollution, particularly persistent organic pollutants (PCB, DDT) within well-dated skeletal remains of whales; and 4) determine rates of development, patterns of succession, and persistence times of whale-fall chemoautotrophic communities doc8588 none Photo-remineralization of (DOM) in seawater can occur both directly through the photoproduction of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) as CO2 and CO, and secondarily through coupled photochemical and biological pathways acting on other photoproducts. Based on their observed CO and CO2 (DIC) photoproduction rates, the PIs currently estimate that some 0.2-1.5% of DOM (measured as DOC) may be directly remineralized daily, yielding a photochemical half-life for DOC in surface seawater of between 46-347 days. Half-life estimates of DOM are further reduced when photochemically enhanced microbial respiration of photoxidation product substrates is considered. The research to be undertaken in the current proposal is directed at better constraining these estimates and evaluating their biogeochemical significance compared to levels of primary production and microbial activity. Research cruises to a range of coastal and open ocean environments are to be undertaken to better estimate the photochemical carbon flux doc8594 none The objective of this study is to investigate temporal relationships between changes in the Agulhas Current, fluctuations of NADW and sea surface temperature through the last interglacial (MIS 5), to establish timing between deep and surface water changes. The study will also produce regional maps of surface and deep water proxy indicators for the Holocene and the last glacial maximum to establish the spatial differences during these climate extremes doc8595 none This collaborative research involves a literature review, background paper, and preliminary data analysis, to be followed by a planning meeting for extension of the concepts to a follow-on international collaborative project, to be proposed separately at a later date. Concern is rising within the United States about inequality. Rapid economic growth and low unemployment have not translated into equal benefits for all. Some observers have linked the growing income gap to technological change and the accompanying shifts in demands for skills. The economy is creating new high-paying jobs for the well educated in the suburbs, leaving less skilled workers behind in the inner cities, and relegating them to minimum-wage service work. Similarly, nations are growing further apart in standard of living. The gap in average income between the richest and poorest countries is also growing. In developed countries, about five percent of the population lives in extreme poverty, while 20 percent do so in Latin America and East Asia, and 40 percent in Africa and South Asia. These gaps are also linked to development strategies, which in turn depend on a nation s skills and technological infrastructure. The research proposed separately but collaboratively by Georgia Tech and AAAS will support the planning phase of a project to explore the role of science and technology policy in the complex dynamics of inequality, and to develop ways to use S&T policy to counteract the centrifugal forces inherent in technological change. Much of the literature attempts to explain income inequality, both domestically and internationally. Income is only a proxy measure, however, for the actual quality of people s lives. This project focuses instead directly on outcome inequalities. It begins from outcomes in four areas of basic human need: health, food nutrition, environment, peace security, plus two intermediate outcome areas, information technology and education employment. In each area, data on outcomes, nationally and internationally, can be used to analyze the effects of and gaps in research agendas that are linked to them through complex webs of institutional links. These analyses then provide us with conceptual tools to develop options for changes in S&T policy that can help improve outcomes for those who are furthest behind in these areas. Based upon the work of the Georgia Tech scholars, AAAS will convene a working meeting of experts familiar with research on inequalities and or science and technology policy, to review and critique the work to date and to provide guidance in designing an extension of the concepts to an international collaborative project involving scholars from several continents doc8596 none The maintenance and enhancement of self-esteem has long been identified as a fundamental human concern, playing a critical role in motivation, affect, and social interactions. This project brings the issue of self-knowledge into the realm of economic analysis, and shows that this has important implications for how agents process information and make decisions in areas as diverse as education, investment, contracts and bargaining, or family and workplace relations. Conversely, the tools of economic modelling can help understand that a number of puzzling facts and behaviors documented by psychologists are often quite rational, and determine when these strategies are effective and when they backfire. The first premise of the model is that people have imperfect knowledge of their own abilities and other enduring characteristics, and constantly learn about them from experience and interactions with others. The second premise is that these self-perceptions affect the individual s incentives to undertake or persevere in a variety of tasks; in most activities, a higher self-confidence in one s ability or willpower enhances the motivation to act. This, in turn, generates a motive for the manipulation of the individual s self-image, both by himself and by others. First, an individual suffering from a bias towards instant gratification (time inconsistency) has a vested interest in enhancing and protecting his self-confidence, so as to counter his own tendency to give up too easily (procrastinate, succumb to short-term temptations, etc.). Alternatively, the manipulator can be another person (parent, teacher, spouse, friend, colleague, manager) who is eager to see the individual persevere and succeed in the task at hand. The first part of the project focuses on individual behavior and beliefs, explaining in particular why people value self-confidence, and how this concern affects their cognitive and decision-making processes. It helps account for why rational individuals often choose to remain ignorant about their own abilities, or blind to important signals from their environment; and why they sometimes deliberately impair their own performance or choose overambitious tasks where they are doomed to fail (self-handicapping). Another central focus of the research is the phenomenon of selective memory or awareness, that is, people s tendency to remember ego-enhancing information more than ego-threatening ones (e.g., successes more than failures). In turn, this helps account for the widely documented fact that most people have overoptimistic assessments of themselves (self-serving beliefs). A formal welfare analysis then allows us to evaluate whether such positive thinking and similar forms of self-deception are really helpful to the individual, or whether it is ultimately better to always be honest with yourself . The project also sheds light on why people sometimes attempt to lower their own self-confidence. The second part of the project extends the analysis to imperfect knowledge of one s strength or weakness of will. This allows us to understand how the personal rules that people set for themselves (diet, exercise regimen, moral code etc.) can be self-enforcing, and help them control their impulses. It can also explain the precedent-setting role of lapses in adherence to a rule, and how the fear of subsequently losing faith in oneself helps the individual achieve self-discipline. Another issue addressed is how the self-monitoring which underlies the effectiveness of rules is undermined by opportunistic distortions of memory and excuse- making. Last but not least, the model helps account for the occurrence of excessively legalistic rules which result in compulsive behavior, such as miserliness, workaholism, or anorexia. The third part of the project turns to interpersonal settings and contractual relationships. First, it provides a formal economic analysis of the conflict between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation emphasized by a large literature in psychology and sociology. It shows in particular that rewards for performance offered by a principal (manager, parent) can indeed have, through their impact on the self-image of the agent (worker, child), or his perception of the task, hidden costs which make them only weak reinforcers of the desired behavior in the short run, and negative reinforcers once they are withdrawn. The model also sheds light on when it is actually the case that empowering an agent increases his motivation and effort, while closely monitoring his performance has the reverse effect. Another puzzle is that while boosting others self-esteem is a pervasive phenomenon, people also often criticize or downplay the achievements of their spouse, child, colleague and other partners on whose effort they depend. The project analyzes such ego-bashing as reflecting battles for dominance (real authority) within the relationship. Finally, it studies situations where the agent has private information and engages in variety of self-presentation strategies such as pleas for leniency, self-deprecation, excuse-making, self-promotion, intimidation, ingratiation, and the like doc8597 none Representation lies at the very heart of democratic processes. Although there are many definitions of democracy, almost all include the need for some level of responsiveness of governors to the will of the governed. This project seeks to extend studies of representation to the American states. It follows the tradition in the literature of examining representation in terms of the congruence between the policy preferences of citizens and the legislators who represent them. The innovations of this project are (1) the extension of theories of representation into the comparative institutional and electoral contexts of the American states; (2) the development of new data resources on legislative policy behavior and constituency preferences. Most of the empirical work on representation focuses on the United States House of Representatives and, consequently, the lack of variation in electoral and institutional conditions means that there is little theoretical development of the conditions which enhance or retard effective representation. The major reason for this is the paucity of data in contexts other than the Congress to address empirically questions of representation. This study includes all state legislatures of the United States. The comparative analysis examines how the varying electoral, constitutional and district features of the states influence the process of policy representation. The project also examines and attempts to account for variations in the intensity of partisan conflict among state legislatures, drawing substantially from the recent literature on the impact of party with the Congress. A major part of this project is the collection of data for the analysis of representation in the states. The biggest task is the collection of a comprehensive set of roll call votes in the 50 states. Two technological advances makes this effort possible: most state journals, the source of roll call data, are not available over the Internet and text-processing technology allows the conversion of the text of legislative journals into roll call data sets. The period covered is the - terms (varying them where appropriate for states with odd-year elections). These data are supplemented with a comprehensive collection of interest group ratings of state legislators, and surveys of state legislative candidates. The surveys serve as validation of the roll call scales and to establish a common metric for roll call-based measures which enhances their value in comparative analysis across chambers and states. On the voter side, the project uses an extensive collection of demographic characteristics available for the state legislative districts. The project also processes newly available presidential voting measures, which serve as an indicator of voter preferences. The project promises to make important progress in our understanding of how electoral and institutional differences among the states shape the ability of citizens to achieve effective policy representation. It also produces important new data for use by the state, electoral and legislative politics communities. The approach and the lessons learned have implications for the study of representation well beyond the context of the American states doc8598 none Articular cartilage is critical to the normal function of human diarthrodial joints. The tissue has unique mechanical and tribological properties which allow for daily activities (i.e. locomotion) by providing a nearly frictionless and wear-resistant joint surface. Osteoarthritis is the most common rheumatic disease and is associated with various degrees of cartilage degradation. Despite the unique function of normal cartilage and the prevalence of osteoarthritis, previous studies have not quantified the three-dimensional (3D) mechanical deformation of cartilage using noninvasive experimental methods. The lack of such comprehensive information regarding cartilage deformations seriously limits our understanding of normal cartilage load-deformation behavior and hence our ability to completely describe, accurately diagnose, and effectively treat cartilage disorders. Thus the goal of this research is to develop a method to noninvasively determine the 3D deformation of cartilage. To meet this goal, three hypotheses will be tested as follows: (1) a noninvasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) pulse sequence can be designed to directly observe cartilage deformation at high spatial resolution of 50 microns, (2) deformation can be measured using the new noninvasive method with less than 5% relative error in strain, and (3) 3D cartilage deformation in osteoarthritic cartilage samples is altered from deformation in normal samples. To test the first hypothesis, tissue deformation will be observed using a specific MRI pulse sequence that superimposes a grid pattern on the cartilage which can be observed to move with the tissue as it deforms. To test the second hypothesis, the accuracy of the noninvasive method will be determined using a MRI-compatible phantom. The 3D finite strain tensor field will be computed from high-resolution MRI images from samples of normal and osteoarthritic tissues to test the third hypothesis. The development of the new noninvasive method is motivated by many basic science and clinical research questions. Once the method is proven by testing the above hypotheses, it will permit noninvasive investigation of the effects of gender, age, degeneration, treatment, repair and healing on cartilage load-deformation. This research represents the foundation of a long-term research program which aims to increase our understanding of normal and abnormal 3D cartilage deformations in vivo doc8599 none This proposal requests support for the research program of the Syracuse University group which is focused on the weak decays of the b-quark and the c-quark. Although the Standard Model of electroweak interactions has been very successful in explaining most phenomena, the model cannot explain the different quark and lepton masses or the different couplings between the quarks. This group is looking for deviations in the data from the model, and in measuring several model parameters. The CLEO experiment at the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR) electron-positron collider has been at the forefront of studies of both the b- and c-quarks. For example, the B0, B+, and DS mesons were all discovered at CLEO. The recent CLEO III upgrade has transformed the detector into a more powerful instrument by incorporating a new particle identification detector (RICH), new silicon-based vertex and tracking devices, and new fast electronics to accommodate increased luminosity from the CESR accelerator. The RICH detector was designed, built, and commissioned by this group. The proton-antiproton Tevatron collider at Fermilab produces copious numbers of b- and c-quarks at rates - larger than at CESR. However, the b-quark events must be extracted from hadronic backgrounds that are a factor of larger than the signal, whereas at CESR the backgrounds are only a factor of four larger than the signals. The BTeV experiment, designed to extend the physics reach of the electron-positron experiments, and whose co-spokesman is the PI of this group, has recently received stage one scientific approval from Fermilab management doc8600 none Wiebe This award will support a Data Management Office for the Southern Ocean Experiment of the Global Ocean Ecosystems Dynamics Program (SO-Globec). The experiments that form the U.S. Globec programs are large, multi-disciplinary, multi-year oceanographic efforts involving many scientific investigators from many different organizations. The Southern Ocean Experiment is a study of the winter survival strategy of krill under the antarctic sea ice in the vicinity of Marguerite Bay on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula. The Data Management Office will be responsible for providing the data management services required by the scientific investigators of the Southern Ocean component of the U.S. GLOBEC Program as they conduct their field research, analyze the data from their individual efforts, and integrate the results with those from other research components. The office will be coordinated and assisted by the same team as the Northwest Atlantic Georges Bank Program. During the proposal period, the office will manage data sets (CTD, biomass, meteorological, satellite, model results, etc.) from the Southern Ocean investigators and make these data available via an on-line, World Wide Web based, data management system (JGOFS); maintain an inventory and program thesaurus of data field names; and support and encourage data synthesis by providing on-line, web-based and stand-alone display tools doc8525 none In a joint project USGS, University of Mississippi and the DOE gathered single-channel seismic and ocean bottom seismometer data from the Gulf of Mexico gas hydrate environment. Initial results show free gas beneath a hydrate-bearing mud diapir but lacks a bottom-simulating reflector (BSR). The PIs propose to further develop an existing seismic tomography code to handle reflecting interfaces and converted shear waves in a self-consistent way. The code will be initially applied to an interesting gas hydrate problem from the Mississippi Canyon area in the Gulf of Mexico. The new technique will be used to learn: 1) how far does the shallow hydrates extend beneath the seafloor?, 2) does free gas exist beneath shallow hydrates and if so, what traps it?, 3) why is there no BSR present. The existing 3D data will be optimized and a method will be developed for 3D PS-NMO based on tomographic inversion doc8602 none This collaborative ocean science technology development project builds upon successes achieved on land with temporary deployments of portable broadband seismographs. A scientific argument has been made to provide an equivalent capability for the oceans. Currently available portable broadband ocean bottom seismographs (BBOBS) and burial systems are prototypes and must be improved before the use of these seismographs in the oceans becomes routine. This project will develop a combination of burial system and buriable seismometer that will enable 2-3 BBOBS deployments per day. The burial system will become part of the U.S. National Ocean Bottom Seismic Instrumentation Pool (OBSIP) and will be available to the research community. The new burial system will use the force of gravity for seismometer burial, and because the new BBOBS uses a borehole seismometer that has a substantially smaller diameter than conventional models, the force required to bury the new seismometer will substantially less. Enhanced seismic coverage over the oceans is vital to improving seismic resolution to better address existing as well as new questions pertaining to solid Earth dynamics. The geophysical community will benefit from ocean bottom seismometers with measurement capabilities comparable to land-based stations that can be deployed and recovered quickly and at minimal cost. This project will construct and test one burial system and one BBOBS. Should the new buriable seismometer and burial system meet design goals, funding will be sought to upgrade up to 30 existing instruments with buriable broadband seismometers doc8603 none In this study, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will conduct a careful study of the marine chemistry of molybdenum (Mo) in the open ocean. Mo is currently believed to behave as a conservative element in the open ocean and therefore to have a relatively uninteresting chemistry in this environment. However, it is well established that Mo is an important micro-nutrient that is required in nitrate reductase and in the most common form of nitrogenase, enzymes which are required for organisms to utilize nitrate and to fix nitrogen (N), respectively. The PIs expect that sufficiently precise analyses of Mo in suspended particulate matter (SPM), and in filtered seawater will reveal variations that are potentially related to biological utilization of Mo. The specific objectives of this proposal are: (1) to establish whether or not non-conservative distributions of Mo in the eastern Pacific result from biological utilization of Mo; and (2) to determine whether or not enrichments of Mo in SPM result from biological utilization of Mo in association with denitrification and or N-fixation. Accomplishing these objectives is necessary in order to evaluate the potential of Mo enrichments as tracers of these important components of the marine nitrogen cycle. In addition, this work could contribute to a better understanding the biological demand for iron (Fe) in the ocean because biological utilization of Mo and Fe are coupled. To accomplish the objectives stated above the investigators will: (1) determine the vertical distribution of Mo in filtered and unfiltered seawater samples from several sites in the eastern Pacific that represent contrasting regimes of denitrification and Mn oxide redox cycling, (2) complete a suite laboratory culture experiments designed to test our hypothesis that cellular Mo concentration covary with levels of Mo-containing enzyme activity and (3) collect and analyze SPM from regions that support active denitrification and N-fixation in order to establish the relative proportions of Mo associated with lithogenic debris, Mn oxides and biogenic material. Upon completing the proposed work the investigators expect to be able to make a first order assessment of the potential of analyses of dissolved and or particulate Mo in seawater as tracers of denitrification, N-fixation or Fe-utilization. In addition, they hope to gain insight into the patterns of biological utilization of a non-limiting micronutrient doc8604 none Northeast Radio Observatory Corporation. PI: A. A. E. Rogers Astronomical Research and Technical Support of Millimeter Wavelength VLBI This award supports the operation of the Northeast Radio Observatory s Coordinated mm-VLBI Array (CMVA). The CMVA provides unified scheduling, support, and analysis infrastructure for an ad hoc network of observatories which carry out very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) at millimeter wavelengths. The CMVA network consists of a core group of mm-wave observatories which have agreed to make approximately two weeks per year available for VLBI; additional facilities make time available on a per-proposal basis. The CMVA is unique, and its intent is to make mm-wave VLBI available to all astronomers, not just those who are experts in the technique. Millimeter-wavelength VLBI achieves the highest angular resolution in astronomy-typically 50 milliarcseconds at 3mm. Only such resolutions can begin to reveal the compact astrophysical structures associated with the massive central engines of active galactic nuclei such as quasars and BL Lacertids, and only at millimeter wavelengths does one minimize the inherent limitations of continuum VLBI due to scattering by the interstellar plasma and optical depth effects. The millimeter band is also rich in molecular masers whose structure can only be resolved by VLBI. During the past award period 60 investigators from more than 25 institutions made use of the CMVA, producing observations of the Galactic Center, a survey of active galactic nuclei, and studies of methanol and silicon monoxide masers in both star-forming regions and the envelopes of evolved stars. This proposal requests funds to continue operation of the CMVA for a final 3-year period. At that time, the proposers expect that 3mm VLBI efforts will fully pass to the NRAO s VLBA - which will have completed upgrading to 3mm capability - and the CMVA s ad hoc activities will be abandoned doc8605 none Rusling This award supports a two-year collaborative research project between Professor James Rusling, in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Connecticut, and Professor Geoffrey Kamau, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Nairobi. The PI will conduct a study on the use of bioreactors for synthesis and pollutant decomposition in microemulsions. Microemulsions are clear, stable fluids made from oil, water, and surfactant. They are less toxic and less expensive than alternative organic solvents, and have shown great promise for controlling and enhancing rates of catalytic electrochemical reactions. New catalytic protein films designed specifically for microemulsions combined with kinetic control by fluid composition may provide a basis for future cost-effective and environmentally benign processes for synthesis of organic chemicals. The collaborators expect to elucidate fundamental principles by which interactions between the protein films and the microemulsions may be used to control reaction kinetics. Electrolysis, product analysis, and voltammetry to monitor film properties and catalytic efficiencies will be done at the University of Nairobi. Kamau and a graduate student will visit Rusling and his students to conduct specialized characterization experiments using instrumentation at the University of Connecticut. The results of this grant should provide fundamental guidance for the future design of electrochemical synthetic processes involving protein film catalysis in relatively inexpensive, low toxicity, water-based fluid media. The methods to be developed involve novel approaches to biotechnology, without resorting to the use of highly sophisticated or complicated technologies. The Division of International Programs, the Division of Chemical Transport System, and the Division of Chemistry are jointly supporting this project doc8606 none This award to Professor Kermit Murray of Emory University entitled Infrared Matrix-assisted Laser Desorption Ionization Mass Spectrometry (IR-MALDI) is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program. The goals of the research are to address fundamental problems in the understanding of IR-MALDI. The research will study wavelength dependence of threshold fluences, ion yields and average initial ion velocities. The investigator will utilize unique two-pulse laser experiments to provide more information and better differentiation between the desorption and ionization processes. In addition the research will include novel applicationssuch as tissue microdissection in conjunction with IR-MALDI and the use of ice matricies for the study of non-covalent complexes. The principle investigator is recognized for his contributions to the community through his widely available internet resources. This research has the potential for high impact in the areas of molecular and cellular biology, as well as, in mass spectrometry doc8607 none Sequestration of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) in the ocean by nutrient additions as well as direct deep ocean injection of CO2 remains an active and controversial area of scientific discussion and research. Multiple scientific experiments have successfully demonstrated the efficacy of short-term, small scale iron additions to spur phytoplankton growth. At least four industries are now studying the feasibility of larger scale commercial operations ostensibly to increase fish production and potential carbon trading programs in the future. Presently there are no scientific or legal protocols to provide oversight to these operations and guidance for the public to assess these commercial scientific ventures. With support from this grant, the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) will convene a two-day workshop in the Spring of to define the scientific and legal uncertainties surrounding C sequestration in the ocean. The proceedings from the workshop will be published in a peer- journal. In addition, the workshop will help form the issues and rationale for a larger symposium on ocean carbon sequestration at some future time. ASLO is well suited to conduct this workshop. The Society conducted one of the first scientific symposia on Fe limitation of primary production in the ocean and the proceedings were published in a special issue of Limnology and Oceanography, the societal journal, in . In addition, the Council of Environmental Challenges at MIT (an alliance of academic and industry scientists) will co-host the workshop and provide logistical support. The final agenda, however, will be determined by an independent steering committee doc8608 none Kotliar This award supports theoretical and computational research and education centered on strongly correlated electron materials with the aim of working toward realistic calculations based on dynamical mean field theory. Dynamical mean field theory methods will be further developed. Planned advances include: the incorporation of material specific realistic orbital and crystal structure, and developing extensions of the theory to include short-ranged correlations. Experimental work on V2O3, NiSe2-xSex mixtures, cerium- and ytterbium-based heavy fermion materials, and strongly correlated organic compounds provides motivation for this theoretical investigation. %%% This award supports theoretical and computational research and education centered on materials where strong electronic correlations play an important role. The proposed work would develop new many-body techniques and computational algorithms to extend and overcome some of the limitations of the dynamical mean field theory. The dynamical mean field theory has enjoyed success in capturing essential features of the Mott transition which is driven by strong electronic correlations. The proposed work would focus on more accurate and realistic descriptions of materials including V2O3, NiSe2-xSex mixtures, cerium- and ytterbium-based heavy fermion materials, and strongly correlated organic compounds doc8609 none This project aims to understand the mechanical dynamics of molecular liquids and solids at a fundamental level. The largest of two distinct but related thrusts involves the development and use of a new technique termed three dimensional (3D) Infrared-Raman spectroscopy. With three dimensional Infrared-Raman spectroscopy it is possible to study how vibrational energy flows through molecules, and how liquid state structures evolve in time. Important liquids such as water and methanol at room temperature will be studied to improve the laser apparatus and advance a theoretical understanding of 3D spectroscopy. A low temperature apparatus is being developed to study temperature dependence of these liquids and cryogenic solids. The smaller thrust involves the development and use of a shock wave spectroscopy technique to study supercooled liquids such as glasses and polymers which have slow structural relaxation dynamics. This technique is also referred to as the nanoshock technique. It produces large amplitude structural distortions in materials and then uses vibrational spectroscopy to monitor structural evolution back toward the original structure. This project involves the development of new instrumentation to study phenomena such as energy flow and how structures evolve in complex systems such as proteins and polymers. The relevance of this project to topics such as the accelerated aging of structural and biological materials is high, and students trained in these areas should be very competitive in the job market in areas of materials and biosciences of high interest to industry doc8610 none High resolution biological observations and samples have been collected approximately yearly over the nine year perod since the eruption near 9 degrees 50 inutes north on the East Pacific Rise. Continuous temperature records have been collected over the same time period from low-temperature diffuse flow sites and high temperature chimneys. The biological time-series data will be analyzed to quantitatively and qualitatively characterize the temporal and spatial changes in vent community structure. Multiple temperature records within individual difuse-flow sites will be analyzed and compared with those from all of the other diffuse-flow sites doc8611 none Funds are provided for the PIs to collect two bathymetric transects of sediment cores on the southern Florida margin and the western margin of the Great Bahama Bank. The PIs will also reconstruct the history of the flow for the Florida Current through the Straits since the last glacial maximum on millennial to centennial time scales through the Holocene and last deglaciation based on these and existing cores. The work will further our understanding of circulation changes in the Florida Current system and therefore the heat transport to high northern latitudes doc8611 none Funds are provided for the PIs to collect two bathymetric transects of sediment cores on the southern Florida margin and the western margin of the Great Bahama Bank. The PIs will also reconstruct the history of the flow for the Florida Current through the Straits since the last glacial maximum on millennial to centennial time scales through the Holocene and last deglaciation based on these and existing cores. The work will further our understanding of circulation changes in the Florida Current system and therefore the heat transport to high northern latitudes doc8613 none This technology development project addresses methane hydrates, which represent the most abundant hydrocarbon source on Earth. Decades of geochemical studies have established the importance of anaerobic methane oxidation (AMO) in methane hydrate containing marine sediments, but the organisms responsible for this major process in the Carbon cycle have never been isolated; and no pure cultures of microbes capable of net AMO have yet been obtained. The project entails an interdisciplinary integrated experimental and field program to determine the mechanism of AMO by following AMO under controlled variable-defined laboratory conditions that provide a thermodynamically favorable environment for microbial methane consumption over methane production. In order to create conditions which support AMO, newly designed anaerobic high pressure low temperature bioreactors will be constructed and tested. The source of microorganisms inoculated into the bioreactors will come from sediment samples with AMO activity. These sediments will be recovered under in situ conditions from the Cascadia Margin off the Oregon coast. A variety of geochemical assays on the culture medium and the resulting methane hydrate will be performed during enrichments in the bioreactor, and the biogeochemistry of the environment will be continuously monitored and characterized. The bioreactors will provide an experimental platform for future analyses of isotopically labeled biogeochemical equilibrium and kinetic experiments under well defined controlled conditions doc8614 none This project will examine the public s view of police abuse and just punishment in the context of the range of settings that typify complex day-to-day encounters between officers and citizens. Two goals describe this research: (1) to establish empirically the dimensions that define police abuse of authority and, following this, just punishment for abusive behavior in the eyes of the public; and (2) to explain under which circumstances structural (i.e., social status), experiential (i.e., prior experience with the police and the criminal justice system), or attitudinal (i.e., socio-political values) factors contribute to an understanding of citizens judgments of police abuse and just punishment. These topics will be examined with data obtained from a telephone survey undertaken with a random sample of respondents in the City of New York. The sampling frame is designed to insure statistically reliable comparisons across ethnic groups in the City, including whites, African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. Also, by using vignettes, the survey instrument will explain empirically whether and to what extent respondents share a common, normative understanding of the boundaries, the seriousness and the thresholds of police abuse and, following this, just punishment. Building on studies of the public s perception of police practices as well as studies of policing, this study of the normative structure of police abuse and just punishment will make a significant contribution to an understanding of the legitimacy of the police in the eyes of the public doc8615 none Sociological research distinguishes between power, defined as the structural capacity to attain resources, and status, defined as a position of prestige and honor based on expectations for an individual s contributions to goals. Research has demonstrated how status can lead to power, but has had more difficulty demonstrating that a position of power can be used to elevate an individual s status. Whereas status can be used to gain a material advantage that leads to power, use of power often produces a negative reaction in those on whom it is used and therefore interferes with the status advantage that might come from power. To help understand this puzzling inconsistency involving these two otherwise closely related concepts, this project develops a theory that describes two ways power can be used to elevate status. First, power users may elevate their status in the eyes of observers of the power use (i.e., those who do not experience the negative reactions that those directly exploited by power do). Second, power users may gain status through philanthropy, or voluntary contributions to the community. Philanthropy may ameliorate negative reactions to power use and change the perception that power users are selfish. The project tests the two components of the theory with two experiments. In the first experiment, observers watch power being used in a network exchange setting, and then have the opportunity to cooperate in a task with either a high power or low power participant from the exchange they observed. The influence of the high or low power participant from the previous exchange on the cooperative task provides a measure of status. In the second experiment, partners in a power exchange network differ according to how much the dominant partner contributes to the success of the group, and then give ratings in subsequent exchanges of the status or influence of the power-wielding partner. Besides demonstrating the validity of the theory, the results shed light on the willingness of people to volunteer for activities that provide little in the way of power gain, but may increase status doc8616 none This award provides funds to support graduate students and young researchers to attend the conference Statistical Challenges in Modern Astronomy III, to be held from July 18-21, , at the Penssylvania State University, University Park, PA. The primary focus of this cross-disciplinary conference is on applying advanced statistical techniques for the analysis of observational data in astronomy. One of the topics of the conference will be statistical methods for extremely large data sets and information systems. Another topic is statistical aspects of dealing with data resulting from the current revolution in observational cosmology. The organizing committee and speakers represent both communities and cross-disciplinary discussion is encouraged doc8617 none Herbst Molecules are found in many different environments in the Universe and are excellent probes of their surroundings. Analysis of molecular spectral features yields important information, but more comprehensive analysis requires the comparison of many observations with detailed chemical and physical models of the assorted sources. In a continuing research program, Dr. Eric Herbst, at the Ohio State University, hopes to understand and utilize chemistry to explain and guide astronomical observations of molecules, and to better our understanding of assorted interstellar and circumstellar objects. During this award period, Dr. Herbst will pursue a wide variety of modeling studies, with concomitant improvements to his standard gas-phase and gas-grain models. He will pay particular attention to the environments of star-forming regions of interstellar clouds. He will also concentrate on improving his grain surface chemistry, since new experiments and theories are now beginning to bring some understanding to this field doc8618 none Andrea Liu is supported jointly by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program and the Materials Theory Program to carry out theoretical research pertaining to stiff biopolymers such as DNA and F-actin. These biopolymer chains are highly negatively charged in aqueous solution, and therefore repel one another strongly. However, both DNA and F-actin can form complexes when multivalent positively-charged ions or cationic crosslinking proteins are added. This research considers how generalized linkers can form complexes with charged biopolymers. The primary objective is to elucidate the structure of dilute aggregates and calculate the phase equilibrium between dilute aggregates, dense bundles, and isolated chains. In addition, the kinetics of bundle formation will be examined in both quiescent and sheared solution. These problems are motivated by biological phenomena such as DNA condensation and self-assembly of actin filament networks and bundles. The physical chemistry in this project is rooted in statistical mechanics, which will allow the identification and exploration of the range of phenomena that can result from a minimal model of charged chains and linkers. The research program is expected to provide a useful vehicle for training research students in numerical and analytical techniques, and for introducing them to biological systems and topics in modern condensed phase physical chemistry. It is known that crosslinked networks of charged filaments form inside cells, and that shearing forces on the cells cause responses that lead to metabolic changes. The understanding of these and other biological applications will be enhanced by this research, which aims to develop simple models that are able to explain a wide range of observable phenomena such as DNA condensation doc8619 none Anomalies in the oxygen isotope compositions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and molecular oxygen (O2), which are the basis for new probes of gross carbon exchanges between the atmosphere, biosphere, and oceans, will be investigated. These anomalies are the results of stratospheric reactions involving O2, ozone (O3), oxygen atoms, and CO2. The rates for O3 formation from the reaction O+O2 are different for different isotopic species. The resulting anomaly in O3 is then photochemically transferred to CO2, although other reactions to be studied might also contribute. Anomalies in CO2 are accompanied by corresponding anomalies in O2 (from which the O3 formed). This isotopic signature is destroyed only by respiration photosynthesis processes at the Earth s surface. Once the stratospheric anomalies are better quantified, the isotopic composition of O2 in the troposphere can therefore be used to infer globally averaged marine and terrestrial biosphere productivity. Ice-core records of the O2 isotopic composition can then be used to derive the biospheric productivity and its response to environmental change for the past 400,000 years. This will lead to a better understanding of Earth s climate history, and therefore, future. In this project, stratospheric air samples will be analyzed for the isotopic composition of CO2 using isotope ratio mass spectrometry. Coupled with laboratory experiments and modeling, these measurements will provide new observation-based constraints on the mechanisms that lead to the observed compositions and on the fluxes of stratospheric CO2 and O2 to the troposphere. This information is needed to interpret the O2 record doc8620 none The solidification of polymers and copolymers under conditions relevant to industrial processing operations is of considerable importance to the design of polymers and to operation of the plastics industry in all its forms. One of the most sought after conditions is crystalline polymers cannot be studied at high supercoolings, or low temperatures as the polymers usually solidify before the desired isothermal condition can be achieved. Two of those polymers are linear polyethylene and nylon 66. The recently developed Ding-Sprueill method of rapid cooling which utilizes a micro-thermocouple embedded in the sample and direct continuous measurement of temperature has proved to over come the difficulties in an unexpected way. As the polymer film is cooled rapidly the heat of crystallization maintains the polymer at a constant temperature determined by the relative rates of cooling and heat liberation. The proposed research seeks to continue current successful studies of polyethylene and its copolymers, which have led to the discovery of new laws of polymer crystallization. These laws have not been observed previously experimentally, nor are they predicted by any available theories. It is proposed additionally to apply the method to nylon 66 and its copolymers. The P.I s group, under current NSF support, have shown that nylon 66 and its copolymers do not follow secondary nucleation as the mechanism of crystal growth, unlike other polymer systems. They therefore compose a unique group of polymers that follow surface roughening as the mechanism of growth. The proposed research is intended to shed considerable light on the mechanism of crystallization of these two generic forms of interest to basic physics, assist in resolving several current controversies on mechanisms of crystallization, and at the same to generate understanding of the crystallization behavior of two very important industrial polymers under conditions which are directly applicable to manufacturing operations. Experimentation will include studies of detailed morphologies developed over wide crystallization temperature ranges under conditions hitherto unattainable as well as studies of the crystallization kinetics and the melting behavior. Experimental methods to be used include transmission electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy, optical microscopy, small angle x-ray scattering and small angle neutron scattering. %%% This research is in the area of structure, crystallization and processing of industrially important polymeric materials doc8621 none When people are faced with stressful or threatening events, they often turn to close others for comfort, assistance, and support. A large body of research indicates that receiving social support, or feeling confident that it will be available when needed, helps people to cope more effectively with stressful life events and has long-term benefits for health and psychological well-being. However, although the links between social support and important personal outcomes are now well-documented, researchers know surprisingly little about the specific ways in which social support processes are carried out in close relationships, or about the role that social support plays in the development and maintenance of those relationships. The primary goal of this research is to address this critical gap in the literature by studying social support as an interpersonal process within adult intimate relationships. To accomplish this goal, a series of laboratory studies will examine how partners behave when one member of the couple is undergoing a stressful laboratory experience. Using a variety of research methods, the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses of both members of the couple will be examined under a number of different laboratory conditions. In doing so, this research will explore a variety of factors that may explain why some people are more effective support-seekers and more responsive support-providers. These factors include personality factors (e.g., attachment style, communal orientation), relationship characteristics (e.g., closeness, commitment), and situational variables (e.g., feelings of empathy, perceptions of partner need). Finally, the links between supportive social interactions (as observed in the laboratory) and personal well-being (e.g., depression, health symptoms) and relationship functioning (e.g., satisfaction, trust) will be examined over time. The broad goals of this research are to gain a better understanding of the processes underlying effective support-seeking and care-giving behavior in close relationships, and to develop a more comprehensive theoretical model to explain these processes. By understanding the specific factors that enhance or inhibit effective social support processes, we will have a better set of tools for identifying individuals (and couples) who are at risk for poor outcomes, and a stronger theoretical and empirical basis for developing interventions aimed at improving care giving processes in couples, and thereby promoting health and well-being doc8622 none Funded under the guidelines for Local Systemic Change (LSC) through Teacher Enhancement, this five-year project is a collaboration among the School District of Lancaster (Pennsylvania), LaSalle University, and the Education Trust. The project supports professional development and curricular implementation for 400 teachers of mathematics in grades K-12 and 30 administrators, to meet the District s goal of having 90% of students meet high mathematics standards by . Lancaster s LSC plan includes: 1. 180 hours of professional development for 400 mathematics support teachers in implementing Everyday Mathematics in grades K-6, Impact in grades 7-8, and NSF-supported instructional materials (Interactive Mathematics Program, Core-Plus, or Math Connections) as the core for all mathematics students in grades 9-12. 2. An additional 90 hours of staff support through modeling, coaching, and collaboration with internal and external mentors. 3. 150 hours of instructional leadership training for administrators and school-based mentors (Instructional Facilitators). 4. Community mathematics fora on supporting mathematics learning. School-based Instructional Facilitators (IF) provide daily support for teachers in improving teaching and learning through modeling, coaching and facilitating teacher collaboration. Each of the District s thirteen elementary schools, four middle schools, one alternative secondary school, and one high school has at least one IF. In addition to the required LSC core evaluation, the project s evaluation includes a student achievement component: (a) the Pennsylvania State Assessments measuring students progress in mathematics at grades 5, 8, and 11; (b) the New Standards Reference Exam measuring students progress in mathematics at grades 4, 7, and 10; and (c) district-wide, 9-week assessments (performance-based tasks adopted and adapted from nationally recognized assessments, including Exemplars and Maryland State Assessments) measuring students progress throughout the year in mathematics at grades 3, 5, 8, and 11 doc8623 none In four large suflide structures were recovered from the Mothra hydrothermal field on the Endeavour segment of the Juan de Fuca Ridge. The four distinctly different samples to be examined in this study provide an opportunity to examine the phylogenetic and metabolic diversity of microorganisms within the environmental gradients that comprise a range of conditions in a mid-ocean ridge hydrothermal setting. The mineralogical-chemical-microbiological gradients witin these samples will be thoroughly mapped and characterized doc8624 none This five-year Teacher Enhancement project will create Professional Development Materials for teachers of physical science and physics with an emphasis on the K-8 grade levels. It is envisioned that professionals who deliver physical science physics workshops for K-8 teachers will use the materials in short courses and workshops. The materials will be developed and piloted in summer institutes at the University of Washington and in other venues nationwide, including at professional meetings. Both print and computer-based materials will be guided by discipline-based physics education research conducted by the Physics Education Group at the University of Washington doc8625 none A fundamental question in cell biology is how metabolic pathways are integrated and controlled to produce a balanced, efficient metabolism. The long-term goal of this research is to gain a molecular understanding of regulatory and metabolic interactions amongst pathways. A solid understanding of such metabolic integration is needed as a foundation for efforts to predict the response of cells to environmental change and developmental switches, efforts to develop metabolic modeling systems, and efforts targeting metabolism for rational drug design and or production of small molecules. The biosynthesis of thiamine in the bacterium Salmonella enterica serves as a model system to address pathway integration. The system was chosen because several metabolic processes and the function of several uncharacterized open reading frames are required for optimal thiamine synthesis. Critical for the hypotheses being tested in this project were the findings that the aerobic synthesis of thiamine requires glutathione and genes involved in the synthesis or repair of [Fe-S] centers. With this project the investigator will i) determine the role of the YggX protein, specifically how it prevents damage and or facilitates repair of oxidatively damaged [Fe-S] centers, and ii) determine the function and structural characteristics of the ThiH protein, a thiamine biosynthetic enzyme. Chemical, biochemical, molecular biological, and genetic techniques will be employed. This study of the biochemical function of the YggX and ThiH proteins should provide insights into the integration of metabolic processes. Ultimately this work should contribute to the understanding of global metabolic strategies that Salmonella enterica uses to survive in its natural environment. These strategies are likely to represent those used by other cells to respond to developmental and environmental stimuli doc8626 none SES 00- Sheila Jasanoff STS and the Liberal Arts: A Workshop on Undergraduate Education This project involves a one-day workshop to introduce the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) to deans and other academic administrators from a nationwide selection of four-year colleges and research universities and to promote wider discussion of the field s possible contributions to undergraduate education. The venue is Cambridge, MA, October 28-29, in conjunction with the Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). With STS education growing in recent years, this is an especially opportune time for an international professional society such as 4S to contribute proactively to this process. Speakers include leading STS scholars and teachers from the US and Europe, as well as administrators who have experience with STS programs at their campuses. The workshop is designed to address three specific goals. The first is informational. The meeting should disseminate knowledge and experiences about the disciplinary content of STS and the design of successful undergraduate programs to a wider cross-section of the educational community. The second is intellectual. The workshop promotes reflection by both scholars and administrators on the unifying characteristics of STS, its relationship with more traditional disciplines, the connections between teaching and research, and the positive roles that STS can play in fostering engaged and informed citizenship in technological societies. The third is network-building. A number of the participants at the workshop will not previously have encountered STS in systematic or programmatic forms. Meeting core figures in the field, and perhaps experiencing parts of the preceding annual meeting, should put them in touch with people and resources if they wish to engage in follow-up activities doc8627 none A program of research in theoretical elementary particle physics will include the study of the relation between quantum field theory in three-dimensional space on the one hand, and gravity and supergravity in higher dimensions on the other hand. Quantum field theory describes such phenomena as the strong nuclear forces. Supergravity is a limiting case of the string theory that may unify all of the forces of nature, including gravity. It has been shown that the connection between quantum field theory and gravity gives quantitative information about the properties of field theory when forces between particles are very strong. This strong - force information is required for many applications and is generally not accessible by other methods doc8628 none of the product sold by the insurance company. In a second stage, it can be related to the pricing policy. One may check whether the premium charged to a particular consumer only depends on her risk, or whether it may for any given level of risk vary with other characteristics, such as age, sex, etc. Conclusions can be drawn on the industrial organization of the field. The third research direction adopts a more normative viewpoint. A striking feature of modern biology is the increasing ability to identify the genes that either are responsible for or tend to create predispositions to various diseases. This possibility will lead to a spectacular amelioration of prevention and treatments. However, the availability of more precise information on the risk destroys insurance possibilities, which is welfare decreasing. A first task is to obtain a first evaluation of the associated welfare loss. This requires, in particular, an evaluation of the benefit provided by insurance coverage. One purpose of the study (and a quite difficult one) is to provide an preliminary evaluation of this order of magnitude. The most radical solution proposed involves a regulation that would strictly prohibit the use of genetic testing by insurance companies. Such a proposal however requires a thorough investigation. From an economist s point of view, it amounts to introducing a strong adverse selection component. Agents will presumably be informed of their risk, at least if (as it will probably be the case) individuals have free access to genetic testing. The problem, now, is to assess the impact of this asymmetry on the market for health or life insurance. This is a crucial issue, if only because the solution might well reveal worse than the initial problem. If the final outcome is a global collapse of the insurance markets at stake, everybody (including the population at risk) will end up in a much worse situation. The last goal of the project is only to provide some preliminary elements for assessing the scope and doc8629 none Gelmont As high-frequency devices are extended farther into the terahertz (THz) regime, the electron physics will, for the first time, be impacted by polar optical phonon resonance (POP) that typically lies above 1 THz. In this frequency region, the dispersion of the permittivity in all heteropolar materials can not be neglected. At the POP frequency, the permittivity has a singularity that influences and perturbs all physical processes within heterostructure barrier devices. Thus, the emerging area of THz electronics requires the development of new physical theories for the analysis of the heterojunction interface in the vicinity of the POP frequencies. In the last two years, the new theory of POP effects within depletion layers of GaAs barrier heterostructures has been proposed [1-2]. This physical phenomenon is based upon dramatic change in complex permittivity of electronic material near the polar optical-phonon resonance frequency which cause highly nonlinear behavior of depleted heterostructure modified by the interaction between the lattice and the electric field. While this simplified theory to date has considered only forward bias conditions and has ignored neutral layer and external parasitic effects, it predicts a strong POP influence. Specifically, it predicts that the POPs present within the electron-depleted region influence the barrier charging dynamics near the semiconductor resonant frequency, directly modify the potential barrier, perturb the spatial dependence of the electric field within the depletion-region and strongly alter the nonlinearity associated with the heterostructure current. This strong and highly-localized frequency-space phenomenon has broad implications to all polar-semiconductor-based heterostructure devices that utilize nonlinear electron transport effects. The goals of this exploratory research project is to develop a new quantitative and physics-based model for investigating the high frequency dynamics of semiconductor interfaces. In particular, a research investigation is proposed to study the nonlinear behavior of forward and reversed bias heterostructures. The physical model will be integrated with a circuit-embedding algorithm to conduct computer simulation of dynamic behavior of heterojunction based high frequency devices operating within realistic situations. This work will also consider the physical operation of interfaces that are constructed from novel materials systems which can be used to release Schottky interfaces with good barriers heights and very low resonance frequencies (~600 GHz). These particular scientific investigations hold great promise for introducing new degrees of freedom into the functionality and performance of semiconductor-based electronic devices. For example, the possibility of enhancing the nonlinearity, and therefore the innate harmonic generation capacity, of heterojunction structures would have a profound impact on the search for high-efficiency harmonic multiplier sources operating at THz frequencies doc8630 none Within the next decade the likely detection of gravitational waves from astrophysical sources will open a new window for astronomy and provide new tests of Einstein s theory of general relativity. Interpreting the observations will require accurate theoretical gravi- tational waveforms calculated from the theory. This project will endeavor to provide the needed waveforms, by solving Einstein s equations systematically in a post-Newtonian ap- proximation, which amounts to an expansion in powers of v c, where v and c are the speeds of the source bodies and of light, respectively. The goal will be to find the equations of motion for the bodies correct to order (v c)7 beyond Newtonian gravity, and the flux of gravitational radiation to order (v c)6 beyond the lowest quadrupole approximation. This will make use of a method known as Direct Integration of the Relaxed Einstein Equations (DIRE), that has been developed at Washington University. Using this method it will also be possible to study the effects of the interior structure of the bodies, including their spin, on the motion and gravitational waveform, to high order in the post-Newtonian expansion. Ways to use gravitational-wave data to test alternative theories of gravity will also be studied. This includes testing the scalar-tensor alternative theories by observing gravita- tional waves from neutron stars inspiralling into black holes, and testing whether or not the graviton has a mass by observing waves from inspiral of pairs of supermassive black holes using the proposed space-based gravitational antenna, LISA. A recently published class of alternative theories of gravity that predict a massive graviton will be studied in detail as foils against which to compare and contrast the predictions of general relativity, and as guides to other possible tests of a massive graviton doc8631 none In Alaskan tundra ecosystems, shrubs and mosses play key roles in regulating surface energy balance in both winter and summer, and are key determinants of the uptake and turnover of limiting elements in the vegetation. Shrub and moss abundance is also expected to change dramatically with climate warming, but it is still unclear and controversial whether the warming of the last few decades has actually caused any changes thus far. This research will use long-term experimental manipulations of the tundra environment at Toolik Lake, Alaska, where shrub and moss abundance have changed dramatically, to improve our understanding of controls on the rate of change in shrub and moss abundance, and on the timing of the sequence of changes in climate, shrub and moss abundance, canopy architecture, and surface microclimate. One product will be demographically-based models of shrub and moss growth and canopy architecture in relation to climate. A second objective is to document annual variation in production, biomass, and species composition at several tundra sites in northern Alaska, so as to quantify the normal background annual variation in these characteristics. By doing the work at sites where similar measurements were made during the s and s, it will be possible to determine whether the changes over 3 or 4 decades exceed the annual variation or whether annual variation exceeds any long-term trends. A third objective is to continue a series of ongoing synthesis activities aimed at improving understanding of climate change effects at the level of the entire Arctic as well as globally doc8632 none Komarneni This research examines the phenomenon of microwave-assisted reactions in the liquid state to synthesize nanophase metal powders, such as Cu, Ni, Pt, Pd, Au, and Ag. This novel microwave-polyol process reduces metal hydroxides or other salts with ethylene glycol, which serves as a solvent as well as a reducing agent. Preliminary results show that nanophase metal powders can be produced rapidly by microwave catalysis. The synthesis of nanophase metal powders associated kinetics are investigated for this technique, and the results are compared to the conventional refluxing process in ethylene glycol at 195 degrees C. Heterogeneous and homogeneous nuclei are added during microwave-polypol processing to better understand the nucleation and growth steps. %%% Monodisperse metal powders are expected to be valuable in conductive inks and in pastes that could be employed for a variety of applications such as electronic thick film technology doc8633 none This award provides funds to partially support the Fifth North American Meeting of New Researchers in Statistics and Probability, sponsored by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. The primary objective is to provide a venue for interaction among new researchers in statistics and probability. The conference will take place from July 31 - August 3, , on the Georgia Institute of Technology campus in Atlanta, Georgia, just prior to the annual Joint Statistical Meetings to be held in Atlanta. Participants will include approximately 50 statisticians and probabilists who have received their Ph.D. within 5 years of the conference or who expect to receive their Ph.D. within 1 year of the conference. Presentations by 4 senior speakers and roundtable discussions on the processes of publishing and grant funding (with participants from NSA, NSF, ONR, and NIH) are also part of the schedule doc8634 none This award supports theoretical research and education the area of soft condensed matter. Research will be carried out on layered structures, nematic liquid crystals, twist grain boundary phases, nematic elastomers, and granular matter. The PI has demonstrated that layered structures, such as free standing smectic-C films, lyotropic smectics with dissolved proteins that form 2D lattices within their bilayer membranes, or DNA-lipid complexes with DNA intercalated between lipid bilayers can exhibit remarkable new sliding phases of matter. These phases are characterized by 2D power law behavior of correlations in spite of nonvanishing interlayer couplings. Many properties of these phases both in stacks of 2D classical systems and in arrays of 1D quantum wires are unexplored or incompletely understood and will be investigated by the PI. Nematic liquid crystals exhibit both line disclination and point hedgehog defects. Disclination loops can produce far-field director configurations equivalent to those of point hedgehogs and can carry hedgehog charge. The topology and homotopy group of these charge carrying loops is well understood. The distribution of hedgehog charge along a disclination loop is, however, largely unexplored. The PI will develop ways of quantifying hedgehog density, explore its energetic consequences, and study its effect on coarsening of defect patterns after a quench into the nematic phase from the isotropic phase. Twist-grain boundary (TGB) phases are liquid-crystal analogs of the Abrikosov vortex lattice phase of superconductors. At least three distinct TGBC phases in addition to the original TGBA phase have now been predicted or observed experimentally. Investigations of the energetic differences among these phases and the parameters that determine their stability, which are poorly understood, form an important part of the proposed program. Nematic elastomers, formed by crosslinking nematic polymers, combine the properties of rubber elasticity and orientational order of nematic liquid crystals. They have unusual elastic properties that have a number of potential applications, most notably as artificial muscles. A major part of the proposed program will be devoted to the study of the static and dynamic properties of nematic elastomers, including nematic elastomeric membranes and lyotropic nematic elastomers formed by dispersing colloidial rods in a swollen gel. When subjected to sufficiently strong shear stresses, granular matter becomes partially fluidized and exhibits flow properties that differ from those of a Newtonian fluid. The PI will investigate the flow of granular materials in various flow geometries using a generalization of the Chapman-Ensgog kinetic hydrodynamical equations with inelastic collisions in which effects of particle corrrelations are modeled near random close packing by a viscosity that diverges more rapidly with density than other transport coefficients. %%% This award supports research and education in the area of soft condensed matter. The term soft materials encompasses a wide spectrum of materials that includes complex fluids and liquid crystals and that are important to industry, as well as most biological matter. The PI will use these materials as an arena to explore fundamental concepts in condensed matter physics, such as broken symmetry, topological defects, and fluctuation destruction of long-range order in low-dimensional systems. This work helps improve our fundamental understanding of soft materials, and involves novel new phases of matter, sliding phases, that occur in layered soft matter, topological defects that occur in nematic liquid crystals, twist-grain boundary phases that occur in liquid crystals, nematic elastomers, and complex fluids doc8635 none Recent work has indicated that dunite bodies in ophiolites, and presumably also in layered ocean crust, represent melt transport conduits through which basaltic melt has migrated and interacted chemically. In this proposal, Lundstrom proposes to test two aspects of this general hypothesis. First, he proposes to test the hypothesis that the melts that moved through the dunites are in fact very enriched and produced by melting of mafic heterogenieties in the mantle. He proposes to do this by measuring the isotopic compositions of oxygen and lithium in mantle spinels from ophiolite samples and mantle xenoliths. A second test, using samples from the Trinity ophiolite, is to determine whether there exist gradients in lithium and other incompatible element isotopes as a function of distance from dunite bodies doc8636 none The investigators will study magnetic impulse events (MIE) in the dayside magnetosphere. MIE events are signatures of plasma entry into the magnetosphere. The study will make use of ground- and space-based data, which will be combined with theoretical models to isolate the most important mechanisms responsible for these processes. In the first year, the investigators will identify the factors controlling the motion of MIE seen in high latitude ground magnetograms and discriminate between proposed interpretations in terms of bursty merging, pressure pulses, and the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. During the second year, they will investigate the nature of magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling by comparing geosynchronous and ground signatures with the predictions of several recent proposed coupling models. In the third year, they will undertake a survey of dayside auroral brightenings seen by satellite imagers, determine their occurrence patterns as a function of solar wind conditions, and establish their relationship to previously reported categories of transient events seen in high latitude ground observations. Understanding MIE is important for identify the factors that control solar wind entry in the magnetosphere and its subsequent effects on Earth s ionosphere and thermosphere and space weather doc8637 none An Instrument development grant has been awarded to Albert Crewe of the University of Chicago to complete, test, and demonstrate a new and original scanning electron microscope (SEM), using a novel lens system, whose expected performance characteristics far exceed those of existing instruments. It is a dedicated low voltage, high resolution instrument that incorporates a permanent magnet lens, placed below the specimen. Such lenses have not been used previously but they show promise of permitting a considerable increase in resolution. The special value of these lenses are that they allow the use of very small focal lengths with correspondingly low aberrations. This makes it especially valuable for use with low accelerating voltages, although the lenses are not limited to this area. A second advantage is that simplified and more versatile column designs are allowed due to the post-specimen lens location. A third advantage is that the anticipated cost of the entire instrument, if made commercially, should be about half that of current high resolution scanning electron microscopes. Finally, the shape of the lens makes it easy to provide a large tilt angle for the specimen. The project involves the training of a number of students who will gain invaluable instrument design and development experience doc8638 none This research will investigate the generation of perceptually controlled behavior in biological and artificial systems. Its focus is to understand intralimb coordination that consists of both discrete and rhythmic elements, such as in drawing or handwriting. The hypothesis underlying the work is that unconstrained multijoint movements can be understood in terms of two fundamental units of action, discrete movements and rhythmic movements. This D-R hypothesis is partially motivated by the fact that, from the perspective of dynamical systems theory, fixed-point and limit cycle dynamics are two primary stable regimes in a complex dynamic system. The research will involve the development of a dynamical model for multijoint movements, consisting of two separate pattern generators that produce rhythmic and discrete movement trajectories. A series of experimental studies will investigate this D-R hypothesis in three stages. First, the basic hypothesis that two regimes exist and that they interact will be tested in experiments examining controlled single-joint and two-joint movements that involve both rhythmic and discrete elements. Second, a subset of the same movement tasks will be examined, with additional recording of cerebral blood flow using functional magnetic resonance imaging. The D-R hypothesis expects that rhythmic and discrete movements will exhibit different brain activation patterns, and the research will test their interaction. Third, complex unconstrained arm movements will be studied in a three-dimensional drawing task. The behavioral experiments will conclude by testing the modeling propositions in the complex perceptual-motor skill of rhythmically bouncing a ball. Complementing the experiments, the model equations will be implemented on an anthropomorphic robot arm with seven degrees of freedom, in order to synthesize movements on the basis of the proposed organizational dynamics. This research is fundamental to understanding how humans perform their everyday activities, the vast majority of which involve coordination of multijoint movements with perceptual information. In addition, from the standpoint of complex system theory, the investigation of the human body and its central nervous system, among the most complex of systems, is extremely useful to the goal of understanding the fundamental organizational properties of complex systems. Furthermore, obtaining a deeper understanding of what could be elementary units in the control of perceptuomotor tasks has the potential to advance knowledge for diagnosis and treatment of movement disorders, as well as to advance methods of training and rehabilitation. In addition, the work on the anthropomorphic robot is ideally suited for studying control principles that can be used for the development of new technologies concerning general purpose autonomous movement systems, limb prostheses, and, in the long run, techniques for functional stimulation in patients. The planned combination of fMRI experiments and behavioral experiments will also contribute to bridging psychological and neurobiological disciplines doc8639 none Weingartner This award to University of Alaska Fairbanks provides instrumentation to update and expand the oceanographic research capabilities of the research vessel Alpha Helix, a ship operated by the University s Institute of Marine Science as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS) research fleet. Specific instrumentation supported here includes two fluorometers plus interfacing to attach to an existing MOCNESS net system, ten water sampling bottles, and an upgrade of an existing optical plankton counter to a laser version of same. These improvements will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists using the ship in their research during and future years doc8640 none O Donnell Primarily observational in nature, this project is a study of the structure of the velocity and density fields along the frontal boundary of a freshwater river plume, together with measurements of mixing at the base of the plume during the reversal of the tide. The data from observations at the edge of the plume will be used to test the validity of predictions extrapolated from laboratory results, and to improve the parameterization of lateral mixing in a numerical model of a freshwater plume. Estimates of mixing across the base of the plume will be derived from a study of the salt budget in a 100,000 square meter box, together with microstructure profiles within the box. These estimates will be used to test the hypothesis that small river plumes are mixed away vertically, shortly after the turn of the tide, as a result of the build up of strong vertical shear at the base of the plume doc8641 none A commercially available Aerosol Time of Flight Mass Spectrometer (ATOFMS) will be used to measure the composition of particles that have been preclassified according to various physical properties. These measurements will provide new insights into the physical chemical properties and mixing characteristics of atmospheric particles. Such information is valuable for interpreting data from more conventional instrumentation and can be used to evaluate state-of-the-art models that describe the evolution of aerosols from various sources as a function of size and composition. Particles will be classified according to electrical mobility (size) with a differential mobility analyzer (DMA), size and hygroscopicity with a tandem differential mobility analyzer (TDMA), or size with a DMA or TDMA and mass with an Aerosol Particle Mass Analyzer (APM). The effect of volatilization on composition will be studied by heating size-classified particles before analyzing them with the ATOFMS. The first two years of the project will focus on studies with laboratory aerosols of known composition and on the development of sampling protocols for field measurements. An intensive field campaign will be carried out in Atlanta, GA. This project represents a collaboration between the University of Minnesota and Carleton College doc8642 none Prop # PI Thomas D. Smith This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessel Alpha Helix operated by the University of Alaska Fairbanks and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Thomas Smith is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire CTD block and sheave and a Furuno Color Fathometer doc8643 none Budding yeast uses a gene repression mechanism, known as silencing, to control the expression of key developmental regulatory genes. Silencing is distinguished from more commonly described modes of gene regulation in that the repression, once established, is a permanent, heritable property of the gene, known as an epigenetic effect. Similar gene silencing mechanisms underlie the development of all eukaryotes, including humans. To gain insights into the mechanism of epigenetic inheritance in yeast two specific questions will be addressed: First, what specific functions of the silencing machinery are required for epigenetic inheritance? The lab will create and characterize new dominant and conditional alleles of several silencing genes, including SIR2. Particular in vivo defects caused by these mutations will be correlated with alterations of Sir2 s biochemical properties in vitro. Second, what is the role of chromosomal anchoring in establishing and inheriting the repressed state? The Sir4 and Rap1 silencing factors are known to localize to the nuclear periphery and act as anchors for the DNA sequences they bind, but the influence of chromosomal localization on gene expression is not clear. To examine the role of chromosomal anchoring on gene silencing the lab is using the yeast REP3 sequence as a surrogate anchor. This project will examine the ability of REP3 to substitute for the functions of known silencing factors, and investigate the possibility that the silencing and REP3 systems have common anchoring sites. The educational component of this CAREER award will support development of two undergraduate courses, Molecular Biology, designed for science majors, and Genetics: From Mendel to the Human Genome Project, designed for non-science majors doc8644 none Bornbusch This award supports participants from the United States (four) and Africa (20) in the US-Africa Workshop on Linkages for Conservation Biology, in Nairobi, Kenya, from July 6-8, . Representatives from the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB), private donor foundations, and several networking organizations, will also be attending, as well as additional scientists from throughout Africa. The co-organizers are Dr. Alan Bornbusch and Mr. John Schoneboom, of the Africa Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); and Dr. Robin Reid, of the Department of People, Livestock and Environment at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Kenya. The goals of the workshop are to strengthen the African network of conservation biologists (possibly through the formation of an SCB-affiliated professional society), explore areas of mutual interest for cross-regional and international collaborative research activities, and identify methods for collecting and disseminating information on conservation biology as efficiently and effectively as possible in Africa. Conservation biology is the multidisciplinary study of the phenomena that affect the maintenance, loss, and restoration of biological diversity. It can have a major role in guiding the sustainable development and use of natural resources and ecosystems. But at the present time there is no Pan-African organization dedicated to conservation biology, and as a result few African scientists know about related research projects being conducted outside their own countries. Furthermore, many US researchers are unaware of the research activities of their African peers. Yet Africa has the potential to produce significant discoveries in such areas as conservation, biological diversity, medicine, and agricultural applications. At the request of the SCB, the Africa Program at AAAS conducted a survey of members of the US and African conservation biology communities, and found strong support for the formation of an African conservation biology society. The creation of such a professional society would enable African scientists to communicate among themselves, and with their international colleagues in conservation biology and other relevant disciplines. This workshop is expected to identify specific ways that US and African conservation biologists can work together to enhance their respective capacities and impacts, create important new research and education opportunities, and develop specific strategies to foster long-term collaborations (such as the creation of a US-Africa network for conservation biology). The African participants will also gain knowledge about promoting and managing scientific societies, while the US participants will gain important information on the needs and assets of their African colleagues. This workshop is being jointly funded by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Environmental Biology doc8645 none Livebearing fishes of the Family Poeciliidae exhibit a variety of developmental strategies. In the guppy, young develop in the ovary from the energy stored in large, yolky eggs (lecithotrophy), whereas in the least killifish, the eggs are very small, with little yolk, and most energy for development and growth is transferred from the mother to the embryo through a placenta-like structure (obligate matrotrophy). Other species exhibit a mixed strategy in which energy stored in relatively large eggs is supplemented by maternal transfer of nutrients during embryonic development (supplemental matrotrophy). The type of strategy exhibited by a given species has been suggested to reflect the productivity of the environment that it inhabits. Obligate matrotrophs are predicted to occur only in highly productive environments where food for the mother is abundant and predictable. In less productive or less predictable environments, lecithotrophy is the expected strategy. Species that exhibit supplemental matrotrophy may inhabit unpredictable environments but be capable of exploiting excess food if it occurs and passing extra energy on to developing offspring (facultative supplemental matrotrophy). The largespring gambusia has traditionally been considered to be strictly lecithotrophic, but recent studies have demonstrated mother-to-embryo transfer of nutrients in this species despite the absence of an obvious placental structure. This study proposes to use radiolabeled nutrients to quantify matrotrophic contribution in largespring gambusia in order to address the following questions: What is the nature of the mother-embryo transfer surface and how does it limit the amount or types of nutrients transferred? To what extent does the largespring gambusia exhibit matrotrophy under natural conditions? How does matrotrophic contribution vary with environmental conditions within a given population and among different populations? Understanding the occurrence of facultative matrotrophy, both across habitats and temporally within habitats, may help explain the variety of developmental strategies within the Family Poeciliidae and the relationship of those strategies to environmental productivity. Furthermore, the strategy of facultative matrotrophy itself may reflect an adaptation to unpredictable environments that allows species exhibiting this strategy to occupy habitats that undergo natural environmental variation. This strategy, then, may provide an important buffer against human-induced environmental changes doc8646 none Prop # PI William Hahn This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessel Endeavor operated by the Unviersity of Rhode Island and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, William Hahn is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire a metering block, GMDSS Inmarsat Equipment through a group purchase by UDEL (no monetary award for URI), and a fire system doc8647 none This project is a qualitative, empirical study of the work practices of scientists in the emerging, interdisciplinary field of tissue engineering. Studying tissue engineering offers an opportunity to examine knowledge production in a scientific field in its embryonic state. The field involves new collaborations and institutional arrangements, and brings together engineers, materials scientists, and life scientists from a variety of disciplinary traditions, sources of expertise, priorities, and styles of problem-solving. The project is timely, as the field is in early stages and new social arrangements are under construction. Studying the new concepts and approaches to research that may result also entails studying the conditions in which the production and circulation of knowledge takes place, including the broader cultural and political-economic values that affect and are affected by new technoscientific endeavors. In particular, the study will examine how notions of risk and control over uncertainty, beliefs about perfectibility and enhancement, and understandings of human biology and the body come into play. The project is a multi-sited ethnography, taking place in research laboratories, professional conferences and other educational settings where tissue engineering is being taught, and public hearings for regulatory and policy purposes. It will include in-depth interviews with scientists, and representatives of relevant professional organizations, policy and other public groups. A literature review will include scientific and professional publications, government documents, and industry analyses, and a content analysis will provide data on the way tissue engineering as a field is represented, as well as the engagement of engineering and life sciences with each other, and with public domains. A search of internet sources and their links will demonstrate not only topics of relevance to tissue engineers, but demonstrate linkages between researchers in various disciplines, and connections of organizations and types of expertise, documenting the circulation of specific types of knowledge. The products will include publications and resources for the social studies of science, technology and medicine, as well as innovative educational tools to be used for both social scientists and tissue engineering scientists. In this way, the project will contribute to the study of a variety of emerging and changing scientific fields, as well as providing empirical data on work practices that will contribute to the growing body of works in the anthropology of science, technology and medicine doc8648 none William Miller of the University of California, Berkeley, is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to develop theoretical concepts and methodologies that can provide a quantitative description of chemical dynamics, a kind of ab initio chemical dynamics akin to the ab initio quantum chemistry of electronic structure theory. New applications of these approaches to specific chemical systems will be carried out to illustrate or demonstrate the new methods and concepts. Computation of reactive flux correlation functions to give chemical reaction rates is a central topic for this effort, and exploration of processes in rare gas clusters using semiclassical (SC) initial value representation (IVR) approaches will continue. The overall goal is to cast the SC-IVR methodology in a form that will make it practical for virtually all systems for which classical molecular dynamics simulation is possible. This research aims to explore the development of a potentially universal treatment of chemical dynamics, including the quantum mechanical effects that are important for very small particles. This approach may improve the predictive capabilities for chemical processes that occur in solids and solutions, with resulting impact in important areas of chemistry, biology, and physics doc8649 none This award will support the development of a new instrument and related methodology for separation and characterization of individual components in protein mixtures. The instrument consists of an automated capillary electrophoresis (CE) system coupled to a gas-phase ion mobility analyzer (GEM). The CE unit provides initial separation of molecules through capillary isoelectric focusing (CIEF); molecules emerging from CIEF are sized and counted by the GEM analyzer. The analyzer includes a charge reduction electrospray source, a differential mobility analyzer and condensation particle counter. The electrospray takes the CIEF effluent and provides singly-charged, individual molecules for gas phase analysis. Because a gas phase ion mobility spectrum can be acquired quickly, a complete three dimensional characterization (number of molecules vs. gas phase mobility vs. isoelectric point) can be obtained almost as rapidly as CIEF can be performed. Development efforts will focus on two main areas: development of an effective interface between CIEF and GEM, and the effective coupling of the GEM output to conventional protein mass spectrometers. Research in proteomics is dependent upon the continued development and application of instrumental methods to separate, identify and measure the amount of proteins in biological samples. Two dimensional gel (2D-gel) electrophoresis is currently the core analytical and preparative technology of proteomics research, but is typically a time-consuming procedure. It has the additional drawbacks of being difficult to control and difficult to use preparatively. Although the instrument to be developed in this project is unlikely to provide the resolution permitted by 2-D gels, it s speed, reproducibility and simplicity of operation are likely to make it the instrument of choice in a number of applications where the highest degree of separation is not necessary, and where further characterization of the products of separation is desired doc8650 none Banaszak Holl Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Professor Mark M Banaszak Holl, Department of Chemistry, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan and Dr. Sefik Suzer, Chemistry Department, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. They plan to explore the structure and reactivity of H8Si8O12 and H10Si10O15 Cluster monolayers on gold surfaces, by conducting synchrotron X-ray Photoemission Spectroscopy (SXPS) experiments. The discovery that these clusters can form monolayers on gold surface, apparently via a mild Si-H activation route at 20-degree C was a surprising result. The combination of high-resolution, high surface sensitivity synchrotron characterization and a system, which can be prepared entirely under ultrahigh vacuum conditions, provides a unique opportunity to obtain detailed structural information about this type of cluster-based monolayer system. The two scientists have also recently discovered that other Si-H bonds, particularly those of alkylsilanes, also react readily with gold surfaces under these conditions. This allows the preparation of alkylsilane-based monolayers that are closely related to the important alkanethiol-based systems that have seen such extensive study and application in recent years. SXPS characterization of these systems is critical. Scope: In this project the collaborators plan to combine their expertise in an important scientific research. The expertise of the two scientists are complementary and the facilities to be used will be at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) and at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. The U. of Michigan has a strong SXPS program. The Turkish PI is an internationally prominent surface scientist, and the graduate students from the U. of Michigan will benefit from working with him at the beamline and in the Michigan laboratories. The US PI will be supported under a separate grant, , being recommended by DMR and CHE. The project meets INT criteria for support of cooperative projects that are mutually beneficial doc8651 none This proposal studies inequalities between groups , broadly defined. Our particular line of inquiry asks to what extent informational externalities can provide a credible theory for such inequalities. We briefly mention a few other potential applications, but the proposal is focused on: (1) Cross country income differentials in a world with free trade; (2) Statistical discrimination in the labor market. In the first part of the proposal we introduce imperfectly observable human capital investments in an otherwise standard competitive trade model. We are interested whether ex post inequalities can arise between ex ante identical countries. We propose a model where this is possible because of interactions between straightforward price effects and the informational externality. Citizens in a nation specializing as a low human capital country are worse off than citizens in the country specializing as a high human capital country, but the situation is self-enforcing because incentives to invest are lower in the low human capital country. Incentives are bad because 1) with few investors someone who looks good is more likely an individual with low human capital that got a lucky draw , 2) the possibility to import goods intensive in human capital from the other country makes human capital less valuable compared to a situation where countries don t trade. In our research we will investigate how these effects interact and whether the model provides a rationale for specialization, as well as explore a number of secondary implications of the model. The second part considers statistical discrimination. Here, informational externalities belong to mainstream theory, but there is reluctance in the empirical literature to take the idea seriously. We believe there are two reasons for this. First, models of statistical discrimination have been (fairly) criticized for assuming away most any contractual solution to the information problem. We therefore propose to investigate how a richer set of admissable contracts and or possibilities of learning affect an otherwise standard model of statistical discrimination. Our preliminary analysis suggests that, in a competitive market with learning where workers cannot commit to stay with a firm, there is an interesting free-riding problem in information acquisition that may force the firms to use proxies even if better information could be acquired. Hence, ex post learning is not sufficient to dismiss statistical discrimination. We will also consider ex ante contracts (without learning). Discrimination based on irrelevant characteristics is still possible and the setup is in a sense more appealing than the standard model, because discrimination can now arise in a unique equilibrium. The second major reason for the skepticism is, we think, that it is not clear what exactly would be evidence of statistical discrimination. We propose to deal with this by designing a model that nests the two major explanations for racial differences, statistical discrimination and racism doc8652 none The past decade has seen a virtual explosion in the amount of data available on the human genome. Data on the human genome can be used to help us understand human evolutionary history, including both our relationship as a species to other great apes and much more recent relationships among human populations reflecting their histories. Information derived from our knowledge of the human genome is also relevant to many of the social sciences. Yet, there is little infrastructure available to help provide an interface between data on the human genome and data derived from the social sciences. One area of particular relevance to history, historical demography, linguistics, medical anthropology, forensic anthropology, and ethnic studies, among others, is the gene frequency variation that exists among human populations. Gene frequency variation among current populations is the net genetic effect of all of the factors in the history of those populations: relative endogamy versus exogamy, past and present population sizes, length of time relatively endogamous, origins, selection, etc. Currently there is no centralized location for information on gene frequency variation for the modern DNA polymorphisms detected in the bulk of the human genome. The closest approximation to such a resource is the current implementation of ALFRED, the web-accessible ALlele FREquency Database http: alfred.med.yale.edu alfred index.asp . This project will further develop ALFRED to serve as a resource for the anthropological genetics field and the other social science areas noted above. The database will contain gene frequency data for multiple genetic loci (both functional genes and anonymous loci) and multiple populations. Each frequency will have detailed descriptions definitions of both the polymorphic site studied with protocols used as well as the specific sample of the specific population studied. The molecular definition of the polymorphism at the DNA sequence level will be linked to the molecular databases and the description of the population (name, language, location, etc.) will be linked to at least one ethnographic database. Development will involve three aspects: curated on-going accumulation of gene frequency data from the current literature and that of the past 15 or so years, enhancement of the design and implementation (hardware and software) to allow robust and rapid response to queries over the internet, and implementation of interconnections to relevant human genomics databases on the molecular side and to ethnographic and other databases on the population social science side. The enhanced database will serve many functions. It will be an educational resource at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. It will be an inter-disciplinary research resource providing reference gene frequencies for comparison with new data. It will provide impetus to focus future data collection efforts in diverse labs on those genetic markers that early studies suggest will provide the best information on specific research questions. It will provide entree to the genetics genomics world via specific social cultural variables such as language, geographic location, population size, etc. Conversely, it will provide links to relevant ethnologic and historical data on populations that anthropological geneticists need in order to interpret the gene frequency data they collect. As a bridge between the genomics databases and the relevant social sciences the database will provide infrastructure to the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of modern research doc8653 none The New York Botanical Garden Herbarium houses the largest collection of bryophyte specimens in the Western Hemisphere and is among the five largest bryophyte herbaria in the world. Since the inception of the institution in the late s the focus of the institution has been on the flora of the Americas, and the bryophyte herbarium has unequalled depth in both historical and modern bryophyte collections. The NYBG herbarium has served as a major resource for all the major floristic treatments on American bryophytes published in this century. The project will catalogue and publish data from the 120,000 specimens of bryophytes from Central America, Mexico and the West Indies. The data made available as a result of this project will expedite research on bryophytes in these taxonomically and phytogeographically critical regions. When overlaid with data sets from other groups of organisms, the data compiled in the course of this project will deepen our understanding of the biodiversity of the areas covered. Specimen and authority records created in the course of this project will be made available in several ways to augment other specimen cataloguing endeavors doc8654 none The objective of this research project is to develop a general-purpose, open-source, real-time experiment interface software system. The need for real-time interface systems is ubiquitous in biological research (e.g., cardiac arrhythmia control, stochastic dynamic clamping, study of gene regulatory networks). However, current options have significant drawbacks: common multi-tasking operating systems such as Windows are inherently non-real-time and therefore require add-on hardware for real-time functionality; MS-DOS is out-dated; and the cost of proprietary real-time operating systems may be beyond the reach of many academic researchers. The system to be developed in this research project will circumvent such shortcomings by utilizing the open-source Real-Time Linux (RT-Linux) operating system. RT-Linux is fast and stable, and can guarantee the timing of a real-time process while concurrently serving as a standard multi-tasking workstation. The proposed software architecture will be designed to ensure that the resulting system will be applicable to a wide range of applications. Flexibility will be achieved through modular software design, flexible graphical layout generation, and hardware transparency. Sample systems, automated installation, comprehensive documentation, and a user developer email list will streamline user implementation. Because the proposed system will be developed under (and must always carry) an open-source license, anyone will be free to download the source code, use it as is, or modify it for a particular application. Due to the open-exchange ethic of open-source software, it is most likely contributions from outside (volunteer) developers will enhance the proposed software - thus the system would reap the benefits of efforts above and beyond those directly supported through this award. Because of the many technical advantages of RT-Linux and the cost and flexibility advantages inherent to open-source, the proposed system has the potential to be an invaluable research tool in a wide range of research areas requiring real-time computation. This system has the potential to enhance undergraduate and graduate education, especially in classroom and laboratory settings where real-time analysis can permit the use of live rather than recorded experiments and demonstrations doc8655 none Professor Krzystof Matyjaszewski of the Department of Chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for research on atom transfer radical polymerization, which is based on the use of radical polymerization to convert monomer to polymer. The purpose of the proposed research is to determine the structure of the catalytic and intermediate species in both ATRA and ATRP, and to build structure-reactivity correlations for alkyl, halide, metal and ligand components of the reactions. These objectives will be met by employing an array of chemical analysis techniques as well as examination of the kinetics and products of the model compound reactions. More specifically, the structures of the catalyst in non-polar media will be determined for various metal ligand complexes using EXAFS, EPR, UV-Visible and other spectroscopic methods. This is required because very little information regarding the structures of such complexes in non-polar media (such as vinyl monomers) exists. Another area of focus is the determination of activation and deactivation rate constants of alkyl halide metal catalyst pairs. The ability of ATRA and ATRP to produce well-controlled products depends heavily on these kinetic parameters, and therefore their determination is of vital importance in the development of new and more efficient catalysts. The systematic investigation of the structures and reactivities of the species involved in ATRA and ATRP will lead to a greater depth of understanding of these reactions. This will, in turn, advance and optimize both synthetic methods, such as the development of more effective catalysts, so that new materials (including small organic compounds and polymers) can be produced more efficiently and with greater yields and selectivity. Professor Krzystof Matyjaszewski of the Department of Chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University using atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP) has been able to polymerize a wide range of monomers including various styrenes, acrylates and methacrylates as well as other monomers such as acrylonitrile, vinyl pyridine, and dienes. Although many of the polymer types described have been prepared using other living polymerizations, ATRP remains the most powerful, versatile, simple, and inexpensive. Researchers have been striving to develop a living radical polymerization for nearly 40 years. An alternative was sought because other types of living polymerizations are severely limited by many factors: only a small number of monomers can be used, the reactions are sensitive to moisture, and two or more monomers cannot be randomly copolymerized. Radical polymerization, in contrast, can polymerize hundreds of monomers, can copolymerize two or more monomers, and can be performed in water as emulsions or suspensions. The Matyjaszewski research group was the first to develop a controlled living radical polymerization (CRP) that used a simple, inexpensive polymerization system. It is capable of polymerizing a wide variety of monomers, is tolerant of trace impurities (water, oxygen, and inhibitor), and is readily applicable to industrial processes. The system that was developed was termed Atom Transfer Radical Polymerization (ATRP). ATRP is a robust system that has generated much interest among polymer chemists in both industry and academia. Science Watch, a trade journal, has recently listed three ATRP papers among the top ten cited papers in chemistry today. Several commercial companies are pursuing CRP as evidenced by 195 patent applications with 72 related to ATRP alone. The first commercial product related to this method will be available this year. The first applications are related to coatings but applications related to dispersants, adhesives, additives, lubricants, and cosmetics will quickly follow doc8656 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Patricia McAnany and her colleagues will conduct four seasons of archaeological and paleoenvironmental research in the Sibun River Valley of Belize. Limited survey to date indicates that this well watered agriculturally rich valley was inhabited during the Classic Mayan period and the direct descendents of this group were described in Spanish colonial documents. Cacao, the basis for chocolate (and not cocaine), occurs wild in the region, constituted an important crop in colonial times and is cultivated today. In fact one of the two largest archaeological sites in the valley - the Hershey site - is so named because it is located in a cacao orchard previously owned by Hershey Foods. The goal of Dr. McAnany s research is to reconstruct the political economy of this region from Classic (ca. 800 AD) through colonial times and to accomplish this she, together with graduate and undergraduate students, will collect both archaeological and paleoecological data. The team will reconstruct vegetation history, carry out geomorphological and soil studies, excavate both open air and ritual cave sites and place these data in a geographic information system. Five transects have been chosen for survey and excavation and these will be supplemented by pollen and sedimentological data derived from cores drilled into a sample of oxbows lining the river. A study of current vegetation communities will provide a context within which to interpret the paleoenvironmental data. Approximately 7% of the structures encountered in the survey transects will be excavated and the artifacts thus recovered - especially luxury items such as jade and imported pottery - will provide insight into the degree of wealth and its distribution within the Sibun River Valley communities. Archaeological research in the lowland Mayan tropics has focused primarily on major centers which, based on reconstructed population size and impressive ceremonial architecture, served as primary centers. However it is also clear that hinterlands which contained valuable raw materials, such as cacao, interacted extensively with larger centers and were incorporated, to a greater or lesser extent into Classic Mayan kingdoms. However the degree and method of integration is both poorly understood and essential to reconstructing how the ancient Mayan world functioned. This project will provide a necessary and lacking view from the hinterlands and because the Sibun River Valley likely was an important prehistoric center for the production and export of cacao, it offers an excellent venue to examine center - periphery relations. The project includes both graduate and undergraduate students and thus also serves an important training function doc8657 none The biotechnology industry, which is characterized by new products processes of unusually high market value, differs from other high tech industries because it is driven by hypercompetition, intellectual property issues that are arising faster than the laws to govern them, and high levels of uncertainty in the incubation and commercialization of new products and processes. These conditions have allowed for risk-balancing organizational arrangements, such as alliances with universities and other firms, to promote innovation. Furthermore, the completion of the human genome project has introduced endless possibilities of research and product process development, which cannot be accomplished within the boundaries of a single firm. This study will address two key questions: (1) to what extent do biotechnology firms depend on regional clusters of other biotechnology firms and universities to form research and development (R&D) alliances? (2) Do R&D intensive biotechnology firms, which have forged alliances with other firms and universities, exhibit better innovation performance than their counterparts? The research questions are based on two major limitations of recent studies of innovation in the biotechnology industry: (1) the effectiveness of different types of alliances has not been examined under one framework of analysis, that is, the role of formal informal and domestic international partnerships in promoting innovation has not been studied, and (2) the role of geography has been limited to the analysis of whether linkages are localized, that is, the role of regional clusters of biotechnology industry in the development, growth, and impact of these linkages on innovation has been largely ignored. The research will conduct a postal survey of the entire population of biotechnology firms in human diagnostics and therapeutics and interviews of appropriate scientific and managerial personnel in a selected group of firms. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses will be utilized to analyze the data. The study is expected to show the importance of location-based advantages in the development of a network, both formal and informal, conducive to scientific advancements and technological development. The proposed study will offer an understanding of the specific processes influencing the organization of innovation in the biotechnology industry. The study is expected to explain how regional clusters influence the organization of innovation in the biotechnology industry and how new technologies develop dominant centers of innovation. Firm-level behavior in a highly competitive and uncertain environment, where barriers to innovation can stifle growth and cause premature demise of brilliant scientific efforts, will be understood. Findings from the study will be used to determine how innovation trajectories are indicative of urban and regional development based on yet-to-be developed cutting-edge technologies. Broader societal implications on university-industry partnerships, the protection of intellectual property rights, and the Federal regulation of innovation will be provided doc8658 none Studies have shown that stress will accelerate the photochemical degradation of many polymers, but reasons for the increased degradation rates are not well understood. The primary objectives of this study are to determine the mechanistic origins of the stress-induced rate increases and to find a general expression for quantitatively relating stress to photodegradation rates. In order to circumvent the problems associated with the mechanistic complexities of photogradation and to facilitate rapid experimental progress, three key experimental strategies will be used. First, to simplify the mechanistically complicated degradation pathways of typical polymers, is proposed to study polymers containing metal-metal bonds placed periodically along their backbones. These polymers photodegrade by a straightforward mechanism with no unwanted side-reactions. Second, to eliminate the complexities caused by rate-limiting oxygen diffusion, radical traps will be built-in along the polymer backbones. Third, a computer controlled apparatus will be used to collect photdegradation quantum yields as a function of stress applied to polymer films. The data will be compared to the predictions of three degradation hypotheses: (1) the Plotnikov hypothesis, (2) the Decreased Radical Recombination Efficiency hypothesis (a theory that relates degradation rates the decreased ability of radical to recombine under the influence of stress), and (3) a photochemical analog of the Zhurkov equation. %%% This work may be of considerable practical significance because polymers are increasingly being used in structural applications, by which they are subjected to stress and light. A proper understanding of the synergy between light and stress is therefore essential for the accurate estimation of polymer lifetimes and for the development of stabilizing systems. Important fundamental principles about radical recombination in the solid state should also emerge from this study doc8659 none Theodore Gerber SES- This study examines the impact of dramatic changes in economic and political institutions on several key aspects of social stratification. Having undergone a massive and rapid transition from state socialism since early , contemporary Russia provides an especially suitable setting in which to test and develop theories regarding the impact of institutional change on stratification processes. General theories of stratification, the nature of market institutions, and market behavior have been deployed by sociologists analyzing how market transition reshapes the social order and the life chances of different groups in former state socialist societies. But these theories remain provisional because they have not yet been put to adequate test in Russia, despite Russia s central importance as a proving ground for theories of post-Socialist stratification. Because Russia was the oldest, purest, and most geo-politically powerful state socialist system, the market transition there has been the most dramatic case of radical institutional change. The first phase of the study involves collecting new, multi-level survey data to analyze stratification dynamics. In September -January a nationally -representative survey of Stratification and Migration Dynamics in Russia (SMDR) will collect employment activity, job, residential, and household composition histories for 7,200 respondents from the end of through the present, as well as the work histories of their spouses partners. The survey will also include sociodemographic variables, measures of current earnings, wage arrears, and alternative sources of income, and information on affiliation with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The survey data will be matched with newly available data on annual regional economic conditions, such as unemployment rates, mean real wages, and relative size of the service sector, during most of the years covered in the study. In the second phase of the study, dynamic multivariate methods will be used to model the effects of individual, household, and contextual variables on individual-level exposure to different types of employment change, job mobility, and migration using the SMDR data. Special attention will be devoted to testing 22 hypotheses derived from theories of the impact of market transition and general theories of stratification originally formulated in studies of democratic capitalist societies. The statistical results will provide an empirical basis for assessing, reformulating, and expanding, these theories. They will thereby advance the broader agenda of research on how institutions shape and re-shape stratification processes doc8660 none The Valle Imperial Mathematics K-8 Local Systemic Change Project (VIM) is a collaborative initiative between the El Centro School District, the Imperial County Office of Education and San Diego State University, Imperial Valley Campus. It is one part of a broad systemic reform initiative in Imperial County, California designed to implement standards-based instruction in mathematics. This five year LSC project is designed to support all 1,230 K-8 teachers of mathematics in Imperial County through the implementation of high quality, standards-based mathematics materials, instruction and assessment in their classrooms. It focuses on rich standards-based mathematics content, constructivist instructional methods to promote student understanding, research on children s learning of critical mathematical constructs, strategies to increase mathematics achievement in language minority students, and the design and use of appropriate student assessment strategies. The VIM project design will utilize a strategy to build leadership capacity with a cadre of teachers within the region. Preservice will be restructured at San Diego State University with a focus on strengthening the mathematics background of prospective teachers. Existing teachers will be afforded the opportunities to participate in a program to receive advanced degrees in Mathematics Education. The project will utilize the regional fiber optic network as a means of extending teacher enhancement. An interactive platform to enhance professional development and networking opportunities for teachers will be used to provide distance learning staff development. The project design includes a strong research component focusing on student outcomes, the effects of teacher enhancement and distance learning doc8661 none The -km-long North Anatolian transform fault across northern Turkey has been repturing from east to west in a series of large earthquakes during the past 60 years. The rupture front advanced 160 km westward in in two disastrous earthquakes. The next rupture is expected to occur within the next few decades benearth the Marmara Sea. In October , the shelf and adjacent slope of the northeastern Marmara Sea were charted using multibeam bathymetry and backscatter technology. The goal was to resolve the planview geometry of seismogenic fault strands, and to identify any related features such as mass-wasting deposits, sand blows, mud volcanoes, and degassing craters doc8662 none The National Center for Science Education proposes to develop a website on evolution and the nature of science for K-12 teachers. This project, WWW.Evolution, aims to improve teacher understanding of the nature of science, the patterns and processes of evolution, and the history of evolutionary thought and to increase their ability to teach these subjects effectively. The Site will also provide teachers with classroom resources, including a selection of effective approaches and teaching strategies and a searchable database of curricula, teacher-tested activities, and lesson plans, which are consistent with those modeled in the National Science Education Standards. The evaluation of the project will include multiple aspects of the proposed website and its constituent elements, ranging from its appeal and utility to its ability to help users understand new concepts and acquire strategies for -- and confidence in -- teaching evolution doc8663 none The five-year Local Systemic Change project is part of a long-term, intensive, inquiry-based initiative that started in the district in with a pilot in two schools supported by state funds. Renaissance in Science Education (RISE) is a model program based on professional development and support for all 372 K-12 science teachers in the district with nine elementary schools, two middle schools and one high school. There are 351 teachers K-6, ten middle school and eleven high school teachers, respectively. The instructional materials are mainly the Science and Technology for Children (STC) supplemented by old ESS kits (now published by Delta) and the new STC Middle School units. At the high school level, teachers plan to examine and consider for adoption the latest secondary-level, exemplary, inquiry-based materials based on a plan for high school curriculum selection and implementation. This selection will be carried out during the first three years with the professional development program for high school teachers being designed and offered in years four and five. Partners with the school district include: Washington University, St. Louis; the Missouri Botanical Garden; the St. Louis Zoo and the St. Louis Science Center doc8664 none Jarosz Description: This award supports the US-India Cooperative Research: Banach Algebra Techniques and Geometry of Banach Spaces. US PI Krzysztof Jarosz of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and Indian PI T.S.S.R.K. Rao of the Indian Statistical Institute(ISI), Bangalore will initiate joint research on maps determining topology, local isometries, and other problems concerning Banach spaces and algebras. The US side brings expertise in areas of function algebras and spaces of analytic functions; the Indian side has expertise in the geometry of Banach spaces. Scope: This is a new collaboration with mathematicians at one of India s most highly respected institutes in this field. It will provide the framework needed by Indian researchers to communicate with others working in modern functional analysis. Among its strengths, this collaboration involves researchers with overlapping but not identical interests. Thus far, the problems to be addressed have generated broad interest among mathematicians at several other institutions including the Indian Institutes of Technology at Madras and Mumbai. The research is of high quality, is likely to result in some very worthwhile contributions to mathematical research, and will open up further avenues of cooperation between India and the United States doc8665 none Schlesinger A thermodynamic model for predicting the activity of tellurium in molten steels is needed to develop safer and more effective alloying practice. This would improve the viability of tellurium as a replacement for lead in free-machining steels. However, little is known about the high-temperature Fe-Te system in general, and the thermodynamics of dilute Fe-Te melts are entirely unknown. The same is true for ternary and higher-order systems. Fe-C-Te and Fe-Mn-Te are of particular importance, given the presence of carbon in most steels and the strong interaction between dissolved manganese and tellurium often noticed in tellurium steels. The research program investigates the thermodynamics of dilute Fe-(C, Mn)-Te molten alloys by measuring the solubility of tellurium vapor in these melts as a function of temperature and composition. The experimental program centers on the use of a self-sealing two-zone furnace tube with molten tellurium at the bottom and the ferrous alloy held in a crucible at the top. Varying the temperature of the tellurium changes its vapor pressure (and thus its solubility); this sets the activity of tellurium with respect to the liquid reference state. Analyzing the ferrous alloy after equilibration determines the mole fraction of tellurium, and thus the activity coefficient. Measurements are made in both pure iron and in iron-carbon (up to saturation level) and iron-manganese ( 10 wt.%) melts, at temperatures ranging between the liquidus and degrees C. The experimental results will be fitted against the thermodynamic model developed by Bale and Pelton for non-dilute metallic solutions. This model allows the prediction of tellurium activity (and thus partial pressure) in ferrous melts as a function of composition and temperature. %%% As environmental concerns over the use of lead in free-machining steels grow, increasing attention is being paid to potential alternative additions. One of these alternatives is tellurium, which, added in small quantities (generally less than 0.5 wt.-%), is even more effective than lead at promoting machinability. However, tellurium is expensive and difficult to alloy, given its low boiling point (989 degrees C); its high vapor pressure at steelmaking temperatures presents workplace hygiene concerns of its own in addition to potential losses to the dust doc8666 none D. Zolandz, NAS The current status of nanoscale science and engineering research and development (R&D) was evaluated by the Interagency Working Group on Nanoscience, Engineering and Technology (IWGN) and after August by the NSTC s Subcommittee on Nanoscale Science, Engineering and Technology (NSET). The National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) was initiated in FY and White House FY budget request recommended increased funding for the field. NNI has as its overall objective to assure that U.S. will fully benefit from the development of a new technology, and maintains or attains the capacity to be a leader or a competitive participant in all areas of nanoscale science, engineering and technology. The National Research Council will compare the current state of the U.S. in this field to the state required to meet the NNI objective. It will then consider whether the U.S. research portfolio in nanotechnology, as represented by the NNI, addresses those gaps which must be bridged to achieve this objective. An interim letter-report will be prepared by October 15, doc8667 none This grant provides partial support for the First International Symposium on Computational Cell Biology to be held March 4-6, in Lenox, MA. Computational Cell Biology is an emerging interdisciplinary field that responds to the need for computational methods to analyze and organize the abundance of experimental data on the structure and function of the cell. Whereas other meetings have been held that focus on bioinformatics and molecular and structural biology, this will be the first meeting geared to the use of computational modeling applications in cell biology, and will be primarily targeted to cell biologists. The major focus of the meeting will be on areas of cell biology for which modeling approaches are currently being developed, or that are ripe for computational modeling approaches. A key goal is to bring together cell biologists whose research addresses quantitative aspects of cellular mechanisms with computer scientists and mathematicians who can provide the computational tools. The symposium is being organized by The National Resource for Cell Analysis and Modeling (NRCAM), located in the Center for Biomedical Imaging Technology (CBIT) at the University of Connecticut Health Center. The organizing committee consists of Drs. Leslie M. Loew, Director of NRCAM and CBIT, John Carson, co-Director of NRCAM and Vladimir Rodionov, associate faculty of CBIT, and is chaired by Ann Cowan, Deputy Director of CBIT and head of dissemination and training for NRCAM. The members of the organizing committee feel that the time is ripe to bring together cell biologists, mathematicians, and computer scientists to develop a true community of scientists sharing the common goal of developing computational tools for cell biological modeling and simulation. Topics at the meetings will encompass a range of cellular mechanisms including regulation of the cytoskeleton and molecular motors, membrane and protein trafficking, regulation of calcium dynamics, signal transduction pathways, and cell cycle control. In each of these areas key researchers who utilize highly quantitative experimental approaches and or are applying mathematical modeling approaches will be invited to speak. The meeting will be an intensive mix of platform sessions, poster sessions and small workshops and tutorials. The venue for the meeting is a resort in the Berkshire mountains that is limited to a maximum of 125 participants. This setting and meeting size will be ideal for encouraging individual interactions between this diverse group of scientists. It will also serve as an excellent educational activity for graduate and postdoctoral students working in this young and expanding field doc8668 none Harvey, Paul M. Two hundred years ago scientists discovered that light from a point source diffracted around a sharp edge produced a fringe pattern. Later it was discovered that information about the spatial structure and spectral characteristics of the light across the pinhole was encoded in the structure of the fringe pattern. Around the middle of the last century astronomers used the sharp edge of the moon as it passed over light from stars to learn about the nature of light from stellar surfaces. The quality and quantity of scientific data recorded using these techniques was limited by the low responsiveness of the focal planes at the time. This new work will leverage new technology focal planes, and high-speed electronics, and improved computer controlled telescope-instrument systems into a new instrument designed and built to record fringe patterns created by lunar occultations of selected celestial objects. This instrument will make measurements in the infrared where different wavelengths between 1 and 13 micrometers can be used to achieve different spatial resolutions of the diameters of stars, search for binary stars and will have a role in reconstructing images of extended sources at different wavelengths. The instrument will be of significant value to educate students on optical diffraction and how it can be used to measure stellar diameters and limb darkening doc8669 none This proposal is for the development of an internet-based professional development model that would supplement hands-on workshops. The model would promote conceptual change and would be broadly accessible to elementary teachers. The efficacy of the model would be tested through an evaluation process. The focus is on using everyday stuff to teach children about the designed world. The project features collaboration of engineers and teachers in the development of curriculum. The project focuses on five topics of design that have previously been the basis of prior NSF-supported curriculum development by the PI, namely: Environmental Analysis and Design; Mechanisms; Circuits and Controls; Packaging and Structures and Signs, Symbols and Codes. The project includes a pilot phase that focuses on facilitator training in the conduct of online forums for teachers, at five professional development sites. Two hands-on workshops will be conducted at these sites. A field-test phase follows, involving scaling-up to 15 sites nationally. The primary deliverable is a tested professaional development package doc8670 none The 187Os 188Os of abyssal peridotites show a wide range from values near those expected for primitive depleted mantle, to higher and lower values. The higher values may be explained by interaction of abyssal peridotites with sea water. This proposal is for a 1-yr pilot study to explore the possibility that chromite grains in the AP may be used to extract real values of 187Os 188Os unaffected by seawater. Preliminary data are presented. In stage 2, the PIs will analyze chromites from suites of normal and plume-affected abyssal peridotites doc8671 none Lay Communication between nerve cells serves as the basis of all brain activity. One of the fundamental steps involved in signal transmission between the nerve cells, is the conversion of a chemical signal liberated at the end of one nerve cell, into an electrical signal at the second nerve cell. This step is mediated by a class of membrane bound proteins known as neurotransmitter receptors. An important member of this family is the glutamate receptor, which is the focus of this study. These receptors bind to the chemical signaling molecule glutamate (ligand) and generate an electrical signal through the formation of transmembrane ion channels. Dr. Jayaraman s laboratory has used vibrational spectroscopy to identify specific interactions between the glutamate receptor protein and ligands such as glutamate. Since, the vibrations of these chemical moieties are controlled by their atomic-level environment, probing these by infrared light has provided insight into the interaction between the protein and the ligand. Dr. Jayaraman will investigate the identified ligand:protein interactions in a time-resolved manner. For these investigations glutamate will be photolytically released in the microsecond timescale using caged glutamate and the kinetic evolution of the vibrational spectral signatures of the ligand and protein will be investigated as the protein evolves from the unligated to the ligated states. These high-resolution structural and kinetic studies are required for a basic understanding of interactions that control protein-ligand recognition and will eventually allow the design of drugs that can alter the behavior of glutamate receptors. Such drugs may be useful in the treatment of traumatic head injury, and memory problems doc8672 none This K-8 Local Systemic Change mathematics project funds professional growth activities for teachers and administrators in Harvey Public Schools District 152. A component of this three-year project is to enhance the district s infrastructure to support on-going improvements in mathematics teaching and learning. Implementation of two reform mathematics curricula -- Math Trailblazers in Grades K-5 and Connected Mathematics in Grades 6-8 -- provide the tools for developing strong professional communities of teachers, administrators and parents committed to improving mathematics instruction in the district. The results of the project will add to an emerging body of knowledge about standards-based curricula implementation in poor, urban communities. The project is a partnership among the Institute for Mathematics and Science Education of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), the Harvey Public Schools, and the North Central Mathematics and Science Consortium at the U.S. Department of Education s North Central Regional Educational Laboratory (NCREL). UIC s Teaching Integrated Mathematics and Science (TIMS) Project will direct the K-5 component of the project, which involves 102 K-5 teachers. The North Central Mathematics and Science Consortium will fund and direct the component for 17 middle-grades teachers doc8673 none Because of an exciting and powerful array of new discoveries across a broad range of disciplines, the social and behavioral sciences stand at a pivotal point. In addition to advances by individual researchers and small groups of investigators, social and behavioral scientists have seen the value of interdisciplinary activities that have increased collaborations with natural, mathematical, and computer scientists and engineers. Increased attention within the social and behavioral sciences has begun to focus on identification of grand challenges -- broad, fundamental questions that transcend the form and substance of individual sciences. This award will permit the Association of American Geographers and other organizations in the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA) to organize and conduct a workshop that focuses on grand challenges in the social and behavioral sciences. Of special concern at the workshops will be identification of one or more major research questions fundamentally central to the overall concerns of the social and behavioral sciences. These questions should (1) hold the promise of creating new knowledge and theory; (2) attract the interest and participation of scientists across a broad spectrum of interests, including the earth, biological, mathematical, and information sciences, as well as in education and engineering; (3) be the result of broad and intensive consultation in the social and behavioral science community and therefore a challenge that will attract broad support and generate widespread enthusiasm; (4) be transparent to intelligent lay persons and capable of enlisting their interest and support; (5) engender interest and attracts support from a broad spectrum of federal and state agencies and private foundations; and (6) be international and multinational in scope, making it a means of promoting multinational collaborative science. About 30 leading researchers and practitioners from the broad range of social and behavioral science disciplines will meet for a two-day workshop, tentatively scheduled for October 13-15, , in Baltimore. Preliminary candidates for grand challenges will be formulated by and circulated among participants before the workshop, with a set of plenary and more focused break-out sessions providing structure for the exploration of ideas and development of consensus. The proceedings and results of the workshop will be disseminated electronically and through publication in the newsletters of COSSA-related societies. The conduct of the workshop and its recommendations will provide valuable new insights and stimulus for researchers, both individually and collectively, and they will contribute to discussions within major funding agencies and organizations regarding major new research and budgetary initiatives now and in the future. A follow-up workshop for Fall is tentative planned. Any NSF support for this follow-up workshop would be made through a supplement to this initial award doc8674 none This collaborative award examines the regional precipitation-evaporation balance and its effect on ecosystems in the climatically sensitive Yukon Territory. Arctic ecosystems are bellwethers for global climate change and examining their responses to natural climate variability is critical to understanding fundamental earth system processes as well as the potential response of such systems to human-induced changes in climate. By using a combination of biotic (i.e., pollen, charcoal) and abiotic (i.e., elemental and isotopic analyses, magnetic susceptibility, sedimentary analyses) proxies, the investigators will produce high-resolution climate records from the past 1,500 years that examine regional variability in moisture. These results will then be compared with findings from ongoing research across the interior of Alaska. Some of the questions that will be answered by this research are; Have past changes in precipitation-evaporation balance occurred in the upper Yukon and have they occurred on time scales relevant to humans? Did these changes occur synchronously and in the same direction across the Yukon? Were they synchronous with changes in other regions? Did vegetation respond to climate change doc8675 none This award provides support for the development of a portable instrument that can be used to provide accurate measurements of the tree height and mass in forested areas. The organization of the forest canopy is closely related to important functional characteristics of the forest: the developmental stage and potential for growth, the exchange of matter and energy with the atmosphere, and the diversity of included habitats. Canopy structure is also an effective predictor of stand attributes important in forest management, such as stem density, basal area, and above-ground biomass. However, understanding of the relation between structure and function is limited by the lack of methods for measuring structures rapidly, accurately, and at scales useful for ecological studies. Remote measurements typically view only the canopy outer surface, and reveal little of the critical internal organization. Although a few airborne scanning instruments that use laser imaging (lidar) have been developed, these systems are proof-of-concept prototypes of spaceborne instruments with limited resolution. The portable lidar system to be developed with support from this award will be able to rapidly assess canopy structure at scales extending from meters to kilometers that can be controlled by the user, and can be deployed either from the ground (looking up) or from towers, cranes, or light aircraft (looking down doc8676 none The Museum of Comparative Zoology s collection of amphibians and reptiles is one of the world s largest and most important resources for systematic herpetology. Information stored in it is of great scientific value. More than half the world s species are represented, including representatives of all families. It is exceptionally rich in primary type specimens and important historical collections, which have figured prominently in the development of herpetology as a discipline and in the development of faunal work for particular areas or taxonomic groups. The collection is heavily used by the international scientific community, as documented by the high frequency of loan requests, by the large number of primary research publications that are based wholly or in part on MCZ specimens, and by the many visitors who come to work in the collection. The present project would relieve serious overcrowding by the purchase of a compactor system and new cabinets, making this important resource more easily accessible to the community. The project is part of the second phase of a three-phase plan to renovate the physical facilities of the Department of Herpetology and modernize the Department s operations doc8677 none The University of Alabama-Huntsville, in partnership with seven north Alabama school districts, proposes a five-year LSC project that will involve 160 middle-grade teachers. The districts are diverse ranging from rural to urban and the 11,500 students are from several traditionally underserved groups. All grade 6-8 teachers, from the 47 elementary middle and high schools in the districts, will receive at least 130 hours of professional development that will focus on: Understanding of science content Ability to use inquiry-centered curriculum materials effectively Awareness of current research on science teaching and learning Knowledge of diverse teaching practices that will enable them to reach all students A repertoire of assessment strategies that are aligned with instructional practices. The major instructional materials to be implemented are Science and Technology Concepts for Middle Schools (STC MS), FOSS and SEPUP. The districts have already piloted the available field-test versions of the STC materials doc8678 none This is a proposal to explore the structure, dynamics, and evolution of the low solar corona. The main effort is theoretical analysis focused on four main questions: How does the heliospheric magnetic field reverse polarity from one solar cycle to the next? What controls the emergence of fast and slow solar wind? How is the dynamic evolution of the low corona tied to the structure and evolution of field and plasma in the heliosphere? For many decades the heliospheric magnetic field has been considered, on average, to execute a simple Archimedes spiral, typically termed the Parker spiral. . A magnetic field that is convected out radially with the solar wind, yet remains attached to a rigidly-rotating Sun will execute such a spiral pattern. Earlier work by these investigators showed how differential rotation in the photosphere and super-radial expansion of the solar wind not symmetric about the rotation axis lead to motion of heliospheric magnetic field footpoints near the solar wind source surface. These footpoint motions can cause strong systematic variations of the heliospheric magnetic field relative to a standard Archimedes spiral. The principles on which the new model was founded address a detailed connection between the dynamic evolution of the low corona and the heliospheric magnetic field. The new model has achieved some acceptance by the community, but many issues still remain. The investigators will test the correctness of the concepts by predicting their global consequences and comparing them to observations. To carry out these tests fully, idealized models must be generalized for the purpose of predictive modeling. The specific tasks to be carried out include: Obtain a more predictive model for footpoint motion that, in particular, does not rely on idealizations valid only during solar minimum; Use the generalized footpoint model to predict the global structure and evolution of the heliospheric magnetic field, and heliospheric plasma; Model the propagation of energetic particles and cosmic rays in the resultant heliospheric configurations and their evolution as the field is restructured during solar maximum doc8661 none The -km-long North Anatolian transform fault across northern Turkey has been repturing from east to west in a series of large earthquakes during the past 60 years. The rupture front advanced 160 km westward in in two disastrous earthquakes. The next rupture is expected to occur within the next few decades benearth the Marmara Sea. In October , the shelf and adjacent slope of the northeastern Marmara Sea were charted using multibeam bathymetry and backscatter technology. The goal was to resolve the planview geometry of seismogenic fault strands, and to identify any related features such as mass-wasting deposits, sand blows, mud volcanoes, and degassing craters doc8680 none This project creates leadership curriculum materials designed to develop the skills, sensibilities and long-term capacity of teacher leaders, enabling them to design and implement quality mathematics professional development. Curriculum materials are video-based (CD-ROM) cases illuminating various aspects of mathematics professional development practice. Rooted in mathematics, a series of five modules (containing six three-hour cases) include video of professional sessions, mathematics activities, interviews, commentaries, research papers, articles, references to the literature, assignments designed to help apply learnings to practice and facilitator guides. Materials are designed for flexible use as individual cases, as complete modules or as a comprehensive curriculum. Rather than providing exemplars to model, these materials will utilize a case method, lesson-study approach where leaders inquire into professional development practice in mathematics K-12. Modules are designed for use in facilitated sessions; text and video facilitation materials are integral to the final product. The CD-ROM format provides for at home and distance learning capabilities. The materials are designed for use by leaders of teacher leaders to help these teacher leaders: 1. Deepen their knowledge of mathematics content; 2. Develop the habits of mind that view professional development as a complex practice, foster a stance of inquiry about that practice and look at all professional development through the lens of equity; 3. Build analytic skills and a language of practice that will enable the development of clearer communication and reasoning about mathematics professional development; 4. Build a repertoire of strategies and facilitation moves that can be used to design and implement a thoughtful program of mathematics professional development doc8681 none Submitted under the guidelines for Local Systemic Change through Teacher Enhancement, this five-year project has as its goal to systemically guide professional growth for every elementary and middle school mathematics teacher in the district through professional development, team planning and collaboration, and collegial coaching. The project -- a partnership between New Mexico State University and Gadsden Independent School District -- develops a sustainable school and community base to support the implementation of curriculum and instruction aligned with New Mexico Education Standards and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Curriculum and Professional Development Standards. The 1,200 square mile district lies along the border of New Mexico and Mexico and serves about 13,000 students. There are twelve elementary schools and three middle schools. More than 50% of the students experience English language deficiencies. Ninety-two percent of the students are of Latino Hispanic origin. Approximately 94% of the students qualify for the Free and Reduced School Lunch Program. The school drop-out rate, as early as middle school, is high. Nine of the twelve elementary schools and all three middle schools will be on probationary status as over 75% of the students scored below Proficient on the state mandated test. The project provides 130 hours of formal professional development as summer institutes and academic year follow-up. The elementary grades will use Investigations in Number, Data and Space while the middle grades will use Connected Mathematics. There are 450 teachers in the district doc8682 none The goal of this project is to synthesize, characterize, and measure the physical properties of solid-state metal chalcogenides (a chalcogenide being a compound that contains sulfur, selenium, or tellurium). Metal chalcogenides show a very rich chemistry that is fundamentally different and much less explored than that of the oxides. Areas to be explored include ternary transition-metal rare-earth-metal chalcogenides, chalcogenide substitutional chemistry, rare-earth oxychalcogenides, rare-earth copper telluride derivatives and thermoelectric behavior, and thorium and uranium chalcogenides. Characterization of the new materials will include structural determinations by single-crystal X-ray methods and the measurement of physical properties to include electrical conductivity, thermopower, and magnetic susceptibility. The ultimate goal of this research project is to make the chemistry of solid-state materials more predictable. %%% The synthesis of new classes of solid-state materials exhibiting novel physical properties such as electronic, optical, thermoelectric, and magnetic together with correlating these physical properties with composition and structure are priority areas of high interest to industry, and students trained in these areas are very competitive in the job market doc8683 none Jay A large data set consisting of acoustic and optical measurements of suspended particulate matter is available from two west coast estuaries, as well as extensive ancillary data. Techniques will be developed to invert the acoustic and optical data to sediment size class spectra. These will then be combined with the ancillary environmental data to study the processes responsible for the distribution of suspended sediment in the two estuaries and, in particular, the development and variability of the estuarine turbidity maximum, a region of enhanced suspended sediment concentration. Finally, a comprehensive theory of the dynamics of estuarine turbidity maxima will be developed and compared to the results of the previous analyses. Estuarine suspended sediment transport, in general, and the dynamics of the turbidity maximum, in particular, are important for the management of pollutant transport, navigation, and living marine resources in estuaries. The analyses and syntheses proposed will focus our conceptual understanding of these processes in a broad class of estuaries doc8684 none Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are powerful technology tools that help create an inquiry-rich environment. With GIS, students discover underlying patterns from locally collected data that can be connected to data from the larger community. But GIS requires teachers to understand new content, new pedagogy and new technology. This project provides materials for professional development of middle and high school teachers in effective use of GIS as an instructional strategy. The GIS teacher enhancement materials are tied to two previously developed project-based curriculum units -- in atmospheric monitoring and biodiversity. The materials are modified based upon pilot testing with teachers and professional developers. The four learning units develop spatial reasoning in the use of maps, teach the use of GIS technologies using ARCView, enable the gathering and use of student data sets, and connect to existing model curricula. The materials, developed with master teachers, are for workshops that deepen teachers content knowledge, model pedagogy consistent with best practice, evaluate the effectiveness of learning opportunities, develop coaching with questioning strategies and provide information about student preconceptions doc8685 none Many animals benefit by learning about the spatial location of food, refuges, or other resources. A small set of species has been studied in depth, and it is clear that there is tremendous variation across species both in the extent of their abilities and how they gather and use spatial information. This variation suggests that examining a wider variety of taxa would be valuable. The goal of this project is to establish jumping spiders, in particular Phidippus audax, as a tool for the study of spatial navigation and learning. These spiders hunt for prey during the day and return repeatedly to silken nests at night, a simple spatial task. They can be studied in the laboratory and field, and rely heavily on visual cues, which are easy to manipulate experimentally. In this project, two aspects of spatial navigation will be examined. (1) In idiothetic orientation, an animal keeps track of its distance and direction as it travels, much as a ship at sea does; animals that use this method can move away from their nest in a circuitous path, but then return in a straight line. Field observations of jumping spider behavior by other researchers suggest that they may be using idiothetic orientation, but data are few. In this project, we will conduct observational field studies of spider behavior to determine whether their behavior is consistent with idiothetic orientation. We will also conduct controlled laboratory tests of whether spiders use idiothetic navigation to return to prey. (2) Animals also use landmarks, or environmental cues that signal the location of a goal. Tests in the field in which landmark placement is manipulated will be used to assess whether jumping spiders use them to find their nests or return to places where they have captured prey. In the laboratory, manipulative experiments will provide more information about exactly how spiders incorporate information from landmarks, including whether they favor close versus far landmarks, whether and how information about landmark size is used, and whether and how information about the relationship between two landmarks is used. Taken together, these observations and experiments will establish jumping spiders as a new model system for the study of spatial learning doc8686 none The development of new catalysts, including metallocenes, has made possible a wide range of new commercial polymers, including polymers with controlled levels of long-chain branching. Existing analytic methods are not sufficiently sensitive the presence of long-chain branching to detect the very low branching levels that are often present in commercial melts. Yet such low branching levels have large effects on polymer processing, even at levels of less than 1 long-chain branch per 100,000 backbone carbon atoms. Rheology has already been developed as a highly sensitive analytic tool for determination of molecular weight distributions in commercial linear polymers. The PI will use rheology to infer the long-chain branching (LCB) characteristics of commercial polyethylene polymers. Recent theory combines the effects of reptation, primitive-path fluctuations, and constraint release into a unified theory of relaxation of polymers of arbitrary branch composition. The theory has successfully predicted the linear viscoelastic properties of model polybutadiene successfully predicted the linear viscoelastic properties of model polybutadiene linear, star, and H polymers, as well as bidisperse and polydisperse mixtures of linears and of stars with linears. However, the theory is less successful for more complex melts, in large part because of uncertainties about the conditions about the conditions under which constraint release should be thought of as a tube reorganization vs. tube dilation process. The next stage, proposed here, is to extend these theoretical ideas and test them by obtaining experimental data on more complex mixtures of linear, star, and comb polybutadienes designed to mimic commercial melts. Then, this approach will be carried over to hydrogenated polybutadienes, which are chemically identical to polyethylene, but can be made in ideal, nearly monodisperse form. %%% This work will begin the task of deducing the branching structure of commercial polyethylenes from their rheology. In the process, we expect to acquire a much deeper and more thorough fundamental understanding of relaxation processes in polymers doc8687 none Spiral waves are a dynamical behavior of excitable media, that is, media in which small changes from the rest state die out and large changes generate oscillatory behavior. Examples of excitable media in biology include the heart, the retina, and calcium waves in various organs, such as the intestine. Chemical systems also exhibit these types of changes and provide a model system for studying how onset and stability of spiral waves are affected by different factors present in biological systems. The chemical reaction will be analyzed both mathematically and computationally. Results should lead to a better understanding of dynamical regime of spiral wave onset and stability in biological systems doc8688 none of the proposed activity. The Fred and Lois Gehring Special Year at the University of Michigan is devoted to Complex Analysis, Complex Dynamics and their interaction. There are several Experts in Complex Analysis and in Complex Dynamics at the University of Michigan, and in addition there will be several senior long-term visitors and several junior faculty hired in these areas and a good number of short term visitors. Also there will be two conferences highlighting recent developments and bringing in experts from around the world. 2. of Proposed Research. Many phenomena in nature and human society, such as the weather, or the stock market, are chaotic and hard to predict and analyze. In fact any time three or more entities interact, the behaviour tends to have chaotic features as the interaction between any two of them is constantly interfered with by the third and the effects of these third person interferences accumulate and backfire. Large systems are beyond our ability to calculate completely. One can only understand with complete precision lower dimensional systems and then one can hope to infer from these which phenomena can happen in larger systems. Complex dynamics provides the low dimensional setting with the most tools available for such analysis. The theory of complex analysis provides powerful methods for complex dynamics. It is also exciting that complex dynamics provides tools back to complex analysis. So getting these groups together for an extended period should have strong impact on both areas. One of the main tools in complex dynamics is (pluri)potential theory, which is a key area in complex analysis. Using Green functions from potential theory one can get invariant currents and measures for the dynamics via the complex Monge ampere operator. A basic problem here is that in some cases it is difficult to define this operator due to the fact that one needs to multiply distributions. Kobayashi hyperbolicity is another key concept. Invariant regions which are Kobayashi hyperbolic gives rise to nonchaotic behaviour because iterates are then a normal family. It is however difficult to decide which regions in complex manifolds are Kobayashi hyperbolic. The best results on the embedding problem for Riemann surfaces in C^2 use complex dynamical techniques, but there are many open cases still. And these are only a few of the topics that will be investigated by this huge group of researchers doc8689 none The proposed research explores the broader comparative relevance of the literature on economic voting by moving outside of the North Atlantic basin to focus on newer democracies and less stable economic contexts. Drawing on both individual- and aggregate-level data, the research tests hypotheses about economic voting at the national and sub-national levels of government in three major countries of Latin America. The central working hypothesis is that voters in Latin America are sensitive to macroeconomic fluctuations and punish or reward governments accordingly, but that the propensity toward economic voting varies with macroeconomic context and institutional conditions. The several components of the proposed research project are designed to contribute to theoretical work on economic voting, enhance our understanding of the functioning of democracy at both the national and sub-national level in contemporary Latin America, and establish a stronger theoretical basis for understanding the ways in which variations in the structure of party competition and macroeconomic volatility condition political behavior doc8690 none The proposed research will focus on problems concerning Banach space theory and its connections with operator algebras and operator theory. The main aim of this research is the investigation of structures of non-commutative L^p-spaces and non-commutative Hardy spaces. The basic permanence question in this direction of research is wether or a given property can be lifted from a given function space to its non-commutative version. One of the questions that will be considered is the classification of non-commutative spaces according to type and cotype. Another significant question is whether or not reflexive subspaces of preduals of von Neumann algebras have the fixed point property. Basic Banach space structure of the newly defined script-L^p-spaces and several non-commutative generalizations of Hardy spaces are at the center of this investigation. Another direction of research to be considered is the study of ideals of operators on C -algebras. This proposal represents work of an interdisciplinary nature on mathematical analysis. Banach space theory, which is the main topic of this proposal, studies notions of distances on infinite dimensional vector spaces. It provides general framework for several fields of mathematics. The theory of function spaces played a crucial role in the development of Banach space theory for several decades. The current project studies a relatively new concepts of non-commutative analog of function spaces in which functions are replaced by operators. These spaces includes C -algebras, preduals of von Neumann algebras among many others. C -algebras turn out to be one of the most important structures in mathematics. They have significant applications to other parts of sciences (for examples, geometry, mathematical physics and quantum mechanics), so it is important to consider them from many different point of view. In this case as Banach spaces doc8691 none A number of factors are known to affect the timing of reproductive maturation in female primates, including humans. Nutritional status is a well documented variable and there is some evidence that social stress also plays a role. This study aims to disentangle the role of socio-ecological variables (both nutritional and social factors) on the timetable of reproductive maturation in captive adolescent female baboons (Papio hamadryas anubis). More specifically, it is the goal of this study to determine how nutritional factors (body weight, skeletal growth, food intake) and social factors (relative dominance rank, amount of aggression received) affect (a) the timing of menarche commencement of cycling, (b) the probability of ovulation, (c) the probability of becoming pregnant, and (d) the probability of successful first birth. With adolescence existing as a marked developmental stage of significant duration in both non-human primates and humans, this study will provide insights into the origins and functions of this transitional stage of development. In addition, this study will provide evidence as to the roles nutritional status and social stress play in the development and maintenance of regular and competent reproductive functioning, including reliable ovulation and the abilities of individual females to initiate and carry out successful pregnancies doc8692 none The Autonomous Undersea Systems Institute (AUSI) will conduct a scientific feasibility study on a Solar Powered Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (SAUV) that it has been developing in conjunction with the Institute for Marine Technology Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Under ONR funding, the vehicle will undergo a series of engineering tests to validate its ability to conduct long endurance sampling tasks. The NSF-funded tests will be conducted in conjunction with Hawaii Ocean Time-series program (HOT), and involves the integration of scientific instruments on the SAUV. A CTD, O2 sensor, fluorometer, and radiometer will be added to the SAUV system. Resulting data will be compared with ship and buoy-based measurements for inter-calibration and to enhance interpretation. If successful, the SAUV will provide the oceanographic science community, with a tool for collecting real time data, on a near continual basis, within 800 meters of the ocean surface, for a minimum of 30 days, without the need for a support vessel doc8693 none This project aims at developing the basis for an innovative and durable concrete bridge deck, made with high performance fiber reinforced cement composites (HPFRCC) and reinforced with only one layer of bottom rebars (steel or FRP). The HPFRC composite is designed to allow the creation of an effective plastic hinge mechanism, with hinges forming at supports and in spans. It also replaces shrinkage and temperature reinforcements in two directions and reduces crack widths by orders of magnitude, thus leading to an exceptional deck durability. When the bottom reinforcement is prestressed, beneficial secondary moments created at the supports improve overall performance doc8694 none This award provides funds to partially support the international workshop Grostat V on applications of computational commutative algebra to statistics. The workshop will take place from September 4 - 6, , at Tulane University in New Orleans. This is the first workshop of its kind in the United States, and will bring together researchers from Europe and the United States from the fields of algebra and statistics. The use of Grobner bases in data analysis and design of experiments forms the main focus of this interdisciplinary workshop. Approximately 20 talks will be given, including two invited lectures. A primary objective of the workshop is to promote this area of research in the United States. The workshop is also expected to have an immediate positive impact on graduate education in the Gulf South region doc8695 none Soft magnetic films with low coercivity and high permeability are critical building blocks in numerous electromagnetic devices such as magnetic recording heads, integrated inductors (microinductors), integrated transformers, magnetic sensors, and micromachined motors. However, a lack of soft magnetic materials with a high saturation magnetization ( 20 kG), a large permeability ( ), and a large ferromagnetic resonance frequency ( 1 GHz), tends to be the bottleneck in these applications. For example, the data rate of hard disk drives is expected to be ~1 Gb s (1 Gb = 1 billion bits) by year . A data rate of 2 Gb s corresponds to a recording frequencies of ~1 GHz, which exceeds the ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) frequency of most magnetic materials. Therefore, it is increasingly urgent to investigate new materials, magnetization dynamics, and recording physics which will enable magnetic recording at a frequency of 1 GHz. In this project, we propose the following: 1) Investigate a new soft magnetic material, namely Fe-Co-N films (FeCoN) with a saturation magnetization of ~24 kG, which will enable higher areal recording densities in hard disk drives ( 100 Gb per square inch). 2) Study magnetization dynamics and magnetic recording at 1 GHz, an important milestone if reduced to practice. 3) Evaluate the viability of the new FeCoN material for integrated inductors, which are desired for emerging applications such as portable wireless communication devices. 4) Educate graduate students and undergraduates about information storage technology via doctoral thesis research, research experience for under graduate (REU), and classroom teaching doc8696 none Coughenour This dissertation enhancement grant supports a US graduate student, Mr. Jeffrey Worden, working under the guidance of Professor Michael Coughenour, with the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University, to conduct a study in the Kajiado District of Kenya on the human-wildlife-vegetation interactions in an East African savanna. Much of Kenya s wildlife lives outside the official Maasailand conservation areas, and as a result it is inextricably linked to the Maasai pastoral herding patterns. But the Maasai s escalating use of land for pastoral purposes has resulted in a decline in both livestock and wildlife populations during the last 30 years. Worden hypothesizes that: 1) changes in Maasai settlements and escalating pastoral land use will show evidence of the process of sedentarization, which segregates areas of high intensity near populated areas from areas of intermediate and low usage; 2) the highest levels of vegetative complexity and heterogeneity will exist in intermediate areas of moderate pastoral land use; and 3) that wildlife density and diversity will be highest in the intermediate pastoral land usage areas. The study will be conducted in the Kajiado District, an area of East Africa that is noted for having a large amount of biological diversity as well as containing the cultural heritage of the Maasai. Three regional locations in unprotected areas of the Kajiado District will be examined using aerial imagery, field surveys, and local interviews. The collected data will be analyzed at multiple scales (local, landscape, and regional) to examine the overall hypothesis that vegetation diversity and landscape heterogeneity should be greater in areas of intermediate use by human populations. The results are expected to identify the impact that changing patterns of pastoral land use have on vegetation resources, as well as how the vegetation changes affect wildlife populations. Dr. Robin Reid and other researchers at the International Livestock Research Institute will provide guidance on this project to Mr. Worden. The results are expected to increase the current knowledge about landscape ecology and human-environment interactions of savanna and pastoral ecosytems, and should be of value to ecologists, social scientists, and resource managers. This project will also support an international research experience very early in the career of an outstanding graduate student. This project is being jointly funded by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Environmental Biology doc8697 none This proposal requests support for the research program of the high energy physics group at SUNY Stony Brook to explore the character of particle interactions at the smallest distance scales achievable. The group proposes to exploit the upgraded D0 detector currently beginning Run II at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. In addition, the group requests support for its work on the ATLAS detector currently being built for the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and expected to become operational in . For several years the main D0 responsibility of this group has been the liquid-argon calorimeter electronics upgrade to accommodate the higher luminosity and shortened inter-bunch time interval of the Run II Tevatron collider, and for the first and second hardware levels of the trigger, particularly for the preshower and tracking detectors. The group will pursue more incisive triggers on low transverse momentum electrons, such as those from J Y and semileptonic b-quark decay. The group intends to focus its future physics analysis capability on issues of electroweak symmetry breaking. Specifically, they propose to work on the search for resonances decaying to b b-bar jets, including the Z boson and the hypothesized Higgs particle, as well as make refined measurements of the top-quark and W boson masses. The ATLAS work of the group will be centered on building and commissioning the high voltage feedthrough system for the liquid-argon calorimeters, and the design and test of the readout driver system used to collect trigger and offline data from the calorimeters. The group has entered the building phase for the high voltage system. The readout driver prototype boards are currently being tested and refined. During this award period, the group expects to bring both of these projects to completion. They also will continue their commitment to education and outreach through participation in the QuarkNet program, and several local initiatives related to high schools doc8698 none This award will support work whose objective is to permit the use of rapid freeze-quench (RFQ) sample preparation with high frequency electron paramagnetic resonance and electron-nuclear double resonance (HF-EPR ENDOR) spectroscopy. While the RFQ technique is extensively used in conjunction with conventional low frequency EPR ENDOR spectrometers, technical difficulties have prevented its optimal use at high frequencies. RFQ arrests the reaction of enzymes on the millisecond time scale to facilitate the investigation of short-lived catalytic intermediate species. The technique involves rapidly mixing two reactants (e. g. an enzyme and its substrate) and freezing the resulting mixture within a known time period (from 5 - milliseconds) by spraying it into a cryogenic bath. However, the small wavelengths and correspondingly small sample tubes and resonant cavities commonly used for high-frequency EPR make the application of RFQ techniques difficult, and have thus prevented the study of RFQ samples with this spectroscopic technique. The objective will be pursued via two general routes. One is the modification of existing RFQ by adapting them to the small HF-EPR capillary sample tubes. The other, larger effort will be devoted to modification of high frequency EPR instrumentation so that it is compatible with existing RFQ technology. This will involve the development of overmoded resonant EPR cavities that accept the standard, large RFQ sample tubes. These tubes are currently prepared in most laboratories that use low frequency EPR. Both approaches - the adaptation of RFQ techniques to high-frequency capillary tubes and the development of overmoded resonant cavities that accept standard RFQ tubes - will permit the study of short-lived intermediates in normal enzymatic reactions. Prior to the development of RFQ techniques, standard strategies for such studies involved the use of inhibitors or substrate analogues that arrested reactions at an intermediate stage. While such intermediates can provide important structural information about enzymes, they are less useful in providing information about electronic properties that are key to understanding the enzyme s role in the reaction doc8699 none The goal of this project is to further develop and evaluate a new kind of fluorescence microscope that will have sufficiently improved the acquisition rate and depth of field of images fast enough, and with enough depth resolution, to investigate live-cell dynamic processes that occur too rapidly to be imaged with existing confocal or widefield deconvolution microscopes. The new instrument, called an extended-depth-of-focus (EDF) microscope, is based on a novel approach to optical design known as wavefront coding, in which a specially designed optical element is inserted into a standard fluorescence microscope to encode the image recorded by a sensitive CCD camera. This CCD image is then decoded using a specially designed, very fast digital filtering process. If the proposed instrument is fully successful, it will provide an image with 15 to 20 times the normal depth of focus, with no loss in image quality. Existing commercial microscopes need to acquire multiple images from successive planes of focus and then combine them using digitally. Because of the extended time required to acquire the multiple images, the sample is exposed to intense light for a much longer period. This accelerates the rate of bleaching of the fluorescent dyes used for labeling specific cell components and also increases potential for significant damage to living preparations. Thus, users of commercial confocal, deconvolution or even two-photon microscopes often acquire only a few images when trying to track moving cell components over time. This compromise means that objects of interest within a cell often move out of focus too rapidly to be recorded. Preliminary results show that the new EDF microscope has the potential to overcome these problems and will be able to rapidly produce images (potentially at video rates) in which all regions throughout the three-dimensional cell volume are sharply focused. The proposed research will expand on these preliminary results and develop new wavefront coding optical elements to optimally convert a commercial fluorescence microscope into an EDF system. As part of the project, the EDF results will be compared to images of the same test objects and biological preparations obtained with deconvolution and confocal microscopes to ensure rigorous evaluation of the results. The microscope improvements to be developed should produce an instrument that can out perform existing commercial fluorescence systems in many biological applications doc8700 none This award supports the development of improved Data Processing and Analysis Software to be used with surface plasmon resonance (SPR) biosensors. In the last 10 years, the use of SPR sensors have become a standard method for measuring biomolecular interactions such as those involving antibodies, receptors, enzymes, and oligonucleotides. Many of the instruments that are available today are automated and, therefore, capable of generating a wealth of information about an interaction. However, there are currently no automated programs available to process biosensor data, and the use of available manual evaluation software is tedious and time consuming The goal of this project is the development of new software designed to reduce the time required for processing biosensor data from hours to seconds, while at the same time, significantly improving the quality of data through the use of novel referencing techniques. Additional developments are planned that will extend the capabilities of biosensors in the area of active concentration determination. Specialized error space analysis routines will also be incorporated to provide detailed information about the results of biosensor analysis. The new software, as well as educational manuals and tutorials, will be made freely available through the Internet. Access to this automated data processing software will turn the potential of real-time biosensor analysis into a reality doc8701 none This award supports the development of a new instrument for measurement of real-time quantitative kinetics of biomolecular binding through use of all-optical surface plasmon resonance (SPR)-based methods. Existing SPR-based instrumentation is commonly used to study interactions of polymers and other molecules, including small ligands and proteins. The proposed instrument will employ a multi-channel biosensor array format, and use multi-wavelength excitation and angular scanning capabilities to optimize sensitivity and time response. Novel SPR methods, developed previously in the PI s laboratory, are expected to provide far greater sensitivity and improved coverage for unlabeled biomolecules in comparison to existing SPR instruments. Software to be developed for data analysis will incorporate detailed modeling of association and dissociation kinetics using self-consistent global analysis methods for multiple measurements and new kinetic models also developed in the PI s laboratory. The instrument to be developed provides simultaneous monitoring of binding kinetics for 16 different channels (4 independent flow cells) with a time response expected to be in the range of 1 millisecond. Judicious choice of excitation and detection frequencies will take full advantage of the optical characteristics of the particular ligands under study; this is expected to provide an additional 1 to 2 orders of magnitude higher sensitivity than current SPR-based biosensors doc8702 none This award supports the development of a device for on-chip, interferometric backscatter detection (OCIBD) for universal on-chip solute determinations. The primary usage of the device will be for protein detection during capillary electrophoresis carried out in channels etched in chips made of glass, such as a microscope slide, or similar substrate. The PI has already shown OCIBD can be used for refractive index measurements of sub-nanoliter volumes of liquids. The liquid passes through an etched channel with the general shape of a half cylinder. The detection system consists of a simple, folded optical train based and a low power laser beam. The laser light backscattered from the channel takes on the form of a high contrast interference pattern; the pattern varies with the bulk properties of the fluid contained within the channel. In preliminary efforts, positional changes in the fringes of the pattern allow the detection of test proteins at micromolar concentrations (0.2-1.0 mg ml). The PI has also developed a preliminary theoretical model for OCIBD that is in good agreement with this experimental data. The model can be used to predict general system performance as a function of proposed optical train modifications including the chip s wall thickness and channel diameter. Improvements realized for OCIBD, under the proposed investigations, are predicted to result in detection limits for proteins at concentrations in the range of 150-250 nanomolar and in volumes of much less than a nanoliter. The result of this research is expected to be a sensitive universal detector system that will be broadly applicable to miniature bioanalytical devices, often referred to as lab-on-a-chip devices. These are of increasing interest in biological research because they minimize the amounts of material needed for separation and analysis, and are amenable to electronic, rather than mechanical, control. Detection of individual proteins and other cellular components at these low levels should make analysis of individual cells possible; availability of detection schemes that do not require chemical modification of cellular components will increase the potential utility of on-chip devices for a variety of uses doc8703 none This proposal provides support for development of a high performance, reconfigurable signal-processing platform that will permit real-time analysis of large-scale multi-channel neurophysiologic data and subsequent use in simulation and modeling. The computational architecture will be a distributed, real-time system of modular design consisting of computational nodes connected in a three-dimensional mesh. A computational node will include a floating-point digital signal processor (DSP), a field programmable gate array (FPGA), and local memory. This system to be used is reconfigurable, so that algorithms can be directly implemented in the hardware. The FPGAs can act as communication processors, allowing significant bandwidth for communication between computational nodes. Configuring the system as a three-dimensional mesh will allow the system to scale to any number of computational nodes required to process an arbitrary number of real-time I O data streams. The platform will be developed using the analysis of neural signal processing in a simple nervous system, that of the cricket. Specifically, the platform will be developed to allow investigation of the cooperative neural encoding schemes used to transmit information about air currents within the cricket s nervous system. The platform will enable real-time decoding of neural information, and will thus enable experimental perturbation of the encoded information while the neural signals are in transit between multiple peripheral sensors and the central processing ganglia. If the platform is successfully developed, an unprecedented degree of interactive control in the analysis of neural function will result. This could lead to major insights into the biological basis of neural computation and a new paradigm in experimental and computational neuroscience, one where experimental and theoretical neuroscientists can work together to test hypotheses of neural function in vivo. This proposal provides support for development of a high performance, reconfigurable signal-processing platform that will permit real-time analysis of large-scale multi-channel neurophysiologic data and subsequent use in simulation and modeling. The computational architecture will be a distributed, real-time system of modular design consisting of computational nodes connected in a three-dimensional mesh. A computational node will include a floating-point digital signal processor (DSP), a field programmable gate array (FPGA), and local memory. This system to be used is reconfigurable, so that algorithms can be directly implemented in the hardware. The FPGAs can act as communication processors, allowing significant bandwidth for communication between computational nodes. Configuring the system as a three-dimensional mesh will allow the system to scale to any number of computational nodes required to process an arbitrary number of real-time I O data streams. The platform will be developed using the analysis of neural signal processing in a simple nervous system, that of the cricket. Specifically, the platform will be developed to allow investigation of the cooperative neural encoding schemes used to transmit information about air currents within the cricket s nervous system. The platform will enable real-time decoding of neural information, and will thus enable experimental perturbation of the encoded information while the neural signals are in transit between multiple peripheral sensors and the central processing ganglia. If the platform is successfully developed, an unprecedented degree of interactive control in the analysis of neural function will result. This could lead to major insights into the biological basis of neural computation and a new paradigm in experimental and computational neuroscience, one where experimental and theoretical neuroscientists can work together to test hypotheses of neural function in vivo doc8704 none The Principle Investigators of this proposal propose to organize a PI meeting for the Networking Research Programs (Networking Research Program and Special Projects in Networking) in the ANIR Division of NSF. The PI meeting will be held over a two-day period in addition to an opening night reception. The reception will be Wednesday evening, November 1, with two full days of technical sessions, Thursday, November 2, and Friday, November 3. The PI meeting will facilitate the exchange of research ideas among the PIs with active NSF awards from the Networking Research Programs and NSF program directors doc8705 none Thompson, Laird A. UnISIS is a laser guided adaptive optics system located at the Coude focus of the Mount Wilson 2.5-m Telescope. It is unique in providing a test-bed for Rayleigh laser guide star work in astronomical adaptive optics. A three-year program has been defined to bring UnISIS through the Science Commissioning phase and to make some of the first deep-sky astronomical observations with a laser guided adaptive optics system. These science observations will be the highest priority aspect of this research work. In addition, the performance of UnISIS will be analyzed by comparing theoretical simulations (including atmospheric turbulence) with on-the-sky observations. This analysis should reveal the relative importance of factors such as (1) the deformable mirror fitting error, (2) focal anisoplanatism (i.e. laser guide star cone effect), (3) temporal sampling errors, and (4) signal-to-noise dependent errors at the wave front sensor. Both the science observations and the system performance analysis should have general application to other adaptive optics systems because the atmosphere above Mt. Wilson Observatory provides some of the best observing conditions in the world. This work will support a postdoctoral student through the NSF Center for Adaptive Optics doc8706 none The Ornithology collection at the Academy of Natural Sciences has one of the largest and most complete series of Andean birds in the world, and includes specimens of special historical interest such as many collected by Alexander Wilson, John James Audubon, and John Gould. The collections also include over 10,500 frozen tissue samples. This project is to replace many old, warped cabinets with new ones to increase protection of this valuable collection from pest infestations, dust, and light. It will also provide a new ultra-cold freezer for the tissue collection, which is stored now in a freezer shared with other departments. The collections are presently seriously overcrowded, with no expansion space available. The new cabinets and freezer will relieve this doc8707 none This award supports the continued development of a new type of electrophoresis instrument for isolation, concentration and recovery of microgram amounts of purified protein isoforms and glycoforms in their native state. The underlying electrofocusing principle, dynamic field-gradient focusing [DFGF], uses a computer-controlled array of electrodes to establish and manipulate, in real time, an electric field gradient. The gradient will drive the protein against a constant flow of buffer in a packed column so that each protein moves to a position in the column where its electrophoretic velocity counterbalances its chromatographic velocity. Because the separating power of DFGF is limited largely by the fidelity of the electronic controller, the use of high-precision electronics should allow this instrument to outperform conventional instruments based on the use of isoelectric focusing. Moreover, the electric-field gradient can be adjusted during a run in response to information collected by an appropriate detector. By altering the electric field profile during the run, it should be possible to localize specific individual proteins and capture them sequentially from the column outlet. The isolated proteins can then be analyzed by standard analytical tools to determine differences in amino acid sequence, carbohydrate composition, and other chemical properties. As part of the project, the ability of this instrument to automatically fractionate purified proteins into their various isoforms and glycoforms will be tested using recombinant proteins from industrial and academic laboratories. Many proteins, whether retained in the cell or secreted, have been shown to be modified at one or more sites by the addition of phosphate residues, sugar residues or other types of small organic or inorganic molecules. In recent years, the study of the structure and function of individual proteins, including study of the regulation of enzyme conformation and activity, has been increasingly concerned with the nature, location and effect of post-translational modifications. The various forms of a given protein can be usually characterized and purified using isoelectric focusing combined with gel or capillary electrophoresis; however, it is frequently difficult to separate and recover enough of each isoform from a gel or capillary to be able to further characterize the protein in its native state. The device to be developed with support from this award should improve the range of options available to protein chemists as the study of proteins continues to expand in the coming years doc8708 none Instruments for characterizing individual atoms and molecules have extensive applications in the biological and physical sciences, and play an important role in manufacturing techniques for miniature machines and electronic devices. With the exception of the light microscope, all such instruments work with solid or tethered molecules, and none have the capacity to analyze large numbers of single polymer molecules in solution. Recent work has shown the potential for development of instruments with such capability that are based on nanometer-sized pores (nanopores) in otherwise impermeable membranes. The diameter of the pore permits passage of polymers like DNA, but only one at a time. These existing experimental detectors employ artificial lipid membranes with pores formed by alpha-hemolysin, a naturally occurring proteinaceous toxin. Measurement of the properties of DNA molecules as they transit such pores has shown that the length of individual molecules can be determined rapidly and reliably. To date, these experimental instruments have had limited use because of the difficulty of preparing the membranes and because of the membrane s fragility and short lifetime. This award provides support for development of a new type of nanoporous membrane that can be used as a robust replacement for the alpha-hemolysin membranes. Several strategies to produce the new membranes from mica will be explored, including the use of radiation followed by an acid etch. Mica-based membranes should be exceedingly stable in operation. A successful effort is likely to lead to development of an instrument capable of rapid measurement of the length and number of individual DNA molecules found in mixed populations, and, potentially, to development of an instrument that can perform rapid sequencing of long DNAs without the need for chemical or radioactive labeling procedures doc8709 none This award will support the development of flow cytometry instrumentation and associated protocols that can analyze aquatic bacteria with emphasis on their growth and viability status. Flow cytometry has become an established research tool for study of blood cells and of a variety of cells and organisms that can be grown in culture. However, its use to analyze natural populations of bacteria such as those found in aquatic systems is complicated by the small cell size typical of such bacteria. Few commercial instruments are dedicated to the detection of these small targets. The main effort of this project is to design additional modifications to a commercial flow cytometer to enhance its ability to determine the growth and viability status of aquatic bacteria. Output signals will be organized for manipulation to reflect the rate of growth in mixed populations as judged by DNA content. Two additional probes for activity will be tested in the system, one for RNA content and the other for membrane potential, both important indicators of bacterial growth and viability. The equipment will be particularly important in study of the microbial generation of greenhouse gasses at high latitudes where both ice cover and bacterial activity is highly temperature sensitive doc8710 none This award supports the development of a DNA-array scanner that detects fluorescence signals by means of a novel wave guide collector. The wave guide will collect light trapped inside the array substrate by total internal reflection (TIR). The proposed scanner combines the best properties of various alternative scanner designs, while avoiding some significant disadvantages. The use of orthogonal illumination will result in low background levels and improved signal-to-noise in comparison to existing commercial instruments. The light collection optics allow addition of a temperature kinetics module which will permit use of hybridization conditions that greatly increase binding specificity. The use of DNA array hybridization has been widely adopted by biologists and biomedical researchers as a technique for detection of mutations in DNA and for monitoring of gene expression. Commercially available instruments for scanning arrays are relatively complex devices based on the same optics used in confocal microscopes, are expensive to manufacture and are unsuited to the real-time measurement of hybridization kinetics. The TIR design is simple, compact, requires little alignment and can be manufactured at low cost. Scanners with TIR collection will make possible a new generation of versatile laboratory instruments for hybridization array quantification with improved accuracy and speed doc8711 none Hughen Donard Lake, Baffin Island, contains annually laminated sediments produced by the summer melting of the Caribou Glacier, which currently dominates its catchment. Donard Lake laminated sediments are classic glacio-lacustrine varves and contain a record of summer temperature variations, potentially as far back as 5,000 years before present. Previous efforts to calibrate Donard Lake varve thickness using a single core showed a correlation of varve thickness to temperature (r=0.57), but also a large amount of unexplained variance. The correlation was greatly improved when both temperature and varve thickness data were smoothed into three-year averages (r=0.82), suggesting that the low correlation for annual data was caused by error and random noise contained in the single-core varve chronology. Research on varved sediments in other Arctic lakes has shown that averaging together measurements from multiple cores is necessary for accurate calibration studies, to eliminate errors in the annual chronology and to reduce noise from random variability contained within individual cores. Detailed calibration data sets are critical to improving the utility of laminated sediments records as paleotemperature proxies, both for accurate quantitative reconstructions of the magnitude of temperature change at individual locations, as well as for the development of integrated spatial networks of paleoclimate records throughout the Arctic. The Principal Investigator will use a suite of five new sediment cores, retrieved with the sediment-water interfaces intact, to construct a high-quality, multiple-core varve chronology for Donard Lake. Cross correlation of the multiple cores will provide a precise layer-count chronology for confirmation of annual deposition using a combination of independent dating methods, including 137 Cs and 210Pb. The cross-correlated chronology will also allow averaging of each year s varve thickness measurements between several cores, providing a lake-wide varve thickness record that is much less influenced by random noise from individual cores. This varve thickness record will be calibrated to summer temperature using monthly instrumental meteorological data from nearby Cape Dyer, resulting in precise and accurate temperature calibration relationships for Donard Lake varves. The meteorological data will also be used to investigate the possible influence of precipitation on varve thickness. The multiple-core varve chronology used to calibrate varve thickness to temperature will be extended back in the new cores for approximately 500 years. This new, 500-year record of temperature change in the eastern Canadian Arctic will provide important quantification of the precise magnitude of warming at the end of the Little Ice Age, and will help efforts to discriminate between natural and anthropogenic forcing of global climate change. In addition, the annual nature of the paleotemperature record will also allow precise determination of variance and rates of change during the past five centuries and place recent climatic changes into a longer-term perspective of natural variability. Hughen Donard Lake, Baffin Island, contains annually laminated sediments produced by the summer melting of the Caribou Glacier, which currently dominates its catchment. Donard Lake laminated sediments are classic glacio-lacustrine varves and contain a record of summer temperature variations, potentially as far back as 5,000 years before present. Previous efforts to calibrate Donard Lake varve thickness using a single core showed a correlation of varve thickness to temperature (r=0.57), but also a large amount of unexplained variance. The correlation was greatly improved when both temperature and varve thickness data were smoothed into three-year averages (r=0.82), suggesting that the low correlation for annual data was caused by error and random noise contained in the single-core varve chronology. Research on varved sediments in other Arctic lakes has shown that averaging together measurements from multiple cores is necessary for accurate calibration studies, to eliminate errors in the annual chronology and to reduce noise from random variability contained within individual cores. Detailed calibration data sets are critical to improving the utility of laminated sediments records as paleotemperature proxies, both for accurate quantitative reconstructions of the magnitude of temperature change at individual locations, as well as for the development of integrated spatial networks of paleoclimate records throughout the Arctic. The Principal Investigator will use a suite of five new sediment cores, retrieved with the sediment-water interfaces intact, to construct a high-quality, multiple-core varve chronology for Donard Lake. Cross correlation of the multiple cores will provide a precise layer-count chronology for confirmation of annual deposition using a combination of independent dating methods, including 137 Cs and 210Pb. The cross-correlated chronology will also allow averaging of each year s varve thickness measurements between several cores, providing a lake-wide varve thickness record that is much less influenced by random noise from individual cores. This varve thickness record will be calibrated to summer temperature using monthly instrumental meteorological data from nearby Cape Dyer, resulting in precise and accurate temperature calibration relationships for Donard Lake varves. The meteorological data will also be used to investigate the possible influence of precipitation on varve thickness. The multiple-core varve chronology used to calibrate varve thickness to temperature will be extended back in the new cores for approximately 500 years. This new, 500-year record of temperature change in the eastern Canadian Arctic will provide important quantification of the precise magnitude of warming at the end of the Little Ice Age, and will help efforts to discriminate between natural and anthropogenic forcing of global climate change. In addition, the annual nature of the paleotemperature record will also allow precise determination of variance and rates of change during the past five centuries and place recent climatic changes into a longer-term perspective of natural variability doc8712 none In this proposal the PIs and their collaborator at the University of Oklahoma propose to build, test, and conduct experiments with an experimental setup to measure flow of liquid through cracks in experimental materials. The cracks will consist of simple single cracks and also interconnected 3D crack networks. The solid matrix will consist of dried epoxy resin, silica glass and the fluid will be deionized and degassed distilled water with dye added. Some experiments will examine the effects of precipitation and dissolution of CaSO4 and other substances on flow through cracks and crack networks. The flow rates will be measured using camera techniques in a specially equipped lab. The results of these simple experiments will then be used to try to better understand the processes occurring in sea floor hydrothermal systems doc8713 none This award supports the continuation of measurements of high-resolution temperature-dependent photoabsorption cross sections of N2 and O2 in the spectral regions near strong dayglow emissions of N+ and O+ as well as a major spectroscopic band system of N2 near 100 nm. The range of temperatures that would be explored in these measurements is from room temperature to ~900 K. Also included in the award is support for the measurements of temperature-dependent fluorescence cross sections for the production of N and N+, O and O+ emissions through photodissociative excitation and dissociative photoionization excitation of N2 and O2, respectively. The cross section measurements would be obtained at the Japanese Photon Factory, and the fluorescence measurements would be obtained with a new position-sensitive detector at the Advanced Light Source facility at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. These laboratory results are important for the improved modeling of the dayglow emission production and solar radiation transmissions through planetary atmospheres doc8714 none This project has two related thrusts; the application of Inelastic Electron Tunneling Spectroscopy(IETS) to achieve greater understanding and improvement of gate oxides, and the materials science of jet vapor deposited(JVD) dielectrics. With gate oxides only a few monolayers thick, it becomes increasingly difficult for conventional dielectric characterization tools, such as infrared spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy to reveal structural and compositional information accurately. In addition, large gate leakage currents also make a number of widely used electrical measurements, such as C-V, G-V, and charge-pumping, either extremely difficult or impossible to implement. IETS relies on tunneling current to probe the ultra-thin gate dielectric in a metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) sandwich and becomes more sensitive when the tunneling current increases. Examples of information from IETS include phonon modes of the gate electrode, phonon modes of the substrate, various vibrational modes of the gate dielectric, bonding structures and impurities in the gate dielectric, and traps as well as other electronic defects; all can be obtained on a sample volume of less than 10 -9 cc. Better understanding of the interactions between the tunneling electrons and the gate dielectric is expected. Information obtained from IETS will be correlated with characteristics of CMOS devices made with the same gate dielectrics, with a goal toward the optimization of high-k gate dielectrics. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. These studies will improve the fundamental understanding of gate dielectrics, which are key to advanced silicon-based microelectronics. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area doc8715 none This grant will provide funding in support of a symposium to be presented at the annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Chicago on January 4-7, . The symposium is entitled Integrative Aspects of Epithelial Structure and Function . The symposium will feature great vertical diversity of experimental approaches, ranging from molecular analyses, through epithelial structure and function, to whole animal performance. Epithelia, which consist of sheets of cells, serve vital functions in multi-cellular organisms. Many epithelia (i.e. skin, gut, and the lining of blood vessels) serve a vital function as barriers. These same barriers simultaneously play a crucial role in transporting important molecules into and out of the body. The speakers will discuss recent findings regarding the functions of epithelia that relate to diseases such as cystic fibrosis, novel mechanisms of hormone function, and cellular protection against environmental stresses. The speaker list has been selected for its diversity. It contains senior and well-established figures in the field, as well as new investigators who have not had numerous opportunities to present their work. It includes tenured faulty as well as non-tenured faculty, graduate students and researchers. The symposium is novel, therefore, both for the breadth with which epithelial structure and function are approached, and for the juxtaposition of senior established scientists and outstanding new researchers, in a comprehensive view of structure, mechanism and control in epithelia doc8716 none The University of Iowa Paleontology Repository has been ranked among the top ten collections in North America in terms of size and significance, and supports the research activities of a paleontology graduate program recently ranked seventh in the nation. The Repository contains some 25,000 type and referred specimens and over one million specimens in total. It has long been the primary holding facility for paleontological and geological collections in the state, and is the focal point of the research and teaching activities of the paleontology faculty in the Department of Geoscience. The Repository has reached its effective operating capacity and is in urgent need of comprehensive reorganization. This project represents the first phase of a larger project, which will ultimately involve both curation and computerization. This first phase (curation) focuses on: (1) a complete evaluation of the holdings, especially the Paleozoic and Mesozoic non-Iowan stratigraphic collections and Cenozoic molluscs; (2) completion of a range of curatorial projects facilitating reorganization, including curation of retiring faculty members research collections and several special collections of potential interest to the community at large, especially the Strimple echinoderm and Belanski Devonian collections; and (3) physical reorganization, including purchase of new specimen cabinets. Visiting specialists will be invited to evaluate those collections where in-house expertise is lacking. Although the collection already is heavily used, completion of the project will result in even greater use. A long-term plan for the collection includes making collection data available on the WWW doc8717 none The American Physical Society (APS), in cooperation with the Mexican Physical Society (SMF) and the Federation of Latin American Physical Societies (FeLaSoFi), translates selected physics education materials into Spanish and makes them available to teachers throughout Latin America and in Spanish-speaking parts of the U.S. Material describing simple and inexpensive physics experiments is translated into Spanish and teachers receive assistance in using the material with their students. The project enhances collaboration in science education among the countries of the continent doc8718 none Strobel The ribosome is the catalyst of peptide bond formation within all living organisms. The 50S ribosomal subunit of the ribosome contains the peptidyl transferase center where the peptide bonds are formed. The recent high resolution crystal structure of the intact 50S subunit suggests that the peptidyl transferase center is composed exclusively of rRNA. The unusual chemical basicity of a single nucleotide within the active site may allow it to serve as a general acid-base catalyst for peptide bond formation. This implies that the ribosome is an RNA enzyme or ribozyme, though this has yet to be biochemically demonstrated. The specific objective of this project is to demonstrate peptidyl transferase activity by an in vitro transcribed 23S rRNA in the absence of ribosomal proteins. To achieve this objective a new version of the peptidyl transferase reaction that alleviates the artifactual reaction conditions required of the previously used fragment reaction will be utilized. The structure of the 50S subunit will be employed to design truncated 23S rRNA fragments that are likely to fold into an active conformation. These experiments are capable of providing definitive biochemical evidence to establish whether 23S rRNA is the catalyst of protein synthesis and will provide a biochemically amenable system for the analysis of the ribosomal reaction mechanism doc8719 none Clemens, James C. Advanced Technology Optical Spectrograph for the Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope (SOAR) A multi-purpose imaging spectrometer is planned for the Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope at Cerro Pachon, Chile. Some features are 1. All refracting instrument operating from 320 to 850 nm; 2. Five arc-minute by five arc-minute field of view with 0.146 arcsecond per pixel sampling; 3. Spectral resolution between 900 and 9,000; 4. Maximum spectral resolution of 14,000; 5. Image quality degradation of less than 0.13 arc-seconds at the field corners and 6. Spectroscopic transmittance of 65%. A full and very comprehensive observing program in stellar astrophysics, galactic astronomy and extra-galactic astronomy are scheduled. This project is co-funded from a private foundation: the Goodman Foundation doc8720 none Church, Sarah E., and Bock, James J. A Bolometric Array Receiver for Measurements of Polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation This program will develop an instrument package to detect and characterize the weak polarization signal of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) over 100 square degrees at frequencies of 100, 150, and 220 GHz. The awardees will construct a bolometer array called QUEST that will simultaneously observe 37 pixels on the sky in two orthogonal directions of linear polarization. They will work in collaboration with researchers at University of Cardiff, Wales, who will develop a 2.6-meter-diameter telescope as the platform for QUEST, to be located at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii. CMB polarization has not yet been detected, but potentially contains much important cosmological information regarding the state of the universe at the time of recombination. The QUEST experiment will enable limits to be set on the cosmic inflationary potential that are 3 times more sensitive than expected from the space-based Planck Surveyor telescope doc8721 none Professor Ingrid Fritsch of the University of Arkansas is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program for her research on electrochemistry in ultrasmall volumes and magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) microfluidics. The research on ultrasmall volumes will attempt to determine the smallest sample size and lowest concentration that can be amperometrically analyzed and how interactions with microfluidics affect such analyses. The effects of proximity of adjacent electrodes and of redox cycling from adjacent electrodes will be examined. Chemical modification of surfaces adjacent to electrodes will be evaluated with respect to immobilization chemistry and electrochemical detection will be studied in separate but closely spaced scenarios. The second thrust will determine the strengths and weaknesses of MHD for microfluidic applications. MHD microfluidics will be driven with an external magnet. On-chip suitability of MHD will be evaluated, and a demonstration system of an immunoassay test system utilizing MHD microfluidics will be constructed. As devices are miniaturized and analytical tests are demanded on chip platforms, the question of how to deliver fluids in tiny volumes becomes a challenge. Studies on ultrasmall volumes are complicated by evaporation and solution manipulation. Implementation of microfluidics methods and development of new ones are immediately needed for microanalysis doc8722 none Sheaff This award provides support for participants from the United States and Africa in an ICFA School Workshop on Instrumentation in High Energy Physics, to be held at the National Accelerator Centre in Faure, South Africa, from March 26 - April 6, . The US organizer is Marleigh Sheaff, Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin. The South African co-organizer is John Sharpey-Schaeffer, Director of the National Accelerator Centre. The participants supported include postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. This is the ninth in a series of schools workshops organized by the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA). About half of the 80 student participants will come from developing countries in Africa, the Near East, and South Asia. The purpose of the workshop is to encourage increased participation by young physicists from these parts of the world in elementary particle physics experiments by providing them with the information and skills needed to undertake detector development for these experiments. In addition, it is hoped that participation in this school will stimulate future collaborations among the students and senior lecturers. The agenda includes lectures on state of the art instrumentation techniques and several hands-on laboratory courses. This award is supported jointly by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Physics doc8723 none Barrett Description: This award is for support of a joint research project by Dr. Bruce R. Barrett, Professor, Department of Physics, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona and Dr. Mohamed Slim Fayache, Assistant Professor, Physics Department, University of Tunis, Tunis, Tunisia. The research addresses one of the long-standing problems in nuclear-structure physics, that of how the free-space interaction between two nucleons (protons and or neutrons) is modified inside a nucleus (i.e., inside nuclear matter). One of these two scientists has previously performed calculations to study these medium-modification effects on the tensor and spin-orbit components of the nucleon-nucleon interaction, but only in a fairly limited model space for the interacting nucleons. New theoretical techniques in the form of the large-basis, no-core shell-model approach now permit such calculations in significantly larger model spaces. The two investigators will study how the medium-modification effects on the nucleon-nucleon interaction are changed by extending the calculations to model spaces beyond excitations of 2hw. Other nuclear-structure problems will also be investigated using the large-basis, no-core shell-model method, such as the properties of nuclei far from the valley of stability. Scope: This award will allow a US scientist to collaborate with a Tunisian scientist in an area where each has knowledge of different and unique methods for solving certain theoretical physics problems. The problem to be addressed, the microscopic calculations of nuclear structures, is one in which the PI and other US scientists are fully engaged. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting US-foreign scientific collaboration in areas of mutual benefit. Funding for this project is provided by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Physics doc8724 none Humans and other animals use visual looming of a stimulus to detect change in distance of a stimulus in the depth of the visual field. It is unclear how such visual cues drive neural signals that guide appropriate behavioral responses such as approach or avoidance for such a stimulus. This project uses an insect, the moth Manduca, which hovers in front of flowers while feeding in flight, as a simpler system for experimentation. A combined approach links behavioral experiments to physiology and to modeling, to experimentally test alternative hypotheses about which visual cues are relevant for guiding behavior, as a basis for developing computational models with realistic biological parameters. Results will be important beyond insect vision, for understanding depth detection and obstacle avoidance by visual mechanisms in general, and for developing useful machine vision and guidance systems in robotics. This project also provides excellent cross-disciplinary training of a postdoctoral woman neuroethologist in an exceptionally strong environment for computational neuroscience doc8725 none This project will investigate magnetic and thermodynamic properties of solid 3H near the nuclear ordering transition. The nuclear magnetism of bulk 3He will be studied as a function of pressure and magnetic field. The magnetic properties of a new form of 3He will also be studied. The new form consists of nanoclusters of 3He that have been precipitated in a matrix of 4He. Surface effects may be significant since an appreciable fraction of he 3He is within a few layers of the surface. Ferromagnetism in the high-pressure hcp phase will be investigated by measuring the frequency spectrum and the magnetization. A companion study at the Hahn-Meitner Institute Berlin will use neutron scattering to characterize the hcp phase, as well as the high magnetic field phase of the low pressure, bcc phase. The critical field for the transition from the high-field phase to the disordered paramagnetic phase will be investigated through the field-dependence of the melting pressure. Graduate students, undergraduates and postdoctoral associates involved in the project will receive training in cutting edge techniques, which prepare them for a range of careers in academe, industry, and government. This project will study the magnetic properties of the helium isotope, 3He, at ultra-low temperatures, where the nuclei of the atoms interact and order themselves in fashion analogous to the way iron atoms couple to form a ferromagnet (though at much higher temperature). The study of 3He at ultralow temperatures can shed light on fundamental magnetism that may have implications for high temperature materials such as iron. There are several different magnetic and structural phases of 3He that occur as a function of pressure and magnetic field. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and other magnetic techniques will be employed. Another study will look at the magnetic properties of small nanoclusters of 3He that can be formed in a matrix of 4He. These nanoclusters have interesting magnetic properties that depend on their small size and on the interaction of their surface atoms with the surrounding 4He atoms. Collaboration with the Hahn-Meitner Institute in Berlin will combine neutron scattering with low temperature physics techniques to prepare and study the low- and high-pressure nuclear magnetic phases of 3He. Graduate students, undergraduates and postdoctoral associated involved in the project will receive training in cutting edge techniques, which prepare them for a range of careers in academe, industry, and government doc8726 none The need for standard reference materials in the ocean sciences has become recognized as a high priority issue by the scientific community. This recognition stems from the fact that standards provide a means of quality control for analytical measurements that are made by an increasing number of laboratories not only in the United States but abroad. For this reason, the PI will set up a committee of 12 members to: (1) compile a list of important oceanographic research questions that may benefit from reference standards; (2) create a comprehensive list of reference materials currently available for oceanographic studies; (3) identify and prioritize the reference materials needed to study the identified research questions; (4) determine for each priority analyte whether reference materials and or analytical methods should be standardized; and (5) identify the most effective means for developing and producing standard reference materials for ocean sciences. Members of the committee will be selected from scientists in the four major oceanographic disciplines (biological, chemical, physical, geological), as well as from individuals outside the realm of the ocean science community such as analytical chemists already involved in the development and production of reference standards. The committee will meet four times, convene one workshop and solicit input from the scientific community via a World Wide Website or via direct communications with investigators in the ocean sciences field. Three separate products will results from this study. Initially, a suggested list of standard reference materials needed by the ocean research community will be provided. Secondly, an assessment of responsibilities for who will produce the reference material and the cost associated with production of these standards will be documented. Lastly, the committee will make a recommendation of which analytical methods need to be standardized doc8727 none Myrold Description: This award supports a US-India cooperative research project on Molecular Diversity of Actinorhizal Symbionts Found in the Sikkim Region of the Eastern Himalayas. US PI David Myrold, Oregon State University and Indian co-PI Arvind Misra, North Eastern Hill University, Shillong will study the molecular diversity of Frankia that nodulate several actinorhizal plants in the eastern Himalayas. This research extends previous studies on the molecular diversity of Frankia, an important N2 -fixing bacteria genus, to include strains from the montane region of India. The objectives are to: 1) assess the molecular diversity of Frankia as a function of host plant and geographical location, and 2) use sequence information to add to the current phylogenetic tree of Frankia. Scope: This work builds on the joint expertise of the PIs in using molecular methods to study Frankia. Research results will complement studies done in North America and Oceania, which have yielded differing results regarding the relative importance of host plant species or environmental factors as determinants of Frankia diversity. Practically, this research may prove useful in attempts to use actinorhizal plants in revegetation and restoration efforts, as they are important early colonizers of disturbed sites. This award is jointly supported by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Environmental Biology doc8728 none Pidaparti Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Professor Ramana M. Pidaparti, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, Indiana, Dr. Hedi Hassis, Civil Engineering Department, Ecole Nationale d Ingenieures de Tunis (ENIT), Tunisia, and Dr. Suleyman Kocak, Civil Engineering Department, Cukurova University, Adana, Turkey. They plan to study the fundamental issues in modeling, analysis and design of durable composite systems for use in infrastructure and various composite industries. They plan to develop analytical and computational algorithms and methods using a hierarchical micromechanical approach for developing design guides for more durable thick composite structures. In the first phase the scientists will develop an analytical model for a single ply composite with warping and coupling effects, and extend the formulation to multi-ply laminates. A micromechanical finite element model will be developed based on the analytical formulations. These models will be integrated and systematically validated using benchmark problems and available experimental data. The second phase will investigate the integration of the above models in a unified manner for failure analysis of complex 3D composite structures into an analysis and design research system. Scope: In this project the collaborators plan to combine their expertise in a study to improve the modeling and analysis of composite structures and the establishment of design protocols for these structures. The scientists will collaborate in modeling, analytical formulations and computational simulations. The project is beneficial to the scientists involved from the United States, Tunisia and Turkey, and is expected to give US researchers and graduate students opportunities to work with scientists from foreign countries. The project meets INT criteria for support of cooperative projects that are mutually beneficial doc8729 none Dutta Description: This award supports a US-India cooperative research project on Fundamental Studies of Nucleation and Crystal Growth of Zeolites and Hydrotalcites. US PI Prabir K. Dutta, Ohio State University (OSU) and Raksh Vir Jasra, Central Salt & Marine Chemicals Research Institute (CSMCRI), Bhavnagar, India will study the synthesis of two classes of microporous materials, zeolites, and hydrotalcite-based layered double hydroxides (HT). The objectives are to understand the factors leading to incomplete crystallization and or formation of impurity phases in zeolite X systhesis systems, and to understand the crystallization dynamics of HT-like compounds. Scope: The research groups compliment one another and each group has highly qualified senior researchers with established research records. For CSMCRI, microporous material synthesis is a key technology area and Dr. Jasra has extensive research experience in the area of zeolite synthesis. OSU will focus on the fundamental structural aspects and identify the specific features that control the crystallization of zeolite X. Their collaboration is expected to produce advances that increase scientific understanding of zeolites and hydrotalcites. The project has clear mutual benefits for the US and India, as well as potential for broad commercial application. This award is jointly supported by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Materials Research doc8730 none This proposal seeks a new approach to the problem of improving spatial coherency in large volume laser sources, and of coherent combination of the outputs of several lasers. This approach is based on using guided mode grating resonances. A fundamental aspect of this project is the study of mode competition in a laser resonator that contains a new element: a waveguide grating mirror. This approach is applicable to different kinds of lasers, but it is most advantageous in the case of semiconductor lasers. We expect to improve brightness and high-power semiconductor lasers by a factor of 60 to 100. Potential applications include semiconductor pump lasers, industrial lasers for cutting and welding, lidars, and vertical cavity surface emitting lasers doc8731 none This Doctoral Dissertation Research Investigation analyzes the dynamics of fundraising between incumbents and challengers on a daily basis over an entire election cycle. The principal objective is to estimate momentum effects in incumbents and challengers fundraising. Just as in presidential elections, the expectation exists that potential contributors in congressional races make their allocation decisions in terms of bandwagon effects and expectations about who will win. A candidate s expectations of success depend not only on the amount of cash on hand, but also on the rate at which new money is being accumulated. Hence, the rate at which candidates raise money-the operational definition of momentum in this investigation--is a theoretically important factor in understanding congressional election outcomes as well as the interplay between incumbents and challengers over the course of the campaign. This Doctoral Dissertation Research Investigation promises to enhance our understanding of this important topic doc8732 none The proposed research addresses the direct asymmetric synthesis of amines. Rather than relying on indirect routes such as carbonyl addition or oxidative alkene functionalization to form chiral alpha-branched amines, stereocontrolled free radical addition reactions will be used, creating a new stereocenter and a new carbon-carbon bond in a single operation from achiral precursors. Within this context are addressed three specific aims - internal diastereocontrol by preexisting stereochemistry using temporary tethers in radical cyclization, external stereocontrol in intermolecular radical addition using nitrogen-linked removable and reusable chiral auxiliaries, and catalyst stereocontrol with Lewis acids bearing chiral ligands. Nitrogen-containing groups ( amines ) with precisely defined three-dimensional structure (stereochemistry) are found in many biologically active molecules and designed pharmaceuticals. Experimental methods for the direct synthesis of such compounds with the necessary stereochemical control are uncommon. With the support of the Organic Synthesis Program, Professor Gregory K. Friestad, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Vermont and State Agricultural College, is studying new methods for the synthesis of amines. Professor Friestad explores the introduction of stereochemistry in reactions of free radicals (molecular groupings containing an unpaired electron) through a variety of approaches, including the temporary linking of reactants. These studies are leading to an enhanced understanding of the reaction chemistry of free radicals and to new and efficient methods for the synthesis of biologically active amines doc8733 none This RUI award provides funding for the continuation of the PI s research program in electron scattering off atoms. In the coming period, the PI will measure differential cross sections, using a method of mixtures, and differential cross-section ratios of the electron-impact excitation of neon and argon from the ground state to the first excited state. The ratio measurements will provide sensitive tests of both target structure as well as scattering dynamics in theoretical models doc8734 none This award represents partial funding for The World Congress on Disaster Reduction. This workshop establishes a process for forging a global network of researchers and practitioners who have the knowledge, experience, technical capacity, and credibility to work together with community stakeholders and policymakers to solve local, national and regional problems related to natural and environmental hazards. The two long-term goals of the process represented by the World Congress on Disaster Reduction are to improve sustainability and disaster technical assistance throughout the world. Members of the Alliance of 1,000 will work together to imporve the technical and political capacity at local, national and regional levels for improving sustanability of the built environment and advancing disaster technical assistance. The Alliance is a diverse group of international professionals committed to being part of a global network to solve a myriad ofresearch and practical problems related to natural and environmental hazards. As part of the process, the Alliance will create a set of thirty-three Global Blueprints for Change, authoritative documents containing guidance for focusing research on the indicators of physical, social, enterprise, and environmental vulnerability and directing professional practice toward practical solutions that are likely to reduce these sources of vulnerability. The Global Blueprints for Change will be disseminated at the Pre-Congress Summit Workshop to be convened at ASCE s World Headquarters in Reston, Virginia on August 19-22, . A much larger meeting will take place on August 26-30, by in Washington, D.C. with approximately 1,000 of the nation s and world s experts on disaster reduction. The larger meeting, to be convened at the US Department of State, is the first of what is expected to become a series of recurring global forums convened at regular intervals, to focus the goals and objectives of researchers and practitioners on achieving a sustainable built environment in communities throughout the world and improving disaster technical assistance. Each meeting will seek to marshal and involve all scientific and technical disciplines, all public- and private-sectors, all communities, all nations, and all geographic regions in disaster reduction doc8735 none Ruth This award supports ten US participants in the US-Mauritius Workshop on Integrated Analysis and Management of Natural Resources: The Mauritius Context, in Reduit, Mauritius, from June 25-29, . There will be approximately seventeen additional participants from Mauritius, including researchers from the University of Mauritius, resource managers, and policy makers, as well as a marine conservationist from Kenya. Representatives of funding organizations and observers from SADC (Southern African Development Community) will also attend. The participants represent a broad spectrum of scientific disciplines, including: biology, industrial ecology, agronomy, hydrology, geography, and oceanography. The co-organizers are Professor Matthias Ruth, of the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland; Dr. Arjoon Suddhoo, Executive Director of the Mauritius Research Council; and Dr. Indurall Fagoonee, Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of Mauritius. The purpose of the workshop is to initiate an integrated analysis of the country s natural resources and their uses, identify resource conservation measures, and prepare a long-term research and education program. Mauritius, with its small size, remote location, large population, and limited resource base, is a microcosm of the social and environmental issues that are being encountered elsewhere in the world. Continued economic development and population growth have adversely affected its land and marine resources, and these pressures are expected to significantly increase over the next decade. Furthermore, its extensive coastline makes it susceptible to climate change-induced sea level rise, which will also adversely affect its natural resources. Additionally, the once expanding Mauritian economy is now being threatened by other countries who can provide the same products at a cheaper price. Mauritius is now considering the provision of high-value items and services, such as textiles and tourism, and its policy makers want any such expansion to be based on the sustainable development of its human and natural resources. This workshop will concentrate on four key issues and the interrelationships among them: 1) Physical Infrastructure Development; 2) Water Resources; 3) Land Use and Agriculture, and 4) Marine Systems. In addition two cross-cutting research themes, Island Streams and Industrial Ecology, will be explored in detail. Workshop participants will synthesize and organize existing data on the natural resources in Mauritius, and develop a framework for the integrated analysis of that data. Graphical computer modeling tools will be used to organize and display information and to develop and execute the models that deal with these issues. The workshop will include field visits to a national environmental reserve. University of Mauritius faculty and students will also give poster sessions at the workshop. Few US researchers have collaborated with any Mauritian colleagues, and the co-organizers expect this workshop to promote the development of linkages which will lead to future cooperative research activities. Workshop results will also enable researchers worldwide to gain new knowledge about natural resources and their use in Mauritius, as well as information on the ecological and societal impacts of land use changes. The project supports the participation of one US graduate and two junior investigators. This workshop is jointly supported by the Division of International Programs, the Division of Environmental Biology, and the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences doc8736 none Prop # PI Robert Knox This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessels Melville, Revelle, New Horizon, Sproul operated by the University of California and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Robert Knox is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire dynamic position system, gyro, Doppler Seed Log, back-up evaporator, fume hood, hazmat storage, and a workboat through a group purchase (no monetary award for this item to UCSD doc8737 none This study is will obtain data on oxygen isotope, deuterium hydrogen and chloride values in pore waters from deep sea sediments to reconstruct the temperature, salinity, and oxygen isotope composition of deep ocean waters during the last glacial maximum. The measurements will allow construction of vertical density gradients of the glacial ocean and allow a test of the concept that deep water production was controlled by sea ice during glacial intervals and that the relationship between isotopic composition of sea water and salinity observed in the modern ocean may not hold for the last glacial maximum doc8738 none Bitton Description: This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. Gabriel Bitton, Department of Environmental Engineering Science, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida and Dr. Ali Boularbah, of Cadi Ayyad University in Marrakech, Morocco. The two plan to study heavy metal concentrations and toxicity in environmental media near a mine located in the vicinity of the city of Marrakech, Morocco. Soil, surface runoffs, surface water, and sediments will be tested for heavy metal contamination via chemical analyses and toxicity tests, using MetPlate or MetPad which are specific for heavy metal toxicity. The two also propose to investigate metal hyperaccumulating plants in the sites. The research is aimed at evaluating the impact of mining operations on metals contamination. The proposal activity applies recently developed techniques to addressing problems in ecological impact assessments, and adds ecological knowledge to a new geographic environment, in Morocco, that has not been studied before. Scope: The data generated will be most useful to Moroccan regulatory agencies, and will provide a catalyst for better environmental control, with possible profound beneficial effects on the health of the local people. This applies particularly to the conditions of this area, which is dry for most of the year, but during the rainy season could produce sudden widespread health problems. The proposed work will help in the training of a Moroccan scientist to properly assess terrestrial metals contamination. The proposed research applies techniques for metals toxicity testing developed by Dr. Bitton. Dr. Bitton has worked before in Morocco and collaborated with Moroccan investigators. The US and Moroccan scientists have good research and publication records, and it is expected that this research will result in publications in international scientific journals. The project will also allow a graduate student from the University of Florida to participate in field research at a foreign site, and thus gain experience in international collaboration. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual scientific interest. This project is being supported by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Biological and Environmental Systems doc8739 none The proposed research is focused on the carrier photogeneration mechanism as well as the carrier dynamics in conjugated polymers. These will be investigated by means of two experiments: 1. Fast transient carrier density measurements in the sub-picosecond time regime, using transient photoinduced absorption probed in the 6-10 ?m spectral region, which spans the infrared active vibrational modes that arise from carriers on the polymer backbone; 2. transient photoconductivity measurements. The former measurement will determine the dependence of the carrier quantum efficiency on photon energy and interchain coupling strength, as well as carrier recombination dynamics, while the latter one will probe the carrier dynamics. The goal of this research is to investigate some of the most fundamental questions in the field of conjugated polymers: Are solitons primary excitations? What is the nature of soliton-soliton interaction? Can one cross the insulator-metal transition at high soliton excitation densities? Is carrier generation possible in strictly one-dimensional systems (e.g. on a single polymer chain)? The proposed research involves state-of-the-art experimental techniques, and thus will provide significant educational benefit to the students and post-doctoral fellows involved in the project. %%% This research is focused on the carrier photogeneration mechanism and carrier dynamics in various conjugated polymers by means of transient carrier density as well as transient photoconductivity measurements. The goal of this research is to investigate some of the most fundamental questions in the field of conjugated polymers: Are solitons primary excitations? What is the nature of soliton-soliton interaction? Can one cross the insulator-metal transition at high soliton excitation densities? Is carrier generation possible in strictly one-dimensional systems (e.g. on a single polymer chain)? Or rather, is interchain coupling inherently required for carriers to escape geminate recombination? How are the carrier quantum efficiency, carrier recombination dynamics, and carrier transport affected by modifying the inter-chain coupling? What is the role of neutral excitons in the carrier photoexcitation process? The proposed research will provide the kind of data that should bring a closure to these core questions. Additionally, the proposed research involves state-of-the-art experimental techniques, and thus will provide significant educational benefit to the students and post-doctoral fellows in the Institute for Polymers and Organic Solids at UC Santa Barbara doc8740 none PI : Terzian, Yervant Cornell University Prop: The Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program in Observational Astronomy at Cornell will continue to support eight undergraduate students in the summer for eight weeks. Students will work directly with faculty and research associates in the department of Astronomy and Space Sciences on a variety of projects including optical, infrared, radio radar, planetary and high-energy astrophysics topics. The students research at Cornell will also provide them the opportunity to participate in astronomical observations at facilities used by Cornell researchers, such as Palomar Observatory, Arecibo Observatory, and other National Astronomy Centers. Opportunities and funding for students to travel to scientific meetings will be made available. Students will attend a lecture seminar twice a week by the Astronomy faculty on a wide range of astronomical topics. The students will be encouraged to present their research findings in a department research forum at the end of their term. The Undergraduate Observational Astronomy research program will continue to emphasize those students who are women and under-represented groups and whose own institutions do not provide this type of research experience. Special efforts will continue to facilitate the logistical and cultural aspects of the students research experience at Cornell doc8741 none A broad program of research in atomic, molecular, and optical physics and related areas will be carried out at JILA at the University of Colorado. Three major themes, or focus areas, characterize the effort: ultracold atoms and molecules, including behavior of Bose-Einstein condensates, formation of degenerate Fermi gases, and atom guiding; ultrafast optical science and applications, including coherent control of molecules, quantum information, and probing molecular bonds and dynamics; and novel tools and spectroscopy, including innovative molecular spectroscopic techniques and metrology with femtosecond sources doc8742 none The Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports Professor Piotr Kaszynski, of the Department of Chemistry at Vanderbilt University, for his work on the synthesis of liquid crystalline radicals and the study of their molecular and bulk properties. Following the design and theoretical analysis of new heterocycles containing the thioaminyl fragment as a source of unpaired spin, Professor Kaszynski will carry out the synthesis of model compounds and develop general synthetic approaches to these materials. Calamitic and discotic mesogens based on these systems will then be prepared, leading to the synthesis of polymeric liquid crystalline radicals. The properties of mesogens will be explored both in the pure state and in binary mixtures by a variety of techniques, including thermal and optical characterization, phase miscibility studies, magnetic measurements, and photovoltaic measurements. Magnetic materials are at the heart of numerous technologies. Although such materials have historically been comprised of inorganic compounds, carbon-based (organic) magnetic materials have also been discovered and offer a variety of unique advantages. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Piotr Kaszynski, of the Department of Chemistry at Vanderbilt University, is carrying out the design and synthesis of a new class of organic magnetic materials. Through incorporation of these materials into polymeric and liquid crystalline compositions, Professor Kaszynski addresses fundamental questions regarding the nature of organic magnets and explores their potential for the preparation of new materials displaying important technological properties doc8743 none Klaus W. Hodapp The performance of the 2.2 meter Ritchy-Chretien wide field telescope of the University of Hawaii on Mauna Kea will be improved significantly by building and applying a broad-band optical system focal reducer to accurately match the field of view and the telescope resolution to the pixel sizes of a new 8Kx8K CCD focal plane. This new-capability instrument will enable searches for near-earth-objects, statistical studies of Kuiper belt objects, studies of the variability of young stars, searches for high red-shift supernovae doc8744 none Professor Mark Wightman of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program for his research on microvoltammetric electrodes. The project entails numerous applications of microvoltammetry utilizing electrogenerated chemiluminescence (ECL). ECL of molecules used in organic LEDs will be studied to develop an understanding of the mechanisms of light production from recombinant processes, and to investigate the role of inorganic and organic dopants in these processes. Stochastic approaches will be used to gain insight into ECL mechanisms in aqueous solution. The ECL reaction between tris(bipyridyl)ruthenium(II) and tripropylamine will be studied and then augmented with studies of reactions between the ruthenium species and amino acids. ECL at microelectrodes will be used as a source for near-field optical microscopy imaging. The PI will fabricate thin layer cells to produce very bright ECL light sources. In addition, ECL will be used in detection schemes for chemical analysis. Light emitted when current is run through an electrode offers many possible applications in analytical chemistry. The funded work will explore the mechanism of light production and many potential uses of this light in detection of species in solution and in biological tissue and other matrices. Applications in biology and materials science are likely to result doc8745 none Tokunaga The NSFCAM, an infrared imaging system developed over 10 years ago for use at the Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) will be upgraded to accommodate the improved image quality now given by the telescope when the adaptive optics system is in use and also accommodate new infrared focal plane technology developments. The adaptive optics system enables diffraction limited performance of the telescope, which is a spatial gain in resolution of a factor of about 8 better than without A O. The current focal plane is a 256 by 256 InSb array. The new array will be a x pixel assembly. Upgrades to the current very successful system include: a new array controller, new lens tubes to provide new pixel scales of 0.04 and 0.08 arcseconds per pixel, a dedicated wavefront sensor for NSFCAM, and a new x science grade focal plane that is provided to the project through funds from another source. The instrument includes a Grism and a circular variable filter and a polarimeter which enable spectro-polarimetric imaging at selected spectral bands between 1 and 5 micrometer wavelengths. Science planned includes AO observations of extended sources such as planets, comets star clusters, star-forming regions, the Galactic Center, active galactic nuclei), as well as observations at higher spatial resolution across smaller fields for circumstellar disks, faint companions to near-by stars, and debris disks around stars doc8746 none Michael F. Singer proposes research to develop efficient algorithms to determine the algebraic structure of solutions of differential and difference equations. In particular the investigator proposes to find efficient algorithms to compute the Galois groups for large classes of differential equations and work towards finding a general algorithm to calculate the Galois group of any linear differential equation. He proposes to also find efficient algorithms to compute properties of the equations as reflected in these groups (e.g., solvability in finite terms and solvability in terms of lower order equations) and apply these algorithms to integrability problems of Hamiltonian systems. The investigator will also use these algorithms to give efficient methods to determine properties of algebraic equations (e.g., absolute irreducibility, calculation of Galois groups). He proposes to find refined criteria that will allow one to construct differential equations with a specified Galois group and extend his solution of the inverse problem for connected linear algebraic groups to arbitrary linear algebraic groups. He will apply his recently developed Galois theory of difference equations to similar problems for these equations as well. In particular he proposes to refine the algorithms to determine if difference equations can solved in finite terms and extend this to q-difference equations, greatly generalizing the work of Petkovsek, Wilf and Zeilberger, develop algorithms to determine the Galois group of such an equation and give a constructive solution of the inverse problem for these equations doc8747 none The paleopalynological (pollen, spores, and aquatic microfauna) and paleobotanical (leaf, seeds, wood) collections at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History constitute an important and irreplaceable scientific resource for the study of plant and animal systematics, paleoecology, evolution, and biogeography. The collection was built through the efforts of one curator, Leonard R. Wilson, and his students between the s and s. It currently comprises approximately bulk palynological samples plus ca. 50,000 corresponding prepared microscope slides, and over macrofossil specimens from Oklahoma, the US mid-continent, and around the world. In addition, there are over palynological slides, herbarium sheets, and wood samples of modern taxa from around the world that constitute comparative materials included in the overall collection. Altough formal expansion and curation has been minimal since the mid- s, the University of Oklahoma has renewed its commitment to the palynological and paleobotanical collections with the addition of staff. The collections have been assigned a larger area in a new building. The current project will involve the acquisition of new cases for the collections and hiring temporary staff to move the collections. Later activities wil include computerization of the specimen data. The project will significantly enhance the quality, and accessibility of these important collections for research, teaching, and public programs in the Museum doc8748 none Prop # PI Frederick J. Jones This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessel Wecoma operated by the Oregon State University (OSU) and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Frederick Jones is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire a levelwind head, immersion suits through a group purchase by LDEO (no monetary award for OSU), and a video echo system doc8749 none Erickson, Neal A fundamentally new kind of millimeter-wave receiver will be designed, built, tested and integrated onto the NRAO Greenbank telescope (GBT) of NSF and onto the Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT) being built by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The instrument will measure radiation from astronomical sources across the entire 75 to 110 GHz window of clear atmospheric transmission with 50 MHz of frequency resolution. The unique technologies are 1. The development of monolithic integrated ultra-low noise amplifiers and wideband mixers, 2. Intermediate frequency amplifiers in the front end, 3. A wideband spectrometer backend doc8750 none Walden This award to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts provides instrumentation to significantly improve the oceanographic research capabilities of the research vessels Atlantis, Knorr and Oceanus, three ships operated by WHOI as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. Specifically, this award will provide new sensors for CTD operations on all three ships, a new Chirp echosounder system for R V Atlantis, upgrades to the multibeam echosounders on R V Knorr and Atlantis, spare parts for a lowered acoustic Doppler current profiler, a new marine magnetometer, and refurbishing of a winch for deploying and recovering deep ocean moorings. These improvements will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists using these three ships in their research during and future years doc8751 none Anthony This award supports a two-year collaborative research project between Dr. Elizabeth Anthony, with the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Texas in El Paso, and Dr. Peter Omenda, with the Olkaria Geothermal Project, Kenya Electricity Generating Co. Ltd. In Kenya geothermal resources are focussed on young volcanic centers which sit in the axis of the Kenya Rift. Anthony and Omenda have already established that although these eruptive centers share many common characteristics, such as location and age, each center also has its own distinct evolutionary history. In addition, geophysicists have recently imaged shallow, high-density bodies beneath the volcanoes, which may represent the magma chambers or residues from magma crystallization. The investigators will collect volcanic and geophysical data from four volcanoes in the Kenya Rift, and use it to develop integrated models on the volume and composition of the subsurface magmas. These models will then be used to understand the cause for the different evolutionary histories, and to interpret the exact relationship between the volcanism and the shallow, high-density bodies. This project combines the petrologic expertise of Dr. Anthony with the geothermal and field experience of Dr. Omenda. Through this project the investigators expect to achieve a greater understanding of the history of volcanoes, and of the relationship between observed volcanic units and subsurface geophysics. This knowledge will also aid in future geothermal exploration and exploitation activities, such as the assessment of long-term heat budgets for individual volcanoes. The Division of International Programs and the Division of Earth Sciences are jointly providing support for this project doc8752 none Immigration has a major impact on American society, but there is a large gap between information needs and existing data. The fundamental questions concerning the short run and long run prospects for immigrant children and the children of immigrants, changes in the health and skill composition of entry cohorts of immigrants over time, the transitions between legal and illegal statuses, the contributions of immigrants to the economy and their assimilation remain unanswered. This project addresses these information needs by conducting for the first time, a comprehensive, multi-cohort longitudinal survey of new legal immigrants to the United States based on nationally representative samples of the administrative records, compiled by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), pertaining to immigrants newly admitted to permanent residence. The New Immigration Survey is a follow-up to a pilot project, which received co-funding from NICHD, NIA, NSF and INS, that has attempted to evaluated the cost and feasibility of fielding the full survey proposed here. The results obtained from the pilot project have informed all elements of the design for the full New Immigrant Survey. To monitor changes across cohorts, new samples will be drawn periodically. To monitor adaptation over time, each sample will be interviewed at regular intervals over the life cycle. To assess the immigrants legacy, information will also be obtained about and from their children, both the immigrant children they brought with them and the U.S. citizen children born to them. The project also puts into the public domain public-use databases from these surveys that provide an important source of information to assess U.S. immigration laws, the assimilation and experiences of immigrants, and the impact of immigration in the United States. These data provide prospective and retrospective information about pre- and post-immigration education, work, health, migration, marriage, and fertility for new immigrants. They also provide useful data on health, on economic status, on schooling, and on children s well being from a population heterogeneous in English and native languages doc8753 none Better prediction of flooding in mountainous terrain has been identified as a high priority research area under the interagency U.S. Weather Research Program. Under this award, the Principal Investigator (PI) will perform numerical and observational studies aimed at improving scientific understanding of mesoscale orographic rainfall and flooding. The data set to be used is that collected during the international Mesoscale Alpine Programme (MAP). The following questions will be addressed: 1. What are the effects of atmospheric stability and mountain geometry on the formation and propagation of orographically induced mesoscale convective systems? 2. What are the basic ingredients for producing orographic heavy rainfall or flooding? 3. How do upper-tropospheric high potential vorticity (PV) air masses or troughs interact with deep warm desert air from North Africa to develop heavy orographic rainfall or flooding in the Alps? To address the first question, the PI hypothesizes that propagation of convective systems is controlled by the upstream Froude number and the vertical moisture flux is enhanced by the Alpine concave geometry in the Lago Maggiore area of Italy. The PI will then perform a series of numerical sensitivity experiments involving different atmospheric instabilities and mountain geometry. The research will analyze radar, wind profiler, and satellite data to verify numerical model results and increase understanding of the underlying dynamics. With respect to the second question, it is hypothesized that the basic ingredients for producing orographic heavy rainfall or flooding are: high precipitation efficiency, the presence of low-level jet, a steep mountain, favorable mountain geometry, strong vertical motion induced by the synoptic system, and slow movement of the orographically induced convective system. To test this hypothesis, the PI will produce synoptic and mesoscale analyses of MAP cases as well as historical Alpine and US flooding events to explore the relative importance and relationship between these ingredients. To address the third question, the PI hypothesizes that an upper-tropospheric high PV air mass or trough helps transport deep moist air from the ocean, enhances the southerly low-level jet, and induces upper-level divergence in phase with the orographically forced upward motion, which is favorable for the development of deep convection. Numerical simulation experiments and data analysis will be conducted to explore this hypothesis. Successful completion of this research will provide insights into the important factors that control orographic precipitation. This potentially could lead to improved flash flood and other precipitation forecasts in mountainous terrain doc8754 none This research is focused on quantifying the role of light intensity and organic complexation on rainwater iron speciation. Preliminary data indicate that there is both seasonal and diurnal variability in iron speciation. The results of this research are relevant to atmospheric processes that affect the oxidative capacity of the atmosphere and to the lifetime and bioavailability of iron as a nutrient and its influences on marine primary productivity doc8755 none Michele Lamont Princeton University The study will analyze the categories and criteria used by scholars to evaluate research proposals in the social sciences and humanities. Data will be gathered on the process used to evaluate research and training projects seeking funding from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation - Women s Studies program, the Princeton Society of Fellows, and an anonymous foundation in the social sciences. Of these programs, two are interdisciplinary competitions in the social sciences, two are interdisciplinary competitions in the humanities, and one is concerned specifically with funding research in the field of Women s Studies. The primary focus of the analysis is to explore (1) differences in how proposal in the social and sciences and humanities in general are evaluated, (2) investigate differences in the evaluation process of interpretive and empirical disciplines, and (3) compare the criteria used in the elite competition, the Princeton Society of Fellows, with those used by other programs. The study asks: What categories of evaluation are used? How much weight is given to formal and informal categories of evaluation such as excellence, significance, originality, feasibility, social usefulness, political relevance, elegance, sophistication and objectivity? What criteria are used to assess proposals along these dimensions? Data will be collected through observing funding panels, interviews with panel members and an analysis of written evaluation of proposals submitted. Fieldnotes, interviews and written evaluations will be analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively using content analysis. Unlike most studies of the peer review process, this study is not aimed primarily at determining whether the evaluation process is fair, but rather at understanding the substance of how quality is assessed. It will contribute directly to promoting excellence in the social sciences and humanities. It is expected that empirical knowledge generated will aid experts in addressing normative questions, such as what should count for excellence in the fields under consideration. The project will also make a contribution to the study of distribution of grants and fellowships, a neglected topic in the sociology of higher education and sociology of knowledge doc8756 none Stacey, Gordon J. A highly sensitive spectrometer designed specifically to observe Extragalactic objects for point source spectroscopy in the submillimeter (350, 450, and 610 micrometer) bands with an instantaneous bandwidth of 6.7 GHz. will be designed, engineered, built, calibrated and applied to acquire data to: Investigate star formation in the early universe, measure redshifts of optically obscured distant galaxies, investigate the sources in Ultraluminous galaxies (originally discovered by IRAS) using spectroscopy, and investigate proto-galaxies. This new instrument is a background limited moderate resolution spectrometer called SAGE for Submillimeter Array Grating Explorer doc8757 none The proposed studies are directed toward the development of transition metal catalyzed annulation methodologies for the synthesis of polysubstituted aromatics, heteroaromatics, and monomers for the preparation of conjugated polymers. Sequential cycloaddition cyclization reactions, triggered by regiocontrolled palladium-catalyzed enyne-yne [4+2] benzannulation, afford condensed aromatic systems. Use of aza-enynes or aza-enynophiles similarly leads to pyridine derivatives. Various related synthetic routes to polysubstituted aromatic systems afford monomers for the synthesis of poly(phenyleneethylene)s and are applicable to the construction of a variety of classes of natural products. With this award, the Organic Synthesis Program supports the studies of Professor Vladimir Gevorgyan, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Professor Gevorgyan is discovering and developing new techniques for the synthesis of cyclic and polycyclic organic molecules which represent the core structures of numerous biologically and pharmacologically active compounds. Simple precursors are efficiently converted to the desired target structures through spontaneous cascades of sequential reactions, affording unusual and adaptable new synthetic approaches. These synthetic routes are also applicable to the preparation of precursors for a class of polymers known to display significant electrical and optical properties doc8758 none Eugene Stanley is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to study the anomalous dynamics of water in the supercooled regime, and determine how this behavior relates to the local structure of water. His first project will examine the underlying mechanism that causes this anomalous behavior. Moreover, he will explore critically the liquid-liquid phase transition hypothesis, attempt to either substantiate or refute this hypothesis, and extend this work on water to those other materials that may undergo a liquid-liquid phase transition. His second project will explore the potential energy surface (PES) in configuration space at low temperature. The way in which microscopic restructuring of the hydrogen-bonded network affects the transitions between basins of the PES will be studied, along with determining what kinds of thermodynamic behavior are found close to the glass transition temperature. Finally, efforts will be made to extend the above studies to examine how the introduction of boundaries affects an otherwise bulk system of water molecules. Outcomes from this project are expected to improve the understanding of the effects of basic phenomena such as the hydrophobic effect on biologically significant processes that occur in confined water. Water is an important fluid. Although it has been studied extensively for many years, water s important and unusual properties are still not completely understood. The outcomes of this research will enable increased understanding of how water forms network structures. These network structures impact the behavior of biomolecules in solution and geologically significant mineral-water interactions doc8759 none Economists professional preference for markets has been instrumental in the move to adopt market-based solutions to the regulation of environmental externalities. But the ex ante promise of efficiency compared to command and control approaches does not translate automatically into actual gains. As the costs of compliance with environmental regulations continue to grow, and we increasingly resort to market-based solutions for environmental problems, the realized effectiveness of such measures deserves careful study. This project examines a market-based environmental regulation called the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI). The TRI has been referred to as ...one of the great unintended successes in the recent history of American public policy and is based on the informal, information regulation of manufacturing plants through the mandatory public disclosure of their toxic releases. There are no formal regulations for toxic releases in this country and since the first year of TRI reporting in , TRI reported releases nation wide have fallen by more than 40%. The apparent success of the TRI has led to its popularity both amongst policymakers and environmentalists. Several states have either adopted or are currently considering the adoption of state level community right-to-know laws that would expand the level of reporting required by TRI facilities. Environmental groups are pressuring Congress to do the same at the federal level. This is a somewhat troubling trend as there are several unanswered questions about the TRI. For example, nothing is well known about how the TRI actually works, or how it affects firm behavior. Given that TRI data are self-reported, and published as is with users having virtually no ability to verify the accuracy of the reports, having a better understanding of the effects of TRI regulation on firms is crucial for policy makers to make an informed decision regarding the effectiveness of the TRI as a policy tool. To answer some of these questions, this project uses data provided by the TRI and links this data to the Pollution Abatement Control Expenditure Survey (PACE), the Annual Survey of Manufactures (ASM), and the Census of Manufactures (CM). This will be the first full linking of these data sets. Variation in state level community right-to-know requirements are used to try to separate TRI induced responses by firms from other trends. Attention is focused initially on petroleum refineries -one of the most heavily regulated industries in the country which showed some of the largest reductions in reported TRI releases before expanding the study to include other industries. An events-study methodology is used to look at stock market reactions to TRI announcements to determine whether the regulation actually provided new information to stockholders. This provides evidence as to whether investors believed that the unexpected information on TRI releases could have an effect on firm profitability that could influence firm behavior. Then, the investigator looks more closely at plant-level responses to the TRI and estimates (1) the relationship between reported TRI reductions and pollution abatement expenditures to estimate whether reported reductions are related to abatement activities of regulated pollutants, and (2) the relationship between reported TRI releases and plant level productivity doc8760 none Peoples, John The Sloan Digital Sky Survey project is a major inter-agency and private-foundation partnership funded ground-based effort to map 10,000 square degrees of the sky at a spatial resolution of 0.40 arcseconds in the spectral bands at: 0.35, 0.48, 0.62, 0.76 and 0.91 micrometer wavelengths with an SNR of 10 for 22.3 stellar magnitudes at 0.62 micrometers wavelengths. The survey goals are to record 900,000 field galaxies down to red magnitudes of 17.7. Further details of this ambitious survey are given at: http: www.astro.princeton.edu PBOOK intro intro.htm . Three aspects of the project will be supported in whole or in part over a five-year period. These are Observing Systems (salaries and maintenance), Data Processing and Distribution, including data distribution and data base user support, and salaries for observers and telescope instrument specialists. Continuation of the observing program to acquire scientific data and the preparation of that data to enable general access by the broad astronomical community are the primary thrusts of this effort doc8761 none Systemic acquired resistance (SAR) is induced after a local infection by necrotizing pathogens and renders uninfected parts of the plant resistant to a variety of normally virulent viruses, bacterial and fungi. SAR is associated with the inducible expression of pathogenesis-related (PR) genes. In dicots, the phytohormone salicylic acid (SA) is both necessary and sufficient for the induction of SAR. The NPR1 protein is a key regulator of SA-mediated SAR in Arabidopsis. npr1 mutants fail to express SAR related PR genes and display enhanced susceptibility to pathogen infection even after treatment with SA. Furthermore, over-expression of NPR1 in Arabidopsis leads to enhanced disease resistance to both bacterial and fungal pathogens in a dose-dependent manner. We have now shown that over-expression of NPR1 in rice leads to enhanced resistance to the bacterial pathogen Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae (Xoo), a serious disease of rice throughout the world. In addition, we have isolated three resistance signaling components from rice: a rice NPR1 homolog, NH1, and two genes that encode products that interact with NH1 and NPR1; a bZIP transcription factor, rTGA2.1, and a previously unidentified signaling component, NRR (Negative Regulator of disease Resistance). The long-term goal of this proposal is to further elucidate the signal cascade governing plant disease resistance and to create novel strategies for disease control in rice and other cereal crops doc8762 none A specimen-level database of the North American and Mexican wild bees at the University of Kansas New computational and information technology provides innovative opportunities to use data resident in museum collections to address research projects involving conservation, predictive modeling, visualization of distributions, as well as other biological phenomena. Unfortunately, few databases for insects or other invertebrates exist for use with these new tools. The wild bees (superfamily Apoidea), with over 20,000 described species world-wide, play a profound role in the economy of nature; as pollinators, they are critically important in structuring ecosystems and have a major impact on agriculture. Data in the excellent bee collection at the University of Kansas will be entered in a modern relational database in order to bring them into a currency for research in biological informatics. This project will 1) capture specimen data from 35,400 specimens of Mexican and 120,000 specimens of North American Apoidea (bees) (7 families; North American and 838 Mexican species) from the collection of the Division of Entomology of the KU Natural History Museum Biodiversity Research Center in a fully relational database; 2) provide georeferencing (latitude and longitude) for locality information so that the data are maximally useful to the greatest diversity of users; and 3) make this database available in fully searchable form on the World Wide Web using Z39.50 query and retrieval protocol. This will be the first comprehensive database of specimen data for Mexican and North American Apoidea (bees) and will include nearly 200,000 individual specimen records, representing data for over 3,100 species, when combined with existing data for Mexican bees. Once the data for these bees are captured, verified and accurately georeferenced, they become permanently accessible to the user community. The database will be web accessible using Z39.50 protocols for search and data retrieval. Retrieved data will be interoperable with other bee databases that may be developed or placed on-line, and with geospatial, modeling and other analytical tools (such as Species Analyst, Biodiversity Workshop, and Arcview) for research in systematics, ecology, and biodiversity dynamics. Programs for mapping, visualization and modeling of biodiversity data are constantly improving, thereby increasing the value of the bee database. By bringing this material into a database, particularly with georeferenced locality data, it will be possible to associate distributional patterns with those of other plant and animal groups for broader biogeographical studies incorporating G.I.S. information on temperature clines, soil types, and other physical data. The data will be available for use in policy decisions concerning native pollinators, agriculture, biological diversity, biogeography, conservation, and resource management as well as basic and comparative research programs doc8763 none The Pullen Herbarium of the University of Mississippi was founded in and is the largest public herbarium in the state. It contains over 62,000 accessioned vascular plant specimens and a backlog of over 40,000 specimens including bryophytes, lichens and myxomycetes. A majority of the specimens are from Mississippi and the southeastern United States. The recent reinvigoration of botanical studies in the departments of Biology and Pharmacognosy and in the Thad Cochran National Center for Natural Products Research has led the University of Mississippi to invest in faculty, research infrastructure and curricula in the plant sciences. In order to meet these challenges and serve as a repository for research vouchers, the Pullen Herbarium requires the installation of a mobile storage compactor system to increase collections storage, new cabinets to fill the compactor and to replace damaged cabinets, and the equipment, supplies and personnel to mount and accession the backlog. Several hundred historically important collections from the turn of the century will also be conserved and digitally documented. These collection improvements will increase total herbarium storage, allowing expansion. Due to the dearth of information on the flora of Mississippi when compared to most other states, funds are also requested to computerize collection data from Pullen Herbarium specimens. Personnel and equipment are required to enter specimen data into a relational database and build a searchable, multi-user platform on the World Wide Web, allowing information to be readily available for research, education, and public knowledge. An integrated three-year plan for collection improvement and computerization is presented that will stimulate research on the plants of Mississippi, encourage interdisciplinary contact, train students in curation and plant taxonomy, make important data readily available for research, and conserve the Pullen Herbarium for the future doc8737 none This study is will obtain data on oxygen isotope, deuterium hydrogen and chloride values in pore waters from deep sea sediments to reconstruct the temperature, salinity, and oxygen isotope composition of deep ocean waters during the last glacial maximum. The measurements will allow construction of vertical density gradients of the glacial ocean and allow a test of the concept that deep water production was controlled by sea ice during glacial intervals and that the relationship between isotopic composition of sea water and salinity observed in the modern ocean may not hold for the last glacial maximum doc8765 none This program is to build and use an interferometric array of six 3.5m diameter radio telescopes to image the Sunyaev Zel dovich (SZ) effect in clusters of galaxies. The array will be used to provide a new view of cosmic structure formation at high redshifts by taking a complete, redshift-independent inventory of galaxy clusters. It will obtain independent estimates of the Hubble Constant H0, the deceleration parameter q0, and the cosmological matter density WM. These measurements will then lead to independent constraints on the total energy density of the universe and the contribution from a cosmological constant. The new array, after its initial survey of clusters, will be used in conjunction with the Owens Valley Millimeter Array of six 10m antennas, and perhaps eventually as part of CARMA (Combined Array for Millimeter Astronomy), to form a heterogeneous array with many advantages for high spatial dynamic range imaging of general astronomical phenomena. After the SZ measurements are completed the array will be made available to the US astronomical community doc8766 none Kaletunc Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Dr. Gonul Kaletunc, Department of Food, Agriculture and Biological Engineering, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio and a Turkish team led by Dr. Faruk Bozoglu, Food Engineering Department, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. They plan to investigate the antimicrobial effectiveness of High Hydrostatic Pressure (HHP) alone and in combination with bacteriocins in bacteriological food liquids such as broth, milk and orange juice. A Gram-positive pathogen, Listeria monocytogenes CA and a Gram-negative foodborne pathogen, Salmonella enteridis FDA, and a spoilage bacteria Pseudomonas fluorscens FM1 will be used to inoculate milk and orange juice products prior to pressure treatment. The data will provide quantitative information on the deactivation kinetics of selected microorganisms as a function of pressure and bacteriocin concentration. Inclusion of the thermal and rheological characterization of pressure bacteriocin treated products and their comparison with those of thermally-processed materials will provide information on the stability, quality, and consumer acceptability of the products in comparison to conventionally used thermal processing. Scope: This is a relatively new area of basic research with the potential for significant industrial application in the food and other industries. Dr. Bozoglu has expertise in food microbiology and has been working on HHP application to food preservation. A graduate student in his laboratory would be involved in the project. Dr. Kaletunc s expertise is in the physical characterization of food materials, and her laboratory is equipped with especially modern equipment needed for this research. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research by US and foreign scientists in areas of mutual benefit. The Division of Bioengineering and Environmental Systems and the Division of International Programs are co-funding this project doc8767 none G. Parker, University of Minnesota The PI proposes to develop a numerical model to accurately predict the downstream fining of sediment in low gradient, sand-bed rivers. This phenomenon is very important in the understanding of river dynamics, long-term landscape evolution, and channel alteration. This model will account for key physical mechanisms occurring in the sediment transport process. Laboratory experimental results obtained at the University of Minnesota and at the Twente University will be used to validate the sediment transport models. Overall results will be compared to field test data obtained from rivers in Papua New Guinea and Argentina doc8768 none Shore The goal of this research is to better understand the energetics and dynamics that lead to the formation of inorganic nitrates. A series of inorganic nitrates will be studied using variable temperature solid-state NMR spectroscopy and variable temperature diffraction measurements. The atomic positions and electrostatic interactions will be characterized. These measurements will then be correlated with the measurement of the motion of the nitrate ion, from NMR spectroscopy, and will be used to develop an atomic-level model that is consistent with the temperature dependent behavior. With this model, a greater understanding of the relationship between dynamics and electrostatic interactions in inorganic nitrates will be obtained. This work will also lead to a better understanding of the formation of ionic materials that contain polyatomic ions. This project initiates a collaboration between investigators from the United States, South Korea, and Australia that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. The United States group will provide the solid state NMR measurements, the South Korean group will provide the neutron diffraction measurements, and the Australian group will provide the single crystal X-ray diffraction measurements. This collaboration has the potential to be long term and to provide fundamental understanding of many important solid state inorganic materials doc8769 none Miller Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Professor Jan D. Miller, Department of Metallurgical Engineering, University of Utah at Salt Lake City, Utah and Dr. Mehmet S. Celik, Mining Engineering Department, Istanbul Technical University (ITU), Istanbul, Turkey. They plan to study the application of a new floatation technique in the processing of trona ore to remove insoluble contaminants. Trona is the source of soda ash, which is widely used in many consumer products. Current methods of recovery involve extraction of trona by conventional underground or solution mining methods, and in both cases the ore is dissolved to remove impurities. Preprocessing by floatation has not been possible until recently, when a unique flotation process was discovered at the University of Utah to allow for such preprocessing. Utilizing this process for preconcentration of trona, will make efficient use of trona resources, and will minimize the environmental impact of the process operations. Scope: The collaborators will combine their expertise in this research and will build on earlier successful collaboration in the area of soluble salt flotation. The proposed work should result in a procedure, for trona extraction, that is more efficient, and more environmentally benign than existing methods. The project has potential benefits to the United States and Turkey, because the United States is the largest producer of trona and Turkey ranks second in terms of trona reserves. The researchers and institutions involved in the project are well known for their contribution in the area of soluble salt flotation. The project meets INT criteria for support of cooperative projects that are mutually beneficial. This project is funded by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Chemical and Transport Systems doc8770 none Dekany, R. Tomographic Wavefront Sensing for Adaptive Optics Using a new, multiple channel wavefront sensor in conjunction with the existing Palomar Adaptive Optics System, the researchers will conduct experiments in atmospheric tomography to reconstruct the three-dimensional distribution of refractive index fluctuations about the 5m telescope at Palomar Mountain. This information will be used to answer fundamental questions on the time evolution of these index fluctuations, including the stability of discreet turbulence layers in the atmosphere. This information will guide the development of future advanced adaptive optics systems that use multiple deformable mirrors to uniformly correct wide fields of view, extending the usable scientific field for adaptive optics and enabling new scientific programs doc8771 none Martin, C. A Phase-Binning CCD for Optical Pulsar Studies: Polarization Capability 2. Distinguish between thermal and non-thermal emission mechanisms producing the optical light; 3. Allow a measurement of the temperature of old neutron stars which are weak or absent in the X-ray band; and 4. Permit a search for evidence of heating by exotic processes such as magnetic monopoles doc8772 none Paul L. Richards Fully lithographed bolometer arrays using Voltage Biased Superconducting Bolometer (VSB) technology will be used to explore planar band-defining filters and RF multiplexers for use with antenna-coupled bolometers and to fabricate and test prototype arrays of antenna coupled hot-electron bolometers with RF multiplexers and filters, and fabricate and test 32 x 32 absorber-coupled focal-plane bolometer arrays. Also work to explore integrating these arrays with a recently developed readout multiplexer that uses only a single SQUID per row of detectors will continue. This technology will provide new high sensitivity detectors in the currently unexplored but astrophysically interesting sub-millimeter part of the electromagnetic spectrum doc8773 none This project will create the first computer-based key and digital image guide for Amazonian pollen. The diversity of vascular plants in Amazonia is incredibly high and may exceed 80,000 species. Because of this diversity, identifying pollen can be extremely difficult. The key, which will be developed from a comprehensive collection of high-resolution digital images taken from vouchered herbarium materials, will greatly facilitate the identification of pollen. The proposed collection of images will contain 20,000 images of ca. 3,000 species. Although this appears to be a small portion of the 80,000 species present in Amazonia, that fact reflects the state of our knowledge and the enormity of the task facing taxonomists who are trying to document the biodiversity of tropical rainforests. This project will be an important step toward facilitating identification of a large component of the biodiversity. The database developed will prolong the usefulness of pollen reference collections and broaden access to modern pollen reference collections by providing keys and images in digital format (WWW and CD-ROM). This will represent the first herbarium-based pollen flora for the Amazon basin, and an order of magnitude more taxa than in the largest of the published fossil-pollen guides. Morphological data and digital images will be stored in a relational (FileMaker Pro 5), and macros will be written to allow use of the database as a multiple access key. Advantage will be taken of the graphics capability of computers to provide a visual, rather than text-based, key to pollen types. The key and images will be useful for teaching palynology and for research on current and Pleistocene floras of Amazonia doc8774 none Prop # PI Braxton L. Tesh This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessel Savannah operated by Skidaway Institute of Oceanography (SkIO), University of Georgia and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Braxton Tesh is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire a gyro compass and auto pilot, radar, GMDSS VHF Radio, escape breathing apparatus, GPS, digital fathometer, EPIRB, and immersion suits through a group purchase made by LDEO (no monetary award for SkIO doc8775 none Forrest Description: This award is for support of a joint research project by Dr. M. Gregory Forest, Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Dr. Otis C. Wright, Mathematics and Computer Science Department at the United Arab Emirates University, Al-Ain, United Arab Emirates (UAE). The research addresses the nonlinear Schrodinger (NLS) equation with nonlinearity, which is the governing equation of envelope pulse propagation in any weakly dispersive and nonlinear system. The purpose of the collaboration is to build on results already obtained for the defocusing NLS equation and the coupled NLS system of equations, and the application of these results to optical pulse transmission. Scope: This award will allow a US scientist to collaborate with a scientist working in the UAE. Dr. Wright is a US scientist working abroad. He is a recent Ph.D. graduate who is engaged in educating young college students in a foreign country where it is likely that little research in his field is being carried out. It is important for him to maintain his collaboration with scientists in the United States at this stage in areas where there is mutual benefit. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting US-foreign scientific collaboration in areas of mutual benefit. The Division of International Programs and the Division of Mathematics provide funding for this project doc8776 none This research focuses on the synthesis and photochemistry of new super photoacids, including their application to biological and photoresist systems. Proton transfer represents one of the two most fundamental processes in nature, yet techniques for studying the dynamics of this process have relied on relatively inefficient, commercially-available materials. This is in contrast to electron transfer, which has seen an overwhelming synthetic, mechanistic, and dynamic effort. Although many similarities exist between the two, including solvent-dependent kinetics rationalized through Marcus theory, photoexcitation creates electrochemical driving forces, which are readily rationalized by an analysis of oxidation reduction potentials. The occurrence of proton transfer in the excited state presents unique opportunities to study the chemistry and dynamics of this fundamental process using ultrafast time-resolved techniques, if the electronic structure of the excited state can be understood. This project involves the design and synthesis of new substrates that test concepts of structure, driving force, and entropy and that allow correlations to be made with theory. This approach uses a knowledge of the electronic structure of excited-states of acids to design molecules which exhibit enhanced excited-state acidity. Some of these, which are termed super photoacids, are the strongest reversible photoacids known. Synthetic methodologies will be developed to achieve molecules whose photoacidity can be tailored thereby providing new methods for studies of proton transfer reactions and novel polymerization catalysts. The research introduces graduate and postdoctoral students to new concepts in acid-base chemistry and kinetics, and to the methodologies to examine these transient effects. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the research of Professor Laren Tolbert of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Institute of Technology. Professor Tolbert will focus his research efforts on the synthesis and excited state chemistry of molecules, called photoacids, whose acid-base properties change on optical excitation. These molecules, which can exhibit immense, but transient, changes in acid-base properties, provide new methods to study acid-base chemistry, and novel approaches to photoactivated, polymerization catalysts. Professor Tolbert is expanding his research efforts through collaborations with Professors Robert Dickson in his Department, Juergen Ruehe of Frieburg University and Menachim Gutman at the University of Tel Aviv. Through Professor Tolbert s research, graduate and postdoctoral students will be exposed to new concepts in acid-base chemistry, and the methodology to examine these transient effects doc8777 none Some of the most interesting objects in number theory are encoded into integer valued functions f(p,a) whose arguments consist of a prime p and a tuple of integers a. (The prototypical example is f(a,p)=(a p), the Legendre symbol; more general examples are given by p-coefficients of L-functions of various algebraic-geometric objects depending on parameters a.) Such functions f are generally not polynomials in (p,a) hence they ``transcend the language of algebraic geometry . The first main idea of the proposal is to enlarge usual algebraic geometry by ``adjoining one new operation, the ``Fermat quotient operation which, on the adeles of the rational numbers, acts as by sending the p-th entry x(p) of the adele into the Fermat quotient of x(p) with respect to p. The main conjectural principle proposed will be that the ring of functions of this larger geometry (called the ring of Fermat adeles) can be used to ``represent many of the interesting arithmetic functions f as above. For each fixed p, such a geometry has been introduced by the investigator in his previous research; the main task in the present proposal is to make p vary ``geometrically . The strategy of the approach, at least for Abelian varieties, is to use Siegel differential modular forms (which are an analogue, in this larger geometry, of usual Siegel modular forms). The study of Siegel differential modular forms is the second main theme of the proposal. A different motivation for the study of Siegel differential modular forms can be described as follows. On the ``moduli space A of principally polarized Abelian schemes of dimension g there is a natural equivalence relation ~ given by ``isogeny . The quotient A ~ does not exist, in any reasonable sense, in usual algebraic geometry, but it has a nice substitute in the larger, ``Fermat adelic geometry . The embedding of A ~ into a projective space should be given by Siegel differential modular forms in a way similar to the embedding of A into a projective space, given by usual Siegel modular forms. A series of problems then arise as to the ``projective geometry and ``cohomology of A ~. This point of view can be generalized to other quotients X ~ where X is a scheme of finite type over the integers and ~ is an ``arithmetically defined equivalence relation on X. One of the main problems of number theory is to understand how various quantities that naturally depend on prime numbers vary as the prime number varies. The variation of these quantities is not governed by classical algebraic geometry in the sense that these quantities are not polynomial or algebraic functions of the variable prime number. The investigator proposes to develop a new geometry that would describe this variation. This geometry would be obtained from the classical algebraic geometry by adjoining one more operation, the Fermat quotient. Once geometry has been enlarged in this way, a series of puzzling quotient objects that did not have any geometric meaning in classical algebraic geometry start making sense geometrically. This particular way of looking at arithmetic functions and quotient problems in arithmetic algebraic geometry should bring a new, geometric, intuition into the study of these objects doc8778 none This project involves the continuation of work on a longitudinal study of the development and implications of moral emotions (shame, guilt and empathy). A secondary focus is on the development of constructive versus destructive anger management strategies. The on-going longitudinal family study is based on a cohort of 380 children, their parents and their grandparents. The diverse intergenerational sample was initially studied when the children were in the 5th grade. Information regarding children s psychological, social and academic attributes was provided by peers, teachers, and the children themselves. Parents and grandparents reported family environment, childrearing attitudes, and attachment style. Follow-up assessments were completed when the children were in the 7th 8th grade, and phone interviews were conducted with a sub-sample of the children at ages 18-19. These data can help to answer questions about individual differences in moral emotional style, and how those differences predict social, emotional and behavioral adjustment. The data also provide information about the developmental origins of moral emotional style, including the parental and family factors that shape children s emerging tendencies to experience shame, guilt and empathy, and the experiences in late childhood and adolescence that cause shifts in moral emotional style. One goal of the project is to understand how children develop adaptive as opposed to maladaptive means of handling anger. Together, the data collected over time and across generations should substantially extend the literature, providing clear directions for early intervention with children at-risk for the development of maladaptive patterns of moral affect and behavior. By identifying specific characteristics that are most highly associated with key moral behaviors, this project can help pinpoint specific avenues for intervention. The findings should be of broad interest to parents, teachers, and clinicians, and the results should inform those seeking to intervene with individuals who display a pattern of aggressive and antisocial behavior doc8779 none Parsley Support is being provided for the travel expenses of speaker participants of four mini-symposia presented at the 20th annual meeting of the Society of Physical Regulation in Biology and Medicine, held in Charleston, SC, January 10-14, . Two of the mini-symposia are in the newer areas of investigation Tissue Engineering and Nanotechnology in Medicine and the other two symposia address advanced topics in Biomechanical Force and Cell Regulation and Mechanical Control of Cardiovascular Cell and Muscle Processes. The topics included in the symposia are of growing importance in biomedical engineering research in fostering the development of such new medical technologies. Post-conference publication of manuscripts from the mini-symposia is to be made in a special volume of the journal Biomedical Micro Devices (Kluwer Publishers doc8780 none Malek Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Dr. R.I. Malek, Materials Research Laboratory, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania and Dr. Z. H. Khalil, Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Assiut University, Assiut, Egypt, and Dr. Said Saad Imbaby, Mining Department, Faculty of Engineering, Assiut University, Assiut, Egypt. They plan to: a) expand the fundamental understanding of the mechanism of evolution of nanostructure in aluminosilicate frameworks, b) explore utilization of cement kiln dust (as a model industrial waste) in the manufacture of masonry and building products, c) evaluate the products and ensure their compliance with the standards specification in both the United States and Egypt, and d) provide sound scientific bases that facilitate the use of any industrial waste to produce nanostructured building products. Scope: This project combines the expertise of scientists from the United States and Egypt to develop new structural materials and to reduce environmental degradation inherent in existing systems. Dr. Malek s laboratory at Penn State University has some of the most advanced testing equipment for materials. Dr. Malek has worked on alternate construction materials for several years and will be responsible for much of the analytical studies and the materials characterization. The Egyptian scientists have access to kiln dust, the material that is produced as an environmentally hazardous byproduct in cement making, and have the facility needed to manufacture usable construction material from that dust. They will participate in the characterization work during their visits to Penn State University. The project will have a significant impact in Egypt by providing new building material in place of the topsoil, which is no longer replenished after the building of the Aswan Dam. The project may help provide less expensive masonry material and at the same time reduce pollution from cement factories. The project meets INT criteria for support of cooperative projects that are mutually beneficial. This project is supported jointly by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Civil and Mechanical Systems doc8781 none Energy availability is an environmental factor that plays a role in regulating reproduction in animals, both wild and domestic, but we know very little about the mechanisms that link energy availability to fertility and reproductive behavior. When food is scarce, reproductive functions such as seasonal breeding, puberty, and lactation in mammals may be strongly reduced. Not long ago the molecule leptin, naturally made and secreted by fat body cells, was discovered to act as a hormone affecting metabolism. It now appears that leptin may signal the brain about how much metabolic fuel is available for an animal, and it may also act as a modulator of reproductive readiness. This project addresses those hypotheses using pharmacology, molecular biology and behavioral approaches on a rodent species chosen for its comparatively short and very regular periodic ovulatory (estrous) cycle. The project determines the critical events involving leptin s association with the phenomenon of anestrous (the disappearance of the usual estrous) when oxidizable metabolic fuel is low, even when body fat levels may be high. The project will also localize where in the brain the leptin acts to influence estrous cyclicity. Results will give a novel perspective for understanding the relationship between energy levels and reproductive functions, and how organisms adapt their reproductive strategies to environmental perturbations, so the impact will extend beyond neuroendocrinology. In addition, the project will foster considerable integration of education with research, and of fostering careers of women in biology, because of the location at a largely undergraduate school and because of the strong involvement of the principal investigator with teaching and mentoring students doc8782 none The use of databases in herbarium management has become a vital tool in the organization and analysis of large collections. First the proposal focuses on completing a database for the ASU lichen herbarium comprising c. 105,000 records, of which approximately half are currently databased. A large fraction of these ASU collections (c. 30,000) are relevant to the greater Sonoran Desert Lichen Flora Project, which involves over 60 collaborators from 15 countries. Most of these collaborators have participated on one or more of the 16 major field expeditions conducted over the past 12 years and have accumulated an additional c. 70,000 collections. A second major objective is to database these records and add them to the 30,000 subset from the first database thereby creating a second database specific to the Sonoran Desert Lichen Flora of c. 100,000 records. In addition to being able to access these two databases through the lichenological community (as is currently available through our homepage http: mgd.nacse.org Arizona - and its links), the databases will be accessible to a much larger community (LTER and ASU scientists, K-12 educational community, resource managers and conservationists) through an ongoing ASU database project entitled Networking our Research Legacy and administered by the ASU Center for Environmental Studies. Once constructed the databases will be maintained as part o the long-term database activities at the ASU LTER site doc8409 none and This project examines local perceptions of sociocultural and economic changes often associated with globalization processes in three subsistence-oriented Inupiat societies in the north Bering Strait region of Alaska. The study focuses on three ethnically related but sociopolitically, culturally, and economically distinct Inupiat communities: people from Ingaliq on Little Diomede Island; from Wales, on the northeastern Bering Strait coast; and from King Island. The study addresses change components that have influenced identity in the areas of foraging technologies and traditions. It relies on a variety of methods, including participant observations and multigenerational family interviews. The researchers will collaborate with a wide spectrum of residents in each community and will employ local adults and students as consultants, research assistants, and interns in an effort to provide locally meaningful research experiences doc8784 none The aim of this proposal is to better understand the extent to which the oxidation of sulfide minerals is controlled by biologic processes. In parallel, this study will also evaluate how much primary biological productivity (bacterial) is supported by sulfide minerals in the vicinity of hydrothermal vents. The study uses samples previously collected at the Endevour and Middle Valley segments of Juan de Fuca. Studies include RNA-based microbial surveys to determine the extent to which they live on sulfide surfaces, microscopic (fluoresence and SEM EDX) analses to look for patterns of biological activity on various minerals, and laboratory culture studies. Microbial diversity will be evaluated using seveal techniques including DNA extraction and analysis doc8785 none The Tulane University Fish Collection, with 7.1 million fluid-preserved specimens in over 190,000 lots, is one of the largest collections in the world and is recognized as a National Center of Ichthyology resource collection. The collection is unique among North American fish collections in having large lot sizes and comprehensive regional (southeastern) coverage. Because of the collection s high concentration on southeastern fishes, some areas of the collection have serious overflow problems. Fluid specimens in the collection are preserved in 50% isopropanol, which many in the fish collection community regard as inferior to ethyl alcohol. One previous ( ) and a current grant ( ) have allowed us to re-curate (re-jar, re-alcohol and re-shelve) roughly 112,000 (67%) of the 167,000 lots preserved in isopropyl alcohol, and to move large specimens and long-term survey collections to a new facility, thereby reducing overcrowding in the main fish collection. The decision to re-alcohol the collection was based on reviewer and panel recommendations from the first collection improvement grant. This proposal requests support for personnel and supplies to complete curatorial tasks currently underway. Our goals for the renewal grant are: 1) to transfer the remaining 55,000 isopropanol preserved lots to 70% ethanol; 2) continue to reduce jar sizes to increase shelf space; 3) transfer remaining lots of common southeastern species to the overflow storage facility; 4) inventory remaining lots against the collection database; and 5) arrange all lots by drainage. By the conclusion of this project, the entire fish collection will be re-alcoholed, reorganized and verified against the collection database. The improvements will greatly increase accessibility to material in the collection by researchers and curatorial staff, and ensure that preservation quality of the collection will remain high for many years to come. In re-alcoholing the collection, we are following procedures recommended by other curators. We are conducting experiments to assess the effectiveness of the alcohol-transfer procedures, and modifying procedures as appropriate to increase preservation quality. We will expand this practice in the proposed project as we recurate lots that have been compromised most by storage in isopropanol. We will share the results of our experiments with the collection community, through professional meeting presentations, publications and the Museum web site. This way others will be able to make use of the re-alcoholing procedures developed as a result of this project doc8786 none The Florida State Collection of Arthropods (FSCA), one of the largest arthropod museums in North America, has 8.18 million prepared specimens and over 3,400 primary types. The FSCA has far outgrown its original capacity and presently has very large holdings from the southeastern United States, the circum-Caribbean area, South America and Oriental regions. Most groups comprising the FSCA s major taxonomic strengths are beyond current drawer capacity, allowing no expansion and little proper curation. Many thousands of pinned and labeled specimens, including many already identified to species, are housed off-site and or in miscellaneous, poorly accessible storage boxes. With adequate cabinet and drawer space, these specimens can be curated and made available for research and education. This project will add about drawers and over 130 cabinets in order fully to use available space in the museum. It will increase the museum s drawer capacity by 48% and allow full incorporated of over 1.45 million prepared specimens of Lepidoptera, Dipters, Hemiptera, Homoptera, Odonata, and Coleoptera. This will alleviate urgent space needs of the FCSA, house the entire pinned collection in drawers, allow further mission-oriented growth, and make valuable material and data available to the public and scientific communities doc8787 none Katiyar Description: This award supports a US-India cooperative research project on Electroceramic Thin Films for Microelectronic Devices. The collaborators are Ram S. Katiyar of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) and Dinesh C. Agrawal of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IITK). They will study fundamental structure-property relationships in electroceramic thin films, particularly novel ferroelectric (FE) and microwave dielectric materials. They will use various techniques to probe their micro- to nano-scale composition, structure and characterization. The aim is to enhance scientific knowledge of these novel materials and to consider their applications in memory and microwave devices. Scope: This award will continue a collaboration between Katiyar and Agrawal and a partnership between the UPR and the IITK that was initiated by the Division of International Programs with support from the United States India Fund. The IITK is one of the premier research institutions in India with excellent infrastructure for high quality research and training of graduate undergraduate students. UPR research activities have risen sharply and Katiyar has equipped an excellent facility there for research in electroceramic thin film materials. He is a first-rate researcher and has mentored a large number of students, many of whom have made outstanding contributions in their respective fields. This award is jointly supported by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Materials Research doc8788 none WormWeb: Geo-referencing computerized data and linking databases in the Manter Laboratory of Parasitology The University of Nebraska State Museum Manter Laboratory of Parasitology (HWML) proposes to increase direct user access to the HWML collections via standard internet protocols by implementing WormWeb. The two primary goals for this activity include (1) Associating each parasite specimen in the HWML database PARASITE with geographic locality data using a relational database structure and first level normalization; (2) Entering the Bolivian Mammal Parasite Collection data in the HWML into PARASITE -- linking parasite data with the mammal source data using a relational database structure and first level normalization. The HWML is one of the most significant centers of Systematic Parasitology in the world. Databases connected via the internet enable researchers to access and analyze data in ways never before possible, producing important new results and insights into causes of biological diversity, rates of speciation, and general evolutionary and ecological processes. The database in the Manter Laboratory of Parasitology (HWML) will be connected to other WWW resources via WormWeb. Making HWML data available on the WWW will give researchers worldwide the ability to obtain detailed information on parasites and their hosts. The establishment of such internet-based resources is essential for the continued growth of biodiversity research. The addition of georeferenced data will vastly increase the usefulness of the database. Researchers will be able to quickly and efficiently determine where particular specimens and species of parasites were collected. Trends in species richness or abundance through time and space can be investigated doc8789 none With its move to larger quarters amongst the other Berkeley Natural History Museums, the University and Jepson Herbaria are entering a period of increased growth and use. The bryophyte collection and associated programs of research and training have grown considerably in recent years. The recent addition of the Norris collection has resulted in a 250% increase in size of the bryophyte collection. The present project is to install a compactor system to house the new collections, which will increase access to these specimens by the scientific and other user communities doc8790 none This is a proposal to continue a long-term study of a color-banded population of western bluebirds whose sons exhibit remarkable behavioral plasticity in the form of staying with parents for winter, breeding on their own, helping at their parents nest, and feeding at nests of widowed females. The specific aim of this study is to determine the benefits for young males remaining on their parents territory through the first winter, a behavior that is a necessary precondition for further interaction with parents later in life. Mistletoe berries are a stable winter resource that is key to year-round territorial behavior in this system. An experiment that involves removing half the mistletoe from winter territories will determine the impact of mistletoe abundance on whether sons stay, their condition, and their success at acquiring a mate and breeding territory of their own. The alternative hypothesis, that sons benefit by staying home due to the preferential treatment they receive when they remain with parents, will also be tested. In fact, both access to parental resources and preferential treatment by parents may simultaneously explain why sons remain home. This work is novel because mistletoe is a uniquely manipulable food resource and its availability only during winter allows for a clean separation of the importance of winter food for dispersal and family stability in a species with year-round territories. Although the results of this study will address a basic question in evolutionary behavioral ecology, they will also address an issue of potential importance to the decline of western bluebirds in California. If mistletoe quantity proves critical to the tendency for young males to stay home for winter and reduction of mistletoe has negative impacts on the condition and survival of stay-at-home sons, then we will have identified a key environmental variable regulating bluebird populations in California doc8791 none The Essig Museum of Entomology at the University of California Berkeley is a major repository of insect and other terrestrial arthropod specimens from the New World, especially California and adjacent regions in western North America. It has had a long-term research focus on the eastern Pacific Rim and Pacific Islands. It is one of the largest university entomological museums in the country and has served a critical role in the training of systematists over the last century. The current project will upgrade and move the Essig Museum collection into new space in the Vertebrate Life Sciences Building. This will allow the consolidation of the natural history museums on campus, providing better integration of technical support, outreach, and administration as well as scientific research and training. The new space will allow for several decades of expansion of the Essig collections doc8792 none Bawa Description: This award supports participation of a large delegation of US natural scientists, social scientists, and policy makers at the US-India Workshop: Tropical Ecosystems: Structure, Diversity, and Human Welfare, Bangalore, India, July . Co-organizers are Professors Kamaljit Bawa, University of Massachusetts Boston and Uma Shaankar, University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore. In recent years, knowledge of tropical biota and ecosystems has expanded; also, its scope has broadened to include social and economic dimensions of land use change and habitat loss. The goals of the conference are to review recent developments in tropical biology including management and conservation of ecosystems and to define priorities for future research. A post-conference meeting on Advancing Frontiers in Tropical Biology will bring together selected US tropical biologists, their Indian counterparts, and graduate students to discuss the latest conceptual and analytical advances, and explore collaboration. Scope: This is the first major international conference on ecology, conservation and management of tropical ecosystems held since that will define future priorities for tropical biology. The timing capitalizes on new opportunities offered by the rapidly expanding knowledge base and new insights on the impact of human induced change on tropical ecosystems. It will involve scientists from the tropics and enable 30 to 40 US scientists, postdocs, and graduate students to travel to Bangalore, India where they will participate in the conference, post-conference activities, field trips and discussions on collaboration. This award is supported by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Environmental Biology doc8793 none Mullen This award supports an 18 month collaborative research project between Professor Kieran Mullen, with the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Oklahoma, and Professor Jean-Marie Ndjaka, with the Department of Physics at the University of Yaounde in Cameroon. Professors Mullen and Ndjaka will theoretically investigate the self organization and elastic properties of semiconductor nanoscale structures. The project will utilize Professor Mullen s expertise in semiconductor physics and Professor Ndjaka s background in magnetic systems and correlated electron systems. This grant will also enable Professor Ndjaka to gain additional experience in the applied theory of nanostructure growth. Anticipated results should provide additional support for the experimental study of quantum dots. The project will also foster a long-term collaboration between the two universities, which will enhance the research programs at both schools doc8794 none Prop # PI Desmond Rolf This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessel Gyre operated by the Texas A & M University and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Desmond Rolf is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire an alarm system and a digital GPS doc8795 none Douglas Description: This award supports US-India Cooperative Research: Geometric Invariants for Quotient Modules. US PI Ronald Douglas, Texas A Misra is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences. They have worked successfully in the past and have sustained much of their research through electronic contact. They are now at a stage where direct contact is needed to proceed with their groundbreaking work. Both investigators lead groups that will be strengthened through this collaboration, which also includes support for an exchange of young scientists. This award is jointly supported by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Mathematical Sciences doc8796 none This grant supports DYCOMS-II (Dynamics and Chemistry of Marine Stratocumulus), a collaborative field program conducted off the coast of California in July . The work consists of (1) an observational study of marine stratocumulus clouds based on seven nocturnal flights of the NCAR C-130 equipped for measuring fluxes in and across the boundary layer; (2) analysis of these and previous data on the cloud-topped marine boundary layer; (3) comparison of the observations with the results of large-eddy simulations (LES). The experiments are designed specifically to provide the data needed to validate LES. Quantities of special interest are entrainment rates, structural features of cloud interfacial properties, and statistical properties of the turbulent air motions. Demonstrating the ability to simulate these quantities is a crucial step in establishing LES as a tool for generating synthetic data to enable the testing of hypotheses and the construction of parameterizations to be used in large-scale atmospheric models doc8797 none The Second International Workshop on Oxide Surfaces (IWOX-2) is organized by Texas A photochemistry, photcatalysis and environmental remediation; biomaterials; ceramics; and sensors. Students trained in these multidisciplinary areas compete very well in the job market in areas such as energy, transportation, chemicals, and electronics, and often go on to contribute in many significant ways to the global economy doc8798 none Prop # PI Joseph Coburn This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessels Atlantis, Knorr, and Oceanus operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Joseph Coburn is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire CCTV Upgrades, winch instrumentation system, life rafts, and vibration isolation table doc8799 none This proposal studies the evolution and subsequent maintenance behavior of code in two very large open-source projects, Linux and GCC free software, to provide insight into the software engineering aspects of open-source software. Focusing on the coupling between components and how this coupling changes over time, successive versions of Linux and GCC are examined, analyzing the change from version to version of each product. The coupling between two units of a software product, a measure of the degree of interaction between those units, is used as a measure of maintainability. Tools are built to compute these changes in coupling, and the output from these tools will be subjected to statistical analysis. The research sheds light on the importance in software maintenance of the skill of the individual software engineer and ameliorates the lack of data as to the effectiveness of open software development as compared to commercial software development doc8800 none Natural selection is the directional force of evolution and is known to have affected the genetic structure of our species. The classic example of selection involves adaptations in the hemoglobin genes of humans created to combat malaria parasites. The most widely known adaptation is the sickle cell hemoglobin. Many primates other than humans harbor similar malaria parasites. One such primate is the orangutan, an Asian ape. The main hypothesis of this study is that the alpha globin genes of orangutans are under natural selection and adaptations to malaria. This is significant because if orangutan alpha globin genes have evolved by natural selection, malaria may be an important selective pressure in primates other than humans. By extension, malaria may have been a major selective force in the lives of early hominids such as Australopithecus. Large-bodied predators are often considered to be selective agents among apes, but microscopic predators may in fact have had larger effects. To test this hypothesis, DNA sequence data will be generated for two genes, alpha-2 globin and Dmd, from a large number of orangutans. Different measures of genetic diversity will be calculated from these two genes, which will be compared and contrasted to one another. The Dmd gene has been shown not to be influenced by natural selection in humans and will therefore be an index of non-selective evolution. If the diversity at the two genes is significantly different, natural selection will be inferred to be acting at the alpha-2 globin gene. The data collected will also be used to make inferences about orangutan population history and inform conservation efforts. Some estimations will be population age, population size, migration rates, and mutation rates. These parameters will then be compared to published comparable estimates for modern humans and chimpanzees, enabling direct comparisons among the population histories of these primates doc8801 none Programming Process Principal Investigator: Wei Li Extreme Programming (XP) is a new software process emphasizing source code as the main communication medium and software testing as the quality assurance mechanism. This research studies object-oriented (OO) software design evolution and examines the predictive capability of software metrics in the XP process by using carefully logged design-change data on two commercial Java systems developed using an XP-like process with daily (working day) log on the design change and the change effort. This project analyzes the collected data and investigates how class design, as measured by metrics such as CTA, CTM, NLM, WMC, and LCOM, evolves from one story to the next: i.e. if they show continuous growth or otherwise. The project also studies if the OO metrics collected at the end of an iteration cycle can predict the refactoring, error-fix, and new design efforts in the next cycle by using multiple linear regression. The result from this study helps us understand how customer requirements, which come in small chunks (stories) from the customer in the XP process, affect software design change doc8802 none Rhoads This three-year award for cooperative research in geography and regional sciences involves teams in the United States and in the United Kingdom. The US team of Bruce L. Rhoads, Marcelo H. Garcia, Rebecca Wade and their graduate students at the University of Illinois propose to collaborate with Stuart Lane, James Best, Philip Ashworth at the University of Leeds, Robert Ferguson at University of Sheffield, and Keith Richards at Cambridge University along with graduate students from these institutions. The US and UK teams will explore the three-dimensional structure of time-averaged fluid motion and turbulence in natural rivers and develop and empirically test numerical models of river-channel dynamics with functions for sediment transport and bank erosion. Streams and rivers are agents of erosion and depositional change on the Earth s terrestrial surfaces. Despite enormous amounts of research on fluvial forms and processes, there is a theoretical need for predicting quantitatively the behavior of river channels over time and space. The proposed interdisciplinary collaboration addresses this problem through research on and development of a field-tested predictive model. The US and UK research teams are expert on computational fluid dynamics and bring to this collaboration different approaches, detailed measurements of model simulations from their respective laboratories, and expertise in computational modeling and field testing doc8803 none Collins For the past 20 years, conventional integrated circuit (IC) plasma etch processes have successfully employed a flux of positive ions to activate surface chemistry. As feature sizes are reduced to below 0.25 microns, spatial charge buildup on etch features already contributes to non-ideal etch profiles, limits etch feature size, and damages MOSFET gate oxide, resulting in lower chip yield. The PI seeks both a scientific understanding and a cure for this potential IC manufacturing showstopper for plasma etch of features down to 0.1 micron. The PI proposes to explore positive charge buildup neutralization via simultaneous electron irradiation of the IC during plasma etching, utilizing a CSU developed electron beam source. Proof-of-principle electron beam irradiation, described within, proves we can successfully transmit electron beams at current levels of up to ~1 mA cm 2 through high ion density (N+ = 10 12 cm -3 ) plasmas to etching substrates. Etch profiles in preliminary experiments with and without electron irradiation are very distinct, indicating that the PO s approach of charge neutralization is a potentially effective technique. The proposed two-part research program builds on the PI s prior proof-of-principle studies. Part one involves production, transmission, and characterization of an electron beam through a reactive plasma etching environment to an etch substrate. Experimentally measured beam spectra will be compared to numerical simulations for quantification of negative charge deposited on test structures prior to the onset of proposed etch profile and charge damage studies. In part two, the PI will examine the effect of various controlled levels of electron beam irradiation on feature profiles during plasma etching, and isolate charge neutralization effects from other known contributors. Agilent Technologies Integrated Circuit Business Division will provide a variety of IC test structures with pre-etched high aspect ratio photo-resist features placed on top of dual plate capacitors to quantify both the positive and negative charge deposited. The existing Agilent Technologies database for plasma etching with ion fluxes alone will baseline his studies and provide the initial operating parameters where cumulative ion charge in microstructures is known to be deleterious. In summary,the PI s research will construct a database of charge neutralization etch conditions. Both neutralization of positive charge in micro-features to improve pattern fidelity of high aspect ratio features as well as blanket charge neutralization to reduce MOSFET gate oxide damage during plasma etch will be quantitatively explored doc8804 none Prop # PI Robert L. Martin This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessel Longhorn operated by the University of Texas Austin (UT) and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Robert Martin is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire a fire suppression doc8805 none This SGER award for $30,000 supports a campaign by Boston University scientists designed to obtain daytime observations at Sondre Stromfjord, Greenland. This effort would be based upon the application of two sophisticated imaging spectrographs designed to make measurements of auroral emissions in the presence of the large Rayleigh-scattered continuum of the daytime sky. These measurements would be conducted simultaneously with the Sonderstrom radar observations of electron density profiles to obtain a determination of the ionospheric conductances in the E-region. The radar measurements of this quantity would be compared with the calculated conductance based upon a model that relates E-region electron densities to the energy of precipitating particles in aurora that would be inferred from the optical measurements. This effort would establish the feasibility of the daytime application of both optical instruments and would also take advantage of the current period of solar maximum activity doc8806 none Price The Association of American State Geologists will continue a program to provide undergraduate students in geoscience with field-oriented research experiences. The objectives of the program are to train students in scientific field techniques (particularly geologic mapping) and to excite and encourage students to pursue careers in geoscience. This program will enable these students to work side by side with experienced geologic mappers, field geologists, and geophysicists in the field. The mentors serve as not only teachers and mentors but also as scientific collaborators. State geological surveys in all 50 states and Puerto Rico are eligible to hire students through this program. Most student projects run during summer months, but some include field activities during other parts of the year. The success of the program is assessed by interviewing students and their mentors and by tracking the students careers. These compiled data are reported to the general geoscience community. Individual state surveys will select students from geoscience departments and summer field-camp programs nationwide and from the summer field-training program administered by the National Association of Geoscience Teachers. It is expected that most of the state field projects will be linked to funded research through the National Cooperative Geologic Mapping Program (in cooperation with the U.S. Geological Survey) or other federal, state, local government or private sector programs doc8807 none McCabe and 2) will only view their livelihoods, including tourism, as sustainable if they allow for maintenance of a pastoral means of production. Using a political ecology approach, Ms. DeLuca will conduct an ethnographic study to investigate how local livelihood choices intersect with larger geopolitical and economic spheres. The study will also consider such variables as gender, social status, education, and heritage. Ms. DeLuca will conduct archival work on tourism and sustainable development policies and programs at the Tanzanian National Archives. Ethnographic information will be collected through surveys (such as free listing), participant observations, interviews, and focus groups. Dr. Sosovele, with the Institute of Resource Assessment at the University of Dar es Salaam, will provide guidance on this project to Ms. DeLuca. The results are expected to increase current knowledge about sustainable livelihoods, especially in Africa, and will be of value to anthropologists, resource managers, and policy makers. It is also expected to advance anthropological theory by identifying the connections between global policies and local livelihood options. This project will also support an international research experience very early in the career of an outstanding graduate student. The project also includes a Tanzanian graduate student who will serve as a research assistant doc8808 none This is the first year funding of a three year continuing award. In this project, the PI will build upon his prior NSF-funded work to develop computer systems capable of operating autonomously in dynamic and uncertain environments. Specifically, the research will focus on three major themes: Qualitative planning under uncertainty using causal and counterfactual relationships; Automatic generation of natural language explanations of actions, recommendations, and unexpected eventualities; Learning causal structures from spontaneous changes, to facilitate predictions and decisions in data-intensive applications doc8809 none This ocean science technology development project will design and implement a cost-efficient and easy-to-operate, multiple rock corer and deep sea camera system that will have wide application for ocean floor imaging and sampling. It will be made available on UNOLS research vessels. The core of the system is based on standard CTD equipment and .322 coaxial conducting cable and winches which are familiar to all UNOLS ships and technicians. The purpose of the multi-corer camera is to take multiple cores during a lowering while at the same time collecting digital photographs of the seafloor being sampled. The system uses a proven self-recording digital camera system, a CTD pylon for triggering each corer, and a pressure sensor and altimeter, that are commonly integrated with CTD units for determining depth altitude off bottom. The multi-corer camera will permit 20 rock cores to be taken on each lowering, with digital photographs taken every ~10 sec. The imaging system will be easily transformable for use with a fiber optic hydrographic cable and direct telemetry of the images to the surface once fiber optic hydrographic cables are introduced on UNOLS ships doc8810 none With this renewal award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the work of Dr. David I. Schuster and Stephen R. Wilson in the Department of Chemistry of New York University in New York City. Part of the work is aimed at the synthesis and photophysical investigation of supramolecular complexes with a variety of rotaxanes and catenanes in which non-covalently linked metal porphyrin complexes and C60 fullerenes are held in unusual spatial relationships. It is based on earlier work with porphyrin-fullerene dyads connected by flexible polyether or rigid steroid linkers. Other studies will involve [2+2] photocycloaddition of cyclic enones to C70, and the synthesis, photochemistry and self-assembly of fullerene derivatives with highly fluorinated molecular tails. Most of the work involves the synthesis and study of molecules which contain both an electron donor (a metal (usually zinc) porphyrin complex), which can be readily put into an electronically excited state using light, and an electron acceptor (a ball of 60 or 70 carbon atoms), to which an electron can be transferred after the donor has been excited. The process mimics the first step of photosynthesis in green plants, which use a magnesium porphyrin complex to absorb light, followed by electron transfer. The novel molecules to be studied will shed light on the details of the electron excitation and transfer process, and could eventually lead to novel optical and electronic materials. Because the work involves synthesis, characterization, photochemistry, photophysics, and computational design, it is expected to provide excellent training for the students involved doc8811 none Tyrosine Phosphorylation and Cell Signaling Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Conference May 16 - 20, The phosphorylation of proteins on tyrosyl residues is now recognized to be an essential element in the control of such fundamental cellular processes as growth and proliferation, differentiation, cytoskeletal function and the cell cycle. We are currently witnessing an outstanding period of progress in characterizing the structure, regulation and function of both protein tyrosine kinases (PTKs) and protein tyrosine phosphatases (PTPs), the coordinated action of which governs the levels of cellular phosphotyrosine. The objective of the Seventh Meeting on Tyrosine Phosphorylation and Cellular Signalling is to provide a format in which the study of PTKs and PTPs will be integrated to help participants see how their results contribute to the overall big picture. The sessions will be organized around physiological processes and cellular functions, rather than around particular categories of enzymes, so as to try and provide a biological context. With the exception of the Keynote Addresses by Joseph Schlessinger and Jack Dixon, all speakers will be selected from submitted abstracts. This will allow emphasis to be placed on encouraging graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and young independent investigators to present talks. It also should facilitate the presentation of the most recent and hottest results. An attendance of 300- 350 is anticipated. Approximately 60 will give oral presentations and up to 160 will present posters. NSF funds will enable more young investigators to participate, especially those who do not yet have independent funding. The integration of research on PTKs and PTPs at this meeting, placing emphasis on the biological roles of these enzymes, will engender a sense of cohesiveness and communication across the field doc8812 none The United States is hosting the 42nd International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) in the summer of . The IMO is the premier international mathematics competition for high school students and it will bring to the U.S. more than 500 of the most talented high school age mathematicians from more than 80 countries. During the competition, students work individually over a two-day period on six challenging problems, presenting their solutions as essay-style proofs akin to those produced by research mathematicians. While in this country, students are treated to American hospitality, visiting attractions in and around the Capital and experiencing American life and culture. At the closing awards ceremony outstanding performances are honored by the awarding of gold, silver and bronze medals to students scoring in the top half of the field. A number of outreach and research activities are planned as a way of enhancing public understanding of appreciation of mathematics and to engage a larger number of young Americans in mathematics doc8813 none The United States of America will host the 42nd International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) in the year in Washington DC. The IMO is the premier international mathematics competition for high school students and it will bring to the USA more than 500 of the most talented high school age mathematicians from more than 80 countries. The American mathematics community will use this opportunity to promote the importance of mathematics for all students and to celebrate the accomplishments of our best and brightest students. During the competition, students work individually over a two-day period on six challenging problems, presenting their solutions as essay-style proofs akin to those produced by research mathematicians. During the several day grading period the IMO students will be treated to American hospitality, visiting attractions in and around the Capital and experiencing American life and culture. At the closing awards ceremony, outstanding performances are honored by the awarding of gold, silver, and bronze medals to students scoring in the top half of the results. As the host country, it is the responsibility of the USA, in addition to organizing the contest, to provide lodging, food, entertainment, and cultural activities for all the participants and team leaders during the approximately two weeks that they are in our country. For the participants, many of whom become world leaders in math and science, the IMO provides a unique opportunity to build friendships with students from other countries, to exchange mathematical ideas, and to learn about other cultures, especially about the USA. For the American mathematics community, the IMO provides an opportunity to promote the importance of a strong mathematics education for all students---much like the Olympics are used to promote physical fitness for all---and to celebrate the outstanding achievements of our nation s young men and women in mathematics. Financial support from the Division of Mathematical Sciences of the National Science Foundation for competition and related administrative costs will help to underwrite the underlying theme of the importance of mathematics education for all students, thus furthering the educational goals of the NSF and IMO USA activity doc8814 none This proposal concerns problems in commutative algebra, algebraic geometry and computational algebra. These problems range from the explicit construction of algorithms in algebra and the development of settings to analyze their complexity to the construction and analysis of several classes of singular varieties. The investigator is: (a) developing methods to construct integral closures of algebras, ideals and modules, and understanding their complexity, including the introduction of non-Turing models of complexity; (b) developing families of numerical signatures (multiplicities, volumes) of rings and algebras that play in local rings and arbitrary algebras a role similar to Castelnuovo--Mumford s regularity in graded structures; (c) carrying out an algebraization of blowup algebras and of algebras associated to commuting sets of elements of Lie algebras with the major aim of finding its properties of Cohen-Macaulay type (including rational singularity), arguably the most efficient packaging of an algebraic structure. The mathematical problems with which this proposal is concerned come from the overlapping areas of commutative algebra, algebraic geometry and computational algebra. The research program is focused on the search for generic and numerical solutions of sets of polynomial and analytic equations, such as those that apply to such diverse areas as algebraic geometry, combinatorics, cryptography, control coding theory and robotic motion. The investigator studies the fine structure of these algebraic systems, and he develops methods and algorithms for solving them. At the same time he is seeking to break the computational logjam of several problems of computer algebra through a more fundamental understanding of their structure doc8815 none Fountain OPP-OO- Jacobel This is a collaborative proposal from Principal Investigators at Portland State University and St. Olaf College. The movement of water through glaciers profoundly affects ice motion by influencing the stress distribution at the bed of the glacier. Therefore, a great deal of research has focused on the hydraulic nature of subglacial water transport. For temperate glaciers, the main source of water is surface-generated melt water. How this water reaches the glacier bed is of critical importance. Surface and englacial conditions may preferentially direct water flow to certain parts of the glacier bed and starve other parts of the bed. Therefore, an understanding of the controls on the spatial pattern of subglacial hydraulic conditions will depend on an understanding of the surficial and englacial conditions routing the water to the bed. Existing knowledge of englacial conduits has largely been a by-product of investigations into subglacial conditions. The goal of this project is to investigate the location, size, and hydraulic character of englacial conduits in an alpine glacier. This project will take place on the Storglaciaren in Tarfala, Sweden, where an extensive background of scientific wok exists and an active research program continues. The Principal Investigators will undertake a two-year field program that directly detects englacial conduits and uses ice radar to identify and trace the conduit paths. Low frequency radar measurements (5 MHz) will locate regions with strong englacial scattering suggestive of englacial water pockets and potentially productive areas for drilling. The radar will also be used to map the local bed depth and topography. Conventional hot-water drilling will penetrate the glacier to intersect englacial conduits. After a conduit is encountered, they will measure conduit diameter, water pressure, and water flow speed using down-hole instruments. They will attempt to determine the interconnectivity between conduits to measure their integrated hydraulic properties over the flow path. The path of the conduits will be traced using a high-resolution ground penetrating radar operated at 100 MHz, a frequency chosen both resolve individual conduits, and to monitor changes in echo characteristics corresponding to hydrologic changes over time. The results from this study will further our understanding of conduit origin and the controls on water routing to the bed. Identification of high-resolution radar signals with conduits of known sizes and locations will make significant progress towards future use of ice radar for detecting and mapping the location of englacial conduit. NSF Proposal Number: PI: Fountain Statement of Work We will directly measure the geometry and hydraulics of englacial conduits The principle method of detecting englacial conduits will be drilling into the glacier to directly intersect the conduits. We will employ a hot-water drill capable of penetrating at rates of 1 m min-1. We will attempt to drill 20 boreholes in 3 different arrays for a total of 60 holes. During drilling we will monitor both drill depth and water levels. If openings appear on both sides of the borehole and flow is detected, either by natural particulates moving in the water or by a deflection of thread hanging from the camera, no further drilling in the hole will occur. If flow is detected careful hydraulic measurements will be made. The shape of the opening will be recorded and flow velocities will be measured. Within each borehole array and between arrays, we will test for interconnectivity by displacing the water in one borehole and measuring the response in other boreholes. The data from this project will test a model for the origin and evolution of conduits. Another test will compare the measured depth of a water-filled conduit and its hydraulic characteristics to that predicted by theory. The flow data and geometry of the conduits will be used to test Rothlisberger s ( ) theory. If we are able to monitor conduits over time we will also test Spring s ( ) non-steady state theory. From the borehole arrays and the radar imaging (Jacobel) we will infer the 3-dimensional topology of the conduit network at 6 different locations (over 2 years) in the glacier. These results will help to resolve the differences between the models of Shreve ( ) and Fountain and Walder ( ). More generally, spatial differences in the conduit networks imply differences in the flux of water to different areas of the bed and therefore impose an external condition on the development of subglacial hydraulic systems. These results will be reported in several journal articles doc8816 none This research project, carried out in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, works to develop an understanding of the growth and phase evolution of metallic and intermetallic microstructures. Professor Ralph Nuzzo and his colleagues are probing the roles played by nucleation, surface chemistry, and dynamics in controlling the morphology of CVD grown thin films. With the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, pattern formation in these materials over various length scales are being examined, with a focus on patterning by soft lithography and self-assembly. Complex assemblies of functional materials, useful as chemically active force transducers are being developed. An understanding of the growth and development of material microstructures is essential to the controlled design of functional materials. This research project, with the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, addresses questions of the mechanism of thin film growth and resulting morphology. Complex mesoscale structures are synthesized and characterized, with an eye toward application in chemically active force transduction doc8817 none Professor Maryanne Collinson of Kansas State University is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program for research focused on templated sol-gel materials for sensor applications. The plan is to design and synthesize mesoporous and macroporous thin films, to characterize their properties at the molecular scale, and to understand the factors that influence material response and selectivity. Macroporous silicate films and organic inorganic hybrid films involving organosilicon precursors will be studied, as well as molecular templated silicate films. Electrogenerated chemiluminescence will be optimized for analytical applications using ruthenium organometallics as a reagent. Deliberately engineered inorganic or hybrid films are key elements of nanotechnology research with possible industrial applications doc8818 none The project will concentrate on the preparation and characterization of polarizable molecular monolayers designed into CMOS circuitry for optical and chemical sensing, in collaboration with the Departments of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Electrical Engineering, and the Center for Solid State Electronics Research at Arizona State University. The active part of the proposed FET-based chemical sensors will be a molecular system that will be switchable between different polarization states. The different dipole fields associated with each state would lead to a difference in threshold voltage that could me measured electrically. The molecular species will be attached to the gate oxide of a split-gate SOI MOSFET by self-assembly. Our group will fabricate the monolayers and characterize them using scanning probe microscopy techniques - STM, AFM, and conducting-tip AFM - under a controlled environment, such as vacuum or dry nitrogen. These instruments will make it possible to better understand the molecular configuration of the surface monolayer. The surface potential before and after the molecular monolayer is polarized will be determined from numerical simulations this surface potential can in turn be related to the dipole filed of the molecule and correlated with the physical structure as determined by the CT-AFM measurements. By combining the measurements of the surface potential with structural information and molecular modeling we will be able to develop a thorough understanding of how the molecular monolayers self-assemble on oxidized silicon substrates, and how their electronic configuration changes after polarization. The ability to correlate the physical structure of the molecules with their associated dipole field is a unique feature of the hybrid molecular-semiconductor heterojunctions that we are proposing. The mix of chemistry, physics and electrical engineering will provide opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students to work in a truly interdisciplinary environment doc8819 none It is planned to study both bound and continuum properties of lightly ionized medium- to high-Z atoms and ions. Both relativity and electron-electron interactions (correlations) must be considered. The case of negative ions is particularly challenging, as most such systems are unbound in the absence of correlations. It is intended to extend present bound state methods to include the continuum case, permitting for example a discussion of photoionization. The present bound state methodolgy will also be extended to permit a treatment of middle of the row transition metals doc8820 none The origin of anatomically modern humans is one of the most exciting and hotly debated topics in human evolution today. The results of numerous genetic studies indicate that modern humans arose in Africa sometime during the last 200,000 years and subsequently migrated to other parts of the world. While the paleontological record of human evolution in Africa during this time period seems to support this scenario, the evidence is beset by many uncertainties as many of the critical fossils are known from fragmentary remains and have proved difficult to date precisely. For example, the purported remains of early modern early modern humans from South Africa are very fragmentary, while the more complete remains from Tanzania and Kenya have proved very difficult to date confidently. For over three decades, the paleontological remains from the Kibish Formation in southwestern Ethiopia have provided critical evidence of anatomically modern humans in subsaharan Africa more than 100,000 years ago. However, the Kibish fossils have also been the subject of debate because of uncertainties regarding their actual age, and the indications that two very different types of fossil hominid are preserved within these deposits- one relatively archaic and another more modern. Resolution of the actual ages of these fossils will contribute substantially to our understanding of the timing of human evolution in Africa and the origin of lineage leading uniquely to modern humans. An initial survey expedition in the Kibish Formation was undertaken in to explore the possibilities and promise of continued fieldwork there. Results of the season include a preliminary tephrostratigraphic framework for the Kibish Formation in the area where the fossils were discovered and 40Ar 39Ar dates for tuffaceous deposits bracketing the cranial remains. These indicate that the Omo 1 and Omo 2 cranial remains are unlikely to have come from the same stratigraphic horizon and that the hominids are between 100,000 and 200,000 years old with other deposits probably extending back to 300,000 years. We also doubled the mammalian fauna known from the Kibish formation and found stone tools throughout the Kibish Formation, including instances of tools associated with faunal remains bearing cutmarks. The overall goals of the research are: 1) To strengthen and refine the numerical control on the age of the Kibish Formation through additional fieldwork and analyses; 2) to refine the stratigraphic and temporal framework for previously collected fossils and establish a broad regional framework for future research; 3) to relate the sedimentology of the Kibish Formation to regional climatic changes; and 4) to locate additional paleontological and archeological localities within this chronometric, stratigraphic and sedimentological framework. Accomplishment of these goals will greatly advance our current understanding of human evolution and modern human origins in Africa during the past 300,000 years, the place and time in which or species first evolved doc8821 none We will continue our Summer Research Experience Program for Undergraduate at SUNY College at Potsdam, joint with Clarkson University. We will be involving nine undergraduates in doing research in the areas of Group theory, Graph Theory, and Topology. Experience has shown that close cooperation with undergraduate students and including them as participants in faculty research stimulates their interest in mathematics and helps them to learn a considerable amount of advanced material. At least six of the nine students will be chosen from institutions other than those participating. Women and minorities will be strongly encouraged to apply. Potsdam College will provide free dormitory rooms, office space, and study lounges for the students. SUNY Potsdam and Clarkson will provide library access and computer support. The institutions involved will pay the salaries of the student leaders. Student leaders will assist in running the program and will also provide role models for students. In this way they help both the students and advisors. The goal of this program will be to build the participants confidence in their ability to do research independently and to stimulate their interest in pursuing mathematics. To expand the students horizons, there will be one talk each week by a guest expert doc8822 none Wireless local area networks (WLANs) have the advantages of inexpensive network reconfiguration and user mobility over wired local area networks. However, WLANs are so far limited to niche applications due to their low data rate and data rate uncertainty. There is a tremendous user demand for WLANs with higher data rates and international availability. This research addresses the challenges of meeting the user demand. This research combines theoretical algorithm development with real-time implementation in hardware. It fosters multidisciplinary research and development among researchers at the University of Florida and the local industry as well as the technology transfer to the local industry. The main objective of the research is the development and application of efficient and robust parameter estimation and symbol detection algorithms and their real time implementations for high data rate WLANs. The investigators devise and evaluate efficient and robust parameter estimation and symbol detection algorithms for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) based WLANs with one or more transmit and receive antennas for both stationary and rapidly time-varying channels. The most effective algorithms are implemented efficiently in hardware in real time. The investigators study the tradeoffs of effectiveness, simplicity, computational complexity, and practical hardware implementation in real time doc8823 none It is now clear that females in many animal species do not mate randomly. The behavior of females before mating suggests a sampling process in which the value of potential mates is assessed. Although we now know that female mate choice exists, we do not know what benefits a female gains from choice, or what specific behavioral rules she uses to make choice. The goal of this research is to evaluate evolutionary models that offer answers to these questions. To evaluate the models, it is necessary to measure the energy cost of mate sampling and the effects of choice on offspring quality, and to record how the experiences of females during sampling guide their choice behavior. This research will take advantage of a well-developed study site (the National Bison Range in northwestern Montana) where individually marked pronghorn may be studied at close range. Each year, most pronghorn females sample potential mates over a two-week period, and then mate once. The energy cost of sampling will be measured using detailed records of female movements during rut, reconstructed from 10-minute interval Global Positioning System locations. Sire effects on offspring performance will be measured by recording prenatal and postnatal growth rates of fawns, as well as size-adjusted body mass and first winter survival. Sire identity will be verified genetically. Information to test hypotheses about the mate sampling method will be obtained by recording the complete sequences of female visits to males and whether, at each visit, the female has had the opportunity to see the male perform vigorously doc8824 none Fundamental understanding of the redistribution of heat and moisture in the atmosphere is important to understanding both climate and weather. This project will undertake, and facilitate for others, fundamental studies of atmospheric convection and rainfall processes. Examples include statistical characterization of the multiple space-time scales involved; inference of vertical structures of convective heating; and comparison of different regions and regimes. Simultaneous sounding, surface, and satellite data sets will be assembled and examined to seek relationships and test hypotheses about the temporal relationships between convection and large-scale meteorological (weather regime) and climatic (land vs. sea, diurnal, seasonal) variations. Initial analyses, focused on the Tropics, will elucidate the characteristics of not only the occasional organized deep convective events, but also the occasional suppressed conditions, and the more ubiquitous conditions with shallow cumuli and middle-topped showers, which are hypothesized to have a substantial role in the general circulation. This project will compose, study, and make available to the community a carefully designed uniform hourly statistical digest of data from a large number of recent and future radar deployments. Data access has been offered by several US groups with large data archives, as well as a Japanese group with a new high-quality shipborne Doppler radar. Cylindrical binning (CYLBIN) is a novel, simple analysis technique for quantitative studies of both reflectivity data (potentially including multi-parameter data) and Doppler-derived wind and wind divergence profiles. Pilot studies with several months of shipborne radar data from the Indian, and eastern and western Pacific Oceans are promising, as significant signals are frequently present even in sparse echo fields. Interleaved tilt angle scanning strategies, designed by the PI with this analysis in mind, offer especially high vertical resolution in several data sets doc8825 none This project will investigate a variety of surface processes that occur when either a bulk or a surface phase transition takes place. One topic consists of a polarization atomic force microscopy and microscopic interferometry study of the shape and line tension of droplets on surfaces, from scales of nanometers through to many microns, in the vicinity of a wetting transition. These data should reveal the influence of surface interactions, surface heterogeneities, and temperature on such droplets. A second topic is an atomic force microscopy and spectroscopic ellipsometry study of critical finite-size effects within thin critical films to ascertain the critical fluctuation force and composition profile within such films. The final topic is an ellipsometry study of dipole-induced surface orientational order at the liquid-vapor surface of critical binary liquid mixtures to examine how dipole interactions influence the composition profile and orientational order at such interfaces. Line tension effects of droplets on surfaces and the universal aspects of surface critical phenomena, in both finite and semi-infinite systems, are poorly understood. Droplet line tensions strongly influence the nucleation and coalescence of droplets on surfaces, while, surface critical phenomena are particularly important in many supercritical extraction processes used in the food, pharmaceutical, and petroleum industries. An improved understanding of surface phenomena will lead to better control of surface related processes and ultimately to the ability to design surfaces possessing desirable characteristics on the molecular length scale. These projects will provide graduate students with excellent training using innovative surface techniques on topics at the forefronts of knowledge. This research will prepare these students well for academic, industrial, or government careers. %%% This work seeks a quantitative understanding of the physical origins of a number of liquid surface processes in the vicinity of either a surface or a bulk phase transition point where, respectively, either the surface or the bulk undergo a structural change as a function of temperature. Innovative optical and force microscopy techniques will be used to study the orientation of molecules at surfaces, the topography and associated energies of droplets on surfaces, and the structure of liquid mixtures within thin films. The data should reveal and how these phenomena are influence by surface interactions, surface heterogeneities, and bulk and surface phase transitions. An understanding of droplet topography and how it is influenced by surface interactions and the presence of a surface phase transition is important in governing (i) the uniformity of surface coatings used in many manufacturing processes and (ii) the wetting or non-wetting properties of fabrics and fibers. Similarly, surface phenomena in the vicinity of a bulk phase transition plays an extremely important role in many supercritical extraction processes used in the food, pharmaceutical, and petroleum industries. An improved understanding of these processes will lead to a better control of surface related processes and ultimately to the ability to design surfaces possessing desirable characteristics on the molecular length scale. Students involved in this research will gain a comprehensive training in physics and material science which will prepare them well for careers in the academic, industrial, or government arena doc8826 none Smyth OSU This project is a preliminary numerical investigation of whether Holmboe waves can generate appreciable mixing in idealized stratified flow configurations similar to those that might be expected in some oceanic regimes such as exchange flows. This research will examine whether a significant mixing efficiency can be achieved. A spectral model of a continuously stratified flow containing a sharp density gradient and a more gentle shear gradient will be used to make direct numerical simulations of the growth and nonlinear development of Holmboe waves. If numerical results provide evidence that the Holmboe instability leads to effective mixing, this will provide an impetus for a more thorough investigation of the life-cycle of Holmboe instabilities and the associated mixing doc8827 none Recursive decoding for Reed-Muller codes and their modifications Powerful error correction is in great demand in modern communication systems. However, practical performance of the best codes is often limited due to infeasible decoding complexity or excessive length of the blocks to be used. In particular, optimum maximum likelihood decoding has huge complexity even on short blocks of one hundred bits. By contrast, iterative decoding combines low complexity and superior performance using long blocks that include tens of thousands bits. Therefore this research focuses on code constructions and decoding algorithms that can achieve good performance and low decoding complexity while using the blocks of moderate length. The particular goal of the research is to employ the blocks ranging from 100 bits to bits, where neither maximum likelihood decoding nor iterative procedures achieve good performance at a low complexity. Due to short lengths and fast decoding, the new codes can be used in a variety of high-speed applications arising in broadband and wireless systems. To achieve this goal, the researchers employ fast recursive techniques that split original codes of length n into two codes of length n 2. These techniques are applied to Reed-Muller (RM) codes, their subcodes, and new code modifications. The basic procedure splits the RM code (r, m) into the two constituent RM codes (m - 1, r - 1) and (m - 1, r). Decoding is then relegated further to the shorter codes. In all intermediate steps, the decoder only recalculates the reliabilities of the newly defined symbols. Finally, fast optimum decoding is performed on the basic RM codes of the first order. For longer codes, this repetitive multilevel recursion increasingly outperforms other low-complexity algorithms, such as bounded distance decoding and majority decoding. The procedures are further enhanced by using very short lists of candidates taken in the intermediate steps of the recursion. Another enhancement uses subcodes of RM codes, for which tracking a few plausible candidates already gives near-maximum likelihood decoding. In particular, even short RM codes of length 128 achieve low output bit error rates (BER) at a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 2.5 dB. Further research topics include: General study of recursive decoding algorithms. The goals are: (a) to estimate the output BER in each step of multilevel recursions; (b) to choose the most protected subcodes of RM codes; (c) to evaluate the output BER in recursive list decoding; (d) to design new criteria for choosing short lists of candidates. Design of new recursive algorithms. The goal is to design more advanced constructions that: a) split the original block into multiple subblocks with different levels of protection; (b) use the recursions with new constituent codes different from RM codes; (c) incorporate permutation techniques in recursive decoding; (d) achieve efficient decoding for blocks up to bits used at SNR of 1 to 2 dB doc8828 none Macroscopic properties of solids, e.g., polymeric materials, result from the combination of molecular structure and macroscopic organization or order. Polymer chemists have become adept at covalent synthesis of macromolecules that can be designed to be amophous, crystalline, bi- or tri-phasic, etc. On the other hand the central aim of supramolecular science is to design building blocks with the proper structure that allows them to self-assemble by noncovalent boding at the molecular level. Synergistic combination of the principles of these two fields should enable more precise design and control of macroscopic structure and properties by utilizing properly designed macromolecular building blocks, i.e., more macroscopic control should result from the use of such precisely defined structural units. %%% The primary goals of this project are to apply self-assembly, to form pseudorotaxane structures, to well defined macromolecular host and guest species and study the structures and properties of the resultant supramacromolecular materials. Using living polymerization protocols constructed and then allowed to self-assemble into a variety of noncovalent analogs of various types of block and graft copolymers, which will be studied and compared to the corresponding covalent analogs when these are available. Pseudorotaxane formation is reversible and this feature can be exploited to enable facile melt processing of mechanically linked (vs. Covalently linked) polymeric systems, which disassemble upon heating to lower molecular weight and lower viscosity building blocks; upon cooling self-assembly is expected to produce solid state features of phase separation, blend compatibilzation and enhanced mechanical properties associate with classical covalent block and graft copolymers. Additionally a great advantage of this modular approach is that from a few precisely defined macromolecular building blocks a large library of two and three dimensional structures can be self-assembled without further synthetic effort. Furthermore, the pseudorotaxane linkage is selective in terms of the cyclic linear components (in a complementary lock and key fashion) and this gives rise to the possibility of control over the orientation and connectivity of building blocks, allowing construction of novel ensembles, including noncovalent analogs of ABC triblock copolymers doc8674 none This collaborative award examines the regional precipitation-evaporation balance and its effect on ecosystems in the climatically sensitive Yukon Territory. Arctic ecosystems are bellwethers for global climate change and examining their responses to natural climate variability is critical to understanding fundamental earth system processes as well as the potential response of such systems to human-induced changes in climate. By using a combination of biotic (i.e., pollen, charcoal) and abiotic (i.e., elemental and isotopic analyses, magnetic susceptibility, sedimentary analyses) proxies, the investigators will produce high-resolution climate records from the past 1,500 years that examine regional variability in moisture. These results will then be compared with findings from ongoing research across the interior of Alaska. Some of the questions that will be answered by this research are; Have past changes in precipitation-evaporation balance occurred in the upper Yukon and have they occurred on time scales relevant to humans? Did these changes occur synchronously and in the same direction across the Yukon? Were they synchronous with changes in other regions? Did vegetation respond to climate change doc8830 none Sturrock, Peter Solar Neutrino Flux Variability AST- The deficiency of observed neutrinos emanating from the Sun has been one of the most intriguing problems of solar astrophysics in recent years. Most researchers now believe that this is more a consequence of neutrino physics and explain the deficiency as a consequence of the transformation of electron neutrinos into muon or tau neutrinos as they fly out of the center of the Sun. Since the Sun s structure is very stable, the flux of neutrinos should be constant. But in arguments that are addressed in this award, the PI and his collaborators believe that magnetic fields may play an important part. In recent papers, they point out that, if the neutrino has a very small magnetic moment, then the magnetic field of the sun, which is not distributed isotropically, could modulate the neutron flux by converting left-handed neutrinos into right-handed neutrinos which would not be registered by terrestrial detectors. The PI and his team support their theory by claiming that the neutrino flux from the Sun varies with a period close to the rotation period of the deep convection zone. The evidence comes from a sophisticated analysis of existing Homestake and GALLEX-GNO data. There are many critics of this analysis. The principal effort made in this award will be to address the critics by reviewing previous analyses and to make preparations for the study of the Super-Kamiokande data and other data sets, as they become available doc8831 none This project addresses fundamental issues related to the electronic structure of organic films and interfaces. Materials to be investigated are pi-conjugated small molecules that are principal ingredients of vacuum-deposited organic thin film devices. The goal is improved understanding of the electronic structure of organic molecular interfaces and of the behavior of these interfaces in devices, leading to more predictive and accurate modeling. The studies involve a combination of surface and interface spectroscopy techniques: photoemission and inverse photoemission spectroscopy (PES, IPES), scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS), internal photoemission, Kelvin probe-contact potential difference (KP-CPD) and interface transport measurements. Collaborations are established in the areas of organometallic chemistry and quantum chemical calculations on materials and interfaces. %%% These studies are expected to provide improved fundamental understanding of organic films and interfaces which are critical areas important to the development of organic materials based light emitting diodes and related devices with greater performance and efficiency for applications in electronics and photonics. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area doc8832 none This goal of this project is to uncover the fundamental aspects of the biophysics associated with synchronization in small groups of neurons. The question will be addressed both in the biological laboratory as well as using numerical and electronic simulations of the neurons seen in the lab. The research will add to the understanding of how biological nervous systems can process information from the environment and pass it on in a coherent way to decision making centers. The work, while in small nervous systems of invertebrates, will directly bear on how more complex systems can organize to produce interesting functional behaviors. During the course of the project, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers from Physics and Biology will work side-by-side and will learn about the biological sciences as well as the physical processes underlying the biological activity doc8815 none Fountain OPP-OO- Jacobel This is a collaborative proposal from Principal Investigators at Portland State University and St. Olaf College. The movement of water through glaciers profoundly affects ice motion by influencing the stress distribution at the bed of the glacier. Therefore, a great deal of research has focused on the hydraulic nature of subglacial water transport. For temperate glaciers, the main source of water is surface-generated melt water. How this water reaches the glacier bed is of critical importance. Surface and englacial conditions may preferentially direct water flow to certain parts of the glacier bed and starve other parts of the bed. Therefore, an understanding of the controls on the spatial pattern of subglacial hydraulic conditions will depend on an understanding of the surficial and englacial conditions routing the water to the bed. Existing knowledge of englacial conduits has largely been a by-product of investigations into subglacial conditions. The goal of this project is to investigate the location, size, and hydraulic character of englacial conduits in an alpine glacier. This project will take place on the Storglaciaren in Tarfala, Sweden, where an extensive background of scientific wok exists and an active research program continues. The Principal Investigators will undertake a two-year field program that directly detects englacial conduits and uses ice radar to identify and trace the conduit paths. Low frequency radar measurements (5 MHz) will locate regions with strong englacial scattering suggestive of englacial water pockets and potentially productive areas for drilling. The radar will also be used to map the local bed depth and topography. Conventional hot-water drilling will penetrate the glacier to intersect englacial conduits. After a conduit is encountered, they will measure conduit diameter, water pressure, and water flow speed using down-hole instruments. They will attempt to determine the interconnectivity between conduits to measure their integrated hydraulic properties over the flow path. The path of the conduits will be traced using a high-resolution ground penetrating radar operated at 100 MHz, a frequency chosen both resolve individual conduits, and to monitor changes in echo characteristics corresponding to hydrologic changes over time. The results from this study will further our understanding of conduit origin and the controls on water routing to the bed. Identification of high-resolution radar signals with conduits of known sizes and locations will make significant progress towards future use of ice radar for detecting and mapping the location of englacial conduit. NSF Proposal Number: PI: Fountain Statement of Work We will directly measure the geometry and hydraulics of englacial conduits The principle method of detecting englacial conduits will be drilling into the glacier to directly intersect the conduits. We will employ a hot-water drill capable of penetrating at rates of 1 m min-1. We will attempt to drill 20 boreholes in 3 different arrays for a total of 60 holes. During drilling we will monitor both drill depth and water levels. If openings appear on both sides of the borehole and flow is detected, either by natural particulates moving in the water or by a deflection of thread hanging from the camera, no further drilling in the hole will occur. If flow is detected careful hydraulic measurements will be made. The shape of the opening will be recorded and flow velocities will be measured. Within each borehole array and between arrays, we will test for interconnectivity by displacing the water in one borehole and measuring the response in other boreholes. The data from this project will test a model for the origin and evolution of conduits. Another test will compare the measured depth of a water-filled conduit and its hydraulic characteristics to that predicted by theory. The flow data and geometry of the conduits will be used to test Rothlisberger s ( ) theory. If we are able to monitor conduits over time we will also test Spring s ( ) non-steady state theory. From the borehole arrays and the radar imaging (Jacobel) we will infer the 3-dimensional topology of the conduit network at 6 different locations (over 2 years) in the glacier. These results will help to resolve the differences between the models of Shreve ( ) and Fountain and Walder ( ). More generally, spatial differences in the conduit networks imply differences in the flux of water to different areas of the bed and therefore impose an external condition on the development of subglacial hydraulic systems. These results will be reported in several journal articles doc8834 none Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) are capable of being transported to the Arctic by long-range processes (i.e., global distillation), and from locally contaminated areas by sea ice and runoff. The effect of these persistent pollutants on arctic ecosystems is poorly understood, but evidence shows that bioaccumulation occurs for some contaminants, and in particular may pose a threat to organisms at the highest trophic levels and indigenous people. Dissolved organic matter (DOM) is ubiquitous to all surface waters in the Arctic, and may play an important role in the fate of POPs. DOM is capable of acting as a quasi-sorbent thereby altering the speciation of POPs in the water column. DOM is also highly photoreactive and is able of forming chemical transients that can transform POPs to other substances. Given the high degree of photon flux that occurs during the boreal summer, photolytic processes may play an important role in POP fate in arctic surface waters. This research is exploring processes that control the fate of POPs in the presence of DOM from surface waters at a freshwater (Toolik Lake) and a marine site (Barter Island) in the Arctic. Specific objectives include: 1. identify and quantify the level of POP contamination in the surface waters at the two sites; 2. collect, isolate, and elucidate the structural and photolytic properties of DOM at these two sites; 3. measure the degree to which direct and indirect photolysis occurs for POPs using solar simulators in the lab and at the Toolik Lake field site; 4. identify and quantify the types and amounts of transient species formed by the photolysis of DOM; and 5. study the reaction kinetics and mechanisms for the direct and indirect photolysis of POPs and their daughter products. The project is a collaborative effort between investigators at Ohio State University BPRC (Chin) and the University of Colorado INSTAAR (McKnight). Heptachlor, hexachlorobenzene, cis-chlordane, lindane, and two PCB congeners have been selected for study because they represent contaminants commonly detected in arctic surface waters, fauna, and the aboriginal people, and because they possess a wide range of physicochemical and photochemical properties. State-of-the-art methods for isolating and quantifying photosensitizers will be used. These include tangential-flow ultrafiltration unit and reverse-phase columns for concentrating DOM from the two sites. DOM isolates present at environmentally realistic levels will be used in both lab and outdoor photolysis experiments to determine the efficacy of these photosensitizers at transforming POPs. The reactions will be followed closely to quantify changes in both the parent compound and their photoderivatives. Other aspects of the project will attempt to trap phototransients using probes in an effort to elucidate important photolytic pathways. The proposed project will provide the basis for future research into the processes that control POP fate in the Arctic. Finally, information accrued will aid those parties responsible for the stewardship of these ecosystems doc8835 none The investigators will continue development of a coupled global magnetosphere-ionosphere-thermosphere circulation model and to make it accessible to the scientific community. The model will be expanded to include an adaptive mesh and will be made more robust and user friendly. Extensive testing, model-data comparisons, and establishing baseline metrics of the model s performance will be an integral part of the development effort. The model results will be made available to the scientific community via the Internet, and runs on demand will be executed for selected events. Data analysis and visualization tools are also provided to make optimal use of the model. The project also includes the acquisition, installation, and maintenance of a new Beowulf computer cluster at UCLA. The model will be used to study the space weather effects resulting from disturbances in the solar wind. This is important for improving the ability to mitigate the potential hazards on technical systems on earth due to solar disturbances doc8836 none This award provides funding to the University of Houston (UH) for a Summer REU Site in Electrical and Computer Engineering under the direction of Dr. Frank J. Claydon. The proposed program will build on the UH in-house self-funded REU program conducted during Summer . The program is designed to infuse 12 undergraudate students with enthusiasm towards graduate level education and careers in research. At least 50% of these students will selected from institutions other than UH. Institutions with significant Hispanic or African-American student populations will be particularly targeted for student recruitment. Each student will undertake a specific research project, and a faculty advisor (participating in the REU program) will work with the student to develop his her research skills. An essential element of the program will be its emphasis on professional development of the students (e.g., paper writing and technical presentations doc8837 none To advance the state-of-the-art in conjugated polymeric transistors by examining ordered conjugated polymer systems and developing ways to engineer it for enhanced mobilities and improved current drive capability. This project will investigate polymeric thin film transistors (TFT) using oriented conjugated polymers to elevate mobility and polymers doped with low molecular weight compounds to enhance charge injection. Recipes and materials developed in Germany will be used to orient and dope the polyflourenes and apply them to polymeric field effect transistors (FET). Processing schemes will be developed to fabricate prototypes which reduce the source drain resistance to the channel while maintaining compatibility with polymer processing. This project team will design, fabricate and test polymeric field effect transistors to advance active matrix polymeric flat panel displays. Large area displays, which could be manufactured using cheap reel-to-reel batch technology, and which are ultra-thin and flexible could become a reality soon. Flexible displays and low production costs make light emitting polymers (LEP) a competitive option for the manufacture of flat panel display technology. Development of polymer electronics will fuel this revolution by their integration with LEPs into smart pixels for active matrix displays. This proposal addresses some of the key impediments to this realization doc8838 none Spinrad How and when do galaxies form? Studies of the microwave background radiation show that the universe was spectacularly homogeneous at redshift of approximately (corresponding to ~ 3 x 10 5 years after the Big Bang). Locally, ~ 13 Gyr later, at time 0, we find that the distribution of matter is lumpy, with baryons largely consigned to luminous, bound structures. such as galaxies and clusters of galaxies. These present-day structures can be explained by the gravitational collapse and coalescence of the overdense regions of the early Universe. A detailed understanding of this collapse, called galaxy and large-scale structure formation, stands as one of the primary challenges to astrophysicists today. This project is a, three year systematic, observational study of the earliest phases of galaxy formation. It has three scientific objectives: (1) identifying galaxies at very high redshift (z 4). (2) characterizing the galaxy population(s) at early cosmic epoch. and (3) performing detailed physical studies on a subsample of these objects as a window toward understanding the early population(s) as a whole. To conduct this study, this project will significantly augment the census of very distant (z 4) galaxies using two proven techniques: (1) photometric selection of very high-redshift protogalaxy candidates from deep ground- and space-based imaging. and (2) slit spectroscopic searches for high-redshift line emission on deep exposures. Once these high redshift objects have been found they will be studied to find the cosmic star formation history at z 5, the prevalence of dust in the early Universe, the surface density and distribution of galaxies at early, cosmic time, and the luminosity function of both photometrically -selected and line-emitting galaxies in the early Universe. In particular. how are these two populations related? Studying both populations is essential for obtaining the truest understanding of the earliest phases of galaxy evolution. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc8839 none Ustach This award to Duke University on behalf of the Duke UNC Oceanographic Consortium provides instrumentation to update and expand the oceanographic research capabilities of the research vessel Cape Hatteras, a ship operated by DUNCOC as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS) research fleet. The acoustic Doppler current profiler, salinometer, echosounder upgrades and water sampling bottles will all be available as shared-use tools for all scientific users of the research ship. These improvements will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists using the ship in their research during and future years doc8840 none Ferre The objective of this project is to explore the use of borehole ground penetrating radar (GPR) for the measurement of water content in landfills by studying the relationship of the electrical and dielectric properties of decomposing refuse with its water content. Specifically, two key issues underlying the use of borehole GPR for water content measurement will be addressed: (1) determination of the frequency-dependent electrical and dielectric properties of decomposing refuse and (2) definition of the spatial sensitivity of the borehole GPR method to spatially variable electrical and dielectric properties. Laboratory column experiments will be conducted to fulfill the first goal. To fulfill the second goal, analytical and numerical methods previously developed by the PI will be extended to fit the borehole GPR situation; these analytical descriptions will be field tested for one year in an operating landfill of the City of Tucson as a part of its reclamation of the historic Rio Nuevo district. Better measurement and monitoring of water content in a bio-reactor landfill is important to its operation. Too much water impedes the flow of air through the refuse slowing the rate of degradation; insufficient moisture can lead to increased subsurface temperatures, reduced reaction rates and the potential for subsurface combustion. Other environmental applications dependent upon measurement of volumetric water content of the subsurface include estimation of natural recharge, optimization of artificial recharge and soil aquifer treatment operations, monitoring of slope stabilization and isolation of hazardous wastes doc8841 none The annual meeting of the Rocky Mountain Regional Neuroscience Group provides a unique opportunity for scientists in this geographically isolated region to interchange results and ideas in neuroscience. Participants hear an internationally known keynote speaker, learn about ongoing research in regional laboratories, and meet neuroscientists from regional universities and colleges. Faculty and students from departments of neuroscience, psychology, and biology, from smaller colleges as well as major universities come to provide interactions that foster undergraduate participation and exchange of graduate training information, as well as potential collaborations. This award provides partial funding for the conference, primarily for small travel awards for participants from distant schools, to help defray student expenses, and for publication of an abstract volume. This meeting will have an impact on career choices of many students who attend, and will foster collaborative opportunities between the many colleges represented doc8842 none The basic purpose of this research is to automate and facilitate the use of rigorous logic. Rigorous reasoning plays (or should play) an important role in a wide variety of intellectual endeavors, and automated reasoning tools have many important potential applications. Procedures for proving theorems will be crucial components of automated reasoning tools, since these procedures can be used as inference mechanisms. The focus of this research is on proving theorems of a formulation of higher-order logic known as type theory (more specifically, the typed lambda-calculus). This formal language includes first-order logic, but in a practical sense it has greater expressive power, and it is particularly well suited to the formalization of mathematics and other disciplines and to specifying and verifying hardware and software. Part of this research involves continued development of an existing computerized theorem proving system called TPS, which can be used to construct and check formal proofs (in natural deduction style) interactively, semi-automatically, and automatically. In automatic mode, TPS first searches for an expansion proof, which expresses in a non-redundant way the fundamental logical structure of proofs of the theorem in a variety of styles, and then transforms this into a proof in natural deduction style. The interactive commands for applying rules of inference are available in a related program called ETPS (Educational Theorem Proving System), which is used interactively by students in logic courses to construct natural deduction proofs. The possibility of using TPS in a mixture of automatic and interactive modes makes it an attractive tool for working on complex logical problems in a variety of disciplines. More information about TPS can be found at http: gtps.math.cmu.edu tps.html. The research involves methods of searching for expansion proofs, including methods of finding appropriate substitutions for set variables, methods of searching for matings of subformulas, and the interactions between these; representations, manipulations, presentations, and translations of proofs; enhancement of TPS as a useful logical tool; and related problems and questions doc8843 none This project concerns research in set theory and descriptive set theory, particularly involving the influences of the axiom of determinacy. The axiom of determinacy is the statement that every two-player integer game is determined, that is, one of the players has a winning strategy. Although this axiom contradicts the axiom of choice, an accepted part of mathematics, it was proposed in the s to be a reasonable assumption for the smallest inner model of set theory containing the real numbers. This model contains the sets of reals occurring in ordinary mathematical practice (e.g., the projective sets and beyond). The study of this model, in turn, gives direct information about the mathematical universe. The notion of a scale is a central structural concept in descriptive set theory, and the axiom of determinacy was used to develop the scale theory of the projective sets, which was later extended throughout the entire model. The scale theory by itself, however, is not sufficient to answer many questions. A more detailed inductive analysis was begun in the mid s which was successful at the lower levels of the model, including the projective sets. This theory does not currently extend through the entire model, and finding such an extension remains a central goal. Recently, several new lines of investigation have opened up, relating in some way to the theory of this model. One such direction concerns investigating the connections between the existing theory of this model and the theory of ultrafilters (Shelah s p.c.f. theory). Preliminary results, which use centrally Woodin s theory of the nonstationary ideal, suggest strong collapsing principles apply as one moves from the inner model to the real universe. Exactly what is forced to collapse, and what principles govern this phenomenon, is a topic of investigation. Finding and establishing principles independent of the complete inductive analysis might also provide a framework for propagating a basic skeleton of the analysis through the entire model. This project attempts to advance the understanding of the mathematical universe of sets. All of mathematics takes place within this universe, and progress here is important not only foundationally, but because of the direct influence on the various branches of mathematics. It has been known for some time that strong assumptions are needed to answer many basic mathematical questions. Identifying these assumptions and exploring their consequences is a major theme in set theory. The axiom of determinacy is an important example of such an axiom. This was formulated in the s but the full extent of its consequences is not known. Recent evidence suggests that it may shed light on some basic mathematical questions, such as the continuum hypothesis (the question of how many real numbers there are doc8834 none Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) are capable of being transported to the Arctic by long-range processes (i.e., global distillation), and from locally contaminated areas by sea ice and runoff. The effect of these persistent pollutants on arctic ecosystems is poorly understood, but evidence shows that bioaccumulation occurs for some contaminants, and in particular may pose a threat to organisms at the highest trophic levels and indigenous people. Dissolved organic matter (DOM) is ubiquitous to all surface waters in the Arctic, and may play an important role in the fate of POPs. DOM is capable of acting as a quasi-sorbent thereby altering the speciation of POPs in the water column. DOM is also highly photoreactive and is able of forming chemical transients that can transform POPs to other substances. Given the high degree of photon flux that occurs during the boreal summer, photolytic processes may play an important role in POP fate in arctic surface waters. This research is exploring processes that control the fate of POPs in the presence of DOM from surface waters at a freshwater (Toolik Lake) and a marine site (Barter Island) in the Arctic. Specific objectives include: 1. identify and quantify the level of POP contamination in the surface waters at the two sites; 2. collect, isolate, and elucidate the structural and photolytic properties of DOM at these two sites; 3. measure the degree to which direct and indirect photolysis occurs for POPs using solar simulators in the lab and at the Toolik Lake field site; 4. identify and quantify the types and amounts of transient species formed by the photolysis of DOM; and 5. study the reaction kinetics and mechanisms for the direct and indirect photolysis of POPs and their daughter products. The project is a collaborative effort between investigators at Ohio State University BPRC (Chin) and the University of Colorado INSTAAR (McKnight). Heptachlor, hexachlorobenzene, cis-chlordane, lindane, and two PCB congeners have been selected for study because they represent contaminants commonly detected in arctic surface waters, fauna, and the aboriginal people, and because they possess a wide range of physicochemical and photochemical properties. State-of-the-art methods for isolating and quantifying photosensitizers will be used. These include tangential-flow ultrafiltration unit and reverse-phase columns for concentrating DOM from the two sites. DOM isolates present at environmentally realistic levels will be used in both lab and outdoor photolysis experiments to determine the efficacy of these photosensitizers at transforming POPs. The reactions will be followed closely to quantify changes in both the parent compound and their photoderivatives. Other aspects of the project will attempt to trap phototransients using probes in an effort to elucidate important photolytic pathways. The proposed project will provide the basis for future research into the processes that control POP fate in the Arctic. Finally, information accrued will aid those parties responsible for the stewardship of these ecosystems doc8845 none The International Union of Physiological Sciences (IUPS) will hold its General Assembly and the XXXIV International Congress of Physiological Sciences in Christchurch, New Zealand, August 26-31, . In order to encourage the participation of U.S. physiologists in the XXXIV Congress, the American Physiological Society will administer a travel grant program, offering a limited number of travel awards to qualified scientists. Special emphasis will be given to new investigators and to female and under-represented minority scientists. The US National Committee of the IUPS will establish the screening and selection committee, and the American Physiological Society will serve as the fiscal agent and award the travel grants. The funds provided by the National Science Foundation will help to support approximately 16 new, female, and or under-represented minority scientists. The overall goal of the travel program is to provide assistance to colleagues to attend the XXXIV Congress, to encourage the participation of women, young and under-represented minority scientists in the Congress, and to provide opportunities for the development of collaborative interactions with scientists from the Australasian region doc8846 none This award provides funding to Utah State University (USU), for a three-year REU Site Program in Space-Related Research, under the direction of Dr. Robert E. Spall. During each summer, 8 undergraduate students will participate in an intensive 10-week research experience. The primary compnent of the project requires students to complete a space-related research project (or component of a larger, ongoing project) primarily at the USU Space Dynamics Laboratory, under the direction of a faculty advisor and a graduate student mentor. Students will also participate in weekly seminars with topics to include aerospace research, technical writing and oral presentations, and graduate school. The program will culminate with attendance at the AIAA USU Annual Small Satellite Conference at which the students will have an opportunity to present the results of their work doc8847 none Kioussis This grant continues Research at Undergraduate Institution (RUI) support for a theoretical study of the interesting and unusual behavior of a series of strongly correlated electron systems: elemental plutonium, its alloys, and the isostructural monopnictides and monochalcogenides of cerium and uranium; and, the electronic and magnetic properties of the one-and two-dimensional periodic Anderson hamiltonian. %%% This grant continues Research at Undergraduate Institution (RUI) support for a theoretical study of the interesting and unusual behavior of a series of strongly correlated electron systems including elemental plutonium and its alloys, and, the electronic and magnetic properties of the one-and two-dimensional periodic Anderson hamiltonian doc8848 none In this proposal funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Henning Meyer of the University of Georgia will pursue a program of research on the spectroscopy, predissociation, and scattering of van der Waals systems. IR and molecular beam scattering are used to study the electronic ground state and predissociation dynamics. Van der Waals systems involving different sources of internal angular momentum, electronic (NO) and internal rotational (acetaldehyde), will be complexed with molecules such as water, CO, nitrogen, methane, and HF. The influence of the internal angular momentum on the bound level structure of the complexes will be studied, as will the energy transfer efficiency of the complexes in bimolecular collisions. Resonance enhanced multiphoton ionization (REMPI) and ion time of flight analysis will be used to analyze fragmentation. The data will be analyzed with a view to establishing the effects of the internal angular momentum on the intermolecular dynamics, for example, with respect to non-adiabatic effects in rotational-electronic coupling and to large amplitude vibrations. The experimental studies will be complemented by a rigorous theoretical treatment, either based on first principles or within the framework of reasonable approximations. The data gathered in this study will provide new insights relevant to intermolecular energy transfer and elementary reaction dynamics. In particular, the studies on acetaldehyde, an important air pollutant resulting from the oxidation of tropospheric hydrocarbons, adds to the understanding of the formation of tropospheric ozone. This fundamental project thus is important for understanding more practical environmental issues such as global change doc8849 none This award provides renewed funding to support the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at Western Washington University s Shannon Point Marine Center (SPMC) during the summers of - . The program will support eight students each summer for a total of nine weeks during which they will work with mentors on independent research projects. Students will be recruited nationally, with special attention given to institutions without research opportunities for undergraduates and institutions without ready access to marine environments. The goal of the program is to provide students the opportunity to engage in research that is both effectively supervised and independent, in the sense that each project s objectives are distinct, identifiable and can be brought to conclusion during the course of the program. Most research topics will focus on the local coastal marine and estuarine environments, including productivity, biogeochemistry, microbial ecology, water quality issues, and chemical ecology. The proposal is based on the theory that mentoring and networking are the most effective methods for recruiting students into a profession and for training young researchers. This program is well designed to encourage highly motivated students to continue the their pursuit of research careers in oceanography. Students conduct independent research and produce oral and written reports at the end of the internship that may lead to publications in research journals. The program will encourage a diverse set of forty students to continue their education in the field of oceanography. In the past the program has had more than 50% female participants, has drawn students from across the nation, and has attracted an ethnically diverse group of students doc8850 none Audretsch This award supports David Audretsch and students from the Indiana University-Bloomington in a collaboration with several universities in Germany, and with the Mannheim Center for European Economic Research. The project will focus on discovering what factors are generating the new wave of high-tech startup firms in Germany, in particular through the mechanism of the Neuer Markt, an new, NASDAQ-like exchange. Since little is known about entrepreneurial activity as an economic factor, the contribution of the proposed research will be great. Even in the United States, where entrepreneurship is highly valued and encouraged, there is little hard empirical data about its role in economic development. The current economic forces at work in Germany have made the creation of high-tech startup firms a focal point of public policy debate there, and has led to a broad range of reforms, privatization, and deregulation to generate entrepreneurship and a new economy. The proposed work will take advantage of the Neuer Markt, which offers a new source of information on German high-tech firms. The results of this study will enable policymakers to focus on which policies and factors really influence the creation and sustainability of high-tech firms doc8851 none Prop # PI Kenneth Coale This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessel Pt. Sur operated by San Jose State University, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories (MLML) and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Kenneth Coale is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire a hydrographic winch and INMARSAT B via a group purchase through University of Delaware (no monetary award to MLML doc8852 none With this renewal award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the work of Dr. David B. Collum at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The work involves a detailed study of the solution structures and reactivities of organolithium aggregates in the presence of N,N,N ,N -tetramethylethylenediamine (TMEDA) and related diamines, as well as ethers such as tetrahydrofuran (THF). The organolithium reagents will include n-BuLi, PhLi, and lithium acetylides. Part of the work will focus on how BF3.amine complexes and other Lewis acid adducts influence the reactivities of the organolithium compounds. Organolithium compounds, containing carbon-lithium bonds, are often written simply as RLi, where R is an organic group. They are used as reagents to prepare a variety of more complex structures, with the formation of new carbon-carbon bonds. The rates of these reactions, and the products formed, depend strongly on the presence of amine, ether, and Lewis acid additives. Dr. Collum and his group are trying to understand what species are present in solution, and how their structures influence their reactivities. The work is likely to be of interest to chemists in both academia and industry, and to provide excellent training for the students involved doc8853 none The primary goal of the proposed new work is the application of solid-state NMR to the characterization of three types of polymeric nanostructures: (1) hyperbranched polycarbonates, (2) dendritic poly(benzyl ether)s, and (3) cross-linked amphiphiles of nanoscale dimensions with a core-shell morphology. The principal technique to be used to solve all three problems will be stable-isotope labeling with rotational-echo double-resonance (REDOR) detection. This strategy involves two or more stable-isotope labels ( or sometimes one label and C-13 at natural abundance) that are incorporated in or near the region of interest, which might be an interface, or a core or surface site of the nanoparticle. REDOR then detects the dipolar coupling between heteronuclear pairs of spins. The coupling is directly related to an inferred if the averaging effects of motion are absent or suppressed. The first research goal is to use C-13 H-2 REDOR to compare the chain packing in linear phenol-polycarbonate with that in hyperbranched polycarbonate of identical chemical composition. Preliminary results indicate a considerable degree of local order in the chain packing of the linear system. REDOR will establish the extent to which this order persists in the presence of 50% branching. The second research goal is to use C-13 F-19 REDOR to establish the packing of chain ends within the internal architecture of a dendrimer, and to determine the extent of interpenetration of chain ends between dendrimers. The stable-isotope labeled dendrimers will be imbedded within a matrix composed either of other dendrimers or of polystyrene, the latter to form a blend interface. The third research goal is to use C-12, N-15, H-2 and F-19 labels in various combinations for the core, interface, and shell of amphiphilic core-shell nanostructures so that multi-frequency REDOR can identify proximities at interfacial, cross-link, and surface sites. These proximities will be used to generate structural models that help interpret chemical, biochemical, and mechanical properties, and to suggest strategies for the synthesis of more effective materials. %%% Dendrimers and hyperbranched polymers are valued for their low melt viscosity, high solubility, and the possibility of many surface-active functional groups. They can be used as encapsulants, ultra-thin film coatings, and as nanoscale filler particles in polymeric composites. Individual molecules form discrete nanostructures with few intermolecular entanglements and many of the other properties of more mechanically stable nanoparticles. Nanostructured amphiphiles mad by cross-linking micelles formed from from block copolymers are true nanoparticles whose proposed applications of societal importance are vast ranging form environmental clean-up, to biomedical drug delivery, to functionalized surfaces to support tissue growth. Whether any of these nanoscale polymer applications will actually succeed will depend on the ability of synthetic chemists to control structure at the atomic level. This structure depends largely on how polymer chains pack within and on the nanoparticle. The characterization of chain packing, cross-linking, and the spatial distribution of functional groups by solid-state NMR is sufficiently detailed that the directed synthesis of tailored nanostructures will be practical doc8854 none Kenkre This is a Collaborative Research Project between the University of New Mexico and the University of Missouri at Rolla. The research performed is theoretical, employ analytic and computer methods, and deals with fundamental issues of quasiparticle transport in organic materials on the one hand, and applications to technologically important systems and devices on the other hand. Among the fundamental issues it addresses are dynamic disorder, static disorder, intense applied fields, carrier-carrier interactions, and quantum effects arising from variation in the characteristic size of the systems under study. Breaking the translational invariance by strong interactions of quasiparticles, such as electrons, with vibrations and other oscillatory motions of molecules, constitutes dynamic disorder. Some of the issues to be addressed are very new, while others are longstanding but unresolved: What is the nature of the fundamental carriers of charge and enegy in organic solids? To what extent are they localized or extended in space, free or associated with distortions around them (polaronic), coherent or incoherent in their motion? What new effects on dynamics may be expected as a result of system size variation from the mesoscale to the nanoscale? Theoretical investigations to be performed will seek to determine conditions under which transport is normal or (and to what quantitative extent) anomalous in the sense of dispersive, so that application of ordinary equilibrium statistical mechanics may not mislead quantitative assessment of experiment. Investigations will also address the possibility of formation, as well as the effects on experiments, of composite particles: electron-photon (e.g., polaron), exciton-phonon (e.g., excimer), phonon-phonon (e.g., vibron), and exciton-photon (e.g., polariton) in limits in which the characteristic motion times of the constituent elements are disparate. Static disorder, both spatial and energetic, arises in organic materials from random molecular packings, chemical impurities, charge-dipole interactions, and orientational and spatial inhomogeneities. Such mechanisms can, and often do, lead to static disorder chacterized by substantial spatial correlations. Research will focus on the sources and possible control of such correlations and their effects on quasiparticle transport. Studies will be performed of the interplay and competition that occurs between correlated and uncorrelated sources of disorder, and a variety of effects, such as rate inversion in polaronic systems, that can arise from a combination of high fields, the polaronic nature of charge, and disorder. On the basis of insights gained through this work on fundamental aspects of quantum transport of quasiparticles, the research will focus on a number of practical device issues and phenomena including the screening of charge-dipole interactions, the mutual interaction of charges during injection, interfacial effects in organic light-emitting diodes and field effect transistors, recombination, and photogeneration. It will also address special device features such as geometrical constraints, reduced dimensionality, reduced phase space, and particularly the nanoscale (more appropriately the meso-micro-nano-scale) transition. %%% This is a Collaborative Research Project between the University of New Mexico and the University of Missouri at Rolla. The research performed is theoretical, employ analytic and computer methods, and deals with fundamental issues of quasiparticle transport in organic materials on the one hand, and applications to technologically important systems and devices on the other hand doc8855 none Parris This is a Collaborative Research Project between the University of New Mexico and the University of Missouri at Rolla. The research performed is theoretical, employ analytic and computer methods, and deals with fundamental issues of quasiparticle transport in organic materials on the one hand, and applications to technologically important systems and devices on the other hand. Among the fundamental issues it addresses are dynamic disorder, static disorder, intense applied fields, carrier-carrier interactions, and quantum effects arising from variation in the characteristic size of the systems under study. Breaking the translational invariance by strong interactions of quasiparticles, such as electrons, with vibrations and other oscillatory motions of molecules, constitutes dynamic disorder. Some of the issues to be addressed are very new, while others are longstanding but unresolved: What is the nature of the fundamental carriers of charge and enegy in organic solids? To what extent are they localized or extended in space, free or associated with distortions around them (polaronic), coherent or incoherent in their motion? What new effects on dynamics may be expected as a result of system size variation from the mesoscale to the nanoscale? Theoretical investigations to be performed will seek to determine conditions under which transport is normal or (and to what quantitative extent) anomalous in the sense of dispersive, so that application of ordinary equilibrium statistical mechanics may not mislead quantitative assessment of experiment. Investigations will also address the possibility of formation, as well as the effects on experiments, of composite particles: electron-photon (e.g., polaron), exciton-phonon (e.g., excimer), phonon-phonon (e.g., vibron), and exciton-photon (e.g., polariton) in limits in which the characteristic motion times of the constituent elements are disparate. Static disorder, both spatial and energetic, arises in organic materials from random molecular packings, chemical impurities, charge-dipole interactions, and orientational and spatial inhomogeneities. Such mechanisms can, and often do, lead to static disorder chacterized by substantial spatial correlations. Research will focus on the sources and possible control of such correlations and their effects on quasiparticle transport. Studies will be performed of the interplay and competition that occurs between correlated and uncorrelated sources of disorder, and a variety of effects, such as rate inversion in polaronic systems, that can arise from a combination of high fields, the polaronic nature of charge, and disorder. On the basis of insights gained through this work on fundamental aspects of quantum transport of quasiparticles, the research will focus on a number of practical device issues and phenomena including the screening of charge-dipole interactions, the mutual interaction of charges during injection, interfacial effects in organic light-emitting diodes and field effect transistors, recombination, and photogeneration. It will also address special device features such as geometrical constraints, reduced dimensionality, reduced phase space, and particularly the nanoscale (more appropriately the meso-micro-nano-scale) transition. %%% This is a Collaborative Research Project between the University of New Mexico and the University of Missouri at Rolla. The research performed is theoretical, employ analytic and computer methods, and deals with fundamental issues of quasiparticle transport in organic materials on the one hand, and applications to technologically important systems and devices on the other hand doc8856 none Educating future generations of scientists is one of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center s ( SERC ) primary objectives, and this has been accomplished since by a highly successful undergraduate internship program. SERC s history and its future potential in training undergraduates make it a model location for establishment of an REU Site in Environmental Sciences. Interns accepted into the REU program will select a mentor and spend four days in that laboratory, and one day a week during their first three weeks rotating through other terrestrial or aquatic laboratories. After settling into an independent research project, interns will be immersed continually in scientific culture and a cohesion curriculum. They will take a series of short courses and will participate in graduate-level discussion groups. They also will attend SERC s weekly and evening seminar series and take field trips to affiliated research institutions. At the end of their internship, interested and motivated students will be encouraged to continue their research through the academic year and accompany their SERC mentors to a national scientific meeting to present their findings. Effective recruitment is critical to the success of this program. Advertising on the World Wide Web, on e-mail bulletin boards, and through mailings will continue. Partnerships with faculty and higher administration at several mid-Atlantic academic institutions to identify and encourage talented students to enter the SERC internship program will continue doc8857 none Paul E. Utgoff University of Massachusetts at Amherst $119,407 - 12 mos Feature Construction for Large Discrete Domains This is the first year funding of a three year continuing award. This project focuses on the problem of learning the representations on which more widely studied data fitting programs depend. Thus, instead of providing a representation and watching the fitting algorithm run its course, the goal is to attack the more fundamental problem of learning the representation itself. The objective is to produce an agent that can identify all of the useful features of a large discrete domain. Artificial neural networks of the typical one or two layers of hidden units cannot scale to large problems of the kind that the PI wants to solve (learning in large discrete domains), because this kind of `few-layered learning suffers not only from local minima and shallow gradients, but more fundamentally from inappropriate bases and the inherent need for exponentially many features (hidden units) imposed by the constraint of so few layers of features. The PI will pursue scalable methods that he characterizes as `many-layered learning , which will move the state-of-the-art past the current nonscalable practices of feature construction, which in turn will affect much of the work in function approximation, including the current nonscalable use of few-layered artificial neural networks. The project will produce a variety of algorithms for many-layered learning. Among them will be one for building a nested feature representation based on problem-solving experience. A second will demonstrate that knowledge layering and decomposition follow naturally from using only simple learning mechanisms to learn the next most easily learned features based on the representation learned thus far. The larger implications for many-layered learning on intelligence will be investigated doc8858 none This goal of this project to more fully understand the capabilities and limitations of the cw Raman laser through detailed probes of the optical dynamics. In particular, the research will i) expand the studies of the quantum statistics of the Stokes output, ii) measure the intensity correlations in the anti-Stokes four-wave mixing, and iii) build a cw Raman ring laser to study the competition and correlations in the forward and backward modal intensities doc8859 none The Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of Kansas has developed a summer program to help undergraduate students understand how scientific research is conducted. To achieve this goal, 30 students (10 in each of the years - ) will be recruited to spend 10 weeks at the University of Kansas campus in Lawrence, Kansas. Students in the program will learn about research in two main ways. First, each student will be paired with a faculty mentor and will complete their own research project. Participating faculty have varied interests (ecological study at many spatial scales; research on evolutionary patterns and processes at several time scales), so a diversity of research projects will be done. Second, students will participate in many group activities including weekly seminars and tours of research facilities. Students will also get additional research exposure by presenting their results at a research symposium and attending a national scientific meeting in their discipline. An objective of this program is to provide research experiences for students who are unlikely to have this opportunity at their home institution and therefore help encourage a diverse population of students to consider scientific careers. Thus, although recruitment will be nationwide, a particular focus will be to attract students from smaller institutions with fewer research faculty, and students from institutions with high minority enrollment. In particular, students from Haskell Indian Nations University, Lawrence, KS will be encouraged to become involved doc8860 none The Plant Biology Graduate Program at the University of Massachusetts will recruit ten qualified undergraduates to participate in a summer research program. The objectives are to i) interest talented undergraduates in plant biology research and teaching, ii) increase the diversity of researchers and teachers in plant biology and iii) strengthen the regional infrastructure for plant science and education in New England. Qualified undergraduates who have finished their junior year will be recruited nationally. Emphasis will be placed upon recruiting students from small New England New York Area colleges that have limited research opportunities for undergraduates, and recruiting minority students that are under-represented in the life sciences. The emphasis of this program is to provide undergraduates with an opportunity to immerse themselves in the day to day activities of a research laboratory. The program will be eight weeks in duration and will emphasize independent research under the supervision of a plant biology faculty mentor. Additionally, weekly activities are planned to foster a sense of community among the REU participants and to proivide useful experience in a variety of important skills used in a scientific research or teaching career.These include a field trip to a local habitat, workshops to develop presentation skills, a career option workshop featuring former REU participants and a poster session at the end of the program doc8861 none The objective of the REU at Rensselaer is to actively involve undergraduates in ongoing frontier physics research. The research projects cover Astrophysics, Condensed Matter Physics, Optical Physics, and Particle Physics. Features include: hands-on projects carefully designed by either using existing facilities, building simple instruments and interfaces, or using computer modeling and performing data analysis. In addition to daily contact among participants, graduate students and faculty, there are weekly group activities (seminars and field trips) that allow interaction among participants. Each research group will hold weekly group meetings to discuss technical issues regarding experiments or modeling. At the end of the 1st week there are presentations of goals. In the 6th week each participant will deliver an oral progress presentation and a written progress report. In the 10th week, each participant will do a poster presentation and submit a written final report. Guidelines for the preparation of reports and posters and samples are provided. The program philosophy is to allow students to experience the challenge, the excitement, and sometimes frustration involved in research outside the classroom. The goal is to attract and encourage talented students including minorities and women into careers in sciences doc8862 none The investigator will examine three-dimensional magnetic reconnection in the solar corona. The main effort comprises three overlapping theoretical investigations. First, numerical magnetohydrodynamics simulations will test the fundamental assumptions of the Minimum Current Corona. These simulations will fix adjustable parameters of the original model and point to the need for modifications. Second, the existing Minimum Current Coronal model will be modified to include helicity and helicity transport resulting from reconnection. This modified model will permit more accurate representations of observed magnetic fields and will test the hypothesis that helicity transport rather than flux transfer is the most energetically important aspect of reconnection. Finally, the details of the coronal reconnection process may be responsible for many aspects of coronal morphology including the occurrence of narrow structures called coronal loops. This possibility will be explored through a third investigation, a kinematic model of reconnection at three-dimensional current sheets. The results of this investigation will shed light on the range of loop diameters theoretically expected and the amount of excess energy that may heat these loops after their reconnection. Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental process occurring in the solar corona and the Earth s magnetosphere. Early investigations of magnetic reconnection produced local models set in two-dimensional geometry. While useful for demonstrating the basic feasibility of the process these models have done little to provide quantitative energetics in complex three-dimensional settings. The Minimum Current Corona, whose development was supported by prior NSF funding, has provided recent strides toward a quantitative three-dimensional model. This model predicts that the evolution of complex magnetic field, such as the solar corona, will involve intermittent flux transfer events accompanied by energy release. Moreover, the model quantifies the relationship between the processes of flux transfer and energy release. This relationship sets the level of energetic activity in each portion of the solar corona or the coronae of other stars doc8863 none This award provides funds for an REU Site in archaeological research methods in Veszto, Hungary. This is part of a collaborative, multi-disciplinary, international research project co-organized by Ohio State University and the Munkacsy Mihaly Museum, Bekescsaba, Hungary. Ten students will have the opportunity to participate in research aimed at understanding the later prehistory of the Great Hungarian Plain. They will help excavate the Early Copper Age settlement of Veszto-Bikeri. They will (1) work side-by-side with Hungarian students as they receive instruction in survey and excavation techniques; (2) participate in seminars taught by experts on archaeological method and theory and on the culture and history of Eastern Europe; (3) visit museums and archaeological sites; (4) plan and complete an independent research project; and (5) live in the small town of Veszto and learn about life in Hungary from the villagers and Hungarian students and archaeologists. The students will be responsible not only for helping excavate the site, but also for analyzing archaeological material that will provide a better understanding of prehistoric economic and social organization. They will present papers and publish their results on the project website and in archaeological journals. This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences doc8864 none Using existing and related international data sets from the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will study the relationships between export and production and the special role that food web processes may have in controlling upper ocean export. The results thus far indicate that the relative rates of carbon fixation and carbon removal via sinking particles vary widely as a function of local food web dynamics. Given the large number of studies that now use the uranium-238 series radioisotope 234Th as a proxy for POC export, these investigators intend to compile global maps of particulate organic carbon export from the upper ocean. They will look directly at the full range of 234Th export data to assess trends between seasonal, episodic, or regional flux variability and a suite of physical and biological parameters. Because a significant portion of export may occur during short pulses or events, the goal is to help explain export variability in order to better model long-term mean export over larger time or space scales. If common mechanisms can be found for the variations of production and export, these could then be incorporated into more reliable models of the global carbon cycle. While much of the ocean is characterized by low relative POC export, sites of high export are most often characterized by food webs dominated by large phytoplankton, in particular diatoms. If this result holds, models that attempt to predict new and export production from surface chlorophyll or production alone will not resolve the local carbon balance or allow one to model export controls. A mechanistic understanding of the underlying export processes is crucial to being able to incorporate this understanding into models, particularly if we desire to predict fluxes in future climate states doc8865 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Scott R. Gilbertson, of the Department of Chemistry at Washington University, is studying the synthesis of P,N-based ligands for application in catalytic asymmetric reactions. Professor Gilbertson is developing synthetic routes for new phosphine-oxazoline ligands which are chiral at phosphorus and position the phosphorus at the bridgehead of a [2.2.1] bicyclic ring system. In order to expand the range of accessible chiral ligands containing P-C bonds, Gilbertson explores the catalytic conversion of vinyl tosylates to vinylphosphines and thence to new ligands. New ligands are screened for their ability to assist in the catalysis of a mechanistically diverse range of reactions, including palladium catalyzed pi allyl addition, the Heck reaction, asymmetric hydroboration, and rhodium catalyzed [4+2] cycloisomerization. Many of the organic compounds discovered to possess desirable properties (e.g., as pharmaceutical compounds) exist in two forms, related to one another as a right hand is to a left - i.e., as mirror images. Not infrequently, only one such isomer of a compound will display the desirable properties, while the other is at best an inactive contaminant and at worst displays harmful activity. The development of new techniques for the selective synthesis of only a desired compound and not its mirror image remains a crucial area for investigation. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Scott R. Gilbertson, of the Department of Chemistry at Washington University, is developing novel classes of compounds designed to function, together with various metal ions, as catalysts for a variety of reactions affording such selectivity doc8866 none This project is part of the U.S. JGOFS Synthesis and Modeling Project (SMP) aimed at the SMP objective of understanding Mechanistic Controls of Local Carbon Balances, specifically the role of food web structure in controlling particle flux, particle export, nutrient regeneration and DOC production in oceanic systems. The collaborators will use data generated from the JGOFS process studies to consolidate field measurements into formal, quantitative descriptions of size and function-based food web groups and the material flows between them. They will use inverse techniques to infer unknown (unmeasured) material flows in the food webs. Finally they will use the trophic networks derived to test the stability of the plankton-biogeochemical ecosystem following potential perturbations to simulate changes due to ocean warming or increased stratification. Scientific reviews strongly support the assertion that understanding how the biological pump operates requires detailed knowledge of the relationships between food web structure, productivity, new production and biological fluxes. The amount of material leaving the surface layer is usually dependent on how it is partitioned among the plankton community. In an idealized plankton community, most of the primary production that passes through bacterioplankton and microzooplankton is likely to be recycled in the surface layer. In contrast, a significant portion of the primary production that passes through the mesozooplankton may become part of the sinking flux of organic matter via fecal pellet production and active transport below the euphotic zone due to vertical migration. Although many of the relevant processes were measured in JGOFS, the resulting data have never been rigorously condensed in a series of depictions of foodwebs consistent with all the data. This food web synthesis, a collaborative effort between Hugh Ducklow, George Jackson and Mike Roman, aims to further an ecosystem-based synthesis of JGOFS results. The goal is the construction or recovery of a series of solutions to foodweb networks consistent with observations from the four major US JGOFS Process Studies in the North Atlantic (NABE); the Equatorial Pacific (EQPAC); the Arabian Sea and the Southern Ocean Process Study (AESOPS -- Ross). The project is based on the assumption that improved understanding of ecosystem structure and function depends critically on knowledge of the component rate processes, or inter-compartmental exchanges. There now exists a body of formal techniques and theory for analyzing the holistic properties of such flux networks. The research plan consists of four elements: 1. Consolidate field measurements into descriptions of size and function-based food web groups and the measured flows between them. 2. Use inverse techniques to infer unknown (unmeasured) material flows in the food web. 3. Use biomass and rate information to examine stability properties and how they differ, and how characteristic flow structures generate basin scale contrasts in particle export, nutrient regeneration, and DOC production in oceanic systems. 4. From the derived stability properties, infer the vulnerability of different foodweb structures (different ocean provinces) to ocean warming and changing stratification doc8867 none This research involves the mitigation of multipath interferences in a frequency-selective fading channel. As broadband digital wireless communications is more demanded than ever, such as wireless image video web browsing and wireless data transmission, the technical challenges are exponentially increasing. One of such challenges is that, when the bandwidth of a channel becomes wider, there are more severe multipaths in a wireless system. This implies that the multipath interference mitigation becomes more important than ever. Modulated coding (MC), a convolutional coding defined on the complex field, has been recently proposed by the PI to optimally mitigate intersymbol interferences (ISI) when the ISI channel is known at both the transmitter and the receiver. The advantage of MC is that, since the arithmetic operations of both MC and ISI are over the complex field, they can be naturally combined together, which provides the convenience of the optimal MC study for a given ISI channel. Since the encoding simplicity of the MC, it is also convenient for further adding a conventional error correction coding (ECC) before the MC. It has been shown that the combined MC and turbo coding of an ISI channel may outperform the AWGN channel capacity at low SNR. As an example, for the two tap ISI channel [0. ,0. ], the bit error rate is 0. at the code rate 1 4 and the SNR E_b N_0=-1.15 dB, which is above the AWGN channel capacity. The disadvantage of the previous MC study is that the transmitter needs to know the ISI channel, which although may be possible for some applications, such as storage channels and wireline channels, may not be practical for some other applications, such as wireless channels. The aim of this proposal is to optimally design and update MC without the full knowledge of the ISI multipath channel at the transmitter with applications, in particular, in wireless communication systems. Due to the simple structure of MC, the MC update at the transmitter is possible, which is unlike the existing coding schemes doc8868 none Freitag This award to University of Rhode Island s Graduate School of Oceanography provides instrumentation to significantly improve the oceanographic research capabilities of the research vessel Endeavor, an NSF-owned ship operated by URI as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The echosounder and acoustic Doppler current profiler supported here will replace aging systems with modern ones, providing state of the art capability to all ocean researchers using the ship. These improvements will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists using the ship in their research during and future years doc8869 none This individual investigator award will fund a project with a goal of understanding the nature of electrical transport in systems of one, two or three dimensions in the vicinity of the metal-insulator transition (MIT). It is believed that in this regime, the behavior reflects a zero temperature quantum critical point that separates the metal from the insulator. On both sides of this point, the behavior is believed to be reflective of quantum mechanical ground states but the extent to which this is understood is minimal. In part this is because the traditional description of a metal in terms of a Landau liquid is simply inadequate and the properties are dominated by coulomb correlations. This investigator s laboratory has developed techniques to continuously tune through the MIT in all dimensions using a variety of methods...magnetic field tuning, continuous growth of films at low temperature, and adjustment of cross-sectional area of wires. Transport, electron tunneling and Hall effect measurements down to a temperature of 20 mK and up to magnetic fields of 20T will be used to build an experimental description of the transition and to test theoretical models. Graduate students will receive training both in condensed matter physics and technology. The physics issues are current and address the unknown aspects of electrical transport in reduced dimensions. The technology in materials and processing is state-of-the-art and will prepare them for a future career with a wide variety of options. This individual investigator award will fund work that addresses one of the most fundamental aspects of the electronic properties of materials...the metal insulator transition. This transition is at the apex of the differences between metals and insulators. Furthermore, as we will study the electrical transport in one, two and three dimensions, it not only addresses the dimensionality of this transition, the physics and materials issues that we learn will have practical importance. As wiring on integrated circuits and electronic memory gets smaller, it approaches these dimensionality limits. Graduate students will receive training both in condensed matter physics and technology. The physics issues are current and address the unknown aspects of electrical transport in reduced dimensions. The technology in materials and processing is state-of-the-art and will prepare them for a future career with a wide variety of options doc8870 none Integrated Circuits (ICs) are becoming more complex and market demand continues to pressure designers to produce new ICs in a shorter amount of time. For these reasons, there is interest in the use of verification methods that allow designers the ability to ensure correctness of their product without resorting to time-consuming simulation techniques. Two approaches for verification are equivalence checking and model checking. Internally, in these two approaches, a method for checking the equivalence of Finite State Machines (FSM) is commonly used. FSM equivalence checking is typically implemented through the use of a symbolic state-space reachability algorithm that uses BDD data structures and satisfiability (SAT) algorithms. While there have been advances in symbolic FSM machine state-space traversal methods in recent years, many designs of interest still cannot be verified using this method due to the transition relation (TR) BDD becoming too large, the BDD representing the state space already traversed becoming too large, the intermediate BDDs during image computation becoming too large, and, the overall process requiring too much computation time. Evolutionary algorithms have recently been applied to several problems in design automation. This research project involves the investigation of the use of evolutionary algorithms for exact and approximate FSM equivalence checking. Evolutionary algorithms are being developed that prune the TR and the reachable state BDDs such that exact, over-approximation or under-approximation state space traversals can be performed. Since evolutionary algorithms can be quite computationally intensive, a major portion of this effort focuses on the development of efficient mutation and crossover operations doc8871 none The Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site at Mountain Lake Biological Station (MLBS, University of Virginia) offers ten students a summer opportunity to conduct independent, self-motivated, interdisciplinary, and original biological research in experimental, field-based ecology, evolution, and behavior. Under the close supervision and guidance of a research mentor, and the program coordinator, students design, execute, analyze, interpret, and present a self-contained research project within the ten weeks of the program. Many student projects are published in leading peer-reviewed journals. Students participate in weekly seminars on the design and conduct of research, scientific ethics, writing and presentation techniques, and other matters of scientific and academic life. Students prepare written and oral proposals and final reports. Participants also take advantage of the rich, varied, and stimulating intellectual and social life at Mountain Lake. MLBS hosts two formal research seminars per week, which include both in-house and invited speakers. All Station residents eat meals together in the common dining hall, and most daily activity revolves around the central lab building where all research programs are housed. And since field sites are often within walking distance, interactions among all Station users occur constantly, resulting in a remarkably supportive and collaborative environment. Researchers from large universities and small colleges return to the Station year after year - some for 10, 20, even 30 years. Sixty to eighty principal investigators, course faculty, post-docs, graduate and undergraduate students, and high school students are in residence at the Station throughout the summer. MLBS has hosted an NSF REU-Sites program continuously since and has graduated well over 100 students - over half have gone on to pursue graduate training in biology. The program is very successful at attracting women and students from small colleges where research may not be a focus. Minority students and those in under-represented groups are especially encouraged to apply doc8866 none This project is part of the U.S. JGOFS Synthesis and Modeling Project (SMP) aimed at the SMP objective of understanding Mechanistic Controls of Local Carbon Balances, specifically the role of food web structure in controlling particle flux, particle export, nutrient regeneration and DOC production in oceanic systems. The collaborators will use data generated from the JGOFS process studies to consolidate field measurements into formal, quantitative descriptions of size and function-based food web groups and the material flows between them. They will use inverse techniques to infer unknown (unmeasured) material flows in the food webs. Finally they will use the trophic networks derived to test the stability of the plankton-biogeochemical ecosystem following potential perturbations to simulate changes due to ocean warming or increased stratification. Scientific reviews strongly support the assertion that understanding how the biological pump operates requires detailed knowledge of the relationships between food web structure, productivity, new production and biological fluxes. The amount of material leaving the surface layer is usually dependent on how it is partitioned among the plankton community. In an idealized plankton community, most of the primary production that passes through bacterioplankton and microzooplankton is likely to be recycled in the surface layer. In contrast, a significant portion of the primary production that passes through the mesozooplankton may become part of the sinking flux of organic matter via fecal pellet production and active transport below the euphotic zone due to vertical migration. Although many of the relevant processes were measured in JGOFS, the resulting data have never been rigorously condensed in a series of depictions of foodwebs consistent with all the data. This food web synthesis, a collaborative effort between Hugh Ducklow, George Jackson and Mike Roman, aims to further an ecosystem-based synthesis of JGOFS results. The goal is the construction or recovery of a series of solutions to foodweb networks consistent with observations from the four major US JGOFS Process Studies in the North Atlantic (NABE); the Equatorial Pacific (EQPAC); the Arabian Sea and the Southern Ocean Process Study (AESOPS -- Ross). The project is based on the assumption that improved understanding of ecosystem structure and function depends critically on knowledge of the component rate processes, or inter-compartmental exchanges. There now exists a body of formal techniques and theory for analyzing the holistic properties of such flux networks. The research plan consists of four elements: 1. Consolidate field measurements into descriptions of size and function-based food web groups and the measured flows between them. 2. Use inverse techniques to infer unknown (unmeasured) material flows in the food web. 3. Use biomass and rate information to examine stability properties and how they differ, and how characteristic flow structures generate basin scale contrasts in particle export, nutrient regeneration, and DOC production in oceanic systems. 4. From the derived stability properties, infer the vulnerability of different foodweb structures (different ocean provinces) to ocean warming and changing stratification doc8873 none The Physics Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) will establish a new REU site program for undergraduate physics majors. Ten students will be recruited each year, eight from outside institutions and two from within UWM. Priority will be given to women and minorities. A full-time educator within the Department, who has direct experience of minority education, will be in charge of pre-program publicity and recruitment, and, later, the day to day running and administration of the program. Applicants will choose from a broad selection of experimental and theoretical projects including: optical spectroscopy and laser physics; LEED; infrared spectroscopy; molecular beam epitaxy and vacuum deposition; X-ray scattering and other X-ray spectroscopic techniques; UV and X-ray photoemission: electron microscopy; acoustic propagation in high Tc superconductors; computational techniques for the extraction of the geometrical and electronic structure of materials from electron and X-ray probes; and the analysis of data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO). The 10 week program will start in early June. As well as the formal research activities, the program will include daily (weekdays) one-hour enrichment classes, in which the REU students will be taken through core physics at an appropriate level. There will also be a weekly colloquium. The Physics Department intends to provide an intellectually enriching atmosphere for REU students, and the Department is especially interested in attracting more women and minority students to the UWM graduate program doc8874 none This Chemistry Division award supports the continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the University of Utah. Richard Steiner is the site s Program Director. Ten faculty will serve as REU student mentors. During the award period ( - ), 10 students will be supported each summer in a ten-week program. Recruitment efforts will target students who do not have substantial research opportunities at there own institutions. In addition, the program will seek to attract a mix of students representing rural and urban upbringing and will focus on females and ethnic minorities. The research projects offered are in the areas of analytical, inorganic, organic, and physical chemistry. Throughout the program, emphasis will be placed on students learning how to work independently on a project while also learning the importance of scientific interactions and teamwork. At the program s conclusion the students will give oral reports, participate in a poster session, and submit s final written report. Program evaluation will include a Likert scale questionnaire for the student participants, and correspondence with the student participants during the academic year immediately following the research experience doc8875 none This award to the University of Oregon by the NSF Chemistry Division s Special Projects, and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the NIH, supports activities by the Committee on the Advancement of Women Chemists to increase the number and the effectiveness of women in leadership positions in the chemical sciences. The project will (1) conduct research aimed at understanding the factors that are inhibiting the careers of female faculty in the chemical sciences, (2) develop and implement programs that increase the number of female faculty, (3) establish networks among peers, (4) develop programs that increase the career success of women, and (5) evaluate and disseminate what is learned. This project will address gender disparity in the academic chemical science workforce doc8876 none Prop # PI Paul W. Ljunggren This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessel Ewing operated by the Columbia University Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Paul Ljunggren is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire a telescoping crane, immersion suits through LDEO group purchase, and a standard C SATCOM system through UDEL group purchase (no monetary award for LDEO doc8877 none Current systems that generate spatial sound for computer-based applications employ Head-Related Transfer functions (HRTFs) and simple models of room reflections to provide the acoustic localization cues. However, the abilities of these systems to generate well-controlled spatial sound streams are quite limited. Although it is possible to position virtual sound sources to the left or right rather accurately, front back confusion is common, localization in elevation is problematic, and localization in range is unreliable. This proposal describes a comprehensive program of research directed at solving the major problems that are the cause of these limitations. These problems are identified as (a) a mismatch between the HRTF used by the system and the listener s actual HRTF, (b) a failure to provide the correct dynamic cues that occur when the listener moves relative to the source, (c) a mismatch between synthesized room reflections and the listener s experience or expectations, and (d) a failure to render the correct spectral cues for familiar sounds, such as human speech doc8878 none The project will improve our understanding of African land-surface conditions in evolution of regional climate at seasonal, interannual, and decadal time scales. In most previous modeling assessments, land-surface conditions were prescribed to their current or former states and their impact on African climate assessed using an atmospheric general circulation model (GCM). Dr. Xue will investigate climate--land-surface interactions using a two-way coupled model, in which vegetation responds to circulation as well. This is often referred to as dynamic vegetation modeling. Dr. Xue will incorporate a dynamic global vegetation model, called TRIFFID (Top-down Representation of Interactive Foliage and Flora Including Dynamics), within National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) s global and regional (eta) climate models and compare the evolution of simulated vegetation with recent satellite based high-resolution estimates of vegetation. The TRIFFID model was developed at the United Kingdom Meteorological Office, and Peter Cox, who was instrumental in its development, is collaborating with Dr. Xue on this project. The project is unique in its coupling of a comprehensive model of the atmosphere, such as the NCEP GCM or eta model, to a dynamic vegetation model. The Large-scale Dynamic Meteorology (LDM ATM), Climate Dynamics (CDP ATM), and the Hydrologic Sciences (HSP EAR) programs in NSF s Geosciences directorate are funding this project doc8879 none This Chemistry Division award supports the continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at Harvey Mudd College (HMC). Shenda Baker is the site s Program Director. Eight faculty will serve as REU student mentors. Over the award period ( - ), eight students will be supported each summer in a ten-week program. Only female students will be recruited and accepted. No more than one-half of the participants may be from HMC. The research projects offered are in the areas of analytical, biological, inorganic, organic, physical, and theoretical chemistry. Summer research activities will be supplemented with workshops on careers in chemistry and scientific ethics, seminars, and a plant tour to an operating chemical facility. Program assessment will include tracking the students major upon graduation, publications, career path and eventual degree obtained. An anonymous program evaluation form will also be used to provide feedback on ways to improve the students summer research experience doc8880 none Dove This is a dissertation grant submitted by Dr. Michael Dove, Yale University on behalf of his student, Ms. Keely Maxwell. The objective of the project is to analyze the dynamic cultural landscape of the Machu Picchu Historical Sanctuary, Peru, and investigate how and why people physically and ideologically shape its landscape. This project is being jointly supported between the Americas Program and the Geography and Regional Science Program. In collaboration with the Machu Picchu Program in Cuzco,and the University of Cuzco San Antonio Abad, the investigators aim is to understand how and why participants perceptions of, and rights and responsibilities to, trees and forests in Machu Picchu differ; how these differences affect resource management strategies and outcomes; and how interactions among physical and ideological shapings of Machu Picchu cause social and ecological consequences. Results of this research will benefit both countries by promoting interdisciplinary discussions regarding how to utilize social theory to analyze and resolve protected area problems, and how social theory can better address dynamics between social and ecological systems doc8881 none This project seeks better understanding of materials properties processing relationships in laser media based on Cr2+ doped chalcogenides. Two experimental focus areas will be pursued: 1) growth of bulk single crystals of Cr2+:CdSe and Cr2+:CdSxSe1-x crystals with a range ( - ions cc) of dopant concentrations by physical vapor transport (PVT) and high temperature solution zoning. Issues addressed include: thermodynamic limits of doping and defect formation at high dopant concentrations and the effect of S alloying; formation of other oxidation states of Cr (e.g. Cr+1 , Cr+3 , Cr+4 ) and the role of Cd or Se overpressure to control stoichiometry; 2) spectroscopic measurements will be conducted to address questions such as: do these crystals emit efficiently at the proposed wavelength of operation; are there satisfactory energy flow pathways such that the material can be pumped(activated) to produce the required inversion; are parasitic losses present that are substantial enough to inhibit laser action; what are the excitation pathways of Cr2+in this host, including the possibility of pumping higher energy states to achieve efficient infrared emission. Several intrinsic advantages of the CdSSe host are: demonstrated ability to achieve single crystals, presence of natural birefringence, possibility of tailoring properties by adjusting the S Se ratio. Tunable solid state mid-IR lasers based on Cr2+:CdSe, and its related ternary compounds, represent an opportunity for developing practical light sources for remote sensing, pollution monitoring, military and medical applications. Close interactions and collaborations with industrial organizations and national labs will continue, helping to accelerate the development of useful optical devices in conjunction with materials research outcomes. %%% The project addresses both basic research issues and education, and the integration of research and education through incorporation of student teaching and training in an area of materials science of high technological relevance, serving to motivate students to pursue careers in related areas. Fisk University is a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) committed to increasing the participation of under-represented minorities in physical sciences. This project will augment its long-standing effort to recruit, train and mentor students from under-represented groups doc8882 none This award supports the study of the phenomenon of polar mesosphere summer echoes (PMSE) through comparison of meteor radar measurements from Resolute Bay and Svalbard with additional MF radar measurements from stations located in Alaska and three radars located in the European sector at 78 N, 69 N, and 68 N latitudes. The mesopause winds, echo power strengths, and mesopause temperature estimates derived from these radar measurements at both stations would be compared for simultaneous operations. The primary motivation for this research is to examine the question as to whether cold mesopause temperatures are the only factor that underlies the production of these echoes. Current preliminary evidence suggests that latitudinal and longitudinal differences in mesopause water vapor composition might also be a factor. These measurements would be supplemented with studies related to observations obtained in the Antarctica at McMurdo and at the Peruvian Machu Picchu site (62 S, 58 W doc8883 none This Chemistry Division award supports a new Research Experiences for Undergraduates site at Idaho State University. Dennis Strommen is the site s Program Director and he will be assisted by Karl De Jesus, Co-Program Director. Over the award period ( - ), ten students will be supported each summer in a ten-week program. The students recruited will be from two-year institutions primarily in the Northwest. Seven Chemistry faculty will offer research in the areas of atmospheric pollutants, solar energy conversion processes, mechanism of action of thalidomide, removal of Hg(II) from aqueous systems, development of cyanide detection, and chemometrics. As a major result of this program, the organizers anticipate the development of the interaction between Idaho State University and the two-year institutions in the Northwest. The achievement of this objective will be central to assessing the success of the REU site doc8884 none This project centers around the determination of masses of light ions to unprecedented precision using the mass spectrometer that has been developed over a number of years at the University of Washington. Using only radio-frequency methods for observing the normal mode frequencies of a single isolated ion, bound to a Penning trap, it is possible to measure masses of low mass-to-charge-ratio ions relative to a multi-charged carbon ion with an overall accuracy that well exceeds one hundred parts per trillion with 24 hours of data and approaches ten parts per trillion in 8-10 days. Projects for the award period include 1) development of a reliable apparatus that allows an ion of practically any element to be loaded from an external ion source into the spectrometer; 2) measurements of light-ion masses at the ultimate accuracy of the instrument; 3) improvements of the spectrometer to attempt to achieve an accuracy of ten parts per trillion in one day; and 4) refinement of the measurement of the tritium-helium-3 mass difference to an accuracy of 0.1 eV doc8885 none Miroslaw Truszczynski, Raphael A. Finkel and Victor Marek University of Kentucky $146,167 - 12 mos Nonmonotonic Reasoning and Computational Knowledge Representation This is the first year funding of a three year continuing award. The PI will study and implement computational knowledge-representation systems based on the paradigm of answer-set programming (ASP) with nonmonotonic logic that he recently identified, in order to demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness of the approach. Logic is most commonly used in knowledge representation as follows. To solve a problem we represent its constraints and the relevant background knowledge as a theory in the language of first-order logic (or its fragment). We formulate the goal (the statement of the problem) as a formula of the logic. We then use proof techniques to decide whether this formula follows from the theory. A proof of the formula, variable substitutions or both determine a solution. Taking a different approach, the PI will study and develop computational knowledge representation tools based on nonmonotonic logics rather than on the first-order logic. In addition, he departs from the single-intended model approach dominant in logic programming. Under the ASP paradigm, a theory in a nonmonotonic formalism is regarded as a specification of a family of sets - a collection of its intended models. Each model is viewed as a representation of a different single solution. The PI will investigate syntactic and semantic issues of ASP formalisms based on nonmonotonic logics, study methods for fast computing with these formalisms, develop practical implementations, and demonstrate effectiveness of answer-set programming engines and their applicability in knowledge representation. If successful, the work will establish answer-set programming as a viable approach to declarative programming, which in turn will provide AI researchers and practitioners with a new generation of computational tools for knowledge representation doc8886 none A program of research in theoretical cosmology will include studies of the formation and evolution of various topological defects -- special structures such as domain walls, strings and monopoles -- in the universe. These remnants of the big bang could still exist in the present universe and could produce a variety of observational effects. A discovery of topological defects would provide important information both about elementary particle physics and about the early universe doc8887 none The project consists of conducting face-to-face interviews on worldviews of the publics of Egypt, Iran and Jordan. The study builds upon a NSF-funded pilot study that was designed and executed in collaboration with social scientists from the three countries. The purpose of these surveys of representative national samples is to: (1) analyze the value orientation of the publics; (2) understand the connection between social groups and value structures; (3) assess in conjunction with the existing comparative historical research the connection between secularization in the three countries and rational-legal authority and liberal democracy; (4) to explore the extent and forms of religiosity, and the relationships between religion and gender and between religion and nationalism; and (5) examine the degree of concordance of values in these societies. The project is informed by a set of historically significant issues raised in more than a century of ideological contentions that transpired in these countries. The historical social transformation of Egypt, Iran, and Jordan in the modern era did not produce a national consensus in these countries regarding the most fundamental principles of social organization, such as the form of government, appropriate economic model, the relationship with the outside world, the status of women and a national identity. Instead these societies experienced different cultural movements based on diverse values structures. The included liberal-nationalism, Islamic modernism, pan Arab nationalism (in Egypt and Jordan) and Islamic fundamentalism. Several questions will be examined in this study. (1) To what extent is there public support for these diverse value structures in Egypt, Iran and Jordan? Do these value structures correspond to diverse social groups and classes? (2) How do value structures of the publics of Egypt, Iran and Jordan differ from each other? To what extent is there a shared set of beliefs among the peoples of these societies? (3) How widespread are fundamentalist religious beliefs among these publics? What factors are conducive of these beliefs? (4) How strong is support for democracy? How widespread are related orientations such as interpersonal trust and tolerance? What factors are conductive to a democratic political culture? (5) Do basic sociological generalizations hold in Islamic societies? Is there a positive correlation between class and religiosity and between religious and political participation? Are women more religious than men in these societies are? The surveys are being conducted as part of the World Value Survey and key items on value orientations are the same one that have been included on surveys in a number of other countries will be included. It is thus possible to analyze data from the Islamic world using comparative yardsticks that make the findings meaningful in a global context doc8888 none An important legacy of the U.S. Joint Global Flux Study (JGOFS) Synthesis and Modeling Project (SMP) will be the formulation of a broad suite of models designed to simulate biogeochemical cycling at the various process study sites. Although this set of models and modeling studies has already substantially advanced our understanding of these systems, few quantitative inter-comparisons of these models have been made. This project will begin to conduct these inter-comparisons, in order to critically examine which ecosystem structures and formulations are most robust, and to investigate and explore the reasons for their success. Furthermore, it will critically evaluate the feasibility of developing biogeochemical models that are applicable over a wide range of diverse ecosystems. The main objectives of the proposed work are: (1) to add to the mechanistic understanding of how and why euphotic zone production, and the associated export of carbon, vary among diverse oceanographic regions, and (2) to accelerate the development of mechanistically-based ecosystem models that are capable of simultaneously describing the primary biogeochemical features of multiple oceanographic regimes. In order to accomplish these goals, and to provide a forum for testing and comparing various ecosystem models, the investigators will develop a series of regional test-beds, based on the high quality and large quantity of observations available from (i) the Arabian Sea Process Study (ASPS), (ii) the Antarctic Environment and Southern Ocean Process Study (AESOPS), (iii) the Equatorial Pacific Process Study (EqPac), (iv) the second iron enrichment experiment (IronEx-II), (v) the Bermuda Atlantic Time-Series Study (BATS), and (vi) the Hawaii Ocean Time-series (HOT). Websites will be constructed for all test-beds and will include access to the physical fields required to force the models, as well as time-series of biogeochemical data that will be used for either evaluation or optimization assimilation. These websites will be available as a community resource, and, in this study, will be used to facilitate both intra-site and inter-site model comparisons. This research will capitalize on work previously accomplished under the JGOFS SMP: the twelve co-investigators involved in this project (see letters of collaboration) will freely provide their regional expertise, model code, forcing fields, and biogeochemical data sets to this project. To further promote model inter-comparisons, this project will involve annual hands-on workshops in which scientists (including but not limited to the co-investigators of this proposal) will work together to quantitatively assess a number of different biogeochemical models and modeling approaches. Through these inter-comparison exercises and carefully designed simulations, the improvement of biogeochemical models will be accelerated, and the scientific community will be significantly closer to having a set of rigorously tested models that can be used for ocean carbon cycle prediction doc8889 none Prior modeling efforts have demonstrated a dramatic shift in nutrient transport fluxes as resolution was increased from coarse scales (1.6 ) to the eddy resolving case (0.1 ). Whereas coarse resolution models suggest the dominance of convective and diffusive nutrient supply, higher resolutions showed that eddy-induced upwelling was important. For this reason, the principal investigator plans to run a five-component biogeochemical model at an eddy-resolving spatial resolution of 0.1 to test the following two hypotheses: (1) the primary impact of mesoscale eddies on upper ocean ecosystems is the supply of inorganic nutrients through vertical transport processes, and (2) below the euphotic zone, the primary influence of mesoscale eddies on biogeochemical cycling is horizontal transport of dissolved materials. Understanding gained from these modeling studies will be used to guide the development of parameterizations for mesoscale biogeochemical processes to permit their inclusion in global ocean circulation models doc8890 none In this project researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will construct a mathematical model relating the fixing of atmospheric carbon dioxide by primary production in the North Atlantic Ocean to the export of that carbon to the deeper ocean. They will combine observations of deep-water sediment traps (in operation for 21+ years) at the Oceanic Flux Program (OFP), euphotic zone measurements (10+ years) at the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Site (BATS), and historical meso bathypelagic zooplankton data with an ecosystem-based biogeochemical model of particle flux from the epipelagic to meso bathypelagic zone. There is a remarkably strong covariance between the upper ocean particle flux at BATS and the deep particle flux measured by the OFP traps, as well as intense modification and strong convergence of the composition of the particle flux with depth to a invariant composition with respect to the magnitude of mass flux. Of fundamental concern is how changes in ocean remineralization will affect the magnitude of material fluxes through the water column, which is one of the major research trajectories of the Synthesis and Modeling Project of the U.S. Joint Global Ocean Flux Study. The central objective of the project is to mechanistically connect euphotic zone processes with meso- and bathypelagic zone processes by means of a prognostic model that can be used to further our understanding of these unparalleled time-series data and to test hypotheses constrained by a battery of in situ data. To do this, the PIs will derive a meso bathypelagic ecosystem structure and use it to model the flux of biogeochemically active constituents (carbon, nitrogen and silica). The meso bathypelagic portion of the model would be driven by a well-established epipelagic model coupling a moderately complex, yet robust, ecosystem model with a state-of-the-art physical upper-ocean mixing model. The choice of driver derives from the underlying hypothesis that the meso bathypelagic activity inferred from the sediment trap data is a response to time-varying responses of the upper ocean ecosystem to events of meteorological scale doc8891 none This award provides funding to the University of California-Berkeley for a 5 year REU Site Program entitled, Summer Undergraduate Program in Engineering Research at Berkely (SUPERB)-Network Technologies, under the direction of Dr. Jan Rabaey. This 8-week summer program will provide 6 undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds a stimulating research experience with mentoring by faculty and senior graduate students. Each student will be carefully matched with a faculty member, working in emerging Networking Technologies such as networking, wireless communications, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and integrated circuits. The students will have access to state-of-the-art computing and networking equipment throughout the program. The students will attend weekly meetings where they will meet with faculty to learn more about the research focus of their projectsand to hear talks on how to improve communications skills and apply to graduate school. The evaluation plan for this project calls for systematic tracking of participants after they leave the program, and the assessment of both educational outcomes as well as the broader effect on the host institution doc8892 none In this project, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will continue operations of the Planning and Data Management Office (PO DMO) of the U.S. Joint Global Flux Study (U.S.JGOFS) U.S.JGOFS planning has been funded at some level since the inception of the program in , and a specific Data Management Office grant was added in . Overall, the goal of the PO DMO is to support the completion of U.S. JGOFS activities and the promotion of JGOFS accomplishments. The Office will work especially toward securing the JGOFS legacy through support of synthesis efforts and outreach to fellow oceanographers, earth system scientists and the public at large. Of key importance will be the production of a high-quality data archive that outlasts the U.S. JGOFS Program and serves future generations of biogeochemists studying ocean processes, especially in the context of global change. A ramping down of research funding to U.S. JGOFS PIs has been underway for the past four years, but activities continue at the Bermuda Atlantic Time Series (BATS) and Hawaii Ocean Time Series (HOT) stations and in the Synthesis and Modeling Project (SMP) though , with projects funded in presumably ending in the time frame. The PO DMO activities under this award will be directed toward providing logistical support for the final stages of these projects. Activities described in this proposal would thus continue through , when the U.S.JGOFS community is expected to host the last major International JGOFS Open Science Conference in Washington, DC. Thereafter, the top priority of the PO DMO will be to produce and distribute the final U.S. JGOFS data products on CD DVD or other more permanent media doc8866 none This project is part of the U.S. JGOFS Synthesis and Modeling Project (SMP) aimed at the SMP objective of understanding Mechanistic Controls of Local Carbon Balances, specifically the role of food web structure in controlling particle flux, particle export, nutrient regeneration and DOC production in oceanic systems. The collaborators will use data generated from the JGOFS process studies to consolidate field measurements into formal, quantitative descriptions of size and function-based food web groups and the material flows between them. They will use inverse techniques to infer unknown (unmeasured) material flows in the food webs. Finally they will use the trophic networks derived to test the stability of the plankton-biogeochemical ecosystem following potential perturbations to simulate changes due to ocean warming or increased stratification. Scientific reviews strongly support the assertion that understanding how the biological pump operates requires detailed knowledge of the relationships between food web structure, productivity, new production and biological fluxes. The amount of material leaving the surface layer is usually dependent on how it is partitioned among the plankton community. In an idealized plankton community, most of the primary production that passes through bacterioplankton and microzooplankton is likely to be recycled in the surface layer. In contrast, a significant portion of the primary production that passes through the mesozooplankton may become part of the sinking flux of organic matter via fecal pellet production and active transport below the euphotic zone due to vertical migration. Although many of the relevant processes were measured in JGOFS, the resulting data have never been rigorously condensed in a series of depictions of foodwebs consistent with all the data. This food web synthesis, a collaborative effort between Hugh Ducklow, George Jackson and Mike Roman, aims to further an ecosystem-based synthesis of JGOFS results. The goal is the construction or recovery of a series of solutions to foodweb networks consistent with observations from the four major US JGOFS Process Studies in the North Atlantic (NABE); the Equatorial Pacific (EQPAC); the Arabian Sea and the Southern Ocean Process Study (AESOPS -- Ross). The project is based on the assumption that improved understanding of ecosystem structure and function depends critically on knowledge of the component rate processes, or inter-compartmental exchanges. There now exists a body of formal techniques and theory for analyzing the holistic properties of such flux networks. The research plan consists of four elements: 1. Consolidate field measurements into descriptions of size and function-based food web groups and the measured flows between them. 2. Use inverse techniques to infer unknown (unmeasured) material flows in the food web. 3. Use biomass and rate information to examine stability properties and how they differ, and how characteristic flow structures generate basin scale contrasts in particle export, nutrient regeneration, and DOC production in oceanic systems. 4. From the derived stability properties, infer the vulnerability of different foodweb structures (different ocean provinces) to ocean warming and changing stratification doc8894 none Sargent The River Basins Research initiative (RBR) NSF-REU Site will incorporate 12 undergraduate science majors into an extensive interdisciplinary research program that is focused on the systematic characterization of river systems throughout the upstate of South Carolina. At present the RBR effort encompasses the Earth and Environmental Sciences, Biology, and Chemistry Departments in the sciences, and the Sociology, Economics, and Political Science Departments in the social sciences. The faculty involved in this program have developed a model system for interdisciplinary integration. The result is a symbiotic interaction between faculty and students from different disciplinary areas. The long-term goal of this research program is to quantify the extent of human impact on river systems in the Lower Broad River Basin in the upstate region of South Carolina. The Greenville-Spartanburg metropolitan area, one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the country, is located in the headwater region of the Lower Broad River Basin. As a result, water quality and water resource issues are of increasing importance to the local community as well as the communities in the downstream portion of the Broad River Santee River Basin. Water quality data collected include chemical data (seven cations including trace metals, seven anions, and alkalinity), conductivity, dissolved oxygen, temperature, fish and aquatic insect abundance and diversity, bacterial abundances, and discharge doc8895 none OCE- This project constitutes the management component for the second and final phase of the Synthesis and Modeling Program (SMP) of the U.S. Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (U.S.JGOFS). The overall objective of the SMP as defined in the Implementation Plan (U.S. JGOFS, ) is to synthesize knowledge gained from the U.S. JGOFS and related studies into a set of models that reflect our current understanding of the oceanic carbon cycle with emphasis on the processes controlling the partitioning of carbon among oceanic reservoirs and between the ocean and atmosphere. The success of the SMP therefore depends heavily on fostering strong interactions between the observational and modeling biogeochemical communities and on focusing those efforts in a coordinated fashion. Over the past three years, the SMP has grown into a vigorous scientific effort with some 50 funded projects from NSF, NASA, NOAA, and DOE and about 100 principal and co-investigators. This project will therefore support the SMP management team s involvement in project oversight and coordination, ongoing program scientific relevance, development of the required infrastructure, and communication among SMP components and to the outside community doc8896 none Kroetz The PI proposes to continue his investigations on the holomorphic aspects of representations of Lie groups. An emphasis will be taken towards applications to automorphic forms and harmonic analysis. In particular, one objective is to obtain estimates on the Fourier coefficients of automorphic forms. The theory of Lie groups, named in honor of the Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie, has been one of the major themes in twentieth century mathematics. As the mathematical vehicle for exploiting the symmetries inherent in a system, the representation theory of Lie groups has had a profound impact upon mathematics itself, particularly in analysis and number theory, and upon theoretical physics, especially quantum mechanics and elementary particle physics doc8897 none A major achievement of the last decade of oceanic observations by the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS) and World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) has been the dramatic improvement in our ability to use observations to estimate the oceanic inventory of anthropogenic carbon. This improvement has been driven both by increased data and by the development of improved techniques for analyzing the observations. An important role has been played by the rapid development of ocean general circulation models that are now being used routinely to do tracer simulations and provide estimates of anthropogenic carbon uptake. However, despite the great progress that has been made, there remain many important issues that need to be resolved. In this project, researchers at Princeton University will conduct model sensitivity studies to examine several hypotheses for model differences. They would make use of measurements from the JGOFS and WOCE surveys to determine which model gives a more realistic simulation, and to improve estimates of the oceanic uptake and storage of anthropogenic CO2, bomb radiocarbon, and chlorofluorocarbons (CFC). The goal is to advance both the development of reliable ocean models and the estimation of oceanic uptake of anthropogenic CO2 from observations with the aim of improving estimates of the oceanic carbon sink and our understanding of the ocean carbon cycle. First, the team plans to examine model simulated tracer-tracer relationships of anthropogenic CO2, bomb 14C, and CFCs to evaluate aspects of model physics that believed to be important in determining tracer distributions. They will then attempt to improve the estimates of anthropogenic CO2 inventories by making use of the model simulations in conjunction with observations to critically examine ways of separating the anthropogenic CO2 from the background total CO2 and by exploring alternative methods using the distributions of CFCs, bomb 14C, and CCl4. A coordinated examination of these tracers that historically have been examined in relative isolation promises a better understanding anthropogenic CO2, bomb 14 C, CFCs, and CCl4 uptake in ocean models and in the real ocean doc8898 none The six participating students will conduct independent research under the supervision of Professor Arie Bialostocki with the assistance of David Grynkiewicz, a former REU participant. The topics of research are: Erdos-type problems ranging from extremal graph theory, number theory to combinatorial geometry and problems in finite groups, in particular permutation puzzles. Additional aspects of the program are enhancing the mathematical writing and presentation skills of the participant and the exploration of a variety of careers in mathematics, especially choosing a graduate school. On the lighter side of the program there will be recreational activities like socializing, hiking, movies, plays and concerts. Each participating student will receive a stipend of $3,200 and free single room housing on campus. More details appear on www.its.uidaho.edu reu. The email contact is reu@uidaho.edu or phone (208) 885 - doc8899 none This Chemistry Division award supports a new Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at Wichita State University. Paul Rillema is the site s Program Director; Erach Talaty is the Co-Program Director. Nine faculty will be available to serve as REU student mentors. During the award period ( - ), each summer ten students will participate in a ten-week program. Recruitment efforts will be 54 institutions of higher learning in the state of Kansas. There will be a special effort devoted to attract women and minorities. The research focus will cover all the basic areas of chemistry, and involve a range of topics such as solar energy conversion, inorganic ferromagnetic, molecular association by mass spectrometry, electrochemistry of porphyrins, heterocyclic chemistry, mechanisms of bio-organic reactions and theoretical calculations. Other activities planned for the student participants include workshops and off-campus visits. Student participants will conclude the program with a oral presentation at a local symposium. A final written research report is also required. Evaluation of the program will include input from both the students and the participating faculty doc8900 none This project is concerned with electromagnetic sensing and imaging applications that require relatively high power levels over wide bandwidths. In such cases, there may be interference between the wideband signal source and other licensed users of the electromagnetic spectrum. Such interference is prohibited by FCC regulations. We propose using reserved Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) frequency bands for the measurements. At the ISM frequencies, unlimited power can be used if necessary. In order to synthesize a wideband response from narrow-band measurements at the ISM frequencies, we will investigate methods for using the observed response at a few closely spaced frequencies and then predicting the full wideband response. A conventional time-domain response can then be calculated, or an interpretation in the frequency domain can be carried out. A critical feature of the proposed approach is that very accurate data must be obtained at the measured frequencies. In the past, inaccuracies in the data have led to limited success with this approach in practical problems. Using a newly developed calibration method, we expect to be able to obtain the high accuracies that will be required. This proposed approach, we believe, has tremendous potential in many fields. For example, ground penetrating radar (GPR) and non-destructive evaluation (NDE) techniques often require wideband, high-power electromagnetic fields in order to image covered objects. Other potential applications include medical imaging. Although a source of EM fields in a medical application will probably not interfere with licensed radio stations, there is a growing risk that the proliferation of such wideband devices may cause interference with each other. There are significant advantages in having each of the imaging devices in a crowded environment operate in a reserved, narrow frequency band, rather than over wide bands that risk interference with each other doc8895 none OCE- This project constitutes the management component for the second and final phase of the Synthesis and Modeling Program (SMP) of the U.S. Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (U.S.JGOFS). The overall objective of the SMP as defined in the Implementation Plan (U.S. JGOFS, ) is to synthesize knowledge gained from the U.S. JGOFS and related studies into a set of models that reflect our current understanding of the oceanic carbon cycle with emphasis on the processes controlling the partitioning of carbon among oceanic reservoirs and between the ocean and atmosphere. The success of the SMP therefore depends heavily on fostering strong interactions between the observational and modeling biogeochemical communities and on focusing those efforts in a coordinated fashion. Over the past three years, the SMP has grown into a vigorous scientific effort with some 50 funded projects from NSF, NASA, NOAA, and DOE and about 100 principal and co-investigators. This project will therefore support the SMP management team s involvement in project oversight and coordination, ongoing program scientific relevance, development of the required infrastructure, and communication among SMP components and to the outside community doc8902 none The goal of this research is to develop the necessary methodology for automated recognition of generic object and concept classes (such as buildings, cars, boats, and trees) in digital images in order to substantially improve the process of content-based image retrieval, which has relied mainly on low-level color and texture features for matching queries to database images. The approach has three major aspects: (1) to design new high-level image features including cluster features that group together lower-level features and relationship features that capture spatial relationships among them; (2) to develop a unified representation that can express a large variety of both low- and high-level features in a form that can be used by learning systems; and (3) to automate the development of recognizers for object and concept classes through the use of a hierarchical, multiple classifier methodology. The resulting techniques are being evaluated on several different large image databases, including commercial databases whose images are grouped into broad classes and a ground-truth database that provides a list of the objects in each image. The results of this work will be a new generic object and concept recognition paradigm that can immediately be applied to automated or semi-automated indexing of large image databases. The methodology will help to bridge the gap between the high-level needs of users of image retrieval systems and the low-level features typically extracted from an image. The generic object class recognition algorithms we develop will begin a new era of object recognition research, leaving the geometric domain and entering the conceptual domain doc8903 none The lateral resistance of short rigid piles depends on the point where the lateral load is applied. Experiments have shown that lateral resistance can be increased significantly by shifting the point of the load application downward to where the resulting mode of the pile movement becomes purely translational, i.e., no rotational movement. Through experimental studies, this point has been identified near the mid-height of the pile for cohesive soils, whereas it is toward the bottom of the pile for cohesionless soils. Analytical studies have been tried to identify this optimum point of the lateral load application, but they have been mostly in two-dimensions without considering the significant effects of three-dimensional development of stresses and movements. The PI has developed a preliminary analytical formulation for the estimation of the lateral resistance of rigid piles considering the truly three-dimensional effects. A limiting equilibrium approach was used incorporating a tetrahedron-shaped failure wedge. The formulation considers circumferential and radial normal and shear stresses around and along the pile as functions of the depth and the magnitude of the lateral movement. The solution method considers an approach of progressive failure. For a given point of lateral load application, the thickness of the soil layer experiencing failure gradually increases from the ground surface (or from the bottom of the pile in case when the lateral load is applied near the bottom of the pile). At a given thickness of the soil layer experiencing failure, the corresponding pile lateral resistance and the point of the pile rotation are calculated from equilibrium conditions through iterative search methods. As the thickness of the soil layer experiencing failure increases, new values of the pile lateral resistance and the point of the rotation are calculated. The process continues until the maximum lateral resistance is obtained. This preliminary analytical solution indicates that the ultimate lateral resistance can be increased by up to 170 % and 340 % for piles embedded in clay and sand, respectively, when the point of the lateral load application moves from the top of the pile to the optimum point. The solution has also been used to compare with the centrifuge model test results reported in the literature. Results indicate that the analytical solution, though preliminary in nature due to numerous assumptions introduced, is capable of estimating the measured pile lateral resistances as a function of the point of the lateral load application very closely However, additional in-depth study is necessary to improve the solution method before it can be used with confidence in accurately estimating the lateral resistance of rigid piles. Centrifuge model tests will be conducted in both sand and clay soils. The effect of pile insertion method and point of loading will be studied. Pile rotation and normal stress measurements will be made during testing. Digital photography will be used to verify pile rotation and document the tests. This is a collaborative research proposal. The South Dakota School of Mines and Technology will be the lead institution, conducting the analytical portion of the study including the solution development and verification. The University of Florida will conduct the experimental centrifuge model tests doc8904 none This research will be on the development of a food web model that can be used to predict export production and to characterize the nature of the carbon exported to the interior of the ocean. The model will be similar to the food web model developed conceptually at the Synthesis and Modeling (SMP) food web work-shop in Keystone, Colorado. In the model phytoplankton are envisioned as consisting of five functional groups, small phytoplankton such as Synechococcus and Prochlorococcus, diatoms, coccolithophores, Phaeocystis, and nitrogen fixers. Division of the phytoplankton in this manner is hypothesized to be necessary to explain the dependence of export ratios on temperature and primary production, to account for the allocation of exported carbon between calcium carbonate, particulate organic carbon, and dissolved organic carbon, and to take into account various methods of ballasting (fecal pellets, calcium carbonate, and silica) that influence the sinking and remineralisation rates of particulate carbon. A distinguishing characteristic of the model is the assumption that open ocean biological communities adapt to environmental conditions in a way that tends to maximize the stability of the steady state condition toward which the communities evolve. This same hypothesis has previously been tested with a simpler food web model in which the phytoplankton are envisioned as consisting of only two functional groups, small and large phytoplankton. The success of that previous model, which was developed with funding from the first phase of the SMP, has provided the motivation for extending this same approach to the more complex model with five functional phytoplankton groups. It is hypothesized that a stable coupled physical-biological model of the ocean will require that the biological component be adaptive. With respect to export production, specific questions to be addressed with the model will include the following: 1. How much of the organic carbon is exported as dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and how much as particulate carbon (PC) 2. Of the PC export, how much is exported as particulate organic carbon (POC) and how much as carbonate carbon (CC) 3. To what extent is the exported POC ballasted by silica and or carbonate or sequestered by incorporation into encapsulated fecal pellets A time-dependent version of the model may be incorporated into a GCM at a later date doc8905 none The prediction of future atmospheric CO2 concentrations requires an in depth understanding of the feedbacks that operate between the physical, biological and chemical components of the global climate system. One means of studying these feedbacks is to investigate observed past variability in the marine carbon cycle, as has been done in the tropical Pacific in connection with the El Nino Southern Oscillation. However, little is known about the contribution of the subtropical and subpolar gyres to atmospheric CO2 variations, despite the fact that these gyres cover more that half of the world s ocean. For this reason, principal investigators from the University of California-Los Angeles, the Bermuda Biological Research Station and the National Center for Atmospheric Research will address this gap by focusing on the following goals: (1) quantify the variability in the marine carbon cycle in the subtropical and subpolar gyres on interannual to decadal time scales and determine the role of these oceanic regions in the observed temporal and spatial variability in atmospheric CO2; (2) evaluate and quantify the contributions from biological and physical processes to the observed variability; and (3) establish the feedbacks that operate between the physical, chemical and biological processes in the ocean. Results from this study will significantly advance the understanding of the response of the upper ocean carbon cycle to interannual variability doc8906 none This award is for NSF co-sponsorship of a workshop to develop a multi-author, advanced-level textbook for human-computer interaction (HCI) in the area of theories, models, and frameworks. Human-computer interaction is a broad and interdisciplinary area concerned with interactions among computational, behavioral, cognitive, social and organizational factors in the design and use of information technology. This area has rich scientific foundations, but they are not addressed in graduate curricula and are under-utilized in research and development. The approach proposed is to form a committee of leading experts who can represent each of about a dozen important scientific areas and theoretical positions: human perception, motor behavior, information processing, notational systems, interaction languages, problem-solving and exploration, distributed cognition, common ground and grounding in dyadic interactions, small group analysis, ethnographic workplace studies, organizational science and design rationale. A face-to-face workshop will integrate and synthesize first-draft materials and develop a plan for revising chapters into a coherent book. The objective is to raise the quality and legitimacy of human-computer interaction research with respect to underlying theoretical issues doc8907 none Neuroscience is the study of the brain and behavior. It is a rapidly advancing and growing field, which in the 21st century will be poised to address some of the most important and fundamental questions in the biomedical sciences. With these advances comes the hope for the treatment of a vast array of neurological problems. This award will be used to establish a ten-week summer training program that is designed to provide undergraduates with an opportunity to gain in-depth training in neuroscience through participation in research. Students will learn the questions addressed by current neuroscience research, experimental design and techniques, research ethics, the presentation of scientific data, and career options in the biomedical sciences. During the program, the students will gradually develop as independent researchers. The program will be administered by 11 neuroscience professors whose expertise ranges from molecular to behavioral neuroscience. A diverse array of students will be encouraged to apply and 10 promising students will be accepted into the program each year. Students will immediately begin to work under the direct supervision of their faculty mentor on a research project that will enable the student to gain practical experience in neuroscience. This will be supplemented by classroom instruction where faculty will present their area of expertise. This laboratory and classroom instruction will be rounded out by weekly Friday seminars given by neuroscientists from local universities, colleges and industries. These seminars will cover a variety of research topics and illustrate different career paths in neuroscience. In addition, there will be a one-day workshop on ethics in neuroscience to educate students about basic ethical concepts, to familiarize them with professional standards of ethical conduct and to introduce them to controversies in research ethics and the role of science in society. Students will interact with graduate students in the lab and at arranged luncheons to discuss preparation for and the selection of graduate schools. At the midpoint of the summer, students will attend a neuroscience picnic where they will interact informally with local area neuroscientists. The end of the summer program will be celebrated by a poster session at which students will present the results of their research project. Students will also present their results the following spring at a regional meeting, the North East Undergraduate Research Organization for Neuroscience (NEURON, http: www.albany.edu neuron). Students will receive regular feedback from their faculty mentors regarding their progress. In addition, student and faculty participants will be asked to review the program at the midpoint and end of the summer, and the following spring so that changes in the program can be made as necessary. This program will provide a rich experience, not found in the normal undergraduate curriculum, for the aspiring neuroscience. It should provide a springboard for those interested in pursuing a career in biomedical research. Interested individuals can learn more about the program through the web site: http: www.albany.edu neuron summer doc8908 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Panagiotis Smirniotis Institution: University of Cincinnati The objective of this proposal is to determine the feasibility of using doped titanium dioxide photocatalysts for the degradation of toxic organics with visible radiation. Although titanium dioxide is a photocatalyst when illuminated with ultraviolet radiation, preliminary experiments by the PI have shown that doping of titanium dioxide with transition metals provides photocatalytic activity with light from the visible part of the spectrum. This phenomenon may result from the creation of a narrow energy band within the original bandgap of the semiconductor, thus facilitating the generation of electrons and holes. This two-stage excitation process can form electrons and holes utilizing lower energy quanta. The proposed research will be an interdisciplinary program focusing on the synthesis and characterization of selected combinations of transition metals on different types of supports including three-dimensional mesoporous molecular sieves, large pore zeolites, and high surface-area titanium dioxide and silicon dioxide. These catalysts will be tested with selected probe molecules to simulate different categories of toxic organics. If the proposed materials are proven to be successful photocatalysts, they will offer a potentially economic alternative for the destruction of toxic organics from aqueous and gaseous systems utilizing solar radiation doc8909 none Proposal # Traub, Joseph F. Columbia University There is huge interest in solving high dimensional problems. Many applications involve functions of hundreds, thousands or even an infinite number of variables. Examples occur in physics, chemistry, mathematical finance, and economics. It is the rare high dimensional problem that can be solved analytically. Generally one must settle for an approximate numerical solution to within an error e. The computational complexity is the minimal computational resource need to solve a problem to within e. Time is the resource considered and is measured by the number of information operations, arithmetic operations and comparisons. An example of an information operation is the computation of a function value. If a worst case deterministic assurance of an e-approximation is desired, then often the computational complexity depends exponentially on the number of variables d; the problem suffers the curse of dimensionality . Examples include integration, approximation, globaloptimization, integral and partial differential equations over typical isotropic classical spaces of r-times continuously differentiable functions. If the computational complexity is exponential in either 1 e or d the problem is said to be intractable. If the complexity is polynomial in 1 e and d, it is tractable. If, in addition, the minimal number of information operations, arithmetic operations and comparisons is independent of d the problem is strongly tractable. Intractability may sometimes be broken by settling for a stochastic assurance of error; examples are randomization (for instance, Monte Carlo) or the average case. A second way in which intractability might be broken is additional domain knowledge about the problem. An example of the domain knowledge is that the integrands in certain mathematical finance problems are non-isotropic. Additional domain knowledge can sometimes be used to make the problem strongly tractable even in the worst case deterministic setting! Continuation of research on achieving tractability and strong tractability is proposed. In particular, one proposed area of research is under what conditions is a double-win achievable for high dimensional integration: convergence faster than Monte Carlo, with a worst case deterministic assurance. The theoretical results will be used to improve the FinDer software system. More generally, research is proposed on the following topics: Theory and Computer Experiments for Mathematical Finance, Tractability of Quasi-Monte Carlo and Monte Carlo Algorithms, Variable Smoothness, Generalized Tractability doc8910 none Schmidt, Edward Pulsational Properties of Type II Cepheid Variable Stars Unlike their Type I counterparts, Type II Cepheid variable stars, while also highly evolved, are low mass stars left over from the early stages of the formation of the Milky Way Galaxy. They are important for the study of the history of the Milky Way, for studies of pulsational instabilities in stars and for understanding the evolution of the older populations of stars in the Milky Way. But there are no clear criteria for assigning stars to this class and the main objective in this award is to establish these by gathering together photometric and spectroscopic data for a sample of at least 50 likely Type II Cepheids. Following this initial work, a second stage of the project will enable the masses of the stars to be determined from theory. The masses are important for studying the general evolution of the old stellar populations doc8911 none Prop : University of Wyoming PI : Ron Canterna The Wyoming Infrared Observatory (WIRO) will provide a Summer Undergraduate Research Assistantship Program (SURAP) as a National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Program. SURAP will offer undergraduate students throughout the nation its tutorial program in research. The main goals are: 1) to introduce undergraduate participants to a realistic and fulfilling experience in astrophysics research, working directly with active professionals, 2) to offer each student experience observing directly with the 0.6 and 2.3 m telescopes and its CCD instrumentation, 3) to encourage each undergraduate to publish their results and communicate their research findings at professional meetings. Seven to eight participants will be chosen from universities and colleges throughout the nation. Successful candidates are selected based on their academic performance, interest in a research career, and faculty recommendations. SURAP s secondary goal is to have a diverse student environment with students from liberal arts colleges and small universities with limited research facilities. Special efforts are made to actively recruit freshmen and sophomore undergraduates, women, and under-represented minorities. The program has traditionally selected students with no prior REU experience, outside of the student s home institution. A concurrent academic laboratory course and research seminar will accompany the tutorial research program and this seminar includes an introduction to modern infrared and CCD detectors, image processing, experience in observing with a modern, computer-controlled telescope, academic instruction in fundamental, modern astrophysics, and science ethics. The focal point of the course will be a student-oriented, temporal monitoring program of interesting astronomical objects using WIRO s computer-controlled 0.6 meter reflector at Red Buttes and the 2.3 meter telescope doc8912 none Goals of the project: (1) To recruit and select bright students, including women, individuals with diverse backgrounds with respect to geographical origin and ethnicity, and students from non-Ph.D.-granting institutions where research possibilities are limited. (2) To involve students in basic, experimental research in microbiology. (3) To expose students to a broad range of bioscience research. (4) To develop each student s critical-thinking skills. (5) To develop each student s ability to record, analyze, and present scientific information. Overall, the goal is to promote the students interests in scientific careers and to enhance their likelihood for success. Means of achieving the goals: The student participants will be integrated into faculty research programs and will be expected to perform like beginning graduate students. Informal faculty-student discussions plus weekly seminars will supplement the laboratory research. Weekly informal lunches, two picnics and a banquet will facilitate social and scientific interactions. At the end of each summer s program, the students will prepare oral presentations to be given at a Summer Program Symposium. Each student will also prepare a written research report, under the guidance of the student s mentor. Overall significance: Summer research programs are very valuable settings for bright students to experience basic scientific research. A significant fraction of the summer students do not have research opportunities at their institutions and might choose non-science careers due to lack of exposure to basic research. Of course not all students who participate in summer research programs in basic science choose careers in basic science, but experience shows that nearly all of the students to go on to post-graduate training in a graduate or professional school. The graduates of summer programs who do choose to go on to graduate school in science have a much better idea of what to expect, and they have a much greater chance of success doc8913 none In attempting to remain one of the Southwest s premier centers for undergraduate mathematics, the Mathematics Department at Trinity University recognizes the importance of the emerging role of undergraduate research and will reopen our Summer Undergraduate Research Experience in Mathematics Program, which was originally funded by the National Science Foundation during the summers of , and . Our objectives in having a three year project are fourfold: 1. To provide student participants with an understanding of, an appreciation for, and an experience in the nature of mathematical research and the life of a mathematical researcher, to a degree which will encourage them to pursue the study of the mathematical sciences on the graduate level. 2. To offer these experiences with a special eye toward students who do not typically have these opportunities. Of particular interest to us are students who are either female or a member of an under-represented minority group. 3. To produce quality mathematical work appropriate for publication in undergraduate research journals and, when possible, in higher level research journals. 4. To gain experience in the use of computers and their interaction in mathematical research. While we envision the recruiting effort for students to be nationwide, we see, due to our location, a unique opportunity to recruit students at many colleges and universities in South Texas that have traditionally high Hispanic enrollment. We will have an expanded recruiting effort to such schools and a revamping of our past program evaluation efforts. This will also be an expansion of our old program from 4 faculty to 6 faculty and the number of students involved from 6 to 12. The available research areas will include: Algebra, Difference Equations, Discrete Dynamical Systems, Mathematical Programming, Combinatorics, and Number Theory. Our expansion is in line with Trinity University s strong commitment to undergraduate research, as demonstrated by Trinity s nationally recognized undergraduate research programs in Chemistry, Biology and Computer Science doc8914 none Selected undergraduate physics majors will participate in scientific research projects; each student will work directly with a faculty member of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Toledo. Possible research areas include astrophysics, atomic physics, biological physics, condensed matter physics, materials science, medical physics, optics, photonics, and plasma physics. Projects will be parts of significant ongoing research programs, and will often result in scientific publications. These opportunities will be advertised nationally and the students will be selected competitively. In addition to stipends and housing for a ten-week research program, students will be given financial support for travel to and from Toledo. Also, students will be encouraged to present a paper at a regional or national scientific meeting, and provided financial support for that purpose. The students will also attend workshops to learn how to choose a graduate school, prepare for the GRE, and present a public talk. Eight students will be supported by the NSF-REU program and two additional students will be supported by funds from the University of Toledo doc8915 none JILA (formerly Joint Institute of Laboratory Astrophysics) and the University of Colorado Department of Physics will conduct REU summer programs introducing 12-14 undergraduates to active, on-going physics research. The faculty are well-recognized contributors to the fields of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics, Chemical Physics, Condensed Matter Physics, Elementary Particle Physics, Geophysics, and Gravitational physics. Special efforts will be made to include significant participation levels from women and minorities. The students will be expected to master at least a part of a large task. Weekly meetings, lab tours and field trips will ensure an active and supportive environment for all students. At the end of their 10-week employment they will give short seminars describing their work and write a report. Students from smaller colleges will be exposed to graduate students here, thus encouraging the undergraduates to continue their education doc8916 none Pittsburg State University of Kansas operates a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site that introduces students to interdisciplinary materials research. Ten undergraduate students are recruited every year for a ten-week summer research experience, with a recruitment focus on students from undergraduate and community colleges in the region. Students participate in research projects under the supervision of faculty from the departments of Engineering Technology, Chemistry, Biology and the Business and Technology Institute at Pittsburg State. The core of the research program is on polymers and plastics science and engineering. In addition to research activities, students attend weekly seminars and participate in visits to local industries and in group social activities doc8917 none This joint Chemistry Division and Division of International Programs award supports the continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the University of Florida. Randolph Duran is the site s Program Director; Michael Scott is the Co-Program Director. Over twenty faculty from French institutions are available to serve as REU mentors for U.S. students. During the award period ( - ), each summer ten students will travel to France to participate in a 10-12 week program at several French institutions, including Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, University Montpellier, CNRS National Laboratory, and University of Strasbourg. (Note: Through French funding, a similar number of French students, recruited from the same institutions, will be doing summer research at the University of Florida.) Recruitment efforts will extend nationwide, targeting more then 80 institutions with noted minority enrollments. The research topics for the students will center on materials chemistry. A mid-program science workshop will afford students the opportunity to hear one or two lectures on a focused topic and to interact scientifically. The student participants will see research performed in a different manner and within a different cultural context from the traditional U.S. model. Student participants will conclude the program with a project summary presentation at the French institution where the research is being done. An enhanced evaluation of the program will be a longitudinal study via interviews and surveys aimed at examining the impact the international experience has on students career choices and cultural attitudes doc8918 none The Baylor REU program has been in place for the past six years at Baylor. Selected Fellows reside on-site for approximately ten weeks with two-week extensions available for those requesting them. Fellows are selected using a national application process with the program advertised at universities around the nation, smaller undergraduate and technical institutions with little or no research capability and historically minority institutions. Complete application information, research information and the ability to apply to the program on-line is provided through a dedicated REU web page. Selected NSF Fellows choose from theoretical or experimental research opportunities in astrophysics, dusty plasmas, elementary particle physics, nuclear physics, space physics or surface physics. All REU Fellows are required to give an end of summer presentation. Additionally, they are strongly encouraged to present their results at international conferences and invited to publish their results (when possible) in peer-reviewed journals. The program provides funding both for student participation at such conferences and the associated publication costs doc8919 none This Chemistry Division award supports a new Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at Indiana University. Steven Wietstock is the site s Program Director; Dennis Peters is the Co-Program Director. Approximately thirty faculty will be available to serve as REU student mentors. During the award period ( - ), each summer ten students will participate in a ten-week program. Recruitment will be via faculty contacts at smaller colleges in the immediate geographic area, including the urban centers of Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, Louisville and Milwaukee. In addition, minority recruitment efforts will be directed through existing contacts at Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, New Mexico State University, Spelman College, University of North Carolina at Pembroke, and Xavier University of Louisiana. Student research projects will be available in analytical, biological, inorganic, organic, and physical chemistry. Included in the summer schedule of activities are classes on ethics in science and chemical information. A visit to a local chemical industry is planned. The summer program will conclude with the students participating in a mini-symposium poster presentation and submitting a final research report in the style of a journal article. A survey at the end of the program will be completed by each of the student participants. A networking system will be established through e-mail and listserve systems to keep track of the students after they leave the program doc8920 none Proteins are one of the major constituents of biological systems, and are involved in all aspects of cell life, from structure to function and reproduction. The goal of this REU site is to expose ten undergraduate students to basic research by having them involved in projects exploring different areas of protein structure and function. At least six of these students will be selected from four-year institutions, mostly within the state of Alabama. A special effort will be made to recruit students from groups under-represented in science, including female and minorities. The Principal Investigator will be visiting different campuses during the fall semester to promote the program and interview potential candidates. Some of these campuses are four-year traditionally minority institutions, including Alabama State University in Montgomery, Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Talladega College and Tuskegee University. The studies will be carried out in different academic units on campus, including Biology, Biomedical Sciences, Chemistry and Pharmacology. Although each student will be working on an individual project, they will be meeting regularly to follow up on the progress of all other projects. The students working in this REU will also participate and discuss their progress during three regularly scheduled discussions with other undergraduates participating in the Summer Undergraduate Research Programs organized every year by the host institution. In addition, all students in the REU site will attend weekly presentations by each of the investigators with projects in this site, to expose the participants to every project and to the different ways in which investigators from different disciplines approach the area of protein biochemistry. The participants will write reports and also will present their results in poster format either on campus (during the Undergraduate Research Week held in the Fall) or at their own campuses. The overall quality of this experience will be assessed by having students complete questionnaires prior and after the summer research and to make improvements for future cycles. Faculty advisors also will be asked to complete a questionnaire at the end of the summer to improve the program in subsequent years. Information and dissemination of the program will be done through the Committee for Undergraduate Research s web page, at http: www.southalabama.edu biomedical ucur doc8921 none The Northeastern University sponsors a NSF-REU program at Cern each summer. CERN is the European Laboratory for Particle Physics and it straddles the border between Switzerland and France just outside Geneva. It is the foremost facility of its kind in the world, and the REU Site at CERN is designed to give ten US science and engineering undergraduates the opportunity to participate in the annual CERN Summer Student Programme. The successful students are chosen after an exhaustive national search. They are chosen not only for their outstanding academic background and interest in physics, but also to provide as eclectic a group of students as possible to represent American diversity to the Europeans. At CERN the US students join a select group of international physics students and participate in a variety of educational and social activities. Although the US is not an official member state of CERN, the US students are treated exactly the same as member state students and they enjoy all the benefits of being an official CERN Summer Student. Activities include: attending lectures by experts in a variety of fields in physics, engineering and computing; working with and learning from world-renowned physicists; collaborating on multi-national research projects including CMS and ATLAS at the Large Hadron Collider. This unique opportunity not only allows the students to learn fundamental physics in a research environment, but it also gives them the benefit of working in an international setting doc8922 none The Department of Mathematics at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo will provide opportunities for summer research for up to ten undergraduates. Recruitment will take place nationwide, but our recruitment will be focused on students from universities in California. The research emphasis will be in the fields of operator theory and combinatorics. The students will attend seminars with participating faculty and work individually with faculty, many of whom have experience doing research with undergraduates. The students will also have the opportunity to work collaboratively with and give talks to their peers, as well as write a final report with their research results. The program will run for eight weeks, and should be compatible with both a quarter system and a semester system doc8923 none A Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site will be established at Miami University focusing on The Ecology of Human-Dominated Landscapes. The goal of this endeavor is to engage undergraduate students in collaborative, multi-disciplinary research that emphasizes ecological questions in landscapes heavily influenced by human activity. Students will learn that the scientific basis for solving environmental problems is established through collaborative research and thus will be better prepared to solve such problems. Each student will conduct an individual research project, but these projects will also be part of student-faculty research clusters, each consisting of 3 students and 3 faculty mentors. Students within a cluster will develop projects that are collaborative with other students. Clusters will be structured around a theme that ties together the research programs of several faculty members and they will develop a research program with faculty research mentors as well as student mentors and collaborators. The activities of the clusters will be coordinated by a faculty cluster leader. In this way, the students will be exposed to a broad range of research and have the opportunity to work in multi-disciplinary research teams, structured similarly to research groups solving real-world problems. In addition to research activities, each student will also participate in whole group activities, including a 10-week workshop course (2 hours per week) that covers the scientific process, scientific and environmental ethics, careers in ecology, how to prepare and deliver scientific presentations, and other research aspects. In addition, all students will attend periodic whole-group meetings, a two-day retreat workshop at a field station, and the annual conference of the Ecological Society of America with their faculty mentors. In addition, they will continue working on projects, with the guidance of their mentors, throughout the following academic year. The year will culminate with an electronic poster-session posted on the program s website, in which all students will present their research results. As a part of this program the student participants and the faculty at Miami University will be engaged in research programs that are relevant to understanding and solving environmental problems nationally and internationally. Through multiple levels of mentoring and collaboration, students will come away with a true appreciation for the manner in which science moves forward and gain a better appreciation for the complexity of the environmental issues we face. In addition, the faculty at Miami University will benefit by strengthening their collaborations with one another and with students from a variety of background and perspectives in a focused and productive context doc8924 none This grant establishes at Central Michigan University a Research Experiences for Undergraduates site. During Summer , eight students recruited nationwide will be actively engaged in mathematical research during the eight-week program. The primary objective is to stimulate talented undergraduate students to pursue graduate work in science and mathematics by providing accessible and challenging research problems in mathematics. Typical problem areas include a sign game on projective planes, Laplacian spectrum of graphs, Schur stability of matrices, and divisible difference sets. Three faculty members will coordinate the effort. Students will work in groups of two with one faculty mentor. Students will make presentations of their progress during weekly seminars. Each student will submit a written report at the end of the program. Students will be encouraged to publish their work and make presentations at professional meetings. Every effort will be made during recruitment process to attract applications from students in under-represented groups. To complement the research experience, a number of enrichment activities have been planned. An ethics workshop, led by members of the Philosophy and Religion Department, will enable student participants to begin considering ethical issues related to research in the sciences, particularly in mathematics. A day trip to Dow Chemical or Ford Motor will provide some exposure to mathematics in the workplace. A weekend trip to Mackinac Island will provide a broader historical perspective on the state of Michigan. Point of Contact: Dr. Sivaram Narayan 989-774- sivaram.narayan@cmich.edu doc8925 none and get into graduate school. Research projects will foster a close collaboration between mentor and student, and will provide a hands-on preview of career opportunities in neuroscience research and education. Students will learn many of the skills necessary to perform research, such as proper formulation of experimental strategy and appropriate documentation and analysis of data. At the end of the 10-week Program, students will formally present the results of their training experience at a colloquium of participating students and mentors. The Neuroscience REU will accept applications from full-time undergraduate students who are enrolled at a four-year accredited college in the United States, and who have successfully completed at least one year of study in neuroscience and or related college coursework (e.g., biology, chemistry, psychology, mathematics). Interested students should complete an application form and write a personal statement describing their interest in the Neuroscience REU. Applicants also must have two letters of recommendation sent from faculty at their home institution who are familiar with their qualifications doc8926 none This award provides funds for an REU Site in Psychology at City University of New York, Baruch College. Sixteen students, who attend colleges in New York City, will participate in the Site as a paid research assistant for three, 12-week semesters. The REU undergraduates will join existing research teams and contribute to ongoing empirical research programs in areas of applied and basic psychology. Students will also propose and complete projects of their own under the direct supervision of a research scientist. The REU project itself will be an experiment in research education evaluated with outcome data. The program will: (1) prepare students for advanced graduate training in scientific psychology and ultimately for careers in academic and applied settings; (2) identify early promising minority students and prepare them for careers in scientific psychology; (3) increase psychological scientists interests in minority issues and concerns as research topics; and (4) develop a CUNY pipeline to provide a pool of talented and diverse students to become the research scientists of the future. Each REU student will join a research team working in an area that matches the student s expressed interests. Each team will focus in one area of psychology, planning and executing studies with the intention of presenting professional papers and submitting research reports to quality peer-reviewed journals. Students will choose one of four ongoing research teams: (a) The psychology and law team; (b) the industrial organizational team; (c) the social psychology team; and (d) the educational psychology team. Students may also work with a faculty member whose research does not fit one of the four research teams. Students will participate in the entire research process. This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences doc8927 none Tepper This research focuses on the development of a new miniature sensing technology based on chemically sensitive and highly selective polymer nanoparticles interfaced with a microfabricated transduction device. The particles are produced using a unique combination of supercritical fluid polymer processing, UV curing and molecular imprinting and consist of highly networked, monodisperse polymer nanoparticles imprinted for high selectivity to a specific molecular species. The main objective of the proposed research project is to develop and demonstrate the performance parameters of the proposed sensor. This will be accomplished by developing a prototype and experimentally verifying key performance criteria including chemical sensitivity, selectivity, response time and reversibility. If successful, the proposed sensor would provide an unsurpassed level of performance in a field portable instrument. Applications of the proposed sensor technology include environmental characterization, medical diagnostics, process control, intelligent appliances, and military surveillance. Additional applications for the imprinted polymer nanoparticles include chromotography, specialty separations and filtering doc8903 none The lateral resistance of short rigid piles depends on the point where the lateral load is applied. Experiments have shown that lateral resistance can be increased significantly by shifting the point of the load application downward to where the resulting mode of the pile movement becomes purely translational, i.e., no rotational movement. Through experimental studies, this point has been identified near the mid-height of the pile for cohesive soils, whereas it is toward the bottom of the pile for cohesionless soils. Analytical studies have been tried to identify this optimum point of the lateral load application, but they have been mostly in two-dimensions without considering the significant effects of three-dimensional development of stresses and movements. The PI has developed a preliminary analytical formulation for the estimation of the lateral resistance of rigid piles considering the truly three-dimensional effects. A limiting equilibrium approach was used incorporating a tetrahedron-shaped failure wedge. The formulation considers circumferential and radial normal and shear stresses around and along the pile as functions of the depth and the magnitude of the lateral movement. The solution method considers an approach of progressive failure. For a given point of lateral load application, the thickness of the soil layer experiencing failure gradually increases from the ground surface (or from the bottom of the pile in case when the lateral load is applied near the bottom of the pile). At a given thickness of the soil layer experiencing failure, the corresponding pile lateral resistance and the point of the pile rotation are calculated from equilibrium conditions through iterative search methods. As the thickness of the soil layer experiencing failure increases, new values of the pile lateral resistance and the point of the rotation are calculated. The process continues until the maximum lateral resistance is obtained. This preliminary analytical solution indicates that the ultimate lateral resistance can be increased by up to 170 % and 340 % for piles embedded in clay and sand, respectively, when the point of the lateral load application moves from the top of the pile to the optimum point. The solution has also been used to compare with the centrifuge model test results reported in the literature. Results indicate that the analytical solution, though preliminary in nature due to numerous assumptions introduced, is capable of estimating the measured pile lateral resistances as a function of the point of the lateral load application very closely However, additional in-depth study is necessary to improve the solution method before it can be used with confidence in accurately estimating the lateral resistance of rigid piles. Centrifuge model tests will be conducted in both sand and clay soils. The effect of pile insertion method and point of loading will be studied. Pile rotation and normal stress measurements will be made during testing. Digital photography will be used to verify pile rotation and document the tests. This is a collaborative research proposal. The South Dakota School of Mines and Technology will be the lead institution, conducting the analytical portion of the study including the solution development and verification. The University of Florida will conduct the experimental centrifuge model tests doc8929 none This Chemistry Division award supports the renewal of Research Experiences for Undergraduates site at Kansas State University. Anne Kelley is the site s Program Director. Over the award period ( - ), eight students will be supported each summer in a ten-week program. Recruitment will be from institutions nationwide that do not have Ph.D. programs in chemistry, with emphasis on smaller institutions, those offering little chemistry research and those institutions with substantial minority (particularly Hispanic) enrollments. Fourteen different research projects are available for selection by the student participants. Students will present their research by oral presentation the last week of the program. Each student will be contacted on an annual basis to track his or her career progress doc8930 none This award provides renewed funding to support the Research Experience Undergraduates (REU) Site located at a variety of institutions in Charleston, SC. The program, called Minorities in Marine and Environmental Sciences (MIMES), would host six minority undergraduate students to actively participate in twelve weeks of research. Major objectives of MIMES include: 1) involving minority undergraduate students in mentor-guided, independent research projects in marine and environmental science; and 2) providing minority students with role models and training in basic principles of marine and environmental science and scientific theory through seminars, classroom work, laboratory and field experiences. The students prepare written and oral technical reports at the end of the program. The program is based on the theory that mentoring and networking are the most effective methods for recruiting students into a profession and for training young researchers. This program is well designed to encourage highly motivated students to continue the their pursuit of research careers in oceanography. It includes appropriate mentoring and research experience that will provide students with an excellent background for a future career in science. In addition, minority participation in the field of oceanography is unusually low. This program will encourage a diverse set of students to continue their education in the field of marine science and environmental science. These types of efforts are important to improving participation rates for minority students in the geosciences doc8931 none Heiles The past decade has witnessed a revolution in the data available on the diffuse interstellar medium, with a variety of techniques and a variety of wavelengths. With new radio telescopes at the Arecibo Observatory and Green Bank, West Virginia, the next few years will see an explosion in quality 21-cm spectral line data on atomic hydrogen. Dr. Carl Heiles, at the University of California at Berkeley, will emphasize observations of this 21-cm line with both of these telescopes, and together with a variety of datasets, will attempt to produce a complete, comprehensive picture of the interstellar medium in our Galaxy doc8932 none The Bucknell University Summer Research Program in Physics will give 8 undergraduate students per summer the opportunity to collaborate with a member of the Bucknell physics faculty for 10 weeks on his or her research. Students will be recruited from around the country. Bucknell s setting as a small liberal arts college provides the perfect environment for some student s first encounter with full-time research. The level of student-faculty interaction will be high. This immersion in a research environment is intended to complement traditional classroom experiences of the students. For many it will be their first contact with the excitement and demands of full-time research. Participation will help students make career choices, and will provide specific preparation for those that continue on to graduate studies in physics. All of the students will live together on the Bucknell campus, conduct most of their research in on-campus facilities, and participate in weekly departmental seminars and colloquia. We will be offering projects in theoretical physics (statistical physics, gravitation, quantum optics), experimental physics (biophysics, atomic physics, nonlinear dynamics and pattern formation), computer simulation, and astronomy doc8933 none This Chemistry Division award supports the continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the University of Wyoming. Dean Roddick is the site s Program Director and there will be available 11 faculty as REU student mentors. Over the award period ( - ), the students will be supported each summer in a ten-week program. Students will be recruited primarily in the West from institutions that do not have Ph.D. programs in chemistry, as well as Wyoming Community Colleges. A particular emphasis will be to seek American Indian students. All students will participate in an Undergraduate Research Symposium during the final week by giving a 15 minute oral presentation on their research doc8934 none The PI s long term objective is to: (1) Understand how molecular chaperones and foldases interact with protein substrates and each other to mediate proper folding in the cellular environment, and (2) Manipulate these pathways to achieve cost-effective production of biologically active heterologous proteins. Their specific aims are to: (1) Gain mechanistic information on the in vivo function of the alternate translation products synthesized from the clpB transcript since they have shown that ClpB plays an important role in de novo protein folding, possibly as a result of its unique ability to break apart and remodel protein aggregates. As part of this aim, they will investigate whether E. coli requires a precise stoichiometric ratio of ClpB (or ClpB variants) to DnaK-DnaJ-GrpE to promote the correct folding of aggregation-prone proteins. (2) Use error-prone PCR mutagenesis to generate ClpB variants and screen the resulting libraries for mutants exhibiting enhanced chaperone function. Selected gain of function mutants will be purified and characterized to gain insights on the structure-function relationship of ClpB. Useful amino acid substitutions will be combined on a single gene, and the ability of various mutants to improve the folding of recalcitrant aggregation-prone proteins will be assessed. (3) Determine whether the folding of small aggregation-prone proteins can be improved by redirecting the flux of newly synthesized polypeptides to the DnaK-DnaJ-GrpE team and its ancillary chaperones. This will be accomplished by eliminating the trigger factor (tig) gene from the chromosome. In parallel, they will use genetics approaches to isolate E. coli strains that constitutively synthesize high levels of the major chaperone teams and will introduce the tig deletion in these backgrounds with the goal of generating host cells that may be particularly well suited for producing heterologous proteins in a soluble form. The performance of these strains will be assessed in batch and fed-batch fermentations. It is anticipated that the proposed work will generate useful tools to deal with the problem of heterologous protein aggregation while providing fundamental insights on the function and mechanism of action of ClpB and the pathways of chaperone-assisted protein folding in the cytoplasm of E. coli doc8935 none This summer research program for undergraduates in Cell and Molecular Biology supports undergraduate research in laboratories of leading researchers in the biological sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Members of minority groups under-represented in biological research and students from institutions without broad research facilities are selected for the program based on research interests and potential commitment to a research career. During a 9-week program, each student works on an independent research project in a faculty mentor s laboratory. Depending upon the project, participants learn current techniques including DNA cloning, PCR sequencing, in situ hybridization, cell culture, and Western blotting. They also participate in workshops on specific research areas, bioethics, advice from graduate students, and preparation for the Graduate Record Examination. Students write and orally present a research proposal at the beginning of the program, and, at the conclusion, submit a paper summarizing their work. The paper is presented at a symposium for the participants and other invited guests from the campus community doc8936 none Thornton The project outlined in this proposal aims to develop a new type of hybrid molecular-semiconductor chemical sensor that is highly integrated, cheap and versatile. The sensor consists of polarizable molecular monolayers that adhere (i.e. self-assemble) to an underlying CMOS-compatible integrated circuit. The molecular monolayers are designed in such a way that their physical structure changes after exposure to the chemical of interest. The change in physical structure leads to a change in their electrical polarization which is detected by a sensitive transistor immediately below the monolayer. It is possible to design the molecular monolayers to respond to a wide range of individual chemical agents. The device combines the enormous flexibility associated with organic synthesis with the mass production capability of silicon chips. If successful, the research the PIs are proposing will lead to chip-based sensors that are cheap enough to be considered disposable, yet contain multiple sensing elements. The sensing elements will be integrated at the nanoscale and each chip will be capable of detecting a wide range of chemical agents. It will be possible to integrate the sensing elements with peripheral electronic circuitry that will perform both analog and digital signal processing. The information provided by the chip can be fed to a central computer (e.g. a home or office p.c.) to form a complete system for monitoring chemicals that influence our quality of life. The research will concentrate on the science and engineering that underpins a generic chemical sensing technology. Rather than focusing on a sensor that detects a single class of chemicals, they are looking to develop general principles that will allow them to build integrated sensors that can be tailored to a wide range of chemical classes. In this way a standardized processing technology can be used to build sensors for gas-phase or liquid-phase species that could be organic, biological or inorganic in nature. This vision is analogous to the way in which present day CMOS can be used to build analog or digital circuits for different applications including information processing, communications and power electronics. As a demonstrator of this technology the PIs propose to fabricate a chip-based sensor that combines circuitry for basic analog signal processing with molecular monolayers that are individually and selectively sensitive to different chemical agents. For demonstration purposes, they shall focus on three prototype devices for sensing pH, metal ions and biologically important enzymes. However, their principal objective is to complete the basic research that would underpin a generic sensing technology based on hybrid molecular-CMOS integrated circuits. The PIs propose a highly comprehensive and multidisciplinary program to investigate the preparation and properties of chemically active organic molecules, the fundamental factors controlling the interfacing of these species with electronic materials, and the incorporation of the molecules into prototype devices for multi-use sensing applications. The work will combine molecular synthesis with novel device fabrication and advanced scanning probe imaging. The molecular synthesis will initially concentrate on specifically tailored porphyrin-based molecular monolayers that incorporate functional groups that will bind strongly to the surface of the underlying transistor. If this approach shows promise, other sensing molecules for other specific applications will be designed and synthesized. The physical structure and orientation of the molecules on the semiconductor surface will be studied using a combination of scanning tunneling microscopy and atomic force microscopy. The visual, and quantitative data provided by the scanning probe images will be correlated with that provided by electrical measurements, to better understand the physical configuration of the molecular monolayers before and after exposure to the chemical agents of interest. If successful this work will create a revolution in environmental sensing that will have widespread beneficial impact doc8937 none The goal of this interdisciplinary research is to analyze the vast amounts of MEMS sensor data using datamining techniques to discover relationships among actions at MEMS actuators and their impact on the system state. These relationships (captured in the form of rules) are then used to build a feedback loop for aircraft control. The input-output relationships for most systems (e.g., the delta wing aircraft) are highly non-linear. Traditional datamining approaches discard much important information from the datasets and cannot provide sufficient transfer function information, which makes them unsuitable for system control. This project develops a scalable multivariate datamining technique that discovers full sensor-actuator relationships and predictive models under a wide range of conditions (dynamic, temporal, spatial, etc.). The research includes collecting data for dynamic system behavior, extending the datamining algorithms for summarizing temporal rules, developing the rule selection strategy for actuation schema, and developing wind tunnel experiments to validate the approach. This work has the potential to advance the state-of-the-art in data mining substantially, as this problem has many features (real time feedback, spatio-temporal nature) that are not commonly found in other applications. The success of data mining techniques is expected to advance the MEMS sensor and actuation technology in system monitoring and control and in other engineering problems doc8938 none This project involves conducting a field measurements program near Cherski, Siberia to quantify the impacts of disturbance on the seasonal cycle of atmospheric carbon dioxide and the discharge of carbon and nitrogen into the Arctic Ocean in forest and shrubby tundra regions. Coastal plain tundra in the region has accumulated large stores of carbon in sediments during the Pleistocene that has been slowly released to the atmosphere and ocean through melting of previously frozen soils during the Holocene. Disturbance, particularly forest fires, of the vegetation exposes the soils to accelerated carbon loss through more direct exposure to erosion. The study will compare an undisturbed region to recently disturbed areas and determine the effects of changes in temperature and hydrology on the rate of carbon flux. The results will be utilized in models to examine possible future disturbance effects, particularly those that could be accelerated by warmer climate conditions doc8939 none This Chemistry Division award supports the continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at California State University-Los Angeles. Scott Nickolaisen is the site s Program Director. Fifteen faculty will serve as REU student mentors. Over the award period ( - ), ten students will be supported each summer in a ten-week program. The focus of recruitment efforts will be on the very high concentration of minority students enrolled in regional public community colleges in the Los Angeles area. These students will have had very little, if any, exposure to a comprehensive research experience. The areas of chemical research include inorganic and organic synthesis, electron spin resonance, nuclear magnetic resonance, infrared and laser spectroscopy, enzyme kinetics, plant genetics, electrochemistry, organometallic photochemistry, protein assays, mass spectrometry, atmospheric chemistry, lipid biochemistry, and capillary electrophoresis. At the conclusion of the program, student participants will present their results to the department in a poster presentation and will prepare a short written report of their research project. Following the program, students will be tracked to evaluate their development doc8940 none Thompson The objective of this research is the development of new fluorescence-based sensors with high sensitivity and accuracy for important industrial analytes for which current chemical sensors are inadequate or nonexistent. In earlier work the investigators demonstrated that carbonic anhydrase-based biosensors were capable of transducing the levels of certain transition metals as changes in fluorescence intensity, lifetime, and anisotropy. These sensors were able to rapidly and continuously determine transition metal ions such copper and zinc at sub-part per billion levels in the presence of calcium and magnesium at million-fold higher concentrations. In this research the metal ion approach will be extended for the detection of the heavy metals lead, mercury and cadmium. The bulk of the engineering effort in this phase of the research will occur at the molecular level, in the construction of the fluorescent transducer recognition molecules and determination of their properties. In addition, a previously developed approach, which uses fluorescence lifetime to detect anions such as cyanide and cyanate, will be adapted for the determination of the anions chromate, arsenate, and nitrate doc8941 none This Chemistry Division award supports a new Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at City University of New York, College of Staten Island. Ruth Stark is the site s Program Director; James Batteas is the Co-Program Director. Ten faculty will be available to serve as REU student mentors. During the award period ( - ), each summer ten students will participate in a ten-week program. Recruitment efforts will extend nationally in order to attract a diverse group of students. The research focus will be on both synthetic and natural polymers--their synthesis, characterization, and physical properties. Other activities planned for the student participants include workshops on the chemical literature, technical writing, and giving a scientific talk. Seminars and field trips are also planned. Student participants will conclude the program with a poster presentation at a local symposium. A final written research report is also required. Evaluation of the program will include self-assessment, benchmarking, and a formal external review doc8942 none The proposal deals with a large set of key problems in stochastic control and applications. Concerning Numerical Methods in Stochastic Control, the aim is to have a large set of effective algorithms which can be conveniently programmed, have good numerical properties, are robust, and for which there are convergence theorems under realistic conditions, so that numerical methods can fulfill their role as a practical and efficient approach to both investigation and design. The foundations are the Markov chain approximation methods. Algorithms with faster rate of convergence for the ergodic cost problem will be developed. The methods will be extended to stochastic differential games. This will allow treatment of robust and risk sensitive problems as well In many problems, the intensity of the noise is affected by the control. We will design practical and well performing algorithms. Numerical algorithms generally suppose that the drift terms are bounded. Problems with unbounded and controlled drift occur in communications theory and appropriate convergent algorithms will be developed. The treatment of ergodic costs with singular controls is one of the key remaining numerical problem areas, and is crucial in applications to communications theory and for heavy traffic limit models. Well performing algorithms will be developed. More generally, the theory of heavy traffic limits for the ergodic criteria and singular controls will be completed. We will also develop a complete theory of approximation methods for the modeling and control of Mobile communications systems when the channels are rapidly time varying in an arbitrary way. The heavy traffic models and associated limit theorems provide good guides for the analysis and control of a large variety of such systems doc8943 none This joint Chemistry Division and Division of Human Resources Development (Program for Persons with Disabilities) award supports the continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at James Madison University (JMU). Daniel Downey is the site s Program Director; Gina MacDonald is the Co-Program Director. Nine faculty will serve as REU student mentors. During the award period ( - ), each summer eight undergraduate students (to include a minimum of one deaf student), one interpreter student, one high school teacher (who is either deaf or teaches the deaf), and two high school students (to include a minimum of one deaf student) will participate in a ten-week program. Students will be recruited from regional colleges and universities as well as from JMU. Recruitment efforts will target under-represented groups in science: namely, females, ethnic minorities and the deaf. At least 75% of the student participants are expected to represent these under-represented groups. Research opportunities will be available in a variety of sub-disciplines including materials science, biochemistry, synthesis, environmental chemistry and spectroscopy. In addition to the research objectives, there will be discussions on ethics in scientific research. At the conclusion of the program, student participants will give oral presentations of their research and submit written reports summarizing their results and conclusions. Project evaluation will include statistical studies of tracking the future of each participant. A complex assessment process will begin with the entry of the participants into the program. Career goals and professional direction will be monitored doc8944 none James Madison University operates a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site. The REU Site offers research opportunities in materials science for students in physics, chemistry and integrated science programs. Undergraduate research projects span the areas of advanced electronic and thermal materials processing and characterization. Ten undergraduate students are recruited every year for a ten-week summer research experience, with a recruitment focus on students from predominantly undergraduate institutions in the mid-Atlantic region. The REU Site helps introduce traditional science majors from James Madison University and from other non-engineering undergraduate institutions to interdisciplinary materials research doc8945 none Through Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF), SURFing the Physics Lab: A NIST-NSF Partnership for Physics will continue to provide an opportunity for the Physics Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology to encourage outstanding physics students to pursue scientific careers. For the past seven years, the NSF-NIST SURF program has exposed students to world-class atomic, molecular, optical and radiation physicists and facilities in the NIST Physics Laboratory. Over this time, the NSF-NIST SURF program has been a host to an annual average of twenty-four students from twelve or more undergraduate institutions to pursue research projects of national and international importance. The selected group of students will spend twelve weeks engaged in physics research at the Physics Laboratory s Gaithersburg site, working one on one with NIST staff physicists in projects that combine the quest for fundamental knowledge and direct applications to problems of national importance, and learning about nonacademic alternatives for research careers. The students will also participate in the weekly SURFing the Physics Lab Summer Seminar Series. SURF students will present a research seminar at NIST and be encouraged to participate in a local or national scientific conference during the following academic year doc8946 none James Madison University will host an eight-week REU program for six undergraduates per year during the summer of . The primary goal of the program is to provide its student participants with an authentic mathematical research experience. The components of program include: (1) Working with another student on a research project with a faculty mentor; (2) Writing a research paper containing project results; (3) Participating in a common seminar at the beginning of the program; (4) Presenting results to the other research groups throughout the program; (5) Visiting research mathematicians at NASA in Langley, VA; (6) Participating in social activities with undergraduate research students in biology, chemistry, physics, and geology; (7) Having results refereed by an external panel; (8) Presenting results at professional meetings during the following academic year; and (9) Continued contact with the mentors after the end of the project. As part of the evaluation process, an external review panel will evaluate the program s success and provide a referee s report for individual student projects. At least three of the six participating students will be recruited from outside the institution, and a significant effort will be made to recruit students from institutions less likely to have resources available to support undergraduate research activity, as well as members of mathematically under-represented groups doc8947 none This award provides renewed funding to support the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at Florida Institute of Technology (FIT). During this program, eight undergraduate students will spend eight weeks in the summer working on research issues including ocean engineering, environmental science, and management of coastal zones. Students will conduct an independent research project under the direction of a faculty mentor. They will also attend seminars on topics such as experimental design and analysis, data management, graphic display of results, web design, Powerpoint presentations, environmental justice and ethics, and participate in a variety of field trips and a 3-day cruise aboard a 60-foot research vessel. Field trips will cover topics such as inlet management, restoration of salt marshes, re-diversion of flood control systems, installation and biological monitoring of artificial reefs, etc. Through their research, seminars and field trips, the students will have to opportunity to meet with individuals from private industry and government who work in the field of coastal management and coastal engineering. The program is based on the theory that mentoring and networking are the most effective methods for recruiting students into a profession and for training young researchers. This program is well designed to encourage highly motivated students to continue the their pursuit of careers in coastal oceanography. It encourages interest in interdisciplinary and applied research, and students will be exposed to a variety of careers in coastal oceanography. Students will conduct independent research and produce oral and written reports at the end of the internship. In addition, the program will encourage a diverse set of students to continue their education in the field of oceanography, and will particularly promote participation of women in coastal research. In the past the program has had 83% female participants and has drawn students from across the nation. This award provides two years of support for the program doc8948 none This is the first year funding of a three year continuing award. Digital video is revolutionizing communication. However, while the technology has provided a means to capture, store, and deliver video, it has not adequately addressed the issue of content creation. Effectively utilizing the medium of video is still a resource- and talent-intensive task. In this proposal, the PI will address this issue by developing Virtual Videography, systems that help automate the production of communicative video. He will develop methodologies that enable events to be recorded with minimal intrusion and processed without expert intervention into informative video. The plan for implementing Virtual Videography is based on the observation that a good portion of the challenge of videography is the range of disparate tasks that a videographer must be proficient at. This traditional decomposition of video into its subtasks suggests a scheme where each task is mimicked by a system component. The PI will develop a software architecture where the traditional video production process has practitioners replaced by software components, and the production pipeline is augmented by a centralized repository for not only video data, but also for annotations about the video s content. Such annotations, created by an image analysis component, will guide: (a) a computational cinematographer in pointing a virtual camera that synthetically created novel views using image-based rendering methods; (b) a virtual editor in selecting shots; and even (c) a virtual effects supervisor in using visual effects to add additional emphasis. The PI will focus his efforts on a specific domain: capturing and presenting university lectures. He will demonstrate a system that automatically processes video recorded by stationary cameras in a lecture hall into edited video, showing multiple viewpoints, editing, and special effects. He will not only develop the technology required to construct such systems, but will also evaluate the utility of the results. This project will contribute insight into how the advanced features of video may be used in pedagogy; it will provide useful tools for disseminating lectures and for educational science research, as well as making technical contributions to the many fields that the effort draws upon doc8949 none The Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Georgia proposes to host an REU site for students interested in conducting research in various areas of physics. The interdisciplinary research projects feature the techniques and methods of traditional physics research applied to problems which overlap with astronomy, aeronomy, biology, chemistry, computer science, and genomics. Several of the projects involve computation of systems important for condensed matter physics and nuclear physics; other projects involve computational physics techniques applied to problems in genetics or biology; and there are also projects which involve less computation and more laboratory physics or observational astronomy techniques. The purpose of the program is to expose undergraduates to real scientific research. At the end of the summer, the REU student will have a clearer idea of what is involved in a scientific career and thus will be better able to decide if this is a suitable career path. The number of students projected for the first year is 10. Funds will be available for presenting the project at a future professional meeting or conference doc8950 none This award provides funds for an REU Site in psychology at Middlebury College in Vermont. The program is designed to provide undergraduate students the foundation of skills and knowledge necessary to become independent in the conduct and evaluation of research. The program will provide ten students with the opportunity to work closely with a faculty mentor for eight weeks during the summer. At least half of the students will be recruited from schools other than Middlebury College. Research projects will cover a wide range of psychological topics, such as improving children s memory, gender differences in spatial reasoning, the relationship of attachment style to the evaluation of romantic relationships, and the effect of motivation on cheating behavior. In addition, interns will participate in a weekly seminar to develop their understanding of the research process. Weekly seminar topics will include a discussion of ethical issues in psychological research, the use of statistical software for cleaning and describing data, and a presentation by former psychology students now in graduate school about their research experiences. A special component of the program involves the participation of a student mentor who, in addition to participating as a research intern, will work closely with the co-PIs to unify the group of research interns, provide guidance and advice to interns, and help organize and facilitate workshops and social activities. Because Middlebury College is a highly competitive liberal arts college with a strong record of mentoring undergraduates in the sciences, it is an ideal setting for this program. This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences doc8951 none This project will investigate the chemical kinetics mechanisms involved in gas phase biogenic reactions. The goal of the project is to develop a predictive model for hydrocarbon aerosol formation as a result of biological gas phase emissions. Currently, biogenic aerosol formation is represented in modeling efforts based on empirically determined parameters. Biogenic aerosols can contribute both to visibility loss on a local scale and to climate forcing effects on a regional scale. The project will involve a number of outdoor chamber experiments to measure terpene gas and particle phase reaction products in the presence of light and nitrogen oxides over a specified temperature range to develop a sequence of kinetic expressions to model aerosol formation doc8952 none One of the best ways to keep undergraduate students excited about science is to involve them in actual laboratory research. The opportunity to become a working member of an active research group provides the impetus for many students to continue into graduate school in science. The NSF REU program at Iowa State University focuses on providing an intensive research experience with an active research group at Iowa State. The research groups work on biotechnology and genomics of plants and animals. Understanding that these types of research opportunities are available for undergraduate students at large research universities, this program focuses its efforts on students that do not have the same research opportunity at their home colleges. Specifically these are schools that serve minority institutions (particularly the Land Grant Schools) and small liberal arts colleges in the Midwest. Outstanding students that have finished their sophomore or junior years will spend ten weeks on the Iowa State University campus where room and board and a stipend are supplied. The students will join university research teams that are working in laboratories on problems in biotechnology and genomics. The students also meet together weekly for lunch and discussions on ethics, diversity, applying to graduate schools, written and oral scientific presentations, and frontiers of biological research. The students practice writing for general and scientific audiences, publish their research on the program web page, and present their work at a mini-symposium for the other students, mentors, and colleagues doc8953 none Dershem, Herbert Hope College REU Sites: An Undergraduate Research Participation Program in Computer Science The Hope College REU program in Computer Science is designed to provide promising undergraduates with an intensive and meaningful research experience that will encourage them to consider a career in computer science research. Our goal is to expose students to the techniques, attitudes, and rewards of computer science research and to provide encouragement and direction in the pursuit of such a career through close collaboration with a faculty mentor on a significant project. We will make extensive efforts to include qualified female and minority group students among the participants. Each year a partner undergraduate institution will be selected where there is presently insufficient infrastructure for a strong undergraduate research program in computer science. One faculty member from the partner institution will be invited to participate in this program, joining three or four Hope College faculty members as research mentors. In addition, two students from the partner institution will join three Hope College students and three students from other institutions as student participants. The student participants will reside on the Hope College campus, spending a minimum of 40 hours per week on research activities for a 10 week period. Each participant will work in close collaboration with a faculty mentor and be given exclusive use of a workstation on the Hope College Computer Science network. The development of communication skills will be emphasized by having participants present their results during summer seminars, at their home institution during the following academic year, and at a regional or national conference. In addition, the participants will prepare a research report and an online poster describing their work doc2262 none This is a standard award. Automated systems that interact with human users in spoken and written communication will greatly enhance productivity and program usability. These systems will allow friendly access to information services and are essential for people with disabilities, or for accessing databases while performing intricate tasks. Unfortunately, current technology is inadequate for the tasks at hand, and there is a need to make progress. The number of available personnel trained in the field must be vastly increased and solutions to long standing problems must be found. At this time, relatively few universities educate students capable of performing the required tasks. Leading professionals are scattered in various industrial, academic, and governmental institutions, often duplicating each other s work. This award will allow a summer workshop on language engineering to be conducted where mixed teams of leading professionals and students can cooperate to advance the state of the art. The professionals will normally be university professors and industrial and government researchers working in widely dispersed locations. Graduate and undergraduate students will join these teams. The participation of undergraduate students is intended not only as an educational opportunity, but also to broaden the appeal of the language engineering field amongst students considering graduate studies doc8955 none Calorimetry is a very versatile and effective investigative tool for analyzing biochemical reactions and is capable of providing continuous quantitative assays of biochemical reactions with exceptional operational stability. The ability to follow the progress of a biochemical reaction continuously as a function of time or reactant concentration has many research and clinical applications with far reaching consequences. However, calorimetric bioanalysis has been mostly hampered by the high cost, slow response times and cumbersome nature of the equipment. To address these limitations, a novel calorimetric biosensor is proposed by integrating a polymer based micro-reaction chamber on a MEMS thin film freestanding microthermopile sensor. The thermopile will be fabricated on a freestanding micromechanical structure such as a cantilever with the cold junctions placed on the bulk of the silicon chip (the rim) and the hot junctions on the freestanding structure. A polymer-based reaction chamber will be integrated right above the hot junctions of the thermopile. The large thermal mass and good thermal conductivity of the rim keeps the cold junctions at room temperature whereas the unconstrained cantilever tip will rise in temperature due to the heat of reaction. Coating the hot junctions with specific immobilized enzymes will provide selectivity by catalyzing only the reaction of the corresponding analyte. The sensor will also be used for the accurate measurement of the specific heat and thermal diffusivity of the reactants. Real-time monitoring of these thermal properties will provide with an independent tool for analyzing the progress of the biochemical reaction doc8956 none The REU site focuses on mathematics and statistics applied to industrial problems. The problems come from local business and industry, partners of WPI s Center for Industrial Mathematics and Statistics. The students work closely with a company representative who introduces them to the problem and guides their work to a solution the company can really use. The faculty advisor helps them maintain a focus on the mathematical issue at the core of the problem. The whole experience is designed to provide the students with a glimpse of the ways that advanced mathematics is used to solve real-world problems. The selection of students is based on academic qualifications, career objectives and past work experience. Working in teams of 2 to 4, students meet daily with the faculty advisor and provide oral and written progress reports for the other teams and the company representative. In this way, the projects help develop some skills in communication and teamwork that are crucial for success in a nonacademic work environment. In addition presentations by mathematicians who work in industry and site-visits to companies contribute to providing the students with a complete image of industrial mathematics doc8957 none This award provides funding for a three-year REU Site in Biomechanics and Imaging (RUBI) at the University of Rochester, under the direction of Dr. Amy Lerner. The objective of this program is to provide research experiences for 10 undergraduate students interested in biomechanical and imaging aspects of biomedical engineering during a 10-week summer program. Opportunities will be provided in at least ten different laboratories on the university campus, including the School of Medicine and Dentistry, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a Movement Analysis Lab affiliated with the Ithaca College Physical Therapy Progam. An educational program of weekly seminars and laboratory tours will be developed to broaden the exposure provided to include a wide range of biomechanical and imaging research tools as well as information about careers in biomedical engineering research. The eudcational program will also provide a framework for interactions between multiple faculty mentors, advisors and participating students. Progress on research will be reported informally to faculty mentors and the other REU participants throughout the summer, and will culminate in a research poster session during the last week of the program. To broaden the impact of this program local high school teachers will be invited to attend to learn more about the nature of biomedical engineering research and education. Reporting and evaluation of the program will be handled largely through web pages dedicated to the program doc8958 none The Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program at the University of Kentucky was established to provide a summer (10 week) research opportunity for highly qualified undergraduates from non-tier 1 institutions interested in attending graduate school. The program seeks to; 1) provide an interactive environment where undergraduates are exposed to the many facets of a graduate career (teaching, learning, research), 2) inform interested undergraduates of the many possible careers available to them in the neurosciences, and 3) immerse students in a research project of their own choosing. Faculty from a wide cross-section of the neurosciences, including molecular, behavioral and physiological, will offer their expertise to mentor students in their laboratories and participate in an intensive neuroscience short course. Students will have many opportunities to interact both socially and professionally by attending a neuroscience symposia as well as numerous social events scheduled to enhance collegiality. By the end of the summer, students who are generally otherwise unable to experience hands-on neuroscience research, will have completed their own project, presented it to a professional audience, taken an intensive neuroscience short course, gained a deeper understanding of the day-to-day work environment of the neuroscientist, been exposed to the multitude of career options open to a graduate, and in general become a more committed future graduate student doc8959 none This is the first year funding of a three year continuing award. This project concerns a new approach to evolutionary computation, called Learnable Evolution Model (LEM), which draws inspiration from intellectual evolution - an evolution of human ideas, designs, artifacts, organizations, etc. Unlike conventional Darwinian-type evolutionary algorithms, in which new candidate solutions are created by semi-random mutations and or recombinations, LEM generates new solutions by hypothesis formation (via machine learning) and hypothesis instantiation (via deduction). Pilot studies have shown that LEM can accelerate evolutionary processes by two or more orders of magnitude over Darwininan-type algorithms (in terms of the number of births or fitness evaluations), and thus appears to be particularly advantageous in application domains in which fitness evaluations are time-consuming and or costly, such as engineering optimization problems, evolutionary design, fluid dynamics, drug development, evolvable hardware, geological inversion, etc. This research will explore LEM s capabilities, limitations, and scalability to complex optimization and engineering design tasks. The PI will develop extensions of the initial methodology, and will experimentally test LEM in selected real-world problem domains doc8960 none The program provides a 9-week research experience designed to help student participants develop skills in the design, execution and interpretation of biological experiments and to improve their written and oral communication skills. This experience will encourage and facilitate a career choice in scientific research. During the program, students will work closely with faculty mentors on the identification of a project, development of an experimental design, research implementation, and dissemination of results through several on and off-campus venues. A major role of the faculty mentors is to help students make the transition from research apprentice to independent researcher, a progression which encourages enthusiasm for research and thus a career choice in science. Because the programmatic focus is broad (molecular biology, physiology, field ecology), emphasis will be placed on the development of collaborations between laboratories with diverse intellectual or technical foci. While the primary focus of the program is research experience, students will also participate in a variety of other activities including workshops, seminars, field trips to non-academic research sites, and symposia. These will demonstrate the range of biological research fields and venues, and help them prepare for their careers. During the program, all students will live on campus in university apartments and participate in social events that will promote interactions among students and faculty mentors doc8961 none North Carolina State University operates a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site in its Physics Department. The REU Site offers research opportunities in physics for rising seniors. Undergraduate research projects span the areas of materials and condensed matter physics, with some projects in other areas of physics. Fifteen undergraduate students are recruited every year for a ten-week summer research experience. Opportunities are also available for travel to professional meetings during the academic year to present results from the summer research. Objectives of the program are to provide a rich research experience for rising seniors that will encourage them to continue graduate studies and will help them in making informed decisions about academic programs doc8962 none Wayne State University has an REU program to bring disadvantaged students from the Detroit Metro Area to national laboratories over the summer. In this proposal we will bring six students to the LNS laboratory at Cornell University and four students to the BNL laboratory in Long Island, NY. WSU provides a uniquely diverse group of students, largely from under-represented segments of society. The recruiting and preparation phase provides the students with intensive faculty interaction, encouragement, and an effort to make sure that the student needs are met. The program consists of a preparation phase involving a one-hour course given over the winter to students and prospective teacher participants (14 hours total). The course introduces the students and teachers to the physical and mathematical concepts relevant for the summer experience. The course also provides an introduction to the computing environment of a large experiment, and a computer homework, which requires the students to write and understand simple programs, produce some graphic output, and write their own web page within a Unix environment. Faculties travel with the students to Cornell and Brookhaven in early June to help them get settled and started. They merge with existing REU programs at Brookhaven and Cornell for social activities, and lectures on various scientific topics doc8963 none Research will be done in connection with metric properties of harmonic measures on infinitely connected domains, in connection with polynomial inequalities and orthogonal polynomials. The estimates for harmonic measures Green functions will be given via a local integral involving a density function associated with the boundary of the domain. Such results directly lead to estimates for polynomials in the complex plane and to extensions of some classical polynomial inequalities for general compact sets. The results, in particular, will allow to find the order of the Markoff factors for Cantor-type sets, which in turn will produce compact sets of zero measure for which the Markoff factors are of the minimal growth order O(n^2). Weighted polynomial inequalities with respect to general (say doubling) weights will also be studied together with applications in connection with approximation theory and orthogonal polynomials. Another part of the research is polynomial approximation and orthogonal polynomials with varying weights (the weight varies with the degree), which will be studied with the help of logarithmic potentials in the presence of an external field. The approximation problem is fundamental in proving appropriate asymptotics for Christoffel functions and orthogonal polynomials with varying weights, that in turn can be used to test the universality hypothesis in statistical- mechanical models of quantum physics. The proposed research uses different tools from classical analysis, but the main method is potential thoretic. Research will be done in mathematical analysis. The main effort will be to find new ways to estimate some classical quantities and to extend some well known results to more general situations. These will allow wider applicability of several classical tools and will provide some new insights into the theoretical aspects of some fundamental questions in approximation theory and orthogonal polynomials doc8964 none This Chemistry Division award supports a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at North Carolina State University, where a previous REU site was funded for - . Thomas Gunnoe is the site s Program Director; Maria Oliver-Hoyo is the Co-Program Director. Twelve faculty will serve as REU student mentors. During the award period ( - ), each summer ten students will participate in a ten-week program. Strong emphasis will be placed on recruiting students from undergraduate institutions that lack research opportunities, using existing relations with many of the HBCUs and PMCUs within North Carolina. In addition, plans are underway to develop relationships with selected universities in Puerto Rico. These relationships will be utilized to bolster the program s minority recruiting efforts. The research projects offered are in the areas of analytical, inorganic, organic, and physical chemistry. While the primary focus of the program will be on the students direct participation in a research project, students will also participate in weekly seminars, industrial site visits, safety instruction, and other educational and networking activities. At the conclusion of the program, each student will present his her research at a mini-symposium that will include both poster and oral presentations. Both long- and short-term evaluation methods will be implemented to determine the effectiveness of this REU program doc8965 none This Chemistry Division award supports a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the University of Pittsburgh (UP), where a previous REU site was funded for - . Joseph Grabowski is the site s Program Director. At least sixteen faculty will be available to serve as REU student mentors. During the award period ( - ), ten students will participate in a ten-week program each summer. UP has chosen to replace the more traditional divisions of Chemistry (organic, physical, analytical, inorganic, biochemical) with a more integrated Chemistry world in which active researchers Make, Model, or Measure chemical properties or processes. Therefore the focus of their REU site will be on the area of Measuring. Students will be recruited nationally and special linkages are being developed with several HBCUs. Each student participant will be paired with a graduate student or postdoctoral mentor within the chosen research group to ensure timely answers to questions and to benefit from their advice when necessary. This is in addition to a close interaction each student will have with his her faculty mentor. Tutorials designed to demonstrate the range of measurements necessary for a technologically advancing society will be held throughout the summer program. Near the end of the program, students will participate in a regional poster presentation. The program will culminate in a public Chemistry Symposium in which each participant will give a 15-minute talk. Project evaluation will include an exit interview and a detailed end-of-the-program participant survey. Students will be tracked and surveyed for several years following the program doc8966 none Fort Valley State University, an Land-Grant institution serving a 90-95% African-American student population, proposes to initiate a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site in biotechnology. The program will focus primarily on encouraging and facilitating research careers and, secondarily, assisting students with interests in other science-based careers to appreciate the nature of research. Ten students (women minorities) selected from small colleges will work on research projects with pre-selected mentors in cell biology, genetic engineering, tissue culture, molecular genetics, environmental sciences, entomology and biochemistry. The students will also participate in seminars, attend workshops, and engage in experiential learning through field trips to major research sites. During the 10-week program, they will complete research projects, give oral presentations and submit written abstracts of their work. To promote continued interest in research, two students will be nominated for additional research funds to extend their experiences into the following school year, and will be eligible for travel funds to present their research at scientific meetings. Program effectiveness will be assessed from student exit surveys and a long-term tracking system. At the formative level, the project will be evaluated by an advisory committee consisting of prominent scientists from private industry and research institutions. Establishing this program will have a significant impact on students decisions to pursue careers in biotechnology or biological sciences, and will enhance the university s opportunities to support student-centered research. Toward that end, the university has committed partial support and resources to ensure successful execution of the REU program doc8967 none This award provides funds for an REU Site in psychology at Western Kentucky University. The Site is an 8-week summer research program for 12 undergraduate psychology students. Each student will develop a research project in collaboration with one of six faculty mentors who has an active research program in an area of Lifespan Developmental Psychology. Across the mentors, developmental levels from prenatal to old age and developmental issues in neuroscience, perception and attention, memory and judgment, and emotion and social cognition are represented. All of the faculty mentors are professionally active and all have a strong record of committment to collaborative research with undergraduates. In addition to working on their research projects, REU students will attend workshops and special topics seminars that are designed to help them gain the technical knowledge and skills they need to successfully complete their projects (e.g., writing research reports, conducting basic statistical analyses; giving poster and oral presentations; ethical issues in the conduct of psychological research; planning for graduate study in psychology). Students will also have numerous opportunities to interact with each other, with current graduate students in psychology, and with each of the faculty mentors. These activities will ensure that students have a rich and meaningful research experience and that they gain knowledge of the variety of interesting problems that can be explored within a developmental framework. This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences doc8968 none The Undergraduate Research Experience in Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics will allow undergraduates to participate for three, nine week summer sessions ( - ) in molecular biology and bioinformatics (MBB) research projects. Research projects will encompass diverse fields of biology each using Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics research tools. Seven highly qualified undergraduates having a research interest in molecular biology and bioinformatics will enter the program from state and national institutions, with particular attention focused on the recruitment of students from under-represented groups. The main objectives of this program are to: 1) provide students with the opportunity to conduct hands-on molecular biology research, 2) train students in bioinformatic methods and demonstrate the use of bioinformatics to aid in elucidating biological problems, 3) provide students with critical information on graduate school admissions and how to succeed in a research career and 4) raise awareness of ethical issues that emerge from molecular biology research. The program seeks to mentor students in the laboratory in order to develop technical and intellectual competence, which in turn encourages independence in the research environment. This REU site will not only enrich students with undergraduate research experience, but also promote careers in academic and industry research doc8969 none Cornell University operates a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site affiliated with its NSF-funded Materials Research Science and Engineering Center. The REU Site offers research opportunities for undergraduate students in a wide variety of materials-related topics; the understanding and control of materials in the nanoscale is the common thread of the research programs. Twenty undergraduate students are recruited every year for a ten-week summer research experience. The REU Site actively promotes the participation of women and students from under-represented groups and from predominantly undergraduate institutions. In addition to participating in individual research projects, students attend weekly technical seminars and career workshops, and participate in collective social activities. Through participation in the summer activities, students in the program are afforded a wider perspective on research than they might see as part of their regular undergraduate studies. This familiarity with different perspectives on scientific research helps them to understand the many different pathways leading to a career in science and engineering research doc8970 none This award provides renewed funding to support the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at SUNY Stony Brook. The program annually hosts eight upper division undergraduate students majoring in science or engineering to actively participate in eight weeks of research on estuarine processes. The students will conduct independent research under the guidance of a faculty mentor. Funding for this program will be supplemented by NY State Sea Grant and MSRC. The proposal is based on the theory that mentoring and networking are the most effective methods for recruiting students into a profession and for training young researchers. It is well designed to encourage highly motivated students to continue the their pursuit of research careers in oceanography. It encourages interdisciplinary research by organizing the students research topics around a central theme. Students conduct independent research and produce oral and written reports at the end of the internship. The program will also encourage a diverse set of students to continue their education in the field of oceanography. In the past the program has had more than 50% female participants, has drawn students from across the nation, and has attracted an ethnically diverse group of students doc8971 none This award provides renewed funding to support the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) located in Woods Hole, MA. The goal of this program is to expose highly selected undergraduate interns, recruited nationally, to research in behavior, ecology, biogeochemistry, hydrogeology, and management of organisms and ecosystems within coastal bays of New England. The work will be done in various field sites along the coast of New England, under the direction of experienced research mentors. The program will support ten undergraduate interns for a total of ten weeks during each summer. Students will participate in weekly workshops focussed on topics such as career options, graduate school, statistical analysis, experimental design, and oral and written presentation of research. Each student will prepare an oral presentation for the Annual Scientific Meeting of the MBL and the reports will be published in the MBL Bulletin publication following this event. The proposal is based on the theory that mentoring and networking are the most effective methods for recruiting students into a profession and for training young researchers. This program is well designed to encourage highly motivated students to continue the their pursuit of research careers in oceanography. The program will encourage a diverse set of students to continue their education in the field of oceanography. In the past the program has had more than 50% female participants and has drawn students from across the nation doc8972 none Undergraduate students will take part in a three year summer research site program in the Department of Biological Sciences at Wellesley College, an undergraduate college for women, which has a strong interest in the research training of undergraduates. Applications will be actively encouraged from Wellesley College Biology, Psychobiology, Biological Chemistry and Environmental Sciences majors, students from regional liberal arts colleges and universities, as well as similar institutions nation-wide. These students will have a serious interest in gaining research experience to add to their demonstrated academic talent. They will already have shown an ability to think independently and imaginatively, and will have strong recommendations from knowledgeable faculty at their own institutions. Ten participants for each of the three years will be selected by the PI and the participating faculty. The selected students will take part in a lively, instructive, ten week program. Under the guidance of their faculty mentor, each student will participate fully in an active research program. This will include everything from pursuing a literature review, to carrying out independent experimental procedures and observations, and continuing to the analysis of data and the determination of conclusions. Each will also prepare and deliver a presentation of results to the entire program in a weekly seminar series. This, along with a series of demonstrations of the techniques utilized by other laboratories, and a final poster session, will familiarize each student with the wide variety of active research programs in the Department. Throughout the summer seminars and workshops will be presented by scientists, and field trips will be taken to field research sites and biotechnology companies. It is expected, based on previous experience, that participation in this program will have a significant impact on the future of these undergraduates, as most will pursue advanced degrees doc8973 none This award provides funding to the University of Maine, Eric N. Landis, Principal Investigator, for the support of a 3-year REU Site in Advanced Engineered Wood Composites. This nine-week program will provide an interdisicpinary research experience for9 undergraduate science and engineering students with the focal point being the development of the next generation of engineered wood composites for construction applications. The program will combine hands-on laboratory work with training in fundamental science and engineering principles. Faculty mentors will work closely with students. Weekly seminars wil include discussions of research techniques, ethics, graduate schools, as well as presentations made by the students. Group field trips will include trips to major field test sites, government agencies, industries, and social events. Follow-through after the students leave the site will consist of advisors working with their students on a technical paper based on the research, as well as advisors assisting students in applying to graduate school doc8974 none This award provides funding to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for the support of a 5 year REU Site entitled, SURFing the Building and Fire Research Laboratory: A NIST-NSF Partnership, under the direction of Dr. Christopher White. This partnership will provide research opportunities for outstanding students to collaborate with internationally known NIST scientists in the fields of building materials, structure, building environment, and fire science and engineering. The 8 undergraduate students will spend 10-12 weeks working one-on-one with NIST staff on selected projects that combine basic research with direct applications to problems of national importance doc8975 none The Blandy Experimental Farm, a biological field stations of the University of Virginia, hosts a 10-week program where undergraduates learn: 1) basic principles of environmental biology, 2) methods by which scientists increase our understanding of the natural world, and 3) essential elements of scientific research and how to put these in a context that is intended to educate the general public about research and ecology. The goal is to teach students, no matter what their major field of study, how to do science, give them an opportunity to conduct original, and largely independent field research in areas of faculty expertise, and to package the results in a form that can be used to educate the public about scientific inquiry. The Program is interdisciplinary, features research on individuals, populations , communities, ecosystem processes, and is built around a diverse team of five scientists and two educators. Individual student research focuses on topics of basic scientific and or applied importance (animal behavior, population dynamics interactions, landscape ecology, and biogeochemical cycles) and especially those topics that have high heuristic or societal value. In keeping with the mission of the Blandy Experimental Farm, the program formally combines scientific research with environmental education. Students progress through three phases: Phase I-1- week of formal lectures and hands-on exercises detailing the scientific method, hypothesis testing, experimental design, statistics and an introduction to basic pedagogies; Phase II-8 weeks of data collection, data analyses, directed study, and experimentation; and Phase III--1 week of data analysis, interpretation, and communication of results. The program includes students from a diversity of cultural backgrounds, interests, and home institutions. Students reside in a field-station setting and are part of a larger research community of 15-25 other students taking courses, graduate students working on theses, post-doctoral researchers, and other faculty. Field trips, weekly seminars, and journal clubs add to the student experience. Exit and follow-up interviews are used to assess the program each year doc8976 none The mechanical state of structures need to be monitored for a variety of reasons, including health diagnostics and health prognostics. The task of identifying the location and nature of damage initiation and growth is made difficult by limitations of (i) sensor technologies and (ii) sensor densities; that can be achieved in realistic structures. Current technologies for mechanical sensors mostly focus on measuring deformations or stains, and are thus useful for deformation-based failure prediction models. In this study we propose to develop a novel class of MEMS-based, self-sufficient sensors that will make direct in-situ measurements of instantaneous local strain, stress, stiffness and energy density in the host structure. Specifically, we have proposed to: (a) provide proof-of-concept of the basic principles for a novel and completely new stiffness energy sensor; (b) demonstrate a MEMS implementation of the underlying principles; and (c) demonstrate its application for damage degradation modeling by mounting it externally to structural coupons. It is anticipated that this study will demonstrate and deliver the first working version of a fully autonomous sensor that will provide real-time, in-situ measurements of the changes in a structure s local stiffness and strain energy density. In conjunction with the damage models to be developed during this study, this sensor will provide the first real opportunity to perform real-time health prognostics in complex structures, experiencing complex dynamic loading throughout their life-cycle doc8977 none This award provides funds for renewed support of an REU Site in archaeology conducted by CUNY City College along with Columbia University and the New York Historical Society. The project consists of the archaeological study of Seneca Village, a 19th-century African-American and Irish immigrant community located in Central Park in New York City. The project is made up of four parts. The first includes working with a geophysicist and remote sensing equipment to ascertain whether or not archaeological remains of the village survive intact in the ground. The second part involves historical research aimed at identifying the various buildings that made up the village and the various people who lived and worked in them as well as the locations and extent of the Village s three cemeteries. The third part involves integrating both the historical and geophysical data into a GIS format. Finally, each student will create a research design for planning archaeological excavations to address a research question related to this 19th-century multi-cultural community. The project will involve eight undergraduate students per year who will focus on different portions of the village and different historical records for the eight week program. Students will be selected from the colleges that belong to the New York City Archaeological Consortium, i.e., the colleges and community colleges of the City University, and the colleges of Columbia and New York Universities. This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences doc8978 none With the increasing amount and complexity of today s data, there is an urgent need to accelerate the development of knowledge discovery and concept learning methods for mining large databases. Furthermore, much of this data is structural in nature, or is composed of entities and relationships between those entities. Hence, there exists a need to develop scalable methods for discovering new knowledge in structural databases. The main objective of this project is to investigate and implement new methods for performing knowledge discovery and concept learning on structural databases represented as graphs. This work builds upon existing methods for graph-based knowledge discovery implemented in the Subdue structural discovery system. The graph-based discovery algorithm is extended to perform structural concept learning and structural, hierarchical conceptual clustering. To achieve greater scalability, database management techniques are integrated into the graph-based discovery and learning processes. One targeted application is the use of Subdue as the core of a structural Web seach engine. Domain experts provide guidance and feedback on applications to molecular biology, geology, telecommunications, and software engineering. Achievement of the above objectives impacts the ability to automatically extract useful knowledge from the ever-increasing amount of data. By disseminating the Subdue discovery algorithm, databases, and discovered results over the Internet, scientists in all areas benefit from similar analyses of their own databases. Through integration of our research ideas into classes taught at UTA and into student research, this project impacts education at UTA and at other universities doc8979 none Hnat The objective of this research is the development of an implantable strain sensor and appropriate measurement system to monitor real time spinal fusion rod strain. As the spine fuses, the load is transferred from the rod to the spine. Therefore, the monitored strain on the rod surface should decrease over time. The load transfer for a normal spinal fusion should be gradual and steady, and any deviation of discontinuity would indicate either non-fusion or possible failure of the rod or pedicle screw. A complete measurement system including microstrain sensors, signal conditioning, battery-free telemetry, sensor housing and an external receiver will developed and then tested using whole cadavers. Micromechanical systems (MEMS) technology will be implemented to produce a miniature strain sensor. Two integrated circuits (ICs), a MOSFET switch and a LC antenna tank circuit placed on a multi-chip module (MCM) board will provide strain sensor signal conditioning and telemetry transmission. The sensor and electronics housing will be developed using advanced mechanical design methods combined with rapid prototyping using selective laser sintering. Measurement system verification will be conducted using whole cadavers and surgical implantation of the fusion rod strain sensors. The lumbo-sacral spine segment will be removed from the cadavers and tested using a MTS Bionix test system to determine system sensitivity doc8980 none This Chemistry Division award supports the continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the University of Connecticut. Amy Howell is the site s Program Director; Christian Bruckner is the Co-Program Director. Twelve faculty will serve as REU student mentors. During the award period ( - ), each summer students will participate in a ten-week program. Plans are to recruit students within the region (New England, NY, NJ, PA) from institutions that have limited opportunities for independent research. A concerted effort will be made to recruit students with physical disabilities--the department has the capability to provide bench chemistry for students who use wheel chairs. The research projects offered are in the areas of analytical, inorganic, organic, and physical chemistry. Student participants will interact extensively with their faulty research mentor and senior graduate student. The program will include a seminar series featuring safety, presenting research results, ethical issues in science, careers in chemistry, and use of chemical databases. The program will conclude with oral presentations and a poster symposium, which will be held in conjunction with other REU programs on campus. The program will be evaluated by the students via a series of questionnaires, first when they arrive on campus and again upon their departure. The REU faculty will be surveyed at the conclusion of each program, as will the faculty at the students home institutions. Students will be tracked in terms of their professional activities following their participation in the program doc8981 none The REU at Tulane in the summer of will involve 6 students and 2 .faculty members (Kalka and Yang) in research in differential geometry. The students will be broken up into 2 groups of 3 students, each group working with one of the faculty members, according to level of preparation and interests. Students will meet regularly with the faculty member and more often with each other. There will be a weekly seminar where each group will give a short presentation on their work. The students will be housed on campus, with housing supplied by Tulane and will each receive a stipend of $ doc8982 none Biology faculty will mentor 30 undergraduate biology students (10 each summer for three years) in a Research Experiences for Undergraduates program based at the University of Colorado s Mountain Research Station. The objectives of the program are to engage students in scientific research at an early stage in their academic development and to encourage these students to pursue careers in research and teaching. Students from under-represented groups will be actively recruited to participate in our program. The program focus is on ecology, behavior, and evolution, with the largest number of students engaged in projects in community and ecosystems ecology. Each summer, students will participate in an intensive one-week introduction to research, followed by nine weeks of research supervised by faculty mentors. The University s NSF funded Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program is based at the Mountain Station, and students benefit from formal and informal interactions with LTER researchers. While undertaking their projects, students learn the principles underlying biological research and gain experience with current scientific techniques. In addition to final presentations of their results at the end of the summer, students are encouraged to publish their findings in peer reviewed scientific journals doc8983 none This is funding to subsidize expenses of student participants in the Student Research Workshop organized in conjunction with the Association for Computational Linguistics Conference (ACL ), which was held October 3-6, , in Hong Kong. The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the primary international organization in the field of natural language processing and language engineering, with two regional chapters, Europe (EACL) and North America (NAACL), of approximately equal size. The Association s annual conference, which rotates between North America and Europe, is the major international meeting in the field, and was held for the first time this year in a Pacific Rim country. The workshop format allows students sufficient time to present their research (25 minutes) and receive feedback from a panel of established researchers in the field (15 minutes). It will provide students with invaluable exposure to outside perspectives on their work at a critical time in their research, through feedback from the panel and other student participants. The ACL Student Workshop is an inexpensive yet highly effective means of encouraging young and upcoming computational linguists. The intimate format encourages the student participants to begin building a rapport with established researchers. This nurturing effort should pay dividends by more effectively guiding students in this rapidly changing research field. In addition, by building a supportive environment for these students, it is more likely that down the road they will in turn lend a supporting hand to other students who follow doc8984 none Founded in , the REU at Louisiana State University is intended for advanced undergraduates from all national demographic groups. Our REU represents a modest step in the effort to help alleviate the current and projected national shortage of scientific and technological workers by providing access for all demographic groups to participate in the excitement and challenge of current mathematical research. The REU will focus on current research topics in number theory, geometry and topology (particularly braids, knots and links). For summer, , the theme will be: Counting problems and zeta functions in number theory, geometry and topology. Further details are available on our web site: http: www.math.lsu.edu REU . The program is designed for eight weeks during the summer with twelve students divided among three faculty mentors. Some basic features of the REU include: cluster housing in student apartments on the LSU campus and daily afternoon teas to foster interaction and promote group cohesion; intial introductory lectures and individual meetings with the mentors during the first two weeks, after which the students group themselves into cohorts of four students working with a mentor on individual but closely-related projects. Communication of mathematics is fostered both informally and formally with an oral project description given early in the summer and final oral and written presentations doc8985 none The main goal of this three-year project is to develop a truly interdisciplinary ten-week undergraduate summer research program at The University of South Dakota (USD) that takes advantage of unique regional resources. Eight students will be selected to conduct research in NSF-eligible areas and will join four additional students in other, non-science fields with funding from USD. The overall program consists of three major components: (i) the research itself, including projects in a number of disciplines from a variety of departments, such as Biology, Chemistry, Psychology, and Archaeology; (ii) social and educational events, which rely upon the excellent and unique opportunities for outdoor activities associated with the river and surrounding areas; (iii) communication of research results, including the weekly Lewis and Clark Hour sessions with participation of the program director, students and research mentors, and student presentations at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) and the USD annual undergraduate research conference, IdeaFest. This program provides a mechanism to expand the undergraduate research culture across campus and to more completely integrate student scholarship into undergraduate education. In an effort to provide research experiences to talented undergraduate students from other campuses in the state, USD will expand involvement to include students from smaller colleges and universities in the state and region and from South Dakota s two tribal colleges doc8986 none This is the first year funding of a three year continuing award. The PI will build a knowledge-based system capable of carrying out commonsense reasoning in the domain of rigid solid objects. For example, such a system would be able to reason that a table with one leg shorter than the others will wobble, or that a door locked with a dead-bolt can be opened from the side with the bolt, but not from the opposite side. The design of such a system will involve a variety of different issue that have not received much attention in previous work on automated physical reasoning, including: reasoning about gross behavior over extended periods of time, while ignoring differential behavior over local time; reasoning using the kinds of partial spatial information that is relevant in this domain; the use of rough estimates of likelihood and of comparative likelihoods; reasoning about collections of an indeterminate number of objects; and integrating reasoning using rules of varying degrees of specificity and certainty. The success of the system will be evaluated using a hand-crafted corpus of some hundreds of examples. The study of these inferences and the development of this system will yield important insights, not only into the epistemic and computational structure of this important domain, but also into issues of more general interest in the construction, extension, and evaluation of large knowledge-based systems for semantically rich domains doc8987 none This Chemistry Division award supports a new Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at Kent State University. Robert Twieg is the site s Program Director; Arne Gericke is the Co-Program Director. Eleven faculty will serve as REU student mentors. During the award period ( - ), each summer ten students will participate in a ten-week program. The focus of the program will be on liquid crystals - synthetic and natural systems. It will have a distinct interdisciplinary characteristic with strong connections to biology, biochemistry, materials science, and physics. Recruitment efforts will target students from those smaller Ohio undergraduate institutions that lack research opportunities, and national institutions that represent minority students. No students will be recruited from Kent State University. All participants will present their research at the end of the summer via a poster presentation. Several of the students will be selected to present their work at an ACS meeting doc8988 none The purpose of the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Fellowhsip at The Academy of Natural Sciences is to provide undergraduates with experience in collections-based research in a natural history museum environment in an effort to recruit new young researchers to pursue advanced degrees in the field of organismal and systematic biology. The REU program at the Academy fills a gap in traditional undergraduate training by providing a diverse and exciting research experience in a museum environment for students who may not be exposed to a research in the areas of systematics, evolution, and organismal biology. An additional goal of the program is to attract underserved minorities to our program and promote diversity in all areas of biological research. Students are recruited from colleges and universites from around the country through advertisements on the Internet and through direct mailing. Students at historically black colleges and universites (HBCU s) are a recruiting priority and direct contact with faculty at HBCU s is used to attract minority applicants. Each year, eight students are chosen on the basis of academic performance, overall interest in organismal biology, and the evaluations of two referees, for a 10-week summer fellowship. After a one-week introductory session in which students receive tours of all collections and academy facilities, students work on an independent research project with a Ph.D. scientist as his or her mentor. Topics for research projects range from systematic biology using traditional morphological and molecular techniques, to ecology, watershed monitoring, and the history of scientific collections. Students gain experience by working side-by-side with curators and senior scientists and are involved in all aspects of collections-based research including collection and curation of specimens, field expeditions, and dissemination of results orally and in a written paper. Most students publish their papers in peer reviewed scientific journals. Students also benefit from a variety of group activities including weekly seminars, social gatherings, a camping trip, and end-of-summer banquet. Natural history museums such as the Academy are becoming increasingly important for formal education in organismal biology because college and university biology departments are, on the whole, becoming more oriented toward cellular and molecular research. Because of this shift in emphasis in biology teaching there is a decline in numbers of specialists dedicated to collections-based, taxonomic and ecological research. Through the REU fellowship at the Academy undergraduate students gain valuable experience and education in organismal biology that they might not obtain at their undergraduate institution. Most students publish the results of their research and a majority of participants choose to pursue careers in systematics and organismal biology based on their REU experience at the Academy. Providing opportunities for undergraduate research to underserved minorities has the added benefit of increasing the diversity of students pursuing advanced degrees in the biological sciences, a change that will hopefully be reflected in an increase in the diversity of the scientific research community of the future doc8989 none The ROMP began in . The ROMP Program at Massachusetts Bay Community College (MBCC) is a very rigorous 12-month (minimal) to 24 month (maximum) research training program. The purpose of the ROMP is to confer on its participants an overwhelming competitive advantage that will ensure their completion of the terminal degree in the basic sciences with distinction. The ROMP is tightly linked to the associate degree programs in Biotechnology at MBCC: Biotechnology, Marine Biotechnology and Forensic DNA Science. ROMP participants must therefore be enrolled as full-time students in one of the Biotechnology Programs. ROMP students undertake summer research projects at collaborative institutions worldwide, which are advanced in the ensuing academic year in the BT Program at MBCC. The Biotechnology Program s research laboratories at MBCC are a multi-million dollar facility and are considered the most sophisticated undergraduate research facilities in the United States. During the academic year students develop their independent research prowess through their collaborative projects, are required to give multiple research presentations and must generate at least one publishable abstract per year. Research opportunities in the ROMP are extensive and include molecular biology, marine biology, environmental science, and forensic DNA analysis of human, animal and plant genomes and DNA-based anthropological studies. Examples of ROMP research projects include: studies in the changes in gene expression in human cells; volcano-induced fish speciation on the Caribbean island of Montserrat; and tracing African-American roots using DNA analysis. The African-American Roots Project was begun in and has bought ROMP students international attention. Faculty- and peer mentoring are key components of the ROMP. Second year ROMP students must mentor first year participants to a high degree of scientific proficiency. In addition ROMP students are required to mentor primary school children of Boston during the course of the academic year. We expect that ROMP participants will instill a passion for science in young minority students during the critical formative years of primary school. A number of ROMP students are now enrolled in basic science doctoral programs nationwide. We anticipate that the ROMP will discernibly increase the number of active, nontraditional people in the American scientific community doc8990 none Garbini One of the oldest and most enduring dreams of the scientific community is to directly observe molecular structure nondestructively, in situ, in three dimensions, with Angstrom-scale resolution. Such an imaging technology would immediately address urgent needs in nanoscale engineering, materials science, molecular biology, and medicine. The objective of the proposed research is to create such a technology. The proposed method is magnetic resonance force microscopy MRFM, which was conceived in , by the proposers specifically as a means for 3D molecular imaging. The central concept of MRFM is to combine three-dimensional magnetic resonance imaging with angstrom-scale probe microscopy. MRFM was first experimentally demonstrated in in collaboration with Dan Rugar s IBM group. Subsequently, MRFM has developed into a worldwide sensing and imaging research effort. The specific aims of this NSF proposal are to: (1) demonstrate nanoscale resolution in 3D MRFM imaging; (2) achieve a reliable, experimentally validated understanding of electron and proton spin relaxation in the MRFM environment; and (3) extend present design principles for optimal control and estimation to the quantum environment appropriate to single spin imaging. The proposed means are to: (1) validate and calibrate the proposers newly completed 3D MRFM scanner, via force, parametric, and multiplex imaging experiments; (2) design and operate a next-generation adaptive digital controller, incorporating optimal control, estimation, and diagnostic algorithms; and (3) survey electron and proton spin relaxation in a variety of target samples. The proposed opening of a new imaging window onto the largely unobserved world of 3D molecular structure will revolutionize the fields of nanoscale engineering, materials science, biology, medicine, and engineering education doc8991 none The University of Michigan will conduct an NSF REU program during the summer of at CERN. CERN is the European Laboratory for Particle Physics and it straddles the border between Switzerland and France just outside Geneva. It is the foremost facility of its kind in the world, and the Michigan REU Site at CERN is designed to give ten U.S. science and engineering undergraduates the opportunity to participate in an international setting. This program will stress strong minority recruitment through direct contact with HBCU s and other REU programs as well as the deployment of state of the art web based achieving technologies to make the CERN summer lectures available to other U.S. REU sites. At CERN the U.S. students join a select group of international physics students and participate in a variety of educational and social activities. Although the US is not an official member state of CERN, the US students are treated exactly the same as member state students and they can enjoy the benefits of being a CERN Summer Student. Activities include: attending lectures by experts in a variety of fields in physics, engineering and computing; working with and learning from world-renowned physicists; collaborating on multi-national research projects including CMS and ATLAS at the Large Hadron Collider. This unique opportunity not only allows the students to learn fundamental physics in a research environment, but it also gives them the benefit of working in an international setting doc8992 none We propose to continue the University of Washington Physics Research Experiences for Undergraduates Program for an additional three years. The program brings approximately 14 undergraduates to campus each summer to work with local faculty, postdocs, and students on forefront research projects. The program is administered by a director and codirector who run two weekly meetings with the students, arrange and oversee the research assignments, and set up machine shop and other special instruction, as needed. At the end of their 10 week visits, the students present seminars on their research activities and write papers summarizing their accomplishments. The program is highly competitive, with about 20 applications per opening. The program is administered jointly by the Institute for Nuclear Theory and the Department of Physics. The students are housed together in a campus dorm. Efforts are made to attract students from small colleges and women and minority students doc8993 none Systematics and evolution are central concepts in biological disciplines. Knowledge of the manner in which species are related to each other and the mechanisms by which they become distributed across the globe provide a framework (in evolutionary trees for example) for organizing and communicating ideas and advances, for example in terms of biodiversity or comparative genomics. Our program provides students with a coherent, hands-on introduction to research in systematics and comparative evolutionary biology, and serves a critical role in attracting, inspiring and educating undergraduate students in the fundamental importance of these biological disciplines. Students enrolled in the AMNH REU program have at their disposal world-class collections of fishes, dinosaurs, reptiles, amphibians, mammals and invertebrates, as well as cutting edge research facilities in the Molecular Genomics laboratories, and the museum s research library. Project titles, while all concerned with the basic role of evolution and systematics, span a range of topics as broad as those being investigated by the museum s curators, including the use of genetic, histological, anatomical and paleontological data types. The American Museum of Natural History is an inspirational place for young scientists to work, and an REU program is a wonderful way for us to bring a critical mass of bright young scholars into our departments and expose them to the challenge and excitement of an original research program doc8994 none The American Mathematical Society will administer the program for selecting and supporting approximately eight U.S. mathematics graduate students and two senior U.S. mathematicians to attend the European Summer School at the Euler International Mathematical Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia. The theme of this summer school is asymptotic combinatorics, with applications to mathematical physics. The summer school will take place July, , and is sponsored by the European Mathematical Society. The grant from the National Science Foundation in the amount of $20,520 will be used for travel and subsistence for the selected individuals. This is an opportunity for substantial cooperation between the American and European mathematics communities doc8995 none This award provides a 3-year award to Clemson University for a REU Site in Wireless Communication Networks, Antennas and Propagation, and Radio Frequency Circuits, under the direction of Dr. Daniel Noneaker. This program is designed to give10 undergraduate participants each summer an opportunity to develop an in-depth understanding of a significant research problem in wireless communications. Each student will pursue ten weeks of directed research in the areas of communications systems, mobile communication networks, broadband antenna design and characterization, and RF and millimeter-wave circuit design doc8996 none Ramirez The REU Program in Water Research at CSU recruits up to 15 outstanding undergraduate students from water-related programs at CSU, from other four-year institutions in Colorado and across the nation, and up to 3 high school teachers to carry out multidisciplinary research in water at CSU. The characteristics of the institutions targeted are: 1) they have programs that prepare students for water- related careers, 2) they have limited opportunities for student research, and 3) they have high percentages of students from under-represented groups. Each participant will undertake an individual research project under the supervision of a faculty member, typically as a member of a group that includes one or more graduate students. Students will participate in a series of seminars and discussions by invited speakers addressing water issues, including issues of ethics in water resources, and other topics of interest. Several field excursions will introduce students to some of Colorado s and the U.S. s most pressing water problems. Students will complete their research during the 8-week summer program, preparing a written report and presenting their results orally to their peers in an end-of-summer REU symposium celebration. Selected students will participate in the Fall Water Center Student Symposium, an interdepartmental gathering of both undergraduate and graduate students undertaking water resources research at CSU. Finally, all students will be invited, expenses paid, to attend CSU s annual AGU Hydrology Days, a professional forum held in mid-April each year doc8997 none This award provides funds for a Field School in Biocultural Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. The program will engage a diverse pool of talented undergraduates in an experiential learning environment that immerses them in anthropological method and theory. Using the large Byzantine St. Stephen s skeletal collection from Jerusalem as the cornerstone for study, historical and archaeological information will be synthesized in a biocultural reconstruction of ancient monastic life. Students will engage in original research to develop a suite of methodological skills in the sciences and enhance their capability for collaborative research. They will share in a field trip program to area research sites, libraries, museums, and a functioning monastery to gain an understanding of the cultural parameters affecting human adaptability. Exploration of ethical issues related to the politics of archaeology, treatment of artifacts, and repatriation will focus attention on scientific ethics, an important foundation for future research endeavors. Finally, a dynamic lecture program delivered by an international team of scholars in the fields of anthropology, biology, history, classics, geography, theology, and Near Eastern studies will crystallize the importance of a holistic approach for studying the past. The biocultural field school will provide an intellectually energizing learning experience, which will equip participants with a suite of talents for viewing their surroundings. The integration of practical research skills, ethical inquiry, and the synthesis of disciplinary paradigms for viewing human interaction will prove useful as students move into graduate or professional careers in the natural and social sciences. This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences doc8998 none Minarik During a ten-week summer program, thirteen undergraduate students will be given the opportunity to actively participate in the research program of a staff member at the Broad Branch Campus of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. The Broad Branch Campus includes both the Geophysical Laboratory and the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. Recruitment efforts will especially target groups historically under-represented in science and students from institutions that are unable to offer a research experience. Scholarship, possible influence on career objectives, and the ability to match the student s scientific interests with available research projects will all be considered in the selection process. While at the Geophysical Laboratory and the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, each student will be assigned an advisor and a research project. Although varied, most of the student s projects will involve some aspect of earth or planetary geoscience research. The students will be instructed by their advisors in the use of the experimental, and or analytical and computational apparatus that are utilized in the research programs. Each week the students will also meet in a group for a lunch seminar. During this time Carnegie staff members will describe their own research interests and laboratory facilities. Students will tour some of the government research laboratories in the area. The students will be expected to prepare a paper describing their summer research results and to participate in a special student symposium where they will present their work to their peers and the scientific staff doc8999 none This project is investigating the heterogeneous chemistry of reactive nitrogen species at the air-water interface. Laboratory studies will be conducted to elucidate the elementary processes associated with the reaction of HNO3 with NO on various wet solids, which are model components of dust particles in the atmosphere. The production of HONO and other reaction products will be measured. The reaction of HNO3 on ice surfaces with NO will also be investigated to determine if this could be the source of HONO that has recently been measured in the Arctic, which appears to be coming at least in part from the snowpack. The results could have significant implications for modeling the global production of nitrogen oxides and ozone doc9000 none Portland State University operates a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site. The REU Site offers research opportunities in applications of microscopy and microanalysis to multidisciplinary research. Undergraduate research projects are supervised by faculty in the departments of physics, chemistry, geology, environmental biology and mechanical engineering at Portland State. Eight undergraduate students are recruited every year for an eight-week summer research experience. The program includes an academic year component that involves ten student participants. The recruitment focus is on students from four-year colleges and community colleges in the greater Portland area doc9001 none The Hope College REU program is intended to provide students with an opportunity to have a significant research experience which will enhance their desire to undertake a research career. The projects available to the students come from a wide variety of specialties; nuclear physics, both experimental and theoretical, technical education of the nonscientist, fracture mechanics, aircraft safety, biomechanics and relativistic astrophysics. The eight REU student researchers, and a similar number supported by other sources, will work side-by-side with the faculty in the lab with daily personal contact. Most of the students arrive with little or no experience in the special area of research. At the same time, we have only the undergraduates to help us do the research we undertake so that it is important that they learn quickly and start contributing early. Thus, they will be given responsibility and freedom to think for themselves while being supervised closely. The process has been successful in the past with many students being co-authors on refereed publications. Students will present their results and prepare posters. Funds are available to support travel to a meeting. Students will receive stipends, housing and travel allowance doc9002 none This Chemistry Division award supports the continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the University of Michigan. Brian Coppola is the site s Program Director and Seyhan Ege as Co-Program Director will assist him. In addition there will be available 48 faculty as REU student mentors. Over the award period ( - ), the students will be supported each summer in a ten-week program, where they will join 50-60 other students. The focus of the program is designed to provide the students with the experience of doing research in a large graduate department of a Research-I institution. Students will have access to all of the research groups of the Chemistry Department including interdisciplinary programs in materials chemistry, bio-related chemistry, medicinal chemistry and environmental chemistry. A relationship is established between each of the students and research group before arriving on campus. The program concludes with each student presenting his her research results at a regional research meeting doc9003 none Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute operates a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site in its Materials Science and Engineering Department. The goal of the program is to expose undergraduate students to materials science and engineering through hands-on research and to the connections between fundamental research and real-world engineering problems. Ten students are recruited every year for a ten-week summer research experience. Research projects offered range from weld-line fracture of superalloys to synthesis of nanomaterials, to the properties of electronic materials, with a common theme on structure-property relationships. Some of the projects involve industrial participation and in those cases students will spend part of the time at the industrial laboratory doc9004 none The project is a one year REU site in mathematics, to be held at Southwest Texas State University. Five students will work closely with two faculty members for eight weeks in the summer to solve open problems in mathematics. The objectives of the program are to directly involve students in research and to allow the students to interact with each other and to form a close mentoring relationship with a faculty member. The students will work in teams of two or three under the supervision of a faculty mentor. All of the open problems for this program have a strong computational aspect. The students will begin their research by computing examples and searching for patterns. They will then progress to making conjectures and proving theorems. The topics for this program will come from the fields of Algebra, Representation Theory, and Graph Theory. The background needed for the program will be a one semester course in Modern Algebra, or the equivalent. Some of the problems will also require knowledge of Linear Algebra. All students who have the necessary background are eligible to apply. Throughout the summer, the student groups will stay informed of each other s progress by holding twice weekly seminars at which they present their preliminary results. At the end of the summer, the student will write their results in the form of a research paper and will prepare a final presentation to be given to the Mathematics Department. The students and faculty will continue to work on the problems after the summer program ends by using electronic correspondence. Most of the projects will result in a final paper that will be submitted to a refereed journal for publication. In addition, each student will be provided with funding to travel to a mathematical conference to present his or her work. The point of contact for student recruitment is Dr. Susan Morey. She can be reached at (512) 245- or by e-mail at morey@swt.edu. Her web site address is http: www.swt.edu ~sm26 index.html. A link to the address for site information will be provided there when it becomes available doc9005 none The Cornell University Laboratory of Nuclear Studies offers a summer program for Undergraduate Research in Elementary Particle Physics, Accelerator Physics, and Synchrotron Radiation Science. The Laboratory of Nuclear Studies at Cornell University will offer ten undergraduate students per year the excitement and challenge of frontier research in the area of elementary particle physics, accelerator physics and synchrotron radiation science. These students, selected from colleges and universities throughout the United States, will spend ten weeks of the summer working at the world class facilities of the Cornell Electron-positron Storage Ring (CESR), the CLEOIII particle detector and the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS). In addition to working closely with physicist mentors, they will participate in seminars, lectures, tours and activities designed to promote interactions among undergraduate researchers. The participants will receive travel and lodging allowances as well as a summer stipend doc9006 none Columbia University will provide an REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) Site at the high energy physics Nevis Lab located on the campus of Columbia University. Stipend and housing expenses will be furnished for 10 undergraduate students, for the 10 week summer research program. The broad Nevis research program seeks to address the most pressing issues of high energy physics. The major research programs include the ATLAS experiment, D0, NuTeV BooNE, ZEUS, and HiRes experiments. The strength of this broad experimental program, coupled with the Nevis infrastructure of world class electronics design and mechanical construction, forms a unique environment with opportunities for training of students and young physicists. As these experiments are at different stages in their development, Nevis provides the opportunity for students to gain experience in all aspects of high energy physics experiments, from initial conceptual detector design, hardware development and construction, to simulation software development and data analysis doc9007 none This award provides funding to Pennsylvania State University for the support of a three-year REU Site in Innovative Sintered Products, under the direction of Dr. Renata S. Engel. This ten-week summer research experience for ten undergraduate students each year, will focus on the interdisciplinary theme of sintered products. The program will be housed in the newly created interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Sintered Products (CISP), an industry-university-government partnership for performing innovative research, education, and outreach activities. CISP is ideally suited to administer a REU site due to its interdisciplinary focus, innovations in research and education, and ability to mentor students in technical training and professional development. The research projects that the students will participate in deal with an array of interdisciplinary topics that will move an enitre industry segment into the next century through coordinated technical innovation, education and outreach doc9008 none This research program has the goals of understanding how bringing conjugated organic chromophores into close proximity influences the optical and electronic properties of the ensemble and how molecular topology can be used to control the organization of molecules in the solid state. To achieve these goals the PI will synthesize model compounds and study their optical, electronic and morphological properties. Specific objectives during the grant period are: (1) The synthesis of structurally defined bichromophoric and multichromophoric molecules that are held together by the paracyclophane framework. The target molecules will have a rigid structure that precisely determines the distance, orientation and number of interacting units. (2) To combine spectroscopic studies with quantum mechanical analysis to build a cohesive view of photoexcitation in multichromophore paracyclophane structures. (3) The synthesis of a homologous series of aggregated chromophores with the intent of identifying the limit at which the electronic communication between individual units ceases to be important. These are truly organic nanomaterials in that their electronic description intermediate between those of individual chromophores and of bulk materials (i.e. crystals, polymer films). (4) The synthesis of organic molecules with geometries that discourage crystallization. Of interest is to examine how topology translates into bulk morphology. Materials of this type can be purified to a greater extent than polymer counterparts and therefore may offer advantages in situations where a small concentration of contaminants disproportionately affects charge migration in the solid. %%% The fundamental knowledge obtained through these studies will enable the engineering of organic materials for use in emerging optoelectronic technologies. This area of technology is likely to find widespread use in society. Specific examples include organic-based light emitting diodes for display applications, thin film transistors, solid state lasers, more efficient organic solar cells for energy generation and photodetectors. The issue of interchromophore delocalization is significant beyond the confines of materials design because it makes a profound impact in other areas of science, such the mechanism of photosynthesis and oxidative charge migration in double-stranded DNA doc9009 none Support from the NSF REU Site Grant will enable the Center for Neural Science at New York University to support an established, successful summer undergraduate research program (SURP). SURP was founded as a model program in and has continued ever since at a reduced level through funds derived from individual grants and institutional funds. Support from the NSF REU Site Grant will make it possible to regularize and expand the program, reach out to students beyond NYU, thereby impact a broader student population. Under-represented minorities, women and undergraduates from small colleges that are limited in resources for equipment and research opportunities will be pursued actively, through collaboration with NYU s Faculty Resource Network., a consortium of 13 historically black colleges and universities in the South and 15 regional liberal arts colleges, together representing over 100,000 undergraduates and over 8,300 faculty members. Eight to ten undergraduates, mostly between their sophomore and junior years, who have demonstrated keen interest in basic neural science research and with a GPA minimum of 3.0 will be chosen every summer from a pool of approximately 100 applicants. First-hand research experience will be made available to these students by placing them in one of the CNS labs, ranging in subfields from theoretical neurobiology, sensory physiology, behavioral and molecular investigation of emotional memory, to cellular and molecular basis of brain development and recovery from injuries. Their education, training, and progress will be fostered and monitored using a three-tiered system, consisting of the following: (1) one-to-one, daily interactions with a mentor and affiliated members of the host lab; (2) weekly and bi-weekly group luncheons, overseen by the director, during which self-assessments are made and a lecture series is scheduled; and (3) close, week-by-week coaching of each student s skills in oral and written presentations, leading up to a Symposium and preparation of a written report during the last week of the program that describe the rationale, hypothesis, outcome and interpretation of data generated from the summer research activity. As in the past, the CNS SURP s seminar series and social functions will run conjointly with those of the NYU Washington Square Campus s Leadership Alliance program in Social Studies and NYU Medical School s Sacklar Institute Minority Undergraduate Summer Research Program in Biomedical Sciences. These joint functions, together with a variety of social and cultural activities that will be planned over lunches, dinners, after-hours and week-ends for the CNS SURP group, will provide students with opportunities to be part of a large group of undergraduate and graduate students, post-docs, and faculty. This program will ensure that the CNS SURP students obtain a realistic view about diversity in scientific inquiries, style, and gain opportunities to chat casually about practical issues of becoming a scientist, such as family planning, balance between personal life and work environment, opportunities and options for PhDs and MD-PhDs, etc. while also enjoying York City s rich collection of culture and research institutions doc9010 none This Chemistry Division award is a continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at Wellesley College. Chris Arumainayagam and David R. Haines share duties as the site s Program Director. Over the award period ( - ) they will oversee a program of interdisciplinary research between chemistry and other departments, particularly biological sciences, physics, computer sciences, environmental science, and the social sciences. A new aspect of the program is the inclusion of physics faculty and students in the research efforts. Approximately 25 chemistry and physics students will participate in the ten-week summer research program each year, with ten of those students supported by this award and the remainder by the College and other funding sources. Five of the ten participants will be selected primarily from institutions with limited research opportunities. The site encourages the participation of women and students from other under-represented groups. The students will conclude their experience with a campus-wide poster session doc9011 none Prop : Inst: Florida Institute of Technology PI : Matthew Wood The Southeastern Association for Research in Astronomy (SARA) provides a collaborative effort involving 6 southeastern United States universities for a NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site Program. The consortium includes Florida Institute of Technology (FIT), East Tennessee State University (ETSU), Florida International University (FIU), the University of Georgia at Athens (UGA), Valdosta State University (VSU), and Clemson University. The program emphasizes the preparation of students for careers in science and engineering through one-on-one collaboration with faculty who are experienced undergraduate student research mentors. Over a dozen research projects are offered ranging from space weather, to spectroscopic studies of minor planets, to the determination of the Galactic disk age from white dwarf stars, to target of opportunity observations of active galactic nuclei and gamma-ray burst optical counterparts. At least 12 REU students annually will use the SARA Observatory in Arizona during the course of their 8-10 week summer research activities. In addition, multi-day workshops will expose each of them to astronomy as practiced at 2-3 SARA institutions during their summer internships. Continuing collaboration and the presentation of papers at national meetings after the summer program is also supported doc9012 none This award provides funds for an REU Site in psychology at Kent State University. Ten junior-level REU students, recruited from 17 regional colleges and two other institutions that offer more promise for recruiting students from under-represented groups, will participate. Faculty members participating have research interests in cognitive psychology, health psychology, psychobiology, or social psychology. Student activities include a Spring interview day, a 10-week summer research experience involving one-on-one faculty-student collaborations, and follow-through activities in the Fall after the summer research experience. The goal of the program is to allow student participants who may have limited past research background to have a research experience that will more them from novice to relative independence in the laboratory. The program will include student preparation prior to arrival at the Site, social gatherings, seminars on research methods and design, weekly brown bag seminars, and presentations at regional or national meetings. This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences doc9013 none This GOALI project is a study of the phase stabilities of rare earth metal silicides and the growth of nanowires on preferred directions along a silicon substrate. Many rare earth metals react with silicon to form disilicides exhibiting the same crystal structure as that of erbium disilicide. The direction of the silicides often has a negative lattice mismatch with one of the 110 directions of the Si. Disilicides of Er, Ho and Dy have such a lattice mismatch. Other rare metal disilicides, such as disilicides of Sm, Gd, and Tb, exhibit a positive lattice mismatch. The mismatch along the c-axis of these disilicides with the perpendicular 110 direction of Si is always positive. This project examines the compositional stabilities of ternary rare earth metal silicides in the solid state at 650C by determining ternary phase relationships. Taking advantage of the chemical similarity of the rare earth metals, an efficient approach is outlined for determining the ternary phase equilibria, including the compositional stability of the disilicides. Since nanowire growth takes place at high temperatures and the coefficients of thermal expansion of these silicides are expected to be different from that of Si, the coefficients of thermal expansion of these disilicides are measured as a function of temperature and alloy composition by high-temperature x-ray diffraction. These investigations are carried out at UW-Madison. Each year of the grant, two or more of the researchers working at UW-Madison will spend time at Hewlett-Packard Laboratory to carry out nanowire growth and characterization with access to HP s expertise and facilities. On the basis of this combined study, appropriate conditions for growing ternary silicide nanowires with optimal lattice mismatch will be determined. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science having high potential technological relevance. The research will contribute basic materials science knowledge at a fundamental level to important fabrication aspects of electronic photonic devices. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through graduate student and post doctoral training in a fundamentally and technologically significant area. A post doctoral research associate and a graduate student will spend time each year of the project working on site at Hewlett-Packard Laboratory benefitting from the Industrial collaboration staff expertise and facilities and instrumentation available at HP. The availability of unique instrumentation and facilities, and direct intellectual interaction with HP staff provides invaluable educational opportunities and perspectives, and fosters the integration of research and education. The project is co-supported by the DMR Metals and Electronic Materials programs and the MPS OMA(Office of Multidisciplinary Activities doc9014 none This award provides funding to bring fifteen Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) students each year to the annual ASLO winter meeting and AGU Ocean Sciences meetings. The REU students must have completed a research project during the previous year and be ready to present the results of their work either as a poster or as a talk. One student will be selected from each of the REU sites supported by OCE. Each student will receive air and shuttle bus fare, registration, room, per diem meal expenses, a ticket to the Award Luncheon or similar official event, and a one-year membership in both ASLO and AGU. Students will be prepared well for meeting navigation, paired with a mentor, and then left largely on their own during the day. Optional daily meetings at the end of the sessions will provide for feedback and interaction. A special poster session will be organized for the REU and other students. Mentors will be selected from senior scientists who work in the area of the student s interest. The majority of the presentations will be by current seniors who will be at a critical career juncture during the meeting doc9015 none The University of Notre Dame physics department NSF-REU program provides an opportunity for at least 12 undergraduate physics majors year to discover the excitement of physics research. Additional students (typically 3-4 per year), beyond those funded by the NSF, will be supported, as has been the case in the past, by the physics department and by various research grants. The program lasts for 10 weeks during Summer (typically starting on the day after Memorial Day) and consists of participation in a research project, weekly research seminars, development of a research logbook, a research paper, contact with various research groups, and social gatherings with other members of the department. The areas available for research projects are: nuclear physics (nuclear structure and lifetimes, nucleosynsthesis, heavy-ion reactions, nuclear astrophysics), atomic physics (theory, laser cooling, atomic lifetimes), astrophysics (g-ray and neutrino astrophysics, physics of comets, irregular satellites, chemistry of young stellar systems), high energy physics (theory, development of scintillating-fiber detectors, physics at BaBar, Tevatron and LHC), and solid state physics and microelectronics (crystal growth, scanning tunneling microscope development, low temperature superconductivity, theory, EXAFS physics). All students are involved with active and ongoing research efforts and are encouraged to become contributing members in the everyday problem-solving events. The REU students are also provided an opportunity to become acquainted with other areas of research within the department doc9016 none Heisterkamp, Douglas R Oklahoma State University REU Sites: REU Site in Computer Graphics, Vision, and Content Based Image Retrieval at Oklahoma State University This is a three year proposal for an Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site at Oklahoma State University in the interrelated fields of 3D computer graphics, 3D computer vision, and content based image retrieval. The objective is to provide a hands on research experience for under-represented minority students from institutions without graduate programs. The aspects of the program are as follows. Ten students will be recruited each year. The target population will be under-represented minority groups. Students will be recruited from institutions without graduate programs. The REU program will be divided into three phases. The first phase, an introduction to research methodology and content background, and the second phase, the actual research project, will occur during an eight week summer program at Oklahoma State University. The third phase involving a paper and presentation will occur at the student s home university. Institution support from Oklahoma State University for the program is strong. The previously funded REU programs conducted by the computer science department have been a great success. This proposed program w ill continue with and build upon the efforts of the department s past REU site programs. The lasting impact of the program will be in its effect on the participating students. We want to use the concrete feedback available in the visual information processing field to improve the students awareness of their knowledge and capabilities, to increase their expectations of what they can do, and to motivate them to actively contribute to the computer science discipline throughout their career. Throughout the program, we will provide information and encouragement to the students on continuing with a graduate education doc9017 none The goal of this program is to train students in conservation biology by providing 12 undergraduate students with an intense and comprehensive research experience during a 10-week summer program. Students concentrate on one of several ongoing research projects in coastal conservation, such as the population ecology and genetics of threatened or endangered species, restoration ecology, impacts of habitat fragmentation and human disturbance on beach-nesting shore birds, exotic species assessments, and impacts and studies of species increasingly affected by different human activities. During the summer residential program, the student researchers will participate in all phases of the scientific method-asking questions, developing hypotheses, designing and conducting field and or laboratory studies, analyzing and interpreting data, and forming conclusions. Student activities initially involve directed research activities on existing projects with a group of research scientists working along the southern New Jersey coast. Scientists are affiliated with partner organizations, which include The Wetlands Institute, The Nature Conservancy, US Fish & Wildlife Service, and the NJ Department of Environmental Protection Program. As they become skilled in those research activities, students will develop their own related, yet new projects in consultation with their research supervisors to be completed during the summer. All students will also participate in 1) weekly academic seminars, 2) periodic workshops on specific research tools including experimental design and biostatistics, 3) a variety of public education and stewardship activities, and 4) a bioethics program. All students conclude their research experiences with presentations of their results at a student research symposium organized as a professional scientific meeting. Selected students will attend and or present their studies at regional or national scientific meetings. Along with training students in research, the project strengthens collaborations among community and government partners, thereby enabling them to improve their conservation efforts doc9018 none Nishida The objective of this research effort is to develop a MEMS-based acoustic array using expertise in acoustics, MEMS design and fabrication, adaptive signal processing, and DSP hardware development for distributed sensing and control. The technology offers the potential to economically scale directional microphone array technology to hundreds of microphones while improving data handling and portability. The potential impact includes directional microphones for communication devices to industrial screening for noise abatement. This research will explore the microphone design, beamforming algorithms, and DSP hardware required to realize a MEMS-based acoustic array. The microphone design involves the modeling, fabrication, and characterization of a dual back plate force-feedback capacitive MEMS microphone as the array element to avoid the electrostatic pull-in instability of open-loop capactive microphones while yielding a wider bandwidth, dynamic range, and larger signal-to-noise ratio. Due to the presence of strong acoustic interference signals, requirements for the beamforming algorithm include adaptive approaches that can be used for simultaneous interference suppression. One of the most effective adaptive beamforming approaches is the Capon beamformer which has been widely used in many applications in radar and communications. This research includes the implementation of the real time adaptive acoustic imaging algorithms with MEMS-based acoustic arrays. These algorithms include: 1. adaptive beamforming algorithms for acoustic sources with arbitrary radiation patterns, 2. steering vector estimation algorithms in the presence of interference, 3. adaptive beamforming with gapped or missing data information, and 4. recursive implementations of the adaptive algorithms for moving sources. This creates a substantial computation problem that has traditionally been handled in a non-real time manner. I doc9019 none This award provides renewed funding to support the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee s Center for Great Lakes Studies (CGLS). The program will host ten nationally recruited undergraduate students in a cohesive, multi-disciplinary science research training program. The program lasts for ten weeks in the summer, during which the students will conduct independent research under the guidance of a faculty mentor or as part of a research team. Workshops on instrumentation, graduate school, career opportunities, writing and public presentation of results will be offered. Students will also participate in a variety of fieldwork aboard the R V LAURENTIAN. At the close of the program, students will present a poster and a 15- minute oral presentation of their research results. They also will write a short journal article that can be submitted for possible publication. The program is based on the theory that mentoring and networking are the most effective methods for recruiting students into a profession and for training young researchers. This program is well designed to encourage highly motivated students to continue the their pursuit of research careers in oceanography and limnology. It encourages interdisciplinary research and offers the students opportunities for field research experience. The program will encourage a diverse set of students to continue their education in the field of oceanography. In the past the program has had more than 50% female participants, has drawn students from across the nation, and has attracted an ethnically diverse group of students doc9020 none This work aims at a unified treatment of radiative corrections in neutral atoms, using both perturbative approaches (exploiting nonrelativistic QED) and a full nonperturbative treatment of the electron propagator. Studies will focus on the two loop Lamb shift, but will also address radiative binding corrections in cesium (relevant both for PNC and for hyperfine splitting) and energy calculations in helium and helium-like ions doc9021 none This award provides funds for an REU Site in Psychology at Oklahoma State University. The purpose of the Site is to provide twelve undergraduate research scholars with an intensive eight week summer research experience in experimental psychology. In this unique experience they will learn all aspects of the research process, including formulating hypotheses, integrating and analyzing scientific literature, study design, data collection, data analysis, and oral and written presentation of findings. The scholars will work on research teams in the areas such as infant memory, children s social development, adult cognition, and language processing. It is expected that scholars will be able to conduct their own independent projects by the summer s end. Contact will be maintained with all scholars to assure they are receiving adequate support to pursue such projects at their home institutions. A special feature of this program is that the participants will attend several weekly seminars focused on statistics and research methods and attend workshops on how to apply to graduate school, how to write successful resume or vita, and how to study for the GRE. Additionally, students will be paired with a graduate student mentor to enhance their summer experience. Further, students will attend weekly brown bag research seminars in which the faculty mentors will present their programs of research. The goal is to have students who are better consumers and supporters of science throughout their lives, enhancing the appreciation of science in the lives of those around them. This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences doc9022 none This is the first year funding of a three-year continuing award. Computer-integrated engineering design consists of a variety of complex and challenging processes, ranging from conceptual design, geometric modeling, evaluation, prototyping, manufacturing, assembly, to production. To ameliorate CAD CAM processes, as well as to revolutionize human-computer interaction technology, the PIs will develop an interactive and tangible virtual environment to advance the current state-of-the-art through the novel integration of dynamic modeling and real-time haptic sculpting. To these ends, they will focus on critical fundamental issues relating to the rapid and accurate synchronization of multiple heterogeneous representations of geometric primitives and physical properties of virtual material in a software environment, including optimal algorithms and their time space analysis, and numerical characteristics such as stability, robustness, and error bounds. They will investigate haptic interaction techniques towards the next-generation design technology in a systematic way through the development of novel haptic sculpting toolkits and the evaluation of both toolkit utilities and human factors. Finally, they will investigate the effective integration of haptic principles with mature geometric design techniques and develop an experimental virtual environment with haptic interface and real-time haptic sculpting capabilities. The PIs will disseminate the novel haptic technology and its software to the U.S. design industry and computer enterprises. To further broaden the accessibility of the new haptic technology in engineering, sciences, and medicine, the PIs will make extra efforts (through extensive collaborations) towards generalizing their prototype software system to other haptics-relevant applications such as surgical simulation and training, and haptic visualization of large scientific data sets, as time allows doc9023 none This award is a continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site program. Two principal concerns inspired the Oklahoma Weather Center (OWC) in previous years to establish summer REU programs: 1) the general lack of opportunities for undergraduates to gain research experience to complement their academic careers and 2) the lack of participation by women and members of ethnic minorities in research in atmospheric science. The OWC in Norman boasts a unique environment that encompasses all aspects of meteorological research and can provide students with the opportunity to enhance their undergraduate careers. Over a three-year period, thirty undergraduate students will participate in the OWC REU program. The students will be involved in a variety of activities throughout the summer. Each student will: 1) be matched with an atmospheric scientist based on his her interest and abilities to conduct research on a related topic, 2) attend atmospheric science lectures, 3) participate in various workshops (technical writing, numerical modeling, meteorological tools, graduate school preparation, etc.), 4) participate in field trips and tours to regional sites, 5) discover various research methods, 6) possibly collect and analyze field data (depending on availability of field programs each summer.) and finally 7) present their research in a written and oral format. The planned activities will introduce and expose each student to the many research possibilities within atmospheric science. The various opportunities will also assist the students with their decisions regarding graduate school and potential futures as research scientists. The students will conduct their research under the supervision of mentors from the OWC. The OWC is a unique confederation of federal, state, and University of Oklahoma organizations that work together in partnership to improve understanding of events of Earth s atmosphere. Organizations of the OWC that will participate in the REU are: Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms, Center for Computational Geosciences, Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies, Environmental Verification and Analysis Center, Oklahoma Climatological Survey, School of Meteorology, National Severe Storms Laboratory, Norman National Weather Service Forecast Office, Storm Prediction Center, and WSR-88D Operational Support Facility doc9024 none This Chemistry Division award supports a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the University of Virginia, where a previous REU site was funded for - . James Demas is the site s Program Director; Milton Brown is the Co-Program Director. Eight faculty will serve as REU student mentors. During the award period ( - ), each year ten students will participate in a ten-week program. They will be recruited from institutions that do not offer Chemistry Ph.D. programs. Special efforts will be made to attract females and other under-represented minority students. A combination of weekly meetings, interim talks and reports will serve to monitor the student s progress. The students will conclude their experience with a final written report and a talk presented at a mini-symposium doc9025 none This award provides funding to the University of Pittsburgh, Mohammed Ataai, Principal Investigator for the support of a 3-year REU Site in Chemical Engineering. Fifteen undergraduate students will participate in a 10-week summer program which will introduce them to research activities and hands-on laboratory experimentation under the direct supervision of a faculty mentor. The experience will be enriched by seminars and visits to industrial laboratories, as well as extracurricular social interacitons. It is anticipated that the program will help the students appreciate the need for a comprehensive education with sufficient depth and breadth; make more informed decisions about the remainder of their undergraduate courses; and evaluate graduate education and career options doc9026 none This award provides funds for the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina to establish a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site in the area of integrative evolutionary biology. This REU Site will enable qualified undergraduate students to spend a summer doing independent research projects that involve the application of molecular techniques to evolution studies. Each student will conduct basic research under the direction of a faculty mentor who has an active research program in some area of evolutionary biology. Students learn about hypothesis generation and testing, as well as the techniques and experimental designs employed in molecular biology and one or more other sub-specialty areas -- behavior, life history evolution, systematics, population biology, and ecological physiology. At the end of the summer, each student will present a summary of his her work in a departmental mini-symposium. Qualified applicants for the REU program will be recruited nationally via the internet and from nearby colleges and universities through personal contacts with faculty at these institutions. Additional applicants representing African American, Hispanic and native American minorities will be sought through contacts at AMP programs throughout the US and Puerto Rico. Previous participants have come from universities throughout the US and approximately 25% have been from under-represented groups doc9027 none This Chemistry Division award supports a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the University of Kentucky, where a previous REU site was funded for - . David Atwood is the site s Program Director. Eleven faculty will serve as REU student mentors. During the award period ( - ), each summer ten students will participate in a eleven-week program. The research area will be nano-scale chemistry, which will include all of the major divisions of chemistry. This research is multidisciplinary and is being conducted with a combination of collaborations involving the Engineering, Biological, and Geology departments. Available to the undergraduates will be the research programs of other faculty outside of the nano-scale projects. During the summer there will be a short-course on nanochemistry. This program will target women and Appalachian students from Kentucky and neighboring states. Academic year follow-up activities are planned doc9028 none This REU site program is designed to prepare undergraduate students for the revolution in biological research. The emphasis of this program is placed on the interfaces between discovery science and biocomputing with hypothesis-driven science. The overall objectives of this program are to provide students with rich and rewarding research experiences and to encourage participating undergraduates to remain in science and technology. This program will recruit 10 students based on GPA, interest statement, and a letter of reference. Special emphasis is placed on students from institutions with little or no research facilities and students from typically under-represented demographic populations. Each student will be paired with a mentor and a specific project based on student interests and background for the 12 week summer internship. The design of the individual projects and the one-on-one interactions between the students and their mentors will foster the students independence and confidence. Students will be expected to participate in weekly group meetings and an end of summer student symposium. Program alumni will receive yearly e-newsletters and continued interaction between mentors and former participants will be strongly encouraged doc9029 none The summer undergraduate research program in the Department of Physics at the University of Connecticut, supported by a National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site Award, is intended to expose a diverse group of talented undergraduates to an exciting research environment (including Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics, Condensed Matter Physics, Nuclear Physics and Particle Theory) and to inform them in weekly seminars about the frontiers of physics and about careers in physics. Departmental social gatherings, a final poster session for presentation of research results, and assignment of a graduate student mentor as well as a faculty advisor are included to enhance the participants sense of community with the other members of the department. Our program attracts outstanding students on a nationwide basis, including talented women and both under-represented and other minority undergraduates, as well as students from primarily undergraduate institutions with less access to a comprehensive research environment. The program encourages these participants to pursue careers in physics doc9030 none An Immuno-Mimetic Sensor-Actuator using Novel Polymeric Vesicles as Artificial Lymphocytes Project In this program the principal investigator will develop a breakthrough sensor-actuator, mimicking the immune system to identify, amplify signal from, and respond to low levels of multiple target compounds in a wet environment. This compact (and potentially chip-based), smart system will continuously monitor a test space and provide independent real time chemical feedback to multiple stimuli. Microelectronics could be integrated into this stand-alone device for added functions. The proposed technology exploits novel polymeric vesicles that will act as artificial lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell. The polymeric vesicles are a new invention, made of tough membranes that will encapsulate amplification or response molecules. Different surface receptors on different vesicles will code for target compounds that, when present in the testing environment, will activate particular vesicles. The test solution flows through an amplification cascade (a rough mimic of bone marrow) to replicate only the activated vesicles. Replicated vesicles (a crude mimic of plasma cells) will return to the test space to release response compounds such as drugs or inhibitors to counteract the target compound(s) detected. The replicator cascade is like a photomultiplier tube (PMT), with amplification occurring on each of several stages. The proposed device is, however, more advanced because, of the many target compounds cataloged, only those in the test space will be amplified. In the device, specific adhesive interactions facilitate separation of activated vesicles from those not yet activated. While the latter are recycled, activated vesicles are lyzed to release each test compound (or analog thereof), at a concentration higher than that at the stage inlet. This solution passes to the next stage where the process repeats, giving a powerlaw dependence of amplification on the stage number. This program will conduct the science and device development necessary to form the basis of a single stage that later could be combined with others to produce the cascade. At the stage level, the goal is to maximize amplification, maintaining selectivity for activated vesicles (not triggering the non-activated ones.) To accomplish this, the scientific investigation will address how adhesive interactions between receptors on vesicle and separator surfaces could be tuned through receptor placement and macroscopic parameters. Fundamental adhesive behavior will be assessed using micropipette aspiration methods (paralleling studies of cell adhesion) and compared with adhesive performance in device prototypes. Results will be interpreted using formalisms established for cell adhesion, appropriate for specific adhesive groups on a membrane capsule in a flowing solution. The specialized vesicles and their replication cascade form a sensor-actuator system whose end applications bridge a number of industries, from biomedical uses to chemical process control and environmental monitoring (closed bodies of water) and response. The proposed scientific investigation targets designs that meet the constraints for a robust technology that will be implantable or submersible. The scientific team bridges academic disciplines and specialty areas to combine expertise in polymer interfaces, biomimetics, adhesion, and MEMS. Graduate and undergraduate students from different engineering and scientific backgrounds will benefit from this synergistic approach to research, which preserves fundamental rigor and emphasizes engineering creativity doc9031 none This Chemistry Division award supports a new Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at Youngstown State University (YSU). Daryl Mincey is the site s Program Director. The Co-Program Directors are Allen Hunter, John Jackson, Sherri Lovelace-Cameron, and Timothy Wagner. Thirteen faculty will serve as REU student mentors. During the award period ( - ), each summer ten students will participate in a twelve-week program. Recruitment efforts will be directed toward students from the Public Private Alliance (PPA) that consists of nine four-year institutions located in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The program calls for five faculty members from PPA to also be involved each summer in the research, thus allowing for the continuation of the research beyond the summer. Most of the faculty are just starting their careers and thus their projects are timely and are supported by various state and national organizations. The research projects offered are in the areas of analytical, inorganic, organic, and physical chemistry. During the program, each of the REU supported students will give a fifteen-minute progress seminar. A poster presentation will be held at the conclusion of the summer program. The YSU Beeghly Center for Education Research will evaluate the program through both formative and summative measures doc9032 none The proposed REU site program will provide students with intensive summer research experience in the Department of Biology at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Consistent with the mission of the University, the project aims to involve a diverse group of students, including non-traditional students from urban environments, minorities under-represented in science, and women. Ten undergraduates, recruited locally and nationally, will participate in research with faculty sponsors, enrichment activities that help students understand the issues surrounding modern biology, and field trips designed to create a better understanding of the environment and a spirit of fellowship among students. Students will interact with faculty, graduate students, and other undergraduates pursuing research on campus to gain first-hand knowledge of the research process. The program begins with a three-day retreat to a field station on Nantucket Island, MA, where students learn about the history and biology of Nantucket, discuss their expectations of the REU program, and form bonds and friendships that enhance their REU experience. After returning from Nantucket, students engage in individual research projects in which each student works closely with an advisor mentor and participate in weekly group discussions where students confront ethical issues, learn about the practical aspects of doing science, and become familiar with the research of their fellow students. Potential research topics span the breadth of modern biology, including neurobiology, genetics, ecology, immunology, and cell and developmental biology. At the conclusion of the program each student will prepare a report and present research results in a student research symposium. The focus of the ethics component will be the research process and contemporary topics in biomedical ethics, such as the Human Genome Project. Participants will also visit several field sites and learn directly about other student projects. A hands-on workshop on molecular techniques will demonstrate the great potential of such methods for many aspects of biological research. The REU Program in Biology will continue UMass Boston s tradition of successful and productive undergraduate research doc9033 none Van Scoy, Van L Baker, David V West Virginia University Research Corporation REU Sites: Virtual Environments REU Site The focus of this NSF-REU program to be hosted at West Virginia University is virtual environments. The objectives of the program are (1) to give undergraduate students practical skills in advanced visualization techniques where visualization has the extended meaning of presentation of information to the ears, or the fingers, or even the nose ; (2) to give undergraduate students practical experience in multidisciplinary research applying virtual environments (VE) technology to problems in physical science, health science, and social science; (3) to help undergraduates discover the excitement of a career in research; and (4) to provide a cross cultural experience, by bringing together students primarily from the Appalachian region and from Puerto Rico and by giving some students the opportunity to work in an academic research lab in Japan. Our recruiting goal is to have 3 students from the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez, 6 students from four year colleges in West Virginia and the Appalachian region, and 3 students from WVU each summer. These students are expected to come from a variety of majors, including biology, computer science, geography, and physics and will be divided into teams to work with faculty and graduate student researchers on problems in computer science, geographic information systems, materials science, and pharmacy. Each week except for the first and last week of the summer program, students will work on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays with researchers on specific disciplinary research projects. On Tuesdays and Thursdays they will attend half day training sessions on specific VE technologies and tools, work in the VE Lab, and participate in a weekly research seminar involving all participants, undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty. After each summer program in , , and , three students will be selected from that year s participants to work in the Virtual Systems Laboratory at Gifu University in Japan during the following summer. The program will provide Japanese language and culture training for these selected participants during spring before their summer experience in Japan doc9034 none In this project the investigators will study experimentally the dynamic evolution of prepared quantum states using a newly-developed wave-particle correlator. In a cavity QED system, where optically pumped atoms interact with a single mode of a driven high finesse optical cavity, the conditional field measured by the wave-particle correlator will allow the reconstruction of the evolution of the quantum state. The conditional measurements will be coupled to quantum feedback control to find ways to stabilize the quantum state. A new study of the development of time asymmetries in correlation functions by looking at the relationship between correlations and measurement back action will also be undertaken doc9035 none The University of Kentucky operates a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) to introduce students to research in functional polymeric membranes and composite materials. Ten undergraduate students are recruited every year for a two-month summer research experience, with a recruitment focus on students from colleges and universities that serve the Appalachian region. In addition to research activities, students attend weekly seminars and are offered the opportunity to participate in a professional conference during the academic year doc9036 none The features of the Maria Mitchell Observatory (MMO) REU site are the student participation in guided research in astronomy and astrophysics (star formation, circumstellar disks, turbulence, comets, variable stars) along with intense involvement in public outreach in astronomy and features students immersion under dedicated professional supervison in research from project selection through the preparation of talks and publications. On-campus living arrangements ensure collegial team building and research experience. The MMO possesses a unique photographic archive and an 8-inch telescope with CCD detector for routine observations. It also has guaranteed time on the 31-inch NURO telescope at Flagstaff, Arizona. during the past several years, observing time for student research projects has also been obtained on large national astronomical facilities. Each REU student participates in these projects. During the last four years, every student has presented a paper at an American Astronomical Society meeting or at other national and international meetings. Every student co-authors a paper in a respected peer-reviewed journal doc9037 none This award provides continued funding for a 5-year REU Site for Novel Technologies for Pollution Prevention, at the University of South Carolina at Columbia, under the direction Dr. Michael D. Amiridis. This 10-week summer program will provide 11chemical engineering undergraduate students, from other institutions, with research experiences obtained from projects focusing on the development of new technologies with positive environmental impact. Each student will be assigned a faculty member as her his research mentor. It is anticipated that the students will be grouped into larger research teams in the following areas: Catalytic, Separation, and Electrochemical Technologies. In addition, the students will tour industrial sites, attend weekly seminars, workshops on graduate studies and ethics in science and engineering, and participate in a final symposium as well as social activities doc9038 none Purdue University Haberstroh This award provides funding for a 3-year REU Site entitled, Increasing Female Minority Enrollment and Awareness in Biomedical Engineering Through Research Experiences for Undergraduates at Purdue University, under the direction of Dr. Karen Haberstroh. The program will provide a 10-week summer research opportunity for 10 students each year. During their summer at Purdue, students will work on original research projects in the various fields of Biomedical Engineering, including those pertaining to the life sciences as well as chemical, electrical, materials science, and mechanical engineering doc9039 none The Graduate Program in Nutrition at The Pennsylvania State University is pleased to continue its offering of a summer program, Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site Program: Biology and Chemistry of Nutritional Processes. The intended impact is to improve the interest level and qualifications of participants to apply to and enroll in post-graduate education, especially in preparation for careers in science research and or college teaching. This experiential learning program builds on the commitment and capabilities of fifteen faculty members. Research areas focus on nutrient metabolism related to neurological development, lipoprotein metabolism, antioxidant defense functions, skeletal development, endocrinology, immunology, inflammatory response, behavioral neurobiology, and food science. The 10-week summer experience will provide 10 students: (a) knowledge of the varied approaches, techniques, and critical thinking skills used in research; (b) excitement of hands-on scientific inquiry; (c) practice to improve communication skills; and (d) guidance in graduate programs and career planning. Seven students will be recruited from a national applicant pool composed of minority students or students from institutions with limited research activities; three students will come from PSU. Penn State will financially support 3 students, assist in purchasing supplies needed for the student projects, as well as provide the resources and mentoring available at a top research institution. Within the team environment of the faculty mentor and the graduate student or other staff person, each undergraduate student will design a research project that can be successfully completed within the summer timeline. Students will attend seminars by faculty, as well as go to workshops to improve scientific communication skills. Social events will complement the scientific community developed within the faculty members laboratories. Finally, the summer will culminate in a student research poster session, similar to that of a national science meeting doc9040 none The objective of the proposed work is to investigate and build a system for measuring finger postures and forces. The system will become an important milestone on the way to producing more effective haptic devices. In the existing systems the natural haptic sense of the human finger is lost or obstructed - this problem will be overcome in the current work. Fundamental properties of finger hemodynamics and tissue mechanics will be investigated, as well as design and signal properties issues. Nail sensor design will be optimized with respect to the distribution of photo diodes and the location and wavelength of LEDs across the nail surface. A nonlinear filter for motion artifact rejection will be designed doc9041 none The University of South Carolina operates a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site in its Chemical Engineering Department. The objective of the REU Site is to provide chemical engineering undergraduate students with experiences in areas related to materials research. Undergraduates are offered research projects in three areas: inorganic materials as catalysts and adsorbents, materials for power sources, and polymers. Ten students are recruited nationwide every year for a ten-week summer research experience. In addition to participating in individual research projects, students attend weekly technical seminars and career workshops, visit industrial sites and participate in group social activities doc9042 none This award provides funding for a 3 year, REU Site on Nanodevices at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, under the direction of Dr. William D. Brown. Twelve junior and senior undergraduate students per year will participate in a 10 week summer cross-diisciplinary undergraduate research experience that will initiate a high level of interest to learn nanoscience based on the teaching through doing paradigm. It will specifically address the teaching of surface science and quantum theory in the context of nanoscience. In addition, the students will learn to construct an educational framework through an industry-like organized training process that develops their teamwork, communication, and leadership skills. They will also be exposed to the wide range of theory in a classroom environment support the program s experimental studies doc9043 none This is a three year standard award. Visual servoing, the use of visual feedback in the control of a robot end-effector, can provide a superior robot interface than those offered by teach pendants or tele-operated systems. Visual servoing is advantageous when precise fixturing is impractical or impossible. In image based servoing, control is effected in the image. This method has the advantages that one does not have to reconstruct 3D information about the robot s environment, and that control laws exist that are not overly sensitive to camera calibration errors. However, there are problems with image based servoing that need to be overcome in order to develop robust, stable systems. This project will address two issues impeding the application of image-based servoing. First, image feature-point path planning methods will be developed and demonstrated. Previous research efforts have focused on the form, and possible decompositions, of the Image Jacobian , relating manipulator velocities to image motion. In contrast, this project will develop methods to determining a path within the image to use as input to a standard image-based regulator. The PI s approach will both improve controller performance and also ensure the image features remain within the field of view during the manipulation task. Second, a parameterized direct image-to-actuator model will be analyzed, evaluated, tested, and compared with classical approaches. The error signal from the image together with the image Jacobian typically map to end-effector velocities which then must be converted to actuator velocities using the robot kinematic model. A controller that converts image displacements directly to actuator commands would eliminate the intermediate step thus enhancing system performance, both in terms of speed and accuracy. Addressing issues of robustness and sensitivity will facilitate application of these techniques outside of the laboratory. Success of this project will facilitate the acceptance of image based servo techniques as a viable control method in production operations. The key scientific contributions created by this effort will include advances in the design of image based visual servo controllers through (1) the introduction of superior robot motion command generation created through image path planning and (2) the introduction of a parameterized direct image Jacobian with appropriate understanding of the model s limitations doc9044 none This research project addresses the development and experimental demonstration of a new methodology for smart sensor designs and their use in health assessment, distributed sensing and feedback control. This work is predicated on the philosophy that sensor cost is directly tied to its bandwidth and that sensor bandwidth should be just enough for an intended purpose. In the case where a sensor is only used for monitoring, its bandwidth is dictated by the signal contents. However, when measured signals are to be incorporated in a feedback loop, the sensors must have significantly larger bandwidths than the bandwidth of the controller which, in turn must be much larger than the required closed loop system bandwidth. An inherent limitation of current sensor designs is the implied need to maintain linearity. The proposed research will depart from this old paradigm and consider the deliberate introduction of nonlinear characteristics in the sensor hardware, enabling self-calibration. The possibility of using arrays of sensors, each with a much smaller bandwidth than a single sensor with large bandwidth, will be considered both for distributed sensing and for high performance feedback control systems. Furthermore methods for integrating the smart sensors envisioned in this work for health monitoring and condition-based maintenance will be pursued. Finally, all of these developments will be integrated into a single framework that will be tested on two experimental setups. The technical approach of the proposed project will be based on nonlinear estimation and multirate signal processing techniques for smart sensor development. The control methodology will be based on ideas from Quantitative Feedback Theory, whereas the proposed self-calibration will rely on stochastic modeling. It is expected that this research will significantly advance the state of the art in smart sensors doc9045 none This award provides for NSF support for the Symposium on New Methodologies in Polymer Synthesis at Pacifichem , to be held in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, Dec. 14-19, . The symposium is intended to bring together leading polymer chemists, as well as young scientists, in the Pacific Rim countries to update their new results in order to achieve the following symposium objectives: (1) to showcase important trends in polymer synthesis and (2) to promote progress in polymer synthesis. %%% Major topics to be addressed are (1) polymerization of monomers and intermediates, (2) novel polymerization processes, (3) metal-catalyzed polymerizations, and (4) sol-gel networks doc9046 none This Chemistry Division award supports the continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the University of Cincinnati. John Alexander is the site s Program Director; Allan Pinhas is the Co-Program Director. Twelve faculty will serve as REU student mentors. During the award period ( - ), each summer ten students will participate in a ten-week program. Recruitment efforts will be targeted on students east of the Mississippi with particular focus on a dozen HBCUs that regularly produce chemistry majors. Another recruitment effort will be targeted on the city s nationally known college prep high school, Walnut Hills, which sends a significant number of talented African-American students to colleges in other cities and states. Women s colleges will also be a recruiting focal point. Student participants will select from projects in analytical, inorganic, organic and physical chemistry. Each student will work closely with a faculty mentor on a research problem. There will be weekly luncheons seminars for all student participants and faculty mentors. The program will conclude with a student poster symposium. Each student will also be required to write a project report. In terms of assessment, a two-page feedback questionnaire will be completed at the end of the program, and there will be follow-up communications during the following academic year doc9047 none This award provides funds for an interdisciplinary REU Site in climate modeling and societal impacts (CMSI) at the University of Colorado in Boulder. CMSI is a cooperative program between academia (The University of Colorado) and a government laboratory (NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research). Its goal is to introduce a group of undergraduates in physical sciences, social sciences, and the humanities to the constellation of perspectives surrounding the use of numerical climate models . The project s premise is that it is crucial for all scholars and citizens to have a deep appreciation of the power and limits of scientific knowledge for the resolution of societal problems. Twelve undergraduates per year will participate in the program for eight weeks. Students will gather and evaluate scientific data and investigate the social, political, psychological, economic, and philosophical issues surrounding the interpretation and use of data for addressing contemporary controversies over global climate change. Research projects will begin with the acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data from radiosondes and the characterization of cloud cover used as input to general circulation models. As this scientific inquiry continues, students will engage in political and philosophical reflection upon their work and the relationships between science and public policy. At the end of the eight weeks, students will draw their own conclusions concerning the relevance of global climate change research to societal needs. Program outcomes will include papers published in scientific, public policy, and philosophic journals and presentations at national conferences. This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences doc9048 none This Chemistry Division award supports a new Research Experiences for Undergraduates site at the University of Southern Mississippi. Jeffrey Evans is the site s Program Director and he will be assisted by at least 12 faculty in the department offering a wide variety of research opportunities for undergraduates. Over the award period ( - ), ten students will be supported each summer in a ten-week program. The objective of this project is to provide research experience for minority undergraduates in Chemistry and Biochemistry. Recruitment efforts will be both within the State of Mississippi and adjoining states with special emphasis on attracting minority students. During the summer there will be weekly research presentations and discussions of ethics in science, graduate school and GRE preparation. The final week in the summer will include a symposium doc9049 none This Chemistry Division award supports a new Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at Howard University. Helen de Clercq is the site s Program Director. Nine faculty will be available to serve as REU student mentors. During the award period ( - ), each summer ten students will participate in a ten-week program. Student recruitment will focus on five partner institutions that are community colleges in the Washington, DC - Baltimore, MD metropolitan area. No Howard University students will be selected for this program. The research projects offered are in the areas of analytical, inorganic, organic, and physical chemistry. The summer research experience will be supplemented with tours of area laboratories and scientific institutions, a tutorial where the students will work on skills necessary to succeed as chemistry majors, and introductory seminars on safety, laboratory practices, instrumentation and the chemical literature. Students will present their research findings at the conclusion of the program both via a poster presentation and oral session. Evaluation of the program will consist of a series of quantitative and qualitative measures, including entrance and exit tests. The PI will conduct individual exit interviews with each of the student participants doc9050 none This award will provide funding to Wayne State University (WSU)for an REU Site in various aspects of sensor and microsystem design, fabrication, and integration, under the direction of Dr. Gregory Auner. The project will involve of minimum of 12 undergraduate students and 4 faculty annually in individual research projects covering topics which include electronic, magnetic, and photonic materials, devices, and associated interactive electronics. Students will be exposed to a variety of experiments and measuring techniques, as part of the ongoing research programs in Smart Sensors and Integrated Microsystems (SSIM), which is a central facility in the College of Engineering with participating faculty from engineering, physics, chemistry, and medicine as well as researchers from other universities and the private sector. The students will be provided with a comprehensive research and educational experience in smart sensors and integrated microsystems and an increased awareness of the post-baccalaureate opportunities in graduate programs in science and engineering, or in industrial research settings doc9051 none EIA - Shah, Mubarak Niels J da Vitoria Lobo REU Sites: Research Experience for Undergraduates in Computer Vision This project represents a continuation of a Research Experience for Undergraduates site which has operated successfully for the past {\bf thirteen} years. Approximately {\bf one hundred thirty} undergraduate students from several institutions in Florida and outside Florida have participated in this program. The key distinctive elements of our approach are (1) to have a full calendar year experience planned for the participants, so that they have time to follow a substantial project through to completion, (2) to present each participant with several possible project topics, so that they can feel they have chosen a project which is most interesting to them, (3) to immerse the participants in the general research environment essentially as if they were graduate students, by having them meet with their faculty advisor once each week to discuss their project, participate in the weekly research group meetings, attend research presentations and meet with visiting researchers, and (4) to follow through over the year by working with the students to write a technical report on their project, to prepare for the GREs and to apply to graduate programs. In past years, a large fraction of our REU participants have been able to prepare a paper for submission to a conference, have the paper accepted and then attend the conference to present the paper. Several past participants have even accomplished substantial enough research to also result in journal publications. Many of our past participants are now pursuing graduate studies at various institutions, and some are now occupying faculty positions doc9052 none PI: Mitchell Wand Modern software architectures display extremely dynamic patterns of procedure invocation, in which it is difficult to determine what procedure is invoked from any call site. These architectures are sometimes called implicit invocation architectures. This project proposes to study two mechanisms for implicit procedure invocation: event-based programming (also known as the Observer pattern), and aspect-oriented programming. It proposes to develop control-flow analyses for these mechanisms, and to consider the correctness of translations between these mechanisms and more traditional models of computation. It also proposes to extend the principal investigator s previous work on contextual equivalence to consider equivalence in contexts limited by architectural constraints doc9053 none This award provides funds for an REU Site in Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Members of the Sociology Department, in collaboration with faculty from a variety of other disciplines on the campus, are currently involved in launching a large-scale research project concerning contemporary urban life in Los Angeles called LA Observed. The REU Site will focus on the training of undergraduate students to conduct ethnographic field research in one substantive area of that project: cultural activities around the city. Fifteen undergraduate students will participate in the eight-week program. The majority of students will be recruited from the regional campuses of the California State University system, with a smaller number coming from the host institution. The goal of the Site is to attract a diversified pool of talented undergraduates, especially those from under-represented groups, who might not otherwise have the opportunity to participate in an intensive research environment. Students will work closely with faculty research supervisors in classroom activities for 8-10 hours per week, and will engage in independent fieldwork at their chosen site for an additional 10-15 hours per week. They will receive rigorous academic training that will quickly allow them to gain first-hand knowledge about the nature of sociological inquiry and analysis. Each student will produce a professional-quality final research paper. Students will thus have the opportunity to contribute to the success of the larger LA Observed project. This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences doc9054 none An interdisciplinary pilot study will develop a Geographic Information System (GIS) model by layering ethnographic, historic, biological, and geologic data to identify significant archaeological finds in areas holding high potential for preservation and discovery: frozen areas in Alaska s Wrangell-St. Elias Park and Preserve. The Wrangell-St. Elias Park and Preserve contains receding glaciers that historically were used on a regular basis by early people for transportation and hunting. The archaeological survey will field-test locales identified using GIS, provide data to refine the model, and obtain information essential for future, more comprehensive use of satellite imagery to identify distinctive visual and infrared signatures of ice fields most likely to contain archaeological remains doc9055 none The University of Chicago Department of Physics proposes to continue to administer a Research Experiences for Undergraduate (REU) site project targeted especially for women and minorities. This program has been in effect for nine years now with the overriding objective being to encourage women and members of under-represented minority groups to pursue careers in physics. Applications are solicited nationally from undergraduate programs in physics and engineering with particular emphasis on traditional women s colleges and historically black colleges. The core of the program for each student participant is a research project under supervision of an individual faculty member. Typical student projects are distributed among the areas of high energy physics, cosmic ray and space physics, astronomy and astrophysics, general relativity, condensed matter physics, optics and solar energy, and electron and ion microscopy. These research experiences are complemented by field trips and a series of lectures. Each of the students makes a formal oral presentation during the last two weeks of the program and submits a written report describing his or her research. The program includes a number of regular social events as well. The program currently is structured to support fourteen or fifteen students each summer and has been combined operationally with smaller REU programs on campus supported independently by the interdisciplinary Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) and the Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica (CARA). These components include 6 to 9 additional students so that for the past few years a total of about 20-23 students have been participating under one roof in the combined programs doc9056 none Beginning in the summer of , Clark Atlanta University will offer summer research experiences for ten undergraduate students in the areas of cellular and molecular biology and biological chemistry. Undergraduate students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the Southeastern United States will primarily be recruited as applicants for this program. Junior and senior students recruited into the program will be involved in basic biological and chemical research in the laboratories of faculty members who are experienced in the training and mentoring of undergraduate students. The purpose of this research training will be to expose students from small, non-research oriented schools to approaches to some of the most critical research problems of today and to state-of-the-art instrumentation. Projects on which students will work range from investigations on the phenomenon of signal transduction in mammalian cells to discoveries of new synthesis techniques for chiral compounds. With these types of exposure, the students will not only gain new scientific knowledge and have their classroom lectures reinforced, but they can also learn firsthand about the career possibilities available in the research arena doc9057 none This Chemistry Division award supports the continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates site at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Puerto Rico. The Program Director is Ana Guadalupe. She is assisted by 15 faculty researchers. For each of the three summers ( - )10 students will be involved in the 8-week program.The program emphasizes hands-on experience in modern chemical instrumentation. The instrumentation includes an NMR spectrometer, mass spectrometer, FTIR spectrometer and X-ray diffractometer. The program provides a number of support systems including instrumentation workshops and seminars on graduate studies and ethics in science. Each summer program terminates with the students presenting their results at a symposium doc9058 none Penn State University operates a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site in its Physics Department. Undergraduate research projects span the areas of materials and condensed matter physics, with some projects in other areas of physics. Twelve undergraduate students are recruited every year for a ten-week summer research experience, with a recruitment focus in the mid-Atlantic region. In addition to the research activities, students attend weekly seminars and participate in extra-curricular activities and in a local research symposium at the end of the summer doc9059 none This Chemistry Division award supports the continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at Bowling Green State University (BGSU). Neocles Leontis is the site s Program Director; Deanne Snavely is the Co-Program Director. Nine faculty will serve as REU student mentors. During the award period ( - ), each summer ten students will participate in a ten-week program. Recruitment efforts will target the 75 colleges and universities within a 250-mile radius of Bowling Green. Special efforts are underway to recruit under-represented minorities, includung contacts with Wilberforce University and Norfolk University. The research focus of the program is the interface between photochemical and biomolecular sciences. Students will participate in one of two short courses: the fundamentals of photophysics and photochemistry, or an introduction to bioinformatics. Other activities will include a weekly seminar program, and a joint poster session with other REU sites in the area held at the conclusion of the program. Surveys will be administered both at the beginning and at the end of the program to determine the students attitudes toward scientific research. Plans are to continue follow-up efforts with each student via a BGSU REU website doc9060 none Louisiana State University (LSU) supports a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site at its synchrotron radiation laboratory, the Center for Advanced Microstructures and Devices (CAMD). Ten students are recruited nationwide every year for a ten-week summer research experience, with a recruitment focus on students from the state of Louisiana and from surrounding states. Undergraduates from many disciplines, including physical, computer and biological sciences and engineering are targeted. Students participate in a variety of research projects within three major categories: basic and applied science research (x-ray spectroscopy of materials) and microfabrication (x-ray lithography). The program at LSU provides non-LSU undergraduates a unique opportunity to participate in research in a modern, large facility. It also provides the opportunity for enhancing synchrotron-based undergraduate research at other colleges and universities by involving faculty from the students home institution through a Home Mentor program doc9061 none Ju The objective of this research is the development of a fluorescence imaging system for massive parallel DNA sequencing. This sequencing system includes the construction of a chip with immobilized single stranded DNA templates that can self prime for the generation of the complementary DNA strand in the polymerase reaction. The system also includes 4 unique fluorescently labeled nucleotide analogues with capped by a small chemical moiety to allow efficient incorporation into the growing strand of DNA as terminators in the polymerase reaction. A 4-color fluorescence imager is then used to identify the sequence of the incorporated nucleotide on each spot of the chip. After removal of the dye photochemically and the capping group, the polymerase reaction proceeds to incorporate the next nucleotide analogue and detect the next base. High density ( 10,000 spots per chip) single stranded DNA will be immobilized on a 4 cm. x 1 cm. glass chip in order to identify more than 10,000 bases after each cycle. After 100 cycles a million base pairs will be generated on one sequencing chip doc9062 none This Chemistry Division award supports the continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at California State University - Fullerton (CSUF). John Olmsted is the site s Program Director; Peter de Lijser is the Co-Program Director. Ten faculty will serve as REU student mentors. During the award period ( - ), each summer ten students will participate in a ten-week program. The student recruitment focus is on local communities (community colleges and CSUF undergraduates) and on communities where chemistry is not strongly represented (minorities and females). The research projects offered are in the areas of analytical, inorganic, organic, and physical chemistry. To complement the research involvement of the students during the summer, special emphasis will be placed on scientific writing. Ethical issues will be presented to the students in the form of three ethical and environmental issues. The summer program will conclude with all students presenting their research at a seminar, presenting a poster, and submitting a written report. An additional component of the program is a series of seminars and discussions that address ethical issues. The program will be monitored by a variety of surveys sent to current and former REU participants doc9063 none This project is an undergraduate research experience for eight students over seven weeks. Students will work in a research group of four students with one faculty mentor. Mentors are selected on a rotating basis from three research areas: hyperbolic geometry, number theory and inverse problems. Though the research areas are different the students will all collaborate in teams to conduct computer experiments, calculations, and simulations motivated by the problems. On the basis of the calculations students to make discoveries and formulate conjectures, then moving on to proving theorems, establishing classifications, or developing algorithms. In addition to this technical program, students will be engaged in a companion program to develop their oral and written mathematical communication skills, collaborative, and other professional skills. This will be accomplished through required oral presentations and technical reports on their work and a close, positive working environment among the students and the P.I. in the Theorodrome, the computer laboratory workplace devoted to the REU doc9064 none This proposed research will create sensor software technology from an Information Technologies (IT) point of view called information synthesis (IS). This knowledge base starts from the premise that sensor and actuation information creates a critical data set which can produce nonlinear models that span the entire information space of a system. The IS technologies will be built by creating an online adaptive nonlinear (NL) modeling technology which is then integrated with analytical functions designed for health detection. The IS technology will be experimentally validated on a drive-by-wire internal combustion (IC) engine research to create fail-safe engines. Research support for the drive-by-wire portion of this work will be sought from industrial sponsors. The scientific impact of this proposed research is the creation of an IS knowledge base applicable to a large class of physical systems. The proposed IS technology complements the data fusion knowledge base by synthesizing information via nonlinear dynamic models instead of I O tabular maps. Therefore as the system ages, the IS online model adaptation will eliminate the need to create a new I O mapping. Furthermore, this model based IS approach will allow information extrapolation to a space corresponding to input signals not originally considered. The first contribution will be the creation of a NL dynamic system modeling technology that can be applied to either experimental data or numerical simulations, or it can be extracted from other NL models such as an artificial neural network. To maintain model accuracy over the product life, the second contribution of this research will develop a passive online model adaptation technology. The next contribution will be the development of an analytical design technology for health detection. Specifically, the adapted model coefficients will be analyzed to extract product health. These IS technologies will be validated on a fully electronic drive-by-wire engine. The engine is a Ford V-8 fuel injected engine fitted with an electronic throttle for fueling control and torque control management. The goal here is to create a fail-safe drive-by-wire engine that can withstand sensor failures that would otherwise lead to engine power burst doc9065 none The Florida A&M University will sponsor a Research Experience for Undergraduates titled, the Florida A&M University Inter-Disciplinary Research Experience for Undergraduates (FAMU-IREU). Participants will consist of undergraduate students majoring in chemistry, biology, physics, computer science, engineering and mathematics. The FAMU-IREU will be offered to students who will be classified as juniors or seniors during the following Academic Year. Participants will work in teams to solve real-world problems. Each team will consist of participants from different disciplines. Team members will blend the theories from these disciplines to develop and analyze solutions to complex problems taken from scientific, industrial and governmental organizations. Each team will develop a research paper that includes computer simulations and analyses. The FAMU-IREU Program will begin on May 15, and end on July 31. Participants will be recruited from predominantly undergraduate universities throughout the United States. Based on the local cost of living, each participant will receive $1,200.00 for housing and meals. Each participant in the will receive a stipend in the amount of $2,200.00 and some support for travel to and from the FAMU-IREU Program. The point of contact person is Dr. Roselyn Williams, Department of Mathematics, Florida A&M University, Tallahassee, Florida , PH (850) 599- , E-mail rwilliams3@famu.edu doc9066 none The Department of Mathematics of Indiana University at Bloomington will host a Research Experiences for Undergraduates site during the summers of , , and . Each year eight students will be selected from the national pool of talented undergraduate mathematics majors to spend eight weeks working on a guided research project. Both individual and small group projects will be available and will cover a wide range of topics in pure and applied mathematics. Students will live together for the eight week period in a university dormitory. They will meet regularly with a faculty mentor, will present lectures on their work, and write a report on the results of their investigations. In addition to their research, students will participate in one or two short courses on interesting topics in mathematics that are accessible to undergraduates but outside the framework of typical courses doc9067 none This grant will allow the PI s to build a seafloor swath bathymetery and sidescan mapping system with an intermediate frequency (30 kHz). This system will be based on the design used by the Hawaii Mapping Research Group (HMRG) to construct the new DSL-120 that will be operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The common technical systems and software will allow scientists and technicians to work easily with both systems. The new instrument will allow scientists to explore the ocean floor with a resolution that was previously unavailable. In particular, the instrument could be used to advance our understanding of offshore fault systems. These fault systems affect a large percentage of the U.S. population when they shift. Further understanding of these systems could be important in future efforts to minimize impacts of earthquakes. Once the instrument is constructed and tested, it will be operated as part of the University of Hawaii shared-use equipment pool doc9068 none The award would support the continuation of a numerical modeling study that seeks to understand the sources of tidal variability in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere (MLT) region. The steady state Global Scale Wave Model would be improved through several upgrades of the basic physics in the forcing of atmospheric tides by solar insolation absorption by water vapor, clouds, and latent heating. A Spectral Dynamics Model based upon a nonlinear time dependent approach to the solution of the primitive equations would be exercised to capture the typical 2-day, 5-day, and 10-day planetary wave events to understand the excitation of secondary waves and their impact upon tidal variability doc9069 none This award provides funding for a 3-year summer REU site in Environmental Research at the University of Idaho, under the direction of Dr. Margrit von Braun. This site will provide a challenging summer experience conducting environmental restoration and remediation research for a diverse group of 10 undergraduate students who have limited opportunities to conduct research at their home institutions and who are primarily under-represented in science and engineering. Working closely with a faculty mentor the students will work on individual research projects with topics such as phyto-and bioremediation, supercritical fluid extraction of mixed waste, biologically engineered treatment systems, aqueous geochemistry, and watershed restoration. Students will also participate in scholarly and recreational activities, such as weekly REU research forums, lunches with professional and academic role models, evening dinner seminars, workshops on environmental ethics, and weekend field trips led by faculty mentors doc9070 none This award provides funding for a three-year REU Site in Construction, at Arizona State University, under the direction of Dr. Anil Sawhney. The 10-week on-site summer program will involve 10 undergraduate students each year in the individual research projects of 12 faculty members. A key focus of the REU site will be studies and research in areas that are of significance to the construction industry. Research activities include an orientation workshop, participating faculty presentations, 9-week individual research program, interaction with current graduate students, workshop on construction management, biweekly research seminars, final research presentation, and final panel discussion of contruction industry experts describing the current status of the industry and its research needs doc9071 none Dr. Robert M. Waymouth, Chemistry Department, Stanford University, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division to develop the chemistry of well-defined titanium complexes in the Ti(III) oxidation state, to investigate atom transfer reactions that mediate the reversible interconversion of Ti(III) and Ti(IV)in non-polar media, and to develop new catalytic systems based on titanium complexes that change oxidation state during catalysis. These studies are directed at catalysts for the syndiospecific polymerization of styrene as well as the development of new catalyst systems for the production of block copolymers of styrene and non-conjugated olefins. Mechanistic studies of syndiospecific styrene polymerization will focus on the reactivity of well defined Ti(III) precursors for styrene polymerization. Styrene and ethylene homopolymerization experiments and styrene ethylene copolymerization experiments will be carried out to test the competence of both Ti(III) and Ti(IV) complexes for styrene and ethylene polymerization activity. The coordination chemistry of titanium complexes with stable nitroxides such as 2,2,6,6-tetramethylpiperidine-N-oxyl (TEMPO) will be carried out as a strategy for reversibly interconverting Ti(III) and Ti(IV) in non-polar solvents. The synthesis of Ti-TEMPO complexes and the bond energies of the Ti-nitroxide bonds will be investigated by thermolysis and nitroxide exchange equilibria. The kinetics and thermodynamics of atom-transfer equilibria between titanium complexes and other metal halides will be investigated to provide fundamental information on metal-halogen bond energetics. These studies will guide the choice of appropriate atom-transfer redox partners to mediate the interconversion of Ti(III) and Ti(IV) complexes. Polyolefins and polystyrenes are two important classes of polymers. This research seeks to develop a catalyst system that can produce a polymer that contains both polyolefin and polystyrene fragments. The properties of such block co-polymers can be precisely engineered if the composition and the size of the blocks of each individual component can be controlled. In this project, new titanium catalysts that will polymerize styrene when the titanium has a 3+ charge and olefins when it bears a 4+ charge will be developed. By altering the metal charge the composition of the block copolymer can be controlled doc9072 none David Marr, Colorado School of Mines The PI proposes to develop colloid-based flow control devices capable of sensing and actuating using optical trapping techniques. Micro-sized check valve, directional valve, and colloid pump are to be built based on single colloidal particles to effect flow control. These devices will have broad applications in biological and engineering systems doc9073 none The research experiences for undergraduates (REU) program at the Medical University of South Carolina is designed to provide both didactic and laboratory research experience in cutting-edge neuroscience research. The successful applicants will receive overview training in the neurosciences, exposure to one or more laboratories where they will have hands on experience in a specific research project, as well as an appreciation for the ethical responsibilities faced by researchers responsible for bringing new knowledge into society and training new neuroscientists. Students will have the opportunity to use a variety of biological, chemical and biophysical approaches to understanding cell biology as it pertains to the functioning of neurons. Research will be focussed on the cellular neuroplastic responses of in vitro and in vivo models of central nervous system functions, including studies of receptors, signal transduction pathways, signaling in development and cell differentiation, as well as in memory formation. The research period will be for a period of ten weeks with an immediate goal of, 1) giving the students hands on experience in the excitement of scientific discovery in the neurosciences, and 2) an appreciation for what a career in research in the neurosciences would be like. The overarching goal and significance of this proposal is that through exposure to the REU program we can attract an important human resource into the field of neuroscience research. However, even if a career in science is not chosen, the REU program will give future decision makers in our society a strong appreciation for the discovery process doc9074 none The University of New Mexico operates a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site on the synthesis and processing of advanced materials. Faculty with chemical engineering, chemistry, materials science and ceramic backgrounds serve as student mentors. Several projects involve participation from scientists at Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories. The REU Site is affiliated with the Center for Microengineered materials, an industry-university cooperative research center at the University of New Mexico. Projects offered to undergraduates include research on the sol-gel synthesis of nanostructures, nanoparticle systems, and thin films and interfaces. Twelve students are recruited every year for a ten-week summer research experience doc9075 none This project from the University of Puerto Rico,Pio Piedras Campus aims to motivate and prepare talented Hispanic undergraduate students for careers in the Cellular Molecular Biology fields of biology. The long-term goal is to increase the number of undergraduate students from under-represented minorities that continue research oriented careers. Ten students from small colleges and universities with no or little access to research in the cellular and molecular areas will be selected based on GPA, research interest as well as on their motivation and potential for Graduate Studies. Students are housed at the University Residential facilities or nearby the University premises during their internship. The central objective of this ten week summer program is to provide the students an intensive hand-on research experience in one of the on-going projects of the participating faculty from the Department of Biology. Students are exposed to a wide range of topics that have as a central theme the use of cellular and molecular techniques to address a biological problem . Each student is assigned a specific research project to be developed under the supervision of a mentor. Projects include topics such as: cellular and molecular analysis of development , gene cloning and gene expression , molecular neurobiology and neuroendocrinology , hormones and neurotransmitters action , cellular interactions . A series of complementary activities to develop research related skills include workshops and colloquia on literature searches and computing literacy, writing and communication in science and bio-ethical issues and practices. To place the students in the Graduate School s track a series of workshops on topics related to admission and requirements are also offered. In addition, activities such as eco-trips and social activities are included in the program to fully expose and integrate the students into the scientific community. This research site provides for a cultural diversified and bilingual environment. It is expected that by integration on the every day activities of research laboratories students will learn modern concepts and techniques and most important will understand the significance of modern research in all biological areas, thus providing a nurturing environment that triggers their development as researchers doc9076 none This is the first year funding of a three year continuing award. Despite a number of successful applications, current discourse parsers are still far from human performance levels. Two factors contribute to this situation. First, the relationship between discourse structure and lexicogrammar is insufficiently understood; we still do not know what lexicogrammatical features correlate with discourse structures and relations. Second, the discourse parsing algorithms implemented to date do not take advantage of formalism and algorithms specific to information and probability theories, which have been shown to produce impressive results in the field of syntactic parsing. The goal of this research is to address these two shortcomings. To this end, the PI will focus on the following two directions: (a) He will investigate empirically, using the principle of maximum entropy and the improved iterative scaling algorithm, the relationship between cue phrases, syntactic-, anaphoric-, and discourse-specific features structures; (b) He will develop robust probability- and maximum-entropy-based discourse parsing algorithms. The empirical aspects of the project will contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between lexicogrammar, cohesion, and coherence, while the computational aspects will provide a thorough study of the features and search strategies that are best suited for probabilistic discourse parsing. This work will also provide computational linguists with robust discourse parsers, enabling them to investigate how the high-level structure of text can be exploited in a variety of natural language applications doc9077 none Christensen This Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site grant will support a minimum of eight undergraduates in Solid Earth Geophysics at the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks. The program will give undergraduates majoring in geology, geophysics, physics, and closely related disciplines, experience in the types of research conducted at the Geophysical Institute. The program objective is to acquaint undergraduates with the exciting research opportunities in the various fields of geophysics concentrating on seismology, volcanology, geochronology, geochemistry, paleomagnetics, geodesy, tectonics, glaciers and sea ice, and remote sensing, and encouraging the undergraduates to go on to graduate school in these or other scientific areas. Women and minorities will be particularly encouraged to apply. In this program, students are assigned to work with individual principal investigators on projects assigned by the investigators. In their contacts with graduate students and by attending seminars and thesis defenses, the students will obtain an accurate perspective on graduate student life. It is our hope that this program will give undergraduate students, many from small liberal arts colleges, the opportunity for in-depth exposure to the fields of solid earth sciences before they must make decisions regarding graduate school. In addition there will be an organized series of weekly lectures and field trips to expose interns to other fields of research beyond the scope of their own project doc9078 none Coale This award to San Jose State University provides instrumentation to update and expand the oceanographic research capabilities of the research vessel Point Sur, a ship operated by the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS) research fleet. A new undulating profiler with sensors for biological, physical and chemical oceanographic observations will significantly expand the ability of marine researchers to study mesoscale processes along the central California margin. New flat-screen monitors and cabinets will improve space constraints in the vessel laboratory, and a carousel water sampler will provide important backup capability for water sampling. These improvements will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists using the ship in their research during and future years doc9079 none The Department of Physics at the University of California, San Diego proposes to offer summer research training to fifteen undergraduate students per year for the next 5 years. Applications will be considered from students across the nation. Students will participate in an individual research project supervised by a Physics Department faculty member. Student projects will include experimental, theoretical, and computational research in high energy physics, condensed matter physics, biophysics, plasma physics, astrophysics and nonlinear physics. The research projects will be designed to guide students from a dependent research status to one that will allow each student to become as independent as their research skills and abilities permit. On arriving, students will work with their faculty advisor to prepare and present a proposed project. At the end of the summer, they will write a final research report and give a presentation at a campus wide Undergraduate Research Conference run by the UCSD Academic Enrichment Office. The REU program includes physics seminars by faculty, regular meetings with one of the program directors, seminars workshops on computer usage, laboratory safety and library research, and joint scientific seminars and meetings with groups from other departments. Students will have the opportunity to attend workshops on graduate school admission and fellowship procedures, how to write a research paper, public speaking, instructional technology and GRE training doc9080 none The goal of this project is to understand and improve upon the ways in which people manage information for re-access and re-use. The project focuses on information found on the Word Wide Web and consists of three phases. In Phase 1, the current situation is assessed to determine the nature and severity of problems in managing Web information for re-use and to determine the effectiveness of supporting tools. Participants are first observed in their workplaces as they use the Web to research a work-relevant topic. In a follow-on session, participants try to return to each in a collection of web sites they have previously visited and found useful. Special attention is given to the choice of tools, their success or failure and to the overall time required to reach a site. In Phase 2, practices of re-use and supporting tools, current and potential, are modeled using Phase 1 data. In Phase 3, a select number of tools and practices of re-use are prototyped and evaluated as guided by the modeling of Phase 2. Results of this project will be improved tools and practices to help manage Web information for personal use and re-use. The project will also provide a framework for the assessment of various tools and practices, current and potential. Possible applications extend beyond the Web to other information types including email, the files of a personal computer and even the printed documents in an individual s office. The results will be disseminated through scholarly publications and through the Internet doc9081 none Frincke, Deborah University of Idaho REU SITES: Developing Undergraduate Research in Computer Network-Based Intruision Detection and Information System Protection The need for technologically literate workers has reached a critical level. The US Department of commerce predicts that by , the United States will need more than 1.3 million new technology workers. Further, there is a growing consensus that the lack of trained information security an information assurance personnel has reached or soon will reach crisis proportions. This REU is intended to address the shortage of information assurance researchers by providing opportunities for undergraduates to participate in ongoing research projects under the auspices of the CSDS. The Center for Secure and Dependable Software (CSDS) at the University of Idaho (UI) was formed in as an Idaho Center to better organize and promote information security education and research. The CSDS University of Idaho was named as one of the first seven Centers of Excellence in Information Assurance Education, and is therefore uniquely suited to lead this initiative. Our specific objectives are to include 14 undergraduate REU participants yearly (42 total) in a program, which is intended: 1. To address the national need for researchers and thinkers with competencies in critical infrastructure protection by involving undergraduates in this area of research. 2. To provide an learn by doing environment in which motivated undergraduates learn how to take charge of their research in a disciplined and creative manner, and to lead others in such endeavors. 3. To offer a unique research experiences to people who would not otherwise have such opportunities. 4. To stimulate undergraduates to pursue graduate education or research careers in information assurance. 5. To attract a diverse student population to this field of study. 6. To provoke discussion and consideration of the vast array of ethical issues involved in computer security and privacy research and practice, both for the REU participants and later at her REU participants home site. Key components of our program include: a faculty with considerable experience in working with undergraduates in a research environment; immediate integration of students in existing research programs in information assurance, drawn from the PI and senior investigator s currently funded research: an emphasis on critical thinking, leadership, presentation, and publication skills; the Expanding Horizons seminars, which bring students into direct contact with highly regarded members of the information assurance field, with practitioners, and with those involved in setting national policy in this area; also an optional ethics component in the form of an integrated sequence of lectures and discussion sections to be led by senior investigators with considerable expertise in this area. A service aspect is also included, where students lead a project of their choice to solve specific real problems in information assurance. The program is geared towards students who would not normally have an opportunity to work in research or in this area. Recruitment will emphasize diversity, both to enrich the student experience and to bring under-represented groups in the national security privacy information assurance policy and technology debates. Ongoing assessment is emphasized in terms both of examining how student capabilities change through their participation in this program as well as in tracking student career choices after the program ends doc9082 none Molecular Physics Laboratory (MPL) of SRI International supports a site for the National Science Foundation s Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Program. The MPL has a worldwide reputation for its fundamental and applied research in atomic, molecular, and laser physics. During the past eight years, 81 undergraduate students have participated in MPL s REU program (74 with NSF support), collaborating with Ph.D. mentors on the MPL staff on a wide variety of experimental and theoretical research problems in these areas. We propose to again recruit highly qualified undergraduate students; to work with them to identify the best match of student, mentor, and research project; and to provide a summer research program. We will continue to provide each student with opportunities both formal and informal to perform exciting research, discuss their work, present project results, and explore science career possibilities with SRI staff mentors. We expect this REU program to continue to produce student mentor co-authored presentations and publications, undergraduates who have a better sense of the work of Ph.D. physicists at a research institute, and a research staff renewed by the energy and fresh perspective of young scientists doc9083 none This REU Site at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) provides an opportunity for 24 undergraduate students to participate in a 10-week summerprogram where each student will have an opportunity to engage in engineering research on meaningful projects in the area of the design and manufacture of metal alloys. The students will be recruited from 20 community colleges in the Los Angeles area with the objective of attracting students from groups traditionally under-represented in the engineering profession. The work will be conducted under the guidance of a staff that has had much success in directing undergraduate students in research work. The students will also be directly monitored by industry and national laboratory personnel. Each of the students will be trained and given responsibility for the performance of an ongoing research project. The students will be expected to publish, as co-authors, the results of their work and to earn university credit for their efforts. Selected students will present the results of their work at conferences of professional organizations. The program will include field trips to five of the top industrial research laboratories in Southern California. Each participant will have access to the extensive information and computational resources of LMU s computer network. In addition, hands-on workshops on word processing, spreadsheets, technical report writing, e-mail and the internet will be conducted. Finally, the students will participate in weekly workshops where they will explore the ethical dimensions of engineering research. The goal of this program is to provide an exciting, productive and rewarding research experience that will inspire the participating students to complete their undergraduate studies in engineering and to engage eventually in advanced study and research at the post graduate level doc9084 none The NSF-REU Site in Physics at San Jose State University, a modern comprehensive California State University campus, has operated on a year-round basis since , has high minority and female participation, and draws from a large pool of well-qualified undergraduate Physics majors. Most of the ongoing research projects are in the areas of optics, condensed matter, and computational physics - areas that represent the major scientific focus in high-tech Silicon Valley surrounding our campus. These on-going projects provide both experimental and theoretical research experiences for undergraduates in Physics. Our summer program serves under-represented students from universities other than San Jose State, and part of our program provides support for students in industry-university partnerships. These partnerships consist of a Physics faculty member, a physicist from an industry or government laboratory, and an NSF-REU student participant. This part of our program fosters important collaborations and facilitates technology transfer to the commercial sector. Research results are reported with, in some cases, student participants as co-authors. In addition, formal presentations by students are made at weekly REU meetings of students, faculty, and industrial scientists doc9085 none This award is to continue an REU site program at the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska. Building on success since , this program will give further research opportunities to undergraduates majoring in the physical sciences. The program objective is to acquaint undergraduates with life and work at a research institute. The objective is achieved by providing summer educational work opportunities in which undergraduates become interns participating in the research activities at the Institute. Research topics concentrate on space physics and aeronomy, but also extend to atmospheric science, and in a minor way to solid state physics and laser physics. Students are assigned to conduct research with individual principal investigators who direct their work and serve as mentors during their internship. A common program of weekly lectures and field trips is designed to expose interns to fields of research beyond the scope of their project. Through their close relationships with their mentors, contacts with graduate students, attendance at seminars, lectures, and thesis defenses, and participation in field trips, the interns gain a first hand perspective on life and work as a research scientist doc9086 none Reeker, Larry H NIST REU Sites: SURFing the Information Technology Lab: A NIST-NSF Partnership The Summer University Research Fellowship (SURF) program at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) was begun by the Physics Laboratory in cooperation with NSF in . Additional NIST laboratories have added such programs, and its youngest lab, Information Technology (ITL), is now doing so. NIST, the second oldest federal scientific organization, is a major working scientific organization, with many stimulating projects for undergraduate participation. Scientists with such projects are given time and resources by NIST to supervise the student research. NSF funds for stipend, travel, and housing expenses go to students via their academic institutions, which have submitted names of interested students and individual application materials provided by the students. NIST obtains quality summer housing at a level covered by the funds granted, provides the project resources, and has an office to administer the program, including recruiting through universities. There is a particular stress on outreach to obtain a group as diverse as it is talented. In addition to the individual projects, NIST provides a series of special seminars, many run by students who select and invite the speakers. SURF and post-SURF seminars by students on their projects are also expected, and papers or other participation at scientific conferences is encouraged. NIST and its individual labs also conduct ongoing reporting and evaluation to assure and increase SURF program quality doc9087 none Biologists who study the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom may work in different worlds, attend separate meetings, belong to separate societies, and interact little with one another. Each community of biologists has developed insights and paradigms that could be extremely valuable to the other -- but are too seldom shared. At the Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Chicago, the symposium on Plant and animal physiological ecology, comparative physiology biochemistry, and evolutionary physiology: opportunities for synergy will break through this isolation by bringing together ambassadors from the plant biology and animal biology worlds. This symposium was jointly arranged by the largely plant-oriented Physiological Ecology Section of the Ecological Society of America and the largely animal-oriented Division of Comparative Physiology and Biochemistry of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, and follows a parallel workshop at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Snowbird, UT, in August. The key to this symposium is that plants and animals have evolved from common ancestors and have much similar biological machinery in their cells, but interact with their environments in very different ways. Plants usually must stay in one place (except for their seeds and pollen) and thus must tolerate whatever challenges their environment presents. By contrast, many (but not all) animals can move and use behavior to escape from or respond to environmental challenges. Both plants and animals have developed a wide array of chemical and physical defenses against environmental stress. Scientists who have studied either plants or animals have made spectacular discoveries about how each kingdom responds to environmental challenges and live in diverse environments. This symposium will bring together distinguished ecophysiologists from the plant and animal ecophysiology communities, in hopes of bringing new perspectives to these fields and stimulating new advances in each. The design of this symposium is an unusual one. Teams of biologists, each including both plant scientists and animal scientists, will consider four related scientific issues of fundamental significance: How do or will organisms respond to global climate change? How do organisms sense that their environment has changed, and how do they coordinate the activities of their diverse cells in response? How can organisms turn themselves off temporarily in response to stress, and what does this mean to their populations? How can organisms respond to extraordinarily severe if not lethal environments? Each team will present broad and synthetic outlooks from their diverse perspectives. The plant member(s) and the animal member(s) will address the topic from the perspectives and paradigms prevalent in his her field. Each pair or trio of presentations will conclude with a formal discussion led by an assigned discussant, and the entire symposium will culminate in a plenary discussion. Manuscripts based on the symposium presentations will be published in American Zoologist and thus undergo widespread dissemination beyond the meeting proper doc9088 none groups or other structures; this subject has its roots in the harmonic analysis of the s; modern questions in this area relate to general topology, Fourier series, and functional analysis. Logic and set theory are relevant because results in topology and measure theory are frequently independent of the usual axioms of set theory; when a result is proved independent, the methods used are those of formal logic. In algebra, the investigator works on algebraic systems such as quasigroups and loops. Automated reasoning tools are very useful here, primarily in the study of non-associative systems. These systems are described by fairly simple axioms, and a computer search can often reveal interesting new consequences of these axioms. However, the investigator combines the computer use with classical arguments involving combinatorics and group theory. There are two distinct, but related, threads to this research. The first thread involves the expansion of our knowledge of traditional pure mathematics. There is no specific practical application in mind here, although topology arises naturally in an attempt to generalize properties of the geometry of physical space, and measure theory is a natural extension of the notion of probability. The second thread involves automated reasoning (AR) tools. AR allows the computer to derive logical conclusions from given knowledge. This subject has been in existence since the s, but it is only in recent years that the hardware and software have become powerful enough to discover conclusions which could not have been discovered without computer assistance. This second thread is a continuation of the investigator s work in improving the AR tools and using these tools to create new results in mathematics. This is of interest not only for the mathematics itself, but because it demonstrates the power of the tools, which can then be applied to reasoning tasks in other areas of science and engineering, as well as to autonomous decision making by robotic agents doc9089 none The conference, to be held in June in Charleston, SC, will focus on computational procedures for developing and studying the network of connections between proteins. The networks of connections between proteins in genomes have to be built by a combination of experimental studies, knowledge-based methods, sequence analysis and structural approaches that are both fast and insensitive to inaccuracies. The Advisory Committee is committed to attending the conference, which will be on the order of 100 participants. The PI is committed to involving junior researchers and under-represented groups as speakers and participants in this conference doc9090 none An important compound involved in reproduction in all vertebrate species is gonadotropin-releasing hormone, GnRH. This peptide is produced in nerve cells of the brain, and regulates synthesis and release of pituitary hormones, which in turn stimulate ovulation. The ancestral mammal was a shrew-like animal, and some shrew species today still lack an ovarian or behavioral estrous cycle, and puberty is initiated by mating rather than by ovarian hormones as in most other mammals. In a species called the musk shrew, the first mating triggers rapid changes in GnRH in the forebrain, and multiple matings initiate ovulation. Shrews have very high metabolism, are largely solitary opportunistic breeders, and reproduction is further regulated by local environmental conditions, particularly food availability, independent of sex hormone cycles. In many mammals including primates, there are at least two forms of GnRH, and one may primarily regulate ovulation, and the other may regulate behavior. This project uses immunocytochemical and molecular techniques with the musk shrew as a unique model to explore novel issues of how mating and food intake affect the functions of the two forms of GnRH in the brain, to regulate sexual behavior and puberty. The impact of this work will extend beyond neuroscience to reproductive endocrinology, and to comparative and evolutionary biology. In addition, this project will support a unique animal colony as a national resource, and will support student training in neuroendocrinology doc9091 none This award provides funding to Rowan University, Kauser Jahan, Principal Investigator, for the support of a 3-year REU Site Program in Pollution Prevention. This eight-week summer program will involve 9 students with backgrounds in Civil Environmental Chemical Electrical Engineering. This research experience will provide students with a unique opportunity to focus on fundamental applied research projects that have significant impacts on human health and the environment. The REU research activities will focus on a single unified theme-Pollution Prevention. The REU Site will strengthen the young engineering program at Rowan University, which strongly supports curriculum-wide emphasis on quality undergraduate education integrated with multidisciplinary research doc9092 none Landolt The goal of Dr. Arlo Landolt s astronomical observational research project is to enhance, develop, and publish faint standard star sequences which are needed for a variety of scientific purposes. There occur projected against the celestial sphere a wide range of phenomena for which observers need intensity and color information. Therefore, there is a long-term need for accurate photometric standard stars, those with known intensities and colors at a variety of optical wavelengths. Use of such standard stars permits the combination and inter-comparison of the brightness and color measurements of different celestial phenomena made by different investigators. Furthermore, Dr. Landolt s standard star work will be an important step toward solving the calibration problems facing the new generation of giant telescopes doc9093 none In this project funded by the Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Barbara Wyslouzil of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute will pursue a program of research on nanodroplet aerosols. The formation of liquid droplets in aerosols will be studied with a view to measuring and understanding nucleation from a phase transition perspective. Small angle neutron scattering (SANS) will be used to experimentally monitor particle size and composition and structure, and infrared (IR) measurements will be used to aid in the compositional analysis during nucleation and droplet formation. The research program is two pronged. First, a deeper understanding of phase transitions under conditions that are far from equilibrium will be obtained. Very high cooling rates insure that nuleation and condensation (phase transition) occur under highly supersaturated conditions. Intrinsic size distribution data from SANS measurements are expected to provide the first direct experimental measurements of nucleation rates in nozzles. Second, the internal structure of multi-component droplets will be discerned. The compositional and structural data will be used to test various models for the droplet structure. Key among the compositional factors to be examined is the degree to which immiscible phases mix and the clarity with which phase boundaries develop between immiscible liquids. This project will lead to a deeper understanding of how multicomponent droplets form. The results of the work will benefit society in helping to understand the physical chemistry of droplet nucleation, and this knowledge will benefit weather and climate studies and industrial processes based upon aerosol droplet formation. The work also will have a high impact on teaching undergradute and graduate students advanced materials science experimental and analysis techniques doc9094 none This First Symposium on Polymers in the Marine Environment will focus on the demanding combination of properties required for applications of polymers in the marine environment. The symposium is the first to combine the technical, environmental, and biological elements that contribute to the challenge of formulating polymers for the marine environment. %%% The symposium will focus on the latest research on (a) Nontoxic fouling release polymers, (b) Membranes for shipboard water purification, (c) Advanced resins for marine composites, (d) Corrosion control with redox polymers, and (e) Novel concepts involving the use of polymers in marine applications doc9095 none This proposal outlines a project to study the dynamics of the fundamental, but unsolved, many-body problem. Atomic collisions represent particularly suitable systems for studying the many-body problem because intermediate particle numbers (3-10) between two-body and bodies with very large particle numbers can be precisely selected. Highly differential and kinematically complete experimental studies on single and multiple ionization processes by positron, electron, proton, and highly charged ion impact will be performed. Thus, direct comparisons for such processes between particles and antiparticles under otherwise the same conditions will become possible. State-of-the-art technologies will be combined in multi-parameter coincidence experiments to simultaneously measure the momentum vectors of n-1 of the n collision products of the few-body systems doc9096 none Lin The main goal of this project is to classify nuclear simple C -algebras by their K-theoretical data. The principal investigator introduced a notion of tracial topological rank for C -algebras. It has been established that this new rank is quite useful in classification of nuclear simple C -algebras. The investigator proposes to classify unital simple nuclear C -algebras with tracial topological rank no more than one by their K-theoretical data. These C -algebras include most known nuclear simple C -algebras. The investigator also proposes to determine tracial topological ranks for many naturally occurred simple C -algebras. The simplest examples of noncommutative C -algebras are collections of matrices. In general, C -algebras could be thought as collections of infinite matrices. In quantum mechanics physical quantities are represented by operators on a Hilbert space i.e. by infinite matrices. C -algebras appeared as an outgrowth of quantum physics. But C -algebras also provide the natural framework for generalizing geometry, topology and measure theory in a fundamental noncommutative way of wide applicability. Simple C -algebras can be viewed as the key to understanding quantum variables. They are the fundamental building blocks of more general C -algebras as well as the typical noncommutative C -algebras. This research project is to study how to describe these C -algebras via a few data which is topological in nature. Immediate applications can be established in the study of dynamical systems doc9097 none The goal of this research is to develop scalable procedures for the derivation of high-quality tests specifically designed for digital logic circuits that contain scan to enhance testability. Such procedures are needed since scan (either full or partial scan) is currently used in most electronic chips, and is expected to continue to be the prevalent design-for-testability technique for design paradigms such as core-based design. The investigators develop procedures for test generation, test compaction, identification of undetectable faults, built-in test generation and delay fault testing specifically targeting scan circuits. In the test application scheme used in this research, a sequence of one or more primary input vectors is applied between every two scan operations. In all the procedures developed, the goal is to use sequences of primary input vectors that are as long as possible. The reasons are that long sequences of primary input vectors contribute to at-speed testing of the circuit, which is important for detecting delay defects, and they allow the number of tests to be kept low, which reduces the test application time. In addition, the circuit operates in its normal mode of operation, potentially resulting in average power consumption which is typical of normal operation. Several commercial tools use the test application scheme adopted in this research, justifying its consideration. However, only a small number of studies have been reported in the literature of effective solutions to the various testing problems under this scheme. This research develops tools that may be used together to provide a comprehensive and scalable solution to the special problems associated with testing of scan circuits under this test application scheme doc9098 none data types with mutable objects, whose operations may have nondeterministic specifications; the extent to which the use of multimethods affects one s ability to prove behavioral subtyping; and the soundness of a specification and verification technique that allows the implementation of a subclass from a superclass s specification, without seeing the superclass s code. The second subproblem comprises enhancing Java and a specification language for Java to better support extensible OO frameworks and libraries. The project implements and refines MultiJava, an extension to Java that supports both open classes and multimethods. The former allow one to extend existing classes with new methods, while the latter allow one to easily extend both a set of data types and the methods that work on them. The project also extends and refines JML, which is a behavioral interface specification language tailored to Java doc9099 none Collaborative Research: Integrated Models of Star Formation Stellar winds play an essential role in removing excess angular momentum from a recently formed star. During this award there will be further development of some critical diagnostics for testing a model of winds driven by the magnetocentrifugal interaction of a strongly magnetized central star and its surrounding disk. The ultimate goal is to detect the co-existence of a wide-angle wind component and a highly collimated central jet which is predicted by the model. This is a Collaborative Research project in which two PI s share common interests in understanding the role of molecular clouds in star formation and whose scientific expertise is complementary. Frank Shu, at the University of California, Berkeley focuses more on the dynamical aspects of the outflow while Alfred Glassgold, at New York University, pays more attention to the microscopic physics. Loose collaborations have been established with observers in order to be able to make detailed comparisons of the models with the spectroscopic observations of the collimated outflows doc9100 none Prop # PI Timothy M. Askew This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessels Seward Johnson and Seward Johnson II, operated by Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Timothy Askew is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire three echosounders doc9101 none A broad program of research in string theory, the candidate theory of all the basic forces of nature, will be undertaken. The focus will be on constructing string models which naturally accommodate large hierarchies of scales. This is motivated by the observed but mysterious discrepancy between the spatial scale of the weak nuclear force (which is roughly the size of the nucleus) and the scale at which the gravitational force becomes strong (which is a much shorter distance than nuclear sizes). This is an important problem because understanding how and why these two very disparate scales occur in nature may be a key to uncovering the next layer of structure of the elementary particles doc9102 none PI: Luke E. Achenie Institution: University of Connecticut Proposal Number: This research aims at developing novel mathematical algorithms and associated software for systematic determination of optimal design margins for chemical processes (CP). These design margins guarantee that flexibility of the CP at the operation stage. A flexible CP is able to operate reliably in spite of the use of inaccurate mathematical process models during the design of the CP. The flexibility of a CP is a very important concern in the design of chemical processes, from economic, safety and environmental points of view. Model uncertainties that impact flexibility are primarily of three kinds: (a) model structure uncertainty, (b) parametric uncertainty (introduced as a result of determining model parameters in the presence of measurement uncertainty), and (c) operational uncertainty. In this work, the PIs are concerned with (b) and (c). Flexibility issues have traditionally been considered through the use of over-design factors, which are based on rules of thumb and experience. Over-design factors are inherently empirical and often lead to costly and inefficient use of resources. The broader impact of this project is to develop methodologies that will reduce the need to use empirical over-design factors in industrial design. Specifically, the following problems will be addressed: (i) estimation of the flexibility of the CP (i.e. the CP s ability to sustain an acceptable level of performance even when external and internal factors change in an unpredictable fashion within certain known bounds), and (ii) CP optimization under uncertainty at the design stage doc9103 none This project is focused on designing solid state chemical strategies that will produce tailor-made porous crystals. Synthetic and host-guest chemistry of new compositions will be developed to advance porous materials research with the following emphasis: (a) frameworks combining porosity with semi-, photo-conductive, and nonlinear optical properties, (b) synthesis of extra-large pore (defined: 10-20 A diameter) frameworks,which will be useful in the separation and catalytic conversion of bio-related molecules (pharmaceuticals) and large petrolewn fractions, and (c) confined molecular space of unusual composition and electrostatic potential capable of hosting the assembly of active molecular complexes and clusters. Because the nature of this project involves both solution chemistry and solid-state chemistry, it provides a rare opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students to experience and become experts in the synthesis, characterization and properties of materials in both arenas. Porous materials based on carbon and oxide compositions have found wide-spread applications in sensing, gas separation, catalysis, environirnental cleanup (water purification and radioactive ion removal), nanotechnology, and more recently in hydrogen and methane storage and transport. For example, the enormous importance of zeolitic silicates and aluminosilicates as shape- and size-selective adsorbents, ion- exchangers and catalysts is reflected by their 350 billion US dollar sector of the global economy. The interdisciplinary nature of this research is ideally suited for training students in areas that are becoming increasingly critical to the US ability to maintain its leadership in global industries doc9104 none This research proposal will explore the patterns and trends of industry patent citations of academic science by technological field, geography, and firm characteristics. The project will use a national sample of patents (as proposed in the modified proposal) and commercial data from the Compustat database. The researcher will apply and construct sophisticated econometric modeling to gauge the impact of these factors on industry citations of academic science doc9105 none Boesgaard The chemical composition of stars holds the answers for many of the most fundamental questions about our Universe. Although the composition of stars like the Sun is very similar to that of the Sun, the amounts of the elements lithium (Li) and beryllium (Be) show interesting star-to-star variations among solar-type stars. This non-uniformity provides a unique opportunity to probe the insides of stars through their Li and Be content; unlike most other elements that are forged by nuclear reactions inside stars, Li and Be are destroyed there. The degree of this destruction, as reflected in the surface content, provides clues about the mechanism that does the mixing between the surfaces and the interiors of stars. Several models have been proposed for this mix-master ; each model predicts differing amounts of depletion for Li and Be so information from both elements together is required. In this work, Dr. Ann Boesgaard, at the University of Hawaii, will concentrate on Be, with a special emphasis on Be in star clusters of known age and metal content. The enrichment over time of various chemical elements in the Galaxy reveals the history of formation of massive stars and the early production of supernovae. Tracking the increase of Be over time gives sensitive information about previous generations of massive stars and supernovae. Probing both the earliest times and the intermediate ages in more detail will result in a greater understanding of the evolution of the Galaxy. Furthermore, the study of Be in star clusters of the galactic disk help to discern the evolution and mixing in the disk component of our Galaxy. This research will take advantage of two of the world s largest telescopes, the Keck-I 10-m telescope and the Subaru 8.2-m telescope at the high-altitude Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii. They are equipped with state-of-the-art instruments and detectors. Their high-resolution spectrometers will be used to obtain the stellar spectra. Recent sophisticated models of stellar atmospheres will be used in the data analysis. The models of stellar interiors and of galactic chemical evolution will be constrained better by the results from the high quality data that is obtained during the course of this research. When this body of work is completed we should have a more comprehensive portrait of the internal structure of stars like the Sun and how this structure changes with time, with mass, and with metal content. Furthermore, we will have a more complete picture of the chemical history of our Galaxy doc9106 none This project will develop network indicators of industrial R&D collaboration from three large databases of inter-firm cooperative agreements and from a set of case studies. The type of networks will include R&D cooperation, joint ventures, strategic alliances, etc. The development of the case studies will produce indicators of the factors underpinning network creation and change. Empirical analysis of the databases will yield indicators related to the characteristics and properties of network structure. These networks will be presented graphically using network graphing theory doc9107 none The Composition of Galactic Globular Clusters AST- In probing the early history of the Milky Way system, high weight is given to comparisons between the oldest stars that we can recognize and those that are being formed at the present time. The analysis is simplified when we can restrict attention to stars that have not yet evolved off the main sequence thereby contaminating their atmospheres with the products on nuclear burning. Good samples of ancient, unevolved stars can be found in globular clusters but they are faint and it is only with the availability of large ground-based instruments like the Keck 10m telescopes that we can study these stars in sufficient detail to make benchmark comparisons. During the course of this award the PI will take advantage of an opportunity to use the high-resolution spectroscopic capability of the Keck I telescope to obtain spectra of main sequence stars near the turnoff in several globular clusters among the halo population of the Milky Way. These spectra will be analyzed and chemical abundances determined with the long-term objective of putting quantitative constraints on the chemical evolution of the Milky Way Galaxy doc9108 none This research proposal will examine and analyze several distinct commercialization strategies of universities by exploring the relationships between six measures in this area. The base data set links patent bibliographic information, licensing data, institutional measures of research and training capacity, and indicators of scientific reputation for U.S. research universities. It will also analyze the relationship between the technological composition of academic patent portfolios and the degree and character of commercial accomplishment at universities doc9109 none In a Bose Einstein condensate (BEC) in a dilute atomic gas all atoms are in the same state. It is planned to study properties of the condensate using methods from quantum optics. These involve issues of coherence, superfluidity, and response to optical excitation. This would include studying the interactions of light with a dense and or quantum degenerate gas, including the localization of light, and developing a theory for photodissociation of a BEC. The corresponding situation of a dilute degenerate Fermi gas will be investigated doc9110 none The Telluride Workshops arose from a strategic decision by the NSF to encourage the interface between Neuroscience and Engineering. The recommendation was for NSF to organize and fund a hands-on workshop to draw together an international group of scientists interested in exploring neuromorphic engineering. This new field seeks to design and fabricate artificial neural systems, such as vision systems, head-eye systems, auditory systems and autonomous robots, whose architecture and design principles are based on those of biological nervous systems. The three-week long Telluride Workshops, have been held annually since then (cf. the Telluride homepage at http: www.ini.unizh.ch telluride ). The workshop includes background lectures, practical tutorials on analog VLSI design, hands-on projects, and special interest groups. There are two daily tutorials covering general material. Participants are free to explore topics of their own choosing in the afternoon; while projects and interest groups meet in the late afternoons, and after dinner. About 60 people are invited to the workshop. Participants are from academia, government laboratories, and industry. Backgrounds span physics, robotics, computer science, neurophysiology, electrical engineering, and computational neuroscience. The workshop provides background material in cellular and systems neuroscience, all aspects of analog VLSI design, simulation, layout, and testing as well as sensorimotor integration and active vision systems. Working groups are established in a variety of areas such as robotics and Central Pattern Generators, sensorimotor interactions, inter-chip communications, active vision, audition, and spatial localization using vision and audition together, attention and selection, locomotion and industrial applications doc9111 none Proposal # Hong, Hoon North Carolina State U The long term objective of this research is to develop mathematical theories, algorithms, and software libraries packages for efficiently solving quantified algebraic constraints (quantified boolean expressions of polynomial equations inequalities over real numbers), which can handle large real life problems. This particular project will focus on moderate size inputs (up to about 10 variables). There are still many interesting real life problems of moderate sizes. The potential impact is as follows. Many important and difficult problems in mathematics, scientific, engineering and industry can be reduced to that of solving quantified algebraic constraints. Thus the availability of efficient algorithms softwares for solving quantified algebraic constraint will have a broad impact on science and industry. The specific approaches are as follows. - Allow approximate solutions. The subject of quantifier constraint solving arose originally as a problem in logic. Naturally, obtaining exact solution has been the goal of the previous research efforts. In order to obtain exact solutions, most calculations have been carried out symbolically, suffering from enormous intermediate computation swelling. Further, they had to deal with all the singular degenerate cases, which are often very expensive computationally to analyze. However, in most real-life problems, approximate solutions are acceptable. In fact, often, there are many uncertain coefficients in constraints, and thus it is even meaningless to try to find exact solutions. Hence, we will allow approximate solutions. During this project period, we will pursue two particular ideas in this direction: approximate quantification and box approximation of solution sets. Our preliminary investigations suggest that these are very promising ideas directions. - Utilize the structure of constraints. So far, the constraints have been treated as flat objects. For example, the polynomials arising in the constraints have been viewed as atomic objects. However, constraints in real life problems usually have intrinsic structures that arise naturally from the structures in the underlying laws components or from the way how the those laws components are combined. Thus, we will utilize the structures of given constraints. During this project period, we will study ways to utilize two particular structures: convexity of bounded quantifiers and composition structure of polynomials. Again, our preliminary investigations suggest that these are very promising ideas directions. The results will be implemented in a software library and freely distributed on the web, in order to facilitate their application to moderate size real life problems by the scientific and engineering communities doc9112 none The proposed research problems of this proposal are in the field of combinatorial representation theory and have, as primary goals, combinatorial constructions of irreducible representations and their characters. The algebraic structures under study are all groups and algebras which come from, or are generalizations of, Lie theoretic objects. The primary funding request of this proposal is for support for three graduate students of the principal investigator. The graduate student research projects center on the combinatorial representation theory of (1) toroidal Lie algebras, toroidal quantum groups and toroidal Yangians, (2) complex reflection groups and (3) Yokonuma-Hecke algebras. The research projects of the proposer are focused on the the combinatorial representation theory of affine Hecke algebras and Iwahori-Hecke algebras. This research strongly uses both algebraic geometric and combinatorial tools. Most interesting symmetries are complex enough that it is difficult to study them directly and a representation is a way of extracting information about these symmetries. Thus is born ``representation theory . However, very often the representations themselves are quite intricate and complicated and the goal of Combinatorial Representation Theory is to find elementary models which allow us to more easily determine properties of these representations: size, number of components, splitting and combination rules, and character. The type of models that are the most useful have the flavor of games for children, like LEGOS or ERECTOR sets, and yet these models enable one to obtain very explicit information about the fine structure of the corresponding representations. In analogy with molecular biology, a general representation is a large and complex structure like a molecule and is composed of smaller ``irreducible components , analogous to atoms. The research in this proposal is directed towards determining the properties of the irreducible components and on determining which irreducible components appear in naturally occuring ``standard representations doc9099 none Collaborative Research: Integrated Models of Star Formation Stellar winds play an essential role in removing excess angular momentum from a recently formed star. During this award there will be further development of some critical diagnostics for testing a model of winds driven by the magnetocentrifugal interaction of a strongly magnetized central star and its surrounding disk. The ultimate goal is to detect the co-existence of a wide-angle wind component and a highly collimated central jet which is predicted by the model. This is a Collaborative Research project in which two PI s share common interests in understanding the role of molecular clouds in star formation and whose scientific expertise is complementary. Frank Shu, at the University of California, Berkeley focuses more on the dynamical aspects of the outflow while Alfred Glassgold, at New York University, pays more attention to the microscopic physics. Loose collaborations have been established with observers in order to be able to make detailed comparisons of the models with the spectroscopic observations of the collimated outflows doc9114 none PI: Ray A. Waller This award provides funds for a travel grant to partially support United States participants to attend the 53rd Session of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) in Seoul, Republic of Korea, from August 22-29, . The ISI meeting is an umbrella meeting of a number of international statistical associations with sessions of interest to thousands of statisticians. The travel grant provides partial support to defray transportation costs for applicants from institutions and non-profit associations. An emphasis of the award is to encourage and provide the opportunity for younger statisticians to participate in the meeting. Special consideration will be given to statisticians who have received their Ph.D. in or later and to women and minorities doc9115 none This project has two components: (1) an investigation of possible signatures of violations of fundamental symmetries in atomic systems; (2) the structure and evolution of Rydberg wave packets and their behavior in external fields. The analysis of signatures of Lorentz and CPT violation will be extended to additional atomic systems and to other symmetries. The continued studies of Rydberg atoms will involve developing new techniques for studying wave packets and revivals in nonintegrable systems doc9116 none Owocki, Stanley Mass Loss and Disk Formation in Rapidly Rotating Stars AST- A long-standing problem in astronomy is the origin of the circumstellar disks that cause the characteristic Balmer line emission of classical Be stars. The basic task undertaken in this award is to understand the way in which these disks are generated, maintained and dispersed. It is probable that they originate from active regions in or near the surface of the rapidly rotating star and are generated by radial mass ejections augmented with energy supplied by the rotational motion of the star which is locked into the outflowing gas by strong regional magnetic fields. The work requires the consideration of a wide range of physical processes such as radiatively driven mass loss, non-radial pulsation, rapid stellar rotation and the interaction of all of these with magnetic fields. Individually and in various combinations, these processes play a key role in many other astrophysical systems on scales from planets to galaxies. Thus the work done here will have wide applicability to other areas of contemporary astrophysics doc9117 none Townes, Charles Precision Measurement of Stellar Sizes and Circumstellar Material with 10 Micron Interferometry and Narrow Frequency Bandwidths AST- Berkeley s unique Infrared Spatial Interferometer will be used for several types of high-resolution measurements. These include interferometric measurement of the diameters of old stars in narrow spectral regions of the mid-infrared (10 micron) region chosen to avoid spectral lines due to gases in the atmospheres of stars and to include only continuum radiation. Measurements on the spectral lines themselves can be used to determine the spatial distribution of the circumstellar gas. Recently enlarged baselines on the interferometer allow accurate measurement of stellar sizes. In particular, changes in the diameter of the brightest Mira variables can be measured and these should lead to information about departures from the sphericity of these stars. One particular advantage of working at such long wavelengths is that the uncertainties due to limb darkening are much smaller doc9118 none The proposed research is in the area of efficient manipulation of finite groups and estimation of their parameters. Potential application areas include computational group theory, graph isomorphism testing (of relevance to chemical documentation), efficient interconnection networks based on groups, and group-based cryptography. Our work belongs to the areas of the Theory of Computing, Group Theory, Symbolic Algebra, and Combinatorics. Building on our previous results in the complexity theory of group algorithms, we propose to pursue several directions of research. The main focus is the design and analysis of efficient algorithms for high degree per-mutation groups and for large dimensional matrix groups. We are looking for algorithms which satisfy both the requirements of fast asymptotic running time and good practical performance. In the permutation group setting, our nearly linear time algorithms achieved this goal for a quite broad class of algorithmic tasks; now we would like to extend this class of algorithms. We implemented most of our algorithms in the GAP programming language and they are available for the public as part of the standard library package of GAP. These algorithms represent the long-awaited marriage of theoretical and practical approaches to computational permutation group theory. We intend to continue the implementation effort. Our major goal is the first polynomial-time algorithm for the basic manipulation of arbitrary matrix groups. In matrix groups defined over a field of characteristic p, we would like to give a polynomial-time algorithm computing the order and a composition series, provided that we can compute discrete logarithms in the fields GF(pe ). Our recent algorithms for the constructive recognition of certain classes of finite simple groups are a major ingredient in this plan. Finally, we plan to investigate some pure algebraic and combinatorial problems, which are motivated by our algorithmic investigations or became more accessible through the methodological advances achieved in connection with our algorithmic results. In particular, we are interested in base size problems for permutation groups, problems concerning the action of groups on the power set of the permutation domain, and problems related to Cayley graphs: the diameter of Cayley graphs and the investigation of non-Cayley graphs with vertex-transitive automorphism group. Small bases are important for fast implementations and for improving the running time estimates of algorithms. Estimates of diameters of Cayley graphs are closely related to the expansion rate and through this to a host of basic questions of the Theory of Computing and Probability Theory doc9119 none Conventional solutions for I O have attempted to provide hardware and software parallelism via RAIDs or parallel machines supercomputers. However, the problems associated with cost, scalability, and or accessibility of these environments make them unattractive for widespread usage. This research addresses this important deficiency in high-performance I O support, by proposing a shared storage system using an off-the-shelf cluster of workstations, disks, and networks. The proposed research goes beyond current state-of-the-art in I O support for clusters and examines a broad spectrum of issues related to I O software on clusters, that include application-directed, compiler-directed, and runtime system-directed optimizations. These optimizations are crucial to reduce hide the latencies to different levels of the I O hierarchy which will help accelerate the deployment of clusters for I O-intensive applications doc9120 none transcendental theory that describes repeating phenomena like sound and waves. A cornerstone of modern mathematics, it provides the foundation for relevant areas of mathematics and has applications to computer network theory and string theory in physics. Using this theory, the investigator and his colleagues can examine the reciprocal relations among objects from geometry, analysis, and number theory. The theory played an essential role in recent solution of the Fermat s last theorem by A. Wiles, and has also been important to the recent development in coding theory and cryptology. The investigator and his collaborators study in the project the intrinsic symmetric structures and transcendental invariants of automorphic forms doc9121 none The Advanced Materials Program in the Chemistry Division supports this award to University of Notre Dame to develop an understanding of redox potentials, oxidation states and reactivity of elements from Groups 12 to 15, and these groups include metallic, semimetallic or semi-conducting elements. The focus of the research will be solution and solid state chemistry based synthesis of homo- and hetero-atomic anion clusters, and to study the bonding of main group anion clusters based on germanium or Group III-V compounds. A number of neutral nanoparticles or semiconducting thin films will be synthesized, and reactions to produce polymeric materials with extended structures of linked clusters will be studied by Prof. Slavi Sevov with this award. With this award, negative oxidation states of elements from Groups 12 to 15 such as indium, bismuth, tin, gallium and other related elements will be studied with respect to their bonding, structures, coordination and reactivity of homo- and hetero-atomic anion clusters. Both solution chemistry and solid state chemistry will be followed to synthesize extended structures with linked clusters doc9122 none Proposal # Popovic, Zoran U of Washington We propose a multi-layered approach to capturing and synthesizing realistic human shapes and motions. To capture the static shape of real humans, we will employ 3D scanning techniques including hierarchical light striping, simultaneous multi-striping, and photometric stereo. A feature-tracked motion capture system as well as 3D scanning techniques will generate motion data. The investigators will acquire this motion data at varying resolutions in order to drive the analysis of skeletal motion, body part deformation such as bulging due to flexing a muscle, and secondary motion such as leg vibrations that occur when stomping on the ground. This wealth of human data will then drive an analysis, modeling, and synthesis stage. The static scan data will be analyzed to construct the space of possible human shapes. This human shape model together with the body part motion capture and full-body motion capture will be used to construct a detailed kinematic model of the human body. Modeling human shape movement at such different levels of detail will allow control of the human motion on the coarse skeletal level while preserving the fine details such as muscle bulging. Furthermore, this multi-layered approach will enable selective replacement of different layers in the human model structure. For example, it will be possible to map the animated movement onto a different body scan and observe a different surface shape movement and creasing. The detailed kinematic human model will be further extended with a model of human dynamics by taking into account a number of physical properties of the human body such as muscle usage and mass distribution. This additional dynamic information provides a way to preserve the realism of motion even when the structure of motion is significantly modified. In addition, the investigators will extend the skeletal dynamic model with secondary motion simulations constructed to replicate the loose skin and tissue vibrations that occur in high-energy movements. The investigators will incorporate their work into new curriculum both at their university and in courses being offered to the professional community. This work will be folded into CDROM s that reach a wide audience, including the general public and a broad spectrum of high school students who may be considering careers in information technology. The results of the research will include complex databases of human shape and motion to be distributed to the general research community in order to encourage further research in this area doc9123 none This award is for the partial support of a series of conferences in the field of Partial Differential Equations in Midwestern Universities: University of Chicago, Indiana University, University of Wisconsin Madison, Northwestern University, Purdue University, Notre Dame, Illinois-Chicago, Illinois-Urbana. The conferences will provide the opportunity for communication and collaboration among faculty and between senior and junior investigators doc9124 none Chen This one-year award, which supports U.S.-Italy cooperative research on the development of new methodology in the area of optimal approximate control theory, involves Victoria Chen of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Ricardo Zoppoli, University of Genoa, Italy. The objective of their research is to expand the role of statistics in operations research. The U. S. principal investigator brings to this collaboration her expertise in the application of statistical learning to stochastic optimization. This work is complemented by the Italian investigator s experience in control theory problems that violate the classical LQG (linear dynamic systems, quadratic cost functions, and Gaussian random variables). The results of this research are expected to reduce the computational effort required to solve problems in approximate optimal control theory doc9125 none This award provides funding to develop a web-based data system to enhance the visibility, networking, and professional success of minorities in the aquatic sciences. Specifically the PI will 1) create a centralized database to identify, characterize and eventually track minority undergraduate and graduate students in aquatic sciences, 2) implement an on-line Student Registry to allow students to network with each other and potential employers and graduate schools, 3) develop a minority webpage, housed on the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) website, containing links to student resources, 4) establish electronic distribution lists to facilitate communication within the minority aquatic science community. These activities are necessary first steps to develop a coherent infrastructure to facilitate career development of under-represented groups and establish networks within and beyond the community of minority aquatic science students and professionals. This system will have an important impact on the recruitment and retention of minority students in the aquatic sciences. The database, student registry, website and electronic distribution list will be important tools for a centralized tracking of minority programs, for distributing relevant information to minority students and scientists, and for recruiting students into graduate programs, and eventually, into faculty positions doc9126 none This research involves media-on-demand systems. A media-on-demand system is a distributed network system where servers respond to demands by clients to receive various types of media such as video, audio, or large files. Such systems may be implemented within an organization like a hotel or a university, or over the Internet. Currently, Internet media-on-demand systems use unicast, meaning that each client receives its own transmission. This method does not scale up well for popular media where hundreds of thousands of requests might be received in a short time. Thus today, for example, hotels providing movies-on-demand typically make customers wait up to an hour for starting times. In this research, the principal investigator studies algorithms for systems where multicast or broadcast is available and buffer storage is adequate. Tradeoffs among server bandwidth, startup delay, client receive bandwidth and client buffer size are studied. In particular, new algorithms and mathematical analyses are developed to explore these tradeoffs. The main goal of the research is to understand how to achieve the highest Quality of Service with as few resources as possible doc9127 none Proposal # Johns Hopkins University The proposed research is concerned with three contemporary topics in the area of variational inequalities and complementarity problems. These topics are: (a) mathematical programs with equilibrium constraints, (b) quasi-variational inequalities, and (c) differential complementarity systems. In each case, our focus is on the design, implementation, and analysis of robust and efficient numerical methods for solving the problems under study. The proposed methods will be supported by a strong theoretical foundation that serves to provide an in-depth undertanding of the problems. Applications of the developed theory and computational algorithms to important disciplinary problems in engineering design, parameter identification, economic equilibria, electric power planning and pricing, constrained mechanical systems, and derivative pricing in financial engineering will also be carefully investigated. Overall, our research is built on the past success we have had in this vast subarea of mathematical programming. The main goal of the project is to expand this subarea in some new unchartered domains of applications that urgently require the kind of computational research proposed herein doc9128 none Orcutt This award to Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, provides instrumentation to upgrade the IGPP Digital Library with the addition of tape storage systems, server, software upgrades and related items. The facility is used to store a wide variety of geophysical and oceanographic information, allowing collaboration among widely-separated research groups, and maintaining direct access to a wealth of historical information. This upgrade will increase speed to access data, and will more than double existing capacity for online data storage to more than 20 Tbytes. These improvements will be of substantial advantage to ocean scientists using the facility in their research during and future years doc9129 none Improved understanding of the interaction of radiation with cold atomic vapors and BEC s will be sought, using nonlinear spectroscopy (both continuous wave and pulsed). In cw spectroscopy collisional effects in cold vapors and mean field shifts and scattering in BECs will be studied as a function of the frequency difference between two fields. The spectrum of recoil-induced resonances will be calculated. For pulsed field interactions both the impulse and Bragg scattering limits will be studied doc9130 none Distributed real-time systems are often very complex. They are composed of heterogeneous systems intended to perform tasks subject to many constraints, including time constraints in the face of dynamic environmental changes. In order to meet these challenges, a unifying, extensible, compiler-based framework is proposed for the design and engineering of complex real-time systems, with the following research objectives: - To devise a systems engineering framework that includes a systems specification language and multiple problem-solving approaches, as well as an automated mapping between them. - To discover common properties of extant on-line performance visualization tools for parallel and distributed, heterogeneous systems, as well as gather desired properties of the on-line performance analysis and visualization as a real-time middleware. Using the findings, to devise a comprehensive performance and analysis framework as a basis for advanced extensions. - To integrate the systems engineering and on-line performance and analysis frameworks in a way that facilities on-line system steering reconfiguration of complex real-time systems. The integrated approach should be semi-automated, and allow algorithmic and visual analyses of instrumentation data received from the target system to utilize problem-solving tools doc9131 none Approximation algorithms are efficient algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems that deliver solutions which are guaranteed to be within a certain factor of the optimum. This area of theoretical computer science has seen a tremendous growth in the last decade for various reasons. First, several important techniques for designing such approximation algorithms have been discovered, including the use of convex optimization techniques and more specifically semidefinite programming. Also, major advances in complexity theory have lead to strong non-approximability results, sometimes even showing that for certain problems trivial approximation algorithms give the best guarantee one could hope for (unless P=NP). In this project, which is a continuation of the PI prior CAREER award, the emphasis is both on the design of general techniques for deriving approximation algorithms and also on obtaining improved approximation algorithms for several classical hard optimization problems. The problems to be considered include routing problems, the traveling salesman problem, the Steiner tree problem, the sparsest cut problem, and scheduling problems doc9132 none Dr. Jack H. Freed of Cornell University is funded for his research on molecular relaxation by ESR spectroscopy and related phenomena by the Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division. Studies of dynamic molecular processes and structure in complex fluids will be continued. New two-dimensional Fourier transform (2D-FT) ESR, including electron-electron double resonance (2D-ELDOR), and far infrared (FIR) ESR techniques and accompanying theoretical developments will be employed to study rotational molecular dynamics in liquids over the 9 to 250 GHz regime. In particular, the dynamic cage model will be tested, especially in the context of glass-forming liquids. These methods also will be applied to the study of the quantum rotational nature of spin relaxation in argon matrix trapped methyl radicals below 40K. Comparisons of microscopic and macroscopic translational diffusion in liquids will be made using dynamic-imaging of diffusion (DID)-ESR for the measurement of macroscopic diffusion and 2D-ELDOR for microscopic diffusion. The new double-quantum coherence (DQC)-ESR method will be developed for the measurement of distances in organic biradicals, and for distance distributions in bilabeled polymers. The detection and analysis of structure in fluids remains a challenging and important area of physical chemistry and is key to many important chemical processes. Dr. Freed s laboratory at Cornell Unviersity will continue extending the utility of ESR spectroscopy to the analysis of diffusion processes in complex liquids (such as polymeric solutions). The advances provided by these studies provide technical leadership in the discipline, and impact many other laboratories. The results to be provided will extend our understanding of liquid structure and of solution structure doc9133 none Empirical Validation of Information Theory-Based Software Metrics Edward B. Allen, P.I, and Rayford B. Vaughn, co-P.I. Empirical Validation of Information Theory-Based Software Metrics is a research project of Mississippi State University that is empirically validating the usefulness of a new generation of software metrics, based on information theory. Software engineers employ a wide variety of diagrams during development of software. Because many abstractions of software are represented by graphs, metrics of graph attributes have the potential for wide application. Information theory is an alternative to counting, focusing on the amount of information in an attribute. The contribution of this project to the state of the art is empirical evidence that information theory-based software metrics of size, length, complexity, coupling and cohesion can be useful timely predictors of software quality, and that they have advantages over counting-based metrics. Case studies in collaboration with industrial and government software development organizations are providing a meaningful evaluation by examining a variety of real-world software systems large enough to be comparable to other industry projects. Collaborators include EDS Inc., Ericsson Inc., and MPI Software Technology Inc. Results will be disseminated throught the Center for Empirically Based Software Engineering (CeBASE). The empirical evidence generated by this project is aimed to facilitate a new level of cost-effective improvement to software quality doc9134 none Tomsovic The project is concerned with the physics of both few-degree-of freedom and many-body mesoscopic systems. The systems include quantum dots and compound nuclei formed in nuclear collisions. These quantum systems have some associated underlying, classically chaotic dynamics. The tools provided by semiclassical and statistical theories are not fully developed for partially or fully chaotic systems. The project expects to extend the theories, to understand their limitations, and to apply these advances to any of a number of physical systems doc9135 none Over the past decade, iterative decoding methods have received a great deal of interest due to the astonishing error performances achieved first by turbo codes, and more recently by low-density parity check (LDPC) codes. However, since the vast majority of these results have been either theoretically derived for, or achieved by computer simulations of very long codes, several issues remain problematic in the implementation of LDPC codes. This research addresses some of these problems and can be divided into three major areas: (1) Algebraic construction of LDPC codes: This research investigates the construction of LDPC codes based on algebra and finite geometries. These constructions are motivated by the possibility of describing families of codes in a very specific and unambiguous way, which is impossible for codes generated with the aid of a computer. Furthermore, tight bounds if not exact values of important parameters such as the code minimum Hamming distance can be determined. This feature remains interesting to evaluate the error performance of applications requiring very small bit error rates such as storage systems. In addition, the algebraic structure of the codes constructed can be exploited to perform simple encoding or decoding, such as encoding of cyclic or quasi-cyclic codes based on linear feedback shift registers. (2) Near-optimum reduced-latency iterative decoding of short to medium length LDPC codes: Although very impressive results have been derived and achieved with long LDPC codes, codes of shorter lengths are more likely to be used in practical applications such as wireless communication systems. For codes of medium length, iterative decoding alone requires a lot of iterations and falls significantly short of the optimum error performance. The investigators devise new decoding methods which, combined with iterative decoding, both reduce the number of required iterations and improve the error performance of current approaches. (3) Simplification of iterative decoding methods: The best iterative decoding methods for LDPC codes depend on the operating signal-to-noise ratio and are subject to numerical problems inherent to the evaluation of probabilities or log-likelihood ratios. The investigators study new decoding methods which become universal and are much less sensitive to numerical problems while maintaining near-optimum error performance. Such properties are important for implementing these promising new decoding approaches in commercial products doc9136 none Prop # PI Matthew Hawkins This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessel Cape Henlopen operated by the University of Delaware (UDEL) and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Matthew Hawkins is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire a rigid inflatable boat through a group purchase made by LUMCON (no monetary award for UDEL). UDEL will make a group purchase of communication equipment for 6 institutions. Through this group purchase UDEL will acquire an integrated communications system doc9137 none Proposal # Van Hoeij, Mark Florida State University This award will devise new methods for solving linear differential equations and for integration of algebraic functions, including implementations. The significance is that differential equations are used in physics, engineering, mathematics and many other sciences. Several computer algebra softwares have solvers that apply various methods to search for closed-form solutions of differential equations. This project will lead to new methods, so that more equations can be solved. Implementations will be written as well and distributed via the web so that researchers who use a computer to solve differential equations can easily benefit from the results. Algorithms for solving non-linear differential equations will benefit indirectly because such algorithms often reduce problems to linear differential equations. The second topic in this award consists of improving the performance of the algorithm for integration of algebraic functions. This is necessary because the the existing method is not efficient enough to handle large inputs doc9138 none Automated Analysis of Probabilistic Open Systems S. Purushothaman Iyer W. Rance Cleaveland (Co-PI) Concurrent systems such as network protocols and net-centric programs are difficult to build and debug because of the potential they exhibit for unintended process interactions. The development of net-based applications which have to contend with probabilistic guarantees from lower-levels is even more difficult as they need to be functionally correct and also satisfy reliability performance constraints. This project will investigate how formal methods can be extended to address both logical correctness and reliability performance constraints. The current project will explore semantic theories of systems that have both non-determinism and probabilistic choice. In particular, notions of equality and approximate equality of system behaviors will be investigated. Furthermore, the effect of these notions on compositional reasoning will also be studied. The second topic of the proposed work will be a thorough comparison of the semantic theories developed in this project against traditional approaches to dealing with non-determinism and probabilistic choice. Finally, practical algorithms for process minimization and for checking equality (and approximate equality) of processes will be designed and implemented in the Concurrency Workbench of New Century. Case studies, to evaluate the proposed theories, will also be constructed and studied doc9139 none Proposal # Princeton University Vanderbei, Robert J. Optimization is the process of determining values of certain controllable parameters so as to achieve the best, i.e. smallest or largest, value of an objective function within a specified domain of feasible parameter settings. The demand for high-performance optimization algorithms and software is increasing rapidly as the power of the current technology to solve difficult real-world problems is becoming more widely recognized. Much of the success of modern optimization techiques stems from the recent development of so-called interior-point methods. These methods were first developed for linear optimization problems but are now actively being extended to nonlinear optimization problems. This research involves the development of new interior-point algorithms and software for large-scale nonlinear constrained optimization. Specific goals include: (1) fundamental enhancements to the current state-of-the-art, such as the replacement of the merit-function for step-length control with a filter-based method and the development of better techniques to detect unbounded and infeasible problems; (2) extension of the basic algorithm to new problem classes, such as second-order cone programming and semidefinite programming, that don t quite fit the basic paradigm of nonlinear constrained optimization; (3) further extension beyond the realm of optimization to nonlinear complementarity problems, which arise in many engineering problems; and finally (4) development of a large repository of optimization models, which serves both to illustrate the power of modern optimization technology and also to provide a test bed for future algorithm development doc9140 none The short term goal of this project is to explore and exploit optical forces on atoms, particularly metastable helium atoms, that derive from improved control of the momentum exchange between the atoms and the light field. This improved control arises from carefully orchestrated, rapid, coherent sequences of absorptions followed by stimulated emissions using non-chromatic light. The longer term plans are for applications of the extremely cold and dense sample of helium that can be produced with these large forces. High on the list of possibilities under consideration is exploitation of the high internal energy for nanofabrication by lithography using self-assembling monolayers to pattern a resist doc9141 none Bania, Thomas Collaborative Research: The 3- Helium Problem AST- Determination of the isotopic abundances of the light elements is fundamental in probing the earliest nucleosynthesis in our universe. During the first seconds, significant amounts of light elements 2-H, 3-He, 4-He and 7-Li were produced. This investigation focuses on the 3-He isotope. A primordial abundance is an ultimate aim but the contribution by the generation of this isotope by nuclear burning within common solar-type stars must first be evaluated. We would expect the contamination from this component to increase with time and also to be larger in areas which have had the highest rates of star formation in the past. These correlations are not seen and a prime goal of the present proposal is to understand why they are absent. The plan is to continue a survey of planetary nebulae and H II regions to determine 3-He abundances in different parts of the galaxy. Earlier work had revealed that small but significant excesses of 3-He were present in the planetary nebula NGC showing that enrichment had taken place. With improved facilities at Arecibo and Green Bank, it is expected that many more objects can be observed now doc9142 none Bunn, E.F. This research will improve methods of analysis for large data sets in Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) studies, including refinements of algorithms for analyzing large maps and removing foreground contamination. The methods will be tested using simulations, and then applied to datasets generated by BEAST, an existing balloon-borne telescope for measuring CMB anisotropies, and eventually all-sky satellite observations. Extraction of statistics beyond the simple power spectrum, such as non-gaussianity and isotropy of the fluctuations, is the main goal of the research doc9143 none This is the first year funding of a three year continuing award. Imagine a factory of the future that teems with intelligent autonomous robots and machines engaged in production. Machines that can not only sense and act, but can also optimize their own behavior without being explicitly programmed. And robots that can learn to coordinate their actions with other robots in order to satisfy an overall optimization criterion. The ability to build such machines and robots radically reorganizes the factories, so that people s role is reduced to specifying an optimization criterion and giving feedback to the machines, leaving the low level control and optimization issues to the machines themselves. This project seeks to design and study the algorithmic and computational tools necessary to build such machines and robots. The long-term scientific goal is to gain a better understanding of the tradeoffs involved in the design of adaptive autonomous multi-agent systems; in particular, the tradeoffs between the optimality of the behavior, computational and communication efficiencies, generality, and speed of learning. Optimizing the performance of programs via rewards and punishments, or reinforcement learning, appears to be the most promising approach to building such adaptive multi-agent systems for complex real-world domains. Many real-world problems in manufacturing, such as production scheduling and inventory control, are best seen as average-reward reinforcement learning (ARL) problems, where the optimization criterion is to maximize the average reward received per unit of time. The goal of this project is to develop scaleable algorithms, programs and techniques for solving large ARL problems, with manufacturing as the primary application domain. The PI will push the frontiers of this technology to the point where it can be applied to factories with hundreds of machines and job types, with realistic assumptions such as partial observability and scalability to multiple agents. Successful completion of this project will lead to new scaleable algorithms and programs for solving large ARL problems, which could well have significant economic impact doc9144 none Our research goal is to improve quality level of CMOS ICs without performing the high-cost burn-in process. High-voltage screening schemes have been successfully developed and implemented to eliminate early-life failures due to oxide defects in digital CMOS circuits. However, the success is not extended to its analog counterparts due to their working conditions and circuit topological structures. This project proposes to develop efficient yet effective high-voltage stress test process for analog circuits. The research objective is to develop the framework of an automatic stress test system for analog mixed-signal circuits, where the system integrate three major components: stressability analysis, stressability design methodologies, and stress test process. The component of stressability design methodologies include a stress vector generation process and a stressability enhancement process. The stress test process generates the test programs with the defined stress conditions for the circuits under test. The success of this development will enable the analog circuit to be stressed properly using high-voltage screening to eliminate early-life failures due to oxide defects and to enhance reliability and quality of CMOS ICs without performing high-cost burn-in screening doc9145 none Clusters of workstations have become standard system platforms for many scientific, commercial, and educational applications. This research focuses on effective usage of global memory resources to deal with dynamic job demands in large cluster systems. The targeted workloads are data-intensive scientific applications, Internet web accesses, and data processing for commercial databases. The first objective is to develop analytical experimental performance models tools to quantitatively examine the impact of the technology changes and data-intensive workloads to resource management policies, and to provide resource management guidance. The second objective is to design several memory-centric load sharing schemes by comprehensively considering dynamic job interactions and global cluster system resources. Finally, these schemes will be implemented and tested in a large cluster system. The impact and contributions of the proposed projects will be: (1) providing insights into memory systems performance and understanding potentials of memory-centric load sharing in clusters; (2) providing effective system solutions to adapt rapid changes of technology and workloads in cluster computing; and (3) making low-cost clusters more accessible for both scientists and business users to effectively run their large and demanding applications doc9146 none Emerging web applications are increasingly likely to use dynamic web data. Traditionally, requests for dynamic data---both time-varying and dynamically-generated---have been handled directly by servers and intermediate proxies haven t been allowed to process requests for such objects (web proxies have been primarily employed to disseminate data that is mostly static). A pure server-based approach for managing dynamic data is likely to limit the scalability of emerging web applications and increase their vulnerability to server failures. To overcome this drawback, novel proxy-based techniques will be developed to manage and disseminate dynamic web data. The proposed research will address two key issues: (i) data dissemination, which addresses the issue of disseminating time-varying web data using proxy-based push and pull techniques, and (ii) computation dissemination, which addresses the issue of moving computations from servers to proxies so as to dynamically generate web objects at a proxy. Both techniques have the potential of radically changing the way web proxies are designed and used. These techniques will need to satisfy three key requirements: user-cognizance (i.e., awareness of user and application requirements), intelligence (i.e., the ability to dynamically choose the most efficient set of mechanisms to service each application), and adaptivity (i.e., the ability to react to changing load characteristics). The proposed techniques will be evaluated using an eclectic mix of simulation, analysis and prototype implementation doc9147 none The Hope College Nuclear Group is involved in research with the Radioactive Nuclear Beams (RNB) available at the University of Notre Dame (ND), the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory at Michigan State University, and the BEARS facility at Lawrence Berkeley Labs. With this proposal, the Nuclear Group will continue to apply the expertise developed over many years of work in traditional areas of nuclear reaction studies and our recent experience with RNB to address questions about the behavior of the exotic nuclei. Specifically, this project seeks to develop the disciplines understanding of unstable nuclei. To do this measurements of various cross sections for a variety of unstable particles will be made including: two- and one-neutron transfer cross sections, near-barrier fusion-fission cross sections, and total reaction cross sections. To facilitate these studies, we will develop a variety of detectors (parallel-plate avalanche counters, neutron detectors and electron multipliers). We will also continue our analysis of a previous experiments and the preparation of other papers from past work. Undergraduate students from Hope College will participate in all aspects of the experiments: planning, detector development (including detector fabrication and testing), detector and electronic setup, data taking, off-line analysis, and modeling. Our experience over the years demonstrates that undergraduate research enhances a student s education and better prepares the student for graduate work or a wide variety of careers in either industry or academia doc9148 none Hyung Kim of Carnegie-Mellon University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to carry out theoretical studies of solvation and chemical reactions and related electronic spectroscopy in diversified solution environments, such as dipolar and non-dipolar solvents. By incorporating spatial dispersion into reaction field theory with the aid of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, Kim will construct an accurate continuum theory to describe equilibrium and nonequilibrium solvation in polarizable, non-dipolar, quadrupolar solvents, such as benzene. Quantum chemistry techniques will be applied to solvation of small molecules and various charge-shift processes, such as Menshutkin and excited-state electron transfer reactions in benzene and other quadrupolar solvents. With the combined efforts of MD, quantum chemistry, and continuum theory, this effort will provide the first systematic study of charge-shift reactions in quadrupolar solvents with proper account of nonequilibrium solvation and associated solute-solvent electronic structure variations. In parallel with this effort, the truncated adiabatic basis-set (TAB) solvent electronic description will be improved to study the condensed-phase properties of water. Specifically, the TAB formulation will be extended to incorporate the pairwise-non additive, many-body character of both van der Waals and Coulombic interactions into the simulations. This is expected to allow the short- and long-range interactions to fluctuate with the solvent configurations and vary with the thermodynamic conditions. This method will be applied to study liquid-vapor phase equilibria, solvation dynamics, linear nonlinear electronic spectroscopy, and ion transport in water under ambient and supercritical conditions. Many chemical reactions occur in condensed phases consisting of reacting solutes that are dissolved in nonreacting liquid solvents. Water, for example, is a solvent of vital interest to chemistry, biochemistry, and chemical engineering. Supercritical water is technologically important, and this research helps provide useful theoretical models that can have long-range impacts on the fundamental understanding of industrially significant solvation effects doc9149 none This research addresses several problems in three areas of computational complexity. The overall objective in each case is to understand the limits of the capabilities of computers and the algorithms that run on them. The first area of research concerns tradeoffs between the processing time and storage requirements of computations: When can one solve problems using algorithms that are both fast and use small amounts of storage and when is one limited to trading off these two resources, reducing storage requirements only at the cost of additional running time? The second area of research concerns the increased efficiencies in data structures that are possible by taking advantage of the wide range of instructions in modern processors that operate on entire computer words at once. The third area of research involves the analysis of algorithms to solve NP-hard search problems. When many such algorithms search but do not find a solution to a problem, they implicitly provide proofs that no such solution exists. In this portion of the research, the investigators analyze the form of these implicit proofs to show the limits of the efficiencies of these search algorithms. More specifically, the research in time-space tradeoffs builds on the investigators previous work on time-space tradeoff lower bounds and is aimed at extending these results to other natural problems such as graph connectivity and improving the complexity limits shown by current lower bound techniques. The research in data structures works in the model of random-access machines with arbitrary unit-cost operations on word-size quantities. The goal of this data structure research is to understand the limits of the algorithmic improvements possible in this model, particularly for nearest-neighbor queries, priority queues, sorting, and garbage collection. The research on the complexity of NP-search algorithms focuses on the proof complexity of co-NP properties of random structures. The goal is to show that for randomly-chosen inputs, natural proof systems such as resolution almost always require exponential-size proofs of membership in the co-NP sets corresponding to the duals of natural NP problems. A consequence of this would be proofs that large classes of algorithms for solving the NP problems require exponential time on large numbers of inputs doc9150 none Proposal # Michael T. Goodrich Johns Hopkins University This project is focused on the development of data structures and algorithms for performing computations involving the representation, transformation, and visualization of collections of objects that can be modeled geometrically, such as vertices, edges, lines, planes, polygons, curves, and spheres. In particular, it addresses the following topics: 1. Graph visualization: the design of efficient data structures and algorithms for efficiently representing and visualizing relational information. 2. Geometric algorithms: the development of efficient algorithms for solving problems involving geometric data, particularly for problems related to graph visualization. 3. Geometric data structures: the design of fast and efficient data structures for representing graphs and sets of geometric objects. 4. JDSLviz: the implementation of a prototype of a Java library of algorithms for graph visualization. Building on our existing JDSL library of fundamental data structures in Java, we shall identify algorithm engineering design patterns for the geometric computations performed in graph drawing, and implement fundamental graph visualization algorithms as reusable software components. 5. GraphNet: the implementation of an Internet computing infrastructure for graph visualization. Extending previous work on the GeomNet system for geometric computing over the Internet, we plan to build a prototype of a novel Web-based graph layout service in the ASP (application service provider) model. The main objective of this work is the development of general methodologies for the design of geometric data structures and algorithms, as well as their incorporation into software libraries and internet computing services. This work has potential impact in areas of science and engineering that model physical objects or that use geometry for information visualization doc9151 none The increased chip complexity causes that average interconnect lengths increase and proportionally larger and larger fraction of chip s area is occupied by interconnects. This proposal addresses several is-sues related to interconnects in submicron technologies. We will concentrate on simultaneous switching cross-talk noise effects in RC interconnects. Our goal here is to develop efficient, easy to compute and accurate bounds on delay in the presence of crosstalk and to characterize and prevent propagating crosstalk signals. Besides correcting the crosstalk caused prob-lems we will also develop methodologies of circuit optimization in the presence of crosstalk. We will develop gate sizing tool, buffer insertion, spacing and net reordering which will consider both cross-talk and delay. At the same time we will explore regularity at the Boolean level to achieve layouts with mostly local interconnects. The ultimate goal is to develop logic synthesis methodology which would produce highly reg-ular layout structures without large area penalty. We propose to continue our work on wave steered design methodology and we will develop tools for logic synthesis and physical design of such circuits doc9152 none Edmund Clarke CMU : Model checking is an automatic verification technique for concurrent systems such as sequential circuit design and communication protocols in which temporal logic specifications are checked by an exhaustive search of the state space of the concurrent system. Considerable progress has been made in the last two decades, and many major companies are now using model checking. To extend the potential of the method, this project pursues several avenues of research that will enable larger hardware systems and certain software systems to be verified. Model Checking and theorem proving: Theorem proving avoids the state explosion problem, but relies heavily on human guidance and tends to get unmanageable for large designs. The project attempts to find and implement a practical methodology that will combine the benefits of theorem proving and model checking and apply it to verification of processors and security protocols. SAT-based Model Checking: Developed recently as a complementary approach to traditional model checking based on Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs), SAT solvers tend to suffer less from the state explosion problem than BDDs. This project investigates how SAT solvers and BDD techniques can be further integrated to enable verification of larger systems. Software Model Checking: Although the major successes of model checking have been in hardware, the procedure was originally developed for software. The first paper by Clarke and Emerson in proposed extracting the synchronization skeleton of a concurrent program and model checking it. Advances in model checking have generated renewed interest in this approach. This project will explore how to achieve this goal doc9153 none The awardee will support the coordination of the NSF Geospace Environment Modeling (GEM) workshops. The GEM workshops are comprised of a week-long workshop each summer and a half-day mini-workshop in conjunction with each Fall American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting. The funds will support all facets of the workshop including facility planning, meeting logistics, room and audio-visual rental, student and scientist travel support, and associated administrative support. The goals of the workshops are to identify and work toward solutions of outstanding problems in several focused areas of research that will contribute to the ultimate development of a magnetospheric global circulation model. The goal of the workshop coordination is to provide organized forums to foster the community-wide discussions and research needed to achieve the GEM initiative goals doc9154 none James Aspnes Fault-Tolerant Distributed Resource Location Resource location is a fundamental problem in distributed computing. Examples include such basic tasks as translating URLs into machine addresses, mapping telephone numbers to individual telephones, and searching for documents on the Web. Typical current solutions involve maintaining centralized directories that become bottlenecks that impair speed and reliability; such solutions are also unsuited to peer-to-peer systems where individual machines come and go freely. The research examines how to distribute directory information holographically throughout the network, so that the costs of searches are spread evenly, no specialized server machines are needed, and resources can still be found even if a large fraction of the machines leave the system. The main technique is the construction of random graphs whose nodes (representing resources and machines) are assigned coordinates in some space based on their keys. Searching for a resource involves moving a token from some initial node to adjacent nodes closer to the target until the target is reached. Core components of the project are the design of graph structures that provide the correct mix of short-distance and long-distance edges for fast searching and the design of local mechanisms for building and repairing such structures quickly without central coordination doc9155 none Proposal # The NSF REU Program at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute presents upper division science majors with pre-graduate school summer research experiences. Students will participate in a challenging ten week program focused in the area of molecular biology. Special efforts will continue to be made to recruit members of recognized under-represented groups and females. More importantly our goal is to recruit undergraduate students that are interested in pursuing scientific careers and may come from colleges that do not have active research programs. Senior faculty serve as mentors. Participants learn science by doing science. Under the tutelage of senior faculty, students are exposed to the realities of a life as a scientist. An environment is created in which the student evolves from a passive, dependent learner to an active member of the research team. The Institute s commitment to the Research Experience for Undergraduates Program is genuine. This program has been in continuous operation since and it has served as a model for other summer research programs. The scientific lifestyle is further explored throughout our program in various seminars activities and culminates in our concluding three-day scientific mini-conference. This is where the students give oral and poster presentations of their research to their peers and the Institute s scientific faculty. Other summer experiences include attendance at our distinguished lecture series, career counseling sessions, and weekend social activities doc9156 none This project deals with two major areas of mathematical relativity which border on the fields of 3-manifold topology on the one hand and numerical experimental relativity on the other. The first research topic treats the question of how the spatial topology of the universe affects its long-time evolution. The second topic involves the development of an efficient and accurate numerical scheme for the computation of gravitational waves produced by colliding black holes. The importance of the first topic is that it seeks to unify the study of the evolutionary properties of the universe with various geometrization results and conjectures from pure mathematics, thereby broadening the scope of results in either field of study. The importance of the second topic is that it seeks to support the experimental search for gravitational waves by improving the theoretical understanding of possible sources of such waves doc9157 none Chandran Galaxy clusters are among the largest organized structures in the observed universe and play an important role in our understanding of the evolution of the universe as a whole. Intriguingly, these clusters possess vast quantities of plasma (hot ionized gas) in the enormous spaces between their galaxies. Typically, there is much more mass in a cluster s plasma than in all the stars in all the galaxies within a cluster. Because this plasma is such an important constituent of a cluster, its evolution poses an important and challenging problem for astronomers. With the advent of x-ray satellites, astronomers discovered that intracluster plasmas cool by emitting huge amounts of high energy x-rays. As the plasma within a cluster cools, the pressure within the plasma decreases, which enables gravity to compress the plasma and force it inwards towards the cluster s center. The rate at which plasma flows inwards is currently the subject of considerable controversy within the astrophysical community. Some astronomers believe that the radiative cooling of intracluster plasma is offset by heating. For example, as the plasma near a cluster s center cools, heat can be conducted inwards from the hotter plasma surrounding a cluster s core. Such heating sustains the pressure of the plasma in the core, reducing the rate of inflow. Other astronomers believe that heating of cluster plasma is minimal, so that large quantities of intracluster plasma are accreted towards a cluster s center. This project will help resolve this controversy by determining the efficiency of thermal conduction in galaxy clusters. The subtlety is that intracluster plasmas are turbulent and magnetized. The particles which carry heat from hot regions to cold regions are constrained to move primarily along the magnetic field, so that if the magnetic field has a tangled topology, the transport of heat is slowed. This project will use numerical simulations of turbulent plasmas to determine the rate of heat conduction amidst such tangled magnetic fields. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9158 none The scientific aim of this collaborative project is to carry out precise measurements of certain transition energies between the n=2 levels on intermediate Z hydrogen-like and helium-like ions. The measurements will test quantum electrodynamic calculations, particularly of higher-order binding corrections, in one- and two-electron systems. The work has relevance to the interpretation of precision spectroscopy of hydrogen and helium and hence to obtaining values for the Rydberg constant and the fine structure constant. The method to be used involves laser spectroscopy of fast, foil-stripped ion beams from the Florida State Van de Graaff accelerator. The work will involve graduate and undergraduate students from Florida State and Florida A&M Universities doc9159 none Research in theoretical elementary particle physics will focus on the study of the symmetries and the dynamics of string theory, quantum field theories and integrable quantum spin chains. A better understanding of the symmetries of physical models will give us detailed information about the interaction of particles. String theory is the only known consistent candidate for a unifying model of all the fundamental interactions (forces) of nature including gravity. The study of symmetries will lead to new quantitative methods for computing quantities of physical interest, such as the masses of the elementary particles. The investigations of integrable quantum field theories and spin chains will provide exact results for such quantities and will serve as test beds for many ideas. This work is significant for quantifying our understanding of the elementary particles and the forces of nature doc9160 none This proposal describes a novel approach for designing network control algorithms that incorporate online simulation using traffic models. The approach facilitates rapid heuristic analysis of simulation data, and can be applied to a wide variety of network control problems, and can be applied to a wide variety of network decision problems. The PIs have proof-of-concept implementations of this approach for two simple problems: the multiclass weighted scheduling problem, and the problem of selecting a dropping policy for random early detection (RED). In both cases, they have empirically demonstrated substantially superior performance when comparing to previous control policies. The PIs propose the substantial exploration, analysis, and implementation of their technique. They plan to apply these ideas to network decision problems including admission access control, flow congestion control, various problems relating to proxy services, and selection of diagnosis and recovery actions. They also plan to extend these ideas to closed-loop systems such as TCP flows, as well as to evaluate the issues that arise in utilizing various traffic models, including fluid-flow and long-range dependence traffic models. This plan exploits the growing work on traffic modeling, providing the potential to use such models to impact network control performance. The broad applicability of the proposed approach opens the possibility for simultaneous improvement of a wide array of control algorithms across the network. The use of this control approach together with familiar model inference techniques to update the traffic model under changing network environments (including attacks) also leads naturally to adaptive control mechanisms for the same wide variety of problems doc9097 none The goal of this research is to develop scalable procedures for the derivation of high-quality tests specifically designed for digital logic circuits that contain scan to enhance testability. Such procedures are needed since scan (either full or partial scan) is currently used in most electronic chips, and is expected to continue to be the prevalent design-for-testability technique for design paradigms such as core-based design. The investigators develop procedures for test generation, test compaction, identification of undetectable faults, built-in test generation and delay fault testing specifically targeting scan circuits. In the test application scheme used in this research, a sequence of one or more primary input vectors is applied between every two scan operations. In all the procedures developed, the goal is to use sequences of primary input vectors that are as long as possible. The reasons are that long sequences of primary input vectors contribute to at-speed testing of the circuit, which is important for detecting delay defects, and they allow the number of tests to be kept low, which reduces the test application time. In addition, the circuit operates in its normal mode of operation, potentially resulting in average power consumption which is typical of normal operation. Several commercial tools use the test application scheme adopted in this research, justifying its consideration. However, only a small number of studies have been reported in the literature of effective solutions to the various testing problems under this scheme. This research develops tools that may be used together to provide a comprehensive and scalable solution to the special problems associated with testing of scan circuits under this test application scheme doc9162 none Two software systems, SATO (SAtisfiability Test Optimized) and SEM (a System for Enumerating Models), developed with the NSF support, have been widely and successfully used for solving many problems often considered a challenge for automated reasoning systems. SATO and SEM were used to solve over a hundred cases of of previously open problems in algebras and logics. The proposed research will further increase the reasoning power of SATO and SEM. A new experimental software system called HOTTER (a Humble OTTER) will be fine-tuned for the high-performance first-order satisfiability testing. The main objective of this research is to develop high performance model generation techniques. These software systems will be serve as an environment for experimenting and developing these techniques, and will be available to the public. Many computational problems from a variety of fields, i.e., software and hardware verification, circuit design verification, scheduling and planning, can be reformulated as a model generation problems. Instead of creating special-purpose software for these problems, an alternative and competitive approach is to write the problems in a model-generation language and then submit the problems to a model generator optimized to this language. Another objective of this research is to support this approach by designing a general-purpose language for model generation, and implementing it with SATO, SEM, and HOTTER as its components. The language will provide an easy-to-use model generator for people in various fields doc9163 none This project supports a research conference and competition for undergraduate and masters level graduate students who are conducting research with faculty members from the disciplines of Anthropology, History, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology. In a variety of ways, the conference encourages undergraduate students to enter graduate school and encourage masters level graduate students to continue. First, it helps give them the motivation and opportunity to participate in the kind of research with faculty mentors that they would do in graduate school. Second, it exposes them to other students involved in research, and possibly interested in continuing their education. Third, it brings in outside speakers to discuss the values and rewards associated with the research process, and an invited plenary speaker to further address the topic of minority students in graduate education. Fourth, it makes awards of $500, $250, and $100 for the top three places in the undergraduate and graduate competition. The conference expands on previously smaller conferences that proved successful in getting participating students to apply to graduate school. It recruits student participants from the South Texas region, hoping in particular to attract minority and first-generation college students, and to enhance their motivation and competitiveness in being accepted into graduate programs and in seeking leadership roles in diverse professions doc9164 none logics, induction theorem proving, and process algebra. The new unification algorithms will be first developed and experimented using the Unification Workbench, a tool under development at SUNY, Albany, with the eventual goal of integrating them into application software, the NRL Protocol Analyzer and a rewrite-based induction theorem prover RRL (Rewrite Rule Laboratory) for use in the applications discussed above. This award is one of three in a collaborative research team. The three awards are (Deepak Kapur, U New Mexico), (Christopher Lynch, Clarkson U), and (Paliath Narendran, SUNY Albany doc9165 none This project concerns links between programming language theory and semantics and formal methods in security analysis, on two levels of modeling detail. 1) Multiset rewriting framework (MSR), in which protocol execution is carried out symbolically, detects common protocol errors. The project studies decision problems for reachability in the MSR formalism extended with disequality testing. MSR formal analysis is also extended to properties of fair exchange protocols. The relationship between MSR and the secure pi-calculus is investigated. 2)A different approach develops an analysis of cryptographic protocols based on the methods of programming language theory, but incorporating the probabilistic techniques of cryptography. This approach allows the analysis of probabilistic protocols and probabilistic encryption. The proposed work in this direction develops principles and proof rules for reasoning about probabilistic observational equivalence. Foundational questions about probabilistic process calculus are addressed, such as a precise operational semantics of the calculus and the establishment of polynomial upper bounds on process execution in an extended version of the calculus that allows polynomial iteration. An information-theoretic variant of the calculus and the relationship to MSR are investigated doc9166 none Switching activity estimation is an important aspect of power estimation at circuit level. Although simulations can provide accurate estimates of switching activity, since simulations are time consuming, recently, probabilistic models are being considered that can capture temporal, spatial and sequential correlations in a circuit. In this research, we propose to explore a novel switching probability estimation strategy using Bayesian networks. Bayesian Networks (BN) can be used to effectively model complex conditional dependencies over a set of random variables. The BN inference schemes serve as powerful computational mechanisms that transform the circuit into a junction tree of cliques to allow for probability propagation by local message passing. The proposed approach is accurate and fast. We intend to investigate (i) power estimation of very large combinational circuits (by developing segmentation schemes) with input modeling to handle complexly correlated input signals, (ii) Bayesian network formalism to handle real delay models with glitches, and (iii) switching estimation in sequential circuits using the Bayesian networks model doc9167 none The proposed research aims to explore several fundamental issues of orientation-induced crystallization in polymers. These issues include: (1) the mechanism of initial stages of crystallization in oriented chains, (2) the overall kinetics of crystallization from the system containing chains of varying degrees of orientation, (3) the effects of molecular weight, molecular weight distribution, chain architecture and chain branching on orientation-induced crystallization, (4) the influence of molecularly dispersed nanostructured molecules on the chain orientation, and (5) the resultant morphology consisting of oriented crystal, oriented mesomorphic and unoriented amorphous phases. To accomplish these goals, it is proposed to carry out four research projects including: (a) the weak shear-flow study under step-shear and steady-state shear conditions, (b) the strong elongation-flow study, (c) the study of the effect of molecularly dispersed nanostructured molecules in polymers, and (d) the study of crystallization in oriented polymers using supercritical carbon dioxide (CO2) as a mean to control molecular orientation. The planned experiments will include the use of combined methods of rheology, a high-pressure apparatus, in-situ optical (light scattering, birefringence and Raman spectroscopy) and x-ray (small- and wide-angle x-ray scattering with synchrotron radiation) techniques and ex-situ microscopic techniques. %%% The significance of the research lays in the fact that orientation-induced crystallization remains one of the most important problems in polymer processing today, and the subject is not fully understood. It is hoped that with the proposed study, an in-depth understanding about the subject can be obtained, increasing the ability to correlate the structure, morphology, process and property relationships for crystalline polymers, thus benefiting the polymer industry doc9168 none Nonperturbative methods will be developed for investigation of the structure and dynamics (both classical and quantum) of extended (Rydberg) atoms in static and time-dependent external fields. One approach will be to study Rydberg hydrogen atoms in polarized fields. A second approach will involve developing a new time-dependent density functional theory and applying it to the structure and dynamics of complex Rydberg atoms in external fields doc9169 none Ricketts This award to University of Minnesota Duluth provides instrumentation to significantly improve the Great Lakes research capabilities of the institution and the research vessel Blue Heron, a ship operated by the Large Lakes Observatory of UMD as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The optical plankton counter, water sampling bottles and zoological sampling nets supported here will significantly enhance capabilities for biological and environmental studies in Lake Superior, and the antennas for the GPS units will allow more precise vessel motion correction, important for a variety of instruments. These improvements will be of substantial advantage to scientists using Blue Heron in their research during and future years doc9170 none Evans In September a large earthquake occurred on the Chelungpu fault in Taiwan. The fault forms the boundary between the highlands of central Taiwan and the coastal plain along the western side of the island. The earthquake resulted in fatalities, ~$11 billion in damage, and the development of spectacular fault scarps along an 85Km long surface rupture. The Chelengpu rupture illustrates one of the outstanding questions in earthquake rupture dynamics and the related issues of earthquake hazard analysis - how does seismic energy radiate to the ground surface, and what are the near surface conditions that lead to the distribution of slip and ground motion associated with large earthquakes? The Japanese geophysical community, with funding from the Japanese Ministry of Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), plans to address this and related questions by drilling two 300-m holes through the tip of the fault at two sites. These cored holes will examine the character of the fault zone and attempt to address questions regarding the nature of slip propagation in the near surface region. These cored holes provide a unique opportunity to extend our understanding of fault zone structure beyond that typically examined in paleoseismological investigations into a region where very little is known about the structure and composition of the fault zone and its relationship to the radiation or dispersal of seismic energy. This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) award will allow the Principal Investigator to take advantage of this rare opportunity to investigate the near surface tip zone of a large, recently rupture fault by providing funds for the full suite of borehole geophysical logs and to provide two on-site structural geologists to collaborate on the initial core logging and borehole geophysical logging of the two holes. They will analyze the borehole data, and integrate detailed surface rupture trace maps, bedrock exposure mapping, and shallow seismic reflection data in collaboration with Japanese and Taiwanese geologists, to provide a detailed description of the fault zone, including fault composition and structure, fluid characteristics, location and nature of the high-slip zones. Samples will be collected for further testing and analysis. Drilling will begin in November and last for approximately two months, thus the time urgency of this SGER request. This work, through international collaboration and integrated methodologies, will provide a detailed view of the processes and structure of a major seismogenic fault in the upper km of the earth, and yield significant new insights into the processes by which seismic energy reaches the earth s surface during large earthquakes doc9171 none The award made to Dr. Evan Williams of the University of California at Berkeley entitled Hydration of Biomolecules and Metal Ions Investigated by Mass Spectrometry is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program. The goal of the research is to increase the fundamental knowledge of how the properties of biomolecules change as they change from isolated species in the gas phase to solution phase species. There are four research objectives, 1) characterizing the formation of zwitterions in hydrated ion-amino acid clusters, 2) measuring the binding energies of hydrated peptides and alkaline earth dications, 3) determining the structures of hydrated peptides and alkaline earth dications, and 4) establishing the reaction rates of hydrated dication-amino acid clusters. The work will be performed on specialized equipment which includes electrospray ionization with Blackbody Infrared Radiative Dissociation (BIRD) on an ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometer. The research related to the enhanced BIRD cell design is both original and creative. This fundamental research into gas phase ion chemistry; kinetics, thermochemistry, structure and mechanism is ambitious and novel. The research will have a significant impact because it bridges the gap between gas phase physical chemical studies and solution phase biomolecular chemistry and because it will impact each field individually as well doc9172 none The PI of this project will continue to work on problems in algebraic group theory using three algebraic cohomology theories having topological origin: motivic cohomology, algebraic K-theory and algebraic cobordism. The PI proposes to work on three relatively independent topics. The first topic is devoted to the rationality problem of algebraic groups and deals with motivic cohomology. The PI expects to find a Postnikov tower for the motive of a simply connected group involving motives of projective homogeneous varieties. The second topic is related to algebraic cobordism. The PI sees the opportunity to use this theory in order to approach the general Rost s degree formula. The latter has many applications in the theory of homogeneous spaces of algebraic groups. The third topic, the essential dimension, although seemingly different from the others, nevertheless, involves the phenomenon of compression of algebraic varieties and hence is closely related to the second topic. The PI proposes to use degree formulas for the computation of essential dimensions of algebraic groups. The area of this project lies between algebraic geometry, the branch of mathematics devoted to geometric objects called algebraic varieties and described by polynomial equations, and algebraic topology where one studies continuously varying families of structures called topological spaces. Translating the methods of topology from topological spaces to algebraic varieties gives new tools to solve problems in algebraic geometry. Much of this project is about using techniques that are of a topological nature to obtain a better understanding of certain problems in algebraic geometry doc9164 none logics, induction theorem proving, and process algebra. The new unification algorithms will be first developed and experimented using the Unification Workbench, a tool under development at SUNY, Albany, with the eventual goal of integrating them into application software, the NRL Protocol Analyzer and a rewrite-based induction theorem prover RRL (Rewrite Rule Laboratory) for use in the applications discussed above. This award is one of three in a collaborative research team. The three awards are (Deepak Kapur, U New Mexico), (Christopher Lynch, Clarkson U), and (Paliath Narendran, SUNY Albany doc9174 none In order to maintain the spectacular rates of growth in the semiconductor industry over the past three decades, it will be necessary in the future to move away from the most traditional ways of building VLSI circuits. This research will explore problems in this domain. The main thrust of the research is related to providing design automation support for circuits using silicon on insulator (SOI) technology, although some aspects of the work will have applicability to the widely used bulk CMOS technology. This research will develop SOI-specific synthesis techniques, as well as optimization techniques that enable the designer to exploit technologies such as dual threshold voltages. Issues related to related to physical design will also be considered doc9175 none Security system architecture, which defines structure of the system, the interaction and coordination among its components, has profound impacts on the security system performance, reliability, interoperability and consistency among other critical properties. The purpose of this project is to develop a formal methodology to model security systems architectures and to assess key quality attributes of the composition. The proposed methodology has several integrated elements: First, an aspect-based architecture modeling framework is developed, which organized heterogeneous system properties into self-contained and yet integrated multi-level aspect models. Each aspect model can be constructed, changed and analyzed individually with minimal burden of complexity from the other models. Second, architecture-based constraint patterns are investigated. These constraint patterns define what conditions or properties that each component and their composition must satisfy under a security architecture. Based on the aspect architecture models, techniques will be developed to decompose system-wide constraint patterns onto individual components and to verify the consistency between global and component constraints. These patterns are the behavioral basis for checking and assuring end-to-end properties in system composition. Third, mature but individually homogeneous analysis techniques will be combined into a flexible and scalable method for analyzing the aspect models against their constraint patterns doc9176 none Two low-turbulence inlets (LTIs) for use on the NCAR C-130 aircraft will be fabricated and deployed during the ACE-Asia program (Aerosol Characterization Experiment-Asia). These inlets permit the slowing of the aerosol sample from the true air speed of the airplane, approximately 100 m s, to a few m s without subjecting the sample to turbulent deposition in the diffuser. This turbulence reduction is achieved through boundary layer suction in the diffuser. A suction flow control system will be installed in order to maintain the desired sample flow as aircraft operating parameters change. The data characterizing the inlet performance will be collected and used to calculate the net enhancement factors which include the effects of anisokinetic sampling and inertial enhancement of large particles in the diffuser. These new inlets will, for the first time, allow airborne sampling of atmospheric aerosols of sub- and supermicron size without turbulent losses of larger particles. Even though large particles will actually be enhanced by these inlets, it will be possible to quantify their concentrations because the enhancement can be calculated. The inlets will be made available to NCAR ATD and the community for use in future programs after the completion of ACE-Asia doc9177 none Innovations in computer and communications technologies are making it easier and faster to do things but also bring with them new security risks. This proposal is concerned with cryptography, which is an important component in the provision of security in the electronic world. A cryptographer designs schemes, or protocols, for tasks such as data authentication, data encryption, identification, and key distribution which are implemented and incorporated into the computer systems and are responsible for imbuing data and transactions with attributes like privacy and integrity. Providing high-quality, cost-effective cryptography is a challenge because cryptographic protocols are easy to specify but hard to analyze, and notorious for containing bugs that take a long time to be discovered. The goal of this project is to identify and tackle practical problems in cryptographic protocol design and analysis based on theoretical techniques, delivering real-world usable protocols backed by theoretically sound security analyses, and thereby impact implementation, usage and standardization of cryptography in the computer and communications industry. The specific research proposed here is on three broad topics: anonymity, authenticated encryption and asymmetric identification protocols. The term ``anonymity is broadly used to refer to issues regarding keeping private the identities of parties engaging in electronic transactions. The researchers will investigate anonymity for mix-nets, anonymous encryption, and blind signatures. In each case they will look at both foundational issues such as definitions, and then the possibility of practical, proven secure constructions. In the authenticated encryption domain they will investigate the security of the popular encrypt-with-redundancy paradigm. Finally they will consider the design of identification protocols secure against attackers having the powerful capability of resetting the internal state of the client machine and also seek improved transformations of identification protocols to digital signature schemes doc9178 none The project studies typed heterogeneous meta-programming systems where the meta-language and the object-language are different languages, with different type systems. The objective of the project is to design and implement a system with a fixed meta-language, in which it is possible to build different systems with different object-languages, or one system with multiple object-languages. The project studies how to integrate the multiple type systems that must coexist in a heterogeneous meta programming system. The type system of the meta-language must be extensible, in a manner that makes it possible to incorporate the type systems of arbitrary object languages. The goal is to produce a system where type correct meta-programs produce only type-correct object-programs. Ideas from extensible kinds, higher-order abstract syntax, intensional analysis of code, indexed-types, and the use of constrained type systems will be investigated as mechanisms to accomplish these goals doc9179 none This work will continue studies in nonlinear optics with bosons (nonclassical fields, confined geometries) and now also consider nonlinear optics with fermionic fields. Topics for bosons will include the generation of squeezed matter-wave fields, entangled optical and matter-wave fields, and instabilities resulting from wave mixing, as well as the possibilities and challenges associated with reduced dimensionality. Potential applications of fermionic fields include fermionic atom lasers and sources of atoms on demand doc9180 none Michael Mackay, Stevens Institute of Technology In a set of preliminary experiments, the PI was able to blend low concentration nanoscale particles in linear chain polymer of the same species. Remarkably, the rheology of this blended material is altered in such a way that its viscosity and modulus are reduced. This effect will have potential favorable impact on procession of polymers. The aim of the present proposal is to determine the mechanism by which the viscosity and the modulus are reduced by a set of planned experiments doc9181 none Proposal # Ye, Qiang U of Kentucky This project will develop preconditioned Krylov subspace methods with analysis for computing a few eigenvalues of a large generalized eigenvalue problem Ax = lambda Bx, and study their robust implementations with a long term goal to develop a specialized package for public distributions. The resulting algorithms should inherit desirable characteristics of the existing Krylov subspace methods, but extend their capability for efficient preconditioning. The feasibility of this objective has been demonstrated by a preliminary study that led to an algorithm of this type for computing the smallest eigenvalue of a symmetric definite problem. In this project, this preliminary work will be strengthened and its idea further developed and generalized to produce algorithms that are capable of delivering extreme as well as interior eigenvalues for symmetric as well as nonsymmetric problems alike. This project builds upon the PI s research expertise and contributions over the past decade, to significantly advance the state-of-the-art of numerical methods for large matrix eigenvalue problems. Unifying several existing ideas and concepts and bringing new approaches, the resulting methods would be an ideal topics for classroom learning and thesis research. Moreover, the preliminary study indicates that they would be well suited for black-box implementations and thus have the potential to reach a broader application community doc9182 none Proposal # Duke University Liu, Qing Huo In this interdisciplinary project, we propose to develop fast algorithms for electromagnetic and elastic wave scattering in layered media. The impetus for such a joint effort is the ever increasing demand for efficient and accurate numerical simulation tools for electronic packaging and geophysical exploration where wave phenomenon plays an important role for design, evaluation, prediction and production. In both applications, there is a pressing need for fast solution techniques for full wave equations in layered media, namely, Maxwell s equations for electronic packaging and both electromagnetic and elastic wave equations for geophysical exploration. As the numerical issues involved in the solution of both wave equations share many common features, a concerted effort to develop fast algorithms for wave scattering in layered media will have a significant impact in both areas. In a high-speed electronic package, interconnects are one of the determining factors for the speed performance of the system. Such a high order effect is not easily captured in either equations or tables, rendering conventional timing driven layout techniques inaccurate and obsolete. One must fully characterize the interconnect structures to ensure on-chip signal integrity and to achieve the expected high-speed system performance. Therefore, there is a strong need for faster and more accurate full-wave electromagnetic analysis tools to extract parasitic parameters such as resistance, capacitance, and inductance. On the other hand, in geophysical exploration for oil and gas, electromagnetic and acoustic sensors are widely used to probe complex geologic structures. The goal of electromagnetic and acoustic subsurface sensing is to infer from these measurements the electromagnetic and mechanical properties of the formation, and to combine with other, such as nuclear, measurements to determine the petrophysical characteristics of the reservoir. The interpretation of these easurements, however, remains a challenging problem because of the complicated interaction of waves with the complex geologic structures and wellbore. The interpretation and processing of these measurements depend on fast and accurate forward and inverse solutions of lectromagnetic and acoustic waves in large-scale, highly heterogeneous media. The main emphasis of this proposal is on numerical algorithm development relevant to direct problems for electromagnetic and elastic waves propagation in layered media. A frequency domain integral equation formulation will be used. Major tasks include fast calculation of dyadic Green s functions for general layered media; fast matrix-vector multiplication and robust preconditioner for matrix solver; construction and study of high order basis functions for large targets; application of the obtained numerical algorithms in electronic packaging and geophysical exploration. Both PI s have extensive experience in the proposed application areas---parameter extraction for VLSI and RF component design (Cai) and geophysical subsurface sensing and electronic packaging (Liu). The collaborated research will greatly benefit the electronics and oil exploration industry, and our research and educational programs in electrical engineering and applied mathematics and scientific computation doc9183 none ions, algorithms, and data structures, for more efficient model checking; integration of model checking with other program design methods; automatic program synthesis via model checking; and the feasibility of extending the dichotomous (correct incorrect) framework of conventional model checking using richer program robustness notions doc9158 none The scientific aim of this collaborative project is to carry out precise measurements of certain transition energies between the n=2 levels on intermediate Z hydrogen-like and helium-like ions. The measurements will test quantum electrodynamic calculations, particularly of higher-order binding corrections, in one- and two-electron systems. The work has relevance to the interpretation of precision spectroscopy of hydrogen and helium and hence to obtaining values for the Rydberg constant and the fine structure constant. The method to be used involves laser spectroscopy of fast, foil-stripped ion beams from the Florida State Van de Graaff accelerator. The work will involve graduate and undergraduate students from Florida State and Florida A&M Universities doc9185 none Baragiola Dr. Raul Baragiola, at the University of Virginia, will carry out laboratory research to address key questions about the surfaces of icy satellites in the outer solar system and their interaction with energetic radiation and atmospheric species. Dr. Baragiola plans to measure the interaction of atomic oxygen with water and carbonaceous minerals. Experiments will be set up to learn how the results for protons scale for highly ionizing, heavier ions, which constitute the predominant source of magnetospheric sputtering in the outer solar system. The ability to control the morphology of amorphous ice will be followed by the study of how microstructure affects the adsorption absorption of atmospheric gases and optical reflectance. The research has direct implications for comets, ring particles, and interstellar grains. The results also have applications to remote sensing of ices on Earth, the physics and chemistry of mesospheric ice in the Earth s upper atmosphere, processing of materials by ion and photons, materials science of amorphous materials, radiation effects in biological tissue and exobiology doc9186 none Proposal # New York University Michael Overton Non-Lipschitz Optimization Problems involving Eigenvalues Optimization problems involving eigenvalues arise in many applications. In recent years, attention has focused on semidefinite programs, which are linear optimization problems in the space of real symmetric matrices, with positive semidefinite constraints. This project focuses on optimization problems in the larger space of square matrices, not necessarily symmetric. In the problems being studied, eigenvalues may appear in the optimization objective, in the constraints, or both. The dependence of eigenvalues as functions of a matrix is non-Lipschitz at points where the eigenvalue multiplicity is greater than one. Hence, such optimization problems are non-Lipschitz. They arise in areas ranging from control theory (e.g., stability constraints) to Markov chains (e.g., optimizing convergence rates). The goal is fourfold: analyze theoretical questions including necessary and sufficient conditions for optimality; build on these theoretical foundations to develop numerical algorithms that are able to find minimizers and verify that they satisfy optimality conditions; implement the algorithms in software that can be used by the general scientific community; and apply the results to the solution of important interesting problems that arise in practice doc9187 none Design of high performance clusters with Quality-of-Service (QoS)guarantees is becoming increasingly important to support a variety of scientific and commercial applications. Performance of a cluster can be improved by an efficient scheduling mechanism. Although a few communication-guided scheduling algorithms have been proposed recently for clusters, these schemes have not been tested on large platforms to examine the potential benefits. Therefore, the main motivation of this research is to design scalable and efficient scheduling algorithms for clusters. The proposed research addresses three related issues. First, an in-depth evaluation of the existing scheduling schemes will be done on a large cluster platform using real workloads before developing new algorithms. Second, various design issues in implementing these algorithms on the generic virtual interface architecture (VIA) will be explored. Finally, the research will examine QoS provisioning mechanisms to facilitate predictable performance in clusters. The success of this research is expected to have many important contributions in the area of cluster computing. Primarily, the practical scheduling algorithms developed in this research can be used on large platforms. The results from the VIA and QoS research should provide novel solutions to satisfy different performance and QoS requirements, and should foster further research in this area doc9188 none The investigator will study numerical algorithms for solving moderate to large scale eigenvalue and generalized eigenvalue problems. There are two lines of research. One is to investigate a new kind of parallelizable Hessenberg eigen-value algorithm termed subdivision-by-deflation . The subdivision-by-deflation algorithm reduces the computational complexity and increases the parallelism of Hessenberg eigenvalue problems. This has the potential of reducing the computational cost of the Hessenberg eigenvalue problem significantly below current levels. The other line of research involves continued development of TTQRE, a variant QR algorithm for solving the moderate scale algebraic eigenvalue problem. Although TTQRE has already proved itself to be a significant advance over traditional QR algorithms, it has not yet reached its full potential. Strategies will be designed that adjust its fundamental parameters dynamically during execution. This project supports a graduate student who will participate in the project. The student s training will benefit from practical computational experience on real parallel computers as from the work with theoretical problems doc9189 none Proposal # Mount, David U of Maryland, College Park The vitality of computational geometry depends heavily on its relevance to real-world problems and applications. This field has made significant contributions to these areas, but continued success requires an understanding of the constraints and structure present in the problems that arise in typical applications. Traditional worst-case asymptotic analysis is often too blunt a tool for establishing the efficiency of geometric algorithms, since geometric data sets often contain simplifying structure, which worst-case efficient algorithms may ignore. Another reason is that worst-case analyses may lead designers to concentrate on difficult data configurations that arise only rarely in practice. As a result, many designers of geometric software do not look to computational geometry as a relevant source of algorithms, and instead rely on heuristics of unproven performance. The goal of this research is counter this perception by developing ad implementing algorithms and data structures for geometric problems that are both efficient in practice and whose efficiency is formally provable. Our approach in achieving practical efficiency is through a sensitivity to presence of simplifying structure. For most algorithms this structure may be present in the input. For data structures this structure is present in the distribution of the queries. Our goal is to design and analyze algorithms and data structures that are most efficient when this simplifying structure is present. In the absence of this structure, these algorithms would ideally degrade to the best worst-case algorithms. This approach will be applied to geometric problems in information retrieval (multidimensional nearest neighbor searching and point location) pattern recognition, robust statistics, and in clustering doc9190 none Proposal Number: PI: R. Sekar Department of Computer Science SUNY @ Stony Brook NY Networked software systems are playing increasingly important roles in critical services such as commerce, banking and telecommunication. Existing techniques for protecting such systems against intruder attacks are reactive in nature, offering little protection against unknown attacks. Solutions, such as applying security patches, last only until newer attacks emerge. System administrators are thus in a constant struggle to stay ahead of a vast army of resourceful hackers. This project develops a proactive approach to protect software systems against known and unknown attacks. It is based on high-level models of security-relevant system behaviors. Actual behaviors are compared against these models to detect deviations, which are deemed to indicate attacks. In order for the approach to work with COTS software, behaviors are modeled in terms of events observable external to the software system, e.g., invocation of system calls and reception transmission of network packets. In contrast with previous work, which was mainly concerned with post-attack detection, the proposed approach can prevent and or contain damage due to attacks. Moreover, it addresses a wide range of threats within a single framework, including software errors in trusted programs, untrusted mobile code and malicious software doc9191 none Gayley, Kenneth Are Optically Thick Winds Regulated by the Distribution Over Line Wavelength Rather Than Line Strength? The most massive stars are predestined to end their active lives with a supernova outburst. Prior to this terminal event, such a star undergoes substantial mass loss through radially driven winds that are many orders of magnitude stronger than those associated with stars of smaller mass like the Sun. It is important to understand how these winds operate, not only because of their part in transferring matter and energy into the interstellar medium but also because of the need to fix the initial parameters of the supernova explosion which itself in turn will enrich the interstellar medium with matter and with energy generated deep in the stellar interior. During the course of this award, the PI and his student. will explore those factors which lead to the extremely large mass loss rates in Wolf-Rayet stars. The plan is to work from the assumption that the major opacity factor is the wavelength distribution of the absorption lines in the expanding stellar atmosphere. Detailed calculations will be carried out to see how this drives the extreme mass loss from these stars doc9192 none Proposal # Purdue Research Foundation Doerschuk, Peter C A key challenge in computational structural biology is the determination of the 3-D structure of a virus, and especially dynamical changes in 3-D structure which are central to understanding the function of the virus. This information is central to rational design of drugs to combat viral infections and to the use of viruses for other purposes, e.g., as vehicles for the targeted delivery of drugs to specific organs. Solving these problems involves the development, analysis, implementation and use of new algorithms for two numerical computation problems, global optimization and multidimensional quadrature. The investigators compute a 3-D structure by locating the global minimum of a cost which is a function of experimental data and of a predictor, and which quantitates the difference between the data and the prediction of the data. The predictor, whose evaluation requires multidimensional quadrature, is a function of parameters describing the 3-D structure of the virus and any unknown aspects of the data collection process and the minimization is with respect to these parameters. Performance of the approach is limited by the global optimization and quadrature tools and therefore these tools are the foci of this research. Key global optimization issues are exploiting the multi-scale structure of the data and parameters in the cost due to the presence of Fourier transforms and the tradeoff between accuracy and computational expense in the evaluation of the cost due to embedded quadratures. Key multidimensional quadrature issues are the unusual integrands and regions of integration, e.g., to integrate a function of three variables with icosahedral symmetry over the three Euler angles that define a 3-D rotation doc9193 none Popescu The proposed research considers problems in noncommutative harmonic analysis, operator algebras, and interpolation in several variables. The framework of this proposal is mainly the full Fock space, certain noncommutative (resp. commutative) analytic Toeplitz algebras, and the algebra of all bounded linear operators on a Hilbert space. Noncommutative dilation theory, Poisson transforms on $C^ $-algebras generated by isometries, and commutant lifting theorems are considered in order to find noncommutative (resp. commutative) multivariable analogues to some classical results. The main directions of this proposed research are the following: harmonic analysis on Fock spaces; power bounded sequences of operators, structure, and numerical invariants; central intertwining lifting, suboptimization, and analytic interpolation in several variables; dilation theory for tuples of operators (noncontractions) and non-analytic interpolation in several variables. The motivation of this research is the recent worldwide interest in the noncommutative aspect of harmonic analysis originated from the concept of quantization which links together several branches of mathematics and is closely related to mathematical physics. The objective of this research is to advance the understanding of the relatively new area of multivariable operator theory and apply some of these results to the study of completely positive maps and their invariants, function theory and interpolation in several variables, multivariable linear systems, scattering, control theory, and model theory for tuples of operators. Popescu The proposed research considers problems in noncommutative harmonic analysis, operator algebras, and interpolation in several variables. The framework of this proposal is mainly the full Fock space, certain noncommutative (resp. commutative) analytic Toeplitz algebras, and the algebra of all bounded linear operators on a Hilbert space. Noncommutative dilation theory, Poisson transforms on $C^ $-algebras generated by isometries, and commutant lifting theorems are considered in order to find noncommutative (resp. commutative) multivariable analogues to some classical results. The main directions of this proposed research are the following: harmonic analysis on Fock spaces; power bounded sequences of operators, structure, and numerical invariants; central intertwining lifting, suboptimization, and analytic interpolation in several variables; dilation theory for tuples of operators (noncontractions) and non-analytic interpolation in several variables. The motivation of this research is the recent worldwide interest in the noncommutative aspect of harmonic analysis originated from the concept of quantization which links together several branches of mathematics and is closely related to mathematical physics. The objective of this research is to advance the understanding of the relatively new area of multivariable operator theory and apply some of these results to the study of completely positive maps and their invariants, function theory and interpolation in several variables, multivariable linear systems, scattering, control theory, and model theory for tuples of operators doc9194 none Regression testing is an important, but expensive part of modern software development practices. Central hypotheses of the project are that several key issues have not been adequately considered in current research and that these issues can be exploited, singly and in combination, to control the regression testing process. If true, then successful research will lead to cheaper, faster, more predictable and more effective regression testing processes, thereby saving a great deal of time and money throughout the industry. Consequently, the project conducts the following experiments: 1. Compare different RTS techniques and to explain how features of their inputs affect their performance. 2. Measure how different application policies (rules that trigger regression testing) affect RTS performance. 3. Develop and evaluate, using the information from experiments 1 and 2, data-driven (based on each test case s prior performance) techniques for prioritizing test case execution, for determining the order in which changes are integrated, and for pruning and optimizing the original test suites. 4. Explore whether and how these techniques can be combined and what effect that has, and 5. Validate these models, techniques, and heuristics in an on-line, long-term study of a large software system doc9195 none Reliable Multithreaded Software William Pugh Multithreading is useful for providing responsive software, particularly in the face of user input and network connections with unpredictable latency. Multithreading allows transparent use of shared memory multiprocessors (SMPs) and multithreaded uniprocessors (e.g., Sun s MAJC, Alpha-EV8). Unfortunately, writing reliable multithreaded programs is difficult. This research defines a formal semantics for multithreaded Java, and works to understand the interaction of that semantics with the compiler and run-time system. The results of this effort should be transferable to other languages and systems that incorporate threads (e.g., C# and C++ with Pthreads). The research effort also performs software archaeology on existing multithreaded systems, documenting data races that have already been fixed and using dynamic and static tools to search for other potential data races. The effort studies both large open source efforts (e.g., Linux kernel, FreeBSD kernel, Apache, Tomcat) and smaller systems. Education, both at universities and for professionals, will form an important component of this research effort. This effort will both illuminate which concepts and forms of instruction are most effective, and also generate material that can be widely disseminated and used by others in instruction doc9196 none Proposal # Annamaria B Amenta University of Texas The award comprises two projects concerning shape reconstruction from real-world data. The first is to work on automating the process of finding a conformation of a molecular model to match an electron density map produced by X-ray diffraction. This is a important problem in protein biochemistry, currently solved by laborious user interaction. Our recent research on the construction of the medial axis should be useful for building a concise encoding of the shape of the density map, which we can search for features to match to the molecular model. The second project is to adapt a two-dimensional image processing technique to produce a high-resolution three-dimensional model of an object by combining many low-resolution point sets cap-tured by a laser range scanner. This would allow the automatic construction of very high-resolution models of real objects, for applications such as customized medical appliances. The key to adapting the technology will be developing a computational model of the scanner itself, a very non-traditional imaging device doc9197 none Proposal # U of Ill Urbana-Champaign Michael Garland Numerous graphics applications in areas ranging from CAD CAM to realistic immersive simulators rely on increasingly complex datasets to achieve convincing levels of visual realism. However, the enormity of the raw geometric data frequently makes it impossible to efficiently process such datasets given limited hardware capacity. Surface models containing millions of triangles are now commonplace, and advances in acquisition technology are making models containing several billion triangles available. Consequently, there has been considerable interest over the last decade in techniques for the automatic simplification of highly detailed polygonal models. However, current methods are, almost without exception, completely incapable of processing input models of this enormous magnitude. This is a very serious shortcoming, as these are exactly the class of models for which effective simplification methods are most pressingly needed. The goal of this project is to develop new techniques for representing and processing very large scale polygonal surface models, enabling the efficient use of extremely complex models far beyond the capability of current systems. Algorithmic scalability is essential in this domain. This research is focused on developing simplification methods which combine simple out-of-core data operations with more complex output-sensitive (i.e., dependent only on the output, rather than the input, size) processing phases. The general approach of this project is to adopt recursive partitioning strategies directed by quadric error metrics. An approximation can be produced from any partition of the vertex set by merging all vertices within each cell of the partition. The use of quadric error metrics means that the aggressive simplification methods designed for this project can be seamlessly coupled with other quadric-based simplification algorithms in a multi-phase process doc9198 none Proposal # Mitchell, Joseph S. B. SUNY Stony Brook Algorithmic Studies in Applied Geometry The methodologies of computational geometry will be applied to design, analyze, implement, and test algorithms for problems that arise in several application areas, including manufacturing, computer-aided design, graphics and visualization, robotics, air traffic management, and cartography. An important aspect of the project is dissemination of the technology to industry, helping to transfer algorithms into practice, while, at the same time, extracting from practitioners a set of high-priority problem areas for further investigation. New industrial collaborations will be pursued, while building on the several industrial partnerships that have already been established. In visitations with practitioners, new applications and mathematical formulations of geometric problems will be developed, and critical algorithmic issues in geometric computation will be identified. Further, as solutions are proposed and developed, the industrial partners will be assisted with the implementation and integration phases of the projects. The specific repertoire of problems includes: (a) manufacturing process planning (tool path generation, NC verification, bending and folding, deposition, cutting) and virtual manufacturing and maintenance (collision detection, assembly planning); (b) computer graphics and visualization (rendering large polygonal models, data compression, irregular grid volume visualization, visibility preprocessing, optimized texture mapping); (c) Air Traffic Management (conflict detection and resolution, congestion modeling); (d) Mobile robotics (multiple robot search and exploration); (e) Geographic Information Systems (GIS), including map generalization, optimal route planning in geometric environments under a variety of constraints and objectives, and network design and optimization (e.g., for fiberless optical networking doc9199 none An additional chapter on energy conservation is created for the Home Module of Active Physics. The chapter is based upon the Rebuild America Program of the U.S. Department of Energy and co-funded by them. Students assess their school building s energy performance and address standards in conservation of energy and interactions of energy and matter. The module follows the Active Physics model in content, design and pedagogical format, while supporting the Department of Energy s energy education program. Rebuild America participates in the dissemination of the module doc9200 none Proposal # Hitz, Markus A. North Georgia College Data collected in experiments, or constants in physics and other sciences are of limited precision, introducing some degree of uncertainty in computations. Traditional exact methods fail to reveal the entire set of solutions to algebraic problems that have uncertain parameters. Often, these problems are inherently ill-conditioned, such that numerical methods become sensitive to small perturbations of the input parameters. Hybrid symbolic-numeric algorithms have proven to be successful for finding nearest solutions of problems that cannot be solved exactly. Efficient (polynomial time) algorithms have been developed for common problems, such as computing approximate GCDs of univariate polynomials. For other problems, e.g., finding the nearest singular Hankel or Toeplitz matrix, it is currently unknown whether there exist efficient algorithms. This project will continue research in this area, in particular on the problem of approximate bivariate and multivariate factorization. For both areas, symbolic and numeric computing, vast software libraries and programming environments are readily available. For hybrid computing those libraries either have features that are computationally expensive (symbolic), or lack symbolic support at all (numeric). A new class of systems adds Limited Symbolic Capabilities (LSC) to existing libraries that have optimized implementations of rational and floating point arithmetic. We will investigate, and contribute to, LSC systems. This is an RUI project. Undergraduate students will engage in research that is appropriate for their level of expertise. In the process they will also gain valuable skills in configuring local area networks, and in operating clusters of computers which become more and more important in server applications doc9201 none To isolate a designer from the complexity of a distributed system, there is a need for appropriate middleware abstractions. It has been recognized that these abstractions must be flexible and customizable to accommodate the wide ranging application requirements. Although many customizable frameworks have been proposed, a general framework that can be used to implement different synchronization-related requirements of a distributed application is lacking. The goal of the proposed project is to design a coordination service that provides a basic infrastructure to implement synchronization. A coordination service will be designed that accepts a synchronization specification from an application and interact with the application entities to allow only those execution sequences permitted by the specification. The used of event-notification technology will be explored to implement the coordination service. New synchronization elements to be added to convert an event-notification service into a coordination service will be identified. The research will focus on developing a scalable, fault-tolerant and customizable coordination service. A critical challenge will be to accommodate synchronization without sacrificing the scalability of the event-notification mechanism. The effectiveness of the coordination service in providing services to other middleware services will be evaluated doc9202 none Approximation of NP-hard problems: Algorithms and Complexity Sanjeev Arora Princeton University The broad goal of the project is a study of the approximation properties of NP-hard problems. NP-hard problems are those that do not have any efficient algorithms if the classes P and NP are different, as is widely-believed. They arise in a variety of application areas in science and technology, including scheduling, VLSI design, artificial intelligence, design of optimum networks, etc. Since we do not expect to solve these problems optimally, there is a need to design efficient approximation algorithms for them: algorithms that compute a solution whose cost is within a small factor of the optimum. The PI has been involved in designing approximation algorithms during the past decade. He has also been part of an ongoing research program that shows that for many of these problems, computing approximate solutions is no easier than computing optimum solutions. (In other words, approximation is also NP-hard.) These inapproximability results shed important light on the problems as well. The project takes a two-pronged approach, combining a search for good approximation algorithms with a search ---using the theory of probabilistically checkable proofs (PCPs)--- for inapproximability results. The project focusses on a collection of important algorithmic problems, including: learning mixtures of distributions (a problem important in AI and data mining analysis), learning bayes nets and markov random fields (useful in speech recognition, machine vision, medical diagnoses systems etc.), lattice problems (useful in cryptography and cryptanalysis), and graph coloring (a central problem in complexity theory). Progress, especially algorithmic progress, on any of these problems has important consequences doc9203 none Optimization with few violated constraints is a variant of the standard optimization in which a small number of constraints may be violated. It is especially useful when some of constraints are not reliable due to modeling uncertainty and or measurement errors. In this proposal, we show that several control problems can be solved within the framework of opti-mization with few violated constraints. One example is a convergent and numerically efficient algoritlini for robust system identification in the presence of outliers. Unlike the standard optimization, however, optimization with few violated constraints has received little attention in the literature and few results are available. After demonstrating a need for optimization with few violated constraints for controls, we present our preliminary results in the proposal which include the problem set up, preliminary analysis and a numerical algorithm for solving optimization with few violated constraints. The algorithm is proven to have a low computational complexity. Preliminary results are very promising. Then, a detailed research plan in terms of the algorithm and its application is outlined in the proposal doc9204 none This work continues the study of atomic dynamics by the direct solution of the time-dependent Schrodinger equation on a numerical lattice, focusing on the dynamics of Rydberg and continuum states. There are projects involving the dynamics of multi-electron wave packets and projects involving the solution of time-dependent close-coupling equations for multi-electron dynamics. New theoretical and computational tools will be developed doc9205 none The life histories of the large majority of marine species include planktonic stages, and the availability of planktonic larvae may regulate benthic as well as pelagic populations. Because the distributions of planktonic organisms are extremely variable in space and time, large numbers of samples are needed to adequately characterize them. Using conventional methods, organisms must be identified and counted in each sample by tedious microscopic examination by highly skilled biologists. The PI will attempt to resolve this sampling bottleneck by developing a novel approach for rapid, quantitative analysis of larval abundance using inexpensive molecular methods. This new approach is referred to as CADRE, for competitive amplification of a diagnostic repetitive element. CADRE exploits the widespread occurrence of taxon-specific repetitive DNA sequence elements. Amplification of these elements by the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) will be used to detect and quantify the target species in mixed plankton samples. Quantification of larval biomass can be achieved by competitive PCR, in which a known amount of a DNA template standard is used as a control for variable PCR conditions. The standard has the same primer binding sequences as the targeted template DNA, and therefore it acts as an internal control for the efficiency of amplification. The products amplified from the standard and target can be distinguished by size, and the ratio of these products, the PCR product ratio, provides an estimate of the initial amount of the target sequence. Although other DNA sequences, including ribosomal RNA genes and mitochondrial DNA genes can be used to detect or quantify planktonic organisms, repetitive elements offer a unique combination of advantages. They are easily detected and quantified, taxon-specific, and relatively independent of the physiological state of the organism doc9206 none Search and optimization problems are central to all areas of computer science and engineering. Finding the optimal layout for a VLSI circuit or the lowest energy configuration of a crystal are both examples of optimization problems. While such problems are believed to be intractable, requiring exponential time to solve the worst-case instances, many heuristic methods have been observed to be relatively successful on instances that arise in different applications. This project addresses questions concerning the quantitative measures of the intractability of search and optimization problems, as opposed to qualitative notions such as NP-completeness. The following are some of the questions addressed in this project: 1. Which instances of optimization problems are the most intractable ones? 2. Exactly how difficult are these problems? 3. What are good heuristic methods for solving optimization problems ? When and how well do they work? 4. Are specific non-complete problems such as factoring also intractable? 5. How much does randomness help in solving problems? 6. Are hard problems suitable for cryptographic applications? If so, what levels of security do they provide these applications? Unconditional answers to these questions first require solving the P=NP problem. However, this project will use two approaches to find the most likely answers to these questions. The first approach is to provide proofs resolving these issues under plausible complexity assumptions. The second approach is to examine restricted but powerful classes of algorithms that include the most successful heuristics for the problems under study. This approach will include attempts to both explain the success of such heuristics and to show limitations that can be used as a guide for the likely inherent complexity of the problems doc9207 none A higher-type function is a function that takes as arguments, or produces as results, other functions. Higher-type functions have proven to be valuable tools in both theoretical and practical work in programming. Indeed, higher-type constructs (e.g., classes, components, modules, etc.) pervade contemporary computing. There is a great deal of useful theoretical work in support of reasoning about the correctness of programs that make use of higher-order features. In contrast, there has been relatively little theoretical work in support of reasoning about the performance (e.g., time and space usage) of such programs. It is clearly a great folly to ignore correctness in program development, but it is nearly as great a folly to ignore performance. Thus there is a serious gap in the scientific underpinnings of programs that use higher-type features---even benchmarking a higher-type procedure is problematic in the absence of a theory to help interpret what the results mean. Higher-type complexity theory extends the general program of computational complexity to a higher-type setting. This project proposes the investigation of several topics in higher-type complexity theory, particularly its relation to the recent results on realizer models of higher-type computation. These topics include: 1. Continuity and feasible computation. The (Scott) continuous functionals of finite type are a key object of study in programming language theory. There are examples of continuous functionals of finite type that are arguably feasibly computable, but do not fit within prior notions of higher-type feasibility. This project proposes use an appropriate polynomial-time version of Kleene s associate realizer framework to develop and investigate notions of feasible computation in the context of the continuous functionals. 2. Prompt fixed points. Various sorts of fixed points are another key tool in the theory of programming languages, especially in explaining forms of recursion. The project proposes to explore certain form of feasible, or prompt, fixed points so as to provide a general context for recent work on feasible higher-type recursions. 3. Efficient programming systems for SR. The sequentially realizable functionals (SR) is another class of functionals that have been the focus of some important in programming languages theory. A key question about SR is whether there is a complexity-theoretically reasonable programming language for the class. The PI has a partial negative result related to this. The project proposes to extend this work. 4. Maximal notions of higher-type computation. The project proposes to show that the (effective) continuous and the (effective) SR functionals both satisfy a structural maximality property amongst higher-type notions of computations doc9208 none A symposium on Critical Issues Questions in Nuclar Dynamics will be held in San Diego, CA on 1-4 April as part of the 221st national meeting of the American Chemical Society. This symposium, organized by S.J. Yennello (Texas A & M University) and W. Loveland (Oregon State University), features a series of tutorial lectures by recognized leaders in the study of nuclear reactions and presentations by a selected group of international experts. Over twenty-five speakers from seven countries will participate. panel discussions involving the speakers and the audience focus on defining the critical issues and questions facing the field. Among the subjects treated are fusion, multifragmentation, fragmentation and nuclear reaction mechanisms. The NSF sponsorship will assist younger scientists and students to participate in the symposium doc9209 none The project develops techniques to quantify design attributes of object-oriented software in terms of architectural structures and patterns, and demonstrates that these design attributes are related to external quality attributes such as maintainability, reusability, testability, and reliability. The focus is on identifying design structures and patterns that will make software easier to adapt and test. Design measurement is based on the structure of interconnected objects including the links between objects, the properties of these links, and the properties of individual object classes. Design patterns are identified through program and design analysis and the use of existing design pattern recognition technology. External design quality evaluations are based on process data from commercial organizations and analytical evaluation of change difficulty. Relationships between design attributes and external quality are identified by examining commercial software engineering data and through analyses of the connection between internal and external attributes. Results from this work demonstrate costs and benefits of alternative object-oriented software designs. The work should lead to improved design methods to produce software that is easier to adapt, extend, and test as it evolves doc9210 none Wireless communication systems must inevitably deal with the severe effects of fading, the phenomenon whereby received signals fluctuate over very wide ranges as the propagation environment changes in time. Various forms of diversity are commonly employed to combat the effects of fading. In various scenarios, it is possible to achieve diversity by transmitting a signal that is redundant in time or frequency, by using multiple transmit antennas and or multiple receive antennas. While techniques for achieving time diversity, frequency diversity, and space diversity through multiple receive antennas are well known, developing techniques for achieving diversity through the use of multiple transmit antennas is a relatively new area which is currently of great practical and theoretical interest. This research involves the design of improved modulation and coding techniques for the so-called space-time systems, i.e., those with multiple transmit antennas. One main goal of this project is to maximize improvement in what is in some sense the worst case scenario where the number of receive antennas is either one or a very small number and also where the channel is fading in a very slow (i.e., quasi-static) manner. In this environment, transmitter diversity and possibly frequency selectivity may be the only sources of potential diversity. This research studies the potential of improving on existing techniques by overcoming two flaws that plague many existing or proposed space-time systems: 1) Space time codes have difficulty providing both diversity and significant coding gain, Many space-time codes must use up all their redundancy to provide diversity and actually provide little or no coding gain. By splitting the jobs of providing diversity and coding gain between either two separate codes or between the coding and modulation formats, this research produces a more effective space-time communication system. 2) Space time codes which promise significant coding gain often do not produce it in a quasi-static fading channel (QSFC). The currently accepted design rules for space-time codes are in fact shaky when applied to a QSFC. By forming a more solid foundation for designing codes for QSFCs, this research produces better design criteria and ultimately better space-time coding techniques doc9211 none In this project, the PI plans to investigate the `continuation properties of the invariant subspaces of the backward shift operator on various spaces of analytic functions on the unit disk. In , Douglas, Shapiro, and Shields showed that functions belonging to these invariant subspaces of the Hardy space posses special continuation properties to the exterior disk. In more recent investigations, this idea of `continuation has been shown to be ubiquitous in that it appears to take place, in one form or another, in many other settings belong the Hardy space case. This proposal plans to get at the heart of the nature of these continuations and why they occur in the first place. This project falls under the broad heading of the field of mathematical analysis which, besides its beauty and elegance, makes many connections and has its roots in problems connected with physics and engineering. In fact, the concept of `continuation properties of analytic functions has been recently studied by the engineer S. Darlington who connected these `continuations to properties of electrical circuit design doc9212 none This project is about testing digital integrated circuits during their manufacture -- production testing. Production testing attempts to identify manufactured parts that do not perform according to their specification (defective parts) as well as parts that will fail early in their operating life (weak parts). Sometimes parts are also sorted by their maximum operating speed (binning). For some selected parts, the exact causes of their deviation from expected functionality must be identified (diagnosed) in order to improve the manufacturing process. Improved IC production test techniques are necessary because current techniques are too expensive and are projected to become increasingly unsatisfactory for future IC designs. The manufacturing cost per transistor is decreasing for newer technologies while the cost per transisitor for production testing is remaining approximately constant. In other words, the fraction of the total cost of manufacturing process due to testing is increasing. There is interest in reversing this trend. Specific research goals are to develop test techniques to replace current burn-in, delay test and the single-stuck fault coverage metric. Other goals will to be compare test results for different generations of technology to find out to what extent results from one technology carry forward to a next generation, and to compare the effectiveness of functional tests with structured tests (for example, sequential circuit test patterns versus scan patterns). Experimental data obtained from ATE will be analyzed. This data will be used to suggest new techniques and to determine their effectiveness. We will use two types of experimental data: some is industrial data that we obtain as part of a joint study with a company; the other is data that we collect ourselves doc9213 none Proposal # Eva K. Lee GA Tech Res Corp -GIT The field of mixed integer programming (MIP) involves a fascinating and lively blend of theoretical analysis, algorithm and software development, and scientific computing. Over the past thirty years, real applications have provided invaluable insight and motivation for advancing the frontiers of this evolving discipline. In particular, the MIP modeling paradigm and the associated algorithmic branch-and-bound, branch-and-cut, and branch-and-price solution strategies have been applied extremely successfully to a broad range of industrial applications, from scheduling and process planning applications, to VLSI and telecommunication network design. Integral to these successful applications of MIP were close collaborations between optimization researchers and the domain experts in each application area. In each case, much research was devoted to developing a superior model (versus simply a correct formulation, as the solution process depends heavily on the underlying structure of the formulated model) and effective computational strategies for the specific application at hand. Beyond this active research came the technological transfer of computational advances into commercial software (e.g., CPLEX, XPRESS), enabling the integration of these advances into the decision support systems used daily by practitioners. The primary focus of this research is to explore applications of mixed integer programming strategies to radio-therapy treatment planning optimization. The initial focus will be radiosurgery treatment planning. Radiosurgery involves small field, stereotactic external beam irradiation to the brain. It has evolved over the past decade into a common method for treating and controlling certain central nervous system lesions such as arteriovenous malformations, metastatic lesions, acoustic neuromas, pituitary tumors, malignant gliomas and other intracranial tumors. Although radiosurgery provides an excellent potential for effectively curing these disorders, the complexities and functional dependencies both within and between brain structures means that the procedure is inherently high-risk and can bring about severe complications. Hence, accuracy and precision are of paramount importance in both the planning and execution of stereotactic radiosurgery doc9214 none Proposal # Georgia State University Olshevsky, Vadim Numerous applications in sciences and engineering, as well as in computational, applied and pure mathematics give rise to problems involving matrices with Toeplitz, Hankel, Vandermonde, Cauchy structures, along with many other patterns of structure. Standard mathematical software tools [e.g., MATLAB, Mathematica, MathCad, Maple, LAPACK], are based on standard [structure-ignoring] methods, and therefore their use is often not appropriate for obtaining a satisfactory solution. Here are two major reasons. First, ignoring the structure artificially squares the size of the data, which requires unnecessary storage and an extremely large amount of CPU time. Secondly, many structured matrices are extremely ill-conditioned, which means that all available standard methods may fail to produce even one correct digit in the computed solution. The only way to overcome these difficulties is to exploit the special structure of such matrices, and to design more efficient algorithms. The objective of this project is the study of several known and several new theoretical and computational problems related to structured matrices which arise in several applied areas, including signal and image processing, system theory, and control theory. This research involves the development of new accurate fast and superfast algorithms for several new classes of structured matrices arising in rational matrix interpolation and approximation problems with norm constraints (passive interpolation). This study will also focus on various stability problems for matrix polynomials, and on various problems in the theory of error-correcting codes doc9215 none This award supports theoretical research on fundamental questions raised by experiments on the magnetic and charge transport properties of complex oxide compounds. The aim of this work is to elucidate the competition between the many possible ground states of correlated electron systems in low dimensions, the quantum phase transitions between them, and the complex crossovers in their dynamic and transport properties at finite temperature. One focus of this work will be the response of correlated quantum systems to non-magnetic impurities like Zn or Li. Nuclear magnetic resonance, neutron scattering, and tunneling microscopy experiments have shown that such impurities can be sensitive probes of the quantum state of the electrons. The PI plans to explore whether these probes can distinguish among the different models proposed for high temperature superconductors. The PI s recent theories correlate the results of different experimental probes and suggest new experiments and open new theoretical issues that will be investigated. The spectrum of collective spin-singlet and spin-triplet excitations in d-wave superconductors, the manner in which these excitations couple to the fermionic S=1 2 quasiparticle excitations, and their possible interplay with stripe correlations will also be studied. The PI also plans to pursue related projects on spin-glass order in strongly disordered transition metal and rare earth compounds, and tunneling between lateral quantum Hall edge states. %%% This award supports theoretical research on fundamental questions raised by experiments on the magnetic and charge transport properties of high temperature superconductors and related transition metal oxide compounds. The proposal involves using impurities like Zn or Li as probes of the quantum state of the electrons in these systems. The response of the correlated electron system as revealed by a variety of experiments is expected to elucidate the fundamental nature of magnetic and superconducting states in these materials. These states are both a puzzle and a motivation for theoretical and experimental work that challenges our fundamental concepts of superconducting, magnetic, and metallic states. A unifying theme of the proposed research involves exploring the role of quantum phase transitions in determining macroscopic properties and the nature of electronic excitations in high temperature superconductors and related transition metal oxides at finite temperature. Quantum phase transitions occur at zero temperature in response to small changes in an external parameter. The proposed work also supports graduate education in state-of-the art methods in condensed matter theory doc9216 none Complex ULSI designs will be plagued by a myriad of interconnects problems that could require many design iterations to meet timing, power, area, and noise specifications. To cope with this interconnect dilemma, the current transistor-centric VLSI design flow must evolve into an interconnect-centric design flow; however, for this design flow to develop it must accurately predict the impact of interconnects on the performance of logic megacells at the earliest stages of design. This research effort is focused on developing an accurate prediction of the length of each net in a given netlist during logic design. The novel aspect of this work is that a stochastic wire length distribution model, which has been developed in part by the principal investigator, is being used to aid in this prediction. In addition, prediction methodologies that give the designer the ability to choose from a set of possible wiring configurations is emphasized. An integral part of this prediction methodology is the incorporation of the wire length predictions into length prediction driven placement algorithms. The significance of this proposed research is that highly accurate wire length predictions could substantially enhance the accuracy of early timing analysis and give the designer greater flexibility in finding solutions to overcome impending interconnect limits doc9217 none ion theorems, where the meaning of a term includes operational information about how computations are shared, and the use of context semantics as a flow analysis tool, where the so-called geometry of interaction can give information about how procedures access their arguments. A further investigation of ``superposition phenomena that occur in high-level sharing is planned. The final component seeks a refined explanation of the bus system of graph reduction in terms of linear logic, in the hope of giving a new categorical rendition of the incremental computation that characterizes optimal evaluation doc9218 none Software bugs currently cause the large majority of computer failures. Unfortunately, the current culture of software development tolerates the release of software with numerous bugs. The best solution to this phenomenon is more thorough testing. This project seeks to increase the amount of testing and effective debugging undergone by modern software. This research enables end users to serve as effective testers by tracing a program s execution automatically and submitting the trace as a bug report. Such traces contain all information needed for the software developer to reproduce the failure, even if that failure is non-deterministic. The goals of this trace-and-replay system reflect the end-user environment it is targeted for. The tracing system should have low-enough overhead to be left on during normal use. The tracing system should translate or encode the trace to maintain the user s privacy. The trace-and-replay system should be easy to use by the end user; for example, it should not need to modify the kernel or system libraries. If successful, the resulting system will dramatically increase the base of effective testers and hopefully result in more reliable software doc9219 none Memory management consumes a great deal of time on today s computer systems, and will take even longer in the future. Software techniques have successfully hidden most of this overhead on personal workstations by shifting the work to times when the system is waiting for user interaction. Such techniques are less effective on SMP servers, where the overall computational overhead is what matters. The Dynamic Memory Management Unit (DMMU), a special-purpose hardware mechanism based on bitmaps and combinational logic can greatly diminish this overhead. Preliminary results for three languages show that this approach is much faster than software memory allocation, and consumes only slightly more memory than software-allocation techniques. This proposal calls for the integration of this hardware unit into SMP systems, which would allow concurrent garbage collection in multithreaded-multiprocessors environments. This can speed up the performance of server applications written in Object-Oriented languages such as C++ and Java doc9220 none The Advanced Materials Program in the Chemistry Division supports this award to University of California Santa Barbara. The focus of the research is the synthesis and characterization of conjugated polymer-lanthanide blends and to determine mechanisms for electronic couplings and charge transfer reactions in these systems. Under this award, ultra fast femto-second and time-resolved spectroscopic studies will be carried out by Vojislav Srdanov and Guillermo Bazan to determine the optical and electronic coupling between the conjugated polymers and lanthanides such as terbium neodymium and erbium in the prepared blends. Specifically, photoluminescence and electroluminescence properties of rare earth centered conjugated polymers will be studied with this award. Orbital energy levels of the polymer, the singlet and triplet levels of the ligand, and those of the lanthanides will be matched for the efficient combination of the polymer and the lanthanide. An understanding of the mechanism for the energy transfer reactions in conjugated polymers doped with different lanthanides may provide impetus for the development of monochromatic light-emitting diodes, flat panel displays and other related electro-optic devices. An understanding of the mechanism for the charge transfer reactions in conjugated polymers with lanthanide rare-earth metals may provide impetus for the development of monochromatic light-emitting diodes, flat-panel display and other related electo-optic devices. The educational plan will integrate interdisciplinary research and education in the area of macromolecular chemistry and photochemistry doc9221 none Computational geometry covers a wide range of applications, such as motion planning and computer graphics, and its contribution to their solution involves the use of sophisticated techniques drawn from many branches of mathematics and computer science. The investigators extensively study many basic and applied problems in the area, including motion planning, Voronoi diagrams, combinatorial and algebraic analysis of arrangements of curves and algebraic surfaces, graph drawing, randomized algorithms, and geometric optimization. A major portion of this research involves the study of arrangements of curves and surfaces. The significant progress made by the PI s on these problems during the past 15 years has opened up many new challenging research directions, including: Combinatorial and algorithmic problems related to substructures (lower envelopes, single cells, zones, levels, vertical decompositions) in arrangements of surfaces in higher dimensions. Related algorithms in real algebraic geometry for computing connected components, stratifications, the dimension and other topological parameters of real semi-algebraic sets. Graph drawing and other algorithmic, combinatorial, and topological problems involving planar arrangements of segments or curves. Applications of these results to numerous areas, including motion planning in robotics, rendering and modeling problems in computer graphics, generalized Voronoi diagrams and geometric optimization problems, including problems in metrology and facility location. An important feature of this research is the cross-fertilization between basic research in computational and combinatorial geometry and various application areas. Another theme is the strong connection between the combinatorial analysis of arrangements and the design of efficient algorithms for constructing and utilizing these structures. The efficiency of the algorithms often crucially depends on the size of the structure to be computed, and most of the work is devoted to bounding this quantity doc9222 none van Gorkom, Jacqueline An HI Survey of Clusters in the Local Universe This project will image twelve nearby clusters of galaxies in neutral hydrogen using the VLA (460 hours have been granted), and supplement the data with deep optical multicolor imaging and optical spectroscopy. As a byproduct of the neutral hydrogen survey, deep radio continuum images will be obtained. The entire volume of the clusters will be probed out to two Abell radii. The work will simultaneously study the low density outer regions and the dense cluster cores. The selected clusters are in varying degrees of dynamical relaxation, some contain starburst and post starburst galaxies, and most have a central X ray source. The goal is to study the evolution of galaxies as they travel from the low density outer regions into the dense cores of clusters and to assess the dynamical state of the clusters doc9223 none Hough The principal objective of this project is to extend and expand a high-resolution radio study of active galactic nuclei (AGN) that will make major contributions to our understanding of the physics of relativistic jets in these objects and, in the process, shed light on unified models of active galaxies. Active galaxies, including quasars and radio galaxies, most likely harbor supermassive black holes in their central regions that are ultimately responsible for the intense, episodic emission the nuclei of these galaxies exhibit. By electromagnetic processes which are still not well understood, material is accelerated in the vicinity of the black hole and channeled into jets that travel outward near the speed of light. Physical models of jets generally predict that their observed properties will strongly depend on the orientation of the jet axis to our line of sight from Earth. Thus to perform statistical tests of these models, extended radio sources covering a very wide range in orientation will be studied. Radio telescopes will be used to image the jets in these objects on scales from light-years up to millions of light-years; the images will be used to look for systematic trends in the jet structures as a function of orientation angle, to determine the statistical distribution of apparent faster-than-light, or superluminal , jet speeds and to follow the trajectories of the relativistic outflows. Observations will also be used to determine physical conditions in the jets and to map their magnetic fields, Several undergraduates - from both Trinity University and the Alamo Community College District - will be direct participants in this research. This will enhance their preparation for graduate study and offer students from under-represented groups the opportunity to do science as they consider career options in the physical sciences. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9224 none Periodic Phenomena in Cataclysmic Binaries AST- Small telescopes are the instrument of choice for variable star photometry which, by its nature, requires synoptic observations covering long time bases. Such facilities are largely unavailable at major observatories and increasingly, amateur observers are doing work of this nature with small telescopes. A number of factors have accelerated this trend. (1) Cheaper telescopes. (2) Cheaper two-dimensional detectors. (3) Sophisticated software that is readily available. On the other hand, the major observatories are becoming more specialized with only scarce, and mostly shared time being available on large telescopes with expensive instrumentation. The PI has assembled a worldwide network of small photometry telescopes to provide the photometry for cataclysmic variable stars. Understanding these stars requires measuring the orbital periods of these binary stars along with period changes when they occur. Up-to-date ephemerides are essential when spectroscopic observation with large telescopes are being planned. During the course of this award, the PI will supervise a team of graduate and undergraduate students who will carry out the reductions and evaluations of the data provided by the worldwide amateur network. In addition, he will lead the analysis and publication of the results as they become available doc9225 none Crotts In the last few years, astronomers have shown that supernovae (SN), in distant galaxies are fainter than expected. The obvious explanation is that they are farther away than we had thought. If true, this implies that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. This change in expansion is attributed to a so called vacuum energy by theoretical physics. This discovery presents both major new opportunities, and a long list of troubling basic new questions. Up to now Gravity has been the hardest part of physics to understand, in part because it has been described by a single number: the Newtonian gravitational constant G which measures its strength. If the universe is speeding up there must be a second number, which should help us understand gravitational physics. In this way, astronomical observations are redefining our understanding of fundamental physics and the universe as a whole. The goals of this project are to provide an independent check of the claim that 70% of the energy density of the universe is some form of mysterious vacuum energy. Astronomical observations are the only way to explore the vacuum energy experimentally, because the effects are significant only over exceedingly large distances. In particular, this project will provide an independent check of the results from supernovae by using angular size as a distance measure. The amount of clumping of the gas between the galaxies will be measured both along the line of sight, and in angle across the sky. The relationship between the two measures gives the distance and hence the acceleration of the universe. The method is insensitive to changes in the state of the universe over long times. The project is urgent, because the vacuum energy remains an unconfirmed, though very plausible, result, and highly significant, because we will have the sensitivity to decisively rule out the amount of vacuum energy suggested by the supernovae, if none were present. In addition to providing an independent check on the SN decelerating universe measurement, this project will also give improved measurements of the clumping of gas between galaxies at early times. This clumping is believed to have arisen from primordial quantum fluctuations when the universe was young.. These fluctuations have been measured at different epochs, and in different ways. However, the methods used in the present project will give the only measurement of the amount of clumping of matter on galaxy sized scales at early times. These new data and simulations will be compared with theoretical predictions, to act as a check on recent investigations which suggest that our present ideas about the growth of small scale structure in the universe are inadequate. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9226 none A ten-year program to use the world s most powerful radio telescope to provide Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty-cm (FIRST) is nearing its goal of mapping the entire northern sky outside the Milky Way with a resolution and sensitivity that exceed previous surveys by a factor of fifty or more. Over three-quarters of a million radio emitters have been detected to date, ranging from nearby active stars to the most distant quasars known. The images and source catalogs are all available on the World-Wide Web, and have been used to date by more than three hundred astronomers. The FIRST team is pursuing a number of major projects with this massive new database. Matching the radio catalog to the near-infrared sources cataloged by the 2MASS survey, they have discovered a number of highly obscured quasars -- objects emitting a thousand times the energy of the whole Milky Way from a tiny region in a distant galaxy core that is so dust-ridden that no visible light escapes. Another major project is using the entire set of radio images to attempt to determine the distribution of the mysterious dark matter in the Universe. Recognizing Einstein s dictum that mass bends light, they look for the slight distortions in the shapes of distant radio galaxies caused by the passage of their radio waves through the mass distribution of the intervening space. While optical astronomers have been conducting such weak lensing experiments on patches of sky the size of the full moon and smaller, this research will study the clumpiness of the dark matter on scales ten to one hundred times larger, thus making a direct connection between the galaxy distribution in the local Universe and the fluctuations seen in the cosmic background radiation which tells us the distribution of matter at the earliest times doc9227 none This project proposes to build a Multi-View Storage System, MVSS. Similar to a Multi-View Database System, MVSS allows multiple views of the same file on the physical disk to be generated dynamically. To support multiple views, devices will be multiported . Different views of a file can be customized to provide different types of service at a multiported device. MVSS separates the deployment of services from file system implementations and thus allows services to be performed at various levels of the storage system. Multiple views of the file are provided to the user through file system namespace. Through these views, MVSS provides a flexible and extensible way for supporting a wide range of services including device-level enhancements. In this project, we will build an experimental testbed incorporating these ideas and plan to evaluate them through real applications. Database Select operations, MPEG filtering for QOS, sorting and a number of other applications will be used to drive the prototype system doc9228 none Many important applications must provide guaranteed real-time performance in spite of uncertain workloads, highly varying computation times for tasks, and with a large number of interacting sites. Examples of such applications include smart spaces, financial markets on the Internet, collections of factories supporting agile manufacturing, and high-tech battlefield coordination. The objective of this research is to develop a software-oriented theory and practice of feedback control that will provide aggregate performance guarantees for these types of systems. Methods to embed such controllers in the operating systems of these types of applications is investigated. The ultimate vision of this research is that software designers will be able to model parts of software systems and use those models to develop software control algorithms based on a theory of feedback control. This work establishes a scientific basis upon which to design and analyze the aggregate behavior of large systems that operate under a great deal of uncertainty. The solutions can be embedded in operating systems to meet the performance specs in transient and steady states, such as deadline miss ratio, stability, overshoot, settling time, and sensitivity requirements doc9164 none logics, induction theorem proving, and process algebra. The new unification algorithms will be first developed and experimented using the Unification Workbench, a tool under development at SUNY, Albany, with the eventual goal of integrating them into application software, the NRL Protocol Analyzer and a rewrite-based induction theorem prover RRL (Rewrite Rule Laboratory) for use in the applications discussed above. This award is one of three in a collaborative research team. The three awards are (Deepak Kapur, U New Mexico), (Christopher Lynch, Clarkson U), and (Paliath Narendran, SUNY Albany doc9230 none This research involves the study algorithmic problems that arise in the design of next generation networking technology. Rapid growth of the internet user base, coupled with rapid parallel growth in mobile subscriber numbers, is creating powerful pent-up demand for wireless access to the internet intranets and other data networks. Communication in wireless networks differs in some fundamental ways from communication in wired networks. In particular, the basic form of communication in wireless networks is broadcasting, as opposed to point-to-point communications in most wired networks. This research investigates the effect of switching to broadcast communication on server strategies in the client-server computing model, one of the most common computing paradigms. A wide range of real-time applications, such as multimedia conferencing, computer supported cooperated workspaces, remote medical diagnosis etc., has become very popular in recent years. These applications have dynamically changing bandwidth requirements. It is clear that controlling and allocating bandwidth for individual users and web browsers is becoming very important for bursty traffic flows utilizing highly constrained communications channels. From the network management s perspective, it is advantageous to allow the network to dynamically change the tariff parameters of the charging scheme in response to demand. This research investigates dynamic renegotiation and pricing problems that arise in the design of networks that give quality of service guarantees doc9231 none This research proposes a new generation of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) based upon a self-timed design methodology known as Phased Logic. One of the principle attractions of FPGAs is that they give users a streamlined methodology for implementing large gate-count digital designs that are specified in a Hardware Description Language (HDL) such as Verilog. FPGAs shield designers from the time-consuming physical design details that Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASICs) designers must face and offer a flexible implementation substrate with a quicker time to market. However, design complexity is increasing significantly for both FPGA designers and users due to timing issues related to global clock distribution over larger arrays operating at higher frequencies. Spending more design effort on reaching timing closure can increase time to market and threatens to undermine one of the key benefits of FPGAs for its users. Phased Logic (PL) is a self-timed, delay-insensitive methodology that allows automatic mapping of clocked netlists to netlists of PL gates. Preliminary work has indicated that PL gates based upon a four input LookUp-Table (LUT4) can implement designs that are competitive with clocked approaches in both power and performance. This research investigates new FPGA architectures using both LUT4-based gates and traditional product-term-based gates. PL offers a general capability for data dependent computing; synthesis techniques that take advantage of this for general logic are investigated. Extensions for supporting these new architectures and PL gate designs are made to the current mapping tool that transforms clocked designs to PL designs. Tradeoffs that sacrifice some delay insensitivity for extra performance are studied doc9232 none This project investigates novel self-encoded multiple access (SEMA) communications for the transmission of digital information in multiuser wireless channels. The approach is based on the unconventional self-encoded spread spectrum technique that has been developed at the University of Nebraska for the modulation and detection of spread spectrum signals. The application of self-encoded spread spectrum to multiple access communications entails a number of considerations in system and coding designs. They arise from the fact that self-encoding does not guarantee pair-wise code isolations between the spreading sequences. Multiuser channel coding can mitigate code collisions and improve the system performance. The research will characterize the system performance under various wireless channel disturbances such as noise, interference and fading. The results from this project demonstrate the feasibility of SEMA communications that will have a developmental impact on mobile communications technology. The focus of this project is the analysis and applications of code-modulated SEMA communications. An analytical model of the system is developed that incorporates multiuser channel coding to control statistical code collisions between the self-encoding sequences. Cooperative channel coding among the users is exploited to determine the balanced trade-offs between signal despreading, capacity (code rate) and error correction capability. The bit-error-rate and capacity of the system are analyzed under various channel conditions. The research includes investigating the use of training sequences and preambles for synchronization acquisition and tracking of self-encoded signals. The development of SEMA multiuser detectors is of particular interest given the fact that the spreading sequences are random, time varying, and not known a priori. SEMA turbo receiver that employs iterative, joint multiuser detector and channel decoding is also studied. The goal of the research is to develop the theoretical foundation for self-encoded multiple access communications, with the potential applications spanning from terrestrial wireless to satellite and optical fiber communications systems doc9233 none The basic elements of the storage industry are in the midst of radical change with the advent of network-attached storage devices. Storage systems comprised of network-attached drives provide many potential advantages over traditional storage architectures, but also introduce additional challenges, particularly regarding manageability. In this proposal, the WiND project (Wisconsin Network Disks) is described, which has the goal of developing the software techniques required to build a truly manageable network-attached storage system. The key to manageability is adaptation. In traditional systems, such adaptation is performed by a human administrator. Future storage systems must themselves adapt, and in doing so, reduce the need for manual intervention. The WiND system will gracefully and efficiently adapt to changes in the environment, reducing the burden of administration and increasing the flexibility of storage for an eclectic range of clients. In particular, WiND will automatically handle the addition of new heterogeneous disks to the system, the failure of existing disks, and changes in client workload. Within this proposal, three specific sub-areas of WiND are developed: adaptive data layout and access with SToRM, adaptive caching via Clouds, and the underlying information substrate doc9234 none The advance of high-speed deep-submicron VLSI technology requires chip interconnect and packaging to be modeled by distributed circuits. Such a detailed modeling level eventually results in large scale linear circuits to be analyzed. Thus, the research objective is to develop new circuit order reduction approach to evaluate the circuit performance and characteristics in a reasonable time period and with a guaranteed performance, as required by real design practice. This project focuses on the following tasks: a) Develop new order reduction approaches that provide guaranteed performance; b) Derive correspondingly high efficiency numerical methods; c) Investigate the methods of maintaining preferred characteristics in the reduced order system as well as related implementation issues; d) Investigate wavelet method application in model order reduction and analysis; and e) Contribute to graduate education at UT- Dallas and UNC-Charlotte. The expected research results will provide efficient and performance guaranteed methods for order reduction and analysis of VLSI interconnect circuits, and their corresponding algorithms and software for simulation test. It will also contribute to engineering and science aspects by the expected research results and software, as well as to graduate education doc9235 none The explosive growth of the World Wide Web, the variety of information hosted by a given site, the rapid fluctuations in user demand, and the complexity of the preferred architectural trend are among the reasons that make increasingly challenging for system administrators to effectively mange today s complex web server systems. This proposal addresses this problem by seeking to develop smart algorithms that help performing difficult tasks such as web server cluster configuration, capacity planning, fault management and load balancing, by continuously monitoring and adapting to changes in the workload and system. Workload mointoring will provide input to analytic models whose solution will in turn be used by both off-line and on-line algorithms that can propose improved system configurations. To this end, the proposed research objectives will provide: (a) methods to derive detailed statistical workload characterizations of web servers, (b) new and efficient solutions for analytic models of systems that serve tasks drawn from heavy tail probability distributions, (c) a software tool particularly targeted to load balancing in clustered web servers, to be used by non expert modelers, including system administrators, and (d) workload-aware and system-aware algorithms that significantly improve performance and ease of web system management doc9236 none Sellwood, Jerry A. Over the past two decades astronomers have amassed a considerable body of evidence for the existence of an unseen component of the universe which exerts a gravitational-like influence but has no other identified signature. This component is known as dark matter. Our imperfect knowledge of the content and distribution of dark matter in galaxies is a major obstacle to our current understanding of the structure and formation of galaxies. This project has three parts all of which are designed to measure the dark matter content of different galaxies. Two of these research projects will attempt to quantify the amount of dark matter in spiral galaxies and the third will search for a possible systematic difference between the dark matter content of barred galaxies and of their unbarred counterparts. These projects involve numerical computer computations of galaxy models taking into account both gravitationally induced particle motion as well as adiabatic compression of dark matter halos as gas cools and settles into pre-existing potential wells. One final result of this program is the elaboration of a mechanism for the origin of bars in galaxies, a topic which has been given renewed urgency by recent observational and theoretical developments. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9237 none Proposal # Saunders, B. David University of Delaware This is a program of research in the area of exact solution of systems of linear equations and related problems. There will be an emphasis on Diophantine problems, wherein the input data (coefficients) are integers and the solutions sought must also have integer coefficients. There will also be an emphasis on parametric linear systems, wherein the input data contain symbolic parameters and the solutions must be expressed in terms of these parameters, including all special cases (ranges of values of the parameters for which the solutions have form different from the general case). New efficient algorithms are sought and high performance software is to be developed based on both new and previously described methods. The work will be largely carried out in the context of the LINBOX collaboration. LINBOX is a group of twelve researchers in three countries (USA, France, Canada) who are conducting research in the design of efficient algorithms for linear algebra, in their implementation in a software library, and in how to interface the library to widely-used scientific computing software. such as Maple and Mathematica. There are two basic approaches to sparse matrix problems, iterative and direct. Both approaches have been significantly developed by the numeric linear algebra community. Iterative methods involve finding recurrence relations in a series of vectors resulting from matrix-vector products. In LINBOX these have been called black box methods, and the adaptation of such methods to symbolic problems has been the emphasis to date. There has been substantial theoretical work in the past two decades in this area. The emphasis of LINBOX is to find and to demonstrate in software the variants and extensions and improvements to these methods which will work in practice. The here proposed research will continue in this direction but will also work to develop the direct methods for solution of sparse symbolic linear systems, again basing on prior work in numerical linear algebra doc9238 none Practical Persistent Data Structures The legal phrase status quo ante refers to reverting to a previous state of affairs. The same concept frequently arises in computer science. For example, most word processors include an undo feature that nullifies the most recent changes and returns the document to its previous state. Unfortunately, most current methods of organizing data do not support the ability to revert to previous states, or at least do not do so efficiently. This research involves designing and evaluating practical techniques for supporting such an ability. Technically, a data structure is called persistent if updating the data structure creates a new version without destroying the old version. After the update the two versions co-exist, and future operations can refer to either or both. Persistent data structures are sometimes called immutable. Persistent data structures have applications in computational geometry, transaction processing, editing, functional programming, compilers, and many other areas. In addition, persistent data structures have several important non-algorithmic benefits, including elimination of certain families of bugs, increased security, and decreased need for synchronization among multiple processors. The objectives of this project include - inventing new persistent data structures, with an emphasis on practicality rather than merely theoretical efficiency, - extracting from these new data structures new design and analysis techniques suitable for a persistent environment, and - experimentally evaluating the practical efficiency of competing persistent data structures doc9239 none PI: Lenore Zuck Proposal Number: This goal of the research is to advance the state of the art in ensuring the correctness of compilation in the presence of extensive optimization. This will be achieved via the use of translation validation where, rather than verifying the compiler itself one constructs a tool that formally confirms that the target code produced by each run of the compiler is a correct translation of the source program. The methods being developed will handle an extensive set of optimizations for modern architectures, ranging from high level loop optimizations that dramaically change the structure of a program to low level machine dependent optimizations, such a instruction scheduling. The research will first develop the theory of a correct translation. Special care will be taken to obtain a maximally faithful representation of hardware factors characteristic of modern architectures, such as instruction latencies, CPU resources, etc. The preferred (and often mandatory) approach is that the validator tool should derive all of this information automatically by a carefully analysis of the source and the target. A major component of the secondpart of the proposal will be dedicated to the development of heuristics and analysis techniques by which this task can be accomplished doc9240 none The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors identifies a need for innovative testing and diagnostic methods for digital and mixed-signal devices. Traditional testing strategies are becoming less effective for several reasons. As device operational frequencies increase, the cost of functional test equipment, capable of testing devices at their native speed (at-speed), is becoming cost prohibitive. Testing methods which use slower, cheaper test equipment need to be able to detect defects that cause at-speed delay failures. The increasing complexity and diversity of these devices also make it difficult to access internal nodes and achieve good fault coverage and parametric device information. Technology trends, such as increases in device leakage currents, have reduced the effectiveness of alternative tests such as IDDQ. This research is designed to address these short-coming by investigating device transient and novel quiescent signal techniques. In previous work, process-tolerant VDDT and IDDQ methods have been demonstrated to (1) detect resistive shorting and open defects, (2) predict performance in defect-free devices, and (3) predict defect location in defective devices. These methods are based on the cross-correlation of multiple static and transient power supply signals. Cross-correlation is used to calibrate for process and technology-related variations, such as shifts in transistor betas and increases in leakage current. This research focuses on the implementation of these techniques in a production test environment, and on identifying their capabilities and limitations. The scalability of the methods to large commercial devices is investigated with industrial partners. Production test environment issues, such as measurement noise and instrumentation sampling requirements, test generation strategies and specialized hardware are also investigated doc9241 none Goldreich Dr. Peter Goldreich, at the , will direct theoretical investigations in several topics in astrophysics. Most of his effort will be in the area of interstellar scintillation and magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence. Most of the baryonic matter in the universe has such high electrical conductivity that magnetic fields diffuse very slowly through it. Thus fluid motions and motions of magnetic field lines are closely coupled. Large scale motions are generally turbulent, and incompressible MHD is the simplest approximation under which these complex coupled motions can be investigated. Dr. Peter Goldreich will carry out a series of numerical simulations of incompressible MHD turbulence to test specific predictions of a theory set forth earlier by Goldreich & Sridhar. These predictions include: 1. A scale dependent anisotropy relationship between correlation lengths that are parallel and perpendicular to the local magnetic field. 2. That velocity and magnetic field differences in planes perpendicular to the local magnetic field obey the Kolmogorov scaling characteristic of hydrodynamic turbulence. 3. That shear Alfven waves control the cascade dynamics and slow waves play only a passive role. Scintillations of small angular diameter radio sources reveal a spectrum of interstellar electron density fluctuations. To a good approximation, these conform to the Kolmogorov scaling, with a constant of proportionality that varies over a wide range in different regions. It is plausible to assume that this spectrum is a consequence of MHD turbulence. Elliptical, scatter-broadened images imply the density spectrum is anisotropic, presumably due to the presence of a large scale magnetic field. A quantitative connection will be made between velocity and magnetic field fluctuations predicted by the Goldreich & Sridhar theory of MHD turbulence and the fluctuations of interstellar electron density. The amount of ionized gas along lines of site to pulsars will be correlated with the pulsars scattering measures to help identify the sources and sites of the turbulence. Dr. Goldreich will also examine processes in planet formation in which he will concentrate on dynamical problems posed by the large orbital eccentricities of detected extra-solar planets. Finally, he will explore the phenomenon of amplitude saturation in multi-mode stellar pulsations. He will attempt to explain why Cepheid variables and RR Lyrae stars pulsate with large amplitudes while many other types of stars pulsate at much smaller amplitudes doc9242 none We investigate a new application of the theory of signals and systems to test and verification of mixed-signal systems-on-a-chip. Both digital and analog input signals are considered as a set of time-varying waveforms, characterized by a correlation matrix. The matrix elements are the auto-correlation and cross-correlation coefficients. Auto-correlation indicates how much a signal resembles its prior values in time. Cross-correlation indicates how similar or dissimilar two signals are. The matrix is determined from circuit inputs having good fault detection properties. Auto-correlation was used on tests for a sequential digital circuit. Random vectors were generated, and only those detecting faults were retained during vector compaction. The correlation matrix (generated from the vectors) was used to create additional test vectors. The results were spectacular -- more faults were detected, using significantly fewer vectors, and with less computation, than by any other known method. The shorter vector length significantly reduces testing costs, which are typically one third of integrated circuit costs. We apply this idea to analog and mixed-signal circuits. We compose the Hadamard matrix (which describes the time history of prior vectors) for a digital circuit with an analog circuit transfer function. The matrix expresses successful digital test waveforms in terms of their digital spectrum. Analog circuits are tested using spectral analysis, but this is the first time that digital circuits have been tested spectrally. In a mixed digital analog system, we arrange digital test waveforms to configure the digital part as a programmable tone generator to test the analog part. Likewise, the analog part is configured to provide the appropriate signal spectrum to test the digital part. The possible benefits would be: (1) Removal of isolation test hardware between digital and analog circuits, which are now tested together; (2) Elimination of delays and distortion due to test hardware; (3) Lower cost; and (4) Simpler test generation algorithms. We also are applying spectral testing ideas to formal hardware verification, which determines whether a circuit, as implemented, is consistent with its specification doc9243 none Group communication services form important building blocks for applications in dynamic distributed systems, where processors and communication links can repeatedly fail and recover. Such dynamic behavior is especially descriptive of mobile environments, in which processors can change their physical location continually. The key features of a group communication facility are (1) indicating to each processor with which other processors it can currently communicate, and (2) letting processors within a group communicate with each other in an ordered and reliable manner. A typical approach to developing fault-tolerant software is to assume certain limitations on the behavior of faulty components. However, in reality there is a non-zero probability that any such assumptions will be temporarily violated; in fact, this probability grows with time. In particular, mobile communication networks are exposed to environmental noise whose level is hard to predict in advance. Thus, it may be too optimistic to approach correctness by assuming that the system is consistent initially and each subsequent step maintains consistency. Self-stabilizing algorithms cope with temporary faults in an elegant way. A self-stabilizing algorithm can be started in any global state, which could be reached due to an arbitrary combination of failures, and always en-sures that the task of the algorithm is achieved, assuming that the designer s assumptions hold for sufficiently long intervals. The goal of this research is to design self-stabilizing group communication services and apply these services to mobile networks. One part of the research will focus on the specification and design of initialized group services, in which the establishment of a new group ensures that messages related to previous incarnations are discarded. Various synchrony assumptions will be considered in order to identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for the specified initialized group services. One approach to be investi-gated is using transient fault detectors that will trigger the establishment of a new group whenever inconsistency is detected. Impossibility results will be developed to indicate which system assump-tions are necessary; lower bound results will be proved to shed light on the degree of optimality of the solutions obtained. A second part of the research will study how different mobile applications can take advantage of the self-stabilizing group communication services developed. A third part of the research will explore the interactions between the group communication services and other, lower level, mobile services. Group communication services have been incorporated in several existing academic and indus-trial distributed systems. However, none of them is self-stabilizing and none of them is specifi-cally tailored for mobile environments. Self-stabilization and group communication are important paradigms for the design of dynamic communication networks, and in particular wireless net-works. There is no doubt that the new methods developed in this project will contribute to future implementations of robust group communication systems doc9244 none Society is increasingly dependent on the robustness, reliability, and evolvability of software systems. Better support for software development and maintenance is essential. This research will help developers to be more productive and to create better software. Developers use high-level linguistic structure and semantics to discuss software artifacts with one another; however, they create and modify software artifacts using low-level text editors and compiler-motivated program representations. The goal of this research is to bridge that gap - to raise the linguistic level of developer computer interaction. That will be done by augmenting text-based representations with multi-modal interaction, and by supporting semantic and structural search, navigation, and transformation mechanisms. Using the Harmonia language-based framework being developed at Berkeley, the new methods will be applied initially to Java. A form of Java will be created that is more naturally verbalized by human developers. Methods will be devised to (1) translate this form to the same annotated abstract syntax representation used by conventional text-based tools, (2) resolve the ambiguities that the new form allows, (3) analyze program fragments, a necessary component of semantic search and navigation, and (4) accommodate lexical, syntactic, and semantic inconsistencies, sustaining language-based services when the artifacts are incomplete and incorrectly formed doc9245 none Mattice New types of catalysts permit the tailoring of the atomisticially detailed structure of known polymers in ways that were not previously possible. The properties of the resulting polymers are often strongly affected by these changes. The properties have their origin at distance scales on the order of a few tenths of a nm, because it is on this distance scale that the atomistically detailed structure is defined. However, the import physical properties of bulk materials produced from these polymers arise from the mixing and organization of long chain molecules, an issue that affects much longer distance scales. The new bridging methods are required in order to connect these two distance scales. The new hierarchy will be employed to understand how these atomistically detailed changes can affect the properties of a single polymer, as illustrated by elastomeric polypropylene , and the blends obtained upon mixing two chemically similar polymers. The change in the dynamics of polymers at the entanglement transition will be studied in a way that uniquely takes advantage of the hierarchical nature of the family of simulations. This hierarchy permits study of the interesting, but relatively slow, dynamics of the entangled system using a coarse-grained model that can unambiguously be related to an atomistically detailed structure. Therefore it becomes possible to perform laboratory experiments with precisely the same system that is the subject of the simulation. The experiments, using pulsed gradient NMR, and simulations will employ precisely the same bidisperse polyethylene melts. The unambiguous connection with experiment will provide a very strong constraint on the development of the simulation, which will cover the transition region in which the system changes from unentangled to entangled behavior. Analysis of the simulations should produce a better understanding of the changes in the types of motion polymers in this transition region. The broad range of time and distance scales covered by important properties of dense polymers has historically produced two different, and disconnected, models for these materials. Models expressed with atomistically detailed structures are limited to short distance and time scales. Phenomena at long distance and time scales are described using coarse grained models, or, for very large scales, continuum models. The project will produce a hierarchy of models that bridges between the atomistically detailed structures and a series of increasingly more coarsely grained structures that extend well into the nanoscale regime, where one sees the transition from molecular to continuum behavior doc9246 none Our ability to build complex software systems relies on composition techniques that enable complete programs to be constructed from smaller pieces. A particular decomposition imposes a structure that makes it possible to manage the complexity of a large system. But the same decomposition can also make it harder to add or change features that cut across the structure. The thesis of this project is that the design, evolution, and comprehension of software can be better supported by tools that allow programmers to examine and work with multiple perspectives of a system. In particular, such tools empower programmers to think of programs, not as linear texts, but as equivalence classes of concrete views, each of which might be appropriate for different tasks. The project develops both foundational results and practical tools for representing and manipulating software. Firm semantic foundations are provided by a new algebraic framework for reasoning about the construction of complex software systems. Practical experience is obtained by developing and experimenting with an interactive browser and editor based on the same algebra. This tool will allow programmers to explore and modify a software system from multiple perspectives, some user-defined, and some automatically generated doc9247 none To meet rapidly increasing demand for satellite communications and broadcast services, there is a need for more bandwidth efficient techniques, and the use of higher level modulations is a natural choice. However, higher level modulations suffer relatively more performance degradation from satellite amplifier nonlinearity. This research focuses on the design and analysis of digital transmission for the nonlinear satellite channel, especially as regards the combination of highly efficient coded modulation, signal processing and decoding algorithms. The research involves a comprehensive plan to develop and compare coded modulation, predistortion, equalization, and decoding algorithms for high-rate bandwidth-efficient nonlinear satellite channels (3 bits symbol information rate and higher). Previous results of the investigator showed that with effective predistortion, the nonlinear channel is well-approximated by a peak power constrained but otherwise linear channel, and suitably optimized (12,4) PSK is superior to 16 QAM trellis coded modulation (TCM). The present work is focused on the following topics: (1) Higher rate TCM and multidimensional TCM for the predistorted channel; (2) Combined equalization and decoding of TCM in the nonlinear channel; (3) Turbo trellis coded modulation (TTCM) in the nonlinear channel, which may be powerful enough to not require predistortion or equalization; and (4) Hierarchical coded modulation in the nonlinear channel, which is suitable for variable error rate protection and or backward compatibility. Although the focus is on ground-based transmitter or receiver techniques with a high power travelling wave tube amplifier (TWTA) transponder, the work is also applicable to on-board linearization of low power satellite amplifier or even in-hand linearization of a cell phone provided that a digitally generated signal is amplified (versus analog combining), because there is still the fundamental problem of bandwidth and power-efficient coded modulation design subject to a peak power constraint doc9248 none A new approach to software testing called observation-based testing is investigated. Observation-based testing is intended to reduce the cost of testing by minimizing the number of test cases that must be evaluated manually for conformance to requirements. It calls for profiling the executions induced by a set of potential test cases and then filtering the executions based on their profiles to identify a subset that warrants manual evaluation. The executions are filtered using multivariate analysis techniques. The subset of execution that is selected for evaluation is one whose profiles suggest is more likely to contain failures than are other subsets. In order to provide a methodology and set of tools for observation-based testing, alternative forms of execution are evaluated to determine which are most effective for identifying conditions associated with program failure; alternative procedures for filtering executions are evaluated to determine which are most effective for identifying failures among a set of executions; and alternative observation-based techniques for estimating software reliability are evaluated with respect to their efficiency. In conjunction with such methodological research, a prototype suite of tools is being developed to support observation-based testing doc9249 none As integrated circuit speed and density increases, more circuits fail due to delay faults -- manufacturing defects that cause the circuit to operate at a speed slower than intended. Such circuits either cannot be used or must be sold at a lower price. The behavior of delay faults is complex, and traditional manufacturing test approaches are increasingly ineffective in detecting them. This research attacks this problem by developing a novel realistic delay fault model. This model is being used to develop powerful techniques for fault simulation, automatic manufacturing test generation, and diagnosis for next-generation integrated circuits. This work is being done in cooperation with U.S. semiconductor manufacturers. These test and diagnosis techniques are being integrated into a state-of-art software system and will be tested on real manufacturing problems. The new realistic delay fault model considers resistive bridges and opens, the impact of process variation on interconnect, device, and defect parameters, and the influence of interconnect parasitics. Fast layout and parasitic extraction algorithms, and model order reduction techniques are being developed to reduce model cost for a given accuracy level. The model is encapsulated in a parameterized static timing analysis engine for use in fault simulation, test generation and diagnosis. A constraint-based fault coverage analysis is used to determine fault coverage over a set of vectors. Together, these techniques can accurately predict fault coverage and achieve very high delay fault coverage for scan-based CMOS logic circuits doc9250 none Proposal Charles K Chui, Wenjie He, and Joachim Stoeckler U of Missouri, Saint Louis : Tight frames with scaling factor 2, generated by the standard affine operations of dilation and translation of two compactly supported cardinal splines, called frame generators, can be easily constructed for any spline order m (or degree m-1), by applying matrix extension techniques. However, regardless of the number of (spline) frame generators being used, at least one of them has only one vanishing moment, when the matrix extension approach is followed. In our recent work, we introduced the notion of vanishing-moment recovery Laurent polynomial factors S(z) is introduced to show that the maximum number m of vanishing moments can be achieved by both compactly supported tight frame generators, for any order m. Furthermore, the Laurent polynomials S(z) can be formulated explicitly when tight frames are relaxed to be sibling frames; that is, both frame generators, together with their corresponding duals, are compactly supported cardinal splines of the same order m. These additional vanishing moments are essential for effective use of the wavelet coefficients for feature extraction, noise removal, etc. Cardinal splines are spline functions with an equally spaced knot sequence extending from. However, in most practical applications, the intervals of interest are bounded and data samples may not be uniformly distributed. Hence, mth order splines with arbitrary knots, or at least with m stacked knots at one or both end-points of the interval of interest, are needed. This new research project is concerned with formulation of the matrix equivalent Sk of the Laurent polynomials S(z), construction of Sk and the corresponding tight (and more generally sibling) frame generators of mth order compactly supported splines with arbitrary knots and with m vanishing moments, achievement of such important features as inter-orthogonality for sibling frames, development and integration of the associated frame algorithms with the existing spline tools, investigation of spline-wavelet frame tools for adding sparsification and editing fearures for applications in computer graphics, and development of a portable software library doc9251 none Constrained Power and Performance Optimization for Embedded Systems The goal of this research is to explore techniques for power management of embedded systems with provable bounds on power efficiency as well as adverse effects on latency due to power management. The current state of the art in system-level power management is limited to shutting parts of a system after a certain period of idle time, thus ignoring the application timing constraints, runtime traffic and application usage information. This work will develop power-performance control knobs that will allow us to make effective online decisions. Specific applications will include power-aware resource scheduling in RTOS, timing-aware power optimizations and tradeoffs between power savings and application quality of service (e.g., missed deadlines). Our technical focus is on solving two key problems: (a) latency-constrained power optimization, i.e., minimization of system-level power consumption with constrains on the effect of system latency due to power management; and (b) power-constrained performance optimization, e.g., system-level task implementation and scheduling within a given power budget. As a first step, we focus on analytic bounds on the effectiveness of online power management algorithms and their efficiency by developing bounds on latency increases due to power management. We introduce the notion of a competitive ratio as a quantitative measure of how well a given power management algorithm performs against an optimum power consumption profile. Next, we incorporate these analytic bounds in a broader system-level timing and power simulation engine which enables an accurate performance simulation while minimizing the details related to actual system functionality. Our experimental evaluation is through RTOS implementation of new power management services through coordinated scheduling and resource shutdown doc9252 none Pulsar Interferometry AST- Pulsars present one of the most clear-cut demonstrations that it is through astronomy and astrophysics that we can study the properties of matter existing under conditions quite unattainable in our laboratories here on the Earth. Radio pulsars are the most easily observed manifestation of the neutron stars which we now recognize as occupying a key position in stellar evolution. For example, comparing the radio pulsar birthrate with the birthrate of massive stars, the frequency of type II supernovae can be constrained, which in turn limits the rate of heavy element generation and enrichment from this source. Their impact on fundamental physics is likewise enormous, for example in the demonstration of gravitational radiation from binary pulsars. Yet, still the basic knowledge of the distances, distribution and dynamics of pulsars is in a very primitive state. With radio interferometry, precise astrometry is now possible for many pulsars which can yield many more parallaxes and proper motions for these objects. During the course of this award the PI and his collaborators plan to use the national radio astronomy facilities make these measurements and thus remedy the earlier deficiency doc9253 none This research investigates a new method of assessing predicted performance characteristics of Object-Oriented software architectures. As scenarios represent the anticipated runtime behavior of a system, they can be used at a very early stage in the design to quantitatively predict aspects of that behavior. The proposed approach can be applied earlier than other existing methods such as simulations and executable designs, and does not require special analytical skills. Early assessment is an important risk mitigation technique, that can contribute significantly to the task of building a distributed system with a greater degree of confidence in its ability to perform as required. The research involves formally defining a set of scenario-based metrics and a corresponding system-wide dynamic metrics model. A strongly typed traceability scheme is defined to support the definition and automated querying of relationships between performance requirements, scenarios, and architectural components. Scenario invocation rates are specified within the context of typical usage patterns, and the relationship between scenarios is investigated to determine when performance requirements should be propagated from one scenario to another. A supporting tool is developed and used to capture metrics and validate them against runtime and simulation measurements taken from a variety of distributed systems doc9254 none Chambers High redshift radio galaxies (HZRGs) are among the strangest and most distant objects known, there is nothing like them in the universe today. Recent observations suggest that they consist of vast regions of gas and dust illuminated by an aniosotropic quasar beam that becomes visible by scattering like a searchlight in fog. The light scattered by dust is polarized, making these objects a good place to study astronomical dust and the cosmic evolution of the dust content of galaxies. Radio-loud, double-lobed, steep-spectrum quasars (QSRs) are the largest extended objects known at high redshift, and studies of their kinematics, dust content, and stellar populations will provide insight to the formation of massive galaxies. This project will study these high redshift radio source hosts. Two novel observational approaches will be used: (i) Targeted studies of a sample of distant radio sources that have bright (M 13) foreground stars within the isoplanatic patch will be observed with the new generation of adaptive optics instruments on 8-10 meter class telescopes with 50 milliarcsecond resolution. With the adaptive optics systems now available, it is possible to obtain two-dimensional surface brightness profiles and color gradients of the most distant and reddest galaxies. Integral field spectroscopy of the extended emission line regions can be compared with dynamical and dust scattering models. Spatially resolved infrared polarimetry will probe the dust content of these objects and its evolution with redshift. The vast improvement in capability provided by AO with natural guide stars provides a crucial tool to advance the field of radio galaxies in the distant universe. (ii) A wide field optical imaging polarimetry survey that will be the first deep sky survey to search for faint polarized objects. With the prime focus camera on the Subaru 8-meter Japanese National Telescope on Mauna Kea a deep polarimetry survey can reach very faint point sources (greater than 29th magnitude). Observations of three separate 0.5 degree fields, will produce images and a catalog of the linear polarization of more than 100,000 extragalactic objects, including more than 100 faint radio galaxies. These will be cross correlated with known radio, submillimeter, x-ray, and redshift catalogs, and HST morphologies. This wide field imaging polarimetry survey will provide a unique and independent measure of the nature and evolution of the dusty galaxy population at high redshift and measure the impact of dust and reprocessed light on the colors and morphologies of high redshift galaxies and AGN hosts. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9255 none Matthews This project lies at the intersection of two emerging revolutions in astronomy: the scientific maturation of our understanding of galaxy evolution and cosmology and the exploitation of the riches of X-ray observations of violently heated regions of the universe. The origin and heating of X-ray luminous hot gas around massive elliptical galaxies are both internal and external. Deep inside the stellar galaxy, most of the hot gas originates from mass loss from normally evolving stars; further out, gas has accumulated by intergalactic accretion. When cosmic gas falls onto the dark matter halos surrounding giant elliptical galaxies, its kinetic energy is converted into heat, reaching temperatures as hot as the center of the sun! This gas is heated even further -- and enriched in heavy elements -- by supernovae explosions from young massive stars. Understanding this latter type of heating is a central problem in modern cosmology -- the feedback problem -- and this is one of the key problems addressed in this project. Elliptical galaxies are perhaps the most dramatic manifestations of these ancient heating activity. The theoretical calculations in this project are aimed at understanding the complex interplay of gas ejection from young star-forming galaxies and the subsequent evolution of this gas into the enormous X-ray clouds typically observed around elliptical galaxies. The calculations begin with initial concentrations of dark matter in an expanding universe, and after 13 billion years the computed radial variation of gas density, temperature and iron enrichment all agree with X-ray observations of large elliptical galaxies. This project will build on these results to study the heating of diffuse gas in groups of galaxies, the way collective supernova-driven galactic winds can produce the abundances of elements typically observed in the richest clusters of galaxies, the physics of the gas cooling process in clusters of galaxies, and the way X-ray emission lines in from the cores of cooling flows is absorbed by partially cooled gas. In addition, the project will study a variety of additional problems relevant to recent XMM and Chandra (x-ray satellite) observations. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9256 none Pandharipande This project continues the ongoing program to develop the fundamental theory of nuclear and other many-Particle systems, with application to astrophysical and condensed matter systems. Nuclear studies emphasize nuclear structure, hadronic structure, electromagnetic properties of the nucleon, and properties of nuclear matter. Research on heavy-ion collisions ranges from studies of the nuclear equation of state to the developing area of ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. The emphasis in astrophysics is on applying nuclear theory to neutron stars and nuclear reaction in the cosmos, with the aim of explaining observations and using observations to learn the properties of matter. Topics in condensed matter physics include Bose-Einstein condensation of excitons in semiconductors and in magnetically trapped atomic systems doc9257 none Real-time computing is an enabling technology for many current and future application areas. Many future generations real-time systems are expected to be highly dynamic and operate in fault-prone on-deterministic environments under strict timing constraints. Therefore, these systems need to be robust while delivering high performance. This motivates the need for robust resource management techniques that dynamically address real-time requirements and provide graceful degradation in the presence of uncertainty. Despite the significant body of results in resource management in real-time systems, most of them are based on ``open-loop strategies which are effective when the workload can be accurately modeled. These schemes are inadequate for many real world problems wherein the workload cannot be accurately modeled. Thus, there is a need for efficient architectures for resource management where predictable performance guarantees can be obtained in the presence of uncertainty. Feedback control theory has been central to modeling systems operating in uncertain environments. In the past few decades, this theory has made impressive strides in this direction. Correct adaptation as illustrated by feedback control theory will yield significant dividends with respect to robustness. This research focuses on developing a robust resource management framework for real-time systems employing feedback control strategies doc9258 none Collaborative Research: The Last of First: Completing Our View of the Radio Universe A ten-year program to use the world s most powerful radio telescope to provide Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty-cm (FIRST) is nearing its goal of mapping the entire northern sky outside the Milky Way with a resolution and sensitivity that exceed previous surveys by a factor of fifty or more. Over three-quarters of a million radio emitters have been detected to date, ranging from nearby active stars to the most distant quasars known. The images and source catalogs are all available on the World-Wide Web, and have been used to date by more than three hundred astronomers. The FIRST team is pursuing a number of major projects with this massive new database. Matching the radio catalog to the near-infrared sources cataloged by the 2MASS survey, they have discovered a number of highly obscured quasars -- objects emitting a thousand times the energy of the whole Milky Way from a tiny region in a distant galaxy core that is so dust-ridden that no visible light escapes. Another major project is using the entire set of radio images to attempt to determine the distribution of the mysterious dark matter in the Universe. Recognizing Einstein s dictum that mass bends light, they look for the slight distortions in the shapes of distant radio galaxies caused by the passage of their radio waves through the mass distribution of the intervening space. While optical astronomers have been conducting such weak lensing experiments on patches of sky the size of the full moon and smaller, this research will study the clumpiness of the dark matter on scales ten to one hundred times larger, thus making a direct connection between the galaxy distribution in the local Universe and the fluctuations seen in the cosmic background radiation which tells us the distribution of matter at the earliest times doc9259 none This research considers the design of bandwidth efficient coded modulation for partially coherent channels. Such channels occur in practice when coherent receivers are operated at low or moderate signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), resulting in noisy phase estimates. This happens for example on wireless channels, where multipath fading causes fluctuations in received SNR. This research leverages a recent breakthrough known as turbo coding, wherein the outputs of two or more encoders at the transmitter are iteratively decoded at the receiver, resulting in reliable communication at SNRs within 1 dB of channel capacity. This research integrates phase-tracking error into all aspects of turbo coded modulation design, thereby reducing the required SNR for practical coherent communication systems. The new design techniques stemming from this research will therefore interest not only communication and coding theorists, but also engineers designing practical communication systems. The goal of this research is to develop theoretically based, practical design methods for parallel and serially concatenated turbo coded modulation over partially coherent (PC) channels, including PC additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels, and PC fading channels with and without channel state information (CSI), with and without correlated fading, and with closed-loop and open-loop phase estimation. The investigators study the information capacity of PC channels, and determine capacity-achieving input probability density functions (PDFs) and capacity-optimal constellations for equiprobable and non-equiprobable signaling under average and peak power constraints. Distance metrics based on pairwise symbol error probabilities will be derived for PC fading channels, and iterative decoder performance prediction tools based on union bounds and convergence-region analysis will be developed. The investigators will then study set-partitioning, bits-to-symbol mapping, and code-search procedures for both linear and non-linear recursive convolutional encoders used as constituent codes in concatenated trellis-coded modulation schemes. Finally, shaping code design techniques for turbo coded modulation on power-constrained PC channels will be developed, based on the capacity-achieving PDFs of these channels, which are known to be non-Gaussian. These codes will shape the high-dimensional space of encoder output symbol sequences so that the induced two-dimensional PDF will closely approximate the capacity-optimal input PDF doc9260 none ion. At the circuit level, new circuit styles are developed that withstand power and timing attacks. At the interconnect level a novel RF on-chip wireless LAN technique is integrated. At the architecture level, reconfigurable data path modules are designed which execute the unusual arithmetic of encryption algorithms doc9261 none The use of persistent RAM in consumer products has increased its capacity and decreased its price. These trends suggest that typical computers could contain large quantities of this kind of memory in the near future. This project will investigate how to change operating system design for workstation and server machines to make best use of the availability of large quantities of persistent RAM. In particular, the project will investigate the use of persistent RAM for a machine s primary stable storage, replacing hard disks. The project will perform a test design and implementation to demonstrate the feasibility of the concept and to suggest possible advantages of the approach. This implementation will be performed on a Linux system augmented with 2 Gbytes or more of RAM that will serve as its primary storage device, with a hard disk used only for large files, such as video and audio data. The project will demonstrate advantages in speed and simplicity of the system. It will also point out interesting possibilities for improvements in operating system services made possible by the use of persistent RAM doc9262 none Star Formation and the Interstellar Medium AST- Star formation is of central importance in modern astrophysics. Stars, particularly massive stars, have a profound effect on their environment through both the winds they produce and the radiation they emit. The overall goal of the research covered by this award is to understand how stars form from the turbulent interstellar medium and how, in turn, energy injection from stars determines the properties of the interstellar medium out of which the stars form. A series of investigations is proposed, each of which is concerned with the problem of star formation both in our galaxy and in disk galaxies other than our own. In our own galaxy, special attention will be given to the process of low-mass star formation. Star formation in large clusters will also be investigated. Large clusters contain stars much more massive than the Sun and it is not at all clear how star formation can even proceed in the presence of the environmental disruption produced by just the first few stars. A third effort addressed during the present award will be an attempt to understand the distribution of gas among various phases. The relative proportions of molecular, cold atomic and warm atomic gas will be determined which will lead in turn to a self-consistent star formation rate within galaxies in general doc9263 none John Maron The invasion of native communities by introduced organisms is causing tremendous economic damage to our natural ecosystems. Biological control programs often fail, which places additional burdens on the environment because invasives must then be controlled with chemical pesticides and herbicides. The foundation of this study is one of the most successful weed biological control programs in the US. It is focused on St. John s Wort (Hypericum perforatum), an important invasive plant that has been successfully controlled using introduced herbivores. The project can help us to understand the evolution of herbivore resistance, and loss of resistance, and can reveal the coevolutionary dynamics between plants and their insect biocontrol agents. The project has strong relevance for basic ecology as well as numerous economic applications in the fields of conservation biology and agriculture. The experiments can determine if plants can rapidly lose, then accrue, resistance in the absence and presence of biocontrol agents, and will also demonstrate if plant resistance to one herbivore provides resistance to multiple herbivores. Currently there are few empirical studies on these questions doc9264 none The proposed work addresses a variety of issues related to motion planning of complex systems: development and application of statistical methods to reduce the effect of the course of dimensionality in configuration-based motion planning; constructing stochastic models of mechanical systems to account for noise in low-level sensing and actuation and its effect on high-level planning; coordination of multi-robot swarms and their biological analogues. The obtained results will be tested on holonomic as well as non-holonomic systems, and also applied to studying other complex systems, such as protein molecules doc9265 none The continuing rapid diffusion of geographic information technologies throughout societal applications and the growing use of geographic and location data use has spawned diverse notions in the scientific community regarding priorities for research and the nature of appropriate research. This divergence in thinking is particularly noticeable when comparing GIS and Society research agendas in the U.S. and Europe. European nations are responding to the expanded use of geographic information by individuals, businesses, government agencies, and scientists in a manner quite different from the responses witnessed in the U.S. Laws and policies regarding the handling of scientific, technical, business, personal, and government data are very different on either side of the Atlantic, and these differences have influenced technical and social science research directions in the field. The growing gaps between U.S. and European approaches to data handling and the divergence in GIS and Society research priorities highlights the need to reestablish links among U.S. and European researchers in order to enable researchers in these communities to inform each other about the underlying influences affecting the directions of research and the different paths they are taking. This award will support the involvement of U.S. and European researchers in a joint workshop to be held in Rome, Italy, during Fall . The objectives of the workshop will be (1) to assess the current state of research on access to geographic information and on geographic access theory, (2) to evaluate the impact of evolving policy and legal trends in the U.S. and Europe on access to scientific and technical data generally and to geographic data specifically, (3) to assess the current state of research on participatory approaches surrounding the use of geographic information, (4) to explore commonalities and differences in U.S. and European directions of research within these arenas, and (5) to develop a joint U.S.-European research agenda on geographic information access and participatory issues. The workshop arises from recent research discussions among members of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) and the Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe (AGILE). The workshop will be structured as a series of plenary presentations, breakout small group discussions, and plenary discussions, a model successfully used by the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis in the U.S. and by the European GISDATA program for more than a decade. over the years. Findings will be issued in a workshop report, and several print and electronic means will be exploited to distribute additional workshop results. This workshop should facilitate communications among U.S. and European scientists examining the dissemination and use of geographic information systems as well as the barriers to more complete and effective use of GISs and related technologies within and across different nations. Through publication of the results of this workshop, the broader research community will benefit from the focus attention given to this issue in Rome. The workshop will contribute to a number of major activities in which the U.S. government is engaged, including the work by the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) to develop an institutional framework for allowing individuals and organizations to share and exchange geographic data and services while retaining substantial public access rights for much of the data. It also will contribute toward comparable international efforts, such as the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure effort, which is promoting mechanisms to allow cross-national collaboration in the sharing and exchange of geographic information as well as more open access to geographic data doc9266 none Telesco, Charles A Mid-IR Study of Protoplanetary & Debris Disks around Intermediate-Mass Stars Understanding the birth and evolution of planets is one of the most intriguing and challenging tasks in modern astronomy. During the period of this award, the PI and his team will use state-of-the-art infrared imagers, built mainly by themselves, to image the distribution of warm dust in disks. The imagers will be used at many of the world s largest 8 and 10m telescopes. They are sensitive to mid-infrared radiation from 8 to 25 microns that is emitted by the dust within several hundred astronomical units of the star. Key program goals are to critically constrain how coalescence and planet formation can proceed and to look for disk distortions and other signatures resulting from the influence of planets that have already formed doc9267 none A broad research program in theoretical physics will include the study of superstring theory, particle astrophysics, the application of field theory to complex physical problems, neutrino masses and oscillations, the development of chaos in quantum systems, and the numerical investigation of quantum chromodynamics. Superstring theory is the exciting candidate for a theory of all the fundamental forces, including gravity; particle astrophysics addresses problems associated with the very early development of the universe; and quantum chromodynamics is the fundamental theory of the strong nuclear forces. Thus, the investigations to be undertaken are of fundamental importance doc9268 none This RUI project focuses on the generation of amplitude-squeezed states of light from vertical-cavity, surface-emitting lasers (VCELs), and, in particular, on what conditions produce the lowest amount of noise from a pulsed VCSEL and why this is the case. To this end the noise behavior of the VCSEL pulses will be thoroughly characterized. The laser will be operated under differing drive and feedback conditions, and the time evolution of the noise behavior will be measured. Coupling between amplitude and phase noise in the laser will be measured, and the technique of amplitude-phase decoupling will be used to reduce the laser noise doc9269 none Studies in Relativistic Physics and Astrophysics General relativity is the theoretical foundation of current work on the physics on neutron stars and black holes, on the generation of gravitational waves, and in a broad sense on modern cosmology in general. However, the theory still remains largely untested, except in the weak-field, low-velocity regime. The the research being done under this award addresses several fundamental areas in relativistic physics and astrophysics that are currently ripe for progress. Specific research topics include the physics of accretion onto relativistic objects, possible ways to detect general relativistic effects and constraints on the equation of state and dynamical properties of dense matter in neutron stars. In addition to the theoretical analyses, attention will be given to the planning and analysing of observations designed to probe the properties of dense matter and strong gravitational fields. In this effort, the research program can take full advantage of the new information on black holes and neutron stars that is now being provided by space-based observations doc9270 none Smith The u g r i z filter system, developed for use for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), has recently gained rapid acceptance as a major filter system for the coming decade s wide-field astronomical projects -- projects which will be conducted at both northern and southern hemisphere observatories. The SDSS, however, is a northern hemisphere survey, and the present network of 164 u g r i z standards, established especially for use in SDSS operations, is geared for northern hemisphere observations. To meet the need for southern u g r i z standards Dr. J. Allyn Smith, at the University of Wyoming, will lead a program to use the facilities of the Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory in Chile to calibrate a series of southern standards. This project is intended as a service to the general astronomical community. As such, quick availability of the data product - a catalogue of calibrated southern u g r i z standard stars - is a high priority. The intent is to make interim versions of the southern standard star catalogue publicly available at the end of each of the four years of the project. Within months of the completion of all observations, a final calibrated catalogue will be made available. Both the interim and the final catalogues will be published on a publicly accessible internet site. The final catalogue will also be published in a refereed journal article doc9271 none This project, a collaboration between NCISE and the Connecticut State Department of Education will investigate the research potential of the portfolios required of all Connecticut second-year mathematics and science teachers and compare multiple avenues of new research that address issues of national significance for improvement of teacher preparation and induction. The study poses the following questions: 1. What mathematics or science content do well-qualified and supported beginning teachers know, and what is the quality of their mathematics and science instruction? 2. How does the teaching quality of second-year teachers vary with the extent and nature of district- and school-level support provided during their first year? 3. What gains do teachers who fail the portfolio submission upon resubmission make? 4. What professional development benefits accrue to teachers who score the portfolios? 5. What aspects of Connecticut s program are transferable and under what conditions? 6. How can preservice faculty use the portfolios to improve their courses doc9272 none The investigators will determine the properties of an Earth-based radar capable of detecting fast Earth-directed solar coronal mass ejections (CMEs). The objective is to assess the feasibility of detecting such events by means of ground-based solar coronal radars and to identify the scientific potential of such observations for enhancing the understanding of the early development of coronal mass ejections. A detailed description of the properties of an Earth-based radar capable of detecting fast Earth-directed CMEs will be developed, including those characteristics that would facilitate continuous monitoring for such events. Radar parameters that best separate the CME radar signature from the background coronal echo will be determined by comparing the expected signature with past observations of coronal echoes. Major Earth-directed CMEs have been identified as harbingers of severe space weather at Earth. As the consequent solar wind disturbance takes a day or more to reach Earth, early detection of such events would provide a means to prepare for the possible impacts on technical systems doc9273 none This award provides funds to aid in purchase of a carbon hydrogen nitrogen sulfur (CHNS) analyzer for the Shannon Point Marine Center of Western Washington University. Because of its location on the Puget Sound basin, the significance of the marine environment and its resources to the local region, and interest on the part of students, the research emphasis at the Center is shifting to more physiologically and biochemically based studies, a shift that will be aided by purchase of the analyser. The instrument will enable study of the input of nitrogen into marine systems from natural sources, agricultural runoff, and other anthropogenic sources. Nitrogen can be an important driver of many processes in the marine environment. Thus, the ability to measure nitrogen concentrations in the oceans and in marine organisms is critical to understanding how these systems function. The CHNS analyzer will be available for use by the five resident researchers the Center, by undergraduate and graduate students and by faculty from the main University campus in Bellingham, WA doc9274 none Magee-Sauer Dr. Karen Magee-Sauer, at Rowan University, will measure and compare abundances of acetylene, hydrogen cyanide, and ammonia in several comets. The composition of native ices is a fundamental question in cometary science. Their characterization is central to identifying the processes that occurred during formation of the Solar System. The focus of this project is to utilize the rapidly expanding field of ground-based infrared spectroscopy to determine cometary composition through quantitative measurements of several key volatile species. The high spectral and spatial resolution afforded by long-slit infrared spectroscopy enable the detection of multiple emission features of each species, and yield information on their productions. Under favorable conditions, the spatial profiles can separately identify material released form the nucleus from that produced in the coma. This will help answer the basic question of the composition of natal ices in comets, and help constrain models of Solar System formation. This project is funded under the Research at Undergraduate Institutions (RUI) program at NSF doc9275 none Meszaros Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) and the active nuclei of galaxies (AGNs) outshine every other gamma-ray source in the sky. GRB are stellar remnants thought to be powered by black holes with masses several times the mass of the sun, which, in a few seconds, emit as much energy as our entire Milky Way does in a hundred years. However, it is not understood what kinds of stars give rise to these events, nor what is the exact mechanism whereby they produce gamma-rays, neutrinos and charged cosmic rays, nor how frequently or how far back in time they occur. AGNs, on the other hand, are suspected of harboring giant black holes, more massive than millions of suns, and are known to accelerate jets of electrons, which produce radio waves, light and ultra-high energy gamma rays. However, it is unclear if these jets also contain protons and neutrons, like some giant neutron gun, which would also entail highly penetrating neutrinos. Both ultra-high energy protons and neutrinos are targets for giant cosmic ray and neutrino telescopes being built by NSF in Argentina and in the South Pole, which will probe energies millions of times higher than any ever achieved in Earth laboratories. This is uncharted territory, and we need to know the theoretical ranges of possible results. A comparison of theoretical models with these experiments is imperative, in order to test the validity of current ideas (or the need for new ones) about how our Universe functions. This project will identify key features distinguishing different conceptions, which will allow an optimization of the design of planned experiments, and the testing of the various competing theories. The results would have far-reaching consequences for a range of questions in astrophysics, including how far into the cosmic past can we peer, what is the total energy content of the Universe, and are the laws of physics different or not at these higher energies and earlier times in the age of the Universe Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9276 none Mathieu, Robert Putting Pre-Main-Sequence Stellar Evolution to the Test: Interiors and Angular Momentum During the course of this award the physical characteristics of young, recently formed stars will be studied by detecting and modeling those stars that form eclipsing binary systems. Through the distribution of rotational velocities among stars in two star clusters of different ages, an attempt will be made to understand the angular momentum loss mechanisms which are effective in the early evolution of single and binary stars. The two star clusters to be studies in detail are the Orion Nebula cluster, with age about 1 million years and the 100 million year old cluster NGC . The main objective of this research is to investigate whether the presently understood mechanisms of stellar angular momentum evolution can change the rotation period distribution within the younger cluster into that observed in the older cluster doc9277 none of the wave fields by extremely simple and explicit probabilistic formulas. The proposed work is expected to significantly affect most areas dealing with the modeling of complicated phenomena in continua. Such areas as non-destructive evaluation, geophysics, acoustics, radar, telecommunication technologies, and other areas dealing with wave propagation are expected to especially benefit from the project. Such considerable impact is provided by the use of a novel approach that combines the simplicity of asymptotic methods with the versatility of direct numerical methods. The method to be utilized is compatible with conventional methods, and it employs scalable algorithms with low memory requirements and with unlimited capability for parallel processing. It is an approach that is ideal for the present state of development of computational facilities, relying on theoretical developments in statistics that have occurred since the s doc9278 none Sparke Most of the Universe s mass emits no light; we know of its existence only through its gravitational pull on the luminous stars and gas. Within galaxies, this `dark matter is most influential in the outer parts. This project will study polar ring galaxies. In these, a huge ring of gas, stars and dust encircles a rotating inner disk of stars, much like our own Milky Way -- but the ring stands perpendicular to the central disk. The motions of stars and gas in both the ring and the central galaxy are controlled by gravitational forces, including those of the `dark halo of non-luminous matter. If the dark halo is roughly spherical, gas in the ring should orbit in circles around the galaxy center, while if the dark stuff lies in a Milky-Way-like disk, the ring will be squashed into an oval by its gravitational force. From observations these motions, the investigators will determine whether the halo is roughly round, or forms a flattened disk. The latter finding would support the idea that the dark material is normal matter (such as burned-out stars), rather than weakly-interacting particles that have not yet been observed on Earth. The investigators also intend to study another gravitational problem: the orbits of stars that experience a gravitational force that is not always the same, but varies with time. An example is that of a star belonging to a small galaxy that follows an elliptical orbit around a much larger galaxy -- our Milky Way has several such satellites. As the satellite swoops in low, the increased gravitational force of the Milky Way can remove stars from its outer regions. The PI has developed a novel method, that of invariant loops , that will be used to tackle this problem, and to find which stars will remain with the satellite and which will be stripped from it. It will then be possible to use observations of stars around these small galaxies, now being gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and other surveys, to measure the gravitational force of the satellite galaxy in comparison to that of the Milky Way. In this way the masses of the satellites can be estimated and their dark matter content calculated. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9279 none Optical and Infrared Observations of Black Hole Binaries and Related Systems AST- Optical and infrared observations of X-ray sources with soft X-ray transients will be carried out. These objects are binary star systems, which consist of an accreting compact object and a less massive companion star that is the donor. Optical and infrared observations show that the compact object is possibly a black hole in many cases although the results are controversial. In quiescence, the optical light is dominated by that of the companion star and orbital parameters can be measured which indicate that, in most cases, the mass of the compact object is above the 3 solar mass upper limit for a neutron star. At the times of X-ray outburst, the optical and infrared radiation is dominated by that from the accretion flow and from X-ray irradiation of the secondary star and surrounding material. Simultaneous optical and X-ray observations are needed to describe the geometry and physics of these objects which are presently providing some of the strongest evidence for the existence of black holes doc9280 none This project addresses basic theoretical and computational aspects of integer programming and combinatorial optimization, using tools of linear algebra and graph theory. In the nineties the principal investigators have developed a computationally successful approach to mixed 0-1 programming known as lift-and-project. A central theme of the research is to develop this approach in new directions that seem computationally even more promising. One of these directions uses a one to one correspondence recently established by the investigators team between basic solutions to the higher dimensional linear program used to generate lift-and-project cuts, and certain basic solutions of the LP relaxation of the mixed integer program itself. This correspondence can be used to generate deepest cuts in the lift-and-project sense without explicitly generating the higher dimensional linear program. Another important topic is the creation of bridges from integer programming to the branch of computer science known as constraint programming. A recently discovered linear characterization of cardinality rules and similar logical constructs, along with the linear time separability of the inequalities involved, makes it possible to develop symbolic constraints usable in an integer programming context that may significantly enhance the power of algorithms dealing with problems involving logical conditions. A third line of research pursued under this project investigates properties of a 0-1 matrix that make the set packing problem or the set covering problem (or both) defined by it have only integer basic solutions. Structural properties of balanced matrices were obtained under previous NSF grants.; ideal and perfect matrices are currently under investigation. Decision makers often face problems that have a combinatorial aspect: choose one among a very large number of possible decisions. A standard approach is to formulate such problems as integer programs and to use a solver to find the best solution. Although integer programming solvers have improved significantly over the last decade, they are still unable to solve many large scale problems to optimality. This project lays the theoretical and analytical foundation for a new generation of solvers for integer programs. The lift-and-project approach developed by the principal investigators has proved well suited to solve hard integer programming problems. Speed remains an issue however. This research project addresses the speed issue by investigating new, faster ways of computing the cuts, lift-and-project as well as other. The potential benefits of the project are significant since cut generators are already being implemented in commercial integer programming solvers and, obviously, the performance of these solvers would be improved by better cut generators. Based on the recent increase in the use of solvers by managers in most fields of business, solvers with improved performance have the potential to increase productivity in the industries where these solvers are used (manufacturing, airline, financial and other industries doc9281 none It has long been recognized that the stars and star clusters of the halo of our Galaxy are the oldest populations in the Milky Way, and therefore hold important clues to its earliest period of evolution. Despite decades of work on the halo population, little is known about its structure and its kinematics at large distances from the galactic center. It is not known, for example, if the distant halo is spherical or flattened, or if instead of a smooth density distribution, it is crisscrossed with stellar streams of debris from tidally destroyed satellite galaxies. These questions and related ones will be investigated by Dr. Robert Zinn, of Yale University, using the data collected by the QUEST survey for RR Lyrae variable stars. The QUEST camera is a 4x4 array of x CCDs mounted at the prime focus of the 1.0 meter clear aperture Schmidt telescope at the Llano del Hato Observatory in Venezuela. Science-grade data have been taken continuously since November , including some data for the RR Lyrae survey that will be concluded with this award. The preliminary data have demonstrated the feasibility of the complete survey, which is intended to cover a total of 700 square degrees of the sky doc9282 none Mermin The PI will re-examine old interpretational questions in the foundations of quantum mechanics in the light of new developments in quantum computation which focus on the quantum state exclusively as a way of manipulating of transmitting (digital) information. A self-contained introduction to the quantum theory will be formulated that is entirely accessible to computer scientists unacquainted with contemporary physics, as a generalization of how one defines and manipulates the ordinary bits of classical information theory doc9283 none The overall objective of this research is to further the understanding of a set of basic atomic and ionic processes significant to plasma science. Three topics will be pursued in detail. 1) The electrical conductivity of dense, cool plasmas will be measured in order to benchmark transport theory of strongly coupled plasmas. 2) Emission and absorption spectra involving low excitation states of He-, Li-, and Be-like ions in well-diagnosed laser-produced plasmas will be measured and the results compared with theory and simulations to test current models. 3) Measurements of x-ray spectral satellite lines will be carried out in order to test theories that the appearance of these lines is due to charge transfer collisions in dense plasmas doc9284 none Morrison This is a collaborative research project involving scientists at 3 institutions: Dr. Edward Olszewski, at the University of Arizona, Dr. Mario Mateo, at the University of Michigan, and Dr. Heather Morrison, at Case Western Reserve University. These researchers are mapping a region of our Galaxy that was hitherto unreachable. They will complete an imaging survey that has been underway for several years, and they will carry out a comprehensive spectroscopic follow-up of halo-star candidates identified in the survey. The survey is undertaken to directly assess the degree to which accretion has formed the majority of the Galaxy s halo. The main focus of the survey is finding candidate halo stars that inhabit the outer parts of the Galactic halo. The final sample of halo stars from the survey will allow placement of strong limits on the existence of halo substructure and will very likely provide direct evidence of such structure if it comprises more than 10% to 20% of the luminous halo. A profound change is underway in how astronomers believe galaxies, such as ours, formed. Older notions of a single, monolithic collapse of the outer Galaxy on a relatively short timescale have begun to be superseded by the idea that much of the Galaxy formed from the accretion of much smaller systems over the entire age of the Universe. Most data supporting this accretion-driven model is somewhat indirect and involves expectations of sophisticated models of how galaxies form in an expanding Universe. Recently, the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy has provided strong evidence that at least part of our halo stars and clusters have come from an accreted satellite doc9285 none Miller Observations of neutron stars are a principal way of investigating the properties of ultra-high density matter at densities several times that of the atomic nucleus. This research program of Dr. Cole Miller, at the University of Maryland, is directed towards a careful analysis of timing and spectral data from the brightness oscillations seen during X-ray bursts, The ultimate aims of the project are to constrain the equation of state and to understand thermonuclear propagation in neutron stars. Observations made with the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellite, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European X-ray Multi-Mirror satellite will be analyzed during the course of the project doc9286 none Hui This is a Collaborative Research Project with Matias Zaldarriaga ( ) of New York University. The light from a quasar (also called a qso) often has multiple dips in intensity, or absorption lines, at positions corresponding to the redshifted Lyman alpha line (at rest wavelength angstroms) from neutral hydrogen. These often occur as a series of absorption lines, called the Lyman alpha forest. The redshift is caused by the expansion of the universe. If we can calculate how the universe is expanding (based on a cosmological model), we can tell where the photons were absorbed in relation to us. Thus, we can use the absorption map to plot the positions of clouds of intervening hydrogen between the quasar and us. The clouds in the Lyman alpha systems are not very massive compared to objects like galaxies. Because of this, reliable computer simulations (numerical experiments) of their gravitational collapse (formation) from primordial fluctuations are possible. These Lyman alpha forest simulations produce structure similar to what we see in the nearby universe (filaments, walls, and voids ) by starting with small fluctuations in matter density and then letting gravity and other known forces act. These detailed calculations of the structure and distribution of matter are at the frontiers of current research and these recent advances in computer modeling have made it possible to use observations of the Lyman-alpha forest at redshifts between 2 and 4 as powerful cosmological tools. The forest has offered, and will continue to offer, interesting constraints on many quantities such as the amplitude and shape of the primordial mass power spectrum, the neutrino mass, the matter density, the cosmological constant, and the reionization epoch. These constraints, in conjunction with those from other observations, provide important checks on our fundamental understanding of cosmology. This project will primarily focus on the transmission power spectrum , a statistic used in cosmological models which is directly observable. The program has two goals: 1) Examination of fundamental assumptions: The project will test several methods to address questions about the influence of continuum-fitting in determining the measured fluctuations in the forest , the interpretation of these fluctuations in terms of mass fluctuations resulting from gravitational instability, and the effect of fluctuations in the ionizing background and the effective equation of state of the intergalactic medium on the interpretation. 2) Maximizing the scientific return from the data: To this end the program will address redshift-distortions, (which affect both the program of mass power spectrum recovery, as well as the ability to measure the cosmological constant through its geometrical distortion of the correlation function), degeneracies among parameters (by performing a full likelihood analysis which will reveal the degeneracies in the 4 to 6 free parameters in the current model of the forest), and obtaining a better understanding of the thermal history of the universe, (by using the drop in temperature with time after reionization to infer or at least limit the epoch of reionization from measurements of the temperature using the small-scale cut-off of the transmission power spectrum at redshifts between 2 and 4.) Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9287 none Wilcots Irregular galaxies are the most common types of galaxy in the Universe and of all the facets of their evolution, none is more important than the influence of the most massive stars. Through exceptionally strong winds and subsequent explosions as supernovae, massive stars deposit tremendous amounts of energy into their environments, triggering the formation of new generations of stars, dispersing newly formed chemical elements, and driving the evolution of the host galaxy. This project focuses on this dynamic and often violent relationship between massive stars and their environments. Using a combination of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory s Very Large Array and the new fiber-optic technology on the WIYN (Wisconsin-Indiana-Yale-National Observatories) optical telescope, the participants will measure the impact of stars on their environment and measure the ability of an individual galaxy to mitigate the effects of these massive stars. This systematic investigation will unravel the mysteries of how irregular galaxies have evolved over time, and how they continue to evolve today doc9288 none Florida Atlantic University will host a community planning workshop to discuss strategies and procedures for linking existing coastal ocean observatories along the East Coast of the US. The goal is to coordinate simultaneous observation of synoptic scale ocean and atmospheric systems, particularly those involving the Gulf Stream and hurricanes, both of which bear major influence on East Coast population centers. Linking the observatories makes it possible to coordinate standardization of oceanographic and atmospheric measurement tools to provide meaningful observations on a synoptic scale. A coordinated network of coastal observatories would also enhance studies on the influence of type, orientation and extent of local shelf characteristics on coastal processes. The workshop will result in a document that articulates the requirements, methods, and potential funding sources for implementing a functional link between the observatories. A consortium of East Coast ocean observatories is envisioned that will facilitate an integrated approach to ocean observation as well as providing a forum for exchange of data and resources doc9289 none Frank, Adam The Magnetohydrodynamics of Planetary Nebulae: New Paradigm, New Tools In the course of this award, the goal is to advance our understanding of planetary nebulae and the late stages of stellar evolution for stars with low and intermediate mass. New high-resolution images of planetary nebulae and their progenitors are leading to a re-evaluation of the mechanism by which the nebulae are shaped. The new observations have revealed features that cannot be explained by pure hydrodynamic theories. In addition, the winds from cool giants which precede the protoplanetary planetary nebula stage apparently lack the energy for radiative driving of the expanding gas shells. During the period covered by this award, magnetic fields will be incorporated to see to what extent the observations can be understood better with the inclusion of magnetohydrodynamics in the theoretical framework. A new computer code will be developed for this purpose that is expected to have wide application to other stars which display prominent circumstellar nebulae doc9290 none The proposed work focuses on human-robot interaction, namely on the robot physically sensing the human hand. Specifically, the PIs will study the microstructure (texture) of the contact surfaces between a robot and a human hand, to infer the perceptual dimensionality of haptic texture sensing (perceptual model), and establish the mapping of relevant spaces. Methods for producing intuitive and efficient synthetic textures will be investigated. Rendering algorithms will be developed for synthesizing textures with desired perceptual qualities. The work is expected to contribute to various areas of haptic perception, texture studies, and multimodal rendering of information doc9291 none Rood, Robert Collaborative Research: The 3- Helium Problem AST- Determination of the isotopic abundances of the light elements is fundamental in probing the earliest nucleosynthesis in our universe. During the first seconds, significant amounts of light elements 2-H, 3-He, 4-He and 7-Li were produced. This investigation focuses on the 3-He isotope. A primordial abundance is an ultimate aim but the contribution by the generation of this isotope by nuclear burning within common solar-type stars must first be evaluated. We would expect the contamination from this component to increase with time and also to be larger in areas which have had the highest rates of star formation in the past. These correlations are not seen and a prime goal of the present proposal is to understand why they are absent. The plan is to continue a survey of planetary nebulae and H II regions to determine 3-He abundances in different parts of the galaxy. Earlier work had revealed that small but significant excesses of 3-He were present in the planetary nebula NGC showing that enrichment had taken place. With improved facilities at Arecibo and Green Bank, it is expected that many more objects can be observed now doc9292 none Smith, Graeme Contributions from Stellar Mixing and Primordial Enrichment to Globular Cluster Abundances AST- Globular clusters are among the oldest objects that we recognize. Determinations of their ages are critical for setting limits to the age of the universe. In addition, because of their long lifetimes, they contain within their constituent stars a fossil record of the chemical history of our own galaxy. However, the situation is more complicated that one might hope. Although globular clusters were once thought to be chemically homogeneous objects, spectroscopy has shown that the brightest red giant stars within the same clusters commonly exhibit abundance differences in the surface elements C-N-O-Na-Mg-Al. At least some of these differences appear to arise from deep mixing in which material is transported from near the hydrogen-burning shell to the surface of the star. But over and above this, there are the primordial abundances which were set when some cluster stars were formed from gas which had been selectively enriched in heavy elements from high-mass stars of a former epoch. The present award looks to a main goal of measuring abundances of red giants in clusters that are less metal poor than those previously studied. This will allow the investigation of the effects of metallicity on the deep mixing process. Deep mixing as a function of stellar mass will also be investigated. The degree to which primordial effects have contributed to globular cluster abundance inhomogeneities will be investigated by spectroscopy of the fainter red giant stars and main sequence stars in several other globular clusters. Here one expects that deep mixing has been an effective agent. Observations with the Keck telescopes and associated spectrographs form the core of this work. Interpretation will follow from the application of state-of-the-art model atmosphere theory doc9293 none Bolte In a collaborative research project, Dr. Eric Sandquist at San Diego State University and Dr. Michael Bolte at the University of California at Santa Cruz will use photometric observations of large numbers (tens of thousands) of evolved low-mass stars in globular clusters to probe the physical conditions found inside the stars. Because the observable properties of a star evolve quickly once it finishes consuming its core hydrogen and because a star s lifetime is primarily determined by its mass, stars of very slightly different masses can be in very different phases of their lives. By simply counting the numbers of stars present as a function of luminosity and temperature, these researchers can estimate how quickly stars of approximately 80% of the mass of the Sun change under the influence of internal processes. The investigators will pursue a number of definite tests of stellar physics that can be conducted with these kinds of observations. In several metal-poor clusters, a surplus of stars has been observed in the subgiant evolutionary phase, which is an indication that there may be an unusually efficient means of transporting energy away from the cores of those stars. The red giant bump has long been known to test how deeply convective motions penetrate into giant branch stars, and the investigators will test mixing processes that this feature and counts of red giant stars at all luminosities can provide. They also describe several new diagnostics that can be applied to the helium fusion phases of a star s life ( the horizontal branch and asymptotic giant branch). The asymptotic giant branch in particular has been difficult to study because of its short duration. The diagnostics provide practical methods of testing whether helium-burning stars evolve in ways predicted by theory. Finally, they describe the constraints that can be placed on the dynamical evolution of entire clusters by observations of blue straggler stars -a population that appears to be created by collisions of stars or the evolution of binary stars. The study will involve the analysis of CCD data already collected from a number of heavily-populated globular clusters, followed by thorough study of the incompleteness of the photometry -- a computationally intensive step that has been responsible for the small number of large-sample studies to date. To derive robust star counts, what is needed is detailed understanding of the probability that cluster stars were lost in the light of other stars or in noise as a function of stellar brightness and distance from the cluster center. Photometric studies of this kind are very important stepping stones toward new tests of our understanding of stellar physics and stellar populations doc9294 none The project studies the physics of processes in which slow electrons induce heavy particle motion. The low energy electron motion requires a quantum mechanical treatment, while the heavy particle motion is classical. The focus is on dissociative electron attachment to different targets and in different environments. Targets to be considered include diatomic molecules, polyatomic molecules, clusters, physisorbed molecules, and molecules embedded in a crystal medium. The project will also consider the theory of inelastic and charge transfer processes in collisions of Rydberg atoms with ground state atoms doc9295 none The award provides travel support for US participants in the GEOMIX workshop, which will be held at the Institut d Etudes Scientifiques de Cargese in Corsica, France from August 19 to September 1, . The theme of the workshop is Geophysical Mixing and Transport. Research in this area---at the nexus of geophysics and applied mathematics---is of considerable practical importance, since applications abound in areas such as ozone depletion (ozone hole) in the high latitudes, long-range transport and transformation of chemical pollutants, North Atlantic thermohaline circulation, and biogeochemical processes controlling ocean absorption of CO2. Core funding for the workshop has been obtained from the European community and from Centre National du Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France. The PI, Ray Pierrehumbert, is an acknowledged leader in this research area, and one of the three lead organizers of the workshop. The NSF award should support travel of approximately 20 U.S. participants, primarily, advanced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early-career junior faculty. The Large-scale Dynamic Meteorology (GEO ATM), Physical Oceanography (GEO OCE), and Applied Math (MPS DMS) programs are all equally contributing to the award funding doc9296 none Vortices in Protoplanetary Disks: Their Role in Angular Momentum Transport and Planetesimal Formation AST- From local observation, it is known that the Sun and the solar system have effectively the same age and that both are likely to have formed through the collapse of a protostellar disk of dust and gas. While infalling material is necessary for the collapse to take place, angular momentum must at the same time be transported outwards if a stable star is to be formed. As a prelude to planet formation, a mechanism must be found that will build kilometer-sized planetesimals from sub-centimeter sized dust grains. During the period of this award, both problems will be addressed by postulating that the formation of small vortices could simultaneously produce the necessary mass and momentum transport for star formation and at the same time be sweeping dust into their interiors where it can settle and form planetesimals. Following on from the work he has done in explaining the structures which are seen in the atmosphere of the planet Jupiter, the PI and his students will be adapting his mathematical procedures to a study of protoplanetary disks, which, he believes, are unlikely to be either featureless, laminar or filled with homogeneous turbulence. He expects to show that small vortices are likely to thrive in such a disk and that they, rather than large-scale turbulence are likely to be responsible for transport within a cool protoplanetary disk. These same vortices are able to entrap the dust grains and aid planetesimal formation doc9297 none Above and Below the Substellar Limit at High Resolution AST- Spectacular advances have been made recently in our knowledge of brown dwarfs and other objects near the substellar limit. The foundation of the program is the continued use of the Keck telescopes and their various instruments. Work carried out under this award will build on and expand upon the pioneering work which has been done during the last few years. Four goals are outlined. (1) To understand the binary frequency among low-mass objects and to investigate the orbital characteristics of binary stars. Observations will include echelle spectroscopy in the optical and infrared to look for radial velocities. Adaptive optics will be utilized to search for sub-arcsecond companions of known low-mass stars. (2) To test the extension of the substellar mass function down to the boundary between brown dwarfs and planets. This will be done with low-resolution spectra, principally to test for the presence of lithium. (3) Analysis of atomic and molecular line profiles in the optical and near infrared will yield information about the physical conditions within very cool stellar atmospheres. (4) An effort to understand what happens to the stellar magnetic activity at the low-luminosity, low-mass end of the main sequence. It is suspected that normal stellar activity, similar to that which we observe in the sun, is greatly diminished in these stars. The observations will be supplemented by state-of-the-art theoretical modeling of the stellar atmospheres with special attention to dust opacity and partial element depletions doc9298 none Tokunaga The Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) is operated as a national facility for astronomical research . Located on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, the IRTF is operated by the University of Hawaii with funding from NASA. The NASA contract to the U. of Hawaii provides for supporting costs of visiting observers studying solar system objects. The NSF funding supports visiting observers for observations of non-solar-system objects, which are allotted approximately 50% of the observing time on the telescope doc9299 none Cowie, A. Over the past decade, numerical models of the growth of structure in the Universe have made vast strides in understanding how the first stars and galaxies in the Universe formed from initial density perturbations. One of the great successes of these models has been in revolutionizing our understanding of the intergalactic gas (IGM) as revealed to us in the forest of Lyman alpha absorption lines and associated metal lines seen in the spectra of distant quasars. Previously, absorption in the IGM was understood in terms of individual clouds in pressure balance within a hot underlying smooth IGM component, or in terms of absorption in individual dark matter mini-haloes at high redshift; now the models have successfully shown that the Lyman alpha forest traces the lower overdensity portions of the cosmic web of filaments and voids that is the early phase of the buildup of structure --- stars, galaxies and clusters --- in the Universe. The study of quasar absorption lines is thus complementary to the study of high redshift galaxies and clusters, and allows us to see the earliest stages of galaxy formation. Stars form out of he IGM, and it in turn is enriched with heavy elements ( metals ) from these stars as they return materials to the gas. Ionizing radiation from stars, galaxies and quasars also affects the balance of ions of hydrogen and other elements in the IGM. The distribution of metals in the IGM and the distribution of ions are therefore both diagnostics of the star formation history of the Universe. In addition, the models predict that the IGM is where the bulk of the baryons in the Universe exist at high redshift, thus, since this gas is fairly easily observable in quasar absorption lines, we are in the lucky position of being able to account for most of the material in the Universe at high redshift. This project will be directly concerned with understanding how the IGM comes to be rather uniformly enriched with metals, even at redshifts of 3 and higher. One possibility is that all the metals that have been observed in the Lyman alpha forest come directly from stars that are forming in the first structures that will later become present-day galaxies, but another possibility is that the whole IGM was pre-enriched by a first generation of stars at very early times: the so-called population III. Since the pre-galactic clumps form in the regions of higher overdensity in the IGM, any enrichment from these stars would necessarily be confined also to these higher density regions. In contrast, the population III stars would enrich the IGM more broadly. As numerical models become more sophisticated at incorporating feedback into the IGM from star formation and evolution, their predictions of metallicity as a function of distance form the star-forming site, and therefore of density, will become more refined. There is therefore a clear rationale for investigating the distribution of metals with density, and this will be a main focus of this project. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9300 none The Eigth International Symposium on Particles, Strings, and Cosmology will be held in Chapel Hill, NC April 10-15, . This conference will bring together leaders of the fields of elementary particle physics, string theory (which is a candidate for a theory that encompasses all of the basic forces of nature), and cosmology. The exchange of ideas is expected to lead to fresh insights and to the beginnings of new scientific projects doc9301 none Bullock Drs. Mark Bullock and David Grinspoon, at the Southwest Research Institute, are developing an evolutionary climate model for Venus that calculates surface temperature evolution as a result of outgassing of volatiles by volcanoes, heterogeneous reactions of atmospheric gases with surface minerals, and the exospheric escape of hydrogen. This model should serve as a guide for geophysicists to examine the role that large changes in surface temperature may have played in the tectonic and volcanic history of the planet. The Venus evolutionary climate model will be improved substantially by incorporating a detailed microphysical model of the clouds, parameterizing solar absorption in the clouds to account for changes in the near-UV absorber, and by investigating the effects of comet and asteroid impacts as both sources of volatiles and dust to the atmosphere. The model will also take advantage of improved estimates of the time-dependence of volcanic activity, now becoming available from a more detailed global analysis of Magellan spacecraft data. The present climate of Venus is controlled by an efficient carbon dioxide-water greenhouse effect and by the radiative properties of its global cloud cover. Both the greenhouse effect and sulfuric acid clouds are sensitive to perturbations in the abundance of atmospheric water vapor and sulfur gases. Outgassing of carbon dioxide, water vapor, and sulfur dioxide by volcanic activity has most likely played a major role in establishing the planetary albedo, through cloud formation, and high surface temperatures through the greenhouse effect. Planetary-scale processes involving the transport and sequestering of volatiles affect these abundances over time, driving changes in climate doc9302 none Durda At least two major satellites in our Solar System, the Moon and Charon, are thought to be by-products of large-scale impact events. Modeling the formation of these bodies, however, is challenging because (i) the initial conditions which existed prior to impact are not well constrained, (ii) the physical characteristics of these binaries today represent the subsequent results of modification by multiple collisional, dynamical, and geochemical processes, and (iii) the necessary simulations push our theoretical understanding and computational resources to the limit. It is possible, however, that similar processes on a smaller scale may provide valuable insights into how the Moon and Pluto originated. For this reason it is advantageous to examine the formation of satellites of main-belt asteroids, four of which have now been detected. Studies of the formation mechanism of asteroid satellites may also yield constraints on the internal structure of asteroids and Kuiper Belt objects that are clues to their origin. Dr. Daniel Durda, at the Southwest Research Institute, will lead a theoretical investigation of modeling and simulation of various impact phases between colliding asteroids. Results will be used to estimate binary formation efficiency as a function of collision parameters and to measure the relative importance of each mechanism in forming satellites. Satellite systems formed by the models will be compared to observed asteroid satellites doc9303 none Simonetti This research probes the structure and physical properties of the warm ionized medium (WIM), a phase of the interstellar medium in which gas is in mostly ionized form at approximate temperatures of to 10,000 K. The investigators use a sensitive charge-coupled device (CCD) camera system in conjunction with narrowband interference filters to image the distribution of the WIM over the entire northern sky with approximately arcminute resolution. Their previous work included a survey of the WIM in the H-alpha emission line ( A ). In this research they extend previous imaging in the [S II] forbidden-line doublet to cover the northern hemisphere. Hydrogen is excited by photoionization, whereas [S II] is collisionally excited. Thus, the [S II] survey is an ideal complement to their H-alpha survey, making it possible to study the physical properties of the gas. Most importantly, this research will globally address fundamental questions concerning the sources of heat in the WIM by providing the [S II] H-alpha emission ratio is a large variety of structures. These surveys are presented to the astronomical community (consisting of both researchers and educators ) at the Virginia Tech Spectral-line Survey (VTSS) website (http: www.phys.vt.edu vtss). The researchers will also produce an H-alpha atlas which combines their VTBB Ha-alpha survey with the WHAM H-alpha survey of Reynolds and collaborators at the University of Wisconsin. These two surveys are ideally complementary. The surveys produced by this research will enable astronomers to study the relationship of the WIM to other phases of the interstellar medium. Through comparison with maps of H I, CO, infrared, and X-ray emission, astronomers will be able to discern how the WIM is distributed in space relative to neutral gas, cold gas, dust, and gas heated to very high temperatures by supernovae and stellar outflows. The angular resolution of the VTSS surveys is well matched to major surveys such as IRAS and ROSAT. This work will involve Virginia Tech undergraduate and graduate students. The researchers are building on previous successes with students trained in conjunction with this research. The camera system is located at a dark site within easy reach of the Virginia Tech campus -- an arrangement that fits the scientific needs of the project, minimizes cost, and enables student involvement. In addition to research uses, the survey images are readily accessible for a wide range of educational uses at the high school and college levels. With this in mind, a simple to use web-based image viewing and processing program is provided for displaying, manipulating, and analyzing the FITS-format images doc9304 none The bulk of this research program will concern the causal set hypothesis , which states that the deep structure of spacetime is that of an extended family tree , known technically as a partial order . Prof. Sorkin will develop this approach further by advancing the underlying theory, while at the same time applying it to questions like that of the cosmological constant, which recently has been shown to contribute the greater part of the effective energy density of the universe. The remainder of the research will continue the study of closely related questions about the fine structure of black hole horizons and questions concerning what happens when the topology of spacetime changes or deviates from flatness on small scales. All these questions are important as part of the larger problem of quantum gravity, which is how physicists refer to the task of unifying the two main pillars of physical theory in its current state of development: Quantum Theory and General Relativity. A theory of quantum gravity is generally expected to tell us about the deep structure of spacetime on the smallest length scales and, at the same time, to help answer questions about how the cosmos came to be as it is on the largest length scales doc9305 none Briley With the support of this award, Dr. Michael Briley, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, will increase the depth and breadth of our understanding of the light element abundance inhomogeneities found in globular clusters in the Galaxy. These objects are of particular interest in astronomy because of their roles as laboratories for the study of how low mass stars evolve, and because they are some of the oldest objects for which reliable ages may be obtained. As such, they contain at least a partial chemical record of events and conditions during their formation. Dr. Briley has laid out an observing analysis campaigns to address a major data deficiency in the chemical records of globular cluster stars. The projects have been chosen not only for potential contribution to the field of astronomy, but also because of their accessibility to faculty and students in a primarily undergraduate institution where the bulk of the work will take place. This award is made through the Research in Undergraduate Institutions (RUI) program in the Division of Astronomical Sciences at NSF doc9306 none Rabalais This award to Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium provides instrumentation to update and expand the oceanographic research capabilities of the research vessel Pelican, a ship operated by LUMCON as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS) research fleet. The laboratory grade water purifier system, computers and related instrumentation, gravity corer, sea water samplers, CTD altimeter, meteorological instruments, and electronic instrumentation for automated seawater analyses will all be available as shared-use tools for all scientific users of the research ship. These improvements will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists using the ship in their research during and future years doc9307 none Rauch How do galaxies form? Studies show that the Quasars (QSOs) have many high redshift absorption lines from elements heavier than Helium in their spectra. Most current theories indicate that the chemical elements which give rise to these absorption lines must have been made in stars formed after the Big Bang (the so called Pop III stars). Yet when observed in quasar spectra, these absorption lines show that the metal enriched gas must be in clouds which lie between us and the QSOs. The goal of this project is to try and understand the role of this gas in galaxy formation in the early universe, at high redshift. This program is designed to complement traditional studies of galaxy formation where the emphasis has been more on the formation and fate of the stars in galaxies during the early merger or clustering process. Over the past decade, cosmological hydrodynamic computer simulations have shown that most of the early stages of galaxy formation (in particular the dark ones, before stars started to shine) can be observed using the absorption lines which they form in the spectra of background QSOs. The velocity structure of these lines shows infall of gas and protogalactic fragments, from the turnaround of perturbations in the intergalactic medium, as well as stellar feedback into the gas and the gasdynamics of the high redshift interstellar medium itself. The aim of this program is to use the observed properties of these low density, high ionization absorption lines to understand the relation between galaxies and gaseous inflows and outflows at high redshift. The statistics of the observed absorption systems (to be obtained from several large telescopes) will be interpreted with the help of state-of-the-art cosmological hydrodynamic -simulations. The clustering properties of metal lines on large scales will be used to trace the high redshift large scale structure at densities much lower than those probed by bright high redshift sources (e.g. radio galaxies, QSOs, Lyman-break galaxies). Absorption line profiles will be examined to determine the kinematics of the gas, and attempts will be made to identify the precise origin of the gas phases revealed by various metal absorption lines and to directly observe the infall of matter into forming galaxies. Observations of absorption systems in very close multiple lines of sight to lensed QSOs will help to quantify the density and velocity structure of the metal enriched gas near the potential wells of young galaxies. Measures of the turbulence of the gas will decide to what degree the surprisingly widespread metal enrichment of the intergalactic medium is a recent process or the result of an ancient Population III phase of starformation. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9308 none Hakkila Despite tremendous scientific breakthroughs during the past two decades, gamma-ray burst (GRB) astro-physics is still in its infancy. GRBs are the most energetic events in the universe. Further understanding of the GRB phenomenon rests in part on understand-ing distinct behaviors that can be associated with physical mechanisms. Identification of distinct physical behaviors (e.g. classification) is an important component of the scientific method. However, distinct behaviors do not always indicate the presence of separate source populations. The complex, overlapping properties of GRBs are a case in point: they have long confounded efforts to subclassify their behaviors. Many identified behaviors have been shown to result from either instrumental or sampling biases. GRB classification can be better carried out using statistically and computationally rigorous approaches of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) combined with a detailed understanding of instrumental and sampling biases. Recently, there have been claims that certain attributes correlate with burst lumi-nosity. The claims, however, are based on a very limited data set of GRBs with afterglows, and on attributes that have only been defined for a small subset of bursts observed by BATSE (the Burst And Transient Source Experiment on NASA s defunct Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory). Are the correlation s between luminosity and these attributes self-consistent with observations of the large BATSE data set? Do instrumental biases play any role in these apparent correlations? All GRBs with afterglows thus far belong to the long class of GRBs; is there similar evidence for these behaviors in the short class of GRBs? Do these attributes indicate the presence of other GRB subclasses? These questions will be addressed in this project using a large GRB database, a set of well-defined and appropriate attributes, detailed knowledge of the instrument(s) from which the observations are made, and KDD methodology. After this database has been produced, pattern recognition algorithms will be applied to GRB classifica-tion. Based on preliminary results, it is expected that general GRB subclasses will be identified, as well as substructures indicative of specific GRB behaviors. As a part of this project, a database of complex preprocessed GRB attributes will be developed and made available via the World Wide Web. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9309 none Zaldarriaga This is a Collaborative Research Project with Lam Hui ( ) of Columbia University. The light from a quasar (also called a qso) often has multiple dips in intensity, or absorption lines, at positions corresponding to the redshifted Lyman alpha line (at rest wavelength angstroms) from neutral hydrogen. These often occur as a series of absorption lines, called the Lyman alpha forest. The redshift is caused by the expansion of the universe. If we can calculate how the universe is expanding (based on a cosmological model), we can tell where the photons were absorbed in relation to us. Thus, we can use the absorption map to plot the positions of clouds of intervening hydrogen between the quasar and us. The clouds in the Lyman alpha systems are not very massive compared to objects like galaxies. Because of this, reliable computer simulations (numerical experiments) of their gravitational collapse (formation) from primordial fluctuations are possible. These Lyman alpha forest simulations produce structure similar to what we see in the nearby universe (filaments, walls, and voids ) by starting with small fluctuations in matter density and then letting gravity and other known forces act. These detailed calculations of the structure and distribution of matter are at the frontiers of current research and these recent advances in computer modeling have made it possible to use observations of the Lyman-alpha forest at redshifts between 2 and 4 as powerful cosmological tools. The forest has offered, and will continue to offer, interesting constraints on many quantities such as the amplitude and shape of the primordial mass power spectrum, the neutrino mass, the matter density, the cosmological constant, and the reionization epoch. These constraints, in conjunction with those from other observations, provide important checks on our fundamental understanding of cosmology. This project will primarily focus on the transmission power spectrum , a statistic used in cosmological models which is directly observable. The program has two goals: 1) Examination of fundamental assumptions: The project will test several methods to address questions about the influence of continuum-fitting in determining the measured fluctuations in the forest , the interpretation of these fluctuations in terms of mass fluctuations resulting from gravitational instability, and the effect of fluctuations in the ionizing background and the effective equation of state of the intergalactic medium on the interpretation. 2) Maximizing the scientific return from the data: To this end the program will address redshift-distortions, (which affect both the program of mass power spectrum recovery, as well as the ability to measure the cosmological constant through its geometrical distortion of the correlation function), degeneracies among parameters (by performing a full likelihood analysis which will reveal the degeneracies in the 4 to 6 free parameters in the current model of the forest), and obtaining a better understanding of the thermal history of the universe, (by using the drop in temperature with time after reionization to infer or at least limit the epoch of reionization from measurements of the temperature using the small-scale cut-off of the transmission power spectrum at redshifts between 2 and 4.) Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9310 none Beers In a collaborative research project, Dr. William Van Altena, of Yale Southern Observatory, and Dr. Timothy Beers, of Michigan State University, will use the newly installed CCD cameras at the Yale Southern Observatory in Argentina in order to complete the Yale San-Juan Southern Proper Motion (SPM) program. The first two catalogs of the SPM have already demonstrated the high quality of the absolute proper motions that are attainable within this program. The CCD system will allow completion of the 2nd-epoch observations of the southern sky and, furthermore, will provide the first full southern-sky set of photometry in V and B, down to a magnitude limit of V = 18.0 and B = 19.0. While the first two SPM Catalogs were based on input lists of interesting objects as well as randomly selected stars for kinematic studies, the new CCD camera system, and recent completion of the digitization of all SPM plates by the Precision Measuring Machine of the U.S. Naval Observatory, will allow the new version of the SPM Catalog to be complete to the limiting magnitude of the 1st-epoch plates. The science return from this effort will be enormous! During this award period, about square degrees, or three-quarters of the remaining SPM fields should be observed and analyzed. The immediate motivation for the project is linked to exploration of the kinematics and dynamics of the Galaxy, using not only randomly selected anonymous stars but also subsets of special interest; primarily the recently completed lists of tens of thousands of metal-poor (MP) and field horizontal- branch main-sequence A-type (FRB A) candidate stars obtained from digital scans of the HK survey plates of Beers and colleagues, and the even larger set of interesting targets generated from the stellar component of the Ramburg ESO Survey. These two surveys form the basis for present spectroscopic exploration of the nature of the early Galaxy and its chemical and dynamical evolution, and hence are of immediate interest. This information will be combined with radial velocities already in hand, or to be obtained from planned large-scale spectroscopic follow-up, in order to determine full space motions for the most interesting targets from the other surveys long before proper motions and distance measurements are obtained with the space missions FAME and SIM doc9311 none Doyle and Ingram Tef (Eragrostis tef) is an annual cereal crop grown primarily in Ethiopia whose evolutionary origins within the grass genus Eragrostis are unknown. The proposed research by graduate student Amanda Ingram with guidance from adviser Dr. Jeff Doyle at Cornell University has the primary goal of investigating the evolutionary relationships among previously proposed progenitors of tef to identify extant representatives of the crop s progenitors and to elucidate relationships within this large and poorly investigated genus of grasses. They will be using DNA sequence data from a variety of loci, including low-copy nuclear genes and a chloroplast locus, as sources of characters for the comparative genetic analyses of the likely diploid progenitor taxa and of numerous accessions of polyploid tef (which combines whole sets of chromosomes from different parents). The data from the nuclear genes will help identify both progenitor species, while the chloroplast loci will help identify the maternal progenitor of tef. Additional taxa will also be included in the analysis of these data to begin generating hypotheses of relationships among major lineages in this grass genus, which currently has 350 named species. Another component of this project will be investigating the morphological changes involved in the domestication of tef through comparisons with its wild progenitors. These studies will be useful in helping identify target genes for future investigations into the genetic changes involved in the domestication process. Genetic diversity within tef and its wild relatives will also be examined through the use of highly variable molecular markers. These data will also be helpful in determining the genealogical structure of various tef cultivars, and this may helpidentify the center of domestication and diversity of this important crop, including genetic diversity of possible value in future breeding work doc9312 none Miralda-Escude High resolution spectroscopic observations of quasars often show multiple emission-line and absorption-line features which are identified as the resonance line of Lyman Alpha (Lya ) which originates in clouds of hydrogen gas at different redshifts located between the observer and the quasar itself. These redshifted Lya lines can be used to map structure in the high-redshift universe (since the redshift gives position along the line of sight). This theoretical research program will show how correlations along multiple lines of sight in the observed Lya absorption lines and correlations between different tracer populations (such as narrow absorption lines, emission lines from diffuse hydrogen, and broad absorption lines) can tighten cosmological constraints and elucidate the physics of quasar and galaxy formation. The research will use hydrodynamic cosmological simulations, collisionless N-body simulations, and numerically calibrated analytic approximations to obtain predictions of current theoretical models, which can be tested against observational studies of multiple tracer populations in the same spatial volumes. In sum, the proposed research program will provide the theoretical development needed to motivate, design, analyze, and interpret multi-tracer studies of high-redshift structure. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9313 none Olszewski This is a collaborative research project involving scientists at 3 institutions: Dr. Edward Olszewski, at the University of Arizona, Dr. Mario Mateo, at the University of Michigan, and Dr. Heather Morrison, at Case Western Reserve University. These researchers are mapping a region of our Galaxy that was hitherto unreachable. They will complete an imaging survey that has been underway for several years, and they will carry out a comprehensive spectroscopic follow-up of halo-star candidates identified in the survey. The survey is undertaken to directly assess the degree to which accretion has formed the majority of the Galaxy s halo. The main focus of the survey is finding candidate halo stars that inhabit the outer parts of the Galactic halo. The final sample of halo stars from the survey will allow placement of strong limits on the existence of halo substructure and will very likely provide direct evidence of such structure if it comprises more than 10% to 20% of the luminous halo. A profound change is underway in how astronomers believe galaxies, such as ours, formed. Older notions of a single, monolithic collapse of the outer Galaxy on a relatively short timescale have begun to be superseded by the idea that much of the Galaxy formed from the accretion of much smaller systems over the entire age of the Universe. Most data supporting this accretion-driven model is somewhat indirect and involves expectations of sophisticated models of how galaxies form in an expanding Universe. Recently, the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy has provided strong evidence that at least part of our halo stars and clusters have come from an accreted satellite doc9314 none We plan to study a variety of free boundary problems. The first one deals with growing polymeric crystallines. The unknowns are temperature in the melt and the growing surface. The speed of the free boundary is a given function of the temperature, and free boundary points move in such a direction so as to minimize the travel time. We wish to establish the existence of the solution and to determine the shape of the free boundary. The second problem deals with non-Newtonian jets. We want to approach it via nonlinear perturbation of the linearized case, a case we have recently studied. The next problem is to develop a general bifurcation theory for free boundary problems. Here we expect to be guided by recent work that we have done dealing with special models that arise in mathematical biology. In order to determine the stability of the bifurcation, we shall first study the asymptotic behavior of solutions of free boundary problems, including the Hele-Shaw problem and the evolution of viscous drops. Subsequently we shall consider the more complicated problems that arise in mathematical biology, such as the evolution of tumors and of protocells. Finally, we shall study the evolution of cracks in elastic media. We expect to utilize formulas that we have derived for the evolution of the stress intensity factors. Free boundary problems deal with solving partial differential equations in a domain, a part of whose boundary is unknown in advance; that portion of the boundary is called a free boundary. In addition to the usually prescribed initial and boundary conditions, an additional condition is imposed at the free boundary, and one seeks to determine both the free boundary and the solution to the differential equations. A seemingly small change in the conditions imposed at the free boundary often result in, technically, an entirely different problem. Special examples have historically guided research in this field; some of the most commonly known examples are flow of liquid in contact with air, air streams behind an aircraft, solidification of steel, and melting of solid. Special examples motivated by physical models continue to be a driving force in the development of the field. The present proposal focuses on several different problems dealing with questions such as crystallization of polymers, jet flows for non-Newtonian fluid (e.g. inkjets), bifurcation of free boundary problems arising in biology, nonlinear stability, and propagation of cracks in elastic media. In all these problems, the goal is to prove that there is a mathematical solution to the scientific problem and to determine properties of the free boundary doc9315 none Johnson Dr. Robert Johnson, at the University of Virginia, will continue a research program to model the radiolysis and photolysis of low temperature solids in the outer Solar System and the interstellar medium (ISM). Irradiation by charged-particles or UV-photons of ice, molecules trapped in an ice matrix or hydrated minerals can determine the ambient neutral envelopes and the spectral properties of outer solar system satellites and of grains in the ISM. An understanding of the interaction of energetic ions, electrons and UV -photons with surfaces is needed to interpret many recent observations . A large body of laboratory data now exists on the sputtering and decomposition of low temperature condensed-gas solids. This data set has some inconsistencies, as well as large gaps in the materials studied and in the incident particle type and energies studied. It has only recently been shown that the long-ignored energetic electrons are important when describing the alteration of icy satellite surfaces. Therefore, Dr. Johnson will carry out a materials-based calculation program to model the available data and then use the results to expand the applicability of these data. His recent molecular dynamics calculations of energy transport during the sputtering of ices will be used to describe the sputtering of volatile and refractory species trapped in an ice matrix. In addition, he will incorporate and test those solid-state chemistry models that have been proposed for the production and desorption of new molecules due to irradiation of ice. The goal is to be able to calculate results for all charged particle types and energies, including cluster impact, for application to sputtering of a grain in the ISM, a ring particle, or a satellite regolith with a grain size and porosity much different than that used in laboratory studies. Such work is possible due to the rapid improvements in the computational tools available in materials science and because there exists an extensive set of data that can be used to test and calibrate these methods for the materials of interest in the outer Solar System and the ISM . Monte Carlo (MC) particle transport codes, which determine the distribution of energy deposition in a material, will be used along with molecular dynamics (MD) models and a continuum model to describe the energy transport and sputtering. The suggested chemical pathways for radiolysis and photolysis will be integrated in the MD model in order to describe aspects of the radiation-induced solid-state chemistry occurring in ice. Finally, Dr. Johnson will continue to assemble laboratory data from the large number of groups studying ion, electron and photon-induced sputtering and implantation and then incorporate these data into the proposed calculations doc9316 none Accretion Disks Around Young Massive Stars AST- Massive stars are responsible for many of the basic characteristics of spiral galaxies. They effectively dictate the properties of the interstellar medium through their strong ionizing radiation, vigorous outflowing winds and eventual demise as supernovae explosions. They also influence the formation of subsequent generations of stars by triggering the initial collapse of cloud cores of molecular dust and gas. The dominant mechanism by which high mass stars form remains one of the outstanding problems of stellar astrophysics. Most likely, the mechanism is similar to that which produces low mass stars through the formation and collapse of protostellar disks. But, in the case of massive stars, there must be important modifications to the star forming process brought on by the enormous radiation pressure from the massive protostars. The possibility exists that there is an alternative route for producing stars in the high-mass range but first it is important to look hard for the signatures of disks. Through this award the PI will turn to radio astronomy and exploit the capabilities of the Very Large Array (VLA) and the Very Large Baseline Array to search for and subsequently study disks of this type. The VLA will be used to directly image the dust continuum emission from the accretion disk at a wavelength of 7 mm. The VLBA will be used to identify accretion disks in another way, via the strong water maser line at a wavelength of 1.3 cm and to use this as a kinetic probe. Whether the accretion disks are detected or not, the proposed observations will provide high angular resolution observations of matter in the vicinity of young massive stars doc9317 none Giovanelli The nuclei of many galaxies harbor highly energetic processes, which are thought to be powered ultimately by strong gravitational fields in the regions surrounding supermassive black holes. In special circumstances, gas orbiting or falling into the nuclear regions of galaxies can produce a luminous maser (a microwave laser) which is observed as a strong radio spectral line emanating from a galactic nucleus. Such megamasers --- so called because they are roughly a million times more luminous than typical masers associated with young stars found in the Milky Way --- are produced by excited H2O or OH molecules. OH megamasers in particular are found only in the nuclei of merging galaxies and are luminous enough to be observable at cosmological distances. The study proposed here aims to characterize and understand the relationship between merging galaxies and the production of OH megamasers with the ultimate goal of using OH megamasers to trace the merging history of galaxies as a function of cosmic time. The number evolution of galaxies with time is not yet known, although it is likely to be an important element in the galaxy evolution process. This study will (1) establish the space density of OH megamasers from a broad OH spectral line survey of merging galaxies at the Arecibo Observatory, (2) determine the spatial scale of OH masing in these systems from a study of line intensity variability, (3) characterize the type of host most favorable to producing an OH megamaser from optical spectroscopy at Palomar Observatory, and (4) characterize the potential use of OH megamasers as indicators of merging galaxies at high redshift doc9318 none A broad program of research in theoretical physics will address outstanding issues of the fundamental constituents of matter, and the laws and forces through which they interact to build the universe that we observe. Studies will address the crucial, but incompletely understood, quantum-mechanical processes by which quarks and gluons, when they are temporarily freed from protons and neutrons in collisions at high-energy accelerators, evolve back into common particles such as the proton, and into exotic entities such as the recently-discovered top quark and the still sought-after Higgs boson. Other studies will center on the rapidly-developing science of neutrinos, where recent experiments are stimulating theoretical insights, from the dynamics of the sun to the evolution of the universe, and are serving as a link between particle physics and cosmology. Ongoing investigations will also develop superstring theory, the exciting candidate for a unification of gravity, felt by all matter, with the nuclear forces felt by quarks and gluons, the electric and magnetic forces felt by electrons, and weak forces felt by neutrinos. The aim of superstring theory is a complete picture of the dynamic processes, and even the geometry, that make up our world doc9319 none The focus of this research project is on the electronic, thermal, and surface properties of alkali nanoclusters ranging in size from 10 to 10,000 atoms. The experiments will be carried out on free clusters in beams, generated in vapor expansion sources, and detected by mass spectrometers. In this way, nanoclusters can be studied as a function of precisely known size and without distortions caused by substrate effects. The project aims to understand: (1) the fate of slow electrons attracted and captured by the cluster polarization potential; (2) the temperature dependence of the electric dipole polarizability of clusters; and (3) the origin of highly efficient charge transfer in collisions of clusters with surfaces. All these phenomena are related to the dynamics of mobile cluster electrons. They touch upon the fundamental physics of finite many-body systems and surfaces, such as carrier scattering and electron-vibrational coupling in nanoscale systems, the interplay between structural and electronic properties, thermal expansion, and the melting transition doc9320 none This award provides support for purchase an environmental scanning electron microscope (ESEM) to be used for examining fully hydrated specimens, a use not possible with a conventional scanning electron microscope (SEM). The ESEM is fully capable of handling observation of wet, dirty, uncoated, even living specimens, as well as observation of dynamic biological processes. The ability of the ESEM to maintain the hydration of a sample indefinitely allows the examination of biological and other wet samples in their natural state. Initial uses for the instrument include studies in botanical and fungal sytematics, tracking of neural crest cell migration and other developmental processes, including imaginal disk folding, and examination of unprocessed or immunolabelled tissue samples. In addition to its use in research, the instrument will be used in training of undergraduate and graduate students and as part of training activities involving high school teachers doc9321 none Principal Investigator: Jerry H. Ginsberg The G. W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology NSF Proposal number Development of the Mode Isolation Algorithm for Experimental Modal Analysis Experimental modal analysis fits measurements of response data to canonical equations representing the analytical response of dynamical systems. The objective is to identify the natural frequencies, damping characteristics, and modal vibration patterns. Such knowledge can be used as a diagnostic tool for existing systems, as well as to identify and correct analytical model shortcomings. The project will develop a new algorithm for performing such tasks. The algorithm iteratively identifies modes, then subtracts them from the data, in order reveal modes that are less evident. A specific objective of the project is to provide a robust method for systems that exhibit strong modal coupling, in which individual modes lose their distinctiveness. Hence, the algorithm will be more widely applicable than the most sophisticated of the current approaches, yet it will retain the simplicity of implementation offered by elementary methods. The primary tasks for the proposed work are to implement and validate the algorithm when it is used to fit measured data to a state-space modal analysis formulation that accounts for arbitrary damping, gyroscopic, feedback, and circulatory forces. These developments will significantly improve the ability to perform experimental modal analysis of complex structures composed of advanced composite materials. Furthermore, enhancing the ability to correctly identify modal properties will lead to designs that use materials more economically. Also, by raising the level of experimental error that is acceptable, the algorithm will lead to cost reductions in experiments. Success in attaining the project objectives will have a major impact wherever vibration control is an issue doc9322 none Weisberg, Joel RUI: Pulsars, Relativistic Gravitation, and the Interstellar Medium In astronomy, we commonly encounter physical conditions quite unfamiliar to us here on Earth. It gives us a chance to test physical theories that apply locally in order to see if they remain valid at extremes. As neutron stars, pulsars represent one such extreme. With their many unusual properties, pulsars can be studied in themselves but they can also be used to probe the interstellar medium and to investigate experimentally the effects of relativistic gravitation. Starting from the background and results of a current grant, the investigation outlined here moves on to new research in each of these three areas. Intrinsic studies of pulsars will include measurements of polarized pulse profiles, investigations of the emission beam geometry, and searches for free and radiative precession. The binary pulsar B +16 will be used as a relativistic gravitational laboratory. Gravitational radiation emission and relativistic spin precession will be measured and compared with theory. The interstellar medium investigations will involve Faraday rotation measurements of the galactic magnetic field and several pulsar pulse-phase-resolved spectrometry studies. The spectrometry experiments will include the determination of pulsar distances and interstellar electron densities through neutral hydrogen kinematic distance measurements doc9323 none This is a combined project in atomic photoionization and ion-molecule scattering. In the first part of the project the group will study the angular momentum partitioning of the electronic components of the Ar atom when it is photoionized by circularly polarized synchrotron radiation. By determining the spin components of the residual excited ion and free electron, the group will be able to quantify the importance of relativistic, spin-orbit interactions in the photo process. In the second part of the project the group will study the highly correlated motion of three massive Coulomb interacting particles when the total energy of the three particles is a few eV above the continuum. The response of the three-body motion to a change in mass dependent variables of momentum and energy will provide information regarding the important parameter of energy sharing in three body systems doc9324 none Virga The rapid explosion in the number of wireless communications systems demands an ever increasing system performance capacity. It is imperative that innovative design paradigms that maximize system performance be pursued. Significant attention has been given to maximizing performance in the communications protocols, while less has been given to the system throughput available from smart array antenna design. Adaptive conformal antenna arrays are arrays with radiating elements that are placed in arbitrary locations and the elements may be directed in different directions. The interest in adaptive conformal antennas at the base station and on the mobile terminals is motivated by previous work reported on indoor wireless channels and on novel space-time coding techniques that suggests the use of conformal arrays improves the reliability of the communications over multi-path propagation effects and fading, and in general, improves the overall quality of service of the entire wireless network. This proposal addresses the development of simulation, design, and analysis approaches for adaptive conformal array antennas and provides an in-depth investigation to quantify the performance capabilities available from conformal arrays. The result will be a new class of array antennas and design tools for fourth generation wireless systems and beyond. This work will be focused in two main areas. The first area involves developing novel simulation algorithms to understand how the particular array weights for several conformal array configurations influences the spatial distribution of the transmitted or received signal. This work will include the development efficient tools to determine the optimal set array weights necessary to obtain a specified spatial response. The research will use the results of previous antenna modeling efforts to factor in the effects of realistic designs of typical antenna elements, (element patterns, gain and phase imbalance, and mutual coupling etc.) and real-time processing resources. The second area involves developing processing methods to determine space-time characteristics for conformal arrays. This will allow the determination of the angle-of-arrival of an incoming signal and will allow the PI s to adapt the array weights in order to maximize signal to noise ratio and quality of the wireless channel. The intellectual and creative aspects of the proposed activities include advancing the state-of-the-art for general conformal array antennas for wireless communications, implementing evolutionary programming methods that take into account multi-design criteria for conformal antenna arrays, quantifying fundamental characteristic design formulas to understand the capabilities and limitations of conformal array antennas, and utilizing directional elements in the design of conformal arrays and quantifying the performance enhancements obtained from the use of directional elements in conformal arrays. Other activities include investigating the mutual coupling between radiators in conformal arrays, and developing novel adaptive processing methods specifically for conformal arrays for angle-of-arrival and time-of-arrival estimation. The PIs plan to interface with research activities in this proposal with work in a wireless networking project when applicable. This will have broader impact beyond the research described in the present proposal doc9325 none Van Altena In a collaborative research project, Dr. William Van Altena, of Yale Southern Observatory, and Dr. Timothy Beers, of Michigan State University, will use the newly installed CCD cameras at the Yale Southern Observatory in Argentina in order to complete the Yale San-Juan Southern Proper Motion (SPM) program. The first two catalogs of the SPM have already demonstrated the high quality of the absolute proper motions that are attainable within this program. The CCD system will allow completion of the 2nd-epoch observations of the southern sky and, furthermore, will provide the first full southern-sky set of photometry in V and B, down to a magnitude limit of V = 18.0 and B = 19.0. While the first two SPM Catalogs were based on input lists of interesting objects as well as randomly selected stars for kinematic studies, the new CCD camera system, and recent completion of the digitization of all SPM plates by the Precision Measuring Machine of the U.S. Naval Observatory, will allow the new version of the SPM Catalog to be complete to the limiting magnitude of the 1st-epoch plates. The science return from this effort will be enormous! During this award period, about square degrees, or three-quarters of the remaining SPM fields should be observed and analyzed. The immediate motivation for the project is linked to exploration of the kinematics and dynamics of the Galaxy, using not only randomly selected anonymous stars but also subsets of special interest; primarily the recently completed lists of tens of thousands of metal-poor (MP) and field horizontal- branch main-sequence A-type (FRB A) candidate stars obtained from digital scans of the HK survey plates of Beers and colleagues, and the even larger set of interesting targets generated from the stellar component of the Ramburg ESO Survey. These two surveys form the basis for present spectroscopic exploration of the nature of the early Galaxy and its chemical and dynamical evolution, and hence are of immediate interest. This information will be combined with radial velocities already in hand, or to be obtained from planned large-scale spectroscopic follow-up, in order to determine full space motions for the most interesting targets from the other surveys long before proper motions and distance measurements are obtained with the space missions FAME and SIM doc9326 none The Nature of Metal-Poor Carbon-Enhanced Stars in the Galaxy For the first time, there is now an adequate sample of stars to use as probes in decoding the initial phases of galactic evolution thanks to surveys that were carried out in the s by the PI and colleagues for extremely metal poor stars. New surveys covering a volume in space 4 times as large are now underway with Hamburg ESO objective prism material. Among the most metal poor stars, carbon enhancements become common and it is already clear that the mechanism responsible for this must be very different from that which provides carbon excesses in the atmospheres of more metal rich stars. The work carried out under this award will be a spectroscopic follow-up to the survey to identify the cause of the enhancement. Various suggestions have been made including contamination of the pre-stellar material by supernovae type II or by a type of nuclear burning which is not found in more metal-rich stars. Medium-resolution spectroscopy for a large sample of these stars is planned in order to identify trends. This will be complemented by high-resolution spectroscopy for a representative subsample to provide the constraints on plausible nucleosynthesis pathways and evolutionary scenarios doc9327 none This research is in different aspects of intersection theory in algebraic geometry: higher dimensional Arakelov theory, a part of arithmetic algebraic geometry, and quantum cohomology, a theory on the border between mathematics and quantum physics. The investigator studies the arithmetic and quantum intersection rings of homogeneous spaces, such as flag manifolds, as part of a general program of extending results of classical algebraic geometry to the new settings. The following are some of the problems considered: a) Understanding the arithmetic and quantum Schubert calculus for homogeneous spaces of classical Lie groups; b) finding determinantal formulas for Lagrangian and orthogonal degeneracy loci and developing further the investigator s theory of double Schubert polynomials; c) obtaining arithmetic analogues of Fulton s results on degeneracy loci and numerically positive polynomials; d) computing arithmetic intersections and heights on Shimura varieties. During the 19th century, mathematicians and physicists were fascinated by the symmetries observed in geometric objects. The many experiments and computations made at that time eventually led to the cohomology theories of the 20th century, which were applied to solve long-standing open problems in both fields. Today, we are in a similar situation in modern number theory and quantum field theory, and it is important to have calculations of specific examples to support and guide our intuition. The investigator examines two new theories, one motivated by number theory and the other by quantum physics, in many specific examples which are prototypes for this purpose. The potential applications are a better understanding of Diophantine equations and approximation, used in coding theory and theoretical computer science, and enumerative geometry of curves, related to string theory and symmetry in physics doc9328 none The objective of Dr. George Gatewood s long term astrometric program at Allegheny Observatory is to provide high precision astrometric data for groups of astrophysically interesting stars that either can not or will not be studied by other techniques. These include stars that are too bright for CCD observing systems and for the FAME spacecraft, as well as stars for which the motion is too slow for detection by short term (5years) astrometric programs. Theoretical understanding of the formation and evolution of stellar systems sometimes requires a data base extending over decades. Because they are the best studied, the bright stars are often the most informative examples that can be studied. The study of triple and quadruple star systems yield indications of the formation and evolution processes of stars and brown dwarfs, as opposed to that of planetary systems. Detections of the long term motions of apparently single stars are giving us the first indications of planetary systems that are similar to the Solar System doc9329 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Clause F. Bernasconi, of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is exploring structure-activity relationships in carbanion forming reactions. His studies focus on the deprotonation of Fischer-type carbene complexes, which offer stabilization of both the neutral carbene (through electron donation) and the corresponding anion (through delocalization). The complex interplay between electron donating and electron withdrawing groups, which leads to unusual reactivity patterns, is being explored through a combination of experimental and computational methods. Carbanions are negatively charged molecules that are of central importance in organic and organometallic chemistry. They can be generated by a number of reactions, including, perhaps most commonly, the removal of a proton from a molecule ( deprotonation ). In some cases, the resulting carbanion is sufficiently stable to allow its observation, permitting the measurement of its properties and thereby yielding important information about reaction mechanisms. Professor Claude F. Bernasconi, of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is studying such carbanion forming reactions with the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program. His studies address fundamental questions about chemical reactions and how they are affected by molecular structure, and in addition provide students with a broad educational experience, ranging from synthesis and spectroscopic characterization to kinetics, data analysis, and computational chemistry doc9330 none Hogan, Craig J. The natural laboratory of the early universe provided more extreme environments for a much longer time than we can ever come close to attaining in artificial laboratories. In this project, Theoretical studies will be performed to connect predicted astrophysical relics of the early universe with observational data. One form of relic is the Dark Matter that provides most of the attractive gravity binding galaxies together. In one part of the project, mathematical modeling will show how observations of the structure of galaxies can reveal the properties of the exotic Dark Matter particles they are made of, and their history of formation and clustering since the early Big Bang. In another part of the project, cosmological sources of gravitational waves will be studied. These vibrations in the fabric of space-time will probably be detected for the first time during the next decade. They are much more penetrating than light or any other kind of energy; every violent event that has ever happened in the history of the universe has left behind a faint reverberation that still echoes today. We will calculate the character of detectable gravitational wave signals that might have been produced during the formation of our three-dimensional space out of the true fundamental space, which is now thought to have many more dimensions. The aim is to learn about the fundamental properties of how space and energy are put together. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9331 none Stinebring The scintillation, or intensity variation, of pulsars can be used to probe the interstellar medium on sizes similar to that of the Solar System. Since scintillation is caused by slight density variations in the ionized component of the interstellar gas, a detailed study of pulsar scintillation yields information about how the interstellar gas is clumped, whether or not it exhibits turbulence, and how the density variations are initiated and sustained. These questions are central to an understanding of the dynamics of our galaxy and, hence, of other spiral galaxies like ours. A dynamic spectrum is a sequential collection of radio spectra obtained, typically, at one minute intervals for several hours. Occasionally dynamic spectra exhibit a loosely organized crisscross pattern as well as the more typical random pattern due to multiple path scattering in the interstellar medium. Recently it has been shown that when harmonically analyzed this crisscross pattern has a distinct and well-delineated signature in transform space. Dr. Daniel Stinebring at Oberlin College will explore this phenomenon using high-sensitivity observations from the Arecibo radio telescope and the new fully steerable radio telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia. By seeing how the harmonic signature is curved in frequency and time, the location of the scattering material can be determined. From this and other details of the observations, the physical size of the scattering objects can be found. This will aid in understanding the physical nature of the scattering material and in linking it to other astrophysical phenomena such as supernova remnants or the turbulent outflow from very young or very old stars. Determining the frequency of occurrence of this phenomenon as well as its variation with radio frequency will give additional insights into its physical origin. This research program will involve undergraduate students in the excitement of exploring a new phenomenon and piecing together parts of a bigger puzzle: how does large scale stirring of the interstellar gas create small scale turbulence which is eventually dissipated as heat? By working closely with experienced researchers, the students will gain a broad range of technical skills as well as further develop their ability to independently explore problems. Using state-of-the-art electronics and computers at the largest radio telescopes in the world, the students will gain confidence in their ability to tackle large and complex problems. Opportunities to collaborate with scientists in the U.S. and abroad and to report their work at conferences and in publications will enhance students research experience and prepare them for graduate training or other roles in the technical workforce. This award is made under the Research in Undergraduate Institutions program at NSF doc9332 none Jackson The Milky Way s dominant star-forming structure, the 5 kiloparsec ring, remains largely unexplored. Using the new SEQUOIA multi-pixel array receiver on the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory 14-meter telescope, Dr. James Jackson and his colleagues at Boston University are conducting a new molecular line survey of the inner Galaxy -- the Boston University--Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory Galactic Ring Survey (GRS). During the course of this award, the group will complete four key science projects: 1. Cataloging molecular clouds and cloud cores discovered during the GRS. 2. Establishing kinematic distances to molecular clouds and their embedded infrared star-forming regions. 3. Determining the structure of the inner Milky Way, and especially that of the 5 kiloparsec ring. 4. Quantifying and testing models of the internal structure of molecular clouds. When complete, the GRS will be the definitive map of the molecular gas distribution in the inner Galaxy, and it will be a vital resource for generations of Galactic astronomers doc9333 none The proposal concentrates on the analysis of certain classes of nonlinear partial differential equations and their applications. Linking them together is the notion of viscosity solution. Part of the proposal focuses on equations of Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) type that are related to optimal control of stochastic partial differential equations. The HJB equations associated with their control are equations in infinite dimensional spaces. The theory of such equations is not well developed. The principal investigator (PI) studies them in the project paying special attention to several equations related to problems of particular interest. One of such problems is optimal control of fluid flow that can be reformulated as optimal control of deterministic or stochastic Navier-Stokes equations. Another problem comes from mathematical finance and is related to option pricing. It includes analysis of infinite dimensional equivalent of ``Black-Scholes equation and its nonlinear version, so called ``Black-Scholes-Barenblatt equation. HJB equations in Hilbert (or Banach) spaces are the key to the dynamic programming analysis of optimal control problems of systems driven by partial differential equations. These HJB equations must be investigated from the point of view of generalized solutions. Viscosity solutions should provide the right approach to such equations and the proposed research should be an important ingredient in setting the stage for optimal control of infinite dimensional stochastic systems. The PI also proposes to investigate a class of fully nonlinear non-divergence form uniformly elliptic equations that includes generalizations of quasilinear equations and certain equations of geometric type, an important class in the elliptic theory. Such equations have not been studied systematically, especially when they are discontinuous in the spatial variable. The equations do not have classical solutions and the PI wants to extend the theory of so called L^p-viscosity solutions to this class. In particular the PI plans to investigate the question of regularity of solutions of such equations. This is a major open problem of elliptic partial differential equations and the PI proposes several possible new approaches to it that may give rise to new and interesting techniques. The notion of viscosity solution is one of the main tools of nonlinear partial differential equations and it has found applications in areas as diverse as optimal control, image processing, moving fronts and phase transitions, statistical mechanics, economics, mathematical finance. The motivation for studying some problems described in the proposal comes from optimal control, especially control of stochastic partial differential equations. Their theory is in a state of rapid development and is fueled by modeling questions coming from physics, population biology, chemistry, and economics and mathematical finance. The problem of optimal control of fluid flow is one of the basic engineering problems and has numerous applications in areas like combustion theory, aero and hydrodynamic control, Tokomak magnetic fusion, ocean and atmospheric prediction just to name a few. Problems related to the Musiela model of interest rates come from the modern theory of option pricing. The research of the project should contribute to the development of new directions in partial differential equations and should also have impact on the applied areas mentioned above doc9334 none Ford Elliptical galaxies contain a large fraction of the stars and dark matter in the local universe, yet their formation mechanisms are still largely unknown. Understanding the formation and evolution of elliptical galaxies is essential for understanding galaxy formation, and, ultimately, the star formation history of the universe. In addition, ellipticals are often found to be the hosts of powerful active galactic nuclei (AGN) and understanding their evolution may also shed some light on the AGN phenomenon. Various competing scenarios of elliptical formation have been studied over the past decade. These include: 1) multiple bursts of early star formation, 2) merging of gas-rich spiral galaxies, and 3) prolonged accretion and tidal stripping of gas-poor galaxies. This project involves a detailed study of NGC (Centaurus A), the nearest giant elliptical galaxy. Cen A has undergone a recent merger with a gas-rich system, and is one of the prototypical classes of radio galaxies. This makes it an excellent laboratory in which to study both the fossil record of old stars in the halos of ellipticals, and the transitional states that result from mergers and nuclear activity. The present work will cover Cen A s halo as far out as a radius of 100 kpc. It will use broadband UBVRI and [O III] imaging and multifiber spectroscopy to constrain the origins of the stellar populations in Cen A. In particular it seeks to: 1. determine the origin of the faint halo light, i.e. the extended stellar disk, shells, and other possible merger remnants like accreted dwarf galaxies. 2. determine the spatial distribution, metallicity distribution, and kinematics of the globular cluster system. 3. determine the quantity, spatial extent, and timescale of AGN-induced star formation in the halo. 4. measure the extent of the elliptical galaxy halo, and quantify the total mass of its luminous and dark matter out to 100 kpc doc9335 none This research centers around three investigations that will make use of two properties of gravitational lenses: 1) background galaxies are distorted tangentially around foreground galaxies (lenses), and 2) background galaxies are boosted in flux by foreground galaxies. The first study will use an existing wide-field survey to characterize individual galaxy dark halos via galaxy-galaxy lensing. The second will test whether the dark matter profile hypothesized for clusters of galaxies can simultaneously reproduce weak lensing shear and cluster velocity dispersions. The third will investigate the mid-infrared photometric properties of a set of normal star-forming galaxies at redshifts of 0.5-1 that have been strongly amplified by galaxy clusters, focussing on the emission features of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs doc9336 none This proposal requests support for the research program of the Wayne State group which is involved in the CLEO experiment at the CESR facility at Cornell University and in the BTeV experiment currently planned for future running at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. This group participated actively in the physics analysis of CLEO II (the PI was co-spokesman for a term), made major contributions to the interaction region (IR) for the upgrade of CESR and CLEO, and helped with the new RICH particle identification detector. The group is currently working on interesting physics results with CLEO II data including D-mixing, the D-star width, rare semileptonic DS decays, the mass of the tau neutrino, B to tau nu, and accelerator physics. For BTeV the group plans to bring its expertise in the construction of low mass and high precision machine-detector interfaces to this project. The physics interests include rare charm decays where no work beyond very promising early calculations have thus far been done. The proposed BTeV detector looks to be very sensitive to D-mixing. BTeV will become the group s main physics interest after the completion of CLEO doc9337 none The annual IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, sponsored by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, has become the largest annual conference in robotics and automation worldwide, and serves as a key forum where international researchers gather to exchange ideas on emerging technologies as well as technical problems and their solutions. It is important that the U.S. be well-represented at each of these conferences, which unfortunately are often held in places to which it is difficult for some of our best researchers to travel due to the cost involved. The purpose of this funding is to bolster U.S. participation at ICRA 01 by helping U.S. researchers who could not otherwise afford to attend the conference. The availability of NSF travel assistance will be announced in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Magazine as well as on the web site of ICRA 01. A 4-member selection committee will be formed by the conference organizers to screen applicants according to a set of criteria, such as: the applicant s technical area of interest; the expected impact of conference participation on the applicant s professional development; the opportunities for planned visits, talks, and interactions by the applicant before, during, and or after the conference; and any other sources of funding available to the applicant to help defray the cost of attending. With this funding we hope to have a strong U.S. presence at ICRA doc9338 none This research will use a specially-targeted subsample of luminous elliptical galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to probe the galaxy distribution power spectrum on large scales, and to study the evolution of massive galaxies. The sample is called the Bright Red Galaxy Sample, consisting of roughly 100,000 galaxies out to a redshift of 0.5, and is designed so that galaxies at low and high redshift should have similar intrinsic properties. The goals are to determine precision constraints from large-scale structure on the low-redshift balance of matter, cosmological constant, and spatial curvature. These results will complement those from cosmic microwave background anisotropies and distant supernovae and should contribute substantially to the construction of a well-tested cosmological model doc9339 none Marscher The spectacular jets observed to emanate from the nuclei of quasars and other active galaxies represent the most energetic long-lived phenomenon in the universe. Decades after the discovery of jets, astrophysicists are still struggling to explain how ultra-hot, magnetized,plasma is ejected into narrow beams from a system involving a black hole weighing millions or billions of suns swallowing gas from its environment. This project will explore the properties of these jets - the flow speeds (which are very close to the speed of light), the magnetic field, the energization of electrons, and wiggling of the nozzle - and how these depend on time, frequency, and energy output. These will provide clues needed to figure out the physical mechanisms that control the jets. They will be accomplished through repeated observations at radio, infrared, and optical wavelengths with world-class telescopes to obtain images and multiple snapshots of spectra of the radiation emitted by the jets. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9340 none Gombosi Drs. Tamas Gombosi and Michael Combi, at the University of Michigan, will continue a comet modeling project that is unique in that it addresses the full range of cometary coma phenomena with state-of-the-art numerical simulation codes. These investigators have experience in applying these codes directly to the analysis of observations. Further development of the models will benefit from the rapid expansion in capabilities of computers and high performance algorithms enabling multi-dimensional simulation techniques to be applied. The long term goal for this project is the development and application of a multi-scale, self-consistent comprehensive model of atmospheres of comets, extending from the complex 3-D nucleus to tens of millions of kilometers into the outer coma and tail doc9341 none Womack Comets provide a unique opportunity to study the formation of the Solar System since they are among the best-preserved specimens of the material of the proto-solar nebula out of which the Solar System formed. Understanding how comets become active and generate comae is critical to developing more accurate models of nucleus composition and structure. One complication in modeling observations is that some comets exhibit different kinds of activity, depending on how far they are from the Sun. The activity of comets within 3 Astronomical Units (AU) of the Sun, for example, is well understood to be dominated by the sublimation of water ice from the nucleus. On the other hand, the activity of many comets that are active beyond 4 AU appear to be driven by CO outgassing and sometimes expel dramatic outbursts of gas and dust. A second complication is that some molecules are often released into comae by distributed sources, which can give misleading results about the relative molecular abundances and kinds of activity in comets. Another issue of concern is the amount of processing that comets experience after their formation due to different volatilities of molecules in the nucleus and the effect of anisotropic outgassing on derived production rates. The principal goal of this project, lead by Dr. Maria Womack at St Cloud State University, is to derive and analyze CO production rates in near and distant comets from mm-wavelength spectra. A large dataset of millimeter-wavelength mapping data of molecular emission in comets Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake and spectra for eight other comets is in hand and reduced, and new observations are proposed for other sufficiently bright comets. These data will be used with recently improved kinematic and excitation models in order to constrain outgassing mechanisms and excitation conditions of molecules in comae near the Sun. Lineshapes and spatial brightness profiles from the data will be used to analyze anisotropic emission and to quantify the amount of distributed sources in comae for CO, H2CO, HCN and other species. Spectral lineshapes and production rates of CO and other volatiles in comets beyond 4 AU will be modeled in order to investigate the quiescent and outbursting stages of distant cometary activity, and to measure properties of molecules sublimating from icy grains in the coma. St Cloud State University (SCSU) undergraduate students known as Cometwatchers will participate in this project as employed research assistants and in upper-level astrophysics courses. Funds will be used to pay students and to improve the student-run SCSU observatory in order to provide them with a collaborative learning environment in scientific research. This award is made under the Research in Undergraduate Institutions program at NSF doc9342 none Weinberg Over the past two decades astronomers have amassed a considerable body of evidence for the existence of an unseen component of the universe which exerts a gravitational-like influence but has no other identified signature. This component is known as dark matter. One of the outstanding problems in the construction of cosmological models is our lack of knowledge of just how the dark matter is distributed with respect to the luminous matter. The spatial function which can describe this difference in distribution is referred to as bias and its determination is critical for understanding the structure and evolution of the universe. The goal of this project is to construct a series of cosmological models, using a bias model known as the halo occupation distribution (HOD) which defines the bias of a population of galaxies by giving the conditional probability p(NjM) that a dark matter halo of virial mass M contains N galaxies, together with prescriptions that specify the relative spatial and velocity distributions of galaxies and dark matter within virialized dark halos. These models would predict different types of galaxy clustering depending on the HOD used. The resulting predicted distributions of galaxies generated by these families of cosmological models will be compared with the observed galaxy distributions found in the upcoming surveys from Australia (the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey or 2dFGRS ) and from the United States (the Sloan Digital Sky Survey or SDSS ). These comparisons may confirm the basic validity of the models and thus determine an empirical form of the HOD. Alternatively, these empirical tests may show that the current theoretical picture of galaxy formation is still missing important physical ingredients. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9343 none Shields The chemical elements are the building blocks of all matter. Hydrogen and helium were formed in the Big Bang, but heavier elements were produced by stars during the evolution of our galaxy and others. This enrichment is essential for the formation of planets and the development of life. The process of chemical enrichment by dying stars has a random character, and fluctuations in the abundance of chemical elements occur from one place to the next. Observations of abundance differences among stars and interstellar gas clouds are becoming available, but there has been relatively little theoretical effort to interpret them. This work will examine the evidence for abundance fluctuations in galaxies and the early universe and their interpretation in terms of nuclear fusion in stars, mixing processes in the interstellar gas, and the motions of stars through the Milky Way. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9344 none Circumstellar Magnetic Field Diagnostics from the Polarization of Line Scattering AST- During the period of the award, a new set of magnetic field diagnostics for dilute astrophysical plasmas will be developed and predictions made which can be followed up observationally. These effects manifest themselves in the polarization of light which has been scattered from the magnetized volumes. Fluorescent scattering of light by atoms causes an observable linear polarization of spectral lines which depends on well-established atomic physics. The new diagnostics could yield the first-ever measurements of magnetic fields in circumstellar envelopes and thus be invaluable to investigations of phenomena involving star-wind coupling with the interstellar medium, comet comae, cool star envelopes and hot stellar winds. The proposed work involves (a) the development of the theory of atomic alignment, (b) new atomic physics calculations for ions of astrophysical interest, and (c) an exploration of the regime where both alignment and polarization effects apply. Broader impacts of the work include the development of cross-disciplinary ties between the solar and stellar physics communities and the development of a potential new diagnostic for dilute plasmas doc9345 none Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) was first developed in as a way to directly measure the ratio of radiocarbon (carbon-14) to stable carbon (carbon-12) in organic material and thus to determine when the organism died using samples of a milligram or less. For reasons that are not completely understood the technique is presently limited to samples that are 60,000 years old or younger. Even for samples, e.g. carbon from oil, natural gas (methane) or coal, that are millions of years old this limit applies. It thus prevents the dating of very old samples. It also prevents the selection of sources of natural gas for use in the production of very large volume liquid scintillation detectors for the measurement of low energy neutrinos. The measurement of these and higher energy neutrinos from the sun is presently an important scientific endeavor. One would like to find sources of methane that have carbon-14 to stable carbon ratios corresponding to 110,000 years, or, perhaps, even to 150,000 years from which scintillation liquid can be manufactured to allow the measurement of the lowest energy solar neutrinos. The proposed research has the aim of measuring such ages of methane and other organic material by AMS doc9346 none After decades of study it is safe to say that the nuclear interaction, ie. the interaction between quarks, is well understood. However the manifestations of this interaction in nuclear matter (hadrons) is only understood in the narrowest of settings. Quark confinement and the structure of hadrons remain intriguing puzzles. Our proposal will study these questions in two broad programs: 1) We have identified a few new states that do not fit into the simple pictures of hadron structure. Other states of this type will be identified and their decay properties will be measured. 2) Electron induced reactions will be used to study the proton and other baryons. Hard-scattering experiments will reveal the quark structure of these states doc9347 none This proposal presents a simple technique to controllably and reproducibly produce ultrafine fibers of conducting polymers. Many factors that control fiber diameter (like solvent viscosity) using this technique (electrospinning) will be investigated so that fibers with average diameters 100 nm (1 nm = 10 -9 m) can be prepared. Electrospinning involves a high voltage source, a metal cathode collector and a glass pipette with the polymer solution to be electrospun. Single fibers will be captured on heavily doped silicon oxide coated wafers. The surface morphology will be studied with an optical microscope, a scanning electron microscope, a transmission electron microscope and an atomic force microscope. Fiber diameters and possible polymer chain alignment will be studied using these methods. Single fibers will also be characterized electrically via dc and ac conductivity measurements as a function of temperature. The PI s will study how the conduction mechanisms in these nanofibers differ from that in the bulk and could provide insights into the importance of interchain coupling that lead to charge delocalization. Finally, the fibers will be studied to check if the dc conductivity can be affected by applying a voltage to the heavily doped silicon. The purpose is to explore the possibility of fabricating nanodevices based on field effects, like nanoelectronic p.n junctions, Schottky junctions or field effect transistors (FET s). %%% This project in materials research is directed at helping under-represented students in academia to participate in scientific research during their undergraduate years. The equipment requested in this proposal will strengthen the institutional infrastructure and also have a broader impact of improving the research facilities on the South-East part of the island doc9348 none Kuelbs The program is designed to stimulate and encourage the scientific development of young researchers in the areas of probability and stochastic processes. The participants will spend the summer together in Madison, Wisconsin in day-to-day interaction with senior researchers from the University of Wisconsin as well as with senior visitors. Participants will benefit from access to the major research library and other research facilities at the University, opportunities to establish continuing contacts and collaboration with other participants in the program, and advice and support in developing long term research programs. The Summer program will focus on the study of probabilities of both large and small deviations in random systems, in the program will be devoted to shapes, waves, and interfaces generated by spatial interactions, and in the focus will involve spatial processes and stochastic geometry. Each of these programs will begin with survey lectures in the given areas of focus by experts from the U.S. and abroad. Three such lecture series are typically planned to begin each program, with each series consisting of five to eight hours of material. After the opening lectures there are follow up lectures on related material, and additional talks by participants, visitors, and local experts. In addition to the lectures, the intern program seeks to generate interactions between senior faculty and participants, as well as those between the participants themselves. These interactions can take the form of study groups, small group discussions, and sometimes one on one discussions. The program lasts about eight weeks doc9349 none Wardle This project has two components: The first part of this project is to study the violent activity in the central regions of very distant galaxies and quasars. The centers of these objects can be more brilliant than a thousand normal galaxies, and are the most violent and energetic objects in the universe. Enormous amounts of energy are generated by stars and gas falling into a super-massive black hole that may weigh as much as a billion suns. Much of the energy is focused into jets of matter moving at nearly the speed of light. These jets radiate visible light, x-rays and radio waves, which can be observe. This work aims to determine what the jets are made of, and how they are focused. The ultimate goal is to understand better the physics of massive black holes, and how they generate energy. The second part of this project is to use these same quasars and galaxies to measure how fast the universe is expanding. They are so bright that they can be seen almost to the edge of the observable universe, and back in time to when the universe was very young. This project will use a new and direct way of measuring the distances to these quasars and galaxies. The hope is that, when combined with measurements of their speed away from us, these will determine if the expansion rate of the universe is speeding up or slowing down. The result is important for finding the age of the universe, and for understanding the earliest history of the universe. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9350 none McWilliam This is a collaborative research project involving Dr. Andrew McWilliam, Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and Dr. R. Michael Rich, University of California at Los Angeles. These researchers will undertake a large survey of detailed chemical abundances in giant stars along the minor axis of the bulge of the Milky Way Galaxy, at distances ranging from 40 to parsec from the nucleus of the Galaxy. The study will provide detailed knowledge of the chemical composition and metallicity function of the Galactic bulge, which is presently well known only for the local disk and halo of the Galaxy. Since extant chemical evolution models are based on these local components, the bulge provides a very different environment with which to test the widely accepted paradigm of chemical evolution. The survey will use the newly commissioned 6.5-meter Magellan telescope in Chile and the Keck telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii doc9351 none Clancy The Venus mesosphere is a dynamical transition region between the zonal rotation of the massive lower atmosphere and the subsonic day-to- night circulation of the thermosphere. It is also a region of key photochemical activity, in which SOx, COx, and HOx catalytic cycles control formation of the massive sulfate cloud layer at its lower boundary, maintain stability of the C02 atmosphere to photolytic dissociation, and limit long-term escape of atmospheric water. The extreme differences in atmospheric circulation and chemistry above and below the Venus mesosphere lead to very large diurnal and interannual variations in its circulation and composition, which have confounded our understanding of this remarkably dynamic regime. Dr. R. Todd Clancy, of the Space Science Institute, will lead a data analysis and observing research program to investigate the variable thermal and compositional state of the Venus middle atmosphere. Millimeter spectral lines of 12CO, 13CO, and HDO enable unique vertical profile retrievals for temperature, and CO and water vapor densities at 70-110 km altitudes within the mesosphere. Over 100 separate measurements of existing, unanalyzed 12CO, 13CO, and HDO millimeter and sub-millimeter spectra will be modeled to determine the diurnal and interannual variabilities of CO and temperatures over the - period. Cursory analysis of these observations indicates abrupt, short-term variations in global mesospheric temperatures at 80-95 km altitudes, a dayside mesopause at 95-100 km altitudes, and strong diurnal variation in mesospheric water vapor abundances. These are unique discoveries of diurnal and secular variabilities in the Venus middle atmosphere that require comprehensive analyses of the full data set to quantify and publish results. In addition, new millimeter and sub-millimeter measurements will be taken over the - period to extend the temporal and vertical coverages of the C0 temperature water retrievals, and to determine mesospheric abundances for SO, S02, H2SO4, and O2. A primary objective of the analysis is to define the diurnal and large interannual variations of the Venus mesosphere with the broadest vertical, parameter {temperature and composition) , and temporal description possible. The - period of these observations will be placed in the context of prior millimeter ( - ), Pioneer Venus orbiter ( - ) , and Galileo ( ) flyby observations to maximize the scientific return of these existing mesospheric measurements, and to support future spacecraft exploration of the Venus atmosphere. Study of the Venus mesosphere, in particular, draws strong parallels from the chemical and dynamical processes only recently defined to control the fragile terrestrial stratosphere doc9352 none Vishniac This project deals with the intersection of two important issues in the field of astrophysics, the generation of large scale magnetic fields, and the accretion of gas onto collapsed objects, such as black holes, neutron stars, or white dwarfs. There has been continuing work on the `dynamo problem for more than 80 years. Very recently, numerical simulations have indicated that there are problems with the dynamo equations. Some simulations designed to produce strong magnetic fields have failed to do so, while others that fail to meet the basic conditions for dynamo activity show strong magnetic field generation. Meanwhile, the last thirty years has seen steady progress in our understanding of how gas collects together to form stars, or to fall into black holes. When the gas is able to radiate its energy, it tends to form a disk of ionized material that slowly spirals into the center, eventually falling onto the central object. This process is believed to lie at the heart of such diverse objects as quasars, where the central object is a supermassive black hole, and proto-stars, where the central object is a newly formed star. Crude models of this process have been successful in providing qualitative models of kinds of radiation emitted from such objects, and some of the time-varying behavior seen in dwarf novae (where the central object is a white dwarf) and soft X-ray transients (where the central object is usually a black hole, with a mass several times the mass of the Sun). Within the last ten years there has been a growing consensus that these two problems are actually closely related, and that the `friction in accretion disks is actually due to magnetic fields that spontaneously wiggle inside the accretion disk. The behavior of accretion disks is actually closely connected to the way that they generate magnetic fields. Computer simulations indicate that the turbulent motions generated by the magnetic field actually helps generate the magnetic field. This project will study the generation of large scale magnetic fields in hot accretion disks using a novel approach to dynamo theory recently developed by the PI and collaborators. The project will have three main components. First, the new dynamo theory will be extended and tested quantitatively to ensure that it provides a viable explanation for the generation of large scale magnetic fields. Second, models of accretion disks in which the detailed evolution of the magnetic field can be replaced with large scale approximate equations will be constructed. These will describe the evolution of the large scale magnetic field, and its ability to provide a source of `friction and therefore heating within the disk. Finally, this approach will be used to study dwarf novae disks. These disks have a number of features which make them ideal for comparison with the models. In particular, they are largely unaffected by the radiation coming from the inner parts of the disk and the central object, and they show outbursts in which the properties of the disks change dramatically. They are also well-observed, so that the success, or failure, of the models will be immediately apparent. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9353 none Abundance Patterns in Extremely Metal-Poor Stars AST- For the first time in history there is an adequate sample of stars to use as probes in deciphering the initial phases of galactic evolution. Surveys for extremely metal-poor stars, carried out in the s, produced this sample. During this period of the present award, large telescopes their spectrographs will be used to determine accurate chemical abundances and thus to trace how heavy element synthesis has proceeded since earliest times. There will be additional benefits. Thorium abundances can be used to compute radiogenic ages for the oldest stars, which will put a lower limit on the age of the universe. The different contributions of s-process elements (generated in the interiors of evolving stars) and r-process elements (contributed by supernovae explosions of earlier generations of massive stars) will be assessed and compared with expectations from nucleosynthesis theory. A search will be made for Population III stars that are predicted to show extreme carbon enhancements without accompanying s-process excesses. Observations will also be made of stars belonging to galactic globular clusters in the outer halo and of stars in nearby dwarf galaxies to search for possible abundance signatures characteristic of chemical evolution in low-mass galaxies doc9354 none Problems in Stellar Abundances and Chemical Evolution: Solutions from Infrared Spectroscopy AST- The central region of our galaxy is heavily obscured and, until the development of infrared instrumentation, was inaccessible to spectroscopic observation. But it is here that we expect to see the long-term effects of vigorous star formation on the chemical abundances of our galaxy. Thus the availability of infrared spectrographs has opened a new window of opportunity for observing stars to investigate abundance trends where they are likely to be the most conspicuous. The work during this two year award will be directed towards the changing abundances of oxygen and carbon in the atmospheres of cool stars in the halo and in the galactic center region. A further advantage of working in the infrared comes from the relative cleanness of the spectrum and an atmospheric opacity which is better understood. The project will use high resolution echelle spectrographs at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory and at the Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii. Plans are also being made to observe with the two Gemini telescopes doc9355 none Stone A wide variety of objects, ranging from new stars in formation (protostars), to objects which are the cinders of burned out stars (white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes), to active galactic nuclei (AGN, such as quasars) are thought to have accretion disks surrounding them. Inflows of gas from these disks onto the central object seem to account for some of the most dramatic components of the Universe. They emit prodigious amounts of power and radiate it over a tremendous swath of the electromagnetic spectrum (from the mid-infrared to hard X-rays and gamma rays). Our theoretical understanding of these accretion flows, however, is still limited by the complexities involved in developing the necessary magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) and radiation hydrodynam-ics computer models. Our understanding of the local physics that control such flows has progressed rapidly in the last few years. It is now important to examine how local processes such as the magnetorotational instability (MRI) determine global disk structure and evolution, especially since only global disk models can be directly compared to high spatial-, spectral-, and time-resolution observations of accretion flows around protostars, white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. Using computational methods, this project will develop the first time-dependent, three-dimensional MHD models of the interaction of an accretion disk with a magnetized and rotating central star. These calculations will allow quantitative measurement of the mixing rate of the stellar field into the disk, the size of the interaction region, the time-averaged torque exerted on the star, and the geometry and kinematics of any polar cap accretion flows that might form. Such quantities are fundamental to the theory of how magnetized stars interact with accretion disks, yet to date they have yet to be calculated from first principles. Direct comparison of the simulations to a large and varied set of observations will be undertaken, including spectroscopic observations of magnetospheric funnel flows and accretion shocks in T Tauri stars, and the observed distribution of the rotation rates in T Tauri stars. Synthetic spectra of the models will be compared to that observed for accreting black holes at the center of early type galaxies and the galactic center, while fluctuations in the mass accretion rate can be compared to X-ray variabil-ity observed by RXTE in X-ray binaries. These global calculations are the first step towards star-disk interaction models which span many decades in radius. The calculations will all be performed with a variety of 2D and 3D MHD computer codes, using large allocations of supercomputer time on massively parallel machines at the national supercomputer centers. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9356 none Theoretical particle physics is concerned with understanding matter and energy at its most fundamental level. The field is just now entering an unusually interesting phase. After more than twenty years of repeated and stunning success, the Standard Model of subnuclear physics is almost certain to fail in the next round of high-energy experiments, beginning an era of intense discovery that will dramatically deepen our understanding of the fundamental physics. This imminent revolution will be addressed from three directions. First, detailed analyses of Standard Model predictions will be used to look for discrepancies that would provide hints about the new physics that is to come. These discrepancies are most likely in rare processes, such as the radioactive decays of elementary particles, and in highly precise calculations of the electromagnetic properties of such particles as the electron-like muon. Second, new numerical methods will be further developed for analyzing theories in which the forces between elementary particles are very strong. These methods are essential for precise analyses of the Standard Model (and for the large experimental programs at SLAC, Cornell, etc.), and could also be essential for understanding the new physics to come --- strong forces are a quite common, almost generic feature of particle physics. Finally, there will be wide-ranging exploration of theoretical possibilities for the new physics, including such options as exotic new properties, like supersymmetry , or extra directions in space-time. Central issues concern the relationship between quantum mechanics and gravity ( string theory ), and also between particle physics and cosmology. A fourth component of this project is interdisciplinary: Analytical and numerical techniques from particle physics will be applied to important problems in condensed matter and solid state physics doc9357 none Ott This project studies several problems in which physical considerations motivate novel questions in chaotic dynamics. The problems include the investigation of chaotic scattering in higher dimensional systems, two-dimensional fluid turbulence with drag, and the transition of certain chaotic systems to bursting states. Although these problems are physically distinct, they are unified by their amenability to similar mathematical techniques doc9358 none This award supports the research of Dorian Goldfeld in the study of discrete groups with applications to analytic number theory. The proposed research concerns various open problems related to: the distribution of additive characters on Fuchsian groups, the ABC-conjecture, higher rank Eisenstein series twisted by Ash-Borel modular symbols, the Waldspurger correspondence for cubic covers of GL(2), and the geometric periods associated to derivatives of L-series. Number theory has its historical roots in the study of whole numbers, and is among the oldest branches of mathematics. Diophantus, of the third century, proposed many problems in his arithmetic, requiring the solutions to be whole numbers. The study of integer solutions to equations is now referred to as Diophantine analysis, and has many applications to computational complexity, data transmission, signal processing, cryptography, etc. Professor Goldfeld introduces and studies new types of geometrical L-series (infinite sums of geometric objects depending on a complex parameter) in order to develop a novel general method to attack a large class of hitherto still unsolved Diophantine problems doc9359 none This grant will support the experimental work of the Intermediate Energy Nuclear Physics Group at Rutgers University. The Rutgers group carries out experiments primarily at the continuous electron beam accelerator, CEBAF, located at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia. Their experiments are aimed at improving our understanding of the structure of nucleons. Although we know the basic building blocks of nucleons are quarks and gluons, how they interact to give the nucleon its observed properties is still not well known. Our experiments use spin, a fundamental property of sub-atomic particles, as a sensitive probe of the nucleon. One type of experiment measures the polarization of ejected protons when polarized (spin-aligned) electrons are scattered from nucleons. This determines the distributions of charge and magnetization in the proton, and how those distributions are changed when the proton is bound in a nucleus. Another type of experiments uses polarized photons absorbed on deuterium. The polarization of the outgoing protons is sensitive to the mechanism of the absorption, and hence to the way the quarks and gluons interact in the deuteron. The third major type of experiments use electrons scattered from a polarized helium target to study the quark spin structure of the neutron doc9360 none Collaboration-Oriented Aspects PI: Karl Lieberherr co-PI: David Lorenz The goal of AOP (Aspect-Oriented Programming) is to turn a tangled and scattered implementation of a crosscutting concern into an aspect, i.e. a well-modularized implementation of the concern. The goal of the proposed research is to design and implement a collaboration-based language for aspect-oriented programming that supports reusable aspects. The potential impact of the proposed research is to improve the development and maintenance of complex software. The design and implementation of the new language will be evaluated in two diverse domains: telecommunication applications in collaboration with BBN and banking applications in collaborations with UBS. The success of the project will be measured based on the ease of evolution of the applications that will be built with our language. It is expected that the tangling control offered by AOP and the loose coupling between class graphs and path sets offered by adaptive programming will lead to more flexible software that is easier to evolve doc9361 none Wheeler, J. Craig Theory and Observation of Supernovae AST- There is a renewed interest in cosmology with the evidence that supernovae, when used as distance indicators, may point to a finite cosmological constant and an accelerating expansion of the universe. In addition, there has been a recent link between a supernova and a gamma-ray burst. Understanding the different types of supernovae has thus become more important than ever before. In this award, three major themes concerning the observation and theory of supernovae will be pursued. The first is to understand better Type Ia supernovae and their application to measure cosmological distances. This will involve observations with the Hobby-Eberly telescope and infrared spectra obtained at other observatories. The second theme is to explore the polarization of supernovae and its implications about the asymmetry of supernova outbursts. The third major undertaking will be to construct theoretical models of the magnetohydrodynamic processes involved in core collapse that may produce jets and asymmetries of the sort observed doc9362 none Furnstahl This group will study a broad range of problems involving strongly interacting systems using either Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the underlying field theory of the strong interaction, or its connection to effective theories of the strong interaction at low energies. Calculations of meson and glueball masses will be made directly as a QCD bound state problem using light-front renormalization-group techniques. Effective field theory techniques will be used to connect QCD with the nuclear many-body problem and with relativistic hadronic description of nuclear reactions doc9363 none Stegeman Spatial solitons are non-diffracting beams which can be self-trapped in Kerr, saturable Kerr, photorefractive and quadratically nonlinear media (near phase-matching for parametric mixing). Quadratic solitons are based on the second order nonlinearity X (2) and in the simplest case consist of a fundamental and a harmonic field which are mutually self-trapped as the y propagate. Previous experiments have dealt with solitons guided in homogeneous media, either in bulk or in waveguides. Recently Falk Lederer s group at Frederich Schiller University in Jena predicted that quadratic solitons can also be guided by arrays of closely spaced, parallel channel waveguides in Quasi-Phase-Matched (QPM) LiNbO3 at power levels of a few watts. These array solitons are guided by virtue of strongcoupling both between fundamental and harmonic fields, and between adjacent channels in the array. Their first observation, characterization and interactions between them are the thrust of the program proposed here. This research is expected to lead to the first bservations of novel solitons, position dependent soliton interactions and new guiding phenomena in array structures. This should also lead to new knowledge that can be generalized to the field of nonlinear discrete systems, an area not readily accessible by experiment to date. The PI is an integral and formal part of a European Community (EC) program to study novel applications of QPM LiNbO3. The European collaborators include Falk Lederer, as well as Wolfgang Sohler whose group (Un. Paderborn) has fabricated QPM LiNbO3 waveguides, phase-matched over 8 cms. In such samples for 20 um wide array spatial solitons, typically 1 cm is required for a soliton control operation or collision. Thus for the first time these waveguides offer the prospect of exciting such solitons and investigating multiple sequential soliton interactions. Furthermore, these samples allow soliton excitation at watt peak power levels, a reduction of orders of magnitude over previous cases. In collaboration with the Jena and Paderborn groups, the PI proposes to generate such array spatial solitons in QPM LiNbO3 slab waveguides, investigate their properties, including collisions and electro-optic and all-optical steering control. The PI s European partners are already funded by ROSA, an EC program which unfortunately does not allow funding of the US part. Here the PI requests funding for the component of the program. Although this program will be focused on basic science, the potential for applications will also be assessed. The extra degrees of freedom introduced by the array lead to a large variety of new stable soliton modes, many without analogs in homogenous quadratic media, and some which do not exist in any currently known nonlinear system. Their properties are in their early theoretical stages and will be investigated experimentally at nm wavelengths. Preliminary calculations have revealed a rich spectrum of interactions, including position-dependent outcomes, and they will be investigated experimentally. Soliton phenomena associated with gain (already demonstrated in erbium implanted QPM LiNbO3 at Paderborn) will also be investigated including focusing, deflection etc. Furthermore, scanning of the soliton across the array by changing its power, the channel separation, or the refractive index electro-optically will be studied doc9364 none Kinematics of Stellar Systems: Distances, Mass Distributions and Binary Star Frequencies This project investigates the structure, stellar content and dynamical evolution of globular clusters and of the dark matter content of the dwarf spheroidal companion galaxies of our own Milky Way. Advantage is taken of the enormous amount of data that can be obtained with the Rutgers Fabry-Perot imager. This instrument is one of the few that can acquire the wide-field radial velocity data which are required to address these challenges. Combining Fabry-Perot measurements of the radial velocity distribution with HST determinations of the distribution of proper motions for member stars will yield direct geometrically based measures of the distances to 13 globular clusters. These new distances will have uncertainties about one-fifth as large as the currently accepted values. Repeated velocity measurements are one of the most productive ways of discovering binary stars and the greatly increased numbers which are expected will test models for the dynamical evolution of globular cluster binaries. The project will use three-color stellar photometry with the wide-field imagers to search for tidal tails of stellar debris associated with the Draco dwarf spheroidal galaxy. Radial velocity measurements of the stars thus found can yield total dark matter masses for the dwarf spheroidal galaxy and the rate at which stars are being lost from the system. Thus, the work done under this award will impact upon several areas of astrophysics including the extragalactic distance scale and the characteristics of dark matter in dwarf spheroidal galaxies doc9365 none This award supports research in commutative algebra. The investigator together with students and collaborators will study problems in four connected areas: the theory of tight closure, rings of F-finite Cohen-Macaulay type, the theory of integrally closed ideals with applications to evolutions, and the study of infinite free resolutions. At its core, tight closure theory rests on reduction to positive characteristic. The principal investigator will study two main problems using tight closure. The first deals with recent work concerning the behavior of symbolic powers in regular local rings, and the second concerns the question of whether tight closure commutes with localization. To study rings of finite (or F-finite) Cohen-Macaulay type, this proposal places the study in the broader context of understanding the decomposition of purely inseparable extensions of a fixed Cohen-Macaulay domain into direct sums of indecomposable Cohen-Macaulay modules. Integral closures of ideals are a basic object in commutative algebra. This proposal concentrates on questions pertaining to the existence of evolutions over the complex numbers. The study of infinite free resolutions and vanishing to Tors is the focus of the last part of the proposal, especially over Gorenstein rings of dimension zero. Commutative algebra studies the relationship between algebraic equations, such as polynomial equations, and geometry. This idea goes back to Descartes and the idea of coordinatizing the plane, and has proved to be a powerful tool. A wide range of problems can be put into the context of solving systems of equations. For example, linear algebra studies systems of linear (degree one) equations. Commutative algebra studies the solutions of polynomial or power series equations of higher order by forming an algebraic object consisting of the generic solutions. The algebraic properties of these generic solutions then give insight into the geometric and algebraic nature of the equations doc9366 none Mateo This is a collaborative research project involving scientists at 3 institutions: Dr. Edward Olszewski, at the University of Arizona, Dr. Mario Mateo, at the University of Michigan, and Dr. Heather Morrison, at Case Western Reserve University. These researchers are mapping a region of our Galaxy that was hitherto unreachable. They will complete an imaging survey that has been underway for several years, and they will carry out a comprehensive spectroscopic follow-up of halo-star candidates identified in the survey. The survey is undertaken to directly assess the degree to which accretion has formed the majority of the Galaxy s halo. The main focus of the survey is finding candidate halo stars that inhabit the outer parts of the Galactic halo. The final sample of halo stars from the survey will allow placement of strong limits on the existence of halo substructure and will very likely provide direct evidence of such structure if it comprises more than 10% to 20% of the luminous halo. A profound change is underway in how astronomers believe galaxies, such as ours, formed. Older notions of a single, monolithic collapse of the outer Galaxy on a relatively short timescale have begun to be superseded by the idea that much of the Galaxy formed from the accretion of much smaller systems over the entire age of the Universe. Most data supporting this accretion-driven model is somewhat indirect and involves expectations of sophisticated models of how galaxies form in an expanding Universe. Recently, the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy has provided strong evidence that at least part of our halo stars and clusters have come from an accreted satellite doc9367 none Campins Dr. Humberto Campins will lead a systematic three-year study of Centaurs, Transneptunian Objects (TNOs), and inactive nuclei of Jupiter-family (JF) comets. He will obtain near-infrared spectra as a function of rotational phase for members of these three groups. The proper study of the spectral variability with rotational phase in a significant number of Centaurs, TNOs, and JF comets is essential if we are to understand the evolutionary links between these three populations of primitive Solar System objects. Dr. Campins will observe with the new 6.5- meter MMT facility in Arizona, which will allow detailed observations of enough members of each population for a proper comparison of their properties. He has already demonstrated that one of these objects ( Asbolus) has a dramatic spectral variation as a function of rotational phase doc9368 none McWilliams Interstellar magnetic fields play a central role in a variety of important processes in galaxies, notably in star formation and the evolution of molecular clouds. Yet the origin of galactic magnetic fields is poorly understood. This project is conducting numerical studies of the origin and evolution of magnetic fields in galaxies in order to determine how their strength and geometry change over time in response to the combined effects of small-scale disturbances such as supernovae and star formation and large-scale disturbances such as galactic-scale accretion and differential rotation. The project s goals include understanding why the field in our Galaxy undergoes a transition from a relatively weak azimuthal field in the Galactic disk to a strong, dipole field at the Galactic center. The detailed nature of the transition zone will be explored, with particular focus on the stability of the transition and the interplay between the magnetic field and individual clouds. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9369 none The Catholic University of America (CUA) group will study the structure of nucleons and the role of quarks in determining this structure, principally using instrumentation in Hall B at The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab). An essential tool In this work is the photon tagger -- a device which measures the Incident energy of a photon that subsequently produces a reaction of interest in a nuclear target. The reaction products are then collected and analyzed, typically by the CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer (CLAS), in order to extract fundamental information of interest about the nuclear interactions involved. The CUA group had major responsibility for the design, construction and commissioning of the tagger, which has subequently been used by about 40% of the experiments in Hall B. In addition to ongoing commitments to Hall B, we have begun work on a tagger design for the new Hall D -- a component of the proposed upgrade of JLab to higher energy. As founding members of the CLAS Collaboration, the CUA group will continue to participate in data-taking and analysis activity for most experiments that use the tagger. A study of special interest to us is the photoproduction of K mesons and hyperons in order to improve understanding of the role of strange quarks in the nucleon. Current investigations include production of neutral K mesons, the dissertation project for a CUA doctoral student. We are refining a proposal to study contributions to the Gerasimov-Drell-Hearn sum rule, a quantity related to the most fundamenetal properties of the proton. Apart from the CLAS collaboration, we are partners in two other projects which use the tagger but not the CLAS detector - a measurement of rare decays of the phi meson, and a forthcoming measurement of the lifetime of the neutral pion using the Primakoff effect doc9370 none Kulkarni Cosmic gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are among the most spectacular, known phenomena in the universe. They consist of short outbursts (fractions of seconds to a few minutes) of high-energy radiation originating in distant regions of the universe, There are a few such outbursts observed per day. These were first observed by the US Vela satellites in the early s. They have remained one of the major mysteries of astrophysics for the past 30 years. In the late s breakthrough discoveries found that the bursts originated in faint galaxies, at typical distances of several billion light years. Measurements of distances to the bursts, using large, ground-based telescopes, revealed that apparently some of them emit prodigious amounts of energy; larger than the total amount of energy produced by our Sun over its entire projected lifespan of about 10 billion years, but compressed into a few seconds! While theories abound, the ultimate cause of these amazing cosmic explosions remains unknown. However, it now seems likely that at least some bursts represent birth cries of black holes, produced in the explosion of massive stars ( hypernovas ). Current research suggests that the GRB phenomenon is closely related to the history of star formation in the universe, and that it can be used as a novel probe of early cosmic evolution. It is also likely that most GRBs produce highly collimated jets of very energetic particles and radiation, effectively becoming giant accelerators in the sky. While a lot has been learned over the past few years, much more remains to be found about the source and the ultimate physical mechanism behind these remarkable cosmic explosions. The keys to this further understanding lies in (1) detailed observations of their afterglows seen at wavelengths ranging from radio waves, through visible light and out to x-rays; (2) additional measurements of the distances to these enigmatic events; and (3) a better understanding of their environments and the distant galaxies in which they originate. This is the subject of the present project. Using the worlds largest optical infrared telescopes (the 10-m Keck telescopes in Hawaii and the large telescopes at Mt. Palomar in California), and the world s premier radio telescopes (e.g., the Very Large Array in New Mexico) to observe GRBs when they are first identified and to continue to observe them as they decline in brightness, the goal is to construct a wide enough bank of data to permit testing and winnowing of the scores of theoretical models presently under study. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9371 none The project addresses the issues of vision tracking, in particular the consecutive use of hypotheses generated by tracking methods to yield better results in tracking. The proposed approach is likely to be expendable to various tasks, such as finding clothed people in images. Overall the approach promises a powerful technique for building an accurate self-initializing tracker doc9372 none ChaMPlane: Measuring the Faint X-ray binary and Stellar Content of the Galaxy AST- This is a deep optical follow-up to the Chandra Multi-wavelength Plane survey made by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The primary objective is to measure stars and black holes in binary stars within the Galaxy. The survey is about 100 times more sensitive than ROSAT and will enable complete samples to be measured over 5-10 Kpc galactic scales. This survey has been granted archival status by Chandra and Long Term Survey status by the National Optical Astronomy Observatories. Deep wide-field images will be obtained with the MOSAIC camera at CTIO and KPNO over the next 5 years in R, H-alpha, V, and I bands for the purpose of source identification. There will be approximately 100 deep Chandra fields available for analysis doc9373 none Rankin, Joanna Low Frequency Pulsar and Interstellar-Medium Research at the Pushchino Radio Astronomy Observatory . With their almost incredibly high densities and rapid rotations, pulsars provide an opportunity to test familiar physical theories in order to see if they remain valid at extremes. Radio signals from pulsars have a different character in each waveband because the radiation is being emitted over a range of radial distances. High-frequency emission appears to originate very close to the pulsar surface while low-frequency radiation is generated at a distance of about 100 km. By studying the low-frequency radiation we obtain vital data about the way the pulsar is interacting with its surroundings. During the course of this award, collaborative research will be carried out with a number of Russian astronomers in a study of selected pulsars at low frequency. The Pushchino Radio Astronomy Observatory is one of the few low-frequency facilities currently available. Support is requested for visits of US astronomers to Russia and of Russian astronomers to the US as well as for some equipment upgrades. Two of the American Co-PIs have already had lengthy experience in this collaboration. The observations are time-critical because man-made radio interference at these low frequencies is increasing rapidly and may become very difficult to make in the near future doc9374 none Van Altena With this award Dr. William Van Altena of Yale Southern Observatory will determine the absolute proper motions, and hence tangential velocities, for approximately twenty Galactic globular clusters and several Milky Way satellite galaxies. The tangential velocities in combination with their measured distances and radial velocities, and assumed Galactic mass models, will enable Dr. Van Altena to calculate their orbits and project their trajectories backwards in time to study their association with existing or newly identified remnant streams. In particular, the distribution of target globular clusters is such that it will provide an excellent probe of the inner Galaxy, allowing the researchers to kinematically disentangle its various components. Tangential velocities and Galactocentric orbits will be determined for the Large Magellanic Cloud, the Small Magellanic Cloud, an Intercloud region, the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, and numerous Galactic globular clusters within the declination and magnitude limits of the first-epoch Southern Proper Motion program (SPM) plates, during this three-year award period. The absolute proper motions will be anchored to the International Celestial Reference System (ICRS), via Tycho-2 stars, which will serve to form this proper- motion reference frame. The anticipated accuracy of the derived tangential velocities ranges from 10 to 20 km s for the majority of the globular clusters, roughly 35 km s for the remaining clusters as well as for the Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal, and from 70 to 90 km s for the three separate Magellanic Cloud fields. The entire set of data obtained with this award should be available prior to the results from planned astrometric satellite missions, such as FAME and SIM. In fact, limitations in the ability of the FAME instrumentation to measure high-density fields, renders most of these proposed targets inaccessible to it. SIM will provide definitive measures for most if not all of these targets, but not until . With the use of the SPM material, Dr. Van Altena will provide reasonably accurate determinations by . At some future date, when the SPM has been completed, it will be possible to reduce the currently under-construction Schmidt sky survey catalogs into the SPM system and use those transformed Schmidt data to improve the accuracy of the tangential velocities further doc9375 none Sandquist In a collaborative research project, Dr. Eric Sandquist at San Diego State University and Dr. Michael Bolte at the University of California at Santa Cruz will use photometric observations of large numbers (tens of thousands) of evolved low-mass stars in globular clusters to probe the physical conditions found inside the stars. Because the observable properties of a star evolve quickly once it finishes consuming its core hydrogen and because a star s lifetime is primarily determined by its mass, stars of very slightly different masses can be in very different phases of their lives. By simply counting the numbers of stars present as a function of luminosity and temperature, these researchers can estimate how quickly stars of approximately 80% of the mass of the Sun change under the influence of internal processes. The investigators will pursue a number of definite tests of stellar physics that can be conducted with these kinds of observations. In several metal-poor clusters, a surplus of stars has been observed in the subgiant evolutionary phase, which is an indication that there may be an unusually efficient means of transporting energy away from the cores of those stars. The red giant bump has long been known to test how deeply convective motions penetrate into giant branch stars, and the investigators will test mixing processes that this feature and counts of red giant stars at all luminosities can provide. They also describe several new diagnostics that can be applied to the helium fusion phases of a star s life ( the horizontal branch and asymptotic giant branch). The asymptotic giant branch in particular has been difficult to study because of its short duration. The diagnostics provide practical methods of testing whether helium-burning stars evolve in ways predicted by theory. Finally, they describe the constraints that can be placed on the dynamical evolution of entire clusters by observations of blue straggler stars -a population that appears to be created by collisions of stars or the evolution of binary stars. The study will involve the analysis of CCD data already collected from a number of heavily-populated globular clusters, followed by thorough study of the incompleteness of the photometry -- a computationally intensive step that has been responsible for the small number of large-sample studies to date. To derive robust star counts, what is needed is detailed understanding of the probability that cluster stars were lost in the light of other stars or in noise as a function of stellar brightness and distance from the cluster center. Photometric studies of this kind are very important stepping stones toward new tests of our understanding of stellar physics and stellar populations doc9376 none Green, Elizabeth The Origins and Binary Properties of Subdwarf B Stars AST- Subdwarf B stars are among the brightest of highly evolved stars. The suggested binary star origin for most of them becomes important in several diverse areas of contemporary astrophysics ranging from stellar population studies in external galaxies to the common envelope evolution in interacting binary stars. This award is for continuing work in obtaining the remaining observations necessary for determining the binary properties and for comparing these properties with theoretical expectations. An extensive spectroscopic program is planned using University of Arizona observing facilities. Most studies to date concern binary stars with the largest velocity amplitude. To fully understand the range of possible orbital parameters, the new observations will be directed towards a kinematically unbiased sample. Once the orbital ephemerides are known, precise photometric monitoring will be carried out in order to search for eclipses, reflection effects and ellipsoidal variations that will put additional constraints on the binary star parameters doc9377 none Zweibel The Galactic magnetic field is a major component of the interstellar medium. Although the origin of the field remains a mystery, many of the processes which maintain the field in its current state have now been identified. One of the most important of these processes is diffusive transport, which changes the distribution of magnetic flux to mass despite the high conductivity of interstellar gas. Dr. Ellen Zweibel, at the University of Colorado, will pursue two research projects directed at understanding diffusive transport of the interstellar magnetic field. The first project concerns the field strengths in molecular clouds, which impact molecular cloud dynamics and star formation. The second project concerns the escape of magnetic flux from the Galactic disk, its implications for the vertical structure of the Galactic magnetic field, and its impact on the Galactic dynamo. These projects are related through their joint dependence on ambipolar drift and turbulence doc9378 none Baring Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) are among the most fascinating objects known in the universe, possessing a uniqueness embodied in their ephemeral nature. Their discovery around 30 years ago has led to a sequence of baffling mysteries and startling revelations. The latest advance among these was the discovery in of fading X-ray, optical and radio afterglows that have permitted accurate determination of their distance from Earth, placing them in the most remote realms of the universe. Consequently, astrophysicists have arrived at the conclusion that GRBs are the most luminous and powerful objects in the universe. Current thinking is that they are spawned by a catastrophic event, perhaps an explosion of a massive star. The goals of this project are to investigate catastrophic event models of GRBs. In these models, the GRB occurs when the ejected material from the star ploughs into the surrounding ambient gas at highly supersonic and relativistic speeds, creating an enormously powerful cosmic shock wave. Energy is liberated, both in thermal forms and in the form of extremely relativistic elementary particles. These high-speed particles then produce radiative emission, which is detected on Earth as gamma rays, X-rays, radio waves and optical light. The uncertainties in this dissipative shock scenario essentially stem from two constraints: (i) the relatively short duration and narrow energy bandwidth of the prompt gama-ray data, and (ii) the present crudeness of theoretical models. This project addresses these limitations. It explores how the relativistic particles can obtain the necessary extreme energies. It includes much more accurate determinations than previously available of the maximum energies attainable. It also seeks to establish definitive correlations and trends between particle acceleration properties and the radiation we see, using the latter as a diagnostic probe on the acceleration physics. The big questions this work seeks to answer include (i) whether the GRB environment is an ordered large scale phenomenon, or whether it possesses a multitude of chaotic, entangled, magnetized cells, (ii) if both of these situations can arise and thereby effect an explanation of the observational possibility that there might be two classes of bursts, not just one, (iii) how large the mean magnetic field is in a GRB, and (iv) whether particle acceleration in bursts is sufficiently rapid to account for the pervasive population of ultrarelativistic nuclei (cosmic rays) that shower Earth incessantly. This connection between the astrophysical environment of gamma-ray bursts and the underlying physics has not been studied before. In addition, this work will also address models for active galaxies, since their emission is probably driven by similar types of physics. Success in these goals will provide a suitable platform for further advancement of our knowledge of the exotic and alluring gamma-ray burst sources over the coming decades. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9379 none Asphaug Impacts are fundamental processes that have shaped the objects in the Solar System. While they were most important during the formation phase of the planets and satellites, they continue to occur today, with potentially severe consequences for humanity and other life on the Earth. This project, lead by Dr. Erik Asphaug at the University of California at Santa Cruz, focuses on an important aspect of the process: the interaction of an impacting body with a planetary (or satellite) atmosphere, as the collision takes place. The research team will build on previous work in simulating impacts into the Venusian atmosphere to develop a more complete understanding of the process. Earlier work demonstrated that high resolution three-dimensional calculations are necessary in order to thoroughly constrain the physics of impacts. The basic goals of this project are to answer the questions: Given the parameters of an impact, what are the mass and momentum that reach the ground to make a crater? How well do atmospheres stop impacting objects? How does an impactor break up in an atmosphere? Using the results of three-dimensional hydrodynamic modeling, a relatively simple model of atmospheric permeability will be developed, calibrated by ground truth data from the Earth and Venus. This will enable answering corollary questions: to determine the age of the surface of Venus, to determine where Earth impactors of moderate size deposit their energy, and to predict the state of the surface of Titan doc9380 none This research program will offer a general framework for understanding synchronization in coupled nonlinear systems with different characters and or different parameter values. The methods developed for analysis of phase and generalized synchronization will be used to understand complex behavior in general, and in particular to understand synchronicity in neuroscience doc9381 none This proposal requests support for Professor Vladimir Braginsky and his group at the Moscow State University (MSU) in Moscow, Russia. Braginsky and his group are members of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) and they propose to continue research on topics of great interest to the LIGO project to which the group has made outstanding contributions over the years. While most of the research will be carried out at MSU, Braginsky and his colleagues will be in frequent close contact with LIGO Laboratory and LSC members as the collaboration works to develop new tools and techniques that will be used in Advanced LIGO detectors. The MSU group will focus their research on new materials and techniques that will reduce the noise level that limits the sensitivity of LIGO in its quest to detect gravitational waves. In addition, they will study ideas for breaking through the quantum limit on measurement precision that is expected to be reached by Advanced LIGO. This limit was pointed out by Braginsky a number of years ago, and interest in trying to avoid this limit is now being pursued in a number of laboratories. Schemes for accomplishing this (called Quantum-Non-Demolition - a term invented by Braginsky) will be studied by the MSU group, the acknowledged world leaders in this topic doc9382 none Majeed Dr. Tariq Majeed, at the Southwest Research Institute, will analyze the newly released electron density data from Jupiter taken by the Galileo spacecraft. Dr. Majeed will modify existing models to allow more realistic calculations of the density distribution of each of the 14 vibrationally excited levels of molecular hydrogen in their ground electronic state. The model will use the neutral temperature structure and composition measurements from the Galileo ASI probe. Dr. Majeed will also study the effects of the vertical drift of plasma, induced either by electric fields or neutral winds, on the distribution of the measured ionospheric electron densities. Such dynamic effects can influence the ionospheric structure by moving the location of the electron density peak. The modified version of the model will be used to interpret the newly released Galileo data doc9383 none Antonucci Active galactic nuclei, (AGN) are some of the most dramatic components of the Universe---they emit prodigious amounts of power (as much as several orders of magnitude more than a bright galaxy), radiate it over a tremendous swath of the electromagnetic spectrum (from the radio region to hard X-rays), and sometimes generate bulk relativistic flows which emerge as jets of particles stretching for millions of light years from their centers. This project covers several different projects. One set of projects is directed at determining the energy source in different types of AGN. They include mid-infrared observations of radio galaxies, to locate hidden AGN which can be seen by their waste heat; photometry in the millimeter spectral regions, to see if optically dull radio galaxies have no hidden optical AGN; and mapping and spectroscopy in the mm waveband, to identify gravitational lensed quasars. The second set of projects involves adaptive optics observations of nearby and high-redshift AGN, including an isotropically selected Seyfert sample, and high redshift quasars and radio galaxies for host information. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9384 none Young Temperature profiles of Jupiter s atmosphere are important for understanding the energy balance, interpreting reflectance spectra or thermal emission, and studying dynamics. In all of these parameters, the temperature gradients are nearly as important as the temperatures themselves, and vertically-resolved measurements of temperature are needed. Similarly the methane distribution is central for understanding the chemistry and radiative balance. Dr. Leslie Young, at the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, CO, will utilize the occultation observing technique to measure the vertical profiles of temperature and methane density. She will prepare a catalog of ultraviolet bright stars that will be occulted by giant planets, and can be observed from Earth orbiting telescopes, and she will obtain spectrally-resolved observations of Io s hotspot occultations by Jupiter, measuring stratospheric temperatures and methane abundance. The occultations of Io s hotspots by Jupiter will be observed using the SpeX spectrometer at the Infrared Telescope Facility on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. The resulting light curves will be used to derive temperatures and methane densities in Jupiter s lower stratosphere, at pressures, latitudes, and vertical resolutions needed to detect and quantify the predicted thermal structure doc9385 none Mixing, Metallicity, and Binaries on the Blue Horizontal Branch Many changes happen to a star in the late stages of its evolution. With this award, the PI seeks to unravel the effects of deep interior mixing, mass loss, mass exchange and diffusion on the atmospheric abundances of blue horizontal branch stars. It has long been known that the blue horizontal branch can take on a very different appearance in globular clusters which seem at first sight to be very similar chemically. Strongest emphasis in the forthcoming work will be given to investigating the role of deep helium mixing and its causes. Work to date shows evidence that it does occur in two cases, in NGC blue horizontal branch star which are cool enough for their atmospheres not to be influenced by diffusion, and in single extended horizontal branch stars which show C,N,O abundances that are correlated in the same way as in giant stars and are thus expected to have resulted from deep mixing. However, to reinforce this case, blue stars covering a much larger range of temperature are to be observed doc9386 none Merline With this award Dr. William Merline, at the Southwest Research Institute, will continue a program of searching for asteroid satellites using adaptive optics systems on a number of different telescopes. An earlier program, which investigated 250 asteroids and discovered three asteroid satellites, contributed significantly to our understanding of asteroids. The frequency and nature of such binary systems provide strong constraints on the satellite forming process and on the collisional evolution of the general asteroid population. The satellite orbits can be used to directly determine asteroid masses, which combined with the asteroid diameter, allows determination of density, a fundamental property related to internal structure and composition. The new work will obtain spectra and colors for individual components of the asteroid-satellite systems. This will provide a critical test of the relationship between, and origin of, the components doc9387 none Link, Bennett Crustal Dynamics in Neutron Stars In astronomy, we commonly encounter physical conditions quite unfamiliar to us here on Earth. It gives us a chance to test physical theories which apply locally in order to see if they remain valid at extremes. Neutron stars represent one such extreme. Not only can we study properties of matter at almost incredibly high densities but also they are accompanied frequently by extremely strong and intense magnetic fields. Recent research has shown that neutron stars lead far from peaceful lives. Starquakes occur through cracking of the neutron star surface or crust and can cause large-scale realignments of the star s magnetic field. These may generate gamma-ray outbursts that can be detected by space observatories. During the course of this award four aspects of the effects of crust rigidity and their connection with spin behavior of the pulsar. Amongst other objectives, the work looks to determine the stage at which crust cracking begins and will provide estimates of the energy thereby released doc9388 none Tytler In the last few years, astronomers have shown that supernovae (SN), in distant galaxies are fainter than expected. The obvious explanation is that they are farther away than we had thought. If true, this implies that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. This change in expansion is attributed to a so called vacuum energy by theoretical physics. This discovery presents both major new opportunities, and a long list of troubling basic new questions. Up to now Gravity has been the hardest part of physics to understand, in part because it has been described by a single number: the Newtonian gravitational constant G which measures its strength. If the universe is speeding up there must be a second number, which should help us understand gravitational physics. In this way, astronomical observations are redefining our understanding of fundamental physics and the universe as a whole. The goals of this project are to provide an independent check of the claim that 70% of the energy density of the universe is some form of mysterious vacuum energy. Astronomical observations are the only way to explore the vacuum energy experimentally, because the effects are significant only over exceedingly large distances. In particular, this project will provide an independent check of the results from supernovae by using angular size as a distance measure. The amount of clumping of the gas between the galaxies will be measured both along the line of sight, and in angle across the sky. The relationship between the two measures gives the distance and hence the acceleration of the universe. The method is insensitive to changes in the state of the universe over long times. The project is urgent, because the vacuum energy remains an unconfirmed, though very plausible, result, and highly significant, because we will have the sensitivity to decisively rule out the amount of vacuum energy suggested by the supernovae, if none were present. In addition to providing an independent check on the SN decelerating universe measurement, this project will also give improved measurements of the clumping of gas between galaxies at early times. This clumping is believed to have arisen from primordial quantum fluctuations when the universe was young.. These fluctuations have been measured at different epochs, and in different ways. However, the methods used in the present project will give the only measurement of the amount of clumping of matter on galaxy sized scales at early times. These new data and simulations will be compared with theoretical predictions, to act as a check on recent investigations which suggest that our present ideas about the growth of small scale structure in the universe are inadequate. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc9389 none Readhead Dr. Anthony Readhead and colleagues at the will continue to use the Cosmic Background Imager (CBI) to make observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) on angular scales of 3 arc minutes to 0.5 degrees. The CBI is located in the Chilean Andes at an altitude of meters. The prime objective of the CBI project is to measure the angular power spectrum of the CMBR over the multipole moment range l=400 to . An additional program will be carried out to measure secondary fluctuations in the CMBR caused by the scattering of the CMBR photons off the hot electrons in clusters of galaxies - the Sunyaev-Zel dovich Effect. A complete sample of 19 nearby clusters will be observed with the CBI, and these observations will be combined with X-ray observations to determine the Hubble Constant with 10% accuracy. The team includes graduate students and post-doctoral fellows. This work addresses a fundamental area of science with a state-of-the-art instrument and is expected to make a significant contribution to our understanding of the origin and evolution of the Universe doc9390 none Lange, A.E. This program will use BOLOCAM, a high-throughput, multi-wavelength, mm-wave camera designed for operation at 1.1 mm, 1.4 mm, and 2.1 mm, to image the arcminute-scale anisotropy of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) over significant areas of the sky. Using BOLOCAM at the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory (CSO), it will be possible to survey 1 square degree of sky. Such a survey would detect 100 clusters of galaxies via the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect (SZE). In addition, it would measure the power spectrum of secondary CMB anisotropy (due to fluctuations in the thermal SZE associated with large-scale structure along the line of sight) at multipole moments of to (angular scales of 1.5 to 3 arcminutes). The utility of these observations will be maximized by choosing the target fields to coincide with those targeted by the SIRTF MIPS team for their deep guaranteed-time observations. In addition to being relatively free of galactic foregrounds and having deep infrared coverage from the MIPS and IRAC on SIRTF, these fields include some of the deepest integrations expected from the EPIC instrument on the XMM X-ray satellite doc9391 none Rich This is a collaborative research project involving Dr. Andrew McWilliam, Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and Dr. R. Michael Rich, University of California at Los Angeles. These researchers will undertake a large survey of detailed chemical abundances in giant stars along the minor axis of the bulge of the Milky Way Galaxy, at distances ranging from 40 to parsec from the nucleus of the Galaxy. The study will provide detailed knowledge of the chemical composition and metallicity function of the Galactic bulge, which is presently well known only for the local disk and halo of the Galaxy. Since extant chemical evolution models are based on these local components, the bulge provides a very different environment with which to test the widely accepted paradigm of chemical evolution. The survey will use the newly commissioned 6.5-meter Magellan telescope in Chile and the Keck telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii doc9392 none Politano, Michael Theoretical Studies of Cataclysmic Variables Cataclysmic variable stars through their binary nature have long been recognized as excellent astrophysical laboratories for studying the behavior of matter under conditions not reproducible here on Earth. Examples include accretion processes, thermonuclear runaways and the physics of degenerate matter. During the period of this award, the PI will improve our understanding of the characteristics of cataclysmic variables. Specifically, he is planning a systematic study of the role of common envelope efficiency and its effect on key features of the cataclysmic variable population. In particular, the formation of cataclysmic binaries with one component being an ONeMg white dwarf will be studied. Attention will also be paid to the formation of those with brown dwarf secondary stars and their subsequent evolution doc9393 none This proposal requests support for R&D work on BTeV, a recently approved program at Fermilab. The collaborating university groups need R&D support to ensure that the BTeV detector is running at the same time as the European competition, LHCb at the CERN laboratory. BTeV is a program designed to challenge the Standard Model (SM) explanation of CP violation, mixing and rare decays in the b-quark and the c-quark systems. Exploiting the large numbers of b-quarks and c-quarks produced at the Tevatron collider requires a highly specialized detector, unconstrained by a central geometry that is prescribed to study high-transverse-momentum physics, and not limited by the relatively low production rate of b-quarks and c-quarks in electron-positron colliders. BTeV excels in several crucial areas including triggering on decays with purely hadronic final states, charged particle identification, electromagnetic calorimetry, and proper time resolution. Key features of BTeV include: (1) a dipole located at the IR, which gives BTeV an effective two arm acceptance, (2) a precision vertex detector based on planar pixel arrays, (3) a detached vertex trigger at level 1 that makes BTeV efficient for most final states, including purely hadronic modes, (4) excellent charged particle identification using a Ring Imaging Cherenkov Detector, (5) a high quality lead-tungstate electromagnetic calorimeter capable of reconstructing final states with single photons, p0 s, h s, or h s and of identifying electrons, (6) precision tracking using straw tubes and silicon microstrip detectors, which provide excellent momentum and mass resolution, (7) excellent identification of muons using a dedicated detector with the ability to supply a dimuon trigger, and (8) a very high speed and high throughput data acquisition system which eliminates the need to tune the experiment to specific final states doc9394 none The main portion of this research project addresses fundamental questions about the nature of space and time. It is part of a broad effort shared by many researchers who are building the structures we need to understand more about both the beginning of our universe and what happens at the center of black holes. Some researchers believe that these answers will lead to many others, and eventually to a complete theory of physics that explains the detailed structure of our universe. A number of specific technical questions will be investigated, relating to various approaches. Some of these develop mathematical tools for the so-called `loop approach to quantum gravity. Others relate to the possibility that our universe may have more than the three space and one time dimensions that we see. For example, this idea is part of the approach known as `string theory. Finally, some investigations use the laws of physics to place constraints on the way that space and time can curve and warp doc9395 none This grant supports the participation of US scientists at the 16th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation (GR16), to be held in Durban, South Africa, July 15-21, . The GR meetings are the oldest international meetings where approximately 500- researchers worldwide convene to present and discuss their work, having been held regularly every three years since the late 50 s. The funds will be distributed by a committee of leading US researchers and will consist of partial travel support doc9396 none At the froniters of elementary particle physics, experiments seek to produce previously-unobserved states of matter and to detect forces unseen since the big bang. To interpret these searches, it is necessary to understand the workings of the strong force, quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which binds together the nuclei of atoms, and which plays a crucial role in all such experiments. The CTEQ Summer Schools are designed to equip junior experimentalists in elementary particle physics with the background in QCD necessary to interpret current, and to envision new, probes of the structure of the universe, incuding investigations of QCD itself. CTEQ Schools involve close interaction between students and distinguished lecturers. The school is a collaboration between CTEQ (Coordinated Theoretical-Experimental Project on QCD) and the United Kingdom s Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology, based in Durham, England doc9230 none This research involves the study algorithmic problems that arise in the design of next generation networking technology. Rapid growth of the internet user base, coupled with rapid parallel growth in mobile subscriber numbers, is creating powerful pent-up demand for wireless access to the internet intranets and other data networks. Communication in wireless networks differs in some fundamental ways from communication in wired networks. In particular, the basic form of communication in wireless networks is broadcasting, as opposed to point-to-point communications in most wired networks. This research investigates the effect of switching to broadcast communication on server strategies in the client-server computing model, one of the most common computing paradigms. A wide range of real-time applications, such as multimedia conferencing, computer supported cooperated workspaces, remote medical diagnosis etc., has become very popular in recent years. These applications have dynamically changing bandwidth requirements. It is clear that controlling and allocating bandwidth for individual users and web browsers is becoming very important for bursty traffic flows utilizing highly constrained communications channels. From the network management s perspective, it is advantageous to allow the network to dynamically change the tariff parameters of the charging scheme in response to demand. This research investigates dynamic renegotiation and pricing problems that arise in the design of networks that give quality of service guarantees doc9398 none for Proposal I plan to study analytical estimates for certain integral operators defined on functions on the Euclidean space of dimension greater than or equal to two. In these operators the integration is over surfaces of positive codimension, and we seek estimates reflecting curvature properties of the surface. Suppose for example, for each point, P, in the Euclidean space we have a one dimensional curve emanating from P. From a given function, f, we form a new function Mf, called the maximal function, whose value at the point P is the supremum of the averages of f over the curve emanating from P. This then defines a transformation from functions on the Euclidean space to functions on the Euclidean space. We want to know for what curves and what values of p this transformation is bounded on the Lebesgue space of functions with integrable pth power. Positive results here imply variants of Lebesgue s theorem on the differentiation of the integral. Namely if the transformation from a function f to Mf is bounded on one of these Lebesgue spaces, then for every function f in that Lebesgue space and almost every point P, the value f(P) may be recovered as a limit of averages of f over small portions of the curve through P. I am also interested in discrete analogues of these operators in which integration is replaced by sums over discrete sets of points. A basic problem for over a hundred years of the branch of mathematics known as Classical Analysis is that of recovering a function from averages of that function. This problem has been intimately connected with that of approximating an arbitrary function by a combination of simpler functions which in turn has been one of the main ways mathematics is applied to real world problems. I plan to study the problem of recovering functions on Euclidean space of at least two dimensions, from averages over small pieces of one dimensional curves. For a continuous function this is an easy question, but for wildly discontinuous functions it is a subtle problem depending on curvature properties of the curves. I also plan to study related transformations and discrete analogues of these transformations where the averaging process is over discrete sets of points doc9399 none This project addresses certain fundamental aspects of the electroweak and strong interactions that are reflected in meson and nucleon properties and interactions at low intermediate energies. The research is motivated by the fact that the present comprehensive theory--the Standard Model (SM)--is known to be incomplete; furthermore, the SM becomes unworkable for strong interactions at low energies. The rare beta decay of the pi-meson (pion), occurring once in about 100 million ordinary pion decays, provides a theoretically clean window to certain allowed extensions of the SM. The PIBETA experiment, mounted at the Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland, by an international collaboration of seven institutions led by the University of Virginia (UVa) group, aims to improve the present 4% accuracy of the pion beta decay rate by about a factor of ten in a staged approach, in order to match the theoretical uncertainty and provide new constraints on physics beyond the SM. Measurements that began in will continue through . PIBETA is the main effort of the present research project. Additional commitments of effort include work on studies of nucleon and meson structure at Stanford (SLAC) and Jefferson Lab (CLAS collaboration). During the past three years this program has resulted in two doctoral degrees at UVa plus three more at collaborating universities stemming from the PIBETA project alone. Four more UVa Ph.D. degrees are expected in the next three to four years. Each year typically one to two undergraduate students are engaged in research on this project, thus gaining practical laboratory experience doc9400 none This proposal requests support for research at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) to study neutrino oscillations using the MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) detectors at Fermilab and Soudan, and the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan, under the NSF Research at Undergraduate Institutions (RUI) program. Recent results from Super-K have used neutrinos produced in cosmic ray interactions with the upper atmosphere to strongly suggest that muon neutrinos of energies from a few hundred MeV to a few hundred GeV oscillate to tau neutrinos as they travel the tens of thousands of kilometers through the earth to the detector. This would imply that neutrinos carry non-zero mass. The MINOS experiment is currently being constructed both to unambiguously confirm this result and to measure precisely the oscillation parameters using an intense well-calibrated man-made beam of neutrinos generated at Fermilab. The neutrinos will be observed by similar detectors near their origin in Fermilab and after travelling the 730-km to the Soudan mine in northern Minnesota. The differences in the signals at the two detectors will provide the best measurement yet of neutrino oscillation parameters. The work being proposed here is for one physicist PI and two undergraduate students to participate in the construction of the MINOS far detector and to develop part of the Detector Control System. Additionally, the researchers will continue to participate in the operation of the Super-K detector, gathering more data to improve its statistical significance while improving the analysis techniques doc9401 none Haglin Theoretical support offering interpretations of the physics in heavy-ion experiments carried out at the relativistic heavy ion collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory and planned at the LHC at CERN is crucial to the experimental study of the possible formation of a quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Conventional mechanisms need to be studied and understood fully before claiming new physics such as QGP. This proposal concerns the physics of particle production and collective nuclear effects in these nuclear collisions. Electromagnetic probes of strongly interacting particles produced within the nuclear medium are the tools of choice of the Principal Investigator. It is hoped that this work will enable one to separate the proposed QGP signals from the all the other complicated hadronic phenomena that occur in the hot and dense environment created in these collisions doc9402 none The investigator proposes to use Kontsevich s space of stable maps (originally motivated by mathematical physics last decade) and related objects to tackle problems in a variety of fields. Traditionally, the space of stable maps has been studied using facts about the fundamental moduli space of curves defined by Deligne and Mumford. The investigator proposes to conversely study the moduli space of curves by studying maps from curves to varieties. Some of the proposed work will likely rely on Jun Li s recent extension of Kontsevich s work, the definition of a space of relative stable maps in the algebraic category. It has long been known that nodal algebraic curves are a powerful tool in algebraic geometry. They can be thought of as surfaces with holes (picture a ball, a donut, or a french cruller) with pairs of points glued together . Earlier this decade, ideas from string theory in physics led to the introduction of stable maps , parametrizing certain kinds of maps of nodal curves into another space. This development has proved to be incredibly fruitful, sparking advances in a variety of fields. The investigator s area of research is the use of these ideas in the field of algebraic geometry, in particular with applications to many other fields (such as enumerative geometry, arithmetic geometry, combinatorics, and physics doc9403 none Sahinidis This grant supports a collaboration between a member of the global optimization community (Nick Sahinidis) and an expert in neural computation and optimization (Theodore Trafalis) to develop novel neural network training algorithms and demonstrate their benefits in solving large-scale learning) problems. The application of neural networks to all aspects of technology has escalated recently as engineers and scientists have widely embraced neural computing in their quest for deeper understanding of complex phenomena and systems. Finding the best possible neural network for a particular application requires choosing the network parameters in a way that minimizes learning errors. Even for simple learning problems, the error function possesses a large number of local minima (isolated valleys). Despite the enormous amount of attention devoted to neural networks, there is currently no efficient method that can identify with certainty time global minimum of the error function. Current approaches, such as back-propagation and stochastic search methods, may get trapped at local minima corresponding to large learning errors and suboptimal neural networks. This may lead to incorrect inferences and devastate decision makers. Globally optimal neural computing holds the promise of an enabling technology that could significantly improve learning in many diverse application domains. The results of the proposed research will be implemented in the their widely distributed global optimization software package and will be made available to the research community doc9404 none This research proposal will utilize a multi-disciplinary approach using principles of statistics and physics to identify statistical characteristics of scientific and technology (S&T) systems. Variables will include scientific field, level of aggregation, and international comparisons. Data used will include R&D funding and personnel, including NSF sources, patents, and publications. The PIs will examine issues such as if the level of aggregation or funding level is critical for scientific productivity doc9405 none This project is devoted to a special class of chaotic dynamical systems, namely hyperbolic mathematical billiards. They serve as the prototype examples of non-uniformly hyperbolic dynamical systems with singularities. Such systems play an increasingly important role in the rigorous mathematical foundation of statistical physics, so that the study of their chaotic (i. e. mixing) properties is getting more and more physical relevance. The project mainly focuses on a fundamental conjecture regarding this family of dynamical systems, namely the celebrated Boltzmann-Sinai Ergodic Conjecture , which states that any finite system of (totally elastic) hard spheres moving on a flat torus is fully hyperbolic and ergodic, of course, on the level set of its trivial first integrals. The proof of this conjecture (in its full generality) has been so far notoriously withstanding any attack against it. The first major part of the present proposal directly targets this conjecture. The second and fourth parts are blueprints for further research in this direction by generalizing the original Boltzmann-Sinai Conjecture to cylindric billiards (mathematical billiards with cylindric scatterers) and billiards in physically more relevant containers, like rectangular boxes. The third part of the project aims at the biggest open question in the topic of Wojtkowski s one-dimensional falling balls: Wojtkowski s still unsolved conjecture on the full hyperbolicity of the falling ball system with nonincreasing masses. (And such that not all masses are the same, of course.) Beside these, the question of ergodicity (possibly, under the condition that a strictly concave potential acts) is also posed and targeted. The foundation of statistical physics (like heat theory, dynamical theory of fluids and gases) took place in the last third of the 18th century, mainly by the groundbreaking works of Boltzmann and Helmholz. That foundation was, however, based upon a strong hypothesis made by Boltzmann himself. That hypothesis claims that any physical system with a huge number of interacting particles (like molecules) has the property that for any fixed total energy and initial state, the system will evolve to any other state with the same energy. Although this conjecture, if taken literally, mathematically cannot happen, yet the precise mathematical formalism and its rigorous verification for different models of statistical physics bears a particular importance to the understanding the physics of the surrounding world doc9406 none This project involves Earlham College undergraduates in the study of differences in proton and neutron behavior in exotic nuclei. Proton and neutron contributions to excited states can be disentangled by comparing experimental measurements that have different sensitivities to protons and neutrons. The advent of radioactive beam technology has enabled such investigations of nuclei away from stability via inverse kinematics proton scattering, electromagnetic lifetime measurements, and Coulomb excitation. The focus of this project is on collective excitations in N=8 and Z=8 single closed shell nuclei. Three measurements are planned, a gamma-ray lifetime measurement of the first excited state of Ne-18 at Florida State University (FSU) and inverse kinematics proton scattering measurements of the first excited states of Neon-18 and Oxygen-22 at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL). The project will span three years and involve one to two students for 8-10 weeks per summer. Participants will to travel to the NSCL or FSU to perform experiments and will analyze the data at Earlham doc9407 none Kou Aluminum alloys are susceptible to hot cracking in the region right outside the fusion zone called the partially melted zone (PMZ), where grain boundary liquation occurs during welding. Studies on alloys (Al with Mg, Si and some Cu, Cr and Fe) have demonstrated that the composition of the weld metal is critical in preventing PMZ cracking. It has been proposed that cracking occurs if the weld metal composition is such that TWS (the weld metal solidus temperature) TBS (the base metal solidus temperature). However, contradictions to this TWS TBS criterion for cracking have been reported possibly because of inaccurate TWS and TBS and or non-equilibrium solidification. This collaborated study between UW-Madison and ALCOA on PMZ cracking in aluminum welds focuses on the mechanism of cracking and the effect of the weld metal composition. First, the PMZ microstructure of several aluminum alloys will be observed to prove that the solidifying and shrinking weld metal pulls and tears the liquated PMZ to cause cracking. Second, binary and ternary alloys of known TWS and TBS will be prepared and welded to test the TWS TBS criterion for cracking. Al-4.5Cu alloy will be welded with pure Al (TWS TBS) and Al-6.3Cu (TWS TBS) fillers, and the resultant welds will be checked for PMZ cracking. Likewise, Al-1Mg-0.6Si alloy (close to the popular alloy , which is being used for car frames) will be welded with pure Al (TWS TBS), Al-5.2Si (TWS TBS) and Al-5Mg (TWS TBS) fillers and checked. Third, the feasibility of assessing the PMZ cracking susceptibility with non-equilibrium T (temperature) vs. fs (fraction of solid) curves will be checked with the welds of the binary and ternary alloys. TWS and TBS reflect equilibrium solidification but non-equilibrium solidification prevails in welding. A PMZ higher in fs than the weld metal at any T is likely to be stronger than the weld metal, resisting its pulling and tearing. T vs. fs will be calculated using a computer code developed at UW-Madison based on thermodynamic and kinetic models and tested extensively with aluminum alloys. %%% As the auto industry is moving to all-aluminum cars, it is essential to better understand and control defects in aluminum welds. ALCOA has a strong interest in hot cracking in aluminum alloys and will cast the binary and ternary alloys for UW-Madison. Graduate students will go to ALCOA to learn how to cast special alloys for welding and duplicate the ALCOA facility at UW-Madison doc9408 none During the summers, the Aspen Center for Physics will serve as a meeting ground where theoretical physicists and astrophysicists can gather to exchange ideas in such areas as elementary particle physics, condensed matter physics, and astrophysics. This exchange of ideas is crucial if there is to be vigorous progress in these fields, and the Aspen Center is exceptionally effective in fostering this exchange. During the winters, the Aspen Center will act as the host for winter conferences in which the latest developments in elementary particle physics, condensed matter physics, and astrophysics will be reported and discussed. Support for the Aspen Center for Physics will be provided through the NSF Divisions of Astronomical Sciences, Materials Research, and Physics doc9409 none The PI plans to finish the preparation of hybrid inorganic ceramic materials and electrically conductive polyaniline. The ceramic materials are porous zeolites(zeolite 13X and zeolite 5A) and montmorillonite clays. Interpenetrating polymer networks of poly(2,6-methyl-1,4-phenylene oxide) and polyaniline as well as polyurethane foams coated internally with polyaniline will be prepared and by transmission and scanning differential calorimetry, DC electrical conductivities, and E.S.R. spectroscopy to determine also their magnetic properties. Theoretical studies of a number of equilibrium and non-equilibrium density functional studies related to polymers as well as investigations of some transport problems related to polymer viscosity, will be completed. %%% This research is in the area of theoretical and experimental investigations of important hybrid materials doc9410 none This experimental research project uses small clusters of atoms to examine the development of several bulk characteristics and phenomena-magnetism, structural defects, and phase transitions-out of molecular properties. Its main thrusts are in magnetic ordering in ferro- and ferri-magnetic particles and in ultrafast ion and electron dynamics in salt systems. The magnetic component seeks to address numerous theoretical uncertainties in the spin ordering of low-dimensional systems. Predictions of enhanced ferromagnetic ordering and even elevated Curie temperatures have been predicted in one- and two-dimensional systems, and small particles, with their large fraction of surface atoms, are proving to be an excellent laboratory in which to study such effects. Spin-canting and a competition between ferro- and antiferromagnetic orderings have also been examined theoretically and will be studied in this work. The dynamics portion examines the interactions of alkali-halide clusters with light, looking at the roles of various energies-thermal, electronic, vibrational, and rotational-in the finite-system equivalents of heating, cooling, melting, and evaporating. Graduate students participating in this research will receive training that will prepare them for industrial, academic, or government careers in the rapidly developing fields of optical science and engineering and nanotechnology, particularly the emerging fields of magnetic and non-volatile charge-based memory and optical computing. This research uses small collections of atoms to examine connections between the science of individual atoms and molecules and the science of bulk matter. In particular, it studies how bulk magnetic properties emerge from those of the individual atoms that comprise bulk matter and how temperature, melting, and evaporation are related to various dynamic phenomena in small molecules. Both experimental programs involve beams of tiny particles in vacuum, so that those particles are studied in the pristine state of perfect isolation. They are therefore well-suited to address many fundamental questions, including how the magnetic atoms in a material order themselves to retain or cancel their magnetism in larger system, how light energy heats small systems, and how large a particle has to be in order to exhibit such bulk properties and phenomena as temperature, crystal structure, and changes of material phase. This research has close connections with modern magnetic and electronic memory systems and with optical storage and communications. Students in this research program undergo rigorous training in condensed matter, atomic, molecular, and optical physics and are well prepared for careers in industrial or academic science doc9411 none The NCSU Industrial Mathematics Modeling Workshop for graduate students (IMMW ) is designed to expose students in mathematics, statistics, and engineering to problems from industry and government laboratories, and introduce them to a team approach to problem solving. The workshop is scheduled for the time period July 23, to July 31, and is organized by Pierre Gremaud, Zhilin Li, Ralph Smith, and Hien Tran. The workshop accommodates approximately 36 graduate students (for a total of 6 teams) from national and international institutions. Scientists from industry or government laboratories will be invited to present current research problems and lead teams of 5-6 students through model formulation and at least partial solution of the problems. This enriches the traditional graduate experience and provides valuable training for both students considering academic careers and those students preparing for nonacademic careers. For students preparing for an academic career, the workshop provides experience which will significantly broaden their perspective in the classroom and may provide a catalyst for later research. The experience is even more significant for students pursuing nonacademic careers since it provides them with an exposure to important ``real life problems and gives them some initial experience at addressing such problems doc9412 none The Arizona State University Meson Physics group will pursue a pair of approaches to provide insight into fundamental descriptions of the constituents of atomic nuclei by [1] obtaining data on the electro- and photoproduction of eta meson, and [2] by studying weak and electromagnetic decays of pions, to provide stringent tests of CKM unitarity, electromagnetic corrections to the Standard Model, the limits of quark lepton universality, and the chiral anomaly. The eta meson production experiments will be conducted with the CLAS Collaboration at Jefferson Lab using the Hall B photon tagger and the CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer (CLAS). Pion beta decay will be studied at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland with the PiBeta Collaboration. The electromagnetic decay of the pion will be studied with a precision measurement of the neutral pion lifetime at Jefferson Lab with the PRIMEX collaboration. Data analyses will be conducted at ASU and at Jefferson Lab. All experiments are high priority activities in contemporary nuclear physics and provide tests of fundamental symmetries. Development, construction, and utilization of major state-of-the-art equipment is integral to this activity. Education of students is an important component of this proposal doc9413 none Quantum effects around and inside black holes will be studied. New tools will be developed to extend present abilities in calculating vacuum stress-energy tensors, and efforts made to make these tools of sufficient simplicity and portability so that they may be adopted and used by other research groups. Further connections between semiclassical gravitational studies of extreme black holes and their role in superstring theories will be sought. Existing results on extreme, zero-temperature black holes, which play a critical role in superstring theories, will be extended to include black holes in spacetimes with a nonzero cosmological constant, and to rotating black holes. These studies will further illuminate the connection between black holes and quantum physics, providing new insights into properties of theories of quantum gravity and helping to establish connections between superstring theories and more conventional approaches to the quantization of spacetime doc9414 none The project is devoted to dynamical systems of physical origin, including Lorentz gases (both in equilibrium and under external forces), hard ball systems, billiards, ideal gases with a massive test particle, and open Hamiltonian systems. Most of these are known (or expected) to have chaotic behavior. Due to recent works of D. Dolgopyat, D. Ruelle, Ya. Sinai, L.-S. Young and others, mathematical tools in the theory of hyperbolic and chaotic dynamical systems appear to be developed far enough to attack many open problems that have been so far only studied heuristically or numerically by physicists, if at all. In particular, we plan to investigate the nature of nonequilibrium steady states by means of Sinai-Ruelle-Bowen measures, time correlation functions that appear in transport laws and diffusion equations, open Hamiltonian systems that admit conditionally invariant measures, the motion of a massive particle in an ideal gas by using an appropriate space-time limit, etc. In each case we aim at obtaining exact results and providing solid rigorous proofs. The general goal of the project is to conduct mathematical studies of facts and phenomena that have attracted attention in physical community and have applications outside of mathematics. In particular, the results would contribute to the mathematical foundation of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics and could strengthen the link between the theory of dynamical systems and physics and other sciences doc9415 none A two-pronged program in theoretical elementary particle physics and cosmology will study the source of mass for elementary particles and the source of energy which now dominates the universe. For the former, studies will be made to determine how data from high-energy collider facilities can be used to unravel the way in which the Higgs boson interacts with matter. From this we will learn whether there is more than one Higgs boson and how the Higgs boson(s) generate masses for other particles. On the latter front, there is mounting evidence that most of the energy in the universe has a unique and unknown form. Models will be built to explain this data and will be tested against the growing body of data. The twin questions of what gives particles their mass and what gives the universe its mass are fundmentally important and will be at the center of theoretical and experimental work for the coming decade doc9416 none This three-year Teacher Enhancement project will develop mentoring systems in which teacher-leaders and administrators nurture new teachers and encourage experienced teachers implementing change. Teams of middle-level teachers (Grades 5-8) from Northwest Missouri will participate in a four-week summer institute for each of three years. Up to 30 mathematics and 30 science teachers will participate. The program combines parallel programs of 130 hours of content specific coursework in mathematics or science, plus 275 hours of integrated teacher development activities during the summer institutes and academic year. Experienced teachers who participate in the renewal portion of the project will follow a phased mentoring plan, mentoring one novice teacher in Year One, two in Year Two and three in Year Three. The project includes a four-day Administrator Academy doc9417 none The Stony Brook Superconducting LINAC is a low-energy heavy ion accelerator with a broadly based research program that studies special properties of nuclei and atoms. The research emphasizes frontier issues in physics. The rare element, francium, has been produced and trapped with lasers, and work is now going on to measure the anapole moments of several francium nuclei. The anapole moment arises from the weak interactions between neutrons and protons in the nucleus. Other research focuses on unusual nuclei that exhibit a handedness to their structure, and nuclei that are stressed by large excitation energy, large amounts of angular momentum or large difference in neutrons from that of stable nuclei. The Stony Brook Nuclear Structure Laboratory also serves as a focus of many educational activities. Students at the high school, undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels participate in the research program with various intensities, from beam line construction to running actual experiments doc9418 none The fundamental particles and interactions in nature are currently described by the Standard Model, with the sector of strong interactions described by Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). The quark mass eigenstates of QCD are related to the physical weak eigenstates of the Standard Model through the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix. A requirement of this matrix is that the sum of the squares of the three elements across each row or each column be unity. Currently, the sum for the first row falls below unity by 2 to 2-1 2 standard deviations. The possible deficiency opens up the possibility for new physics, such as additional quark families or super-symmetry models. One of these matrix elements can be determined by a measurement of the decay rate of the K meson into a pion, a positron, and a neutrino, known as Ke3. Experiment E927 at Brookhaven National Laboratory will use the Crystal Ball spectrometer to make a new, high-precision measurement of the Ke3 decay rate. This improvement by about a factor of 3 over the current value, along with new neutron decay experiments, will permit a critical test of CKM unitarity. Experiment E927 will also provide data concerning weak interactions in hadrons, and may help with the interpretation of recent related data on the production of neutron mesons from nucleons and nuclei doc9419 none Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) materials have tremendous potential for strengthening damaged structures at low costs. Studies have shown that the load-carrying ability of FRP materials is related to the bonding of the epoxy to the substrate. One factor affecting the bond behavior is the roughness of the surface. The objectives of this project are to prepare surfaces of differing intensities and classes of roughnesses, measure the roughness using a laser profilometer, bond FRP sheets to the surfaces, and test the bond strengths with a pull-off tester. Analyses will determine which type of roughness results in the highest bond strength doc9420 none This proposal requests support for the collider physics research program of the University of Nebraska. The primary focus is the D0 experiment at Fermilab. With leading roles in the continued analysis of existing Run I data (collected between and ) and in the D0 upgrade for Run II starting in March , this group focuses on physics studies in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) and searches for new particles. Recent accomplishments (also a Nebraska PhD thesis) include a search for a supersymmetric partner to the top quark using the full Run I data set. For Run II, this group has built electronics for the new Level-2 muon trigger. The CMS experiment, currently under construction for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory in Geneva Switzerland, will be the next major experiment for the University of Nebraska group. On CMS, this group has the responsibility to coordinate the measurement of the pp luminosity. On analysis, this group will extend its work on D0 by concentrating on new particle searches and QCD studies exploiting the enhanced physics reach of the 14 TeV LHC. Lastly, the PI s are very heavily involved in undergraduate and graduate education projects as well as in novel outreach programs such as the separately-funded NSF-sponsored CROP program doc9421 none This proposal will investigate the structure of atomic nuclei at the extremes of stability, angular momentum, and energy. The studies will include nuclear systems beyond the proton drip line and at the limits of stability to fission. Techniques will be developed to study light-ion transfer reactions on nuclei far from stability using radioactive ion beams. This proposal also addresses, via measurements of magnetic moments of excited states, the the microscopic description of nuclear wavefunctions as a function of energy and spin, the study of residual nucleon-nucleon interactions, and the interplay of single particle configurations with an underlying spherical or deformed core. A new technique, combining the traditional transient field method with the newly developed approach involving Coulomb excitation of {\it beams} in inverse kinematics, will be explored in order to measure magnetic moments of excited states with subpicosecond lifetimes in nuclei close to shell closure. The structure of the proposed activities is designed to have great impact on the education and training of graduate and undergraduate students, as well as postdoctoral associates involved with these experimental research activities doc9422 none In this project fundamental problems in quantum chaos and electromagnetic wave chaos will be addressed using microwave experiments that study wave mechanics in model billiard geometries in which the classical particle dynamics is chaotic. The experimental results will be analyzed to obtain insights into the correspondence between classical and quantum properties. The correspondence between quantum and classical correlations, and the quantum coherent corrections, all of which signify non-universal behavior, will be a major theme of the project doc9423 none The objective of the proposed work is to investigate the vision task of coherent surface identification in a single image, and to use acquired knowledge for improvement of existing algorithms. The work is a natural extension of the PI s recent work on coherent surface detection, while also adding new aspects related to the field of object recognition. The envisioned system will be able to autonomously learn object recognition models from a set of images, and then identify those objects in a complex environment. The work has strong connection to vision-based robotics as applied to unknown environments doc9424 none As part of the implementation of an Agreement for Scientific and Technological Cooperation Between the European Community and the Government of the United States of America, the National Science Foundation has entered into an implementing arrangement with a European Union key action that supports materials research. Details about this agreement may be found at http: www.cordis.lu fp5 and in the NSF Dear Colleague Letter, NSF- (revised), Proposals for Cooperative Activities in Materials Sciences between the National Science Foundation and the European Commission, http: www.nsf.gov pubs nsf nsf .htm. The present project, NSF-EC Activity: Current Induced Magnetic Switching in Sub-micron Sized Multilayers , is a joint undertaking between the PI s group at Michigan State University and Prof. A. Fert s group at ORSAY in France. The research concerns the current induced magnetic switching in sub-micron sized multilayers. This topic is of great importance both on account of its intrinsic interest on the physics of giant magneto resistance, as well as for its technological relevance. The principal goal of this grant award is to permit the PIs and or their students to travel to France to plan and carry out joint experiments. This scientific interchange serves to enhance the synergistic link between two major groups and the development of a globally oriented workforce, which helps maintain America s leadership position in the science and technology of magnetic materials. As part of the implementation of an Agreement for Scientific and Technological Cooperation Between the European Community and the Government of the United States of America, the National Science Foundation has entered into an implementing arrangement with a European Union key action that supports materials research. Details about this agreement may be found at http: www.cordis.lu fp5 and in the NSF Dear Colleague Letter, NSF- (revised) ), Proposals for Cooperative Activities in Materials Sciences between the National Science Foundation and the European Commission, http: www.nsf.gov pubs nsf nsf .htm. The present project, NSF-EC Activity: Current Induced Magnetic Switching in Sub-micron Sized Multilayers , is a joint undertaking between the PI s group at Michigan State University and Prof. A. Fert s group at ORSAY in France. The research concerns the current induced magnetic switching in sub-micron sized multilayers. This topic is of great importance both on account of its intrinsic interest on the physics of giant magneto resistance, as well as for its technological relevance. The principal goal of this grant award is to permit the PIs and or their students to travel to France to plan and carry out joint experiments. This scientific interchange serves to enhance the synergistic link between two major groups and the development of a globally oriented workforce, which helps maintain America s leadership position in the science and technology of magnetic materials doc9425 none Ko The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory allows for the first time the creation in the laboratory of nuclear matter with energy density that exceeds the critical value for making a transition into its constituent quarks and gluons. The resulting quark-gluon plasma is believed to exist only in the interior of neutron stars and during the first microsecond after the Big Bang. Since the quark-gluon plasma is only formed for a brief time during the early stage of heavy ion collisions, to verify its existence and to study its properties pose a great challenge both experimentally and theoretically. In this project, we shall develop a multiphase transport model that can describe the interaction between incoming nuclei, the subsequent formation of the quark-gluon plasma, the eventual phase transition back to the hadronic matter, and the final expansion of the hot dense hadronic matter. We will then use the model to find possible signals for the quark-gluon plasma. In particular, we shall investigate if effects due to the quark-gluon plasma can be seen in the collective dynamics of final particles, in the photon and dilepton spectra, and from the abundance of heavy particles that consist of strange and charm quarks doc9426 none This is the first year funding of a three year continuing award. A variety of on-line planning methods are used in artificial intelligence including, for example, real-time search methods such as LRTA , reinforcement-learning methods such as Q-learning, and robot-navigation methods such as D . The PIs intend to improve the performance of these and other on-line planning methods substantially so that, for example, future robot-navigation methods will be able to map unknown terrain significantly faster than is now possible, yet have the same advantageous properties as existing on-line planning methods. Many on-line planning methods, either always or most of the time, execute actions that move the agent in the perceived direction of the goal, that is, move the agent so that it reduces the estimates of the goal distances the most. However, the PIs preliminary theoretical results show that executing actions that move the agent in the perceived direction of the goal is usually not a good idea. For example, D does not reach a goal location in unknown terrain with a minimal travel distance in the worst case. The key to improving the performance of these on-line planning methods then is to exploit the distance estimates that they maintain (or can maintain) in a way that is more directly related to the planning or learning objective. The PIs will study the properties of on-line planning methods both theoretically and experimentally, and will develop improved on-line planning methods that have the same interface as the existing methods, which allows users of these methods to easily substitute the new methods for the ones they are currently using. Side benefits of the proposed research include developing a test-bed for the experimental evaluation of robot navigation methods in unknown terrain, and creating a solid theoretical foundation for understanding robot-navigation methods in unknown terrain, including D doc9427 none One of the major quests of Kim s research project is to investigate stable relations occurred in simple structures. Major problem is to know when the simple structure has generic stable reduct. A generic stable reduct of a simple structure is the definitional stable reduct preserving forking independence. If a stable reduct of a simple structure is found, then every problem is reduced to the stable context from the simple context. Hence then stationarity can be used, which will resolve many open problems such as definable infinite group existence in 1-based structures, and group configuration problems. Unlike the well-known opposite process of constructing simple structures from stable structures, questions on finding stable fragments in simple structures seem to be rather difficult. Over the last 3 to 4 decades, model theorists have worked on stable structures. Kim s thesis in opened new research areas in model theory enlarging the scope of study of stable structures. Namely he proved the fundamental notion of independence in stable structures also exists in the wider class of structures, called simple. After then the study of simple structures takes place one of the major research area in model theory, and grows rapidly. Kim s continued work on simple structures will deepen and strengthen the model theoretic understanding of mathematical structures more doc9428 none Research in nuclear structure at the University of Kentucky is focussed on related topics in nuclear spectroscopy, neutron-induced reactions, and neutron scattering. Most of this work will utilize fast neutrons produced at the University s accelerator facility and the unique gamma-ray and neutron detection capabilities of this laboratory; complementary, collaborative research with colleagues at several other institutions is in progress and these collaborations are expected to continue. Neutron scattering experiments are primarily oriented toward exploring multiphonon vibrational excitations of the quadrupole and octupole types in nearly spherical nuclei, examining the separate roles of magnetic and electric dipole transitions in collective excitations, defining the roles of protons and neutrons in collective modes, and understanding nuclear shell structure and the nature of nuclear shape transitions. The characterization of phonon-coupled excitations of mixed-symmetry states, a new type of collective mode, in weakly deformed nuclei will receive a high priority. A new direction is the use of higher-energy neutrons to produce final nuclei that are not readily accessible with charged-particle fusion-evaporation reactions. Lifetime determinations with the Doppler-shift attenuation method and gamma-gamma coincidence measurements, for which the methodologies have been developed in our laboratory, will play crucial roles in many of these studies. Neutron scattering studies, which aid in elucidating the differences between neutron excitation and other probes, will complement studies of the microscopic basis of collective excitations. Carefully selected studies in other areas, e.g., nuclear astrophysics and the properties of light nuclei, which are particularly appropriate to the capabilities and facilities at the University of Kentucky accelerator laboratory will be pursued. Education continues to be an important component of all activities in our laboratory, and efforts to provide an excellent working environment for undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate education in nuclear science at the University of Kentucky will be made doc9429 none This award is to provide support for the Aspen Center for Physics Winter Condensed Matter Physics Workshop. The workshop will be devoted to the topic of high-temperature superconductivity. More than a decade after its discovery, high-temperature superconductivity is an exciting and challenging field with remarkable developments on the experimental front. This Aspen Winter Conference will have an unusual format: formal presentations will be on experimental results only. A small number of rapporteur talks will analyze the issues raised in the context of four major basic still-unanswered questions: 1) What is the global phase diagram? 2) Is non-Fermi liquid behavior fundamental? Does spin-charge separation and or topological order play any role? 4) what are the systematics of Tc? The latest experimental results pertinent to these issues will be presented and discussed at the conference. The answers to these questions will involve great conceptual advances in the condensed matter field and are likely to lead us to contemplate a shift in paradigm. The support provided will enable young physicists to attend and participate in the workshop. They will benefit from the opportunity to interact in a small setting with world experts in the field. This award is to provide support for the Aspen Center for Physics Winter Condensed Matter Physics Workshop. The workshop will be devoted to the topic of high-temperature superconductivity. High-temperature superconductivity occurs in a number of metallic materials all of whose properties are so unlike those of ordinary metals that a theoretical understanding of them does not yet exist. This Aspen Winter Conference will bring together leading workers in the field to discuss how the very latest experimental results impact the theoretical framework which must be developed. The answers to the basic questions around which the conference is organized will involve great conceptual advances in the field of condensed matter physics and are likely to lead us to contemplate a shift in paradigm. While the meeting will be relatively small, the attendees will include both senior scientists and junior ones just starting in the field. It is important for the future of physics that young physicists participate in a major way in small conferences of this kind. In addition these young scientists will benefit from the opportunity to interact in a small setting with international experts in the field doc9430 none The major emphasis of this research is new and continuing experimental tests of quantum electrodynamics (QED) and relativistic bound-state formalism in the positron-electron system positronium (Ps). Ps is an attractive atom for such tests because it is purely leptonic and because the electron and the positron are antiparticles, and thus the unique effects of annihilation on the real and imaginary energy levels of Ps can be tested to high precision. In the past few years, the precision of QED theory has overtaken that of experiment, and the challenge now is to improve the experimental precision correspondingly and to confront theory. A new measurement of the triplet decay rate will achieve 200 ppm uncertainty early in ; the present experiment will push this to a level of 60 ppm doc9431 none In this project, a plan is outlined to continue the efforts of the Student Meeting Activities Subcommittee of the Power Engineering Education Committee of the IEEE Power Engineering Society (PES) to promote student interest in the power engineering field by sponsoring electrical engineering students from US universities to attend the North American Power Symposium to be held at Texas A the program offers students several opportunities to interact with faculty and students from other universities in the power area doc9432 none Tools and methods from the calculus of variations will be developed and applied to a variety of problems in dynamical systems, partial differential equations and geometry. For dynamical systems, the existence of various kinds of connecting orbits for Hamiltonian systems will be established. There are related applications to geometry where the existence of minimal heteroclinic, homoclinic, and chaotic geodesics for the n-torus and other manifolds will be studied. For partial differential equations, it will be shown how some equations that arise in phase transition models admit a large number of different kinds of equilibrium states. The goal of our project is to develop new minimization and minimax methods and apply them to areas such as dynamical systems, geometry, and partial differential equations. The applications to dynamical systems include establishing the existence of orbits asymptotic to simple basic states like equilibrium points and periodic orbits. Related problems occur in geometry where the basic periodic states are periodic geodesics and we seek connecting states that are also geodesics. For partial differential equations, a class of phase transition models will be studied where we seek to understand what kinds of equilibrium states are possible doc9433 none This project consists of two experiments aimed at testing fundamental symmetries of nature using spin magnetometers. The first experiment will set new limits on violation of time-reversal symmetry by searching for a permanent Electric Dipole Moment (EDM) using liquid 129-Xe. It will constrain new sources of T and CP violation caused by Supersymmetry and other extensions of the Standard Model. The current best limit on EDM of a diamagnetic atom comes from the 199-Hg experiment and is limited by statistical noise. Using liquid Xe we will be able to increase the number of atoms by eight orders of magnitude and the electric field strength by a factor of 10 relative to the latest version of the 199-Hg experiment. SQUID magnetometers will be used for detection of spin precession and for monitoring leakage currents. The limits on CP violation can be improved by 2 to 4 orders of magnitude. The second experiment will set new limits on CPT violation and Lorentz symmetry violation by comparing the spin precession frequencies of 3-He and 39-K atoms contained in the same cell. CPT and Lorentz symmetry violations can occur in string theories and other theories of quantum gravity. The K magnetometer will operate at low magnetic field and high number density, eliminating relaxation due to spin exchange. We will use a new self-compensating design that takes advantage of the spin-exchange coupling between K and 3-He atoms, while automatically canceling magnetic field fluctuations and eliminating many systematic effects typically limiting atomic spin magnetometers. We expect to improve the existing limits by 2-3 orders of magnitude doc9434 none PROPOSAL NO.: PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Sacks, Gerald INSTITUTION NAME: Massachusetts Institute of Technology TITLE: GREATER BOSTON LOGIC CONFERENCE NSF RECEIVED DATE: 9-26- 12:00 am SUMMARY: For over twenty years the Greater Boston Logic meeting has met every odd-numbered year at MIT. Each Meeting is a chance for young mathematical logicians, graduate students, and post-docs to hear about and to discuss current work in mathmetical logic. The National Science foundation has provided critical support for this effort for at least twelve years. In addition to invited talks by senior logicians, a large number of short contributed talks is given by younger logicians. Space and time are set aside for informal discussions. Women and minorities are invited to participate. Approximately 100 people are expected to attend the meeting doc9435 none This proposal requests support for the research program of the experimental high-energy physics group of the University of Illinois Chicago. This group has been a member of the D0 collaboration since and of the CMS collaboration since . On the D0 experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron collider, the group will concentrate on Run II physics analysis, the Level-2 trigger system, and on possible detector upgrades needed to achieve an integrated luminosity of at least 20 inverse femtobarns before LHC turn-on. On the CMS detector, currently under construction for the LHC collider at the CERN laboratory in Geneva Switzerland, this group intends to expand its involvement in the hadron calorimeter and start a new effort on the silicon tracker. CMS is expected to become the group s main focus by the time the LHC turns on, currently expected in . For the D0 detector, this group is developing the calorimeter Level-2 trigger that will identify electrons and jets, and calculated missing transverse energy. The group will remain responsible for operating, maintaining and improving the calorimeter Level-2 trigger system. The group will participate in considering various detector upgrade scenarios concentrating on studies related to the silicon tracker and the trigger system. The research focus of the group is to continue study of high pT physics at the highest energy possible. Previous analysis experience and technical responsibilities put this group in a unique position to take a leading role in the search for the long-sought Higgs boson at the Tevatron. This group has designed and fabricated part of the optical readout system for the CMS hadron calorimeter and has recently accepted responsibility for development of the Level-1 readout and control processors for the same system. With the addition of Gerber to the faculty, involvement in the CMS detector will expand, as the group becomes one of five US universities responsible for the outer silicon tracker of CMS. The UIC Department of Physics has a long history in education and research training of undergraduates, graduate students and post-docs, as well as outreach to the community. These efforts will be continued and expanded doc9436 none This award provides funds for initiating a project to study the properties of slow light and its interaction with a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). Within the course of the project, attempts will be made to reduce the speed of light to 1 cm sec in the BEC. At this point the light speed is equivalent to the speed of sound in the condensate, and a number of predictions have been made about the condensate behavior. One is that atoms will surf on the front of the light pulse and that the propagating pulse will lose energy by exciting vibrations of the condensate. Secondly, shock waves can be generated and observed. Finally, the observation of quantized vortices is possible below the transition temperature for Bose-Einstein condensation. All these phenomena will be addressed in the experiments doc9437 none This project has the following components: 1) the US ATLAS detector construction project at the LHC, a 7 TeV on 7 TeV proton-proton collider under construction at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. This machine and its detectors will define the next energy frontier; 2) the D0 experiment now undergoing a major upgrade at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), a 1.8 TeV proton-antiproton collider, an experiment at the current energy frontier; 3)the ZEUS experiment, at the electron-proton collider at DESY in Hamburg, Germany, which probes the structure of the proton with the world s highest energy electron microscope; 4) the NuTeV experiment, that has successfully used a new neutrino beam at Fermilab, to probe the nucleon structure in a manner complementary to electrons; 5) the MiniBoone construction project at Fermilab, which can provide new information on neutrino mass; 6) the HiRes cosmic ray detector project in Dugway, Utah, which will detect cosmic rays at the highest energies yet seen in nature. 7) an innovative e-bubble project, which also includes a new education-outreach component through Quarknet. These activities are supported by the facilities of Columbia s Nevis Laboratories doc9438 none Funding is being provided for the International Symposium on Electron-Molecule Collisions and Swarms, to be held in Lincoln, Nebraska July 14-16, , as a satellite to the ICPEAC. This will permit the attendance of students, junior faculty and participants from less favored regions. Since this Symposium will represent the major world gathering of workers in this field, it will represent an important educational opportunity for these participants doc9439 none The proposal consists of 4 parts. In the first part the investigator and his colleagues study the asymptotic affine Hecke algebra introduced by G. Lusztig. The asymptotic Hecke algebra is a suitable limit of the usual Hecke algebra as parameter tends to zero. Its representation theory is closely related with representation theory of the Hecke algebra itself. One of the aims here is a proof of Lusztig s Conjecture describing the asymptotic Hecke algebra in the elementary K-theoretic terms. In the second part the investigator studies module categories over monoidal categories. This subject is closely related with modern physics where module categories appear in the context of the Boundary Conformal Field Theory. In the third part the investigator and collaborators study distinguished involutions in the affine Weyl group. In particular they make extensive explicit calculations of canonical distinguished involutions in number of cases. In the fourth part the investigator and his colleagues study the Double Affine Hecke Algebra. The aim here is to describe Intersection Cohomology of certain infinite dimensional algebraic varieties in terms of Kazhdan-Lusztig type combinatorics of this algebra. In this proposal the investigator studies various questions of Representation Theory. Representation Theory is a part of mathematics that studies all possible ways in which symmetry can be used for solving concrete physical or technical problems. Many physical and technical systems do not change under some transformations (e.g. the gravitational field of the Sun depends only on the distance from the Sun and so it does not change under rotating of the space around the Sun). Such transformations are called symmetries of the system. In many cases symmetries can be used to simplify the study of such systems. So it is not surprising that Representation Theory has many applications in physics (where continuous symmetry is one of the most fundamental concepts), chemistry (especially in quantum chemistry where it is used in computations of chemical forces inside molecules), computer science (for example, Fourier analysis, which can be considered as a simplest case of Representation Theory, is one of the most widely used of all calculation techniques), and inside of mathematics itself, in number theory (where Representation Theory is an essential part of the Langlands program). One of the central objects of study in Representation Theory is the affine Hecke algebra, because answers to many seemingly unrelated questions are encoded in the structure of this algebra. This proposal is mainly devoted to the study of the affine Hecke algebra doc9440 none Professor Murray Johnston of the University of Delaware is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry and Atmospheric Chemistry Programs for his research on chemical characterization of ultrafine aerosol particles. The work will develop a new analytical approach for ultrafine particle analysis, particularly those smaller than 10 nm. Laser desorption photoionization of aerosols collected on a plate will be demonstrated with aerosols in the 20-50 nm range. Ultimately, ambient aerosols in 5 nm range will be studied. The results will be compared to single particle analysis where possible. The characterization of aerosols and study of their formation and growth is an unsolved problem in condensed phase chemistry and atmospheric science. Understanding aerosols is key to accurate modeling of the atmosphere and prediction of global climate change. It is also important to study nanodroplets for their implications on health. Ultrafine particles are more harmful to breathe because they penetrate deeper into the lungs doc9441 none In cartography as in many other scientific fields, advances in research and education increasingly rely on the development of international collaborations that bring together skilled scholars and educators from many different nations. International contacts and collaborations develop through many different means, but one of the most successful has been periodic meetings of the International Cartographic Association (ICA). The ICA has been the primary international forum for cartographic research since , and it currently involves 79 nations. The ICA s next biennial meeting will occur in Beijing, China, in August . To facilitate the continued involvement of U.S. scientists in ICA activities and to facilitate the involvement of more Americans in international networks at early stages of their careers, this award will provide group-travel support to enable at least ten early-career cartographers from the U.S. to attend the ICA meeting. Funds will be distributed to U.S. cartographers whose applications are evaluated using a number of criteria associated with active participation in the meeting. Travel grants will be given to more junior scientists in order to encourage their participation in international discussions and communications. This award will foster greater participation by U.S. cartographers in the global forum of the International Cartographic Association. As has been demonstrated in follow-up reports from Americans who have been supported with previous travel grants to other major international meetings, opportunities abound for meeting professional colleagues from many other nations, for hearing ideas and information from a broad range of different perspectives, and for participating in discussions that frequently result in successful research collaborations doc9442 none Yen The flow rating curve showing the relationship between water-surface stage and the flow discharge has been widely used in hydrology for over a century. Direct measurements of discharge in open channels is costly, time consuming, and impractical during floods. Difficulties with stage-discharge ratings have long been recognized. The relation between stage and discharge is not unique. The water slope and changing channel cross sections result in a range of possible discharges for the same stage. A number of methods have been proposed to improve the fit but have not adequately assessed the fundamentals of stage-discharge ratings based on fluid mechanics. This work would explore the feasibility of deriving the rating for a stream reach theoretically. An important feature in the project design is the close collaboration with the Illinois USGS office that tie the theoretical to work years of practical experience. The approach would develop rating curves without stage or discharge measurements by using the unsteady-flow equation. The recently developed Hydraulic Performance Graph (HPG) contains all the information needed to develop a relation between the stage, the water-surface slope, and the discharge. Unsteady-flow equations will also be explored. The result sought is a rating curve supplemented with graphs or equations representing the correction due to additional contributing factors, such as water-surface slope, in a nondimensional form. Measured data will be used to verify the rating curve, instead of deriving it, allowing considerable savings in time, cost, and effort in data collection. Furthermore, the work includes a preliminary investigation of the uncertainties associated with the individual contributing factors and the overall uncertainty of discharge determination from stage doc9443 none The goals of this project are to produce dense sources of laser-cooled atoms, and to understand the collisional and radiative properties of these dense atoms. The dense atom cloud of laser-cooled rubidium atoms will be generated in a holographic atom trap (HAT), which is produced by sending a high power continuous-wave YAG laser through a holographic phase element, then imagining the diffraction pattern onto a cloud of atoms formed inside a dark magneto-optical trap. The effects of multiply scattered light depend crucially on the off-resonant absorption spectrum of the atoms, which is predicted to have a narrow linewidth, but a large maximum value, making the densest HAT clouds optically thick even when the laser light is tuned far off resonance. Measurements of this effect will be made. The high densities in the HAT will also allow for the first time systematic studies of ultracold collision frequency shifts outside the context of atomic clocks doc9444 none Elementary particle physics research is at the verge of a major revolution, owing to new data and new theoretical ideas. A broad program of research in theoretical elementary particle physics will be conducted, with the aim of trying to understand the origin of spacetime and of matter, the masses of the elementary particles, and the forces acting on these particles. The possibility of spatial dimensions beyond the three we have already observed will be considered. New insights into the origin of matter though new experimental results on particles containing the beauty quark and on neutrinos will be explored. The connections between superstring theory (the only candidate for a theory of all the basic forces, including gravity) to experimentally accessible processes will be investigated. So too will be the basic structure of quantum field theory doc8500 none As information technology has become more widespread, it is now increasingly possible for decision makers, such as CEOs and legislators, to obtain advice from a variety of experts with di!ering areas of expertise. Conventional wisdom suggests that, as a result, the decision maker will reach better decisions. This, however, ignores the fact that experts may withhold or distort information in the hope of influencing the decision in a direction favorable to them. Thus, a decision maker needs to consider how the structure of communication -- the conversation --affects how informative is the advice received from experts. This project investigates how the structure of communication a!ects the quality of decisions. The first part of the project concerns conversations between an uninformed deci- sion maker and an informed expert. When the expert sends a written report, unac- companied by any dialogue, this results in substantial information loss. A face-to-face meeting between a decision maker and an expert, however, leads to an improvement in the informativeness of expert advice--even though the decision maker is completely uninformed. Both the decision maker and the expert benefit from the conversation. This leads us to examine the following questions: How much information can be cred- ibly transmitted in a face-to-face meeting? Is it possible to induce the expert to fully disclose his information? In many situations, the decision maker himself may be knowledgeable about some aspects of the decision. As an example, an entrepreneur may have detailed knowl- edge about the growth prospects of his product, but still require financial expertise in taking his company public. The second part of the project concerns communication in such situations--where both the decision maker and the expert have some rele- vant information. Once again, the structure of communication can critically affect the amount of information exchanged. For instance, there are many circumstances where back-and-forth communication does not lead to information gains--even if the decision maker is informed--and we identify these circumstances. This leads us to ask the following questions: Is the situation improved by adding more rounds of com- munication? Is a face-to-face meeting superior to a back-and-forth exchange, such as via E-mail? The third part concerns situations where decisions are multi-faceted and informa- tion is dispersed among many specialist experts. For instance, a piece of legislation may impact both employment and the environment. Different lobbying groups are likely to possess expertise in each of these areas. We study whether providing experts with an opportunity to communicate with one another improves the informativeness of their advice. Is the situation improved if the decision maker also participates? Is the situation improved if there is overlap in the experts specialized knowledge doc9446 none A potential contributor to contemporary and future climate changes from human activities is that due to jet aircraft emissions. Station climate data, intensive field experiments, and numerical modeling reveal the impacts of jet condensation trail (contrail) cirrus clouds on the surface and atmospheric radiation and energy budgets. Some scientists suggest that in certain regions (e.g., central Western Europe) contrails already may be as significant for climate as the present anthropogenic CO2 forcing. However, before attempting to evaluate the climatic impacts of contrails, and in order to extrapolate the effects of the predicted continued increase in air traffic into the 21st century, a comprehensive spatial climatology of contrail occurrences for the contemporary period ( - ) is required. Satellite high-resolution imagery are a close-to-ideal database for developing a climatology of contrails. The development of a contemporary contrail climatology is the primary research objective, and will be achieved using the archived thermal infrared imagery from the NOAA polar orbiters, available on-line. The spatial and temporal variations of contrails over the U.S. in the period - will be determined for mid-season months using a manual technique. This climatology will comprise normalized maps of contrail occurrences composited by diurnal, monthly, and annual time periods; graphed zonal frequencies for different periods; and temporal variations plotted by region, facilitated using geographic information system (GIS) methodology. For about 7 contrail outbreak periods comprising the range of geographical locations, mid-season months, and synoptic meteorological conditions, the incidence of contrail spreading to form cirrostratus clouds will be tracked using GOES imagery. For these cases also, the satellite contrail information will be allied with aircraft-level temperature and wind observations to help disclose the important physical processes associated with persisting contrails. The contemporary contrail climatology developed for the U.S. will help provide appropriate boundary conditions for assessing the climatic impacts of contrails, for modeling the possible role of contrails in future climate, and for ultimately guiding policymakers. More specifically, the analysis will permit clarification of the associations between synoptic meteorological conditions and contrails, and help provide rules useful for the real-time prediction of contrails. The ultimate products of the research will be statistical models that quantify the relationship between the contrail data and other proxy measures of jet aircraft activity (e.g., jet fuel usage). These will permit an extrapolation into the first half of the 21st century of the magnitude and preferred locations of likely increases in the cirrus clouds that result from persisting contrails, and which are important for climate doc9446 none A potential contributor to contemporary and future climate changes from human activities is that due to jet aircraft emissions. Station climate data, intensive field experiments, and numerical modeling reveal the impacts of jet condensation trail (contrail) cirrus clouds on the surface and atmospheric radiation and energy budgets. Some scientists suggest that in certain regions (e.g., central Western Europe) contrails already may be as significant for climate as the present anthropogenic CO2 forcing. However, before attempting to evaluate the climatic impacts of contrails, and in order to extrapolate the effects of the predicted continued increase in air traffic into the 21st century, a comprehensive spatial climatology of contrail occurrences for the contemporary period ( - ) is required. Satellite high-resolution imagery are a close-to-ideal database for developing a climatology of contrails. The development of a contemporary contrail climatology is the primary research objective, and will be achieved using the archived thermal infrared imagery from the NOAA polar orbiters, available on-line. The spatial and temporal variations of contrails over the U.S. in the period - will be determined for mid-season months using a manual technique. This climatology will comprise normalized maps of contrail occurrences composited by diurnal, monthly, and annual time periods; graphed zonal frequencies for different periods; and temporal variations plotted by region, facilitated using geographic information system (GIS) methodology. For about 7 contrail outbreak periods comprising the range of geographical locations, mid-season months, and synoptic meteorological conditions, the incidence of contrail spreading to form cirrostratus clouds will be tracked using GOES imagery. For these cases also, the satellite contrail information will be allied with aircraft-level temperature and wind observations to help disclose the important physical processes associated with persisting contrails. The contemporary contrail climatology developed for the U.S. will help provide appropriate boundary conditions for assessing the climatic impacts of contrails, for modeling the possible role of contrails in future climate, and for ultimately guiding policymakers. More specifically, the analysis will permit clarification of the associations between synoptic meteorological conditions and contrails, and help provide rules useful for the real-time prediction of contrails. The ultimate products of the research will be statistical models that quantify the relationship between the contrail data and other proxy measures of jet aircraft activity (e.g., jet fuel usage). These will permit an extrapolation into the first half of the 21st century of the magnitude and preferred locations of likely increases in the cirrus clouds that result from persisting contrails, and which are important for climate doc8236 none Collaborative research: Rhizosolenia mats as a source of nitrogen flux into the surface waters of the Pacific Ocean: Fe stress, N excretion and basin scale distribution patterns This project will quantify nitrogen cycling dynamics in the euphotic zone by vertically migrating Rhizosolenia mats, and will provide the first physiological data on mats below diver accessible depths. These macroscopic diatom assemblages sink below the euphotic zone to acquire nitrate, store it in their vacuole, and then return to the surface for photosynthesis. This new production is based entirely on a biologically, rather than physically mediated transport of N. These fragile associations require specialized collection techniques such as SCUBA and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). As a result, their biology and biogeochemical importance has been largely overlooked. Other taxa also vertically migrate, and this project will conduct the first enumeration of this entire community in order to understand the broader role of vertical migration in oceanic nitrogen cycling. In-situ video imaging techniques will be used to quantify mats in the eastern central N. Pacific gyre. Depth specific (MOCNESS) sampling will be used to quantify the remaining taxa. A ROV will be used to collect mats below diver accessible depths in order to compare deep mats with surface mats. An existing computer model will be used to calculate transport flux rates with these revised estimates. In addition to transporting N, Rhizosolenia mats under Fe and or light stress may excrete both inorganic and organic nitrogen. This will be evaluated using both laboratory and field Rhizosolenia. Based on previous results, oceanic Rhizosolenia mats in nature appear to be chronically Fe-stressed. However, ferredoxin, a common and convenient in situ marker of cellular Fe status, may not be produced in these oceanic taxa and thus may not be a valid means of characterizing Fe stress in open ocean Rhizosolenia. As part of our research, we will evaluate this indicator for Fe stress in Rhizosolenia isolated from the Pacific Ocean. Our goals are to assess the Fe quotas of rhizosolenid diatoms, document the validity of the ferredoxin index as a measure of Fe stress in large oceanic diatoms, and determine N excretion rates by these taxa. A migration model will be rigorously tested by examining deep mats. These data will provide additional insight into the synergistic relationship between trace nutrient limitation and macronutrient acquisition and assimilation, an important developing theme of modern biological oceanography. The rates of biological N import and release for the eastern half of the central N. Pacific gyre by the entire migrating community will be assessed. This is a fundamental to understanding oceanic N cycles, and has direct relevance for both carbon and nitrogen cycling in the upper ocean doc9449 none The problem being addressed in this proposal, dissolution mechanisms in deep sea carbonate sediments, is essential to the interpretation of paleo-climate records and to provide a robust assessment of the role of the carbonate pump in the global carbon cycle. The approach suggested here is an extension of the PI s previous NSF award investigating non-homogeneous carbonate dissolution. Since the rain-rates of CaCO3 and 230Th to sediments should remain constant over time, variations in the 230 Th normalized accumulation rate of CaCO3 should provide a sensitive and independent indicator of any variable CaCO3 dissolution.. The PI proposes to use this at a number of selected and well-characterized sites (e.g. Ontong-Java Plateau in western Eq..Pac; Ceara Rise in west. Eq. Atl; Sierra Leone Rise and Cape Verde Plateau in east. Eq. Atl.) which he has sampled during the past decade. Correlation of the high spatial resolution (2 -3mm) 230Th analyses with those factors thought to control CaCO3 dissolution (such as sediment composition, sediment mixing rates, pore water chemistry, pH, dissolved oxygen and organic carbon etc) will be undertaken for these sediment cores. Radiocarbon (14C) ages of calcite dissolving at the sea floor provides a centennial to millennial timescale with which to observe and interpret more complex mixing models for carbonate dissolution occurring in the deep sea sedimentary record. The interpretation of past climatic change through studying carbonate sediment accumulation in the deep ocean is recognized as being an important component of climate change research doc9450 none The PI will test the Kennett et al. ( ) hypothesis that the prominent negative late Quaternary carbon-isotopic shifts in the Santa Barbara Basin cores resulted from methane hydrate dissociation. The PI will study the molecular-isotopic record of two sets of samples from the interval with the high-amplitude negative isotopic anomalies in both the benthic and planktic foraminifera. The biomarker record of organic carbon, especially from source-specific products of sedimentary microbes and algae could contribute independent evidence to test this and alternative hypotheses doc9451 none This research develops intelligent algorithms that mimic the cognitive processes of human decision-makers. Such algorithms allocate cognitive resources like other scarce resources. Attention is only allocated to tasks in which it will do the most good. The algorithms settle for approximate solutions and educated guesses when solving highly complex problems. The research develops models that predict the form of such educated guesses, providing an implementable model of artificial intelligence. To succeed such models must find a sensible middle ground between the extreme rationality of omniscience and the extreme myopia of mechanistic strategies. An intelligent machine that tried to think of everything (omniscience) would run out of time when making a decision. By contrast, a machine that acted myopically would quickly blunder into obvious mistakes that humans would never make. Finding a middle ground between the extremes of omniscience and myopia will require answers to numerous questions about cognition. What information do people use? How is that information manipulated? How do individuals decide when to stop working on a complex problem and act on their best guess? The directed cognition model that addresses these questions is expressed as a three-step algorithm. First, the algorithm evaluates the expected benefit of various cognitive operations. The expected benefit is related to the predicted likelihood that a cognitive operation will reveal useful information about an upcoming decision. Second, the algorithm executes the cognitive operation with the greatest expected benefit. Third, the algorithm repeatedly cycles through these first two steps, stopping when the cognitive costs of analysis outweigh the expected benefits. The directed cognition model realizes three goals. First, the model is psychologically plausible, predicting numerous observed psychological phenomena (e.g., salience, myopia, and anchoring) and matching the cognitive strategies that experimental subjects claim to use. Second the model generates precise quantitative predictions that can be empirically tested. Initial experimental data overwhelmingly rejects the perfectly rational model in favor of the directed cognition model. Third, because the model is general it can be applied to a wide class of problems. By extending the directed cognition model and integrating it with other models of cost-effective cognition, the research develops a general bounded rationality approach to optimization, including boundedly rational dynamic programming. At the core of this approach is a theory of endogenous approximation. Current applications include contract theory and consumption. Contract theory applications explain both the presence and form of contract incompleteness, including boilerplate contracts. Boundedly rational consumption models explain why households adjust too slowly to changes in their economic environment and why households simultaneously exhibit excessive sensitivity to salient variables like current income. The directed cognition model makes sharp predictions about how much time experimental subjects will choose to spend on each problem in a multi-part quiz. The model also predicts how the quality of respondents answers will vary when the amount of time allowed for a given problem is fixed by the experimenter and varied across subjects. If the directed cognition model continues to be empirically validated, it will represent one of the first economic models that can formally predict the difficulty of a decision problem --- i.e., the model predicts the quantitative relationship between time spent analyzing a problem and optimality accuracy of the resulting decision. Ultimately, a relatively general model of artificially intelligent decision-making may be developed, which can be applied and tested in a wide range of choice problems doc9452 none Although geochemists know that sunlight-induced photochemical reactions involving dissolved colored organic matter (CDOM) are ubiquitous in natural waters everywhere, observational difficulties have dictated that the detailed study of the underlying reaction mechanisms has been largely confined to the laboratory. The two principal laboratory techniques -- laser flash photolysis (LFP) and steady-state probes (SS-P) used to trigger photolysis imply reactions such as CDOM + hn @ CDOM+ + eaq- where hn represents a photon impinging upon a reactive site in the CDOM molecular structure, and eaq- is a hydrated electron ejected into solution as a consequence. However, investigators have been puzzled that LFP is significantly more efficient that SS-P in hydrated electron production. LFP is an important tool for photochemical research, so it is important to understand the discrepancy. In this project, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Brandeis University, and the University of Maryland combine efforts to re-evaluate the key reaction (above) by comparing LFP and SS-P data for samples from fresh and estuarine waters. The comparative studies would be calibrated using compounds with well-characterized photochemical properties, The focus would then shift to detailed comparative studies of estuarine and terrestrial CDOM fractions. If possible, unprocessed water samples would also be examined doc9453 none Financial crises are one of the dominant features of the s. The fact that so many episodes of financial turbulence and distress have been packed into fewer than ten years points to what is new and troubling about our current economic and financial environment. Or does it? The premise implicit in recent analyses - that the crisis problem is growing more severe - is just that: implicit. Virtually the entire recent literature on financial crises uses the same crisis dates for the same sample of developing countries for the same 25 years. We lack systematic, rigorous, quantitative comparisons of the last quarter century with earlier times and places. The goal of this project is therefore to construct a new database encompassing not just the s, s and s but more than a century of historical experience. These historical data, for a substantial number of developed and emerging markets, allow this project to formulate more precise answers to the question of whether crises are growing more frequent and severe, and to construct more powerful tests of their determinants. It sheds new light on the causes and consequences of financial crises. It provides a unique resource for future investigators. This project asks and answers questions like the following: Have there been changes in the frequency of currency and banking crises? How do they compare in terms of severity? What is the role of macroeconomic, financial and political variables in their incidence? How long has output taken to recover? What was the impact on the current account, money supply and interest rates? The project addresses these questions with a combination of statistical and historical techniques. The statistical analysis uses a newly generated set of crisis dates, together with macroeconomic variables and econometric techniques designed to disentangle the two-way causation between recessions and crises. The historical analysis looks deeply at particular episodes where there are parallels with today. This research has immediate policy implications. If crises are indeed becoming more frequent and or severe, then there exist important weaknesses in our current financial environment requiring urgent reform. If history shows that crises are especially pervasive and or devastating in countries with particular exchange rate systems, monetary regimes, regulatory arrangements, and capital account regimes, then the results will have obvious implications for the choice of exchange rate regime, the desirability of capital-account liberalization, and the emphasis that should be placed on financial deregulation. The data developed for this project and the institutional variation provided by history should enable us to uncover these patterns. Even if not everyone agrees with our conclusions, our database will provide a new resource with which others can also pursue such questions doc9454 none In an array of acoustic extensiometers was deployed at the south Cleft segment of the Juan de Fuca Ridge. These instruments are designed to precisely measure horizontal distances across the axis of the ridge to detect and quantify seafloor speading events. Eleven instruments were deployed in permanent seafloor benchmarks. The instruments make daily measurements of distance to their neighbors in the array by recording the round trip travel time of acoustic pulses. Temperature is measured to corect the ranges for sound speed variations, and pressure was measured at each benchmark to monitor for veritical deformation doc9455 none Fucoid algae dominate most rocky shores across the north Atlantic and contribute substantially to structuring of the coastal ecosystem. Reproduction in fucoid algae is sensitive to hydrodynamic conditions, resulting in high fertilization success because gamete release occurs only under calm conditions. These findings have important implications for asynchrony in gamete release between populations and the scale of population isolation. This study will 1) test a nascent model describing when successful fucoid reproduction can occur, 2) determine whether hybridization between Fucus vesiculosus and other fucoid algae occurs when gamete release is delayed by turbulent conditions, and 3) analyze whether genetic differentiation in F. vesiculosus is correlated with variable hydrologic conditions due to coastal topography. Quantitative data on gamete release at multiple sites on opposite sides of coastal points (and smaller features) will be collected. This will determine whether gamete release in fucoids occurs at different times over small spatial scales due to variable wave and wind exposures across opposite sides of the undulating coastline. Species-specific monoclonal antibodies to recognize fucoid sperm are available; they and the required pump concentration apparatus have been tested successfully at Pemaquid Point. Local environmental data (e.g., wind speed, light levels, water motion) will be collected and compared with data from monitoring systems such as NOAA s National Data Buoy Center stations. Maine shores have been stable for thousands of years; if the coastal F. vesiculosus is reproductively isolated in topographic fragments, population genetic structure may be affected. This will be tested with AFLP analysis of randomly collected adults. Storms delay gamete release from fucoid algae, and laboratory studies predict that natural hybridization will increase sharply if over-mature eggs participate in fertilizations. This will be tested in field studies of hybridization potential, achieved hybridization, and identification of hybrid position in the intertidal zone in F. spiralis versus F. vesiculosus (Maine) and F. serratus (an exotic) versus F. vesiculosus (Nova Scotia). The hypothesized environmental interaction with development as a regulator of hybridization and genetic structure in F. vesiculosus (and other fucoids) could have strong local and biogeographic effects on intertidal communities across the north Atlantic. Among the products of this research will be a robust regional model for fucoid reproduction as a function of relevant physical factors (i.e., wind speed and direction, wave height, light levels doc9456 none This proof-of-concept project will develop a cognition-based assessment system (CBAS) to help determine the cognitive underpinnings students reach in understanding and mastering core mathematical ideas in grades K-8. The project will identify these ideas in the areas of geometry and whole numbers. The system is comprised of a) the identification of core mathematical concepts in K-8; b) research-based cognitive milestones and fluencies for each core concept; and c) assessment tasks that track different positions of student understanding as students progress. CBAS will be designed for use by teachers in formative and summative classroom assessment, and for use by districts, program evaluators and researchers in evaluating the quality of student learning in various curricular and instructional programs doc9457 none This ocean science technology development project will provide oceanographers with a shipboard instrument capable of separating and quantifying phycobiliproteins in seawater. No routine method currently exists for separating phycobiliproteins, despite the fact that they are diagnostic pigments for important phytoplankton groups. By combining expertise from various fields, the investigators plan to use capillary electrophoresis (CE) with laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) detection to facilitate the determination of phycobiliproteins. By transposing conventional CE-LIF methods to a task-specific, monolithic microchip platform, and by incorporating acousto-optical deflection (AOD) for self-alignment of the laser in the detection scheme, the project will address difficulties that would otherwise be encountered by a shipboard phycobiliprotein measurement system. The specific goals of the project include (1) optimization of conditions necessary for the separation and enumeration of individual phycobiliproteins in a mixture, along with optimal extraction procedures for these pigments from picophytoplankton; (2) design and construction of a micro-chip CE-LIF system with AOD-based laser beam scanning for self-aligning detection; and (3) employment of the micro-chip system developed on cruises to determine phycobiliproteins in natural water samples in real time, and to compare these results with those of subsequent laboratory-based analyses to determine the effects of seawater sample storage and transport. Fulfillment of these goals will provide the oceanographic community with a robust, multidisciplinary tool capable of determining distributions and concentrations of various phytoplankton derived pigments like phycobiliproteins, which will facilitate studies of global primary production and carbon biomass doc9458 none Should each country have its own currency? Should one and only one currency circulate in each country? How many currencies should circulate in the world: 1, 10, 50, or the current number of roughly 180? These issues are at the forefront of the policy debate because of the politicoeconomic developments of the last few decades, which featured a large expansion of the number of independent countries. In , there were 76 countries in the world; today there are 193 and, with few exceptions, all of these countries have their own currencies. Unless one believes that a country is by definition an optimal currency area, either there were too few currencies in or there are too many today. In fact, given the phenomenal increase in trade and financial integration between countries (the so-called globalization), one might have expected the number of currencies to decrease rather than increase in the post-World War 11 period. An additional pressure toward currency unions has come from the renewed emphasis on price stability, rather than active macroeconomic stabilization, as the main objective of monetary policy. This change in policy stance is likely a reaction to the inflationary decades of the seventies and eighties. As a result of these developments, the unquestioned identity one-country one-currency is increasingly being called into question. This project studies, theoretically and empirically, the question of what is the optimal number of currencies in the world. The basic strategy is to combine new economic analysis with two existing strands of the literature. One of these strands is the work on alternative exchange rate regimes and optimal currency areas; the second is the literature on formation of political jurisdictions and the equilibrium number of countries. The initial theoretical research shows how the benefits from currency union depend on trading costs, commitment abilities, co-movements of prices and outputs, accommodations of anchor countries to clients, and treatments of seignorage revenue. Further work shows how geographical considerations determine equilibrium configurations of currency unions. Further research includes empirical estimation of some of the key relationships in the theoretical framework, assessment of the sources of home bias in exchanges of goods and financial services, treatment of country size as jointly determined with currency arrangements, assessment of the interplay between currency union and financial development, analysis of underlying commitment abilities of policymakers, and more explicit allowance for competition among potential anchor currencies doc9459 none MacCready A three-pronged field effort is proposed to study the generation, release, and dissipation of tidally generated sidewall eddies in a fjord. The deep (stratified) water adjacent to the headland at which the eddy is generated precludes immediate dissipation by bottom friction. Laboratory experiments suggest that the long lifetime of the eddy promotes different characteristic flow fields than observed in shallower environments. This hypothesis will be tested doc9460 none Schopf This project focuses on the development and testing of a numerical ocean general circulation model, including its application to dense overflows and the deep circulation of the ocean. If successful, the primary outcomes will be an enhancement of infrastructure, in the form of better ocean modeling capability, and better insight into the dynamics of dense overflows. The ocean model at the heart of the project is the Poseidon model which uses a generalized vertical coordinate. The model development will center on improving the representation of ocean mixing, using existing observational data and theoretical results on dense overflows, such as the Mediterranean outflow, to define test problems and calibrate the results. The project will also explore the effectiveness of several other algorithmic refinements doc8516 none This objective of this study is to provide estimates of long-term changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations from the Eocene through the Oligocene. The study will utilize carbon isotope measurement of alkenones and carbonate microfossils along with oxygen isotope measurements in carbonate microfossils. Measurements will be done on 6 discreet time slices representing the early, middle, and late Eocene and the early, middle and late Oligocene. Sample resolution will be approximately 250 to 500ky. In addition records will be established prior to and following distinct climatic episodes such as the Eocene Oligocene transition and the apparent rapid deglaciation at the end of the Oligocene doc9462 none The long term objective of this Doctoral Dissertation Research Investigation is to better understand how decisions with regards to program design made by state level policy makers affect the target populations use of state supported health care through Medicaid. Specifically, the research has the following goals: First, the research seeks to determine what environmental (health, economic, and social) and political factors shape the decisions of states to request Medicaid program waivers? Second, why do states vary in their design and complexity of managed care programs in Medicaid? Finally, do variations in managed care programs affect the delivery of health care? Specifically, does the access to care and the cost to state vary by design? To answer these questions multiple designs and statistical procedures will be employed. An event count approach using the 50 states from through provides an explanation of the determinants of an increased probability to obtain a waiver. To address the issues of program diversity, access, and cost a set of simultaneous equation models will be employed. Indices are created to serve both as independent and dependent variables. Health Care Financing Administration data as well as additional data collected by the Ph.D. student will be used in this study doc8524 none Political scientists have long attempted to measure and describe the modest and contingent effects of party on the behavior of members of Congress and on policy choices. They have done so without specifying models that reflect the multiple ways in which parties might influence choice. In this investigation, the researchers: 1) directly model alternative forms of party effects; 2) extend the analysis for the entire post-Civil War period in order to encompass the various rules and partisan regimes that might be associated with different forms of party influence; 3) compare preference and party effects in different institutional contests (House and Senate); and, 5) compare preference and party effects in must pass legislation and in bills where a sizable contingent prefers the reversion point. This project enhances substantially our understanding of the topic and produces a database that will be of use for numerous other scholars interested in the topic doc9464 none The goal of the project is to assess both species diversity and the distribution of growth rates among eukaryotic phytoplankton populations under natural conditions. Relatively little is known about phytoplankton species composition in any particular sample of seawater, let alone the growth rates of those species. The wide range of growth rates and responses to environmental conditions observed for phytoplankton has obvious implications for species succession and the efficiency of the biological puinp. The investigators will focus on eukaryotic phytoplankton because these cells are responsible for the bulk of production in many regions, including most marine phytoplankton blooms. They will employ a three-tiered approach that combines: 1) high-throughput DNA sequencing and fragment analyses to allow us to determine species diversity and to design species-specific rRNA-targeted probes for ecologically relevant organisms; 2) a newly emerging class of molecular phylogenetic probes known as peptide nucleic acids (PNAs), which are highly sensitive and relatively easy to design and use; and 3) flow cytometric cell cycle analyses of PNA-labeled cells to determine intrinsic growth rates of targeted species. Since the division cycles of most phytoplankton are phased to the daily light:dark cycle, the intrinsic growth rate of a population can be determined by monitoring DNA cell cycle distributions over a diel period. If the flow cytometric signature (pigment fluorescence light scatter characteristics) of the organism in question is sufficiently distinctive (as with the prokaryotic picoplankter Prochlorococcus), DNA distributions (measured with a fluorescent stain) in natural samples can provide growth rates at the species level. Direct flow cytometric analyses of eukaryotic phytoplankton cell cycling are not practical because multiple species in a given sample typically have similar morphology and flow cytometric signatures, but different amounts of DNA or cell division timing. Therefore, the investigators will selectively analyze cells of particular species by using fluorescentlylabelled PNA rRNA probes. Target species will be chosen from among the phytoplankton present at diel sampling sites in coastal and open ocean waters. They will extract DNA from phytoplankton purified either by flow cytometric cell sorting or size fractionation and amplify eukaryotic rDNA using PCR. A combination of terminal restriction fraction length polymorphism (T-RFLP) analysis and the sequencing of 18S clone libraries generated from selected sites will be used to select species of interest for further study. Specific rRNA probes to selected species will then be designed. The invetigators will use fluorescently-labeled PNA probes, in conjunction with DNA staining and dual-beam flow cytometry, to obtain cell cycle (and thus growth rate information for target species). In addition to speciesTm growth rates, these analyses will provide new perspectives on the distribution and diversity of eukaryotic phytoplankton in the sea and will improve our capabilities to address a variety of oceanographic questions on ecologically relevant scales doc9465 none Understanding spatio-temporal patterns of biotic diversity represents one of the central challenges facing ecologists and systernatists. This challenge is particularly acute in the marine environment where we are only just now beginning to comprehend the evolutionary processes which have produced the epic diversity evident in tropical nearshore faunas. A central paradox in marine evolution is how speciation rates in many clades are sufficiently high to produce large sibling species complexes on geographic scales that are dwarfed by the dispersal potential of their planktonic larval stages. The aim of this project is to address how the Gulf-Atlantic genetic disjunction for regionally distributed Caribbean morphospecies scales relative to the genetic structuring experienced over the rest of their collective geographic ranges. Three distinct phylogenetic trajectories are hypothesized that hinge on whether the Gulf--Atlantic genetic disjunction for individual study taxa originated early in the history of the Miocene Suwannee Seaway, or postdated it s Pliocene closure, and whether or not genetic cohesiveness has been maintained across oceanic barriers to dispersal. These hypotheses will be tested using three exemplar mytilid morphospecies chosen on the basis of their appropriate geographic ranges, ecological abundance in distinct coastal habitats, availability of reference congeners on the Pacific side of the isthmus of Panama, and possession of rapidly evolving paternally -transmitted mitochondrial lineages. Mitochondrial and nuclear gene trees will be generated for population samples spanning the southeastern Florida genetic break, the oceanic dispersal barrier to Bermuda, and representative locations in the Caribbean Basin. Sampling of Caribbean eastern Pacific congeners will allow the identification of transisthmian reference geminate species and provide a meaningful temporal perspective for the intraspecific gene tree topologies. The project promises to yield important new insights into the nature and origin of biotic diversity in both this regional fauna and in the broader marine environment doc9466 none This project examines the dynamics of third-party international mediation using statistical time-series analyses of political event data. Third-party mediation is one of the most common international responses to political conflict. Studies show that the use of mediation has increased following the end of the Cold War. Surprisingly, there are few systematic studies of mediation. Those that do exist focus generally on relatively static contextual factors, such as the attributes of the conflict and the prior relationship between the mediator and protagonists, rather than on dynamic factors - both contextual and process - that may contribute to the success or failure of mediation activities. In contrast, the extensive qualitative literature provides numerous hypotheses about dynamic aspects of mediation. These studies, however, are primarily case studies, often are undertaken by mediation practitioners, exhibit little cumulation and, when taken as a whole, are rife with contradictory assertions. This research formally tests a number of the hypotheses embedded in the theoretical and qualitative literatures on mediation, suing automated coding of event data from news-wire sources and employing time-series and event-history methods available in standard statistical packages. Event data provide a rich set of indicators about the results of mediation, the political circumstances of the mediation (for example, prior military success or failure by the protagonists), and the various strategies employed by the mediating parties). The research looks at the factors that influence (1) whether mediation is accepted by the parties in a conflict, (2) whether formal agreements are reached, and (3) whether the agreements actually reduce the level of conflict. The project focuses initially on conflicts in the Middle East, a region where the principal investigators have substantial field experience. The TABARI machine-coding system - an open-source successor to the NSF-supported KEDS coding program - is adapted to code events according to the new IDEA coding framework developed by Taylor, Jenkins and Bond. The broader research community has access to the revised coding program, coding dictionaries, and datasets via a web site. After refining the statistical tests on the Middle East case, the analysis is extended to event data on conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and West Africa. Finally, a subset of tests is applied to the historical crises in Leng s Behavioral Correlates of War dataset and to the contemporary crises being documented in Alker s Conflict Early Warning System project. The research uses three types of statistical models. The first set of models employs interval-level methods on scaled and aggregated event data, using methods similar to those found in econometric analysis. The sensitivity of the event scaling system also is examined. Second, mediation is explored using the time series cross-sectional logit technique that is used widely in the democratic peace research and other war-initiation literature. This work takes into consideration modifications suggested by Beck, Katz, King and others to improve the effectiveness of this methodology. Finally, event-history and other duration models are estimated; this approach should be particularly useful given the large random element in the timing of many conflicts. This study contributes in both the academic and practical arenas. It provides an extensive empirical analysis of hypotheses about the dynamics of the mediation process. Those empirical generationalizations can inform the efforts of individuals engaged in actual international mediation. The project also continues the development of research tools and datasets that can be used in a variety of statistical studies of international behavior doc9467 none Issues in the Applied Analysis of Markets. This proposal has several parts. The first is to extend prior models of demand systems in characteristic space. These models were primarily developed to provide a tool that enables the user to analyze (own and cross) price and characteristic elasticities of demand. The same models can (and have) been used to evaluate the demand for and the utility derived from new goods, but their implications in those contexts are questionable (these include applica- tions like evaluating the returns to innovations, or constructing price indices). This is because some of the model s properties vis a vis the evaluation of new goods are counterintuitve . We consider a change in the demand model that gets rid of these coun- terintuitive implications, and then compare alternative ways of evaluating new goods. One of the alternatives is \hedonic analysis; a technique which is currently used to correct the CPI for new goods bias. In doing this com- parison I will provide a detailed analysis of alternative ways of computing hedonic corrections. Hopefully this will be of use to the statistical agencies. The second section of the proposal seeks to extend methods for computing and analyzing dynamic games to allow for asymmetric information. We focus on models which can detect and analyze collusive outcomes, and show how the learning and artificial intelligence literatures can help provide a simple tool for such an analysis. The third section of the proposal outlines a new and relatively simple procedure for estimation and subsequent empirical analysis of oligopolistic markets when either asymmetric information, or dynamic considerations, are important. I hope to explore the range of application and performance of this technique. The technique was developed while I was trying to sort out research strategies for two new empirical projects, one on the demand for pharmaceuticals and one on deregulated electric utility markets. The two final sections of the proposal outline these projects. Both empirical projects are joint with colleagues who have worked exten- sively on the industries studied. Our goal in the project on the demand for pharmaceuticals is to understand how past experience, marketing, and infor- mation on product performance, interact with other market characteristics to shape demand. We are particularly interested in the impact of advertis- ing on demand and on welfare, and on how recent institutional changes, like the development of the Over the Counter market for some durgs, impact on demand and welfare. The project on deregulated British electric utility markets will initially focus on getting estimates of start up and capital costs. This should enable us to provide measures of profitability that take account of these costs. This, in turn, will enable us to quantify the incentives to invest in more generating capacity that are provided by the institutions which determine the newly derregulated market outcomes. Later we hope to engage in a more in depth analysis of the relationship between different aspects of these institutions and the price and quantity allocations that are likely to be generated by the market doc9468 none This project addresses two challenges in elementary school mathematics improvement. First, it will provide a high quality mathematics curriculum that is aligned with national standards, promotes student understanding, and is acceptable to a wide range of elementary school teachers. Second, it proposes to advance teachers mathematical understanding as they teach, and to accomplish this goal without the additional cost of extensive professional development. Following Liping Ma s belief that the right kinds of curriculum materials can help improve teachers understanding of mathematics, the project will build on the existing Math Workshop materials to develop a dual-purpose curriculum, one that improves the understanding of both students and teachers. The evaluation of the project will assess not only student learning, but will also include extensive analyses of how the instructional and professional development materials promote teacher understanding doc9469 none The growth of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has been explosive over the last few decades. A conservative estimate of international NGOs (groups with operations in more than one country) puts the number at 29,000. The growth of local groups is even more pronounced. The World Watch institute estimates that there are two million NGOs in the United States, 70% of which are less than 30 years old. In a short four-year period ( -94), the percentage of European Union relief aid channeled through NGOs grew from 47% to 67%. NGOs now disburse more money than the World Bank. NGOs are involved in a quiet revolution: a revolution that holds important implications for the development of civil society and social capital. Perhaps their most important contribution lies in the alternatives that they provide in terms of goods, services, and civic engagement. Despite their growth and importance, we know very little about their impact on domestic politics. Theories of NGOs, their international connections, and their impact on politics can be categorized into three perspectives: liberal, neo-liberal, and Marxist. Liberals argue that the flow of international resources to local NGOs provides the means necessary for citizens to overcome or bypass weak and ineffective political institutions that fail to provide public goods and services. With external funding, previously excluded segments of society can increase their political influence. Neo-liberals see NGOs as efficient providers of goods and services. They argue that NGOs and their foreign benefactors are politically neutral; they merely take on responsibilities previously held by a state unable to provide the goods and services efficiently. Marxists argue that resources from abroad corrupt local NGOs. Once local NGOs come to depend more on resources from abroad than on achieving political victory, they quickly lose sight of their original goals, eventually demobilizing their membership. We propose the first quantitatively oriented empirical study of NGOs, foreign funding, and their impact on politics. Specifically, we estimate the impact of NGO access to foreign funding on voting behavior. Our proposal requests funds to collect financial data and electoral data, and to conduct archival research. We target a natural experiment provided by two massive World Bank projects in two Brazilian states: Rondonia and Mato Grosso. The two Brazilian states are remote and sparsely populated. Consequently, the two World Bank projects represent the vast majority of foreign resources, allowing us to trace accurately the distribution of external funds. There is an additional dimension to the experiment: each project disburses funds to local NGOs as well as to the two state governments. Because resources in each project are allocated to government agencies and NGOs, we can test whether the two methods of implementation affected electoral outcomes differently. In addition to collecting electoral and financial data, we conduct archival research to determine the degree to which each NGO is politicized. Every NGO that receives money is required to submit a brief history and statement of purpose. From that description we can obtain important information on how closely the NGO is tied to politics. By interacting the allocation of funds with the degree of politicization, we can distinguish among several hypotheses derived from the theoretical literature. The proposed study is designed not only to determine is an empirical connection exists among foreign donors, NGOs, and politics, but also to explain why doc8522 none Productivity follows a hump shape over the lifecycle. Economists have developed models of lifecycle human capital accumulation to explain this pattern the incentive to invest in human capital is greatest at young ages when the remaining career is longest. Psychologists have noted the same lifecycle pattern but have attributed it to lifecycle variations in the ability to assimilate and produce new ideas. According to this view, at first exposure to a field, individuals thought patterns are highly flexible, but as exposure (measured by experience in an area) accumulates, existing thought patterns become reinforced making it increasingly difficulty to think in different ways. Thus, if economists attribute lifecycle variations in productivity to changes in the incentives to acquire new skills, psychologists have emphasized variations in the ability to assimilate new concepts. Building on our previous work, a pilot analysis shows that across a range of fields, creators whose work evolved through experimentation, do their most important work at older ages, but that those whose contributions were conceptual, did theirs while quite young. While the late peaks are consistent with the human capital model, it is impossible to reconcile a peak at the beginning of the career with the human capital model. For someone in their 20s or 30s, the finiteness of the career has a trivial effect on the incentive to invest in new skills. Nor does the human capital model provide a natural explanation for the striking differences between these groups. This proposal presents a new model of lifecycle productivity that draws on a declining ability to change thought patterns. According to this model, theorists most important contributions are most common at the beginning of their careers because their work is based on quick re-conceptualizations, which are most likely before existing thought patterns have become reinforced. Empirical work (of equal importance) derives from the gradual accumulation of a body of knowledge, so the ability to re-conceptualize issues continually is less important. We will test these predictions using data collected under funding on a range of disciplines, including the sciences, arts, and business. With the increase in educational attainment and the greater reliance of science in production, the ability to innovate is becoming an increasingly important determinant of earnings relative to human capital, making this analysis timely. The ability to adapt to change affects the response to changes in work brought on by technological change. The model implies that the adoption of new technologies that require re-conceptualizations of work will be greatest among young workers, but that old workers will heavily adopt new technologies that draw on existing knowledge. A decline over the lifecycle in the ability to adapt to change represents a new form of vintage human capital effect, which we will test against traditional vintage effects using data on computer adoption. The proposed model also provides new explanations for gender differences in the occupation structure and for the occupational mobility of older workers doc9471 none The goal of this proposed study is to obtain data on the partitioning of rare earth elements (REE) between minerals and aqueous fluids under conditions like those existing in active hydrothermal systems. This will allow a more quantitative evaluation of hypotheses regarding mineral reactions in the so-called reaction zone of active systems. With a variety of starting materials and conditions, the experiments will help understand REE partitioning during alteration of plagioclase and clinopyroxene, the main REE- carrying minerals in basalt and diabase. In addition, experiments will be done to evaluate the effect of anhydrite and barite precipitation on the REE patterns of hydrothermal fluids. This study will specifically test the hypothesis that the REE patterns of hydrothermal fluids are due mostly to the alteration of plagioclase doc9464 none The goal of the project is to assess both species diversity and the distribution of growth rates among eukaryotic phytoplankton populations under natural conditions. Relatively little is known about phytoplankton species composition in any particular sample of seawater, let alone the growth rates of those species. The wide range of growth rates and responses to environmental conditions observed for phytoplankton has obvious implications for species succession and the efficiency of the biological puinp. The investigators will focus on eukaryotic phytoplankton because these cells are responsible for the bulk of production in many regions, including most marine phytoplankton blooms. They will employ a three-tiered approach that combines: 1) high-throughput DNA sequencing and fragment analyses to allow us to determine species diversity and to design species-specific rRNA-targeted probes for ecologically relevant organisms; 2) a newly emerging class of molecular phylogenetic probes known as peptide nucleic acids (PNAs), which are highly sensitive and relatively easy to design and use; and 3) flow cytometric cell cycle analyses of PNA-labeled cells to determine intrinsic growth rates of targeted species. Since the division cycles of most phytoplankton are phased to the daily light:dark cycle, the intrinsic growth rate of a population can be determined by monitoring DNA cell cycle distributions over a diel period. If the flow cytometric signature (pigment fluorescence light scatter characteristics) of the organism in question is sufficiently distinctive (as with the prokaryotic picoplankter Prochlorococcus), DNA distributions (measured with a fluorescent stain) in natural samples can provide growth rates at the species level. Direct flow cytometric analyses of eukaryotic phytoplankton cell cycling are not practical because multiple species in a given sample typically have similar morphology and flow cytometric signatures, but different amounts of DNA or cell division timing. Therefore, the investigators will selectively analyze cells of particular species by using fluorescentlylabelled PNA rRNA probes. Target species will be chosen from among the phytoplankton present at diel sampling sites in coastal and open ocean waters. They will extract DNA from phytoplankton purified either by flow cytometric cell sorting or size fractionation and amplify eukaryotic rDNA using PCR. A combination of terminal restriction fraction length polymorphism (T-RFLP) analysis and the sequencing of 18S clone libraries generated from selected sites will be used to select species of interest for further study. Specific rRNA probes to selected species will then be designed. The invetigators will use fluorescently-labeled PNA probes, in conjunction with DNA staining and dual-beam flow cytometry, to obtain cell cycle (and thus growth rate information for target species). In addition to speciesTm growth rates, these analyses will provide new perspectives on the distribution and diversity of eukaryotic phytoplankton in the sea and will improve our capabilities to address a variety of oceanographic questions on ecologically relevant scales doc8938 none This project involves conducting a field measurements program near Cherski, Siberia to quantify the impacts of disturbance on the seasonal cycle of atmospheric carbon dioxide and the discharge of carbon and nitrogen into the Arctic Ocean in forest and shrubby tundra regions. Coastal plain tundra in the region has accumulated large stores of carbon in sediments during the Pleistocene that has been slowly released to the atmosphere and ocean through melting of previously frozen soils during the Holocene. Disturbance, particularly forest fires, of the vegetation exposes the soils to accelerated carbon loss through more direct exposure to erosion. The study will compare an undisturbed region to recently disturbed areas and determine the effects of changes in temperature and hydrology on the rate of carbon flux. The results will be utilized in models to examine possible future disturbance effects, particularly those that could be accelerated by warmer climate conditions doc9474 none The costs of environmental policy are frequently thought of as the direct costs to firms and individuals associated with compliance. Yet, modeling efforts over the past ten years have consistently demonstrated that interactions with existing tax distortions can increase (and under less common circumstances decrease) the cost to society by a factor of several times. This is in complete agreement with early work by Harberger who emphasized that taxation in one market can lead to large welfare effects in other related markets. At the same time, however, classic theoretical work on public good provision by Diamond and Mirrlees suggests only a modest divergence between direct and social costs. This disagreement can be traced to opposing assumptions about the nature of the tax system: optimal versus fixed taxes. Despite considerable work on the topic of regulation in the presence of existing taxes, there has been little attempt in the environment literature or the public finance literature to reconcile these results in a unified model. This is particularly important for environmental policy since the relative cost of different policy options (e.g., tradable permits versus command-and-control) depends on these effects. This project develops a general equilibrium framework that can be used to examine the social cost of different environmental policies under alternate assumptions about government fiscal behavior. The analytic framework is based on classic public finance models suitably modified to consider these differences. Expressions are derived for the marginal social costs associated with the various combinations of environmental policy and fiscal behavior, linking this exercise with previous work and providing much needed intuition about distinct outcomes. The practical goal is to provide guidance to analysts and policymakers, who wish to evaluate environmental policy with specific, or at least transparent, assumptions about fiscal policy. The scholarly goal is to unify work on both public good provision and environmental regulation under alternative fiscal assumptions. Cost-benefit analysis is one of the foremost tools of environmental policy analysis. Even when benefits are difficult to quantify, cost studies often provide the impetus for or against proposed regulation. Since considerable theoretical and empirical work has demonstrated the potential for social costs to diverge significantly from private costs, a thorough and yet practical understanding of the determinants of that divergence is important. It is important for accurate cost analysis and it is important for good policy decisions. By clarifying the connection between government fiscal policy and social costs of environmental policy, the proposed research can enlighten the discussion of costs and benefits and improve the quality of cost analyses doc9475 none Studies demonstrate that pollution, locally unwanted land uses, and other environmental hazards disproportionately burden low-income and minority communities. However, most studies provide snap-shot information about the current distribution of environmental hazards by socioeconomic status and race. They do not explain the processes by which disproportionate environmental burdens occur. Building on a pilot study of commercial hazardous waste facilities in Michigan and the Great Lakes region, this project examines past socioeconomic and racial disparities and changes over time for the full nation. In so doing, it overcomes several difficult methodological problems concerning measurement of geographic location and identification of bi-directional causal influences. Specifically, the project uses longitudinal data aided by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology to examine demographic and housing variables at or near the time of siting for commercial hazardous waste facilities and transporters for the years from to . It pays careful attention to identifying accurate locations of the facilities that can be mapped and analyzed using GIS software, and measuring demographic and housing changes that occur before and after the sitings. The results evaluate competing arguments that present-day disparities reflect pre-siting demographic and racial characteristics of communities, or post-siting demographic changes in areas with hazardous facilities and transporters. The results also identify differences in the processes across regions of the nation. These improvements in data and methodology shed light on the processes that produce environmental inequality, and contribute to policies to ameliorate such inequality doc9476 none Yavapai College serves the needs of rural and isolated small urban populations in Yavapai County, Arizona. The college is well underway toward completing its ADA self-evaluation goals for physical barrier removal. A corresponding effort, however, has not taken place to address access to instructional materials in appropriate forms, educational technology, alternative delivery methodologies and access to laboratory and field experiences. The goal of this project is to increase the number of rural disabled students successfully pursuing SMET careers. An advisory committee will provide oversight and project direction to actualize the following objective: To develop a model program that creates an inviting rural community college environment responsive to the needs of students with disabilities. The Open Door Project will: 1. Assign a SMET disabilities curriculum coordinator to research, gather, and maintain a specific set of alternative curricular materials and strategies for all gateway math and science courses that use current best practices of adaptation, accommodation, and assistive technology. 2. Train disabilities Master Teachers in all SMET curricular areas who will conduct disabilities awareness and alternative strategies training at the SMET department level. The problem of adjunct faculty inclusion will be addressed by specific training at orientation, access to intranet resources, and assignment of a disabilities mentor from the full-time SMET faculty. 3. Develop ways for students to have a SMET hands-on experience by creating innovative ways to assimilate students with disabilities into ongoing research, field and laboratory activities and to facilitate student interface with working SMET professionals in local and regional high tech businesses. This activity will include development of a SMET Summer Camp for students with disabilities. The Open Door Project will also work to increase the number of disabled high school students, veterans, women re-entering the workforce and Native Americans with SMET career expectations. This will be accomplished by using the countywide outreach activity of existing TRIO and Transition programs to encourage interest in SMET careers among disabled students. In addition, these outreach groups, staff development activities, and stipends for participation in summer programs, will be used to raise the awareness of high school and college career counselors and faculty. This will increase their competency to address the needs of students with disabilities and promote existing Yavapai College Foundation scholarships for disabled and SMET students as well as SMET summer camps. The Open Door Capacity Building Project will raise the visibility and attractiveness of SMET careers for disabled students by creating a program specifically designed to capture their imaginations and provide a responsive community college experience that articulates into a SMET career or advanced degree. The long-range post-project goal is to use Yavapai College s unique field sites and on-campus dorm capacity to create a regional SMET magnet school for students with disabilities doc9477 none This is the first workshop of a planned workshop series. Its objective is to stimulate and focus interest in the emerging area of data management for context-aware, mobile computing environments. As wireless bandwidth becomes more widely available, the communication infrastructure will be heavily wireless oriented. It will provide adaptive connectivity among immobile systems and portable devices such as cell phones, laptops, and other such future devices. Under this platform the computing will begin to migrate away from the desktop toward these devices consequently it will become necessary to managed data more carefully. Industry and academia recognized wireless devices as an important area for development, however, the problems of data management have not been addressed in a coordinated manner. This workshop aims to fill this gap by providing a forum for leading researchers from both industry and academia in the areas of infomation management, wireless networking, communications and signal processing systems to set the research agenda for the future. This workshop will lead to a more cohesive research community and will result in a quicker development and adoption of technologies for this new area. It will facilitate the development of new standards and will provide the synergy necessary for the US technical community to become a dominant player in this field. The results of the workshop will be made available online through web site (http: www.cstp.umkc.edu nsfmobile wshop.html or http: www.cs.brown.edu nsfmobile wshop.html ) and will be reported in periodicals (e.g., ACM and IEEE) and relevant conferences, workshops or meetings doc9478 none Next generation high-speed networks are expected to support exciting new applications involv- ing multi-media traffic, such as video-conferencing, tele-medicine, video-on-demand, and web TV, in addition to countless other yet-to-be-conceived network applications. The viability and the continuing success of these networks will depend crucially upon their ability to offer high performance with regard to latency, delay variation, and bandwidths they can provide to these myriad of applications. Customers will demand high-quality multimedia services, and not be satisfied with the kind of high-latency, variable delay that is characteristic of the current Inter- net. The various performance requirements from the users and the sheer size of these networks make it imperative that we properly understand at a fundamental level how to design, engi- neer, and control these networks, and develop appropriate methodologies. It is also essential that these tools be evaluated in terms of complexity and accuracy using experimentation (i.e., testbed) and simulation. To address the challenges described above, we propose to develop an innovative approach that harnesses the power of combined measurement and analysis to create design and control tools for next generation networks. We plan to elaborate on the approach in the context of: performance evaluation (i.e., QoS estimation), and QoS-sensitivity estimation. These issues form the foundation required to solve key network design and control problems. Building upon our approach|combining analysis with measurements|we will then focus on on a variety of problems that have to be addressed in order for networks to support QoS: admission control, congestion control, QoS-based routing, and network design and dimensioning. Our proposed solutions to the above problems will be supported and refined by extensive empirical studies on our experimental platform. This platform is capable of supporting a variety of network technologies and traffic characteristics. Our research team has been at the forefront of the development of important results in traffic analysis, network design, and control, and is committed to creating the necessary synergy for addressing the key problems outlined above. Our team already has a significantly productive track record in previous collaborative efforts. We are planning to address a set of problems that are critically important for deploying next generation networks with the capability of offering high bandwidth and stringent QoS to users. Creating a future broadband network that is exible, efficient, robust, and controllable is essential to the viability of our economy and to the different communities within it. Hence, if our research is successful, it will have a significant impact on the delivery of services necessary to meet the diverse needs of education, business, and entertainment doc9479 none This project enhances and expands the work of ACCESS Earth, an intensive summer institute in Earth system science for students with disabilities and their teachers previously funded by NASA. During ACCESS Earth teachers and students work with research scientists at the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve on the coast of Maine, examining the impacts of sea level rise, climate change, and coastal development. Teachers and students have the opportunity to use technology such as Geographic Information Systems and remote sensing to study environmental changes and the dynamics of land-sea-air interactions. Earth System Science Works! will build on the current program by providing: 1) mentoring for teachers and students during the school year, 2) support for adaptation of existing Earth system science curriculum, 3) support for a partnership with the Digital Library for Earth System Education, and 4) support for visiting scientists with disabilities to attend the summer institute. Through Earth System Science Works! students and teachers will be able to continue their studies in earth system science beyond the week of the summer institute. Students will communicate electronically with scientists with disabilities working in earth system science fields and will share their interests in science through an interactive Web site. Teachers will communicate with science and education faculty on implementing accessible earth system science lessons into their classrooms and will post adapted lessons and other ideas on the project Web site. The goal is to create a sustained discussion forum on the accessibility of earth system science education at the K- 12 level. This project will positively influence the way in which earth system science is taught at all educational levels through a partnership with the Digital Library for Earth System Education. A special working group of teachers selected by project staff will adapt popular earth system science curricula so that they are accessible to students with disabilities and will field test the adaptations in their classrooms and at the summer institute. The adapted curricula and strategies for teaching earth system science to students with disabilities will be published as an Earth System Science IdeaBook, which will be fully integrated into the Digital Library. The timing of this project affords an ideal opportunity to guide the development of the library. Teachers and students will serve as testers of library tools, collections, and interfaces and will advise staff on its accessibility for persons with disabilities. This project seeks to increase the number of students with disabilities who pursue earth system science careers by changing the methods, materials, and curricula used in high school science classes. Earth system science courses are being offered with increasing frequency at both the high school and middle school levels, and the Digital Library for Earth System Education will further increase the availability of educational resources. Earth System Science Works! Will comprehensively evaluate the accessibility of earth system science education and provide new resources for teaching earth system concepts to persons with disabilities doc9480 none This project examines how gender affects the naturalization process among Somalian refugees in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. The project develops two sets of propositions that hinge on whether men or women become naturalized at proportionately higher rates. On the one hand, if the idea of citizenship is historically male, American citizenship may increase Somalian men s status within the household and men may provide the family liaison to the public sphere. Consistent with these ideas is the further consideration that bureaucratic and discriminatory barriers to citizenship may disproportionately affect Somalian women. On the other hand, Somalian women may seek American citizenship at higher rates than men because they have greater exposure to Western ideals through their interaction with welfare and educational institutions, and they have more to gain from the rights rhetoric that accompanies the notion of citizenship. In addition to exploring the effect of gender, the project will consider the effect of education and family structure on men and women s naturalization choices. To explore these questions, interviews will be conducted with a total of 140 Somalian refugees in the Twin Cities. In these interviews, the project will assess the local, national, and international forces that encourage certain individuals to seek citizenship while explicitly or implicitly discouraging others. This is a significant undertaking as the project will facilitate the incorporation of men and women refugees into their new environment in the United States by identifying formal and informal barriers that inhibit their efforts to participate in the community. This project will also have broader implications for understanding world polity as American citizenship can privilege individuals as ambassadors of global principles-human rights, environmental protection, democratic process-to their native countries doc9481 none The explosive growth of computer networks, combined with rapid and unpredictable developments in ap-plications and workloads, has rendered network service inference and performance prediction increasingly de-manding and intractable tasks. Nonetheless, end-systems must have knowledge of internal network traffic con-ditions and servicing in order to validate, predict, or enhance performance capabilities required by demanding applications. Network service providers also have a great need for gauging the performance of their own sub-systems without recourse to global strategies. Without special-purpose network support, the only alternative is to indirectly infer dynamic network characteristics using edge-based network traffic processing. The INCITE (InterNet Control and Inference Tools at the Edge) Project focuses experts from the fields of networking, digital signal processing, and applied mathematics towards the goal of characterizing network ser-vice based solely on edge-based measurement at hosts and or edge routers. This project blends recent work in multifractal traffic modeling, quality of service (QoS) measurement, and network tomography to develop a unique and innovative framework for network service inference. The INCITE Project will develop new al-gorithms and implementations using the latest in DSP-driven network processor technology, providing a vital step towards better managing and understanding of Internet performance. Our effort consists of three closely inter-related research thrusts: 1. Multifractal Traffic and Path Modeling: We will develop new, highly accurate tools for analyzing, modeling, and measuring the dynamics of network connections and end-to-end paths from the edge. Our approach to inferring the competing cross-traffic load on a path utilizes an innovative exponentially spaced probing sequence that is inspired by the theory of multifractal random processes. These probing packet chirps balance the trade-off between overwhelming the network with probes and obtaining statistics rich enough for accurate estimates. 2. Multiclass Service Inference: We will develop a framework for clients to assess a network s core QoS functionalities based on external and passive observations. Using the theory of traffic envelopes, maximum likelihood estimation, and hypothesis testing, clients will be able to assess a broad set of the network s multi-class control mechanisms such as the service disciplines, link sharing rules and parameters, and policing parameters. 3. Unicast Network Tomography: We will develop a novel methodology for network tomography that pro-vides link-level performance characterization of networks of arbitrary topologies based on unicast traffic measurements at a the network edge. A new network modeling framework based on factor graphs will enable the statistical inference of link-level service parameters (e.g., losses, delays, and service strate-gies). A key strength of our envisioned methodology is that it will enable scalable, real-time tomography algorithms deployable on hosts and or edge routers. The INCITE Project will develop the theoretical underpinnings of network multifractal traffic processing, service inference, and link-level characterization for complex, large-scale networks, and lead to computation-ally efficient and scalable service inference algorithms based only on traffic measurement at the network edge. Moreover, in collaboration with a leading provider of broadband Internet bandwidth (Enron) and an innovator in networked signal processing hardware (Texas Instruments), we will build a complete prototype implementation of the proposed algorithms, including modules for multifractal traffic and path modeling, service inference, and network tomography. This reference implementation will provide a first-of-its-kind platform for obtaining a deep understanding of large networks and enable principled designs of future network architectures, algorithms, and models doc9482 none Gordon Funding is provided to complete the analysis of the comprehensive data set collected over the last data decade by the ARLINOD project in the Indonesian Seas. An array of CTD stations, with a lowered Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler in , was sampled from to within the deep Indonesian Seas, east of Kalimantan, and moored current meter and temperature measurements were collected in the Makassar Straits from December to July . A comprehensive treatment of these data in conjunction with archived XBT data will be conducted to investigate various circulation and stratification characteristics with the Indonesian Seas pertaining to the Indonesian Throughflow and its monsoon and ENSO modulations. The central theme of the research is to place the Indonesian Seas into the context of larger scale climate phenomena and inter-ocean exchange. The specific objectives are to investigate: (1) spatial and temporal variability of the ocean stratification (surface, thermocline and deeper water) within the Indonesian Seas, and (2) the relationship of Makassar Strait mass and thermohaline fluxes to regional and larger scale stratification characteristics doc8568 none The northern boundary of the Galapagos microplate is defined by a relatively recent Incipient Rift that is a slow-spreading new rift oriented orthogonal (along a flowline) to the active East Pacific Rise (EPR). The PIs propose to map this incipient rift completely with multibeam, to conduct basalt sampling by wax coring and dredging, and to run some towed camera traverses within the rift. Based on samples from a pilot study, the incipient rift offers the opportunity to sample the behavior of the EPR melting regime in the across-axis dimension and to examine changes in the amount of melting that takes place as one moves farther from the active EPR axis. The mapping and camera work will help to locate good sampling sites and will also help to determine whether the 800m scarps of the incipient rift expose deeper rocks, potentially a useful complement to studies of Hess Deep and the nature of young crust formed at the EPR. The proposed study would be carried out on a large UNOLS vessel ( 23 days of Melville requested), with subsequent laboratory study of samples, and laboratory study of camera and multibeam results doc9484 none This project develops a research proposal investigating how local amenities affect manufacturers location patterns. This preliminary work can be generalized into three tasks: examination of prior literature, index specification, and econometric modeling. The examination of prior literature focuses on multi-market hedonic analysis and location theory. This information will provide a critique of a previously used amenity measure, and will aid in expanding and reformulating that measure. Here also, potential data sources will be identified which may be used to achieve that objective. The third task involves identifying econometric models that will be suitable for the proposed research being planned. After these tasks, a competitive grant proposal will be submitted in August . Given that amenities do influence location, this research is useful to public and private planners interested in economic development and forecasting. More detailed knowledge about the link between the two promotes economic efficiency. The importance of this topic is further evidenced by the increased attention paid to amenities and other nontraditional location factors when localities compete to attract and retain industry. Yet very little empirical research has been done to date which directly analyzes the influence that amenities have on manufacturers location decisions doc9485 none The nature of the magnetic Jurassic Quiet Zone is unresolved because Jurassic ocean crust occurs in only a few locations. New results have been obtained at Ocean Drilling Project Hole 801C suggesting up to six polarity reversals or intensity events within the Jurassic. This project will conduct a nested set of near-bottom deeptow magnetic profiles encompassing the region around 801C and then expanding out to extend the existing deeptow lines south to the magnetic rough-smooth boundary which is thought to define the end of the spreading sequence in the area. The deeptowed magnetic survey will boost the signal to noise ratio, reduce the diurnal noise problem and mitigate the attenuation due to water depth doc9486 none This research program focuses on the contribution of benthic microalgae to the total primary productivity of a major continental shelf system, the South Atlantic Bight (SAB) off the southeastern United States. The work will focus on the proposition that biogeochemical cycling is intensified in the lower portion of the euphotic zone when the euphotic zone extends to the sand sediments of the shelf. In particular, it is hypothesized that the areal efficiency of light utilization for photosynthesis is enhanced as a result of the optical environment in the sands, high benthic microalgal biomass, and the internal cycling of nutrients within the surface layer of the permeable sands. Further, it is hypothesized that areal benthic primary production on the shelf may be estimated on a regional scale as a function of irradiance levels at the shelf sea floor. The study builds upon the results and experience obtained in a prior study that suggested that most of the sea floor of the broad SAB shelf is often within the euphotic zone. And, although the light intensity reaching the shelf sea floor averaged only some 4-7% of surface incident irradiance, microalgae could contribute about 40% of the total primary production (water column plus benthic) over the mid-shelf region of the SAB. To address the hypotheses stated above, the study will: 1) determine benthic primary production over the annual cycle in relation to regional environmental and bio-optical variability; 2) evaluate the areal efficiency of utilization for photosynthesis on the shelf, emphasizing on the sediment portion of the euphotic zone; 3) investigate key aspects of the physiological ecology of benthic diatoms, particularly those that could contribute to the maintenance of high benthic microalgal biomass (and high areal photosynthetic potential) in the shelf sediments. In the study, several approaches will be employed to obtain a robust estimate of benthic primary production as a function of incident irradiance. The biogeochemical and oceanographic scope of the proposed study will be expanded through association with other regional field programs currently in process doc9487 none Medical patients often face treatment options that involve an element of uncertainty or risk. When processing information, patients in need of recuperative treatment are likely to be in a heightened emotional, cognitive, motivational, and attentional state. Our central proposition is that these features of recuperative treatment decisions are likely to influence psychological mechanisms that are known to affect how people process risk information. In this research we examine how patients process risk information and test the extent to which current knowledge about risk processing extends to the context of recuperative treatment decisions. Preliminary findings indicate that current knowledge in the decision science literature only partially translates to contexts such as these, where the decision maker is likely to process information in an intrinsically self-referential manner. Our focus is on four distinct but related topics. The first is how patients respond to logically equivalent risk information presented in semantically different frames. The second explores how patients choose between treatment options that vary in the risk associated with therapeutic benefits versus side effects. The third is how patients make decisions to choose versus reject treatment options that vary on the extremity of the advantages and disadvantages they offer. The fourth topic examines how patients determine their individual risk of further complications of their health condition. Results from the proposed research will enhance our understanding of how people process risk information in extremely self-referent decision contexts. The results should also be useful to medical practitioners in communicating risk information to their patients doc9488 none The goal of this study is to evaluate whether 231Pa 230Th can be used as a nutrient-independent measure of the vigor of thermohaline circulation in the ocean. 231Pa has a residence time similar to the time scale of NADW (N. Atl. Deep Water), whereas 230Th has a much shorter residence time. Because of this, 231 Pa is exported from the Atlantic into CPDW; the 231Pa 230Th of sediments in the Atlantic reflect the extent of export and thus the vigor of THC. The ratio will be measured in sediments from 12 areas of the Atlantic with ICPMS to look at changes in the THC from Holocene and glacial times. The data will be used to constrain circulation models doc9489 none Byrne A field experiment is proposed, which will provide multi-year time series of salt, heat, and mass transports from the Agulhas retroflection region into the South Atlantic subtropical gyre. The program will deploy inverted echo sounders, both with and without pressure sensors and near-bottom current meters. The in situ data will be complemented with satellite data, both SST and altimetry. Historical data will also be included in the data analysis. The success of the program is based substantially on a new technique, GEM-ETTA, for analyzing IES (inverted echo sounder) and PIES (pressure and inverted echo sounder) data. Analysis of the field data in conjunction with reanalysis of historical data will provide the first long-term time series of these inter-basin fluxes on interannual scales doc9490 none BSCS is developing a 10th-grade curriculum unit on evolution and on science as a way of knowing. Included is a 100-page, six-chapter book to be used by students and a teacher s guide that contains background information, implementation strategies and student assessments. The first chapter of the student book deals with the nature of science and the issue of diversity and unity within and between species, the second with historical materials regarding evolutionary theory, the third with basic questions about diversity and adaptation, the fourth with genetics and molecular biology, the fifth with how evolution can be demonstrated experimentally with viruses and by reference to the AIDS epidemic and antibiotic resistance, and the sixth with the effects of humans on the environment and on natural selection. Two CD-ROMs complement the program. One includes samples of the writings of Darwin, maps of his voyages, and other historical materials as well as 2-3 student investigations for each chapter of the book. The second CD-ROM is an interactive simulated inquiry based on contemporary research on finches in the Galapagos Islands. Also included on the CD-ROMs are professional development materials for teachers doc8491 none A field experiment is proposed, which will provide multi-year time series of salt, heat, and mass transports from the Agulhas retroflection region into the South Atlantic subtropical gyre. The program will deploy inverted echo sounders, both with and without pressure sensors and near-bottom current meters. The in situ data will be complemented with satellite data, both SST and altimetry. Historical data will also be included in the data analysis. The success of the program is based substantially on a new technique, GEM-ETTA, for analyzing IES (inverted echo sounder) and PIES (pressure and inverted echo sounder) data. Analysis of the field data in conjunction with reanalysis of historical data will provide the first long-term time series of these inter-basin fluxes on interannual scales doc9492 none Information systems are now mobile, wearable, multimodal, real-time, scalable from workstations to desktops to notebooks to palmtops to cellular, collaborative and ubiquitous. Network access is becoming increasingly important as a part of the computing infrastructure. Unfortunately, for the near term, un-limited bandwidth, anytime access to a network is not feasible, particularly in large urban environments where interference, occlusion and collision are ongoing problems. To alleviate this, we are developing a set of context-aware Autonomous Information Retrieval (AIR) pods. These are small, hardened low-cost computers that require only electric power. AIR pods have sufficient local storage to hold relatively static information and are equipped with two wireless interfaces: one short-range, unlicensed high-speed interface such as IEEE 802.11 and one long-range, low-speed interface such as CDPD or other Wide Area Network connection which may be intermittent. AIR pods can be either stationary or mobile. Stationary AIR pods can be attached to lamp posts and traffic lights, hidden in lighted store signs or in subway stations. Mobile AIR pods can be attached to delivery trucks, postal service vehicles, buses, police cruisers, taxis or other vehicles that roam city streets. AIR pods are also small enough to be carried in backpacks. We propose to develop and implement the prototype hardware and software AIR idea, and explore what kinds of infrastructure support are necessary to make these devices a key component of network applications. Research issues addressed will be cooperative data sharing, resource scheduling and anticipatory caching, message propagation and wide-area resource discovery. The proposed mobile networking infrastructure will be tested in a demanding set of context-aware mo-bile research projects. The first project is a wearable augmented reality system that allows outdoor users to tour a campus interactively. A second related project allows indoor users to collaborate with those outside over wireless networks. The third project is a mobile robot sensing system that can autonomously explore the campus and create rich 3D, texture mapped, site models. All of these applications need to interact with host computers through limited network access, and we propose to optimize this interaction over bandwidth, devices, and locality using context-aware wireless networks doc9493 none The goal of this research is to develop an approach to policy evaluation that combines the best features of the structural and treatment effects approach, by putting more economics into the treatment effects approach and at the same time producing a more robust statistical approach to structural policy evaluation. A latent variable modeling framework is used to formulate and estimate structural models and reduce the dimensionality of the estimation problem in conducting nonparametric analyses of treatment effects. The research represents an extension of previous work by the investigators, and the goal is to produce an economically interpretable earnings function that can be used to evaluate alternative public policies designed to foster human capital. The earnings function is also nested within a dynamic general equilibrium model of earnings, schooling, and capital formation doc9494 none The objective of this project is to develop a new theory of choice under uncertainty based on agents attitudes toward uncertainty when uncertainty is described by (a finite set of) states of nature. Implications of the new theory for consumption allocations and prices of financial assets in equilibrium are studied too. The main attitude toward uncertainty this project is concerned with is risk aversion. Risk aversion gives rise to many important results in financial economics. The most frequently used specification of risk-averse preferences is the concave expected utility. But this is very restrictive and has little empirical or experimental support. Further, it has no satisfactory axiomatic foundation in the relevant setting. The occasionally used more general class of risk-averse preferences - utility functions that are monotone with respect to second order stochastic dominance - has proved to be, with exception of some special cases, very difficult to characterize. This project studies a new alternative class of utility functions that is broader than monotone functions with respect to second order stochastic dominance but yet can be used to obtain very useful results on portfolio choice, risk sharing, asset pricing and other areas of financial economics. The project explores a new notion of greater risk based on the idea of risk as a mean-independent random variable (a state-contingent claim) with zero mean. The project introduces a class of utility functions that are monotone with respect to greater risk. Greater risk is far stronger than the standard Rothschild-Stiglitz (or second order stochastic dominance) notion of more risky. One difference is that two contingent claims with the same distribution are not considered equivalent under ordering by greater risk, in contrast to the Rothschild-Stiglitz notion. There is no appealing reason that they should be considered equivalent. The class of utility functions that are monotone with respect to greater risk (called averse to mean-independent risk) has a nice characterization. Again, this is in contrast to functions that are monotone with respect to second order stochastic dominance for which there is no useful general characterization. The second important advantage of the class of mean-independent risk-averse utility functions is that, as all important results in the theory of financial markets - most of them known under the assumption of risk-averse expected utility - carry over to that much broader class of functions doc9495 none Most decisions require an assessment of the likelihood of possible consequences. For instance, the decision whether or not to undergo surgery requires an estimation of the likelihood that the operation will succeed. Not only do people judge probabilities in service to making decisions, but they also use these numbers as a currency of communication (e.g., between doctor and patient). A better understanding of the intuitive processes underlying probability assessment can lead to prescriptions for improving intuitive decision making, strategies for debiasing formal decision analysis, and more effective communication. People rarely know the precise probability of an event except when it entails a simple game of chance (e.g., a fair coin lands heads ) or stable historic frequencies are available (e.g., 1 in 40,000 people inoculated for measles experiences an allergic reaction ). More often, people judge probabilities intuitively and with some degree of imprecision. Past research has identified mental shortcuts or heuristics that govern this process (Kahneman, Slovic Rottenstreich if the balance favors the complementary hypothesis the judged probability will be close to zero; if the balance is equal a the judged probability will be one-half. The Principal Investigator (PI) observes that when people have no evidence available they typically apply the principle of insufficient reason, assigning equal credence to the elementary events into which the event space is subjectively partitioned. For instance, if five unfamiliar horses are entered in a race, a person will typically assign equal belief in the proposition that each horse will win, yielding an ignorance prior probability of 1 5 for each horse. Assuming one holds the partition constant, this mode of judgment yields probabilities that are perfectly calibrated. Unfortunately, subjective partitions usually shift over time. For instance, a person may judge the probability that the Jakarta stock index (JAX) closes above 1,000 to be 0.5 (assigning equal belief to the events below 1,000 and above 1,000 ) but may likewise judge the probability that the JAX closes above 5,000 or even 50,000 to be 0.5. Hence, judged probabilities seem to depend crucially on the subjective partition that is adopted by the decision maker. The PI hypothesizes that judgment under uncertainty typically reflects a compromise between the balance of evidential support and this ignorance prior, and advances and tests a theoretical model that extends support theory to accommodate this pattern doc9496 none The Journey to El Yunque is a website to improve middle school students understanding of ecology and changing ecosystems. The bilingual web-based learning environment allows students to investigate the effects of Hurricane Georges on the Caribbean National Forest known as El Yunque. The materials address selected science standards. Embedded assessments are included. Teacher support materials are connected to the Exploring the Environment website hosted by NASA. Parent support pages are provided doc9497 none ASSESSMENT INTO MATHEMATICS The Department of Mathematics of the University of Missouri - Columbia (MU) in a unique collaboration with the university s Adaptive Computing Technology (ACT) Center and the Assessment and Consultation Clinic (ACC), proposes to create a highly supportive mathematics learning environment for students with learning disabilities (LD). The project will ensure retention and success in mathematics for students with LD by: 1. enabling students with LD to amplify and successfully apply intact cognitive processes by using adaptive computing technology (ACT); 2. increasing institutional capacity of the MU Department of Mathematics to effectively identify and instruct students with LD; and by 3. developing field placement opportunities to support successful school-to-work transitions. Success in mathematics depends on perceiving, processing, retaining, retrieving, and applying complex information. A deficiency in any of these capacities places students with LD at high risk for failure. Often, students have more than sufficient cognitive capacity to comprehend mathematical concepts and master essential skills if they have appropriate classroom and testing accommodations. While technologies exist to compensate for weak processing capacities in students with LD, such technologies are of little benefit if they are not appropriately customized to the student or effectively utilized in the classroom. In addition, the link between specific learning disabilities and appropriate compensatory technology, especially as applied to postsecondary students enrolled in mathematics coursework, has been largely conjectural. Instructors and students have therefore underused this strategy. Postsecondary success of students with disabilities has remained unsatisfactory. The proposed model for mathematics instruction of postsecondary students with LD will consist of: 1. Enhancement of mathematics instructors awareness of LD and how to effectively teach students with LD through collaborative trainings offered by the ACT Center and the ACC; 2. Collaboration between the ACC and ACT Center to link specific LDs to appropriate technology; 3. Integration of the technology accommodations of the ACT Center into mathematics curriculum and instruction; 4. Collaboration among all three units (ACT Center, ACC, and Department of Mathematics) to identify placement opportunities and maximize student learning opportunities in the workplace doc9498 none This project develops an 8-week middle-school mathematics module that introduces cryptography, the science of sending secret messages, while teaching and reinforcing the learning of related mathematical concepts. The topics range from the classical encryption systems and the historic context in which they were used through powerful modern encryption systems that provide secrecy in electronic messages today. The module also covers passwords and codes that correct errors in the transmission of information. Public awareness of the importance of cryptography is growing, as is the need to understand the issues involved. The study of cryptography provides an interesting context for students to apply traditional mathematical skills and concepts. Mathematical topics covered include percents, probability, functions, prime numbers, decimals, inverses and modular arithmetic. The main product is a middle-school student book, with accompanying teacher materials. A web site is being developed that supports the activities in this book. Abbreviated modules for Grades 3, 4 and 5 are also being developed, as well as an instructor s guide for adapting the materials for use in informal educational settings such as museums and after-school programs. The development of the module involves piloting and field-testing by experienced classroom teachers from diverse school communities and instructors of informal educational programs. Evaluation includes review by mathematicians and educators, as well as an investigation into the level of students understanding of the topics studied doc9499 none This project will employ an integrated program of mesocosm and field experiments to determine the influence of grazer diversity on trophic processes (plant productivity and functional group composition, secondary production, and trophic transfer) in beds of eelgrass (Zostera niarina), an important ecological engineer in coastal regions throughout the northern hemisphere. Vegetated estuarine systems are particularly suited to addressing links between grazer diversity and ecosystem processes because of the well documented impacts of grazers on both plant assemblages and predator production in these systems, and their relatively rapid responses to manipulation. The investigator s previous research demonstrated that small invertebrate grazers can be pivotal in maintaining normal structure and function in this and other vegetated benthic ecosystems. Yet the importance of grazers in the context of the multi-level seagrass food webs remains poorly understood. Accordingly, the study three goals: 1) to test the relative importance of grazing and resource limitation to structure and function of eelgrass communities, and the role of grazer diversity in mediating them; 2) to test the impact of grazer diversity on penetrance of the trophic cascade, using the eelgrass community as a model system; and 3) to test the hypothesized link between biodiversity and ecosystem stability by comparing variance in production and trophic processes across years and seasons as a function of grazer diversity doc9500 none Collaborative IT E-Learning Support Network for People with Disabilities The Education in Information Technology project (EDIT) represents a new partnership of some of the nation s leading informational technology providers in support of people with disabilities. Western Michigan University and the Association of Rehabilitation Programs in Computer Technology (ARPCT) form a partnership to combine the hardware and software of IBM with the courseware of Smartforce.com to focus on a research initiative. EDIT will develop an E-learning Internet support network to study the impact of using a collaborative Internet site to increase the educational capacity of community colleges for preparing students with disabilities for information technology related careers. Ten of 50 ARPCT member programs are already located in community colleges, and efforts will be made to increase this number. IBM and Smartforce.com have donated over $500,000, in product, support and courseware, to initiate the effort. This project will develop the site, promote its use, and conduct rigorous research on its impact for assisting community colleges to build their capacity for preparing students with disabilities for information technology related careers. The effectiveness of community colleges using a national collaborative E-learning site to improve their ability to prepare more students with disabilities will be tested, and results will be disseminated widely doc9501 none Classroom of the Sea (COS) is a comprehensive three-year project that addresses many of the special needs of deaf learners in science. About one in every thousand school age children in the U.S. is deaf or hard of hearing and these learners often lag behind their hearing peers in cognitive and language development. COS will address these issues, as well as the special communication needs of deaf learners, through a partnership of scientists, educators, and students that aims to enhance both teaching and learning in middle and high school science education. The project staff will integrate research and education and draw upon the excitement of scientific discovery to motivate students, provide situated learning opportunities, and identify the scientific and technical concepts that need to be integrated with American Sign Language to enhance science instruction to deaf students. For the past four years the National Undersea Research Center (NURC) located at the University of Connecticut has been collaborating with the American School for the Deaf (ASD) to successfully advance science education for deaf students. This interaction was initiated by ASD s participation in the Aquanaut Program, an educational outreach program of NURC that provided deaf learners an opportunity to conduct hands-on research using visual technologies, including sonars, robots, computers and other marine sampling devices. This project will provide the expertise and infrastructure to develop a standards-based science curriculum and problem-based lab and field experiments, evaluate the effectiveness of these approaches, while simultaneously improving the ability to teach science to deaf learners through language enhancement. The objectives of the Classroom of the Sea program are to: 1) develop an integrated science curriculum for deaf students using highly interdisciplinary marine science; 2) provide real-world oceanographic research opportunities to enrich the curriculum; 3) develop processes for optimizing the use of technical signs and American Sign Language in science and technology instruction; 4) adapt and develop technologies to disseminate the curriculum, language enhancement strategies, and research results to the Deaf community, educators of deaf students, and others; and 5) better prepare deaf students to pursue careers in science and technology. COS is comprised of two integrated elements - Science Through Marine Science and Communications Access . The program is based upon the premise that students, and particularly students with disabilities such as deafness, can achieve a high degree of scientific literacy by learning science in a practical manner, i.e. within authentic learning environments. This will be achieved by studying the many facets (i.e. disciplines) of the marine environment. The second major element of the Classroom of the Sea involves Communications Access, which will emphasize functional communication in teaching science through sign language and will involve the identification of concepts and terms that lack clear signs within American Sign Language (ASL) and the effective use of ASL grammatical features. Appropriate technologies will be developed and tested to implement and disseminate all elements of the program. The critical program components studied and demonstrated in the Classroom of the Sea project will not only benefit deaf learners, but can be applied in school programs to enhance the education of all students, especially those with other disabilities or those for whom English is a second language doc9502 none The goals of this proposal are to understand the Os abundances and 187Os 188Os of the ocean as well as the fluxes of Os into and out of the oceans, needed to determine the geochemical budget of Os in the oceans, its residence time and the possible utility of Os data for paleoclimatic studies. Analyses will be carried out for hydrothermal fluids from Juan de Fuca, organic-rich black shales, tributaries of the Orinoco river, and Mn crusts and nodules in order to constrain the budget of Os in the oceans doc8602 none This collaborative ocean science technology development project builds upon successes achieved on land with temporary deployments of portable broadband seismographs. A scientific argument has been made to provide an equivalent capability for the oceans. Currently available portable broadband ocean bottom seismographs (BBOBS) and burial systems are prototypes and must be improved before the use of these seismographs in the oceans becomes routine. This project will develop a combination of burial system and buriable seismometer that will enable 2-3 BBOBS deployments per day. The burial system will become part of the U.S. National Ocean Bottom Seismic Instrumentation Pool (OBSIP) and will be available to the research community. The new burial system will use the force of gravity for seismometer burial, and because the new BBOBS uses a borehole seismometer that has a substantially smaller diameter than conventional models, the force required to bury the new seismometer will substantially less. Enhanced seismic coverage over the oceans is vital to improving seismic resolution to better address existing as well as new questions pertaining to solid Earth dynamics. The geophysical community will benefit from ocean bottom seismometers with measurement capabilities comparable to land-based stations that can be deployed and recovered quickly and at minimal cost. This project will construct and test one burial system and one BBOBS. Should the new buriable seismometer and burial system meet design goals, funding will be sought to upgrade up to 30 existing instruments with buriable broadband seismometers doc9504 none The potential environmental, social, and economic impacts of rising sea levels are serious. A major potential source of water to the world s oceans that would result in sea-level rise is from melting of the world s glaciers. This research project will examine the contributions of meltwater from all of the world s glaciers except the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets in the recent past and potential contributions in the future. The investigators will model results from mass-balance time series for different glaciers to the middle of the 20th century using observational data, repeated geodetic and mapping surveys, and aerial photographs. Statistical analyses will help determine teleconnections in glacier volume change between glaciated regions and relate these to teleconnections in climate. Static sensitivities of glacier mass balances to air temperature and precipitation change will be calculated using long-term records and glaciological data averaged by mountain ranges. Stochastic scaling and percolation theory will be used to estimate the number and size of glaciers and relationships among glacier area, volume, and response times. Expected outcomes of the project include greatly improved information and understanding of changes in glacier volume, which affect sea level and the global water balance, improved information on large-scale patterns of climate, and evidence of climate change as revealed by glaciers. Project results will be used by several world meteorological programs, including the Global Climate Observation System (GCOS), and also the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), Global Environmental Monitoring System (GEMS), World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS), and the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder. There are significant social and economic reasons for improving capabilities to project future sea-level rise. A major fraction of the world s population and the world s most valuable real estate are at elevations within a few meters of sea level. Local effects like reductions in the sediment discharge of large rivers and subsidence caused by pumping water or oil out of the ground are exacerbated by sea-level rise. Improved estimates of sea-level rise based on better understandings of the contributions of melting glaciers to global ocean volume therefore will be important for land-use planning, coastal-zone management, and other social, political, and economic processes that are at risk. This study will produce a greatly improved estimate of changes in glacier ice volume which affects sea level and the water balance between land and ocean; significant new information on regional and temporal patterns of glacier-climate interactions, and algorithms for extending these results in studies of climate and glaciers in the past; regional information on changes in runoff to be expected as a result of global warming in those areas where the runoff is largely derived from glacier wastage, such as closed drainage basins in South America and Central Asia; improved information on large-scale patterns of climate and climate change as revealed by glaciers, and new scientific advances on the mathematical treatment of incomplete data sets doc9505 none This ocean science technology development project builds on previous work developing instrumentation to measure light scattering and absorption in ocean water. These variables are critical in determining the optical properties of the oceans, which has great applicability in making in situ measurements and in remote sensing of oceanic surface waters. Absorption is especially problematic, but newly developed instrumentation for such measurements has obtained reliable data in the spectral range of 380 nm to 700 nm. using isotropic illumination of the sample in an integrating cavity. The goals of this project are: (1) to extend the capabilities of this previous instrumentation and make measurements in the ultraviolet spectral region in the 320 nm to 380-nm range; (2) to investigate the apparent fact that contact of ultra-pure water with glass and quartz leads to increased absorption of the ultra-pure water in the blue to near ultraviolet range; (3) to measure and improve the accuracy of the absorption coefficients in the important UV-C and UV-B spectral regions (specifically 240 nm to 320-nm); (4) to build and test a large spherical integrating cavity to provide higher accuracy in the absorption measurements at the minimum of pure water absorption; and (5) to study, build, and test a long tubular form of the integrating cavity with the objective of an in situ device doc9506 none The overall objective of this project is to continue to provide the oceanographic community with a critical resource for scientific and technological studies, namely a deep-ocean mooring platform and core interdisciplinary measurements. Time-series programs off Bermuda (Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study or BATS) have been effectively used since to make exciting discoveries, to increase our knowledge and understanding of a variety of ocean processes, and to develop and test models. Objectives of the BTM program include: collection of high temporal resolution, interdisciplinary data, which will complement ship-based BATS data (and data collected through other specialized programs in the vicinity; facilitate studies and enhance understanding of the roles of higher frequency and episodic phenomena (gravity waves to mesoscale and beyond) in affecting the variability of upper ocean biogeochemistry, ecology, and physics, and 3) provide the BTM s high frequency, long-term data sets to investigators who will be developing and testing sub-seasonal, seasonal, and longer-term disciplinary and interdisciplinary models designed to include high frequency and episodic phenomena. BTM will also serve as a model for future autonomous global ocean observatory system platforms. Technological objectives include: supplying data which can be used for groundtruthing data for passing floats, drifters, gliders, and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) as well as satellites to provide a platform for the testing and utilization of emerging sensors, instrumentation, and data communication technologies, and reduce dependence on ship-based operations (and therefore cost) as new sensors, platform technologies, and communication systems come on line. The BTM program is multi-faceted and already serves a large number of oceanographers and students ranging from technologists to observationalists (in situ and remote sensing) to modelers. The continuation of the BTM program will be used to accelerate observational capacity at a time when knowledge of the ocean is of growing societal interest and concern doc9507 none This project continues research on the macroeconomic effects of New Deal labor and industrial policies using quantitative, dynamic, general equilibrium models. The U.S. economy remained substantially depressed long after the trough of the Great Depression in . Hours worked per adult in were about 22 percent below its level, and real GNP in was about 26 percent below its trend-adjusted level. This slow recovery has long puzzled economists; the economy experienced several positive shocks after that should have fostered a healthy recovery. Productivity and the money supply both grew rapidly after , and banking panics and deflation, which are considered to be major depressing shocks between before , ended in . Some economists, including Robert Lucas, Milton Friedman, and Armen Alchian, have suggested that New Deal policies, such as the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which raised prices and wages, may have been an important contributing factor to the persistence of the Depression. The goal of the research, which is joint with Harold Cole of the Minneapolis Fed, is to quantitatively evaluate for the first time the macroeconomic impact of these policies on the U.S. in the s and s using a plausibly parameterized dynamic, general equilibrium model. The research combines detailed empirical documentation of the effects of policies on wages and prices, and the development of new quantitative theory that captures the main features of these policies. These data suggest that New Deal policies created a significant insider-outsider friction in the economy. The key innovation in the dynamic general equilibrium macroeconomic model is incorporating a dynamic bargaining game between workers and firms in the model. The equilibrium path of the model economy is computed between and , and is compared to the actual time path of the U.S. economy. A plausibly parameterized version of the benchmark model indicates that New Deal policies were an important contributing factor to the persistence of the Depression. In particular, the predicted equilibrium path of the model economy between and is quite similar to that in the data; the model predicts a partial recovery beginning in , and also predicts that the recovery stalls shortly afterwards, leaving output about 14 percent below its normal level. The project also makes theoretical and empirical extensions of the basic analysis. One extension allows for industry-specific capital that creates a hold-up problem in that labor can appropriate some of the returns to physical investment. This allows the model to capture more aspects of s labor firm bargaining, and also enriches the model so it can be applied more broadly to general equilibrium studies of unions, hold-up problems, and European insider outsider frictions. Another extension allows for time variation in the effects of policy. The baseline model treats policy as coming from a single regime. Labor bargaining power increased in , which was followed by a general reversal of New Deal policies during World War II. Modeling these shifts in policy allows the investigators to examine how policy variation contributed to two key fluctuations during this period: the Recession of , and the economic boom of World War II doc9508 none This project investigates the effects of a new land law requiring the registration and titling of rural land on the productive activities and livelihoods of women, pastoralists, and poor households in northern Ivory Coast. A major debate exists in the African rural development literature on whether indigenous land rights systems should be built upon or supplanted by land titling to promote natural resource conservation and economic growth. The question is what will be the implications of the Ivory Coast land law on the fundamental issues of resource allocation and use. The research seeks to document shifts in resource access and use in the context of the new land law at the local and regional scales. The main hypothesis states that the new land law is creating from scratch new political-administrative entities, rules, and regulations within rural communities which will interact with and augment, not replace, existing institutions and practices of land allocation. These institutional innovations linked to new governance structures at the local, regional and national scales present new opportunities for individuals and groups to gain (and lose) access to and control over productive resources. The general question is how will resource access and use patterns change as a result of these interactions as different actors interpret and modify these new rules and regulations? Do the strategies of different actors to claim land rights under these changing conditions result in greater investments in agricultural and pastoral production and natural resource conservation? A hybrid research strategy and comparative case study will generate both qualitative and quantitative information. The principal methods include survey research techniques (farming systems studies); interviews with members of land registration and land management committees (land registration studies), vegetation transects, key informant interviews, and aerial photo and satellite image interpretation (environmental change study). This project will contribute to land tenure policy debates at a time when many African governments are engaged in land tenure reforms. This study s focus on the actions taken by women, pastoralists, and the poor to maintain or improve their access to resources will illuminate the creative ways in which vulnerable subgroups actively seek to improve their status and livelihoods. Finally, this project will provide original and high quality data on the relationship between land registration and environmental change by examining the effects of the new land law and land user stakes on land cover and land use changes doc9509 none Winters This study examines the role of internal waves in mixing near source regions of internal waves by studying several different types of non-linear internal-wave interaction problems. Numerical experiments will be used to examine three different regimes. The first will look at the nonlinear cascade of energy between short and long internal waves in a run-down experiment initialized with a high-energy, random-phase internal wave field with a spectrum similar to that postulated by Garrett and Munk. The second set of experiments will look at energy transfer from internal waves at the frequency of the M2 tide, forced by tidal excursions over topography, to higher frequency internal waves when that tranfer is catalyzed by the presence of a background field of internal waves. The third focus is on interactions between wind-forced near-inertial waves and non-inertial internal waves. The numerical experiments will be conducted with a three-dimensional, non-hydrostatic, psuedospectral code. The numerical results will be compared to field data collected during a variety of prior oceanic and coastal experiments doc9510 none The purpose of this research is to develop, evaluate, and disseminate a non-visual interface for accessing digital information. The aim is to investigate the perceptual and cognitive problems that blind people face when trying to interpret information provided in a multimodal manner. The project also plans to provide touch sensitive and sound based network interface and navigation devices that incorporate cognitive wayfinding heuristics. Haptic (force feedback) interfaces will be provided for exploring web pages that consist of map, graphic, iconic or image products. Sound identifiers for on-screen windowed, map, and image information will also be provided. These tasks will contribute to transcending the Digital Divide that increasingly separates blind or vision impaired people from the growing information-based workplace. Recent research at UCSB has begun to explore how individuals identify features presented through sound and touch. Other research (e.g. O Modhrrain and Gillespie, ; McKinley and Scott, ) have used haptics to explore screen objects such as windows, pulldown menus, buttons, and sliders; but map, graphic and other cartographic representations have not been explored. In particular, the potential of auditory maps of on-screen phenomena (e.g. as would be important in GIS applications) has barely been examined and few examples exist of combining audio and touch principles to build an interface. While imaginative efforts to build non-visual interfaces have been proceeding. there is a yet little empirical evidence that people without sight can use them effectively (i.e. develop a true representation of the experienced phenomena). Experiments will be undertaken to test the ability of vision impaired and sighted people from different age groups to use these new interface or features such as: (i) the haptic mouse or a touch window tied to auditory communication displays; (ii) digitized real sounds to indicate environmental features at their mapped locations; (iii) sound painting of maps, images, or charts to indicate gradients of phenomena like temperature, precipitation, pressure, population density and altitude. Tests will be developed to evaluate (i) the minimum resolvable area for the haptic interpretation of scenes; (ii) the development of skills for shape tracing in the sound or the force-feedback haptic domain, (iii) the possibility of using continuous or discreet sound symbols associated with touch sensitive pads to learn hierarchically nested screen information (e.g. locations of cities within regions within states within nations); (iv) to evaluate how dynamic activities such as scrolling, zooming, and searching can be conducted in the haptic or auditory domain, (v) to evaluate people s comprehension and ability to explore, comprehend, and make inferences about various non-visual interpretations of complex visual displays (e.g. maps and diagrams), and (vi) to explore the effectiveness of using a haptic mouse with a 2 square motion domain to search a 14 screen (i.e. scale effects doc9511 none The issue-oriented and eigth grade courses in life and physical science developed by SEPUP (Science Education for Public Understanding Program) are extended to the sixth grade covering Physics and Earth Science. Students will understand the unique physical characteristics of the Earth in comparison with other planets, the relationship between force and motion, the role gravity plays in planetary processes, how energy in sunlight interacts with the Earth and its atmosphere, the role convection plays in atmospheric, oceanic and geologic processes and how the study of rocks provides evidence of current and past Earth processes and conditions. Each of these topics is considered in the context of making informed, non-emotional, evidence-based decisions that affect students and their families such as global warming, need for space exploration, location of essential, but potentionally dangerous structures, etc. The course materials include kits, printed materials, teacher guides and community outreach tools. The materials are developed by teachers and scientists and are tested in classrooms. Specific learning goals for students are derived from national and state standards. Student assessment is based on the previously developed embedded assessment system. The materials are published and distributed by LabAids doc9512 none The biennial meeting of the International Ethological Congress is open to all who are interested in ethology, animal behavior and related disciplines. The IEC is the only international gathering for those studying all aspects of animal behavior. The coverage of the field at IEC conferences is always broad, with papers ranging from neurobiology and neurochemistry to applied animal ethology and behavioral evolution. The IEC emphasizes integration of the field of animal behavior across all animal groups and all levels of analysis rather than promoting one particular point of view or methodology. It seeks to integrate pure and applied ethology, field and laboratory orientations, theoretical and empirical approaches and to bring together those working in other subdisciplines, such as ornithology, herpetology, mammalogy, entomology, primatology, physical anthropology. The conference also makes an effort to bring in ideas from related fields that can broaden and strengthen the study of behavior. It is particularly important that young scientists be exposed to this perspective and to the intellectual stimulation that this conference provides. They need to establish professional contacts with leaders in their field from around the world. As interactions in many fields increase, this opportunity for international dialogue between young scientists of different countries should also not be overlooked. Because these young scientists are often financially limited, NSF support that would partially defray the costs of this conference will greatly enhance their participation in the conference and allow them to reap the professional and intellectual rewards of that experience doc9513 none Sanford This project will support processing and analysis of data from the Denmark Strait Overflow, collected during an expedition to the Denmark Strait. These data will be used to produce a description of the energetics, eddy characteristics and basic dynamical parameters of the Denmark Strait Overflow. The results will be used to test the predictions of existing theories of hydraulic control in dense overflows. The observed data will also be used to examine the structure of eddies in the Denmark Strait. The properties of the flow in and near the eddies will be compared with three existing theories of eddy formation in an effort to determine which one is most applicable to the Denmark Strait doc9514 none Taylor The gulf of Corinth is an active continental rift with high seismicity and extensional strain. The bunding faults are high angle where they are exposed at the margins of the Gulf, but become much more shallow dipping at depth. The mechanisms of faulting and extension are poorly understood, but are similar to that observed in other rifted margins. The primary deformation is focused beneath the Gulf making the use of marine seismic reflection profiling the best technique to directly image these features. The present project will use the RV Ewing to acquire 1o days of multi-channel seismic reflection data from the Gulf of Corinth rift. Primary analyses will be focused on determining the mode of deformation and how it varies along strike. The project will be an important step in determining how exposed deformation relates to evidence of deformation at depth, and hence the dynamics of the faults in this area. The project will be undertaken in cooperation with Greek and French scietists doc9515 none We trust others to gain the benefits of cooperation. In the business world, trust supports interfirm alliances, acceptance of organizational change, the transfer of knowledge, and more. In public life, trust underlies voting for candidates and support for government initiatives. In private life, trust guides relations among patients, physicians, and medical organizations. Given this clear, pervasive importance of trust to our lives, it is not surprising that it has become the focus of a growing body of research activity. The goal of our project is to test a new model of social trust within the applied context of environmental risk management. Our model differs from others by clearly distinguishing social trust from confidence as separate, but interacting, paths to cooperation. Social trust is based on judgments of values or intentions; confidence is based on judgments of past performance. Social trust is associated with uncertainty and risk; it is required when confidence fails. Confidence is the normal state of affairs, sometimes lost when performance is judged to be bad, but restorable through the establishment of social trust. Social trust is a bridge between steady states; it has primacy and control over confidence. Our model has clear, practical implications for the practice of risk management: attempts to communicate about performance (i.e., the management of risk) should be preceded by the establishment of social trust relations. The state of trust relations conditions the interpretation of performance information. In a state of distrust, presumably good performance information is discounted and does not lead to confidence. Similarly, in a state of trust, presumably bad performance information does not lead to the loss of confidence. Social trust, according to our model, is resilient, and helps us to remain confident in the lives we lead; it can be progressive or conservative. Our research project will provide a test of this model of social trust and confidence in risk management, improving our understanding, moving us closer to the goal of using social trust to improve our lives doc9516 none This study sets out to better constrain the global biogeochemical cycle of methane, CH4, by a consideration of the isotopic composition of oceanic source end members. Recent renewed interest in several aspects of the geochemistry of marine methane clathrates poses a number of intriguing problems that the proposed isotopic information is likely to inform. Methane, in the form of submarine gas hydrates, potentially represents the largest known reservoir of hydrocarbons on the planet. It is important to fully understand the methane cycle in the oceans for at least two reasons, i) evaluation of its potential as an energy source, and ii) evaluation of the propensity of its past and future outgassings from the ocean to effect large scale climatic change. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, with a radiative impact approx. 25 times that of CO2. The investigators on this project will measure the natural isotopic composition of methane (d 13C-CH4 and d 2H-CH4 in addition to some measurements of D 14C-CH4) from the water column as well as suspected end-member sources in sediments in order to construct composition mixing models. The work takes advantage of the restricted circulation of anoxic basins such as the Black Sea, using the overlying water column to integrate the effects of different sources of and processes taking place on CH4 as it passes through the water column. The study will build on and extend preliminary measurements on d 13C-CH4 and d 2H-CH4 made on samples collected from a Black Sea expedition doc8474 none This ocean science technology development project involves the design, construction, testing, and installation of a seafloor geomagnetic observatory at the Hawaii-2 Observatory (H2O) site located midway between California and Hawaii in m of water. The geomagnetic instrumentation to be installed meets INTERMAGNET standards for data accuracy and timing. It will consist of a delta Idelta D magnetometer, a gyrocompass for absolute direction measurement, a set of suspended magnet variometers, auxiliary environmental sensors, and a separate geoelectric observatory utilizing electrode chopping techniques. Power will be supplied by H2O and real-time, two-way communications will allow both control of the observatory from land and transmission of data to the user. The data from this site will be made freely available to the scientific community through INTERMAGNET. The geomagnetic observatory will also be a prototype for future installations at other sites doc9518 none Prliminary paleomagnetic results from ODP cores from Leg 145 show their suitability for study of the magnetic paleointensity. They span the same interval of time covered by deep-tow magnetometer survey near Juan de Fuca ridge that shows high-frequency wriggles within magnetic anomaly 5 (ca. 10 to 15 Ma). These wiggles are either due to high-frequency magnetic field reversals or variations in the Earth s magnetic field intensity. Funds provided will allow the study of these cores in detail and resolve the origin of the tiny wriggles doc9519 none Reef corals are first and foremost symbioses between invertebrate animals and dinoflagellate algae. Recent scientific and public concern over the eventual fate of corals and coral reefs in the face of continued climate change and global warming has led to the suggestion that corals may face widespread regional-scale extinction as early as . However, because the dinoflagellate symbionts of reef corals are extraordinarily diverse, the possibility exists that reef corals may switch or shuffle symbionts in response to changing temperatures, and thus mitigate the effects of climate change. This study investigates this possibility by examining the effects of natural temperature variation on symbiont community distributions over a variety of spatial and temporal scales. In doing so, it investigates the paradoxical (in)stability of coral reefs while addressing one of the most pressing and significant questions in coral biology, ecology and conservation: do reef corals possess a novel symbiotic mechanism for mitigating future environmental change? To answer this, a multi-national, multi-year program will be established to monitor changes in these symbioses over time, and uses a threefold approach to investigating the role of temperature in regulating symbiont community structure. It will: (1) undertake latitudinal surveys of corals in three countries from two oceans that vary in their host and symbiont diversity; (2) survey and experimentally manipulate a model system in US domestic waters where temperature regimes vary over small spatial scales (meters); and (3) make seasonal comparisons of labeled coral colonies from four countries in three oceans. Using established and reliable molecular techniques that use Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphisms (RFLPs) in 28S-like rRNA genes as markers for the 15 symbiont genotypes will also enable the discovery of new symbiont taxa. Preliminary data from Australia indicate that high latitude coral hosts contain different symbionts from their tropical conspecific counterparts, supporting the hypothesis that different temperatures may favor different symbionts, and providing baseline data for comparison with other locations. Similarly, data from the -98 El Nino event in Panama provide additional evidence indicating that different symbiont taxa vary in their susceptibilities to temperature stress. This suggests that different thermal optima may indeed promote shuffling of symbionts in response to temperature gradients.To date, no surveys of symbiont diversity have explicitly collected data to assess the effects of temperature on symbiont distributions. Together, the multiple approaches and scales (including experimental work) proposed here represent the first test of the hypothesis that corals may adapt to different temperatures by modifying their symbiont communities. This knowledge contributes to our understanding of the environmental and biogeographic controls on symbiont diversity and their significance for reef coral ecology and conservation. It also provides critical data for an assessment of the potential for long-term symbiont community change in the face of a globally warmer climate doc9520 none Fat stores are an important source of energy for reproduction, maintenance, and growth in vertebrates. Recently, a protein hormone (leptin) that is central to regulation of lipid stores was discovered in mammals. Leptin also affects metabolic rate, age-at-maturity, and appetite (perhaps through regulation of lipid stores). Although leptin s biology has been vigorously studied in mammalian systems ( publications since ), its study in ectotherms is limited to a handful of papers. This research team initiated studies of leptin function in Sceloporus undulatus, the eastern fence lizard, and have demonstrated that injection of murine leptin in fence lizards induces the same short-term effects seen when leptin is injected into mammals. If long-term effects of leptin injection in fence lizards are consistent with mammalian studies, then leptin could be used to manipulate age-at-maturity, yielding a powerful new approach to test the fitness consequences of variation in this central life history trait. To reach that goal, leptin will be isolated and characterized from fence lizards. Initial results indicate that fence lizards express a protein of appropriate size that is recognized by an antibody against murine leptin. Taking advantage of this assay, the investigators will use three approaches to cloning and characterizing leptin from fence lizards. First, a cDNA expression library will be prepared from S. undulatus. This library will be screened with the mouse leptin antibody, to identify putative lizard leptin clones. Identity of clones will be verified via DNA sequencing and BLAST comparisons with GenBank sequences. Second, two-dimensional immunoblots of brain tissue will be screened with the mouse leptin antibody. Putative leptin spots will be partially sequenced by Edman degradation, and this primary sequence information will be used to make degenerate primers to use in amplifying lizard leptin by PCR. Lastly, the mouse leptin antibody will be immobilized to a chromatography matrix, and reacted with lizard brain tissue. Captured antigens will then be eluted and characterized by partial Edman degradation. These approaches will run concurrently, thus maximizing the chance of success. Although this research is focused on characterizing leptin in lizards in order to study life history variation, the isolation and characterization of leptin from fence lizards will significantly improve understanding of structure function relationships in homologous leptins. The success of this project will yield the only leptin sequence from an ectotherm. By comparative sequence analysis with mammalian leptins, regions of functional importance will likely be revealed, which may be useful information for researchers seeking to use leptin as a natural chemical to ameliorate human obesity doc8554 none A series of dye studies and associated hydrographic and current measurements are proposed. Dye will be released in the bottom layer of the Hudson River estuary and tracked in order to quantify diapycnal transport processes, secondary circulations, and horizontal transport in a stratified estuary. Of particular interest will be the contributions of secondary circulations to vertical and horizontal exchange and their ultimate influence on the along-estuary momentum balance and dispersion rates. The field study and analysis phases of the program will be complemented by numerical studies. These efforts will test hypotheses concerning the failure of classical theories of estuarine circulation to explain observations doc9522 none OPP- 00- Thompson The Principal Investigators will retrieve ice cores from the col between Mt. Bona and Mt. Churchill, located in Wrangell Mountains, southeastern Alaska. The ice core records will fill a significant void in the high resolution climate history of this region and will complement and extend the tree ring-based climate records. These records will be an important contribution to the suite of high resolution ice core histories from other north polar ice fields including, Greenland, Svalbard, the High Canadian Arctic the Windy Dome Ice Cap (Franz Josef Land, Russian Arctic) and Greenland. These polar records are part of a global suite of ice core records including those retrieved from seven lower latitude, high altitude sites in Tibet, South America, and Africa. These cores have contributed critical low-latitude proxy climate histories to the continuing efforts to identify the major drivers of Quaternary climate change and to determine the global synchronicity of glacial-age climate events. Currently, there are no high quality ice core records from Alaska, so these cores should provide critical new insights. The paucity of high resolution climate histories from the northeastern side of the Pacific Basin is a major obstacle to advancing our understanding of the rapid and recent changes in the dynamic state of the Pacific region and its global connections. Of particular interest are: 1) the warming of the last 30 years that appears to be amplified at high elevations in the tropics and subtropics and in northwestern North America and northern Asia; 2) the most recent step change in the dynamics of the Pacific Basin climate regime in -77; and 3) the nature of recently identified multi-decadal ENSO-like mid-latitude climate variability that may have its roots in the tropical Pacific. The field program will include geophysical and surface studies designed to select the best site on the col for recovery of two high resolution, well-preserved ice core records to about 500 meters. The results from laboratory measurements of soluble and insoluble aerosol concentrations will reveal drought and wet periods and relative storm intensities. Oxygen isotope analyses should provide a proxy for the temperature history and past atmospheric circulation patterns in this area. The high annual accumulation and cold mean annual temperatures are good indicators for thick and well preserved annual signals in the physical and chemical records that will allow excellent time control with annual resolution for the last years. The complete record should extend back at least 5,000 years. The significance of recent climatic and environmental variations must be evaluated from a perspective provided by a globally dispersed, long-term proxy climate records. Linking these records from pole to pole allows assessment of the global nature of these climatic variations and identification of critical linkages between the higher latitudes and the tropics where changes in the global heat source can trigger global-scale changes in the climate system doc9523 none What events might transpire that would lead someone to consider abandoning her his home and possessions, and take flight to seek refuge elsewhere, either within or outside of her his country? People who, owing to a reasonable fear of persecution, take such action and seek refuge abroad are recognized under international law as refugees. Those who seek refuge in mountains, forests, or with relatives within their own borders are recognized as internally displaced persons. The project explores the etiology of flows of refugees and internally displaced persons. The project addresses four questions: I) What characteristics make a country likely to produce refugees and internally displaced persons? 2) How can we distinguish countries that produce greater numbers of internally displaced persons from those that produce greater numbers of refugees? 3) What can explain greater flows of refugees to one bordering country rather than another? 4) Are the factors and processes that produce `voluntary migrant flows distinguishable from those that produce `forced migration flows? That is, do economic factors influence refugee and internally displaced person (R-IDP) flows? The literature on this topic is interdisciplinary, and thus suffers from limited communication across disciplinary boundaries. As such, no comprehensive study exists that seeks to explore the usefulness of the many hypotheses scattered throughout the literature. In addition, the work on this topic is largely idiographic and descriptive: there are few comparative case studies, a relatively limited number of theoretically driven studies, and very few large-n, statistical analyses. This investigation makes a significant contribution by creating a comprehensive, theoretically driven set of hypotheses, and examining them using a global data set. Like many scholars who work on migration, the investigator employs a simple cost-benefit framework for studying these flows. The major argument with respect to the first question is that countries where people feel that their lives are threatened by violence have a greater likelihood of producing refugees than countries where this is not the case. This is not a novel argument, nor is it particularly surprising. Yet, what is surprising is that few analyses of the etiology of refugee and internally displaced person flows do not move on to ask the additional questions listed above, and none of them have sought to test hypothetical answers. With respect to the second question, the investigator argues that policies toward both emigration and immigration, the level of violence in surrounding countries, and the border terrain will separate those countries that produce a high level of internally displaced relative to refugees from those that produce a high level of refugees relative to internally displaced. These same variables, save emigration policy, should help determine which country refugees seek asylum in. Finally, by including measures of relative wages in the regressions that address questions two and three, the investigator will be able to address question four. The investigator assembles a dataset for a global sample covering the period - . Attention is given to both validity and reliability issues. Finally, the hypotheses are examined using relevant statistical techniques. This project enhances our understanding of the topic and produces a dataset that will be of use to numerous scholars interested in the topic doc8542 none The goal of this experimental study is to understand the relation between deformation and melt migration in partially molten rocks and to find out how melt actually moves as a function of varying temperature, stress, lithostatic pressure, magma pressure, strain rate, and time. Partly molten rocks will be tested in hydrostatic melt extraction experiments under conditions of varying pressure, with one or two solid phases, and with melt of variable amount and viscosity, which will result in significant differences in permeability in different experiments. Triaxial deformation experiments will also be carried out at variable temperatures, melt percents, and strain rates. Samples will be carefully examined before and after the experiments to evaluate physical properties. Permeabilities will be measured directly in some of the experiments. Results will be evaluated in light of previous experiments and theoretical considerations doc9525 none Existing studies of voter behavior are based on the premise that if a voter is issue-oriented. she should vote for the candidate whose personal position or campaign platform is closest to her own preferences. In a democratic system in which a lone elected official makes all policies. such a view of issue voting may make sense. But in a democratic system with multiple policymakers - such as an executive and a legislature and a separation of powers, it makes little sense for voters to imagine that a candidate will accomplish everything she says she will once in office. If voters are issue-oriented, as Downs ( ) argued. their goal should be to elect officials who will likely produce public policies that the voter prefers. The foundations of issue-voting are the expectations voters hold about the policies the government will adopt given the election of each of the candidates. In presidential and gubernatorial elections, these policy expectations associated with each candidate may differ from the candidate s personal position due to the institutional power of the executive relative to the legislature and to divided government. Furthermore, the extent to which voters use policy expectations or candidate position when deciding which candidate to support may also be influenced by the prospects of divided government and the voters perception of the power of the executive branch. In many cases the candidate whose personal position is closest to the voter s own will not be the candidate who would produce policies closest to the voter s preferences. The PI s conduct a telephone survey of registered voters in each of two states (New- Jersey- and Virginia) that, will have gubernatorial elections in . The survey. which will take place the two weeks preceding the election. will present respondents with a series of questions asking them to place on an issue scale their own position. the positions of the gubernatorial candidates. the position of the state legislature. and the position of the state government under each gubernatorial candidate. Respondents will also be asked which party they believe will have a majority in the state legislature, how powerful they believe the governor is compared to the legislature, and for which candidate they intend to vote in their state s gubernatorial election. The survey will also collect data on respondents party identification, socioeconomic characteristics, level of political information, attention to politics, and other relevant, data. The PI s will then measure the impact of policy expectations versus candidate positions on voters choice of candidates. Across both states, they expect to find that once voters policy- expectations are taken into account, voters are more issue-oriented than researchers have previously found. Also, candidate positions will play little role in the vote decisions made by voters unless the executive is likely to have tremendous control over policymaking or is unlikely to have any control. In the latter case, voters will cast an expressive vote for the candidate whose personal position they most prefer knowing full well that the candidate will have little influence over policy. Results from this project will contribute to research on voting behavior and state government. For the literature ore voting behavior. The PI s will provide the first true test of issue voting based on the theory that voter s preferences are defined over expected policy- outcomes rather than the positions of the candidates. With this research; the investigators hope to provide empirical evidence relevant to controversies concerning both divided government and directional voting models. For studies of state government, the PI s will provide a new source of data on the relative influence of the executive branch of government across two different states. These data can also be combined with previous work by the PI s on Ohio and Texas state government. Data from the survey will be made available to other researchers and to the general public. The research promises to enhace substantially our understanding of the topic doc8530 none While mid-ocean ridge basalts provide wide-spread samples of the oceanic upper mantle and the chemistry of these rocks potentially constrains mantle temperature and composition, interpreting these constraints requires inversion using petrogenetic models that specify mangle mineralogy, temperature, geochemistry, and dynamics. Oxygen-isotope variations in these basalts have the potential to add important new constraints because oxygen-isotope composition of subducted oceanic crust differs from that of common mantle peridotites such that subduction of crust into the uppermantle can create domains that are both compositionally compositionally enriched in basaltic and sedimentary components and anomalous in delta 018. Detailed sutdies of suites selected to examine the influence of crystallization-differentiation, crustl assimilation, and sub-solidus alteration on the delta 018 of mid-ocean ridge basalts doc9527 none s of spatially varying order, determining statistical properties of defect dynamics, and studying various aspects of defect dynamics in driven systems. %%% This award supports theoretical research in the dynamics of defects and their role in the development of ordered phases. Defects are ubiquitous in condensed matter systems, for example, vortices in superfluid and normal liquid helium, domain walls in magnets and disclinations in liquid crystals, and play an important role in determining many properties of materials. An important part of this research involves the determination of the equations of motion for defects that exist on intermediate length scales from more microscopic equations that describe ordered states and their spatial variation. The proposed research will support training graduate students in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics doc9485 none The nature of the magnetic Jurassic Quiet Zone is unresolved because Jurassic ocean crust occurs in only a few locations. New results have been obtained at Ocean Drilling Project Hole 801C suggesting up to six polarity reversals or intensity events within the Jurassic. This project will conduct a nested set of near-bottom deeptow magnetic profiles encompassing the region around 801C and then expanding out to extend the existing deeptow lines south to the magnetic rough-smooth boundary which is thought to define the end of the spreading sequence in the area. The deeptowed magnetic survey will boost the signal to noise ratio, reduce the diurnal noise problem and mitigate the attenuation due to water depth doc9529 none This action provides support fora group research project focusing on specific aspects of tsunami coastal hazards mitigation. To mitigate tsunami coastal hazards, the first priority is to improve the identification of the tsunami-inundation zone. Recently, NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) has launched a comprehensive program to estimate potential inundation zones along the coastal areas of the Pacific States (California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii; http: www.pmel.noaa.gov tsunami time ). The next level of mitigation strategy is to reduce loss of life and property damage within the tsunami inundation zones by considering the runup process in detail: flow patterns, induced forces, the impact of debris and floating objects, and their implication for improved design of waterfront structures and decisions concerning land use. The five primary objectives are to: Understand the fundamental turbulence phenomena associated with tsunami runup and its effects on tsunami forces on structures and scouring; Improve the prediction capability of tsunami runup models, by more accurately including the effects of dispersion and wave breaking; Achieve a practical means of describing the complex runup flows within the context of their interactions with structures, trees and other typical complex coastal features (e.g. dunes, earthen dikes and river intlets); Develop benchmark problems and their solutions for validating numerical models and for determining the adequacy of different approximations for different applications in tsunami hazard reduction; Develop scenarios focusing on four interrelated issues: single and multiple structures (rectangular and cylindrical forms), porous media, missiles debris impacts, and scouring. The project involves researchers from Cornell University, Southern Methodist University, the University of Southern California, the University of Washington, GeoEngineers, Inc., Seattle, and a Professor Emeritus from Harvard University. In addition, it includes collaboration on scouring during tsunami runup with researchers at Japan s Public Works Research Institute (PWRI), using PWRI s large and unique experimental facility doc9530 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Timothy J. Deming, of the Departments of Chemistry and Materials Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is studying the synthesis of amido-amidate metallacycles and their use for the catalytic preparation of polypeptides. Through analysis of the reactivity of low-valent metal complexes with amino acid N-carboxyanhydride (NCA) derivatives, the generality of NCA reactivity with transition metals will be illustrated and new candidates for NCA polymerization initiators will be developed. Alternate synthetic routes to amido-amidate metallacycles, the active propagating species in NCA polymerization, will provide more efficient initiators and allow versatility in the end-functionalization of polypeptides. By working with amido-amidate metallacycles with new, well-defined coordination geometries, stereocontrolled NCA polymerization will be explored. Polypeptides represent one of the major classes of macromolecules utilized by living organisms. These large molecules, comprised of many amino acids linked together, display a wide range of important physical and chemical properties. New approaches to the preparation of polypeptides offer promise for the efficient synthesis of molecules anticipated to display new and or unusual properties, including the selective transport of ions. Professor Timothy J. Deming, of the Departments of Chemistry and Materials Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his studies of new catalytic techniques for polypeptide synthesis, offering promise for the selective and efficient synthesis of complex polypeptides with unique molecular architectures doc9531 none Papapolymerou This project requests travel support for 24 participants from U.S. universities in the Student Paper Competition at the IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium (IMS). The IMS is the annual meeting of the Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S) of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE). The IMS is also the major international symposium in the microwave field and a focus of research results in wireless telecommunications. The IMS will be held in Phoenix, AZ, USA on May 20-25, . Each year, the Microwave Theory and Techniques Society promotes student education in microwave theory and techniques through a number of mechanisms. One of the most important is the Student Paper Competition at the IMS. This selective program brings the world s best students together in an integrated program in which they present their work not only to a technical audience but again to a group of judges. The program helps develop the students technical acumen as well as their communication and presentation skills. It also helps introduce them to the international technical community and helps to build a community of students who will lead the next generation of microwave engineers. The IMS provides financial support of various forms but does not reimburse travel expenses. Travel support from NSF will ensure that the program is open to the widest range of interested applicants from U.S. universities doc9532 none This project provides for continued operation of the armored T-28 meteorological research aircraft system as a national facility for research into cloud, thunderstorm and hailstorm processes. The proposed cooperative agreement provides for the management, staffing, upgrading, testing, operation, and maintenance of the T-28 aircraft and associated instrumentation and software. These efforts will maintain the performance and measurement capabilities of the aircraft and make it available for support of several upcoming research projects requiring observations within the around mature covective storms. The focus of these investigations is on thunderstorm electrification and its relation to Nox production, and on validating and improving hydrometeor-identification algorithms for polarimetric radars. The proposed agreement includes scientific effort to support facility deployments and analysis of the resulting data engineering effort to evaluate modifications to improve aircraft performance, and instrumentation and software upgrades to enhance the scientific and educational capabilities of the facility doc9533 none In recent years experimental methods have become an indispensable component of economic research. Laboratory experiments are used to test economic theory, to discover the properties of alternative institutional rules, and to assist in the design of new market institutions. A few examples are the design of the FCC spectrum auctions, the design of a new market institution for matching medical interns with hospitals, and the design of new market institutions for the deregulated allocation of electrical power. Laboratory experiments in economics and game theory rest on the premise of transference , or parallelism: the assumption that the behavior of subjects in the laboratory will be the same as the behavior of people in the actual strategic encounters that the experiments are designed to help us understand. If laboratory subjects behave differently, for whatever reason, this would present a challenge for experimental research: theory that failed in the laboratory might perform well in the field, or vice-versa; the properties of a trading rule in the laboratory might be different from its properties in the field; and trading rules designed in the laboratory, and which work well there, may perform poorly in the field. Recent evidence suggests that the behavior of people with expertise in certain kinds of strategic situations may be different than the behavior of people who are inovices, as laboratory subjects typically are, with little or no experience in the given strategic context. This evidence includes recent research by Walker and Wooders in which leading professional tennis players were found to make strategic decisions that were more in accord with the theory of strategic behavior than the decisions of laboratory subjects who had no prior experience in the strategic situation. The research project consists of experiments designed to study whether, and how, the strategic behavior of experts differs from the behavior of less experienced and less expert decision makers. The experiments will be conducted primarily on the World Wide Web, and they will be designed specifically to provide for the development and identification of varying levels of expertise and the means to identify differences in behavior that are associated with differing levels of expertise. The results of this research promise to provide a better understanding of the role of expertise in strategic behavior and of the strategic contexts in which parallelism can be expected to hold, and to help identify the settings in which Web-based experiments are superior and those in which laboratory experiments are likely to be superior doc9534 none This Doctoral Dissertation Research project looks at American state government agenda setting comparatively. It considers how political issues get on state government agendas, and, in particular, why gubernatorial, legislative, and judicial political agendas vary across and within states. More specifically, this dissertation examines institutional agenda space allocated to redistributive social and economic policies across varying preference distributions, institutional rules, design and political context, and political resources. Redistributive policies are defined as social and economic policies that involve advantaged and disadvantaged groups (i.e., rich versus poor; majority versus minority). The goal of this project is to provide an integrated model of agenda setting that highlights the primary forces promoting or inhibiting redistributive agendas in the states. The research design in this study collects and analyzes data from all fifty states, looking at the years - . Ordinary least squares and maximum likelihood estimation will be employed to systematically test hypotheses about institutional agenda setting and economic and social redistribution in the American states. The data will consist of governor state of the state addresses, state legislature bill introductions, and state supreme court case dockets. The results from this dissertation will provide a comprehensive view of the politics of agenda setting practices within and across the states doc9535 none of algebraic properties of elaborate physical or engineering systems, and the study of transformations on function spaces has often led to the solution of problems in control theory, intimately tied to systems theory and electrical engineering. Our research project is aimed at resolving some outstanding problems in multivariable operator theory, while creating recruitment and retention opportunities for women and minorities to pursue careers in mathematics, by engaging their participation in projects related to the interaction of mathematics with other sciences doc9536 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Carl Lund Institution: State University of New York at Buffalo The objective of this proposal is to determine the chemical nature of high activity redox sites on zeolite catalysts. In previous work the PI postulated the novel hypothesis that the anions, rather than the cations, were involved the redox activity. A kinetic model involving nitrate and nitrite species was proposed to explain anomalous behavior above a certain partial pressure of reactant. Specifically, it was found that the rate of decomposition of nitrous oxide over a zeolite catalyst jumped to a higher level when its partial pressure exceeded a critical value. Because this phenomenon only occurred when the zeolite had been ion-exchange with iron, there is some interaction with the cation. The proposed research may reveal a new type of redox chemistry, which may be applied to the decomposition of NOx compounds as well as partial oxidation reactions. The use of gravimetry, infrared spectroscopy, microcalorimetry, isotope-labeling studies, and detailed kinetic studies may reveal the nature and identity of the high activity redox sites. This work has the potential to elucidate phenomena important in industrial and environmental applications including the selective catalytic reduction of nitrogen oxides doc9537 none The broad objective of this interdisciplinary research project is to develop the fundamental knowledge required to reliably manufacture functional ceramic-polymer composites for ultrasonic sensor applications. A new approach for designing and rapidly screening functional materials referred to as combinatorial engineering has been developed. This approach involves producing mesoscale periodic structures with both composition and design variations. Its success hinges critically on exploiting recent advances in solid freeform (or additive) fabrication of materials, such as robotically controlled deposition (RCD) that offer the agility required to rapidly build complex 3D components. The RCD process utilizes concentrated colloidal gels (as inks) during the deposition process. The aim is to build and test the piezoelectric response of composites containing interpenetrating ceramic-polymer matrices connected in three dimensions. These components may find application as ultrasonic sensors in advanced medical imaging devices. Moreover, such architectures may find broad application as photonic lattices, substrates for catalyst supports, and scaffolds for biomaterials. Outreach to high school science teachers and their students will continue to be a focus of the research. The current web site created by this research team to introduce materials science and engineering to a broader audience will be augmented with a demonstration based on robotically controlled deposition processing. The research team will also include hands-on experiences for undergraduate students brought into the lab environment doc9538 none This project involves the study of polarized electron collisions with chiral molecules and heavy noble gas atoms. The proposed experiments address basic physics questions about the dynamics of electron-molecule and electron-atom scattering, particularly with regard to electron-spin-dependent effects. For example, one experiment involves examining how molecular chirality influences scattering dynamics in electron-molecule collisions. The work also provides important information for applications requiring knowledge of electron-molecule and electron-atom scattering cross sections. Finally, improved sources of polarized electrons will be developed, with the goal of providing a turnkey polarized beam for general applications doc9539 none This proposal requests support for the research program of the high energy physics group at the University of Kansas, for work on the D0 experiment at Fermilab and also for work on the CLEO experiment at the Cornell University CESR electron-positron collider. The upgraded D0 detector has just begun taking data at the world s energy frontier in the long-anticipated Run II at the Fermilab Tevatron proton-antiproton collider. In addition to searches for new phenomena beyond the minimal Standard Model, e.g., for the Higgs boson or for supersymmetric partners to the known particles, the D0 experiment will make precision measurements in top-quark physics, W and Z physics, QCD, and b-quark physics. The Kansas group has played a leading role in building the silicon tracker for the D0 upgrade and is also responsible for the offline software support of the central preshower (CPS) detector. This group will also align, calibrate, and fine-tune the CPS detector for maximal detection efficiency. The group s expertise in b-quark physics, silicon, and preshower detectors will all be put to use in tagging jets containing a b-quark. This is a crucial step in all new physics searches. The Kansas group will also continue its analysis of CLEO data, especially in the area of charmed baryons, where they have traditionally played an important role doc9540 none The geometry of a separable infinite dimensional Banach space X can be studied and better understood through a study of its spreading models and asymptotic structure (those finite dimensional bases that can be found inside X, but arbitrarily spread out). Knowledge of these structures does not always pass through to infinite dimensional information about X but sometimes, surprisingly, it does. The author will study a number of open problems of this nature using the tools of infinite combinatorics, analysis and logic. For example if a Banach space has only one spreading model, must it contain a copy of one of the classical Banach spaces? This project concerns the study of the geometry of normed linear spaces. The easiest example of such a space is ordinary three dimensional Euclidean space. However one may, even in two or three dimensions, have other geometries than Euclidean. For example in the taxicab space distances between points in the plane are computed by traveling the shortest route along roads that run only horizontally or vertically. In this geometry the set of all points equidistant from a fixed point is diamond shaped rather than a circle. Applications of such alternate geometries are numerous in physics, engineering, signal processing and many other sciences. The state of a system or a signal may be given by a sequence of numbers and one may have to have a way of computing the distance between two states or signals to see how close they are. And in these applications one has to often use finite dimensional spaces of larger dimension than three or even spaces of infinite dimension. The author will be exploring the latter case by studying the asymptotic structures of these alternate geometries. This is a method of linking finite and infinite dimensional structure. The techniques to be used are a combination of analysis, infinitary combinatorics and logic. The problems that arise could also impact and motivate development in these latter areas as well doc9541 none This is a proposal to analyze the AMANDA II data to search for neutrinos from Gamma Ray Bursters and for high energy neutrinos. This group will also perform the necessary simulation and calibration work required by this search. Some of the work will need to be done at the South Pole doc9542 none This one year proposal will explore how to create very large area plasmas. The focus is on sustaining plasmas with electron series resonant (ESR) surface waves (SWP). Part I of the proposed investigation tackles open theoretical questions concerning devices large enough to support very long wavelength surface waves. Part II investigates the use of surface waves for electron energy distribution (EEDF) control (i.e. selective heating and cooling) in plasmas. Part III will look into bow to distribute power fed into ESR-SWP s for creating large area uniform plasmas. The initial approach will be to feed discharge power into the ESR-SWP by a distributed excitation using a directionally coupled slow waveguide doc9543 none Three topics in Rydberg electron dynamics in external fields will be studied: (1) spatial localization of atomic electrons, (2) ionization of Rydberg states in rotating microwave fields, and (3) chaotic scattering of Rydberg electrons. Both classical and quantum approaches will be used. Results achieved in problems involving Coriolis forces, where reduced dimensionality models fail due to unconserved angular momentum, will be utilized doc9544 none Einstein s gravitational field theory (general relativity), besides providing the most accurate current model for the study of gravitational physics on the astrophysical and cosmological scales, is also the source of a rich collection of mathematically interesting questions. This award will support a program of research which focusses on some of these, including the following: 1) Study of the behavior of the gravitational field very close to the big bang in cosmological solutions of Einstein s equations. Remarkably, it seems that even for solutions which appear to be very different some time after the big bang, the behavior close to the big bang is very similar: It oscillates in a characteristic way. We can show this, numerically or analytically, for simple families of solutions, and we hope to show it more generally. 2) Construction of new sets of initial conditions for the gravitational field which juxtapose two known sets. This is not easy because the initial conditions must satisfy certain nonlinear partial differential equations--the Einstein constraints . We are developing techniques for smoothly joining ( or gluing ) two solutions of the constraints into a single solution. The first of these projects, although it ignores any quantum gravitational effects, could be very useful in our drive to understand the nature of the very early universe. The second is of interest both mathematically and physically. The mathematical interest stems from the fact that the Einstein constraint system is among the most complicated to which gluing studies have been applied. The physical interest comes from the possiblility of using the developed techniques to set up initial data for black hole collisions and other astrophysical problems which are being intensely studied numerically in anticipation of future data from LIGO doc9545 none Trafalis This grant supports a collaboration between a member of the global optimization community (Nick Sahinidis) and an expert in neural computation and optimization (Theodore Trafalis) to develop novel neural network training algorithms and demonstrate their benefits in solving large-scale learning) problems. The application of neural networks to all aspects of technology has escalated recently as engineers and scientists have widely embraced neural computing in their quest for deeper understanding of complex phenomena and systems. Finding the best possible neural network for a particular application requires choosing the network parameters in a way that minimizes learning errors. Even for simple learning problems, the error function possesses a large number of local minima (isolated valleys). Despite the enormous amount of attention devoted to neural networks, there is currently no efficient method that can identify with certainty time global minimum of the error function. Current approaches, such as back-propagation and stochastic search methods, may get trapped at local minima corresponding to large learning errors and suboptimal neural networks. This may lead to incorrect inferences and devastate decision makers. Globally optimal neural computing holds the promise of an enabling technology that could significantly improve learning in many diverse application domains. The results of the proposed research will be implemented in the their widely distributed global optimization software package and will be made available to the research community doc9546 none The fundamental theory of elementary particles, quantum chromodynamics, has been thoroughly tested both theoretically and experimentally. It contains quarks, the basic constituents of neutrons and protons, and gluons, the particles responsible for nuclear forces. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, which began operation in June , will accelerate and collide two beams of heavy nucleii in order to produce a new state of matter known as the quark-gluon plasma. In this plasma the temperature is so high that the quarks and gluons are not confined inside nucleii. The properties of this quark-gluon plasma are a crucial test of quantum chromodynamics and are important for understanding the early universe. This project will perform theoretical calculations on the behavior of the particles in the quark-gluon plasma doc9547 none The primary topic is the interaction of two-electron atoms with intense laser fields, which leads to detachment of the electrons. An important mechanism is recollision, in which one electron is removed from the atom and then oscillates in the laser field, recolliding with the residual atom one or more times. It is found that double collisions can be more effective than single collisions in removing the remaining electron. The plan is to use models of the two electron atom in analytic and numerical studies of these mechanisms of double ionization. It is also planned to study photorecombination, in which electrons recombine with atomic ions in the presence of the intense laser fields. Undergraduate students will contribute to the project in computer programming and analysis, but also in explaining the physics of the double-ionization process doc9548 none Stephenson There is increasing experimental evidence that neutrinos have mass, but there is serious need for information on the actual values of neutrino masses. This proposal continues the study of effects which could influence the extraction of neutrino mass from an analysis of the electron energy spectrum very near the high-energy end point in nuclear beta decay. Scenarios alternative to Standard Model physics may also affect the electron spectrum and have further consequences such as an alteration of signals in solar neutrino detectors similar to what has been observed. This investigation of neutrino properties could have profound effects on cosmology through the dark matter problem doc9549 none This award is to support the research activities of two professors, their graduate students and a Senior Research Associate at Kent State University in the area of experimental medium-energy nuclear physics. The general objectives are the study of the structure of the nucleon (neutron or proton) and the nature of the nuclear force. This group is involved in experiments being performed, or to be performed at the Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jlab) in Virginia and at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) on Long Island, New York. An experiment is in progress at Jlab to determine the charge distribution inside the neutron. The neutron, while neutral overall, is known to consist of objects with both positive and negative charges. These objects are called quarks . The quarks are held together by the exchange of particles called gluons . Exactly how the quarks combine, move, and interact inside the neutron is not known. A precise measurement of the charge distribution, called the Electric Form Factor, will provide one of the most sensitive tests available of various models of the neutron structure. These measurements are only recently possible and require the electron beam characteristics now available at Jlab and involve the use of a large-volume neutron polarimeter developed by this group in experiments performed during the last decade at other accelerator facilities. The development, installation, calibration, and operation of the polarimeter represents the unique contribution of this group to this important experiment. This group plans also to perform another experiment at Jlab to study short-range correlation between nucleons inside nuclei. Such short-range correlations are known to exist, but the exact nature and strength of such correlations are only poorly determined. This group will bring its expertise with neutron detectors to help study such correlations involving neutrons. This group has recently joined an effort planned to study interactions between colliding beams of polarized protons using the STAR detector at RHIC (STAR stands for Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC). The object of this study is to determine the exact origin of the intrinsic angular momentum, or spin, of the proton. The spin, like the charge distribution, arises from the existence, interactions and movements of the constituents of the proton, generally believed to be the quarks and gluons. To date, only the contributions from the quarks has been determined; this project offers the possibility of determining the contribution to the spin of the proton due to gluons. In order to measure these contributions, it is necessary to observe hadronic jets produced at relatively small angles in the collisions. This group, together with a collaboration of other researchers from Indiana University, Argonne National Laboratory, and others, will construct a new end-cap calorimeter to be installed at one end of the present STAR detector at RHIC. It will be this group s responsibility to provide characterizations and calibrations of the multi-anode photomultiplier tubes used for particle detection in this new calorimeter doc9550 none Modern multi-terawatt, femtosecond chirped pulse amplification lasers easily make possible studies of matter subject to unprecedented light intensities. The interactions of this laser radiation with various types of materials have accessed a new regime of strong field nonlinear optics, a regime in which perturbation theory breaks down and very high order nonlinear processes are possible. The experimental work in this proposal is aimed at understanding the nonlinear optical properties of particles of sizes ranging from a few nanometers to a few microns in the strong field regime. These studies are of interest not only because they will elucidate the electron dynamics in these strong field interactions but also because such studies may lead to enhanced conversion efficiencies of laser light to short wavelength light, and therefore have a direct bearing on the development of coherent, ultrafast-laser-driven short wavelength sources doc9551 none Professor Goncharov continues his study of the arithmetic aspects of classical polylogarithms and their generalizations, such as multiple polylogarithms, special values of L-functions of algebraic varieties, algebraic K-theory and motivic Galois groups. Professor Goncharov investigates the structure of the motivic fundamental group of the projective line punctured at zero, infinity and all N-th roots of unity and its surprising relationship with the geometry and topology of modular varieties. The motivic fundamental group is a mixed motive. Mixed motives can be investigated via their Hodge and l-adic realizations. The l-adic, i.e. arithmetic, side of the problem concerns the action of the absolute Galois group on the pro-l completion of the fundamental group of the projective line punctured as above. When N is 1 it is a classical problem studied by Grothendieck, Deligne, Ihara, Drinfeld and many other mathematicians. The simplest case of this problem for general N is equivalent to the classical theory of cyclotomic units. The relationship with the geometry of modular varieties is a new tool to study this problem. The Hodge, i.e. analytic, aspect of the story concerns the properties of multiple zeta values and their generalizations, multiple polylogarithms evaluated at N-th roots of unity. Professor Goncharov investigates a similar problem about the structure of the motivic fundamental group of an elliptic curve with complex multiplication punctured at the torsion points and its relationship with the geometry of modular varieties. Professor Goncharov continues his study of special values of L-functions and polylogarithms. This research is in the area of number theory, which is the branch of mathematics that is concerned with questions about the integers and roots of polynomial equations with integer coefficients. The theory of systems of polynomial equations with integer coefficients is important for many applications including questions in cryptography and coding theory. A fundamental invariant of such a system of equations is its L-function. During the last three hundred years the L-functions were one of the main sources of new mathematical conceptions and theories. For example, certain L-functions provided vital links in the chain that led to the recent proof of Fermat s last theorem. The proposer uses the latest techniques in number theory and algebraic geometry to study L-functions and their special values at integer points doc9552 none The researchers will develop and apply new and more efficient computer algorithms for solving problems in quantum field theory (elementary-particle physics) and the statistical mechanics of phase transitions and critical phenomena (condensed-matter physics). They will then use these numerical studies to motivate new theoretical insights. The research focuses on two principal application areas: lattice spin models and field theories, including lattice gauge theories; and self-avoiding random walk. This work impacts simultaneously on several areas of physical science and applied mathematics. Lattice field theories are of direct interest in elementary-particle physics; in particular, lattice gauge theories provide our best model for the strong subnuclear interaction. Lattice spin models are employed to model phase transitions in numerous areas of condensed-matter physics and physical chemistry. The self-avoiding walk models the behavior of high-molecular-weight polymer molecules (including proteins and other biopolymers) in solution; it thus has applications in numerous areas of physics, chemistry and chemical engineering, and biophysics doc9553 none The goal of this research project is to gain an increased understanding of the behavior of simple quantal systems whose classical counterparts are chaotic. This will be done by carrying out different sets of experiments in close concert with collaborating theorists. One experiment will study the response of hydrogen atoms in highly excited states to strong, non-perturbative external fields that are near or above the threshold for ionization. A second will use the polarization of the driving field to test theoretical predictions about the dimensionality dependence of different strong-field phenomena doc9554 none We want to investigate several projects in Dynamical Systems and in Partial Differential equations. We will also consider multi-particle systems that share properties with both One unifying thread is that we would like to understand the relation between variational approaches and more geometric ones. In particular, we would like to produce proofs of diffusion that use geometric and variational methods and to extend results in dynamics obtained by variational methods to partial differential equations. An important tool for geometric methods is the theory of normally hyperbolic manifolds and we would like to extend it to Partial differential equations and infinite particle systems. Sometimes, small short range causes may have large long term effects. For example, small periodic forces may build up large changes in energy. Some small changes in the local properties of a material may lead to the emergence of patterns that cover large distances. In other situations, however, local effects just average out. We would like to device a broad based array of methods (including numerical studies and geometric techniques) that can be used to decide whether build up or averaging occurs. We would also like to pay special attention to some concrete models appearing in technological applications doc9555 none Research will be carried out leading to an improvement in accuracy of the neutron lifetime. A new cooling and trapping technique (developed by the same researchers) will be used to aid in the measurment. The lifetime measurement will permit more precise tests of the standard model of electroweak interactions. The experiment will be carried out at the National Institute of Standards and Technology research reactor. This activity is multidisciplinary, bringing together low temperature techniques and nuclear physics techniques as well as understanding of condensed matter, molecular and nuclear phenomena. The methods being developed will also permit development of a new, intense source of ultra-cold neutrons for further nuclear physics studies and for future materials research studies. The lifetime measurement and the possible study of correlations in neutron beta-decay are high priority activities in contemporary nuclear physics and studies of fundamental symmetries. Improvement of existing state-of-the-art equipment is integral to this activity. Education of graduate and undergraduate students and postdocs is a strong component in every aspect of this grant doc9556 none Zielinska-Pfabe The dynamical evolution of collisions between heavy ions at medium energies, such as those studied experimentally at Michigan State University and other laboratories, will be studied in a framework of a semi-classical mean field approximation with an addition of density fluctuations. The major issues of the study are a) the nature of the disassembly of the excited nuclear system, b) the time scales of this disassembly, and c) the equilibration of different degrees of freedom doc9557 none The project is concerned with the study and simulation of low energy nuclear reactions during the post-main sequence phase of stellar evolution. The particular goal is the measurement of helium burning direction in Red Giant stars and hydrogen and helium burning processes in Asymptotic Giant (AGB) stars. This information is necessary for the interpretation of observational data on isotopic and elemental abundance distribution in the atmospheres of Red Giants and in the planetary nebulae surrounding AGB stars. The determination of these processes is not only important for the understanding of nucleosynthesis mechanisms but also for the interpretation of fast dredge-up and convection processes in these The experiments are performed at the Notre Dame low energy KN accelerator which is dedicated for nuclear astrophysics measurements doc9558 none The principal investigator and his colleagues study noncommutative algebra and associated noncommutative geometry. The proposal consists of two topics: the classification of graded domains of Gelfand-Kirillov dimension three, or the classification of noncommutative projective surfaces; applications of dualizing complexes. The classification question is one of the most important questions in noncommutative algebra and noncommutative projective geometry. Derived categories has been used in many areas of mathematics, and it has been proven that the dualizing complex is an effective tool in studying noncommutative rings. More applications of dualizing complexes are expected to be discovered. Noncommutative algebra plays an important role in Mathematics and Physics. For example, quantum groups introduced in the s are essentially a family of noncommutative and noncocommutative Hopf algebras. Some classes of subtle symmetries appeared in Mathematics and Physics can be expressed by using noncommutativity. The aim of this proposal is to develop effective methods, to understand the structure of noncommutative algebra, and to explore its interaction with other field such as statistical mechanics, quantum field theory, and noncommutative geometry doc9559 none This research contains two projects. First, the principal investigator plans to investigate tail distributions of sums of Banach-valued independent random variables. The principal investigator, with Pawel Hitczenko, already has many results concerning the case of real-valued random variables. But now the principal investigator feels that there are also fundamental questions concerning the Banach-valued case, for which up until now there are only partial, albeit deep, results. The second part of this proposal is to find new martingale inequalities. This work, joint with his Ph.D. student Jerry Shen, will extend the celebrated inequalities of Burkholder, and also similar inequalities involving so called tangent sequences. A single random event in and of itself is hard to predict. But far more is known when the effect of many random events are averaged together. This study of the sum of many different random variables goes back to the foundations of probability theory, including such celebrated results as the laws of large numbers and the central limit theorem, both foundational in the study of statistics, finding applications to any field, for example, medicine, in which single events are hard to predict. Despite the long history of this study, there remain many questions still unanswered. This work will be pure research, focusing on the fundamental aspects of this averaging behavior doc9560 none This project deals with the structure of minimal free resolutions and their applications in algebraic geometry. The P.I. will conduct research on the following topics : 1) connectedness and smoothness of Hilbert schemes over exterior algebras (joint with M. Stillman); 2) the asymptotic properties and structure of free resolutions over complete intersections; 3) free resolutions over rings with restricted powers (joint with V. Gasharov and T. Hibi). The proposed research is in the closely related fields of commutative algebra and algebraic geometry. These fields study the algebraic invariants of systems of polynomial equations and the geometry of sets defined by the vanishing of polynomials. Usually it is very difficult to find explicitly the solutions of a system of polynomial equations; however one can study the geometric properties of the set of solutions. Some of the results in these fields have applications in communications and robotics doc9561 none It is planned to develop and apply two new next-generation high precision many-body formalisms. One is a generalized cariational coupled-cluster method, the other the direct evaluation of fourth-order many-body perturbation theory. They will be tested on high precision experimental data for alkali-metal atoms. The approaches will improve the basis for high-precision interpretations of parity-nonconservation measurements, constraining extensions to the standard model of elementary particles. They will permit the high precision description of long-range interactions, crucial to ultra-cold collision studies doc9562 none Research is carried out at medium energy electron accelerators, in particular the MIT Bates Linear Accelerator Center. The goal is to use the precision and versatility of the electron probe to study the structure of matter. The energy of the accelerator is such that we can see matter at distances where phenomena are governed by the strong nuclear force. Experiments are carefully designed to gain insight into the structure and dynamics of nuclear matter. This is a contemporary field of research that uses recent technological advances in the production of electron beams and nuclear targets coupled with specially designed detection systems. At the Bates Center we conduct experiments with multiple magnetic spectrometers capable of making high precision measurements to advance the science. We are also leading the construction of a new detector, the Bates Large Acceptance Spectrometer Toroid (BLAST). which is expected to start data taking in . Up to date information in the development of these projects can be found at http: mitbates.mit.edu . Our research program under this grant provides an excellent environment for the educational development of students and postdoctoral personnel doc9563 none The Association of American Universities (AAU) is developing an inter-institutional network of AAU institutions to sustain current exemplary practices in the mathematics, science and technology preparation of teachers and to promote the sharing of such practices in teacher preparation. AAU is convening a forum for vertical teams from AAU universities consisting of college and university administrators, including Deans of Science and Deans of Education, and science, mathematics, engineering, and education faculty. This invitational forum on Exemplary Practices and Challenges in Teacher Preparation, features presentations of models of teacher preparation in mathematics, science, and technology, discussions of implementation strategies, and a webcast of the conference. Outcomes of the forum include publication of the conference proceedings, identification of best practices, and the development of a Campus Action Plan to guide campuses in developing their individual implementation plans for engaging science, mathematics, and engineering faculty in teacher education. The forum reflects the goals of a Resolution on Teacher Education adopted by the presidents and chancellors of AAU calling for an increased effort to certify disciplinary majors to teach, an ongoing commitment to integrate the research activities of universities with preservice and continuing teacher education, and a renewed emphasis on the importance of engaging the university faculty more fully in their roles of preparing future teachers, experienced teachers, and future teachers of teachers. AAU seeks to create a network of faculty and leaders in research universities who share, develop, and adopt exemplary practices in teacher education doc9564 none The effect of membrane behavior in clay soils is to reduce the contaminant mass flux through the soil relative to the contaminant mass flux that would occur in the absence of membrane behavior. Since the purpose of many clay soil barriers used in waste containment and in situ remediation applications is to restrict the migration of aqueous miscible contaminants, the existence of membrane behavior represents a potentially significant beneficial aspect that presently is not considered in the use of clay soil barriers for such applications. Thus, the goal of the research is to evaluate the significance of membrane behavior of engineered clay soil barrier materials with respect to their use in waste containment and in situ remediation applications. This goal will be achieved by providing sufficient experimental data to evaluate the combined effects of compressibility and salt concentration on the membrane behavior of clay soils that have properties resembling those of barrier materials used in waste containment and in situ remediation applications. The proposed research will advance our present understanding of membrane behavior sufficiently to allow a more rational basis for potentially incorporating membrane behavior into the design of clay soil barriers, such as compacted clay liners, geosynthetic clay liners, and soil-bentonite vertical cutoff walls doc9565 none Sundaram Classical intuition plays a crucial role in the analysis of a wide variety of complex quantum mechanical phenomena. The proposed research continues the PI s work in extending this intuition to include nonlinear systems exhibiting chaotic dynamics. In particular, the study would emphasize the use of classical analyses to facilitate control of the corresponding quantum dynamics. The research is largely motivated by recent experimental realizations of mesoscale phenomena, particularly in the contexts of cold atom optics and nanostructures doc9566 none This is a continuing project in the combination astronomical and laboratory studies of the molecular spectroscopy of simple molecular ions. A number of directions will be pursued. 1) Astronomical spectroscopy of H3+ and related molecules will be continued in order to reveal a more complete picture of the chemistry of the diffuse interstellar medium. 2) A new ion spectrometer based on a computer-controlled color center laser will be used for vibration rotation spectroscopy of molecular ions of astrophysical interest such as C3H3+, CH2NH2+, etc. 3) The laboratory spectroscopy will be pushed to shorter wavelength regions to correspond to a change from astronomical observation in dense clouds to diffuse clouds. Overtones of H3+, a benchmark for theoretical studies, will be the first focus of the new measurements. This multi-disciplinary project is supported jointly by the Divisions of Physics, Chemistry, and Astronomical Sciences in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorates doc9567 none Machleidt Phenomenological nucleon-nucleon (NN) potentials, based on meson exchange, provide a high-precision description of the NN scattering data. A drawback of these potentials is that they are not derived from the fundamental theory of the strong interaction, QCD. The symmetries of QCD are retained in a low energy effective field theory termed chiral perturbation theory. The chiral NN potentials so derived do not, as yet, provide such a quantitative fit, nor are they suited for microscopic nuclear structure theory. The Principal Investigator has experience with the development of potentials that provide a high quality fit. The proposal contains a plan for continuing development of the chiral NN potentials until they give a high-precision fit to the data. An accurate chiral NN potential will have substantial impact on exact few-nucleon studies and microscopic nuclear many-body theory doc9568 none This is the first year funding of a three year continuing award. The project is devoted to the study of relational structures in the context of machine learning and reasoning. A lot of progress has been made in these areas in recent years, but much of this work ignores structure in examples and representations. Relational representations are natural for many application areas, e.g. molecular problems in bioinformatics, or sentence structure in natural language processing (NLP). The PI believes that further progress can be made by considering relational structures and techniques explicitly in such contexts. A large part of this project is concerned with algorithms based on first order Horn expressions, where reasoning problems have long been studied, and learning within inductive logic programming . Recent results suggest that some learning problems are feasible if the learner can ask questions. This project will extend that work in an attempt to identify more learnable classes, the associated complexity of the problems, and the limits of the approach. The PI will continue work on the LogAn-H system, so that algorithmic ideas developed can also feed directly into heuristics for learning from examples. The PI will also explore alternative representations and reasoning mechanisms for relational structures, and their effect on learnability. This includes both the use of linear threshold elements (perceptrons) to embed relational structures, and the logic-based approach of reasoning with models. While most of the work is concerned with theoretical foundations, applications in NLP and bioinformatics will be explored. All these directions are part of an effort to develop foundations for systems that learn their knowledge and use it for reasoning doc9569 none Nuclear beta decay was important in motivating the Standard Model, and it continues to be of importance in searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. The simplest system for studying beta decay is the neutron. By measuring the neutron s lifetime (from the Ft value) and the neutron s beta asymmetry A, one has enough information to independently determine the weak vector and axial-vector couplings, GV and GA. An approved experiment (located at Los Alamos) will again measure the A coefficient, utilizing Ultra-Cold Neutrons (UCN), dramatically reducing systematic errors otherwise present due to beam-induced backgrounds and incomplete polarization. The key features are 1) the ability to port the neutrons to a significant distance away from their production site, 2) vetoing events when the beam pulse is on target, and 3) obtain 100% polarization using an axial magnetic field. This proposal covers efforts to develop an optimum coating for transporting polarized neutrons, and implementing a suitable DAQ system for the experiment. It appears pulsed-laser-deposition (PLD) diamond films may be suitable. A successful campaign to make suitably coated guides would have an significant impact, not just for this experiment, but planned future experiments as well. 5 doc9570 none Morningstar The physics of hadronic and gluonic excitations, such as hybrid hadrons, glueballs, and the N resonances, will be studied using computer simulations of quarks and gluons on a space-time lattice. Little is currently known about such systems, but their existence is suggested by quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the field theory believed to describe the strong interactions. These excitations should also yield vital clues to the elusive mechanism of quark confinement and the nature of the QCD vacuum. The motivation for these studies is the experimental program at Jefferson Laboratory, in particular the N program in Hall B and the proposed Hall D photoproduction of gluonic excitations doc9571 none Halderson This proposal has projects in two areas of nuclear theory. The first project will use the recoil-corrected continuum shell model (RSCCM) to investigate nucleon induced reactions on light nuclei, in particular those nucleon capture reactions of astrophysical interest. The recent extension of this model to p-shell nuclei allows the study of single neutron halo nuclei, polarized electron scattering data, and a variety of other topics including the effective interaction of nuclear structure theory. The second area of research is in the study of the hyperon-nucleon interaction with meager experimental input from scattering and binding energy systematics of light hypernuclei. The RCCSM, by allowing the hyperon to be bound or unbound, is particularly suitable for hypernuclear structure calculations because bound state excitation and quasi-free scattering are included in one consistent framework. The theoretical understanding expected from this work would be useful for experiments both at Brookhaven and Jefferson Lab doc9572 none Diebold This award to Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in the City of New York provides instrumentation to significantly improve the navigation capabilities of the research vessel Maurice Ewing, an NSF-owned ship operated by LDEO as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The navigation and quality control software and instrumentation supported here will allow major improvements to survey operations for geophysical research. Other items, including spare magnetometer and upgrades to the shipboard computing network, computers and peripherals, will modernize these systems and improve capabilities provided to shared-use researchers funded by NSF from throughout the U.S. These improvements will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists using the ship in their research during and future years doc9573 none Bates This award to Bermuda Biological Station for Research provides instrumentation to expand the oceanographic research capabilities of the research vessel Weatherbird II, a ship operated by BBSR as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS) research fleet. The CTD sensors and pylon provide critical backup systems, and the new meteorological instruments provide a more cost-effective alternative to the existing suite of sensors on the vessel. In addition, we support preparation of a well in the vessel that can in future be used for installation of an acoustic doppler current profiler, although funds to acquire that instrument are not provided at this time. These improvements will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists using the ship in their research during and future years doc9574 none Research in theoretical elementary particle physics will focus on possible extra dimensions of space, their role in the fundamental laws of nature and in cosmology. The research will develop specific models which utilize extra-dimensional mechanisms for resolving several outstanding puzzles in the standard model of particle physics, and study their experimental implications. Extra spatial dimensions are strongly motivated by Superstring Theory, the best developed theory for unifying General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics. The experimental discovery of new dimensions would revolutionize our understanding of fundamental physics and initiate an exciting new frontier of exploration. For these reasons, the research is of the highest importance in our quest for a fundamental understanding of the physical universe doc9575 none The main objective of the proposed research is to develop a new approach to the robust decentralized control of large electric power systems, based on the powerful tools of Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMI). This problem will be addressed in the general framework of interconnected dynamic systems with piecewise continuous nonlinearities. An important advantage of the LMI method lies in its ability to incorporate decentralized information structure constraints on the gain matrices, and to limit their respective norms. It also allows for the inclusion of a variety of additional design requirements, such as the degree of exponential stability and time delays. Several different applications of LMI - based control will be considered. All of them are computationally straightforward and well defined, with no tuning parameters or any need for trial and error analysis. In the initial stages of the project we will develop decentralized control strategies using the classical generator model, together with a second order model for the turbine generator. The work will then be extended to include the design of robust exciter control, in the framework of two-axis generator models. In the final stage of the research, we will explore the application of LMI to parametric stability. In this context, we will consider the elimination of bifurcations by appropriate control designs, as well as the robustness with respect to uncertainties in model parameters doc9576 none Schulman The principal topics proposed for continued research arise from statistical mechanics. They include i) the possible relation of the thermodynamic arrow of time to large scale features of the universe and ii) a master equation method appropriate to nonequilibrium statistical mechanics which allows the PI to address questions of complexity in open systems. Other topics include path integrals, and deviations from exponential decay doc9577 none The main physics goals of this project are two-fold: 1) to create in the laboratory a new state of matter called Quark Matter by heating compressing normal nuclear matter to a sufficiently high temperature density, and, equally important, 2) to uniquely determine whether such a transformation to Quark Matter has actually taken place. Quark Matter is composed of free quarks and gluons, the fundamental particles which are bound into protons and neutrons which make up normal nuclear matter. It is predicted that the Universe was entirely in the Quark Matter state several millionths of a second after the Big Bang. The method which we will use to make Quark Matter will be to collide beams of heavy nuclei (e.g. lead on lead and gold on gold) moving at speeds near the speed of light. These beams will be generated by new state-of-the-art particle accelerators located at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and at the CERN laboratory in Geneva. To determine whether Quark Matter has actually been created in these high energy heavy ion collisions, large particle detectors will be present to detect the secondary particles which are produced (mostly pi and K mesons and a range of more exotic particles). Theories predict that unique signatures for Quark Matter formation can be extracted from information obtained from these secondary particles. One of the main roles of the Ohio State University group in these experiments is to lead the analysis of the data from a new type of particle detector which OSU has taken part in developing called a Silicon Drift Detector and, hopefully, to extract unique Quark Matter signatures.5 doc9578 none This program focuses on a series of experimental investigations of methods and applications of a technique for controlling optical interactions in atomic systems by taking advantage of the coherence properties of these interactions. These Two-Pathway Coherent Control processes make use of an interference that occurs when optical interactions proceed via two distinct excitation routes in atomic, molecular, or condensed phase systems. This interference has been shown to result in an enhancement or inhibition of excitation probabilities, control of the direction of propagation of photoelectrons or photoions, and control over the branching ratios of photoionization or photodissociation into different continuum channels. The projects in the program include: 1) a series of measurements that will explore the role of autoionizing resonances on the phase of the interference; 2) development of a techniques for sensitive detection of weak optical transitions; and 3) detailed investigations of a robust form of interference that is insensitive to the phase of the laser field doc9579 none This project, at an RUI institution, provides undergraduate students with research experience through an active program in laser spectroscopy. Students are actively involved in the study of optical properties of rare earth ions doped in crystalline host materials, and novel organic dyes in solid plastic materials. Measurements include time-resolved spectroscopic techniques to study energy transfer characteristics and mechanisms. Processes such as energy transfer between sensitizers and activators, fluorescence quenching, Stoke s shifts, and the effect of host materials on such processes are studied. The research aims to help students understand and solidify their thinking about energy levels, selection rules, radiative and nonradiative processes. Students actively participate in weekly group discussions interacting with fellow students and the PI. %%% The project is primarily oriented toward providing research education experience for undergraduates in materials physics studies including advanced characterization tools and analysis methods to address basic research issues in a topical area with technological relevance. The research will contribute basic materials science knowledge to important aspects of processing and fabricating photonic devices such as lasers and sensors. An important feature of the program is the way in which research and education are integrated through the training of students in basic research in a technologically significant area doc9580 none Maier Small random fluctuations, which are often of thermal origin, are the cause of many important and interesting physical phenomena. These include chemical reactions, the nucleation phenomenon in phase transitions (i.e., the formation of a droplet of one phase within another phase), and the formation of unusual spatially localized states in liquid crystals. In all of these, `noise , i.e., random fluctuations, eventually drives a physical system over a barrier, and moves it from one stable state to another. Several special cases of this phenomenon were treated by Kramers in ,and for several decades thereafter, theoretical and experimental physicists relied heavily on his work. However, his formulas, and modified versions which other researchers later derived, apply only if the physical system is capable of coming to equilibrium, in a thermodynamic sense. Many physical systems are inherently out of equilibrium, either because of the unusual nature of their microscopic dynamics or random fluctuations, or because they are driven by external forces (for example, periodically). This research will study, both theoretically and experimentally, several nonequilibrium systems, and will extend the range of theoretical techniques that can be applied to them. Systems to be investigated include systems where the barrier to be crossed oscillates periodically, on account of externally applied periodic driving. A system that exemplifies this is a mesoscopic particle confined to a periodically modulated dual optical trap, and subject to small thermal fluctuations. Also to be investigated are multistable systems with spatial extent. In systems with spatial extent, the state of the system is infinite-dimensional: it comprises much more information than the position of a single particle. An example is a thin layer of a nematic liquid crystal, driven by weak spatiotemporal noise. Among other projects, this research will attempt to extend the Kramers approach to systems with spatial extent doc9581 none The goal of the proposed research it to produce a source of oxygen 14, a radioactive isotope of oxygen having a half-life of 70 seconds. If this development project is successful, the source will be used in a future experiment designed to test one of the fundamental aspects of the unified theory of the weak and electromagnetic interactions. To perform this experiment the source must have an activity of at least 100,000 decays per second, and for technical reasons must be deposited on a very thin foil in an area of no more than a few square millimeters. The weak interaction experiment which we hope to carry out later will test what is referred to as the Conserved Vector Current Hypothesis, and will involve measuring the energy spectrum of the positrons emitted in the decay of oxygen 14 doc9582 none Since the completion of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility at Thomas Jefferson National Laboratory (JLAB), the precise measurement of the polarization of high energy photons has become an important topic. For example, the scientific program at JLAB s Hall B includes fundamental experiments that require polarization measurements to be accurate to at least 5%, and some of them require an accuracy of 1-2%. The physics program at the planned Hall D will also depend largely on linearly polarized photons whose polarization must be accurately known. In spite of a history extending over 40 years, high energy photon polarimetry is still a relatively undeveloped field. For high energy photons, such as those produced at JLAB, all known methods for measuring polarization have low analyzing power, and absolute accuracy below that required for the approved and anticipated physics programs. The polarimeter proposed in this project will have an unsurpassed experimental asymmetry of approximately 1.7 for an energy range from a few tens of MeV up to several GeV. The polarimeter is simple in construction, compact, and its costs will be lower than that for polarimeters built according to any other available method. Two prototypes have already been built and tested. The performance of the detectors and the electronics met expectations and the measured analyzing power was as large as predicted. The use of this polarimeter at Spring-8 enabled the first direct measurement of the azimuthal asymmetry in pair production by linear polarized photons in the energy range 1.5 to 2.4 GeV. However, more improvements are needed to produce a polarimeter that will be permanently in use at JLAB. This project will undertake those improvements, including additional work on pair production theory and calculations, data acquisition and analyzing software, and the development of detector hardware. In addition to solving urgent needs in polarimetry, providing the ground for the ultimate experiments at JLAB, the development of this program will bring novel equipment to NCCU, and increase involvement of students in research, advancing the education of undergraduates from under-represented groups doc9583 none This award supports two projects that focus on field-induced collective motion and quantum control in multi-electron and multi-atom systems. The experiments employ intense femtosecond pulses to excite and control isolated systems, and imagining instrumentation to monitor quantitatively energy and angular correlation between simultaneously ejected components. The subject of the first project is three-atom systems undergoing field-induced Coulomb explosion. The fact that the vibrational motion of linear and nonlinear triatomic molecules leads to different explosion dynamics will be exploited to control the branching ratio between explosion channels. In the second project two-atom systems will be studied. In particular, the coupling between the nuclear and electronic motion in the presence of strong laser fields will be investigated in the molecule HD doc9584 none This experimental and computational research program continues the investigation of Rydberg atoms and molecules in electric fields using the technique of recurrence spectroscopy. Quantum mechanical atomic wavefunctions do not provide the means to easily visualize the dynamics of an atom, whereas recurrence spectroscopy, combined with semiclassical theory, provides a physical understanding of the motion of the Rydberg electron through its classical orbits. Recurrence spectroscopy will be used to investigate recurrences above the classical ionization threshold as well as recurrences resulting from higher excited initial states and recurrences of higher angular momentum states. These studies will be undertaken on helium, complex atoms, and simple molecules. A strong interaction between experimentalists and theorists is a hallmark of the program doc9585 none Professors Lyman Page, Suzanne Staggs, and David Wilkinson will measure minute variations in the temperature and polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). The CMB is now widely accepted as the remnant radiation from the fiery big bang. It is the oldest light in the universe and may be thought of as a fossil of the cosmic conditions that gave rise to such objects as galaxies. The CMB has cooled with the expansion of the universe so that it now emits predominantly in the microwave region of the spectrum. The research focuses on two open questions: to what degree is the CMB polarized and how does the intensity of the radiation vary from position to position on the sky on angular scales of order a tenth the size of the moon. Both questions are pursued through the development of new instrumentation coupled with new observational and data analysis techniques. Cosmology is in the midst of a revolution. Through new technologies and techniques, coupled with theoretical advances, the physics of the universe is being comprehended in ways only dreamt of a decade ago. The CMB, already having played a central role in the current understanding, is the premiere tool for making the next advances. Measurements of the polarization and fine scale angular distribution of the CMB directly address the following questions: what were the sources of dynamism in the universe just 300,000 years after the big bang? what are the properties of the new form energy, the recently discovered cosmological constant ? how exactly did the first cosmic structures form? and how much of the universe is made of the material of which we are made doc9586 none Experimental and theoretical studies on enhancing nonlinear optical processes at very low light (single-photon) levels in multi-level atomic systems with and without an optical cavity form the focus of this activity. The main objectives of the project include (i) understanding the nonlinear interactions between electromagnetic fields and multi-level atomic systems at low light level, especially the quantum correlation and quantum statistical properties in such systems; (ii) linking the fundamental researches of atomic coherence and quantum interference in multi-level systems to practical device applications in optical communication; and (iii) demonstrating a practical opto-electronic device concept in semiconductor nanostructures based on quantum interference effects in multi-state systems doc9587 none Fuller Prof. Fuller proposes to continue his investigations on a wide range of problems involving neutrino physics, nuclear astrophysic sand cosmology. The PI has obtained seminal results which examine possible links between neutrino processes (masses, mixing and possible sterile neutrinos) and processes such as supernova explosions, r-process nucleosynthesis and big-bang nucleosynthesis. Current experiments suggest strongly that neutrinos have mass, and the PI s prior and proposed research has the potential to make fascinating new connections between these diverse areas of astrophysics and neutrino reactions doc9588 none The subject of this work is the dynamics of simple atomic systems subject to strong time-dependent perturbations, as in the classical quantum correspondence of highly excited atomic systems and in the interplay between strong external perturbations and internal electron-electron correlations. Projects are (1) the evolution of highly excited Rydberg atoms under the influence of ultrashort high intensity electric field pulses and (2) electron correlation and two-electron processes in quantum dots driven by terahertz pulses doc9589 none This proposal requests support for the research program in experimental particle physics of a Stanford University group whose primary goal is the elucidation of the source of CP violation through the study of the decay of mesons containing the bottom quark. The program will be carried out with the BaBar detector and PEP-II storage ring at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). Within the BaBar collaboration, this group has been responsible for all detector monitoring and control hardware for the Silicon Vertex Tracker (SVT), and for the SVT data acquisition software. In the period of this request, the group intends to maintain the SVT systems they designed, built and commissioned: a radiation monitoring and beam interlock system based on PIN diodes near the beam pipe, a position-monitoring system for the SVT and drift chamber, a temperature monitoring and power supply interlock system for the SVT readout electronics, and a gas and fluid monitoring system for the SVT. The PI recently completed a one-year term as Physics Analysis Coordinator (PAC), preceded by a term as Deputy PAC. During her term as PAC, the BaBar collaboration presented its first preliminary results on the CP-violating phase, b, the B lifetimes, the B0 B0-bar mixing rate, radiative Penguin decays, charmless hadronic B decays, and other analyses at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Osaka, Japan. The Stanford group contributed to various aspects of the lifetime, mixing, and CP analyses. The focus of this group will be on continued analysis of BaBar data, concentrating on B lifetimes and mixing, rare decays such as B+ - t+ nt and B+ - K+ n n-bar, and charm baryon physics doc9590 none In order to determine the number of employees, the job skills, and the educational preparation that the aquarium and marine interpretation industry needs in its workforce in the Pacific Northwest and nationally, and to plan a degree program that addresses this need, this project is conducting a comprehensive survey of the field, including aquariums, interpretive centers, fish and wildlife agencies, and aquaculture facilities. Based on the survey results, the project is developing outlines of potential academic programs that are of interest to the local and national industry and examining existing curricular materials to determine what materials can be adapted for this purpose and what new materials need to be developed doc9591 none This grant supports the participation of the Penn State University in the STAR experiment at Brookhaven, including a full time research associate, Akio Ogawa, at Brookhaven Lab. The principal interest of the Penn State group involves the study of proton spin structure with experiments using polarized proton beams at RHIC. The approved upgrades to the STAR detector for this physics include an EMC (Electro-Magnetic Calorimeter). As this system comes online, STAR will be capable of reconstructing the higher rate, higher transverse momentum interactions that are needed for polarized structure function measurements. The utilization of these new features for a meaningful measurement of proton spin structure presents a very large software challenge. Penn State is developing software that will be required to simulate, collect and analyzed these data from STAR. Some polarized proton running at RHIC is expected each year for the next several years and will likely be in increasingly important component of the STAR program. The central objective of these experiments will be the measurement of the contribution of gluon fields to the proton spin doc9592 none This proposal requests support for the research program of the high energy physics group at the University of California, San Diego to continue experimental investigations of heavy quark physics as part of the CLEO collaboration at the electron-positron colliding beam facility, CESR, located at Cornell University. One effort will focus on rare semi-leptonic B-meson decays involving the CKM matrix element Vub, a fundamental parameter of the Standard Model. Another UCSD effort involves mixing and CP violation in the D0 D0-bar system. In response to the recommendations of reviewers, the UCSD group will move its research program from CLEO at CESR to BaBar at PEP-II at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. The group is interested in rare semi-leptonic charged and neutral B-meson decays into non-charm mesons such as B p l nl . This process is sensitive to the CKM matrix element Vub. A small but gradually increasing effort will be directed toward the CMS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. UCSD is a part of the CMS collaboration and has taken responsibility for part of the Level-2 trigger and data acquisition. This work would be integrated with that of other physicists at UCSD doc9593 none When ultraviolet light or soft x-ray radiation is used to illuminate a gas, it is possible for light particles (photons) to be absorbed by atoms, resulting in the emission of electrons (photoelectrons). This process is termed photoionization. It can be used to probe the electron structure of atoms and the interactions among the various atomic electrons. Here the theory of these interactions will be investigated, especially for electrons lying deep within the atom. One problem to be studied is core relaxation, the rearrangement of the remaining electrons in the atom after the departure of the photoelectron. Another problem is core polarization, the change in the arrangement of the remaining electrons in the presence of the departing photoelectron doc9594 none The goal of this project is to demonstrate extremely efficient and highly linear microwave-to-optical conversion using new modulator design principles. The theoretical basis for this proposal was developed recently, while the planned experiments will build upon over a decade of research at Texas A&M in ferroelectric materials for guided wave optics. The proposed electrooptic modulators utilize a traveling wave (TW) Mach-Zehnder interferometer configuration. Integrated grating reflectors in each interferometer arm form an etalon which reduces the average optical propagation speed in the forward direction. The slow waveguide structures provide two features which lead to improved modulator performance over conventional fast TW designs: (1) optical microwave velocity matching in substrates with high electrooptic coefficients and dielectric constants, and (2) enhancement of electrooptic interaction strength due to the dwell time of the light in the modulation region. For devices fabricated in the conventional lithium niobate (LN) substrate material, these two factors lead to a potential improvement of an order of magnitude in electrical power dissipation over conventional velocity-matched designs. Additional orders-of-magnitude reduction in driving power is anticipated from the use of tungsten bronze substrates such as strontium barium niobate (SBN), which have much higher electrooptic coefficients than LN. Better response linearity in interferometric modulators is also possible using slow wave structures in both LN and SBN. Etalons with N equally spaced reflectors (N _ 3) which exhibit high transmittance over a wide spectral range have been designed for use in the slow-wave modulators. Since the transmittance of such a structure is periodic in optical frequency, a single modulator with appropriate reflector spacing could be used on any channel in a dense wavelength-division- multiplexed (WDM) communication system. Modulators designed to operate at a wavelength near 1.5 gm will be fabricated in LN and SBN substrates. Conventional lithography, etching, and diffusion techniques will be used to produce waveguide and electrode patterns. Corrugated gratings will be produced on the surface of the substrate by reactive ion etching or ion milling using a holographic phase mask with an argon laser as the light source to define the 0.35 gm-period patterns. Measured electrical power dissipation, pi-voltage (Va), and linearity of response will be compared with results reported for fast-wave devices in LNto bandwidths 10 GHz. These modulators are expected to find application in digital and analog fiber optic communication systems, where order-of-magnitude reductions in electrical power requirements would have a major impact on the size and cost of optical transmission equipment. Furthermore, since the need for very thick (~ 15-30 ~tm) electrodes is eliminated, the cost of the integrated optic chip can be reduced considerably. Analog fiber optic links operating in the GIfl regime would also benefit from enhanced dynamic range, which presently is limited by the maximum drive power available from microwave amplifiers and the linearity of response of integrated optic modulators doc9595 none The primary activity of the Northern Illinois University (NIU) experimental elementary particle physics research program is the exploration of the sub-microscopic world with the DZERO detector. The detector, constructed and operated by a 500-member international collaboration and located at the Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory, is a large, general-purpose device designed to observe and study proton-antiproton collisions produced at the Tevatron. The Tevatron is the world s highest energy accelerator. Presently the group is involved in preparation for the second 5-year data collection period of DZERO, and has responsibility for the construction and operation of a muon particle detector, muon triggering, and muon reconstruction software. The group also has overall responsibility for the full DZERO triggering and data acquisition systems. The NIU group will focus on continued searches for new forms of matter, such as the Higgs particle, which is thought to give mass to all other particles, and supersymmetry, which postulates heavy partners to all already discovered particles. Over the past decades advances in particle physics have resulted in the construction and confirmation of the Standard Model which describes in great detail and accuracy the interactions of the fundamental particles. The theory is incomplete and there are hints that new forces and particles are required to fully describe the microscopic world. In particular the numbers of particles and the origins of their mass are great mysteries. The second run of the DZERO detector will offer an opportunity to discover the mechanism that lends mass to particles and an over-arching theory that unifies the description of the microscopic world. This run will exploit the improvements to Fermilab s accelerator complex which have recently been completed, allowing significantly more sensitive searches to be made. At a more immediate level, over the past decade the ongoing NIU particle physics program has offered research experiences to more than 100 undergraduates and Master s students. These graduates have accepted employment with technological firms, the financial industry, governmental agencies, and academic institutions. A great number of the students have become high school physics instructors. The NSF sponsored program will continue to offer opportunities and support to these students as well as PhD students admitted into the new NIU physics doctoral program doc9596 none The dynamics of the relativistic two-body problem will be studied in the limit where one of the bodies is very much more massive than the other. The extreme mass ratio is amenable to analytic treatment, and can be used to describe a neutron star or similar object interacting with a super-massive galactic black hole. The primary questions to be addressed concern the dynamical stability of the orbits and the transition from inspiral to plunge. This should shed light on our ability to extract information from the gravitational waves emitted during the final stages of the orbital evolution. A variety of new and existing techniques will be developed and applied. The evolution of two masses under their mutual gravitational attraction is a major outstanding problem in classical general relativity. It has a direct bearing on the observational program of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO). The possibly that the orbital evolution is effectively chaotic has a number of interesting theoretical and observational consequences doc9597 none The main thrust of this project is to continue recent advances in atomic experiments designed to find and measure violations of parity and time-reversal symmetries. A major effort is the search for a permanent atomic electric dipole moment (EDM), which can exist only if time-reversal symmetry is violated. This will be done with a mercury EDM experiment, which has reached such a level of sensitivity that it is now possible to make an exacting test of low energy supersymmetry and other models in which T-violation would occur naturally. At the same time, an experiment with optically cooled and trapped diamagnetic atoms, chiefly ytterbium and radium, will be used to explore a possible new realm of EDM sensitivity. Other related efforts include parity nonconservation (PNC) experiments in thallium and the development of a new PNC experiment with a singly ionized barium ion doc9598 none This is the first year funding of a three year continuing award. This project will afford people agile views - effortless control over different representations - for digital video objects, by providing a multiplicity of indexes that are attuned to people s experiences, leverage the features of the content, and are easily and rapidly used and changed. The PI will specify such an interface, create prototype instantiations, and develop and apply procedures for testing the usability of the prototypes and specifications. Most research on digital video systems focuses on the retrieval of specific objects and on one or a few indexing attributes. This project is unique in three ways. First, it aims to address tasks at the collection level as well as at the item level; thus, in addition to the retrieval task, it aims to help people understand a video collection s structure, what is and is not available, and what attributes might be useful for retrieval purposes. Second, it aims to provide people with a range of surrogates and to integrate these into an effective and efficient interface; it aims to create an environment that provides multiple surrogates at the collection level as well as at the individual item level, and to provide novel control mechanisms to manage these alternatives. Third, it aims to assess user performance on these different tasks using these surrogates; evaluating browsing behavior is a challenge in any medium, and this work will build upon tasks and metrics developed in previous studies to go beyond traditional metrics to address time-benefit tradeoff measures. For this project, the video objects will be drawn from the Open Video Repository. Surrogates such as key-frames (in slide shows, storyboards, and skims), audio extracts, and keywords will be used as the basic representa-tions for specific video segments, and will be user-manipulable through a variety of interaction mechanisms. Additional surrogates (such as two-dimensional layouts of metadata and coordinated metadata lists) for collections of videos will also be developed, and additional views, i.e., histories (reviews), peripheral views, and shared views, will also be investigated within the agile views environment. The usability of the agile views environment (its individual components and the completely-integrated interface) will be evaluated iteratively, concluding with assessments of user performance (object and action recognition, and video comprehension), tradeoffs associated with viewing compaction rates, and user satisfaction with the interface. These evaluation techniques will themselves contribute to research and development by providing metrics and techniques for assessing interactive browsing. The ultimate goal of this work is to provide an information-rich and interactive environment that enables people to go beyond their innate visual and audio abilities to browse video content and process large volumes of video information doc9599 none Research in theoretical phusics will focus on improving our understanding of elementary particles, their interactions, and their relevance to astrophysics and cosmology. Plausible extensions of today s very well confirmed standard model of the elementary particles will be constructed in order to resolve such outstanding questions as the contrasting and unexplained patterns of neutrino and quark masses, especially the underlying mechanisms producing these masses; the nature of the dark matter and dark energy that now dominate the dynamics of the universe; the origin of cosmic rays with energies beyond what was expected; the failure to detect any electric dipole moment of the neutron and the apparent departure of the recently-observed magnetic moment of the muon from its predicted value doc9600 none This award will provide support for several experimental research activities based at Jefferson Laboratory in Newport News, VA. These include: (1) a measurement of the neutral pion lifetime, which will provide a quantitative test of predictions of quantum chromodynamics; (2) tests of so-called parton-hadron duality in inelastic electron scattering from the proton; (3) electromagnetic production of strange particles and hypernuclei. These efforts will involve strong participation by students and postdoctoral researchers from under-represented groups doc9601 none Lipson This grant, jointly funded by the Materials Theory Program in DMR and the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program in CHE, is targeted at understanding the correlation between microscopic structure and macroscopic behavior for fluids and their mixtures. The research tools are theoretical, but a major thrust of the research is to make connections and comparisons with experimental data both for small-molecule and polymeric fluids. In addition, a real opportunity afforded by this work is the ability to compare the results for the lattice and continuum models using the same theoretical approach. The behavior of complex fluids has been of high interest in recent years, stimulated by the increasingly sophisticated kinds of measurements accessible to researchers. In addition, the ability to simulate mixtures of dense fluids has expanded dramatically within the last decade. Thus, more data capable of testing statistical mechanical theories are appearing, particularly for complex liquid mixtures. The research here involves the Born-Green-Yvon (BGY) integral equation technique. Using the BGY formalism, descriptions of lattice and continuum systems have been derived, and comparisons between the results using the two have been initiated. The lattice theory yields closed-form expressions for thermodynamic quantities of interest. The advantages of lattice theory include its accessibility to non-theorists, and the ability to test it using lattice simulation results on relatively complex fluids and mixtures, which are more plentiful than continuum simulation data. The continuum theory is capable of tackling more subtle issues involving the interplay between local structure and bulk properties. However, continuum solutions involve numerical methods, and simulation data on mixtures are not yet plentiful. As indicated above, the development of analogous lattice and continuum theories yields the possibility of determining what kinds of equilibrium properties are expected to be sensitive to the imposition of a lattice constraint. In the current grant, the lattice studies will focus on developing an understanding of polymer solutions and blends, building on the demonstrated ability of the lattice BGY theory to describe simple alkane fluids and mixtures and hydrocarbon polymer solutions and blends. This work will involve analysis of data, including (new to this effort) small angle neutron scattering results, in order to obtain the characteristic microscopic parameters. Having determined what minimum data set is required to characterize a system, the goal is to predict less accessible properties, such as the pressure dependence of the coexistence curve. Such information is important, for example in deciding on processing conditions. The BGY theory is also capable of probing the effects of structural and energetic differences on miscibility in an effort to understand at a more sophisticated level the balance between the two. On the continuum side, recent research by this group has shown that the BGY theory is effective in describing such phenomena as chain collapse and the contraction of a hard-sphere chain in a hard-sphere solvent. The research will focus on dense fluids and mixtures which interact via a square-well potential. This potential is of interest because it is simple, yet capable of capturing the essential physics of real fluids. This potential has been used in making the first lattice-continuum comparisons, finding (among other things) that the scaling relationship between chain dimensions and chain length exhibits universal behavior. Future work will test the ability of a square-well fluid to serve as a model for alkanes, allowing a comparison with BGY lattice studies on n-alkanes. This connection between lattice and continuum will enable a meta study on n-alkanes, involving both theories as well as simulation and experimental data. A major question is whether analogous results may be obtained using lattice and continuum BGY theories and, if so, what level of sophistication is required. Another issue is whether it is desirable to leave the theoretical development at different stages in the lattice and continuum, sacrificing subtlety for ease of use on the lattice, and accessibility for the ability to describe more complex systems in the continuum. %%% This grant, jointly funded by the Materials Theory Program in DMR and the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program in CHE, is targeted at understanding the correlation between microscopic structure and macroscopic behavior for fluids and their mixtures. The research tools are theoretical, but a major thrust of the research is to make connections and comparisons with experimental data both for small-molecule and polymeric fluids. In addition, a real opportunity afforded by this work is the ability to compare the results for the lattice and continuum models using the same theoretical approach doc9602 none This Collaborative Research project is to develop an understanding of the processing of thermotropic liquid crystalline polymers (TLCPs) so that the current barriers to widespread applications are lowered. This will be accomplished through a coordinated study of melt stability, flow behavior, and structure properties of TLCPs. An array of sophisticated characterization methods will be applied to monitor the thermal stability of the melt at high temperature, and x-ray scattering methods to study the development and fate of molecular orientation (directly related to mechanical properties of TLCPs) in both simple flows and complex flows of relevance to processing. These methods have been productively applied to model TLCPs of purely scientific interest in recent years, but this project affords the first opportunity for a comprehensive study of a technologically relevant material using these techniques. To relate such fundamental information to product properties, channel flow plaques will be molded under protocols guided by the x-ray results, and their morphologies and physical properties studied. These materials are used commercially in applications requiring excellent processibility, mold-filling precision, physical properties, dimensional stability, and thermal stability. Despite considerable promise, TLCPs have yet to be broadly applied in numerous applications where their potential as high strength low weight materials might be realized. Contributing factors include thermal stability limitations at high temperatures in the melt during processing, systematically weak directions in moldings, and the high cost of commercially available TLCPs. This work will feature a TLCP material that offers potential for dramatic price reductions (approximately $3 lb), thereby directly addressing the central issue of cost. The collaboration between Northwestern University and MMI provides a venue for graduate and undergraduate students to gain experience in state-of-the art characterization tools and thermal analysis doc9603 none The goal of the present proposal is to search for new physics at the deepest subnuclear level in order to improve our understanding of natural phenomena at the very highest energies as well as at the very early stages of the universe. We plan to employ both the ``bottom-up approach of supersymmetry and possible hidden extra dimensions in nature as well as the ``top down approach where all particles are replaced by wiggly strings to seek new physics that can explain present experimental observations related to neutrinos, dark matter and dark energy of the universe, origin of matter etc. The results of this study may not only broaden our understanding of the forces and matter in the universe but it may also provide a window to its future evolution doc9604 none The receptive parts of most neurons (nerve cells) in the brain are the branches called dendrites. These dendrites are covered with spiny structures, which are part of the functional contacts between nerve cells called synapses. These spines receive signals from the synaptic terminals of other neurons. Neurotransmitters are the biochemical compounds that carry a signal across the small gap between the pre- and the post-synaptic sides, and generate the electrochemical membrane response in the post-synaptic cell. Dendritic size, complexity, and accessibility, together with the hundreds or thousands of synaptic contacts on a single cell, make it technically difficult to study the local dynamic mechanisms underlying this synaptic signaling at this microscopic scale. It is very difficult to elicit a physiological multi-site stimulation pattern and to perform multi-site recordings of the membrane potential, especially to measure local synaptic potentials concurrently at different sites in the same cell. This project uses novel optical methods in addition to the powerful patch-clamp electronic technique for whole-cell physiological recordings. An optical workstation has been developed that uses a pulsed ultraviolet (UV) laser beam with a novel acoustico-optic control for microsecond timing of the position of a spot in the micrometer size range, in connection with a biochemical compound that acts as a cage around neurotransmitter molecules to keep them invisible for their receptors. When caged molecules are hit with the laser beam, the light energy immediately breaks the cage (photolysis) and free transmitter can act on the synapse. High-resolution differential-interference-contrast (DIC) microscopy of neurons in culture, with the pulsed random-access laser-scanning photolysis, and a new technique of laser-scanning fluorescence microscopy of voltage-sensitive dye bound to the cell membranes are combined to allow a new level of computer-controlled, non-invasive, high-resolution stimulation and recording. This powerful technology is used to examine the functional role of dendritic structural details, to characterize spatio-temporal interactions among dendritic synapses, the computational functions that can be assigned to dendrites in integrating signals, and the effects of prior activity on dendritic behavior. Results will be important for understanding the fundamental role of dendrites for cellular information processing, and for refining computational compartmental models of nerve cells. The impact of the technology also will extend beyond cellular neuroscience to cellular biology. In addition, exceptional cross-disciplinary opportunities will be provided for postdoctoral and graduate training doc9605 none Research in theoretical elementary particle physics will focus on M Superstring Theory and related supergravity theories. The M Superstring Theory provides us with the only known consistent framework for reconciling quantum mechanics with Einstein s theory of gravity and is a very important, promising candidate for a successful unified theory of all the forces of nature.The underlying fundamental symmetries of M Superstring Theory will be investigated and these symmetries will be used to study the consequences of the theory such as the elementary particles that the theory predicts. Mathematical techniques that are essential for carrying out this program will be developed further. At certain low energy regimes, M Superstring Theory can be effectively described by supergravity theories, which will also be studied doc9606 none Pang, Jong-Shi From: Jaksa Cvitanic [cvitanic@math.usc.edu] Sent: Monday, July 02, 4:33 AM To: Pang, Jong-Shi Subject: Re: your mail Dear Dr. Pang, I enclose here the abstract for my proposal. Let me know , please, if it s O.K. Sincerely, Jaksa Cvitanic ------ Principal Investigator: JAKSA CVITANIC Research is proposed on various aspects of the modern theory of financial markets and related mathematical problems of stochastic analysis, filtering and control. Issues that will be studied involve: (i) finding algorithms to compute the diffusion term of the optimal wealth hedging process, and related questions about Martingale Representation Property and Malliavin Calculus; (ii) questions on maximizing Stochastic Differential Utility and connections to Forward-Backward Stochastic Differential Equations and problems of incomplete asymmetric information; (iii) analytical and numerical methods for finding optimal portfolio consumption investment for retirement, in general diffusion models; (iv) theory of utility maximization risk minimization in general semimartingale models of markets with frictions; (v) filtering and calibration of stochastic volatility models; (vi) optimal design of executive compensation. It is expected that tools from stochastic analysis and martingale theory, convex duality theory, functional analysis, stochastic control, Monte Carlo simulation methods, will prove valuable in the resolution of these questions, sometimes requiring development of new tools, thus enhancing the understanding of both the theoretical and applied aspects of these fields. The optimal portfolio selection and consumption selection is the theory that provides answers to the question of how to allocate money between investing in different assets in financial markets, and consuming it in order to buy various goods. The theory has been developed in almost full generality by now. However, it depends on a mathematical model of the markets, and our ability to estimate the model parameters. For example, correct pricing of complex financial contracts, such as exotic options, depends on how well we can estimate the volatility (riskiness) of the stock on which the option is written. One of the problems we propose to study is how to do this estimation by using observed stock prices. Similarly, the problem of actually computing the corresponding optimal trading strategies has not been resolved in general. The algorithms that are commonly used today typically do not work well in more complex and realistic models for financial markets, that are becoming a standard, due to the increased sophistication of market modelers. Thus, it is important to explore new analytical and computational methods for finding optimal trading strategies, some of which are suggested in this proposal. Similar methods are suggested for exploring important problem of how a firm should compensate its executive so that the resulting behavior of the executive is optimal doc9607 none IN this project the investigator will study computability theory and its relationship and applications to other areas of mathematics such as differential geometry and algebraic structures, as well as internal computability properties such as automorphisms of computably enumerable (c.e.) sets and the effective content of mathematics. The space Riem(M) of Riemannian metrics (modulo diffeomorphisms) on certain manifolds is of considerable interest to a wide variety of mathematicians and physicists. Topologists have proved for certain natural scale invariant functionals related to diameter on the space Riem(M), and for certain manifolds M of dimension 4 that for every c.e. set A there is a sequence of points x_n, n in N, the integers, such that if n in A then x_n determines a local minimum on Riem(M) whose depth is roughly equal to the halting time of the Turing machine computation that n in A. The investigator constructed an infinite sequence of sets A_i, i in N, of c.e. sets so that for all n the settling function (for stopping times of the associated Turing machine) of A_i dominates that of A_{i+1}, even when the latter is composed with an arbitrary computable function. The two results together give a fractal like behavior with extremely big basins, and very much smaller basins coming off them, and those containing still smaller basins, and so on, where the relative size of one set of basins to the next exceeds any computable function, what the topologists describe in their paper on fractals as the astonishing richness of the space of Riemannian metrics on a smooth manifold, up to reparametrization. The investigator s work will also stress connections of computability to model theory and algebraic structures. With a junior colleague and a graduate student he will classify the degree spectrum of models which are prime or saturated but which have no computable isomorphic copy. Finally, he will continue his work on the automorphisms and structure of c.e. sets. He will put together these results to help obtain a classification of structure of c.e. sets and effective content of certain parts of mathematics doc9608 none This research grant supports a program of electromagnetic and weak current experiments to probe the flavor content and spin structure of protons and neutrons (nucleons). At present, these properties of the nucleon cannot be precisely predicted using quantum chromodynamics, the accepted fundamental theory of the strong interaction, and so experiment must lead the way. A series of parity-violating electron scattering experiments at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab) will enable us to determine the strange quark sea contribution to the nucleon ground state. These experiments include a measurement in Hall A of the parity-violating asymmetry in scattering from the proton at low momentum transfer, and measurements of the asymmetry in scattering from 4He and 208Pb. The G0 parity-violation experiment in Hall C is moving from the design and construction stage to the commissioning and data-taking stage. This experiment will definitively map out the strange quark vector form factors for the nucleon as a function of momentum transfer. A measurement of the asymmetry for the N to Delta( ) transition will be made simultaneously, and planned measurements on deuterium will probe the axial form factor. A new initiative is under development to use a modified version of the G0 spectrometer to perform a parity-violation electron scattering experiment at very low momentum transfer, in order to make a sensitive search for physics beyond the standard model. A series of polarized electron scattering experiments at Jefferson Lab are dedicated to elucidating the spin structure of the nucleon using polarized 3He targets. This program is well underway, three experiments using these targets will take place in the next year at Jefferson Lab, and a 3He target cell lab at William and Mary supports this program doc9609 none This proposal addresses research in LIGO data analysis leading to gravitational wave astronomy. In particular, methods for removing instrumental noise from the LIGO data stream, preparatory to its analysis will be developed. This work, called data conditioning , is critical to the success of the LIGO since the gravitational wave signals are expected to be weak and would most likely be totally masked by instrumental noise. Several methods are proposed for conditioning LIGO data including the use of artificial intelligence tools for time-ordered data. In addition, LIGO data will be analysed to 1. set upper limits on the gravitational wave strength from known pulsars, 2. search for unanticipated sources of gravitational waves, 3. combine data from the three LIGO detectors synthesized to perform as a single detector. On technique for identifying gravitational wave signals in the data stream invloves the use of filters designed to pick out a signal with specific characteristics. Several innovative methods are proposed for the development of non-linear filters in the presence of non-Gaussian noise, involving the use of techniques to determine the most appropriate likelihood function for use when non-normal moments of the data distribution are known doc9610 none The overall objective of this project is to investigate, theoretically and experimentally, nonlinear propagation of ultrashort light pulses under conditions in which soliton formation occurs. Multi-dimensional solitons will be studied in materials with quadratic nonlinearities and in nonlinear media with periodic structures. These materials and structures will be chosen and developed to create environments that support solitons. A specific overall goal is to generate stable three-dimensional spatio-temporal solitons - so-called light bullets. The proposed work should have important implications for all-optical information processing as well as for scientific applications that involve the interaction of intense light fields with matter doc9611 none This project is to conduct a theoretical and experimental research program on chatter in the rolling of flat products. The theoretical research will include the development of dynamic models of mill structures and of the rolling process, coupling these models to create a comprehensive model for chatter in tandem rolling mills. The research places particular emphasis on the phenomena that are known to have a profound influence on tandem mill stability where only a few theoretical results are available. These process dependent phenomena include the effect of multi-modal three dimensional mill vibrations introducing variations in roll-bite geometry; fifth-octave-mode chatter leading to roll grinding chatter marks and banding due to debris pickup that can cause variations in roll geometry and friction; and the consequences of strip transverse vibrations and dynamic friction effects upon the entry angle of the strip. The developed structural and rolling process dynamics models will be combined into an all-encompassing chatter model to ascertain mill stability with respect to negative process damping, strip and roll regeneration, torsional oscillations, and other composite mechanisms in single and multi-stand mills. Experiments will be conducted on unique, full instrument, laboratory-scale mill in combination with data measured on actual production-scale mills in industry. This will assist the development and validation of the theoretical models. Validation on steel and aluminum industry mill stands will be performed. The research is expected to result in better methods for mill and process design and to lay the groundwork for more intelligent mill control systems for the processing of sheet metal doc9612 none Theoretical research is being carried out in two areas related to gravitational waves and their detection. The first area is the invention of new techniques and technology for advanced laser-interferometer gravitational-wave detectors. These advanced detectors will entail measuring the motions of 40 kilogram sapphire-crystal mirrors with an accuracy so high that the mirrors are governed by the laws of quantum mechanics and not the laws of classical physics. The new techniques and technology entail, among other things, new configurations of mirrors and laser beams designed to deal with quantum effects that are absent in current gravitational-wave detectors, changes in how the laser light is manipulated after it leaves the interferometer, and a reshaping of the cross sections of the interferometer s light beams. The second area of research is the theoretical modeling of astrophysical sources of gravitational waves with the goal of predicting the sources dynamical behaviors and the details of the waves they emit. Among the sources being modeled are oscillations of rapidly spinning, newborn neutron stars, the spins of neutron stars that are accreting gas from companion stars (``Low-Mass X-Ray Binaries ), the late, highly relativistic phase of inspiral of black-hole black-hole and black-hole neutron-star binaries, collisions of black holes, and the tearing apart of a neutron star by a black hole. The research on new techniques and technology for gravitational-wave detectors is a key underpinning for the advanced detectors that are being proposed for construction in LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) beginning in , and for even more advanced detectors in the subsequent decade. This research makes use of, and contributes to, human knowledge in the area of quantum information theory --- a new, 21st century discipline that also includes quantum computation. This research is likely to have much impact on areas of technology that---in the coming two or three decades---will confront quantum limits on the accuracy of measurement and will try to evade them via ``quantum nondemolition (QND) techniques. These areas of technology include quantum optics and nanotechnology. The research on sources of gravitational waves will provide key underpinnings for analyses of the gravitational-wave data to be produced by LIGO: It will improve the ability to find gravitational-wave signals in the noisy LIGO data, and it will provide tools for extracting astrophysical information from the discovered signals. Thus, this research will play a key role in future gravitational-wave-based studies of black holes, neutron stars, and their oscillations and collisions doc9613 none Entanglement at the quantum level and chaos at the classical level are defining features of nonlinear systems with multiple degrees of freedom. They will be studied in the real physical setting of the dynamics of ultracold atoms trapped in magneto-optical double-well potentials, examining quantum control, in connection with experiments of Jessen. Another central objective is to study the nature of the transition from regular quantum dynamics to chaotic classical dynamics doc9614 none Sham The aim of this theoretical research is to contribute to the construction of fundamental devices in quantum information processing and computation, and in spin-enhanced optoelectronics. The research is planned on the theory of the basic physical processes involved in the realization of the quantum algorithms by means of laser manipulation of electrons and their spin degress of freedom in semiconductor nanostructures. A photon in the laser beam can excite an electron in a semiconductor nano-dot into a state known as an exciton. The circular polarization of the light can also give the exciton a specific spin. Here, the spin-polarized exciton is selected as the phsyical representation of the fundamental unit of quantum information, the qubit. Optical control of a single exciton addresses the qubit and optical control of two interacting excitons yields the operation of a quantum logic device. The research consists of (1) a computation of the energy structures of the multiexciton states; (2) a theory of the nonlinear optical spectra of the quantum dot under intense laser excitation as a diagnostic tool for the conditions of operations; (3) design of the optical processes for the operations of the basic devices; (4) a study of the environmental degradation of the quantum nature of the exciton (decoherence); and (5) test of the design by numerical simulations of the time series of operations to accomplish simple versions of key quantum algorithms. %%% The aim of this theoretical research is to contribute to the construction of fundamental devices in quantum information processing and computation, and in spin-enhanced optoelectronics. The research is planned on the theory of the basic physical processes involved in the realization of the quantum algorithms by means of laser manipulation of electrons and their spin degress of freedom in semiconductor nanostructures doc9615 none We propose here a joint University of Houston - Max Planck Institute (MPI-Stuttgart) program on the diffuse scattering of X-rays and neutrons from disordered alloys. There are three projects involved: a) The determination of detailed local and long-range static atomic displacements in a dilute random Ge(0.08)Si(0.92) alloy crystal using anomalous X-ray scattering at the ESRF in Grenoble, along with high energy-resolution X-ray or neutron measurements of the optic modes and in-band resonant modes; b) The use of a null matrix 62Ni(0.52)Pt(0.48) crystal (62Ni, which has a negative scattering length, will be supplied by the MPI) to eliminate all Bragg, thermal diffuse and Huang scattering in order to evaluate both the local order and local atomic displacements for comparison with theoretical models for this alloy. A normal Ni-Pt crystal will also be used to assess the phonon dispersion curves and Huang scattering. Companion theoretical work on the elastic and electronic interactions will be performed in collaboration with our MPI colleagues; c) Continuation of theoretical work to understand defect influences on phase transitions, in this case the X-ray observation of the conversion of a bulk first-order transition in V2H to a tricritical transition in a defective (dislocation-dominated) skin layer. Students will participate in this research. In this program of work we continue our studies of the detailed local structure of alloys - both semiconducting and metallic - through the application of diffuse (i.e. non-Bragg) X-ray and neutron scattering. The underlying physics of alloys depends on the precise nature of the interatomic interactions, both electronic and elastic. These interactions may be directly probed through a combination of scattering data and theoretical modeling, either via simulation or from first principles. The essential issues are the size of an atom, i.e. charge transfer, and the way in which the basic electronic structure is manifested in local order, alloy stability and, ultimately, in the prediction of phase diagrams. Statistical mechanics lies at the heart of these problems, as does the influence of defects, such as dislocations, on phase stability and phase transitions. Our scattering program, combined with theoretical modeling, will address these issues in a comprehensive way using synchrotron X-rays and reactor-based neutrons. This research will be conducted with students who will receive training in one of the contemporary forefront areas of condensed matter physics. Through this they will be prepared to enter the scientific technological workforce of the next few decades doc9616 none This continuing project on quantum fluctuations in the radiation field will study the initiation of directed collective spontaneous emission from excited two-state atoms, conditional homodyne detection, and non-Gaussian fluctuations of nonlinear and noisy quantum systems, as realized in cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED). It will include an international collaboration with Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, involving short term exchange visits for graduate students and postdocs doc9617 none This research will support efforts by the University of Utah Gamma Ray Astronomy Group in observational investigations of high energy astrophysical phenomena using the Whipple and VERITAS ground based telescopes. Both of these instruments use the Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov imaging Telescope (IACT) technique to record the faint flashes of optical light emitted by gamma rays as they interact with the Earth s atmosphere. The University of Utah will participate in the operation and analysis of data from the existing Whipple observatory, as well as participate in the design, construction, operation, and analysis of the new VERITAS observatory, supported by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Smithsonian Institution as well as by international agencies in England, Ireland, and Canada. The success of the IACT technique has led to the founding of a new field of astrophysics: Very High Energy (VHE) gamma ray astronomy, which has provided numerous contributions to many fields of astrophysics and fundamental physics. Discovery of gamma-ray emission from super massive black holes in nearby galaxies has led to new understanding of the energetic processes occurring in these objects, and have also allowed study of infra-red radiation fields generated by galaxy formation in the early universe. The unknown origin of Galactic cosmic rays may be directly probed to their source through gamma ray emission at their source objects such supernova remnants. The nature of our three-dimensional space and time and the possible presence of additional dimensions may also be studied using VHE gamma rays. This research will support observational activities with VERITAS and Whipple, with an emphasis on these studying extragalactic infrared radiation fields, searching for the missing `dark matter in our Galaxy, searching for evidence of extra dimensions associated with quantum gravity, and exploring new techniques for high-resolution observations of nuclear cosmic rays. The University of Utah Gamma Ray Group will design and construct the calibration, Level 1 trigger, and Cables Connectors systems for the VERITAS Observatory. The University of Utah plays a major role in the simulation and analysis efforts associated with the VERITAS and Whipple science goals. Utah will develop detailed simulations of Whipple and VERITAS detector response, and use these simulations to optimize observing strategies, electronic triggering configurations, and analysis procedures. The Utah gamma ray Group will also provide these simulations to the Whipple VERITAS collaboration for use in scientific analysis of the VHE gamma ray observations. The University of Utah Gamma Ray group will participate in Educational Outreach programs at the community, University, and State National levels. This support will continue these existing activities and enhance them through development of the University of Utah as an educational outreach node associated with an Education Public Outreach Initiative under development for VERITAS doc9618 none This research program focuses on quantum control of atomic motion in optical lattices, extended arrays of micron-sized traps formed by the AC Stark shift in laser standing waves. Research will concentrate on two related problems: (1) the study of quantum dynamics and the quantum to classical transition for atomic spinor wavepackets in magneto-optical double wells and (II) quantum feedback control in this same system, with the objective of creating specific quantum states or enforcing a desired quantum evolution doc9619 none A series of experimental investigations of light scattering will be undertaken. At lower atomic density, or larger detunings from atomic resonance, the polarization and frequency dependence of the scattering cross section will be used to extract data on the dipole transition matrix elements for transitions out of the ground and excited levels of the atoms. Transition matrix elements measured in this way serve as benchmarks for sophisticated atomic structure calculations, and they provide data useful to interpretation of atomic parity violation experiments. At high atomic density, multiple light scattering dominates, and the scattering is macroscopically strong. Investigation of these multiple scattering effects also forms part of the project doc9620 none It is intended to study quantum effects in basic plasma processes (as occur in stellar interiors), and their consequences for plasma reaction rates and equations of state, with applications in stellar evolution (including the solar neutrino problem) and in the early universe (its energy density). The studies will utilize the novel multiparticle quantum code recently developed at UCLA, which is designed to handle hundreds of quantum particles doc9621 none Multi-electron process in slow highly charged ion-atom and ion-molecule collisions will be investigated by means of time-of-flight coincidence measurements of Auger electrons, scattered projectiles and target recoil ions or fragments. In addition to the Auger electron energies, final projectile and recoil ion or fragment charge states, the measurements will simultaneously provide the Q-values or the kinetic energy release distributions and angular distribution information by means of recoil ion momentum spectroscopy. The experiments will be carried out at the multi-charged ion research facility at the University of Nevada, Reno doc9622 none This project will develop industry purchasing power parity (PPP) for research and development (R&D) at the detailed sector level for several OECD countries. Development of PPPs for the service sector will also be explored. The construction of the R&D PPPs will utilize national source data coupled with follow-up interviews with R&D firms to validate and improve the results. These PPPs will be used with newly created PPPs at the industrial sector output level to construct metrics of effort, efficiency, and competitiveness doc9623 none The proposed work addresses a computational model for periodic pattern perception based on the mathematical theory of crystallographic groups. The model to be built will have a capability of isolating underlying periodic patterns in images. Results of the work are likely to enrich methods of image processing of symmetric structures. Other applications include pattern indexing (textile, psychology), image reproduction compression, gait analysis, among others doc9624 none The principal goal of this proposed work is to develop proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) as a viable complementary alternative to conventional experimental modal analysis for vibration systems. Proper orthogonal decomposition has been used for obtaining energy modes, as opposed to normal modes, from sensed system outputs. Proper orthogonal decomposition can indeed yield normal modes in lightly damped systems if the mass distribution is known. This research aims to overcome the requirement of a known mass distribution, estimate modal frequencies and damping factors and associate them with the correct mode, expand the applicability to arbitrary excitations, and compare the performance of POD with classical experimental modal analysis. Auxiliary objectives are the extension from 1-D distributed-parameter systems to 2-D systems, and the application of POD to multi-modal nonlinear responses. The research approach will involve theoretical analyses, numerical simulations, and experiments. Simulations and experiments will be used to test theoretical developments on simple systems with analytical solutions, and also on systems with complicated geometries. If POD were sufficiently developed, it would significantly enhance our ability to extract vibration parameters as a complement to traditional modal analysis. Experimental vibration facilities are globally prevalent, geared for industrial problems of noise, performance, and safety. Even if POD were used in a fraction of such laboratories, the total POD activity would be quite large. It will be particularly advantageous to systems for which sensed inputs are not available. The project is geared for a doctoral student s research program. The project will also involve an undergraduate researcher for applying POD and conventional modal analysis on experimental systems doc9625 none A(n ordinary) proper coloring of a (hyper)graph is an assignment of colors to the vertices of this hypergraph in such a way that no edge becomes monochromatic. The chromatic number of a hypergraph is the minimum number of colors used in a proper coloring. Finding proper colorings using only few colors can be useful in many applications. The assignment of colors can model resource allocation; the edges represent conflicts in usage of resources. Areas of application include scheduling, database access, assignment of computer registers, data clustering, computer aided design of printed circuits, positional games, DNA sequencing, etc. The more general model of list coloring allows to restrict the colors available for each vertex. Each vertex is assigned a list of available colors. The color for each vertex must be chosen from its list, but the constraints imposed by edges must still be satisfied by the chosen coloring. List coloring can be used to model problems such as extension of colorings of subgraphs. The list chromatic number of the hypergraph is the minimum k such that whenever all lists have size at least k, it is possible to choose a proper coloring from the assigned lists. A proper coloring with k colors can be considered as a list coloring with all the lists of vertices being the same (of size k). Thus, the list chromatic number of a hypergraph always is at least the chromatic number. Although one might think that the most difficult case of list coloring is when all the lists are the same (giving more conflicts for colors), this is not always the case. Vizing and Erdos, Rubin, and Taylor gave examples of 2 colorable graphs with arbitrarily large list chromatic number. On the other hand, in some classes of (hyper)graphs the list chromatic number behaves similarly to the (ordinary) chromatic number. The main thrust of this project is to explore the analogs for list coloring of many results about ordinary coloring. The issue is under what conditions there are similar bounds for related list coloring and coloring problems. Upper bounds on coloring parameters can lead to efficient algorithms; lower bounds impose limits on what can be accomplished. One question is when the list chromatic number actually equals the chromatic number. Another is how many edges are needed to form a (hyper)graph with a given chromatic number, subject to various additional conditions; here a list coloring analogue will also be explored. For classes of graphs obtained using intersections of geometric objects of special types, bounds on (list) chromatic number in terms of the maximum number of pairwise adjacent vertices are sought. Many coloring problems have analogs using lists, and this project will begin the exploration of many of these list coloring problems. For example, many generalized coloring parameters have bounded values on important classes of graphs such as the planar graphs (those that embed in the plane without edge crossings). Do such colorings still exist when the vertices are assigned color lists of bounded size? Most of the work is planned to be done jointly with Douglas B. West (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign doc9626 none We propose to investigate three fundamental problems arising in Analysis on Carnot-Caratheodory spaces. The first question is from geometric measure theory. It is related to Cacciopoli sets and their characteristic locus with applications to minimal surfaces. The second problem is from non-linear potential theory and sub-elliptic PDE related to sharp capacity estimates. The third question concerns the integrability and Hausdorff dimension distortion of quasiconformal mappings in Carnot-Caratheodory spaces. The fundamental difficulty in this theory lies in the fact that in Carnot-Caratheodory spaces we can only work with a restricted number of differential operators (corresponding to admissible directions) while in Euclidean analysis all possible directions were allowed. The underlying geometry has a fractal-like character illustrating well the complexity and the need of new ideas for approaching the above problems. Due to their construction by mechanical linkages, robot motions have to satisfy infinitesimal constrains of admissible directions. Similar differential constrains appear in thermodynamics between the characteristic quantities (temperature, pressure, volume, entropy and energy) describing the stage of an ideal gas. The right mathematical context for studying these and related phenomena from engineering and physics is the setting of Carnot-Caratheodory spaces. The present proposal intends to develop the adequate tools of Analysis for approaching various practical questions in this context doc9627 none The investigator will work on further development and applications of his powerful geometric machinery of graded diagrams which was created to solve the famous Burnside problem (posed in ) on periodic groups of sufficiently large even exponents. In particular, he will extend the framework of the main induction construction of this machinery to obtain more results on groups whose defining relators are nth powers. In addition, he will work on a generalized version of the Hanna Neumann conjecture on subgroups of free groups and long-standing Stallings problem on presentations of the trivial group. This research is in combinatorial group theory which studies groups defined by means of generators and defining relators and is at the intersection of the theory of groups with low dimensional topology, geometry, and mathematical logic. The theory of groups is a mathematical theory of symmetry which interacts with many other disciplines, for example, physics and chemistry outside of mathematics, coding theory, number theory, topology and geometry inside mathematics doc9628 none It is intended to extend present understanding of how to achieve overlap of oppositely signed plasma species within nested Penning traps. (Penning traps are a plasma confinement approach which employs an applied electric field to provide charged particle confinement along an applied magnetic field.) The emphasis is on how to overlap positron and antiproton plasmas so that recombination takes place and trapping of antihydrogen atoms is possible doc9629 none This grant provides support for young investigators to attend the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) Summer Research Conference on Biological Methylation to be held on July 21-26, , in Saxton River, VT. This conference is the fifth in a series of biennial conferences that began in , under the auspices of the FASEB. These conferences were organized in response to the need for a conference with a focus on S-adenosylmethionine (AdoMet), the methyl donor for most biological methylation reactions, and the various AdoMet-dependent transmethylation reactions in cells. Approximately half of the meeting s sessions will be focused on the methylation of DNA, as DNA methylation has been shown to play important roles in the regulation of gene expression, imprinting and tumorigenesis. Other topics to be discussed at the meeting include the AdoMet and human health, various protein methylation reactions involved in aging and gene expression, and small molecule methylation reactions important in chemotherapy. This Conference provides a unique opportunity for scientists interested in various aspects of AdoMet methylation and AdoMet metabolism to interact, which is not achieved at any other conference. Consequently, this meeting has traditionally provided the starting point for productive collaborations. The expertise of attendees varies widely, ranging from synthetic chemistry to molecular biology to physiology and medicine doc9630 none The proposer will work on Operator Theory problems, problems related to invariant subspaces and to stability. The proposer has developed a new technique to construct invariant subspaces by using different kinds of extremal vectors. This has, so far, led to new and unified constructions of invariant subspaces for large classes of operators, including operators commuting with compact or normal operators. It has also led to strengthenings of so called Two Sequences Theorems, which are connected to invariant subspaces. There are several directions to refine and improve this techniques and the proposer intends to do so. The study of stability under perturbations of cyclicity, supercyclicity or hypercyclicity is still in its beginning, both for operators and vectors. This is strongly connected to the study of which properties are carried by large resp. small classes of operators. The proposer intends to carry these studies further. The study of operators and their invariant subspaces can be seen as a generalization of linear algebra, where matrices and their eigenvectors are studied. Although these are problems in pure mathematics, they are closely connected to the many applications of linear algebra to Physics, Biology, Genetics, Economics and other sciences as well as to the applications in industry. Operators can be seen as infinite matrices and are a suitable tool for the study of large and complex systems depending on an unbounded number of parameters doc9631 none Singh This study will investigate the toughening of highly cross-linked thermosetting polymers by the incorporation of various nanoparticles. A direct fabrication technique will be used to independently control the reinforcement geometry (size, size distribution and morphology), reinforcement material, reinforcement volume fraction, and interfacial adhesion characteristics. The effects of these reinforcement parameters, on the fracture mechanisms, fracture toughness and material response, will be characterized by direct experimentation. Based on this fundamental characterization analytical numerical models will be developed to predict the overall material response and toughness. The education component of this investigation is targeted towards increased integration between undergraduate education and research with special emphasis on increasing the participation of under-represented minorities in engineering. Undergraduate students will be recruited to work on various tasks relevant to the research component. At the same time, specific research findings and projects will be introduced into undergraduate courses that focus on the behavior of materials. Also, students will make periodic visits to local high schools and setup in-house laboratory demonstrations. These activities will expose high school students to the excitement and challenges of innovative materials based on cutting-edge nanotechnology. Finally, results from the education and research activities will be published regularly on a dedicated web page, which will enable concurrent feedback and interaction unlike traditional paper-based publication doc9632 none The project focuses on a system for bringing enhanced tactile sensitivity and dexterity to supervised tele-manipulation. The proposed structure will utilize a combination of tactile, force, audio, and visual feedback channels between a human operator and a slave system consisting of a robot arm manipulator and a multi-fingered hand. The proposed approach builds on upon existing work in grasping and dexterous manipulation, telemanipulation, and tactile sensing. Future applications of this work include, maintenance, repair, exploration, and salvage operation in remote and hazardous environments doc9633 none Proposal: PI: Dorothy Reed Institution: University of Washington Date: May 22, CMS Performance of Electric Utility Lifelines in Urban Centers for Earthquake Hazards PI: Dorothy Reed, University of Washington. The utility infrastructure system in the US is undergoing significant changes due to deregulation. Recently, structural component failures induced by natural hazards previously considered minor have caused widespread blackouts. The effects of shortages due to natural and man-made causes has been particularly critical for the Pacific Northwest, as compliance with environmental standards places constraints on the generation of power. It has become clear that the US lacks a cohesive approach to electric utility infrastructure reliability. Such a framework would be valuable in identifying the importance of system components and ultimately provide guidelines for improved performance. We propose to develop a reliability-based framework for the performance assessment of power delivery by an electric utility distribution system for earthquake hazards. The distribution system is defined to include components such as the distribution lines, poles, pole-based equipment and substations. Our framework will be focused on the performance of the structural system used to deliver power and its interactions with other critical lifelines. Our approach will significantly expand the three-pronged model developed by Nojima of Gifu University in Japan in which component, system and societal performance measures are blended into a single standard. The valuable lessons learned through the Hyogoken-Nanbu (Kobe) and Nisqually earthquakes will also be incorporated into our investigation. This investigation will require the formulation of proposed performance levels in the context of the present US socio-economic, regulatory and political climate. A major contribution of our project will be to explicitly include, and ultimately clarify, the role of the non-technical constraints of regulations, and in so doing, implicitly evaluate the conditional influence of the political climate upon the development of levels of performance for a US location. Although we will focus on a specific locale within the US [the Pacific Northwest], the adaptation of our approach to other locations in the US should be straightforward doc9634 none 00- Canham Conference support: Understanding Ecosystems: The Role of Quantitative Models in Observation, Synthesis, and Prediction This conference will focus on the role of quantitative models in understanding ecosystems. The conference themes will emphasize the role of models in ecosystem science research, education and decision making; testing and validating models; mechanisms, resolution and uncertainty in models; and predicting ecosystem dynamics. The topics were chosen to oblige authors to synthesize the literature, rather than present details of one or a few specific models. Recent years have seen dramatic advancements in the computational power and mathematical tools available to modelers. The body of traditional, mechanistic, empirical research is also growing phenomenally. The field is ripe for major gains in the synthetic and predictive power of models, and this comes at a time of growing need by society for quantitative models that can inform debate about critical environmental issues. Quantitative models provide a means to test understanding of ecosystems by allowing the exploration of interactions among observation, synthesis, and prediction. The utility of models for synthesis and prediction is obvious. The role of quantitative models in informing and guiding observation and experimentation is perhaps less often appreciated, but equally valuable. The conference is being hosted by the Institute of Ecosystem Studies and will take place May 1-3, doc9635 none This is a proposal to investigate aspects of low dimensional dynamical systems. The most important long term project is to better understand a topological description of C^r generic area preserving diffeomorphisms of surfaces where r 1. In addition the proposer hopes to investigate the action of more general groups than the integers or the reals on surfaces, and in particular area preserving actions. Professor Franks will continue his investigation of the dynamics of surface maps. The study of such transformations, especially area preserving ones, has a long history going back to Poincare and G. D. Birkhoff. There are numerous applications of results in this area to classical mechanics as well as more modern chaotic dynamics. The proposed research will address questions concerning the existence of periodic behavior in area preserving two-dimensional discrete dynamical systems and a topological description of the dynamics of such systems doc9636 none I plan on working on the following specific problems. First I would like to prove new Strichartz estimates without using explicit parametrices. This could potentially greatly widen the scope of their applications. I would also like to prove almost global existence for quasilinear wave equations and investigate whether there is global existence for nonlinear wave equations outside of nontrapping obstacles. I would like to use the techniques developed on these projects to study problems in relativity theory, including the stability of the Schwarzschild solution. Finally, I would like to continue my work on problems in harmonic analysis that arise in geometrical situations. The above problems arise naturally from interactions between mathematics and areas in physics that include general relativity, quantum mechanics, and quantum chaos. The techniques employed include stationary phase and the study of propagation of singularities. There is a very active group of researchers in quantum physics groups at major universities studying high-energy eigenstates, and I am especially interested in making further contributions to this area doc9637 none Wang And Green Frictional heating often causes failure of many tribological elements. Investigating the combined thermal and mechanical effects holds the key to understanding heat-induced failure and the overall performance of machine parts and their tribological surfaces. However, for conformal contacts, such as in bearings and seals, analyses become very difficult because they typically involve macro-scale structural analyses of the element parts, and micro-scale contact lubrication calculations at the sliding rolling interfaces. The common practice today is to use commercial finite element packages to solve such problems. The boundary element method (BEM) is expected to provide a far more efficient solution, because by nature all that is important, from a tribological point of view, occurs at the boundaries of the interacting surfaces. Therefore, the BEM formulation is expected to reduce the simulation effort and computation time by orders of magnitude (because only the boundaries need to be meshed and solved for). Therefore, the solutions for the problem of the three-way coupling of lubrication, elasticity, and thermal effects can be achieved much faster to be effective in design and analysis. Because meshing is necessary on the boundaries only, also computer storage is reduced significantly. It is, therefore, that the boundary element method (BEM) is the most reasonable and efficient means to use for thermal-mechanical problems in tribology. The proposed collaborative research aims at developing the formulation of a general boundary element method (BEM) for thermomechanical problems of tribological elements having any general geometry subject to thermal-elastic boundary conditions. Other computational techniques, such as the FFT and the macro-micro approach would make the BEM formulation a complete and the most efficient numerical method for thermomechanical problems of complex tribological elements. The modeling of the combined thermal and mechanical phenomena in tribology will provide the needed link between performance analyses and failure simulation. This work is the first attempt to solve the thermomechanical contact problem of finite structures with the boundary element method. It is expected to become an important and the most computationally effective tool for contact analysis problems where the half-space Green s function integral or the FEM approaches become either inaccurate or computationally impractical. This work will be performed in conjunction with the ongoing research at the existing Center for Surface Engineering and Tribology (CSET) at Georgia Tech and Northwestern University, which is co-funded by NSF and participating industries. The proposed research will link the contact simulation ability of Professor Wang s group at NU, and build upon Professor Green s work at GT on the analysis of triboelements, failure simulation, and prevention. The fusion of expertise by Green and Wang will construct an entirely new, efficient, and accurate analytical tool for analyzing thermomechanical failure of practical triboelements. The new approach will greatly enhance the CSET research, benefit its membership as well as other US industries in their efforts to improve designs and introduce new products doc9638 none Sawyer This SGER award will support a feasibility study of the effect of nanoparticle strenghthening of polymers for tribological applications. There are strong indications that polymers filled with hard nanoparticles will exhibit significant improvements in tribological performance as compared to traditional filled polymers. Polymers are widely used in bearing applications because they provide quiet continuous operation, have a low coefficient of friction, absorb vibrations, are compliant and non-abrasive to the counterface, can be easily manufactured, are inexpensive, non-corrosive, and are generally biocompatible. The challenge in designing bearings with homogeneous polymeric materials is their low wear resistance (high wear rates). Hard filler particles are frequently added to improve the wear resistance, however these hard filler particles increase the abrasive wear to the counterface and increase the sliding coefficient of friction. Lubricious fillers are also added to polymers and under certain operating conditions can reduce the wear rate and the coefficient of friction, however a constant supply of lubricous filler must be available at the wear surface and these materials are frequently sensitive to the environment. The ideal filler for polymers would be inert, reinforcing, non-abrasive, and reduce the coefficient of friction. There is good evidence that nanoparticle filled polymers may be this ideal composite. For example, recent studies have shown that the wear resistance can increase in polymer composites filled with hard nanoparticles, while at the same time the wear of the counterbody decreases and the sliding coefficient of friction decreases. This type of tribological behavior will have an impact in polymeric bearings covering the spectrum from industrial applications needing dry sliding bearings, to orthopaedic implant materials, to self-lubricating bearings for space environments. In order to design composites with the optimum properties and predict performance, however, some severe limitations must be overcome. First, our understanding of the mechanisms contributing to wear performance in filled polymers is poor. For example, the role of the filler matrix interface and the effect of particle size has not been well studied nor are there appropriate models that consider the interface or size of the filler. Secondly, it is unclear for non-lubricious nanoparticles what the mechanism is that lowers the coefficient of friction. Finally, nanoparticle filled polymers have not comprehensively explored for wear applications despite the strong evidence suggesting large improvements in performance. The overall scientific goal of the project is to gain a fundamental understanding of the wear mechanisms in filled polymers by a) experimentally isolating the effects of particle size (10 nm to 10 micrometers), particle aspect ratio (1 to ), dispersion, filler matrix interface, and matrix properties on performance, and 2) obtaining a parametric understanding of the correlation between wear behavior and other mechanical properties, 3) modeling of the wear properties doc9639 none This proposal from Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi (TAMU-CC) targets a large area and a significant number of school districts in South Texas, known as the Valley region. The proposed work is organized around four partnership activities: District and Community Forum to allow STRSI staff to explain the reform activities and gain the acceptance and cooperation of the school and community (especially parental) stakeholders. Systemic Leadership Institute to annually gather the district Leadership Teams for improving team capacity and for team networking. Teacher Partner Academy for leadership, content, and pedagogy training for the master teacher who provide the principal intervention in the schools. Administrative Partner Academy to ensure administrative support and leadrship for the reform doc9640 none Ferroelectric thin films are becoming extremely important in the implementation of non-volatile memories with nearly unlimited endurance and fast read and write times compared to conventional floating gate non-volatile memory technology. These thin films have been successfully integrated onto conventional complementary metal oxide semiconductor technology (CMOS). We are proposing a novel application for ferroelectric thin films in the area data conversion. In digital to analog converters, scaling network plays an extremely important role in the overall performance. The scaling network is usually voltage based using resistor networks or charge based using capacitor networks or a combination of both. This proposal investigates the design, modeling and implementation of polarization based scaling network. The proposed digital to analog converter should have less area, reduced power dissipation, reduced substrate noise and higher speed. The project involves developing a suitable SPICE circuit model for the ferroelectric capacitor switching as well as process and material characteristics condition to obtain a given resolution. The model to be developed will also incorporate temperature and voltage dependence characteristic of circuit elements. Capacitor test patterns will be fabricated with Strontium Bismuth Tantalate (SBT) ferroelectric thin films. The SPICE model parameters will be extracted from ferroelectric capacitor characterization. The analog switches, voltage references and comparators will be attached to the CMOS chip by flip chip technology. The module will be tested to verify the performance of PDAC doc9641 none The Aviram-Ratner model of orbital energy levels predicts that monolayer arrays of Donor Sigma-Acceptor (D-?-A) molecules will pass electrons in only one direction, that is, D-?-A molecules should be able to rectify electricity. In this project a new class of materilas incorporating perylenebis(dicarboximide) as a new D-?-A acceptor, and or a related tetralkylperylene as a new D-?-A donor, will be prepared and evaluated as potential rectifiers of electrical current. The molecular orbital levels of these groups are well situated for the D-?-A task. The perylene-based donors and acceptors have two synthetic handles, allowing the convenient attachment of the -?- bridge between them, as well as tails to the other ends. These tails are required both to improve solubility and to permit the formation of the monolayers required to evaluate rectification. Monolayer films will be controlled to form in either the D-?-A or A-?-D orientation by the appropriate selection of tails. The relatively polar polyethyleneglycol (PEG) tails proposed for some targets should improve current flow compared to nonpolar alkyl tails. Whereas rectification has been reported recently from D-?-A multilayers as well as from D-?-A monolayers, the Aviram-Ratner model properly applies to D-?-A monolayers. The proposed research will test these systems. . The D-?-A targets will be synthesized at the University of Mississippi, and will be evaluated for film-formation and electrical properties at the University of Alabama. %%% The investigation of molecular-scale rectification is of far-reaching practical interest because it could lead to greatly miniaturized electronic devices. This is an important goal in the world of nanoelectronics. This project provides a significant opportunity for substantial advancements in the training of young minority scientists from Mississippi and Alabama doc9642 none This award provides funds for the purchase of a research grade microscope with epifluorescence and Nomarski DIC capabilities and of an integrated image analysis system to enhance the existing research facilities in the Department of Biology at the Humanco campus of the University of Puerto Rico. The integrated image analysis system will consist of a high resolution CCD camera, video CCD camera, controller computer, image analysis software and printer. The instrumentation will significantly improve research capabilities in microbial ecology and neurobiology, and facilitate study of DNA damage by radiation and pollution in the environment. The equipment will enable undergraduate research students to participate in collaborative projects with faculty, and to be trained in use of techniques that take advantage of recent progress in light microscopy, and related improvements in image collection and analysis doc9643 none The magneto-optical and optical properties of thick films of hexagonal ferrites (hexaferrites) will be developed to meet the emerging need for integrated optical isolators for broad-band telecommunication systems. Comparisons between barium hexaferrite, the prototypical uniaxial hexaferrite, and yttrium iron garnet (YIG), the prototypical garnet composition used as the basis for developing all presently used magneto-optic materials, shows that barium hexaferrite possesses a significantly higher Curie temperature and larger Faraday rotation than YIG. In addition, the optical absorption mechanisms and spectral dependence appear to be the same for both materials. Thus, there is a strong premise for believing that the substituted hexaferrite films to be developed here may have superior magneto-optical properties and temperature stability compared to present-day bismuth-substituted garnets. In addition, the strong uniaxial anisotropy inherent in oriented hexaferrite films may allow fabrication of self-biased, magnetically-saturated, waveguide isolators that can be incorporated into integrated optoelectronic devices. As of yet, no one has measured hexaferrite films of sufficient thickness for magneto-optical applications. This program builds upon our successful development of thick epitaxial hexaferrite films for milimeter-wavelength applications, and will systematically measure the structural, magnetic, optical and magneto-optical properties of both pure and substituted hexaferrite films. Techniques for film lift-off will also be developed to simplify the fabrication of integrated devices. Particular emphasis will be placed on developing films having high Faraday rotation and good thermal stability, and on designing and testing optical waveguide isolators that use the uniaxial anisotropy of hexaferrites to eliminate external magnets doc9644 none Faust, Rudolf This U.S.-Hungarian research project between Rudolf Faust at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and his partner Miklos Zsuga of Lajos Kossuth University, Debrecen, features synthesis of novel amphiphilic block copolymers with non-linear architectures by living cationic polymerization and the study of architectural effects on their aggregation behavior. Building upon their previously developed methodologies that employ static light and dynamic light scattering, the researchers intend to investigate the architectural effects on structural parameters such as aggregation number, overall size, core, and shell dimensions of block copolymer micelles in water at different temperatures. Their results may yield some relatively inexpensive amphiphiles and non-ionic surfactants with many potential applications, but for which structure must be better understood to optimize performance. Above the critical micelle concentration in dilute aqueous solutions, amphiphilic block copolymers self-assemble into micelles with a hydrophobic insoluble core and a hydrophilic shell. The U.S.-Hungarian team maintains that block copolymer architecture (star-shaped, H-shaped, graft etc.) is an important parameter in micelle formation. With this in mind, they intend to synthesize non-linear block architectures consisting of hydrophobic polyisobutylene (PIB) and hydrophilic poly(methyl vinyl ether) (PMeVE) segments. They expect resulting amphiphilic star-block copolymers to serve as model polymers for characterizing architecture property relationships of macromolecular amphiphiles and non-ionic surfactants. This polymer research project fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc9645 none The award covers graduate student and undergraduate student research with the PP2PP experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. The goal of the international PP2PP collaboration is the comprehensive measurement of proton-proton elastic scattering, eventually covering a wide, and unexplored, domain in energy (from 50 to 500 GeV) and momentum transfer (from 0.006 GeV^2 to 1.3 GeV^2) within a single experiment. The first data run with polarized proton beams will take place in the Fall . Two Roman pot detector stations will be used, one in each arm. Two more stations plus central tracking will be added in following years. With the experiment and by comparing with existing antiproton-proton elastic scattering data, the helicity structure of the long-distance pp interaction will be investigated, the exchange mechanisms will be studied and connected to QCD calculations of multi-gluon exchanges. The intriguing dip structure in pp elastic scattering will be accessible with high statistics. At very small momentum transfers PP2PP will measure absolute cross sections and the details of the forward scattering amplitude. Beyond , a special tune of the RHIC machine will allow the lowest accessible momentum transfer to reach into the Coulomb regime. The small scale of the PP2PP experiment makes it ideally suited for participation by undergraduate students in all aspects of construction, data taking, and data analysis doc9646 none This proposal requests support for a group at the College of William and Mary to participate in the MECO experiment currently being planned to run at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The MECO experiment, testing lepton-flavor violation scenarios beyond the Standard Model, will be sensitive to direct muon-to-electron conversion at a branching ratio below 10-16, four orders of magnitude more sensitive than previously achieved. The William and Mary group is specifically responsible for the design, fabrication, testing, and installation of an active cosmic-ray shield that is to surround the detector solenoid. A double layer scintillator veto shield assures that cosmic-ray induced background events which may imitate true muon-to-electron conversion events are kept at levels well below the projected sensitivity of the experiment. Both during the R&D phase and the assembly phase many opportunities will develop for engaging the research talents of postdocs, graduate students and undergraduates who will work professionally towards a rewarding and challenging scientific objective while learning important skills and techniques doc9647 none This project will study several situations in algebraic geometry where, for reasons connected with mirror symmetry, spaces defined in terms of a Lie group are expected to have enumerative or cohomological invariants which are related, or equal, to those where the group is replaced by its Langlands dual. The aim is to compute these invariants and verify the predictions of mirror symmetry. Among the principal examples to be studied are: (1) the stringy Hodge polynomials of the spaces of flat connections on a Riemann surface with structure group a reductive Lie group; (2) the stringy Hodge polynomials of the moduli spaces of solutions to Nahm s equations of magnetic monopoles; (3) the quantum cohomology of a loop group. This is research in algebraic geometry, one of the most classical parts of mathematics, concerned with finding solutions of polynomial equations. But it is aimed at corroborating some very recent hypotheses about mirror symmetry, an exciting idea which has lately emerged from theoretical physics. Mirror symmetry proposes that certain string theories about the fundamental structure of the universe can be formulated mathematically in two seemingly different but equivalent ways. This project will explore the evidence supporting one of the recent suggestions for how to construct one of these formulations in terms of the other doc9648 none Univ. of Santa Barbara Carlos G. Levi A multidisciplinary scientific team will undertake a collaborative program to investigate the dynamics of layered, multifunctional surfaces. The focus is on coating systems that provide both thermal insulation and oxidation corrosion protection for thermostructural components. The overarching intellectual challenge is establishing a science-based protocol for optimizing functionality while integrating thermomechanically and thermochemically disparate materials that experience large temperature extremes. These systems are inherently metastable and evolve via morphological changes, diffusional interactions and thermomechanically-induced stresses that generally degrade performance and limit durability. The program aims to develop a fundamental understanding of the underlying mechanisms that could provide a basis for designing superior, durable surfaces. The scientific themes involve phase equilibria between oxides and intermetallics, diffusive and thermal transport phenomena in oxides, fundamental mechanisms of deformation and basic mechanistic aspects of oxide growth. Specific objectives seek to elucidate (a) the role of composition on the mechanisms of surface diffusion in fluorite-structured oxides, as well as boundary diffusion in intermetallics; (b) the thermomechanical behavior of individual layers, as they relate to chemistry and microstructure, and complexities associated with their interaction; (c) the interplay between processing and material parameters via microstructural modifications; and (d) the mechanisms governing thermal transport in porous multicomponent oxides. The materials systems of interest are ceramics based on zirconia and rare earth oxides, as well as Ni-based intermetallics alloyed with platinum group metals. The synthesis technologies are predominantly vapor-based, with precursor methods and melt processing used in generating model specimens. Thermodynamic, kinetic and mechanics modeling activities will be an essential complement of the experimental activities. The program offers a balanced set of educational, scientific and technological benefits. The technological motivation derives from the drive to expand the limits and durability of structural materials, wherein durable multifunctional surfaces represent a materials challenge of highest priority. These material systems are essential to the pursuit of improved efficiency and reduced environmental impact for gas turbines, a predominant source of power for global electrification, aircraft and marine transportation, as well as numerous industrial processes. The societal and economic benefits are thus self-evident but are presently limited because of insufficient scientific understanding to guide needed improvements in materials design, processing and performance. The complexity and richness in fundamental issues associated with the dynamics of these layers provide the scientific motivation as well as the need for an interdisciplinary research approach. The team assembled has an unprecedented combination of expertise and available facilities to undertake this research. They are all closely involved in working with students and motivated by the unique educational opportunity afforded by the NSF-EC program. Accordingly, the projects will be defined to foster collaboration among American and European students. Mechanisms will be provided for extended reciprocal visits of students working together on a given topic, to experience first hand how research is done at the partner institution. By working on a broad doc9649 none Passive control of structures is still evolving technologically, with increasing understanding of system behavior, response prediction methodologies, design guidance, and field experiences. Valuable information regarding behavior, design, and implementation of passive control systems is being developed in Japan due to their significant research investment in innovative passive control measures for protection of structures against both seismic and wind forces. One type of innovative passive control system that has been developed recently in Japan is a type of yielding brace damper. The yielding brace contains a single steel plate with large ductility capacity and relatively low yield strength that is encased in a grout filled tube, but is not bonded to the grout. The key concept of the device is that yielding occurs in the encased steel plate equally for both tensile and compressive loading cycles and the system exhibits stable hysteretic energy dissipation capability. A new type of yielding device is proposed which builds on the economic advantages of the yielding brace, but allows tailoring the yielding element materials to achieve specific performance requirements and employs noncohesive media to confine the yielding elements. These two innovations combined provide controlled post-yield slope of the damper that maintains self-centering capability of a structure even during an extreme earthquake when the building frame may significantly yield and soften; provide a generally applicable confining technique that does not infringe on existing patents; eliminate high-precision design, detailing, and fabrication of devices at the debonding interface; lower damper cost; ease of repair replacement of yielding elements after a damaging earthquake; enable inspection; and provide additional friction damping which may be beneficial for wind response mitigation. This new device is defined as a composite yielding damper (CY-damper). The combined attributes of CY-dampers may provide significant technical and economic advantages over existing devices. A research program, integrating both experimental and analytical components, is proposed to investigate the application of CY-dampers for building structures. The primary objectives of the proposed research project are to: (1) develop prototype CY-dampers, (2) characterize the structural performance of individual CY-dampers and optimize damper properties, (3) determine the behavior of building frames with CY-dampers under varying magnitude earthquakes, (4) develop analytical models to describe the behavior of CY-dampers and CY-damped systems, and (5) provide guidance for the application of CY-dampers directed toward performance based design. These objectives will be achieved by working in collaboration with a team of Japanese researchers who are the primary developers of this system in Japan. Professional relationships and research collaboration are on-going between the researchers and significant resource and information exchange will take place throughout all phases of the proposed research program. Small and large-scale CY-damper tests under reversed cyclic loading are proposed. Parameters to be studied include: (1) application of different materials including combinations of high and low strength steels or other high-performance materials, (2) investigation of different confining materials and plate slenderness parameters, and (3) long term durability under high-cycle low-amplitude fatigue. A prototype multistory multibay steel frame building will be used to facilitate development of realistic test specimens and permit comparison between different damper designs. In concert with experimental tasks, analytical models will be produced which are compatible with available analysis programs and correlate experimentally observed response. Simplified and practical analysis methods including equivalent linearization techniques will be developed to predict response and develop practical design guidance doc9650 none This award provides support for acquisition of an ultramicrotome with cryostage and a glass knife maker to be placed in the Integrated Imaging Center located in the Johns Hopkins University Biology Department. The Integrated Imaging Center includes both light and electron microscopy equipment and thus provides university faculty and students convenient access to conventional and advanced techniques in both types of microscopy. The major focus of the Center is the utilization of fluorescent and electron dense probes for the purpose of investigating cellular subcellular structure and function. In recent years, the development and refinement of new techniques that use antibodies to localize specific proteins within cells has become an essential component of any comprehensive study of subcellular structure and function. Typically, the antibodies used are chemically conjugated to fluorescent or electron dense moiety to facilitate visualization by microscopy. This complements and extends results obtained by other approaches. The Center offers both undergraduate and graduate courses in microscopy (as well as regular workshops) as a means of providing training and exposure to the latest, most advanced microscopy techniques to students and to faculty. These courses emphasize the integration of microscopic techniques with the use of other cell biological research tools. The new equipment will replace older existing equipment that can no longer function with the precision required for modern cell biology research. Among the projects that will make use of the equipment are studies of the endocytosis pathways of yeast and insect cells, analysis of mitochondrial dynamics in yeast, and investigation of the role of golgins in structure and function of the golgi apparatus doc9651 none This project is centered around the study of A-hypergeometric functions. These have been introduced in the 80 s by Gel fand and his coworkers as solutions of a system of partial differential equations encoding combinatorial data of polytopes. Specific problems to be addressed in this project include: the classification of rational hypergeometric functions and their relationship with toric residues; bounds for the holonomic rank and rational rank; hypergeometric functions arising as periods of Calabi-Yau manifolds. Potential applications of this work include a deeper understanding of the properties of the A-discriminant and new algorithms for the computation of total residues -a rational expression on the coefficients of a system of polynomial equations which is of considerable interest in computational algebraic geometry- and, ultimately, the development of algorithms for solving polynomial equations. The study of polynomial equations is of fundamental importance on almost all branches of science and technology. In the last few years it has become clear that the best approaches to their solution are those that combine numerical and symbolic methods. The work on this project attempts to answer some basic questions on the symbolic study of a class of partial differential equations closely related to systems of polynomial equations with the goal of developing new algorithms. This same system of differential equations arise also in Mirror Symmetry, a fundamental theory in high-energy physics, with remarkable consequences in pure mathematics. The investigator hopes to be able to relate the symbolic approach to the classical algebraic geometric (Hodge Theory) approach doc9652 none Starrett In this project, a plan is outlined to continue the efforts of the Student Meeting Activities Subcommittee of the Power Engineering Education Committee of the IEEE Power Engineering Society (PES) to promote student interest in the power engineering field by sponsoring electrical engineering students from US universities to attend the IEEE PES annual Winter Meeting to be held in Columbus, Ohio. The goal of this project is to provide an opportunity for students to be exposed to the most recent developments in design, operation, construction, and research in the power engineering field. This is a particularly critical time for power engineering as the industry undergoes significant change due to the restructuring of the traditional utility structure. The career opportunities for students interested in power engineering are many and varied; the program offers student several opportunities to interact with practicing engineers from utilities, vendors, manufacturers, and consulting firms doc9653 none Tony Pantev uses techniques from both the abelian and non-abelian Hodge theory to approach concrete geometric questions as well as problems in cosmology, mathematical physics and string theory. The investigator and his collaborators study four problems. The first one describes a conjectural Hodge theoretic criterion for deciding whether a given homotopy type underlies a smooth projective variety. The second concerns the symplectic topology of four manifolds, fibered over the two sphere. The third project designs an explicit construction of sheaves on a gerby K3 surface and discusses its relations to the physical notion of non-commutative deformation of fields. The fourth project proposes an explicit construction of the special coordinates on the moduli space of Eucledian $D$-branes by means of secondary Abel-Jacobi maps. The understanding of these questions is essential for unifying various linearization procedures in algebraic geometry, symplectic topology and mathematical physics. It brings us closer to understanding the basic structure of algebraic varieties and enhances the geometric arsenal of techniques for building explicit models of string theory vacua. This is a research in the field of algebraic geometry. Algebraic geometry is not only one of the most intensively researched parts of modern mathematics, but also a crucial testing ground for the recent influx of revolutionary mathematical ideas coming from string theory physics. The investigator s research sets the stage for a rigorous treatment of the hard conjectures generated by our current understanding of string dualities and enlarges the arsenal of available tools for understanding the physics of strings. The investigator s methods are applicable to a wide range of concrete problems in astrophysics, quantum gravity and string theory doc9654 none Campbell This award supports acquisition of a DNA microarray reader and supporting equipment. The equipment is required for studies of the simultaneous expression of all genes found in the genomes of yeast and other organisms. Such analysis of whole genome expression is usually referred to as functional genomics; the cost of purchasing and operating the equipment needed for functional genomics is high enough that it is generally beyond the means of single undergraduate institution. The equipment purchased through this award, though located at one institution, will be available to a consortium of college faculty from across the country who desire to pursue such research, but currently lack access to the necessary equipment. Research to be enabled by the equipment includes studies of the effect of aging and of DNA-binding chemicals on gene expression in yeast. In addition, several participating faculty will collaborate on an effort to develop new algorithms for mathematical analysis of DNA microarray datasets. The users are members of a group of 23 faculty (from the US and Canada) who have formed the Genome Consortium for Active Teaching (GCAT). During the - academic year, GCAT will coordinate a series of functional genomics experiments using yeast DNA microarrays that can be measured using the equipment provided through this award. The research efforts are expected to have a substantial impact on undergraduate training (including that of women and under-represented minorities) in an area of biology of major importance doc9655 none Proposal: CMS - PI: Geoffrey Hewings Institution: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Date: May 25, CMS Analysis of Lifeline Damages and Economic Impacts of an Earthquake: Development of an Integrated Economic-Engineering Assessment Model Research will be carried out by the colleagues in the U.S. (University of Illinois SUNY @ Buffalo) and Japan (Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry), who have been collaborating on the development of regional and interregional economic impact and forecasting models for both countries for over three years. An integrated economic-engineering model will be cdonstructed to estimate the indirect impacts of an earthquake and to simulate recovery activities and its system-wide effects. The project will build on a set of recently completed models, including an engineering model for assessing the lifeline damages in an urban area and economic models for estimating the indirect impacts and effects of an earthquake in urban, regional, and interregional contexts. Attention is directed to the integration of the engineering model and economic models, systematically connecting time, space, and the damages between two different modeling schem3s. Once completed, analysis will focus on the following policy implications: a) evaluation of retrofit strategies on lifeline systems; b) sensitivity analysis of emergency management plans; and c) life cycle assessment of lifeline facilities aganist earthquakes. The constructed integrated model will also provide the information on the propagation paths of the economic impacts in an interregional context, the relationshop between physical damages and economic impacts, and the time series analysis of the economics impacts focusing on production chronologies. The interregional focus derives from urban areas; increasing dependence on external markets for sources of inputs and as destinations for the consumption of goods and services produced in the urban area. The major contributions will lie in the way in which different engineering and economic modeling paradigms are integrated, the perspectives that can be learned from experience in other countries and the identification of crwitical linkages that needs to be explored to assist in recovery efforts doc9656 none The project is aimed at the development of optimization techniques for planning capacity expansions when forecasted planning data are unreliable. Stochastic programming has emerged as an important tool for solving planning problems with data uncertainties. In capacity expansion problems, however, the integral nature of strategic decisions prevents the use of standard decomposition approaches that have been successful for stochastic linear programs. This project will develop efficient solution strategies for stochastic integer programs arising in capacity expansion applications. A key component of the project will be to identify special problem structures that can be exploited within solution strategies. The structural results will be used to design, analyze, and implement approximate and exact solution algorithms. The viability of the developed methodology will be demonstrated in important economic sectors such, as semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities and web hosting enterprises. Capacity expansion to meet anticipated demand growth is a key strategic concern in all industrial sectors. In high growth-high volatility industries, such as the IT sector, uncertainties in forecasts for costs, demands, and technology evolution, and the economies-of-scale in expansion costs make capacity expansion decisions very complex. Using stochastic integer programming concepts, this research project will develop an optimization based paradigm for aiding capacity expansion that explicitly address forecast uncertainty. If successful, the project will provide robust computational techniques to aid strategic capacity planning in a wide variety of industries. It is also anticipated that insights gained from this research will significantly advance the current state-of-the-art in solving multi-stage stochastic integer programs doc9657 none W. Gibbs New Mexico State Several studies will be undertaken in order to understand the interaction between hadrons in a nuclear setting. It is intended to test the idea that the same effective potentials which are used for interactions between nucleons can be used for interactions between other hadrons. Cases to be considered include proton-proton, pion-nucleon, nucleon-nucleon, lamda-nucleon, and pion-pion interactions doc9658 none The objective of this Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison in Industry (GOALI) project is to research and develop an integrated framework for automatic generation of setup plans and fixture designs, applied to a wide range of components (prismatic, rotational, as well as irregular) that require machining in lathes, 3-axis machines, and 5-axis machining centers using modular, standard, or dedicated fixtures. Setup planning and fixture design are two closely related tasks. While setup planning is constrained by fixtures to be applied, it also provides guidelines for fixture design. The cyclic interaction creates the chicken or egg dilemma, which is the main research barrier. This problem will be solved as follows. First, a graph representation is developed to capture the feature tolerance relationship of a product model. Through the recognition of design datum frames, the graph is transformed to a datum-machining surface relationship graph (DMG). With considerations of production scheme (integrated, distributed, or combined operations), fixturing constraints, machine tool capability, and tolerance decomposition, DMG will be converted into a setup graph. Tolerance stack-up analysis and setup plan verification is then followed to provide information for fixture design. If successful, this research will yield both basic and applied advances. As basic research, it will provide a generalized methodology to unify current research results in setup planning and fixture design to achieve smooth integration of computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM). It will also shed light on mathematics-based tolerance analysis. For practicing engineers, it will allow them to incorporate setup generation and fixture design capability into existing CAD CAM software tools; thus, dramatically improve user productivity. The incorporation of the research results into course curriculum will broaden mechanical, industrial, and manufacturing engineering students knowledge spectrum; thus, better preparing them for the knowledge intensive and multi-disciplinary working environment in the 21st century doc9659 none Liquefaction has generated widespread damage and disruption to urban areas during many large US and Japanese earthquakes. This destruction has created public demand for state and local governments, public utilities, and other responsible agencies and corporations to mitigate liquefaction hazard in their respective jurisdictions. An initial step in hazard mitigation is definition of vulnerable areas and potential deleterious effects through liquefaction hazard maps. Most US liquefaction hazard maps are based on geologic units with generalized criteria leading to qualitative hazard ratings of high, moderate, low, etc. Users, including city planners, building officials, engineers, utility companies, and loss estimators, need maps with more detail and accuracy than those based on generalized geologic criteria. The purpose of this study is to develop improved mapping techniques for delineation of liquefaction hazard to meet this need. The compilation of such maps will require evaluations based on detailed subsurface stratigraphy and soil properties. To develop and test improved techniques, a test area is needed where an extensive array of borehole or CPT logs and accompanying soil property data has been compiled and where liquefaction and consequent deleterious effects from a past earthquake have been documented. A unique opportunity to develop and test mapping techniques has occurred with the compilation of a large set of geotechnical data for the Kobe, Japan metropolitan area by Prof. Yasuo Tanaka and his colleagues at Kobe, Japan, University. This data set consists of over 5,000 borehole logs scattered over Kobe and two adjacent communities, with concentrations of logs in areas heavily damaged by the Hyogoken-Nanbu (Kobe) earthquake. Similarly, an extensive compilation of observed liquefaction effects, including lateral spread displacements, has been assembled by Japanese investigators, including Prof. Masanori Hamada and his colleagues at Waseda University, Tokyo. The objective of this project is to work jointly with Prof. Tanaka and his colleagues to develop improved susceptibility and ground failure hazard mapping procedures. These techniques will be developed by analyzing subsurface sediment stratigraphy, soil properties, local topography, and past liquefaction effects in the Kobe area. From these analyses, several possible procedures will be developed and evaluated for mapping liquefiable layers and consequent hazards. The most viable technique or techniques will then be used to prepare demonstration liquefaction hazard maps for selected parts of the Kobe metropolitan area and an urban area in the US. A likely urban area for the US demonstration map is Oakland, California, urban area where Dr. Thomas L. Holzer, USGS, is in the process of installing and collecting data from a large array of CPT soundings and SPT boreholes. The work of Dr. Holzer specifically directed toward evaluation of liquefaction hazard doc9660 none As the requirements for machines, structures, vehicles, and other mechanical systems become more ambitious and more demanding, the order and complexity of the mathematical models that must be confronted for analysis and design increases. Physical insight and analytical methods become less effective. Yet as the system dimension increases, so does the likelihood of multiple time-scales. The presence of two or more widely separated time-scales offers the opportunity for system decomposition and consequent simplified analysis and design. For a linear time-invariant system, both time and frequency domain methods are available to exploit this opportunity. For a nonlinear system, the analytical singular perturbation method is available. But this method is only applicable to a mathematical model in singularly perturbed form, and this form is not generally obtainable without a priori knowledge of the multiple time-scale structure. The research objective is thus to develop a methodology for time-scale identification and reduced-order model development for application to finite dimensional nonlinear dynamical systems. Under previous NSF funding, the foundations of the methodology, which is based on finite-time Lyapunov exponents and vectors, have been developed. In the current project the methodology is used to investigate the time-scale structure in nonlinear dynamical systems that model mechanical systems. Exemplary systems that have yielded to the analytical singular perturbation method, and thus are known to have two or more time-scales, are investigated first to further refine the methodology. Next systems either known or suspected to have multiple time-scale behavior are investigated. An approach is then developed for using the time-scale information to construct a state transformation that will bring the system model into a form amenable to reduced-order analysis and control design. The research will establish a significant new capability for nonlinear system analysis and design. The order reduction, better conditioning, and physical understanding -- previously obtainable only for low-order systems by clever analysts applying the analytical singular perturbation method -- will be obtainable for general nonlinear dynamical systems doc9661 none This award provides support for the acquisition of an isotope ratio mass spectrometer with elemental analyzer and gas-sampling peripherals for the Stable Isotope Ratio Facility for Environmental Research (SIRFER) at the University of Utah. The Facility is a leader in the expansion of stable isotope analyses into ecological and environmental sciences, currently processing approximately 16,000 samples a year. SIRFER now operates 4 isotope ratio mass spectrometers for ecological and environmental research that are available for use by investigators and students from the University of Utah and from other institutions throughout the nation. In addition to purchase of the mass spectrometer, the award will enable purchase of peripherals to upgrade an existing mass spectrometer, a UV laser for ablation of carbonates, and a micromill for high-resolution sampling of tree rings. The new equipment will permit compound-specific analyses at concentrations smaller than currently possible, determination of high resolution temporal - spatial information, use of laser-based high resolution approaches, and training of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in these latest methods and instruments. Isotope-ration mass spectometry plays an important role in modern ecological research aimed at measuring chemical constituents of existing and past environments, as well as the elemental makeup of living and fossilized organisms doc9662 none A conference on Molecular Electronics will be held at Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, December 10-15, . The conference will address theoretical and experimental aspects of molecular electronics with emphasis on molecular phenomena and material science considerations. Molecular Electronics is an emerging field developing as the microelectronics field looks beyond silicon to evaluate new possibilities for future technology, and as atomic level resolution probes have become available for accessing and manipulating individual molecules and molecular assemblies. New techniques will be discussed for molecular synthesis, as well as new techniques for attaching molecules to specific surfaces interfaces, and evaluating molecular transport properties. The conference will also concentrate on possible techniques for creating molecular circuits and methods needed to be able to interact with and to exploit the properties of single molecules. The program is organized around 20 invited speakers, and both contributed papers and posters are scheduled. The overall size of the meeting is expected to include 60-80 participants. Special efforts have been made to recruit a diverse group of participants, including foreign and American scientists, younger and older researchers, and industrial, national laboratory and academic researchers. Objectives are to stimulate communications among the chemistry, physics, engineering and materials science communities working in this and related fields, and to formulate and delineate critical research necessary to move molecular electronics concepts forward. The conference is well organized by an international committee. A list of invited speakers and conference organizers who are leaders in the field is provided. The conference is expected to provide an effective forum for discussion of critical scientific issues and directions in Molecular Electronics. Along with the opportunity to assess the field and future directions, it is expected that new ties and collaborations will be established between university, industry, and other research institution researchers. %%% An evaluation of the progress and status of Molecular Electronics and related chemistry and materials issues, especially critical materials and device related research areas, and the relationship of molecular and materials issues to device fabrication along with current assessments of the most important developments in this field will be of great value to the understanding and development of new capabilities in computing, data processing, and communications doc9663 none The objective of this research is to gain a fundamental understanding of the physical and chemical transport processes in the chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of functionally graded methods, through a combined experimental and computational investigation. A functionally graded material (FGM) may be defined as one in which the composition of the material varies gradually from one extreme to another. Functionally graded materials can successfully be used to join two disjoint materials such as metals and ceramics, or provide coatings on substrates in such a way as to provide a gradual variation of the thermal expansion coefficient. CVD involves the gradual deposition of a material on a substrate heated to a temperature where chemical reactions can take place, thus forming a thin layer of deposit. A typical CVD process involves complex interactions between flow, temperature, species concentrations, and reactor geometry. Understanding the precise interactions between the various flow variables is very essential to obtaining the optimum set of operating parameters, and their manner of variation. The fundamental issues addressed in the experiments will be the transient planar distributions of the chemical species transported by the carrier gas, and of temperature near the surface of the substrate. The objective of the computational study will be to develop a mathematical model of the transient flow, heat transfer and chemical reactions that occur during the graded deposition process doc9664 none Shatz An important goal of this research is to understand the relationship between the morphology of inner ear hair bundle structures and their functionality; in particular, how the size and shape affects their response to stimuli of different frequencies. Another goal is to understand the role that an overlying membrane has in hair cell sensitivity. Hair bundles of hearing organs are usually topped by an overlying membrane called the tectorial membrane. Comparing the hydrodynamics of a model which represents an overlying membrane to one that does not should elucidate the role of an overlying membrane in hair cell sensitivity. The principal investigator previously investigated the hydrodynamics of a single hair bundle as a two-dimensional flap and as a three-dimensional hemispheroid. The 3-D analysis indicated that the 2-D model does not adequately represent hair bundle dynamics at low frequencies. This new research project is designed to extend the hemispheroid model in two directions: to include mid-frequencies, and to analyze a model with an overlying membrane in the low and high frequency regions. Students are to participate in this research in several ways: by comparing the results of different methods of solving for the distribution of the fundamental solutions; by animating the motion of the hair bundles and surrounding fluid; by studying the singularity method; studying the features of neural tuning curves. The research will enhance the students understanding in the areas of fluid flows, numerical analysis, ear physiology, and computer programming. Results from the research are expected to contribute to the knowledge base of auditory science and also to numerical modeling of fluids. In the field of micro-mechanics the new knowledge may prove useful in developing micro-mechanical transducers of sound and motion doc9665 none The investigator and his colleagues study connections between self-dual linear codes and algebraic curves over a finite field. The main goal is to improve existing bounds for the asymptotic relative minimum distance of self-dual codes by showing that the zeros of the zeta function of a self-dual code satisfy a Riemann hypothesis analogue. The zeta function of an algebraic curve, that contains information about the number of rational points, can be defined for an arbitrary self-dual code. The zeta function of a self-dual code contains information about the minimum distance of the code, which has an expression in terms of the trace of the zeros of the zeta function. A Riemann hypothesis analogue would give an upper bound for the minimum distance similar to the Hasse-Weil bound for the number of rational points on an algebraic curve over a finite field. The problem under investigation comes from the theory of error-correcting codes. Error-correcting codes are used to ensure reliable communication over noisy communication channels. One of the central problems asks how good codes can be, in other words how many errors can be corrected if we choose an optimal code. Even if we restrict ourselves to the important and much smaller class of self-dual codes, no precise answer to this fundamental question is known, although some estimates are available. Improved estimates will follow by establishing analogues for self-dual codes to known results on zeta functions in Number Theory and Algebraic Geometry doc9666 none This investigation focuses on the analysis and design of nonlinear actuators which utilize smart material transducers comprised of piezoelectric, electrostrictive or magnetostrictive materials. These transducers have proven highly effective in a number of industrial, automotive, defense, aerospace and aeronautical applications due to their dual capability for sensing and actuating, the magnitude of generated forces, and their broadband nature. At high drive levels, however, all of these materials exhibit constitutive nonlinearities and varying degrees of hysteresis. The goal in this investigation is to develop mathematical models and control algorithms which, in conjunction with drive electronics, compensate for the nonlinearities inherent to these materials. The strategy in the modeling component focuses on utilizing energy mechanisms to develop unified models that are appropriate for each of the smart material compounds. Inverse compensators based on these models will then be combined with feedback, feedforward, adaptive and robust control laws to provide the control algorithms necessary to achieve linear transducer dynamics. This investigation will advance the state of smart material control systems and extend the capabilities of currently available actuators for high performance applications by facilitating the construction of actuators which have the full stroke and force capabilities of the nonlinear constituent smart materials but exhibit linear behavior throughout their drive range doc9667 none This research project will explore the anti-stiction effectiveness of a number of organic coatings deposited from vapor phase. Vapor-phase processes would be environmentally friendlier and more economical than standard liquid-phase processes. Furthermore, dry processes may well result easier to scale-up from research stage to production, due to the potential for easier control and better uniformity. Because silicon has excellent mechanical properties, there is a growing interest in developing technologies that use silicon as a mechanical material. One such technology, called surface micromachining, consists of deposition and selective etching of multiple layers of structural and sacrificial thin films, and is a core technological processes underlying microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). Despite significant advances in surface micromachining, stiction remains a key problem, severely limiting the realization and reliability of many MEMS devices. The project will provide core training for a graduate student. The student will benefit from interdisciplinary training at the crossroads of surface science, electrical and mechanical engineering and materials science. An additional pay-off is the achievement of higher reliability MEMS. The PI will continue her ongoing commitment to education, including outreach activities to under-represented groups, undergraduate research participation in the work to be performed, public presentations on the topics of microsystems technology and surface engineering, and active involvement in curriculum development on these topics doc9668 none The principal investigator proposes to study the sharp regularity properties of operators associated to domains of finite type in dimensions greater than two, and to apply the results to the study of the boundary behavior of holomorphic functions in these domains. He also proposes to study corresponding properties on certain nilpotent Lie groups. The operators under consideration include the Szego and Bergman projections, and the relative fundamental solutions to the Kohn-Laplacian. In particular, the principal investigator hopes to find an appropriate metric that controls the size of the distribution kernel for the Szego projection on diagonalizable pseudo-convex domains of finite type, and on convex domains. He hopes to study the boundary behavior of holomorphic functions in certain non-diagonalizable domains, and in this context, he proposes to study variants of the Hardy-Littlewood maximal function. Appropriate nilpotent Lie groups can model many of these problems, and the principal investigator proposes to study the corresponding convolution operators on the groups. The distribution kernels of these operators have singularities that are more complicated than the classical Calderon-Zygmund singular integral operators, and the problem thus leads to interesting questions in harmonic analysis. Interesting questions and results in mathematics often arise at the interface of two or more areas of research, since in such situations, deep results in one field can shed light on previously intractable problems in another. The research outlined in this proposal is directed towards questions at the interface of modern harmonic analysis, several complex variables, and linear partial differential equations. For more than forty years these areas have enjoyed a very profitable symbiotic relationship. For example, attempts to solve the Levy problem in complex analysis led to the development of deep results about hypo-elliptic partial differential equations, and these problems, in turn, led to developments in harmonic analysis on nilpotent Lie groups such as the Heisenberg group. Many of these related results dealt with integral operators that are modeled on the classical singular integrals such as the Hilbert transform and the Riesz transforms whose study goes back to the middle of the twentieth century. In recent years, it has become clear that new problems in complex analysis require the understanding of new kinds of operators in which the singularities of the kernel are considerably more complicated than the classical singular integrals. The research described in this proposal is directed toward understanding these more complicated situations doc9669 none The proposed work addresses development of novel methods for enhancing the ability of humans to perform complex and delicate manipulation tasks at a microscopic level. The proposed approach is based on a combination of off-line programming and on-line adaptation of task-specific human-computer manipulation idioms. The work builds upon this group s experience in the development of steady-hand robotic augmentation. Specific tasks from microsurgery and micro-assembly will be used for testing the ideas and evaluating the results obtained doc9670 none The goal of this research project is to produce a novel class of aluminum matrix nanocomposites with superior structural and corrosion-resistance properties that can be manufactured rapidly and uniformly. The nanocomposites are formed by first producing aluminum and mullite nanoparticles using high-energy ball milling (mechanical attrition). The nanocrystalline powders are then processed to near net-shape composites using Hot Isostatic Pressing (HIP). Further, the incorporation of design innovations to improve the speed and uniformity with which these nanocomposites are formed are being investigated. Specific tasks include the development and evaluation of a fluidized bed process for the continuous milling of nanocrystalline materials. Oxidative milling will be incorporated in the fluidized bed process in order to form intimate mixtures of nanocrystalline aluminum and ceramic, that can then be further processed via HIP. Characterization of the interfacial, mechanical, and corrosion properties of nanocrystalline mullite-reinforced nanocrystalline aluminum matrix composites will be conducted. Mechanical properties are to be characterized using nanoindentation and traditional tensile testing. Corrosion studies will be carried out to determine the effects of nanocrystallinity on chemical resistance. The project will provide research experiences for undergraduates involved in the Louisiana Alliance for Minority Participation (LAMP). It is expected that LAMP students from Dillard, Southern and Xavier will participate and be encouraged to pursue advanced degrees doc9671 none This collaborative research deals with the development of a rigorous finite element method-based approach to studying robustness and reliability of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS). Exploitation of the finite element formulation is proposed to incorporate higher order moments into the probability analysis without incurring excessive cost. The computational burden from introducing higher order moments will be eliminated by taking advantage of the finite element formulation of selective functionals. New modeling methods for MEMS will be explored and a variety of MEMS devices will be studied. To overcome the limitations of existing methods for propagating the effect of uncertainty, a reliability analysis-based procedure for probability analysis is proposed, which will achieve a good balance between accuracy and efficiency. If successful, the research will benefit the MEMS community with improved quality assessment and a better understanding of the intrinsic relationship between robustness and reliability. The ability to efficiently evaluate higher order derivatives in the finite element method is also beneficial to other applications where this derivative information is needed. Comparative study on various methods for probability analysis can provide better guidelines for choosing the most appropriate technique. The reliability analysis-based procedure for probability analysis is expected to be applicable to design problems with nonlinear behavior and large uncertainty variations doc9672 none Willis This award to Oregon State University provides instrumentation to significantly improve the oceanographic research capabilities of the institution and the research vessel Wecoma, an NSF-owned ship operated by OSU as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The winch supported here will allow much more efficient use of the vessel in surveying, as it allows use of a fiber optic cable system, and upgrades existing capabilities so that shallow and deep operations may take place during the same, synopic surveys. The other item, a time domain reflectometer (TDR), will allow rapid identification of the location of tow cable failures, and thus save time and effort during survey operations when cable problems arise. These improvements will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists using the ship in their research during and future years doc9673 none The investigation will focus on the monitoring and analysis of the State Street Bridge in Salt Lake City, Utah, which has been seismically retrofitted with Carbon FRP composites. The severe weather changes, the application of salt in the winter, and the freezing and thawing patterns make this a unique study. Test items, plates, and cylinders will be placed at the bridge site and used for destructive testing at predetermined intervals. Further laboratory testing, will investigate single and dual variables. The objectives of this research are to: (a) evaluate the long-term reduction in strength and modulus of elasticity of the carbon CFRP composite due to changes in temperature, alkalinity, chlorides, UV exposure, and freeze thaw cycles; (b) evaluate the durability of the bond between the CFRP composite and concrete using mechanical, thermal, and chemical testing; (c) evaluate the long-term effect of the CFRP composite retrofit on the strength and structural characteristics of the reinforced concrete bridge; (d) develop a durability reduction factor to be used in the design of a CFRP composite retrofit, based on the information gathered from the long-term monitoring of State Street Bridge. Instead of testing only commercial products in the proposed durability study, a matrix of carbon fibers and resins will be utilized. A total of five composite materials will be investigated: three commercial composite products, to be supplied from three independent manufacturers and two non-commercial products doc9674 none The primary aim of this proposal is the development of diffractive photonic components for the terahertz spectral range, and the exploration of terahertz pulse propagation in strongly diffractive media. One primary aim of this proposal is to develop a range of new and useful optical components specifically designed for the far infrared, or terahertz, spectral range, based on the concepts of photonic crystals. Researchers have made tremendous strides in the use of periodically diffractive materials for optical components, with examples ranging from fiber Bragg gratings to colloidal crystal notch filters. Such systems could also be useful as waveguides, filters, tunable dispersive optics, and as components for wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). However, these ideas have rarely been implemented at terahertz frequencies, a portion of the spectrum with increasing technological importance. Another important aspect of the proposed research involves the propagation of THz radiation in strongly scattering media. This area of research has been of substantial interest in recent years, motivated by the prospect of achieving localization of electromagnetic waves. Interestingly, although a clear demonstration of light localization is quite difficult in the optical regime, this research has led to the development of techniques for imaging in turbid media. Since many of the expected applications of THz imaging involve turbid or scattering media, it will be valuable to extend these imaging studies to the THz regime doc9675 none It is recognized that our infrastructure to a very large extent is founded on unsaturated soils. In fact, construction in unsaturated soils is typically preferred when practical, due to reduced costs and effort. However, the geotechnical research community has not yet solved all of the issues of implementation of unsaturated soil theory. One of the primary difficulties in bringing the relatively new fundamental theories of unsaturated soil mechanics into engineering design, analysis, and construction is the difficulty, time, and cost associated with unsaturated soil characterization. Two major elements are needed to bring unsaturated soil mechanics and fundamental analyses into practice: (1) estimates or measurements of soil suction, and (2) moduli or coefficients relating soil suction to performance parameters such as soil shear strength and compressibility. In this research, a range in sophistication of approach will be employed for unsaturated soil characterization. Hierarchical Level 1 will be developed for extremely high-level, large budget projects for which significant expenditures are likely. Hierarchical Level 4 will be developed for lower budget, routine projects for which very limited testing and analysis are common. This research is an important step in bringing unsaturated soil mechanics into present day geotechnical engineering and construction practice. The implementation of unsaturated soils theory would result in more fundamentally sound analyses and design and would lead to substantial savings in construction costs for many applications doc9676 none This research on strategies for cross-training and call agent assignment is a ripe research topic that promises not only scientific innovation, but also a significant step forward in call center managerial practice and performance. This research has the potential to impact call center agents through increased career development and quality of life and help organizations with call centers through improved practices that lead to improved profitability. Moreover, it will increase the quality of service experienced by the users of call centers, which includes nearly the entire population. Within the last decade, call centers have become a large service industry employing roughly 3-4 million Americans, growing at about 10% annually, according to Data Monitor. The operational management of call centers, which is a notoriously difficult task, has developed to the point where the technology is already available to dynamically route incoming calls to the most suitable customer service representative (CSR), or agent, based upon their skills and training. Much more than convenience and profit are at stake. Critical emergency services such as 911, police, ambulance, and fire dispatching depend upon call centers and have experimented with cross-training call center agents to handle multiple call types. In response to these pressing needs, this project develops innovative approaches to setting effective strategies for determining which agents to cross-train for more than one task as well as how to best assign calls to them. The principal investigators have interacted with industrial call center managers and software solution providers to maximize the impact of this work This research will construct a detailed, conceptual classification scheme for call center environments that identifies key characteristics germane to the selection of a cross training strategy. It will create and analyze a series of mathematical models that predict the performance of various cross-training patterns utilizing skills-based call routing and provide insight into the factors that determine their efficacy from a cost benefit perspective as well as the system s response performance. The analysis will use tools that include queuing theory, Markov decision processes, discrete event systems theory, and simulation. The anticipated results of this research are: (1) managerial insights that greatly deepen the understanding of which systems will benefit from cross-training and a suitable strategy for implementation; (2) CSR (Customer Service Representative) cross-training strategies that are robustly effective across a wide range of call centers; (3) useful analytical models for the analysis and design of agile work systems; and (4) extensions of the queuing technology base to include broad classes of systems where servers operate in new and complex ways based on their skill sets. Upon implementation, the results will impact users of call centers with increased quality of service, agents through increased career development and quality of life, and firms (small, medium, and large call centers) through improved management practices doc9677 none The objective of this project is to research and develop an integrated framework for automatic generation of setup plans and fixture designs, applied to a wide range of components (prismatic, rotational, as well as irregular) that require machining in lathes, 3-axis machines, and 5-axis machining centers using modular, standard, or dedicated fixtures. Setup planning and fixture design are two closely related tasks. While setup planning is constrained by fixtures to be applied, it also provides guidelines for fixture design. The cyclic interaction creates the chicken or egg dilemma, which is the main research barrier. This problem will be solved as follows. First, a graph representation is developed to capture the feature tolerance relationship of a product model. Through the recognition of design datum frames, the graph is transformed to a datum-machining surface relationship graph (DMG). With considerations of production scheme (integrated, distributed, or combined operations), fixturing constraints, machine tool capability, and tolerance decomposition, DMG will be converted into a setup graph. Tolerance stack-up analysis and setup plan verification is then followed to provide information for fixture design. If successful, this research will yield both basic and applied advances. As basic research, it will provide a generalized methodology to unify current research results in setup planning and fixture design to achieve smooth integration of computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM). It will also shed light on mathematics-based tolerance analysis. For practicing engineers, it will allow them to incorporate setup generation and fixture design capability into existing CAD CAM software tools; thus, dramatically improve user productivity. The incorporation of the research results into course curriculum will broaden mechanical, industrial, and manufacturing engineering students knowledge spectrum; thus, better preparing them for the knowledge intensive and multi-disciplinary working environment in the 21st century doc9678 none In this preliminary research project, large arrays of Micro Electromechanical Systems (MEMS) with programmable electrodes and electromagnets will be used to achieve microscale positioning of particles, whiskers, and chopped fibers in polymer matrix multi-functional materials. The research will enhance the understanding of the electro-magneto-mechanical interactions of particles in thin layers of liquid polymer undergoing solidification and curing. The preliminary research task is to establish whether particles at this scale can be patterned by rearrangement in response to electric and magnetic fields. Currently there is no way to affordably position particles and whiskers in microscale patterns in composite materials. The research is thus a critical enabling technology that will provide an affordable method to pattern two or more types of particles into unit cells. Such patterning will reduce the concentration of stress, electric field, and magnetic field, thereby leading to materials with improved threshold properties such as mechanical strength, electric breakdown field, and magnetic saturation field. These three threshold properties will be tested in patterned microstructures, and the results will be compared with random particle arrangements. If the feasibility of this method is established, it is expected that this novel process would then provide an affordable way to make massive arrays of electrodes and electromagnets with features as small as one micrometer at low unit cost based upon photolithography methods. The MEMS arrays are designed to be reusable, as they are not part of the finished product doc9679 none The research project is focused on the analytical aspects of the theory of integrable systems related to the Riemann-Hilbert and isomonodromy methods. The problems under consideration include the asymptotic analysis of the correlation functions of exactly solvable quantum field and statistical mechanics models, the investigation of the double scaling limits in the theory of orthogonal polynomials, the analysis of the integrable systems describing the distribution functions of random matrix theory and random permutations, and the global asymptotic analysis of the solutions of integrable differential equations of the Painleve and KdV types. The theory of integrable systems is an expanding area which plays an increasingly important role as one of the principal sources of new analytical and algebraic ideas for many branches of modern mathematics and theoretical physics. Simultaneously, it provides an efficient analytic tool for the study of some of the fundamental mathematical models arising in modern nonlinear science and technology. Specifically, the research directions indicated above deal with the mathematical models which form the theoretical basis for the following fields: condensed matter, high energy and plasma physics, nonlinear hydrodynamics, and high-bit rate telecommunication systems. A special attention in the project is given to the analysis of the distributions of random matrix theory which govern statistical properties of the large systems which do not obey the usual laws of classical probability. This kind of systems appears in many different areas of applied science and technology including heavy nuclei, polymer growth, high-dimensional data analysis, and certain percolation processes doc9680 none This project addresses problems in dimension theory of dynamical systems and ergodic theory of tilings and substitutions. In the first direction, it is proposed to study the dimension characteristics of invariant sets for non-conformal dynamical systems and natural measures on them. These questions are related to problems on self-similar sets with overlap and arithmetic sums of Cantor sets. The second direction concerns non-periodic self-affine tilings, their generalizations, and symbolic analogs. There are many links between the two directions; for instance, self-affine tiles often have fractal boundaries, and number-theoretic issues (e.g., the appearance of PV-numbers) are prominent in both areas. The problems to be studied are concerned with dynamical and diffraction spectra of tilings and substitutions. The mathematical chaos theory deals with the appearance of chaotic motions in dynamical systems (which are mathematical models of various phenomena in physics, biology, economics, etc.). These chaotic motions are often associated with various fractal phenomena. The modern dimension theory uses a wide variety of tools to study the fine structure of these motions and their invariant sets (such as strange attractors ). Still, many aspects of this fractal chaotic world remain mysterious, and the proposed research aims to get further insights into them. The second part of the project is concerned with the so-called aperiodic order, the hallmark of which is the remarkable class of solids, discovered in the early s and called quasicrystals, which exhibit sharp diffraction spectrum with a forbidden 10-fold symmetry. Penrose tilings, discovered in the s in a purely mathematical development, turned out to be a good model for certain quasicrystals, but many open problems remain, both on the mathematical and on the physical side. The second part of the proposed research investigates some of these problems using the techniques of ergodic theory and symbolic dynamics doc9681 none Davis This is a workshop proposal submitted by Dr. Robert Davis, University of Virginia, to request travel expenses to enable 12 U.S. scientists to attend an international meeting on new perspectives on catalysis for sustainable chemical technologies. This meeting is scheduled to be held in Beijing, China on September 23-27, . The purpose of this workshop is to bring together young scientists and engineers for an exchange of views on future trends in catalyst synthesis and catalytic reaction processes related to the environment and energy production. The NSF and the National Science Foundation of China jointly support this workshop doc9676 none This research on strategies for cross-training and call agent assignment is a ripe research topic that promises not only scientific innovation, but also a significant step forward in call center managerial practice and performance. This research has the potential to impact call center agents through increased career development and quality of life and help organizations with call centers through improved practices that lead to improved profitability. Moreover, it will increase the quality of service experienced by the users of call centers, which includes nearly the entire population. Within the last decade, call centers have become a large service industry employing roughly 3-4 million Americans, growing at about 10% annually, according to Data Monitor. The operational management of call centers, which is a notoriously difficult task, has developed to the point where the technology is already available to dynamically route incoming calls to the most suitable customer service representative (CSR), or agent, based upon their skills and training. Much more than convenience and profit are at stake. Critical emergency services such as 911, police, ambulance, and fire dispatching depend upon call centers and have experimented with cross-training call center agents to handle multiple call types. In response to these pressing needs, this project develops innovative approaches to setting effective strategies for determining which agents to cross-train for more than one task as well as how to best assign calls to them. The principal investigators have interacted with industrial call center managers and software solution providers to maximize the impact of this work This research will construct a detailed, conceptual classification scheme for call center environments that identifies key characteristics germane to the selection of a cross training strategy. It will create and analyze a series of mathematical models that predict the performance of various cross-training patterns utilizing skills-based call routing and provide insight into the factors that determine their efficacy from a cost benefit perspective as well as the system s response performance. The analysis will use tools that include queuing theory, Markov decision processes, discrete event systems theory, and simulation. The anticipated results of this research are: (1) managerial insights that greatly deepen the understanding of which systems will benefit from cross-training and a suitable strategy for implementation; (2) CSR (Customer Service Representative) cross-training strategies that are robustly effective across a wide range of call centers; (3) useful analytical models for the analysis and design of agile work systems; and (4) extensions of the queuing technology base to include broad classes of systems where servers operate in new and complex ways based on their skill sets. Upon implementation, the results will impact users of call centers with increased quality of service, agents through increased career development and quality of life, and firms (small, medium, and large call centers) through improved management practices doc9683 none This is a proposal to continue the research supported by NSF Grant along two direc-tions. Computation of the reach sets of hybrid dynamical systems is needed to evaluate system perfor-mance. Prior work led to efficient algorithms for calculating the reach sets of linear systems with bounded control, with and without uncertainty. Those algorithms will be extended to hybrid sys-tems. Lambda-Shift is a new language for the specification and simulation of hierarchical, hybrid systems. It has the potential of providing an invaluable framework for the design of such systems. That potential will be explored. The proposed research leverages efforts supported by the DARPA Program on Model Based Inte-gration of Embedded Software (MoBJES), and the ONR Program on Autonomous Vehicles doc9684 none The overall project goal is to investigate a novel vibration control concept --simultaneous disturbance rejection and vibration confinement via piezoelectric network tailoring. The underlying principle for vibration confinement, which has attracted significant attention among vibration control researchers, is to alter the structural modes in such a manner that the corresponding modal components have much smaller amplitude in concerned areas than the remaining part of the structure. As a result, the vibration energy will be confined to regions that are less important. While vibration confinement is an attractive idea, some critical problems need to be addressed before the concept can be realized. The proposed new idea can solve these problems and greatly advance the state of the art. The research tasks include theory development, system analysis, and experimental investigation. The significance and impact of the proposed research will be: (a) With piezoelectric networks, it is possible to suppress vibration of the entire mechanical structure by confining the energy in the electrical circuitry part of the system, which cannot be achieved with the current confinement approach. (b) With the circuit elements as design variables, one can re-design the electrical system to achieve vibration confinement without changing the mechanical structure -- adjusting electrical circuits is much easier than modifying mechanical components. (c) With the circuit elements as additional design variables, the system design space can be significantly increased. This could allow the possibility of simultaneous left right eigenstructure assignment. One can thus achieve disturbance rejection (through shaping the left eigenvector) together with energy confinement (shaping the right eigenvector) and end up with much better vibration control performance than that of the current practice. (d) The proposed effort will be the first to examine piezoelectric network tailoring for general complex structures with a systematic and rigorous approach doc9685 none This grant provides funding to develop new methods for machining elastomers and elastomer-steel composites. Several machining methods will be investigated including high speed milling using ultra-sharp cutters, machining of elastomers with induction heated tools, and machining of cryogenically-cooled elastomers. An understanding of the tool-workpiece interaction will be developed using finite element techniques that address the large strain and highly deforming elasto-viscoplastic response of elastomers. The models will be used to determine tool forces, workpiece temperatures and deformation, and surface roughness of a machined elastomer as a function of operating conditions and tool geometry. Appropriate material property data will be developed in close collaboration with several industrial partners to characterize the elastomer response at the elevated temperatures and high strain-rates anticipated in machining. Tools and operating conditions that result in smooth surface finishes and damage-free parts will be identified, and cutting tests will be performed to verify the models based upon tool forces and surface finish. This research will lead to new understanding of the fundamental mechanisms of chip formation during machining of elastomers at both elevated temperatures and cryogenic conditions. This understanding is critical for identifying tools and operating conditions to improve the machinability of a wide range of elastomeric products such as shock isolators, sound and vibration absorbers, seals, tires, electrical and thermal insulators, footwear, tubing, and other applications requiring a highly flexible or stretchable material. As compared with traditional expensive and time-consuming molding processes, the machining methods investigated in this research promise a practical alternative for rapid production of precision elastomeric parts for a multitude of custom applications at significantly lower cost. This research also offers the potential for the development of new manufacturing processes for cost-effective and environmentally conscious tire recycling doc9686 none for Adaptive Micro-Systems Transducers : Research is focused on high strain susceptibility and low switching field giant magnetostriction of Tb-Fe or Sm-Fe films, which are sandwiched between high magnetization soft magnets, such as Fe-Co. Due to inter-layer interactions between stress and magnetization in these multilayers, understanding and controlling favorably the magneto-elastic coupling is a key objective of these studies. An overall energy function is being developed for the combination of all magnetic, mechanical, and coupling energies, in order to understand the magneto-elastic coupling. Multilayers are being sputter deposited as a function of layer thickness and number of bilayers, with post-deposition stress annealing to optimize their magneto-elastic behavior. Films are being characterized for their magnetic structure and microstructure using analytical electron microscopy, x-ray diffraction, and scanning probe microscopy. Optimized films are being tested as adaptive components of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and Bio-MEMS. In addition to the richness of new phenomena that are being observed due to magneto-elastic interactions, these studies impact significantly the rapidly evolving fields of MEMS and bio-MEMS. Examples include highly efficient micro-switches, laser beam deflectors, fluid jet deflectors, valves, ultrasonic motors, micro-grippers and micro-pumps, with high dynamic response. Educational impact includes active training and participation of graduate and undergraduate students, as well as high school students from Buffalo area inner city high schools doc9687 none The goal of this project is to develop Layer Stripping , or more properly, Layer Splitting techniques for inverse scattering problems in one or more dimensions. We are working to create stable algorithms by utilizing the principle of causality and by characterizing the scattering data, as much as we possibly can. Inverse scattering problems are often posed in either the frequency domain or in the time domain . Theoretically, the two are equivalent, one set of data being related to the other by the Fourier transform. However, features that are easily seen in one domain can appear much more complicated in the other. For example, the scattering operator, in the frequency domain is easily seen to satisfy certain bounds. The analogous bounds in the time domain appear much more complicated. Similarly, the timing of reflections (i.e. you hear reflections from nearby objects before you hear those from objects further away) becomes a property of ideals in spaces of analytic functions when translated to the frequency domain. A main feature of our approach is to carefully analyze how to express each such feature in both contexts, and use these to help characterize the scattering data and enforce stability. The fundamental task of science is to investigate the world. Most often, we accomplish this goal by directing waves (e.g. light, X-rays, sound) at an object and observing the waves after they have interacted with that object. In some cases, the results of such an experiment can be readily understood (e.g. a photograph, a single X-ray). However, as our technology becomes more and more complex, the data from an experiment are less and less likely to be directly meaningful. More and more, sophisticated mathematical and statistical techniques are necessary to translate data into something which is meaningful to the human investigator (e.g. a CAT scan, a neutron scattering experiment). This is the general role that Inverse Problems plays in science today. It is the mathematical science of interpreting experiment. When we solve inverse problems we run physics backwards, deducing the cause from the effect. While physical intuition often suggests the best imaging experiments, an imaging algorithm is not a model of a natural process. In particular, these problems are often ill-posed, and physical principles must often be applied in ways that are radically different than how they would function in a forward problem which directly models nature. Thus they offer a unique opportunity for using mathematical intuition to supplement physical intuition. This project seeks to employ physical principles in novel ways to develop stable imaging techniques. Here is an example, discovered under previous NSF support. We observe reflections of waves from a layered lossless medium with unknown wavespeed. If one makes a guess at the wave speed in part of the medium and uses that guess to compute the reflection one would have seen from the rest of the medium, then either the guess is correct or the computed reflections violate the principle of causality by arriving back at the receiver too soon. We used this principle to develop a very stable algorithm doc9688 none Luminescent polyelectrolytes exhibit enhanced fluorescence quenching ( superquenching ) with very large Stern-Volmer quenching constants. The superquenching arises from a combination of two effects. First, it has been demonstrated that a single acceptor (functioning as an acceptor for photoinduced electron transfer) can quench the fluorescence emission from an entire macromolecule in aqueous solution. Second, in aqueous solution, such luminescent polyelectrolytes are charged. As a result, the positively charged acceptor and the anionic polymer form a weakly bound complex thereby enabling static superquenching. The superquenching of the photoluminescence (PL) can be used for sensing biomolecules with specificity and with high sensitivity. Thus, determining and controlling the magnitude of the Coulomb binding energy of the polymer quencher complex is of particular importance to the use of luminescent polyelectrolytes in biosensor applications. If the binding between the ligand tethered to the quencher and the analyte is smaller than that between the quencher and the polymer, the quencher ligand cannot be effectively pulled away from the luminescent polymer. In addition, the photoluminescence (PL) quantum efficiency is sensitive to the conformation of the polymer in solution. It is known that polyelectrolytes can form stable complexes with oppositely charged amphiphilc molecules (surfactants). Experiments have shown that addition of sufactant to solutions containing luminescent polyelectrolytes significantly increases the PL efficiency. Thus, studies of the chain conformation of luminescent polyelectrolytes is of clear scientific relevance and importance. %%% This project is directed toward determining the chain conformation of luminescent polyelectrolytes and the magnitude of the Coulomb binding energy of the polymer: quencher complexes. The luminescent polyelectrolytes to be studied include water soluble PPV derivatives and novel poly-lysine polymers (polypeptide chains with cyanine dyes in J-aggregate configuration attached as side-chains). A series of quenchers with different charges have been developed and are available for these studies. Quenching of PL will be studied by changing the ion concentration in buffered aqueous solutions, by changing the concentration of acceptors, and by varying the temperature. The chain conformation of the luminescent polyelectrolytes will be determined (with and without quencher, surfactant etc), as a function of the Debye screening length (ion concentration) and as a function of molecular weight using light scattering and neutron scattering doc9689 none Robert Wyatt of the University of Texas at Austin is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to develop analytical and computational methods and algorithms for generating quantum trajectories that can be used for solving multidimensional problems in quantum dynamics. An ab initio approach will be taken to develop all that is needed on the fly as trajectory ensembles evolve. The focus will be on performing numerically accurate integration of the time-dependent Schrodinger equation using trajectories as the underlying computational tool. The techniques that will be explored are the quantum trajectory method (QTM) and a second trajectory method based on an implementation of stochastic mechanics. For the QTM, the following methods will be developed and incorporated into a new code for multidimensional problems: (1) both direct product and non-direct product (spherical symmetry) distributed approximating functionals (DAFs), (2) a new variational moving least squares method to evaluate derivatives that appear in the equations of motion, (3) a new local gauge transformation method to filter input functions before derivative evaluation is initiated, and (4) several types of grid adaptation intended to bypass problems associated with regions near nodes in the wavefunction. In stochastic mechanics, the following topics will be investigated: (1) on the fly integration of the convection-advection-diffusion (CAD) equations in the Lagrangian picture, and (2) the possible use of complex-valued trajectories to avoid the node problem. Applications will be made to electronic nonadiabatic transitions in collisions with and without curve crossing, and intramolecular rearrangements such as the vinylidene isomerization reaction. The solution of the time-dependent Schrodinger equation sought in this research is a very general problem which has important ramifications in chemistry, physics, and biology. This research could ultimately lead to the development of computer codes that will permit new understanding of important properties of complex molecular systems doc9690 none In multicomponent systems, the molecular motion of a polymer may be strongly affected by the presence of other synthetic polymers, solid substrates, fillers, or biological structures. Such changes in dynamics significantly influence transport and mechanical properties. The long term goal of this research is to understand how to predict the changes in polymer dynamics which occur with mixing. Multicomponent polymer systems exhibit complex dynamics. Significant progress can be made by fully characterizing the dynamics of a number of model mixtures. The proposed research will characterize: 1) segmental dynamics of both components in a model one-phase blend (low molecular weight polystyrene polyisoprene); 2) longer length and time scale motions of both components in a model one-phase blend; 3) segmental dynamics in the limit of infinite dilution for several one-phase blends with polyisoprene as the minor component; 4) structure and dynamics of a model nano-composite (C60 polybutadiene). In addition, two key conceptual aspects of blend dynamics will addressed: 1) the correlation between local mobility and local structure in a miscible blend (polyisoprene polyvinylethylene); 2) the size of the regions which determine local mobility. Characterizing dynamics in complex mixtures requires the coordinated application of a number of different experimental techniques. The proposed research primarily relies upon multiple field NMR relaxation time measurements and solid-state NMR measurements of segmental and normal model motion, and neutron scattering to assess aggregation in a nanoscale composite. %%% This line of research should lead to an understanding of the complex features and useful properties of miscible polymer blends, and ultimately the ability to predict these properties. Insights from the study of a model nano-composite could lead to the ability to predict transport properties of ions and small molecules near nano-devices in contact with polymers. Comparisons between dynamics experiments and molecular dynamics computer simulations will lead to improved forcefields and the ability to perform more accurate simulation in materials science and beyond doc9691 none The proposal is motivated from a comprehensive and formal study of control and diagnosis of discrete event systems with temporal logic specifications. The supervisory control theory provides a formalism or synthesizing controllers for event-driven systems in order to enforce desired qualitative specifications. Such specifications are traditionally expressed as formal languages or equivalently as state machines. It is more practical, however, to express specifications in a language close to a natural spoken language. Temporal logic is an attempt to bridge the gap between formal and natural languages. It is our intent to develop techniques for control and diagnosis of discrete event systems when the specifications are expressed in temporal logic. We choose the temporal logics of CTL (computational tree logic) and LTL (linear time logic) proposed by Clarke-Emerson-Sitsla for which automated techniques exist for verifying system properties. The proposed research complements that work by developing automated techniques for synthesizing controllers and diagnosers. Several problems in this context have been proposed including, control under complete observation, control under partial observation, modular control, failure modeling and diagnosis, and computation using the symbolic method. Our initial work shows that with the usage of temporal logic, there is no loss of computational complexity, yet there is surely a gain of expressibility and user-friendliness doc9692 none Electrochemical capacitor (EC) energy technologies, including double layer capacitor (DLC) and electrochemical double layer capacitor (EDLC) have promising potential in electric vehicles (EV) or hybrid vehicles. The most important advantages of EC are their high power and energy densities. Other EC advantages include long cycle life (100,000 - 1,000,000 cycles) and maintenance-free property. The energy density of EC mainly depends on specific capacitance and applied voltage. The maximum capacitance of EC is limited by the concentration of ions in the electrolyte. The key to increase the energy density of the electrochemical capacitors seems to rest in the increases in the electrochemical windows and ionic concentrations of the electrolytes, and improvement of mass transfer in metal oxide film. The project objectives include: Development of novel electrodes: Composite electrodes composed of carbon and nano-film of metal oxide will be investigated. Development of novel electrolytes: Organic liquids as electrolytes will be investigated. Modeling and investigation of charge-discharge mechanisms. Current metal oxide film used in EC has micrometer thickness and the fabrication is complicated. In this research, a novel oxide film processing method is proposed. By adsorbing metal to activated carbon and then modifying it to metal oxide, the new method will produce nano-meter-thick metal oxide film, having high energy density and low internal resistance. The theoretical analysis and preliminary experiments were conducted and specific energy was calculated. Theoretical energy density of - Wh kg was obtained for electrochemical capacitor unit using ionic liquids. It is anticipated that the goals outlined in this proposal will lead to the development of a new capacitor with high power and energy densities doc9693 none Wang and Green Frictional heating often causes failure of many tribological elements. Investigating the combined thermal and mechanical effects holds the key to understanding heat-induced failure and the overall performance of machine parts and their tribological surfaces. However, for conformal contacts, such as in bearings and seals, analyses become very difficult because they typically involve macro-scale structural analyses of the element parts, and micro-scale contact lubrication calculations at the sliding rolling interfaces. The common practice today is to use commercial finite element packages to solve such problems. The boundary element method (BEM) is expected to provide a far more efficient solution, because by nature all that is important, from a tribological point of view, occurs at the boundaries of the interacting surfaces. Therefore, the BEM formulation is expected to reduce the simulation effort and computation time by orders of magnitude (because only the boundaries need to be meshed and solved for). Therefore, the solutions for the problem of the three-way coupling of lubrication, elasticity, and thermal effects can be achieved much faster to be effective in design and analysis. Because meshing is necessary on the boundaries only, also computer storage is reduced significantly. It is, therefore, that the boundary element method (BEM) is the most reasonable and efficient means to use for thermal-mechanical problems in tribology. The proposed collaborative research aims at developing the formulation of a general boundary element method (BEM) for thermomechanical problems of tribological elements having any general geometry subject to thermal-elastic boundary conditions. Other computational techniques, such as the FFT and the macro-micro approach would make the BEM formulation a complete and the most efficient numerical method for thermomechanical problems of complex tribological elements. The modeling of the combined thermal and mechanical phenomena in tribology will provide the needed link between performance analyses and failure simulation. This work is the first attempt to solve the thermomechanical contact problem of finite structures with the boundary element method. It is expected to become an important and the most computationally effective tool for contact analysis problems where the half-space Green s function integral or the FEM approaches become either inaccurate or computationally impractical. This work will be performed in conjunction with the ongoing research at the existing Center for Surface Engineering and Tribology (CSET) at Georgia Tech and Northwestern University, which is co-funded by NSF and participating industries. The proposed research will link the contact simulation ability of Professor Wang s group at NU, and build upon Professor Green s work at GT on the analysis of triboelements, failure simulation, and prevention. The fusion of expertise by Green and Wang will construct an entirely new, efficient, and accurate analytical tool for analyzing thermomechanical failure of practical triboelements. The new approach will greatly enhance the CSET research, benefit its membership as well as other US industries in their efforts to improve designs and introduce new products doc9694 none This proposal is an interdisciplinary, collaborative, and international program between the University of Arizona Optical Sciences Center (OSC), the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UCLA, and European-Union researchers. The program is directed at creating and developing the materials, the fabrication processes, and the components needed to demonstrate an integrated, optoelectronic system-on-a-chip capable of multifunctional sensing of chemical and biological agents. The UCLA research involves the development of sol-gel glasses doped with biomolecules that can be used as opto-chemical transducers that exploit the sensitivity and selectivity of antibodies and enzymes. The chemical and biochemical changes of the encapsulated biomolecules can be monitored by optical methods. The research will encompass the development of light sources, photodetectors, and micro-optical systems based on hybrid organic inorganic materials. The students will receive more than simply exposure because they will gain hands-on experience in areas of materials synthesis, processing, spectroscopy, device fabrication and operation, as well as system integration. The interdisciplinary nature of this collaboration will also provide the students with a fundamental understanding of synthesis-property relationships for hybrid optical materials and their applications in chemical and biological sensing. This proposal is an interdisciplinary, collaborative and international program directed at creating and developing the materials, the fabrication processes, and the components needed to demonstrate an integrated, optoelectronic system-on-a-chip capable of sensing chemical and biological agents. The program consists of two components: (1) research and development of chemical and biomedical sensing materials based on the sol-gel encapsulation of biomolecules and (2) research and development of optical sensing techniques that capitalize on the optical properties of the sensing materials. The program will provide strong educational benefits to participating undergraduate and graduate student researchers and make them competitive in the world economy. The breadth of the research and our proposed international training program will ensure that the students will not only become experts in their own field of specialization, but that they also will achieve a detailed understanding of the entire sensor system. The students knowledge will encompass the fundamental chemical and physical science and engineering of the transducer and optical system, and the realities of device fabrication. This project is being co-funded by the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate (Office of Multidisciplinary Affairs, Division of Materials Research, Chemistry Division) and the Engineering Directorate (Chemical and Transport Systems Division doc9695 none Tsukruk The goal of this project is to develop robust nanocomposite molecular coatings of advanced polymers with controlled mechanical and tribological properties. These coatings would serve to enhance the performance of microdevices such as microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) by improving their resistance to contact deformation and friction and by providing controllable surface nanomechanical properties. The approach is to combine two-step self-assembly and grafting routines to fabricate multifunctional coatings from advanced polymeric materials with appropriate nanomechanical properties. The chemical grafting of the polymer layers onto the functionalized silion surface will then be explored in order to produce wear resistant and superelastic coatings. A grafted rubber matrix will be reinforced by interconnected glassy nanodomains to enhance its wear resistance. The grafting technique will also be used to grow nanocomposite brush layers with two dissimilar polymers, soft-hard alternating, and with reversible adaptive intralayer reorganization. Mapping of mechanical properties will be done with a nanoprobing nanoindentation technique adapted for compliant coatings. Robust, uniform, nanometer thick polymer coatings which are uniformly and firmly anchored to solid surfaces and which have low adhesion energy and variable elastic modulus and wettability are expected to be highly beneficial for the operation of nano- and microdevices in real world applications, where they are exposed to humid air and bio and chemo fluids. This will expand the application range of these devices significantly doc9696 none This award provides support for acquisition of a MALDI reflectron time-of-flight mass spectrometer system. This system will be used for studies of protein structure and function by a broad range of investigators including seven faculty and students in the departments Biophysics, Biology, Chemistry and Pharmacy on the main campus of the University. The system will provide the required resolution and mass accuracy to support applications in peptide mapping for identification and searching of modification sites in protein digests, and for studying various protein-protein and protein-drug interactions. A high mass detector will permit monitoring of proteins as a function of cellular processes, protein-drug studies and for verifying sequences obtained by peptide mapping. Mass spectrometry is a widely-used, critical technology in the study of protein structure and function, sometimes referred to proteomics. In addition to the group of seven major users, at 13 other investigators will benefit from the availability of the MALDI-TOF device. Many of these investigators currently rely on instruments in local industry or in private laboratories for their research. The new instrument will be located in the mass spectrometry facility in the Chemistry Department and will accessible for use by investigators from other departments. In addition to its use in research, the instrument will be used in graduate and postdoctoral training of a large number of students, including as many as 50 students and post-doctoral trainees in the major users laboratories, plus a large number of other students, including undergraduates, in these and other laboratories doc9697 none The restructuring of the utility industry has created new opportunities for distributed generation. The market for distributed generation is growing and is expected to reach between 25 to 50 GW by . Current trends in the United States favor distributed generation due to its increased efficiency and reduced emissions. The objective of the proposed research is to develop a low cost, high efficiency interface system in residential buildings for connecting dc sources like fuel cells to the grid, and to provide backup power during utility outages. The proposed topology supplies output power as split single-phase (plus minus 120 V, 240 V). A novel system configuration is proposed which essentially eliminates all switching losses, thus enabling very high efficiency and high power density. A prototype utility interface rated for an output power of 1.5 kW operating from a dc input will be built. The prototype will be thoroughly tested for its functionality and efficiency. The protection features incorporated into the system will be tested against possible fault conditions. The design will be scaled up to a 10 kW power rating. A low-cost, high efficiency utility interface (also able to act as a backup power source) will accelerate the use of distributed generation sources such as fuel cells and micro-turbines. The design of the proposed interface can be modified for higher power in three-phase applications doc9698 none The author proposes to study a variety of problems in harmonic analysis related to linear and multilinear singular integral operators. More specifically, the principal investigator proposes to embark on a study of multipliers for translation-invariant multilinear operators, both broad enough to cover known examples, but also deep enough to include very singular operators such as the bilinear Hilbert transform. A key point of the author s research will be the characteristic function of the unit disc thought of as a bilinear multiplier and its relation to other important operators in Fourier analysis such as the ball multiplier and Carleson s operator. A related study of maximal multilinear multipliers will also be pursued. Deep relations between Carleson s operator in two dimensions and the maximal disc multiplier will be sought. In particular it will be investigated whether the analysis developed in the study of the maximal bilinear disc multiplier will shed light on the problem of almost everywhere convergence of Fourier series in two dimensions. Problems in linear harmonic analysis that will be investigated include estimates for rough singular integrals and sharp inequalities for operators such as the discrete Hilbert transform and the Balayage operator associated with Carleson measures. In music, harmonics are simple tones whose oscillations are integral multiples of a simple basic frequency and these can be used to disassemble arrangements of complicated sounds. In mathematics, harmonic analysis has a similar objective i.e. the study of complicated objects via their decomposition into simpler well-understood basic blocks. Irregularities of signals and images are better located once these are decomposed into small pieces and studied via Fourier analysis. For instance, noise and blurring are easily located with the application of the Fourier transform, but nowadays even more challenging feats can be achieved. This proposal is concerned with the study of certain linear and multilinear multiplier operators using decomposition techniques. Multiplier operators are defined by altering the frequency of signals via multiplication with a fixed and often nonsmooth function. In practice, the abrupt interruption of radio communication or television transmission by a meteorological phenomenon are examples of such nonsmooth multiplier operators. The protection against the loss of information can be mathematically modeled in a quantitative way (integrability to a power) which is proposed to be studied here. This constitutes the first goal of the proposed research. A secondary issue considered in this proposal is obtaining sharp estimates for some important and useful inequalities. Sharp estimates enrich our understanding of these inequalities as they often reflect useful esoteric combinatorial or geometric information. Furthermore, they provide improved error estimates often needed in numerical implementation doc9699 none In this project, new techniqucs to extend nonlinear optics into the soft-x-ray region of the spectrum will be explored. Specifically, precisely controlled optical waveforms, structured wave guides, and quasi phase-matching at short wavelengths will be used to increase the brightness of laser-based coherent x-ray sources. In the past 2 years. dramatic progress has been made in this arca, demonstrating new methods for efficient conversion of laser light into the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) region of the spectrum, at wavelengths around 50eV. It is now possible to generate short- wavelength light pulses times shorter than can be generated by synchrotrons-short enough (10 femtoseconds) to directly probe atomic motion. It is also possible to dramatically improve the conversion efficiency of these very high-order nonlinear processes by using phase matching techniques. For example, by propagating the laser beam through a hollow fiber, the phase velocity of the optical pulse can be made to match that of the generated x-ray beam, thus improving thc conversion efficiency. Finally, very recently it was shown that feedback-control algorithms can fine- tune the shape in time of the laser pulse driving high-harmonic generation, making it possible to optimize the process and selectively enhance a particular x-ray photon energy. This is a fundamentally new type of phase matching that occurs within a single atom, where the laser pulse shape is optimized so that x-rays generated from one half-cycle of the laser interfere constructively with x-rays generated by adjacent half-cycles. This is in contrast to more-conventional phase matching techniques, where emission from a large number of individual atoms is arranged to interfere constructively by matching the phase velocities of the driving and harmonic waves. In the proposed work, several significant remaining challenges for generating coherent light in the EUV will be addressed. New techniques will he developed that will allow us to apply phase- matching techniques to higher photon energies, from 50 - 500eV. Simply extending previous work will not suffice because higher-energy x-ray photons are emitted at higher levels of ionization, introducing a very large phase velocity mismatch between the laser and x-ray beams. Possible new techniques include the use of structured waveguides for modulating the nonlinear response of the system to obtain quasi phase matching, and the use of two-color excitation. This work, when combined with continuing work on the use of temporally-shaped pulses, will greatly enhance the understanding of laser-atom interactions in this highly nonlinear-regime, and our ability to optimally control the x-ray generation process. This area of research presents a unique and challenging combination of forefront basic research and advanced technology. Ultrafast, broad bandwidth laser pulses and feedback algorithms will be used to coherently control and engineer the electron wave function of a radiating atom, with the very practical objective of developing bright, coherent, soft-x-ray light sources. This control of matter on the sub-nanometer, sub-femtosecond, distance- and time-scales explores the limits of fundamental atomic and molecular processes, as well as of optical technology. This work will provide excellent training for students in optical, computer, electronic, and EUV technologies- technologically- significant fields where the needs of industry far outpaee the availability of graduates. Furthermore, this new light-source has potential future applications in nanotechnology, microscopy, metrology, lithography, the characterization of x-ray optics, and in the study of ultrafast dynamic processes using x-rays. We and other are actively pursuing many of these applications doc9700 none Jacobsen What is the ultimate focus of electromagnetic radiation? The far-field focus of a lens can be characterized by its Rayleigh resolution of 0.61 times the wavelength divided by half of the lens opening angle, or numerical aperture. To achieve a finer focus than that obtained from a visible light laser and a high numerical aperture microscope objective (such as in a confocal microscope), one must significantly decrease the wavelength while still maintaining appreciable numerical aperture. This can be accomplished by using x rays for their short wavelength, and diffractive optics for maintaining a reasonably high numerical aperture. Fresnel x-ray zone plates have been fabricated as diffractive focusing optics that produce the finest far-field focus of electromagnetic radiation at any wavelength - about 35 nm Rayleigh resolution at 2-5 nm wavelength. These zone plates have been fabricated in an academic-industrial collaboration between a group at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at SUNY Stony Brook that carries out research in x-ray microscopy using the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) at nearby Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the state-of-the-art electron beam lithography group of Don Tennant at Lucent Technologies Bell Laboratories. Zone plates produced by this collaboration are employed as the focusing optics in three x-ray microscope systems at the NSLS, and these microscopes are used by the Stony Brook group and by a number of U.S. and European groups for research in biology, polymer science, geoscience, colloid chemistry, environmental science, and other fields using x-ray microscopy. Given that x-ray microfocusing is growing in importance at U.S. synchrotron radiation facilities including those at Brookhaven, Argonne, Berkeley, Stanford, Cornell, University of Wisconsin, and Louisiana State University, and that each of these facilities represents an investment of $20-500 million, it seems crucial to further develop the processes needed for fabrication of the highest possible resolution zone plates within an academic setting in the U.S. Indeed, a large number of potential applications of x-ray microscopes (both in the 0.2-1 keV energy range, and the 1-10 keV energy range) would become possible if the spatial resolution of zone plates were to be increased significantly beyond what is now attainable. The PIs research program includes the following: o They propose to supply zone plates to one of the world s leading groups in ultrafast x-ray pulse generation: the lab of Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapetyn at the University of Colorado JILA. This should enable the first exploration of nonlinear optics at x-ray wavelengths in a setting other than that of a thermonuclear weapon. o They propose to develop zone plates that should, for the first time, make sub-100 nm resolution imaging routinely available for 1-10 keV x-ray microscopes. Microscopes in this energy range are ideal for trace element mapping in biology and environmental science, and for inspection of defects in buried interconnects in integrated circuits. o They propose to carry out experimental tests aimed at future development of Bragg zone plates, where high aspect ratio zones must be angled to be on the Bragg condition to achieve high focusing efficiency and very high numerical aperture. o They propose to work with one of the leading groups in nanoimprint lithography (University of Texas at Austin) to combine our capabilities in fine linewidth zone plate fabrication with their technology for high throughput lithographic fabrication. The ultimate goal is to make a limited number of high resolution master zone plates, and use the UTA nanoimprint method to fabricate disposable high resolution zone plates. This could be a key technology for a high-risk, high-payoff scientific project: the use of x-ray free electron lasers to obtain atomic resolution maps of the structure of membrane proteins doc9701 none This award is a collaborative research among researchers from the City College of New York (CCNY), the University of Tokyo, and the Kyoto University, Japan. The objective of this project is to develop a new and advanced semi-active electromagnetic shape-memory alloy friction damper for protecting buildings and other civil infrastructures against strong winds and earthquakes. The new semi-active electromagnetic shape-memory alloy friction damper to be developed has significant advantages and potential over other semi-active control systems currently under development. Specific objectives of this project are: (i) to develop a semi-active electromagnetic friction damper, (ii) to develop a semi-active electromagnetic shape-memory alloy friction damper, (iii) to demonstrate the performance of the proposed advanced semi-active friction dampers developed in (i) and (ii), and to verify the theoretical results using a 1 4 scaled 5-story building model on the shaking table at the City College of New York, and (iv) to demonstrate the application of the proposed semi-active friction dampers on a full-scale 5-story frame building at the Disaster Prevention Research Institute, Kyoto, Japan. It is mentioned that the budget for the proposed research doesn t include the cost to manufacture the proposed semi-active electromagnetic shape-memory alloy friction damper. The proposed damper device for the 1 4 scaled and full-scale testing will be manufactured using small research grants from the Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York (PSC-CUNY) and the start-up funds of the PI. The semi-active electromagnetic shape-memory alloy friction damper to be developed is inherently nonlinear. Effective and practical control strategies will be investigated and developed, in particular with respect to the demand of near-field earthquakes. The device is applicable not only to the new constructions but also to the retrofit of deteriorated structures. The results of this research project are expected to make a significant advancement for the state-of-the-technology in auto-adaptive media based protective systems for civil infrastructures. The benefit derived from this research project in urban earthquake disaster mitigation is not limited to US and Japan, but also many countries in the world doc9702 none Cherkassky This proposal will attempt to develop new approaches to the statistical foundations of learning, which are fundamental to the performance and capability of all learning systems, including intelligent control. Many learning algorithms are based on the idea of empirical risk minimization , which amounts to choosing the model that minimizes the number of errors on the training data. However, the goal of learning is often to obtain a model providing minimal prediction risk, i.e. error for (unknown) future data. It is well-known that for a given training sample there exist a model of optimal complexity corresponding to the smallest prediction (generalization) error for future data. Hence, any method for learning from samples need to have some provisions for complexity control. Existing implementations of complexity control include penalization (or regularization), weight decay (in neural networks), and various greedy procedures (i.e. stepwise regression). There are three (generic) problems common to all methodologies for complexity control. First, one needs to define a meaningful complexity index for a set of (parameterized) functions (admissible models). Second, one needs to estimate the prediction risk from the (known) empirical risk; such estimates are known as model selection criteria in statistics. Third, there is a problem of finding a global minimum of the empirical risk (or penalized empirical risk). This project will attempt to extent Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) theory in order to provide a principled solution to these problems. This research is intended to improve theoretical understanding of signal estimation and to develop new practical methods for signal denoising. The PI shall develop new methods for estimation denoising of 1D and 2D signals (images) and compare them with existing wavelet denoising methods doc9703 none MECHANICS OF SINGLE- AND MULTI-WALL CARBON NANOTUBES Carbon nanotubes exhibit superior mechanical properties with extraordinarily high stiffness and strength. There are, however, virtually no continuum studies of carbon nanotubes because it is generally thought that continuum mechanics theories are not applicable on the atomic or nanometer scales, and one must rely on atomistic studies. The atomistic studies, on the other hand, have some limitations on both the time and length scales for applications involving a large number of carbon nanotubes.The objective of the work is to develop a continuum theory for carbon nanotubes that incorporates the interatomic potential of carbon. We will adopt a systematic approach to link the continuum and atomistic scales. The strain energy density on the continuum level will be obtained by averaging the bond energy in carbon bonds on the atomic level, which will lead to a continuum constitutive model for carbon nanotubes. The nanoscale continuum will then be validated by the atomistic studies doc9704 none This proposal combines an experimental program intended to fabricate proof-of-concept solid-state THz sources and evaluate their technological promise (in terms of real-world benchmarks, such as power output over the attainable freqcuency range). together with a theoretical effort intended to clarity the high-frequency generation mechanisms and guide the experimental work among different device geometries. This proposal will complete the envisioned program fully with regard to fabricating and characterizing proof-or-concept devices and developing the theoretical framework doc9705 none This award provides support for purchase of an Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope (ESEM) equipped with a Peltier cooling stage to be used by at least 13 research groups in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology of Harvard University. This modern, multifunctional instrument will replace an existing, 25-year-old instrument which lacks the capacity for examining fully hydrated materials. The instrument will be available for use by students, research associates and faculty, insuring student training in use of a modern electron microscope. Diverse research in the areas of organismic, evolutionary, and developmental biology will utilize this new equipment. Initial uses include studies of the morphology of sulfur-oxidizing bacteria, determination of the migration pathway of neural crest cells in amphibians, and studies of the mechanisms of xylem embolism repair and root water uptake in plants. Such studies with the level of resolution provided by scanning electron microscopy were not possible until the development of instruments that did not use a low pressure or vacuum in the sample chamber doc9706 none This project will study several questions in partial differential equations which lead to interesting questions in harmonic analysis. The first set of questions are related to the inverse conductivity problem as studied by Sylvester and Uhlmann. My main interest is considering the a priori regularity assumption which seem to be necessary to study this problem. I propose a technique to establish a uniqueness theorem in dimensions 3 and larger for coefficients which only have one derivative. In addition, I will consider the two-dimensional problem, where such a theorem is known. In two dimensions, I propose to extend the result from equations to systems. The second set of questions are related to the mixed problem for Laplace s equation. The goal here is to obtain optimal regularity results for solutions to these problems. Examples indicate that the positive result depend strongly on the geometry of the domain and the sets where Dirichlet and Neumann data are posed. The inverse conductivity problem is a mathematical formulation of the problem of determining the interior physical properties of an object by making electrical measurements at the boundary. This and related problems are of practical importance in medical imaging and in the nondestructive evaluation of materials. The theoretical investigations proposed in this project may shed some light on how to improve practical implementation of these problems. The mixed problem for Laplace s equation models the problem of determining the temperature in the interior of a solid where part of the boundary is insulated. My research is focused on understanding how the geometry of the region of the region affects our ability to solve this problem doc9707 none This proposal is for research into three areas of current interest in noncommutative algebra. First the PI plans to study the enveloping algebra of a classical simple Lie superalgebra. Specifically he is interested in primitive ideals and problems concerning the center of the enveloping algebra. Secondly the PI intends to investigate differential operators on toric varieties and maps between toric varieties arising from refinements of fans. Finally the PI proposes the study of certain finite dimensional Hopf algebras arising from quantized enveloping algebras of classical Lie superalgebras. The methods to be used come from representation theory and algebraic geometry. This research is concerned with some particular aspects of modern abstract algebra, as an area of mathematics. In recent years a number of algebraic constructions have been increasingly important in Physics. These include Lie superalgebras and quantum groups, two constructions which will be investigated in this proposal. It is a widely held belief that a better understanding of the algebraic structure of these objects could lead to further significant advances in Physics doc9708 none Gidley An interdisciplinary research program is proposed that combines the well-known void-volume sensitivity of positron annihilation lifetime spectroscopy (PALS) with state-of-the-art positron beam technology in order to characterize defects and pores in a wide range of engineering materials where traditional techniques are not adequate. Porosity control is an important aspect of the emerging field of nanoengineering. Introducing and engineering porosity in microelectronic low-K dielectric films, in thin polymeric permeation filters, and in catalytic films is attracting intense research interest. On the other hand, preventing interfacial defect porosity is a long-standing problem in structural materials such as adhesives, encapsulants, and composites. Traditional probes are challenged by the amorphous nature of these very thin films and by the nanoscale size of the pores defects. PALS has been demonstrated to be an important new tool in characterizing nanoscale porosity in such sub-micron film systems. As a result of the previous NSF-ECS grant beam-PALS is playing an important role in helping the microelectronics industry develop next-generation, low-K interlayer dielectric films. The sensitivity of PALS to the size and interconnectivity of 1-100 nanometer pores has been demonstrated. A procedure for extracting pore size distributions for closed-pore systems has been developed. PALS is found to be sensitive to Cu interdiffusion into the dielectric and the consequently required diffusion barrier layer integrity can be tested as well. This proposal will expand upon this work. Metal interdiffusion and barrier integrity thermal stability will be studied with particular attention focussed on developing a standardized PALS testing procedure as requested by Sematech, a research consortium primarily comprised of the major U.S. electronics corporations. Cross-calibration experiments with complementary techniques used to characterize porosity, such as small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) at NIST and solvent absorption ellipsometric porosimetry at IMEC, will be continued. Such studies help determine the unique strengths and weaknesses of each respective technique. A second major thrust of this proposal will be the study of polymer thin films, surfaces and interfaces. Ibis research builds upon previous work in which beam-PALS was used to study the structure and dynamics of thin 10 urn polymer films constrained on silicon wafers. Such films were found to have a highly immobile adhesive layer next to the silicon and an unconstrained liquid layer at the surface. Particular attention will be focussed on the interfacial regions in order to determine the sensitivity of the immobile layer to the onset of adhesion failure and delamination. If failure is due to the coalescence of precursor nano-voids into larger pores due, for example, to fatigue, thermal stress, or corrosion, depth-profiled beam-PALS should be a very powerful probe of this pre-failure initiation phase that is otherwise invisible. Specifically, the role of defect voids in the failure of polymer encapsulants and adhesives used in microelectronic packaging will be studied. An ancillary study of the evolution of nanostructure in a chemically amplified photo-resist as it develops under UV exposure will also be performed. The proposed research builds upon a strong existing collaboration between the University of Michigan Physics Department and the Materials Science and Engineering Department. To provide critical guidance and clear focus on relevance the PIs have developed strong working collaborations with six individual companies, NIST, and with two large industrial consortiums; Sematech in the U.S. and IMEC in Europe doc9709 none Proposal: PI: Raymond Burby Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Date: July 10, : Urban Containment Programs and the Vulnerability of Infrastructure to Hazards: Are Cities Being Engineered to Be Safe as Well as Smart Smart Growth is now being advocated in the United States by federal agencies, industry, and professional associations in order to bring about more efficient, environmentally sensitive, and livable urban communities. One key tenet of smart growth is containment of urban sprawl through the use of regulatory growth boundaries, greenbelts, and curtailment of water and sewer extensions. Smart growth and urban containment, however, may have a serious unintended consequence: increased vulnerability of urban development and related civil infrastructure systems to natural hazards due to increased development pressure. In this interdisciplinary project (civil engineering and urban planning) we will document the dimensions of this threat and identify engineering and other measures that can be used to counter it. The study will focus on a paired sample of four metropolitan areas. Two metropolitan areas have had urban containment programs in place for twenty or more years: Portland, Oregon and San Diego, California. They will be paired with neighboring Vancouver Clark County, Washington and Orange County, California, respectively, which do not have containment policies. Several hundred parcels within each metropolitan area will be randomly sampled to determine the change in the value of parcels and intensity of development before and after containment began. Data will also be collected on a range of other factors that can affect development (e.g., hazard mitigation and other infrastructure standards and development regulations, parcel size, soils and slopes, accessibility, public services, and nearby development trends). Regression models will be used to isolate the effects of containment while controlling statistically for other factors that can affect development and value. Then, using ratios of infrastructure (roads, bridges, water, sewerage, and electricity) to housing units of various types, the degree to which containment programs increase the potential for losses to civil infrastructure systems will be estimated. The development of engineering standards for the built environment and planning standards for contained urban growth will be explored through discussions with representatives of federal agencies, industry trade associations, and engineering and planning professional associations. The implications of the study findings for engineering urban growth will help to ensure that smart growth now being advocated widely is also safe growth doc9710 none Approximately tornadoes are observed within the U.S. annually. These tornadoes are spawned from a variety of parent storm types, including supercell thunderstorms and quasi-linear convective systems (QLCSs) such as squall lines and bow echoes. The horizontal extent of viable tornado-breeding sites is an order of magnitude larger in QLCSs than in individual supercells. QLCS tornadoes can be strong and produce extensive damage. Also, QLCS tornadogenesis appears to occur, on average, more rapidly than does supercell tornadogenesis from the perspective of Doppler radar. The geographical, seasonal, and diurnal distributions of QLCS tornadoes are unknown. A significant amount of research effort has been devoted to the study of supercell tornadogenesis, but no published research addresses specifically QLCS tornadogenesis. Owing to the related lack of fundamental knowledge of QLCS tornadogenesis tornado climatology, it may be argued that operational meteorologists are generally unable to assess the potential risk of tornadic winds in QLCSs and, hence, properly alert the public to this danger. The Principal Investigator will undertake a complementary two-part study. The objectives are to: 1. Estimate the climatological distributions of QLCS-spawned tornadoes; characterize the environmental conditions under which they occur; determine radar-based attributes of tornadic versus non-tornadic QLCS. 2. Gain an understanding of tornadic versus non-tornadic QLCS morphology and evolution. Successful completion of this research will increase fundamental knowledge of QLCS tornadoes and will have applications in severe weather forecasting and warning operations doc9711 none R.W. Siegel, RPI Partial travel support for 18 invited participants and speakers at the Nanomaterials Workshop in Montreal, Canada, October 22-25, , co-sponsored by CNRS and NSF, has been requested. The objective of this meeting is to evaluate the current research results in the field, discuss future research directions and technological developments, the work needed in order to increase industrial relevance, and explore opportunities of collaboration. Engineers, material scientists, chemists and physicists from academe and industry will attempt to identify common principles and approaches. The main sessions will cover synthesis of building blocks, theoretical challenges, characterization (local and bulk techniques), mechanical properties, magnetic and optical properties, chemical and thermal properties, and applications. Participation of young researchers is encouraged. There will be about 18-20 invited speakers from each U.S. and France, as well as invited speakers from Canada. Ample time will be allowed for questions and discussions. The workshop is expected to be an interactive forum for participants. A purpose of the meeting is to facilitate the establishment of long-term cooperation among researchers from U.S., France and Canada, in academe and industry in the area of nanocomposite materials doc9712 none This project is about solving Nonconvex Combinatorial Optimization Problems (NCOPs) by linear programming based branch-and-bound algorithms. Most NCOPs can be reformulated as mixed-integer programs (MIPs) by the addition of auxiliary binary variables. For this reason the study of NCOPs other than MIPs has been very limited. However, reformulation may have many disadvantages including increasing the size of the problem significantly. There are some NCOP structures that arise naturally in many practical applications and therefore merit study in their own right. These include: (1) semi-continuous - if a nonnegative variable is positive, it must be at least some positive constant; (2) k-cardinality - no more than k variables from a set of n nonnegative variables may be positive; (3) special ordered set of type 2 - no more than 2 variables from a sequence of n nonnegative variables may be positive, and if 2 variables are positive, they must be adjacent in the sequence. The primary objective of this project is to study these and a small number of other NCOP structures, as has been done for MIPS, and to develop preprocessing procedures, polyhedral results (cuts), branching procedures, and primal heuristics for dealing with them directly. The end result will be efficient branch-and-cut algorithms for linear programs with piecewise linear nonconvex objectives, nonconvex quadratic programs, scheduling and facility location problems, and several other NP-hard problems for which an MIP approach has not been very successful. Decision making problems in manufacturing and logistics, such as resource allocation and facility location are represented by optimization models. This project contributes to the knowledge of algorithms for solving such optimization models that contain certain types of nonlinearities that make the models very difficult to solve. The results of this project will provide significant enhancements to the optimization tools that are used in practice doc9713 none This project concerns two main topics: harmonic analysis on noncompact semisimple Lie groups and symmetric spaces, and unique continuation problems and absence of positive eigenvalues of Schrodinger operators on Euclidean spaces. The author s goal is to develop real-variable methods that could be used to study boundedness properties of certain natural operators on noncompact semisimple Lie groups and symmetric spaces. Some of the problems to be investigated are the following: sharp estimates related to the Kunze-Stein phenomenon, behaviour of the solution of the wave equation on symmetric spaces at large time, singular integral operators on symmetric spaces, transference principles for operators defined by Fourier multipliers on symmetric spaces, and maximal operators and applications in ergodic theory. The author made progress on these problems in certain special cases, mostly on Lie groups and symmetric spaces of real rank one. The second part of the project is aimed at understanding the absence of positive eigenvalues for Schrodinger operators with potentials in appropriate Lebesgue spaces and with certain decay properties at infinity. The problem of eliminating the possibility of positive eigenvalues for the Schrodinger operator associated to one or many particles comes from mathematical physics. One expects on physical grounds that such positive energy bound states cannot exist. This is indeed the case for a large class of Schrodinger operators associated to potentials which satisfy certain uniform decay conditions, such as the Coulomb potential. These potentials were studied in the 60 s by T. Kato, S. Agmon, J. Weidman, B. Simon, and others. In the last twenty years there has been growing interest in extending these classical results to more general potentials in various Lebesgue spaces doc9671 none This collaborative research deals with the development of a rigorous finite element method-based approach to studying robustness and reliability of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS). Exploitation of the finite element formulation is proposed to incorporate higher order moments into the probability analysis without incurring excessive cost. The computational burden from introducing higher order moments will be eliminated by taking advantage of the finite element formulation of selective functionals. New modeling methods for MEMS will be explored and a variety of MEMS devices will be studied. To overcome the limitations of existing methods for propagating the effect of uncertainty, a reliability analysis-based procedure for probability analysis is proposed, which will achieve a good balance between accuracy and efficiency. If successful, the research will benefit the MEMS community with improved quality assessment and a better understanding of the intrinsic relationship between robustness and reliability. The ability to efficiently evaluate higher order derivatives in the finite element method is also beneficial to other applications where this derivative information is needed. Comparative study on various methods for probability analysis can provide better guidelines for choosing the most appropriate technique. The reliability analysis-based procedure for probability analysis is expected to be applicable to design problems with nonlinear behavior and large uncertainty variations doc9715 none mathematical structure has on one s ability to compute specific functions and relations. The second type deals more directly with developing the mathematical (and especially logical) tools needed for the crucial areas of program verification, data management and automated control of real-world complex systems. Commercial applications are expected for some of this work and there has already been a spin off to a start-up company developing several applications including data compression and network management algorithms. Other applications of these techniques to be investigated include multimedia applications and distributed continuous systems doc9716 none This award supports the purchase of confocal microscope to be used for research in cell and developmental biology by a group of 7 faculty and their students. The equipment will also be available for use by a large number of other Cornell faculty and students, irrespective of their departmental affiliations. The confocal scanning laser microscope has become a critical and essential tool in research because of its ability to non-invasively image structures and processes in living cells, and visualize macromolecular interactions in real time. Among the planned uses are studies of: the mechanisms that regulate the movement of macromolecules within and between plants; the interactions of the bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas synringae with its host (tomato); the structure and function of biological membranes; the role of plastids and mitochondria in the growth and development of plant cells; the physiological roles of ion channels; the development of the olfactory system using zebrafish as a model; and the action of essential reproductive proteins and their effectors in Drosophila. It is expected that these and other studies will generate important contributions to our understanding of macromolecular interactions, organelle biogenesis and cellular remodeling in plants, animals and, as well, microbes doc9717 none Theory revision is the correcting of a given, roughly correct rule, also known as a concept or theory. This problem arises frequently in machine learning, for instance, when the initial output of an expert system is not correct, and when the machine learning problem is too large or too complex to solve from scratch, and an approximately correct rule is needed to jump-start the learning process. There has been considerable ad hoc building of theory revision systems, but the theory is poorly understood. This research investigates fundamental mathematical possibilities and limitations of efficient theory revision. It is hoped that as a result of this research, theory revision in computational learning theory will emerge as a general framework for the study of learning situations where a large amount of initial information is available or necessary. In particular, the PIs investigate the following areas: extensions of their previous work on propositional logic theory revision with queries, relations to certificate complexity and attribute-efficient learning, revision problems for predicate logic representations, and both the learning and revising of categorial grammars doc9718 none Perk and Au-Yang This is a research project for the study of exactly solvable models of statistical mechanics, including the integrable chiral Potts model and various Ising models. These models will be studied by exact analytical and approximate numerical methods. Various physical phenomena will be studied, such as critical phenomena in quasi-periodic or aperiodic lattices, commensurate-incommensurate phase transitions, and frustration. The impact of frustration on the wavevector-dependent susceptibility will be analyzed by studying partially and fully frustrated triangular or checkerboard Ising models. New algorithms for the susceptibility series of planar Ising models, whose complexity grow polynomially, will be developed and the resulting long series expansions will be analyzed to get a better understanding of corrections to scaling. Many challenging problems remaining to be solved within the integrable chiral Potts model, such as the magnetization, spin-spin and energy-energy correlations. By its very nature, this project also involves several areas of mathematics of current interest doc9719 none The investigator will study finite groups from Combinatorial, Probabilistic and Computational point of view. The research will proceed in three major directions. First, the problem of generating random group elements is studied. The two major venues: Babai algorithms and the product replacement algorithm - both will be attacked by the investigator. Second problem involves recognition of the finite groups based on the random elements. Finally, third problem deals with property testing of groups is studied, by introducing random subproducts as pseudo random elements in the finite group. Finite groups can be viewed as sets of symmetries of finite objects; they are central in understanding of our universe. Finite groups are often unimaginably large, which represents both theoretical and computational difficulties for working with all its elements. Thus the information about the group is often stored in a small set of elements (generators), so that all other group elements can be obtained from these. Now the difficult problem is reversing this encoding and recovering information about the whole group from the generators. The current proposal aims at developments of the new algorithms and improvement of the existing procedures doc9720 none The objective of this project is to predict the strong ground motions at Treasure Island, in San Francisco Bay, resulting from postulated earthquakes on the Hayward and the San Andreas faults. Earthquake prediction exercises have been carried by various organizations of engineers and seismologists in recent years; for example for Turkey Flat, California ( ), the Ashigara Valley, Japan ( ) and most recently for the Kobe Osaka region in Japan ( ). The basic idea was to attempt to model measured ground response and or to predict response for sites at which recordings had not been made, permitting different methods of prediction to be compared. These exercises highlighted several difficulties that this project will attempt to avoid by focusing on one very well documented site - the National Geotechnical Experimentation Site at Treasure Island, California - and asking for predictions of motion on the Hayward and the San Andreas faults. A recent compilation of geologic data for the San Francisco Bay Area by researchers at the United State Geological Survey, combined with the intensive geologic studies by CALTRANS (California department of transportation) for the new Bay Bridge span have drastically reduced path uncertainty problems. The project involves a two-part prediction exercise. In the first part (this project), predictors will develop bedrock motion spectra under Treasure Island, for scenario earthquakes on the two faults. Predictors will be selected after a first pre-qualification phase, in which a selection of a range of approaches will be made. Once predictions for this well-documented setting are made, uncertainties implicit in the different methods will be easier to quantify at a final workshop. At least five student teams from different universities will be invited to present predictions as well, to be discussed at the final workshop, and included in the proceedings. A second phase is planned once this work is completed, in which predictors would then take the consensus bedrock motions under the island and predict soil response at various points in the 90-meter-deep soft soil profile, as well as at other points on the island. This second phase will be a follow-on project, intended to study the final cumulative uncertainties involved in source-path-site predictions by state-of-the art methods doc9721 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Scott A. Strobel, of the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University, is undertaking a combinatorial approach to the exploration of acidity perturbations important for RNA structure and function. By exploiting the technique of Nucleotide Analog Interference Mapping, Professor Strobel simultaneously yet individually monitors the effect of incorporating a nucleotide analog at every position within an RNA molecule. After developing a set of nucleotide analogs which retain a full set of base functional groups, but which have altered acidity of the A- and C-imino groups, a variety of RNAs will be screened for functionally important protonation sites. These analogs will then be brought to bear on an investigation of potential base ionization events important for the catalytic activity of three self-processing ribozymes, specifically the hepatitis delta virus, the Varkud Satellite, and hairpin RNA enzymes. Many biochemical reactions are facilitated by general acid and or base catalysis, wherein the reaction is assisted by a partial proton transfer somewhere along the reaction pathway. Since they possess acidic and basic groups of the appropriate strength, protein enzymes are well-suited to catalyze such reactions. Like proteins, large ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules can also adopt complex structures and catalyze chemical reactions. However, unlike the protein enzymes, RNA does not contain acidic or basic groups which would be expected to participate in general acid or base catalysis. This implies that in particular circumstances, the acidity of a group within RNA must be substantially shifted by its specific, local microenvironment within the RNA molecule. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Scott A. Strobel, of the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University, has developed a technique permitting the rapid analysis of the effects of multiple changes on the structure and properties of RNA. By developing a new set of tools for the application of this technique to the analysis of acidity effects, Professor Strobel will elucidate the molecular underpinnings of general acid and base catalysis by RNA, providing information about RNA structure and function and suggesting new ways to think about molecular evolution and catalysis doc9722 none The Vision Cone Penetrometer (VisCPT) is an electronic cone penetrometer containing two miniature CCD video cameras. The cameras collect a continuous stream of images of a soil stratigraphy at two levels of magnification as the probe is advanced vertically through a soil. The VisCPT delineates soil types and through computer image processing it facilitates very high-resolution stratigraphic characterization of a site. The present research effort will consist of three parts: Development of standard indices for soil grain size based on the power spectra of wavelet-transformed images; Modifications to the existing VisCPT instrumentation including adaptation of color cameras and real-time digital image acquisition; and field data collection at the National Geotechnical Experimentation (NGES) site on Treasure Island in San Francisco. The collected VisCPT data will be evaluated with specific focus on image-texture and wavelet transform techniques for determining soil type. Continuous high quality piston tube soil samples will be taken for comparison to VisCPT results. The VisCPT images will also be compared to standard piezocone (uCPT) test results to illustrate and quantify the effects of thin strata on uCPT readings. It is anticipated that the modifications to the VisCPT will substantially enhance the ability of geotechnical engineers to characterize a site, especially with regard to the identification and location of thin strata. This will lead to significant improvement in predictions of liquefaction potential, settlement rates and other critical behaviors doc9723 none This award provides funds to aid in purchase of an automated DNA sequencer and related equipment and software needed for sample preparation and data analysis. Use of the instrumentation in research and training efforts will be shared by a large group of faculty, students and postdocs. Research areas to be addressed include regulation of surface proteins in various protozoa, gene-flow in tropical trees, yeast gene regulation and variability in flower color. Many research questions in biology now require use knowledge of genotypes as a basic unit of observation. These questions span diverse fields and include hypotheses related to protein structure and function, gene regulation, genome organization, relationships within and among species, spatial and temporal organization of genetic polymorphism and the exchange of gametes among populations or individuals. Automated approaches to DNA sequencing and fragment genotyping are faster and more accurate than the manual methods they replace, increasing the quantity and quality of data. In addition to use in research, the faculty plan to employ the instrument in hands-on laboratory exercises, now technically beyond their laboratory capabilities, for both undergraduate and graduate courses doc9724 none EXPERIMENTAL AND THEORETICAL STUDIES ON COMPACTION WITH APPLICATION ON PHARMACEUTICAL POWDERS Antonios Zavaliangos and Iosif Csaba Sinka GOALI - NSF CMS In contrast to the scientific advances in drug design, tablet processing has been dominated by empiricism, and it presents a bottleneck for transition to market of new discoveries. In this basic research project, Drexel University and Merck & Co., Inc. aim to develop a science basis for the compaction of pharmaceutical powders that leads to solid dosages. Specific objectives of this study are to: (i) establish experimental procedures for characterization of pharmaceutical powders under conditions characteristic of industrial operations. (ii) determine experimentally the origin of rate effects and their influence on the mechanical properties of tablets, (iii) formulate constitutive models that portray accurately the behavior of powder mixtures during compaction, (iv) develop design guidelines that will allow rational decision making in pharmaceutical powder formulation doc9725 none Many unresolved questions about strategic behavior concern strategic sophistication, the extent to which players analyze their environment as a game, taking its structure and others incentives into account. Sophistication is the main difference between the behavioral assumptions of traditional game theory, which take it to be unlimited, and adaptive learning models, which take it to be nonexistent or severely limited. It is also the main difference between the leading kinds of learning models, beliefs-based and reinforcement. Even when convergence to equilibrium is assured, sophistication can affect limiting outcomes through players initial beliefs and the structure of their learning rules. The influence of sophistication on convergence, equilibrium selection, and the nature and timing of responses to changes in the environment give it a leading role in applications of game theory to economic, political, and social interactions. This project concerns experiments designed and conducted with Faculty Associate Miguel Costa-Gomes of the University of York, UK. Experiments allow the control needed to test theories of behavior in games, which are sensitive to environmental details. Experiments also allow us to study sophistication and other aspects of cognition more directly, by monitoring subjects searches for hidden information. Under plausible assumptions about cognition and information search, leading theories of initial decisions and of learning both have sharply separated implications for search. Interpreting subjects searches in the light of the cognitive implications of alternative theories of behavior help to understand their strategic thinking and predict their behavior. Some experiments adapt the MouseLab design used to study subjects initial responses to two-person matrix games to two-person guessing games in which subjects have hidden, independently variable payoff parameters, monitoring their searches for their own and their partners parameters. This new design better separates decision rules; and searching for payoff parameters within a known structure is a very different cognitive task than searching directly for payoffs in matrix games, which expands our view of subjects strategic thinking. Another set of MouseLab experiments adapts our previous design to study initial responses to two-person matrix games with multiple equilibria mixed with other games designed to separate boundedly rational decision rules. The main goal is to separate traditional theories of equilibrium selection that apply notions like risk- or payoff-dominance to the set of equilibria from the view that responses to games with multiple equilibria are a by-product of the same kinds of boundedly rational rules that appear to predominate in other games. A third set of experiments monitor subjects searches for hidden payoff parameters and the history of decisions and realized payoffs in repeated play of normal-form games with a variety of structures. The goal is to exploit sharp separation of information requirements to distinguish reinforcement and beliefs-based learning and hybrids such as experience-weighted attraction learning. These experiments require the development of a new interface with expanded search capabilities doc9726 none Throughout the United States, hydrophobic organic compound (HOC) contamination has become a widespread and pervasive problem. HOCs, which include tars, creosotes, petroleum residues, and chlorinated solvents, are commonly used in a myriad of different industries. They are generally classified as irritants and or toxins, and many have been identified as lethal carcinogens. Therefore, in order to protect public health and the environment, sites with existing contamination urgently need remediation. Unfortunately, removing HOC contamination has proved to be very difficult. These compounds are extremely persistent due to their low aqueous solubilities, and their distribution within the subsurface is highly dependent on particle and macro-scale heterogeneities. In spite of attempts to develop efficient HOC remediation technologies, very few have been successful. In-situ flushing with surfactants cosolvents, though, has been shown to be promising. Surfactants cosolvents are pumped into the subsurface to increase HOC desorption solubilization by lowering interfacial tension. Once in solution, the contaminants are mobilized towards wells where the solution is commonly pumped out and treated. The effectiveness of the flushing process, however, depends largely on the extent of contaminant desorption and solubilization, and the degree of interaction between the solution, contaminant, and soil. The objective of this research is therefore to characterize the distribution of HOCs in heterogeneous soil environments and develop and evaluate the electrokinetic enhancement technique for the remediation of HOCs under difficult heterogeneous subsurface conditions. Though electrokinetically enhanced flushing has great potential, the physicochemical reactions and transport mechanisms are complex. A complete fundamental and conceptual understanding of the various components of the process is essential. To achieve this goal, the following tasks will be performed: (1) characterization of the HOCs in heterogeneous soils, (2) evaluation of surfactants cosolvents for enhanced HOC desorption and solubilization, (3) assessment of HOC removal from particle-scale heterogeneous soils, (4) assessment of HOC removal from macro-scale heterogeneous soils, and (5) development of design guidelines for remediating HOC-contaminated soils. In conjunction with the research objectives, the project will offer educational opportunities and infrastructure improvements for geotechnical and geoenvironmental education at both the graduate and undergraduate student levels. Equipment for the research, especially the physical two-dimensional simulation models, will serve as important demonstration tools for classroom instruction doc9727 none This grant provides funding for the development of the necessary technologies that support automatic geometric model reconstruction of existing objects having arbitrary topology when the prototype is created or modified on the shop floor and when a computer-aided design model does not exist. Particularly, the focus is to automate the data segmentation process on the reconstructed manifold surface and to facilitate optimal geometric model reconstruction for precision mechanical parts by geometric computation and reasoning. An algorithm will be developed to efficiently reconstruct a triangle mesh from 3-dimensional unorganized coordinate points to optimally recover the object shape. The reconstructed triangle mesh captures object topology with the associated 2-manifold represented as a combinatorial structure, which establishes explicit relations among the data points, and provides a topological domain with necessary differential geometric characteristics for the subsequent data segmentation process. By extending segmentation concepts from the regular image domain to the irregular mesh domain, a robust two-step automatic data segmentation approach will be developed, combining the border-based approach and the region growing approach. Finally, algorithms for geometric computation and reasoning will be developed to automatically classify the segmented patches into surface elements and to infer possible topological relations and geometric constraints among them. If successful, the results of this research will lead to significant improvements in automatic geometric model reconstruction and reverse engineering. With automatic data segmentation and intelligent geometric reasoning, user intervention can be eliminated and the entire model reconstruction process can be shortened from days to minutes. When integrated with state of the art scanning devices, the developed technologies could lead to a seamless reverse engineering process and support rapid design and prototyping of high-precision mechanical components. The results will have potential application in a whole spectrum of engineering problems with a major impact on rapid design and prototyping, shape analysis, and virtual reality doc9728 none The development of a high-speed,high sensitivity single-electron detector for research in the area of quantum-effect electronics and computing is proposed. The electrometer will be applied directly to the study of quantum cellular automata (QCA)for the implementation of logic circuits using anostructures. The proposed work will result significant progress in both the understanding of single-electron transistor (SET)and QCA switching dynamics as well as the performance of high-speed QCA circuits. Previous work has shown the feasibility of QCA-based digital logic;logic gates and latches have already been demonstrated experimentally.What is still needed is experimental verification of the high speed capabilities of these devices. Once this has been achieved, real applications can be contemplated which employ nanostructure-based logic.The proposed research will make this possible. The proposed detector is based on a sub-nanosecond temporal resolution continuous-wave micro-wave-frequency reflectometer. In contrast to conventional approaches, this technique uses changes in the reflection coefficient of a resonant single electron transistor (SET)sensor rather than attempting to directly sense the voltage or current in the SET.The capacitively-coupled external charge changes the conductance (via the Coulomb blockade)in the SET s tunnel junctions. This proposed work will provide both undergraduate and graduate students with excellent opportunities for research in nanostructure-based devices and circuits,as well as serve as a vehicle for demonstrating, in Prof.Fay s Microwave Circuit Design course (EE 458), the use of microwave-frequency engineering concepts in a novel and unconventional context. The proposed work will also enhance research infrastructure for applications other than QCA-based circuits, since the high-speed electrometer will enable numerous experiments in a variety of fields in science and engineering that are not yet possible doc9729 none The project concerns deterministic and random conformal dynamical systems. This includes the theory of conformal iterated function systems (IFS) founded by the proposers , rational functions of the Riemann sphere and entire and meromorphic functions. We propose to study conformal IFS in a Hilbert space, in particular to examine the transfinite dimensions of the limit sets . Extending the work with A. Zdunik to the dimensions greater than 2, we propose to deal with the Hausdorff dimension of the harmonic measure of the limit set (whose closure is a topological Cantor set) of an IFS. Developing our rigidity investigations we intend to prove the geometrical rigidity of higher dimensional limits sets whose closures are topological disks. We intend to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for conformal measures of regular IFS to satisfy the doubling property and as an application we would present a characterization of all subsets of natural numbers which generate the continued fraction systems with conformal measures satisfying the doubling property. Passing to rational functions we propose to deal with no-recurrent maps (more precisely, the critical points contained in the Julia sets are assumed to be non-recurrent). We would like to work on the proof of equality of the Hausdorff dimension and box dimension of these maps, to study various definitions of pressure and the escape rates. Employing the concept of affine laminations, we propose to develop together with M. Lyubich the thermodynamic formalism of semi-hyperbolic rational functions. Together with J. Kotus and A. Zdunik we propose to explore invariant and geometric (Hausdorff, packing) measures for the members of the exponential family, as well as meromorphic functions fitting into Walters thermodynamic formalism. We intend to deal with recently emerged topic of quantization dimension relating its theory to the multifractal formalism. Our last sub-project concerns geometric measures of random IFS, in particular concerning the existence of an exact packing measure function. We propose to continue and develop our ongoing research involving measures of various kinds-Hausdorff, packing, conformal, Gibbs states, invariant measures absolutely continuous with respect to Lebesgue measure, etc., and associated functions such as capacities and pressure and finally associated dimensions. These notions are studied from two interlaced viewpoints. One is that of various dynamical systems and the other is that of geometric measure theory as applied to recursively generated objects. These approaches naturally meld with one another and lead to some interesting mixtures of ideas. We have developed an extensive theory of conformal iterated function systems, the iteration of infinitely many conformal maps, which may be hyperbolic (uniformly contracting) or parabolic (at least one map has an indifferent fixed point) and also have made some applications of it to some well known problems, e.g., continued fractions and Apollonian packings. There are yet some fundamental outstanding problems and several others which arise within the context of applications. We want to extend and develop this theory to cover a more structured iteration of maps-whose governed by directed graphs or substitutions and random iterations and an appropriate multifractal formalisn for these systems. This has many applications not only to the study of rational, entire and meromorphic functions, but also to newly emerging theory of quantization dimension problems arising from statistics and engineering. We also intend to apply our theory to limit sets generated by various cellular automata. This could be very important for compressing visual images doc9730 none This award provides funds to aid in purchase of a hybrid quadruple time-of-flight mass spectrometer with electrospray ionization (ESI-MS). The instrument will be used by 30 basic science faculty and by approximately two hundred graduate students and postdoctoral fellows for diverse research in neurobiology, biological sensors, and nanotechnology. The instrument will be located in the Mass Spectrometry Laboratory in the school of chemical sciences where is will be managed and maintained by dedicated technical staff. Students and postdoctoral associates who require instruments of this type in their research have the option of having professional staff run their samples, or of being trained to use the instrument and then running the samples themselves doc9731 none Proposal No.: CTS- Proposal Type: Investigator Initiated- SGER Principal Investigators: Vadim Guliants Institution: University of Cincinnati SGER: Exploratory Research for New Concepts in Ultra-rapid-cycle Adsorptive Separation of Air As a step in designing a micro-scale pressure-swing-adsorption (PSA) oxygen concentrator, this project measures the intracrystalline diffusion coefficients of oxygen and nitrogen in a low-silica X zeolite. The measurements are being done by use of isotopic tracers in single-crystal permeation apparatus. If the gas diffusion coefficients are as large as expected, this work will lead to the design and fabrication, using MEMS technology, of a small, light-weight oxygen concentrator for use by victims of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. This device will operate on a relatively high-frequency swing of air pressure. The experimental diffusivity values will also be useful in the engineering of conventional PSA processes as well in the theoretical modeling of zeolite adsorption and transport doc9732 none A big theme in number theory in the last 50 years has been the relationship between automorphic forms, Galois representations and objects from algebraic geometry. There is an extensive web of extraordinary conjectures (for instance the Artin conjecture, the Shimura-Taniyama conjecture, Langlands conjectures, Serre s conjecture and the Fontaine-Mazur conjecture) linking these three seemingly very different subjects (which relate to analysis, algebra and geometry respectively). Progress on these conjectures is currently very exciting. Under his previous NSF grant the PI proved (with Michael Harris) the local Langlands conjecture for GL(n) of a p-adic field; completed (with Christophe Breuil, Brian Conrad and Fred Diamond) the proof of the Shimura-Taniyama conjecture; found (with Kevin Buzzard, Mark Dickinson and Nick Shepherd-Barron) the first infinite families of non-soluble irreducible Artin representations for which one could prove the Artin conjecture; and established the meromorphic continuation and functional equation of the L-functions of all abelian varieties ``of GL(2)-type . The PI will continue to work on related problems. In particular he will work with Michael Harris to generalise the work of Wiles and of Wiles and the PI from GL(2) to GL(n). There seems to be just one significant problem remaining in the way of a really useful result. If this problem can be overcome the PI will work with Michael Harris and Nick Shepherd-Barron on applications to the arithmetic of elliptic curves. The PI will also look for generalisations of his work with Michael Harris on the local Langlands conjecture for GL(n) to other reductive groups. This circle of ideas is the one that led to Andrew Wiles celebrated proof of Fermat s last theorem after over 300 years. They fall into the general area of arithmetic geometry - a subject that blends two of the oldest areas of mathematics: number theory and geometry. This combination has proved extraordinarily fruitful. Among its many consequences are new error correcting codes. Such codes are essential for both modern computers (hard disks) and compact disks doc9733 none We propose to study low-energy nuclear reactions, most related to nuclear astrophysics, using short-lived secondary beams of 6-He, 8-Li, 7-Be, 8-B, and other nuclei. These will be used to study nuclear reactions related to the apparent deficit of solar neutrinos, and the missing mass problem in the Universe. The experiments will utilize a unique UM-developed apparatus consisting of two large superconducting magnets and will continue further technical developments of the device, which also has applications in other fields such as nuclear medicine. Additional related experimental work, as funding permits, will be done at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (E. Lansing, MI), and the Texas AM Cyclotron Laboratory doc9734 none A major part of the success in the linear and quasilinear theory of partial differential equations is based upon interpreting derivatives in the generalized sense of distributions, allowing for a more powerful calculus. However, Distributions do not seem, in general, well suited to non-linear problems because they cannot be multiplied. Jets are generalized (local) pointwise derivatives that allow for the interpretation and calculation of non-linear functions of derivatives. In this proposal, the PI presents a project to extend the notion of jets from the Euclidean or Riemannian case to more general state spaces. Typically, in these spaces higher derivatives with respect different parameters do not commute, as in the Euclidean case, but rather satisfy more complicated algebraic relations. Jets adapted to the geometry of a state space endowed with a family of vector fields satisfying a non-degeneracy condition are called subelliptic jets . Basic analysis topics like Taylor developments and maximum principles have to be adapted to conform to the new subelliptic geometry. The PI proposes to study Hamilton-Jacobi equations, to provide with a natural approximation procedure for semi-continuous functions, and to explore notions of subelliptic convexity to help formulate appropriate second derivative subelliptic estimates. The derivative is a basic tool in mathematical analysis, used to measure the growth and decay of functions. Knowledge of the derivative of a function allows for its recovery by means of integration. When trying to model complex scientific phenomena it is often necessary to write down equations satisfied by derivatives, and derivatives of derivatives, of functions with respect to several parameters. These equations are called partial differential equations. If these equations are linear, a well developed theory exists to study their solutions. Much less in known in the more interesting case of nonlinear equations, although when the state space is Euclidean, there is vast fully-nonlinear theory developed in the last twenty years. However, in applications coming from Control Theory, Robotics and Finance, very often we find derivatives which do not commute. The analysis of nonlinear operator of these derivatives is the main object of this project. The significance of this proposal relies in the interconnection between areas of classical mathematical analysis and applied mathematics as well as the use of computational tools not available until now in mathematical analysis doc9735 none The principal investigators conduct research in the following areas: global geometric Langlands correspondence, local Langlands correspondence in the de Rham setting, conformal field theories related to Hecke chiral algebras, families of Tate spaces and related infinite-dimensional algebraic varieties. They explore analogs of the local Langlands correspondence in the de Rham setting relating representations of Kac-Moody affine algebras with de Rham local systems for the Langlands dual group on the formal punctured disc. They study the representation theory of chiral Hecke algebras and related global non-rational conformal field theories in which the correlator D-modules form Hecke eigensheaves in order to understand the global geometric Langlands correspondence in the de Rham setting. They construct and study the universal family of Langalnds transforms of GL(2) local systems. They study the algebraic geometry of infinite-dimensional algebraic varieties similar to the space of maps from the punctured formal disk to a smooth algebraic variety. The subject of the research lies on the intersection of several domains of modern mathematics and mathematical physics - the Langlands program, geometric representation theory, infinite- dimensional algebraic geometry, and conformal field theory. The blend of complementary ideas and methods is very fruitful - in particular, it leads to construction of a geometric version of Hecke eigenforms by means of an appropriate quantum field theory doc9736 none Eberfelt In this project, the principal investigator (PI) studies geometric, analytic, and algebraic aspects of real submanifolds in complex manifolds and, more generally, of manifolds with a CR structure. More specifically, he focuses on questions that are related to the local classification problem, which asks for a local description of the CR structure on a manifold near a distinguished point up to equivalence. For instance, for a real submanifold in complex space, one would like to know which other real submanifolds are equivalent to it by a local biholomorphic transformation. The PI studies this problem extrinsically by trying to find normal forms in classes of real submanifolds, and intrinsically as an equivalence problem for systems of differential equations. An important part of the classification problem is to understand the group of transformations preserving the structure or, more generally, the set of mappings between two given structures. The PI of this project studies the local stability group of a real submanifold in complex space, i.e. the group of local biholomorphisms preserving the real submanifold and a given distinguished point on it. He investigates under what conditions this group can be embedded as a subgroup of the jet group of a predetermined order, and seeks to describe the subgroups that arise in this way in more detail. He looks for conditions that imply coercivity results such as e.g. convergence of all formal mappings between real-analytic submanifolds, or real-analyticity of all smooth CR mappings. He also investigates closer the prolongation of the system defining CR mappings to a Pfaffian system, and explores its applications. The theory of several complex variables is a rapidly developing subject in mathematics which has applications in contemporary mathematical physics (e.g quantum field theory and string theory) as well as in engineering (e.g. control theory). The study of the geometry of real submanifolds in complex spaces, such as e.g. smooth boundaries of domains, is central to this theory, and is also related to other areas of mathematics such as partial differential equations and differential geometry. In this project, we investigate questions regarding the geometry of real submanifolds in complex space and their mappings that arise in the classification problem of such up to equivalences that preserve the complex structure of the ambient space doc9737 none This proposal grows from the PI s recent discovery that important elements of Faraday s investigation into gold -- a large set of microscope slides and other laboratory materials -- still exist in a well-preserved state at the Royal Institution in London. The combination of laboratory materials with the more traditional written documentation from the scientist s notebooks presents an important opportunity for cognitive scientists to understand even more thoroughly the work of Faraday -- and scientific work more generally. The proposal requests SGER support for travel to England so that the PI can undertake certain technical work related to the slides and other laboratory materials before undertaking a more detailed scholarly examination of the entire set of experiments by Faraday. Primarily, Tweney seeks assistance to enable him to photographically reproduce and catalogue the microscope slides. He also wants to examine and study the chemical materials and processes that Faraday used, some of which survives as well. From this preliminary work, a more complete exploration of Faraday s gold research can be undertaken by the P.I. in the United States doc9738 none The research project examines ways to utilize climate information gained by the scientific community in conjunction with the traditional knowledge held by people native to the Arctic as a determinate for making decisions in response to changing climate conditions in the far north. A range of scenarios for changing climate conditions such as decreased sea ice, changing frequency of extreme weather events, storm surges, and other environmental factors will be used to predict the probability of variable environmental conditions that could lead to decisions in the local communities about management of resources, marine transportation options, and coastal construction. Local stakeholder groups will be used to identify how socioeconomic decision-making might be done in response to various probabilities for changing climate on a variety of time scales. An interdisciplinary education project will integrate natural and social sciences with specific application to arctic climate and socioeconomic issues. The project will contribute to the Human dimensions of the Arctic system (HARC) initiative of the Arctic System Science Program doc1640 none This Collaborative Grant Opportunity for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) project will study strategic capacity planning decisions and their impact on the supply chain in a make-to-order environment. The project will construct analytical models and develop analytical, numerical, and simulation methods that will be tested in General Motors environment to guide the research direction and ensure their practicality and ease of implementation. To provide their customers with customized products within reasonable lead-times at competitive prices, firms need to shift to make-to-order production where adequate capacity decisions are even more important than in the past. For a make-to-order strategy to be successful, supply and demand need to be reasonably balanced. This can be achieved through: (1) manufacturing flexibility, so that capacity can be shared among different products, (2) price flexibility, so that demand can be managed, and (3) delivery-time flexibility, so that demand coming from time-sensitive customers can be shifted in exchange for a price break. The project will study the effect of each of these levers on supply chain performance and on capacity requirements to offer guidance to companies on the design and management of their make-to-order production systems. In addition, the plan is to integrate the capacity investment decisions for products and additional features or options (e.g., vehicles and leather seats). Several issues need to be considered in the capacity analysis for these options: (1) The option and vehicle model capacity decisions are interdependent. (2) Demand for the various options might be correlated. (3) Customers have a different attitude towards different options. For example, they might not buy a car without an automatic transmission, but may accept other missing options, such as a vanity mirror. This leads to very different risks of over- and under-capacitizing for each particular option. Thus, the project will develop models that address capacity-pricing decisions considering customers preferences. The research will provide: (1) Analytical results and insights for better capacity planning in a make-to-order environment, and (2) Tools for vehicle and option capacity planning that consider uncertainty, demand management techniques, and the impact on operational supply chain costs. Also, the projected outcome is to develop general models that can be used in a wide range of industries and demonstrate their practical impact by implementing testing them at General Motors doc9740 none This grant provides funding to develop a systematic yet flexible approach to build a series of metamodels for robust design space exploration and optimization of large systems along a design timeline. Six statistical metamodeling approaches will be evaluated, namely, response surface modeling, kriging, multivariate adaptive regression splines, classification and regression trees, artificial neural networks and wavelets. Both classical and space-filling experimental designs will be tested with the most promising statistical metamodeling approaches and verified for use along a design time-line. The design of families of general aviation aircraft (to verify product platform development), and the design of vehicle body structures (to verify the metamodeling and robust design methodology) are used to evaluate the efficacy of the method. This work, if successful, will provide the proof-of-concept for the development of a formal, generic, mathematically rigorous method for use in rapidly exploring concepts in the early stages of project initiation. The outcome is anticipated to have an impact both on the engineering design community and the statistical community bringing both communities closer to addressing real problems with tools anchored in a rigorous and mathematically correct foundation. In addition, the successful use of this method by manufacturing enterprises will allow them to rapidly and cost-effectively design product platforms thereby enhancing their competitiveness doc9741 none This award provides partial support for purchase of analytical equipment to be shared by six faculty and by student researchers, all of whom are participating in a multi-disciplinary Initiative in Ecology and Evolution program at the University. The equipment includes an elemental analyzer and autoanalyzer, a digestion block and two computers to control and acquire the data from the auto- and element analyzer. These will be used to analyze plant tissues, soils, soil extracts and water samples for total nitrogen, phosphorus, carbon and soil nitrate, ammonium, phosphate and silica. Research enabled by availability of the equipment include studies of ecosystem-level nutrient cycling, carbon sequestration, impacts of herbivory on plants, stoichiometry in terrestrial ecosystems, limnology, paleoclimatology, and validation of remotely sensed biomass indexes. In addition to its use by this group, the equipment will be available to other researchers and graduate students working on various topics within the School of Biological Sciences, Geology and the School of Natural Resources and will be a key component of a new focus on ecology within the University of Nebraska at Lincoln doc9742 none This project is aimed at conducting a dynamic analysis of the control and containment requirements for a high performance, axial piston, hydrostatic pump. Over the last thirty years, a great deal of information has been added to the literature which describes the control requirements for a standard swash-plate pump design; however, virtually nothing has been written on the topic of swash-plate containment. Also, within the pump industry itself, a few innovative companies have identified certain advantages in using a non-standard swash-plate design, which utilizes a variable primary swash-plate angle and a fixed secondary swash-plate angle; but, again, nothing has been added to the literature to generally describe and apply these advantages to a broad range of pump designs. In this ascertain the control and containment requirements for this design. Furthermore, this work will go a step beyond current-day practice by considering the general case when both the primary and secondary swash-plate angles vary. The outcome of this study will be to identify the mechanical and control requirements for this novel machine and to theoretically prove the advantages of implementing the design. If successful, the work of this research will be used to significantly enhance the performance of axial piston pumps that are widely used in fluid power applications today. The improved performance will be demonstrated in increased operating efficiency and quieter pumps. These improvements will be achieved by optimizing the internal pressure transients of the pump for operating conditions that may vary over a wide range during the normal duty cycle of the machine. A secondary impact will be to reduce valve-plate erosion within the pump. The overall objectives of this work are reduce waste and to increase the productivity of axial-piston pump technology. The successful accomplishment of these objectives will manifest itself in lower pump operating costs, longer product life, and a reduction in engineering time for product maintenance and design doc9743 none This research program concerns questions at the intersection of commutative algebra, integer programming, and discrete geometry. The link between these fields is made via toric ideals and their Groebner bases. The first set of questions concern the characterization and construction of toric initial ideals without embedded primes. Answers to these questions will provide new structural results in the theory of integer programming via the classical technique of group relaxations due to Gomory and will extend recent work in this area by Serkan Hosten and the proposer. The second set of questions concern the toric Hilbert scheme, a parameter space for all polynomial ideals with the same multi-graded Hilbert function as a given toric ideal. A central open question about these schemes is whether they are connected. The proposer will work with Diane Maclagan on this connectivity question, building on their recent construction of a graph on the monomial ideals of the scheme which is connected if and only if the scheme is connected. Over the past decade, the proposer has contributed to the development of several new theories in discrete optimization using algebraic techniques and has worked on the application of the resulting, non-traditional algorithms to practical problems. The research that has contributed to these theories brings tools from algebra, combinatorics, optimization and discrete geometry to bear on problems from all of these fields. The application of algebraic techniques has led to new understanding in the field of integer programming, a branch of discrete optimization, but tools and ideas from optimization have also led to new results in algebra. This interplay of ideas and techniques has shed light on questions from each of these areas and promises to lead to greater insight and advancement. The proposer works with students on some of the computational aspects of the research and plans to involve students in the development of software that implements these algorithms. The proposer is also interested in curriculum development in subject areas related to this research at the University of Washington doc9744 none The investigator has determined the necessary and sufficient conditions that ensure the existence of tree lattices, that is discrete subgroup of finite covolume in the automorphism group of a locally finite tree, giving a complete answer to the Bass-Lubotzky conjectures for the existence of tree lattices. The intention is to explore the connections between tree lattices and lattices in rank 1 Lie groups over non-archimedean fields. The investigator is interested in making explicit constructions of non-uniform lattices contained within rank 1 Lie groups, comparing them with general tree lattices, covolumes, questions of arithmeticity and commensurability, and Hausdorff dimension. Concerning lattices in Lie groups, A. Lubotzky showed that rank 1 Lie groups over non-archimedean local fields contain uncountably many conjugacy classes of lattices. The investigator has obtainted a topological description of Lubotzky s deformation spaces of lattices. The aim now is to investigate the analytic and algebro-geometric structure of these deformation spaces, and to construct infinite dimensional deformation spaces for non-uniform lattices. The investigator and H. Garland have established that Kac-Moody groups over finite fields contain lattices. The aim is now to show that in rank 2 there are deformation spaces of lattices and to investigate the structure of the deformation spaces, of fundamental domains for non-uniform lattices, and of commensurability groups of uniform lattices in rank 2. Under consideration also is the existence of uniform lattices and spherical buildings in higher rank, congruence subgroups, and lattices in non-split and generalized Kac-Moody groups. The investigator and her colleagues aim, following the work of E. Rips, to give classification theorems for groups with free or stable actions on R-trees by isometries, and by isometries and homothety. The strategy is to give a classification of the pseudogroups of isometries of R, and then to combine this with a structure theory for reconstructing group actions which has recently been developed. We are studying infinite trees , which are connected graphs with no closed circuits, and the algebraic structure of their symmetries. The algebraic structures that are discrete and have finite volume are of particular importance. We have established the existence of such symmetries, and we are investigating their properties. This allows us to study the interactions of mathematics with physics. Our techniques also have applications in algebra, geometry and topology doc9745 none Proposal: PI: Betty Morrow Institution: Florida International University Date: May 25, CMS Hurricane Andrew 10 Years Later: Implications for Disaster Mitigation Due to the extensive losses, Hurricane Andrew is widely recognized as a watershed event, placing disaster resistance and mitigation visibly on the political agenda. The ultimate goal of this project is to inform national mitigation efforts through an assessment of the extent to which vulnerabilities evident prior to or emerging after this major disaster remain nearly 10 years later. This project focuses on several dimensions of community and household status as they relate to disaster vulnerability and resilience. At the community level, this project will: 1) Document changes in demographics, economic and business base, and political structure looking at those areas directly impacted and the rest of Miami-Dade County; 2) Determine the extent to which the policies and practices instituted during reconstruction resulted in increased disaster resilience of the community; 3) Analyze whether there have been any lasting improvements in the political power of previously marginalized groups; 4) Compare the recovery levels of various sections within the impacted region and explore possible explanations for any found differences. On the household level, the focus will be twofold: 1) to assess the vulnerability-related status of the Families of Andrew ; and 2) to assess the current disaster resistance of households county-wide. A primary focus will be decisions regarding housing, shutters, insurance, and risk planning and preparation in general. The findings from this milestone project will make a major contribution to the field and to a safer nation. A clearer understanding of community and household issues associated with long-term recovery from a major disaster in a diverse metropolitan area will result in more effective models of disaster mitigation and response doc9746 none Within the standard model of non-relativistic quantum mechanical matter interacting with the quantized radiation field methods are developed to show that an isolated atom or molecule prepared in a, possibly highly exited, bound state is unstable and eventually relaxes to its ground state by emitting photons. Similarly, the exited states of a free charged particle are not stable. It is shown that photons which are not bound to the electron escape ballisticly while the particle relaxes to a state of minimal energy followed by a cloud of soft photons (dressed one-electron state) in which it propagates according to a reduced dynamics. The key problem in the case of an atom is to show that no infrared problem occurs. For a free charged particle an infrared problem does occure and one has to deal with nonequivalent representations of the CCR. - The proofs require as an ingredient good control over the spectral properties of the Hamilton operator and, in addition, asymptotic completeness of Rayleigh scattering and Compton scattering of the respective system. These prerequisites are established by methods and techniques inspired by similar methods and techniques in the spectral and scattering theory of $N$-particle Schr\ odinger operators, such as Mourre theory, propagationestimates, the construction of suitable propagation observables and others. In addition ideas and methods from constructive quantum field theory (soft photon bounds, Rosen estimates, renormalization group analysis) are employed. This research leads to a mathematically rigorous understanding of physical phenomena such as the radiative decay of atoms, the photo effect, and Compton scattering. These are phenomena which are at the heart of many technical devices and which determine our visual impression of the world. Furthermore the phenomenon of radiative decay (or the relaxation to the ground state) and the similar phenomenon of return to equilibrium at positive temperature play key roles in attempts to understand dissipative, irreversible behavior in the quantum theory of open systems. The mathematical methods which are developed apply equally to other physical systems such a particle in a crystal interacting with quantized lattice vibrations (phonons), and find currently application in the study of return to equilibrium of matter interacting with radiation at positive temperature doc9747 none This award provides funds for purchase of a wide field confocal microscope equipped with two high- sensitivity, intensified charge-coupled-device cameras, a spinning disk-type confocal imaging device, and imaging software. The cells system capable of high speed, dual excitation or dual emission ratiometric imaging, and includes equipment needed for microinjection of living cells. The microscope will be the centerpiece for a new Laboratory for the Study of Developmental Dynamics to be shared by a number of investigators. The high-sensitivity detectors allow extended fluorescence imaging of developing systems that is not possible with laser scanning confocal microscopes, or multi-photon instruments. The system will be used by postdoctoral associates, graduate and undergraduate students, and faculty investigators for a variety of research projects in cell biology, and will provide the basis for an expanded course on modern techniques in optical microscopy doc9624 none The principal goal of this proposed work is to develop proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) as a viable complementary alternative to conventional experimental modal analysis for vibration systems. Proper orthogonal decomposition has been used for obtaining energy modes, as opposed to normal modes, from sensed system outputs. Proper orthogonal decomposition can indeed yield normal modes in lightly damped systems if the mass distribution is known. This research aims to overcome the requirement of a known mass distribution, estimate modal frequencies and damping factors and associate them with the correct mode, expand the applicability to arbitrary excitations, and compare the performance of POD with classical experimental modal analysis. Auxiliary objectives are the extension from 1-D distributed-parameter systems to 2-D systems, and the application of POD to multi-modal nonlinear responses. The research approach will involve theoretical analyses, numerical simulations, and experiments. Simulations and experiments will be used to test theoretical developments on simple systems with analytical solutions, and also on systems with complicated geometries. If POD were sufficiently developed, it would significantly enhance our ability to extract vibration parameters as a complement to traditional modal analysis. Experimental vibration facilities are globally prevalent, geared for industrial problems of noise, performance, and safety. Even if POD were used in a fraction of such laboratories, the total POD activity would be quite large. It will be particularly advantageous to systems for which sensed inputs are not available. The project is geared for a doctoral student s research program. The project will also involve an undergraduate researcher for applying POD and conventional modal analysis on experimental systems doc9749 none The investigator continues his work on the Bloch-Kato conjecture (bijectivity of the norm residue homomorphism) and on Galois-cohomological invariants for linear algebraic groups. Norm varieties form the basic examples of an intimate link between Galois cohomology and cobordism theory which lead in recent years to considerable progress on the Bloch-Kato conjecture. The main goal of the project is the construction of norm varieties for arbitrary weights and primes, the computation of some of their characteristic numbers and of some of their K-cohomology groups. Cohomological invariants are characteristic classes for G-torsors over a field. Classical examples are the discriminant and the Hasse-Witt invariant for quadratic forms. There is a huge variety of known cohomological invariants for various linear algebraic groups. One objective of this project is to get a better systematic understanding of cohomological invariants, but also to investigate certain particular cases. Some of the invariants (for the special linear group and for some exceptional groups) are closely related with norm varieties. A basic problem of algebra, number theory and algebraic geometry is to find solutions to polynomial equations. A mathematical law provides a means for solving a huge class of equations, rather than just finding a solution to a single equation. Thus the mathematician s goal is to find and verify useful mathematical laws. One potentially very powerful but as yet unverified law is called the Bloch-Kato conjecture. With the goal of demonstrating that the Bloch-Kato conjecture is valid in general, the investigator studies in depth the properties of certain very special systems of equations, called norm varieties doc9750 none This grant provides funding for the development of a computational tool for analysis and prediction of microstructure changes and residual stresses generated in cutting of hardened steels using single-point tools. The computational tool will be used to establish the optimal parameter values for cutting speed, feed, depth of cut and tool geometry that yield favorable residual stresses and a workpiece surface free of undesirable microstructure changes (e.g., white layer formation) in two-dimensional cutting of a hardened steel material. To achieve this goal, analytical models of the metallurgical phase transformation occurring in quenching of steels will be developed and combined with a coupled thermo-mechanical updated Lagrangian finite element model of the two-dimensional cutting process developed using the ABAQUS Standard finite element code. In order to validate the complete model, orthogonal cutting experiments will be performed with bearing steel (e.g., AISI ) as the workpiece material and PCBN tool material using cutting parameters determined from the model. Existing material property data and or elevated temperature high strain-rate tests will be used to establish the material flow-stress models to be used in the simulations. The microstructure of the machined workpiece samples will be characterized using optical and scanning electron microscopy while residual stresses will be measured using X-ray diffraction. If successful, the results of this research will provide the capability of accurately simulating surface generation in machining of hardened steels and determining an optimal window of cutting conditions to produce surface characteristics that enhance the service-life of hardened steel components. This will in turn help to reduce cost, improve part quality, and promote the industrial use of hard machining technology. On a fundamental level, the proposed research will advance current physical understanding of material and cutting process interactions in hard machining, particularly from a standpoint of workpiece microstructure changes (e.g., white layer formation) and residual stresses. The proposed research will also provide a solid framework for future development of a three-dimensional model for simulating hard machining processes such as turning and milling doc9751 none Morse is working on a project involving a filtration for the space of symmetric functions that depends on a positive integer k. In earlier work, Lapointe, Lascoux, and Morse introduced new families of polynomials that lie in these subspaces, and they made a number of assertions relying on their characterization of these elements. Among these conjectures is one stating that their elements form a basis for the k-subspaces of the symmetric function space and that the Macdonald polynomials expand positively on this new basis. More generally, their claims lead to a family of positivity conjectures which will provide a natural refinement for many fundamental concepts in symmetric function theory. For example, their elements appear to play a role in the k-subspaces analogous to the important role that the Schur functions play for the symmetric function space. Morse is working on proving these conjectures and is also investigating the possible representation theoretic interpretation for these polynomials. The theory of symmetric functions is a classical part of mathematics with a wide variety of applications in fields including physics, engineering, and computer science. Recent development in the study of symmetric functions was made with the introduction in of a new family of symmetric functions called the Macdonald polynomials. Remarkably, these polynomials have also been found to play an important role in areas such as geometry, representation theory, and many-body physics. The successful completion of this project would prove important properties of the Macdonald polynomials and more generally, would provide a natural refinement for the fundamental concepts in symmetric function theory doc9752 none This grant provides funding for developing a methodology to study long-term capacity investment in a competitive electric market. The objective is to study generation adequacy in relationship to the many complex factors in markets, such as load growth, market mechanisms, cost characteristics and physical limits of generating units, environmental policies, and competition. Specifically, three main goals will be targeted: (1) Develop a real-options based, long-term generation asset valuation tool, and use it to evaluate capacity investment decisions. (2) Develop theoretic results to define the optimal capacity expansion, including the investment timing and the generator s type and size in a well-defined, deregulated environment. (3) Develop a model that simulates generation capacity expansion process in the competitive electric power a model that simulates generation capacity expansion process in the competitive electric power industry, and use the model to study capacity expansion related problems, and forecast generation adequacy and electricity price trend. If successful, given a well-defined market environment, the model will be used to forecast the probability distributions for electricity price and system capacity at each future time period and the probability of blackouts as well. This forecasting model will help to detect unforeseeable problems related to generation adequacy, and to serve as an early warning system doc9753 none The research project is aimed at developing accurate as well as efficient computational methods for large-scale simulations involving wave propagation in bounded and unbounded domains. The resulting methods will enable improved solution of countless engineering problems encountered in the fields of acoustics, nondestructive evaluation, earthquake engineering, medical imaging, wireless communications, oil exploration and landmine detection. Several aspects of the project are significant: In the case of modeling wave propagation in bounded domains, a new dispersion reducing technique is expected to bring down the computational cost of frequency-domain simulations by several orders of magnitude without sacrificing any accuracy. For transient (time-domain) analysis, a combination of the dispersion reducing technique and some modified time-stepping algorithms could significantly reduce the cost of analysis. The proposed investigation will also include error estimation studies to enable adaptive use of these algorithms for further reduction in computational cost. Since standard numerical methods such as finite element methods are limited to bounded domain problems, special methods are necessary to model wave propagation in unbounded domains. Proposed are two new methods - one based on space-time discretizations and the other based on continued fraction approximations. Space-time techniques are showing promise in obtaining highly accurate methods that are significantly more efficient than the existing methods of comparable accuracy. Preliminary work based on continued fraction approximations indicates the possibility of obtaining highly economical, yet accurate local absorbing boundary conditions. Other aspects of this research include devising efficient and stable schemes to couple unbounded domain methods with bounded domain methods. It is expected that the computational cost reduction from the proposed methods will enable accurate and detailed simulation of several important physical processes involving wave propagation doc9754 none This award provides support for purchase of equipment to establish an integrated laboratory for high-throughput processing of DNA samples in environmental research. Establishment of the laboratory will give scientists at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) access to high-throughput capabilities that are typically restricted to biomedical or industrialized genomic research centers. Equipment to be purchased include several robotic workstations, a real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction device and a pulsed field gel electrophoresis) system. This new equipment will permit scientists at both institutions to achieve optimum use of an existing high capacity DNA sequencing and microarray facility. This robotic equipment will completely automate management and processing of DNA samples, and thus enable scientists to sample genetic diversity in the environment at a level previously unimaginable. Research questions to be pursued address issues in genome evolution, biodiversity, and environmental influences on gene expression. The equipment will allow precise measurement of changes in gene expression in response to external factors (e.g. toxins, other chemicals) and as a result of symbiosis, and will also be used to measure specific DNA sequences in uncultivable environmental populations. The new high-throughput capabilities will also directly impact the training and education of visiting and year-round scientists, students, and postdoctoral fellows at the two institutions in Woods Hole, MA doc9755 none This research project addresses the central impediment to the wide-spread exploration of the potential of Local Composition Control (LCC) - the information pathway required for the representation and design of composition within a component and its realization by Solid Freeform Fabrication (SFF). It is hoped that the development of an information pathway to support Local Composition Control will provide designers with the access they need to fully explore this intriguing capability. One of the great potential benefits of SFF technology is the ability to control the internal composition of components, a capability not shared by conventional mechanical manufacturing processes. While several compelling applications such as Drug Delivery Devices and Lenses which function by local control of the index of refraction, are under development, it is likely that the potential is largely untapped. The proposed work envisions a suite of Composition Design Features which the designer can use singly or in combination, to specify the composition of complex components. Each composition design feature will relate directly to the geometry of the design, often relying on user interaction to specify critical aspects of the geometry. For example, features can specify the composition of sub-volumes or the transition of composition between sub-volumes. The representations underlying the composition design features will be analytic and therefore concise. Wherever possible, the work on this project will be kept generically applicable to SFF technologies. Where a specific process must be chosen to focus the work, Three Dimensional Printing will be used as the prototypical SFF technology. 3D Printing is well suited to local composition control as multiple materials may be printed through multiple inkjet nozzles, thereby achieving true 3-D composition control doc9756 none Most architectural acoustic prediction programs utilize ray-tracing techniques that work best for environments with large reflecting surfaces such as auditoria and concert halls. This project will apply the radiosity method that has been developed for illumination and visual computer rendering to the prediction of sound fields in diffuse acoustic environments. The new prediction method will allow for prediction of sound levels in small complicated environments such as open plan offices and factories where ray tracing techniques fail. The decreased computational requirement of the method may allow acoustics to be added to the visual architectural walk-through of office and factory designs. In the radiosity method a set of energy balance equations between the bounding surfaces of the room is developed. Most of these equations are independent of the source and receiver positions and thus acoustic prediction on multiple source and receiver locations can be significantly faster than with ray tracing techniques. In the first phase of this project, the acoustic radiosity method is developed assuming perfectly diffuse surfaces and radiators and ignoring diffraction effects. In the second phase the method is extended to include non-diffuse surfaces. In the third phase diffraction effects are added to the model. Students working on the project will present their results at national conferences and through publications in peer reviewed acoustic journals. Results of the work will be incorporated into existing classes on building noise control and room acoustics where students will develop their own radiosity programs for acoustic prediction doc9757 none The long-term goal of this research is development of a piezoelectric-based cochlear implant, while complementing research in existing implant technology and to the understanding of hearing processes. The device will utilize the incoming mechanical energy into the cochlea to generate electrical charge by virtue of the piezoelectric effect, and stimulate surviving nerve fibers in the cochlea. Another goal will be to overcome challenges in the fabrication of miniature piezoelectric devices, and gain insights into their properties. Compared to currently used cochlear implants, this unit is self-contained and designed to work without any signal amplifiers or transmission elements, greatly simplifying the stimulation process. A considerable amount of background research has already been performed in our laboratories, both in vivo and in vitro. Results have demonstrated feasibility, and have indicated the need to focus on device analysis and development. A device utilizing bending mode piezoelectricity has been designed. The design is flexible, allowing a number of engineering parameters to be varied to obtain optimum performance. Specific aims of the proposed research are to: a) determine the dynamic acoustical piezoelectric properties of PVDF in the bending mode; b) systematically evaluate device performance as a function of engineering variables; c) perform in vitro testing in a mechanical model of the cochlea; and, d) study the nature of mechanical forces in the cochlea to enhance transducer performance. Research will involve collaborations with acoustics, biophysics and polymer surface treatment specialists to improve upon the initial efforts and bring to fruition an implantable device doc9758 none The goal of our research is to develop a new and highly sensitive technique for the characterization and investigation of stress-induced breakdown in the advanced, ultra-thin gate dielectrics which constitute one of the key components for next state-of-the-art and next generation VLSI technology. Our technique of Noise Spectroscopy is based on the realization that dielectric breakdown must involve the breakage and rearrangement of atomic bonds arising from the impact of energetic carriers (electrons or holes) which invariably leads to the formation of CARRIER TRAP STATES. EXCESS CURRENT NOISE in the tunneling, leakage current through gate dielectrics represents an extremely sensitive probe of both the presence and the nature of these TRAPS which serve as stepping stones in the tunneling process and therefore the detailed and systematic investigation of excess noise via Noise Spectroscopy has the potential of providing direct information on the QUALITY OF DIELECTRIC FILMS immediately after growth as well as the PATHWAY TO DIELECTRIC BREAKDOWN. The potential impact of this research in the shorter term is the development of a more sensitive and informative technique to ascertain the quality and robustness of ultra thin gate dielectrics which will be useful to the silicon VLSI industry complementary to conventional charge to breakdown and CV techniques. In the longer term, when a clear understanding of the physical mechanism of dielectric breakdown is achieved it should lead to the ability to design and manufacture better and more robust gate dielectrics e.g. via addition of trace impurities to pin atomic motion and reduce trap formation. In terms of education, we intend to involve three graduate students, one for the Noise Spectroscopy technique and the others for dielectric growth. Both aspects will involve state-of-the-art methods in the respective areas. In addition we plan to foster industrial ties to the fullest extent doc9759 none The PI proposes to study problems in three subjects of fluid dynamics: the motion of the interface of general two layered flow, the boundary layer problem, and the motion of water wave. The motion of the interface of general two layered fluid flow includes vortex sheet motion as a special case. In a recent work, the PI shows that arbitrarily specifying independent position and velocity data generally will yield no Sobolev class vortex sheet for any positive time. Some crucial assumptions in this work are: the fluids are inviscid, there is no surface tension, and the interface remains a regular surface at positive time. A problem of interest is therefore a well-posed model for the vortex sheet motion. The PI proposes to reintroduce viscosity into the fluids, and to understand the effect of the viscosity near the interface. This leads to the study of the zero viscosity limit of two layered viscous fluids. A related problem of both mathematical and practical importance is the boundary layer problem. The question is to find the zero viscosity limit of the incompressible Navier-Stokes flow in a domain with a fixed nonempty boundary. It is well-known that the difficulty is in the boundary layer, within which the normal velocity gradient generally becomes very large. The PI s approach is different from the usual one, in the sense that the PI will assume no knowledge of the possible limit equations. The PI proposes to analyze directly the Navier-Stokes flow, and to obtain the qualitative behavior of the boundary part and the interior part of the solutions of Navier-Stokes equation. The method will be from harmonic analysis. It is expected that the techniques and results developed in solving the boundary layer problem will provide insight in finding a well-posed model for the vortex sheet motion. The PI proposes to continue her study in the water wave problem. Recently, the PI proved the existence and uniqueness of solutions locally in time for the Water wave problem. The proposed research concentrates on issues relating to the long time behavior of the water wave: the global existence and uniqueness of solutions, the lifespan of the water wave before singularity, and the singularity profile of the solution. The method will be from harmonic analysis and Clifford analysis. The methods and techniques developed by the PI in solving the water wave problem has found applications in the vortex sheet problem. Success in this project will enhance our understanding of the wave motion, of the mixing of fluids, separation of boundary layers, generation of sounds and coherent structures in turbulence models doc9760 none This Grant Opportunity for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) project aims to extend the results of basic research in an industrial setting to assist in the development of a more reconfigurable line boring process. Line boring is widely used to machine a concentric line of bores, such as those for an engine camshaft or crankshaft. The industrial partner, Lamb Technicon Machining Systems, recently completed a prototype flexible line-boring machine, but further development is needed for its smart tool , which is to provide compensation for tool vibration through internal laser feedback and piezoelectric actuation. A new process stability solution that addresses the real, corner-radiused tooth geometry seen in boring operations will be extended to account for the dynamic effects of the tool s guide-pads, the actuator and the controller. A new cutting tooth concept will then be modeled and analyzed toward reducing the radial machining force by 50%. Model-based tooth designs will be tested to compare forces, cutting power and tool wear to those measured using conventional corner-radiused tools. If successful, the extended stability solution will help avoid instability that can damage the expensive smart tool. Having a science-based tool like this is particularly important here due to the added complexity of the system. If the radial force can then be reduced through the new cutting tooth concept, either the requirements on actuator size and power will be reduced or increased actuator motion will be achieved. This will facilitate smaller boring bars and less demand on the actuator power-induction system that must operate across a rotating interface. Perhaps the most important outcome of this collaboration will be the bilateral impact on the research programs of both Lamb Technicon and the investigator. The investigator will bring specific expertise to the smart tool problem while learning more about the industry s true needs and their day-to-day challenges doc9761 none This project in precision measurements seeks to measure at greatly improved accuracy the following four fundamental quantities: 1) the magnetic moment of the electron (often called its g value) ; 2) the fine structure constant; 3) the ratio of positron and electron g values; and 4) the ratio of the masses of the proton and electron. The measurement of the fine structure constant, along with the measurement of g, will test QED to an unprecedented level of accuracy. Greatly improved techniques for trapping positrons will aid the comparison of measured g values for the electron and positron to provide the best test of CPT invariance with a lepton system doc9762 none This is a Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) award. The goal of the project is to develop global meta-hybrid approaches and corresponding software tools for the efficient solution of large-scale supply chain optimization applications and other massive combinatorial optimization problems. This research effort is built on recent research in heuristics for combinatorial optimization, including the global meta-heuristic Nested Partitions (NP) framework. The focus is on problem classes for which fast heuristics may be developed for both the construction of feasible solutions and for the improvement of such solutions. However, rather than considering heuristics in isolation, the researchers wish to obtain maximum benefit from their availability by employing them within the global framework of partition-based strategies. The term global meta-hybrid is used to denote the combination of a global meta-heuristic with linear programming technology. Such a hybrid combines the lower bound information available from linear programming relaxations with the upper bound and feasible solution data from the heuristic in a synergistic fashion. This project will yield mathematical techniques and corresponding computer software for the generation of high-quality solutions for large-scale supply chain models as well as large-scale combinatorial optimization problems arising from other applications such as radiotherapy. Such problems are intractable for current approaches that do not take advantage of the special properties to exploit within the methodological framework. This project is a collaboration with Rockwell Automation doc9763 none Underwater landslides have generated several local tsunamis reaching at least 30 meters in elevation this century -- most recently on Flores Island, Indonesia in . In addition, these events typically occur close to shore and offer very little time for warning, and can be devastating to nearby coastal development. Underwater landslides often pose the greatest local tsunami hazard. Tsunamis generated by underwater landslides are governed by at least six fundamental parameters, which are functions of landslide geometry and kinematics. In addition, nonlinear interactions may occur between waves, shoreline, and landslide. Consequently, predicting landslide tsunami amplitudes requires sophisticated numerical methods. The PIs have developed an accurate and efficient model of inviscid, irrotational, fluid dynamics during tsunami generation, based on a Boundary Element Method (BEM). A three-dimensional (3D) version, the Tsunami Open and Progressive Initial Conditions System (TOPICS) is an analytical tool that provides estimates of tsunami features and initial conditions. The source code is distributed freely to academic, nonprofit, and government researchers, in order to facilitate tsunami hazard assessment within the tsunami community (see: www.tsunamicommunity.org). This action is to support research to refine the effects of landslide shape, motion, and deformation, on tsunami generation, describing three-dimensional effects during tsunami generation, coupling tsunami generation and propagation models, validating these numerical methods with experiments and actual case studies, and producing more accurate versions of TOPICS for the tsunami community. The fundamental goal is to predict accurate tsunami source features doc9764 none This exploratory research project addresses the development of smart rotating machinery. Unplanned machinery downtime and poor machinery performance impact negatively both industrial productivity and safety at an annual level of $1 trillion. It is therefore timely to develop smart rotating machinery that are highly adaptive to uncertain dynamic environments while maintaining high level of performance. Such machinery must incorporate new and innovative breakthroughs rooted in new information technologies that enable them to exhibit memory, learn from experience and use this learning ability to improve their adaptability while performing in an optimal manner. The technical approach of the proposed research relies on health monitoring, condition assessment and early fault diagnosis through a combination of physics-based nonlinear rotordynamics models and empirical models developed through real-time sensor data. Closed-loop early incipient fault diagnosis is achieved through the use of computational intelligence tools, e.g. neural networks, fuzzy logic, and genetic algorithms, and other advanced signal processing methods, such as wavelet analysis. Towards making smart rotating machinery a reality, an initial framework will be explored for a methodology that will enable embedding certain elements of intelligent behavior into rotating machinery. The proposed limited effort is considered high-risk because it constitutes a pioneering study in smart systems with the perceived difficulties in developing an effective methodology. Furthermore, this research will lead to the experimental demonstrations of early diagnosis algorithms for controlled rotating machinery, a subject that has yet to be addressed in the literature. Such algorithms will control and mitigate impending failures of critical rotating machinery, reducing the probability of unplanned downtime, emergency shutdowns and catastrophic accidents doc9765 none Thin film solar cells, active matrix displays and displays with driver electronics require crystalline silicon thin films on inexpensive, large area and or transparent substrates such as glass for improved performance and low manufacturing costs. To achieve this goal the difficulties are: (1) amorphous nature of glass makes it impossible to employ current growth techniques that take advantage of crystalline character of the substrate. (2) the inability of relatively inexpensive glass to withstand high processing temperatures required for growth of crystalline silicon films. To overcome these problems we propose a solid state laser crystallization technique where laser pulse causes melting and re-solidification of the near surface region however short duration of laser pulse prevents sustained heating of the underlying substrate and makes the process compatible with glass substrates. The goal of the proposed program is to understand the basic science of laser crystallization using solid state lasers with near infrared wavelengths and grow amorphous silicon films by a low temperature process on glass substrates and then crystallize them by semiconductor diode lasers for seed layer followed by thicker films by plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition to demonstrate high efficiency solar cell devices. The research effort is Academy-Industry collaboration under the National Science Foundation GOALI program. The university faculty and graduate students will work in close collaboration with the team of scientists and engineers at the BP Solar Corporation. The university industry collaboration will provide additional opportunity for students to work with industrial scientists and use of their additional state of the art equipment facilities. Besides improvements in solar cell technology, this project will provide education to students in thin film growth, laser processing and electronic device fabrication, which are highly desired skills and important areas of current interest. The proposed program will have a strong outreach activity such as summer experience for high school teachers to work in solar energy and laser applications area, visit to industry and a display in a local museum of improved device for public knowledge and generate interest in science and engineering doc9766 none Washington In order to meet the communication and broadcasting needs of the 21st century, aperture antennas are generally required to have shaped surfaces so that their radiation patterns efficiently match the geographical regions where the signals are to be transmitted and received. These antennas are, in general, rigid and consist of parabolic, paraboloidal, cylindrical, spherical, or hyperboloidal shapes. In terms of the current state of the art, beam shaping with these rigid structures is possible with multiple off-center feed arrays or asymmetric shaping of the reflector surface (contour beam reflector antennas). Beam steering can be accomplished electrically by utilizing the feed array or mechanically by using specially designed gimbals that tilt the whole reflector. In the case of spaceborne contoured beam reflector antennas, a major limitation is the fact that a rigid shaped reflector is optimized for coverage of a specific geographical area. Once the antenna is deployed on orbit, radiation pattern modification cannot be accomplished. As satellites become more reliable and their expected service life increase, the probability that the satellite service area and or operator will change also increases. Mechanically active antennas have been proposed as a solution to this problem, but at time there are no commercially viable units. The main rationale of this stems from the following issues: 1. We have algorithms that can accurately predict reflector shapes based on user defined radiation patterns, but we have very few mechanisms that deal with real structures and even fewer for how to achieve these deflections for reflectors that will change their shape dynamically. 2. There is very little fundamental research on how many actuators to use, actuator placement, and optimal actuator deflections for active aperture antennas. 3. There is no fundamental mechanism for coupling the electromagnetics to the mechanics in a seamless fashion. The research proposed in this study seeks to effectively design, model and construct a mechanically reconfigurable antenna that addresses these issues. Since this type of antenna can be built at a fraction of the total cost of a traditional phased array antenna there is commercial significance as well. For example, a commercial manufacturer of phased array antennas claims that they can build phased array antennas at a cost of about $100.00 per element. The resolution needed for space based communications ranges from about 10,000 to 1,000,000 elements. This puts the total cost anywhere between ($1.0M-$100M). The system weight and complexity can also elevate this cost. A mechanically reconfigurable system can be built with off the shelf components today for less than $25,000. Presently there are roughly 600 satellites in commission throughout the world. By the year , it is expected that up to new satellites will be launched, many with multiple antenna systems. Based on this fact it is easy to see the potential payoff. A fundamental approach to design and construction of these antennas will revolutionize the way these aperture antennas are built today doc9767 none The proposer will continue the research that he has been pursuing under the support of the National Science Foundation. The specific areas of the proposed research include the following: (1) Simultaneous diagonalization of commuting tuples of self-adjoint operators modulo various norm ideals. This problem has been solved (with NSF support) in the case where the norm ideal is the Schatten p-class when p is strictly greater than 1. The proposer will next consider the case where p is 1, i.e., where the norm ideal is the trace class. This is a difficult problem, but this is also an important problem because of its potential applications. The proposer will also consider a class of ideals which are related to the Schatten class. (2) The complete determination of automorphisms of the full Toeplitz algebra on the unit circle which are induced by homeomorphisms of the circle. This has been accomplished under previous NSF support in the case where the homeomorphism in question is bi-Lipschitz. The final goal is to remove the bi-Lipschitz condition. This involves some careful estimates of norms in the Toeplitz algebra and the use of certain singular integral operators. (3) Toeplitz algebras associated with minimal flows. The ultimate goal here is to use K-theory to characterize the invertibility of systems of Toeplitz operators associated with such flows. (4) Hankel operators on certain reproducing-kernel Hilbert spaces. Here the main question is the Schatten-class membership of these operator. The reproducing kernel will be involved in certain quantitative estimates. The proposed problems are fairly representative of the current research interests in operator theory and operator algebras, which is a study of, among other things, the spectral properties of various linear operators. In part inspired and demanded by the development of the quantum theory in the early part of the 20th century, this study was initiated by great mathematicians such as H. Weyl and J. von Neumann. Because additivity (i.e., linearity) appears in many fundamental aspects of nature, operator theory provides the right mathematical tools for scientific fields ranging from atomic physics to optimal control. Many abstract problems in operator theory and operator algebras owe their origin to these fields of applications. For example, both for theoretical reasons and for practical applications, quite often one must deal with, or introduce, perturbations which are small by some measure or other. Problem (1) is about such perturbations. The root of this problem can be traced back to a paper of Weyl published in , which asserts that a continuous spectrum can be turned into a discrete one by a compact (which a measure of smallness ) perturbation. Problem (2) requires both modern techniques and classical-style mathematical analysis. A theme which underlies all these problems is the establishment of various estimates (i.e., bounds or growth rates). In general, the sharper the estimates, the better theorems one obtains doc9768 none The proposed project has several related components: 1) We plan to continue our study of the Schelling segregation model as a dynamical system. This model, which first arose in economics, is related to a number of lattice models in statistical physics like the lattice gas, but more difficult due to the inherent non-local nature of site coupling; 2) We plan to study the rigidity of periodic point invariants for symbolic and hyperbolic dynamical systems. These topological invariants include, for a Holder continuous function f, the unmarked periodic orbit spectrum, the beta function P(-s f), and the zeta function. These invariants are fundamental objects of study in dynamics and statistical physics, but the information about the function f they capture is subtle and poorly understood; 3) We plan to continue our investigation into the distribution of values of fundamental quantities in ergodic theory (e.g. Lyapunov exponents, local entropy, and Birkhoff averages) and the fine structure of the corresponding phase space decomposition. The proposed project has several related components: 1) We plan to continue our study of the Schelling segregation model as a dynamical system. This model, which was first proposed by the eminent economist Thomas Schelling, is related to a number of lattice models in statistical physics like the lattice gas, but more difficult due to the inherent non-local nature of site coupling; 2) Pressure is a fundamental object of study in statistical physics, but even in highly idealized systems, the information about the system it captures is subtle and poorly understood. We plan to study whether certain systems are completely identified by their pressure. These problems have striking similarities to fascinating questions which Kac adroitly summarized with the question Can you hear the shape of a drum? ; (3) For ergodic systems, the time average of a function along almost every orbit equals the spatial average. Only very rarely can almost every orbit be replaced by every orbit. We plan to study the fine structure and dimension of the exceptional set whose time average does not coincide with the spatial average doc9769 none Sulfate-rich cohesive soils are found in several regions of the United States. When the sulfate-rich soils are treated with calcium based lime and cement stabilizers for soil improvements, the sulfates in soils react with the calcium of stabilizers and alumina of clayey soils to form a crystalline mineral, ettringite. This mineral, upon hydration, undergoes a large amount of heave in the soils. This heave is termed as sulfate induced heave in the literature. Buildings, pavements, runways and embankments built on cement and lime treated sulfate-bearing soils have been affected by this heave distress. Repair and maintenance of the distressed structures costs millions of dollars annually. Potential heave problems may arise in the future due to the increased use of industrial sulfuric waste products for soil stabilization and solidification. Hence, it is necessary to fundamentally understand sulfate-stabilizer reaction mechanisms in soils that cause sulfate heave movements. This project is designed to investigate the influence of soil compositional and environmental factors on the heave mechanisms in sulfate rich soils and establish problematic sulfate levels for various soil compositional and environmental variables. Four types of clayey soils with different types of clay mineralogies, two cement and lime treatment levels, five sulfate amounts, two moisture content levels, and three temperature conditions will be investigated. Treated and untreated soil samples will be prepared, cured if necessary, by accelerated curing methods at different temperatures and then tested under a variety of mineralogical, chemical and engineering swell, suction potential and shear strength tests. Test results will be analyzed to understand the possible causes of sulfate heave mechanisms and investigate time periods at which ettringite formation takes place in soils. Additionally, models will be developed to predict problematic sulfate levels in soils at which heave distress can be expected for a given chemical treatment. These models will be verified by comparing their predictions with the known heave distresses of field sites. This project will make a strong contribution to the fundamental understanding of the sulfate induced heaving mechanisms in soils. Potential benefits of this research project are: (1) develop problematic sulfate conditions for different clayey soils at which cement and lime treatments cause heave distress, (2) develop better chemical treatment methods in the future by targeting the factors that influence the ettringite formation, and (3) facilitate the use of sulfuric wastes for recycling applications in stabilization. Also, applications of free alumina and electric conductivity measurements in soils to identify problematic sulfates will be evaluated. This project will also have a strong impact on the researchers educational activities. An integral part of this project is to teach swell, shrink, mineralogical and chemical characterization methods as well as data acquisition, data reduction and analysis and data presentation concepts to graduate and undergraduate students. Both graduate and undergraduate students will be encouraged to work as a team in performing the research tasks. The research project information will be made available to interested individuals through the web address of the geotechnical program. Updates on research status and findings will be posted throughout the year. Also, the research findings will be disseminated in various journals and proceedings articles doc9770 none The principal investigator would like to continue his work on partial differential equations and variational problems. The first theme of this project, and also of the research of the PI over the past several years, is to study special sets associated to solutions to differential equations and variational problems. The problems that the PI would continue to work on include the geometric structure of level sets, in particular the nodal sets and the singular sets. The study is partly motivated by the desire to understand to what extent the solutions can be described quantitatively by polynomials or by homogeneous solutions. These problems have a close connection with other fields in mathematics, including several complex variables and algebraic geometry. A new research trend is the study of the relation between the growth of nodal sets and the growth of solutions themselves. It is expected that they are closely related to each other. The second theme of this project is to study the isometric embedding of two-dimensional metrics in the three dimensional Euclidean space, both locally and globally. In general, the isometric embedding is based on the complicated Nash-Moser iteration, which requires detailed discussions of the linearized equations. Moreover, the global isometric embedding is expected to meet some topological obstacles. Difficulties arise when the Gaussian curvature changes its sign. Singular sets may appear even if the embedding exists. The problems of the singular sets originate from the material science and the control theory. Singular sets, as the name suggests, are those sets where singularities occur. Precise definitions vary according to problems where they arise. In reality it is impossible to eliminate singular sets, the so-called bad sets . An example is provided by cracks in the building material. Hence one of the central tasks is to investigate the conditions under which the singular sets can be controlled and hence can be made small. Another application involves the high-performance computing, in particular the image processing. One problem is to recover the image from a distorted copy and the difference is measured exactly by some singular sets. It is highly expected that such sets should be small enough to be neglected. The problems stated in the project are simplified mathematical models. It is the hope by the investigator that the discussion of these mathematical problems would improve the methods to control the singular sets in various applications doc9771 none The intrinsic structure and chemistry of nanotubes provide a framework upon which important functional nanoscale systems can be built. At the University of Pennsylvania, we are discovered and produced hybrid materials in which molecules are introduced into the lumen of nanotubes to impart new and improved functionality. The first of these was one-dimensional chains of C(60) molecules encapsulated in single-wall carbon nanotubes. The molecules were shown to be highly mobile within the tubes and therefore provide an ideal basis for the experimental and theoretical study of one-dimensional systems. We have recently shown that our synthesis methods are general and we have incorporated the alkali metals K and CS, and the endohedral molecule La(2)@C(60), inside of nanotubes. This can lead to important results. For example, calculations predict that the tensile modulus of nanotubes is greatly increased when they contain chains of C(60). Also, there are possible applications of these systems to hydrogen storage and Li-based batteries. An exciting prospect is the use of nanotubes as nanoscale reaction chambers to produce metastable molecules. %%% Our theory program first developed the intermolecular potentials among graphitic and fullerene structures and then applied one-dimensional statistical mechanics to analyze the clustering and one-dimensional equation of state of fullerene chains within nanotubes doc9772 none The project addresses questions concerning the distribution of rational and integral points on higher dimensional algebraic varieties. The main problem is to relate the Zariski density and the asymptotic distribution of points to global geometric invariants. Number theory is one of the oldest branches of mathematics. Today it is marked by profound connections to geometry and analysis. It has a wide range of applications to data transmission, storage and cryptography. For example, many algorithms are based on arithmetic properties of elliptic curves. This research explores the higher dimensional case of surfaces and threefolds doc9773 none This Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) award provides funding for improving the performance of a hydrostatic thrust bearing. It is well known that these bearings undergo both small and large scale deformations and that these deformations can significantly reduce the load-carrying capacity of the bearing. What has been less well known is that certain types of bearing deformation can actually increase the load-carrying capacity! In this research, these advantageous deformations will be investigated using analytical, numerical, and experimental techniques. The objectives of this work will be to develop design guidelines that may be used to ensure beneficial deformations while also guaranteeing that harmful deformations do not occur. The fluid-film thickness between the bearing and the thrust surface will be optimized based upon sliding speed, structural properties of the bearing, fluid conditions, and power source limitations. A method for conducting these investigations will be to study the impact of intentionally profiling the bearing surface to achieve optimal bearing performance. The optimized profile geometry, coupled with the expected passive deformation of the bearing, will be used to specify the design requirements for the advanced bearing design. If successful, the work of this research will be used to significantly enhance the performance of hydrostatic thrust bearings that are widely used in mechanical design applications. The improved performance will be demonstrated in higher load-carrying capacities and lower power requirements. A secondary impact will be to reduce wear and increase life expectancies by eliminating the potential for metal-to-metal contact between the bearing and the thrust surface. The design guidelines that are generated from this work may be used to update the classical textbook theory that exists for these widely used machine elements. By doing this, improved machine design practices will be disseminated among the engineering community and a significant reduction in waste and an increase in productivity will be realized doc9774 none A new type of actuation device has been conceptualized that meets the needs of large 1) displacement, 2) force and 3) bandwidth within a package more compact than currently available magnetostrictive and stack-type piezo actuators of similar rating. The actuation mechanism relies on micro-scale electrohydrodynamic (EHD) pumping of a dielectric liquid with a small concentration of free charges. Analytical and numerical studies have shown the EHD-pumped actuator to be capable of delivering equal force and bandwidth to magnetostrictive and stack-type piezo actuators of the same size, but with considerably greater displacement. Research is proposed to further analyze the new concept to establish a parametric understanding of the actuator with respect to geometry, fluid, and temperature constraints. Research is also proposed to experimentally verify the viability of the promising concept. A multitude of prototypes will be designed, fabricated, and tested to provide experimental benchmarking of the model predictions. It is envisioned that 1) tools for the design, fabrication, and deployment of the EHD pumped actuator, 2) working prototypes providing force, bandwidth, and size capabilities superior to comparable magnetostrictive and piezo type devices will be developed. It is expected that these actuators will substantially impact the field of active sound and vibration control doc9775 none This award provides partial support for purchase of a cryo-cooling device to be installed in a shared facility used for x-ray protein crystallography. Crystallographic studies now play a central role in biology as the sequencing of large stretches of DNA reveals more and more genes whose role in the cell are poorly understood. Cryo-cooling minimizes radiation damage to protein crystals during data collection, and is an essential feature of modern x-ray crystallography workstations. At least 90% of the current crystallography projects on campus require cryo-cooling, including structural studies of a thermostable glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase, other NAD binding enzymes, human bactericidal permeability-increasing protein, EF-hand calcium binding proteins, anti-DNA antibodies, and enzymes in the alginate biosynthetic pathway. Although one such device is already available to the PIs, usage of the X-ray facility is expected to increase significantly as a result of the recent establishment of a Structural Biology Core facility for which they are responsible doc9776 none formulas for any given number of squares as the Fourier coefficients of modular forms. In Rankin proved that any one of these formulas, for more than 8 squares, would be highly non-trivial to compute explicitly. Since , explicit exact non-trivial formulas have only been found for up to 32 squares, with an even number of squares much easier than an odd number. The investigator used his combinatorial elliptic function methods to derive infinite families of expansions of powers of classical theta functions, and the corresponding non-trivial explicit sums of squares formulas. (See http: xxx.lanl.gov abs math.NT ). This is the first time that infinite families of non-trivial exact explicit formulas for sums of squares have been found. All of this work gives a new elegant extension of the classical formulas of Jacobi doc9777 none Professor Bourdon and his collaborator Joel Shapiro of Michigan State University will investigate problems arising from the interaction between the modern theory of linear operators and the classical theory of analytic functions. The problems to be studied involve norms, decomposability, and numerical ranges of composition operators as well as the chaotic behavior of both composition operators and operators commuting with backward shifts. Insights and tools developed during the course of the project will be applied to other classes of linear operators on Hilbert and Banach spaces. Many of the differential and integral equations that physicists and engineers use to model physical processes may be viewed as linear operators on spaces of functions. This viewpoint, pioneered by David Hilbert, led to the development of function-theoretic operator theory, which is the branch of mathematics inspiring the problems that are the focus of Bourdon and Shapiro s project. A number of these problems concern the notion of numerical range of a linear operator, an object that has relevance to quantum physics and that has proven useful to engineers in determining the stability of certain control systems. Other problems relate to the chaotic behavior of linear operators. That linear operators can give rise to chaotic systems is a relatively recent discovery which has led to unexpected connections between operator theory and dynamical systems. The idea of decomposability--the study of how to break a complicated linear system up into simpler ones--has been shown to have surprising connections with such chaotic behavior. The final group of problems involves norm calculations for composition operators. The norm of an operator measures how much the operator can stretch the unit ball of the space on which it acts. Computer experimentation should yield insights and intuition concerning both composition-operator norms and numerical ranges. Through such experimentation, undergraduate students at Washington and Lee University will be given an opportunity to participate in the project. The training and research experience provided to these students by the project contribute to its human-resources impact doc9778 none The proposer plans to examine function theory problems, invariant subspace problems, and model theory on certain reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces of analytic functions on domains in Cn. The main cases concern, but are not limited to, spaces whose reproducing kernel has one positive square. Recent commutant lifting theorems and Beurling-Lax-Halmos type theorems for such spaces provide the rationale for connecting these topics. Among the function theory questions considered are corona theorems for various multiplier algebras of operators on reproducing kernel spaces. In addition, using Hilbert space methods, the principal investigator expects to derive new estimates for the H2(D2)-corona theorem on the bidisk and consider vector valued corona theorems. The invariant subspace topics which will be pursued include consequences of the Beurling-type invariant subspace theory for reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces with Nevanlinna-Pick kernels. In addition, a concrete model theory of commuting n-tuples related to that of Agler and Athavale will be developed. One of the unifying themes of the proposed work is the systematic use of control theory ideas in the context of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces. Such spaces provide a fundamental notion for connecting problems in, for example, classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, circuit theory, and signal analysis. Some of the proposed problems may be viewed as inverse problems or partial knowledge problems. For example, to effect a desired output, how should one decide on an appropriate input? Interpolation type problems have long been studied for the stabilization of systems in feedback control in one dimension. Much of the emphasis of the proposed research will be on the multidimensional theory. The proposer expects this viewpoint to be productive in developing new techniques for the inverse problems being considered doc9779 none While attempting to solve a problem raised by Talagrand in the context of deviations from a median, the PI and his collaborators introduced the notion of the subgaussian constant in the context of concentration inequalities on product graphs. Estimating the subgaussian constant amounts to estimating a certain log-moment generating function, and is useful in establishing tight concentration phenomenon on graphs. Some known (classical) results of Maurey, McDiarmid, and others are derived using this notion, leaving open still some fundamental problems, a few of which are addressed in this proposal. Besides the subgaussian constant, in recent work the PI (with his collaborators) has introduced new Poincare- and Log Sobolev-type functional constants in the discrete setting of Markov chains and graphs. Algorithmic problems such as computing and approximating these and related isoperimetric constants are considered here. Mathematical problems such as estimating the vertex isoperimetric constant and its functional analog on product graphs are also proposed. The combination of combinatorial and functional-analytic techniques has proved quite fruitful, especially in the last few years, in investigating discrete isoperimetry, and in establishing tight inequalities between isoperimetric and Poincare-type constants. These inequalities in turn were invaluable to problems in extremal and probabilistic combinatorics, and to the design and analysis of randomized and approximation algorithms. Not as well understood, in the discrete setting, are the finer so-called Log-Sobolev inequalities, and their connection to isoperimetric and concentration inequalities. Some fundamental problems are addressed here with a view towards a better understanding. In summary, this proposal addresses some important and current problems in discrete probability and combinatorics. The motivation for some of these problems stems from questions which arose in the fields of probability theory and computer science doc9780 none This project is on the finishing of balls of advanced ceramics, glasses, and semiconductor material using the magnetic float polishing technology. Conventional finishing of advanced ceramics and glasses by grinding, polishing, lapping generally leads to several defects including large scratches, formation of pits due to the dislodgment of grains, viscous flow of the glassy phase in the case of glass, and surface and subsurface microcracks. These defects affect the properties and performance of these materials and are traditionally removed by subsequent diamond polishing. To address this difficult problem, a gentle finishing technology, called the magnetic float polishing was developed (in a recently completed investigation supported by NSF) without the need to use diamond abrasives. Surface finish on the order of 4 nm Ra and 40 nm Rmax with sphericity in the range of 0.25 micrometers were accomplished on Si3N4 balls with a total polishing time of ~ 20 hours. A better understanding of the mechanical and chemo-mechanical actions involved in the polishing of Si3N4 balls has resulted. In this project, the investigators intend to generalize this work to cover other advanced ceramics (balls of different size and number per batch), various glasses, and silicon. Advanced ceramics, such as Si3N4, SiC, Zr02, and Al2O3 are increasing being considered for structural applications of which Si3N4, in specific, is chosen for hybrid ball and roller bearing applications. Similarly, various types of glasses are used for optical applications, such as lenses and recently spherical silicon balls are being considered for micro-electronic applications (instead of silicon wafers). This research would be the first of its kind on the finishing of silicon balls (instead of wafers) by magnetic float polishing. Thus, the finishing technology proposed is expected to address structural, optical, and electronic applications that can have a significant impact on the manufacture of balls for various advanced technology applications doc9781 none The objective of this research project is to develop a post-processing technique to planarize curved freestanding thin film microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) devices by means of controlled exposure to a neutral ion beam. The method works by (1) affecting a thin highly stressed layer in the first few seconds of ion beam exposure through atomic rearrangement near the surface of the film; and, (2) removing initially stressed material in the film after several additional minutes of ion beam exposure. These effects can be combined in a controlled way to offset the initial relaxation curvature in the micro-mirror. MEMS micro-mirrors are important components in several next-generation optical communications devices. Freestanding MEMS micro-mirrors are often fabricated in a layer-by-layer process before being released from a host substrate; through-thickness dimensions may be as small as one micron or less. Once these thin structures are released, residual stresses due to processing are relaxed by transverse curvatures large enough to render the devices optically useless. The program includes both theoretical and experimental work. Using analytical and numerical models, the effects of various processing parameters will be studied; experiments will be carried out to test these parameters, and the quality of the resulting planarized mirrors will be characterized doc9782 none Characterizing these in terms of the control gain can be misleading. The idea of using feedforward of known effects to assist the feedback control is good, but well known. Micro-level material objectives have been indirectly incorporated in the design of controllers for years. However, the idea of explicitly incorporating the effects of heat flow is a good example of the use of modeling to help determine the controller explicitly. Although adaptive control is proposed as an integral part of both the feedback control and the feedforward control, very little is said about adaptive control per se. I have a few comments on the interpretations of the graphs. The text in Figure 11 states that the oscillation in diameter indicates the need for adaptive control. However, without knowing the measurements that determine both the pull rate and the heater power, and the system dynamics, it is not apparent that adaptive control is required. Certainly, Figure 11 by itself is insufficient. Figure 19 shows oscillations of the boule diameter, which is one indication of nonminimum phase behavior. However, the anomaly near the end of the graph appears to be due to a nonlinear effect (or a time variation). This graph, if the anomalous behavior is not uncommon, would present a good argument for the use of adaptive control. The modeling of the CZ and EMCZ appears to be appropriate. Experimentation to validate the models is reasonable, and I expect that it can be conducted on the available puller. In summary, I think the primary contribution of the proposed effort will be the development of models for the CZ and EMCZ processes. There will be no new contribution to control theory (and the proposal doesn t claim any). Although the proposal states that controllers for these processes will be developed, the analysis of the control issues is weak doc9783 none This award provides support for purchase of equipment to be used to establish a multi-user, integrated core equipment facility for cellular and molecular biological research. The equipment includes centrifuges, a microinjection apparatus, a spectrophotomer and an inverted microscope. The facility will be shared by faculty in two departments: a newly formed Department of Cell Biology and Neuroscience and an existing Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. A shared focus of all these investigators is the elucidation of the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying neural development and or nerve regeneration. All are now physically located in adjacent labs, and given the overlap in their research methodologies, will be able to share the equipment supported through this award.. Some of the major equipment items requested would replace existing items that are close to 25 years old and in serious disrepair, while others will provide new or expanded capabilities. All major users are members of the NSF sponsored IGERT doctoral training program at the University. This program in Complex Biological Systems is designed to train graduate students to approach biological problems from a multitude of levels, from the molecular to the systems level, using a variety of approaches drawn from cellular and molecular biology, structural biology, computational biology and systems neuroscience. Thus the IGERT trainees will benefit considerably from access to the equipment which will be used in both course work and in thesis research. The equipment will also be available for use by a number of undergraduate students who undertake independent research projects as part of their education doc9784 none Wilkinson will continue to extend her previous work toward an understanding of the dynamics of partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms. In particular, with her collaborators, Wilkinson proposes to address the issue of density of stable ergodicity in the space of partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms, and the existence of Sinai-Ruelle-Bowen measures for these diffeomorphisms. Wilkinson will also study the dependence on smooth parameter of invariant structures for partially hyperbolic systems. A diffeomorphism is a way of smoothly rearranging the points in a space. A diffeomorphism is a natural object, arising, for example, in the study of planetary motion. By applying a diffeomorphism repeatedly, one obtains a dynamical system; each iteration corresponds to a unit of time in the evolution of the system. For any given space, there are infinitely many diffeomorphisms, with widely varying dynamical behaviors; a goal of dynamics is to arrange diffeomorphisms into classes whose dynamical behavior can be understood. One class of diffeomorphisms whose dynamics are now well-understood are Smale s Axiom A, or hyperbolic, diffeomorphisms, which are chaotic: among other things, they display sensitive dependence on initial conditions. This project aims to better understand the behavior of another important class of diffeomorphisms, called partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms. Partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms have many of the features of Axiom A systems, but their dynamical behavior is yet to be completely understood doc9785 none The Charles A. Dana Center of the University of Texas at Austin, will use a one-year planning grant to assess the design of standards-based mathematics and science resources for early childhood educators. The project will produce a prototype curriculum unit, based on The Wonder of Water, which was developed as part of the Texas SSI Family Learning Project. The curriculum will be tested, revised and re-tested in six early childhood education settings. The results will be used to produce a plan to field test, research and disseminate the curriculum regionally and nationally, resulting in a strong resource for early childhood educators that will enable preschool children to develop an understanding and appreciation for math and science. By using this product in settings such as Head Start, a better sense of continuity will be established between preschool and elementary science and mathematics content doc9786 none This award provides funds to assist in the purchase of a modern scanning electron microscope (SEM) for research in systematic biology and paleoecology at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History (OMNH). In addition, the funds will assist in the purchase of a critical point dryer and a sputter coater, items required for the preparation of some types of materials for study with the SEM. The SEM to be purchased operates with variable pressure in the specimen chamber, and thus can image specimens at low pressure that are large (e.g., dinosaur teeth), too fragile (e.g., block of trilobite-rich shale), or too rare to be studied with conventional SEM preparation techniques. In addition, the SEM is capable of imaging very small, coated specimens (e.g., pollen, flowers) in the conventional high magnification high pressure mode. Initially the instrument will be used by faculty curators, research associates, graduate students, and undergraduates for studies of the systematics and evolution of flowering plants and heterosporous ferns, early Cretaceous vertebrates, Lower Paleozoic and Cenozoic bats, and other small mammals. The availability of the microscope will improve the research and educational capabilities of the University, and improve the museum s ability to preserve biological, paleontological, and archeological specimens while insuring their availability for research doc9787 none This university-industry collaborative research project seeks to advance the capability for the manufacture of crystalline surfaces for use in short wavelength light emitters (blue UV LEDs and lasers) by contributing to a basic understanding of the generation of defects resultant from the processing of ZnO substrates, and the subsequent homoepitaxial growth of films. ZnO substrates will be prepared by chemomechanical polishing and further pre-growth processing techniques, after which homoepitaxial films will be grown on the substrates. The defects generated at various stages of surface processing will be examined with high energy backscattering spectrometry, ion channeling and scanning electrical properties microscopy. This understanding will aid in identifying the processing conditions which show promise for producing ultra-high quality epitaxial films on ZnO. Development of this understanding has the potential to contributing to the successful demonstration of the homoepitaxial growth of ZnO. This work will further contribute to the development of advanced surface characterization tools which are needed for assessing near surface damage at the nanometer scale. An extensive collaborative effort involving Oklahoma State University, Eagle-Picher Technologies and Los Alamos National Laboratory will be undertaken doc9788 none Research on this project involves the use of algebraic, geometric and combinatorial methods to attack fundamental questions involving enumeration in convex polytopes and certain graded partially ordered sets. Questions considered involve enumerative properties of general polytopes and arrangements of hyperplanes, properties of related families of partially ordered sets, and connections of all of these structures to fundamental algebraic structures involving permutations. Recent connections between subalgebras of quasisymmetric functions and enumerative properties of families of partially ordered sets have made it likely that significant progress can be achieved on these questions. A major focus is to move closer to a characterization of the numbers of faces and chains of faces in polytopes and arrangements. In addition, the investigator and his colleagues will continue their work on the study of the geometry of the space of phylogenetic trees. An initial goal will be to determine an efficient scheme to compute distances between trees in this space. The type of enumerative information being sought here is of use in the design of geometric algorithms for problems in robotics and motion planning, and recently has come into play in the analysis of randomization schemes for the management of data. The associated permutation questions relate to questions arising when one studies efficient schemes for sorting large amounts of data. The questions involving phylogenetic trees bear on the development of statistical methods to deal with trees derived from DNA data. Such methods are of great interest to biologists studying the genetic relationship between different species or different diseases doc1664 none This Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) award supports the development of a framework, comprised of models and efficient solution algorithms, for two different problem domains. One that is characterized as multi-stage, sequence-dependent group scheduling problem with carry-over setups, and the other with no carry-over setups. Applications of the former exist in printed circuit board (PCB) assembly, while the latter is applicable in hardware (discrete parts) manufacturing such as those supported by cellular manufacturing. The emphasis is on the development of scheduling models that truly reflect real operational constraints. In a two-stage PCB assembly process, these include performing the setup required on either stage based on a surrogate board group representing all board types, and performing the setup on the second stage in anticipation of the arriving board group. The impact of carry-over sequence dependency is assessed by recognizing that the setup time required of a surrogate board group on either stage is dependent upon the entire set of preceding surrogate board groups that have so far been processed. A variety of performance measures including the minimization of total completion time, mean flow time, and weighted tardiness will be considered in order for the producer to be highly responsive to a variety of customer needs. Recognizing that both problems belong to a class of notoriously difficult NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems, the structure of the problems will be exploited to develop efficient lower bounds. For the minimization of mean flow time, special cases will be investigated to identify those that can be optimally solved in polynomial time. For completely solving problem instances that have industrial merit, computationally efficient solution techniques that combine the underlying concepts of branch-and-bound aided by filtered-beam search, and tabu search will be developed and tested. The lower-bounding mechanisms will be embedded in these techniques to not only seek solutions with guaranteed quality, but also use them advantageously to terminate the search to enhance computational efficiency. For the total completion time minimization problem with no carry-over setups, an approach based on an equivalent formulation of the asymmetric generalized traveling salesman problem will be investigated. Finally, the solution techniques developed will be tested with data obtained from industrial collaborators to validate their computational efficiency and ability to obtain solutions with guaranteed quality. The successful completion of this project will provide both electronics and hardware manufacturing companies with methodological frameworks for rapidly generating schedules with guaranteed quantifiable performance. The insightful research findings so obtained will also enhance the existing graduate courses in scheduling at Oregon State University and University of Texas at Dallas doc9790 none One of the basic geometric and analytic problems in several complex variables is to determine when two real submanifolds in multidimensional complex space are locally biholomorphically equivalent. That is, when is it possible to find a local invertible holomorphic transformation sending one submanifold onto the other? This problem has attracted the attention of many mathematicians since the beginning of the twentieth century, starting with the work of Poincare and continuing with the major contributions of E. Cartan, Tanaka, Chern, Moser and others. The principal investigators will continue their research on several aspects of this problem. In particular, they will focus on determining when it is possible to reduce the biholomorphic equivalence problem to solving systems of polynomial equations with complex coefficients. They also plan to determine when a formal mapping sending a real submanifold into another is necessarily convergent. In addition, they will attempt to categorize those submanifolds for which such mappings are determined by finitely many derivatives at a given point. They expect that this study will lead to the discovery of new geometric, analytic, as well as algebraic invariants of these submanifolds. The Principal Investigators will continue their study of fundamental properties of analytic and geometric objects, such as surfaces and curves, in multidimensional complex spaces. A complete classification of these mathematical objects can have important implications for a number of other questions in mathematical science. In fact, this study is motivated by the rich interplay between several areas of mathematics and physics, including control theory, string theory, and other areas of mathematical physics. Progress on the problems proposed by the Principal Investigators will likely have impact on the above-mentioned areas as well doc9717 none Theory revision is the correcting of a given, roughly correct rule, also known as a concept or theory. This problem arises frequently in machine learning, for instance, when the initial output of an expert system is not correct, and when the machine learning problem is too large or too complex to solve from scratch, and an approximately correct rule is needed to jump-start the learning process. There has been considerable ad hoc building of theory revision systems, but the theory is poorly understood. This research investigates fundamental mathematical possibilities and limitations of efficient theory revision. It is hoped that as a result of this research, theory revision in computational learning theory will emerge as a general framework for the study of learning situations where a large amount of initial information is available or necessary. In particular, the PIs investigate the following areas: extensions of their previous work on propositional logic theory revision with queries, relations to certificate complexity and attribute-efficient learning, revision problems for predicate logic representations, and both the learning and revising of categorial grammars doc9792 none This Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) project s first major research objective is to effectively sequence mixed models under dynamic conditions in an assembly plant so that the sequence at the downstream assembly sections can be known in advance to the plant and suppliers. The second major objective is to develop a model and method in evaluating the manufacturing costs for having many choices in product options. This research effort can result in significant opportunities to enhance production control and supply chain management at the plant and potentially for similar production environments. Mixed-model assembly can provide a production environment with more even output of finished products, more even part usage rates on the assembly line, and potentially more even workloads among assembly stations. At the assembly plant, mixed models of pickup trucks are produced on a seven-mile long assembly line. Due to a block-painting practice and unexpected production problems in the upstream assembly sections, the intended mixed-model sequence is significantly revised prior to reaching the downstream assembly line sections. At the downstream sections, however, many suppliers need to know the model sequence in advance in order to achieve sequenced part delivery. This research will attempt to develop mixed-model sequencing under these dynamic conditions in order to achieve advance knowledge of the sequence. Development from this research is expected to be useful for similar industrial environments. Currently, customers are offered a vast number of choices in features such as cabs, box styles, engines, drives, tires, axles, doors, and colors. The vast number of option combinations has a significant impact on production, material, and inventory costs. This research attempts to develop a model for evaluating the impact of having various choices and options on manufacturing and material management. Also, this research attempts to more closely link production costs and product complexity in order to assist in sound decision making in this regard doc9793 none The Indiana nuclear physics group plans to assume a leading role in the investigation of the following critical questions in nuclear physics. The spin of the proton is an essential property that determines the structure of matter, yet we know that only a small part of the spin comes from the three quarks that form the proton. The STAR-SPIN group would definitively measure the contribution from the gluons, the short-lived particles that hold the quarks together and which account for much of its mass to see if that is where the missing spin resides.The measurement of the gluon contribution to the proton spin will be carried out by adding a special detector for high energy gamma rays to the STAR detector located at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. The detector is now being built using separate NSF construction funds. The force between pairs of neutrons and protons cannot, by itself, account for the strength that binds the nucleus together. New, three-body forces are needed, but their form is almost unknown. By manipulating the neutron and proton spins when three of them come together, the PINTEX collaboration would produce a map to guide a theory of such three-body force. . FY will be the last year of data taking using the intense beams and unique capabilities of the Indiana University Cooler Facility to study these three-body forces. The weak force between nucleons, which can change the form of matter, is still poorly understood. By making a measurement accurate to one part in a billion on the formation of a deuteron from a neutron and a proton, the IU neutron group would measure the longest-range part of the weak force . The Indiana group would support studies of the weak force and other effects accessible using cold neutrons at NIST and LANSCE and by providing crucial parts of the experimental apparatus. There is mounting evidence that neutrinos, one of the most ubiquitous particles in the universe, may have mass, thus changing our most elegant theories of matter and how it controls the expansion of the universe. The neutrino group would check a recent observation from LANL of a few cases where neutrinos, because they have mass, spontaneously change from one neutrino type into another by collecting a large enough data sample to settle this issue. A key component of the Indiana program will be the training of students to become the next generation of researchers. This effort includes the involvement of post-doctoral associates in critical experimental roles, guiding the research of graduate students, involving undergraduates through the NSF-funded REU summer program and part-time employment, and reaching out to make the community aware of our scientific mission doc9794 none The objective of this Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) research project is to continue the comprehensive experimental and theoretical study of electrospinning of polymer nanofibers with the emphasis now on the fabrication of nanofiber assemblies and the evaluation of their microstructure and properties. Electrospinning is an emerging technology producing polymer fibers in the diameter range from a few microns down to three nanometers. Previous collaborative research by the principal investigators has advanced the understanding of the process in a single jet regime, including a recent discovery and analysis of a hierarchical bending instability as a major mechanism of production of small diameter fibers. Potential industrial applications of the process require further development of methods of nanofiber placement and fabrication of nanofiber assemblies with controlled geometry, orientation, and properties. This research will provide a body of knowledge necessary for the development of robust, industrially relevant methods and devices for flexible and reproducible fabrication of large nanofiber assemblies with controlled geometry and microstructure. Development of better methods of fabrication of nanofibers and their useful assemblies will produce a considerable impact in the general area of nanostructured materials. In order to establish new technologies for the control of nanofiber placement, the research tasks will include experimental and theoretical analysis of the density distribution of jets in the cloud region of the process envelope. Under normal conditions, non-woven sheets with random fiber orientation are being produced. By taking into account the interactions of the segments of the jet with themselves and with the external field, electromechanical methods of placement of the nanofibers into controlled oriented and gradient assemblies will be explored. Microstructure and properties of these assemblies will be characterized and correlated with the process parameters. The research will be performed in close collaboration with the Donaldson Company, Lucent Technologies Bell Laboratories, NIST, and SUNY Stony Brook Brookhaven National Laboratory doc9795 none Many important buildings and bridges are supported by foundations consisting of groups of steel pipes or piles driven into the ground. The horizontal resistance provided by these groups of piles is critical in determining whether or not the structures will survive an earthquake without significant damage. Although fairly reliable methods have been developed for predicting the horizontal resistance of single piles under slowly applied loads, there is very little information to guide engineers in the design of closely spaced pile groups, particularly under rapidly applied loads. Nevertheless, the data from these limited field tests indicate that piles in groups will undergo much more movement and higher stresses for a given load per pile than will a single isolated pile. These pile group effects are commonly accounted for in design by using reduction factors to reduce the resistance provided by the soil on the piles in the group, but there is considerable uncertainty regarding appropriate reduction factors. The proposed research study has the following objectives: (1) Evaluate the effect of pile spacing on measured group reduction factors and develop a design curve for these factors as a function of pile spacing, (2) Determine the validity of the reduction factor concept for a large (5-row) pile group and determine if the reduction factors remain constant beyond the third row, (3) Determine the effect of repeated loading and gap formation around the piles on the measured group reduction factors, (4) Examine the effect of loading rate on the resistance provide by the soil around the pile, and (5) Provide a well-documented case history for use in evaluating and calibrating computer and physical models. These objectives will be accomplished by conducting a series of horizontal load tests on a full-scale pile and pile groups. These tests will supplement pile group testing already conducted at the site with pile spacing of three feet on centers. First, horizontal load testing will be performed on a single 12-inch diameter steel pipe pile for comparison purposes. Load will be applied in 10 increments with 15 cycles per increment to simulate the repeated loading from a large earthquake. Next, horizontal load tests will be conducted on a five-row pile group spaced at four feet on centers. The same cyclic loading procedure will be applied and the load carried by each pile will be measured. The load frame will then be moved to an adjacent pile group for testing at six feet spacing. In addition to the slowly applied loads, load will be applied rapidly using a rocket sled (Statnamic device) which will simulate the speed at which earthquake loads are applied. Following data reduction, the test results will be analyzed using available computer models and appropriate pile group reduction factors will be determined as a function of pile spacing. The results of the load tests from this and previous work at the site will also be provided to several researchers in Japan for detailed analysis using sophisticated 2-D and 3-D computer models. These analyses should help quantify the increased resistance seen during rapidly applied loads relative to slowly applied loads. Potential Japanese researchers will include Prof. Matsumoto of Kanazawa University, Dr. Susumu Iai of the Japanese Port and Harbor Research Institute, and other researchers expressing interest in analyzing the results doc9796 none Gianchandani Plasma processing is routinely used in semiconductor processing applications, and is the dominant technique for silicon etching. Conventional etchers aim to create a uniform plasma across the process chamber in which the silicon wafers are located. However, there are applications in micromachining and nanotechnology in which alternative paradigms may prove useful. For example, present fabrication techniques are not practical for manufacturing an array of trenches with 100 different depths, which would require 100 lithography steps. Such a array could be useful for applications like biological cell sorting. This proposal addresses questions pertaining to the science and technology of spatially confined reactive plasmas (microplasmas) and their application to the etching of silicon and other materials. In particular, it focuses on in-situ microplasmas, which are generated by electrodes patterned on the silicon wafer itself. The viability of this concept, which differs radically from other recent work in microplasmas, has been demonstrated by preliminary experiments in which in-situ DC microplasmas were used to etch completely through a silicon wafer in less than one hour. The proposed effort will explore the physics, technology, and diagnostics for reactive microplasmas for etching silicon and other materials. A number of etching configurations will be examined for their impact on plasma confinement, etch rates, anisotropy, mask selectivities, and electrode wear. Promising electrode structures will be explored, including options in which the ion flux is electrostatically controlled to locally adjust the etch rate and sidewall profile. Various electrode materials, powering schemes, and gas chemistries will be evaluated. Both in-situ and ex-situ diagnostic tools (including thin-film Langmuir probes) will be developed and used. Spectroscopic analysis will be performed. The dependencies of the Paschen breakdown curve, the molecular behavior of the ambient gas, the ionization rates and the electron energies, as well as the relationship of these parameters to the etch rates and profiles will be explored. Theoretical models will be developed for the reactive microplasmas by refining global plasma analysis. This includes the incorporation of realistic basic data and consideration of discharge geometry and electrode material. The theoretical models will be used for scaling studies to determine if the plasmas can be reduced to nanometer dimensions. Supporting experiments will be carried out to explore the scaling limits and validate the theory. The proposed reactive microplasmas have the potential not only for making a contribution to traditional etching applications, but also facilitating the fabrication of microstructures that were previously infeasible. Using microplasmas, an array of 100 trenches with different depths could be built with just two masking steps. In addition, if the proposed research is successful, not only will it be possible to individually specify the profile of every trench in the array, but also to skew the direction of the etch with the help of local electric fields controlled by secondary electrodes. In the longer term, the proposed research could lead to other avenues of research, including localized deposition by sputtering or plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD doc9797 none Operator Theory and Inverse Problems The proposed research will focus on a few inverse problems: the uniqueness in the multivariable moment problem, the best approximation of planar domains with finitely many prescribed moments; the inverse spectral problem for the modulus of the restriction operator between the Bergman spaces of two planar domains; a renormalized Riesz transform with applications to image reconstruction in any dimension. Methods of operator theory, function theory and approximation theory will be combined in this work. In many areas of modern activity it is required to reconstruct an entity from partial, and sometimes distant and indirect, data. Inverse problems address such specific questions. The proposed research will be concerned with a couple of inverse problems arising for instance in tomography or in geophysics. To be more specific, given a number of different angle X-rays of a body, we will propose a constructive, optimal way of approximating, or sometimes reconstructing this body doc9798 none This project will investigate different work allocation strategies in conjunction with operator replacement policies that appear to be more suitable for high labor turnover environments. The idea is to find work allocation methods that give less workload to new operators and automatically increase this load as they gain experience. In particular, the reduction of the effects of labor turnover on productivity when hybrid assembly methods based on bucket brigade and work sharing are used will be will be researched. This investigation will be performed by constructing the appropriate analytical and simulation models of different production lines and work allocation and operator replacement strategies. An important characteristic of the research is the close collaboration that will be maintained with industry. In order to develop and test the models, the investigators will gather information and validate the research results in the facilities of the industrial partner. High labor turnover, frequently cited as a major contributor to lagging productivity and competitiveness of the U.S. industry, represents enormous costs that impact the competitiveness of a manufacturing firm. The costs more frequently associated with labor turnover include those associated with recruiting and training the new employees. However, there are other costs, such as production losses caused by the variability introduced by the new operators into the assembly line, that are frequently ignored. These production losses are the result of the learning process that the new employees go through and that the current assembly lines are not designed to accommodate. While the usual approach to deal with high labor turnover focus on reducing it by using long-term strategies such as better recruiting and giving incentives to employees to stay with the company, this research project seeks engineering solutions to mitigate its negative effects. This is particularly important for the period in which the benefits of the implementation of long-term policies are not felt yet doc9799 none AUTOMORPHIC FORMS, L-FUNCTIONS AND GALOIS REPRESENTATIONS The princial investigator proposes to do the following: (i) attach Galois representations to cusp forms of weight k 1 over any CM field K (with totally real subfield F) by transferring certain associated forms on GL(4) F to suitable unitary groups by making use of L-functions, trace formula, congruences, restrictions of Hasse invariant forms and pseudo-representations; (ii) construct certain special holomorphic forms on GSp(4) Q, study their lifting to GL(4) Q, and derive consequences for certain Galois representations; and (iii) to continue ongoing work with D. Prasad on a refinement of the local Langlands correspondence for self-dual representations of GL(n). The field of research of the P.I. is Automorphic Forms. The simplest, yet not so simple, instance of the basic problem of the field is the following: Start with a sequence of numbers {a_0, a_1 , a_2, a_3, .., a_n, ...} and consider the generating function f(q) = a_0 + a_1q + a_2q^2 + ... + a_nq^n + ...., where q is a dummy variable. A fundamental question is to know when f(q) satisfies a hidden symmetry . To elaborate, write q = exp(2\pi iz), with z a complex number of positive imaginary part, and set q = exp(-2\pi i z). What one is often looking for, and this shows up in disparate fields like string Physics and combinatorics, is a relationship between the pair (f(q), f(q )). One says that f has weight k if f(q ) =(-log q 2\pi i)^k f(q). The existence of such a symmetry implies that the sequence {a_n} we started with has miraculous properties. For example, when the a_n are multiplicative, i.e., when a_{mn} = a_ma_n for m,n relatively prime, with a_0=0 and a_1=1, then there is an associated 2-dimensional Galois representation R coming from geometry whose associated L-function equals 1 + a_2 2^s + a_3 3^s + ..., implying that for each prime p, a_p = u_p + 1 u_p with u_p an algebraic integer of absolute value p^{(k-1) 2}; in particular, |a_p| is bounded by 2p^{(k-1) 2}, which is not provable by an apriori analytic estimate. A key example to keep in mind is the ubiquitous Delta function q{(1-q)(1-q^2)(1-q^3)...)}^{24} = q+tau_2q^2 + tau_3q^3 + ..., which has weight 12. The general Langlands program envisions many such occurrances, and they involve a family of symmetries ( modularity ) which are complicated to write down explicitly, but are nevertheless very important to pursue due to their far-reaching consequences. For example, one key ingredient of the celebrated proof of Fermat s last theorem by Wiles makes use of a result obtained in this program. In his work related to his current (about to become preious) NSF proposal, the P.I. proved that given two functions f(q), g(q) as above attached to {a_n}, {b_n} respectively, admitting hidden symmetries of some weights, the product sequence {a_nb_n} is associated to a modular object of degree 4. This has the following consequence. Suppose f, g have the same weights, and suppose further that a_p^2 equals b_p^2 for almost all primes p. Then f equals g doc9800 none The questions the proposer addresses in her research are the following: given a dispersive equation, how much regularity does one have to assume for the initial profile (initial data) in order to be able to insure existence and uniqueness of the wave solution at later times? What are the conditions on the initial profile that guarantee ``a long life for the wave? And if the wave does ``live for a long time, which of its initial properties are preserved? A satisfactory analysis of these phenomena requires answering questions on long time existence and uniqueness for the solution of the associated Cauchy problem, as well as regularity properties of the solution. It requires also analyzing continuity with respect to the initial profiles, possible blow-up of some energies in finite time, and rate of blow-up. A mathematically rigorous approach to the questions of long time existence and blow-up is very difficult. Certainly numerical methods provide a guide for theoretical results. But it is believed that the analytic techniques available at the moment are not fine enough to recover the predictions of the numerical work. The techniques that proposer uses are purely analytical. The tools that she employs have been recently developed in the general area of Fourier Analysis and Harmonic Analysis. As the tools are new, the investigation is more likely to produce truly novel results. These methods may bring new insights into well studied theoretical and empirical issues. The proposer main field of interest is Partial Differential Equations. In particular, she concentrates her research on Dispersive nonlinear PDEs, so called because their solutions tend to be waves which spread out spatially. Two well known equations belong to this class: the Schrodinger equation and the Korteweg-de-Vries equation. These equations and their combinations with the wave equation, have been proposed as models for many basic wave phenomena in Physics. Examples of these phenomena are: the propagations of signals in optic fibers, nonlinear ionic-sonic waves in plasma in magnetic field and long waves in plasma doc9801 none The Hawaii Department of Education, in partnership with the University of Hawaii at Manoa, will conduct an Implementation phase RSI project for teachers and administrators in rural, disadvantaged schools on the islands. The project will rely heavily on leadership development opportunities and implementation of curricular standards, to achieve better learning opportunities for the targeted students. Much of the networking and inservice training will be conducted through distance learning technology doc9802 none This award supports the purchase of instrumentation needed for genomic DNA analysis at the Center for Marine Genomic Studies of the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory. The two instruments to be purchased are a second-generation polymerase chain reaction (PCR) thermal cycler with four-channel fluorescence microplate reader that permits monitoring of reactions in process, and a robotic microplate processor that allows efficient set up of the 96-well plates used in the PCR device. The instruments will facilitate studies of the expression and function of genes in marine organisms with particular emphasis on improving the understanding of physiological processes in relation to environmental determinants such as salinity and temperature. Four NSF-funded research projects will make major use of the requested instruments. These focus on molecular studies of membrane transport proteins and associated enzymes in the gills of euryhaline teleost fish and of crustaceans doc9803 none The investigator is interested in a wide range of questions from extremal combinatorics and related fields. A common theme is the exploration of new ideas for the construction of extremal objects; in particular, the investigator suggests new ideas for constructions in the settings of Shannon capacity, the lonely runner conjecture, and combinatorial discrepancy. In the area of Shannon capacity, the investigator has developed a new construction for independent sets in the powers of odd cycles that is, in a sense, asymptotically optimal. It is hoped that the algebraic ideas used in this construction can be further developed to give more insight into the Shannon capacities of odd cycles. The investigator suggests a similar algebraic approach to a number of conjectures (conjectures that follow from recent work of R. Holzman, D. Kleitman and the investigator) concerning the extremal objects for the so-called lonely runner conjecture. The research on combinatorial discrepancy is motivated by a conjecture of Lovasz, Spencer and Vestergombi on the relationship between the linear discrepancy and hereditary discrepancy of a hypergraph. In addition to work on new constructions, this research includes questions in the fields of random graphs and the combinatorics of cellular automata. Questions considered in extremal combinatorics are of the form: `How large (or small) can an object that lies in a particular discrete mathematical system and satisfies a certain condition be? We are usually interested in the size of extremal objects for very large systems. Interest in such questions grew extensively during the twentieth century. Pioneers of the field, such as Paul Erdos, had posed many fascinating questions of this form and had devised powerful methods for solving them even before the close connections between extremal combinatorics and various other fields (including computer science, statistical physics and information theory) had been discovered. Shannon capacity is a prime example of the significant link between extremal combinatorics and information theory. Shannon capacity gives a measure of the zero-error performance of a noisy communications channel. The investigator has developed new, near--optimal codes for some notoriously difficult channels, and the proposed research includes further development of these codes with the goal of determining the zero-error optimum of these channels. The study of cellular automata has been part of the recent interaction between extremal combinatorics and statistical physics. Cellular automata are discrete dynamical systems that have been used to model a wide range of physical phenomena. The investigator proposes research on the regularity of growth of certain cellular automata that model crystal growth. This work is expected to have impact on our understanding of the shapes achieved by these models and their randomized counterparts doc9804 none Doron Zeilberger proposes to continue to develop methodologies for harnessing the great potential of Symbolic Computation to do research in Combinatorics and related areas. In particular he hopes to introduce new computational and conceptual frameworks that would extend the so-called Wilf-Zeilberger proof theory to much wider classes of identities and theorems. He also proposes to continue his efforts in `Artificial Combinatorics , and develop algorithms for the discovery and {\it rigorous} proof of theorems in combinatorics whose complexity make them unfeasible for human proofs. This research should be symbiotic, as it is expected that both the concrete results and the underlying methodologies, would help computer algebra developers to improve and enhance their systems. This research is in the general area of Combinatorics. One of the goals of Combinatorics is to find efficient methods of studying how discrete collections of objects can be arranged. The behavior of discrete systems is extremely important to modern communications. For example, the design of large networks, such as those occurring in telephone systems, and the design of algorithms in computer science deal with discrete sets of objects, and this makes use of combinatorial research. This research is also in the general area of Symbolic Computation, that attempts to teach computers to perform research that previously required extensive human resources. Progress in this area promises to have important ramifications to science and technology doc9805 none The Hilbert 16th problem, part 2, is: What may be said about the number and location of limit cycles of a planar polynomial vector field? Traditionally this question is interpreted as a problem of finding an upper bound of the number of limit cycles of a polynomial vector field as a function of the degree of the polynomials. Even for the degree two, the upper bound is not yet found, and its existence is not yet proved. It makes sense to consider restricted versions of the Hilbert 16th problem. Namely, the set or all polynomial vector fields is replaced by a particular subset of by a similar class. The examples are Lienard and Abel equations (the latter ones are polynomial in the phase variable with coefficients 1-periodic in time). Even for these equations the problem of the number of limit cycles stays open. It is solved by the PI with an extra restriction: Abel equations, and Lienard ones with the polynomial of odd degree, are considered together with an upper bound for the magnitudes of the coefficients; the upper estimate on the number of limit cycles depends on this upper bound of the magnitudes. This is the result from the prior NSF support. In the current project we try to get rid of this latter restriction, and to give an estimate of the number of limit cycles that depends on the degrees of the polynomials in the right hand side only; for Abel equations the coefficients should be trigonometric polynomials of given degree. We hope to use mighty tools of the theory of complex analytic foliations, growth and zeros theorems for holomorphic functions and methods developed under the prior NSF support. Another important problem to be studied is the infinitesimal Hilbert 16th problem. It requires to estimate the number of limit cycles generated by a small perturbation from the ovals of the Hamiltonian polynomial vector field; closed orbits of the latter field form continuous families. This problem is reduced to the estimate of the number of zeros of an Abelian integral, that is, an integral of a polynomial 1-form over the ovals of a real polynomial in the plane; the estimate should be given in terms of the degrees of the polynomial Hamiltonian function and of the integrand. This problem was investigated by the author since 69; later on by Yakovenko, D.Novikov, Horosov, Gavrilov, Petrov, Khovanski, Varchenko and others. Some progress was obtained by Glutsuk and the author for the restricted version of the problem when the Hamiltonian polynomial is taken of a special type and of arbitrary degree. One of the goals of this project is to get an explicit upper estimate that is expected to be an exponential of a polynomial of the degree of the Hamiltonian function, provided that the integrand has a smaller degree. The theory of dynamical systems is the realm of determinism, on one hand, and of chaos, on the other hand. Vector fields in the phase space of dimension higher than two form the realm of chaos. This was understood in s, and henceforth, this realm is the subject of the top interest for mathematicians, computer scientists and physicists. On the other hand, the classical subject of planar differential equations which may be called realm of order attracted the interest of researchers during more that one hundred years, beginning with Poincare and Hilbert. Hilbert s 16th problem is the main one in this domain. It persists the efforts of mathematicians during 100 years, and it is clear now that simplified restricted versions of the problem should be attacked first. The project suggests some concrete ways of this attack based on new ideas and the progress from the prior NSF support doc9806 none In joint work with Sergiu Klainerman and John Stalker, we study the decay rate, pointwise and uniform, of solutions to a linear wave equation on a Schwarzschild background metric. We have preliminary results for each spherical harmonic. This is the first step towards understanding the non-linear stability of these metrics. Roughly speaking, this corresponds to the propagation and decay of an electromagnetic wave near a black hole. Our work starts with a careful mathematical analysis of ideas known to physicists, and plans to develop new tools doc9807 none Price This proposal is directed towards the investigation of some problems on dynamical systems on von Neumann algebras, and is related to recent work by a number of authors on the subject of semigroups of endomorphisms on von Neumann algebra factors. This research project involves a number of areas of mathematics, including operator algebras, finite fields, number theory, and combinatorics. In contrast to semigroups of automorphisms, a semigroup of endomorphisms may be viewed as a dynamical system that may proceed forward but not backward in time. It is remarkable how challenging this subject has proven to be in light of the relatively simpler theory of one-parameter semigroups of automorphisms on a type I factor. A principal goal of this proposal is to make additional progress in the classification of one-parameter semigroups of unital endomorphisms, analogous to Wigner s characterization of groups of automorphisms acting on factors of type I. The study of operator algebras traces its origins back to the work of von Neumann and others. Their goal was to construct mathematical models that capture the behavior of quantum mechanical systems, and to use these models to make predictions about the time evolution of such systems. As knowledge has grown and techniques in the field have been refined, connections have been established between operator algebras and a number of other areas of mathematics and science. This proposal involves connections among the fields of operator algebras, commutative algebra, number theory, and combinatorics. The principal objects of study in this project are known as binary shifts on a certain type of operator algebra and are defined using bitstreams of 0 s and 1 s such as one studies in the theory of linear recurring sequences. A major goal of this project is to complete the classification of the binary shifts and to relate this classification to the analysis of linear recurring sequences. Binary shifts will also be studied for their potential applications to the theory of quantum dynamical systems, specifically those systems that may proceed forward, but not backward, in time doc9808 none The first question motivating the subject of our project is the following: Let f be a holomorphic function in a neighborhood of the origin of affine n-space. Can the singularities of f(z)=0 get worse under small perturbations of the function f? By get worse we mean: Can the critical exponent of f get smaller, where the critical exponent is the supremum of all exponents d for which the absolute value of f raised to the power -d is locally integrable. This question, and its effective counterpart, play an important role in proving the existence of Kahler-Einstein metrics on certain Fano manifolds (as has been recently demonstrated by Demailly and Kollar). We plan to apply our method of algebraic estimates to this problem. A related question which we will pursue is the following: Let R be a rational function with complex coefficients. How do we decide if R is in L^p? To what extent is the L^p norm of R a continuous function of its coefficients? The third motivating question concerns decay rates of oscillatory integral operators is one which has attracted much aattention is recent years: What is the best decay rate of such operators? We have been able to attack this problem in the multilinear one-dimensional case when the phase function is a polynomial, and have succeeded in finding the best decay rate (modulo logarithimic terms). Our method employs in an improved version of the curved trapezoid technique developed by Phong-Stein. We plan to apply this method to the higher dimensional case and in the case of damped operators. The main themes of this proposal - oscillatory and singular integrals and the method of stationary phase - are central to the field of classical analysis, with foundational results dating back to the nineteenth century: Harmonic Analysis plays a critical role in the solution of wide spectrum of problems in physics and applied mathematics - solving the heat equation, wave equation, Laplace equation, Schrodinger equation all make use of the Fourier analysis technique. The use of harmonic analysis in X-ray diffraction is indispensible to determining the structure of large molecules (such as DNA), and the Fourier transform method in signal processing is at the core of much of the modern technology involving the transfer of information by electronic means. In modern applications to a variety of questions, traditional techniques do not suffice and the need for a more general theory has arisen. In particular, the issues of bounds and stability for oscillatory integrals and operators, and the related problem of regularity of Radon transforms have been the focus of much recent work. The principal investigator, working with D.H. Phong (Columbia University) and Elias M. Stein (Princeton University), plans to continue investigating this circle of problems using the tools from geometry and analysis which were recently developed in our joint work doc9809 none Gorokhovsky This proposal belongs to the area of noncommutative geometry. It is devoted to three projects. The goal of the first project is to obtain construction of characteristic classes for the important class of noncommutative spaces, arising naturally in the contexts of discrete group actions on manifolds and foliations. The approach is based on the recently developed by A. Connes and H. Moscovici theory of cyclic cohomology of Hopf algebras. The goal of the second project (joint work with R. Nest and A. Uribe) is to obtain index theorem for algebras of Fourier integral operators, and study applications of these results. The third project (joint work with J. Lott) is devoted to the proof of the local version of Connes index theorem for etale groupoids, as well as various extensions of this theorem. Noncommutative geometry is a field of mathematics situated on the crossroads between analysis, geometry, and mathematical physics. Discovery of quantum mechanics has shown that the classical principles of geometry are not applicable to the world of microscopic particles. Noncommutative geometry unifies geometry with analysis for the solution of the problems of quantum mechanics. Different parts of the present work deals both with solving internal problems of noncommutative geometry and with applying methods of noncommutative geometry to other parts of mathematics and mathematical physics doc9810 none Moy Moy will investigate two topics in the representation theory of reductive p-adic groups. In the first project, Moy will study the use of the Bruhat-Tits building of a reductive group in its representation theory and harmonic analysis. Moy will investigate by two different methods the very old fundamental conjecture that every irreducible supercuspidal representation is compactly induced from an open compact modulo center subgroup. The first of these two methods is based upon extension of earlier joint work of Moy and Prasad which proved the conjecture in the case the supercuspidal representation has depth zero. The second method would be to show that any irreducible smooth representation which does not contain a cuspidal representation of a parahoric subgroup must have a nonzero Jacquet functor. Both these methods involve the Bruhat-Tits building. Also as part of the first project, Moy will extend his joint work with Barbasch which gave a new proof of the Howe conjecture on orbital integrals to other twisted cases. For the second project, Moy will investigate explicit construction of G-invariant essentially compact distributions on the group G doc9811 none The investigator and his colleagues study various problems in the analytic theory of L-functions and mean values of multiplicative functions. In particular the investigator aims for an improved understanding of the distribution of zeros of L-functions, their behaviour at special values, and the size of extreme values in the critical strip. The second main aim of this project is to describe the spectrum of possible mean-values of multiplicative functions whose values at primes are constrained to lie in special subsets of the unit disc. The investigator, in collaboration with Granville, intends to develop further the close connection between such mean values and solutions to a family of integral equations. This project concerns problems in the area of multiplicative number theory. A fundamental problem in this area is to understand the zeros of the Riemann zeta function and other L-functions. These functions encode much information about prime numbers, and other arithmetic objects. Besides being of intrinsic interest to mathematicians, ideas emerging from these problems have found use in computer science, cryptography and coding theory doc9812 none This project will investigate the dynamics of partially hyperbolic systems. It is hoped to improve the recent theorem of Pugh and Shub by weakening the center bunching hypothesis and adapting the proof so that it applies to the pointwise (or Brazilian) version of partial hyperbolicity rather than more stringent uniform assumptions made by Pugh and Shub. I also hope to extend the classes of partially hyperbolic maps within which the hypotheses of the Pugh-Shub theorem are known to hold generically by studying compact group extensions of the compact group extensions already studied by myself and Wilkinson. In addition I plan to continue my work with Paternain on magnetic flows and to collaborate with Hasselblatt and Wilkinson on a study of Lyapunov exponents for geodesic flows. This project will study the dynamics of partially hyperbolic systems. A differentiable dynamical system consists of a differentiable manifold which represents the possible states of the system and a differentiable map of the manifold to itself which represents the evolution of the system from its current state to its next state. A basic mechanism which tends to produce chaotic behavior is for the derivative of the map to stretch vectors in some directions and to shrink vectors in the complementary directions. Such behavior is called hyperbolicity. The system is called partially hyperbolic if in addition to the expanding and contracting directions that are stretched and shrunk there is a third direction which is stretched less than the expanding direction and shrunk less than the contracting. It has long been suspected that most partially hyperbolic systems should have the same chaotic behavior as fully hyperbolic systems. In the s the work of Pugh and Shub (in collaboration with Grayson and Wilkinson) has made it possible to prove this in considerable generality. I aim to extend their work, by weakening the hypotheses in their main theorem and studying a number of particular examples of partially hyperbolic systems doc9813 none Professor Xia proposes to continue his investigation of dynamics of Hamiltonian systems. One of the most important problems in Hamiltonian dynamical systems is whether orbits in typical systems are stable. The proposed research will address these problems, with research topics such as Aubry-Mather theory, Arnold diffusions, chaotic behaviors and Newtonian $n$-body problem. The ultimate goal is to show that typical near integrable Hamiltonians in higher dimensions are topologically unstable. The proposed research concerns the stability problems in Hamiltonian dyanmics. Hamiltonian dynamical systems model many systems arising from classical mechanics, celestial mechanics and physics. These problems has a long history, going back to Poincare and Birkhoff. A typical question one often asks is the following: Is our solar system stable? One of our goals is to find an answer to this and a large class of related questions. With recent progresses in the theory of modern dynamical systems, we understand much better the chaotic nature of typical systems. However, the stability problem remains open except in some special cases and it is one of the most important areas of study, from both theoretical point of view and wide applications it finds in various physical systems doc9814 none The principal investigator plans to work on various problems in the theory of several complex variables and complex dynamics. With Professor Sibony, the principal investigator will work on a systematic development of the theory of iterations of holomorphic maps. This depends on the use of pluripotential theory to construct invariant measures as well as a broad range of function theoretic tools from the theory of several complex variables. One of the main problems in the theory of dynamical systems is that the equations are too difficult for rigorous study. Holomorphic maps have enough structure so that many results can be proved rigorously thereby giving an idea of phenomena that can occur also in more complicated systems. The principal investigator also plans to work on several problems in the theory of several complex variables. This includes generalizations of the Bochner-Hartogs extension Theorem to more general manifolds and to solutions of the Cauchy-Riemann equations in singular spaces. The goals of this proposal are to study problems in complex analysis and in dynamical systems using techniques of complex analysis. Complex numbers were introduced to solve algebraic expressions that could not be solved with real numbers. With time, complex numbers have proved to be necessary to explain fundamental physical phenomena like electromagnetisms, vibrations in mechanical systems, etc. Complex analysis studies the changes of quantities that depend on complex numbers. Dynamical systems is the study of systems that change over time. Examples of dynamical systems range from the weather to the study of populations. Dynamical systems are in general very hard to model and to understand. The simplest models involve using real algebraic expressions to represent the system. Considering the algebraic expressions over the complex numbers allows one to see and study the problems in a higher dimensional setting and using more powerful tools. In this setting, a very intricate and fascinating scenario appears. Computer generated pictures show the geometry of this phenomenon: a very complicated fractal structure. Proper understanding of this geometry will lead to a better understanding of real dynamical systems doc9815 none Fast FTIR imaging using newly available Focal Plane Array detectors and step-scan interferometers allows the acquisition of multicomponent images of the diffusion process from which the nature of the diffusion process and the magnitude of the diffusion constants can be measured. The images allow the detection of anomalous diffusion in the polymer samples arising from voids or cracks. These studies will be initially directed at characterization of the role of residual and diffusing water in poly(methylmethacrylate) (PMMA). The initial studies will be made on diffusion of water into ultrapure and ultradry PMMA samples of varying molecular weights and at different temperatures above and below the glass transition. The PI will study the plasticizing effect of residual water in PMMA on the diffusion behavior of other substances. Solid state NMR will be used to measure the changes in the polymer dynamics due to the presence of water in the PMMA in order to determine the impact of polymer chain mobility. The PI will study the role of physical aging of the PMMA and establish the correlations of multicomponent diffusion with the changes in the average size of microcavities or voids in the glassy polymer (measured by Positron Annihilation Lifetimes). Subsequently, multicomponent diffusion studies will be made with water and environmental agents to determine the role of substance molecular size, shape and chemical interactions on the multicomponent diffusion process. Additionally, the PMMA will be systematically oxidized and the role of gradient in polymer degradation from the surface to the bulk evaluated. The experimental results will be compared with current theories of molecular diffusion. The experimental images will be utilized as visualization aids in an educational module (PCL.cwru.edu) which will be used to interactively teach students the mechanisms and parameters of the diffusion process in polymers. %%% This award, co-funded by the Division of Materials Research and Chemical and Transport Systems, is directed toward the utilization of a powerful analytical tool-Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) Imaging for the study of diffusion of multicomponent penetrants into polymers. Diffusion of small molecules such as monomers, catalysts, diluents, and solvents in materials is of vital importance in many applications. Information concerning diffusion coefficients is necessary in many industrial processes such as devolatization, polymerization, membrane separation, crying, coating, and painting. The plasticization, coloration, curing and drying of coatings are all influenced by the mobility of solvents, dyes, and low molecular weight additives doc9816 none Reductive groups often arise as groups of symmetries of arithmetic and geometric structures. This connection makes their study very interesting and it is also a major source of important questions. For example, for the celebrated Langlands Program (in Number Theory), a complete classification of unitary representations of reductive groups over local fields is needed. I propose to investigate arithmetic, group theoretic and geometric properties of reductive groups using various tools. Among the powerful tools I have used in the past is the geometry of a nice space known as the building of the group provided by the Bruhat-Tits theory. This theory, together with a detailed understanding of the structure of reductive groups, and their cohomology (these are certain subtle geometric invariants of the groups), has helped to settle many important questions about these groups. In my own work on rigidity of certain large subgroups known as lattices , and also in my study of arithmetic questions about these groups, including the congruence subgroup problem, these techniques played crucial role. In my joint work with Allen Moy, the Bruhat-Tits theory of reductive groups over local fields was used to settle some questions about their representations and also to classify admissible representations of depth zero. Subsequently, several other mathematicians used our frame-work and techniques to find solutions of many interesting problems in the representation theory and harmonic analysis. I will use some of the geometric techniques mentioned above to find a classification of irreducible admissible representations of reductive groups over local fields. I will also investigate the congruence subgroup problem which remains unresolved for certain (anisotropic) groups. The latter would require understanding their normal subgroups first. I am working on this question with Andrei Rapinchuk and Yoav Segev. I also plan to write a book on the congruence subgroup problem in collaboration with Andrei Rapinchuk doc9817 none Aggregate computation is expensive, especially when time-varying attributes are involved in it. The task of computing aggregates becomes more challenging for spatial and spatio-temporal databases, as the spatial and temporal extent over which the aggregate value holds must be computed. For example, multi-attribute images are often the result of a query in the Earth Observing System (EOS) environments, which retrieves all of the measurements incident on the pixels that satisfy the spatio-temporal bounds of the query. Each pixel of multi-attribute images has several values associated with it. This project develops a suite of techniques for computing spatio-temporal aggregates. While there has been significant work done in temporal aggregation, little is known about how to evaluate spatial aggregates. The existing temporal aggregation and spatial join algorithms are generalized to create efficient algorithms for computing spatial aggregates, and then further generalized these algorithms to accommodate spatio-temporal aggregates. In addition, scalable techniques will be developed by parallelizing the aggregation algorithms on a shared-nothing architecture. The project team includes a hydrologists at the United States Geological Survey on the USGS Death Valley Regional Flow System (DVRFS) Project, which is investigating ground-water flow in the Nevada Test Site, proposed as a repository for high-level nuclear waste. The results from this research has a direct impact on many large-scale spatio-temporal database applications such as EOS, cadastral databases, atmospheric databases and hydrologic databases doc9818 none The proposal is concerned with operator theory and function theory involving the generalized Schur and Nevanlinna classes and two-isometries on Pontryagin spaces. A generalization of Nudelman s problem in interpolation theory will be studied. In the classical case, existence criteria were given by M. Rosenblum and the PI using the commutant lifting theorem. The criteria imply a series of classical interpolation results with both interior and boundary data. The Ball and Helton generalization of the commutant lifting theorem yields an extension of Nudelman s problem to the generalized Schur class which has similar applications. New problems for boundary interpolation and Hilbert transforms arise in the indefinite case and will be studied in joint work with T. Constantinescu and A. Dijksma. D. Z. Arov and the PI will study Darlington synthesis for J-contractive matrix-valued functions in the unit disk. State spaces now are Pontryagin spaces. The approach follows previous work by Arov and also uses the factorization theory for pseudo-continuable functions by Rosenblum and the PI. L. A. Sakhnovich and the PI will study indefinite cases of direct and inverse problems for canonical differential and difference equations by the method of operator identities. A recent Ph.D. dissertation by C. Hellings obtains a generalization of Richter s theorem on analytic two-isometries on Pontryagin spaces. This area is new and includes a number of open questions and possibilities for further developments. The proposal is concerned with problems in areas of mathematics which have traditional connections with engineering and control theory and especially the design of stabilizing feedback controllers and passive networks. The main problem of interpolation theory is to reconstruct a function from partial information such as given values of the function at specified points. Usually the data of a problem satisfy a positivity condition depending on the class of functions under consideration. The proposal will study a unified method to deal with one class of such problems in which the positivity conditions are replaced by weaker assumptions. The inverse problem of spectral theory, which asks to reconstruct an operator from observed spectral properties, is related to interpolation theory, and the effect of weakening positivity will again be considered. Other problems are related to the embedding of a passive system into a conservative system: extensions will be considered in which systems contain active as well as passive elements. Conservative systems correspond in some sense to isometric operators, and another group of problems explores generalizations of isometric operators in the absence of positivity. The projects are in collaboration with colleagues in the U.S. and Europe. Funding of the project will also provide support for an undergraduate research program in the Mathematics Department of the University of Virginia that matches students one-on-one with mathematics professors for projects of approximately eight weeks in doc9819 none Witte One focus of this project is the study of tessellations of homogeneous spaces. Namely, if G H is a non-compact, simply connected homogeneous space of a connected Lie group G, the question is whether there is a properly discontinuous subgroup D of G, such that the orbit space D\G H is compact. Some special cases were studied by L. Auslander, Y. Benoist, G. A. Margulis, R. J. Zimmer, and others. In collaboration with H. Oh and A. Iozzi, the PI has recently made progress in understanding the case where G is a semisimple Lie group of real rank two, including a detailed study of the case where G = SO(2,2n) or SU(2,2n). The PI will continue this research, both for real rank two and higher real rank. He will also continue his study of actions of arithmetic groups on the circle, and related questions. This project studies crystals in mathematical spaces other than the 3-dimensional universe that we live in. (A crystal is a material whose atomic structure is very symmetric.) The most fundamental problem in this subject is to decide which spaces contain crystals, and which do not. (For this question, the most interesting spaces are homogeneous, which means that every point of the space looks exactly like all of the other points.) Mathematicians have made substantial progress on this problem in recent years, and this project will continue the work. In cases where crystals do exist, the project will investigate the algebraic properties of the group formed by the symmetries of a crystal doc9820 none This project concerns definable equivalence relations and classification problems that are more complex than the isomorphism of countable structures. One of the main focuses is the universal orbit equivalence relation, namely, the most complex equivalence relation induced by a Borel action of a Polish group. The investigator studies topics such as (1) the Urysohn universal metric space, the isometry group and its actions, (2) actions of the unitary group, and (3) classification problems for various topological spaces. The obvious connections of these topics to analysis, geometry and topology also bring together the development of descriptive set theory and other fields of mathematics. The descriptive set theory of definable equivalence relations has provided a standard scale on which complexity of various classification problems in mathematics can be measured. The low end of this scale is very well understood through the previous work in the field. But there has been relatively little information known for the high end. The investigator seeks to advance the knowledge of complex definable equivalence relations. Through this research it is hopeful that not only the complexity or difficulty of the mathematical problems involved can be better understood but also methods to deal with complicated and large-scale systems can be obtained and applied to other fields of mathematics and sciences doc9821 none This project is in the field of arithmetic algebraic geometry and contains two parts: Neron models and the geometry of Shimura varieties. The focus of the first part is a numerical invariant, called the base change conductor, defined using the Neron models. This numerical invariant measures the difference between the Neron models of a semiabelian variety before and after making a finite base extension so that the semiabelian variety acquires semistable reduction. For an abelian variety over a number field, the base change conductor is equal to the decrease of Faltings height under stabilization. Recently E. de Shalit, J.-K. Yu and Chai proved that the base change conductor for a torus is equal to one half of the Artin conductor, using a congruence property for Neron models they discovered. This congruence property has been extended to abelian varieties by Chai. The explicit goals of the first project include: (a) Prove that the base change conductor for an abelian variety with potentially ordinary reduction is equal to the pairing between two central functions on the Galois group: the character of the Galois representation on the character group of a formal torus obtained from the Neron model, and a specific central function defined for every finite Galois extension. This specific central function has values in some cyclotomic extension of the field of p-adic numbers; it can be thought of as a bisection of the Artin conductor because the sum of this function with its complex conjugate is equal to the Artin character. (b) Prove an additivity property of the base change conductor. (c) Study the elementary divisors of the base change conductor. The second project is centered around the Hecke orbit problem and Oort s foliation structure for good reductions of Shimura variety. A notion of Tate-linear subvarieties of reduction of Shimura varieties with ordinary points will be investigated. (d) Verify in lower-rank cases the conjecture that every Tate-linear subvarieties is equal to the reduction of a Shimura subvariety. (e) Prove some cases of Oort s conjecture that the Zariski closure of a prime-to-p Hecke orbit is equal to the Zariski closure of a leaf in the foliation structure. This is a proposal in the area of mathematics known to as Arithmetic Geometry. In this subject the problems and techniques of both Algebraic Geometry and Number Theory intermingle, to the benefit of both areas. Number theory is the oldest branch of mathematics. In recent years it has become an indispensable tools in areas such as communication systems, data transmission, and cryptology. A typical problem in Arithmetic Geometry concerns polynommial equations. For a system of polynomial equations, the degree of complexity of drops if one is allowed to use more general numbers, because it becomes easier to find solutions. The first part of this project studies a numerical invariant which measures how much the complexity drops. The second part of this project studies the of symmetries of a very special class of polynomial equations, called Shimura varieties, which are of central importance in Number Theory doc9822 none Hoffman will investigate the properties of endomorphisms which are isomorphic to one sided Bernoulli shifts. One direction this work will take is to show that particular dynamical systems are isomorphic to one sided Bernoulli shifts. In particular Hoffman will attempt to classify which toral endomorphisms are isomorphic to a one sided Bernoulli shift. He will also attempt to classify all toral endomorphisms up to isomorphism. Hoffman will try to show the differences between Ornstein s theory of Bernoulli automorphisms and the emerging theory of Bernoulli endomorphisms. A particular example of this relates to compact extensions of Bernoulli endomorphisms. Rudolph proved that any compact extension of a Bernoulli shift that is weak mixing is isomorphic to a Bernoulli shift. Hoffman will try to show that Bernoulli endomorphisms do not share this property. Hoffman will also continue his work in probability theory. He will continue to study infinite percolation cluster on the square lattice. In particular he will compare the properties of simple random walk on the square lattice with the properties of simple random walk on infinite percolation clusters. The overall goal of this portion of the research is to determine if the distribution of paths for simple random walk on the infinite percolation cluster can be rescaled in such a way as to generate the distribution of Brownian paths in the plane. The study of randomness is a major part of the application of mathematics to many interesting systems. For example, in statistics knowledge of randomness is used to make sense of data and in applied math random processes are used to model financial markets dynamical systems. This proposal deals with randomness in the context of dynamical systems and probability theory. This proposal will attempt to classify various types of mathematical systems according to the type and amount of randomness that they exhibit doc9823 none An international seminar on deduction - organized by Prof. Ulrich Furbach (University of Koblenz, Germany), Prof. Harald Ganzinger (MPI Saarbrucken, Germany), Prof. Ryuzo Hasegawa (Kyushu University, Japan), and Prof. Deepak Kapur (University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA)- will be held March 4-9, at the Dagstuhl Seminar Center in Wadern, Germany. About 75 automated deduction researchers from around the world have been invited to participate. This award pays for travel funds for American invitees to attend the seminar doc9824 none Koranyi The proposal is concerned with several lines of investigation, The first one of these is the mapping problem of domains in several complex variables with the aid of symplectic quasiconformal maps (with respect to the Bergman metric). It has already been proved that bounded simply connected smooth strongly pseudoconvex domains can always be mapped onto each other by such maps. The present project is concerned with developing geometric methods for computing or estimating the minimal qusiconformal distortion. The second line of investigation has to do with Poisson transforms of sections of vector bundles. Such Poisson transforms have been used to extend infinitesimally quasiconformal maps from the complex unit ball to the interior. They are now to be further investigated for their injectivity properties and for pairs of differential operators intertwined by them. Here the machinery of semisimple Lie groups will be used to its full capacity. A further subject to be studied is generalized conformal maps of generalized flag manifolds; it is expected that Liouville s classic theorem will extend to this situation. (This question is related to the preceding one through the notion of parabolic geometry.) In addition, three further, more or less related problems will be investigated; these concern analysis on two-step nilpotent groups, harmonic functions on spaces with negative curvature, and an application of the theory of reflection groups to statistics. The main goal of the proposal is to discover new mathematical facts in the field of analysis of functions. The theory of functions of one complex variable has been the most central field of mathematics in the last 150 years. It has innumerable applications to physics and other sciences. The theory of functions of several complex variables has had important successes but has not up to now matched in perfection and applicability the one-variable theory. The first goal of the proposal is to try to improve on this situation by studying the so-called mapping properties of functions of several complex variables. It will also be investigated to what extent the fundamental notions and facts of this theory can be extended to more general situations. The project also includes the investigation of some further related problems, one of these concerns an application to statistics. A secondary goal of the proposal is to understand more clearly the connections between certain already known facts in the main subject. This should make them easier to learn; in this way a contribution to mathematical education is expected to be made doc9825 none The investigator will study the relationship between the prime ideals of a Hopf crossed product and the prime ideals of the underlying algebra on which the Hopf algebra acts. A more general problem is to compare the primes in a Hopf Galois extension; such extensions include some well-known extensions of quantum groups. Finite-dimensional semisimple Hopf algebras and their representations will also be considered, in particular questions on the Schur indicator of an irreducible representation, as well as other invariants of the representation. Finally some problems about generalized Lie algebras will be studied, such as when can they be twisted via a Hopf cocycle to an ordinary Lie superalgebra. These generalized Lie algebras are Lie algebras in the category of comodules over a cotriangular Hopf algebra, and include, for example, Lie color algebras, the case when the Hopf algebra is a group algebra. It is desirable in many areas of mathematics to try to classify certain objects,or at least to know enough about them to distinguish them from similar objects. Thus one tries to attach invariants to these objects. Hopf algebras appear as such invariants both in mathematical physics (in areas such as conformal field theory) and in several areas of mathematics itself (such as studying knots in geometry). Thus to describe these structures, it would be useful to understand Hopf algebras better and to begin to classify them, as well as to understand how Hopf algebras act on other objects. Moreover within algebra itself, Hopf algebras provide a unifying framework for other algebraic objects, such as groups, Lie algebras, and their recent generalizations coming from quantum mechanics. Thus studying them should give new insights within algebra as well doc9826 none The purpose of this collaborative research project is to develop new models that can help firms make their production and financial decisions simultaneously. Production decisions (e.g., when to produce and how much to produce, when to order and how much to order) and financial decisions (e.g., short term borrowing, issuing of dividends) are interrelated in a firm. This project will integrate recent results in production and inventory control with those in finance, as well as new methodologies in stochastic programming, to develop models that can help firms make their production and financial decisions simultaneously in the presence of demand uncertainty and financial constraints. In this research, models will be developed for making production and financial decisions simultaneously and study the effect of financial constraints on production decisions. This is motivated by experience working with industry. The research tasks offer the potential to integrate the state of the art in traditional production and inventory control modeling with finance. If successful, the research will provide structural results for the problems and meaningful insights for managers; and, useful tools for improvement in production and inventory planning. The decision tools will integrate material flows and financial flows and help firms make production and financial decisions simultaneously in the presence of uncertainty. The models will be demonstrated through actual use by industrial partners doc9827 none Nigel Roe A deepening understanding of the role played by large-scale geometry in topology has made it clear that large-scale geometric features of groups determine small-scale features of their unitary duals. The effect is easily observed in abelian groups, thanks to Fourier theory and Pontrjagin duality, but the situation is more involved for nonabelian groups, whose unitary representation theory is too complicated to admit a direct descriptive account. However the perspective on dual spaces provided by Alain Connes noncommutative geometry makes it possible to formulate instances of this large-scale to small-scale phenomenon for nonabelian groups. Moreover the tools of algebraic topology, carried over to the noncommutative realm, make it possible to elevate the phenomenon to a conjectural reciprocity (formulated by Baum and Connes) between the global, homotopy theoretic structures of groups and their reduced duals. The purpose of the research outlined in this proposal is to obtain a more accurate and deeper understanding of the Baum-Connes conjecture in operator K-theory and of the large-to-small scale phenomenon which underlies it. The proposers will investigate issues related to group boundaries, Sobolev theory on the reduced dual of a group, and Hilbert space embeddings of groups. The recent discovery of counterexamples to variants of the Baum-Connes conjecture will be analyzed in depth. Although the tools used to investigate it are rather elaborate, the idea behind large scale-geometry is very simple: ignore the local, small-scale features of a geometric space and concentrate on its large-scale, or long term, structure. By doing so, trends or qualities may become apparent which are obscured by small-scale irregularities. The investigators and others have developed tools to distinguish between different sorts of multi-dimensional, large scale behavior in geometry. Somewhat surprisingly, aside from their intrinsic interest, these tools have found application in ordinary, small-scale geometry and elsewhere. The present proposal focuses on geometric aspects of group theory which are illuminated by large-scale geometry. The proposers are actively involved in training the next generation of mathematical scientists. They lead Penn State s Geometric Functional Analysis group. They run an active, twice-weekly research seminar and between them they have eight doctoral students under their direct supervision (a number of other students attend the seminar regularly). They currently serve as mentors to one VIGRE supported postdoctoral fellow, and will be recruiting a second fellow to be supported by NSF Focussed Research Grant funds this year. The Geometric Functional Analysis group frequently hosts sabbatical visitors as well as visiting graduate students. Besides the seminar, the group runs a continuing program of mini-workshops on research subjects of current interest. The research described in this proposal will be supported by, and carried out as part of, the activities of the Geometric Functional Analysis group doc9828 none Jones This award supports a joint US-NZ Workshop on Civil Infrastructure Systems (CIS) Research, to be held in October in Christchurch, New Zealand. The goal of the Symposium is to provide an expert forum for identifying and comparing common problems and solutions, for exchanging ideas on recent and future developments, and for promoting international cooperative research in all areas of Civil Infrastructure Systems. The Workshop will last four days. Two days will involve invited presentations; the third day will consist of workshop sessions; the fourth day will involve a field visit to the City of Wellington. Prepared papers by invited representatives from the US and NZ will exemplify contemporary issues in Civil Infrastructure Systems, with an emphasis on asset planning and management in a multi-hazard environment doc9829 none Our Intermediate Energy research group at Boston University consists of three faculty, two postdoctoral fellows, four graduate students, and several part-time undergraduate students. In the next three years, we will: 1) Continue to work on the Muon g-2 experiment. The muon is like a heavy electron but is unstable and decays like a radioactive nuclear isotope. Because it has both spin and charge, it behaves like a microscopic bar magnet, whose magnetism we measure in our experiment (g-2). Our latest value, based on a small part of our data, disagrees with the Standard Model (a theory which describes the particles in nature and the forces between them) prediction by several times the error. If this disagreement persists after we analyze all of our data, it will be very exciting since it suggests the existence of new physics beyond the standard model. We plan two other experiments using the same large storage ring magnet which is used for g-2, the measurement of the muon electric dipole moment(EDM) and the direct measurement of the muon neutrino mass. The EDM is expected in theory to be smaller than we can measure, while indirect measurements from other experiments suggest that the neutrino mass is not zero. 2) Measure the muon lifetime, which determines the strength of the weak interaction within the standard model. 3) Measure the muon to electron conversion rate to unprecedented accuracy, a process which is forbidden by the Standard Model. All of these measurements directly test the Standard Model. Any significant deviation of the experimental values from theory would imply that there is physics beyond what we already know doc9830 none The planned research involves several interrelated areas in spectral graph theory, extremal graph theory and random graphs. A main goal is to deduce the fundamental properties and structures of a graph from its graph spectrum (or from a short list of easily computable invariants). Various combinatorial, geometric and probabilistic techniques are being developed for examining the relations and behaviors of various graph invariants and properties. Although the primary objective is to advance our understanding of the intrinsic characteristics and underlying principles that govern discrete structures, such principles are quite effective and essential in dealing with problems involving massive graphs that arise in Internet computing and massive data sets. A number of combinatorial problems on Internet infrastructures are examined, including the modeling and scaling of massive graphs using probabilistic analysis. Of particular interest is the study of graphs with power law distributions that offer good approximations for realistic networks. The evolution process of large dynamic graphs with only partial information is being analyzed and this has led to challenging problems and new research directions doc9831 none Bernard Shiffman will continue his research on the statistics of random polynomials in several complex variables and more generally of random sections of powers of positive line bundles on compact complex manifolds and on almost complex symplectic manifolds. He will investigate the scaling limit statistics as the degree of the polynomial or the power of the line bundle goes to infinity when distances are rescaled so that densities are normalized. He will study spacing of zeros, hole probabilities, pair correlations for local maxima, and other topics. He will also study correlations of critical points of spherical harmonics. In another direction, he will study the compact singularities of equidimensional meromorphic mappings into compact complex manifolds. He will also look for new examples of Kobayashi hyperbolic hypersurfaces in complex projective 3-space. Kobayashi hyperbolic spaces do not carry any entire holomorphic curves; simple examples are the Cartesian squares of curves of genus greater than 1 and symmetric squares of generic curves of genus greater than 2. He will look for low-degree hyperbolic birational images of these surfaces in complex projective 3-space. This research project is motivated by a need to understand complex quantum mechanical systems. Quantum mechanics is the fundamental theory that describes the behavior of atoms and molecules and their component particles--protons, neutrons, and electrons. These particles are described by wave functions, which are solutions of Schrodinger s equation. The zeros and local maxima of wave functions give important information on states of atoms and molecules; the zeros are known in quantum chemistry and physics as nodal lines. The behavior of random polynomials provide an elementary model similar to complex quantum systems. Polynomials in several variables correspond to systems with several degrees of freedom, and those polynomials of high degree correspond to wave functions for highly excited states. The project includes statistics on symplectic manifolds, which serve as the mathematical models for the states of quantum systems. Another component of the research involves understanding the geometry of complex algebraic manifolds, which play an important role in quantum field theory and provide models for diverse physical phenomena doc9832 none Lenstra The proposed research belongs to the interface between number theory and algebra. It is inspired by problems that come up in an algorithmic context and in arithmetic algebraic geometry. Altogether, the proposal contains 19 problem sets: five from Algorithmic Number Theory, three from Algebraic Number Theory, five from Commutative and Homological Algebra, three from the Geometry of Numbers, and three from Group Theory. The collection has been composed with a view towards assisting the investigator s many current and future graduate students in choosing suitable thesis subjects. The problems have the appealing features of appearing to be feasible without being trivial, and of being specific without being narrow. They belong to mainstream areas that will also serve the students after obtaining their degrees. Of the nineteen problem sets, the following two are both easy to formulate and attractive. The first is the development of an algorithmic theory of quadratic forms over rings and fields of arithmetic interest. A typical question is how quickly one can find a representation of a positive integer as a sum of four squares. Or: it is known that any odd unimodular indefinite inner product space over the ring of integers is diagonalizable; given the symmetric matrix that defines the inner product, how quickly can one find the change of basis that diagonalizes the form? A first investigation shows that one may expect a wide spectrum of answers to the algorithmic questions in this area, displaying all the riches of number-theoretic algorithms. The second is giving class number estimates for orders in number fields. What is a good upper bound for the number of equivalence classes of fractional ideals of a giving order, expressed as a function of the degree and the discriminant of the order? And can one find better estimates for orders that have nice properties, such as being Gorenstein? This type of question is of importance in the theory of abelian varieties, and one will need to apply techniques coming from commutative algebra, abelian group theory, combinatorics, and elementary analytic number theory. In order to place the project in perspective one may consider the recent development of number theory. Present day number theory differs in two important respects from number theory twenty five years ago, namely in the roles played by algorithms and computers, and by algebraic geometry. It has been found that algorithmic number theory has important applications, notably in cryptography, and in addition number theorists have learned how to use computers for their research. Inventing good computational methods for number-theoretic problems has thus become of central importance. One of the principal investigator s strengths is in the interaction between theory and practice, on the one hand using recent theoretical advances for algorithmic purposes and on the other hand deriving purely mathematical inspiration from the problems suggested by the applications. At the other end of the spectrum, knowledge of algebraic geometry has become a standard requirement for aspiring number theorists. Virtually every breakthrough in number theory over the past few decades, including Andrew Wiles s work on Fermat s Last Theorem, has involved arithmetic algebraic geometry. Algebraic geometry depends on a broad spectrum of techniques from algebra and algebraic number theory, and gives rise to an unending array of tantalizing questions in those areas, of which the project studies a sample. What is maybe the most exciting of all, is the way in which arithmetic algebraic geometry and algorithmic number theory are presently being tied together, both in the application of geometric objects to cryptography and in the application of algorithmic techniques to investigate geometric objects in number theory. The project will be carried out by the investigator s graduate students, many of whom will, as experience shows, acquire combined expertise in these two areas, which is a very precious but fairly rare commodity doc9833 none The proposed research is directed at topics in several complex variables on entire holomorphic maps, interpolation problems, and value distribution theory. The principle investigator proposes to continue his study on the well-known transcendental Bezout problem about the growth of the volume of entire analytic sets and find sharp estimates on the counting functions of zeros of entire holomorphic maps. He also proposes to study interpolation problems for weighted spaces of entire functions, one of fundamental and central problems in several complex variables. In particular, he wishes to characterize interpolating varieties geometrically, which is closely tied with his study on the Bezout problem. In the third direction, he would like to continue his research on value distribution theory with a special attention given to the refined Nevanlinna second fundamental theorem for slowly moving targets and its relations to other problems such as uniqueness problems of meromorphic functions and meromorphic solutions of partial differential equations. The above problems are important not just from the point of view of several complex variables, but also from their relations and applications to other subjects such as harmonic analysis, transcendental number theory, systems theory and engineering. For instance, many important problems like finding and representing solutions to partial differential equations or systems of convolution equations arising in signal processing, image compression, materials testing, etc. are equivalent to interpolation problems for entire functions in weighted spaces. The proposed research aims at developing and advancing both theories and applications for the above areas in several complex variables doc9834 none Averson This work relates to two loosely connected areas, a) the theory of one-parameter groups of automorphisms of the algebra of all operators on a Hilbert space which posses a certain causal structure, and b) the theory of commuting n-tuples of operators acting on a Hilbert space. We have been attempting to understand the nature of noncommutative dynamics for many years, and our approach recently has been based on the theory of E_0-semigroups. There has been exciting recent progress on several fronts, the full implications of which are still being sorted out. In multivariable operator theory, we have introduced a curvature invariant which is somewhat analogous to the integral of curvature of a Riemannian manifold. We have shown that it is an integer in many cases by relating it to another invariant, the Euler characteristic of a certain finitely generated module. However, the key formula is valid only in certain cases, and we are now in the process of relating the curvature invariant to a more subtle integer invariant, essentially the index of a Dirac operator that can be associated with the given n-tuple of operators. In quantum theory the observable quantities are represented by operators. The algebra of operators differs sharply from the algebra of numbers because the result of multiplying two operators A and B depends on the order in which they are multiplied: AB is not the same as BA. This failure of the commutativity law has profound consequences, the most basic one being the uncertainty principle. The flow of time in quantum theory is represented by certain transformations, each of which moves operators in subtle ways, and the dynamics of quantum theory is the study of such groups of transformations. This noncommutative dynamics is very different from the commutative dynamics of classical physics. Our approach is based on a certain notion of causality, which involves the technical idea of semigroups of endomorphisms. Recent progress has been very encouraging - with the discovery of new connections with probability theory, in which one may now pass back and forth between noncommutative flows of time and certain random processes which can be thought of as off-white noise, in that they are close to white noise, but not exactly white noise. In a different but related direction, our work on sets of (commuting) operators establishes significant connections between sets of operators and fundamental geometric ideas such as curvature. At issue is a numerical invariant for sets of operators. While this invariant appears to be a real number capable of taking on any value, it is in fact an integer. What integer? The answer that appears to be emerging now is that this number is the numerical index of a certain Dirac operator. There appear to be significant connections with other parts of mathematics, including Riemannian geometry and algebraic geometry doc9835 none There are two main topics of research in this proposal, first, the large time behaviour and scattering theory of nonlinear Schrodinger waves off a potential term which supports many bound states. This leads to the analysis of multichannel nonlinear scattering and metastability of hamiltonian dispersive equations. The second topic involves the study of radiation damping for metastable mutltibreather solutions of the wave equation. The large time behaviour of the linearized wave equation around multibreather solutions is analyzed; a theory to estimate the lifetimes of perturbed multibreather solutions is developed and applications to nonlinear optics, in particular optical guides with non-uniform diffraction profiles. The use of optical devices and fibers in today s communication systems motivates some of the problems studied in this proposal. In particular we concentrate on the problem of effects of defects and other irregularities in optical fibers on their transport properties. We also analyze some novel optical devices made by modifying the medium in a way to achieve better filtering of noise and interchannel interference doc9836 none Mei-Chi Shaw will investigate topics in partial differential equations which arise from function theory in several complex variables. Problems in three specific areas are discussed in this proposal : the Cauchy-Riemann equations on nonsmooth domains, tangential Cauchy-Riemann equations and their interplay with singular integrals and geometric measure theory. Aspects of the Cauchy-Riemann equations on Lipschitz domains addressed include the complex Neumann boundary value problem and estimates of the Cauchy-Riemann equations. Function theory will be analyzed on strongly pseudoconvex Lipschitz domains, as well as the Bergman projection and biholomorphic maps. Recent results in harmonic analysis on Lipschitz domains are the main tools. Research on the regularity property of the global and local solutions of the tangential Cauchy-Riemann equation will be continued. This includes the existence and regularity theorems on CR manifolds which are Lipschitz or of higher codimension. Homotopy formulas, Szego projection, Hodge theory and the embeddings of abstract CR manifolds are also studied. Singular integral theory and geometric measure theory on Lipschitz curves and nonsmooth domains will play a major role in the approach to these problems. These problems are at the interface of harmonic analysis, geometric measure theory, complex geometry and partial differential equations with rough coefficients, important fields all in modern analysis. Classically, harmonic analysis offers a powerful tool to solve partial differential equations, especially the Dirichlet and Neumann boundary value problems. Harmonic analysis is also intertwined with one complex variable, especially for function theory in the unit disc. In its modern version, harmonic analysis has evolved into singular integral theory and geometric measure theory. The development of one influences the other and both collectively are viewed as one of the most important and elegant theories in mathematics. In several complex variables, these overlapping areas have produced even richer and more profound results whose impact have shaped modern partial differential equations, several complex variables and harmonic analysis. Their influence even extends beyond these fields into other areas, like complex differential geometry, algebraic geometry and mathematical physics. While great progress has been made in the past few decades for the case when the domains are smooth, little is known when the domain is less regular. The investigation of these problems on nonsmooth domains is already central to the study of classical Dirichlet and Neumann boundary value problems using harmonic analysis. Built on these solid foundations, the PI intends to tackle more challenging problems in several complex variables. Their solution will advance all the aforementioned intricately related fields and open up a vast unexplored area doc9837 none New methods based on generalized Borel summation and trans-asymptotic expansions are being developed by a number of analysts and are emerging as a new field of study, analyzability theory . The methods enable one to treat solutions of equations at singularities much more general then usually dealt with and provide a rigorous foundation to previously formal calculations. The present proposal aims at developing and applying these new techniques. The PIs will continue their research in the context of ODEs, difference equations and PDEs. Applications addressed include the classification of nonlinear ODEs at irregular singularities, determining their integrability properties as well as their reducibility to simpler systems, study of adiabatic invariance, and Painleve analysis for difference equations. These techniques will be used to continue rigorous research of the time dependent Schroedinger problem under periodic perturbations of arbitrary strength and also of resonance theory. The project is a piece in an unfolding enterprise to bridge the gap from formal calculations to rigorous proofs, and in the advance of what appears to be emerging as a general theory of singular behavior. Countless applications exist in mathematics as well as in the study of physical phenomena doc9838 none The main thrust of this research is to establish in the setting of function fields analogues of major conjectures by Rohrlich and, Shimura on the algebraic (in)dependence of coordinates of periods of certain abelian varieties. The current step involves the analysis of the structure of certain types of t-modules, which correspond roughly to abelian varieties. With these tools, one expects further progress on related questions. In particular, the PI and his coworkers will establish precise conditions for the independence of the periods of certain one dimensional t-modules, called Drinfeld modules. Another approach to Nesterenko s recent work on the Ramanujan functions will also be attempted by means of determining the rational solutions to a certain differential equation. This would allow the application of the PI s Lojasiewicz inequality rather than the original fundamental, but considerably more complicated, independence criterion due to Philippon. Moreover the PI will provide a quite general arithmetic version of the fundamental Lojasiewicz inequality which is best possible in its important respects. The present proposal centers about the properties of numbers and polynomials. One central question is whether those numbers which arise in various contexts in mathematics (analysis or geometry) have unkown linkages. Some of the first research of this type over a hundred years ago resolved problems which had puzzled mathematicians for two millenia. One main objective of the present research is to show that such linkages do not exist in a broad setting analogous to certain central puzzles of today. In that setting, polynomials correspond to integers and power series correspond to real numbers. The core of this work will be carried out by the PI together with M.A. Papanikolas and G.W. Anderson. A coordination of quite diverse elements is crucial to establishing these results on the boundary between the broad fields of analysis, geometry, and number theory. In the classical case, the PI will try to develop an understanding of the behaviour of certain differential equations to simplify our view of certain recent work of Nesterenko. Just as one tries to show that there are no hidden linkages between values, one also strives to establish that polynomial values cannot be unnaturally small. The PI has one good version of such a result, and he will extend its applicability even further doc9839 none In this project, the PI will investigate several different aspects of the theory of linear partial differential equations associated to manifolds with singular Riemannian metrics. These include the propagation and diffraction of singularities for the wave equation on manifolds with conic and edge singularities, and the structure of the fundamental solution for the time-dependent Schrodinger equation on manifolds with scattering metrics. Tools such as the Fourier-Bros-Iagolnitzer transform will be studied and refined as needed. Linear partial differential equations (PDEs) that describe wave propagation (such as the classical wave equation and the Schrodinger equation) are of fundamental importance in physics and geometry. The propagation of waves on curved spaces often involves the geometry of the underlying space in a subtle manner. When the space is `singular, either in the sense of being infinite in extent or of having degenerate properties in a finite region, the relationship between geometry and the properties of solutions to PDEs is especially fascinating and poorly understood doc9840 none Professor Shapiro will continue his long-term collaboration with Paul Bourdon on problems arising from the interaction between the modern theory of linear operators and the classical theory of analytic functions. Shapiro and Bourdon will study problems involving norms, numerical ranges, decomposability, and chaotic behavior for operators that occur naturally on spaces of analytic functions, most notably composition operators and operators that commute with backward shifts. The theory of linear operators originates from mathematical physics, especially from quantum mechanics, and has more recently found significant application in control system theory. The numerical range is a convex subset of the plane that has proven useful to engineers in determining the stability of control systems associated with linear operators. The chaotic behaviour of dynamical systems has recently become an important subject spanning mathematics, physics, engineering, and biology. It has only recently been discovered that significant classes of linear operators can give rise to chaotic systems, and this has led to unexpected connections between operator theory and dynamical systems. The idea of decomposability---the study of how to break a complicated linear system up into simpler ones---has recently been shown to have surprising connections with such chaotic behaviour. The research of Shapiro and Bourdon arises from, and has contributed to, these developments: it is anticipated that the project outlined in this proposal will further enhance our understanding of the connection between dynamical systems and operator theory doc9841 none The investigator intends to study problems in the theory of differential operators that arise from de Rham cohomology theory, from the theory of D-modules, in the context of toric varieties and GKZ-systems, or from stratified spaces. He will investigate the category of quasi-coherent D-modules on a toric variety, and the modeling of operations within that category by more familiar objects, as well as problems related to the nature of characteristic varieties. The investigator will also consider practical questions related to algorithmic D-module theory via Groebner bases, which give rise to certain stratifications. He will study the relation of D-modules with Dwork cohomology, and try to characterize jump parameters in GKZ-systems. This is a project in the mathematical area known as algebraic geometry. During the 20-th century, algebraic geometry has changed its nature from analytic geometry into a much more complex science. The result is a complicated but powerful method for studying curves, surfaces and other geometric objects. This modern approach to geometry allows mathematicians to use geometric techniques and intuition in many other situations. The methods used in algebraic geometry are of a very wide range. The investigator s work concentrates on the applications of differential calculus and computer power to the subject, thus combining geometry, algebra, calculus and modern technology in his work. As he continues to uncover the interplay of these objects by theoretical and computational means, algebraic geometry is becoming ever more valuable as a tool in other parts of mathematics, physics and engineering doc9826 none The purpose of this collaborative research project is to develop new models that can help firms make their production and financial decisions simultaneously. Production decisions (e.g., when to produce and how much to produce, when to order and how much to order) and financial decisions (e.g., short term borrowing, issuing of dividends) are interrelated in a firm. This project will integrate recent results in production and inventory control with those in finance, as well as new methodologies in stochastic programming, to develop models that can help firms make their production and financial decisions simultaneously in the presence of demand uncertainty and financial constraints. In this research, models will be developed for making production and financial decisions simultaneously and study the effect of financial constraints on production decisions. This is motivated by experience working with industry. The research tasks offer the potential to integrate the state of the art in traditional production and inventory control modeling with finance. If successful, the research will provide structural results for the problems and meaningful insights for managers; and, useful tools for improvement in production and inventory planning. The decision tools will integrate material flows and financial flows and help firms make production and financial decisions simultaneously in the presence of uncertainty. The models will be demonstrated through actual use by industrial partners doc9843 none The proposer intends to continue his study of geometric questions in the theory of meromorphic functions, using the new techniques developed in his previous work. The main directions of the proposed research are the following. a) Questions related to Bloch s theorem and the Type Problem of a simply connected Riemann surface, especially the relations between the conformal type of a surface and its integral curvature. b) Problems of geometric function theory arising in real algebraic geometry. More specifically, it includes counting real solutions of certain systems of algebraic equations of geometric origin, which have important applications in linear control theory. c) Generalization of results of geometric function theory to quasiregular maps in spaces of arbitrary dimension. d) Normality criteria for families of holomorphic curves in projective spaces. One of the basic questions in mathematics and its applications is whether a given equation or a system of equations has solutions, how many, and where are they located. In the theory of meromorphic functions one studies these questions for equations of the type f(z)=a, where a is a given complex number and f a given meromorphic function. The class of meromorphic functions includes elementary functions, such as rational, exponential and trigonometric ones, as well as the special functions, a. k. a. higher transcendental functions, such as the Gamma function, Airy functions, elliptic functions and so on. Most functions arising in applications of mathematics belong to this class. In modern mathematics, questions about solvability of equations are usually formulated in geometric language, which makes the results appealing to our geometric intuition. The logic of development of mathematics and its applications require an extension of results to vector-valued functions known as ``holomorphic curves . The proposer plans to continue his study of geometric theory of meromorphic functions and holomorphic curves. A part of the proposal is related to existence of real solutions, which is by far more subtle than the existence of complex solutions, which are usually studied. This part is inspired by the so-called pole placement problem , which is a major unsolved mathematical problem in control theory of linear systems. The results in this area will have implications for the design of complicated automatic control systems. These results would establish limitations on the possibility to control a system of given size by a control device of certain class doc9844 none Boas Staube This project has two main scientific components. The first goal is to advance the theory of the inhomogeneous Cauchy-Riemann equations on pseudoconvex domains in multidimensional complex space. Although global regularity of the d-bar Neumann problem holds on large classes of domains, it fails on the so-called worm domains. Currently there is no general theory that unifies the known positive results, much less one that also accounts for the negative results on the worm domains. Likewise, necessary and sufficient conditions for the stronger property of compactness of the d-bar Neumann operator are not known. A basic question to be addressed is how to unify Catlin s approach to global regularity (via compactness) with the investigators vector field method. The investigators expect a new sufficient condition for global regularity to emerge from this study. They also hope to characterize compactness in the d-bar Neumann problem by some condition slightly weaker than Catlin s so-called property P. The second thrust of this project is to develop a new area in multi-dimensional complex analysis: namely, the study of how the theorems and estimates of the subject depend asymptotically on the dimension of the space as the dimension tends to infinity. Two particular problems of interest are the recently developed theory about extending Bohr s classical power series theorem to higher dimensions and the question of quantifying how zeroes of the Bergman kernel function depend on the dimension of the ambient complex space. During this project, the investigators will train graduate students, and they will supervise a young mathematician at the post-doctoral level (supported through a VIGRE grant at Texas A Bohr s classical theorem has repercussions in operator theory; and the Bergman kernel function provides a concrete model for Berezin s quantization scheme in mathematical physics. In addition to advancing the frontiers of knowledge through basic research, this project will contribute significantly to the development of human resources through the scientific training of highly qualified personnel doc9845 none Gravels and gravelly soils are engineering materials commonly used in many civil engineering applications such as structural fills and pavement subgrades. The geotechnical engineering community has long known that gravels have engineering properties that are both similar and non-similar to sands. Sands have been researched extensively, for both static and dynamic loading conditions, and their behavior is comparatively well understood. In contrast, gravels have been researched and tested to a much lesser extent due to the need for large specimen sizes and physical difficulties of handling such specimens. Consequently, the engineering properties of gravels have been commonly obtained by means of correlations based on experimental tests on sands. In addition, granular material behavior understanding is primarily based on conventional triaxial tests where specimens are tested under axisymmetric principal stress conditions. These particular stress conditions apply only for special situations in engineering practice, such as soil lying directly below and on the axis of a circular load. Often, conditions exist where none of the principal stresses are equal. It is then necessary to take into consideration the influence of the intermediate principal stress on the stress-strain and strength characteristics of the material. During the last three decades, much research has been conducted on the behavior of sands under multiaxial, or true, states of stress. Cubical triaxial devices, that allow the intermediate principal stress to vary from the minor to the major principal stress, have facilitated research on the behavior of sands, clays, rock and concrete in three-dimensional principal stress space. Missing from the literature is any comprehensive study focusing on multiaxial testing of gravel-sized particles. In an effort to address this gap in fundamental understanding of gravelly soils, an extensive study of several gravels under three-dimensional stress paths is proposed. Based on a systematic experimental program using a flexible boundary true triaxial device, the three-dimensional behavior of gravels will be ascertained. The effects of grain size, particle shape, and fines content on the mechanical response of gravels will be evaluated. The device boundary effects will be evaluated using new instrumentation that will be developed as part of the project. A constitutive model for gravels will be developed and calibrated from preliminary experimental data and verified against further test results. The calibrated model may enable successful numerical modeling and performance prediction of Civil Engineering geotechnical structures and foundations doc9846 none The nervous and endocrine systems play a critical role in allowing organisms to cope with environmental stressors. Recent studies on non-mammalian species have identified responses to stress that have adaptive features that do not fit readily into current views, largely based on laboratory animals, that stress is a disorder. This symposium brings together for the first time scientists specifically working on chemical signaling during stress in mammalian and non-mammalian animals. The symposium will cover the phylogenetic diversity of the stress response in invertebrates and vertebrates, the comparative aspects of how mechanisms for responses show specific adaptations, and the integration of how stress responses function in development, reproduction, immune function, and behavior. The symposium itself takes an integrative approach from molecules to behavior, over a wide range of organisms, and is a satellite meeting to the similarly broad Society for Integrative & Comparative Biology. Papers will be presented by graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, as well as senior researchers, and the proceedings will be published an international journal. This symposium will have an impact by giving a unique perspective on a topic of broad interest to animal physiology as well as to neuroscience and behavior, and the exposure of young scientists to these ideas and to interactions with leaders in the field will have an impact on their careers doc9847 none symmetry types, for almost two hundred years. One of the earliest major results is Jordan s theorem, which asserts, more or less, that a geometric figure can have a complicated symmetry group only if it lives in a space of many dimensions. This proposal deals with several extensions and applications of Jordan s result. The motivating problem comes from algebraic number theory, the study of number systems. These systems can have intricate groups of symmetries, which can be externalized as symmetries of spaces analogous to the usual spaces of geometry. The investigator intends to probe the symmetry of certain number systems by means of a new extension of Jordan s theorem. In a different direction, the investigator intends to use a similar class of methods to analyze the internal symmetry of certain physical systems. Michael Freedman has recently proposed using the systems in question as the basis for a fundamentally new type of quantum computer which should be much less vulnerable to the decoherence problem which has plagued existing designs. For this to work, one needs a large enough symmetry group to allow the new machine to simulate the internal state of a machine of the old type doc9848 none Four projects on the mathematical theory of dynamical systems are proposed. Each project contains a cluster of problems with a common theme. The first pertains to strange attractors with strong dissipation and a single direction of instability. Extensions of a general theory developed under a previous grant to arbitrary phase-dimensions are proposed, as are applications to concrete problems such as nonlinear oscillators. The second project concerns the statistical behavior of dynamical systems with predominantly hyperbolic behavior. The focus of the proposed research is on mechanisms leading to various rates of correlation decay in both discrete and continuous times. The topic of the third project is lattice dynamical systems. A systematic analysis of the aggregate behavior of large numbers of dynamical systems coupled together is proposed. The final project proposes dynamical systems methods of solution for three unrelated problems on the Schrodinger operator, kinematic fast dynamo and Navier-Stokes equations. As a branch of mathematics, dynamical systems is concerned with the time evolutions of processes governed by certain underlying laws. A primary goal of the subject is to develop unifying mathematical theories to explain observed phenomena and predict future occurrences. In this proposal, the investigation of a number of models amenable to mathematical analysis and with potential applications to the physical and biological sciences is proposed. It has been known for some time that relatively simple laws can lead to complicated dynamics. The first part of this proposal focuses on systems with chaotic behavior. Two topics are proposed: an analysis of strange attractors and a statistical theory of mixing. (Strange attractors are highly complex objects which capture the long term behaviors of dissipative dynamical systems; they have been observed frequently in nature and in simulations but have thus far resisted rigorous analysis.) Other projects proposed include the relations between aggregate properties of large dynamical systems and those of their individual components, and a few problems from physics and hydrodynamics which the principal investigator believes can be solved by the methods of dynamical systems. Four projects on the mathematical theory of dynamical systems are proposed. Each project contains a cluster of problems with a common theme. The first pertains to strange attractors with strong dissipation and a single direction of instability. Extensions of a general theory developed under a previous grant to arbitrary phase-dimensions are proposed, as are applications to concrete problems such as nonlinear oscillators. The second project concerns the statistical behavior of dynamical systems with predominantly hyperbolic behavior. The focus of the proposed research is on mechanisms leading to various rates of correlation decay in both discrete and continuous times. The topic of the third project is lattice dynamical systems. A systematic analysis of the aggregate behavior of large numbers of dynamical systems coupled together is proposed. The final project proposes dynamical systems methods of solution for three unrelated problems on the Schrodinger operator, kinematic fast dynamo and Navier-Stokes equations. As a branch of mathematics, dynamical systems is concerned with the time evolutions of processes governed by certain underlying laws. A primary goal of the subject is to develop unifying mathematical theories to explain observed phenomena and predict future occurrences. In this proposal, the investigation of a number of models amenable to mathematical analysis and with potential applications to the physical and biological sciences is proposed. It has been known for some time that relatively simple laws can lead to complicated dynamics. The first part of this proposal focuses on systems with chaotic behavior. Two topics are proposed: an analysis of strange attractors and a statistical theory of mixing. (Strange attractors are highly complex objects which capture the long term behaviors of dissipative dynamical systems; they have been observed frequently in nature and in simulations but have thus far resisted rigorous analysis.) Other projects proposed include the relations between aggregate properties of large dynamical systems and those of their individual components, and a few problems from physics and hydrodynamics which the principal investigator believes can be solved by the methods of dynamical systems doc9849 none The analysis of multi-variable functions or configurations is an important problem area with connections to topics like quantum systems of many bodies, multi-variate statistical distributions, special functions, numerical cubature, and algebraic combinatorics. The common thread of the problems posed in this proposal is the existence of a symmetry group. An important class of applications, for example, is formed by the Calogero-Sutherland-Moser (CSM) systems; these are quantum-mechanical problems of a number of identical particles in a one-dimensional space with certain interactions (inverse square, for one). The symmetry group is the group of all permutations of the coordinate functions (the type-A Weyl group) or the group of permutations and sign-changes (the type-B Weyl group); the latter occurs in spin models. Some of the classical orthogonal polynomials are associated to Weyl groups and compact homogeneous spaces. Dunkl has developed a theory of differential-difference operators (called Dunkl operators in both mathematics and physics literature) which are crucial devices for this analysis. These operators are a parametrized version of the usual derivatives. They are used to construct certain invariant differential operators (which prove the complete integrability of several CSM models). There is also an associated generalization of the Fourier transform. Specifically this project concerns the construction of generating functions for polynomials with certain desirable properties (orthogonality or eigenfunctions, for example) associated to finite reflection groups (of types I, A, B, H); a study of the generalized binomial coefficients defined in terms of nonsymmetric Jack polynomials, a search for useful self-adjoint operators enabling orthogonal decomposition of type-B harmonic polynomials (which would be used to express wave-functions of CSM models on the line in spherical polar coordinates), a study of special CSM models with three-body interactions. Also it is proposed to investigate possible modifications of the original differential-difference operators connected with bispectral problems or super-integrable models. Mathematical analysis can be considered as having two different emphases, one is to find exact formulae to describe some mathematical system, like the motion of the planets or of a pendulum, or an electron belonging to an atom which is part of a crystal, and the other is to find good and useful approximations and processes which can get as close as desired to the solution of a problem by taking an adequate number of steps. For example, computed tomography does not give a perfect image of a cross-section of the subject, but it does provide all the detail needed for practical purposes. This project is in the part of analysis which aims to give exact solutions in situations which enjoy some symmetry. This could be the quantum-mechanical problem of indistinguishable particles, a statistical analysis which treats each data point the same way, or the molecular structure of a crystal where each atom has six nearest neighbors, up, down, left, right, front and back. In particular, Dunkl has developed a calculus which takes the symmetry into account, thus allowing precise and powerful techniques for the analysis. The problems in the proposal can be categorized by the types of symmetry, such as those formed by rotating a circle through multiples of sixty degrees (that is, one sixth of a complete revolution), or those associated to permutations of identical objects, to name just two. The goal of the project is to develop tools and discover methods for multi-variable analysis of problems with symmetry; these will be useful in understanding the physics of interacting particles, statistical analysis of complicated data, and the techniques of digitizing and the subsequent reconstruction of sounds and images doc9850 none In this project, the principal investigator pursues a research program in nonlinear partial differential equations, the calculus of variations and singular perturbation theory. The research topics come from three applied settings: Ginzburg-Landau type models for superconductivity, von Karman type models for thin film blistering, and a model in micromagnetics. In the area of superconductivity, the P.I. will focus on the response of samples to large magnetic fields, with particular attention paid to the bifurcation from the normal state to a superconducting state. In the area of thin film blisters, the P.I. will investigate the nature of instabilities of the blistered region through the analysis of various dynamical models for blister growth and thin film growth. Finally, in the area of micromagnetics, the P.I. will analytically explore a model thought to capture a new kind of magnetic wall structure associated with a geometric constriction within the sample. This project concerns the behavior of various materials when subjected to outside fields or when forced to take on specific shapes. The energy of these systems is generally described through a function, often called an `order parameter, whose values indicate what state is taken on by the material under a given set of circumstances (such as geometry, applied fields, etc.). Through this type of study, one hopes to gain an understanding of what shapes are optimal for a given sample in order to enhance or diminish various physical effects. For example, in the case of a superconductor, one hopes to learn which shapes are most conducive to producing a supercurrent that conducts without losses due to resistance. The relevant mathematical tools come from the calculus of variations and from the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations, as well as from methods of asymptotic analysis as applied to the previou doc9851 none This proposal requests support for Research and Development of the beamline and particle detector systems for MECO, one of the two experiments that comprise the RSVP initiative. The MECO (for Muon to Electron Conversion) experiment will search for the coherent conversion of muons into electrons in the field of an atomic nucleus. This is a process that violates muon and lepton number, commonly referred to as lepton flavor violation. MECO proposes to search for coherent muon conversion at a sensitivity a factor of times that of current experiments. The MECO experiment will be mounted at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, using the Alternate Gradient Synchrotron proton accelerator as a driver for a new, extremely intense muon beam. The muon beam uses a new technique involving producing muons in the bore of a superconducting solenoid and transporting them in a second solenoid to the region of a target in a third solenoid, in which they are stopped by a thin target. The conversion electrons are momentum analyzed in a set of particle detectors, also located in the bore of the third solenoid. While neither the beamline components nor the particle detectors are beyond the state of the art in their respective technologies, significant development and detailed design work are required before construction. The MECO experiment has been approved by the National Science Board to be included in the President s budget as an MRE project for FY . This proposal is to support design work in five areas: superconducting solenoids, particle tracking detector and associated electronics, calorimetric electron detector and associated electronics, active cosmic ray shield, and modifications to the proton beam line. The work will be done by the MECO collaboration and by subcontract to an organization with expertise in the design and construction of large superconducting magnets doc9852 none This individual investigator award funds a project to thoroughly investigate a new electro-optic effect in quasi-one-dimensional charge-density-wave (CDW) conductors. The effect is caused by deformation of the CDW by an applied electric field and is unusual in that it occurs at very small fields (0.1V cm) and over a very wide infrared spectral range (0- cm-1). This project involves the use of modulation spectroscopy with tunable infrared diode lasers The project is to extend previous measurements of the PI s group, which were for transmittance of infrared light polarized transversely to the conducting chains in the CDW compound K0.3MoO3, to other polarizations, optical constants (e.g. reflectivity), and materials. The research will investigate the fundamental physics of CDW materials, some of the most unusual conductors known, including how the CDW deforms in a field, what new states are associated with CDW motion, and how phonons are affected by this motion. At the same time, the research will probe the utility of CDW materials for electro-optic devices and also represents the first application of tunable infrared diode lasers to solid state spectroscopy. The PI s group will work closely with the laser manufacturer (Laser Components Instrument Group) in interfacing the lasers with an infrared microscope for these studies. The skills the students learn in building equipment, as well as carrying out and interpreting the experiments will aid their future careers, whether they go into industry, academia, or government research. In addition the industrial connection will give the students a direct insight into industrial research. %%% The periodic modulation of the electron density in a crystal is known as a charge density wave (CDW). Under certain conditions, such as an applied electric field, the CDW is able to move, or slide, as a coherent entity through the material. Materials with sliding CDWs exhibit some of the most unusual electronic properties ever observed. Recently, the principal investigator s group discovered that the response of a material to radiation in the infrared range is also affected by CDW sliding. This gives rise to an electro-optic response at much smaller electric fields and over a much wider spectral range than for conventional electro-optic materials. This individual investigator project will extend the previous investigations of the electro-optic response of CDW materials, with the goals of i) improving our knowledge of how the CDW moves and interacts with the crystal, ii) studying how the effect might be utilized in devices, and iii) extending the application of tunable infrared diode lasers to solid state spectroscopy. The manufacturer of the laser (Laser Components Instrument Group) will work closely with the principal investigator s group to optimize this application. The skills the students learn in building equipment, as well as carrying out and interpreting the experiments will aid their future careers, whether they go onto industrial or academic research. In addition the industrial connection will give the students a direct insight into industrial research doc9853 none NONLINEAR OPERATOR THEORY. The goal is to find canonical nonlinear generalizations of analytic function theory and the related parts of linear operator theory. Many classical and many new analytic function theorems have a statement purely in terms of linear operators. The surprising thing is that these theorems about linear operators do not actually require linearity, and it has become clear that there will be extensive nonlinear generalizations of them. This wide open area is close to control theory. COMPUTER OPERATOR ALGEBRA. Linear engineering systems theory and operator theory are rife with calculations in a noncommutative algebra. Helton s group with M. Stankus are major providers of software (called NCAlgebra) for performing general noncommutative calculations in Mathematica. One phase of the software is at the level of a very powerful `yellow pad , and contains numerous algorithms they developed. For example, the noncommutative convexity algorithm discussed below will go in. In another phase there is extensive software implementing noncommutative Groebner basis algorithms due to Mora and algorithms for sorting and shrinking the output in various ways ( this is crucial in the noncommutative case). Since the techniques are new, experimentation on traditional problems is important. NONCOMMUTATIVE INEQUALITIES. Recently, Helton and collaborators made progress on a theory and resulting algorithm which takes a rational function F of noncommutative variables Z and outputs a family of inequalities which determine a domain G of Z on which F is matrix convex . Decidedly non-trivial is showing that the domain G determined by the algorithm is the largest possible domain of matrix convexity for F. This is a first attempt at an automatic method for what engineers now do with Schur complement tricks to convert a design problem to Linear Matrix Inequalities. OPTIMIZATION OVER SPACES OF ANALYTIC FUNCTIONS. Qualitative theory, computer algorithms based on this theory, analysis of such algorithms. These are the key optimization problems which arise in designs of linear systems where there are competing constraints, or uncertainty in the math model of the physical system one is trying to control. The research is directed at several projects in parts of operator theory and functional analysis related to engineering system theory. Linear operator theory has had a strong interplay with analytic function theory and engineering for many decades. Indeed most commercial software (at least in the control engineering community) for solving analytic function problems is based on this type of interplay between functions and matrices. One branch of analysis closely related to applications is classical Nevanlinna-Pick- Nehari theory, or equivalently commutant lifting theory, a part of the area called operator model theory. The early development of this was done for the purest of mathematical reasons, but in the mid s and early s this was shown to be critical to the design of engineering systems where stability of the system is the key constraint. This motivated much more mathematical development and now it is one of the areas of functional analysis most closely associated with control engineering. For many years (since Norbert Wiener) design tools optimized mean square performance. The theory above ultimately lead to (commercially commonplace) tools for optimizing worst case frequency domain performance. The goal of much of the proposed research is to extend this theory in several radically new directions and we list the main ones. HIGHLY NONLINEAR GENERALIZATIONS; the goal is to find canonical nonlinear generalizations of analytic function theory and the related parts of linear operator theory. This wide open area is closely related to control theory. Many systems which people wish to control are nonlinear (e.g., jet engines). NONCOMMUTATIVE COMPUTER ALGEBRA; if a signal goes into a system A, comes out and then goes into B what we get is BA, while if a signal goes into B and then A what we get is AB. Seldom does AB equal BA, thus the design of engineering systems requires (heavy) noncommutative calculations. Helton s group has a broad based effort to develop methods and theory for computer assistance of such calculations. Inequalities with noncommuting elements is now a major topic in engineering and Helton s group is working out systematic methods for treating them doc9854 none This proposal for research concerns questions of almost everywhere and mean convergence in ergodic theory, and their connections with harmonic analysis and probability theory. The first group of questions on convergence which will be addressed concerns the mean convergence of averages of measurements made on a stochastic process at a random sequence of times that is chosen in advance. Other questions concern randomly generated times which yield to sampling along sequences with big gaps. The second group of questions concerns subsequence ergodic theorems for subsequences coming from members of Hardy fields, Results obtained by the PI in the previous grant periods suggest that in the context of Hardy fields, a meaningful characterization of the ``good sequences of measurements is possible. Indeed, due to a significant advance in the previous grant period, a complete characterization of good sequences of measurements is at reach. This work for one dimensional averages gives us confidence to start exploring possible higher dimensional results, therefore extending the work of Stein and Weinger. The third group of questions concerns upcrossings and related oscillatory behavior of the ergodic averages. This line of research was initiated by Bishop, Bourgain, Kalikow, B. Weiss and others. Wierdl and his collaborators discovered a fundamental connection between Ergodic Theory and martingales. This discovery---which often manifests itself as a bounded squarefunction of the difference between ergodic averages and certain martingales---allows one to translate many of the results of Martingale Theory, such as squarefunction, large deviation or jump inequalities, to ergodic theoretical and harmonic analytical results. Part of the proposed work is to extend the investigations on upcrossings to other operators such as higher dimensional singular integrals and averages over various sequences of domains with an eye on possible extensions to group actions. These investigations will reveal deep connections between ergodic theory, harmonic analysis and probability theory. Ergodic theory grew out of statistical mechanics, the statistical description of matter. This latter means, for example, that instead of describing the behavior of each individual water-molecule in a cup of water, one is satisfied with finding the average speed, energy etc. of the molecules. But then the fundamental question arises: how can we measure the average speed or energy. It is clearly impossible to measure the speed of each individual molecule and then take the mean of the data. The ergodic theorem says that it is enough to select a single molecule, measure its speed in each second, and if we make enough measurements and take the average of the data, the number will be basically the average speed of all the molecules in the cup of water. This amazing theorem has one drawback: it requires that the measurements are taken exactly at every second. But in practice, the measurements might be made at, say, 1, 3, 4, 6, 11,... seconds or, even worse, at 1.1, 2.4, 2.9, 4.3,... seconds instead of at 1, 2, 3,... seconds. Obviously, we would like to know whether we still can compute accurately the average speed from the measured data. The proposed research addresses two basic questions about measurements: 1) What more practical sequence of times (other than 1, 2, 3,...) for measurements will still yield the average speed, energy, etc.? 2) How many measurements one has to make to get a useful approximation to the average speed, energy, etc.? Note that the ergodic theorem just says if you make enough measurements, you get useful information about average speed, energy, etc. , but it does not say in any way how many is enough doc9855 none L. Archer, Cornell University The PI proposes to explore the effect of entanglement density on polymer dynamics in terms of damping function, time-strain factorability, and orientation angle. The investigation will include experiments to identify nonlinear rheological characteristics of entangled polymer systems in shear and extensional flows. Furthermore, experiments will be designed to examine aspects of specific molecular scale phenomenon in the nonlinear polymer flow behavior. Based on the information obtained, molecular-based constitutive equations will be developed doc9856 none This proposal contains a number of different problems whose common thread is a core approach combining dynamics, probability theory, and a basic set of techniques that were mainly developed in the classical ergodic theoretic setting. These techniques have been very successfully adapted to problems from hard analysis and combinatorics, in areas such as: KAM theory; Ramsey theory (in particular density versions of results previously known for partitions, e.g., the density version of the Hales-Jewett theorem); Fractal geometry and Haussdorff dimension of sets in Euclidean space; the theory of amenable groups and their actions. These are the main areas that we propose to develop further. Physical systems satisfying the same set of laws exhibit a wide variety of behaviors going from the extreme of completely chaotic systems which appear to be completely random to systems that exhibit a surprising level of stability (for instance, a particle moving in a cyclotron). Mathematical dynamics and ergodic theory explain these different types of behaviors. The same methods turn out to be extremely useful in other areas, in particular in combinatorics, information theory, data compression, etc. Our work is developing new methods that give better explanations of these phenomena and extend the applicability of the field to a broader class of problems doc9857 none The proposed work would continue and deepen the work of the Northern New Mexico Network s first five years, which has been primarily devoted to increasing the capacity of teachers in 22 public school districts to understand, adopt, and implement standards-based instructional practices, based on the New Mexico State Standards, as well as hands-on science and math instruction. The goals of the project are: 1. Implementation of a comprehensive MST standards-based curriculum 2. High quality teacher and administrator professional development program. 3. Convergence of resources in support of increased student achievement in MST. 4. Development of a comprehensive assessment and accountability system. 5. Sustaining reform strategies. The scope of work will involve use of the Leadership Development for School Teams as the primary professional development vehicle for school administrators and the master teachers. The master teachers, termed Circuit Riders, will be assigned mentoring responsibilities in specific schools, and are in essence the field operation of the effort doc9858 none The proposal concerns the investigation of motivic cohomology of schemes and its relationships to algebraic K-theory. One part of the project proposes an investigation of generically contractible sheaves. The investigator intends to use the properties of such sheaves in an attempt to show that Grayson motivic cohomology coincides with Voevodsky one and hence Graysons construction gives another approach to the dvelopment of the motivic spectral sequence. Another part of the project concerns the Friedlander-Milnor Conjecture. The investigator expects to develop new methods for the proof of the rigidity property for homology of the finite general linear group. Finally the investigator plans to figure out what if anything is missing in the proof of the Bloch-Kato Conjecture modulo an arbitrary prime integer. This research proposal is in the area of mathematics known as algebraic geometry. The objective of algebraic geometry is to gain a deep understanding of the geometric properties of solutions to polynomial equations -- while everyone sees quadratic equations in school, equations of higher degree or more variables become much more subtle. Yet, because computer and robot computations are inherently finite approximations to the continuous real world, understanding polynomials is vital to such endeavors doc9859 none This proposal concerns questions in higher dimensional Arakelov theory and algebraic K-theory. The PI intends to extend results of previous work with Soule on motivic weight complexes of algebraic varities to the arithmetic case. In collaboration with J. Hu, he intends to use the deformation to the normal cone techniquess for Arakelov theory (developed by J. Hu in his thesis) to the case of stacks. He also intends to study questions in arithmetic geometry related to the Mordell conjecture using methods from differential algebra and Arakelov theory. This proposal deals with arithmetic geometry and algebraic K-theory. Arithmetic geometry is the study of the properties of equations with coefficients that are whole numbers, and using methods both from number theory (the study of properties of whole numbers) and algebraic geometry, which studies geometric figures that can be defined by the simplest of equations, namely polynomials. Algebraic K-theory studies properties of linear equations using methods from geometry. The questions and phenomena which arise from combining number theory and geometry serve as driving forces in much of contemporary mathematics research. Moreover, arithemetic geometry has contributed to many applications including cryptography and theoretical computer science doc9860 none This project focuses on some of the unexpectedly fruitful connections between proof theory and important open questions in computational complexity. In mathematical logic, Buss investigates proof theory and proof complexity, especially weak proof systems with close connections to open problems in computational complexity. He investigates aspects of theoretical computer science related to open questions such as the P versus NP problem and related problems in complexity including open problems in the mathematical foundations of cryptography. Buss studies the proof complexity of propositional systems such as Frege systems, cutting planes systems, Nullstellensatz proof systems, counting axioms, the polynomial calculus, and intuitionistic proof systems. He plans to extend previous work on bounded arithmetic and its relationships with proof complexity, computational complexity and cryptographic conjectures. The goals of this research are firstly to give bounds on proof size and on proof search algorithms, and to determine what kinds of computational content can be extracted from formal proofs; and secondly to investigate open problems in computational complexity from the viewpoint of mathematical logic. The work of this project is motivated by the desire to obtain a better understanding of open problems in computational complexity. These open problems include the P versus NP problem regarding the difficulty of solving a large range of combinatorial problems including scheduling and optimization; they also include establishing the possibility of mathematically secure cryptographic systems. It is commonly believed that many of the computational problems in NP and in cryptography are intractible, and it important for many applications that they be intractible. However, mathematical proofs of intractibility have not been obtained yet, in spite of extensive efforts. Buss works on aspect of these problems in the setting of mathematical logic and proof theory. His work addresses the logical and computational complexity of formal, symbolic proofs; this includes the analysis of proofs in a variety of proof systems corresponding to feasible computation, and the possibility of extracting computational information from proofs. This project will be supported by the Foundations program of the Division of Mathematical Sciences and the Theory of Computing program of the Division of Computer and Communications Research doc9861 none The proposer is going to study a number of interconnected combinatorial problems related, on the one hand, to exact or asymptotic enumeration of branched coverings of one surface by another and, on the other hand, to exact or asymptotic evaluation of various sums over partitions. These problems arise both from enumerative geometry of the moduli spaces of curves (and related moduli spaces) and from connection with random matrices. If solved, these problems will lead to important applications to algebraic geometry, ergodic theory, and other fields, and will also substantially further our present understanding of the interaction between geometry of the moduli spaces and combinatorics of random matrices and partitions doc9862 none ion allows the discovery of common features in widely different areas of mathematics, ranging from probability theory to combinatorics to algebraic geometry. This kind of work has been fruitful both in a better understanding of algebraic structures and in providing a background for investigations in database theory. In particular, Baldwin s work with his co-author Michael Benedikt of Lucent Technologies on `embedded finite model theory has found limits on the expressibility of database queries. Baldwin will continue his educational work - primarily focusing on developing innovative and effective ways to prepare mathematics teachers. The educational work is connected with two other NSF sponsored programs doc9863 none The proposed research is designed to advance the recent progress on nonlinear Hamiltonian PDE towards three goals: 1. Extend the local-in-time initial value methods to solve more complicated PDE. 2. Adapt the initial value techniques to treat initial-boundary value problems. 3. Construct a global-in-time theory of nonlinear Hamiltonian PDE. The proposal identifies specific problems whose solutions contribute to the three goals for which there are methods of attack emerging from the last decades spectacular progress. The studies for Goal 1 aim to extend the sharp 1-dimensional calculus techniques for proving multilinear estimates in Bourgain s Xs,b spaces by carrying out an incremental research plan, involving small Xs,b denominators, spatial anisotropy and vanishing parameters. A technique for recasting initial-boundary value problems as initial value problems with boundary forcing has recently been developed, in collaboration with Kenig. The range of applicability of this method is the main topic of the proposed investigations toward Goal 2. A reinterpretation of the L^2 conservation law for the KdV equation, obtained in collaboration with Keel, Staffilani, Takaoka and Tao, has led to a new method for showing global wellposedness by constructing almost conserved quantities using multilinear harmonic analysis and the local wellposedness machinery. The third thrust of the proposed research will exploit these quantities to understand the long-time behavior of nonlinear Hamiltonian PDE. No specific scientific or engineering application motivates the proposed studies; rather the intention is to contribute toward a general rigorous theory of nonlinear phenomena including turbulence, singularity formation, scattering and recurrence. The widespread applicability of Hamiltonian PDE, across diverse fields of current scientific and technological significance, demonstrates the central prominence of the proposed research to our science and engineering infrastructure. The proposed research is designed to advance the recent progress on nonlinear Hamiltonian PDE towards three goals: 1. Extend the local-in-time initial value methods to solve more complicated PDE. 2. Adapt the initial value techniques to treat initial-boundary value problems. 3. Construct a global-in-time theory of nonlinear Hamiltonian PDE. The proposal identifies specific problems whose solutions contribute to the three goals for which there are methods of attack emerging from the last decades spectacular progress. The studies for Goal 1 aim to extend the sharp 1-dimensional calculus techniques for proving multilinear estimates in Bourgain s Xs,b spaces by carrying out an incremental research plan, involving small Xs,b denominators, spatial anisotropy and vanishing parameters. A technique for recasting initial-boundary value problems as initial value problems with boundary forcing has recently been developed, in collaboration with Kenig. The range of applicability of this method is the main topic of the proposed investigations toward Goal 2. A reinterpretation of the L^2 conservation law for the KdV equation, obtained in collaboration with Keel, Staffilani, Takaoka and Tao, has led to a new method for showing global wellposedness by constructing almost conserved quantities using multilinear harmonic analysis and the local wellposedness machinery. The third thrust of the proposed research will exploit these quantities to understand the long-time behavior of nonlinear Hamiltonian PDE. No specific scientific or engineering application motivates the proposed studies; rather the intention is to contribute toward a general rigorous theory of nonlinear phenomena including turbulence, singularity formation, scattering and recurrence. The widespread applicability of Hamiltonian PDE, across diverse fields of current scientific and technological significance, demonstrates the central prominence of the proposed research to our science and engineering infrastructure doc9864 none With this renewal award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the continuing work of Dr. Frederick D. Lewis in the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The research is based on earlier studies of the spectroscopy and photochemistry or organic molecules. The relationship between molecular structure and the behavior of electronic states will be explored in three different systems: 1) one-dimensional arrays of pi stacked poly(arylurea) chromophores, 2) aromatic amines, and 3) unsaturated aromatic molecules that undergo photochemical cyclization reactions. This research in the area of organic photochemistry involves synthesis, structural studies using NMR and x-ray crystallography, and studies of excited state behavior using a combination of spectroscopy, computational methods, and product isolation and characterization. The work is expected to provide excellent training for the students involved, and could lead to the development of organic materials with applications as wires and sensors doc9865 none This project, which is divided into several parts, is concerned with several interrelated areas of algebraic geometry centered around the birational geometry and the Hodge theory of algebraic varieties. In the first part, the investigators intend to construct differentials on certain universal spaces arising in algebraic geometry, and apply these to the study of algebraic cycles. In the second part the investigators, in collaboration with D. Abramovich and K. Karu, intend to extend their previous work to the prove the strong factorization conjecture for birational maps. This conjecture says that any birational map between smooth complete varieties has a particularly simple structure: it is a sequence blow ups followed by a sequence of blow downs with smooth centers. In the third part, the investigators will apply the previously established weak factorization conjecture to compare the Hodge structure of two birationally equivalent minimal models. In the fourth part, one of the investigators intends to extend their previous vanishing theorems and apply them to the study of birational invariants. In the fifth part, one of the investigators will attempt to relate the Hodge theory of higher homotopy groups to the intersection theory of algebraic cycles. In the sixth part, one of the investigators intends to study a class of surface singularities, which are important for birational geometry, over fields of positive characteristic. In the sixth and final part, one of the investigators intends to extend the theory of toroidal embeddings by taking into account certain stratifications. Algebraic varieties are geometric objects which provide a rich set of models for a number of phenomena within mathematics as well as in neighboring fields of science such as physics and computer science. They have the advantage of being describable in finite terms, as solutions to a finite system of algebraic equations. However, these descriptions are often complicated and not unique; deciding when two such descriptions lead to equivalent, or even approximately equivalent, varieties is very difficult. Approximate equivalence is made precise by the notion of birational equivalence. One of the goals of this project is to study the finer structure of the birational equivalence relation. Another goal of this project is to introduce and study certain natural birational invariants, that is, measures of the geometric complexity of algebraic varieties. Some of these invariants count the number of harmonic (energy minimizing) objects associated to the algebraic variety. These two goals are related since the investigators expect that the fine structure of the birational maps will yield insights into the properties of these invariants doc9866 none This award is for the partial support of the conference in the field of Partial Differential Equations at the University of Arkansas. The conference will concentrate on the area of solutions of PDE s in periodic media. The conference will be a part of the Arkansas Spring Lecture Series and will attract researchers from other areas, such as Differential Geometry (Dmitri Burago) and Dynamical Systems (John Mather doc9867 none We investigate four major unsolved problems in or bordering on harmonic analysis. These are the Kakeya problem, the Lipschitz differentiation problem, the restriction problem, and global solvability for the Navier Stokes equation. For the Kakeya problem, we continue our work with Tao on improving exponents in the sums-differences approach. For the problem of differentiation by Lipschitz vector fields, we try to apply our work on maximal functions in arbitrary directions to understand what are the limitations on a counterexample and hopefully that none can exist. For the restriction problem, we try to apply the new results on Kakeya and to better understand Bourgain s machine for converting Kakeya results to ones about restriction. For Navier Stokes, we first discretize everything in the form of a kind of generalized wavelet coefficients. In work with Pavlovic, this has already produced a generalization of the Caffarelli-Kohn-Nirenberg theorem to the case of hyperdissipation. We hope from this point of view to discover a sort of local dispersion property for the cascading effect from the nonlinear term. Then we hope to tie in the Clay problem with a dyadic model in which this dispersion is a given. As might be imagined, we are unlikely to solve all these problems. Analysis concerns the proof of estimates on interesting systems by examing the contributions of all their parts. One such system is the Navier Stokes equation which governs the behaviour of incompressible viscous fluids. An important open problem is whether this equation starting with smooth initial data can develop singularities without a forcing term. This would akin to a cyclone beginning spontaneously in one s bathtub. It seems rather unlikely but the tools of analysis are not yet strong enough to rule it out. Our approach is to discretize the problem, that is to try to approximate the problem by one about a finite number of objects and investigate possible interactions of those objects by means of combinatorics. Most physically arising mathematics can be looked at this way because matter is not continuous but rather composed of particles. We will work on the above problem and some other important problems which may be approached with the same point of view doc9868 none After the spectral theorem it is difficult to think of a theorem that has had a more profound effect on the development of operator theory and its myriads of applications to mathematics and science than the Sz.-Nagy Dilation Theorem. The idea of representing a general operator in a specialized class of operators as a part of a nice operator in the class has had many successes and we seek to develop this point of view with a primary focus on problems in the theory of functions in one and several complex variables. A particular group of problems that we propose to attack involves the generalizations to several complex variables of some of the classical moment and interpolation problems on the unit disc such as the interpolation theorem of Nevanlinna and Pick and the moment theorems of Caratheodory and Herglotz. Another group involves deriving analogs of the theorem of Adamyan, Arov, and Krein on spaces more general than the classical Hardy space. Research intrinsic to operator theory that we will undertake includes issues involving model theory in one variable on nonsimply connected domains in the plane and in several variables on domains other than the bidisc. Operator Theory, the particular type of mathematics that we are proposing to investigate, has direct and concrete benefits for a number of areas of human endeavor. For example, the model theory aspects of our proposal all involve the generalization of the Commutant Lifting Structure which leads to an effcient algorithm for the discovery of oil from acoustical data taken on the surface of the earth. Other aspects would add to the theory of Linear Matrix Inequalities. LMI s, which currently are all the rage in several areas of engineering, are an extension of linear programming, a mathematics which has made possible not only the optimization of large scale resource allocation but the accurate prediction of economic markets as well. Finally, the particular branch of function theory we propose to study, forms the mathematical core of the recently developed H-infinity control theory, which has been used to design control systems for fusion reactions inside Tokamaks and feedback stabilization systems for the space shuttle doc9869 none Quigg Kaliszewski This is a proposal for the ninth West Coast Operator Algebra Seminar (WCOAS),to be held at Arizona State University on October 20 -21, . The WCOAS is a decade-long tradition among the operator algebraists in the western United States. The Seminar provides an invaluable opportunity for these researchers to stay abreast of their field, fosters and reinforces ties among the western universities, and provides young researchers with a forum in which to present their latest results and discuss them with senior mathematicians. The high concentration of operator algebraists in the western United States and Canada has been one of the main reasons for the success of the WCOAS doc9870 none Recently, we observed that organic semiconductor device shows strong bistable states with remarkably differing electrical conductivities when it is structure right. The transition from an electrically insulating state to a conducting state in the device is accompanied by a drastic increase in injection current by as much as six orders of magnitude. The retention of the high conductivity state was observed even after switching off the power. Furthermore, the low conductive states can be re-established by applying a negative voltage pulse. These discoveries pave the way for potential applications such as low-cost, large-area, electrically addressable high-density data storage devices, organic switches, and sensors. This newly invented organic device is significant for two reasons. First, this device uses organic insulators as the active material, thereby providing new options for organic electronic devices, which have been traditionally associated with organic semiconductors. Second, electronic memory is a very important component in all electronic devices such as computers, cell phones, PDAs etc. It is anticipated that the successful development of this device as memory cells will have a tremendous impact in the electronic industry. Unfortunately, the mechanism of this device, for example the sudden change in electrical conductivity at ~3V; and the reason behind the retention of the high conductivity state even after switching off the power, is not yet clearly understood. Our goal of this project is to gain the understanding of the organic bistable device, from both experimental and theoretical modeling approaches. Based on the obtained results, we will try to further improve device performance and to realize other applications doc9871 none The investigator will continue his research in enumerative and algebraic combinatorics. He feels that there are many opportunities for strengthening the myriad connections between combinatorics and other branches of mathematics. He will investigate how recent breakthroughs in the theory of total positivity can be applied to open problems concerning such topics as counting faces in cubical polytopes and counting stable sets in clawfree graphs. The investigator will also continue his research on the combinatorial properties of convex polytopes that have arisen in such areas as statistical inference and the representation theory of semisimple Lie algebras. In particular, he will investigate further some convex polytopes related to Kostant s partition function. He will in addition pursue a number of miscellaneous problems arising in the work of Kac, Kontsevich, Varchenko, and others. The field of combinatorics was first systematically investigated in the s and only recently has reached a high level of maturity. It is an area of mathematics that has close connections with many other subjects, ranging from algebra, geometry, and statistics within mathematics, andcomputer science, high-energy physics, chemistry, and most recently biology without. The investigator s primary interest is the development of connections between combinatorics and other areas of mathematics. He will investigate a number of problems that would continue the development of the connections between combinatorics and other branches of mathematics and that would lead to the development of tools that could be used by scientists outside of mathematics doc9872 none Putatunda The focus of the SGER grant is on a new, super-soft magnetic material with high creep strength at elevated temperatures. The alloy, iron with 10-20% aluminum, will use an innovative powder metallurgy processing route by simultaneous hot pressing and sintering. The iron-aluminum phase diagram indicates that iron with more than ten percent Al will not undergo the austenite to ferrite phase transformation. Furthermore, the addition of aluminum to iron allows for significant grain growth during sintering. Thus, it should be possible to produce a large grain size (grain diameters in excess of mm) in a super-soft magnetic material with extremely low coercivity, very high saturated magnetic induction, and very high permeability. Furthermore, the phase diagram indicates that in iron-aluminum alloys with 10-20% aluminum there is a likelihood of Fe3Al-type precipitates. These precipitates should provide barriers to magnetic domain wall movement, as well as obstacles to dislocation movement, resulting in a material with high creep strength at elevated temperatures. Iron and aluminum powders will be mixed in the requisite proportion and compacted. After compaction, the green product will be sintered at different temperatures and time periods to determine optimum processing conditions for a fully dense product. The magnetic and mechanical properties of the alloy will be characterized and compared with commercially available iron-silicon alloys and iron-phosphorus alloys. The influence of aluminum on grain growth and magnetic properties will be considered. Fine scale precipitates of Fe3Al will be produced in the matrix by a judicious mixture of cold working and annealing and subsequent quenching and aging processes. Successful processing will generate a new super soft magnetic material with excellent high temperature mechanical properties at low cost with very efficient magnetic performance and energy savings. %%% Soft magnetic materials are important engineering materials needed in power generation devices. These materials must have high magnetic permeability, low coercivity and high saturated magnetic induction. Moreover, they must have a narrow hysteresis loop. The soft magnetic materials generally have poor mechanical properties at elevated temperatures. Many industrial applications (e.g., rotors in high-speed generators, magnetic bearings in engines, auxiliary power units, etc.) require soft magnetic materials, which not only can retain their soft magnetism at high temperature but also can withstand high stress at elevated temperatures doc9873 none The increasing miniaturization of electronic devices has been the foundation of the electronics revolution. Similar trends ate being seen in the field of actuating devices. where the acronym MicroElectroMechanical Systems is quickly being replaced at its leading edge by NanoElectroMechanical Systems (NEMS). The ultimate scate for such devices will be the atomic scale. Nanoscale engineered materials will the building blocks of such devices [I]. Among these materials. nanotubes (NTs) provide many of the necessary properties required for NFMS: their geometry, extraordinary mechanical properties [2-6] ( which will allow GI-Iz mechanical resonance), novel electronic properties (metallic, semiconducting) [7-9]. and novel interfacial properties (atomically smooth, low friction)110, llj. We have recently discovered the atomic scale features in both the motion (friction)[1 I] and electrical properties of nanotube contacts [12]. These measured changes in response at the atomic scale in the dynamic electrical contact between NTs allow for a host of novel devices. These include high frequency devices, where the modulated signal depends on the relative velocity of the sliding contact, to atomic scale linear encoders in which the relative movement of a system can be measured to within a unit cell spacing. A necessary technology in the deployment of NT based NEMS will be a batch-fabrication process which includes NT integration. One solution to this problem is through NT growth processes. in which catalyst material is patterned on a substrate to produce desired integrated NI NEMS. Specifically, growth processes will have to be understood such that NTs of specific crystalline orientation, radius, and length can be grown in-plane within an integrated silicon based device structure. We propose a plan of research that combines both investigations into the basic mechanisms of novel NEMS devices, and growth techniques that make strides toward batch-fabrication of NT NEMS. The specific NEMS devices we have in mind exploit the atomic scale features of the dynamic contact between NT electrical leads, and the mechanical resonance properties of NTs. Ln our view, the idea of position and orientation dependence of electrical contacts is an aspect of NEMS devices that deserves attention. It is a unique property of the nanometer scale and should open up device applications that are unique to NEMS. In a micron scale contact, the transport properties are an average over many relative crystalline orientations of the contacting surfaces as well as defects etc. hi a nanometer scale contact. ncw behavior will be observed due to relative perfection and smoothness of the contacting surfaces [13] and thc ability to tune precisely the relative orientation of contacting atomic lattices. hi this case the atomic structure matters. We propose to create: 1. Voltage to frequency converter. The (M1-lz-GI-Iz) driving signal will be convened to a signal with 1- times the input frequency depending on the input amplitude 2. Gigahertz frequency mixer: Sum and difference frequencies will be generated from input M1-Iz signals 3. Atomic resolution linear encoder in an integrated. submicron device doc9874 none In heterogeneous distributed computing, a network of dissimilar machines is used to execute a given application in parallel. With the advent of advanced network technologies, the scale at which heterogeneous computing can be practicaly applied is growing to a global scale, thus making it possible to collect high performance computers across the globe into a single computational resource. Multiple users will be able to simulataneously use this computational resource to execute a variety of large, parallel applications. However, there are a number of problems to solve before this type of computing becomes a reality. Therefore this project proposes to develop effective matching and scheduling methods to allow multiple users to execute applications in a large, decentralized, failure-prone, heterogeneous computing environment. Due to the dynamic and uncertain nature of this environment, the algorithms that will be developed will use statistical techniques to allocate resources fairly in a highly dynamic system. The algorithms will be evaluated by simulations and also on a small testbed. There are three different aspects of this proposed work: 1. Methods will be developed to statistically obtain an estimate of the response time of a task on an arbitrary target machine. This will be accomplished by developing separate techniques to estimate the execution time, machine loads, and network loads. A method for estimating the execution time using data gathered from past executions of the task has already been developed. This method will be refined and similar stochastic methods will be developed for machine and network load estimation. 2. A dynamic matching and scheduling method for heterogeneous machines will be developed. This method will allow each application to make scheduling decisions without direct knowledge of the other applications executing in the environment. Each application will have to compete for the computational resources of the network. The scheduling heuristics will take into account the uncertainty in the stochastic estimates of the execution time and machine and network loads. 3. Finally, reliable scheduling algorithms based on either heuristic cost functions or evaluation of the reliability of applications will be developed. The heuristic cost functions developed will define the impact of a scheduling decision on the reliability of an application in time units. These algorithms will consider both the execution time and failure probability of applications while making scheduling decisions, and thus, will be capable of producing task assignments that improve both the performance and reliability of applications. In addition, algorithms which can trade performance for reliability of applications will be designed doc9875 none The focus of this work is (1) on principles and applications of manipulating gaseous Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC s) with laser light under realistic experimental conditions. The research will also focus (2) on modeling the loading of optical lattices using a BEC and (3) on studying the characteristics of a practical atom laser beam. The work will provide new capabilities for the investigation of practical atom lasers doc9876 none We propose an experimental and theoretical investigation of quantum interference current control (QUIC) in a number of large- and small-gap semiconductors. The investigations will include terahertz burst generation and detection using ultrashort laser pulses. We request funds for two graduate students and faculty summer salary. With prior NSF support, the basic theoretical concepts of the proposed experiments have been worked out, a well equipped, state-of-the-au ultrafast laser laboratory was set up, and preliminary experiments were conducted. With support committed by UNTvI NASA s PURSUE (Preparation for University Research of Students in Undergraduate Education) program, one to two undergraduate minority students will be involved in this project doc9877 none Crystallizable polymers in the thin film geometry will be studied using electrical and optical methods. Constraints on molecular mobility that arise from the thin film geometry will be investigated and compared to behavior observed in the bulk polymers. Materials chosen for the study are model systems having well-characterized molecular weights and tacticity, comprising isotactic polystyrene (i-PS), and miscible blends of isotactic with atactic polystyrene (a-PS). Effects of film thickness on the glass transition and cold-crystallization kinetics film thickness and root mean square end-to-end distance of the polymer chain will be determined for homopolymer i-PS and blends. In nanometer-scale thin films, optical methods measuring alignment layer relaxation, and surface studies using elevated temperature atomic force microscopy, will be used to corroborate the dielectric experiments. Ex-situ characterization of the films will include thickness measurement by profilometry, and surface structure analysis by scanning electron microscopy. Degree of crystallinity of thin films will be assessed using Fourier Transform infrared spectroscopy. In bulk-scale films, simultaneous wide and small angle X-ray scattering will be performed to assess structural parameters and to determine crystallization kinetics from the time development of scattered intensity. Differential scanning calorimetry and its temperature-modulated variant will be used to determine the glass transition temperature and degree of crystallinity of thicker films. %%% Thin polymer films are being used more frequently in technological applications, and it is therefore of great practical interest to understand the structure and properties of crystallizable polymer nanometer-scale films. This work will provide fundamental information about the molecular motions and crystallization processes in thin polymer films, which impact directly the material properties and performance characteristics of thin films doc9878 none During the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) to be held January 3-7 in Chicago, Illinois, the Division of Comparative Endocrinology will sponsor a mini-symposium on amphibian metamorphosis. This mini-symposium will concentrate on molecular mechanisms and hormonal control of metamorphosis. Metamorphosis consists of a series of postembryonic developmental steps that leads to the transformation of an aquatic tadpole into an often land-dwelling frog. This sequence of events is triggered and controlled by hormones. Although humans are direct developers, and thus do not undergo a metamorphosis, many of the same basic developmental processes occur in frogs and man. Amphibian metamorphosis provides an ideal animal model system to analyze, at the cellular and molecular level, how hormones orchestrate development. Concern over the status of amphibian populations has been mounting due to widespread reports of population declines and deformities in adult frogs. Recent reports of malformed frogs throughout the Great Lakes Region have focused concern on the effects of pollution on amphibian development. Both wildlife and human populations in the Great Lakes region and beyond are potentially at risk from the teratogenic effects of such pollutants. Because many of these pollutants can mimic or alter hormonal signaling there is a strong potential for disruption of basic developmental processes. Amphibians can serve both as indicator species of environmental contamination and powerful model systems for assessing potential deleterious effects of pollutants on wildlife and humans. In this symposium, experts in various scientific disciplines and whose central theme of investigation is amphibian metamorphosis will take a multidisciplinary approach to analyzing this complex process. Speakers will address the molecular, evolutionary and hormonal aspects of amphibian metamorphosis. This synthesis of scientific expertise from different disciplines will advance understanding of this fundamental developmental process and may advance our understanding of the physiological problems underlying declines of some amphibian populations doc9879 none Sinte Gleska University will conduct Development-level activities with local BIA and public schools. SGU has a history of involvement with NSF - and other funded educational improvements projects, including the Tribal College RSI. The development period of twelve months will focus on systems approach to change, data collection, and addressing the achievement gap. It will also focus on building collaborative partnerships and community involvement doc9880 none The investigators will study major heliospheric pickup ion sources in the solar wind, their propagation and acceleration. Pickup ions are generated from neutral atoms when they become ionized and begin to gyrate in a plasma s magnetic field. In the case of the solar wind, pickup ions born from slowly moving neutrals acquire an initial speed nearly equal to the solar wind speed as they are transported out with the solar wind s magnetic field. The pickup process thereby creates a more energetic and therefore more easily observed population of ions that may be used to infer properties of the neutral environment from which they were created. In the heliosphere, there are three main populations of pickup ions: interstellar pickup ions from interstellar neutrals, inner source pickup ions created by interactions between interplanetary dust and the solar wind, and discrete source pickup ions from comets, planets, and other discrete sources. The investigators will characterize near-solar pickup ion sources by modeling distribution functions and hydrodynamic properties of pickup ions produced from near-solar and interstellar sources. They will also study the relative significance of near-solar source pickup ions, interstellar source pickup ions, and solar wind particles as seed populations for energetic particles and anomalous cosmic rays doc9881 none A Hele--Shaw cell consists of two horizontal, slightly separated, parallel plates, forming a 2-dimensional strip and filled with a viscous fluid (say for example oil). The oil is then removed by forcing a less viscous fluid (say water) into the channel. After an initial formation of several invading fingers, the penetrating fluid reaches a steady state and takes the form of a single finger. Mathematically one seeks a harmonic function within the set occupied by oil and vanishing on the set occupied by water. On the free boundary separating the two fluids, one imposed a kinematic condition guaranteeing conservation of mass. Saffman and Taylor in the late 50 s computed explicitly a family of profiles of the invading finger, parameterized by the asymptotic upstream width of the finger. Experimental data however show that such a width is always 1 2 of the width of the channel. The mathematical and physical mechanism by which Nature selects the solution corresponding to the value 1 2 of the parameter, is not well understood. We have shown that among all the Saffman-Taylor explicit solutions, the one corresponding to the value 1 2 of the parameter, maximizes the thrust of the fluid across the channel at the tip of the invading finger. The problem, which is non--variational, is recast into one that has a variational form, through a Baiocchi-type transformation. The non-variational nature of the problem, set in an unbounded domain, is accounted for by a precise description of the asymptotic behavior at infinity of the solutions of the corresponding non-linear elliptic equation. Such estimation is achieved through non-standard applications of the Harnack Inequality and the identification of the nose of the finger. We have also shown that for the value 1 2 of the parameter the motion of the finger occurs by mean curvature. An effort will be made to connect and understand these two features. In another direction, we will investigate local behavior and uniqueness of solutions to the Buckley--Leverett system. This is a system of two degenerate (in the principal part) and singular (in the lower order terms) of parabolic equations. The degeneracy yields a hyperbolic-parabolic behavior. Kruzkov observed that uniqueness of boundary value problems for such a system is linked to the regularity of the solutions. We intend to use recent ideas developed in connection with hyperbolic--parabolic problems and our long standing investigations on the regularity of solutions for degenerate evolution equations, to investigate the uniqueness of such solutions. More theoretically, we will continue our investigations on Harnack--type estimates for solutions of degenerate parabolic equations and quasi--minima in the Calculus of Variations. The Hele-Shaw problem simulates the penetration of oil into water. It s importance stems from its applications to the recovery of oil trapped into layered rocky soil (hence the 2-dimensional model). Physically one observes that the asymptotic width of the penetrating finger is 1 2 of the width of the channel. The natural questions we are attempting to understand is why Nature selects such a value and what s the underlying mathematical and physical reason for such a specific selection to occur. On the same realm of physical application one asks whether two fluids one penetrating into another (Buckley-Leverett system) do so in a unique manner, and if not, what is the reason the a possible lack of uniqueness. The supporting mathematics to such physical issues involves fine estimates of the local behavior of solutions of degenerate and or singular evolution partial differential equations, such as for example the Harnack inequality doc9882 none The project is an investigation into the representation theory and cohomology of finite groups over fields of prime characteristic. The Principal Investigator is particularly interested in the homological properties of representations which underlie the basic module theory. He plans to consider a question open for more than 20 years on the classification of a specific type of modules that play an important role in the larger category theory of the modules, and also to look the structure of the cohomology ring of the group which acts on the fundamental homological constructions. Carlson and his collaborators have shown that many facets of the module category are controlled by the group cohomology of p-subgroups. The proposed work would build on this foundation. Other projects involve investigations of the structure of module categories of finite groups and the general theory of extensions of modules. Results from the project could be of interest in the area of algebraic topology as well as in representation theory. Professor Carlson plans to continue his development of computer algebra systems for experimentation with modules and homomorphisms. He intends to expand his collection of programs for the computation of group cohomology and other aspects of the module theory. The programs are also being rewritten for more general applications in the area of the representation theory of algebras. In basic terms the Principal Investigator will look at certain types of algebraic systems together with the actions of operators. Such a system is called a module and it might have many dimensions in the sense of depending on many variable. The operations may represent something like the geometric rotation of points on a space. The project will concentrate on the classification and properties of modules whose associated operators have a preset collection of interactions. A significant part of the project is the development of computational techniques and software for analyzing the structure and properties of modules. Groups of transformations on modules and spaces are basic objects in modern mathematics and arise in many applications of the mathematics. Some of the methods of the study are closely related to geometric techniques used in topology doc9883 none In this proposal funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Veronica Bierbaum of the University of Colorado will pursue a program of research on the kinetics, mechanisms, and thermochemistry of gas phase ion-molecule reactions. Tandem flowing afterglow-selected ion flow tube instruments will be used to study the gas-phase ion thermochemistry of peroxyls, hexamethylene tetramine, nobornadiene, and pentalene. Nucleophilic substitution and elimination reactions, their competition, solvation effects, and solvent kinetic isotope effects will be examined. Reactions of nitrogen and oxygen with many different ions will be investigated, with special emphasis on anion chemistry, novel product ions, and isotope exchange. Negative and positive chemical ionization techniques for volatile organic detection will be extended to studying rate constants, branching ratios, H D exchange and CID fragmentation patterns. Much of the thermochemical data gathered in this program has relevance to important combustion and atmospheric processes. The sources of high concentrations of oxygenated hydrocarbons in the earth s troposphere are not currently understood, but their impact on atmospheric chemistry is significant. The characterization of biogenic emissions from a variety of growing and harvested plants addresses this critical problem in atmospheric chemistry. The experimental results from this research will also contribute to the fundamental understanding of reaction kinetics and thermochemistry and will provide valuable intercomparison with theory doc9884 none This work is directed toward the goal of generating maximally entangled photonic states, either by use of a four-wave mixing device operating in a nonlinear regime or by coupling a pair of interferometers via a Kerr medium. Both methods require media with large nonlinear susceptibilities. Methods will be developed to generate such susceptibilities using the techniques of electromagnetically induced transparency doc9885 none This award provides funds to enable purchase of storage phosphor screens and a phosphorimaging device that can be used in combination to locate and measure radioactive biological macromolecules. Such devices have become essential instrumentation for a large variety of procedures in the qualitative and quantitative analysis of proteins and nucleic acids, typically following separation procedures that make use gel electrophoresis. Latent images, produced by ionizing radiation emitted by the radioactive biomolecules, are captured by the storage phosphor screens which are then scanned by the phosphorimaging device. The resultant image can be stored in digital format to permit image display, analysis and if required, the preparation of publication-quality images of the data. The use of storage phosphor screen and phosphorimager replaces the use of conventional X-ray film and eliminates the need for development and scanning of film. The imager can also be used to detect molecules chemically labeled with fluorescent chromophores without the need for screens. The instrumentation will serve 5 major users and 3 minor users in interdisciplinary research and education efforts at both the undergraduate and graduate level. The requested equipment will be housed in a central location in close proximity to the research laboratories of all the major users. The availability of such instrumentation will have an enormous impact on the quality and volume of the research being performed by the user groups, including graduate students and participants in an NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates - Site project. The experimental problems being investigated by the user groups include developmental regulation of drosophila and tetrahymena gene expression, studies of thyroid hormone receptor m-RNA, and analysis of yeast mitochondria doc9886 none I intend over the next three years to understand how hybrid objects, made partly of configurations spaces and partly of bary-center spaces and or of a collection of unstable manifolds of critical points arise in Yamabe-type problems as well as in contact form geometry. I also would like to make out of the homology which I have defined for contact forms (on a space of dual Legendrian curves) a practical tool. Singular solutions arise in a natural way in several fields of Science (Physics: Ginsburg - Landau, liquid crystals, biology, chemistry etc). Smooth solutions are variational solutions which also arise in a natural way, in the same fields, but through a different process (extremization of kinetic plus potential energy in Physics...) I intend to understand at least partly what are the bridges connecting these two processes doc9887 none In recent years. new applications such as large area conformal displays, multi-color organic displays. fault-tolerant terra-byte memories, large area solar cells, conformal electronic sensors for biological applications etc. have demanded that active electronic devices be grown on plastic films. With the exception of organic LED s, almost all such devices use amorphous Si as the active materiaL However, a-Si material suffers from low carricr mobilities, and poor stability. Therefore, the ability to grow thin film electronic devices in cri stalline Si-based materials on plastic substrates may provide both better performance and greater stability in these applications. Such a development would also allow one to grow c-Si devices on polyimide layers, which are widely used as planarizing insulators in standard c-Si wafer-based device technology, and thereby allow three dimensional device architecture. The development of thin film crystalline devices would be very useful for efficient integration of organic LED s with driver circuits on a polymer substrate. It is the objective of this proposal to develop hi2h performance crystalline Si- based electronic devices on plastic substrates. The proposed work is based on our recent success, under a NSF SGER grant, in being able to deposit high quality c-Si films on polyimide. and making proof-of-concept c-Si solar cells in them. We plan a comprehensive research project to improve the electronic properties of the film and to make novel TFT devices in thcse films. The project embraces the following tasks: o Control of crystallinity of the films by using reactive ion beams of H, Cl and F during growth in a novel, well-controlled ECR reactor. o Systematic investigation of structural properties by using Raman, TEM. SEM and x-ray diffraction. o Systematic investigation of electronic properties by using DLTS, Hall measurements and capacitance spectroscopy of defect levels. o Study of growth of stable field-oxides (gate insulators in MOS devices) by controlled plasma-oxidation with F and 0 and study of oxide semiconductor interfaces, using capacitance and conductance techniques. o Fabrication of horizontal TFT devices. o Measurement of properties of these devices, including channel mobility and stability after charge pumping and charge injection. o Fabrication of novel proottof. concept vertical TFT which may not be affected by grain boundaries. The effort relies on using our past experience in material growth, material analysis, device fabrication and device design and analysis. The facilities exist to carry out this work. A significant educational component is planned, including graduate student and undergraduate student involvement. The undergraduate students will be drawn from our on-going NSF-REU site program. A significant minority student research experience is also planned. Women students, particularly at the high school level, will also participate in the program. The program will lead to development of new courses in this area, thereby integrating research and education. The project has a potentially significant impact on industry. We have planned a strong collaboration with a company, Micron technologies, which is expected to provide a cash grant for supporting additional graduate students in this research area doc9888 none Research in theoretical elementary particle physics will include studies of: (i) the partonic structure of the nucleon within the framework of perturbative quantum chromodynamics, (ii) the origin of electroweak interaction symmetry breaking; and (iii) observable signatures of new physics, such as supersymmetric particles and extra dimensions. Partons are fundamental constituents (i.e. quarks and gluons) of observed nuclear particles, such as protons and neutrons. Electroweak interaction symmetry breaking is intimately related to the origin of masses of fundamental particles. New physics scenarios, such as supersymmetry and extra dimensions, if discovered, could extend our understanding of the extremely successful Standard Model of elementary particle physics to a much deeper level doc9889 none The principal investigator pursues the representation theory of p-adic groups, centered on the structural theory of the p-adic groups via Bruhat-Tits theory, and the method of restriction on compact open subgroups. Specifically, combining his work on the construction of supercuspidal representations, explicit computations of Bruhat-Tits buildings and refined minimal K-types, the investigator studies refined types, Hecke algebra isomorphisms, and other related topics. The representation theory of p-adic groups, being an amazing theory in its own right, plays a prominent role in number theory and automorphic forms, hence is fundamental to applications of number theory to computing and cryptography. Recently there have been exciting new advances, including the investigator s construction of supercuspidal representations, which was considered most unreachable objects. These advances open up new questions, which is to be pursued in this project doc9850 none In this project, the principal investigator pursues a research program in nonlinear partial differential equations, the calculus of variations and singular perturbation theory. The research topics come from three applied settings: Ginzburg-Landau type models for superconductivity, von Karman type models for thin film blistering, and a model in micromagnetics. In the area of superconductivity, the P.I. will focus on the response of samples to large magnetic fields, with particular attention paid to the bifurcation from the normal state to a superconducting state. In the area of thin film blisters, the P.I. will investigate the nature of instabilities of the blistered region through the analysis of various dynamical models for blister growth and thin film growth. Finally, in the area of micromagnetics, the P.I. will analytically explore a model thought to capture a new kind of magnetic wall structure associated with a geometric constriction within the sample. This project concerns the behavior of various materials when subjected to outside fields or when forced to take on specific shapes. The energy of these systems is generally described through a function, often called an `order parameter, whose values indicate what state is taken on by the material under a given set of circumstances (such as geometry, applied fields, etc.). Through this type of study, one hopes to gain an understanding of what shapes are optimal for a given sample in order to enhance or diminish various physical effects. For example, in the case of a superconductor, one hopes to learn which shapes are most conducive to producing a supercurrent that conducts without losses due to resistance. The relevant mathematical tools come from the calculus of variations and from the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations, as well as from methods of asymptotic analysis as applied to the previou doc9891 none XML is becoming the principal medium for data exchange over the Web, and for information integration in general. Increasing amounts of public and private data are described in XML while more legacy sources (e.g., relational databases) offer public XML views. The feasibility of many applications that have emerged with the growth of XML on the Web requires new and complex query optimization techniques. The goal of this research project is to develop a chase & backchase optimization method for XML queries. Based on chasing with constraints and incorporating cost-based optimization, the method brings together strategies such as use of indexes, use of materialized views, semantic optimization and join scan minimization, allowing optimizations that depend on non-trivial interactions between these strategies. Particular attention is given to the challenges posed by XML document order and by regular path expressions in queries. This project is expected to result in a theoretical foundation and a practical framework for defining and using indexes, materialized views and complex constraints in XML query processing systems. The practical framework will be demonstrated through a publicly available software prototype appropriate for teaching about XML query systems and for supporting related research projects doc9892 none This project, conducted with the collaboration of co-investigator Ian M. Brooks, is motivated by the need for a better understanding of mixing processes at the top of the marine boundary layer. During the summer months, the West Coast of the United States is a region of widespread and persistent stratocumulus clouds. The distribution of the clouds is highly variable and difficult to forecast accurately because of the extreme sensitivity of the predicted cloudiness to changes in the boundary conditions at cloud top. The clouds are limited in vertical development by a temperature inversion. Whether they persist or dissipate is determined in part by the rate of entrainment of dry air from above the inversion into the cloudy air. The purpose of the project is to investigate the mixing process using existing remote-sensing and in-situ data. In the summer of , the C-130 research aircraft operated by the National Center for Atmospheric Research flew a series of eleven research flights off the coast of northern California and Oregon. Measurements included high-resolution, downward-pointing lidar observations of the boundary layer structure and aircraft traverses through the boundary layer, measuring the atmospheric stability, wind, and turbulence. This study goes beyond the original intention of the experiment by focusing on the effects of wind shear at the inversion level on the turbulence and mixing processes. The result will improve insight on the relative importance of shear and stability on entrainment doc9893 none This award is for the partial support of the conference in the field of theory of Banach spaces and Operator Theory. The list of topics is very broad and includes many important new directions in the field, such as Banach lattices, noncommutative function spaces and also classical topics such as spaces of analytic functions, interpolation in Banach spaces, geometry of convex bodies doc9894 none The project will develop quantitative tools to analyze the large-scale tracer transport in both models and the atmosphere. Numerical models of atmospheric chemistry and transport are being increasingly used to understand the interactions between various atmospheric regions, e.g., between troposphere and stratosphere, and the Tropics and midlatitudes. Since trace gases do not directly impact atmospheric motion, they reveal the movement of air parcels. The climatological pathways of the air parcels and the dynamical mechanisms determining the pathways are not known with great certainty at this time. Dr. Bowman will develop a diagnostic tool for analyzing tracer transport, by estimating the Green s (or influence) function for the tracer conservation equation. Dr. Bowman will construct this function from particle trajectories computed from observed (reanalysis) and NCAR Community Climate Model simulated winds. Bowman s project is unique in view of its focus on transport dynamics of the troposphere (as opposed to the stratosphere doc9895 none This award will support a research effort aimed at measuring the angular correlation between neutron spin and the emission direction of the electron following beta decay of the neutron. The experiment will utilize ultra-cold neutrons at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center. The goal is ultimately to provide an order-of-magnitude in the precision to which this asymmetry is known. This measurment, coupled with ongoing measurements of the neutron lifetime, can provide sensitive tests of the electroweak standard model, as well as improved values of the weak axial form factor of the nucleon. The research effort contains an exceptionally diverse collection of nuclear and atomic experimental techniques, at a scale where a Ph.D. student can have a substantial impact upon the course of the research doc1161 none This award is for an exploratory operation to investigate mineralogic changes in Holocene and modern speleothems from caves in the Seito River Valley, Nepal, in order to increase understanding of late Holocene Indian summer monsoon variability. In well- vented, dolomitic caves, calcite stalagmites indicate humid conditions while aragonite stalagmites record relatively arid cave conditions and accompanying in-cave evaporation. In many cases, deposition of calcite formed during precipitation-laden summer monsoons alternates with aragonite formed from reduced drip rates at the end or between monsoons. In order to better quantify the relationship between changes in speleothem mineralogy and climate, the project will perform cage fluid chemical studies (elemental and isotopic) and elemental analyses of the speleothems, as well as increase the geographic coverage of sampled caves doc9897 none It is intended to provide a theoretical framework and numerical tools for solving the three body recombination problem and other related processes. This is the situation in which three atoms simultaneously collide, forming an atom and a diatomic molecule, with some of the energy liberated transferred to the rotational and vibrational degrees of freedom of the molecule, the remainder to translational kinetic energy. An important application occurs in Bose-Einstein condensation, where losses from the trap due to three body recombination limit the density achievable in condensates doc9898 none Nicholas J. Kuhn Professor Kuhn has a long record of developing methods to solve interesting problems in homotopy theory, K-theory, and representation theory. The goal of the largest part of this project is to connect new polynomial resolutions of classic function spaces to other things: model categories of structured spectra, equivariant stable homotopy, classial loop space theory, and periodic homotopy. These connections will be used to calculate previously inaccessible cohomological invariants of both such function spaces and infinite loop spaces. A second part of the work is a continuation of the study of the generic representation theory of finite fields. In particular, from his homotopical K-theoretic point of view, he is studying his newly discovered lattices of generalized Schur algebras, with an eye towards gaining insight about the modular representations of the finite permutation groups, and the finite general linear matrix groups. Homotopy theory, K-theory, and representation theory are mathematical subjects in which one is trying to discover, and ultimately classify, fundamental building blocks of various sorts of mathematical structure. (This is quite analogous to a chemist studying simple molecular configurations, and how these can be assembled in more complex ways.) Homotopy is concerned with deformations of geometric objects such as higher dimensional surfaces. A sample hard problem is to understand the `shape of all continuous functions from a sphere (surface of a ball) to itself. Representation theory is concerned with the algebraic symmetries of more rigid and discrete objects such as configurations of lines and planes. A sample hard problem is to understand all the basic ways in which the set of n by n matrices of 0 s and 1 s can act on strings of 0 s and 1 s. Finally K-theory is a sophisticated hybrid of the two. Professor Kuhn is studying new connections relating these subjects, by developing and using a variety of state-of-the-art algebraic and homotopy theoretic tools doc9899 none This research investigates the generation and synthetic applications of short-lived reactive intermediates, including 1,3-dipoles, ortho-quinodimethanes, alpha-keto carbocations, beta-trimethylsilyl- and beta-alkoxy-substituted carbocations. Both electrochemical and chemical means will be utilized to generate the intermediates. The use of microemulsions and or ionic liquids may prove to have advantages over classical solvents as media for organic electrochemical reactions. In addition, there is a potential benefit to society if new green electrochemical methods are realized from this research. With this renewal award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Professor Albert J. Fry in the Department of Chemistry at Wesleyan University. Professor Fry s research investigates the generation and reactivity of a number of short-lived organic intermediates. In particular, the proposed electrocatalytic regeneration of hydrogen iodide as a reducing agent and the electrocatalytic oxidation has the potential to lead to the development of new, environmentally friendly reactions. These reactions could become new environmentally benign and efficient industrial processes doc9900 none In the study of local rings of equicharacteristic p, the tight closure has proved very useful, This closure also extends nicely to local rings of equicharacteristic zero. Unfortunately this closure does not naturally extend to mixed characteristic rings. This project is designed to fill this void. In earlier work, the principal investigator defined four variants of an extended plus closure. As the name suggests, these closures are based upon the plus closure of an ideal, the set of elements which are in the extension of the ideal in some integral extension of the original ring. In the earlier work, a number of properties of the closures were demonstrated, In this project, additional properties will be demonstrated, While the benefits of this project will probably not be restricted to these, the objectives are the properties which shall allow the extended plus closure to fill the role of tight closure. Assuming the program is successful, the following will be demonstrated. Ideals in regular local rings will be shown to be closed. The colon-capturing property will be proved. The persistence property will be proved - an element in the closure of an ideal will remain in the closure upon taking homomorphic images. It should also be shown that an element which is not in the closure of an ideal of a local ring will also not be in the closure when the ideal is extended to the completion. A successful project will have major ramifications for the homological understanding of mixed characteristic rings. Among other things, this will imply the truth of the Direct Summand Conjecture. One of the most fundamental subjects in algebra is the understanding of ideals and modules in local rings. For those local rings which contain a field, tight closure has evolved as a way to give a unified presentation - and a simplified one - for many of the known properties of these objects. As a natural byproduct, it has also led to the discovery of new properties. Understanding of local rings which do not contain a field has always lagged behind. The principal investigator has proposed several closely related and highly promising candidates to play the role of tight closure in the alternate setting. In this project, the investigator will attempt to determine to what extent these new closures fill the void doc9901 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Barbara Imperiali, of the Department of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is studying the structure, association properties, and function of mini-protein motifs. A 29-residue mini-motif containing a disulfide link will be rationally designed to a disulfide-free motif, and a biological strategy for evolving 23- and 29-residue motifs will be used to develop mini-motifs including only the 20 encoded amino acids, rather than relying on one or two D-amino acids currently used as turn stabilizing agents. New methods, including the use of fluorescent reporter groups and amino acids with solvatochromic properties, will be implemented to permit the discovery of peptide oligomers with discrete quaternary structure. Finally, Professor Imperiali will explore the possible function of these mini-motifs in the molecular recognition and sensing of small molecules such as fluorescent organic species and fluorescently labeled mono- and disaccharides. Proteins (polypeptides), comprised of long chains of interconnected amino acids, play myriad biochemical roles. Their specific function is critically dependent on the three dimensional structure adopted by the polypeptide chain, yet the factors responsible for protein folding are still at best incompletely understood. Through the design, synthesis, and study of small polypeptides, Professor Barbara Imperiali, of the Department of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, is shedding light on the factors responsible for the formation of particular protein folding motifs. Her studies also explore the possibility that these mini-motifs could serve as scaffolds to permit the recognition and sensing of small organic molecules, including sugars, leading in the longer term to the design of peptide-based chemosensing agents doc9902 none Prop # PI Steven C. Rabalais This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessel Pelican operated by the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON) and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Steven Rabalais is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire life rafts, a clean van through University of Delaware s group purchase (no monetary award for LUMCON), and funds to lead a group purchase for workboats doc9903 none The research will primarily focus on three problem areas: (i) the noninvasive detection of faults (cracks) in homogeneous media, (ii) near-optimal configurations of large numbers of sampling points on a sphere, and (iii) the determination of near-optimal sampling points on certain curves. Regarding (i), the goal is to develop an efficient algorithm (program) that utilizes only boundary data to determine the existence and location of cracks inside a conducting material. Concerning (ii), we shall investigate point sets on the sphere that arise in the structural analysis of large molecules, and also serve as well distributed locations (eg. on Earth) for sampling climate data for global weather models. Regarding (iii), we shall explore point sets on certain curves that can be used for geometric design and data sampling purposes doc9904 none Duran This award for a planning visit to France involves scientists and administrators from the Universities of Florida, North Carolina and Texas in the US and the Universities of Bordeaux, Paris and Strasbourg in France. The goal is to prepare an international IGERT (Integrative Graduate Education, Research and Training) proposal in advanced chemical concepts, which will be submitted to the - IGERT competition. The proposed IGERT program s goal is to provide extensive international experience and a multidisciplinary training program to US and French Ph.D. students, possibly leading to a joint Ph.D. degree. The US team and French counterparts will plan the science and training areas of the program and hold discussions on degree equivalence, residency requirement, tuition waivers, and other questions related to the development of a dual Ph.D. or international Ph.D. program. This award represents the US side of a joint planning visit. The National Science Foundation will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US team. The French Ministry of Research will provide similar funding to the French team for a reciprocal visit to the United States doc9905 none Funding is granted to assist in holding a conference on Structural Ceramics and Ceramic Composites for High Temperature Applications in Seville, Spain, October 7-12, , sponsored by the United Engineering Foundation. The conference will encompass five sequential sessions on Modeling of High Temperature Mechanical Properties, New Thinking about Silicon Nitride Deformation, New Developments in SiC-based Materials, New Developments in Oxide Materials, and Environmental Effects on Non-Oxide Structural Ceramics. Each of these sessions attempts to address areas that are both timely and that have not been the subject of recent conferences. The modeling session will focus on new microstructure-based models for deformation The session on silicon nitride will attempt to link recent work on internal friction to that of the recently developed non-traditional deformation models. The session on Environmental Effects will bring together experts interested in solving the recently recognized susceptibility of non-oxide ceramics to degradation in high-temperature, high-velocity, water-containing environments. This problem effectively blocks widespread adoption of nitrides and carbides in high-temperature engines, an area of research for more than 30 years. The session on new developments in SiC-based materials will have a large component on the new so-called Eco-ceramics and biomorphic ceramics--silicon carbides with microstructures either fabricated from or inspired by natural materials. The session on oxide ceramics is roughly equally divided between superplastic behavior and the deformation of directionally solidified eutectics. Although superplasticity has been around for quite some time as a topic in and of itself, it has resisted complete explanation. %%% Over the past thirty years outstanding efforts and resources have been devoted to research in ceramics, particularly for high-temperature structural applications such as turbine blades, heat exchangers, and diesel engine components. Improved fabrication procedures and novel materials have resulted, understanding of the properties-microstructure relationships has been achieved, and tentative models have been proposed, all leading to a better knowledge of the fundamentals and potential applications of ceramics in modern technology. Fracture, creep, slow-crack growth, and anelasticity are important mechanical properties at high-temperatures. These properties are strongly sensitive to environment (atmosphere, temperature, etc.) so understanding their interaction with the environment is particularly appropriate. Furthermore, it has also been six years since the previous United Engineering Foundation Conference on Plastic Deformation of Ceramics, held in Snowbird, Utah, in August of . This conference united a number of researchers, and there has not been a similar conference since then doc9906 none This work will exploit recent advances in atomic de Broglie wave interferometry for precise measurements of rotation and for new tests of the Equivalence Principle. The potential impact of Bose-Einstein condensed sources on future precision measurements will be experimentally assessed through application of atomic AC Josephson effects to sensitive and precise measurements of acceleration and h m (the ratio of Planck s constant to atomic mass), and through the study of squeezed many-body atomic states in the context of achieving statistical sensitivities below the atom shot-noise limit. The dynamic evolution of entangled many-body quantum states will be studied in connection with this latter goal doc9907 none Starting with the work of Katz and Serre and developed by Hida one has seen that modular forms naturally live in families and that this point of view has vast arithmetic applications. In particular, these ideas have been applied by Wiles and Taylor toward a proof Fermat s Last Theorem and by Buzzard and Taylor toward new cases of Artin s conjecture. They instigated Mazur s theory of deformation spaces of residual representations which was pivotal in the aforementioned work of Taylor-Wiles. We have shown with Mazur that there is a natural curve called the eigencurve of finite slope forms whose properties have already shed light on some of the previous topics. This curve maps into the above deformation space but its image is still very mysterious. With William Stein we have shown that some points in the deformation space associated to modular forms of infinite slope are in the topological closure of the image of the eigencurve and some are not. Our research is directed at a better understanding of the image of the eigencurve. This is a proposal in the area of mathematics called arithmetic algebraic geometry; this is where the techniques and questions of number theory merge with the techniques and questions of algebraic geometry. The main focus of this research is to better understand a particular special kind of algebraic geometric curve, called the eigencurve, which is intimately and directly connected with a continuously varying collection of deep and important number theoretic data. Understanding the link between the eigencurve and its corresponding number theoretic data will advance the field of number theory, which in turn provides the underpinning for most of modern cryptography and digital security doc9908 none Steel is working in the theory of canonical inner models for large cardinal hypotheses, and in descriptive set theory. In inner model theory, he has focussed on questions related to the fundamental iterability problem, and on questions concerning how to construct inner models in various situations so as to obtain consistency-strength lower bounds. He is particularly interested in obtaining large cardinal strength from the Proper Forcing Axiom, from the failure of Jensen s square principle at a singular cardinal, and from the failure of the Unique Branches Hypothesis. In descriptive set theory, Steel is working on various questions related to the structure of models satisfying strong forms of determinacy. Strong axioms of infinity, or as they are more often called, large cardinal hypotheses, have been a focal point of work in set theory and the foundations of mathematics for thirty or forty years, for at least two reasons. First, large cardinal hypotheses can be used to decide in a natural way many questions which cannot be decided on the basis of the commonly accepted system of axioms for mathematics, and second, large cardinal hypotheses provide a way of organizing and surveying all possible natural extensions of this commonly accepted system. One important way to study large cardinal hypotheses is to construct canonical minimal inner models in which these hypotheses are true. Such models admit a systematic, detailed analysis of their internal structure which makes them an invaluable technical tool in both sorts of application of large cardinal hypotheses. At the moment, we have a good theory of canonical inner models satisfying ``There is a Woodin cardinal , and even slightly stronger large cardinal hypotheses. A fundamental open problem, one of the most important open problems in set theory, is to extend this theory to models satisfying ``There is a supercompact cardinal . Steel is working in this direction doc9909 none The RECOMB conference series is an annual conference, now in its fifth year, which meets at various cities around the world. The subject area, computational biology and bioinformatics, is rapidly growing in scientific importance and impact. The conference organizers are committed to supporting travel to the conference of people at the beginning of their careers, especially Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows. The support for student travel expenses will result in exposing new workers in the area to the newest, best research doc9910 none Alexander This award provides partial funding for U.S. ocean scientists, particularly those in the academic research community, to participate in the activities of the North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES). This organization was established in to promote and coordinate marine scientific research in order to advance knowledge of living marine resources, land-ocean and atmosphere-ocean interactions, ecosystem components and processes, resource usage, ocean response to global weather and climate change, and human impacts in the North Pacific. Members presently include Canada, China, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the United States. Participation by U.S. scientists in Annual Meetings, scientific committee working groups and workshops, will also be funded through this award doc9911 none Deering This award to University of Delaware provides instrumentation to update and expand the oceanographic research capabilities of the research vessel Cape Henlopen, a ship operated by the University s College of Marine Studies as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS) research fleet. The CTD and vehicle spare parts supported here will both be used with a towed undulating vehicle for 3-dimensional characterization of physical, chemical and biological properties of the water column. These improvements will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists using the ship in their research during and future years doc9875 none The focus of this work is (1) on principles and applications of manipulating gaseous Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC s) with laser light under realistic experimental conditions. The research will also focus (2) on modeling the loading of optical lattices using a BEC and (3) on studying the characteristics of a practical atom laser beam. The work will provide new capabilities for the investigation of practical atom lasers doc9913 none Recent technological advances in wireless networks and portable information appliances have engendered the new paradigm of mobile computing, enabling users carrying portable devices to access and update data regardless of their physical location or movement behavior. However, the use of this technology will remain limited unless we develop the necessary concepts, theory and infrastructure that can seamlessly integrate mobility and disconnection into everyday networked computing. Extensive research is needed in order for mobile computing to become pervasive. Current research efforts do not support sufficient automation and management of mobile data access and update. Assumptions are usually made regarding the application, the source of mobile data, or the particularities of the mobile device. Ubiquitous data access is lacking due to the tight coupling between the mobile device and the mobile data. Users are therefore not allowed to switch mobile devices without spending a lot of effort on copying and re-hoarding. Additionally, current solutions do not support mobile access and hoarding from heterogeneous sources of data such as file systems, database servers, web servers, etc. Current research is also limited to basic synchronization schemes that do not take into consideration the variable and individual needs of consistency and up-to-dateness of mobile data. Finally, current mobile transaction models are not efficient in terms of successful commit rate, especially under prolonged periods of disconnection. This proposal is based on ongoing research on mobile computing, operating systems and data warehousing. The overall goal is to make mobile computing available to a broader range of users and applications by automating the hoarding of a wide variety of data from multiple heterogeneous sources into mobile devices, and to facilitate sophisticated synchronization between the mobile devices and the fixed networks where the sources reside. The specific goals are: Develop and evaluate a three-tiered architecture based on the Coda file system that provides independence between the mobile data and the mobile devices via a data warehouse for storing the user s working set. Develop algorithms for automatically and incrementally hoarding data on mobile devices and for synchronizing the contents of the mobile device with the working set in the warehouse and the original sources. Develop new synchronization techniques for maintaining the user s working set, based on programmable and conditional consistency specifications of mobile data items. Different data items may have different consistency requirements, and must therefore be synchronized differently. Develop a new model of mobile transactions that can guarantee that transactional updates performed during disconnection are highly likely to be committed upon reconnection. Our goal is to build upon existing results to develop the architecture and algorithms to make smart hoarding and synchronization in mobile environments a reality. We see the realization of such a framework as an important and necessary step towards making mobile computing a viable practice for a broad audience; a step that some day may lead us to the realization of ubiquitous computing. In our vision, users should be allowed to switch to any mobile device to connect to the fixed network and carry the necessary data with them, without having to worry about hoarding, synchronization, and other low-level burdens. Given our prior experience and research results in the areas of mobile computing, distributed systems, and data warehousing, we believe that we can successfully apply data warehousing technology to manage important user data as well as support the incremental maintenance of this data in light of frequent updates doc9914 none Award: . Principal Investigator: Peter B. Kronheimer The aim of this project is to apply gauge-theory techniques to the study of three-dimensional manifolds. The principal investigator proposes to investigate Floer homology and closely related areas of geometry, and hopes to shed light on the applicability of gauge theory to problems in three-dimensional topology. In particular, it is hoped that a relation can be established between the Floer homologies of three-manifolds defined on the one hand by the monopole equations on the other hand by the instanton equations. (These are the equations which, in four-dimensions, lead respectively to the Seiberg-Witten invariants and Donaldson invariants of four-manifolds, and which have led to an flood of results in four-dimensional differential topology in the past twenty years.) A first goal is to prove that if the instanton Floer homology of manifold with first betti number one is trivial in the strong sense that all the representations of the fundamental group can be made to disappear by a holonomy perturbation, then the monopole Floer homology groups are trivial also. (For the instanton groups, the relevant representations are the representations in SO(3) with non-trivial Stiefel-Whitney class.) By an application of a non-vanishing theorem for the monopole Floer homology and use of Floer s exact triangle, this would lead to a proof of the Property P conjecture . A related goal in this project is the development of new constructions for Floer homology, based on the technique of finite-dimensional approximation (which has already seen convincing application in the study of the four-dimensional invariants). Topology is the qualitative study of space and its connectedness. Its importance was recognized at the turn of the last century by the French mathematician Poincaro, during his investigation of the laws of motion that govern the movement of a three-body system such as the Earth, Moon and Sun moving according to Newton s laws. In the past twenty years, topology has seen applications in questions such as the knotting of proteins and DNA, and in modern theories of high-energy physics. The topology of three-dimensional spaces, as opposed to those of higher dimension, is of particular subtlety. Through this project, it is hoped to bring new techniques to bear on outstanding questions in three-dimensional topology. These techniques -- gauge theory and the Seiberg-Witten equations -- originated in physics, where they had potential application to fundamental questions such as quark confinement. They have been an effective tool in the study of four-dimensional spaces (such as our space-time). The aim now is to apply the same techniques to questions in dimension three doc9915 none Dr. Patrick J. Farmer of the Department of Chemistry, University of California at Irvine, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program of the Chemistry Division, National Science Foundation, for his work on modeling the chemistry of heme-based nitrite and sulfite reductases. The various enzymes perform integral steps in the biochemical cycling of nitrogen and sulfur, which are of importance in the global denitrification of soil fertilizers and in the removal of oxides of nitrogen and sulfur, which are pollutants from industrial waste-waters. The studies will have implications for the global effects of modern agriculture, based on understanding the chemical basis for the generation of non-carbon greenhouse gases. The studies will provide a diverse group of undergraduate and graduate students (some are Asian, Hispanic or from Eastern European countries) with invaluable experience that will be relevant to the American economy, and will form the training ground for the next generation of scientists doc9916 none In this research project, the investigator studies the uniform nature of constructions from Algebraic Geometry and Commutative Algebra. Uniformity has to be understood here in the following sense. Suppose an algebraic-geometric object, such as a variety or a coherent sheaf, is presented to us by means of some polynomials over an algebraically closed field. From this object other objects or invariants can be derived by applying some algebraic-geometric process. The question posed is now when can this construction be carried out by using only polynomials of degree bounded by the degree of the initial polynomials? In particular, when is an invariant associated to this object uniformly bounded by the initial degrees only? Provided such uniform bounds exist, the following transfer principle can be applied. Encode, allowing negations and quantification, the construction or some of its properties in the field by means of the coefficients of the polynomials involved--the existence of uniform bounds is certainly a necessary, but often even a sufficient condition for this to hold. Then use the Lefschetz Principle to carry over results from positive characteristic to zero characteristic, or, conversely, from zero characteristic to almost all positive characteristics. The investigator has already successfully applied this method to the following non-trivial facts: the Bass Conjecture, the Zariski-Lipman Conjecture and the New Intersection Theorem. In this proposal, he is especially interested in applications to tight closure in characteristic zero. Moreover, he proposes to infer from the existence of uniform bounds, the constructible nature of certain algebraic-geometric constructions. For instance, he seeks to continue the following program originally initiated by Nagata and Grothendieck: for a given geometric property of a point on a variety, when is the set of all points on the variety for which this property holds, constructible? This program provides an alternative approach to some open problems in the field, as well as a simplified treatment of previous results. The author takes a special interest in the following old problem, simple to state but yet so far resisting all known proof methods: is every curve in three dimensional space obtained by intersecting two surfaces? On a deeper level, the current proposal can be seen as an attempt to analyze and better understand the constructive nature of Algebraic Geometry, by looking at it from a logicians point of view. In this way, the Principal Investigator intends to present the domain in a more coherent and unified way and obtain an improved link between Geometry and Algebra doc9917 none The project is aimed at developing a quantitative model for high temperature creep of dispersion strengthened aluminum alloys (Al-Sc-Mg-Zr-SiC) by integrating the dislocation dissociation and positive climb concepts. An innovative creep specimen geometry will elucidate the threshold stress mechanisms and the microstructural evolution during creep deformation. An understanding of the influence of particle size and distribution on threshold stress and creep kinetics can lead to development of high temperature aluminum alloys by microstructural design. The development of quantitative model based on fundamental dislocation parameters is in dire need. Major goals of the study are: (1) to investigate the deformation characteristics in simpler alloy systems (Al-Sc, Al-Zr, etc) for a systematic understanding of their mechanical behavior; (2) to perform in-situ transmission electron microscope (TEM) straining experiments for determining dislocation velocities during their glide and climb movements; and (3) to develop quantitative model using the experimentally determined parameters. The work involves a combination of university-industry-government laboratory-national user facility. %%% This research develops new understanding of the fundamental mechanisms of dispersion strengthening beyond the current state of the art. The results are aimed at the development of creep-resistant materials for high-temperature applications in various technologies doc9918 none for DMS - (1) What is the distribution of the eigenvalues of a random matrix, with certain symmetry conditions to guarantee the reality of the spectrum? What happens to the distribution, when the size of the matrix gets large? What about universality in the limit? (2) What is the statistics of the length of the longest increasing sequence in random permutation or random words (Ulam s problem). This question applies to models of interface growth, polymers in random environments, first passage percolation problem, and dimer configurations. (3) Integrals over groups and symmetric spaces, (or over their tangent spaces) lead to a variety of interesting matrix models. The coefficients of the (perturbative) expansions have striking combinatorial or topological significance and can be computed in a recursive way. This work originates in the works of Feynman, t Hooft, Bessis-Itzykson-Zuber and Witten, in the context of string theory. (4) The sample canonical correlation coefficients (maximum likelihood estimates) for the canonical correlation coefficients of two Gaussian populations are the test statistic for the statistical independence of the two populations, as studied by Hotelling, James and Constantine. (5) The four problems above and their time -perturbations are all solutions to integrable equations or lattices. For large random matrices or permutations, they are solutions to the Korteweg-de Vries equation. In the finite case, they are solutions to the Toda lattice, and to two new integrable lattices, the Pfaff and Toeplitz lattices. %Besides matrix integrals solutions, these lattices %have interesting rational solutions. It is fair to say that matrix integrals point the way to new integrable systems, but also to new combinatorial and probabilistic questions ! General description: The problems above relate to a number of important questions in physics, engineering and statistics: Problem (1) has its origin in the study of energy levels (excitation spectra) of heavy nuclei in nuclear physics (Wigner, Dyson). These levels are so intricate that any explicit description would be intractable. For that reason, Wigner proposed a statistical model for these energy levels. Concerning problem (2), it is well known that a large percentage of computer time is devoted to the rearrangement of the data used in the course of computations. How many data, after a complete reshuffling, are statistically still in order? This question of random permutations also applies to statistical mechanics, the basis of thermodynamics, and to questions of polymers. Some of the matrix models (3) provide toy models for string theory, an important set of ideas at the basis of the fundamental interactions in the physical world. It turns out that certain matrix models, mentioned above, are used in testing whether two sets of statistical data are correlated, as sketched in (4). The Korteweg-de Vries equation, the arch-type ``soliton equation , describes the propagation of waves in shallow water; a similar non-linear partial differential equation governs the propagation of ultra-short pulses in optical fibers, when the wave length is long compared to the diameter of the fiber doc9919 none This research program will develop finite-dimensional nonlinear dynamical models for underwater robot vehicles, and incorporate these models in the development of provably stable nonlinear controllers for dynamic maneuvering of underwater vehicles. This research will directly address the following two problems: 1. Nonlinear Finite Dimensional Dynamical Modeling: We are developing unsteady dissipative hydrodynamical models and numerical simulations for marine vehicles, and experimentally verifying these analytical models under the low-speed operating conditions typical for dynamically positioned vehicles engaged in survey, sampling, docking, and maneuvering operations. 2. Stable Model-Based Nonlinear Adaptive Control: We are developing 6-DOF model-based adaptive tracking controllers, and experimentally evaluating both the new and previously reported techniques in full-scale experimental trials. The goal is to enable marine vehicles to perform missions presently considered either infeasible or impractical with existing manned and unmanned systems. The intellectual merit of the activity is the analytical development and experimental validation of finite-dimensional plant models with explicit dissipative structure, and the development and experimental validation of a new class of model-based adaptive identifiers and tracking controllers for underwater vehicles. The broader impacts of the activity include: Development and web-based dissemination of Dynamics and Control of Marine Vehicles, a new course at JHU. Advances developed under the proposed research will be transitioned to the vehicles of the NSF supported National Deep Submergence Facility to improve their operational capabilities for U.S. oceanographic science doc9920 none Graph Theory is a central subject of Discrete Mathematics, important both for theoretical reasons and in view of its wide applicability. It models patterns (and strength) of connections between the components of complex systems. Investigation of very large graphs usually require special mathematical tools. The most widely known example for very large graphs is the connection structure of the Internet, where various parts differ substantially. Breaking up such large graphs to a small number of more homogeneous and thus more manageable pieces is the core of the PI s current research doc9921 none The CORF plays an essential role in defending the radio frequency interests of the U.S. scientific community before national and international organizations that deal with the allocation and efficient use of the radio spectrum. A major CORF activity centers on participation in public pleadings before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regarding allocation and assignment of radio frequencies and other regulatory matters. During the past 3-years, covering the previous grant period, CORF filed comments before the FCC in matters related to unwanted emissions of satellite systems, sharing various radio astronomy bands with the medical telemetry service, preparations for WRC-00, and other matters. During the coming 3-year period, CORF is expected to comment on the U.S. implementation of the results of WWRC-00, U.S. proposals to WRC-03 and possibly WRC-06, and the impact on radio astronomy of spurious emissions from transmitters on board of satellites, among others. CORF is also expected to continue working with the FCC on issues related to millimeter wave spectrum use doc9922 none The investigator continues to study general decomposable forms. In particular, he seeks better bounds for the number of primitive integral solutions to non-degenerate decomposable form equations and also stronger asymptotic results for the number of integral solutions to the related inequality. In addition, the investigator studies the absolute Siegel s lemma and the related Hermite s constant over the algebraic numbers. The main goal here is an effective version of the former and improved upper bounds for the latter. The decomposable form equations dealt with here are examples of Diophantine equations. These have been studied for millennia. Long thought to be mere intellectual curiosities, it is now realized that knowledge in this area is crucial in our ``digital age. Much of cryptography, coding, and data exchange rests on the ability, or lack thereof, to find solutions to such equations. Siegel s lemma and Hermite s constant are intimately connected with sphere packings, finite groups and error-correcting codes, and via these to many disparate areas of science doc9923 none Schloerb, F. Peter University of Massachusetts Amherst Astronomy Research at the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory The Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory at the University of Massachusetts is a group of scientists and engineers who work together in support of a research program in millimeter-wave astronomy. The FCRAO program emphasizes three principal areas: (1) astronomical research; (2) development of state-of-the-art instrumentation; and (3) training of graduate and undergraduate students in observational astronomy and astronomical instrumentation. The program is currently known for its operation of a 14m diameter millimeter-wave telescope in Massachusetts. However, in order to remain at the forefront of research, the Observatory is participating with the Mexican Instituto Nacional de Astrofisica, Optica, y Electronica (INAOE) in the construction, in Mexico, of a 50m diameter Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT), to be completed in . The research to be undertaken involves continued operations of the FCRAO 14m telescope for scientific observations, and the initial stages of transition to the new facility. The latter includes development and testing of new LMT instrumentation (a wide-band correlator, a 1mm SIS receiver, a wavefront sensing system for pointing corrections, and a holography system), and work on antenna monitor and control systems doc9924 none Cherlin and Thomas will pursue interactions of the techniques of logic with problems in algebra and combinatorics. Cherlin will work with groups of finite Morley rank using methods modeled heavily on finite group theory, aiming particularly at an approach to the odd characteristic case compatible with the existence of bad fields, and on problems in graph theory susceptible to model theoretic analysis (universal graphs and problems of wqo). Thomas will work on Borel equivalence relations, particularly with those associated with natural classification problems in algebra, which may well provide the examples needed to settle some problems presently open in full generality, as well as providing information on the relative difficulty (according to a very robust system of measurement) of the algebraic problems, some very classical and open, for what can now seen to be essential reasons. Thomas will also pursue his work on the automorphism tower problem, using set theoretic techniques. Mathematical logic provides tools of great generality which can be applied to various areas of mathematics. In combinatorial contexts the model theoretic point of view provides methods that can be used to handle specific problems very uniformly, rather than on the case by case basis sometimes encountered in the literature. Descriptive set theory provides methods for analyzing the relative difficulty of both solved and unsolved problems in algebra, and in particular provides concrete information as to how detailed an answer one may usefully seek in a classification problem, making it possible to distinguish dead ends from fruitful lines of inquiry on an a priori basis doc9925 none Over the past two years I have been working on multi-linear singular integral operators. Recently, in a joint work with T.Tao and C.Thiele we generalized the previous results on the bilinear Hilbert transform to the case of multilinear operators with much more singular symbols. The striking fact about these developments is that it seems that these techniques could have a very nice and important application to the spectral theory of Schroedinger operators. The final goal of our project, is to show that for the classical Schroedinger operators with square integrable potential and for almost every positive eigenvalue, their corresponding eigenfunctions are bounded. The answer to the above conjecture would imply a better understanding of the behaviour of the Schroedinger operators, which lie in the heart of Quantum Mechanics doc9926 none The focus of this proposal is the design and implementation of cluster-based electronic commerce servers (or simply distributed e-commerce servers) that are efficient, scalable, and capable of service differentiation. To achieve these properties, our servers will efficiently adapt their quality of service, will efficiently handle any type of incoming request according to the client s profile, will not involve any centralized resources, and will cache both static and certain dynamic content. The key challenges are in determining the set of policies and mechanisms that should be used to differentiate the services provided and to implement truly efficient and scalable policies and mechanisms for request processing. At the end of the project, we will demonstrate two distributed e-commerce servers (an on-line store and an auction server) running on a cluster with 64 processors. The contributions of this project will be the following: (1) A complete and general characterization of e-commerce workloads; (2) An understanding of the issues involved in service differentiation for distributed e-commerce servers, including the use of optimizations based on the past history of actions taken by high-priority clients; (3) The design, implementation, and evaluation of mechanisms for shared state maintenance and transaction support in distributed e-commerce servers; and (4) The study of techniques and mechanisms for improving the efficiency and scalability of distributed e-commerce servers. We believe that the potential implications of our research and contributions are far reaching. In fact, we think that the impact of our research can be substantial, given how significantly various companies have come to rely on their on-line networking operations. Furthermore, our research can be useful for operating systems and distributed systems teaching purposes, as our software infrastructure will provide a tool for the study of distributed e-commerce servers doc9927 none D.C.Jiles and J.E.Snyder Progress beyond data storage densities of 100 Gbits in2 requires a revolution in materials. Magnetic tunnel junctions provide a possible solution and are expected to form an essential component of future magnetic disk drive read heads, part of the $50 billion year hard disk drive industry. Tunnel junctions with a R R of 30% have been announced in the last year. However there are serious problems with the current generation of tunnel junctions, which are based exclusively on an alumina barrier layer. These layers are now down to 0.7 nm in thickness and still the resistances of the tunnel junctions are too high for the intended applications. Essentially the alumina tunnel junction has reached its ultimate performance limits and there is a concern if alumina tunnel junctions will ever be able to be used in read heads and MRAM because of the high resistance. Therefore it is time for new tunnel junction materials to be brought forward based on alternative barrier layers. Recently studies of alternative insulator materials by Fert et. al. showed that the barrier layer strongly affects the spin polarization in the magnetic layers. Freitas et al. have studied the effect of nitrogen additions to the alumina which changed the barrier height and resulted in an increase in tunnel magnetoresistance from 22% to 25% as the composition changed from Al2O3 to AlN. However none of this has addressed the central problem of the overall resistance of the devices. In our proposed SGER we intend to make the radical change of completely replacing the alumina with other semiconductors. Of course this is a high risk endeavor, but the enormous benefits to the magnetic data storage industry that will accrue if the project is success make this a worthwhile exploratory investigation doc9928 none Recommended project is for measurement of the platinum group elements (PGE), chalcophile elements, and Os isotopic compositions on well-characterized dunites and harzburgites from the Oman ophiolite, representing relict samples from obducted oceanic mantle. The major goal is to determine the Os isotopic and PGE composition of the mid-ocean ridge basalt (MORB) mantle source, principally to test whether it has chondritic Os and PGE signatures that are fractionated from chondrites (as are abyssal and massif peridotites). The proposal will also examine PGE mobility during magmatic and alteration processes, considering specifically whether wall-rock interaction during melt transport and weathering of exposed rock can change PGE values. This work will provide important constraints regarding the origin of the MORB source, and should help to resolve geochemical contraditions presented between ophiolites and abyssal peridotites regarding whether they are both residues of MORB melting doc9929 none Garcia-Garibay This award co-sponsored by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Chemistry will support a Regional Workshop on Photochemistry, Photophysics, and Spectroscopy in Organized Media to be held in Cordoba, Argentina on May 25-28, . The workshop is organized by Dr. Miguel A. Garcia-Garibay of the University of California, Los Angeles and Professor Pedro F. Aramendia at the Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina. The workshop will afford 18 U.S. scientists the opportunity to interact with 18 counterparts from Central and South America. It will serve to bring together major researchers in the area of photochemistry, photophysics, and spectroscopy, to explore new directions influenced by the interaction between light and matter in various materials systems. Young researchers from the U.S. and Latin America will comprise a significant number of the attendees. This workshop will focus on studies of solids, thin films, supramolecular aggregates, and other non-fluid systems that have important applications in the fields of materials science and engineering, photonics, sensors, and molecular computing doc9930 none Although sterility in hybrids between species has been documented repeatedly, its genetic causes are poorly understood, and only one gene that may contribute directly to hybrid sterility has been identified. Hybrid sterility may be caused by genes failing to trigger other genes in what are referred to as regulatory pathways , hence ultimately disrupting the processes that produce functional sperm. We propose to use a novel method to identify which genes are active in two Drosophila species but inactive in their hybrids, hence identifying the regulatory pathways that have been disrupted resulting in sterility. Modern evolutionary biologists have an impressive understanding of how genes evolve within populations, but a relatively poor understanding of how one species splits into two, as when their hybrids are sterile. This research will illuminate the mechanisms of speciation, providing insights into the fundamental evolutionary processes that regulate biodiversity on earth doc9931 none The two co-PI s will continue research on the effect of specify interactions on the phase behavior of polymer blends. One part of the proposed work concerns the completion of work initiated a few years ago on the effect of chain architecture on the number of like and un-like contacts in solutions and blends where the components contain functional groups that hydrogen bond to one another. These systems are particularly amenable to study because infrared spectroscopy can be used to count the number of contacts in well-chosen systems. Work in progress involves the effect of branching in hyperbranched and dendrimer-like polymers, mesh size in cross-linked networks and microphase separation in blends involving block copolymers. The second part of the proposed research involves the application of a new technique, a two-dimensional Fourier transform infrared dielectric spectrometer. Dielectric relaxation measurements have been used for many years as a probe of the dynamics of polymer chains, through the detection of the transitions and relaxations that are a result of various types of coupled or local motions. Infrared spectroscopy provides a probe of molecular level structure and, in certain systems, intermolecular interactions. Clearly, a technique (or, more accurately, a hybrid-technique) that can measure the temperature and frequency range of various transitions and relaxation s, while simultaneously probing the functional groups involved and the degree to which their motions are coupled, would be an extremely powerful analytical tool. It is expected that this instrument will open up various new areas of research and undergraduate students will be involved in scouting experiments as part of their senior projects to help explore and establish these. At the same time, this hybrid spectrometer will be used to explore problems associated with the major thrust of our research that could not be tackled previously, particularly the dynamics of functional groups and polymer chains in associating systems. %%% This new area of research has considerable potential for enhancing both research activities and education. In terms of the former, the development of the technique should allow the functional groups involved in relaxations and transitions in various materials, not just polymers, to be explored. In terms of education, through the mechanisms of involving undergraduates in the research, seminars on technique development and incorporating this instrument into our undergraduate laboratories, the importance of combining methods of investigation and techniques in order to tackle complex problems will be taught and emphasized doc9932 none The first part of the proposed work concerns Monge-Ampere equations, including extensions of classical results of Jorgens, Calabi and Pogorelov which state that entire solutions to such equations are quadratic polynomials. Dirichlet problem for Monge-Ampere equations in exterior domains of Euclidean space will also be investigated. Related problems concerning the affine Bernstein problem will be studied. The second part of the proposed work concerns best Sobolev inequality on Riemannian manifolds and the Yamabe problem on manifolds with boundary. This includes efforts in establishing a new form of best Sobolev inequalities on Riemannian manifolds as well as existence and compactness results concerning the Yamabe problem on manifolds with boundary. Sharp pointwise estimates to blow up solutions play important roles in such studies. The role of mathematical analysis is not so much to create the equations as it is to create qualitative and quantitative information about the solutions. This may include answers to questions about existence, uniqueness, smoothness, and growth. In addition, analysis often develops methods for approximation of solutions and estimates on the accuracy of these approximations doc9933 none Davila Visual acuity (VA) is a measure of how well the visual system can resolve closely spaced objects. The Snellen eye chart is the most common method of measuring VA in adults however it is useless when measuring VA in infants and other non-verbal patients. Preferential looking, optokinetic nystagmus, and photoscreening have been used to assess VA in infants, however all of these methods have been found to have their shortcomings. Diseases such as amblyopia, which occurs in 2-3% of the population, if not diagnosed by age 6 can lead to permanent visual loss, and this can lead to learning and behavioral difficulties. Standard pre-school visual screening programs can fail to diagnose ocular disease in as any as 2% of the population. The visual evoked potential (VEP), an electrical potential generated in the visual cortex of the brain in response to a visual stimulus, has been used to measure VA in infants. This is done by determining the maximum spatial frequency in the stimulus which elicits a detectable VEP. However, this method does not yield very repeatable measures and has a higher variability than psychophysical measures of VA. The PI s group has developed VEP detectors which are capable of detecting very low-level VEP s at much higher stimulus spatial frequencies than other detectors; nevertheless, long measurement times are still required. The goal of this proposal is to obtain the laboratory equipment necessary to study objective measurement of visual acuity based on a new model of the visual system. This model, if validated, will enable VA to be measured using the VEP by simply computing its temporal frequency spectrum (which is much faster than existing swept spatial frequency methods). The spacing of photoreceptors in the eye is not a good predictor of limits on spatial resolution. The average spacing of cones on the foveal of the retina would actually predict a much higher visual resolution limit than the often quoted value of 60 cycles deg. The proposed model is based on the premise that the eyes are constantly in motion and hence the luminance falling on any given photoreceptor in the retina is constantly changing with time. The main hypothesizes is that resolution in foveal vision is determined entirely by the temporal dynamics of the visual system. The model for VA consists of a photoreceptor, a ban of temporal bandpass filters, and a detector at the output of the filter bank. The temporal bandpass filters have the same effect as the spatial frequency filters which have been used to model the visual system. A second hypothesis associates the temporal filter-based model for VA with the VEP. A number of psychophysical and electrophysiologic experiments are proposed which are designed to validate the two hypotheses. One experiment is based on the classical psychophysical adaptation experiments of Blakemore and Campbell but rather than adapting to a constant spatial frequency, we propose to adapt to a constant temporal frequency. This will be done by stabilizing the drift rate of the stimulus grating with respect to eye motion. By measuring the contrast sensitivity function (CSF) at two different drift rates and a fixed spatial frequency, the temporal filter model would predict a result which the spatial frequency channel model would completely fail to explain. Experiments co paring psychophysical and electrophysiologic spatiotemporal CSF s will also be performed which are designed to insure that the psychophysical results carry over to the electrophysiologic domain. The equipment needed for this research consists of a high accuracy dual Perkinje image eye tracker, an optical image stabilizer, a high scan rate, fast phosphor video monitor, and a psychophysical graphics generation system. The PI s institution has agreed to cost-share 30% of total project costs. This research will have important theoretical ramifications in understanding the basic processes in human vision. In addition, it will also impact the quality of health care by enabling an accurate method of electrophysiologically measuring VA in infants and non-verbal patients doc9934 none This research is investigating the gas-phase formation pathways of organic acids, hydrogen peroxide, organic peroxides and other multifunctional oxygenated and nitrated compounds in the atmosphere. The P.I. is developing a novel solid phase microextraction technique (SPME) which, combined with gas chromatography mass spectrometry, will help determine important reaction pathways for the production of secondary aerosols in the atmosphere. This research is of critical importance to understand the biochemical effects associated with atmospheric aerosols and sources of airborne acidity in the environment doc9935 none The New World monkeys (platyrrhines) are a diverse group of primates whose evolutionary history in South and Central America dates back to at least the late Oligocene. Despite a great deal of study in recent decades the evolutionary relationships between species of this group have been difficult to resolve. Studies of craniodental and postcranial anatomy, as well as molecular data, have produced conflicting results, especially with regard to marmosets and tamarins. In addition, the relationships of Saimiri (the squirrel monkeys), Cebus (capuchins), Aotus (owl monkeys), and Callicebus (titi monkeys) to the rest of the New World monkeys are equivocal in most analyses. The present study seeks to contribute to the resolution of these uncertainties by providing information from a hitherto poorly known region of anatomy, the paranasal sinuses. The paranasal sinuses are hollow mucous-lined outpocketings of the nasal cavity that occupy various portions of the facial skeleton in mammals. Sinus anatomy is well documented in Old World monkeys and apes, in which it provides diagnostic features of several genera and groups of genera. It has yet to play a role in studies of NWM relationships because our knowledge of which sinuses are present in different species is very incomplete. What little information we have indicates that these monkeys may exhibit a greater diversity of sinus patterns than any other group of primates. This project will used computed tomography scanning of dry crania as a non-invasive means of imaging the internal anatomy of the sinuses in forty-seven specimens of platyrrhines representing ten genera. Each genus is represented by an age-graded series of specimens from juvenile to adult, allowing the development of their sinuses to be documented for the first time. The taxonomic distribution of sinus anatomy documented by this analysis will be compared to several competing phylogenetic hypotheses in order to reveal which relationships it supports. By completing our knowledge of sinus patterns in higher primates, these data will also facilitate interpretation of sinus anatomy in fossil representatives of Old World monkeys and apes doc9936 none The investigator together with Arizona State University is hosting the Thirteenth International conference titled Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics (FPSAC 01). This continuing series of conferences bring together researchers from various areas of combinatorics and theoretical computer science and links them with leading scientists from allied disciplines in pure mathematics, applied mathematics and physics. The focus of the conference is on algebraic and enumerative combinatorics, again with emphasis on interdisciplinary links to allied fields. Topics include: formal power series and enumeration (e.g., enumerative problems in physics), algebra and enumeration (e.g., combinatorial methods in representation theory, association schemes), topological and geometric combinatorics (e.g., arrangements of hyperplanes, Helly and Tverberg type theorems, oriented matroids), probabilistic methods (e.g., extensions and refinements of Rodl method, randomized algorithms), poset and graph theory (e.g., correlation and sorting, combinatorial approaches to the algebraic aspects of correlation), extremal combinatorics (e.g., algebraic methods used to determine structural properties of extremal objects doc9937 none Single molecule studies can provide unique information on the structure and dynamics of biological molecules and cellular complexes that is impossible to obtain using traditional structural techniques. These studies, to be performed at conditions close to physiological environments, open the way for looking directly at the function of individual biological molecules and their complexes. Scanning probe microscopy and atomic force microscope (AFM) in particular has proven to be a very useful technique permitting static and dynamic studies of molecules at nanometer range resolution. However, the requirement for the sample to be bound to the surface restricts considerably the dynamical studies. A breakthrough has recently been made in the real-time observation of dynamics of molecular complexes at the single-molecule level using single-photon sensitive fluorescence microscopes. However, the resolution of this technique is limited by the wavelength of the light and does not reveal structural details of molecules. The combination of AFM and a single molecule fluorescence (SMF) microscope into one instrument would enable us to identify structural details of biological systems at the molecular level by AFM and to use the SMF microscope to observe directly the dynamics of an experimental system at a the single molecule level. Importantly, the dynamics can be performed on molecular systems structurally characterized by AFM and localized on a comparatively large surface area. Therefore, the major objective of this proposal is to build AFM SMF system based on the currently available Bioscope AFM fluorescence microscope instrument. The sensitivity of the fluorescent system will be tested using specially designed samples. In addition, potential pitfalls of integrated AFM will be identified and analyzed for solutions doc9938 none for DMS - The principal investigator will study the spectral geometry of non-compact domains and Riemannian manifolds in order to elucidate the geometric content of scattering poles. First, the PI will continue his study of the spectral geometry of hyperbolic manifolds and their perturbations. He will study resonances as functions on the deformation space of the underlying discrete group, and define and analyze a determinant of the Laplacian. Secondly, the PI will study scattering theory for the wave equation on two-step nilpotent Lie groups and their quotients by discrete subgroups. New parametrices or the wave equation on the Heisenberg and Heisenberg-type groups will be derived, and trace formula for certain quotients obtained. Riemannian submersion techniques of Gordon, Wilson, and others will be used to obtain pairs and families of `isoscattering manifolds which will help determine the limits of geometric information which may be deduced from a knowledge of the scattering poles. Thirdly, the PI will study the isoscattering problem for exterior domains in Euclidean space. The fundamental problem of spectral geometry is to elucidate the geometric content of the Laplace spectrum on a Riemannian manifold. For so-called scattering manifolds, the eigenvalues of the Laplacian together with scattering resonances constitute the spectral data for the manifold. Elucidating the geometric content of such spectral data advances our understanding of quantization, produces new analytic tools for the study of geometric objects, and provides insight into inverse problems of a more `applied nature where the eigenvalues and scattering poles are measurable quantities. The present work aims to begin with geometrically natural examples where techniques of Lie theory, automorphic functions, and harmonic analysis may be used, and progress to harder problems such as target identification by radar where such techniques are not available but the underlying mathematical problems are very similar doc9939 none This award will help obtain annual-to-decadal resolution records of abrupt climate change preserved in varved and finely laminated fossiliferous lake sediments from western and southern Europe. Stratigraphic sections in Pianico, Italy, archived cores from Grande Pile, France, and new cores from Bispingen and Krumbach, Germany and Ribains, France will be examined using multiple biotic (i.e., pollen, diatoms) and abiotic (i.e., clay and silica mineralogy, magnetic susceptibility) climate proxies to obtain high-resolution signals of atmospheric cooling at the end of the last interglacial period. Such records will provide new insights into the physical mechanism underlying the transition from warm to cool climatic conditions at the last interglacial transition. Furthermore, these terrestrial records will be compared with marine records to investigate the validity of the conceptual model that links persistent warm low-middle latitude sea-surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere with concurrent decreasing temperatures and sea ice formation at higher northern latitudes. In the process of developing new data, ideas, and insights surrounding abrupt climate change, the research will also help develop new collaborations with international colleagues working in this intellectual area and enhance the sharing of scientific data and ideas doc9940 none This award provides funds to support the purchase of an instrument with combined liquid chromatography and advanced time of flight and tandem mass spectrometry capabilities. Recent advances in mass spectrometry have provided unprecedented opportunities for the analysis of proteins, such as internal sequencing, identification of nature and location of post-translational modifications and noncovalent interactions. The system to be purchased will allow the research communities at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and Rutgers University - Newark to take advantage of this state-of-the-art technology in protein research. Currently, there is no instrument available that allows researchers at either institute to sequence and elucidate protein structures using tandem mass spectrometry. Provision of this technology will significantly enhance the quality and productivity of the research on both campuses, as well as at others in the Newark area. The instrument will be placed in a Mass Spectrometry Core Facility available to researchers at both institutions. The projects outlined in this application by the expected major users of the instrument entail basic research into the structure and function of proteins from a wide-range of organisms - human, yeast, bacteria and plants. The types of questions to be addressed will require protein identification and sequencing, nuclear protein complex identification, localization of protein-ligand interactions, enzyme tertiary structure determination, quality control of designer metallo-protein synthesis, internal sequencing of N-terminally blocked proteins, and identification of post-translational modification of proteins. This equipment will be supervised and maintained by an experienced mass spectrometrist who is in charge of the core facility. Three committees drawn from both institutions oversee the fiscal and scientific management and daily operation of this facility doc9941 none For countries with large immigrant populations such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, the skills of immigrants constitute an important part of national human resources. However, little is known about what determines 1) the skills immigrants bring to their host country, and 2) how well immigrants perform in the new labor markets they enter. Existing immigration studies have demonstrated that the level of development and inequality in the country-of-origin influences immigrants skills and socioeconomic outcomes, but have given little attention to local social environments and the nature of immigrant networks between the source and host countries. This project examines how these local characteristics and immigrant networks affect the labor market skills and economic success of immigrants. The project uses decennial census data collected by government agencies of three destination countries - the United States, Canada, and Australia. It then links these data to various national level indicators gathered from publications of the United Nations and other international organizations. The new and more comprehensive data combine country-of-origin attributes with characteristics of the immigrants settlement areas. The analyses then estimate the effects of human capital, social capital, and macro social factors on immigrant outcomes for groups that differ by national origin and destination doc9942 none Rodriguez This US-Chile award will provide support for cooperative research to Dr. Sergio Rodriguez of Purdue University to work with Dr. Zdenka Berticevic of Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria and Dr. Monica Pacheco of Universidad de Santiago in Chile on theoretical studies of extended and localized electronic states in semiconductors and their low dimensional structures. The project will attempt to develop a theoretical understanding of recent experiments with diamond dopands that should have implications for the development of wide band-gap semiconductors useful in many electronic devices. The collaborators will investigate the production of quantum dots in semiconductors making use of complementary facilities and tools at their respective institutions doc9943 none The purpose of the proposal is to study the geometry of algebraic varieties and their invariants from different points of view. In particular the investigator and his colleagues study the structure of fundamental groups and universal coverings of algebraic varieties, the problem of placement of singularities, restrictions on the concentration of singular points in special fibers of the fibrations of algebraic varieties. In the latter case the goal is to develop a sufficiently simple method which can be generalized to the case of arithmetic family of curves. The study of the Galois groups of functional fields is going to provide with an alternative approach to the problems of birational geometry. The investigator suggests to continue a broad scope of research in the area of algebraic geometry with potential applications to number theory and theoretical physics. Of special interest is the study of a formula that provides nontrivial estimates for a number of solutions in equations similar in form to the famous Fermat equation doc9944 none The PI and his collaborators have shown that the method of factorizing the operator exp[-dt(T+V)] to fourth order with purely positive coefficients, which has produced superior symplectic integrators for solving classical dynamical problems, has also yielded excellent numerical algorithms for solving the time-dependent Schroedinger equation, the Fokker-Plank equation, the Kramers equation, and the imaginary time Schroedinger equation. The latter has resulted in a number of new fourth order Diffusion Monte Carlo algorithms. These new algorithms require knowing the potential and the gradient of the potential. The fourth order error coefficients of these new algorithms are orders of magnitude smaller then those of the existing split operator (second-order) method and can produce converged results using time steps 10-50 times as large. This operator factorization approach suggests a new class of more efficient algorithms for solving diverse quantum many-body and dynamical problems in nuclear, condensed matter and atomic physics. This proposal seeks to develop further fourth order algorithms for solving large scale, grid based, Hartree-Fock, Kohn-Sham and Gross-Pitaevskii equations in arbitrary three-dimensional geometry doc9945 none This award supports a collaborative effort among the Gemini Observatory, the U.S. Air Force Starfire Optical Range, and the Keck Observatory to develop reliable sodium wavelength lasers for use as adaptive optics guide stars. Used to excite the sodium D lines in the sodium layer of the Earth s atmosphere, the laser creates an artificial guide star that can be used as a point source to measure the aberrations in the incoming stellar wavefront caused by the atmosphere. The technique, originally developed by the Department of Defense, has been proven. The purpose of this program is to advance the state-of-the-art in available laser power and to provide a design for a reliable, low-cost laser that could be operated at many observatories without the necessity for specialized and expensive technical support. The development program will be carried out by industrial firms under the guidance of the collaborating institutions and an expert advisory committee doc9946 none This is the first year funding of a three year continuing award. The PI s contention is that the field of computer vision has matured to the point where a completely portable system capable of finding signs and other textual events in the environment in close to real time, and then reading their contents aloud, is feasible. His goal in this project is to provide the visually impaired with a way to obtain crucial information from the environment that is now totally inaccessible (except through intervention of a sighted person). Running on a wearable computer connected to a gyroscopically referenced head mounted camera, the envisaged system will detect text and signs within a compact representation of continuous video of the user s surroundings in the form of a mosaic. The sign detection and recognition system will use a set of multi-scale features that have been shown to be invariant to changes in viewing angle and illumination. Recognition will be accomplished by building multi-resolution spatial networks of distributions of these features and matching them against a database of known (customized to locale) signs (e.g. international highway signs) using a coarse to fine matching technique that is both robust and efficient. Text will be detected using the same techniques, with the aid of a commercial OCR system. The PI will also examine the OCR s intermediate representations, and a word dictionary for tolerance to character recognition errors. He will leverage existing work on image retrieval from large databases using image content, face recognition, image indexing using color properties, and text detection and recognition in complex images. The work will be performed in three phases roughly corresponding to a year each. System design and evaluation will both be conducted in conjunction with Lighthouse International, which specializes in rehabilitation training for the visually impaired. In the first phase of the work, individual components, which include camera stabilization, mosaics, text and sign recognition, will be developed. In the second phase, a head mounted unit, attitude inference, a wearable computer, a camera, speech synthesizer and user interface model will be developed. Additionally, the use of log-polar cameras will be examined for fast computation of multi-scale features and for its effectiveness in simultaneously addressing the field of view and resolution issues. The third and last phase will consist of a series of user and system evaluations and refinements. There is no doubt that, if successful, this research will have a tremendous impact on and dramatically improve the lives of visually impaired individuals doc9947 none Darsh Wasan, Illinois Institute of Technology It has been shown previously that in the presence of colloidal particles, the wetting region is comprised of the bulk fluid with the meniscus and the transition region leading to a thin film of structured colloidal particles. Experiments with similarly charged monodispersed latex particles show co-existence of ordered-disordered particle structures, depending on the film thickness relative to the particle diameter. Since the particles are similarly charged, there must be some form of long-range attractive force responsible for creating the ordered structure. Microintereferometric methods are proposed to be used to measure the film thickness profile and to calculate the capillary pressure near the contact line. The effect of volume fraction, particle size, shape and polydispersity on the film structure and stability will be investigated by direct observation of the ordered microstructure within the thin film near the contact line. The structural disjoining pressure will be calculated from the particle radial distribution function and the mean potential of particle interactions. The contact angle is calculated from experimentally measured values of the capillary pressure and the calculated disjoining pressure doc9948 none Many fluvial systems of the central Great Plains have flashy discharge regimes and high sediment yields. As a result, their sedimentary processes are extremely sensitive to changing hydrologic conditions. Evidence in the form of cut-and-fill terraces and alluvial stratigraphy with high resolution depositional units suggests that both hydrologic and sedimentologic adjustments have taken place throughout the Holocene. Morphologic properties of currently active gullies and valley fills also indicate that contemporary gully erosion rates are sensitive to changes in modern environmental conditions. This general objective of this doctoral dissertation research project is to quantify gully erosion and valley aggradation rates in the upper Republican River basin of western Nebraska and to determine how these rates have varied in response to environmental change. This research will examine how gully systems have (1) activated and stabilized on decadal time scales in the late 20th century; (2) incised and aggraded in response to climate changes of the Holocene; and (3) extended headward to shape watershed morphology during late Quaternary. This research will integrate field, laboratory, and GIS analyses. Historical gully erosion will be documented by examining aerial photographs to determine the magnitude of headward gully migration on a decadal time scale since the s. The spatial distribution of gully-derived sediment downstream from active headcuts will be established using a 137-Cs sediment tracing technique. Holocene valley aggradation rates will be estimated on the basis of radiocarbon age determinations of organic matter within alluvial fills and terraces. Sedimentologic and pedologic analyses of these same fills will permit interpretation of the depositional and soil-forming processes active during aggradation. Extension of drainage networks will be investigated by using soil-stratigraphic and morpho-stratigraphic evidence to infer the headward limits of networks at various times throughout the late Quaternary. These limits can define network planforms that will be analyzed in a GIS environment to determine changes in hydrologically significant drainage network parameters over millennial time- scales. Results of this research will help document the response of semi-arid fluvial systems to environmental change. As scientific concern mounts over the potential impact of future climate change in sensitive semi-arid regions like the Great Plains, realistic appraisals of past hydrologic variability become increasingly necessary. This research will improve understanding of that variability by examining its impact on gully erosion and valley aggradation. By investigating these processes over temporal scales ranging from decades to millennia, the project will establish a better understanding of the complete range of potential process rates, and will document the many factors that may govern changes in these rates. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc9949 none E. E. Michaelides, Tulane University The International Conference on Multiphase Flows will meet for the fourth time in New Orleans, from May 27, to June 1, . Its purpose, every third year, is to bring together multiphase flow researchers from about fifty countries and allow these scientists and engineers exchange ideas on the recent developments in the field. This is a special opportunity for the younger members of the community. It is expected that their will be a projected 600 participants doc9950 none Salmon OCE- Lattice-Boltzmann techniques are simple, stable, and conducive to massive parallelization, but inflexible . With effort, they can be made more flexible. The PI proposes to continue his efforts in this regard. He has developed a square, flat-bottomed ocean model using the shallow water equations and the quasi-geostrophic equations. He will derive the formulae for a Lattice-Boltzmann primitive equation model on spherical coordinates. He will also develop balanced versions of the Lattice-Boltzmann model doc9951 none In the proposed research we address the modeling and analysis of mesoscopic equations describing pattern formation in materials and complex fluids. We focus mainly on two paradigms, surface processes and field-responsive fluids. Mesoscopic models are coarse grained PDE or Stochastic PDE, derived directly and exactly from microscopic interacting particle systems and include detailed atomistic molecular information. The principal question we attempt to answer is how microscopic intermolecular forces affect pattern formation and evolution at much larger length scales. The analysis proposed here draws techniques from nonlinear PDE, calculus of variations and stochastic processes. In the first project we study pattern formation and evolution in surface processes under the influence of multiple and possibly competing mechanisms such as surface diffusion, reaction and adsorption desorption. Here we employ Gamma-convergence techniques in order to understand patterning at equilibrium, and viscosity solutions and varifolds for their dynamic counterparts. In a second project we focus on molecular dynamics and related mesoscopic models describing particle suspensions in fluids and in particular on the derivation and analysis of mesoscopic PDE for field-responsive fluids. Here we employ mass transport and relative entropy methods combined with Riesz Transform estimates to show existence of solutions as well as relaxation to equilibrium. Ample experimental evidence indicates that interatomic and intermolecular forces dictate macroscopic properties of matter and determine formation and selection of patterns and textures. Notable examples arise in polymer blends, alloys, catalysis, epitaxial growth of advanced materials and biological media. Molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo algorithms, developed in a Quantum Statistical Mechanics framework, provide detailed, quantitative dynamic and equilibrium descriptions of these phenomena; however they are limited to short space time length scales, while experimentally observed morphologies involve much larger scales. This disparity between computations and experiments underscores the need to develop models (PDE, Stochastic PDE) for larger scales, which take in consideration microscopic details. The mesoscopic models we develop and study numerically and analytically are geared towards this direction, incorporating systematically, (a) microscopic interactions, and (b) underresolved microscopic scales fluctuations. The developed models and analysis methods can allow for a more direct comprehension of macroscopic dynamic and equilibrium morphological behaviors and also provide comparisons to experiments which typically involve larger length scales than the ones arising in microscopic modeling and simulation doc9952 none Effros Popa Takesaki The three PI s intend to continue their investigations on a broad range of problems in operator algebra theory. Effros and Ruan are continuing their collaboration on operator spaces. Effros and Ruan are particularly interested in studying the local theory of von Neumann algebraic preduals. Building on their earlier result with Junge that that all von Neumann preduals are locally reflexive, and that the injective preduals have a simple characterization, Effros and Ruan hope to prove that the general architecture of a von Neumann algebra can be described in terms of the local structure of the preduals. Effros also intends to look at the quantized analogues of rotundity. A number of Popa s research projects will be concerned with his axiomatization of the standard invariant for subfactors. In particular he plans to work on the most challenging problem in subfactor theory: finding techniques that would be applicable to the theory of subfactors of hyperfinite factors. He intends to continue his studies with Bisch of property T in the context of subfactors. In a very different direction, he will investigate the structure theory of C -algebras based in part on his earlier work on the theory of local approximation by finite dimensional algebras, and of the relative Dixmier property for C -algebras. Takesaki plans to continue his development of a canonical approach to the theory of type III factors. In the next stage of his research program, Takesaki and his collaborators intend to complete their studies of outer automorphism actions of a discrete amenable group on an approximately finite dimensional (or hyperfinite) factor of type III-lambda (lambda larger than zero) and he expects that the type III-zero case will yield to this analysis. He will continue his investigation into the most difficult problem in the area: the classfication of one-parameter groups of automorphisms. Takesaki expects to apply classfication principles learned from factor theory to the classification of certain classes of C -algebras. Operator algebraists study the mathematics of quantum physics. In Heisenberg discovered that the paradoxes of atomic particles could be resolved with a modified version of Newtonian physics. He showed that the equations of the classical theory were still valid, provided one reinterpreted their symbols. In the classical theory these variables stand for functions. Heisenberg showed one can predict the behaviour of atomic particles if one instead regarded the variables as representing possibly infinite arrays or ``matrices of numbers. A few years later, von Neumann gave a mathematically precise formulation of these quantum variable in terms of Hilbert space operators. He went on to suggest that since the classical notions of measurement and geometry that underlie so much of mathematics no longer correspond to our understanding of the real world, it was necessary to seek quantized versions of mathematics. As in physics, one must begin by replacing functions by operators. In the last fifty years, operator algebraists have succeeded in quantizing a remarkable number of areas of mathematics, including analysis, topology, differential and Riemanian geometry, probability theory, and the theory of symmetry. As in quantum physics, the quantum world of mathematics is remarkable in the completely new phenomena that occur. The theory has had profound applications to various areas, including knot theory and low-dimensional topology, index theory on foliated manifolds, the classification of dynamical systems, and most recently, mathematical frameworks for both the standard model of quantum field theory (Connes) and renormalization theory (Connes and Kreimer). In this broad framework, Effros is one of the founders of quantized functional analysis (operator space theory), Popa is a leading figure in the theory of quantum symmetries (subfactor theory), and Takesaki is internationally recognized for his work on the modern theory of non-commutative integration and its use in studying the structure of von Neumann algebras and their automorphism groups doc9953 none Work will focus on needs for new theory in three-body recombination (both charged-particle and neutral-particle) at ultralow energies, relevant to the formation of anti-hydrogen and to Bose Einstein Condensate (BEC) experiments. Several significant and basic collisional mechanisms need to be described. Areas of concern include Stark-mixing transitions, collisional transitions, vibrational quenching and collisional re-dissociation doc9954 none Stanley This award provides travel support for young investigators to attend the 21st International Union of Pure and Applied Physics Triennial Conference on Thermodynamics and Statistical Physics (Statphys-21) to be held in Cancun, Mexico, on July 15-20, . The award is co-funded by the Divisions of Materials Research, Mathematical Sciences, Chemistry, Physics and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in MPS. The International Division is also providing support. %%% This award provides travel support for young investigators to attend the 21st International Union of Pure and Applied Physics Triennial Conference on Thermodynamics and Statistical Physics (Statphys-21) to be held in Cancun, Mexico, on July 15-20, . The award is co-funded by the Divisions of Materials Research, Mathematical Sciences, Chemistry, Physics and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in MPS. The International Division is also providing support doc9955 none PI: Karen A. High Institution: Oklahoma State University Proposal Number: The Inaugural Woman s Initiative Committee Session entitled turn of the Century Chemical Engineers: Successes and Challenges will be held at the annual American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) meeting in Los Angeles. It will be a full morning session from 8:30 to 11:30 am with seven speakers including women from industry, academia government. Some of the presentations include: - A discussion of the work of the Congressional Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering and Technology Development by Dr. Kathryn Johnson, Vice President of Matrix Consulting Group - A discussion of the progress made by women chemical engineers and opportunities for partnership between AIChE and the Women in Engineering Programs Advocacy Network (WEPAN) by Dr. Suzanne Brainard, Director of the Center for Women in Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. The session is a part of a more comprehensive program to help women at all stages of their careers - from graduate student to tenured faculty as well as women in various industrial positions in the chemical process industries - to advance in their careers. Other activities will continue during the day including the inauguration of a joint venture with the Girl Scouts to develop science kits which will hopefully help encourage young girls to study engineering doc9956 none The investigators will deploy an array of latitudinally spaced magnetometers at low latitudes along the coast of Chile. The array will include a total of 11 sites extending from the northern coast of Chile to the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. The array will provide the scientific community with much needed low latitude data from the South American continent by bridging the gap between existing chains of stations. The data are used to study the processes by which energy from the solar wind is transferred to the inner magnetosphere and generates pulsations and transient variations on the ground at low latitudes. The project is a collaborative effort between UCLA and a number of Chilean universities. Data from the array will also be used to study geomagnetic effects resulting from large solar storms doc9957 none Vinals This research project will use analytical and computational techniques to study the formation, stability and coarsening of lamellar phases in diblock copolymers. Although block copolymers are already widely used in industry, newer technologies that rely on high performance polymeric materials often require precise control of the polymer microstructure and its self-assembly. Processing by temperature quench or solvent casting from a high temperature isotropic phase always leads to the formation of a polycrystalline structure comprised of domains or grains of differently oriented lamellae. The focus of this research is on mechanisms controlling long-ranged orientational order, including the reorientation of lamellar phases by reciprocating shears, and the motion of topological defects and its effect on coarsening of the lamellar structure. A theoretical analysis is carried out at a mesoscopic level to find nonlinear solutions under imposed, reciprocating shears, as well as to elucidate their stability. Viscoelastic contrast between the microphases is explicitly taken into consideration. In addition, the longest relaxation times in the lamellar phase are likely to be determined by the spatial distribution and motion of topological defects. The motion of grain boundaries, disclinations (in two-dimensional samples), and dislocations is considered, as well as their effect on the coarsening times of the microstructure, and on the possible existence of asymptotic self-similarity. %%% This research project will use analytical and computational techniques to study the formation, stability and coarsening of lamellar phases in diblock copolymers. Although block copolymers are already widely used in industry, newer technologies that rely on high performance polymeric materials often require precise control of the polymer microstructure and its self-assembly. Processing by temperature quench or solvent casting from a high temperature isotropic phase always leads to the formation of a polycrystalline structure comprised of domains or grains of differently oriented lamellae. The focus of this research is on mechanisms controlling long-ranged orientational order and the motion of topological defects and its effect on coarsening of the lamellar structure doc9958 none Tesh This award to Skidaway Institute of Oceangraphy provides computer hardware and peripherals required to operate the NOAA Scientific Computer System (SCS v. 3.0) on the vessel Savannah, presently under construction, which will be operated as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS) research fleet. This system will be used as the primary data acquisition system on the vessel, and will thus be a resource used by all scientific users of the vessel in their research during and future years doc9959 none The project is a combinatorial study of structures arising from affine algebras and Weyl groups. The first object of study is the crystal graph of a module over a quantized universal enveloping algebra of an affine Lie algebra. Lusztig and Kashiwara have developed the deep and intricate theory of canonical bases for suitable modules over quantized enveloping algebras of Kac-Moody algebras. When the quantum parameter is set to zero (the \low temperature limit ), one obtains a colored directed graph called the crystal graph of the module. This remarkable graph encodes nearly all the important algebraic data of the module. Using the crystal graph, many algebraic problems are reduced to combinatorial ones. In the case of a+ne Kac-Moody algebras the combinatorics is particularly favorable; it was shown by Kang, Kashiwara, Misra, Miwa, Nakayashima, and Nakayashiki, that the elements of the crystal graph can be expressed as certain eventually periodic finite sequences of elements of very special finite crystal graphs called perfect crystals. In turn, the perfect crystals can be studied using techniques of classical combinatorics such as the theory of Young tableaux. One goal is to determine explicitly the colored graph structure of crystals in a family whose existence was conjectured by Hatayama, Kuniba, Okado, Takagi, and Y. Yamada and which arose from the study of the Bethe Ansatz in integrable systems. Another goal is to give explicit formulae for certain multiplicities that arise in conformal field theory and statistical mechanics, such as fusion coefficients and branching functions. It is of particular interest to express such quantities in a certain form (\fermionic ), one which admits a quasi particle interpretation for the states of the underlying model. Such formulae have combinatorial descriptions in terms of the rigged configurations of A. N. Kirillov and N.-Y. Reshetikhin. The second object of study is the family of Kazhdan-Lusztig (KL) polynomials for a+ne Weyl groups. For simple Lie algebras these polynomials are prominent in the geometry of Schubert varieties and in the representation theory of both the Weyl group and the simple algebraic group; these phenomena generalize for the a+ne algebras. One goal is to give explicit combinatorial (no alternating sums allowed) formulae for certain of these polynomials, which appear as graded multiplicities of irreducible modules for the associated simple Lie algebra, in the modules of twisted functions on the nullcone, the closure of the principal nilpotent adjoint orbit of the simple Lie algebra. A second goal is to give such formulae for certain parabolic KL polynomials for the a+ne Weyl group of type A, which can be expressed in terms of the ribbon tableaux of Lascoux, Leclerc, and Thibon doc9960 none This project involves three working groups of researchers meeting at DIMACS, the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, to address different aspects of massive data analysis problems in different applied contexts. One group is concerned with streaming data analysis and mining. The group deals with computational and analytical methods relevant to problems that arise when decisions must be made in one, initial scan as data stream by. The results will have impact on massive data set problems arising from credit card transactions, telephone calling, financial transactions, environmental modeling, and astrophysical experiments. The second group develops and analyzes new models and algorithms for and applications of multidimensional scaling. MDS, a traditional tool of data analysis in marketing, psychology, and other social and behavioral sciences, faces new challenges from the sheer volume of data in today s databases and from a variety of new applications, and the results should be useful in a wide variety of applications in economics, management science, chemistry, and psychology. A third group brings together researchers designing computers to generate scientific conjectures. Specifically, the group deals with conjectures in graph theory and related areas of chemistry that are generated from databases of graph invariants and relations between them and of chemical structures such as of fullerenes. The results should be of wide interest to researchers in graph theory and chemistry but also to researchers dealing with automatic theorem proving and generation. The results of the three working groups will be broadly disseminated to research communities via technical reports, papers, and books in the DIMACS book series doc9961 none This project is addressing the need to improve the mathematics learning environment in two-year colleges by generating increased student enthusiasm in the exploration and applications of mathematics and by attracting more students to science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) fields of study. The overall project goal is to provide faculty with a complete package of information and materials for establishing and conducting an interdisciplinary course for the study of mathematics. The package includes (a) ten laboratory exercises, each having a technology problem, a bibliotechnology research exercise, a method to develop the mathematics tools required to solve the problem, a model portfolio, and a thesis defense; (b) initiation of a marketing plan; and (c) initiation of a management plan. Means to accomplish the project objectives involve in-kind support from the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges (AMATYC), Texas Instruments, and Capital Community College. Twenty AMATYC faculty members have been selected to produce the ten laboratories. Project outcomes include a laboratory, marketing, and management plan, all of which are being compiled into The Math Works Resource Book, to be published in hard copy and via the Internet. This project is offering a multitude of professional enhancement opportunities to those who develop or use the products developed through this project doc9962 none This proposal is about the study of some asymptotic problems in Fluid Mechanics and Gas Dynamics. Asymptotic problems arise when a dimensionless parameter epsilon goes to zero in an equation describing the motion of some type of fluid (or any other physical system). Many mathematical problems are encountered when we try to justify the passage to the limit, which are mainly due to the change of the type of the equations, the presence of many spatial and temporal scales, the presence of boundary layers (we can no longer impose the same boundary conditions for the initial system and the limit one), the presence of oscillations in time at high frequency .... In this Proposal, the PI intends to study (among other problems) the hydrodynamic limit of the Boltzmann equation, the compressible-incompressible limit, These asymptotic problems allow us to get simpler models at the limit, due to the fact that we usually have fewer variables or (and) fewer unknowns. This simplifies the numerical simulations and improves our understanding of the prevailing phenomenon when the parameter is small, in fact, instead of solving the initial system, we can solve the limit system and then add a corrector doc9963 none In this research a novel ultrafast optical word generator, or parallel-electronic to serial-optical converter, will be demonstrated. This optical word generator functionality may be important for example for converting parallel words of computer data into a serial format suitable for transmission onto ultrafast time-division multiplexed (TDM) fiber interconnection networks. The proposed approach uses the parallel processing capabilities of optics to generate data streams consisting of sequences of ultrashort optical pulses at rates substantially faster than the speeds of individual electronic and optoelectronic devices. This research is expected to impact both optical time-division-multiplexed (TDM) data communications systems and networks operating at rates of ~100 Gb s and above, as well as hybrid wavelength-division-multiplexed time-division multiplexed (WDM-TDM) transmission, networking, and processing systems working at even higher rates. In order to realize the optical word generator, three main technologies will be investigated, as follows: Direct space-to-time pulse shapers, which are optical systems capable of converting one-dimensional spatial images directly into corresponding ultrafast time-domain data sequences. Optoelectronic modulator arrays, which provide the spatial image needed by the pulse shaper. In particular, optoelectronic modulator arrays providing rapid reprogrammability (~Gb s) for compatibility with the needs of modern high-speed packet networks, high on-off contrast, and operation in the 1.55 micron fiber optic wavelength band will be developed. Arrayed waveguide grating devices, which are integrated optical components commonly used forseparation or routing of independent wavelength channels in WDM optical communications. In particular, modified arrayed waveguide grating devices will be demonstrate that function as integrated direct space-to-time pulse shapers. By combining these technologies, a compact and novel module capable of generating sequences of ultrashort pulses (ultrafast optical words) with the ability to reprogram at GHz rates will be realized doc9964 none This project is concerned with the asymptotic and exact enumeration of perfect matchings of certain lattice graphs (or, in an equivalent language, enumeration of tilings of the regions dual to these graphs) that turn out to be closely related to several important problems in combinatorics (enumeration of spanning trees, plane partitions, alternating sign matrices), and that appear in statistical physics in the guise of the dimer model. Specifically, motivated by the monomer-monomer correlation introduced by Fisher and Stephenson, and based on the exact enumeration found by the proposer of the tilings of certain hexagonal regions with triangular holes along their symmetry axes (which generalizes MacMahon s theorem on counting plane partitions), the proposer pursues extending his work on the asymptotic enumeration of tilings in the situation when the holes are not necessarily on the symmetry axis of the region. This should bring useful insight into an important conjecture of Fisher and Stephenson concerning the rotational invariance of the monomer-monomer correlation. Furthermore, the proposer studies three additional problems. First, the proposer pursues extending the arguments that allowed him to prove directly one identity from a set of four similar identities he found relating eight of the ten symmetry classes of plane partitions to the remaining three identities. This would help explaining the still mysterious fact that all ten cases are enumerated by simple product formulas and would bring close to completion the task of finding combinatorial proofs for all ten cases. Second, the proposer continues his work on the three dimensional dimer problem by considering the question of improving the lower bound, employing extensions to three dimensions of the Gessel-Viennot and Kasteleyn theorems that yield signed enumerations. And third, the proposer uses a generalization of his complementation theorem for perfect matchings to classify the periodic weightings of the Aztec diamond that lead to simple product enumeration formulas, thus giving a unified perspective on several results of Elkies, Kuperberg, Larsen and Propp, B. Y. Yang, Stanley and the proposer. This research is in the general area of Combinatorics. One of the goals of Combinatorics is to find efficient methods of studying how discrete collections of objects can be arranged. The behavior of discrete systems is extremely important to modern communications. For example, the design of large networks, such as those occurring in telephone systems, and the design of algorithms in computer science deal with discrete sets of objects, and this makes use of combinatorial research. The specific problems in this project are instances of the dimer model of statistical physics. A basic illustration of this is the real-world process (relevant to the study of of lubricants) of adsorption of a liquid, consisting of two-atom molecules --- the dimers in the model --- along the surface of a crystal, whose fixed atoms form a lattice pattern, with any two neighboring positions capable of holding one molecule, and any given crystal atom being involved in the adsorption of at most one molecule. The main issue in this setting is the asymptotic behavior of the quantities that are studied (specifically, the number of different ways the surface of the crystal can be covered by molecules), but it turns out in the present context that the usually more difficult problem of determining quantities exactly allows progress in the asymptotic study doc9965 none Networks based on the exchange of social goods among actors can involve single connections or compound connections. Each type of connection has different effects on network performance. Consider, for example, an office manager who needs the work of all subordinates to complete a task. Since all subordinates must contribute to complete the task, this case involves single connections. Further, since any one subordinate can disrupt the task, the subordinates exercise power over the manager. In contrast, compound connections include a reserve of potential subordinates who can replace those who do not perform, and give power to the manager over subordinates. This project uses laboratory experimental methods to investigate how different types of compound connections produce different power exchange outcomes. The experiment places subjects in separate rooms to negotiate through connected PCs. The manipulation involves differences in the number and types of compound connections in the subjects networks, and the outcome involves the gains made by network members in competing for points. The results extend the scope of network exchange theory and its application to group behavior doc9966 none Prop # PI Nicholas Bates This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessel Weatherbird II operated by the Bermuda Biological Station and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Nicholas Bates is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire wire and cable spooler and a workboat through a group purchase by LUMCON (no monetary award for BBSR doc9967 none This proposal requests support for the research program of the Notre Dame group, which emphasizes experiments performed at hadron colliders. Key physics areas include the study of the top quark, the continued testing of the Standard Model, the search for physics beyond the Standard Model, and the investigation of the Higgs sector. An important facet of this program is the education and preparation of the next generation of experimental high-energy physicists. This program is centered on the D0 experiment at Fermilab and the CMS experiment currently under construction at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory in Geneva Switzerland. The physics of the D0 experiment involves the study of the top quark, strong interaction physics (QCD), electroweak physics (W Z), B-quark physics, and searches for new phenomena. Of particular interest is the possibility of discovering a Higgs boson with a mass less than 180 GeV c2. The LHC experiment will expand the physics horizon to include complete coverage of the Higgs sector and supersymmetry. The Notre Dame program involves four major aspects: (a) installation, commissioning and calibration of the D0 detector for Run II at Fermilab; (b) analysis of the Run II data with emphasis on topics singled out by the ND faculty and graduate students, e.g., BS mixing, search for supersymmetry, hard diffraction, study of the top quark, searches for evidence of extra dimensions, and Higgs searches; (c) overall coordination and development of tracking algorithms and software for the new D0 scintillating fiber tracker including track algorithms, detector simulation, calibration, pattern recognition, and track fitting; and (d) detector R&D and construction of the CMS detector at the LHC. On CMS, this group is participating in the development, construction and implementation of the hadron calorimeter (HCAL) with emphasis on the electro-optical readout of the detector sub-system. This group has also provided major leadership in development of the Quarknet project involving high school teachers and students in high-energy physics nationwide doc9968 none This is a Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) award. The project will allow a rapid follow-up to the PI s discovery of a new class of materials, the so-called left-handed materials (LHM). In normal materials, both the electric permittivity and the magnetic permeability are observed to be positive quantities. LHM are composite materials constructed so that the permeability and permittivity are simultaneously negative. The properties of LHM are quite different from ordinary materials. Some of the most important and non-intuitive properties of LHM are exposed when electromagnetic radiation propagates through such a LHM medium. For example, Snell s law is reversed. In work to date, materials have been constructed that behave as LHM in the microwave region. This SGER award will allow the exploration of theoretical and experimental work to determine if LHM materials can be fabricated at optical frequencies. If this can be achieved, and it is not known with certainty whether this will be possible, the potential impact of LHM in photonic materials, laser applications and other technical areas would be substantial. This is a Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) Award. The Principal Investigator and co-workers have produced a new class of composite materials with physical properties that scientists theorized might be possible, but had never before been produced. The materials are called left-handed materials (LHM) because they reverse many of the physical properties observed in ordinary materials in response to electromagnetic radiation. The new class of materials has the ability to reverse properties such as the Doppler effect, the principle that changes the frequency of waves as the source of the waves moves. Thus, a train whistle sounds higher in pitch as the train approaches and lower as the train recedes. Maxwell s equations, which describe the relationship between magnetic and electric fields, suggest that microwave radiation or light would show the opposite effect in this new class of materials, shifting to lower frequencies as the source approaches. Similarly, Maxwell s equations suggest that a lens made of such materials, instead of dispersing electromagnetic radiation as usual, would focus it as it passes through. This SGER award will allow the exploration of theoretical and experimental work to determine if LHM materials can be fabricated at optical frequencies. Such materials would have strange properties such as a flashlight shining on a LHM slab would be focused at a point on the other side. Students and post-docs working on this project will received excellent training in a new area, and will be qualified for a range of employment in academe, industry and government doc9969 none Dr. William M. Jackson of the Department of Chemistry, University of California at Davis, is supported by the Experimental Physical Chemistry program of the Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, for his work on the molecular dynamics of the photo-dissociation of ions, photon induced ion-pair formation, and photon induced Rydberg dissociation in various light halo-alkanes using velocity ion imaging techniques. This study will provide significant information on the photochemistry of light halo-alkane hydrocarbons. As well, several under-represented minority students will be mentored and trained in an area that is somewhat unique in the country and that requires both experimental and theoretical efforts doc9970 none The PI s will particpate in the Gulf of Alaska Long-Term Observation Program (GOA-LTOP) as part of Phase II of the Northeast Pacific (NEP) GLOBEC program. The GOA shelf supports a rich ecosystem that includes many commercially important fisheries. The basis for this productivity is enigmatic for the GOA shelf is deep, forced by downwelling-favorable winds, and fed by a massive nutrient-poor coastal freshwater discharge. Both the winds and the freshwater discharge are intimately linked to the strength and position of the Aleutian Low. The GOA ecosystem experiences substantial physical and biological changes on decadal and inter-annual time scales. Although some of these changes are correlated with various climatic indices a mechanistic understanding of climate change and ecosystem response is unavailable. The generic goal of this LTOP is to understand and quantify temporal (seasonal and interannual) and spatial (cross- and along-shelf) variations in the thermolialine, chemical, and biological pro-perties and relationships of this shelf. This research will support GLOBEC goals by providing the seasonal and interannual context for other concurrent studies, and by providing boundary conditions and data sets for model evaluation. The field effort involves seven, 9-day interdisciplinary cruises year in the northern GOA. The study area encompasses the 220-km long, Seward Line (sampled in the s) that extends across the shelf and slope and high resolution sampling of the Alaska Coastal Current (ACC), upstream, downstream, and with-in Prince William Sound. The ACC is an important shelf habitat for yoy salmon migrating from nursery areas in the sound and into the GOA doc9971 none This project requests travel support for 10 student participants from U.S. universities in the Student Paper Competition at the International Topical Meeting on Microwave Photonics (MWP). The International Topical Meeting on Microwave Photonics (MWP) is the major international meeting on microwave photonic devices, systems and applications. The MWP 01 is co-sponsored by the Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S) and the Lasers and Electro-Optics Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). It will be held in Long Beach, CA on October 7-10, . Each year, the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society and IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society promote student education in microwave and photonics engineering through a number of mechanisms. The Best Student Paper Program at the MWP is one of the student outreach programs to promote the interactions among students, faculty and industrial participants, and helps to develop the students technical acumen as well as their communication skills. It also introduces them to the international technical community and helps to build a community of students who will lead the next generation of microwave photonics engineers. The MWP provides financial support of various forms to student presenters but does not reimburse travel expenses. Travel support from NSF will ensure that the program is open to the widest range of interested applicants from U.S. universities doc9972 none properties of algebraic systems that are used in particle physics, data analysis, data encryption, engineering, statistical mechanics, and geometry. These discrete structures are concrete objects that can be enumerated and investigated on a computer. Using computer explorations, investigators have made startling new theoretical discoveries, and computation has become a significant method of mathematical investigation. The work in this project furthers the understanding of these algebraic systems and makes them more accessible to computational studies. Furthermore, these methods allow the investigator to fully involve undergraduate students in research. Young researchers can construct, manipulate, and analyze these objects without needing a huge amount of advanced training. At the same time these manipulations reveal deep truths about fundamental systems from algebra, geometry, and topology doc9973 none The focus of this project is on the application of model theory (a branch of mathematical logic) within mathematics. Model theory comes into the picture in two ways: (a) it provides a new set of tools; (b) it provides a new language within which to formulate results and problems. Recent successes demonstrate that these can provide powerful new methods for many areas of mathematics and can be the basis for breakthroughs on critical problems. This project focuses, therefore, on a well defined and coherent research direction, made timely by recent advances, not on a single mathematical problem. Model-theoretic methods typically involve identifying and axiomatizing the first order theories of classes of structures, studying their nonstandard models, identifying the class of definable sets in a structure (quantifier-elimination), and making use of the compactness theorem to work within rich nonstandard models. There is a sophisticated machinery available (via Shelah and others) for understanding definable sets in certain general classes of structures. For example, once a concrete structure is identified as being stable, this machinery comes into play. The research problems to be emphasized in this project involve potential application of model theoretic ideas and tools within symbolic dynamics and algebraic geometry, the algebraic theory of differential equations, analysis, and geometry. One of the goals of this project to find new and effective ways to help mathematicians learn how to use model theory. In particular, the researchers selected for support by this project will often be mathematicians who work outside model theory, and who are interested in finding ways to use it in their own work doc9974 none Solid-state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance will continue to be used to study the structure and dynamics of two classes of oxide glasses that have major technological applications, namely boron-containing glasses and oxyfluoride glasses. We will acquire quantitative microscopic information on borate, borosilicate, aluminoborate, and oxyfluoride glasses at ambient and high temperature, including systems containing diamagnetic analogs of rare earth elements, and will interpret and model existing thermodynamic and transport property data in light of these new findings. We will continue to emphasize temperature effects, with both in situ, high temperature measurements and studies of glasses prepared with varying thermal histories, which record the liquid structure at a range in temperature. We will use a wide range of NMR methods (on nuclides including 11B, 170, 19F, 23Na, 25Mg, 27AI, and 29Si), supplemented where needed by other methods such as Raman and infrared spectroscopy. Instruments available at Stanford include spectrometers with 9.4, 14.1, and 18.8 Tesla magnets (the latter the highest field strength currently commercially obtainable), with sophisticated high-speed magic-angle spinning, double and triple resonance, and high temperature NMR probes. A newly-developed rapid quench apparatus that will allow thermal history studies of small, valuable, isotopically enriched samples to be done. Applications of new NMR methods, in particular multiple quantum NMR, will continue to play a major role, as will the empirical calibration of NMR observables with structure of known crystalline model compounds. Models linking the microscopic and macroscopic will continue to be developed and tested and a new program of ab initio energy calculations, based on density functional theory, will be used to complement experimental results. Boron-containing oxide glasses are widely used in corrosion- and temperature-resistant containers, pipes and tanks, in fiberglass composites, in optical components, computer display screens, etc. Borosilicate glasses are also likely to play a major role in sequestering radioactive wastes. The ease with which the boron cation changes its local structural environment as a function of composition and temperature not only contributes to the useful properties of these materials but makes them a unique and intriguing subject scientifically. In oxyfluoride glasses, some oxygen ion is replaced by fluoride, again giving the resulting glasses and glass-forming liquids unique properties, and again posing a wealth of fundamental scientific issues concerning the structure and dynamics of mixed-anion systems. Fluoride has long been used to lower viscosities and melting temperatures of glass-forming liquids without clear understanding of mechanism; in recent high-tech innovations, oxyfluoride glasses are becoming interesting as hosts for rare earth elements in laser and optical amplifier materials. In all of these materials, the ability to tailor their properties to specific technological applications requires quantitative knowledge of their structure at the atomic scale, and the dynamics with which that structure changes in the precursor high-temperature glass melts. Nuclear magnetic resonance sees the local atomic structure and dynamics, often in a highly quantitative way, around selected isotopes of many of the most important constituents of oxide glasses. NMR has thus proven to be a near-ideal tool for studying such non-crystalline materials, and has increased our understanding of them enormously. This project should have direct interest to the Materials Science community, but its results will also have real significance to physicists working on the dynamics of glass- forming and other complex liquids, to physical chemists developing new applications of solid-state NMR, and to geochemists trying to model and predict the behavior of silicate magmas in nature. In the past, and hopefully in the future, the discipline-crossing nature of this type of study has broadened the perspectives of students in our group, with backgrounds in spectroscopy or geochemistry, into the fascinating and technologically important world of glass and ceramic sciences doc9975 none This award supports a project of Professor Shokurov. The project is focused on the finite generatedness of algebras-- a fundamental problem of algebra. The work proposed is to resolve the problem in a certain important class of algebras (named (FGA)) with the aim to finish the proof of the existence of log flips in any dimension whenever the Log Minimal Model Program (LMMP) and, in particular, the log terminations hold in the lower dimensions. To apply this inductive step to the LMMP in dimensions higher than 4 the principal investigator intends to finish the log termination for 4-folds. This gives the 5-fold log flips, and establishes the LMMP in dimension 4. A concrete application of this technique will be done by his student, Jihun Park, in his study of birational geometry of Del Pezzo fibre spaces, with a view to their existence, uniqueness of their certain models, and to the birational classification. This is research in the field of algebra with methods and applications in algebraic geometry. The finite generatedness corresponds to completeness in geometry, and effectiveness from the computational point of view. Algebra and algebraic geometry are very old, traditional areas of modern mathematics, but which have had a revolutionary flowering in the past century. In its origin, algebraic geometry treated figures that could be defined in the plane by the simplest equations, namely polynomials, or be given in the 3-space by the simplest geometric constructions, e. g., conic sections. Algebra is about these equations. Both fields interacts with most of branches of mathematics, e.g., analysis, topology and mathematical physics, with applications in those fields as well as in number theory, physics, theoretical computer science, and robotics doc9976 none Foecke The Sixth International Conference on the Fundamentals of Fracture is the latest in a series of meetings, held every four years, that assembles researchers to discuss the latest in theoretical and experimental research in the field of fracture. The wide-ranging discussions are held in locations that rotate around the globe from Asia to Europe and the United States. Its purpose is to foster collaborations and information exchanges among the best and brightest in the field of fracture. It has been especially successful in introducing a host of graduate students and post-docs to senior researchers and has led to the development of a significant number of new, long-standing relationships. This series of meetings is specifically dedicated to the science of fracture. The list of topics shows the organizing committee s desire to cover a broad range of materials systems and physical aspects of fracture. The preliminary list of topics include: atomistics of fracture, mesoscopic scale modelling, multiscale phenomena & modelling, crack dynamics, steels & other engineering materials, environmental effects, fundamentals of fatigue, and interfacial fracture.Support in the amount of $5K is provided to fund graduate student and post-doctoral attendee fellowships to maximize attendance from these groups that are traditionally under-represented at international meetings. %%% With the exception of isolated symposia within national meetings, such as the MRS, there are no meetings specifically dedicated to the science of fracture. The closest one is the International Congress on Fracture held every 3 years (the last one held in Australia in ). That series of meetings has an engineering-oriented flavor and does not deal with fundamental scientific issues doc9977 none The grant will provide partial funding for a USA delegation consisting of young Ph.D s and graduate students to participate in the mathematics conference entitled Computational Methods and Function Theory 01, which will take place during the period June 25-29, in Aveiro Portugal and will focus on the interactions between certain areas of pure and applied mathematics. The grant will also provide travel funding for several outstanding researchers from eastern Europe. The grant will provide funding for a USA delegation of of young Ph.D s as well as graduate students to participate in a conference that will emphasize various aspects of the interaction between scientific computations and the area of mathematics known as function theory. The conference will also foster contacts between scientists from diverse cultures. For this purpose, the funding provided will also help support some eastern European participants doc9978 none The effects of outflowing ionospheric ions on the dynamics of the magnetosphere is an inherently very difficult problem to study. A natural way of studying such phenomena is to utilize kinetic particle simulations. The difficulty in doing such simulations has been the large amounts of computer time required to generate physically reasonable results. New version of the EMPM (Electromagnetic Particle Model) code has been developed to make use of the capabilities of massively parallel computers such as the ORIGIN or the Cray T3E. This new code will provide a factor of two improvement in spatial resolution over the previous code and will provide better dynamics of the inner magnetosphere and ring current. Ionopsheric models of outflowing heavy ions will be used to incorporate the injection of these ions into the magnetosphere. The EMPM code will then be used to study the dynamics of magnetic storms as affected by the presence of heavy ions. In particular, the effect of changes in the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) will be investigated. This will be done using simplified time-varying IMFs to determine the effect of the varying IMF on the M-I coupling due to overflow of ionospheric ions doc9979 none Given geographical constraints, the ability of humans to be aware of or establish contact with others falls off rapidly with physical distance. Indeed, problems as diverse as the spread of disease within human populations, the diffusion of cultural norms, migration, racial ethnic segregation, and susceptibility to panic or revolution have all been linked to the distance-based structure of human relations. Yet, this spatial element of social network formation has received little attention. This project therefore develops mathematical network models based on physical distance, evaluates competing network models using published data on interpersonal relations across space, and presents measures of network structures. Using simulation methods, it identifies the linkages between large-scale social processes, such as those described above, and the social networks that span social groups and organizations. The mathematical methods thus provide insights into the general structures of human interaction that shape the more specific experiences and behaviors of individuals in a variety of types of groups doc9980 none The award is to conduct the annual National Science Foundation Design, Service and Manufacturing Research Conference. The conference will involve researchers in all program areas within the Division of Design, Manufacture and Industrial Innovation (DMII), the manufacturing researchers in the Divisions of Engineering Education and Centers (EEC), Electrical and Communication Systems (ECS), Civil and Mechanical Structures (CMS), located within the Directorate for Engineering, Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS), located within the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, Materials Research (DMR), located within the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, International Programs (INT), Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research, specifically the Innovation and Organizational Change Program (IOC), located in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences who are in manufacturing related research will present ongoing activities in their current research and attend sessions which will extend beyond their immediate area of research. Ongoing research in manufacturing related research activities are presented by the grantees from the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia (CONACyT), from locations within Mexico, and grantees from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the National Research Council (NRC), from locations within Canada. The conference ensures that the individual researchers are informed about the ongoing activities of their colleagues. An elimination of duplication of their efforts may be achieved and a degree of cooperation may result from this activity. An overall improvement of efficiency of the research activity could be expected. In addition, the conference program organization allows for ample time to discuss manufacturing research in detail with the collective research community at the meeting, with feedback to and input from the National Science Foundation. Finally, personal contacts between the grantees and program directors in the Divisions should contribute to clarify many current issues in their work. The aims of the conference are: (1) to broaden the outlook of all participants; (2) promote transfer of ideas and technology from one area of research to another; (3) to allow those working in a related area of research to get to know their peers so as to avoid duplication of research and to encourage cooperation, and (4) to allow personal contacts from the collective research community, the NSF, CONACyT, NSERC, and NRC program staff to discuss manufacturing research in detail (this should contribute to clarifying many current problems in ongoing projects). Attendees to the conference gain an early access to the information disseminated doc9981 none Concepts of species-island relationships originated in and have been widely applied to islands in marine environments. Among the factors most often examined biogeographers and ecologists exploring variations as they examine species richness on islands have been the relative and absolute distances separating islands from sources of colonists and the area of the islands under examination. More recent studies have highlighted the possible role that factors like effective distance, island morphology, environmental heterogeneity, disturbance, species interactions, and vegetation dynamics may play. This doctoral dissertation research project will expand the application of island biogeography concepts through analysis of islands in freshwater environments, particularly the factors influencing spatial and temporal variation of island vegetation within the Massasauga Provincial Park on the eastern shore of the Georgian Bay. Among the research questions to be addressed are: Do species-area and species-distance relationships apply in the Massasauga islands? What mediating factors besides area and distance affect species richness on the islands? Do forest age-class structures help determine whether there is a long-term equilibrium of species richness, or do current characteristics of vegetation represent only one stage in a process of dynamic change? To answer these questions, herbaceous and woody species richness will be determined along two 1-m-belt transects on each of 50 islands selected through stratified random sampling. Within 100-m-squared quadrats centered randomly along the transects, the number of trees, saplings, and seedlings will be recorded by species. The diameter of all trees within the quadrats will be recorded, and tree cores will be taken from a subset of those trees. Substrate texture, pH, and depth to bedrock will be recorded from the center of the quadrats. Topographic maps and hydrographic charts will be used to measure island size and perimeter, island distances, and topographic variability. Distance variables, prevailing atmospheric patterns, lake currents, and island density (i.e. stepping stones) will be used to determine effective distance. Island shape will be calculated as a perimeter area ratio. The dependent variable, species richness, will be calculated for the overall data set and for subsets consisting of forest, shrub, and herbaceous species. The ratio-level independent variables will be tested for their relative impact on species richness using multiple regression. Simple regression will be used to establish relationships between diameters and age in order to estimate ages for all of the sampled trees. Age-class plots of stands on each island will be drawn to help determine whether or not dominant species are reproducing themselves. This will allow inferences to be made about the possibility of changing species dominance and therefore of changing species richness within ecological time scales. Investigating measurable factors influencing species richness of Massasauga park will further understanding of island biogeographic concepts in freshwater settings. By incorporating a temporal dimension of forest dynamics as an indicator of the stability or impermanence of current species richness, the results of the proposed research will be generalizable to broader issues of ecological change. This research will provide management officials with baseline data and insight regarding island vegetation and biodiversity. Research results will also pertain to current issues concerning the ecological integrity of the Georgian Bay shoreline, including the Massasauga islands. Two initiatives (Ontario s Heritage Coast Project and the Thirty Thousand Islands United Nations Biosphere Reserve proposal) are planned to generate eco-tourism and development activities in the region, which would increase island use. Increasing human pressures may eventually lead to shifts in the species richness and composition of the islands. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc9982 none Research in theoretical elementary particle physics will include work on relating theoretical predictions to new experiments that will be performed in the near future, and to the development of ideas involving superstring theory, a theory of all fundamental interactions. The detection of dark matter, the mysterious non luminous material that appears to make up about 90 % of our Milky Way galaxy, and the the recent exciting Brookhaven National Laboratory measurements that appear to indicate the existance of new physical phenomena will be analyzed, and a study will be made of how superstring models can account for the masses of elementary particles. The analyses of experimental predictions are of importance as a whole array of new experiments that will be able to discover the existence of new laws of physics in the high energy domain have now started or will start in the near future, and these experiments can be used to test new theories of nature and determine what these new laws are. The theoretical work on superstring theory is of importance as this theory is one of the main candidates for a new theory of all interactions including gravity, as well as representing a possible fundamental framework for cosmology doc9983 none Deregulation and globalization of financial markets and the introduction of new information technologies in the financial industry have had profound impacts on the banking industry. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine the extent to which these challenges are affecting the globalization of Japanese banks in syndicated credit markets. Specifically, the project will investigate whether Japanese banking is becoming more similar to European and U.S. banking in the face of similar global pressures or whether Japanese banks remain distinctive because of the Japanese political and economic context in which they are embedded as well as the competitive pressures from the existing banking structure, especially networks among non-Japanese global banks. The research will examine the globalization of Japanese banks as the outcome of changes in the Japanese financial markets, the existing structures of the global financial markets, and the networks strategies of Japanese banks embedded in the other two forces. Using the DealScan database, the student will compare the behaviors of six Japanese city banks and those of eight banks from U.S. and Europe with respect to the overall lending practices and performance and the geography of financial intermediation (the international networks of investors and borrowers in which they participate). The student will examine the domestic and the global context in which Japanese banks have evolved since the mid- s. Second, using the league tables in DealScan, the student will identify the major players and the country shares in the global syndicated credit markets. The student then will create Arranger-Participant matrices and Arranger-Borrower matrices of individual banks and statistically measure the extent to which the international networking behavior of Japanese banks differs from those of non-Japanese global banks. Geographers have not explored the possibility of quantitative and empirical research on the behavior of global financial institutions due to lack of geo-referenced data sources. Through the use of the DealScan database, this project will demonstrate elements of the geography of international portfolio lending by banks of different nationalities, an aspect of international investment that rarely is documented. The study will also illustrate the importance of geography in understanding financial networks by showing how the different status of financial institutions in various markets has been considered in network creation. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc9984 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Viktor V. Zhdankin, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, is exploring the chemistry of hypervalent compounds of iodine and xenon. His studies include the preparation and structural characterization of novel, stable complexes of hypervalent iodine and xenon with chelating nitrogen ligands, a search for catalytic reactions utilizing hypervalent iodine, the development of new oxidizing agents based on benziodazoles, and the preparation, structural study, and exploration of the reactivity of mixed phosphonium-iodonium ylides and imides. With this Research in Undergraduate Institutions award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research efforts of Professor Viktor V. Zhdankin, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. Through the study of new structural types of compounds containing iodine or xenon, Professor Zhdankin will enhance our understanding of the structure and reactivity of these unusual compounds, develop new reagents and procedures for organic synthesis, and search for new compounds with unusual and useful properties. Undergraduate students from the University of Minnesota, Duluth and from other universities will carry out these studies doc9985 none Constantin Theoretical interest and experimental efforts concerning Lagrangian particle analysis have been increasing in the last years. The proposed research is to develop an Eulerian-Lagrangian approach initiated very recently. A main object of study in this approach is a diffusive Lagrangian path inverse that allows a natural formulation, including a viscous analogue of the inviscid Cauchy formula. The solution is built using a product expansion near the identity transformation. It is proposed to study this construction and apply it to randomly forced flows. In addition, the study of quenching of flames by strong random flows in turbulent combustion is proposed. Fluids and plasmas exhibit many active scales of motion, and are notoriously difficult to compute and predict accurately. The reason is that the equations describing them are not well understood. It is proposed to study mathematically the processes of transport of momentum and heat under extreme conditions doc9986 none Knox This award to University of California at San Diego will provide instrumentation for oceanographic research for use by the Oceanographic Data Facility of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, as well as specific instruments for use on the four research vessels operated by the institution, R Vs Revelle, Melville, New Horizon and Sproul. All four of these research vessels are operated by the university as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. Specific instrumentation to be acquired includes new meteorological sensors for underway data acquisition, new transmissometers, thermometers and altimeters for use with CTD systems, new servers for shipboard computer networks, a replacement GPS system for attitude and speed data acquisition, and a grab sampler and deep ocean pinger. The shared-use instrumentation supported here will assist marine scientists conduct studies worldwide on SIO and other research vessels during and future years doc9987 none Magin This Industry University Collaborative project, a component of the Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) initiative, involves faculty and students at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) and Texas A&M University (TAMU) teamed with practicing engineers at General Electric Medical Systems (GEMS) as participants in a new research educational program combining Ph.D. research in RF technology with industrial experience in state-of-the-art Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) systems. The activity is to support development of innovative, collaborative industry-university research and educational programs. Support will be provided for eight Ph.D. students (four at UIC [this project] and four at TAMU [award ]), who will be co-advised by university faculty and industrial scientist engineers. These students will spend one semester or summer each year doing research at GEMS. While in residence at GEMS in the Applied Sciences Laboratory, the students will have access to advanced MRI system design and testing equipment and work under the supervision of the industrial Co-Principal investigators, who also will serve as members of the student s Ph.D. advisory committees. Additionally, six senior GEMS engineers scientists will participate in this project as mentors for the students. This project is expected to establish a new model for industry university collaborative research and education programs at the Ph.D. level in MRI engineering doc9988 none Marder We will carry out studies in single crystal silicon to find how the speed of a rapidly running crack depends upon loading magnitude, loading mode, crystal plane, orientation, and temperature. The studies will include the first investigations of crystalline fracture at temperatures below 100K. We will also provide careful measurements of the structures left behind the cracks, both on and below the fracture surface. In addition, we will investigate the brittle-ductile transition for polymers, glasses, ionic crystals, and alloys, and study the laws governing crack paths in crystalline and amorphous materials. %%% When airplanes or bridges fail, the culprit is often fracture. Cracks race across solid structures near the speed of sound, ripping them in two. At the same time, fracture underlies many processes used to shape materials, such as cutting, sanding, or polishing. The first motivation to study fracture is therefore to protect engineering structures, and the second is to learn new ways to manipulate and form them. We have been constructing experiments to obtain detailed information on how fracture proceeds under precisely controlled conditions. Our experiments will be performed in single crystals of silicon at temperatures that are 200 degrees C below room temperature. The information from these experiments will tell us how the structure of matter at the atomic scale affects fracture, and will test theories claiming to make predictions about possible atomic effects. As the experiments in silicon are completed, we will broaden our studies to investigate crack motion in other crystalline and glassy materials doc9989 none This project studies organizational population dynamics in the civil sector, specifically of self-help mutual aid organizations between and . Population ecology models of the birth and death rates of organizations have been applied relatively successfully to the private and governmental sectors, but controversies exist over the measurement of the key variables of legitimacy and competition. The civic sector provides a strategic opportunity to redefine legitimacy in terms of reputational externalities and competition in terms of resource differentiation. The project gathers data on the emergence, growth, decline and persistent of self-help mutual aid organizations from encyclopedia, sourcebooks, and IRS records, and links this information to demographic, financial, and affiliation characteristics of the organizations. In addition, it draws reputational data on the organizations from journals and federal registers of grant awards. Dynamic modeling using event history methods, negative binomial and poisson regression, and latent curve techniques are applied to the data. The results show the extent of the influence of legitimacy and competition on organization survival in the non-profit sector doc9990 none The present record of the natural variability of hurricane activity is insufficient to accurately predict the recurrence intervals for hurricane catastrophe events. The study of coastal sedimentary sequences that provide long-term proxy records of hurricane activity can be used to address this issue. This doctoral dissertation research project will develop a 1,200-year-long high-resolution record of hurricane and tropical storm activity for the Boston area based primarily on the sedimentary record from the Lower Mystic Lake. The Mystic Lake record is laminated and appears to hold an annually resolvable archive of sedimentation for the last millennium. Hurricane storm surge and overwash events can be detected in the sediments by changes in physical sedimentology and diatom assemblages. Based on microscopic examination of the laminae and radiometric dating, this project will develop a high-resolution record of these events for the region over the last millennium. The record will be compared with a lower-resolution record developed from a marsh in Boston Harbor. This second record is more typical of studies carried out elsewhere to reconstruct past hurricane frequency. It is expected that the Mystic Lake record will preserve more subtle events and events that are closely spaced in time, occurrences that are not evident in a lower-resolution record. The project will contribute to understanding of how synoptic climate controls may moderate different regional modes of hurricane activity. By examining the frequency of hurricane events in the context of long-term climate changes, in particular the frequency of events over the past millennium from the cold episodes of the Little Ice Age compared to warmer periods, results of the project may suggest the expected hurricane activity in a climate warmed by greenhouse gases. The value of better understanding hurricane activity and recurrence intervals is enhanced by populations that have led increasing numbers of people to live along or near coastlines that are subject to hurricanes. More than half of the total U.S. population currently is located in vulnerable coastal zones, and these populations are expected to swell another 20 percent by . Combined with the uncertainty of how global warming may affect hurricane activity, civic planners, disaster management agencies, and the global insurance industry have begun to wonder whether recent disasters like Hurricane Andrew are simply a precursor to an increasing number of even more costly and deadly tropical storms in the coming decades. Results from this project will contribute to the growing body of knowledge necessary to answer this question. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc9991 none Extensive efforts have been made to properly incorporate remotely sensed atmospheric data from open oceans where conventional data are sparse into the numerical prediction models. Along this line, the PI seeks to advance the assimilation of the Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) occultation data by improving old approaches as well as exploring a new method. The degree of refraction of the radio signals transmitted by the GPS depends on the properties of the atmosphere through which the signals travel, and thus can be used to gain the knowledge of the atmospheric thermodynamic state. This research project is divided into four areas: 1) Improve the computational efficiency of the raytracing approach (a forward modeling calculation to match the bending angle profile with the observed profile) used by the PI in her previous study and improve its performance in the lower troposphere; 2) Develop an efficient refractivity assimilation method by estimating the averaged atmospheric refractivity information along the ray path to obtain the integrated effect of refractivity index; 3) Assess and quantify errors in the GPS-derived refractivity data; 4) Evaluate and examine existing physical parameterization schemes using the information retrieved by the GPS data. The potential impact of this study on weather predictions is significant considering the role that GPS data likely will play in the future doc9992 none This project examines the role of compensation and coercion in relationships that involve exchange of social goods among actors. Whereas compensation is the promise of a positive reward to be delivered in the future, coercion is the promise of impending punishment. According to theories of the relationships between religious leaders and followers, and theories of power in exchange relationships, the ability of person A in a dyad to use compensation or coercion in dealing with person B will increase the exchange payoff for person A. For example, control over a generalized reward (such as Heaven) or a punishment (such as Hell) gives power to one person over another. However, the two forms of control may differ in the power they generate and the timing of the emergence of that power. This project uses data from a laboratory experiment to compare the effects of compensation and coercion for power differences in systems of exchange. In the experiment, subjects in separate rooms negotiate through connected PCs. In the negotiations, the subjects vary according to their position in the exchange relationship, and their ability to use compensation or coercion, which in turn affect the payoffs the subjects receive in the exchange. In addition to contributing to the general understanding of how people interact with one another in exchange relationships, the results offer insights into relationships between religious leaders and followers doc9993 none In recent decades, suburbs have expanded their share of the metropolitan job base and matured into bustling economic centers blurring the once distinct boundaries between the urban core and the suburban periphery. As metropolitan regions have been transformed, so has the nature of the relationship between central cities and suburbs, prompting a debate that has penetrated both policy circles and the popular press about the importance of the central city to the metropolitan economy. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine urban-suburban economic relationships and the unique agglomeration economies central cities are purported to have through an analysis of the intra-metropolitan location of producer service industries and the spatial linkages between producer service establishments and their clients, competitors and suppliers. Producer services are an important group of industries to study given that they are held to be traditional city industries and represent a dynamic segment of the economy. This project will use data on employment, wages, output, and the spatial linkages between major U.S. firms and their producer service providers to examine the intra-metropolitan location of producer services and the spatial division of producer service functions in 20 major U.S metropolitan areas. This analysis will provide a backdrop for a comparative case study of the accounting industry in the New York and Minneapolis-St. Paul regions. Case study data will be collected through a telephone survey of accounting firms and supplemental interviews with firm representatives, development officials, and industry experts. This research project will contribute to the industrial location literature by identifying trends in the intra-metropolitan location of producer service industries and the factors that drive location decisions. This research also has the potential to influence local and regional development policy. Greater insight into why certain producer services continue to cluster in central cities and the extent to which suburbs and central cities compete as producer-service providers will advance understanding of the economic interdependencies of cities and suburbs and help to determine if agglomeration economies represent a competitive advantage of central cities. Identifying and building upon competitive advantages will help jurisdictions in crafting local and metropolitan-wide development strategies aimed at maximizing economic competitiveness. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc9994 none This project contributes to the literature on downward mobility in the United States through a series of in-depth interviews. Although upward mobility remains more common than downward mobility, important economic changes have made downward mobility more prevalent in recent decades than during the s and s. This makes the experience of doing worse economically than one s parents increasingly common. However, little is known about how people explain and interpret the experience of downward mobility. In addressing this gap, the project builds on studies of class and inequality in the United States, improves our understanding of cultural messages about success, and addresses issues crucial to Americans. The methods involve interviews with 100 respondents from the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metropolitan area who belonged to their high school s class of . Using an initial survey instrument based on a four-category occupational scheme, the project identifies 50 downwardly mobile respondents, and 25 upwardly mobile and 25 immobile respondents who serve as control groups. The in-depth interviews gauge how individuals who differ by race, class, and gender view their experiences with downward mobility. They also reflect the extent and nature of the social psychological effects of downward mobility doc9995 none The purpose of the proposed grant is to design and lay the necessary groundwork for major education research projects related to K-12 science and mathematics in the Delta resgion of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. This project provides the advantage of working within the framework of an established major systemic reform initiative, The Delta Rural Systemic Inititiative. We will bring together an interdisciplinary cadre of national and regional researchers, resouce personnel and practitioners, all working in close collaborat8ion, to develop partnerships and research designs which will lead to major research initiatives focused on the underpinnings of systemic changes in regions serving impoverished, rural populations doc9996 none Wright This Industry University Collaborative project, a component of the Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) initiative, involves faculty and students at Texas A&M University (TAMU) and the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) teamed with practicing engineers at General Electric Medical Systems (GEMS) as participants in a new research educational program combining Ph.D. research in RF technology with industrial experience in state-of-the-art Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) systems. The activity is to support development of innovative, collaborative industry-university research and educational programs. Support will be provided for eight Ph.D. students (four at TAMU [this project] and four at UIC [award ]), who will be co-advised by university faculty and industrial scientist engineers. These students will spend one semester or summer each year doing research at GEMS. While in residence at GEMS in the Applied Sciences Laboratory, the students will have access to advanced MRI system design and testing equipment and work under the supervision of the industrial Co-Principal investigators, who also will serve as members of the student s Ph.D. advisory committees. Additionally, six senior GEMS engineers scientists will participate in this project as mentors for the students. This project is expected to establish a new model for industry university collaborative research and education programs at the Ph.D. level in MRI engineering doc9997 none Pasnicu The ASH algebras (respectively AH algebras) are C -algebras arising as inductive limits of finite direct sums of subalgebras (respectively corner subalgebras) of matrix algebras over unital,commutative C -algebras.A C -algebra is said to have the ideal property if each ideal is generated by projections.The investigator proposes to classify a large class of nuclear ASH algebras with the ideal property and also to classify the AH algebras with the ideal property.He also proposes to work on a conjecture which states that many nuclear,separable C -algebras with the ideal property which are the crossed product of a unital,commutative C -algebra or of an AF algebra by the integers is an ASH algebra in the above class.This project is related to Elliott s program of the classification of the separable,nuclear C -algebras and to a problem of Effros and could have an impact in operator algebras but also in ergodic theory,in the study of the (noncommutative) dynamical systems and in geometry. C -algebras could be thought as collections of infinite matrices of numbers endowed with an interesting algebraic and topological structure. The C -algebras have significant applications to other parts of mathematics (geometry,topology,ergodic theory),to parts of physics (quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics) or to other sciences (the structure of DNA and other molecules).A complete classification ( enumeration ) of a special class of operator algebras,called amenable von Neumann algebras,was given by Connes in his Fields Medal winning work. This project has two main goals.One is to classify ( enumerate ) large classes of amenable (nuclear) C -algebras with the ideal property (an interesting technical condition) which are defined by a particular construction ( inductive limits ).The other one is to show that many amenable C -algebras with the ideal property arising from a completely different and natural construction ( crossed products ) belong in fact to one of the above classes (of inductive limits ) that the investigator proposes to classify ( enumerate ).This project could have an important impact in several mathematical fields including operator algebras, dynamical systems,geometry and also in some domains outside mathematics (e.g. in quantum physics doc9998 none The investigators will study the role of high latitude Poynting flux in large-scale magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling. The principal means by which energy is transported from the magnetosphere to the ionosphere is by Poynting flux and particle precipitation in the high latitude polar regions. The Poynting flux will be derived by combining magnetometer measurements from the Iridium satellites with electric field measurements from the SuperDARN radar system. The study involves three specific objectives: (1) Establish the principal regions of electromagnetic energy flux by determining the spatial distribution of the Poynting flux; (2) Identify the influence of the neutral wind dynamo by looking for regions of negative Poynting flux; and (3) determine correlations between Poynting flux and other magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling phenomena. The combined data set will be used to calculate the global scale Poynting flux and energy deposition into the atmosphere doc9999 none Alejandro Adem This award provides partial support for participants to attend a Workshop on Mathematical Aspects of Orbifold String Theory to be held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, May 4 through May 7, . The workshop will bring together groups of mathematicians and physicists to identify and outline emerging problems associated with diverse mathematical developments arising in orbifold string theory. In particular this event will foster interdisciplinary research involving mathematical physics, algebraic geometry, differential geometry, algebraic topology and representation theory. Recent Ph.D. s and graduate students are especially encouraged to attend and apply for support. Further information, including invited speakers, schedule of talks, housing information and a registration form is available at http: www.math.wisc.edu ~conklin ost doc10000 none This award provides funds, through Kenyon College, for an REU Site in archaeology and cultural anthropology at the Lower Cacaulapa Project in NW Honduras. Eight students will conduct independent field investigations supported by in-field class instruction and a living and working situation. Participants will take a common core of seminars that introduce them to archaeological and ethnographic methods and theory and sensitize them to the political, cultural, and economic context in which they live and work. Student investigations will include explorations of modern and ancient cultural processes and behavioral patterns. This course of study is founded on the directors considerable experience in collaborating with and teaching undergraduates within field settings in the past, most particularly on NSF REU Site projects that they directed in the Naco vally, Honduras in , , , , and , and in the lower Cacaulapa valley during . This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences doc10001 none McDuff This award to University of Washington s School of Oceanography provides instrumentation to significantly improve the oceanographic research capabilities of the research vessels Barnes and Thompson, two ships operated by UW as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. It also provides instrumentation to UW that will be used to support scientific operations on USCG Healy, an icebreaker operated by USCG in support of NSF-funded Arctic research projects. The specific items supported with this award include an acoustic Doppler current profiler for coastal research on R V Barnes, a plotter, copier and fiber-optic multiplexer for R V Thompson, and deep-sea pingers and cryogenic freezers for research use by scientists on R V Healy. These improvements will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists using these three ships in their research during and future years doc10002 none The 2nd International Symposium on Advances in Computational Heat Transfer will be held on May 20-25, , in Palm Cove, Queensland, Australia. The International Centre for Heat and Mass Transfer will host the conference. The purpose of the conference is to provide technical exchange, identification of the state-of-the-art, and the projection of future needs and trends in computational techniques applied to heat transfer. The conference will assemble scientists and engineers working in fields related to, and requiring, computational methods for modeling all modes of heat transfer, including coupling with fluid flow. The symposium will be held at the Novotel Palm Cove Resort, Palm Cove, Queensland, Australia. The conference web site is (http: cht01.mech.unsw.edu.au); Begell House, Inc will publish the conference proceedings. The NSF funds will help support travel for U.S. participants consisting of undergraduate and graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and non-tenured faculty with limited research funding working in the field of computational heat transfer doc10003 none The last 30 years have witnessed a major transformation in American Trade Policy. Until the s, the U.S. government used high tariffs and import quotas to protect troubled industries. Starting in the mid- s, those were replaced with fair trade policies, a modified form of protectionism. However, government success in including these new policies under GATT has varied considerably across industries. This project attempts to explain why the U.S. government has changed its trade policy preferences, and why its ability to turn these preferences into official policies has varied. In so doing, it sheds light on how states deal with global forces, international relations, and domestic institutions in developing policy. To reach these goals, the project gathers data from archival and secondary sources, such as government reports, trade journals, Congressional hearings, GATT publications, and interviews with key figures, to compare trade policy both over time and across industries. The over-time component compares trade policies and international agreements formed in the s s with those formed in the s. The cross-industry component compares policy trajectories in textiles, steel, and civil aircraft -- three industries that have gone through economic difficulties and experienced a significant shift in the trade policies affecting their products doc10004 none Survey research has consistently demonstrated variation in the intimate lives and dyadic arrangements of heterosexual and homosexual men, including rates of partner change, expectations of emotional commitment, and acceptance of non-monogamous practices. However, the pathways to these differences are less well understood. Theories and studies often treat preferences of gay and straight men as fixed traits of individuals, when orientations develop and change over the life course. Taking a social constructionist life course perspective, this project examines how structural contexts of opportunity and relational histories affect the development of intimate orientations and careers, and how orientations are constructed in response to these opportunities and constraints. The project gathers life histories of 100 heterosexual and homosexual (black and white) males between 21 and 49 years of age in New York City. The life history method tracks continuities and turning points in intimate practices and dyadic arrangements from baseline orientations to the present. It also explores racial differences in these processes. Rather than make generalizations about gay and straight men, the project captures the dynamic interplay of structure and process, and thereby contributes to a more sociological understanding of behavior that is often viewed from individualistic or biological perspectives doc10005 none The field-aligned current (FAC) and the auroral acceleration are related to each other and are most important in the magnetosphere-ionosphere (M-I) coupling. The recent studies have found that on the nightside, auroral emission and electron precipitation tend to be more intense in the winter (dark) hemisphere than in the summer (sunlit) hemisphere. The observed asymmetry of auroral emission, suggests that the field-aligned current is more intense in the winter hemisphere, even though auroral regions in two hemispheres are connected by the magnetic field line, and the background ionospheric conductance is lower in the winter hemisphere. The proposed project seeks to study this paradoxical problem by observationally testing three possible explanations. Those explanations are (1) The upward FAC is more confined or structured in latitude in the winter hemisphere creating locally more dense currents; (2) The enhanced electron precipitation in the winter hemisphere overcompensates for the asymmetry of ionospheric conductance due to solar illumination; and (3) The region 1 currents in the summer and winter hemispheres have different sources in the magnetotail, and the M-I coupling takes place separately in each hemisphere. Magnetometer data from the DMSP-F7, F12, and F13 satellites and Geotail data will be used to examine FACs above the ionosphere. An automatic procedure to identify FAC structures will be applied to those data sets, and the characteristics of FACs such as current intensity, current density, latitudinal thickness of FAC sheets, and spatial irregularity will be quantitatively determined. The project will compare those characteristics between the summer (sunlit) and winter (dark) hemispheres. The proposed project will be the first comprehensive study of the summer-winter asymmetry of nightside FACs and will shed new light on the role of the ionospheric conductance in the M-I coupling doc10006 none The primary coupling between the magnetosphere and the ionosphere is accomplished via electric currents flowing along the Earth s magnetic field. Upward current regions generally result from downward flowing electrons which have been observed with many satellites. In contrast, downward current regions generally involve upward flowing electrons that have been more difficult to observe. Thus our outstanding of the downward current regions has lagged behind our understanding of the upward current regions. This study will develop a self-consistent picture of the plasma and field properties of downward auroral current regions. The results will lead to a better understanding of such features as ion conic particle distributions, downward pointing electric fields and ELF VLF turbulence. The theoretical underpinning of the study will be to break the problem into two separate but coupled problems with vastly different time scales. ELF VLF turbulence operates on times scales of milliseconds, while the evolution of the large-scale auroral current structures takes place on time scales of minutes to hours. Thus a self-consistent high frequency spectrum can be determined in the context of a slowly evolving background distribution doc10007 none As members of a minority group become integrated into the dominant society, they may lose their ethnic identification through a process of assimilation. To test theories of assimilation, this project examines the self-identification of third and fourth generation Americans of Mexican ancestry, and how this self-identification is shaped by high levels of ongoing Mexican immigration. Using national-level census data and personal interviews conducted in two U.S. cities, the project makes special efforts to measure ethnic identification. It then uses quantitative and qualitative methods to first assess the impact of generation, educational attainment, and residential ethnic concentration of immigrants on Mexican-American intermarriage and the identity of children of such unions. It next examines how social context and culture shape the self-identity of later-generation Mexican-Americans. And it lastly draws out the implications of Mexican self-identity for deciding how to respond to questions in the U.S. census about ethnicity doc10008 none Studies of the Civil Rights Movement have done much to describe and explain how such movements emerge and recruit members, are influenced by the political environment, and change their strategies and leadership. However, the response of states to challenges of the Civil Rights Movement is less well-studied and understood. When movements engage states in battles over inequality and the meaning of race, for example, the state can defend its use of racial classifications, make symbolic rather than real concessions, or bring about reform through voting rights and integration. At the same time, state officials in choosing their response must consider the meanings their actions have to diverse audiences - the federal government, the national public, local officials, movement activists, and state voters. This project thus examines the actions one state took in response to civil rights challenges and to the competing claims of multiple audiences. In so doing, it contributes to our understanding of how states deal with political conflict and change, try to maintain their legitimacy, and obstruct or facilitate changes in inequality. More specifically, the project examines the actions of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission ( - ), an organization created by the state legislature during the Civil Rights Movement to monitor race relations and defend against encroachment. It uses primary data from the files of the commission and interviews with persons familiar with the commission, and uses secondary literature on the Civil Rights Movement and commissions in other states. The data from these sources show how the commission framed its efforts to legitimate segregation to multiple audiences, and faced challenges to the state s system of racial classification doc10009 none The overall goal of this award is to expand the impact of previous work supported by the Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program in order to increase the number of well-prepared individuals, including those from under-represented groups, entering technical positions in the biotechnology work force. This goal is being accomplished through two tightly interrelated objectives. The first objective is focussing on faculty enhancement workshops related to biotechnology methods and the biotechnology workplace. The second objective is focussing on the dissemination of quality biotechnology instructional materials directly to secondary school classrooms. Activities for both objectives incorporate instructional materials created by other ATE projects. This project involves partnerships with the Wisconsin School for the Deaf, the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Education, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, the Wisconsin Educational Communications Board, and the ATE-funded Cases in Industry Practices in Biotechnology , the Shoestring Biotechnology Project, and the Bio-Link Center of Excellence in Biotechnology. Project objectives and outcomes are expected to be: 1: To enhance the skills and knowledge of faculty from two- and four- year colleges and secondary schools so that they: Effectively incorporate important biotechnology workplace skills into their curricula Promote student awareness of varied technical career opportunities in biotechnology Incorporate effective active learning and laboratory activities into their classrooms Establish relationships among educators and industry representatives Introduce laboratory and work place curricula into traditional baccalaureate programs 2: To adapt and disseminate quality instructional materials for biotechnology technical education that were developed with previous ATE funds so that: + Quality materials are customized for different target populations of students, including those in under-represented groups + Secondary students are aware of biotechnology workplace opportunities + Secondary students math and science skills improve + Secondary students skills in biotechnology improve + Quality instructional materials reach diverse students + Pre-service teachers learn about biotechnology and the biotechnology workplace doc10010 none Three magnetic storms were identified by the joint SHINE-GEM-CEDAR magnetic storm campaign as candidates for a broad and inclusive study of the dynamics of magnetic storms. The periods to be studies are 10-11 May , 24 Sept. - 1 Oct. , and 18-31 Oct. . This study will examine the spatial and temporal evolution of the electric fields in the inner magnetosphere during the three storm study periods. A global model for the storm-time electric field will be obtained by mapping the ionospheric electric field (as determined from ground based observations using the Assimilative Mapping of Ionospheric Electrodynamic - AMIE - technique) into the magnetosphere along magnetic field lines. The effects of penetration of electric fields to lower latitudes and hence the inner magnetosphere will be incorporated by a detailed analysis of field-aligned currents associated with the divergence of the ring current computed by the Ring Current-Atmosphere interaction Model (RAM). The RAM model will also be further extended to include the effect of wave-particle scattering of energetic O+ ions. The model results will be compared with satellite data doc10011 none The long-term maintenance and survival of the endangered species like the grizzly bear depends on the capabilities of small groups of animals to move and interact with other groups of the same species, thereby reducing the negative effects of an increasingly narrow gene pool over time. Grizzly populations inhabiting the Selkirk and Cabinet-Yaak ecosystems along the U.S.-Canada border are is dependent upon periodic interactions with other Canadian grizzly populations. Although researchers have studied many facets of grizzly activity, the have not yet determined how dispersed populations stay connected and what demographic and genetic effects current levels of connectivity have individual populations. Previous studies addressing connectivity between various populations of a species have used field studies to collect and analyze data or have taken a theoretical landscape ecology modeling approach. Though a landscape modeling approach allows examination of the issue from the correct spatial scale, it falls short of fully capturing the spatial dynamics of bear movement. Field methods and fine scale studies can capture the dynamics of bear movement, but because of low population densities and life history traits of bears in settings like the those along the U.S.-Canada border, the collection of data on bears at the appropriate spatial and temporal scales is very difficult. This doctoral dissertation research project will use an autonomous agent methodology, object-oriented design principles, and remote sensing and geographic information system (GIS) technologies to develop a spatially and behaviorally explicit, individual-based model replicating the movements of grizzly bears. Movements within and between local populations will be generated and analyzed by means of a computer simulation. More specifically, the project will examine the theoretical foundations of bear behavior across geographic space and develop a simulation model that evaluates the current level of connectivity between the different populations of grizzly bears. The latter task will be done by defining population boundaries between local populations, by determining the probability and frequency of bears in one population successfully dispersing and breeding in another population, and by determining the demographic and genetic effects that dispersals have on each of the individual local populations. The project also will identify any connectivity barriers between local populations. The integration of GIS and remote sensing technologies with theoretical models should provide a valuable new tool for inquiry and understanding. This integration will provide a level of spatial realism that cannot be achieved by theoretical modeling alone. Use of an autonomous agent approach should allows the explicit inclusion of the interaction between individuals and between individuals and their habitat. The inclusion will produce a more accurate model of wildlife spatial dynamics. Because of the increased spatial realism and dynamics, this project will advances the current understanding of how spatial structure influences animal movement. This is critical to the investigation of the importance of considering spatial structure when exploring the affects of human factors, such as human-induced landscape fragmentation and global warming, on endangered species persistence. In addition, this research will advance knowledge about the importance of including local interactions in the regional level assessment of ecological connectivity between geographically disjunct populations. This research will offer an advancement in bear conservation, because it will go beyond discerning potential corridors based on habitat to assessing the contribution of current corridors to the long-term genetic and demographic viability of each of the local populations. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc10012 none At the end of , there were stock markets in 103 different countries, and 48 were established between and . Some of these new stock markets appear similar to those established elsewhere, but others involve substantial local control and have special characteristics. What explains the proliferation of these stock markets, and the different forms they can take in different countries? Four theories provide competing answers to these questions. First, a strong theory of global change suggests that states are increasingly powerless against homogenizing global economic forces. Second, a hollowing out theory predicts that global markets weaken and constrain rather than destroy state capacity, and leave room for local control of markets. Third, a skeptical theory argues that states actively participate to varying degrees with international economic forces, produce diverse national institutions, and allow for considerable local control of markets. Fourth, a world culture theory explains increasing similarity across nations through the international diffusion of organizational norms. This project -- the third phase of a larger study of recently-created stock markets -- examines these questions and evaluates these theories through the study of new stock markets in Fiji, Ghana, and Iceland. It uses methods of participant-observation, in-depth interviews with market participants, and archival analysis to test predictions about the global economy and state power in affecting the establishment and operation of new stock market exchanges. In particular, the study describes and analyzes the sources and types of information market participants draw on, the connections of the market to international organizations, and local and regional dynamics in market practices doc10013 none The proposed ARW is to provide a forum for free-spirited exchange and debate of views, visions, and ideas. The format includes both prepared invited presentations and ad hoc contributions with uninhibited exchange of views and rebuttals. Some of the key luminaries will come to share their opinions and to lead the discussions on where the technologies are going and or should be going. Balanced representations of advocacy and opposition will be intentionally sought. Each day will start with presentations given by key speakers on subjects in one or two chosen themes. It is then followed by debates and invited talks by other participants. All oral presentations (in morning sessions) are to focus on the presenter s views and projections of future directions, assessments or critiques of important new ideas approaches, and NOT on their own achievements. The presenters are asked to be provocative and or inspiring. Latest advances made and results obtained by the participants will be presented in the afternoon sessions in the form of posters and group individual discussions. The day will be concluded by an evening panels session that attempts to further the debates on selected controversial issues connected to the theme of the day. Each session will be chaired by one forceful character that will invite 2-3 attendees of his her choice to lead with a position statement, all other attendees being the panelists. The debate will be forcefully moderated and irrelevant digressions will be cut off without mercy. Moderators will be also assigned a hopeless task to forge a consensus on critical issues. For these considerations, a format has been choosen that is less rigid than normal workshops to allow and encourage uninhibited exchanges and sometimes confrontation of different views. A design a central theme will be designed together with the speakers for each day doc10014 none This project proposes to conduct a study that investigates various aspects of leadership development in mathematics and science education while addressing four questions: 1. What are the characteristics of current leaders in science and mathematics education in crucial arenas of educational activity? 2. What educational and professional experiences led them to their leadership positions? 3. What do these leaders see as the desired future directions for mathematics and science education? 4. From where will the next generation of leaders come? In order to address these questions, the project will: 1) interview a systematic sample of mathematics and science education leaders in crucial areas; 2) review their curriculum vitae and products of their professional work; 3) analyze existing national databases that provide information about this leadership community; 4) review literature that expands understanding of leadership in the context of education; and 5) study program documents from leading programs of preparation of mathematics and science education leaders doc10015 none Spencer This award will support American graduate students, middle school science teachers, and university faculty to participate in research related activities in Japan in connection with NSF s Summer Programs in Japan. The project is led by Professor B.F. Spencer, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Notre Dame, in collaboration with Professor Yozo Fujino, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Tokyo. Faculty and students selected for the program will participate in workshops and site visits prior to participation in the formal NSF Summer Programs. The workshops and site visits will provide broad exposure to natural hazards mitigation research in Japan and enable the American participants to establish relationships with Japanese researchers and students in their field. Japan is a world leader in natural hazards mitigation research. Professor Spencer s project will help connect American students and researchers to the most active Japanese university, government and corporate laboratories in this field. It is expected that this will have the long-term result of increasing U.S.-Japan collaboration, to the benefit of both countries doc10016 none As coupled magnetospheric, ionospheric and thermospheric models mature it is increasingly apparent that Joule heating may take place over a wide variety of spatial scale sizes. Current models used for space weather estimate Joule heating rates by using average bulk plasma flow velocities (Vb) in large-scale high-latitude convection patterns. However, recent studies suggest that structure in the ion drift over smaller scale sizes of 10 to 100 km may change the estimated Joule heating rate by more than a factor of 2. This proposal will use data from the Dynamics Explorer-2 satellite and from the DMSP satellites to describe the average and maximum amplitude of velocity structure (AV) at high latitudes as a function of position, season, solar cycle and geomagnetic activity. Thus, Joule heating rates previously calculated using only the average bulk flow rate Vb of the plasma will be improved to become a function of Vb + AV. The data description will be cast in the form of a model that functionally describes the magnitude of the velocity structure in terms of the bulk flow so that these refined estimates of Joule heating rates can be easily used both in thermospheric models and as boundary conditions for coupling magnetospheric models with the ionosphere. A first order dependence of the model on magnetic activity will allow a better specification of the high latitude thermosphere and ionosphere for space weather applications doc10017 none There are indications that the dominant source of plasma for the plasma sheet and the near-Earth portion of the magnetosphere may be the ionosphere. Over the past two decades there have been numerous investigations involving spacecraft observations, radar observations, and simulations directed toward understanding the possible mechanisms that drive the upward outward ionospheric plasma flow observed in the high-latitude F region above 500 km altitude. A good empirical model has not been generated for the outflow (inflow) of plasma from (to) the auroral zone and polar cap as a function of geomagnetic activity, solar activity, and season. This proposal seeks to address this latter issue through the utilization of ion flow data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) series of spacecraft, flying in the topside F region at the 800 km altitude level. The database from these high duty cycle spacecraft observations extends from to the present, covering more than a complete solar cycle. Major proposed tasks in performing this research are 1) the determination of the seasonal variation in the plasma outflow in the topside F region, 2) investigation of the baseline values of the outflux and velocity structure and of the magnitude of storm-time perturbations in the plasma outflow, 3) performing a superposed epoch analysis to establish the characteristic response of the ionosphere to changes in magnetic activity, and 4) development of an analytic model of plasma outflow suitable for use by the general scientific community doc10018 none Paul G. Goerss This award provides partial funding for the - Emphasis Year in Algebraic Topology at Northwestern University. The main goal of this special year is to develop some of the new connections between homotopy theory and other areas of mathematics, including algebraic geometry, cohomology of groups, algebraic K-theory, and A(1) homotopy theory. During the year there will be a series of short term visits by experts in these areas and a smaller number of longer term visitors. A mini-conference on algebraic topology and its connections with group cohomology and representation theory will be held in the Fall of , and an international conference on Homotopy Theory and its Applications will be held in March of . Both will be at Northwestern University. Further information about the Emphasis Year and the associated conferences, including invited speakers, schedule of talks, and housing information, will be available at http: www.math.northwestern ~pgoerss emphasis doc10019 none This research project investigates the suppression of friction-induced oscillations through the use of high-frequency dither signals. The primary application of this research effort is that of brake squeal, which is a self-excited vibration that afflicts most braking systems. Brake squeal has been an elusive problem to solve because it involves an interaction of multiple brake components. This project builds upon research conducted on Georgia Tech s brake squeal dynamometer, which demonstrated that a high frequency dither in the brake pressure could effectively eliminate squeal. This dither force, supplied by means of a piezoceramic actuator, used frequencies beyond the audible range, thus silencing the brake system. This research project aims to understand more fully how dither suppresses brake squeal and how to develop more effective dither-control strategies. The proposed work uses a combination of analytical and experimental techniques. Nonlinear mathematical models of brake systems and subsystems will be developed and validated against experimental observations. The experimental program will explore the use of alternative dither signals as well as feedback to enhance performance and robustness. The influence of dither on mean braking torque will also be assessed. This work promises to have a significant impact in a variety of industrial and scientific applications. Brake squeal-related warranty claims impose a high cost upon the automotive industry. Additionally, brake manufacturers must currently make design compromises in the selection of brake pad materials, compromising on materials that are less prone to induce squeal. Therefore, a low-cost, simple technology that permits improved braking performance while reducing development and warranty costs would yield substantial benefits doc10020 none The PI intends to continue the study of singularities of nonlinear heat equations in differential geometry and mathematical physics, such as The Ricci flow, Harmonic Map flow, Mean curvature flow, and the Porous medium equation. Possible singularities will be analyzed by means of matched asymptotic expansions. In addition to this the PI hopes to continue his collaboration with groups in medical imaging, serving at least as a source of theoretic knowledge for such groups and perhaps collaborating more intensely. Nonlinear diffusion equations occur in many forms in mathematical physics and engineering, as well as in pure mathematics (differential geometry). Understanding of the solutions to such equations can be gained by studying their singularities. E.g. singularities of a solution to an equation modeling a chemical reaction in a reactor may correspond to explosion as opposed to steady reaction. The PI intends to study such singularities. In addition, the PI intends to continue his collaboration with a research group in Medical Imaging. The practical problems of how to automatically process 3D fMRI images all belong to a branch of mathematics called differential geometry. A detailed knowledge of differential geometry has proved to be very useful in medical imaging in the past, and promisses to stay important. Conversely, medical imaging problems may serve as a source of new mathematical problems and theories doc10021 none PI: Masoud Soroush Institution: Drexel University Proposal Number: To achieve greater profitability, process designers have been creating design in regions involving complex nonlinearity where process controllers continue to face stiff challenges. Steady state multiplicity, limit cycles, chaos, and parametric sensitivity are manifestations of the nonlinearity. In addition to the nonlinearity, there are many process designs that have unstable and or non-minimum-phase steady states. In many cases, operation is more profitable at an unstable steady state, or at a stable steady state in the close proximity of an unstable steady state, often involving non-minimum-phase behavior (inverse response). Examples of process designs that can show such behavior are chemical reactors, fermentation reactors, fluidized catalytic crackers, reactor-separator-recycle plants, azeotropic distillation towers, and reboilers. Processes with such designs are known to be more challenging to control than processes with stable and minimum-phase steady states. This University of Pennsylvania-Drexel University joint research project is aimed at addressing more efficient and easier operation of processes with unstable and or non-minimum-phase steady states. It is a study of the interactions between design and control in the processes, and strategies to develop process designs that make control of the processes easier. The designs of existing chemical and biochemical processes with unstable and or non-minimum phase steady states will be studied to identify the design features that give rise to such process behavior. Alternative new process designs, if possible, will then be developed for the processes such that the same level of profitability is maintained but the instability and non-minimum-phase behavior are eliminated. For processes for which such desired alternative designs cannot be found, new differential-geometric, model-based control laws will be developed that are applicable to general nonlinear processes, whether minimum-phase or non-minimum-phase. Initially, control laws will be developed for general, nonlinear, continuous-time processes without deadtimes or input-saturation constraints. Subsequently, the latter two complications will be addressed, and the methods will be extended to multi-input-multi-output (MINO) systems and tested for chemical, petrochemical, and biochemical processes. A prototype symbolic-manipulation software that, given a process model, automatically generates differential geometric control laws will be developed to simplify their industrial implementation and testing doc10022 none machines (in automata theory) have been found to be a very useful tool for studying such problems. Transactions are often designed in advance with parameters instantiated at runtime. The project intends to extend these automata-theoretic techniques for studying logical properties of parameterized transactions and related computational complexity issues. In applications aspect, the project applies the constraint approach to develop data models and query languages for moving object databases. The goal is to provide a conceptual framework and optimization techniques for managing and querying moving objects doc10023 none The project will improve our understanding of the genesis and evolution of tropical synoptic disturbances in the northwest sector of the Pacific. The structure of the background monsoonal flow in this region during northern summer (with westerlies in the western and easterlies in the eastern part of domain) allows for interesting dynamical interactions involving tropical waves and cyclones. Dr. Chang will investigate the dynamical processes, particularly, nonlinear interactions in the vicinity of confluent mean flow, to advance the understanding of tropical cyclogenesis. Tropical cyclones in this region are often disastrous, taking tremendous toll on human lives and the economies of Southeast Asia. Investigation of the conditions under which tropical synoptic disturbances evolve into cyclones can lead to improvement in cyclone forecasting. Together with co-PI, Dr. Roger Williams, Dr. Chang will dynamically model the interactions between the background monsoonal flow and tropical disturbances using barotropic, baroclinic, and primitive equation models, to better understand their evolution doc10024 none This project will provide for the continued dissemination of research results from the Geospace Environmental Modeling (GEM) program through the use of the WorldWide Web, electronically disseminated newsletters, and published reports. The timely dissemination of news about the GEM program has been a critical part in the past successes of the GEM program and will continue to be vital to the future of GEM doc10025 none This research plan consists of two themes. The first is concerned with investigations into the structure theory of injective-like objects in the category of operator spaces, and involves the theory of contractive projections on real or complex C -algebras. The second is a study of linear and nonlinear representations of the Lorentz group with an eye towards finding physically meaningful models in mathematical physics. The link connecting these two objectives is described in the following paragraph. Since the pioneering work of Jordan, von Neumann and Wigner in the s, Segal in the s and 50s, and Alfsen-Shultz-Stormer in the s, Jordan algebras, and more recently Jordan triples, have been used as a model for the study of the state spaces of quantum mechanics. On the other hand, contractive projections have played a key role in the structure theory of Banach Jordan triple systems, and those which are completely contractive give rise to injectives in the category of operator spaces (also known as quantized Banach spaces). The PIs plan to study the fine structure of contractive projections on operator spaces in order to gain a better understanding of their role in operator space theory, as well as their role, together with Jordan structures, in quantum mechanics and relativity doc10026 none Foreman s work is in two directions: ergodic theory and combinatorial set theory. In ergodic theory he seeks to characterise the complexity of various classes of ergodic measure preserving transformations, using the tools of descriptive set theory. In combinatorial set theory he is continuing a program of applying reflection principles and Shelah s PCF theory to study classical problems in infinite combinatorics. Foreman investigates the phenomenon of apparent randomness in physical systems that are deterministic in nature. A system can be deterministic in the sense that the behavior of any particular individual (particle) in that system is completely determined (perhaps by some differential equations), but on a macro level, any measurement made shows random behavior. Many systems in nature have this kind of paradoxical properties. Foreman s other line of research considers difficult combinatorial problems asked by people such as Erdos in the s that remain major questions in the 21st century doc10010 none Three magnetic storms were identified by the joint SHINE-GEM-CEDAR magnetic storm campaign as candidates for a broad and inclusive study of the dynamics of magnetic storms. The periods to be studies are 10-11 May , 24 Sept. - 1 Oct. , and 18-31 Oct. . This study will examine the spatial and temporal evolution of the electric fields in the inner magnetosphere during the three storm study periods. A global model for the storm-time electric field will be obtained by mapping the ionospheric electric field (as determined from ground based observations using the Assimilative Mapping of Ionospheric Electrodynamic - AMIE - technique) into the magnetosphere along magnetic field lines. The effects of penetration of electric fields to lower latitudes and hence the inner magnetosphere will be incorporated by a detailed analysis of field-aligned currents associated with the divergence of the ring current computed by the Ring Current-Atmosphere interaction Model (RAM). The RAM model will also be further extended to include the effect of wave-particle scattering of energetic O+ ions. The model results will be compared with satellite data doc10028 none McGrath Living biomaterials spanning the size scale from cells and tissues to entire organs can be damaged by accidental exposure to temperature extremes (e.g. frostbite and burns). Unusually high or low temperatures can also be used clinically to kill tumors by heating or freezing respectively. In contrast, proper use of low temperature exposure can be used to preserve cells and tissues for virtually indefinite periods. Furthermore, between the extremes of preserving and killing there are many surgical and biotechnology procedures that amount to producing biomaterials with modified characteristics by using heating or cooling (freezing). Examples include heating treatments for stabilizing joints, relieving spinal pain, cosmetic surgery and heart disease. In all of these cases it is very important to understand how the biomaterial responds to the temperature changes and associated events such as the phase changes which occur during freezing. Unfortunately, very often not enough is known about the detailed responses of cells, tissues and organs to temperature excursions. Furthermore, the experimental tools available to study the detailed responses are limited or lacking. We have identified two specific needs that are the focus of the proposed research. Current methods often use temperature-measuring devices that disturb the system measured (invasive), only measure at one location and are too large relative to the small sizes of interest. Thus the first need addressed by the proposed research will be to provide a means of continuously measuring temperature non-invasively (using optical methods) over entire surfaces of biomaterials (rather than single locations) with micro-scale spatial resolution. The current state of the art is also limited with regard to methods to measure whether cells within tissues are alive or dead. Thus the second need addressed by the proposed research will be to provide a means of continuously measuring tissue cell viability non-invasively (using optical methods) within tissues with micro-scale spatial resolution. Molecular biology methods are applied to accomplish this using tumor cells as an example. These two optical methods provide a means of directly linking the applied thermal history of the biomaterial to the biological response in a manner not possible previously. Examples of the successful implementation of these two methods will be developed as part of the proposed research. The successful completion of this research will provide tools that can be used to develop a better understanding of the response of many types of biomaterials to a variety of applied thermal challenges. This will form the basis of future methods of rationale design of thermal treatments for improved health care doc10029 none The project looks at several seemingly unrelated problems from a unified perspective. It deals with questions of expansion of Cayley graphs of finite groups, eigenvalues of Riemannian manifolds and pro-p groups. Somewhat unexpectedly, methods and results from one field shed a new light on the other areas. The work is promising to be very interdisciplinary and should have, if successful, a serious impact on several mathematical fields, pure and applied. On the pure side, it is expected to have a completely new approach toward the Thurston conjecture on three- dimensional manifolds. On the applied side, it will bring a better understanding of expanding graphs, graphs which serve as basic building blocks for various communication networks doc10030 none This proposal describes planned activities that will build a strong, ongoing relationship between the Physics Department at Southern University (SU) in Baton Rouge, LA and the LIGO Laboratory. The program has two major components: first, the study of impurities in materials of interest to LIGO for advanced detector optics; and second, an educational and research program for SU students together with an outreach program in collaboration with the LIGO Livingston Observatory (LLO) to inform and educate students of all ages about basic science in general, and the LIGO search for gravity waves in particular. In addition, the proposal looks forward to an interesting analysis program to correlate gamma ray bursts (observed for a number of years, but still not understood) with gravity waves that LIGO expects to observe when the LIGO upgrade is completed. The proximity of LLO to the SU campus ( it is about 50 miles from SU) greatly enhances the outreach program since students will have access to research projects at LLO while they are enrolled in classes at SU doc10031 none The Advanced Materials Program in the Chemistry Division supports this award to University of Arkansas to study the basic mechanism and method of nanoparticle crystal growth using size- and shape-dependent optical properties of these nano-particles. With this award, Professor Xiaogang Peng will develop green chemistry-based methods for the large scale synthesis of nano-sized cadmium selenide crystals from the less toxic precursor cadmium oxide, and these methods will be quite different from the presently used methods with precursor dimethyl cadmium, which is toxic, unstable and expensive. The award will help to develop new methods for the large-scale synthesis of semiconductor nanocrystals of uniform size and shape for applications in electrooptic devices. Both graduate and undergraduate students will greatly benefit from the training and research opportunities provided by this award in materials chemistry. With this award, nanoparticle crystal growth will be studied using size- and shape-dependent optical properties of these crystals. Nano-sized cadmium selenide crystal will be prepared in large scale using cadmium oxide as the precursor. This green chemistry-based method will be cost effective, and used less toxic and much more stable precursor. Both graduate and undergraduate students will greatly benefit from the training and research opportunities provided by this award in nano-crystal growth and characterization doc10032 none This research is for a systematic study on one important type of complex systems, namely chemically cross-linked polymer networks. Information about the dynamics of these systems will be generated experimentally by broad-band dielectric relaxation spectroscopy and dynamic mechanical spectroscopy, and will be verified against the appropriate models. The proposed research adds a major new dimension to the earlier studies of dynamics in polymer networks in that the systems selected for study dimension to the earlier studies of dynamics in polymer networks in that the systems selected for study exhibit, in addition to the transverse dipole moment component, a persistent cumulative dipole moment along the chain contour that can be relaxed via the normal mode process. This part of the dipole moment of the polymer molecules is present when the repeat unit lacks a plane of symmetry perpendicular to the chain contour. For a sequence of n such units, the dipole vector must correlate with the displacement vector and thence from the studies of the normal processes one can determine not only the relaxation time but also the mean square end-to-end distance. Therefore, the network-forming materials chosen for study will have a unique characteristic in that their molecular architecture will be conducive to the detection of the entire hierarchy of molecular motions, ranging from local to segmental to global. It is anticipated that the controlled variation in the structure and topography will result in the ability to tailor-make networks with desired characteristics whose response can be varied by a selective engagement on the time scales shorter or longer than the characteristic time of each dynamic process. Ultimately, it will be possible to realize the macroscopic properties of the networks by molecular concepts. %%5 The proposed research will have implications broader than the aforementioned goals. This is so because the interplay of dynamics of various length scales is crucial to the behavior of many other complex systems, such as self-assemblies and various nanostructures, as well as to the host of bio-related issues that range from gene therapy, protein dynamics and protein folding to the loops and cruciforms that affect the local and global dynamics of DNA s. The integration of research and education will be realized through lectures and laboratory courses for undergraduate and graduate students. The proposed work will also contribute to the enhancement of ethnic diversity by accommodating a number of under-represented minority students from New York City high schools under the aegis of the YES (Youth in Engineering and Science) summer program at Polytechnic doc10033 none A Florida law that separates the state juvenile justice system from social welfare agencies marked a change in the ideology behind juvenile justice. Once focused on protection and rehabilitation of children, the juvenile justice system, like the adult criminal justice system, now focuses more on punishment. Where previous laws reflected beliefs that children are still unformed and not fully responsible for their actions, and that they require guidance rather than punishment, the new laws reject such beliefs. This project examines how the shift in the law reflects changing attitudes toward the children it most affects, particularly African-American children. It uses two major research strategies to understand the sources and consequences of the reform of Florida s juvenile justice system. First, analysis of quantitative data on a randomly selected sample of all cases processed by Florida s juvenile courts reveals the effects of the new statewide policy on the treatment of problem youth. Second, a detailed legislative analysis of how the policy was developed and adopted into law identifies the changes in values and ideologies of childhood that guided the new policy. The results contribute to research literatures on the social construction of childhood, the workings of the criminal justice system, and the emergence of criminal justice policy doc10034 none The TEAM II project, submitted in the area of Teacher Retention and Renewal, will develop highly qualified elementary mathematics teacher leaders throughout North Carolina. Principals and central staff will locally support teacher leaders. The goal of the project is to develop the state s leadership infrastructure by improving teachers leadership skills, mathematical and pedagogical content knowledge. Staff development will provide in-depth investigation focused on: (a) national and state mathematics standards; (b) mathematics content and pedagogy; (c) curricular materials that support standards-based learning; and (d) the process of change. Administrators are extensively involved in this project. Lenses on Learning staff development materials will be used to increase administrators knowledge of mathematics content and pedagogy. Administrators and lead teachers will receive support to develop long- and short-range plans to effectively implement reform-based curricula at the school level. Internal evaluation will include surveys of participants during summer institutes, interviews with project staff and instructors, conversations with school system principals and central office staff, and participants reflections on the usefulness of project activities. External evaluation will document increased knowledge of participants, application of this knowledge in instruction, effects of improved teaching on student learning, and leadership by participants in NC mathematics reform. Data will be gathered through content assessments, interviews, written reflections, classroom observations, analysis of end-of-grade test scores and reports of leadership activities doc10035 none Barron In continuation of work that is presently funded by a one-year NSF SGER grant, the PI s propose to elaborate on this novel class of structured, sequence-specific heteropolymers to develop close mimics of natural SP-B and SP-C, that will be stable and biocompatible for in vivo use. This medically-relevant research project offers potential for broad impact on the field of biomaterials engineering, by demonstrating the usefulness of non-natural, sequence-specific polymers for biomimicry. The aims are: (1) To design, synthesize, chromatographically purify, and spectroscopically characteize the secondary strutures of peptoid mimics of helical, amphipathic LS proteins SP-B and SP-C; (2) To perform in vitro biophysical characterization of peptoid SP mimics as spreading agents for biomimetic lipid admixtures, carrying out studies on a pulsating bubble surfactometer and a Langmuir-Wilhelmy surface balance, and making comparisons to LS containing natural petpides; (3) To formulate a therapeutic, biomimetic LS replacement containing both phospholipids and SP mimics, that is effective, bioavailable, biocompatible, and more cost-effective than animal LS; (4) To carry out in vivo testing of optimized biomimetic LS replacements in a murine model of RDS, in collaboration with Brigham and Women s Hospital; and, (5) To deepen the present fundamental understanding of the relationship between LS protein structural features and biophysical functioning in phospholipid surface films doc10036 none R. Benny Gerber of the University of California, Irvine, is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to explore the formation mechanism of novel rare gas containing molecules using molecular dynamics simulations, including surface hopping between the different potential energy surfaces that may be involved. These rare gas molecules, such as HXeCl and HXeOH, have recently been discovered experimentally, and have stable bonds of typical chemical strength. The simulations will compute the formation yield of these compounds and its dependence on radiation wavelength and temperature, both for the rare gas clusters and for species in matrices. Another objective of the calculations is to predict if new but still unknown rare gas containing compounds can be made by evaporation of rare gas atoms from clusters species. This research will pursue the formation of new argon-containing molecules, and the possibility of preparing neon and helium containing molecules. Finally, simulations will be used to test whether pure crystals of HRgX molecules can be stable. In addition to the dynamics simulations, calculations of the vibrational spectroscopy of the new molecules will be carried out using the Vibrational Self-Consistent Field (VSCF) method, which includes effects of anharmonicities and coupling between modes. The outcomes of this effort are expected to greatly expand knowledge about a new and interesting class of molecules, enable discovery of new species within this family, and encourage studies of analogous compounds for non-rare gas chemically inert molecules. Until recently, it was widely assumed that rare gas atoms (helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and radon) could not form chemical bonds in the electronic ground state of neutral molecules, and chemical compounds containing rare gas atoms have belonged to a limited class. The new family of rare gas molecules that will be explored in this research could ultimately have significant applications in various areas of science, including atmospheric chemistry and materials chemistry doc10037 none Microzooplankton, grazing organisms 200 gm in size, have a central role in marine pelagic food webs and are significant consumers of phytoplankton and a major food resource for larger zooplankton. The PI s will provide detailed information on microzooplankton stocks in the GLOBEC California Current System (CCS), in the context of physical, chemical, and biological data collected in the CCS Long Term Observation Program (LTOP). They will document temporal (seasonal and interannual) and spatial (along-shore and from coast to offshore) variability in distribution of microzooplanktonic protists in the CCS. The specific objectives of the research are: 1) Retrospective analysis of microzooplankton stocks in the CCS from samples collected along the Newport (NH) line off Oregon in September during a strong El Nino, and in September after relaxation of the El Nino event, 2) Seasonal regional sampling of microzooplankton stocks in the CCS as part of the LTOP program through September , 3) Analysis of spatial and interannual variability in microzoo-plankton stocks with respect to environmental parameters collected as part of the LTOP cruises, and 4) Estimating potential rates of herbivory by microzooplankton, and significance of microzooplankton as a food resource for mesozooplankton, for use in CCS food web models. Data will include abundance and carbon biomass of general taxonomic groups of microzooplankton, and observations of ingested prey in protist food vacuoles and of the abundance of mixotrophic ciliates. Results from the retrospective analysis of microzooplankton standing stocks, and from our sampling program during the LTOP cruises in - will be processed, archived and disseminated to other GLOBEC investigators as the data become available. The results of this study will provide important data for CCS ecosystem modelers, and will also be valuable in comparisons of CCS and Coastal Gulf of Alaska (CGOA) ecosystem dynamics doc10038 none This proposal concerns several related problems in quantum information theory, all arising from the study of noisy quantum channels. The first problem is to prove additivity of minimal entropy and multiplicativity of the maximal trace norms for a unital qubit channel. This result would imply additivity of the Holevo capacity for such channels, thereby settling one particular case of a longstanding conjecture. The second problem is to investigate a conjectured equality between the Shannon capacity of a noisy quantum channel and a new quantity which was introduced in earlier work of the P.I.. The third problem involves a study of one special class of non-product measurements for product channels, with the goal of providing an interesting laboratory for testing ideas about entangled measurements. Advances in nanotechnology have provided the opportunity for scientists to study and manipulate the quantum properties of microscopic systems, including single-atom systems and single-photon states. Recent theoretical discoveries indicate that such systems may have extraordinary properties. One example is the quantum computer, which is a theoretical device capable of outperforming any standard computer. Another example is a protocol for unconditionally secure encryption, which would be achieved by encoding messages as quantum states. Mathematics played a key role in the development of both of these ideas. The current proposal concerns a similar mathematical investigation of quantum devices which would be used to transmit and store information. A fundamental problem is to determine the information capacity of such a system, and thereby find the quantum analog of Shannon s famous expression for the capacity of a noisy channel. The P.I. describes a strategy for determining this capacity in an important special case, namely a memoryless channel where qubits are used to encode the information. The method of solution would involve some new mathematical ideas which may have applications to other areas of quantum information theory doc10039 none of the bifurcations that occur within this system. He also develops algorithms for the computation of structures that are difficult to compute with existing methods. Rhythmic phenomena are ubiquitous in biological systems. Examples include the heartbeat, the cell cycle, circadian rhythms, legged locomotion, and electrical signals in the nervous system. Most of these involve multiple time scales. The investigator pursues new mathematical theory and computational methods that apply to dynamical systems with multiple time scales. Emphasis is given to models of neural systems, an area in which the presence and importance of complex dynamics are manifest. The investigations draw upon decades of research in characterizing generic phenomena observed in dynamical systems with a single time scale. The resulting body of mathematics, sometimes called chaos theory, needs extension and modification to fully explain the behavior of systems with multiple time scales. Those extensions are the goal of this project. On a longer time frame, the project lays foundations for coming generations of biological models for cellular processes such as gene expression and signal transduction. New biotechnology leads to ever more complicated reaction networks that are simulated as dynamical systems. This project produces results that aid the implementation and interpretation of such simulations of complex, multiple time scale dynamical systems doc10040 none An oriented matroid is a combinatorial abstraction which can be used to encapsulate features of a nite point set in Euclidean space which are of interest in combinatorial geometry. It is planned to study certain enumeration problems involving oriented matroids by making use of the theory of valuations on distributive lattices. Indeed some progress along these lines has already been made. It is hoped that information on the range of certain important functions for example, the f-vectors of convex polytopes, or the number of k-sets of a finite point set will be generated. Additionally it is hoped that this research will enable the extension to oriented matroids in general of substantial results already obtained for uniform oriented matroids. Combinatorial geometry is a subject with a venerable history which in recent years has become an even more important arena for research, due to its applications in the area of algorithms for geometrical structures. Research in combinatorial geometry often leads to better algorithms in computational geometry, which in turn leads, for example, to improved design of computer chips, better algorithms for image analysis and processing, and so forth doc10041 none Lanzani This project concerns several questions about integral representations for holomorphic functions of one and several complex variables, related (singular) integral boundary operators, and elliptic boundary value problems. The main underlying theme consists of estimates of Cauchy singular integral operators with focus on the case of domains with rough boundaries. The crux of this project is the basic observation that it is often possible to determine the values a certain function, say, f, takes inside, say, a ball, by only measuring the values f takes on the surface of the ball, via the computation of a (surface) integral involving the datum f and an auxiliary function K ( the kernel ). It may help to think of the value f at a point P as the temperature at this point: by (easily) measuring temperature on the surface of a ball (think of the ball as been made of a solid material, such as metal), one can then find out the value of the temperature inside the ball without having to reach the inside, simply by plotting the surface temperature data in an integral formula, and then computing the integral. Because of the microscopic nature of matter, it is much more natural to make these measurements and calculations on a rough body, say a cube (which has corners and edges), than a smooth ball. In the mathematical model, this new situation translates into additional constraints on the kernel K which make it much harder to effectively use K in the computation of the integrals. In this project we study certain ( complex )analogues of these mathematical models in the context of rough domains doc10042 none This project focuses on a study of strong optical superradiance that utilizes cold ytterbium atoms contained within a magneto-optical trap and a short-memory-time optical cavity. Strong superradiance comprises the regime of radiative decay where correlations within a material sample lead to radiative energy damping on time scales substantially different from the natural lifetime of the constituent quantum systems. The use of the short-memory-time cavity accelerates the time scale on which superradiance occurs within a specific atomic sample while leaving the system dynamics otherwise unchanged. As a result, strong superradiance can be observed in optically thin atomic samples and therefore in the absence of intra-sample field propagation effects. The use of cavity acceleration and essentially non-dephasing atomic ytterbium provides the first experimental opportunity to demonstrate and investigate strong superradiance under conditions similar to those assumed in original descriptions doc10043 none Supra-national and transnational regional economies are emerging as a territorial response to the competitive pressures of trade-led development. Analysis of these emerging regional institutions has tended to focus on their implications for the management and control of economic flows and their potential threat to the sovereignty of nation-states. Less attention has been directed to the impact of regional economic integration on the political spaces in which local communities can articulate their concerns over trade-led development. Preliminary evidence suggests regional economic integration is remaking the geography of political opportunity and creating new possibilities for marginalized communities to demand accountability and action at scales beyond the nation-state. Focusing on regional integration in the Caribbean, the doctoral dissertation research project will compare how two non-governmental organizations (one labor- and one feminist-oriented) have interpreted and interacted with regional economic institutions to advance the interests of those they represent. A combination of archival research, interviews with organizational representatives and participant observation will be employed in three locations: Barbados, Guyana, and Trinidad. Using a text-based manager, data will be analyzed to reveal a narrative of the changing nature and scale of political opportunity in the Caribbean. Comparing two very different organizations makes it possible to assess which issues have been addressed most successfully at the regional scale. Understanding how non-state actors operate within this complex landscape of political opportunities will advance theoretical and empirical understandings of how regional economic integration transforms political space. The significance of this research lies in its investigation of how regional economic integration reorganizes political space to create opportunities for political action at scales beyond the nation. The research contributes to empirical and theoretical debates within political and economic geography and feminist studies. It extends and deepens analysis of regional economic integration through its attention to cultural discourses and the activities of non-state actors. Exploring how Caribbean community is transformed and how different actors interpret regionalism is key to understanding how supra-national regions are emerging as potential sites for increased public engagement and reinvigorated democratic politics. Advancing empirical understanding of the process of regional development in the Caribbean provides unique insight into meeting the needs of poor and marginal populations at a time of intensified globalization and institutional erosion. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc10044 none In developing the concept of social capital, sociologists have extended the general meaning of capital - the investment in the acquisition or creation of a resource with the expectation of a return beyond the cost of the initial investment - to apply to social networks. Social capital refers to both the productive benefits of social relationships for the economic status of individuals, and the forces that act to preserve the social resources of densely-connected, homogenous communities. This project builds on the social network foundations of the concept of social capital to determine how 1) participation in certain types of organizations and activities affects an individual s social capital, and 2) an individual s level of social capital affects economic success, tolerance, health, and happiness. To answer these questions, the project gathers data from a questionnaire sent to households in Miami, Florida. The data measure participation in political, civic, religious, work, and informal organizations; social network ties to persons in a representative set of occupations; and personal characteristics relating to economic status, health, happiness, and tolerance. Analysis of the data identifies how social capital is created, what benefits it can bring to individuals, and if it is harmed by the decline in participation in certain types of organizations doc10045 none First introduced as part of the U.S. Trade Act of (and amended by the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of and in the Uruguay Round Agreements Acts of , Section 301 provides the opportunity for interested parties to charge other nations with unfair trading practices by filing a petition with the U.S. Trade Representative s office. This doctoral dissertation research project will constitute a descriptive, explanatory, and institutional analyses ofthe disposition of Section 301 cases since the legislation s inception, and it will evaluate both industry and government views of the effectiveness of Section 301, not only in terms of the outcomes of individual cases, but also in terms of its larger impact on global trade. By examining not only the geographic implications of trade policies as reflected in Section 301 cases, this project also will explore the geographic context within which trade policy is developed, enacted, and operationalized. The research will consist of two components. Descriptive and explanatory analyses of Section 301 cases from to will provide the basis for analysis of the patterns of Section 301 cases in terms of their evolution over time, the countries and regions targeted, the types of unfair practices cited, the economic sectors involved, the types of complainant, and case outcomes. These descriptive analyses will be augmented by chi-square analyses and refinement of a explanatory multinomial logit model aimed at identifying the factors that have influenced the success or failure of Section 301 cases. The second part of the project will consist of interviews with key informants in the USTR s office and with three trade associations that have been active in Section 301 cases. Emphasis will be placed on identification of the processes that led to decisions to file Section 301 petitions and reports, the associations and the USTR s views of the policy, the USTR s selection of cases for prosecution, and the interactions between the associations and the USTR. Archival research will complement the semi-structured interviews with staff and officers of the associations and the USTR s office. This project will produce the first extensive examination of the geographic, temporal, and sectoral characteristics of Section 301 cases as well as the dynamics between those and other characteristics. The project should result in the most comprehensive and current analyses of the outcomes of Section 301 cases as well as the case-specific and structural factors that explain Section 301 case success. These kinds of analyses should enhance understandings of the ways that trade policies like Section 301 affect on the magnitude and direction of trade, then we need to know under what conditions those effects are manifested. The project should help clarify what role policies like Section 301 play in the larger geography of trade, especially the ways that these policies define what constitutes unfair practices. More generally, the project will contribute toward broader economic geographic understandings of the ways that institutions, policies, and trade interact with each other. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc10046 none This project addresses inorganic and organic interfaces composed of inorganic films resulting from key microelectronics reactions of oxidation and nitridation of Si (SiO2 and Si3N4 and SiOxNy) and organic polymer films (poly o-methoxyaniline (POMA), poly p-phenylenevinylene (PPV) and the hererocyclic polypyrrole and derivatives that have interesting electronic and optical properties with semiconductors (Si, Ge and GaAs) metals (Au, Al, Ir, ITO) and insulators (SiO2 and Si3N4). The fundamental materials science aim is to understand the nature and extent of interface reactions. The key research strategy is to follow the evolution of interface formation in real time. The approach is to use in situ real-time ellipsometry along with in situ real-time characterization methodologies in a configuration that can provide interface and film formation dynamics, chemical composition, and structure and optical properties. Additional interface sensitive characterization techniques include: spectroscopic immersion ellipsometry, Fractal analysis, and Fowler-Nordheim tunnel current oscillations. Interface and thin film preparation processes include: thermal (rapid and conventional), electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) plasma and ion sputtering for inorganic interfaces and chemical and electrochemical solution methods for organic films. Interface reaction models to be used for ellipsometric data analysis can be compared in both the inorganic and organic materials systems. In both systems metal oxide insulator semiconductor (MOS) devices can be used as electronics properties test vehicles with similar electronics characterizations. Comparisons that are not usually made are a feature of the approach. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. These studies will improve the fundamental understanding of dissimilar materials interfaces, which are key to advanced microelectronics and photonics. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area doc10047 none While stratification researchers typically focus on education and the family as primary institutions affecting inequality, a new institution has become of central importance for racial stratification: the criminal justice system. With lifetime probabilities of incarceration nearing 30 percent for young black men, experience with the institution of criminal justice has increasingly important consequences for racial inequality. Yet, research has only begun to examine the social and economic consequences of large scale incarceration, and to assess the implications for racial disparities. This project investigates the effects of incarceration on the socioeconomic attainment in employment, occupational status, and earnings of white and black men. It uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to obtain quantitative estimates of these effects on racial stratification. It then uses in-depth interviews with a sample of Milwaukee parolees to purse a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that generate the quantitative effects. Together, the quantitative and qualitative data provide for a comprehensive analysis of how race differences in incarceration affect race differences economic success later in life doc10048 none PI: Warren D. Seider Institution: University of Pennsylvania Proposal Number: To achieve greater profitability, process designers have been creating design in regions involving complex nonlinearity where process controllers continue to face stiff challenges. Steady state multiplicity, limit cycles, chaos, and parametric sensitivity are manifestations of the nonlinearity. In addition to the nonlinearity, there are many process designs that have unstable and or non-minimum-phase steady states. In many cases, operation is more profitable at an unstable steady state, or at a stable steady state in the close proximity of an unstable steady state, often involving non-minimum-phase behavior (inverse response). Examples of process designs that can show such behavior are chemical reactors, fermentation reactors, fluidized catalytic crackers, reactor-separator-recycle plants, azeotropic distillation towers, and reboilers. Processes with such designs are known to be more challenging to control than processes with stable and minimum-phase steady states. This University of Pennsylvania-Drexel University joint research project is aimed at addressing more efficient and easier operation of processes with unstable and or non-minimum-phase steady states. It is a study of the interactions between design and control in the processes, and strategies to develop process designs that make control of the processes easier. The designs of existing chemical and biochemical processes with unstable and or non-minimum phase steady states will be studied to identify the design features that give rise to such process behavior. Alternative new process designs, if possible, will then be developed for the processes such that the same level of profitability is maintained but the instability and non-minimum-phase behavior are eliminated. For processes for which such desired alternative designs cannot be found, new differential-geometric, model-based control laws will be developed that are applicable to general nonlinear processes, whether minimum-phase or non-minimum-phase. Initially, control laws will be developed for general, nonlinear, continuous-time processes without deadtimes or input-saturation constraints. Subsequently, the latter two complications will be addressed, and the methods will be extended to multi-input-multi-output (MINO) systems and tested for chemical, petrochemical, and biochemical processes. A prototype symbolic-manipulation software that, given a process model, automatically generates differential geometric control laws will be developed to simplify their industrial implementation and testing doc10049 none Guldberg Tissue engineering strategies have recently emerged as an alternative approach to bone grafting to augment the regeneration of bone in vivo. The basic elements required for successful regeneration of bone include an extracellular matrix scaffold, cells, and bioactive genes or proteins. Whether these elements are provided by the host or must be included within a tissue-engineered construct depends critically on the local biochemical, mechanical, and vascular environments at the defect site. Mesenchymal stem cell (MSC)-based approaches to bone regeneration have advanced rapidly in recent years in parallel with an increased understanding of musculoskeletal cell biology. Cellular augmentation is especially important for difficult clinical cases involving older patients, smokers, patients receiving chemotherapy or radiation, and patients with severely damaged wound beds where the endogenous cellular supply may be diminished. Well-characterized in vitro and in vivo test bed systems with quantitative outcome measures are required to evaluate the efficacy of these and other bone tissue-engineering technologies. The objective of this project is to quantifiably compare in vivo and in vitro bone formation within 3D mesenchymal stem cell constructs subjected to identical cyclic mechanical loading conditions. For all experiments, tissue-engineered constructs will be created by seeding demineralized trabecular bone allografts with MSCs purified from canine marrow aspirates. In vivo experiments will be conducted using a canine hydraulic bone chamber (HBC) implant model that has been used previously to test bone tissue engineering constructs. Cylindrical MSC constructs measuring 6.35 millimeters in diameter and length will be implanted within bilateral chambers located in the distal femoral metaphyses of canines. The HBC model has the ability to apply a controlled cyclic mechanical stimulus to constructs implanted within the chamber. Separate experiments will evaluate the effects of time, seeding density, and mechanical loading on MSC differentiation and mineralized matrix synthesis in vivo. The amount and organization of mineralized matrix formation will be quantified and compared using microtomography (microCT) imaging and 3D stereology. Parallel in vitro experiments will be conducted using a novel 3D tissue culture system with the ability to simultaneously perfuse cylindrical cell-seeded constructs in the transverse direction and apply a cyclic axial mechanical stimulus. As in the in vivo experiments, cylindrical MSC constructs measuring 6.35 millimeters in diameter and length will be tested. The effects of time, seeding density, and mechanical loading on in vitro bone formation will be quantified using microCT and 3D stereology. The hypothesis that the 3D tissue culture system will accurately predict the relative effect of experimental variables such as time, seeding density, and mechanical loading on mineralized bone formation in vivo will be tested. The proposed experiments provide a basis for better understanding the interaction between physical factors in vivo and the efficacy of cell-seeded constructs designed to enhance bone regeneration. Identifying aspects of the in vivo bone formation response that may be predicted by a 3D, load-bearing in vitro system may lead to improved in vitro screening protocols, potentially reducing the number or size of animal studies required to benchmark and optimize bone tissue engineering technologies. A validated 3D system would facilitate, for example, efficient evaluation of a wide range of design parameters that may influence overall construct efficacy such as the scaffold architecture, material, and mechanical properties as well as cell type and seeding density doc10050 none James Griffioen University of Kentucky CISE Research Infrastructure: The Metaverse: A Laboratory for Digital Media Networks The primary goal of our research is to investigate and develop new techniques to support networked, collaborative, visually immersive environments and applications. The objective is to design visually compelling collaborative spaces (where people interact with computer simulations and each other) that are inexpensive, extensible, automatically configurable, adaptable, and scalable. The work involves an interdisciplinary team of researchers exploring system-level issues including visualization, network communication, and computer vision, with others studying application-level issues such as scientific (CFD) visualization, presentation of new-media art, and the educational efficacy and impact of the technology. The requested infrastructure will be used to create three physically separate, networked visualization laboratories supported by two new technical staff. Each visualization environment will have a distinct configuration and objective. The CORE (COllaborative Rendering Environment) will explore compelling collaborative immersive spaces, while the VIDE (Visually Immersive Display Environment) investigates stereo visualization. Unlike the CORE and VIDE, where users are immersed in pixels, the DOME (Digital Object Media Environment) will be a head-tracked ``outside looking in configuration. The environments will demonstrate the versatility of the underlying base technology by using the same techniques to support multiple application domains. A fourth environment will be deployed at the University of Puerto Rico doc10051 none Aidong Zhang SUNY at Buffalo MultiStore: A Research Infrastructure for Management, Analysis and Visualization of Large-Scale Multi-dimensional Data Sets This project establishes a research infrastructure (MultiStore) for supporting integrated research in specific targeted areas of Computer Science, including Multimedia, visualization, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Bioinformatics. The research objective is to develop computational theories and algorithms for storing, managing, analyzing, querying and visualizing multi-dimensional data sets that are generated from the related fields. The research components include: (1) Data storage and management. We develop approaches to manage large-scale multi-dimensional data sets. Particular research issues include: multi-dimensional data storage, indexing, and clustering. (2) Data visualization. We develop effective graphics and visualization techniques that can help the user in information processing tasks. Particular research topics addressed include graph visualization and detecting clusters in a multidimensional data set through visualization. The visualization tools will be used in biomedical image understanding and analysis. (3) Data analysis and querying. We focus on geographical image understanding, analysis and querying. The particular research issues include geographical metadata knowledge extraction, geographical metadata knowledge representation and management, and geographical metadata knowledge querying. (4) Data mining and bioinformatics. We develop data mining techniques for determination of protein structures and detection of gene expression patterns. Through these research activities, the fundamental understanding and novel techniques will be provided to support the management of various large-scale multi-dimensional data sets doc10052 none Recent research on the complex interactions among ocean, atmosphere, and terrestrial systems have highlighted the need for more complete understanding of the processes that influence climatic variability at seasonal, annual, and decadal time scales. Once facet of vulnerability that has special significance for many different sectors of society is the tendency for longer-term dry and wet spells, which can have critical impacts because of the absence or overabundance of precipitation. This doctoral dissertation research project will analyze the spatial and temporal variation and forcing of natural modes of drought and wet spells over the U.S. and northern Mexico. Analyses will focus on the regional spatial scale and decadal to century time scales. Instrumental and tree-ring-reconstructed Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) data sets are available as June-July-August means covering the U.S. for cells measuring 2 degrees of latitude by 3 degrees of longitude, with the instrumental data extending over the period from to period while the dendroclimatological data cover the period from to . The reconstructed data set will be expanded in this study with new tree-ring chronologies over northern Mexico. The overall goal of this study is to better understand how moisture anomalies vary spatially and temporally and what factors within the natural variation of earth s climate system cause them to occur. The project s first objective is a description of the spatial and temporal characteristics of well-known epic droughts and wet spells during the 20th century. Potential analogs to these epic events and their spatial position, progression, and severity will be characterized from the long tree-ring reconstructed PDSI data set and historical evidence in the literature. Animations of PDSI map sequences will help analyze drought wet spell progression and dissipation. Studies of factors that lead to or force droughts wet spells will include examination of the effects of solar insolation variation, Pacific sea surface temperatures, and indices like the Pacific North American Pattern, Pacific Decadal Oscillation, Southern Oscillation, North Atlantic Oscillation, and Arctic Oscillation on the position, duration, and intensity of drought wet spells. Methods used for these forcing analyses will be the mapping of composite sea surface temperatures and correlation statistics obtained from pair-wise comparisons between the forcing time series and individual grid point PDSI time series. The possible link between moisture anomalies and various forcing factorswill also be assessed and plotted using t-tests and spectral analyses. This research project should result in a better understanding of the geographical positioning, timing, progression, intensity, and causes of long-duration drought and wet periods in the U.S. and northern Mexico. The focus will be on long-term drought and wet periods because of the enormous impact they have had on the environment and society. Examples are the s epic drought and the wet periods of the early s and the early s. These events are not unprecedented in the climate history of the U.S., however. Based on a 300-plus-year record of U.S. moisture anomalies reconstructed from tree-rings, recurring long duration drought wet periods will be identified and characterized. Causal mechanisms such as variations in solar irradiation and sea surface temperature will then be statistically associated with these recurring moisture anomalies to identify common causes. The expected result is an improved understanding of the timing, position, and severity of drought and wet spells associated with certain forcing or causal mechanisms. This is expected to lead to improved forecasts of drought wet spells and provide valuable insight and data for continued research into these profound climatic anomalies. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc10053 none Casey and Phillips The main goal of this project is to determine rate laws for exchange of individual oxygens between structural sites in large clay-like aluminum complexes and water. The aluminum nanoclusters are chosen to have structural elements in common with soil mineral surfaces and a similar surface charge density of protons. Unlike bulk studies of mineral reactions with fluid, our experiments yield information about rate laws for exchange of individual oxygens with the bulk solution at a scale that is suitable for computer simulation. This molecular-scale research requires reconsideration of much current thinking about mechanisms for mineral reaction in water. For example: 1) The important oxygens for mineral dissolution are apparently highly coordinated oxygens deeper in the molecule. 2) Proton transfer to the bridging hydroxyls, which precedes exchange of the oxygens, commonly takes place internally and not by proton uptake from the solution. 3) Dissociation of a surface-bound water molecule controls the rates of many adsorption reactions, yet the rates at individual sites are largely unknown. We find that these solvolysis rates for large polyoxocations fall into the same range as dissolved aluminum monomers, suggesting that the rates for edges of clays and protonated aluminum hydroxide minerals are similar. 4) The rates of oxygen exchange are highly sensitive to metal substitutions, in ways that could not have been anticipated from bulk studies or by changes in from bond lengths determined by X-ray crystallography doc10054 none David P. Dobkin Princeton University CISE Research Infrastructure: CISE Pervasive Computing: Applications and Systems We are entering a new era in computing, the era of ubiquitous computing. In this world, our classrooms, labs, offices, and homes will be filled with a diverse collection of sensor, display and computing devices. Ubiquitous and pervasive displays will revolutionize the way we use computers. In such an environment, the conventional view of the network as providing bit-pipes between clients and servers will no longer be appropriate. Many of the devices available in the environment will have limited computational capabilities and be connected by limited-capacity networks. So, we need an intelligent network that will be implemented by a collection of servers and programmable routers that overlay the physical network substrate. The award is to build a research infrastructure consisting of three components. At the edge of the system, will be a variety of display technologies and sensors. At the core of the system, will be an intelligent network using commodity PCs and emerging network processors. Underlying everything will be commodity wired and wireless networks to provide connectivity among the edge devices and nodes in the intelligent network. This network will augment the CS Department s current network, which already includes both wired and wireless components doc10055 none This project investigates how and why consumption tastes and practices have changed in Russia from the late-Soviet period to the post-Soviet period. In the last 25 years, party-state control over production and distribution of consumer goods, so central to the organization of Soviet power, has been supplanted by private production and exchange. As Soviet scarcity of goods has given way to post-Soviet scarcity of money, Russians have developed diverse strategies for provisioning themselves and their households. Despite the emergence of a market economy, then, consumption in Russia differs from that in western capitalist nations, and the changes taking place there require separate study. Further, since existing theories of how class and status affect consumption in western capitalist societies may not explain the changes in Russian consumption, theoretical work on the topic needs to be revised and extended. In addressing these needs, this project contributes both to a specific understanding of changes in consumption in one former socialist nation, and to a broad-based understanding of the importance of the political and economic context to consumption. To reach its goals, the project surveys consumers of different socioeconomic status in a medium-sized Central Russian city (Kaluga). The retrospective interviews used in the survey draw on the memories of consumers who lived through the great transformation, and describe changes in the correspondence between status, class, and consumption. The analysis uses quantitative techniques to describe types of consumption lifestyles, position in the stratification system, and upward and downward mobility. It also uses qualitative techniques to analyze preferences and values not easily captured with quantitative techniques doc10056 none Scott A. Hauk University of Washington CISE Research Infrastructure: An Infrastructure for Integrated Systems Education and Innovation The research contained in this proposal represents a wide-ranging investigation into the future of single-chip systems. We will seek to develop a design methodology that can provide the benefits of multiple different resource types for numerous design domains. To support the design of such cutting-edge silicon systems, we will develop innovative techniques to handle numerous design issues. These will include investigations into the following critical issues in chip design: Development of techniques for integrating RF and Analog components into future 1V SoC designs. Creation of high-performance, power efficient digital logic families for supporting the stringent requirements of these systems. Investigation into reconfigurable subsystems for SoC designs, providing post-fabrication customization for support of multi-protocol and multi-algorithm systems. Integrated testing methodologies for complex, heterogeneous systems that can provide complete system test. Complete simulation and design methodologies that can handle complete system integration, architectural exploration, and validation. In addition to the development of new approaches to future chip design, we will also develop innovative techniques for educating future chip designers. By providing an integrated curriculum in VLSI CAD, embedded systems, and complex system design, we will help create system architects capable of harnessing these radically new design techniques and opportunities. We will also seek to increase the opportunities in chip design for new constituents, especially under-represented groups to help increase the pipeline of new designers doc10057 none Social psychologists argue that individuals create social structures through interaction with others, and that these structures in turn serve to shape, constrain, or enable future interaction. However, the nature of the kinds of group structures and decision-making that emerge depend on the sources of group legitimation. For example, group legitimacy may come externally from the larger organization, or it may come internally from its own beliefs systems. This project examines how different sources of legitimation make groups more or less hierarchical in their decision-making, and more or less flexible in their routine interactions. To address these questions, it uses experimental methods involving subjects brought together to interact in a group project. The independent variable is authorization by the researcher (i.e., external legitimation) or endorsement by the group (i.e., internal legitimation). The dependent variables are the group s adherence to routines over two different types of tasks it is asked to complete, and the patterns of observable power and prestige that emerge in the groups interactions. Along with evaluating theories of legitimation, the results provide valuable information for organizations concerned with implementing team or group decision-making structures doc10058 none With this Renewal proposal, Professor Richard Saykallly seeks support for his research on laser spectroscopy of ions and water clusters. The proposed research will refine and extend the water dimer potential, by characterizing and modeling out of plane librational vibrations expected to be seen near 500 cm-1. The refined dimer potential will then be used to calculate three-body interactions in the water trimer. These potentials will then be used for advanced bulk water simulations, in collaboration with David Chandler s group at Berkeley. Additional aspects, such as experimental examination of (H2O)8, hydrated proton clusters, EXAFS of liquid water, and nucleotide base hydrates will be examined experimentally. Improved models for liquid water and aqueous solvation will have impact in the modeling of protein structures and other biological molecules. A greater understanding of liquid water remains an important unsolved problem in molecular physics and condensed matter chemistry doc10059 none Understanding the severity of past drought events and assessing the linkages of these events to conditions in the eastern Pacific is essential for long-term water resource planning in California and adjacent portions of the southwestern United States. This doctoral dissertation research project will use the remains of aquatic organisms, specifically midge fly larvae, preserved within the sediments of small, climatically sensitive Sierran lakes to reconstruct a high-resolution record of paleotemperature and paleohydrology for California during the late-Quaternary (past 13,000 years). This research is an expansion of an earlier NSF-supported project that assessed how present-day differences in air temperature and precipitation, lake water temperature, salinity, depth, and surrounding vegetation are reflected in the modern elemental chemistry and oxygen isotopic composition of lake waters, and the chironomids (midge flies), cladocera (crustaceans), diatoms (unicellular algae), pollen, and stomates found in Sierran lake sediments. Previous work had determined that the modern distribution of midges in Sierran lakes is controlled by summer surface lake-water temperature, lake depth, elevation, and iron. The relationship between midge fly distributions and surface lake-water temperature also have been characterized through the development of a transfer function (mathematical formulae that express the value of a specific environmental variable as a function of plant or animal species composition data). This dissertation research project will apply the new transfer function to the fossil midge assemblages contained within late-Quaternary lake sediment cores, thereby enabling a high-resolution reconstruction of paleotemperature for California during the late-Quaternary. Earlier paleoenvironmental research in the Sierra Nevada indicates that drought events of greater severity than those experienced during the instrumental period (past 100 years) have occurred in eastern California during the late-Holocene (last 3,000 years). Because of the fragmentary nature of the existing paleoenvironmental records, however, understandings of earlier drought periods is limited. This research project will provide a high-resolution record of the inherent variability of eastern California climate during the past 13,000 years. More specifically, this project will use the remains of midge fly larvae preserved in Sierran lake sediments to provide a sensitive and detailed history of the climatic changes that occurred in the eastern Sierra Nevada, California over the last 13,000 years. The results of this work will assist hydrologists, paleoclimatologists, oceanographers, and climate modelers in understanding the timing, magnitude, and causal mechanisms associated with high frequency climate oscillations evident in California during the late-Quaternary. The expected results should assist water resource managers as they attempt to adequately plan for future water resource needs. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc10060 none Shallow landslides often occur on natural hillslopes during rainstorms of high intensity or long duration. While researchers have examined the profound effects that that an urban environment can have on surface hydrology and drainage morphology, relatively little attention has been given to the effects of urbanization on landslide hazards. This doctoral dissertation research project will address the influence of impervious surfaces on shallow landslide occurrence in Seattle, an urban area with a precipitation climatology characterized by winter rainstorms of long duration and low intensity. The project will use a geographic information system (GIS) framework to combine rainfall data from a dense gauge network, high-resolution digital topography, a historical record of landslide occurrence, and a remotely sensed map of impervious surfaces. Analyses of these data will facilitate evaluation of the watershed-scale effects of surface drainage alteration on landslide susceptibility. Research methods will include compilation of historical shallow landslide occurrence and associated precipitation climatology. Empirical relations between rainfall intensity duration will be defined. Field investigations of large or recent landslides will provide information on the geologic setting, style of landslide failure and deposition, and influence of drainage modifications. To evaluate the effect of impervious surfaces on landslide occurrence, a coupled rainfall-infiltration slope-stability model will be used to describe the spatial distribution of pore-water pressures at depth during rainstorms in which landslide are known to have occurred. This project will examine the influence of impervious surfaces on landslide hazard in an urban setting where slope failure occurs during rainstorms of low intensity and long duration by applying a coupled, physically based model in a GIS framework. The study will illuminate the processes through which the urban environment has a significant impact on hillslope processes at the watershed scale. In a broader context, the project will add to the understanding of human impact on geomorphic systems. Results from this study should provide predictive and design tools for emergency management and planning. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc10061 none The Arctic Research Consortium of the United States (ARCUS) is to provide organizational support for Arctic sciences to develop, promote, and implement arctic research and education by nurturing the orderly growth of arctic research through tasks that cannot be accomplished as effectively by individual researchers, institutions, agencies, or by currently existing advisory bodies. Specifically, they will provide services in four areas. They are: o Arctic science planning-coordinating science planning for the arctic research community at several levels, including continuing examination of logistical requirements with the goal of improved access for all researchers in the Arctic; o Organizational support for research programs included in the Office of Polar Programs Arctic Sciences Section-the Arctic System Science Program (ARCSS), the Arctic Social Sciences Program (ASSP), and the Arctic Natural Sciences Program (ANS); o Development and coordination of arctic science educational activities; and o Information and outreach activities to disseminate information about arctic research to the scientific community, policy and decision-makers, and to the public doc10062 none Structure of functorial compactification of moduli of abelian varieties and their relatives The investigator will continue to study the moduli of stable pairs with semiabelian group action and, in particular, the part which gives the functorial compactification of the moduli of abelian varieties. The aims are: to get a detailed description of the structure of this space and the way the closure of the Schottky locus sits inside of it; to study generalizations of this moduli space to the relative case and to the case of other group actions. The methods employed are going to be both algebro-geometric and combinatorial. This research is in the field of algebraic geometry, but with a strong combinatorial aspect. The main object of algebraic geometry is solutions of polynomial equations. Started in the ancient times, in the 20th century it saw development of new and enormously powerful methods. Its applications reach across the scientific boundaries to such diverse fields as physics and cryptography. Combinatorics concerns counting, and is the basis of most real-life applications of mathematics. The grant will also support education and scientific training of new PhD students doc10063 none White Furthering U.S. Interests and Leadership in the International Council for Science (ICSU) Due to the global character of contemporary science and engineering, it is essential for U.S. scientists and engineers, as well as their professional organizations, to remain in close contact with the activities and plans of their foreign counterparts, in part as a means to facilitate the development of collaborative programs. Additionally, gaining a better understanding of many important problems, such as those associated with the global environment, data quality and access, and the training and utilization of research personnel, require cooperative efforts on a multilateral basis. An increasing number of such problems cut across and transcend individual scientific disciplines. The oldest and most extensive mechanism for facilitating world-wide communication between U.S. scientists and engineers and their foreign counterparts is the array of non-governmental international disciplinary unions and interdisciplinary organizations that together comprise the International Council for Science (ICSU), a non-governmental, multilateral organization comprised of an adhering organization in over 90 countries. This award will enable the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council (the U.S. adhering organization to ICSU) to continue to manage U.S. participation in ICSU. The award provides dues payments to ICSU, and support for two international disciplinary unions (the International Commission of Mathematical Instruction and the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics) as well as two interdisciplinary organizations (the Pacific Science Association and the Committee on Science and Technology for Development doc10064 none This is funding in support of a doctoral research consortium (workshop) of promising graduate students and distinguished research faculty. The consortium will be held in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ), sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery s Special Interest Group on Human Computer Interaction (SIGCHI). The goals of the workshop include building a cohort group of new researchers who will then have a network of colleagues spread out across the world, guiding the work of new researchers by having experts in the research field give them advice, and making it possible for promising new entrants to the field to attend their research conference. Student participants will make formal presentations of their work during the workshop, and will receive feedback from the faculty panel. The feedback is geared to helping students understand and articulate how their work is positioned relative to other human-computer interaction research, whether their topics are adequately focused for thesis research projects, whether their methods are correctly chosen and applied, and whether their results are appropriately analyzed and presented. Student participants will also present their work during the technical program of the CHI conference. Extended abstracts of the students work will be disseminated via publication in the CHI Extended s, which has wide print and electronic distribution. Evaluation of the consortium will be conducted by ACM SIGCHI s conference management committee, and results of the evaluation will be available to the organizers of future consortia doc10065 none This project addresses the influence of thermo-mechanical-treatment (TMT) and alloying on deformation and creep anisotropy of titanium alloys. The research involves characterization of anisotropic biaxial creep of Ti alloys using closed-end internally pressurized thin-walled tubing superimposed with an axial load. The approach is to investigate these behaviors in Ti and Ti- 3Al-2.5V following stress-relief anneal and complete recrystallization. Alloying additions such as Al to Ti result in significant modification of crystallographic texture and operating slip systems. Cold-working leads to grain-shape anisotropy of the otherwise equiaxed grain structure of Rx materials. The effects of these variables on deformation microstructures are to be investigated along with deformation anisotropy following biaxial loading under varied stress-states and stress-levels. Transitions in creep mechanisms and the effect of underlying deformation mechanism(s) on creep anisotropy will also be addressed. Such studies are important for realistic estimates of creep strains and life of these structural materials in service. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a contemporary topical area of materials science with technological relevance in aerospace, automobile, and chemical sectors where Ti-alloys are used in tube form. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area. The project is expected to provide unique opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students to develop strong technical, communication, and organizational management skills through experiences in a forefront research environment doc10066 none This project involves a data-analysis and theoretical investigation into the properties and causes of steady magnetospheric convection (SMC) events. SMCs are extended intervals of elevated geomagnetic activity without the occurrence of substorms. The objectives of this project are (1) to further our understanding of SMCs by statistically comparing their properties with the properties of non-SMC periods, (2) to further our understanding of solar-wind magnetosphere coupling by using SMCs as a probe of the special solar wind conditions that drive SMCs, (3) to further our understanding of how bursty bulk flows (BBfs) transport magnetic flux, energy and momentum in comparison with substorm transport, and (4) to explore new ideas about why SMCs occur under certain solar wind conditions doc10067 none The project extends work begun under Award No. . A consortium consisting of three universities (University of New Mexico, Arizona State University, and University of Texas at Austin) and three community college systems (Albuquerque Technical Vocational Institute, Maricopa County Community College District, and Austin Community College) in three contiguous states, each of which has semiconductor manufacturing as an economic backdrop, is implementing cross-training of technicians and engineers. Supported by a previous NSF grant, the consortium developed a suite of six computer-based training (CBT) modules designed to be integrated into factory-like labs and related courses for co-training of technicians and engineers. The first six modules covered lithography, metalization, design of experiments, etch, chemical vapor deposition, and statistical process control. In the current project, the consortium is (1) developing three more modules covering oxidation and diffusion, doping and annealing, and factory dynamics; (2) deploying the modules in side-by-side training of engineering and technician students at the partnering universities and community colleges; and (3) completing the evaluation of the full suite of nine modules. The project is built around the premise that cross-training technicians and engineers, such that each group better understands the roles and skill sets of the other, will enhance their effectiveness as team members in real factory settings. The project s CBT modules cover basic semiconductor unit processes (lithography, metalization, etch) and their facility demands, design of experiments, and factory-level dynamics from both the technician s and the engineer s perspectives. The modules include interactive, schematic-based simulator panels for selected manufacturing machines, to support a need-based, top-down learning paradigm. In addition, the modules have structured exercises that require interactive roles between technicians and engineers. The side-by-side presentation of text, graphics, animations, videos, simulations, and exercises give technicians enhanced exposure to mathematics and science and give engineers enhanced exposure to machine (tool) operation issues. The multimedia modules are designed to operate stand-alone or coupled to a multi-level manufacturing simulator package. They can serve training needs in real, mock, or virtual factory-like labs doc1243 none Karlstrom Connelly Williams Siddoway Proterozoic rocks in central Colorado preserve a transition, from semi-brittle upper crust to pervasively ductile middle crust, that was frozen in at about 1.4 Ga. This rheologic transition is expressed as a regionally significant change in the style of ca. 1.4 Ga intracratonic tectonism. Field observations suggest that a subhorizontal boundary separates a domain in northern and central Colorado (exemplified by the Colorado Mineral Belt), where 1.4 Ga deformation is characterized by discrete mylonite zones, from a domain in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico dominated by penetrative ductile deformation. Geodynamic models developed for intracontinental orogens such as Tibet, Altiplano-Puna, and the Sevier-Laramdie indicate that such mechanical decoupling may be a critical factor in controlling the tectonic evolution of intracontinental deformation. Like some of its younger analogs, the structural transition of central Colorado apparently corresponds with a magma- and fluid-rich, high-strain layer. These deeply exhumed rocks present intriguing opportunities to directly investigate deep-crustal processes that are inaccessible in younger orogens. Issues of general impact include characterization of: (1) the controls on the depth and thickness of the brittle ductile transition (e.g. temperature, lithology, fluids), (2) the kinematics and dynamics of deformation near the rheological transition, (3) mechanisms of accommodating strain incompatibility between different deformation regimes, and (4) the role of granitoid melts and or a widespread melt-fluid layer, in localizing middle crustal flow and structural decoupling of upper and lower crust. In addition to exploiting the deep crustal exposures of central Colorado to study general processes of intracontinental deformation, this study is contributing to the understanding of the Proterozoic tectonic evolution of the southwestern United States. In particular, alternate models for anorogenic (extensional) versus orogenic (transpressional) tectonic settings for 1.4 Ga tectonism can perhaps be reconciled in an orogenic plateau model where regional horizontal contraction is balanced by more localized gravitational collapse. The study uses an integrated data set involving structural, petrologic, and U-Pb geochronologic data to evaluate the kinematics and evolution of this important structural transition. Focus is on a well exposed transect across the structural transition. Specifically, studies of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison and adjacent areas within the Colorado Mineral Belt are characterizing the style, extent, and P-T conditions of mylonite shear zones and emplacement of syn-kinematic 1.4 Ga plutons above the transition. Work in the Wet Mountains and Sangre de Cristo Range is characterizing pervasively ductile deformation and fabric reactivation within and below the transition. The geochronology is emphasizing both U Pb zircon dating of critical syn-kinematic plutons in central Colorado and microprobe monazite dating of high-grade metamorphism along the transect doc10069 none This individual investigator research project includes two research thrusts related to the properties of unusual ferromagnetic materials in which the magnetic and electronic properties are strongly coupled. The first research thrust will be an investigation of phenomena related to phase separation in the colossal magnetoresistance perovskite manganites. Recent experimental and theoretical work has indicated that intrinsic magnetoelectronic phase separation is an important element of the physics of these materials, and the research will investigate resultant novel phenomena. The second research thrust will be an investigation of the transport and magnetic properties of thin films of ferromagnetic (Ga,Mn)As and MnAs. The basic physics of these materials (which are semiconducting and metallic, respectively) will be probed through magnetic and magnetotransport studies of the pure materials and heterostructures incorporating these ferromagnets with other magnetic and non-magnetic materials. The educational component of the project will involve the dissertation work of at least one graduate student and the active participation of undergraduates in the laboratory. These students will acquire knowledge and skills that will be use in future careers whether in academia, industrial, or government laboratories. %%% This individual investigator project centers on two different research thrusts related to the properties of unusual magnetic materials which are ferromagnetic, i.e. displaying a macroscopic magnetic moment. The specific materials studied are of particular interest because their magnetism is strongly connected to their electronic properties, and advances in the fundamental understanding of this coupling could potentially contribute to spintronic technological applications which exploit a combination of magnetic and electronic properties. The first research thrust will be an investigation of phenomena related to the coexistence of two different types of magnetic and electronic phases within a class of compounds known as the colossal magnetoresistance perovskite manganites. The second research thrust will be an investigation of the transport and magnetic properties of thin films of ferromagnetic (Ga,Mn)As and MnAs which both can be grown epitaxially on the commonly used semiconductor GaAs and thus may have more immediate technological importance. The educational component of the proposed research will involve the dissertation work of at least one graduate student and the active participation of undergraduates in the laboratory. The training that these students obtain will be valuable for future careers in industry, government, or academia doc10070 none This Focused Research Group is composed of pure mathematicians, computational mathematicians, and neuroscientists. They develop implementations of discrete conformal mapping for multidisciplinary use, both within mathematics itself where complex analysis is being reinvigorated by new discrete techniques, and in the larger scientific context with visualization and analysis of scientific data. The Riemann Mapping Theorem guarantees unique conformal maps between any pair of conformal 2-discs (or conformal 2-spheres); the conformal geometry preserved by such maps carries valuable mathematical structure. Such surfaces arise naturally in many scientific contexts as piecewise flat (from data) or smoothly embedded (from theory) surfaces in 3-space. Recently the new computational technique of circle packing has allowed computational approximations to these conformal maps. Implementing such approximations for large scientific datasets faces both theoretical and computational challenges. The investigator and his colleagues work on three related topics: theoretical superstructure of the circle packing technique, refinement and parallelization of the circle packing algorithm for use on large datasets, and the application of these conformal maps to visualization and analysis of scientific data. The main application focuses on conformal flattening of human brain cortical surfaces. The investigators use uniqueness of conformal maps to install surface-based coordinate systems on these surfaces; these coordinate systems allow localization of activation foci in Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) brain scans. Conformal flattening has wider applicability as a visualization and graph embedding technique, and these connections inform the research. This Focused Research Group develops algorithms to bring a classical mathematics theorem (the Riemann Mapping Theorem, ) to bear on problems of visualization of data. The Riemann Mapping Theorem guarantees the existence of unique conformal (angle-preserving) maps between surfaces, but does say how to compute these maps. Modern computers and new algorithms have changed all that, because our new computational ability can breathe life into classical existence theorems of mathematics, turning theory into computational tools. This project develops algorithms to implement the computation of conformal maps on complex spatial surfaces. The main application is the flat mapping of human brain cortical surfaces. The brain surface is highly convoluted and folded in space, and most of the brain surface is folded up and hidden from view. If one flattens the surface, one can simultaneously see down into all the folds. The mathematically unique conformal maps produced by the algorithms allow surface-based coordinate systems to be computed on the brain surface so that surface positions can be precisely determined. Moreover, if one puts foci of functional activation onto the flattened surface, one can then visualize and measure the relationship between brain function and brain anatomy. These new surface-mapping techniques and their application to the brain surface permit biomedical researchers and clinicians to rapidly and accurately map and compare the locations of physiological and pathological events in the brains of research subjects and of patients with a variety of neurological and psychiatric disorders. The project is supported by the Computational Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, and Geometric Analysis programs and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in MPS and by the Computational Neuroscience program in BIO doc10070 none This Focused Research Group is composed of pure mathematicians, computational mathematicians, and neuroscientists. They develop implementations of discrete conformal mapping for multidisciplinary use, both within mathematics itself where complex analysis is being reinvigorated by new discrete techniques, and in the larger scientific context with visualization and analysis of scientific data. The Riemann Mapping Theorem guarantees unique conformal maps between any pair of conformal 2-discs (or conformal 2-spheres); the conformal geometry preserved by such maps carries valuable mathematical structure. Such surfaces arise naturally in many scientific contexts as piecewise flat (from data) or smoothly embedded (from theory) surfaces in 3-space. Recently the new computational technique of circle packing has allowed computational approximations to these conformal maps. Implementing such approximations for large scientific datasets faces both theoretical and computational challenges. The investigator and his colleagues work on three related topics: theoretical superstructure of the circle packing technique, refinement and parallelization of the circle packing algorithm for use on large datasets, and the application of these conformal maps to visualization and analysis of scientific data. The main application focuses on conformal flattening of human brain cortical surfaces. The investigators use uniqueness of conformal maps to install surface-based coordinate systems on these surfaces; these coordinate systems allow localization of activation foci in Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) brain scans. Conformal flattening has wider applicability as a visualization and graph embedding technique, and these connections inform the research. This Focused Research Group develops algorithms to bring a classical mathematics theorem (the Riemann Mapping Theorem, ) to bear on problems of visualization of data. The Riemann Mapping Theorem guarantees the existence of unique conformal (angle-preserving) maps between surfaces, but does say how to compute these maps. Modern computers and new algorithms have changed all that, because our new computational ability can breathe life into classical existence theorems of mathematics, turning theory into computational tools. This project develops algorithms to implement the computation of conformal maps on complex spatial surfaces. The main application is the flat mapping of human brain cortical surfaces. The brain surface is highly convoluted and folded in space, and most of the brain surface is folded up and hidden from view. If one flattens the surface, one can simultaneously see down into all the folds. The mathematically unique conformal maps produced by the algorithms allow surface-based coordinate systems to be computed on the brain surface so that surface positions can be precisely determined. Moreover, if one puts foci of functional activation onto the flattened surface, one can then visualize and measure the relationship between brain function and brain anatomy. These new surface-mapping techniques and their application to the brain surface permit biomedical researchers and clinicians to rapidly and accurately map and compare the locations of physiological and pathological events in the brains of research subjects and of patients with a variety of neurological and psychiatric disorders. The project is supported by the Computational Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, and Geometric Analysis programs and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in MPS and by the Computational Neuroscience program in BIO doc10072 none Aspray,William Computing Research Association Special Projects: Graduate Students in Computing Travel Support for Career Workshops This award to the Computing Research Association (CRA) provides funds to support advanced graduate students to attend the CRA career workshops in , , and . The workshops are held in Washington, DC and are open to all recent doctorates and advanced graduate students in computing disciplines. Topics incorporated in the workshops include development of effective teaching practices, research programs, and developing a successful academic career overall. Senior computer scientists and engineers conduct the workshops and program managers from NSF and DARPA discussing how their research funding programs are organized are also part of the workshops doc10073 none Hussey The joint meeting of the International Conference on Plasma Science (ICOPS) and Pulsed Power Conference (PPC), which is being called Pulsed Power Plasma Science (PPPS- ), will be the first of its kind. Historically, the two conferences, which have considerable technical overlap, have both been held in June. In recent years travel restrictions have increasingly forced individuals whose technical areas are covered by both conferences to choose between them. PPPS- , therefore, is an experiment by the IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society, the parent organization for both conferences, to determine the viability of holding these conferences jointly on a regular basis. PPPS- is scheduled for June 18-22, at Rio Suite Hotel in Las Vegas, NV. This project requests travel support to defray the travel expenses for young investigators whose papers have been selected for presentation at the Conference, but who lack funds and might not be able to attend without travel support. It is proposed that the PPPS- Student Grants Committee, in collaboration with the Technical Program Committee, select those to receive the support. The total amount requested is $6,000 on the basis of an average travel grant of $500 for 12 participants doc10070 none This Focused Research Group is composed of pure mathematicians, computational mathematicians, and neuroscientists. They develop implementations of discrete conformal mapping for multidisciplinary use, both within mathematics itself where complex analysis is being reinvigorated by new discrete techniques, and in the larger scientific context with visualization and analysis of scientific data. The Riemann Mapping Theorem guarantees unique conformal maps between any pair of conformal 2-discs (or conformal 2-spheres); the conformal geometry preserved by such maps carries valuable mathematical structure. Such surfaces arise naturally in many scientific contexts as piecewise flat (from data) or smoothly embedded (from theory) surfaces in 3-space. Recently the new computational technique of circle packing has allowed computational approximations to these conformal maps. Implementing such approximations for large scientific datasets faces both theoretical and computational challenges. The investigator and his colleagues work on three related topics: theoretical superstructure of the circle packing technique, refinement and parallelization of the circle packing algorithm for use on large datasets, and the application of these conformal maps to visualization and analysis of scientific data. The main application focuses on conformal flattening of human brain cortical surfaces. The investigators use uniqueness of conformal maps to install surface-based coordinate systems on these surfaces; these coordinate systems allow localization of activation foci in Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) brain scans. Conformal flattening has wider applicability as a visualization and graph embedding technique, and these connections inform the research. This Focused Research Group develops algorithms to bring a classical mathematics theorem (the Riemann Mapping Theorem, ) to bear on problems of visualization of data. The Riemann Mapping Theorem guarantees the existence of unique conformal (angle-preserving) maps between surfaces, but does say how to compute these maps. Modern computers and new algorithms have changed all that, because our new computational ability can breathe life into classical existence theorems of mathematics, turning theory into computational tools. This project develops algorithms to implement the computation of conformal maps on complex spatial surfaces. The main application is the flat mapping of human brain cortical surfaces. The brain surface is highly convoluted and folded in space, and most of the brain surface is folded up and hidden from view. If one flattens the surface, one can simultaneously see down into all the folds. The mathematically unique conformal maps produced by the algorithms allow surface-based coordinate systems to be computed on the brain surface so that surface positions can be precisely determined. Moreover, if one puts foci of functional activation onto the flattened surface, one can then visualize and measure the relationship between brain function and brain anatomy. These new surface-mapping techniques and their application to the brain surface permit biomedical researchers and clinicians to rapidly and accurately map and compare the locations of physiological and pathological events in the brains of research subjects and of patients with a variety of neurological and psychiatric disorders. The project is supported by the Computational Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, and Geometric Analysis programs and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in MPS and by the Computational Neuroscience program in BIO doc10075 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: FRG: Mathematical and Computational Methods for High-Data-Rate Optical Fiber Communications Ablowitz The goal of this research project is to develop new methods that can be used to determine the behavior of optical transmission systems under realistic circumstances. This will be accomplished by a combination of various techniques. One approach will exploit the mathematical structure of fiber transmission models in order to eliminate unessential degrees of freedom. The reduced models that will result will be more tractable mathematically and also much more computationally efficient. Another approach that will be used is the application of linearization and importance sampling techniques to enable the simulation of systems at realistic data error rates. These methods will be combined to study the main sources of impairment in optical fibers in order to achieve an accurate evaluation of system performance. All the techniques to be developed will be carefully validated by comparison to more computationally time-consuming models and to experiments. The development of high-data-rate optical fiber communications is one of the great technological achievements of the late 20th century; in the last decade alone, data rates have increased by four orders of magnitude. This enormous increase has made possible the growth of the global Internet that promises to continue to revolutionize day-to-day communications. Because demand for further growth continues unabated, however, system capacity is becoming limited by fiber transmission effects. It has therefore become crucial to accurately model and calculate the impairments due to non-ideal fiber properties when designing systems. Due to the tremendous data capacity that will be required of future transmission systems (terabits per second of aggregate capacity) and the need for extremely small transmission error rates (less than one error per trillion bits), realistic attempts to model and predict the effects of these impairments as they appear in practical systems present a number of difficult mathematical and computational challenges. The techniques that will be developed in this collaborative research project are expected to yield large reductions in the computational time required to model optical communication systems, and at the same time produce new insights into system behavior. Because these methods will be capable of providing detailed information about system performance at realistic data error rates, we believe they will lead to significant changes in the way in which optical transmission systems are modeled, and, ultimately, in the way that they are built doc10076 none Dr. Paul R. Sharp, Department of Chemistry, University of Missouri at Columbia, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program of the Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, for his work on the organometallic chemistry at the edge of polycyclic aromatic carbon compounds. Specifically, the chemistry of polycyclic aromatic yne and metallacycle complexes will be developed as a means to construct carbon nanotubes by a step-growth approach based on permetalated naphthalenes, coronenes, and coroannulenes. Carbon nanotubes will be constructed by special design at the molecular level. These nanotubes will provide other researchers opportunities to explore novel electronic properties of one-dimensional conducting systems. They will also find applications in such areas as nanoscale electronic devices, field emitters, hydrogen storage, and non-linear optics. Graduate students and post-doctoral associates will receive enviable training from the molecular scale chemistry to the nanoscale dimension doc10077 none The investigators propose to study the electrodynamics of the coupled magnetosphere-ionosphere (M-I) system in the vicinity of the region-2 shielding currents that link the inner plasma sheet and inner magnetosphere to the auroral and subauroral ionosphere. The project will focus on two outstanding physics questions: (1) the effects of field-aligned potential drops on global electric field and precipitation patterns, and (2) the physical mechanisms involved in the generation of Polarization Jet (PJ) events. The principal tool for carrying out the proposed investigation will be the Rice Convection Model (RCM), an established computer model that self-consistently follows the time evolution of electric fields, currents, and plasma flow velocities in the quasi-static approximation. Improvements in the numerical machinery and algorithms of the RCM will be implemented, as needed, to investigate these phenomena. Model results will be archived and visualization tools provided to facilitate comparisons with data from incoherent scatter radars and polar-orbiting spacecraft, and with empirically derived patterns of electric fields developed within the context of the NSF CEDAR initiative. Comparisons with observational data will be carried out in collaboration with Utah State University and as part of the GEM Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Coupling Campaign doc10078 none The investigators will conduct research primarily to enhance understanding of solar variability. The main effort is to continue, and indeed to improve, the synoptic program of observations at the 150-foot solar tower on Mt. Wilson that measures and records the state of solar surface magnetism and dynamics. The sun is the dominant source of external variability for the Earth s climate system and is the source of space weather. Direct study of the sun is an essential part of a program to understand climate change and to monitor and predict the state of space weather. This project emphasizes solar magnetism because most solar variability is directly influenced by the state of the sun s magnetic field. The cause or causes of the twenty-two-year solar magnetic cycle remain an elusive problem that prevents addressing variability in a fully satisfactory manner. Since the magnetic cycle is of a fully global scale on the solar surface, data on all timescales are essential to discover the underlying causes of solar variability. Each day the Mt. Wilson Observatory (MWO) program obtains up to twenty full disk scans of the sun s magnetic field and velocity field to provide a record which can address questions of global solar variability. The historical time series of both fields must be sufficiently long to study the solar cycle and the 150-foot tower program has provided this history since its digital record began in . As part of this project the investigators will consider several corrections to the older data and will organize a workshop for the intercomparison of the magnetic field data among investigators who now regularly obtain full-disk magnetogram and dopplergram records doc10079 none This project will extend the results of the PI s previous model for energetic electrons at geosynchronous orbit to cover the entire inner magnetosphere from 3-10 R. It will also determine the physical basis of the correlation between the solar wind speed and electron flux enhancements. The magnetic storm events chosen for detailed study by the Geospace Environment Modeling (GEM) program campaign on the Inner Magnetosphere and Storms will be used to compare the results of the modeling effort to the measured data. Particular emphasis will be placed on the question of whether the transport and energization of the electrons can be accounted for as a result of diffusion or whether other mechanisms are required doc10080 none Sprigg The Executive Vice-President of Northwest Science and Technology University of Agriculture and Forestry, Professor Li Jing, has sent personal invitations to 11 U.S. scientists to help China assess soil erosion and environmental problems in the Yellow River watershed. Nine of the 11 scientists are employees of the U.S. government. The two non-government scientists require support for international travel and related expenses. The proposed participation of two non-governmental U.S. scientists broadens the range of scientific disciplines represented on the team. The trip would expose U.S. scientists working on the topic to programs under way and to field conditions in China and provide access to data that can be used to develop a scientific understanding of the process fundamentals in conditions more extreme than any found in the United States. All housing and travel expenses inside China will be supported by the host country. These funds would support international and incidental expenses for the two non-government members of the delegation. A report of the issues, observations, conclusions, and recommendations will be submitted to both the host and the NSF sponsor doc10081 none The NAS Taylor McKee Decadal Report on astronomy for - recommends as a top priority the formation of a National Virtual Observatory (NVO) to link archival data sets and catalogues from many existing astronomical surveys. The effective use of such integrated massive data sets involves more than just access and extraction of information -- scientific understanding requires sophisticated statistical modeling of the selected data. This effort falls under the rubric of statistical inference and includes the fields of multivariate analysis, nonparametrics, Bayesian analysis, spatial point processes, density estimation and data mining. Large-scale multiwavelength astronomical surveys present a variety of new challenging statistical and algorithmic problems that require methodological advances. The principal investigator and his colleagues address some of the critically important statistical challenges raised by the NVO. Specific approaches include: low-storage percentile estimation for large data sets, multi-resolutional K-Dimensional trees for clustering and outlier detection, and multi-dimensional goodness-of-fit tests for comparison of multivariate astronomical data sets with astrophysical models and simulations. Such an endeavor needs close collaboration of statisticians, astronomers and NVO specialists who reside at different institutions. Developing a statistical toolkit within the NVO software environment implementing both new and existing methods is one of the central goals of this project. As the data volume and complexity of astronomical findings have enormously increased in recent decades, a paradigm shift is underway in the very nature of observational astronomy. While in the past a single astronomer might observe a handful of objects, today data mining of large digital sky archives obtained at all wavelengths of light is becoming a major mode of study. The astronomical community thus faces a key task: to enable efficient and objective scientific exploitation of enormous multifaceted data sets. In recognition of this need, the National Virtual Observatory (NVO) initiative has recently emerged to federate numerous large digital sky archives and develop tools to explore and understand these vast volumes of data. The investigation here aims at developing statistical and computational methods to achieve these goals. The cross-disciplinary team, of astronomers and statisticians, brings advances in these fields into the toolbox of observational astronomy. The project seeks not only to formulate effective techniques to address NVO problems, but also to code these methods into statistical toolkits within NVO software environments for the entire astronomical community. The collaboration includes two institutions skilled in astrostatistics (Penn State and Carnegie Mellon) and an institution at the center of the NVO effort ( ). The participation by graduate students and postdocs give them a rare opportunity to develop skills needed for cross-disciplinary work doc10082 none The Community College of Philadelphia is engaged in a partnership with 12 baccalaureate-degree granting institutions in Pennsylvania to: (1) create a new degree option for students preparing for careers in secondary math or science education; and (2) expand the articulation agreements with four-year institutions to include secondary education. Two new courses and educational materials focused on inquiry-based, hands-on learning, are being developed for prospective teachers: Teaching with Technology and Problem-Solving in Math and Science. Both courses explore the use of technology to investigate authentic problems in math and science. Students develop a portfolio of problem-based learning scenarios using technology appropriate for use in their future professional practice. The project addresses the International Society for Technology in Education standards for preservice preparation in technology. The project also includes customized systems of advising and mentoring; recruitment of prospective teachers from mathematics and science courses; learning communities; an education student club; and faculty development workshops doc10083 none Gunnar Carlsson The overall goal of this project is to develop flexible topological methods which will allow the analysis of data which is difficult to analyze using classical linear methods. Data obtained by sampling from highly curved manifolds or singular algebraic varieties in Euclidean space are typical examples where our methods will be useful. We intend to develop and refine two pieces of software which have been written by members of our research group, ISOMAP (Tenenbaum) and PLEX (de Silva-Carlsson). ISOMAP is a tool for dimension reduction and parameterization of high dimensional data sets, and PLEX is a homology computing tool which we will use in locating and analyzing singular points in data sets, as well as estimating dimension in situations where standard methods do not work well. We plan to extend the range of applicability of both tools, in the case of ISOMAP by studying embeddings into spaces with non-Euclidean metrics, and in the case of PLEX by building in the Mayer-Vietoris spectral sequence as a tool Both ISOMAP and PLEX will be adapted for parallel computing. We will also begin the theoretical study of statistical questions relating to topology. For instance, we will initiate the study of higher dimensional homology of subsets sampled from Euclidean space under various sampling hypotheses. The key object of study will be the family of Cech complexes constructed using the distance function in Euclidean space together with a randomly chosen finite set of points in Euclidean space. The goal of this project is to develop tools for understanding data sets which are not easy to understand using standard methods. This kind of data might include singular points, or might be strongly curved. The data is also high dimensional, in the sense that each data point has many coordinates. For instance, we might have a data set whose points each of which is an image, which has one coordinate for each pixel. Many standard tools rely on linear approximations, which do not work well in strongly curved or singular problems. The kind of tools we have in mind are in part topological, in the sense that they measure more qualitative properties of the spaces involved, such as connectedness, or the number of holes in a space, and so on. This group of methods has the capability of recognizing the number of parameters required to describe a space, without actually parameterizing it. These methods also have the capability of recognizing singular points (like points where two non-parallel planes or non-parallel lines intersect), without actually having to construct coordinates on the space. We will also be further developing and refining methods we have already constructed which can actually find good parameterizations for many high dimensional data sets. Both projects will involve the adaptation for the computer of many methods which have heretofore been used in by-hand calculations for solving theoretical problems. We will also initiate the theoretical development of topological tools in a setting which includes errors and sampling doc10084 none The goal of this project is to expand our understanding of the effects of various magnetic cloud configuration on the magnetosphere - ionosphere system by analyzing simulations for a set of idealized magnetic clouds occur in variety of different configurations. The polarity of the magnetic field orientation appears to be ordered by solar cycle and may have a determining role on the geoeffectiveness of a given magnetic cloud. Furthermore, magnetic clouds are often accompanied by interplanetary shocks, high-speed streams and trailing density enhancements. The development of an understanding of fundamental physics involved in these interactions has been hampered by an inability to separate these potentially synergistic features. The Lyon-Fedder-Mobarry (LFM) global MHD code will be used to simulate the magnetosphere - ionosphere system under a variety of magnetic cloud conditions. In addition, a 2-D relativistic guiding center particle code will be used to mode the evolution of the radiation belts. The study will focus on 1) varying the polarity of the magnetic cloud, 2) changing the duration of the IMF rotation interval, 3) changing the energy input into the magnetosphere, and 4) including trailing density enhancements. A baseline set of parameters derived from the simulation will be used to assess which features control the geoeffectiveness of a given configuration doc10085 none This award is drawing upon the experience of the Consortium gained from its production of a two-semester developmental mathematics program, Developmental Mathematics and its Applications (DevMap), that offers an alternative approach to the traditional elementary and intermediate algebra courses typically offered at two-year and four-year colleges. In producing materials for the DevMap curriculum, the theme that mathematics is central to most advanced technological fields was incorporated. Applications and modeling problems from an array of industries and technical areas including engineering, biology, biochemistry, environmental science, precision agriculture, and GPS were developed. DevMap problems are authentic and current, are often open-ended and without unique solutions, and are true representations of what students will encounter in the workplace. Successful implementation of the DevMap curriculum and materials will be largely dependent on the ability of teachers to work with authentic but often unfamiliar applications of mathematics. Additionally, it will be extremely beneficial for instructors to develop additional applications tailored to meet the interests of their own students and the needs of the local employers. Thus, TeachMap is now addressing the need to provide teachers with the experience necessary to adapt the DevMap curriculum into their classrooms. This award creates a professional development program for teachers of mathematics in ATE and ATE-type programs that is preparing them to meet two challenges: 1. how to use ATE-type applications to enhance student learning; and 2. how to develop ATE-type applications that are responsive to the interests of the students and the needs of the local employers. Through participation in the TeachMap program, instructors are learning how to: - use open-ended, authentic applications in developmental mathematics classes; - locate sources of new problems suitable for students in particular ATE programs; - identify resources (including the WWW) that might provide data and specific problem settings; - create new problems that are open-ended and, in some cases, that require student research; - access and use appropriate technologies including geometric utility programs, spreadsheets, and virtual laboratories; - construct learning environments appropriate to the problems being modeled by using short- and long-term group activities and project-based assessments doc10086 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: FRG: Mathematical and Computational Methods for High-Data-Rate Optical Fiber Communications Menyuk The goal of this research project is to develop new methods that can be used to determine the behavior of optical transmission systems under realistic circumstances. This will be accomplished by a combination of various techniques. One approach will exploit the mathematical structure of fiber transmission models in order to eliminate unessential degrees of freedom. The reduced models that will result will be more tractable mathematically and also much more computationally efficient. Another approach that will be used is the application of linearization and importance sampling techniques to enable the simulation of systems at realistic data error rates. These methods will be combined to study the main sources of impairment in optical fibers in order to achieve an accurate evaluation of system performance. All the techniques to be developed will be carefully validated by comparison to more computationally time-consuming models and to experiments. The development of high-data-rate optical fiber communications is one of the great technological achievements of the late 20th century; in the last decade alone, data rates have increased by four orders of magnitude. This enormous increase has made possible the growth of the global Internet that promises to continue to revolutionize day-to-day communications. Because demand for further growth continues unabated, however, system capacity is becoming limited by fiber transmission effects. It has therefore become crucial to accurately model and calculate the impairments due to non-ideal fiber properties when designing systems. Due to the tremendous data capacity that will be required of future transmission systems (terabits per second of aggregate capacity) and the need for extremely small transmission error rates (less than one error per trillion bits), realistic attempts to model and predict the effects of these impairments as they appear in practical systems present a number of difficult mathematical and computational challenges. The techniques that will be developed in this collaborative research project are expected to yield large reductions in the computational time required to model optical communication systems, and at the same time produce new insights into system behavior. Because these methods will be capable of providing detailed information about system performance at realistic data error rates, we believe they will lead to significant changes in the way in which optical transmission systems are modeled, and, ultimately, in the way that they are built doc10087 none Navrotsky Zeolites and other nanoporous materials are of major importance in catalysis, ion exchange, gas separation, and other technologies. They consist of a wealth of open framework structures with varying compositions and degrees of hydration. As Part of an ongoing study of the energetic driving forces which govern zeolite synthesis and reactivity, this work uses unique calorimetric capabilities in the UC Davis Thermochemistry Facility to determine energetics of formation, ion exchange, and hydration in selected aluminosilicate zeolites and their gallium and germanium analogues. This work is completed by molecular modeling. In situ calorimetric studies of zeolite synthesis form another focus of research. Such synthesis is controlled by both inorganic and organic structure directing agents, and their energetic role in both zeolites and mesoporous materials will be investigated by calorimetry. The overall goal of this research is an understanding, at the molecular level, of the factors which cause specific structures to form. The Thermochemistry Facility and its diverse activities (including participation in an NSF IGERT) provide vigorous, rigorous, and supportive education for a large number of students and postdocs from many cultural, ethnic, and economic backgrounds doc10088 none Ocean and atmospheric conditions in the coastal Gulf of Alaska vary widely over daily, seasonal, and interannual time scales. The abundance of dominant upper trophic level species, including salmon, has been shown to vary in concert with this environmental change, most notably on decadal time scales. The mechanisms linking these large-scale population shifts with climate are not clear, but may involve lower trophic level responses (i.e. bottom-up effects). Although lower trophic level species are less well studied in the CGOA, preliminary data indicates that the abundance and activity of microplankton populations also respond strongly at least to short-term changes in CGOA physical regimes. Additionally, microzooplankton are likely the dominant consumers of phytoplankton on the shelf, thus consituting a key link between physical forcing of primary production and higher trophic levels. The PIs will examine the processes structuring microplankton communities and link them with populations of Neocalanus spp., the dominant particle-grazing copepods in the coastal Gulf of Alaska. Collectively, 3 species of Neocalanus (N. flemingeri, N. plumchrus, N. cristatus) contribute substantially to total spring and summer mesozooplankton biomass in the CGOA. Neocalanus are capable of consuming both phytoplankton and microzooplankton, though the factors dictating this diet partitioning are not well understood. Furthermore, these copepods have been shown to alter individual body size, population biomass, and life cycle timing in response to variations in ocean conditions. Finally, the size and abundance of Neocalanus make them an important potential prey for pink salmon fry and other coastal fish species. Thus the microplankton - Neocalanus food web is a potential locus for the translation of environmental variation into higher trophic level responses. Specific measurements to be made are: 1) Microplankton abundance and composition (phytoplankton size structure, microzooplankton species and size composition); 2) Rates of microzooplankton herbivory; and 3) Rates of Neocalanus spp. grazing on microzooplankton and phytoplankton. A novel element of the work is the use of the FlowCAM (Flow Cytometer and Microscope) to characterize microplankton abundance and community composition during feeding experiments. This new imaging-in-flow technology should allow us to conduct many more copepod grazing experiments than would be possible with complete reliance on conventional microscopy. By sampling across a range of coastal physical regimes and seasons, this work will test the hypothesis that variation in the physical environment dictates production levels and food web structure in the CGOA, altering the timing, amount and quality of resources available to Neocalanus and ultimately to other higher trophic level species doc10089 none Frederick MacDonnell of the University of Texas, Arlington is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program, and by the Nanoscience and Engineering Initiative, for a program of research on tertiary and quaternary structures in rigid supramolecular assemblies. Rigid dendrimers (previously prepared by the PI) will be used in synthesis and self-assembly of rigid, spatially well-defined, macromolecular assemblies. Enantiomerically pure complexes of the trisphenanthroline ruthenium(II) type will serve as the the fundamental building blocks for these assemblies. The resulting structures will be spatially well defined, since the components are conformationally inflexible. This project will examine the quartenary structure and behavior of larger aggregations of these macromolecular species -- that is the structure and properties of assemblies of assemblies . Those rigid, spatially well-defined nano-scale composites will be examined as colloidal aggregates in solutions and on surfaces, using several techniques, including microscopy (STM and AFM). This project involves preparing small molecular complexes containing ruthenium atoms surrounded by organic ligands arranged in a known, regular and rigid structure and linking these units, in a controlled way, into larger aggregates that also have known, rigid, and regular spatial arrangements. These macromolecular assemblies will then be combined to form nano-scale aggregates, in solution, in colloidal suspension and as particles adsorbed on surfaces. This effort will examine how the properties and behavior (both physical and chemical) of the nano-scale aggregates is related to the known characteristics of the component fundamental units that comprise each system. This multilevel approach has high probability of generating understanding and technical experience that will be of considerable benefit to the progress of nanoscience and technology doc10090 none This project provides opportunities for high school and two-year college students to gain workplace readiness and safety skills in a chemistry context through integrated learning experiences based on national science standards. The project aims to: (1) create standards-based college and high school resource materials that provide contextual integration of chemistry content with workplace readiness and safety skills and that are aligned with the National Science Education standards; (2) provide professional development courses for college and high school educators that enhance their knowledge of industrial uses of chemistry and standard operating practices used in the chemistry-based workplace; and (3) create an infrastructure of local and national support for developing and sustaining new local partnerships among high school chemistry teachers, two-year college chemistry and chemical technology faculty, and workplace specialists (technicians, process operators, scientists, and management). The following outcomes are anticipated: chemical technology courses and supporting materials; high school lessons which are to be developed, piloted, field-tested, and disseminated; professional development courses for high school chemistry and college chemistry and chemical technology educators; improvements in high school and two-year college student learning as documented by appropriate assessment protocols; and improvement in students critical thinking skills doc10091 none Cataret Community College and North Carolina State University are leading a collaborative effort for articulation between a two-year college and a four-year institution for technician education and teacher preparation. The three goals are (1) improving curricular coherence between community college and upper division courses of study, (2) increasing the retention and success of community college students after transfer, and (3) providing comprehensive professional development activities for university, community college, and secondary school science and mathematics faculty doc10092 none Bellevue Community College and The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges provide professional development for secondary, post secondary and adjunct faculty in information technology (IT) in Washington State. The workshops build upon the programs of the Northwest Center for Emerging Technologies (NWCET) to improve the overall level of IT instruction through out the State. The faculty are provided the skills to effectively use onsite, online, and distributed instructional delivery systems to make effective use of media-based instructional resources. The professional development also provides opportunities in the use and application of industry-identified IT skill standards and the NWCET curriculum development kits to align curricula with national standards. They develop the skills needed to evaluate, select and use media-based components in standards-based courses applicable to IT certificates and degrees. The website also provides collaborative opportunities for faculty to update and refresh current Washington State-approved IT related programs and identify areas for new courses. A special emphasis is on increasing the number of IT instructors by attracting IT professionals and instructors from related fields to increase their knowledge about pedagogy and content doc10093 none The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), partnering with several ATE Centers of Excellence, is conducting a series of hands-on regional faculty workshops to bring together technology program faculty to enhance their knowledge of emerging technologies, explore ways in which these technologies may be incorporated in programs, and provide faculty with experience in developing effective assessment strategies that measure the impact of curricular innovation on the performance of their graduates. These workshops are providing tools for the development of programs that are innovative, relevant to emerging technologies, and attractive to students; thus, preparing graduates of technology programs to enter their careers with greater mobility and transitional capabilities. These workshops are also enhancing the faculty s technical professional development and providing them with a sound basis for assessing the quality of their curricular innovations. Part I of the workshops is an exploration of emerging technology relevant to the future of technology graduates conducted by industry partners. Part II consists of sessions on developing educational programs based on continuous quality improvement methodology and outcomes based assessment. The workshops are being facilitated by engineering professionals experienced in implementing ABET s outcomes-based criteria -- Engineering Criteria , consultants with expertise in assisting schools with assessment planning, industry representatives current in their company s continuous quality improvement efforts, key representatives for the NSF Advanced Technological Education (ATE) Centers, and members of ABET s Technology Accreditation Commission (TAC). Facilitators are motivating faculty to analyze different university and college missions and to develop programmatic objectives in light of those missions; determine specific outcomes to achieve those objectives; discuss ways to achieve those outcomes (such as curricular innovation) and decide how to measure the success of the actions taken. The workshops are producing case studies and examples highlighting different university and college missions and program objectives which can be used by faculty to develop program specific assessment plans to determine success of their curriculum reform and program innovation. Key features (and strengths) of this initiative are the active support and participation of industry and ATE Centers. This assures that the workshops address the most important issues facing industry and academia. The workshops are being conducted over a three-year period at geographically dispersed locations chosen to provide ease of access to the nation s technology faculty. The workshops are open to faculty members from both non-accredited and ABET accredited technology programs. While offering tools for program innovation, these workshops also provide faculty the opportunity to enhance their own technical knowledge, thereby enriching their educational programs. Additionally, faculty benefit from networking with faculty from other institutions and programs to share best practices in curriculum improvement and techniques of incorporating new technologies in their programs doc10094 none This project develops a new certificate program to provide innovative training in the high demand area of web technology, including network fundamentals, client-server architectures, interactive dynamic multimedia human-computer interfaces and relevant development tools and languages. The program is unique in its coverage of the complete end-to-end web technology spectrum, from multimedia user clients to information servers. The project involves a regional collaborative partnership including a community college, four year colleges and universities, a public school district, and industries. The objectives are to develop, implement and evaluate new courses and educational materials, to develop a program web site to be shared by industry and academia, and to develop and implement train the trainer workshops for faculty. Undergraduate students are the primary target audience of the newly developed certificate course offerings. The project also provides professional development opportunities for college and university faculty, high school faculty and industry representatives as well as outreach to high school students doc10095 none This project develops certificate and associate degree programs in computer integrated manufacturing. It provides a seamless educational pathway from high school through the two year associate degree on to a baccalaureate engineering degree and career placement. It involves a regional partnership focused on recruiting and training women and non-traditional students to meet the technology workforce needs of the region. It builds on and adapts a site-based learning approach employed in a prior ATE project implemented in the regional high schools. The major activities include establishing computer integrated manufacturing options in existing courses and curricula, integration of technical experiences across the curriculum, establishing a center and lab to simulate projects prior to the site-based learning experience, outreach and recruitment, summer orientation and internships and a host of other support services. A compendium of all instructional materials is to be made available to others interested in developing similar programs in computer integrated manufacturing doc10096 none This project is developing two new AAS degree programs in Manufacturing Engineering Technology and Plastics and Polymers Manufacturing. These programs are based on the development of new course materials and on the adaptation of curricula and courses from Sinclair Community College and the Pennsylvania College of Technology. The programs serve current manufacturing employees, employees who are newly entering the workforce or seeking a career change, and graduating high school students aspiring to develop essential technical career skills. Course content addresses critical workforce skills that have been identified by regional manufacturers. Articulation partnerships are established with Old Dominion University and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. These partners offer third- and fourth-year-level manufacturing technology courses for program graduates doc10097 none Alternating shallows and deeps, or riffles and pools, are common features in many alluvial rivers. Pool-riffle structures affect the dynamics of river meandering, and they provide morphological and hydraulic diversity for stream habitat. This doctoral dissertation research project will further the understanding of the three-dimensional dynamics of pool-riffle sequences. The project will focus on different aspects of pool-riffle form and dynamics through a case study in a reach of the Embarras River, a small, low-gradient, gravel-bed agricultural stream in east central Illinois. Among the activities to be undertaken are the development of a 3-D form index that defines pools and riffles based on parameters the include downstream and cross-stream asymmetry of channel morphology and the total vertical difference between riffle crests and pool troughs. The project will explore related sequences of upstream riffles and downstream pools and point bars in order to test hypotheses that associate these kinds of pools and riffles as important elements that initiate meandering. The project also will include direct comparisons of the patterns of fluid motion through a variety of pool-riffle types. Fluid-flow velocity measurements will be used to estimate patterns of near-bed shear stress measurements and relate these patterns to sediment transport through pool-riffle sequences. The methods employed in this study will include surveying of channel form, measurements of three-dimensional flow structure and sediment transport, and textural analysis of bed material. Results of the research will yield basic knowledge on the three-dimensional form and dynamics of pools and riffles. Such knowledge will advance basic theory on stream channel form and dynamics. It also will be important for the development of design criteria for stream naturalization, a type of stream management that seeks to establish morphologically and hydraulically diverse, dynamically stable stream channels that are capable of supporting healthy, biologically diverse aquatic ecosystems. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc10098 none This research program concerns several topics in stochastic control theory and related areas of applied probability and nonlinear partial differential equations. One topic is risk-sensitive control on an infinite time horizon, motivated by problems of robust feedback controller design for nonlinear systems. Another application of risk-sensitive control is in mathematical finance, including dynamic portfolio allocation problems on long time horizons. Yet another research topic concerns first order partial differential equations of Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman type. While such equations are nonlinear in the usual sense, they are linear with respect to max-plus algebra operations. This allows for approximate solution via max-plus basis expansions. Finally stochastic control models for economic growth and debt which arise in international finance are being studied. Stochastic control provides a framework for modeling and analysis of dynamic decision making in the presence of uncertainty. The method of dynamic programming provides a way to obtain optimal stochastic control policies by solution of corresponding nonlinear partial differential equations. The research funded through this grant is motivated by a range of applications in engineering and financial economics, including robust feedback controller design, nonlinear estimation and filtering and optimal dynamic investment allocation. In international finance,growth debt models are considered in which the goal is to choose national investment and consumption policies which optimize a suitably chosen criterion subject to imposed constraints. The model performance under optimal control may provide benchmarks to suggest whether actual current account deficits and levels of foreign debt are sustainable under current policies doc10099 none Anuj Srivastava The proposed research will focus on developing methods for automated object recognition using tools from statistics, differential geometry and computer graphics. The main objective is to design algorithms for recognizing (3D) objects from their (2D) camera images, with an emphasis on automated face recognition. The biggest challenge comes from the variability manifested in the images. How do we model it and what efficient procedures can be used to analyze it? Many current methods seek dominant subspaces (e.g. PCA, ICA, Fisher discriminant) of the observed images to capture and characterize this variability. Although the hardware technology has advanced significantly for both computing and imaging,the current mathematical techniques and algorithms for computer vision remain limited in their ability to fundamentally handle the image variability. Recent technological advances, such as 3D imaging, super fast graphics, and high-performance computing, make this project both feasible and timely. Our approach builds upon the physical considerations that will lead to representations in stochastic geometry. We highlight the physical factors behind the image variability and propose methods to model them. A distinct advantage of modeling the physical factors is the ability to incorporate the contextual information in the resulting recognition algorithms. In particular, we will develop (i) geometric models for facial shape variability, (ii) tools for synthetic illumination and facial rendering, and (iii) algorithms for statistical inference on these models parameters. We use coordinate and differential geometry to characterize object shapes, pose, motion, reflectance, illumination, and their time variations, and show that these variables take values on the Lie groups and their quotient spaces. Following the analysis by synthesis paradigm, where the observed images are statistically compared to the synthesized images, we propose inferences over the nuisance variables to seek the best match, and thus perform recognition. In a Bayesian framework, the contextual knowledge of these physical representations can be incorporated as a prior model, to add to the observed information. The inference engine is based on the Monte-Carlo methods particularized to these representations. These stated goals require expertise from distant areas of statistics, geometry, computing, and graphics. Through this FRG collaboration, we will create an atmosphere for synergistic, multi-disciplinary research that will support many future endeavors doc10100 none With this renewal award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program in the Chemistry Division and the Solid-State Chemistry Program in the Division of Materials Research support the ongoing work of Dr. George Whitesides in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The work will explore the self-assembly of components at the meso-scale (micrometers to centimeters in size), using strategies modeled on molecular self-assembly. The work will be extended to smaller size, more complex topography (including 3D), and include electrical and optical functionality. It will explore the value of molecular and biomolecular concepts and analogies for the design of meso-scale, self-assembling systems, including analogues of bubble raft assemblies developed for condensed matter physics. This work at the meso-scale bridges the gap between devices with components at normal scale (cm) with those at the molecular level (nm), using concepts from chemistry and biology. The work is expected to develop new methods to prepare tiny electronic and optical devices that are difficult or impossible to make by current methods. Because of its interdisciplinary nature, it is expected to provide excellent training for the students involved doc10101 none The ICP 21 project provides an innovative curriculum in introductory physics, offering an attractive, student-centered alternative to the standard lecture laboratory format using conventional textbooks. For the two-semester course, 10 content modules and a supplemental skills toolkit have been developed. Each module consists of activities designed to encourage active student engagement using the following models: inquiry and experimentation activities (Explorations), reinforcement exercises (Dialogs), expanding-the-concept activities (Extensions), assessments (Ranking Tasks), and Application ( which require groups of students to solve engineering problems involving several physics concepts). This project is: (1) conducting a full-scale field test (2) developing three additional modules needed to meet the needs of many technology programs, and (3) implementing a dissemination plan with a commercial publisher. The full scale field test of ICP 21 involves participants from the high school, two year college and four year college teaching communities. An external coordinator is responsible for all aspects of the field test. The results of the field test are used to improve and strengthen the ICP 21 modules. The test also gives data and information related to the success of module implementation in the classroom, and the impact it has on the students in understanding the concepts of physics. During the first phase of the ICP 21 project, physics teachers have repeatedly asked for additional modules in physics areas not covered in the original 10 modules. As a result of this input, three new modules are being developed: electrostatics, fluids, and physical optics. The third component of the project is to conduct a major dissemination program for ICP 21. This is being done in conjunction with a commercial publisher, Ztek. Ztek is a publisher that specializes in electronic media for physics and physical science. Because of the innovative nature of the ICP 21 material, most instructors will need training or assistance in using it in the classroom. The role of the instructor is much different when using the ICP 21 material properly than when in a traditional classroom lecture format. During the field testing and initial implementation this will be done through workshops. Evaluations are being done by an independent evaluator, who has been the evaluator during the first phase. The evaluation is concentrating on three areas. The first is to monitor the modules and make sure they fulfill what was promised in the first phase of the project. The second is to evaluate the efforts of this phase, and determine its effectiveness for student learning. The third area will be to evaluate the effect of ICP 21 on students attitudes and feelings about physics. This information will complement the field test results to give a complete picture of the effect of ICP 21 on student learning doc10102 none With this new RUI award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the work of Dr. Donald W. Slocum and Dr. Robert W. Holman in the Department of Chemistry at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The work involves detailed studies of directed ortho-metalation reactions involving organolithium reagents in various hydrocarbon solvents with added Lewis base ethers like THF and bis-chelating amines like TMEDA. The reactions involve alkylation of aromatic substrates like anisole, dimethylanaline, and dimethylbenzylamine, where coordination of the heteroatom is believed to facilitate addition of the alkyl group at the ortho position. NMR studies will be carried out using 13C and 7Li isotopes. This award will support a growing effort in chemical research at Western Kentucky University, and involve undergraduates in original research of interest to chemists in both academia and industry seeking improved methods for the synthesis of useful organic compounds. The PI has active collaborations with area industries, and one of them is providing financial support. Many of the students are expected to find work in local industries or go on to advanced degrees doc10103 none This project will investigate advanced materials processing methods that do not disrupt spin-injection and transport in order to polarize, inject, transport, control, store and detect spins in semiconductors. The discovery of ferromagnetism in (In, Mn)As and (Ga,Mn)As opens an opportunity to explore the combination of high purity heterostructures and ferromagnetism. However the low Curie temperature for these materials ( 35K and 110K, respectively), limits their practical impact; in sharp contrast, (Ga,Mn)N is predicted to have a TC ~400K. This project will address the following topics: (i) development of low resistance p-ohmic contacts with sharp metal semiconductor interfaces to allow efficient injection of spin-polarized currents into various heterostructures, e.g., (Ga,Mn)N GaN, (Ga,Mn)N InGaN; (ii) the development of appropriate plasma chemistries for equi-rate and selective dry etching of (Ga,Mn)N and related materials. For etching Mn, high density F2-based plasma chemistries have been successful. The normal Cl2-based chemistries for GaN will need to be altered in order to obtain equi-rate removal of all three lattice constituents in the (Ga,Mn)N; (iii) implantation isolation needed in selective area doping for contact formation and for intra-device electrical and optical isolation. It is expected to achieve efficient doping of (Ga,Mn)N using Si+ for n-type and Mg+ P+ for p-type doping. The thermal stability of the (Ga,Mn)N during annealing will also be explored, in order to study formation of other phases or precipitates; (iv) examine the interaction of H with Mn-if passivation occurs, this will lower TC. The thermal stability of the effect, the reactivation kinetics (both thermal and by minority-carrier injection) and the H diffusivity, will be investigated; (v) fabrication of various test structures to enable a measurement of the spin injection efficiency- these include a GaMnN AlGaN GaN light-emitting diode and a GaMnN spinfet. The significance of the research will be the development of an understanding of how to process (Ga,Mn)N to achieve efficient spin injection and transport, as the basis for novel device structures. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science having high technological relevance. The research will contribute basic materials science knowledge at a fundamental level to important aspects of electronic photonic devices. The basic knowledge and understanding gained from the research is expected to contribute to improving the perform-ance and stability of advanced devices and circuits by providing a fundamental understanding and a basis for designing and producing improved materials, and materials combinations. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area doc10104 none Nanoscale magnetic devices are of critical technological importance. This project will advance our understanding of their properties through a coordinated program of modeling, analysis, simulation and experiment. Topics to be addressed include (a) development of improved numerical methods for the simulation of magnetic materials and devices; (b) exploration of the micromagnetic energy landscape and the role of noise in thermally activated switching; and (c) investigation of specific nanoscale effects such as configurational anisotropy and geometrically constrained walls. Mathematics has much to contribute and much to gain. The study of appropriate limits leads to challenging problems of analysis whose solution will shed light on the essential physics. The analysis of noise and switching leads to the study of the energy landscape and to physically relevant examples of stochastic partial differential equations. Modeling coordinated with laboratory experiments will refine our understanding of the relevant phenomena. This Focused Research Group activity will draw expertise from a multidisciplinary group of mathematicians, physicists and computational scientists. The project includes a collaboration with IBM and training of postdoctoral scientists and graduate students. Magnetic storage devices lie at the foundation of modern computing. Their modeling, simulation, analysis and design raise fundamental questions of physics and mathematics, many still unanswered. As device size decreases, the relevant science changes: defects, spatial disorder and thermal fluctuations become crucial in the nanoscale regime. Mathematics has much to contribute and much to gain. The study of appropriate limits leads to challenging problems of analysis whose solution will shed light on the essential physics. The analysis of noise and switching will be studied in a three-pronged approach: by mathematical analysis, numerical modeling and experimental investigation. Modeling coordinated with laboratory experiments will refine our understanding of the relevant phenomena. This Focused Research Group activity will draw expertise from a multidisciplinary group of mathematicians, physicists and computational scientists. The project includes a collaboration with IBM and training of postdoctoral scientists and graduate students. Date: June 26, doc10105 none This project combines the benefits of two national initiatives in the sixteen Wisconsin Technical College System districts to advance the teaching and learning of common manufacturing concepts in technician education using the power of online multimedia resources. The NSF-ATE TECH SPAN project has developed a common manufacturing curriculum isolating twelve core competency clusters that cut across over forty manufacturing engineering related technical degree programs. The Wisconsin Online Resource Center, a FIPSE-LAAP project focused on a general education digital learning library, builds web-based learning objects that are designed and linked to a competency driven curriculum. This NSF-ATE project is adapting this Center framework to create a manufacturing digital library, and multimedia-based chunks of learning are being designed that stimulate and accelerate student understanding of core concepts. In addition, a post-associate degree advanced technological certificate in emerging industrial practices of integrated cellular manufacturing is under development using an associated learning object collection in the digital library. Secondary teachers, prospective teachers in industrial technology, and community-based trainers of disadvantaged women and minorities are being trained in Center resources to inspire the next generation of manufacturing technicians doc10106 none The Kentucky Information Technology Center (KITCATE) is a regional information technology (IT) center. This consortium of the Kentucky Community and Technical College System and Lexington Community College enables two-year colleges to prepare skilled information technology (IT) workers needed by new and existing Kentucky companies. The goals of the Center are to increase the IT enrollment and completion rates of students in two-year colleges; to implement widely an industry driven IT curriculum; to provide professional development for high school and two-year college IT faculty; and to increase the support and participation of business, government and industry in Kentucky for IT education. To reach these goals the number of capable, qualified faculty to teach IT courses must be increased. A physical center provides the education for faculty and staff and for business, government and industry workers. A virtual center provides information on the IT curriculum, offers IT courses, and supports workshops. Mobile centers provide workshops for instructors and for workers in business, government and industry at their locations. The two year-colleges provide articulation for high school students with vendor certificates who enroll in appropriate degree programs. An IT industry advisory board provides guidance and support to the Center doc10107 none This award will support preparing, carrying out, and analyzing a series of measurements of electromagnetic structure of matter by the University of Massachusetts Group, primarily at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and for conducting a program of graduate and undergraduate education in experimental high energy nuclear physics. This work has as a common thread the use of high energy (sometimes polarized) electrons and gamma rays to probe matter. A major area of work will be the data runs, analysis, and publications for SLAC Experiment E158 that will use the SLAC high intensity polarized electron beam and a new dedicated spectrometer and detector system to measure parity violating asymmetry in electron-electron scattering. This high precision data will provide important tests of the Standard Model of matter at low momentum transfer in the electromagnetic coupling via the interference between exchange of virtual photons and Z bosons. The UMass Group has contributed to the design of the spectrometer and beamline instrumentation, to the calibration systems, and to implementation of the data acquisition system. The UMass Group is taking a leading role in developing a new high intensity, high energy quasi-monoenergic polarized photon beam facility to be build at SLAC for a program of experiments: 1) to measure the high energy contribution to the Gerasimov-Drell-Hearn sum rule 2) to measure the nuclear dependence of the photoproduction of charmed mesons and 3) to measure the gluon spin distribution using polarized photoproduction of charmed mesons doc10108 none It is proposed here that support be provided for four projects as part of the investigator s continuing work in the representation theory of p-adic groups with applications to local number theory. The first of these projects would extend to classical groups much of the investigator s work with Bushnell on the groups GL(N). The ultimate goal is to construct inducing representations for the supercuspidal representations of these groups and then to produce covers for the resulting supercuspidal types. This would allow the use of earlier methods in studying the harmonic analysis of these groups and would hopefully have arithmetic applications, especially to Langlands functoriality. The second project involves working out what might be called a Plancherel theory for affine Hecke algebras with possibly unequal parameters. These algebras play a critical role in applying the techniques alluded to above; it is to be hoped that results already obtained in low rank may be extended to this general situation. The third project involves the K-theory and homology of p-adic groups and builds upon some recent results on the module theory of Hecke algebras. The fourth project is to apply methods involving compact, open subgroups to study the oscillator representation, especially in case p=2. A basic problem in the mathematics of almost every ancient culture was to determine solutions to equations where the solutions were constrained to be whole numbers. Such equations, called Diophantine equations after the late Greek mathematician Diophantos, have motivated much of the development of that part of mathematics referred to as the theory of numbers. As an example, one has the so-called Fermat equation, an equation that has been much in the news of late due to the recent determination of its lack of solutions except in case n=2. One way of attempting to solve a Diophantine equation is to replace the equation by a congruence: that is, one picks an integer N and one replaces the condition that the two sides of the equation be equal by the less stringent condition that the difference of the two sides of the equation be divisible by N. Solving these congruences for enough integers N often gives good information about the existence or non-existence of solutions to the original equation. Often it is useful to fix a prime number p and then to study the congruences that result when N runs through all powers of p. In this case, one says that one has localized the problem to the prime p. This process of localization has, over the last two hundred years, led to the development of a part of number theory called local number theory. This is the general area in which this project is to be carried out. One of the most powerful conceptualizations in local number theory is to be found in the conjectures of R.P. Langlands which, if verified, would go a long way to clarifying the nature of local Diophantine problems. The project proposed here would build on the investigator s earlier work in an attempt to provide some of the tools necessary to verify these conjectures doc10109 none In the work proposed here, four researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute work in teams with postdocs and graduate students to solve inverse problems. The goal is to identify material properties or surface features from indirectly related data sets. Each problem is modeled as an elastic, electromagnetic, or acoustic medium and the mathematical model is strongly taken into account to develop solution techniques. Two of the four problems to be considered are: (1) find variations in stiffness in biological tissue so that regions that are abnormal (usually with 7 to 17 times stiffer than normal tissue) can be identified. The model is the equations of elasticity and measurement of low frequency propagating shear waves using Doppler ultrasound provide the data. Noise reduction, use of models with random media, determination of the minimum size of abnormal regions that can be identified, reconstruction algorithms and images are all targets of this investigation; and (2) create radar images from satellite or airborne radar equipment by developing solutions that correct for deviations from ideal flight paths, that correctly identify object positions (break left-right symmetry problems) and that can image objects that are moving. The problems involve establishing mathematical results, utilizing engineering expertise and development and implementation of numerical algorithms. In this work, four principal investigators, together with postdocs and graduate students, solve problems where noninvasive sensing is followed by the creation of images. To solve these problems, the researchers work in teams to combine mathematical analysis, engineering and numerical computation to achieve results. Two of the problems that will be addressed are: (a) elastography with ultrasound measurements of tissue movement created by a second low level propagated signal yields data that can distinguish the stiffer tissue of cancerous tumors from normal tissue. The goal, then, is to determine algorithms for computing the location of the stiff and normal regions, to find the minimum size of regions that can be identified, and to create images in real time ; (b) airborne and satellite topographic and object sensing where signals reflected from the earth s surface are used to locate positions of objects and topographic features. The goal is to improve resolution and accuracy, to reduce the size of objects and features that can be identified and to correctly represent features that are partially hidden from view doc10110 none An unmet need exists for associate level technician education programs that target rural and minority populations. In North Carolina, rapid growth in emergent technology-intensive sectors is creating opportunities for skilled technicians, even as the State s traditional economic powerhouses of textiles, tobacco and agricultural continue their precipitous decline. A serious disconnect exists between the skill sets that satisfied the traditional industries and those required by new sectors. The Eastern North Carolina Plastics Technology Consortium was created to address these impediments as they affect the plastics industry. The three-year program is leveraging resources of multiple community colleges to educate students for careers as technicians in plastics manufacturing. Catalyzed by industry requests, the Consortium has secured State funding for facility construction and approval from the North Carolina Community College System to develop an AAS degree program in plastics technology. Students complete the first year of courses at their respective home institutions and a second year of technology-intensive, hands-on courses at a shared centrally-located facility. Goals include curricular reform based on industry standards, professional development for faculty including industrial experiences, and recruitment and retention of students using an innovative mentoring model that calls on faculty and industry partners doc10111 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: FRG: Mathematical and Computational Methods for High-Data-Rate Optical Fiber Communications Kath The goal of this research project is to develop new methods that can be used to determine the behavior of optical transmission systems under realistic circumstances. This will be accomplished by a combination of various techniques. One approach will exploit the mathematical structure of fiber transmission models in order to eliminate unessential degrees of freedom. The reduced models that will result will be more tractable mathematically and also much more computationally efficient. Another approach that will be used is the application of linearization and importance sampling techniques to enable the simulation of systems at realistic data error rates. These methods will be combined to study the main sources of impairment in optical fibers in order to achieve an accurate evaluation of system performance. All the techniques to be developed will be carefully validated by comparison to more computationally time-consuming models and to experiments. The development of high-data-rate optical fiber communications is one of the great technological achievements of the late 20th century; in the last decade alone, data rates have increased by four orders of magnitude. This enormous increase has made possible the growth of the global Internet that promises to continue to revolutionize day-to-day communications. Because demand for further growth continues unabated, however, system capacity is becoming limited by fiber transmission effects. It has therefore become crucial to accurately model and calculate the impairments due to non-ideal fiber properties when designing systems. Due to the tremendous data capacity that will be required of future transmission systems (terabits per second of aggregate capacity) and the need for extremely small transmission error rates (less than one error per trillion bits), realistic attempts to model and predict the effects of these impairments as they appear in practical systems present a number of difficult mathematical and computational challenges. The techniques that will be developed in this collaborative research project are expected to yield large reductions in the computational time required to model optical communication systems, and at the same time produce new insights into system behavior. Because these methods will be capable of providing detailed information about system performance at realistic data error rates, we believe they will lead to significant changes in the way in which optical transmission systems are modeled, and, ultimately, in the way that they are built doc10112 none Famiano This award supports a two-year Science and Technology Agency (STA) Postdoctoral Fellowship for Michael Famiano of Ohio State University. He will be undertaking his research with Professor Isao Tanihata at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) in Saitama, Japan. Dr. Famiano will be researching the measurement of beta-decay rates of r-process and other exotic neutron-rich nuclei. The proposed work involves both experimental and theoretical efforts surrounding the rapid-neutron capture process, which is believed to be the source of heavy elements in stars and planets. He will be carrying out sophisticated r-process calculations in which he will insert his predictions for excited state beta-decays into a state-of-the-art r-process code to observe the impact of the excited state decay half-lives on the r-process abundance predictions. The research will result in solving a longstanding problem in the formulation of r-process nucleosynthesis calculations. The findings will then allow the incorporation of the calculated rates into more elaborate r-process models, and the experimental verification of these calculations. Useful contributions to the field are likely, and the exposure of the awardee to a new research setting will be intellectually stimulating. The proposed work will benefit through collaboration with the Japanese host laboratory, where Dr. Famiano will have access to the necessary experimental systems, equipment and expertise doc10113 none This is a project to build upon an earlier NSF funded program Project TEACH I that focused on pre-service education. It is a collaborative effort of the Green River Community College, Central Washington University, and six school districts in the Green River area. This project is expanding those efforts to include in-service training for current and future teachers, creating a communications center for coordinating teacher training efforts, and increasing the recruitment of talented future teachers. Project Teach II is strengthening the existing pre-service teacher training and recruitment programs by implementing research-proven activities that integrate pre-service and in-service training. It also strengthens the interplay of education and industry by providing a forum for local businesses to participate in teacher training doc10114 none Jackson State Community College (JSCC) is partnering with Austin Peay State University, the University of Tennessee at Martin, and Arkansas State University to develop three comprehensive articulation programs in Precision Agriculture: a 2+2 program, a 4+1 program, and a 3+1 program. These partnership programs ultimately lead to a Bachelor of Science degree in Precision Agriculture. The unique feature of these articulation agreements is that students not only transfer from the community college to the university, but also from the university to the community college. This inverted degree program with a reverse transfer format allows students to graduate from both JSCC and a four-year institution, with the fourth year spent at JSCC. JSCC holds technologically sophisticated equipment not available at the partnering universities, and it has developed a number of innovative courses to provide experiential learning opportunities to students in this field. The Precision Agriculture program provides students with theoretical background and hands-on experience in agronomy, GIS, GPS, and computer science. A unique combinations of courses and experiences train students to work in the precision agriculture industry doc10115 none The PI will participate on a cruise aboard the German research vessel FS Sonne to collect samples on the MAR leg of the cruise as a complement to their methane sampling, through which they are hoping to identify anomalies resulting from hydrothermal activity or serpentinization. This project will study hydrothermal activity along the MAR from 5 to 15 N. Most of this section of the MAR has not been explored previously. Samples will be collected for transition element analyses including dissolved and particulate Fe and Mn. A WetLabs SeaTech Light Scattering Sensor (LSS) will be used so that evidence of hydrothermal activity can be assessed in real time, based on hydrothermal particle anomalies in the water column. The LSS will also help in making informed decisions, based on the observation of hydrothermal particle plumes, about when to close Niskin bottles for sample collection. The MAR between 5 and 15 N is host to large fracture zones, where ultramafic exposures are likely to be found. It is possible that active hydrothermal sites occur within a ridge offset in this region, in a setting similar to that which is host to the Rainbow hydrothermal site at 36 16 N on the MAR. The Rainbow site shows extremely high concentrations of hydrothermal particles in the water column, along with methane anomalies, so if a similar venting system exists within the 5 to 15 N region of the MAR, we will undoubtedly observe the hydrothermal anomaly in one of the above tracers doc10116 none This project is instituting a Biotechnology Technician A.A.S. degree in response to state needs. More than 116 biotechnology firms are located in Utah with 57 moving in during the last eighteen months. These firms employ individuals focused on work in genetic engineering, bioinfomatics, molecular biology, and pharmaceutical development. Partners include the community college, local industries, universities in Utah, and 5 public school districts. Prior to this program, no two-year biotechnology programs were available in Utah or neighboring states. Industry representatives are involved in outlining skills competencies, delivering instruction and facilitating instructor professional development. Outcomes for this project include: (1) establishing reciprocal partnerships with local industry; (2) identifying, adapting and implementing secondary and college curriculum; (3) preparing college and secondary instructional staff; (4) supporting industry internships for faculty and students; (5) developing a state of the art instructional laboratory doc10117 none Major challenges face the Northwest and the nation both in sustaining environments and economies and in developing educational programs to meet present and emerging needs. Natural resources and resource-based economies are severely threatened; restoration and conservation based on ecosystems approaches must be implemented through public-private partnerships supported by education programs developed in concert with new land management efforts. As an Advanced Technological Education (ATE) focal point, the Northwest Center for Sustainable Resources (NCSR) is transforming two-year community college programs to meet the needs of the technological, high performance workplace in natural resource management. The Center is: (a) marketing and distributing curriculum projects and clearinghouse materials both in traditional formats and electronically through the Center s website. (b) offering faculty development institutes for high school teachers (NCSR s Natural Resources Institute) and community college instructors (NCSR s Ecosystem Institute and GIS Institute). (c) developing and delivering new NCSR Adaptation Institutes to provide frameworks for curriculum adaptation for community colleges and high schools across the nation. (d) disseminating the Center s model partnership approach through institutes and presentations; emphasizing employer connections and infusion of industry and professional standards into technician education programs. This project is building on successful Center activities including the development and beta-testing of over 30 courses; production of materials, newsletters, reports, and a Website; and the offering of over 20 faculty development institutes doc10118 none This project focuses on the study of the transverse dynamics of a nearly-confocal nonlinear Fabry-Perot ring resonator, using a rubidium vapor cell placed in the resonator as a Kerr medium. Coupling by four-wave mixing of the transverse modes is predicted to produce a transverse cavity mode spectrum consisting of a central spike corresponding to the lowest on-axis TEM-00 mode, on top of a low pedestal of higher modes. The similarity of this transverse mode spectrum to the central spike formed by bosons in the momentum space distribution when they undergo Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) suggests that these phenomena can also be understood by an analogy to BEC. Extending this analogy, the group will attempt to observe a BEC-like phase transition in which the well-collimated output beam corresponding to the central-spike momentum spectrum suddenly becomes uncollimated as a random modulation of the input laser light by crossed AOMs is increased beyond a certain critical amplitude doc10119 none Jonathan McCammond In recent years ideas from geometry have driven some of the most exciting developments in combinatorics such as Gromov hyperbolic groups and CAT(0) spaces, combinatorial Morse theory, combinatorial Ricci curvature, combinatorial differential manifolds and matroid bundles. The central unifying notion in geometry is that of curvature. Now, through these diverse geometric and combinatorial theories, curvature is emerging as a powerful tool and fundamental unifying concept in combinatorics as well. This Focused Research Group will explore some of the specific notions of combinatorial curvature driving current combinatorial work, and also the role of curvature as the basis for a coherent geometric vision of combinatorics itself. The notion of curvature has been one of the grand unifying concepts in geometry and physics for well over a century. For example, Gauss, the originator of our modern understanding of curvature, showed that Euclidean geometry was distinguished from other geometries as being the geometry of a space with zero curvature. As an application he showed that it is precisely the curvature of the surface of the Earth which makes it impossible to draw a map of the Earth s surface (on a flat piece of paper) that accurately portrays all lengths and angles. Riemann generalized Gauss s work to smooth spaces of higher dimensions, and Einstein observed that Riemannian geometry was precisely the right setting in which to describe his theory of general relativity (in which the curvature of the universe is the result of gravitational forces). Partly as a result of Einstein s work, the last century saw an intensive investigation into the curvature of smooth spaces. Combinatorics, roughly defined, is the study of objects which can be described by a finite amount of information. This is precisely the mathematics that computers can do. This type of mathematics seems far removed from the geometric investigations of Gauss, Riemann and countless others. However, there is a growing collection of combinatorial phenomena which can best be viewed as being finite analogues of facts about the curvature of smooth spaces. The goal of this proposal is to come to a coherent understanding of curvature as a combinatorial notion. In addition, bringing together researchers from a variety of mathematical disciplines, we wish to bridge the chasms between geometry, combinatorics, algebra and topology, using curvature as the unifying theme doc10120 none AgTEC, a National Partnership, is improving the mathematics, science, and technical competencies of agriculture technology graduates who are preparing for careers that support the most efficient and sustainable food and fiber production in the world. Kirkwood Community College with partner colleges, secondary schools, and universities, guided by the vision of the agriculture industry, is institutionalizing improvements in select agriculture technology education programs that serve as models for the nation. To accomplish this vision, AgTEC is focusing on three areas of activity: curriculum development, faculty development and capacity building. Specific directions in each of these activity areas are being determined annually by a Critical Issues Conference. Conference breakout sessions address needs and establish outcomes for annual projects. Projects are being accomplished by a team of lead partners and then institutionalized, in following years, by all appropriate partners. The annual conferences also address best practices in the three primary areas of activity as improvements are institutionalized. In curriculum development, the center is (a) defining advanced technological careers in Agriculture Business Services, Agriculture Production, Agriculture Science and Advanced Agriculture Technology, and identifying the knowledge and skill competencies required by students entering careers in these fields; (b) validating and enhancing existing curriculum and developing new curriculum driven by emerging technologies and critical issues influencing 21st century agriculture; and (c) developing all courses modules with strong science, mathematics, and technical skill components. The center is also helping to develop faculty expertise by (a) hosting workshops for college and high school instructors to strengthen their skills in using and applying new technology, curriculum, and electronic resources; (b) coordinating instructor internships at agricultural research centers and in industry; (c) identifying and promoting model agriculture teacher education programs at four-year colleges and universities; and (d) assisting partner colleges and high schools to integrate advanced mathematics, science and technology through one-on-one mentoring and technical assistance. To help build capacity, the center and partner colleges are enrolling students previously denied access to advanced Agriculture Technology Education by identifying and implementing successful recruitment and retention models. The Center is maintaining a national clearinghouse of electronic resources and reports to be used by the nation s educational institutions for program improvement and facilitating 2 + 2 + 2 articulation between high schools, two-year and four-year colleges and universities. Ongoing assistance is being provided by an Industry Council of leading agri-businesses, a University Council of leading university agriculture programs, and local teams of community colleges, universities, and secondary agriculture programs doc10121 none This project brings together a planning team composed of stakeholders of the Tennessee Valley Region to develop a comprehensive and systematic plan for a regional center for information technology education. The center addresses the need to increase the region s capacity to produce and sustain an information technology workforce. Particular emphasis is placed on developing human resources capacity to enable further automation and sustain the region s major industries of manufacturing, finance, and health care. The planning process focuses on three areas: development of plans and processes to build a community of those with an interest in information technology education, development of a detailed plan for academic program reform and faculty development in information technology education in the region, and creation of a program that engages a large population of potential information technology workers. The planning team that manages the process has representatives from the major stakeholders in the region including community colleges, universities, a large metropolitan school system, and industry partners doc10122 none The College District in north central California is engaged in planning for the enlargement of its laser optics photonics program into what will eventually be a regional center. Yuba s laser optics photonics consortium involves industry partners Coherent Optics, Inc., and Spectra-Physics, Inc., in close association with their representative professional organizations LEOMA and SPIE. This basic consortium is building its capacity to serve the industry and the region through enhancements to the structure, functions, and size of the consortium and through improved curriculum design utilizing a Tech Prep-type format. The planning project covers (1) building the partnership to include two universities, three community colleges, six high schools, and approximately twenty industrial partners; (2) developing an infrastructure (a committee structure, the needs and roles of prospective staff, and the points of contact within each participating organization); and (3) developing plans for articulation, marketing, data collection assessment, and staff development. The project s second year includes a teacher training component. The consortium has already received grants, equipment gifts, and cash to support the Marysville laser optics photonics center doc10123 none Prince George s Community College is leading an effort to develop and implement science and mathematics courses for preservice elementary teachers in Maryland s community colleges. Courses are modeled after courses developed through the Maryland Collaborative for Teacher Preparation and conform to a constructivist and inquiry-based approach. Mentors from two and four year colleges assist with the course development and continue working with faculty throughout the year. Courses are consistent with the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) standards, national science and mathematics education standards, and Maryland state technology standards. The science and mathematics course development is part of a larger effort to establish an Associate of Arts degree in Teaching in Maryland community colleges that articulates with all four year institutions in the state. Course development is based on an outcomes document that specifies a constructivist approach. Students demonstrate their understanding through performance assessments and portfolios. Partnerships between community colleges and the Future Educators Associations at local high schools are assisting in recruiting students into teacher education programs doc10124 none Viscous conservation laws arise in a wide variety of physical applications, including fluid dynamics, magnetohydrodynamics, and materials science. Of particular importance are solutions of such equations that are stable and hence typically correspond with observable phenomena. Unfortunately, establishing the stability of these solutions has proven to be a quite difficult problem. The pointwise Green s function approach, however, initiated by Liu and developed by Liu and his collaborators, has proven quite robust: in applications to viscous shock waves arising in single conservation laws of arbitrary order, viscous shock waves arising in systems with second order diffusion, planar viscous shock waves, degenerate viscous shock waves, and rarefaction waves. We propose to continue and extend this promising line of research in three directions. First, new techniques recently developed by Howard and Zumbrun appear suitable for extension to (i) systems of viscous conservation laws admitting degenerate viscous shock waves, and (ii) systems of viscous conservation laws with high order viscosity. Second, we propose to develop further techniques that will extend the pointwise Green s function approach to the case of viscous rarefaction waves. Finally, we would like to incorporate new techniques recently developed in the context of perturbation theory for completely integrable systems into the study of the necessarily oscillatory dynamics that arise in viscous conservation laws of order higher than two. The conservation of such fundamental properties as energy and momentum often leads to partial differential equations that model some underlying physical process. For example, the Navier-Stokes equations of fluid dynamics and the Maxwell equations of electromagnetism follow this paradigm. Of primary concern are stable phenomena: those whose principal structure is robust to minor environmental fluctuations. We propose to continue and extend a promising line of research that has been extraordinarily successful in establishing a clear criterion for such stability. A direct consequence of the approach is a detailed understanding of certain fundamental partial differential equations doc10125 none The methods used to characterize interpolation sequences vary depending upon whether the context is the Hardy space, the Bergman space, the Fock space, or the Dirichlet space. This research will attempt to unify these theories, using the concept of weak interpolation, which can be defined in the general context of a Hilbert space of analytic functions with a reproducing kernel. Moving away from the Hilbert space setting, an additional avenue of research will focus on obtaining a geometric characterization of interpolating sequences for the Bloch space. Yet another direction of research, suitable for experimental computer work by undergraduates who could search for useful evidence, involves the question of polynomial factors of harmonic polynomials in Euclidean spaces of arbitrary dimension. A polynomial that has an isolated zero at the origin cannot be a factor of a nonzero harmonic polynomial. This raises the question of which polynomials are factors of nonzero harmonic polynomials. Harmonic and analytic functions have been the subject of intense scrutiny by mathematicians, scientists, and engineers for the past two centuries. The Laplacian operator, whose vanishing characterizes harmonic functions, appears naturally in several areas of science and engineering, ranging from the heat equation to the distribution of electric charges. This project investigates properties of collections of analytic and harmonic functions in an attempt to understand deep aspects of the behavior of these functions. A key part of this project is the involvement of advanced undergraduates, who will be introduced to the world of mathematical research in the hope of inspiring them to pursue further studies and a career in mathematics. Showing these students the excitement of discovering new mathematical knowledge may help create the next generation of mathematicians doc10126 none Plasma is a manufacturing medium with unique properties, and its use has led to more efficient processes and products that could not be fabricated without them. Yet, despite the importance of plasma-aided manufacturing, few community colleges currently offer courses and prepare technicians in this critical technology. To address this urgent need, the project is developing essential resources that will enable community colleges to implement plasma-aided manufacturing courses. These resources include outcomes- based instructional materials, training systems in plasma technology, and workshops for community college faculty. Outcomes-based instructional materials are organized around three fundamental components of a plasma processing system. These fundamental components include plasma physics, RF power subsystems, and gas delivery subsystems. Modules on plasma applications, e.g. plasma etch, chemical vapor deposition, and sputtering, integrate the three fundamental components into a capstone-type learning experience for students. Laboratory improvement will focus on the design of plasma training systems at RF frequencies. Project staff are working with equipment suppliers to adapt current manufacturing systems for community college laboratories. Finally, faculty enhancement workshops provide hands-on opportunities with plasma training systems and disseminate instructional materials developed through this project doc10127 none Award: Principal Investigator: William Abikoff The Ahlfors-Bers Colloquium is to be held in October at the University of Connecticut campus at Storrs. This award primarily supports the participation of graduate students, junior researchers, and speakers. Plenary lectures are planned to cover a wide-ranging agenda in geometric function theory, hyperbolic geometry, dynamics, and other topics and workshop days early in the meeting are planned to showcase junior researchers. The Ahlfors-Bers Colloquium is one of a series of conferences on geometric function theory, Riemann surfaces and related topics that have been held every three or four years since . The meetings name honors Lars Ahlfors and Lipman Bers, two giants in complex analysis who shaped the meeting s subjects over the twentieth century. The current core of geometric function theory consists mainly of Riemann surfaces (two-dimensional spaces defined over the complex numbers, such as the collection of all complex solutions to a typical single polynomial equation in two variables), Teichmueller theory (an approach to studying the variations of structure possible for a particular Riemann surface), Kleinian groups (the most important discrete groups of isometries of hyperbolic three-space), iteration of rational functions (which combines dynamical systems ideas with function theory), and hyperbolic manifolds. This core reaches back 150 years and meets or includes some of the most active specialties in current mathematical research. Award: Principal Investigator: William Abikoff The Ahlfors-Bers Colloquium is to be held in October at the University of Connecticut campus at Storrs. This award primarily supports the participation of graduate students, junior researchers, and speakers. Plenary lectures are planned to cover a wide-ranging agenda in geometric function theory, hyperbolic geometry, dynamics, and other topics and workshop days early in the meeting are planned to showcase junior researchers. The Ahlfors-Bers Colloquium is one of a series of conferences on geometric function theory, Riemann surfaces and related topics that have been held every three or four years since . The meetings name honors Lars Ahlfors and Lipman Bers, two giants in complex analysis who shaped the meeting s subjects over the twentieth century. The current core of geometric function theory consists mainly of Riemann surfaces (two-dimensional spaces defined over the complex numbers, such as the collection of all complex solutions to a typical single polynomial equation in two variables), Teichmueller theory (an approach to studying the variations of structure possible for a particular Riemann surface), Kleinian groups (the most important discrete groups of isometries of hyperbolic three-space), iteration of rational functions (which combines dynamical systems ideas with function theory), and hyperbolic manifolds. This core reaches back 150 years and meets or includes some of the most active specialties in current mathematical research doc10128 none The purpose of this project is to use equivariant methods to study problems concerning algebraic varieties with group actions. Part of this project involves moment graphs of varieties with torus actions. For a variety on which a torus acts with finitely many fixed points and curves, one can define a combinatorial object called a moment graph. There has been much recent progress in computing topological invariants, such as cohomology or intersection homology, in terms of the moment graph. The investigator proposes to extend this to K-theory. Schubert varieties are among the most important varieties with this type of torus action; the investigator plans to continue work with Brian Boe on a conjecture that would simplify determining if a point in a Schubert variety is rationally smooth. Moreover, he plans to extend some facts known only for Schubert varieties to the more general setting of varieties with this type of torus action. In addition, the investigator plans to use equivariant methods to study certain interesting varieties: he plans to calculate Chern-Schwartz-MacPherson classes of degeneracy loci, and to calculate interesting invariants (degrees, push-forward measures) of nilpotent adjoint orbits of reductive Lie groups. This project is in the area of mathematics referred to as algebraic geometry. Algebraic geometry studies geometric objects by describing them as solutions to polynomial equations -- such objects are called algebraic varieties. Fortunately, although algebraic varieties can be very complicated, many of them have a great deal of symmetry. Mathematicians have been intensely investigating such varieties with extra symmetry for several reasons: The presence of such extra symmetry makes these varieties easier to study, so that these varieties are valuable test cases in developing methods to investigate all varieties. Moreover, varieties with extra symmetry are of great interest in their own right: they play important roles in various areas of mathematics, including number theory, combinatorics, and representation theory. There has been considerable recent progress in developing techniques to understand these kinds of varieties; this project is about extending these techniques, and using them to study particular classes of varieties doc10129 none To date, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has certified aircraft technicians under its Federal Aviation Regulations. These regulations dictate curriculum and testing procedures for schools that prepare Airframe (aircraft structure) and Powerplant (engines) Technicians. Advancements in aircraft systems, structures and engines without regulatory updates and the current shortage of technicians, demand aggressive measures to improve and expand the current system of preparing aircraft technicians. This project is serving as a catalyst for systemic change in the preparation of aircraft technicians by bringing together many organizations that have the capacity to influence change on a national basis. As a major step to involve partners, the project is organizing a national conference whose focus is to develop a plan for aircraft technician reform, addressing the basic mathematics and science requirements as well as the specific skills and curriculum for avionics, airframe, and other related aviation specialties. In particular, the topics to be considered include certification standards and procedures, curricula including both core and technical courses, internship programs, access to instructional technology, student recruitment, and faculty development. A second goal of this project is the development and testing of three courses -- electrical connectors, communication, and navigation. The initial testing of these courses is with incumbent technicians. After the initial trouble shooting, the courses are being introduced as credit courses setting the foundation for new aircraft electronics certification programs doc10130 none The Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS) is adapting and implementing the Career Transcript System (CTS) in 16 high school, college, and industry sites across the state. The primary goal is to create a state-wide system and national model focused on improving the technical education provided for Kentucky s current and future workforce in the Information Technology (IT), Engineering Technology (ET) and Manufacturing Technology (MT) sectors. Adaptation of this material will strengthen science, mathematics, engineering, and technical learning as well as improve the career skills of students and workers participating in the program. The CTS was created by the SCANS Center at Johns Hopkins University with funding from NSF ATE over the past eight years. It combines professional development, teaching tools, assessments, and verified documentation in the form of a Career Transcript (CT). Two campuses of KCTCS, Central Kentucky Technical College and Bowling Green Technical College, had previously pilot tested the CTS in IT and MT classrooms. This project is implementing the CTS at additional college sites, high schools, and industries across the state. By fostering partnerships with high schools and industry, KCTCS is creating a pipeline for future employees and enhancing skills development for current employees in the Kentucky IT, ET and MT sectors. Over the course of two years, 835 students and workers are receiving Career Transcripts, 32 KCTCS faculty and staff are being trained to use the CTS, 12 faculty are being certified to train other faculty, KCTCS is hosting a two-day state wide conference to disseminate results, and a CTS committee is working to institutionalize the system across the state doc10131 none applications to topology of manifolds Principal Investigator: Guoliang Yu : The investigator proposes to study the K-theory of operator algebras associated to metric spaces and groups, and its applications to topology of manifolds. The K-theory of such operator algebras are receptacles of higher indices of elliptic differential operators and have important applications to problems in differential geometry and topology of manifolds such as the existence problem for Riemannian metrics with positive scalar curvature, the Novikov conjecture on homotopy invariance of higher signatures. The methods to be employed include controlled operator K-theory, infinite dimensional almost flat bundles, and geometric group theory. Manifolds are spaces glued together by Euclidean spaces. Examples of manifolds include spheres and tori. In differential geometry one studies how manifolds are curved. For example a flat piece of paper has zero curvature while the sphere has positive curvature. This is why we can not bend a piece of paper into a sphere. A basic problem in differential geometry is to determine when a manifold can have positive scalar curvature. Another important problem in mathematics is the classification of manifolds. By surgery theory the classification problem for higher dimensional manifolds can be essentially reduced to the Novikov conjecture. The K-theoretic higher indices of certain elliptic differential operators can be used to attack the positive scalar curvature problem and the Novikov conjecture. A key step in this analytic approach is the computation of the K-theoretic higher indices, which can be essentially reduced to the problem of computing the K-theory of operator algebras associated to metric spaces and groups doc10132 none Kopriva, David From: R. Bruce Kellogg [kellogg@ipst.umd.edu] Sent: Thursday, May 31, 6:04 AM To: dkopriva@nsf.gov Cc: kellogg@ipst.umd.edu Subject: Proposal No: - Proposal No: - Some problems of mathematical and numerical analysis related to singularly perturbed boundary value problems will be studied. The mathematical problems include obtaining sharp bounds for derivatives of the solution that take into account boundary layers, interior layers, and corner singularities. The numerical problems include the development of stabilized discretizations for these singularly perturbed problems and the study of the best approximation properties of singular perturbation problems. The proposed work studies physical systems in which some quantities undergo rapid changes in certain regions. Such systems include fluid flow, where the rapid changes occur at boundary layers, shocks, and interior layers. These systems arise in the design of fluid machinery, the study of underground oil and water transport, the modeling of airflow over cars and airplanes, and other areas. The results of this research will be of use in the development of more accurate computer simulations of these systems, with consequent improvements in the design of equipment used in such real-world problems. In addition, the proposal provides for regular visits of Professor M. Stynes to the U.S.; it is planned that Prof. Stynes will interact with graduate students in mathematics who are working in related areas doc10133 none Phi Theta Kappa, the honor society for two-year colleges, in cooperation with the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), is conducting a multi-disciplinary, multi-component, nationwide mentoring project to enhance and expand the role of community colleges in providing teacher preparation programs for future K-12 science and mathematics teachers. This project responds to the recommendation areas put forth in the NSF report, Investing in Tomorrow s Teachers: The Integral Role of Two Year Colleges in the Science and Mathematics Preparation of Prospective Teachers. Project objectives are being accomplished through a set of proven mentoring activities that extend, for replication and or adaptation, the knowledge, experience and materials achieved by seven community college teacher preparation programs recognized as exemplary by NSF --first to 18 competitively selected community colleges, and then, via extensive dissemination activities, to community, technical, and junior colleges nationwide. Project activities include: national competition to select 18 colleges; two National Teacher Preparation Conferences, at which mentors, and resource persons from their four-year college partners, work with their assigned four-member college teams to develop action plans; mentoring services, including site visits, throughout the project; a periodic networking collaboration-building newsletter, available electronically and in print; a case study monograph for distribution to presidents, academic deans, education chairs, science or mathematics chairs, and education institutions in the participating colleges regions; and a broad range of other dissemination activities through Phi Theta Kappa and AACC websites, conferences, and publications. The 18 community colleges selected to participate are each working with one assigned community college educator mentor and one four year college resource person from exemplary teacher preparation programs at El Camino College, CA; William Rainey Harper College, IL; Henry Ford Community College, MI; Tulsa Community College, OK; Community College of Philadelphia, PA; Prince George s Community College, MD; and Green River Community College, WA. Mentors and resource persons represent disciplines of mathematics, biology, physics, chemistry, and education. Taken as a whole, these teacher preparation programs address NSF s teacher preparation recommendation areas: recruitment of prospective teachers; strengthening undergraduate courses and infrastructure; preservice experiences; inservice activities; and liaison between two and four year institutions doc10134 none The Building for Tomorrow project is bringing together teachers from 35 urban high schools for participation in structured professional development workshops that are equipping them to attract under-represented high school students into science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) fields. The medium for this is participation in the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition and other national SMET competitions. With participation in these competitions, students are increasing their interest in SMET careers, and this interest is translating into increased enrollment and success in related high school courses and in SMET majors at postsecondary institutions. The collaborating institutions (Middlesex Community College, St. Louis Community College, and San Diego City College) are conducting a series of summer institutes to train teams of practicing high school teachers and preservice teachers from urban districts so they may guide their students through these tournaments. The institutes also assist the teams to establish partnerships with corporations and academic institutions to support the participation of their high schools in SMET competitions. FIRST is sponsoring an annual robotics competition that partners teams of high school students with engineers from businesses and universities and introduces the students to the excitement of engineering. In a six-week program, each team is brainstorming, designing, constructing, and testing a champion robot for the tournament. Through these activities, students are discovering the connection between classroom lessons and real world applications. Annually, teams from about 400 schools are participating in FIRST regional and national competitions. The strategic goals of Building for Tomorrow are to: 1. Cultivate and direct student enthusiasm, generated by participation in national and local SMET-related competitions, towards effective learning. 2. Capitalize on students desire to succeed in SMET competitions to expand their knowledge of and interest in SMET disciplines and SMET careers in industry and education through transmission of real-time competition-related information ( e.g., how to design, engineer, problem solve, construct, communicate ideas, and work in teams.) 3. Increase SMET high school teacher knowledge of and ability to apply effective team building, project management, effective communication, creative problem-solving, time management, and conflict resolution doc10135 none Proposed here is a study featuring models for the interaction of surface and internal oceanic waves with sediment-laden bottom topography. The project includes derivation and mathematical analysis of models, development of algorithms for the approximation of solutions, implementation of the algorithms as computer codes, comparisons of the output of numerical simulations with field data, the use of the models for prediction and their development as a tool for effective coastal engineering. The basic issue under consideration is challenging in that it involves the temporal evolution of two free surfaces whose dynamics are connected in a complex and nonlinear way. The wave motion involves the deformation of the water s surface, or in the case of internal waves, the pycnoclines. Even over a fixed bottom, these issues are difficult in their exact formulation, and consequently model equations are typically used. In the present conception, the bottom is not fixed, and this added complexity is what makes the issues proposed here for study scientifically very interesting. In view are three-dimensional models that are initiated by incoming wave fields from deep water. These models will allow for long-shore variation and take account of reflection. It is planned to develop such models and to test them extensively against both laboratory experiments and field observation. Comparisons are in view at several sites around the world, including the Field Research Facility of the US Army Corps of Engineers at Duck, NC, a site of the Polish Academy of Sciences on the Baltic Sea, the North Coast of the Magdelan Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Gold Coast of Australia, the Island of Djerba off the Tunisian coast and two regions in Morocco (Alger in the Gibraltar Strait and Agadir on the Atlantic coast). The motivation for carrying out the study outlined above is several-fold. First is the pure science of the subject. The project involves interesting and substantial issues from hydrodynamics, partial differential equations, and sediment transport theory. Secondly, it is an ideal venue in which to acquaint students with interdisciplinary research. There is a strong practical reason for this study as well. The erosion and retreat of coastlines is a worldwide phenomenon. Global warming will increase the activity of storms, raise the sea level, and further degrade the present, sometimes catastrophic state of many beaches. Fragile Arctic coasts, beaches on the Great lakes and on many coastal regions already display the unmistakable signs of deterioration caused by these global changes and aggravated by social developmental pressure. Severe erosion is likely to spread to many coastal areas within half a century and thus increase the demand for effective prevention methods. The present project aims at deepening our understanding of fundamental wave-bottom interaction processes, especially as regards sediment dispersal. Going beyond the science, the project also grapples with the intelligent use of this kind of knowledge in designing coastal protection strategies. With experience already in hand, it is clear that there are a variety of protection options and that it is not always smart to simply build some permanent, often-ugly structure. So-called soft protection methods are a useful addition to the reperatoire of the coastal engineer. These are much less expensive when they can be made to work. The assessment of the practicality of a protection plan, be it hard or soft relies upon the kind of knowledge investigated under the auspices of this project doc10106 none The Kentucky Information Technology Center (KITCATE) is a regional information technology (IT) center. This consortium of the Kentucky Community and Technical College System and Lexington Community College enables two-year colleges to prepare skilled information technology (IT) workers needed by new and existing Kentucky companies. The goals of the Center are to increase the IT enrollment and completion rates of students in two-year colleges; to implement widely an industry driven IT curriculum; to provide professional development for high school and two-year college IT faculty; and to increase the support and participation of business, government and industry in Kentucky for IT education. To reach these goals the number of capable, qualified faculty to teach IT courses must be increased. A physical center provides the education for faculty and staff and for business, government and industry workers. A virtual center provides information on the IT curriculum, offers IT courses, and supports workshops. Mobile centers provide workshops for instructors and for workers in business, government and industry at their locations. The two year-colleges provide articulation for high school students with vendor certificates who enroll in appropriate degree programs. An IT industry advisory board provides guidance and support to the Center doc10137 none This individual investigator award will fund a project to study moving charge-density waves (CDWs) in niobium triselenide films and single crystals. The project will combine crystal and film growth with various characterization techniques. The materials will be explored through the application of spatially and temporally resolved transport measurements as well as novel diffraction tools. In particular, spatially-resolved transport and coherent x-ray diffraction measurements will explore the cause of a recently discovered form of extremely slow creep-like collective motion that exhibits temporal order. A related first-order dynamic transition will also be studied. Spatially-resolved measurements of CDW conduction noise will be used to investigate spatio-temporal correlations in CDW dynamics. Through growth chamber and target modifications and lattice-matched substrates fully oriented films with improved grain sizes and transport properties will be grown. These films as well as single crystals will be used to fabricate a variety of CDW microstructures and heterostructures that will allow study of fundamental aspects of CDW physics, of interactions between the CDW, superconducting, and metallic states, and of potential applications of these remarkable materials. This work will provide excellent training to graduate and undergraduate students in the concepts and techniques of modern materials science, solid-state physics, and nanotechnology. Novel electronic materials including high-temperature superconductors, conducting polymers, carbon nanotubes, and charge-density-wave (CDW) conductors illuminate the fundamental physical processes that underlie how solid state electronic devices work, and provide opportunities for creating the electronics of tomorrow. Next to superconductors, CDW conductors are perhaps the most remarkable electronic materials ever discovered. An important barrier to the understanding, and practical application, of these materials has been the lack of high-quality thin films from which to fabricate devices. This barrier is now being overcome, and the first thin films of the CDW conductor niobium triselenide have been prepared. This individual investigator award will fund a project that focuses on improving the quality of these films, preparing unusual device structures from them, and then exploring the fundamental and useful properties of these devices. This work will provide excellent training to graduate and undergraduate students in the concepts and techniques of modern materials science, solid-state physics, and nanotechnology doc10138 none This project is conducting planning activities for the development of a model curriculum based on an existing program at Evergreen Valley College. The envisioned curriculum will integrate new technologies such as GIS, GPS, CADD and computer-aided math into civil engineering technology. Design constraints envisioned include an expandable certificate program that includes all course descriptions, textbooks, assignments, lab activities, and fieldwork doc10139 none The Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS) is adapting and implementing curricular materials and best practices from South Carolina s ATE Center of Excellence in order to increase enrollment, retention, diversity, and success rate of technology students. The goals of this project are: to develop a technology portal (i.e., a pre-technology curriculum) to serve under-prepared students desiring to enter a number of technology-related programs (not only Engineering Technology but Industrial and Engineering Technology, Applied Process Technologies, Industrial Chemical Technology, Information Technology and other related Technology Programs); to adapt the SC ATE Engineering Technology Freshman Year Core to accommodate the needs of KCTCS Industrial to develop the faculty expertise to design and implement an integrated curriculum at both the portal and freshman levels; and to design and implement an integrated curriculum that will enhance students basic skills in mathematics, communications, English, and physics, utilizing applied methodology in a technology environment. Key business and industry partners across the state are collaborating with faculty in curriculum design, and business and industry advisory committees at each pilot college are reviewing proposed curricula. All curricula are encompassing the skills identified in the SCANS report. The Kentucky model is adapting modules developed by the SC ATE and is using South Carolina s practices to create additional modules to meet the needs of the Commonwealth. As a result of this project, it is envisioned that a more diverse population will enroll in technology courses, remediation time will be shortened, students will be better prepared to enter the workforce and or baccalaureate programs, and participants (faculty and students) will connect the required general education components more directly to the technological field in which they are teaching and learning doc10140 none Dan C. Marinescu Purdue University CISE NGS: Middleware for Internet Workflow Management Middleware is a software layer that allows applications to use the resources provided by a grid. The middleware is expected to perform functions provided by the operating system of a computer, e.g. resources management and process management. In case of a tightly coupled system, resource and process management is under the control of a scheduler, which manages and controls the allocation of all system resources to process competing for them. The scheduler has accurate information about the System State. The situation is quite different on a grid where resources are managed by autonomous entities and the scale of the system prevents any single entity from knowing accurately the state of the entire system. This proposal is concerned with middleware for process or workflow management doc10141 none This three-year project is developing a curriculum on Distributed Energy Systems. The five industry-based course curriculums are becoming elective course options for community college degree and certificate programs, as well as being integrated into apprenticeship worker training. Accompanying the five industry-based course curriculums are supporting educational materials. Four, 2-member teams composed of Brevard Community College (BCC) and Florida Solar Energy Center (FSEC) faculty are developing the curriculum and other educational materials. The public and professional community now have opportunities to learn about the economic, environmental, and workforce benefits of distributed energy through seminars and printed materials doc10142 none This award is helping to meet the growing demand for biotechnology technicians in Colorado s Front Range corridor by establishing close collaborations among K-12 school systems, two-year and four-year educational institutions, and the business community. The project is utilizing previous interactions with BioLink and BioTechEd, NSF-funded Advanced Technology Education efforts in the biotechnology area. High school teachers from throughout the region are being recruited and supported to develop biotechnology curriculum for their particular secondary system, they are attending the Biotechnology Institute established at the Community College of Aurora, and they are introducing into their curriculum biotechnology topics such as the handling and manipulation of DNA and proteins in a manner consistent with research and industry protocols. Once fully implemented, the project is impacting or more high school students over three years as the 75 teachers trained in the Institute implement biotechnology activities, modules, and courses in their high schools. Final outcomes from the award will include: - an active, ongoing Advisory Committee to provide guidance on project activities and links to needed resources. - a total of 75 area high school teachers trained at the introductory and advanced levels in biotechnology topics. - weekend laboratory sessions for high school teachers. - on-line learning opportunities and resources to discuss and share implementation of Institute training in the classrooms, the opportunity to attend industry-related events, and assistance with guest speakers and field trips. - teachers with ready-to-use biotechnology equipment and supplies from a college-maintained lending library. - model curricula that additional teachers may use as they develop biotechnology courses appropriate to their district science standards. - information for students and their parents about career opportunities in biotechnology with special efforts to reach those from ethnically diverse neighborhoods and schools doc10143 none The Puget Sound Consortium for Manufacturing Excellence (CME) is a regional education-industry partnership that is improving the connection between manufacturing technology education, student career goals, and private sector demand. The CME is working with its education partners to modularize manufacturing technology curriculum based on existing, regionally focused industry skill standards. Instruction is seamlessly combined for customization of instruction to students and incumbent workers, and leads to a degree. CME partner colleges and tech-prep programs are using CME modules in their manufacturing and engineering programs. Professional development activities are providing workshops for faculty on the design and use of the modularized curriculum system. The CME is also assisting high schools and colleges in promoting manufacturing career opportunities to students. Through its curriculum and professional development services, the CME is: -- adapting and organizing already-developed instructional modules to form a manufacturing technology curriculum that is responsive to regional industry skill requirements; -- developing a Teaching Factory model that develops skills by having students apply classroom instruction to real problems in a work-like setting; -- training over 30 high school instructors, college faculty, and other instructors on how to utilize the modular curriculum system; and -- improving curriculum articulation between high schools, community and technical colleges, and 4-year colleges and universities. The long-term impact of the CME will be more and better skilled manufacturing technology graduates, improved technology instruction, articulation of the curriculum and enhanced coordination among secondary and post-secondary institutions doc10144 none The mission of the Applied Information Technology Education (AITE) project is (1) to equip and develop students who can function effectively in an information technology (IT) workplace, who can adapt to changes in emerging technologies, and who will become innovators in their respective disciplines, and (2) to prepare educators with the understanding of an IT economy and with the knowledge and skills to teach and develop the current and future workforce. This mission evolves from Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College s vision to develop a Gulf South workforce that can perform successfully in a knowledge- and idea-based economy, embedded with technology. The project is accomplishing its mission by increasing the supply of IT workers--female IT workers, in particular--in the Gulf South region and developing programs in database administration and Web design and administration. Activities and methodologies to support the goals and objectives involve faculty training and certification; curriculum adaptation; developing a career awareness and exploration model, called The IT Pathway, focusing on females and other under-represented groups; communicating The IT Pathway to high school and college faculty and students; and disseminating the project s findings and products. The curricula developed in the project are geared to nationally recognized certifications and industry standards doc10145 none This award is providing a series of hands-on professional and curriculum development workshops and follow-up activities for HS and TYC physics teachers who serve students involved in technology-based or technician careers. The workshops are focussed toward the effective integration and implementation of technology and the use of active learning strategies in areas such as microcomputer-based laboratories, digital video, computer simulations, conceptual tasks and tools, web and Internet activities, group work, assessment of learning, and physics-related technician education. Activities are linking participants to previous ATE projects and industry. Outcomes of the workshops include: - an enhanced understanding and appreciation of the needs of the technician workforce; - educational programs that deal with technician, workforce issues; - the opportunity to identify and evaluate the appropriateness of the workshop ideas toward meeting the needs of these students and technician programs; - knowledge of and experience with recent advances and applications of computer technology, ATE supported centers and projects, assessment in student learning, and relevant curriculum materials and activities; - the background and incentive to develop, adapt, adopt, and implement workshop activities and materials into additional courses and programs; and - a method to build bridges and to develop working relationships between TYC and HS physics and technology programs, and local or regional businesses and industries doc10146 none Findley This award to University of Miami s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences provides instrumentation to improve the shared-use scientific instrumentation available to researchers using the four research ships operated by University of Miami and the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution. These four vessels, R Vs Seward Johnson, Seward Johnson II, Edwin Link and Walton Smith, are all operated as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The specific instrumentation supported by this award includes a variety of environmental sensors, replacement shipboard computers and related tape and disk storage, and water sampling bottles. These improvements will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists using the ships in their research during and future years doc10147 none The goal of this project will be to analyze the effect of the mixing state of aerosols on global and regional direct forcing and temperatures. This effort involves the development of global-scale baseline aerosol model simulations and comparison with actual observations and climatologies. The project will investigate the global- and regional-scale mixing state of aerosol-particles and the resulting direct radiative forcing and feedbacks of aerosol-particles to climate. Aerosols to be investigated include (a) fossil-fuel soot and organic matter, (b) biomass burning gases and particles, (c) sulfur dioxide and resulting sulfate doc10148 none The Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC), the largest provider of IT training in Maryland, is collaborating with other organizations to implement an associate degree program in e-commerce and two related certificate programs for Building E-Commerce Solutions for Organizations and Managing E-Commerce Enterprises. Partners include the Maryland State Department of Education, the University of Baltimore s Department of Business and Economic Development, the University of Maryland University College, the Maryland Community College Teleconsortium, the Baltimore County Career and Technology Education Division, the Next Generation Internet Company, Paragon Computer Services, Circadian Management Corporation, Delata Graphics and Communications, Vansant Creations, and the Maryland Online Network. The project builds on course work developed under NSF Award No. , Internet and Multimedia Technology (I MMT): Curriculum, Faculty, and Workforce Development, and also builds on the IT skill standards developed by the NorthWest Center for Emerging Technologies, an ATE Center of Excellence. An important part of this project is the development and validation of skill standards needed to define the specific skill sets, performance indicators, employability skills, and technical knowledge required of technician-level workers in e-commerce in the region. The resulting degree and certificate programs aim to prepare students for entry-level employment, provide opportunities for workers to upgrade and acquire technical skills, and prepare students for further education in articulated four-year programs. Students in the new programs have access to two delivery options for their courses: the Internet and the classroom. Project faculty are obtaining professional development through graduate studies and internships. Workshops are upgrading K-12 teachers skills. An annual professional development conference brings together K-12 and college faculty and industry representatives to address ongoing changes in the field. Finally, the project is employing an Internet-supported process to survey business leaders in e-commerce, in order to access business expertise, maintain the currency of the skill standards information, and regularly update the curriculum. Business and educational partners are supporting the program as advisory board members, in program development, and for internships and cooperative education opportunities for faculty and students doc10149 none This project is (a) providing students the technical background and information they need to choose the dual enrollment option to attend the community college and to receive college credit while still in high school, (b) enabling substantial numbers of high school students to take college courses beyond a prescribed introductory course, (c) preparing students to matriculate to one of the community college s Engineering Technology programs, (d) allowing selected students to enroll in Miami University s two plus two bachelor s degree program being offered by distance on the community college campus, and (e) graduating an estimated 50 students as skilled engineering technologists with associate degrees. The project includes enhancement of the curriculum at the high schools, through the development of new courses and the infusion of SMET content in grades 11-12 coursework. TEAM (Technology, Engineering and Manufacturing) academies are being organized in the high schools with the collaboration of the partners. Ultimately, the project is demonstrating a workable pipeline in which students flow through from the high school, through the community college, into four-year college, into technician careers or engineering careers. Partners include two inner city high schools (Columbus East High and Marion Franklin High) and Miami University doc10150 none James T. Staley James T. Staley of the University of Washington has been awarded a grant to to support 8 U.S. PIs and 8 students postdocs to attend a 2-day public symposium and 1-day workshop entitled Genomics: Beyond the Sequence in Edinburgh, Scotland, 26-27 March, . The event is sponsored by the Systematic and Evolutionary Group of the Society of General Microbiology and the International Committee for Systematic Bacteriology. Participants at the symposium and workshop will discuss, digest and forecast the impact that genomics will have on our understanding of the evolution of prokaryotes and their inter-relationships. It is intended that speakers will draw heavily from data, tools, etc. derived from complete genome sequencing projects and develop a perspective of future developments at the interface of microbial systematics and genomics. Prokaryotic microbes are the oldest, most abundant and most diverse forms of life on earth. They are responsible for maintaining Earth s biogeochemical cycles, sustaining its ecosystems, and regenerating the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, and the soil in which we grow our food. Microorganisms are also at the foundation of the modern revolution in biotechnology. An understanding of the evolutionary patterns and processes of these organisms is essential to all microbiological research, and genomics offers the ultimate tool for resolving their phylogeny, taxonomy and classification. Half of the funds of this award will go to supporting training for students and postdoctoral participants in the symposium and workshop doc10151 none This is a three-year project to adapt an integrated curriculum model, developed by the NSF-funded Mecomtronics program at the New Jersey Center for Advanced Technological Education (NJCATE), to develop an engineering technician curriculum. The four components of the project are Curriculum Development, Faculty Development, Student Outreach and Development, and Dissemination. The faculty development team at the College of Dupage has received mentoring in mecomtronics from the NJCATE. A Virtual Education Network is expected to facilitate rapid modification of modules and projects according to changing industry needs. Outreach includes workshops for 70 high school teachers, seminars for 60 college university educators, and a high school summer camp for 20 students doc10152 none To address the shortage of well-educated, skilled workers in the manufacturing sector, and maintain economic competitiveness in the region, the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC), in cooperation with partners representing industry, education and government, is planning for a Metropolitan Baltimore Center for Manufacturing Education. The Center has as its main thrusts reengineering the CCBC manufacturing programs; expansion of current cooperative arrangements among manufacturing stakeholders; adaptation, adoption or development of curriculum; increasing enrollment capacity; and increasing graduation and placement of technicians into skilled positions within regional manufacturing. To plan for a Metropolitan Baltimore Center for Manufacturing Education, the CCBC is bringing together all shareholders in manufacturing to develop a plan of action building on existing programs and industry need; establishing a management plan for the Center; enhancing collaboration among the partners; identifying deliverables; and developing a plan for evaluation doc10153 none of reproductive life histories of mosses designated as survey and manage species, versus attributes of a control group of ubiquitous species from similar habitats. 2) Field and experimental assessments of dispersal and establishment success of survey and manage species subject to exploitation, versus success of the ubiquitous epiphytic species. 3) Exploration of TEK levels held by local indigenous people that might be specific to the habitat requirements and post-harvest disturbance response of old-growth forest mosses and might offer insights into species biology and conservation doc10154 none This is a three-year project to enhance the preparation of underserved students for employment in the fields of manufacturing communications and information technologies industries. The design to do this is to improve the teaching and learning process in participating institutions by incorporating technology-based curricular materials, preparing faculty in effective teaching practices, and developing work-related technical learning experiences for faculty and students. This initiative is building directly on the existing School to Work Program (STWP) in the area of high technology. . The lead institution is the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) at Aguadilla. Other partners are UPR at Humacao and Bayamon, two 4-year institutions of the UPR system, 26 public high schools currently participating in the STWP, and an array of local high-tech industries. The project is serving 150 faculty members and teachers doc10155 none This project is infusing applied geospatial technology into both the geosciences curricula and into other curricula within the Natural Sciences, Physical Education and Technology Division at Gainesville College (GC), and the College of Arts and Sciences at the State University of West Georgia (UWG). Curricula is being articulated between the two institutions to ensure that available transfer and reverse transfer opportunities work smoothly for students in both institutions. The effort contributes toward articulated Bachelors of Science and Associate of Science degree programs in geographic information science, remote sensing, and global positioning systems at the two institutions. The project has three major elements: (1) University of West Georgia is including a new technology course in their core curriculum for mathematics, science, and technology - such courses are required for all undergraduate students. The course is being modeled after the Geographic Information Science course at Gainesville College. (2) Faculty members (GC science program, UWG geoscience program) are integrating remote sensing into the core course described above. This program is being used in faculty development workshops (Introduction to Geospatial Data Analysis for Research and Classroom Applications) and in undergraduate courses. Faculty from other regional institutions are also participating in these workshops. (3) Faculty from both institutions are working together to ensure course compatibility across the two institutions doc10156 none A consortium of seven community colleges in Texas, lead by the College of the Mainland, along with their local high schools and industries are planning to address the development of a workforce with skills and knowledge in e-business. The necessary skills and competencies for jobs in e-business are assessed using the DACUM process and curricula are developed to provide a common technical core with four exit options - technical support, programming, graphic arts and security. The planning establishes a statewide industry education partnership that possesses a broad grasp of the Internet economy. A partnership memorandum of understanding assures that each derives benefit. Presentations are made to strengthen public awareness and gain support doc10157 none This project is presenting a team of community college students, four-year college students, and technical high school students with a real marine engineering problem to be solved over the course of a one-semester elective laboratory engineering course. The four-year college students are acting at the project engineers; the community college students are acting as a commercial laboratory testing facility; and the high school students are the engineering technicians. The project being presented to the students involves the development of an underwater marking applicator which can be operated by the grappling arm of the submersible vessel ALVIN. When this vessel is on an undersea geophysics mission, there is a need for making markings or attaching tags to rocks of geophysical interest. Participation in a technical project of this nature is providing the students with experiences that enhance their technical knowledge and abilities. Institutions involved in this project are Upper Cape Cod Regional Technical High School, Bristol Community College, and the Massachusetts Maritime Academy in partnership with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution doc10158 none This project is developing rapid prototyping and time-compression techniques in a design for manufacturing program for technicians. Tasks include developing and expanding nine course modules, offering workshops for faculty, providing technical and research experiences for students, and developing laboratory and computer-aided design tools. A unique feature of this project is its application to the entertainment industry, with additional applications in the biomedical biotechnology fields. A strong information technology component includes the sharing of design code and files over the internet between the laboratories at the three institutions. The project is serving community college, university, and high school vocational technical students doc10159 none An ATE Regional Center in Nanofabrication Manufacturing Education is being established to meet the increased demand in Pennsylvania and nationally for associate degree-level workers in the field of nanofabrication, including semiconductor manufacturing. The ATE Regional Center is built upon a unique educational consortium, the Pennsylvania Nanofabrication Manufacturing Technology (NMT) Partnership, and the ATE Regional Center will capitalize on Penn State s state-of-the-art Nanofabrication Facility. The NMT Partnership involves Penn State, Pennsylvania industry, Pennsylvania community colleges, and public school districts throughout the state. Key to the NMT Partnership is the Penn State Nanofabrication Facility, a $23 million investment in class 10 cleanrooms and equipment, and its engineering staff. This Facility is part of NSF s National Nanofabrication Users Network (NNUN). It is shared among Pennsylvania community colleges and secondary schools and with Pennsylvania industry through the Partnership. Initial funding from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for the Partnership has supported facility expansion and has supported resident instruction at the Facility for a small number of students, allowing community colleges across Pennsylvania to offer NMT degrees and certificates. It has also supported NMT workshops for community college and secondary school educators, chip camps for secondary school students, and assistance for Pennsylvania industry in nanotechnology development. The ATE Regional Center is being built on the current NMT program in order to strengthen and institutionalize collaboration among all 15 Pennsylvania community colleges, the 14 comprehensive universities comprising the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PSSHE), secondary schools (including vocational-technical schools), private industry, and the Penn State Nanofabrication Facility. New activities address (1) continued improvement and expanded delivery of resident instruction in NMT at the Facility, (2) creating curricula and strengthening NMT capacity at Pennsylvania s 15 community colleges, (3) strengthening NMT capacity at PSSHE institutions, (4) strengthening professional development of secondary and post-secondary educators and industry personnel in NMT, (5) promoting awareness among secondary and post-secondary school students and educators of NMT career opportunities, and (6) promoting increased participation in NMT educational programs by under-represented groups doc10160 none The investigator studies diophantine properties of points on curves and related questions involving solutions to diophantine equations. A diophantine equation is simply a polynomial equation with integer coefficients. One is generally interested in solutions to these equations that are rational numbers or integers. The investigator uses the p-adic method Chabauty-Coleman to study the number of solutions to Thue equations, which are equations of the form F(x,y) = m, where m is an integer and F is a homogeneous polynomial with integer coefficients and without repeated roots. The investigator has shown that the number of integer solutions (x,y), with x and y coprime, can be bounded in terms of the degree of F under certain hypotheses and is now working on weakening these hypotheses, sharpening his bounds, and extending his methods to attack other similar problems. The investigator also looks at various questions related to Vojta s conjecture for algebraic points on curves, which implies a variety of important results in diophantine number theory, most notably the abc conjecture. In addition, he uses techniques from arithmetic geometry to study class groups of quadratic fields, consequences of the abc conjecture, and curves over finite fields. The investigator studies problems having to do with whole number and rational solutions to polynomial equations in two or more variables. Such problems are among the oldest in the branch of mathematics known as number theory. Indeed, they derive their name diophantine equations from Diophantus of Alexandria, a Greek mathematician who lived in the 2nd century BC. Over the past few years, mathematicians have succeeded at completely solving many diophantine equations that were first examined hundreds of years ago: Andrew Wiles solved the famed Fermat equation (which has the form x to the nth power plus y to the nth power equals z to the nth power , where x,y, and z are positive whole numbers and n is a whole number greater than or equal to 3) that was initially studied by French mathematician Pierre Fermat in the s, and others have solved problems posed by Diophantus himself. Contemporary investigations of diophantine equations have given rise to a host of new questions and conjectures; for example, it has been conjectured that the number of solutions in rational numbers to a polynomial equation in two variables depends only on the degree of the equation. Number theory has proven to be of more than historical and theoretical interest in recent years. It provided the theoretical ideas that led to the development of error-correcting codes employed by compact disc players and has found applications in the areas of cryptography and data encryption, which are important both for national security and for e-commerce doc10161 none This project supports the development of seven new manufacturing degree programs in the Pittsburgh area through a coalition known as PRIME - Partnership for Regional Innovation in Manufacturing Education. These manufacuring programs address twelve core competencies as identified by the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. The coalition includes two-year and four-year institutions and approximately fifty industrial partners. The project consists of the adaptation of exemplary material from other manufacturing programs and the development of twenty modules in engineering materials, manufacturing processes, quality and metrology, computer applications in manufacturing, and programmable logic controllers. An active, collaborative learning approach of exploration, dialog, and application is being incorporated in the modules. Industry-supplied projects for collaborative student teams are being developed, and newly-equipped laboratory instrumentation is networked for cross-institutional use. Web-based conferencing facilitates regional collaborative teaming opportunities doc10162 none This project is facilitating the implementation of GIS and GPS technologies in two-year colleges and high schools in Georgia. Curriculum modules are being developed for high school students, and high school teachers are being provided necessary field equipment, data, and software to implement the modules. The modules are environmentally based and address current regional needs as specified by the Georgia Environmental Protection Division, including source water protection and land use analysis. The modules are based on courses developed through previous grant support to Gainesville College and Phi Theta Kappa entitled Improving Science and Technology Education at Community Colleges. Eight regional high schools are participating in the project. Teams of faculty staff members from each school are working closely with Gainesville College faculty, staff, and students to develop custom GIS GPS applications for their region and to integrate the instructional modules into the science classroom. The modules are being developed at Gainesville College and tested in geology and integrated science courses during the first year. Each teacher team is attending workshops and developing a plan for the integration of GIS GPS into their school curricula during the second year. During the third year, each team is being required to implement their plans and disseminate their results to other teachers and schools. All teams are strongly encouraged to present outcomes at state and national conferences doc10163 none Zaworotko This project aims to use metal-organic clusters that approximate the shape of simple polygons and which can be self-assembled using well-known geometric constraints and appropriate multifunctional ligands, thereby building discrete and infinite structures based upon faceted polyhedra. The goals are to develop protocols for the rational design of a new generation of self-assembled discrete and infinite nanostructures based upon molecular polygons, and to characterize these novel nanostructures in terms of structure, stability, chemical reactivity, and porosity. %%% These nanostructured materials will have broad impact in a numbeer of applications areas that include sensors, green chemistry and pharmaceuticals. With the University of South Florida being one of the largest urban universities in the U.S., its exceptional ethnic diversity will provide broad educational opportuities, especially in areas of undergraduate education doc10164 none A consortium of four community colleges and their associated high performance computing laboratories are studying the need for technician support for these laboratories. High performance computing is the use of a networked group of computer processors that perform complex computational operations in parallel. In this project, a survey is being developed, distributed, and analyzed to determine the demand for technicians and the skills they need. A national advisory board composed of representatives from industry, academia and government are guiding the project. The colleges involved are University of Hawaii Maui, Wake Technical College, Contra Costa College, and Pellissippi State Technical Community College. The high performance computing partners include Maui High Performance Computing Center, Oak Ridge, Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, and the North Carolina Supercomputing Center doc10165 none Midlands Technical College is adapting and implementing the telecommunications education program developed at Springfield Technical Community College s Northeast Center for Telecommunications Technologies (NCTT). The Departments of Engineering Technologies and Engineering Transfer are adapting the NCTT curriculum to include a pre-telecommunications technologies component to be delivered by secondary teachers to high schools in Richland, Lexington and Fairfield counties. Laboratories are being designed to house the appropriate equipment, and Midlands is ensuring the ongoing operation and continued support for the work. In addition to articulated coursework in telecommunications in local high schools, the project is facilitating the professional growth and development of college and high school instructors as well as recruiting, retaining, graduating, and placing students in good jobs. Partners include Springfield Technical Community College, the Northeast Center for Telecommunications Technologies, the three schools districts, CISCO, the Central Carolina Economic Development Alliance, the SC State Technical College System, and the Central Midlands School-to-Work Consortium doc10166 none The institution is developing a watershed learning environment for their Integrated Natural Resources Technology program s innovative and successful curriculum. The Watershed Research and Assessment Project (WRAP) adds a contextual framework to the existing curriculum by integrating it physically into a small watershed so that students experience the interconnectedness and complexity of an ecosystem. This approach produces multi-disciplinary natural resource technicians with the knowledge, comprehension, and skills to support efforts for solving key environmental issues in the region. An important aspect of the program is the involvement of area high schools and local communities in the learning process. The project enables these groups to participate in collaborative watershed studies. The interdisciplinary faculty include those with extensive technician and technology education, as well as research and natural resources management experience. They are uniquely suited to develop and disseminate the Watershed Research and Assessment Project material and methods to high schools, community colleges and community groups doc10167 none A Beowulf cluster is a low-cost supercomputer based on inexpensive computer nodes networked together. It provides a low-cost parallel processing environment that can be used to enrich curricula in computer science and related fields at the associate s and bachelor s levels. This project is developing a Beowulf-Based Curriculum Enrichment Integrated Laboratory (B-CEIL) for enhancing important concepts and principles in key courses of several degree programs: B.S. in computer science, Associate of Applied Science (A.A.S.) in computer information systems, and Bachelor of Applied Technology (B.A.T.). The central component of the lab is a 24-node Beowulf cluster, built from an existing inventory of 24 Pentium computers and three Alpha workstations, with the addition of complementary equipment to simulate a Public Switched Network (PSN). Two levels of student lab projects are being developed in the B-CEIL environment. The first level covers topics such as computer interfacing, networking, clustering, task scheduling and optimization, and benchmarking. The second level focuses on enhancing students understanding of real-world PSN-based networking and computationally intensive fields such as artificial neural networks, image compression, image analysis, numerical analysis, and distributed databases. The student lab projects are applicable to a number of courses in the university s B.S., A.A.S., and B.A.T. programs, including Networking, Systems Programming and Concurrent Processes, Computer Organization, Operating Systems, Database Management Systems, Principles of Programming Languages, Numerical Methods, Image Processing, and PC Hardware doc10168 none This project is developing enrichment materials and methods that use the power of Web-based tools to enhance students preparation in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology via a new hands-on virtual learning environment for information technology (IT) networking education. Online features are supporting teachers in leading IT networking courses and supporting students in their learning. The goal is for innovative and scale-up applications of new, low-cost technologies, such as console port Telnet session sharing, to strengthen network training in a sample of community colleges and secondary systems. Network equipment configuration activities rich with student inquiry assignments are accessible through an online teacher and student support Web site. Support to teachers and students in the form of mentoring and moderated discussion is available. Innovative software is making possible remote classroom sharing of multi-vendor network routing and switching equipment hosted on the Internet. Flexible curriculum activities and pedagogical guidance are enabling real-time instructor-led mentoring in the virtual classroom and virtual laboratory environment. Students are benefiting by having multi-vendor access experiences via remote connections, a typical real world professional work mode. The pairing of realistic case problem curricula with Internet classroom delivery tools is saving money for school systems while providing the most realistic educational settings and scenarios. The reduction in laboratory equipment costs is encouraging networking program start-ups at resource-limited schools doc10169 none The College of Technology (COT) is developing courses in two ATE concentrations - Telecommunications and Manufacturing. Each ATE concentration consists of four elective courses, allowing students to enroll in all the concentration s elective courses during the regular course of study. This NSF ATE project enables the COT to develop and refine four courses in information technology and polymers and composites. Both of these ATE elective sequences are being co-developed with strong business and industry partners. The COT is also designing and testing distance learning strategies for these newly developed elective courses. Teacher and faculty enhancement workshops are being offered to high school math, science and technology teachers and to two-year and four-year ATE faculty. These professional development opportunities illustrate new teaching and learning approaches related to the specific industry-based ATE topics. In addition, technical experiences in industry are available for COT faculty, four-year ATE post-secondary faculty and high school technology teachers. The Connecticut Community College System, the COT, and the Connecticut Business and Industry Association cooperate to offer these technical experiences doc10170 none E-Portal to Information Technology and Careers (E-Portal to IT) provides on-line dissemination of IT curricula and educational materials, best practices, career and certification information, and professional advancement opportunities. The portal, developed and maintained by the Northwest Center for Emerging Technologies (NWCET), aggregates content, brings together a community of interest in IT education solutions and provides them with adaptive e-tools necessary to efficiently reach and organize information. The Business Connector increases and enhances connections to practices and models for working with community colleges and other educators to develop IT educational programs. Also posted are internship and employment opportunities. The Development Finder provides educators and business-education partnerships links to smart IT Skill standards, online access to curricula and courseware based on the standards, professional development opportunities, implementation guides and resources developed by NWCET and other ATE projects. The IT Program Finder and Skills Locator links jobs to required skills, educational programs and certification in ways meaningful to students and re-careering adults. The portal expands linkages with professional organizations and business and industry leaders to ensure ATE presence in policy making and implementation doc10171 none Mazumdar This grant, jointly funded by the Materials Theory Program in DMR and the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program in CHE, supports theoretical and computational research on the fundamental science and device physics of p-conjugated polymers. The research has three foci: (1) The PI aims to develop a complete theory of excited state absorption in photoluminescent p-conjugated polymers like poly(para-phenylenvinylene) (PPV) and poly(paraphenylene) (PPP), and of acene molecular crystals. This will involve understanding the nature of two-photon states seen in ultrafast spectroscopy and their relaxation mechanisms. (2) A goal of the work is to develop a conceptual framework for designing photoluminescent p-conjugated polymers that emit in the infrared. Identification of real materials that have small optical gaps, but nevertheless, posses the excited state ordering conducive to photoluminescence is planned. (3) The PI plans to develop a general theoretical technique for calculating the relative cross-sections of competing charge-transfer reactions between molecular components of organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) and photovoltaic devices. The aim is to reach a quantitative theory of the yields of singlet verses triplet excitations in OLEDs and to understand the material dependence of the efficiencies of photoinduced charge transfer processes. To describe the electronic states in these materials, the PI will begin from the Pariser-Parr-Pople p-electron Hamiltonian for oligomers and molecular systems and perform calculations using the multiple-reference doubles configuration interaction (MRDCI) and a diagrammatic exciton basis valance bond method developed by the PI. The MRDCI allows proper truncation of basis states, while the exciton basis gives pictorial descriptions of correlated eigenstates, which in turn lead to mechanistic descriptions of the photophysics. Calculations of the intermolecular or interchain charge transfer reactions that occur in OLEDs and photovoltaic processes will be performed within a time-dependent Schr Mazumdar This grant, jointly funded by the Materials Theory Program in DMR and the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program in CHE, supports theoretical and computational research on the fundamental science and device physics of pi-conjugated polymers. The research has three foci: (1) The PI aims to develop a complete theory of excited state absorption in photoluminescent pi-conjugated polymers like poly(para-phenylenvinylene) (PPV) and poly(paraphenylene) (PPP), and of acene molecular crystals. This will involve understanding the nature of two-photon states seen in ultrafast spectroscopy and their relaxation mechanisms. (2) A goal of the work is to develop a conceptual framework for designing photoluminescent pi-conjugated polymers that emit in the infrared. Identification of real materials that have small optical gaps, but nevertheless, posses the excited state ordering conducive to photoluminescence is planned. (3) The PI plans to develop a general theoretical technique for calculating the relative cross-sections of competing charge-transfer reactions between molecular components of organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) and photovoltaic devices. The aim is to reach a quantitative theory of the yields of singlet verses triplet excitations in OLEDs and to understand the material dependence of the efficiencies of photoinduced charge transfer processes. To describe the electronic states in these materials, the PI will begin from the Pariser-Parr-Pople pi-electron Hamiltonian for oligomers and molecular systems and perform calculations using the multiple-reference doubles configuration interaction (MRDCI) and a diagrammatic exciton basis valance bond method developed by the PI. The MRDCI allows proper truncation of basis states, while the exciton basis gives pictorial descriptions of correlated eigenstates, which in turn lead to mechanistic descriptions of the photophysics. Calculations of the intermolecular or interchain charge transfer reactions that occur in OLEDs and photovoltaic processes will be performed within a time-dependent Schrodinger formulation that allows the monitoring of relative yields of competing charge transfer interactions. %%% This grant, jointly funded by the Materials Theory Program in DMR and the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program in CHE, supports theoretical and computational research on the fundamental chemical, photophysics, and device physics of pi-conjugated polymers. The PI will study the fundamental physical processes involved in, or that interfere with, the absorption and emission of light in pi-conjugated polymers. Quantum chemical techniques together with methods developed by the PI will be used to perform quantitative calculations that include the effects of electronic correlations. The work will contribute to the search for novel photoluminescent materials that are candidates for use in infrared lasers and research on the OLEDs is expected to predict dependencies of electroluminescence efficiency on materials properties. This project will provide a graduate level and higher learning environment for training in the chemistry, physics, and optics of pi-conjugated polymers. dinger formulation that allows the monitoring of relative yields of competing charge transfer interactions. %%% This grant, jointly funded by the Materials Theory Program in DMR and the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program in CHE, supports theoretical and computational research on the fundamental chemical, photophysics, and device physics of p-conjugated polymers. The PI will study the fundamental physical processes involved in, or that interfere with, the absorption and emission of light in p-conjugated polymers. Quantum chemical techniques together with methods developed by the PI will be used to perform quantitative calculations that include the effects of electronic correlations. The work will contribute to the search for novel photoluminescent materials that are candidates for use in infrared lasers and research on the OLEDs is expected to predict dependencies of electroluminescence efficiency on materials properties. This project will provide a graduate level and higher learning environment for training in the chemistry, physics, and optics of p-conjugated polymers doc10172 none CAMP Inc., in partnership with the College of Education and the Advanced Manufacturing Center at Cleveland State University, Cuyahoga Community College, Lorain Community College, and Lakeland Community College is developing a plan for establishing a Regional Center for Manufacturing Education. Building on the strengths of existing programs and relationships, the project is conducting a series of activities aimed at developing new training and education programs and curricula that incorporate the use of information technology in modern manufacturing processes. As information technology (IT) has become critical to the quality and means of production, there is a growing demand for manufacturing workers with a thorough knowledge of IT .The introduction onto the factory floor of networked computers has dramatically changed the world of manufacturing. IT is a major factor in production control systems that may be monitored from remote stations; IT is at the heart of product tracking, monitoring quality control, ergonomic feedback systems, and in getting the final product to the customer on time. The proliferation of computers and the impact of IT in the factory demands rethinking the preparation of SMET educators and future technicians. In the planning process, the partners are: 1. Evaluating existing IT curriculum and manufacturing technology curriculum to determine where linkages need to be created; 2. Identifying courses that would be ideal for delivery in an on-line or distance learning environment; and 3. Brainstorming teacher and faculty projects to test and evaluate new curricula doc10173 none This project is establishing a collaboration, called Project Sun, among Brevard Community College (BCC), the Florida Solar Energy Center, Brevard Public Schools, the University of Central Florida, and the Astronauts Memorial Foundation. It increases the number and diversity of prospective K-12 teachers at BCC by providing opportunities to improve technological literacy, strengthen science and mathematics preparation, transfer seamlessly to a four-year program, and connect with business and industry. The objectives of the project are to: (a) improve the technological literacy of 150 pre- and in-service teachers by providing them an opportunity to learn technology applications in a hands-on workshop called the Sun Academy. (b) increase the knowledge of these pre- and in-service teachers about the use of workplace technologies in the classroom through follow-up learning opportunities during the academic year. (c) increase by 10% the number of prospective K-12 teacher enrolling in the community college while also increasing diversity. (d) facilitate a smooth and seamless transition for community college students to four-year teacher preparation programs through articulation partnerships. During the academic year, participants work in elementary school classrooms, evaluating how students learn from Solar Matters, an online solar energy curriculum unit, and the Sun Kids Website. An Inquiry Group is forming an online discussion group, developing mentoring relationships, posting lessons and observations to the Website, and meeting annually to review the effectiveness of student learning. Participants also visit the Florida Solar Energy Center and the University of Central Florida Instructional Technology Resource Center doc10174 none This project is a collaboration between Kingsborough Community College and Brooklyn College to strengthen the science skills of future K-12 teachers. An integrated three-course sequence at Kingsborough Community College features an education course with a fieldwork component, an independent study course, and a revised Biology course. These courses are engaging preservice teachers in inquiry-based science projects with a constructivist approach. The students participate in field work at informal science institutions and serve as docents working with children under the supervision of a science educator. Kingsborough Community College and Brooklyn College faculty are collaborating in the development of web-enhanced courses and virtual components of science and education courses. An on-line advisement system for transfer students is specifically designed to facilitate the transition of prospective teachers into the teacher preparation program Brooklyn College. The project includes early mentoring by peer tutors and K-12 teachers. The overall goal of Crossing Boundaries is to expand the pool of qualified teachers and to better prepare these teachers to introduce their own students to science and mathematics doc10175 none Westark College fosters the development of work relevant curricula and instructional materials in information technology (IT) that are competency based and integrate general education throughout. The curricula in essential IT clusters, based on various standards documents, consist of building blocks that provide graduates with meaningful skills tied to industry established competencies, including third-party certificates at credible exit points. The instructional delivery system supports both traditional on campus students and place bound students and employees in the workplace. The curricula of the Center articulate with existing high school and tech prep programs and also with four-year programs to shorten the time to employment. The Center provides faculty development opportunities doc10176 none This project is focussing on professional development of middle school science, mathematics and technology teachers. These middle school teachers are (a) receiving technology training (b) interning with Cleveland State faculty on real world science, mathematics, engineering, and technology projects, (c) attending follow-up content and pedagogy workshops, (d) implementing Middle School ATE professional development materials with their students, and (e) leading a year-long engineering challenge activity. Concurrent with professional development efforts are curriculum development, the focus being to develop or adapt curriculum from prior ATE projects for a middle school audience, and to prepare materials that can be disseminated to institutions that prepare middle school teachers. The project is a collaboration between the Advanced Manufacturing Center (AMC) at Cleveland State University, Cuyahoga Community College, and Lorain Community College. Other partners include the Cleveland Municipal School District (CMSD), and CAMP Inc, a non-profit organization doc10177 none This project focuses on the recruitment and retention of rural and under-represented students into teaching careers in mathematics, science, and technology through a partnership involving Colorado State University and four community colleges: Aims Community College, Morgan Community College, Northeastern Junior College, and Front Range Community College. Preservice preparation competencies required of future teachers are being incorporated into an associate degree program. Future Teacher Mentors on each community college campus advise and mentor community college students as they transition into university programs preparing them to teach mathematics, science, and technology. The project focuses on three outcomes: 1) to attract and retain greater numbers of students into targeted teaching areas to serve rural communities; 2) to attract and retain larger numbers of minority students into teaching in the targeted areas; and 3) to improve the preparation and current teaching of mathematics, science, and technology teachers and preservice providers. Recruitment efforts include Future Teacher Clubs on each campus, scholarships for prospective teachers, and recruitment in high school mathematics, science, and technology classes. An annual needs assessment determines the professional development needs of K-12 and community college faculty and guides yearly conferences and on-line workshops. The project builds on the course reform efforts of the Rocky Mountain Teacher Education Collaborative (RMETC doc10178 none California manufacturers cannot fill their demand for qualified, trained technicians in electronics, welding, machining and other manufacturing related fields. Allan Hancock and Cuesta Colleges along with select industrial partners and faculty are joining California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo to address this shortage by developing a Regional Center for Manufacturing Education. This project constitutes the planning phase for the development of this center. The planning phase is helping the participating members to create the strong linkages needed for the success of such a comprehensive undertaking. Planning activities are focused on organizing meetings with industrial partners to identify industry needs, offering a pilot workshop to community college and high school faculty, and reviewing all relevant data to meet industry needs for manufacturing while maintaining educational integrity. Once developed, this center will provide industry driven skill training for high tech jobs, will offer a series of activities to attract students into manufacturing programs, and will give those who wish to pursue a baccalaureate degree a seamless path to a four-year institution doc10179 none This project is building on prior efforts of the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges (AMATYC) in the area of teacher preparation to: (a) elevate awareness among two-year college mathematics faculty of the role two-year colleges play in teacher preparation; (b) identify and promote model programs that use appropriate technology as a foundation piece of the teacher preparation coursework in the first two years of college; (c) broaden the information base by collecting data on the nature of mathematics coursework and the appropriate use of technology at two-year colleges for preservice teacher; (d) strengthen collaborative bonds between two- and four-year colleges and feature successful collaborations; (e) equip two-year college mathematics faculty to strengthen teacher preparation initiatives at their colleges; and (f) disseminate information about effective two-year college strategies in the areas of early field experiences for preservice teachers, the appropriate use of technology, mathematics content for preservice teachers, and recruitment of prospective teachers, particularly minorities and under-represented groups. In particular, the three-year program is holding four regional conferences that highlight the role of two-year colleges in teacher preparation. These conferences where best practices are being disseminated are being attended by teams who prepare action plans for improving preservice education at their own institutions. Two intensive summer institutes are being offered to address issues of content, technology, and pedagogy for prospective teachers. Capstones for the project are the creation of Traveling Workshops in Teacher Preparation and an extensive website of resource materials doc10180 none The Lexington Collaborative for Revitalizing and Improving Middle Mathematics (LCRIMM) brings together Lexington Community College, the University of Kentucky, and Fayette County Public Schools to increase the quantity and quality of middle school mathematics teachers in the Lexington, Kentucky area. The project is addressing a primary barrier to improving middle school students mathematics performance: teachers limited knowledge of the mathematics needed to teach standards-based mathematics curricula. The collaborative group is addressing the knowledge base of middle school mathematics teachers by creating two courses needed in their mathematics preparation: a geometry course and a statistics course. The content of each is being aligned with state and national mathematics standards for preservice education, and with the International Technology Education Association (ITEA) standards for technological literacy. The courses are activity-based and make appropriate use of technology, collaborative activities, and real-world problems. Fayette County Public School teachers are involved in the development and team-teaching of the pilot courses doc10181 none This Research in Undergraduate Institution project at Western Washington University, a renewal of an earlier award, is to synthesize and characterize metal oxide-supported boride and phosphide catalysts to remove sulfur from organic sulfur compounds by hydrodesulfurization. This interdisciplinary project is jointly supported by the Advanced Materials and Processing Program in the Chemistry Division of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate and the Kinetics, Catalysis and Molecular Processes Program in the Division of Chemical Transport Systems of the Engineering Directorate. Professor Bussell and his students will prepare novel catalysts based on borides and phosphides of cobalt, nickel and molybdenum, and they will characterize them to optimize the catalyst synthesis and to determine the relationship between surface chemistries and catalytic properties. The research will introduce undergraduate and masters degree students to state of the art techniques in materials and surface chemistries, and will provide training to them in synthetic methods to prepare novel materials for heterogeneous catalysis. This award will provide fundamental information for the design, synthesis, characterization and application of novel bimetallic systems for hydrodesulfurization by heterogeneous catalysis. Metal oxide based borides and phosphides of nickel, cobalt and molybdenum will be prepared and evaluated for the removal of sulfur from organosulfur compound for potential application in the removal of sulfur from crude oil and coal. In addition, the research program will provide a rich multidisciplinary education and training opportunity to undergraduate and masters degree students in material and surface chemistries doc10182 none This project is designing and implementing courses and curricula to produce well-qualified computer technicians and Web designers who will serve rural northwestern New Mexico--specifically, McKinley County, the Navajo Nation, and Zuni Pueblo. Largely by adapting and implementing resources from other institutions, the project is developing (1) a new certificate program and A.A.S. degree program in computer repair and networking technology and (2) a new certificate program and A.A.S. degree program in Internet technology and Web design. The student audience is community college students at UNM-Gallup and high school students who participate in a dual-enrollment vocational program at UNM-Gallup. The project is also offering several workshops on basic computer maintenance and Web operations for UNM-Gallup faculty and prospective and current high school teachers. Gallup (population 20,000) is located on I-40 in McKinley County, one of the poorest counties in the United States, between the Navajo Nation (population 250,000) and Zuni Pueblo (population 10,000). UNM-Gallup is both a two-year community college and a branch campus located 140 miles from the main UNM campus at Albuquerque, with a full-time enrollment of approximately 1,500 students, most of whom are Native American. Major area employers are local and federal schools, healthcare facilities, and governments. Many Native Americans are self-employed craftspeople. Although local unemployment is high (8.4% in December ), most residents are reluctant to leave the area because of historical and cultural ties to the land and their families. According to a Vocational Needs Assessment that surveyed students, parents, and employers, UNM-Gallup has a pressing need for a program to train technicians to maintain the increasing numbers of computers and networks in the college s service area. Skilled applicants are needed for this growing job market. This project is a response to the problem. It provides local students with the technical education and assistance they need to find local jobs, and it also translates into more Native American students seeking four-year electrical and computer engineering degrees doc10183 none Los Angeles County, the largest urban manufacturing area in the United States, currently has a labor crisis in durable manufacturing that threatens to inhibit the growth of the local economy. At a time when the metal manufacturing industry is experiencing a growing demand for skilled employees, industrial and technical education in the state is in crisis due to lack of qualified instructors and support from districts. Well-educated machinists are critical to the continued success of manufacturing in the region. To address these issues, Los Angeles Trade-Technical College and the Small Manufacturers Association in collaboration with the National Institute for Metalworking Skills are in the planning stages of establishing a Regional Center for Manufacturing Education with the goal of developing a model for the systemic reform of industrial education. Validating skills through nationally accepted standards is at the core of the mission and is facilitating articulation along a career pathway to stimulate the development of a well educated workforce. The ultimate goal is to support the growth of durable manufacturing in the southern California region doc10184 none This collaborative project between a four-year and a two-year institution is developing an Internet-based laboratory curriculum in water science, with a goal of preparing future water science technicians for the increasingly high-technology, interdisciplinary, and often contentious world of water resource management in the 21st century. Through the on-line curriculum, students learn and apply their knowledge and skills using inquiry-based problems derived from real-world and real-time data collected by state-of-the- art water quality monitoring technology. The curriculum is designed as a two-semester lab sequence targeted toward second-year technical students in water resource management, water science, or environmental resource management programs. It consists of six key units that cover the range of knowledge and skills needed by future water science technicians: the knowledge base, experimental design, data collection, data management, data analysis and interpretation, and management policy, outreach and education. Each unit in turn consists of a series of three to eight interactive modules that cover specific topics (e.g. the Data Analysis Unit includes web-based modules on Exploratory Data Analysis, Trend Analysis, Spatial Analysis, and Modeling). The modules are linked through a series of inquiry lessons designed around current water quality management issues and using real-time water quality data. This approach allows community college teachers considerable flexibility in adopting the entire curriculum, or in using the units, modules and inquiry lessons to fit the needs of their particular program. This curriculum serves as either a capstone experience for students completing a technician program, or a gateway for students interested in pursuing water science degrees at four-year institution doc10185 none Black Hills State University (BHSU) and Western Dakota Technical Institute (WDTI) have created a consortium including school districts and industrial partners to develop, deliver, refine and evaluate a network-based distance education model for the delivery of basic electronics curriculum. This project is designed to improve technology instruction, experiences and opportunities for juniors and seniors in six school districts. Key elements of the project include on-site teacher training course content and delivery; the implementation of distance education at participating high schools; professional and technical support for participants provided by faculty and industrial partners; technical experiences for students provided by industrial partners, evaluation of the program by all partners; dissemination about the project at the local, state and national levels; and or credit at BHSU or WDTI for the proposed secondary course work doc10186 none This project is delivering a baccalaureate degree in Information Systems Technology (IST) to associate degree graduates at a distance within the state of Florida. This involves the collaboration of a university, community colleges, and industry. This partnership is developing, implementing, and evaluating a model distance education program that enables students to make a successful transition from an associate degree program to the IST degree Bachelor of Science. The IST option is becoming an integral part of the Engineering Technology at a Distance (ETD) program currently offered. Students from the community colleges may complete these degree programs without having to come to the University of Central Florida (UCF) campus. The initial target group of associate degree students is comprised of graduates of the Southeast Center for Networking and Information Technology Education at Daytona Beach Community College (DBCC) and Seminole Community College (SCC). Also included are Valencia Community College (VCC) students participating in their ATE funded Information Technology System and students at the College University Center at St. Petersburg Junior College. The Information Systems Technology Articulation project is giving these students the final plus 2 years for their bachelor s degree. The objectives of the project include developing Information Systems Technology courses for delivery at a distance and beginning to offer these courses in the - academic year to partners; ensuring that support services for distance learning are in place; and marketing the degree to community colleges and industries within Florida doc10187 none This project is creating a partnership between Sisseton-Wahpeton Community College (SWCC) and Northern State University (NSU) that allows Native American and other area students to receive their bachelor s degrees in elementary and middle school education without having to leave the area. The students receive a paraprofessional degree from SWCC and then work in the classrooms while completing their bachelor s degree. They complete the program for their bachelor s degree while on the reservation. The project is based on a seven-point plan: 1) Development of an articulation agreement with Northern State University whereby NSU delivers most of the third and fourth year level educational classes on the reservation. 2) Creation of a degree that trains papaprofessionals who have expertise in the use of technology as a teaching aid. 3) Training of in-service instructors. 4) Offering support for students in the form of mentoring and securing finances. 5) Raising students mathematics proficiency. 6) Recruitment of students to create a self-sustaining program. 7) Creation of a listserv that gives all tribal colleges easy access to each other doc10188 none The incompressibility of the ionosphere has led to the paradox that it appears as if the ionosphere must sometimes drive the magnetosphere. To understand this problem the mechanism by which information is transferred from one part of the ionosphere to another must be examined. This project will investigate the role of the fast-mode plasma wave and how it propagates in the ionospheric waveguide. The investigation will look at how far fast-mode waves can travel and how they couple to shear-mode Alfeven waves. Strongly coupled waves would imply that the propagation is controlled by the lower altitude ionosphere s properties. This will provide a definitive answer to whether or not the magnetosphere can be driven by the ionosphere doc10189 none In December , the U.S. Department of Education redefined career education by structuring occupational programs into 16 new career clusters. One of these clusters is Information Technology (IT), but the remaining 15 all have IT aspects. The basic premise of this project is that there should be commonality of approach to IT curriculum over the remaining 15 clusters. The project assumes that all technician workers need IT content as part of their preparation, and that content should include a core of knowledge necessary for IT literacy. This project is developing a guiding curriculum framework and associated materials for instructors in schools and two-year colleges to use in addressing the IT aspects in 6 of the clusters. The major objectives are to: a. Develop a common language defining IT applications and to develop a common curricular framework that apply across the clusters; b. Work with community and technical college faculty to develop, pilot and validate a set of resource guidebooks in 6 of the 15 clusters (Manufacturing; Transportation; Distribution and Logistic Services; Health Services; Human Services, Scientific Research, Engineering and Technical Services; and Education and Training Services.) Each guidebook is designed to give practical information for teaching IT applications in a particular cluster, providing instructional models on how to develop scenario-based lessons structured around tasks and problems found in authentic workplace situations, assessment rubrics, and student record-keeping tools. c. Enhance the educational outcomes of the career cluster initiatives by ensuring that the IT applications are integrated into the curriculum developed by each of these clusters. d. Disseminate Resource Guides through each career cluster s own dissemination mechanism and through the national leadership organizations. Partners in this project include Lorain County Community College, Middlesex Community College, MPR Associates, and The National Association of State Directors of Vocational and Technical Education doc10190 none LaGuardia Community College is establishing the Institute for New Media and Applied Technologies in collaboration with new media industries, colleges, high schools, and community leaders. The goals are to bring IT education and skills training to the unique and underserved multi-ethnic residents and business population of Brooklyn and Queens. The project creates a comprehensive, interdisciplinary curriculum that emphasizes experimental learning and industry internships for students and faculty and leads to an A.A.S. degree in New Media. A total of 200 students will be enrolled and no less than 15 faculty members will be trained and participate in externships. The project will also establish skill standards, based on those developed by ACM and the Northwest Center for Emerging Technologies. The project will collaborate with the New York New Media Association, Consolidated Edison of New York, Queens County Overall Economic Development Corporation, and other area businesses and community organizations to form an advisory board and set benchmarks. The Northwest Center for Emerging Technologies also serves as the project evaluator doc10191 none The Center for Nondestructive Evaluation and six community colleges form a dissemination focal point to enhance the education of technical workers in the fields of nondestructive testing nondestructive evaluation (NDT NDE). The project builds upon previous projects that developed simulations in ultrasonic detection. Education for NDT NDE is fragmented, taking place in various technological studies. The focal point provides a website that informs high school and community college faculty and students about the knowledge and skills required for jobs in NDT NDE. This website brings standards, skills, curricula, materials and job information together materials in one place. The materials can be used in related technology programs such as manufacturing, welding, airframe, power plant and chemical processing. The project also provides opportunities for faculty development and student awareness doc10192 none This project is developing a fully interactive three-dimensional model of the fermentation process. The virtual reality biochemical processing plant has three levels of immersion and is targeted to run on a standard personal computer. This model places special emphasis on bioprocess technology workplace preparedness. Indian Hills and its partners - Iowa State University, Iowa BioDevelopment, Southeastern Iowa Accelerated Career Education Biotechnology Consortium, Bio-Link, Madison Area Technical College, Pennsylvania College of Technology, Iowa Equity Resource Center, and Iowa Department of Education are developing and disseminating best practices in biotechnology education and the use of virtual reality for instruction in complex technical fields. The virtual reality bioprocessing plant provides students with an unprecedented opportunity to see how a bioprocessor works from the inside out. In addition, the virtual plant accurately models the controls and response of the real plant so that students can explore cause and effect relationships without costly plant shut-downs or product loss. Prior to this project, only in-plant training was available to technicians entering this field, yet in-plant training is expensive and the student cannot fully examine hazardous, non-profitable or transient conditions. In contrast, 3-D modeling and synthetic environment technology offers an inexpensive and flexible first step to training new operators on the biochemical processing system. Students in the Indian Hills Associate in Applied Science Degree program in Bioprocess Technology are benefiting directly from the virtual reality bioprocessor experience which is integrated into a number of courses. In addition, this technology is being utilized in a variety of settings ranging from high school to university as the technology has applications to a number of fields including biochemistry, engineering, biophysics, microbiology, and computer science. Students utilizing the virtual reality bioprocessor, whether in the personal computer format or in full immersion environment with pincher gloves and goggles, are able to visualize and test the information that is presented, internalizing the lesson. This technology fills a major gap in the academic preparation, in-service training, and continuing education of technicians in the biotechnology industry doc10193 none This project is expanding an NSF-funded, pilot program that is improving aquatic science education at the college and in high schools located in Eastern and Western Alabama. The project is (1) allowing existing educational resources to be used more efficiently; (2) increasing the quality of aquatic science education in high schools; (3) increasing the technical proficiency of secondary school teachers; (4) improving the technical quality and reputation of the college s Aquatic Sciences Program; and (5) increasing recruitment, retention, and placement of students in technical careers in the aquatic sciences, especially the aquaculture industry. These goals are being enhanced by installing recirculating systems in high schools and establishing distance education capability at the college s aquaculture facility. A core group of secondary teachers is participating in technical workshops. Self-sufficiency among teachers and their classes is being accelerated by the establishment of an electronic network. The focus is on the improvement of aquatic science education and career preparation through distance education and locating intern positions for students within the private sector. An additional 18 high schools (bringing the total to 28) are being equipped with a tilapia recirculating system and at least 20 additional secondary teachers are increasing their technical knowledge and teaching capacity. The college is developing a 2-year degree program and a transfer degree program in aquaculture technology. Partners include Auburn University and the University of Alabama in Birmingham doc10194 none The Midwest Center for Information Technology is a consortium of ten community colleges together with four-year colleges, secondary school districts and businesses in Nebraska, Iowa, and North and South Dakota. The Center emphasizes the areas of networking, computer applications, systems integration, application development, telecommunications, and digital media. The goal is to increase the preparedness of the region s information technology (IT) workforce primarily through faculty and teacher professional development, 2+2+2 articulation, innovative education training programs targeting students at various levels including incumbent workers, and dissemination of best practices and proven deliverables. Objectives include increasing by 50% the number of teachers and faculty who hold industry-validated certifications; by 50% the number of students articulating to community college programs; by 50% the number of students completing community college IT programs; and by 25% the number of students articulating successfully to four-year colleges. These activities should lead to a 30% decrease in the number of unfilled IT positions in the region s businesses. The Center programs build upon other programs of the Applied Information Management Institute doc10195 none This project is in direct response to the needs of the emerging biotechnology industry and involves major industrial companies that are developing strong technical capabilities in biotechnology such as AstraZeneca, DuPont, Gore and Hercules. Spanning the market from pharmaceuticals to health care, food, agricultural products, and biomaterials, the Delaware region is becoming a major source in biotechnology. As the biotechnology industry grows and matures, there is an increasing demand for well-trained biotechnicians in both research and manufacturing. Through the development of a Biotechnology Program, this project is enabling AAS degreed technicians to perform many of the same jobs and job tasks previously being done by BS degreed professionals. The partnership with the Delaware Biotechnology Institution (DBI), its research facility and industry network, is serving as an extension of Delaware Tech s laboratories and provides a transition to the real world working environment. DBI provides a facility for faculty and students to learn new skills and applications in the field of biotechnology and assists college faculty and staff in determining short-term training needs of industry workers. This collaboration creates a unique opportunity for college faculty and students to use the latest laboratory and manufacturing equipment in the industry while learning alongside experts in the biotechnology field. A focus on functional genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics and bioimaging makes this program unique among community college biotechnology programs and builds upon the partnership with DBI which specializes in these research areas. This project incorporates adaptations of exemplary educational materials; upgraded laboratory equipment and experiments; student technical internships coordinated through the DBI; and extensive faculty development including attendance at workshops, seminars, and conferences and participation in technical internships coordinated by DBI. The biotechnology program serves a diverse student population including those who wish to graduate as AAS technicians and those who transfer to baccalaureate institutions. A certificate in Biotechnology, based on the program s capstone courses, is offered to individuals with baccalaureate degrees in science who need hands on experience in the biotechnology laboratory. Specialty training courses for technicians employed in the field provide continuing education opportunities to program graduates and others who wish to enhance their skills doc10196 none The Teacher Education Alliance for Math and Science (TEAMS), a partnership of 7 school districts, Lee College, and the University of Houston Clear Lake, is developing and strengthening lower division teacher education curricula in math and science; providing preservice students with opportunities for field experiences and interaction with inservice teachers; and recruiting prospective teachers, particularly from under-represented groups. Outcomes of the project include a new team-taught interdisciplinary course, Physical Science Algebra, a revised Math for Elementary Teachers course, and a new fully articulated associate degree program for prospective elementary teachers. New courses reflect the Texas state standards and new certification requirements for grades 4-8. A series of Saturday Labs taught by community college and university faculty focuses on the understanding and development of math science projects by pairs of preservice and inservice teachers. The preservice inservice teams are designing experiments geared for 4th and 5th grade students and conducting the activities in the partner schools through a Traveling Lab. In addition, prospective teachers are providing classroom assistance to 4th and 5th grade mentor teachers in science and math doc10197 none This project is adapting and implementing the processes developed by the NSF funded ATE Center - Maricopa Advanced Technology Education Center (MATEC). MATEC has developed competency based multimedia modules to educate instructors of semiconductor manufacturing technology programs in specific processes and equipment of the semiconductor industry. Embedded in the MATEC model is a learner focus. This project uses the MATEC model to develop Web based experiential laboratory exercises for students in an Associate of Applied Science in Controls Technology and Manufacturing Technology programs. These simulations or experiential modules replace the traditional laboratory exercises of a site based Manufacturing, Instrumentation or Controls Technology curriculum, and instead do them in a Web environment. The theory components of the curriculum are already commercially available in a digital format and have been satisfactorily tested for past the 5 years at San Juan College. The missing and critical component for effective delivery of the curriculum via distant education is the experiential or hands on laboratory exercise in a format suitable for effective learning in a Web environment. The rapid growth of web-based education and the rapid rate of technology changes in industry and society have created a need for a revised methodology in educational curriculum and delivery. This refocus must facilitate lifelong learning and have a learner driven process. The project is creating 16 virtual laboratory or experiential modules for two different classes over the two-year life of the project. It is developing a distance education competency based experiential model that can be used to implement the curricular objectives of the traditional hands on or laboratory exercises in the virtual world of a web based program doc10198 none Technology companies in the Austin area face a shortage of qualified information technology (IT) workers. To help solve this problem, the Austin Regional Industry Education Systems (ARIES) Alliance is putting in place a competency-based system for IT education at the high school and community college levels. This effort includes (1) the development of IT skill standards for Texas, (2) alignment of existing IT curricula with the skill standards, (3) design and implementation of new curricula based on the skill standards, (4) professional development for teachers, and (5) portable, performance-based assessments and appropriate certifications. The project is tailoring for the state of Texas the industry-validated IT skill standards developed by the NorthWest Center for Emerging Technologies (an ATE Center of Excellence in Bellevue, WA). The project is also adapting and implementing the NorthWest Center s vendor-neutral Introduction to IT course and the center s curricula in eight career concentrations: programming software engineering, network design and administration, enterprise systems analysis and integration, database development and administration, Web development and administration, digital media, technical support, and technical writing. A team of statewide community and technical college faculty are using the new Texas IT skill standards to align the IT curriculum in all Texas community and technical colleges. Articulation between the curricula at the high school and community college levels provides multiple entry and exit points for students doc10199 none This project (Minority Engineering Transfer and Articulation Program - META) is a joint effort by Santa Fe Community College, New Mexico State University, the New Mexico State Highway and Transportation Department, and three civil engineering firms. It supplements the New Mexico Alliance for Minority Participation (AMP). META s goals are to provide a connected and coordinated educational pathway from associate s degree programs in engineering technology to bachelor s degree programs in civil engineering and to create instructional materials that emphasize technology applications in civil engineering. The summer bridge program includes an industry-sponsored design project, a new technology course, guidance workshops and seminars. There are also summer internships, industry sponsored tuition and book scholarships, faculty development seminars and workshops, comprehensive student advising, and multi-level recruitment strategy. It addresses minority issues and updates an outdated Civil Engineering curriculum doc10200 none This project is establishing a comprehensive program in chemical technology over a three-year period. The county where this community college is located is home to a large number of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, and the region faces a shortage of well-qualified chemical technicians, especially those trained in instrumental analytical techniques relevant to those encountered in local industry. Recent funding from NSF s Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) program has enabled purchase of sophisticated, modern instrumentation which forms the foundation upon which the chemical technology program is being built. The new curriculum incorporates the Voluntary Industry Standards (VIS) of the American Chemical Society. With this institution having an ethnic minority enrollment that exceeds 80%, a significant impact on the employment of technicians from under-represented groups is expected doc10201 none This project is developing, implementing, and evaluating a model that uses a non-traditional approach to the recruitment of women and minorities into advanced technical careers, particularly in the information technology (IT) field. The model features not just recruitment, but academic advising, career exploration and support services. Over 800 students are being served by the program. Project objectives are: 1: Introducing and exposing women and minorities in a five county area of Portland to education and employment opportunities in advanced technical fields in which they are under-represented. Key outcomes include increased awareness by women and minorities about advanced technical careers and programs and identification of potential project participants. 2. Facilitating enrollment and success of educationally and or economically disadvantaged women and minorities in advanced technical education programs. Key outcomes include increased enrollment by women and minorities into advanced technical programs; increased retention and improved academic performance in technical programs such as Computer Information Systems, Welding Technology, Advanced Facilities Maintenance, Computer Sciences, Microelectronics, and Engineering Technology; and enhanced educational opportunities in specialized fields. 3: Facilitating school-to-work transitions in Information Technology (IT) and other advanced technical fields. Key outcomes include women and minorities employed in higher paying jobs and a 20% increase in the number of women and minorities who are participating in cooperative education with an industry partner in targeted science and technology fields. 4. Training instructors, tutors, career counselors, and academic advisors in gender and culturally equitable teaching, learning, assessment, and advising practices. Key outcomes include improved instruction, career counseling and academic advising delivered with more equity. 5. Involving IT and other employers in recruitment, retention, and school-to-work transition activities doc10202 none The research supported under this proposal touches cosmology, observational astronomy, aspects of particle physics, plasma physics, high energy astrophysics, black holes and computational physics. Techniques will be developed to best exploit future high precision data on the cosmic microwave background radiation and irregularities in the distribution of galaxies. The evolution of galaxies and some aspects of gamma ray bursts will be studied using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Keck telescopes. Theoretical work will attempt to elucidate the properties and distribution of dark matter, the origin of the excess of matter over antimatter in the Universe, the underlying physics of gamma ray bursts, the source of the highest energy cosmic rays, the process by which large black holes form and accrete matter, and selected issues in particle physics. The work will help pin down the fundamental cosmological parameters such as Einstein s cosmological constant, the curvature of the universe, and the matter content of the universe. Conditions in the Universe in the instant after the Big Bang will be inferred. The mechanism by which the Big Bang developed and then ended will be elucidated and the Inflationary Scenario will be tested. Novel properties of space-time, such as extra dimensions or intrinsically quantum mechanical dimensions whose distances cannot be described by ordinary numbers, are inherent in string theory; it is an important challenge to find ways to discover these hidden features of the Universe, if they are there. Identifying and measuring the dark matter and dark energy, and answering the questions above, are prerequisites to deducing the fundamental theory of nature and to understanding why the Universe is hospitable to life at this or any epoch in its history doc10184 none This collaborative project between a four-year and a two-year institution is developing an Internet-based laboratory curriculum in water science, with a goal of preparing future water science technicians for the increasingly high-technology, interdisciplinary, and often contentious world of water resource management in the 21st century. Through the on-line curriculum, students learn and apply their knowledge and skills using inquiry-based problems derived from real-world and real-time data collected by state-of-the- art water quality monitoring technology. The curriculum is designed as a two-semester lab sequence targeted toward second-year technical students in water resource management, water science, or environmental resource management programs. It consists of six key units that cover the range of knowledge and skills needed by future water science technicians: the knowledge base, experimental design, data collection, data management, data analysis and interpretation, and management policy, outreach and education. Each unit in turn consists of a series of three to eight interactive modules that cover specific topics (e.g. the Data Analysis Unit includes web-based modules on Exploratory Data Analysis, Trend Analysis, Spatial Analysis, and Modeling). The modules are linked through a series of inquiry lessons designed around current water quality management issues and using real-time water quality data. This approach allows community college teachers considerable flexibility in adopting the entire curriculum, or in using the units, modules and inquiry lessons to fit the needs of their particular program. This curriculum serves as either a capstone experience for students completing a technician program, or a gateway for students interested in pursuing water science degrees at four-year institution doc10204 none This project provides for training and faculty professional development to students and faculty at a group of community colleges with large native American populations. It has goals that include increasing the numbers of American Indians in the technological workforce and enhancing the educational opportunities for students on the reservation. Students participate in a recently implemented information technology program at one of the community colleges. They have the opportunity to select courses to achieve different IT hardware certifications and to do internships in the community. The IT courses are offered by distance education, allowing place-bound reservation students the opportunity for a degree. Professional development opportunities for preservice teachers, teachers and college instructors in technological applications are also included, with integration of the technologies into the associated curricula. Summer workshops provide training for teachers who then serve as trainers and mentors for peers. This model of community collaboration and involvement addresses workforce needs in the geographic area and a unique way to increase the participation in IT careers by under-represented groups doc10205 none This project is combining traditional surveying techniques with training in high-technology spatial data acquisition and manipulation in the Geomatics Technology Program. The program provides training in industry-standard applications including GIS, GPS, land information systems, remote sensing and traditional surveying. In this project, the scope and resources in the program are being expanded. The project s five major goals include improving teacher and faculty knowledge in geographic information technologies; developing a local mapping and surveying workforce; enhancing the technical experience for students; improving laboratories; and promoting careers in mapping, surveying, and geographic information technologies. Activities include developing cooperative education and internships, providing more hand-on experiences for students with industry standard equipment, job shadowing for college faculty, summer workshops for high school teachers and college instructors, a fast-track program for industry professionals, and a short video to market Geomatics Technology to high school and non-traditional students doc10206 none The applied research project builds on the IMD funded Where are We? and poses the following research questions: Do students perform significantly better on real-world map tasks after using WAW? What specific misconceptions and weaknesses remain widespread among students after using the materials? How much improvement in student performance on map skills tasks would be expected after using the curriculum? How can teachers tell whether student learning has occurred? What is the relationship between teachers spatial abilities and the likelihood they would use the materials? The project will develop quantitative, reliable field-based assessments of map skills and use them, along with other instruments, with three populations: elementary students using the materials; children over the 7-15 age range who do not use the materials; and preservice elementary teachers. Results from these assessments will be used in a redesign of the materials doc10207 none Yochelson Council of Competitiveness This award will provide partial support for the second National Innovation Summit to be held at the University of California, San Diego, on April 5-6, . The Summit will serve as a forum for over 150 public and private sector leaders to discuss issues pertinent to the nation s economic competitiveness and technological innovation. The core components of the agenda, which highlight NSF s research and education goals, include winning the skills race, sustaining American leadership at the frontiers of discovery and research, and strengthening regional innovation capabilities. In each of these areas, leaders will define strategic challenges, illuminate them with policy research, and develop broadly supported policy recommendations advancing the national interest. Consequently the Summit will raise awareness of the close connection between innovation and competitiveness in the global economy doc10208 none The primary applied research question posed by this project is: What is the impact of inquiry science on student outcomes compared with the impact of other instructional strategies and approaches? The project will: 1) identify studies to be included; 2) review and organize the studies into clusters; 3) code and analyze studies within and across clusters; 4) prepare written reports and articles and 5) disseminate findings to researchers, reformers, educators, parents and the general public doc10209 none Marvel, Kevin American Astronomical Society This award to the American Astronomical Society will be used to provide financial awards to three high school students who present astronomical research projects that are judged to be outstanding at the annual Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF). The American Astronomical Society (AAS) administers the awards on the behalf of all participating institutions: the National Science Foundation, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP), the International Amateur-Professional Photoelectric Photometry (IAPPP), and the American Astronomical Society. The Priscilla and Bart Bok Awards, awarded jointly by the AAS and the ASP, and the Richard D. Lines Special Award in Astronomy, sponsored by the IAPPP, are used by students to further their education and research efforts. Each student s school also receives a modest amount that can be used by their science departments to enhance their science programs. The annual ISEF is the culmination of a series of local, county, regional, state and national science fairs conducted in over 40 countries and involves several million students annually. Originally sponsored by the Westinghouse Corp, which also sponsored the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, these two competitions are now jointly sponsored by the Intel Corporation doc10210 none The northern Bering Sea ampeliscid amphipod bed, covering approximately 40,000 km2, is the most productive benthic community reported. Ampeliscid amphipods are the major prey of gray whales and a significant proportion of the eastern Pacific (California) whale population feeds in the northern Bering Sea. Although the gray whale population has been growing at a rate of 3.29% yr since , there has been over a three-fold increase in whale mortality in the last year. It has been suggested that this increase in mortality may be due to starvation. A 30% decline in amphipod secondary production between - indicated that the whales may have been approaching the carrying capacity of the Bering Sea amphipod community at that time. Today, they may be food limited. In addition to whale predation, declines in amphipod production, abundance and biomass could be due to a decrease in primary production or changes in phytoplankton species composition, resulting in declines of carbon flux to the seabed. In addition, a temperature regime shift due to recent El Nino events or global warming might also impact ampeliscid populations. This effort will reoccupy stations sampled from to , using identical techniques. Specifically, it will measure the abundance, biomass, size composition, species composition and production of the ampeliscid amphipod community in the Chirikov Basin, northern Bering Sea. These measurements will permit documention of changes that may have occurred in the feeding regime of the gray whales between and . Due to their low growth rates and long generation times, the ampeliscid community may be slow to recover from substantial declines in abundance, biomass and production. Given their central role in energy transfer to apex predators, declines in amphipod production, whatever the cause, are likely to alter the ecological community structure in the Chirikov Basin. Such changes may effect not only wildlife and fish resources in the region, but may also negatively impact the native subsistence communities in both Siberia and Alaska doc10211 none Jorgensen, Churchill, Killeen, Telleria. Bolivia is one of the most biologically diverse countries in the world and the Madidi region has the highest level of biodiversity within Bolivia. A collaborative research effort is underway to catalogue and describe the plant and fungal diversity of that region. The survey is designed to measure biodiversity at different levels using complementary methodologies: 1) A general inventory will be based on newly collected specimens in order to produce a comprehensive list of fungi, mosses, and vascular plants. Collections will contribute to phylogenetic and biogeographic research carried out by specialists all over the world using both traditional and DNA sequencing techniques. 2) Permanent study plots will be used to determine plant species richness within specific habitats and to establish a long-term effort to monitor the health of the ecosystems that house that biodiversity. 3) Satellite images will be combined with data on topography, elevation, geology, and climate in a geographic information system (GIS) to create detailed vegetation maps that provide estimates of both habitat and landscape-level biodiversity. The project involves research institutions and conservation organizations from Bolivia, the United States of America, and Spain, as well as the close collaboration of the Bolivian National Park Service. The lead institution in Bolivia is the National Herbarium of Bolivia, which is coordinating with the Missouri Botanical Garden (under the overall supervision of Dr. Jorgensen) and the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid. Also collaborating are the Ecology Institute of La Paz, the Noel Kempff Mercado Natural History Museum of Santa Cruz, Bolivia and the Center for Applied Biodiversity Science of Conservation International. The project involves a large training component for both graduate and undergraduate level students at Bolivian universities. The information produced by the project will be used by the Bolivian National Park Service to support a variety of management initiatives within Madidi National Park and the adjacent Pilon Lajas and Apolobamba Biosphere Reserves doc10212 none This sixth through eighth grade comprehensive, project-based, science curriculum focuses on students acquiring deep understandings of the concepts, principles and habits of mind articulated in national science standards. The curriculum builds upon the experiences of the Center for Learning Technologies in Urban Schools developing the LeTUS modules for Chicago and Detroit Public Schools. The project brings together scientists and science educators from three universities, teachers and administrators from six school districts, curriculum speialists from Project , educational researchers from EDC, and Kendall Hunt publishers. The design principles, arising from research on teaching and learning, include alignment with standards, assessments, contextualization, sustained student inquiry, embedded learning technologies, collaboration, and scaffolds between and within modules. Phase 1 focuses on the development of two units: Structure of Matter and Diversity of Life and Evolution. Learning outcomes are identified, target understanding performances are specified and assessments are designed before the activities are developed. Everday authentic questions that students hold as important provide the basis for projects, contextualize the activities and give coherence to the curriculum. In addition to the student materials and teacher guides, the project develops materials to provide information to administrators and the community to understand and support the implementation of the modules. Issues of language, literacy, culture and diversity are addressed. Professional development materials address teacher attitudes and beliefs while educating the teachers about the new context and pedagogy doc10213 none This project involves studies of tropical cyclogenesis and development along three avenues. Previous work by the PI and his group advanced the understanding of the axisymmetrization for vortices where the mean vortex intensifies at the expense of the small-scale vorticity anomalies through an upscale energy cascade process using a fairly simple model. As the first avenue of investigation, the PI will further explore the validity of the theory using a more realistic three-dimensional cloud-resolving model under various initial conditions. The second avenue is to examine and determine the conditions for the disruptions of the upscale energy cascade. If a barotropic vortex is tilted from its rotation axis, it may or may not return to its upright position (alignment) and disrupt the upscale energy cascade. This work seeks to determine the conditions that enable a finite Rossby number vortex to resist the adverse effects of vertical shear. The third avenue will be the testing of the theory using the airborne Doppler-radar data from a tropical cyclone field experiment done in . This part of the work will be done in collaboration with Drs. Frank Mark and Paul Reasor of HRD and Prof. Lance Bosart of SUNY Albany. The results of this project have the potential to enhance the understanding of tropical cyclogenesis and to improve the prediction of tropical cyclone intensity doc10214 none Two 8 to 10 week modules, one focusing on cells and the other on reproduction and heredity, serve as the basis for the development of a comprehensive, assessment-driven, middle school science curriculum called Science for Today and Tomorrow. A curriculum frramework is developed for Life and Physical Sciences to be taught in Grades 6 and 7 and Earth Science in Grade 8. The research-based materials assist students to develop a working knowledge of a core set of ideas that are fundamental to the discipline and ultimately to see how the concepts span the disciplines. The student materials and the teachers guides are enhanced with classroom-tested assessments and web-based content resources, simulations and tools for gathering and interpreting data. On-line professional development materials allow teachers to gain content knowledge and pedagogical skills. The website also contains an area that provides information for administrators including strategies for supporting teachers and another area for community members to involve them in the students science learning. The project builds upon the lessons learned in previous materials development projects at TERC doc10215 none Levine This award supports theoretical and computational research on pattern formation with applications to physical, chemical, and biological problems. The focus of the research includes pattern nucleation, self-organized flocking states, and stochasticity in interface dynamics. The PI aims to apply a combined numerical and analytical approach to the problem of pattern nucleation. Pattern nucleation refers to the creation of patterns by fluctuation effects in systems exhibiting multistability. The research effort will include applications. Of immediate interest is the spontaneous creation of intracellular calcium waves by stochastic channel openings. Flocking behavior occurs in interacting multiparticle systems away from any simple equilibrium state. Self-organized structures arising from flocking have been found in a wide range of diverse systems from microorganism colonies to human pedestrian traffic. Continuum equations will be devised for these processes with an aim to better understand allowed parameter ranges and instability mechanisms. Results from model calculations will be compared to real-world data obtained in part through collaboration with leading experts in the fields of animal flocking, traffic patterns, and amoeba aggregation. The PI will also continue his studies of how stochasticity influences interface dynamics. Efforts will focus on extending two possibilities, pulse backfiring in excitable systems and noise-induced diffusive instabilities. The PI aims to find an analytic approach and to find necessary and sufficient conditions for the occurrence of these anomalous noise effects. A new effort is planned on an application to noise effects during infection spreading. This award also supports education through research results that are incorporated into a course on pattern formation and through the preparation of a textbook on pattern formation. %%% This award supports theoretical and computational research on the physics of non-equilibrium processes, especially in the emergence of spatial patterns in extended systems. The research will in part, capitalize on tremendous advances in the field over the past decade to make critical and nontrivial predictions regarding the behavior of a wide variety of complex systems. The work will focus on how fluctuations influence the formation of patterns in systems with coexisting dynamical states, on understanding the self-organizing properties of interacting self-propelled particles, and on better characterizing the conditions under which noise-sensitive interfaces occur. Results of this work will provide a foundation for a wide range of specific applications to physical, chemical, and biological systems. The PI will focus on the spontaneous creation of intracellular calcium waves by stochastic channel openings, animal flocking, traffic patterns, amoeba aggregation, and infection spreading. This award also supports education through research results that are incorporated into a course on pattern formation and through the preparation of a textbook on pattern formation doc10216 none Carter Liquid processable solid state semiconductors show promise of dramatically changing future technologies by offering improved and new device functionality at significantly lower energy, environmental and processing costs than traditionally processed semiconductors. In the class of liquid processable materials for optoelectronic applications, polymer-based semiconductors offer some of the highest charge carrier recombination and generation efficiencies combined with advantages of being highly tunable, flexible, light weight and dopable. Nonetheless, significant challenges exist for making high performance polymer-base devices due to difficulties in achieving both efficient charge injection into the polymer and high current densities with long device lifetimes under ambient conditions. Recent work on multilayered and blended polymer-based structures that contain charge-transport layers has been undertaken to overcome these limitations. While this direction is promising, it has also introduced a new challenge, namely how do we understand charge injection, transport, generation and recombination in multilayered heterostructures of polymer-based devices? The objective of this proposal is to address this question through systematic experiments and simulations on multicomponent polymer-based light emitting diodes and photovoltaics. To accomplish this objective, they have brought together an interdisciplinary team of three scientists from academic, industrial and government labs. Sue Carter, a physics professor at the University of California, is an expert in electrical and optical characterization of polymer-based optoelectronic devices. J. Campbell Scott, a Research Staff Member at IBM Almaden Research Center, is an expert in the design, characterization and simulation of organic-based light emitting devices. Finally, David Ginley, a principle scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratories, is an expert in photovoltaic technologies and the synthesis of inorganic semiconducting nanoparticles. This extensive experience, combined with their demonstrated commitment to the education of students and to the advancement of these fields, should enable them to achieve their goal to have significant impact on their understanding of multilayered polymer-based optoelectronic devices, increasing their potential for scientific innovation and technological viability doc10217 none The Design and Manufacturing Simulation Project (DMSP) is supporting systemic reform through education, applied research, curriculum development and reform, professional development, and dissemination. It is also providing a forum for joint industry education collaboration focused on identifying manufacturing and simulation technologies critical to the success of the automotive industry centered in the southeastern Michigan region. Curriculum work is addressing mathematics, science and technology components essential to the lean manufacturing enterprise and its virtual design and manufacturing simulation activities. Expertise is being developed by engaging subject matter experts and by providing workplace experiences for faculty, teachers and students from a variety of diverse backgrounds. The DMSP is utilizing the Wisconsin Instructional Design System (WIDS) to create educational modules designed to enhance existing manufacturing programs and develop modules that focus on industry-validated simulation competencies. DMSP partners include Mott, Macomb, Oakland, and Henry Ford Community Colleges, Central Michigan University, General Motors, Daimler-Chrysler, Delphi Automotive, Detroit Center Tool, Delmia, Mechanical Dynamics, and the Tech Prep consortiums of Genesee, Macomb, Oakland, St. Clair, and Wayne counties. This partnership involves the Design and Manufacturing Alliance (DMA), an established partnership between the four community colleges and several business industry representatives focused on design and manufacturing careers. The DMSP is enhancing existing Design Drafting CAD Associate Degree programs by incorporating and using simulation to validate design scenarios. In addition, the Manufacturing Simulation Technology - Robotics program (NSF ATE # ) is being modified to address the needs of the virtual machining simulation industry. Curriculum deliverables include modules that update existing design and manufacturing degrees for 21st century industry and post-Associate degree or certificate programs that address simulation competencies and software products. The goal is to supply the automotive manufacturing industry with skilled workers capable of embracing advanced design and simulation activities that support more efficient development of automobiles. The DMSP seeks to increase the number of minority and under-represented candidates in the field and is marketing programs and opportunities to schools, businesses, and parent professional groups doc10218 none The workshop will address the themes: design as a social process; social and political issues in design; social issues the design for a hopeful future; instrumental approaches and methods for optimizing designs; and the confluence of ethics and design. The workshop will attract 75-100 engineering design faculty from around the country, and it will foster discussion among these faculty of the issues cited. This Mudd Design Workshop provides a unique opportunity for engineering design faculty to come together to discuss engineering design methods and pedagogy in a forum specifically for that purpose. The workshop successfully fosters innovation in engineering design education and leads the way to the adoption and teaching of better engineering design methods doc10219 none Foundation Science is a comprehensive, articulated curriculum for grades six through ten in which conceptual understandings are built and deepened from year to year. The curriculum in grades six through eight consists of four modules in each of the three major science disciplines. The sequence of modules in each discipline develops concepts in progressively deeper and more complex ways so that modules can be taught by discipline or in an interdisciplinary manner. The ninth and tenth grade modules are developed in Phase One along with the conceptual framework for the entire curriculum. These modules serve as a prototype for all the modules; they address learning goals and formative and summative assessment strategies that inform instruction and measure students achievement for the learning goals. Each module consists of a student book and teachers guide. Educational technology is used for instruction and learning, accessing and sharing information as well as for assessment, professional development and community outreach. Professional development enhances the teachers content knowledge, supports the hands-on, inquiry approach and prepares teachers for using the variety of assessments. Also included are materials to inform the community about the approach of the materials and also to gain administrative support for their implementation. The evaluation includes information about student learning of the learning goals doc10220 none Despite the recent popularity of case-based instruction and other practice-based forms of teacher education, we know little about how such instruction is enacted and what teachers actually learn from participating in courses that utilize such an approach. The goal of Project ASTEROID is to produce empirical evidence of what teachers learn as a result of participating in practice-based teacher education courses. Three primary kinds of data will be collected in this regard: (a) pre- and post-measures of teacher knowledge of mathematics, of pedagogy, and of student learning; (b) continuous measures of teachers developing understanding during the courses; and (c) observational data that focus on teachers classroom practices. We plan to map what teachers learn on to various course experiences and how that learning does or does not transfer to actual classroom teaching. The courses will focus on two areas of the middle school mathematics curriculum that have been problematic for teachers: proportional reasoning and algebra as the study of patterns and functions. In the courses, the everyday work of teaching is the object of on-going investigation and thoughtful inquiry. Through the examination of records of authentic practice -- mathematics tasks selected from innovative curricula, student responses to mathematical tasks, and episodes of classroom instruction -- teachers develop an understanding of mathematics, of mathematics pedagogy, and of students as learners of mathematics As we develop procedures for studying the implementation and impact of the courses, we will systematically document the processes and instruments that we find effective. These will be made available to the field for use in the documentation and evaluation of other teacher education and professional development efforts doc10221 none Optimization is used in everything from the control of spacecraft to optimizing chemical processes. Optimization usually takes place in the presence of equality and inequality constraints. Differential algebraic equations (DAEs) are implicit systems of differential equations. Usually it is also assumed that the Jacobian with respect to the highest derivative is singular. An integer quantity called the index is one measure of how different a DAE is from being an explicit ordinary differential equation. Many problems are most naturally initially modeled as a DAE particularly those that are analyzed and simulated using computer generated mathematical models. DAEs occur in optimization because the original problem is a DAE, because of the activation of constraints, and when partial differential equations are numerically solved using the method of lines. Many problems also involve delays either because delays are inherently present in the process or because of delays in control or feedback loops. Direct transcription methods are a popular approach for the solution of optimal control problems. Recently it has been shown that the usual theory of DAE integrators needs to be substantially modified when DAEs occur during the numerical solution by direct transcription methods of inequality constrained optimal control problems. The primary focus of this proposal is the numerical solution of inequality constrained optimal control problems including those with delays using direct transcription methods. Theory will be developed, the theory will be applied to numerical algorithms and their implementation in production codes, and the algorithms will be applied to a number of applications. The interaction between optimization, delays, direct transcription, numerical discretizations, and state inequality and equality constraints is far from fully understood. This proposal will carefully examine this interaction. In addition, more general DAE simulation algorithms will be developed. Designing controls and process behavior which are optimal in some sense is fundamental to designing efficient and effective processes. The optimization can include minimizing energy consumption, producing a part in minimum time, maximizing part quality or maximizing product production. In general, the availability of robust DAE simulation, analysis, and optimization software will result in more accurate models and predictions of performance, which in turn translates to more efficient processes and their more efficient operation resulting in better performance. The particular theoretical and computational questions to be examined are motivated by, and will be applied to, applications arising at the Boeing Corporation. The specific applications each of which may have delays, are real time control, chemical processes, and aerospace vehicles. However, the results will be publicly distributed and will find use in a variety of software packages and in a number of similar applications that affect a wide range of industries. High performance and efficient use of complex processes is a basic need in modern engineering and science. The training of young scientists in the areas of this project and the establishment of both industrial and international aspects to their research will be a significant contribution of this research project for years to come doc10222 none The applied research project builds on the IMD funded Where are We? and poses the following research questions: Do students perform significantly better on real-world map tasks after using WAW? What specific misconceptions and weaknesses remain widespread among students after using the materials? How much improvement in student performance on map skills tasks would be expected after using the curriculum? How can teachers tell whether student learning has occurred? What is the relationship between teachers spatial abilities and the likelihood they would use the materials? The project will develop quantitative, reliable field-based assessments of map skills and use them, along with other instruments, with three populations: elementary students using the materials; children over the 7-15 age range who do not uses the materials; and preservice elementary teachers. Results from these assessments will be used in a redesign of the materials doc10223 none This project concerns the properties of glasses and their phase transformations. The physical nature of the Intermediate phase (IP) that separates the Floppy phase (FP) from the Rigid Phase (RP) in select chalcogenide glass systems will be examined. These properties will be investigated in four different sets of experiments. First, temperature-dependent Raman scattering studies of Ge-Se, As-Se and Ge-As-Se bearing bulk glasses will be performed over the range from 78K to Tg+200 K to examine the nature of molecular structure changes taking place across Tg in the FP, IP and the RP. Second, the same glass systems, but now synthesized as obliquely deposited thin-films (obliqueness angle in the range from 0 to 80 degrees) will be examined in their virgin and photo-illuminated state in Raman, 119Sn Mossbauer effect and photo-contraction studies. The columns formed in the porous (obliquely) deposited films may represent the elements of medium range structure responsible for the rather unique physical properties of glasses in the IP. Third, pnictide based glass systems, such as As-Se, As-S and As-Ge-Se bearing glasses will be examined in Raman, NQR, EXAFS and 129I Mossbauer spectroscopic studies to elucidate new aspects of molecular structure recently inferred from the discovery of the IP in Modulated Differential Scanning Calorimetry (MDSC) measurements. Lastly, 119Sn Lamb-Mossbauer factors in select glasses will be established as a function of mean coordination number to contrast the local elastic response of glasses in the IP from those in the FP and the RP. Students will participate in this research and will thereby be prepared to enter the scientific technical work force of the 21st Century. This research concerns the properties of glasses and glass systems. Glasses are characterized by progressive cross-linking of a floppy network that will render it rigid at a critical connectivity. This is often realized by systematically changing the chemical composition in a glass system. Experiments on sulfur- and selenium-bearing glasses have shown however that a floppy phase (FP) and a rigid phase (RP) are separated by an intermediate phase (IP). Four different sets of experiments will be performed to establish the physical nature of the IP in select glass systems. Different experimental techniques will be brought to bear on selected glass systems over a range of glass compositions that encompass the three different phases. The experiments will be performed over a wide temperature range that embraces the transitions among the phases. Furthermore, specially fabricated thin films of these glasses will be investigated. These experiments are expected to shed light on the intricacies of glass systems under various conditions of temperature and composition and the results will be of use for the incorporation of new glasses in advanced technological devices. Students will participate in these investigations. They will thereby acquire training in one of the important contemporary areas of condensed matter physics and materials science and will be prepared to enter the scientific technical work force in industry, academe, and the government doc10224 none Despite enormous efforts, high-temperature superconductors have yet to fulfill the vaunted expectations placed in them. There exists neither a good basic understanding of these materials, nor the ability to process them for many potential applications. Progress has been impeded by the complexity of the perovskite-like structure and the important influence of defects. This individual investigator award will fund a project to study the temperature- and pressure-activated defect relaxation processes in both bulk high-Tc materials and their grain boundaries. The knowledge gained will help develop strategies to optimize the superconducting properties, in particular the current carrying capacity, and stabilize them for long-term applications. In addition, by suppressing the relaxation processes in a low-temperature experiment, the intrinsic dependence of Tc on pressure will be determined over a broad range of lattice parameter and carrier concentration, thus allowing a meaningful test of theory and perhaps pointing the way to higher values of Tc. High-pressure experiments on molecular magnets and superconductors are also planned. The research will involve a collaboration with a Russian scientist. Graduate and undergraduate students working on this project will benefit from the exposure to international collaborations as well as learn skills that will prepare them for future scientific careers. %%% High-temperature superconductors have yet to fulfill the vaunted expectations placed in them after their discovery nearly 15 years ago. Only a few specialized applications have reached the marketplace. Progress has been impeded by the complicated structure of these materials and the presence of many kinds of structural defects. Some of these defects can even migrate around at room temperature, thus degrading important properties, such as the current carrying capacity. This individual investigator award will fund a project to study the properties of mobile defects and try to develop a strategy to prevent their migration. This will open the door to further applications and also permit a better understanding of why these materials are superconducting at such high temperatures and perhaps point the way toward superconductivity at much higher temperatures. The research will involve a collaboration with a Russian scientist. Graduate and undergraduate students working on this project will benefit from the exposure to international collaborations as well as learn skills that will prepare them for future scientific careers doc10225 none This research is focused on the investigation of the spin polarization of ferromagnetic metals and the switching of ferromagnetic components. These phenomena, occurring on the nanometer scale, are of crucial importance to magnetoelectronic devices. We propose to use the point-contact Andreev reflection technique, with appropriate analyses, to measure the intrinsic spin polarization of a variety of materials, especially CrO2 and the Heusler alloys, which have been predicted to be 100% spin polarized. We also propose to address key issues in multilayers with exchange bias, particularly the type of antiferromagnetic spin structure present, antiferromagnetic domains, and the switching of exchange-coupled systems using synthetic antiferromagnets. The graduate students involved in the project receive training in cutting-edge technology of careers in academe, industry and government. Magnetoelectronic devices are new devices that manipulate both spin (magnetic dipole moment) and charge of electrons as opposed to only charge of electrons in traditional electronic devises. These new devices depend crucially on the substantial spin polarization of certain ferromagnetic materials (a difference in the number of resident spin-up and spin-down electrons) through which the itinerant electrons flow, and the ability to switch the magnetization of the ferromagnet channels. Example of such devices employing these components include giant magnetoresistance (GMR) read-heads in virtually all computers manufactured today, and magnetic random access memories (MRAM) that one day may be replace the current dynamic random access memory (DRAM) used in current computers. This work is directed at measuring the intrinsic spin polarization of metals (the ferromagnetic channels) using the technique of Andreev reflection, which depends on fundamental properties of superconducting junctions that are employed in the experiments. The other part of this work is to understand how thin magnetic layers, which exist in many magnetoelectronic devices, can be made to switch easily by a small external field, or be designed to resist switching. Students in this program will receive extensive training in physics, new materials, and measuring techniques to enable them to pursue careers in academe, as well as in industrial and government labs doc10226 none Cole This Americas award will support a collaborative effort between Dr. Philip L. Cole, University of Texas at El Paso, Dr. Franz J. Klein, Florida International University, and Dr. Juan Carlos Sanabria, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, with the purpose of completing a series of experiments, which will make use of the unique probe of a beam of linearly-polarized photons. These experiments will measure the polarization observable for reactions involving meson photoproduction. The objective is to improve the understanding of the underlying symmetry of the quark degrees of freedom in the nucleon; the nature of the parity exchange between the incident photon and the target nucleon, and the mechanism of associated strangeness production in electromagnetic reactions. The first phase of the experiments, investigation of the nature of the underlying structure of protons and neutrons, will be performed at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab) in Newport, Virginia, where powerful computers will allow for the rapid acquisition and thorough analysis of the data. This will enable the researchers to measure high-multiplicity events over most of the phase space at high rates with an unprecedented high quality beam of continuous-wave electrons. The collaboration will make possible the search of previously unmeasurable baryon resonances and will shed considerable light on the internal symmetries and dynamics of an assembly of three quarks, further aiding in understanding the nature of the strong force doc10227 none The goal of this project is to advance the state of multi-agent processing for intelligent, adaptive biomedical monitoring systems. Adaptive reasoning will align with an agent s mission and guide agent monitoring of aspects of a target environment--comprised of base models with interjected instrumentation readings. Base models are infused with live interactive data and decision functionality embedded within multiple, autonomous agents, which determine actions, set off alerts and export state. Experimentation will involve exploring the most effective guidance capabilities from genetically programmed agents and adaptive neural networks, in combination with a supportive knowledge base. While the approach has broad application possibilities, it has specific implications for supplemental assistance to medical personnel inundated with information. This project will also provide opportunities for undergraduate students to become actively involved in a growing area of computer science research doc10228 none This project supports the need for tribal communities to have a Native American work force who can help meet their local needs in science education and in the management of their resources. The main objective is to increase the number and quality of community college students who transfer into Bachelor of Science K-12 teaching programs or environmental science programs. Emphasis is being placed upon Tribally Controlled Colleges (TCCs) using environmental science as an educational implementation mechanism. Strategies used to address this objective include development of recruitment programs for each participating TCC, development of recruitment programs, faculty student articulation agreements, transition support for the students to successfully enter an appropriate baccalaureate program, support for student retention, dissemination of program results and program evaluation. The project utilizes a successful student retention program, the Mesa State College New Environmental Student Transition (MSC-NEST), as a model developed to attract, motivate, and retain students. The focus is upon using the Environmental Science and Technology Bachelor of Science degree program as a model articulation partnership program with the participating community colleges. This degree program enables a student to select either a K-12 teaching degree path or an environmental science technology related degree doc10229 none Development of Courses and Recruitment Models for Attracting and Preparing Middle Grade Mathematics Teachers is a three-year project that addresses the needs of middle grade mathematics teachers through the development and delivery of four foundational mathematics courses with accompanying support materials and the development and implementation of an aggressive teacher recruitment model. Funded under the Teacher Enhancement guidelines for Mathematics and Science Courses for Improving Teacher Qualifications, the project s leadership -- a collaborative between mathematics faculty from the College of Arts and Science and mathematics education faculty from the College of Education at the University of Missouri - Columbia -- develops three-credit courses designed to provide middle grade teachers with a strong mathematical foundation and connect the mathematics they are learning with the mathematics they will be teaching. Courses focus on algebraic and geometry structures, data analysis and probability, and the mathematics of change; and employ standards-based middle grade mathematics instructional materials as a springboard to learn mathematics in depth. The courses are designed for teachers choosing a grade-level change (primarily elementary), middle secondary teachers in oversupplied disciplines, individuals seeking career changes for entry into teaching, middle grade mathematics teachers seeking to upgrade their content knowledge, and traditional pre-service middle grade mathematics teachers. The recruited teachers pilot the courses and supplemental materials [companion modules] in Summer Institutes and in semester courses offered at off-campus sites. The program of courses provides a core that leads to certification for teaching middle school mathematics for participants and others throughout Missouri and is informed by the current national recommendations of the CBMS Mathematical Education of Teachers Project, Draft Report. The first year of the project s timeline is devoted to the development of the courses and materials, including a contractual commitment from a professional publisher for the publication and national dissemination of the supplemental materials, and the development of recruitment models for identifying and attracting middle school mathematics teachers. The remaining two years are spent on implementing the recruitment models, field-testing, revision of materials, and dissemination in Missouri and nationally. Project evaluation focuses on participants understanding of the fundamental mathematics concepts within each course, their knowledge of standards-based middle school mathematics instructional materials and how these relate to the mathematical content in the four courses, as well as the effectiveness of the courses on changes in teachers classroom practice doc10230 none The investigators will study electric field and conductance variability in the high latitude ionosphere. The study will be conducted using the Assimilative Mapping of Ionospheric Electrodynamics (AMIE) model for a large number of intervals for which a variety of ground-based and space-based measurements are available. The study addresses three scientific questions: (1) What are the spatial and temporal scales of structures in the electric field in the ionosphere? (2) What are the spatial and temporal scales of structures in the ionospheric conductance? (3) How do the structured electric field and conductance affect the global Joule heating? The variability of electric fields and conductances from the AMIE model will be summarized as a function of magnetic latitude, magnetic local time, and geomagnetic activity. The analysis will provide guidance on the amount of variability being omitted in models that have coarser spatial and temporal scales. It also provides guidance on the geophysical processes that need to be understood before physics-based models can completely capture the variability and its effects. The ultimate objective is a better understanding of the coupling between the thermosphere, ionosphere, and magnetosphere during geomagnetically disturbed conditions doc10231 none The intended two-year pilot Local Systemic Change project seeks to increase scientific understanding and literacy among middle school students in four diverse districts in Missouri. Professional development will be provided by science and science education faculty from the three of Missouri campuses (Columbia, Rolla and St. Louis). A total of 16 teachers, four from each participating district will be selected. Each participant will be offered 5 hours graduate credit each year, tuition waivers, an annual stipend, career ladder credit and STC MS materials. One administrator from each district will also be involved. Summer institute sessions will be supplemented by a web site to enable continuous electronic interaction for teachers to discuss content and pedagogy concerns, compare experiences and engage in collective problem solving. The site will also be used to link participants to other web based information sources such as the Online Journal for Teacher Research (http: www.oise.utoronto.ca). Bi-weekly study sessions (teachers will keep journals to record the experience), site meetings and day-long project meetings will be held. The project will develop and test a sustainable structure of teacher professional development and support to facilitate the implementation of exemplary instructional materials and teaching practices. With the support of the University of Missouri science and science education faculty members, school administrators and middle school science teachers will collaborate to create an inquiry based classroom environment as a step towards broad comprehensive science education reform doc10232 none This four-year program prepares 128 high school chemistry teachers with the content knowledge, instructional and leadership skills and confidence to serve as peer mentors collegial coaches, workshop presenters and agents of change in their schools. These lead teachers will be provided with in-depth chemical knowledge, as well as skills to implement standards-based instruction and assessment. The skills and knowledge to serve as mentor, coaches, presenters and change agents for novice teachers will also be enhanced. The program is composed of a 3-week summer institute each of 2 summers with extensive academic year follow up through electronic networking, on-line mentoring, workshops, newsletters and classroom visits doc10233 none Mili Univ of Texas - Dallas SGER: Using NLP Tools for Requirements Visualization Creating, understanding, and formalizing requirements are major hurdles in system development. Inherent ambiguity in natural language makes requirements documents difficult to interpret and maintain, while formal specification methods are unacceptable to many stakeholders. This project intends to demonstrate the feasibility of using natural language processing (NLP) tools to analyze informal descriptions of software requirements for the purpose of generating semi-formal and formal descriptions, analyzing them, and automatically maintaining interdependencies between textual, graphical, and formal representations. The chosen NLP tool is the Ergo parser of Bralich and Bickerton, one that is capable of full analysis of English grammar and syntax and of engaging in question answer and statement response repartee in real time. The project explores a variety of grammatical and writing styles to establish guidelines for useful documents; analyzes synonymous English styles to establish dependency grids; and creates and integrates interfaces with other program functions doc10234 none The first Conference on Social Cognitive Neuroscience will be held on the UCLA campus in April . This conference will highlight the new but fast growing field of Social Cognitive Neuroscience. Symposia will focus on Social Relations and Theory of Mind, Emotion, Control and Automaticity, Attitudes and Attitude Change, and Stereotyping and Social Perception. Each symposium will consist of research reports using neuroimaging, neuropsychological, or computational modeling methodologies. Additional panel discussions will allow cognitive neuroscientists and social scientists to discuss ways in which important questions from the social sciences can be tested using the methods of cognitive neuroscience. There will also infrastructure talks focusing on developing coherent training programs in social cognitive neuroscience and securing funding for this sort of interdisciplinary research. There will also be a poster session to allow for rapid transmission of other research findings. Informal sessions will allow additional opportunities for researchers to become acquainted and to share their latest research results. The conference will help to inform the new emphasis at NSF on cognitive neuroscience (NSF 01-041 doc10235 none The investigator studies the general affine groups and their related geometry (affine algebraic geometry). These groups are the algebraic automorphisms of affine spaces over a field. Group actions and their associated rings of invariants play a central role in this investigation. Of particular interest are actions of the additive group of the underlying field, or equivalently, locally nilpotent derivations of polynomial rings. These automorphisms are related to several deep problems of algebraic geometry, such as the Jacobian Conjecture, the Nagata Conjecture, the Affine Cancellation Problem, and the Embedding Problem. One of the simplest and most important mathematical functions is a polynomial. A polynomial can be defined using any number of unknowns (variables). The branch of mathematics known as algebraic geometry studies the geometric objects naturally associated with polynomials: a polynomial in 2 variables defines a curve in the plane, a polynomial in 3 variables defines a surface in 3-dimensional space, and so on. These objects can be remarkabley complex, and one wishes to understand their symmetries, their intrinsic properties, how they intersect, etc. While aspects of algebraic geometry were already studied in classical Greece, it is a mainstream field of modern mathematics, both in theory and application. Two areas where recent research has led to fruitful applications are in high-speed computing (solving large polynomial systems) and in cryptography (fast and secure coding schemes doc10236 none Willner The proposed NSF Workshop, scheduled forDec. 4-5, , will examine critical and enabling optical technologies that will be required to meet the needs of the coming bandwidth revolution. The location for the workshop will be the Marriott Key Bridge in Rosslyn, VA. This proposal contains the fruits of a planning meeting by the Steering Committee held on August 8 at the NSF. Specifically, this proposal addresses: (i) a description and rationale for the workshop, (ii) a list of topics and potential speakers to be considered, (iii) an agenda, and (iv) a budget. The NSF Workshop will explore research opportunities in critical enabling technologies, with the goal of assuring continued bandwidth and capacity growth in optical communications and networking systems throughout the next decade. The workshop will address forward-looking, high-impact research, including technologies for all-optical packet switched networking, novel technologies for increasing the optical fiber communications bandwidth beyond 50 THz, and microwave photonics for LANs and very high frequency wireless systems. Potential bottlenecks will be identified and means of overcoming them will be explored with a view towards achieving 50-100 Tb s networks. Moreover, the workshop will also explore how the NSF can play a strategic role in alleviating the critical shortage of trained optical engineers for the workforce. The workshop will bring together experts from academia, industry, and government to discuss these areas and identify critical issues in materials, device, systems, and networking research. The final report prepared by the workshop participants will detail important challenges, both fundamental and technological, that are likely to be at the forefront of this field for many years to come. The workshop is being organized by several NSF directorates, including: ENG, MPS DNM, and CISE ANIR doc811 none This study will conduct a survey along the Easter Salas-y-Gomex Nazca (ESN) trail tobetter characterize and constrain movement of the hotspot over the last 25 to 30 Ma. The survey will involve geochronologic, geochemical, and geophysical study of seamounts and volcanic ridges. Multibeam bathymetric data and backscatter imagery will be used to define topography and structural features at selected localities and identify targets for dredging. Dredged samples will be dated using 40Ar-39Ar technique and their petrological, chemical and Nd-Pb-Sr isotopic chracteristics will be determined. The new data will be combined with re-analyses of existing samples to test Nazca-hotspot motion and mantle flow models and compare them to Pacific-hotspot models doc10238 none Adams This award is a GOALI (Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry) grant supporting research and education in the area of adhesion, lubrication, and wear of aluminum surfaces. This GOALI award involves collaborative research with the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA) and General Motors (GM) and addresses fundamental tribological issues that impact aluminum processing and long-term durability of aluminum parts. Adhesion and wear processes are complex, and can involve many mechanisms. This project focuses on three important mechanisms, namely metal adhesion (when the lubricant and bulk oxide are penetrated), lubricant adhesion (how to maintain the lubricant on the surfaces during high stresses and temperatures), and wear processes (how material is removed, and the factors that control that removal). There are three major goals of the work. 1. Understand the factors that control metal-ceramic adhesion: In previous work, interfaces between aluminum and a model oxide and a model carbide were investigated. Density functional calculations explored many possible interface structures to determine the most favorable one. The PI investigated the electronic structure of these interfaces, using density of states, charge density, bond-order, Mulliken population analysis, and the Electron Localization Function, which, when combined, give a rich understanding of the type of bonding across the interface. The PI will extend this work from model systems to new carbide and nitride interfaces, as those materials are the most promising candidates for wear-resistant coatings. The effect of common alloying elements (Cu, Mg, Mn, Zn, and Si) on adhesion will be investigated because it is known that they have a major effect on adhesion and wear. In support of this work, GM will carry out experimental studies to measure interfacial adhesion energies for direct comparison with these calculations. 2. Investigate how lubricant boundary additives react with and bond to aluminum surfaces: These molecules are added to lubricants so that one end can bind to the surface while the other end is compatible with the lubricant, so that the lubricant is kept on the surface during high stresses. Previous work involved electronic structure investigations of how typical boundary additives (alcohols, carboxylic acids, and esters) react and bond to the surface. A combination of ab-initio molecular dynamics and geometry optimization enabled the determination of optimal reaction paths and typical products for several boundary additive species. This award will extend previous work that focused on additives used for metals processing to investigate additives used for automotive engine lubricants. A similar set of complementary simulations and calculations will be performed to determine optimal reaction pathways and final structures of typical bound species. The PI will also explore how high compressive and shear loads can cause some interfacial lubricants to react with and soften the surface. 3. Investigate the factors that control nanoindentation and wear: In previous work, empirical MD simulations were used to investigate many factors that affect nanoindentation, including temperature, surface orientation, indent load speed, tip geometry, and tip-substrate interactions. Atomic scale deformation mechanisms, including local amorphization melting and dislocation nucleation and motion, were visualized. Similar studies for asperity-asperity shear were also carried out. These calculations were complemented by experimental nanoindentation studies at GM, AFM tip dragging studies at ALCOA, and GM s continuum mechanics finite element modeling of nanoindentation wear. In this award, the PI plans to extend these nanoindentation and asperity-asperity simulations to include the effect of alloying elements (Cu and Mg), for both low concentrations (solid solutions) and high concentrations (precipitate formation), to see how those affect deformation mechanisms. Simulations of AFM tip dragging will be performed and compared with experimental results. The effect of thin native oxides on the surface, and boundary lubricants will also be explored. %%% This award is a GOALI (Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry) grant supporting research and education in the area of adhesion, lubrication, and wear of aluminum surfaces. The research is a collaborative effort involving the University of Arizona, the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA), and General Motors (GM) and addresses fundamental tribological issues that impact aluminum processing and long-term durability of aluminum parts. Adhesive and abrasive wear during bulk aluminum forming limits the stresses that can be applied, damages processing equipment, and impacts surface properties such as image clarity, spot weldability, and lubricant retention. Similarly, improvements in wear and lubrication of aluminum will enable greater use of aluminum in automobile engine applications, allowing weight reduction and increases in fuel efficiency, durability, and performance. The award supports interaction with industry on problems of fundamental and industrial interest using the tools of molecular dynamics simulation and electronic structure tools. The results will be tested at ALOCA and GM laboratories. The award provides an opportunity for graduate students trained in the use of materials simulation methods and electronic structure theory to tackle real-world problems and develop skills useful for industry and academe alike doc10239 none Since , The Evaluation Center at Western Michigan University has been conducting a project for Materials Development, Training and Support Services (MTS) through the support of the Division of Research, Evaluation and Communication. This award has permitted intensive evaluation training of faculty and advanced graduate students through summer institutes. In addition, a number of other training activities as well as support mechanisms for evaluators have been developed, such as training materials, an Evaluators Directory, and checklists for evaluators. Under this award, the work of the Evaluation Center on MTS will continue. Forty-five participants will be trained during the summer, and 18 of these will continue on into internships during the following academic year. Additionally, a model for training evaluators will be developed and tested, including an instrument for testing knowledge and a self-assessment measure. There will also be training materials developed by participants that will be made available to the field. Finally, the web-site developed for evaluators will be enhanced and used more widely doc10240 none The Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) award to Dr. Stephen Creager of Clemson University entitled Ultrasensitive Amperometric Detection of Redox Molecules: Fundamentals and Bioanalytical Applications is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. The goal of the project is the development of an electrochemical amplification strategy which will have superior sensitivity to existing techniques. The amplification strategy is based on redox active molecules used as tags for detecting important biomolecules. Additionally studies will be performed on a new class of monolayer-coated electrodes based on carbon. These surfaces are predicted to have enhanced stability compared to electrodes currently in use. The analytical developments will be complemented by computer modeling and simulation experiments. The final stage of the research will be the application of the technique for specific DNA detection assays. The research is interdisciplinary, challenging and original, and will have potential impact on the fields of physical chemistry, biochemistry, clinical chemistry, electrochemistry and sensor technology. The research shows a true integration of University and Industry efforts. Students will get an outstanding exposure to industrial R&D during the course of the project and a product with significant societal impact could well result doc10241 none This five-year Teacher Enhancement project will prepare experienced science, mathematics and technology teachers to mentor novice teachers. This renewal of the mentor and mentoring of the novice encourages both to stay in the profession. Designated as the Teachers As Mentor program (TAM) for South Texas rural and small school districts, sixty mentors will be prepared and each will mentor three novice science, mathematics and technology teachers for a minimum 137 hours each. The phased mentoring plan has each mentor teacher mentoring one novice teacher the first year, two the second year and three the third year. Mentors are supported by project personnel and their local districts for travel to national meetings to participate in the larger professional learning community of mentor teachers. The novice teachers receive the mentoring support plus educational materials and local district support doc10242 none The focus of this project is on the fabrication and in situ characterization of air sensitive ultra-thin films and thin-film interfaces. The capability to perform these investigations relies on a recently constructed Sample-Handling-In-VAcuum (SHIVA) chamber in which thin-film samples can be reliably connected disconnected at the deposition station (where optical and transport measurements can be made) and then transferred, without exposure to air, to the bottom of a vacuum-compatible cryostat for low temperature (1.3K) and high field (7T) magnetotransport measurements. The rationale for this approach centers on observations that air sensitivity can be a primary impediment to unraveling intrinsic behavior in a variety of systems. The scope of work will be concentrated in four overlapping areas: percolation and the metal-insulating transition, metal C60 bilayers and composites, magnetism in reduced dimensions, and the determination of screening lengths at metal-dielectric interfaces. Specific systems to be studied include Ag films near the percolation threshold (exhibits pure geometric behavior and a negative classical magnetoresistance), magnetic (Ni, Fe, Co, Gd) metal C-60 bilayers and composites (exhibits charge transfer and anomalous positive magnetoresistance), thin disordered magnetic and magnetic semiconductor (e.g., Fe, GdxSi1-x) films, and tunnel junction capacitor structures with magnetic electrodes (exhibits magnetocapacitance due to dependence of screening length on magnetic field). We expect that the SHIVA system will greatly facilitate a comprehensive understanding of novel physical phenomena occurring in air sensitive systems. This research is carried out with students who will acquire training skills that will prepare them for future employment in the scientific technological sector of our economy. As the thickness of a metallic film decreases, its electrical properties become increasingly sensitive to its interface with the underlying substrate and its interface with the ambient environment. For example, many freshly deposited thin films (e.g., Al, Fe) will rapidly oxidize when exposed to air and, if sufficiently thin, will in a short time become totally oxidized. To measure the intrinsic electrical properties of such air-sensitive thin films, it therefore becomes necessary to utilize specialized techniques in which air is prevented from reaching the sample in the period between its fabrication and electrical characterization. The capability to perform these investigations relies on a recently constructed Sample-Handling-In-VAcuum (SHIVA) chamber in which thin-film samples can be reliably connected disconnected at the deposition station (where optical and transport measurements can be made) and then transferred, without exposure to air, to the bottom of a separate vacuum-compatible chamber for electrical measurements at low temperatures and high magnetic fields. Specific systems to be studied include metal films near the conduction threshold, magnetic metal Carbon-60 bilayers and composites, thin disordered magnetic and magnetic semiconductor films, and tunnel junction capacitor structures with magnetic electrodes. We expect that the SHIVA vacuum deposition and characterization system will greatly facilitate a comprehensive understanding of novel physical phenomena occurring in air sensitive systems. Students will participate in this research. They will thereby acquire skills and training in preparation for employment in scientific technological sectors of industry, academe, and government doc10243 none Submitted under the guidelines for Teacher Retention and Renewal, this 49-month project is designed to develop a cadre of teachers, leaders, supervisors and collegiate mathematics educators who will act as change agents responsible for implementing standards-based high school mathematics reform [project summary]. More specifically, the project provides (a) comprehensive professional development for 256 high school teachers in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin so they can effectively implement national goals for standards-based mathematics education through implementation of the Core-Plus instructional materials in their classrooms; (b) leadership development for 16 master teachers who are experienced with Core-Plus; (c) leadership development, structured workshop and classroom observation, and preservice or inservice leadership experience for eight college professors and eight school mathematics curriculum supervisors; and (d) experiences for participants to work with all stakeholders, such as parents and administrators, on behalf of standards-based renewal of school mathematics education. The project s teacher-participants engage in professional development in two cadres, each for two years, for at least six weeks over the life of the project; university college professors and school mathematics supervisors participate for approximately four weeks doc10244 none This project involves a year of planning for the development of an ATE regional center for information technology. It includes forming regional partnerships including the key stakeholders having a vested interest in the economic and workforce development for information technology capacity. It also includes three symposia to raise awareness of the need for academic program reform and professional development for college faculty and K-12 teachers as well as to stimulate regionwide capacity building activities. Research activities identify IT gaps and establish benchmarks for IT development in the region. Finally, a facilities plan for the regional center is developed. All of these activities lay the foundation for the development of a project for a regional center for information technology in the next year doc10245 none ing simulations by extracting and parameterizing critical features serves to facilitate automated evaluation of batch siumlation runs or network monitoring. Support by an SGER is being requested for two reasons. (1) The proposed application of information visualization to the mobile networking domain has not previously been attempted. The proposed work shows great promise to dramatically change improve current approaches to development and simulation-based analysis of adaptive protocols. However, this work requires experimentation with new ideas in emerging research areas (interactive steering and feature characterization), and specific outcomes are not guaranteed. (2) Immediate support is needed since the proposed work is to be conducted in conjucntion with a newly-funded NSF project. It is expected that this will greatly enhance the progress achieved within both projects doc10246 none The temperature and magnetic field dependence of the London penetration depth of a superconductor yields direct information about the underlying quantum state. This individual investigator project will use high resolution penetration depth measurements to explore Andreev bound states, a new quantum phenomena that arises from the unconventional angular momentum state of the charged pairs in high temperature superconductors. Andreev states modify the energy spectrum and significantly influence the electromagnetism of these materials. These states are greatly enhanced in superconductors containing defects of nanometer size produced by heavy ion irradiation. The penetration depth in irradiated samples will be studied in order to explore how high temperature superconductivity changes when nanoscale structures are introduced into a crystal. If fully successful, this project will add a new spectroscopy of the pairing state, a new chapter in the electromagnetic properties of superconductors and a window into the behavior of high temperature superconductivity at the nanoscale. The students and postdoctoral researchers involved in this research will obtain training and experience in modern electronic instrumentation, cryogenics, graphical computer programming, electron microscopy, materials characterization and research at national accelerator facilities. This will provide them with skills useful in many scientific or technological careers. %%% The ability to shield a magnetic field is a property shared by all superconductors. The degree of shielding is determined by a quantity known as the London penetration depth. This individual investigator project will use high resolution measurements of the penetration depth to explore a new class of quantum phenomena called Andreev bound states that arise in high temperature superconductors. Andreev states are unique to these unconventional materials and can provide a new tool with which to understand them. The question of how high temperature superconductivity is modified in devices of nanometer size remains an outstanding problem. Andreev states will be particularly important in this realm and experiments are proposed to understand their role. Superconductors have a potentially huge technological impact, largely by virtue of their unusual electromagnetic properties. This project will lead to a deeper understanding of these properties and if fully successful, to a hybridization of high temperature superconductivity and nanoscience. The project will train students and postdoctoral researchers in modern electronic instrumentation, cryogenics, graphical computer programming, electron microscopy, materials characterization and research at national accelerator facilities. These skills will be important for research in industrial, academic, or government research doc10247 none The proposal provides travel expenses for US researchers to participate in a DELOS workshop on Information Seeking, Searching, and Querying in Digital Libraries to be held in Zurich, Switzerland December 11-12, . DELOS is a major forum for and organizer of digital libraries research and planning activities in Europe. It is funded by the Information Societies Technologies (IST) 5th Framework Programme of the European Commission. The workshop continues the planning and research agenda put forward by the multi-year NSF-EU working groups process jointly sponsored by CISE IIS, SBE INT and the European Union. In the groups final report An International Research Agenda for Digital Libraries , increased levels of collaboration and interaction was seen as critical to building multi-lingual, multi-national digital libraries doc10248 none Under prior grants from the National Science Foundation, Education Development Center (EDC) has developed two year-long courses, called Lenses on Learning: A New Focus on Mathematics and School Leadership, and Lenses on Learning: Classroom Observation and Teacher Supervision, that provide school and district administrators with the opportunity to explore new ideas about mathematics, learning and teaching; to think critically about the nature of mathematics instruction; and to think through the implications of these ideas for how they support teachers and standards-based instruction. Building on previous work, this project ensures the availability of highly qualified Lenses on Learning facilitators on a national scale. Professional associations in mathematics and school administration, state departments of education, state-wide principal s academies, regional consortia for mathematics and science, and large school districts are project partners key to national dissemination efforts. Facilitator Institutes will provide prospective facilitators with the orientation and skills they need to teach either Lenses on Learning course. In the years - , - , and - EDC will offer year-long Facilitators Institutes, each consisting of a two-week residential summer program, on-line support during the following academic year, and two three-day retreats during the academic year. EDC also will offer facilitators an Advanced Institute. Participating organizations and districts are required to teach Lenses on Learning courses in their home sites in the year(s) following their participation in the Institute doc10249 none Submitted under the NSF 00-99 guidelines for Teacher Enhancement: Mathematics and Science Courses for Improving Teacher Qualifications, the primary purpose is to develop six courses for middle-school mathematics teachers during this thirty-nine month project. The targeted geographic area is the Delmarva region in the states of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. There are forty-five middle schools in the area and over 500 middle-school teachers. Six professors will each develop a course for middle school teachers. There are three objectives for the project: 1) to develop six credit-bearing, interconnected graduate courses in mathematics for middle-school teachers to foster a deep understanding of fundamental mathematics; 2) to implement the mathematics in the teachers schools, reflect on their experiences and modify their teaching; 3) to reduce the anxieties which teachers experience due to their insufficient mathematical backgrounds, and thus improve their confidence. The courses will be delivered in an incremental manner doc10250 none The intended two-year LSC Pilot project is a collaborative effort of eleven high poverty districts in the Appalachian region of Kentucky and Tennessee. Working together with universities and science rich institutions serving the area and building on positive results realized through the Appalachian Rural Systemic Initiative (ARSI), the districts have targeted K-6 science as high priority (nine of these districts are working with ARSI). The intended project will prepare a cadre of 22 teachers and 11 administrators at 11 pilot schools (one in each district). Through summer institutes, academic study groups, job-embedded reflective tasks, and online facilitated discussions the teacher leaders strengthen their knowledge and skills in pedagogy, science content, and mentoring. Quality of professional development is assured through the involvement of national consultants, scientist and science educators from the University of Tennessee, Eastern Kentucky University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory doc10251 none This project will produce a series of textbooks to be used in professional development in mathematics for middle school teachers. The subject areas for the textbooks are Algebra, Calculus, Geometry, Number Theory, and Probability and Statistics. The books will emphasize content and pedagogy and will include ancillary materials such as videotapes of some of the professional development classes. The texts will come from the Seminars for Elementary Specialists and Mathematics Educators (SESAME) in the Mathematics Department at the University of Chicago. The writing team includes teachers, mathematics educators and research mathematicians doc10252 none The Escherichia coli gcvTHP operon, coding the glycine cleavage enzyme system, provides one-carbon units for essential cellular methylation reactions. This operon is controlled by gcv -specific (GcvA and GcvR)and global-acting (Lrp, CRP and PurR)transcriptional regulatory proteins that are integrated into a regulatory network that allows the cell to respond to multiple environmental signals to either activate or repress transcription. The gcvB gene, encoding two small non-translated regulatory RNAs, is controlled solely by the GcvA and GcvR proteins. GcvA activates both operons in the presence of glycine, and represses the operons when glycine is limiting. Repression by GcvA requires the negative-acting GcvR protein. It is hypothesized that GcvR interacts directly with GcvA and not with DNA to repress the operons. Generally, repressors must bind to DNA to be functional. It is also hypothesized that a specific surface on GcvA interacts with different subunits of RNA polymerase to activate the gcvTHP operon and the gcvB gene. A combination of genetics, physiology and biochemistry will be used to address two major and interrelated questions to understand this regulatory network. First, what is the molecular mechanism used by the gcv -specific regulatory proteins GcvA and GcvR to control expression of the gcvTHP and gcvB operons? Second, how does a surface on the GcvA protein interact with different regions of RNA polymerase to activate transcription at the gcvTHP promoter versus the gcvB promoter? Since there are many functional and structural similarities between the transcriptional apparatus from both prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms, understanding the mechanisms of bacterial transcription initiation will contribute to our general understanding of gene expression and its regulation doc10253 none Field-aligned currents play an important role in magnetosphere-Ionosphere (M-I) coupling. These currents can act as the source of free energy for a number of kinetic instabilities which lead to plasma energization. The instabilities may also lead to the formation of plasma density cavities or enhancements, and these in turn play a role in the escape of heavy ions from the ionosphere. All of these factors affect plasma transport properties in the M-I system, and the high latitude ionospheric plasma must also respond to both magnetospheric and corotational electric fields. This study will examine the role of kinetic instabilities to M-I coupling and plasma transport processes. A multi-scale model will be used to generate simulations which can be incorporated in other global models, such as those used in space weather research and forecasting doc10254 none This four-year Teacher Enhancement Renewal and Retention project will prepare 180 experienced teachers to be mentors for 360 novice science, mathematics and technology teachers. Over a span of three years each novice teacher will receive a minimum of 150 hours mentoring. The phased mentoring plan has each mentor teacher mentoring one novice teacher the first year, two the second year and three the third year. Mentors are supported by project personnel, their local districts and for travel to professional meetings to participate in the larger professional learning community of mentor teachers. The novice teachers receive the mentoring support plus educational materials and local district support. The project emphasizes a rigorous content-focused professional development (PD) curriculum, dictated in part by hiring practices that employ teachers who have not fully met state licensing standards. PD opportunities will be delivered through summer institutes and statewide conferences. Of the teachers who are supported directly by the project, 180 will serve as district and statewide content mentors for the states of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont doc10255 none The Puerto Rico Resource Center for Science and Engineering (RCSE) and partners are instituting a distance learning program for K-12 science and math teachers. The content strands are the areas of special emphasis that emerged from the Puerto Rico Statewide Systemic Initiative (PRSSI). The workshops and courses are delivered by the University and designed to meet the needs of local teachers in district efforts to implement standards-based mathematics and science instruction. Thirty lead teachers provide local technical and content support for districts that participate in the project. Over five years, K-12 teachers will participate in and take courses through the project. Much of this is done through telecommunications technologies, which are used for delivery, collaboration, access, reflection, inquiry, online discussions and mentoring. The project builds on the SSI which has impacted nearly 50% of the island s schools. It clearly notes the work completed under the SSI and delineates what is left to be done. It is this remaining work that constitutes the core of the project. These efforts are supported by networking being installed throughout the island (T1), a number of earlier grants, and links to New York City (Lehman College). In addition, the project uses a supporting technology called mindtools. These are defined as computer-based tools and learning environments that have been adapted or developed to function as intellectual partners with the learner in order to engage and facilitate critical thinking and higher order learning. In addition to content and methods, the project provides teachers with badly needed training in the use of computer-based technologies. The project also carries out research on the necessary conditions to scale such technologies doc10256 none This EDC project seeks to build a model program for the development and support of middle grades mentor teachers and a replicable implementation strategy. It will prepare 30 experienced teachers to serve as mentors for 60 novice teachers. Project staff will work on content, pedagogy and mentoring skills with the 30 teachers in Massachusetts to improve their skills, knowledge and confidence so they can work effectively with 60 novice science teacers. The goal of the project is to decrease attrition of novice teachers and develop their capacity to teach standards-based science. Key project components include summer institutes on physical, life and eath science; on-site classroom observation and conferencing; monthly study groups and engagement of 45 district administrators doc10257 none This project is a teacher development program that builds on three projects, the Virtual Solar System Project , the Virtual Exploratorium, and the Virtual Gorilla Modeling Project. While featuring modeling enriched inquiry-based learning environments, the project develops and evaluates a model for changing teaching practice as teachers incorporate the extensive use of these technologies. The PIs use a four-phase process to help 90 middle school teachers make the transition. In the first two years of the project, teachers begin their apprenticeship with a one-week intensive workshop on science, pedagogy and technology. This is followed by one or two weeks working in one of three summer camps (at the Georgia Outreach Program or the Zoo). The third phase involves digital video and reflections with a follow up one-day seminar. In the final phase, teachers build their own communities, hold local workshops (1-2 hours) and do outreach presentations. Subcontracts are to the Atlanta Zoo and to EDC (Honey et al) for evaluation, which is quite thorough and consistent with PDET. Included are three doctoral students doc10258 none The goal of the North Carolina Middle Mathematics Project (NCM2) is to improve mathematics education in grades 6-8 across the entire state of North Carolina, supporting teachers in their professional development and providing academic renewal and financial recognition to support their retention. The project will help middle grades mathematics teachers become local and statewide leaders, secure National Board certification and take the crucial first steps toward master s degrees. To carry out the project, nine centers of the University of North Carolina s Mathematics and Science Education Network (MSEN) will combine their efforts and the talents of faculty, school system administrators and talented middle school mathematics teachers. The project will form an NCM2 Leadership Network combining teams from each MSEN regional center including university mathematicians, university mathematics educators, school district administrators and highly qualified middle school mathematics teachers (two teachers from each region). The Leadership Network will assist NCDPI in revision of the North Carolina Standard Course of Study and revision of the state s tests, including End of Grade Tests and the End of Course Test for Algebra I. The NCM2 Leadership Network will also develop three graduate-level courses for middle school mathematics teachers, one each in the content areas of statistics and data analysis, geometry and measurement, and number and algebra. The MSEN centers will provide these courses to teachers statewide. The teachers will use this course work in obtaining National Board Certification in Early Adolescence Mathematics and as the foundation for obtaining master s degrees in middle school mathematics education. National certification and master s degrees are both rewarded in North Carolina with salary supplements doc10259 none Submitted under the guidelines for Teacher Enhancement, Teacher Retention and Renewal, this is a 36-month project to offer a graduate leadership program in middle school mathematics to 100 teacher leaders. The teacher leaders will complete a 36-hour master s degree in mathematics content and pedagogy, and in leadership mentoring. The project will include both residential and on-line components. It is a collaborative effort among Southwest Texas State University, Stephen F. Austin State University, Sam Houston State University, the Texas Statewide Systemic Initiative, the Texas Rural Systemic Initiative, and K-12 partner schools. The project builds upon successful collaborations in pre-service with the intent to provide leaders who can mentor the new inductees. It will combine face-to-face meetings in the summer and weekend immersion during the academic year, along with internet coursework and interactive distance learning doc10260 none This proposal envisions a model partner-based system that provides lead teachers both school-based workshops and a summer institute for science content. The model has three components: a science pedagogy part provided by science education faculty, a science content component provided by active research scientists and a classroom teaching component. The specific goals are to deepen teachers understanding of content, scientific inquiry and pedagogy, including curriculum and assessment strategies; to develop a group of sixty teacher leaders and to provide teachers access to effective applications of educational technology doc10261 none The mission of High Expectations for Learning Middle School Science (HELMSS) Pilot Local Systemic Change (LSC) is to nurture middle level scientific literacy throughout Rhode Island. The project is managed by a partnership of Rhode Island College, East Bay Educational Collaborative and ten partnering districts. The $658,000 project is funded by $200,000 from the National Science Foundation and $458,000 from Rhode Island College and the ten partnering districts. Goals include building a foundation for middle level science systemic change, developing cooperative relationships, building the capacity to implement standards-based curricula to deliver effective professional development and to provide materials support for all middle schools in Rhode Island. HELMSS is conceptualized as a three-phase, six-year project. Phase 1, Initiating, began in . Project personnel assessed teacher and system needs, designed courses, examined science frameworks and existing curricula and supported the piloting of middle school science instructional materials such as FOSS for Middle School and NSRC s Science and Technology Concepts for Middle Schools. Phase 2, Building Capacity, ( - ) is the HELMSS Pilot LSC. The primary work of this phase is to build awareness of middle school science reform, forge new partnerships among other districts in the region, and develop middle school science teachers capacity to lead their peers. Eighteen teachers will participate in three 45-hour science content courses and a seminar focusing on leadership, pedagogy, and curriculum. A principal seminar will enable them to work effectively with teachers on-site to support standards-based teaching and learning. By working closely with K-12 teachers and administrators, higher education faculty will improve middle level teacher preparation programs. Phase 3, Scaling Up, ( - ) is the HELMSS Comprehensive LSC. More than 100 Rhode Island middle level teachers will improve student performance in middle level science. All teachers will implement NSF-funded instructional materials and engage in professional development opportunities created during Phase 2, Building Capacity doc10262 none This project utilizes scientists from the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, and Portland and Oregon State Universities to provide middle and high school science teachers with authentic work in environmental monitoring and forest research at one of the National Forests. The project provides a five-week summer research experience for teachers who will be partnered with field scientists. Five additional days of professional development training are provided during the school year to ensure transfer to the classroom. Teachers begin the program by working on an established project with forest scientists, and then create a short inquiry project of their own to be used with their students during the school year. Novice teachers work with mentor teachers in implementing the research projects. Mentor training is provided during the summer and the school year. This project will educate 105 mentor and 210 novice science teachers over four years. In the third year the project will be extended to a site that will be run by the University of Northern Colorado. Teachers at this new site will be will be recruited from Colorado, Wyoming and Montana doc10263 none The goal of the four-year project is to revitalize and retain grades 3-8 teachers of the physical and space sciences, and in so doing improve the instructional quality and increase the overall quantity of these sciences for students. The collaborative effort, to further teacher retention and renewal nationwide, is managed by the Science Education Department (SED) at Harvard College Observatory and the McAuliffe Challenger Center Learning Center (MCLC) at Framingham State College (FSC). The aim is to build on the pilot SEDNet project, which was an exploratory effort designed to revitalize and retain grades 3-8 teachers of the physical and space sciences, and in so doing improve the instructional quality and increase the overall quantity of these sciences for students. Three person teams from16 Challenger Learning Centers (CLC s) attend two, two-week SEDNet summer institutes in alternate years for in-depth professional development on inquiry science embedded in the physical science concepts that form the basis of the ARIES modules. These team leaders then provide (at their own locale) fee-based implementation workshops, which support teachers using ARIES modules with elementary and middle school students. Built in sustained support for teachers will include CLC-based focus meetings, distance learning opportunities and Web-site support. Over time the SEDNet programming will be self-sustaining. Evaluation includes summative pre post test measures to assess changes in science content knowledge of both team leaders and second-tier teachers and some comparison testing of students in schools doc10264 none The Virtual Molecular Dynamics Laboratory will revise a set of instructional materials for virtual chemistry laboratories and provide professional development on those materials to 336 high school chemistry teachers. A key feature of the materials is the use of molecular dynamics. Students can see in real time, the microscopic behavior and using split-screen software programs can simultaneously see the corresponding macroscopic behavior. By changing the system conditions (e.g., the temperature) the student can begin to understand both the microscopic and macroscopic properties. The teachers professional development will focus on using the simulations in their classes, introducing the use of cooperative learning as a pedagogical approach to teaching chemistry and encouraging the teachers to contribute to their profession by developing new activities, approaches, lessons and assessments using the computer as a simulator doc10265 none The project focuses on Hamiltonian ODEs and PDEs under strong constraining forces. For an given Hamiltonian composed of the kinetic energy and a potential energy, consider particles restricted to a submanifold (independent of time) in the configuration space, i.e. a holonomic constraint. The idealization of the constrained particles motion is governed by a Hamiltonian system defined on the tangent bundle of this submanifold involving geometric notions. In physics, an alternative way to realize the constraint is to consider the system in the original space with an extra strong potential which penalizes the distance to the constraining submanifold. This idea applies to both Hamiltonian ODEs and PDEs. While the convergence of the motions under strong constraining potentials to the limit geometric Hamiltonian motions on finite time intervals has been studied for ODEs, the problem in PDEs is basically untouched. The project focuses on two questions. The first is the convergence of the strongly penalized motions, both on finite and infinite time intervals. The second question is the relation between the dynamics of the strongly penalized motions and their limits, i.e. the structural stability under strong constraining forces. The subjects are stability, periodic motions, homoclinic motions, resonances, etc. The problem can also be viewed as homogenization or elliptic type singular perturbations. The problem of motions of particles restricted to submanifolds in the configuration space appears naturally in both classical mechanics and PDEs. For example, in classical mechanics, whenever a rigid rod is considered as elastic with a large elastic coefficient, the problem falls in this category. Also, it is found, in material science, that some anti-ferromagnetic systems converges to geometric wave equations targeted on the unit 2-dimensional sphere formally. Therefore, it is important to study how the constrained motions converge. Moreover, as the penalized motions have high frequency oscillations, it is even more important to investigate the relation between the asymptotic qualitative behaviors doc10266 none Funded under the guidelines for Pilot Local Systemic Change Projects, this two-year project in the Anoka-Hennepin Independent School District #11 (MN) provides at least 216 hours of professional and leadership development for 17 high school mathematics teacher-leaders who will pilot the Interactive Mathematics Program (IMP) instructional materials. Working with Hamline University and the IMP Midwest Regional Center at the University of Minnesota, the District implements a program of teacher enhancement that includes direct engagement with the IMP materials as well as leadership development. The leadership development is based on Michael Fullan s framework for teacher-leadership that includes not only knowledge of teaching and learning, but also knowledge of collegiality, knowledge of educational contexts, knowledge through continuous learning, knowledge of the change process and moral purpose. In addition, high school administrators and counselors are involved in learning about a standards-based mathematics curriculum, as well as staff development related to beliefs about teaching mathematics and mathematics for all students. Project evaluation includes a student outcome component (comparison of pass fail rates in the first two years of IMP mathematics vs. non-IMP mathematics, as a measure of student retention in mathematics), a mathematics department climate survey in district high schools, and classroom and professional development observations doc10267 none The National Teachers Enhancement Network for Elementary Teachers (NTEN) will electronically provide professional development to elementary teachers on science concepts based upon selected kit-based curricula from FOSS, STC, BSCS Science and Delta Education II. The project will assist elementary teachers in deepening their science content knowledge and improve their ability to incorporate technology into their classes. The development team will consist of MSU and other faculty with NTEN experience (from the Keystone project), K-6 master teachers and instructional technologists. Each module will be of 4-6 weeks duration. Initially, four modules will be pilot tested with 25 teachers. A second pilot for 50 teachers will occur in the second year of the project. NTEN will specifically target teachers of Native American and other minority students. The project will provide an Instructional Technology and Technical Support team to module instructors and participants. This team will provide training in using technology to the instructors and develop an online professional development package for participants. Furthermore, the Support team will provide an electronic listserve and chat room to establish a distance learning community for NTEN participants. As further support, teachers will be encouraged to participate in school teams doc10268 none Over a three-year period, the Mobile Elementary Mathematics Initiative - Phase II (MEMI-Phase II) develops the Academy for Excellence in Mathematics Education, K-6 and prepares its members to lead and sustain elementary mathematics reform in the 66,000-student Mobile [AL] County Public School System (MCPSS). The Academy will include a critical mass of leaders from four groups of essential stakeholders in K-6 mathematics reform: 36 teachers; 17 school and district administrators; 30 business and community leaders; and 6 post-secondary mathematicians and teacher educators. The heart of the Academy is its Teacher Leadership Program and its carefully coordinated summer institutes, academic year experiences, and reflection seminars which deepen Academy Teachers understanding of mathematics and how it is best taught. The MEMI-Phase II builds on knowledge being gained from a mostly private-funded, three-year ( - ) Maysville Mathematics Initiative which involves a cluster of four inner-city and high-poverty elementary schools in the MCPSS. As part of the Teacher Leadership Program, Academy members will lead and support school-wide mathematics reform in four additional MCPSS elementary schools using the Maysville Mathematics Initiative model. MEMI-Phase II will directly impact over 180 teachers and their 3,600 students and it will set the stage for a district-wide elementary mathematics reform initiative, including textbook adoption, that would impact Mobile s over 2,000 elementary teachers doc10269 none FLORA OF CHINA The Flora of China (FOC) is a collaborative international project to publish the first English-language treatment of the approximately 30,000 species of vascular plants of China, or about 12% of the world s total. All accounts of FOC are jointly co-authored by non-Chinese (mostly American and European) and Chinese scientists. To date, the FOC project has published seven of the 25 text volumes and four of the 25 illustration volumes. All accounts are downloadable as pdf files and ASCII-delimited text files. The FOC websites at Harvard University Herbaria (HUH) http: flora.huh.harvard.edu china and Missouri Botanical Garden http: www.mobot.org research asia.html (MBG) provide dynamic links to distribution maps, illustrations, and other relevant data such as botanical names, bibliographic citations, altitudinal ranges, synonyms, and species status (endemic, native, cultivated, or naturalized). The project has eleven centers: HUH, California Academy of Sciences, Smithsonian Insti-tution, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew), Museum National d Histoire Naturelle (Paris), MBG (the coordination center), and the institutes of botany in Beijing, Kunming, Nanjing, and Guangzhou. These institutions complement each other in their excellent libraries and rich collections of Chinese plants and, they exchange material and literature during work on the FOC accounts. The major results expected during this two-year award include the publication of four text volumes treating 44 families and 4,560 (or about 15% of the entire flora). These include important species of food, horticultural, medicinal, and timber values, especially members of the buttercup, rose, orchid, mulberry, and elm families. Work on additional volumes will also be at various stages of editing or near completion, especially on members of the large and taxonomically difficult rhododendron, palm, carrot, and sedge families. In addition, at least three illustration volumes will be published, and the images of the scanned illustrations and finalized legends will be placed on the web and linked to the descriptions and checklist data. Because FOC is the first up-to-date, English-language account on the plants of China, the information included will be of tremendous value to horticulturists, conservationist, botanists, and scientists in related fields. Study of the FOC is important for understanding modern floristic affinities between North America and eastern Asia because species of many genera are found only in these two areas. The fragmentation of China s vegetation makes it all the more important to have accurate, up-to-date information. Consistent efforts will be made during the course of the FOC project to identify threatened and endangered species and those that have not been collected recently. The information included in FOC is extremely important for the proper management of the plant resources of China and for solutions that address environmental issues doc10270 none The IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) is held yearly at sites alternating between the U.S. and abroad. The Symposium will be held at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC, USA on June 24-29, . This proposal requests support for the travel expenses of ISIT participants from the U.S., Russia and Eastern Europe. These participants would be individuals whose papers have been selected for presentation at the Symposium, but who lack funds and would not be able to attend without travel support. It is proposed that the co-chairs of the symposium, Thomas Fuja and Prakash Narayan make the awards. The total amount requested is $40,000, split equally between U.S. and non-U.S. Participants; this is based on 40 U.S. awards (averaging $500 apiece) and 15 foreign awards (averaging $ apiece doc10271 none This project is a five-year leadership development project in mathematics educaton that addresses the need to retain qualified mathematics teachers in the profession. The primary goal is to keep competent beginning and experienced K-12 teachers in the profession while increasing their ability to teach mathematics effectively. The project is based at the University of Califonria, Santa Barbara, and involves teachers and districts in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. In Project RENEW, two cohorts of 30 experienced teachers will received 36 days of professional development over a three-year period. These teachers, called preceptors, will increase their knowledge of mathematics and mathematics pedagogy, develop their leadership capabilities, and develop and implement strategies to mentor three to five beginning teachers for a period of three years. The plan is to involve the two cohorts of 30 teachers with two cohorts of 120 beginning teachers for a total of 300 teachers. A resource manual for devloping teacher leadership for mentoring beginning teachers will be developed doc10272 none Submitted under the guidelines for Teacher Retention and Renewal, this sixty-month project supports approximately 300 teachers of high school mathematics in fourteen school districts of California. These teachers comprise three distinct groups. First, those already experienced with instructional materials aligned with NCTM s Principles and Standards for School Mathematics develop mentoring and professional development skills and serve as mentors and leaders in their districts... The other two groups are veteran teachers wishing to improve their teaching through alternative means of instruction and assessment, and novice teachers needing mentoring and support in the critical early years. The Interactive Mathematics Program (IMP) materials are the primary vehicle for the project s professional development. The teacher enhancement curriculum includes summer and winter workshops and individual work, collaboration, mentoring and electronic networking throughout the school year. All participants are expcected to make a commitment for at least two years (130 hours of professional development per year), but may choose to participate for three or four years doc10273 none Maricopa Mathematics Mentoring and Renewal, a four-year project of Maricopa Community College District (AZ) in collaboration with the Chandler School District, the Tempe Elementary School District, Tempe High School District, Chandler Gilbert Community College, and Arizona State University is designed to address the issues of continual need for new mathematics teachers due to both teacher turnover and continuous growth in population. Funded under the Teacher Enhancement guidelines for Teacher Retention and Renewal, the project focuses on preparing 81 teachers of grades 5-12 to serve as mentors coaches to novice teachers. n additional 119 teachers participate in professional development activities and implement standards-based units while being mentored and coached by the mentor teachers. All project teachers participate in professional development activities designed to enhance both mathematical content and pedagogical practice. In addition, mentor teachers develop their skills in coaching and leading collegial support groups. Participating 5th - 8th grade teachers implement a minimum of two standards-based mathematics units. In the last two years, each middle school becomes a site for a collegial support group. Teachers from feeder elementary schools and cluster high schools are a part of the middle school based support group. Both mentor and novice teachers participate in content courses delivered through Arizona State University. A summer school practicum employs a mentoring coaching model that engages teams of participants in planning lessons based on standards-based instructional strategies. The teaching is followed by reflection, re-planning, and re-teaching by another team member doc10274 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Genetic Diversity in Benzoate Degrading Denitrifying Bacteria and Environmental Samples. Genetic diversity of 16S rRNA, nitrite reductase, and benzoyl-CoA reductase in bacteria capable of degrading benzoate under denitrifying conditions are being investigated with bacterial pure cultures isolated from estuarine sediments of a contaminated landfill site. In addition, DNAs will be extracted directly from the same sediment and environmental DNA clonal libraries (metagenome library) will be constructed to link the different kind of genetic information obtained from 16S rRNA genes and functional genes involved in benzoate degradation and denitrification in the environment doc10275 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Can selection to minimize the effects of translational and or mutational errors explain codon usage patterns in microbes despite their diversity? The investigation of error minimization mediated by biased codon usage will be extended from bacteria to their bacteriophage parasites, using both comparative genome analyses of natural isolates and laboratory evolution experiments. Primarily, the research pursues the preliminary observations that 1) patterns of codon usage bias in bacteria appear to reflect selection for error minimization, and 2) phage genome type (e.g. dsDNA vs. ssDNA) appears to influence the degree of error minimization, but not the degree to which phage codon usage reflects host codon usage doc10276 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Development of a two-species biofilm to study bacteria-bacteria interactions. This project applies the power of bacterial genetics to an environmental biofilm to determine the intricate associations between 2 different species of bacteria. Shewanella and Desulfovibrio species are ubiquitous environmental bacteria that form natural biofilms and promote steel corrosion. This ecological system is genetically and chemically tractable and is being used to develop a model for a 2-species biofilm to examine the structural impact of each species on the biofilm, identify and characterize genes that are induced or expressed during biofilm development, and identify parameters essential for maintaining the 2-species biofilm doc10277 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Utilizing biochemical and genetic methods to dissect how a cyanobacterium senses and responds to changing light conditions. The test organism is Fremyella diplosiphon. A detailed biochemical analysis is being made of RcaE, a putative phytochrome-like photoreceptor that controls the process of complementary chromatic adaptation (CCA). Specifically, the experiments address the phosphorelay model which holds that RcaE is the photoreceptor that differentially controls the phosphorylation state of the response regulator RcaF in different light qualities, which in turn regulates the phosphorylation levels of RcaC doc10278 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Effects of bacterial signal mimic compounds produced by pea plants on the nitrogen-fixing symbiont Rhizobium leguminosarum. Cell-to-cell signaling within a bacterial population, quorum sensing, plays a major role in bacterial growth, survival, and host-microbe interactions. The sponsoring scientists have shown that peas secrete signal mimics, compounds which interact specifically with bacterial quorum-sensing receptors. This is a comprehensive study of quorum-sensing-regulated gene expression in Rhizobium leguminosarum, by determining the effects of pea signal mimics on gene expression, behavior, diversity, and viability in the rhizosphere doc10279 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Using the Tools of Molecular Biology and Chemistry to Characterize Pigment Biosynthesis in the Chestnut Blight Fungus. The goal of this research is to analyze the pathway for production of polyketide pigments in the fungus Cryphonectria parasitica. Genes required for biosynthesis of emodin and other related anthraquinone compounds are being cloned, sequenced, and characterized from an ordered cosmid library and by PCR amplification of PKS genes. These approaches will permit analysis of genetic diversity within a conserved pathway present in numerous fungi and plants doc10280 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Producing hydrogen gas from sunlight and water using green algae. The photosynthesis pathway in green algae can be altered to produce hydrogen instead of oxygen. This research tests if the algae s need for metabolic energy is the driving force behind this solar-powered hydrogen production. An understanding of this phenomenon will aid in the development of green algae as an alternative-energy fuel source doc10281 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Evolutionary patterns and processes in symbiotic fungi associated with fungus-growing ants. Many microbes form close associations ( symbioses ) with plants and animals. Symbiosis involves a dramatic change for microbial species, permitting us to understand how differences in life styles and environments shape microbial biodiversity and evolution. Fungus-growing ants in the Neotropical tribe Attini (Formicidae) comprise a group of about 200 described species which are all dependent on the cultivation of fungus for food. Some ants repeatedly domesticated fungi from free-living stock, while other associations are ancient and highly specialized. This study explores how symbiotic associations have shaped the evolutionary processes and patterns in the fungal symbionts of attine ants. It further seeks to determine if symbiosis with ants involves a switch from sexual reproduction to reproductions without sex. The proposed work will provide valuable insights into how intimate associations with ants have shaped the patterns and processes of evolution in symbiotic fungi doc10282 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Can Bacteria Move by Slime Extrusion? The physics of A-type motility in Mxyococcus xanthus. Myxococcus xanthus moves by gliding utilizing two distinct genetic mechanisms: Social(S) and Adventurous(A) motility. This is a study of A-type motility using a slime extrusion model based on a nozzle-like organelle discovered in cyanobacteria. A theoretical model is being explored and experiments performed to determine if this type of mechanism can drive A-motility doc10283 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Coevolution at the genomic level of aphids and their bacterial endosymbionts. An ancient association between the aphid, Melaphis rhois, and its bacterial endosymbiont, Buchnera aphidicola, has produced an obligate mutualism in which symbionts provide essential amino acids to their hosts. Buchnera gene expression patterns over the course of the host complex life cycle are being characterized using microarray technology doc10284 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled The Origin and Early Evolution of Apicomplexans. Apicomplexans are microbial parasites that appear to have descended from phototrophic dinoflagellates. Aseptate gregarines are apicomplexans that inhabit marine worms and possess many ancestral features. Moreover, many taxa of uncertain phylogenetic position possess apicomplexan-like characteristics. Morphological and molecular phylogenetics of these enigmatic taxa are being investigated and are expected to throw light on apicomplexan origins and the evolution of novel characters doc10285 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Evolutionary genetics of ecological diversification in cyanobacterial populations from hot spring habitats differing in nitrogen availability. Understanding how ecological differences evolve in microbial populations is essential for explaining the magnitude and distribution of microbial diversity. This research uses a combination of quantitative, population and developmental genetic approaches to: (1) test for ecological divergence between populations of the cyanobacterium Mastigocladus laminosus from habitats differing in nitrogen availability; (2) evaluate the evolutionary processes shaping ecological structure in these populations; and (3) link molecular genetic variation to variation in the ability to assimilate different nitrogen sources doc10286 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Effects of energy, environmental variation, and dynamic constraints on the structure of experimental microbial food webs. A lab-based microbial system, comprised of bacteria, autotrophic algae, heterotrophic protozoa, and rotifers, is being used to determine the effects of environmental variability and energy on the emergent structure of food webs. Webs of varying complexity are experimentally perturbed and changes in web structure are compared to stability measures to assess how perturbations and stability-complexity interact to generate community organization doc10287 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Molecular characterization of microbial nitrite reductase genes from a permanently ice covered Antarctic lake. Lake Bonney is a permanently ice-covered, chemically-stratified Antarctic lake that is unusual in that denitrification occurs in the deep anoxic waters of the east but not the west lobe. The goal of this project is to compare the distribution, diversity, and expression of denitrification genes (nitrite reductase) from microorganisms in the two lobes in an attempt to explain this mystery doc10288 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Understanding the role of the soil microbial community in the arctic tundra: integrating microorganisms with climate change theory. Soil microorganisms control the flow of nitrogen, carbon, and phosphorus through ecosystems. Soil samples are being taken from established sites which have undergone existing long-term manipulations of temperature and nutrient and light availability. The sample microbial communities in these samples are being studied to determine whether treatments known to affect plant communities also affect soil microbial biomass, activity, and community composition as measured by terminal restriction fragment length polymorphisms (tRFLP doc10289 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Developing gene expression tools to identify the physiological states of natural populations of a marine cyanobacterium. The important physiological activities of microorganisms that facilitate their survival and define their roles within an ecosystem are largely unknown. This research focuses on adapting new gene expression technologies (DNA microarrays, in situ RT-PCR, and proteomics) to identify the environmentally-significant physiological activities of the highly-abundant, globally-significant marine cyanobacterium, Prochlorococcus spp doc10290 none John R. Spear This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Microbial Diversity and Hydrogen in the Yellowstone Ecosystem. The goal of this work is to describe the microbial composition and metabolic underpinnings of the Yellowstone geothermal ecosystem, with the hypothesis that hydrogen is the primary biological energy source. First, hydrogen concentration in waters are being measured. Then, the associated biomass, consisting of hydrogen-metabolizing microorganisms, is being characterized using a molecular phylogenetic approach doc10291 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Molecular studies of microbial coevolution and endosymbiosis in a complex assemblage of hosts. Chewing lice that infect birds harbor endosymbiotic bacteria (putatively Rickettsia) in specialized cells. Lice probably require these bacteria for digestion of the feathers on which they live. Selected nucleic acids are being sequenced to correctly place these bacteria in a phylogeny. Rates of evolution are being compared and cophylogeny with their hosts is being tested. Finally, the effect of endosymbiosis on nucleotide sequence evolution is being evaluated doc10292 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Conversations between bacterium and squid: Studying the genetics behind V. fischeri s response to its symbiotic host, E. scolopes. Colonization of the squid E. scolopes by its bacterial symbiont, V. fischeri, requires the bacterial sensor kinase RscS. This research tests the hypothesis that RscS regulates other genes essential to the symbiosis by identifying these genes using a variety of molecular methods. Further, laser-scanning confocal microscopy is being used to identify where in the symbiosis process RscS is required doc10293 none This project is devoted to the study of two topics: (i) limit theorems in probability and statistics, and (ii) lower tail and small ball probabilities of Gaussian processes. Limit theorems play a fundamental role in the development of probability and statistics. The principal investigator continues his study in this direction in general, focusing on self-normalized limit theorems in particular. The investigator intends to systematically study moderate deviations for self-normalized sums of independent random variables, for Hotelling s t-statistic and for studentized U-statistic. The objective is to establish a Cramer type moderate deviation theorem under a finite third moment condition. Since the self-normalized moderate deviations require few moment conditions, they not only extend classical limit theorems but also provide much wider applicability to other fields, particularly to statistics. The study should also help us better understand the behavior of large classes of statistical functionals since the t-statistic and U-statistic are their building blocks. Another area where limit theorems prove useful is the study of the real zeros of random algebraic and trigonometric polynomials. Such polynomials with random coefficients arise in many disciplines and their behavior is of interest to statisticians, engineers, economists, and mathematicians. The primary focus of the second topic is on estimating lower tail and small ball probabilities for Gaussian processes. These types of probabilities often arise in estimating the chances of rare events occurring in areas where such events are of fundamental importance such as weather prediction, natural disaster prediction and economic indices. One of the objectives is to develop new methods of estimating small ball and lower tail probabilities. The focus is specifically on small ball probabilities of the Brownian sheet in high dimensions and lower tail probabilities for stationary Gaussian processes. The investigator also intends to study basic sample properties for a newly introduced family of Gaussian processes which have the same scaling and time inversion properties as the Brownian motion but are infinitely differentiable. It is believed that this new family of Gaussian processes would prove useful in many other fields as mathematical models. This project is devoted to the study of two topics: (i) limit theorems in probability and statistics, and (ii) lower tail and small ball probabilities of Gaussian processes. Limit theorems play a fundamental role in the development of probability and statistics. It is hoped that the first part of this research may lead to the development of a self-normalized limit theory in probability and statistics, while the second part of the research could provide significant new knowledge about Gaussian random processes as well as about our random environments doc10294 none The program coordinators propose to organize a workshop titled The Internet as a Large-Scale Complex System to be held at the Santa Fe Institute in March . The main purpose of the workshop is to provide a forum for disseminating relevant accomplishments and discussing future challenges associated with trying to gain a solid understanding of the dynamics and evolution of the global Internet from a broad and still unconventional perspective-complex systems dynamics. The coordinators plan to bring together network researchers with a group of distinguished researchers with expertise ranging from statistical physics, dynamical systems theory, and control theory to biological, physical and social systems. Select contributions from invited speakers will be published as part of the SFI book series by Oxford University Press doc10295 none This project will investigate the behavior of ill-conditioned regressors with correlated response generalized estimating equations (GEE) framework. This ill conditioning occurs when the Fisher s Information matrix is nearly singular, a situation that leads to traditional problems of multicollinearity . The resulting effect is poor prediction, large variability in the population parameters that are being estimated and poor testing. The Principal Investigator will subdivide the alternative estimators and will then propose well-defined estimations techniques for the subclasses. The estimators are used to understand regression under ill-posed conditions. The procedures to be developed under this grant are primarily for the purpose of understanding the fundamental aspects, but also will have application to large longitudinal data sets and provide a unifying framework for generalized models and the expectation maximization algorithm, chemometrics and genomics. The Principal Investigator will enable many students from a large number of disciplines to participate in his education research efforts doc10296 none The three-year project will develop a coordinated set of six courses designed specially to prepare teachers to teach mathematics in the middle grades, level 5-8. The courses will form the core of a Master s Degree program or can be taken separately for certification. Two existing courses will be modified. The project is a collaborative effort involving university mathematicians, statisticians, mathematics educators, Presidential Awardees for Excellence in Mathematics Teaching and other exemplary middle-level teachers. The objectives include: increase the conceptual content knowledge of middle-level teachers, provide exposure to exemplary materials and develop skills to use them, prepare teachers to act as mentors, work with the state on certification, strengthen infrastructure that supports preparation and professional development, enhance teaching practices of middle-level teachers and college faculty, produce knowledge about collaborative course and program development, produce research results on developing and implementing a research-based and standards-based program for in-service teachers, and contribute to the understanding of adult education teaching strategies and distance delivery systems that can be effective in under-served rural areas (due to very small schools and great distances between them). This project addresses the fact that sixty-four percent of the teachers teaching mathematics do not have a state credential in mathematics doc10297 none This proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF- . Biomedical and chemical researchers routinely employ liquid scintillation counting as a means of quantifying the amount of radioactivity emitted by beta-particle emitting isotopes (e.g., 3H and 14C) in samples generated during experiments. Frequently, these samples are aqueous in nature and must be mixed with an organic solvent containing dissolved fluor molecules (scintillators) to form an emulsion-based cocktail . Although efficient, the disposal of the large quantities of mixed (radioactive and organic) waste generated by liquid scintillation counting presents an economical and environmental challenge. To solve this problem, the PI proposes to develop an aqueous-based scintillation system by applying nanotechnology. The overall goal of the 12-month project is to develop an aqueous-based NanoScintillation system that may serve as an alternative to organic solvent-based liquid scintillation cocktails. Two specific aims proposed are: 1) to demonstrate that a primary fluor molecule can be entrapped in an engineered aqueous-based NanoScintillation System meeting the following criteria: system consists of 98% water, no organic solvents, and permanently suspended particles 100 nm, and 2) to demonstrate that the engineered NanoScintillation System has detection efficiencies for 3H and 14C that are 50% of those of commercial organic solvent-based liquid scintillation cocktails. Two types of stable oil-in-water microemulsions as nanotemplates for the curing of solid nanoparticles containing fluor molecules will be engineered. Particle size, stability, and suspendability of the engineered nanoparticles will be measured as a criteria for an optimal NanoScintillation System. The detection efficiency of optimal systems for 3H and 14C will be determined and compared to those of commercially available organic-solvent based cocktail systems doc10298 none Bryers The objective of this research is to quantify surface chemistry effects on the conformation and subsequent availability of mixtures of adsorbed contaminants for bacterial degradation. The added influence of ambient humic acids on the adsorption conformations will also be determined. Three organic wastes are considered: naphthalene, cyanuric acid and trichloroethylene. This research has two major objectives. First, carry out degradation studies (both in suspension and as biofilm culture) of the three selected organic wastes, in prescribed mixtures, both with and without the presence of known amounts of humic acids. The added influence of ambient humic acids on the adsorption conformations and bacterial responses will be quantified. Second, develop model substrata that mimic inorganic soil substrata. Also, determine the spatial conformation and molecular distributions of various mixtures of the three organic contaminants exposed to these different mineral mimic substrata. In addition, quantify individual species metabolic responses when mixed cultures are exposed to these various substrata. This research is expected to provide fundamental information that is critical to affecting efficient treatment protocols for contaminated land and water doc10299 none Cleary This well integrated Research for Undergraduate Institutions (RUI) proposal aims to produce new metal phosphorous chalcogenides displaying nonlinear optical activity, and to integrate education objectives with the research by bringing to the curiculum topics such as solid state chemistry and nonlinear optics not normally covered in the traditional undergraduate chemistry degree program. %%% Among the materials to be synthesized and characterized are new films of nonlinear optical materials based on the chemistry of metal hexathiohypophosphates. These materials are relevant to applications areas that include optical data storage and optical communications technologies. The educational benefits include a better understanding at the undergraduate level of scientific and technological issues facing society doc10300 none This project involves two years of excavation at an extraordinary, waterlogged late Mesolithic site in the interior of Denmark. The focus of these investigations is the study of inland settlement of hunter-gatherers and its role in the transition to farming around B.C. A good deal has been learned in recent years about coastal settlement and subsistence in this region On the other hand very little work has been done on inland settlements and their place in late Mesolithic adaptations. Several lines of evidence suggest that such sites may have been the initial locus for the adoption of farming. Excavations will be conducted at a site where organic preservation is exceptional and substantial quantities of plant and animal material are available for the characterization of subsistence change. In addition artifacts of stone, bone, wood, and other materials should be present in large numbers providing a more complete view of the technology of these inland groups The excavations should provide information on the subsistence focus, season and duration of inland settlement, as well as connections with the coast. The presence and age of Early Neolithic materials at the inland site may allow an assessment of the role and priority of farming activities in this region. The research will evaluate the role of climate and resource deterioration in the transition from hunting and gathering to farming in this region. Excavation analysis and conservation of materials from waterlogged Stone Age sites is expensive but the information gained from such well preserved contexts is well worth the cost Permission has been granted for this work to proceed. All materials recovered in the excavation will be the property of the Kalundborg og Omegns Museum, Kalundborg, Denmark doc10301 none Experiments are proposed to explore the physics of electrons confined to a small region of space and coupled to nearby metallic leads. The particular system to be studied is the single-electron transistor (SET). Experiments carried out in the past few years have revealed the effects of strong coupling between the confined electron droplet and the leads in an SET. In particular, they have demonstrated that the Anderson Hamiltonian, together with scaling and renormalization theories, provides a quantitative description of the equilibrium (zero-bias) conductance as a function of temperature and gate voltage. Specifically, the ground state of the coupled system is a Kondo singlet. The publication of these results has stimulated a number of theoretical predictions, and one goal of the proposed research is to test these predictions. The differential conductance as a function of bias will be studied. In addition, the effects of multiple levels on the Kondo effect will be examined. In a magnetic field the peak in differential conductance associated with the Kondo singlet splits in two. Predictions have been made of the splitting of these peaks and the evolution of their line shape with magnetic field will be tested. A new measurement facility has been constructed which will allow the measurement of the Kondo effect to be extended to lower temperature. The system is equipped with a 16T magnet and rotation stage, so that the field can be in the plane or perpendicular to the plane of the droplet of electrons. This will allow the measurement of the temperature dependence of the Kondo peak in differential conductance precisely. A completely different phenomenon, recently discovered in SETs, is Fano interference. For small SETs the single-electron line shapes are asymmetric with the characteristic shape predicted by the Fano theory. The latter requires a continuous transmission channel that interferes with a resonant one. Experiments are planned to clarify the nature of this interference. In particular, while the resonant channel appears to arise from single electron addition, the origin of the continuous channel is a mystery. Measurement of the temperature and magnetic field dependence of the line shapes may clarify the microscopic physics. This research will be done with students who will thereby receive training in a cutting edge area of nanoscience and technology. %%% The most dramatic phenomenon of the last half of the twentieth century is the technological revolution, driven by the decrease in cost and increase in efficiency of semiconductor technology. We often describe this by Moore s Law , the exponential increase in the number of transistors on a silicon chip. The latter number has been increasing by a factor two every eighteen months for over forty years. This explosion was made possible by discoveries in fundamental semiconductor physics. However, in order to sustain it, scientists and engineers needed new technologies for making smaller and smaller structures, so that it is now possible to make semiconductor structures that are only nanometers in size. Whereas electrons in conventional transistors behave like classical particles, electrons confined to small dimensions can only be described by quantum mechanics. Thus, discoveries in physics led to new technology, which now make it possible for us to study new physics. This research will explore the physics of electrons confined to nanometer dimensions. The structure focused on is called a single electron transistor (SET). A transistor is a switch that turns on when electrons are added to it and turns off when they are removed. The conventional transistor of today, in a cellular telephone or personal computer, for example, requires about electrons to turn on. The SET turns on and off again every time a single electron transistor is added to it. The goal of this research is to understand how the electron is distributed between the trap and the electrodes of the transistor and how this distribution depends on the properties of the SET, the temperature and an applied magnetic field. The physics is expected to be similar for a wide variety of nano-electronic structures and so will be of broad application to nanoscience and nanotechnology. Graduate and undergraduate students will participate in this research. They will receive training in one of the forefront areas of nanoscience and nanotechnology that will prepare them for employment in academe, industry and government institutions doc10302 none This proposal was received in response to NSF- . Research is planned in which phenacenes, which are ribbon-like molecules of fused rings, are examined for their potential to reinforce polymer matrices with unprecedented effectiveness. The research activities incl3de synthesis of the desired phenacenes in monodisperse populations of selected lengths, preparation of microscopic mechanical test specimens, and small-scale mechanical testing to demonstrate the hypothesis that the strength and stiffness of nanocomposites made with phenacenes are significantly higher than those of the corresponding nanocomposites made with carbon nanotubes. The research is a collaboration that combines fundamental chemistry with materials engineering and that targets undergraduate women being trained in the basic physical sciences for the field of post-graduate engineering doc10303 none Jose Cortes-Figueroa, Chemistry Department, University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program. The focus of the work is the synthesis and characterization of transition metal fullerene complexes. Novel fullerene-transition metal carbonyl complexes will be synthesized and characterized by spectroscopic and electrochemical techniques. Reaction rates and activation parameters of the fullerene substitution processes will also be studied. Overall, this project should provide information on the thermodynamics of the fullerene-transition metal interaction. Transition metal fullerenes show unique chemistry and electrochemistry. These properties may be exploited in the optics, materials science, and electronics areas. This award is under the Research in Undergraduate Institutions Program (RUI) and involves several undergraduates at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez. These students will learn important laboratory skills while conducting cutting-edge research doc10304 none The investigator will study questions in the deformation theory of global Galois representations. Let a two dimensional mod p Galois representation be given. Serre has conjectured this representation comes from a modular form. His conjecture necessarily implies the mod p Galois representation is the mod p reduction of some p-adic Galois representation. The author plans to continue his study of whether such deformations exist independently of Serre s Conjecture, and if they can be arranged to be potentially semistable in the sense of Fontaine. Such constructions, especially combined with recent work of Taylor, could be regarded as providing evidence for Serre s Conjecture. There are interesting cases that are still open, such as reducible residual representations and representations of the absolute Galois group of totally real fields. The proposed research falls under the general area of Number Theory, which has its roots in the study of whole numbers and their various properties. Natural questions that arise in this field, such as properties of prime numbers and how frequently they occur, can have applications to coding theory and cryptography. The proposed research is also related to Galois Theory, the study of symmetries of solutions to equations. Studying these symmetries can shed light on the understanding their solutions, a basic mathematical question doc10305 none In this proposal funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Arthur Suits of the State University of New York at Stony Brook will pursue a program of research on ion pair imaging spectroscopy. Vacuum ultraviolet radiation will be used to drive dissociation of various molecules to produce ion pairs. The kinetic energy released, when one of the ions in the pair is structureless (e.g., chloride ion) maps the energy levels of the co-fragment in a manner analogous to photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). This approach permits study of species for which no stable precursors re available, and will readily allow for probing levels that are optically inaccessible. The overarching goal of this project is to obtain vibrational frequencies and thermochemical data for elusive ionic species not accessible to conventional techniques. Preliminary studies of the methyl cation will be extended to include related C2 and C3 species, as well as the methylene cation. The results of these studies will be used as benchmarks for comparison to theoretical calculations, for their intrinsic value in determining the thermochemical scales on which all of chemistry relies, and for developing the fundamental understanding of transient species of importance in combustion, atmospheric and interstellar chemistry doc10306 none Funding is provided for an education and planning workshop under the MARGINS initiative to be held in March on the Red Sea. Red Sea and Gulf of Suez area is one of the two chosen focus areas selected by the MARGINS community to study the fundamental processes of rupturing continental lithosphere to form new ocean basins. The workshop will be held in Cairo and Sharam el-Sheikh and will provide a forum for interaction between US scientists and potential collaborators from countries surrounding the focus study area. The workshop includes a 2-day field trip along the Suez rift followed by a 3-day seminar in Sharam el-Shiekh that will summarize the state of the knowledge about the area and discuss further research need doc10307 none The investigators will work to understand the physical nature of large-scale phenomena on the Sun. The main effort is to make long-term observations of large-scale magnetic fields, interpret interrelated phenomena seen on the solar surface, and develop realistic models of the processes acting in the solar interior, corona, and solar wind. Dynamic changes of solar magnetic fields affect the corona, interplanetary space, and finally the terrestrial environment on a vast range of time scales. Short and intermediate time scale magnetic variations drive geomagnetic activity, while longer term changes in the overall level of solar activity seem to be related to irradiance variations, and therefore to climate change. The investigators will continue several specific lines of investigation presently supported by an expiring NSF grant. The main research topics are mechanisms of solar activity on cycle and shorter time scales, magnetic structure and evolution of the solar corona and heliosphere, and prediction of geoeffective solar inputs to the terrestrial environment. These studies are based on analysis of solar magnetic field observations made at the Wilcox Solar Observatory (WSO) and other observatories such as SOHO MDI, NSO, etc. Coronal fields are estimated by numerical model calculations. The investigators also will continue partial support of SolarMail, and SolarNews. These services are provided to support the general solar physics community. They can be accessed via the web at http: spd.aas.org doc10308 none As both the foci and the character of scientific inquiries have become more global in nature, increasing attention is being given to developing frameworks through which scientists from different nations may work together to advance fundamental knowledge. A critical part of the scientific infrastructure fostering such collaborations is the International Council for Science (ICSU) and its 22 member scientific unions. This award provides support for U.S. participation in three of those unions. Five years of support are provided for U.S. participation in the International Geographical Union and for operations of the Committee on Geography at the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council, which serves as the U.S. National Committee for the IGU. One year of support is provided for U.S. participation in the International Union of Psychological Sciences (IUPsyS) and for operations of the U.S. National Committee for the IUPsyS, and one year of support is provided for U.S. participation in the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science (IUHPS). In addition to activities associated with these three international scientific unions, this award also provides core support for other activities of the Committee on Geography. The overall goals of this committee are to clarify and set priorities for geography research; to identify the role of geography in major policy issues; to support and assure the quality of geography content in education; and to encourage and facilitate the involvement of geographers in the IGU. In pursuit of the first three goals, the committee is engaged in a series of independently funded studies, including studies that examine data needs for place-based decision making; research priorities in geography at the U.S. Geological Survey, and the processes through which children develop spatial thinking. This award will facilitate activities designed to increase and enhance participation by U.S. scientists in international collaborative activities in the geographic and psychological scientists as well as by historians and philosophers of science. These collaborations will complement research and educational efforts in the U.S. and elsewhere and facilitate continued evolution of a global scientific community. The award also will assist the Committee on Geography in continuing its efforts to focus and generate geographic inquiry and education in ways that will better meet the needs of academics, practitioners, educators, and students as well as government decision makers and the public as a whole doc10309 none The investigator works on Invariant Theory and representations of quivers. He studies some fundamental problems in the theory of quiver representations. In earlier joint work with Jerzy Weyman, he found a nice description and even an algorithm for the decomposition of a general representation into indecomposable representations (this is the canonical decomposition as introduced by Kac). Also Weyman and the investigator proved that semi-invariants introduced by Schofield always generate the ring of semi-invariants. The above results have a remarkable application to Littlewood-Richardson coeffients. In particular one can prove results of Klyachko, and Knutson-Tao about the set of nonzero Littlewood-Richardson coefficients using quiver representations. Using results about quiver representations many more new results about Littlewood-Richardson coefficients can be proven. The investigator is continuing his research on quiver representations to deepen our understanding of generic representations of wild quivers, and to apply these results to the combinatorics of Littlewood-Richardson coefficients. The investigator just finished writing a book together with Gregor Kemper on Computational Invariant Theory. He is now studying various problems in Invariant Theory, in particular algorithms for finding rational invariants and for determining whether two elements in a given representation of an algebraic group lie in the same orbit. This orbit problem is the original motivation of Invariant Theory. This research is in the area of Mathematics referred to as Invariant Theory, a branch of Representation Theory, in the general area of Algebra. Invariant Theory has a long tradition back to the nineteenth century. It studies quantities which stay invariant under certain symmetries (in arbitrary dimension). A simple example is a person on earth. The quantity distance to the rotation axes stays invariant under rotation of the earth. Of course symmetries play an important role in nature. Related to this is the problem to recognize if two objects can be transformed into each other by certain symmetries. Think of a robot eye which has to recognize whether two objects are the same after rotation. The investigator studies various problems in invariant theory and in particular (a mathematical formulated version of) the object recognition problem. Quiver representation theory can be thought of as a generalization of linear algebra. This theory shows a deep and interesting structure. For example, a graphical representation gives fractal-like pictures. There are several applications to other branches of mathematics doc10310 none Richard Matzner will carry out research in gravitational physics and relativity, utilizing the tools of mathematical analysis, comparison to observation, and computational modeling. He will apply these techniques to understanding the possible configurations of massive objects as described in general relativity, concentrating on black holes. He will study the way in which these objects can be described in computational terms, and the dynamics of these objects in interaction. The main part of this work will concentrate on developing evolutions of black hole interactions. These are the strongest possible gravitational sources, and will produce strong gravitational wave events. They are a testbed in which our understanding of strong gravitational fields is exercised, and in which new theoretical concepts are developed. They are a difficult computational problem (large operation counts, large numbers of field variables), and require special techniques, very careful numerical handling, and very large computational resources. Thus they are an excellent domain to develop new computational infrastructure. And they may provide detailed predictions of the waveforms detected in the current and in future generations of gravitational wave detectors doc10311 none This proposal requests funding for carrying out two concurrently operating Conferences. One Conference addresses experimental QCD and high energy interaction topics. The topics of current interests are: Higgs boson searches, heavy flavor physics, search for particles beyond the Standard Model, QCD properties of W and Z production, low x physics and diffraction, heavy ion physics, and new trends in physics. The other Conference deals with electroweak interactions and unified theories. The subjects are: Standard Model tests, searches for the Higgs boson, Heavy flavor physics, CP violation, Neutrino physics and search for neutrino oscillations, theories beyond the Standard Model doc10312 none Ming In the proposed research, formation of the theoretically predicted new dense phases in the B-C-N composition triangle will be systematically examined over a wide pressure and temperature range using laser heated diamond anvil cell (up to 1x 106 atm or 14.7 x 106 psi and oC) as well as large-volume high P-T apparatus (up to 3x 105 atm or 44.1 x 105 psi and oC). The structures and properties of quenched samples will be analyzed by powder x-ray diffraction, electron microscopy, hardness measurements, and optical and acoustical methods. The overall scientific goals of the project are: (1) synthesis of novel superhard phases in the B-C-N system at high pressures and high temperatures by direct conversion of layered B-C-N phases, (2) investigation of physico-chemical and structural properties of the end-products at ambient conditions, and (3) characterization of elastic and vibrational properties of novel phase(s) at high pressures up to 1x 106 atm (14.7 x 106 psi) and at room temperature. %%% The proposed research will provide valuable data that will be used to identify main features of the phase transformations observed in the B-C-N system at high pressures and temperatures, and the factors responsible for formation of superhard B-C-N phases. These results will enhance our understanding of the fundamental problem in development of new superhard materials and will provide a sound basis of developing and producing new super-abrasives that are thermally and chemically more stable than diamond, and harder than cubic BN, enabling major advances in the cutting and polishing industries doc10313 none Jones This Americas Program award will provide support for cooperative research between Dr. William D. Jones of the University of Rochester and Dr. Juventino J. Garcia Alejandre of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico to do a two-year study of new methods for the cleavage of carbon-carbon bonds using transition metal complexes. A portion of this support is being provided by NSF s Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Program. The goal of this project is to discover new compounds that can cleavage carbon-carbon bonds in a variety of aromatic and aliphatic molecules. The project will benefit from the complementary expertise of the collaborators, with the U.S. researchers providing the necessary equipment to analyze and characterize the compounds, and the Mexican researchers providing their substantial synthetic capabilities and reaction product characterization. The cleavage of carbon-carbon bonds by transition metal compounds is one of the greatest challenges to organometallic chemists. Only a few examples of this difficult reaction have been reported to date. Consequently, this project has the potential to increase our understanding of these important chemical processes doc10314 none The proposed research focuses on imputation and variance estimation after imputation for survey data with nonresponse. Marginal imputation (such as random hot deck imputation, nearest neighbor imputation, and random regression imputation) will be studied for the purpose of estimating population totals and quantiles. The investigator will also study joint imputation (for estimating parameters such as the coefficients of correlation or the cell probabilities in a contingency table) and imputation under nonignorable response. For each imputation method, variance estimation that takes nonresponse and imputation into account will be studied, using a direct derivation approach or a replication method such as the jackknife, the balanced half samples, and the bootstrap. Many statistics and government agencies collect data through surveys. Most surveys have nonresponse. Item nonresponse occurs when some sampled units cooperate in the survey but fail to provide answers to some questions. Imputation techniques, which insert values for nonrespondents, are commonly used compensation procedures for item nonresponse. In some cases, when auxiliary information is properly used, imputation increases statistical accuracy. An essential requirement for an imputation method is that one can obtain unbiased (or approximately unbiased) survey estimators by treating the imputed values as observed data and using the standard estimation formulas designed for the case of no nonresponse. This requires developments on imputation methodology and statistical analysis procedures to take nonresponse and imputation into account. Since most of the proposed research topics are motivated by problems in survey agencies such as the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Westat, and Statistics Canada, results obtained from the proposed research will have significant impacts on the imputation and variance estimation methodology for these survey agencies doc10315 none The PI, collaborators and students develop statistical models and methods for problems involving latent structure in large and complex data sets. Specific research topics include: new models for regression and prediction with latent variables; a range of developments involving latent structure in Bayesian regression models and associated algorithmic implementation using simulation methods; statistical aspects of machine learning algorithms for regression and classification; generalized linear and multivariate latent factor models; models with errors in predictor variables; empirical factor models. Research in these areas is partly motivated by applications in bioinformatics in the area of gene expression profiling, and related research and applications in time series in finance and communications signals processing. This research is concerned with creating and implementing improved methods for the statistical analysis of large and complex data sets arising in fields such as functional genomics, finance and communications engineering. The research goals include creating new mathematical models that can adequately represent the complex structure of increasingly large data sets, together with appropriate computational tools and algorithms for the analysis of such data using these models. The need for substantial advances in this area of statistical research are highlighted by the analysis challenges posed by the increasingly large and complex gene expression data sets that are becoming standard in biomedical research due to rapid advances in genome technology, and major aspects of this research involve applications in functional genomics. Additional applications of models arising from this research lie in analysis of time series data arising in areas including finance and communications doc10316 none This 5-year Retention and Renewal proposal, targeting Boston Public Schools, builds on the extensive professional development work of EDC and TERC. The Cultivating Leadership to Support Elementary Mathematics Education Reform in Boston project, targets approximately 400 teacher leaders who participate in over 200 hours of professional development. Administrator leaders participate in over 45 hours of professional development, and an additional 600 teachers participate in at least 130 hours of professional development through the leadership work in each school. The professional development designed to strengthen participants mathematics teaching practice will support schools in the implementation of the Investigations in Number, Data and Space. All 87 elementary schools in Boston will be supported by this project. In addition the project targets seven carefully selected schools where teacher and administrator leadership is firmly in place and there is a school-wide focus on mathematics teaching and learning. These Learning Site Schools will serve as resources to other schools in the district, providing opportunities to learn about how teacher and administrator leadership is developed, how leadership is leveraged within a school, and how a school-wide focus on mathematics teaching and learning is created and sustained. Two additional schools, one without the infrastructure to support reform and one with minimal infrastructure to support these efforts, will receive extensive support. Research documenting the change process for schools at different stages of reform will be conducted doc10317 none This project explores the role of balanced information diets in information filtering. Information filtering is an increasingly important response to the problem of information overload. Community-based information filters are particularly beneficial because they can they can strengthen communities and recognize community tastes. The goal of this project is to investigate the benefits that can be realized by having the information filter balance the information presented to the user across the available topics. The project will explore how people forage in information abundance, what interfaces best support balanced information diets, and how much users like balanced information filters. The results will be interfaces to information through which users will receive the right amount of information on each topic, according to their interest in that topic. The information filter will learn which of the disparate sources of information are best for which topics, and present articles from the best sources. The research will also explore the effect of balanced information filtering on communities. The result will be balanced information filters that strengthen communities by ensuring sufficient overlap in information diets among community members doc10318 none Award: Principal Investigator: Xiao-Song Lin The central theme of this project is to explore as thoroughly as possible the significance of the Jones-Witten and Vassiliev invariants to knots, links, and 3-manifolds as topological structures. To be more specific, we will study the thermodynamic limit of the colored Jones polynomial using various probabilistic models; to explore beyond a simple formulation of the Casson invariant we found; to understand the congruence relation among Ohtsuki s invariants through congruence subgroups of the modular group; to find the normal form of a degree 1 map from a knot complement to another knot complement; to study the cohomology of knot complexes; to explore the applicability of classical techniques in 3-manifold topology to the study of Vassiliev invariants; and to continue the study of value and root distributions of the Jones polynomial. The phenomenon of knotting is a fundamental feature of the space that we live in, and knot theory is thus an important part of mankind s scientific knowledge because it is aimed at understanding the interplay of mathematical formulae and space structures. It is no wonder that concepts and tools originated from knot theory have been used in many areas of mathematics, as well as in chemistry, biology, physics, and computer science. For example, geneticists utilize knot theory to understand the processes of DNA replication and the function of enzymes that unknot DNA strands, and chemists use knot theory to understand and distinguish between different types of molecules. Our ability to discern different knots could well be served as a test of our scientific understanding of space structures doc10319 none David Ford, Texas A their high surface-group density and tunable chemistry allows one to create membranes that are highly selective for various gas-phase species of interest. Other design variables such as pore size, dendrimer size, and dendrimer surface coverage allow further control of membrane performance. Thus, these unique nano-architectures afford a degree of simultaneous control over both the chemistry and free volume of the membrane that is difficult to achieve with purely polymeric or purely inorganic materials. The goal of this project is to apply scientific and engineering concepts at the nanometer scale to create membranes of novel composition and structure. Such membranes can perform environmentally important separations, such as the removal of volatile organic compounds from air, more efficiently than current techniques. This will result in a cleaner environment at a lower cost. Furthermore, the project provides an excellent opportunity for a collaboration that crosses the boundaries between Colleges (Engineering and Science) and disciplines (separations and synthetic organic chemistry doc10320 none The recent discovery of high-Tc weak ferromagnetism, WF, in lightly doped hexaborides, A1-xLaxB6 (A = Ca, Sr, or Ba), has stimulated theoretical and experimental efforts to understand the this phenomenon. While several models have been proposed, an explanation is still elusive. In order to gain a better understanding of the origin of the WF, measurements by Electron Paramagnetic Resonance, EPR, uniaxial stress, microwave-absorption, and magnetization, M, in controlled samples will be conducted between 2 K - K. Also, systems known as multiferroics, MF, will be studied. They are simultaneously ferroelectric, FE, and ferromagnetic, FM. It has been suggested that BiMnO3 is MF. The experimental data on BiMnO3 is incomplete. Its magnetic, electrical and structural properties will be measured by EPR, M, specific heat, Raman, X-rays, and electric polarization. This work should help understand the nature of the interactions present and stimulate future work in these compounds. Several undergraduates and master s students will be involved in this program. They will be trained in cutting-edge research techniques, which provided the students excellent preparation for Ph.D. programs or for careers in industry. %%% The recent discovery of ferromagnetism in doped CaB6 is one of the great surprises in the modern study of magnetism for which there is still no explanation. Selected experiments will be carried out to provide new insight into the physics of these systems, which could lead to the correct theoretical model. Also, studies of compounds that are simultaneously ferroelectric, FE, and ferromagnetic, FM, will be carried out. Despite little work having been performed in these systems, a number of important new applications can be imagined. Examples are multiple state memory elements, electric field controlled FM resonance devices, and variable transducers. Several undergraduates and master s students will be involved in this program. They will be trained in cutting-edge research techniques. These provide excellent preparation for Ph.D. programs or for careers in industry. High school students and teachers will also participate in this program. This will continue the successful outreach program conducted by the PI s group in order to improve the quality of science education in K-12 doc10321 none This award will support research on annually-laminated lake sediments (varves) to provide detailed records of past climate from the Great Lakes region of the United States over the past 12,000 years. Such varved sediment records can prove a treasure trove of information critical to addressing issues of drought frequency and abrupt climate change in the region. By constructing continuous oxygen isotope time series of Holocene climate variability for lead dated sediment records from individual lake sites, the investigators will evaluate climatic controls on oxygen isotope records with existing regional instrumental records of temperature, precipitation amount, and dominant atmospheric circulation patterns. By focusing on high-resolution oxygen isotope analyses across discrete Holocene climatic events, the researchers will establish the characteristic and rate of past natural climate variability doc10322 none Chen The study of additive functionals is an important part of probability theory, as it serves as a tool of describing the stochastic processes in terms of properties like ergodicity and recurrence. This project is to investigate various limit laws for additive functionals associated to Markov processes. The recent study shows that the asymptotic magnitudes of additive functionals of a Harris recurrent Markov process are measured by the partial Green functions. The progress suggests further questions and establishments in broader situations. The project lists four areas in which the limit laws of related additive functionals will be studied under this research. As the first step toward the general theory, the investigator will look for relations between weak and strong laws for additive functionals. Specifically, the investigator will study the limit theorems for additive functionals of diffusion processes and for the local times embedded in various norm spaces, and the strong laws for occupation times arising from interacting particle systems. The significance of this study is also due to its connections to some important problems. The limit laws for additive functionals have been extensively applied to computer simulation and control theory. In general, additive functionals describe random accumulations --- in particular, the capital accumulations of investors in market environment. The study of additive functionals arising from particle system will lead to better understanding of population growth and migration of various species, and of the spreading process of certain diseases. Such models can be viewed as random system evolving in time and this project is about the long term behaviors of these systems. This research could achieve: 1) progress in the general theory of the limit laws for additive functionals; 2) developments of technologies and tools for study of additive functionals; 3) solutions to the problems raised from some practically interesting models doc10323 none The project proposes to convene publishers, curriculum developers and state and district science education leaders for two separate but related conferences. The first targets curriculum developers. The second will include developers, and adds individuals responsible for curriculum development in states and districts. The goals of the conferences are for participants to gain a more complete understanding of the Project curriculum evaluation instrument, and to analyze and critique it. In addition, the conference proceedings (including commissioned papers) will be published on-line and information about the proceedings will be distributed through the project s newsletter (circulation 50,000 doc10324 none Olson This U.S.- Brazil Program award provides support for cooperative research between Dr. Ronald E. Olson, University of Missouri-Rolla and Drs. Geraldo M. Sigaud and Eduardo C. Montenegro of Pontificia University of Rio de Janeiro in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in an international study on the dynamics of ionizing collisions. This collaborative research project combines the theoretical expertise of Dr. Olson and the experimental expertise and resources of Drs. Sigaud and Montenegro to develop a better understanding of the fundamental subtleties of electron-electron and electron-ion interactions in fast heavy particle collisions. They will develop momentum spectroscopy techniques that are needed to understand the relative importance of interactions in atomic collision studies. The results of this research will allow the interpretation of very difficult charge exchange measurements and increase our understanding of many collision processes in nature, such as energy deposition processes in biological tissue, in health-related applications, in fusion energy development and in material science applications doc10325 none The objective of this project is to gain access to the bulk of microbial biodiversity by developing approaches to cultivate presently uncultivable microorganisms. Uncultivable microorganisms make up 99% of all species from most environments sampled, and the riddle of uncultivable microorganisms has been recently recognized as the main challenge for basic and applied research in microbiology by the American Society for Microbiology. We propose an approach that is radically different from those traditionally employed for culturing microorganisms from environmental samples. We propose to culture the microorganisms in their natural habitat. We have designed a growth chamber that is separated from the environment by membranes that prevent cell migration and thus maintain purity of the inner space and yet enable full chemical contact between the inner space and the outside environment. Microorganisms incubated in the natural environment as we propose will be exposed to the complete suit of the outside environmental conditions and components. Our simulation of the natural environment may result in cultivation of a wider range of organisms, including those that have previously been considered as uncultivable . Once we achieve microbial growth in the field-incubated growth chamber, we will use an array of molecular techniques to identify and verify the previously uncultivable component among the grown colonies. Even if our approach allows us to grow just a few novel isolates, this project, by the virtue of proving our concept, may become an important milestone toward solving one of the major problems of microbial ecology doc10326 none The major objectives of this proposal are concerned with the study of nonlinear parabolic equations related to degenerate and singular diffusion, in connection with more complex problems of differential geometry, including the Gauss curvature flow and the Ricci flow and with physical applications such as diffusion in porous media and thin liquid film dynamics. One specific area which will be investigated concerns with the regularity and geometry of interfaces in degenerate diffusion: this long term project which was initiated in , has the objective of determining the connection between the geometry and regularity of the interfaces in degenerate diffusion. Another specific area of the main objectives concerns the study fast and super-diffusive nonlinear parabolic problems: this project has the objective of studying several new important phenomena related to the well-posedness and vanishing profile of solutions to singular diffusion equations arising in physical applications and differential geometry. In particular, it involves the study of the vanishing profile of the maximal solutions to the Ricci flow and the geometric implications of these results. The non-linear equations to be studied under this proposal form the basic concepts of many applications which deem to be important to technology and the society at large. The purification of materials, from chemicals to petroleum and even water, is often achieved by diffusion through filters. The purification filters are the porous media described in the proposal. Thin film dynamics and the Van der Waals forces operating between thin layers are described by singular quasilinear equations of super-fast diffusion. The dynamics of population growth, polymer chain growth, including cross linking and high rate growth of biomolecules, are also non-linear phenomena amiable to our basic studies. The interesting problem of the expanding universe and other cosmological phenomena seem to be governed by nonlinear dynamics, which in certain cases are applications of the more complex problems described here doc10327 none Iskander With this proposal the PI s respectfully request NSF support to develop a detailed, accurate, and computationally efficient propagation model for wireless communications in micro- and pico-cell systems. A new 3D model [or alternatively a 2D model with advanced calculation capabilities such as the vertical-plane-launch (VPL) technique] will be developed based on integrating three new and innovative approaches to improve calculation accuracy and increase the computational efficiency. This includes the use of the following: 1. A new unstructured triangular grid ray tracing method (TGRM) to provide significant savings in computational time when modeling outdoor regions. Preliminary results show that CPU time for the TGRM method is approximately 30% of that of the visibility ray tracing. 2. A space division procedure based on a uniform rectangular grid method (URGM) for indoor regions and assuming that the reflection transmission surfaces coincide with the grid lines. Preliminary results show that the CPU time for the proposed uniform grid method for indoor propagation regions is approximately 14% of that of the visibility ray tracing method. 3. An FDTD approach to calculate reflection (F ) and transmission (F ) coefficients of composite walls and incorporate these coefficients in the overall ray tracing code. This is important for short range signal prediction where average or effective values of materials properties of walls may provide inaccurate predictions. The multigrid Finite Difference Time Domain (multigrid FDTD) code will also be used to calculate diffraction coefficients from indoor and outdoor objects that are difficult to model analytically. Diffraction coefficient results will be incorporated with a 3D ray tracing code that implements the proposed procedures described above. Diffraction coefficients will be included as part of the program in the form of a database and look-up tables. 4. The development of the 3D version of the proposed ray tracing code will be based on using pyramidal or tetrahedral cells in the TGRM procedure, and solid rectangular cells in the URGM method. The proposed methods do not involve search algorithms and hence significant improvement in the computational efficiency is expected. The overall results from the developed new propagation model will be validated experimentally on scaled models in the 60 x40 x23 indoor antenna range available at the University of Utah. Scaled models will be carefully selected so as to present physical structures of interest, on the one hand, and an object that can be used as a building block towards the development of a fully understandable and physics-based propagation model, on the other. With the available experimental facilities (HP up to 40 GHz), it will be possible to use scale factors as large as 20 to model realistic structures at the higher frequencies (2GHz) presently being used in terrestrial wireless communication systems. In addition to the development of the deterministic EM-based propagation model, the PI s propose to use the calculated EM power distribution pattern to determine statistical parameters that may be used in the simulation of wireless communications systems. This includes calculations of coverage, delay spread, bit error rate, and angle of arrival. The project will involve two graduate students to work on the simulation part of the project, and one additional graduate student together with a team of undergraduate senior students to work on building the scaled models and conducting the experimental verification part of the project doc10328 none Solecki studies possible applications of descriptive set theory to indecomposable continua and to ideals of closed sets. The first part of the project is concerned with studying the composant equivalence relation on indecomposable continua using techniques and notions developed in the study of Borel equivalence relations. Solecki builds on his prior work on indecomposable continua. He primarily investigates the question whether on a comeager subset of an indecomposable continuum the composant equivalence relation is Borel isomorphic to one of two special Borel equivalence relations via an isomorphism preserving meager sets. The affirmative answer to this question would solve an old problem of Kuratowski and even partial results for special indecomposable continua would sharpen several theorems from the literature. In the second part of the project, Solecki studies ideals of closed subsets of a Polish space. He investigates a certain very concrete representation of simply definable ideals of compact sets. This is connected with several open problems in this area of mathematics. Additionally, he continues his study of the ideal of Haar null subsets of a Polish group. Particular aims here are to develop the theory for all non-abelian Polish groups (the theory works fine for the class of Polish groups with invariant metrics) and to fully understand the connection between Haar null sets in infinite products of locally compact groups and amenability of the factor groups. One of the themes of Solecki s project is the investigation of indecomposable continua. These are fascinating geometrical objects whose intricate topological properties attracted interest of mathematicians since the beginning of the (last) century. However, only quite recently it was realized how ubiquitous such continua are and how important a role they play in various contexts in dynamical systems and topology. There is an old conjecture, due to Kuratowski, which is still unresolved and whose confirmation would completely reveal the finer structure of indecomposable continua. Solecki works on particularly important instances of this hypothesis and other problems related to it. Another theme of Solecki s project is the study of certain notions of smallness. These are important in various branches of mathematics to measure the size of sets under consideration. The starting point here is his observation that a vast class of such families of small sets admit surprising and very concrete type of representations. The possibility of representing a family of small sets in this fashion has deep implications for the structure of such families and, if realized, answers some old questions regarding this structure. Solecki studies the extent to which such representations can be established, interconnections between these type of representations and properties of notions of smallness, and other problems related to notions of smallness doc10329 none Iskander The PI requests NSF funding of the first Wireless Grants Review Workshop to be held on February 20-21, at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC. The main objective of this workshop is to help establish closer ties among the wireless communications researchers at NSF and to facilitate a forum for exchanging ideas, discussing progress, minimizing duplication, and ultimately helping build and maintain a stronger research program in this area at NSF. The workshop is also expected to help NSF learn of outcomes from ongoing research projects, highlight and display significant progress to communities at large, and also identify and focus future funding on promising technologies in this fast-growing area of research doc10330 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor George A. Olah, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Southern California, is studying protolytically activated superelectrophiles and their chemistry. This includes the investigation of superacid catalyzed carbonylation of alkanes and cycloalkanes with protolytically activated formyl cation [HCO+...HA or, in the limiting case, HCOH(2+)] as the de facto formylating agent in both liquid and solid superacid systems. Superelectrophilic nitrations with activated nitronium ion reagents [NO2H(2+)], nitrosations with NOH(2+) equivalents, and acylations with protioacyl dications [RCOH(2+)] will be investigated. The chemistry of fluorine-substituted allyl cations and polyallyl cations, several elusive azo onium dications, including bisdiazonium dication [N4(2+)] and diazo acyl cation [N2CO(2+)], and a number of silylated onium ions, including silylated CO, CO2, COS, CS2, N2O, O2, and O3, will also be explored. Numerous chemical transformations are effected by acids. Extremely potent acids have been discovered which can react with compounds which are only very weakly basic, and through such reactions of superacids , extremely reactive species may be generated. Through the preparation and study of such species, one may gain insight into the mechanisms by which organic molecules react and develop the ability to effect chemical transformations of otherwise unreactive molecules, including petrochemical feedstocks. Professor George A. Olah, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Southern California, is carrying out fundamental studies of superacid-activated molecules and their reactions with the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program doc10331 none Prop # PI Russell McDuff This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessels Thompson and Barnes operated by the University of Washington and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Russell McDuff is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire tension meter system, Inmarsat B, Oil Spill Boom, and a precision Autopilot System doc10332 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Analysis of Some Nonlinear Problems in Electromagnetic Fields Hong-Ming Yin This project investigates several nonlinear problems arising from the theory of electromagnetic fields and heat conduction. The first problem area concerns investigation of induction heating processes. The mathematical model consists of nonlinear Maxwell s equations coupled with a nonlinear heat equation. The objective is to analyze whether or not thermal runaway (blowup) happens and how to prevent it if it does occur during a heating process. More complicated free boundary problems, modeling phase change during the heating process, are also under study. The second problem area concerns investigation of a p-Laplacian type of evolution system that models the classical Bean s critical-state model in the superconductivity theory. The effort focuses on understanding how the phase change takes place between normal and superconducting states. This project investigates mathematical models of heat flow in situations that involve electromagnetic fields. These models are important for many industrial applications. The results of this work will lead to a better understanding the complicated dynamics of electromagnetic fields and will provide explanations for certain experimental phenomena. In addition, this investigation will produce mathematical results of general interest for the study of Maxwell s equations and nonlinear heat conduction doc10333 none Partial support for participant costs associated with the VIIth Cyanobacterial Workshop, is being provided. Funds are being used to cover: a portion of the expenses for graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, assistant professors who will run the program as speakers and session chairs; a foreign keynote speaker; two invited speakers and up to four senior scientists in financial need. The Workshop is being held at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, CA with the title A Signal Event and the theme of signal transduction. The Keynote Address will be given by Dr Nicole Tandeau de Marsac, the Head of the Unite de Physiologie Microbienne, Institut Pasteur, Paris, France. The address will focus on aspects of protein phosphorylation and its role in signaling processes. The importance of signal transduction pathways -as becoming realized through the complete genome analysis of more than five different cyanobacteria -will be highlighted throughout the sessions. A session on genomics will discuss data derived from recent completion of the genomes of Nostoc punctiforme ATCC -the largest microbial genome sequenced to date -and Anabaena sp.PCC . Further sessions will emphasize recent developments in nitrogen fixation, differentiation, photosynthesis and cyanobacterial physiology and molecular ecology doc10334 none National Academy of Sciences T.H. Moss Impact of Information Technology on the Future of the Research University This is a workshop proposal to consider research university responses to new challenges and opportunities presented by information technology with a focus on the need for future policies to ensure the evolving research enterprise will be capable of addressing national needs. The results of the workshop will be broadly disseminated. Participants include members of diverse constituencies: early faculty adopters in innovative uses of information technology, intellectual and administrative university leaders, and representatives of government and the private sector doc10335 none of queuing systems often involves a Skorokhod problem formulation to account for the changes to systems dynamics when some of the queues become empty. A major goal of the project is to develop this approach for a variety of examples (e.g. different network structures and cost criteria) in order to discern the mathematical structure of solutions to the HJI, the form of the optimal policies themselves, and how the unique features of the Skorokhod problem formulation can be treated in this approach. Using the understanding of solutions to the HJI gained through these case studies, numerical methods are developed to analyze larger and more complex examples. The mathematical tools produced will contribute to the theory of robust control in general, to problems involving Skorokhod dynamics in particular, and will introduce robust control techniques to the area of traffic control. The flow of traffic through a network, whether vehicles on a system of intersecting roads, products in a multistage manufacturing process, or packets of information in an electronic network, is an increasingly important aspect of our commercial and public services infrastructure. In the familiar example of vehicles on a system of roads the network consists of several intersections connected by roads of various sizes. The different streams of traffic that meet at an intersection must take turns or share the limited capacity of the intersection. The efficiency of the network depends on the strategy which controls the traffic streams that are allowed to use the various intersections at each moment of time. (In the most familiar vehicular setting this simply means the scheme which governs the sequence and timing of traffic lights.) Now that sensors are available to detect the number of vehicles waiting or traveling on each of the roads in a network, the design intelligent signal light control strategies to manage the network with optimal efficiency is a natural goal. The same general issue of service allocation strategy is present in manufacturing or communication systems, although the terminology and specific features of the networks are different in those settings. Traffic and network engineers have developed various ways to study the performance of network service control strategies experimentally and to adjust those strategies to current network conditions in an adaptive way. However, with only a few exceptions, past research has not developed systematic tools to identify service control strategies whose performance is optimal in a precise mathematical sense. This project develops mathematical ideas and tools for this purpose. The new understanding and mathematical techniques which result should be a valuable contribution to the management and design of high performance networks doc10336 none Rubinstein This award supports theoretical and computational research on charged polymer adsorption at surfaces and interfaces. Research will focus on hydrophilic and hydrophobic polyelectrolytes. The PI will develop an analytical model of adsorption of hydrophilic polyelectrolytes in the presence of short-range and long-range interactions between polymers and surfaces. De Gennes self-similar carpet model of short-range adsorption of uncharged polymers will be combined with a model of long-range adsorption of polyelectrolytes to oppositely charged surfaces. Another model will be developed to study hydrophobic polyelectrolyte adsorption in the presence of both short-range and long-range interactions. The properties of hydrophobic polyelectrolytes in solution will be studied in more detail to enable the extension of adsorption models to hydrophobic polyelectrolytes. The interplay of short-range attraction and long-range (electrostatic) repulsion leads to a necklace conformation of hydrophobic polyelectrolytes. Computer simulations and scattering experiments have recently confirmed the main features of the necklace model of hydrophobic polyelectrolytes. The remaining open questions important for the application of the model to the adsorption of hydrophobic polyelectrolytes will be investigated using a combination of analytical calculations and computer simulations. The resulting model of hydrophobic polyelectrolyte solutions will be combined with the adsorption model of hydrophilic polyelectrolytes into an adsorption model of hydrophobic polyelectrolytes. The kinetic theory of polyelectrolyte adsorption at charged surfaces will be developed using de Gennes two-step approach in the framework of Rouze-Zimm model for unentangled adsorbed layers and of tube models for entangled layers. A wide range of educational activities spanning K-12 outreach to the education of postdoctoral research associates are supported by this grant. This award also provides partial support of the preparation of a polymer physics textbook. %%% This award supports theoretical and computational research that contributes toward the development of a complete molecular picture of the adsorption of charged polymers on charged surfaces. Adsorption of charged polymers is one of the least understood areas of polymer physics. The technological importance of charged polymers as rheology modifiers, dispersing aids, stabilizers, and binders is due to their unique properties both in solutions and near surfaces. An application in the area of nanoscale science and engineering is multilayer formation via layer-by-layer deposition of oppositely charged polyelectrolytes, leading to novel methods of nanodevice fabrication. A better understanding of charged polymers will also impact molecular biophysics because many biopolymers, such as DNA and proteins, are charged, and electrostatics plays a significant role in their properties and function. The award will also support a wide range of educational activities including K-12 outreach and education in polymer physics and chemistry at the undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels. Some of the research will be included in the Polymer Physical Chemistry course sequence at UNC and in a textbook that is in preparation doc10337 none Limit Theorems and Statistical Inference for Ergodic Processes A major goal of the project is to develop a new approach to the change point problem in which the abrupt change of the latter is replaced by an arbitrary monotonic change. The new procedure uses a penalized likelihood ratio statistic for testing equality of means against a non-decreasing trend, derived for independent normal observation errors. The properties of the test can be studied in the more general context of dependent, but stationary and ergodic errors. Applications of such procedures should be evident in the analysis of climate changes results from cataclysmic events or legal intervention, such as the required reduction on vehicle emissions. Current work by the principal investigator and students has determined the asymptotic null distribution of the test statistic for stationary ergodic errors under modest conditions, thus allowing application to historical data sets, like weather data. Remaining questions include developing a sequential analogue for applications to quality control, alternative penalizations, and estimating a variance parameter after an isotonic regression. A second major goal of the project is to develop asymptotic distribution theory in a context that is applicable to the first. The central limit theorem will be studied for additive functionals of a Markov chain with special attention to chains in which the current state is a function of the previous state and an independent variable. Many linear and non-linear time series models are of this form. Conditions for the existence of a stationary distribution have been widely studied for such processes, but there is much less work on central limit theory for their additive functionals. The principal investigator plans to develop central limit theory in this context. Previous work has shown that additive functionals can be written as a martingale plus a remainder term of smaller order in many cases, and then asymptotic normality can be deduced from the martingale central limit theorem. This approach does not require Harris recurrence or other strong forms of asymptotic independence. It will be developed, and statistical applications explored, especially applications to the modified change point problem. Other statistical applications include setting approximate confidence intervals. In some cases, approximate confidence intervals may be obtained from a multivariate central limit theorem. For others, it is necessary to develop tightness of empirical processes, and this question will be studied. In highly structured models, it is possible to go beyond asymptotic normality to (Edgeworth like) asymptotic expansions from which corrected confidence intervals can be formed, intervals whose actual coverage probability converges to the nominal value at a fast rate. A third major objective of project is to develop such expansions. Previous work by the principal investigator, co-workers, and students has developed expansions of this nature for adaptively designed linear models and auto regressive processes. This work will be extended to processes whose finite dimensional distributions form exponential families, a large class of processes that includes Markov Chains and many semi-Markov processes doc10338 none This proposal requests funding for carrying out partial support for young physicists to attend a six-day lecture workshop at Vanderbilt University on subjects related to cosmology astrophysics, nuclear, and particle physics. The subjects raised are related to each other and will be addressed by experts in their respective fields doc10339 none The project focuses on sensing, and proposes to develop new ways for fast shape and appearance sensing, 3D tracking, recognition, and compression. The sensing approach proposed is based on dynamic active triangulation, with structured light illumination swept across the scene., allowing 100-200 range maps per second doc10340 none The proposed research considers several problems in the higher-order asymptotic theory of likelihood-based inference. Many higher-order approximations apply only to the case in which the underlying data have a continuous distribution. The proposed research considers the extension of these results to the case in which the underlying data have a lattice distribution. A second aspect of the research is the development of methods for models with a hierarchical structure. Likelihood methods are generally derived under the assumption that the likelihood function is correctly specified. Of course, in practice, the probability models used are often only an approximation to the true, but unknown, models. Hence, the proposed research considers the development of methods that are based on more limited assumptions, such as moment conditions. Statistical methods based on the likelihood function play a central role in statistical theory and methodology. Many of these methods are based on approximations which may have questionable accuracy in certain cases. The proposed research develops methods of approximation with generally higher accuracy. The result is statistical methods that offer an improvement over those currently available doc10341 none Di Ventra This Nanoscale Exploratory Research award, which results from the Nanoscale Science and Engineering solicitation (NSF 00-119), supports theoretical research on shot noise in nanoscale conductors. The PI will develop theoretical and computational tools that use the wavefunctions of density functional theory-based calculations for molecular devices in an external bias to calculate current flow and current fluctuations. These tools would be applied to study shot noise in nanoscale conductors composed of atomic and molecular chains with the further aim to innovate new designs for reduced noise electronic devices with dimensions on the nanoscale. The proposal has an additional educational component that aims to incorporate the research approach into the graduate Computational Physics course. %%% This Nanoscale Exploratory Research award, which results from the Nanoscale Science and Engineering solicitation, supports theoretical research on shot noise in nanoscale conductors. The PI will develop theoretical tools based on modern electronic structure methods to describe the flow of electric current in molecular devices. A particular focus of the research is to calculate self consistently electronic currents and current fluctuations in these nanoscale devices. The PI aims to use these tools to innovate new designs for reduced noise electronic devices with dimensions on the nanoscale. The proposal has an additional educational component that aims to incorporate the research approach into the graduate Computational Physics course doc10342 none for NSF Proposal DMS - The Topology of Open Manifolds with Nonnegative Ricci Curvature Christina Sormani Dr. Sormani proposes to study the topology of complete manifolds with nonnegative Ricci curvature and their limit spaces. In particular she plans to investigate various approaches to Milnor s conjecture that the fundamental group of an open manifold with nonnegative Ricci curvature is finitely generated. She also plans to study the higher dimensional homology of these spaces. Techniques which will be employed involve Gromov-Hausdorff limits, the almost rigidity theory of Cheeger-Colding, and Busemann functions. In particular, the properness of Busemann functions on these manifolds will be investigated. It should be noted that there are direct applications of this project to the theory of topological censorship in general relativity. The condition of nonnegative Ricci curvature on space-time is called the null energy condition and it arises in the Einstein equation. Roughly speaking, Dr. Sormani proposes to study the existence and prevalence of holes in a space which has no boundary, extends to infinity and has a condition imposed upon the way in which it can bend. The universe we live in is such a space. Simpler examples are cylinders (i.e. tubes) and paraboloids (i.e. bowls). The cylinder has a hole but the paraboloid does not. The spaces studied in this project are of arbitrary dimension and so the holes come in various dimensions as well. The universe is one such higher dimensional space and its holes, which may or may not exist, are often called wormholes. By furthering our understanding of this geometric problem, it is hoped that we will further our understanding of the universe doc10343 none Dey, Tamal K. Ohio State University CISE Postdoctoral Associates in Experimental Computer Science: Sampling Based Geometric Modeling Many application domains ranging from engineering to medicine require the computer modeling of physical objects. Laser range scanners and other modern scanning devices are capable of sampling large numbers of points on the surface of a physical object. Computing a model of an object, often referred to as surface reconstruction, has received wide attention in recent years. In the proposed postdoctoral training and research project, the problem of how to perform surface reconstruction of a physical object from a set of sampled points will be further studied. Specifically, a postdoctoral associate will focus on extending the cocone algorithm to handle large, noisy, and undersampled sets of data points. The associate s research will contribute to building a software library that provides the reconstruction functionality needed to meet the widespread demands of a range of users across disciplines doc10344 none With support of this planning grant, Russell Donnelly, Professor of Physics and Director of the Cryogenic Helium Turbulence Laboratory at the University of Oregon, Eugene, is developing a four-part television series on low-temperature physics. Based on Tom Shachtman s book of the same title, the series will explore the field s key concepts, the significant individuals and events in its history, its impact on society through such technologies as air conditioning, refrigeration and liquefied gases, and its promise for the future. Shachtman will be the principal writer for the project, and Donnelly and Shachtman will work closely with television producers Meredith Burch and Steve Lyons, formerly a producer for NOVA. Barbara Flagg will conduct front-end evaluation during the planning phase. Activities to be conducted during the planning phase include: Preliminary evaluation of audience knowledge Consultations and meetings with advisors Development of detailed content outlines for the four programs Exploration of means to enhance the impact of the project through ancillary materials and outreach Assessment will include an investigation of the potential for adapting the content to other media such as design of a traveling exhibit, development of a Spanish-language radio version, production of mini-films for use on children s cable television, and publication of specialized print media doc10345 none Professor Theodore Cohen in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his research on lithium-ene cyclizations. The project will investigate the scope and stereoselectivity of these ring-forming reactions; in addition, enolate-directed lithiations and the cyclopolymerization of dienes via titanium-ene intermediates will be studied. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Theodore Cohen is developing new, efficient methods for forming cyclic organic compounds. These new methods for synthesizing cyclic compounds are most likely to find applications in the pharmaceutical and fine chemical industries. New techniques for preparing polymers consisting of a series of rings in an ordered, controlled manner are also being investigated. Variation of the polymerization procedures should result in new materials with novel physical properties doc10346 none Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and muon spin rotation (muSR) techniques will be used to study electronic structure, magnetism, and superconductivity in strongly correlated electron metals and alloys. The sensitivity of NMR and muSR to magnetism on the atomic scale makes these techniques ideal tools to probe local effects of strong electron correlation. Particular attention will be paid to the crucial role of structural disorder in the non-Fermi-liquid (NFL) behavior of many heavy-fermion systems. NMR and muSR spectra and spin-lattice relaxation rates will probe inhomogeneous paramagnetism and glassy low-frequency spin fluctuations in UCu5-xPdx and other NFL systems. 27Al NMR and muSR spectra relaxation rates in Ce1-xLaxAl system will be examined for evidence whether, as recently claimed, these alloys exhibit an anisotropic Kondo effect. A thorough examination of superconductivity and magnetism will be carried out in the newly-discovered class of CenTIn3n+2 heavy-fermion materials, which exhibit a wide variety of anomalous magnetic and superconducting behavior. Other projects include muSR studies of cuprate and maganite transition metal oxides, and quantum critical behavior in MnSi under pressure. Graduate students in this program will be bell prepared for research teaching careers in both basic and applied areas. Understanding effects of correlations between electrons on magnetism and conduction in solids remains an important unsolved problem in condensed matter physics, with practical consequences for technology in several areas of materials science. This research uses magnetic resonance techniques as probes of correlated-electron behavior at the atomic level. In magnetic resonance, the magnetism of spin probes (e. g. nuclei as nuclear magnetic resonance) is used to spy on the local magnetic environment of the probes, which observe but do not seriously perturb their surroundings. This work will lead to better understanding of the behavior of the so-called heavy-electron metals, in which electrons behave as if they were hundreds or even thousands of times more massive than free electrons. It will be carried out in collaboration with researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and with research trips abroad (Leiden University, ETH Zurich, TU Munich, TRIUMF, Vancouver, and Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland). Graduate students in this program will there for gain valuable insight into research at the national and international level, and will be well prepared for research teaching careers in both basic and applied condensed matter physics and materials research doc10347 none Interest in the solid state sciences has undergone explosive growth in recent years due to the broadly based recognition of the technological importance and scientific challenges involved in the discovery and study of new materials, and due to the influx of scientists from other disciplines into various areas of materials research and development. The Electron Distribution & Chemical Bonding Gordon Research Conference will explore the nature of chemical bonding as the glue that holds atoms together and also gives materials most of their properties. The goal of the conference is to facilitate international collaborations and information exchange across a broad spectrum of researchers with interests in solid state science and materials research and development. The NSF funds will be used to support the attendance of graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and junior faculty. %%% The materials research and development community continues to have direct impact on technological advances of high significance to society by designing, synthesizing and characterizing new materials such as magnetic, electronic, and biomolecular materials doc10348 none Howard University seeks funding for a three-year Teacher Retention and Renewal project for 180 middle school and high school teachers in Washington, DC, public schools. The project will develop teacher leaders with advanced skills and understanding in Science, Mathematics and Technology (SMT) education content and pedagogy who will help strengthen ongoing professional development in schools through the mentoring of other training courses for teachers in life science, earth science, biology, chemistry and physics. Scientists and science educators will teach the courses. The courses will be grounded in constructivist learning theory and the activities will be interdisciplinary and inquiry-based. The teachers will receive graduate credit doc10349 none This action provides support for U.S. participation in the tsunami symposium to be held in Nice, France, March . This symposium is a part of the Natural Hazards program within the 26th General Assembly of the European Geophysical Society. It will present the state-of-the-art as regards tsunami generation, propagation and impact along coastlines, as well as discuss the tools needed to assess and mitigate the tsunami hazard. The participants supported by this grant include key researchers and junior members of the U.S. tsunami community; their presence at this meeting is critical for future cooperative research efforts. The symposium topics include contributions from geophysics, geology, numerical modeling, social and economical sciences, urban planning, and warning systems. Tsunami research has become increasingly important and international in its focus. Strong international cooperation is necessary since tsunamis can affect not only the region near the source but also distant regions through propagation across oceans. There were eleven major tsunami disasters around the world during the last decade, starting with the Nicaragua tsunami. A spectrum of challenging tsunami-related research will be presented and discussed at this symposium; it is expected that collaborative projects in many of these topics will be initiated by the participants doc10350 none Helmut H. Hofer The main tool for most of the proposed projects is a particularly adapted theory of holomorphic curves, which has been developed by Dr. Hofer and his co-workers in recent years. The fact, that there is such a close, but completely unexpected, relationship between some important class of dynamical systems and a suitable theory of holomorphic curves has deep implications. Immediately it makes it, in principle, feasible to relate questions about large classes of dynamical systems to recent mathematical theories like quantum cohomology, Gromov-Witten invariants, and in low dimensions even to Seiberg-Witten invariants. One of the main goals of this project will be the development of a mathematical machinery for constructing global surfaces of section for three-dimensional Reeb flows and generalizations thereof. In practice this means that the study of certain three-dimensional dynamical system can effectively be reduced to two dimensions. The other goal is the development of a symplectic field theory. Particular cases of such a theory are Gromov-Witten invariants and Floer Homology. Many physical systems like the flow of an incompressible ideal fluid, the movement of a satellite under the gravitational forces of celestial bodies, or the movement of charged particles in a magnetic field, to name a few, are examples of so called dynamical systems. The mathematical theory of dynamical systems provides tools to understand their complex behavior and allows to make predictions. The particular examples mentioned above are of so-called Hamiltonian nature. For such systems, beginning with the work of Lagrange and Hamilton, geometric tools have been developed leading to the modern theory of contact and symplectic geometry. These geometries play a central role in connecting mathematical areas like dynamical systems, algebraic geometry and smooth topology. This makes it possible to employ powerful tools from different mathematical areas in the study of important classes of dynamical systems and also to use ideas from dynamical systems to study important intrinsic questions in other fields by new methods doc10351 none The funding is for the workshop Pathways to the Future , to be held August 10-11, , in New York, NY. The workshop provides a venue for approximately 20 young female researchers in probability and statistics to interact with each other and with approximately 5 invited established researchers. The young researchers must have received their Ph.D. within the five years prior to the workshop, and will give a short presentation of their research. All participants must also have the intention to attend the Joint Statistical Meetings that will be held August 11-15, , in New York, NY doc10352 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: James Dumesic Institution: University of Wisconsin The objective of this proposal is to convert carbohydrate-derived chemicals for the production of commodity chemicals. Lactic acid produced from the fermentation of carbohydrates may be further processed for the production of commodity chemicals such as biodegradable polymers, 1,2-propanediol, ethyl lactate, acrylic acid, and acrylates. The combination of fermentation processes and selective catalytic processes provides a clean route for the production of these commodity chemicals from renewable carbohydrate feedstocks instead of from non-renewable petroleum sources. In previous work copper-based catalyst systems exhibited 100% conversion of lactic acid with high selectivity to the desired 1,2 propanediol. Fundamental studies of the interactions of oxygenated hydrocarbons (hydroxy acids, organic acids, alcohols, and aldehydes) over copper-based materials and over transition-metal-based materials will be conducted. The plan is to combine microcalorimetric measurements, reaction kinetics studies, spectroscopic investigations, and density functional theory calculations to elucidate pathways for reactions of light oxygenated compounds over supported metal catalysts. Overall, this work has the potential to enhance the commercialization of chemicals produced from renewable biological sources doc10353 none Modeling and Development of Gradient Based Smart Polymer Sensors and Actuators Gregory Washington, PI Ohio State University Proposal # The goal of this study is to develop a novel gradient-based sensor for spatial measurement of distributed systems. The sensors and actuators in this study are developed from polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF). Previous studies have used spatial aperture shading techniques (spatially varying electrodes to achieve a particular performance function) to measure a myriad of distributed systems. A major limitation of the spatial aperture shading techniques was that the apertures have a heavy dependence on 1-dimensional variation for most cases. In this study spatial gradient polarization and aperture shading techniques are used to develop the next generation of sensors. In spatial polarization the material is polarized in a manner such that its piezoelectric constant is allowed to vary in controlled manner. Specifically, the objectives of this research are to: (1) Develop the analytical basis for spatial gradient polarization. Inherent in this part of the study is the development of techniques for analytically calculating weighting functions for various structural configurations. (2) Develop the experimental hardware and facilities necessary for making spatially polarized sensors and actuators. (3) Develop control techniques necessary for the production of user defined film actuators and sensors. (4) Develop a non-contact measurement technique for deflection verification. The research goals are accomplished by applying differential calculus, the principles of mechanics, and piezoelectric polymer modeling to a given sensor system. The experimental hardware that will be developed for polarizing the films consist of a corona charging system with an appropriate stretch and drive mechanism for correct placement and rastering of the film. A wide-angle stereo-photogrammetry system similar to those used in particle tracking applications will be modified to accurately measure the location of the distributed system when actuated. The sensors market is an $18 billion market and growing. These new sensors can be utilized in a host of applications including Automotive, Biomedical sensors, Aerospace Structural, and Impact sensors in Military applications, like sonar sensing equipment and so on. In addition, there is a possibility that this novel technology can be applied directly to piezoceramic actuators as well doc10354 none Award: Principal Investigator: Tao Li Essential laminations and immersed essential surfaces are two important objects in 3-manifolds. They generalize embedded incompressible surfaces, and are remarkably useful in obtaining topological and geometric information of 3-manifolds. The main goal of this project is to explore the relationships between the topology of 3-manifolds and these two objects. The tools that the investigator will use include branched surfaces and immersed branched surfaces that have been proved to be extremely useful in the investigator s previous work. The investigator intends to continue his research on essential laminations and immersed surfaces with the following goals. (1) To construct essential laminations in 3-manifolds obtained from Dehn surgery on hyperbolic knots. The techniques to be developed in this research could potentially have great impact on some famous conjectures in knot theory, e.g., Property P for knots and the cabling conjecture. (2) To find an algorithm to decide whether a 3-manifold is a Seifert fiber space. The investigator intends to use immersed branched surfaces and normal surface theory to find a practical algorithm. (3) To show that two homotopy equivalent 3-manifolds, which contain essential laminations, are homeomorphic. (4) To find an algorithm to decide whether a 3-manifold contains an essential lamination. Three-manifolds are objects modeled on the 3-dimensional space that we are living in. These objects can be found in many other sciences, such as physics, biology, and chemistry. A geometric way of studying 3-manifolds, which is extremely fruitful, is to view a 3-manifold as a collection of 3-dimensional pieces glued together along 2-dimensional surfaces. The investigator plans to study the structure of 3-manifolds using such 2-dimensional surfaces, which are called essential laminations and immersed essential surfaces. The research in this project is related to knot theory, which has helped to understand the structure of DNA; it is also related to hyperbolic geometry, which has been used by physicists to understand the universe doc10355 none Ankem This project is aimed at new understanding into low temperature creep of two-phase titanium alloys that find applications in various technologies including energy, aerospace, marine, chemical industries, consumer goods and bio-medical implants. Recent observations on the creep behavior of alpha titanium at ambient temperature by twinning led to the need for a more complete and fundamental modeling for predicting the integrity of these structures. The main goals of this study are: (1) to determine the activation energies for creep mechanisms in alpha, alpha-beta and beta titanium alloys in the low temperature range of 298- 458K, (2) to model the creep behavior of these alloys including Finite Element Modeling (FEM), (3) to compare FEM predicted creep curves and strain distributions with experimental values, and (4) to recommend optimal chemistry and microstructures of Ti alloys for improved low temperature creep resistance. To reach these goals, two different alloy classes (Ti-Mn and Ti-V) are selected for deformation tests at low temperatures combined with SEM and TEM for electron lithography, surface deformation studies and microstructure characterization such as dislocation densities and crystal structure analyses. Activation energies are determined and the creep processes are modeled from the creep tests data. The creep constants of the alpha and beta phases are used to model the creep behavior of two-phase alpha-beta Ti alloys by FEM using ANSYS computer program. The FEM modeling of creep of alpha-beta alloys gives a predictive capability in terms of the alpha and beta phases present and their morphologies. The results of the study are directly applicable for other similar systems such as zirconium and magnesium alloys that find application in energy and transportation sectors. In addition, the results related to the FEM modeling are applicable to any two-phase or composite materials. %%% The research develops new understanding of the low temperature creep mechanisms and the results are applicable for designing new titanium alloys and in optimizing the microstructures of existing alloys for improved creep performance. The research will also help in predicting component performance. Titanium alloys have attractive engineering properties including high strength to weight ratio, high fracture toughness, good high temperature strength, excellent corrosion resistance and bio- compatibility. Due to these properties, they find applications in various areas including energy, aerospace, marine, chemical industries, consumer goods and bio-medical implants. In some of these applications at low temperatures such as ambient temperature, loads are applied on the components for extended periods of time where creep becomes an important property. In this regard, it was recently shown that titanium alloys can creep at 95% yield stress at ambient temperature, but the activation energies for creep which can explain why and how creep occurs are not known. In addition, there are no simple models available to predict the creep behavior of two-phase materials from the knowledge of the creep behavior of individual phases, their morphology and volume fractions. The main objectives of this investigation are: (1) Determine the activation energies of creep mechanisms in alpha, alpha-beta and beta titanium alloys in the low temperature range of 298- 458K, (2) Model the creep behavior of a, a-b and b Ti alloys including Finite Element Modeling of a-b Ti alloys, (3) Compare FEM predicted creep curves and strain distributions with experimental values, and (4) Recommend optimal chemistry and microstructures of Ti alloys for improved low temperature creep resistance. For these studies, three Ti-Mn alloys and three Ti-V alloys will be used as the model systems. Tensile tests will be conducted in the temperature range 298 -458 K and creep tests will be conducted in the temperature range 298 - 458 K and in the stress level ranging from 85 -100% YS. SEM and TEM will be employed for electron lithography, surface deformation studies and microstructure characterization such as dislocation densities and crystal structure analyses. From the creep tests data, activation energies will be determined and the creep processes will be modelled. The creep constants of the a and b phases will be used to model the creep behaviour of two-phase a-b Ti alloys by Finite Element Modelling using ANSYS computer program. It is expected that the proposal work can be completed in three years. A successful completion of this work will be of great technological importance, as it will have a significant effect in designing new titanium alloys and in optimizing the microstructures of existing alloys for improved creep performance. For example, determination of activation energies gives a clue as to which species, i.e. elements, present in the material are responsible for low temperature creep and, accordingly, new alloys can be designed for improved performance. The FEM modeling of creep of alpha-beta alloys gives a predictive capability in terms of the alpha and beta phases present and their morphologies. This will also help in designing and in predicting component performance. Even though this investigation uses titanium alloys as the model system, the outcomes of the studies related to activation energies are directly applicable for any other similar systems such as Zirconium alloys. Furthermore, in general, the results related to the FEM modeling would be applicable to any two-phase or composite materials. This work will be carried out by the PI, Prof. S. Ankem and two graduate students. The PI has extensive experience in physical and mechanical behavior of Ti alloys and FEM Modeling. The graduate students will be trained in the state of the art experimental techniques such as electron lithography for drawing fiducial lines, SEM and TEM techniques and application of computers in predicting material behavior doc10356 none Dr. Glascock will continue to operate an archaeometric center at the University of Missouri and employ the technique of neutron activation analysis to analyze the elemental composition of archaeological materials. This multi-elemental technique which allows the major, minor and trace elements of a material to be determined simultaneously and with considerable accuracy and precision. Of particular interest are potential analyses of ceramics, lithics, metal and bone. Through elemental analysis of archaeological materials, a number of significant kinds of questions can be addressed. NAA provides a taxonomic tool because it allows materials of similar composition to be grouped together. In some instances, it also permits the proveniencing of artifacts and thus may provide information about procurement practices, routes of trade and political boundaries. It may also improve understanding of ancient technologies and (through analysis of skeletal remains) give insight into prehistoric diet and nutrition. This project is particularly important because the Missouri laboratory is one of the very few which provide NAA service to archaeologists. It also plays an important role in training students and it maintains large data bases and is working actively to facilitate scientific access to them. Under this current award, Dr. Glascock will integrate high-resolution inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) with standard NAA procedures. He will develop calibration standards that will facilitate the integration of NAA and ICP-MS data. It is likely that within the coming years ICP-MS, because of its relative accessibility and more economic operating costs, will play an increasingly important role in archaeometric analysis and Dr. Glascock will work to provide standards for the archaeometric community. He will also explore the potential of solid-sample analysis via laser ablation and investigate new kinds of archaeometric studies such as slip and pigment analysis by laser ablation ICP-MS doc10357 none This project aims at greater understanding of dislocations in GaN. The approach involves generation of dislocations with known Burgers vectors and known character, and the study of how these dislocations propagate during thin film growth. Additionally, the project addresses how dislocation propagation is influenced by orientation of the growth surface, particularly during lateral epitaxial overgrowth (LEO). Electrical and optical properties of these dislocations will also be examined. Specially designed grain boundaries will consist of ordered arrays of dislocations which are self-aligning and self-stabilizing. Variation of misorientation angle will be used to give control over dislocation spacing and character of the dislocations while variation of the boundary plane will be used for Burger vector control. Having many aligned dislocations in a single specimen gives the benefit of meaningful statistical analysis. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. These studies will improve the fundamental understanding of defects in Gallium Nitride, which is a key material to advanced microelectronics and photonics. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area, and education outreach activities to promote diversity doc10358 none Shlyakhtenko Shlyakhtenko will study classes of operator algebras arising in connection with Voiculescu s free probability theory. The main emphasis of this research is placed on the study of operator-valued free random variables and operator algebras that they generate. Analysis of these von Neumann algebras is intimately tied with the goal of classification of free Araki-Woods factors, which are free probability analogs of ITPFI type III factors. Such analysis is also important for understanding of subfactors and automorphisms of amalgamated free product algebras. One of the goals of the present research is to develop free entropy-based techniques for dealing with operator-valued random variables. Free probability theory is a highly non-commutative parallel to basic probability theory. Matrix-valued random variables (such as random matrices) naturally fit in the non-commutative probability framework; the asymptotic behavior of large random matrices is well-modeled by matrix-valued free random variables. Applications are in mathematics to the theory of operator algebras, subfactors, ergodic theory, as well as the theory of random matrices, which have connections with certain physical models doc10359 none This proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF- . The long delay in recognizing the potentially key role of Fe in coastal marine systems has been in large part because of the complexity of microbial:Fe interactions in seawater. There still is no analytical method for determining biologically available Fe for either prokaryotic or eukaryotic phytoplankton. However, there is evidence that Fe availability to eukaryotic phytoplankton can be regulated by additions of the fungal siderophore desferrioxamine B (DFB) to coastal waters. The DFB-Fe complex not only is unavailable for uptake at significant rates, but also outcompetes the natural organic ligand classes in seawater for Fe. Measurement of DFB-Fe concentrations in a titration series should therefore provide a first order measure of the Fe supply to phytoplankton. This project will investigate the feasibility of miniaturizing a current bulk liquid membrane system that can actively isolate and concentrate 59Fe-DFB from aqueous solutions by constructing liposomes with the needed transport characteristics. The high surface area and optimal diffusional aspects of these nanodevices will enable efficient 59Fe-DFB accumulations at the extremely low dissolved Fe concentrations ( 1 nM) encountered in coastal waters. The transport characteristics of these nanodevices will be measured as a function of liposome compositions and fabrication conditions to optimize the active transport of 59Fe-DFB from a seawater matrix. If progress permits, the relationship between 59Fe accumulated by these nanodevices and cellular 59Fe uptake and growth of natural population cultures will be explored. The immediate goal of this exploratory project is to demonstrate the feasibility of developing nanoscale sensors for quantifying the supply of Fe to eukaryotic phytoplankton in coastal seawaters. The broader goal is to establish the viability of nanotechnology for sensing bioactive substrates in the marine realm doc10360 none Du This project is proposed to study the mixed alkali effect (MAE) in the corrosion behavior of Kyocera s SN282, a turbine-grade Si3N4 ceramic, and chemically vapor deposited Si3N4 in oxygen environments containing single alkali (sodium, cesium) and mixed alkali (sodium and cesium) elements. It aims to reveal the potential and establish the understanding of MAE in high-temperature corrosion retardation of Si3N4 ceramics. Questions that will be answered include: (1) Will the incorporation of Na and Cs in the oxide layer on Si3N4 be mutually retarded compared to a single alkali (Na or Cs) situation, and if so, what is the quantitative correlation? (2) How will the corrosion kinetics (rate and activation energy) and oxide characteristics (composition, phase, morphology, and structure) compare under mixed alkali and single alkali conditions? (3) Is MAE in corrosion a function of alkali ratio (e.g., [Na] [Cs]) in the oxide and in the environment? (4) Do corrosion minima exist at some alkali composition(s)? (5) How will MAE affect the corrosion mechanism? And (6) What are the effects, if any, of the additive and impurity cations in SN282 on (1)-(5)? The objectives of the project will be achieved by evaluating the corrosion kinetics of Si3N4 in O2-NaNO3, O2-CsNO3, and O2-NaNO3-CsNO3 gas mixtures of selected compositions over a broad temperature range and by characterizing the oxide layers using various analytical tools. %%% The susceptibility of silica-forming ceramics to hot corrosion by sodium salts remains a severe roadblock to the exploitation of ceramic benefits in advanced gas turbine engines and other structural applications. A critical need exists to search for means to mitigate the corrosion problem in order for the realization of their projected applications. This project aims to explore the mixed alkali effect (MAE) in silicate glasses for corrosion retardation of silicon nitride ceramics in sodium-containing environments. MAE refers to the pronounced, non-linear changes in many properties of a glass when a dissimilar alkali oxide is added. The premise of the proposal rests on two known facts. First, sodium-accelerated corrosion of silicon nitride results from the dissolution of the oxidation layer through sodium incorporation. Second, MAE lowers the alkali activity and reduces alkali diffusivity in silicates by 2 to 6 orders of magnitude. This project represents the first known attempt to use the MAE concept to address sodium-accelerated corrosion of silica-forming ceramics. It will yield rich kinetic and analytical information on and insights into MAE in high-temperature corrosion of Si3N4. The knowledge generated will provide the design and user communities with the scientific basis for practical exploitation of MAE for corrosion retardation and durability improvement of silica-forming ceramics for advanced turbine engines and other demanding applications where they would otherwise be unsuitable doc10361 none This proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF- . A novel approach for the fabrication of atomistic electronic devices is proposed which, if realized, will have important industrial applications. The theoretical methods involve simulations using quantum tight-binding molecular dynamics scheme that can be used to accurately treat interactions in carbon systems at the nanoscale level. Large scale simulations will be performed using novel parallel computer algorithms using a synergistic interdisciplinary collaboration. Simulation results can be used as a guide in the experimental investigations. Although the present electronic technology is dominated by silicon, it is becoming clear that Si based electronic devices cannot be relied on to sustain the current pace of miniaturization. It is becoming clear that a new class of molecularly perfect materials are needed to make these new devices. Single-wall carbon nanotubes are one such material that are expected to execute a ``quantum leap i the area of nanoscale electronics, computers, and materials. A focussed effort to lay the foundation for fullerene and nanotube based molecular electronics which will revolutionize the electronics and computer industries is proposed. The emphasis is on the modeling and simulations which will be used to guide experimental efforts to realize these devices. The theoretical method for the treatment of these systems contains many state-of-the-art features, making it ideally suited for studying these systems doc10362 none Funds from this award will be used to help students and other junior investigators to participate in the Quark Matter Conference, to be held January 14-20, . With the recent commencement of data-taking at the newly commissioned Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), this conference will be a very timely milestone marking first results in the search for the quark-gluon plasma doc10363 none This individual investigator award will fund a project to study the superconducting and normal state properties of electron-doped copper oxides, a class of high-temperature superconductors, with the aim of eventually understanding the mechanism of high temperature superconductivity. The electron-doped high-Tc superconductors have some unique properties compared to the more prevalent, and more studied, hole-doped cuprates. A synergistic feedback between the materials preparation of single crystals and thin films, and physical properties is expected to lead to both higher quality materials and new insights into the nature of the normal and superconducting states. The measurements planned include: low temperature thermal and electrical transport, low temperature specific heat, single particle tunneling, Raman scattering and optical reflectivity, photoemission, and penetration depth. All measurements will be done at zero magnetic field to probe the superconducting state and at fields above the critical field to probe the low temperature normal state. This project provides excellent training for graduate students and post doctoral research associates in a multidisciplinary area of research. It will expose them to research tools and ideas that will be useful for careers in industry and academia. The origin of high- temperature superconductivity in copper oxides is one of the major unsolved problems in physics. An understanding of high-Tc superconductors is likely to impact not only fundamental condensed matter physics, but also potential applications of these materials as improved electronics devices and current carrying wires. This individual investigator award will fund a project that has as its goal to understand electron-doped high-Tc superconductors. These materials form a subset of all the high-Tc copper oxides, but they have very unusual properties that need to be understood. The experiments proposed in this project will provide excellent training for graduate students in a multidisciplinary area of research. It will expose students to research tools and ideas that will be of great use in industry doc10364 none The Advanced Materials Program in the Chemistry Division supports this award to Northwestern University to design, synthesize and develop novel multifunctional fluorophores that combine fast unidirectional internal photoinduced electron transfer with efficient fluorescence from the charge-separated species. With this award, Professor Michael Wasielewski will study molecular structural features to tailor optical and electronic properties of these materials as desired. Molecular design incorporating perylene derivatives will be used to design molecular switches for potential applications in molecular devices. Graduate students will greatly benefit from training and research opportunities provided by this award in materials chemistry and in photophysical property characterization of materials. With this award, ultra fast optical gating of electrons in synthetic molecular entities will be studied using photoexcitation. Molecules will be designed, synthesized and derivatives incorporated, and these molecules will be characterized by time-resolved femtosecond laser spectroscopic methods. Design of molecular switches with potential application in molecular devices will be one of the out come of these studies. Students will greatly benefit from training and research opportunities provided by this award in materials chemistry, and in characterization of photophysical properties of materials doc10365 none Beale The proposed work is concerned with the development of improved methods for computing singular or nearly singular integrals, and with applications to numerical methods for simulating fluid flow with moving boundaries. In many scientific problems, quantities of interest can be written in terms of integrals such as a double layer potential on a boundary. When such an integral is evaluated near the boundary, usual quadrature rules are inaccurate because of large derivatives in the integrand. It is desirable to calculate such values in a way that is simple and efficient, without requiring a special choice of quadrature points. The present approach uses regularization of the singularity and a standard quadrature rule, followed by local corrections derived from asymptotic analysis. This technique will be used to design an alternate version of the immersed boundary method of C. Peskin, a computational method which has been used to model various biological processes. In this method viscous, incompressible fluid is influenced by a membrane or interface which exerts a force on the fluid. In two dimensions, the force can be expressed in terms of nearly singular integrals to which the proposed approach can be applied. It is hoped that this modification will extend the usefulness of the immersed boundary method in realistic applications. Application may also be made to methods for computing flow with moving boundaries separating different fluids. The technique for nearly singular integrals will be extended to surface integrals in three-space, generalizing work already done for marker points on surfaces. Related work will concern interfaces in inviscid, potential flow using improved regularizations of boundary integrals. Many scientific processes involve moving boundaries, for example, the boundary of a drop of one fluid moving through another, or a membrane in living tissue. Numerical models of such processes encounter special difficulties, since it is simplest to compute quantities at a set of points which are regularly spaced and unchanging. There are presently several numerical approaches which avoid changing fundamentally the way the region is approximated at each new time. In some cases important quantities can be written as integrals over boundaries. These integrals arise as solutions of differential equations and are usually singular, or nearly singular; that is, large values appear, representing the strong interaction of nearby points, as in the inverse square law of gravity. Special techniques are needed to calculate such integrals accurately and efficiently. This proposal is concerned with the development and application of methods of this type. The use of integral representations to modify the design of existing methods for computing fluid motion with moving boundaries might improve the ability of these numerical methods to make reliable predictions doc10366 none The University of Hawai i at Hilo, on behalf of the state of Hawai i, has requested NSF support for a planning grant designed to help Hawai i set priorities for the improvement of the state s basic science and engineering research infrastructure. The project s objective is to design a statewide science and technology (S &T) plan that will stimulate economic opportunities and wealth building capacity. The planning process will examine activities that have the potential to: (1) affect greater participation in academic research and development (R&D) and (2) significantly improve the status of science and technology (S&T) education and workforce development. The planning process will analyze the state s current S&T infrastructure and inventory current research personnel and facilities. This analysis includes identifying: S&T areas of current research excellence as well as areas with the potential for future national R&D competitiveness. The planning process will result in a coordinated state-wide effort to improve academic R&D capabilities in targeted disciplines, enhance training and education for students in science and engineering, and increase efforts to promote transfer of technology from the state s universities to Hawai i s private and public sectors doc10367 none The investigators will examine processes structuring microplankton communities and linking them with populations of Neocalanus spp., the dominant particle-grazing copepods in the coastal Gulf of Alaska. Collectively, three species of Neocalanus contribute substantially to total spring and summer mesozooplankton biomass in the coastal Gulf of Alaksa. Neocalanus are capable of consuming both phytoplankton and microzooplankton, though factors dictating this diet partitioning are not well understood. Further, these copepods have been shown to alter individual body size, population biomass, and life cycle timing in response to variations in ocean conditions. Finally, the size and abundance of Neocalanus make them an important potential prey for pink salmon fry and other coastal fish species. Thus, the microplankton - Neocalanus food web is a potential locus for the translation of environmental variation into higher trophic level responses. Specific measurements to be made include: microplankton abundance and composition, rates of microzooplankton herbivory, and rates of Neocalanus spp. grazing on microzooplankton and phytoplankton doc10368 none Arkady Berenstein investigates the area lying at the crossroads of the Representation Theory of Lie Groups, Quantum Groups and Piecewise-Linear Combinatorics. He studies canonical bases and crystal bases, the multiplicities for the representations of reductive groups, and the totally positive varieties. The main tools he uses for this study are the valuations of the corresponding (quantum) algebras, the method of involutions, convex polyhedra, rational maps and geometric crystals. The subjects of Arkady Berenstein s research are combinatorial structures in the area of Mathematics known as Representation Theory of Lie algebras. These structures naturally emerge in classical enumeration problems that arise from physics, chemistry and other basic sciences in addition to mathematics. Quite surprisingly, these purely discrete structures have continuous counterparts. Understanding the relationship between these enumerative combinatorial structures and the geometric structure of their continuous counterparts is a question of the greatest importance. This relationship proved to be a useful tool in the study of Langlands Correspondence -- the most mysterious and inspiring correspondence between Algebra and Geometry of the 20th century Mathematics doc10369 none The Amphibians and Reptiles and Their Parasites of Mexico-A Megadiverse Country This project will inventory the diversity of amphibians and reptiles of Mexico, the country with the largest numbers of species of these two classes of vertebrates. In addition to the large number of species, Mexico is of particular biogeographical interest because it includes the transition zone between the two great faunal regions of the Western Hemisphere, the Neartic and Neotropical. An analysis of previous collecting localities revealed a large geographical collecting bias. The rugged relief of Mexico has made access into many highland areas difficult, and this is reflected in the small number of collections made in mountainous regions above meters. As specimens of amphibians and reptiles are collected, the parasites living on them also will be collected and preserved for taxonomic identification. Based on previous information, it is anticipated that parasites from at least seven different invertebrate phyla will be collected and identified. The amphibians and reptiles and their parasites (protozoans and metazoans, internal and external) will be surveyed over a three-year period, emphasizing the most poorly known mountainous regions. These regions have been selected because they are the most poorly known, and in several of them the forests are rapidly disappearing. About described species of amphibians and reptiles are known from Mexico, and 62% of these species are known only from Mexico. Approximately one hundred new species of amphibians and reptiles have been described from Mexico since even without an organized survey for the country. It is anticipated that 200+ species of amphibians and reptiles, and a far larger number of parasites, remain to be discovered in Mexico. In addition to describing new taxa, a web-accessible geo-referenced database for Mexican amphibians and reptiles will be developed, and checklists, distribution maps, and identification keys will be prepared. The materials collected during this survey will be available to researchers in systematics, ecology, and conservation. Graduate students from Mexico and the U.S., and Mexican scientists will participate in all aspects of the project doc10370 none Fangyang Zheng This award provides partial support for active research mathematicians with limited means of support to attend and participate in the Conference on geometry in dimension 3 and 4 to be held at the Columbus campus of the Ohio State Univeristy during Spring . The list of main speakers includes Gregory Margulis (Yale), John Morgan (Columbia), Rick Schoen (Stanford), Cliff Taubes (Harvard) and S-T. Yau (Harvard). The conference will be scheduled for a 3 day weekend, most likely in late March of . The schedule will be arranged so that there will be plenty of time for discussions between all the participants. The full program will appear soon in posters as well as in the web page: http: www.math.ohio-state.edu doc10371 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Steven M. Weinreb, of the Department of Chemistry at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, is carrying out the stereoselective total synthesis of several complex naturally-occurring molecules of biological significance, complemented by the development of new and practical methods for organic synthesis. An approach to the total synthesis of the hepatotoxic alkaloid cylindrospermopsin uses as a pivotal step Professor Weinreb s N-sulfinyl dienophile Diels-Alder methodology. Several structurally unique polycyclic marine bryozoan alkaloids of the chartelline securamine class will also be synthesized. The total synthesis of the recently isolated novel pentacyclic indole alkaloid tronocarpine will utilize the unique chemistry of 1-hydroxyindoles. New methods of chemical synthesis will be investigated, including a simple alternative to the Eschenmoser coupling reaction for preparing vinylogous amides and carbamates, and the use of N-sulfinyl compounds as reagents for the formation of glycosidic and N-glycosidic bonds. Construction of the often-complex molecules which display desirable biological or pharmaceutical activity requires the development of new and sophisticated methods for the synthesis of organic molecules. As new methods are developed, they ultimately must be tested and proven effective through their application to real synthetic problems. Such testing also provides training in the thought processes and practice of organic synthesis, vital to the educational development of students who will become the next generation of practicing organic chemists. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Steven M. Weinreb, of the Department of Chemistry at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, is exploring the development of new and practical methods for organic synthesis and applying them to the total synthesis of several complex naturally-occurring molecules of biological significance doc10372 none This individual investigator award will support an experimental project focusing on the low energy electrodynamics of novel materials with strong electron-electron interactions, disorder and reduced dimensionality. The materials to be investigated include: a) metals such as NbSi where the interplay of interactions and disorder leads to a metal-insulator transition and to a nonmetallic state, where quantum effects and randomness is essential; b) molecular nanowires, strictly one-dimensional chains of atoms such as Mo6Se6 where electron-electron interactions and or disorder lead to a Luttinger Liquid in case of interactions, and an Anderson-Mott localized state in case of disorder; and c) metals such as UPt3 where electron-electron interactions are strong, the so-called heavy fermion systems. In the latter materials, magnetic correlations may place the materials close to a magnetic instability, which could be viewed as a Quantum Critical Point. In all cases the primary interest will be the so called quantum limit where the energy associated with the electromagnetic field is larger that the thermal energy, a region of the parameter space which has not been explored by experiments to date. The graduate students and post docs working on this project will receive excellent training that will prepare them for future careers in academia, industry, or government laboratories. %%% Electrons in materials can, just like atoms, assume an electron liquid, electron solid and electron glass state. In contrast to atomic arrangements, such states are more difficult to achieve and at the same time quantum effects play a more prominent role in most of the properties of such collective electron states. Because of the electronic charge, such states strongly interact with electromagnetic radiation, thus optical studies lead to fundamental information about such states. At the same time, development of such states lead to materials with unique, novel optical and electromagnetic characteristics. Typically the response to such radiation occurs at frequencies below the optical spectral range, at microwave, millimeter and sub-millimeter wave frequencies. This individual investigator award provides support to an experimental program that will explore the various electron states of matter, by developing new instrumentation and also by conducting novel type of experiments in the frequency ranges mentioned above on materials where such electron states occur. The graduate students and post docs working on this project will receive excellent training that will prepare them for future careers in academia, industry, or government laboratories doc10373 none Research in theoretical elementary particle physics will focus on the properties of nuclear matter in extreme environments, such as high temperatures or high density. Phase transitions are expected in these situations between conventional matter approximating the interior of a large nucleus and new, highly exotic large-scale states of matter in which there may be superfluidity, superconductivity and plasmas of unconfined quarks and gluons, the constituents of nuclear matter. Computer simulations as well as precise, analytic methods based on the theory of symmetries, will be employed to search for these new phenomena. These studies are important because they may tell us about conditions in the early universe doc10374 none Taqqu The focus of this research is on a special class of stochastic processes with the following three properties: stationary increments, self-similar and stable non-Gaussian probability laws (stable sssi processes, in short). Unlike the Gaussian case, there are infinitely many different stable sssi processes. This overwhelming variety may be regarded as a fundamental problem. One now has to understand how these processes are different or what it is that they have in common. However, non-Gaussianity also brings to the picture new tools that were unavailable in the Gaussian case. It has been known for quite some time now that non-Gaussian stable processes having some invariance property, like self-similarity or stationarity of the increments, can be associated with nonsingular flows. It is then based on some properties of these flows that one can describe the structure of the corresponding stable processes. The focus will be at first on an important subclass of stable sssi processes called self-similar mixed moving averages. The connection of self-similar mixed moving averages to nonsingular flows allows one to decompose them into separate, independent processes and then explore each part in the decomposition separately. The purpose of this research is to better understand a class of random processes that have characteristics that one encounters in many areas of applications. Examples of such processes include the limit of the so-called renewal reward processes applied in telecommunications and random wavelet expansions introduced in probabilistic modeling of images. These processes are fractal-like. They display scale invariance and tend to take often extreme values that deviate greatly from the mean. Their mathematical structure is complex. The goal of this research is to develop tools that can be used to analyze that structure doc10375 none Francis Galton, the progenitor of modern regression, chided those of his statistical colleagues who limit their inquiries to Averages and do not revel in more comprehensive views . Arguing that any complete analysis of the full variety of experience requires the entire distribution of a trait, not just a measure of its central tendency, he introduced the empirical quantile function as a convenient graphical device for this purpose. Unfortunately, the very success of least squares methods throughout applied statistics has obscured the need for a more complete analysis of the statistical relationship among variables. The least squares regression limits its inquiries to the conditional mean function and thus can fail to find when structural relationships in the data may depend on the size of the response. For example, patients with long survival times may respond to treatment differently from those with average survival times; or persons with long periods of unemployment may respond to training differently from those with shorter unemployment periods. Such differences could not be seen in standard analyses that model only the mean response. The investigators propose to extend conditional quantile functions to more complex situations, specifically to parametric and semiparametric regression quantiles for correlated or censored response variables (which are common in both examples mentioned above). The computation of the conditional quantile functions is facilitated by modern linear programming algorithms, and appropriate statistical inference can be developed through traditional large sample theory or Markov Chain Marginal Bootstrap being developed by the PI and his colleagues. Conditional quantile functions help data analysts understand general heterogeneity in the population. They are often of direct interest in applications ranging from biomedical research, economic and business analyses to infrastructure studies. The proposed research is to establish a firm statistical theory for regression quantiles and provide a complete toolkit for their applications in complex problems with correlated and or censored data doc10376 none This individual investigator award will fund research focused on studies of the in-plane and out-of-plane normal-state electrical conduction of high quality single crystals of selected copper-oxide superconductors and layered manganites. The emphasis of the experimental project on the cuprates will be on the transformation of their normal-state conduction across the phase diagram which includes insulating, under-doped, and over-doped regimes. The electrical transport and magnetization data obtained will be analyzed for information about conduction mechanisms. Layered manganites have a rich phase diagram which includes several phase transitions. These thermodynamic phase transitions have a strong effect on the charge transport. The emphasis of the manganite research will be on the effect of thermodynamic phase transitions on the electrical conduction. The research is expected to significantly enhance our fundamental understanding of the electrical behaviors of cuprates and manganites. More broadly, the results from this basic investigation may provide insight into appropriate doping schemes to facilitate applications of cuprates and manganites for electronic sensors and devices such as magnetic field sensors or even computer logic devices. This highly interdisciplinary project will contribute to the education and training of doctoral and undergraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers at the institutions which are part of the collaboration. The diversity of expertise gained by the participants in this research program is a substantial advantage in today s knowledge based, technology driven economy, being beneficial to a future career in industry, government, or academia. %%% This individual investigator award will fund an experimental research project to study the unusual electrical properties of high temperature superconductors and layered manganites. The high temperature superconductors, even in the normal state, conduct electricity in ways that are very different from typical electrical conductors such as copper and silicon. Also, the conduction of electricity in manganites is strongly affected by thermodynamic phase transitions. The proposed research is expected to significantly enhance our fundamental understanding of the electrical behaviors of cuprates and manganites. Clarifying these novel electrical behaviors may contribute to eventual applications of these materials for electronic sensors and devices such as magnetic field sensors or even computer logic devices. This project offers excellent research and education opportunities for graduate students within an interdisciplinary program. It involves minority-group graduate students who pursue thesis research and receive excellent training beneficial to a future career in industry, government, or academia doc10377 none A mentored research program for undergraduates in environmental biology will be created at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The scientific theme of The Ecology of Global Change will draw upon a primary research focus in a recently created interdepartmental Program in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (PEEB). The Undergraduate Mentoring in Environmental Biology (UMEB) Program will add an entirely new undergraduate component to PEEB. Experience gained in the administration of a successful (since ) HHMI-funded undergraduate research program will be used to jump-start the UMEB efforts, but the UMEB Program will be completely independent and have a strong focus on improving the quality of faculty mentoring of under-represented minorities. Students (eight per year, recruited from the 200+ Black and Hispanic Latino undergraduate majors in the life sciences at UIUC, as well as from students in other majors interested in environmental biology) will participate in a two-year program (sophomore-junior academic years, plus summers) of mentored research, career-development activities (including training in how to be a successful mentee), a poster session, a research symposium, and social events. UMEB Fellows also will take a course together (Illinois in the changing Earth System) and share housing over the summer, activities that will further promote the development of a sense of community. Faculty mentors will be drawn from the PEEB. All mentors will participate in a mentoring the mentors workshop at the start of each summer as well as in the research presentations. Both mentors and mentees will be supported by a team consisting of a UMEB program administrator (Evan DeLucia, director of PEEB), a faculty assistant (Susan Fahrbach, director of UIUC s HHMI-sponsored programs), a mentoring assistant (Claudia Washburn, manager of UIUC s HHMI-sponsored programs) and a graduate administrator. The UMEB Program s goal is to identify, early in their academic careers, students with an interest in environmental biology and then guide them through the maze of UIUC s resources. The coordinated program of activities encompassing the sophomore and junior years is intended to attract undergraduates, particularly under-represented minorities, to graduate training and careers in fields related to the biology of a changing planet doc10378 none This project focuses on heteroepitaxial growth of III-VI based semiconductors and on interrelated structural, electronic, and optical properties of this class of materials. The research seeks to elucidate mechanisms of III-VI thin film growth, and to develop III-VI growth technology and materials characterization to the stage where these materials may be utilized for optoelectronic applications. Interface compounds based on III-VI materials will be used to control heteroepitaxy of both III-VI and more standard electronic materials, including their use to promote both laminar and islanded nanostructure formation. Problems associated with bulk III-VI materials, poor mechanical and thermal properties, are being addressed through use of thin films on substrates such as Si, GaAs and CaF2 . Development of this new generation of materials requires new, basic knowledge about the interacting constraints that control their electronic, optical and structural properties. This project strives to elucidate the role of these constraints through studies of heterointerface formation between common electronic materials and III-VI based materials. Primary goals are: to establish an experimental and theoretical framework based on nanoscale heteroepitaxial growth processes to optimize structural, electronic and optical properties of III-VI heterostructures; to exploit III-VI interface compounds to control semiconductor nanostructure formation; to evaluate structural, electronic, and optical properties of III-VI-based heterostructures for feasibility in novel optoelectronic applications. The approach is to concentrate in two areas: (i ) nucleation, growth and properties of GaxSey, AlxSey , and their alloys on Si(111), Si(100), GaAs(100), and CaF2 (111), and (ii) use of the resultant thin films as substrates for a) laminar and islanded growth of GaAs and ZnSe and b) GaxSey - Alx Sey superlattices. Growth kinetics, morphologies and quantum dot properties will be studied with nanoscale resolution using in situ scanning probe microscopy, UHV-transfer photoelectron spectroscopy and near-edge x-ray absorption, and ex situ high resolution transmission electron microscopy and energy loss spectroscopy. Area-averaged properties will be probed using photoelectron spectroscopy and diffraction, electron diffraction, ion scattering spectroscopy, and optical spectroscopies (photothermal, reflection-transmission, photoluminescence, and Raman scattering). %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science having high potential technological relevance. The research will contribute basic materials science knowledge at a fundamental level to new aspects of electronic photonic devices. The basic knowledge and understanding gained from the research is expected to contribute to improving the perform-ance and stability of advanced devices and circuits by providing a fundamental understanding and a basis for designing and producing improved materials, and materials combinations. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area doc10379 none Perhaps the most important task of archaeology is providing a chronology for the material remains that are recovered. Any statements about how and why cultures have changed in the past are predicated on an accurate and precise chronology. Archaeologists have utilized an array of physical methods for determining age, most commonly radiocarbon dating. Luminescence dating, which is widely used in Europe, has seen less use in American Archaeology. The National Science Foundation is supporting research by the University of Washington s Luminescence Dating Laboratory, directed by Dr. James Feathers, in expanding the application of this dating method in American archaeology. This research involves addressing some chronological problems that have not been resolved by other dating methods but which are particularly suitable for luminescence dating. Luminescence can be used to date buried sediments, pottery and burned lithics. Primarily pottery dating, with some lithic dating, is being addressed in this project. Luminescence dates pottery to the last time it was heated, usually when it was made or used. Since the manufacture or use is the event that archaeologists are interested in, luminescence has the principle advantage of providing direct dates for pottery and does not rely, as do other dating methods, on association of the pottery with some other event that is dated. This has some particular advantages for some chronological problems, which are being addressed by this research: 1) Archaeologists are interested in regional settlement dynamics, but small sites, particularly those which contain mainly surface material, are difficult to date and thus place in a settlement chronology. Are these sites the same age or different age than larger sites and what does this mean for how the population was dispersed across the landscape? Undiagnostic pottery sherds are often the only artifacts found at these sites. Luminescence is the only method that can date them. 2) A particularly vexing problem in archaeology is the mixing in one deposit of materials of different age. This confounds interpretations of cultural history and blurs evidence on the tempo of change. By directly dating artifacts (in this case pottery sherds), as luminescence can, one can begin to tease apart the different occupations. 3) Duration of occupation in one location is an important variable for understanding population trends and their impact on environment, economy and political complexity. Determining duration has long been problematic in archaeology. By directly dating a number of pottery sherds, luminescence can provide a measure of duration that is statistically quantifiable. Pottery tends to have a relatively short use-life, and emphasis on sherds that have the most fragile fabrics will minimize problems of artifacts that may last longer than the occupations. 4) Dating pre-ceramic sites can also be difficult. Luminescence is able to date heat-treated stone tools as well as pottery and offers a solution to improving the earliest chronologies in America. These problems are being addressed in this research through work in the Mississippi Valley, the Tennessee Valley, eastern Mississippi, central Alabama, and other localities in the Midwest and Southeast. Research into improving the accuracy and precision of luminescence dating of pottery is also being undertaken doc10380 none This project focuses on the nonlinear optical properties of excitons in GaAs and InGaAs coupled quantum wells. When an electric field is applied normal to the wells, the electrons and holes in excitons in these structures become spatially separated, leading to several nonlinear effects. One specific project goal is to create excitonic circuits by which excitons are manipulated by an electric field just like free carriers. This involves modeling the effects of inhomogeneous electric field and stress and developing ways to increase the mobility of excitons in these structures. This task involves a collaboration with sample fabricators. A second goal is to work toward an efficient, room-temperature optical transistor based on this type of quantum well structure. In this scheme one light beam switches another light beam on and off. This involves understanding the many-body renormalization effects of the excitons in these structures, a goal that will be pursued in collaboration with several theorists. This project also includes a substantial commitment to undergraduate science education. An undergraduate Certificate in Photonics program was begun at the University of Pittsburgh under a previous NSF grant. The present project includes efforts to expand that program by creating opportunities for several undergraduates to do research in photonics. When light is absorbed in a semiconductor, the photon particles can be changed into a new type of energy particle known as an exciton. An exciton carries optical energy like a photon but moves through the semiconductor crystal like an electron. By fabricating special layered structures known as double quantum wells, we can cause these exciton particles to move in response to stress and electric field. In this project we study the properties of excitons in double quantum wells, with the aim of creating circuits for these optical particles similar to electronic circuits. The wavelength of the excitons in these structures can also be very sensitive to the intensity of light that hits them. We hope to use this effect to develop an optical transistor, in which one light beam switches another light beam on and off, just as an electronic transistor switches an electrical signal on and off. These effects are part of the field of photonics, in which devices are made which use photons just as electronics uses electrons. This field is a growing sector of our economy, as the increased need for fast communications pushes technology to optical rather than electronic signals. This project involves not only research in photonics, but also a substantial commitment to photonics education. An undergraduate Certificate in Photonics program was begun at the University of Pittsburgh under a previous NSF grant. The present project includes efforts to expand that program. In particular, this project creates the opportunity for several undergraduates to do research in photonics doc10381 none This award is in response to the Nanoscience and Engineering (NSE) solicitation(NSF-00-119) and involves a nanoscience Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) at the University of Pennsylvania with broad-ranging national and international collaborations. It is being co-supported by the Polymers Program of the Division of Materials Research (DMR), the Special Programs of the Division of Chemistry (CHE), and the Interfacial, Transport and Thermodynamic Processes Program of the Division of Chemical & Transport Systems (CTS). %%% The ability to transition nanoscience and engineering (NSE) research to nanotechnology will depend on the development of efficient new synthetic methods to produce monodisperse nanoscale objects. To this end, the primary goal of this Nanoscale Interdisciplinary research team (NIRT) is to enable a rational approach to the design and synthesis of libraries of complex functional monodisperse objects of well-defined shapes, dimensions up to the wavelength of light, surface, and internal compartmentalized architecture. To accomplish this goal, the NIRT combines synthetic methodologies from Materials and the Life Sciences. The NIRT has assembled expertise in organic, macromolecular, supramolecular, and peptide synthesis, along with theory and modeling, and structural analysis by x-rays, TEM, and SFM. The team effort is amplified by exploiting established links with partners in industry and in Europe. Success will reveal the principles required for the construction of libraries of monodisperse self-assembling dendritic building blocks, to enable the hierarchical design of monodisperse single molecule functional nanostructures (SMN) with shape, chirality, internal and external structure, and function controlled at the level of precision currently available only in biological systems. The NIRT will investigate the structure and properties of these nanoscale objects at the level of the single molecule and in 2-D and 3-D assemblies. Novel applications of SMNs are elaborated that have potential to yield nanoscale devices for electronic, optical, chemical and medical technologies doc10382 none Award: Principal Investigator: Darryl McCullough The proposed work advances a number of research projects in the area of low-dimensional topology. Their unifying theme is the automorphisms of 3-dimensional manifolds, including homotopy equivalences, diffeomorphisms, and isometries. Specific projects include: the Generalized Smale Conjecture for elliptic 3-manifolds, the isomorphism problem for diffeomorphism groups of elliptic 3-manifolds, generalization of the Abikoff-Maskit structure theory for Kleinian groups using topological methods, investigation of free actions of finite groups on orientable handlebodies using Nielsen equivalence classes of generating sets, and fibration theorems for spaces of fiber-preserving diffeomorphisms of manifolds having fiberings and singular fiberings. The primary mathematical constructs that will be investigated are 3-manifolds, which are geometric objects locally modeled on the 3-dimensional spatial structure of the physical universe, and groups, which are algebraic systems with an operation akin to the addition of ordinary numbers. Some of the ongoing work has already been applied in the theoretical physics of gravitation, but most of its applications are entirely within pure mathematics. The guiding philosophy of most of the research is to use topological and geometric structure of 3-manifolds to understand groups of symmetries and other kinds of automorphisms. Groups of automorphisms of a mathematical object often exhibit their own interesting structure. A classic example of this is the finite-dimensional vector spaces. They are rather simple objects, but their automorphism groups, the general linear groups, have a rich structure and find wide-ranging uses in mathematics and physics. Within the proposed work, an example is the 3-manifolds called handlebodies. These are among the simplest 3-manifolds to describe topologically, but their groups of symmetries are subtle and varied. In fact, any finite group can be a group of symmetries of some handlebody, and the number of distinct ways that a group can act as symmetries on a given handlebody can be quite large. A different use of the philosophy involves Kleinian groups, which are discrete groups of symmetries of 3-dimensional hyperbolic space. Each Kleinian group produces a quotient 3-manifold, and one of the projects uses the topological structure of these quotient 3-manifolds to give an algebraic classification of Kleinian groups doc10383 none This Nanoscale Exploratory Research (NER) project aims to design, synthesize, and assemble organic molecules. Two specific areas will be addressed. Firstly, by creating new types of molecules (for example that form discotic liquid crystals) with specific noncovalent interactions, a scheme for interfacing self-assembled, organic conductors with gold surfaces will be achieved. Secondly, these interconnections will serve to orient dipolar columns assembled on surfaces creating macroscopic polar order, which is a prerequisite for creating nanodevices for ferroelectric, piezoelectric, and pyroelectric applications. %%% A major goal of nanotechnology is the creation of molecular systems such as one dimensional conductors from discotic liquid crystals that can serve as a springboard for multidisciplinary research aimed at developing nanoscale devices. The types of devices to be explored include piezoelectric, ferroelectric, pyroelectric, and nonlinear optical. Students trained in these areas will be compete well for academic and industrial jobs doc10384 none The search for novel macromolecular structures is at the core of innovation in macromolecular science and engineering and is the long-term goal of our research. Polymer gels are a unique class of macromolecular networks that contain a large fraction of solvent such as water within their structure. Most current research on structures of polymer gels has focused on either bulk gels or microgels. The objective of this work is to create nanostructured bulk polymer gels and correlate such structures to their physical properties. The central idea is to first synthesize monodispersed polymer gel nanoparticles, then self-assemble them into 3D networks, and eventually covalently bond them. The covalent bonding contributes to the structural stability, while self-assembly provides the with crystal structures that diffract light, resulting in colors. The self-assembled structure of the PI s systems are further enriched by their two-level structural hierarchy: the primary network consists of crosslinked polymer chains inside each nanoparticle, while the secondary network is a crosslinked system of the nanoparticles. As a feasibility study, the PI s synthesized such a material that contains 97 wt% water, displays a striking iridescence but is soft and flexible. The PI s approach consists of four components. First, several representative polymer gel nanoparticles such as N-isopropylacrylamide and hydroxypropyl cellulose will be synthesized and characterized by light scattering methods as model building blocks. Second, the nanoparticles will be self-assembled into various structures. Third, various reaction schemes will be used to covalently bond these assemblies. Fourth, the physical properties of the networks, including covalent bonding, mesh size, two-level structural hierarchy, periodic structures, and elasticity, will be investigated using Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, chromatography, UV-visible spectroscopy, and light scattering methods. %%% This work, if successful, will provide a framework to generate stable periodic 3D structures with varying feature sizes in macromolecular materials. It allows us to obtain useful functionality not only from the constituent building blocks but also from the long-range ordering that characterizes these structures. Creating such nanostructured material may also be of importance in technological applications including controlled drug delivery, biomaterials, sensors, devices, chromatography, bio-adhesives, and displays. Both undergraduate and graduate students will participate in this research. They will gain valuable skills in interdisciplinary research and development in macromolecular science and nanotechnology doc10385 none Gonzalez The investigator studies constitutive relations for continuum rod models of DNA and develops new tools for analyzing the supercoiling and packaging of DNA and other material filaments. The main objectives of the project are to apply the theories of statistical mechanics and stochastic differential equations to develop constitutive relations for continuum rod models of DNA that are provably consistent with detailed, sequence-dependent structural information at the base-pair level; to apply the new concept of global curvature to develop a geometrically exact and computationally tractable formulation of the self-contact constraint that plays a central role in the supercoiling and packaging of DNA and other biological filaments; and to develop efficient and provably accurate computational methods for continuum rod models that faithfully respect global geometric constraints as well as qualitative features of the underlying system. Biologists and chemists now believe that the linear sequence of base-pairs along a DNA molecule contains not only a genetic code, but also a structural code that governs the global organization of the molecule and its susceptibility to interactions with other molecules. An understanding of this structural code requires realistic mechanical models of DNA over a wide range of length scales. The research project pursued by the investigator is aimed at the further refinement of medium- to long-scale continuum models. In particular, methods are developed for estimating local, sequence-dependent material parameters and for describing global, finite-thickness effects. Results from this research will be useful in developing a greater understanding of the physical and mechanical properties of DNA, in modeling how DNA may twist, bend and supercoil upon itself, and in studying how DNA and other material filaments may be optimally packed in confined geometries doc10386 none Structured deformations provide a multiscale geometry and kinematics for describing the effects at the macrolevel of both smooth and non-smooth deformations occurring at submacroscopic levels. The proposed research focuses on (i) applying this recently developed multiscale geometry to refine and improve important continuum descriptions of single crystals undergoing slipping on more than one crystallographic system, (ii) identifying via a relaxation technique from the calculus of variations a geometrical variable that measures the volume swept out by submacroscopic vacancies and understanding the connection between this variable and different types of dislocation movements, and (iii) obtaining relations that complete the system of balance laws and constitutive relations that arise when a continuous body undergoes structured deformations and motions. This research bears on the fields of materials science and engineering and on the mathematical study of geometry at multiple length and time scales. The geometrical changes in a deforming paper clip or other metallic body that appear continuous and smooth to the naked eye often appear to be jerky and abrupt when viewed in a microscope. Similarly, the smooth stretching of a plastic sandwich bag or other thin plastic film appears differently at macroscopic and submacroscopic scales. The most successful theories for studying macroscopic changes in a body - paper clip, sandwich bag, or otherwise -- brought about by applied forces or heat sources are called field theories. The success of field theories rests first on our physical understanding of how a particular substance, e.g., the particular metal comprising the paper clip or the particular plastic constituting the sandwich bag, influences the detailed form of the field theories and, second, on our mathematical understanding of the equations that comprise the field theory. The research undertaken in this project is part of an ongoing program to enrich these field theories by permitting them to describe and predict the behavior of a body that changes shape differently at macroscopic and submacroscopic length scales. The desired outcome of this research is refined, improved field theories that permit more accurate simulations of the behavior of technologically important materials. Date: June 25, doc10387 none Multiphase flow is a branch of fluid dynamics of considerable difficulty, importance, and interest. The defining equations result from averages of some primitive equation, such as the Navier-Stokes or Euler equations. Nonlinear terms in the primitive equations lead to new unknowns in the averaged equation and the need for closure relations. These are difficult to determine, or even to measure experimentally. Closure is nonunique, as different closures apply to different flow regimes, and different closures may define competing equations to describe the same flow regime. The different equations may be complementary in that they describe the same situation in differing levels of detail. They also may reflect unresolved differences of scientific opinion. For these multiple reasons, the analysis of the equations is of considerable importance to science. The proposal here is primarily concerned with methods of analysis that delimit or shed light on the closures that are valid descriptions of fluid flow. Multiphase flow, and more generally the study of turbulence, is one of the major unsolved problems of importance to physics and to engineering. Flow of oil, gas, and water mixtures in a pipeline or in the rocks of a petroleum reservoir provide examples of such flows. Thermal mixing layers in meteorology leading to formation of thunderstorms provide another example. The formation of salt domes in geological formations, the study of controlled fusion to provide ample energy sources, and the study of late stage supernovae, or stellar explosions are further examples. In all cases, the phenomena is too complex, detailed and varied to be described usefully at a fine level of detail. Just as with the process of addition of milk to coffee, the initial swirls of milk in the coffee are artistic and complex, but the coffee-milk mixture after stirring is better described by averages of coffee and milk. Such a study of averages of mixtures, and the appropriate equations is the purpose of this proposal. Because of the importance of the problem, many methods are used for the study of mixtures: experiment, theory and numerical simulation. The mathematical aspects of the equations describing the mixture also give an important window into this subject and will be the primary focus of this investigation doc10388 none Chemical reactions that convert a solid oxide into new fluid and solid products with compositions that differ from the initial oxide are considered to be incongruent (e.g., incongruent melting, incongruent dissolution). While some types of incongruent reactions are well understood, the basic kinetic mechanisms by which oxides undergo incongruent reduction with molten metals are not. The objective of this research is to develop a fundamental understanding of the kinetic mechanisms (rate-limiting steps, microstructural evolution) by which a solid oxide undergoes incongruent reduction with a reactive metallic liquid. In this work, the incongruent reduction of aluminum oxide in contact with Mg-Al liquids (which involves the formation of solid magnesium aluminate spinel) will be examined. Novel experiments with in-situ x-ray diffraction will be used to track, in real time, the formation of spinel on alumina surfaces immersed under molten Mg-Al layers. The kinetics of alumina weight change upon immersion in Mg-Al melts will also be studied under steady-state conditions. These kinetic measurements (phase change, mass change) will be used along with microchemical and microstructural analyses of the alumina melt interface to identify the rate-limiting step(s) of incongruent alumina reduction. %%% The rate of reaction between ceramics and liquid metals is of vital importance for a number of advanced technologies, such as: 1) novel, low-cost, reactive infiltration processing of ceramic metal composites for automotive applications (e.g., cylinder liners, brake components, bearing sleeves), and 2) investment casting of advanced titanium alloys for lightweight and strong structural components in aircraft. The purpose of this research project is to develop a better fundamental understanding of the mechanisms of reactions between solid ceramics and liquid metals, so that the rate of such reactions can be better predicted and controlled. This research will involve the use of state-of-the-art analytical equipment to track the progress of such reactions in real time at interfaces between solid ceramics and liquid metals doc10389 none Mathematical Sciences: Shock Waves and Geometry Temple This project is focused on the interplay between principles of geometry and the principles of the mathematical theory of shock waves. There are three main areas of research. The first is analysis of regularity and shock formation in initial value problems for weak solutions of the Einstein equations. The second area is development of shock-matching methods with application to blast waves in general relativity. The third area is investigation of oscillations in systems of conservation laws, with particular emphasis on analyzing oscillations that are generated in transonic flow. As part of the project, we combine Glimm s theory of wave interactions with the theory of general relativity to analyze shock wave interactions for Einstein s equations. Since the Einstein equations contain the compressible Euler equations as a subsystem, results on shock wave propagation in general relativity are expected to have new implications for analysis of shock waves in classical fluids. We are developing a theory of shock wave propagation in Einstein s theory of general relativity. A shock wave is best known as the blast wave that marks the leading edge of an explosion. In that case, the shock wave is the surface between the rapidly expanding material and the ambient, undisturbed air into which the shock front propagates. In general relativity, shock waves are waves in the curvature of spacetime itself. There are thus new and interesting fundamental issues involved in extending Einstein s equations to a setting that admits shock wave propagation. As part of the project, we are constructing new exact solutions of Einstein s equations that incorporate a blast wave into the Big Bang -- the explosion that first set the universe into expansion. The mathematical results will also have application to shock waves in ordinary fluids doc10390 none Robles This project would establish a structured undergraduate mentoring program in environmental biology at a minority serving university - California State University, Los Angeles (CSLA). It would strengthen collaboration among faculty, their supporting research institution, and a network of off-campus partners devoted to environmental science education. A unifying science theme, acquisition and use of spatial information in field studies, provides a focus for curricular and research activities. Student programs may include special courses in Geographic Information Systems, field instrumentation, computer modeling, molecular genetic population differentiation, as well as more traditional environmental science offerings. Students would gain research experience in interdisciplinary teams of mentors, graduate students, and collaborating scientists. Students will rotate and adopt one of three teams: (1) Molecular Genetics of Populations (2) Perturbations of the Terrestrial Carbon Cycle, and (3) Models of Marine Benthic Populations. Program activities are staged over two to three years in phases: (I) Orientation - introduction to the environmental science community and encouragement in basic scholarship, (II) In-Depth Training - emphasis on advanced research skills, and (III) Culmination - presentation of scientific findings and preparation for graduate school. Additional activities include internships with agency partners, intensive field immersion experiences, and mentoring by accomplished role models. An ethics component will feature seminars and discussions with local and national ethicists. This mentoring program is based on the fact that students motivation is crucial to their success; therefore, all activities seek to build student confidence and capability. Motivation will be heightened by imparting awareness of scientists social responsibilities and by fostering an appreciation for the contribution students from under-represented groups can make. By promoting on and off campus educational partnerships, the project will positively affect the future of environmental science education at CSLA, and benefit students beyond the cohort of exemplary UMEB undergraduate fellows doc10391 none PIs: Ledyaev, Treiman, and Zhu PROJECT The main objectives of this project are to develop nonsmooth analysis for semicontinuous functions and multivalued mappings on smooth manifolds and to apply these new analytical techniques to a variety of optimization and control problems. Examples of nonsmooth (nondifferentiable) functions on manifolds are provided by the maximum eigenvalue of a symmetric matrix on the manifold of symmetric matrices, the Riemannian metric and Riemannian distance functions on Riemannian manifold, control Lyapunov functions for stabilization of control systems on manifolds and optimal value functions for optimal control problems. The major directions for research are the following: (i) subdifferential(infinitesimal) calculus for nonsmooth functions on smooth manifolds; (ii) applications of subdifferential calculus to optimization problems on smooth manifolds; (iii) applications of subdifferential calculus to the study of invariance of closed sets and monotonicity of semicontinuous functions with respect to solutions of differential inclusions on manifolds; (iv) applications of these results to the study of generalized solutions to Hamilton-Jacobi equations on manifolds; (v) applications to the derivation of optimality conditions for general nonsmooth control problems on manifolds; (vi) applications of subdifferential calculus for constructing discontinuous optimal and stabilizing feedback controls using nonsmooth optimal value and control Lyapunov functions; (vii) the study of interior point methods in semistable and semidefinite programmings via discontinuous feedback techniques and the study of generalized gradient flows on manifolds. Design of high-performance feedback controls for nonlinear systems whose mathematical models include manifolds is an active research area oriented to automotive, aerospace, and naval applications. It has been recognized that, in general, control tasks (such as stabilization or robust optimal control) for these systems cannot be performed using traditional continuous feedback and require discontinuous feedback. Since existing mathematical tools (differential inclusion theory) have proved inadequate for analysis of discontinuous feedback performance, this research project is aimed at developing new analytical tools and techniques for such analysis. But feedback control is not the only one research field which will benefit from these new analytical tools. Other fields of application for these research results include numerical and theoretical optimization, in particular, a development of robust numerical methods for new semistable and semidefinite optimization problems, and generalized solutions of partial differential equations on manifolds doc10392 none This proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF- . The PI propose to develop solid-state many-body modeling techniques for evaluation of decoherence, relaxation, and interaction properties of nuclear and impurity-bound electron spins in nanoengineered semiconductor materials. Modern layered semiconductor heterostructures and quantum wells, involving strained alloys, band-structure and g-factor engineering, have been utilized in recent designs for realizations of quantum information processing (quantum computing). Quantum bits (qubits) are the nuclear or bound-electron spins of precisely positioned, isotopically selected impurity atoms. Recently, it has been demonstrated that such structures can be actually made by advanced MBE and lithography techniques. Consideration of polarized spins in semiconductor materials has become also of central interest owing to new experimental developments including optically pumped NMR detection of polarization and coupling of spin-polarized electronic behavior to nuclear polarization. Several experimental efforts are on the way to measure single spins and realize initial few-qubit semiconductor spin-based quantum computation. There has been only limited advancement in theoretical modeling and estimation of spin interactions, control, relaxation, and decoherence. The consideration of decoherence, in particular, is a new dimension in solid-state semiconductor research, not considered in earlier studies. The field is widely open with the open questions being not only how, but what to calculate, and with many conceptual issues remaining to be clarified, in relation to coherent quantum dynamics. PIs emphasis will be on developing and applying theoretical techniques to study all the aspects of quantum dynamics in such systems, from control to decoherence, by field-theoretical many-body solid-state techniques. It is hoped that success of this exploratory project will lead to new breakthroughs in an explosively growing field of semiconductor research and technology development doc10393 none CHICOS (California HIgh school Cosmic ray ObServatory) is a collaborative project involving Caltech, Cal State Northridge, and local high school physics teachers to site an array of particle detectors at high schools in the Los Angeles area. The array will operate as a coordinated network and will be capable of detecting and characterizing a sample of the highest energy elementary particles ever observed. The project will offer students and teachers in local high schools a unique opportunity to collaborate with researchers at Caltech and address fundamental issues at the forefront of present-day astrophysics and particle physics doc10394 none High-dimensional data, such as, biotech and genetic data, financial data, satellite imagery and hyper-spectral imagery, are commonplace in our daily life. Indeed, high-dimensional data analysis has become an important research topic in statistics. Variable selection is fundamental to high-dimensional statistical modeling. Many approaches currently in use are stepwise selection procedures, which are expensive in computation and ignore stochastic errors in the stage of selection process. This research involves a variety of data-analytic techniques for developing a unified effective variable selection procedure in high-dimensional statistical modeling. The goal of this project is to significantly enhance the availability of tools for analyzing complicated high-dimensional data. In this project, penalized least squares and a penalized likelihood approach are proposed to select significant variables for various models used in high-dimensional data analysis. The proposed approach is distinguished from others since it deletes insignificant covariates by estimating their coefficients to be zero. In the other words, it simultaneously selects significant variables and estimates their regression coefficients, and thereby enables one to construct confidence intervals for the estimated parameters. An algorithm is proposed for finding solutions to optimization problems involved in the penalized least squares and penalized likelihood. The rates of convergence and the sampling properties of the resulting estimators are investigated and presented doc10395 none This proposal is for the study of electric field effects on meteor trails in the equatorial region. Additionally, the PIs seek to understand any deviation of the radar scattering properties of a meteor trail from traditional specular reflection processes. These scientific goals require the upgrade and continued operation of an existing meteor radar at Piura, Peru (5S, 81W). The upgrade at this site consists of installing a complete all-sky meteor radar system, so that the angle-of-arrival of meteoric backscatter can be unambiguously determined. In addition, archive data from Christmas Island will be analyzed for meteor winds as well. As a byproduct of this work routine mean wind, tidal amplitudes and phases, and meteor decay statistics will be available to the scientific community via a web server doc10396 none Stoffer & Ombao In this proposal, we concentrate on topics relating, in general, to statistical methods in the frequency domain. First, we propose to extend the spectral envelope methodology for stationary time series to the notion of evolutionary spectral envelope for nonstationary series. In another project, we will direct our attention to analyzing nonstationary multiple time series and their principal components using transforms based on smooth localized complex exponentials (SLEX). In a third project, we will consider spectral analysis of time series collected in experimental designs with covariates. The spectral envelope was first proposed as a method to analyze stationary categorical-valued time series in the frequency domain. The motivation for that research was the analysis of DNA sequences. A common problem in analyzing long DNA sequence data is in identifying coding sequences that are dispersed throughout the sequence and separated by regions of noncoding. It is well known that DNA sequences are heterogeneous, and even within short subsequences of DNA, one encounters local behavior. In this project, we are interested in extending the spectral envelope methodology to capture the local behavior of such sequences. To address this problem of local behavior in categorical-valued time series, we will explore using the spectral envelope in conjunction with a dyadic tree-based adaptive segmentation (TBAS) method for analyzing locally stationary processes. Our hope is that this methodology will help emphasize any harmonic feature that exists in a categorical sequence of virtually any length in a quick and automated fashion. Projects such as the human genome project have produced large amounts of data. We believe our methods will prove to be useful as a data mining technique for help in the analysis of the vast quantities of data being produced by various genome projects. While the first project focuses on Fourier based methods, the second project concentrates on other techniques that will give spatial (or time) and frequency localization. Our goal, as always, is to develop computationally efficient algorithms for the analysis of large data sets. In our initial investigations, we will focus on the SLEX transform for analyzing categorical-valued nonstationary time series, but our goal is eventually to apply the technique to multiple time series (and their principal components) in general. The SLEX transform has special properties that make it ideal for analysis of nonstationary time series. The SLEX transform is based on the SLEX basis functions which are localized in both the time and frequency domains. The SLEX transform yields a decomposition in both time and frequency and allows a choice among many orthogonal transforms. Orthogonality leads to computationally efficient procedures for automatic segmentation of nonstationary time series and will hopefully facilitate in our investigation of the theoretical elements of our proposed methodology. An orthogonal representation allows one to store the coefficients and later process them by methods such as nonlinear thresholding. Our feeling is that if the data can be reduced to a relatively small number of meaningful coefficients then these coefficients might be useful in some type of secondary statistical analysis. In our collaborations with other scientists and physicians, we frequently encounter settings where time series, and covariates, are recorded for several subjects in an experimental design. There is an absence of a core of statistical procedures for analyzing such data, and we typically run across techniques that are cooked up in an ad hoc manner by researchers who have little technical skill or knowledge for analyzing correlated data and estimating (spectral) functions. Our goal in this project is to develop a general, user friendly, statistical methodology that will incorporate the relevant information obtained from time series data sets recorded from several units from many groups, and where covariates may also be measured. Our initial approach will be to exploit the relationship between spectral density estimation and generalized linear models doc10397 none for DMS - (Blaine Lawson) This project is concerned with global problems in geometry and in particular with the study of cycles residues and differential characters. It focuses on the relationship between certain important families of cycles in a space and the geometry of the space itself. Of particular interest are algebraic cycles and the cycles associated to singularities of mappings or the higher order contact of geometric structures. These objects -- of importance in themselves -- have been shown to have ties to other areas of mathematics. A major aim here is the discovery and development of such ties. The proposal has several interrelated parts. The first concerns groups of algebraic cycles and cocycles on a projective variety. A theory of homology-type based on cycles has been developed by the proposer and others. It will be used to study concrete questions about algebraic spaces. In a variant of the theory involving real algebraic cycles, surprizing connections to equivariant homotopy theory have been found. The implications for real algebraic geometry will be explored, and the quaternionic analogues will be studied. A second part of the proposal concerns differential characters, objects which mediate between cycles and smooth data, and lead to important geometric invariants. Recent discoveries have been made concerning them -- for example, the existence of a fundamental duality theorem. Further development of the theory is proposed. Geometric results will be sought by bringing the calculus of variations to bear in this domain. A third area of the proposal concerns the study of singularities and characteristic forms. The subject includes a generalization of Chern-Weil theory which gives canonical homologies between singularities of bundle maps and characteristic forms. Many applications concerning the global geometry of singularities, and its relation to characteristic classes and differential characters, will be investigated. A forth area is concerned with special cycles in geometry: Special Lagrangian cycles in Calabi-Yau manifolds, and associative and Cayley cycles in G(2) and Spin(7) spaces. These latter subjects relate to gauge field theory and gravity in Physics as well as many areas of geometry and algebra. A concept of central importance in geometry is that of a ``cycle . In algebraic geometry a cycle corresponds to the simultaneous solution of a system of polynomial equations. In differential geometry cycles arise in many ways: as the large scale solutions of certain differential equations, and as the level sets and singularity sets of differentiable mappings. Curves and surfaces in space are simple examples. This proposal is concerned with the study of certain important classes of cycles which arise in geometry. Part of the study aims at relating them to fundamental large-scale geometry of the surrounding space. In the algebraic case this has led to the establishment of surprizing and important relationships between spaces of algebraic cycles and fundamental constructions in algebraic topology that have led to new insights in both fields. This work will be continued with the intent of obtaining further concrete applications. A second part of the proposal concerns differential characters, objects which mediate between cycles and smooth data. They lead to important geometric invariants and have appeared in discussions of the ``Mirror Symmetry Conjecture from modern physics. The proposer has made some recent discoveries about characters, including a basic Duality Theorem. Further development of the theory and its applications is proposed. Another area of investigation is concerned with relations between cycles and geometry which arise from connections. Connections are fundamental in mathematics, where they constitute differentiation laws, and in physics, where they represent the fundamental forces of nature at the classical level. The investigator has developed a theory of singular connections which encompasses much previously unrelated phenomena and has applications to many areas of geometry. The proposal will continue this work with emphasis on applications. Yet another area of the proposal is concerned with very special cycles in geometry which relate to gauge field theory and gravity in Physics as well as many areas of geometry and algebra. This project will also be concerned with graduate student development. Students will be part of the research team. There will also be an undergraduate educational effort aimed at fostering mathematical independence and developing interactive environments doc10398 none STATISTICAL METHODS FOR SOME APPLIED PROBLEMS Stochastic models and methods for a number of real-life problems will be developed together with appropriate statistical inference tools. Results of the proposed research will be applicable and directly relevant to important areas of applications. The first topic concerns statistical methodology for problems originating by users command streams in a multi-users computer network. Statistical modeling of such data has important applications in networks intrusion-detection, in designing intelligent computer internet environments with learning capabilities, and more. The goal is to develop a practical methodology for profiling individual users or, more generally, random sequences of commands originating from a fixed given source. Our methods allow the system to recognize statistical signature of users, and to flag out masqueraders who might assume the e-identity of a legitimate user. The data pose huge practical challenges, because of its shear size and complexion and our current method has very good operating characteristics (false- and missing- alarms) on two publicly available test data. The second topic concerns the development of a new concept of data-depth functions, based on multivariate medians. We provided a new algorithm for calculating an important multivariate median function, and a closed form formula for the associated data depth. The methodology will lead to robust, practical tools for multivariate data analysis, inference, regression, image processing, and more. The third topic concerns regression analysis and nonparametric methods for the comparisons of growth curves under informative heterogeneous censoring. In many tumor growth inhibition studies, tumor sizes are recorded over a period of time, forming a growth curve for each experimental subject. The usual noninformative-censoring model is often not applicable, because subjects could be censored out of the study due to treatments toxicity effects. We propose to develop statistical tests for the comparison of tumor growth rates and estimates of regression coefficients, in the presence of informative heterogeneous censoring. The proposed testing procedures are expected to be widely used, since they naturally correct the censorship bias, retain high efficiency and require no distributional assumption of the growth curves or the censoring mechanism doc10399 none Virginia State University is submitting this planning proposal to the National Science Foundation Historically Black Colleges and University Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP) in Mathematics, Engineering, Computer Science, and the Physical Sciences. The Goal of this planning proposal is to conduct an assessment at VSU on the SMET offerings and develop a plan which will be an institutional stepping stone toward a National Science Foundation SMET-UP five year grant proposal with t he long term intention to increase the number of well-qualified minority students graduating in engineering, science and mathematics and to provide these students with sufficient preparation, guidance, and encouragement to attend graduate school. Key personnel for the project will be the Principal Investigator (PI), Co-PI, Activity Coordinator, the director of Institutional Planning and Assessment, the director of Freshmen, Retention and General Education Programs and all SMET department chairpersons doc10400 none Robust Limited Memory Hybrid Sparse Solvers Sparse linear solvers can be broadly classified as being either direct or iterative. Direct solvers are based on a factorization of the associated sparse matrix and are extremely robust. However, their memory requirements grow as a non-linear function of the matrix dimension because original zeroes fill-in during factorization. The Krylov subspace (KSP) family of iterative methods are memory scalable, but their convergence can be slow or fail altogether. This project concerns developing scalable hybrids than can be parameterized to model the range from pure iterative to pure direct methods. We propose to develop parallel algorithms and software engineering methods aimed at providing robust, limited memory hybrid solvers that satisfy the computational demands of a variety of applications. On the algorithmic front, our focus is on hybrids obtained by preconditioning KSP solvers using suitable incomplete matrix factors. Such preconditioners are robust and widely applicable, but until recently they were considered unsuitable for parallel computing. The main reason is that the sparse triangular solves for applying the preconditioner become a bottleneck due to the relatively high latency of communication. We have recently developed a latency tolerant selective-inversion scheme that overcomes this problem to yield an efficient and scalable implementation. In this project, we propose developing parallel sparse factorization techniques that are efficient for the entire spectrum of fill-in. We will develop a new supernodal diagonal row block formulation for scalable incomplete factorization. We will also consider innovative ways of combining symbolic (level of fill) and numeric (threshold) strategies to specify fill-in to be either retained or discarded. Additionally, our algorithmic framework enables us to provide a single, unified, extensible implementation of hybrids for symmetric positive definite, symmetric indefinite, and nonsymmetric systems. On the software front, we define a new usage model based reverse engineering process to develop a high-performance domain specific solver as a smart composite of several methods. Our premise is that the right composite solver is domain specific; substantial performance gains can be realized by selecting the right combination of underlying methods to match linear system attributes. We will obtain a uniform interface to a variety of parallel sparse solver software by developing an object-oriented sparse template library that utilizes parameterized polymorphism. Composites will be instantiated by using this template library and a scripting language that supports parallel computing using MPI. Our design goals and performance targets will be keyed to three large-scale computational science applications. The first concerns computational methods for advanced optimization; this application requires robust indefinite solvers. The second is a structural mechanics application for modeling cracks and fractures. The third application involves large sparse eigenvalue problems that arise in quantum molecular dynamics. Our project represents a concerted effort to resolve critical research issues in the area of parallel sparse matrix computations. Our goal is to develop the next generation of sparse solvers by combining research in parallel algorithms and software engineering doc10401 none Yann-Hang Lee Arizona State University Adaptive Performance and Power Management for Real-Time Systems This research will enable real-time computer systems to monitor and automatically adapt their power usage to specified fault-tolerance and performance requirements, prevailing workload, and current and projected energy power constraints. Many systems, which are power-constrained, do not always have a strict limit on their power consumption. Instead, they have periods of time during which energy supply is very limited, and should be used sparingly, while at other times, the power available is adequate and the system is allowed to exploit all its resources to deliver maximum performability. While there has been a great deal of research in developing circuits and design techniques to build low-power devices, there is very little reported on techniques to adjust power consumption on-the-fly to adapt to changing levels of workload and energy power availability. There is the need for an integrated approach, ranging from the hardware operation (using voltage-clock scaling or a sleep mode) to the application level. Our preliminary investigations have shown that such an integrated approach, exploiting the synergy between these various layers, is far more effective than single-layer approaches adopted incrementally doc10402 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Collaborative Research: Mathematical Studies of Short-Ranged Spin Glasses Stein The work under this grant addresses the mathematical foundations of the theory of disordered magnets known as spin glasses. Although there exist proposed solutions of idealized (and unrealistic) spin glass models, the principal investigators interests center on answering fundamental statistical mechanical questions that bear on the behavior of real laboratory spin glasses. These questions, many of which remain controversial despite two decades of intensive study, include the nature of ordering in the equilibrium spin glass phase, understanding anomalous behavior, such as slow relaxation and aging arising from nonequilibrium dynamics, and proving the presence or absence of a phase transition in finite dimensions. The methods used and concepts introduced should be relevant not only for spin glasses but also for other disordered systems, many of which remain poorly understood. Moreover, the generality of the principal investigators approach to dynamics should yield progress in certain aspects of nonequilibrium dynamics in both homogeneous and disordered systems. Our deep physical and mathematical understanding of ordered systems in the solid and liquid state --- for example, crystals, ferromagnets, superconductors, liquid crystals, and many others --- has been both of fundamental scientific importance and has spurred profound technological change throughout the second half of the last century. However, there exist many systems, both familiar and unfamiliar, in which randomness or disorder plays a key role, and in which our mathematical and physical understanding remains comparatively primitive. One familiar example is ordinary window glass, where the atoms or molecules are stuck in random locations (as opposed to a regular crystalline array as would be found, for example, in ice). Spin glasses are disordered magnetic systems which are thought to be prototypes for this kind of macroscopic frozen-in disorder. Disordered systems in general present both fundamental scientific challenges and at the same time hold great promise for applications. The latter includes not only the possibility of new materials and devices but also the creation of new algorithms and applications to the biological and other sciences. Progress in understanding these systems is therefore greatly desirable. Spin glasses may be more amenable to mathematical analysis than other materials in this class. Nevertheless, little fundamental progress has been made even here. The principal investigators work is aimed at resolving basic mathematical and physical issues concerning these materials and at providing a general theoretical approach for a wide variety of disordered systems doc10403 none Integrating Interactive Identification Keys, Distribution Maps, and Stratigraphic Columns with the Neogene Marine Biota of Tropical America WWW Database The project will continue development of the Neogene Marine Biota of Tropical America (NMITA) database, an online biotic database http: nmita.geology.uiowa.edu containing high-quality images and synoptic information on taxa collected as part of several associated multidisciplinary fossil-collecting projects in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. They include the Panama Paleontology Project (coordinated by Jackson and Coates of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute) and the Neogene Paleontology of the Northern Dominican Republic Project (coordinated by Jung of the Natural History Museum in Basel, Switzerland). NMITA provides basic information on authorship, synonyms, and type specimens of individual taxa identified in the collections, as well as diagnostic morphologic characters and stratigraphic and geographic occurrences. The website offers online identification keys and illustrated glossaries of morphologic terms, as well as interactive maps and stratigraphic columns for examining occurrences and interpreting distribution patterns. During the original first phase of the project, information was contributed by nine specialists at different institutions in the U.S., U.K., Switzerland, and Panama. A total of ~ taxa (~ images) belonging to two kingdoms and five animal phyla were included. The taxa consisted of: ~225 corals, ~330 bryozoans, ~350 mollusks, ~100 foraminifera, ~100 ostracodes, and ~230 fish; all except mollusks are at the species level. During the second phase of the project (supported by the present grant), data for ~ molluscan taxa and Oligo-Miocene corals will be entered, ongoing data entry for foraminifera and ostracodes will be completed, and remaining static pages for corals and bryozoans will be converted to a new Oracle system. Additional identification keys and morphology ecology-based search routines will be implemented, and new dynamic maps and columns showing occurrences for individual taxa will be developed. Pilot projects will be performed sharing data with the NCEAS Paleobiology database, specimen databases, and STATPOD. Proper documentation will be developed for the NMITA database project, and made available online so that others could manage the database or develop a similar database elsewhere. When complete, NMITA will provide an image-based inventory of the marine biodiversity of tropical America over the past 25 million years. It will serve as a paleontological databank, accounting for taxa in quantitative analyses of diversity through geologic time. It will summarize ongoing systematic research on the fossil marine biota of tropical America and be instrumental in earmarking diverse clades in need of future systematic study. NMITA is unique among paleontological databases in its specimen basis and its emphasis on photographs and illustrations, and it serves as a model for future dissemination of taxonomic data in paleontology doc10404 none Proposal Number: The principal investigator studies complete aspherical spaces with particular emphasis on the rigidity of local splitting structures and the minimal volume problem. Dr. Cao intends to continue his work on Gromov s minimal volume gap conjecture jointly with his coauthors. Using the F-structure theory developed by Cheeger and Gromov and the heat flow, he would like to study the minimal volume gap conjecture for complete aspherical manifolds. The investigator hopes to show that if a compact nonpositively curved manifold $M$ is homotopy equivalent to a generalized graph-manifold, then $M$ must be a generalized graph-manifold with vanishing minimal volume as well. In addition, Cao plans to continue his study of the sign of the Euler number of compact aspherical manifolds. This project focuses on the study of global geometric shape of aspherical spaces. The examples of aspherical spaces include flat tires and surfaces with more than two holes, such as pretzels. There are also examples of higher dimensional aspherical spaces. Our universe can be viewed a 3-dimensional aspherical space. Dr. Cao is trying to investigate diameter, volume, spectrum and other geometric data of those spaces. Cao has also been interested in the study of the shortest closed curves on non-positively curved spaces. He has already shown that two such surfaces with possible cusps are isometric if and only if the data of lengths of all shortest closed curves on the two surfaces are identical. The data of lengths of all shortest closed curves on a closed surface M is called the marked length spectrum of the space M. The study of marked length spectrum on spaces with boundaries has a number of applications in modern industry and geological sciences doc10405 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Enhancement and Quenching of Combustion by Fluid Flow Kiselev It is known that in many combustion phenomena the turbulent advection of the underlying fluid plays an important role. Depending on the setting, it can lead to a significant speed up of combustion or to the quenching of the flame. The main goal of this project is to improve fundamental understanding of this important phenomenon. In particular, this work explores analytically how the geometry, scaling, and intensity of the velocity field determine the effect advection has on combustion. A primary goal is to determine the optimal geometry for the fastest extinction of the flame, or for the most effective speed up. The models to be studied include passive reaction-diffusion equations with physically-motivated reaction terms, systems of reaction-diffusion equations, and active scalar models with feedback of temperature and concentration on fluid velocity. The methods of analysis include maximum-principle-based techniques, estimates on solutions of partial differential equations, and functional inequalities, as well as some methods of harmonic and spectral analysis. The influence of strong fluid advection on combustion plays a crucial role in many important combustion processes in technology and in nature. Strong fluid advection may drastically enhance the rate of burning, leading to higher efficiency, or, in some situations, extinguish the flame. This question has been extensively studied by engineers, physicists, and mathematicians alike. However, until very recent work of several research groups, there were few rigorous results on the topic. Building on the technique developed in earlier works, the project seeks to deepen the understanding of this phenomenon, in particular relating the geometric characteristics of the fluid flow with the effect it has on combustion. The potential impact of the project is an improved knowledge of combustion processes in settings as diverse as internal combustion engines and stars. The research may lead to direct suggestions on the most efficient ways of flame suppression or enhancement. In addition, the techniques developed for tackling this problem may prove useful in analyzing other partial differential equations doc10406 none Kimmerer With support from NSF, the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry will provide an intensive academic experience of mentoring, research and community outreach to 32 students from traditionally under-represented groups. The goals of the project are to provide students with a meaningful independent research opportunity that may stimulate pursuit of graduate study and a career in environmental biology. The program is designed to expose students to the range of scientific career opportunities and to offer preparation and encouragement for pursuit of those opportunities. The program explicitly incorporates multicultural perspectives into the research theme in order to enhance cross-cultural competence in the academic community. The unifying theme of the program is Biodiversity Conservation. Through a 2-year sequence of seminars, field research and opportunities for international travel, students will gain expertise in the concepts, skills and career opportunities in the science of biodiversity. Biodiversity research is recognized as a critical area of investigation by federal and international agencies. The accelerating rate of species loss and the increasing impact of humans on global ecosystems provides urgency to the complex task of conserving biodiversity. All over the world, conservation biologists and policy makers are realizing the importance of incorporating local and indigenous knowledge into conservation efforts. Cross-cultural competence thus becomes an important component of functioning effectively in the global scientific community doc10407 none Research shows that direct experiences with nature have beneficial effects on people s physical, cognitive, and emotional well-being. Yet what happens psychologically when advanced technologies augment human nature interactions? Grounded in Value-Sensitive Design, this project represents an early, cohesive, and rigorous effort to answer this question. At the heart of this project lies five empirical studies. Study 1 involves a room with an augmented window view (a video plasma display of a real-time local nature scene). Study 2 involves whether it matters psychologically that an augmentation of a natural scene occurs in real-time. Study 3 involves robot pets in the lives of children and adolescents. Study 4 involves robot pets as possible companions for the elderly. Study 5 involves a telegarden (a telerobotic installation that allows Web users to garden by controlling a remote industrial robot arm). A diverse range of physiological, behavioral, and social-cognitive data are collected over short-term and longer-term conditions. In the coming years, augmented reality will become part of our everyday lives, and pervasive across diverse fields, such as architecture, education, gerontology, recreation, and ecommerce. This project contributes proactively to the design and use - from an ethical stance - of this emerging technology doc10408 none Egami Complex electronic oxides that show remarkable properties, such as the colossal magnetoresistive (CMR) manganites and the high-temperature superconductive cuprates, have atomic and nano-scale local structures that are distinct from the average crystal structure, and these local structures more directly influence their electronic properties than the average structure does. The goal of this project is to determine the local structure of complex electronic oxides using pulsed neutron scattering, synchrotron x-ray scattering and modeling. We directly determine the distances between atoms using the method of the atomic pair-density function (PDF) analysis of the total scattering data including diffuse scattering. %%% The knowledge obtained by this project would form a scientific basis for the rapidly developing technology of highly sensitive oxides, and would suggest ways of improving their performance. This project is also related to the effort to upgrade a pulsed neutron powder diffraction beamline, NPD, at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center, supported by the NSF and DOE doc10409 none The project describes proposed work of the newly reconfigured Center for Educaton of the National Research Council. In September, , the Center was expanded to include the Board on Testing and Assessment (BOTA), the Committee on Educatonal Excellence and Testing Equity (CEETE), and the Board on International Comparative Studies in Education (BISE). Other boards, e.g., the Mathematical Sciences Education Board (MSEB), the Committee on Science Education K-12 (COSE K-12), and the Committee on Undergarduate Science Education (CUSE) will continue. The Center will expand its work at the nexus of education policy, practice and research and will enable synergy among the various boards and committees around key issues. Among the issues identified for study in the first two years of this grant are: o Relationships of classroom assessments and high stakes tests; o Effects of NSF-supported mathematics curricula; o Next steps in mathematics teacher development; o Taking stock of the National Science Education Standards; o Framing science teacher education as a continuum; o Criteria and Benchmarks for evaluating undergraduate SMETE program effectiveness; o Transitions from graduate learning to undergraduate teaching in SMETE; o Promoting inquiry-based science education for undergraduates; o Technical skills for work. Work over the subsequent three years will be developed to take advantage of the most promising work of years one and two, and to address current strategic issues in mathematics and science education strategically doc10410 none Support is provided for the 45th, 46th and 47th annual meetings of the Wind River Conference on Prokaryotic Biology, held at the Aspen Lodge, Estes Park, Colorado. The meetings are held annually each summer. This conference is primarily concerned with the biology of prokaryotes, and is the major annually occurring meeting devoted to this subject area. One significant feature of these meetings is their accessibility to graduate students and post-doctoral students, whose travel funds frequently are limited. Specifically to address this problem, funds are provided for travel and support scholarships to facilitate the attendance of graduate students and post-doctoral students working in various areas that comprise prokaryotic biology doc10411 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Collaborative Research: Mathematical Studies of Short-Ranged Spin Glasses Newman The work under this grant addresses the mathematical foundations of the theory of disordered magnets known as spin glasses. Although there exist proposed solutions of idealized (and unrealistic) spin glass models, the principal investigators interests center on answering fundamental statistical mechanical questions that bear on the behavior of real laboratory spin glasses. These questions, many of which remain controversial despite two decades of intensive study, include the nature of ordering in the equilibrium spin glass phase, understanding anomalous behavior, such as slow relaxation and aging arising from nonequilibrium dynamics, and proving the presence or absence of a phase transition in finite dimensions. The methods used and concepts introduced should be relevant not only for spin glasses but also for other disordered systems, many of which remain poorly understood. Moreover, the generality of the principal investigators approach to dynamics should yield progress in certain aspects of nonequilibrium dynamics in both homogeneous and disordered systems. Our deep physical and mathematical understanding of ordered systems in the solid and liquid state --- for example, crystals, ferromagnets, superconductors, liquid crystals, and many others --- has been both of fundamental scientific importance and has spurred profound technological change throughout the second half of the last century. However, there exist many systems, both familiar and unfamiliar, in which randomness or disorder plays a key role, and in which our mathematical and physical understanding remains comparatively primitive. One familiar example is ordinary window glass, where the atoms or molecules are stuck in random locations (as opposed to a regular crystalline array as would be found, for example, in ice). Spin glasses are disordered magnetic systems which are thought to be prototypes for this kind of macroscopic frozen-in disorder. Disordered systems in general present both fundamental scientific challenges and at the same time hold great promise for applications. The latter includes not only the possibility of new materials and devices but also the creation of new algorithms and applications to the biological and other sciences. Progress in understanding these systems is therefore greatly desirable. Spin glasses may be more amenable to mathematical analysis than other materials in this class. Nevertheless, little fundamental progress has been made even here. The principal investigators work is aimed at resolving basic mathematical and physical issues concerning these materials and at providing a general theoretical approach for a wide variety of disordered systems doc10412 none The goal of this research is to investigate the generation and magnetic trapping of ultracold molecules in laser-cooled gases and in Bose-Einstein condensates, the interactions between ultracold atoms and molecules, and the possible formation of a molecular condensate. This will be accomplished with single color or Raman photoassociation of atoms in a laser-cooled or Bose-condensed Rb-87 gas, and with a Feshbach resonance in Rb-87. Molecules will be detected with resonant multi-photon ionization, which can be both sensitive and state-selective. In addition, nonlinear atom-optical methods could be used to probe the molecular state. Atom-molecule collision rate measurements will be carried out, and these may yield evidence of new kinds of ultracold collision resonance phenomena. Precise measurements of the stimulated Raman free-bound lineshapes will provide further information. The limitations to coherent atom-molecule interconversion will be investigated. Bose condensation and molecule formation in a tightly confining optical trap in which excitations are suppressed will be investigated. An optical trap will also be used for the Feshbach resonance studies and to study a Rb-87 spinor condensate. Finally, an effort will be made to generate a molecular condensate with free-bound transitions from an atomic condensate, and to investigate its properties and its interactions with the atomic condensate doc10413 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator:Randall Snurr Institution: Northwestern University This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119). New multi-scale modeling approaches will be applied to novel nanoporous materials for selective oxidation catalysts. Linkages will be developed to permit the modeling of both physical processes and chemical interactions. State-of-the-art embedded cluster quantum chemical methods will be interfaced with iterative quantum classical calculations. Continuum, atomistic, and quantum descriptions will be linked to yield a general description of the behavior of the reactive system Electronic information will be incorporated into the statistical mechanical simulations through a novel development of the Fukui function. Enhancement of microkinetic reaction modeling will be coupled with mass transfer effects. The multiscale model will be applied to new mesoporous artificial enzymes, resembling molecular squares and composed of zinc porphyrin walls, rhenium corners, and a manganese porphyrin catalyst. Stable, nanoscale cavity environments will be synthesized and organized through self-assembly. Through the modeling effort new catalysts, based on these materials, will be designed. Model reactions to be studied are the epoxidations of olefins. This modeling work has the potential to guide the design of catalysts capable of mimicking biological processes and performing enantioselective syntheses doc10414 none California State University, Fullerton (CSUF) will initiate a program of Undergraduate Mentoring in Environmental Biology (UMEB) to provide a multifaceted series of educational experiences for undergraduates, focused on learning through discovery in environmental biology. The program will strive to attract primarily students from under-represented minority groups to environmental biology early in their academic careers. Over the 4-year project period, as many as 18 students will undertake a diversity of approaches to environmental issues in three distinctly different ecosystems affected by human encroachment in Southern California (desert, foothill, and coastal wetlands). The program s goal is to prepare the UMEB Scholars to develop a realistic career plan and strategies for entering graduate school in environmental biology and or entering the workforce in environmental industry or governmental agencies. The program will (1) provide opportunities for students to become engaged in hands-on research experience in a broad array of areas within environmental biology, (2) promote the development of mentoring skills by faculty members, (3) foster a collaborative enterprise between student and mentor in engaging in the science of environmental biology, and (4) thus attempt to increase the number of students from under-represented groups engaging in environmental biology and going on to advanced study and careers in the field. The UMEB Scholars will be selected during the spring of their freshman year and will participate in an intensive field-based course and complete a supervised research project during that summer. The 4-week course will bring together students, faculty members, and other professional environmental biologists for in-depth study of the effects of human activities in the three targeted ecosystems. Following this, each student will be matched with a faculty mentor based on interests, mentoring needs, and available research opportunities, and will become an integral member of the mentor s research group. At the end of each summer, the UMEB Scholars will present their research findings at a student poster session. As part of their Biology major, the UMEB students will complete classes designed for their needs, including courses in experimental design and research ethics. The cornerstone of the CSUF UMEB Program will be the completion of a two-year independent research project done in collaboration with a faculty mentor, culminating in a senior thesis. Students will present reports on their research progress in a Proseminar designed to strengthen the community of environmental biologists at CSUF and to provide information about research, internship, graduate school, and career opportunities. The entire program will prepare the UMEB Scholars for careers or graduate programs in environmental biology doc10415 none This proposal requests support for Research and Development on several experimental devices with the goal of measuring the branching ratio of the rare KoL decay into po n n-bar. This decay occurs through a CP (charge conjugation x parity) violating interaction, and knowledge of its rate will complement the worldwide research effort to observe CP violation through decay of B mesons. In particular, a difference between the CP violating parameters in B decay and those in K decay would indicate CP violation outside the Standard Model of particle physics. Such a difference would be a natural consequence of many of the formulations that extend the clearly incomplete Standard Model and of the matter-antimatter asymmetry observed in our Universe. The KOPIO experiment will be mounted at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, using the Alternate Gradient Synchrotron proton accelerator as a driver for a new, extremely intense neutral kaon beam. While neither the beamline components nor the particle detectors are beyond the state of the art in their respective technologies, significant development and detailed design work are required before construction doc10416 none This proposal is submitted to the National Science Foundation in response to the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP). The purpose of this interdisciplinary proposal is to request funds to develop and implement Southern University at New Orleans s (SUNO) ``Program of Excellence in Science and Computer Technology (PESMaCT) . The PESMaCT web address is www.suno.edu cs pesmact . Studies have confirmed that the shortage of manpower in the science and technical workforce is particularly acute within the under-represented minority population. Minorities make up only 14.5% of the present enrollment in graduate science and engineering programs, and 6% of the science and technical work force. Compared to the 28% minority representation in the population as a whole, there is an untapped minority resource for building the nation s scientific and technical workforce. The origin of this problem can be traced to inadequacies in science education in K-12 schools. It has also been documented that lack of achievement in science is due to shortcomings in present instructional methods which lack emphasis on gate-keeper and lab centered courses, hands-on training, and ineffective or non-collaborative efforts to utilize local universities resources and facilities. SUNO is proposing a solution to this problem through PESMaCT. The goals of this project are to: (1) increase the pipeline flow of minorities from high schools and junior colleges to science, mathematics, and computer technology (SMaCT) fields,(2) improve retention of minorities in SMaCT, and (3) improve the quality of graduating SMaCT majors. The overall objectives are to: (1)integrate technology into all gate-keeper courses, (2) double the current retention rate of 30%, (3) graduate 300 quality SMaCT majors within a 5 year period, and 4) get 15% to be accepted to graduate or professional schools. These goals and objectives can be achieved by: (1) engaging in aggressive recruitment, (2) implementing a strategic retention plan, (3) enhancing undergraduate curricula, 4) utilizing undergraduate research as a valuable teaching tool, and (5) establishing a collaborative and synergistic relation with Louis Stokes Louisiana Alliance for Minority Participation (LS-LAMP). The important catalysts for our plan are: (1) collaboration among departments in the College of Science at SUNO and (2) collaboration between SUNO and the New Orleans Public Schools (NOPS) which supply 74% our student population. Unlike other institutions in the city of New Orleans, SUNO is an open-admission institution serving about 4,000 students with majors in liberal arts, sciences, business and education. Also, the University has graduate programs in social work, criminal justice, computer information systems, and education. NOPS district serves about 84,000 urban students with 85% being African Americans. Compared to the rest of the state with 59.2 % poverty level, 88% of NOPS students come from families with incomes below the federal poverty level. PESMaCT is designed to improve the educational experience of minority students in science, mathematics, and computer technology from high school through college. Implementation of PESMaCT in high schools will motivate students to pursue degrees in careers of SMaCT fields. As a result, this will lead to an increase in the number of minority graduates and serve as a crucial pipeline in increasing the number of under-represented minorities receiving graduate degrees and working in SMaCT fields. Beyond the funding period, PESMaCT will be sustained by support from the University, local industries companies and funds acquired from other grants. PESMact will support the University strategic plan to: (1) increase opportunities for students success, (2) ensure quality and accountability, and (3) enhance services to the community and state. Most importantly, the project outlined in this proposal will help PESMaCT to achieve the NSF HBCU-UP goal to enhance the quality of undergraduate science, mathematics, engineering and technology (SMET) at Historically Black Colleges and Universities as a means to broaden participation in the SMET workforce. In addition, PESMaCT will positively impact the largest urban public school system in the State of Louisiana doc10417 none This project seeks greater understanding of the spin, charge and lattice coupling in a class of ferromagnetic cubic perovskite materials known as colossal magnetoresistance (CMR) materials through nanofabrication and characterization. The project also emphasizes the development of integrated research and educational opportunities at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The magnetoresistive response of ferromagnetic cubic perovskite materials such as (La,Sr)MnO3 is extremely sensitive to lattice strain and thus to structural distortion. Correlating structural distortions with magnetic and electronic properties is particularly important in shedding light on the origin of the anomalously large magnetoresistance effect observed. This project specifically addresses (i) the relationship between local magnetic structure and the strain state through geometrical confinement and (ii) the magnetotransport in submicron size device heterostructures. The strain state of CMR materials can be tailored by geometrical confinement through nanofabrication and the resulting nanostructures will be characterized magnetically and electronically. This approach provides information not only on the interplay between structure and magnetics behind the anomalously large magnetoresistance in these materials but also on the fundamental quantum limit of their incorporation into magnetic recording applications as magnetic media become denser. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science having high potential technological relevance. The research will contribute basic materials science knowledge at a fundamental level to new aspects of magnetic devices. The basic knowledge and understanding gained from the research is expected to contribute to improving the perform-ance and stability of advanced devices by providing a fundamental understanding and a basis for designing and producing improved materials, and materials combinations. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area doc10418 none Tunable Radio-Frequency Electromagnetic Absorption In Ferrite Nanoparticles ______________________________________________________________________ This proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF- . Nanostructured materials display a wide variety of novel physical properties that can be used in producing tailored materials for device applications. Specifically, the RF and microwave response in these materials is of great interest as there exists the potential for achieving tunability and tailored electromagnetic response useful for specific applications. Demonstration of improved RF characteristics or discovery of new electromagnetic properties in nanomaterials would have a major impact on future development of a large class of devices like filters, phase shifters, circulators, isolators etc. that are commonly used in wireless and communication applications. The overall objective of this Nanoscale Exploratory Research project is to study the radio-frequency (RF) electromagnetic absorption properties in ferrite nanoparticles. The PI will focus on g-Fe2O3 and the Ni-doped soft ferrites synthesized in collaboration with industry and would attempt to correlate the high frequency response with the underlying important parameters in ferrite nanoparticles like the particle size, nanostructure and magnetic behavior. In addition to magnetic susceptibility, hysteresis loops and frequency-dependent (up to 1 GHz) complex permeability measurements, a novel RF resonant technique developed by the PI will be employed to probe the magnetic anisotropy. This research will contribute to education and student training at the University of South Florida in a technologically challenging and important field. It further provides the opportunity for an Applied Physics graduate student to interact with materials engineers in industry and travel to the company site and participate in synthesis of ferrite nanopowders doc10419 none Divisions of Chemistry, and Bioengineering and Environmental Systems support this multidivisional award to University of California Los Angeles, and this award is part of the Nanoscale Exploratory Research in the Nanoscale Science and Engineering program. Under this project, Jeffrey Zink will synthesize nano-engineered photo-electrochemical cells by self assembly process using solution-based sol-gel process, which will replace time consuming step-by-step serial assembly process. This materials synthesis method will provide flexibility in the spatial configuration and the chemical environment of the photoelectron donors and acceptors. Theoretical studies will be performed to determine the charge separation and electron transport in the nanostructured materials. The research program will provide education and training opportunities in material chemistry to under-represented groups in undergraduate education through the Student Research Participation and Center for Academic Excellence programs at University of California at Los Angeles. Under the award, nano-engineered photo-electrochemical cells will be fabricated using a solution-based sol-gel self-assembly process. The process will yield ordered and oriented nanostructures of relatively large sizes for the development of photoelectrochemical devices. In addition, the research program will provide multidisciplinary education and training opportunities in materials chemistry to under-represented groups in undergraduate education doc10420 none Proposal: Principal Investigator: Leonid FayBusovich, Department of Mathematics, University of Notre Dame . PI analyzes geometric and algebraic structures arising in connection with optimization problems. The major goal is to further expand the domain of applications of interior-point algorithms. A method based on the theory of random matrices is proposed to calculate characteristic functions of cones generated by Chebyshev systems and thus self-concordant barriers for these cones. This drastically expands the domain of applicability of interior-point algorithms. In particular, possible applications to spline approximations are outlined. A general approach to the construction of self-concordant barriers for a broad class of infinite-dimensional domains is proposed. The technique of JB-algebras is suggested to carry over the recent impressive applications of the theory of Euclidean Jordan algebras to symmetric programming to the infinite-dimensional situation. Possible control applications are outlined. The theory of interior-point algorithms provides a general framework for the analysis of a broad class of extremely efficient optimization algorithms. These algorithms are used to solve problems aiming at finding the best possible solutions under various constraints (e.g. time constraints , available resources e.t.c ). The realization of the project will enable us to drastically expand a class of problems that can be solved with the help of powerful modern computers doc10421 none The principal investigator will study theoretical properties of boosting algorithms. Topics include the assumption of weak hypotheses, the behavior of generalization error in the large time limit and during the process of boosting, a comparison to the optimal Bayes error, the performance in noiseless and noisy situations, overfitting and regularization, and the analogy between regression and classification boosting algorithms. The following goals will be addressed: (I). Provide conditions and examples for the assumption of weak hypotheses to be valid, as well as some implications of the assumption on the generalization error. (II). Further understanding of the overfitting behavior and regularization methods in boosting. (III). Bring together the important recent developments in the areas of regression (e.g., thresholding) and classification (e.g., boosting), where increasingly different sets of tools have been developed. Boosting algorithms are very useful tools for combining simple prediction rules sequentially and adaptively into more powerful prediction rules, and are of mutual interest to the fields of computer science, machine learning and statistics. A popular version of the algorithms, called AdaBoost, is shown to improve the fit on the existing data very quickly when more and more relatively simple rules of thumb are incorporated. In addition, the algorithm also improves the prediction of new outcomes very effectively. On the other hand, recent empirical evidence has shown that combining too many simple rules can `overfit the existing data and deteriorate the performance in predicting new, unseen outcomes, when data are `noisy . This project studies important theoretical properties of boosting algorithms, based on an analogy between the regression situation (when the outcomes are continuous numbers) and the classification situation (when the outcomes are discrete classes). This will be helpful in understanding how boosting works, in what situations, to what degree, and how to prevent `overfitting and improve the performance when treating noisy data doc10422 none This Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NER) grant is to develop a nano-manufacturing protocol based on the combination of a novel nano-lithography process and an ultra precision motion control technology. This instrument is capable of economically producing well-defined pores or channels in the nanometer scale (10~100 nm) on thin polymer layers. Exploratory research to prove the design concept will be carried out in this project. If the concept is successfully demonstrated, the investigators will write a follow-up proposal for fabrication, characterization, and testing of a prototype manufacturing instrument. The nano-scale transport phenomena (i.e. nanofluidics) using the well-defined features generated by this instrument will also be studied. The application of nano-fabrication technology to create precisely designed miniature devices represents an exciting research challenge. Strategies that have been explored for fabricating patterned nanostructures include lithography with photons (X-ray or EUV), particles (electron or ion beams) and scanning probes. X-ray and electron beam lithography (EBL) are expensive and high energy techniques. For large-throughput manufacturing like microprocessors and memories in the IC industry, they may be affordable. However, for markets with very broad product needs and relatively short product lifetimes as in the bio-medical field, the development of cost-effective methods that are capable of writing and replicating nanostructures in a wide range of materials is essential. The scanning probe lithography (SPL) and associated replication methods represent the most promising technology that may have economics superior to those based on photons or particles. These emerging lithography technologies are aimed at micro-electronic applications in which only a low aspect ratio is needed and bio-compatibility is not an issue. For many medical and chemical applications, there is an urgent need to develop new manufacturing methods that can fabricate polymer and metal devices with a high aspect ratio and nano-sized features doc10423 none This Focused Research Group project will address priority areas in the formation of uniform particles of simple and composite monodispersed colloids. The focus will be on the synthesis of nanosized particles, and modelling and characterization of their unique properties which develop for dimensions smaller than the typical submicron-sized colloid scales. Experimentral and theoretical evidence that a great many monodispersed colloids of spherical and other shapes are formed by aggregation of nanosized units will be developed to link the nansize and micrometer size particles. Coatings produced by surface precipitation and by adhesion of smaller particles on well-defined cores will be investigated. Nucleation, growth of nanoparticles, and their aggregation, will be kinetically controlled to identify different process stages which will be modelled theoretically. Both the intermediate and final products will be characterized in terms of shape, size and structure using techniques that include combined dynamic and static light scattering. %%% The broader impacts on science and technology will span areas involving both physical and biological disciplines. These include catalysis, pigments, clays, magnetics, ferroelectrics, and several medical areas such as sensors and localized drug release. This excellent team effort integrates research and education in such a way as to have a significant impact on areas of high interest to industry. Students trained in these areas of nanoscience and technology will be very competitive in the job market. This award is co-funded by the Chemistry Division and the Division of Materials Research doc10424 none NSF Proposal # Combined NIL and ESA Processing of Electro-Optic Materials Richard O. Claus, Virginia Tech, PI This NSF NER program will study polymer dielectric nanocomposites with enhanced electro-optical modulation efficiency and thermal stability, by using a combination of electrostatic self-assembly (ESA) facilities at Virginia Tech and nanoimprint lithography (NIL) facilities at the University of Michigan. We will use NIL to create a base nanopatterned template and ESA to fill in the template through the molecular-level assembly of dipolar molecules. This combination of approaches would allow the potentially low-cost manufacturing of optical and electro-optic materials and devices. The program will allow us to explore fundamental issues involving nanopatterning, molecular alignment, and structure property relationships in resulting prototype device materials doc10425 none This project addresses dynamics of film growth and surface and interface reactions on Si and SiGe; the approach encompasses interface chemistry, strain effects and surface and interface energetics. The primary objective of the research is to develop a fundamental understanding of the dynamics of interface instabilities for nanostructure formation on Si and SiGe alloys. In situ measurements will employ photo-electron emission microscopy (PEEM) with UV excitation from a free electron laser (UV-FEL). The research goals include: (1) Development of specific approaches to use the FEL PEEM system for in situ, real time measurements of the dynamics at Si and SiGe surfaces. The major advantage of the LTV-FEL PEEM system is that the high intensity FEL light can be wavelength tuned to the appropriate photo threshold to obtain image contrast of the desired surface. (2) Development of methods to prepare nanoscale silicide islands on Si, and the characterization of the electrical properties of the nanoscale islands using scanning probe techniques. The research will relate coalescence and ripening processes and shape transitions of the epitaxial islands. (3) Dynamics of liquid metal-Si (M-Si) micro-droplets on Si surfaces. The metals of Pd, Pt, Ni and Au all exhibit a deep eutectic in the M-Si binary phase diagram. Research will explore how interface chemical equilibrium affects the evolution of the surface microstructure under various conditions of metal deposition or evaporation, or Si deposition. (4) Dynamics and stability of metallic interfaces on SiGe. This research will involve in situ PEEM measurements of the dynamics of these instabilities. New approaches to avoid segregation effects are based on models of the processes. (5) Dynamics of strain relaxation and nanostructure formation in SiGe epitaxial layers on uniquely oriented Si. For epitaxial SiGe layers on Si, strain is relaxed through the formation of misfit dislocations and through the development of surface corrugations. This project will explore whether the strain relaxation processes are affected by the presence of substrate surfaces with different step and terrace structures. The research will also explore the use of surface morphology for nanostructure organization. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area. An integrated educational program has been developed that includes scientific research techniques, interdisciplinary research approaches, and laboratory safety, and involves graduate and undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds doc10426 none This award in the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative (Nanoscale: Interdisciplinary Research Teams) will support the application of materials science and engineering to biosystems and environmental biology at the nanoscale. This new approach can open up new and exciting possibilities for researchers in many fields of biology. A multidisciplinary team has been assembled to explore the potential for the application of semiconductor quantum dots to two areas in particular, environmental immunoassays and cell biology. The unique optical properties that are available via the quantum confinement effect inherent to nanoscale clusters of semiconductor material offer unique possibilities in biosystems research. The emission of light from quantum dots is dependent on the size of the cluster. Hence, it is possible to design clusters of various sizes to emit at a desired wavelength. The visible part of the optical spectrum can be covered by a range of quantum dots whose emissions are spectrally distinct, permitting their use in simultaneous bioassays for environmental pollutants and hazards, as well as replacements of conventional fluorophores in studies of peptide chemistry and binding to cell receptors. In addition, the magnetic properties of quantum dots can be used for the manipulation of biological molecules in magnetic fields. Quantum dots will be synthesized initially by an established method that can produce CdSe clusters capped by ZnS that permits bioconjugation to molecules of interest via a carboxyl group. Reverse micelles will also be studied as an optional scheme; this method may offer a better control on particle size. A major thrust of the effort will be directed to the identification of quantum dot materials that absorb in the visible spectrum and that can avoid the excitation of strong background fluorescence that is typical of complex environmental samples. Metal oxides will be given particular attention by using our established laser ablation method to screen new materials that have a small bulk bandgap, such as VO. Iron oxide will be studied because of its particularly interesting magnetic properties, and the additional benefit that ferromagnetism may confer in terms of manipulation in bioassays and cell migration studies. A new scheme for the improvement of the laser ablation synthesis of quantum dot materials will be investigated by selecting clusters on-the-fly, based on their functional performance i.e., their optical or magnetic properties. The usefulness of the quantum dots in environmental bioassays will be explored by applying them to immunoassays that are designed to detect a class of molecules that are important in agriculture, atrazines. Simultaneous assays will be designed using spectrally distinct quantum dots as labels in assays using a class specific antibody for atrazine, and using compound specific assays for members of the atrazine family. Monodispersed quantum dots will also be evaluated in cell based systems.The quantum dot surface will be coupled to peptide ligands via functional groups, and used to probe intact lymphoma cells. Analysis will include flow cytometry, tissue or cell staining, and peptide trafficking studies. The quantum dot performance will be compared with that of a conventional fluorochrome such as BODIPY. Initial experiments will involve quantum dots with only one defined wavelength. Once the cellular techniques are perfected, and when monodispersed quantum dots with a series of different sizes are available, multiplexed analysis will be performed using a series of peptides that have different binding affinities to the cell. Research in biology depends increasingly on the development of rapid and sensitive measurement technologies. The use of nanoscale materials in biology for labeling molecules, with the unique properties that arise as a result of the very small scale of these materials, will play a significant role in contributing to progress in this development. The results of this work will lead to the development of improved, miniaturized detection methods for pollutants in the environment and in human populations, as well as providing a valuable new tool for studying fundamental processes at the cellular level doc10427 none Mitas This award supports research on many-body computational approaches for electronic and atomic structures of real materials. Research focuses on further developing quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods and on their applications to nanoscale systems. One focus of the work is to expand the capabilities of QMC for calculations of Born-Oppenheimer forces on ions, excited states and optical absorption, the effects of zero point motion on excitations in systems with light atoms. The PI will use QMC together with these enhancements, to investigate molecular nanosystems and clusters with promising potential for scientific discoveries and applications. Specific activities include: determining the electronic structure of thiolate derivatives which are being explored as prototypes for molecular devices, and determining optical and structural properties, and excited states of SinHm and SinOlHm nanocrystals which exhibit ultrabright luminescence effects. An important aspect of this activity is the training of undergraduates and graduate students in advanced electronic structure methods and in efficient use of parallel and distributed computational platforms at national supercomputing facilities. %%% This grant supports research and education in computational methods that can determine the quantum states of electrons and their excitation energies in nanostructures to high accuracy. The PI plans to develop extensions of existing methods to enable the accurate determination of atomic positions, electronic excited states, and optical absorption spectra. These enhanced quantum Monte Carlo-based tools will be applied to specific nanoscale structures of atoms and molecules that are of fundamental interest and may have direct impact on nanoelectronics and other emerging technologies doc10428 none A majority of entering students begin their college careers with inadequate mathematics background to pursue SMET careers. The purpose of the proposed planning program is to design a comprehensive program to overcome these entering deficiencies to improve the participation and performance of minority students in SMET disciplines. The overall goals of the planning program will be (a) to assess the strengths, weaknesses and needs of mathematics instruction as well as other gate-keeping courses in the SMET disciplines; and (b) to assess undergraduate student research needs and opportunities in SMET disciplines on and off campus. Assessment includes, student performances on many items such as the Sophomore Proficiency Examination, Major Area Examinations, Graduate and Professional School Entrance Examinations, success in advanced programs, presentations of research papers at professional conferences, professional publications, and the type of employment and advancement in ranks. Assessment of the quality of faculty members in the SMET disciplines will be done by a review of the credentials of faculty members as compared to the SMET faculty in other institutions and the standards set by accrediting bodies and performance portfolios. In assessing faculty development and recruitment needs, the ratio of instructor students in mathematics and other SMET disciplines will be compared with other majors at Benedict, as well as with other similar institutions. Visitation to other institutions with SMET s curricula that have recently been reformed due to NSF effort, self-study or otherwise, will help Benedict to have a better assessment of the College s current SMET s curricula. This is also the case when selected staff members of the Task Force visit sites that they have recently reformed their SMET s curricula. The current and future technology needs for SMET courses, in general, and SMET majors, in particular, will be assessed. Consultants with expertise in SMET curricula will be used in the overall process of assessing the current curricula and potentially improving and or redesigning them. It will be made certain that high-level decision-making administrators (President, his cabinet, and deans) review the comprehensive proposal and approve its contents before submission to NSF . An internal advisory committee, (Task Force), will help to guide the work and to assess the planing program. In particular, this committee will help assess and analyze data and plan design the curriculum for the comprehensive program. It is anticipated that the proposed project will result in the development of a competitive proposal for submission to the National Science Foundation for funding through the HBCU-UP Program. The proposal will be based on an accurate assessment of current and future needs in the SMET programs at Benedict College. Results of these assessment activities will also provide information needed by the College to improve other areas that bear on the performance of students in the SMET disciplines doc10429 none This individual investigator award will provide funds for a project to measure the dynamic atomic-scale structure of charge-density waves driven by an applied electric field over randomly located impurity atoms. Charge density wave systems are a good example of a driven periodic system in the presence of disorder. To perform quantitative tests of some novel theories for such systems, several important quantities need to be measured. These include measurements of the steady-state (equilibrium) dynamics and measurements of the coupling between the electronic and the lattice degrees of freedom. This project will (a) continue to develop X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy (at the Advanced Photon Source) for measurements of the equilibrium dynamics and will (b) assess (at CHESS) the feasibility of using resonant-elastic-scattering to separate the response of the electrons from the response of the crystal lattice. The potential impact of these measurements is large as the results relate directly to a diverse array of systems including: magnetic-bubble lattices driven by a magnetic-field, Wigner crystals, colloidal suspensions driven by an electric field, driven arrays of Josephson-junctions, and the growth of crystals on substrates. The impact of this project on advancing education and human resources development includes continuing the research group s demonstrated practice of pro-actively searching out, recruiting and supporting women and under-represented minorities at the undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels. X-ray diffraction has historically been the technique of choice for measuring the structure of matter on atomic length scales. The continuing development of time-resolved x-ray techniques allows the atomic positions to be determined on ever-faster time scales during chemical, physical, and biological processes. Time-resolved x-ray measurements span length-scales from atomic to macroscopic distances and time-scales from 1 millionth to seconds. This individual investigator project will develop new x-ray techniques for studying a variety of problems in condensed-matter physics. X-ray technique development will occur in the process of studying of charge-density waves found in the quasi one-dimensional metal NbSe3. This system is known to be a nearly ideal realization of a physical system with a large number of internal degrees of freedom that can be driven over disorder, thus it forms an. excellent one which to use new improved techniques. This project will (a) continue to develop X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy (at the Advanced Photon Source) for measurements of the equilibrium dynamics and will (b) assess (at CHESS) the feasibility of using resonant-elastic-scattering to separate the response of the electrons from the response of the crystal lattice. The potential impact of these measurements is large as the results relate directly to a diverse array of other systems, some of which have the potential for technological applications.. The impact of this project on advancing education and human resources development includes continuing the research group s demonstrated practice of pro-actively searching out, recruiting and supporting women and under-represented minorities at the undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels doc10430 none A. Garcia Arizona State University This is a NER Grant. Surface phenomena become prominent when fluidic systems and devices are miniaturized since the surface area to volume ration increases. Biological systems capitalize on nanoscale surface phenomena by assembling unique elements such as membranes and vesicles to shuttle materials into and out of cells or to process wastes in organs such as the kidney. Much research is currently underway to find alternatives to moving parts in order to move ultra-small volumes of liquid (i.e. micorfluidics) since mechanical pumps and valves are currently difficult to manufacture at the nanoscale and require very careful choice of materials. This NER research project is an exploration of the nanoscale engineering of the surface of capillaries to control movement of ultra-small volumes of liquid. It explores the hypothesis that molecular mixtures including photochromic molecules can be attached to the surface to form various types of nanoscale monolayer films in which the solvation and free volume of the active element (i.e. the photochormic molecule) are controlled. This in turn will allow the design of light controlled micorfluidic pumping, switching, and valving systems with biotechnological applications. This project also supports the establishment of collaboration with the NSF-CREST Computational Center for Molecular Structure and Interactions at Jackson State University in order to visualize and interpret our experimental results as well as to guide further experimentation doc10431 none Casazza This project will concentrate on several new applications of frame theory concerning the transmission of information. First, for communication networks such as the Internet, packets of data are often lost in transmission and are retransmitted according to a protocol invisible to the user. In many applications, the subsequent delay is unacceptable and best possible reconstruction from what is initially received is necessary. Second, it has been shown that wireless communication systems which employ multiple antennas can have very high channel capacities. Until now, constructive approaches to achieving this capacity have relied on the assumption that the receiver knows the complex-valued Rayleigh fading coefficients. This assumption is often unrealistic in practice and recently new classes of unitary space-time signals have been proposed where neither the sender nor the receiver knows the fading coefficients. The investigators will facilitate the implementation of both of these programs along with a host of related problems in signal image processing. This will require: (1) The construction of totally new families of uniform tight frames with specific optimization properties; (2) The development of algorithms for their implementation; (3) The development of new (and computationally efficient) methods for inverting the Gabor frame operator to allow a much broader class of functions to be used for signal image processing. Is it possible to develop a cell phone which will not fade under almost any circumstance? Is it possible to have your computer receive an almost perfect message immediately after it is sent? Is it possible to develop a hearing aid which not only allows the wearer to hear what he she wants, but also allows a person to filter out sounds they do not want to hear? Is it possible to have a breast x-ray which is so clear that cancer diagnoses are 99% accurate? The answer is that all of these (and a host of other important questions) are ``theoretically possible . What is needed for the implementation of these important applications is the development of a branch of mathematics called ``uniform tight frames . Working with a dozen research groups around the country, the investigators are developing the mathematics needed for these applications as well as developing the means to implement these results in the specific cases listed above and a large number of other areas of application doc10432 none This project will develop scalable algorithms for solving discrete optimization problems (DOPs) in distributed-memory computing environments. DOPs arise in many important applications such as planning, scheduling, logistics, telecommunications, bioengineering, and robotics. Most of these problems are NP-complete, but in practice, intelligent search algorithms such as Branch, Cut, and Price (BCP) have been successful at tackling them. This research will develop parallel algorithms based on BCP that not only can use large numbers of processors efficiently, but also can handle very large problem instances. A key part of these algorithms is the data structure used for maintaining the information for each node in the search tree. This can be implemented with a memory-efficient differencing scheme relating the parent and child nodes. However, these data structures do not allow the use of current techniques for implementing scalable branch and bound search algorithms. This project will overcome that difficulty. The project will build on previous work in which the PI developed an object-oriented, generic framework called SYMPHONY (Single- or Multi-Process Optimization over Networks). Because of its modular design, SYMPHONY is extremely flexible and can be used to solve a wide variety of DOPs. Source code and documentation for SYMPHONY is currently distributed for free to the research community. This project will develop data structures and load balancing methods to decentralize SYMPHONY s current centralized control and data storage model. These improvements will be added to the web-based distribution to improve the impact of this project doc10433 none This individual investigator award will fund a project that will employ a new pinning-force microscope in conjunction with fast transport measurements, to address key questions on vortex dynamics. These include: a) the mechanism of current driven metastable to stable transitions; b) the nature of moving vortex phases and the transitions between them; c) effects of boundaries on dynamics and phase segregation in the peak effect region; d) the mechanism of frequency memory in vortex states. The planned pinning force microscope will image not the vortices themselves but the contrast between regions with different pinning forces. It will be capable of distinguishing between a strongly pinned disordered vortex state and a weakly pinned ordered one with spatial resolution of about 1micro-m, and its operation will not be limited to low fields. By taking advantage of the fact that the vortex motion can be frozen in place and that the imaging is non-invasive, the microscope will be capable of resolving vortex motion with excellent temporal resolution (about 1ms). This method will allow access to regimes of vortex dynamics not possible by existing vortex imaging techniques. The students and young researchers involved in this work will gain skill in applying newly developed new techniques to questions of interest. The knowledge and skills that they will learn will be of use to them in future research and development careers. %%% A limiting factor to the use of Type-II superconductors in technology is that at a particular magnetic field strength, magnetic vortices form. These vortices can become de-pinned which then cause the superconductor to loose its zero resistance state. Because most properties of Type-II superconductors are governed by the physics of vortices, it is of fundamental and technological interest to study the physics of the motion these vortices. Several newly discovered phenomena have made it clear that our present understanding of vortex dynamics (or motion) is flawed. It appears that, due to the presence of a random pinning force, the phase transitions and the onset of vortex motion are very interesting and more complex than originally thought. This individual investigator award will fund a program to address these issues by imaging the pinning force distribution in the vortex phases with a novel high resolution microscope that we propose to build in our laboratory. A strong educational component will be an integral part of the project. Students at both graduate and undergraduate levels as well as a post doctoral fellow will actively participate in all research and development aspects of the program. The knowledge and skills that they will learn will be of use to them in future research and development careers doc10434 none Israe Koren University of Massachusetts Adaptive Performance and Power Management for Real-Time Systems This research will enable real-time computer systems to monitor and automatically adapt their power usage to specified fault-tolerance and performance requirements, prevailing workload, and current and projected energy power constraints. Many systems, which are power-constrained, do not always have a strict limit on their power consumption. Instead, they have periods of time during which energy supply is very limited, and should be used sparingly, while at other times, the power available is adequate and the system is allowed to exploit all its resources to deliver maximum performability. While there has been a great deal of research in developing circuits and design techniques to build low-power devices, there is very little reported on techniques to adjust power consumption on-the-fly to adapt to changing levels of workload and energy power availability. There is the need for an integrated approach, ranging from the hardware operation (using voltage-clock scaling or a sleep mode) to the application level. Our preliminary investigations have shown that such an integrated approach, exploiting the synergy between these various layers, is far more effective than single-layer approaches adopted incrementally doc10435 none This project is devoted to the investigation of collective and localized excitations in tetrahedrally coordinated semiconductors and their heterostructures by means of a variety of optical techniques. The research will focus on the collective and localized excitations in isotopically controlled semiconductors composed composed of light atoms (diamond, SiC, BN and BP). Attention will be given to electronic states of donor-bound electrons and acceptor-bound holes in isotopically controlled diamond, Si, silicon carbide polytypes, as well as II-VI and III-V compound semiconductors. In addition, localized vibrations and gap modes of isoelectronic and compensated impurities will be explored and delineated in the chalcopyrites genealogically derived from the II-VI and III-V semiconductors. Collective excitations subjected to the constraints of the reduced dimensionality of nanostructures fabricated with molecular beam epitaxy will be investigated. Raman, Brillouin, Infrared , photoluminescence and modulated reflectivity transmission spectroscopic techniques supplemented by piezo- and magneto-spectroscopy will be employed to address the above problems. Students will participate in this research. They will receive training in one of the forefront areas of current semiconductors physics and will thereby be prepared to enter the scientific technical workforce of the 21st Century. This research deals with the application of several experimental optical techniques to problems posed by advanced semiconductor materials. These materials play a great role in current technology but a basic understanding of their behaviors is still lacking. This research will provide information that will be useful for the synthesis and use of ultrahard materials, such as diamond, silicon carbide, boron nitride and others that have found applications as superhard thin film coatings. The behavior of these materials can be changed by the deliberate, controlled introduction of specific impurities or by manipulating their isotopic composition. The changed behaviors hold the promise of improved performance of the materials in applications of high temperature high power electronic devices. This project offers many opportunities for the participation by students. Participants in the program will be exposed to the excitement and intellectual challenges of an area that is important in contemporary basic science and significant for potential applications. The expertise thus developed will prepare them for a future in academia and government as well as a career in research and development in the high tech optoelectronic industry doc10436 none Donald, Bruce Dartmouth College CISE Postdoctoral Associates in Experimental Computer Science: Physical Geometric Algorithms and Systems for High-Throughput NMR While automation is revolutionizing many aspects of biology, the determination of three-dimensional protein structure remains an expensive task. Traditional automated and semiautomated approaches to protein structure determination through nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy require dozens of experiments and months of spectrometer time, making them unsuitable for high-throughput automation. The research proposed is to develop algorithms and systems for determining protein structure from only a few key NMR spectra. The system will use algorithms similar to and adapted from physical geometric algorithms, pattern recognition and machine vision, signal processing, and robotics, in order to analyze spectra, assign spectral peaks to atom interactions, compute secondary structure, and estimate the global fold. Previously developed software, JIGSAW, represents NMR data with graphs encoding potential interactions between amino acid residues. JIGSAW applies graph algorithms to find subgraphs encoding the secondary protein structure. The postdoctoral research associate will build on the insights of JIGSAW by assisting to 1) integrate automated analysis of geometry and correlations in three-dimensional input spectra, 2) prove correctness, completeness, and complexity results within a random graph formalism, 3) extend JIGSAW to larger proteins, and 4) utilize long-range interactions in order to estimate three-dimensional protein structure doc10437 none EIA- Donald, Bruce Dartmouth College CISE Postdoctoral Associates in Experimental Computer Science: Physical Geometric Algorithms and Systems for High-Throughput NMR While automation is revolutionizing many aspects of biology, the determination of three-dimensional protein structure remains an expensive task. Traditional automated and semiautomated approaches to protein structure determination through nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy require dozens of experiments and months of spectrometer time, making them unsuitable for high-throughput automation. The research proposed is to develop algorithms and systems for determining protein structure from only a few key NMR spectra. The system will use algorithms similar to and adapted from physical geometric algorithms, pattern recognition and machine vision, signal processing, and robotics, in order to analyze spectra, assign spectral peaks to atom interactions, compute secondary structure, and estimate the global fold. Previously developed software, JIGSAW, represents NMR data with graphs encoding potential interactions between amino acid residues. JIGSAW applies graph algorithms to find subgraphs encoding the secondary protein structure. The postdoctoral research associate will build on the insights of JIGSAW by assisting to 1) integrate automated analysis of geometry and correlations in three-dimensional input spectra, 2) prove correctness, completeness, and complexity results within a random graph formalism, 3) extend JIGSAW to larger proteins, and 4) utilize long-range interactions in order to estimate three-dimensional protein structure doc10438 none The University of the District of Columbia plans to establish a Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology (SMET) Research and Training Center to develop and implement strategies to teach and retain students in SMET courses. Specific objectives for organizing the Center are to: 1. Modify the content of entry level (gate-keeper) science, mathematics and engineering courses for undergraduate students to enable them to improve their performance and retention rates in these programs, to improve performances on graduate and professional school standardized tests,and increase their competitiveness for employment opportunities; 2. Develop procedures that will be used to improve science, mathematics, engineering, and technology capabilities of faculty and students by identifying and planning activities such as seminars, symposia, and workshops to expose them to current trends in the various disciplines; and 3. Obtain information on the current status of teaching and research facilities in the Biological and Environmental Sciences, Chemistry and Physics, Mathematics , and Engineering programs in order that a strategy can be developed to improve laboratory infrastructure which includes obtaining equipment and adequate space that will enhance faculty and undergraduate student research. The SMET Center is designed to improve the academic performance and increase student retention. Entry level (gate-keeper) science, mathematics and engineering courses in the SMET curricula will be revised to add a research component to the laboratory courses in order to emphasize reasoning skills and stimulate logical thinking. This activity is designed to develop a long-term dynamic curricula that can adapt to changing technologies. One hundred freshman students will be randomly selected to participate in the center. Fifty students will have declared majors in one of the SMET disciplines and 50 will be undeclared majors. The participants will be followed through graduation to determine the impact of the SMET Center activities on course attendance and completion rates, passing rates, research activities, grade point averages, graduation rates, enrollment in graduate and professional schools and employment. The Center administrators will consist of the principal investigator , two co-principal investigators and an administrative assistant. The administrators will plan and implement Center activities with the advice and support of the advisory committee. The principal investigator will have the primary responsibility of supervising all aspects of the program with the co-principal investigators assuming the day-to-day operations of the Center, such as, organizing, conducting and, implementing the activities. An advisory committee consisting of scientists and administrators (7), as well as, two consultants will complete the administrative core. All faculty in the SMET disciplines will be invited to participate in the center. They will participate in enrichment activities (research, workshops etc.), implemented by the Center. These activities are expected to produce energetic faculty, committed to teaching and research. They will utilize improved teaching techniques and computer technology to make courses interesting and stimulating. The status and availability of research and teaching facilities in the SMET disciplines at UDC will be assessed by consultants. The consultants (2), selected from UDC faculty, will inventory current equipment and available space in the University for teaching and research. Additionally, the consultants will provide information concerning available research facilities in government, industry, and research-intensive universities in Washington doc10439 none A Botanical Survey of Madagascar s Endangered Littoral Forests This project involves a detailed botanical survey of selected littoral forest areas along Madagascar s east coast in order to compile a comprehensive checklist of the plant species that occur in this highly threatened ecosystem. Littoral forests on sand were once widespread and continuous along the coastline, but are now reduced to small, isolated patches that cover less than 1% of this island nation and continue to be degraded by intensive human exploitation. Despite their small size, however, these forests probably contain well over 1,000 native plant species, or about 10% of the total Malagasy flora, and many of them are restricted to this very specialized and localized ecosystem, occurring nowhere else on Earth. A team of U.S. and Malagasy botanists will systematically visit six representative littoral forest sites distributed along the ca. 1,500 km coastline, covering nearly 12 degrees of latitude. The flora of the study sites will be fully documented though the collection of dried herbarium specimens (ca. 1,400 per site); digital color images will be taken of 30-40% of the species, and information will be gathered on local uses and threats to the forest areas. The herbarium material will be identified and compared with historical collections made during the last 150+ years and stored in major institutions in St. Louis, Madagascar, and Paris, France (which has the largest collection of Malagasy plants). Critical specimen data (e.g., species name, geographic location, date of collection, etc.) will be compiled and made available on the Internet as a Survey of the Vascular Flora of the Humid Evergreen Littoral Forests of Madagascar, with a summary list and statistics for each site, and an integrated mapping capability for individual species, often accompanied by digitized images. The results of this study will greatly improve our knowledge of Madagascar s highly threatened littoral forests. Many species new to science will likely be discovered during the project, and hundreds more will be documented for the first time in decades, including many now threatened with extinction and therefore of critical conservation importance. Using data from the study we will evaluate whether species composition changes from north to south along the coastline. Preliminary data suggest that most species are restricted to only a portion of the littoral forest ecosystem, with gradual changes in species composition along a latitudinal gradient. If this hypothesis is proven to be correct, we will identify specific areas where the establishment of protected areas (parks or reserves) would collectively ensure the continued survival of the unique plants that comprise Madagascar s littoral forests doc10440 none A conference on the Chemistry of Supramolecules and Assemblies will be held at the end of July at Connecticut College as part of the Gordon Research Conference series. This conference will focus on the chemistry, properties and reactions of supramolecules and supramolecular assemblies; topics of current interest as they relate to such issues as (i) building blocks of extended 2D and 3D colloidal crystals, (ii) nanostructured and layered materials, (iii) surfactants and DNA, (iv) assembly of molecules and polymers into thin films, (v) functional dendrimers, (vi) vesicles, emulsions, mono- and bi-layers, micro-emulsions and liquid crystals. Graduate and undergraduate students invited to participate at this conference will gain a valuable experience through informal interactions with more seasoned investigators, given the nature and practice of these conferences doc10441 none This individual investigator award will provide support to a young professor at Clemson University for his research on the mixed state of type-II superconductors. In particular he will attempt to measure the amount of charge bound inside a vortex line in a type-II superconductor. Recent transport models for the mixed state of the high temperature superconductors have invoked a nonzero vortex charge as an explanation for the anomalous behavior seen experimentally. In the high temperature superconductors, the value for the vortex charge is expected to be enhanced over its value in conventional type-II superconductors. A novel technique utilizing the measurement of the mixed state thermoelectric Hall effect (Nernst Effect) will be employed in this effort. The expected sensitivity of this technique means that a null result will be as important as a finite value. The charge will be measured in the cuprate superconductors as a function of stoichiometry, temperature, and magnetic field. This research will increase our understanding of these technologically useful materials. The students working on this project will develop skills that will help them find jobs in academia, government or industrial laboratories. %%% Superconductors are materials that have zero electrical resistance and thus can carry an electrical current without loss. The technologically useful superconductors are known as type-II. These materials have what is known as a mixed state. In the mixed state an external magnetic field is able to penetrate the superconductor in quantized (fixed) amounts, resulting in vortices. Recent theories to explain the observed anomalous behavior of the electrical and thermal transport in the mixed state of the high temperature superconductors invoke the notion of a non-zero electric charge for these vortices. The charge of a vortex has never been measured. In conventional, low temperature superconductors it would be too small. However it may be possible to measure this value in the high temperature superconductors. This individual investigator award will provide support to a young professor at Clemson University for his attempt to measure the charge bound inside a vortex in a high temperature superconductor. The project will utilize a newly developed, sensitive technique to make this measurement. The technique has enough sensitivity that even a measured value of zero for the charge will be significant and have implications for the theories of the mixed-state. This research will increase our understanding of these technologically useful materials. The students working on this project will develop skills that will help them find jobs in academia, government or industrial laboratories doc10442 none The purpose of this project is to conduct an intensive two-year sampling program of the fishes of Fiji. Data from this project will be combined with information from previous collections to establish a comprehensive list of the species present and provide information on the habitats of the species and characteristics of the biological communities. Although Fiji lies within the region supporting the most diverse coral-reef fish fauna in the world, its fishes are not well known and estimates of the diversity of fishes inhabiting the Fiji Islands are grossly underestimated. Collecting efforts will concentrate on reef and shore fishes, and include sampling in reefs, mangroves, seagrass beds, mud flats, and rocky and sandy shores. In addition to making collections using SCUBA at depths of 30 meters or less, a pilot sampling of fishes will be conducted to a depth of 120 meters using closed circuit rebreather technology. Specimens will be photographed in the field and returned to the University of Hawaii for identification. The fish specimens collected will be available for future systematic and biogeographic studies, and will provide information on biodiversity, habitat specificity, and characteristics of Indo-Pacific marine communities. An interactive, searchable database system on the fishes of Fiji will be developed. The database will contain basic taxonomic data for each taxon (authorship, location of type specimen, synonyms), major references for identification, diagnostic characteristics, distributional information, photographs, and listings of major museum holdings of specimens from Fiji. A book on the fishes of Fiji is planned as a follow-up project doc10443 none This individual investigator award is to a young professor for a study of vortex matter phases and phase transitions related to the peak effect in type-II superconductors, using in situ neutron scattering and ac magnetization measurements. In spite of the technological importance of type-II superconductors, the vortex matter phases are poorly understood. For many years, it was thought that a genuine order-disorder (melting) phase transition cannot occur in vortex matter systems due to the destructive effects of random pinning. Recently it was proposed that a topologically ordered vortex solid phase (Bragg glass) could exist in weakly disordered type-II superconductors. The melting (disordering) of the Bragg glass phase has been suggested as the origin of the well known but poorly understood peak effect anomaly seen in many type-II superconductors. There is preliminary experimental evidence suggesting that the peak effect is a genuine order-disorder phase transition in the superconducting vortex matter. This project will use in situ small angle neutron scattering to determine the vortex matter phase diagram in a classic type-II superconductor, Nb. The effects of disorder on the supercooling and superheating of vortex matter will be investigated. This project will also explore a possible application of neutron spin echo technique for studying the metastable vortex phases. These studies will establish a basic understanding of the magnetic properties of type-II superconductors. The graduate and undergraduate students participating in this project will have the opportunity to work at the Center for High-Resolution Neutron Scattering at the NIST and at the Institut Laue Langevin in Grenoble, France with researchers from around the world. This should prepare the students for future careers in academia, industry, or government. %%% Vortices in type-II superconductors form a condensed matter system of technological and scientific interests. Superconductors are of technological interest because they are able to carry high electrical currents without loss due to resistance. The current-carrying capability of a superconductor is determined by a subtle competition between the vortex-vortex interactions, the random pinning (vortex-pin interactions), and thermal fluctuations. In spite of the technological importance of type-II superconductors, the vortex matter phases are poorly understood. This individual investigator award is to a young professor who will study the physics of vortex matter using in situ neutron scattering and ac magnetization measurements. These studies will establish a basic understanding of the magnetic properties of type-II superconductors. The graduate and undergraduate students participating in this project will have the opportunity to work at the Center for High-Resolution Neutron Scattering at the NIST and at the Institut Laue Langevin in Grenoble, France with researchers from around the world. This should prepare the students for future careers in academia, industry, or government doc10444 none This individual investigator award funds research that aims to apply the muon spin relaxation (MuSR) technique to the study of superconductivity and magnetism in a variety of systems including; high-Tc cuprate, intercalated HfNCl, other superconductors, and low-dimensional and or geometrically frustrated spin systems. The MuSR method will allow accurate determination of the magnetic field penetration depth in type-II superconductors, and of spontaneous magnetic fields and spin fluctuations in magnetic materials. This project will also include attempts of charge doping via the formation of field effect transistors (FET). The MuSR and FET results will elucidate the evolution from insulators to superconductors to simple metals in superconductors, and from spin singlet states to frozen spin states in magnetic systems. Emerging pictures will be considered from a unified point of view regarding crossover from gapped to ungapped states near quantum phase transitions. The project will also support highly motivated graduate students at Columbia, give them the unique experience of international collaboration, and promote a greater role of female PhD students researchers in experimental physics. %%% During the recent 15 years, several novel superconductors with very high transition temperatures have been discovered. They include high-Tc copper oxides and intercalated HfNCl. Muon spin relaxation (MuSR) is a new and powerful experimental method for studying superconducting and magnetic properties of solids by using a beam of sub-atomic particles (Mu-meson) produced by high-intensity proton accelerators. This individual investigator award will support research in which the Columbia University group will apply the MuSR technique to studies of several high-Tc superconductors and relevant magnetic materials to elucidate how charges and spins are correlated to exhibit a variety of novel phenomena in solids. This project will provide information crucial for increasing transition temperatures, which would help in the application of high-Tc superconductors to commercial electronic devices and power cables. The project will also support highly motivated graduate students at Columbia, give them the unique experience of international collaboration, and promote a greater role of female PhD students researchers in experimental physics doc10445 none This project addresses materials science research on InGaNAs GaAs, a technologically relevant material to the telecommunications(1.3um) industry. The performance(characteristic temperature, To) of InGaNAs lasers is considerably higher than that of equivalent InP-based lasers, in part due to the increased electron confinement resulting from the larger conduction band offsets in this material compared to InGaAsP InP. InGaNAs vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) have been demonstrated, and the epitaxial structure of InGaNAs VCSELs overcomes one of the largest problems in developing high-performance VCSELs at a reasonable cost, since high quality AlGaAs GaAs distributed Bragg reflectors are easily incorporated with the InGaNAs active region. The two primary materials issues that this project will address are the extension of the emission region to longer wavelengths and the elimination of nonradiative defects, which cause a high internal absorption coefficient and high current threshold, through the incorporation of pseudomorphically strained InGaNAs quantum wells in the laser epitaxial structure. Specifically, the bandgap of the epitaxial material will be tailored through deliberate modification of growth kinetics to optimise nitrogen incorporation and adjust lattice strain across the InGaNAs active region. The approach is to alter the amount of nitrogen that can be incorporated while two-dimensional (2D) growth is sustained by varying the substrate orientation, growth temperature, and lattice strain. The effect of bandgap tailoring will be evaluated by characterizing the epitaxial structures via photoluminescence (PL) studies as well as by characterizing the optical and electrical performance of InGaNAs Fabry-Perot laser diodes. The results from both PL and device characterization studies will be coupled in order to achieve a more complete understanding of the InGaNAs heterostructures. In particular, the relationship between bandgap tailoring techniques and emission wavelength and radiative and nonradiative properties will be determined. The application of standard AlGaAs processing techniques, such as impurity-induced disordering and native oxidation, to fabricate planar index-guided emitters will also be explored. Following a materials characterization study to verify that these processes have not degraded any material properties, an index-guided edge-emitting laser will be fabricated. The basic goal of the proposed project is to gain greater understanding of InGaNAs GaAs growth and processing, and achievement of significant enhancements in the performance of single-mode planar InGaNAs laser diodes through improved growth and processing techniques. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. These studies will improve fundamental understanding of basic materials properties limiting the efficiency and performance of telecommunications light sources. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area. The project is designed to develop strong technical, communication, and organizational skills in students through unique educational experiences made possible by a forefront research environment doc10446 none This FRG project explores local electronic spin injection and transmission in semiconductor heterostructures and ferromagnetic metal films on semiconductors. The approach is to fabricate a series of III-V heterostructures(e.g., AlGaAs GaAs, InGaAs InAlAs, InAs InP, etc.) and hybrid ferromagnetic semiconductor systems, and to combine state-of-the-art surface science instrumentation with first principles total energy calculations which include electron spin. The local structural properties of the layers will be determined during growth using an in situ scanning tunneling microscope (STM). The fraction of spins able to traverse the interface will be determined using a spin-polarized STM technique, which uses a single crystal Ni 110 STM tip as a source of a 100% spin-polarized electron injection current. The structural information obtained with the STM will be used as the input structure for the first-principles total-energy calculations to provide a detailed picture of local electronic and electromagnetic field properties of the surfaces. Comparing this information with the experimentally measured local spin-injection probability map will assist in identification of mechanisms responsible for electron spin flip with near atomic resolution. Ferromagnetic metal films (e.g., elemental Co) on semiconductors will also be grown. Nucleation and growth of submonolayer thick films will be studied using in situ STM. By counting the number of Co islands formed for a set of 0.1 monolayer thick films each grown at a different temperature fundamental parameters governing the nucleation and growth are expected to be identified. To quantify this information, Monte Carlo computer simulations that mimic the growth procedure and predict the experimental outcome will be conducted. From these calculations, diffusion coefficients and activation energies for diffusion are obtained. With only 0.1 monolayer of Co on the semiconductor surface, local spin-injection properties will also be investigated. This allows local monitoring of the effects of Schottky barrier formation on the spin injection process. First-principles total-energy calculations will also be carried out for these surfaces and the results compared to the experimentally measured local spin-injection map to identify mechanisms for spin-flip scattering. After completion of one monolayer of Co, either thicker elemental Co films or alternate monolayers of MnAl and Co will be grown to form the Co 2MnAl Heusler alloy. Elemental Co films allow systematic studies of structural and magnetic quality on a simple one-component system, while the Heusler alloy provides a cubic structure, closely lattice matched to InP, and is thought to be an ideal spin-injection contact, since only one spin participates in electrical conduction. The magnetic quality of the overlayers will be determined using SQUID magnetometry, and the structural quality of the films will be determined using X-ray diffraction. Ferromagnetic metal contacts will be fabricated in situ on the high-electron mobility semiconductor quantum well structures, and transport properties evaluated. The outcome will be modeled using transport theory which takes into account the detailed structure of the interface. The theoretical component of these studies will be conducted in a collaborative arrangement with the Theory Group at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), allowing students to travel to the NREL and gain additional research experiences and skills. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. These studies will improve fundamental understanding of factors important to the evolving field of spintronics, which combines conventional electronics and spin transport. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area. The interdisciplinary project strives to develop strong technical, communication, and organizational management skills in students through unique educational experiences made possible by a forefront research environment, and collaborative activities with a national facility doc10447 none Two new types polymers will be synthesized and characterized in the laboratory of the principal investigator, and some of their properties will be determined in greater depth in the laboratories of collaborators. Thousands of polymer colloids (also known as latexes) will be synthesized in parallel by emulsion copolymerization of hydrophilic and hydrophobic monomers in search of copolymers that exhibit new morphologies. Visual tests will be used to determine which latexes form opalescent films, and which will separate into phases like those of polymer blends. Copolymers formed by emulsion polymerization, which has been used for the manufacture synthetic rubber latex and coatings for more than fifty years, may provide a low cost alternative to block copolymers that are used now to stabilize polymer blends. The chemical and physical bases for the transformation of colloidal crystals of a styrene-hydroxyethyl methacrylate latex to porous polymer nets will investigated. The polymer nets will be explored as separation media for polymers and colloids, as solid supports for catalysts, and as templates for preparation of photonic bandgap materials. Optical properties of the materials will be studied in collaboration with Profs. Ackerson and Tong in the Oklahoma State University (OSU) Department of Physics. Model polymampholytes will be synthesized to enable testing of current theory of their structures and properties in aqueous solutions. Polyampholytes are synthetic synthetic analogues of proteins that contain (+) and (-) charged units in a single polymer chain. They will be prepared by living radical polymerization of uncharged monomers followed by functional group transformations to create the charged units. The compositions, structures, and molecular weights of the polymers will be determined at OSU. The model polyampholytes will be provided to Prof. Colby of Pennsylvania State University for measurements of viscosity of aqueous solutions, electrical charge on the polymer chains, and dielectric response, and those results will be compared with new theories of polyampholytes by Prof. Rubinstein of the University of North Carolina. %%% This research is in the general areas of nanoscience, bio-related polymers, and combinational chemistry. Students earning graduate degrees from this research will gain experience at polymer synthesis and characterization in the laboratory of the principal investigator, and in properties of polymer solutions at Penn State or optical properties of colloidal materials in physics at OSU. In addition to meeting degree requirements in chemistry, the graduate students (and the postdoctoral scholar) will participate in the interdisciplinary workshops and short courses of the Oklahoma Network for Nanostructured materials (NanoNet), a newly formed group of faculty in chemistry, physics, chemical engineering, and electrical engineering at OSU, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Tulsa. The broad scientific base will prepare them for industrial research and development or university teaching doc10448 none PROPOSAL NO.: PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Choi, Jaewu INSTITUTION NAME: Louisiana State University & Agricultural and Mechanical College TITLE: NER: Molecular Diode and Molecular Nonvolatile Memory The proposed research program addresses the challenges and opportunities available with molecular diode and molecular nonvolatile memory. The proposed molecular diode and molecular nonvolatile memory can be achieved with carbon nanotubes functionality and heterostructure of carbon nanotubes with a ferroelectric linear polymer. The carbon nanotube, itself, has many functional properties, such as quasi-one dimensionality, metal-semiconductor, mechanical stiffness, capillarity, high aspect ratio, large surface area, and chemical stability. In application of these carbon nanotubes to the electronic devices, one serious obstacle is handling the chiarlity, which plays an important role in determining the metallic-semiconducting behavior of the carbon nanotubes. The proposed research program allows us to overcome these difficulties by utilizing the carbon nanotubes as a backbone for a diode and a sensor for a nonvolatile memory. First of all, the proposed molecular diode consists of the differentially doped single carbon nanotube. This is based on our own research work on the electronic structure study of the modified carbon nanotubes by ion-bombardments, alkali metal doping, and atomic and molecular gas adsorption. These recent studies show that the density of states near Fermi level, work function, and band gap of the carbon nanotubes can be tunable. Therefore, it does not require any junction of two carbon nanotubes with different chirality to make a molecular diode, which has been suggested in a theoretical calculation by growth of a single carbon nanotube with different chiraity. To make a diode from a single carbon nanotube in this proposed research program, the half of the tube will be doped with p-type acceptor (like oxygen or fluorine) and the other half will be doped with n-type donors (alkali metals) using screening doping. Secondly, the proposed molecular nonvolatile memory is a heterostructure of a carbon nanotube and a ferroelectric linear polymer with a permanent dipole moment. The carbon nanotube has been studied as a gas sensor and a gas-storage. Adsorption of gas on carbon nanotube induces the conductivity change and band gap opening. In this proposed carbon nanotube-ferroelectric polymer heterostructure, we are going to detect the conductivity change of the carbon nanotube due to the electric dipole reorientation of the ferrolectric polymer by applying the normal TTL (transistor-tansistor logic) voltage. Therefore, the carbon nanotube-ferroelectric polymer heterostructure is the combination of the sensor and information storage. The interface between the carbon nanotube and the ferroelectric polymer, PVDF, of the proposed heterostructure systems is changed from the hydrogen or fluorine rich to the hydrogen and fluorine mixture across the conformational switching from all trans to gauch-trans-gauch bar with variation of temperature or applied voltage (a gate voltage). This is the working principle of the proposed molecular nonvolatile memory. Through this proposed program on molecular diode and molecular nonvolatile memory, graduate and undergraduate students will be involved and trained in the cutting- edge research area (an emerging area of nanoscale science and technology, in special molecular electronics) of science and technology with advanced synchrotron and microfabrication facilities doc10449 none Parmenter The Undergraduate Mentorships in Environmental Biology (UMEB) Program at the University of New Mexico will provide research training experiences across a range of ecological studies involving biology, ecology, and meteorology in the Rio Grande Basin of New Mexico. The UMEB Program will collaborate with faculty researchers in the Sevilleta Long Term Ecological Research Program (LTER) and the Museum of Southwestern Biology (MSB). The goals of the UMEB program are: (1) instruct undergraduates in the principles of scientific research, (2) expose the students to a wide variety of ecological research techniques and career opportunities, (3) facilitate individual student research projects, and (4) encourage students to continue their scientific education in upper-division courses and graduate school. Emphasis in student recruitment will ensure high participation by students from under-represented ethnic groups. These activities will provide training in theoretical and technical aspects of ecological research, and promote a holistic approach to large-scale ecological studies. The UMEB program will contribute to four significant areas of research training in the United States: (1) Assist in counteracting current and anticipated shortages of Ph.D. s for teaching at colleges and universities and conducting research in the national interest; (2) increase the ethnic diversity of students entering the ranks of professional scientists in the field of Environmental Biology; (3) provide students with essential information regarding graduate school program selection and enrollment; and (4) facilitate hands-on research experiences for undergraduate minority students, so as to prepare these students for the demands of graduate school and professional scientific careers doc10450 none for DMS - Inverse Comparison Geometry: Riemannian Comparison Theorems pertain to manifolds whose curvatures are bounded in some way, and are proven by comparing the geometry to that of a well known model space. I propose the name Inverse Comparison Geometry for the subject of constructing Riemannian manifolds with prescribed curvature conditions. My proposal focuses on the problem of constructing manifolds of positive and nonnegative curvature. In it, I outline my plans to (a) find counterexammples to the Uniform Pinching Conjecture among the 3-sphere bundles over the 4-sphere, (b) study two sided Cheeger perturbations of the metrics on biquotients and homogeneous spaces (c) search for nonnegative and positive curvature on certain homotopy 5 and 6 dimensional real projective spaces. (d) construct nonnegative curvature on ``double soul manifolds , (e) study a rigid version of the ``double soul problem , and (f) prove my conjecture---that the dimension of the image of a Riemannian submersion of a complete, positively curved manifold is strictly greater than half the dimension of the domain. These problems all address the general question of how does the curvature of a space effect its geometry and topology? Roughly speaking, curvature is what determines the trigonometry of a space. For example one can prove that the surface of the earth is curved with out looking at it from outer space. To do this have two people start at the north pole and travel in any two directions that are perpendicular to each other. If they travel at the same speed, they will eventually meet again at the south pole. On the other hand, if the same experiment were conducted on a flat world, the two people would never meet. They would keep getting further apart, even if they never reached the edge of the world. The main justification for studying this general question is that it seems intrinsically beautiful, intriguing, and natural. It has a long history, that dates back to the s work of H. Hopf, Morse, Schoenberg, Meyers, and Synge doc10451 none Some of the most astounding recent discoveries about our universe have been made by telescopes and instruments collecting forms of natural radiation from space, that are invisible to the human eye. For example, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to scientists who worked in collecting astrophysical X-rays and solar neutrinos. This proposal is to support groups at the University of Chicago and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) for participation in the exploration of the next frontier in astronomy, the observation of high-energy gamma rays from space. The VERITAS (Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System) telescope is an array of collectors that detect the small light flashes produced by high-energy gamma rays interacting in the upper atmosphere. Several sources of this high-energy radiation have been discovered with earlier pathfinder telescopes. These sources apparently exist both within our galaxy and in energetic extragalactic objects. VERITAS can detect much fainter and more distant objects than existing telescopes, and is expected to discover many new sources of high-energy gamma rays. VERITAS is a collaboration of 10 institutions in the USA, Canada and Europe. The construction of the project is managed by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, with the project office located near Tucson, Arizona. Apart from an active involvement in the development of the science of this new astronomy, Chicago and UCLA have key roles in the construction of the VERITAS array hardware and software supported by this proposal. These activities include building key components of the camera at the focus of each VERITAS collector, and designing the way in which the data will be collected and recorded. The VERITAS array is at present under construction for completion in . The first scientific results are expected to appear in doc10452 none Victor Guillemin, Andras Vasy This award provides partial support for participants to attend the meeting `Geometric Microlocal Analysis: a conference in honor of Richard Melrose to be held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, March 29-31, . The speakers at the conference will be distinguished mathematicians working in Melrose s wide-ranging fields of interest. The primary need for the conference is the otherwise unavailable opportunity to gather together specialists from many different areas who would normally have little contact, but who all have ties to Professor Melrose. In particular, inviting experts with connections to Melrose s fields of interest, but whose work often has a different emphasis and uses different methods, provides an unprecedented opportunity for the synthesis of these ideas. The tentative list of the main speakers, who will deliver one-hour lectures, consist of Michael Atiyah, Nicolas Burq, Charlie Epstein, Charles Fefferman, Lars Hormander, Victor Ivrii, Gilles Lebeau, John Lott, Peter Sarnak, Johannes Sjostrand, Terence Tao, Daniel Tataru, Michael Taylor, Gunther Uhlmann, Steve Zelditch. The schedule is not expected to be crowded so that there will be plenty of time for discussions between all the participants. Further information will be soon available at http: www-math.mit.edu seminars doc10453 none This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF-00-119). The resulting grant is co-funded by the Divisions of Materials Research and Mathematical Sciences. Nanostructures such as quantum dots and quantum wires can be employed to yield devices with novel electronic properties. One particularly promising route to quantum dot formation is via the spontaneous self-assembly process that occurs during heteroepitaxy. To control the quantum dot formation and self-assembly process to the extent that these novel electronic devices become a reality, this team of researchers will investigate the mechanisms of dot formation, and develop predictive models of the dot formation and self-organization process. Achieving this goal requires an integrated interdisciplinary effort that can address the quantum dot formation and self-assembly process from the atomistic to the continuum or nanometer length scales. The work of this group will thus involve, for example, first-principle calculations of surface energies and surface diffusion coefficients, calculations of the evolution of quantum dot shape and composition during deposition, and the nonlinear dynamics of pattern formation or self-assembly of quantum dots. Each effort will feed into the other, as the information at the smaller length scales will be employed in the larger scale calculations, enabling us to bridge length scales that range from the fraction of a nanometer to thousands of nanometers. The ultimate goal of the project is to develop an understanding of the important materials issues governing formation and self-assembly of quantum dots, and to develop predictive models that enable the first-principles design of quantum dot nanostructures. The models can then be used to design and create specific quantum dot structures, providing for possible breakthroughs in the fabrication of new quantum dot electronic devices doc10454 none Reidy This U.S.-Mexico award will support joint collaborative work between Prof. Richard Reidy of the University of North Texas and Prof. Oscar Mendoza Gonzalez of the Instituto Tecnologico de Saltillo together with colleagues at CINVESTAV-Queretaro, in the field of biomaterials. More specifically, the researchers will focus on the relationship between the structure and surface functionalities of silica xerogels and aerogels and the consequent growth mechanisms, compositions, and morphologies of hydroxyapatites grown on these substrates from simulated body fluids. Using small-angle neutron scattering, gas adsorption, electron microscopy, and a range of instrumentation and expertise available at the collaborating institutions, the results of this research collaboration should prove useful in the development of inexpensive bioactive or resorbable bioceramic materials with many potential bioengineering applications doc10455 none Fort Valley State University (FVSU) has sustained the commitment to its mission and strategic plan of providing quality educational experiences for under represented minority group individuals (who constitute 93% of enrolled students), equipping them for productive and effective citizenry in an increasingly competitive society. A recent benchmarking, study conducted by the University System of Georgia, hailed FVSU as one of the top four institutions in the State with a competitive retention rate of 70% or better. Additionally, 88% or more of FVSU s biological sciencesgraduates are placed in medical or graduate school. We proposes to build upon this successful tradition of minority group retention and graduation from general baccalaureate degree programsby increasing more broadly the number of minority group graduates who pursue advanced studies in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology (SMET). Funding is requested to achieve the primary goals of increasing the number of minority students graduating with a major in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology (SMET) by 30%, and achieving a 10% increase over a five- year period in the number of SMET graduates pursuing master and doctoral degrees. There are three strategic initiatives being proposed to achieve these goals namely: i) enhancing the recruitment, and retention, of SMET major, ii) enhancing the infrastructure for providing technology if used and research-based SMET courses of instruction, and iii) providing career awareness opportunities in SMET field of study. These goals will be achieved via achievement of five interrelated objectives: 1) Enriching the academic preparation of students in SMET disciplines by focusing on developing course reform and enhancement, 2) Broadening and strengthening the research program for faculty development, 3) Strengthening the partnerships with academic institutions and industrial labs to enhance quality research experiences for students, 4 ) Infusing technology into teaching, research, and professional development, and 5) Enhancing critical transition activities to improve access and retention of undergraduate students. These objectives will be accomplished in different phases: revising gateway courses and improving the performance of students in SMET gate-keeping bottleneck courses via including research lab exercises and providing students tutorial assistance. Faculty enrichment activities will improve their research skills, collaborative research will provide wide exposure to students to opportunities to become familiar with SMET programs. Providing `hands-on experience to students using the state-of-the art facilities and other enrichment activities will improve their skills, and motivate them to pursue graduate studies. Student participation will be promoted by financial assistance as work study stipend, and by summer internships at major research institutions. Bridging initiative to address high school undergraduate-graduate- job market transitions in SMET fields will also be established. It is expected that this project will: 1) substantially increase the number of minority graduates in SMET disciplines and increase the proportion of those graduates who pursue advanced degrees in these disciplines through bridging and career awareness programs; 2) strengthen faculty expertise and capability to mentor students as researchers, and overall commitment to continued professional development as SMET scholars - a 10% increase in faculty research projects, publications, linkages, and grantsmanship will be attained; 3) promote gains in learning through the provision of a revised SMET curriculum which builds on increased faculty interactions with the incorporation of inquiry-based pedagogy; and 4) promote the greatest potential for student enrollment and success in SMET disciplines by enhancing the physical infrastructure (e.g., teaching research facilities) of the university. Dr. Sarwan Dhir, Assistant Professor, having strong project management experience will direct the program under the supervision of Dr. Josephine Davis, Vice President Academic Affairs. A Leadership Team of the Chairs of the SMET departments and an Advisory Committee of internal and external distinguished scientists will conduct an annual review of the program outcomes as well as formative evaluation as the program is developed. The results of this project will be disseminated widely in the professional community through presentations at regional and national scientific meetings and publications in scientific journals. The general public will have access to the successful efforts of this project through FVSU web site. The commitment of Fort Valley State University is evidenced from the supporting letter from Dr. Oscar L. Prater, President, FVSU, and overall supervision of Vice President for Academic Affairs and participation of Dean s, on the Advisory Committee, release time for faculty, matching cost of the equipment, and allocation of physical facilities for the teaching and research laboratories and use of other facilities and resources. This project will advance the mission of the University through its provision of high quality degree programs that increase the participation of minority group graduates in higher education doc10456 none This planning grant proposal is written in response to the NSF 00-131 Program Solicitation for Historically Black Colleges and Universities Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP). We believe that this planning grant will provide substantial assistance to Savannah State University (SSU) in conducting an assessment of science, mathematics, engineering and technology (SMET) education. Accordingly, Savannah State University will develop an institutional plan to enhance SMET education through curriculum improvement, faculty development, and infrastructure facility acquisition and utilization. This planning grant will not only significantly enhance the academic environment at SSU, it will also assist the institution in assessing its strong programs as well as those SMET disciplines, where SSU is not producing enough qualified graduates (with GPA 3.0 or higher) to enter graduate programs, be competitive and receive their Masters or Ph.D. degrees. Savannah State University is already assessing its programs and thus NSF support will complement our planning process to improve curricula and instructional programs in those disciplines that are not producing large enough numbers of well qualified graduates entering graduate school or the work force in SMET- related fields. This assessment period will end during the mid-semester in the Spring of ; planning will take place between March and August . We anticipate receiving continued support from the NSF to plan the SMET improvement grant proposal doc10457 none The overall goal of this work is to develop the computational tools to better study shaken baby syndrome . This project will develop highly accurate parallel adaptive Lagrangian discontinuous Galerkin techniques for the simulation of fluid mechanics and solid mechanics. These techniques will be central to the development of high fidelity simulation tools for investigation of pediatric brain injury mechanisms and preventative strategies. Even the most powerful computers today using the best available codes would need weeks or months to do these calculations. Moreover, even those heroic calculations would not provide reasonable simulations due to the poor numerical accuracy of the lower order (O(h)) finite element finite difference schemes and explicit time integration schemes (O(Dt)) used. The key element of the new strategy is the development and use of parallel adaptive hp Lagrangian discontinuous Galerkin schemes that provide the accuracy and efficiency necessary for dealing with the complex geometric and material structure of the brain tissue, associated membranes, and blood vessels. These schemes will enable the use of higher order approximations to obtain accuracies that are O(hp) and O(Dtk), for p, k 1. While the pediatric brain injury application will drive the research into this new class of parallel computational techniques, the codes and methodology should be useful for a much wider class of problems doc10458 none Piezoelectric thin films are attractive elements in several MEMS applications due to the large generated force, high electromechanical coupling coefficients, and substantial charge output that can be generated. This proposal focuses on two approaches to increasing the performance in piezoelectric MEMS devices: (i) enhancing the effective piezoelectric response in thin ferroelectric films utilizing in-plane poled structures and (ii) developing miniaturized flextensional transducers to amplify the piezoelectric effect. From the scientific standpoint, the program will determine how the piezoelectric properties of in-plane polarized lead zirconate titanate films compare to through-the-thickness polarized transducers, as well as any differences in the way piezoelectric and dielectric properties age and fatigue relative to conventionally poled films. A processing scheme to enable production of flextionsional MEMS transducers will also be developed. In addition, a MEMS switch for RF applications with large displacement (~2 microns) and high-speed ( 1microsecond) will be demonstrated using the d33 coefficient and a flextensional actuation mechanism. The educational aspects of this program will concentrate on training graduate as well as undergraduate researchers. %%% Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are miniaturized devices produced with the same techniques developed for integrated circuits, and typically range from several microns to several millimeters in size. Such devices are now widely used in ink jet printers and automobile air bag deployment accelerometers. Many fields, including miniaturized biomedical instrumentation for bedside diagnosis, commercial electronics such as cell phones, and small sensors to detect phenomena as diverse as toxic gases or the imminent failure of a piece of industrial equipment would benefit from MEMS devices with higher sensitivities or with the capability of doing more work. This program is designed to increase the functionality of MEMS systems by exploring the integration of high performance ferroelectric thin films with motion amplification. This program will also train and educate scientists in an interdisciplinary research environment in a technologically-significant area of national importance doc10459 none Tougaloo College seeks to increase the number of majors in science, math, and computer science who ar successful in their courses, who complete undergraduate studies with honors, and who attend graduate school in the sciences and technology. The college has an excellent track record for placing students in medical and health professional schools, and has also recently been cited as among the top five undergraduate sources of African-American doctorates. The program has three strategies. The first is to improve student success in introductory courses in biology, chemistry and mathematics. To our tutorial drop-in center we are adding three people (two supported by this grant) to provide weekly supplemental instruction sessions for the first two years of of instruction in these disciplines. In addition test practice sessions will be held to familiarize students with standardized test questions from examinations such as the Graduate Record Examination and the Medical College Admissions Test. We will also build the enrollment in our physics, pre-engineering, and computer science programs. We will sponsor a six-week summer program to introduce students to both fields, along with reading and English skills. We will offer a number of scholarships to talented students in computer science or physics who maintain a 3.3 science GPA. Finally we plan to stimulate interest in science and in graduate school by supporting research as an integral part of of the life of both faculty and student scientists. Contrary to its past tradition, the college will provide time for older faculty and new faculty to set up a viable on-campus research program, through either released time or sabbatical leaves. This program will continue to be supported by the College after the grant, as faculty acquire outside funding. These initiatives will provide a rich, stimulating environment for students which will provide a unique window on the reasons why people become scientists. 1 doc10460 none Nationwide statistics show marked under-representation of minority students attending graduate schools or pursuing careers in the areas of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics (SEM). HBCU s are in the most ideal situation to provide solutions to this problem. Universities like Kentucky State University must make every effort to recruit, retain, and graduate minoritySEM students and subsequently enable them to attend graduate school. Unfortunately, enrollmentin SEM disciplines is declining rather than growing. Therefore, Kentucky State University is submitting a proposal to the NSF HBCU-UP initiative designed to increase enrollment of minoritystudents in SEM areas and enhance their preparedness for graduate school success. Teams Enhancing Access for Minorities in Science (TEAMS) is a comprehensive program designed to prepare young minority students for entry into careers in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics (SEM) fields. The first phase of the program is a summer Undergraduate Bridge Program for rising high school seniors and graduates. Once students matriculate at Kentucky State University, they will proceed as TEAMS through several phases of their undergraduate academic program culminating with an intensive Graduate Bridge Program in preparation for graduate school. The overall goal of TEAMS is to increase the number of qualified minority students entering graduate schools in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics and to provide them with academic experiences and research opportunities which will increase their participation in graduate schools and their degree of successful completion of graduate endeavors. The benefits of the TEAMS Program will include: - Providing a conduit that will facilitate the entry of high potential minority high school students into Kentucky State University through an Undergraduate Bridge Program that will support andprepare high school students to reach above average achievement in undergraduate studies in SEM courses. -Providing students with a curriculum that will challenge them in a manner that is appropriate for developing the content and skills in subject areas pertinent to graduatestudies in SEM. -Establishing Excel Study Research Teams that will prepare students in content, problem-solving skills, and cooperative and investigative approaches to learning. -Establishing a Graduate Bridge Program that will promote readiness for and an awareness of the expectations of graduate studies by providing students with first hand experiences in various aspects of research. -Providing faculty development activities, such as workshops, seminars, institutes, and conferences on innovative teaching strategies, including inquiry-based teaching and learning, collaborative learning, and interdisciplinary approaches doc10461 none for Mahapatra Integrated Research and Education in High-Performance Parallel Optimization Algorithms This project will perform integrated research and education activities in the multidisciplinary area of parallel optimization. Given the enormous potential role of parallel computing in solving large-scale optimization problems with great societal implications, it is imperative that future scientists and engineers learn its fundamentals. The education component of this project will contribute towards bridging the current gap in knowledge of those professionals. The research activities center around efficient parallelization of an important optimization method called branch-and- bound (B and workers in operations research who develop and use sophisticated application-specific B&B algorithms with little or no parallelism, to solve larger COPs. The overall objective of the proposed research is to improve solution time and quality for some important optimization problems by an order of magnitude, or to solve previously intractable problems, by applying scalable, high-performance parallelization techniques to application-specific B&B methods. Technically, the specific goals of the proposed project are as follows. (1) Adaptive Load Balancing: To develop load balancing schemes that adapt to application and target-system characteristics to maximize processor utilization. (2) Efficient Limited-Memory Search: To develop efficient search schemes that enable large problems to be solved within the available memory of practical parallel distributed systems. (3) Specialized B&B Methods: To develop specialized B&B methods for some important COPs like mixed-integer programming and the traveling salesman problem, and use these to demonstrate solution time and quality improvements for real-world instances of those problems. (4) Parallel Optimization Course and Web Resource: To develop a model course on parallel optimization for upper-level undergraduate and beginning graduate students, as well as a comprehensive, searchable web resource on parallel optimization useful for education. (5) Parallel B&B Software Environment: To incorporate the parallelization techniques developed in this project in a software system for use as an educational and research tool for fast, efficient solution of optimization problems using parallel B&B doc10462 none Francisco-Ortega Two institutions in Miami, Florida International University (FIU) and Fairchild Tropical Garden (FTG), plan a multidisciplinary, two-year program to mentor 27 upper-level students in tropical environmental biology. The program involves 13 FIU faculty and an education specialist from FTG. The immediate objective of the program is for students to develop careers in biological sciences relating to the environment. To achieve this objective the PIs will direct a mentoring program on the natural history, marine and terrestrial environments, and conservation biology of the Caribbean region. To attract high-quality students, the program will provide: stipends, three new upper-level courses, field courses (in the Bahamas and Panama), Florida field trips, laboratory rotations, research supplies, travel to a professional meeting, and career orientation activities. Mentors will offer academic, research and career advice. Each student will produce and present a research project. The program will have internal and external evaluations by a steering committee, two outside evaluators and an advisory committee. FIU is one of the leading U.S. research universities in recruiting students from groups that are under-represented in science (71% are African American or Hispanic). In the long term, this program will produce well trained environmental biologists who will have a positive impact on the conservation of fragile environments of the Caribbean - South Florida region doc10463 none Morris Brown College requests as Planning Grant of $50,000 form the National Science Foundation to support TranSMET -Phase I, a period of academic self-assessment, understanding, and planning around those issues of infrastructure, faculty and student preparedness that pose barriers to desired student outcomes in the science, math, engineering, and technology disciplines. The 10 month planning phase is designed to culminate in 1) a comprehensive five-year proposal that will catalyze the pedagogical reformation of Morris Brown College by 2) conducting a thorough analysis of the College s SMET infrastructure and programs and to develop a realistic and workable plan for implementing changes; and 3 ) developing a process of consistent assessment and evaluation of SMET programs. With the formation of TranSMET Morris Brown College plans to design a series of three retreats (meetings and workshops). Phase I of the project will culminate in a complete analysis of its current SMET infrastructure, the formation of a permanent assessment and evaluation process for all present and future SMET programs, and fmally the development of a comprehensive multi-year proposal to increase minority participation in the SMET knowledge workforce doc10464 none We propose to study rate sensitivity of the prototypical discrete analogs of active materials. At the micro-level, active materials can be viewed as complex assemblages of multi-stable, molecular size devices; large deformations are then due to the switching between different locally stable configurations. At the macro-level the switching leads to the energy flux into smaller scales and associated dissipation. In this project we focus on optimization of energy transduction between the scales in multi-stable materials and specifically consider behavior of these systems in the situations where fluctuations are relevant and the size effect can not be neglected. In this research project we study the dynamic behavior of active materials which include shape-memory, magnetostrictive and ferromagnetic alloys, transformation-toughened ceramics and materials, exhibiting controllable distributed micro-damage. Biological examples of active materials are provided by muscles and other distributed protein systems. The goal of the project is to understand the mechanics of dissipation and active force generation in these materials which may open ways to an actual construction of the artificial molecular size motors. Specifically we are interested in developing prototypes for ultra-small objects, which can carry load and be self propelled. Date: J doc10465 none of molecular device mechanics and dynamics, with semiempirical quantum mechanics for efficient structure calculations on these systems. Undergraduate and postdoctoral research assistants will carry out complementary components. Undergraduates will build skills with commercial software for electronic structure calculations while modeling molecular recognition and self-assembly. A postdoctoral research assistant will be involved in the fusion of these methods with the methods of semiclassical mechanics for nano-systems doc10466 none The defect states formed by muonium (Mu) in wurtzite structured semiconductors are investigated using a series of related techniques known as muon-spin rotation, resonance, and relaxation, or mSR. Muonium is effectively a very light isotope of hydrogen in which a positive muon replaces the proton. Results of these studies provide crucial information on the behavior of isolated hydrogen impurities in these materials. The focus will be on the group-III nitrides and the II-VI compounds; in particular, the wide gap materials currently being developed for short wavelength lasers and other electro-optical applications. Hydrogen is an important impurity in these materials that reacts with other impurities to modify the related electrical and optical properties, thus understanding its effects is crucial to engineering these materials for specific uses. The muonium studies will yield information on the isolated hydrogen precursor to so-called passivation complexes that is very difficult to obtain by any other means. The various sites and charge states for H (Mu) will be obtained, the motion or diffusive characteristics of each state will be examined, and various transitions between these states characterized. This project follows very successful studies of Mu in the cubic semiconductors in which a complete model of the dynamics of Mu states and transitions was developed. The hexagonal wurtzite structure has twice as many sites for Mu as diamond or zincblende structures making assignments of the observed sites and transitions more difficult. Mu forms a shallow donor in some of the II-VI compounds in addition to the usual deep-level states; thus the crossover from deep to shallow behavior will be investigated in II-VI alloys. The ultimate goal of this project is to provide sufficiently detailed characterization of the observed Mu states that an accurate dynamic model of muonium in the wurtzite materials can be realized. Experience with other semiconductors indicates that the Mu results yield a semi-quantitative model for H impurities. This research will be conducted with students who will receive training in preparation for useful employment in the scientific technical workforce of the 21st Century. Understanding the role of hydrogen impurities in the semiconductors being developed for blue and UV lasers and other optical applications is crucial to engineering these materials for specific uses. However, many aspects of the behavior of hydrogen impurities have been extremely difficult to study directly. In this project, we investigate an artificially produced impurity known as muonium that is formed by implanting a short lived particle into these materials. Muonium mimics the behavior of hydrogen in essentially all its important properties, but is far easier to study. The materials we plan to investigate include gallium nitride, aluminum nitride and other semiconductor compounds. These laser materials have a common structure known as wurtzite and our main goal is to develop a complete model of the behavior of muonium (hydrogen) impurities in materials with this structure. Our previous very successful studies of muonium in more common semiconductors, such as silicon and gallium arsenide which have a cubic structure, provided a detailed picture of the properties of isolated hydrogen impurities in the cubic semiconductors and serves as a guide for the current work. The results of this project will provide the experimental data for comparison to the theoretical calculations currently being used to predict the behavior of hydrogen within the technologically important wurtzite semiconductors. Successful completion of this work will allow a better model of the long term effects of hydrogen on the electrical and optical properties of short wavelength laser materials, and how these effects may be modified by various processing steps and aging under typical device use conditions. This research will be conducted with students. They will receive training in a forefront area of contemporary condensed matter physics and materials science in preparation to enter the scientific technical workforce of the 21st Century doc10467 none Edsel Pena This project will address statistical research problems in hazard-based models in the face of incomplete data and optimal adaptive tests for these models, by investigating conditions for their existence, construction and application. Additionally, stochastic problems in recurrent events applications will be considered. A new and general class of recurrent events analyses that will encompass the special cases now in the literature is proposed. This class features models that simultaneously incorporate interventions as they occur and account for the effects of concomitant variables. The major contributions of this project are expected to enhance the theoretical understanding of inferences in a variety of hazard-based models. Hazard-based models have wide application. They are used to understand reliability of many operations, including industrial, biomedical and economic. The procedures to be developed under this grant are primarily for the purpose of understanding the fundamental aspects of these experiences and experiments. These models may model rare events such as flooding and industrial accidents, but also be appropriate for modeling hospital admissions and stock market cycles. Thus, these statistical methods very useful for further research. The Principal Investigator will enable many disadvantaged students from a large number of disciplines to participate in his education research efforts doc10468 none Texas Southern University (TSU) proposes a Science and Technology Enhancement Program (STEP) One-Year Planning Grant to the NSF Historically Black College and University Undergraduate Program (HBCU UP). The objective is to increase the recruitment, retention and graduation rates of students in undergraduate programs in science, mathematics, engineering and technology (SMET) areas through quality enhancements of teaching and student learning at the University. The TSU STEP will achieve this overall objective through four (4) programmatic thrusts: Student recruitment and retention for academic success, Faculty development in teaching and scholarly achievements, Curricular reforms through use of technology, and Assessment and evaluation for sustainability beyond NSF funding. These programmatic thrusts will have measurable goals and timelines to achieve the overall objectives of the TSU STEP. During this one-year planning period the TSU STEP will develop a comprehensive recruitment and retention plan for science and technology. Industry will become an integral part of the S&T programs trough establishing a Corporate and Professional Advisory Committee for the College of Science and Technology and a discipline specific one for each department. Comprehensive plans to assist faculty teaching with technology and enhancing their research capacity will be developed. Each undergraduate academic program will recommend improvements in their curriculum to enhance the quality of the education. An assessment and evaluation plan will be developed such that the TSU STEP will be sustainable after NSF funding has expired doc10469 none Stability is a term used to describe a wide variety of issues revolving around the physical observability of a solution of a differential equation. Stability lies at the very heart of the ability to make predictions about physical situations from mathematics and are particularly relevant when numerical approximation is involved, since discretization causes perturbation of both the model and the data. Numerical stability issues are typically complex because addressing such questions often requires a wide range of mathematical techniques, involving not only standard methods of numerical analysis, but ideas from dynamical systems, geometry, functional analysis, and the theory of differential equations. This raises barriers both to young researchers trying to learn about numerical stability and to communication between researchers working in different areas yet facing similar stability problems. The goal of the Workshop on the Preservation of Stability under Discretization is twofold: (1) to increase the accessibility of numerical stability issues for young researchers and (2) provide an opportunity for the exchange of information and ideas between specialists in different application areas. The Workshop will host a series of lectures by leading experts, each of whom will each address a separate aspect of stability under discretization. The lectures will be aimed towards an audience of advanced graduate students and non-specialists and will be collected into a permanent archive. In addition, the invited speakers will host a series of discussion and analysis sessions for students and young researchers. Stability is the term used to describe the situation in which a physical quantity is affected by small disturbances taking place at remote distances and times. The butterfly effect in chaos is one well-known stability issue, but stability issues arise in nearly every kind of physical situation from the flow of fluids and gases to computing rocket trajectories to other planets. Stability is particular relevant to numerical modeling of physical situations on computers because the modeling itself induces widespread error disturbances. Accounting for the effects of these discretization errors is difficult because it typically requires mathematical ideas from many areas, raising barriers both to learning about how deal with stability and to communication between different areas of specialization. The goal of the Workshop on the Preservation of Stability under Discretization is twofold: (1) to increase the accessibility of numerical stability issues for young researchers and (2) provide an opportunity for the exchange of information and ideas between specialists in different application areas. The Workshop will host a series of lectures by leading experts, each of whom will each address a separate aspect of stability under discretization. The lectures will be aimed towards an audience of advanced graduate students and non-specialists and will be collected into a permanent archive. In addition, the invited speakers will host a series of discussion and analysis sessions for students and young researchers doc10470 none In mesoscopic systems at low temperatures, heat transport and thermal equilibration occur in a very different manner from macroscopic systems at room temperature. This is due to the small heat capacities involved, and very long thermal relaxation times to reach equilibrium with a heat reservoir, the environment. At the ultimate limit, thermal transport involves exchange of a single energy channel between a system and the environment. During the preceding phase of this project, investigators observed, for the first time, this predicted quantization of thermal conductance. This places an important, hard upper bound on the thermal conductance available through future molecular electronic devices. The current project continues the investigation of heat capacities of nanomachined mesoscopic systems: Suspended semiconductor nanostructures that are thermally-isolated and have integral transducers that permit the localized introduction of heat and local temperature measurements. Heat capacity measurements on minute samples with unprecedented sensitivity should be possible. This should provide data relevant to the engineering of miniaturized thermal detectors, and will provide crucial information relating to limits of power dissipation in molecular-scale and ultrasmall electronic devices. With this level of sensitivity, calorimetry experiments that elucidate processes involving individual atoms and molecules should also become possible for the first time. The effort will introduce undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers to advanced techniques in nanofabrication and in techniques and principles of ultrasensitive measurements. %%% Future electronics will likely be based upon molecular scale devices. Active electronic devices, at any scale, require power to operate and this must ultimately be dissipated to their surroundings. However at the molecular scale the processes that govern power dissipation become very weak; hence it can be problematic. This domain had remained largely unexplored until , when, in a previous NSF-funded research program, investigators observed the quantization of thermal conductance -- a fundamental limit to the rate at which power can be conducted from a small system to its surroundings. In their current proposal, the authors propose to continue with research in this realm, turning now to the heat capacity of very small systems, i.e. their ability to store energy. Their approach involves suspended semiconductor nanostructures, fabricated by new surface nanomachining processes they have developed. These enable the construction of complex exploratory devices at the nanometer-scale, with internal components allowing quantitative and precise measurements on their properties to be carried out. In the proposed research program these will be utilized to obtain a more complete understanding of heat transport and the heat capacity of nanometer-scale structures. They should also prove to be extremely useful for the engineering of miniaturized thermal detectors, and will provide crucial information relating to limits of power dissipation in molecular-scale and ultrasmall electronic devices. With this level of sensitivity, experiments that elucidate processes involving heat flow between individual atoms and molecules should also become possible for the first time. The effort will introduce undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers to advanced techniques in nanofabrication and in techniques and principles of ultrasensitive measurements doc10471 none The aim of this research is to obtain detailed descriptions of single atoms and molecules. These experiments provide the basis for understanding chemical and physical processes at surfaces and properties of nanostructured condensed matter and molecular materials. Low temperature scanning tunneling microscopes (STM) are used to image, manipulate, chemically modify, and spectroscopically identify individual atoms and molecules. The development of the single molecule vibrational probe by inelastic electron tunneling spectroscopy (STM-IETS) provides a new analytical technique with unprecedented spatial resolution. It is now possible to investigate chemistry at the spatial limit with the STM; the results provide a view of chemistry not possible by studying an ensemble of molecules. In particular, the fundamental motions in molecules (vibration, rotation, translation), the coupling of tunneling electrons to nuclear motions (charge and energy transfers), and electrical conductivity (as related to molecular electronics) can be studied with single molecule sensitivity. The tunnel junction forms a novel nanoreactor in which the tip and the substrate can be used together to carry out unimolecular dissociation and bimolecular reactions. The research covers selected chemical systems from the lightest element (hydrogen atoms) to diatomic (carbon monoxide) and larger organic molecules (thios) on metal surfaces. These studies will lead to the development of a method to detect single electron spins in individual atoms and molecules by the STM. A thin film of magnetic metal (iron, gadolinium) is evaporated on the STM tip to provide a source of spin polarized electrons. The study of single and small aggregates of Manganese, Cobalt, Nickel, and Iron atoms, nitric oxide and nitric oxide dimers, 1,1-diphenyl-2-picryl-hydrazyl (DPPH), and other molecules with unpaired spins provides a new way to understand magnetism at the atomic scale and illuminates the role of the electron spins in chemistry. Overall, these experiments are intended to illuminate general experimental procedures and scientific understandings. The research on solid surfaces is fundamental in nature and provides a foundation for a broader understanding of chemistry in the gas phase, solution, and other condensed media. %%% An integral part of the proposed research involves the scientific training and development of undergraduate and graduate students. Since the STMs (microscope, electronics, and software) are homemade, the students have a unique opportunity to be involved in the design and construction of new generations of STMs. In addition, UC Irvine has established centers to reach out to local K-12 schools which have large populations of under-represented groups. The P.I. will teach a special topics course on Nanoscience which will attract an interdisciplinary group of students from physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering. While the emphasis of the proposed research is to obtain a fundamental understanding, the implications for futuristic technologies are apparent, and students trained in these areas will be highly competitive in the job market. This project is being co-funded by the Chemistry Division Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program and the Division of Materials Research Solid State Chemistry Program doc10472 none Richard Zare, Stanford University The fundamental processes of biology occur on the nanoscale. Proteins are on the order of few nanometers; the organelles essential to cellular function are tens or hundreds of nanometers. Direct investigation of these structures has been limited by the difficulty of making tools of compatible size. A novel tool is proposed that may enable the manipulation and investigation of individual nanoscale biological objects with control and flexibility impossible with existing tools. A nanoengineering process that produces pipettes especially has been designed for the robust manipulation of small biological objects, such as vesicles. Unlike the conventional pipettes routinely used in electrophysiology, the proposed pipettes have a concave seating surface at their tips. This seating surface provides a large contact area between the pipette and the object being held, resulting in excellent stability and control. In addition, the size of the seating surface can be tailored to hold objects of varying sizes, from tens of microns to hundreds of nanometers. The lower size limit is compatible with a wide range of subcellular organelles. A further extension of our pipettes is as delivery devices. It is proposed to combine electrophysiological and chemical composition analyses by coupling patch clamp and capillary electrophoresis with laser induced fluorescence. This novel coupling of analysis techniques will enable the further elucidation of vesicle-to-vesicle differences by combining information about morphology, electrophysiology, and chemical composition. The significance of biological heterogeneity is only beginning to be explored. The tools we propose may afford new insights on this intriguing biological problem doc10473 none The Living and Learning Science Retention Program (LALSRP) at Saint Augustine s College is designed to facilitate entry into the junior year by providing a support system for entering freshmen and sophomore science, mathematics and computer science (SMC) majors. A comprehensive approach to provide a support system will be accomplished by implementing the following objectives: 1. To revise and update curriculum to incorporate cooperative learning which will enhance study skills and generate independent learners; 2. To provide participants with intramural research experiences which will increase their analytical reasoning skills and provide hands-on laboratory experiences; 3. To build students confidence so that they can successfully pursue an undergraduate degree in science and technology by providing positive role models, mentors and a strong academic support system; 4. To assist participants in the understanding of the process involved in pursuing a degree in science and technology by offering seminars, workshops and field trips; and 5. To enhance and develop faculty participants by providing research and curriculum development opportunities. In order to accomplish the stated objectives, the program will consist of five components: (1) Curriculum Enrichment which will include a Pre-freshman Summer Bridge Program, Enrichment Center and a Village of Science and Technology (VOSAT); (2) Undergraduate Research Experience; (3) Seminars and Workshops; (4) Scholarships and (5) Faculty Development. This program will enhance the living and learning community on the campus of Saint Augustine s College. It will serve as a model that can be replicated across the campus and can also be applied to other disciplines. It is anticipated that by the end of the 5-year funding period, the number of SMC graduates at Saint Augustine s College will increase 2 fold. In five years the campus will have an established infrastructure to support the transition of freshmen into the junior year. The dormitory VOSAT in particular, will stimulate scientific and technological discussions among majors and nonmajors on the campus. This proposed Living and Learning Science Retention Program will support 30-50 students each year and impact approximately 1,400 undergraduate students who reside on the campus of Saint Augustine s College. This program will serve as a model that can be replicated on any campus that has a minority based population doc10474 none STUDIES OF NEOTROPICAL PLASMODIAL SLIME MOLDS The plasmodial slime molds are fungus-like organisms usually present and often abundant in terrestrial ecosystems. Most of what is known about the assemblages of slime molds associated with particular types of terrestrial ecosystems has been derived from studies in temperate forests; relatively little information is available on assemblages associated with tropical forests. This research project seeks to characterize the assemblages of species associated with microhabitats and vegetation types not yet investigated in the Neotropics. Particular emphasis will be directed towards the assemblages of species associated with various microhabitats in the canopy of tropical moist forests and microhabitats potentially available to slime molds in tropical dry forests and other types of vegetation characteristic of more arid areas of the Neotropics. The research will be carried out in three primary study areas: the Luquillo Experimental Forest in Puerto Rico, the Guanacaste Conservation Area in Costa Rica, and a portion of the state of Tlaxcala in eastern central Mexico. Specimens associated with specific microhabitats within each of these study areas will be collected in the field and obtained from moist chamber cultures prepared with samples of organic material from microhabitats being investigated. Most of the microhabitats to be investigated are accessible from the ground. However, gaining access to the canopy of a tropical forest is exceedingly difficult. Consequently, studies associated with various canopy microhabitats will be carried out in areas being subjected to active logging (i.e., samples will be collected from individual trees as soon as possible after a tree has fallen to the ground). The data accumulated as a result of the research project funded by an earlier NSF grant provided evidence for a number of ecological patterns not previously reported for slime molds. The most important of these are that (1) species richness and [especially] relative abundance increase with decreasing (and not increasing, as might have been anticipated)with moisture conditions and (2) in tropical forests, distinct assemblages of slime moldsare associated with microhabitats that have no counterparts in temperate forests. The assemblages of slime molds associated these new microhabitats are characterized by the presence of significant numbers of species either new to science or previously considered to be exceedingly rare. It is anticipated that the research to be carried out during this project, which will include all of the major Neotropical vegetation types not previously investigated, will yield the data necessary to develop a fairly complete understanding of slime mold distribution patterns, ecology, and diversity in this region of the world. The project will include several undergraduates as active participants, and collaborations developed with scientists in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, England, Spain, Russia, and Germany will be continued doc10475 none PI: Thaleia Zariphopoulou In most market models, the classical assumption of a perfect market is not satisfied. The PI proposes to continue her research program to develop methods to study valuation problems in incomplete markets, concetrated in the following class of applications: i) optimal asset allocation under market frictions the goal being to derive and analyze the optimal risky demand and to represent the value function in terms of distorted measures, ii) valuation of derivatives written on nontraded assets with the goal to use utility-based pricing methodology to specify the hedging strategies and to expole their role in risk aggregation, iii) dynamic hedging of volatility risks the goal being to specify the arbitrage-free components of the implied volatility process and to study their implications to the dynamic management of volatility risks, and iv) asset valuation under irreversible decisions with the goals being to evaluate early exercise instruments under constraints related to irreversible decisions and to analyze the impact of irreversibilities to prices and optimal demand. The technical tools come from stochastic analysis, stochastic control and nonlinear partial differential equations. In most market settings, the classical assumption of market completeness is not satisfied and, therefore, the traditional approach of perfect replication cannot be applied. It becomes hence necessary to review the pricing and risk management concepts. The first step is the development of a unified framework to analyze the inherent market risks, and identify the components that can be hedged away and the ones that cannot. The second step is the establishment of a coherent method to price the unhedgeable risks in order to achieve effective risk management. The PI proposes to continue her work in market models with frictions along the aforementioned two general directions. The proposed methodologies rely heavily on the classical economic principles of utility theory which reflect the investors preferences towards the risks that cannot be eliminated. Among others, the PI proposes to study models of asset allocation, derivative pricing and risk management under various market frictions including stochastic volatility, nontraded assets and irreversible management policies doc10476 none Mark McCready, University of Notre Dame This proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF 00-119. The aim of the proposal is to develop nanostructured catalysts for gas-liquid reactions, which have a system of macro-pores designed to take advantage of oscillatory convection that can be created by large-scale hydrodynamic disturbances. It is expected that the efficiency of the reactor would be improved by such a combination doc10477 none This proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF- . The proposed research explores a new approach for increasing the density of logical operations in electronic circuits by using the polarization response of organic molecules. A key element of this approach is to use a Molecular Controlled SEmiconductor Resistor (MOCSER) to transduce the outcome of the logical operation into a current. Positive attributes of this scheme are less molecular decomposition, less severe statistical fluctuations and an ability to interface with today s microelectronics. The MOCSER is a specially designed and gateless metal-oxide semiconductor field effect transistor. In place of the metal gate on the transistor, organic molecules will be chemically bonded to the device s gate oxide. By polarizing these organic molecules the current flow between the source and drain electrodes of the transistor can be modulated. The work will begin by demonstrating the MOCSER s response to a voltage-controlled, molecular polarization. With the success of this initial phase of work the proposed effort will include two parts: nanolithography and demonstrating olecular templating. To demonstrate the feasibility of a solid-state device a new generation of the MOCSER, in which the gate oxide region is connected to metal pads through a molecule, will be fabricated and tested. The nanolithography will be performed at the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility, in collaboration with the expertise from the Weizmann group . In parallel, we will use the templating of complementary DNA strands, one which is tethered to the gate region of the MOCSER and the other to the AFM tip, to characterize the self-assembly of molecules and voltage-controlled polarization response through noncovalent contacts. Successful completion of this work should set the stage for using molecular polarization to perform logic functions and transducing the molecular polarization into current in a solid-state electronic device doc10478 none Partial funding is requested for a FASEB Summer Research Conference, The calpain gene family in health and disease to be held June 30th to July 5th, , at Big Mountain Resort, Whitefish, Montana. The conference will comprise 30 minutes oral presentations by 25 to 30 experts on various aspects of the calpain family of intracellular proteases, as well as poster presentations from graduate students and post-doctoral trainees. It will draw participants from a wide variety of disciplines and backgrounds, since calpains are involved in many physiologic and pathologic processes. Half-day speaker sessions will cover the following topics: calpain structure function studies; novel calpain genes; non-mammalian calpains; molecular and cellular aspects of calpain regulation; physiologic functions of the calpains; genetic calpainopathies, and other pathologies associated with calpains. While focussing on the calpains, the meeting will attract a broad range of investigators, allowing input from many perspectives. From example, studies on model systems (C. elegans, Drosophila) may provide insights on calpain functions in mammalian cells, and the effects of its loss in calpainopathesis ( muscular dystrophy type 2A, type II diabetes). This is the second FASEB Summer Conference on Calpains. The first conference, held in , was attended by over 110 participants. All talks and posters were well attended, and the conferees overwhelmingly voted to have another meeting in doc10479 none The purpose of this proposal is to enhance the partnership between the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the graduate community by creating a new mechanism for ongoing and substantive communications between senior administrators at our universities providing graduate education and the NSF. Based on the model of the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) Dean in Residence Program, we propose to establish a NSF CGS Dean in Residence. Selected through a national competition developed and administered by the Council of Graduate Schools, the NSF-CGS Dean in Residence, would interact with program officers in the Division of Graduate Education (DGE) and in other divisions of the Directorate for Eduction and Human Resources, with program officers and managers in the research directorates at NSF, as well as with senior officials at the National Science Foundation. Working though CGS the dean would, in turn, share with the graduate dean community and with the broader science and engineering faculty NSF s perspective on graduate education, particularly but not exclusively those aspects of graduate education that NSF is attempting to strengthen or redirect through its portfolio. The program will serve as a national model that could be adopted by other federal agencies in the future doc10480 none Award: Principal Investigator: Robert E. Gompf This project focuses on constructing symplectic, contact and 4-dimensional manifolds. The Principal Investigator has defined a topological structure called a hyperpencil on an even-dimensional closed manifold, generalizing a linear system of curves on a complex algebraic manifold. He has shown that any hyperpencil canonically determines a symplectic structure on the manifold. In dimensions less than 8, this correspondence maps the set of hyperpencils onto a dense subset of all symplectic forms on the manifold (up to isotopy and scale). A similar statement seems likely in higher dimensions, and would provide a complete topological characterization of those manifolds admitting symplectic structures. If the fibers of this correspondence can be topologically specified, the result will be a purely topological description of a dense subset of all symplectic structures on all closed manifolds. In addition to this investigation, Stein surfaces and their contact 3-manifold boundaries will be studied by methods such as Legendrian Kirby calculus. The topology of exotic R^4 s and other smooth 4-manifolds will also be investigated. An n-manifold is a space that in small regions looks just like n-dimensional Euclidean space. Points, curves and surfaces are manifolds of dimensions 0,1 and 2, respectively. The space in which we live is a 3-manifold, and the universe (space-time) is a 4-manifold. Surprisingly, 3- and 4-manifolds are much less well understood than their higher-dimensional counterparts, although major progress has been made in recent years. Symplectic and contact structures on manifolds were discovered through classical physics (Hamiltonian mechanics and optics, respectively), but they are now seen to be important in such diverse areas as quantum physics, complex analysis, differential geometry and topology. For example, a rigid pendulum swinging in 3-dimensional space determines a symplectic manifold. The bob moves on a spherical surface, so its position is specified by 2 variables (latitude and longitude on this sphere). To completely specify the state of the system, one must also include the momentum of the bob. At any position, its momentum is tangent to the sphere and thus specified by two more variables. Hence, the set of states of the system is a 4-manifold (locally specified by 4 variables). This 4-manifold has a special symplectic structure whose role is to link each position variable to the corresponding momentum variable. This linkage ultimately results in Hamilton s equations describing the motion of the pendulum under the influence of a specified force field. There are many other situations in which manifolds and their symplectic and contact structures arise. While our understanding of such structures has advanced enormously in recent years, some of the most basic questions remain to be answered. Which manifolds have symplectic or contact structures, and how many such structures are there on a given manifold? How many 4-manifolds (if any) are there satisfying a given description? Questions such as these form the basis of this project doc10481 none This grant provides support for a conference to be held under the auspices of the Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology (FASEB) entitled New Perspectives in Transporter Biology. This meeting is the third bi-annual conference on the subject and is scheduled to be held from July 21 - July 26, at the Omni Tucson, in Tucson Arizona. It is expected to be attended by approximately 160 researchers. The conference will bring together biochemists, biophysicists, physiologists, and molecular biologists to share information on the molecular and physiological properties of the proteins responsible for mediating the transport of amino acids, peptides, neurotransmitters, and other ions across biological membranes. Recent work on the structure function, regulation, and physiological roles of these transporters have shown them to be critical not only for normal function but as therapeutic targets in disease states. The explosion of new information on these molecules makes this a timely topic for interactions among the top transporter biologists. The conference sessions will be devoted to recent findings in the field of membrane transport and include the latest information on transporters for amino acids, amines, peptides, glucose, as well as vesicular transporters and ion exchangers. Some topics to be examined in depth include transporter physiology, structure function, trafficking and localization, regulation, model systems, and diseases states. The conference will consist of nine oral scientific session over five days (morning and evening), and three afternoon poster sessions. Each oral session will be followed by a panel discussion of the topic. In order to promote the advancement of junior faculty, the most exciting poster submissions will be selected for short oral presentations during the regular oral sessions. This conference should provide the top transporter investigators with a forum for intimate discussions of the commonalities and differences among this important class of molecules doc10482 none Dr. Carlyle Storm of the Gordon Research Conferences is sponsoring the Electrochemistry Gordon Conference in Ventura CA, January 14-19, . The chair is Debra Rolison of the Naval Research Laboratory and the vice-chair is Henry White of University of Utah. The theme of this meeting is if charge moves, it s electrochemistry, and the topics include fields at surfaces, materials, electrochemical power sources, and nanochemistry. This broader scope of the meeting represents a change from past meetings in the series. The meeting has excellent participation of under-represented groups. The meeting is partially funded by this grant from the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities and the Analytical and Surface Chemistry program doc10483 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Methods for Turbulence Haller The mathematics of turbulence, the last unsolved problem of classical physics, has traditionally been statistical in nature. This approach leads to long-term predictions of the bulk properties of generic fluid flows. In contrast, many technological and geophysical mixing problems, such as mixing of fuel and air in a combustor, or the spread of an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, call for detailed finite-time predictions on turbulent mixing. This project is concerned with further development and novel applications of the recent theory of finite-time mixing. This new nonlinear theory enables one to analyze concrete numerical or experimental velocity fields and isolate global structures in the flow that is responsible for mixing or lack thereof. The project will involve applications of these new techniques and their extensions to global circulation models, vortex breakdown and merger, ocean drifter data analysis, mixing enhancement in combustors, and continuous steel casting doc10484 none This Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) will focus on the effects of the discreteness of atomic structure and charge on the electronic properties of nanoscale devices. New tools will be developed to examine the structure and structure fluctuations of nanoscale devices while simultaneously measuring electronic transport properties. Specifically, nanoscale metal wires will be fabricated in situ in an ultra-high vacuum combined scanning-tunneling microscope atomic-force microscope. The atomic-scale structural fluctuations of these wires will be studied during electromigration while simultaneously acquiring electronic transport information. Small gap junctions will be also be fabricated, and used to study simultaneously the atomic structure and electronic transport properties of carbon nanotubes and novel molecular devices. Concurrently, the sensitivity of nanoscale devices to fluctuating electrostatic environments will also be studied. New charge sensors such as carbon nanotube-based single-electron-transistors and semiconducting carbon nanotube field-effect transistors will be investigated. Efforts to manipulate the charge sensitivity of these devices through chemical modification will be explored. Undergraduate and graduate students will be involved in the development and use of cutting-edge research tools and will receive excellent training in interdisciplinary research at the frontiers of nanotechnology. %%% This Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) is attacking two fundamental and intertwined problems, which will increase in importance, as electronic device dimensions become smaller. First, the discreteness of atomic matter becomes significant in determining structural stability of devices. Will fundamental properties such as the bonds between molecules remain stable during device operation. Second, the discreteness of charge causes significant sensitivity of the device to fluctuations in the electrostatic environment. How will local electric fields or static charge affect the devices. The quantum nature of electronic transport in nanoscale systems requires that the structure of molecular-scale devices - as well as their interconnects - be controlled at the atomic level. Techniques will be developed to simultaneously image the atomic structure of molecules, nanotubes, nanoscale wires, and interconnects while measuring electronic transport properties. Changes in the local electrostatic environment at the level of motion of single charges will have pronounced effects on the electronic transport through nanodevices. The proposed research will focus on the charge sensitivity of nanostructures ranging from superconducting single-electron transistors coupled to nanowires to semiconducting carbon nanotubes. Undergraduate and graduate students will be involved in the development and use of cutting-edge research tools and will receive excellent training in interdisciplinary research at the frontiers of nanotechnology doc10485 none Chief objectives of this bi-national workshop are to: exchange latest research findings in vibration and noise engineering; invite industry to identify key research questions and trends that must be urgently addressed; and form collaborative teams and provide an opportunity for a closer interaction between leading U.S. and Indian experts. The 3-day joint symposium will be held at the Center for Automotive Research at The Ohio State University in the fall of . The symposium builds on a similarly focused small workshop that took place at IIT Delhi, India in . Pre and post workshop activities will include industrial R&D visits and short courses. Technical topics include vibro-acoustic analyses of structures, equipment and vehicles, machine dynamics, signal processing and diagnostics, spatial domain measurements, non-linear problems, computational techniques, dynamic design concepts, passive and active damping, smart actuators and sensors, and the like. A special issue of the Journal of Sound and Vibration will be published based on the articles presented at the workshop. This symposium intends to identify common international interests and priorities in the area of noise and vibration control and focus on important relevant scientific issues doc10486 none Carbons with sp2 and sp3 bonding exhibit entirely different envelope of properties. Here, we propose to fabricate and test (for mechanical properties) carbon nanocomposites by combining the two bonding. Recent advances in chemical vapor deposition of nanotubes and nanocrystalline diamond present a possible synergistic approach to synthesizing dense nanocomposite material with aligned and uniformly spaced nanotubes. CVD will be used to synthesize nanotubes oriented vertically to patterned substrates and by controlling the chemistry of plasma nanocrystalline diamond will be deposited on these. In addition, modeling of carbon nanotube-diamond hybrid microstructures will be done to understand mechanical properties and interfacial behavior doc10487 none PROPOSAL NO.: PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Zhou, Chongwu INSTITUTION NAME: University of Southern California TITLE: NER: Carbon Nanotube Devices and Integrated Systems This is a proposal to design, build and evaluate various novel nanotube devices and integrated systems. Specifically I propose to make n type field effect transistors (FET), nanotube p-n junctions, and an integrated single-molecule CMOS inverter. This research is exploratory in nature; however, if successful, will advance our understanding of the fundamental properties of nanotubes and produce practical nanoscale devices for the real world. There has been a great deal of research into carbon nanotubes in the past few years. P type field effect transistors have been demonstrated consisting of semiconductive nanotubes with a silicon substrate backgate separated from the tube by a layer of SiO2. Despite the utmost interest in developing n type FETs to enable nanoscale CMOS circuits, the research effort has been hampered by lack of an effective doping method for nanotubes. I propose to demonstrate a simple, effective and reliable method to electrostatically dope nanotubes into n type, thus paving the way for n type FETs, p-n junctions and integrated systems. This new method will employ TiO2 instead of SiO2 as the gate dielectric. With a dielectric constant of 30 for TiO2, as compared to 3.8 for SiO2, the gate utilizing TiO2 will be seven times more effective than previously reported, and our preliminary analysis confirms that with a reasonable gate bias (~ 10 V), a nanotube can be electrostatically doped into n type, thereby producing an n type FETs. Furthermore, carbon nanotube p-n junctions will be demonstrated with a split-gate technique, by depositing TiO2 onto a semiconductive nanotube contacted with source and drain electrodes, and patterning two gate electrodes atop the TiO2, each covering half of the tube. By controlling these two gate biases independently, one can tune the left half tube into p type and the right half into n type, thus creating a p-n junction in between, which provides an ideal system for studying the depletion and screening in one dimension. Finally, a simple integrated system will be demonstrated by attaching an electrode to the center of a semiconductive nanotube in addition to the source and drain electrodes. This center electrode divides the nanotube into two segments and serves as the output of the circuit. The silicon substrate backgate with TiO2 dielectric layer will serve as the circuit input and be used to tune one tube segment to function as an n type FET and the other segment as a p type FET, thereby forming the worlds first single molecule inverter doc10488 none This Nanoscale Exploratory Research (NER) project investigates liquid-to-solid and vapor-to-solid transformations in nanometer scale clusters. In nanometer-scale systems, phase transformations exhibit irregular variations of characteristic parameters and magic numbers. Other systems exhibiting such behavior are atomic nuclei, atoms, quantum dots, cluster beams and metallic nanowires. The proposed studies are important in understanding the role of clusters in biological systems, including identifying clusters that actuate electron transport pathways in biomolecular systems, and the adaptation of clusters as they connect to external objects, such as leads, DNA and proteins. A series of electrical transport measurements as a function of pressure and temperature are proposed to understand the electronic properties of these clusters. Nanoelectrodes with atomic scale gaps are immersed into a medium that is tuned sufficiently close to a bulk phase transformation. Then, by applying electric fields strongly localized in space, a cluster of different phase is nucleated locally between the electrodes. Electron transport investigates the electronic properties and stability of the cluster. Graduate and undergraduate students participating in the project receive training in nanofabrication technology, including visits to national nanofabrication facility, combined with fundamental experimental techniques in the laboratory. This experience makes them competitive for a range of careers in academia, industry and government. %%% This Nanoscale Exploratory Research (NER) project investigates liquid-to-solid and vapor-to-solid transformations in nanometer scale objects. When the size of the objects approaches one nanometer, the transformations are significantly modified, and they acquire properties that are typically found in atoms and nuclei. Consequently, the objects of study are referred to with a new name: clusters. The properties of clusters as a function of size vary irregularly, in analogy with the periodic variation inside the periodic table of elements in atomic physics. Additionally, there are clusters that have very high stability. These are known as magic-number configurations, and are analogous to inert atoms. These clusters also occur naturally in biological systems, and they play important role on electronic transfer and binding to bio-molecules such as DNA and proteins. This project breaks new ground in combining nanotechnology on silicon-chip and electron transport through individual clusters, to determine their electronic and other properties, such as how clusters conduct electricity. The students involved in the project are thoroughly trained in cutting edge technologies important in further miniaturization of electronics. Additionally, they acquire basic laboratory skills, and specialized skills in high-level measurements. This experience will allow them to pursue careers in academia, industry and government doc10489 none A symposium entitled Bayesian Statistics in Science and Technology: Case Studies VI will be held at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Friday September 28 and Saturday September 29, . The symposium will include two extended presentations of applications of Bayesian methods in problems in which the statistician was an integral member of the research team, and one case study of statistical methods analyzed by a panel of three experts. Two contributed poster sessions will also be held. The objectives of the symposium are to (i) Highlight the close interplay of statistical theory and applications in the context of substantive scientific research, (ii) Contribute to the development of Bayesian statistics, by identifying problems without standard solution, and encouraging the extension of the theory and its implementation so that possible approaches to analyses may be found. (iii) Bring to the fore the topic of reporting of Bayesian statistical analyses to the scientific community, and discuss effective and relevant means of communicating both the methods used in, and the conclusions drawn from quantitative analyses. (iv) Provide a small meeting atmosphere for young researchers and graduate students to present their work and to interact with senior colleagues, and to learn about the recent advances in implementation of Bayesian method in substantive problems. (v) Encourage the collaboration between statisticians and researchers in subject mater disciplines, by emphasizing the many challenging statistical problems that arise in the course of scientific research. (vi) Disseminate the results of the research presented at the workshop by publishing a volume containing well-documented and peer-reviewed case studies and data sets, and other selected workshop presentations. As increasingly much background information becomes available to scientists undertaking an investigation, it is important to utilize previous knowledge effectively in designing studies and analyzing data. Bayesian statistical methods are tailored to this purpose. There have been many recent advances in Bayesian statistical theory and computation, but scientific meetings rarely spend substantial time discussing applications. The purpose of this symposium is to concentrate attention solely on applications of Bayesian statistics. The goal is to elucidate the interplay between theory and practice and thereby identify successful methods and indicate important directions for future research doc10490 none This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119). The goals of the project are the fabrication, study of physical properties, theory and applications of nanoscale metallic photonic crystals (NMPC). These are structures in which metals are periodically embedded into dielectrics with nanometer size periods. NMPC may carry substantial electrical current but at the same time have transmission bands in the visible infrared ranges. Some NMPC are also magnetic with important collective spin properties, while others may be superconductors at low temperature with non-linear transport properties. It is planned to fabricate two- and three-dimensional (2D and 3D) NMPC structures, and study their linear and nonlinear optical properties, as well as their transport properties. The surface of low-defect molecular single crystals from the acenes family (such as anthracene, pentacene, etc.) will be patterned into 2D structures, where carrier injection from evaporated metal electrodes will control the resulting device conductivity, metal-insulator transition, plasma frequency and superconductivity properties at low temperature. Theoretical work will guide the experimental research studies. The project is an interdisciplinary collaborative effort among researchers in Physics, Electrical Engineering and Materials Science with collaborators from Honeywell Inc. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science, physics, and electrical engineering with high technological relevance. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area. The wide range of fabrication, experimental and theoretical physics methods and applications employed throughout the project will enhance the educational opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students doc10491 none Crittenden This proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF- . The goal of this project is to design and synthesize novel TiO2-based nanotube p-n junction photocatalysts. The principal investigators have combined the p-n junction principle and concepts of template preparation of nanomaterials toyield a new general route for preparing nanotube p-n junction photocatalysts. Through this process, they will further understand the nucleation and growth of very small diameter semiconductor nanotubes. The morphology of these TiO2 nanotubes will be analyzed. The photocatalytic activity will be evaluated by examining the destruction of representative organic pollutants in the gas phase. The proposed research is expected to improve the quantum efficiency for photocatalytic destruction of environmental pollutants by providing a basis for designing and constructing TiO2-based nanotube photocatalysts. An important feature of the multidisciplinary research team is the integration of research and education through broader academic and research training of students in fundamental materials science, environmental science, and related technological areas doc10492 none This proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF 00-119. This Nanoscale Exploratory Research award is part of the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI). It will exploit self-assembly of block copolymers of styrene and 1,3-cyclohexadiene into a core-shell cylinder-in-cylinder morphology, followed by crosslinking of poly(cyclohexadiene) (PCHD) and removal of the polystyrene (PS) segments, as a means for producing novel functionalized PCHD nanotubes. PCHD may be aromatized to poly(phenylene) (PP), a strong, crystalline, and thermally stable engineering polymer. As an alternative, PCHD can be carbonized by pyrolysis. These materials will be thoroughly characterized in terms of their sized, shapes, surface chemistry and mechanical properties. To conduct this work, an interdisciplinary collaboration between the polymer chemistry group of Dr. Jimmy Mays (University of Alabama at Birmingham, UAB) and the polymer physics morphology group of Professor Sam Gido (University of Massachusetts, UMass) is proposed. %%% Composites incorporating such nanotubes could lead to a new class of robust, lightweight, high strength materials. By controlling molecular weight and processing conditions, we should be able to create nanotubes of varying radius, wall thickness, and aspect ration. By varying the composition of the block copolymer, other shapes besides tubes (cylinders, plates) can also be made. Reactive hydroxyl groups present on the surface of these molecular objects can be used to manipulate their processing characteristics and to provide strong bonding to matrix materials. The PP nanotubes may be insulating or they may be made conducting by doping. Such materials could be used as component in a smart composite designed to transmit an electronic signal, for example, if impacted. Opto-electronic, nanoprobe, and medical applications are also envisioned for these materials doc10493 none N. Seeman, et al., New York University This proposal was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSE) solicitation, NSF- , in the category Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Teams (NIRT). This is a collaborative activity between New York University, and Dow Chemical Co. using GOALI model. The goal is to synthesize and demonstrate operational nanoscale machines or devices. The level of control offered by DNA systems can be exploited to make intricate DNA nanostructures, including self-assembling DNA that forms two-dimensional and three-dimensional arrays. Modeling and simulation is a critical part of this project, in order construct and test the DNA nanostructures. It is proposed to combine the activities of New York University, and Dow Chemical laboratories to achieve a demonstration of DNA based nanomechanical devices useful for performing fast calculations, for sensors that detect specific molecules in the environment, or to improve the properties or performance of a material. Practical design and manufacture of nanoscale machines and devices requires overcoming numerous challenges in synthesis, processing, characterization, design, optimization, and fabrication. The approach will be first to prototype the designs computationally, optimizing the particular base-pair sequences, making sure that the particular lengths and spacings will lead to proper clearances, and testing the operation of the device, including the dynamics. The project will focus on nanomechanical devices of three types. o The B-Z based nanomotor. A DNA based nanomotor predicated on the B to Z DNA transitions under different salt conditions. o A DNA sequence-specific mechanical device o A DNA based switch based on principles similar to the DNA sequence- specific mechanical device doc10494 none Baranger This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF-00-119). The resulting grant is co-funded by the Divisions of Materials Research, Chemistry and Physics. The proposed research will investigate quantum interference (coherence) and electron-electron interactions (correlations) in both model and realistic systems over a wide range of spatial scales, from nanometers to microns. The interplay of correlations and coherence is one of the deepest topics in current chemistry and physics. Nanostructures provide a novel controlled environment for studying these effects: both interactions and interference can be manipulated by changing the size and shape of the nanostructure, thereby directly gaining information on their interplay. The principal investigators (PI s) will calculate the results of such manipulation in several prototypical cases spanning size scales from one nanometer to one micron. Furthermore, a number of long-range technologies being investigated involve electron-electron interactions and quantum interference in their operation - single electronics, spintronics, molecular electroncs, and quantum computing, for instance. The PI s plan to investigate coherence and correlation in these possible device structures. Thus, the project will contribute to the knowledge base needed to evaluate the practical relevance of these nascent nanotechnologies. More precisely, four scale sizes will be studied: correlations at the scale of the electron wavelength, simple single and multiple quantum dots, metallic nanomolecules, and finally, networks of carbon nanotubes. Three computational techniques will be used - quantum Monte Carlo (QMC), full density functional theory (DFT), and a simplified density functional technique suitable for nanotubes. These electronic structure techniques will be combined with the semianalytic techniques of random matrix theory and semiclassical theory developed recently in nanophysics. Each of the computational techniques requires substantial innovation. In the case of QMC, the fermion sign problem will be atacked by using the recently developed cluster-type algorithms. For the metallic nanomolecules, teh full DFT code must be modified to properly include spin-orbit effects critical in spintronics. And for the simplified DFT method, the recently developed linear-scaling and self-consistent tight-binding methods must be combined and optimized for carbon nanotubes. The computations will be done on a parallel beowulf-class cluster of processors. The specific issues which the PI s intend to elucidate include: (1) the combination of Coulomb blockade and single-particle quantization effects in quantum dots and nanoparticles and their relevance for single-electronic devices; (2) correlation effects at the soft edge of quantum dots; (3) the role of disorder and pairing correlations in transport through nanoparticles; (4) the spin states, magnetic moment, and anisotropy energy of metallic nanomolecules and, deduced from these, their spintronic properties; (5) the robustness of entangled states in multiple quantum dots of interest for quantum computing; and, (6) the interactive behavior of a large collection of carbon nanotube quantum dots - an artificial macromolecule. %%% This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF-00-119). The resulting grant is co-funded by the Divisions of Materials Research, Chemistry and Physics. The proposed research will investigate quantum interference (coherence) and electron-electron interactions (correlations) in both model and realistic systems over a wide range of spatial scales, from nanometers to microns. The interplay of correlations and coherence is one of the deepest topics in current chemistry and physics. Nanostructures provide a novel controlled environment for studying these effects: both interactions and interference can be manipulated by changing the size and shape of the nanostructure, thereby directly gaining information on their interplay. The principal investigators (PI s) will calculate the results of such manipulation in several prototypical cases spanning size scales from one nanometer to one micron. Furthermore, a number of long-range technologies being investigated involve electron-electron interactions and quantum interference in their operation - single electronics, spintronics, molecular electroncs, and quantum computing, for instance. The PI s plan to investigate coherence and correlation in these possible device structures. Thus, the project will contribute to the knowledge base needed to evaluate the practical relevance of these nascent nanotechnologies doc10495 none This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119). The project addresses theoretical methods to design new families of nanostructured building blocks and to guide the assembly of these blocks into mesoscale lattices. Dendritic and molecular self-assembly synthetic techniques will be used to implement theoretically-inspired nanoscale structures. Novel 3-D circuit fabrication techniques will be employed to pattern materials on both the nano and mesoscales to achieve integration of nanoscale materials with traditional micron scale optics and electronics. Equilibrium statistical mechanics and kinetic Monte Carlo theoretical methods, relevant to treating long-range and spatially-anisotropic intermolecular electrostatic interactions, will be refined and implemented. Theory will be used to guide design of the shape of nanoscale molecular objects to permit realization of highly-ordered mesoscale acentric molecular lattices. Such organic lattices do not occur naturally but are critical to device-related phenomena of electro-optic (EO) activity, unimolecular rectification, and photorefraction. Kinetic Monte Carlo calculations will also be employed to investigate nanoscale phase separation and molecular ordering phenomena and to guide the development of processing conditions relevant to the realization of optimized nanostructured acentric material lattices. Precisely sized and shaped nanoscale dendrimers permit inhibition of unwanted intermolecular electrostatic interactions and the realization of a wide range of desired auxiliary properties. Included are low optical loss at telecommunication wavelengths, high thermal and photochemical stability of induced acentric molecular order (electro-optic activity), and processability that permits the fabrication of buried channel EO waveguides and the integration of such waveguides with VLSI electronics and with fiber optics. Second order nonlinear optical chromophores (required for EO activity) can be assembled into a variety of dendrimer structures including those containing multiple chromophores. The operation of dendrimer-based EO devices requires half the drive voltages and extends to twice the bandwidth of current commercial lithium niobate devices. EO dendrimers can be constructed using fluorinated and cyanurate dendrons, which reduce optical loss at 1.55 microns telecommunications wavelength to 0.1-0.2 dB cm. Use of such dendrons also permits precise control of material refractive index relevant to circuit integration. Surface functionalization of dendrimers with crosslinkable moieties can lead to materials with exceptional thermal and photochemical stability. EO chromophore-containing dendrimers will be assembled into electro-optic materials by a variety of methods including sequential assembly and self-assembly methods; however, the primary method employed for such assembly will be electric field poling. Once prepared, dendrimer-based EO materials will be fabricated by reactive ion etching, two-photon lithography and multi-color lithography into 3-D passive active optical circuitry, which will be integrated with semiconductor VLSI drive electronics and silica transmission fibers. Organic EO materials will also be integrated with photonic bandgap structures and with controlled-birefringence block copolymer and layered organic materials to realize special device performance. A variety of devices, including spatial light modulators, phased array radars, ultra high bandwidth signal sources and detectors, etc., will be fabricated and evaluated. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. The proposed research and the format of education technology exchange contribute to positive economic and social impacts. An integrated research education program based on an undergraduate student graduate student faculty team will be implemented building upon experience NSF-IGERT, NSF-EEC, UW UIF Nanotechnology Center, and UW international exchange programs. A new course will be offered to permit wider dissemination of specialized nano-engineering tools developed in this research education program. Extensive interactions exist with industry, government laboratories, and international research centers. The project is co-supported by the DMR EM, ECS PFET, and EEC Divisions doc10496 none P. Monson, U of Massachusetts Amherst This proposal was submitted in response to solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119) and requests support for an interdisciplinary research program concerned with understanding the growth of nanoporous materials- focusing on zeolitic materials. A research program in this area will have immediate impact on an enormous worldwide effort for developing porous materials with properties tailored at the nanoscale for applications such as catalysis or separations. Moreover, a central feature in the growth of such materials is the assembly of supramolecular precursor particles to form complex organic-inorganic structures with crystalline order. This mechanism is paradigmatic for the synthesis of a whole range of new materials, ranging from substrates for quantum confinement and laser applications to biomaterial implants with controlled porosity and nanostructure. The proposal has its origin in a collaboration among some of the PI s on the problem of crystal growth of silicalitc-1 zeolite, in which important features of a growth mechanism involving the formation and assembly of subcolloidal zeolite particles were elucidated. The collaboration featured both experimental work and modeling of the growth process. As this work developed it became clear that further progress would be greatly enhanced with a larger research team. In particular, it was clear that expertise was required in detailed atomistic modeling of the growth process as well as in characterization by light scattering and atomic force microscopy. The NSF NIRT initiative has created an opportunity for this research team to come to full fruition. Our interdisciplinary team involves researchers in four departments at the Universities of Massachusetts and Delaware, partnerships with companies at the forefront of applications of nanoporous materials and collaboration with a government laboratory. The project is divided into two main research areas: Synthesis, Purification and Structure of Subcolloidal Particles: Assembly of Subcolloidal Particles and Silicalite Crystal Growth In addition to elucidating fundamental aspects of zeolite growth, we anticipate that in the longer term our research will lead to novel assembly methods and the development of new materials grown by assembly of subcolloidal zeolite particles. Each of our research areas will feature both experimental and modeling investigations. A spectrum of modeling techniques will be employed spanning length scales from the atomistic level, required to understand the formation and structure of subcolloidal zeolite particles, to the mesoscopic level, required to understand the crystal growth habit of zeolite materials. The research program has substantial educational component including: the development of new graduate courses on nanoscale materials and on computational materials science at both partner Universities, industrial internships for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars, as well as involvement of undergraduate students in the research doc10497 none This proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF- . The goal of the research is to explore the potential application of carbon nanotubes for greatly enhancing the efficiency of existing microarray devices in biological biomedical research. The proposed work will synthesize arrays of well-aligned carbon nanotubes that can be used to transfer biomolecules from the tips of the nanotubes for creating microarrays at a level of packing density not achievable by current techniques. Carbon nanotubes are uniquely suited for this application owing to their extremely high elastic modulus and strength as well as exceptional capability in sustaining large nonlinear elastic deformation. This is a preliminary feasibility study of a novel idea in nanoscience and engineering with focuses on nanoscale devices and systems architecture, and modeling and simulation at the nanoscale. The effort is likely to catalyze rapid advances in biological biomedical research. The objectives of this exploratory research are to (a) better understand the growth of aligned carbon nanotubes for achieving optimal control of their length, diameter, and packing density in microarrays, (b) better understand the structures and performance of individual nanotubes as well as microarrays through microscopic and mechanical characterizations, (c) initiate computational mechanics effort at both the continuum and atomistic levels for modeling the nano-structure, chirality, and mechanical behavior of nanotubes, (d) develop the tools and criteria for assessing the performance of this novel microarray device for biological biomedical research, and (e) evaluate the feasibility of the nanotube-based microarray devices. It is expected that this project will advance microarray technology to enable more rapid study by biological and biomedical investigators in areas of genetic research. Ultimately,this technology may result in advancements in the study and treatment of human disease. Fundamentalinvestigations on synthesis, characterization, and property modeling of carbon nanotubes will benefit the technology of nanotube synthesis and engineering. Better understanding of nanotube growth mechanisms will enable improved synthesis and control of the nanotube structure. Development of structure property models for mechanical behavior of carbon nanotubes, along with synthesis structure relationships, will ultimately provide a tool for engineering their mechanical properties doc10498 none This U.S.-Hungarian research project involves Michael Maroney of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Csaba Bagyinka of the Institute of Biophysics at the Hungarian Biological Research Center, Szeged. They intend to examine the biological processes in hydrogenase reaction mechanisms, which catalyze the reversible two-electron redox chemistry of dihydrogen. The project features work with the enzyme Thiocapsa roseopersicina. Theory suggests a number of possibilities for structures of T. roseopersicina catalytic intermediates which the international team will test by spectroscopic and other physical probes. To do so the researchers plan to use time-resolved FTIR studies for determining the species involved in catalysis. They will characterize interconversions and their rates, hoping to detect kinetic intermediates and follow evolving thermodynamic microstates. The US-Hungarian partners specifically seek answers to questions about what roles protons play in determining the charge on active sites, what redox states are involved in catalysis, or whether protonated cysteines are present. If successful, findings may provide clues applicable to conversion of chemical energy to electricity for fuel cells and to storage of solar energy in chemical form via photochemical hydrogen production. This international project in biophysics research fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the Untied States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc10499 none Kuo This proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF- . The goal of this proposal is to explore a novel method for etching copper nano-lines at room temperature, which is crucial for the fabrication of future nano-devices and circuits. The PI plans to study the key step in the process, i.e., a unique anisotropic plasma-copper reaction, in the nano-scale region. This is an experimental research project. The PI is going to investigate a number of issues in the nano-line definition process, such as the critical dimension control, profile, sidewall surface, and residue formation, through fundamental studies of plasma-copper surface reaction, solid-state reactant transport and copper-halide reactions. This research involves the microstructure of the copper material, plasma chemistry, and directional solid-state reaction mechanisms. In addition to plasma process characterization, he will make extensive use of Transmission Electron Microscopy (TFM) as well as other thin-film analytical methods to probe the plasma-copper reaction phenomenon at the nano-scale. The plasma reaction will he carried out in the principal investigator s (P1 s) Thin Film Microelectronic Research Laboratory. All experiments will employ a simple parallel-plate reactive ion etching reactor with a 13.56 MHz RF generator. The nano-line pattern, e.g., sub-100 nm, will be prepared in the NSF National Nanofabrication Users Network (NNUN) facility located in the Pennsylvania State University using c-beam lithography. The industry sponsor AMD agrees to support this project by supplying thin film characterization service, technical consulting, and 6-inch wafers doc10500 none Alok Choudhary Northwestern University Scalable I O Management namely, the bottleneck of analyzing and managing massive data in high-performance distributed computing environment (such as Grid doc10501 none This Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Teams (NIRT) project it to develop robust routes to produce high-density arrays of functional nanoscopic structures using nanoporous templates derived from diblock copolymer thin films. The diblock copolymer films used possess self-assembled cylindrical microdomains oriented normal to the surface of the film, with cylinder densities in excess of 1.0 x 10^12 in^2. Selective degradation of the minor polymer block and cross-linking of the major block results in a polymer film having a high-density array of nanopores that serves as a template for the fabrication of functional arrays of nanoscopic structures. The project will expand the potential of this simple process by developing methods that give pore diameters ranging from the nanometer to the hundreds of nanometers. The research will advance the use of these templates to produce functional arrays of nanoscopic structures. This includes the use of metal electrodeposition in the template pores to produce ultrahigh-density arrays of magnetic nanowires for magnetic storage applications. The nanopore array can be patterned laterally using electron-beam lithography, to create magnetic nanowires and nanoparticle electron-transport studies. The nanoporous arrays will also be used as electrochemical nanoelectrode arrays, as reactive-ion-etching masks for silicon technology, and to produce glass nanopillars. The project provides several unique educational opportunities including REU, RET, an interdepartmental nanoscience course, biweekly interdisciplinary meetings, and a technology-training program based on interactive digital video. This project integrates efforts from the academic and industrial sectors, with collaborations from national laboratories and international groups doc10502 none Soghomonian This proposal addresses an avenue toward self-assembled collections of molecular electronic devices, via the synthesis, experimental characterization and theoretical study of zeolitic materials as hosts for single-electron transistors. The open zeolitic framework is synthesized to possess single-electron transistor functionality at lattice sites. Individual addressability is obtained through the conducting framework of the zeolitic material: some chains of the framework carry current, others fulfill the role of voltage gates. The individual chains comprising the zeolitic structure are in turn connected to external, macroscopic, metallic electrodes by flexible and functionalized biopolymers such as DNA wires. This cross-disciplinary endeavor also addresses quantum-computational aspects of the zeolite transistor arrays and lithographic two-dimensional analogs, and comprises theoretical and experimental studies of the collective charge transport phenomena that surface in arrays of interconnected nanoscale or molecular devices. %%% Molecular electronics promises to shrink electronic devices to the nanoscale, by utilizing properties of chemical species at the molecular level. This project aims to adapt zeolitic materials to host vast arrays of molecular-scale, single-electron transistors. The transistors are formed during the crystal growth, as part of the crystal lattice, and thus vast numbers of near-perfect, near-identical devices may be produced at once. The problem of accessing each of the electrical locations on the crystal chip is solved through the inherent conducting chains of the zeolitic material. The result is a self-assembled and chemically contacted dense and vast array of single-electron transistors, with implications for future quantum-computational architectures, nanoelectronics and memory devices. Educationally, graduate, undergraduate and two-year technical college students will be introduced to new interdisciplinary concepts with potential future impact in a variety of disciplines. This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119). The award is jointly supported through this initiative within the Ceramics and Electronic Materials programs of the Division of Materials Research in MPS doc10503 none This project aims to systematically evaluate and describe the structures that arise from packings (including low density ones) of simple geometrical objects such as spheres, polyhedra and cylinders. These will be evaluated for their utility as the basis for designed crystal structures. A complementary study will be the systematic evaluation of the topology of known periodic (crystal) structures to determine how they are related to the geometric packings. A product of this work will be a database of known structures that can be used to identify the topologies of new materials. Also, methods for the determinations of crystal structures of materials for which crystal size is too small for single crystal X-ray diffration will be developed. Techniques for combining electron diffraction with X-ray powder diffraction, and with libraries of possible topologies for structure analysis will also be developed. Experimental work will be focused on the synthesis of novel 3- and 4-connected oxide and oxyhalide frameworks using unusual combinations of elements such as boron either alone or in combination with heavier metals. %%% A program to develop the experimental and theoretical basis for designing and synthesizing new classes of inorganic materials with novel properties has significant potential for high impact in important areas of high national interest, including areas such as new optical, semiconducting, and structural materials of high interest to industry. A unique aspect to this research is the active interplay of the theoretical and experimental components of solid state chemical research to optimize the search for important new materilas doc10504 none Nanotechnology has had a profound impact on biosensor development. The understanding and exploitation of specific biomolecular interactions has led to new applications in medical diagnostics, environmental monitoring, and genomic science. The objective of this research is to use second harmonic generation (SHG) to detect specific adsorption of unlabeled biological molecules (e.g., proteins, DNA) at a surface, and thus develop a new biosensor platform that will have significant advantages over conventional sensor platforms. SHG is the creation of light at twice the frequency of the light with which the material is being irradiated, and occurs only in materials that are noncentrosymmetric - that is, materials comprised of molecules arranged in a non-random fashion. It has been shown previously that ionically self assembled monolayers (ISAMs) of polyelectrolytes can be used to make nanometer-thick, noncentrosymmetric monolayers that exhibit a large SHG signal. The ISAM technique involves the alternant adsorption of oppositely-charged polyelectrolyte layers via electrostatic attraction. During the course of those investigations, it was found that adsorption of a capping layer of a polyelectrolyte of opposite charge onto an SHG-active monolayer results in a dramatic decrease in the measured SHG signal. This indicates a change in the net orientation of the molecules in the pre-adsorbed film towards a more centrosymmetric configuration. This project will extend this concept to the development of a sensor that detects specific adsorption of biomolecules. Nanoscale ISAM films will be designed and fabricated in which specific adsorption of an unlabeled target biomolecule will induce a substantial change in the net orientation of molecules in the film. Important parameters will be determined that control how the sensor is constructed, the sensitivity, the dynamic range, the effect of non-specific adsorption of sample contaminants and results will be evaluated in order to compare with other biosensor systems doc10505 none Survey of Orthopteroid Insects of Hispaniola The rapidly expanding human population is putting great pressure on the Hispaniolan forests and other natural areas. Many species have probably gone extinct. Others are endangered. This project will assist in the biotic inventory of insects by intensively surveying the orthopteroid insects (crickets, katydids, grasshoppers, cockroaches, mantids, and stick insects). Despite their ubiquitous presence and significance in agriculture, the orthopteroids are poorly known in Hispaniola. The specific goals of the project are to sample a variety of habitats with special emphasis on the mountain reserve areas, identify the known species, describe and name the species not yet known to science, provide keys on the internet to identify the species (and information on the habitats and distributions of species), and collaborate with local biologists in building an infrastructure for future Hispaniolan entomological research. The oldest parts of Hispaniola are about 105 million years old. Because of its age and proximity to the rich Neotropical biota, Hispaniola has the third highest plant diversity of the world s oceanic islands. It is expected that the insect diversity, once known, will be huge, perhaps comparable to that of the continental tropics. The total number of recorded Orthopteroids from Hispaniola is 238; however, the actual number may be as much as six times the number presently known. Because of the pioneering use of the internet to provide taxonomic information, this project will almost immediately benefit the local infrastructure of biodiversity studies in Hispaniola and will help to promote entomological research. The principal vehicle for communicating the results will be an existing global taxonomic database to orthopteroid insects (Orthoptera Species File Online: http: viceroy.eeb.uconn.edu orthoptera doc10506 none This individual investigator award is for an experimental research project that will address some of the most fundamental physics issues associated with high-temperature superconducting cuprates. The primary objectives are: [1] To investigate the competing orders and possible existence of a quantum critical point in different families of hole-doped (p-type) cuprate superconductors as a function of the doping level and temperature by means of low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and spectroscopy (STS). [2] To compare the pairing potential, pairing symmetry, and competing orders in the electron-doped (n-type) cuprate superconductors with those in the p-type cuprates. [3] To elucidate the characteristics of spin and charge transport in the p-type cuprate superconductors by studying the effects of spin-polarized and simple quasiparticle injection in perovskite ferromagnet-insulator-superconductor (F-I-S) and in normal metal-insulator-superconductor (N-I-S) heterostructures. The superior spatial resolution of STM STS is expected to provide unique information for the microscopic properties of cuprate superconductors, and the investigation of spin charge transport in these superconductors can yield insights into the roles of spin- and charge-degrees of freedom in their pairing state. In addition to the potentially significant impact of these studies on revealing the fundamental physics of cuprate superconductivity, the wide range of forefront experimental techniques employed in conducting this project will provide sound technical and scientific training for the participating students and postdoctoral researchers. Furthermore, novel microelectronic devices based on the tunable superconducting properties of F-I-S heterostructures under variable spin-polarized quasiparticle currents may be devised for a range of applications. %%% This individual investigator award will fund an experimental research project that attempts to address some of the most fundamental physics issues and potential applications associated with high-temperature superconducting cuprates. There are two primary experimental approaches. One involves the use a low-temperature scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to study the microscopic physical properties of cuprates with atomic-scale spatial resolution, thereby proving direct information for the quantum nature of these unconventional superconductors. The other experimental approach involves studying how various superconducting properties of the cuprates are modified under the injection of electrical currents in novel devices comprising of thin-film layers of ferromagnet-insulator-superconductor (F-I-S) and normal metal-insulator-superconductor (N-I-S) heterostructures. In addition to potentially significant impact of these studies on revealing the fundamental physics of cuprate superconductivity, the wide range of frontier experimental techniques employed in conducting this project will provide sound technical and scientific training for the participating students and postdoctoral researchers. Furthermore, the tunable superconducting properties of the F-I-S heterostructures under variable injection currents are promising candidates for various microelectronic device applications doc10507 none This proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF- . The award supports the construction and application of an electric Stark-effect coupled infrared near field microscope. This will be a powerful new tool for the analysis of the chemical composition of surface nanostructures on 50-100 nm length scales, which are the critical scales for polymer nanotechnologies doc10508 none Hochella The primary objective of this research program is to observe and quantitatively characterize, on the nanometer (10-9 meters) scale, the complex interactions that occur between microorganisms (specifically bacteria) and minerals. These interactions are ubiquitous in soils and rocks near the Earth s surface. We hypothesize that microbe-mineral interactions, when studied directly at the nanoscale, will result in the discovery of exotic behavior relative to current concepts and models that seek to explain mineral-microbe association and dependence. In order to accomplish our goal, we will depend heavily on biological force microscopy (BFM), a variation of the atomic force microscope that we have developed in our lab over the last two years. This technique, for the first time, allows for the direct measurement of forces (both attractive repulsive and adhesive) between fully functional cells and any other substrate as a function of separation distance. Reproducible and reliable measurements between bacteria and mineral surfaces are readily obtained with nano- to pico (10-12)-Newton force resolution while at the same time controlling their separation to the nanometer level. This has already given us an unprecedented view of the intricacies on mineral-microbe interaction as a function of water chemistry, microbial physiology, and surface mineralogy. Practical application of this work includes the development of a new generation of transport model for microorganisms in surface or subsurface environments, using the wealth of nanoscale information obtained from our BFM and associated measurements. Such models should be very useful in developing more robust subsurface bioremediation strategies in the future. This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119 doc10509 none The goal of this project is to carry out a detailed multi-disciplinary study of single-electron latching switches and of possible use of 2D arrays of such switches for hardware implementation of self-organizing (plastic) neuromorphic networks. Preliminary estimates show that such networks may provide unparalleled possibilities for complex information processing. By these estimates, the networks may also have remarkable scaling properties: if implemented using a 10-nm technology, they may have density about 10 8 neurons per cm 2 at manageable power dissipation below 100 W cm 2 , and feature full learning cycle time of the order of a few seconds. This scaling gives every hope that the networks will be able, after initial (largely unsupervised) learning, not only provide complex information processing including complex image recognition, but possibly reproduce biological evolution of the cerebral cortex at a time scale some 6 orders of magnitude shorter. The objective of the proposed project is to carry out a preliminary study of this remarkable opportunity, addressing all its basic aspects at several structural levels. In particular, research will include the following components: A. Single-electron switch node design (D. Averin, K. Likharev, J. Wells). Detailed theoretical analysis and modeling (on two basic levels of single-electron transport theory) of statics, dynamics, and statistics of the proposed single-electron latching switches. B. Low temperature prototyping (J. Lukens). Fabrication and experimental study of Al AlOx Al prototypes of single-electron latching switches, with the goal to scale single-electron islands down to 100 nm and tunnel junctions to 10 nm, respectively, which would bring the reliable operation temperature up to about 10 K. C. Molecular single-electron device development (B. Brunschwig, J. Lukens, A. Mayr). Exploration of the opportunity to implement the basic component of the switches, the single-electron transistor, by chemical self-assembly of molecular components. The molecular components will be deposited in solution on the prefabricated metallic wire structures, and then characterized using a set of electrical, electrochemical, and time-resolved laser-spectrometry methods. D. Top level modeling and analysis (J. Barhen, M. Bender, K. Likharev). Large-scale computer simulation and a partial analytical study of the growth, dynamics, and self-adaptation of neuromorphic networks based on these switches. Hopefully, the project will achieve enough progress to justify a large-scale R&D effort in this exciting direction. In particular, a reliable evidence of self-organization of adaptive neuromorphic networks during largely unsupervised learning would certainly be followed by the first hardware implementations of sizable networks (possibly, after an initial stage of purely-CMOS-based prototyping using commercially available FPGA technology). The project will have a substantial educational component. Specifically (besides participating in general educational Stony Brook initiatives), at least 4 FTE graduate students will be involved in the project each year, and some 20 undergraduate and graduate students will take part in the project during its full 4-year period. At least one student will work in BNL and one in ORNL most of the time. Working in a multi-disciplinary team will allow these students to overcome inter-departmental barriers in their education. As another specific educational initiative, we plan to organize a Web-based undergraduate course on massively parallel supercomputing and neural networks, using the IBM SP3 computer at Oak Ridge. Work on the inter-related aspects of this multi-disciplinary project will be constantly coordinated by its P.I. (K. Likharev). In particular, regular meetings of all Stony Brook and Brookhaven participants of the team working on the project (including postdoctoral associates and students), and annual meetings with Oak Ridge collaborators, are planned doc10510 none This proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF- . Features of the Casimir force will be explored for nanometer separations. In particular, evidence will be sought for the demonstration of repulsive and lateral Casimir forces. Such forces have never been experimentally demonstrated and could play an important role in the fabrication and control of electromechanical devices as MEMS approaches NEMS doc10511 none This proposal was recieved in response to NSE, NSF- . Focused electron beam decomposition of molecules adsorbed on surfaces will be investigated as a means for fabricating electrical contacts to individual or small arrays of nanostructures. This direct write technique offers a convenient, flexible and practical method for bridging the gap between mesoscopic lithography and the nanoscale. Of primary importance is the purity and resistivity of the deposited film. Resistivity will be correlated with process parameters by depositing between predefined metallic contact pads. Contamination of deposited metallic features will be avoided by using inorganic precursor molecules such as TaF5, TiCl4 and WF6 . Film purity will be determined in situ ,using standard surface science techniques. Preliminary estimates of write speeds achievable in environmental electron microscopes indicate that 1:1 aspect ratio,nm-scale wires can be written at rates of 0.1 um sec. Additionally, use of environmental electron microscopy will allow simultaneous identification and contacting features of interest. The flexibility of this technique will allow tailoring the deposited structures for different applications. Examples are nanowires for electrical contacts, metal nanodot arrays for attachment of functionalized organic molecules or specially shaped metal gates deposited on semiconductor surfaces to allow charge confinement and manipulation in nanoscale regions. Thus,success of this technique will enable rapid prototyping of diverse concepts cutting across several nanoscience and technology subfields. Longer term, the capability for e-beam writing of entire nanodevices is envisioned. Electron-beam decomposition of inorganic species leading to growth of semiconductors and insulators will also be investigated. Novel precursor chemistries will be developed for e-beam growth of insulating and semiconducting phases compatible with Si-based nanoelectronics. Essentially,this is an athermal method for depositing nanoscale features at temperatures below that for which the features melt via surface diffusion of deposited atoms doc10512 none This Nanoscale Exploratory Research (NER) award to Clemson University is cofunded by Divisions of Chemistry (MPS), and Design, Manufacturing and Industrial Innovations (ENG), and is part of the Nanoscale Science and Engineering program. Under this project, George Chumanov will develop novel techniques to simultaneously synthesize and assemble silver nanoparticles in multidimensional structures with nanoscale spacing. Monodispersed silver nanoparticles with tunable optical properties will be formed by liquid droplet formation and hydrogen reduction with electrostatic focusing for particle transport and assembly on different substrates. This electrostatic focusing method could develop a new bench-top technology for routine particle deposition in the nanometer range and spacing. In addition, the research project will provide education and training opportunities to undergraduate students in the assembly, processing and characterization of nano particles with specialized optical properties. Under the award, novel monodispersed silver nanoparticles with tunable optical properties will be formed by liquid droplet formation and hydrogen reduction. Electrostatic focusing will be used to transport and assemble nanoparticles on different substrates. These multidimensional regular arrays of nanoparticles are expected to be robust, and could be used in next generation photonic and optoelectronic devices. The method once fully developed could provide a bench-top procedure for routine nanoparticle deposition doc10513 none This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119). The project addresses nanoscale effects on synthesis and properties of semiconductor nanowires. A versatile, template-based approach to the synthesis of metal semiconductor metal nanowires will be developed, utilizing nanoporous membranes as substrates for nanowire assembly using semiconductor vapor-liquid-solid growth and metal electrodeposition. This approach provides the ability to synthesize single crystal semiconductor structures sandwiched between contact metal segments in a single nanowire with controlled diameters and lengths. After removal from the membrane, a field assisted assembly method will be used to attract and align the nanowires suspended in solution on to pre-patterned contact pads on a substrate. An electric field is used to polarize the nanowires and induce alignment via dielectrophoresis. Field assembly will be used to align and position large numbers of nanowires on large area contact pads for electrical characterization. Fabrication studies will focus on two materials, Si and GaAs, enabling a study of nanoscale effects in indirect and direct gap semiconductors. Structures with dimensions ranging from hundreds of nanometers to tens of angstroms will be produced and characterized to study the impact of length scale on the physical properties of nanowires. The development of vapor-liquid-solid growth methods in nanoporous membranes will encompass a study of vapor phase transport, reaction kinetics, nucleation and crystal growth in nanoscale cylindrical geometries. The fabrication of metal semiconductor junctions within individual nanowires will be used to engineer nanocontacts in these structures and probe phase equilibria, interfacial reaction kinetics, Fermi level pinning and ohmic and Schottky contact characteristics in small dimensional structures. The ability to rapidly position and measure large numbers of individual nanowires will be used to carry out detailed measurements of electrical transport. Theoretical studies of band structure and carrier scattering in restricted geometries will be carried out in conjunction with the experimental work to provide insight into the experimental findings. An interdisciplinary team with specific expertise in semiconductor crystal growth, metal semiconductor contacts, nanowire self-assembly and characterization and the theory of nanostructure electronic properties will carry out the research. The team includes faculty members from Materials Science and Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Physics. The interwoven structure of the research and the close physical proximity of the investigators will enable co-advising of graduate students and the development of individual thesis projects that encompass a range of topics in nanoscale synthesis, assembly, characterization and theory. The project will also include the preparation of educational modules, developed in conjunction with a high school physics instructor, that are designed to introduce concepts in nanotechnology to a general audience. The modules will be used by team members in their current K-12 education and outreach activities and in additional on-campus programs that target minority and female recruitment in science and engineering. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area. The project is designed to develop strong technical, communication, and organizational management skills in students through unique educational experiences made possible by a forefront research environment. There will be active involvement of undergraduates in the program and formal emphasis on developing effective oral and written communication skills. The project is co-supported by the DMR EM, CTS CRP, and CTS FPH Divisions Programs doc10514 none This proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF- . Sensitivity at the level of individual quanta is required for such diverse applications of nanosensors as characterization of macromolecules and biological objects, monitoring of molecular binding, and control of dephasing processes in quantum dots. In nanoscale structures the phonon exchange is too fast, and strong thermal (phonon) coupling between the sensor and its surroundings puts strict limitations on the sensitivity of ordinary bolometric sensors. In the hot-electron sensor, the incoming quanta overheat only electron states, which relax to equilibrium due to electron-phonon coupling. The sensitivity of hot-electron sensors can be improved by weakening the effective coupling between electrons and phonons. In nanoconductors, the electron-phonon interaction is substantially modified in comparison with the interaction in bulk materials. Due to the interference between electron-phonon and electron-boundary scattering, the electron relaxation dephasing rate depends drastically on vibrations of boundaries. It may vary over a wide range, spanning several orders of magnitude, and may be controlled by selection of a substrate material. The proposed research includes complex investigations of the interference between electron scattering mechanisms in superconducting nanostructures and experimental demonstration of the electron energy relaxation controlled by elastic electron scattering from boundaries and defects as well as the design of a new hot-electron sensor with a record value of the noise equivalent power, NEP=10-20W Hz1 2, and the energy resolution of 5 10-24J, which will be able to count individual low-energy quanta (photons or phonons doc10515 none Lee This proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF- . As the area of microfabricated biochemical instrumentation continues to grow, increasingly sophisticated devices are necessary. Fluid flows in the great majority of current microfluidic devices are electrically driven, especially for those involved in charge-based separations of biological molecules such as DNA, RNA, and proteins. This electrically driven flow offers numerous advantages over micromachined pressure-driven pumps, including ease of fabrication and operation, simplicity of integration with other functional elements, and the absence of moving parts. However, this electrical means of pumping suffers from the lack of simultaneous control over fluid flow in multiple interconnected channels, and the inability to perform spatial- or time-controlled modification of flow rate and direction. The realization of true lab-on-a-chip technology, in which the capability of desktop bioanalytical tools is replicated in a credit card sized package, will require precise flow control and metering in complex networks of interconnected microfluidic channels between mixers, reactors, reservoirs, separators, sensors, and related components. To this end, we propose to create an integrated system for fluid control in this miniaturized format. A novel microfluidic element, a microfluidic multiplexer, can overcome the limitations mentioned above for ordinary electrically driven fluid flow. This is accomplished by directly controlling the electrical properties at the inner surface of the microfluidic channels through the application of a radial, external electric field. The microfluidic multiplexer, which allows on-device flow control in complex microfluidic networks, will serve as the key component in a range of microfabricated devices for performing unique bioseparations and bioanalyses doc10516 none This research project, supported by the Division of Integrative Biology and Neuroscience, will be carried out by Dr. Rong Wang, Dr. Nickolas Menhart and their students at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The target of the research is to develop a novel approach that allows a real-time study of the dynamic behavior of individual ligand-receptor pairs (typical size of several nanometers) in the living cell environment. The essence of this approach is to guide the tip of the atomic force microscope (AFM) to desired receptor proteins regardless of the roughness and complexity on the cell membrane surface. Besides imaging of biomolecules at the submolecular level under physiological conditions, dynamic and kinetic processes of the biorecognition events can be clarified on the nanoscale. The research will involve novel experiments aimed at fundamental studies of single ligand-receptor interaction in the natural environment. This will provide the molecular basis for biological activities and molecular communications within cells. One of the promising applications is to elucidate a vaccine or drug target at the particular cell-surface protein in a diseased cell or an activator target in a growth cell. This revolutionary approach shows strong promise to elevate the development of the fundamental understanding of molecular functions in bioscience to an entirely new level, and will stimulate progress in the study of biological and biologically inspired systems in which nanostructures play an important role doc10517 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Mehdi Asheghi This proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF- . The project is focused on the study of two major nanoscale phenomena: (a) phonon transport in single crystal silicon layer of thickness in the range of 10-50 nm and (b) ballistic phonon transport near hotspots ( appr. 10 nm) in the active region of silicon-on-insulator (SOI) transistors. The experimental part of the study involves the very first measurements of thermal conductivity of nanometer size, single crystal silicon layer and ballistic phonon transport near a hotspot in a transistor. Transient and steady state heat transfer experiments on nanostructures at both room and cryogenic temperatures will be performed to reveal the fundamentals of phonon transport at nanometer scales. The theoretical effort focuses on numerical simulations of phonon Boltzmann transport equation (BTE) in the relaxation time approximation, accounting for phonon dispersion as well as frequency dependent phonon mean free paths in silicon. The analytical work will take advantage of the experimental data and numerical simulations to introduce simple, yet physically realistic, expressions for phonon transport in nanostructures, which can be used for rapid electrical thermal simulation doc10518 none PROPOSAL NO.: PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Lu, Yicheng INSTITUTION NAME: Rutgers University New Brunswick TITLE: NER: Feasibility Studies on ZnO Nanostructures And Their Device Applications This proposal addresses the exploratory research on zinc oxide (ZnO) based nanoscale structures and feasibility study of their device applications. ZnO is a multifunctional material possessing unique electrical, optical, acoustical, and mechanical properties. Semiconductor ZnO has a wide and direct energy bandgap (~3.3eV). ZnO can be grown at low temperatures, in contrast with the other wide bandgap materials, such as GaN and SiC. Its ternary compounds, formed by alloying ZnO with CdO and MgO, permit bandgap tuning from ~2.8 eV to ~4 eV. Doped ZnO ternaries can be made magnetic or ferroelectric, extending its applications beyond the traditional semiconductor confines. In this exploratory research, we will study growth mechanisms and conduct substrate engineering for selective growth of ZnO nanotips and nanotip arrays on various substrates, including R-plane sapphire, Si, silicon-on-sapphire (SOS), and GaN-on-sapphire. Feasibility studies of ZnO nanotip applications will focus on field-emission, two-dimensional photonic bandgap (PBG), and fine instrumentation such as atomic force microscopy and scanning tunneling optical microscopy. We will also explore the feasibility to form CdO quantum dots in ZnO using the activated alloy phase segregation mechanism, which may be proved as a viable alternative to the Stranski-Krastanov mechanism. These quantum dots have potential applications in UV lasers and integrated UV optoelectronic chips. The proposed work will extend the research on nanoscale structures and devices into the field of wide bandgap semiconductor nanoscale science and engineering. The research and development of nanoscale structures in ZnO and its ternaries will lead to a fundamentally new class of devices, which integrate multi-phenomena and posses unprecedented multi-functional characteristics doc10519 none Aldroubi The investigator and his colleagues develop a mathematical framework and fast computational schemes for the reconstruction of functions, signals or images from noisy, very large sampled data sets, acquired on nonuniform grids, by nonideal acquisition devices. The problem of nonuniform sampling and reconstruction is treated in the context of shift-invariant subspaces, Besov spaces, and in arbitrary dimensions. The theory is developed for the case when the samples are obtained from weighted averages. Density conditions for exact reconstruction are established. When the data are noisy, incomplete, or when the assumptions needed for exact reconstruction are not satisfied, bounds on the error between the reconstructed and original signal are derived in terms of the sampling densities, the averaging functionals, and the noise statistics. The development of the mathematical framework and the computational schemes requires a new set of techniques and ideas, and involves several areas of mathematics including wavelet theory, frame theory, functional analysis, and harmonic analysis. The project is motivated by problems arising in data transmission, geophysical exploration, astronomy, spectroscopy, and biomedical imaging. The problem of reconstructing a signal or an image from a set of nonuniform samples is encountered in many applications of signal or image processing. For example, the loss of data packets during transmission through internet or from satellites can be viewed as a nonuniform sampling and reconstruction problem. In geophysical exploration, the earth s magnetic field is measured by a combination of airborn, fast moving acquisition devices, as well as scattered stationary devices resulting in highly nonuniform sampling patterns, and a huge data set. The goal is to reconstruct the magnetic field and use it to reveal geological features. In fact, modern digital data processing of signals or images always uses a sampled version of the original analog signals or images. However, the sampling devices are never ideal, and the collected data consist of average samples. Moreover these data are often very large, incomplete, and corrupted by noise. The question then arises whether and how the original signal can be recovered from the data. Therefore the investigator aims to 1) quantify the conditions under which it is possible to reconstruct a signal exactly from different sets of nonuniform average-samples; 2) use these analytical results to develop explicit, and computationally efficient reconstruction schemes; and 3) analyze the performance of the algorithms under adverse conditions, or when the data are incomplete or corrupted by noise. The development of a theory and algorithms that perform well under stringent and realistic situations will help the analysis, processing and management of very large data sets obtained digitally by new acquisition modalities, and transmitted or received by communication networks such as the internet, cellular phones, and other distributed communication systems doc10520 none Susmita Bose, Et. Al, Washington State University This project will investigate the synthesis route for making nano-powders of calcium phosphate based ceramics. It will explore the possibility of dendrimer mediated synthesis of nano-powders of calcium phosphate based ceramics that can be used for making dense and porous bone grafts with improved mechanical properties. Among various ceramic materials, calcium phosphate based ceramics are of significant interest because of their excellent biocompatibility. However, the composition suffer from poor mechanical properties due to sintering. The sinterability issues of these and other calcium phosphate based compositions will be evaluated using nano-sized powders. It is believed that the higher surface area of the starting nano-powders will increase the sintering kinetics, and better sintering will improve mechanical properties. The nano-powders will be synthesized by using different dendrimers via sol-gel synthetic route. Preliminary cell proliferation tests will also be conducted with these bone grafts doc10521 none Myrick This proposal was received in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119). This project will explore a novel technique for film formation and implantation that is applicable to vacuum processing of polymers and low-vapor-pressure organic materials. This approach uses accelerated nanoparticles to create films from materials that ordinarily require non-vacuum processing (such as spin-casting) and are thus incompatible with most integrated circuit semiconductor processing methods. Nanoparticles will be injected into a vacuum chamber by a particle beam interface that employs a supersonic free jet expansion and an electron impact ionization system to charge and accelerate the particles. We will explore whether this interface can be used to deposit nanoparticles with sufficient kinetic energy to instanteously melt the materials on impact. It is hoped that the use of nanoparticles may keep the energy density of the material below the point at which the primary chemical nature of the particle is irreversibly altered. Nanoparticles deposited by settling and acceleration onto surfaces will be studied with surface spectroscopies, probe microscopy and temperature-programmed desorption mass spectroscopy. These studies will inform us about the nature of the materials deposited, whether the nanoparticles have been damaged by deposition melting, and about the morphologies of the deposits. Molecular dynamics simulations will be performed to develop understanding that may lead to control of deposition. These simulations will be based on the classical method of molecular dynamics simulations by mixing sophisticated many-body potentials with simple pairwise potentials doc10522 none This award to Ohio State University by the Chemistry Division is part of the Nanoscale Exploratory Research in the Nanoscale Science and Engineering program. Under this project, Jonathan Parquette will develop novel enantioselective catalysts based on the active transition metals, such as ruthenium and copper, incorporated in chiral dendrimers. Monodendrons up to three generations will be prepared using aminopyridine dicarboxamide as the branching units, and chiral nonracemic anthranilamide as the terminal units. Dendrimers with transition metals will be evaluated for enhanced catalytic Diels-Alder and aldol condensation reactions. In addition, the research program will provide education and training opportunities in material chemistry to graduate and undergraduate students. Under the award, novel enantioselective catalysts based on the active transition metals in chiral dendrimers will be studied. Dendrimers, with up to three generations, will be synthesized and their conformationally based chiral changes in different solvents will be evaluated using circular dichroism. In addition, different metals selectively placed at the periphery of dendrimers will be evaluated for enhanced catalytic activities for the organic synthesis of chiral materials. The research program will provide education and training opportunities in materials chemistry to graduate and undergraduate students doc10523 none This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119). The goal of this project is to develop laser and optoelectronic device technologies that achieve photon and electron confinement to generate 0-dimensional states, based on advances in nanolithography and dry etching to fabricate nanocrystals containing self-organized quantum dots. A decrease of a semiconductor laser s volume to its minimum size, while maintaining high Q, along with a decrease in the electronic confinement potential, may result in revolutionary advances in device operation. These include high-speed operation below and at threshold, and high efficiency in the spontaneous regime below threshold. In the ultimate limits of small active volume and sufficiently high Q the system can enter the quantum reversible regime necessary to create quantum-entangled states. Both these quantum limits of the photons and electron-hole pairs are possible using III-V nanostructured active material and nanostructured photonic crystals. The materials to be employed in these studies will be GaAs AlGaAs InGaAs strained layer heterostructures grown by molecular beam epitaxy, which will be fabricated into photonic crystal lasers and microcavities. The III-V heterostructures will be grown at the University of Texas Austin Microelectronics Research Center, and photonic crystal fabrication will take place at the (CIT) and at UT-Austin. The III-V nanostructures will be optimized for high-speed operation based on studies to be carried out at CIT. Manufacturable processes for the nanolithography will be developed at UT-Austin. Graduate research assistants working towards Ph.D. degrees represent a major component of this research. The expected impact of the research is the development of a new technology for low power, high speed optoelectronic interconnects suitable for wavelength division multiplexing and low power transceivers for optical interconnects, and new devices useful for exchange of quantum information. %%% The project addresses basic materials science and engineering research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area. The project will develop strong technical, communication, and organizational management skills in students through unique educational experiences made possible by a collaborative forefront research environment. The project is co-supported by the DMR EM, ECS PFET, and EEC Divisions doc10524 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator:Harry Ploehn Institution: University of South Carolina This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119). The objective of this proposal is to design dendrimer-stabilized nanoparticles of transition metals, bimetallic alloys, and transition metal oxides for use in heterogeneous catalysis. Dendrimers, used as chemical templates and nanoparticle stabilizers, provide an opportunity for precise control of the size, composition, and arrangement of atoms in catalytic nanoparticles, as well as a means for self-assembly and immobilization of nanoparticles in ordered two-dimensional and three-dimensional arrays on surfaces. Catalyst activity, selectivity, and lifetime will be improved by exploiting phenomena unique to catalytic structures designed and fabricated on the nanoscale. Research and educational activities include theoretical design, molecular modeling, nanoparticle synthesis, catalyst preparation and evaluation. Through this multidisciplinary activity, an overall goal is to design the next generation of catalysts based on a rational atom-up approach. Additional support will be provided to students through the three NSF-REU sites and through Sloan Foundation Fellowships, aimed at increasing minority participation. This work has the potential to improve the rational design of catalysts through molecular modeling and synthesis of nanoparticles doc10525 none Cui This proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF- . A promising new method for rapid DNA sequencing will be explored. Molecular dynamics simulations will be performed to establish the potential feasibility of a proposed method for resolving individual bases of single-strand DNA in aqueous electrolyte medium being driven through an artificially fabricated channel of nanometer cross section by an axial electric field. The magnitude and duration of electrical current variations will be determined between a pair of biased electrodes positioned transverse to the channel axis, as individual bases on the fully-elongated DNA strand are driven between the electrodes. The crucial feasibility issues to be explored in this calculation are the reproducibility of the current signature of a given base, the distinguishability of one base s signature from others , and the magnitude of the signature compared with random fluctuations. If calculations demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, there will be strong incentive to study it further both experimentally and computationally, for it offers the potential to speed up DNA sequencing from ca. 0.3 bases per second using current technology based on the Sanger method to perhaps millions to billions of bases per second. Such rapid sequencing could enable sequencing of an individual genome within time scale and cost appropriate for individual diagnostics and genome-based treatment. Techniques exist today that, in principle, allow fabrication of channels of ca. 2 nm cross section with embedded electrodes of dimensions comparable to those of a single base. Experimental realization of such systems is expected within the next few years. Already, experiments with DNA and RNA detection during electrically-driven flow through nanometer scale protein pores in natural membranes have excited great interest, but these systems fall far short of the promise of the fabricated channels proposed for study and have many other disadvantages, as well. Success in the proposed exploratory simulations is certain to stimulate and guide efforts toward experimental realization and will provide the tools for optimizing and understanding these future experiments doc10526 none The biota of Thailand is one of the richest, most endemic (unique), and most endangered in the world. Concerns about deforestation and the loss of biodiversity has prompted conservation organizations to identify Thailand and surrounding areas as a biodiversity hotspot, underscoring the richness, endemism, and immediate threat to the biota. The mountains of northern Thailand represent the southeastern edge of a montane corridor that extends northward to Nepal, and interdigitate with an extension of the tropical rain forest farther from the equator than anywhere else in the world. Consequently, northern Thailand is a nexus where typically northern and southern taxa have invaded biogeographically extreme latitudes. Concern about deforestation, pollution, watershed degradation, and attendant loss of aquatic species has led to an acute interest in Thailand s aquatic insects and in their potential use as indicators of water quality. Many lotic (stream-inhabiting) insects are thought to be especially sensitive to environmental perturbations; however, the general use of lotic taxa as bioindicators requires baseline data on their diversity, distribution, relative abundance, and life history. The primary goal of this project is to survey stream-inhabiting insects of northern Thailand. Specimens will be gathered by diverse methods, including Malaise-trap, black-light, and aerial collection of adults, rearing of larvae and pupae, drift-netting, and qualitative and quantitative sampling of numerous habitats (e.g., riffles, depositional areas, rootmats). Material will be collected from throughout the region, but several sites have been selected for more frequent and intensive inventory. A team of taxonomic experts, including specialists from the United States, Thailand, and Europe, will participate in two field expeditions and will use resultant collections to conduct taxonomic, ecological, phylogenetic, and biogeographic studies. The primary objectives of this inventory are to: (1) discover and describe new species of lotic insects; (2) document the distribution, relative abundance, and natural history of lotic species; (3) associate and construct user-friendly keys to all life stages of lotic taxa; (4) develop a database and web site for faunal, distributional, and ecological information. Another important objective is to help build a foundation for a strong aquatic entomology program in Thailand. This will be accomplished through educating Thai and American students in the methods of systematics, including biotic inventories, curation, and taxonomic techniques, and through the provision of museums and educational institutions with research collections, reference material, and a database for Thailand s aquatic insects. This study will provide a comprehensive inventory of stream-inhabiting insects from northern Thailand. This inventory will greatly enhance our knowledge of the regional insect fauna and our understanding of Southeast Asian biodiversity. It also will provide an authoritative reference collection for educators and researchers in aquatic entomology and systematics, and for future revisionary, phylogenetic, and biogeographic studies. The educational value of this collection and the training of personnel will be among the lasting products. Data on the diversity, distribution, relative abundance, and natural history of aquatic insects will provide insights into potential bioindicators of water quality. All of these will strengthen aquatic entomology and insect systematics programs in Thailand. Another product of this survey will be a database and web site that will be useful to insect systematists, aquatic- and fisheries biologists, biogeographers, conservationists, and resource managers. The data generated in this study will permit identification of areas of local endemism and sites of phylogenetic and biogeographic significance, which will have important implications in the conservation and management of Thailand s streams. Thai colleagues also have expressed great interest in organizing future taxonomic workshops, which will provide additional opportunities to educate students, researchers, resource managers, and the public about the identification, value, and use of insects in stream ecosystems doc10527 none This Nanoscale Exploratory Research (NER) project is an exploratory study aimed at understanding the key physical mechanisms governing the dispersion of nano-particles in molten metals and the concomitant solidification of the nano-particle-reinforced molten metals resulting in the formation of nano-particle reinforced composite solders having attractive combinations of strength, durability and reliability. Carefully orchestrated and planned experiments will be performed to produce nano-particle reinforced composite solders based on commercial tin-lead and lead-free solder mixtures blended well with nanopowders. In the first phase of this research nanopowders of copper, iron, molybdenum and nickel will be chosen and in the follow phase nanopowders of titanium dioxide and aluminum oxide will be the candidates. Innovative techniques will be developed after several trial and error experimentation to establish an efficient means for blending the nano-powders with the micron-size powders of the solder resulting in a molten solder mixture having a near uniform dispersion of nanoparticles. Quantitative measurements will be conducted to characterize the dynamics of solidification of the composite molten solder mixture. Metallurgical observations using both optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy will be made to characterize the nature, morphology and distribution of intrinsic microstructural features and the presence and distribution of artifacts such as micro and macro porosity, voids and microscopic cracks. Mechanical tests, to include microhardness, tensile deformation and cyclic fatigue, will be conducted to demonstrate the overall superiority combination of mechanical properties of the nano-particle reinforced composite solders. It is anticipated that the findings of this research study will provide a viable solution to engineering high strength materials by adding trace amounts of nanopowders into a solidifying molten metal to form nano-particle reinforced composite. The engineered composite solders will have attractive combinations of strength; damage tolerance and durability coupled with improved reliability thereby enhancing the probability of its use on in a spectrum of microelectronic and opto-electronic devices and assemblies. Results of this research exercise will also have far reaching consequences beyond soldering materials. It is expected that the study would also shed light on several fundamental issues related to the formation of nanoparticle-reinforced metallic and even non-metallic composites. A study of the influence of nano-particles on crystalline nucleation kinetics and microstructural development will contribute to enhancing our understanding of modern solidification theory doc10528 none for DMS - PI: Jie Qing The proposed project consists of two related research topics. The first part is research in conformal geometry. The second part is a continuation of the research of formation and structure of singularity developed along geometric flows. For conformal geometry part it takes surface theory as the guideline of geometry in higher dimension. The theory of conformally flat structure, in 4 dimension for instance, has not been so successful because of the lack of right analytic tools, in our view point. But it seems that some replacement of complex analysis by theory of fourth order PDE is found to be very promising to study conformal geometry. Therefore the main thread in the part of this proposed research is to further develop conformal geometry with those newly developed analytic tools. The proposed research takes a fundamental and comprehensive approach to the study of conformal geometry. It will significantly enhance and develop the conformal geometry. It will also provide some ways to better understand topology in 3 and 4 dimension. For the second part of this proposed project we continue our research in the study of formation and structure of singularity developed along the heat flow for harmonic maps from surfaces. It is always very interesting to understand the behavior of the flow across the finite time singularity. The better understanding of the finite time singularity is believed to be very helpful in further applications of the theory of harmonic maps in topology and physics. The development of conformal geometry has a very long history and extensive literature. It is intimately tied with modern physics as we have seen it in conformal field theory. Particularly it becomes even more important as the correspondence between quantum gravity and conformal field theory relatively well understood in physics demands mathematical foundation, as well as stimulates development in conformal geometry. Therefore it is clear that conformal geometry is an exciting frontier of modern sciences. Singularities naturally develop in many mathematical models for almost everything in sciences. Singularity, for instance, develop when some parameters in the physical system approach certain critical values, like Ginzburg-Landau model in super-conductivity and super-fluids. To study the singularities in evolution systems have been the major problems in the theory of partial differential equations with tremendous applications to many physical and engineering fields. Any essential analytic progress in this line will greatly attract attention from experts in all related areas. At last, but not the least, the proposed project is also generating research activities to the benefit of the graduate program in the Department of Mathematics at UCSC doc10529 none This Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) project will be conducted by a team that includes researchers on fracture micromechanics, characterization of structure and interfaces, plasma technology, aerosol technology, and microfabrication, together with collaborators at Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories. Evidence from a number of studies suggests that it should be possible to produce nano-crystalline composites that are superhard possessing hardness rivaling diamond and that also possess other properties that make them superior to diamond for applications requiring friction and wear resistance. A novel approach is proposed for synthesizing such materials, based on plasma synthesis and deposition of nanoparticles. The synthesis tool will be hypersonic plasma particle deposition, in which nanoparticles nucleate in thermal plasma and are then accelerated, in a hypersonic expansion, causing them to deposit by high-velocity impact. Nanocomposite films will be deposited with grain sizes in the range 5 to 10 nm, comprised of various combinations of the elements boron, carbon, nitrogen, silicon and titanium. In separate experiments, aerodynamic lenses will be used to focus the nanoparticles to collimated beams. These beams will be used in conjunction with microfabrication techniques to demonstrate fabrication of Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) devices from nanoparticles. These synthesis studies will be supported by fundamental studies of structure-property relations. The structure, crystallinity, chemical composition and deformation behavior of the synthesized material will be characterized at length scales ranging from the atomic level to individual nanosized grains, to interfacial regions, to the entire film. In addition to these experimental studies, numerical simulations of nanoparticle deformation at the atomistic scale will be performed in the context of both the processing and the subsequent mechanical performance. The highly interdisciplinary, highly interactive environment between two academic departments, several laboratories, and collaborators from Los Alamos and Sandia National Labs will provide graduate and undergraduate students with a breadth of experience in nanomanufacturing and nano-materials characterization. In additions, K-8 students involved in the NSF-supported ScienceWorks Program will be provided the opportunity to experience this novel research area doc10530 none Divisions of Chemistry, Materials Research, Bioengineering and Environmental Systems, and Molecular and Cellular Biosciences support this multidivisional award to William Marsh Rice University. This Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119). Under this project, Vicki Colvin, a material chemist with experience in template chemistry, Daniel Mittleman, an optical engineer and George Phillips, a biologist with expertise in protein crystal growth, will develop crystalline and monolithic nanostructured metal and ceramic materials using crystals of streptavidin, lysozyme and related proteins. These protein crystalline structures will be reinforced by glutaraldehyde cross-linking before the templating. X-ray diffraction studies and atomic force microscope imaging will be used to characterize the prepared materials with respect to crystal symmetry, periodicity and overall quality of the crystal arrangement. These porous and three-dimensional open crystalline inorganic structures with nanometer spacing may find applications in diffraction gradients, lenses, mirrors and other devices for soft X-ray optics. The research program will also provide a rich multidisciplinary education and training opportunities in material and protein chemistries to postdoctoral, graduate and undergraduate students. Under the award, ordered mesoporous nanostructured metal and ceramic materials will be fabricated using cross-linked protein crystals as sacrificial templates. The broader impact of the project is the understanding the formation of nanostructures, the templating effect of different protein crystal scaffolding, and the determination of optical properties of the mesoporous structures prepared in the soft X-ray range of the spectrum. In addition, the research program will provide a rich multidisciplinary education and training opportunities in materials chemistry, protein chemistry and optics to graduate and undergraduate students doc10531 none Lindsay This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119). It brings together experts in organic photochemistry, experimental and theoretical physicists and engineers in a University (Arizona State)-Industry (Motorola)collaboration aimed at developing nanoscale molecular optoelectronic devices based on paradigms from photosynthetic electron transfer. The first phase of the project builds on the PIs current work on the basic building blocks of molecular electronic devices. They will use bifunctionalized molecules covalently bonded at one end to a gold-coated conducting AFM tip and at the other end to a gold substrate. In this way they will measure the electrical properties of simple molecular insulators (n-alkanes) and molecular wires (carotenoids) at the single molecule level. These measurements will be compared to first-principles simulations, with the goal of developing both theory and experiment until they have a reasonably accurate description of transport in both the molecules and their contacts to the metal electrodes. Armed with this information, they will insert the molecules into nano-scale gaps in gold electrodes on oxidized silicon wafers.These devices will be made at Motorola. Final gap fabrication uses active-feedback control of electrochemical deposition, a technique developed by a consultant to the group.The goals of this step are to (1)make two electrode devices on wafers that can be characterized in terms of the single-molecule AFM data and (2) explore the current-voltage characteristics of these devices with greater flexibility than possible in the AFM (for example, making temperature-dependent measurements). The second phase will focus on the electronic properties of optically excited molecules, and molecules in high-energy charge-separated states. The use of light to provide additional inputs to molecular-scale electronic devices offers several advantages, and may lead the way to the design and fabrication of technologically useful constructs. They will use much the same approach as outlined above, but with the addition of controlled optical excitation of chromophores. They will start with the carotenoids, as the simplest system, but will go on to study molecules containing porphyrins and fullerenes that are built to make transitions into long-lived triplet states, or into long-live charge-separated states. These systems present theoretical as well as experimental challenges, and they propose computational approaches for dealing with nuclear-relaxation on excitation or charging and for dealing with highly correlated molecular electronic states. They propose a single-molecule opto-electronic switch as a candidate device on which to focus the long-range efforts of the group. The device might prove useful as an optoelectronic molecular-scale building block. But developing the science and technology that would go into building the device and understanding it are the main motivation for this project. This group provides an extraordinary opportunity for training minority students in multidisciplinary approaches to nanoscience in both academic and industrial research environments doc10532 none This project will utilize the data from the AMPTE CCE satellite to do a statistical analysis of the decay of the Earth s ring current after magnetic storms. The decay of the ring current due to charge exchange will be compared with global ring current decay rates estimated from the Dst index. The Polar Cap (PC) index will be used to estimate the rate of continued injection of ions into the ring current doc10533 none groups and geometry. The need for deeper understanding of this link has been demonstrated again and again by different threads within 20th century mathematical developments. Many of these threads were pulled together around by Gromov, whose proposed unification of geometric group theory using the relation of ``quasi-isometry has been very fruitful in the intervening twenty years. The focus of this research project will be to investigate quasi-isometric classification problems for several different types of symmetry groups. In particular, by using a constructive technique known as ``graphs of groups , new symmetry groups can be constructed out of familiar examples such as surface groups; these and closely related constructions will be the subjects of this research project doc10534 none Lydia Sohn Princeton University Nano Exploratory Research: The Single-Molecule DNA Transfer The focus of this project is to investigate the possibility of using single molecules of DNA for molecular-based electronic devices. Recent results of single-molecule DNA transistor shows a Coulomb Blockade Staircase and a gate-voltage dependence of the conductance enabling reliable and reproducible conducting DNA devices. This project is furthering this work to investigate the mechanism for DNA conduction and its dependence on various chemical and structural parameters. The single-molecule DNA transistor is being further investigated too understand the mechanism by which DNA conducts. Various questions such as dependence of conductivity of DNA to length and sequence; differences in conductivity between single-stranded and doubled-stranded DNA; dependence of the conduction in DNS to salts from the buffer solution; where are possible scattering centers located in the DNA molecule? Answers to such fundamental questions are expected to lead to a number of future novel molecular-scaled DNA-based electronic devices doc10535 none This research is focused on investigations of the quantum mechanical phase coherence properties of mesoscopic devices. At low temperatures, most mesoscopic circuits only exhibit coherence times between 0.05 to 10 ns and it is believed that much longer times will be required to make functional quantum devices. This work will systematically explore the phase coherent transport and magnetic properties of mesoscopic systems on time scales much shorter and much longer than the phase coherence time. Studies of the effect of 0 to 26 GHz measurement currents on decoherence in metals (with and without magnetic impurities) and semiconductors will be made. Measurements of the thermodynamic electron temperature in a variety of mesoscopic samples will be made using SQUID based noise thermometer techniques in order to check the recent theoretical prediction that thermodynamics may break down in small devices. The goal of all this work is to understand how the high frequency, material, and geometrical properties effect the quantum coherence properties of small systems. The graduate students involved with this program will learn how to fabricate a variety of quantum devices using modern fabrication techniques, measure these devices using state-of-the-art techniques, and will comprehend a wide body of solid state theory. All these skills are necessary in order to become successful in an industrial, government, or university career. %%% The low temperature properties of all electrical circuits can be significantly changed when the dimensions of the elements are reduced below a few microns. Quantum effects such as electron interference and charge quantization are responsible for many of the large conductance fluctuations observed in these devices and have kindled hope that a revolutionary new class of fast coherent quantum devices can be built to help fuel the continuing progress in the microelectronics industry. Many of the proposed new devices require long electron coherence times in order to maximize the signal, yet most nano-scale circuits only exhibit coherence times between 0.05 to 10 nanoseconds. This proposed research is focused on understanding the underlying physics that controls the phase coherence time in small electrical circuits with the expectation that we will be able to discover ways to increase this time. We will systematically explore the phase coherent transport properties of small quantum systems on time scales much shorter and much longer than the phase coherence time in an attempt to understand if we can manipulate the quantum state without causing decoherence. The graduate students involved with this program will receive the training necessary to become a future generation of microelectronic scientists. They will learn how to fabricate a variety of quantum devices using modern fabrication techniques and measure these devices using state-of-the-art techniques. All these skills are necessary in order to become successful in an industrial, government, or university career doc10536 none This proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF- . Carbon nanotubes are of interest as electronic conductors because of their unique properties, notably their behavior as 1-D conductors and their ballistic nature over several microns at room temperature. A general picture of electronic conduction in nanotubes is being developed by researchers in the field. Although the transient response of current flow is expected to be quite rapid (picosecond range), present experimental data for conduction properties of nanotubes is primarily obtained at low frequencies or in static measurements. In order to shed light on the fundamental current transport processes in nanotubes, an experimental and theoretical effort is proposed to develop characterization techniques which would allow the measurement of the transient current responses through nanotube conductors. This work will address two issues: i) the integration of nanotube conductors with appropriate high speed photoconductor materials and ii) the development of characterization techniques for nanoscale conductors based on pump probe measurements using high speed pulsed laser systems. It is expected that the proposed work will shed light on the conduction processes of these interesting electronic materials and provide important capabilities for integration of these materials with other electronic materials, including semiconductor device structures doc10537 none Enzymes are the catalysts that effect chemical transformations in biological world. The wide application of enzyme-based technologies is viewed as an important strategy to develop green industries that are energy-efficient and environment-benign. Immobilized enzymes, which are usually prepared by attaching enzymes to solid materials, are preferred in industries due to the ease of reuse and extended lifetime. Among other properties, the size of the solid materials is critical in determining the effective content and availability of attached enzymes. Accordingly, nano-sized particles provide the upper limits of the performance of immobilized enzymes. Currently, however, not much knowledge regarding the preparation and behaviors of bioactive nanoparticles is available. The feasibility of a unique process for the construction of enzyme-bearing nanoparticles will be examined in this research. The assumption is that enzyme molecules grafted with hydrophobic polymer chains will function as surfactants, and can selectively assemble at oil-water interfaces if applied to a microemulsion polymerization system. This mechanism will lead the enzyme to be covalently attached to the external surface of the resulted nanoparticles. In addition to the development of high performance nano biocatalysts, intent is also to shed light on mechanisms governing their catalytic behaviors. Like free enzyme molecules, nanoparticles exhibit Brownian motion. That means the attached enzymes are not immobilized, but with restrained mobility. This consideration points to an interesting transitional region bridging those of free and immobilized enzymes. Current theories appear to be difficult to cover such a transitional region. For example, the collision theory fails to provide a reliable prediction on the impact of particle size on enzyme activity. This project will probe the validity of classical theories for such size-activity relationships, thus inspire future theoretical studies regarding nano biocatalysts. Results from this study will also help to understand a much broader range of fundamental issues in other areas, such as the behaviors of aggregated proteins in biological systems, nano-size drug delivery devices, and biomedical diagnostic and drug-targeting systems doc10538 none Somasundaran This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119). Research in nanotechnology has to date concentrated mainly on the equilibrium properties and behavior of nano-systems, with the dynamics of the system rarely studied. This study is based on the conviction that elucidation of the basic mechanisms of dynamics will help in developing materials of the future which will have an inherent smartness built into them. For example, adsorbed polyacrylic acid structures will undergo coiled to stretched dangling conformational changes upon changing the pH. This can produce a marked response in the dispersed state of suspensions. This project will focus on the dynamic behavior of novel nano-structures and their active groups as a function of electrical, chemical, magnetic, thermal and optical fields. Some of the topics to be evaluated are 1) how the conformation of polymers changes and how rapidly they do so under changing pH, thermal, electrical, optical, magnetic and acoustic fields, 2) how the response of the active groups can be manipulated to develop novel structures, 3) how the properties of the nano-composites change as a function of their structure if a sinusoidal field is applied during the preparatory stage, and 4) what happens if variations and perturbations in the field take place after the preparation. The general methodology involved is to add a probe to a target molecule, which would respond to external perturbation vectors. This response would induce conformational changes in the adsorbed target molecule which will be followed in real time. For changes in pH we have carboxylic acid groups as probes, for magnetic field we will use aqueous ferro-fluids (hematite nanoparticles stabilized by surface active agents) and for optical perturbation we will use azo groups. These will be adsorbed on surfaces of silica (for AFM), gold (for SPR), and alumina (for ESR and fluorescence) functionalised for the binding of the modified macromolecules. The first stage of the research project involves synthesis of macromolecules incorporated with these probes. In the second stage, the dynamics will be studied using AFM, ESR, SPR and fluorescence spectroscopic techniques, while the molecules are being perturbed. It is the final goal to use the information gathered in the second stage to build novel nanomaterials with controllable properties doc10539 none This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119). The project addresses the fabrication of quantum scale devices through the combined oxidation and etching of Si SiGe Si nanostructured pillars. The project aims to demonstrate the validity of nanoscale computing by developing a process technology to fashion quantum dots of a predictable size, shape and placement, suitable for mass production and simple electrical contact. The project includes specific strategies and processes to control the size and composition of the nanostructured pillars and the resulting quantum dots and oxide insulators to be formed. The research spans issues of materials science, circuits, and device fabrication and characterization; the structures to be fabricated are closely integrated with quantum level devices necessary for cellular automata circuits. Methods of high speed testing to characterize the devices as well as theoretical modeling to optimally design the structures are included. The project is highly collaborative between Ohio State, Illinois, Notre Dame, UC Riverside, the Naval Research Laboratory and Air Force Research Laboratory. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area. The project brings together electrical engineers, material scientists, physicists, computer scientists, experimentalists, and theoreticians for the purpose of realizing advanced nanostructured quantum dot devices. The project is designed to develop strong technical, communication, and organizational management skills in students through unique educational experiences made possible by a forefront research environment. There will be active involvement of undergraduates in the program with an emphasis on developing effective oral and written communication skills. Cross-disciplinary research and site visits to each other will enhance the educational process. The project is co-supported by the DMR EM and ECS EPDT Divisions Programs doc10540 none Professors Marcus and Rosen have been studying the relationship between the local times of strongly symmetric Markov processes and Gaussian processes for many years. They have obtained many interesting results about local times which they have published in more than a dozen papers and a monograph. Until recently their work was based on an isomorphism theorem of Dynkin, which is difficult to prove and to apply. In the last two years this has all changed. Together with Professors Eisenbaum, Kaspi and Shi, they have obtained new, simple isomorphisms relating local times and Gaussian processes and have greatly simplified and clarified their early work. They have also obtained many new results; the most significant is a simplified version of Ray s theorem on the local times of diffusions. They will continue this work to generalize the scope of Ray s theorem to consider local times of processes which are not continuous. They will apply their new results and techniques to consider other properties of Markov processes that can be studied through their local times. They also plan to extend their results to more general classes of continuous additive functionals of strongly symmetric Markov processes by comparing them to Gaussian chaos processes. Professor Marcus will continue his studies of sample path properties of infinitely divisible moving average processes. These process are fundamental in applied mathematics. They appear to have remarkable smoothness properties and to behave better than similarly defined Gaussian processes. This surprising observation will be investigated. Professor Rosen plans to study the time needed for a simple random walk to visit each point on a finite graph. The case of the two dimensional lattice torus is particularly challenging. He intends to study this discrete problem by relating it to a continuous one concerning Brownian motion on the two dimensional torus. This in turn will lead to the analysis of `late points , those points whose approach by the Brownian path takes an unusually large amount of time. Professor Rosen also plans to study points of infinite multiplicity on the path of planar Brownian motion. This research deals with fundamental properties of stochastic processes and has potential applications in all areas that deal with random phenomena. Generally speaking phenomena that evolve in time do so in a random fashion. Examples are the Dow Jones average, data on global warming or communication with satellites. Of particular importance is the amount of time that a process takes a specific value. This is studied in terms of the local time of the process. In this proposal the local times of Markov processes will be investigated by means of associated Gaussian processes. Until very recently these two important classes of stochastic processes, Markov processes and Gaussian processes, were considered to be essentially unrelated. Professors Marcus and Rosen have shown that they are intimately related and are searching for a unified theory for these important processes doc10541 none Mechanism-Based Modeling and Simulation in Nanomechanics G. Xu, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California at Riverside H. Gao, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University W. D. Nix, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Stanford University Y. Huang, Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign This research is aimed at developing effective methodology for the study of nanoscale mechanical behavior of materials. In particular, combined atomistic simulations and continuum models will be developed to investigate the energetics of dislocation nucleation and motion and their respective roles in nanoscale discrete plastic deformation. The nanoindentation technique will be used to probe the mechanical behavior of materials at the nanoscale as well as to validate the developed methodology. The emphasis will be to link atomistic simulations and continuum approaches to develop a mechanism-based model that is able to predict mechanical behavior of crystalline materials at length scales ranging from nanometers to submicrons. Collaborations with national laboratory and industry partners will focus on practical applications of the developed models doc10542 none James O Berger Four areas in Bayesian analysis and its interfaces with frequentist statistical reasoning will be pursued. The first is model selection, in particular the greatly needed development of automatic Bayesian methodology for choosing between models. Other problems in model selection that will be considered include the question of optimal choice of a model when prediction is the goal, and study and comparison of large sample approximations in Bayesian model selection. The second area of research is objective Bayesian analysis, which will culminate in the preparation of a research monograph on the subject (with associated software for practical implementation). Included in the research that must be performed to reach this goal is the development of objective prior distributions for covariance matrices and the practically very important class of hierarchical models. The third area is nonparametric Bayesian analysis, especially involving use of wavelets. The final area of research that will be addressed is conditional frequentist testing, and its unification with Bayesian testing. The advances in model selection and nonparametric Bayesian methodology will be utilized in the study of Cepheid variable star oscillations, which are key to establishing astronomical distances. The work on objective Bayesian inference will impact the setting of confidence limits in physics. The development of conditional frequentist tests will be undertaken in a variety of biostatistical settings, especially involving clinical trials. In addition to these interdisciplinary impacts, the research will benefit education and human development through intensive training of graduate students and the incorporation of the developed methodology in statistics courses at Duke University and elsewhere doc10543 none Complex Manifolds with special Structures, author: Zhuang-dan Guan My research has been largely in the area of complex manifolds and have a number of problems to work on. Recently, I am working on three major directions: (1) Classification of compact hyperkahler manifolds, (2) Stability and extremal metrics, (3) Classification of Complex homogeneous spaces. Our research was highly concentrated on these directions for the last 4 to 5 years. We expect to work on extremal metrics and hyperkahler manifolds for some other years since many breakthroughs are happenning in these directions. The picture for extremal metrics is becoming clear after many years of research. It can be described by the geodesic stability principles. The uniqueness comes from the convex property of the modified Mabuchi functional on Mabuchi moduli space of Kahler metrics and the existence of geodesics between Kahler metrics [GM4]. The existence should be the same as the geodesic stability [GM7]. I already test these principles by both the examples in my dissertation and those in [GM7]. For the toric manifolds, we already proved the uniqueness and that existence implies the geodesic stability. We are trying to solve the final part of the geodesic stability principles that geodesic stable implies existence for toric manifolds. We also test the geodesic stability for many toric manifolds, e. g., the manifold obtained by blowing up two points in a 2 dimensional complex projective space. This will eventually solve the historical problem of existing Kahler-Einstein metrics and extremal metrics. The best condidates of Hodge diamonds for the complex 4 dimensional compact hyperkahler manifolds are described by the possible pairs of the second and third Betti numbers (5,36),(7,8),(8,0),(23,0) ([GHS4]). Now it is the time to work on classification with many tools as Lagrangian fibration, Rozansky-Witten invariants, geometric elliptic genera. A sandwich inequality of Rozansky-Witten invariants suggests further results for higher dimensional case. The classification of compact complex homogeneous spaces is reduced to the better understood manifolds as parallelizable manifolds, reductive spaces and primary spaces in [GH7]. We will try to understand more about the higher step primary spaces in the future. The research of Kahler-Einstein metric has been pioneered by many well-known mathematicians including several Fields Medal receivers. It turns out that there are many similarity between this field and the Hitchin-Kobayashi correspondence in the holomorphic vector bundles on compact Kahler manifolds. Both fields are closed related to Physics Science, e.g., Einstein equation, general relativity, Yang-Mills, Mirror Symmetry, Calabi-Yau, etc. We will write up a textbook in Kahler geometry describe a clear picture on both of these fields. Hyperkahler manifolds and homogeneous manifolds are some important manifolds which have some physics origin as that of Calabi-Yau manifolds and are unsolved classical topics in complex geometry. The pictures for these fields become clearer recently doc10544 none This project is an interdisciplinary Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) that will investigate the quantum properties of nanometer-sized single-molecule magnets (SMMs). The miniaturization of magnetic devices to this size using conventional fabrication techniques is a major scientific challenge. For this reason, there is a growing interest in a bottom-up or molecule-based approach whereby magnetic nanostructures are synthesized chemically using solution methods at room temperature. These materials enable fundamental studies of the properties intrinsic to magnetic nanostructures that have previously been inaccessible. For instance, nanoscale magnets (including SMMs) are susceptible to quantum tunneling of their magnetic moment (QTM), which could seriously impair their usefulness in magnetic recording but, at the same time, could provide a medium for quantum computation. This collaboration will address some of the important open fundamental questions in nanomagnetism and QTM via a concerted program in SMM synthesis and advanced characterization. Magnetic interactions within SMM crystals will be varied chemically through modification to the molecule site symmetry, intramolecular exchange interactions, interactions between nuclear and electronic spins, and intermolecular dipolar interactions. Parallel to these synthetic efforts, SMMs will be characterized using quantum level specific Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopies and high sensitivity micro-Hall effect magnetometry. This program will provide the highest quality interdisciplinary research training to a diverse group of graduate students and post-doctoral scientists, which will include training in new chemical synthesis methods and advanced magnetic measurement techniques. %%% This project is an interdisciplinary Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) that will investigate the quantum properties of nanometer-sized single-molecule magnets (SMMs). The miniaturization of magnetic devices to this size is critical to advances in magnetic information storage, which is an important industry in the United States. Conventional techniques used to fabricate magnetic nanostructures have seriously limitations. For this reason, there is a growing interest in a bottom-up or molecule-based approach whereby magnetic nanostructures are synthesized chemically. These materials enable fundamental studies of the properties intrinsic to magnetic nanostructures that have previously been inaccessible. For instance, nanoscale magnets (including SMMs) are susceptible to quantum tunneling of their magnetic moment (QTM), which could seriously impair their usefulness in magnetic information storage, but, at the same time, could provide a medium for a new and potentially much faster type of information processing known as quantum computing. This collaboration will address some of the important open fundamental questions in nanomagnetism and explore new avenues for the implementation of SMMs in future devices. This will be accomplished via a concerted program in SMM synthesis and advanced characterization. This program will provide the highest quality interdisciplinary research training to a diverse group of undergraduate students, graduate students and post-doctoral scientists. Students will be trained in cutting edge chemical synthesis and magnetic measurement techniques. Their training will also include interactions with leading industrial researchers in the magnetic recording industry doc10545 none This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119). This Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) will produce and characterize photonic structures containing ordered elements on length scales ranging from the molecular ( 1 nm) to the macroscopic (mm) by the patterning of self-organizing block copolymers. Self-Assembled Polymer microphotonics has the potential for the ready production of precision optical devices or elements using low cost materials and simple processing steps. The team will study 1, 2, and 3 dimensionally periodic photonic materials with finely tuned optical properties. Such materials will have probable impact on technologies for communications devices, sensors, integrated devices and related electro-optic technologies. The team will design and create the required polymers, cany out the proposed processing and characterize and measure the resulting nanostructures and anticipated electro-optical devices. The patterning of block copolymers offers remarkable possibilities for size control on much smaller length scales than currently possible and with intricate geometries and functions not realizable with convcntional lithography alone. In addition to advances in microphotonics, the success of this project has the potential to completely revolutionize the way all routine lithographic nanopatterning is carried out and to open up new strategies for integrating soft materials onto a silicon device platform. Team members consist of four Cornell faculty, Christopher Ober, (team leader), Geoff Coates, Sol Gruner and Uli Wiesner plus Edwin Thomas of MIT and Nitash Balsara of UC Berkeley. Both Balsara and Thomas are internationally recognized experts in the study and control of block copolymer microstructure. Thomas is also a pioneer in the field of block copolymer microphotonics. Coates, Ober and Wiesner are known for their ability to synthesize unique polymers and Gruner for characterization expertise. Our partners (Rohm & Haas and Wright Materials Labs) are established centers for research in lithography and the optical behavior of materials, respectively and will provide valuable expertise to this NIRT doc10546 none This Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team brings together expertise in state-of-the-art spin-tunneling science with proven success in fabrication and characterization of single-electron transistors. The goal here is to understand science in spin-based nano-fabricated structures by probing the quantum states and dynamics of spins on nano-sized islands, laying the foundation for a new generation of ultra-fast and non-volatile electronics. This program begins with the fabrication of simple nanostructures based on proven single-electron transistor architecture and processing, with ferromagnetic electrode(s) to inject polarized spins. These new nanoscale hybrid structures will be used to test various theoretically predicted phenomena such as enhanced magnetoresistance, single-electron charging effects, conductance oscillations, and spin diffusion. One of the novel features of this effort is to inject fully polarized spins into nonmagnetic materials such as carbon nanotubes, nonmagnetic metals, and superconductors, by spin filtering through the use of a magnetic semiconductor. Ultimately, the localization of a single-electron of controlled spin in a highly sensitive nanostructure will enable novel and more versatile spin-based devices, which so far is being pursued based on the behavior of large numbers of spin-polarized electrons. This program represents an excellent opportunity for the students (of all levels) involved being educated in the nanoscience; participate in a true team effort with complementary and collective goals. The students will work in multidisciplinary areas - physics, materials science, and nano-devices, getting trained and educated in the spin-based research laying the foundation for future technology, which is already in short supply in the U.S. %%% The recognition of electron spin as a binary variable analogous to its charge as currently used in semiconductors, opened new fields of science and technology that have already led to commercial devices, called spin electronics. This interdisciplinary team will address the underlying fundamental science and engineering research issues that are critical to the emerging field of nanoscale spin electronics (also called as spintronics). In spite of the recent progress and potentially promising for applications, the field of spintronics just beginning to unravel, (remains largely unexplored) and requires extensive research efforts. The proposed research (elucidating spin transport including spin tunneling and injection from a ferromagnet into a nonmagnetic metal, superconductor or a semiconductor) holds great promise for nanoscale science and future information technology. This aim is supported by the investigation of promising new materials combinations for spin transport and the development of powerful, innovative probes of spin dynamics in nanostructures. This team, with complementary knowledge and expertise - of physicists, material scientists and electrical engineers, will efficiently address all the issues from the conceptual level to the near-device stage. The proposed program will ultimately lead to novel spin electronic devices that meet the criteria for low power, broadband, and ultra high density including extremely powerful computers. Many PhD students, and importantly undergraduates and high school students will take part in this program under the guidance of the PIs and postdoctoral fellows. The training will generate future scientists and engineers in high demands in the area of nano-science and spin-based information technology to maintain the future technological prowess of the country, critically necessary for the national security doc10547 none Sheiko This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119). Miniature actuators, which produce large strains at short response times are of interest for nano- and biotechnologies. They can be used to construct micro fluidic pumps, tiny locomotives, and micromanipulators. It is generally believed that extremely efficient and fast actuators can be prepared from single macromolecules. Cylindrical brush molecules consisting of a flexible backbone and densely grafted side chains are possible candidates because they can change their length in response to variations in their surrounding environment and the effect of an external field. It is proposed to use soft cylinders with a stimuli-responsive shape as a multifunctional platform for the development of nanomechanical devices. One of the most interesting applications is envisioned for an array of molecular brushes, which are tethered with one end to a solid substrate and change their conformation under incident light. The layers will be designed to generate surface-relief-gratings, which propagate along the substrate plane and transport different fluids, small particles, and ultimately biological cells. For this purpose, either IR-absorber dyes or photosensitive azobenzene and spiropyran moieties will be introduced in the chemical structure of brushes. Similar to tracheal cilia, the tethered molecules will beat back and forth in a coordinated way and propel overlaying substances in a certain direction. The project will address three fundamental questions: (i) What are the molecular and external parameters controlling the length of brush molecules? (ii) What is the force developed during contraction extension of brush molecules? (iii) What are the dynamic properties of the tethered brushes under the effect of polarized light? The PI s will achieve their goals of answering these important questions by taking the following steps. First, they will prepare a series of well-defined brushes and investigate the specific effects of the side chain length, the grafting density, and the photoisomerizable groups on the length of brush molecules. Second, they will study mechanical properties of individual molecules and tethered monolayers by stretching them uniaxially with an atomic force microscope and magnetic tweezers. The experimental studies will be supported by theoretical analysis of brush conformations. Third, an optical set-up combined with an atomic force microscope will be built for in-situ investigation of the morphology and the diffraction efficiency of the surface relief grating. This will allow the measurement of the access and relaxation times of the double-brush monolayer, and the monitoring of the transport of the overlaying substances. This interdisciplinary project will be based on precise chemistry, rigorous physics, and biological concepts. It presents a perfect opportunity for students to master several of these fundamental disciplines and at the same time gain experience at the cutting edge of nanotechnology doc10548 none Nanostructured molecular sensors will report high-resolution spatial and temporal system data during industrial processes, health care diagnostics, and other applications without significantly affecting the systems they monitor. These nanosensors require specialized elements for sensor attachment to the target, assembly of a structural framework, sensing a particular physical or chemical state of the environment, and transducing this state into an output signal. Protein receptors offer a paradigm for nanosensor development as they have developed domains that perform each of these functions. It is proposed to develop a protein-based nanosensor based on the paradigm of cell adhesion complexes. Upon receiving the appropriate environmental stimulus the sensor will self-assemble subunits for supporting structural roles, sensing signals, and generating chemical messages. The initial aim of the project is to optimize adhesion of a sensor subunit to an inert solid matrix. Glutathione-S-Transferase (GST) will be employed to adhere GST-fusion proteins to glutathione, a GST ligand, covalently linked to a glass surface. The next project goal is to demonstrate detection of an enzymatic modification of the GST fusion protein on the surface. A GST fusion of a tyrosine kinase ligand will be attached to the surface and activation, or phosphorylations, of the ligand will be detected using radioactive phosphate or antibodies that specifically recognize phosphorylated proteins. The final stage of the project will investigate detection of sensor activation based on recruitment of structural and signaling components to an activated sensor subunit. Phosphorylated tyrosine residues bind to SH2 protein domains. An SH2 domain will be fused to a fluorescent protein, enabling detection of sensor activation by a simple fluorescence measurement doc10549 none Schlom The technical objective of our NIRT is to understand the fundamental science underlying the structural, dielectric, and optical response of artificially-engineered nanoscale ferroelectrics, which can be drastically different from that of conventional homogeneous ferroelectrics. Using first-principles effective Hamiltonian approaches (based on lattice Wannier functions) and Landau-Ginzburg-type phenomenological methods, we will predict the effect of one-dimensional composition and strain gradients, and mechanical and electrical boundary conditions on the appearance and stability of the spontaneous polarization in these systems and on the modifications of ferroelectric domain structures. These predictions will be compared against observations on corresponding nanostructures (made by reactive MBE) of perovskite ferroelectrics in which composition and strain are varied in one direction. The resulting films will be characterized via a combination of TEM, x-ray diffraction (including synchrotron studies), Raman spectroscopy, second harmonic generation, dielectric property measurements as a function of electric field and temperature, and piezoelectric and pyroelectric techniques and compared with corresponding theoretical predictions in order to refine our understanding of nanoscale ferroelectrics. Composition and strain gradients in ferroelectric films will be investigated as a means to incorporate new functionalities: enhanced dielectric and pyroelectric responses, as well as a variety of novel optical properties. %%% For over 30 years molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) has been used to build up layered semiconductor nanostructures atom-by-atom to investigate and improve our understanding of semiconductor physics and create new devices. These devices (which include laser diodes, high-performance transistors, and magnetic field sensors) have advanced healthcare, national security, communications, entertainment, and transportation-resulting in significant improvements in the quality of life for all Americans. Recent progress in research has demonstrated that this same atom-by-atom synthesis technique can be used to build up nanostructures of oxides, including ferroelectrics, with comparable nanometer-scale layering control. Since ferroelectric materials exhibit a wide variety of electrical, optical, and electromechanical properties, they are extensively used in healthcare (e.g., medical ultrasound), national defense (e.g., night vision and sonar systems), and communications (e.g., miniature capacitors for cell phones and computers). The ability to customize the layering of ferroelectric materials at the atomic-layer level opens exciting possibilities in terms of creating new functional materials that we believe can be designed (with sufficient understanding) to have exceptional properties. The improved understanding gained via this research will be applied to the development of improved (enhanced performance and smaller size) capacitors, night vision devices, and optical components. This NIRT program will also train and educate future scientists in a highly interdisciplinary research environment in a technologically-significant area of national importance. This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119). The award is jointly supported through outside sources and the NSF Ceramics and Electronic Materials programs of the Division of Materials Research in MPS with the assistance of the initiative doc10550 none for NSF proposal : In this project, the principal investigator investigates the geometry of Calabi-Yau manifolds and mirror symmetry. First the PI plans to describe the degeneration of Kahler-Einstein metrics on Calabi-Yau manifolds near the large complex structure limit. Second the principal investigator studies special Lagrangian submanifolds and deformed Hermitian-Yang-Mills bundles on Calabi-Yau manifolds. Third, using Fourier transformation, Legendre transformation and their variations, the principal investigator explains the mirror duality of complex geometry and symplectic geometry between mirror manifolds. The geometry of Calabi-Yau manifolds is an important subject in Mathematics, and also in Physics. Originated in String theory, mirror symmetry conjecture gives a duality transformation of this geometry. This project is towards uncovering this amazing symmetry principle doc10551 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Dynamics in Time Dependent Continuous and Discrete Equations and Applications Wenxian Shen This project investigates three aspects of the dynamics of time dependent (specifically time quasi-periodic and almost periodic) continuous and discrete equations: (i) traveling waves in time-dependent evolution equations; (ii) asymptotic behavior of time-dependent population models, and (iii) oscillatory dynamics for quasi- or almost periodic oscillators and wave equations. In the first area, problems related to traveling wave solutions in time dependent continuous and discrete equations of bistable and Kolmogorov-Petrovskii-Piskunov types are studied. The second research topic is focused primarily on uniform persistence, coexistence and convergence in time dependent multi-species competition models. The third area concerns a general study of oscillatory dynamics in quasi- or almost periodic oscillators and wave equations through investigation of the existence and structure of attractors in general quasi-periodically forced first-order oscillators as well as some second order oscillators. The results of the project will enhance understanding of dynamics in time-dependent continuous and discrete equations and will have application to numerous physical and biological problems. It is very important to understand the asymptotic behavior of solutions of nonautonomous differential equations, especially in situations where the nonautonomous part depends on time in a roughly, but not exactly, periodic way. Such equations are widely used as models for processes in biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering. A deep understanding of such almost-periodic or quasi-periodic equations will have a great impact on the development of theory as well as on applications. The objective of the proposed research is to investigate various aspects, of interest in applications, of the solutions to such equations. The results of the project will have significant impact for the analysis of a wide range of mathematical models that are based on these equations doc10552 none Reimanis Our current understanding of surface cracking phenomena is too limited to adequately predict conditions for fracture in sophisticated, inhomogeneous structures. Recent advances in mechanics modeling of graded structures, as well as advances in the micro- and nano-scale control over the fabrication of specific film structures have opened new doors for developing a better understanding of the connection between crack growth and performance in brittle films. Work proposed here will examine how surface cracking depends on 1) surface architectural characteristics, including the gradation architecture, and the associated residual stress distributions, 2) the elastic and plastic properties of the substrate, 3) the strength of the film substrate interface, and 4) microstructural features of the film. Surfaces will be prepared by depositing films of chromium nitride (CrN and Cr2N), which have been extensively studied at Colorado School of Mines, as well as CrxCy, TixN, and TixC. Cartridge brass (Cu-30wt. % Zn), and Ni alloys will be utilized as model substrate systems, while steel substrates will provide a connection to technological systems, offering comparison to data in the literature. Conventional layered and novel architectures will be fabricated, and their mechanical behavior will be characterized using fundamental fracture experiments. A comprehensive set of experiments will elucidate the generic behavior among the different films, and this behavior will be compared to existing theoretical models for the purpose of extracting mechanics effects from material behavior effects. The inherent complexity in these systems dictates the need for numerical methods to model the mechanical response. Thus, finite element analysis will be employed to evaluate residual stress states and crack tip stress fields. %%% Brittle films serve a wide variety of purposes: corrosion, radiation and thermal protection, and wear resistance. In applications such as high temperature superconductors and for many microelectronic components, the film is the device, engineered to conduct current or respond to photons, electrons or ions. The performance of a film depends in large part on its structural integrity. In the case of high temperature superconductor tape, a surface crack dramatically reduces the current density; in the case of turbine engine components, cracking may result in enhanced oxidation; in the case of tools and dies, surface cracking decreases the wear resistance. In some applications, such as turbine engines for land based power generation, a limited amount of cracking may actually be desired in order to increase the film compliance. Clearly, it is technologically extremely important to understand how cracking occurs in engineered surfaces. The proposed work is designed to advance understanding in the fracture behavior of hard, brittle films with complex structures so that it may ultimately be applied to design new, high performance surfaces doc10553 none Basic exploratory research is performed on nanoscale surface engineering through means of ultra-fast, pulsed laser radiation coupled with near-field scanning probe microscopy. A new experimental apparatus consisting of a femtosecond laser source coupled with a scanning AFM STM system is used for this purpose. Depending on the process parameters, high-definition nanomachining and nanodeposition can be achieved. The effects of the laser intensity distribution, wavelength, and polarization are examined in relation to the sample probe tip material parameters. The integrity, durability, mechanical, chemical and electrical structural properties of the produced nanofeatures are characterized by various micro-analytical techniques. The long-term objective is the development of functional relationships between key process parameters, patterning features, and material properties of the modified surfaces that will enable nanostructure optimization doc10554 none This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF-00-119). The resulting grant is co-funded by the Divisions of Materials Research and Chemical and Thermal Systems. The proposed research will be carried out at the Universities of Tennessee, Michigan and Virginia. Also participating are NIST, Hybrid Plastics and Tal Materials. Polyhedral oilgomeric silsesquioxane (POSS) molecules are unique nanometer-sized structures. POSS molecules have a polyhedral core which can be multifunctional and serve as platforms that can be synthetically modified to contain groups for polymerization, adhesion, light sensitization, binding catalyst species, and improved solubility. The ability to independently functionalize each corner of a POSS cube with different organic or inorganic groups confers a nearly infinite array of possible hybrid nanostructures made of assemblies of POSS molecules. Depending on the functionalization of the POSS cages, the resulting systems can be solid or liquid, or on crosslinking turned into a network. They are a truly nanostructured building block, which, through self-and guided-assembly, can be transformed into a remarkable array of products, and due to recent breakthroughs in rapid synthesis technology, are only just now becoming available to industry on a commercial scale. While much is known experimentally about the chemical synthesis of POSS systems, very little theoretical understanding exists at the molecular level or beyond. In particular, the way in which individual POSS molecules can be assembled and manipulated at the nanoscale to form meso-and macro-scale systems has not been studied. In this grant a multiscale computational framework will be developed to simulate the synthesis and self-and guided-assembly of POSS systems. In order to address POSS systems at many levels, beginning at the quantum mechanical through to the mesoscale and macroscopic, the principal investigators (PI s) have the requisite expertise ranging from electronic structure calculations to molecular simulation. This expertise will be applied to three initial problems: (1) structure of cross-linked POSS networks; (2) nanostructured phase prediction; and, (3) templated nanostructured thin films. Feasible multiscale modeling routes to describing these systems have been developed, based on the expertise and codes available among the PI s. Modifications will be made as the modeling effort evolves. The simulation codes developed will be in the public domain, documented in user manuals and technical reports, and distributed to the user community. These techniques will enable the prediction, essentially from first principles, of the physical and structural properties of hybrid inorganic organic nanostructured systems doc10555 none Robbins This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119). This Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team brings together investigators from a research university (Johns Hopkins), the Naval Academy, and the Naval Research Laboratory, with backgrounds in physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering and materials science. Together they will develop new multiscale modeling tools and apply them to problems in adhesion, nanotribology and nanofluidics that are of both fundamental scientific interest and technological importance. One approach to multiscale modeling will be hierarchical. Results from different scales will be calculated independently, and the outputs used to determine inputs needed at other scales. For example, atomic scale calculations will provide constitutive relations and boundary conditions for continuum calculations, while continuum calculations determine contact geometries and stresses for atomic calculations. The second approach will involve simultaneous calculations at multiple scales. Specific strategies for linking tight-binding simulations to classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, and for linking MD to continuum solid and fluid calculations are described. Studies of adhesion will examine how surface roughness, surface chemistry, and capillary forces affect stiction. This is the major cause of failure in micromachines and becomes more important as device size decreases. Research on nanotribology will start from contact geometries determined in the adhesion studies. Quantitative comparison between continuum mechanics and MD simulations will be performed at different scales to determine how continuum mechanics breaks down and at what scale. The effect of molecular structure of boundary lubricants, surface roughness, and other factors on friction in nanocontacts will be studied. Work on nanofluidics will focus on changes in flow as the mean free path becomes comparable to some dimensions of the flow path, with an emphasis on understanding lubricant transport to and around nanoscale contacts. Participation in the project will give undergraduate and graduate students, midshipmen and postdoctoral fellows a unique multidisciplinary educational experience that will be strengthened by newly developed course sequences. Modeling tools developed by the team will be designed for portability and to be integrated into publicly available simulation tools doc10556 none This research applies a novel synthetic approach based upon modulated elemental reactants to kinetically trap oriented thin films of novel compounds, heterostructures, and superlattices based upon quasi-two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenide compounds their 3d transition metal intercalates and phosphochalcogenide compounds. These materials provide unprecedented variability in the type of heterostructures that can be formed since the constituent materials range from wide and narrow gap semiconductors to antiferromagnetic insulators to semimetals to metals, some ferromagnetic, antiferromagnetic, or superconducting. X-ray diffraction, cross sectional TEM, SEM, AFM and STM will be used to characterize the structure and defects in these new materials. The targeted materials are expected to exhibit distinct and interesting magnetic and transport properties. Specific goals include: (1) grow and characterize metal-semimetal and metal-semiconductor superlattices; (2) produce unusual magnetic structures by preparing superlattices containing components with different magnetic structures and; (3) induce an insulator to metal transition in the correlated insulating MPX3 compounds by alloying and or layering to produce quasi-2D correlated metallic states that we expect to have interesting conducting properties. Students will be trained in cutting-edge research techniques during this research and exposed to the challenges and rewards of industrial research through Oregon s Ph.D. internship program %%% This work uses a recently developed synthetic approach to prepare thin films of novel compounds, heterostructures, and superlattices based upon quasi-two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenide compounds, their 3d transition metal intercalates and phosphochalcogenide compounds. These materials provide unprecedented variability in the type of heterostructures that can be formed since the constituent materials range from wide and narrow gap semiconductors to antiferromagnetic insulators to semimetals to metals, some ferromagnetic, antiferromagnetic, or superconducting. X-ray diffraction will be used to follow the evolution of the initial reactants to crystalline superlattices, to determine the superlattice modulation and to solve crystal structures of these new materials. Cross sectional TEM will be used to explore the nature and density of the stacking defects, and SEM, AFM and STM will be used to characterize their lateral structure. The targeted materials include metal-semimetal and metal-semiconductor superlattices, unusual magnetic superlattices, and correlated-electron conductors. These materials are expected to exhibit distinct, interesting and technologically relevant magnetic and transport properties that can be systematically controlled by varying the structure of the superlattice periods. Students in this program receive a broad and rigorous training in materials science, chemistry and physics and will have opportunities to spend part of their graduate careers participating in Oregon s Ph.D. internship program which is designed to expose students to the challenges and rewards of industrial research and development doc10557 none This proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF- . A Forster transfer microscope (FTM) will be developed to allow in vivo imaging of living cells with 5 nm resolution. The unprecedented resolution will be achieved through non-radiative Forster energy transfer between a scanning probe containing a silicon nanoparticle and a sample tagged with dye molecules. The FTM will exploit two recent developments in nanotechnology: (i) the discovery, at the University of Illinois, of a technique for fabricating 1 nm silicon nanoparticles with excellent size uniformity and fluorescence efficiency, and (ii) the development of a combined atomic force microscope near-field scanning optical microscope (AF-NSOM) with 50 nm optical resolution and 1 nm height resolution. The FTM will be used to solve a long-standing question about how hormones and drugs interact with epithelial membranes: Is ion transport modulated by movement of ion channels to and from the apical membrane (vesical trafficking), or by changes in their activation state? As cultured epithelial membranes become a more widely used biomaterial, e.g. skin for burn victims, an understanding of cell dynamics on the 100 nm scale and below will be invaluable doc10558 none This proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF- . The project involves blending of molecular biology, polymer chemistry, and materials physics, in an attempt to create a new class of spin-tronic functional nanostructures. A new architecture is proposed to create spin-tronic magnetic devices, using a biologically modified, metal coated, polymer nanotube process. The advantages of spin-tronics include higher speed, greater storage density, low power dissipation, and non-volatility. The proposed architecture uses a form of molecular self-assembly based on biological models. The magnetic nano-wires are formed from a tubular polymer backbone, that can be coated with various metallic layers. By functionalizing the ends of the tubes with special molecules, the nano-tubes become what we call Smart Wires . Smart-Wires are at the center of our proposed new architecture for nanoscale device fabrication, since the instructions for wiring the circuits are built into the molecular nanostructures themselves, rather than having to be imposed afterwards using a patterning process. The Smart-Wires use molecular recognition, modeled after the biological antibody-antigen bonding reaction, to attach the wire ends to the appropriate substrate structures. Under this project metal coated nano-tube will be fabricated and the work will be extended to include the Smart Wire functionalization and bonding, and also metallic multilayer coatings. A full range of sensitive magnetic and electronic probes will be used to measure the nano-tube properties, using methods perfected in a previous NSF project to study epitaxial spin-valve structures. The research team plans to develop a prototype of a magnetic nano-tube assembly with a switchable magnetic state doc10559 none Award: Principal Investigator: Michael Handel The proposal divides into four projects in the related fields of two dimensional dynamical systems and geometric group theory. The goal of the first, which is a collaboration with Mark Feighn, is to compute, in a transparent, geometric and algorithmic way, the centralizer of an element of the outer automorphism group. The second is to continue the principal investigator s study of the forcing order on braid types in the four times punctured disk. This project has both an experimental and theoretical part. Computer programs are used to generate examples and to aid in the formation of conjectures. Once conjectures are made that cannot be disproved by computer, rigorous proofs will be attempted. The third project is a collaboration with John Franks with the long term goal of proving that generic area preserving diffeomorphisms of the two dimensional sphere have dense periodic orbits. The more immediate goal is to find analogs for generic area preserving diffeomorphisms of the topological structure that is known to exist for twist maps. The fourth is a collaboration with Lee Mosher. The first steps in the project will be to identify and study quasi-lines that can play the role in Culler Vogtmann space that Teichmuller geodesics play in Teichmuller space. This proposal is concerned with the interface between two areas of mathematics: two dimensional dynamical systems and geometric group theory. The former studies the long term behavior of systems that evolve over time, while the latter treats algebraic objects by geometric means. The fields have been intertwined for more than fifty years and have been the focus of a great deal of research in the past twenty. Part of the proposal focuses on two long standing fundamental questions in two dimensional dynamical systems. The first examines how simple systems change into chaotic ones. The second concerns transformations of the sphere that preserve area, and asks whether every piece of the sphere contains at least one point that eventually (as the system evolves) returns to its original position. There are two groups (in the technical algebraic sense) that are most closely related to two dimensional dynamical systems. They are the mapping class group and the outer automorphism group. To understand the geometry of a group one must understand its geodesics; i.e. what the shortest paths are between any two points. The geodesics of the mapping class group have been well understood for some time. The principal investigator will generalize from what is known about the geodesics of the mapping class group to identify and study geodesics for the outer automorphism group doc10560 none Divisions of Chemistry, Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, Chemical Transport Systems, Computer-Communications Research, and Experimental and Integrated Activities support this multidivisional award to University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. This Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) award is part of the Nanoscale Science and Engineering program. Under this project, an interdisciplinary team with Joseph Lyding as the principal investigator will develop protein-based logic chips that interfaces between biochemical reactions and conventional microfabricated silicon-based electronics such as metal-oxide semiconductor (MOSFETs) taking advantage of biocomplexity and electronic speed. These protein interfaced MOSFETs will help to create atomically accurate protein arrays to function as cellular nonlinear neural network, and this in turn will help to over come the 100 nm limit in miniaturization of the present transistor technology. Industrial collaborations and outreach programs in the K-12 system will be part of the project. Under the award, ordered and atomically accurate protein arrays that interfaces between biochemical reactions and conventional microfabricated silicon-based electronics will be developed. Strong industrial collaboration will help in the industrial development and technology transfer of this science. In addition, the research program will provide multidisciplinary education and training opportunities in materials chemistry, protein chemistry and electronics to students from K-12 to post doctoral candidates doc10561 none This research focuses on synthesis of nanoscale magnetic molecules whose magnetic and electrical properties can be tailored by design, and on techniques to wire these molecular magnets together to create new nanostructures and nanostructured magnetic materials. The impact of these nanostructured materials on material science may be comparable to that of fullerenes and nanotubes. The studies will focus on high-symmetry molecules, for which phenomena associated with quantum coherence (resonance effects, high magnetic susceptibility, generation of radiation with adjustable frequency) can be observed at reasonable temperatures. Research goals include: 1) designing and synthesizing new magnetic nanoscale molecules; 2) understanding the quantum properties of these large-magnetic-moment molecules; 3) assembling new nanostructures from these molecular building blocks that will exhibit magnetic and electronic effects useful for a new type of electronics based on electronic spin; 4)understanding the interaction of these molecules in complex nanostructures. Graduate students will learn state-of-the-art technology and develop skills that prepare them for careers in industry, academia or government. Selected high school, junior college and four-year college teachers will participate in the research in outreach efforts. %%% This research focuses on synthesis of nanoscale magnetic molecules whose magnetic and electrical properties can be tailored by design, and on techniques to wire these molecular magnets together to create new nanostructures and nanostructured magnetic materials. Research goals include: 1) designing and synthesizing new nanoscale magnetic molecules; 2) understanding the quantum properties of these large-magnetic-moment molecules; 3) assembling new nanostructures from these building blocks that will be useful for a new type of electronics based on electronic spin; 4) understanding the interaction of these molecules in complex nanostructures. This project will establish foundations for a new spin electronics technology with potential applications in data storage, mobile communications and quantum computing. Graduate students will learn state-of-the-art technology, and develop skills that prepare them for careers in industry, academia or government. Selected high school, junior college and four-year college teachers will participate in the research in outreach efforts doc10548 none Nanostructured molecular sensors will report high-resolution spatial and temporal system data during industrial processes, health care diagnostics, and other applications without significantly affecting the systems they monitor. These nanosensors require specialized elements for sensor attachment to the target, assembly of a structural framework, sensing a particular physical or chemical state of the environment, and transducing this state into an output signal. Protein receptors offer a paradigm for nanosensor development as they have developed domains that perform each of these functions. It is proposed to develop a protein-based nanosensor based on the paradigm of cell adhesion complexes. Upon receiving the appropriate environmental stimulus the sensor will self-assemble subunits for supporting structural roles, sensing signals, and generating chemical messages. The initial aim of the project is to optimize adhesion of a sensor subunit to an inert solid matrix. Glutathione-S-Transferase (GST) will be employed to adhere GST-fusion proteins to glutathione, a GST ligand, covalently linked to a glass surface. The next project goal is to demonstrate detection of an enzymatic modification of the GST fusion protein on the surface. A GST fusion of a tyrosine kinase ligand will be attached to the surface and activation, or phosphorylations, of the ligand will be detected using radioactive phosphate or antibodies that specifically recognize phosphorylated proteins. The final stage of the project will investigate detection of sensor activation based on recruitment of structural and signaling components to an activated sensor subunit. Phosphorylated tyrosine residues bind to SH2 protein domains. An SH2 domain will be fused to a fluorescent protein, enabling detection of sensor activation by a simple fluorescence measurement doc10563 none NER: A Novel Concept for Electrophoretic Separation of Long DNA Molecules with High Resolution at Nanoscale Dimensions. Vladimir A. Samuilov and Dilip Gersappe State University of New York Stony Brook The recent advances in molecular biology rely on improved techniques for the separation of long (multi-kilobasepairs and megabasepairs) DNA molecules. Current methods employ electrophoresis of DNA molecules in different sieving matrixes, such as junction points in a gel and the entanglements in polymer solutions. Separation of DNA by size, in particular, is at the heart of genome mapping and sequencing and is likely to play an increasing role in diagnosis. There have been important advances in fast-developing and innovative technology like elechophoresis on microchips. In the implementation of micro-fabricated systems for electrophoresis based on silicon technology, the interaction of DNA molecules with the surfaces of the devices should be taken into account in analyzing the mechanisms of the separation. This research introduces a novel approach to the liquid-solid interface as the separation medium and to the mechanism of electrophoresis itself at nanoscale dimensions. Also, a new concept of loading of the DNA sample onto a microchip is considered. Specifically the study considers the electrical transport properties of long DNA molecules at a flat liquid-semiconductor interface. One-dimensional positioning of DNA molecules on a silicon surface is accomplished by a simple physical alignment process using capillary forces applied by the receding front of an evaporating drop containing DNA molecules. A diblock-copolymer system, self-assembled with L-B technique, is used to produce patterns at the nanometer length scale, which are used as a template for introducing metal nanopatterns on semiconductor surfaces to serve as DNA separation media. Success in this effort will make possible more rapid and more precise DNA analyses for a variety of applications and provide an important new tool for genetic analyses doc10564 none Angela Belcher, University of Texas Austin This proposal was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSE) solicitation, NSF- , in the category Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Teams (NIRT). Biological systems efficiently and accurately assemble nanoscale building blocks into complex and functionally sophisticated structures with high perfection, controlled size and compositional uniformity. The self-organizing processes found in these systems rely largely on non-covalent interactions that enable elegant rearrangement between usable architectural forms and self-correction. The research will take advantage of the atomic composition and plane specific recognition that a biomolecule can exhibit for an inorganic phase, and the nanostructural control and regularity that biomolecules typically impose on crystal phases and crystallographic orientations to control nanostructure formation. Furthermore, RNA templates will be used to direct the parallel self-assembly of multiple electronic components with high precision. Using combinatorial peptide evolution, peptide sequences will be identified that select for and bind to specific nanocrystal and nanowire substrates, such as magnetic and semiconductor quantum dots and silicon nanowires synthesized in solution. The peptides provide recognition specificity between the biological molecules and the inorganic substrate. The peptides couple the inorganic electronic building blocks to the biological machinery that directs the architectural blueprints for organization. In essence, genetically encoding biological-electronic interactions are selecting the mRNA sequences that code for specific amino acid sequences, but beyond that, specific secondary and ultimately tertiary structures can be achieved; thus, leading to supermolecular architectures. An interdisciplinary effort will include synthetic chemistry, electrical and materials engineering, and molecular biology, which targets the development of specific recognition chemistries between biological and inorganic substrates for the creation of nanostructured materials and devices with novel applications. The proposed project offers highly interdisciplinary educational and research opportunities for graduate students doc10565 none Buhlmann This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119) One of the great challenges of nanotechnology is the development of techniques for imaging of nanoobjects. This research develops the methodology to observe surfaces at the molecular and atomic level with chemical selectivity. It is based on the use of scanning tunneling microscope (STM) tips that chemically interact with the sample surfaces of interest. STM has revolutionized surface analysis because it allowsimaging with atomic resolution even in air and liquids, where many other analysis methods fail. However, the limited ability for chemical recognition, i. e., for discrimination between different types of atoms or functional groups, is a weakness ofconventional scanning tunneling microscopy. This problem can be solved by allowing an STM tip to interact chemically with a sample. Recently, it has been shown that the modification of gold tips with self-assembled monolayers or polypyrrole can be used to selectively recognize functional groups that form hydrogen bonds. Preliminary results have shown that this method is also able to distinguish between functional groups that have different spatial orientations and to differentiate different metal atoms. The working principle of STMwith chemically modified tips resembles that of chemically modified electrodes in electroanalytical chemistry. While in the former case electrons are transferred between the STM tip and sample, the electron transfer in the latter caseoccurs between the sensor electrode and a molecule in the sample solution. In both cases, an overlap of the electronic wave functions of the electron-donating and accepting side is required for the electron transfer.In the latter case, the chemical modification of electrodes is used to control selected redox reactions. In the STM case, an analogous enhancement of electron transfer by chemical tip modification results in selective recognition of selected functional groups or atoms in a surface image. To observe individual functional groups or atoms on a sample, a chemically modified tip must interact chemically only with one functional group of the sample at a time. Unfortunately, electrochemically etchedand chemically modified metal tips that are sharp at the molecular level cannot be produced with high reproducibility. Consequently, chemical interactions between the sample and several interaction sites on chemically modified tip used so far often occur simultaneously, impairing the resolution. To obtain very high resolution, this project explores the use of chemically modified carbon nanotubes as STM tips. Carbon nanotubesare ideally suited for chemically modified STM tips. Carbon nanotubes have a cylindrical shape with diameters that are typically between 0.8 and 15 nm. These extraordinarily small diameters provide for very slender and atomically sharp tips. Also, the rigid arrangement of the covalently linked carbon atoms that form a carbon nanotube results in great stiffness under conditions that are typical for STM imaging. In this project, carbon nanotubes will be chemically modified in various ways and used to image well-understood test samples. The ability of chemically modified carbon nanotube tips to distinguish between different functional groups and atomsof the test samples will be investigated, and the experimental parameters determining the resolution will be studied. The unique ability of STM to characterize samples at atmospheric pressure in liquids and gases, combined with the capability for chemical selec-tivity, should make this technique a very generaltool for nanosciences. Potential real-life applications are, for example, the characterization of nanodevices, self-assembled structures, catalytic surfaces, or electroanalytical sensor surfaces, as well asthe in-situ observation of chemical reactions and biological processes doc10566 none This project is devoted to the study of two topics: (i) limit theorems in probability and statistics, and (ii) lower tail and small ball probabilities of Gaussian processes. Limit theorems play a fundamental role in the development of probability and statistics. The principal investigator continues his study in this direction in general, focusing on self-normalized limit theorems in particular. The investigator intends to systematically study moderate deviations for self-normalized sums of independent random variables, for Hotelling s t-statistic and for studentized $U$-statistic. The objective is to establish a Cramer type moderate deviation theorem under a finite third moment condition. Since the self-normalized moderate deviations require few moment conditions, they not only extend classical limit theorems but also provide much wider applicability to other fields, particularly to statistics. The study should also help us better understand the behavior of large classes of statistical functionals since the t-statistic and U-statistic are their building blocks. Another area where limit theorems prove useful is the study of the real zeros of random algebraic and trigonometric polynomials. Such polynomials with random coefficients arise in many disciplines and their behavior is of interest to statisticians, engineers, economists, and mathematicians. The primary focus of the second topic is on estimating lower tail and small ball probabilities for Gaussian processes. These types of probabilities often arise in estimating the chances of rare events occurring in areas where such events are of fundamental importance such as weather prediction, natural disaster prediction and economic indices. One of the objectives is to develop new methods of estimating small ball and lower tail probabilities. The focus is specifically on small ball probabilities of the Brownian sheet in high dimensions and lower tail probabilities for stationary Gaussian processes. The investigator also intends to study basic sample properties for a newly introduced family of Gaussian processes which have the same scaling and time inversion properties as the Brownian motion but are infinitely differentiable. It is believed that this new family of Gaussian processes would prove useful in many other fields as mathematical models. This project is devoted to the study of two topics: (i) limit theorems in probability and statistics, and (ii) lower tail and small ball probabilities of Gaussian processes. Limit theorems play a fundamental role in the development of probability and statistics. It is hoped that the first part of this research may lead to the development of a self-normalized limit theory in probability and statistics, while the second part of the research could provide significant new knowledge about Gaussian random processes as well as about our random environments doc10567 none Jarvis Christian College, ``the college with the personal touch and where dreams come true, proposes an aggressive and comprehensive model Historically Black College and Universities Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP), engaging a community of academic partners working together to significantly increase minority participation and access to science careers. The Program goal is to develop, implement, evaluate and institutionalize a program that will achieve and sustain a high quality and competitive science, mathematics, engineering and technology (SMET) education program. The comprehensive program proposed for Jarvis emphasizes the following four elements: Pre-College Outreach Programs; Undergraduate Student Scholars; Faculty Development Opportunities; and Curriculum, Equipment and Laboratory Development. The specific objectives are: (1) to implement a summer enhancement and skills development summer workshop for rising high school students who have demonstrated an interest and aptitude in the science areas that will ensure that 80% of the participants will complete the twelfth grade and enroll in college as a SMET major; (2) to implement a summer ``bridge program for students entering Jarvis in the Fall that will impact 90% success rate during the first year; (3) to develop an implement a Scholars program customized to achieve 90% undergraduate retention and graduation rates and result in at least 70% enrollment in graduate or professional SMET programs; (4)to develop and implement a comprehensive faculty development program, develop new curricular offerings and expand existing courses for improvement and (5) to increase diversity and the number of SMET majors by 20% annually. All proposed activities support the mission of the National Science Foundation, ``to provide access to quality science education for all students , and the mission of Jarvis Christian College, ``to provide a quality education to increase the competitiveness of its students in post-baccalaureate efforts. The extensive evaluation process and the involvement of the total college community and the community partners will insure its success. This proposed Jarvis Program represents the model for ``Creating Windows of Opportunity for Success in the SMET areas doc10568 none The Aspen Winter Physics Conference will devote one week, February 4-10, to gravitational waves and their detection. The winter series began in and the first gravitational wave session was held in . This conference has grown to be one of the most important for the gravitational wave community. Experimental and theoretical results and plans for the future will be discussed with an emphasis on recent progress in building and operating several gravity wave interferometers in the US, Europe and Japan doc10569 none Award: Principal Investigator: Francis Bonahon The Project proposes to study several geometric problems in dimension 2 and 3. A common theme is that these problems all involve hyperbolic geometry, either as a tool to understand wider range problems or as a topic of interest in itself. The first half of the proposal is a natural extension of the research developed by the Principal Investigator in the past few years. On the purely hyperbolic side, it proposes to study convex cores of hyperbolic structures on 3-dimensional manifolds, and to further develop an approach to hyperbolic structures on surfaces which is based on the technique of geodesic currents. On the more topological side, it proposes to take advantage of methods of hyperbolic geometry to analyze simple closed curves on surfaces. In particular, one of the objectives of the proposal is to determine the fractal dimension of the space of simple closed curves on a surface. The second part of the proposal is based on exciting new conjectures which would connect two aspects of the theory of knotted curves in 3--dimensional space which so far have had very little interaction, namely topological quantum field theory and hyperbolic geometry on knot complements. The project proposes to attack these conjectures and, if these are proved, to further develop the connections so established. The proposed research is focused on the interplay between hyperbolic geometry and topology. In low-dimensional topology, one tries to analyze the possible shapes for spaces of dimensions 2 and 3. In particular, it includes as a subfield knot theory, where the goal is to understand all possible ways in which a string can be knotted in space; techniques of knot theory have successfully been applied to analyze the recombination of DNA and the knotting of complex molecular structures. Hyperbolic geometry is apparently very different. It is a non-euclidean geometry which was introduced in the early nineteenth century, in order to test the internal consistency of the axioms of the classical geometry developed by Euclid and other Greek mathematicians. An unexpected connection was established in the nineteen seventies, through ground breaking work of Bill Thurston who showed that hyperbolic geometry could be successfully used to solve problems in topology. For instance, there is a number associated to each knotted curve, called its hyperbolic volume and which can be computed fairly easily by current software. If two knotted curves have different hyperbolic volumes, one is guaranteed that it is impossible to deform one curve to the other. A new picture is now beginning to emerge, where the hyperbolic volume of a knotted curve unexpectedly occurs in techniques of mathematical physics originally designed to predict the behavior of high energy particles. The main part of the proposal is aimed at clarifying this picture, with the expectation that the cross-fertilization between topology, hyperbolic geometry and mathematical physics will lead to advances in each of these three fields doc10570 none This research focuses on a new statistical method for the analysis of correlated data, the quadratic inference function (QIF) approach (Qu, Lindsay & Li ). The QIF is built on a semiparametric framework defined by a set of mean zero estimating functions, but differs from the standard estimating function approach in that there are more equations than the number of unknown parameters. The QIF has advantages compared to the estimating function approach, such as not requiring the specification of the likelihood function. It also overcomes limitations of the estimating function approach such as a lack of objective functions and likelihood functions for testing. One of the main goals of the proposed project is to explore the QIF for robustness with respect to the consistency of estimators when mean zero assumptions are not satisfied. A second goal focuses on the missing data problem, which occurs often in longitudinal data. Testing whether missing data are ignorable is still a challenging problem in general. The goodness-of-fit test for the QIF appears to be a valid test for nonignorable missing data. The third goal is to test order restricted alternative hypotheses for correlated data using the QIF. Current existing testing tools are not satisfactory and are mainly based on the likelihood function for parametric models, and therefore are not applicable for correlated data where the likelihood function is difficult to formulate. The QIF is related to the empirical likelihood (Owen, ) which is popular for nonparametric models. The proposed project also illustrates the Edgeworth expansion of QIF and explores how to apply the bootstrap strategy to improve testing accuracy for small samples of correlated data. This research will have a significant impact and many applications in biostatistics, econometrics, and the environmental and social sciences where correlated data arise often. In particular, the QIF method substantially improves the estimation of regression parameters in generalized estimating equation settings (Liang & Zeger, ). Considering a real world example of air pollution for health impact assessment, even a slight difference in the regression parameter estimates can have a major impact on our health and environmental policies. Further, it is also the first effort to connect the generalized method of moments (Hansen, ) in econometrics to estimating functions in the statistics field. It attempts to answer a question frequently asked by econometricians: how to choose the most informative moment conditions with the lowest dimension possible. The research will also serve an educational purpose through developing a new course on longitudinal data and training of graduate students doc10571 none Lange This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119) Surfaces can be made either super-hydrophobic or super-hydrophilic by producing a textured surface that resembles hills and valleys, provided that the wetting angle of the liquid on a flat surface of the same material is 90 degree . The mechanism that produces the effect is based on the fact that the liquid only wets the tops of the hills and gas (air) is trapped within the valleys. Simple analytical functions have been developed for different periodic, textured surfaces to show that the wetting angle is related to the area fraction of wetted hills and the wetting angle for a flat surface. The lotus leaf is a natural example of a super-hydrophobic surface. In , micron size wax bumps were discovered to produce this effect. Water drops on the lotus leaf are nearly spherical (q ~ 170 degree) and easily roll around collecting dust particles to produce a self-cleansing effect that has made the lotus plant revered for its purity. Synthetic super-hydrophobic surfaces have been produced by coating a surface with a rumbled thin film and with a micromolding method. These surfaces are promising for practical applications that include rain-repellent surfaces, surfaces designed to decrease the resistance to fluid flow, and surfaces designed for selective liquid condensation. Recently, we demonstrated that super-hydrophobic surfaces could be produced by simply dip-coating a substrate into a slurry containing small, dispersed particles. The particles were attracted to the substrate by to their opposite surface charge, relative to the substrate. We demonstrated that the area fraction and particle size can be systematically controlled and that surfaces can be textured with commerically available particles in the range of 5 nm to 300 nm. By reacting the surface with fluoroalkyltrichlorosilane molecules, a flat surface is rendered hydrophobic, and super-hydrophobic, when textured. We observed that the super-hydrophobic effect was related to the area fraction of adsorbed silica particles and that the super-hydrophobic effect disappears when the average spacing between the spherical particles exceeds a critical value. When the particles are very small the water droplet shows absolute adherence to the surface. Both of these latter two effects can be predicted with the Laplace equation, which relates the equilibrium curvature of a meniscus to the pressure exerted by the water drop. Systematic experiments are planned with nano-textured surfaces to study these two new phenomena in relation to specific functions derived with the Laplace equation. This will be accomplished using glass substrates that will be coated with colloidal silica particles that are commercially available in the size range of 5 nm to 300 nm. The prepared nano-textured surfaces will consist of randomly distributed silica sphere on a glass substrate. The silica particles will be fixed to the substrate by sintering. The nano-textured substrates will then be reacted with fluoroalkyltrichlorosilane molecules to ensure optimum hydrophobicity. All experiments will be conducted with deionized water on nano-textured surfaces treated with the same fluoroalkyltrichlorosilane molecules. With these constrains, the surface energy per unit area, g, and the contact angle of a flat surface, q, will be keep constant. Spontaneous Wetting Experiments: Spontaneous wetting will occur when the Laplace pressure exceeds a critical value to produce an instability; spontaneous wetting is expected to be a strong function of both the area fraction and particle size. Experiments will be designed to determine the validity of this expected result that can be formalized as an analytical equation. These experiments will include contact angle measurements vs. drop size, area coverage and particle size (5 nm to 300 nm). Adhesion Experiments : Tilting experiments will be carried out to measure the a) advancing and receding contacts angles and b) the critical angle for drop movement, all as a function of the drop size and the characteristics of the textured surface (area fraction and particle size). Experiments will be carried out to determine the critical drop size that can still adhere to the surface when the substrate is held up-side down; these results will be related to an analytical equation that describes the critical pressure for spontaneous de-wetting doc10572 none M.Tirrell, University of California-Santa Barbara The work proposed here aims to develop the science of spontaneously dividing three-dimensional space into compartments, that is, into controlled environments, at the nanometer size scale, in order to accomplish several engineering objectives. The objectives include: controlled release of therapeutic agents (e.g., drugs, genetic materials); controlled access to biofunctional components (switching or masking activities when desirable); embedding biological signaling within 3D matrices (nano-phase-separated block co-polypeptides decorated with targeting or homing ligands) and using surface patterning and templating to produce novel or tailored structures and environments. Four project areas encompass and organize our overall plan: 1. Creating nano-environments via lipid encapsulation; 2. Nano-environments from peptide amphiphiles; 3. Amphiphilic block copolypeptides with hierarchical structures; 4. Patterned surfaces for self-assembly. The work we will do is conceptually similar to creating artificial cells in the sense of separating regions for different functions (without any attempt to build in self-replication). We are aiming toward bio-mimetic structures for functions that may not be naturally occurring, and that mimic or supply interesting functionality. The kinds of functions we wish to incorporate vary from biological (e.g., cell adhesion) to non-biological (e.g., fluid connectivity). The science we will pursue is the principle of spontaneously creating compartments or confined regions with a definite inside and outside. As a practical matter, this means delving deeper into controlled formation of micelles, vesicles, domains, tubules and other controlled regions, as part of larger assemblies of nanoscale components. We will synthesize new lipid-like and macromolecular architectures to drive self-assembly in ways that can encapsulate some species and exclude or display others, controllably, on the interiors and exteriors, respectively, of defined regions. Our research will produce new materials for biomedical applications, new therapeutic approaches based on controllable binding and transport processes and new ways of integrating biological structures with semiconductor fabricated devices. Our core expertise includes extensive experience with lipid and macromolecular structure and phase behavior, based on substantial ability to synthesize new molecules. We have experience with assessing and influencing biological activities and functions, ranging from cell adhesion, to drug delivery and gene transfection, to the roles of metal ions in growth processes and pathological conditions. Characterization expertise and facilities for all of this work are readily available among the members of this collaboration: electron microscopy (adapted in several ways for soft, wet, biological samples), scanning probe nicroscopies, optical microscopy (with fluorescence, confocal, interference and video capabilities), surface force measurements, x-ray and neutron scattering, neutron reflectometry and organic synthesis. The interdisciplinary talents of this team are essential to educate students broadly in the new fields of nanotechnology and biotechnology. The five graduate students and one postdoctoral fellow supported by this proposed grant will work in broad areas of the overall project where interests of several groups overlap strongly. In this way, the students will have continued exposure to the full interdisciplinary group of biochemists, chemists, physicists, chemical engineers and materials scientists that make up our team. An active effort is planned to attract a diverse population of students to this project. We believe that the students and fellow trained in the course of this research will be extraordinarily flexible in their talents, and therefore exceptionally, well-prepared for careers in industry or universities, because of the multiple advisor, multiple technique environment we will provide. The PI and co-PI s will manage this project to continuously promote this interdisciplinary approach in the selection of specific projects to be pursued. The efforts from this project will feed new ideas, examples and practical experience into a new laboratory-based course under development entitled, Biomaterials Preparation and Characterization doc10573 none This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119). We propose a joint Caltech NASA-JPL Agere Systems research program to develop new materials for Si nanocrystal nonvolatile memories and related nanoscale electronic devices. Under the program: o New aerosol-based Si nanoparticle and nanowire engineering methods will be developed to enable formation nanoparticle and nanowire arrays with precise control of particle size, particle number and array structure. These methods will be compatible with Si ultralarge scale integrated (ULSI) circuit process technology. o Aerosol-synthesized and colloidally processed silicon nanoparticle and nanowire arrays with novel configurations will be integrated into Si-based metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) devices at state-of-the-art device dimensions yielding nanometer-scale memory devices. o A dielectric heterostructure layered tunnel barrier will be developed to achieve simultaneous ultrafast chargc injection and extremely long charge retention times, which are mutually exclusive for existing conventional dielectric tunnel baffler designs. o Nanocrystal charging via electrical injection and photoexcited carrier injection will be studied to assess layered tunnel barrier performance and to determine whether quantum size effects on the density of electronic states can be exploited for control of electronic charging energy. The focal point of the work is a recently demonstrated high-performance aerosol silicon nanocrystal memory device, developed by the present nanoscale interdisciplinary research (NIRT) team under prior NSF support. Silicon nanoparticles comprise the floating gate that is the storage node of a nanocrystal nonvolatile memory. Aerosol synthesis allows control of Si nanocrystal size and shape that are difficult to achieve by other synthesis methods. Uniquely, our team has successfully integrated vapor-synthesized aerosol nanoparticles into a high-performance silicon-based electronic device, fabricated at 0.18 micron design rules on 200 mm substrates by ultraclean processing at state-of-the-au device dimensions. Extensive electrical characterization of transistor subthreshold and turn-on performance, retention time, program-erase cycling, gate and drain disturb characteristics indicated that these devices are high performance memory devices. The Caltech JPL Agere NIRT team is unusual in its combination of basic research on new electronic materials developed at Caltech followed by direct materials integration into a flexible, state-of-the-au silicon device process carried out at Caltech and Agere System s fabrication facilities doc10574 none Patricia J. Teller University of Texas The goal of this project is to develop the tools needed for performance-directed integrated design and control of complex applications running on distributed computational systems. Its target computational systems are complex, incorporating the difficult heterogeneity, latency, and adaptive properties of computational grids. Its target applications are at the cutting edge of computational science: very large, complex applications with adaptive characteristics that do not allow their optimal system configurations or computational requirements to be estimated prior to run time. Each application will be viewed as a composition of components, with a formal, high fidelity model of performance to be designed for each component. The approach is to use model-based adaptive run-time control, based on these composed performance models, to control the execution of the application to meet specified performance goals. The control strategy will make real-time changes to parameters that modify the behavior of both application and computational platform doc10575 none Magnetic Force Microscopy (MFM) is one of the most promising and best-known techniques for probing magnetic phenomena on length scales approaching 10 nanometers, but the spatial resolution of MFM is presently limited to about 30 nanometers. Factors limiting the spatial resolution include both the the force sensitivity of the cantilevers used for MFM and the ability to create controlled magnetic nanostructures on the cantilevers. The PIs propose that MFM sensors based on the integration of nanomagnets, carbon nanotubes, and optimized silicon microstructures can push these limits to allow sub-10-nm spatial resolution. The PIs individually have experience in atomic force microscopy, novel magnetic microscopies, the growth of single-walled and multi-walled carbon nanotubes, the integration of carbon nanotubes with silicon microstructures, the growth and characterization of cobalt nanomagnets and nanorods, and the fabrication of high-bandwidth ultra-sensitive force cantilevers with integrated displacement sensors. This research requires the participation of an interdisciplinary research team, populated by a collection of graduate and undergraduate students from many departments in science and engineering. The fabrication of these sensors will require the integration of advanced nanomaterials and modern fabrication processes, benefiting researchers and industrial developers. The processes that are developed during the course of this research will be published in the NNUN s on-line process library, as well as in research journals. Undergraduate and graduate students whose research includes the development of these techniques and their application to materials science will be well suited to make ongoing contributions to nanoscience and technology. %%% Research on nanomaterials such as bucky-balls, nanotubes, nanomagnets, molecular manufacturing, and many other examples has led to excited speculation regarding the technological promise of nanoscience. However, these nanotechnologies do not easily merge with conventional technologies, including microfabrication. Stanford has recently demonstrated methods for localizing the growth of carbon nanotubes on specific locations within a conventional microfabrication process, a breakthrough that could allow nanotechnology to approach important technological applications. The propsed work would use this breakthrough to integrate nanotubes and nanomagnets into MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS) fabrication, producing a useful new family of ultrasensitive physical probes and developing realistic processes for the integration of nanomaterials and silicon microstructures. This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119). The award is jointly supported through two directorates at NSF: (i) Mathematical and Physical Sciences and (ii) Biological Sciences. Additional support comes from the National Facilities and Instrumentation program of the Division of Materials Research (DMR doc10576 none Considerable effort in nanotechnology research has been devoted to creating new molecular materials from inorganic or organic building blocks. These efforts have led to numerous new inorganic and organic materials with length scales generally in the 1-10 nm range (1,000,000nm=1mm). Biology offers a special opportunity to develop new materials on the next larger length scale. Because of their scale and composition, biological macromolecules could be especially suited to designing materials for biological applications. Exciting progress has been reported recently in the use of DNA to direct the assembly of nanomaterials, but a general method for using proteins to direct the assembly of nanomaterials has not emerged yet. The present project will explore and develop a new approach to protein design in which novel proteins are created by fusing together various natural oligomeric protein components. When the separate protein components are fused together under certain geometric rules, the newly designed proteins should self-associate and give rise to a vast array of new assemblies and nanomaterials with sizes and length scales in the 5-30 nm range. The approach is based on the principles of symmetry and, owing to its generality, can produce a wide variety of architectures, including cages, filaments, and extended two-dimensional and three-dimensional arrays. The long-term future applications of these protein-based materials include: synthetic vaccines, molecular delivery vehicles, biosensors, filtration devices, substrates for ultra-high density molecular display (e.g. of DNA molecules), and templates for deposition of more traditional conducting or semiconducting materials doc10577 none This proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF- . This NIRT project focuses on the study of charge transport in molecular systems. An interdisciplinary team from physics and chemistry, working in the areas of nanoscale synthesis, high-precision structural characterization, electrochemistry, DNA chemistry, microfluidic techniques, and the use of novel nanoscale materials will be engaged in the effort. There are two principal experimental thrusts to the work: 1) the systematic exploration of electronic tunneling through solvents and other small, well-characterized molecules and 2) a rigorous study of charge transport through DNA. The award is jointly funded by the Divisions of Physics and Chemistry doc10578 none Through evolution, biology has produced a remarkably diverse and efficient collection of proteins. These proteins assemble into a seemingly infinite variety of nanobiostructures, and they promote an extensive repertoire of chemical processes; hence, they comprise an interesting collection of biomolecular nanomachines. The proteins that are responsible for the maintenance and manipulation of DNA are one important subset of this collection. Their capacity to assemble with, and to alter the structure of, DNA is essential for all biological function. These proteins function in the packaging of DNA, the high-fidelity copying of genetic information, the reading of the genetic code and its conversion into RNA, the generation of genetic diversity, and the preservation of genetic and structural integrity of the genome. This project describes a new experimental approach to study the assembly and function of several of the nanomachines that function in these biological processes. The method involves the direct visualization by fluorescence microscopy, in real-time, of the assembly, disassembly, and movement of these nanobiostructures on single, optically-trapped DNA molecules using a novel, multi-port, laminar-flow, micro flow cell. This instrument will allows one to readily introduce an individual, optically-trapped DNA molecule sequentially into a series of reaction conditions, and to visualize the changes in structure assembly of the molecules in real-time using multi-wavelength fluorescence microscopy. The successful development of this instrument will reveal important information about the structure and function of DNA-protein interactions that cannot be obtained using large ensembles of DNA molecules (where such information is often lost by averaging, or obscured by competing intermolecular interactions). This research will provide revolutionary new information about how proteins function to alter the structure of DNA. Furthermore, the experimental techniques can be applied to the study of many other nanoscale biostructures doc10579 none Under the influence of light, electricity, or chemical reagents, certain interlocked molecules, known as catenanes and rotaxanes-which comprise appropriately matched ring and dumbbell-shaped components-will perform motions (e.g., rotary and linear) at a molecular level reminiscent of the moving parts of macroscopic machines. Such molecular motors hold promise as the intelligent building blocks for the construction of devices and machines. A team of chemists and engineers from two different institutions (UCLA and nearby CALTECH) will address the fundamental scientific issues surrounding the relationships between controllable molecular machines, nanoscate devices, and the predictable movements of machine components at a macroscopic level. The aims of this collaborative project-which focuses on the NSE RESEARCH THEME of Nanoscale Devices and System Architecture-are to (I) develop the template-directed synthesis (self-assembly) of interlocked molecules (switchable catenanes and rotaxanes) and interpenetrating supermolecules (addressable pseudorotaxanes) as a forerunner to (2) attaching them covalently to frameworks (e.g., silica, alumina) whose (3) synthesis (self-organization) must be established prior to (4) demonstrating the abilities of these machine-like (super)molecules to express different kinds of coherent movements (mainly linear but also possibly rotary ones) characteristic of macroscopic machines when (5) they are activated by chemicals (acids bases or oxidizing reducing agents) or electrons or light (redox and electron transfer processes) as a prelude to (6) transducing and amplifying the coherent molecular level movements into macroscopic motions. The specific objectives of the team are to demonstrate transduction of force and motion from the relative mechanical movements of the components present in catenanes, rotaxanes and pseudorotaxanes through the development-on the nanoscale level-of actuating materials and devices reminiscent of (1) engines, (2) levers, (3) muscles, and (4) valves. In thc first instance, we envisage constructing supramolecular two-stroke engines based on two-station pseudorotaxanes with the ring component lodged covalently in appropriately-sized silica pores, leaving the semi-dumbbell-shaped component to act as the piston. In the second example, we propose to design mechanical levers to amplify nanometer motions generated by suitable molecular or supramolecular machines. In the third instance, we propose to graft the ring and thread components of pseudorotaxanes onto separate carbon nanotubes using an aromatic polymer which we have demonstrated wraps itself helically around carbon nanotubes in order to realize artificial muscles and actuators. And, in the final example, we intend to develop molecular valves at the necks of suitably-sized silica pores, lined with pseudorotaxanes that can be induced to associate and dissociate (rings from threads) such that guest molecules located within the pores are, respectively, trapped or free to escape. The anticipated outcome of the proposed program of research includes (I) the synthesis of new molecular motors capable of operating as machines, (2) the synthesis of integrated power supplies for the machines, (3) a bottom-up and top-down integration of frameworks for the machines, (4) new fundamental understanding of forces, friction, etc., on the nanoscale, and (5) a group of students with both broad perspectives and individual expertise in nanoscicnce. With chemists and engineers working side-by-side, this highly integrated project seeks to transform molecular machines from being scientific curiosities into functioning nanosystems with technological potential, to enrich the education of both graduate and undergraduate students, and to promote the public awareness of nano-science and technology through community outreach doc10580 none This Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Teams (NIRT) project will address the common problem of large pressure drops in microfluidics by nano-engineering novel channel surfaces and controlling their surface properties. The consequences are expected to be both dramatic and far-reaching. The research project is to develop a nano-engineered surface to drastically reduce viscous drag. Despite the explosive growth in microfluidics, as represented by such high-profile applications as biochips and lab-on-a-chip, this fundamental problem associated with miniaturization remains unsolved: the disproportional increase in the relative pressure drop and the power consumption as devices are reduced in size. Due to the severe retardation of velocity at the surface, transport of liquids through long, nano microscale channels encounter to high losses to be practical. Fabrication of these surfaces will be developed by integrating the rich arsenal of MEMS and Nano-technologies with the extensive knowledge of surface and biomaterial sciences, based upon the specialized expertise of the four principal investigators. Following development and characterization of the novel surfaces, an electrically re-configurable bioreactor chip will be developed as a capstone device, which further promotes synergistic integration among the team members as well as public awareness. Fusion of the traditionally disjoint areas in this research - mechanical engineering and chemistry - start from students, who will take a set of formal courses developed and cross-offered between two schools for nanoscale science and engineering. The students continue to develop their interdisciplinary mind from monthly team meetings and weekly task meetings for research doc10581 none Rudolf Eigenmann Purdue Research Foundation NGS: Collaborative Research: An OpenMP Environment for Wide-Area Network Computing The objective of this proposal is to develop a new programming system that will close the gap that exists between programming SMPs and networked computer clusters, by using the emerging standard (OpenMP) for SMPs and develop compiler and runtime support that will enable using OpenMP on distributed platforms with optimized performance. The proposed programming system will make it possible to program the Grid and networked computer systems using OpenMP, the emerging standard for shared-memory programming. The PI expects to attain high efficiency in the execution of OpenMP programs for collection of Grid-connected computers. Through static and dynamic compiler techniques, we expect to harness the complexity and load fluctuations of the target environment doc10582 none Anand Sivasubramaniam Pennsylvania State University NGS: Powerful Software for Power Constrained Systems The objective of this proposal is to develop new monitoring and simulation tools for resource monitoring at runtime, and compiler assisted optimization to enable execution under energy evaluation and optimization conditions. The proposal will implement these methods into an integrated framework to evaluate optimizations at the application, compiler and operating system levels. This project will specifically focus on a spatial database application called PocketGIS, an important mobile application, to explore these issues doc10583 none The main technical theme of this research is to undertake an interdisciplinary study (chemical engineering, physics and chemistry) of the structuring and restructuring of nanophase carbons, including nanoporous carbons, nanotubes, nanoropes, C60 fullerene and MetCars and the nanoscale processes leading to control of specific metal-carbon interactions. The main purpose is to study rearrangenment of amorphous carbons into nanocrystalline domains by the action of alkali and transition metals, welding of carbon nanotubes to one another through the formation of metal carbide nanojunctions and other metallic nanowelds, bonding of three dimensional structures consisting of vertically and horizontally oriented carbon nanotubes oriented orthogonally and welded through the metal-carbide nanojunctions, and the fabrication of monolithic metal carbide membranes with regular, uniform and aligned pores (vias) through the bulk normal to the average macroscopic membrance surface. The near term intellectual products of this research will lead to novel nanofabrication processes and to unique nanomaterials that can be used for electronic, mechanical and chemical applications. %%% The direct products of this research will be new physics, new chemistry, and new materials nanofabrication processes. The students trained in these interdisciplinary nanomaterials areas will be highly competitive in the nanoscience and -technology based industrial job markets of nanomedicine, nanoelectronics and nanochemical structures and processes. This grant is being co-funded by the Solid State Chemistry, Ceramics and Metals Programs of the Division of Materials Research, and the Kinetics, Catalysis and Molecular Processes Program of the Division of Chemical and Transport Systems doc10584 none This multi-disciplinary proposal will unite researchers from physics, chemistry, and biology to work synergistically on a coherent project that involves one basic concept, the development and synthesis of novel materials from self-assembled magnetic nanostructures whose configuration and or functions can be tuned and controlled by external fields. We will demonstrate that, by understanding physical mechanism of self-assembly and field-controlled phenomena and by bringing together two frontiers of the new century---the nanoscale science and the field of soft matter, we will be able to develop functional materials that enable new technologies ranging from memory devices, drug delivery agents, field-controllable nanomachines, magnetically actuatable polymers, and many other liquid, gel, or solid devices. We propose to perform experimental and theoretical research to study the conditions for self-assembly phenomena in surfactant-stabilized magnetic fluids. Experimental observations using scattering techniques such as neutron and light scattering, imaging (Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) Magnetic Force Microscopy (MFM)), and thermodynamic measurements (e.g. heat capacity) will be supported and evaluated by using computer simulations. We propose to use realistic quaternion molecular dynamics simulations in viscous media to study the dynamics of isomer transitions under varying conditions and to present a correct interpretation of the experimental results. Based on the configuration of self-assembled structures in zero field and its response to external fields, novel structures can be synthesized that have important applications. The proposed research will provide the basis for the design of new, smart materials and externally controlled systems that can respond to an external environment through the unique combination of theory, computer simulations, and experimental investigations. This work will have an important impact in applied physics, chemistry, material sciences, biology and medicine, and device industries. Our approach aims to facilitate the education of tomorrow s scientists in nanoscience and technology through the involvement of students in every aspect of proposed research doc10585 none The investigator, Dan Stefanica, extends the Finite Element Tearing and Interconnecting (FETI) algorithms to mortar methods, thus taking advantage of the inherent flexibility of the mortar elements. He establishes that the resulting algorithms preserve the convergence properties of the FETI methods for conforming elements. This agrees with extensive numerical experiments for FETI algorithms for low order mortar finite elements. He checks whether the condition number estimates obtained for the FETI algorithms for mortars are sharp. He extends the FETI method to spectral methods and mortar spectral elements, by providing numerical and theoretical convergence analysis for these algorithms. Finally, he designs Dual--Primal FETI algorithms for both geometrically conforming and geometrically nonconforming mortar methods. The algorithms analyzed in this project are part of the larger family of domain decomposition methods, which are powerful, fast, and easily parallelizable methods for the numerical solution of partial differential equations arising from a large spectrum of practical applications. The investigator couples one of these methods, the FETI method, with a versatile discretization of the equations, called the mortar method. Thus, he is able to solve problems with very complicated geometry while concentrating most of the computational effort on resolving the critical parts of the problem. The FETI method has already been implemented in huge parallel codes for a large spectrum of applications. Improvements in it developed by this project will be important for such applications as aerospace design, computational mechanics and fluid flow problems doc10586 none Several classes of asymptotic problems are considered. The averaging principle for deterministic and stochastic perturbations, asymptotic problems for reaction-diffusion equations, and problems related to stochastic resonance are among them. The long-time evolution of perturbed systems with conservation laws, even in the case of purely deterministic perturbations, leads, in general, to stochastic process on complexes defined by the conservation laws. So the classical averaging principle (say, for deterministic perturbations of integrable Hamiltonian systems when the Hamiltonian has many critical points) should be treated in the stochastic framework. In this research small diffusion asymptotics for reaction-diffusion in an incompressible 2D-fluid, which is closely related to the averaging for Hamiltonian systems, is studied. Another class of problems concerns the large deviation theory and stochastic resonance. A number of new effects such as large amplitude oscillations and stabilization induced by the small noise in autonomous systems are considered. The asymptotic approach is one of the most powerful tools of applied mathematics. In particular, the averaging principle plays the leading role when systems combining multi-scale processes are considered. Such problems arise in mechanics, in material sciences, in biophysics, and in other areas. This research does not just consider problems concerning the mathematical justification of the averaging principle, but also describes new applications and new effects. In recent years stochastic-resonance-type effects, which first appeared in the theory of long-time evolution of the climate, have attracted the attention of specialists in many areas of physics, engineering, and biology. The mathematical theory of these effects is doc10587 none Tomasz Haupt Mississippi State University Computational Vortals for Next Generation Scalable Computing Computational Power constantly is opening new opportunities for numerical simulations, in turn opening opportunities for new science. This computational power is expected to be a low cost alternative for design and validation, boosting efficiency of manufacturing, and be a reliable source of forecast (e.g., weather earthquakes. the stock market, to name just a few domains), as well as all the other claimed and realized advantages for academic computing. This constant demand for faster and faster compute servers drives vendors to introduce more and more sophisticated; scalable architectures including scalable interconnects. The PI s will develop high-level user directed assists to enable application programs to exploit cluster-computing resources; this will connect application level resource requirements with lower-level scheduler and middleware resources. The work will advance the usability of clusters by a significant class of applications doc10588 none Slava Epstein A grant has been awarded to Dr. Slava Epstein at Northeastern University to conduct a high-resolution identification and inventory of the free-living ciliates along Northeast Atlantic coast. The target organisms comprise the Phylum Ciliophora and are among the most important microorganisms in the ocean. Genetically, this phylum is likely to be more diverse than the whole animal kingdom, yet the species diversity of ciliates cannot be presently assessed even with an order of magnitude accuracy. This is a reflection of the fact that traditional morphological methods of ciliate (and other protists) identification and cataloguing are not sufficient to describe their biodiversity. This study will integrate traditional morphology and comparative genomics into one synergistic approach. This will enable creation of an innovative catalogue of marine ciliates in the form of collection of specimens, their DNA, specific gene sequences, as well as an Internet-based searchable database. This database will include rich verbal and pictorial morphological information, including still-, 3-D-, and video images, data on genetic diversity, all cross-referenced to the earlier data. No database of this kind is available today. The marriage between traditional morphological and modern molecular tools in studying biological diversity is an important development in the area of protozoology. In the most immediate sense, it will greatly facilitate identification and classification of the ciliates that are targeted by research in systematics, population biology, ecology, physiology, biochemistry, and evolution. More generally, this comprehensive catalogue of the ciliates will become an integral part of the process of documenting the overall diversity of life on our planet doc10589 none Nonparametric statistical methods are used in practice so far mainly for low dimensional data. A major reason for this is the so-called ``curse of dimensionality , meaning that the statistical performance of methods get worse with increasing dimension. On the other hand, the steep increase in complexity when passing from dimension one to higher dimensions might not be caught adequately by parametric models. Hence, there is a need for non- and semiparametic methods that on the one hand do not suffer too much from the curse of dimensionality, and on the other hand are computationally feasible. The goal of this project is to develop such types of nonparametric statistical methods. Central for this project is the observation that many important statistical problems can be formulated in terms of ``mass concentration , thereby providing a unifying view to diverse problems with potential applications in various scientific fields. The intuitive idea of mass concentration becomes explicitly expressed in the statistical methods developed in this project. This makes the proposed methods transparent and intuitively accessible which supports interpretation of the outcomes. Included in the project is problem of ``investigating multivariate modality . Different approaches will be considered. One approach is based on a local fitting procedure, and another is based on some concavity property of a certain concentration function. Another problem included in this project that admits a natural formulation in terms of mass concentration is ``measuring volatility or risk in financial time series which is a central problem of stochastic finance. Regions with high volatility can be interpreted as regions where the volatility function is highly concentrated. Investigating more than one explanatory variable simultaneously leads to a nontrivial multivariate problem. Surprisingly, these quite diverse problems can be treated by closely related methods. This underlines the usefulness of our methodology whose propagation is another inherent goal of this project doc10590 none There are two independent strands of financial stochastic modeling: continuous-time models centered in the modern finance literature and discrete-time models in the empirical finance literature. The continuous-time models are dominated by the diffusion which elegantly accommodates finance theory such as arbitrage and option pricing but is very hard for statistical inference. Most of the discrete-time models are the autoregressive conditionally heteroscedastic (ARCH) and stochastic volatility (SV) models which often provide parsimonious representations for the observed discrete-time data and are relatively easier for statistical inference. It is natural to ask whether the discrete-time model can be compatible with the continuous-time model. Not until recent years did researchers begin to bridge the gap between the two modeling approaches and establish the weak convergence of the discrete-time ARCH model to continuous-time diffusion. Because of the weak convergence linkage, there is a general belief in financial economics and financial mathematics that the ARCH model and its diffusion limit are ``equivalent at all respects. Since both types of models involves unknown parameters, their practical implementation requires to estimate and test the parameters from the data. Because of the belief and ARCH s easier statistical inference, it is a common practice toapply statistical procedures derived under the ARCH model to the corresponding diffusion. However, the claimed statistical equivalence and the employed practice are much based on blind faith and lack of adequate statistical justification. In particular, they can not be rigorously justified by the weak convergence linkage. In this proposal PI will initiate a new research topic: study the statistical relationship between these discrete-time and continuous-time models. Three interrelated problems will be investigated. Whether the experiment formed by observations from the ARCH model is asymptotically equivalent in terms of Le Cam s deficiency distance to an experiment comprised by observations from the diffusion limit ? Study model equivalence or nonequivalence at different frequencies (e.g. daily, weekly and monthly); Propose a wavelet stochastic volatility model for widely available high-frequency data. The proposed research bears important computational and practical consequence. For example, if the two models are asymptotically equivalent at certain lower frequencies, the easily obtained statistical inference based on the ARCH model can be applied to the subsample that are sampled from the diffusion data at the corresponding frequencies; because ARCH and SV models describe stationary processes and fail to account for local sharp peaks and long-memory founded in high-frequency data, the proposed wavelet model is expected to fit high-frequency data better and easily pick up high frequency features like sharp peaks, local shock, and non-stationarity as well as low frequence phenomenon such as long-memory and long term trend. Stock market modeling has two types of approaches in the literature. One is continuous-time modeling that assumes a stock price to change with time continuously and obey a continuous-time stochastic process. Historically, continuous-time models based on stochastic differential equations have been developed in financial economics. Because of elegant accommodation of finance theory such as arbitrage and option pricing, modern finance theory is much based on the continuous-time modeling. However, in reality all data are recorded only at discrete intervals. Unknown parameters in the continuous-time models need to be estimated and tested from the observed discrete-time data. Due to the difficulty in statistical inference for the continuous time model based on the discrete data, the validity of the continuous-time modeling is not straightforward to check. Another approach is discrete-time modeling of available discrete data. Successful discrete-time models are the autoregressive conditionally heteroscedastic (ARCH) and stochastic volatility (SV) models. These discrete-time models often provide parsimonious representations for the observed discrete-time data, and their statistical inference is relatively easier. But the discrete-time models are statistical models in nature and are not easy to accommodate finance theory. This proposal will study the statistical compatibility of the two types of models and investigate wavelet modeling for high-frequency data. The research bears important theoretical and practical consequences. For example, the research can yield a picture on when continuous-time and discrete-time models are statistically equivalent; if equivalent, the easily obtained statistical inference procedures for thediscrete-time models can be applied to the continuous-time models; the wavelet based model is expected to fit high-frequency data better and easily pick up high frequency features like sharp peaks, local shock, and non-stationarity as well as low frequence phenomenon such as long-memory and long term trend doc10591 none This proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF- . The goal of this proposal is to develop the scientific and engineering foundations of a broad range of energy conversion devices based on the novel approach of using 1-D semiconducting nanowire heterostructures. These heterostructures will consist of nanowires made of two or more single crystal semiconducting materials that are spatially arranged in such a manner that confinement effects are exploited in new and unique ways. The approach will rely on a promising chemical synthesis technique called vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) process that can be used to grow monocrystalline nanowires Si, Ge, SiGe, ZnO and various III-V and II-VI semiconductors. Electron and phonon confinement as well as the availability of new material phases in nanowire heterostructures will be used to tailor electronic, thermal, thermoelectric, optical and electromechanical properties. Based on the fundamental understanding of these properties, three different types of integrated devices will be developed to convert energy between thermal, mechanical, optical, and mechanical forms. The first will concentrate on high-performance thermoelectric devices for refrigeration and power generation. The second will investigate light emitting devices that can be used for low-loss coupling to optical fibers. Finally, the piezoelectric properties will be used for developing nanoelectromechanical sensors and actuators doc10592 none David Padua Univ. of Illinois NGS: Collaborative Research: An OpenMP Environment for Wide-Area Network Computing The objective of this proposal is to develop a new programming system that will close the gap that exists between programming SMPs and networked computer clusters, by using the emerging standard (OpenMP) for SMPs and develop compiler and runtime support that will enable using OpenMP on distributed platforms with optimized performance. The proposed programming system will make it possible to program the Grid and networked computer systems using OpenMP, the emerging standard for shared-memory programming. The PI expects to attain high efficiency in the execution of OpenMP programs for collection of Grid-connected computers. Through static and dynamic compiler techniques, we expect to harness the complexity and load fluctuations of the target environment doc10593 none An international team of mycologists (experts on fungal diversity), led by Dr. Timothy Baroni of SUNY-Cortland, is surveying the fleshy fungi (mushrooms, boletes, polypores, puffballs, crust fungi) associated with neotropical pine forests. The investigation will concentrate on the beneficial symbionts of pine roots, which are mostly boletes and mushrooms known as ectomycorrhizal fungi. Some previous work in the Dominican Republic with the endemic pine forests (Pinus occidentalis) has revealed many undescribed species of fleshy fungi and at least some of these species are clearly related to ectotrophic mushrooms (root symbionts) from western and northwestern North America. Because tree hosts and fungal symbionts are tightly associated, it is difficult to explain the presence of these widely separated populations of fungal species from northwestern North America and the Dominican Republic. One plausible explanation is to consider a historical migratory route for pines and their fungal symbionts along a corridor extending from the Rocky Mountains through the Sierrra Madre Occidental into the geologically ancient (for this part of the world) Mountain Pine Ridge and Cockscomb Mountain zones of Belize in Central America. This migratory route established a southern most source, a refugium, for these island hopping symbionts which could have been carried to Hispaniola from Belize and or neighboring countries in Central America due in part perhaps to late season hurricane activity. Late season hurricanes in this region tend to produce easterly moving storms. These storms could have and still may carry seeds and fungal spores to Hispaniola and other islands in the Caribbean. Because the pine in the Dominican Republic is endemic and the only native pine to this island, and appears to be related to Central American pines, the hypothesized transport event likely occurred in the distant past. Inventory collecting in the possible fungal refugium in the Mountain Pine Ridge and Cockscomb Mountain zones in Belize is central to the study. This area is significantly older geologically than much of the rest of Central America(100-400 MY vs. 3-5 MY). It is also believed that these mountains remained above water as islands when sea levels rose in the past. Therefore, because of the possible long-term isolation, this region has the potential to harbor a significant number of new species of fungi, especially since this area has never been thoroughly surveyed. Data on undescribed amphibians from the area tends to support this view. The fungal symbionts of Belizian pines should be similar to or show close relationships with species from western and northwestern North America, and also be similar to some of the species from the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic will also be the focus of further mycological survey work and study. It appears to be a nexus of migratory paths for fungi, showing species from eastern North America, the Lesser Antilles and from South America as well as those recently found from western and northwestern North America. The survey is likely to cover to species from a broad spectrum of basidiomycetes (12 orders, 36 families, over 300 genera). Based on previous results, the team expects to discover approximately 20% to perhaps 30% new taxa. In addition to species descriptions and range distributions, published in the specialist literature, summaries of the results and materials (including selected color photographs for identification by amateurs and mushroom hunters ) will be made available to individuals in the ecotourism industry in Belize and the Dominican Republic doc10594 none James H. Aylor University of Virginia NGS Performance Modeling of Complex Hardware Software Systems through Mixed Level Modeling This project will develop a revolutionary new capability by providing a unified design framework for complex, high performance computer systems. This framework includes a performance modeling environment that will be integrated into a mixed level hardware software design environment through the use of standard Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) and supporting design tools. This framework will allow the modeling of hardware and software systems at a high level to enable rapid design space exploration and system performance analysis. The framework will provide the capability to refine these high level designs in a step-wise manner into models with more design detail and, ultimately into an implementation. This step-wise refinement capability allows areas of the design that are determined to be high risk in terms of performance to be refined to a more detailed level where the effects on system performance of assumptions and design can be realized doc10595 none for DMS - The PI, Christopher Bishop, will study the geometric properties of conformal mappings in the plane and quasiconformal mappings in space, focusing on the expansion properties of such maps and investigating various applications to geometric function theory, dynamics and topology. The PI has shown that a result of Dennis Sullivan s concerning the geometry of convex bodies in hyperbolic three space implies a factorization theorem for conformal mappings in the plane and this, in turn, implies uniform bounds on the amount of contraction a conformal map in the plane can have. Finding the best constants in the factorization theorem has consequences for well known problems such as dimension distortion, integral means and Brennan s conjecture. The PI will continue his work on limit sets of Kleinian groups, a natural and important class of fractal sets. The questions here are mainly to estimate the fractal dimension of these sets and study the behavior of the dimension as the group is deformed. The PI will also work on the metric properties of harmonic measures, particularly results which quantify the idea that harmonicmeasure cannot be concentrated on a small set. Problems include the lower density conjecture, stability of harmonic measure and the growth rate of diffusion limited aggregation. A few other questions involving quasiconformal and biLipschitz maps are also considered. Conformal mappings are a class of functions which are important in many area of mathematics and which are closely related to mnay physical problems (fluid flow, heat conduction, electric fields, random growth models, ...) and have been intensively studied for many years. One of the fundamental properties of such maps is expansion; they tend to push points farther apart on average. Making this precise has motivated much research in mathematical analysis. The PI has discovered a new way of quantifying this expansion by approximating conformal maps by (the more general class of) quasiconformal maps and showing these approximations may be taken with a very strong expansion property. This has given a clearer understanding of some known results and has led to progress on new problems. In particular, it implies new results about Kleinian groups (these are important examples of conformal dynamical systems, and hence a contribution to the more general area of dynamical systems, fractals and chaos). The PI s approach also ties the behavior of conformal maps to the geometry three dimensional hyperbolic space; this connection seems to be new and should lead to many interesting problems and more interaction between the areas of complex analysis and three dimensional topology (already connected in other ways). He will also investigate the computational aspects of this connection which may lead to new methods of computing conformal maps and Greens functions (important for a variety of applications). The PI will also continue his investigation of other problems including the geometry of random paths such as Brownian motion, the stability under perturbation of certain dynamical systems and fundamental geometric properties of conformal and quasiconformal mappings doc10596 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Analytical Approaches to Singular Perturbation Problems of Significance in Applications O Malley The research will develop asymptotic methods to solve nonlinear singularly perturbed boundary value problems for both ordinary and partial differential equations. A special emphasis will be the systematic development of renormalization methods, which theoretical physicists have proposed as a unified tool for asymptotic analysis. Another will be continued investigation of metastable dynamics for algebraic, as well as exponential, asymptotics. The problems are related since they both deal with long-time asymptotics and the classical method of multiple scales. Asymptotic methods, like computation, provide an important way to find approximate solutions to nonlinear problems arising in significant applications. This work seeks to further develop such analytical techniques and to apply them in engineering and the sciences doc10597 none Pemantle The principal investigator will work in several areas of combinatorial probability. In the area of asymptotic enumeration, he will obtain approximations to coefficients of multivariate meromorphic generating functions that are asymptotically valid as the multi-index goes to infinity in any possible way. The ultimate goal is to automate this procedure, at least for the class of (multivariate) rational generating functions with nonnegative coefficients. Previous results indicate this may be feasible, or at least may be carried out to some extent. These results are to be applied to several combinatorial problems in probability theory, including asymptotics for random tilings for the so-called Aztec Diamond configurations and other related tiling ensembles conjectured to produce polynomial phase boundaries. In the area of random processes with reinforcement, he will investigate the rate at which processes of stochastic approximation type converge to their ultimate limiting behavior. In particular, the slow convergence of vertex-reinforced random walks and uniformly reinforced social network models to their limits is to be explained by giving quantitative bounds on the probabilities of deviating from this behavior at finite times. It is hoped that this will both explain simulation data and give a theoretical basis for the use of these models. Among the other miscellaneous problems are several problems in economic game theory and one concerning asymptotics of solutions to functional equations. Recent progress in computer algebra has made many types of computation automated which once were done only by skilled practitioners. Nowadays, a few messy equations are no barrier at all to a complete theoretical and practical understanding of a problem. The most tangible result of the asymptotic enumeration project will be the transformation of a formerly difficult type of computation into a straightforward, though messy, series of steps. Applications reach far beyond the motivating examples of random tilings, and include queuing theory, signal processing and combinatorial enumeration. Reinforcement processes arise most commonly in three application areas: formal models of learning, population biology, and economic behavior. In each of these areas, the results of the project will shed light on when and why the theoretically predicted limiting behaviors are not observed in the timeframes of real applications doc10598 none This award supports theoretical research on quantum phase transitions in electronic systems. The PI will extend his previous work to include simultaneously, the effects of interactions between electrons and disorder due to impurities. The main idea is to begin with the Hall problem, where the effects of interactions are well understood and to add on disorder. Evidence that certain magnetic phenomena in a disordered system may be described by an effective pure interaction will be explored. The PI will explore the possibility that a metallic state, disallowed in the noninteracting case, can occur in systems with interactions and disorder. Another focus of this award is on the effective communication of physical concepts and research tools of theoretical condensed matter physics to the community, students, and the lay public. %%% This award supports theoretical research on quantum phase transitions -- transformations that occur at zero temperature through the variation of an interaction or field. These transitions can have a profound effect on materials properties at nonzero temperatures. The PI intends to focus on a notoriously hard problem -- the reliable theoretical description of a disordered and interacting electronic system. The PI will begin from the fractional quantum Hall state in a clean system where the correlations that result from the interactions between electrons are relatively well understood. His strategy will be to introduce disorder and eventually remove the magnetic field in the hope of elucidating the nature of the quantum mechanical ground state of a disordered interacting system in two dimensions. The award will support graduate and postdoctoral training in condensed matter theory and other educational activities, including speaking and writing for a lay audience on condensed matter physics doc10599 none A Survey of the Sharks and Rays of Borneo and their Metazoan Parasites In a collaborative effort involving parasite and elasmobranch taxonomists from eight different institutions in the US, Australia and Malaysia, this project will focus on the elasmobranchs (sharks and rays) and their metazoan parasites of the inshore and freshwater habitats of East Malaysia on the island of Borneo. Preliminary surveys suggest that this region is home to well over 100 species of sharks and rays, many of which are poorly known, and at least some of which are likely to be new to science. At present, essentially no records of metazoan parasites exist for sharks and rays of this geographic region. It is anticipated that the project will yield an extensive diversity of metazoan parasites belonging to at least four animal phyla, including all four major groups of platyhelminths, as well as annelids, nematodes and perhaps as many as five major groups of arthropods. Metazoan parasite diversity in sharks and rays generated from data collected in a previous survey conducted elsewhere will be tested. These data lead to the prediction that this region may yield between 500 and 1,000 species of metazoan parasites, well over 50% of which are likely to be new to science. This survey will provide essential baseline taxonomic data to facilitate the development of a resource management plan in East Malaysia. It will also do much to begin to fill in an enormous gap in our knowledge of parasites of sharks and rays doc10600 none Gary W. Howell Florida Institute of Technology CISE NGS: Cache Efficient and Parallel Bidiagonalization Cache efficient reduction to bidiagonal form allows a significant speedup in computation of the singular value decomposition (SVD) for rectangular matrices. The SVD provides the most standard and stable means of solving least square problems and of providing low rank approximations (allowing compressions of data stored in matrix form). As such it is used constantly by researchers around the nation and the world. This proposal will result in speedups in the standard LAPACK implementation and also in the parallel computation package SCALAPACK. The work will also extend to the parallel case with a view for inclusion in SCALPACK. In the parallel case the optimizer must take into account not only details of the local computer architecture and memory hierarchy but also communication among the processors doc10395 none This proposal is for the study of electric field effects on meteor trails in the equatorial region. Additionally, the PIs seek to understand any deviation of the radar scattering properties of a meteor trail from traditional specular reflection processes. These scientific goals require the upgrade and continued operation of an existing meteor radar at Piura, Peru (5S, 81W). The upgrade at this site consists of installing a complete all-sky meteor radar system, so that the angle-of-arrival of meteoric backscatter can be unambiguously determined. In addition, archive data from Christmas Island will be analyzed for meteor winds as well. As a byproduct of this work routine mean wind, tidal amplitudes and phases, and meteor decay statistics will be available to the scientific community via a web server doc10602 none Laxmikant V. Kale University of Illinois Performance Modeling and Programming Environments for PetaFlop Computers and the Blue Gene Machine The objective of the proposal is to develop performance simulation capabilities to allow system level analysis and prediction of performance of the next generation complex PetaFlop machines that include multiple levels of memory hierarchy and interconnects. The performance simulator that will be developed will be used to test parallel data structures and algorithms implemented in programming environments used in these machines, as well as frameworks to enable the development of applications for these machine classes. A number of important applications will be used to test and validate the CS technology advances doc10603 none The proposal outlines a program of exploring different aspects of low dimensional dynamics: combinatorial and geometric issues of holomorphic dynamics, its interplay with one-dimensional real dynamics (particularly in the rigidity and renormalization theories), interaction with three dimensional hyperbolic geometry and the theory of foliations, analytic and geometric aspects of two dimensional complex and real dynamics. The dynamical systems theory studies the evolution of various systems arising in physics, biology, engineering etc., as well as simplified mathematical models for those systems. It has been realized in the past 25 years that even one- or two- dimensional models can exhibit rich and important phenomena. It has been also realized that the methods of complex analysis provide powerful tools for dealing with these systems. The proposal intends to explore further this branch of dynamics doc10604 none Johathan M. Rosenberg Professor Jonathan Rosenberg will study the topology and geometry of manifolds and manifold-like spaces, as well as C -algebraic index theory. By this we mean a combination of C -algebra theory, index theory of elliptic operators, K-theory, geometry, and topology. One main focus of the proposal will be the use of invariants coming from C -algebras (especially Kasparov s KK-theory) to study the geometry and topology of manifolds. For example, KK-classes coming from the classical elliptic operators (the Euler characteristic operator, the signature operator, and the Dolbeault operator) will be intensively studied. Attention will also be paid to the equivariant case, where a finite group acts on the manifold in question. These studies will deepen the link between topological and analytic approaches to manifold theory. In addition, Professor Rosenberg will study the classification of manifolds via their Yamabe invariants, and the classification of metrics of positive scalar curvature, problems which involve a quite subtle blend of differential topology, differential geometry, and analysis. He will also study the applications of K-theory to the study of C -algebras, and various related problems on algebraic K-theory, especially on algebras of operators or on algebras coming from quantization of geometrical systems. The context of this project is the use of new methods in analysis, based on noncommutative operator algebras, for attacking problems in geometry and topology. On the one hand, these methods are useful as a new source of tools for studying geometry, especially in high dimensions. And on the other hand, the methods are motivated (and more or less forced) by the quantization of classical physical systems. The study of the scalar curvature properties of manifolds is also motivated by problems in gravitation. Professor Rosenberg will continue to train graduate students in analysis, geometry, and topology, and will also work toward integration of mathematical software into the undergraduate mathematics curriculum doc10605 none DMS-010 Anatoly S. Libgober Concrete issues proposed in this project are the study of 2-variable elliptic genus and chiral deRham complex for non-singular and singular varieties, mathematical foundations of the second quantized elliptic genus and orbifold elliptic genus, ODE and PDE appearing in mirror symmetry, the Chern classes of mirrors and the topology of the complements as well as the study of the fundamental groups of the complements. The goal of this project is to analyze from mathematical point of view several methods and techniques which were used in theoretical physics, more precisely in string theory. Such mathematical investigation should lead to new results in the physical theories involved and produce a broader understanding of the reasons of effectiveness of the methods used by physicists. Particular problems which we are planning to solve are motivated by dualities in string theory and more specifically by mirror correspondence. One of the problems is to find new properties of mirror correspondence and its characterization. This involved the study in topology, algebraic geometry and differential equations doc10606 none Naren Ramakrishnan Virginia Polytechnic Institute NGS: A Microarray Experiment Management System The objective of this proposal is to develop systems software relating to the management of microarray experiments for studying hundreds of genes in given organism simultaneously. This is a multidisciplinary collaboration between computer scientists who will perform the computer science research part of this project and will develop the computer systems software, and biologist who will use the microarray experiment as a driving case for the systems software to be developed under the project, and then they will be the users of the developed management infrastructure doc10607 none Richard M. Hain The goal of this project is to better understand the structure of mapping class groups and then to apply this knowledge to the problem of understanding motives over the spectrum of the integers. The Principal Investigator hopes to compute the stable highest weight decomposition of the graded quotients of the lower central series of the Torelli groups (tensored with the reals) as modules over the real symplectic group of rank g. This should be of interest to those studying 3-manifold invariants. The Principal Investigator plans to use his knowledge of this stable decomposition to study the image of the Galois group of the rational numbers on appropriate completions of mapping class groups. In particular, he (in joint work with Makoto Matsumoto) hopes to be able to characterize the Zariski closure of the image of the Galois group in the group of outer automorphisms of the relative unipotent completion of mapping class groups of large genus. This should lead to improved understanding of the connections between Hodge Theory and Galois Theory; in particular, to improved understanding of the role of mixed zeta numbers in Galois theory. The Principal Investigator also plans to study the pseudoconvexity of the moduli spaces of curves. Looijenga has conjectured that there is a proper, non-negative, (g-2)-pseudoconvex real-valued function defined on the moduli space of genus g curves. Hain, in joint work with Looijenga, hopes to prove that the function that he constructed with David Reed several years ago is such a function. This result would lead to new vanishing results for coherent cohomology of moduli spaces of curves as well as unified proofs of several results of Diaz and Harer on the topology of these moduli spaces. Topology is the study of those geometrical properties of surfaces and their generalizations that remain unchanged under stretching (short of tearing) and other continuous deformations. Geometry is the study of those properties of surfaces and their generalizations that preserve geometric properties such as distances and or angles. There is a profound connection between the topological symmetries of a surface (called the mapping class group of the surface), the geometry of all of the different ways of measuring angles on such a surface (the moduli space of conformal structures on the surface) and the arithmetical properties of the surface when viewed as the graph of a polynomial. Questions about mapping class groups and moduli spaces of conformal structures on surfaces arise in many areas of mathematics (such as the study of numbers, and algebraic geometry), and have applications to particle physics through string theory and conformal field theory. There are also potential significant applications to cryptography. The goal of this proposal is to further explore and understand the intricate and deep connections between these topological, geometrical and arithmetical aspects of surface theory, especially those aspects with connections to number theory doc10608 none Jose Lopez Peter McCarthy Julie Olsen A grant has been awarded to Drs. Jose Lopez, Peter McCarthy, and Julie Olson at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution (HBOI) to perform a taxonomic survey and inventory of deeper water marine microorganisms contained in HBOI s microbial culture collection. The approximately microorganisms within the collection were isolated from deep-water marine invertebrates (primarily sponges). This project will survey about half of the collection using a combination of descriptive and molecular genetic techniques, provide access to this information via the Internet, creation of a Harbor Branch Marine Microbe Database (HBMMD) and professional scientific publications, and apply the knowledge gained to examinations of the genetic diversity within preserved specimens of the host invertebrates. It is thought that the microbial communities associated with marine invertebrates will differ with the species of host invertebrate, geographic location, and water depth. Little is known about the biological and genetic diversity of marine microorganisms. Due to the inherent difficulties associated with gaining access to deep-water environments, even less is known about deeper water marine microbes. There is an urgent need to study the diversity of marine ecosystems, which are under increasing threats caused by tourism, recreational use, nutrient overload, and general ocean warming. Understanding the balance of biodiversity in marine ecosystems which are still relatively healthy will enhance our ability to manage and conserve them, suggest possible goals in the restoration of similar but less healthy marine systems, and help to foster a greater global appreciation of microbial ecosystems doc10609 none Many stochastic optimization problems assume that the decision maker has the total freedom to intervene the system. That is, the control policies can be adjusted continuously and instantaneously, or the state processes can be stopped arbitrarily within some time interval. However, this assumption is often violated in practice. The first part of the project is concerned with some new formulations for stochastic optimization problems in order to accommodate these practical constraints. These models share a common feature: random intervention times determined by exogenous signal processes. In the context of optimal control, the decision maker is allowed to adjust the level of control only at times when an exogenous process gives him a green light; for example, when an Poisson process makes a jump. In the area of optimal stopping, the state process is allowed to be stopped only at times when it receives certain signals from an exogenous process. Both formulations admit explicit solutions and can be applied to model practical constraints on control policies or stopping times. The second part of the project is concerned with a class of diffusion processes with jumps. The major effort is put on their applications to economics and finance. The reason for the introduction of such processes is that the classical diffusion model for stock prices cannot explain many empirical puzzles. For example, an abnormality called volatility smile is often observed in option pricing, and the return distributions of financial assets exhibit a leptokurtic feature. We intend to explain these phenomena, using the jump processes to model stock prices in a financial market or the values of economic projects in investment problems. The discontinuous behavior in the underlying processes requires new techniques to obtain explicit solutions to certain pricing and wealth optimization problems. The research project includes pricing commonly traded exotic options, analysis of utility maximization, and evaluation of investment projects. Stochastic optimization is one of the main topics in modern applied mathematics, with many applications in disciplines like engineering, biology, economics and finance, etc. The purpose of this research project is to systematically develop mathematical theories that are more faithful to real life problems, so that the conclusions drawn from them can be used with more confidence. For example, a better understanding for the uncertainty of stock prices can help agents reduce the risk in financial practice. However, in developing more realistic models, one must be aware of the subtle balance between complexity and mathematical tractability. A realistic yet too complicated model can be mathematically untractable. The goal of the project, therefore, is to develop analytically or numerically solvable models that embrace the essence of the practical problems. To this end, some new formulations are considered for general stochastic optimization problems in order to accommodate some practical constraints; for example, the controller can intervene the system only at times when an exogenous process sends out a certain signal. Also considered are some new models for economics and finance that incorporate the drastic changes of stock prices over short periods of time. These new models can be used to explain many empirical puzzles that the classical models fail to do, and to help agents develop better portfolios to reduce risk doc10610 none Rastislav Bodik University of Wisconsin NGS: Wisconsin DOVE: Distributed Optimizing Virtual Environment Wisconsin DOVE proposes to improve the performance of modern distributed and parallel applications as well as increase the productivity of application developers and system maintainers. Building on recent advances in distributed control, dynamic program optimization, and hardware-supported performance monitoring, our project will build a Distributed Optimizing Virtual Environment (DOVE) whose power will stem from two primary innovations. The VM-in-OS paradigm. Dove will implant into the operating system an optimizing virtual machine (VM), whose ability to analyze a running program and correlate the analysis with hardware-based performance monitoring will achieve vertical integration, spanning the application, the kernel, and the hardware. The VM-enabled operating system will be intimately aware of both the application above and the hardware and network below, and hence it will be able to schedule resources more intelligently and adaptively. A clan of optimizing virtual machines. Expecting that future distributed applications will be assembled from distributed components written in Java (or a similar mobile language), we propose to organize the VMs underlying the individual distributed components into a clan, in which the VMs exchange profiling and program-analysis information about their clients. By supporting gossip among the distributed VMs in a clan, we will be able to compute a run-time communication and dependence profile of the distributed application and, in response, perform a dynamic repartitioning of the application doc10611 none Manish Parashar Rutgers University The overall research goal of this proposal is to design, develop, evaluate and deploy Pragma, the next generation adaptive runtime infrastructure capable of reactively and proactively managing and optimizing application execution using current system and application state, predictive models for system behavior and application performance, and an agent based control network. The overarching motivation for this research is to enable very large-scale, dynamically adaptive scientific and engineering simulations on widely distributed and highly heterogeneous and dynamic execution environments such as the computational grid . The design, development and evaluation of the proposed Pragma framework will be conducted in collaboration with the Astronomy Department at the University of Arizona in the context of a real-world astrophysical hydrodynamics simulation using adaptive mesh refinement and including multigroup flux-limited diffusion, self gravity, nuclear burning, and a complex equation of state doc10612 none Katsinis, Constantine Drexel University CISE Postdoctoral Associates in Experimental Computer Science: An Interconnection Network Architecture for Petaflops Computing Research in high-performance computer systems is proposed that will expand the one-dimensional prototype Simultaneous Optical Multiprocessor Exchange Bus (SOME-Bus) interconnection network into a two-dimensional architecture. Recent work on the SOME-Bus over the past few years has raised several important issues (e.g., network interface design, network management, programming, applications and performance) that remain open and challenging as they relate to the potential two-dimensional bus. The experimental and theoretical work of the postdoctoral research associate will contribute to multidisciplinary research in computer architecture, performance analysis, optoelectronic devices, and VLSI design. The associate s research training will be enhanced by interactions with other nearby academic and industry groups working on similar high-performance architectures, and limited contributions to graduate student projects and courses in computer architecture doc10613 none Bhargava, Bharat. Purdue University CISE Postdoctoral Associates in Experimental Computer Science: Experiments in Security and Quality of Service in Mobile Systems Disaster recovery after an emergency such as an earthquake, terrorist attack, or war may depend on mobile systems for communications. Security and Quality of Service (QoS) are of utmost importance. Providing security and QoS is a difficult problem in mobile systems because the availability of network and other resources may change as the mobile host fails, moves, or comes under intentional or unintentional attack. Research on a technique to achieve fault-tolerant mobile node authentication in an efficient way is proposed for a postdoctoral research associate. Such a technique would eliminate single points of failure, distribute loading, and enhance scalability and survivability, and make failures transparent to users. A series of experiments are planned that will evaluate this technique under a variety of variables and lead to the development of new authentication and key management techniques. The associate will 1) identify guidelines for authentication between an upstream domain and an ingress router in a QoS enabled network, 2) evaluate various secure group communication and access control techniques for suitability in wireless communications, and 3) explore adaptability requirements when considering security as a QoS parameter doc10614 none Thomas G. Leness The goals of this proposal, to be done in collaboration with P. Feehan, are to prove Witten s conjecture relating the Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten invariants of smooth four-manifolds, to understand the relation between the conditions of Seiberg-Witten simple type and Kronheimer-Mrowka simple type, and to search for possible topological constraints on these invariants. This work will be carried out by exploring the moduli space of PU(2) monopoles which contains a moduli space of anti-self-dual connections and the moduli spaces of Seiberg-Witten monopoles for certain Spin C structures. This implies that the Donaldson invariant can be expressed as a sum, over these spinc structures, of an expression given by pairing certain cohomology classes with the link of the moduli space of Seiberg-Witten monopoles in the Uhlenbeck compactification of the moduli space of PU(2) monopoles. The first phase of this work is to complete the proof that the pairing of these cohomology classes with the link of the moduli space of Seiberg-Witten monopoles can be expressed in a universal form depending only on the Seiberg-Witten invariant and the homotopy type of the manifold. This work will also yield a proof of the Kotschick-Morgan conjecture on wall-crossing formulas for Donaldson invariants. The second phase of this work is to calculate this universal form in sufficient detail to allow the computation of the explicit relation between the Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten invariants. We intend to do this calculation by using known surgery formulas for both invariants (e.g. blow-up formulas), examples where both invariants are known, and some internal symmetries of the sum mentioned above. It is possible that this relation between the Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten invariants is over-determined and thus will reveal constraints on these invariants given by the topological type of the four-manifold, as was done in earlier work with Kronheimer and Mrowka. An n-dimensional manifold is a topological space that locally looks like n-dimensional Euclidean space. Manifolds are important objects to study because they are ubiquitous: the solution set of k equations in n variables will usually be an (n-k)-dimensional manifold. The main tools for distinguishing between four-dimensional manifolds are the Seiberg-Witten and Donaldson invariants. Thus, understanding the relation between these invariants is crucial to an understanding of four-dimensional topology. In addition, the conjectures relating these invariants arise from Witten s work using quantum field theory. These methods of quantum field theory are not mathematically rigorous, so our mathematically rigorous proof of Witten s conjecture can be viewed as an extremely inexpensive form of experimental physics doc10615 none The project will build on prior successful work and: 1) Explore extending the applicability of its criteria for evaluating materials to the elementary school level and to a greater variety of topics. 2) Produce a set of interrelated on-line databases of instructional components -- research summaries, representations, phenomena and questions tasks that developers can use to creat K-12 goals-based textbooks and other materials that focus on important ideas and skills in science, mathematics and technology. It is anticpated that these databases will also be valuable to practicing teachers (this component forming the basis for Project inservice programs) and to those designing preservice courses. 3) Create an expanded set of conceptual strand maps portraying students growth of understanding for important topics such as weather and climate, basic functions of living things, energy conservation, and electricity and magnetism; and 4) Create professional development workshop plans and presentation materials designed particularly for curriculum materials developers and educators responsible for evaluating and selecting textbooks. In addition, a new component to the initiative will: Design strategies and create materials to help parents, decision-makers, and the public in general to understand basic scientific literacy. This component will include the Conover Miller Group Global Strategy Group who will conduct public opinion market research polls and develop a strategic communications plan. The Project will produce a customized website that links the resources of AAAS with other organizations such as the NSTA, NRC and the Annenberg CPB Project to help teachers and parents increase their understanding of the important issues related to science education. This component will encourage teachers and parents to become more actively involved in their state s efforts to improve science education doc10616 none FOR A Settlement System Model for the Central Alaska Peninsula Pacific Coast Professor Allen P. McCartney, Principal Investigator Patricia L. McClenahan, Co-Investigator Department of Environmental Dynamics University of Arkansas, Fayetteville The past 1,000 years witnessed the transition of North Pacific hunter-gatherers from small, egalitarian family-based groups to complex hunter-gatherers. The upper and lower Pacific coast of the Alaska Peninsula, Kodiak, and the Aleutian Islands were intensely inhabited prehistorically, and after 1,000 B.P. the residents were taking part in a greater southwest Alaska cultural interaction sphere. However, there is little information about the prehistoric and historic inhabitants of the central Alaska Peninsula Pacific coast. The project will retrieve archaeological and environmental data from the Portage Bay watershed. The goal is to better define the central Alaska Peninsula with regard to subsistence and settlement strategies compared to those of the greater Alaska Peninsula through time. The project will utilize ethnohistoric and ethnographic data now being gathered about the subsistence-settlement systems of the historic inhabitants of Portage Bay. The project will contribute to recording and preserving the prehistoric and historic traditions and cultural heritage of the Alutiiq people and others doc10617 none Purdue University John R. Rice The goal of this project is to develop the tools needed for performance-directed integrated design and control of complex applications running on distributed computational systems. Its target computational systems are complex, incorporating the difficult heterogeneity, latency, and adaptive properties of computational grids. Its target applications are at the cutting edge of computational science: very large, complex applications with adaptive characteristics that do not allow their optimal system configurations or computational requirements to be estimated prior to run time. Each application will be viewed as a composition of components, with a formal, high fidelity model of performance to be designed for each component. The approach is to use model-based adaptive run-time control, based on these composed performance models, to control the execution of the application to meet specified performance goals. The control strategy will make real-time changes to parameters that modify the behavior of both application and computational platform doc10618 none Survey of Invertebrates at Sea Floor Deployments of Wood in the North Pacific Ocean Perhaps because of the small, well-defined habitats in which they occur, animals at sea floor hydrothermal vents are increasingly well known, but our knowledge of animals that live elsewhere on the vast sea floor continues to be limited. Do species known from vents and their relatives occur in comparable, non-vent habitats in which oxygen is limited? One little-known seafloor habitat, that provided by wood sunken to the sea floor, shares with hydrothermal vents temporal transience, random distributions, ecosystems based on bacterial production. Both hydrothermal vents and sunken wood provide hard substrates on the otherwise sediment-laden sea floor. The earliest deep-sea discovery cruises first reported the very high diversity and unusual animals associated with wood falls trawled from the sea floor, but the composition of the wood fall fauna remain poorly known. Experimental deployments of wood and a control substrate, basalt, will sample this little-known fauna to determine its composition and relationship with the vent fauna. Individual lengths of wood and basalt cubes in a mesh bag will compose deployment units. Four of these units will be tied to a frame constructed from PVC tubing. Two frames with units will be deployed in the North Pacific Ocean from a surface ship using the CTD wire with a transponder at Axial Volcano at m depth and two deployed on the abyssal plain at m depth. After one year, half of the deployments at each site will be recovered by a Remotely Operated Vehicle to ascend to the surface ship in a lidded box. The other half will be recovered after two years. Because these sites differ in substrate, depth and proximity to hydrothermal venting, the recovered units will likely carry maximal species diversity. Specimens recovered on-board ship will be deposited in The Field Museum collections where existing collections from North Pacific hydrothermal vents will facilitate direct comparisons. Improving the availability of deep-sea specimens will increase our knowledge of wood fall specialists in the North Pacific Ocean, and of their habitat specificity, especially relative to hydrothermal vents doc10619 none This project develops concepts, perspectives, and tools leading toward a conceptually well-founded theory and methodology of nonparametric and robust data analysis in arbitrary dimension. The general framework being developed includes extensions of the traditional tools of one-dimensional analysis as well as tools unique to the higher-dimensional context. A theory of median oriented quantile functions having probabilistic interpretations similar to univariate quantiles is being pursued. A central approach is based on statistical depth functions. A major secondary objective is to bring the depth-based approach to a definitive degree of completion. Topics receiving special focus include multivariate quantile functions, depth functions, vector-valued L-statistics, matrix-valued scale statistics, generalized quantile processes, and generalized L-statistics. Linearization techniques via functional representations are used. Overall, the project advances nonparametric and robust multivariate analysis using quantile methods and addresses a range of specific applications. As the scope of application of multivariate statistical modeling has widened, the treatment of multivariate probability distributions and data has become increasingly important and central. A great deal of univariate statistical analysis is carried out in terms of percentiles, which lend themselves easily to interpretation. The use of percentiles has become fundamental. This project extends such methodology to higher dimension, to support a coherent and meaningful percentiles approach to the analysis and interpretation of multivariate data. Users of multivariate statistics in diverse fields of application thus acquire a tool that is of fundamental importance and conceptually well understood doc10620 none of small-scale effects for all dynamic properties of polymeric fluids. Furthermore, all three contribute towards a prediction of these effects from the structure of the molecules and the thermodynamic state. Both local chain structure and local environment affect the mobility of polymer chains in blends and melts. In this project, local effects on polymer dynamics will be investigated through a small-scale simulation approach. Expressed as local friction coefficients, the simulation results can be combined with coarse-grained theoretical models to make predictions about viscoelastic and diffusion coefficients. Several polymer systems will be investigated in detail in this work and predictions for their dynamics compared with experimental data. Experiments on a large number of miscible polymer blends have shown that blends display complex dynamic behavior resulting from differences in the local environment of the chain segments. The nature of the local heterogeneities, however, is still under discussion and different models for local environments have been proposed. In order to investigate this problem, small-scale simulations will be evaluated based on different models for local heterogeneity and the resulting predictions for dynamic properties of miscible blends will be compared with experimental data. The transport of thermal energy through a dense polymeric fluid is not well understood and often treated independently from other dynamic processes. The work proposed here extends a microscopic lattice network model for heat transport through polymer melts in order to investigate heat transfer between segments on different chains. The results will enable us to develop a coarse-grained lattice model for dynamic properties that incorporates both chain mobility and heat conduction in dense polymeric fluids. %%% Understanding the relationship between the structure of polymer chains and the properties of polymeric materials has been a long-standing goal of polymer science. A case in point are the transport properties of polymers in the liquid state (viscosity, thermal conductivity, diffusion coefficients) which are important in polymer processing and applications, but cannot typically be predicted from the structure of the constituents and the thermodynamic state of the system. The purpose of this theoretical research grant is to add to our understanding of the structure-property relationship by investigating small-scale effects on the dynamic properties of polymeric fluids doc10621 none Donald E. Thomas Carnegie Mellon University Next Generation Software: A Computer System Design Hierarchy for Simulation Computer system design requires reasoning about the interaction of software with the underlying models of hardware resources without limiting such models to single system views. Computer system elements and their interactions are not purely software-functional or purely hardware-structural-they have properties of both. A challenge in computer system design is to define the elements and the means of resolving their interactions, so that software interacting with underlying hardware resources can be modeled flexibly; alternate designs, ones with different numbers and types of processors, network interconnections, and or software schedulers, may be easily considered doc10622 none Mohammed J. Zaki Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute NGS Performance Mining of large-scale Data-Intensive Distributed Object Applications The objective of the proposal is to develop a performance measurements-based run-time environment for supporting large data-intensive distributed object applications. The system will provide continuous and adaptive performance optimization via a combination of performance data mining, critical path discovery and speculative execution. To address these challenges for next generation software systems we propose to develop the PERFMINER engine for the performance mining. PERFMINER, a system for continuous performance optimization via mining, will enable a distributed object system to: 1) discover its own critical path, 2) detect new opportunities for speculative processing, and 3) to facilitate modifying an object s behaviors (i.e., methods) at run-time in response to newly acquired knowledge doc10623 none I-Ling Yen University of Texas-Dallas The PI s proposed to develop new innovative approaches and techniques to advance the component-based development ( CDB) of complex applications. The proposed effort in developing advanced CBD techniques spans three dimensions: The research will enable such capabilities by enabling ontology-based repository, code pattern based component composition and tool suite for component comprehension and customization. Technological advances, such as rapidly increasing computing power and network bandwidth, are enabling advanced high-performance distributed applications that can significantly enhance the quality of education, health care, remote monitoring and control, early warning systems, scientific collaborations, and other high-performance distributed applications doc10624 none ANATOMY OF A BIODIVERSITY HOTSPOT: MARSUPIAL, RODENT, AND BAT DIVERSITY IN NORTHWESTERN ARGENTINA A three-year survey of marsupials, rodents, and bats in northwestern Argentina will be conducted. This is the southernmost part of the Tropical Andes Hotspot designated by Conservation International as the biologically richest area in the world when data on plants, amphibians, mammals, birds, and reptiles are considered together, supporting an exceptional concentration of endemic species. The region also is considered Vulnerable, Regionally Outstanding biologically, and has been given the Highest Priority at both an International and Regional Scale by the World Bank. This biogeographically significant region is largely unexplored biologically. The study area, 469,000 km2, encompasses the high- and low-elevation Andean region and the pre-Andean foothills of the provinces from Jujuy to La Rioja. Major habitats include puna, prepuna, Yungas forest, montane grasslands, Chaco, montane Chaco, and Monte desert. Microhabitat diversity is high and numerous isolated valleys and montane islands exist. The area is a natural corridor for north-south migration of biota and has been hypothesized as a center of diversity for many taxa. It is an ideal area for geographic isolation and subsequent speciation. While the region is being recognized as the most biologically diverse in the world, it also is undergoing exceptional rates of loss of habitat. Economic development activities involving agriculture, overgrazing, tourism, deforestation, mining, dam construction, and oil and gas exploration are placing considerable stress on all habitats. Marsupials, rodents, and bats will be surveyed at numerous localities in northwestern Argentina and voucher specimens will be collected and deposited in museum collections. Data on habitat use, habits, molting, reproduction, and natural history will be recorded. A project database, accessible through the SNOMNH web site, will provide information on identifications, localities, and specimen data. Surveys, checklists, and identification keys will be produced in print and electronic format. New taxa will be described. Research will examine phylogenetic relationships, biogeography, and conservation. Data will aid in choosing sites for preservation and provide baseline information on habitat selection, reproduction, and species composition for major habitats in this threatened region. Related projects include the development of an expedition website, submission of a proposal for an REU supplement, and submission of a proposal for an ISE (Informal Science Education) supplement. The project will include collaborators from the US and Argentina. Argentine and US students will be supported and trained in the field and in the laboratory doc10625 none This proposal requests support for a University of Chicago group for its participation in the construction of the Pierre Auger Observatory. The Pierre Auger Observatory, when completed, is intended to consist of two cosmic ray detectors, one presently under construction in Malargue Argentina, and the other eventually to be in Utah. Each observatory will consist of an array of particle detectors based on detecting Cherenkov light spread over square kilometers complements with atmospheric fluorescence detectors. The arrangement is optimized to detect with maximum efficiency showers initiated by primary cosmic rays with energy greater than electron volts. The southern observatory is being built by a consortium of eighteen nations. The US contribution to the southern $50 million construction project is $7.5 million coming equally from the NSF ( ) and the DOE, with an additional $2 million in project support from Fermilab. At the present time an engineering array of 40 surface particle detectors and two fluorescence detectors is nearing completion. This is necessary in order to verify the entire design including the individual detectors, solar power, wireless communications, and GPS timing. The Chicago group has participated in many aspects of the project. The PI is the spokesman for the entire project, and is the PI for the US construction award ( ) and its DOE counterpart. He has been responsible for the scientific direction of the project. Ken Gibbs has directed the survey for the engineering array, is developing plans for the survey and installation of the full array, and installation of the weather monitoring stations. Brian Fick has developed the weather monitors and is task leader for development of the hybrid software, which combines data from the surface and fluorescence detectors. Paul Sommers is the task leader for the fluorescence detectors doc10626 none Thu D. Nguyen Rutgers University System and Compiler Support for Component-Based Construction of Scalable Internet Services The principal investigators propose to investigate system and compiler support for an emerging class of Scalable Internet Service (SIS) applications. This proposed work will be motivated by the emergence of the Internet as the global, ubiquitous networking infrastructure, and its accompanying computing model where much of the computing takes place on servers rather than local machines. SIS applications provide a rich set of services such as on-line auctions, stock exchanges, and instant messaging to diverse clients worldwide doc10627 none University of Delaware-Guang R. Gao A Framework for Developing Complex Applications On High-End Petaflop-Class Machines This research proposes to develop novel software technologies for supporting the design and implementation of complex applications on next-generation high-performance computers such as the IBM Blue Gene machine, the teraflop-class systems of the ASCI program, and the architecture (s) proposed in the NSF peta-flops point-design studies. Future high-performance computers such as these will have large numbers of processors (from a few thousand to several hundred thousands, or even more), and a complex multilevel memory hierarchy with memories physically distributed across different parts of the machine. To use such machines effectively, enormous amounts of parallelism must be exposed in user programs, and careful attention must be paid to the latency and bandwidth of access to different levels of the memory hierarchy. The applications enabled by such high-end machines are also expected to be significantly more complex and dynamic than applications in the past. Therefore, supporting the development of such applications on next-generation high-end computers is a major software challenge doc10628 none James C. Browne University of Texas The goal of this project is to develop the tools needed for performance-directed integrated design and control of complex applications running on distributed computational systems. Its target computational systems are complex, incorporating the difficult heterogeneity, latency, and adaptive properties of computational grids. Its target applications are at the cutting edge of computational science: very large, complex applications with adaptive characteristics that do not allow their optimal system configurations or computational requirements to be estimated prior to run time. Each application will be viewed as a composition of components, with a formal, high fidelity model of performance to be designed for each component. The approach is to use model-based adaptive run-time control, based on these composed performance models, to control the execution of the application to meet specified performance goals. The control strategy will make real-time changes to parameters that modify the behavior of both application and computational platform doc10629 none S. Hedayat The investigator together with his co-researchers study and employ a combination of mathematical, statistical, and computational tools which are useful in discovering new orthogonal arrays useful for multifatorial experiments. Proper and relevant small Chebyshev-systems and maximum principles will be developed for identifying and constructing optimal designs for non-linear models. When needed genetic algorithms will be developed for the purpose of explicitly constructing optimal and near optimal designs useful for linear and non-linear models. This proposal develops new methods and theory for the purpose of collecting informative and cost effective data. Two broad cases are considered. Those cases where data are controlled by many factors, and those cases where medicinal chemists are seeking for natural products with chemotherapeutic and chemopreventive properties among thousands of agents. In both cases the goal is to collect the minimum amount of data with maximum info cost value. The proposed research has important applications in collecting and analyzing raw optical density data used by medicinal chemists. This research provides a mechanism for integrating, coordinating and expanding interdisciplinary interaction between statisticians and researchers in the areas of pharmaceutical and medical sciences. The emerging uses of natural products in preventing and treating disease add urgency to a portion of the proposed research. The outcomes of this proposal will also assist scientists working on research projects sponsored by NIH Office of Dietary Supplements (DOS) and National Centers for Complementary and Alternative Medicines (NCCAM doc10630 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Hyperbolic Conservation Laws in Continuum Physics Dafermos The research program lies on the interface between continuum physics and the theory of hyperbolic systems of conservation laws. It involves the following two projects: (a) the study of the geometric structure of weak solutions to hyperbolic conservation laws that are merely bounded and measurable but not necessarily of bounded variation; (b) the study of the interaction between nonlinear hyperbolicity and damping induced by viscous or electromagnetic effects. Hyperbolic conservation laws are nonlinear systems of partial differential equations that govern the dynamic behavior of materials with nonlinear elastic response, such as air, rubber etc. Nonlinearity induces the development of discontinuities propagating as shock waves. The research project will investigate to what extent the destabilizing action of shocks may be checked by damping mechanisms induced by viscous or electromagnetic effects doc10631 none Wubah The goal of the James Madison University (JMU) UMEB is to recruit, mentor and train minority students to become productive scientists through hands-on research experiences. The program will be built on existing partnerships with Blue Ridge Community College (BRCC) and Northern Virginia Community College (NVCC). Students recruited from the participating institutions will progress from performing experiments proposed by a JMU faculty mentor to designing their own workable experiments to solve specific environmental problems in the Shenandoah Valley. Students and two community college faculty members will be assigned to a laboratory during the residential summer program. In addition, faculty and participants will take part in seminars presented by scientists, weekly group research meetings, journal clubs, workshops in scientific writing, career development and graduate school admission process and field trips to selected sites. The summer program will end with a research symposium, where students will present their research in oral and poster formats. During the academic year, students in the Harrisonburg area will continue their research and seminars will be held through videoconferencing with NVCC participants. The program will provide a supportive network that will develop skills needed to succeed as environmental scientists doc10632 none Lichens are poorly known symbiotic organisms that occur world-wide on bark, rocks and soil. Outside of the Arctic there are no comprehensive identification books available. The current investigation involves a 10-year collaboration among over 70 scientists from 15 countries to develop a modern identification book for northwestern Mexico and southwestern USA, a region covering 600,000 square miles and designated the greater Sonoran Desert region. Adjacent mountains as well as the desert are included in the region. Although the collecting phase involving over a dozen major scientific expeditions is now concluded, analysis of specimens is still on-going. Current funding will allow final analyses and development of appropriate classifications to go into the second and final volume of the identification book (the first one is essentially complete). In addition, current funding will allow development of an internet identification system based on the almost species recognized from the region. The final product will include two books covering the species and include species descriptions, distribution maps, keys for identification of the species and an extensive introduction. An alternative version will be available over the internet. The treatment will almost 50% of the lichen species known from North America and as a consequence will have significance beyond the immediate geographic region covered. Because lichens are well known to be sensitive to air pollution and are important components of many ecosystems, it is anticipated that the results will be of considerable interest to land managers, air pollution specialists, scientists and public interest groups concerned with natural ecosystems doc10633 none for DMS - The project can be conditionally divided into the following (related) parts: Study of periodic metrics (including area-minimizing properties of flats in normed spaces, symplectic filling volumes for Finsler metrics, asymptotic volume growth of Finsler tori, Riemannian metrics without conjugate points on products, and Lagrangian systems on tori without conjugate points); Relationship between bi-Lipschitz equivalence and quasi-isometries (with the most intriguing cases of general Penrose tilings and finitely presented groups, including co-compact lattices in the same Lie group); Products of non-commuting maps, flows of positive metric entropy, and sequential dynamics; Applications of geometry of non-positive curvature to algorithmics and dynamics; Geometry of non-negatively-curved manifolds (foliations by minimal surfaces, isolated flat totally geodesic tori); the PI s graduate students work on generalizations of the Finite Distance Theorem to non-Abelian groups, approximations of embedded surfaces with small variation of Gaussian curvature by developing surfaces, constructing Lipschitz homeomorphisms with prescribed Jacobians, generating certain groups by products of conjugates of elements from a bounded subset. The first part of the project deals with large-scale invariants of periodic metrics. Their physical analogs are macroscopic properties of periodic media (such as a crystal substance), and the problem is to understand how such properties can be recovered from microscopic characteristics and vice versa. A large part of the project belongs to a borderline between geometry and dynamics, and in particular new applications of geometric methods. For instance, problems of stability in sequential dynamics model situations where the laws of evolution of an object (for instance, a physical or an ecological system) are subject to small perturbations; it is desirable to understand the result of such perturbations in the large time scale. There are also applications of modern geometry of singular spaces to problems originated from statistical physics (such as estimates on the number of collisions of particles in gas models, a problem that goes back to Boltzmann), and to computational problems (such as: how to numerically find a shortest path between around several obstacles). The last part of the project deals with stability of geometric objects described by curvature-type characteristics. Indeed, whenever we study a geometric object (for instance, a surface), we deal with imprecise information. Thus it is important to understand whether small deviations in this information can result in crucial changes for the geometric object (or even a non-existence of a model object doc10634 none Josep Torrellas University of Illinois NGS: Collaborative Research: SmartApps: An Application Centric Approach to High Performance Computing The objective of this proposal is to develop new methods that allows runtime performance optimization by an enhanced monitoring, resource modeling, evaluation and remapping of the application at runtime, depending on runtime resources and application performance. The specific approaches to be pursued include application algorithm adaptation, run-time software optimization, system configuration selection and tuning reconfigurable OS services doc10635 none Lawrence Rauchwerger Texas Engineering Experiment Station NGS: Collaborative Research: SmartApps: An Application Centric Approach to High Performance Computing The objective of this proposal is to develop new methods that allows runtime performance optimization by an enhanced monitoring, resource modeling, evaluation and remapping of the application at runtime, depending on runtime resources and application performance. The specific approaches to be pursued include application algorithm adaptation, run-time software optimization, system configuration selection and tuning reconfigurable OS services doc10636 none Survey of the Andean Butterfly Fauna of Ecuador The purpose of this award is to contribute to the cataloging of the World s declining biodiversity and to make that knowledge available to specialists and the general public. Butterflies constitute perhaps the most familiar, conspicuous and well-studied group of insects. This award will be instrumental in aiding a comprehensive survey of the butterfly fauna of the Ecuadorian Andes, one of the most species-rich but also threatened habitats on Earth. This project has two main objectives: to compile and synthesize data on the geographic and elevational distribution of the c. species of butterflies occurring in Andean Ecuador, with critical evaluation of the taxonomic status of all species; and to continue to improve the national collection in Ecuador and train Ecuadorian scientists in bioinventory techniques. Field work will take place in under-sampled regions of the country, concentrate on taxonomic groups poorly represented in existing collections, and use a variety of underutilized field techniques to maximize the number of known and undescribed species recorded from each study site. This project will result in the most complete inventory of the butterfly fauna for any Andean country. It is estimated that as many as 200 species within the study area will need to be described. Identification keys will be published in journals and in interactive, electronic form to be accessible to non-specialists. Information on the distributions for all species will be presented as an electronic database supplied to principal conservation groups within Ecuador and made available on the World Wide Web. Comprehensive specimen collections will be deposited in the USA and the host country, in addition to a collection of alcohol-preserved material for molecular study. It is hoped that the collections within the host country and published taxonomic studies will provide the basis for a long-term, national research program on butterfly systematics, biology and conservation. The distributional data set will be the largest, most extensive and at the finest spatial scale available for any group of Neotropical insects. The potential applications of these data are numerous, including testing biogeographical hypotheses concerning the origins of the west Andean (Choco) fauna and the montane faunas on both slopes, examining the effects of elevational gradients on species richness, testing the value of butterflies and butterfly groups as indicators of biodiversity, mapping the strength and type of biogeographic transition zones throughout the country, investigating patterns of species richness and endemism, and identifying priority areas for conservation in these highly threatened Andean forests doc10637 none Aluru, Srinivas. Iowa State University CISE Postdoctoral Associates in Experimental Computer Science: Parallel Hierarchical Methods for Computational Electromagnetics The goal of this research is to develop parallel algorithms and build parallel software for the solution of a wide variety of problems involving the computational analysis of electromagnetic scattering. Specific problems of interest are: 1) electromagnetic scattering from quasi-planar surfaces, 2) dielectric random rough surfaces, 3) multiregion surfaces, 4) three-dimensional problems where the fields are characterized by frequency and 5) three-dimensional problems where the field behavior is dependent on time history. The unifying theme in addressing these problems will be the use of the hierarchical Fast Multipole Method and its variants. A major goal of the research is to develop the capability to solve highly non-uniform problems efficiently. Emphasis will be placed on the development of distribution-independent algorithms, i.e., provably efficient algorithms for which the run-time is independent of the distribution without making any assumptions on either the range of distributions or the limited precision of computer arithmetic. The postdoctoral research associate will develop and validate software employing these algorithms in close cooperation with experts in electromagnetics at Iowa State University. Validation of the results will be carried out via comparisons against experimental data as well as numerical results obtained from slower, established solvers. The associate will perform experimental evaluation of the performance of the software using conventional parallel computers and high-performance clusters. Aluru, Srinivas. Iowa State University CISE Postdoctoral Associates in Experimental Computer Science: Parallel Hierarchical Methods for Computational Electromagnetics The goal of this research is to develop parallel algorithms and build parallel software for the solution of a wide variety of problems involving the computational analysis of electromagnetic scattering. Specific problems of interest are: 1) electromagnetic scattering from quasi-planar surfaces, 2) dielectric random rough surfaces, 3) multiregion surfaces, 4) three-dimensional problems where the fields are characterized by frequency and 5) three-dimensional problems where the field behavior is dependent on time history. The unifying theme in addressing these problems will be the use of the hierarchical Fast Multipole Method and its variants. A major goal of the research is to develop the capability to solve highly non-uniform problems efficiently. Emphasis will be placed on the development of distribution-independent algorithms, i.e., provably efficient algorithms for which the run-time is independent of the distribution without making any assumptions on either the range of distributions or the limited precision of computer arithmetic. The postdoctoral research associate will develop and validate software employing these algorithms in close cooperation with experts in electromagnetics at Iowa State University. Validation of the results will be carried out via comparisons against experimental data as well as numerical results obtained from slower, established solvers. The associate will perform experimental evaluation of the performance of the software using conventional parallel computers and high-performance clusters doc10638 none The 43rd Annual Maize Genetics Conference is being held March 15-18, in Lake Geneva, WI. The meeting offers members of the Maize Genetics community the opportunity to present and discuss their most recent research results. A wide range of topics are covered, ranging from classical to molecular genetics. The 43rd Annual meeting features 45 minute talks by four invited speakers, 15 minute talks given by individual participants, two poster sessions, and two workshops. The invited speakers are: Alice Barkan, University of Oregon; Kelly Dawe, University of Georgia; June Nasrallah, Cornell University; and Laurie Smith, University of California-San Diego. The workshops focus on two timely topics: Comparative Genomics of Maize and Rice and Bioinformatics. This award provides partial support toward student participation in the conference. The Maize Genetics meeting provides an outstanding opportunity for graduate students to meet and interact with scientists in the field, to discuss their research ideas as talks or posters, and to begin to establish the scientific networks that will prove invaluable throughout their careers doc10639 none Vikram S. Adve University of Illinois-Urbana The goal of this project is to develop the tools needed for performance-directed integrated design and control of complex applications running on distributed computational systems. Its target computational systems are complex, incorporating the difficult heterogeneity, latency, and adaptive properties of computational grids. Its target applications are at the cutting edge of computational science: very large, complex applications with adaptive characteristics that do not allow their optimal system configurations or computational requirements to be estimated prior to run time. Each application will be viewed as a composition of components, with a formal, high fidelity model of performance to be designed for each component. The approach is to use model-based adaptive run-time control, based on these composed performance models, to control the execution of the application to meet specified performance goals. The control strategy will make real-time changes to parameters that modify the behavior of both application and computational platform doc10640 none This action will continue the research on the GrADS technologies for building Grid applications and to expand their applicability to new classes of applications. In particular, the work will concentrate on workflow- style applications from mesoscale weather forecasting and computational biology. In addition, it will explore enhanced technologies for automatic construction of grid applications from high-level specifications, along with new mechanisms for performance monitoring and rescheduling. The results will be demonstrated on new versions of the two GrADS testbeds doc10641 none Li A program of research related to the application of pseudoframes for subspaces (PFFS) and relevant interpolation techniques is proposed. Theme 1 of the program studies the contribution of PFFSs to artifact reduction in data image compression. Key observations lie in the fact that there are symmetric and compactly supported biorthogonal wavelets, but not within an MRA (of compactly supported wavelets). It shows the lack of room within the MRA subspace structure. PFFS is a tool to explore the insight story of such a phenomenon. Theme 2 focuses on a new construction approach of interpolatory multiresolution analysis (I-MRA). The key observation is that an interpolatory sequence can be defined by sampled reproducing kernel function of a subspace V of an MRA. It is expected that such an interpolatory sequence can easily form a basis or frame of V, giving rise to an interpolatory interface to the MRA, and a construction methodology of I-MRA. Theme 3 studies applications of PFFSs in the Sinc-type methods for interpolations and quadratures. The motivation is to explore the advantage of fast decaying properties of PFFSs in the Sinc-type applications. In theme 4, the P.I. expects to apply similar interpolation techniques as described in theme 2 to study multi- band samplings using frames and or PFFSs as fundamental tools. The technique of PFFSs with their flexibility is expected to play a role. Each research topic is highly motivated by its applications in data image compression, sampling and interpolation for efficient numerical implementations. PFFS is a tool to study a subspace V while standing outside of it. In doing so, one is given the freedom and additional room to perform tasks in V by using advanced tools not available in V. In signal image processing, such advanced properties of PFFS are extremely useful because it is known that biorthogonal wavelets of finite length with symmetry are desirable for reducing ``blocking and ``ringing effects, and yet such biorthogonal wavelets do not reside in its dual wavelet subspace. We believe that PFFS shall not only provide a class of biorthogonal wavelet examples, the additional information (known from the construction) contributed by PFFS will provide practical insight about blocking and ringing artifacts, and thereby delivers new solutions and enhanced signal image compression rate and communication speed. Other applications of PFFSs in irregular sampling (for multi-band functions) as well as in the Sinc-type methods (for interpolation and quadratures) are all based on applying flexible properties of PFFSs. The expectations include enhanced practical efficiency and improved rate of convergence. The project on interpolatory multiresolution analysis has practical applications in data acquisition sampling while simultaneously performing the wavelet transform. One of the key ingredients of the study is to build an interpolatory interface to a given MRA and still keep the underlying desirable wavelet properties doc10642 none EIA: Rajive Bagrodia University of California-Los Angeles The goal of this project is to develop the tools needed for performance-directed integrated design and control of complex applications running on distributed computational systems. Its target computational systems are complex, incorporating the difficult heterogeneity, latency, and adaptive properties of computational grids. Its target applications are at the cutting edge of computational science: very large, complex applications with adaptive characteristics that do not allow their optimal system configurations or computational requirements to be estimated prior to run time. Each application will be viewed as a composition of components, with a formal, high fidelity model of performance to be designed for each component. The approach is to use model-based adaptive run-time control, based on these composed performance models, to control the execution of the application to meet specified performance goals. The control strategy will make real-time changes to parameters that modify the behavior of both application and computational platform doc10643 none The proposer will study periods of irregular connections and Reimann Roch type problems for Gauss-Manin connections associated to irregular connections. The focus will be on proving a conjectured formula for the determinant of the Gauss-Manin connection. He will study applications of this formula to epsilon factors in arithmetic and to the theory of co-adjoint orbits in representation theory and symplectic geometry. At the same time, the proposer will investigate whether periods of irregular connections can be subsumed in a theory of contravariant motives for singular varieties. Certain numbers like pi and e play a central role in mathematics. In some cases, these numbers are periods . Essentially, they arise where geometry meets number theory. Other such numbers (irregular periods) seem to be fundamentally non-geometric and non-number theoretic in nature. This proposal is an attempt to better understand these irregular periods. The key idea is the observation of a Japanese mathematician, Terasoma, that even though one has no geometric construction of these irregular periods, they are known in some cases to satisfy formulae which are analogous to the formulae satisfied by other objects (called epsilon factors) arising in number theoretic algebraic geometry doc10644 none This collaborative research project with Jerry Harrington, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, will develop and test a radiation-transfer model for snow photochemistry. The model will help quantify the extent of photochemical processing of trace compounds within snow and will help in interpreting ice core climate records and understanding atmospheric chemistry in snow-covered regions. The project includes a laboratory-based program of experiments to quantify absorption spectra and quantum yields. Experimental measurements of photolysis rates for bromoform, a possible precursor of active bromine in a proposed mechanism of Arctic boundary-layer ozone depletion, and other trace compounds in snow interstitial spaces will be made in a novel snow photolysis chamber doc10645 none Professor Mary Berry of the University of South Dakota is supported by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program to study the excited state decay dynamics of vapor phase lanthanide complexes. These experiments represent the first application of spectroscopic molecular beam methods to the case of lanthanide complexes, complementing studies by others on alkali, alkaline earth and transition metals. Resonance Enhanced Multiphoton Ionization (REMPI) spectroscopy will be employed to investigate europium (III) complexed with organic ligands. The initial focus will be on the feasibility of REMPI detection in these molecular systems. These gas phase studies will allow the spectroscopy and dynamics to be determined without the convoluting factors of crystal strain and solvent and ion interactions. Lanthanide compounds are important in energy applications and are used as materials for lasers, for example. A more thorough understanding of the spectroscopy of these compounds will prove useful in developing new optical materials. The PI has an excellent mentoring record including Native American students doc10646 none The primary objective of this project is a comprehensive inventory of the approximately 6,000 vascular plant species of Pakistan. This will be accomplished primarily by completion of the remaining family-level treatments of the published Flora of Pakistan, and all funds granted for this project are directed toward preparation of those treatments by Pakistani botanists and their international collaborators, including Pakistan s senior botanist, Dr. Syed Ali, who is co-principal investigator. Treatments of 203 families are already in print, leaving only 10 to be published. However, these include large families for the region such as Asteraceae, Cyperaceae, and Scrophulariaceae, and include an estimated 25% of all the species. Work supported with other funding will assemble the published information in a web-accessible relational database of all plant species in Pakistan. The ultimate goal of the project is a complete modern flora of a large but relatively poorly studied region of South Asia, and the first complete floristic database for the region. Completion of the Flora of Pakistan is an essential first step to understanding, managing, and preserving the biodiversity of Pakistan. Information from the project will provide scientists and government officials with critical data for resource management, including selection of areas for conservation priority and of plants for use in restorations for erosion control and reforestation doc10647 none Knobler This U.S.-Mexico award will support a workshop on current problems in complex fluids with a particular emphasis on self-assembling systems. The workshop, which will take place in Oaxaca, Mexico, July 10-14, in conjunction with a major international meeting on statistical physics, STATPHYS 21, is being co-organized by Dr. Charles M. Knobler, UCLA and Dr. Carmen Varea, of the Institute of Physics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and colleagues at UNAM and at the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosi. This activity is being jointly supported between the Division of International Programs and the Chemistry Division of NSF. The workshop will discuss current developments in the field of self-assembling systems and related areas and help to stimulate joint research initiatives between the US and Mexican research communities. The area of complex fluids is a multidisciplinary research area that has attracted increased attention over the past decade due to a variety of technological applications as well as connections to nanoscale and biomimetic materials. A variety of materials fall under this category, sharing common properties useful in attempts to describe and characterize them doc10648 none This project proposes to develop statistical methods useful for the analysis of correlated, non-normally distributed data. Such data arises commonly in clinical trials, in familial genetic studies, in ecological studies, and in a variety of other contexts when binary or count data is gathered on the same subject, on the same family, at the same site, or from the plot of land. Failure to account for correlations in the analysis of such data can readily lead to misleading conclusions. The methods will be based on deriving unbiased estimating equations for both variance components and regression parameters within the context of a generalized linear mixed model. The goal is to derive methods of wide utility with good small sample performance. The performance of the newly developed methods will be assessed on their own with regard to ease of computation, lack of bias, smallness of mean square error, the ease with which accurate standard errors can be computed, and the ease of calculating accurate confidence intervals and performing hypothesis tests. The methods will also be compared to extant methods (maximum likelihood, higher order Laplace approximations, penalized quasi-likelihood and generalized estimating equations) using the same criteria doc10649 none Systematics and Biogeography of the Herpetofauna of Papua New Guinea New Guinea, the world s largest and highest tropical island, has more than 530 species of amphibians and reptiles, about 5% of the world total. However, much of New Guinea remains poorly known and it is estimated that as many as 200 species remain unknown to science. This project focuses on inventorying unexplored regions of Papua New Guinea, a country that occupies the eastern half of the island of New Guinea as well as associated archipelagos to the north. The principal investigators will conduct intensive inventories of amphibians and reptiles of ten major unstudied areas, provide logistical support for concordant studies of mammals, land snails, scorpions, aquatic insects and other groups, train at least five Papua New Guinea citizens as parataxonomists, and supervise two Papua New Guinea graduate students in research being done as requirements for Master s Degrees. This study will result in the description of new species, a much better understanding of the fauna (particularly its evolution and biogeography), compilation of a comprehensive spatial database on the distribution of species, and publication of illustrated field guides with keys. It also will provide essential information for conservation planning, and will help advance and refine biodiversity predictive modeling methodology (BIORAP) that uses locality information from museum specimen collections to identify priority areas for conservation doc10650 none A five-year survey will be conducted of the biodiversity of the Gaoligongshan region of western Yunnan Province, People s Republic of China. The Gaoligongshan region, which extends from the eastern Himalayas to southern Yunnan Province, is recognized by global conservation agencies as one of the hottest of biodiversity hotspots worldwide. At the heart of this region lies the Gaoligongshan, a spectacular high ridge of mountains running some 600 km from north to south near the border between southwestern China and northeastern Myanmar (Burma). Unlike much of the surrounding area, the forests of the Gaoligongshan have remained largely intact because of their remote location. The survey will be very broad taxonomically and include the following groups: bryophytes and vascular plants, diatoms, arthropods, and vertebrates. The foundation for this project consists of a three-way collaboration between the California Academy of Sciences (CAS), the Kunming Institute of Botany, and the Kunming Institute of Zoology. To provide sufficient scientific expertise for our endeavor, the three primary institutions will collaborate with a number of other institutions that maintain vigorous research programs on the Chinese biota: the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, the Institute of Zoology in Beijing, Hunan Normal University, the Missouri Botanical Garden, Harvard University, and the United States National Herbarium. A large number of experts have been recruited worldwide to aid in the identification of specimens belonging to the most species-rich taxonomic groups (plants and arthropods). The CAS will collaborate directly with the Yunnan Cultural Relics and Archaeology Institute in a survey of quaternary cave deposits. This will complement the neontological survey by providing a picture of how the Gaoligongshan s vertebrate fauna has changed since the mid-Holocene with the advent of intensive agriculture. The project includes a major training component for Chinese graduate students, postgraduates, and employees at nature reserves. The information generated from this project will provide the basic knowledge necessary for sound management and conservation decisions affecting the Gaoligongshan ecosystem. The collections resulting from the project will be used by members of the project team in various scientific endeavors, from the publication of monographs to molecular phylogenetic studies. The data also will be used as the basis for more specific studies of evolutionary patterns and processes, such as tests of biogeographic models of the northern hemisphere, biodiversity and environmental patterns through time and space, and the utility of the hotspot concept in predicting the diversity of poorly inventoried groups doc10651 none The general objective of this project is the development of techniques in the calculus of variations, geometric measure theory, and in the regularity theory for systems of partial differential equations to address equilibrium and stability problems involving both bulk and surface energies, and where the admissible fields develop fast, multiple scale oscillations, and well as defect concentrations. The underlying models include singularly perturbed energies, multiscale homogenization, shape optimization for gradient-constrained functionals, and multiscale problems for dimension reduction. The research activity will be motivated by contemporary issues in materials science and solid physics, where the contribution of mathematicians has already paved the way to important advances in the theoretical understanding of advanced materials and in high-technology performance. Emerging issues require state-of-the-art techniques in applied analysis, new ideas, and the introduction of innovative tools. The program contemplates the study of phase transformations (e.g. nucleation and growth of phases, dynamics of phase boundaries, multi-phase elasto-plastic materials), micromagnetism and ferromagnetism, nanostructures and thin films, optimal design of composites, and multiple scale problems. Date: May 30, doc10652 none Inventory of the Ferns and Fern Allies of Hawaii In Hawaii ferns and fern allies make up approximately one-sixth of the total native vascular flora and comprise a very important element of the vegetation. Unfortunately, there is no modern inventory of these plants. Many are poorly known and understood, and many are rare, threatened, or endangered. The objective of this project is to complete and publish a manual containing a description and key to identification of the species, varieties, and hybrids of all the ferns and fern allies of Hawaii. The manual will complement the two-volume Manual of the Flowering Plants of Hawaii by W. L. Wagner (no relation), D. R. Herbst, and S. H. Sohmer ( ). Descriptions of 70 percent of the species have been completed with support of two previous NSF grants, but problems exist in determining the names and relationships of many of the remaining taxa. Field surveys in Hawaii will be made and herbarium collections will be studied, especially at the Bishop Museum, Honolulu. Volunteer botanists in Hawaii have already augmented our knowledge of existing species, finding some that were thought to be extinct. Explorations by them in seemingly inaccessible locations will contribute substantially to the completion of the manual. Photocopies of fresh specimens collected in the field will be used for illustrations in the manual. Duplicate specimens will be distributed to herbaria throughout the world. A database for Hawaiian ferns will be developed. The Hawaiian ferns suggests taxonomic problems beyond the scope of the manual. The islands are geographically the most isolated in the world, and, without land bridges to the continents, the ferns have adapted and evolved in diverse ways. A complete manual of the ferns and fern allies will encourage and enable botanists to study questions of their origin and evolution. Hawaii has many naturalists and non-professional botanists who, for years, have been asking for a manual with which to identify this important element of the vegetation, before the invasion of exotic species and encroaching development eliminate more of this flora doc10653 none We work on two outstanding open problems in the statistical mechanics of charged particle systems. The first one is equivalent to the universality conjecture of the local eigenvalue statistics of random matrices, an equilibrium problem. The second one is the construction of relativistic Vlasov kinetic theory from a microscopic model, a nonequilibrium problem. As to the first problem, we use a new, entirely analytic strategy to extend the known universality for the unitary matrices also to the other types of random matrices: real symmetric, complex normal, and quaternionic self-dual. The strategy applies to the bulk and to the edge of the spectrum. We also apply our method to the study of the Laughlin wave function of superconductivity, which is of a related structure. As for the second problem, we use the recently laid microscopic dynamical foundations of relativistic many-particle theory to establish the first derivation of relativistic Vlasov kinetic theory in form of a weak law of large numbers. We also study its fluctuations around the limit in form of a central limit theorem. The universality conjecture is currently one of the top priority problems of random matrix theory, a subfield of probability and mathematical physics. Its applications range from nuclear physics, nanotechnology and superconductivity on the physics and technology side to deep number theoretical implications on the mathematical side - which in turn have applications in cryptography and related fields. The conjecture has been proven so far for the simplest type of matrices, but a proof for more general matrices has so far been elusive. The relativistic Vlasov theory of charged particle systems forms the dynamical basis for a large part of high temperature plasma physics, with applications ranging from thermonuclear fusion research to space plasma research, e.g. about the solar wind and magnetic storms. Its microscopic atomic underpinnings, which have so far eluded researchers, will make it possible for the first time to systematically study the accuracy of Vlasov theory and in particular to compute its leading corrections doc10654 none 100 Years of Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt)- A Colloquium One of the major issues in the public domain today is the controversy regarding the cultivation of modified plants. This issue is international in scope and involves farmers, consumers, pesticide manufacturers, environmentalists, and multinational corporations. Heated debates on the Internet and demonstrations on the streets outside meeting rooms have ensured that these issues receive daily press coverage. Perhaps the single trait most vigorously discussed is the use of the toxin of the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). The gene for this toxin has been cloned and introduced into a wide variety of plants, including cotton, corn, and wheat. Previously, the toxin has been sprayed on crops- apparently without ill effects-protecting primarily against Lepidopteron insects. A major controversy has not erupted with the demonstration that, under certain conditions, the toxin will kill monarch butterflies. The use of Bt to improve plants serves as the paradigm for all genetic engineering of plants. The primary objective of the proposed colloquium is to consider all aspects of Bt, but focus on modified plants. We will analyze the scientific background of Bt and consider such questions as its mode of action, mechanism of insect resistance to the toxin, and its effect on nontarget organisms. Other questions that will be considered are questions of food safety of modified plants, threats to biodiversity from the use of Bt, and the effect on the use of chemical pesticides resulting from these modifications. We plan to convene this colloquium March 30-April 1, , in Tucson, Arizona. Although the toxic properties of Bt were discovered a century ago, this is the first far-ranging colloquium that has been held on this subject. The colloquium will bring together scientists with broad expertise to consider the science of an issue with broad political and social implications. Participants will have expertise in the following scientific disciplines: microbiology, entomology, ecology, population biology, risk assessment, and plants. Following the colloquium, a report will be developed-in both print and electronic formats-that will be analytical and comprehensive, yet offer practical recommendations doc10655 none The investigator outlines how to continue his work started in the prior proposal to develop a new, probabilistic approach to positional games (i.e. combinatorial board games). The straightforward way to analyze a position is to examine all of its options and all the options of these options and all the options of the options of these options and so on. The obvious difficulty of this exhaustive search through the game-tree is that it takes enormous amount of time. An attempt to make up for the lack of time is to study the random walk on the game-tree, i.e. the randomized game where both players play randomly. The basic idea is that the statistical analysis of the randomized game can be efficiently converted via potential arguments into deterministic optimal strategies. It is basically a game-theoretic adaptation of the so-called Probabilistic Method in Combinatorics ( Erdos theory ) applied to hopelessly complicated games where the exact methods fail to work. It is very surprising how this ``desperate attempt turns out to be successful for large, interesting classes of positional games. Carrying out the program sketched in his prior proposal the investigator have developed a game theoretic second moment method for fair games, and applied it to solve long-standing open problems in graph and hypergraph games. Another great success was his work toward game-theoretic independence (i.e. game theoretic Lovasz Local Lemma). In this direction the investigator achieved an important partial result, which led to the solution of the long-standing Hales-Jewett conjecture about the multi-dimensional Tic-Tac-Toe game. In this new proposal the investigator aims for a biased generalization of his game-theoretic second moment method, which would create a breakthrough in game-theoretic random graph theory . Also the investigator wants to continue his work to prove a perfect game-theoretic analogue of the probabilistic Lovasz Local Lemma. Traditional game theory focuses on games of incomplete information. The traditional theory provided good insights to Economics, and many areas of social science (Management, Military Strategy, etc.). One can expect at least as many new applications from a successful theory of games of complete information. Positional games, i.e. 2-player pure conflict games of skill like Chess and Go, form the most natural and interesting subclass of games of complete information. An extremely exciting aspect of studying positional games is that they give unique insight to how human intelligence works. It concerns fundamental questions like whether human understanding is a computational or non-computational process. Or more specific problems like to understand why (say) Go playing computer programs are nowhere close to the best human players. In contrast to Go, the best Chess-playing programs have reached the level of human Grandmasters. Game-playing computer programs examine millions of positions before deciding what to do next. On the other hand, even the best Grandmasters do not search more than 50 positions per move. In human Chess and particularly in human Go pattern recognition plays a far more important role than search. How to supply this human knowledge to a computer is a puzzle that no one has solved yet. A more concrete theoretical significance of this proposal is that it brings the seemingly separated subjects of Probability Theory, Combinatorics, and Game Theory closer to each other in an unexpected way doc10656 none Research is proposed on the following topics: 1. Breakup of liquid jets: This research will mathematically analyze the capillary breakup of jets of Newtonian and viscoelastic liquids. The effect of polymer additives in suppressing breakup is well known and exploited both in nature (spider webs) and in technology (control of drops sizes in spraying of liquids). The research will concentrate on the asymptotics of breakup and compare various constitutive theories. 2. Stability of viscoelastic flows: Elastic instabilities have been investigated extensively over the past ten years. Such instabilities often pose limits for polymer processing conditions. In the numerical investigation of instabilities in complex flows, continuous spectra which are poorly resolved pose a significant challenge. The research is aimed at using analytical techniques to determine the location of these continuous spectra. 3. Shape control in elasticity: An elastic medium is controlled by actuators which can supply a stress of a given type. The research will investigate the question whether such controls can achieve a given shape of the medium. 4. Numerical simulation of two-fluid flows: The research will continue work on simulation of flows of two liquids using a volume of fluid code. The following three problems will be investigated: a) Formation of ``staircase structures on impacting drops due to capillary waves. b) Tipstreaming in drop breakup under shear when surfactants are present. c) Effect of normal stresses on breakup of viscoelastic drops under shear. The proposed research addresses fundamental issues which arise in the processing and use of polymeric liquids, the control of deformations of elastic solids and the formation of emulsions by shear mixing. The proposed topics include a comparison of the qualitative behavior various models of polymeric fluids in jet breakup, the stability of polymeric flows, the question which shapes of an elastic medium can be achieved by a given type of control, and the development of numerical methods for two-fluid flows doc10657 none STOCHASTIC MODELS FOR QUEUEING AND FINANCE NSF Proposal: Principal Investigator: Steven E. Shreve Work is proposed in two areas. The first is the analysis of queueing systems with deadlines under heavy traffic conditions. Consider a queueing system with renewal process arrival streams. Suppose that upon arrival, each customer is assigned a lead time, the amount of time until the customer s deadline for service elapses. One can model the lead times of the customers in queue at a station as a counting measure on the real line, the location of the point masses corresponding to customer lead times. Research will address the convergence of these measure-valued processes under heavy-traffic scaling. Research will also be directed to mathematical models for finance. On such model is for an option on a traded account. For the simplest of these, an account trading one underlying geometric Brownian motion and a constant-interest-rate money market, there is a strikingly simple optimal rule: hold the geometric Brownian motion long when the account value is negative and short when the account value is positive. For an option on two geometric Brownian motions, there is a conjectured optimal rule, which is supported by numerical analysis. The proof appears to require the development of new mathematics. A second mathematical finance problem concerns the development of a unifying model for risk-neutral pricing of credit derivatives. This research has two parts. The subject of the first part, queueing systems with deadlines, arise in communication networks, especially networks used to transmit digitized video or audio signals. Data which are too long delayed can cause unacceptable disruption of the signal. The proposed research will provide a basis for performance analysis of heavily-loaded communication networks which take deadlines into account. The subject of the second part, mathematical models for finance, builds on the revolution in finance begun by the Black-Scholes option pricing formula. The particular work proposed here is concerned with proper pricing and usage of financial instruments whose purpose is to insure against loss, either due to drastic reduction in market value (options on a traded account) or default (credit derivatives doc10658 none This collaborative research project with William Simpson, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, will develop and test a radiation-transfer model for snow photochemistry. The model will help quantify the extent of photochemical processing of trace compounds within snow and will help in interpreting ice core climate records and understanding atmospheric chemistry in snow-covered regions. The project includes a laboratory-based program of experiments to quantify absorption spectra and quantum yields. Experimental measurements of photolysis rates for bromoform, a possible precursor of active bromine in a proposed mechanism of Arctic boundary-layer ozone depletion, and other trace compounds in snow interstitial spaces will be made in a novel snow photolysis chamber doc10659 none This RUI project addresses photo-refractive macromolecular materials research with emphasis on the synthesis and characterization of new chromophores with appropriate non-linear optical response, and seeks to identify the relationship between phase stability and chromophore reorientation in low-Tg (glass transition temperature) photorefractive polymers. Photorefractive polymers blended with nonlinear optical dye molecules exhibit relatively large refractive index modulations due to spatial reorientation of the dye. An interdisciplinary team of Drew University students and faculty from the Chemistry and Physics departments will fabricate photorefractive polymers spanning a range of materials behavior by synthesizing dye molecules of relatively similar optical properties but considerably different interactions with the host polymer. The phase stability of each composite will be observed through measurements of the time dependent optical absorption coefficient. The refractive index modulation will be determined by diffraction efficiency measurements, and the relative orientational mobility of the dyes will be inferred through frequency dependent transmission ellipsometry. This data will be used to delineate boundaries of the phase-stability orientational-mobility tradeoff, and to improve understanding of dye-polymer interactions and the design of blends suitable for applications. %%% An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area. All of the materials fabrication and optical characterization will occur at Drew University in chemistry and laser laboratories. These laboratories have been developed in part through an NSF-ILI grant Materials science and nonlinear optics in physics and chemistry laboratories and represent an ongoing effort to integrate the fabrication and characterization of nonlinear optical materials with Drew undergraduate instructional labs. The experiments are tabletop in scale and expose students to the photonic and electronic technology valued by employers and graduate schools. Students will also have the opportunity to study the holographic image storage properties of the materials they fabricate through a collaboration between the principal investigator and Dr. G. Wood of the Army Research Lab. The research is intellectually accessible to undergraduates, giving them a sense of ownership in their work. This RUI award will support six summer research students over three years, and will provide equipment support for Honors and Independent Study projects during the academic year. Results will be disseminated in peer-reviewed research literature with student co-authors and presented at professional meetings doc10660 none This proposal addresses one simple question: how can we develop effective multi-agent systems out of the exception-prone (buggy, malicious, or simply dumb ) agents and infrastructures we can expect to encounter in open system contexts? This problem will be addressed by developing technologies that can determine, at run time, what exceptions can occur, as well as what exception detection and resolution strategies are appropriate, for a dynamically changing agent population and system environment. This work will build on two key ideas: (1) it is possible to identify highly reusable domain-independent exception handling expertise, and (2) this expertise can be instantiated in the form of distinct exception handling services that outsource exception handling from the agents, requiring only that they adhere to some relatively simple guidelines. The potential impact of this work will include (1) enabling the creation of multi-agent systems that can function effectively in open contexts, while (2) reducing the burden on agent developers by obviating the need to create agents with sophisticated exception handling capabilities doc10661 none The investigator and co-workers are studying differentiability of functionals of empirical measures and distribution functions. In one dimension, p-variation norms work well for Frechet differentiability. Extensions to several dimensions are being pursued. In Bayes asymptotics, normal approximations with small relative errors are being found even for small probabilities of intermediate deviations. In Bayes asymptotics, one of the goals is to choose the best of several statistical models, possibly for multiple data sets. For example, multiple clinical trials may be done of a treatment for a disease. Three models are that the treatment is helpful, is harmful, or makes no difference. Further models incorporate the possibility that the treatment may have substantially different effects in different study populations. The procedure is to begin with a noninformative prior probability distribution on each model, then adjust it based on the likelihoods from each data set. Improved approximations of the updated probabilities are being investigated. For differentiable statistical functionals, a data set gives an approximation to a probability distribution. If a nonlinear transformation is applied both to the true distribution function and to its approximation, one looks for a linear transformation that approximates the nonlinear one as well as possible in the neighborhood of the true distribution. One is also looking for effective ways of bounding the discrepancy between the true and approximate distributions and their transformations doc10662 none Terman The investigator and his colleague develop geometric, dynamical systems tools for analyzing biophysical, conductance-based models for a broad class of neuronal networks. These systems arise in numerous applications including motor activity, sensory processing and learning. They also develop computational models for the generation of sleep rhythms, epilepsy and parkinsonian tremor. The investigators also construct and refine a mathematical and computational model for electrical activity in the subthalamic nucleus and external segment of the globus pallidus. These are two nuclei in the basal ganglia, a part of the brain involved in motor activity. Dysfunction of the basal ganglia is associated with movement disorders such as Parkinson s disease and Huntington s disease. The model is used to test hypotheses on the role of the basal ganglia in both normal and pathological movement. Numerous experiments have demonstrated that neurons within the basal ganglia display a rich variety of dynamic behavior; moreover, patterns of neuronal activity, both spatial and temporal, are different between a normal and a pathological state. The investigators characterize the possible patterns of neuronal activity that arise in the model and determine how these patterns change with respect to modulations of network parameters and structure. A long term goal is to develop a model realistic enough so that it can shed light upon the key parameters and mechanisms responsible for the generation and modulation of observed activity patterns. A mathematical theory for the analysis of neuronal dynamics helps illuminate the role played by various components of a model in generating a particular population rhythm. These components may correspond to some intrinsic property of individual cells, or to some network property such as the strength and type of synaptic coupling or the probability that two cells communicate with each other. Clarification of the mechanisms underlying different activity patterns may lead to a classification of all possible rhythms that can emerge from a given network, and enable us to determine how complicated a model should be in order to display some observed behavior. It also helps predict transitions of the network behavior as parameters in the model are varied. The investigators develop models for neuronal dynamics, and in particular of electrical activity in the subthalamic nucleus and external segment of the globus pallidus. These are two nuclei in the basal ganglia, a part of the brain involved in motor activity. Dysfunction of the basal ganglia is associated with movement disorders such as Parkinson s disease and Huntington s disease. The model is used to test hypotheses on the role of the basal ganglia in both normal and pathological movement. Such models may help illuminate both fundamental neuroscience questions and clinical issues about how the brain and central nervous system work doc10663 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Nonlinear Elliptic Boundary Value Problems Keyfitz The major focus of this project is to develop systematic theories to understand the solution structures of nonlinear elliptic boundary value problems arising from change-of-type systems in multidimensional conservation laws, and from experiments in morphogenesis and ecological systems. It is a distinctive feature of multidimensional conservation laws in self-similar coordinates that they change type, being hyperbolic far from the origin but of mixed type near the origin. Analysis of behavior near the origin gives rise to interesting open problems in elliptic partial differential equations, including nonlinear free boundary value problems, degenerate oblique boundary problems, and quasilinear degenerate elliptic systems. Such problems arise in many different combinations in the study of two-dimensional Riemann problems, including those for the compressible Euler equations of gas dynamics. This project also investigates a class of singular non-quasimonotone elliptic systems that arise in models of biological morphogenesis experiments and certain predator-prey interactions. Multidimensional conservation laws are mathematical models for fundamental processes in physics and engineering, such as high-speed flows and supersonic jets. While tools for numerical simulations of multidimensional conservation laws have been developed extensively, there is very little analytical theory available. It is our goal to establish parts of the needed theory and to investigate the structure of solutions for such problems. The results of the project will have application to a wide a variety of physical systems doc10664 none This proposal concerns the growth of epitaxial films. The simulation technique and coarse-grained model discussed in this proposal are based on kinetic Monte-Carlo (KMC) simulations, which are an established method of simulating crystal growth on an atom-by-atom basis. While believed to be faithful to the micro-scale physics, KMC simulations are extremely slow and there is a recognized need for models appropriate for larger length and time scales. The first of the two approaches discussed in this proposal is a new simulation technique referred to as an Atomistic Difference Scheme. In this method, one assumes that the distribution of atoms on the surface of the film is in near equilibrium and can be computed by time-stepping difference equations derived directly from the KMC transition probabilities. The topography of the crystal, on the other hand, is assumed to evolve on a slower time-scale and is computed on a discrete basis that conserves mass. The second approach seeks a homogenized, continuum version of this micro-scale model. The continuum model takes the form of partial differential equations that describe the system s evolution on macroscopic length and time scales. A final component of this investigation considers the application of these two methods to a continuous processing configuration where substrate (a tape) is continuously passed through a deposition zone. The continuously moving contact-line and its stability are of particular interest. Epitaxial films are of vital technological importance in the semi-conductor industry. As applications for high-temperature super-conductors (HTSC) develop, epitaxial films hold still further promise, with extensive efforts under way to produce HTSC wires and tapes that have enormous current-carrying capacities. At the same time, the film growth process is a burgeoning source of inspiration for applied mathematicians, requiring a wide range of mathematical techniques and simulation tools to explore the behavior of these systems over an enormous range of length scales. In particular, the research undertaken in this proposal seeks to enhance our ability understand and control the nano-scale structure of materials, placing a special emphasis on linking atomic-scale models with traditional modeling approaches. Date: June 22, doc10665 none The aim of this project is to develop a series of statistical methods for the analysis of longitudinal data. The investigator studies the theoretical and practical properties of these methods through a series of asymptotic and simulation studies. This type of data involves either equally or unequally spaced repeated measurements over time from a collection of independent subjects. Because of the possible intra-subject correlations, two major tasks involved in a typical longitudinal analysis are: (1) to model and estimate the mean time-varying covariate effects on the response variables of interest; and (2) to quantify the possible correlations and individual effects in a statistical estimation and inference process. The investigator provides a range of nonparametric tools for accomplishing the above tasks through the investigation of four research topics: (a) developing and comparing the large sample properties of several local smoothing methods for the estimation of coefficient curves in varying coefficient models; (b) developing a class of local and global inference and model diagnostic procedures to assess the validity of parametric and semi-parametric regression models; (c) evaluating the theoretical and practical properties of the leave-one-subject-out cross-validation and other procedures for the selection of smoothing parameters; and (d) investigating the theoretical and practical properties of global approximation through a class of nonparametric mixed-effects models. In addition to the methodological publications, results of this project also include algorithms that allow for easy implementations of the developed methods. The theoretical results of this project provide useful insights for guiding the development of new statistical procedures in longitudinal analysis. The investigator and his collaborators demonstrate the usefulness and the potential impacts of their methods by applying them to a number of biomedical and epidemiological studies. The rapid development of computing technology has enabled scientists in various fields of social and natural sciences easy access to large datasets involving variables repeatedly observed over time. This type of data, known as longitudinal data, is common in biomedicine, epidemiology, economics, and sociology, among others. Statistical research plays the crucial role of providing theoretically sound and practically feasible tools for extracting useful information from the data. In biomedical and epidemiological studies, such useful information may include, for example, the effects of treatments on disease progression over time, the potential association between a mother s habit of cigarette smoking and the fetal growth pattern during pregnancy, and other findings that are of biomedical and public health interests. Despite considerable progress made by many talented researchers, there is still a large demand for more reliable and efficient modeling and diagnostic techniques, particularly in the area of initial data exploration, that are capable to handle repeated measurements. Systematic theoretical development is also needed for building a solid foundation to judge the adequacy of some existing methods and providing insights that lead to future methodological development. In the current project, the investigator evaluates the theoretical properties of a class of flexible and useful statistical models known as the varying coefficient models and, by extending his theoretical results, develops a class of new modeling approaches that are potentially superior to the existing ones in many longitudinal settings. Because the statistical theory, models and algorithms can be applied to situations where there does not exist a pre-specified parametric model, they provide valuable tools that are capable to derive statistical inferences entirely based on the data. These tools allow scientists, policy makers and researchers to draw adequate conclusions from their data without depending on pre-specified assumptions that maybe too restrictive to their settings. In a collaborative effort with other statistical and biomedical researchers, the investigator and his colleagues demonstrate the application potential of their methods by applying them to a number of biomedical and epidemiological studies and discuss the biological implications of their findings doc10666 none of NSF Proposal # Dr. Chi proposes to find smooth torsion-free G_3 connections that are not analytic by exploring a certain system of partial differential equations induced from such connections. The affirmative solution to this work will open a new avenue of research about these connections, for which all the known examples by far have been analytic. He also proposes to investigate the classification problem of isoparametric hypersurfaces with four principal curvatures in spheres by investigating the normal holonomy Lie algebra of a focal submanifold of the hypersurface, which contains the information about the 2nd fundamental form of the focal submanifold, which is, by his study, crucial for the classification. If one sets off from the North Pole and travels with a compass along a loop, one will discover that at the end of the trip back at the North Pole the compass needle has turned a degree. This says mathematically that parallel translation (induced by a linear connection) of vectors along loops can detect whether the space is flat, which is fundamental to Einstein s Theory of Relativity. In Hermann Weyl s terms, the existence of inertia systems in the universe warrants that its linear connection is torsion-free. The project on torsion-free G_3 connections is a study of the rather anomalous nature of these connections among all exotic holonomies whose development has been participated by the PI. The notion of isoparametric hypersurfaces was first proposed in connection with wave fronts in Euclidean space and recently the more general Dupin hypersurfaces were tied with integrable hamiltonian systems of hydrodynamic type. Shortly after their introduction the isoparametric hypersurfaces were all classified in Euclidean and hyperbolic spaces of all dimensions. The complete classification of such hypersurfaces in spheres of arbitrary dimensions has defied people s efforts for nearly six decades, despite many outstanding results achieved in the past three decades. The PI s second project is to utilize the normal holonomy and the new approach of him, T. Cecil and G. Jensen toward the classification in the case of four principal curvatures doc10667 none Steif The principal investigator will carry out research in probabability theory; more specifically in statistical physics, Markov random fields and ergodic theory, and especially on problems which belong to the interface of these disciplines. A common theme for these problems is the notion of a phase transition which comes up in various guises. The first set of problems to be investigated concerns elucidating the relationship among the notion of finitary mappings, a concept which is relatively old, the much newer and important notion of exact simulation and finally the existence of a phase transition. It is already known that there are intimate connections between these. A second set of problems concerns better understanding the relationship between the phase diagram for various statistical mechanical systems (such as the Ising or the classical Heisenberg models) and the underlying graph on which they live. These questions lead to the study of phenomena which do not arise on the classical Euclidean lattices. A third set of problems concerns determining the sets of capacity 0 for certain concrete Markov processes arising in particle systems (e.g., the stochastic Ising model). Finally, a fourth set of problems concerns understanding the class of stationary processes which arise from positive contractions in Hilbert space, a class of stationary processes which have very different behavior than processes traditionally studied. Even for these systems, the concept of phase transition arises. Many systems in the world evolve stochastically and probability theory is utilized in order to better understand and predict the behavior of such systems. For example, statistical physics is the study of how particles behave globally and more generally how various general cooperative systems evolve. Understanding such systems is part of the motivation for this project. Another goal of this project is to determine how certain abrupt changes occur within a system (a so-called phase transition such as when water boils) and to investigate the underlying conditions which lead to such phenomena. There are various distributions which arise here which are important to investigate but for which one is not able to make explicit calculations. In such cases, a key tool is computers which, via simulations, allows us to approximate these distributions. In many cases, one can sample exactly from these distributions and one more goal of this project is to understand when this is possible doc10668 none This award is for the partial support of the conference in Geometric Partial Differential Equations and Calculus of Variations at the Rutgers University. The conference will attract many leading researchers in the field and will provide an opportunity for communication and collaboration between senior and junior investigators doc10669 none Award: Principal Investigator: Feng Luo The principal investigator will focus on two problems in the Teichmuller theory and 3-manifold topology. In Teichmuller theory, the aim of the investigation is to understand the complex structure on the Teichmuller space by constructing holomorphic functions arising from flat singular metric uniformization of the Riemann surface. We have produced many naturally defined complex valued functions on the Teichmuller space. The goal is to show that they are holomorphic. This will give us a better understanding of the complex structure which is of vital importance to the Teichmuller theory. In 3-manifold topology, we propose to show that any non-trivial 3-manifold group has a non-trivial SL(2,F) representation for some field F. We have translated the existence problem into a problem concerning how simple loops propagate in a surface. With the recent advance of our knowledge on surfaces, one may eventually solve the problem using surface topology. The existence of SL (2,F) representations will have many important consequences in 3-manifold topology. A 3-manifold is a space in which every point has a small surrounding similar to our real world. It is an important mathematical problem to classify all 3-manifolds. One of the main tool developed in recent decades in 3-manifolds theory is to use geometry. In particular, the geometry of surfaces has been used very successfully in understanding the 3-dimensional spaces. The proposed work addresses the topology of 3-manifolds and the geometry of surfaces. We attempt to use the symmetry theory (SL(2) representation theory) to understand the fundamental group of 3-manifolds which is a vital invariant of 3-manifolds. The SL(2,C) representation theory has been used very successfully in recent years by many topologists. Our approach seems to be new and uses simple loops on surfaces. The second part of the proposed work addresses the geometry of surfaces. One of the main problems on surface geometry is the moduli space problem. The moduli space problem asks for, for instance, what is the shape of the space of all convex polyhedrons which look like a cube. Many geometric problems are best expressed in terms of the topology and geometry of the moduli space. The corresponding object for high genus surface is the Teichmuller space. In contrasts to the topology of the Teichmuller space which is well understood for about 60 years, the geometry of it is much less understood. Our proposed work is an attempt to understand explicitly the complex analytic geometry of the Teichmuller space. The explicit description of the complex geometry of the Teichmuller space will have applications not only in mathematics but also in physics, for instance in string theory doc10670 none The twentieth century saw the rise and fall of Marxist practices. At the beginning of the century, the international communist movement was a growing social and political force inspired by emancipatory ideas, but by its end the movement has virtually disappeared. Today, the movement is mostly talked about in association with totalitarian and authoritarian regimes of the past. However, at least two twentieth century communist parties can lay claim to more democratic histories and hopeful futures: the South African Communist Party and the Community Party of India in Kerala. Both parties represent exceptions to the historical norms of twentieth century international communism. Yet, the two parties also differ: in Kerala the party developed a participatory democratic orientation, and in South Africa the party developed a representative democratic orientation. Through the comparative method, this project examines why the two parties diverged after having developed by the late s broadly similar democratic commitments and orientations. Based on interviews with party leaders, activists, and members, and access to party papers, memos, correspondence, and reports, the investigator identifies the conditions that facilitate the growth and development of various types of democratic communism doc10671 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Collaborative Research: Capillary Interfaces McCuan This research addresses behavior of solutions to the mathematical equations of capillarity theory. The equations will be studied in their full nonlinear generality, using procedures deriving from the intrinsic structure of the physical problems. These procedures have turned out to interact in a natural way with newly developed methods of geometric measure theory, which were developed initially for the special case of minimal surfaces in other contexts. In a number of cases of interest, striking and unusual behavior of solutions was uncovered in this way. Our investigations will continue in directions that have already led to discoveries of discontinuous dependence on boundary data, symmetry breaking, failure of existence under physical conditions, failure of uniqueness under conditions for which solutions exist, and discontinuous reversal of comparison relations. Capillary interfaces play an important role in many practical situations, notably in reduced gravity or in configurations for which physical length scales are very small. Capillarity is an essential concept for describing situations in which substances are in contact at surface interfaces and do not mix. A precise understanding of the mathematical properties of solutions of the capillarity equations will provide valuable insight for resolving such matters as how to design fuel tanks on an orbiting spacecraft so that the fuel will be accessibly located, predicting where oil or water resides in underground pore spaces of rocks, or determining the manner in which the faces of microelectronic components will become partially covered when they are dipped in a coating bath. The work under consideration is of particular relevance for predicting unexpected behavior of liquids in these and in other applications doc10672 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: The Whitham Equations and Their Solutions Tian The Principal Investigator will consider a variety of problems concerning the Whitham equations, which describe the macrostructure of nonlinear dispersive oscillations. In particular, the Principal Investigator will study (1) multiphase Whitham equations in one spatial dimension, and (2) Whitham equations in several spatial dimensions. The primary interest of the first project is in the interaction of single-phase oscillations and generation and propagation of double and higher phase oscillations. The basic goal of the second project is to understand how the zero phase Whitham solution develops singularities in several dimensional space. The proposed methods will be both analytical and computational. Results of this project will have broad impact in interdisciplinary work. The multiphase Whitham equations in one spatial variable play an essential role in both zero dispersion limit and modulation theories of nonlinear dispersive oscillations. They also have applications in the transmission of pulses in optical fibers. The Whitham equations in several spatial dimensions are intrinsically connected to Landau-Ginzburg models in topological field theory and the Seiberg-Witten solution in supersymmetric Yang-Mills Theory doc10673 none The investigator studies various K-theories of algebraic varieties and their relation to arithmetic cohomologies. In the case of classical algebraic K-theory this relation has found numerous applications in number theory, for example, to special values of L-functions of motives. In the last couple of year the investigator has introduced log-K-theory groups of log-schemes (log-scheme is a generalization of a toric variety) and studied their basic properties. She proposes to continue studying these groups as well as regulator maps into log-crystalline and log-etale cohomologies. She believes that this will have important arithmetic applications. This proposal deals with number theory and algebraic geometry. Number theory is the study of the properties of the whole numbers and is the oldest branch of mathematics. Algebraic geometry studies geometric figures that can be defined by the simplest of equations, namely polynomials. The questions and phenomena which arise from combining these two subjects serve as driving forces in much of contemporary mathematics research. Moreover, the combination of these subjects has contributed many applications in such diverse areas as codes and data transmission, robotics, and theoretical computer science doc10674 none The research project is devoted to theoretical investigations of frontal polymerization (FP) processes, in which a localized reaction zone propagates into a monomer converting it into a polymer. The project addresses both modeling of specific FP processes and the study of more general mathematical problems motivated by these modeling efforts. Specific modeling topics include the study of initiation of FP waves, their linear and nonlinear stability and fluid dynamical behavior. Asymptotic approaches are used to determine the structure of the polymerization wave and the composition of the product, as well as such experimentally measurable characteristics of the wave as its propagation velocity as a function of the kinetic and thermophysical parameters of the problem and the initial conditions. Topics of a more general mathematical nature are concerned with threshold phenomena in reaction diffusion systems, existence of time-periodic traveling waves of monotone parabolic systems, new kinds of integro-differential equations describing polymerization kinetics, and new forms of solutions of reaction diffusion systems, the so-called quasi-traveling wave solutions, the characteristics of which, including the propagation speed, vary slowly in time. The importance of the proposed studies of frontal polymerization is twofold. First, it is a method to produce polymers which have become an integral part of human life. It bears strong similarities with another technological process occurring in a frontal regime, namely, self-propagating high-temperature synthesis which uses combustion waves to synthesize desired inorganic materials. Unlike the frontal polymerization process, the self-propagating high-temperature synthesis process is well-studied and is known to enjoy certain advantages over conventional technology, in which the mixture is placed in a furnace. These include (i) shorter synthesis times, (ii) less expense, since the internal chemical energy of the reactants is used rather than the external energy of the furnace, (iii) the use of simpler equipment, and (iv) purer products, since the high-temperature wave burns off volatile impurities. Similar benefits can be expected in polymer synthesis. Specifically, energy costs and waste solvent production can be reduced and unique materials obtained. However, before any advantages can be achieved and the frontal polymerization process becomes a competitive technology, a better understanding of the factors that affect frontal polymerization is necessary. Second, studies of specific models of frontal polymerization pose questions of a more general mathematical nature that are related to the behavior of solutions of general reaction diffusion convection systems. The study of these more general problems contributes to the understanding of specific frontal polymerization problems. Date: June 18, doc10675 none This proposal focuses on the microscopic electronic magnetic structural inhomogeneity found in functional oxides, and its corresponding roles in the macroscopic physical response of these materials, such as magnetoresistance, magnetic permeability, piezoelectric constants, and linear and or non-linear optical characteristics. Understanding and controlling the inter-relationship between the inhomogeneity and physical response are of paramount importance for the development of new advanced electronic and magnetic devices. The concepts of thermodynamic or quantum criticality, soft modes, disorder effects and electronic phase separation will be important to understand the coexistence or fluctuations of neighboring phases in phase space. The activities envisioned in this program include a few important classes of complex oxide materials. The first topic is the area of magnetoresistive materials (such as CuIr2S4-CuCr2S4 and also (Bi,Sr)MnO3-(La,Sr)MnO3), showing a competition between, as well as a coexistence of, charge-ordered-insulating and ferromagnetic-metallic phases. Other topics include the enhanced piezoelectric response near MPB of ferroelectric relaxors (PMN-PT) and chemical pressure effects in geometrically frustrated antiferromagnets such as ZnCr2O4. We will also study tunneling magnetoresistance in polycrystalline films as well as a trilayer structure of double perovskite (Ca,Sr,Ba)Fe0.5Mo0.5O3. The success of this project will critically depend on a comprehensive characterization of the functional, complex oxides (or chalcogenides) as well as the fabrication of high-quality polycrystalline materials and single crystals. Materials synthesis and classical characterization including magneto-transport, susceptibility, and thermodynamic measurements will be done in the PI s lab at Rutgers University. In addition, x-ray scattering, neutron scattering, TEM, microwave, Raman, and low-temperature STM experiments will be performed through inter-institutional collaborations. This research will be conducted with the assistance of students who will thereby be prepared for entry into scientific technological careers in industry, government or academia. %%% Modern electronic and magnetic devices often utilize physical responses of materials when the materials are exposed under external parameters such as magnetic or electric fields, pressure, or optical irradiation. Recent investigation has suggested that the large-scale physical response such as magnetoresistance, piezoelectricity, or linear and or non-linear optical response can be drastically enhanced in materials with microscopic electronic magnetic structural inhomogeneity. Thus, this enhanced response in microscopically inhomogeneous materials can provide the scientific underpinning for future technologies. In this project we focus on understanding as well as controlling the inter-relationship between the microscopic inhomogeneity and macroscopic physical response. The inhomogeneity can be associated with various charge spin orbital degrees of freedom, and may accompany dynamic fluctuations, in addition to static spatial fluctuations. We will primarily investigate functional, complex oxides and also other chalcogenides, showing various competing or mutually antagonistic ground states. The success of this project will critically depend on a comprehensive characterization of the materials as well as the fabrication of high-quality polycrystalline materials and single crystals. Fabrication and basic characterization of the materials will be performed in the laboratory of the Principal Investigator at Rutgers University, while other more complex characterization will be performed through functioning inter-institutional collaborations. This research will be conducted with students. They will acquire advanced training in a forefront area of condensed matter physics and materials science and thus prepare them to enter the scientific technological workforce doc10676 none The PI proposes to carry out experimental and numerical investigations of flow instabilities induced by cavitation as often found in hydraulic machinery, and in flows around hydrofoils and propellers. Attention will be paid in the following four ares: (1) the formation of cloud cavitation and its effect on the wake structure of hydrofoils, (2) detailed study of erosion mechanisms caused by the collapse of such cavities, (3) comparative study of the acoustics of cloud and bubble cavitation, and (4) analysis of the periodic oscillations of the reentrant jet and their scaling. Experiments and numerical simulations will be carried out in an interactive manner to enhance the progress in both endeavors doc10677 none James N. Damon Professor Damon s research will apply infinitesimal and stratification methods from singularity theory to investigate the topology and deformation properties of a general class of highly nonisolated singular spaces. These spaces arise as nonlinear sections of certain natural universal varieties. For instance, geometric and deformation properties of mappings under various equivalences can be captured by such universal varieties. The structure of the tangent vector fields will be used to deduce algebraic formulae for certain fundamental topological invariants. These will be given in terms of certain natural algebraic and geometric multiplicities, measuring the singular behavior of mappings relative to associated geometric structures such as foliations Second, he will refine these ideas for questions in computer imaging by developing geometric structures associated to objects and features in images in terms of such highly singular spaces. The presence of discreteness, noise, and distortions in images require a scale-based geometry which is applicable to nondifferentiable functions, measures, and even distributions. Such a geometry will apply to almost all objects in a given type, and will yield stable geometric structures in scale space. This will allow the geometric analysis of images using functions and measures discriminating various features in images. The first part of Professor Damon s research will determine for specific types of systems of nonlinear equations, the qualitative properties of the set of solutions. These can be obtained from certain universal systems of equations. He proposes to use certain infinitesimal symmetries of the equations to deduce properties of the set of solutions in terms of algebraic invariants which reflect both properties of the universal equations and how the specific equations relate to the universal ones. Second, the research will be applied to problems in computer imaging. To objects and features in images, one may associate geometric structures capturing their properties for various imaging purposes. Such structures are defined using systems of equations as above. The presence of discreteness, noise and distortions in images interferes with identifying geometric features. The research will refine the methods described above via scale-based versions which introduce robust geometric structures overcoming these difficulties, which can then be used for a variety of computer imaging problems doc10678 none This project is designed to develop reduced dimension models for hydrodynamical systems and to foster undergraduate participation in mathematical research. While the fundamental equations describing fluid motion, the Navier-Stokes equations, are well-known, it is generally computationally expensive and analytically infeasible to solve the full equations exactly. To better understand these systems, it is necessary to turn to simplified or reduced models resulting from systematic approximations of the full equations. The semi-discrete approximation techniques which are utilized in this project focus primarily on reducing the dimension of the full fluid equations by exploiting symmetries or widely disparate lengthscales in specific systems. The resulting predictions from the reduced models will be compared qualitatively and quantitatively with experimental data. Fluid dynamics arises in a multitude of biological, environmental and industrial applications. This project is designed to develop models that describe basic hydrodynamical phenomena such as hydraulic jumps that can arise in jet impingement cooling systems and hydrodynamical systems with flexible boundaries. The latter include spinning magnetic media such as disk drives, and biological problems such as insect flight, blood flow in arteries and dynamics of the syrinx in song birds. Undergraduate participation is an integral part of both the experimental and mathematical aspects of the program. Mathematical models will be tested in the new Fluid Dynamics Laboratory which will provide a hands-on environment in which students learn to integrate mathematics with physical phenomena. This unique approach encourages students to apply their mathematical skills in consort with their physical intuition within the framework of contemporary research doc10679 none This research encompasses problems in the two areas of stochastic flows and coupling of diffusions. The principal problems in the latter area involve a probabilistic proof of Moser s Harnack inequality and a search for the best coupling on manifolds. In the former area, the problems concern the qualitative and quantitative behavior of Brownian and turbulent flows, especially their dispersion properties. The general setting of the set of problems on coupling is the behavior of steady state temperature distributions on manifolds (surfaces for example) and the rate of convergence to this steady state. The scope of the work on stochastic flows is quite broad. It presently concerns the nature of dispersion of oil slicks or high temperature bodies on the ocean s surface. The ultimate goal is to apply some of the ideas from previous and current work to solve problems about the fractal nature of the energy of the magnetic field on the sun doc10680 none John W. Morgan The work proposed to be carried out under this grant concerns mathematical formulation and proof of some of the mathematical dualities arising from high energy physics. The first duality to be studied concerns the F-theory heterotic string duality. The mathematical formulation of the duality is that for a certain range of parameters the moduli spaces of classical vacua for various compactifications of F-theory and of heterotic string theory should be isomorphic. We conjecture that the appropriate mathematical statement is that the moduli spaces of heterotic vacua are non-normal infinite-sheeted coverings of the F-theory moduli space associated with maximal parabolic subgroups of the fundamental group of the F-theory moduli space. These maximal parabolic subgroups are the fundamental groups of neighborhoods of certain divisors at infinity. This study involves a detailed analysis of the moduli space of semi-stable principal bundles over elliptic curves as well as the notions of differential cohomology. The second duality is the famous quantum field theory duality between SU(2) Yang-Mills theory and the abelian Seiberg-Witten theory. These dual descriptions are simply the high and low energy limits of a twisted version of supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory. One part of a mathematical understanding of this duality involves giving precise mathematical formulations of the high and low energy limits of the twisted supersymmetric theory and showing how certain correlation functions in this twisted theory converge in the sense of perturbation theory to the usual Donaldson polynomial invariants in the high energy limit and to the Seiberg-Witten invariants in the low energy limit. This part of the story is surely amenable to rigorous mathematical formulation. The more ambitious goal is to find some mathematical formalism which allows for a mathematically rigorous interpelation between these two limits -- a mathematical substitute for the mathematically undefined quantum field theory -- which would allow one to compare the high and low energy limits. The connection between mathematics and high energy theoretical physics has always been a close one. In the last few years it has taken on new aspects. With the study of global issues in quantum field theory and string theory has come a new level of interaction between geometry and topology and these areas of theoretical physics. Belief in the existence of these (to date non-rigorous) physics theories leads physicists to make predictions, i.e., conjectures in mathematics. In a strange way these conjectures play the role that physical predictions used to play. Now the physicists take confirmation that they are on the right track when these mathematical predictions can be verified by rigorous mathematics, which, since it is rigorous, can not make use of the quantum field theory paradigms that we used to make the prediction in the first place. The interest in mathematics of this interplay is that the sorts of mathematical statements that are predicted in this way have turned out to be quite novel producing conjectures unlike anything that had been seen before. Much of the progress the last ten or fifteen years in large areas of geometry and topology traces back to this source. One of the most fruitful sources of mathematical conjectures has been various dualities in physics. These occur when there is more than one classical mathematical limit of a quantum field theory or string theory. The mathematical objects that arise in the description of the classical limits then are related because they are limits of a single quantum field theory or string theory. The mathematical problem is always the same -- define rigorously what the relationship is and then establish it mathematically. The work proposed here is exactly along these lines for two such dualities doc10681 none Prop: PI: Dyer, Kristy Dr. Dyer is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro. She will study the nonthermal emission in supernova remnants as a way to understand shock physics and the origin of cosmic rays. Her research plan involves using the low frequency receivers at the Very Large Array and unblocked aperture of the Green Bank Telescope to remove flux uncertainties in order to test predications made by shock acceleration theory. She will also look for a missing population of very young galactic supernova remnants by carrying out a high resolution study of bright, compact SNR s selected from recent surveys. And lastly, she will make higher resolution radio observations of extragalactic supernova remnants in order to extend the sample of known supernova remnants. In her educational activities, she will contribute to NRAO s outreach program by planning and conducting several Chautauqua courses, intensive workshops for undergraduate college faculty, and by participating in the development and implementation of NRAO s programs for the underserved community in the local public schools doc10682 none for DMS - The proposed research program seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the dynamical phenomena of non hyperbolic systems with singularities. The main goal is to investigate the interplay between dynamics and the growth and structure of generating groups, the number theoretic properties of the defining parameters, and the topology and geometry of restricting domains and the induced symbolic dynamical systems. The scope of the program includes generalizations of interval exchanges, polygonal dual billiard maps, piecewise isometries. This program is in dynamical systems, an active area of mathematics whose main objective is to study long term behavior of objects under applications of the same mathematical principle. Apart from applications in other areas of mathematics, the proposed program will have implications in Electrical Engineering, in particular in digital filters. Digital filters, are algorithms used commonly in electrical components that built in many wireless and voice recognition devices doc10683 none The investigators will provide a better understanding of activity in cool stars on three essential timescales: activity-cycle (of order years), rotational (months), and short-term (days). The main effort is to continue the Solar-Stellar Spectrograph (SSS) project currently underway at Lowell Observatory. The SSS spectrograph is well suited for this task. It covers several important chromospheric diagnostic lines, including Ca II H and K and H alpha, as well as most of the optical spectrum from wavelengths to angstroms. It is a dedicated instrument, associated with Lowell Observatory s 1.1-meter John Hall telescope, which receives starlight from the telescope focal plane via a fiber-optic feed, but is also equipped with a solar telescope -- a raw fiber that sees the Sun as an unresolved disk. Sunlight and starlight are therefore recorded via the same optics and detectors -- a unique advantage. The spectra thus recorded can be studied in several ways. Time series observations of the emergent flux in spectral lines responsive to solar and stellar activity reveals the phase, amplitude, and morphology of activity cycles present. The SSS target list includes all stars brighter than visual magnitude 7.1 lying near the Sun s location on the main sequence (roughly spectral types F5 through K7, with emphasis between F8 and G8), as well as the Sun itself. Examination of seasonal variability reveals the degree of rotational modulation -- the change in emission level arising not from the activity cycle, but from the passage of active regions across the visible hemispheres. This provides insights regarding the degree of chromospheric activity that accompanies cycles of various amplitudes and morphologies. The spectrum-to-spectrum variability examined across a broad ensemble of related spectral lines, reveals changes in solar and stellar activity on both short and long timescales. This is a new method of interpreting solar and stellar activity, developed for this project that will be fully exploited in the proposed grant cycle doc10684 none for DMS - (Bryant, Duke) Robert Bryant plans to apply the theory of differential systems, the method of equivalence, and methods from the calculus of variations to study a collection of problems in differential geometry and mathematical physics. In the first problem, motivated by mathematical physics, Bryant intends to study the geometry of connections compatible with either a Riemannian or pseudo-Riemannian metric that admit parallel spinor fields and that differ from the Levi-Civita connection by a closed 3-form. In the second problem, Bryant wants to continue his investigations into the nature of singular special Lagrangian subvarieties and special Lagrangian foliations of Calabi-Yau manifolds. In the third problem, which concerns the study of the space of almost complex structures on 6-manifolds, Bryant proposes to investigate several natural functionals on the space of such almost complex structures and the geometry of the extrema of these functionals. Fourth, Bryant plans to continue his study of the space of homologically volume minimizing cycles in compact Lie groups, with the goal of finding a complete classification of the volume minimizing cycles in each homology class in a compact, simple, simply connected Lie group. Finally, Bryant plans to continue his investigations into Finsler geometry, particularly the problem of classifying the spaces of constant flag curvature (the natural generalization to Finsler geometry of constant sectional curvature in the Riemannian case). Optimization is a central problem in mathematics, in which one tries to select the best configuration in a space of possible configurations of a model for a physical system. An example is the problem of navigating on a body of water in which one must take water currents into account in planning the best path from origin to destination, where best is taken to mean shortest time of traverse . A path that is optimal for a short period (a geodesic ) might not remain optimal if pursued far enough. This is known as instability. (For example, in a river where the current is faster in midstream it turns out that downstream geodesics are stable, but that upstream geodesics are not.) The geometric quantity that measures this notion of stability is known as curvature , since it was first identified in studies of the curvature of the Earth. Bryant s work studies curvature and over-determined systems of differential equations, and is relevant to optimization problems in motion planning, control theory, robotics, and string theory models in high energy physics. Some of the specific problems he works on are aimed at applications to mathematical physics (e.g., connections with parallel spinor fields) or control theory (e.g., Finsler geometry, which is the subject that studies problems such as the navigation problem mentioned above), while others are aimed at more foundational questions about the nature of minimizers (e.g., volume minimizing cycles in Lie groups) or the limits and or possibilities inherent in the current methods and techniques for minimization problems (e.g., special Lagrangian geometry and almost complex 6-manifolds doc10685 none The goal of this research is a theoretical and practical study of split-plot designs in industrial applications. While split-plot designs maintain many of the fundamental features of industrial experimental design such as effect sparsity, effect hierarchy and effect heredity, the more complicated randomization structure impacts both the design and the analysis of the experiment. Regular and non-regular fractional factorial split-plot designs are studied. In both cases, the fundamental problems considered are (i) defining optimality criteria for split-plot designs in industrial applications; (ii) constructing optimal split-plot designs; and (iii) analysis of split-plot designs. Novel approaches for constructing optimal regular and non-regular fractional factorial split-plot designs will be proposed. To analyze non-regular fractional factorial split-plot designs, new Bayesian variable selection procedures are entertained. Lastly, the connection between split-plot designs and other designs (i.e., compound orthogonal arrays and robust parameter designs) will be addressed. The design and analysis of experiments have been successfully used in efforts to improve products and processes. They have made important contributions to scientific discovery and innovation and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Most recent advancements relate to experiments where the trials are performed as completely randomized designs. However, many industrial processes take place in multiple. This experiment structure induces correlation between observations and a split-plot design results. The aim of the proposed research is a theoretical and practical study of the design and analysis of fractional factorial split-plot experiments in industrial applications. The proposed work will develop new techniques for constructing and analyzing such experiments. The potential gains realized by performing an experiment as a split-plot design include more efficient and cost effective designs and increased power to detect some significant effects of interest doc10686 none Proposal Number: Han s proposal comprises of two research projects and an education project. In the first research project Han proposes to adapt recent techniques from geometric analysis to study certain geometrical and analytical problems in the evolution of vortex sheets in two dimensional Euler equations. In particular, the project proposes to study a possible notion of weak solution in terms of rectifiable varifolds, which, if successful, should provide more geometric description to the evolution of singular vortex sheet than the currently available notion of weak solution in terms of integrable vorticity functions. In some prototype situations, Han also proposes to study the more precise geometric behavior in the roll up of intersecting vortex sheets. In the second project, Han proposes to establish a value distribution theory for harmonic maps into negatively curved surfaces. Recent results in this area have suggested very rich geometric behavior of such harmonic maps in terms of induced foliation structures and tree-like structures in the vicinity of infinity. The geometric description of such behavior is closely related to the solvability of asymptotic boundary value problems of the relevant system of partial differential equations. The interaction of geometric analysis, partial differential equations, and their application to some interesting applied analysis problems is the thread connecting the two projects. In the education project, Han proposes to rejuvenate an undergraduate geometry course mostly for math education majors and an undergraduate differential geometry course to better serve the need of a wider audience that has grown out of today s rapidly changing technological environments and emergence of new interdisciplinary fields. A good understanding of the evolution of concentrated vortices, such as vortex sheet, has immensely important practical values. The mathematical equations that govern the evolution of vortex sheets exhibit many features very similar to those that have been successfully studied in geometric analysis in recent years. The PI hopes that the interactions of ideas and tools from across the fields will bring some fruitful results in understanding better the geometric aspects of vortex sheet evolution. In his second project, the PI also hopes to combine closer the geometric and the analytic approaches, the success of which may provide further insight back to purely geometrical or analytical problems. The successful implementation of the third proposed project will will be a positive contribution to the K-12 math education through better training of math education majors doc10687 none William M. Goldman This project continues the PI s investigation of locally homogeneous geometric structures on manifolds, their moduli spaces and their symmetries. The holonomy correspondence relates moduli of geometric structures to the representation theory of the fundamental group. The primary geometric structures of this investigation include conformally flat Lorentz and Riemannian structures, real projective and affine structures, and real and complex hyperbolic structures. Dynamical questions concerning both the action of the fundamental group, various flows (including and generalizing the geodesic, horocycle and frame flows) and the automorphisms of the moduli space will be studied. The close interaction between the dynamics of the mapping class group and the global topology of the moduli space is especially notable. The moduli spaces often possess symplectic structures which lead to important and mysterious algebraic constructions, such as the Lie algebra based on curves in a smooth surface. These objects play an increasingly important role both in mathematics and physics. Lorentzian manifolds arise as cosmological models in relativity. Moduli spaces have become central in quantum physics, and mapping class group actions and Teichmuller space have become prominent in 2-dimensional quantum gravity. This study lies in the interface between geometry topology, dynamical systems, analysis and algebra. Despite their complicated nature, the examples studied are extremely explicit. Thus one can profitably investigate them experimentally. Our current computer technology is appropriate for such projects. With Dr. Richard Schwartz and the support of the University of Maryland Mathematics Department, the Experimental Geometry Lab has been operating for over a year. This lab has included software projects performed by postgraduates, graduate students, and especially undergraduates doc10688 none Experiments exploring itinerant magnetic and nearly magnetic states in low carrier density metals and semiconductors are the focus of this research program. Such materials are particularly sensitive to external magnetic fields as is apparent in their transport, magnetic, and thermodynamic properties. This sensitivity results from mechanisms unrelated to those found in the well studied local magnetic systems where carrier scattering can be controlled by magnetic fields. Instead, disorder, poor screening, and strong exchange interactions lead to surprisingly large and robust quantum interference effects. The control over carrier densities, disorder, and magnetic ground states that these materials offer, along with their sensitivity to magnetic fields, suggest that innovative device technologies may result from these investigations. Other experiments included in this program involve the exploration of many body effects in low dimensional systems such as bulk one-dimensional magnets and homogeneous ultra-thin films. This research involves undergraduate as well as graduate students and participants in the Teach For America program who obtain a full exposure to experimental science from the synthesis, characterization, and careful measurement of the materials, to the data analysis and publication of results. %%% Many of the new concepts for advanced electronic device design rely not only on the electronic carrier charge, but also on the carriers intrinsic angular momentum, or spin, as well. Much of the progress in realizing these novel technologies has been made in semiconducting and metallic systems where local magnetic moments, magnetic moments associated with the ions that make up the crystal lattice, are either intrinsic to the material or can be added as impurities. In this research program we are exploring magnetic systems where the magnetism and electrical conduction are due to the very same electrons in order to search for novel physical properties. These itinerant magnetic systems may offer greater control over both the magnetic and electronic attributes, which may allow innovative design technologies. The focus of this experimental program is the exploration of materials and mechanisms by which sensitivity to external parameters, and thus controls of physical properties occur. This research involves undergraduate as well as graduate students and participants in the Teach For America program who obtain a full exposure to experimental science from the synthesis, characterization, and careful measurement of the materials, to the data analysis and publication of results doc10689 none PI: Anthony M. Bloch Dynamics and Control of Mechanical Systems : This is a proposal for the continuation and extension of the proposer s research into the dynamics and control of nonlinear mechanical systems in finite- and infinite-dimensions. In particular, research is proposed in the following areas: integrable dynamical systems in finite- and infinite- dimensions including both Hamiltonian and nonholonomic systems, the stabilization and control of nonlinear mechanical systems via energy methods and the extension of these methods to systems with nonholonomic (nonintegrable) constraints, the geometry of the smooth and discrete dynamics of rigid bodies, and the control of quantum mechanical systems. A general area of interest that encompasses several parts of this proposal is the relationship between energy preservation and asymptotic behavior in dynamical systems and between reversible and irreversible behavior. In the integrable systems area the proposer is interested in the nonabelian Toda lattice, infinite-dimensional generalizations of Toda, and generalized smooth and discrete rigid body systems. Finally he intends to analyze the dynamics and control of various coupled mechanical systems in both the classical and quantum regimes. This proposal is aimed at studying the behavior of various mechanical systems that are important for applications in science and engineering. These include systems such as wheeled or articulated robots, aerospace systems, submarine vehicles, and quantum (microscopic) devices. Quantum devices, where the laws of motion of atoms and molecules play a key role, have become increasingly important in such areas as communication and coding theory. In addition to studying the behavior of these systems the proposer intends to analyze their control and optimal control -- that is, to provide methods for using such systems in engineering applications in a practical, stable, and efficient manner. The proposer intends to analyze various key examples of such mechanical systems with mathematical structure which is particularly amenable to detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis. Further, the proposer intends to analyze the transition between the behavior of systems at the quantum (microscopic) level and the large scale (macroscopic) level. This transition is important for the application of physical devices in the real world as well as interesting from the scientific point of view doc10690 none The PI is investigating questions in several areas of discrete probability that often have surprising interconnections. Most of these questions are set in a group-invariant context and the goal is to understand how geometric or algebraic properties of the group are reflected in probabilistic properties of the processes. For example, in the random cluster model, there are 4 natural critical values of p for each value of q. The PI is continuing his previous investigations of the relations among these values on planar Cayley graphs of groups. Two other models under investigation concern random spanning forests in graphs. One of these is obtained from limits of minimal spanning trees in finite graphs, while the other is from uniform spanning trees. The former is connected to percolation, a special case of the random cluster model. The latter, connected to random walks and potential theory, is much better understood. The PI is working to bring the state of knowledge of the minimal spanning forest closer to that for the uniform spanning forest. There are also many open questions related to the uniform spanning forest that the PI is investigating. When one views uniform spanning forests as determinantal probability measures, there are a large number of new questions that open up. For example, the PI is working to establish basic topological properties of higher-dimensional analogues of random forests and to establish conjectures that arise by analogy to percolation. Phase transitions and entropy of other determinantal dynamical systems are also under investigation. The field of statistical physics is concerned to a great extent with mathematical models of phase transitions (e.g., water to ice). Typically the model of space is a fixed lattice, for example, the square lattice in two dimensions or the cubic lattice in three dimensions. This lattice is infinite and possesses the mathematical properties of what is called a group. The simplest model, known as percolation, originated in the study of fluid flow in the ground and gas flow through a gas mask. One asks how far fluid can flow, in particular, whether it can flow arbitrarily far. This, of course, depends on the density of particles; there is a phase transition as the density increases, whereby after a certain point, with probability 1, fluid can no longer flow arbitrarily far. One would like to know where that point is and how the probability changes as this critical point is approached. About a decade ago, several researchers began investigating lattices that are quite different from the usual Euclidean ones that are most familiar and that most closely correspond to our physical world. These new lattices, called nonamenable, are also usually based on groups. Such investigations began out of the usual scientific and mathematical curiosity that drives fundamental research. Within the last 5 years, this area of research, statistical physics on nonamenable groups, has seen an explosion of interest. This area of research turns out to be quite rich and to contain a large number of important fundamental questions whose answers remain unknown. Already, there have been applications to Euclidean lattices of some of the new ideas that have arisen in response to the need to develop new tools for nonamenable groups doc10691 none The main purpose of the research is to derive new necessary conditions for a minimum in optimal control theory, using the approach developed by the PI in recent years, based on the systematic use of generalized differentials instead of classical differentials, of flows instead of vector fields, and of abstract variations instead of the standard needle variations. This will achieve a unification of the various existing versions of the finite-dimensional Pontryagin Maximum Principle, incorporating them all into a single result, which, in addition, will be more general in scope and will also apply to hybrid problems. Several other related lines of research will be pursued: sufficient conditions for an optimum for families of trajectories, using extensions ---due to the PI in collaboration with B. Piccoli---of V. Boltyainskii s idea of a regular synthesis, ergodic properties of skew-product flows (in collaboration with M. Nerurkar), viscosity solutions of first-order Bellman equations corresponding to problems with degenerate Lagrangians, and subanalyticity of value functions. This work is motivated by the need for powerful new and usable tools for studying curve optimization problems. Such problems occur in many areas of science, ranging from the more traditional automatic control questions that arise naturally in engineering (e.g. control of power plants, aircraft, or various mechanical devices) to the more recent applications in biological and medical problems (e.g. the search for optimal ways to administer combinations of several medications). The common aspects of all these problems are (a) that they involve the search for strategies for influencing (i.e., controlling ) the behavior of a system so as to get it to achieve a desired goal in the best possible way ( optimal control ) or, at least, to come as close as possible to that goal, and (b) that they have a definite dynamical structure (for example, one needs to know not only how much of each medication to administer, but also the specific time sequence in which this is to be done). The search for solutions to optimal control problems has been made more difficult by the fact that the existing mathematical methods involve a collection of different techniques that cannot be combined into a single theory. This means that most real-life problems do not fit within the framework of existing techniques, especially when these problems are hybrid, in the sense that they combine continuous aspects with discrete ones. The ultimate goal of the PI s proposed research is to produce tools that will make it possible to attack large classes of such problems by means of a single, systematic, user-friendly approach doc10692 none This Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) research project will address the mathematical modeling and analysis of piezoelectric transducers for polymer characterization. The principal investigator and a graduate student will work in cooperation with a researcher at DuPont to develop mathematical models and corresponding analytical and numerical tools to describe the response of thickness-shear mode resonators to contact with inhomogeneous viscoelastic media, a critical step in developing piezoelectric based transducers into operational chemical sensors. DuPont will participate in the development of the models by providing access to experimental facilities, data and involvement of the graduate student at the industrial site. The mathematical modeling is based on boundary-value problems for the linear and nonlinear systems of partial differential equations governing the physical processes at work in the sensor. Both perturbation and numerical methods will be used to obtain results, simplify the problem when appropriate, and to gain insight into special limiting cases. The design of low-cost, high performance sensing systems is of great interest both to research and commercial applications. Examples of areas that can benefit from such systems are processing waste material from mining and other industries which are of environmental concern, coating (e.g. in the automotive industry as well as in medical applications), packaging (e.g. food, medical) and pollution control sensors. This Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) research project will address the mathematical modeling and analysis of sensors for polymer characterization. The DuPont company will collaborate with the principal investigator and a graduate student to develop models for the improvement of these sensors. The project will benefit from this collaboration, including an industrial training opportunity for the mathematics graduate student. Date: June 4, doc10693 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: The Semiclassical Limit of the Focusing Nonlinear Schroedinger Equation Miller This project addresses the behavior of solutions of the focusing nonlinear Schroedinger equation in the singular semiclassical limit, with particular attention paid to solutions that are tied to definite given initial data. Specific research goals include (i) generalizing a steepest-descents procedure for matrix Riemann-Hilbert problems to recover asymptotics of the initial-value problem for general real-analytic and oscillatory-analytic initial data, (ii) computing rigorous spectral asymptotics for the nonselfadjoint Zakharov-Shabat operator and taking estimates of the error into account in the inverse-scattering problem, (iii) studying sets of minimal weighted Green s capacity in the upper half-plane and relating them solidly to semiclassical asymptotics, and (iv) determining the sensitivity of the asymptotics to the presence of singularities in the data and also robustness to structural perturbations. The analysis will employ numerical methods, careful asymptotic spectral analysis of a family of nonselfadjoint differential operators, and potential-theoretic aspects of functional and complex analysis. The focusing nonlinear Schroedinger equation is a ubiquitous model equation for the propagation of waves of many different kinds (water waves, light waves, etc.) in the simultaneous presence of nonlinear effects that can self-amplify the waves and dispersion which can pull the waves apart. In particular, it is a tested and accepted model for the transmission of lightwave pulses along certain types of glass optical fibers. This project will produce new understanding of this model equation relevant to situations where the coefficient of the dispersive term in the equation is relatively small, or alternatively, nonlinear processes dominate the evolution of broad disturbances for short times. Dispersion-shifted optical fibers currently being installed in many modern telecommunication systems provide an environment where the effects of dispersion and nonlinearity are present in precisely such a skewed proportion. The results of this project will be likely to influence the analysis and design of the next generation of high-speed optical telecommunications systems doc10694 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Dynamical Systems Approaches to Partial Differential Equations Wayne This project explores the long-time behavior of partial differential equations using tools from the theory of dynamical systems. The equations to be studied include both dissipative and Hamiltonian systems. As an example of the former, Professor Wayne will study the long-time behavior of the Navier-Stokes equations in the neighborhood of vortex solutions. He will construct finite dimensional invariant manifolds in the phase space of these equations and use them to study both the long-time asymptotics of solutions of the equations and the existence of vortex solutions for which no explicit formulas exist. In related work he will derive and rigorously justify approximate equations for the motion of waves on the surface of a fluid, studying in particular the interaction of colliding waves. In addition, by using ideas first developed to study finite dimensional, nearly integrable, Hamiltonian systems, he will investigate the validity of commonly used beam and plate models for motion of elastic materials in thin domains. Finally, in collaboration with a mathematical biologist at Brown University, Professor Wayne will study the existence and stability of pulses in models of neural tissue. The systems under study arise in many applications, including materials science, fluid mechanics, and biology. Even though it is impossible to solve the equations that govern their motion explicitly, applications require at least a qualitative understanding of the behavior of their solutions. For instance, the equations that describe vibrations of elastic materials are so complicated that their solution remains very time consuming, even with modern computational tools. Consequently, engineers have derived many approximate models for the behavior of such systems, particularly in situations where one dimension of the system is much smaller than others, as is the case for beams and plates. Very little is known rigorously, however, about how well these models actually mimic the true behavior of the beam or plate. This research aims both to provide accurate estimates of the errors that occur in using such models and to develop an algorithm that permits one to systematically improve the models. In a similar vein, Professor Wayne will also investigate models for waves on the ocean. Recently it has been realized that the wake of high-speed ferries can produce solitary waves of sufficient magnitude to cause significant damage at the shore. The mechanism by which these waves are created in the wake is not yet understood. Understanding the relationship between the solitary waves of the model problem and the solutions of the actual water wave problem may shed light on the creation and propagation of this type of wake doc10695 none Justin D. Roberts The goal of this project is to try to understand the topology underlying quantum invariants in three dimensions. The current state of knowledge seems inadequate for explaining what kind of topological information the invariants carry, and therefore what kind of applications in three-dimensional topology they might have. However it has revealed (through the frameworks of TQFT and Vassiliev theory) a wealth of very interesting algebraic structures, which seem to be specifically related to topology in three dimensions, and so should be thought of as kind of ``new algebraic topology in three dimensions. Roberts intends to try to bridge the gap between this new topology and classical algebraic topology. There are three main areas of investigation. The first is K-theory, which could help to explain the relationship between quantum knot invariants and Vassiliev invariants (for example, why the Jones polynomial is a polynomial). The second is Rozansky-Witten theory, a very interesting new example of a TQFT which provides new hints about intepretation of the invariants, and could have additional applications in complex or hyperkaehler geometry. The third is the hyperbolic volume conjecture of Kashaev, Murakami and Murakami. This conjecture seems to fit into a general pattern of ideas relating quantization (and specifically, 6j-symbols) to classical geometry; ideas which might provide a conceptual context for the conjecture. To a mathematician, a knot is what you get by tangling up a piece of string and then gluing its ends together. It is clear that there are qualitatively different ways of doing this; trying to describe and understand these ways forms a branch of topology, which might be thought of as what remains of geometry when quantitative questions are ignored. The main tools of knot theory are topological invariants , numbers which can be associated to knots and which encode some information about their structure. During the last sixteen years, ideas borrowed from the physics of quantum field theory have led to the discovery of many new and beautiful invariants called quantum invariants , but because of this unusual origin, their meaning remains very mysterious, and their potential unfulfilled. The goal of the project is to use some new ideas to try to explain this mystery and to bridge some of the gaps between geometry, topology, and physics. The work should contribute to the healthy exchange of ideas between these disciplines, and stimulate new work in each doc10696 none The investigator will continue the development of inferential methods that do not rely on unrealistic or unverifiable model assumptions. Standard inferential methods rest upon strong assumptions, especially in the analysis of time series, random fields, or whenever complex dependencies must be taken into account. In contrast, resampling, subsampling, and other computer-intensive methods offer viable approaches to obtaining valid distributional approximations while assuming very little about the stochastic mechanism generating the data. In part 1 of this proposal, the investigator will address several important problems so that these bootstrap and subsampling methods can serve as good approximate methods in statistical practice. The main issues we wish to tackle include the following: further relaxing of conditions (such as slower mixing rate for long memory data and allowing for nonstationarity); more theory for irregularly spaced data; studying delicate problems where the rate of convergence depends on unknown parameters, such as in the notoriously difficult problem of autoregressive type processes with unit roots; improve the accuracy of distribution estimation by techniques such as Richardson extrapolation, and by optimal choice of block size; and pursue the development of goodness-of-fit tests in the dependent data case. These methods are especially useful in modelling of economic time series, due to the inherent difficulties caused by nonlinearity and nonstationarity. In part 2 of the proposal, the investigator will pursue the development of methods that have exact finite sample validity, such as the construction of conservative confidence regions, without the expense of losing efficiency, at least in large samples. Typical nonparametric methods are based on approximations or limit theorems, so that finite sample behavior is always an issue, and is often typically addressed by small scale simulations. In contrast, the goal here is to construct nonparametric procedures with guaranteed finite sample behavior and good efficiency. The statistical analysis of data is vital in many diverse scientific disciplines: physics, engineering, acoustics, geostatistics, medicine, econometrics, seismology, law, ecology, and others. The scope of modern statistical analysis is continually expanding, as is the need for inferential methods that are valid without imposing strong model assumptions. The investigator will continue the pursuit of the development of statistical methods that can be applied safely in practice, keeping in mind the many applications toward which such methods can fruitfully be applied. The philosophical approach of the investigator is to develop practical methods that have a robustness of validity so that they may be applied in increasingly complex situations. The impact of this work is potentially quite large because strong inferential statements can be made without imposing strong assumptions doc10697 none Essential properties of multidimensional probability distributions often include geometric and analytic characteristics related to global behavior of smooth functionals in a growing number of variables. This research focuses on various concentration phenomena for different classes of probability measures in spaces of high dimension. The classes of product measures, uniform distributions over convex bodies, or logarithmically concave measures are good examples with a number of challenging problems. The study of the role of the dimension as the main parameter of a distribution is placed in the center of the research. Many important properties of stochastic processes postulate possible behavior of sample trajectories and often refer to distributions of various functionals. Obtaining essential information on the process requires the study of multidimensional distributions and leads to deep mathematical problems which are also interesting in themselves from the point view of the natural development of mathematical sciences. This research focuses on the study of global properties of stochastic processes and on how they relate to different objects from analysis, geometry and statistics doc10698 none Ramanujam, Jagannathan Louisiana State University & Agricultural and Mechanical College CISE Postdoctoral Associates in Experimental Computer Science: CISE Postdoctoral Research and Training in Advanced Compiler Optimization Modern processors extensively use memory hierarchies with multiple levels of caches in order to cope with the widening gap between processor and memory speeds. As a result, the performance of programs depend critically on their memory access characteristics and how these are matched to the memory hierarchy of the processors. While several compiler transformations have been proposed towards enhancing locality, even for programs with regular memory access patterns such as those in dense linear algebra computations, the best compiler-optimized codes do not match the performance of library implementations. One goal of this research is to train a postdoctoral research associate in the area of developing compiler transformations (either data or computation or a combination of the two) to handle a larger class of programming constructs than perfect nests and regular memory accesses. Initially, the associate will build on data shackling, which has been recently proposed as a data-centric approach to the problem of optimizing locality. To accomplish this goal, the associate will be trained to design an optimization strategy that will integrate data shackling (a data-centric approach) and tiling (a control-centric approach), and implement it in a compiler and evaluate its effectiveness. The associate will: 1) Study a large collection of applications with both regular and irregular memory access patterns, including scientific computing codes and multimedia applications, 2) Design heuristics for improving the effectiveness and applicability of data shackling, develop methods to integrate data shackling and tiling, and implement these in a compiler, and 3) Perform extensive experimental evaluation of the techniques on several benchmarking applications doc10699 none This award is to hold an Industry University planning meeting for a proposed research site at the Arizona State University which will be a part of the I UCRC for water Quality at the University of Arizona. The planning meeting will examine the organizational feasibility and economic viability of the research site. A portfolio of initial research projects will be determined. New members will be recruited during the tenure of the award doc10700 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Collaborative Research: Capillary Interfaces Concus This research addresses behavior of solutions to the mathematical equations of capillarity theory. The equations will be studied in their full nonlinear generality, using procedures deriving from the intrinsic structure of the physical problems. These procedures have turned out to interact in a natural way with newly developed methods of geometric measure theory, which were developed initially for the special case of minimal surfaces in other contexts. In a number of cases of interest, striking and unusual behavior of solutions was uncovered in this way. Our investigations will continue in directions that have already led to discoveries of discontinuous dependence on boundary data, symmetry breaking, failure of existence under physical conditions, failure of uniqueness under conditions for which solutions exist, and discontinuous reversal of comparison relations. Capillary interfaces play an important role in many practical situations, notably in reduced gravity or in configurations for which physical length scales are very small. Capillarity is an essential concept for describing situations in which substances are in contact at surface interfaces and do not mix. A precise understanding of the mathematical properties of solutions of the capillarity equations will provide valuable insight for resolving such matters as how to design fuel tanks on an orbiting spacecraft so that the fuel will be accessibly located, predicting where oil or water resides in underground pore spaces of rocks, or determining the manner in which the faces of microelectronic components will become partially covered when they are dipped in a coating bath. The work under consideration is of particular relevance for predicting unexpected behavior of liquids in these and in other applications doc10701 none This research is concerned with the development of a systematic approach to the study of analytic and geometric properties of random fields. Special emphasis is placed on Gaussian and stable random fields such as the Brownian sheet, stable sheets and additive Levy processes. The investigators wish to continue their study of precise quantitative connections between the aforementioned random fields and the theory of capacities, as well as potential theory for general Markov type random sets. They believe that these connections will yield detailed analytic and geometric information about the random fields in question. Amongst other things, two long-standing open problems are emphasized: one on the potential theory of the Brownian sheet, and the other in the theory of random coverings. The investigators also plan to develop and advance canonical techniques for fractal and multifractal analysis of a large class of multiparameter Levy processes, as well as the Brownian sheet. They expect these techniques will, in turn, be useful in studying complex random fields and processes. The Gaussian and stable random fields considered in this project play a prominent role in many areas of pure and applied mathematics, statistics, mathematical physics, medical imaging, ecology, geology, geophysics, oceanography, hydrology, as well as mathematical finance. This research is concerned with developing and introducing various analytic and geometric tools that will lead to a better understanding of geometric problems for random fields, as well as help promote their future applicability doc10702 none Olver The project will focus on the applications of the proposer s new equivariant theory of moving frames for general Lie group actions. Particular emphasis will be in three key applied directions: analysis and applications of invariant variational problems and invariant partial differential equations in geometry and physics, the design of symmetry- preserving numerical algorithms for approximating differential invariants and integrating invariant differential equations, and object recognition and symmetry detection in computer vision based on differential invariant and noise-resistant joint invariant signatures. The project will include further development of the underlying moving frame theory, particularly in the case of infinite-dimensional Lie pseudo-groups, and the formulation of a proper geometrical foundation for multivariate numerical approximation and interpolation. The recognition and exploitation symmetry is an essential tool in modern mathematics and its applications. This project will continue to develop a new, powerful geometric approach, known as moving frames, to systems that have continuous symmetry. The modern moving frame theory developed by the PI has already witnessed a remarkable range of new applications, including computer vision, for object recognition and symmetry detection, a geometric approach to classical algebra and invariant theory, as well as the design of numerical integration schemes that preserve the underlying symmetry of the problem to be solved. The combination of analytical, geometrical, and numerical advances, coupled with practical applications has proved to be a particularly potent blend of theory and practical tools. This research project will continue the rapid development and application of the moving frame method, concentrating on theoretical developments tied to applications in computer vision, in geometry and physics, and in symmetry-based numerical integration methods doc10703 none This project addresses materials issues in polycrystalline, semiconductor materials, with emphasis on the dominating influence which interfaces and grain boundaries have on film properties. Project goals are: to develop a new, comprehensive approach to polycrystalline film characterization based on exploring chemical, electronic, and optical properties of individual crystallites within a film, and to apply this approach to understanding and improving polycrystalline CdTe and GaAs for electronics and photonics applications such as displays and high efficiency solar cells. The approach utilizes scanning probe techniques including low temperature NSOM PL and AFM measurements of surface potential on polycrystalline films. This information will be correlated with that from other techniques such as scanning Auger spectroscopy, XPS, STM and transport measurements. CdTe has been chosen because existing approaches allow films with good minority carrier properties to be prepared making it a potential model system to study in terms of finding general methods for improving polycrystalline materials. High quality polycrystalline films of GaAs have been more problematic. Studies of GaAs and related III-V materials will be directed at characterizing the effects on electronic and optical performance of novel approaches for improving minority carrier properties. Success with this system would have important technological implications given the broad technological base which exists for III-V materials. Numerical modeling of NSOM excitation in the presence of surfaces and grain boundaries is included. As the study proceeds, information from these investigations will be fed back into the film growth processes to test results and, ultimately, to improve film quality. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. These studies will improve fundamental understanding of factors limiting the efficiency of displays and solar cells. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area. The project is designed to develop strong technical, communication, and organizational management skills in students through unique educational experiences made possible by a forefront research environment. There will be active involvement of undergraduates in the program and formal emphasis on developing effective oral and written communication skills. A new microelectronic processing course will provide students with expertise in materials preparation and processing. Collaboration of CSM students with students at the University of Wisconsin will be an additional, valuable, learning opportunity doc10704 none The principal investigator will work on several problems in random matrix theory and determinantal random point fields. The main emphasis of the research is on statistical properties of the eigenvalues of large random matrices, in particular on the universality conjecture. Building on the previous work on the largest eigenvalues of certain Wigner matrices he expects to extend his results to a wider class of Wigner matrices and prove similar results for sample covariance matrices. He also proposes to study universality in the bulk of the spectrum by using the renormalization group approach. Another foci of the project is concerned with determinantal random point fields. The goal is to find sufficiently general conditions for Central Limit Theorem type results for (rescaled) linear statistics and to study the ergodic properties of translation-invariant random point fields. The random matrix models that are proposed to study come from, or have applications in multivariate statistical analysis (principal component analysis), nuclear physics (statistics of energy levels of heavy nuclei), solid state physics (modelling transport properties of small metallic particles and quantum dots) and theoretical computer science (computational complexity, statistical analysis of errors and linear numerical algorithms). The importance of the field increases as many different areas of mathematics and physics including combinatorics, representation theory, operator algebras, number theory, integrable systems, quantum chaos, nuclear physics, statistical physics appear to have deep and fruitful connections to random matrices. Besides the various applications of the results indicated in the proposal the principal investigator believes that it is equally important to achieve a better understanding of some mathematical phenomena in random matrices, in particular, universality of local distribution of eigenvalues doc10705 none Computer models of clouds and climate rest on assumptions that relate aerosol particles to the cloud droplets that form on them. Observations have revealed uncertainties in these relationships. For example, the concentration of cloud droplets computed from the measured sizes and chemical composition of aerosol particles usually overestimates the observed concentration. The aerosols that are capable of serving as centers for drop formation are the ones with an affinity for water (hygroscopic). Of these, the particles important for natural clouds in the atmosphere are those on which droplets form at relatively low values of ambient supersaturation. The cloud-nucleating ability of an aerosol population is measured by instruments called cloud condensation nucleus counters (CCN counters), which record the number of cloud droplets formed per unit volume of air as a function of the applied supersaturation. This project is an investigation of droplet formation in different types of clouds based on airborne observations with a CCN counter and other equipment. The work will be conducted as part of two field projects that are independently supported by NSF: DYCOMS-II, a study of marine stratocumulus clouds off the coast of California in July ; and a Wyoming-based study of continental cumulus clouds in the summer of . The main objective of DYCOMS-II (Dynamics and Chemistry of Marine Stratocumulus) is to obtain high-resolution aircraft data (using the NCAR C-130) on temperature, humidity, vertical air velocity, and cloud properties, that can be used for validating large-eddy simulations of mixing processes in the marine boundary layer. This project contributes to DYCOMS by providing CCN measurements and the study of aerosol-droplet relationships. Likewise, it is an important component of the continental cloud study, based on observations with the Wyoming King Air aircraft. In both of these field projects, the airborne Wyoming Cloud Radar (a mm-wavelength Doppler radar) will be employed for measurements of vertical air motion near cloud base, a parameter that is needed to test the theoretical relationship between the activity spectra of CCN and the drops they produce. This information has not been available in previous aerosol studies, and may help to resolve some of the reported discrepancies between aerosol properties and droplet counts. The ultimate goal of the research is to improve the parameterization of clouds in large-scale models of atmospheric circulation and climate doc10706 none This project concerns the synthesis and properties of mesostructured thin films of metal oxides based on surfactant and block copolymers as the structure-directing agents. A central concept involves the chemically different and spatially separated regions of the mesostructure. On the molecular level, the mesostructures consist of two distinct regions: the framework that is formed by the sol-gel metal oxide, and the organic region that is formed by the template. The project contains two complementary objectives. The first objective is to deliberately place dopants in specified regions of transparent mesostructured silica. The location of specific molecules will be characterized by optical spectroscopy, and the spatial relationships between multiple dopants will be probed by energy transfer. The second objective is to synthesize semiconductor frameworks in mesostructured films and to characterize their formation processes. Mesostructured films of tin dioxide will be synthesized and optical probes will be used to monitor and interpret the dynamics of both micelle and metal oxide framework formation. The optical methods to be used provide 50 nm resolution of the dynamic transformations taking place in a time frame of a few seconds over film dimensions of several centimeters. The experiments are directed at determining the evolution that occurs from the dissolved unimer (individual dissolved copolymer molecules) to the micelle to the mesostructured metal oxide film. These dynamic measurements will correlate the chemical changes and structural development occurring as the film is deposited. The second set of experiments will monitor the development of the semiconductor framework. Electron transport in mesostructured films will be measured and interpreted. %%% The prospects for creating mesostructured films with unique electrical and optical properties. The development of these novel materials will have a significant impact on the fields of optical physics, and device areas such as sensors for medical applicatons (e.g., implants and in vivo and in vitro biosensors). Students trained in these areas will compete very favorably in the job market. This project is to be funded jointly by the Chemistry Division and the Division of Materials Research doc10707 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Collaborative Research: Capillary Interfaces Finn This research addresses behavior of solutions to the mathematical equations of capillarity theory. The equations will be studied in their full nonlinear generality, using procedures deriving from the intrinsic structure of the physical problems. These procedures have turned out to interact in a natural way with newly developed methods of geometric measure theory, which were developed initially for the special case of minimal surfaces in other contexts. In a number of cases of interest, striking and unusual behavior of solutions was uncovered in this way. Our investigations will continue in directions that have already led to discoveries of discontinuous dependence on boundary data, symmetry breaking, failure of existence under physical conditions, failure of uniqueness under conditions for which solutions exist, and discontinuous reversal of comparison relations. Capillary interfaces play an important role in many practical situations, notably in reduced gravity or in configurations for which physical length scales are very small. Capillarity is an essential concept for describing situations in which substances are in contact at surface interfaces and do not mix. A precise understanding of the mathematical properties of solutions of the capillarity equations will provide valuable insight for resolving such matters as how to design fuel tanks on an orbiting spacecraft so that the fuel will be accessibly located, predicting where oil or water resides in underground pore spaces of rocks, or determining the manner in which the faces of microelectronic components will become partially covered when they are dipped in a coating bath. The work under consideration is of particular relevance for predicting unexpected behavior of liquids in these and in other applications doc10708 none The project contains the following main topics: 1. Approximation of Riemannian manifolds by polyhedral metrics and generalization of Alexandrov embedding theorem. The PI has proved that approximability by polyhedral metrics implies a new kind of curvature bound which appears naturally but has never been considered in geometry before. The proof is interesting in its own right, as it uses a Lemma closely resembling the Alexandrov embedding theorem (which states that any positively curved metric on a 2-sphere is isometric to a convex surface in a Euclidean space). This brings us back to a more geometrical point of view on Riemannian Geometry, according to which ``interesting curvature bounds should arise from properties of embeddings of manifolds into Euclidean space. This circle of ideas also gives a new approach to the old conjecture that every simply connected Riemannian manifold with positive curvature operator is diffeomorphic to a sphere; 2. Collapsing with lower curvature bound. The general goal of this topic is to understand how collapsing with lower curvature and diameter bounds happens and, in the very best case, to construct a structure analogous to the one obtained by Cheeger-Fukaya-Gromov for the case of bounded curvature. 3. Gate spaces. Gate spaces are related to a circle of problems arising from the question of K.Grove of whether there is an Alexandrov space that has two different smoothings into Riemannian manifolds of the same dimension and lower curvature bound; 4. Applications of megafolds to collapsing with bounded curvature and to Ricci flow. Megafolds are a generalization of Riemannian manifolds and orbifolds that has already proved it usefulness for collapsing with bounded curvature; in particular, they were used by the PI to prove, in coloboration with W.Tuschmann, the main part of the Klingenberg-Sakai Conjecture. Such a collapsing also arises naturally from the rescaling of the Ricci flow; it can be used to construct singularity models for the Ricci flow with no injectivity radius estimates; 5. Theory of Alexandrov spaces. Alexandrov spaces appear naturally as limits of Riemannian manifolds with lower curvature bound. Most geometric results which are true for Riemaninan manifolds with lower curvature bound are also true for Alexandrov spaces; however, there are several such results that cannot be generalized. For example, it is not known whether a convex hypersurface in an Alexandrov space is also an Alexandrov space. Such problems are mostly due to the lack of local analysis, and that is what the PI proposes to study. Riemannian manifold, which could be considered as a simplified version of space-time, is a way too complicated object. The first topic in this proposal is aimed at studing Riemanian manifolds by means of approximation by simpler objects. These objects are polyhedral spaces, i.e. spaces glued of Euclidean polyhedra. The other topics considers a different approach to studing Riemannian manifolds. It is based on considering extremal metrics, in an appropriate sense, for example how Riemannian manifolds collapse to lower dimenssional objects. This method makes possible to get new results in the main stream direction of Riemannian geometry: how to make conclusions about global structure of space basing on local properties doc10709 none Over the last 40 years the study of the motion of small particles in a viscous liquid has become one of the main focuses of applied research. The presence of the particles affects the flow of the liquid, and this, in turn, affects the motion of the particles, so that the problem of determining the flow characteristics is highly coupled. It is just this latter feature that makes any fundamental mathematical problem related to liquid-particle interaction a particularly challenging one. The goal of this project is to furnish a mathematical analysis of one of the several important and still not completely understood aspects of this fascinating subject, namely, the orientation of homogeneous, symmetric particles sedimenting in Newtonian and viscoelastic liquids. In particular, the PI intends to furnish a quantitative and rigorous explanation of the challenging tilt-angle phenomenon that is observed in certain viscoelastic liquids, where particles orient themselves at a preferred angle with the main flow. The angle depends on the shape of the particle, their mass and on the physical properties of the liquid. Liquid models such as Oldroyd-B with shear-dependent viscosity will be used, along with some suitable analytical tools (the splitting method ) that the PI with his collaborators has been developing over the last few years for the study of well-posedness of several viscoelastic liquid models. The orientation of homogeneous long bodies in liquids of different nature is a fundamental issue in many problems of practical interest. In composite materials, the addition of short fiber-like particles to a polymer matrix will to enhance the mechanical properties of the material; for instance, it could make the material softer or harder, and more durable. The degree of enhancement depends strongly on the orientation of the fibers and the fiber orientation is in turn caused by the flow occurring in the mold. Another important application occurs in separation of macromolecules by electrophoresis. Modern applications include weight determination of proteins, DNA sequencing, and diagnosis of genetic disease. Electrophoresis involves the motion of charged particles (macromolecules) in solution, under the influence of an electric field. The orientation of the molecules plays an important role, since it is responsible for the loss of separability during steady-field gel electrophoresis. A final, but not less important application of particle orientation, occurs in blood flow, where the blood cells under certain flow conditions tend to chain themselves along the axis of the artery at certain preferred angles (tilt angle doc10710 none Award: Principal Investigator: Frank Quinn This project involves two distinct areas: 4-dimensional manifolds, and high-dimensional controlled topology. Recent successes with topological 4-manifolds suggest the time is ripe to try to formulate surgery obstructions for arbitrary fundamental groups. Improved understanding of handlebody structures and a new construction of topological field theories in dimension 4 offer hopes for combinatorially-defined invariants of smooth 4-manifolds. In the controlled area recent work with Ranicki has provided a proof of an elusive stability theorem for controlled surgery obstructions. This may point the way to a full description of the groups as generalized homology, analogous to earlier descriptions of the end and controlled h-cobordism obstructions. Such a description would have applications ranging from local structure in stratified sets to sharpening 2-torsion conclusions in some cases of the Novikov conjecture. This project explores the boundary between the discrete and continuous worlds. Geometry and analysis (continuous points of view) have revealed strange behavior in dimension 4. In terms of the mathematics used in physics, other dimensions are classical while dimension 4 seems to be quantum. Topologically 4-dimensional objects are described in terms of 3-dimensional building blocks (a discrete point of view), particularly knots and links in 3-space. One objective is to bridge the gap between these two views, and in particular understand the quantum behavior from the topological point of view. In higher dimensions algebraic and qualitative topology (e.g. surgery theory) are discrete points of view. Twenty years ago the PI bridged the gap between this and local continuous topology in one case, pseudoisotopy. This has had numerous applications. Many more applications await a widening of this bridge to include other cases, for instance algebraic K-theory and surgery, but the methods are complex and intensely technical and have so far resisted extension. The other objective of the project is to carry through these generalizations doc10711 none To the naked eye, the polished surface of a metal sheet appears as a homogeneous continuum. Under the metallographer s microscope the same surface reveals, after etching, an underlying polycrystalline structure. Many materials, including metals, ice and rocks, are aggregates of tiny crystals or grains, which assume different orientations in space and are separated by interfaces called grain boundaries. Comprehensive mapping of grain boundaries and individual grain orientations in polycrystals has recently become possible with the emergence of orientation imaging microscopy. Details about grain orientations, e.g., the misorientations of neighboring grains, are called microtexture. Microtexture could exert a strong influence on the mechanical behavior of polycrystalline materials (e.g., on the volume of backscattered ultrasonic noise, which at sufficiently high levels renders ultrasound totally useless for material flaw detection in aircraft engines; an undetected metallurgical defect in the No. 2 engine was the culprit for the crash of a United Airlines DC-10 in ). The main objectives of the present project are as follows: (i) to reexamine the mathematical foundations and properties of several theoretical constructs which have been proposed by material scientists for describing microtexture in various degrees of detail and sophistication; (ii) to delineate the effects of microtexture on the mechanical anisotropy of sheet metals in forming operations; (iii) to study the effects of microtexture on the acoustoelastic behavior of stressed polycrystals; (iv) to develop further an earlier study that concerns using the dispersion of Rayleigh waves for the nondestructive inspection of surface layer of residual stress, which is imparted on critical components of aircraft engines to enhance their high-cycle fatigue performance. Date: May 18, doc10712 none Regression analysis is the general area of study of how a response variable changes as one or more predictors are varied over their possible values. Regression is one of the most widely applied areas in statistical analysis, and is used for monitoring the performance of assembly lines, for determining the success or failure of social innovations, to predict the future outcomes based on passed data. Regression analysis has a long history, dating back at least 200 years. A myriad of methods for specific types of problems (e. g., problems in which the response is a survival time, or a binary variable) have been developed. The work proposed in this project looks at regression in a very general way. It is founded on asking two questions. First, how much can be learned about dependence through using graphs? And the second question: how far can one push regression methodology without making any limiting assumptions about the nature of the problem at hand? Over the last decade, substantial progress has been made on the first of these questions, summarized in two books, a theoretical summary of the area in Cook ( a) and an applied approach to regression through graphics in Cook and Weisberg ( a). Both theoretical and applied issues must be understood to develop methodology for regression based on graphics. The second question is important because all the existing methodology for regression through graphics is based on a few assumptions, generally concerning the distribution of the predictors. The methodology to be developed in this project will overcome the limitations that are imposed by making assumptions at the outset. In particular, the assumption that predictors must be at least approximately linearly related is not required. In addition, the method can be extended to qualitative predictors like factors doc10713 none With National Science Foundation support Drs. T. Douglas Price and R. Alexander Bentley will continue their analysis of archaeological skeletons of the earliest farmers in Central Europe. They will attempt to distinguish between two hypotheses which account for the appearance of agriculture in Europe: the spread of actual populations vs. the spread of ideas across essentially immobile groups. Because agriculture appears suddenly in Central Europe and is accompanied by a suite of other cultural items such as distinctive ceramic styles, many archaeologists have accepted this as evidence of human migration. Other researchers however have noted that humans are adaptable, can accept new modes of behavior and that it may have been ideas rather than people which moved. To select between these options Drs Price and Bentley will continue their examination of isotope values in skeletons from relevant populations. The ratio of two isotopes of strontium in bones and teeth provides a record of the geological environment in which the person lived. Since bone tissue is replaced continually over an individual s lifetime while the competition of teeth is set at adolescence, a measured difference in the strontium isotope ratio between bones and teeth can identify an immigrant. The foreign signal in an immigrant s tooth can then be traced to a likely region of origin based on regional geology. In their research to date, analyses have indicated that a mixture of the two models best explains the skeletal data. These suggest that most likely a small number of migrants may have initially brought farming into Europe, but its adoption by indigenous Europeans also played a major role. To improve on these preliminary finding the team will expand the analysis to a larger number of skeletons. In order to create a baseline map of strontium and also lead isotope signatures, the researchers will analyze archaeological animal teeth collected from different geological provinces in regions adjacent to the study area in southwestern Germany and eastern France. On this basis they hope to identify immigrants points of origin. This research is important for several reasons. It will provide insight into an important time period and seminal event in European prehistory. It will shed light on the basic processes which drive culture change and help to develop an analytic tool potentially applicable to a wide array of archaeological questions in many parts of the world doc10714 none Alan Dow The Principle Investigator proposes to focus on three central problems in set-theoretic topology which involve basic countable convergence issues and set-theoretic independence results. The first question, due to Efimov, is to determine if it is consistent that any compact space that does not contain a converging sequence will contain the Stone-Cech compactification of the integers. The second, due to Bashkirov, is to determine if there can be a countable bound on the sequential order of a compact sequential space. This problem can, in some ways, be viewed as a very interesting strengthening of the recently resolved Moore-Mrowka problem. The third is to continue a systematic study of the Stone-Cech remainder of the reals analogous to that which has long been conducted for the remainder of the integers. There appears to be many obstructions to progess caused by the additional complexity imposed by the connectedness property. General questions of the existence of converging sequences and the extent to which converging sequences fully determine the topological structure arise frequently in a variety of settings. These questions are particularly meaningful in the context of compact subsets of function spaces (natural informative topologies on sets of real-valued functions). The investigator is continuing to pursue lines of investigation that have stimulated intensive interaction between the fields of general topology and set-theory for de doc10715 none This award will fund young participants at the Second Duke Mathematical Journal International Mathematics Research Notices (DMJ IMRN) Conference, which will take place at Duke University on April 27 to 29, . For the purposes of this Conference, a young mathematician is one who is just about to graduate or is up to seven years beyond the doctorate. The Conference will focus on areas covered by the two journals. The eight speakers will be internationally renowned younger mathematicians. The goal of the Conference is to bring together young mathematicians to help them learn about recent major developments in areas near their own, and also to help broaden their interests and perspective (which should be important in their development as mathematicians doc10716 none for DMS - A general problem in Riemannian geometry is to find and describe manifolds that admit a complete Riemannian metric of positive sectional curvature. If there is no positive lower bound on the curvature, then the manifold is known to be diffeomorphic to Euclidean space, by the Cheeger-Gromoll-Meyer Soul theorem. In the class of closed, positively curved manifolds, there are few restrictions, most of which are classical, such as the Bonnet-Myers and Synge theorems. For closed, simply connected manifolds, there is essentially just Gromov s theorem bounding the total Betti number in a given dimension. Given that there are few known obstructions, it is frustrating that the set of known examples, although infinite, is relatively small. My research is concerned with understanding the geometry and topology of the known examples. More specifically, the goals are: 1) to attempt to find new examples of positively curved manifolds by studying more general metrics on biquotients (in collaboration with J.-H. Eschenburg), 2) to compute the isometry groups for the known cohomogeneity one manifolds of positive curvature and 3) to see whether the 7-dimensional Berger space is diffeomorphic to a 3-sphere bundle over the 4-sphere (in collaboration with N. Kitchloo). Riemannian geometry arose from trying to understand curvature. Intuitively, we know that tabletops are flat while basketballs and saddles are curved. Geometers are able to quantify curvature precisely and it provides a numerical invariant that helps distinguish objects. For instance, the surface of a doughnut and the surface of a coffee cup have the same nature i.e., they are both surfaces with one hole, but they are shaped differently. On the other hand, the surface of a ball (usually called a sphere) is different in shape and nature from the surface of a doughnut (usually called a torus). How can we be sure that this is always the case? One may wonder if it is possible to deform the sphere suitably so that we might end up with the torus. A sphere has positive curvature everywhere while it can be shown that no matter what shape a torus takes, it will always have zero curvature somewhere. This tells us that the two objects are somehow fundamentally different from each other. Differential geometry is also the language used to express the general theory of relativity, our best theoretical description of gravity and its effects on the universe. In general relativity, a vacuous space-time universe would be inherently flat. This idealized state is warped by the presence of masses or energy, Thus, gravity is the curvature in space-time, and by understanding the geometry of Lorentzian space-time, one may some day understand the shape of the universe. My work involves the study of positively curved objects in higher dimensions. This is part of trying to understand how the structure imposed by curvature (geometry) is essential to understanding the nature (topology) of an object and vice versa doc10717 none The aim of this research is to study several random spatial models on various infinite graphs. Four topics concerning stochastic dynamics of Ising spin systems, the random cluster and Ising ferromagnetic model, and the contact process are proposed to be studied. The first topic concerns stochastic dynamics of an Ising spin system on an infinite lattice where spins evolve according to the usual Glauber dynamics. Some typical questions are: does a spin flip infinitely many times or only finitely many times? what is the probability that a spin has not yet flipped at time t? The second topic is about Ising models on hyperbolic lattices. Although Ising models on the hypercubic lattices have been studied intensively and extensively since they were introduced, these models on hyperbolic lattices have just started to receive attention from physicists and mathematicians. They are found, by both numerical studies and mathematical proofs, to exhibit a phenomenon of multiple phase transitions. Although some results have been rigorously proved, many statements suggested by numerical studies are to be proved, and many more are to be explored. Some GHS type inequalities in the random cluster model and a related question of uniqueness of the random cluster measure are the contents of the third topic. The final topic deals with phase transitions of models with low-dimensional inhomogeneity. These models include percolation, Ising ferromagnetic systems and contact processes. Models of the sort to be studied in this research arise naturally from physical sciences. Percolation is a probabilistic model of studying flow through a discrete disordered system, such as particles flowing through the filter of a gas mask, or fluid seeping through the interstices of a porous medium, while the contact process can be regarded as modeling the spread of an epidemic through a population doc10718 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Differential Equations resulting from the interaction of Gravity with other Force Fields, and Shock Waves in General Relativity Smoller This project is concerned with mathematical problems involving gravity, as described by Einsteins theory of general relativity, on two different scales: (A) elementary particles, whereby gravity is coupled to other fundamental forces (e.g., nuclear forces), and quantum mechanical effects are taken into account, via the Dirac Equation; and (B) astrophysics, in particular, shock-wave explosions in the universe. In Part A, we study the behavior of elementary particles (fermions) in a rotating black-hole geometry. We also study the decay and stability of solutions of the Teukolsky equation (which applies to gravitational waves, electromagnetic waves, etc.), in a rotating black-hole background geometry. In Part B, we investigate a new cosmological model, different from the Big-Bang model. The model, which agrees with astronomical observations, is based on shock waves that can occur beyond the Hubble length. We will also investigate the validity of the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorem for situations involving interacting shock waves. Finally, we will study the dynamics of a star collapsing to a black hole, modeled as an initial-value problem for the Einstein-Euler equations, with certain constraints on the initial data. This study will also help us learn more about the constraint equations that all initial data for the Einstein equations must satisfy. This project is concerned with mathematical problems involving gravity, as described by Einsteins theory of general relativity, on two different scales: (A) elementary particles, whereby gravity is coupled to other fundamental forces (e.g., nuclear forces), and quantum mechanical effects are taken into account, and (B) astrophysics; in particular, shock-wave explosions in the universe. In Part A, we study the behavior of an elementary particle (electron, proton, etc.) near a black hole. We also study the stability of electromagnetic and gravitational waves near a black hole. In Part B, we explore a new model for cosmology, different from the usual Big Bang scenario, which is based on a shock-wave explosion. We will also study the collapse of a massive star to a black hole doc10719 none Award: Principal Investigator: Efstratia Kalfagianni The PI will study the ``finite type invariants of knots and 3-manifolds by using techniques from classical 3-dimensional topology and search for geometric information encoded in these invariants. First, she will continue her work on developing the theory of finite type invariants for knots and links in arbitrary 3-manifolds by using techniques from the theory of atoroidal decompositions of 3-manifolds. She also plans to work on relating the Vassiliev knot invariants to properties of Seifert surfaces spanned by the knots and to intrinsic invariants of the knot complement. This will extend classical results about the topology of the Alexander polynomial to the Jones polynomial and its generalizations. Finally, the PI plans to search for relations between the Jones polynomial of a knot and the fundamental group of 3-manifolds obtained by Dehn surgery on the knot. The research of the project lies in the area of 3-dimensional topology the central objects of study of which are spaces called 3-manifolds. A 3-manifold is an object that locally looks like the ordinary 3-dimensional space but whose global structure can be complicated. A main goal of 3-dimensional topology is to understand these structures and achieve a classification of 3-manifolds. An important part of 3-dimensional topology is also the study of knots (loops embedded in some tangled way in 3-manifolds) and their classification. One of the ways that topologists have been approaching these problems is through the use of ``invariants . In the recent years, ideas originated in physics, lead mathematicians to the discovery of a variety of invariants of knots and 3-manifolds. The central theme of the PI s project is to understand the properties of these invariants, using ideas from traditional 3-dimensional topology and from physics, and to look for applications to the aforementioned classification problems doc10720 none Over the next five years, the Principal Investigator proposes to examine the mathematical issues and develop computational methods for solving the following classes of direct and inverse problems motivated by industrial applications: scattering and diffraction by periodic structures (gratings), second harmonic generation in nonlinear diffractive optics, and inverse and optimal design problems in diffractive optics. The main topics of the proposed work are as follows: -- Modeling, analysis, and computation of the diffraction by periodic chiral structures and the scattering by a perturbed diffractive structure. Modeling and design of electromagnetic resonances. -- Well-posedness of the nonlinear Maxwell equations in second harmonic generation. An interface least-squares finite element method for solving the three-dimensional model problem. Structure (grating) enhanced nonlinear optical effects. Effects of coatings on nonlinear diffractive optics. -- Optimal design of diffractive structures. A relaxation technique (homogenization) and a local approach for the optimal design problem. Uniqueness, stability, and regularity studies of the inverse diffraction problem. Numerical solution of inverse and optimal design problems in diffractive optics. The recent enabling technologies of high-performance computing facilities and microlithographic fabrication techniques have led to an explosion of applications of diffraction in optics, establishing diffractive optics as one of the most rapidly advancing areas of current research in optical engineering. The practical applications and scientific developments have driven the need for rigorous partial differential equation models, mathematical analysis, and numerical algorithms to describe the diffraction of complicated grating structures, to compute electromagnetic fields and thus to predict the performance of a given diffractive structure in linear, chiral, and nonlinear optical media, as well as to carry out optimal design of new structures. The proposed research has significant potential for evolving new mathematics and science and providing industry with guidance to design and fabricate new optical devices doc10721 none Local regularization methods show great promise for the solution of a number of different classes of inverse problems, often retaining the special structure of the original problem as well as leading to very fast algorithms (especially in the case of Volterra problems). In addition, numerical tests show that local regularization methods can work well to resolve sharp features of solutions without having to rely on nondifferentiable or nonquadratic optimization schemes. To date, the convergence theory for the local regularization of Volterra problems has been limited to only mildly ill-posed inverse problems. In the case of more severely ill-posed problems, there is numerical evidence that certain local methods may suffer from lack of stability and or convergence. Because of the cost efficiencies of local regularization methods, an important question is therefore whether new variations of these methods can be developed for which stability convergence can be proven in the general case. The PI proposes to develop two new variations of local regularization methods which show promise in numerical tests and for which there is hope of establishing a general stability convergence theory. The PI also proposes to develop adaptive schemes for the selection of variable regularization parameters in local regularization methods. Variable parameters are of use in applying more smoothing in some parts of the domain and less in others. In numerical tests adaptive local regularization techniques have been shown to be effective in determining the variable regularization parameter at the same time that local parts of the solution are recovered. Because no convergence theory exists at the present time for such an approach, the PI proposes to study such adaptive schemes and develop a theory which will be useful in making recommendations for adaptive parameter selection methods. The PI also proposes to extend these ideas to nonlinear Volterra problems and to linear non-Volterra problems. Inverse problems occur widely in many applications, including problems of biomedical imaging (CT scans and X-rays), image reconstruction (from satellites or other sources), and geophysical exploration. The Volterra class of inverse problems arises in the determination of the surface temperature of a space vehicle as it re-enters the earth s atmosphere; additionally, Volterra inverse problems appear as models for remote sensing problems. While classical methods exist for for solving such problems, classical methods are often very inefficient and lead to overly expensive solution techniques. A second disadvantage of classical solution methods is readily seen in imaging applications where reconstructed images may have blurred edges and inadequately detailed features. The PI proposes to address both of these difficulties with the development of new solution methods based on the ideas of local regularization. The use of these newer methods can lead to a significant decrease in cost for the solution of a wide class of practical inverse problems, with improved resolution of detailed features of solutions doc10722 none Alexander A. Voronov The goal of the project is to discover and study new algebraic structures in topology suggested or motivated by mathematical physics, in particular, quantum field theory and string theory. More specifically, the project aims at discovering a new algebraic structure on the homology of an n-sphere space, by which we mean the space of continuous maps from the n-dimensional sphere to a given manifold. This part of the project, joint with Dennis Sullivan, generalizes the work pioneered by Chas and Sullivan in the case n=1, i.e., that of a usual free loop space. Another goal is to establish connection between Chas-Sullivan s work and Gromov-Witten invariants, which we believe to be a holomorphic version of Chas-Sullivan s algebraic structure. Gromov-Witten invariants come from sigma model of quantum field theory, and Chas-Sullivan s work String Topology may be regarded as a topological version of the physical construction. This part of the project is suggested to be completed by developing a fusion intersection theory of semi-infinite cycles in infinite dimensional manifolds. Finally, part of the project is dedicated to relating the above to Kontsevich s Conjecture, which generalizes Deligne s Conjecture and unravels a deep relation between deformation theory of abstract n-algebras and the topology of configuration spaces of points in an (n+1)-dimensional Euclidean space. The main idea of Algebraic Topology is to be able to recognize topological properties of a geometric object by associating algebraic data or structure to the geometric object. Sometimes the geometry is too complicated to allow immediate understanding and work with the object, while the algebraic information is usually simpler by its nature. This project suggests some new algebraic structure for a sphere space, the space of maps from an n-dimensional sphere to a manifold. Such spaces are quite complicated and the classical work of Chen, Segal, Jones, Getzler, Burghelea, Fedorowicz, Goodwillie, and others, produced not only the computation of the homology of loop spaces, which are the particular case of sphere spaces for n=1, but also revealed amazing connections with algebra (Hochschild complex). Also, recent progress in string theory emphasized the importance of invariants associated to holomorphic maps from the 2-sphere to a manifold (Gromov-Witten invariants). In this project we undertake an analogous study of continuous maps from the n-sphere to a manifold, which for n=1 has already enabled significant progress in topology doc10723 none John J. Millson Millson and his collaborators will explore the geometric properties of configuration spaces of n-gon linkages in Lie algebras, symmetric spaces, compact Lie groups and Euclidean buildings beginning with the question of deciding when these moduli spaces are nonempty (finding the generalized triangle inequalities). In addition they will study the finer structure of these moduli spaces. In particular, they will study commutative and noncommutative Hamiltonian systems of differential equations on these spaces and use the quantizations of these systems to obtain results about the representation theory of compact Lie groups and of the Artin groups of Lie type. Millson and B.Leeb have obtained necessary and sufficient conditions for the moduli spaces of n-gon linkages in Lie algebras to be nonempty generalizing well-known results of Klyachko for sl(n,C). Millson, M.Kapovich and B.Leeb have found necessary and sufficient conditions for the moduli spaces of n-gon linkages in Euclidean buildings and symmetric spaces to be nonempty. In some cases, Millson and H.Flaschka have constructed (commutative) integrable Hamiltonian systems on these spaces but the flows are not periodic. For applications to the representation theory of compact Lie groups it is critical to find the associated action variables, i.e. find Hamiltonians with periodic flows which are functions of the original Poisson-commuting Hamiltonians. Millson and Toledano-Laredo have constructed representations of Artin groups of Lie type by quantizing certain noncommutative Hamiltonian systems. They hope to construct the trigonometric analogues of their quantum systems. The results just mentioned may be found at http: www.math.umd.edu ~jjm. Millson s work begins with one of the first theorems of high-school geometry - the theorem that if two triangles have the same set of side lengths then they are congruent. The analogue for quadrilaterals is clearly false: one can change a square into a rhombus without changing the side lengths. So one is led to try to parametrize the set of all planar n-gons with the same side lengths. From there one is led to a favorite theme of nineteenth century mathematics, the study of planar linkages (systems of rods and hinges). In the nineteenth century such a study was of immense practical significance - the problem was to convert linear motion (of a piston rod) to circular motion (turn a wheel) by a linkage. The problem was solved by a French naval officer, Peaucellier. It turns out that from the modern point of view the nineteenth century work is insufficiently precise. Millson and Kapovich have corrected the errors and written up a proof of a result (often attributed to Thurston) that, given any smooth manifold M, there is a planar linkage whose configuration space is diffeomorphic to a disjoint union of a number of copies of M. This result will appear in the journal Topology . The above work on planar linkages led to a study of n-gon linkages in space. This theory is enormously richer, connecting with symplectic geometry, integrable Hamiltonian systems and representation theory. The analogous theory in spherical and hyperbolic three-space and their generalizations (compact Lie groups and the symmetric spaces of their complexifications) appears to connect up with some of the newest objects in geometry and algebra, for example Poisson Lie groups and quantum groups doc10724 none Geometric Variational Problems The principal investigator proposes to continue the study, joint with R. Schoen, of constrained variational problems for lagrangian cycles. In its most basic form the problem can be posed as follows: Consider a symplectic manifold with a metric compatible with the symplectic form. Fix a homology class that can be represented by a lagrangian cycle. Find a lagrangian cycle that minimizes volume among all lagrangian cycles representing this class and derive optimal regularity of this cycle. In the case that the symplectic manifold is Kaehler, with Kaehler-Einstein metric, sufficient regularity of the minimizer implies that the minimizer is both lagrangian and minimal (zero mean curvature). If the first Chern class is negative such submanifolds could be unique, in a suitable sense, and then useful in understanding the geometry of the ambient manifold. If the Kaehler manifold is a Calabi-Yau manifold sufficient regularity implies that the minimizer is a calibrated submanifold, a special lagrangian submanifold. We propose to investigate the existence and regularity of this and related varitional problems and to study the consequences of these results on the geometry of Kaehler-Einstein manifolds. A consequence of the proposal is an existence theorem for special lagrangian submanifolds of a Calabi-Yau manifold. This result is an essential part of the program proposed by Strominger-Yau-Zaslow for the geometric construction of mirror symmetry . Mirror symmetry is one of the most interesting and important problems currently being studied in mathematics and theoretical physics. At its core it proposes a duality between a class of manifolds called Calabi-Yau manifolds. This duality allows computations to be performed on one manifold that yield a result for its mirror . Thus computations that are otherwise extremely difficult can be achieved. The realization of mirror symmetry will effect such diverse subjects as algebraic geometry, differential geometry, topology, partial differential equations and string theory. The current interest in this subject helps bridge the gap between physics and mathematics. In two-dimensions our proposal has some close analogies to a well-known model problem in non-linear elasticity. The regularity theory developed here will shed light on the difficult regularity problems of that theory. Finally this problem is the first attempt to make a systematic study of a variational problem with a geometric constaint. This idea will have other important applications in geometry and its applications doc10725 none In the last two decades, the homotopy continuation method for solving polynomial systems has been established and proved to be reliable and efficient. Resulting from a previous project, supported by NSF Grant , a source code, HOM4PS, was produced. Excellent performance of this code on a large collection of polynomial systems in a wide variety of applications provides practical evidence that the newly developed methods constitute a powerful general purpose solver. Nontheless, there are still numerous models of polynomial systems in applications which do not have a satisfactory line of attack. Those models provide a rich source of interesting and challenging problems with strong mathematical content. The essence of the proposed project is the advance development of the solver based on the conduct of further research to greatly enlarge the scope of its applications. The ultimate goal is a more complete high-quality block-box solfware which will incorporate the best state of the art to provide the general scientific community a reliable source for solving polynomial systems in practice. The problem of solving polynomial systems has been, and will continue to be, one of the most important subjects in both pure and applied mathematics. The need to solve systems of polynomial equations arises very frequently in various fields of science and engineering, such as, formula construction, geometric intersection, inverse kinematics, robotics, vision and the computation of equilibrium states of chemical reaction equations, etc. In recent years ( - ), a considerable research effort in Europe had been directed to this problem in two consecutive major projects, PoSSo (Polynomial System Solving) and FRISCO (FRamework for Integrated Symbolic numerical COmputation), supported by European Commission with thirteen university teams in seven European countries involved. Those research projects focused on the development of the already well-established Groebner basis methods within the framework of computer algebra. Their reliance on symbolic manipulation makes those methods seem somewhat limited to relatively small problems. In contrast, the approch by the homotopy continuation method in this project is numerical and exhibits much powerful application results doc10726 none Complex Statistical Models: Theory and Methodology for Scientific Applications Larry Wasserman, Christopher Genovese, Robert E. Kass and Kathryn Roeder This project is aimed at developing statistical theory and methodology for highly complex, possibly infinite dimensional models. Although the methodology and theory will be quite general, we will conduct the research in the context of three scientific collaborations. The first is ``Characterizing Large-Scale Structure in the Universe, a joint project with astrophysicists and computer scientists. The main statistical challenges are nonparametric density estimation and clustering, subject to highly non-linear constraints. The second project is ``Locating Disease Genes with Genomic Control. We aim to locate regions of the genome with more genetic similarity among cases (subjects with disease) than controls. These regions are candidates for containing disease genes. Finding these regions ina statistically rigorous fashion requires testing a vast number of hypotheses. We will extend and develop recent techniques for multiple hypothesis testing. The third projects is ``Modeling Neuron Firing Patterns. The goal is to construct and fit models for neuron firing patterns, called spike trains. The data consist of simultaneous voltage recordings of numerous neurons which have been subjected to time-varying stimuli. The data are correlated over time and a major effort is to develop a class of models, called inhomogeneous Markov interval (IMI) process models, which can adequately represent the data. Statistical methods for simple statistical models with a small number of parameters are well established. These models often do not provide an adequate representation of the phenomenon under investigation. Currently, scientists are deluged with huge volumes of high quality data. These data afford scientists the opportunity to use very complex models that more faithfully reflect reality. The researchers involved in this proposal are developing methodology and theory for analyzing data from these complex models. The methods are very general but they are being developed for applications in Astrophysics, Genetics and Neuroscience doc10727 none Liu It is proposed to study the shock wave theory for conservation laws and the Boltzmann equation in the kinetic theory. Shock waves occurs in many natural phenomena, such as supersonic flight, sonar wind, earthquakes and hurricanes. There is now a satisfactory mathematical theory for the inviscid plane motion. It is planned to study the multi-dimensional gas motion as well as the dissipation effects. The Boltzmann equation models the gas motion on the microscopic level. This is necessary for important physical phenomena such as the thermal effects of the boundary on the gas motion. The nonlinear waves and the boundary effects for the Boltzmann equation will be studied. The Euler equations and Navier-Stokes equations for the gas dynamics are considered. The project will include the study of the nonlinear stability of shock waves for these and more general systems of hyperbolic-parabolic conservation laws. The approach combines the pointwise estimates and the energy estimates and is based on the new understanding of the structure of the Green s function for the equations linearized about the shock. For the Boltzmann equation, the positivity of Boltzmann shocks has been shown and the boundary effects such as the thermal creep are being studied. These are based on the new macro-micro decomposition of the Boltzmann equation and time-asymptotic analysis doc10728 none Award: Principal Investigator: Michael W. Davis This is a proposal for research in geometric group theory focusing on Coxeter groups, Artin groups, and mapping class groups of surfaces. The main problems to be addressed are the following. (1) For which Coxeter groups is the Coxeter diagram uniquely determined by the group? For which Coxeter groups is the fundamental generating set uniquely determined (up to conjugation) by the group? For which Coxeter groups is the outer automorphism group finite? (2) Are all Artin groups linear groups? (3) Find a formula for the cohomology with compact supports of a building. Likewise for the Salvetti complex of an Artin group. (4) Determine the l^2 Betti numbers of cubical manifolds associated to right-angled Coxeter groups. Do they vanish outside the middle dimension? This would imply the Flag Complex Conjecture concerning triangulations of odd-dimensional spheres and has implications for graph embeddings. (5) Develop a theory of mock reflection groups. This is a class of groups similar to Coxeter groups which arise as transformations of blow-ups of hyperplane arrangements. (6) Is the Torelli subgroup of the mapping class groups of a surface of genus at least three finitely generated? (7) Can a word hyperbolic group be the fundamental group of a surface by surface bundle? Must all finitely presented non word hyperbolic groups contain a Baumslag-Solitar group or an abelian group of rank two? Group theory arises from the study of symmetries of an object. When this object has an interesting geometric structure, one can use geometric techniques to better understand the group of symmetries. This project involves the study of certain families of groups which arise in a broad range of mathematical and physical contexts, such as the study of crystal structures and the intertwining of DNA. These groups are associated to rich and beautiful geometric structures which lend themselves to the techniques of geometric group theory doc10729 none This project is dedicated to the study of uniqueness and stability in some important inverse problems, in particular to identification of diffusion coefficients and the speed of propagation for scalar partial differential equations and (Maxwell and elasticity)systems. Tools will be new Carleman type estimates and interaction between control theory and inverse problems. Also potential theory is to be utilized in the further study of inverse gravimetry and vorticity problems. In case of many boundary measurements the effort will be made to resolve the fundamental uniqueness question in the inverse conductivity problem with the data on a part of the boundary by using localized solutions of elliptic equations recently constructed by Greenleaf and Uhlmann. The PI will try to find cases of increased stability in inverse problems, in particular obtaining Lipschitz conditional stability estimates for recovery of nonlinear (space independent) elliptic and parabolic equations from boundary measurements and quantifying increased stability in prospecting by stationary waves with higher frequency. Applications of theoretical results will be in identification of volatility in options markets. We expect to develop a very efficient and reliable algorithm based on the modeling of volatility. This problem is of fundamental importance for prediction of options markets and evaluation of economical stability from current market data. Another expected application is recovery of the fundamental physical relations (in chemical equations, heat conduction) from experimental data. This problem is of growing importance for contemporary engineering due to the discovery of new materials and the use of high temperatures. The theory of inverse gravimetry combined with available models of vorticity is expected to achieve progress in evaluation of turbulence (e.g. past aircrafts) from distant measurements of pressure. This problem has important implications for increasing capability of large airports. The project will involve graduate students and stimulate their interest in mathematical problems of practical importance doc10730 none Award: Principal Investigator: James W. Cannon We attempt to resolve the hyperbolic case of Thurston s Geometrization Conjecture for 3-dimensional manifolds. Among the many possible approaches, we choose to study the asymptotic recursive properties of the fundamental group of the manifold. We concentrate on the asymptotic shingling patterns at infinity defined by the group and seek methods for proving that such patterns do or do not satisfy the necessary and sufficient conformality axiom which we introduced in our earlier studies. We study this problem in three contexts: (1) We study closed 3-manifolds with Gromov-hyperbolic group, with emphasis on the examination of concrete examples constructed by our new method of twisted-face-pairings; (2) We study general subdivision or local-replacement rules in the plane, where we have more freedom in constructing examples with special properties; and (3) We study branched coverings of the 2-sphere by the 2-sphere, where the corresponding problem is to some extent already solved by means of Thurston s combinatorial characterization of rational maps. It is in the third context that the connection with classical Teich- mueller theory becomes apparent; we are seeking an appropriate version of Teichmueller theory for our setting. In all of these contexts, we use the circle-packing programs of Ken Stephenson, the automatic group programs of Epstein, Holt, and Rees, and the program SnapPea of Jeff Weeks in conjunction with programs of the proposer and his coworkers to construct, geometrically optimize, and explore the patterns being studied. William P. Thurston has supplied us with a powerful conjectural picture of the spaces of 3-dimensional mathematics, the 3-dimensional manifolds. Thurston s Geometrization Conjecture is the most important unresolved problem in low dimensional topology, even if one sets aside the case of spherical geometry where the conjecture implies the famous million dollar Poincare Conjecture. Thurston suggests that every 3-manifold can be divided in an intrinsic manner into pieces, each of which is modelled on one of eight natural geometries. Within each piece, one can apply well-understood algebraic and geometric techniques to derive properties of the manifold. This project seeks to resolve the generic case of the Thurston Conjecture, namely the case of hyperbolic geometry. The technique employed is to maximally unwind the manifold, that is, take its universal cover, and study the asymptotic properties of this cover. The cover can be studied combinatorially almost as a growing cellular organism as a plant or animal might be studied by a cell biologist. The cover can be studied computationally as a cellular automaton might be studied by a computer scientist. The cover can be studied analytically by methods of discrete dynamical systems or differential equations or conformal mapping doc10731 none A new approach for Fourier transform spectrometry (FTS) is proposed. The principal advantage of FTS is the tremendous throughput improvement compared to dispersive or filter spectrometers. Traditional FTS techniques, however, require a precision scanning mirror. This requirement significantly increases the cost, and is difficult to implement for use from a moving platform or for a dynamic target. A more recent technique does not require scanning. This provides the ability to acquire all spectral bands simultaneously, allows high spatial resolution from a moving platform, improves the reliability, and lowers the mass, volume and cost. These non-scanning FTS, however, have yet been unable to exploit the tremendous potential throughput advantage of FTS, since they require operation in a pushbroom mode. In this mode, a narrow slit masks the field-of-view (FOV) to a narrow strip and this severely reduces the throughput. The proposed approach uses deconvolution techniques to provide spatial resolution along-track, without the need for a narrow field mask. This technique can therefore simultaneously provide both the throughput advantage of traditional FTS, and all the advantages of non-scanning FTS. Imaging spectrometry is a powerful tool for Earth Science, particularly for investigation of land cover and land use change. When applied to Space Science, particularly exploration of the solar system, imaging spectrometry is the primary tool for global determination of surface mineralogy and is also useful for studies of atmospheric composition. In Human Exploration and Development of Space, spectrometry is being employed for diagnostics of reusable rocket engines, by observation of the exhaust plume. The proposed technique provides a factor of 10 to advantage in throughput compared to current techniques for imaging spectrometry, allowing greatly improved radiometric resolution. The absence of moving parts improves the reliability and lowers the cost, mass and power requirements doc10732 none This proposal is concerned with the analysis of large data with many dimensions. For a variety of reasons, it is often desirable to reduce the dimensionality first. Using the techniques of sliced inverse regression and principal Hessian directions as building blocks, new methods are developed for more complex applications involving many input and output variables simultaneously. When the variables consist of time series or curves, automatic basis searching systems are derived for modeling both the deterministic trends and the stochastic patterns. Scientific data from a variety of disciplines have accumulated in unprecedented volume and complexity. This is exemplified by the massive gene expression profiles generated by microarray technologies. Hidden under many public accessible rich databases is a gold mine of biological messages, awaiting genomic researchers exploration. Powerful statistical methods from clustering and classification have been successfully applied to dig them out. But the variety of information that can be distilled is so diverse that the pursuit of new paths is more than warranted. The new methods developed in this project will meet this demand. In particular, they can be used to visualize both the local and the global interaction in gene expression, to infer metabolic circuitry and enzyme functionality, to shed light on the multi-task coordination at different stages of the cell cycle, and to explore the relationship between drug responsiveness and gene profiles doc10733 none Award: Principal Investigator: Darren Long The proposers plan to continue their work on a variety of problems bearing on the understanding of the geometric and topological aspects of low dimensional manifolds. On the topological side, the areas of study include Heegaard splittings, unknotting tunnels and related topics; the geometric side deals with issues related to orbifolds, the construction and melding of surface subgroups, developing an understanding of higher dimensional hyperbolic manifolds, as well as some interactions with other areas, for example algebraic number theory. Manifolds play a central role in physics, mathematics and to some extent in other sciences, since they are objects which on small scales look like Euclidean space of dimension n. For example, the space that we live in is a three manifold and space-time is a four manifold. For this and other reasons, these dimensions have attracted a good deal of attention in mathematics and physics. One basic unsolved problem is exactly which manifold is the correct model for the universe - there has been some speculation that it falls into the class of so-called hyperbolic manifolds, a certain class of three dimensional spaces which in some sense appear to be generic. Cosmological theories about the origins of the universe put constraints on the shape of space-time and hence constraints on which manifolds could occur. One of the goals of this project is refine current methods (which have already ruled out many possibilities) to narrow the search down further. There are also other applications of geometric ideas which are less obvious but still, in fact, directly important. It is no exaggeration to say that almost any problem which can be formulated qualitatively can be studied with geometric methods and as a result the powerful tools developed over the last thirty years in low-dimensional topology can be brought to bear upon it doc10734 none Gregory G. Galloway Research under this award will be conducted in the areas of Lorentzian and Riemannian geometry, with applications to General Relativity and String Theory. One of the specific aims of this project is to investigate the global structure of asymptotically locally anti-de Sitter spacetimes, especially in connection with the AdS CFT correspondence. We continue investigations into the relationship of the topology of an asymptotically locally anti-de Sitter spacetime and that of its conformal boundary-at-infinity, and undertake a study of certain topological and geometrical properties of higher dimensional black holes, and related objects arising in string theory, including certain solitions conjectured to be least energy configurations. Another aim of this project is to continue investigations into spacetime rigidity phenomena associated with the occurence of timelike lines and null lines. Applications of the null splitting theorem will be considered, and a new approach to well-known conjectures concerning the rigidity of the singularity theorems is proposed for study. Modern theories of gravity are geometrical in nature. The gravitational field and other fields, black holes and related objects, may be described and analyzed using geometric methods. In more general terms, this project is concerned with the study of certain features of gravity of current scientific interest from this geometric point of view, utilizing the tools of Riemannian geometry, a mathematical theory of space, and Lorentzian geometry, a mathematical theory of spacetime. These theories provide a method for studying the relationship among three fundamental aspects of the spacetime universe: curvature (i.e., the bending of space or spacetime), topology (i.e., the global shape and complexity of space or spacetime) and causal structure (i.e., the large scale behavior of light rays and light cones doc10735 none for DMS - In this proposal the research will study the geometry, asymptotic behavior, conformal structure and topology of properly embedded minimal surfaces in R3 . One of the main goals of the proposal is to classify all properly embedded minimal surfaces of genus zero and to describe the asymptotic geometry of all finite genus examples. Related theoretical techniques concerning compactness, regularity and convergence of minimal surfaces of locally bounded genus will be investigated as well. One hoped for application of this research is to classify all smooth finite group actions on S3 . Finally the research proposes to prove that Bryant surfaces in hyperbolic three-space are unknotted. Classical minimal surface theory has its roots in 18th and 19th century mathematics and gives one of the first important examples in what is called the calculus of variations, first described by Euler. Physically minimal surfaces can be modeled locally as soap films on wires or by surfaces of least-area relative to local boundaries. These surfaces play an important role as a tool in the study of three-dimensional topology and Riemannian geometry. The research in this proposal concerns global properties of these surfaces and possible applications to basic research in three-dimensional topology and geometry doc10736 none NSF Proposal Speaking more technically, the proposal aims to treat four research lines in complex geometry and analysis. We are studying the Grauert tube construction for its rigidity and uniquesness properties for large (maximal) radius or domain, and examining whether this point of view adds to old questions in representation theory and automorphic forms. Second, we will study a Kaehler-Einstein version of Min-Oo s rigidity theorem which we conjecture to hold. We will continue work with X. Gong on Levi flat hypersurfaces with singularities, especially algebraic ones with isolated singularities. Their importance is suggested by recent work of Siu and others proving the conjecture of Camacho on the non-existence of smooth, Levi-flat hypersurfaces in the complex projective plane. Finally we propose to study the rigidity of special classes of Schubert cycles on flag manifolds, following upon the work of the PI s former student M. Walters and, independently, R. Bryant. The proposal addresses several questions in complex analysis and geometry. Most people are familiar with Descartes analytic geometry from high school: in most respects, this line of investigation is the modern descendent of those early ideas. We will study the relationship between a geometric locus, sometimes defined by equations as in Descartes original case, and its analytic properties, those properties influenced by the calculus of Newton and Leibniz. In particular we study a complexification of geometric locus, that is, we add imaginary points to the geometry, related to the imaginary unit i , and study the influence of the imaginary points on the real points and their geometry. Another portion of the project seeks to understand the asymptotic, or long range properties of special metric geometries related to the Einstein equations. It is well known that both of these properties can be influential in physical applications, and there is recent work to lead one to hope that both this complexification construction and the asymptotics of Einstein metrics can be used to understand parts of the so-called Maldacena correspondence in theoretical physics doc10737 none for NSF proposal (Leon Simon \& Brian White joint P.I. s) Leon Simon plans to pursue various questions related to the structure of the singular sets of minimal submanifolds and energy minimizing maps, including the extension of his recent work on construction of singular examples of minimal hypersurfaces. A current aim is to construct examples of minimal submanifolds with singular sets which include ``gaps and other phenomena, the possibility of which is left open by his previous general work on the structure of the singular set. He is also proposing to complete work on the singular set of mod-2 currents to show that, in all dimensions, the top-dimensional part of the singular set locally lies in a finite union of continuously differentiable submanifolds. Simon also proposes to pursue several questions related to asymptotics on approach to singularities. Brian White plans to study how regularity properties and singular structure for minimizing chains with coefficients in a metric group depend on the group and its metric. This includes study of immiscible fluid interfaces as a special case. He also plans to investigate singularities in the mean-curvature flow. He will continue his investigations of 2-dimensional minimal surfaces, in particular concerning branch points and concerning total boundary curvature. An understanding of singularities, and how singularities are formed, is a fundamental element in our overall understanding of many physical and geometric phenomena. For example, in cosmology singularities of space-time (e.g. ``black holes ) play a fundamental role. Likewise in the study of the ``canonical objects which arise naturally in topology and geometry, singularities arise in a very natural and unavoidable manner, and the understanding of these singularities is an absolutely fundamental problem. As with most non-linear phenomena, there is not a single general theory which applies in a wide range of different contexts. Rather, each different context has its own collection of effective techniques, and it is the development and application of such techniques in the context of the geometric calculus of variations which is the focus of the present research proposal. Specifically, Simon and White propose to continue their efforts toward a complete understanding of singularities, and how they are formed, in the context of area minimizing submanifolds and energy minimizing maps. Such techniques are likely to be applicable to the study of other objects of geometric and physical significance---for example to the study of immiscible fluid interfaces, soap-films, and the equilibrium free surfaces of fluids doc10738 none Pang, Jong-Shi From: Terry Rockafellar [rtr@math.washington.edu] Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 3:59 PM To: jpang@nsf.gov Subject: proposal abstract Jong-Shih, here s the abstract for my proposal Variational Analysis in Problems of Optimization . Terry ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ This project will apply the latest advances in variational analysis to a range of optimization problems and issues. Sensitivity and metric regularity in parametric dependence will be studied. Second-order optimality conditions will be devised for new purposes and from nonstandard perspectives. Connections between cost-to-go functions and feedback for certain kinds of optimal control will be explored along with the specialization to a control framework of recently generalized Euler-Lagrange equations and Hamiltonian equations. New risk models and splitting algorithms will be developed in stochastic programming, where decisions must be made optimally in advance of full information. These efforts are needed because problems of optimization, which are of great importance in many applications from management to engineering, are not well covered by standard mathematics of the past and have required new ways of thinking. In such problems, centered on minimizing cost or maximizing efficiency , for instance, there usually are very many side conditions that have to be satisfied, and moreover the number of decision variables to be coped with can be enormous---in the thousands or even millions. It is crucial to have a solid foundation for the development of numerical methods for finding solutions and understanding the effects that shifts in input data might have on those solutions. The work to be performed will further the progress in those directions doc10739 none Resampling and subsampling offer viable approaches to obtaining valid distributional approximations in the context of dependent data while assuming very little about the underlying stochastic mechanism. Many important questions still need to be addressed in order for these modern approaches to be applied safely and accurately in practice. The main issues the investigator wishes to tackle include the following: (a) Extend the realm of applicability of subsampling by considering self-normalized statistics and or extrema of time series with possibly heavy tails together with extrapolation interpolation of subsampling estimators. (b) Investigate the performance of the Local Bootstrap in forming confidence bands for conditional moments and prediction intervals for future values of a Markov process, as well as constructing hypothesis tests for time-reversibility. (c) Show that nonparametric estimation of conditional moments via flat-top kernel smoothing is not appreciably affected by the curse of dimensionality when the underlying function is ultra-smooth. (d) Investigate the performance of the newly proposed Local Block-Bootstrap in the case of a nonstationary series with a slowly-changing stochastic structure. (e) Propose the Tapered Block-Bootstrap algorithm, and show that it achieves superior performance as compared to the well-known Block-Bootstrap. (f) Propose a new block bandwidth choice estimator with superior rate of convergence. And finally (g) consider the issue of a possibly integrated time series, and propose a new computer-intensive procedure, the Continuous-Path Block-Bootstrap, for statistical inference. Correlated data, such as time series and spatial data, are often encountered in many diverse scientific disciplines including economics, meteorology, electrical engineering, etc. The general goal of this project is to further the development of computer-intensive statistical analysis methods that are applicable in the setting of correlated data but do not rely on unrealistic or unverifiable model assumptions. Addressing this issue fruitfully will have many practical applications. For example, in a daily series of exchange rates or stock returns spanning a decade (or more), there may be evidence that the stochastic structure of the series has not been invariant over such a long stretch of time. Creating a practical way to model such nonstationarities and devising appropriate resampling methods for inference would be most helpful for economic applications. For a different application, consider the problem of stochastic simulation of manufacturing systems or a Gibbs-type sampler simulation; the development of subsampling resampling for `almost stationary time series would be most helpful in order to assess convergence and accuracy of the simulation. In the context of spatial statistics (e.g., mining and geostatistics, atmospheric and environmental science, etc.), the data typically correspond to measurements obtained at spatial points that are irregularly spaced. For example, a measurement may indicate the quality or quantity of the ore found in some location X, or a measurement of precipitation or air quality at location Y during a fixed time interval. The irregular nature of the measurement locations presents an added complication that, however, can be by-passed by specially designed versions of resampling subsampling doc10740 none The Principal Investigator will study several problems in Probability Theory concerning random processes on general graphs and networks, in particular certain Markov processes (Glauber dynamics) that have natural Gibbs measures as stationary distributions. The investigator and his collaborators have shown that for the Ising model on trees, (and on other hyperbolic graphs), the mixing time for Glauber dynamics is polynomial in the volume, at any temperature. Moreover, on a finite regular tree, the critical temperature for rapid mixing is lower than the critical temperature for uniqueness of Gibbs states on the corresponding infinite tree. The investigator intends to study precisely which aspects of the geometry of a graph (e.g. spectra, Cheeger constants) are most relevant to the mixing rate of Glauber dynamics. Modern approximation schemes for hard combinatorial problems (e.g., counting matchings in a graph) use processes related to Glauber dynamics, so new insights on these dynamics will have an impact on randomized approximation algorithms. Large networks of interacting particles have been studied for decades in statistical physics, as models of magnetism, freezing, and other physical processes. In these models, each particle interacts only with its immediate neighbors, yet from this local interaction, global structure can emerge. The evolution of these systems over time is called Glauber dynamics . In the last twenty years, these dynamics have been used in image analysis, approximate counting algorithms, and communication networks. While most of the mathematical results and physical predictions available are restricted to quite special networks (where the particles are arranged in a regular lattice), they have motivated applications where the underlying network has completely different structure. The investigator intends to analyze Glauber dynamics on a variety of networks, with attention focussed on the effect of the network geometry on the dynamics. He is collaborating with several computer scientists on the algorithmic aspects of Glauber dynamics doc10741 none In non and semiparametric inference Bickel, in collaboration with Ritov and others, proposes to study how an increasing but proportionally vanishingly small cross validation sample can be used systematically to optimize supervised learning (classification and regression) procedures, for example ADA BOOST. Further they propose to study a unified theory for testing of semiparametric hypotheses and develop efficient tests for bioequivalence. In dependent data models, they propose to extend previous results on Hidden Markov models to state space models and study how procedures obtained by fitting and use of approximate likelihoods such as particle filters behave. The investigator and collaborators propose to analyze and develop new effective methods for identifying (by machine) the type of a newly perceived object or predicting some feature from historical information. This ranges from machine reading of hand written zip codes to predicting travel times of cars from one destination to another to predicting tumor type from microarray data. In a similar direction they propose to see how well computer simulation based approximations to ideal prediction methods work in very complicated models applying to situations such as voice recognition. Further they propose to study methods of inference bearing on questions such as whether a new drug which may be more expensive and have side-effects is sufficiently better than drugs currently in use to be authorized for distribution doc10742 none Stephan Stolz The principal investigator proposes to study the question which manifolds admit Riemannian metrics of positive scalar and Ricci curvature, respectively. Concerning the first question, previous work of the principal investigator shows that these questions boil down to computing abelian groups which depend only on the dimension, the fundamental group and the first two Stiefel-Whitney classes of the manifold these metrics live on. The role these groups play in the existence classification problem for positive scalar curvature metrics is analogous of the role of Wall s surgery obstruction groups in the existence classification problem for smooth structures. The principal investigator hopes to gain an algebraic functorial understanding of these groups by studying various maps that relate these groups with homology K-theory connective K-theory of classifying spaces of groups, and with the K-theory of the associated group C -algebras. Concerning positive Ricci curvature, the investigator is pursuing a proof of his conjecture that the existence of a positive Ricci curvature metric on a spin manifold with vanishing first Pontryagin class implies the vanishing of its Witten genus. This invariant arose from considerations in string theory. Heuristically it is the index of a yet to be rigorously defined Dirac operator on the free loop space of this manifold. Mike Hopkins has described a homotopy theoretic way to define the Witten genus of a family of such manifolds which lives in the elliptic cohomology of the parameter space. It is a very interesting challenge to express the elliptic cohomology and the family Witten genus in terms of the objects that string theorists are analysing and thus to give a geometric interpretation of Hopkins construction. These projects fit in the general framework of trying to relate the topology of a manifold (qualitative information about its global shape) and its geometry (quantitative information about its local shape). For 2-dimensional manifolds (like the surface of a ball or a tire), a nice classification has been known for a long time: Two such surfaces have the same topology (that is, they can be deformed into each other if we think of them as being made of thin rubber) if and only if they have the same number of `holes (the surface of a ball no holes, the surface of a tire or a cup has one hole, and a pretzel has two holes). Moreover, if a surface has `positive curvature in the sense that the angle sum in each triangle whose edges are geodesics (shortest curves) is larger than 180 degrees, then this surface has the same topology as the surface of a ball. It is a major goal of modern day mathematics to generalize these results to higher dimensional manifolds. For example, our universe is a manifold of dimension 3, Einstein s space-time has dimension 4, and manifolds of dimension 10, respectively, 26 play a crucial role in the theoretical physics of the attempted unification of the four fundamental forces doc10743 none Professor Mark E. Welker in the Department of Chemistry at Wake Forest University is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his studies on the development of exo-selective and or enantioselective Diels-Alder reactions that are catalyzed by transition metals. Series of chiral ligands, transition metals, and reducing agents that do not react or react very slowing with the dienophile carbonyl and double bonds will be screened for their efficacy in the catalytic cycle. This methodology will be used to synthesize several cis-decalin ring systems related to biologically significant compounds. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Program, Professor Welker is investigating new ways to form six-membered rings with precise control over the three-dimensional spatial arrangement of the substituents. These reactions will be catalyzed by small amounts of transition metals. By using catalytic amounts, savings in terms of material and waste disposal costs will be realized. The new methodology also will be utilized to prepare the bicyclic core structures of several biologically active organic compounds doc10744 none for DMS - In his major project the investigator plans to continue his work on Riemannian manifolds with positive sectional curvature on open dense sets of points. A particular emphasis shall be put on the question how to distinguish this class from the two well studied classes of manifolds that have positive respectively nonnegative curvature everywhere. In further projects the investigator plans to obtain rigidity results for metric foliations of Euclidean spheres and for manifolds all of whose geodesics are closed. The surfaces of eggs and footballs or the idealized surface of the earth are examples of 2-dimensional Riemannian manifolds with positive sectional curvature. For more than a century geometers understand that surfaces with positive curvature must look simple. They can not develop any holes, so they look for example fundamentally different from the surface of a doughnut. In contrast there are two dimensional manifolds with nonnegative sectional curvature, which essentially look like the surface of a doughnut. This elementary observation reveals a fundamental difference between positive and nonnegative curvature. The main aim is to understand this fundamental difference and its implications in higher dimensions as well doc10745 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Applications of Nonlinear Dynamics Yorke This project concerns the theory of chaotic dynamical systems. The research explores mathematical phenomena that are relevant to the modeling of nonlinear physical systems and the analysis of experimental data. We consider the method commonly used by scientists to reconstruct the dynamics of a nonlinear physical system from experimental data, and we study the mathematical relationship between the reconstructed dynamics and the true dynamics. We will also develop methods for forecasting the behavior of spatiotemporally chaotic systems, such as the Earth s weather, given limited measurements of the state of the system. Further, we will study fractal measures that arise in chaotic fluid flow and their application to problems of mixing and magnetic field generation. Chaotic dynamics has been observed in many aspects of nature; in weather, it has been called the butterfly effect. Chaos can be an obstacle in some cases (limiting the predictability of the weather) and an asset in others (such as industrial mixing applications). Our research concerns the mathematics behind the methods scientists use to model and forecast chaotic systems. Our intent is both to examine the validity of apparently useful but unproven methods, and to develop new and improved methods. Long-term benefits may range from better weather forecasts to more efficient procedures for mixing chemicals doc10746 none for DMS - The focus of the proposal is on the research of locally Hermitian symmetric spaces of non-compact type, considered as special complex manifolds of non-positive sectional curvature. Complex hyperbolicity can be considered as a weak notion of negative curvature. From analytic point of view, the principal investigator proposes to work on the rigidity of tangent bundles among the moduli space of vector bundles of locally Hermitian symmetric spaces. From the uniformization point of view, he proposes to work on characterization of arithmetic lattices in complex two balls. He proposes to investigate the analogue of Fijita s conjectures concerning very ampleness of pluricanonical line bundles on such manifolds, relating to algebraic geometry. He proposes to understand and estimate the growth of Betti numbers on a tower of coverings naturally associated with the manifolds, relating topology to geometry. In the direction of number theory, he proposes to study the question on finiteness of rational points on models of two ball quotients defined over an algebraic number field. He also proposes to work on several other problems in the area of complex hyperbolicity and Kaehler geometry, relating to his earlier research directions. In mathematics, people are interested in models which on one hand are elegant and relatively simple to describe and on the other hand display rich mathematical structures. Locally Hermitian symmetric spaces are such nice geometric models for which different disciplines of mathematics meet. The main purpose of this proposal is to understand several geometric and arithmetic aspects of such models and explain their interrelationships. Understanding of the various properties and problems proposed will enhance the knowledge of the subject and other disciplines of mathematics involved doc10747 none Mathematical Sciences: Nonlinear Geometric Optics Rauch The project concerns the development and analysis of new asymptotic methods to study short wavelength solutions of nonlinear hyperbolic partial differential equations. Short wavelength asymptotics, also known as geometric optics, is one of the most penetrating and widely applicable methods for analyzing partial differential equations. Traditionally applied to linear problems, the method has recently been employed to furnish rigorous results in the nonlinear context. This project continues the development of the method for treatment of nonlinear problems. Special emphasis is placed on analysis of solutions that model ultrashort laser pulses and on the behavior of both wave trains and pulses upon crossing focal points. This project develops new mathematical tools to describe the propagation of waves whose form is that of short pulses. The technique, called asymptotic analysis, studies such pulses in the limit as the wavelength of the pulse becomes shorter and shorter. In such limiting situations, much can be learned about solutions of the underlying equations, which express physical laws such as Newton s second law for fluids or the laws of electromagnetism. This project develops the technique to analyze important nonlinear equations that arise in a variety of applications. Special attention is given to diffractive effects that occur when rays of geometric optics stay close together for long times, and to the effects that occur when pulses focus in a nonlinear regime. Promising preliminary results show that standard numerical techniques can be improved in both accuracy and simplicity. The results of this project will yield reliable procedures for numerical simulations of important physical systems, including lasers that produce ultrashort pulses doc10748 none The experimental determination of the mass of the neutrinos (orantineutrinos) is a slow and increasingly more complex process. The electron antineutrinos are the favored object. They are produced during beta-decay, and electrons are ejected at the same time. Their properties link directly to the spin and mass of the escaping neutrino through fundamental conservation laws. The preferred beta decay source is tritium since the electrons have only 18.56 KeV energy at the endpoint of the beta spectrum. This is a value, which is technologically achievable even with meV resolution. However one is dealing with the endpoint of the beta spectrum, where the intensities of the electron fluxes per eV energy interval are down by 10 order of magnitudes. This is the quintessential problem for all experiments aimed at the direct determination of the neutrino mass. All neutrino rest mass experiments must include electron spectrometers with high resolution; ultralow dark count detectors, excellent calibration procedures, and superstabilities for all experimental parameters to collect data for very long times to cope with the statistical uncertainties. A new effort is under way at the Physics Department of The University of Texas at Austin, in cooperation with the University of Nebraska, Brandeis University, Michigan Tech University, Pomona College, and The University of Texas at Arlington. Our approach is based on a series of electrostatic electron analyzers, which are designed to record the beta electron energies with about 1 eV resolution. The source is gaseous, molecular tritium at 30K. The detectors are easily accessible and can be shielded from unwanted cosmic radiation to 1 dark count per day. There is no magnetic field inside the whole apparatus. Furthermore we will use the gas cell as a target for electron diffraction in order to calibrate the voltages at the spectrometers with the de Broglie wavelenghts of electrons produced by a telefocus electron gun. This is possible since the bond length of T2 is very well known from Raman spectroscopy. The beam electrons will also give us laso the spectrometer function to about .2 eV resolution. In summary, when all units work as designed our experiment will lead to a determination of the mass of the elctron antineutrino at the .5 eV level doc10749 none ions are in applications. An integer partition is a partition of a given integer into decreasing parts. A central problem is to study the structure of a partition chosen at random among all such partitions. Since the pioneering work by Erdos and Lehner, the studies by Szalay, Turan, Fristedt and this investigator resulted in discovery of a rather detailed picture (shape) of the typical partition. The investigator plans to continue his research on the random integer partitions, and to extend it to the random plane partitions, a surprisingly rich combinatorial scheme, whose probabilistic aspects have only started to emerge. The investigator plans to combine enumerational tools and the probabilistic techniques in order to study the geometric characteristics of the typical plane partitions. The random partitions have been found critically important in probabilistic studies of optimization problems. One such well known problem is to partition a given set of numbers (weights) into two groups so that the weights of two groups are as close to each other as possible. Simplicity of this problem is deceiving: there is no efficient algorithm to solve it when the set of weights is large. It is natural then to switch attention and to study computational complexity of a typical problem when the individual weights are random. In on-going joint research C. Borgs, J. Chayes and the investigator have found a parameter of the problem whose value plays a crucial role in determination of how intrinsically difficult a typical instance of the problem is. Much as the partition problem differs from the evolving random graph, there is a striking similarity between two structures: both experience a rapid transition within a surprisingly narrow window on the parameter scale. The research will continue, and the collaborators plan to broaden it, to include various other optimization problems doc10750 none Award: Principal Investigator: Heather M. Johnston Polygonal knot theory studies the isotopy classes of embedded polygons in three space where the number and length of edges are fixed throughout the isotopy. The PI and co-author have found the first examples of polygons which are topologically unknotted, but for which the isotopy class of embeddings is nontrivial. The PI and student collaborators will investigate questions such as whether or not there are any such examples for equilateral polygons. Surgery theory studies the set of manifold structures within a given homotopy type. The Bryant-Ferry-Mio-Weinberger surgery exact sequence for homology manifolds has been used by the PI to prove that up to s-cobordism many of the geometric properties of manifolds also hold for homology manifolds. The Novikov conjecture and related coarse Novikov conjecture are keys to our understanding of surgery theory. The PI has developed some techniques for attacking the coarse Novikov conjecture for unusual non uniformly contractible spaces. Controlled and bounded surgery theory will be used to further investigate homology manifolds and the coarse Novikov conjecture. Up to now, topologists have studied well-behaved spaces such as manifolds. Yet singular spaces arise more and more frequently in subjects such as analysis, algebraic geometry and physics. The non-resolvable homology manifolds studied in this project are so singular that they have no points whatsoever with Euclidean neighborhoods. Perhaps these strange spaces will someday account for the extra dimensions of the universe predicted by string theory. Coarse geometry, and the coarse homology of John Roe are ways of separating the large scale behavior of spaces from the local information. The invariants of coarse geometry and topology depend only on the large scale behavior of the space. Better understanding of these objects and their invariants will help topologists to classify the different types of singular spaces, which appear throughout modern physics. In polygonal knot theory, a new twist on the classical study of knots, a different type of singular spaces is studied. This new theory is modeled by sticks joined end to end by universally flexible joints (rubber tubing perhaps) to form a closed loop. The PI has produced the first examples of configurations which are stuck (cannot be unraveled), but only because they are made of sticks. If the same configurations were made of string they could be unraveled. Knot theory of strings has been applied to the study of protein and DNA molecules. For a small number of atoms each bond can be represented by a stick in the model discussed here, This is a richer and more appropriate model for small molecules than the string which has been used in the past doc10751 none Petrova This project addresses some problems in transport equations, Godunov type central schemes for hyperbolic conservation laws, classical and nonlinear approximation. The common thread that runs through the proposed research is the use of techniques from approximation theory, harmonic and functional analysis (Littlewood-Paley theory, wavelet decompositions, maximal functions, interpolation and K-functionals) to prove analytic results in other areas of applied mathematics and to use these techniques to develop numerical methods. Particular emphases will be placed on several issues: development of a satisfactory theory for linear transport equations in several space dimensions which arise when linearizing the nonlinear problem, development of Godunov type central schemes for solving multidimensional systems of conservation laws, and application of these schemes to various problems and models. Extensions of averaging lemmas to go from microscopic to macroscopic formulations will also be of primary concern. A portion of this project will address fundamental questions in nonlinear approximation and multivariate cubature. The areas under discussion (nonlinear approximation, analytical properties of solutions to transport equations and development of effective numerical methods for their computation) are of significant practical interest. The applications include image processing, statistical estimation, fluid mechanics, geophysics, meteorology, astrophysics, multi-component flows, ground water flow, semiconductors, and reactive flows doc10752 none Shahidi, Ramin Stanford University CISE Postdoctoral Associates in Experimental Computer Science: Integrating Soft Segmentation with Intensity-Based Matching for 2D 3D Image Data Registration Soft segmentation is a recent innovation in image processing which attempts to preserve the maximum amount of information possible in an image while classifying various image elements. Soft segmentation produces flexible (e.g., fuzzy or probabilistic) labels for individual pixels in an image as opposed to forcing a decision about each pixel. Soft segmentation is an effective method for noisy images, such as intra-operative fluoroscopic x-ray images, where preservation of information is critical. In recent years, a variety of promising voxel-property or intensity-based matching algorithms have been developed for three-dimensional (3D) medical image registration, but these algorithms are inadequate in the presence of significant noise. Spine images contain rigid elements (vertebrae) within a deformable structure (spine). Registration is performed on a single vertebra, therefore, spine images contain both structured and unstructured noise. Research is proposed to apply soft labels to the segmentation of two-dimensional (2D) images of the spine for 2D 3D image registration. The postdoctoral associate will assist in 1) adapting an existing fiducial-based clinical spinal navigation system to use image-based fine registration using pre-segmented images, 2) developing a semi-automated segmentation of fluoroscopic images growing a bounding-box around the region of interest, 3) developing both fuzzy and probabilistic soft labels for segmenting the fluoroscopic images, and 4) the convolution of soft labels into gradient and mutual information-based intensity-based matching algorithms doc10753 none for DMS - . This proposal consists of seven items. The first item is a joint project of the two principal investigators and returns to previous joint work on the wave trace for a manifold with boundary, in order to sharpen and simplify the earlier results by defining the wave trace, not as a trace on the space of initial data of the wave equation, but as a trace on the space of boundary data. The second item is a joint project of Guillemin and K. Okikiolu and involves refinements of a recent result on ``two-tiered asymptotics for Szego estimates. The third item is a joint project of Guillemin with C. Zara, and concerns the interplay between graph theory and topology on GKM manifolds. The fourth item is a joint project of Melrose and P. Loya extending the Atiyah-Patodi-Singer index theorem to manifolds with corners. The fifth item involves on-going work of Melrose and R. Mazzeo and the beginning of a project with D. Grieser to analyze the Laplacian on singular algebraic varieties by blow-up and pseudodifferential methods. The sixth project involves Melrose, A. Hassell and A. Vasy in the description of scattering by potentials which are smooth up to infinity. The final item is a joint project of Melrose and J. Wunsch in which the propagation of singularities for waves on manifolds with conic singularities is investigated. A common theme of the items above is the wave equation and related techniques. For instance, one of the important applications of the joint project of the two principal investigators will be to the understanding of the reflection of waves in a domain in the plane. For a convex planar domain the results of this project should shed light on the celebrated problem: Can one hear the shape of a drum , that is, do the frequencies of vibration of a planar domain, corresponding to the head of a drum, determine its shape? Earlier work of the investigators showed that these frequencies of vibration determine the so-called length spectrum of the domain, namely the lengths of inscribed polygons of minimal circumference. One result of the investigation above should be a determination of the SHAPES of these polygons as well doc10754 none The goal of this project is to understand macroscopic properties of materials undergoing solid to solid phase transitions through modern methods in the calculus of variations. A main objective is to investigate the possible patterns that can form and their impact on the elastic behaviour of the material. On the analytical side, virtually all methods to attack this problem are connected to the deep mathematical concept of quasiconvexity. Even 50 years after Morrey s seminal work, quasiconvexity is despite its fundamental importance still poorly understood, and any progress in this program will contribute to the unraveling of its mysteries. The numerical simulation of microstructure poses a wealth of challenging problems. New insight into the underlying theoretical concepts will enhance the performance of algorithms and lead to their rigorous verification. Successful computations will help to develop new experiments that allow to identify optimal properties of materials. The proposed integrated analytical and numerical approach is designed to advance the understanding and the optimization of new materials which play a crucial role in emerging technological applications, for example of microactuators based on shape memory materials or light guiding devices and bifocal contact lenses made of nematic elastomers. Date: May 11, doc10755 none Raskin The objective of this research is to develop and optimize biologically active carbon (BAC) filtration systems to remove low concentrations of perchlorate from drinking water. These systems must produce water that meets all regulatory standards, is biologically stable so that its quality does not degrade during distribution, is free of odorous substances, and has a low chlorine demand so that excessive chlorination by-product formation will not be an issue. The proposed research could result in an efficient, bench-scale perchlorate treatment process that can produce water meeting these requirements. The specific objectives are: (1) to develop methods for microbial identification and quantification in BAC filters, (2) to develop a biofilm modeling approach for optimizing BAC filter operation and design, and (3) to integrate process engineering optimization, microbial characterization and biofilm modeling doc10756 none Award: Principal Investigator: Abigail A. Thompson The focus of the proposed research is the study of knots and 3-dimensional spaces. We will examine questions about surgery on knots, knotting of graphs in 3-space dimensional spaces, and Heegaard decompositions of 3-manifolds. We describe three specific goals and their connections to some of the basic questions in the field. The first goal is to develop the tools and techniques of multi-parameter thin position and sweep-outs so that they can be used to tackle some of the long-standing problems in knot theory and 3-manifold theory. A second is to extend work of the proposer and M. Scharlemann on unknotted planar graphs in the 3-sphere to a more general setting. Finally, we aim to obtain a clearer understanding of general questions about 3-manifolds by obtaining a deeper understanding of 3-manifolds of Heegaard genus two. We will examine specific questions about tunnel number one knots, special cases of larger questions about what genus two manifolds can be obtained by surgery on a knot in the 3-sphere, which of these manifolds contain immersed surfaces with injective fundamental groups, and how information from the Heegaard diagrams of these manifolds translates into geometric and algebraic information about the manifold itself. We live in what is apparently a universe with three spatial dimensions. Exploring the possible forms that our universe might have is not only a deep problem for physicists but also for mathematicians. Different mathematical possibilities lead to very different expected physical properties. As an example, we do do not know if, were we able to program a very fast rocket to go straight into space, it would eventually return to its starting point, like a ship on the surface of the earth, or if it would continue to travel away from us forever. There are an infinite number of possibilities for the shape of the universe. This project proposes to explore some of them using the techniques of low-dimensional topology and knot theory doc10757 none for DMS - This project is concerned with the structure of smoothly curved spaces on a small but definite scale, with the partial reularity and singularity structure of limit cases of such spaces, with the relations between analysis and geometry on metric measure spaces, and with the structure of nonpositively curved spaces. Specifically, we will continue our investigations of manifolds with Ricci curvature bounded below and their weak limits, of Einstein manifolds and their weak limits, of metric measure spaces for which a doubling condition and Poincar\ e inequality hold, and of compact nonpositively curved manifolds whose volume is sufficiently small. Smoothly curved spaces (the higher dimensional generalizations of curved surfaces) play an important role in geometry and in physics. A central issue is to describe the ``worst possible examples of spaces the curvature is controlled in some specific fashion, and, what is very closely related, to describe the kinds singularities which can form in limiting cases. This study is the main concern of our project. An example (from a somewhat different domain) of what we mean by the ``formation of singularities , one can think of the formation of ``black holes doc10758 none EFFICIENT COMPUTATION IN MULTI-LEVEL MODELS In recent years, a new trend has been growing in applied statistics---it is becoming ever more feasible to build application specific models which are designed to account for the structure inherent in any particular data generation mechanism. Such models have long been advocated on theoretical grounds, but recently the development of new computational tools (e.g., hardware, software, and algorithms) for statistical analysis has begun to bring such model fitting into routine practice. Of course, much work remains to be done. The flexibility of such methods comes at a cost---they require problem specific coding, long computation times, and present difficulties in ascertaining convergence. This proposal aims to tackle some of these difficulties using newly developed efficient Monte Carlo techniques. The PIs plan to study a number of outstanding theoretical questions concerning the behavior and extended application of these efficient methods by developing new algorithms for a number of important models which are prime candidates for these methods. The PIs are involved in several on-going substantive data analytic projects (e.g., in computational biology and high energy astrophysics) which both help to clarify the relevant theoretical questions and stand to benefit from the new methodology. The computational goals of this research are by no means an end unto themselves, but rather a means to improved data analysis and statistical inference. As has been so clearly illustrated in recent years improved computational tools can open up whole new areas of statistical application, as well as increase reliability, thus improving statistical inference. Research will focus on such newly developed Monte Carlo techniques as multi-point Metropolis and the methods of conditional, joint, and marginal data augmentation. Multi-point Metropolis generalizes the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm by allowing multiple dependent proposals at each iteration. As a consequence the multi-point method is more able to jump further, is less likely to be caught in a local mode, and thus can substantially improve mixing. The methods of conditional, joint, and marginal augmentation have already substantially improved performance of the EM and Data Augmentation algorithms in a wide range of models (e.g., mixed-effects models, finite mixture models, multivariate t-models, probit generalized linear models and generalized linear mixed model, Poisson image models, etc.). In particular, these new algorithms maintain the stable convergence properties of EM and DA while sometimes reducing the required computation time by over 99%. These methods, especially in tandem, have the potential to significantly improve and extend Markov Chain Monte Carlo in statistical practice. This program is being jointly funded by the Division of Mathematical Sciences and Astronomical Sciences and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities from the Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences doc10759 none Mikhail G. Khovanov The project aims to construct quantum invariants of 4-dimensional objects. It is based on the author s recent discovery of a doubly-graded cohomology theory of links in the 3-sphere. The Euler characteristic of the cohomology groups is equal to the Jones polynomial. We would like to extend this theory to link cobordisms. The invariant of a cobordism will be a homomorphism between cohomology groups assigned to the boundaries of the cobordism. Furthermore, the theory should extend to tangles and tangle cobordisms. To a tangle we ll associate a functor between triangulated categories associated to the boundaries of the tangle, and to a tangle cobordism a natural transformation between functors. These triangulated categories will be related to highest weight categories of modules over simple Lie algebras, as well as categories of modules over certain Frobenius algebras, such as cyclotomic Hecke algebras. In addition, we will look for cohomology theories lifts of other quantum invariants of links and 3-manifolds, including the Alexander and HOMFLY polynomials and Witten-Reshetikhin-Turaev invariants. An n-dimensional manifold is an object that locally looks like an n-dimensional space. A circle can be approximated by a tangent line in the neighbourhood of a point, and is a one-dimensional manifold (n-manifold, for short). The global structure distinguishes the circle from the line, though. Surfaces provide examples of two-manifolds. It turns out that one and two-manifolds are easy to classify, while in higher dimensions classification is hard. It is a theorem that in dimensions greater than three there can be no satisfactory classification, and topologists seem to be fairly close to finding one for three-manifolds. Given a pair of manifolds, it is a tough question to decide whether or not they are isomorphic. One approach is to extract some tangible invariant out of a manifold, such as a number, or a polynomial, and then compare these numbers. Most of the times the numbers are different and tell us that the manifolds are different, too. Dimension three is special in that there is a wealth of such invariants. These invariants, moreover, link three-manifold topology with deep algebraic structures. There are indications that the invariants can be lifted to the next dimension, to invariants of four-manifolds, and my goal is to find them and compare to analytical invariants of 4-manifolds that arise from solutions of certain partial differential equations doc10760 none Interdisciplinary (99) This is a supplement to award , Completion of Case Studies for the Learning through Technology website (LT2). This website is being designed on the basis of research and is relatively timeless in its approach to explaining the effective use of educational technology. Early feedback indicates that there is a strongly felt need for this resource among reform-ready SMET faculty. In this final phase, our work is bringing all of the planned sections of the website to a full-use threshold, which we define to mean the lowest level of completeness needed to be useful to reform ready SMET-faculty doc10761 none for DMS - PI: Wei-Dong Ruan Dr. Ruan proposes to study the Lagrangian fibration structure of Calabi-Yau manifolds and of more general Kaehler manifolds, and their applications in mirror symmetry and other Kahler geometry problems as well. The objective of the proposed research is to further inderstand the Lagrangian torus fibration structures for more general Calabi-Yau manifolds, exploring the interplay of sympletic geometry and complex geometry in Kaehler manifolds, as indicated by Kontsevich s categorical mirror symmetry program. Mirror symmetry has its origin in string theory and says that we have two theories, which appear to be completely distinct, describing the same physics. If we have two different models of the same universe, one can expect that one of the models can fill in the gaps in understanding the other model. This project is towards understanding this symmetry principle. Results from this proposal should be of interest to mathematicians from various disciplines as well as physicists in string theory doc10762 none Problems in Surface Geometry and Topology Howard Masur The principal investigator proposes to work on problems in the geometry and topology of surfaces. The geometric problems consist of studying the dynamics of flows on flat surfaces with cone angle singularities. A particular example is the study of billiards in polygons with angles that are rational multiples of pi. The particular aspect of this study will be to attempt to find the asymptotic growth rate for the number of periodic orbits. For some billiards such as the square, the growth rate is known. Other more interesting examples are certain right triangles. The principal investigator will study additional examples such as the square with a slit or barrier. The idea is to find asymptotic quadratic estimates. The topological problems concern the mapping class group of a surface. This group is one of the main objects of study in surface topology. One of the recent developments in group theory is to study the large scale or asymptotic geometry of a group. The principal investigator proposes to study the large scale geometry of the mapping class group with a goal of showing that the mapping class group is quasi-isometrically rigid. In the field of dynamical systems one studies the motion of objects. The field had its origins in the study of the motion of the planets. Billiards are another closely related example. There one has a point mass that moves in straight lines so that when it encounters the boundary of a region, it rebounds so that the angle of reflection equals the angle of incidence. Billiards have been studied for over 100 years. In order to understand such a dynamical system one needs to understand the long term behavior of the orbits. One particular example of this long term behavior are the study of the periodic orbits. These are the orbits that repeat themselves. The study of periodic orbits for billiards in polygons in the plane is the main subject of this proposal doc10763 none Gunnar Carlsson This project includes several different directions of research. Carlsson will study a homotopy theoretic model he has constructed for the algebraic K-theory spectrum of a field, which is built out of the representation theory of the absolute Galois group of the field. He will try to prove that the model is indeed equivalent to the K-theory of the field, as well as to work out the consequences of this result for the Quillen-Lichtenbaum conjectures and the relationship between this result and the Bloch-Kato conjecture. He will also investigate potential applications of algebraic topology in high dimensional data analysis. He expects to improve software which he and V. De Silva have developed for homology computation, with the goal of identifying features such as singular points as well as global topology for data sets of dimension greater than three. He also plans to study homotopy theoretic issues which arise in computational questions, relating to sampling subcomplexes from large simplicial complexes. Kiem plans to compute intersection numbers for singular moduli spaces of curves. This is an important problem since the intersection numbers in this case are related to well-known geometric invariants, such as the Casson invariant. One of the great themes in mathematics over the last two centuries is the strong relationship between arithmetic and geometry. The study of this theme was initiated by Abel and Galois in the early 19th century, and in this century its further development has resulted in our obtaining very precise information concerning sets of integer or rational solutions to systems of equations. The goal of this project is to explore another manifestation of this theme, in the form of the so-called algebraic K-theory of fields. Algebraic K-theory is a geometric construction attached to arithmetic objects, called fields. Fields are arithmetic objects in which one can add, multiply, and divide. Algebraic K-theory attaches geometric objects to these fields, and in such a way that already well understood invariants of fields can be extracted easily. Algebraic K-theory also contains many less well understood invariants as well, and the goal of understanding these invariants has been one toward which topologists have been striving since the early s, when Quillen defined higher algebraic K-theory. Two important conjectures have been formulated concerning algebraic K-theory, the Quillen-Lichtenbaum and Bloch-Kato conjectures. They would relate the algebraic K-theory of a field to properties of its absolute Galois groups , an object which incorporates all possible symmetries of sets of solutions of sets of equations over the field in question. This project aims to understand very clearly how algebraic K-theory is built out of information of this large group of symmetries, and to use this understanding to approach the two central conjectures mentioned above doc10764 none for PI: Richard M. Schoen Professor Schoen is proposing to study the existence of an extremal metric which defines the Bartnik quasilocal mass for a domain in a spacetime of general relativity. This would yield an existence theorem for asymptotically flat solutions of the static vacuum Einstein equations with suitable boundary conditions. It is part of a variational approach for constructing three dimensional geometries. Schoen s second project involves the construction of special lagrangian, and more generally minimal lagrangian, submanifolds in Calabi-Yau and Kaehler-Einstein manifolds. The approach is to construct hamiltonian stationary submanifolds by direct volume minimization among lagrangian submanifolds, and to obtain sufficient regularity to show that they are minimal lagrangian. Schoen s third project is to further develop the harmonic map approach to prove the rigidity of smooth actions of lattices in semisimple Lie groups on compact manifolds. Professor Mutao Wang proposes to study the mean curvature flow for special classes of submanifolds of codimension greater than one. The major thrust is to obtain stability and regularity properties of the flow. Dr. Baozhang Yang will study singular behavior of Yang-Mills connections in arbitrary dimension. This study will include an investigation into the structure of blow-up sets and asymptotic behavior near singularities. This research project concerns the study of geometric shapes which optimize certain physical and geometric energies. For curved spacetimes in general relativity, there is no natural mass-energy density which can be assigned to the gravitational field, so Bartnik proposed to measure the gravitational mass of a region in a spacetime by minimizing the total mass of all physical spacetimes which contain this region as a subset. This minimal mass spacetime, if it can be shown to exist, will be a static solution of Einstein s equations. One of the goals of this project is to find a way to construct such static solutions, and to use them to study three dimensional geometry. It is expected that three dimensional spaces have natural geometries on them which are uniquely characterized by their curvature properties. Another goal of this project is to construct certain special surfaces in Calabi-Yau manifolds, the spaces of string theory. These (three dimensional) surfaces, called special lagrangian submanifolds, are analogous to soap films in that they are surfaces of least possible area. Finally, it is proposed to study the evolution problem for surfaces which is called the mean curvature evolution. This is an evolution problem which moves a surface in space in such a way that its area is decreased most rapidly. Understanding the behavior of this evolution is important for simplifying and smoothing complicated surfaces in an optimal way. Mathematically this is a difficult problem because the surfaces may develop singularities such as cone points and tears which must be accounted for doc10765 none One focus of the research is perfect simulation. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approximate sampling methods have become extremely popular for Bayesian inference problems and for problems in other areas, such as spatial statistics, statistical physics, and computer science as a way of sampling approximately from a complicated probability distribution. For some problems, it is now possible to use more sophisticated MCMC techniques to sample perfectly (that is, without error) from the distribution of interest. The investigator and his colleagues work on creating, improving, analyzing, and applying efficient perfect simulation algorithms; these algorithms include the Fill-Machida-Murdoch-Rosenthal algorithm and the new Randomness Recycler technique pioneered by the investigator and his colleague Mark Huber. The second focus concerns probability and combinatorial structures, especially trees. The investigator and his colleagues study such problems as characterizing the shape of random multiway search trees (via fundamental research in the area of analytic combinatorics known as singularity analysis); generalizing the analyses of the height of a random incomplete digital search tree, of the move-to-front rule for self- organizing lists, and of recursive trees; and extending the so-called generalized smoothing transformation to distributions on the entire real line. One focus of the investigator s research is perfect simulation from probability distributions. Standard Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for approximate simulation from complicated probability distributions have proved extremely useful for problems in statistics (including image analysis), physics (including models for magnetism and for phase changes), and computer science as a way of sampling approximately from a complicated probability distribution. But there are problems with the MCMC approach -- most notably that for many problems it is unknown for how long the simulations must be run in order to come close to the distribution of interest. For some problems, it is now possible to use more sophisticated MCMC techniques to sample perfectly (that is, without error) from the distribution of interest. The investigator and his colleagues work on creating, improving, analyzing, and applying efficient perfect simulation algorithms, including two different algorithms pioneered by the investigator. The second focus concerns interplays between probability and combinatorial structures, especially trees, which are fundamental structures for the storage of computer data. This second focus of research has applications to the modeling of epidemics, family trees of ancient manuscripts, and pyramid schemes and to the election of multiple leaders in a multiprocessor computer network doc10766 none This award supports the travel, housing and registration costs of 18 students who would not otherwise be able to attend the 5th International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents ) to be held in Montreal, Canada, May 28- June 1, . This conference is the premier conference on agent technology and will have associated with it many tutorials, workshops and other events given by leading researchers in this field. One valuable part of student training is participation in the excitement of an international conference where major researchers present their work and engage one another in dialogue. The goal of this proposal is to enable students who are deserving but may not have the financial resources available to attend. A committee of senior agents researchers and conference organizers has been formed to select students based on the following criteria: 1) those presenting papers or software systems; 2) those presenting in workshops or other associated conference forums; 3) those demonstrating financial need; and 4) new students to the area demonstrating benefit from attendance doc10767 none Venkateswaran This individual investigator award will fund a professor at a predominately undergraduate institution for a research project that will investigate the optical and electrical properties of carbon nanotubes subjected to high pressure. During the three-year period, the following experiments will be performed: (1) High-pressure Raman studies on solubilized single walled carbon nanotube samples that contain individual tubes and small bundles of 2-3 tubes, leading to an. understanding of the effects of van der Waals coupling between the tubes. (2) Raman studies on iodine and C60 doped nanotubes aimed at probing the effects of encapsulated atoms on the vibrational properties of nanotubes. (3) Development of experimental techniques to measure electrical transport properties at elevated pressures and study of the gas adsorption properties of nanotubes as reflected by the changes in their electrical resistivity and thermopower. A key component of this proposal is the involvement of undergraduate students in research. Research collaborations with the Pennsylvania State University, proposed in this project, will provide an opportunity for undergraduate students to visit a research university and participate in materials synthesis. Our experimental research is expected to stimulate further theoretical work on carbon nanotubes and related materials. %%% The dominant technological thrust of the twenty-first century will be the new ability to control materials properties and fabricate devices at the nanoscale level. Carbon nanotubes are unique molecular structures in the form of tiny, long tubes made of carbon atoms. They are light, have high mechanical strength and flexibility, and can exhibit metallic or semiconducting electrical behavior. These versatile properties make carbon nanotubes strong candidates for the basis of innovation in nanotechnology. The rapid progress made in the field of carbon nanotubes in the recent years, promise interesting possibilities for a wide variety of applications. However, to develop this potential to the level of reliable devices, a deeper understanding of their fundamental physical properties is needed. This individual investigator award will fund a professor at a predominately undergraduate institution for a research project that will study the optical and electrical properties of carbon nanotubes and train undergraduate students in materials characterization techniques. This project focuses on the understanding of the fundamental interaction among tubes in nanotube bundles and on the effects of introducing other molecules, such as iodine or fullerene, inside the tubes as well in the channels between tubes in a bundle. In addition, the undergraduate students will have an opportunity to participate in frontier research in this exciting field doc10768 none We investigate the classification of compact topological and smooth manifolds, as well as embedding problems - knot theory. We use both new and classical homological, geometric and analytic techniques such as algebraic L-and K-theory, controlled topology, operator theory and Von Neumann signatures. One problem attacked, from differential geometry, is to determine whether almost flat manifolds bound compact manifolds. New knot invariants, defined during the prior grant, are continuing to reveal new and unexpected knotting phenomena and will be used to further investigate the classification of topological four manifolds within a fixed homology type. These invariants will also be applied to further compute the topological concordance group of knots, and to the rich structure of three manifolds as seen through descending series of the fundamental group. Another problem is to compute and apply characteristic classes for combinatorial vector bundles, an initial step in understanding a new category of manifolds - the combinatorial differentiable manifolds of Gelfand-MacPherson. A final topic is the computation of algebraic K- and L-theory using controlled topology and applying these computations to manifolds with fixed fundamental group. A n-dimensional manifold is a set of points which is locally modeled on an n-dimensional linear space. For instance a surface is a locally 2-dimensional linear space, such as a sphere, or the surface of a donut (torus). The principal problem of geometric topology is the classification of manifolds. In differential topology we also ask how many ways we may do calculus on a given manifold, addressing the uniqueness question. The fundamental group of a manifold gives an algebraic structure to the collection of all loops in the manifold, thus providing a pathway to algebra. The researchers focus on both high dimensional and low dimensional manifolds. Four dimensional manifolds are of particular interest as the results and techniques in this dimension manifest the harmony of the algebraic techniques which have found success in high dimensional manifold topology and the geometric techniques which prevail in dimension three. Investigating the foundations of manifold and knot theory fundamentally underpins our understanding of geometry, algebra, physics and differential equations. Additionally, knot theory plays a growing role in string theory, quantum field theory and the study of DNA. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 11 May 14:27:02 - (EST) From: James F. Davis jfdavis@indiana.edu To: Christopher Stark cstark@nsf.gov Cc: korr@indiana.edu Subject: Re: NSF proposal recommendation Hi Chris, Kent and I were very happy to here that you plan to recommend that our NSF proposal be granted. However, some of circumstances have changed since we wrote the proposal, so I thought I should discuss them with you in case the budget is affected. Sorry for the delay getting back to you, I was visiting the University of Chicago this week. We asked for summer money to support three graduate students: Karl Bloch, Diarmuid Crowley, and Tae-Hee Kim. Well, I am happy to report that Diarmuid Crowley has been named a Clay Mathematical Institute Lift-Off Mathematician http: www.claymath.org researchers index.htm and will receive some money from them this summer (provided some visa problems work out.) He is suggesting to Clay that they award him the money from June 13 to July 27. After Aug 1, I believe he will be supported by Max Planck Institute in Bonn. However, he could still use NSF money, for example, he is attending the 3-week School on high-dimensional manifold topology in at the ICTP in Trieste, Italy, mostly at his own expense. Please advise us if it is necessary to rebudget and return the money allotted to Diarmuid. The second change is with regard to my proposed REU student, Matt Cecil. Matt Cecil worked with me as an REU student last summer (partially supported by NSF funds), and continued throughout the academic year. He is attending UCSD as a math graduate student in the fall. However, due to mathematical reasons and personal reasons, he will not be an REU student with me this summer. So the question again is - what to do with the money allotted to him? I talked to our chair, Dan Maki, and he said that he could use the money to help undergraduate research projects connected with industry. Dan has many industrial contacts throughout the state of Indiana and had lead such projects for several years. The money would primarily go to student travel expenses. So, Chris, please advise on whether we should give some money back to the NSF and rebudget, or just go with the modifications outlined above. Jim doc10769 none Birge This individual investigator award funds research in electron physics in mesoscopic metallic wires. It exploits microfabrication tools to study processes in solids that occur on submicron length scales. Four topics form the focus of the research; 1) the dephasing and energy exchange between electrons in small metallic wires below 1K; 2) spin-polarized transport in hybrid magnetic non-magnetic systems; 3) electron transport in superconductor non-superconductor (normal and magnetic) structures; and 4) growth of and electron transport in self-assembled rare-earth silicide nanowires. In each case the planned experiments are aimed at increasing our understanding of observed phenomena, as well as searching for potential device applications. The graduate students and post-docs working on all four of these projects learn a wide variety of technical skills associated with microfabrication. Their research experience prepares them for jobs in academia, national labs, or industry. %%% A vast array of microfabrication tools has been developed to enable the semiconductor industry to fabricate integrated circuits with millions of transistors on a single chip. Those same tools allow researchers to study the behavior of metals on length scales well below one micrometer, where many new strange phenomena occur. For example, electrons in macroscopic metals at room temperature behave essentially like tennis balls, i.e. they obey the rules of classical physics. In contrast, electrons in sub-micrometer samples at low temperature behave more like waves, i.e. they obey the rules of quantum mechanics. This leads to many interesting properties, such as the fact that some metals become superconducting at low temperature, others are magnetic, and still others remain normal metals. When different kinds of metals are put together, such as superconductors and normal metals, or ferromagnetic and nonmagnetic metals, new things happen. This individual investigator award will fund research into the properties of such very small samples in order to unravel the sometimes-mysterious new behavior, as well as to search for possible new kinds of useful devices. Students and post-doctoral research associates working in this area become familiar with the microfabrication tools used in industry, and they also learn how to think about the physics of very small devices. Former students and post-docs from this research program now work in industry, government labs, and academia doc10770 none We propose various directions for studying embedded minimal surfaces in three-manifolds. This includes the study of the convergence of such surfaces, how they degenerate and whether or not their Morse index is bounded. There are many possible applications of results along these lines including to the spherical space-form problem, the topology of three-manifolds with positive scalar curvature etc. In addition, these results should yield new insight into minimal surfaces in Euclidean space. This project focuses on minimal surfaces in three-dimensional manifolds. Minimal surfaces are critical points for area (e.g., soap films are least area surfaces) and arise naturally in many problems in mathematics and in the other sciences. Many of the classical results in this area are on least area surfaces. In contrast, our main interest is in high index (i.e., highly unstable) embedded minimal surfaces with bounded topology - a well-known example is given by the standard helicoid. Roughly speaking, the point of some of our theorems is that the behavior of the helicoid is typical doc10771 none The project will examine the effects of a major biological change that has occurred recently in the Bering Sea. Once a diatom-dominated ocean, the Bering Sea has changed to a coccolithophore-dominated ocean. The dramatic change in phytoplankton abundance has many ramifications, not the least of which is that coccolithophores emit the gases Dimethylsulfide (DMS) and dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO). DMS and DMSO are greenhouse gases and the introduction of these gases in the Arctic could lead to enhanced warming of the region and concomitant effects beyond the Arctic doc10772 none The Kentucky Science and Technology Council, Inc., through its Appalachian Rural Systemic Initiative Leadership, will host a conference on research topics needed in rural education, particularly in the disadvantaged Appalachian region. The conference will bring together researchers, practitioners, community leaders, parents, and others interested in rural education, to formulate a research agenda, most likely conducted through a partnership with two regional research universities doc10773 none A problem common to many disparate fields of scientific and industrial enquiry is that of comparing a set of experimental conditions, or `treatments , when faced with heterogeneity in the units of material on which the experiment is to be performed. The technique of blocking specifically addresses this problem. Typically using values of some identifiable nuisance factor, the experimental units are partitioned into homogeneous subsets called blocks. Inferences can then be based on the more precise comparisons of measurements from the same block. The design problem is to determine which treat- ments are assigned to which units in which blocks, said assignment being driven by the desire to maximize the quality of information that will ultimately be produced. The problem becomes more complicated as more nuisance factors, with various inter- relationships, are introduced or identified. This project addresses the design problem for a variety of commonly encountered experimental settings, with two broad goals: (i) to extend the known theory for determining optimal designs for a wider range of settings than is now known or available; and (ii) to produce a comprehensive catalog of designs to be incorporated into a larger, web-based resource that will include a vari- ety of downloadable combinatorial designs useful for statisticians, mathematicians, and other scientists in academia and industry. By collecting optimal designs in a single, easily accessible resource, the use of good designs can be increased and the practice of experimental science consequently sharpened. When comparing v treatments, the most commonly encountered situation across a range of scientific endeavors is that of a single blocking variable partitioning bk experi- mental units into b blocks of k units each. This project will examine optimality problems for these simple block designs, and the attendant combinatorial issues, augmenting the- ory by computation where needed, to produce designs for a practical range of parameter combinations (v; b; k), including settings where equireplication is not possible. The most frequently used designs with two blocking factors are row-column designs, in which two blocking factors can be visualized as row and columns in a rectangular array, and re- solvable designs, in which a second blocking factor partitions a simple block design into subsets of blocks each consisting of a single replicate. This project will also address problems in optimality and construction of designs in both these classes, with special emphasis on plans most demanded in practice: those with few replicates doc10774 none for DMS - The three principle investigators on this proposal will be involved in research in the following areas: Barry Mazur will be involved in at least four major projects. The first concerns Euler systems and their applications in algebraic geometry, arithmetic and analytic number theory. The second project will study interpolations of modular eigenforms via special curves. The third concerns the ABC conjecture in number theory and the fourth concerns rational points on rationally connected varieties. Raoul Bott will conduct research at the interface between mathematics and physics including research topics that relate to computational complexity, equivariant cohomology, diffeomorphism groups and toric varieties. The major project of Clifford Taubes concerns the coding of smooth 4-manifold structures by the pseudo-holomorphic curves defined by their self-dual 2-forms. The first long range goal is to read off invariants of smooth 4-manifolds from these curves. The second goal is to use them to simplify a presentation of the manifold. Here are some comments of a less technical nature about this research: Barry Mazurs work concerns properties of the integers and relations between them. A typical question asks for integers, say a, b and c, that satisfy some given equation. An example is the equation of Pythagoreas, which asks that the sum of the squares of a and b equal that of c. There are very general and natural classes of such relations (such as those involved in the now proved Fermat conjecture) that probe to the heart of the theory of numbers; and the study of such equations forms the core of Mazurs research. Raoul Botts work probes the manner in which families of symmetries can be used to simplify computations in mathematics and theoretical physics. These symmetries relate different structures and often this relation equates a simple to understand property of one system to a mysterious and not understood property of another. Clifford Taubes major project probes the possibilities for the large scale structure of four dimensional universes. Our universe has four dimensions, these the usual three dimensions of space plus time as the fourth. This said, the research seeks to provide a complete list of the possible large scale structures for a universe such as ours. To put this in perspective, there is a conjectured list for all possible three dimensional spaces, but there is as yet no credible conjecture for a similar list for four dimensions doc10775 none Professor Robert Field of MIT is supported by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program for a novel study of the dynamics of energy transfer in molecular Rydberg states. A nanosecond pulse will be used to prepare a carefully designed initial state, and a pair of scanned-delay phase-coherent IR femtosecond pulses will be used to study the dynamics of the initially localized excitation. In particular, the first pulse is used to prepare a coherent superposition among a well defined set of Rydberg states, and the second pulse interrogates the recurrences or rephasing. Detection will be by a field ionization voltage ramp. The mechanistic details of electronic and nuclear energy flow will be studied, varying the extent of resonance between interacting states. Alkaline earth monohalides such as CaF, CaCl and BaF prepared in molecular beams, previously studied by the PI in the frequency domain, will be utilized as model systems. The study of Rydberg states enhances our understanding of energy flow and storage in small molecules. As the method is improved, it may be applied to increasingly complicated molecules, with potential impacts on fields such as photochemistry and quantum information storage doc10776 none Dramatic increases in data-storage capacity have changed how we use computers. Ceramic platters offer significant advantages over current Aluminum-based technology. They are more rigid, while still light, and can be rotated faster, or simply moved, without increased fluctuations normal to the platter that would cause a head crash and drive failure. Glass platters are now in production but glass-ceramic platters would offer even greater performance. Polishing ceramic platters is difficult because the material is hard, and in the case of glass-ceramics, it is chemically inhomogeneous. Chemical-mechanical polishing (CMP) involves fracturing the material at the surface while not creating subsurface damage and smoothing the surface to produce a finish that is 100 times smoother than the size of the particles in the polishing medium. Ceria currently give the best results when polishing glass, not because it is particularly hard, but because it gives the best combination of hardness and chemistry. It is known that the chemistry at the point of contact is a critical factor-ceria polishing always involves water. Methods for polishing glass-ceramics are still being developed with ceria being the primary candidate. In this program, students work with cutting-edge techniques including electron microscopy, atomic-force microscopy and spectroscopy at the near-atomic scale. They apply their training in chemistry and mechanics to today s critical technology. Actually, there are many aspects of device fabrication which involve producing a smooth flat surface. For example, CMP is also used to planarize layers while building multilayer chips and to prepare the ends of optical fibers for optimizing interconnections. In the new high-speed hard-drives, the glass platters which support the magnetic storage media must be polished so flat that bumps are less than 10 s of atoms high on a three-inch disk; compare this to smoothing the USA so no hill is higher than a few inches! Polishing has developed as an art but we need now to understand the science and to train students in both the art and the science. Our program addresses two problems: a lack of basic knowledge and the shortage of trained scientists who understand the art and science of CMP. This project shows students in materials science why they need those basic courses in chemistry, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering and how these disciplines combine in an industrial setting, not just for this project but for many applications of CMP. Our interdisciplinary research program brings together a diverse group of graduate and undergraduate students from different disciplines. The students meet our industrial colleagues, and visit the companies working with this technology. Skilled scientists who understand CMP and can fuller utilize the state-of-the-art instrumentation are a national need in the industrial workplace doc10777 none Tierney The recent Cerro Grande and Viveash wildfires in New Mexico provide a unique opportunity to study the early effects of intensive regeneration efforts on two distinct forest types. Over 720,000 poinds of seed, most of which was non-native grasses, was applied to the Cerro Grande burn site over this summer. Similarly, 230,000 pounds of seed were also applied to the Viveash site. Review of the literature suggests that ecological studies evaluating the effects of reseeding, particularly with non-native species, have not been conducted in such southwestern forest ecosystems. This project will monitor the establishment and distribution of introduced, seeded and post-fire native emergent species in the first two growing seasons following the wildfires. Data collected in this exploratory study will be used to test spatially explicit models that predict patterns of distribution and persistence among introduced and native plant species in seeded and unseeded burned areas. These models are useful in examining the long-term effectiveness of reseeding and the effects of introducing non-ntaive species on patterns of recovery and succession in mid-elevation Ponderosa pine and high-elevation spruce fir forest systems doc10778 none This project focuses on the study of direct and inverse problems for parabolic partial differential equations. The PI will utilize both analytical and numerical methods to address a number of challenging questions related to two important problems in domain identification. The first problem involves the detection and identification of an inhomogeneity inside an otherwise known domain. The second problem involves determination of an unknown portion of the boundary of a domain. In each case, information is provided in the form of overly posed boundary values on a portion of the boundary of the domain. Specific attention will be focused on the development of realistic models for cracks and inclusions inside a thermally conductive body, theoretical and numerical questions related to the inverse problem of crack and inclusion detection from thermal data, the development of stable and reliable algorithms for the determination of an unknown portion of the boundary of a domain from thermal data, and the investigation of a number of issues related to the mathematical modeling of corrosion. When studying physical objects or processes, many properties cannot be measured directly, either because it is impractical to do so, or because unwanted damage to the object would result. Well-known examples include the detection of tumors inside the human body, the detection of oil reservoirs or mineral deposits deep underground, and the detection of hidden damage inside an object such as an aircraft wing or fuselage. The field of inverse problems focuses on determining or estimating these non-measurable properties by measuring other properties, then using a mathematical model (usually a partial differential equation) to connect these measurements to the desired properties. This project investigates the use of thermal methods to determine properties of the inside of objects without damaging them. A portion of the outer surface is heated, then the temperature on the surface is measured over a period of time. The relationship between the measured temperature and the structure of the inside of the object can be modeled mathematically. This project focuses on the analysis of this mathematical model, and on the development of a practical algorithm which will permit the extraction of information about the interior of the object from these temperature measurements. This analysis will provide a theoretical foundation to develop stable and reliable algorithms for use in a wide variety of important applications, including the analysis of corrosion damage inside aircraft wings and fuselages, the inspection of newly manufactured objects for interior cracks or voids (quality control), and in medical diagnostics doc10779 none Recent work in syntax and semantics has yielded dramatic developments in the depth and cross-linguistic breadth of our understanding of the role of topic and focus in language. At the same time, there has been increased interest among phoneticians and phonologists in the cross-linguistic study of intonation. One area of intonation which has proven to be a rich yet relatively understudied area of research is focus and topic. Studies of various languages have indicated that utterances involving a focused or topicalized element are typically associated with intonational properties different from utterances without any focused or topicalized elements, e.g. increased pitch range, specialized tonal configurations, different durational characteristics. These studies suggest a close link between differences in prosody and the kinds of differences in meaning associated with various kinds of topicalization and focus. Nevertheless despite recent advances in the study of intonational properties of topic and focus, there is ample room for further advancing our cross-linguistic knowledge of the interaction between the phonetics and phonology of intonation and the syntax and semantics of topicalization and focus. In particular, increased interaction between syntacticians, semanticists, phonologists and phoneticians promises to yield important progress in the study of intonational correlates of the meanings associated with topicalization and focus. A workshop on Topic, Focus and Intonation will be held at the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute in Santa Barbara, CA. In this workshop, we hope to explore further the effects of various kinds of topicalization and focus on intonation. It is especially hoped that the workshop will lay the groundwork for future collaborative efforts between linguists devoted to the study meaning and linguistics engaged in the quantitative study of intonation. Both descriptive and theoretical papers on any aspects of the relationship between intonation, on the one hand, and topic and or focus, on the other hand, are welcome. Papers may deal with intonational aspects of topic and or focus in any language, whether relatively well-studied or relatively underdocumented doc10780 none The investigator will research high-order and pseudospectral methods for the numerical approximation of solutions of linear and nonlinear partial differential equations of evolution. The proposed activities divide into methods for time and space: high-order time stepping without severe stability restrictions, even in the presence of stiffness, and the use of radial basis functions for spatial differencing (with emphasis on the need for efficient and stable computation). Analytical and numerical techniques will be used to frame and solve interesting issues. Computational simulation is a vital part of research and design in science and engineering. Many problems of academic and industrial interest remain beyond present computing power, and there are also significant benefits in solving tractable problems more quickly and accurately. Innovations in both hardware and software will be needed to continue the progress of recent decades. The research in this proposal is directed at finding and improving the techniques that will be used in scientifically oriented software in the near future. There is an emphasis on phenomena that propagate or evolve over long distances or times. Specific fields of study that could benefit include optical communications, imaging by electromagnetic or acoustic illumination, and computational chemistry doc10781 none Gutierrez This Americas Program award will provide support for cooperative research between Dr. Gaston Gutierrez of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Dr. Marcos A. Reyes Santos of the Universidad Michoacana in Morelia, Mexico, on a project entitled Search for Glueballs in High Energy Central Reactions. A fundamental objective of all particle physics research is to understand the interactions of the basic forms of matter and their structure. Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is currently the leading theory governing the structure and interactions of particles subject to the nuclear force. A unique feature of QCD is that the force carrier, called gluons, may form bound states known as glueballs. At present, there is little experimental evidence about such states. This proposal will allow the collaborators to analyze existing Fermilab data (Experiment 690), which was collected using an 800 GeV proton beam on a liquid hydrogen target. The results of this analysis will serve to confirm the existence of glueballs in various reactions and increase our understanding of elementary particle physics doc10782 none The principal investigator plans to work on several topics in probability theory. The aim of the first project is to study transience recurrence behavior of edge reinforced random walks on graphs. The purpose of the second project is to characterize stability and optimality of batch service policies for queueing systems. The third project is a rigorous study of the NK model of protein evolution. The main interest here is in determining the exact or asymptotic behavior of various quantities in the corresponding fitness landscape. The fourth project involves a sequence of interacting Moran model particle systems and their scaling limit, the interacting Fisher-Wright diffusions. The goal here is to develop tools and techniques that will help one answer questions about fine properties of the interacting diffusions. Random processes with reinforcements appear in models of biological systems. A particle performing an edge reinforced random walk on a graph has memory and prefers to traverse edges that were traversed before. It is known that some reinforced random walks exhibit behavior very different from that of the classical random walks without memory. The aim of the first project is to show that edge reinforced walks for which each edge is reinforced only once, by a fixed amount, are not so different from the classical random walks. The batch service queueing system is a model of a retail store delivery van, or a terminal in a computer network which downloads software packages. The purpose of the second project is to describe a large class of batch service policies that keep the queueing system stable, and to find easy to implement policies in this class, that are close to optimal with respect to a specific cost function. The NK model is an idealization of protein evolution in the presence of selection. The interacting Moran models represent a subdivided population with a resampling mechanism within each subpopulation, and migration of individuals to neighboring subpopulations. The properties of both models are of interest to geneticists doc10783 none EPIC (Eastern Pacific Investigation of Climate processes in the coupled ocean-atmosphere system) is an activity of the US CLIVAR Program. EPIC consists of four components focussing on (i) intertropical convergence zone warm pool phenomena; (ii) cross-equatorial inflow into the intertropical convergence zone; (iii) upper ocean structure and mixing and (iv) an exploratory study of boundary layer cloud properties in the southeasterly tradewind regime. The field phase of EPIC is scheduled for a 6-week period during the interval Sept 1 to Oct 15, . In addition to the eight awards made by ATM, this collaborative research has awards made by NSF OCE and NOAA OGP. Under this award (collaborative with Molinari SUNY Albany, ), the PI will examine factors responsible for the fluctuations in the strength and position of the East Pacific ITCZ on weekly time scales. The variations of the ITCZ convection as a function of the diurnal cycle will also be examined. The work is important because it will improve understanding and modeling of climate variability over the Eastern Tropical Pacific doc10784 none The National Academy of Sciences will undertake a broad range of activities to generate advice for and provide information to the National Science Foundation and the U.S. scientific community regarding a wide range of issues dealing with the national and international management and exchange of data. These activities will include national and international conferences, symposia and workshops on data policy, management and exchange issues. The USNC will assure that U.S. interests in database issues are represented effectively in the CODATA Committee and other relevant fora. Data management and policy issues are at the forefront of those confronting the conduct of basic research at both the national and international level. In part as a result of series of legal decisions, many countries, including the United States, have adopted or are considering adopting legislation to assign a legal right , akin to copyright, to those who generate databases. Such a right would enable those who generate databases to not distribute them, to sell them, to restrict their use, or to apply some combination of these restrictions. Basic research, which depends on the full and open exchange of scientific data, could be severely impacted if a new general right were not to provide for the full and open exchange of data for scientific purposes, especially basic research sources. The budgets of agencies which fund research might also be severely impacted if the scientists they sponsor were required to pay for all of the data they need from other sources, especially if the price were to include support for the full economic costs of acquisition of the data and possibly a profit as well. The USNC will also interact closely with its counterpart organizations in other countries, especially to transmit to them information regarding U.S. interests and concerns and will conduct outreach activities in the U.S. and abroad doc10785 none This individual investigator award will support research focused on fundamental problems of strongly correlated 4f- and 5f-electron systems. The physical properties of this large class of systems challenge conventional theories of condensed matter based on a Fermi liquid theory. The aim of the proposed research is to; 1) investigate the non-Fermi liquid behavior of nearly magnetic heavy fermion metals; 2) investigate the role of crystal structure, crystalline and magnetic anisotropy in heavy fermions; 3) test various theoretical models; and 4) search for new materials with exotic properties. The project will involve both the synthesis and characterization of heavy fermion materials. Experimental techniques employed in this research will include transport, thermodynamic, and magnetic probes in a wide range of temperatures and magnetic fields, using the facilities of National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and the Microkelvin Laboratory, aided by international collaborations. The project addresses the widely recognized national shortage of qualified personnel able to synthesize novel materials of research quality by expanding graduate training in materials synthesis and characterization. Students involved in this project will receive training in synthesis and fundamental measurement techniques. They will be prepared for careers in fundamental and or applied research. %%% Materials containing Lanthanum and the Actinide elements have been the source of many recent fundamental discoveries that have challenged our current understanding of matter. Due to strong electron correlations, these heavy fermion materials exhibit many exotic properties. They show extreme sensitivity to temperature, magnetic field, pressure, and frequency. Thus they may be a source of important technological applications. This individual investigator award will support a project focused on searching for new exotic states of matter as well as new heavy fermion materials, in addition it will test several theoretical models of these interesting materials. Samples prepared in-house, or obtained through international collaborations, will be studied by electric, magnetic, and thermal probes using state-of-the art facilities of National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and Microkelvin Laboratory. This project will address the widely recognized national shortage of qualified personnel able to synthesize novel materials of research quality by expanding graduate training in materials synthesis and characterization. Students involved in this project will receive experience in working at national facilities as well as in international collaborations. This training will prepare them for careers in fundamental and or applied research doc10786 none Through a three year award, the National Science Foundation will continue its long term support of the University of Arizona Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. This grant allows the laboratory to hire three inidviduals to analyze samples collected from archaeological sites. The technique of tree-ring dating was pioneered at the University of Arizona. Because the rate of treegrowth is determined by environmental conditions, yearly growth rings in a tree vary in form and thickness. It is possible to build up a tree ring chronology by cross matching trees from the present to well back in the prehistoric past and then to use this `master record` to date small wood samples collected from archaeological and other situations. For archaeologists in the Southwestern United States, this technique has been a boon because it allows materials to be dated within one year. This far exceeds the accuracy of radiocarbon dating. Because it has not been adequately supported and because many archaeologists lack the funds to pay for its services, the Arizona laboratory has not been able on its own to keep pace with archaeological requests for sample dating. This grant will help to remedy that situation. In particular, it will benefit young scientists and those not associated with more wealthy main line research institutions doc10787 none The North American Eocene primates have been the subjects of numerous scholarly studies regarding their adaptive diversity and phylogenetic relationships. However, these primates show a distinctive pattern of community evolution during the Eocene epoch. During the early Eocene intervals, morphological diversity and species richness increased rapidly and by the middle Eocene, primate diversity was at its peak. Yet, during the latter half of the middle Eocene, species numbers began to decrease, it seems, quite rapidly. This decline of primate diversity in North America has been attributed to changes in climate and habitat. While these hypotheses of climate and habitat change have been put forth, they have never been rigorously tested. The purpose of this research is to explore the factors that led to the decline in primate diversity during the later intervals of the middle Eocene. Specifically, the researchers will evaluate the effects of habitat change on the decline of primate species during the latter intervals of the middle Eocene using a case study of North American western interior fossil localities. The researchers will combine methods of habitat reconstruction with the assessment of changing primate community structure in order to investigate how local habitats have influenced the decline of primate communities in the western interior during the middle Eocene. Analyses of North American Middle Eocene mammalian faunas and extant Neotropical mammalian faunas will be used to determine: 1) the habitat characterizations for middle Eocene western interior localities using ecological diversity analysis, 2) the structure of mammalian communities containing primates from the middle Eocene, in terms of these functional variables: diet, body size and locomotion (or substrate preference), and 3) the ecomorphological variation over time in primate and co-occurring arboreal mammal communities in relationship to the habitats in which they are found doc10788 none The PI will conduct a preliminary investigation of immunity-based computational techniques to pave the way for more complex studies of this subject in the future. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop computational techniques inspired by the natural immune system for solving real-world science and engineering problems. The natural immune system is a distributed novel-pattern recognizer which uses intelligent mechanisms to detect a wide variety of antigens (novel patterns). From the computational point of view the immune system uses learning, memory, and associative retrieval to solve recognition and classification tasks. The immune system is a subject of great research interest, not only in the hope of finding cures for many diseases but also as a means for understanding its powerful information processing capabilities. In the current project the PI will investigate immunological principles, explore the underlying concepts and mechanisms, and take initial steps towards the development of intelligent computational techniques for solving problems in the field of science and engineering doc10789 none This award is for NSF sponsorship of the first national conference on the Social and Economic Implications of Information Technology (IT). The two-day conference will bring together academic researchers, commercial research and consulting firms and the policy community to review research that contributes to a broad and contextual understanding of social and economic change, as it relates to IT. It will stimulate debate on research strategies, policy implications and a future research agenda, and it will offer a prototype annual conference for this area of research. The conference will reflect the concerns of the Presidents Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) that we have insufficient scientific understanding of the actual scope and trajectory of the socio-technical transformations related to IT and that we need to build a national infrastructure to support this area of research doc10790 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Matt Sponheimer and his colleagues will investigate the ecology of the early human ancestor Australopithecus africanus and associated mammals from Makapansgat Limeworks, South Africa. The team brings together specialists in biogeochemistry, dental microwear, and ecomorphology to provide a more complete picture of the ecological background for human evolution. No single method of paleoecological research can provide a complete picture of an animal s ecology, as they all have intrinsic strengths and weaknesses. By using a variety of techniques in tandem, however, it may be possible to utilize their respective strengths, while partially overcoming their limitations. To this end, this team will examine the paleoecology of the Makapansgat fauna using dental microwear, cranial and postcranial morphology, carbon isotope, oxygen isotope, and elemental analyses. The initial phase of this project will be a large-scale modern collection and sampling program in South Africa and Kenya. This will provide the necessary background for interpreting data from fossil specimens. Once the modern specimens have been analyzed, the team will apply these techniques to the three million-year-old fossils from Makapansgat. The team will focus on the following questions: 1) What habitats did our early ancestors prefer; 2) What did our early ancestors eat; and 3) How much competition did they have for these resources. While this project is ultimately intended to provide information about the ecology of Australopithecus africanus and its associated fauna, it will also make important contributions to all of the individual subfields utilized, as the team will analyze a larger and more diverse African fauna than previous efforts. This research is important for several reasons. It will provide data on early human diets and habitats of long-standing interest to archaeologists and physical anthropologists. Moreover, it will provide a sound multidisciplinary basis from which the ecology of other extinct animals can investigated. This will shed new light on the ecological background of mammalian evolution in Africa doc10791 none The goal of this project is to adapt recent advances in crystal engineering for the preparation of covalently cross-linked coordination crystals, materials potentially useful in separations and ion conduction. We use a template methodology. We synthesize rigid nanoscale organic molecules which are then initially assembled in the solid state via labile organic-ligand-to-metal coordination-bonds. In the second step we introduce guest molecules without altering the host crystal structure. These guest molecules cross-link the original organic molecules to each other. In this way, we are able to access a new regime of organic solids viz., crystalline multi-dimensional covalently bonded organic solids. Such materials will be chemically and physically more robust than existing organic materials. This research program is carried out together with graduate and undergraduate students who receive state-of-the-art training in crystal engineering. The fundamentals of two different fields, organic reaction methodology and solid state chemistry, are applied in the design of useful crystalline materials. The next generation of solid state devices will require materials that combine both the functional specificity of typical organic compounds plus the global architecture of traditional inorganic solids. In this project methodologies are developed for designing routes to these materials in which the organic and inorganic portions are joined together at a molecular scale. An important synergism is needed here between organic, inorganic and solid state chemistry, a synergism which is vital to the successful design of useful devices doc10792 none With this award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the work of Dr. John D. Roberts at the in Pasadena, California. The work will build on earlier work of the PI on substituent effects on conformational equilibria of 1,2-disubstituted ethanes. These equilibria will be studied by NMR using proton-proton vicinal coupling constants, which depend on the average dihedral angle between the planes defined by the C-C bond and the bonds from these central carbon atoms to their substituents. The initial emphasis will be on repeating and reinterpreting measurements on succinic acid (HOCOCH2CH2CO2H) and its salts reported by Prof. Chidichimo at the University of Calabria. Extensions will include other solvent systems, including lyotropic media, and other molecules, such as aminoacids. The proposed research involves a fundamental question in organic chemistry: What determines the angle of rotation about carbon-carbon single bonds in organic molecules, many of which contain C-C bonds that can be regarded as 1,2-disubstituted ethanes. These angles determine the 3D structures, and many of the properties, of many organic molecules, including those involved in biological systems. In addition to shedding light on an important subject, the work is expected to provide excellent training for the postdoctoral and undergraduate students involved doc10793 none Award: Principal Investigator: Tim Cochran This project develops a new area of noncommutative algebraic topology and its applications to low-dimensional topology. The success of algebraic topology in knot theory, for example, has, until recently centered around abelian invariants, that is to say, invariants associated to the universal abelian covering space of the knot or link exterior. These invariants are the Alexander module, which is the first homology of this cover as a module over a commutative Laurent polynomial ring, and the Blanchfield pairing. These determine the S-equivalence class of the knot as well as various other invariants. From the perspective of the knot group G, the Alexander module is simply G G . Hence any behavior associated to G will be invisible to these abelian invariants. We remedy this deficiency by studying the quotients of successive terms of the higher derived series, or, put another way, study modules associated to more general solvable covering spaces. These are modules over noncommutative rings and thus are difficult to work with. We use techniques from noncommutative algebra and C algebras to define invariants. We find , for each integer n, an entire theory which parallels the Alexander module and Blanchfield form and signatures. There are applications to estimating genus, detecting fibered knots and 3-manifolds, new invariants of concordance and representations of mapping class groups. The advent of quantum mechanics led scientists to many paradoxical, but now accepted, facts about our universe. In particular, there came the realization that commutative mathematics was inadequate to describe our physical world. Recall that 2 times 3 equals 3 times 2 is the commutative law of multiplication of numbers. Quantum mechanics showed that physical quantities are not mere numbers but more like arrays or matrices of numbers. Since multiplication of matrices is not commutative, this explains and models noncommutative phenomena at the most fundamental levels of the physical world. This project studies the shape of 3 and 4-dimensional spaces by using new noncommutative mathematics arising from algebra doc10794 none The work under this grant is in the general area of Probability Theory with special emphasis on a number of stochastic models with interesting spatial structure. One project, with C.D. Howard, concerns Euclidean first-passage percolation and aims to prove the nonexistence of doubly infinite geodesics and derive the values of two-dimensional fluctuation exponents that to date have only been proved using exact solution methods for models with special combinatorial structure. Other collaborative projects are on interacting particle systems. One is with L.R. Fontes, M. Isopi and K. Ravishankar and concerns aging, scaling limits and chaotic time dependence in such systems as voter models with random rates. Another is with F. Camia, E. De Santis and others and concerns local transience, recurrence and absorption issues for zero-temperature stochastic Ising models, including those with random environments. In the general area of probability theory, an increasingly important role is played by systems in which random effects are observed in the spatial structure rather than in, or in addition to, the behavior as a function of time (as in models of equity prices). Some of these models, such as first-passage percolation, have arisen separately in multiple contexts, such as fluid flow in porous media (which is relevant for example to modelling of pollutant dispersion in aquifers), polymer structure and other parts of materials science. The research under this grant concerns the mathematical phenomena that occur in several representative examples of such stochastic systems with interesting spatial structure. Although the main focus is on rigorous mathematical results for simplified models, the long term goal is to provide new understanding and tools that will be useful for the more complex models used in applications doc10795 none Large Second-order Cone Programming: Algorithms and Applications. PI. Donald Goldfarb and Garud Iyengar. . Second-order cone programs (SOCPs) are convex optimization problems in which a linear function is optimized over the intersection of an affine linear manifold with the Cartesian product of second-order (Lorentz) cones. Linear programs (LPs), convex quadratic programs (QPs), and quadratically constrained convex quadratic programs can all be formulated as SOCPs, as can many other problems that do not fall into these three problem classes. On the other hand, since a second-order cone constraint is equivalent to a linear matrix inequality, semidefinite programs (SDPs) include SOCPs as a special case. Computationally speaking, an SOCP falls between an LP or a QP and an SDP. Interior point methods solve all of these problems in polynomial time. Although, the computational effort required to solve an SOCP is greater than that required to solve an LP or a QP, it is substantially less than that required to solve an SDP of similar size and structure. However, in many ways, an SOCP is closer to an SDP than an LP or QP since its feasible set is non-polyhedral. The proposed research focuses on several aspects of SOCPs, including the development of numerically stable algorithms for SOCPs that take advantage of sparsity in the data, the study of SOCP-based approximation algorithms for hard combinatorial optimization problems, the study of computational aspects of cut generation methods for mixed 0-1 SOCPs and the applications of SOCPs in robust financial optimization. SOCPs are excellent models for applications that arise in a broad range of fields from engineering, control, and finance, to robust and combinatorial optimization. The wide applicability of SOCPs and the need for efficient, numerically stable algorithms to solve them makes their study worthwhile doc10796 none SUPERFLUID TURBULENCE IN THE LOW TEMPERATIRE REGIME The two most common approaches to study of superfluid turbulence are the HVBK theory and the classical theory of vortex filaments. There are many shortcomings in these models that make them unrealistic and ad hoc. The main objective of our proposal is to use a third approach based on certain forms of nonlinear Schroedinger equation (NLS) for two closely related purposes: to provide microscopically realistic parameters for HVBK theory and the classical theory of vortex filaments and to elucidate superfluid turbulence using new variants of the NLS that are more faithful to real helium II. More specifically we plan: (1) use NLS equations to study the process of vortex line reconnection in sufficient detail to characterize quantitatively the accompanying radiation of sound and Kelvin waves. The results will allow us to define reconnection rules that could be used when classical theory is applied to superfluid turbulence. (2) Use NLS theory to simulate superfluid turbulence in the low temperature regime to study the transition between weak and strong turbulence states in the superfluid. (3) Analyze dissipative NLS models that include damping from the mutual friction between superfluid and normal fluid. (4) Study and classify attractors, bifurcation sequences, and routes to chaos in solutions of forced and dissipative NLS equations. Our main goal is, however, to elucidate superfluid turbulence in the low temperature regime in which experiments are currently in the planning stage. Superfluid turbulence has been studied experimentally for many years and has by now become a major branch of cryogenic physics. In addition to the intrinsic intellectual challenges of the subject, there are several reasons for this. Helium is used as a coolant for superconducting magnets and for infrared detectors, to name just two of several engineering applications. The flow commonly becomes turbulent in these contexts. The subject also has implications beyond the field of helium research, such as in the study of high temperature superconductivity, systems of magnetic spins, melting transitions of crystals, and the origin of glitches in neutron star rotations. Superfluid turbulence may also provide insights into classical fluid turbulence, especially at high Reynolds numbers, where the vorticity has an intermittent, fractal character doc10797 none This research involves the development of methods for combining data sets from different sources with the goal of obtaining robust estimates of phylogenetic relationships. As an example, consider the case in which evolutionary information in the form of DNA sequence data is available from several distinct genes sampled throughout the genome. Phylogenetic trees estimated individually from each of these genes will yield estimated gene trees, trees which illustrate the evolutionary history of that particular gene. What is often of most interest is the estimation of the species history, which may be different from the gene history. Thus, the genetic information must be combined appropriately so that species relationships can be estimated. This research will address three main issues associated with this problem. The first is the study of currently available tests for assessing combinability of the individual data sets, and the improvement of these existing tests. The second component of this research involves the development of new procedures for testing for similarity in underlying evolutionary history in the datasets, and for development of methods for testing which evolutionary mechanisms (i.e., hybridization, horizontal gene transfer, etc.) might be responsible for differing underlying histories. These newly developed tests are based on likelihood ratio statistics which compare the likelihood of a tree-like structure estimated under the assumption of a particular evolutionary force to an unrestricted likelihood. The final component of this research is the development of appropriate methods for combining data from different sources in order to estimate the species tree. This is achieved by modeling the probability that a set of observed gene trees would have arisen from a given species trees. The estimated species tree is then that tree which maximizes this probability. The inference of the evolutionary history of a collection of organisms based on the information contained in their DNA sequences is a problem of fundamental importance in evolutionary biology. The abundance of DNA sequence data arising from genome sequencing projects has led to significant challenges in the inference of these phylogenetic relationships. Among these challenges is the inference of the evolutionary history of a collection of species based on DNA sequence information from several distinct genes sampled throughout the genome. This research will address numerous aspects of this problem, including (1) the assessment of existing procedures for combining data from different genes, and the improvement of such procedures; (2) the development of methods for testing for the cause of differences in the evolutionary histories of distinct genes; and (3) the development of new procedures for combining DNA information from distinct genes with the goal of inferring species relationships. This work has applications in the understanding of much-debated species relationships, such as the evolutionary relationships between placental mammals, marsupials, and monotremes doc10798 none Mathematical Sciences: Symmetry and Mechanics: Geometric Integration Techniques and Bifurcations of Relative Critical Points Lewis The project consists of three main components: geometric integration using Lie group methods, numerical integration of conservative systems, and bifurcation theory of relative critical points. The first component involves the design of efficient, stable geometric integration schemes on Lie groups and homogeneous manifolds. The primary goals are minimization of computational costs with accurate capture of key features and facilitation of the adaptation of existing numerical codes to geometric schemes. The second component addresses the role of approximate or exact preservation of conserved quantities or structures in the numerical integration of conservative systems. Comparisons of the symplectic, energy, and momentum errors to overall algorithm performance, including accuracy of capture of such key features of the underlying system as (relative) equilibria and separatrices, will be carried out for a variety of algorithms, including variational algorithms. The third component addresses the variational characterization of relative equilibria, that is, steady motions, as critical points of appropriate functionals. The notion of a relative critical point unifies and generalizes the two most widely used characterizations; this generalization will facilitate the extension of existing bifurcation and stability results to a wide range of finite and infinite dimensional systems and will provide insights into the geometric structure of sets of relative equilibria. Specific applications of geometric integration methods include the Landau--Lifschitz--Ginzburg (LLG) equations for a micromagnetic field and various mathematical models of muscular hydrostats. The LLG equations model systems such as read write heads on disk drives, nanocrystralline magnets, and magnetohydrodynamic materials; efficient, accurate numerical algorithms are needed to carry out simulations on the spatial and temporal scales relevant to industrial applications. Muscular hydrostats are structural components of many biological systems, including many kinds of worms, reptile and amphibian tongues, and sea anemones; plausible mathematical models of these systems are needed to test theories of the evolution of such systems. Conservative systems arise throughout physics and mechanics, playing a crucial role in both industrial and theoretical research. Numerical simulations that respect the conservation laws of such systems have been shown to be crucial in several fields, including astrophysics. The bifurcation analyses will be applied to problems in fluid mechanics, elasticity, and stellar dynamics doc10799 none Although streams are networks of aquatic habitat that are distributed across a terrestrial landscapes; little is known about how the patterns of these networks affect the distributions of organisms that live within them. The objective of this research is to examine how stoneflies, a group of insects that develop as larvae in streams and live in the forest as adults, disperse among streams, and how the patterns of streams affect the distribution of stoneflies in the White Mountain National Forest of New Hampshire. Using stable isotopes, adult stoneflies will be tracked in the forest to measure flight distances. A model will be developed to predict how individual insect and habitat characteristics affect flight patterns. Historic dispersal patterns will be estimated indirectly by assessing relatedness of individuals using molecular genetics. This research will provide a greater understanding of how aquatic insect populations are integrated among streams, and will be useful for predicting how disturbances affect populations distributed across connected habitats doc10800 none DeMets The Oaxaca GPS study is designed for a detailed geodetic study of the mechanics of subduction along the 350-km-long Oaxaca segment of the Middle America trench, where the trench lies closer to the coast (50-65 km) than for any other continental land mass on Earth. Interseismic loading of the locked subduction interface in this region gives rise to high elastic strain gradients everywhere within 75-100 km of the coast. Surface displacements measured via geodetic techniques are thus sensitive to the distribution of loading and or slip along the nearby subduction interface. This makes the coastal and near-coastal areas of Oaxaca a superb and possibly unsurpassed region for studying the mechanics of subduction in the upper, seismogenic area of the subduction interface. Forward and inverse modeling of the expected spatial resolution of a 40-site GPS array in Oaxaca indicates it would have a level of resolution 5-12 times better than that of the dense Japanese GPS array. Measurements of site displacements in Oaxaca will allow many questions to be addressed, including at least the following: (1) Is interseismic coupling relatively homogeneous along the fault and if not, what is the spatial scale of the heterogeneity? (2) How does the geodetic coupling coefficient compare to the seismic coupling coefficient of 0.5-0.75 estimated for this trench segment and what does any difference between the two imply about aseismic processes that may accommodate slip along the subduction interface? (3) Does the degree and or pattern of coupling evolve through time? (4) Is the downdip edge of the locked zone located at a depth of 20 km, as proposed by Suarez and Sanchez ( ) to explain the general absence of large (M 8) earthquakes along the Cocos-North America subduction interface? (5) Is there any evidence for slowly propagating ruptures (slow earthquakes) that help to relieve interseismic loading? Given that large earthquakes tend to recur every few decades along most segments of the Middle America trench, measurements during the interseismic phase will also eventually enable us to attack many additional questions about subduction mechanics, including in particular the comparative patterns of interseismic loading and coseismic slip release. The results of this work will add new and useful observations to the still-modest set of observations that constrain conceptual models for the mechanics of shallow subduction, and should also bear on the applicability of rate- and state-variable friction laws to subduction mechanics. The study, which is co-funded by CONACYT, NSF, and the Vilas foundation of UW-Madison, represents a partnership between Dr. Enrique Cabral at UNAM, Dr. Bertha Marquez at the University of Guadalajara, and Dr. Charles DeMets at UW-Madison doc10801 none This grant supports theoretical research on the dynamics of physically adsorbed layers of atoms and molecules on solid surfaces. The goal is to achieve a quantitative understanding of the interaction of atoms and molecules with surfaces in examples where the adsorbate and substrate are weakly modified by the interactions. The work is a combination of analytically-based theory and computations which can be performed using work stations. The topics include the analysis of the normal modes (phonons) of solid layers and of processes which contribute to the dissipation of energy initially in the layer, such as vibrational damping and sliding friction doc10802 none Tanis This award supports John Tanis and students of Western Michigan University to cooperate with Nikolaus Stolterfoht of the Hahn Meitner Institute in Berlin, Germany. The research will focus on the investigation of double-core vacancy production by ions and photons in three-electron systems. The use of three-electron systems enables a clear interpretation of the results of measurements, and the relative simplicity of the systems lends itself to theoretical analysis. A core vacancy in an atom or ion can occur when an inner-shell electron is excited or ionized through collision with a photon or a charged particle. If two such vacancies are produced in a single collision, the mechanisms for the production of the double-core vacancies can involve electron correlation effects. As a result, the study of such processes gives insight into the atomic structure and collisional dynamics of systems with multiply interacting particles. Complementary facilities and expertise in the German and U.S. groups promise a wide range of new results from various perspectives doc10803 none In recent years, the emerging technology of smart materials and structures has brought to the fore of scientific investigation the pressing need to control, optimize, and stabilize dynamical interactive structures, whose components behavior is governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). A canonical illustrative example of keen national interest is the noise reduction problem in an acoustic chamber (aircraft s or rotorcraft s cockpit or cabin, etc). This couples the oscillatory behavior of the unwanted acoustic pressure (noise field) within the chamber with the elastic vibrations of a flexible wall of the chamber, possibly reinforced by sandwiched layers, and possibly accounting for thermo-elastic effects. Pairwise sets of piezo-electric patches bonded on the flexible wall, once suitably wired, develop an elastic moment that is meant to dampen out the noise in the acoustic chamber. Mathematically, the acoustic pressure is modeled by a second order scalar hyperbolic equation (wave equation), while the flexible wall is modeled by a plate-like Kirchhoff equation with or without structural damping. In the first case, the plate has a parabolic behavior, in the second a hyperbolic behavior, resulting therefore in either hyperbolic parabolic coupling, or in hyperbolic hyperbolic coupling of the overall structure. Two additional key, novel, distinguishing features of the present project are: (i) first, the linear or non-linear PDEs describing the coupled structure have variable coefficients in space, which is always the case when the properties of the medium depend from point to point; (ii) and, moreover, the flexible wall may be curved (rather than flat), and thus modeled by a shell (rather than a plate). Accordingly, differential geometric methods are then proposed in the control theoretic analysis of the overall coupled structure, to cope with these two serious difficulties. The goal is to optimally control - according to a pre-assigned optimality criterion - and asymptotically stabilize the coupled structure. The methodology of this project consists in first establishing a mathematical theory, to be followed next by a numerical analysis thereof, to yield effective and computable algorithms. Recent Federal research has convincingly demonstrated smart materials structures to be a laboratory reality. This is also confirmed by a Workshop Report for the National Science Foundation entitled: Rebuilding and enhancing the Nation s infrastructures: a role for intelligent material systems and structures , . These new structural concepts actively damp noise and vibration, suppress flutter at trailing edges of airfoils and enable active twist camber of both fixed wing and rotorcraft; attenuate or suppress water borne signatures (active acoustic signature control), etc. The transition of novel smart structures into new, truly revolutionary platforms faces many obstacles. The most significant is design optimization: both of the smart structure and its communication and control systems. The present project aims at producing a contribution in this area, based on solid mathematical foundations and analysis doc10804 none The advent of the exploding Internet and the terra-bytes of heterogeneous data in it have made more acute the topic of searching such large digital databases. The challenges involved go beyond questions in information retrieval. One may envision seeking images in films, seeking words in voice data, and seeking phrases in compressed files and in files of various types. These challenges have boosted the appearance of myriad start-up companies and ad-hoc methods for the various tasks. The PI s approach has been a basic bottom-up long-term study of the theory of searching. They have a large center of pattern matching research that has pursued and continues to pursue understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of generalized searching, coupled with applications of their various ideas. the current research will continue the investigation of issues in generalized searching. In particular: 1. Approximate indexing with a small number of errors. 2. In-place compressed search. 3. ``Reusable dynamic programming code. 4. Parameterized matching with ``don t care s. Research on the theory of image processing will also be continued. The particular areas of concentration are: 1. The effect of digitization. 2. Real multi-dimensional scaling. 3. Efficient search of rotated images. The investigators research group has started a program of selective implementation of advanced pattern matching ideas, some in conjunction with research groups from other application areas. There are plans to implement text fingerprinting ideas and test their applicability in IR. In addition a project is planned that incorporates many of the ideas on searching compressed and heterogeneous files by constructing an automatic scientific home-page generator and maintainer (guaranteed to be an instant hit with all professors of Computer Science doc10805 none Versteeg Description: This project supports a collaborative project between Dr. Roelof Versteeg, Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University and Dr. Raafat Fat-Helbary, Aswan Seismological Center, the National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics, Aswan, Egypt. They plan to create a useable seismic hazard and soil strength maps for the Tushka Project, a massive new infrastructure effort in Upper Egypt. The PIs plan on combining probabilistic seismic hazard maps that describe the frequency of exceeding specified ground motion levels with a surface wave analysis technique that can provide detailed site effects. They will combine MASW type of inversion techniques with imaging to obtain shear-wave velocity profiles that can be of great use for engineering projects. The results will be made available in a GIS environment. This work will develop a technique that can usefully complement macro-scale hazard analysis, and make refined microzonation of hazard a real possibility useful in siting of critical facilities. Scope: The project has important scientific and practical implications. The geography of the Upper Egypt area is important and has been affected by recent human development including the construction of the Aswan High Dam. This research will document and interpret geophysical and geotechnical data and will seek to develop practical information for future projects. Dr. Versteeg has the needed experience in the acquisition and processing of geophysical data as well as the integration of these data into GIS based product for use by non-geophysicists. Dr. Fat-Helbary is experienced in the Tushka seismic studies. He will lead the effort for collection of the large-scale data sets, and will lead the effort in creating ground motion acceleration maps. Both sides will benefit from this collaboration and from the opportunity to learn from the type of planning that is underway to develop a region of the world that has historical significance. The experience and methods developed in this proposed project will be applicable to future developments in Egypt as well as in other parts of the world. The PIs are well qualified for the planned. The project meets INT criteria for support of collaborative research doc10806 none Grossmann This U.S.-Argentina Program award will provide support for cooperative research between Dr. Ignacio Grossmann of Carnegie-Mellon University and Drs. Jaime Cerda and Aldo Vecchietti of Universidad Nacional del Litoral in Santa Fe, Argentina. Their work is in the integration of disjunctive programming and constrained logic programming for the design and scheduling of process systems. This project will introduce recent advances on generalized disjunctive programming and constrained logic programming to the combinatorial problems that come up in scheduling of process systems. The collaborators will concentrate on short term mixed batch continuous multiproduct scheduling and design models. Dr. Grossmann has experience in the area of mixed integer linear and nonlinear optimization and its applications in a variety of areas including process operations problems, while Dr. Cerda has expertise in heat exchanger network synthesis as well as process scheduling problems. Results of this work will have applications in design, scheduling, and control, as well as in a variety of engineering and science areas doc10807 none Jesper Grodal The project consists of developing the homotopy theory of classifying spaces of compact Lie groups (including finite groups) and their generalizations. The goal of this is to solve central problems in homotopy theory involving classifying spaces, as well as to discover new relations to problems in group theory and representation theory. A further goal is to produce results in related fields such as in the theory of group actions, equivariant cohomology, and group cohomology. The project centers around developing the homotopy theoretic group theory of the classifying space BG, or rather of its p-completion. This involves examining the induction theory, p-local theory, representation theory as well as the more general actions of these objects. The methods used come from modern unstable homotopy theory, developed since the solution of the Sullivan conjecture, combined with ideas and techniques from modern group theory. Forming the classifying space BG of a group of symmetries G is a way of geometrically or topologically encoding the symmetries present in G. Geometric spaces of this form and generalizations thereof are ubiquitous in topology, and hence form an important class of spaces to study. Furthermore, the less rigid structure of the classifying space BG, compared to that of the group G, makes certain techniques available in the study of the former which were not available when dealing with the later directly. Hence, studying the group theory of BG provides an interesting and useful way of studying the original group G doc10808 none Chimowitz, Eldred H U of Rochester The principal investigators hypothesize that in the near-critical regime the dominant transport mechanism in supercritical fluid-microporous membrane systems will occur by diffusion of surface-bound solute species with little contribution from void regions of the membrane because of the effects of critical slowing-down therein. In this case the principal investigators have argued that his should uniquely lead to highly enriched solute fluxes through the membrane which would be a significant outcome for the proposed research objectives. The specific goal in the first year of the project will be to use computer simulation to study near-critical transport phenomena through microporous membrane systems using a novel relaxation-dynamics simulation technique, particularly suited for calculations in the critical region. The relaxation-dynamics simulation ensemble consists of two chambers, a phenomenological construction chosen to mimic concentration-driven diffusion processes. Each respective chamber s structure can be set up to resemble the membrane of interest. The two chambers are separated initially by an impermeable partition with the two profiles meeting at a discontinuous concentration interface. Once the partition is removed, diffusion between both chambers occurs, and molecular fluxes selectivities can be directly enumerated as the system relaxes towards its overall equilibrium state at the given thermodynamic conditions. The dynamics in the entire ensemble will be generated by a kinetic Monte-Carlo, particle-exchange algorithm. The main objective of these simulations will be to evaluate this new simulation methodology and use it to study the properties of the near-critical membrane system described above. The principal investigators have currently benchmarked these computational procedures in homogeneous fluid systems and now have the computational resources and theory in had to use them to carry out a systematic study of near critical dynamics in confined structures. They hope to be able to complete a comprehensive investigation of this issue within next year, leading to new results that they intend to write up for publication. These simulation results will be of significant value in providing a conceptual framework for guiding experimental work in this area, which they aim to emphasize during the latter half of the project. The objective here will be to build and commission an experimental system for reliably acquiring data for model solute permeances through mesocale inorganic membranes as supercritical transport conditions. The principal investigators view the ability to do this as central to exploring the viability of the concepts described herein; funds have been requested to facilitate this endeavor. This will require the modification of a high-pressure absorption apparatus, currently in their laboratory, to accommodate a ceramic membrane module, which they intend to purchase from the US Filter Corporation. During this time their dynamic simulation capability in these systems should be fully functional, which will advance their goal of a useful interaction between both simulation and experimental aspects of the project doc10809 none Craig Guilbault This award provides partial support for active research mathematicians with limited means of support to attend and participate in the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Annual Workshops in Geometric Topology to be held in the summers of , , and . The workshops will be hosted by Oregon State University in the , Calvin College in , and Brigham Young University in . The Workship will feature Princial Speaker Abigail Thompson of the University of California, Davis who will deliver three one hour lectures. Similarly, the and Workshops will also be centered around prominent principal speakers. Further information is available at: http: ucs.orst.edu ~garityd TOPOLOGY workshop.htm doc10810 none Most micro-sized relays (switches) currently on the market or reported in the literature are solid-state devices made using semiconductor technology, with silicon the predominant material. Such devices are not best suited for applications that require large power capability because they typically have low current capacity, low off-resistance, high on-resistance, high power consumption, and low dielectric strength. In recent years, the fast-evolving technology of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) has opened up new opportunities for microfabricating microelectromechanical switches. However, most of the MEMS relays are based on silicon fabrication and can not be used for power applications. We propose to design, analyze (model and simulate), microfabricate, and test a new type of micro-relays using electromagnetic actuation. These relays should have the following characteristics: fast switching speed, high power capacity, high off-resistance (completely disconnected), lower on-resistance, and low power consumption and heat generation. Some preliminary study has been conducted and promising results have been obtained on the proposed research work. The proposed micro-relays will be fabricated with UV-LIGA (based on UV lithography) microfabrication technologies. UV-LIGA is based on thick resist (SU-8) and optical lithography, provides slightly lower quality, much shorter time span for development and fabrication, and therefore much lower cost. The LIGA processes provide great potential for building microstructures from a broad selection of materials. Any metals or alloys that can be electroplated could be used as a potential candidate material for three-dimensional MEMS structural components. The combination of a broad material selection and the capability of making high aspect ratio microstructures make the technology best suited for fabricating microelectromechanical relays that can be used in, but not limited to, the applications of high power capacity. For example, good spring materials like beryllium-copper, and good electrically conducting materials including copper and gold can all be electroplated. With improved switching time, the relays may also be used for series sampling with low feedthroughs. Compared with the commonly used electrostatic actuation, the proposed electromagnetic actuation has several advantages: stronger actuation force and potentially higher power capacity, lower possibility of electrostatic sparks doc10811 none This project is organized around two leading themes in internal gravity wave propagation in stratified fluids: (a) interplay between nonlinearity and dispersion, and (b) instabilities and resonances. Within the first theme, the long term goal is to provide a model of internal waves in layered stratification that correctly accounts for dispersion and high nonlinearity, to be used in alternative to the currently adopted non-dispersive and weakly nonlinear models. The aim is to retain the advantage of the simplicity of these theories with respect to the full Euler (or Navier-Stokes) governing motion equations, while still maintaining the ability to describe wave dynamics of practical interest. Highly nonlinear regimes often generate instabilities. The causes and evolution of these instabilities for fully nonlinear internal waves are the focus within the second theme. In particular, stability criteria based on the Howard-Miles theorem for stationary shear flows and parametric instability occurring at stable Richardson s number will be revisited in the context of internal gravity waves. This research focuses on an area of wave propagation which has widespread atmospheric and oceanic applications, and, therefore, large societal implications. For instance, large internal waves generated by wind forcing of the upper ocean may have a strong feedback effect on the intensity of hurricanes. Thus, numerical codes based on models capable of representing accurately large amplitude waves and their dispersive behavior (responsible for the spreading of wave energy over increasingly larger regions) can play an important role in hurricane forecasts, at little additional cost with respect to the currently employed hydrostatic codes. The award will support work that will help establish the theoretical and technical foundations of such improved computational codes doc10812 none for DMS - This project involves analytic aspects of the theory of pseudo-holomorphic curves. The aim is to develop effective methods for computing Gromov-Witten invariants of symplectic manifolds and enumerative invariants of algebraic manifolds. This work builds on the P.I. s recent work with E. Ionel on the `sympletic sum formula for GW invariants. The first project involves extending the sum formula to the `modified GW invariants recently defined by the P.I. s student Junho Lee. This would make the formula applicable to K\ ahler surfaces with $p_g 0$ where there are important conjectures that are not currently approachable by GW methods. The second project is a symplectic approach to understanding physicists predictions about the generating functions which count curves in Calabi-Yau 3-folds. The goal is to prove the predicted formulas by adapting some analytic methods C. Taubes developed to relate the Seiberg-Witten and Gromov invariants. The last two projects also relate to the sympletic sum formula. One seeks formulas expressing the relative Gromov-Witten invariants of a pair $(X,V)$ in terms of the usual GW invariants and the descendant classes of $X$ and $V$. The other proposes extending the sum formula to a more general type of symplectic sum which occurs in algebraic geometry when one considers projective linear systems. One of the most basic problems in mathematics is to determine the solutions of a system of polynomial equations, and an important first step toward that goal is to determine the NUMBER of solutions. There is an explicit formula for the number of simultaneous solutions of a set of n polynomials in n variables. One can then ask for the number of solutions for n polynomials in n-1 variables. In this case there is a free parameter, so the locus of solutions will be a union of curves. How many? This question has been systematically studied for 100 years, but only a few special cases were solved. Then, around , it was realized that these problems can be translated into symplectic geometry, and then tackeled using the powerful machinery of mathematical gauge theory. (Gauge theory, originally part of physics, has been the focus of many very fruitful interactions between mathematicians and physicists over the past twenty years; it includes Yang-Mills and Seiberg-Witten theory, and String theory). This `Gromov-Witten invariant approach led quickly to formulas answering some of the original enumerative problems, and there are clear indications that there are more to be discovered. This project is aimed toward further developing the symplectic gauge theory in order to produce additional general formulas and to meld these formulas into a coherent theory doc10813 none TITLE: Dissertation Research: Species Recognition in Brood Parasites FACULTY SPONSOR: Paul W. Sherman STUDENT: Mark E. Hauber Most birds and mammals are reared among family members. Therefore, learning the characteristics of siblings and parents results in appropriate species recognition. Because brood parasites lay their eggs in nests of other birds, imprinting on foster parents would lead their young to misidentify their own species. How does recognition develop in parasites? This project investigates species recognition in the brown-headed cowbird (Molothrus ater), a common brood parasitic bird of North America. By combining continuous observations at naturally parasitized nests, selective removals of female parasites to limit early social experience of fledgling cowbirds, DNA parentage analyses, playbacks of conspecific vocalizations throughout parasitic offspring development, and plumage manipulations of hand-reared juveniles, this study evaluates the relative importance of social learning and self-referent phenotype matching in the development of cowbird species recognition. This study will be informative for research on species-, kin-, and mate-recognition mechanisms in general. In addition, because species recognition is a poorly known aspect of the biology of most host-parasite systems, findings from this work will also increase our understanding of host- and self-recognition doc10814 none Matson This U.S.-Mexico Program award will provide support for dissertation research by Mr. John Harrison, under the direction of Dr. Pamela Matson of Stanford University. Mr. Harrrison will work in Mexico with Dr. Ivan Ortiz-Monasterio on the Wheat Program at the International Wheat and Maize Improvement Center (CYMMYT) in Obregon, Mexico. The investigators will study the emissions of nitrous oxide from waters draining the Yaqui Basin in Mexico. Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas that is increasing globally and the fertilization of agricultural fields is thought to be the single most important source of the observed increase. The Yaqui Valley provides a unique opportunity to look at the interactions of several kinds of anthropogenic change that are important drivers of biogeochemical change. Results from this study should improve our basic understanding of nitrous oxide emissions from agricultural drainage and the factors that control them doc10815 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Workshop on Soliton Equations: Applications and Theory Carlson This award supports U.S. participants (primarily young researchers and graduate students) in the Workshop on Soliton Equations: Applications and Theory, held at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, on August 10-12, . The workshop involves interdisciplinary examination of soliton equations by experts in both theory and applications. Nonlinear problems of optical communications are emphasized, particularly the use of the nonlinear Schroedinger equation and its variants for the modeling and design of long distance fiber optic communication systems. Additional applied topics include the appearance of solitons in other optical problems, magnetic thin films, and Bose-Einstein condensates. Theoretical topics include extensions of inverse scattering and inverse spectral theory to Schroedinger or Dirac type operators, new methods of analyzing Riemann-Hilbert problems, connections of soliton equations with geometry, and new insights into meromorphic or real analytic solutions of soliton equations. Since the initial discoveries relating the Korteweg - de Vries equation to the scattering transform, soliton equations have provided a veritable fountain of physical and mathematical surprises. This workshop offers researchers in this field a chance to exchange new results and new problems, and it provides young researchers with an overview of the field. The workshop aims at interdisciplinary presentation, with a healthy mix of successful applications of the ideas to physical problems, computational studies which can illuminate applications and suggest new theoretical issues, and new theoretical results doc10816 none Dorothy Shippen Telomeres are essential for genome stability and continued proliferation in an undifferentiated and dedifferentiated state. Arabidopsis thaliana is a useful model to elucidate the role of telomeres in plant growth and development and to address fundamental questions of telomere function in higher eukaryotes. The investigator recently demonstrated that Arabidopsis can survive up to ten generations without telomerase, the enzyme responsible for maintaining tracts of telomeric DNA on chromosome ends. In telomerase-deficient plants, telomeres shorten progressively and late generation mutants endure increasing levels of cytogenetic damage, correlated with developmental anomalies in vegetative and reproductive organs. Unexpectedly, a significant subset of telomerase-deficient plants show a different phenotype that includes homeotic transformation in floral organs and leaves that curl up along the longitudinal axis. The striking similarity of this phenotype to mutants defective in aspects of chromatin structure in Arabidopsis strongly suggests that telomere dysfunction can lead to global epigenetic repercussions in the regulation of gene expression. This project will test whether telomere erosion is accompanied by changes in nuclear architecture and chromatin structure and to reveal the global transcription profile during successive generations of a telomerase deficiency doc10817 none Varadhan The focus of this project is interacting particle systems and their scaling limits. When we have a large system of particles interacting through local interactions, the evolution of such a system when it starts far away from equilibrium poses several questions. Density being often the only conserved quantity, there is usually some sort of a transport equation appearing as the scaling limit. Superposed on it is the motion of individual particles, which is usually an inhomogeneous Markov process after the interactions are somehow averaged in the scaling limit. Laws of large numbers as well as fluctuations and large deviations from them are some of the interesting problems in this context. In addition the coefficients arising in the limiting descriptions are functions of density and or other parameters and the regularity of their dependence on the parameters is also of importance. There are a large class of physical processes where the rules of behavior are prescribed at the level of individual units. These rules concern the nature of the interaction between individual units that could involve some randomness as well. But one needs to make predictions of the collective behavior of the units at a much larger scale. This project deals with the derivation of the rules of collective behavior from models of interactions at the level of individual units. In the physical sciences examples of such problems that have been successfully studied include the rules of fluid flow that are derived from the laws of interaction between molecules that make up the fluid. Similar problems in the social sciences, for instance one of predicting macroeconomic behavior based on models of economic exchange between individuals, have not been adequately addressed doc10818 none Prop: PI: Winn, Joshua Dr. Winn is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a program of research, education, and public outreach at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. His research program will apply the phenomenon of gravitational lensing and the techniques of radio and optical interferometry to problems in cosmology and galactic structure. Using gravitationally lensed quasars, he will measure the current expansion rate of the Universe, and will test whether this expansion rate is accelerating. In a third project, he will attempt to find and study central black holes in distant galaxies. He also plans to contribute to the technical development of optical interferometry and its application to study gravitational lensing by compact dark objects in our Galaxy. His educational and public outreach program includes teaching several undergraduate courses and continuing to write articles about science and science policy for the public doc10819 none Prop: PI: Norman, Dara Dr. Norman is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at the Cerro Tololo InterAmerican Observatory (CTIO) of the National Optical Astronomy Observatories (NOAO), in La Serena, Chile. She will use the Deep Lens Survey (DLS) underway at CTIO to continue her studies of the two-point angular correlation function between foreground galaxies and high redshift quasi-stellar objects (QSOs). The DLS will increase ten-fold the number of QSOs used in the most recent large scale, homogeneous survey completed in her earlier work. This increase in sample will enable a more accurate measure of the amplitude and scale of the correlation function which will be used to put limits on cosmological parameters. The DLS will also provide data to search for galaxy distortions or shear in these QSO fields. She will also work with the DLS team to improve the image quality of the MOSAIC II camera on the CTIO 4-meter to ensure that any shear signals, if present, can be detected. Dr. Norman will also initiate and participate in a number of outreach projects at CTIO and NOAO that will bridge educational initiatives in the US and in Chile. She plans on becoming involved in the CTIO Research Experiences for Undergraduates Program, working with a local student group in La Serena to provide astronomy activities, with the goal of linking professional and amateur astronomers with 4th - 9th grade teachers in local communities (Project ASTRO), and working as a resource within the NOAO Research Based Science Education Program doc10820 none Zucker The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide twenty-four months of support to Dr. Daniel B. Zucker to do research with Dr. Eva Grebel at Max-Planck-Institut fur Astronomie in Heidelberg (MPIA), Germany on starburst galaxies from the local group to the Hubble Deep Field. Support for this project is provided by NSF s Math and Physical Science Directorate s Office of Multipdisciplinary Activities. Starburts - intense episodes of star formation - have been observed within our own galaxy and in other nearby galaxies. Observations of high-redshift galaxies suggest that local starbursts are reasonable analogs of the star formation modes in their more distant cousins. An understanding of the physical properties of nearby starbursts, covering a range of metallicities, is therefore essential for interpreting data from galaxies at earlier epochs. During this project, the PI will work to construct a coherent database of the observational and derived physical parameters of nearby dwarf starburst galaxies, including existing data as well as new observations, and to apply this database to a study of starburst galaxies at moderate to high redshift. At MPIA, the PI will have access to ground-based telescopes with state-of-the-art optical and infrared instruments which are critical to this research. Dr. Grebel has extensive experience working on stellar populations and the dynamics of nearby galaxies doc10821 none Siegel This proposal is concerned with the analysis and numerical computation of moving boundaries in problems from fluid dynamics and materials science. The proposed problems are motivated by different applications but are remarkably similar from a mathematical point of view. One class of problems concerns the deformation and breakup via tip streaming of drops and bubbles in extensional flows. Tip streaming refers to the phenomenon where a bubble develops a deformed shape featuring cusplike ends, from which fine filaments or small bubbles are emitted into the exterior fluid. Experiments suggest that interfacial tension gradients such as those produced by surfactants are important for the onset of this instability. The PI shall continue his development of an analytical theory for the deformation and evolution of slender bubbles with surfactant, focusing on the effects of soluble surfactant and its influence in tip streaming. Mathematical difficulties in the analysis are associated with a jump in boundary conditions at stagnant caps of surfactant on the free surface. Techniques employed to address these difficulties include singular perturbation theory, theory of singular integral equations and Riemann-Hilbert problems, and complex variable theory in moving boundary problems. The theory will be complemented by accurate numerical computations. The PI also proposes to investigate tip streaming and air entrainment in simple models of fiber coating, as well as cusp formation and a possible analogue of tip streaming which may occur during the diffusion controlled evolution of voids in a stressed solid. The mathematical statements of these free boundary problems are similar, and the PI expects that there will be a certain synergism between them. Moving boundary problems, such as the evolution of waves on water, the propagation of flame fronts, or the growth of crystals, continue to challenge applied scientists and engineers. The PI proposes to study a class of fundamental moving boundary problems that are important in technological applications. A common feature among the proposed problems is that the moving interface develops very small-scale features, such as cusps or very fine filaments, which can then greatly influence the properties of the material or fluid. One application of the proposed work is in the coating of materials (such as optical fibers) by pulling at high speed through a liquid bath. Air filaments produced during the coating process can snap off, leaving voids or other blemishes that adulterate the coating. A second application is in the failure of materials. Small pores present in materials evolve (via atomic diffusion) when the material is stressed. Cusp development in the pores can initiate cracks or dislocations (misalignment of atoms); this has been implicated as a prominent cause of failure in microelectronic circuits. Other applications include emulsion formation and mixing in multi-component fluid systems doc10822 none Some profound connections have been developed, over the past few years, between algebraic geometry and integrable systems, on the one hand, and quantum field theory and string theory on the other. The aim of this proposal is to suggest some new links, and to explore and expand the existing ones. The first proposed project involves a conjectural extension of the Fourier-Mukai transform, or the spectral construction, to several new situations, including fibrations without sections, noncommutative geometries, and higher dimensional complex or special Lagrangian torus fibers. The special Lagrangian case in particular casts new light on the SYZ approach to mirror symmetry and suggests the existence of an integrable system structure on the stringy moduli space of Calabi-Yaus. The next two projects involve applications of the first to two central issues of quantum field theory and string theory. Specifically, the second project seeks to derive a fully realistic version of the Standard Model of particle physics, starting from particular M-theory vacua. This is based on the construction techniques for vector bundles on genus-1 fibrations discussed in the first project. The third project studies several aspects of the other major conjectural string duality, the one between the heterotic string and F-theory. Proposed work includes the rigorous establishment of the isomorphism on all strata of the geometric boundary in complete generality, and its extension to the interior in one important case where it may also be possible to establish the equality of the superpotentials on both sides. String theory is generally considered to be the leading candidate for a unified physical theory which explains everything we know about the physical world, from the smallest sub-particle scales to the entire universe. Our confidence in the power of string theory to describe the real world relies to a great extent on the recent discovery of string dualities and their understanding via geometric tools. This proposal aims to explore and expand these recent applications of algebraic geometry to string theory and especially to dualities. It also includes a range of educational activities, including curriculum development, the writing of a textbook, and extensive work with undergraduate and graduate students, aimed at the dissemination of new knowledge concerning the interactions of mathematics and high energy physics doc10823 none for DMS - The main part of the project describes a new isospectral construction technique (Anticommutator Technique), which provides the first isospectral pairs of metrics on the most simple manifolds: on balls and spheres. The most striking examples are constructed on suitable spheres, where one of the members of an isospectral pair is a homogeneous metric, while the other is locally inhomogeneous. This demonstrates the surprising fact that no information about the isometries is encoded in the spectrum of the Laplacian acting on functions. These investigations also extend to the Laplacian spectrum of forms. Related questions are also considered. One of them is construction of Brownian-motion-equivalent spaces (Isothermal Metrics). This equivalence relation is much stronger then the isospectrality property, yet it does not determine the local geometry. The same statement is true regarding the metrics with equivalent density functions (Isodasyc Metrics). The old argument between Relativity and Quantum Physics is easily discovered in the depth of these questions. In Relativity, the whole Physics is derived from a curved space. Actually, Physics is identified with the complete Geometry of this curved space. Einstein put his idea this way: There is no such thing as Physics. Everything is Geometry. Contrary to Relativity, the Quantum Physics uses only particular aspects of Geometry such as the spectra of several operators or the Brownian Motion defined by a metric space. Einstein suggested, however, that the Brownian Motion may determine the complete local geometry. This reflects the extent of the confusion about the following question: How much Geometry is used by the Quantum Physics? The proposed investigations demonstrate, for the first time, how little information about Geometry is used by Quantum Physics. For instance, Quantum Physics completely ignores the isometries of the spaces, which otherwise form the central piece of a theory developed in Geometry doc10824 none for DMS - The investigators research focuses on establishing sharp geometric inequalities that are invariant under linear or affine transformations and using them to obtain new analytic inequalities. Since an affine structure contains no notion of distance or angle, one might think that there is little to say or do. In fact, there is a rich and deep theory that already encompasses many of the most important aspects of Euclidean geometry, including the sharp isoperimetric and Sobolev inequalities. Most of the investigators efforts will be devoted to developing and understanding the Brunn-Minkowski theory and its generalizations. The investigators work involves some of the most fundamental objects in mathematics: bodies in and functions of ordinary Euclidean space. These are used to represent real objects and phenomena in science and engineering. Although it is impossible to predict the future impact of this work, the investigators believe that the concepts and techniques developed in this project could prove to be useful in fields ranging from pure mathematical areas such as differential geometry, partial differential equations, and Banach spaces to more applied areas such as robot vision, information theory, and stereology doc10825 none This project is to support a problem-posing and problem- solving workshop on an emerging new topic in Computational Geometry, with applications in Graphics, Robotics, and Mobile Computing. Funding will support a small international group of participants, including students and post-docs, to get together and draft a list of the main questions to be answered about this relatively new data structure, and to work on solving some of them doc10826 none Testing behavioral evolution in response to ecological change in the village weaverbird (Ploceus cucullatus). PI: Prof. Robert B. Payne Co-PI: David C. Lahti Behavior can evolve by natural selection, but testing this in wild populations is often difficult or impossible. The village weaverbird Ploceus cucullatus is a choice candidate for such a test, because historical events have fortuitously set the stage for an effective experiment. In the village weaverbird s home range in Africa, the diederik cuckoo Chrysococcyx caprius lays its eggs in weaverbirds nests ( brood parasitism ). A hatched cuckoo promptly removes the weaverbird eggs or young from the nest. In and , Lahti found that village weaverbirds throughout Africa eject from their nests eggs that are dissimilar from their own in color and spotting pattern, a behavior which is an effective defense against cuckoo parasitism. Their discrimination ability is finely tuned, which is necessary because the diederik cuckoo eggs mimic the appearance of weaverbird eggs. Humans introduced the village weaverbird from Africa into two islands where parasitic cuckoos do not exist: Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, a century ago, and Hispaniola, in the Caribbean, about two centuries ago. Today there are large populations of the weaverbird in both places. Lahti will test quantitatively whether the weaverbirds ability to discriminate against dissimilar eggs has declined in these two populations by playing the cuckoo and experimentally placing eggs into their nests. This experiment effectively imitates the environmental dangers of the weaverbirds home range in a place where those dangers don t exist anymore. In this way the researchers can determine whether and to what extent the behaviors that evolved as a defense against those dangers have declined, since they are no longer needed doc10827 none for DMS - . The investigator will study two groups of problems related to physical models of topological string theory and two-dimensional gravity and their interaction with geometry and other branches of mathematics. Based on physical ideas and methods, E.Witten conjectured that certain topological invariants of the moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces with higher spin structures assemble in a generating function that can be determined by an infinite system of differential equations (the so-called Gelfand-Dickey hierarchy). The goal of the first part of the proposal is to study geometric and algebraic structures related to this conjecture by using techniques from the theory of Gromov-Witten invariants and quantum cohomology. Besides exposing deep connections between seemingly unrelated areas of geometry and analysis, a goal of this part of the project is to develop tools for analyzing more general cohomological field theories of spin type and the corresponding spin analogs of quantum cohomology and Gromov-Witten invariants. The second part of the proposal is related to applications and generalizations of the so-called chiral de Rham complex, a canonical sheaf of vertex algebras introduced in joint work with Malikov and Schechtman. The main goal here is to find a rigorous geometric foundation for the physical models of two-dimensional superconformal field theory on smooth varieties and orbifolds. String theory is a proposed physical theory which attempts to unify all kinds of forces and, in particular, combines Einstein s theory of gravity with the quantum theory. Because this theory cannot yet be verified on experiments, physicists working in string theory are testing it on sophisticated mathematical models. Often the same physical quantity can be computed by more than one method which gives answers expressed in terms of very different mathematical structures. This suggests the existence of deep ties between various seemingly remote parts of mathematics and leads to formulation of non-trivial conjectures connecting different mathematical objects, usually geometric and analytical in nature. The goal of the current project is a mathematical study of some of these conjectures and interactions. Besides producing new mathematical results, it should give mathematical verification of some physical models and provide more direct links between mathematical and physical methods of analysis of these models doc10828 none Maura McLaughlin Dr. McLaughlin will carry out a program of research as an MPS Distinguished International Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Jodrell Bank Observatory. She will study pulsars, the rapidly rotating, highly magnetized neutron stars which emit pulses that are detected once per rotation. Pulsars have many astrophysical applications, including strong-field gravity, condensed matter physics, particle physics, planetary astronomy, and even cosmology. While pulsars radiate across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, there are over known radio pulsars and only 40 known X-ray and or gamma-ray pulsars. Consequently, the relationship between low- and high-energy emission and the emission processes themselves are not well-understood. This research program will lead to a more complete census of the pulsar population, a better understanding of emission mechanisms, and the discovery of unique individual objects. Techniques for discovery will include radio searches for counterparts to high-energy sources and pulsars that are likely to be detectable at high energies, as well as high-energy searches, spectroscopy, and imaging. This research is funded through the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences doc10829 none Ceperley The long range goal of this research program is to develop practical, efficient theoretical methods to accurately predict the properties of many-electron systems. The methods and computational algorithms so generated can be applied to important idealized systems, such as the homogeneous electron gas, as well as to realistic problems in condensed matter. The rapid development of these computational quantum methods will have a qualitative impact upon the course of many fields of science including physics, materials science, chemistry and even biology. The approach is a combination of quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations and density functional theory (DFT). QMC can provide exact results for some many-body problems, the principle goal is to extend the range of problems for which the method can be applied. On the other hand, DFT is the only current method feasible for accurate large-scale simulations of real systems. The research concerns both the basic theory, as well as tests of approximate forms using QMC. Continued development of QMC methods, with emphasis upon more accurate wavefunctions and improved boundary conditions and upon developing new methods able to use much larger computational facilities will be undertaken. Applications of QMC methods to physical problems will include nanoscale quantum devices and two-dimensional electron systems in the presence of disorder, where there is much experimental and theoretical controversy concerning the possible metal-insulator transition. General theoretical methods for studying dielectric polarization and functionals in correlated systems will be developed. We will extend the lattice model calculations to continuum systems that can serve as the basis for improved universal density-polarization functionals. We will also continue work started recently using time-dependent DFT to predict excitation spectra of materials, nanostructures and quantum dots. The first system studied will be silicon clusters, where intense blue light emission has been recently discovered. A long range goal is to develop both many-body methods and imporved functionals that can go beyond DFT approximations for ground state energies and excitation spectra. %%% The long range goal of this research program is to develop practical, efficient theoretical methods to accurately predict the properties of many-electron systems. The methods and computational algorithms so generated can be applied to important idealized systems, such as the homogeneous electron gas, as well as to realistic problems in condensed matter. The rapid development of these computational quantum methods will have a qualitative impact upon the course of many fields of science including physics, materials science, chemistry and even biology doc10830 none Lars Andersson This proposal is concerned with the global existence and cosmic censorship problems for the Einstein equation, and related issues in Lorentzian and Riemannian geometry. One of the primary goals is to prove a nonlinear stability result for the Einstein equation in the cosmological case. For large data, global existence is a very hard problem, and here the aim is to identify and study model problems as well as lower dimensional problems derived by symmetry reductions. The structure of cosmological singularities will be studied from the point of view of the BKL proposal. For flat, spatially compact spacetimes, global constant mean curvature foliations will be studied, in particular their asymptotic behavior in the expanding direction and near the singularity. The Einstein equation, which describes the interaction of matter with spacetime geometry, is one of the fundamental classical field equations of modern physics. According to the world view of modern physics, our universe is described on large scales by one of the simplest solutions to the Einstein equations, the Friedman-Lemaitre solution. According to this picture, the universe has developed from a singularity (big bang) and is expanding. The work in this project is concerned with the nonlinear stability of this model, the behavior of spacetime in extreme conditions near the big bang and its ultimate fate in the expanding direction doc10831 none The inherent speed and potential for parallel processing make signal manipulation in the optical domain an attractive alternative, but one that requires the ability to produce well-defined nonlinear functions (e.g., wavelength conversion, phase-preserving optical multiplication, logic operations), as well as to direct the optical intermediates and outputs as necessary. We propose to expand our exploration of a new class of photonic devices which possess both of these characteristicst nonlinear photonic crystals (NLPCs). We show theoretically that the structure of an NLPC can be successfully determined for a particular nonlinear optical application - a one-step interchange of optical data between two wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) channels. Preliminary measurements confirm the success of this inversion problem (i.e., desired output 4 NLPC structure). We propose to explore the properties of this and related lattice-based devices and circuits. We also intend to extend this work to quasi-periodic and aperiodic nonlinear optical geometries, and to nonlinear distributions based on nanoscale domain distributions. We believe that this research direction will continue to uncover new and powerful applications of all-optical elements for a wide range of disciplines, including telecommunications, signal processing, and remote sensing doc10832 none Denda This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Mitsunori Denda of Rutgers University and Professor Julio Florez-Lopez of the University on the Andes in Venezuela. The project will focus on the assessment of damage to reinforced concrete structures subject to strong loading. The research team will carry out analytical, numerical and experimental studies to compare the fracture mechanics and lumped damage mechanics approaches of assessing cracking in reinforced concrete structures. The vulnerability of concrete structures to strong loading, such as that caused by earthquakes, results in significant loss of life and property damage. Potential new approaches to assessing the cracking behavior of reinforced concrete could have far-reaching implications for building safer structures and mitigating against damages from earthquakes. This collaboration brings together the efforts of international laboratories with complementary expertise and research facilities. The project will directly involve U.S. undergraduate and graduate students in the international collaboration doc10833 none Evan Scannapieco Dr. Scannapieco will carry out a program of research as an MPS Distinguished International Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Osseratorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Italy, and the Institut d Astrophysique, Paris. His theoretical and observational program will examine heating and enrichment processes in the Universe and their impact on the formation of large-scale structure. The observational program will carry out the most accurate spectroscopic examination of distant outflows yet undertaken, as well as a search for heated gas around distant galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field. The observational research will be complemented by three closely related theoretical projects: 1) a detailed numerical study of galaxy outflows that will help to better quantify the role outflows play in the thermal and enrichment history of the diffuse gas from which all galaxies form, 2) a study of how this enrichment history can be related to the metal distribution in the stars of our own galaxy, and 3) a numerical study of the impact of outflows on the cosmic microwave background radiation, one of the most sensitive probes of the heating and ionization history of the Universe. This research is funded through the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences doc10834 none The Mission Discovery project targeting middle school youth is a collaborative endeavor between the Carnegie Science Center (CSC) and the Hill House Association. This year-round project will work with inner-city children from communities in southwestern Pennsylvania. Thirty middle school students will experience standards-based, creative programs and activities. Physical Science, Life Science and Earth & Space Science will be the content focus of the project. CSC provides the mathematics and science expertise while the Hill House Association (serving six predominately low-income African American communities) provides the community, recruitment and staffing expertise doc10835 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Meredith S. Chesson will conduct one field season of archaeological research on the Kerak Plateau of Jordan. Dr. Chesson s research project combines archaeological methods and social anthropological models of heterarchy to investigate the social, political and economic structures of the earliest urban settlements in the Southern Levant. Focusing on the third millennium urban communities on the Kerak Plateau in central Jordan, survey and test excavations of eight Early Bronze Age (EBA) settlements will collect data to assess the applicability of this alternative model for reconstructing the nature of this early urban society. Over the last century, researchers have proposed many models for understanding the process of EBA urbanism and the nature of urban society. Recent excavations at several sites, including Zeraqon, Yarmuth, Arad, Megiddo, and Handaquq South, demonstrate a surprising diversity in scale of settlement, nature of economic base, settlement in environmental zones, and life history of the EBA community. In this investigation of EBA walled towns, researchers are uncovering a diversity of expression of urban life that challenges the normative boundaries of traditional models of secondary state formation, chiefdoms, and the nature and role of ritual and elite institutions. This diversity of social, political and economic structures of EBA life presents researchers with an intriguing theoretical puzzle: is it possible to encompass the variation of EBA urban lifeways, economic bases, social networks, and political structures into an explanatory model? Can any reconstruction accommodate the range of cultural expression that we define as EBA society? In attempting to answer this question, Dr. Chesson s research seeks to test the applicability of heterarchy in reconstructing the nature of EBA urban society. Dr. Chesson s project combines a macroscale (regional) and microscale (site by site) approach, investigating the nature of economic, social, and political structures and ties of communities in the region by gathering data at eight EBA urban settlements on the Plateau. In pedestrian surveys at these eight EBA urban communities, and test excavations at two of these sites, the team will document the scale of settlement, classes of material culture, specific forms of artifacts, and materials from which they were fashioned to provide insights into the complex connections between modes in EBA urban society, and the nature of cultural links between these settlements. The Kerak Plateau research project emerges from the reevaluation of models for understanding urban society, and contributes to archaeological investigations of social complexity and urbanism at local, regional and global levels. The project s documentation of site chronologies, material culture, and settlement size data, and the preliminary understanding of the nature of economic, political and social structures, will produce a database for comparing other EBA urban communities in both marginal and rich ecological zones, facilitating site to site comparisons, as well as regional comparisons. On an even broader level, this research offers comparative data in examining the development of social inequality, the rise of urban societies, and the links between ecology and society. The Kerak Plateau Project will offer more data and ideas to this broader anthropological dialogue on the development of social complexity and the growth of an urban society doc10836 none This award is to hold an Industry University planning meeting for a proposed research site at the University of Michigan which will be a part of the I UCRC for Intelligent e-Maintenance Systems at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The planning meeting will examine the organizational feasibility and economic viability of the research site. A portfolio of initial research projects will be determined. New members will be recruited during the tenure of the award doc10837 none Lebiedzik The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide twenty-four months of support to Dr. Catherine Lebiedzik of the University of Virginia to do research with Dr. John Cagnol at Pole Universitaire, Leonard de Vinci, in Paris, France, and with Dr. Jean-Paul Zolesio at Ecole des Mines de Paris in Sophia Antipolis, France. Funding for this project is provided by NSF s Math and Physical Sciences Directorate s Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. The PI will work on the problem of reducing noise in an acoustic cavity. The project involves the complex mathematical solution of a simple physical system; describing the physics via the acoustic wave equation embedded in an appropriate boundary surface. Noise reduction is a concern in the field of aerospace engineering as well as an application of modern control theory of partial differential equations (PDEs). The structural acoustic interaction in the chamber is mathematically modeled by a coupled system of PDEs. The international nature for this work is necessary because the intrinsic model itself was first developed in France. The French group will be responsible for generalizing the model to include thermoelastic effects and for assisting in numerical analysis with the finite element method doc10838 none Prop: PI: Johnson, Kelsey Dr. Johnson is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a program of research, education, and public outreach at the University of Wisconsin and at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Socorro. Her research program focuses on the study of the earliest stages of massive star clusters. She will use panchromatic data, from the radio to the near-infrared, to study the physical properties of the star clusters as they evolve from being completely enshrouded to being dominated by stellar light. Study of these clusters provides knowledge of the conditions required for the formation of massive star clusters and their physical properties at different stages in their development. Dr. Johnson will also carry out a program of undergraduate education, community outreach, and minority participation and recruitment doc10839 none PI: Daniel J. Pisano Dr. Pisano will carry out a program of research as an MPS Distinguished Research Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian National Telescope Facility. His research will focus on the HI properties of loose groups of galaxies, in an effort to resolve controversial models for the formation of our Milky Way Galaxy and others more distant galaxies. Most galaxies, including our own, reside in groups, although many properties of loose groups, such as our own Local Group, are relatively poorly understood. It is not known whether loose groups of galaxies are still assembling, for example, or how the environment affects members of these groups. Some galaxy formation models suggest that hundreds of dark matter halos should exist in loose groups. Perhaps the high velocity clouds seen around the Milky Way are associated with these dark matter halos and are the gaseous debris associated with the formation of the Local Group. If these theories are correct, then the analogs of high velocity clouds and satellite galaxies should exist in other loose groups as well. This research program will test these hypotheses, with HI and optical observations of loose groups of galaxies, that will search for the presence of high velocity clouds in loose groups and detect low-mass, gas-rich galaxies. This research is funded through the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences doc10840 none of reality without being strictly correct; this is the basis for the investigation of statistical distances. Although theoretical in nature, this has implications throughout statistics and could lead to a more meaningful use of models. A second investigation is focused on a class of statistical methods that allow one to reduce the restrictiveness of model building assumptions; the goal is to expand the range of applicability of these methods. There are many potential applications in social sciences and medicine. The final subject of investigation springs from an increased demand for statistical tools in the area of biology, especially in genomic research; the principal investigator is applying expertise in his modeling area to three different applications. In each application the statistical model used, the mixture model, has direct scientific meaning as a tool for measuring the heterogeneity in biological processes doc10841 none The research work will concern mathematical and numerical aspects of semiconductor manufacturing, specifically to work on problems of microstructural reliability, including aspects of electromigration and chemical mechanical polishing. The work will be combination of mathematical modeling to produce reasonable physical models, complete with appropriate boundary conditions and internal dynamics, and numerical algorithms, in part relying on algorithms for surface evolution and elliptic solvers in irregular domains. The goal will be numerical simulations and comparisons with experiment. Dr. L. Borucki from Motorola Corporation will take this Senior Research Fellowship in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California- Berkeley. This GOALI project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc10842 none This MPS Distinguished International Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (MPS-DRF) award supports a research project in the study of quantum gases, or Bose-Einstein condensates, an area that brings quantum mechanics from the level of a single atom to millions of atoms. The proposed research will study vortices, a fundamental structure in Bose-Einstein condenstaes, at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. The research will be undertaken in collaboration with other theoretical and experimental groups in Europe and the US, specifically at Oxford University in England, at the F.O.M. Institute in Amsterdam, and at the National Institute for Standards and Technology doc10843 none Hannaford This one-year award will support a dissertation enhancement project of Jesse Dosher, a student in the Biorobotics Lab of the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Washington. He will work with Prof. Massimo Bergamasco at the PERCRO lab at Scuola Superiore Santa Anna in Pisa, Italy. The objective of Mr. Dosher s research is to improve the design of the Biorobotics Lab s new control method for haptic devices. While at PERCRO, one of the world s leading laboratories in haptic device mechanization, Mr. Dosher will learn state of the art materials, mechanization, and fabrication techniques for haptic device design. While at PERCRO, Mr. Dosher will offer seminars on the Biorobotics Lab s new control method for haptic devices doc10844 none Prop: PI: Hurley-Keller, Denise Dr. Hurley-Keller is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU). She will carry out a photometric survey of dwarf galaxy satellite systems around isolated spiral galaxies, which will provide constraints both on the evolution of disk galaxy stellar populations and their dark matter halos. The survey will be conducted with the CWRU Burrell Schmidt telescope and will reach fainter than other studies of isolated systems and will sample dwarf spheroidal populations throughout the dark halos of these galaxies. With this survey, she will be able to investigate two primary issues: 1) the relationship between the properties of a galaxy s disk halo bulge and of its satellite system, and 2) the constraints that numbers of dwarf galaxies place on various cold dark matter models and their predictions. Dr. Hurley-Keller will also design and offer an undergraduate course for non-majors in which students explore the process of science by focusing less on the material content and more on thinking like a scientist in the context of both historical and current astronomical problems doc10845 none Prop: PI: Hooper, Eric Dr. Hooper is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a program of research, education, and public outreach at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on understanding the phenomenon of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) by constructing a sample that is broadly representative and fully characterized. He will obtain spectroscopy for source characterization and the determination of multi-epoch luminosity functions of a subsample of objects observed with the Chandra X-ray telescope. The resulting sample will incorporate most known AGN types and include previously hidden populations. Dr. Hooper s educational activities will include participation in a science teacher training program, known as UTeach, being developed at the University. He plans to offer an upper-division course on research methods which is aimed at synthesizing the students previous course work and developing independent problem solving skills doc10846 none Professor Daniel Romo in the Department of Chemistry at Texas A&M University is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his development of concise and practical enantioselective syntheses of beta-lactones via nucleophile catalyzed aldol-lactonizations (NCALs) of ketenes and aldehydes. Novel transformations of these beta-lactones to form various heterocyclic structures will be explored. The utility of the intramolecular NCAL reaction will be illustrated by the total synthesis of a lactacystin analog and an enantioselective synthesis of the natural product, brefeldin A. Mechanistic studies on the NCAL reaction will be carried out using REACT IR and 1H NMR. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Program, Professor Romo is developing novel methods by which certain highly strained organic compounds can be prepared with precise control of their three-dimensional structure. These compounds serve as intermediates which can be further converted to more complex products, many of which are share similar structural features with pharmacologically active compounds doc10847 none Prop: PI: Coble, Kimberly Dr. Coble is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at the University of Chicago. Her research program centers on measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) which will test the standard theory of structure formation in the early universe. Her observations will be made with the Degree Angular Scale Interferometer (DASI), which is currently operating at the South Pole Station. DASI will be used to measure the as yet undetected polarization of the CMB, and following a planned upgrade will be used to observe smaller angular scales as well as the Sunyaev-Zel dovich effect in galaxy clusters. Dr. Coble s educational program will be carried out at the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum, where she will teach courses on astronomy and cosmology, and establish a communications link to the South Pole while she is conducting research doc10848 none The project will investigate the causes for the off-equatorial location of the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). The confluence of northeast and southeast trade winds generates the moisture flux convergence that feeds deep tropical convection. The convection shows up as a bright cloud band in satellite pictures, and helps identify the ITCZ. Although solar forcing is nearly symmetric in the annual-mean, the ITCZ in the central eastern Pacific remains northward of the equator throughout much of the year. Recent studies have revealed the role of ocean-atmosphere interactions in equatorial and coastal zones, and of geographical asymmetries of continents (e.g., the Americas) in producing the Northern hemisphere location of the ITCZ, but many key questions remain unanswered. Not surprisingly, the ITCZ remains a poorly simulated feature in current climate models. Drs. Shang-Ping Xie and Tim Li will identify the key climate interactions that control ITCZ location from modeling analysis, using a pair of coupled climate models. The PIs will decompose the geographical asymmetries of the Americas into several elements and investigate their symmetry-breaking potential in context of ITCZ s meridional position. They will also investigate the interaction of the eastern Pacific ITCZ and the North American monsoon. This research will advance the understanding of how ocean, land, and the atmosphere interact to shape the eastern Pacific climate. In so doing, it will provide the large-scale interpretive framework for NSF s Eastern Pacific Investigation of Climate (EPIC) field program, and also contribute to the Pan American Pacific research goals of the U.S. CLIVAR program doc10849 none This project provides for international technology assessments and related workshop and staff support. While a division of Loyola College, the World Technology Evaluation Center conducted over 50 such technology assessments using a peer review methodology that many believe is the best single method for evaluation of research and development abroad. The objectives include seeking technologies to transfer to the U.S., evaluating the position of U.S. science and technology with respect to leading competitors, and seeking opportunities for international cooperation in research doc10850 none The Exploratorium will create the Outdoor Exploratorium, a 10,000-square-foot, open-air exhibit environment comprising 20 to 25 original installations. Each exhibit will allow visitors to interact directly with a variety of elements, that is water, wind, sound, light, and living things, as they exist in the natural world. One of the key components of this project will be the use of Noticing Tours. Led by staff scientists, artists, educators, exhibit developers, and other expert noticers, the tours will initiate a dialogue with the visitors as a starting point for exhibit development. To augment visitor learning and unify the museum s entire collection, exhibit text will relate the Outdoor Exploratorium experiences to exhibits. The project will culminate in a workbook for the field and two workshops for museum professionals. The Exploratorium Teacher Institute staff will develop two-week institutes that make extensive use of the Outdoor Exploratorium. Classroom activities and inquiry-based learning experiences will be developed based on the new exhibits doc10851 none Offspring Recognition and Brood Parasitism in African Finches: Implications for Signal Mimicry and Diversification David W. Winkler and Justin G. Schuetz Communication between parents and offspring is widespread among birds. However, the signals that nestlings employ in this dialogue have undergone extreme elaboration in only two families of birds, the Estrildid finches and the brood parasitic Viduid finches. The mouth patterns of estrildid nestlings are incredibly diverse; each species possesses a unique combination of spots, colors, and markings on its palate and tongue. Viduid nestlings, which are raised alongside estrildid host nestlings, have mouth markings that precisely match those of the host species they exploit. Presumably, mimicry occurs because raising parasites is costly and because host parents that discriminate against foreign-looking young are favored by natural selection. However, to date, there is scanty evidence for nestling recognition in estrildids and only a few studies of wild host populations have been undertaken. Previous work suggests that food availability, host learning, and nestling phenotypes may influence whether host parents recognize and reject nestlings. Controlled aviary experiments in combination with fieldwork will help to assess the relative importance of these variables. Captive populations of known-age hosts and parasites have already been established, and research in Tanzania, where a viduid exploits more than one host species, will allow for tests of nestling discrimination. Throughout aviary and fieldwork, variation in nestling morphologies within and across species will be documented. In addition to informing our understanding of offspring recognition behavior, results from this research will provide insight into host-parasite interactions and the processes that affect the evolution of animal signals doc10852 none Preliminary work by the PIs has shown that application-level information can be exploited to greatly reduce the amount of redundancy required to deal with transient failures, which are by far the most common type of failure. For example, in a radar target-tracking application, our approach required only 15% redundancy to provide complete fault-tolerance against transient faults. Another use of ALFT is in providing a temporary patch in the event of a permanent processor failure, allowing the system more time to execute a recovery algorithm. ALFT is orthogonal to other approaches to fault-tolerance, so that it can be used either by itself or in combination with them. For example, a designer might use ALFT to guard against transients, and make a small amount of hardware redundancy available, in the form of line-replaceable spares, to deal with permanent failures. The objective of this project is to develop Application-Level Fault Tolerance strategies and investigate their effectiveness for various classes of real-time applications. The main focus will be to generalize our approach to include as many different types of applications as possible, develop the most suitable strategy for each application type and evaluate the efficiency of the developed scheme doc10853 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Wave Interactions in Continuum Mechanics Young, Robin This project is a study of nonlinear hyperbolic waves and their interactions. Waves are ubiquitous in science, and a general understanding of their interactions is of fundamental interest and importance. This project will systematically develop a dual framework for understanding waves and their interactions, via direct and asymptotic methods. Interacting pairs of waves are described in detail, and are combined in a coherent fashion to describe the structure of general solutions. These methods will be applied to several important systems of continuum mechanics. The mathematical theory of waves lies at the intersection of mathematics and physics and has application to many engineering problems. This project develops methods for understanding the results of wave interactions in general systems. The results obtained in this study will be of use in experimentally measuring material properties of elastic solids doc10854 none Ralph Saxton This project concerns modeling of heat propagation in materials at low temperatures (including superconducting regions) which are characterized by fast processes whose properties cannot be explained simply through the use of Fourier s law. The models under study are applicable to a wide class of materials for which heat waves, or second sound, can be detected, and they accommodate important hyperbolic parabolic phase transitions between two temperature regions, which are not included in other general theories. Under study are qualitative properties of the long-time behavior of both smooth solutions and solutions having shocks. Free-boundary problems modeling phase transitions are also studied. Conventional models of heat conduction involve infinite speed of propagation. The approximations that lead to this counterintuitive situation work well in most practical settings. Experimental studies of heat propagation in systems at very low temperatures, however, show the need for a theory with finite speed of propagation. This research project concerns development of such a theory of heat propagation in crystalline materials at low temperatures and mathematical analysis of the resultant partial differential equations. The project, carried out with the participation of undergraduate students, will lead to an efficient, generally applicable theory of heat propagation in solids, with possible eventual application to high-temperature superconducting materials and fast process laser heating doc10804 none The advent of the exploding Internet and the terra-bytes of heterogeneous data in it have made more acute the topic of searching such large digital databases. The challenges involved go beyond questions in information retrieval. One may envision seeking images in films, seeking words in voice data, and seeking phrases in compressed files and in files of various types. These challenges have boosted the appearance of myriad start-up companies and ad-hoc methods for the various tasks. The PI s approach has been a basic bottom-up long-term study of the theory of searching. They have a large center of pattern matching research that has pursued and continues to pursue understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of generalized searching, coupled with applications of their various ideas. the current research will continue the investigation of issues in generalized searching. In particular: 1. Approximate indexing with a small number of errors. 2. In-place compressed search. 3. ``Reusable dynamic programming code. 4. Parameterized matching with ``don t care s. Research on the theory of image processing will also be continued. The particular areas of concentration are: 1. The effect of digitization. 2. Real multi-dimensional scaling. 3. Efficient search of rotated images. The investigators research group has started a program of selective implementation of advanced pattern matching ideas, some in conjunction with research groups from other application areas. There are plans to implement text fingerprinting ideas and test their applicability in IR. In addition a project is planned that incorporates many of the ideas on searching compressed and heterogeneous files by constructing an automatic scientific home-page generator and maintainer (guaranteed to be an instant hit with all professors of Computer Science doc10856 none Mueller This US-Chile grant will allow Dr. Peter Mueller of Duke University to travel to Santiago, Chile to work with Dr. Fernando Quintana at Pontifica Universidad Catolica de Chile. Their work concerns the use of Bayesian statistics to study data in the form of binary sequences. Specifically, the collaborators will study issues of inference, model selection, and design choice when binary sequences are considered. These sequences often arise when dealing with longitudinal models with binary observables, often encountered in biomedical applications. Primary responsibility for modeling and simulation will be with the Chilean investigator; responsibility for the development and implementation of the optimal design schemes with the U.S. investigator doc10857 none O Brien This US-Brazil proposal provides support for Drs. David P. O Brien and Patricia J. Brooks of CUNY Baruch College to work with Professors Antonio Roazzi and Maria G. Dias at Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in Recife and Dr. Wany Sampaio of Universidade Federal de Rondonia in Brazil, on cross cultural and development perspectives on the language of thought. NSF s Developmental and Learning Sciences Program is providing co-funding. This project involves the investigation of reasoning skills of people of different ages, in the U.S. and Brazil, who speak English, Portuguese, and Tupi Kawahib dialect. It also will examine the reasoning skills of speakers who have learned language in diverse ways - oral literate, oral illiterate, and deaf. Of particular importance is the planned investigation of members of a recently discovered indigenous tribal group in the southwestern Amazon Basin, the Amondawa, which had its first contact with the outside world in . Before that, it was a stone-age hunter gatherer group. (This portion of the research will be possible because of the participation of Dr. Wany Sampaio of the Federal University of Rondonia, who has been studying the language of this group for the past six years doc10858 none Maine Public Broadcasting Corporation is producing three seasons of a regional television series that will enable audiences to explore, appreciate and learn about the relationship between science and everyday life in Northern New England. The project is being developed in collaboration with public television stations in Vermont and New Hampshire and will attract viewers by focusing on content and issues that are of unique interest to this area. It addresses the critical need to improve science literacy in this predominantly rural region of the country. Ancillary materials will be developed for use at home, in the community, and in classrooms and will consist of: Quest Take-Home Activity Pages, In Your Community Guides, Quest Community Events, and Classroom Lesson Plans and Suggested Activities doc10859 none Katarzyna Saxton This project concerns modeling of heat propagation in materials at low temperatures (including superconducting regions) which are characterized by fast processes whose properties cannot be explained simply through the use of Fourier s law. The models under study are applicable to a wide class of materials for which heat waves, or second sound, can be detected, and they accommodate important hyperbolic parabolic phase transitions between two temperature regions, which are not included in other general theories. Under study are qualitative properties of the long-time behavior of both smooth solutions and solutions having shocks. Free-boundary problems modeling phase transitions are also studied. Conventional models of heat conduction involve infinite speed of propagation. The approximations that lead to this counterintuitive situation work well in most practical settings. Experimental studies of heat propagation in systems at very low temperatures, however, show the need for a theory with finite speed of propagation. This research project concerns development of such a theory of heat propagation in crystalline materials at low temperatures and mathematical analysis of the resultant partial differential equations. The project, carried out with the participation of undergraduate students, will lead to an efficient, generally applicable theory of heat propagation in solids, with possible eventual application to high-temperature superconducting materials and fast process laser heating doc10860 none Studies of female preference in the wild. Barry R. Sinervo and Ryan Calsbeek Females should be selective in their choice of mate, since females typically invest more in the production and or care of offspring than do males. When there are a limited number of females available for mating, males should vie for access to females. Though abundant evidence supports the notion that female choice can profoundly affect the evolution of natural populations, there is little agreement regarding the mechanisms by which females benefit from mating selectively. Females may choose mates for direct benefits (territory quality, parental care, nuptial gifts), and or indirect benefits (the contribution of good genes by the male). The relative importance of direct and indirect benefits will be tested in the side-blotched lizard, Uta stansburiana. In this lizard, males set up territories that vary greatly in the availability of thermal resources. Normally, males that control the best territory also are of large size for the following reason. Thermal resources are crucial for lizards, which obtain heat for maintaining high body temperature from the sun. High body temperature and activity promote high growth rate and body size. The thermal resources on a males territory are correlated with the amount of rock in the habitat. The mates vary in territory quality and in other physical attributes such as body size. To understand the importance of direct and indirect benefits, territory quality and body size will be experimentally uncoupled. Direct Benefits: Experimental manipulations of territory quality will be performed between pairs of neighboring males. After all territories are mapped in early spring, rock will be removed from the territories of large males and deposited on adjacent territories of their smaller male neighbors. This manipulation will effectively reverse the correlation of large male body-size and high-quality territories that is normally present in nature. Changes in the location of female territories will be measured as a function of changes in territory quality, which measures female preference for direct benefits of territory quality. Measuring female s reproductive success will test for the direct benefits accrued by females on high quality territories. Aspects of female reproductive success will include: the condition and survival of the female parent, numbers of offspring produced, size and condition of offpsring, subsequent growth and survival of offspring, The thermal properties nest sites where females lay eggs will also be measured. Indirect Benefits: The indirect benefits of mate choice are associated with genes that a high quality mate passes on to the female s progeny. In this case, females would be expected to select large males which are likely to carry genes that might enhance progeny growth rate to maturity or perhaps survival. In this species, the female mates with many mates which can vary in male body size. In nature, DNA paternity methods will be used to determine the father of each progeny in the female s clutch. The performance of progeny from large and small males will be measured. In addition, females will be mated in the laboratory to large and small males and the performance of individual progeny will be followed after the progeny are released onto experimental plots in nature. Finally, mate choice trials will be carried out to assess whether females exhibit a strong preference for male body size. The combination field experiments of territory quality and laboratory experiments will provide a strong test of the relative contribution of direct benefits of territory quality and indirect benefits of good genes for the growth and survival of the female s progeny doc10861 none Considerable progress has been made in recent years in earthquake simulation techniques in geotechnical engineering through, for example, centrifuge modeling, 1g shaking table experiments, and numerical and field simulations. These latest developments significantly enhance the research capabilities in geotechnical earthquake engineering, and generate enormous opportunities as well as great challenges for this research community. These newly-available capabilities significantly expand the types of research that can be conducted. For example, the simulation of large field structures such as earth dams, in-depth field investigations, and closer-to-real-life computer simulations become feasible. At the same time, the significant investment in research facilities combined with the limited funding resources available requires that future research focus on making maximum use of these new capabilities. This workshop will help to facilitate this by bringing together experts from around the world to discuss the capabilities and limitations of the new facilities, to discuss the research topics that can be conducted using these facilities, to develop ideas of collaboration among groups of researchers, to find innovative and effective ways of information dissemination, and to address the unique challenges resulting from the implementation of the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES). Approximately 30 US and international experts will meet in Cleveland, Ohio in July . In addition, a web discussion site will be setup before, and continue after the workshop. It will be accessible not only to the workshop participants, but to all interested researchers, thus allowing non-participants to join in and contribute to the workshop discussions. The workshop proceedings will be posted online for wide dissemination and accessibility doc10862 none Priority effects - influences of species already present in a community on the successful colonization by later arriving species - are important during the formation of ecological communities (community assembly). Because of increasing habitat fragmentation, it is important to understand whether the influence of priority effects can be generalized across locations. The proposed research examines priority effects in a model system: insect and spider communities inhabiting creosote bush in Arizona. Experiments will be conducted in two habitat types (i.e., desert remnants and outlying desert areas) that previous research found to differ in degree of fragmentation, diversity, recovery following disturbance, and response to priority effects. Research will investigate the influence of two predatory pioneer colonists on community recovery and determine how long priority effects are detectable in community assembly. This approach to community ecology will illustrate the importance of initial conditions during species assembly that will be useful to restoration ecologists working in fragmented habitats doc10863 none Recent observations on the arrest of secretion response (ASR) in yeast have documented a novel form of intracellular signaling: the protein which initiates the signal, although it is normally at the cell surface, must be trapped within intracellular compartments in order to signal. This project will explore molecular mechanisms which operate along this signaling pathway. In the ASR, inhibition of transport along the secretory path in sec mutants relocates proteins of the nuclear pore complex (NPC), inhibits nuclear import and also relocates nucleoplasmic proteins to the cytoplasm. Protein kinase C (Pkc1p) and two of the transmembrane proteins of the Wsc family are required for these events. They nevertheless do not require the Pkc1p MAP kinase cascade. Moreover, Wsc proteins trapped along the secretory path are required for signaling, as opposed to those which are normally at the plasma membrane. Thus, this work will determine Whether Pkc1p associates with Wsc proteins and whether such association depends on whether an active ASR is occurring, Whether diacylglycerol is generated when the secretory path is inhibited, i.e. during the ASR, Whether a genetic screen can identify signaling intermediates which are required, especially those which function downstream of Pkc1p doc10864 none Furtado This Americas Program award will support Dr. Frederico C. Furtado of the University of Wyoming and Dr. Bradley J. Plohr of SUNY at Stony Brook in collaboration with Dr. Dan Marchesin of the Instituto de Matematica Pura e Aplicada, Brazil and Dr. Felipe F. Pereira of the Instituto de Politecnico da Universadade do Estado Rio de Janeiro. The team will join complementary expertise and technical accomplishments in mathematical analysis, numerical analysis, and multiphase flow to investigate the equations and solutions of multiphase flows in geologically heterogeneous porous media. This project involves five tasks: (1) development of multiphase flow models that accurately account for important physical effects; (2) computational investigation and stochastic analysis of fluid mixing dynamics for these models in the presence of stochastic geologic heterogeneities; (3) construction of up-scaled multiphase flow models based on these results; (4) mathematical analysis of the solutions and non-linear wave structure; and (5) application of the newly developed models to technologically important flows such as Water-Alternating-Gas enhanced oil recovery doc10865 none The present text proposes research in two distinct areas, namely 1) estimation of the overall (homogenized) behavior of inhomogeneous materials containing microscopic misfits, and, 2) evaluation of wave propagation and scattering by inhomogeneous media. Microscopic misfits are certain types of deformations and electrical magnetic polarizations that are experienced by the microscopic components of a composite material. In a ceramic-metal composite (cermet), for example, the two basic components of the mixture have different coefficients of thermal expansion; heating, therefore, gives rise to misfits - i.e., microscopic deformations which would be mismatched, were it not for constraints of continuity of elastic displacements at the boundaries between ceramic and metal. Misfits thus produce microscopic stresses that determine, to a substantial extent, the macroscopic composite behavior. The proposed efforts in these regards will seek to provide a theoretical understanding of misfits, so that materials with improved properties can be designed. One of our goals, for example, seeks to design ceramics that do not shatter at elevated temperatures, and are thus appropriate for use in turbine blades at high temperatures. Problems of scattering by inhomogeneous media, on the other hand, play central roles in a wide variety of applications, including radar, sonar and remote sensing, medical microscopy, optical communications and non-invasive evaluation. The work proposed here will seek to develop fast high-order solvers for a variety of configurations arising in engineering practice. In view of recent results, it is envisioned that the proposed techniques will significantly enhance our prediction capabilities in both materials science and computational wave propagation. The proposed work impacts a number of areas of federal strategic interest, including high-performance computing, materials research, medicine, biology and national security. The specific research is in two distinct areas, namely 1) estimation of the overall behavior of inhomogeneous materials containing microscopic misfits, and, 2) evaluation of wave propagation and scattering by inhomogeneous media. These efforts seek to produce highly efficient computational methods for engineering of materials with specified properties, for the solution of problems in optics and microscopy, and for remote sensing problems related to radar and sonar. Date: June 18, doc10866 none This project will continue an ongoing measurement program at Mauna Loa Observatory (MLO) to collect and analyze aerosol filter samples for non-seasalt sulfate (NSS), nitrate, sodium, ammonium, and nitric acid. The decade-long free tropospheric observations of aerosol concentrations at MLO provide a basis for comparison with chemical transport models from the Asia-Pacific region and for use in global climate models doc10867 none This proposal seeks funding for an after-school field ecology research program. The plan involves 20 teachers student center staff and 500 urban students from under-served communities over a three-year period in a unique research project that links teachers and students. The students will be divided into two cohorts: 14-16 years old and 17-18 years old. The younger group (14-16) will conduct research led by teachers in riparian field ecology along urban rivers. The older students (17-18) will be involoved in more in-depth projects where they are paired with a mentor from the state environmental agency. The proposed program is designed to complete a four-year pilot project that was initiated at Boston College in . It is a partnership effort involving the Boston Public Schools, the Mayor s Office, state environmental agencies and a consortium of corporations. Students collect, analyze and post data at the Boston College web site. In addition to engaging in original research that is substantive and meaningful, students learn to use scientific instruments. The goals of the program are to increase urban students interest in science and in careers in science doc10868 none The Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS) proposes to develop a permanent, one-acre, outdoor exhibition overlooking the San Francisco Bay called called The Forces That Shape the San Francisco Bay. The exhibition will focus on the geologic and hydrologic forces and the human impacts that have shaped the San Francisco Bay and its environs. The exhibition s interactive components and related programs will involve visitors in learning about erosion, river sediment and deposition, mountain building, folding of strata and thrusting, faulting and seismicity doc10869 none Hannaford This one-year award will support a dissertation enhancement project of Greg Lee, a student in the Biorobotics Lab of the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Washington. He will work with Prof. Paolo Dario at the ARTS MITEC Laboratory at the Scuola Superiore Santa Anna, in Pisa, Italy. The objective of Mr. Lee s research is to incorporate MEMS techniques into his research on low power haptics. Mr. Lee will benefit from studying biorobotic MEMS technology being developed at the ARTS MITEC laboratory, which is unique in its integration of MEMS with biorobotics. interface. While at ARTS MITEC, Mr. Lee will offer seminars in real-time embedded Windows CE networked control systems doc10870 none The Wildlife Conservation Society seeks funding for a three-year project to develop an after school and Saturday program for 180 high school students from the Bronx in New York City. The families are all low-income and 85% are below the poverty level. Students will attend sessions two times a week after school from 2:30pm-5:00pm for 18 weeks; one-half day on Saturday per session will also be included. Sessions will be held in the spring and fall, and will include a total of 180 students over the three years of the project. The science content will be based on the Wildlife Inquiry through Zoo Education (WIZE) curriculum materials developed by the Bronx Zoo and supplemented with hands-on activities at the Zoo. The program will bring students from Bronx-area high schools to the Bronx Zoo where they will learn to observe, formulate hypotheses, collect data, analyze and present the data. Student will learn aspects of ecology, anatomy, animal behavior, food webs and chains, etc. Participating students will receive high school credit from the city of New York for participating. The Institute for Learning Innovation, an Annapolis, MD-based, non-profit educational research and development organization, will conduct formative remedial and summative evaluation of the implementation and long-term impact of the program doc10871 none Prop : PI: Keating, Brian Dr. Keating is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship out a program of research, education, and public outreach at . His research program focuses on studies of the polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation. The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB) provides a snapshot of the epoch at which radiation and matter decoupled, approximately 300,000 years after the Big Bang. The spectrum, spatial anisotropy, and polarization of the CMB can constrain theories of cosmological structure formation. He will work to develop and deploy novel polarization-sensitive detector systems, such as the Polatron, which is designed to measure CMB polarization at arc-minute scales, where the signal is expected to be at a maximum. He also plans a program of education and outreach that will introduce students to astronomy through the construction of a small radio telescope, which is used as payload in a mock Earth orbiting satellite. The program will bring astronomy education to a low socio-economic region in Southern California and will be developed as a model that can be duplicated in other schools doc10872 none The Delta Research & Education Foundation (DREF) is following up on a successful planning grant with the Science and Everyday Experiences (SEE) Initiative. The SEE Initiative will be implemented by the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, a non-profit organization composed of 190,000 predominantly African-American professionals, that provides programs and services to promote human welfare. The program offers a five-year, comprehensive approach to the delivery of resources designed to help parents and caregivers of African-American children in grades K-8 effectively support informal science and math learning. By partnering with the AAAS, SEE provides members of the 800+ Delta chapters with leadership and professional development training in informal science education. The first phase of training is a three-day professional development workshop for Delta regional officers and members. Regional leaders are prepared to conduct State Chapter Leadership Professional Development Workshops. State Chapter workshops are 12-hour sessions that train 4,200 sorority members per year to sponsor ongoing family science events. Finally, Delta members that are K-12 or community educators will be designated as Parent Educators. SEE Parent Educators will receive 40-hour training sessions from AAAS, which enables participants to provide parents with 24 hours of informal science education. It is anticipated that 2,800 SEE Parent Educators will be trained during the life of the grant. Delta chapters are located in seven geographical regions, which encompass 40 states and will serve as the primary mode of dissemination. Promotion of the SEE Initiative will occur in conjunction with media partners. A 30-minute science radio talk show for families will broadcast nationally on Radio One and inquiry-based science inserts will be placed in the Afro-American Newspaper, which has a circulation of 6.5 million. Other outcomes include an informational website, as well as science activity cards for families and training materials. This project will impact 17,500 families per year doc10873 none Feeny Current patterns of association between insects and plants have resulted from events in which insects modify their range of acceptable host plants by colonizing novel host-plant species. However, the plant traits that predispose insects to shift onto some plants instead of others are poorly understood. The goals of this research are to determine (1) if ancestral and novel host plants share similar chemical stimulants that would facilitate a host shift and (2) if insect preference for these chemical cues has a genetic component. This will be accomplished by investigating a host shift within the Papilio machaon group of swallowtail butterflies. Butterflies will be tested on host plants and chemical extracts made from these plants to quantify preference for ancestral and novel host plants. A heritability experiment will be performed to determine if preference for chemical cues is a heritable genetic trait. These experiments will determine whether plant chemistry can act as a mechanism for insects to recognize new plant species as potential hosts. Understanding how insects incorporate new hosts into their diets is important because many of our worst agricultural pests have colonized crop plants by shifting from a native host plant to an abundant crop host. Therefore, learning how plant chemistry can affect an insect s decision to shift to a novel host may help to reduce future colonizations by insect pests doc10874 none Orchids comprise one of the largest plant families with approximately 20,000 described species. They represent an extremely diverse group of organisms with a worldwide distribution, occurring on every continent except Antarctica. The large tribe Vandeae makes up 10% of the entire family. It possesses several very specialized members that have been evolutionarily reduced to a leafless and often almost stemless state. These plants depend entirely on their green roots for food manufacture. The primary focus of this study is to develop a phylogenetic hypothesis for these leafless Vandeae using molecular evidence from DNA as well as evidence from macro- and microscopic root structure. With the recent spate of molecular data, evolutionary relationships of plant groups are being reestablished and recircumscribed. Surprisingly, Vandeae, a significant group within the orchid family, has been essentially untouched by molecular taxonomists. This study will provide an additional set of characters, which can be used to derive hypotheses of evolutionary relationships. More importantly, questions concerning the evolution of one of the most extreme modes of epiphytism will be answered doc10875 none Nolan The investigator seeks to improve ultrasound imaging in order for it to be a more effective tool in breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. He uses modern methods of partial differential equations and microlocal analysis to provide images of the breast that are artifact-free and of a higher resolution than currently available. He models propagation and scattering of ultrasonic waves using microlocal analysis and geometrical optics. In particular, the approach uses the complete waveform of the ultrasound instead of just its phase. Microlocal analysis provides a clear explanation of artifacts that appear in acoustic images. More importantly, it provides a means of avoiding and removing such artifacts. To help in obtaining clear images, the investigator looks for an arrangement of transducers providing the strongest measurable scattered signal at the surface of the breast. The optimal configuration is based on a power method that starts with a non-zero arbitrary source and measures the resulting scattered field (caused by a tumor for example) at the surface. He models the scattering process with a linear scattering operator based on the wave equation. The scattering operator maps sources to scattered wave fields, whereas the adjoint scattering operator maps scattered wave fields to sources. By composing the scattering operator with its adjoint, he uses the power method to find the eigenfunction corresponding to the largest scattered signal. Novel in the approach is the ability to couple the power method with geometrical optics. This provides an analytical tool for computing the optimal sources that can then be implemented computationally in a very efficient way for both modeling and imaging the inversion. This work aims to provide a new method of imaging the female breast for use in diagnosing and treating of breast cancer. The technique is based on ultrasound waves, howver it uses much more information from these waves than is currently used. In particular, the shape of the waves that bounce off of a lesion or tumor in the breast is analyzed. The method is tailored to avoid artifacts that can appear in current imaging techniques. In addition, the method will be fast and feasible to implement. Because of the reliability and clarity of the images, this new imaging technique should significantly cut down on the number of unnecessary biopsies that are currently carried out in the United States each year. Because of the speed of the method, it can help to provide a quick diagnosis. The method also takes advantage of recently developed three dimensional imaging technology. Ultrasound is a tried and safe method of imaging; it involves no harmful radiation. The method is general enought that it could concievably have spin-offs into other modes of imaging (X-Ray, MRI, etc.). Finally, this new method of imaging should create opportunities for new and established companies to manufacture devices that take advantage of it doc10876 none The Buffalo Bill Historical Center will develop the Greater Yellowstone Adventure project, encompassing 1,719 square meters of exhibits in the Center s newly constructed Draper Museum of Natural History. The exhibits and associated programming constitute a major cultural and educational resource for underserved residents of rural, northwestern Wyoming and approximately 500,000 annual visitors to the region. The goal of Greater Yellowstone Adventure is to promote understanding of the relationships binding humans and nature and the use of science in exploring those relationships. The exhibits are orgainized into three galleries: Expedition Trailhead, Braided Paths and Tangled Destinies, and Seasons of Discovery doc10877 none Li&Ripley The formation of large Ni-Cu sulfide deposits in mafic magmatic systems appears to require: 1) attainment of sulfide saturation through country rock contamination, 2) concentration of immiscible sulfide liquid in fluid dynamically favored areas within magma conduits, and 3) enrichment of the metal content of the coalesced sulfide by reaction with continued flow of magma through the conduit. The Jinchuan deposit in north-central China is the largest conduit-related occurrence in the world. Major reserves of Ni- and Cu-sulfides are located within ultramafic rocks that intrude a Proterozoic metasedimentary sequence. To date the deposit has not been investigated with respect to the potential role of country rock contamination in ore genesis, nor have the physicochemical dynamics of metal upgrading of sulfide by fresh magma been evaluated. We propose a detailed study of olivine chemical variations and stable isotopic distributions within the rock types present in the Jinchuan intrusion. Olivine chemistry, in conjunction with whole rock major and trace element data, will be used to determine if multiple magmas have been involved in building the Jinchuan intrusion, and if so, to what extent they have interacted with sulfide to produce enriched Ni and Cu contents. Sulfur and oxygen isotopic data will be collected from country rocks and both mineralized and non-mineralized intrusive rocks. These data will be used to evaluate the extent of country rock assimilation recorded in the ore-bearing intrusive rocks, and to construct mixing models that will be utilized in simulating the history of sulfide saturation and concentration in the magmatic system. Findings from the proposed research will not only improve our understanding of the formation of the Jinchuan deposit and other deposits of similar type around the world, but will also improve our knowledge of dynamic petrological processes in mafic magmatic conduit systems doc10878 none The proposed work tests hypotheses on the causes of the evolution of self-pollination in Clarkia xantiana, a native annual plant composed of an outcrossing and a self-pollinating subspecies. Previous work shows that the two subspecies differ in geographic range, plant community associations, and population size. This project examines the role of plant population size and plant community interactions in determining the abundance of pollinating bees and whether an outcrossing versus self-pollinating mating system is advantageous. The proposed work investigates (1) the distribution and abundance of specialist bee pollinators with respect to the mating system and population attributes of C. xantiana, (2) the factors affecting whether reproductive output is limited by the abundance of pollinators, and (3) the effects of population size and the plant community on the relative success of C. xantiana individuals that vary in mating system. A combination of field observations, field experiments, and molecular genetic analyses will be employed to address these problems. The evolution of self-pollination is among the most common events in the evolutionary history of flowering plants. While the biological consequences of self-pollination (e.g. inbreeding) are well known, the ecological causes of this evolutionary transition have rarely been considered. This project will also provide new information on the importance of native bee communities and plant communities in the viability of plant populations doc10879 none MarsQuest Online is an exploration-based website designed to complement the innovative MarsQuest traveling exhibit launched by the Space Science Institute (SSI) in . MarsQuest Online will enhance and extend the exhibit, which is currently on a six-year, 18-city tour. TERC, working in collaboration with the Space Science Institute and NASA s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), will create a virtual version of the exhibit using software such as Java, Quicktime VR and JPL s sophisticated MarsNet Viewer system. Users will be immersed in an integrated, interactive environment complete with the tools and resources to carry out investigations and enhance inquiry-based learning. MarsQuest will expand users understanding of the history of Mars, scientific exploration, the climate and related earth science concepts, while enabling them to follow the exploration of various landers and orbiters, and access NASA scientists. A diverse collection of Guided Inquiry experiences will foster the ability of users to develop inquiry and analysis skills, while offering options for novice, intermediate and advanced learners. Finally, a comprehensive evaluation plan will examine how the website and exhibit compare in promoting the understanding of science, broadening public interest in space exploration, and motivating further learning. The site will be promoted for use by schools as a tool for teaching earth science and space exploration. It is estimated that 300,000 people will visit MarsQuest Online annually doc10880 none Zhiqin Lu, Bennet Chow and Peter Li This award provides partial support for active research mathematicians with limited means of support to attend and participate in the Southern California Geometric Analysis Seminar to be held in the winter quarter of , , and . The seminar will be held at the University of California, Irvine in , the University of California, San-Diego in , and the University of California, Irvine in . The potential speakers will be M. Gromov (IHES Courant), K. Grove (Maryland), T. Mrowka (MIT), P. Sarnak (Princeton), E. Witten (Princeton) and S.T. Yau (Harvard) for the winter . The Seminar will typically be held over a weekend with 3 main (one-hour) lectures on Saturday and another 3 main lectures on Sunday. The schedule will be arranged so that there will be ample time for the participants to interact with the speakers and other participants. A social event will also be arranged for Saturday evening to promote further interaction. Please refer to the Seminar s website for updated and detailed information: http: math.uci.edu ~scgas .html doc10881 none Hamrick In plants, gene movement is mediated either via pollen or seeds. In most flowering plants, pollen can potentially travel much greater distances than seeds. Orchids, however, are capable of considerable long-distance seed dispersal while pollen flow is limited to the range of pollinator movement. What is the relative contribution of pollen and seed dispersal to overall partitioning of genetic variation? How much gene movement occurs in disturbed habitats and what is the spatial scale of that movement? To address these questions, the distribution of genetic diversity in the neotropical, epiphytic orchid, Laelia rubescens, will be examined at multiple spatial scales using biparentally inherited nuclear markers (allozymes) and maternally inherited chloroplast sequence markers. Genetic diversity is crucial for the long-tern survival of species, particularly in fragmented and disturbed landscapes which are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. It increases the likelihood that a species can survive environmental fluctuations and natural catastrophes that invariably occur over time. By better understanding how pollen and seed dispersal impact the distribution of genetic diversity in this orchid, insights will be gained into how forest fragmentation influences genetic viability and how species with long-distance seed dispersal capabilities may preserve genetic variation and thereby facilitate their long-term survival in highly disturbed habitats doc10882 none The University of Minnesota is requesting funding to implement a nationwide citizen science project focused on the life cycle of monarch butterflies. Scientists from the University will train naturalists and environmental educators throughout the U.S. at nine host sites. Participants in the first round of training will then conduct regional training sessions for naturalists, who will in turn train volunteer monitors. The target audience for volunteers will be adult child teams. Results will be disseminated using the University of Minnesota s Environmental Spatial Analysis Center to show temporal and spatial data via the WWW. Listserves will also be created to support the project, to augment a monthly newsletter and the website. Mini-exhibits will be created to highlight the project at participating nature centers. Exhibits will focus on monarch and insect ecology and conservation, as well as local and population-wide monitoring efforts. It is estimated that 90-150 nature centers will participate in the regional training, and they will in turn train almost 5,000 volunteers doc10883 none Smith This award supports Kevin Smith and students from Boston University in a collaboration with Ralf Nyholm at the MAX-lab synchrotron radiation facility in the University of Lund, Sweden. The project will focus on the study of structural properties of wide band gap nitride semiconductors using photoelectron microscopy, in which area Professor Nyholm is an expert. The new collaborations will combine the skills of the two labs to address issues of fundamental importance in nitride semiconductors, and a high level of productivity is expected from combining the separate but complementary expertise of the U.S. and Swedish groups. Among the specific goals of the proposed work are an understanding of microscopic surface electronic properties of clean binary nitride semiconductors, understanding adsorption of simple gas molecules on well-characterized nitride surfaces, understanding growth, structure, and stability of metal contact overlayers, understanding the thermal decomposition of complex nitride alloy surfaces, and training of students doc10884 none The purpose of this planning grant is to provide infrastructure for long-term research on Athabaskan languages, with a focus on Tahltan, a critically endangered language of northwest British Columbia. A set of data collection, organization and analysis activities are proposed to study the structure of verbs. Verb forms are fundamental in the study of Athabaskan languages because they provide crucial information about the structure and interpretation of sentences (i.e., the syntax and semantics). They are also important in the description of sound structure (or the phonology) because the different domains in an Athabaskan verb represent different sound systems. Verbs are thus fundamental to subsequent documentation of Tahltan, i.e., dictionaries, texts, grammars, and theoretical hypothesis testing, all of which fall within the scope of this long-term research program. Verbs in Athabaskan languages are made up of a stem, which contributes the principal meaning of the word, and two classes of prefixes, namely the disjunct and conjunct prefixes. The disjunct prefixes form a class with stems because they are lexical items and have the full range of phonological structures. These properties distinguish disjunct prefixes and stems from the conjunct prefixes, which are not lexical items and have a highly restricted set of phonological structures. One chief aim is to give a natural account of the differences between these two morphological classes, for both the lexical non-lexical distinction and their different phonologies. A set of hypotheses are developed in Optimality Theory that explain this correlation in terms the adherence of different morpheme types to their underlying representation. A host of predictions are made concerning the range of possible phonological structures and the types of processes expected in each word domain. The research plan begins with the study of Navajo verbs, both to evaluate the optimality theoretic analysis in a well-documented Athabaskan language, and as a way to provide a framework for primary linguistic documentation of Tahltan. Existing sound recordings of Tahltan will be digitized, and the fieldnotes and word lists associated with them will be incorporated in a database of large corpora that can be searched electronically. This database will clarify specific research questions and provide a guideline for additional data collection. Three trips in the field are planned to confirm the data and generalizations of previous work and to supplement the study of verb forms. The resulting relational database and grammatical sketches will provide the first complete description of verbs and materials for testing specific hypotheses about the morphological and phonological structures of verb forms. In addition, the lexical database will make possible a variety of other research and teaching activities that extend beyond the scope of verb structure doc10885 none Shrout This U.S.- Chile Program award provides support for cooperative research between Dr. Thomas R. Shrout of Penn State University and Dr. Mauricio E. Pilleux of Universidad de Chile in Santiago, Chile, to carry out research involving the use of copper powder to replace noble metals in designing multi-layer electroceramic materials. The collaboration will combine the expertise in surface physics and thin film dielectrics at the Universidad de Chile with the expertise in electronic ceramics of researchers at the Materials Research Laboratory at Penn State. Layers of dielectric ceramics have a wide variety of industrial applications, including actuators, sensors, ultrasonic transducers, voltage transformers, and dielectric capacitors. This research may lead to important applications in the manufacture of multi-layer ceramics doc10886 none Native Waters is a comprehensive four-year tribal science education program focused on water. Working closely with leaders from 28 Missouri River Basin Tribes, the project will explore the Missouri River Flood Basin from a scientific and cultural standpoint. Partners are The Watercourse and International Project WET (Water Education for Teachers). Activities include Leadership Institutes for community educators and Native Waters Future Leaders Camps for secondary school and college students. Products to be developed include an interactive traveling exhibit, which will focus on the Missouri River watershed and the physical properties of water, as well as its uses from a cultural and scientific standpoint. The exhibit will travel to cultural centers, tribal colleges and school libraries throughout the ten Missouri River Basin states. A 250-page Native Water s Educators Guide will be disseminated nationally and impact over 500,000 individuals, both youth and adults. Finally, a 16-page student activity book and a Native Waters film will be produced to introduce youth and community members to water resource issues. The training materials will be used in cultural centers, museums, area water councils and schools doc10887 none Feldman This six-month award will provide support for US researchers to attend a workshop on disordered systems in Andalo, Italy, March 12 - 15, . Joseph Feldman, Center for Computational Materials Science, Naval Research Laboratory is the US organizer; Gabriele Viliani, Department of Physics, Trento University, Italy is the European co-organizer. Although this is the eighth workshop of its type, it is the first at which US researchers will be a strong presence. The workshop will focus on an understanding of the glass transition and of the high-frequency dynamics in glasses. The purpose of US attendance is to develop ongoing collaboration between US and European researchers in the field of disordered systems doc10888 none This is a proposal for some of the critical R&D needed to bring the muon storage ring neutrino source to the point where it can be evaluated as a potential physics project for the field. In addition, it may pave the way for a future muon storage ring to explore physics at an energy scale beyond what is foreseen for the coming decade. This is of great interest as it can lead to advances in neutrino physics and possibly eventually to a new method to make a lepton collider. More specifically, this project can have significant impact on the enabling of well characterized, narrow band, variable energy beams of neutrinos for the determination of neutrino mass and mixing parameters and possibly for seeing CP violation in the neutrino sector. Students will be given diverse opportunities to work on unique problems doc10889 none for DMS - The algebraic-geometric theory of soliton equations developed in the middle seventies has become one of the most powerful tools in the theory of integrable models, and has had enormous influence on many branches of mathematics and theoretical physics. The main objective of the present project is a further development of this approach to integration of non-linear equations, models of solid state physics, and models of quantum field theories. An immediate goal is to construct integrable models corresponding to various supersymmetric gauge Seiber-Witten models, which can be instrumental in investigating key physical issues such as duality, the renormalization group, or instanton corrections. Another goal of the project is a classification of commuting difference operators. Particular attention will be paid to connection of this theory with the Hitchin system which is central in modern theory of the moduli space of vector bundles over algebraic curve. Recent progress in understanding non-perturbative structures in supersymmetric gauge theories has shed new insight upon the role of integrable structures in modern theoretical physics. The nineteenth century saw many aspects of geometry and analysis, particularly the development of Abelian functions, drawn together in the study of integrable systems. The works of Jacobi, Abel, Riemann and Weierstrass enabled a number of important integrable problems of mechanics and physics to be solved. The modern discovery of soliton theory has led to a renewed interest to the theory of integrable systems. Nonlinear phenomena could now be treated, and the ever-growing interest in this theory is connected with the fact that it is applicable to equations which possess a remarkable universality property. They arise in the description of the most diverse phenomena in plasma physics, the theory of elementary particles, the theory of superconductivity and in nonlinear optics. Geometry and algebraic geometry, functional equations and special functions, Lie algebras and groups all come together in their study. This ubiquity of integrable systems together with the beautiful structures that underly them has been confirmed recently by discovery of unexpected relations between the Whitham perturbation theory of soliton equations developed in earlier works of the author and the Riemann mapping theorem. It seems urgent to develop methods which can identify various Whitham hierarchies with conformal maps for more general types of domains. A range of possible applications include flows in porous media, fundamental theory of pattern formation doc10890 none The goal of this project is to determine how pink salmon in the northern Gulf of Alaska are affected by variation in the plankton production system during their first months at sea. This will be accomplished through an integrated project that includes field sampling, laboratory analyses and modeling. Pink salmon occupy surface waters of the continental shelf in the summer and fall after entering marine waters in the spring. In that period they grow rapidly and their feeding changes from small zooplankton in the summer to large zooplankton in the fall. This project will document temporal and spatial variation in prey use and availability, it will assess the effects of the shelf environment by measuring condition of pink salmon, and it will use spatially- explicit foraging bioenergetic modeling to understand observed patterns in feeding, growth and condition. Fish of hatchery origin, identified by thermal otolith marks, will be of particular interest, as the marine survival of each hatchery cohort will be available a year after those fish enter the marine environment. Spatial and temporal variation in pink salmon diets and surface zooplankton will be described through laboratory analyses of field samples, and the basis for diet shifts to larger prey will be determined by calculations of prey selectivity. Standard length weight condition measures will be calculated, and the energy content of salmon will be measured by calorimetry. The relationship between condition, growth and the environment will be examined. Habitat quality over the continental shelf will be assessed with spatially explicit models with foraging and bioenergetic components that produce weight- specific estimates of growth potential. Bioenergetic modeling will also be used to estimate daily ration and seasonal consumption by pink salmon. The relationship between diets of pink salmon and other planktivorous fishes will be assessed. This research will contribute directly to accomplishment of the GLOBEC program goal of understanding how production of upper trophic level species is linked to variation in oceanographic conditions. It is widely accepted that production of salmon in the GOA is determined by planktonic production. Detailed descriptions of spatial and temporal variation in diet, prey availability, temperature, and fish condition will substantially enhance our understanding of the connections between the marine environment and salmon production doc10891 none Teens Exploring and Explaining Nature and Science (TEENS) is a year-long, multi-component program serving Chicago public school students from 7th to 12th grade through three contiguous programs: (1) SMART Squad; (2) Science Explorers; and (3) Science Guides which focus on science education and job-skills training. The purpose of the project is to raise students expectations for academic achievement, to enhance their scientific knowledge, and to increase their academic skills, occupational expectations, aspirations and self-esteem doc10892 none Harveya Hook. (Orobanchaceae) is a genus of parasitic plants native to South Africa. Harveya species parasitize other plants by means of specialized root organs called haustoria. Little is known regarding delimitations of species within Harveya, relationships among species, or if Harveya species are specific to particular host plants. Goals of this study include the examination of morphological characters to determine species delimitations, the inference of phylogenetic history from morphological characters and DNA sequences, and determination of host specificity by excavation of haustoria. In parasitic plants, genes encoding photosynthetic proteins are not functionally constrained. These genes may bear function-reducing mutations. Because parasitic plants obtain nutrients from a host plant rather than through photosynthesis, these mutations are not detrimental to fitness. Therefore, these mutations may be passed to offspring and become fixed in populations. Deterioration or deletion of photosynthetic genes has been documented in parasitic plants of diverse lineage. Another parasite, Hyobanche L., is the sister genus of Harveya. Hyobanche bears mutations in the gene rbcL, a chloroplast gene encoding the large subunit of Rubisco, a protein necessary for photosynthesis. These mutations render rbcL non-functional in this genus. One might expect Harveya to demonstrate similar function-ending mutations in this gene. However, in all Harveya species examined thus far, rbcL encodes a functional protein. Two hypotheses may be invoked to explain the absence of these mutations. (a) The loss of Rubisco functionality has occurred via a different pathway in Harveya than in Hyobanche. (b) Rubisco retains function in Harveya, in facultative photosynthesis or an unknown, non-photosynthetic role. In this study, genes encoding both the small subunit (rbcS) and large subunit (rbcL) will be sequenced in Hyobanche and Harveya to compare functionality. Additionally, RNA and protein products of these genes will be assayed to determine the evolutionary pathway by which Rubisco functionality has been lost in these genera or if Rubisco serves some non-photosynthetic function. The importance of this study is several-fold. South Africa maintains the greatest floral diversity of any temperate region of equal size. However, many species may become endangered as population growth continues, and human habitations expand into wild areas. Conservation efforts will rely on knowledge of the evolutionary history and ecological needs (e.g. suitable plant hosts) of threatened organisms. Secondly, the dichotomy of rbcL functionality in Hyobanche and Harveya provides an ideal system for the study of evolution of photosynthetic genes in non-photosynthetic plants. Furthermore, rbcL and rbcS have an integrated function, but are coded in different genomes of the plant: rbcL in the chloroplast genome and rbcS in the nucleus. Loss of function of one of these genes may result in loss of function in the other. To date, no study has examined if mutations occurring in one genome may be mirrored by mutations in the other. Hyobanche and Harveya offer an excellent framework for investigating this phenomenon doc10893 none By studying isolated subcomponents of complex systems, many assume that the processes observed in such small subsets can be added together to predict phenomena in the larger system. This assumption is inherent in predation theory, yet many recent studies report that the impacts of particular predators in isolation with their prey cannot be added together to predict the impact of multiple predator species simultaneously. The ability to predict conditions under which higher or lower rates of predation than expected will occur is crucial to determining patterns of mortality in prey populations. A lab experiment involving predators that use similar foraging behaviors and those that use different foraging behaviors will be used to test hypotheses about the combined effects of predation by multiple predator species. This experiment will provide knowledge about the level of predation risk that prey face and has implications for biodiversity by demonstrating the factors influencing the distribution and abundance of species in nature. This study will improve our ability to predict the effect of invasive predator species on native communities doc10894 none Phadke This award supports Arun Phadke and Virgilio Centano of Virginia Polytechnic and State U. in a collaboration with Hans Ottosson of Enersearch AB in Malmo, Sweden. The research will focus on catastrophic failure of power networks, exploration of methods for damage assessment, control, and restoration of electric power grids following catastrophic disturbances. Disturbances to be studied include natural disasters such as earthquakes and tornadoes, and man-made disasters such as terrorist attacks and human error. The Virginia Tech group will concentrate on information system infrastructure overview, computer networks, and electric power networks for robustness in the face of catastrophic events. The Swedish group will make substantial contributions in each area, and will be able to offer ways to enhance infrastructures for improved performance. Catastrophic failures of power networks are a universal phenomenon, and restoration of service to lost loads occupies the interest of engineers throughout the world. In particular, there is a significant pool of knowledge on these topics in Northern Europe, which this collaboration will doc10895 none This proposal seeks funding for a 3-year After School Centers For Exploration and New Discovery (ASCEND) project for middle school students and their families. The Science and Engineering Experiences for Knowledge (SEEK) project will enroll 60 students during Year 1, 120 students during Year 2, and 180 students during Year 3. The students will engage in investigative projects that explore the program theme, Florida s Environment: Past, Present, and Future. Activities include individual and group projects, field trips, family projects at home, parental involvement, and project presentations at the museum for other middle school students and museum visitors. Project activities in the first year will engage the students in learning about Florida s geological and biological history and global change environment through the study of insects. In the second year students will be introduced to Florida s present environment through the study of insects. During the third year, students will investigate factors that will influcence Florida s future environment such as habitats, weather and recycling. The students will meet two times a week (3:30 p.m. - 5:30p.m.) during the school year. The project is a collaborative effort involving the University of Florida s Florida Museum of Natural History and its College of Engineering, The Alachua County School Board and the Gainesville Regional Utilities doc10896 none The ability to identify, recognize and manipulate patterns is fundamental to knowing the world. Brooklyn Children s Museum (BCM) is developing Pattern Place, a new collections-based traveling exhibition, to introduce children ages 7 to 10 to the structure, meaning and importance of patterns. The exhibition will incorporate an array of objects from BCM s collections and open-ended, hands-on inquiry skills. The 1,200-square-foot trilingual exhibition will open at BCM in and then travel to eight other museums in the U.S. and Canada. A range of family programming, a Web site and a portable museum kit will provide further dissemination and support educators in incorporating object-based inquiry into the classroom curriculum doc10897 none As it developed its guide on Enhancing the Postdoctoral Experience of Scientists and Engineers, the Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP)--a joint committee of the National Academy of Science, National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine--found that action was needed by postdocs, postdoc advisers, administrators, funding organizations, and disciplinary societies and developed a set of recommendations for each. It also found tht more dialogue was needed amongst all these parties in order to enhance the postdoctoral experience. Therefore, COSEPUP decided to host a Convocation on Enhancing the Postdoctoral Experience of Scientists and Engineers to bring all these parties together to facilitate dialogue, highlight best practices, and encourage action on the part of all. This convocation will take place on March 2, . The National Academies are requesting $25,000 to provide travel support for postocs to attend the Convoation doc10898 none Kinetic City After School is a two-year project that will produce a web-based after-school program for children ages 9-11. The on-line adventure will enable users to enter a virtual universe where a computer virus (Deep Delete) systematically attacks a new area of science each month (analogous to one of the 12 Project Benchmarks for Science Literacy). As students battle the virus, they learn Benchmarks learning goals. Each unit invites children to think about the problem, take action and reflect on their experience. The activities accommodate different learning styles and are supplemented by live audio chats with scientists and a self-assessment enables students to earn Kinetic City Power Points. Power Points can be donated to after school programs without computers and Internet access. These sites may in turn, exchange their accumulated Power Points to obtain computers, Internet service and a site license for Kinetic City After School. Although the program is web-based, most of the activity extensions are done off-line. Kinetic City After School will be introduced to after-school sites with a two-day training workshop, with follow-up via phone meetings and site visits. Supporting materials will include a Leader Guide, Journal and Kinetic City Home Crew activity pages for use in the home doc10899 none Levi This U.S. Mexico award will support Drs. Mark Levi, Howard Weiss, and Yakov Pesin in a research collaboration with Valentine Afraimovich of the Mathematics Department of the Unversidad Autonoma de San Luis de Potosi. The investigators plan to study: 1) Coupled map lattices corresponding to partial differential equations from physics and biology, in particular, the FitzHugh-Nagumo equation (which is of great interest in neurobiology). The collaborators intend to describe the ergodic properties of its local map and construct SRB measures for the attractor of this map. 2) The transition from coupled map lattices to partial differential equations via traveling waves, which will build a foundation for numerical modeling of some partial differential equations of evolution type. 3) The Dynamics of chains of coupled oscillators, in particular, those associated with the Sine-Gordon equation. A coupled map lattice is a discrete time dynamical system whose phase space is of a particular form, and for which the overall system exhibits translational symmetry. Coupled map lattices have recently gained wide popularity as models of spatio-temporal chaos and coherent structures. There is currently great interest in using coupled map lattices to model turbulence, nerve cells, phase transitions in statistical physics, and crystals. They also arise naturally from the discrete version of evolution partial differential equations doc10900 none Puri This award supports travel of fifteen US participants to a transatlantic workshop, New Combustion Models with Practical Fuels, associated with the meeting of the Italian Section of the Combustion Institute in Portofino, Italy, September 16-19, . The organizers are Ishwar Puri, of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Tiziano Faravelli and Eliseo Ranzi at the Polytechnic of Milan, Italy, and Antonio Cavaliere at the University of Naples, Italy. The objective of the project is to consider issues related to the current understanding and future challenges related to new combustion models in the context of practical fuels. Specifically, the workshop will address the flame chemistry of realistic fuels, the nature of the reaction zones in new combustion models, and state relationships for the laminar flamelet approach. The workshop will be specifically designed to encourage international research collaboration through the development of a research agenda. International research experiences fur undergraduates, graduates, and postdoctoral researchers will be developed under the aegis of the Student Transatlantic Engineering Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago doc10901 none Robertson This three-year award for U.S.-Italian-Portuguese-Swiss cooperative research involves Anne Robertson of the University of Pittsburgh and Alfio Quarteroni of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland and Adelia Sequeira of the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon, Portugal. Alessandro Veneziani of the Politecnico di Milano in Italy is a member of Professor Quarteroni s group and will also participate. The multinational and multidisciplinary team proposes to develop multiscale models of blood flow in the human vascular system. Specifically, they plan to evaluate multiscale models from the perspective of mathematics, numerical analysis, and physics engineering. The Italian group brings expertise in mathematical fluid mechanics for Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids; the Swiss group will contribute expertise in finite and spectral element methods, numerical simulation of blood flow in human cardiovascular systems, fluid-structure interactions, and multiscale modeling; the PI has experience in continuum mechanics, including fluid mechanics and numerical simulation; and the Portuguese group is knowledgeable in mathematical analysis and numerical methods in fluid mechanics. The goal of the collaboration is to develop a more sophisticated numerical simulation tool, using a newer fluid dynamics model, that can be used for understanding and evaluating clinical treatment strategies for vascular disease doc10902 none AMNH ASCEND is a new model afterschool program of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. AMNH ASCEND focuses on the legal, ethical, social and cultural implications of new discoveries in genetics. Eighty New York City high school students will be involved in a two-year program that includes a series of courses, hands-on activities, laboratory experiences, field trips, career development opportunities and educational support. In the first year students will participate in seven-week laboratory courses on genomic technology followed in the second year by a research experience in genomics at the Museum. The project is a collaboration of AMNH with AAAS, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, the City University of New York and the New York City Board of Education doc10903 none DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Ecological Selection and the Evolution of Reproductive Isolation in a Marine Copepod Daniel Promilow and Amber Keyser This research is designed to study the evolutionary consequences of environmental change on an abundant, marine organism, Tigriopus californicus. Changing climate patterns affect the temperature and salinity conditions that these copepods experience. The species must be able to adapt to these changes, or risk extinction. However, adaptation to changing ecological conditions can be a mixed blessing because the indirect effects of adaptation can influence many different aspects of the organism s lifestyle. One of the most dramatic secondary consequences can be the evolution of barriers to interbreeding between populations. In this series of experiments, the researchers will maintain populations of copepods under different environmental conditions in the laboratory. This will simulate various kinds of climate change. Over sixteen generations in the laboratory, the researchers will look for evidence of adaptation to the new conditions at a molecular level and at the developmental level. In addition, they will look for indirect effects of climate change such as an increasing inability of copepods from different populations to interbreed. The results of these experiments will help researchers to predict the long-term, evolutionary effects of global climate change on crustaceans in the marine environment doc10904 none The Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM) will develop Cyborgs: A Natural History of Machines and Humans. The Project will result in a national traveling exhibit, a web site, and a complement of related educational programs focused on the boundaries between humans and their machines and on recent scientific efforts to understand the human body and mind. The 6,000-square-foot exhibit will open at the SMM before traveling to the six large museums in the Science Museum Exhibit Collaborative (SMEC), and then will be available for lease by other museums doc10905 none The Educational Broadcasting Corporation (WNET in New York) is developing and producing a new public television project exploring cutting-edge technology. The project consists of an eight-part hourly broadcast component; six 60-second mini-programs; a World Wide Web component; and extensive educational outreach targeted to adults aged 25-39 and older. The topics for the eight programs in season one are: Replacements - prosthetic devices and biologically electronic artificial body parts In Search of Eve - the race to decode the human genome Light of the 21st Century - Fiber Optics Nanotechnology - molecular manipulation of materials Technospy - technologies used to gain information Sports Technology - the pursuit of better equipment and training regimes Artificial Intelligence - efforts to create computers the mimic human intelligence Appropriate Technologies - technologies that use local, inexpensive material Beth Hoppe, WNET s Director of Science Programs will serve as Executive Producer for the series. Each of the programs would be produced by an independent producer selected by WNET. Content advisors include: Angela Christiano, Departments of Dermatology, Genetics and Development, Columbia University; Sheila Sen Jasanoff, Harvard University JFK School of Government; Horace Freeland Judson, Center for History of Recent Science, George Washington University; Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist, CUNY and host, Explorations radio series; Wilfred Pinfold, Microprocessor Research Labs, Intel Corp.; and Barbara Wilson, chief technologist, NASA s Jet Propulsion Laboratory doc10906 none Project Splash is a 24-month project targeting middle school students (grades 7-9) from predominately immigrant and refugee backgrounds. Although numerous partnerships are highlighted throughout the proposal, the main partnerships include the University of Massachusetts Lowell, the Lowell Heritage State Park, the Lowell Housing Authority, the New England Board of Higher Education AQUA Educators Network, GEARUP, Salem State College, Lowell High School, the New England Aquarium, and Lowell s Youth Leaders, the River Ambassadors. Two cohorts of 25 youth (a total of 50 students) will participate in after school and summer academic activities. Activities will link culture and science through hands-on environmental experiences with science leaders and cultural representatives. Students will participate in Project Splash two hours a day twice a week during the academic year and summer. Transportation will be provided to all program activities doc10907 none This creative project pairs grandparents or other senior citizens with children in grades K-7 for an intergenerational hands-on SMT program. The OASIS institute, which has a large national membership of adults 55 and older with centers based in 25 cities across the US, is the source of adults. Twenty intergenerational modules will be developed which address the learning styles of both children and older adults, half of which will be linked with the NSF-funded Find Out Why materials. Master training sessions will be conducted for OASIS trainers, who would then train volunteers at their local centers. Anticipated outcomes include increased knowledge of standards-based SMT concepts, enhanced problem-solving skills and a better understanding of how science, math and technology apply to everyday life. In addition to the modules, the program would also result in the creation of a supplementary guide for volunteers, materials kits and a comprehensive training program. It is anticipated that this exciting program will be piloted in the following nine states: MO, IN, OR, MD, AZ, TX, CA, IL and OH. Over 100,000 individuals will be impacted during the three years of the project doc10908 none WGBH is producing and disseminating two seasons of a daily, half-hour television science series and accompanying outreach for three to five year olds. The series will be carried nationally as part of Discovery Television s newly expanded Discovery Kids. The project, Peep and the Big Wide World, will model a developmentally-appropriate process of inquiry and exploration, nurture young children s innate curiosity, catalyze further hands-on exploration of the world around them, and motivate parents and care-givers to support and encourage these activities. The television programs will combine animation and short, live-action segments. The animation will weave the early childhood science curriculum into stories about three birds and their animal friends as they explore the world. Science content, unifying concepts, and habits of mind will be reinforced through two-minute live-action segments that show kids engaged in science play relating directly to the previous story. The television series will be supported by a comprehensive Anywhere Science outreach component of the project. Anywhere Science reinforces the fact that opportunities to experience and enjoy science exist in most facets of life. It will offer a range of activities -- through both web and print materials -- that can be enjoyed by just about anyone, just about anywhere. Anywhere Science is being designed to show parents and caregivers how important it is to support children s curiosity and how easy it is to engage in activities that help develop their science habits of mind. The outreach campaign will be built around the new National Association for the Education of Young Children professional development standards and Head Start s science framework. The content director for Peep and the Big Wide World is Karen Worth, Senior Scientist at the Education Development Center and the Co-Director of the Center for Urban Science Education Reform. She is also the Principal Investigator of Tool Kits for Early Childhood Science Education that is developing national standards for preschool science education. The Executive Producer for the project is Kate Taylor who has previously served as Executive Producer for ZOOM, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, and Degrassi Junior High. The creator of PEEP and animation artist is Kai Pindal, former Head of Animation at Danish Television. The head writer is Kathy Waugh who has written four seasons of the Emmy winning children s series, Arthur. Evaluation will be conducted by Rockman et al. Advisors for the series include Barbara Bowman, President of the Erikson Institute for Advanced Study in Child Development; Diane Levin, Professor of Education at Wheelock College; Tera O Hora, Consultant and Workshop Facilitator for Science Beyond the Sandtable; Kathy Paget, an early childhood educator working as a science curriculum developer and evaluator of science-related educational projects at the Technical Education Research Center; Diane Whitehead, a Quality Initiative Coordinator for the National Head Start Association; and Elizabeth Young, Director of Head Start Child Care in Cambridge, MA doc10909 none The Pacific Science Center, in collaboration and with support from the Washington NASA Space Grant Consortium, proposes a three-year program to develop and test a model for delivering mid-scale, astronomy and space-themed exhibits and programming in a shopping center environment, especially in rural locations. The program targets an audience that does not have easy access to a science center or that may not be inclined to take advantage of such a facility. The exhibits and curriculum for this project will be based on Pacific Science Center s well-tested Space Odyssey Van Program, which presently tours elementary schools in Washington State. Phase One of the project will be a test delivery of the existing exhibits and programming to two malls. Phase Two involves construction and testing of the final, larger exhibits and reworking existing programming to better fit a mall delivery environment. Phase Three takes the newly tested devices to ten malls in suburban and rural Washington doc10910 none The Cornell Lab of Ornithology (CLO) will develop Understanding Birds , a suite of exhibits and related programming in the new environmental science center to be opened in Sapsucker Woods in . The new building will house the Lab s research, education, and outreach operations, including the Library of Natural Sounds, a new Library of Nature Videos, and Cornell s systematic collection of vertebrates. The building also will include a multi-media-based interactive Visitors Center providing both real and virtual learning activities for visitors of all ages, backgrounds and skill levels. Plans for replication of the exhibits will be made available broadly to museums, nature centers and other organizations doc10911 none The objective of this project is to characterize the chemical and physical characteristics of aerosol particles above, in, and below stratocumulus clouds. The study will be carried out as part of the DYCOMS-II project (Dynamics and Chemistry of Marine Stratocumulus), off the California coast in July . The interaction of aerosol and cloud particles will be evaluated by comparing the size distributions and chemical composition of particles measured within cloud with those outside the cloud. Measurements of the cloud droplet size distribution will be used to investigate the effects of aerosol particles on cloud microphysical properties. Instrumentation includes particle spectrometers for the size range 0.005 to micrometers. Electron microscopy of aerosol samples will be used to identify chemical functional groups, including organic species, and elements. The residue of cloud droplets collected by counterflow virtual impaction will be analyzed the same way. The data will give insight on the following scientific problems: (1) the chemical composition of particles incorporated into cloud droplets; (2) the effects of different aerosol chemical types and size distributions on cloud microphysics; (3) the degree of chemical processing of the aerosols by cloud; (4) the extent to which the observations can be approximated by physical and chemical cloud models. The ultimate goal of the research is to improve the ability to parameterize the radiative, dynamic, and thermodynamic effects of clouds in large-scale models of atmospheric circulation and climate doc10912 none The Worcester Pipeline Collaborative ASCEND Initiative will offer Worcester youth long-term, academic research projects partnerships, summer research projections for high school students and self-directed research projects for middle and high school students and a summer science camp and after schools science club for middle school students. The long-term project goal is to enhance scientific literacy in Central Massachusetts by preparing students interested in science skills with the necessary skills. This is especially important in an urban community whose traditional manufacturing base is being replaced by technological and health industries doc10913 none Education Development Center (EDC) is developing and implementing a three-year project to promote the informal learning of key basic mathematical concepts and skills among undereducated adults throughout the country. The effort will be part of EDC s Adult Literacy Media Alliance (ALMA). The principal components of the project will be: Ten new, half-hour episodes of the television series, TV411, which is currently carried by approximately 100 public television stations. The new programs will shift the emphasis of the series from reading literacy to mathematics skills. In addition to covering a broad array of mathematical concepts, procedures and vocabulary, the programs will have an explicit focus on problem-solving strategies and attitudes about mathematics. A multi-level national outreach and marketing campaign to attract viewers and users to the materials and to increase carriage of the series. An in-depth implementation effort will be conducted with outreach partners is six large metropolitan areas. EDC will adapt the outreach, marketing and promotion aspects of this focused effort so that it can be used by all television stations that commit to carry the series. Formative and summative evaluation to enhance the quality and effectiveness of the materials and to inform the understanding of the impact on viewers and users of these types of materials doc10914 none Scriven This U.S.-Brazil Program award will support Dr. L.E Scriven of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in a research collaboration with Eng. Marcio S. Carvalho, Eng. Paulo R. Souza-Mendes, and Eng. Luis F. Azevedo of the Pontifica Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC). The primary objective is to document experimentally, explain theoretically, and reduce to computer code for process analysis, design and optimization two phenomena: 1. The film-splitting instabilities and generation of mist that limit productivity of roll-coaters, which are widespread in industry. 2. The breakdown of steady, coherent flow in fast slot-coating to form a thin liquid layer; this breakdown limits productivity of slot coaters, a common precision device in industry. Liquid applied coating processes are an enabling technology in about 11% of total industrial production in the U.S., E.C. and Japan, and of increasing importance in advancing economies such as Brazil s. This collaboration will combine the expertise of researchers at PUC in coating flows, polymer processing, and experimental technique in fluid mechanics with the expertise in coating processes at Minnesota, one of the leading centers in the country in this area doc10915 none Oregon State University will expand its successful Master Science Educators program and create a national model for the delivery of natural science education to elementary and middle school youth. Master Science Educators are volunteers who undergo a rigorous 30-hour training and commit to 50 hours of service to a community site, such as a community center, housing project or school. Volunteers work in teams of two so that each site receives 100 hours of service devoted to the research and development of a natural science project. Volunteers and on-site and off-site scientists who act as virtual volunteers, guide youth ages K-8, in the design, development and evaluation of their project. Wildlife habitat projects provide a means for participants to learn inquiry and are tailored to address local science standards. A trainer s guide, a volunteer handbook, a guide for community sites and promotional and training videos will be produced, as well as a web-based science course. It is anticipated that 240 volunteers will be trained to work with over 12,000 youth during the course of the project. Dissemination will occur through the 4-H Extension service, impacting both urban and rural populations doc10916 none The Exploratorium will develop a series of Internet resources on three popular topics -- cooking, gardening, and making music -- to encourage users in science education activities in relation to daily activities. The three-year project will include the development and testing of resources that explore the science behind these topics, using the notion that we all, consciously or not, are accidental scientists who engage in the scientific process in the course of everyday life. Target audiences include general public adults and youth. Components of the site will feature aspects of cooking, gardening, and making music that are intended to appeal to diverse communities. The resources will also serve formal education through the Exploratorium s national and local network of educators doc10917 none In Texas, 57% of incarcerated youths have prior offenses. Multiple organizations (Bell County, Central Texas College, Central Texas Workforce Board, ESRI, Inc., Killeen Independent School District, Texas A&M University System, and Texas Youth Commission) will demonstrate different and innovative learning methods to close this revolving door on the juvenile justice system. Engagement in Learning will stimulate learning through technology and engage the student in life-long learning through hands-on deliverables. Student engagement will be achieved by circumventing poor reading skills through hands-on applications of modern technologies. This three-year program is comprised of teacher and student training, classroom research and exploration projects, and the integration of students into the workplace. Killeen ISD will train teachers in basic computer skills and in project-based learning that integrates modern technology into the classroom through appropriate curriculum. Other trained teachers from the region will serve as mentors to the teachers that directly serve the incarcerated population. Several follow-up sessions will be incorporated to strengthen teachers supporting teachers. Approximately 250 students will be selected and trained for 100 and 150 hands-on learning hours in aligned science education curriculum (e.g. Life Management Skills, Geographic Information Systems, Health and Safety, Horticulture and Food Sciences). Working in teams, students will utilize scientific processes to simulate real-world experiences that utilize science curriculum. Each project will be developed collaboratively through the student team and teacher facilitation and will utilize project-based management methods and hands-on learning to build and reinforce student learning and self-esteem. The evaluation process will examine the effectiveness of intensive project-based learning on the at-risk population of incarcerated juveniles and will study the power of technology in changing life direction doc10918 none Grigory Mikhalkin This project will study complex and real algebraic hypersurfaces from a topological perspective. In particular it will study the interrelation of their topological and algebraic properties. This subject recently got a new powerful tool, the so-called theory of amoebas. Mikhalkin will work on further developing this theory and will make use of amoebas for investigating algebraic varieties. Amoebas have already proved to be an extremely useful tool in several areas of Mathematics, including Algebraic Geometry, Topology and Complex Analysis. Earlier Mikhalkin used this tool in the proof of topological uniqueness of maximal arrangements of plane real algebraic curves (in the context of Hilbert s 16th problem). A part of the project is to obtain a generalization of this result in higher dimensions. The other part of the project is based on the same technique but will investigate complex algebraic hypersurfaces by constructing and analyzing certain singular Lagrangian fibrations over PL-complexes. Such fibrations give a hope to extract topology hidden in the Hodge structure of algebraic varieties. Algebraic varieties and, in particular, real algebraic varieties are fundamental mathematical objects naturally occuring in modern-day Physics, Optics, Mechanics and Robotics. For instance, all possible positions of a mechanical linkage (e.g. an arm of a robot) form a real algebraic variety. The question of topological classification of plane real algebraic curves (1-dimensional varieties) posed by Hilbert over 100 years ago is still open. A recent advance by Mikhalkin in this problem relied on a new mathematical notion, that of amoeba, introduced by Gelfand, Kapranov and Zelevinski. Algebraic amoebas are regions in space which are associated to varieties. These concave regions with tentacles and vacuoles resemble in shape biological amoebas doc10919 none Acevedo This two-year award, which supports U.S.-Spain cooperative research on modeling grass and shrub vegetation recovery after disturbance, using product imaging techniques to investigate molecular dynamics, involves Miguel Acevedo of the University of North Texas and Jose Bonvehi at the University of Alicante, Spain. The objectives of their research are to develop individual-based models for vegetation regeneration, and to develop scale-up methods by estimating parameters of the simpler transition models from the individual-based models. The U. S. investigator brings to this collaboration his experience with modeling and spatial analysis. This is complemented by the Spanish investigators expertise in modeling population and community dynamics and his data sets on tropical grass growth and grass shrub recovery dynamics after disturbance events. The results of this research are expected to provide an understanding of vegetable dynamics in soil useful to conservation efforts and ecological restoration, and to assessing their influence on geochemical cycles doc10920 none Who were the post-Pleistocene peoples of Egypt, Nubia, and Africa s Horn? How closely related were they? Were they native to northeast Africa, immigrants, or both? Is there continuity with recent peoples? These, and other long-standing questions have been asked by countless African researchers. Yet, despite many archaeological and a lesser number of biological-based studies, particularly among Dynastic populations, there has been little agreement regarding the answers. The proposed project is intended to build upon these previous studies and, specifically, several dental investigations by J Irish -- in which 36 dental traits in samples throughout North and sub-Saharan Africa (n= 1,625 individuals) were compared. The objectives of the new project are to address the more specific, region-oriented questions in three ways. First, up to 5,000 dentitions in a cross-section of northeast Africans (and comparative West Asian and European samples), will be examined for the same traits, plus 32 dental measurements. This work will be done to discern collective traits across time space beyond what little is known, and identify trends in occurrence. Second, those groups most dentally alike will be identified using inferential statistics. It is widely held that dental similarity approximates genetic relatedness. These numerically-derived affinities can then test existing hypotheses concerning population origins, relationships, migration, and microevolution. Previously, such hypotheses were derived and tested via artifactual evidence, or biological data subject to environmental and methodological bias. Dental anthropology is a proven field that minimizes these factors. Third, the findings will be contrasted with published genetic, linguistic, cultural, and other data to test for concordance among methods. These objectives, when met, will provide a better understanding of diachronic population history in a region that fostered some of the greatest civilizations the world has ever known doc10921 none Twin Cities Public Television, in association with Red Hill Studios, is producing and disseminating an Exploring Time television special and associated outreach material. The project will augment and leverage the Exploring Time traveling exhibit now being developed by the Science Museum of Minnesota (NSF grant #99- ). The goal of both the exhibit and the television special is to increase the public s understanding of our world by revealing the unseen world of natural change -- the multitude of changes that are occurring in the present but at rates too slow or too fast to be seen. The television special will provide visual explorations of changes that take place over a vast range of timescales -- from billionths of seconds to billions of years. The television series and exhibit will be supplemented by a range of materials. Both low- and high-bandwidth, web-based material will be available and a teacher s guide will be developed for middle school classrooms. A Time Explorers Toolkit will be available to both formal and informal learners. This CD-ROM includes detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to create time-lapse movies. The project also will coordinate outreach with the Community Technology Centers Network, the organization that supports technology centers that serve individuals from under-represented and low-income groups doc10922 none Galaxy Explorers submitted by the Chabot Space and Science Center (CSSC) will recruit 225 students from 75 East Bay high schools in the Oakland, CA area. The project engages students in extensive training over a three-year period. The major training components develop students content knowledge and job skills training while providing internship and volunteer opportunities. The project model builds on lessons learned from two previous projects: Giants of Science and the Teen Volunteer Program. As in these two projects, the Galaxy Explorers project will focus on helping students see the relevance of science to their everyday lives. Guest speakers and CSSC staff will use a variety of educational approaches, including hands-on lab activities, technology and interactive presentations to engage students in scientific investigations doc10923 none Alvarez-Cohen The objectives of this research are to characterize the microbial diversity in consortia capable of reductively dechlorinating chlorinated ethenes to determine the roles of different physiological groups in those reactions, to isolate pure cultures capable of complete dechlorination of trichloroethene (TCE), and to construct simple consortia capable of rapid, stable growth and efficient, complete dechlorination of TCE. Various molecular techniques will be used in this study, including clone library construction analysis, terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) analysis, and fluorescence in-situ hybridization (FISH) analysis. The anticipated results of this study will provide fundamental information on the diversity, physiology and biochemistry of microbial species involved in complete reductive dechlorination of chlorinated ethenes. This information is needed for designing efficient treatment processes for remediating chlorinated ethene contaminated sites. This research project will advance the development of molecular biological techniques as tools for evaluating and monitoring reductive dechlorination in contaminated subsurface environments. Also, it could lead to the development of microbial consortia appropriate for application in bioaugmentation strategies for site remediation doc10924 none This proposal seeks funding for an after-school program in science for 2,000 middle school students in grades 6-8. The proposed after-school Imperial Valley Agriculture Learning Center project is designed to engage under-represented groups of middle school students in sustentative after-school activities in specific areas of science, mathematics and technology. The science content will focus on agricultural science and will include topics such as entomology, soils, meteorology and genetically modified crops. Four twelve-week programs will be offered each year and students will attend two sessions per week (after school). The project is a cooperative initiative between El Centro School District, The Valley Imperial Project in Science LSC, The San Diego State University-Imperial Valley Campus and the University of California, Division of Agricultural and Natural Resources, Desert Research and Extension Center doc10925 none Community Science Workshops: Beginning a National Movement is an extension of a successful, NSF-funded project that created a network of community science centers in California. The San Francisco State University will now take this successful venture to a national level by working with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Quality Education for Minorities (QEM) to establish a new Community Science Workshop (CSW) 8-10 in underserved communities over the next four years. Once sites are selected, CSW directors participate in an intensive two-week training program. This is followed by visits by site mentors, and ongoing support through the WWW and other media, which contributes to the establishment and eventual sustainability of the centers. Each site partners with larger, established museums and science centers locally to gain much needed assistance with exhibits and education programs. Community Science Workshops contain permanent exhibit space, a workshop area for student projects and classroom storage space. They serve a variety of audiences through after school, family, school and summer science programs. Potential locations include Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, New York, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and the District of Columbia doc10926 none California State University-Los Angeles seeks funding for a 36-month endeavor for an after school Science, Technology and Engineering Program (STEP) Up for Youth ASCEND project. STEP Up for Youth is a community-based, informal science exploration and discovery initiative targeting middle school youths and their parents in disadvantaged communities of Los Angeles. The project provides participants with standards-based, hands-on science activities and opportunities for participation in science clubs. They are also provided the opportunity for leadership roles in building institutionalized programs for furthering science literacy in their respective communities. The project is a collaborative effort involving California State University-Los Angeles, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, The California Science Center, The Boeing Company and the Los Angeles Unified School District, in partnership with community-based organizations, service providers and neighborhood businesses doc10927 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Properties of galaxies: constraints from gravitational lensing and dynamics Hunter The project will follow two complementary two lines of investigation of the large-scale structure of galaxies. The first line is concerned with the gravitational lensing that occurs when a galaxy lies close to the line of sight between us and a much more distant source, such as a quasar. Electromagnetic waves from the distant source are both bent and slowed down as they pass close to the galaxy. As a result, the gravitational lens may produce multiple images of that quasar. A number of quasars that are multiply imaged by galaxies are now known. The configuration of those images and their relative magnitudes is determined by the distribution of mass in the intervening galaxy. The principal investigator has developed methods for calculating the lensing properties of elliptical lenses. Applied to observational data, these properties can be used to make deductions about the distribution of mass in the lensing galaxy. He will develop methods that are more powerful and refine them as necessary after testing them on observational data. The second line of investigation is concerned with the dynamics of the stars, which are the major visible components of galaxies. Its ultimate aim is to build dynamical models of galaxies, but two preliminary topics are to be studied first. One is investigation of how central density cusps and central black holes, which are widely believed to be present in many galaxies, influence the orbits of the stars, and to what extent they allow galaxies to be triaxial. The other is to improvement of a procedure for analyzing orbits and computing their fundamental frequencies and orbital densities. The two lines of investigation are complementary because both the orbits of the stars in a galaxy, and the gravitational lensing properties of that galaxy, are influenced by all the matter of the galaxy, whether visible or dark. This project looks at galaxies, the fundamental building blocks of the Universe, from two perspectives. One is that of gravitational lensing and the other is that of the motions of the stars of the galaxies. Light rays are bent when they pass close to a massive object such as a galaxy. Consequently, a galaxy that happens to lie between us and a distant quasar can cause us to see multiple images of that object. This phenomenon is known as gravitational lensing. It is of much current interest because it provides a tool for investigating the combined effects of the visible and dark matter content of a galaxy, since both contribute to the lensing. There are a number of instances of galaxies that produce four images of the same distant quasar. The principal investigator is developing theories for deducing what those image systems, their configurations and their relative strengths, tell us about the arrangement of mass in those galaxies. That arrangement is critical for the structure of the galaxy. Galaxies contain swarms of hundreds of billions of stars. The motions of those stars are governed by the gravitational forces due to all the mass of the galaxy, both visible and dark. Understanding the motion of stars in galaxies will facilitate understanding the large-scale structure of the universe doc10928 none This award supports purchase of boats, diving equipment and facility at the Long Marine Laboratory (LML) of the University of California Santa Cruz. These improvements in facilities and equipment will allow the Diving and Boating Safety Programs (DBSP) to meet the growing numbers and needs of students and researchers. Funds will be used to equip a new Marine Support Facility with scuba cylinder racks, Nitrox tank-charging equipment, cabinets, and heating and ventilation systems. The new facility will provide students and researchers with areas for staging, fabrication and maintenance of diving and scientific equipment. The award will augment institutional funds to be used for site preparation, foundation, rough carpentry and minimal interior finish work. In addition, the award will support purchase of a 16 inflatable boat, a 22 fiberglass vessel and 3 outboard engines. A forklift will also be purchased to move boats and heavy gear on the grounds of the facility. Since , the LML has been the coastal research laboratory for the University s Institute of Marine Sciences. The laboratory is located on a coastal bluff adjacent to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, the nation s largest National Marine Sanctuary. The LML Education Program (K-12) and aquarium displays serve 35,000 visitors each year. The Diving and Boating Safety Program provides support for faculty, staff, student and visiting researchers in biology, chemistry and earth sciences. Approximately one-third of the University s 300 undergraduate Marine Biology students use the scuba diving and small boat facilities in classes or as part of their research doc10929 none With the rate of global species extinction rapidly increasing, there is an intensifying debate among scientists as to whether or not a high diversity of species is required to maintain ecological processes that are important for the functioning of ecosystems (processes like primary productivity, decomposition, and the cycling of nutrients). Limited evidence suggests that the certain types of ecosystems may require more species than others. For example, recent experimental work has led to the hypothesis that decreasing species diversity in ecosystems characterized by periodic disturbances leads to greater changes in ecological processes than decreasing species diversity in ecosystems less characterized by disturbance. The current research will test this hypothesis by relating species diversity to the rates of 3 ecological processes in stream ecosystems that differ in flooding regime (=disturbance metric). Using records from the US Geological Survey, 200 randomly selected streams from the eastern United States will be ranked according to their frequency and predictability of bank-full flooding. The 25 streams most characterized by flooding and 25 streams least characterized by flooding will be sampled to determine the rates of three ecological processes (primary productivity, leaf decomposition, and removal of suspended particles from the water), and the diversity of species that influence these processes (primary producers, invertebrate detritivores, and invertebrate filter feeders). To test the hypothesis, the relationships between (1) algal diversity and primary productivity, (2) invertebrate detritivore diversity and leaf decomposition, and (3) invertebrate filter-feeder diversity and retention of suspended particulate matter, will be statistically compared between streams most and least characterized by flooding. The results will help determine whether species diversity is more or less important for conserving biological processes in ecosystems that are naturally or anthropogenically disturbed. This study will also provide much needed, basic information about the factors that potentially regulate the contribution of species diversity to ecosystem-level processes doc10930 none Bergantz This award will provide funds to offset participant costs for the Geological Society of America (GSA) Penrose Conference entitled Longevity and Dynamics of Large Silicic Systems that will be held at Mammoth Lakes, California on June 14-21, . The funds will be used to provide support for travel and registration of students and early-career researchers that will be selected on the basis of need. The applicants for those funds will be asked to provide a curriculum vitae, a poster title for a presentation at the meeting, and a statement of financial need. The results of the conference will be published on GSA Today and posted on the GSA web site doc10931 none The Villafranchian is a European time interval based on the mammals which lived from roughly 3.5-1.5 million years ago, an interval which saw important events in human and faunal evolution. Although this concept was first proposed nearly 150 years ago, there is still uncertainty as to the timing of the unit and subunit boundaries. The PI s will attempt to clarify the situation through reanalysis of one of the major late Villafranchian mammalian localities, the volcanic explosion-crater lake (maar) of Seneze, in central France. No major paleontological collection has been undertaken at Seneze in 60 years, while stratigraphic and dating studies since have yielded conflicting results, ranging between 2.2-1.5 Ma. As the earliest human tools in Europe proper (Spain) and human fossils with tools at the margins of Europe (Israel, Georgia) occur close to this time range, the fauna from Seneze is often used as a standard for comparison to determine the age of such early human presence. The team effort has three complementary goals: 1) to clarify the local geology of this complex site; 2) to utilize a combination of dating methods (ESR, Ar-Ar and paleomagnetic correlation) on the site and its fauna; and 3) to collect mammalian fossils from known points within the revised and dated stratigraphy. New specimens of important mammals such as the terrestrial primate Paradolichopithecus may result from this study. This application requests funds for a four-week geological and age-dating season in June-July . If that is successful, full-scale collecting of fossils is planned for - doc10932 none Disturbance often enhances diversity by creating a refuge allowing the persistence of fugitive native plants. Many exotic species are also successful colonizers of disturbances and may compete with native taxa. Thus, the effects of disturbance on native species in invaded communities are difficult to predict without an understanding of the differential responses of natives and exotics to disturbance. Within this context, the proposed research focuses on the effects of three soil disturbances (mounds, trails, and slides) on native plant species. Previous research indicates that fire facilitates rare native plants by removing accumulated leaf litter and exotic plants. Similarly, soil disturbances are hypothesized to facilitate natives, although exotic species may mitigate this beneficial effect. The response of native plants to disturbance, the presence of exotic species, and their interaction will be quantified through a series of manipulative experiments. The proposed research will document how plant life history traits and population dynamics interact with disturbance characteristics to determine temporal patterns within invaded communities doc10933 none Understanding the processes that shape biodiversity requires multiple lines of evidence, including those from paleobiology, ecology, population genetics, biogeography, and phylogenetics. I will use a powerful technique, known as phylogeography, that employs many of these lines to investigate which processes have been most important in generating diversity in a group of gastropods known as the Neritopsina. I will be testing whether or not species that are distributed in space with geographic barriers separating them show more genetic divergence between populations than species that have no barriers between populations. I will then combine this information with data from their evolutionary relationships and fossil record to test whether or not this divergence at the population level is manifested as significant diversity at the species level. As biodiversity is a dynamic process, with populations and species in a constant state of flux, it is necessary to understand how diversity is generated in order to make informed conservation decisions. By understanding how geographic distribution has affected the evolutionary history of these gastropods, we may better understand which processes need to be conserved in order to ensure that diversity remains relatively stable through time. Instead of focusing solely on the current state of these gastropod species, I will be examining how we might better ensure that they are allowed to continue to maintain and generate diversity in the millennia to come doc10934 none DOCTORAL DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Relative Effects of Differential Seed and Seedling Predation by Crabs on Tropical Forest Composition and Structure - Carroll. Ecologists have debated for more than a century in the theoretical literature over the predominant mechanisms that structure plant communities over a heterogeneous landscape. Proposed mechanisms include plant response to variable environmental conditions, differential seed dispersal, differential competitive abilities among plant species, and differential seed predation. There have been few empirical comparative studies that investigate the relative importance of these proposed hypotheses. Recently, several studies have debated the significance of differential herbivory versus plant response to environmental conditions on observed mangrove community shifts, yet no comparable investigations have been conducted in terrestrial forests. Preliminary data from a secondary coastal forest in Costa Rica suggests that herbivorous land crabs and terrestrial hermit crabs have the ability to induce the shifts in forest community structure observed in tropical coastal forests. Through the use of vegetation analyses, seed traps, crab exclosures and controls, and manipulations of environmental conditions, this dissertation research will determine the relative effect of seed and seedling predation pressure by crabs on the patterns of coastal forest regeneration. The results of this study will be of practical management use in coastal forest conservation efforts throughout the tropics. Researcher collaborations with faculty and students of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma of Costa Rica fosters an essential working relationship among native Costa Ricans and the Cabo Blanco Absolute Reserve that is viewed as the model of conservation by their Park Service doc10935 none Schat In West Nile virus (WNV) reached New York causing massive mortality in American Crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos). In Tompkins County crows have been studied since , and blood samples for DNA extraction are available. Since WNV will most likely reach epidemic proportions in upstate NY in the summer of , massive mortality can be expected among crows. This provides a unique opportunity to determine which individuals can survive infection with WNV and identify the genetic component of the resistance. Large numbers of crows will be captured in the - winter and blood samples will be obtained for DNA analysis and serology. DNA samples will be analyzed for differences in immune response genes by, thus providing the basis to study genetic diversity before and after the onset of the expected WNV epidemic. The hypothesis will be validated if crows surviving the WNV epidemic differ in allele frequencies of genes associated with immune responses. Although it is assumed that pathogens co-evolve with the ability of the host to mount effective immune responses, very few studies using natural populations have tested the validity of this hypothesis. In order to understand the risks to which populations are exposed when a new disease infects them, it is important to compare populations before and after they are exposed to the new pathogen doc10936 none Gaut This work will study the divergence of duplicated genes in two plant model organisms: Arabidopsis thaliana and Zea mays (corn). The Arabidopsis work will use computational tools to examine differences among 271 duplicated gene pairs found within the Arabidopsis genome. The purposes of the Arabidopsis study are to infer the processes of diversification after gene duplication and also to search for sequence-based clues for shifts in gene function. The second part of the research uses a unique population-based approach to examine divergence of duplicated genes. For this part of the project, DNA sequence data will be generated from several individuals from each gene of several duplicate gene pairs. This population-based approach will provide additional information about the forces governing gene divergence and may also yield insights into the function of several agronomically important genes. The genomics revolution has produced whole-genome sequences from myriad organisms ranging from bacteria to humans. Genomic sequences provide a blueprint of genetic architecture, but the more difficult work is just beginning - i.e., to infer gene function and gene origin. One surprise gleaned from genome data is that all organisms have a very high proportion of duplicated genes. It is not yet clear if the two (or more) duplicate copies retain the same gene function as the ancestral gene or instead diverge to fulfill new functional roles. Knowing how genes diverge after gene duplication is essential for understanding genome evolution and will in turn help us understand the basis of genetic differences among organisms doc10937 none Models for Kerogen Oxidation, the Carbon Cycle, and Atmospheric Oxygen over Phanerozoic Time Change over geologic time in the level of atmospheric oxygen is both a principal cause and principal effect of biological evolution, and, thus, study of such change is of interest to both the earth and biological sciences. One the four basic processes controlling the level of atmospheric O2 over time is the removal of O2 by the oxidative weathering of organic matter (kerogen) in sedimentary rocks. We propose to construct theoretical models to quantitatively evaluate the role of O2 in the rate and mechanism of kerogen weathering and help decide whether or not the rate limiting step in such weathering is simply the exposure of fresh kerogen by physical erosion. As a check on the modeling we will turn to the field measurements of kerogen weathering that have been done under our previous NSF grant. In addition, we propose to combine already existing simple models for the evolution of atmospheric O2 over the past 550 million years (Phanerozoic time) with an already published much more complex model for the evolution of atmospheric CO2 that considers such processes as mountain uplift, continental drift, and climate change. Combined with our model results on kerogen weathering, we hope to be able to construct a complete model for the evolution of both atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide and to relate changes in the two gases to biological evolution and climate change doc10938 none Fendley This award supports theoretical research and education on strongly correlated electron materials and systems. The work will make extensive use of field-theoretic techniques with an emphasis on non-perturbative methods. Research will focus on electronic materials and systems for which the Fermi liquid paradigm does not apply and often does not even provide a qualitative description of the correlated electronic states. Research areas that will be engaged include: disordered systems in two dimensions, including the transition between plateaus in the quantum Hall effect; spin-charge separation in lattice gauge theories on high temperature superconductors; correlation functions for Haldane-gap spin chains; the existence of Lifshitz points in chiral field theories; and tunneling into a fractional quantum Hall device. The techniques of integrable field theory will be used, which include conformal field theory, the Bethe ansatz, and the exact scattering matrix description. %%% This award supports fundamental theoretical research and education on strongly correlated electron materials and systems. The PI will apply state-of-the-art field theoretic techniques to central problems in the field of strongly correlated electron materials with an aim to understand how electronic states arise that differ from the Fermi liquid states observed in ordinary metals doc10939 none Proposal # PI: Eve Riskin U of Washington In the not-too-distant future, downloading images and video to a handheld device will be as commonplace as viewing an image on a Web page is today. To enable this, high quality, flexible, and robust image and video compression algorithms will be required. Recently, Group Testing for Wavelets (GTW), a new type of wavelet coder based on group testing was developed. It offers competitive performance to the best compression coders available today and with further development, GTW could outperform them significantly. This research involves developing new algorithms for robust and flexible coding of images and video. Whereas GTW is used as a motivating example, the research is applicable to many compression algorithms and in many scenarios. First, a set of problems related to GTW will be explored. This includes applying GTW to wavelet packet decompositions and reduced complexity transforms; extending it to video and the new area of progressive geometry compression; and developing a theory for its strong performance. Next, methods for applying forward error correction to compressed data in a progressive manner will be investigated. Finally, unequal frame expansions will be used to recover from packet loss. The research will have practical use in many arenas including the Internet and wireless communications and will be included in a new undergraduate course on data compression, to be taught jointly by the two principal investigators doc10940 none Despite numerous studies, it is still unclear how biodiversity affects ecosystem function. This research will evaluate whether interspecific effects overshadow intraspecific variation in influencing ecosystem dynamics. A field experiment being conducted as part of this dissertation has found that genetic makeup of leaf litter affected components of the carbon and nitrogen cycles by influencing tannin content, decomposition rate, and nitrogen content. Low genetic diversity yielded idiosyncratic nutrient cycles that differed significantly from high diversity treatments. While this project is unique in its focus on intraspecific, and not interspecific diversity, the implications need to be considered in relation to interspecific diversity. Specifically, will the effects of decreased intraspecific diversity be masked by the addition of a single commonly co-occurring species? To answer this, the PIs propose to replicate field experiments in the lab with and without the addition of naturally co-occurring pine litter. By comparing carbon and nitrogen dynamics of oak litter with and without pine litter, the PIs will be able to assess the effects of additional species in the community on the ecosystem-level consequences of reduced intraspecific genetic diversity doc10941 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Dynamics of High-Speed Machining Stone This grant supports collaboration between a mathematician at Utah State University and an engineer at The Boeing Company to investigate chatter instability in drilling. Chatter is a self-excited oscillation between the machining tool and the work piece that limits productivity of machining operations, reduces the quality of the product, and shortens machine tool life. Drilling itself is one of the least well understood machining processes due to the complex geometry of the cutting surface, and simple linear models of drilling have had limited success. We are developing nonlinear models that incorporate information from finite element models for metal cutting as well as information about vibrational modes of the drill. The resulting models take the form of delay differential equations. We use a combination of conventional engineering techniques and techniques from nonlinear dynamics (e.g. center manifold reduction) to analyze these systems. We will utilize new capabilities in large-scale simulation software and build on previous theoretical work done at Boeing to perform dynamic stability analysis. The award is co-funded by the Dynamic Systems and Control Program and Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) Program in the Directorate for Engineering and by the GOALI program through the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities of the Mathematical & Physical Sciences Directorate. Drilling is a crucial machining process in aircraft manufacture: over a million holes may be drilled during the construction of a commercial airplane, and production errors resulting in out-of-tolerance holes can be extremely costly. Improving the precision with which holes may be drilled depends on a detailed understanding of instabilities such as chatter. Beyond the technological importance of this work is the synergy it promotes by supporting collaboration between academic mathematicians and industry engineers. The connection with The Boeing Company is a central part of Utah State University s industrial mathematics program, which provides mathematics students with enhanced training by exposing them to real applications, encouraging group work, and honing communication skills. Another aspect of this project is the development of an active collaboration between researchers at Boeing-Seattle and Dr. Stone and those at Boeing-St. Louis and Dr. Philip Bayly of Washington University. The capabilities of these two groups mesh in a unique way, providing a strong research environment with interlacing thrusts of theory, experiment, and direct numerical simulation. The projects supported by this grant are part of this collaboration, which combines the expertise and facilities of both groups, and will lead to state-of-the-art results capable of enhancing high-speed drilling practices doc10942 none Despite a widespread belief that phosphorus (P) availability poses a strong constraint on ecosystem dynamics in tropical forests, direct tests of this belief are rare. Furthermore, most studies that have addressed this issue have focused on P limitation to the plant community; virtually none have addressed the possibility that the microbial community is P limited. Mr. Cleveland s dissertation research to date suggests that decomposition of carbon in a lowland tropical rainforest in southwestern Costa Rica is P limited, although the extent of this limitation is still unknown. Early findings have revealed that in spite of the apparent P limitation to microbial processes at this site, the production and activity of phosphatases, enzymes responsible for the mineralization of organic P, are relatively low. This Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant will support experiments that address the following two basic questions: 1. Does phosphorus availability limit the decomposition of native carbon in moist tropical forests? and 2. At a site where the mineralization of organic P should be important in offsetting deficiencies in available inorganic P, is phosphatase activity directly limited by the availability of another element doc10943 none DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Supply-side Regulation of Herbivore-Induced Phenolics in Plants Jack Schultz and Toni Schaeffer Phenolics are carbon-based chemicals synthesized within all plants. Lignin, the major component of wood, is a phenolic. In addition to the structural role of lignin, many other phenolics play diverse roles in the lives of all plants as both structural and defensive elements. Changes in phenolic production comprise the most-studied class of defenses in research on plant pests. Much ecological theory on how plants allocate their carbon and nutrient resources presumes that plants, in response to changes in their environment, are able to vary the proportion of their resources that they use to synthesize phenolics. The majority of the world s carbon passes through the biosynthetic pathways leading to phenolic synthesis (once it is taken from the atmosphere by the plant during photosynthesis). Hence, these pathways are critical components of global carbon cycling. All evidence to date suggests that global change will enhance the importance of these biosynthetic pathways. However, plant regulation of phenolic production is still poorly understood. This may be partly because the two biosynthetic pathways that plants use to synthesize phenolics have traditionally been studied separately. The shikimate pathway (SP) has been studied as the source of aromatic amino acids, and the phenylpropanoid pathway (PP) as the source of defenses and lignin. Most plant scientists have focused on the detailed regulation of the PP, the second pathway in this pipeline, ignoring earlier steps in these pathways. The core hypothesis of the proposed research is that regulation of phenolics is accomplished at the supply-side of synthesis within the SP, the first pathway, as well as downstream within the PP. Using a series of greenhouse experiments, this research aims to determine how plants coordinately regulate the top and bottom of this synthetic pipeline, namely two regulatory enzymes (DAHPS and PAL). Also being explored is the idea that plants are able to exploit stored pools of carbon-based pathway intermediates when they change their phenolic production. By comparing the phenolic regulation strategy of a model herbaceous plant, tobacco, to a model woody plant, poplar, this research will help explain how carbon resources are allocated to these important pathways and products in very different plants. The results will clarify the regulation and evolution of carbon allocation patterns in plants. This information will point to ways in which plants may be bred or engineered to maximize carbon allocation for various purposes, and will facilitate better understanding of plant growth, defense, and productivity doc10944 none The goal of research in complexity theory is to classify the complexity of real world computational problems by providing lower bounds on the resources required to solve them. To date - in spite of impressive lower bounds for restricted types of circuits- almost the only useful progress toward this goal has come via the tool of reducibility, which allows one to show that problem is complete for complexity class. Many of the most important complexity classes can be characterized in terms of Boolean circuits of restricted size or depth, etc. Recently, it has become apparent that arithmetic circuits are also very useful in this regard. The relationships between Boolean and arithmetic circuit complexity are still only poorly understood, although there has been significant progress on this front recently. This project will work to clarify these relationships further. Specially, this project will exploit new insights about the complexity of arithmetic operation, in order to investigate the power of small space-bounded complexity classes and complexity classes defined in terms of small-depth circuits. Also the tools of Kolmogorov complexity will be applied, in order to obtain a better understanding of the complexity of graph reachability problems. More generally, the project will attempt to clarify the relationship among complexity classes, and the various notions (nondeterminism, unambiguity, symmetry, Boolean and arithmetic circuits, etc.) that define models of computation characterizing important complexity classes doc10945 none s, distribution maps, and illustrations will be included in the revision, along with cladistic, biogeographical and ecological analyses. The proposed study will significantly contribute to a better understanding of evolution at the species level in the Passifloraceae. This investigation will be the first to incorporate modern cladistic methods in a morphological study of any group within the genus Passiflora. The proposed research will also use combined morphological and molecular data matrices to develop hypotheses of phylogenetic relationships in the section and will contribute to a better understanding of the utility of such an approach in plant systematics. In addition, this research will permit the evaluation of the Heliconiinae-Passiflora coevolutionary relationship based upon a well-supported phylogenetic hypothesis for a group of species within Passiflora. Lastly, this study will be one of the few studies to attempt to determine the evolutionary forces that have led from hymenopteran to bird pollination in a group of closely related, tropical species. Thus, the result of the proposed study will be a more extensive understanding of evolutionary trends and relationships within a group of rapidly evolving plant species of the neotropics doc10946 none Bernardi The investigators will determine the extent that ecological and genetic factors play on the reproductive isolation between two closely related freshwater fish species in California (Lavinia symmetricus and L. exilicauda). The two species occur together in two separate drainages: Clear Lake and Monterey Bay rivers. Levels of reproductive isolation between the two species differ in the two drainages with extensive hybridization occurring in only one of the drainages. The investigators will produce crosses between the two species in the laboratory to measure performance of the hybrids against the pure crosses. Processes that allow the formation of new species have been a central focus in biology. Groups of individuals in a rapidly radiating species that have recently become isolated can be analyzed to determine which factors are contributing to reproductive isolation. Other research has shown that there are two types of processes contributing to rapid radiations: ecological and genetic. Much of the empirical research on radiations in closely related species has focused on ecological factors. Recent work has revealed that genetic incompatibilities between closely related species may be more prevalent than believed. Results from this study will allow a greater understanding of the processes that promote speciation and diversification doc10947 none PROPOSAL # TEXAS ENGINEERING EXP. STA. XIONG, ZIXIANG This ambitious project explores several new directions in the algorithmic design and architecture of challenging multimedia communication systems. A unified approach is taken for transmission of multimedia data over heterogeneous networks (e.g., the Internet) and noisy channels (e.g., a wireless LAN) based on scalable source coding. Topics covered in the project are: 1) Scalable multimedia data compression based on efficient arithmetic coding of bit planes of transform coefficients. For image coding, the wavelet transform is used like in the new JPEG- standard. The focus is on introducing progressiveness in the traditionally non-progressive trellis coded quantization scheme. The 3-D wavelet transform is adopted for fully scalable video coding. A new nonuniform modulated complex lapped transform (NMCLT) is applied for audio coding. To achieve high arithmetic coding performance, a significant amount of effort is invested in high-order context modeling of the NMCLT or wavelet coefficients. In addition, new methods are studied for masking quantization noise of the NMCLT coefficients for audio coding and exploring the motion information for 3-D wavelet video coding. 2) Scalable transmission of Internet multimedia via optimal packetization and joint congestion and error control. A dynamic programming based optimal packetization scheme for scalable multimedia bit streams is studied. Suboptimal but low complexity packetization schemes are also investigated. Congestion control is used to determine the available transmission rate and an end-to-end optimal error control scheme devised to mitigate the effects of pack loss. This is achieved by optimally trading off scalable source coding and unequal error protection doc10948 none Schemske The proposed research investigates the mechanisms that contribute to species boundaries in two closely related, Neotropical gingers. The study species live in the same tropical forests in Central America, flower at the same time and are pollinated largely by the same species of hummingbird. Yet they differ in a number of leaf and flower characters, and never produce hybrid offspring. What keeps these species distinct? The research will use experimental crosses, field observations and molecular genetic techniques to answer this question. The information gathered thus far suggests that crosses in one direction fail because pollen growth is inhibited, while reproductive failure in the other direction is caused by the inability of the pollen to grow far enough to produce seeds. The research findings will ultimately show the subtle, but effective means that allow different species to coexist. One of the great mysteries of Nature is how species retain their distinctive characteristics. Without mechanisms to prevent interbreeding, the diversity of species would be far less than what we see today. Understanding how these reproductive barriers function in natural populations provides insights useful for both the development of new agricultural varieties and for the conservation and management of biodiversity doc10949 none Data compression techniques that are important in modern efficient communication and storage systems are implemented using computer system architectures with multiple processing elements. Computer failure errors reduce the reliability of many parts of the overall system because compression is achieved by reducing the residual redundancy common to all forms of data, particularly image representations. Also, the resulting formats are extremely sensitive to errors introduced by the communications or storage medium. This susceptibility to errors has long been known and most international data compression standards include resilience features designed to eliminate or mitigate channel error effects. Error control coding is employed in conveying the compressed data. However, there are quite different classes of errors emanating from failures in the computing resources that implement the compressing, transmitting and expanding of the data. The impact of such computational failures can be disastrous to critical data in remote-sensing or medical applications that depend on compressed data. Hence, fault tolerance capabilities need to be considered in system architectures realizing the compression systems. The proposed research will introduce fault tolerance design methods in data compression computing architectures so that temporary computer failures are detected, guaranteeing that no corrupted compressed data reaches the intended user without warning or appropriate action. The research will analyze the specialized effects of computer failure errors in supporting system parts and will provide design methodologies to integrate fault tolerance in standard data compression algorithms. Protection levels will be verified by computer simulations of the proposed architectural designs. The ultimate goal of this research is to influence optional features in data compression standards that insure fault tolerance capabilities for critical applications. Common aspects of various compression standards will be studied concerning computer failure errors. The work will begin with still image standards and later expand to those for video images where motion is involved. Fast transform algorithms, integral to many standards, are highly susceptible to even a single computational error, and special design techniques are required to avoid overwhelming any protection methods applied to them. Most compression standards rely on lossless coding techniques such as Huffman or arithmetic coding. The outputs from these coding steps contain very little redundancy from which failure errors can be detected. The prediction methods for compressing motion data have feedback paths that greatly exacerbate computer-induced errors, and fault tolerance design techniques will need to be developed especially for them. Any fault tolerance design procedures must also be integrated with the limited error control features and resilience capabilities already present for combating communication or storage errors, even though they address a totally different class of effects doc10950 none This project explores the preparation, properties and chemistry of dehydrobenzannulenes. These molecules are related to such substances as buckminsterfullerenes in having an almost all-carbon composition. Unlike fullerenes, dehydrobenzannulenes can vary in structure quite radically and rationally designed structures are accessible by total synthesis. The aim of this research project is to prepare and study dehydrobenzannulenes with novel shapes in order to answer fundamental scientific questions as well as to explore the materials propertied of the resultant macromolecules. With this Award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program continues its support for the research and educational activities of Professor Michael M. Haley of the University of Oregon, Eugene. Professor Haley s research explores the preparation and properties of macromolecular, carbon-rich dehydrobenzannulenes. These novel macromolecules can be as large as several nanometers in diameter and offer the prospect of novel properties including, but not limted to nonlinear optical properties. In addition to his work with doctoral and postdoctoral scientists, Professor Haley also includes undergraduate students of chemistry in his research programs doc10951 none This proposal addresses a direct numerical reconstruction algorithm for the 2-D inverse conductivity problem. The 2-D inverse conductivity problem is to determine an unknown conductivity distribution on a bounded region from knowledge of the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map. Physically, knowledge of the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map is tantamount to knowing the current density distribution on the boundary of the region resulting from any given voltage distribution applied on the boundary. The problem is modeled mathematically by the generalized Laplace s equation with the conductivity as an unknown parameter. In A. Nachman proved that knowledge of the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map uniquely determines the conductivity in the interior of a smooth bounded region in 2-D. An important feature of Nachman s proof is that it outlines a direct method for solving for the conductivity without iteration. The proof is based on techniques of inverse scattering and the d-bar method, which is a method of solution for scattering problems, not a numerical technique. The primary goals of this proposal are to solve the inverse conductivity problem numerically using the d-bar method, develop a practical reconstruction algorithm for medical applications, and to test the implementation on physically relevant conductivity distributions. The 2-D inverse conductivity problem has applications in geophysics, nondestructive testing, and a medical imaging technique known as electrical impedance tomography (EIT). One application of EIT is the imaging of heart and lung function in real time. In this application, electrodes are placed around the circumference of the patient s torso, current is applied on the electrodes and the resulting voltage is measured. The resulting 2-D inverse conductivity problem is then solved numerically to reconstruct how the electricity passes through the interior and to form a cross-sectional image of the patient s chest. Other applications include the detection of breast cancer, monitoring for internal bleeding, and the diagnosis of pulmonary embolis (a blood clot in the lung). The proposed approach represents a new class of image reconstruction algorithm for the EIT problem. Work thus far has indicated that the algorithm yields more accurate images than the existing fast algorithms, since it solves the full set of equations rather than a a more simplified version of the problem. This is particularly important in medical applications such as breast cancer detection, where the measured values distinguish between the presence of a tumor or a benign cyst. The algorithm will be tested on real data and compared to existing algorithnms in terms of accuracy and efficiency doc10952 none Dissertation Research: Evolution and Development of Left-Right Asymmetry in Echinoderms Gregory Wray and Margaret Pizer One of the most active areas of research in evolutionary biology today concerns the origin of the unique morphological features seen in the different animal phyla. The members of the phylum Echinodermata (sea urchins, sea stars, sea cucumbers and their relatives) exhibit a number of features whose evolutionary origin has been the topic of extensive speculation among biologists for over a century. Perhaps the most striking of these characteristics involve echinoderm body symmetry. Echinoderm larvae are bilaterally symmetrical, while the adults show five-fold radial symmetry. The transition between these very different body symmetries occurs when adult structures develop on the left side of the larva, producing a left-right asymmetrical intermediate stage. Several scenarios have been proposed to explain the developmental transitions from bilateral symmetry to left-right asymmetry to pentaradial symmetry that occur during the echinoderm life cycle, but little testing of the predictions of these theories has been done using developmental data. This project involves a systematic study of the development of adult structures in echinoderms. The goals of this study are to investigate 1) the evolution of left-right asymmetry within echinoderms and 2) the developmental mechanism of left-right asymmetry in echinoderms and the evolutionary origin of this mechanism. To achieve these goals a variety of embryological techniques will be used, and results will be compared between different groups of echinoderms and between echinoderms and their relatives. A detailed study of the evolution and development of left-right asymmetry will result in a better understanding of the origin and evolution of echinoderm morphology. In addition, this study will provide insights into the evolution and development of left-right asymmetry in other phyla of animals and the evolution of metamorphosis in other marine invertebrates doc10953 none PI: Francis Juanes Doctoral student: Rebecca Jordan The cichlid fishes of Lake Malawi are an excellent example of rapid species diversification over a relatively short period of evolutionary time. There are numerous theories to explain this diversity that are often linked to sexual selection through female choice. Given that males are brightly colored, females, presumably by using visual cues, choose among the males. In being selective of certain males, females drive the reproductive isolation that lead to species differences. Little, however, has been done to investigate the visual factors used by female Lake Malawi cichlids. In fact very little has been done to discern what type of visual system these fish have, which is particularly surprising given their reliance on visually guided behaviors. The primary objective of this work is to ask four main visual questions with a group of rock dwelling Lake Malawi cichlids (mbuna): (I.) what spectral abilities exist across several groups? (II.) what is the role of visual cues in among species mate choice? (III.) what is the role of ultraviolet radiation in mate choice and feeding, and (IV.) what variation in physical characteristics occur with attenuating light? A critical understanding of the visual factors affecting the Lake Malawi mbuna is a necessary step in understanding of the reproductive isolation see in these fish. This understanding can aid in explaining the extreme diversity seen in these mbuna, and comes at pivotal time because of the anthropogenic stressors that currently threaten the integrity of the East African cichlid fish doc10954 none A diverse group of mormyrid fishes has recently been discovered in Gabon. These fishes produce weak electric pulses to communicate with one another. Past studies indicate that they can detect differences between pulse waveforms and use this information for same-species recognition. Each species emits a distinct electric signature, with one notable exception. Two signal forms ( normal polarity and reversed polarity ) are produced by co-occurring individuals that cannot be distinguished by sex, shape, or preliminary comparisons at five genetic markers. These forms may be alternate morphs within a single interbreeding species or two nascent species caught in the process of divergence. These alternatives will be investigated by (1) playing back signals to breeding fishes and observing their preferences during two field trips to Africa and (2) surveying hundreds of genetic regions for differences using the new Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism technique. If the evidence supports reproductive isolation between forms, the fact that they cannot be distinguished by external measurements or preliminary genetic data would indicate species formation to be extremely recent or still in progress. Such cases are difficult to find in nature. They yield important insights into the conditions that give rise to new species. A lack of reproductive isolation between forms, on the other hand, would demand a re-thinking of the importance of electric signals as mating barriers for all members of this group. The results of this project will also be significant to neurobiologists studying electrosensory coding in mormyrid fishes -- a field that has contributed to work on other time-coding sensory systems such as hearing doc10955 none Jian Li Spectral Analysis of Gapped or Missing Data This research focuses on the spectral analysis of gapped or incomplete data sequences. The gapped or missing data problem usually arises when contiguous data measurements for a long time are hard to obtain or the measurements during some intervals are not useful due to strong interference or jamming and must be discarded. Spectral analysis of gapped or incomplete data sequences holds promise to advance many fields including astronomy, communications, medical imaging, radar, and underwater acoustics. This research involves the development and application of efficient and robust spectral analysis algorithms for incomplete data sequences. The goals of this research are to devise and evaluate statistically sound and mathematically solid spectral analysis methods for various applications that involve the spectral analysis of gapped or incomplete data sequences, to gain both practical and theoretical insights into the algorithm properties including accuracy, resolution, convergence, and computational complexity, and to understand the impacts of large gaps or large numbers of missing data samples on the algorithm design. It is anticipated that the results of this study will significantly impact the advances of many practical applications doc10956 none There has been an increasing trend to conduct scientific research using numerical simulations on modern high performance computers in recent years. Considerable progress has been made in the area of computational material sciences. Computational tools have been used in the design of new materials as well as in the study of their properties. The central objectives of this project are: 1) to develop or refine certain mesoscale and macroscale models, so to enlarge the range of physical problems for which such models are valid; 2) to analyze these models in order to gain further understanding of their properties and solutions; 3) to develop, analyze, and implement algorithms, in particular, parallel and adaptive algorithms, for the numerical simulation of these models; and 4) to use our algorithms and codes to study some interesting phenomena in material sciences. In the proposed work, the principal investigator will study models and develop numerical algorithms for some interesting material sciences problems that involve multiscale (mesoscale and macroscale) and stochastic effects, such as problems related to vortices and other defects in superconductivity and magnetism. A major part of the project is aimed at increasing the range of applications for the mesoscale codes and allow more comparative studies between the mesoscale and macroscopic models through the use of domain and scale decomposition integration and adaptive computation techniques. The codes for mesoscale models can be of use in gaining information and insight about the physical behavior and interaction of the fine structures (such as vortices) with, for example, boundaries, interfaces, impurities, currents, and thermal fluctuations. They can be of indirect use to device designers, in particular, when connections with macroscopic properties can be identified. Models based on the stochastic partial differential equations and their numerical simulations will also be given emphasis, so as to gain insight to the macroscopic effect of thermal fluctuations and impurities in the materials like superconductors and liquid crystals. The work will be aimed at making the computational codes robust, efficient, flexible, accurate, scalable and user-friendly. It is hoped that these codes can be used by physicists, material scientists, and engineers in laboratories, universities, and industrial organizations as a tool for studying some specific material properties and also a tool in designing devices doc10957 none This award will underwrite a symposium organized to bring together scientists with divergent opinions on questions surrounding the origins of anthropoids, the group of primates including monkeys, apes and humans. The participants will address such questions as: How are anthropoids related to other primates? Where and when did the group originate? What functional and adaptive innovations characterize anthropoids today? What is the adaptive significance and evolutionary history of these innovations? This is an exciting time for those interested in deepening our knowledge of primate evolution. Newly recovered middle and late Eocene primates from Asia and Africa have been variously interpreted as supporting competing hypotheses regarding anthropoid relationships and biogeographic origins. Equally divergent views exist concerning the antiquity of the major groups of living anthropoids-catarrhines and platyrrhines (Old World and New World Monkeys). There is an improved understanding of function and adaptation in the visual system, brain, and feeding apparatus, key anatomical systems where distinctive anthropoid features are concentrated. New methods for estimating visual acuity and activity patterns in fossil primates are providing insights into the evolution of the visual system. The rapid accumulation of information on color vision in primates, including new genetic evidence of possible trichromacy in strepsirrhines, and new behavioral data on the benefits of color vision, makes this an exciting time to evaluate the role of chromatic perception in anthropoid evolution. Research into the primate visual system by neuroscientists has generated a plethora of important data in recent years, making this an ideal time to bring these researchers together with anthropologists. Primate behaviorists and ecologists are developing new models to explain the origins of group living in primates and anthropoids provide an excellent test of these ideas. The fossil record of early anthropoids allows testing of these models, revealing novel trait combinations that can provide critical falsification of these models and suggest the sequence in which current trait associations have evolved. Molecular approaches continue to aid in clarifying our understanding of the timing and tempo of evolutionary change. The objective is to bring together some of the key researchers in these fields to discuss their views, to enhance intellectual exchanges among paleontologists and neontologists who study the visual and masticatory systems, molecular systematics, and phylogenetic analysis as applied to the study of adaptation doc10958 none Danforth and Lin Insects in the New World treehopper subfamily Membracinae (5 tribes, 38 genera and about 447 species) show a range of social behavior from (1) solitary individuals, to (2) nymphal or adult aggregations, to (3) highly developed maternal care with parent offspring communication via substrate-borne vibrations. The behavioral variation in membracine treehoppers provides an excellent opportunity to study the evolution of subsocial behavior in insects. However, our current knowledge on the evolution of subsocial behavior in this group is limited because of an incomplete picture of their phylogenetic relationships. We don t know how many times maternal care has evolved, whether maternal care gives rise to solitary behavior, or exactly how complex forms of maternal care involving communication and signalling have evolved. In order to more fully understand the historical patterns of social evolution in membracine treehoppers, a phylogenetic study of this group will be conducted using both morphological and molecular (DNA sequences from nuclear and mitochondrial genes) data by graduate student Chung-Ping Lin under the guidance of Dr. Bryan Danforth at Cornell University. New collections will be made from South America to augment existing samples and museum holdings. The results of phylogenetic analyses will provide a historical framework to reconstruct the likely direction of behavioral character changes among membracine treehoppers. This information will then be used to identify the origins of subsocial behavior and to trace the development of subsocial behavior over evolutionary time. The result of this study will contribute not only to our understanding of subsocial behavior in this fascinating group of insects but to knowledge of evolution of sociality in general doc10959 none word count: 223) Ever since naturalist Joseph Dalton Hooker explored the southern continents over 150 years ago, biologists have been interested in understanding the current distributions of related organisms in southern South America, Australasia, and or Africa. It has been argued that this austral biogeographic pattern is associated with the vicariant breakup of Gondwana that began over 80 million years ago, but a competing hypothesis suggests that the same pattern might have arisen more recently via long-distance dispersal. Fossil evidence and results from phylogenetic studies corroborate the vicariance paradigm for some woody forest groups, but few studies have focused on higher elevation herbaceous genera in southern regions. It has been suggested that these alpine herbs may not be relics of a widespread Gondwana flora, but rather the result of more recent events. Recentness is likely in alpine groups because these herbs occur in habitats that have existed only since the final Quaternary uplift of high-elevation mountains in New Zealand and South America. The subalpine, herbaceous genus Ourisia (Scrophulariaceae) comprises about 35 different species that are distributed throughout the South American Andes from Venezuela to Tierra del Fuego, the mountains of New Zealand, and high-elevation regions of Tasmania. We will reconstruct the evolutionary history of Ourisia using DNA sequence data and morphology to investigate vicariance and dispersal hypotheses as potential explanations for the austral biogeography of the genus. Significance (word count: 235) Our comprehensive phylogenetic study of Ourisia (Scrophulariaceae) presents a valuable opportunity to expand our understanding of the austral biogeographic pattern. Most biogeographic studies of plant groups that exhibit this southern distribution have focused on woody forest groups such as Nothofagus (Nothofagaceae), Araucaria (Araucariaceae), and closely related genera in Atherospermataceae. Although Gondwanan vicariance is a good model for these ancient groups, it may not apply to high-elevation herbaceous plants such as Ourisia that occupy habitats that are of more recent Quaternary origin. In addition to its biogeographical significance, our study will also allow us to examine some evolutionary patterns within Ourisia. Because Ourisia exhibits ample variation in floral morphology, chromosome number, habit, and vegetative characters, a comprehensive morphological study will provide new insights into character evolution in the genus. We will also examine radiation patterns of species in the mountains of New Zealand and South America, and discuss the general implications of areas where the phylogenetic pattern of Ourisia is congruent with current or historical barriers, geology, and climate. Our study will thus provide a reconstruction of the evolutionary history of Ourisia that we can use to: 1) provide a better understanding of the relationships of species within the genus, and between Ourisia and its closest relatives, 2) examine the biogeography of Ourisia and assess patterns of radiation within each geographical region, and 3) investigate evolution of chromosome number and morphological characters in the genus doc10960 none Common for non-specialists: (217 words) Biologists have claimed that hybridization between species is an important evolutionary phenomenon in plants, yet the vast majority of corroborating evidence derives from research using herbs growing in temperate climates. As a consequence, we do not know how accurately this assertion describes the evolutionary biology of tropical woody plants. To address the applicability of this idea to tropical plants, we will examine a group of tropical trees touted for its propensity to hybridize at the species and population level. The group, Bursera subgenus Bullockia (family Burseraceae), consists of over 40 species that range from Arizona to Bolivia. It is purported to include a handful of stabilized hybrid species and multiple, localized hybrid swarms. We will construct phylogenies or evolutionary hypotheses of relationships of the species using nuclear DNA sequences and chloroplast restriction site data to determine whether hybrid species indeed exist in this group. We will also genetically fingerprint a potential hybrid swarm of Bursera species located in the Galapagos to test for hybridity and to elucidate the geographic component of gene flow between species of these long-lived trees. The results of this study will contribute new information to our generalized understanding of hybridization in tropical, woody plants while they augment the systematic knowledge of Bursera and the exclusively tropical family of trees to which it belongs. Significance summary: (197 words) This project will examine a commonly held belief in plant evolutionary biology using a group of tropical trees. This assessment is significant because the premise that interspecific hybridization is a potent, relatively common evolutionary phenomenon is based primarily on information from temperate, herbaceous plants and need not necessarily apply to tropical woody plants, which have radically different life histories. We will increase our generalized understanding of the extent and evolutionary consequences of interspecific hybridization by testing purported stabilized hybrid species in a tropical, woody plant genus, Bursera (family Burseraceae). We will also improve our understanding of the formation of hybrid swarms and gene flow between tropical, woody plants by testing the isolated, geologically young populations of Galapagos Bursera for reported evidence of introgression. Additionally, the hypotheses of evolutionary relationships generated by this project will contribute new information to the systematics of Bursera and the Burseraceae, a family mostly unstudied at the molecular level. This project will help answer not only longstanding questions about the evolutionary history of this particular group such as whether stabilized hybrid Bursera species exist and whether Bursera can form interspecific hybrid swarms but also whether Bursera and Commiphora, its African relative, are congeneric doc10961 none Dissertation Research: A Functional and Mechanistic Investigation of Yolk Androgens in the European Starling (Sturnus Vulgaris) Elizabeth Adkins-Regan and Kevin Pilz Female birds deposit steroid hormones, such as testosterone, in the yolks of their eggs. In captive-bred canaries, high levels of yolk testosterone in eggs cause elevated growth rates and begging behavior in the chicks that hatch from those eggs. There is currently no information regarding the behavioral effects of yolk hormones in other species of birds. Nor is there well-substantiated evidence that females deposit different levels of hormones in eggs under different ecological circumstances to maximize their reproductive success. This study intends to fills these gaps in our knowledge by studying two types of yolk androgens , one being testosterone and the other being a related hormone called androstenedione, in wild-living European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris). The first goal of this research is to document the effects of yolk androgens on European starling chick growth and behavior. Eggs will be injected with hormone or with a control solution and the growth and begging behavior of the chicks will be monitored until the chicks are ready to leave the nest. The second goal of this research is to test the hypothesis that females who engage in the reproductive strategy of brood parasitism deposit high levels of yolk androgens in their eggs. A brood parasite female lays her eggs in the nests of other females to avoid raising the chicks herself; starlings sometimes brood parasitize other starlings. If yolk androgens cause chicks to compete more, by begging more and growing faster, then a female who lays brood parasitic eggs should deposit high levels of androgen in those eggs so that her chicks will be able to selfishly outcompete their unrelated nestmates. The third goal of this research is to examine whether female characteristics such as body size and age are related to the levels of yolk androgens that females deposit in eggs. This data will be used to determine if the small size and young age of brood parasitic females may explain why brood parasitic eggs have high levels of yolk androgens. This data will also be used to test the hypothesis that high quality females (larger, older females) should invest more yolk androgens in eggs than low quality females. In summary, this research will investigate within a single species of wild songbird, 1) the effects of yolk androgens on chicks; 2) whether females allocate androgens to eggs in ways which benefit their reproductive success; and 3) whether female allocation of yolk androgens varies with female characteristics such as body size and age. This research will increase our knowledge of hormone effects on development in birds and provide understanding of non-genetic means by which females can adaptively manipulate offspring characteristics. The research may also be useful as a model of maternal hormone effects on developing offspring in mammalian species doc10962 none W. Allen Miller Significant regulation of gene expression occurs at many levels after transcription of genetic information into messenger RNA. This meeting will focus on mechanisms of RNA regulation, from transcription in the nucleus until the encoded genetic information has been converted to protein via translation. Until recently, post-transcriptional events, such as mRNA processing, mRNA decay, and translation have not been studied extensively in plants. However, exciting new discoveries have revealed a plethora of post-transcriptional control events ranging from the subtle (e.g., mRNA stability) to the sublime (e.g., post-transcriptional gene silencing). The plenary speakers will cover diverse biological functions such as host-pathogen interactions, abiotic stress response, chloroplast function, and plant development. The following specific topics will be covered: RNA-mediated, post-transcriptional gene silencing; suppression of gene silencing; mRNA turnover; pre-mRNA splicing; novel viral mRNA translation mechanisms; translational control of plant genes; and bioinformatics and genomics. Attendees of this meeting will come away with an increased awareness of the amazing diversity of gene expression mechanisms. Furthermore, this meeting will highlight the need for further research into understanding post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression as more eukaryotic genomes are nearing completion and new genes are discovered doc10963 none Rand Deadly parasites sometimes turn into benevolent mutualists. Understanding the evolutionary forces that can affect this transition requires a model system in which both parasites and mutualists are found. A large body of literature exists documenting the parasitic effects of Wolbachia in the fly Drosophila simulans. However, our preliminary experiments with the model organism Drosophila melanogaster indicate that a beneficial Wolbachia strain inhabits this species. This mutualistic form of Wolbachia can extend the lifespan of D. melanogaster flies up to 35%. This research investigates whether this increased lifespan leads to enhanced evolutionary fitness. To do this, the investigators will compare the age-specific survival and reproduction of infected flies with flies that have been experimentally treated with antibiotics to remove Wolbachia infection. The experiments will improve understanding of parasite-arthropod coevolution by characterizing a novel phenotype, extended lifespan, associated with Wolbachia infection. This will allow quantification of Wolbachia s effect on Drosophila fitness and determine if normally parasitic Wolbachia are becoming mutualists in Drosophila hosts. The Wolbachia-Drosophila symbiosis may prove useful to researchers investigating the virulence of parasites, and may provide an ideal system for testing evolutionary theories about the transition from parasitism to mutualism doc10964 none A cophylogenetic analysis of avian hosts and their parasites: toucans (Aves: Piciformes) and chewing lice (Insecta: Pthiraptera) I am using nuclear and mitochondrial DNA sequences to reconstruct the phylogenetic history of an avian host group (Ramphastos toucans) and two of its parasitic chewing louse genera (Austrophilopterus and Menecanthus), which differ in life history characteristics. The object of this study is to determine how parasite groups with different ecological, behavioral and morphological characteristics respond to identical geographical and habitat perturbations (diversification and speciation of the host group). I will compare host and parasite histories by superimposing the phylogenies of the parasites and their hosts to determine whether or not parasite lineages with differences in ecology, behavior, and morphology respond similarly to speciation events in their hosts. If differences in the life history of the chewing lice are important, the different parasite lineages should vary in their degrees of cospeciation (parallel speciation). However, if parasite lineages respond to host isolation events similarly, then one would expect the phylogenetic trees of the two parasite lineages to be congruent. Insights gained via this simple system should shed light on patterns of speciation in more complex systems of free-living organisms. Phylogenetic studies can answer important questions about speciation. However, one problem faced by phylogeneticists is that, when studying free-living organisms, they often lack nformation about the history of the study organism s habitats and geographic distribution. Thus, a useful first step in phylogenetic studies is to reconstruct this history. Cophylogenetic studies of hosts and their parasites do this by superimposing the parasite phylogeny onto the phylogeny of the host. Speciation events in the host group are analogous to biogeographic vicariant events (e.g., when geographic barriers islolate opulations leading to speciation). Speciation, or lack thereof, in the parasites represents a response to geographic and ecological changes caused by host speciation events (vicariant events). By comparing parasites with different ecological, morphological, and behavioral characteristics we will begin to understand how these different life history characteristics affect the process of speciation doc10965 none Stebbins This proposal is for renewed funding for a program of research on atomic-scale structure and dynam-ics of crystalline, glassy, and molten silicates and oxides of interest to the Earth Sciences. This program emphasizes the application of techniques of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) to obtain fundamental data to help better understand and predict processes of interest in geochemistry, petrology, and geophys-ics. NMR is an element-specific experimental technique that can provide quantitative data on local struc-ture around atoms such as H, Li, B, C, O, F, Na, Mg, Al, Si, P, K (etc.) in crys-talline and amorphous sol-ids and liquids, out to distances of second atom neighbors and some-times beyond. It is also uniquely sen-sitive to atomic motions at relatively slow time scales (seconds to nanoseconds), that are particularly in-teresting in processes such as diffusion, phase transitions, and viscous flow. An unusual capability of this research effort is in situ, high tempera-ture NMR to temperatures up to degrees C. Under previous funding, this project has produced a wide range of results on coordination en-vironments of both cations and anions in glasses and melts, how composition, temperature and pressure change the structure, and how these changes affect thermodynamic and transport prop-erties. In particular, quantifying the extent of structural disorder in liquids, and relating this to configurational entropy and viscosity, have been emphasized; related questions of disorder in crystalline silicates and aluminosilicates have also been of high priority. During the current funding period, significant progress has been made in determining the degree of Al-Si ordering in aluminosilicate glasses and melts, including for the first time the use of 17O triple quantum NMR ( 3QMAS ) to directly count the proportions of Al-O-Al oxygens. A statistical thermodynamic model of the ordering, formulated independently from 29Si NMR data, is well supported by these results and allows prediction and comparison with data on properties. Other studies using this method have made new contributions to our understanding of the complex process of water dis-solution in aluminosilicate melts and to detect variations from strict aluminum avoidance in zeolites. For the latter, new NMR methods including five quantum techniques have shown dramatically en-hanced spectral resolution. A newly installed 14.1 Tesla spectrometer (600 MHz 1H frequency), and ac-cess to an 18.8 T instrument at Stanford (800 MHz), have allowed dramatic improvements in resolution and sensitivity, which have been especially useful in studying tiny (1 to 10 mg) high pressure samples to determine structural changes in melts and in mantle minerals such as Al-bearing MgSiO3 perovskite. Many of these projects will continue and be extended if this proposal is funded. A particular emphasis will be on quantifying the effects of temperature on melt structure, a critical and poorly understood issue that is at the heart of understanding melt properties. A major tool in this effort will be a recently con-structed fast quench apparatus that will allow sampling of the melt structure from a wide range of fictive temperatures , even for small, expensive, isotopically enriched samples. Further in situ, high temperature NMR will be used to characterize dynamics in aluminosilicate melts directly. Studies will continue of disorder in crystalline aluminosilicates (including framework and sheet silicate minerals), and its effects on the site-specific rates of exchange among framework oxygens and H2O. Collaborations on high pres-sure glasses will continue, to explore simultaneous changes in both cation and anion coordination and dif-ferent P T pathways for recording pressure effects on melt structure; collaborations on site occupancy and order disorder in upper and lower mantle minerals will also be extended. New NMR methods and tech-nologies will continue to be developed which should have a wide range of applicability both within and outside of the Earth Sciences doc10966 none DISSERTATION RESEARCH: The Evolutionary History of Marsupial and Placental Mammals: A Study of Evolutionary Constraints in Mammalian Limbs Karen Sears and John Flynn Marsupials compose only six percent of living mammals and are less physically diverse than placental mammals. Traditionally, it has been assumed that low marsupial diversity is due their unique mode of reproduction constraining their evolution. Immediately after their early birth, newborn marsupials, using only their forelimbs, crawl a distance one hundred times their body length to the teat where they attach and complete their development. The primary goal of this study is to test the hypothesis that the obligate commitment of the marsupial forelimb and shoulder girdle in propelling the newborn to the teat has constrained its evolution. Constraints are defined as factors that limit physical variation. Variation is the raw material of natural selection, and therefore species or lineages with more variance can evolve new physical forms more easily. Constraints have long been cited as important factors in evolutionary history but have not been adequately tested. Aside from illustrating the role of constraints in the evolution of mammalian limbs, an understanding of the role of a constraint in this system will provide a base for understanding the role of constraints in other systems. A three-tiered approach incorporating genetic, developmental physical and adult physical data from living and extinct mammals will be used to test the hypothetical constraint on marsupial forelimb development. Genetic data will provide explanations for the observed differences in timing of developmental events in marsupials and placentals. Changes in developmental timing are important because they provide a mechanism for constraint. Physical data will be used to examine patterns of variation within individuals, within species and within marsupials and placentals. If marsupials are constrained relative to placentals, they should show less physical variation during development, especially before birth, and achieve less adult physical diversity. Combining different types of data will allow unique insights into the process of evolution and the role that constraints play in it doc10967 none Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are the most common kind of beneficial fungi associated with plant roots. This study tests the hypothesis that light availability and AMF interact to influence the composition of the remarkably diverse plant communities in Midwestern oak savannas. Plants in sunnier areas have greater needs for soil nutrients, and so may benefit more from AMF (or from highly active AMF species) than plants in shady sites. Plants in shady sites should either lack AMF or be associated with species having lower metabolic rates. Shifts in the kinds and numbers of fungal species along sun-to-shade gradients may thus have a profound effect on the identity and diversity of savanna plants. To test these ideas, we will first measure the distributions of plant species and AMF species as a function of light availability and soil texture in three Wisconsin savannas. The effects of AMF on understory plants will then be evaluated by applying fungicide to experimental field plots and documenting changes in plant composition over a two-year period relative to untreated plots. Finally, we will conduct experiments under greenhouse conditions to determine the effects of different AMF species on the growth of individual plant species when they are grown alone, and on the competitive ability of those same species when grown together doc10968 none DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Worker nepotism during queen combat in honey bees Principal Investigator (thesis advisor): Thomas D. Seeley Doctoral Studies Graduate Student: David C. Gilley Nepotism is a widespread phenomenon in social animals, yet there is little evidence of it within the highly cooperative societies of insects, such as honey bees. Evolutionary theory predicts that the workers in honey bee colonies should show nepotism when there are multiple queens in a colony and they are fighting to the death to determine who will be the colony s next queen. Each worker has the opportunity to help a full-sister queen (with whom the worker shares three quarters of her genes) kill half-sister queens (with whom the worker shares only one quarter of her genes). The graduate student will determine if honey bee workers behave nepotistically during queen fighting. He will accomplish this goal in three steps (steps 1 and 2 have been completed). 1. He has observed queen fighting in a natural context and has determined that two worker behaviors, worker-queen aggression and queen-cell guarding, are most likely to be nepotistic. 2. He has labeled for individual identification the workers in five colonies and has recorded their worker-queen aggression and queen-cell guarding during subsequent queen fighting. 3. He will use DNA microsatellites to determine if the workers from step 2 more often aggressed half-sister queens and more often guarded full-sister cells. Evidence of nepotism in honey bee colonies will show that even in highly cooperative societies nepotism will occur when the benefit of nepotism (a greater share of the colony s reproductive output) exceeds the cost of nepotism (a smaller total colony reproductive output doc10969 none Iron plays an important role in the function and productivity of aquatic ecosystems, either directly, via effects on biogeochemistry and nutrient cycling, or indirectly, via effects on plankton community composition. Dr. Brzezinski and Ms. Franck would like to explore the ways in which iron availability can regulate diatom production and macronutrient cycling in the Polar Frontal Zone in the Pacific Sector of the Southern Ocean and in the highly productive upwelling areas off the coast of California and Peru. All are regions where large diatoms blooms and net CO2 drawdown can occur, but where iron (Fe) and silicon (Si) availability may play a role in regulating the timing and occurrence of these blooms and the magnitude of CO2 uptake. In this work the investigators will quantify the effects of Fe availability on Si and nitrate biogeochemistry, as well as look for mechanisms behind the observed effects, e.g. how Fe availability alters Si and nitrate uptake kinetics, diatom species composition and species-specific Si uptake doc10970 none Miksis In this proposal, it is planned to investigate both the problem of the spreading of a liquid along a solid substrate and the spreading of a liquid along a liquid interface. The Navier-Stokes equations will govern the motion of the fluids. The investigation of the spreading of a liquid along a solid substrate is interesting and difficult because of the singularities that can occur at the contact line. Spreading along a liquid interface is a challenging problem where multiple free boundaries can exist. Here, in addition to the liquid liquid and liquid gas boundaries, a triple junction can exist at the liquid liquid gas line of intersection. Predicting the dynamics of these three phase lines is one of the aims of this proposal. We will be interested in situations where the interfaces are clean and situations where surfactants are present. Mathematically we are faced with problems having coupled moving interfaces along which singularities can exits. Both asymptotic and numerical methods will be used to study these complex free boundary problems. For example, we will consider the thin film limit where the complete three-dimensional system of equations can be reduced to a coupled system of nonlinear evolution equations. We will also apply the level-set numerical method to solve the complete nonlinear system of equations. When a liquid drop is resting on a solid surface, the free boundary of the drop is characterized by the gas liquid interface, and the line of contact between the liquid gas solid phases. This three-phase line is usually referred to as the contact line. It occurs whenever three phases come into contact. It is a familiar phenomena of everyday life, and can be observed when one pours oil into a frying pan or in a partially filled wine glass. It also occurs in many areas of practical interest. Examples are industrial coating processes, the transport of gas liquid mixtures in pipes, the spreading of droplets of medication in the lungs and the spreading of liquid wastes (e.g. oil or chemicals) on the sea. The latter problem is an example of a situation where the contact line (refereed to as the triple junction in this case) occurs at the intersection of a liquid liquid gas interface. Even though the contact line occurs in these many areas, our understanding of it is very limited. Models are still being developed and because of the mathematical singularities associated with the behavior of the solutions in the neighborhood of the contact line, solution techniques, both analytical and numerical, need to be identified doc10971 none PI: Penelope F. Kukuk Social behavior is found in all types of organisms and is a characteristic of ecologically dominant species. The study of how social evolution came about has concentrated on selection. To date, theoretical and empirical work has focused on how group life and social cooperation influence survival and reproduction. This work began in the nineteen sixties and continues today. The other side of the evolutionary coin, the study of the genetic mechanisms underlying social cooperation, has been neglected. Even in the social Hymenoptera there is very little information concerning the most basic issues. It is not known to what extent differences in social behaviors among individuals in a species are based on differences in their genetic makeup. In species where females all have the potential to be competent reproductives, we do not know if there are enough genetic differences between individuals underlying any given social behavior to suggest that the behavior has the potential to evolve. Due to this lack of knowledge it is not possible to predict the evolutionary trajectory of social behaviors or to examine how inheritance of a suite of socially relevant traits may be correlated. This one-sided approach to social evolution is based on methodological constraints. Appropriate social species have neither the large reproductive output nor the ease in laboratory rearing needed to use the powerful methodology of quantitative genetic research, a methodology that can best address these questions. This limitation is changing. Due to new but well tested methods for obtaining information rich genetic fingerprints for individuals, based on multiple highly variable marker genes such as microsatellites, in combination with conceptual and statistical advances it is now possible to apply the methods of quantitative genetics to social behavior in a field setting for the first time. A collaboration between a quantitative geneticist (Allen Moore) and a behavioral ecologist (Penny Kukuk) will apply new methodologies in a field based quantitative genetic study of social behaviors for a group living halictine bee species Lasioglossum (Chilalictus) hemichalceum. This communal species, in which all group members reproduce, is an ideal species for such a study. In this species, individuals differ from one another in social behaviors and microsatellite markers are available to produce precise genetic fingerprints for individuals. Information on similarities between individuals in their microsatellite based genetic fingerprints and easily observed social behaviors will be used to determine components of inheritance for a suite of behavioral characteristics that are known to have important effects on survival and reproduction. The research will pioneer the quantitative genetic study of social behavior and pioneer the use of quantitative genetic methodology for behavioral traits in a natural setting doc10972 none D. Feener and Edward LeBrun The factors that determine which species live in a particular area and the relative abundance of those species are only partially understood. Much of our knowledge is derived from studying pairs of species interacting. Indirect effects, a second category of species interactions in which one species affects a second via its interactions with a third, can also influence community structure. Parasitism of worker ants by phorid flies changes the outcome of competitive interactions between the ant species attacked by the fly and other ant species. The result of parasitism is that the species that would normally lose to the parasitized species wins. This change in the outcome of competitive interactions constitutes an indirect effect that potentially has a strong influence on the structure of the community of competing ants. Preliminary investigation has already revealed additional indirect effects relevant to this process. The proposed research, to be conducted in Southeastern Arizona, will quantify the indirect effects that parasitism by phorid flies has on the host ant and determine how the indirect effects change the outcome of interactions between competing ants. The goals are to: 1) quantify the effect of parasitism on the ability of the host ant to compete with non-parasitized species; 2) determine whether competitors benefit from food resources lost by the host as a result of parasitism; 3) test the validity of a theory predicting how strongly the outcome of competitive interactions will be modified by parasitism. This effort is important because it will provide the first detailed investigation into how strongly indirect effects that modify interactions between species effect the identity and abundance of competing groups of species. It will directly address the predictability of this impact. It will expand our understanding of how locally co-existing groups of ant species, an extremely ecologically important group, are assembled and how phorid parasitoids impact this process. Finally, it will increase our ability to predict the efficacy of using phorid flies in efforts to biologically control invasive species of ants doc10973 none Texas wintergrass (Nassella leucotricha), a common rangeland grass, is frequently infected by a fungus (Atkinsonella texensis) that sterilizes the plant. Infected plants, however, may grow faster and be more likely to survive than uninfected plants. This study will determine whether this is true, by testing three different hypotheses: (a) The fungus may directly cause infected plants to grow faster and be more likely to survive. (b) Infected plants may recover from being eaten by insects better than uninfected plants, perhaps because they are larger. (c) Infection may make a plant less likely to be eaten by insects, perhaps because the fungus produces distasteful chemicals. This study will also test whether fungal infection affects a plant s ability to compete with other plants for light, water, and nutrients. Although fungi probably play very important roles in natural ecosystems, their roles are poorly known; this study will help fill this gap doc10974 none One of the great mysteries of the natural world concerns why males and females of the same species often differ in many morphological characters. Sexual size dimorphism (SSD), or the difference in mean body size between the sexes, is of particular interest since body size plays a central role in the fitness of an individual. With the advent of new statistical tools and conceptual advances, investigations into the evolution of SSD have moved from the traditional temporally static, single pressure, single sex perspective, to the more robust view of multiple selective forces interacting in both sexes across many generations. However, to fully interpret the evolutionary implications of these selective pressures, one must also know the underlying genetic architecture of male and female body size. This is true since genetic architecture may alter or constrain a dimorphic response to selection. Unfortunately, few studies have expanded their investigation of SSD beyond the scope of the selective pressures involved, creating a dearth of information regarding the evolutionary genetics of dimorphism. The objectives set forth in this proposal will investigate the underlying genetic structure of a sexually dimorphic trait that is known to be under selection from multiple sources. This study will employ an empirical quantitative genetic approach to generate for both sexes the variance covariance matrices (G-matrices) for body size and two other important correlated traits under selection. This will permit comparison between the sexes for differences in genetic architecture and tests for significant correlations between the sexes for homologous traits that may constrain dimorphic evolution. In addition, when G-matrices are coupled with selection gradients that describe the direction and intensity of selection, one can predict if genetic covariances will have a significant effect on trait evolution, if this effect constrains or reinforces trait evolution, and if dimorphism is still evolving. The results of this study will be of general interest as they will likely have bearing on gender-based differences for many other traits in many other systems doc10975 none Methane is a natural component of the earth s atmosphere. However, the increase in the concentration of atmospheric methane since the turn of the century is a likely contributor to the enhancement of the greenhouse effect. A significant portion of atmospheric methane comes from freshwater wetlands where microorganisms produce methane in oxygen depleted soil. It is known that microorganisms living in the oxygenated part of the soil can consume some of the methane produced, so that the amount of methane leaking to the atmosphere is the difference between production and consumption. It is also possible that this methane consumption can occur in the oxygen depleted zone of the soil, yet this process is poorly understood. Most evidence for this process comes from sediments beneath the ocean, yet I have found strong evidence that large amounts of methane also can be consumed by microorganisms in the oxygen poor soil of a freshwater wetland in central New York State. The process is elusive and linked to seasonal climate patterns, which may be why the process was not seen by earlier investigators. This proposal requests funds to examine the extent of the process in peatlands in central New York State, Maryland, West Virginia, and Sweden. These are all well studied sites where the process would be expected to occur. Primary objectives are to assess the role of microorganisms that use iron instead of oxygen to consume methane, and how iron availability might limit the process. Results of this study should provide valuable insight into the relationship between atmospheric methane and wetland methane emissions. Moreover, a mechanistic understanding of methane emissions is essential in order to predict how methane emissions from wetlands will respond to future environmental changes doc10976 none Dissertation Research: Mechanisms and Significance of Ontogenetic Changes in Respiratory Function During Insect Locomotion Jon Harrison and Scott Kirkton The goal of this research is to examine how body size affects the respiratory physiology of active insects. Initial results show that larger older grasshoppers fatigue quicker during repeated jumping, which suggests possible problems with oxygen delivery to the muscle. This project utilizes American locusts (Schistocerca americana) to determine how structural changes in both the respiratory tracheal system and the jumping muscle vary with body size during development. The tracheal structure will be measured using light and electron microscopy, while the leg muscle metabolic biochemistry will be measured using enzymatic assays. The amount of oxygen consumed during jumping will be measured for the whole animal using flow-through respirometry and leg muscle oxygen levels will be measured with electron paramagnetic resonance. The results of this project will help understand the general relationship between body size and tracheal function and provide a test of the hypothesis that gigantic insects of the Paleozoic Era were made possible by increased atmospheric oxygen levels doc10977 none This project explores the manner in which morphology has evolved over the course of the 40 million year history of the deep-sea ostracode genus Poseidonamicus. Fossil and modern specimens will be studied using scanning electron microscopy. Features of the ostracode carapace will be measured using the digital images obtained, and patterns of morphological change over time will be reconstructed. From these data, it will be determined if features that are more variable within populations are also more likely to evolve. This study will be one of the first to use the fossil record to determine if patterns of variation affect the direction of long-term evolutionary change. While the evolutionary importance of these patterns is well understood over the course of a few generations, it is not clear whether trait variability matters for long-term evolution. Several researchers have suggested that patterns of variation should act to bias or constrain the course of evolution, even over long time stretches of time. The proposed research uses the evolutionary history of a taxon with a rich fossil record to test these suggestions doc10978 none This research investigates the evolution of cooperative display behavior in lance-tailed manakins (Pipridae; Chiroxiphia lanceolata). These small, neotropical birds have a unique mating system that requires two males to cooperate in an elaborate courtship song and dance in order to attract a mate. When a female is receptive, the subordinate male leaves and only the dominant male copulates. There is no apparent conflict between the males. This sort of cooperation contradicts current evolutionary thought, which predicts that indviduals act to maximize their own reproductive success. This study will test a series of hypotheses that could explain the adaptive advantage of cooperation for subordinate males. This research represents the first thorough study of lance-tailed manakins doc10979 none Species boundaries, evolutionary relationships, and the historical biogeography of Hawaiian members of the fern genus Dryopteris (Dryopteridaceae) will be explored using both DNA sequence data and morphological data. Dryopteris is a cosmopolitan genus comprised of approximately 250 species. Nine to 16 endemic species and one non-endemic species of Dryopteris occur in the Hawaiian Islands. Species boundaries, as delimited by past morphological studies, are unclear. This research will use both molecules and morphology to address objectively the issue of species delimitations. Although confusion about numbers of species exist, it appears that the species diversity observed in Hawaii was a result of multiple, successful colonization events to the Hawaiian Islands. This study aims to determine the number of Dryopteris species present in Hawaii, the evolutionary relationships among those species, and biogeographical origins of Hawaiian Dryopteris. Although several phylogenetic and biogeographical studies have been performed for flowering plants in Hawaii, to date there are no published phylogenies for any pteridophyte group occurring in Hawaii. Pteridophytes make up about 1 5 of the native vascular plant species in Hawaii and this lack of phylogenetic information about pteridophytes represents a large gap in our understanding of the evolution of the Hawaiian flora. Additionally, the proposed research is of critical importance to the study of evolution on islands in general, and on the Hawaiian Islands in particular, because we will elucidate the phylogenetic and biogeographical history of a group of endemic species that probably represents multiple independent colonizations of the archipelago. Our results will help elucidate biogeographical processes that may contribute significantly to the biological diversity of islands doc10980 none DISSERTATION RESEARCH: The Genetic Basis of Adaptation in Thermally Adapted Escherichia Coli Albert Bennett and Michelle Riehle This project will take a genomic approach to understanding of adaptation to high temperature. The PIs will examine populations of Escherichia coli, a microbe present in the intestinal flora of all mammals, that have been cultured in the laboratory for generations at high temperature. They will examine the genetic basis of adaptation to high temperature, the degree of parallel evolution among different lines adapted to high temperature, and the reversability phenotypic and genetic changes upon exposure of populations to lower temperatures. The work addresses three main goals. The first goal is to examine how adaptation to high temperature changes the copy number of genes, either increasing copy number via duplication or decreasing copy number via deletion. The second goal is to examine how adaptation to temperature affects the level of gene expression. Lastly, given changing thermal conditions, how do organisms respond on the phenotypic or organismal level and how do they respond on the genetic level? Is there a particular pattern? Are changes at the organismal level always caused by the same genetic change, or can multiple genetic changes yield the same change in phenotype? DNA high-density arrays will be used to screen whole genomes for regions of gene duplication and deletion, and to characterize gene expression. This whole genome approach is a powerful tool in that it allows the simultaneous screening of all E. coli genes, making individual examination of all genes unnecessary. This work is important because it begins to dissect the complex process of adaptation that has intrigued comparative and evolutionary biologists ever since the time of Darwin doc10981 none This effort is designed to investigate whether galactic cosmic ray (GCR) variations that result from variations in solar activity can affect low cloud properties, and if so, to elucidate the physical mechanism and the magnitude of such effects. Distinct correlations between GCR intensity and average global coverage of low-level clouds have recently been reported. The P.I. will utilize a basic aerosol microphysics model constrained by data from recent field programs such as the Aerosol Characterization Experiments (ACE), and the TRACE-P (Transport and Chemical Evolution over the Pacific) to test several hypotheses for explaining the link between GCR and cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) in the atmosphere. The P.I. will investigate classical binary and ternary nucleation theories as well as his own ion-mediated nucleation (IMN) hypothesis doc10982 none DDIG: Cooperation and Conflict within Reproductive Coalitions of Wild Turkeys Co-PI: Walter D. Koenig Co-PI: Eileen A. Lacey Doctoral student: Alan H. Krakauer Males wild turkeys form stable coalitions during the breeding season that cooperatively court females. This cooperative behavior is puzzling because of the intense competition among males for females. The project will determine genetic relatedness among coalitions of male turkeys and provide a comprehensive view of the benefits keeping subordinate males in groups. The theoretical framework used will be reproductive skew theory, a rapidly evolving field that seeks to explain how reproduction is partitioned within social groups. Low status males may profit through direct reproduction, through indirect reproduction by helping a related group member, or by inheriting the dominant position at some time in the future. Reproductive skew models provide quantitative predictions to determine what combination of these three benefits are important for the formation and maintenance of male coalitions. These predictions will be tested by combining behavioral and genetic data on a free-ranging wild turkey population in central coastal California doc10983 none Evolutionary biologists and ecologists have long been fascinated by explosive radiations of species that exhibit tremendous morphological diversity and occupy a wide range of habitats. The flowering plant lineage Valerianaceae contains 300-350 species that have been placed in 14-17 genera, with nearly 200 of the species being endemic to South America. These species exhibit a striking range of floral and vegetative forms. It has been hypothesized that the South American species represent a recent radiation. The availability of fossils will allow us to explicitly test biogeographic hypotheses and investigate rates of speciation within this group. The goals of this study are: 1) to infer the phylogeny of Valerianaceae using several DNA sequence data sets, 2) to examine morphological character evolution, 3) to elucidate the biogeographic history of Valerianaceae, and 4) to assess rates of speciation, with an emphasis on the South American radiation. This will be the first phylogentic analysis of Valerianaceae to include a broad sample of species from each of the genera and will also provide an empirical application of several new methods for the study of rates of evolution and speciation. Specifically we will test the hypothesis that over 200 species of Valerianaceae have originated since the formation of the Isthmus of Panama some 3-6 million years ago. This project will compliment ongoing studies of other lineages of the Dipsacales and will enhance our understanding of Northern Hemisphere biogeography and the origin of the South American flora. While our main aim is to address questions of broad evolutionary significance, there is an element of urgency to this research from the standpoint of conservation. Specifically, the enormous diversity now found in the Andes of South America is threatened by human impacts on the high elevation paramo vegetation doc10984 none The function of multiple signals in avian vocal communication Stephen Nowicki Martin D. Beebee The puzzling occurrence of highly conspicuous traits in the males of many species of animals is thought to be explained by the fact that these traits act as signals to potential mates, indicating something about phenotypic or genotypic quality. This apparent resolution, however, does not easily explain cases in which individuals exhibit more than one conspicuous trait. For example, many songbirds use a combination of bright coloration and complex vocal displays in courtship, or multiple kinds of courtship vocalizations. If an individual trait can act as an indicator of male quality, what is the added function, if any, of possessing two or more such traits? The goal of this project is to study the function of multiple vocal traits in the yellow warbler (Dendroica petechia), and test a hypothesis for how different traits of an individual might function as signals. As with several groups of North American and European songbirds, yellow warblers have two distinct modes of singing: one relatively simple and one more complex. Results from previous work suggest that these singing modes are specialized for communicating different messages to males and females. This hypothesis will be evaluated using a combination of field and laboratory studies to examine three important aspects of signal function: how the singing modes are used by males, what kinds of information the singing modes convey, and how males and females respond to the different singing modes doc10985 none Speciation - the splitting of one species into two - creates biodiversity. As two interbreeding populations evolve mechanisms preventing the exchange of genes, they become new species with independent evolutionary fates. Genetic exchange between species is often limited by the sterility or inviability of their hybrids. At least in animals, such hybrid problems are caused by genetic incompatibilities: some genes from species A no longer function properly with those of species B when brought together in hybrids. The work proposed here will investigate the genes that cause hybrid inviability between species of the fruitfly Drosophila. Using the genetic and developmental techniques available in these model organisms, the project will first identify the DNA sequences of genes that miscommunicate in hybrids and, second, characterize their lethal interaction. The experiments will focus on the role of one candidate speciation gene , maternal hybrid rescue. Once identified at the molecular level, one can then ask how the sequences of such genes changed between species, why their products fail to properly interact in hybrids, and what evolutionary forces drove their divergence. Only by genetically dissecting hybrid problems can biologists begin to understand the evolution of genetic incompatibilities and thus the origin of new species doc10986 none Proposal: DEB-1- PI: N. C. Arens & C. Stromberg Dissertation Research: The origin and spread of grass-dominated ecosystems during the late Tertiary of North America and how it relates to the evolution of hypsodonty in ungulates. During the Miocene (18-15 million years ago), animals such as horses, camels, and rhinos independently evolved traits interpreted as adaptations to grasslands. These traits included high-crowned cheek teeth for processing coarse food and long legs for running. If these traits are truely adaptations, one must show that the traits arose at the same time or soon after grasslands appeared. This problem is difficult because plant fossils are absent in most places in North America where fossil animals are preserved. In conjunction with other evidence, such as those derived from pollen or paleosols, the use of a new type of plant fossil - phytoliths - will allow this problem to be circumvented. Phytoliths are microscopic silica bodies produced within the tissue of plants that allow the determination of life form (e.g., grasses versus shrubs versus tree). The proposed research will provide answers to three general questions. First, does a detailed record of phytoliths exist in North America that can be used to reconstruct vegetation type associated with animal fossils? Second, when and where do grasslands first appear in the Great Plains and how do they spread? Third, does the change to grass-dominated ecosystems happen before, coincident with, or after the evolution of animal traits associated with life in grasslands doc10987 none Miller Relatively little research has been conducted on the historical and reproductive factors that affect genetic characteristics of fungi that form mutualistic associations with host trees. In an effort to elucidate the genetic structuring of the mutualistic ectomycorrhizal fungus, Russula brevipes, studies utilizing various molecular markers were designed to determine how historical and geographical barriers (e.g., ice ages and the formation of mountains) affect dispersal, genetic makeup and population differentiation. Collections of R. brevipes from many locations in the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain region will be made to assess genetic differentiation. Ectomycorrhizal fungi (EMF) form indispensable symbiotic relationships with tree roots by providing water and nutrients, increasing seedling survivability, and protecting against root pathogenic organisms. R. brevipes forms mutualistic associations with valuable timber and recreation trees in the western U.S. including lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta), Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) and Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis). In the Rocky Mountains, lodgepole pine is never replanted into massive clearcuts and regeneration is dependent on processes of natural seedling establishment and survival mediated by EMF. It is important to understand the population biology and genetic structure of EMF, particularly since these fungi may affect survivability of their hosts by mediating competition between species through interconnected networks below-ground doc10988 none Templeton Abdominal pigmentation pattern varies widely in the genus Drosophila. In particular, the South American species D. polymorpha exhibits a range of abdominal pigmentation patterns, with light, intermediate, and dark morphs. The frequency of these morphs varies with time and space, indicating that this trait is under natural selection and thus important in the ecology of the species. The proposed research aims to understand this pigmentation pattern polymorphism from both developmental and population genetic perspectives by: 1) examining the developmental processes leading to pigmentation differences within the species; 2) correlating pigmentation differences with variation at candidate gene loci; and 3) examining the microevolutionary forces affecting current geographic distributions of the trait by determining the spatial distribution of genetic variation in natural Brazilian populations. Only a few similar studies have investigated the general question of morphological evolution at such a microevolutionary level, and only a subset of these have addressed the evolutionary forces shaping the fate of a variable trait. Finally, this proposal is unique in that it is a multidisciplinary approach, uniting investigators and integrating methods from both developmental biology and population genetics in both the United States and Brazil doc10989 none PLAYBACK EXPERIMENTS TO DEMONSTRATE CONTEXTUAL USAGE OF SHARED WHISTLES BY ALLIED MALE BOTTLENOSE DOLPHINS, TURSIOPS TRUNCATUS. Peter L. Tyack and Stephanie L. Watwood Biology Department, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Woods Hole MA . Dolphins and whales (known to biologists as the cetaceans) constitute one of the few mammal groups that demonstrate highly developed vocal learning abilities. Dolphins not only learn to produce an individually distinctive signature whistle as infants, but adults retain the ability to imitate sounds. There has been growing interest in the role of vocal matching during the formation of social bonds in birds and humans, and dolphins provide an opportunity for studying this issue in a mammal that independently evolved abilities of vocal learning (Tyack ). Call imitation is used in bird species primarily between individuals with close social relationships or between territorial competitors. Most evidence suggests dolphins match calls either to initiate an interaction with another individual, or as a badge of group membership. When dolphins are interacting, they may imitate the individually distinctive whistle of an animal with whom they share a strong bond. Smolker and Pepper ( ) described whistle convergence in socially interacting male dolphins which formed a close-knit alliance, suggesting that whistle sharing is important for individuals with close relationships. This study proposes to examine the use of convergent or imitated whistles by allied male bottlenose dolphins in naturally occurring reproductive contexts or other social contexts. Playback experiments will test whether allied male bottlenose dolphins use shared whistles to attract potentially receptive females or to guard females from competitor non-alliance males. It has been difficult to study the individual vocal responses of free-ranging animals until recently. This study uses a small, towed linear array that can determine the direction from which sounds are produced in the water column, allowing for the identification of individual signalers (Tyack and Miller ). The research will be carried out in Sarasota Bay, Florida, where a community of individually identifiable dolphins has been studied for 30 years. Playback stimuli will be generated from high-quality recordings from a variety of age-sex classes recorded during temporary capture-release events during the last 15 years. Analyses of these recordings for alliance males demonstrated a high degree of similarity between the whistles of alliance partners. This proposal makes use of recent developments in acoustic localization to obtain identified whistles from free-ranging, socially interacting bottlenose dolphins. The combination of focal behavioral sampling, acoustic localization, and playback experiments presents a new way to understand the role of imitation in social communication. Playback experiments have been invaluable in deciphering the use of specific vocalizations in birds and primates. The proposed research presents an opportunity to examine acoustic social behavior in cetaceans on a much finer scale than previously attempted with free-ranging animals. The results from this study will be much more comparable to similar studies in terrestrial species doc10990 none This project will investigate the evolutionary origin of bryozoans, a group of aquatic animals with many species that form colonies by asexual reproduction. Although association of bryozoans with molluscs, annelids, and other protostome taxa is well supported, relationships among these groups is not. Data suggesting that bryozoans diverged from a common ancestor before other members of the clade Lophotrochozoa is, however, intriguing and warrants further investigation. The present study will investigate Hox genes, which are important transcription factors in early development. The DNA sequence of Hox genes, as well as their arrangement within the genome, has been conserved over the course of animal evolution, making them good candidates for understanding relationships between widely divergent groups of animals. DNA sequencing and gene mapping will be utilized to investigate the Hox genes of representatives from two major lineages of bryozoans, cheilostomes and phylactolaemates. These data will be combined with other information to infer the relationships between bryozoans and other major lineages of animals. Results of this study will provide important information concerning the early evolution of animal development and body plans. Additionally, the sequencing and mapping of bryozoan Hox genes will provide a platform for future work on the origins of zooid polymorphism in bryozoan colonies doc10991 none Stroud Theoretical research will be conducted in three areas of materials research: (1) the physics of superconducting arrays and related materials: (2) fluctuations and inhomogeneities in cuprate-based high temperature superconductors; (3) linear and nonlinear response of macroscopically inhomogeneous materials. Superconducting arrays are arrangements of superconductors which are weakly coupled together by Josephson or proximity-effect interactions. They have a wide variety of potential applications and are also good models for superconducting thin films. In this area continued study of underdamped Josephson arrays coupled to a resonant cavity will be carried out. In addition, a study of noise produced by magnetic flux motion in arrays and films will also be undertaken, as well as a study of conditions under which a superconducting array can lock into a coherent state. Finally, a study will be made of quantum effects in superconducting arrays, films and smaller groups of junctions. Models for terahertz absorption in the underdoped high temperature superconducting materials will be studied. Also to be investigated are models of low-angle grain boundaries in the ab-planes of the high temperature superconductors, since grain boundaries limit the critical current. The c-axis current-voltage characteristics of these materials will also be investigated, as well as the conditions governing the position and width of the Josephson plasmon resonance in the most anisotropic materials. Also, recent calculations o fquantum melting of the vortex lattice at zero temperature will be compared to experiment. The PI will also extend recent work on macroscopically inhomogeneous media to the study of magnetic composites. Here the problems to be addressed include magnetoresistance arising from the inhomogeneous conductivity tensor in a material with a ferromagnetic domain structure, and the behavior of magnetic multilayers coupled through nonmagnetic layers, which will be studied by a model analogous to the Lawrence-Doniach treatment of layered superconductors. Finally, the PI will study the electromagnetic response of collections of small metal and dielectric particles contained in an optical microcavity. The research involves studies of several fundamental questions in condensed matter physics, and may lead to a wide variety of technological applications. It will also contribute to human resources in science and technology by training graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. %%% Theoretical research will be conducted in three areas of materials research: (1) the physics of superconducting arrays and related materials: (2) fluctuations and inhomogeneities in cuprate-based high temperature superconductors; (3) linear and nonlinear response of macroscopically inhomogeneous materials. The research involves studies of several fundamental questions in condensed matter physics, and may lead to a wide variety of technological applications. It will also contribute to human resources in science and technology by training graduate students and postdoctoral fellows doc10992 none Annual reproductive output has been shown to be a major factor affecting the recruitment, and hence the abundance, of Neotropical migrant birds. This study will identify and evaluate the mechanism(s) driving reproductive output that are critical to understanding current and future population trends of these species, many of which are declining. A review of the literature and analysis of breeding data on Black-throated Blue Warblers (Dendroica caerulescens) reveals that an important factor affecting the number of breeding attempts, and hence productivity, is territory level-food availability. This study will test to see if food is a causal factor using a food supplementation experiment. Additionally, observational data will be collected to test the alternative hypotheses that nest site availability, male assistance protection, or female quality drives the number of breeding attempts and therefore annual reproductive output. This research contributes to current knowledge by examining population-level questions from the perspective of the individual female. Using a mechanistic approach, coupled with modeling this study will provide information necessary to assess how species respond to perturbations, which is especially import in light of proposed changes in species abundance due to global warming, habitat fragmentation, and other anthropogenic effects doc10993 none Soil aggregates, groups of soil particles bound together into a larger structural unit, may be important regulators of carbon and nitrogen cycling in soil. Aggregates physically protect organic matter from microbial oxidation and provide microsite habitats that may favor greenhouse gas production. Aggregate structure is typically lost following soil disturbances such as tillage, and the recovery of aggregate structure could help mitigate environmental problems related to carbon and nitrogen cycling. Accelerated carbon and nitrogen transformations in disturbed ecosystems contribute to a number of environmental problems, including greenhouse gas accumulation, groundwater contamination, and soil erosion. This research will examine soil aggregation and its effects on carbon and nitrogen cycling in ten ecosystems on the same soil series along a disturbance gradient. The systems range from intensively managed, row crop agriculture to late successional forests. The research will test hypotheses about the recovery and breakdown of aggregates on soil carbon storage, trace gas fluxes, and microbial population structure doc10994 none Brodie Coevolution is the process by which two participants reciprocally affect the evolution of traits in each other. Typically, coevolution is considered to be a process that occurs between different species. The geographic mosaic theory of coevolution predicts that coevolutionary interactions will vary across geographic locales. Furthermore, this theory states that processes that differentially affect the genetic makeup of individual locales (e.g. migration, extinction, recolonization) will play a role in the outcome of the coevolutionary interaction globally and locally. The current research will test how migration between populations affects the dynamics of a predator-prey coevolutionary interaction on different geographic scales. The target species for the project are the toxic newt Taricha granulosa and its resistant garter snake predator Thamnophis sirtalis. Data on toxicity in newts and resistance in garter snakes will be collected to evaluate the strength of the coevolutionary interaction in populations. Tissue samples will be collected for genetic analyses that will estimate migration between populations. This research will test the geographic mosaic theory of coevolution in a predator-prey system, thereby giving a better understanding of coevolutionary interactions. Understanding how species interact is important to the understanding of ecosystems and important to the conservation of ecosystems. Migration of animals between populations can play a critical role in the balance and persistence of populations. This project has implications for the release of captive bred animals into natural populations (simulating large scale migration). Additionally, tetrodotoxin (the toxin found in Taricha) is widely used in neurobiology as a sodium channel blocker. Studying garter snake resistance sheds light on natural sodium channel variation and function in the nervous system doc10995 none Landscapes, both natural and human-altered, are a mosaic of habitat types. The success of an individual in finding high quality habitat within this mosaic will affect both its survival and the dynamics of whole populations. This investigation examines the interaction between individual behavior and population dynamics across a landscape by studying the eastern painted turtle. The researchers ask how pond quality, size, and location and the types of intervening habitat influence the movement of turtles between ponds. Measuring growth rates and reproductive output will assess the impact of movement on individuals. The effects of these movements on population processes (birth, death, immigration, and emigration rates) for each pond and across the landscape will then be determined. One of the consequences of current land use practices is an increase in the fragmentation of habitat. Habitat areas suitable for supporting wildlife are becoming smaller and more distant from each other. Information on how species react to and cope with small, isolated habitats embedded in unfavorable landscapes is needed in order to conduct proper management. This research is one of the most detailed examinations into individual behavior at the landscape level yet to be conducted. It will provide concrete evidence for the importance of integrating behavior and population dynamics doc10996 none Proposal DIG: Interspecific interactions in stage structured population models: The effects of herbivores and pollinators on Trillium grandiflorum Susan Kalisz , Tiffany Knight The growth rate of a plant population depends on the strength of its interactions with herbivores and pollinators, as well as the stage in the plant life-cycle in which these interactions take place. Thus, variation in the magnitude of interactions with herbivores and pollinators among plant populations can cause variation in the rates of growth among natural plant populations. If populations that have a high density of flowering plants are more attractive to both herbivores and pollinators, then the magnitude of their interactions with both herbivores and pollinators may be expected to change deterministically as plant populations grow or decline in time. I have collected preliminary data on 12 populations of Trillium grandiflorum, a perennial forest herb. The magnitude of its interactions with its mammalian herbivore, white tailed deer, and insect pollinator, bumblebees, vary highly among these populations, and these interactions primarily influence the reproductive stage in the plant life-cycle. In a pilot experiment that manipulated plant density, significant changes in the magnitude of both plant-herbivore and plant-pollinator interactions were found. In this proposed work, I will quantify the amount variation among populations that is caused by variation in herbivore and pollinator interactions. In addition, among several populations, I will experimentally manipulate the plant density to more fully quantify the density-dependent influences of herbivores and pollinators on Trillium survival, growth and fecundity. I will use a modeling framework to synthesize all of this information and assess the effects of changes in interspecific interactions on the growth rate of plant populations doc10997 none Shkoller This three year research effort is founded upon the author s recent development of a novel Lagrangian averaging procedure for the Euler and Navier-Stokes equations of fluid dynamics. The method is based on expressing the exact Lagrangian fluid flow as a composition of a smooth deterministic volume-preserving Lagrangian flow and a rough stochastic flow consisting of volume-preserving near-identity transformations. This decomposition is asymptotically expanded about the identity, substituted into the variational principle, and then averaged. The resulting deterministic system of equations is termed the Lagrangian averaged Navier-Stokes (LANS) equations in the presence of viscosity, and the Lagrangian averaged Euler (LAE) equations in the ideal case when viscosity is absent. Both the LAE and LANS models are parameterized by a small spatial scale alpha, and are derived in such a fashion as to accurately reproduce the dynamics of the Euler and Navier-Stokes equations at spatial scales larger than alpha, while averaging (or homogenizing) the fluid motion at scales smaller than alpha. Unlike current approaches such as Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) or Large Eddie Simulation (LES) models which add artificial dissipation to the system to remove subgrid scales, the LAE LANS equations preserve the underlying structure of the inviscid dynamics, namely, energy, helicity, and circulation, by instead using a geometric, nonlinear dispersive mechanism. As a result, our LANS model, unlike RANS or LES, does not artificially suppress intermittency, a fundamental feature of fluid turbulence. The resulting system is a set of dynamically coupled partial differential equations for the mean velocity field and covariance tensor. This system will be the backbone of a massive analytic and computational assault on the modeling and understanding of fluid turbulence. Although heavily studied by numerous researchers for over a century, incompressible fluid turbulence elusively remains one of the last great challenges of modern scientific exploration. Its understanding is of paramount importance in a wide range of engineering and physical applications, ranging from the design of airplanes and automobiles, to daily weather forecasts and global climate prediction. Roughly speaking, a flow becomes turbulent when all of the spatial scales in the fluid are activated, or in other words, when the fluid is moving so chaotically, as to create smaller and ever smaller vortices. In such a flow regime, the trajectory of each fluid particle appears unpredictable, yet the challenge is to derive a mathematical set of equations which can describe this unpredictable motion. About 150 years ago, the Navier-Stokes equations were introduced for this very purpose, and although it is now generally accepted that these equations do indeed provide a remarkable physical model of reality, it remains a mathematical mystery as to whether or not unique solutions to these equations exist for all time. Moreover, even numerical approximations of these equations on the world s fastest supercomputers are incapable of modeling the small-scale structures and patterns which are formed in a turbulent regime -- the computer simply runs out of memory long before it can simulate the prohibitively small vortical motion. The LANS model, described above, is intended to alleviate these fundamental difficulties, and make the computational simulation of turbulent flows feasible doc10998 none An intriguing reproductive feature of Daphnia and other Cladocera in lake plankton is that they produce dormant eggs that can hatch after many years in lake sediments. Dormant Daphnia eggs in lake sediment are a zoological analog to the seed banks of terrestrial plants in soils. Dormant eggs in surface sediment are a reservoir of genetic diversity for active populations, and older eggs in deeper sediments are a record of genetic structure in past populations. This project will analyze the genetic composition of the Daphnia egg bank in sediments from a Minnesota lake to evaluate whether the population has evolved in response to natural selection imposed by predation by rainbow trout that have been stocked annually for the past 40 years. It will 1) compare the genetic composition of the egg bank at times in the past with that of the active resident population and 2) estimate the effects of hatching of dormant eggs in surface sediment on the demography of the active population. A novel feature is that for the past decade this lake has been monitored the genetics and demography of active zooplankton populations, permitting evaluation of the linkages between active populations and the pool of dormant eggs. The goal is to link short-term variations of genetic diversity to long-term evolutionary dynamics doc10999 none The mutualism (actinorhizal symbiosis) between the genus Cercocarpus, a shrub or tree in the rose family (Rosaceae) found in western North America, and Frankia, a nitrogen-fixing filamentous bacterium, is a system that may have experienced cospeciation. We propose to generate hypothesized evolutionary histories for Cercocarpus using DNA sequence and chloroplast restriction site data, and strains of Frankia infective on Cercocarpus using DNA sequence data. We will also test the host-specificity of these Frankia strains towards Cercocarpus species and other plants that have the ability to interact with Frankia. In addition, we will test whether the evolutionary histories of Cercocarpus and Frankia exhibit a pattern of cospeciation. The phylogeny produced for Cercocarpus will help clarify the confusing taxonomy, species boundaries, and relationships among species in this genus. Our study will be one of the first comprehensive examinations of possible cospeciation in groups involved in actinorhizal symbiosis. No comparably broad surveys of infective strains of Frankia exist for an actinorhizal genus, nor such broad scale identification and description of strains infective on members of the rose family. Information on the strains of Frankia infective on the members of the rose family can be used in comparisons with other known actinorhizal groups and our documentation of the diversity of Frankia may identify strains that can be used in agriculture doc11000 none DIG - Leibold, M. and Hall, S. Why do environmental changes affect composition of species among different localities? What role do species play in the cycling of energy and nutrients in ecosystems? These important yet difficult questions still challenge ecologists mechanistic understanding of nature. However, recent experimental and theoretical evidence suggests that a new approach to studying species interactions may help ecologists tackle and integrate these two questions. This approach, called ecological stoichiometry , incorporates constraints imposed by mass balance of key nutrients (such as phosphorus and nitrogen) into descriptions of plant-herbivore interactions. Our research program focuses upon improving these descriptions and evaluating the importance of stoichiometry in complex natural and semi-natural, experimental conditions. Currently, we are learning that, in ponds, species composition of zooplankton grazers is sensitive to changes in the relative proportion of phosphorus and carbon contained in their algal food. Furthermore, the elemental quality of this food is driven, at least in part, by the relative and absolute supply of light and nutrients to pond ecosystems. In our future work, we plan to more intensely quantify temporal dynamics of plant-grazer interactions in differing light:nutrient environmental regimes and with differing levels of predation pressure upon grazers. This focus upon dynamics will enable us to more quantitatively evaluate the role that ecological stoichiometry may play in nature and to integrate it into extant mathematical theory. Ultimately, our goal is to understand how supply of key resources to ecosystems influences composition of plant and herbivore species and flow of energy through food webs. Ecological stoichiometry may provide a valuable framework to achieve this goal doc11001 none Understanding the way in which predators interact with prey communities is a central challenge of ecology, and becomes more difficult and important in habitats disturbed by humans. Habitat destruction and nutrient enrichment, common anthropogenic effects on ecosystems, may shift systems from being prey-limited to being habitat-limited, with important consequences for predators. Predators may be less effective at controlling prey populations, and this likely has far-reaching effects on ecosystem characteristics. Pacific northwest streams provide a compelling example of these dynamics. Preliminary evidence for larval Pacific giant salamanders, dominant predators in old growth forest streams, suggests that logging shifts the ecosystem from being prey-limited to being habitat-limited. Experimental food and habitat addition at old growth and logged sites will determine whether salamander larvae are limited by habitat or by prey. Further, manipulating salamander densities and monitoring the prey community will determine the relative impact on the abundance and diversity of prey doc11002 none Mueller The overall objectives of this research project are to clarify relationships within the genus Porpidia (lichen-forming Ascomycota), and to analyze the distribution and interdependence of transitions between reproductive modes within and among its species. The genus was chosen, due to its accumulation of closely related taxa that show contrasting reproductive modes. The P. flavocoerulescens (sexual) P. melinodes (asexual) species pair was selected for detailed population-level analyses. Hypothetical patterns of changes between the two modes of reproduction will be tested using a phylogenetic approach. The underlying population structure and history within the species pair will be studied using an integrated phylogeographic and genealogical analysis. Today the significance of sexual and asexual reproductive modes and their continued coexistence are still unsolved, despite the in-depth theoretical attention the issue has received. This situation is in part due to the scarcity and disparate nature of available empirical data, which do not allow stringent tests of proposed hypotheses. Model systems such as Porpidia that include closely related species with different modes of reproduction ranging from sexual to asexual provide important means to gain insight into the history and consequences of different levels of recombination. So far, investigations have concentrated almost exclusively on either the phylogenetic or population-genetic aspects of the problem. The present study will be the first in lichenized ascomycetes to integrate both phylogenetic and population-genetic approaches. It will not only infer patterns of evolutionary history, but also provide insight into the underlying population processes and historical events shaping these patterns doc11003 none Vilgalys This research focuses on the genetic basis for reproduction in mushroom-forming fungi. Genes will be isolated from several mushroom species through a method termed positional cloning . Because of the hyper-variability of mating-type genes, these genes cannot be isolated or cloned using standard protocols. As an alternative strategy, positional cloning utilizes the conservation of genes adjacent on the chromosome to the target genes. This technique will be applied to isolating the genes controlling mating in oyster mushrooms as well other mushroom species that represent unusual breeding systems. Finally, the proposed research will determine whether the positional cloning strategy can be successfully applied to isolating mating genes from the various and diverse subgroups of mushrooms. Mushrooms are atypical because natural populations of these fungi can contain numerous sexes, called mating-types. Unlike animals and many plants that determine sexes through sex chromosomes, mushrooms achieve multiple sexes through variation at a single genetic locus. The genes controlling mating-type in mushrooms have been isolated and the function of the mating-type proteins is well known. However, mating-type in fungi has been studied only in two species. Because of the great amount of variation in reproductive mode among the mushroom fungi, it is important to expand the knowledge of how mating type genes function to represent the diversity of this ecologically important group of organisms doc11004 none This project will utilize a multi-fluid global simulation of the magnetosphere to study several important questions concerning the interaction of the magnetosphere with the ionosphere and with the plasma sphere. It will examine how changes in ionospheric conductance modifies the cross-polar cap electric potential drop, the effects of ionospheric mass loading on the evolution of the magnetosphere and how the introduction of heavy ionospheric ions affects the reconnection process in the magnetotail doc11005 none Rice Speciation involves the splitting of a population, such that the members of either of the new populations are unable to mate and produce fertile offspring with the members of the other. In nearly all cases, little is known about exactly what biological changes are responsible for this reproductive isolation. The proposed research will address this question using the rotifer Brachionus plicatilis, populations of which inhabit salt lakes and coastal ponds worldwide and exhibit a range of abilities to interbreed. First, two genes from B. plicatilis will be sequenced to determine genetic divergences and the evolutionary relationships (i.e., a family tree) between different populations. Second, representatives of different populations will be crossed and the fate of the hybrids followed closely. The following specific questions will be addressed: What trait differences causing reproductive isolation arise first (i.e., what initiates speciation, and what finalizes it)? What evolutionary processes are responsible for their divergence? How rapidly can and does a new species originate? Understanding the biology underlying the evolution of reproductive isolation is critical to a general understanding of the processes responsible for producing biological diversity. Furthermore, many groups of organisms, including rotifers, have hidden species, populations that are fully reproductively isolated but do not look distinct and are thus not recognized as distinct species in most surveys. In addition to determining the true number of species currently lumped together as Brachionus plicatilis , this study will provide insight into the mechanisms by which hidden species arise and how common they are, an understanding of which is essential to any accurate assessment of biodiversity doc11006 none Dissertation Research: Nutritional Ecology of Social Insects Joan M. Herbers and Timothy M. Judd Seasonal changes affect the foraging strategies of animals. Previous experiments demonstrated that colonies of the ant Pheidole ceres change their foraging behavior seasonally. When presented with both sugars and proteins, the ants increased their intake of protein when they had more larvae in the colony. In this proposed study, two hypotheses to explain that increase will be examined. First, the way in which the workers assess the needs of the larvae will be explored. Colonies will be split into four subunits, each given a different diet, and then the brood will be exchanged between them; offering choices between proteins and sugars throughout the experiment will show how the treatments affect the ants foraging decisions. Second, the types of nutrients stored by ants will be assessed by measuring total protein and total fat found in individual ants collected throughout the year. Finally, the ants foraging behavior will be compared to the types of nutrients they are storing. Together, these experiments will provide insight to how ant colonies meet nutritional demands doc11007 none Systematists are charged with the difficult tasks of quantifying and characterizing diversity in large groups of organisms and of identifying discontinuities in morphological or genetic diversity that correspond with species delimitations. These tasks are especially critical for groups that have, 1) species that have become model systems for studying evolution and ecology, and 2) a large number of rare or threatened species. Species in the plant genus Mimulus have become model systems for the study of evolutionary processes in nature due to the diversity of interesting traits and adaptations in the genus. Species in this worldwide genus have different chromosome numbers, reproductive strategies, and pollinators, and interesting adaptations to extreme environments. Many species of Mimulus are also rare. Phylogenetic estimates of widely distributed, species-rich groups are important, because they give biologists the opportunity to study broad-scale diversification events, in which parallel radiations into spatially separated, similar environments may have occurred. An estimate of the evolutionary relationships among the species is useful in documenting these radiations and enables comparative analyses. The role of systematists in delimiting species is equally vital. Conservation plans and studies of evolutionary processes require accurate circumscription of species. The purposes of this project are: 1) to determine the relationship of Mimulus to other genera, 2) to determine whether Mimulus is a natural group, 3) to estimate species-level relationships and define taxonomic units within Mimulus and 4) to explore evolutionary patterns in the newly recognized radiation of Mimulus in Australia. The proposed research will accomplish two goals. We will use DNA sequence information from two different genomes to further develop species-level phylogenetic hypotheses in the newly recognized Australian Mimulus clade. These analyses will provide an appropriate global perspective on diversification in the newly circumscribed family Phrymaceae. These will also provide an explicit phylogenetic framework for evaluating morphological changes in this group and will serve as a basis for future comparative studies. We will use DNA sequence and polymorphic DNA fragments to analyze patterns of genetic diversification in Mimulus sect. Eunanus. These patterns will be used to guide taxon delimitation and will serve as a model for defining taxa in groups with few morphological character differences. Because many of its species are rare, accurate species delimitation in Mimulus is critical to establishing appropriate management policies doc11008 none This research addresses the roles of direct organic nitrogen (N) uptake in higher plant nutrition and terrestrial ecosystem nutrient cycling. It is hypothesized that plant use of organic N, particularly free amino acids (AA), is more prevalent in terrestrial ecosystems than currently perceived. Although the extent of AA uptake may depend on a variety of soil and plant factors, AA uptake may act as a general mechanism of plant N acquisition along with mineral N uptake. The research will use stable isotope labeling techniques in field and greenhouse experiments to investigate the generality of AA uptake, and to quantify the contribution of directly acquired external AA to plant productivity and nitrogen cycling for four contrasting ecosystems in the Southeast USA. This research will investigate AA uptake by plants growing in situ in temperate terrestrial ecosystems, and the ecological implications of AA uptake in these ecosystems doc11009 none Rausher Natural populations of the tall morning glory (Ipomoea purpurea) are commonly infected by a fungal pathogen, Coleosporium ipomoeae. This plant has a single gene with two alleles that condition either complete resistance or susceptibility to infection. Both alleles are represented in natural populations of the tall morning glory, a pattern found in many wild plant species. This observation contradicts the intuitive prediction that an allele providing resistance against a harmful pathogen should approach a frequency of one. Hypotheses proposed to explain the resistance susceptibility allele paradox suggest the net benefit of a resistance allele is mediated by inherent costs when the pathogen population is dynamic. This project will use field experiments to explore the potentially conditional benefits of the resistance allele in the tall morning glory. This work attempts to explain how natural selection may act to maintain genetic variation using the resistance susceptibility allele paradox as a case study. In addition to contributing to the resolution of a fundamental issue in evolutionary biology, this work may also have applications to crop breeders who have historically incorporated resistance alleles from the wild progenitors of crop plants. As many countries become increasingly skeptical of transgenic crops, there is a renewed need to understand how natural selection acts on resistance alleles in natural populations, both to better utilize current resistant crops and to better conserve the natural resource that resistance alleles represent doc11010 none This research will examine classified satellite images of Arctic sea-ice in order to evaluate the temporal and spatial change in melt ponds in the sea-ice. Sea-ice impacts the heat budget of polar areas by reflecting a large majority of incoming solar radiation, hence reducing the effect of solar heating. As the summer season progresses, melt ponds develop, absorb significantly more sunlight, and increase the ice melt rate. Details of the development of melt ponds can be obtained by direct examination of high-resolution visible satellite images. The proposed research will utilize images from 4 areas of the Arctic and 3 summer seasons ( - ) and will evaluate the change in extent of melt ponds and open water as the summer season progresses. The results will be declassified and open to the public doc11011 none In many fire-prone ecosystems of North America, the historical fire regimes have been disrupted for decades, resulting in decline and disappearance of unique species that reside in them. This study will determine the effects of experimental fire regimes on the Big Pine Partridge Pea, Chamaecrista keyensis (Fabaceae), a legume herb that only occurs in pine rocklands of the lower Florida Keys. Lower Keys pine rocklands are one of the fire-dependent ecosystems in Florida, but their historical fire regime is unclear. An ongoing, larger study funded by the Department of the Interior, includes experimental treatments (summer burn, winter burn, and unburned controls) on blocks of pine rockland on Big Pine Key. Within this design are detailed plant population studies, including monitoring soil seed bank dynamics. Preliminary results indicate that the winter burn treatment may be the most beneficial for maintaining or increasing populations of Big Pine Partridge Pea. These seasonal fire treatments are being repeated to see whether this trend holds. This study will also determine the relationship of Big Pine Partridge Pea population dynamics with habitat variables influenced by fire. This research will help to identify the historical fire regimes under which the Lower Keys pine rocklands and their unique species evolved. Results will shed light on the processes that can lead to local population decline and extinction of a rare species doc11012 none Project Description The Plethodon jordani complex is an assemblage of seven high-elevation mountain species that show little morphological differentiation, but contain high levels of genetic differentiation according to surveys of protein variation. Cycles of temperature change during the most recent ice ages are predicted to have caused repeated episodes of population isolation and contact as salamanders tracked their favorable environments. These contrasting episodes may have caused genetic ivergence when isolated and genetic mixing while in contact. In many cases it is unclear how the interplay of these forces has affected species formation in this species complex. Objectives of this research are to utilize mitochondrial DNA sequences in tandem with the existing protein variation data to test hypotheses of genetic differentiation and hybrid formation among fragmented populations in the P. jordani complex through phylogenetic analyses. Project Significance Few phylogeographic studies have sufficient sampling to detect on a fine geographic scale the patterns of genetic fragmentation and secondary contact among natural populations. This study seeks to provide a detailed and fine-scale phylogeographic test of species hypotheses that were generated from protein variation. The relatively limited distribution of the Plethodon jordani complex allows extensive sampling across its distribution and, therefore, near complete characterization of genetic diversity for a mitochondrial gene. The large sample sizes and mitochondrial DNA sequences allow us to distinguish ongoing dynamic gene exchange among populations versus historically discontinuous patterns of gene exchange. Furthermore, the existence of extensive surveys of protein variation provides an ideal situation for examining combined data sources for quantifying evolutionary divergence among populations and species formation doc11013 none Attempts to predict ecological response to global climate change must start with a comprehensive understanding of factors influencing current spatial patterns of vegetation. The proposed research examines the relationship between patterns of vegetation in old-growth forest and environmental factors likely to change under scenarios of global warming. Previous analyses have shown the need for better landscape-level estimates of fundamental environmental properties. Consequently, fine-grain measurements of temperature and moisture will be collected across an experimental watershed in the Western Cascades to address this critical need. An additional sampling effort will focus on an active area of community transition, because shifts in these transitions have been highlighted as potential early warning signs of climate change. This research will examine how temperature and moisture influence the transition from forest dominated by Tsuga heterophylla to forest dominated by Abies amabilis. Simulation models based on generated data will facilitate synthesis and identify areas of potential climatic sensitivity doc11014 none DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Female influences on sperm storage and use in two species of tephritid flies with divergent mating systems Dr. William J. Rowland Ann. H. Fritz Female choice is a form of sexual selection well documented at the level of precopulatory choice and helps to explain many male traits (e.g. peacock feathers). After or during copulation, however, females may differentially influence the fate of ejaculate from two or more males to affect paternity outcomes. This phenomenon, referred to as cryptic female choice (CFC), is currently under intense investigation because 1) it adds a new dimension to the evolutionary conflict between the sexes, and 2) it changes our views on the degree to which females influence male reproductive success. This study examines the relationship between two species of tephritid flies with divergent mating systems and the potential for female influence on sperm use and storage. One species mates infrequently and has a complex courtship behavior, whereas the other species mates frequently and has minimal courtship behavior. CFC is predicted to be more important in species that exhibit multiple matings with little pre-copulatory choice. This study uses a multi-pronged approach to estimate the presence and degree of female influence on reproductive outcomes by examining sperm storage, mating behavior, neuromuscular control, and paternity outcomes in relation to male characters doc11015 none The family Lasiosphaeriaceae is one of the largest and least studied families in a group of fungi known as pyrenomycetes. It contains several ecologically and economically important genera, which occur throughout temperate and tropical regions and produce minute, dark-colored, flask-shaped fruiting structures on wood and dung. Numerous genera have been transferred into this family without critically assessing their evolutionary relationships. This study will (1) provide a monophyletic circumscription of the Lasiosphaeriaceae and test hypotheses about morphological characters currently used in ascomycete systematics; (2) provide a taxonomic revision of Lasiosphaeria, one of the largest and most complex genera in the family. Lasiosphaeria; (3) focus on the L. hirsuta and L. ovina species complexes, establishing species boundaries. This study will serve as a model system for future studies in ascomycete systematics by using a multi-gene approach, incorporating both protein-coding and ribosomal genes, along with morphological characters for determining phylogenetic relationships at the specific, generic and familial levels. The Lasiosphaeriaceae and its type genus Lasiosphaeria are of particular systematic interest for several reasons. Phylogenetic analyses of DNA sequences that included single representatives of four of the ten families of Sordariales suggested that the order is not monophyletic. A detailed assessment of the evolutionary relationships among these families is needed to address this issue, but a meaningful sampling strategy requires revision of key genera like Lasiosphaeria. The Lasiosphaeriaceae either contains, or is closely related to, the family containing Neurospora and Sordaria. Representatives of the Sordariaceae will be included in our analyses to evaluate these generic and familial relationships. Ascospore morphology has been used extensively throughout the filamentous ascomycetes for distinguishing families and genera even though this one-character taxonomy has never been rigorously tested. This study will be the first to objectively test the evolutionary potential of this character system. Although many Lasiosphaeriaceae are encountered throughout temperate and tropical areas, identification guides are not available. With the aid of digital image capturing systems, this study will produce detailed hardcopy and web-based identification guides for taxa in the Lasiosphaeriaceae doc11016 none Carter Evolution can occur through several different processes. One process that has important implications for the evolution of many traits, including those related to aging, is the correlated response of a trait at one age to selection on that same trait at a different age. More specifically, how a trait measured at many different ages (also called an ontogenetic trajectory) responds to selection at one specific age is poorly understood. In this study, lines of laboratory mice selected for voluntary activity and unselected control lines will be used to examine the influence of early-age selection on a trait s ontogenetic trajectory. In both populations, the ontogenetic trajectories of one morphological and two behavioral traits will be described, changes in the patterns of genetic variance and covariance of all three traits across all ages measured, and patterns of genetic variance and covariance partitioned to determine how genetic variation contributes to each trajectory. These results will provide predictions about the effects of future selection on each ontogenetic trajectory, identify genetic tradeoffs during aging, and determine the effect of selection on the genetic variation underlying each trait. This information is important to the further development of evolutionary theory, and to gaining a better understanding of the genetics and evolution of aging doc11017 none DISSERTATION RESEARCH: An Ecophysiological Approach to Understanding Nitrate Metabolism and Photosynthesis Timothy Sherman and Julien Lartigue All plants and especially aquatic plants are subject to temporal variation in the availability of nutrients and light. As a consequence, many plants appear to have evolved a capacity to regulate their metabolism in response to these fluctuations. How plants tune their photosynthetic and nutrient assimilation pathways to the ambient conditions and integrate these two fundamental processes is the focus of this research. Three cosmopolitan genera of macroalgae - Enteromorpha (Chlorophyta), Gracilaria (Rhodophyta), and Gelidium (Rhodophyta) - will serve as the plant models for this work. The goals of this research are 1) to understand how non-synchronous fluctuations in light and nitrate availability influence nitrate metabolism and 2) to develop a model for predicting rates of nitrate reduction in the field. The fate of nitrate, from uptake to assimilation, will be tracked using the stable isotope, N15, while pulse amplitude modulated (PAM) fluorometry will allow for repeated, non-invasive sampling of photosynthetic pathways. This integrative approach will lead to a linking of the physiology of nitrate metabolism and photosynthesis in the context of a plant s physical and chemical surroundings. The result will be a more complete picture of macroalgal physiology at the level of the whole organism. This work also seeks to integrate research with undergraduate education by including aspects of this research in a marine botany course doc11018 none Clark Ethanol and acetic acid tolerance are highly positively correlated across populations of D. melanogaster and species of Drosophila. The non-independence of traits associated with different steps in the ethanol and acetic acid detoxification pathway underscores the need for a pathway analysis of ethanol and acetic acid tolerance. Analysis of this complete pathway was hindered by the fact that only ADH and aldehyde oxidase (ALDOX) could be studied at the biochemical and molecular levels, leaving the third step in the ethanol detoxification pathway, catalyzed by acetyl Co-A synthetase (AcCoAS), uncharacterized. Identification of AcCoAS from the complete genome sequence of D. melanogaster and recently developed molecular probes for the AcCoAS reaction now allow for a complete pathway analysis of ethanol and acetic acid tolerance. We hypothesize that selection for both tolerances operates on the entire detoxification pathway and will shape the patterns of variation and covariation between the three key enzymes in the pathway. A combination of techniques will be employed to quantify variation in and covariation between nucleotide sequence data, mRNA expression levels, enzyme activities and tolerance to both ethanol and acetic acid. The research funded by this Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant takes an evolutionary quantitative genetic approach to characterize the relationship between genetic variation and enzyme activity variation at all three steps in the pathway and the consequences of this variation on ethanol and acetic acid tolerance. The findings will be analyzed in the context of metabolic control theory and will allow us to make predictions about the genetic and biochemical responses to selection on organismal performance doc11019 none DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Examining genetic similarity, mating behavior and fitness consequences in a simultaneous hermaphrodite Dr. Andrew Sih Thomas M. McCarthy Genetic similarity may play an important role in both mate choice and reproductive success, but few studies integrate these inter-related fields. Physid snails are simultaneous hermaphrodites that can both self-fertilize and outcross, and are thus an excellent system for addressing questions about the role of genetic similarity in mating behavior, mate choice and reproductive fitness. This study includes a series of experiments that integrates these issues. It will also consider additional factors that may affect the interplay between genetic similarity, behavior and fitness. The study will be comprised of three experimental sections. The first section tests for any effects of genetic similarity on mating behavior in paired snails, and for effects of genetic similarity on reproductive output and offspring hatching rate. These reproductive consequences will also be examined for self-fertilizing individuals. The second section of the study tests whether the genetic similarity of potential mates affects mate-choice decisions in groups of three individuals. The behaviors and reproductive consequences observed in the first section of the study will be used to make a priori predictions about mating frequencies during these interactions. The third section tests whether additional factors (predation risk, food availability, temperature regime and reproductive status) affect mating interactions and measures of reproductive fitness within pairs of snails with varying levels of genetic similarity doc11020 none The goals of this study are: 1) to infer the phylogeny, or set of genealogical relationships, of Hibbertia using chloroplast and nuclear DNA sequences; 2) to document the pattern of floral development using Scanning Electron Microscopy for selected Hibbertia species; 3) compare the sequences of developmental events between species in the context of a relativistic time course, so that developmental events may be compared without the assumption that similar appearing stages in the of different species represent units for direct comparison. The combination of data on the pattern formation and relative timing of organ development will then be analyzed in a phylogenetic context, so that hypotheses of how relative changes in the timing of developmental events have affected mature floral form may be explicitly tested. Preliminary data suggests that in one major group of Hibbertia, the timing of the origination of the carpels (female floral organs) has been advanced, relative to the initiation of stamens (male, pollen-producing floral organs), so that the carpels take up space on the lower half the floral meristem (aggregation of undifferentiated, embryonic cells) that in other taxa produce stamens. The result of relative timing shift is the transition of a radially symmetric patterning of stamens around the flower, to a bilaterally symmetric arrangement of stamens formed exclusively on the top half of the flower. This study will be among the first to elucidate the evolutionary processes behind differences in floral morphology at the level of the floral groundplan. The study of floral morphological diversity stands as one of the principal foci of botanical research. While the implications of this field for flowering plant classification have been the most long-standing and far-reaching, the study of floral evolution impacts economically important disciplines such as horticulture and plant breeding. A group with particularly great potential to further our understanding of the evolution of floral form is Hibbertia (family Dilleniaceae), a genus of ca. 150 species distributed in Australia, New Caledonia, and Madagascar. What makes Hibbertia such an ideal candidate for such a study is, as put forth by the great evolutionary botanist G. L. Stebbins ( ), that [t]here is probably no other genus of angiosperms that exhibits such a high degree of variation in those characteristics that are often regarded as fundamental and are usually associated with the separation of genera or even higher categories doc11021 none DDIG - DEB- The Effects of Increasing Atmospheric CO2 on Plant Defense Against Pathogens When grown under elevated carbon dioxide, plant leaves typically contain lower concentrations of nitrogen. Because plant defenses against herbivores and pathogens are nitrogen-intensive, rising atmospheric CO2 may make it more difficult for plants to mount an effective defense against pathogens, particularly if they are required to defend themselves against an herbivore at the same time. I will expose turnip grown under current and twice current levels of CO2 to a bacterial pathogen, and measure levels of both salicylic acid (a signal molecule in pathogen response) and anti-pathogen proteins. I will also simultaneously expose a subset of plants to simulated herbivory, and measure levels of protease inhibitors (a nitrogen-rich anti-herbivore defense). Together, these experiments will allow me to determine whether there is a trade-off between defense against pathogens and against herbivores, and whether this trade-off will become more severe as atmospheric CO2 continues to rise doc11022 none Bolger This research investigates local and landscape-scale controls on the abundance of the spring salamander, Gyrinophilus porphyriticus (Plethodontidae), in headwater streams throughout the northeastern United States. Spring salamander abundance is negatively related to (1) post-timber harvest accumulation of sediment in streams, (2) the presence of predatory brook trout, and (3) distance to other streams which are potential immigrant sources. Experiments exploring the combined effects of sediment level and brook trout on spring salamander survival are proposed. These experiments will address the hypothesis that post-harvest sediment input reduces the survival of larval spring salamanders in streams occupied by brook trout by reducing the availability of refuges among the rocks of the streambed. Species abundance is controlled by factors acting both locally and at the landscape-scale. Local controls include within-population reproduction and survival rates. Landscape-scale controls are a function of dispersal rates among populations. Landscape-scale controls have been shown to be critical to species persistence in natural systems affected by human activities, but are poorly understood in stream systems. These experiments will elucidate how habitat disturbance affects species interactions in headwater streams and will permit the assessment of the mitigating influence of among-stream dispersal. This analysis will expand understanding of the basic ecology of stream species, and significantly improve the effectiveness of recovery strategies for these species following timber harvest doc11023 none Methyl halides are important trace gases in atmospheric chemistry. Methyl bromide and methyl chloride supply a significant amount of inorganic chlorine and bromine to the stratosphere where they catalyze ozone loss. Methyl chloride, methyl bromide and methyl iodide are also active in lower atmosphere chemistry and may impact the cleansing rate of the troposphere. Consequently, methyl bromide, a widely used agricultural fumigant, is being regulated in the U.S. and abroad. As anthropogenic sources of these gases decline with time due to regulation natural halogen sources will dominate. Agricultural emissions of these gases must be quantified and understood. Recent field research has shown that globally significant amounts of methyl bromide and methyl iodide are produced by worldwide rice agriculture. We propose to determine the effects of certain abiotic factors (including soil halide amounts and light levels) on methyl halide production in rice and to examine the underlying physiology and biochemistry of the plant response. These studies will incorporate in-situ (seasonal greenhouse measurements) and in-vivo (leaf-disk enzyme assays) studies doc11024 none Diana Lane, University of Illinois, Chicago. Ecosystem restoration has become a widespread activity in recent years. Little is known, however, about the success of restoration projects in restoring soil quality. The objectives of the research are 1) to characterize changes in soil nutrients as restoration proceeds over time, and 2) to determine the mechanisms that control such changes. The investigators will conduct field studies and experiments across a unique 25-year chronosequence of tallgrass prairie restoration sites that were created on former agricultural land. An important aspect of this research is to determine whether the temporal and spatial variability of soil resources increase following restoration. Variability in soil resources is characteristic of natural systems but may decrease when soils are used for agriculture. Results from this study will improve understanding of the functional consequences of restoration. In addition, these results will have broader implications for understanding the development of plant-soil feedbacks following disturbance doc11025 none PIs: Joel Brown & Erin O Brien The way a plant grows roots in response to soil nutrients and the roots of other plants has important consequences with respect to its fitness (i.e., growth, survivorship, and reproduction), competition among plants, and plant community organization. The proposed research models and tests how root allocation can provide an indicator of competitive ability in different species. A three-pot design with two split-root plants provides each plant with the choice of proliferating roots in an exclusive space versus a shared space. Differences in competitive abilities between pairs of plants should manifest in predictably different strategies for allocating roots to the exclusive and shared pots. Garden plot experiments will then verify that the plant s rooting strategies predict outcomes of competition. The entire approach aims to show that plants may be much more animal-like in their behavior than previously thought doc11026 none The George V Coast (140 - 150 degrees E) is an understudied coastal region of Antarctica. This Small Grant for Exploratory Research adds a biological component to a project focusing on the shelf and bottom water formation along the coast. This research will determine basic information on the biological oceanography of the region and in particular, how its productivity is related to the local hydrographic fields. The specific goals are 1) to map the chlorophyll a distribution and the photosynthetic capacity of the phytoplankton of the regions, 2) to characterize the phytoplankton and microzooplankton populations in the region by direct microscopic analysis, and 3) to measure nitrate and silicate levels in the various water masses. These goals will provide information on to what extent biological production relates to regional water masses, on the biological nature of the local production and the association between function groups of plankon and the water masses of the region, and on the interaction between phytoplankton growth and nutrient draw-down. Results from the study can be used as the basis for more extensive hypotheses about the biological production and flux in the region and are likely to catalyze further research in the understudied Southern Ocean doc11027 none Judy A. Stamps Alison M. Bell Despite considerable public and scientific concern about the presence of anthropogenic chemicals in the environment that can interfere with the endocrine system (endocrine disrupters), little is known about the effects of chronic exposure to low levels of endocrine disrupters on animal behavior. The proposed project will: 1) Determine how lifetime exposure to environmentally-relevant levels of ethinyl estradiol affects behavioral development, life history traits and biomarkers of endocrine disruption in threespined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus); 2) Determine how chronic exposure to low levels of ethinyl estradiol affects the developmental trajectories of full sib families of stickleback from two populations where adults differ in behavior, morphology and life history. The proposed experiment will examine the influence of lifetime exposure to low levels of an exogenous estrogen on the development of behavioral traits. It will contribute to the growing literature on endocrine disruption by relating widely-used toxicological biomarkers with ecologically relevant traits, such as life history and behavior. In addition, the study explicitly examines intraspecific variation (among full-sib families and populations) in susceptibility to endocrine disruption. These data will shed light on important questions regarding the source of population-level variation in stickleback doc11028 none The objectives of this research are to investigate relationships of red, mud, spring, and many-lined salamanders (Pseudotriton, Gyrinophilus, and Stereochilus), evaluate the factors that have determined their geographic distributions, and assess species boundaries in the group. Specimens from throughout the ranges of these species will be examined using both molecular and morphological data. DNA markers will also be developed that will allow reliable identification of larvae of the red and mud salamanders (Pseudotriton); these are important components of many aquatic systems but are extremely difficult to distinguish based on morphology. Plethodontid salamanders are model organisms for a wide variety of ecological and behavioral studies, but very little is known about phylogenetic relationships and species boundaries within and among the genera Pseudotriton, Gyrinophilus and Stereochilus. Preliminary mitochondrial DNA sequence data suggest greater species diversity than previously thought. Nuclear sequences will also be examined to test phylogenetic hypotheses based on the mitochondrial data. Pseudotriton ruber exhibits genetic homogeneity throughout the Appalachians but considerable diversity in the lowlands, suggesting a higher degree of gene flow in highland populations of this species than that observed for any other plethodontids. This study will allow tests of hypotheses regarding high- versus low-elevation centers of diversification in plethodontids, and has broader implications for understanding of historical biogeography, patterns of biodiversity, and conservation in eastern North America. This work will also result in a major taxonomic revision of the Pseudotriton Gyrinophilus doc11029 none Stanton Unlike humans, plant species often have more than two sets of chromosomes. These polyploid plants, 30 to 70% of all plant species, are usually unable to mate with diploid individuals with two sets of chromosomes, and so they are considered different species. When a polyploid plant originates from diploid progenitors, how does it succeed, if the surrounding plants interfere with reproduction? One possibility is that the two types of plants have different habitat requirements. If so, their spatial separation may prevent reproductive interference. This project will examine whether the plant species, Ranunculus adoneus, with 16 or 32 chromosomes have different requirements for their survival, growth, and reproduction. Populations with different chromosome counts grow in separate places in the Colorado Rockies. This experiment will monitor survival and growth of seedlings transplanted between locations. Reproductive interference will be demonstrated if adding pollen from the other plant type reduces the number of seeds produced. Understanding the forces generating and maintaining biological diversity is one of the fundamental goals of biology. Polyploid speciation has been an important process leading to new plant species, but is not well understood. This study asks how new plant species originate, and so seeks to understand a major source of plant diversity doc11030 none This study tests for effects of habitat heterogeneity in population dynamics of snowshoe hares, critical prey for many coniferous forest carnivores, including Canada lynx. Prevalent hypotheses appeal to habitat heterogeneity and resulting source-sink dynamics to explain the lack of hare population cycles in their southern range (the contiguous U.S.A.). Veterinary ultrasound and radio-telemetry will estimate birth, survival, immigration and emigration rates in different forest stand structure types. These estimates will test hypotheses of population dynamics in heterogeneous landscapes. Computer models will test for influences of landscape configuration on the relative importance of different vital rates. An experiment will test for changes in hare abundance resulting from pre-commercial thinning, a common silvicultural perturbation in forest habitats. This study will test theories that explain why certain animal populations do or do not cycle from high to low density, a central question in ecology. They will also inform federal, state, and private management of forested habitats where snowshoe hare population size, and Canada lynx population viability, are of concern and provide research training for undergraduate student-scientists doc11031 none Is it possible that a plant s growth form predicts plant chemistry? We investigate the association between evolutionary changes in growth form and shifts in plant chemistry with this research. The genus Adenia (Passifloraceae) provides an ideal group to research this and related questions. With ca. 90 species, species in this group have diversified into trees, succulent shrubs, tuberous herbs, tuberous vines, caudiciforms, fibrous rooted vines, and lianas, as well as variants on these basic forms. In addition to this remarkable growth form radiation, the chemistry is varied and appears to play an important role in the plants interactions with Acraea caterpillars and various Chyrsomelidae which use Adenia as a host. By constructing a molecular phylogenetic hypothesis of the relationships of species in Adenia, we hope to test the monophyly of the group and determine where Adenia fits within the Passifloraceae family. During the second phase of the research, we investigate the development and evolution of stem anatomy as it relates to growth form. We test the hypotheses that the ancestral growth form is a vine (implying that the trees, shrubs, and herbs are derived from vines) and that the succulence observed in the trees and shrubs is a result of paedomorphic processes. Ultimately, we map leaf cyanogenesis and leaf tannin content on the phylogeny to test hypotheses developed from allocation theory and apparency theory. We believe that cyanogenesis will be highest in vines whereas tannins will be most concentrated in other more apparent growth forms. Furthermore, we predict that changes in stem anatomy will correlate with changes in chemistry. Species of Adenia are distributed throughout the Old-World tropics. Hearn has traveled to South and Eastern Africa to make field collections and observations of the Adenia there. This fall and winter, , he will travel to Madagascar to research the 20 Adenia endemics found there. This DDIG support provides the funding to carry out both the Malagasy research, the anatomy research, and parts of the molecular and chemistry research doc11032 none Schaal Domestication occurs as humans select and cultivate plants from wild populations. In many crop species, the adoption of high-yielding, uniform cultivars has resulted in the abandonment of genetically variable, indigenous varieties. It is well known that during these later stages of domestication, genetic diversity is lost as high-yield crops are developed; however, the fate of genetic variation during the early stages of domestication (prior to intensive plant breeding) is not known. This study examines the process of domestication in a tropical fruit tree, the purple mombin (Spondias purpurea L.), which is believed to be in the early stages of domestication. DNA sequence data will be used to pinpoint the geographic origin of the purple mombin, and to examine relationships among cultivated and wild populations. Genetic variation will be quantified to determine the proportion of total variation captured in the cultivated populations. Recently, much attention has refocused on crops and their wild relatives as concerns mount about the lack of genetic diversity in cultivated species. This proposal will result in a comprehensive assessment of the origin, distribution, and amount of genetic variation in a tropical fruit tree, providing insights into the evolutionary processes involved in the domestication of our cultivated plants. Historical knowledge of cultivated plant populations will yield critical information required for developing conservation strategies doc11033 none eproductive cooperation and conflict in the white-throated magpie-jay John McAllister Eadie, PI Elena Catherine Berg, co-PI This study will analyze the relationship between kinship, parentage, and behavioral variation within a Costa Rican population of white-throated magpie-jays (Calocitta formosa), a highly gregarious bird inhabiting the tropical dry forests of Central America. In this cooperative breeding bird, territorial groups typically consist of a breeding pair, their immature offspring, and one or more helpers (adult offspring that forego their own breeding attempts and assist the breeders with nest-building, defense against predators, and feeding of the incubating female and her nestlings). In most cooperative breeders, males act as helpers, but the magpie-jay is particularly interesting in that these sex roles are reversed: only females stay behind. This provides a rare opportunity to study interactions between related females and assess the factors affecting female reproductive decisions. Specifically, we will test a recent model of reproductive behavior that predicts the precise conditions under which females should 1) lay eggs parasitically in the nests of other females, 2) breed alone, or 3) act as non-breeding helpers in their natal territory. By testing the specific predictions of this model in a field setting, it will be possible to evaluate the factors affecting reproductive decisions among females, creating a springboard for future research on the relationship between cooperation and conflict in birds. To test this model, behavioral and molecular data will be collected on multiple groups of magpie-jays during three breeding seasons. Observational data will be collected on patterns of nesting and helping behavior, and molecular analyses of blood samples collected from adults and nestlings will be used to establish the reproductive output of individual females as well as patterns of kinship within and among groups. This is an exciting new approach because it offers a fresh outlook on female alternative reproductive tactics, provides a theoretical framework for linking cooperating breeding and parasitism, and outlines specific predictions that can be tested in the field doc11034 none Venable The researchers are studying the annual vs. perennial habit as alternative strategies for persistence in variable environments in a group of related plants native to the arid western United States. They will be using DNA sequence data to infer the ancestor-descendant relationships in the Section Anogra of the genus Oenothera (Onagraceae). They will test the association of the annual habit with aridity in the context of this hypothesis of relationships. In addition, they will use demographic studies of an annual species and a closely related perennial species to test for patterns of survival and fecundity predicted to favor the annual vs. perennial habit. The combination of large-scale (phylogenetic) and small-scale (demographic) comparative studies will allow the researchers to examine both the pattern of evolutionary change and specific mechanisms driving this change. It has long been suggested that the transition from the perennial to annual habit is an important pathway of diversification and adaptation in arid lands. In this study of the selective forces driving changes in habit, the researchers will further the understanding of the drivers of biotic diversity in arid lands, and the means by which plants persist in variable environments in general doc11035 none Wainwright Sympatric speciation, in which a single population undergoes an evolutionary split into two co-occurring species, has been a source of controversy for 50 years. Many biologists believe species split only when populations are geographically divided. Skepticism about sympatric speciation is due to theoretical criticisms and the paucity of unambiguous examples. The idea has regained acceptance lately, due to accumulating empirical examples and supportive theoretical analyses. However, the theory relies on population dynamics that have never been soundly demonstrated in nature. The hypothesis is that competition among individuals in a population is strongest among common phenotypes, weakest for rare phenotypes, so that the average individual does poorly while unusual individuals escape competition and do relatively well. The investigators will use observational surveys to test whether such disruptive selection occurs naturally in populations of freshwater stickleback fish. They will also conduct experimental population density manipulations to test whether competition is the underlying cause. This research will test the assumptions underlying recent advances in speciation theory. It is also relevant to understanding how individuals in a population subdivide their resources, which affects both population dynamics, and how an invading species adapts to a new environment doc11036 none Milligan The performance of individuals within populations and the ability of populations to respond to selection, e.g., due to environmental changes, have received special attention by conservation biologists. In particular, small relative to large populations are generally regarded as either containing individuals expressing deleterious genes or lacking sufficient genetic variation to respond to selection. The quantitative genetics measures of inbreeding depression and heritability quantify these effects, and ideally such measures would be available for both small and large populations of the same species. This study is using innovative molecular genetic methods to measure these quantities in populations of Aquilegia (Ranunculaceae; columbines) that vary dramatically in total population size. DNA genotypes will be used to determine how related inviduals are within the populations; statistical models will then be used to estimate the quantitative genetics parameters describing inbreeding depression and heritability. Because populations of different sizes will be studied, a relationship between these measures and population size can be detected if it exists. Conservation biology has increasingly relied upon molecular genetic variation. However, to fully understand how that variation relates to adaptive differentiation, evolutionary potential, and resistance to the threat of extinction--all critical concerns of conservation biology--a better understanding of the quantitative genetic basis of adaptive traits is critical. Furthermore, the assumptions mentioned above about how population size affects that basis require empirical testing in natural populations. This novel study addresses and empirically tests important phenomena in biological conservation using measurements of quantitative genetics in field environments doc11037 none Although southwestern forests historically have been subjected to a disturbance regime that includes frequent fires, many tree species are sensitive to fire, especially during juvenile states of development. Paradoxically, fires occurring at mean intervals should exclude even dominant species such as Ponderosa Pine. This suggests that extended intervals without fire are required for the establishment of Ponderosa pine and other fire-sensitive species. Within this context, the proposed research addresses central issues in disturbance ecology with important implications to forestry and resource management. The effects of temporal variation in fire-return intervals are investigated with respect to the demography of dominant and sub-dominant species of tree, as this can have a significant impact on forest diversity. In addition, mathematical models are developed which consider the likelihood of fires occurring within a specified area. This provides quantitative insights concerning the scaling of effects for disturbance doc11038 none Proposal: Principal Investigator: Shubin, Carol A. Institution: California State University at Northridge This proposal concerns the completion of several works of Thomas H. Wolff. Wolff s recent unfinished work concerns the restriction conjecture and Kakeya problem, Anderson models, and spectral gap properties of measures. In addition, he was in the process of writing an introductory book for analysis students about the restriction conjecture and Kakeya problem. Wolff was a recognized leader in the field of harmonic analysis. He received the Salem prize and Bocher prize for his work, as well as being invited to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians in and . Many projects were in progress at the time of his tragic death on July 31, . The PI proposes to undertake supervision of their completion doc11039 none Schmidt Ley Dissertation Research: Seasonal changes in biomass and diversity of microbes in an extreme environment Life in the soils of high elevation talus slopes is microbial. Like soils of polar deserts, high elevation talus slopes are characterized by cold temperatures, extremely low humidity, little liquid water, high light and UV-B levels, and extreme temperature cycling across the freezing point. What controls microbial production and biomass? Early findings by the PI and graduate student Ruth Ley have shown that the microbial ecology of this system is exceedingly complex, and is characterized by seasonal variations in bacterial and fungal assemblages. These intriguing findings have raised the possibility that very different suites of organisms comprise these groups. To investigate this possibility, the PIs will apply molecular analyses to the techniques used to estimate microbial functional group biomass. This study will contribute to the field of microbial ecology in extreme environments, and also to elucidating the environmental roles of microbial groups about which little is known doc11040 none Luqi Naval Postgraduate School Monterey Workshop - Engineering Automation for Software Intensive System Integration A 3-day workshop, to be held in Monterey, CA on June 19-21, is organized for the dissemination and integration of recent research results related to the production of reliable cost-effective software in heterogeneous environments. A major goal of the workshop is to help the software engineering community focus on issues that are vital to improving the state of software engineering practice, including all topics related to supporting engineering automation of reliable, cost-effective, integrated, distributed software development processes. The workshop activities aim to assess current research efforts in this area, identify results and directions that can increase the degree of automation, aid tool integration by building a common understanding, and increase the practical use of formal methods doc11041 none This action is to support a field survey, in Easter Island and the Juan Fernandez Islands off Chile, of the Aleutian tsunami. The April 1, Unimak Island, Alaskan tsunami remains a geophysical mystery: It was generated by a relatively moderate earthquake, yet it produced the highest waves recorded in historical times in Hawaii, where it killed 159 people and caused considerably more damage than the nearby earthquake (a much larger seismic event), or even the great Chilean tsunami that was triggered by the largest earthquake ever measured. Seismic information is scant, and the only realistic possibility of understanding this event appears to be hydrodynamic inversion from inundation data around the Pacific. Criteria for the accuracy of hydrodynamic inversions are not well established, but it appears that the geographic distribution of data is at least as important, if not more so, than the number of data points. Until recently, it was believed that the tsunami had little impact south of Hawaii. However during a field survey of an tsunami in the island of Fatu Hiva in September , the International Tsunami Research Team discovered large rocks that were reportedly moved inland in , at about the time of the Aleutian tsunami. Some of the rocks were found 300m inland. In the summer of , a joint US France expedition was able to document these findings. The team interviewed eyewitnesses and their accounts helped develop approximate inundation maps for the Marquesas from the April 1, event. This field survey of the Aleutian tsunami in Easter Island and the Juan Fernandez Islands off Chile is very timely, since the location of these islands allows the measurement of free field inundation data - assuming that eyewitnesses can be found. During the Marquesas survey, the ITST interviewed about 40 eyewitnesses on 6 islands (and an additional 10 on 2 of the Society Islands), many quite elderly. Apart from the advanced age of the expected eyewitnesses, there is another compelling reason for performing this survey: preliminary analysis suggests that a landslide was involved in the Aleutian tsunami. If this is the case, then accurate hydrodynamic inversion is urgently needed to identify the landslide source. Inundation maps for Hawaii are currently being re-evaluated, and inundation maps for the Pacific states of the US mainland are being developed for the first time. Tsunamis from the Aleutians need to be carefully reassessed, particularly in view of the landslide trigger potential, so that the new evacuation maps are developed with the best available technology and field knowledge doc11042 none The development of all organisms is regulated by a wide variety of genes that interact and control one another. Recent research has revealed that many of these sets of genes are shared across a wide variety of plants and animals. A very real question then emerges: if the same genes influence development in all of these organisms, how do the organisms come to be so different from one another? Obviously, the properties of the genes themselves must be changing through time. This project aims to address the question of how quickly these changes occur and whether or not the rate of change is influenced by a gene s role in the regulatory hierarchy. This research focuses on several naturally occurring species of monkeyflowers (Mimulus) and measures rates of change for three genes that interact in regulating flower development using DNA sequencing and an analysis of genetic variation both within and between species. This work will shed light on how variation in developmental processes can lead to the vast diversity we see among living organisms. This not only addresses a fundamental issue in biology, but can also lead to a better understanding of the function of the genes themselves, which has potential implications for both agriculture and human health doc11043 none A central goal of biology is to understand ecological and genetic factors which have contributed to the diversity of life. Adaptation to different ecological conditions occurs through changes in the genome and in visible traits. Few studies have analyzed the genomic differences underlying divergence. This project aims to answer fundamental questions regarding the adaptive differences between two dramatically different wild populations of Mimulus guttatus (yellow monkeyflower). One population consists of tiny, small flowered annual plants living in extreme alpine conditions. The other population includes large-flowered perennials inhabiting sand dunes in a coastal temperate environment. This study will use genome mapping approaches to identify and characterize the genetic basis of trait differences in a common garden environment. In addition, this experiment will reveal how particular genotypes perform in different natural environments with respect to fitness. By analyzing recombinant inbred lines (advanced generation hybrids between annual and perennial) in a reciprocal transplant experiment, fitness variation associated with specific genomic regions in each of the two natural environments will be assessed. This genetic dissection of local adaptation will help clarify which traits and chromosome regions are associated with performance in the wild. Results of these experiments will provide an unusually complete understanding of basic evolutionary questions, such as how genetic differences contribute to an organisms ability to occupy diverse ecological environments doc11044 none Walker This Americas Program award will support Dr. Robert T. Walker of Michigan State University in collaboration with Marcellus Caldas and Joaquin Bento de Souza Ferreira, both of the University of Sao Paulo. The purpose of this proposal is to organize a social science workshop to address our collective understanding of the processes driving tropical deforestation, and to identify potential policy responses. Three subjects will be addressed: (1) research methodology, (2) the drivers of deforestation, (3) and policy responses. The objective of the conference is to bring together researchers of various disciplines, working at different geographical levels in the Brazilian Amazon, to facilitate the integration of their work into more universal theories about the social dimensions of tropical deforestation. The workshop by its very structure will facilitate international collaboration on key research questions and will establish generational continuity in the social science research community studying the Amazon doc11045 none Turner, Albert J. Parrish, Edward A. Association for Computing Machinery Special Projects: Group Travel to 7th IFIP World Conference on Computers and Education (WCCE ) This proposal requests support to bring US participants to a major international conference on the use of information and communication technologies in education and on the teaching of computer science. The travel program will be administered jointly by the Association for Computing Machinery in association with the IEEE Computer Society doc11046 none The accuracy of positioning systems that use piezoelectric actuators is limited by a hysteresis relationship between the input to the actuator and the resulting displacement. The positioning accuracy of the system can be improved by minimizing the effect of the hysteresis. To reach this goal it is necessary to have an accurate representation of the hysteresis, and a control strategy that provides compensation for the hysteresis. Recent work has demonstrated the feasibility of using the KP operator to model hysteresis. This work also demonstrated the use of the inverse KP operator to create an open loop control that minimized the positioning error caused by the hysteresis. The results of that work are restricted to an actuator working under a fixed set of operating conditions. As these conditions change the performance of the model and the control degrade. To remedy this situation the proposed three year research program will focus on the modification of the KP operator so that it is capable of modeling hysteresis over a wide range of operating conditions (temperature and load). As before, the inverse operator will be used as part of a controller designed to minimize positioning error over a range of operating conditions. The major program tasks are: 1) The determination of the conditions necessary for data that is used to identify the nonnegative measure of the KP operator; 2) The modification of the KP operator to explicitly include variables associated with the temperature of the actuator and the load acting on the actuator; 3) The inversion of the modified KP operator and the development of a control based on this inverse. Computer simulations and experimental data will be used to evaluate the relative performance of the KP and modified KP operators. Similarly, the performance of controllers based on the inverses of both operators will be compared to determine if the positioning accuracy of the actuator can be improved by incorporating load and temperature variables into the KP operator. A key component of many mechanical systems is the positioning subsystem. This subsystem typically consists of a controller that uses sensor information to drive an actuator such that a desired position is attained by a system component. For a satellite-tracking antenna, it may be the system that aims the parabolic antenna dish at the desired point in the sky, or it is the system that is used to position a specimen under the probe tip in a scanning probe microscope (SPM). Whether it is a system for pointing an antenna or imaging microscopic structure, the accuracy of the positioning directly impacts the overall effectiveness of the system. For an SPM a piezoceramic type actuator is used for positioning. A relationship between the actuator input and the resulting position, called hysteresis, limits the accuracy of this type of actuator. The hysteresis introduces a positioning error that cannot be effectively minimized with conventional control strategies. However, over the past decade several methods have been developed that are capable of minimizing this error for fixed operating conditions. The proposed program is directed at extending a method based on the KP operator so that it can be used to reduce the hysteresis error over a range of actuator operating conditions. The two major benefits of the program are: 1) The results can be used to improve the accuracy of currently installed positioning systems such as those used for microscopic imaging and integrated circuit production and 2) The program will actively engage a diverse undergraduate student population to state of the art research. The second of these benefits is as significant as the first, for this effort will include the development of an experimental test facility at Ferrum College for both computer simulation work and experimental testing. Students at the college will be active participants in the design, implementation and execution of experiments directed at the development and evaluation of the hysteresis models and the actuator controllers. Additionally, they will apply material learned in their undergraduate courses to analyze experimental data and system performance. The program will provide a rare opportunity for undergraduate students in this region to experience advanced research typically only found at a major research university or industrial research center. This program will also be an introduction for this region of the state to advanced technology doc11047 none Immigrants in the contemporary world are faced with significant problems of identity, since modern technology facilitates a transnational existence with ties in both current and original cultures. A major issue faced by migrants is adjusting their desired family size to their new circumstances. Traditional societies stressed large numbers of children while modern societies have a reduced vision of a reasonable family size. This research by an anthropologist and a historical demographer studies how Malian immigrants to Paris restructure and negotiate their identities as parents. Within the family men and women face contradictory pressures. Biomedical messages promoting fertility control, Islam, and French immigration policy have generated conflicting responses of accommodation and resistance resulting in marital conflicts over family size and composition. Men oppose contraception, citing Islamic doctrine, while women justify contraceptive use based on fatigue, sickness and economic security. This research on Malian immigrants in Paris will examine the role of Islam in shaping migrant responses to fertility control messages. The project will trace Malian representations of appropriate family size and shape over the past three decades, focusing on the role of village associations in France mediating between family in France and West Africa. Systematic sampling of migrants will be done in sites of village and community associations, workers hostels and health services in Paris districts with substantial African populations. Structured interviews with 180 women and men over a two-year period will be carried out. Hypotheses will be tested relating immigration policy and different reproductive strategies of men and women. The research will contribute to the anthropological understanding of the politics of reproduction, documenting the local and global processes implicated in reproductive relations of Malians in France. By focusing on men s and women s objectives and preferences, the research will provide insights into how reproductive goals are shared, contested, and how transnational linkages shape family organization doc11048 none Lichens are obligate mutualistic ectosymbioses between fungi (mycobionts), and green algae or cyanobacteria (photobionts). Despite the importance of the photobiont in providing carbohydrates to the mycobiont, the identification of lichens relies almost exclusively on morphological and chemical (secondary compounds) features of the mycobiont. Members of Acarosporaceae and Acarospora have putative ancestral character states suggesting a basal position within the lichenized ascomycetes. Therefore, the study of this family and genus is likely to provide information essential to our understanding of the diversification of lichens. However, morphological features found in Acarospora and Acarosporaceae are also found in other genera and families, resulting in their uncertain circumscriptions. In the present study, phylogenetic relationships of the Acarosporaceae and Acarospora within the Ascomycota will be reconstructed based on three molecular data sets. This phylogeny will be the framework to: 1) date major speciation events within the lichenized ascomycetes, while comparing three new methods for dating divergence events; and 2) test the validity of traditional diagnostic features used to circumscribe Acarosporaceae and Acarospora. About 1 5 of all known extant species in the fungi kingdom are lichenized. The proposed research will generate a considerable molecular database relevant to phylogenetic relationships among fungi, in particular of the Acarosporaceae with other lichenized and non-lichenized ascomycetes. The use of DNA sequences to reconstruct the phylogeny of the Acarosporaceae and Acarospora will also answer long-standing and important systematic questions at the family and genus levels, that have not yet been answered using traditional tools (morphology, anatomy and chemistry). The study of Acarosporaceae diagnostic characters will contribute to a better understanding of the delimitation of the family. Finally, major dates of origin and radiation of lichenized ascomycetes will be estimated for the first time doc11049 none for Proposal No. by Jiang-Hua Lu In this project, the PI will continue to develop Poisson Morse theory, the theme of which is to use Poisson structures to study the topology of the underlying manifolds. She will also study a moduli space of a class of Poisson structures, which is closely connected to semi-simple symmetric spaces and their compactifications. Poisson structures first arose in the 19 th century in the study of classical mechanics. Nowadays Poisson geometry is being influenced by and has applications in theoretical physics such as string theory. In the same spirit, this proposal is about the rich connections between Poisson geometry and various other fields of mathematics and mathematical physics, such as topology, Lie theory, Hopf algebras, and integrable systems. It also has applications in control theory and robotics doc11050 none The DISsertations initiative for the advancement of Climate Change ReSearch (DISCCRS) program is an interdisciplinary, cooperative effort involving several professional societies including the American Geophysical Union (AGU), American Meteorological Society (AMS), and Ecological Society of America (ESA). Targeting recent Ph.D. recipients from across the spectrum of disciplines involved in climate change research, the program will quantify and characterize recent Ph.D. recipients interested in climate change to assess human potential and identify needs; consolidate and disseminate Ph.D. dissertation abstracts to highlight individual capabilities; establish electronic distribution lists to promote international, interdisciplinary communication; and organize an international capstone symposium for recent graduates to foster interdisciplinary understanding and interactions across disciplines. The program is structured to foster interdisciplinary understanding and accelerate research and insights in the vitally important and time-sensitive area of climate change and its impacts. It will foster international as well as inter-institutional networks, and favor participants from both developing and developed countries. Demographic data will facilitate the characterization and tracking of human resources across the climate-change research community. Tracking recent graduates through their first few years of professional development should tell us much about career progression and satisfaction during these early and most critical years of professional development. The on-line Dissertation Registry provides a comprehensive yet concise summary of new research for scientists, policy makers, and agency representatives and facilitate integration of this new generation of researchers into the broader community. Electronic distribution lists provide a mechanism to disseminate information and foster communication across disciplinary and international boundaries. The symposium will bring together individuals whose work transcends traditional boundaries and enable them to enhance understanding and perspectives and establish collegial, long-term associations to advance the field in new ways. In addition to presenting their research, participants would discuss emerging science and policy topics. Perspectives and recommendations will be published doc11051 none The proposal deals with some new classes of codes applicable to computer and VLSI system. New design methods for balanced codes, where each codeword contains equal number of 1 s and 0 s, and low weight codes are investigated. These codes find broad applications - reducing noise and conserving power in VLSI systems, maintaining data integrity in write-once memories, obtaining delay insensitive communications in asynchronous systems, data encoding in fiber optics, etc. New classes of higher radix and binary Gray codes are also investigated. In Gray code sequence, two consecutive codewords differ in one digit position by 1. Gray codes find applications in wide areas - analog to digital converters, data compression, graphics and image processing, hashing, efficient combinatorial algorithm design, processor allocation in the hypercube, solving puzzles such as towers of Hanoi, etc. Our goal is to find new methods for designing these codes. Some preliminary results and the future research efforts related to these topics are described doc11052 none This project explores the potential of various Lewis-acid catalyzed reactions to be promoted and rendered catalytic and or asymmetric by the introduction of chiral Lewis bases. The types of reactions that this scheme encompasses is extensive, with immediate objectives including asymmetric aldehyde aldol reactions and aldehyde allylation reactions. Mechanistic investigations supporting the methodological studies include kinetic studies relying upon supercritical fluid chromatography and rapid-injection NMR. With this Award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program continues its support of the research and educational activities of Professor Scott E. Denmark of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Professor Denmark conducts fundamental research into synthetic and mechanistic aspects of reactions designed to prepare small molecules controlling the stereochemistry of several centers of asymmetry in a simultaneous fashion. In addition, doctoral students of chemistry gain invaluable knowledge in the conception and conduct of modern organic chemistry doc11053 none The goal of this research is to examine the climatology and seasonal circulation patterns in West and Central Africa and investigate the relationship of biomass fires and tropospheric ozone levels of the Tropical Atlantic. High ozone levels in the tropical Atlantic have major implications for global atmospheric chemistry and potential environmental effects throughout the tropics. The principal investigator is utilizing visible and infrared satellite imagery and numerical modeling of selected case studies to isolate key transport mechanisms for ozone and ozone precursors. The project involves significant collaboration with African scientists doc11054 none This award provides support for student attendance at the Workshop on Non-neutral Plasmas. The workshop is being held at the University of California, San Diego, from 30 July to 3 August, , and brings together about 120 plasma and atomic physicists working on diverse aspects of non-neutral plasmas and beams doc11055 none An international research conference in the area of discrete mathematics and computer science will be held at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee from 21st to 24th May, . The conference is entitled `Horizons in Combinatorics, and will be held in conjunction with the 16th Annual Shanks Lectures. While all areas of graph theory, combinatorics and computing will be welcome at the conference, there will be an emphasis on the areas of ordered sets, colorings, and routing and flows in networks. The conference includes the Shanks Lectures, to be given by W. T. (Tom) Trotter, Jr. (Arizona State University). These lectures have played a prominent role in Department of Mathematics at Vanderbilt University for the past sixteen years. Many distinguished mathematicians in discrete mathematics (including Ron Graham and Laszlo Lovasz) and other areas (including Israel Gelfand and Ingrid Daubechies) have been among the invited lecturers. The other invited speakers for this year s conference are Jeff Kahn (Rutgers University), Eva Tardos (Cornell University), Robin Thomas (Georgia Institute of Technology), Bjarne Toft (University of Southern Denmark) and Peter Winkler (Lucent Technologies Bell Laboratories). The organizers are Paul Edelman, Mark Ellingham, Jonathan Farley, Michael Plummer, and Jeremy Spinrad (all Vanderbilt University). The proposed conference will last four days, providing ample time for an estimated 70 to 100 contributed papers and for discussion among the attendees. The conference focuses on combinatorics, graph theory and computing. These areas form the essential theoretical background for much of our modern information infrastructure, and for many modern methods of optimizing activities such as transportation and scheduling. Tools from these areas are used in areas as diverse as ecology, communication networks such as the Internet, economics and business, and military logistics. The conference aims to promote interaction between researchers, to allow for the dissemination of the most recent research results, and to publicize the importance of these areas in modern society doc11056 none Prop: PI: Smith, Donald Dr. Smith is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at the University of Michigan. He will work with the Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment (ROTSE) project, a program to distribute and operate at least four small, automatic telescopes at widely separated points on Earth in order to capture the early optical emission from an extensive sample of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). Early observations will yield constraints on characteristics of the burst origins. The telescope design allows GRB observations during the important window between five and forty seconds after the onset of the event, which no other current or planned experiment will be able to achieve. Dr. Smith will develop the operational and analysis software, use existing instruments to respond to alerts, install units at the international sites, and train collaborators in the use of the system. The ROTSE project also provides a large database of all-sky observations for student projects and his work will involve undergraduate students in the research. He also intends to develop a course in observational astronomy and presentations at a local museum using the ROTSE database, as well as an interactive tool providing access for the public and researchers alike doc11057 none Butler The Paleomagnetics Laboratory at the University of Arizona is an experimental facility utilized for a wide variety of geological projects. The Paleomagnetics Laboratory Director and PI on this project, is currently collaborating with geologists on research projects in: (a) southeast Alaska; (b) the Bolivian Andes; (c) the Pyrenees of Spain; (d) Nepal; (e) Ethiopia; and (f) northern Tibet. Funds from this grant will provide partial support for three equipment needs: (1) The primary instrument used to measure paleomagnetism is a superconducting rock magnetometer (SRM) that uses a refrigeration system to maintain low temperatures of the cryogenic components. This refrigeration system requires periodic replacement which will be accomplished early in the grant period. (2) A common method of analyzing the magnetism of rock samples is thermal demagnetization in which samples are heated to progressively higher temperatures in a low magnetic field environment. To increase capacity for processing samples in the laboratory, we will construct three additional thermal demagnetization furnaces. (3) In paleomagnetic research, it is important to identify and characterize the iron-bearing minerals that carry magnetic signals. We will purchase and install a Kappabridge susceptometer for measurements of magnetic susceptibility versus temperature and anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility. The resulting data will provide rapid and detailed information permitting identification and characterization of ferrimagnetic minerals. Purchase and or construction of these instrumentation items will permit The Paleomagnetics Laboratory at the University of Arizona to expand productivity and advance the experimental capabilities of this facility doc11058 none Weber This funding jacket will provide for the award of a contract to Petroleum Helicopters, Inc. (PHI) of Lafayette, Louisiana, as a result of NSF solicitation OPP- , Acquisition of Helicopter Services for the United States Antarctic Program (USAP). This is a two year contract with three one-year options. The Department of Interior, Office of Aircraft Services (DOI OAS), under an agreement with NSF (MOA of September ), will provide administrative oversight of the contractor s performance and provide periodic disbursement of funds to PHI on NSF s behalf. Funds have been provided to DOI OAS through award number . This award in the amount of $1.00 is to assign a contract number for the purpose of identifying and tracking the contract within the NSF awards system. The Program Manager recommends this award for funding doc11059 none This individual investigator award will provide funds to a senior researcher for a project to investigate the role of defects in two-dimensional phase transitions. The concepts of symmetry, dimensionality, and disorder all are central to the description of phase transitions. It is generally recognized that defects can play a critical role in phase transitions, especially in reduced dimensionality. The combination of the atomic resolution available with the variable-temperature scanning tunneling microscope (STM) coupled with the ability to grow artificially structured two and one-dimension configurations out of equilibrium on a surface promises to change the way we think about the role of defects in phase transitions in reduced dimensionality. This project will utilize a variable-temperature STM, which renders spatial images of the atomic and electronic distributions at the surface as a function of temperature. Surface structure and lattice dynamics will be determined with elastic and inelastic electron scattering as well as surface x-ray scattering. Surface magnetism will be probed with a combination of linear and non-linear magneto-optical Kerr rotation utilizing a newly designed octapole superconducting magnet. Young scientists from the undergraduate through the post-graduate levels will be trained in techniques relevant to future careers in academe, industry, and government laboratories. %%% This individual investigator award will provide funds to a senior researcher for a project to investigate the fundamental role of imperfections or defects in phase transitions for material systems in two dimensions. It is generally recognized that defects can play a critical role in phase transitions, especially in reduced dimensionality. Many potential technological devices utilize the properties of a phase transition in a given material. As the size of devices become smaller, it is important to understand the effect of defects on the phase transitions of these materials of reduced dimension. The impact of this research program will be felt on two fronts. First, these experiments, and the concepts that come from them, may change the way we think about phase transitions in reduced dimensionality. Secondly, and most importantly, is the training of young scientists at the undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate levels in an area supporting our national agenda on nanotechnology doc11060 none A fundamental goal of the GLOBEC program is to understand the secondary production of the coastal Gulf of Alaska (GOA) and how the success of higher trophic levels, specifically salmon, are affected by the variability in the magnitude of secondary production seasonally, inter-annually, and at the decadal scale. Because of the highly advective nature of the GOA, it is necessary to establish the relative importance of local versus imported production. The PIs will determine the rates of development, growth and egg production for the dominant copepod and euphausiid species in the coastal GOA. They will determine the in situ rates inshore and offshore by incubation techniques employing artificial cohorts (copepods) and individual females (both copepods and euphausiids). Incubation techniques are the only appropriate methods for this region due to its highly advective nature. The proposed research will put the in situ rates in perspective by determining their maximal rates under food- saturated conditions in the laboratory. The investigators also will estimate the extent to which secondary production is food-limited in the field by determining the functional relationships of development, growth and egg production to body size, temperature and food regimes. Food regimes will be assessed in terms of chlorophyll and particulate organic carbon, plus the abundance and biomass of autotrophic and heterotrophic protists. In collaboration with other researchers in the GLOBEC program, the implications of physical versus biological processes on the success of salmon recruitment will be established and predicted doc11061 none Olson This project consists of a series laboratory fluid dynamical experiments designed to simulate processes that are important in the generation of the geomagnetic field in Earth s liquid outer core. One set of experiments will be conducted in rotating hemispherical shells of fluid, and are intended to model thermal convection in the self-gravitating, rotating, spherical geometry of the core. The purpose here is to delineate those characteristics of rotating spherical shell convection that can be used to interpret seismic and geomagnetic images of the core. A second series of laboratory experiments will be conducted on thermochemical convection in solidifying gallium-indium alloys, with and without the influences of rotation and externally applied magnetic fields. The gallium-indium alloy is analogous to the iron-rich alloy of the outer core, and the solidification represents the growth of Earth s solid inner core. These experiments are designed to test the assumptions of the gravitationally powered dynamo model, which is widely regarded as the most likely energy source for the geodynamo, and to determine the properties of turbulent fluid motion in the environment of the outer core doc11062 none V. Knyazev, Catholic University In this study the kinetics and mechanisms of reactions of chlorinated hydrocarbon radicals is studied over wide ranges of temperature and pressure using the laser photolysis photoionization mass spectrometry (LP PIMS) technique. Particular systems investigated include (1) reactions of chlorinated radicals (CH2, Cl, CHCl2, CCl3) with methyl (CH3); (2) reactions of chlorinated methyl radicals with molecular oxygen (O2) at high temperatures; and (3) the unimolecular decompositions of C2Cl3 and delocalized chlorinated hydrocarbon radicals, as well as their reactions with O2, oxygen atoms, and chlorine (Cl2). Experimental kinetic results are analysis using transition-state theory, RRKM, and Master Equation approaches. The information generated in this effort will lead to improved models of combustion of chlorinated hydrocarbons (CHCs). This should enable more efficient incineration of CHC waste and reduction of hazardous emissions. This award is support jointly by the Combustion and Plasma Systems Program and the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program doc11063 none Under the direction of Dr. William Isbell, Mr. Juan Leoni will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will conduct archaeological fieldwork at the site of Nawinpukyo which is located in the Ayacucho region of highland Peru. Situated on a rocky hill the site contains concentrations of stones which have been interpreted as public buildings and elite residences. A supposed ceremonial compound with a platform mound, a series of storage granaries, administrative buildings, courts and patios has also been described. Although studied by previous researchers the site is enigmatic because its surface has been affected by centuries of farming and related earth moving activities. Ceramics indicate occupation during more than one period. The original excavator interpreted Nawinpukyo as the capital city of an early Andean state and believed that the size and arrangement of ruins testified to this fact. Later archaeologists have disagreed and asserted that the remains reflect a less complex form of social organization. To address this question, Mr. Leoni will conduct a multistage research project. He will survey and map the site core, conduct surface collection of pottery and other artifacts and also carry out limited excavation. The resulting materials will be subjected to laboratory analysis. Through this approach Mr. Leoni will determine what portions of the site were occupied at particular periods of time and then focus on the earliest of these. (Archaeologists agree that by the latest represented interval state level societies were, in fact, present in Peru.) In particular Mr. Leoni will examine the distribution of materials across residences to determine whether their amount and variety differ significantly among them. Differential distribution of wealth which reflects the presence of a governing elite is one of the hallmarks of state level society. The question of how complex societies arose and were maintained is central to anthropological archaeology and considerable disagreement exists. The process has taken place independently in many parts of the world - the Andes is one - and thus archaeologists can compare geographically discrete occurrences to look for underlying patterns. Some believe that the same basic processes and principles apply in all cases and that it is possible to define a clear-cut series of developmental steps. Others argue that historical contingency plays a major role and that the process varies in fundamental ways from region to region. Because complex state level societies developed in the Andes, data from sites such as Nawinpukyo speak directly to this question. This research will also provide data of interest to regional archaeologists and assist in training a promising young scientist doc11064 none The project is concerned with issues related to exponential and asymptotic stability of solutions to linear and nonlinear distributed parameter systems. Particular attention is focused on the investigation of how stability properties are preserved by finite dimensional semidiscrete approximation schemes and how stability properties are affected by disturbances or by system parameters. The PI studies most issues by making use of an appropriate renorming of the underlying state space. The idea of the renorming method is that while every mathematical model is associated with a natural norm (which measures an important quantity in the model, such as energy), it is often the case that a judicious choice of a new norm can be especially useful for insight into a specific issue such as exponential stability. Frequently a new norm also allows construction of improved Galerkin approximation schemes. For linear models, the PI considers applications including hybrid systems (i.e. coupled dynamics, such as models of thermoelasticity) and systems of delay equations, as well as questions such as the implications of renorming in feedback control problems. For nonlinear models, the renorming is an issue for investigation at the stages of linearization and approximation. Today s scientists and engineers are using increasingly complex and sophisticated mathematical models, and they often require quite accurate answers to difficult and delicate questions. A particularly important issue for many models, and the main focus of this project, is exponential stability. Typical of questions related to exponential stability would be - do vibrations of a mechanical structure (robot arm, smart material actuator, satellite antenna, digital reading device, ...) dissipate and at what rate; does the flow of a fluid (around a wing or rudder, in a mixing process, ...) stay smooth or become turbulent; do computer simulations preserve the stability behavior of the original model; etc. These and other issues will be investigated using a mathematical method known as renorming, which also often leads to the construction of improved computer simulation methods (approximation schemes). Undergraduate students will be actively involved in some lines of research, giving them an exposure to topical and scientifically relevant mathematical models, training in the use of the latest scientific computing algorithms and software, and an appreciation of applied mathematics doc11065 none The investigators will perform theoretical investigations of incompressible and nearly incompressible magnetohydrodynamic turbulence and anisotropic linear cascades in the corona and interplanetary medium. Complex nonlinear dynamical behavior, or turbulence, is observed in space plasmas over a wide range of scales that may be described by a magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) model. Many phenomena in the extended solar corona, including the solar wind, in the magnetosphere, and in the interstellar medium may involve turbulence. Turbulence is likely to have importance in coronal heating, the acceleration of solar wind, and the acceleration and diffusion of energetic particles. An integrated approach will be adopted using MHD and fluid simulation techniques, transport theory, analytic theory of turbulence and particle diffusion, and related analysis and interpretation of spacecraft observations. Work in basic MHD theory will include development and refinement of phenomenologies for MHD relaxation and decay processes, further characterization of the nature of MHD spectral anisotropy, and information theory-based attempts to advance a description of coherent structures in MHD turbulence. Advances in phenomenologies and transport models will be used to further develop scattering and transport theories of cosmic rays. Long-term goals are self-consistent models of coronal heating and the acceleration and evolution of the solar wind doc11066 none Kari Vilonen The goal of the the work of the principal investigator is to develop geometric techniques for applications in representation theory and the geometric Langlands program. From this point of view the basic geometric problem is to understand perverse sheaves from the microlocal point of view. A sufficiently deep understanding of microlocal perverse sheaves on flag manifolds should lead to interesting invariants of irreducible representations of reductive Lie groups and, hopefully, in the end, to an understanding of unipotent representations. Similar techniques are also being applied to modular representation theory. The goal of the last project is to gain insight in the geometric Langlands conjecture in its various forms. In addition to microlocal techniques the point of view of Whittaker models is used. The fundamental theme of the project is the interplay between geometry and representation theory. The idea of reducing the understanding of various geometries to their groups of symmetries goes back to Felix Klein at the end of the nineteenth century. From this point of view the basic objects, the atoms of the theory, are the irreducible representations of the group of symmetries of a given geometry. It turns out that these atoms arise from a particular geometric situation and hence we can apply geometric methods to analyze the properties of the irreducible representations. This is the goal of the first part of the the proposal. The second part of the project deals with the deep conjectures of Langlands. Here the geometry in question arises from an arithmetic situation and this brings number theory in the mixture of geometry and representation theory doc11067 none This is a US-Polish collaborative research project that will support the participation of Polish researchers in the PP2PP experiment at RHIC. The principal investigator is Dr. Michael Rijssenbeek from SUNY at Stony Brook. His Polish collaborators are Professor Andrzej Sandacz from the Institute for Nuclear Studies in Warsaw and Drs. Janusz Chwastowski and Bogdan Pawlik from the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Krakow. The SUNY Stony Brook group has been responsible for PP2PP simulations. This activity will now be taken over by the Polish group. In order for this to happen this project will provide support for the necessary consulting and transfer of software responsibilities. This project will also facilitate and integrate collaborative research in preparation of the data run, during data-taking, and in the data analysis phase. This project in nuclear physics research fulfills the program objectives of bringing together leading experts in the U.S. and Central Eastern Europe to combine complementary efforts and capabilities in areas of strong mutual interest and competence on the basis of equality, reciprocity, and mutuality of benefit doc11068 none Under the direction of Dr. Nicholas Toth, Mr. Dietrich Stout will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. The goal of the research is to gain insight into the cognitive abilities of early humans and to accomplish this, Mr. Stout will examine the brain activity associated with the production of simple Mode 1 stone tools. The first such objects appear in the archaeological record ca. 2.5 million years ago and because of their durable nature, over most of the period of human evolution they comprise the primary evidence available to reconstruct behavior. They provide the best, and often, the only insight into early human mental ability. Archaeologists have experimentally replicated Mode 1 tools which consist of simple flakes removed from a larger core of raw material as well as the successively more complicated succeeding lithic technologies. However it is difficult to draw a direct link between these manufacturing techniques and cognitive organization. It is unknown exactly what minimal basic cognitive abilities are necessary to produce simple stone tools and the degree to which early humans were capable of abstract thought. To address this problem, Mr. Stout will conduct Positron Emission Tomography (PET) to determine mental ability by establishing a more direct link between flintknapping and brain activation. Six technologically naive subjects will participate in a longitudinal study. PET images of three experimental conditions (control, novice flintknapping and experienced flintknapping) will be collected. Use of a slowly decaying tracer for imaging will allow experimental tasks to be performed under relatively naturalistic conditions outside a scanner, prior to image collection. Three kinds of data will be collected: PET images, attributes of the tools produced, and videotapes of task performance. The main research goals to be pursued with these data will be 1. dissection of sensorimotor and cognitive aspects of flintknapping skill and 2. exploration of neural, artifactual and behavioral aspects of skill acquisition. PET image data will be used to test specific hypotheses derived from both the literature and from results of a pilot study. Of particular interest will be putative activation of cognitive planning areas in novices and potential overlap with classic cortical language (Broca s and Wernicke s) areas. The ultimate objective of the research is to apply the results to the archaeology of human origins. A large body of research in the experimental neurosciences now allows patterns of brain activation to be interpreted in terms of mental processes such as motor or strategic planning. In this fashion, imaging of tool replication experiments will provide insight into the necessary information processing requirements of particular flintknapping tasks. This insight may then be judiciously applied to cognitive interpretations of the archaeological record doc11069 none Bercovici, David The investigator proposes to study the process of lithospheric shear localization (focussing of deformation in solid materials due to nonlinear weakening mechanisms) and plate boundary formation through his newly developed two-phase damage theory. The theory states that a damaged material (i.e., with microcracks and voids) is, in its simplest form, a two phase material (a matrix phase representing solid host, and a fluid phase representing void-filling material such as water or air). It also states that the energy going into making microcracks is the surface energy of the crack wall, which in the two phase model is the surface energy of the interface between phases. Preliminary results show sharp localized weak zones under intense shear, and distributed damage with extreme shear (suggestive of processes such as crack-branching instabilities). The theory, however, is still in a very basic form and has only been tested for simple one-dimensional geometries. Thus, the proposed project entails further development and testing to 1) apply it to more mantle lithosphere-relevant geometries and conditions; and 2) include further pertinent physics. The model will be applied to cases of uniaxial compression; compressive folding and tensile necking; gravity-driven flows (as in slope and continent stability); source-sink driven flows (to examine the excitation of toroidal motion from purely poloidal flow); and convectively driven motion. The new physics to be studied and incorporated includes healing and annealing processes; inter-phase reactions (e.g., hydration); anisotropy (to account for pore microcrack alignment); thermomechanical effects (e.g., fluid thermal expansion which affects pore pressure, thermoviscous behavior of matrix material, and temperature sensitivity of interface surface tension); and partitioning of deformational work between irreversible dissipative heating and semi-reversible storage as interface surface energy. This project will further our understanding of the fundamental processes of lithospheric and other shear localization mechanisms, as well as the origin of tectonic plates and plate boundaries doc11070 none Edward Riseman University of Massachusetts SGER: Digital Aerial Video Mosaics for Ecosystem Carbon Cycle Modeling This grant will support preliminary explorations for applying digital video aerial image analysis to long-term issues of global warming, in particular carbon cycle modeling, in the government arena. Many government agencies are already using GIS heavily, but in a less dynamic way, relying on single images in time, without fine-grain time references. This project will explore government uses of real-time imaging, at resolutions beyond what can be achieved with commercial satellite images, allowing the digital film to be geo-referenced, integrated with data streams from other sensors, and viewed in 3D through polarized glasses doc11071 none Three-dimensional aspects of storm outflow play an important role in the initiation of convective storms. In many forecast scenarios, the primary question is not whether deep convection will develop along a given boundary but where and when along this boundary will storms be favored. Preliminary and related modeling studies by the investigators as well as recent observations suggest a link between anomalies instabilities along outflows and other convergence boundaries and convection initiation. A three-dimensional convective cloud model will be employed to improve understanding of the processes that prompt deep convection initiation at specific locations along outflow and other convergence boundaries. As part of this study, the detailed three-dimensional structure of outflow boundaries and related moist convective forcing will be investigated in environments favoring specific instabilities along the outflow leading edge. Observations will be used where possible to validate the results from the numerical simulations. The underlying objective of the project is to improve the prediction of initial storm location by applying the knowledge obtained from this research. Specific primary objectives of the project include: 1. Investigating the role misocyclone circulations along outflow boundaries with marked horizontal shear (i.e., a vertical vortex sheet) play in moist convection initiation; 2. Examining the moist convective forcing and basic structure and morphology of lobe and cleft instability along outflow boundaries. This second objective will include a comprehensive examination of the fine-scale three-dimensional structure of outflow boundaries in environments without marked leading edge horizontal shear (in contrast to item 1). These objectives involve critical elements for furthering our understanding of convection initiation along outflow boundaries. Further, these objectives are consistent with a key goal of the U.S. Weather Research Program involving the refinement of precipitation forecasts with improved knowledge of boundary layer processes doc11072 none Oseroff This U.S.-Argentina Program award will provide support for the Fifth Latin American workshop on magnetism and magnetic materials and their applications organized by Dr. Saul Oseroff of San Diego State University and Drs. Manuel Tovar and Maria Teresa Causa of Centro Atomico Bariloche. This workshop will be held in San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina, September 3-8, . This activity will encourage new collaborations between researchers from the U.S., Latin America and Europe within different areas of magnetism, promote mechanisms for long term collaborations involving academia, industry and government, and identify new areas of research for joint collaborations doc11073 none The gap between processor speed and main memory access speed can cause processors to spend much of their time waiting on memory accesses. As the gap has grown, this memory latency has become an increasingly significant bottleneck in processor performance. Existing cache designs have worked well to fill the gap, but new cache designs are needed as the gap continues to grow. A promising new class, restricted caches, includes skew caches, assist caches, victim caches, and other multi-lateral caches. Experiments have indicated that some restricted caches offer significant potential for improvement over traditional set-associative caches. They also have revealed some interesting phenomenon that are not possible in traditional caches. For example, skew caches seem to exhibit self-reorganization. However, no theoretical explanation exists for this behavior or for why these restricted caches perform well. The investigators study the performance of distinct restricted cache structures and algorithms for managing them. The investigators first identify an underlying structural difference between restricted caches and traditional fully-associative caches: all cache lines are not identical. Specifically, in a restricted cache, unlike in a traditional set-associative cache, there exist pairs of memory blocks whose sets of legal cache lines are not identical and have a non-empty intersection. Using this insight, the investigators evaluate and compare different cache structures using new techniques. Most other analytical studies of caches focus only on the performance of algorithms for a given cache structure and do not explicitly compare the effectiveness of distinct cache structures. The investigators also study the performance of various algorithms for these cache structures using a variety of techniques such as resource augmentation, standard competitive analysis, and trace-based simulation. Their results indicate that traditional cache management algorithms behave very differently on restricted caches than they do on traditional set-associative caches. For example, the least recently used (LRU) algorithm that is strongly competitive for traditional caches is not competitive at all for restricted caches unless explicit rearrangement of items in the cache is allowed. Finally, the investigators construct a trace warehouse to facilitate the comparison of distinct trace-based simulation studies as well as to help new researchers learn this this evaluation technique doc11074 none The project is on the measurement of magnetic properties of nanocrystals of CoPt, FePt, and R2Fe17 (R=Rare earth) grown as films. The films are encapsulated in gaphite coatings to protect them from oxidation and environmental degradation. The graphite coating also increases the effective distance of neighboring nanocrystals, and causes the decrease of the particle-particle exchange interaction, which is an important issue in the ongoing development of films for high-density magnetic recording medium. The ordered phases of CoPt and FePt exhibit high magnetocrystalline anisotropy that results in a strong energy barrier against thermally activated switching of the magnetic moments for extremely small ferromagnetic nanocrystals. The presence of minute amount of carbon in R2Fe17 structure increases Fe-Fe exchange interaction. This causes the increase in the ferromagnetic transition temperature that makes the utilization of these materials as magnets over a wide range of temperature possible. The materials are fabricated at Northwestern University (Professor Vinayak P. Dravid and his research group) while this study is aimed at the characterization of their magnetic properties using magnetometry, Mossbauer spectroscopy and magnetic force microscopy at the undergraduate research institution (San Jose State). %%% The activities proposed here are fully compatible with the goals of NSF-RUI program in enhancing the research infrastructure of SJSU. Interaction with Northwestern University in areas of synthesis and structure is additional feature of the proposed research making the study of advanced materials possible at SJSU. SJSU is a diversified school with high percentage of minorities and women while the results will be very useful to disk drive technology doc11075 none This award supports the investigation of the discharge variablility of Ross Ice Streams over the last millenium, using a combination of numerical simulation and satellite remote sensing of flow features on the Ross Ice Shelf. The proposed collaborative research will use the Ross Ice Shelf record of flow variability to deduce variations in ice stream discharge over the last years. Changes in ice stream discharge disrupt flow of the ice shelf, in both profound and subtle ways, distorting flow features and changing crevasse patterns. The result in an integrated record of many changes over the lifetime of the ice within the shelf. Interpretations of flow-trace and crevasse geometry already made by Fahnestock and others will be used as a template for the design of numerical modeling experiments. The primary objectives are to verify the imagery existing concepts of ice stream dishcarge variability and will produce new data sets, both which will be use to the Antarctic glaciology community. Landsat-7 imagery will be used to measure velocity in areas of particular interest where existing data are inadequate. MODIS data, which has better radiometric and spatial resolution will be used to improve feature mapping on the ice shelf in sensitive areas doc11076 none The discrete spectrum of the Laplacian on the modular surface and the associated eigenfunctions (called Maass wave forms) are an interesting and basic class of functions which nevertheless remain mysteriously elusive fifty years after their discovery. While numerical approximations exist, concrete analytic information is somewhat scarce; in particular, at present no explicit constructions exist for any of these eigenfunctions. These mathematical objects are of interest in such seemingly diverse fields as number theory in mathematics and dynamical systems, statistical mechanics, and quantum chaos in theoretical physics. The starting point for this project is a new class of functions equivalent to the Maass forms, called period functions in analogy with the period polynomials associated to the classical modular forms of integral weight. These functions, discovered by the investigator and developed individually and more recently in collaboration with D. Zagier, are holomorphic and satisfy a simple functional equation, and so appear to be simpler class of mathematical objects than the Maass forms themselves. For this reason, and because the development of their algebraic structure leads in a number of different interrelated and intriguing directions, they show promise to continue to shed new light on this basic problem. Their further development and the extension of these results to general subgroups, using representation theory and cohomology of groups, are the main goals of this project. In addition, connections between period functions and certain equations which arise both in the study of transfer operators for dynamical systems and in the study of spin-chain partition functions in statistical mechanics are already under study by several researchers, including one working group in Germany which is specifically investigating these questions. The applications of Maass period functions to these related areas of theoretical physics is thus also a focus of this work, to be pursued including discussions with researchers working on these problems. Research in mathematics and related theoretical physics will use methods developed by the investigator and his colleagues to gain more concrete and explicit information about Maass wave forms. These functions are one type in a class called modular forms which has many applications in such diverse fields as number theory, physics, and cryptography (or code making and breaking). Maass wave forms in particular are the non-Euclidean version of the sine waves (or pure tones - the wave form produced by striking a tuning fork) in ordinary space, which are the basic components out of which all shapes are built. The study of geometry and physics in this non- Euclidean parallel universe has provided science with a rich source of new ideas, as well as a contrasting proving ground on which to sharpen ideas in the geometry and physics of the space we live in. For example, the study of the behavior of Maass forms provides very useful insights in the quest to gain a deeper understanding of the conditions under which a physical system will exhibit regular or chaotic behavior, an important and pervasive question in physics. Maass forms have proven mysteriously hard to construct explicitly, and continue to be under active investigation fifty years after their discovery doc11077 none Bierly For years studies by government and private groups have addressed the changing research climate in the U.S. and also the changing education environment at all levels, K-12 through post-graduate. Many of these studies have had a common theme, the need for a closer integration of research and education. New opportunities using this theme continue to exist for restructuring or redirecting programs in the Earth and Space Sciences. Here, Earth and space science is defined broadly to include atmospheric sciences, geochemistry, geology, geophysics, earth sciences, hydrology, oceanography, aeronomy and space physics, and other closely allied disciplines. One of the best ways to move toward integrating research and education is to have open discussions with the leaders of departments responsible for the research and associated education. These are the Heads and Chairs of the Earth and Space Science Departments. This award supports the annual meetings of the Heads and Chairs over the next three years doc11078 none The Ohio State University, Arizona State University and Arizona Public Service Company will undertake a collaborative research effort in a fundamental study on the modeling of power system loads. In the next decades, the power systems of the United States will face bottlenecks of bulk power transfer capabilities because of the virtual absence of new transmission facilities. The increased utilization of the existing facilities to cope with growing magnitude of bulk power transfers and third-party access will require a closer look at system dynamic performance. Accurate power system models are needed for accurate study of system dynamic performance. The motivation is to make load modeling accuracy commensurate with generation and system modeling accuracy. The main theme of this project is to utilize the advanced system identification concepts developed for generator parameter estimation and generator modeling for power system load modeling. Features of the load modeling include: automatic updating of the model, utilization of an artificial neural network model, and work with actual industrial data throughout the project. If successful, the work would be a major advance in the automated load modeling of power system loads as well as a significant increase in system modeling accuracy for dynamic studies. Therefore, the economic impact of the proposed research is significant in permitting operation of power systems closer to the stability limit by increasing the transfer capabilities and postponing the need for new construction doc11079 none Theis This grant provides support for a conference entitled Summer Symposium on Sustainability to be convened by the Center for Environmental Management at Clarkson University in June . The symposium will bring together educators, students, researchers and practitioners with a common agenda, but different backgrounds in natural and industrial ecology, engineering and science, economics, management and social sciences, and environmental policy to investigate the basis of sustainability, factors asociated with its applicability and the possibility of progressing towards an agreement of research and education principles and methodologies that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries. This symposium will emphasize the integration of research and educational approaches to sustainability and, therefore, graduate student participation is central to its objectives. The symposium will be organized around four overlapping research areas: Industrial Ecology, Ecological Economics, Ecosystem Health and Environmental Policy with the overarching goal to foster further collaboration among individual researchers and educators in these areas. A major output of the symposium will be the publication of principal findings in the peer-reviewed academic journals affilitated with the above four areas: Ecological Economics, Journal of Industrial Ecology, Ecosystem Health, and Environmental Engineering and Policy. Additionally, the Center will dedicate a special section of its web pages to the conference and proceedings doc11080 none Slater Solute transport controls vegetation and water chemistry gradients in peatlands. Dispersive mixing and advective transport in peat will be measured in laboratory column experiments and in a natural gradient tracer test in a peatland to determine the relative importance of these processes. We will assess the retardation of solutes by matrix diffusion and the applicability of a dual-domain model. Electrical geophysical methods, verified through direct measurements, will be used to track tracer migration. An extensive geophysical and hydrogeologic characterization of the peatland will map variability in peat depth across the basin and identify stratigraphy. Ground-penetrating radar and resistivity induced polarization imaging will be employed. Piezometer tests will provide a measure of the spatial variability in hydraulic conductivity within Caribou Bog, a large peatland in Central Maine. Correlations between hydrogeologic and geophysical parameters will be assessed and used to provide constraints on parameters for ground-water flow and mass transport modeling. Peat cores will be collected for laboratory tests to measure hydraulic conductivity, dispersion, effective porosity, specific surface and complex resistivity. The variability of peat properties with depth will be determined through laboratory testing. Relationships between peat electrical properties and hydrogeologic parameters will be evaluated. An NaBr tracer will be injected into the peatland and monitored for 12 months. The tracer will be tracked using surface and borehole electrical imaging. The pixels on the geophysical images will be a substitute for extensive direct water sampling points, allowing rapid and nearly continuous tracking of solute distribution. Geophysical and ground-water chemistry data collected from the tracer test will be used to calculate the spatial moments of the solute plume through time. Three-dimensional hydrogeologic and mass transport models will be calibrated to the geochemical and geophysical data to further evaluate mass transport parameters. Matrix diffusion, the migration of solutes into hydraulically isolated pores, will be incorporated into the numerical models to evaluate this important process. The project will evaluate: (1) the nature of dispersive mixing, (2) the correlation of hydrogeologic and geophysical parameters, and (3) the role of mass transporft in peatlands. Peatlands are a large carbon reservoir and a significant source of methane gas. Ground-water flow and mass transport are important in regulating geochemical conditions favorable for methane production and peat accumulation. The work will add to the understanding of processes that impact carbon and nutrient dynamics for peatlands. Geophysical monitoring of a tracer will provide important information on the utility of this non-invasive method for tracking the movement of solute plumes. This project will demonstrate the potential benefits of including electrical geophysics in hydrogeologic assessments and wetland characterization doc11081 none Proposal Number: C Principal Investigator: Wilfred Tysoe Institution: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee The objective of this proposal is to grow and characterize model supported catalysts formed by adsorbing metal carbonyls onto planar hydroxylated alumina films grown on a refractory metal substrate. Oxide films will be deposited onto single crystal substrates. With these model systems, surface science techniques can be used to define and characterize surface species more precisely than can be done with conventional catalysts. The nature of the active catalyst will be probed using x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy to monitor metal oxidation state, electron energy loss spectroscopy to estimate cluster sizes, reflection-absorption infrared spectroscopy to follow vibrational changes, and temperature-programmed desorption to measure decarbonylation kinetics. The two systems to be studied are alumina-supported molybdenum and alumina-supported rhenium catalysts for olefin metathesis. The metathesis reaction has wide industrial applications, and obtaining a better understanding of the catalysis through model studies may help in the development of improved catalysts. The synthesis of realistic planar model supported catalysts, and the corresponding ability to fully analyze the surface, provides a powerful strategy for fundamentally understanding catalytic reactions on realistic supported systems doc11082 none Electro Magnetoencephalography Signal Processing Methods and Performance Arye Nehorai EECS Department University of Illinois at Chicago Detecting electric sources in the brain is important for both understanding its function and for clinical applications. Examples include mapping the brain activities and finding foci of epilepsy activities before surgical treatment. We are developing detection methods that find the sources through computer processing of measurements from arrays of sensors around the head. More specifically, we employ Electro Magnetoencephalography (E MEG) sensors that measure electric potentials on the scalp and induced magnetic field outside the head. We are developing several new methods of processing the E MEG signals, analyzing their performance and validating with real data their applicability, thus contributing to improvements in the use and performance of E MEG equipment and to increase the capabilities of neurological data processing tools. We hope to solve some of the most currently relevant E MEG problems: (i) estimating and tracking paths of functional and neuronal connectivity, following the trajectories of cerebral sources, (ii) estimating concentrated and extended sources, in the presence of noise with unknown spatio-temporal covariance, (iii) simultaneously estimating source parameters and tissue conductivities, (iv) developing computationally efficient methods for realistically-shaped head models, which reduce the demands on segmentation algorithms, (v) estimating source parameters for evoked responses with inhomogeneous epochs. We are also deriving performance measures for evaluating the newly proposed methods allowing comparison with existing systems and techniques; identifying those that are effective and helping in the optimum design of future systems. Finally, we are using empirical data sets evaluate and validate methods. These data sets are being derived by the Dr. Jeffrey Lewine s group from Clinical and Cognitive Neurosciences studies where whole-head MEG and high-density EEG are recorded simultaneously. The Nehorai group is developing the processing methods and the two groups will collaborate on their evaluation and validation doc11083 none Investigators: Joan Feigenbaum and Sampath Kannan : Massive data sets are increasingly important in many applications, including observational sciences, product marketing, and monitoring and operations of large systems. In network operations, raw data typically arrive in streams, and decisions must be made by algorithms that make one pass over each stream, throw much of the raw data away, and produce ``synopses or ``sketches for further processing. Moreover, network-generated massive data sets are often distributed: Several different, physically separated network elements may receive or generate data streams that, together, comprise one logical data set. The enormous scale, distributed nature, and one-pass processing requirement on the data sets of interest must be addressed with new algorithmic techniques. Two programming paradigms for massive data sets are sampling and streaming. Rather than take time even to read a massive data set, a sampling algorithm extracts a small random sample and computes on it. By contrast, a streaming algorithm takes time to read all the input, but little more time and little total space. Input to a streaming algorithm is a sequence of items; the streaming algorithm is given the items in order, lacks space to record more than a small amount of the input, and is required to perform its per-item processing quickly in order to keep up with the unbuffered input. The investigators continue the study of fundamental algorithms for massive data streams. Specific problems of interest include but are not limited to the complexity of proving properties of data streams, the construction of one-pass testers of properties of massive graphs, and the streaming space complexity of clustering doc11084 none Gehrels The Himalaya has received intensive study as if is an active continent - continent collision, and many parameters such as amount of shortening, rates and subducted material measured in the Himalaya have been used in developing general models for continent - continent collisions. Recent results indicate that some of the shortening in the Himalaya may be due to an older event. This project aims to investigate this pre-Himalayan deformation and separate it from the tertiary collision of India with Asia, generally considered to be the Himalayan orogen. Results are expected to refine or correct important aspects of the deformation history of this important system that will have widespread application doc11085 none Alexandru I. Suciu This project is centered around a topological study of complex hyperplane arrangements, with a view towards finding effectively computable invariants of their complements. The goal is to decide whether a given invariant is combinatorially determined, and, if it is, to express it explicitly in terms of the intersection lattice of the arrangement. An important role is played by the jumping loci for cohomology with coefficients in local systems, and the related resonance varieties. These varieties have emerged as a central object of study. They provide deep information about the homotopy theory of the complement of an arrangement, as well as a bridge relating various invariants, in often unexpected ways. Another key role is played by the rational-homotopy notion of formality, which provides the underlying explanation for many of the encountered phenomena. Whenever possible, the study is done in a more general setting, which includes certain types of subspace arrangements, both real and complex, as well as certain links in the 3-sphere. Such a point of view enlarges the range of applicability of the results, and helps explain what is really peculiar to complex hyperplane arrangements. In its simplest manifestation, an arrangement is a finite collection of lines in the plane. These lines cut the plane into components, and understanding the topology of the complement amounts to counting those components. In the case of lines in the complex plane (or, for that matter, hyperplanes in complex n-space), the complement is connected, and its topology (as reflected, for example, in its homotopy groups) is much more interesting. The theory of arrangements is a relatively new branch of mathematics, started in the s with a study of the classifying space for the pure braid group. The theory has developed at the interface between topology, algebra, algebraic geometry, and combinatorics. Hyperplane arrangements, and the closely related configuration spaces, are used in numerous areas, including robotics, multi-dimensional billiards, graphics, molecular biology, computer vision, and databases for representing the space of all possible states of a system characterized by many degrees of freedom. There are also deep connections between hyperplane arrangements, knot theory, hypergeometric functions, conformal field theory, and quantum cohomology doc11086 none PI s: James R. Rice (principal investigator) and Renata Dmowska (senior co-investigator), Dept. of Earth and Planetary Sci. and Div. of Engin. and Appl. Sci., Harvard Univ. Our project seeks to understand mechanical principles controlling earthquake rupture propagation and arrest in geometrically complex fault systems. As part of that we are devising numerical methodology to model dynamic rupture with inclusion of non-planarity of fault surfaces, step-overs and branches in fault networks, activation of smaller faults or fractures in the region bordering a main fault zone, and simultaneous activation of competitive rupture paths. In general the rupture path cannot be specified a priori but, rather, must be dynamically self-chosen among available fault segments of the network. Geological, geodetic and seismological observations are used to constrain and test developing ideas on how rupture geometry and prevailing stress state, including principal stress orientations, control whether a rupture starts along a branching fault structure, whether it continues for long distances along the branch, how intermittent is the rupture propagation, etc. Those observational cases include thrust (San Fernando , Kettleman Hills ) and strike slip (Imperial Valley , Landers , Hector Mine ) events in which branching and or activation of off-fault activity seem to be involved. Other examples are under study throughout the world for major fault systems, including the North Anatolian system, the Izmit sequence along it, and its possible future continuation near Istanbul. The studies include consideration of how energy is dissipated in dynamic rupture, and what are characteristics of the enriched high frequency seismic radiation doc11087 none This project is aimed at developing data compression techniques for substantially reducing the data memory footprint of memory intensive applications. We will study the behavior of a wide range of applications to identify characteristics of data held in data structures by these programs that can be exploited in carrying out data compression. We will develop a suite of data compression transformations that will be implemented by the compiler. Our goal is to develop data transformations that can be applied to partially compressible data structures, that is, data structures in which all the data is not compressible. This approach will not only result in transformations that are widely applicable, but also lead to techniques for applying them that are efficient. In particular, instead of relying on complex compile-time analysis for proving their applicability, we will be able to use simple value profiling techniques to identify data structures that are mostly compressible and then apply the transformations to them. We will develop data compression extensions (DCX) to a RISC-style instruction set for efficiently manipulating compressed data. In addition, we will also address other low level code generation issues, such as impact of transformations on register pressure and instruction cache behavior, which can have a significant impact on performance doc11088 none Physiological and molecular studies of the diageotropica (dgt) mutant of tomato have demonstrated that plants have a single gene that is involved in regulating many different aspects of growth, development, and responses to environment, including lateral root initiation, stem growth, leaf and vascular tissue differentiation, fruit development, and responses to gravity and light. All of these processes are controlled by the plant hormone auxin and dgt mutant plants exhibit reduced sensitivity to auxin. This project will complete the map-based cloning of the Dgt gene and begin characterization of it s function. Using similarities with the Arabidopsis genome that was recently completely sequenced, we have used molecular markers to pinpoint the location of the Dgt gene to a single 15 Kb region of DNA. We plan to completely sequence this region of the genome and use comparisons between normal and mutant genes as well as repair of mutant plants with the intact gene to confirm the identity of the Dgt gene. Characterization of the DGT gene product following sequencing will have a large impact on our understanding of the interaction of other hormones with auxin in regulating environmental and developmental responses. In addition, this research will explore the potential for the use of similar DNA regions between Arabidopsis and tomato to clone genes and provide validation for using the information emerging from the Arabidopsis genome project for studies of other plant species doc11089 none PI: James B. Rawlings Institution: University of Wisconsin Proposal Number: To maintain economic competitiveness, maximize product quality and operate more environmentally benign processes, the chemical process industries need to invest in process monitoring and control technology. Industrial process operations are becoming increasingly integrated and complex, operation against constraints is common and the dynamic process behavior requires more sophisticated online analysis and decision making in order to optimize the process performance. The goal of this research is to address three outstanding challenges in the further development of advanced chemical control methodology: 1. State estimation based on dynamic models and online measurements is used to further improve process operations. The moving horizon estimation (MHE) approach addresses this need as it allows both nonlinear models and estimator constraints as part of the problem formulation. The PI plans to study a series of issues and application problems in order to understand and expand the current applicability of MHE theory. 2. Use model predictive control (MPC) for online optimization of an integrated, large-scale plant. The PI plans to exploit the inherent communication capability provided by the forecast horizon in the MPC controllers. 3. Develop a suite of nonlinear MPC test problems for closed-loop control. These problems should provide a convenient standard for the research community to test new nonlinear MPC theories, approaches and algorithms. Expected impacts for this research include: improved understanding of the fundamental issues surrounding the online use of models for monitoring, inference and decision making; direct impact on industrial plant operations and control; and rapid and wide dissemination of new research results to educators by the development and release of high-level source code doc11090 none The investigators will study electron solitary holes (ESH) on auroral magnetic field lines. ESH are positive potential wells moving at a fraction of the electron thermal speed with parallel scale sizes the order of the Debye length and variable perpendicular scale sizes. The CLUSTER satellites have instrumentation for measuring plasma waves and electron distribution functions. These data can be used to study the origin, evolution, lifetimes and effects of ESH. The four satellites making up the CLUSTER II mission were successfully launched in the summer of and all instruments are working nominally. The investigators have developed plasma wave receivers and interferometers for many years and have studied ESH using data from the POLAR spacecraft. ESH have recently been observed in the auroral acceleration zone, plasma sheet, cusp cleft, high latitude boundary layer, shock transition region, and possibly the wake of Europa in the solar wind. Study of this phenomenon is essential to our understanding of space weather and plasma processes in the magnetosphere doc11091 none Essentially all present-day traveltime tomographic inversions ignore diffractive wavefront healing, and fail to account for the ability of a finite-frequency seismic wave to feel 3D structure off of the unperturbed spherical-earth ray. We used the support of NSF Grant to develop 3D banana-doughnut traveltime sensitivity kernels, which correctly account for all such finite frequency effects. We intend to continue these investigations under Grant , extending the theory to treat near-grazing and near-critical waves that are not adequately modeled by the present formulation, and using our 3D sensitivity kernels to invert the extensive global cross correlation traveltime dataset collected over the past decade by Professor Guy Masters and his collaborators at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. We shall also develop and apply 2D variations in the phase velocity, 2D kernels that express the sensitivity of a measured body-wave traveltime to topography on the core-mantle boundary or the 410 km or 660 km discontinuities, 3D sensitivity kernels for differential traveltime measurements made using seismic arrays, and 2D and 3D sensitivity kernels for other seismic observables, including arrival angles and amplitudes of both body and surface waves. Finally, we shall conduct an extensive series of numerical validation and synthetic inversion studies, in both pseudo-random media and realistic whole-mantle models, in order to ascertain the degree of mantle roughness needed to give rise to significant diffraction effects upon long-period seismic traveltimes doc11092 none Ronald J. Stern This award provides partial support for graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, junior faculty, and principal speakers to attend the Symplectic Geometry and Lefschetz pencils conference to be held April 12-16, on the campus of the University of California at Irvine. This conference will bring together researchers to discuss and present new advances in the study of symplectic Lefschetz theory and symplectic 4-manifolds . The discovery of Donaldson that every symplectic 4-manifold supports a symplectic Lefschetz pencil and the discovery of Auroux and Katzarkov that every symplectic 4-manifold is a finite ramified covering of the complex projective plane presents the possibility to classify four-dimensional symplectic manifolds using mapping class group data and methods from algebraic geometry. This conference will provide an opportunity to summarize, centralize and disseminate results in this new direction of mathematical research and will provide the opportunity for new PHD s and graduate students in algebraic and differential geometry topology and theoretical physics to learn from the leaders of this emerging field. Specific information will be available at http: www.math.uci.edu sub6.html doc11093 none Dabrowski A significant thrust of this project will address issues important to the materials synthesis of complex oxides ceramics and will provide superior quality research material including single crystals of novel compounds. These complex transition metal oxides exhibit strong electron-electron, electron-magnon, and electron-phonon interactions. Because of these strong interactions, conduction electrons in these systems cannot be considered separately and the collective behavior is best described in terms of highly correlated electron systems. In this context an extensive study will be made of the superconducting and magnetic properties of ruthenocuprates and magnetic properties of selected phases of non- superconducting complex oxides that contain the octahedral arrangement of Ru and 0 ions. The proposed research will also address the problem of coexistence of superconductivity and weak- ferromagnetism in ruthenocuprates, which remains unique in the family of high-temperature superconductors, since the magnetic order originates in the sublattice of d-electron Ru ions. Students in the research work will be guided through the complex process of fabrication (including our unique high- pressure oxygen synthesis capabilities that lead us recently to discovery of novel Ru1-xSr2GdCu2+xO8-d superconducting and magnetic phases) and materials characterization. Participating students will be exposed to the use of cutting-edge techniques through their involvement in experiments utilizing the X-ray synchrotron based (Advanced Photon Source) and neutron diffraction techniques at Argonne National Laboratory. Supplementary muon spin rotation experiments that provide unique insights into local magnetic structure are planned and will be facilitated by the established cooperation with research team at the Paul Sherrer lnstitut in Switzerland. Advancing the fundamental understanding and associated applications of complex transition metal oxide ceramics is constrained by the current limits of our knowledge of the complex interactions present in these systems. Study of these compounds constitutes the frontier of modern solid-state ceramics and its associated physics and chemistry. The proposed project will substantially enhance our understanding of the long-standing issue of the coexistence of magnetism and superconductivity by studies of a class of recently discovered magnetic high temperature superconductors. Our unique pathways to synthesis have led to discovery of new superconducting phases of ruthenocuprates and to significant modification of magnetic properties of complex ruthenates. Beyond investigating the properties of these materials, emphasis will be placed on studying the synthesis-structure-properties relationships and exploring processing routes for novel compounds in this class using our distinctive high-pressure oxygen synthesis capabilities. Supplementary experiments are also planned, within the frame of existing cooperative efforts, with research teams from the Paul Sherrer Institut in Switzerland and the Polish Academy of Sciences in Poland. The inclusion of students in this project will provide them with valuable, contemporary experience, training, and skill with state-of-the art instrumentation in our laboratory and in the experimental facilities of Argonne National Laboratory (cutting-edge X-ray synchrotron radiation based techniques at the Advanced Photon Source and neutron diffraction experiments at the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source doc11094 none This purpose of the proposed research is to examine how situational awareness (or its other similar outcroppings) develop within work dyads and teams required to behave very reliably, as in high reliability organizations (study 1). A second purpose is to examine what, if any, relationship exists between situational awareness and other local global processes (study 2). The investigators are particularly interested in contexts where errors of judgment or inference can lead to catastrophe. The investigators also intend to provide some theoretical rigor around the psychological constructs guiding the first part of the research, and embed those constructs within group processes (study 2), deepening our basic knowledge of the ways individual and group cognitive processes interact with contexts. Study 1 will focus on the Oakland Police Department s Emergency Dispatching Service (911), while Study 2 will take place at the Stanford anesthesiology simulator, which provides a situation in which distributed cognition can be more thoroughly investigated, and in which actors are tied to technologies long ago invented to solve an anesthesiology or operating problem doc11095 none Experimental Analysis and Modeling of Digital Video Quality The cost of the production and transmission of digital video imagery is large and roughly proportional to the information in the images. Consequently, information is routinely deleted from video imagery to reduce cost. This deletion reduces the quality of the imagery as perceived by human viewers. The ultimate objective of this project is to quantify and minimize this loss of quality. As a step toward this goal, an understanding of how humans evaluate the quality of video images needs to be developed. To gain this understanding a series of experiments are being performed in which human observers describe and evaluate defects that they detect in video images of the kind that are typical in digital video applications. These images are processed so that they incorporate defects similar to those that occur in digital video. The results of these experiments are then used to develop an understanding of how humans process and evaluate video imagery. Image processing methods are being used to create sets of video defects that are quite similar to typical video defects, but are under much greater control. These defects occur at random times and places within normal video clips. They are treated as visual signals presented in a context of normal video imagery. Established methods of visual pattern detection and visual pattern appearance analysis are applied to the study of these defects. These include the following tasks: detecting the presence of a defect, rating the annoyance caused by a defect, and analyzing the perceived features of a defect. The results of these experiments will be used to develop an increasingly detailed model of video quality evaluation by human observers doc11096 none PI s: C. Sammis and H. Saleur, University of Southern California There is mounting observational evidence that large earthquakes are followed by tens of years of regional quiescence of intermediate-size events, and preceded by a comparable time period of accelerating seismic release. This acceleration (due mostly to an increase in intermediate-size events) can be fit to a power law of the time-to-failure equation, which offers the possibility of predicting large earthquakes on an intermediate-term basis, of perhaps a few years. The radius R of the optimally accelerating region scales with magnitude as log R ~ 1 2 M, which is equivalent to R being proportional to fault length L. This phenomenology has been interpreted as signifying the approach of a region to, and retreat from, a critical state. Power law scaling and growth of the correlation length of the stress field leading to increasingly larger events are expected behavior when approaching a critical point. We plan to devise and implement quantitative observational tests of this analogy between regional seismicity and critical phenomena. This does not require having a detailed understanding of why earthquakes should be critical phenomena. Criticality, like self-organized criticality, leads to universal features like power laws and scaling relations, that are independent of the mechanisms involved. To develop the tests, we will explore the evolution of the spatial, temporal, and magnitude distributions of seismicity that are predicted by critical point models. We shall be especially interested in the behavior of the smaller events, which have not, as yet, been used to help monitor the approach to criticality doc11097 none This research is concerned with the development, analysis and empirical evaluation of algorithms for information retrieval and data mining, primarily using spectral analysis. A partial list of the fundamental questions being addressed are: How should data be stored, organized and processed so as to allow the most effective retrieval of information? How can ``important structure and ``meaningful patterns be found within a large data-set? How and when can this hidden structure be used to facilitate determination of missing data or to ``clean data that is imprecise or partially incorrect? What are appropriate models for data generation, and how can these models be used to improve the design of data mining algorithms? The researchers are studying applications that have already received a great deal of attention and on which empirical success has been achieved, including object clustering and web site ranking. In addition, they are designing and analyzing algorithms, and developing and analyzing models for newer data mining problems, including collaborative filtering, topic distillation, spam detection and prevention, and hierarchical clustering. Matrix perturbation theory is the foundation for the development of theoretical results. The researchers are also studying new techniques for speeding up the computation of the SVD. The theoretical research is being complemented by experimental evaluation on real data sets doc11098 none With modern processor architectures, programs can achieve good performance only if they possess sufficient data locality to exploit on-chip caches. This research focuses on developing and evaluating software support for improving locality for advanced scientific applications for both sequential and parallel machines. The basic premise is that both compile-time analyses and sophisticated run-time systems are necessary. Run-time systems are needed because many programs are not analyzable statically. Compiler support is crucial both for inserting interfaces to the run-time system and for directly applying program transformations where possible. This proposal investigates locality optimizations needed for three features found in advanced scientific applications (3D arrays, irregular accesses, and pointers). It focuses on extending locality optimizations to handle cache conflicts between multiple data, deep memory hierarchies (multi-level caches and TLBs), hardware and software prefetching, nonlinear memory layouts, parallel and cluster architectures, and memory performance tools. Locality optimizations will be applied to representative programs and experimentally evaluated on advanced computer systems. The results of this research should help improve the performance of computationally intensive scientific applications. Because of trends in computer architectures, lessons learned are also likely to be useful for application domains such as image processing and high-performance databases doc11099 none he models used in inductive inference have their roots in the models used by the philosophers of science who were discussing the scientific method. The goal there, and in prior work in learning theory, was to come up with an explanation of the phenomenon under consideration. However, scientists rarely work directly for the grand goal of a complete explanation. The more modest goal of finding features and facts about the observed data is pursued. A variety of types of algorithms that could be construed as discovering their final result will be investigated. We propose to consider computations that discover rather than compute their intended result. A logic of discovery will be developed and investigated. This study is particularly relevant to contemporary science as automated data generation techniques produce sufficient volumes of data to overwhelm the analysis abilities of humans. The goal of our work is to illuminate precisely what can and cannot be accomplished by automatic data analysis algorithms. Such algorithms are used in data mining and text analysis for world wide web search engines doc11100 none Edward M. Greitzer, MIT Professor A.M.Yaglom, co-author with Professor A.S. Monin of the classic book on turbulence Statistical Fluid Mechanics that was published in Russia in -66 and in English by M.I.T. Press in -5, is current working on the second edition of the book. He plans to update the original book to present a panoramic view of turbulence research at the end of the 20th century . The work on the early parts of the book was supported by Stanford Ames Center for Turbulence Research, by US Army Research Laboratory, Silver Spring, MD, and by a private Foundation in Massachusetts. All the funding ran out in October of . The purpose of this proposal is to secure funding for the continuation of this project at MIT where Professor Yaglom is a Fellow doc11101 none The proposed research investigates new methods for symbolic analysis to improve various restructuring compiler optimizations. A new algebra on functions is investigated to manipulate, simplify, and derive normal forms of scalar functions and (generalized) induction variables in multi-dimensional loops. The derivation of normal forms for intermediate program constructs enables reasoning about the semantics of a program under analysis. This is extremely useful to improve various compiler optimizations to effectively deal with symbolic expressions in real-world applications. More specifically, the proposed research aims to improve symbolic analysis methods such as generalized induction variable recognition, linear and non-linear data dependence analysis, value range analysis, global value propagation, and counting the number of solutions to systems of constraints. The effectiveness of parallelizing compilers depends heavily on the accuracy of these methods. The research will result in the ability of compilers to more effectively handle symbolic expressions and constraints. Current methods are not always effective, resulting in considerable performance losses caused by worst-case assumptions or when program analysis has to be performed at execution time doc11102 none O Handley New, powerful ME-coefficient measurement techniques are used to study the effects of strain and dislocations in epitaxial magnetic nano-dots. The effects of limited lateral dimensions on strain relief and on ME effects are examined by using interferometric lithography to make highly-regular patterned arrays of magnetic dots and ovals having lateral feature sizes down to 25 nm and thickness from 2 to 20 nm. The program focuses on epitaxial Ni80 Fe20 and cobalt films on Cu-buffered Si (001), materials important for many magnetic thin film applications. The characterization of the film and dot arrays makes use of (a) synchrotron x-ray diffraction at BNL to determine strain, (b) torque magnetometry to characterize magnetic anisotropy, (c) vibrating sample magnetometry to determine saturation magnetization and Curie temperature, (d) differential capacitance measurements of first-order and second-order ME coupling coefficients, as well as (e) UHV and cryogenic magnetic force microscopy (in collaboration with the University of Basal), and scanning electron and transmission electron microscopy. Strain and ME coupling coefficient measurements on arrays at these small dimensions will provide important information for reliable processing of magnetic thin film devices. Further, the magnetic dots will mimic the behavior of grains in polycrystalline materials where grain boundaries provide some relief of intra-grain epitaxial misfit strain. %%% This study has excellent potential for advances in science with relevance to new technology in spintronics as well as magnetic random access memories doc11103 none Schlottmann This grant to support theoretical research on strongly correlated electron systems is coordinated with a similar grant at DOE. The topics to be studied include heavy fermions, related mixed valent phenomena, properties of manganites, and integrable one-dimensional models of correlated electrons and magnetism. %%% This grant to support theoretical research on strongly correlated electron systems is coordinated with a similar grant at DOE. The topics to be studied include heavy fermions, related mixed valent phenomena, properties of manganites, and integrable one-dimensional models of correlated electrons and magnetism doc11104 none This award will support international travel of younger US cognitive scientists to enable them to participate in the full scientific program of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, taking place August 1-4, in Edinburgh, Scotland, the first such meeting outside of North America. The participation of these younger (Ph.D. within the last six years) scientists, all of whose research is on topics within the purview of NSF, will allow them to forge connections with researchers in the international community. Thus, not only will collaborations be born that could not start in other fashions, but also the international visibility of these young US scientists will be enhanced doc11105 none This laboratory study of subduction is motivated by recent seismic and geochemical advances on understanding of subduction and mantle flow attending subduction. The PI proposes laboratory experiments similar to those he has done for ridges and plumes, to investigate subduction processes. There will be four types of analog lab experiments: 1) studies aimed at understanding longitudinal subduction vs. rollback (slab sinking), 2) experiments to study the role of rollback-style subduction on back arc basin spreading and plate motion, 3) experiments to look at the effects of oscillating longitudinal and rollback subduction on the thermal structure of the slab and wedge, and 4) the effects of this oscillation on generation of mantle diapirs in the wedge region. All these experiments have relevance to the processes being studied in the MARGINS program. Part of the work will be done at Australian National University (ANU) with Ross Griffiths, where Kincaid will spend a one-year sabbatical. This will take advantage of the excellent lab facilities available at ANU doc11106 none High latitudes are recognized as climatically sensitive and poorly understood components of the Earth s climate system. The transport of heat and moisture in the atmosphere constitutes the primary link between the Arctic and the global circulation system, yet owing to the dearth of conventional data in the central Arctic, little is known about the quantities, pathways, and interactions of energy and moisture after they enter the region. New data sets offer an exciting opportunity to observe the Arctic climate by providing measurements of atmospheric and surface quantities at (100-km)2 spatial resolution for two decades. This project will exploit observations from unique and recently available satellite-derived products to evaluate a new method to compute atmospheric heating caused by the convergence of horizontally transported sensible heat and moisture. Preliminary calculations suggest that these quantities have, indeed, changed significantly during the 20-year record of observations, with varying magnitudes and signs in different regions of the Arctic doc11107 none Windom This Americas award will support a visit to Brazil for Drs Herbert L. Windom and Richard A. Jahnke of the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography to plan a collaborative research proposal in the area of coastal marine biogeochemistry with Dr. Felipe Niencheski, Loaboratorio de Hidroquimica of Fundacao Universidade Do Rio Grande in Brazil. Topics for discussion during the proposed visit will include chemical and advective processes in coarse-grain sediments and their effect on coastal marine chemistry. Since coastal lagoons comprise 13% of the world s coastline, a study of these systems is critical to understanding how inputs from them can alter the biogeochemistry of the adjacent coastal ocean doc11108 none Cheirolepidiaceous Conifer Fossils from North America: New Data on the Structure and Diversity of the Dominant Mesozoic Vegetation Brian J. Axsmith Members of the extinct conifer family Cheirolepidiaceae evolved high levels of morphological diversity and reproductive sophistication, and were among the dominant land plants of the Mesozoic Era. Nevertheless, many aspects of the structure and evolution of these plants remain poorly understood. This situation represents a significant gap in our understanding of the Mesozoic world and the evolutionary history of seed plants. The proposed research involves the collection and or description of new cheirolepidiaceous conifers from sites in Arkansas, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Jersey that will elucidate the structure, diversity and evolution of this intriguing family. In addition to the first description of the important genus Hirmeriella from North America, at least three new taxa, as well as the only intact seed cones of the cosmopolitan species Pseudofrenelopsis parceramosa, will be described. In addition, a preliminary phylogenetic analysis of the Cheirolepidiaceae will be undertaken. Although much of the current state of knowledge regarding these plants is based on European collections, the proposed research will demonstrate that North America was a major locus of cheirolepidiacean diversity and evolution doc11109 none Modern processors predict the outcome of branch instructions and speculatively fetch instructions on the predicted path. If the prediction is wrong the speculatively fetched instructions are squashed (deleted) and fetch continues on the correct path. Techniques will be investigated that will reduce the number of such squashed instructions. With compiler and hardware assistance instructions that would normally be squashed and later re-fetched are identified and specially handled so they can be retained. Another approach to be investigated is to delay the fetch of instructions that might have to be squashed, in their place fetching instructions that would be executed regardless of branch outcome. A memory access latency hiding technique will also be investigated. It works by retiring a portion of the dynamic instruction stream (that is delayed by a cache miss) out of order, if necessary. The techniques will help solve two pervasive problems: the limited speed of integer programs due to branch mispredictions and the reduced performance of certain programs due to long memory latency. Branch misprediction penalty is an increasing function of issue width and pipeline depth; as both of these are expected increase the techniques to be developed will have a greater relative impact doc11110 none The proposed research has as final objective advancing knowledge on disk arrays performance, as well as developing new disk array organizations and algorithms for improved performance and reliability. The following specific areas will be investigated. Mirored disks (RAID1) double the disk access bandwidth for reads, but even higher performance is possible through scheduling. A combination of single disk scheduling methods adapted to mirrored disks and methods utilizing non-volatile storage to defer writes will be investigated. RAID6 disk arrays tolerating two disk failures utilize two parity disks or one parity disk and one utilizing the Reed-Solomon code. Two data layouts for the former case have been proposed. The performance of these configurations will be compared with each other, as well as RAID5, while the system is operating in normal, degraded, and rebuild modes. Active disks process data locally to disk, responding with final or filtrated data rather than raw data. Techniques to process more sophisticated queries than those considered so far will be investigated. Prioritized processing of disk requests allows background applications to make progress without significant impact on the performance of higher priority applications. We plan to investigate nonpreemptive as well as preemptive priorities in processing disk requests doc11111 none This research involves developing new connections between the areas of machine learning, on-line algorithms, and optimization, and using these connections to address fundamental problems in all three areas. In machine learning, one focus of this research is how to best combine a small sample of labeled data with a large amount of unlabeled data in order to produce high quality predictions. This type of problem has become especially important given the explosion of data now available over the web. This research is exploring how techniques such as network flow and graph cuts from the optimization literature can be used to provide a new means of attack, and how to best make a number of design choices that arise in this approach. Another basic question this work investigates is what kinds of concepts can be automatically learned in the presence of highly noisy data, and to what extent substantially new types of algorithms may be possible. The PI recently gave the first algorithm to learn a class of concepts in the presence of noise that is provably not learnable by a wide class of techniques known as Statistical Query methods. The current research aims to expand on this work and explore the extent to which it can be pushed much further. The types of learning problems being studied have close connections to problems of decoding random linear codes and finding approximate shortest lattice vectors that arise in cryptography. Improvements to the learning algorithms should impact our understanding of those problems as well. Another major thrust of this research is the use of techniques from machine learning to address problems in online algorithms. In particular, the highly-developed weighted experts technology in machine learning suggests new approaches for combining multiple online algorithms that may simplify a number of longstanding open problems. This work is studying the extent to which this connection can provide insight into several basic questions, such as dynamic optimality in search trees and the weighted caching problem. Finally, this research is also studying a number of basic approximability questions, as well as exploring new frameworks for the analysis of local search techniques doc11112 none Karato The interaction of convection currents in Earth s mantle with the mantle transition zone (410 to 660 km depth) affects the pattern of mantle circulation and hence evolution of this planet. This interaction depends strongly on the change in physical properties that occurs in the transition zone, particularly the rheological properties. To help understand the influence of rheological properties of transition zone materials on this interaction, the PI proposes to conduct experimental studies on plastic flow in transition zone minerals (wadsleyite and ringwoodite respectively) under the transition zone conditions with the emphasis on the effects of water and grain-size. Both grain-size and water can change significantly as convection currents go through the transition zone. The investigators will extend their previous studies into two new directions; (1) to investigate the effects of water on rheology and deformation fabric, and (2) to improve the quality of data by better-defined (constant strain-rate) deformation experiments and by stress measurements using the synchrotron radiation facility and transmission electron microscopy. These results will provide the first quantitative data set on the effects of water and grain-size on rheology and deformation fabric of major transition zone minerals and a firm basis for interpretation of seismic anisotropy in the transition zone doc11113 none Systems This research focuses on algorithms that work with limited information. Each topic is motivated by an application in on-line resource allocation in computer systems and is studied using theoretical analysis as well as empirical evaluation. The first topic is focuses on designing protocols for power management. The second topic of this research addresses problems that arise in scheduling and load balancing for multimedia servers. The third topic focuses on the problem of balancing the use of bandwidth and storage in caching continuous multi-media objects for Web proxy servers. For the power management topic, the question addressed is when to move an idle device to a lower power consumption state so as to conserve power usage while minimizing the latency experienced by the user. The investigator expands upon previous work on power management by introducing the notion of latency and by studying systems with multiple levels of power usage. The work on multimedia scheduling and load balancing focuses on two problems. The first is scheduling transmission of data that must be viewed continuously when clients have large buffers that can store data transmitted ahead of time. The second problem is to perform load balancing in assigning tasks to servers when there are multiple resource requirements that need to be balanced. For the topic of caching continuous multi-media objects for Web proxy servers, the challenge is that continuous data must be transmitted to the client in a continuous sequential stream. To support the real time requirements of streaming, web caches need to reserve bandwidth as well as space for each request for a continuous data object. This research investigates algorithms for balancing these two resources doc11114 none Proposal # U of Rhode Island PI: Kumaresan, Ramdas Many natural and man-made sounds have a time-varying, broad-band spectrum. Although a number of computer processing methods have been developed to analyze such signals, the auditory systems of humans and animals seem to process such signals and make inferences on them much more successfully. What kind of signal analysis underlies this phenomenon? In this research auditory scientists and signal processing engineers collaborate to attempt to answer this question, and, in the process advance the state of the art in computer-based signal analysis. The potential applications of this research include improved feature extraction for sound speech recognition classification, separation of overlapping sounds speech, sound source localization and better understanding of the auditory system. The auditory system, in addition to performing some form of spectral analysis, also extracts temporal modulation information from the acoustic signals. This information is encoded in the timing patterns of the spike trains that originate in the inner ear. In this research, with the help of auditory scientists, the above observations are translated into mathematically tractable signal processing problems. Specifically, the following basic question is explored: how can band-pass signals be represented by timing information only, as opposed to traditional Nyquist-rate amplitude sampling (as in Shannon s sampling theorem)? Recent results by the investigators indicate that the information about the phase and envelope modulations of arbitrary band-pass signals can be represented by certain zero-crossings alone, if appropriate adaptive preprocessing(demodulation) is performed on the signal. Based on these ideas an analysis-synthesis procedures is being developed in which time-varying signals such as speech can be effectively represented by a small number of modulated components using only timing information. The robustness of such procedures will be examined and the analysis-synthesis procedures will be applied to a number of applications mentioned in the above paragraph doc11115 none Johnston This proposal requests funds to support an ion probe study of existing 10 kbar mantle-melting run products which the P.I. proposes to pursue while at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution during his sabbatical in Fall, . These run products represent 5+ years of NSF-funded work by the P.I. and two recent Ph.D. graduates. Ten peridotitic starting materials, each constructed by recombining hand-picked and acid-washed mineral separates in differing modes, were investigated. Five of these utilized minerals from a fertile lherzolite xenolith from Kilbourne Hole while the other five utilized minerals from a compositionally intermediate lherzolite sample from Mt. Noorat, S.E. Australia. In all, 54 glass- and olivine-bearing run products are available, 36 with cpx, 41 with opx, and 47 with spinel. Calculated melt fractions range from 1-48 wt. %; 22 contain less than 5 wt% melt. All experiments employed a variation of the diamond aggregate technique (e.g., Hirose and Kushiro, ; Baker and Stolper, ) in which a layer of 70-100 micron diameter vitreous carbon spheres was substituted in lieu of powdered diamond, to provide a melt sink in which some melt could be isolated from the residual crystals, thereby preventing its quench modification upon termination of the experiments. Major element mineral and glass data for all starting materials vary in a systematic and sensible manner with increasing temperature and this, combined with run durations of 2-10 days, supports a close approach to equilibrium in the experiments. The primary goals of the proposed work will be to measure the distribution coefficients between melt and cpx and opx for REE, Ti, V, Cr, Sr, Y, and Sr (Be, B, Rb, Nb, and Ba will also be attempted but will probably be too low in the pyroxenes), and to analyze the water contents of these nominally anhydrous run products. To my knowledge, these will be the first such data germane to mantle melting derived from experiments on peridotitic, as opposed to basaltic, bulk compositions. Earlier work in basaltic systems has revealed complex compositional dependencies of pyroxene melt Ds demonstrating that the use of single-valued Ds in modeling studies is inappropriate. Our major element data greatly expand the composition space covered by experiment and will allow extension and better definition of these dependencies, thus improving predictive models. We also have 17 cpx-bearing run products with less than 5% melt and some of these melts have the elevated Na2O and SiO2 contents that Baker et. al. ( ) first noted characterize very near-solidus mantle melts. Given the likely importance of fractional melting in the mid-ocean ridge environment, determination of the partitioning behavior of key trace elements between these exotic melts and mantle pyroxenes will be critical doc11116 none The proposed research will investigate architectural approaches to optimize memory-hierarchy performance, focusing on the gap between the lowest level of on-chip cache and the off-chip DRAM. Prior work has shown that the combination of careful scheduling of prefetch requests on dedicated high-band width DRAM channels and careful placement of prefetch data in the cache can make very aggressive prefetching schemes practical. The proposed work builds on this framework in three directions: integration of multiple prefetch-generation sources, development of prefetching based on run-ahead threads, and integration of prefetching and replacement such that predictions of future access patterns can be applied in both domains. In each of the proposed areas, detailed designs will be developed, tested, and iteratively refined via simulation. As solutions in each area firm up, the results will be integrated into a unified model to work out interactions among the mechanisms. The overall objective of the research is to develop and analyze an integrated memory system that delivers maximum efficiency across a range of DRAM-constrained system workloads. The impact of these design techniques will be to increase the efficiency and performance of the high-performance systems used as database, web, and technical computing servers, increasing their responsiveness and capacity doc11117 none Collaborative: Electro Magnetoencephalography Signal Processing Methods and Performance Arye Nehorai EECS Department University of Illinois at Chicago Detecting electric sources in the brain is important for both understanding its function and for clinical applications. Examples include mapping the brain activities and finding foci of epilepsy activities before surgical treatment. We are developing detection methods that find the sources through computer processing of measurements from arrays of sensors around the head. More specifically, we employ eletro Magnetoencephalography (E MEG) sensors that measure electric potentials on the scalp and induced magnetic field outside the head. We are developing several new methods of processing the E MEG signals, analyzing their performance and validating with real data their applicability, thus contributing to improvements in the use and performance of E MEG equipment and to increase the capabilities of neurological data processing tools. We hope to solve some of the most currently relevant E MEG problems: (i) estimating and tracking paths of functional and neuronal connectivity, following the trajectories of cerebral sources, (ii) estimating concentrated and extended sources, in the presence of noise with unknown spatio-temporal covariance, (iii) simultaneously estimating source parameters and tissue conductivities, (iv) developing computationally efficient methods for realistically-shaped head models, which reduce the demands on segmentation algorithms, (v) estimating source parameters for evoked responses with inhomogeneous epochs. We are also deriving performance measures for evaluating the newly proposed methods allowing comparison with existing systems and techniques; identifying those that are effective and helping in the optimum design of future systems. Finally, we are using empirical data sets evaluate and validate methods. These data sets are being derived by the Dr. Jeffrey Lewine s group from Clinical and Cognitive Neurosciences studies where whole-head MEG and high-density EEG are recorded simultaneously. The Nehorai group is developing the processing methods and the two groups will collaborate on their evaluation and validation doc11118 none RUI: Oriented Matroids and Rigidity Theory Techniques for Pseudo Triangulations, Visibility Graphs and Other Structures in Computational Geometry PI: Ileana Streinu : This research is motivated by fundamental questions in Robotics and Computer Graphics, such as planning the motion of a robot arm, detecting collisions and computing visibilities. It seeks efficient algorithmic solutions by investigating the underlying computational structures with novel mathematical tools and it has a substantial potential to lead to applications in understanding the nature of the protein folding process in biology. The investigator is undertaking a systematic plan of research aimed at furthering the understanding of how the underlying oriented matroid structure of points and lines affects properties of a variety of partially embedded combinatorial structures such as pseudo triangulations and visibility graphs. The focus is on combinatorial (enumeration, generation, characterization) and algorithmic questions, the underlying framework is geometric (dimensions 2 and 3), and the techniques involved come from matroid and oriented matroid theory, rigidity theory, combinatorial topology, computational algebraic geometry and graph embeddings doc11119 none PI s: Yong-Gang Li, University of Southern California, and John E. Vidale, University of California, Los Angeles We propose to continue our study of the post-seismic healing process on Landers, California, rupture zone using fault-zone seismic waves excited by explosions detonated within the rupture zone. Repeated surveys in , , , and have revealed that the shear velocity of the fault zone rock increased by ~1.2% between and , and increased further by ~0.7% between and . This trend indicates the Landers rupture zone has been healing by strengthening after the mainshock, most likely due to the closure of cracks that opened during the earthquake. The observed velocity increase between and is consistent with a decrease of ~0.03 in apparent crack density within the rupture zone. We also found that cracks near the fault zone was partially water-filled and became more wet with time. However, the data recorded in the most recent experiment showed that wave velocities in the shallow rupture zone did not increase further more but with a slight decrease for shear velocity between and , inferring that the fault healing probably became invisible since 6 to 8 years after the earthquake. However, we speculate that the healing process on Landers rupture zone might have been affected by the M7.1 Hector Mine earthquake on October 25, , occurring only ~25 km east of Landers. The Hector Mine mainshock triggered slip on the neighboring faults as shown in the InSAR data and could cause crack opening or coalescence in the shallow crust due to strong shaking and change in the mean stress in the region. We shall conduct a repeated experiment in - . The new data will help us to determine if the healing process on the Landers rupture zone was affected by the Hector Mine earthquake or has become invisible. We shall compare the healing process on the Landers rupture zone with that on the Hector Mine rupture zone for which we are monitoring from November of . We shall develop a mechanical model based on crack dilatancy theory to interpret the fault healing quantitatively doc11120 none Synchronization insures correctness of parallel execution by enforcing true data dependencies and timing constraints. In a parallel programming environment based on the shared-memory programming model, synchronization is provided either through explicit user-level coarse-grain synchronization primitives (such as locks and barriers) or implicitly synchronized data structures such as lock-able L-structures and write-once I-structures. In this project we propose a new efficient way to support fine grained synchronization mechanisms on multiprocessors. We propose to design a full empty tagged memory hierarchy with aggressive hardware support for fine grained synchronization that is embedded in the cache coherency mechanism of an SMP or a NUMA multiprocessor, or a single-chip multiprocessor. We propose to handle synchronization faults in a similar way as cache misses in a lockup-free cache. We believe that handling synchronization and coherence together can provide a more efficient execution, reducing the occupancy in the memory controllers and the network bandwidth consumed by protocol messages. The performance benefits are primarily the result of allowing a dataflow style of computation in programming models, and maximizing the exposed parallelism by minimizing the possibility of false dependencies caused by coarse grained synchronization doc11121 none Scalable high-speed routers are necessary to handle rapidly growing traffic in the Internet at the aggregated packet forwarding rates expected to reach terabits per second. This proposal deals with a novel router architecture with good scalability and capable of forwarding hundreds of millions of packets per second, in order to keep up with future transmission technologies. It aims to help advance the state-of-the-art of router design and to enable large networking configurations. The project contains both basic research and experimental systems activities, including the major objectives of (1) developing a fast packet classification subsystem (PCS), (2)pursuing a scalable switching fabric (SSF) for interconnecting line cards, (3) assessing the use of a simultaneous multithreading SMT) processor to replace the conventional processor(s) in each forwarding engine, and 4) investigating into effective fault-tolerant schemes for key router components. The first three objectives are related to router scalability and performance, whereas the last one is for reliability improvement, which is especially crucial as the router sizes grow. The fast PCS proposed comprises multiple forwarding engines and a novel cache-oriented multistage structure (COMS), which directs packets arriving at line cards to those forwarding engines for table lookups. The COMS caches lookup results at its constituent switching elements to enable fast and concurrent lookups of subsequent packets. Each forwarding engine keeps only partial routing filter lookup tables, rather than full ones (as in any other router design). The SSF is based on PI s earlier switching fabric work, with an appropriate set of wrap-around connections and additional logics for hardware multicast support. An initial study on the use of an SMT processor to handle multiple table-lookup processes, with one thread for a process, is encouraging, and its extensive assessment will be conducted in this project. Caching lookup outcomes optimally in COMS will be modeled formally as a graph optimization problem, with its solution being developed. Research results from this project are likely to have material, positive impacts on future router design, advancing networking technologies to facilitate the continuous expansion of the Internet for years to come. They will also enrich the lecturing materials of such courses as computer communications and networks, network computing, and distributed systems doc11122 none This research involves two applications of graph algorithms; the first regards communication in networks, the second involves solving flow problems in structured networks. The investigators study algorithms for finding paths connecting many communicating parties in a network. The goal is that the paths do not overutilize any particular link in the network. The second item the investigators will study is the famous problem of routing the maximum amount of flow through a network. This problem is itself interesting and has numerous applications in fields as diverse as transportation and computer vision. More specifically, the investigaters study low congestion routing in networks. This problem is easy in a relaxed fractional setting but notoriously difficult in an integral setting. Recent work has established relationships between a cut based upper bound and the fractional lower bound on this problem. These results will lead to better understanding of the integral version of this problem. Research on this problem has made use of techniques from linear programming, randomized rounding, combinatorial graph theory, as well as geometric embeddings of graph metrics. For the maximum flow problem, the investigaters study ideas in a recent maximum flow algorithm in order to extend them to the minimum cost flow problem. The investigators also study the maximum flow problems on planar and other restricted classes of graphs doc11123 none The research focuses on techniques, algorithms, and methodologies for the analysis and transformation of monolithic programs, which use operations on entire arrays. High-level monolithic analysis drives the mechanical optimization and efficient scalarization of such programs. Whereas optimization of monolithic code has previously focused primarily on expressions, this project investigates optimization over larger units of program granularity. The optimum elimination of unnecessary array partial results, with a particular focus on partial results assigned to a program variable may studied. A given array value assigned to a program variable may contain a permutation of the elements in some other array variable, and hence a compiler may be able to avoid materializing the given value. In contrast to minimizing materializations, there are situations where compiler introduced materializations, such as data rearrangement, or partial materializations, can significantly improve the efficiency of memory access at various levels of the memory hierarchy. Optimization techniques are studied both for avoiding materializations and for utilizing compiler introduced materializations. An intrinsic aspect of compiling monolithic code is scalarization. The use of monolithic analysis to obtain information that guides or drives scalarization, hopefully directly yielding optimized scalarized code doc11124 none This research takes a significant step towards enabling and evaluating the application of compiler optimizations for uniprocessor performance within explicitly parallel programs, with a flexible view of memory consistency. Two important unanswered questions are targeted: (1) What kind of performance can be gained with the Location Consistency (LC) memory model in comparison to the sequential consistency (SC)-derived models for shared memory parallel programs, amidst the new developments of compiler analysis and optimization for SC-derived models? (2) As a compromise between the two divergent approaches, can both the SC-derived models and the LC model be supported within the same program, by developing a programmer-controlled memory consistency strategy supported by compiler technology? The results will include: (1) specification and implemenation of a programming model that assumes an end-to-end view of the memory system based on the LC model, and a study of its programmability, (2) compilation analyses to uphold programmer-controlled memory consistency so programmers can choose between the memory models in different parts of the same application, (3) development and refinement of cache consistency protocols based on the LC model in a software caching context, (4) experimental evaluation of compiler optimization and program performance under different memory consistency models and cache protocols doc11125 none A Long-Term Paleoecological Record of Coral Reef Communities John M. Pandolfi Ear- Reef coral communities living during the past 500 ka (thousand years) show remarkable persistence in taxonomic composition and diversity during multiple episodes of global climate change. In contrast, similar studies conducted over decadal time scales in living reefs show striking change and unpredictability with apparent dramatic and unprecedented decline during the past 30 years. This apparent paradox confounds attempts to predict the response of coral reefs to local and global environmental change. This research will investigate the taxonomic composition and diversity of coral communities, using a long term paleoecological record between and years before present (ybp) in the Holocene raised reef terrace along a 35 km segment of coastline of the Huon Peninsula, Papua New Guinea (PNG). The exposed fossil reef from the -year Holocene interval preserves fossil assemblages before and after a clearly identifiable, narrowly dated, and widespread earthquake disturbance event. The 20 m high Holocene seacliffs contain a shallow fore-reef habitat that exquisitely preserves reef coral assemblages, and can be dated and sampled with a resolution within 150 years. This temporal framework, inaccessible in living reefs, corresponds well to the life history attributes of the long-living corals, and provides the key link between studies of older Pleistocene assemblages and modern studies at decadal time scales. Study of the PNG paleoecological record of coral reefs in the absence of significant human impact will document: 1) patterns in coral community structure every 150 years for years, including post-disturbance community re-colonization; and 2) the relationship between coral species distribution patterns through time and space and global climate and local environmental variation, during continuous sea level rise and variable Holocene sea surface temperatures. Ecological data will be gathered by conducting surveys measuring the abundance of reef coral species along 25-m transects representing similar age assemblages over a 35 km distance. Previous work differentiating the ancient habitats will be corroborated using sedimentology and composition of the coralline algal communities. A significant component of this research is to relate species distribution patterns through time and space to fluctuations in their environment. Thus, the Holocene reef environment will be characterized using paired geochemical analyses (isotopic and trace element) of corals and mollusks. A detailed temporal sequence will be established for each of the sampled Holocene reef geological sections using abundant 14C (radiocarbon) age dates doc11126 none for GRAPH-THEORETIC APPROXIMATION ALGORITHMS (NSF # ) PI: Ramamoorthi Ravi, Carnegie Mellon University. The increasing size of communication and information networks has motivated several new problems in the design of networks with low cost and high resilience; Many of these problems are known to be prohibitively expensive in terms of computing power to solve to full accuracy. Yet these problem abstractions capture models from a variety of application areas such as communication network routing, multicasting messages in large networks, VLSI layout, and transportation networks with economies of scale. The research in this proposal aims to advance our fundamental knowledge of the structure of good solutions to such inherently intractable computational problems involving networks. The investigators will develop approximation algorithms for these problems -- these are heuristic methods that trade off some accuracy in the solution in return for lowered computational resources, in a quantifiable way. The research will involve the application of and new discovery of results in the theory of graphs to guide the design of these heuristic solutions. In particular, the investigators will design polynomial-time approximation algorithms with improved performance ratios for many basic graph-theoretic problems including the problem of augmenting a tree to make it two-connected, buy-at-bulk network design problems and the minimum $k$-cut problem. The investigators will continue their ongoing study of bicriteria network design problems (problems that involve two objective functions to be optimized simultaneously) to design improved bicriteria approximation algorithms for many spanning tree problems arising in practice; These problems involve a combination of commonly studied objectives such as the maximum node degree, diameter and total cost of the tree. The research effort will focus on the theme of studying natural mathematical programming formulations for these NP-hard problems and attempt to derive improved approximation guarantees via rounding algorithms that will also establish the integrality gap of these basic formulations doc11127 none Frey Terrestrial volcanoes are associated with three different tectonic settings. Two are associated with plate boundaries, that is, regions of plate divergence and convergence, and the third is intraplate volcanism. Magmas erupted in these different environments differ significantly in geochemical characteristics. In this proposed research the goal is to understand the source and processes which determine the geochemical characteristics of Hawaiian lavas. This endmember is of great interest because it may in part represent the consequences of subducting oceanic crust deep into the mantle at subduction zones. The approach will be to determine abundances of major and trace elements and isotopic ratios of O, Sr, Nd, Pb, Hf and Os in lavas of varying relative age from these two shields. For Koolau the samples to be studied are from a recently drilled core, that penetrates the shield to a greater depth and older age than previously studied surficially exposed samples. For Kahoolawe, which has not been intensively studied, the samples will be from several stratigraphic sections across the shield. The principal objective is to understand the source components contributing to these magmas; hence emphasis will be on evaluating correlations between abundance ratios of highly incompatible elements, e.g., Ba Th, Ce Pb and La Nb, and isotopic ratios. These geochemical characteristics will be determined using analytical facilities such as inductively couples plasma mass spectrometry and thermal ionization mass spectrometry. Because of their oceanic plate setting, relatively simple mineralogy and a wealth complementary studies, Hawaiian volcanoes present the best opportunity for understanding the role of recycled crustal components in oceanic island volcanism. In particular, this research will aid in constraining the processes and source components which create a geochemical endmember of Hawaiian shield lavas doc11128 none PROPOSAL # WILLIAM MARSH RICE UNIVERSITY PI: JOHNSON, DON H. The closely allied fields of signal processing and information theory have never found common ground. Signal processing focuses on how signals can represent information and how systems manipulate and change signal structure. Information theory revolves around the structure of information that signals represent, but ignores what information is meaningful to the receiver by concentrating on efficient compression and communication. The research develops a new theory of information processing that weds these two disciplines and has the dual goals of understanding how effectively signals, no matter what their nature, can represent information and of quantifying how well systems process information. Because of the theory s generality, we analyze both communication systems, to probe how effectively they convey information and meaning, and neural processing systems, to understand how neural groups process and represent information. We quantify how well signals represent information by computing an information-theoretic distance (it obeys the Data Processing Theorem) between signals associated with two instances of the encoded information. We assume that the signals are stochastic, and the distance measures how different are the probability distributions associated with the signals. We use the Kullback-Leibler distance because it is related both to optimal classifier performance via Stein s Lemma and to optimal least-squares estimator performance through the Cramer-Rao bound. A larger distance thus corresponds to a more effective representation of the information. The information processing ability of a system is measured by the information transfer ratio, defined to be the ratio of distances computed at the system s input and output. With this ratio, we quantify how well an information processing system behaves as an information filter doc11129 none This project addresses the challenges of successfully deploying large-scale parallel I O servers to meet the demands of modern data-intensive applications multimedia retrieval, We and database servers, visualization and graphics, and spatial and temporal databases. The goals are to develop scheduling and resource management algorithms for parallel I O systems, and increase our understanding of the complex underlying resource tradeoffs. These include basic scheduling issues dealing with parallel I O, including those related to prefetching and caching, on -line scheduling, fair servicing of multiple users and deadline-constrained real-time parallel I O. Secondly the algorithms designed in this research will be directly applied to areas like multimedia systems, including variable-bit rate (VBR) video retrieval, and Web, database and application servers dealing with large numbers of concurrent, interacting I Os doc11130 none The research focuses on the design and implementation of a framework, called the ADaptive Object RE-optimization (ADORE) system, to evaluate the effectiveness of dynamic binary re-optimization, and to study the interaction between architecture micro-architecture and a dynamic binary re-optimizer. The topics studied include: efficient profiling techniques; runtime hot region selection and formation; light-weight runtime optimizations; code patching and region linking techniques; architectural and micro-architectural support for dynamic binary optimization; and runtime specialization and value profiling. The first implementation of the ADORE system will be based on two different implementations of the IA-64 architecture, the Itanium and the McKinley. The performance of application code optimized for Itanium will be tested on McKinley using the ADORE system doc11131 none Kleene algebra with tests (KAT) is a system for describing and manipulating computations and assertions. KAT allows propositional logic and the algebra of programs to be integrated seamlessly into a single system that is remarkably powerful in expressive and deductive power, yet computationally and conceptually simple. KAT has many applications in computer science. In particular it has recently been used to specify and verify various communication protocols and common compiler optimizations. It does so more simply and with less effort than more traditional systems such as Hoare Logic. In this proposal, we propose (i) to further develop the theory of KAT; (ii) to produce a research monograph of significant scope giving a comprehensive introduction to KAT; and (ii) to continue to investigate the use of KAT in practical program verification doc11132 none Scholz - Burgmann - King Northeast Asia, where the Pacific, North American, and Eurasian plates come together, is one of the last frontiers of plate tectonics. The location of the North America - Eurasia plate boundary is not well established. The problem is further complicated by a number of smaller microplates in the region, including the Okhotsk, Arctic, Bering, and Amurian plates, whose existence, rates of motion, and boundaries are still uncertain. This project relies on space geodesy to study the broad zone of deformation encompassing the boundary of the Eurasian and North American plates, intervening microplates, and their interaction with the Pacific plate. This investigation is motivated by the recent initiation of high-precision GPS measurements in eastern Siberia, Korea, and Japan, which provide the opportunity for a significant advance in understanding of this enigmatic region. New GPS measurements provide constraints for tectonic models, which take into account plate tectonic angular velocities and deformation associated with strain accumulation and release at the plate boundaries. The geodetic analysis helps constrain the kinematics of deformation from central Asia to western North America through careful integration of regional and global GPS data. New measurements focus on three areas not well constrained by current data: Sakhalin, the Cherskiy Range in eastern Siberia, and the Kamchatka cusp. Expected results will include an improved location (in northern Siberia) of the pole of rotation between Eurasia and North America; more precise delineation of plate boundaries in northeast Asia; and constraints on the existence, location and present-day motion of the Okhotsk microplate and other regional blocks. The major problem preventing a straightforward inversion of GPS velocities for rigid plate motions is that displacements of many GPS stations are affected by inter-seismic strain accumulation along plate boundary faults, especially along the Pacific subduction margin. Where large earthquakes (such as the Mw = 7.0 and Mw = 6.8 Sakhalin, and the Mw = 7.7 Kamchatka events) occurred within our study region, the deformation field is further disturbed by co-seismic and post-seismic motions. Thus, the investigation addresses the inextricably linked regional plate kinematics and subduction zone dynamics. Elastic and visco-elastic models are used to evaluate the inter-seismic strain accumulation process and to estimate the amount of seismic coupling on major plate boundary faults. The modeling allows for separation of the contributions of plate boundary strain and plate tectonic angular velocities to the measured GPS velocity field doc11133 none Java programmers rely on clumsy erasure idiom to define generic operations: a generic class is represented by conventional classes where all references to type parameters have been replaced by the type Object. Programs that rely on this idiom must repeatedly cast the results of generic operations to the types of omitted type parameters. Generic operations in Java are slower than their non-generic counterparts because this idiom introduces a level of indirection in the representation of type parameters instantiated as primitive types. The investigator has recently completed the construction of a prototype compiler for NexGen, a Java extension supporting genericity designed by the investigator and Guy Steele. The compiler relies on the erasure idiom to implement genericity and hence does not improve the performance of computations involving generic classes. To produce good performance for generic Java, a compiler must eliminate indirection in the representation of generic class instances. The requisite transformation is called {\em whole program analysis} because it is invalid if any program operation depends on the address of an inlined object. Fortunately, there is a nearly linear algorithm based on previous work by the investigator on concrete type analysis that can determine if a given object field can be inlined. This project will develop a new optimizing compiler for NextGen that uses concrete type analysis to inline the parametric fields of generic classes doc11134 none Diversity Dynamics of Middle Paleozoic Marine Animals Michael Foote The subject of diversity dynamics explores how and why the number of species in the world changes over time. This research will explore diversity dynamics with data on marine animals from the middle of the Paleozoic Era, about 440 to 350 million years ago. The species composition of fossil communities will be inventoried, and the ancient geographic and environmental setting of these communities will be determined. Using this new information as well as existing data from other sources, the times of origination and extinction of animal genera (the more inclusive taxonomic units that consist of one or more related species) will be estimated. This will allow the temporal patterns of diversity, origination, and extinction to be reconstructed, and these temporal patterns in turn will be used to assess the dynamics of diversity. When diversity increases over millions of years, does this tend to occur because the rate of production of new species has increased or because the rate of extinction of existing species has decreased? Likewise, does a decline in diversity tend to be marked by a decrease in origination or an increase in extinction? In other words, is origination or extinction more important in regulating biological diversity? Previous research shows that the style of diversity dynamics changes over the course of animal evolution, with extinction more important for about the first 300 million years of the history of animals (during the Paleozoic Era) and origination more important thereafter (during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic Eras). There are reasons to think that diversity dynamics may vary geographically and environmentally. This research will be the first to test the predictions that, as far as diversity regulation is concerned, extinction is more important in the tropics than in the temperate zones and more important in shallow-water environments than in deeper waters. In addition, it is known that shallow marine and tropical marine environments were more prevalent in the Paleozoic Era than later. The results of this research will therefore be significant in determining whether the observed, long-term temporal change in diversity dynamics may be underlain by a change in the prevalence of certain environmental and geographic settings in the marine realm doc11135 none With the demand for higher data rates and wireless services rising as fast as the Internet permeated our lives, the need to cope with the idiosyncrasies of the shared wireless medium increases along with the challenges : multi-user interference (MUI), fading propagation effects, mobility-induced impairments, and high-performance telecommunication systems that are also bandwidth- and power-efficient. Today s Code-Division Multiple Access (CDMA) relies on long aperiodic pseudo-noise codes and strict power control to suppress MUI. On the other hand, CDMA proposals with symbol-periodic short spreading codes relax the need for power control at the expense of high-complexity MUI cancellation which is less affordable at the mobile unit in the downlink. But also in the uplink, the frequency-selective fading that asynchronous high-rate transmissions experience as they propagate through multipath-rich channels, degrades performance unless bandwidth is sacrificed. The CDMA system of this grant relies on the novel idea of spreading a block of symbols with long, yet structured and deterministic, user codes. Our block-spread transmissions can be viewed as (and are implemented by) chip-interleaving of symbols spread by short codes. The attractive features of the resulting Chip-Interleaved Block-Spread (CIBS) CDMA system: i)flexibility to revert as block-spread TDMA, FDMA, Direct-Sequence-, or, Multicarrier-CDMA; ii)power- and bandwidth-efficiency; iii)MUI avoidance by-design; iv)full-multipath diversity and no loss of optimality with matched-filter reception; and v)low-complexity. Basic research directions include: performance analysis and comparisons with competing alternatives in terms of capacity and bit error rates; mobility studies and development of timing-offset, carrier-frequency offset and channel estimation algorithms for acquisition and tracking; incorporation of multiple antennas to enhance diversity with space-time coding gains; investigation of optimal precoding, power-and-bit loading and adaptive modulation; and study of cellular system-level issues doc11136 none This award is directed to the study of polymer degradation due to UV irradiation and thermal treatment in the presence of air and ozone air mixtures. The proposed studies will be performed on polymers containing hindered amine stabilizers (HAS) as protecting additives. The main method of study is electron spin resonance imaging (ESRI) of nitroxides and other radical intermediates formed in the degradation process. Spatial information will be encoded in the spectroscopy by collecting ESR spectra in the presence of magnetic field gradients. 1D ESRI will provide the spatial distribution of the radical intensity, and 2D spatial-spectral ESRI will allow visualization of the line shapes along the sample depth. The experiments will be performed as a function of treatment time, wavelength of the UV source, and temperature in thermal degradation. Additional information will be obtained by spin probe ESR, UV, FTIR, and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). Photo- and thermal degradation will be performed on two classes of polymers: 1. Polymers based on styrene, acrylonitrile and butadiene, as homopolymers and in different combinations as copolymers. This group will include the copolymers poly(styrene-co-butadiene), poly(acrylonitrile-co-butadiene) and poly(styrene-co-acrylonitrile), and poly(acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene) (ABS). 2. Copolymers of polypropylene and ethylene prepared by sequential polymerization. These polymers consist of a semicrystalline polypropylene (PP) matrix and a dispersed amorphous elastomeric component, and have a phase-separated morphology; the study of these systems will benefit from the rich literature available on polypropylene degradation, but will present the challenge and advantage of properties modification by addition of the elastomer phase. The ability to perform nondestructive profiling via ESRI is an important advantage compared to other (destructive) methods now in use for probing the spatial dimension. %%% The proposed research is expected to: identify specific morphological domains where the degradation process is accelerated; map the consumption of the stabilizer within the sample depth on the scale of mm, and within the morphological domains on the scale of micrometers, contribute to the understanding of environmental factors, for instance the effect of irradiation wavelength and ozone; and lead to nondestructive spectral profiling as a method for the detection of early events in polymer degradation and stabilization doc11137 none Roger Loring of Cornell University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to develop methods for modeling nonlinear infrared spectroscopy in liquids and biomolecules with an atomistic level of description. Experimental observables in two-pulse and three-pulse vibrational echo measurements will be computed using classical molecular dynamics simulations. The fundamental theoretical issue underpinning this research is determining the optimal use of classical mechanical molecular dynamics data for complex systems to calculate nominally quantum mechanical observables. Two closely coupled research directions will be pursued: (1) to establish rigorously the validity regime of classical mechanical echo calculations, by performing numerically exact classical and quantum calculations for the same model system, and (2) to perform classical echo calculations for liquid-state and biomolecular models, for which quantum treatment is not feasible. Calculations will focus on myoglobin-CO, for which experiments are now characterizing the nature and time scales of protein fluctuations. Computing vibrational echoes in myoglobin-CO will identify the specific protein dynamics sensed by the CO ligand, and will guide the application of these new laser laboratory techniques to other bimolecular systems. Molecular motions in liquid solvents and in the heterogeneous environments of proteins are an integral part of the dynamics of chemical reactions and biological processes. A new generation of spectroscopic techniques can probe these motions directly. This research will allow for a detailed molecular picture of these processes by interpreting these new measurements doc11138 none General purpose processors (GPPs) are designed to implement on fixed configuration that is good on average but may not be well suited for individual applications. In fact, applications can have drastically different execution characteristics (e.g. branch prediction technique preference, cache configuration and policy preference, low-power opportunities). This suggests the use of device reconfigurability, but generic reconfigurable logic of any substantial scale (e.g. most field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology) is slow, lacks density, and is power-hungry. Yet many processor structures are easily adaptable to a wide variety of configurations. This research will develop dynamic, small-scale, partial reconfigurability for such structures. This Dynaptable approach has the further benefit that it integrates work at the architectural, logic, and circuit levels. The Dynaptable approach consists of three key elements: 1. Flexible structures: designing key processor structures with judicious amounts of reconfigurable hardware to provide flexibility in a low-cost, non-invasive way. 2. Run-time monitoring: determining the current configuration s performance or effectiveness compared to other possible competing configurations. 3. Dynamic reconfiguration: using the results of run-time monitoring to adapt to a new configuration that improves the chosen figure of merit (e.g. performance, energy-delay product, fault tolerance). The research will identify the most profitable places for adding small-scale reconfigurability, design the requisite reconfigurable elements, and develop the most effective and lowest-cost techniques for dynamic monitoring and adaptation. This work will have an impact on the design of a variety of processor components (branch predictor, cache, datapath, etc.) for a range of processing environments (embedded systems, superscalar, SMT, etc.). The final goal is to develop a consistent methodology for dynamically adapting GPP microarchitectures for improved performance, lower power, and increased fault tolerance doc11139 none This research aims to expand and redefine the role of prediction-based techniques for parallel and distributed systems. First, we reduce barrier synchronization overhead by predicting the final producer of a value before the barrier. This producer identification allows the consumer to speculatively proceed past the barrier, only waiting on the actual production as needed. Second, we introduce the slipstream paradigm to multiprocessor systems. A redundant version of each parallel thread runs concurrently, its execution reduced by speculatively removing long-latency events, such as shared memory writes. The reduced thread dynamically detects sharing patterns, which are used by the original thread to optimize its coherence and synchronization actions, improving overall performance. Finally, we investigate the use of producer-validated message prediction to reduce traffic in a message-passing environment. Both the producer and the consumer of a message predict its contents, using redundant prediction histories. Since the producer knows the results of the consumer s prediction, it need only send those data that were not correctly predicted. This traffic reduction is significant in environments in which communication is much more costly than computation, such as networked embedded systems. These three avenues of research represent an excursion into new frontiers of prediction-based technology, resulting in parallel systems that scale to new levels of availability and performance doc11140 none C-CR Dana Randall Markov Chain Algorithms for Computational Problems from Physics and Biology This research in Markov chain Monte Carlo methods has three primary goals: (i) developing new, general techniques for analyzing convergence rates of Markov chains; (ii) designing rigorous, efficient algorithms for specific computational applications, focusing on problems from statistical physics and biology with relevance to computer science; and (iii) exploring the connections between the phase structure of physical models and the inherent limitations of various sampling methods. The research is concentrated in these areas. 1) Coupling has been a very popular method for bounding the convergence rates of Markov chains based on local updates, but only works in restrictive settings. Heat bath algorithms, which allow possibly nonlocal updates, appear to circumvent potentially bad situations arising from simpler chains, but tend to be prohibitively complex for analysis. Decomposition theorems provide a new tool which allow a Markov chain to be broken into pieces whereby a hybrid approach can be used to analyze each piece. The investigator studies how these methods can be used together to approach some new sampling problems. 2) Computational biologists have developed a Turing-universal model of computation based on Wang tiles using double-stranded DNA. New efficient sampling algorithms for some of these simple models are explored with the goal of providing ways to test the model predict outcomes of experiments. 3) The research additionally explores the connection between rapid mixing of locally defined Markov chains and the uniqueness of the Gibbs state of the underlying physical system, also characterized by the lack of a phase transition. Knowledge of this phase structure is used to develop algorithms which will allow sampling below the critical point, where local Markov chains are inefficient doc11141 none The certitude that software execution terminates in principle is of little use without a grasp of the resources required, in particular computation time and space as functions of input size. Research over the last decade has demonstrated the potential of implicit static analysis of computational complexity, that is, programming and verification paradigms that automatically guarantee program execution within feasible resources, without an explicit analysis of algorithmic complexity in terms of machine models. This project further explores the conceptual underpinnings of machine-independent complexity, in particular abstraction mechanisms in functional programs and verification systems. It studies the implementation of these principles within major programming paradigms and styles, notably declarative and object oriented programming. Finally, it initiates applications of implicit complexity in Feasible Mathematics, in the guise of a library of formal proofs which establish the feasible computational contents of mathematical theorems without referring explicitly to computational complexity doc11142 none The project is on the development of efficient numerical algorithms and high quality software to solve systems of polynomials. A basic problem is to decompose the positive dimensional subsets of solutions into irreducible components. The numerical approach of Sommese, Verschelde, and Wampler is based on generic slicing with linear spaces, generic projections into lower dimensional linear spaces, and use of classical interpolation techniques to numerically do what elimination theory does in symbolic programs. Given a polynomial system with parameters, a goal of the project is to find equations on the parameters that need to be satisfied for the system to have a positive dimensional component of solutions. Two applications targeted by this project are factoring multivariate polynomials and finding overconstrained mechanisms. A major outcome of this work will be publicly available software to solve polynomial systems that arise in science and engineering. This work is carried out in the research fields of numerical analysis and computer algebra whose mission is to provide the scientific community with software to solve mathematical problems. Since polynomial systems are used as models in application areas as far apart as chemical reaction systems, the design of mechanisms, or economic equilibria to name but a few areas, the focus of the project on such basic models as polynomial systems is appropriate. Besides the technology transfer of advanced mathematical tools into science and engineering, an important aspect of this project is to introduce students in the design and use of the developed software doc11143 none An effective way of providing error resilience for multimedia transmission in a communication system with a relatively small reduction in efficiency is multiple description coding (MDC), which assumes the existence of multiple independent channels between the transmitter and receiver, each of which can be temporarily down or can experience burst errors. With MDC several coded streams, called descriptions, are generated and transmitted over different channels. At the destination, if all of the streams are received error free, than the signal can be reconstructed at its highest level of fidelity. However, if only one or a few descriptions are received in a usable form, the receiver can still reconstruct an acceptable signal. All multiple description coding methods to date assume an on-off channel model between the transmitter and the receiver; each link is either broken, in which case the transmitted symbols, or packets, are lost completely, or it functions properly, in which case the packets are received free of errors. This model is appropriate for Internet transmission, but it is not appropriate for wireless channels. This study replaces the parallel independent on-off channel model with a wireless channel model, such as a Rayleigh fading model. Communication is performed using multiple transmit and receive antennas over the channel. With these models the signal at any of the receive antennas is the superposition of the transmitted signals from each transmit antenna independently faded. Therefore, even if the descriptions at the receiver side are completely independent, the received signal at each antenna will include some information from each description. This research involves finding the best multiple description coding strategy for these channels, the theoretical limits of such a scheme, and the efficiency with which it can be implemented doc11144 none The properties of strongly correlated electrons in reduced dimensions remain some of the most fascinating problems in condensed matter physics. The discovery of high temperature superconductivity focused attention on two-dimensional models, with the copper oxide plane found in high temperature superconductors well described by a square lattice. The central theoretical hypothesis of research in high temperature superconductivity is that strong electronic correlations in reduced dimensions lead to enhanced superconducting correlations when the electrons are itinerant. A corollary of this hypothesis is that the low energy excitations in high temperature superconductors are anomalous due to strong correlations. Exactly how strong correlations produce these effects for two-dimensional systems, if at all, is currently not known. This research will study the effects of strong correlations and reduced dimensionality on systems of itinerant electrons by calculating high temperature series for correlation functions of the 2D t-J model. The 2D t-J model has been widely adopted as the fundamental model for high temperature superconductors. Direct numerical results are needed to sort through approximate analytic treatments of 2D strongly correlated electrons. High temperature series provide a means to obtain accurate, unbiased results in the thermodynamic limit for key properties of the 2D t-J model. The specific quantities to be calculated are thermodynamic properties, equal time correlation functions and zero frequency susceptibilities. The strength of superconducting correlations in the 2D t-J model are of key interest for applications to high temperature superconductivity. Series will be calculated for all possible symmetries of spin singlet pairing correlations. The full range of doping will be considered, from pseudogap behavior at small doping to the crossover to more conventional behavior at large doping. The zero frequency, wave vector dependent charge susceptibility will be used to search for charge stripe formation, while the zero frequency, wave vector dependent spin susceptibility will aid interpretation of NMR experiments. Equal time correlation functions and susceptibilities through their temperature derivatives can both be used to determine the momentum dependence of the low energy spin and charge excitations of the 2D t-J model. All quantities calculated for the full 2D square lattice will also be calculated for ladder lattices and other subsets of the square lattice with varying boundary conditions. This will allow a detailed study of boundary effects for systems of strongly correlated electrons. The series results will also be compared to density matrix renormalization group calculations on the same lattices and with the same boundary conditions. %%% Theoretical computational research will be conducted on a model for the behavior of electrons in the high temperature superconductors. The results will aid in understanding these intriguing, fundamental and potentially useful materials doc11145 none With communication link speed exceeding terabit per second, packet processing at the routing processors is becoming the main bottleneck in network services. The workload for these processors is very different compared to the general-purpose processors. The two-year project develops necessary benchmark and simulation environment to analyze the impact of new architectural ideas, such as instruction-level parallelism, branch prediction, speculative execution, lock-up free caches and multiprocessing, on the performance of Internet router architectures. First, it creates suitable workload by developing a set of communication benchmark programs that normally execute on high-performance routers. These programs are executed on commercially available processors and their performance is compared with other standard benchmark applications. The main contribution of the project lies in development of an execution-driven simulator for the router, where these communication programs are compiled and executed. The simulator incorporates the network processor, line cards, and the backbone crossbar switch. The input data to the simulator is obtained from real Internet traces, such as NLANR and UCB. By incorporating new ideas in instruction-set design, memory subsystem, packet scheduling, and multiprocessing into the simulator, architectures for the next-generation Internet routers are developed and tested in this project doc11146 none This research investigates core architectural features for secure and private communications and computations over the public Internet and wireless infrastructures. It focuses on what instruction-set architecture (ISA) features general-purpose processors would have, if secure information processing is the default pervasive mode of operation, with non-secure processing the optional mode, rather than vice versa. It proposes ISA features for very fast, flexible, software cryptographic processing, not only for current algorithms but also to enable algorithm designers to create new cryptographic algorithms that are more secure and more efficient. Word-oriented, programmable processors can be radically more effective for cryptographic functions with new instructions for sub-word manipulations, as well as for multi-word arithmetic. Novel bit permutation instructions are proposed for providing superior diffusion capabilities for current and future symmetric key algorithms. Their performance, area and latency tradeoffs, and scalability with superscalar organizations are studied. Very fast table lookup and other ISA features are also studied for algorithms like Rijndael, the recent Advanced Encryption Standard winner, and for public-key algorithms like Elliptic Curve Cryptography. The research also investigates architectural features for secure key management, and other ISA features designed to enhance or enforce system security doc11147 none PI: Richard Cole This research concerns the finding of approximate solutions. It is often the case that finding exact solutions is vastly too expensive in terms of the time required, to the point of being infeasible. Yet fairly accurate solutions which are good enough may be obtainable in a much shorter time, and consequently be more practical. The specific problem domains on which this research focuses range from pattern matching (for example, devising algorithms to find similar and or repeating patterns in DNA sequences) to intrinsically intractable problems such as the travelling salesman problem (which amounts to finding a shortest route connecting a collection of cities). The research on string matching is considering new notions of approximation so as to devise efficient algorithms for a broader class of approximate matches than is feasible presently; both searches between pairs of strings and against a database of strings are being studied. The second part of our research focuses on NP-hard problems. We are looking at multicost shortest path problems (e.g. with a cost comprising both time and price) in which one seeks all non-dominated solutions, at improving the quality of approximations for the Travelling Salesman Problem in the plane, and also at improving the approximations obtainable for generalized Steiner Tree problems doc11148 none J. McCarthy, University of Pittsburgh The mixing or segregation of cohesive granular materials is considered in the context of three particle-level sources of cohesion: liquid bridge (capillary) formation, Van der Wals forces, or electrostatic interaction. The method of Particle Dynamic Simulation, already tested in the simple case of free-flowing powders (no cohesion), will be used to establish the macroscopic flows which are induced by these microscopic cohesion effects. Among other results, it will yield the prediciton of mixing or separation in simple granular flows. Special attention is given to the liquid bridge (or interstitial) modeling, which includes surface tension, pressure and viscous forces, and the roughness of the surfaces involved doc11149 none Error correcting codes were originally invented to increase the precision of retrieval, storage and communication of data. The investigator s goal is to study and develop codes with new features added on top of the error correcting property, such as checkability, identifiable parent property (IPP), or quantum-error correcting property. In spite of the importance of designing codes with added features, there has not ben a comprehensive study of them up to date, and each design is treated as an isolated case. The investigator wants to put the designs under one umbrella (whenever it is possible) so that their properties can be compared and further improved upon. Among the benefits such improvement can bring about are better non-approximability results in complexity theory, better means to trace pirates of electronic images, and new algorithms for quantum computers. The investigator was the first to observe that constructs in the theory of probabilistically checkable proofs can be viewed as error correcting codes with added features. The best parameters for these codes and their kins are still not known, and they are the primary targets of the proposed investigation in the first year. The investigator also plans for a study that would lead to a general checkability theorem for product codes, with a surprise application in circuit complexity, and recommends a simplified look at Raz s parallel repetition theorem. A different thread of the the proposed research is motivated by questions about schemes that protect a multi-media publisher against piracy of electronic images. The publisher can use words of a code to mark electronic copies of an image. Then, if the code is appropriately designed, any image forged by combining pieces of two legally traded images, contains sufficient amount of information to trace the identity of at least one of the source (parent) images. Here the problem is to build efficient codes that can identify one of three or more source images. Other research targets include efficiently decodable quantum codes, and complexity lower bounds for dynamic problems via unusual codes. There is a general framework in which the investigator plans to do the research. This entails: 1. The study and exploration of the relation in between different unusual codes; 2. Their classification and axiomatization; 3. Search for novel applications of unusual codes in the theories of lower bounds and pseudo-randomness, and in other walks of computer science; 4. Building a family tree of code properties, and finding a match in between properties and applications. The methodology should embrace and extend classical coding theory doc11073 none The gap between processor speed and main memory access speed can cause processors to spend much of their time waiting on memory accesses. As the gap has grown, this memory latency has become an increasingly significant bottleneck in processor performance. Existing cache designs have worked well to fill the gap, but new cache designs are needed as the gap continues to grow. A promising new class, restricted caches, includes skew caches, assist caches, victim caches, and other multi-lateral caches. Experiments have indicated that some restricted caches offer significant potential for improvement over traditional set-associative caches. They also have revealed some interesting phenomenon that are not possible in traditional caches. For example, skew caches seem to exhibit self-reorganization. However, no theoretical explanation exists for this behavior or for why these restricted caches perform well. The investigators study the performance of distinct restricted cache structures and algorithms for managing them. The investigators first identify an underlying structural difference between restricted caches and traditional fully-associative caches: all cache lines are not identical. Specifically, in a restricted cache, unlike in a traditional set-associative cache, there exist pairs of memory blocks whose sets of legal cache lines are not identical and have a non-empty intersection. Using this insight, the investigators evaluate and compare different cache structures using new techniques. Most other analytical studies of caches focus only on the performance of algorithms for a given cache structure and do not explicitly compare the effectiveness of distinct cache structures. The investigators also study the performance of various algorithms for these cache structures using a variety of techniques such as resource augmentation, standard competitive analysis, and trace-based simulation. Their results indicate that traditional cache management algorithms behave very differently on restricted caches than they do on traditional set-associative caches. For example, the least recently used (LRU) algorithm that is strongly competitive for traditional caches is not competitive at all for restricted caches unless explicit rearrangement of items in the cache is allowed. Finally, the investigators construct a trace warehouse to facilitate the comparison of distinct trace-based simulation studies as well as to help new researchers learn this this evaluation technique doc11151 none The objective of this research is to establish methods for theoretical study in an important area of theoretical computer science, which is the analysis of randomized algorithms. The main focus is on problems that either can be modeled by Markov chains or can be analyzed using the Markov chain approach. This project concentrates on three main topics: (1) general analysis of discrete-time Markov chains and the Monte Carlo Markov Chain method, (2) analysis of Markov chains for generating random permutations, and (3) resource allocation problems in distributed systems. In the area of general analysis of Markov chains the goal of the research is to develop new tools for the analysis of mixing times of Markov chains. An important part of this study is to investigate relationships between various known methods of the analysis of mixing times of Markov chains. In the investigations of Markov chains for generating random permutations the main focus is on so called random switching networks. These networks model behavior of many Markov chains that are sought in applications in cryptography. In the area of resource allocation problems in distributed systems, the research focuses mostly on resource allocation problems in networks, in which the cost of the allocation depend on the routing properties of the input network as well as on the contention resolution protocols applied to the system doc11152 none A thorough investigation of componene-oriented programming languages is undertaken that entails (a) designing a component-oriented language, (b) implementing it efficiently on modern computer architectures, and (c) ensuring its applicability through case studies. Design of the new language entails evaluating the suitability of existing programming-language concepts for component-oriented programming, specifying and evaluating new programming-language features, and integrating the new and the old into a coherent new language. Implementation involves assessing existing compiler technology, proposing, building, and evaluating new compiler mechanisms, and merging them into an efficient compiler and runtime system. Finally, to ensure the language s applicability, a variety of case studies are designed and implemented and the resulting systems compared to more traditional solutions doc11153 none Koetter Phase unwrapping in 2-dimensional topologies is a signal-processing problem that has been extensively studied over the past 20 years and has important applications, such as medical imaging and synthetic aperture radar. However, despite its importance in science and engineering, to date, phase unwrapping in 2-dimensional grids has remained an essentially unsolved problem. This research takes a fresh approach to the problem using methods from probabilistic inference. The work not only holds the promise of resulting in powerful phase unwrapping schemes based on the sum-product algorithm and structured variational methods, but also has the potential to provide deep theoretical insight into the ill-posed nature and solvability of the phase unwrapping problem. Such an insight is extremely important for guiding the development of practical algorithms. The main objective of this research is to develop and refine algorithms for phase unwrapping that are versatile, efficient and that significantly improve upon earlier approaches. One of the guiding ideas in this context is the use of probability inference as a nonlinear preprocessing step in a phase unwrapping scheme. Initial experiments have confirmed that the performance of traditional techniques can indeed be significantly boosted with such an approach. Success of this research can have a profound practical impact. For example, in SAR interferometry, phase unwrapping is an essential step in generating terrain elevation maps, and this work can significantly enhance the accuracy of existing algorithms based on deterministic phase models. Similarly, the proposed work will make routine phase imaging using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) signals feasible, which will significantly extend the clinical utility of MRI doc11154 none An undesired consequence of the growing parallelism of modern processors is that it is dramatically more difficult to separate the events that limit execution speed from the events whose latencies are tolerated. A method for focusing design effort is critical-path analysis. This research proposes to apply critical-path analysis at the micro-architectural level, with the goal of detecting and eliminating execution bottlenecks. This research will explore the potential of the critical path in four interrelated efforts: (1) Modeling the micro-architectural critical path. The main task is to define a model of the critical path, i.e., the set of events and dependences in a micro-execution that will be exposed in the dependence graph on which the critical path will be computed. (2) Efficient tracing of the critical path. This effort will develop an on-line algorithm that will use a last-arrival edge at each node to calculate the critical path in one pass in a simulator. (3) Hardware critical-path predictors. This research will explore the use of approximation methods in avoiding the analysis of the entire dependence graph. (4) Criticality-aware processor policies. This research will use hardware critical-path predictors to focus hardware policies on events likely to be on the critical path doc11155 none TITLE: Image Coding with Constraints This project studies image and video coding schemes for emerging and future networks. The study concentrates on certain specific types of image coding including facsimile, still imagery, and video. Networks of the future will consist of hybrid combinations of wired and wireless components. Commercial products such as digital cameras, cell phones, and PDAs will send and or receive images of various types over a wide range of network channel conditions. The networks impose constraints such as: low data rate and high unpredictable packet losses. The devices impose constraints including small batteries, small displays, low delay, limited memory, and limited processing power. Together, these constraints make the design of inexpensive and efficient image transmission devices of the future a very challenging task. In addition to designing such systems, a solid theoretical understanding of the achievable qualities and limitations is important to know. The main objectives of this research are to achieve deep theoretical understanding of source and channel coding for images transmitted on lossy networks and to develop practical algorithms that can be effectively used in real applications. The work exploits the diverse backgrounds of the PIs in image and video coding and combined source channel coding. The investigation involves code design, theoretical analysis, and computer simulation. The main topics investigated for constrained image coding include: (1) Robust facsimile transmission, (2) Robust low rate video source coding, (3) Error correction, resilience, and concealment doc11142 none The project is on the development of efficient numerical algorithms and high quality software to solve systems of polynomials. A basic problem is to decompose the positive dimensional subsets of solutions into irreducible components. The numerical approach of Sommese, Verschelde, and Wampler is based on generic slicing with linear spaces, generic projections into lower dimensional linear spaces, and use of classical interpolation techniques to numerically do what elimination theory does in symbolic programs. Given a polynomial system with parameters, a goal of the project is to find equations on the parameters that need to be satisfied for the system to have a positive dimensional component of solutions. Two applications targeted by this project are factoring multivariate polynomials and finding overconstrained mechanisms. A major outcome of this work will be publicly available software to solve polynomial systems that arise in science and engineering. This work is carried out in the research fields of numerical analysis and computer algebra whose mission is to provide the scientific community with software to solve mathematical problems. Since polynomial systems are used as models in application areas as far apart as chemical reaction systems, the design of mechanisms, or economic equilibria to name but a few areas, the focus of the project on such basic models as polynomial systems is appropriate. Besides the technology transfer of advanced mathematical tools into science and engineering, an important aspect of this project is to introduce students in the design and use of the developed software doc11157 none Critical path prediction is a processor architecture technique that uses the past behavior of instructions in the instruction stream to predict which fetched instructions will be on the critical path; that is, which instructions will have a significant impact on processor performance, and which will not. This information can then be used to guide the selective application of a variety of processor optimizations. Modern processors remove most artificial constraints on execution throughput. Therefore, the bottleneck for many workloads on current processors is the true dependences in the code. Chains of dependent instructions constrain the overall throughput of the machine, often leaving aggressive processor technology highly underutilized. These chains of dependent instructions constitute the critical performance path, or critical path (CP), though the code. The performance of the processor is thus determined by the speed at which it executes the instructions along this critical path. In our efforts to get the maximum performance from the processor, it is no longer reasonable to treat all instructions the same. If we can know which instructions are critical to performance, we can accelerate their execution, possibly at the expense of instructions not on the critical path. This research will attempt to identify these critical instructions dynamically in hardware. We call this critical path prediction. This prediction is based on the behavior of previous invocations of the instruction in the pipeline. This prediction will enable the processor to make better decisions about where to apply certain policies and optimizations. A variety of critical path predictors will be examined. In many cases, critical path prediction will enable more effective application of other resources or optimizations. Possible applications of critical path prediction include guiding value prediction, instruction reuse, instruction issue priority, instruction scheduling on a clustered architecture, speculation control on a power-constrained processor, arbitration between instructions or threads on a multithreaded architecture, or to guide the spawning of speculative threads in a speculative multithreaded processor doc11158 none Online computation involves optimization problems for which the input is revealed progressively. Online algorithms base their decisions only on the past without knowledge of the future, much in the same way that a stock market investor or a robot that explores an unknown environment decide about their next action. Naturally such problems of decision-making with incomplete information arise in many areas. During the last decade research in the area of online algorithms has been very intensive. Still, some of the fundamental problems remain unresolved and important problems arise from new applications. The project deals both with old and new online problems. Perhaps the most important fundamental unsolved problem is the k-server problem. The objective is to settle the k-server conjecture and to investigate other variants of the problem such as the k-taxicab problem and the CNN problem. Another objective is to design and analyze competitive algorithms for a related problem, the online matching problem on Euclidean spaces; some interesting variants of the problem seem to play a central role in new e-commerce applications. For all these and many other problems, one algorithm, the generalized Work Function Algorithm, seems to have almost optimal competitive ratio. The research addresses the roots of this phenomenon. Research deals also with the pertinent problem of indexing of databases; the size of datasets of real applications has been increasing dramatically and so does the importance of good indexing schemes. Competitive analysis can be used to quantify how much the performance of indexing schemes is affected by changes in a database. Finally, the techniques of competitive analysis are a useful tool to address specific game-theoretic problems in networks doc11159 none Computer architecture research is based on experimental evaluation of application behavior. One critical issue in the architecture of high-end enterprise servers is the design of the memory hierarchy, which must be designed to support current and future data-intensive applications. Few evaluations of the memory behavior of large commercial applications exist, especially in the public domain. The research proposed here is based on a collaboration between IBM and USC to take advantage of the IBM Watson Server Performance Laboratory to explore the memory behavior of high-end commercial applications. More specifically, it is proposed to use the IBM MemorIES board to collect bus activity traces from a modern server machine running large, finely tuned OLTP, DSS and Web workloads. Because of the sheer size of the traces, samples of transaction records will be collected only in selected time intervals. Besides obtaining traces, the goal of this project is to characterize the memory behavior of these applications, to evaluate alternative memory hierarchies for future high-end commercial servers, and to explore new multiprocessor architectures for commercial systems. The experimental environment provided by the IBM Watson Server Performance Laboratory cost millions of dollars and years of effort to setup. This proposed research will leverage these efforts. It is a unique opportunity to collect and disseminate traces and experimental data which would be practically impossible to obtain under any reasonable research budget doc11160 none The Investigator studies intersection theory on and the cohomological field theory arising from the moduli of algebraic spin curves and stable spin maps. Especially important in this study is the exploration of the plethora of similarities between Gromov-Witten theory and cohomological field arising from higher spin curves and spin maps. Also important in this research is the study of the many relations between these cohomological field theories and integrable hierarchies, including significant recent progress toward proving some remarkable conjectures like the W-algebra conjecture and Generalized Witten Conjecture. The research in this project is concerned with connections between algebraic geometry and physics, and it has implications for both subjects. Algebraic geometry, which is the study of solutions to polynomial equations, and especially the sub-discipline of algebraic curves, which is one of the main foci of this research, have many applications. The most notable of these applications are in secure electronic communications (cryptography and error correcting codes). Recent research has shown that algebraic geometry also has significant ties to high-energy physics and plays an important role in helping us understand the fundamental nature of the universe. Conversely, physics has helped us better understand some important aspects of algebraic geometry and its applications. This research is focused on studying and further developing some of these important links doc11161 none This award supports preliminary site investigations and logistics planning for an ambitious drilling project to recover a series of ~400 meter-long continuous sediment cores from Lake Malawi at the southern end of the East African Rift Valley. Previous studies from the region show the area to be a unique outdoor laboratory and archive for the study of tropical paleoclimatology, tectonics, and evolutionary biology. Consequently, Lake Malawi holds the promise of providing a high-resolution paleoclimate record of unparalleled antiquity in a region highly sensitive to climate change and critical for understanding the dynamics of the Earth s climate system doc11162 none The proposed research will focus on a multidimensional analysis of evolution at different hierarchical levels, from the molecular to the organismal and phylogenetic. The study organisms, plethodontid salamanders of the genus Batrachoseps, are unique among vertebrates in displaying great variation in the proportion of red blood cells in the circulating blood - from nearly all nucleated to nearly all enucleated. The variation appears to be correlated with degree of organismal specialization, in particular with elongation, attenuation, and miniaturization, in a group of organisms that is specialized for semifossorial existence in seasonally dry environments. A complicating factor is the very high genome sizes in these organisms, which raises the possibility that enucleation is a phenomenon associated with a fundamental conflict between large cells, a necessary correlate of large genomes, and small blood vessels, a necessary correlate of miniaturization. The study will investigate the possibility that enucleation is a mechanical outcome of miniaturization, by conducting ecological and morphological studies. In order to proceed it will be necessary to develop a robust phylogenetic hypothesis for the genus, using molecular markers. Mitochondrial genes have already been studied, and there is good resolution of many of the tips of the phylogenetic tree; new work will focus on more conservative nuclear genes and deeper branches in the tree. A phylogenetic hypothesis will permit a comparative biological analysis of this problem area and a determination of whether increases in body size within a miniaturized lineage are accompanied by increases in nucleation levels for red blood cells. The significance of this research lies in the focused effort to study how different levels of organization -- molecular, cellular, organismal, ecological, and phylogenetic -- interact during development to give form and substance to lineages of organisms. A simultaneous investigation of different levels provides a realistic assessment of how evolution proceeds in lineages through time, and permits an assessment of the nature of general adaptation processes and their implications. The study also holds promise for opening new avenues of research on the puzzling phenomenon of increases in genome size, which are so great in these organisms as to strongly effect cellular and organismal levels (the classic C-value paradox doc11163 none Becker A precise estimate of the osmium isotopic composition of the convecting upper mantle is one of the prerequisites to obtain constraints on the likely proportion of recycled oceanic crust in this reservoir as well as in the bulk mantle. Previous Re-Os work on mid-ocean-ridge basalts and abyssal peridotites, materials commonly used to constrain the composition of the convecting upper mantle, encountered various problems. In some instances, it has been suspected that 187Os 188Os of both rock types may have been increased by contamination with seawater, yielding chondritic to suprachondritic 187Os 188Os for bulk rocks. Re-Os data on peridotite whole rocks from a Jurassic oceanic peridotite massif (Totalp ultramafic massif, Swiss Alps) range between sub- and suprachondritic, similar to abyssal peridotites. This massif contains concordant pyroxenitic layers that show subchondritic to highly radiogenic initial 187Os 188Os at 160 Ma, the age of the overlying pelagic sediments. It has been suggested that pyroxenites may be a minor component in the convecting upper mantle. This pilot study will attempt to confirm the results on whole rocks by obtaining Re-Os data on mineral separates from pyroxenites and peridotites that show suprachondritic 187Os 188Os. In the case of the pyroxenites, consistent internal mineral isochrones should confirm the validity of the highly radiogenic initial 187Os 188Os, whereas for the radiogenic peridotites, initial 187Os 188Os for whole rocks should coincide with initial 187Os 188Os of individual phases. Jurassic Re-Os ages for the pyroxenites would support the notion that crystal precipitation and melting occurred at about this time, and that the pyroxenites and their radiogenic Os were derived from the convecting upper mantle doc11164 none The research will use a variable-resolution stretched-grid general circulation model (SG-GCM) to conduct climate studies on anomalous regional events. The following issues will be addressed: (a) numerical experimentation with new emerging SG-GCMs incorporating land-surface models; (b) simulation at seasonal and interannual temporal scales, and regional-to-global spatial scales; (c) improved understanding and modeling of processes that affect regional climate variability. The major goals are simulating the - El Nino Southern Oscillation and related monsoon circulation with 25-40 km and finer resolution; studying intraseasonal and interannual regional climate variability for the extended multiyear SG-GCM simulations; studying the impact of sea surface temperatures and land-surface forcing on SG-GCM simulations; studying the impact of ensemble integrations; and developing educational tools for students. The work is important because the SG-GCM formalism may prove to be a viable new approach to regional and subregional climate studies and applications doc11165 none This U.S.-Hungarian archaeological research project involves William Parkinson and Richard Yerkes of Ohio State University and Attila Gyucha of the Munkacsy Mihaly Museum in Bekescsaba. Their intent is to examine socioeconomic organization and change that occurred during the late Neolithic to Early Copper Age period on the Great Hungarian Plain. The collaborative work involves excavations at two Early Copper Age settlements (Veszto 20 and Korosladany 14) located in the Koros River Valley. Results are expected to contribute to our basic understanding of social organization in middle range or tribal societies and to anthropological models for comparing development of pastoral economic systems. Together the Hungarian-U.S. team plans to explore the organization of specific sites within their local context to gain a regional framework for interpreting findings in the Carpathian Basin. Efforts at each site will feature: 1) size and spatial organization of settlement sites, 2) economic organization, 3) paleoenvironmental reconstruction, and 4) chronology and social interaction. The insights gained should add to a specific body of multi-disciplinary regional work that can be applied to models for trajectories of social change in the later prehistory of the Great Hungarian Plain. While regionally specific, the results of this research are also expected to help refine models for small-scale, semi-sedentary agricultural, autonomous village societies elsewhere in the world. This international archaeological research project fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the Untied States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc11166 none National surveys such as the Current Population Survey (CPS) or the National Crime Victimization Survey give accurate estimates of poverty or criminal victimization at the national level. These surveys do not, however, contain sufficient sample sizes to give reliable estimates by themselves for small areas such as counties or minority groups, or to provide detailed information about events such as domestic violence that affect only a small part of the population. Current methods for estimating poverty in small areas incorporate auxiliary information from administrative sources such as tax records through regression. This approach assumes that the administrative data are without errors; it also does not incorporate information from other surveys or make use of longitudinal information. This project focuses on combining information from multiple surveys, with possibly different sampling designs, to improve estimation in small areas. Thus, for estimating poverty in small areas, the CPS can be used in conjunction with the American Community Survey and other sources. Multivariate multi-level models that allow for missing data will be developed that make use of the correlations in the different surveys to increase the precision of the small area estimates, and theoretical properties of the estimates will be derived. Modifications of the multivariate models will allow information from longitudinal surveys to be combined as well, and allow longitudinal analyses from a panel survey to be supplemented by information from related cross-sectional surveys. The investigator will also develop methods for outlier detection and robust estimation using the multiple data sources. Increasing amounts of information are available from surveys and other sources, and there is increasing demand from federal and local governments and from social scientists for estimates in small areas. The models developed in this research will combine information from different surveys and use longitudinal and spatial aspects of the surveys to improve the accuracy of small area estimates, with no additional data collection cost. The theoretical results derived in this research will also be useful for other areas of application such as genetics and quality improvement. This research is supported by the Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics Program and a consortium of federal statistical agencies under the Research on Survey and Statistical Methodology Funding Opportunity doc11167 none Ross Framework structures encompass a wide range of natural and synthetic compounds of importance in the Earth sciences, solid state chemistry, condensed matter physics, and materials sciences. Framework structures are materials whose atomic structure can be described in terms of the linking together of tightly-bonded groups of atoms such as SiO4 or PO4 that can be thought of forming relatively rigid polyhedra whose corners are formed by the anions such as oxygen. The frameworks are then formed by the condensation of these polyhedra, i.e. by sharing of the oxygen anions. Examples of framework structures formed of tetrahedral groups such as SiO4 and AlO4 include major groups of minerals such as the feldspars (60% of the Earths crust), and zeolites that are the most important family of catalysts in the chemical industry. Other frameworks, including minerals stable in the deeper Earth such as garnets, incorporate network-forming tetrahedra and octahedra. Perovskites, which are probably the single most technologically-important group of compounds because of their electrical and elastic properties, are examples of frameworks composed entirely of corner-linked octahedra. Understanding the principles of behavior of these common structure types is important for a number of reasons. For example, in geochemistry we need to be able to predict the limit of solid solution of other components into end-member compounds. For geophysics one needs to predict the influence of these minor chemical components on the elasticity of minerals. The interaction of elastic and structural properties is also important for understanding the behavior of such perovskites such as ferro-relaxors and ferro-elastics that are used in many industrial devices. High-pressure studies can provide important insights into the general properties of frameworks for several reasons. First, pressure is energetically a far stronger driving force than temperature and thus one can explore a far greater range in structural behavior by compressing a structure rather than heating it. Second, pressure allows the repulsive regime of the inter-atomic potential to be explored directly. And, third, determination of the unit-cell constants of a material yield not only the volume as a function of pressure (for thermodynamic calculations and petrology) and the bulk modulus which is important for geophysical interpretations, but also certain combinations of individual elastic moduli. The philosophy of the research that we propose to undertake is to study the evolution of selected structure types under pressure by single-crystal X-ray diffraction up to pressures of 10 GPa. Current methodologies do not allow the sufficiently precise determination of the structural parameters of crystals under high pressures to identify all of the small changes that occur in framework structures as pressure is applied. Therefore a significant part of the work proposed in this grant is devoted to the improvement in the experimental techniques, which we expect will have wider applications than to high-pressure research alone. From the specific results we expect to be able to derive general principles concerning the behavior of framework structures under a range of conditions doc11168 none Bulmer This Americas Program award will support Dr. Mark Bulmer and Dr. Bruce Campbell, both of the Smithsonian Institution, and Dr. Tracy Gregg of SUNY at Buffalo in a research collaboration with Eng. Guido Salas of the Universidad Nacional de San Agustin in Arequipa, Peru. The overall objective of this study is to improve current knowledge of the emplacement of thick lava flows by studying those at Sabancaya volcano in Southern Peru. These flows have unique topographic and geochemical signatures. Three tasks are proposed: (1) Determine quantitative inferences on the rheology and flow regime of the lava flows based on the dimensions, topography, morphology, petrography and geochemistry of the flows; (2) Compare the flow properties derived in Task 1 to a variety of natural lava flows and laboratory simulations; and (3) Use the results gained from Tasks 1 and 2 to determine the extent to which the surface structure and roughness of different lava flow surfaces can be used as a diagnostic tool in remote sensing for accurate geologic interpretation of emplacement styles and lava compositions. The eruption of large evolved lava flows on Earth has never been witnessed, making careful data analyses combined with numerical (and possibly physical) modeling the only way to understand them. Furthermore, little is known about the magmatic processes that govern the generation, ascent and eruption of these viscous flows. For this collaboration, the U.S. researchers will contribute archived data sets of satellite and airborne visible and near-infrared data of Sabancaya volcano and the surrounding region, while the Peruvian side will contribute access to geologic samples from when the first of the most recent eruptions began, and their expertise concerning the surrounding region. The Sabancaya flows will provide an important reference point for the geological interpretation of remotely sensed data of volcanic terrains doc11169 none We propose to develop an architecture and theoretical underpinnings for providing absolute delay guarantees for HTTP traffic. HTTP traffic constitutes an overwhelming majority of all Internet traffic today. Both network load and user-perceived end-to-end response time of web requests depend not only on network conditions but also on the performance of web proxy caches around major network backbones. For example, in an HTTP-dominated network, increasing the total amount of cached data may increase hit ratio and subsequently decrease both network load and network delay. Hence, an architecture for end-to-end web traffic delay guarantees should explicitly consider the effect of caching. It is the joint consideration of caching and network performance that separates our work from prior efforts on delay guarantees. Essentially, the joint problem considers data placement (replication) as a dimension to manipulate for affecting traffic delays. The approach is cost-effective since data storage is cheaper than network bandwidth. The first contribution of this project is to develop a scheme for network load control that relies on adaptive data prefetching. The architecture can be thought of as replacing admission control at the network boundary. In an HTTP context, while admission control would prevent a client s request from entering the network, data prefetching would bring the information to the client s side before it is requested, hence de ecting the request away from the backbone. While prefetching itself introduces traffic, the performance gain comes from the fact that, unlike serving live requests, prefetching can occur at a lower priority in the background without jeopardizing user-perceived network performance. Hence, prefetching removes time constraints from a big chunk of HTTP traffic which can now be served at a lower priority. Consequently, the remaining (live) HTTP traffic will receive better service from the network. The second main contribution of the project is a theoretical derivation of the relationship between network resource utilization and the satisfaction of end-to-end deadlines. Specifically, we prove that keeping network resource utilization due to live web traffic below a given threshold ensures that all ow deadlines are met. We call this threshold, the overcommitment threshold . This result allows us to associate deadlines with live web traffic and ensure their satisfaction simply by performing utilization control. The result obviates maintaining per- ow state in the network for the purposes of satisfying absolute delay guarantees. Merging the aforementioned contributions together, we propose to use our adaptive prefetching scheme to keep the amount of live web traffic below the overcommitment threshold. Hence, we ensure the satisfaction of absolute delay guarantees while requiring neither admission control on the network boundary nor per- ow state in routers. The architecture calls only for service differentiation in the network to separate live real-time web traffic from background prefetching traffic which may receive lower priority. The project will use the PI s existing evaluation testbed for implementing and evaluating architectural prototypes doc11170 none This is a proposal for small grants for exploratory research (SGER) to apply a new expertise and approach to established research in early impact cratering events. Specifically, the PI and his collaborator, Dr. Gunter Lugmair, plan to develop a routine field and laboratory procedure for using the Cr isotope method in investigating early impact cratering. The Cr isotope systematics of impact ejecta has been shown to be one of the most effective tools not only for verifying the occurrence of impact events but also for identifying the class of meteorites that impacted during these events. All samples studied for Cr isotope systematics so far, however, were carefully selected, containing a significant proportion of an extraterrestrial component (ETC) in the impact ejecta. In contrast, most of the suspected impact sites on Earth are characterized by a low ETC content. This is reflected particularly by low Ir and Cr concentrations. When Cr concentration is low, the isotopic composition of the terrestrial background Cr masks that of the cosmic Cr. This severely hampers the use of the Cr isotope method. To avoid these difficulties much effort is needed to develop physico-chemical procedures for concentrating meteoritic Cr in the samples and to continue improving the mass-spectrometric technique for the Cr isotope analysis. In addition, a thorough selection of the samples based on their geological settings and measurements of concentrations of other siderophile elements is crucial. For this study, Cr isotope systematics of the ejecta materials from two suspect impact sites in South Africa and Western Australia will be analyzed. Samples from these sites have variable ETC concentrations; these have never been analyzed for Cr isotope systematics before. A successful completion of the proposed investigation will be a great leap forward in our ability to unequivocally identify impact sites, constrain the nature of the extraterrestrial impactor in each site, and better understand the geological and environmental consequences of cratering on the Earth s surface doc11171 none Sandwell Synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR) is a relatively new tool for monitoring deformations of the surface of the earth associated with earthquakes, volcanoes, and groundwater subsidence. Sparse networks of GPS receivers provide accurate ground motions over a limited number of points while the space-based InSAR technique provides higher spatial resolution (~100 m) and global access but poor temporal resolution. Suitable civilian SAR satellites have been flown by the European Space Agency (ERS-1 and ERS-2) as well as by the Japanese Space agency (JERS-1 and ALOS - launch date). These data are largely unexplored and are of enormous value for assessing the earthquake risk in Southern California. The investigators will use these data to monitor co-seismic, post-seismic, and inter-seismic crustal deformation. Published models of the earthquake cycle predict that much of the diagnostic crustal strain occurs within 10 km of the fault zone and thus it will not be observed by the relatively coarse distribution of GPS monuments ( 10 km spacing). The proposed tasks include: development of high-resolution topographic models for accurate removal of topographic phase from change interferograms; estimation of the depth distribution of slip on the Hector Mine rupture; examination of post-seismic slip at the Landers and Hector Mine ruptures in relation to the earthquake cycle models; monitoring creep rate and creep depth along major faults in Southern California; development of a boundary-element model of the Southern California fault system; and preparation for L-band SAR data to be collected by the Japanese ALOS mission doc11172 none This individual investigator award provides support to an assistant professor for a project working at the physics biology interface. The project investigates conformational motion of biological macromolecules which is coupled to substrate recognition and enzymatic catalysis. This mechano-chemical aspect is crucial in two ways: it ensures the high specificity of enzymatic reactions and it produces the ordered motion at the molecular scale by which the cell s devices operate (channels, motors, receptors). The study develops and applies a micro-mechanical technique which allows the detection of conformational changes of single proteins or DNA oligonucleotides and at the same time applies a controlled force to the molecule. It is an extension of earlier methods that were successfully applied to motor proteins, and it will allow the study a broader class of enzymes. The object is to gain insight into the physical principles under which these molecular devices operate; eventually this will generate design criteria for artificial molecular devices. The project provides excellent opportunities for training graduate students in this fast growing interdisciplinary field. Students will learn to use and develop state-of-the-art molecular biophysics techniques, such as single molecule detection and manipulation, nanomechanics, optical tweezers. This know-how is presently much in demand both in academics and the biotechnology industry. %%% This individual investigator award provides support to an assistant professor for a project working at the physics biology interface. The project focuses on one of the distinctive characteristics of biological macromolecules (proteins, DNA): their ability to change shape in response to an external (chemical) stimulus. This is the bases for nature s molecular devices in the cell, and it will form the basis of operation of artificial molecular sensors and actuators in the future. The project develops a single molecule micro-mechanical technique to study these conformational changes from the point of view of the physical principles underlying such molecular machines. Students participating in the project will acquire experience in an array of state-of-the-art molecular biophysics techniques, such as near field optics, nanomechanics, optical tweezers. Being able to participate in all aspects of the experiments, from design to implementation to analysis, students will acquire the ability to devise original solutions to technical challenges. Such background in the interdisciplinary field of biophysics is at present much sought after both in academics and the biotechnology industry doc11173 none Ague Profound questions regarding the nature and extent of fluid migration in subducted crust have arisen in recent years. Strong evidence for regional fluid flow and large fluid fluxes can be found in some settings (e.g., California), but is notably lacking in others (e.g., Alps, Cyclades). The latter case is particularly thought-provoking because clays, serpentine, and carbonate minerals in the precursor sediments and hydrothermally altered igneous rocks should have released abundant volatiles during prograde high-pressure low-temperature (HP LT) metamorphism. In an effort to resolve this apparent paradox, it is proposed to test for the presence of large-scale, regional fluid flow during both prograde subduction and retrograde exhumation and tectonic imbrication in the Cycladic Archipelago (Greece) by integrating high-accuracy digital field mapping, chemical analyses of rocks and minerals, and numerical models of coupled fluid flow and reaction. The specific focus is on the HP LT rocks of Tinos island, which to date have yielded no clear evidence for regional flow despite prograde metamorphism during the Alpine orogeny to epidote-blueschist eclogite facies. Futhermore, the potential for regional flow is not limited to the prograde stage, because many of the HP LT rocks of the Cyclades underwent fluid infiltration and greenschist facies retrogression during exhumation. However, the processes and length scales of flow remain unclear. The field and laboratory work will focus on the following straightforward criteria, applicable to both prograde and retrograde settings, to test for limited or no regional flow. (1) Local or limited devolatilization (prograde case) or volatile uptake (retrograde case); (2) derivation of vein mass from local surroundings as opposed to precipitation from through-going fluids; (3) limited mass transfer of non-volatile elements by flow processes; (4) small estimated fluid fluxes and; (5) absence of regional conduits for volatiles. Regional flow, on the other hand, requires that one or more of these criteria be violated. The numerical modeling will establish what type of flow regimes, whether local or regional in scope, are compatible with observed net transfer reactions, amounts and spatial distribution of reaction progress and element transport, volume changes of reaction, fluid compositions, and distribution of any flow conduits. The major goal will be direct determination of processes of volatile generation and pathways of volatile escape from downgoing slabs. The results will constrain models of the major and trace element composition of subduction zone fluids, critical for our understanding of mantle metasomatism and arc magma chemistry. Furthermore, the general directions of fluid motion, whether subvertical or slab-parallel will be estimated. Slab-parallel flow confined to regional tectonic units, in strong contrast to subvertical flow across layers, may deprive the mantle hanging wall of volatiles and transported non-volatile elements, therefore limiting mantle metasomatism and, ultimately, arc magma generation. Tectonic juxtaposition in active subduction zones allows downgoing rock units undergoing prograde metamorphism to release fluids that retrograde HP LT terranes undergoing exhumation. What remains to be resolved is if the fluids can migrate regionally, or if the HP LT packages absorb volatiles locally, preventing large-scale outwards fluid migration to the surface doc11174 none Townsend Temperate river systems and their associated floodplains have been substantially altered by human activity. Although the effects of dams on river hydrology and downstream ecosystems have been studied extensively, data on how changes in historic sedimentation regimes and geomorphology affect floodplain ecosystems is practically nonexistent. This research will demonstrate for an entire model river system (the Roanoke River of North Carolina) the degree of post-colonial landscape-scale ecosystem alteration due to sediment deposition, and the future changes likely to affect vegetation dynamics as those sediments are redistributed and transported out of the system. We will test a series of specific hypotheses centered on the following: (1) Anthropogenic sediment deposition on the Roanoke River floodplain over the last 250 years has led to a dramatic alteration of the extent and distribution of landforms within the geomorphologic system; (2) The vegetation of the lower Roanoke floodplain has been substantially altered as a consequence of environmental changes due to geomorphic alterations from post-colonial sedimentation; (3) Models of sediment-impacted riparian areas developed from geomorphologic and paleoecological data can be used to predict future landforms and vegetation composition. To address these hypotheses we will integrate dendrogeomorphic, palynological and modeling techniques to (1) develop a spatially explicit model of post-colonial sediment accumulation for the lower Roanoke River floodplain, (2) model the pre-colonial geomorphic landscape and simulate future floodplain geomorphology, and (3) predict vegetation distributions for those surfaces using vegetation-environment relationships doc11175 none Schubert The main objective of this research project is to develop a new generation numerical geodynamo model based on a domain decomposition technique that divides the fluid part of the Earth s core into six identical subdomains with the same metric tensor and nearly uniform grids. The computationally expensive Legendre transform is no longer needed and many available efficient algorithms can be used in each subdomain. The pole singularities of spherical coordinates are removed. The new model will be particularly suitable for efficient implementation on parallel computers. Preliminary results obtained for a kinematic dynamo model show that the proposed domain decomposition technique is both workable and extremely efficient. A convection-driven, nonlinear geodynamo model will be developed for a rotating spherical shell that will operate at an Ekman number smaller than 10^{-6 doc11176 none Rex Skodje of the University of Colorado is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to develop and apply new theoretical techniques to achieve a better understanding of chemical processes. This research has several components. First, there will be a study of short-lived intermediates in chemical reactions using quantum scattering theory and wavepacket dynamics. Second, a new technique for simplifying large systems of kinetics equations will be developed and applied to large chemical models. Finally, the kinetics of thin films will be studied with the aim of understanding aggregation in thin films. The last two topics are strongly synergistic. A wide variety of chemical problems, such as combustion, atmospheric chemistry, and surface reactions, are modeled using complex networks of nonlinear kinetic equations. Unfortunately, most realistic models involve many species, reactions, and time scales, which can hinder numerical treatment as well as meaningful physical analysis. The goal of this research is kinetic simplification that promises to impact many fields of science and engineering doc11177 none Farley Techniques and applications of (U-Th) He dating have grown rapidly in the last several years due to the low closure temperature and relatively high analytical precision of this newly revitalized chronometer. This proposal seeks funds to continue ongoing, broad efforts at Caltech to improve and expand methods of (U-Th) He dating. In the case of apatite thermochronometry, several important questions remain to be investigated to assure confidence and reliability of the method. In addition, preliminary work indicates that other minerals may also be of use for (U-Th) He dating and may provide new ways to address important geologic problems. These are the major issues to be explored by the proposed work. More specifically, the proposal objectives are 1) development and implementation of new experimental techniques for assessing He diffusion coefficients with the goal of establishing a robust understanding of what factors ultimately control He diffusion; 2) development of an understanding of why occasional apatite samples yield erratic He ages, and testing of new analytical methods by which to circumvent these problems; 3) exploration of the origin and significance of apatite grain-to-grain age heterogeneity using the newly developed laser heating technique; 4) development and initial application of methods for dating of extremely young volcanic samples (10 s of kyr to few Myr), and in particular assessment of the consequences of U-series disequilibrium, and 5) exploration of the use of (U-Th) He techniques for dating of Fe and Mn oxides produced in weathering horizons doc11178 none In all networks that have a broadcast channel as the basis of communication, the medium access control (MAC) protocol serves a vital role, as it directly controls the access to communication resources. As the networks and the traffic they carry both become more heterogeneous the question is how to best adapt to the unknown or changing network conditions. The natural answer provided by most existing protocols is to include some kind of adaptivity in order to dynamically adust their operation to the actual network conditions. Examples of adaptivity include hybrid protocols that periodically recompute slot assignments, adjustment of retransmission probabilities (e.g., backoff mechanisms), as well as many other ad hoc solutions that tend to become unstable under high load. Rather than what amounts to essentially tuning parameters of the protocol on the fly, we instead propose a new meta-MAC protocol framework that implements new dimension of adaptivity, on top of existing MAC protocols. Specifically, we propose research on a method, whose roots are in Artificial Intelligence (A1), to systematically and automatically combine a set of existing protocols into a single MAC protocol in a novel way, such that the resulting combined protocol has provable optimality properties. Each protocol in the set may be a good candidate for certain situations. For example, a randomized contention based protocol is good for low loads, due to its low delay, while an allocation based protocol is desirable for high loads, as it avoids the breakdown induced by too many collisions. Then the meta-protocol will automatically find combined decisions that dynamically represent the best of the team, under the actual network conditions, without having to know in advance which of the conditions will actually occur and how they will change. Thus, rather than tuning parameters in an ad hoc manner, we systematically and automatically optimize the medium access approach itself. The proposed research program intends to fully explore the promising potential of the novel meta-MAC protocol aggregation approach, in which encouraging initial results of the PI and co-PI have already shown the principal feasibility. Specifically, the three main research directions include aggregating more sophisticated MAC protocols (such as IEEE 802.11), dynamically altering the protocol mix to support Quality of Service (QoS) at the MAC layer, and an in-depth study of the correctness, stability, and consistency of meta-MAC protocols. Our proposed meta-MAC optimization runs autonomously without any centralized control or any message exchanges. This makes the meta-MAC approach inherently scalable to arbitrarily large networks. Thus, the meta-MAC approach is ideally suited for the evolving application requirements of today s increasingly heterogeneous networking environments. In addition to the above, we plan to incorporate the general approach into the graduate curriculum in the new Telecommunications Engineering Program at the University of Texas at Dallas, thus enriching the traditional telecommunications curriculum with novel adaptive methodologies that provide intelligent, highly adaptive solutions in large, dynamically changing, heterogrneous networks doc11179 none Ground Motion and Source Kinematics Studies of the 21 September Taiwan Earthquake PI: Douglas S. Dreger Proposal The kinematic source process of the MW7.6 Taiwan (Chi-Chi) mainshock and large aftershocks, and the effects of three-dimensional velocity structure on the generation of strong ground motions are investigated. The Chi-Chi earthquake, which occurred in a heavily urbanized region, inflicted considerable damage and human suffering once again underscoring the need for better understanding of the processes that control the generation of strong ground motions. This earthquake is unique in terms of data quality and quantity. More than 400 three-component strong motion stations recorded the earthquake waves, and this high quality data set provides an opportunity to study the earthquake source and wave propagation at scales never before possible. Three fault models, each with a distinct geometry, have been proposed to describe the kinematics of thrust faulting in the Chi-Chi earthquake, and are being tested by fitting observed and synthetic seismic waveforms and ground deformation (GPS) data. These geometries are tested by performing kinematic inversions of the strong motion and GPS data sets to determine the optimal distribution of fault slip. Additionally, several large aftershocks exhibited either shallowly or steeply dipping reverse focal mechanisms. Of particular interest is whether any of the aftershocks actually slipped on the low angle planes indicating the presence of a controlling basal decollement. By investigating the source kinematics of the mainshock and the large aftershocks it is possible to map the slip distribution of the earthquake sequence thereby obtaining an image of the active fault surface. The active mountain building of the Taiwan arc-continent collision has resulted complex crustal structure, as evidenced in recent tomographic studies and the considerable topographic relief. Three component seismic waveforms, phase arrival times, and peak ground motion parameters for the mainshock and large aftershocks are being modeled to constrain the three-dimensional wave propagation, and effects of free-surface topography using an elastic, velocity-stress staggered-grid, finite difference algorithm. Finally, the sensitivity of simulated strong motion waveforms due to the coupled nature of extended finite-fault source representations and three-dimensional structure is being analyzed. The results from this study will form the framework for future waveform modeling studies to refine the 3D structure of Taiwan, and will also provide an essential examination of strong ground motion variability contributing to the US earthquake hazard mitigation effort doc11180 none PI s: B. Romanowicz, University of California, Berkeley This project addresses the issue of how to model teleseismic S waveforms to accurately account for strong 3D heterogeneity, such as recently found in D , that cannot be handled using standard approaches, in view of recent developments in numerical modeling, and with the goal of improving our understanding of deep mantle dynamics. In the last few years, much progress has been made in the development of numerical methods adapted to spherical geometry and able to compute waves emanating from a realistic seismic source, reaching, within reasonable computational time, periods of interest for teleseismic studies, making no assumptions on the strength of velocity contrasts, and able to handle interface waves and interface topography. The most promising new method is the spectral element method. It combines the advantages of the flexibility of a finite element method with the precision of a pseudo-spectral method. Nevertheless this method has an excessive numerical cost for realistic frequencies (i.e. at least 15-25 sec). Further progress has been made recently by Capdeville ( ), who developed a hybrid method that couples spectral element computations with a normal mode solution, so that the spectral elements are used only in the target strongly heterogeneous regions. This allows one to focus on the target region and extend computations to much higher frequencies than if spectral elements are used for the whole earth. In collaboration with Dr. Capdeville, we will apply this method to waveform modeling of S-type waves (S, Sdiff, SKS, ScS) interacting with the base of the mantle and the core-mantle boundary. We will particularly be interested in modeling waveform distortion due to heterogeneity, such as that observed in SPdKS, and SVdiff waveforms. In the process, we will also address issues of crust and uppermost mantle effects on teleseismic body and mantle waves. This work will involve adapting Capdeville s hybrid method to the specific case of D , collecting an appropriate global dataset of S waveforms and forward modeling D structure to match these waveforms doc11132 none Scholz - Burgmann - King Northeast Asia, where the Pacific, North American, and Eurasian plates come together, is one of the last frontiers of plate tectonics. The location of the North America - Eurasia plate boundary is not well established. The problem is further complicated by a number of smaller microplates in the region, including the Okhotsk, Arctic, Bering, and Amurian plates, whose existence, rates of motion, and boundaries are still uncertain. This project relies on space geodesy to study the broad zone of deformation encompassing the boundary of the Eurasian and North American plates, intervening microplates, and their interaction with the Pacific plate. This investigation is motivated by the recent initiation of high-precision GPS measurements in eastern Siberia, Korea, and Japan, which provide the opportunity for a significant advance in understanding of this enigmatic region. New GPS measurements provide constraints for tectonic models, which take into account plate tectonic angular velocities and deformation associated with strain accumulation and release at the plate boundaries. The geodetic analysis helps constrain the kinematics of deformation from central Asia to western North America through careful integration of regional and global GPS data. New measurements focus on three areas not well constrained by current data: Sakhalin, the Cherskiy Range in eastern Siberia, and the Kamchatka cusp. Expected results will include an improved location (in northern Siberia) of the pole of rotation between Eurasia and North America; more precise delineation of plate boundaries in northeast Asia; and constraints on the existence, location and present-day motion of the Okhotsk microplate and other regional blocks. The major problem preventing a straightforward inversion of GPS velocities for rigid plate motions is that displacements of many GPS stations are affected by inter-seismic strain accumulation along plate boundary faults, especially along the Pacific subduction margin. Where large earthquakes (such as the Mw = 7.0 and Mw = 6.8 Sakhalin, and the Mw = 7.7 Kamchatka events) occurred within our study region, the deformation field is further disturbed by co-seismic and post-seismic motions. Thus, the investigation addresses the inextricably linked regional plate kinematics and subduction zone dynamics. Elastic and visco-elastic models are used to evaluate the inter-seismic strain accumulation process and to estimate the amount of seismic coupling on major plate boundary faults. The modeling allows for separation of the contributions of plate boundary strain and plate tectonic angular velocities to the measured GPS velocity field doc11182 none Effects of Tissue Architecture on Vascular Mechanics: ROLE OF THE HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURE AND CONSTITUENT EVOLUTION OF ELASTIN This proposal combines the techniques and approaches of several disciplines, including mechanics, polymer physics, and molecular biology, to study the role of elastin in the arterial wall. Arteries are complex heterogenous structures with profound ability to remodel in response to biochemical and mechanical stimuli. Since arterial diseases like atherosclerosis and aneurysms directly correlate with changes in the amounts of elastin in the vessel wall, it is important to characterize the mechanical properties of arteries with varying amounts of elastin. The project aims to hierarchically link tissue microstructure and biochemical composition of arterial walls to their emergent mechanical behavior. A primary goal of this work is to study the effect of constituents on the structural properties of vessels. The mechanical tests will be used to assess the effects of a changed tissue microstructure on its overall constitutive behavior. In order to link changes in mechanical behavior with alterations in tissue microstructure, structural relationships will be characterized using biochemical methods. The results of this study have broad applicability to vascular mechanics and clinical treatments for arterial diseases doc11183 none Heller Dethier Widespread remnants of Cenozoic sedimentary rocks in the central Rocky Mountains may indicate the former presence of a large post-Laramide basin fill that has subsequently been largely removed. If such a regional basin fill can be demonstrated, it would provide a regional marker for determining the extent and rate of sediment removal and provide a marker for vertical tectonic movement during the late Cenozoic. This project will combine mapping fission-track and cosmogenic nuclide geochronometry to attempt to determine the former extent and continuity of the post-Laramide basin fill, and to search for possible tectonic or geologic causes of the observed changes. Results will help clarify the competing effects of tectonic verses climatically driven uplift doc11184 none With support from the National Science Foundation Dr. Katheryn M. Linduff and her colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh, Jilin University, Hebrew University and the Inner Mongolia Institute of Archaeology will conduct three more seasons of archaeological fieldwork in the Chifeng region of southeastern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in northeastern China. The region is strategically positioned between the center of early Chinese dynasties in the agriculturally productive Yellow River basin and the steppe land to its north and west where a pastoral nomadic adaptation developed. The region shows a long sequence of relatively independent development before it was fully incorporated into the dynastic system. The team seeks to record and clarify what conditions led to greater social complexity in the region. The principal research activity is a regional-scale settlement study. The first two field seasons ( - ) have already begun to provide information on the period from c. B.C. through c. A.D. 200 that will be necessary to understand the relationships among sites already investigated through stratigraphic excavation during several decades of research by Chinese archaeologists. Work in the Chifeng region to date has covered 550 sq km of a projected sq km area and aims to broaden our knowledge beyond the subjects treated in ancient Chinese historical documents that saw the Central Plain as the primary location and motivator of change across north Asia. Second, it is focused on a region outside the heartland of early Chinese states, in which no historical documents were written, but where excavated mortuary materials suggest the existence of more complexity than reported in the texts. The research has begun to collect information necessary to contextualize existing archaeological data and bring it to bear on reconstructing social, political, cultural, and economic patterns for the whole region.The team will conduct further stratigraphic excavations in order to clarify the chronological sequence, conduct instrument mapping and intensive surface collection of surface remains of several sites with extensive above ground architectural remains so a to understand their functions better. Although China has long been recognized as vital to comparative study of the origins and development of complex society, data from there is absent even from most recent syntheses and is only recently been systematically collected in this way. Dr Linduff s project is the one of very few international collaborative archaeological endeavors in China and the first of its kind in the northern region. The resulting information will contribute to a broadened understanding of the variability to be observed in the trajectories of development of early complex societies in a global comparative context doc11185 none Hibbard Hames Miller The timing and nature of accretion of the Carolina Zone to Laurentia is one of the more significant and least constrained tectonic problems in modern southern Appalachian geology. The original suture has been overprinted and obliterated by subsequent Alleghanian motion along the western margin of the Carolina zone, precluding direct investigation of the suture. The Gold Hill Shear Zone is a prominent feature in the western part of the Carolina Zone and may record features produced by the suturing event that have been preserved due to the distance of the shear zone back from the actual terrane margin. The project involves an integrated structural and geochronologic study of the Gold Hill Shear Zone in an attempt to understanding timing, kinematics and crustal affinities of the original suture and collision of the Carolina Zone with Laurentia. Results will help develop reconstruction of the Appalachians and their exotic terranes doc11186 none Biogeochemical weathering controls on soil formation and landscape development. The soil production rate is defined as the rate at which bedrock, in this study chemically weathered granodiorite, converts to a mobile layer (soil, defined by loss of granitic texture). Previous studies have established the form of the inverse relationship between soil production rates and soil thickness. However, these studies have not compared erosion to solute losses during landscape lowering, or incorporated detailed consideration of the biogeochemical weathering processes that must precede, and generally follow, soil formation. In this project, conservation of mass equations will be solved using geochemical tracer results and existing cosmogenic dating information to determine long-term mass transfers due to erosion and solute loss during landscape development on the Bemboka Granodiorite in SE Australia. Variation in solute versus erosional fluxes with soil thickness and landscape position will be evaluated, and possible relationships between the solute loss rates (prior to soil formation), soil thickness, and microbial processes in the weathered granite will be examined. The analysis will also yield values for long-term erosion and solute losses for most elements per unit area of land surface per unit time. This investigation extends prior geomorphological approaches to incorporate biogeochemical as well as biophysical weathering contributions to soil formation and landscape evolution. Broader impacts of the research will stem from new insights into factors controlling rates of soil formation, improved understanding of the processes by which landscapes respond to perturbation, and the quantification of long-term sediment and solute fluxes to the oceans doc11187 none This individual investigator award will support a project to elucidate properties of correlated 2 dimensional electron systems (2DES) in the Quantum Hall regime. These studies will include: the measurement of the magnetization of the 2DES, the study of current induced dynamic nuclear polarization, and the role of spin in metal-insulator transitions in a Si-MOSFET 2DES. The experimental methods to be employed in the proposed investigations are electrically detected electron spin resonance and electrically detected electron-nuclear double resonance. Furthermore, a magnon model for the mechanism of the electrically detected electron spin resonance in the quantum Hall state will be developed and compared with the experimental temperature and microwave power dependence of the signal response. Experiments are to be conducted on high mobility GaAs AlGaAs quantum wells fabricated at Sandia National Labs and Si-MOSFET heterostructure devices. Instrumentation at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and in the P.I. s laboratory at the University of Florida will be employed to carry out the proposed investigations. Students involved with this research will gain skills that will prepare them for future careers in industry and academia. In addition, they will gain the experience of collaborating with scientists at national facilities. A fundamental understanding of the processes associated with the flow of electrons through composite semiconductor materials is key to the development of new types of devices with improved performance and novel characteristics. The spin of the electron plays a central role in the conductivity properties of high performance nanostructured semiconductors at low temperatures and high magnetic fields. Under these conditions (referred to as the quantum Hall regime), the flow of electrons is strongly affected by quantum mechanics where the available states of the electron are restricted to certain energies. This individual investigator award will support research aimed at probing the spin degree of freedom by resonance absorption of microwave energy. The spin of the electron can be flipped by this absorption, and as was first shown by the German Nobel Laureate Klaus von Klitzing, this can be detected as a change in the conductivity. This project will attempt to explain the mechanism of this electrically detected spin resonance effect, and to use it to probe the quantized energy levels in the nanostructured semiconductor. The research could impact on the development of quantum computation devices or new types of spin transistors with improved performance over conventional devices. The commercialization of these potential applications could have major long-term economic impact in the technology sector. Thus, representation in this research area by a US research group is crucial to the National interest. Students involved with this research will gain skills that will prepare them for future careers in industry and academia. In addition, they will gain the experience of collaborating with scientists at national facilities doc11188 none Understanding the dynamics of biotic response to past environmental change is an essential element for predicting the effect on the earth s biosphere of future environmental change. Although time-series data in the geologic record represents the major source of information describing the dynamics of this past biotic response, methodological and administrative gulfs between biological scientists and earth scientists, and among real-time, recent-past, and deep-time approaches, have hindered basic research and its application to policy issues. This study will describe mechanisms for promoting the interdisciplinary science at the interface of biology and geology that depends on the collection, analysis, and understanding of biogeologic time-series data. The study will provide the basis for informed decision-making in government, industry, and academia, by (1) assessing the current state of biogeologic analysis relevant to biosphere dynamics; (2) identifying the most promising directions for collaborative research and the sharing of methodologies; and (3) describing the programmatic themes and research and data infrastructures required to accomplish these interdisciplinary objectives doc11189 none PI s: Gary L. Pavlis, Indiana University, Bloomington We have developed a new technology for direct imaging of P to S converted phases. It builds on imaging concepts used in the oil and gas industry to directly image backscattered (reflected) seismic waves, but we utilize forward scattered P to S conversions produced by distant earthquakes instead of backscattered waves generated by artificial sources. This allows us to directly manipulate raw recordings of distant earthquakes to produce an image of P to S scattering potential underneath a seismic array. The mathematical model used is a form of inverse scattering appropriate for this type of wave interaction. Applications of the technique to date have revealed the presence of previously unseen dipping boundaries that coincide with ancient suture zones within the continents. Existing applications of the technique have been limited to 2D slices. The proposed project would extend the capabilities of this technique to produce 3D images of P to S conversion structure beneath broadband arrays. The technique will be applied to data from the recently completed array experiment in the Tien Shan of central Asia to address fundamental issues about the relation of mantle and crustal processes in continent-continent collision zones. We also propose to apply this approach to new, dense broadband array data available in southern California. This may provide new insights on the nature of flow in the upper mantle connected with the San Andreas fault system doc11190 none John Lumley, Cornell University The PI proposes to adapt the divergence-free wavelet-based dynamical model for the simulation of a turbulent channel flow. The main goals are (1) to investigate how effective wavelets are in describing the coherent structure in the near wall region of turbulent channel flow, (2) to use wavelet bases to construct a low-dimensional dynamical-system representation for the near-wall region, and (3) to compare the wavelet and POD-Fourier representations of the coherent structure doc11191 none Reeve Solute transport controls vegetation and water chemistry gradients in peatlands. Dispersive mixing and advective transport in peat will be measured in laboratory column experiments and in a natural gradient tracer test in a peatland to determine the relative importance of these processes. We will assess the retardation of solutes by matrix diffusion and the applicability of a dual-domain model. Electrical geophysical methods, verified through direct measurements, will be used to track tracer migration. An extensive geophysical and hydrogeologic characterization of the peatland will map variability in peat depth across the basin and identify stratigraphy. Ground-penetrating radar and resistivity induced polarization imaging will be employed. Piezometer tests will provide a measure of the spatial variability in hydraulic conductivity within Caribou Bog, a large peatland in Central Maine. Correlations between hydrogeologic and geophysical parameters will be assessed and used to provide constraints on parameters for ground-water flow and mass transport modeling. Peat cores will be collected for laboratory tests to measure hydraulic conductivity, dispersion, effective porosity, specific surface and complex resistivity. The variability of peat properties with depth will be determined through laboratory testing. Relationships between peat electrical properties and hydrogeologic parameters will be evaluated. An NaBr tracer will be injected into the peatland and monitored for 12 months. The tracer will be tracked using surface and borehole electrical imaging. The pixels on the geophysical images will be a substitute for extensive direct water sampling points, allowing rapid and nearly continuous tracking of solute distribution. Geophysical and ground-water chemistry data collected from the tracer test will be used to calculate the spatial moments of the solute plume through time. Three-dimensional hydrogeologic and mass transport models will be calibrated to the geochemical and geophysical data to further evaluate mass transport parameters. Matrix diffusion, the migration of solutes into hydraulically isolated pores, will be incorporated into the numerical models to evaluate this important process. The project will evaluate: (1) the nature of dispersive mixing, (2) the correlation of hydrogeologic and geophysical parameters, and (3) the role of mass transporft in peatlands. Peatlands are a large carbon reservoir and a significant source of methane gas. Ground-water flow and mass transport are important in regulating geochemical conditions favorable for methane production and peat accumulation. The work will add to the understanding of processes that impact carbon and nutrient dynamics for peatlands. Geophysical monitoring of a tracer will provide important information on the utility of this non-invasive method for tracking the movement of solute plumes. This project will demonstrate the potential benefits of including electrical geophysics in hydrogeologic assessments and wetland characterization doc11192 none DISTRIBUTION AND GENESIS OF UNUSUAL CARBONATE FABRICS (ATAR GROUP, MAURITANIA) - UNDERSTANDING THE EVOLUTION OF THE PROTEROZOIC CARBONATE FACTORY JULIE K. BARTLEY Recent studies of Archean and Proterozoic rocks indicate broad temporal trends in carbonate depositional style. Abiotic, macroscopically crystalline carbonate, for example, is abundant in both subtidal and peritidal environments in the late Archean and Early Paleoproterozoic. By the late Neoproterozoic seafloor precipitates are virtually absent, supplanted by micritic carbonate textures, except where associated with highly evaporitic conditions or Neoproterozoic glacial deposits. Carbonate textures in the Mesoproterozoic display features characteristic of both older and younger Proterozoic carbonate successions. Furthermore, Mesoproterozoic to early Neoproterozoic carbonate platforms record a diversity of fabrics unknown elsewhere in the geologic record. A Mesoproterozoic peak in the diversity of stromatolite morphologies suggests a dynamic interplay among mat growth and decomposition, carbonate precipitation, and micrite deposition. Similarly, a Mesoproterozoic peak in the abundance of molar-tooth fabric - an enigmatic carbonate fabric that contains rapidly lithified carbonate cement juxtaposed with slowly lithified matrix - suggests a dynamic interface between two contrasting carbonate precipitation regimes. Together, these lines of evidence serve to underscore a recurrent theme: The Mesoproterozoic represents an interval that lay at a critical threshold with respect to the kinetic ease of carbonate nucleation and precipitation. In such a system, relatively minor modification of the physiochemical environment may have inhibited or enhanced carbonate precipitation, resulting in marked changes in the style of carbonate deposition. These inferred environmental changes should therefore be sedimentologically predictable and their consequences geochemically testable. This project aims to systematically examine a wide array of carbonate fabrics within a single basin and delineate the environmental parameters, observable in the field, that control carbonate nucleation and growth. In exploring these relationships it may be possible to explicitly address the complex mechanisms governing Precambrian carbonate production. The late Mesoproterozoic to earliest Neoproterozoic Atar Group, Mauritania, is an ideal succession in which to explore these relationships. Carbonates of the Atar Group contain diverse stromatolites, deep- and shallow-water precipitates, herringbone carbonate cement, and numerous horizons of molar-tooth fabric. As the first step in a multi-faceted approach utilizing field, petrographic, and geochemical datasets, we will conduct field research in the Atar Group, Mauritania and examine the field relationships among the observable carbonate fabrics and the facies in which they occur. This approach provides the most effective method to decipher the relative roles of individual variables in controlling carbonate deposition and, in this way, will address fundamental questions regarding the mechanisms underlying changing carbonate regimes throughout the Precambrian doc11185 none Hibbard Hames Miller The timing and nature of accretion of the Carolina Zone to Laurentia is one of the more significant and least constrained tectonic problems in modern southern Appalachian geology. The original suture has been overprinted and obliterated by subsequent Alleghanian motion along the western margin of the Carolina zone, precluding direct investigation of the suture. The Gold Hill Shear Zone is a prominent feature in the western part of the Carolina Zone and may record features produced by the suturing event that have been preserved due to the distance of the shear zone back from the actual terrane margin. The project involves an integrated structural and geochronologic study of the Gold Hill Shear Zone in an attempt to understanding timing, kinematics and crustal affinities of the original suture and collision of the Carolina Zone with Laurentia. Results will help develop reconstruction of the Appalachians and their exotic terranes doc11194 none Skilling The onset of flood basaltic volcanism is frequently explosive but this explosive volcanism is often overlooked with respect to the voluminous flood basalts that follow. We document here unusual voluminous basaltic breccias that predate and are interbedded with the earliest flood basalts of the Karoo Large Igneous Province (LIP), South Africa. No detailed studies or facies models for these deposits exist, nor can existing models for explosive volcanism explain them. The Karoo breccias have an outcrop area of km2, a total volume of at least 500km3, which can be divided into flow units with volumes which may be as high as 27km3. The breccias consist of juvenile vitric clasts in a matrix dominated by sedimentary sand grains. These sediment-magma mixtures infill large caldera-like collapse structures from which they were probably erupted, and also form outflow sheets interbedded with the earliest Karoo lavas. Juvenile clasts in the breccias are very similar to those of associated fluidal peperites suggesting a continuum of mixing processes from the subsurface to surface. The collapse structures contain bodies of dolerite juxtaposed with large blocks of fused sandstone, suggesting prolonged intervals of efficient heat transfer. This study will look at pre-eruptive, eruptive and emplacement mechanisms that led to the production of the Karoo lavas, by studying and comparing infill and outflow facies, and by looking at proximal to distal variations within a representative outflow sheet. We will develop and test the hypothesis that mixing was preceded by underplating of large areas of wet unconsolidated sand by sustained and constantly replenished high-level sills of basalt. Mixing and eruption may have been accompanied by upwelling of gravitationally unstable slurries, or jetting of magma-sediment mixtures issuing from close-spaced, but ephemeral vents. We will use detailed geological mapping and facies analysis to infer emplacement processes and SEM and image analysis of juvenile clasts to constrain pre-eruptive degassing and fragmentation mechanisms. In year 1, we will study the infill sequence of the Sterkspruit Complex, selected because, in addition to excellent exposure, it contains an unusual near-vent deposit on its margin. In year 2, we will extend the study beyond the Complex to characterize outflow deposition and place the complex in a regional context. We will use chemical stratigraphy to construct the interplay between effusive and explosive phase, and will constrain this work by Ar Ar age determinations. The study has implications for the onset of eruption in all flood basalt provinces. Similar deposits are currently under study, by White and students, for the stratigraphically equivalent Ferrar LIP of Antarctica. Little studied voluminous breccias also occur at the base of the flood basalts in the East Greenland area of the North Atlantic Tertiary LIP, and in the Siberian Traps LIP. Models for the global impact of flood basalts are predicated only on the effusive component. This study will add data that will enable refinement of these models doc11185 none Hibbard Hames Miller The timing and nature of accretion of the Carolina Zone to Laurentia is one of the more significant and least constrained tectonic problems in modern southern Appalachian geology. The original suture has been overprinted and obliterated by subsequent Alleghanian motion along the western margin of the Carolina zone, precluding direct investigation of the suture. The Gold Hill Shear Zone is a prominent feature in the western part of the Carolina Zone and may record features produced by the suturing event that have been preserved due to the distance of the shear zone back from the actual terrane margin. The project involves an integrated structural and geochronologic study of the Gold Hill Shear Zone in an attempt to understanding timing, kinematics and crustal affinities of the original suture and collision of the Carolina Zone with Laurentia. Results will help develop reconstruction of the Appalachians and their exotic terranes doc11196 none Chopelas Measurement of vibrational modes at simultaneous high pressures and temperatures offers many important opportunities to expand the state of the art in Raman spectroscopy in geophysics. First, phase boundaries can be quickly determined in situ. Second, new unquenchable phases can be easily detected, with probable structures or space groups identified based on spectral patterns. Third, these experiments directly measure the intrinsic anharmonicity, a value required for extrapolating important parameters such as thermal expansivity from 1 atm to deep earth conditions or calculating densities of a material in P-T space using the Mie-Gruneisen equation of state. Earth temperature, compositional, and dynamical models generally rely on extrapolation of these properties of candidate minerals to deep Earth conditions. Our current capabilities include a nearly identical experimental arrangement as those in Mainz: Raman double monochromator with CCD camera and photomultiplier tube, diamond cells, and excitation laser. Preliminary data from the Mainz laboratory using a CO2 laser for heating show that this method is feasible. A CO2 laser is requested in this proposal. We propose to extend the current Raman spectroscopic capabilities in our laboratory at UNLV to simultaneous high temperatures and pressures using CO2 laser heating in the diamond anvil cell. Once the laboratory is upgraded, the study will first focus on the two geophysically important minerals forsterite and magnesium silicate perovskite, both important mantle phases. Prior Raman studies of these at either elevated temperatures or elevated pressures are available for comparison. First results will focus on providing direct constraints on the Mie Gruneisen equation of state and on thermal expansivity at mantle conditions using a Maxwell relation doc11197 none This project is aimed at studying physical properties of various soft condensed materials such as chiral-smectic liquid-crystal and bent-core compounds that display a large net electric polarization. In addition to experimentally determining the molecular azimuthal arrangements in the chiral-smectic variant phases, studies of physical properties of various new mesophases formed by bent-core molecules will be emphasized. Employing state-of-the-art optical systems, numerous important discoveries in these areas are now possible such as the characterization of mesophases formed by bent-core molecules. These experimental results will focus on fundamental studies of molecular packing in the various mesophases and provide theorists important physical parameters for theoretical modeling. Educational opportunities will be developed to train both undergraduate and graduate students in designing and constructing cutting-edge optical systems as well as acquiring, analyzing and understanding high quality experimental data. The desire for high-speed liquid crystal displays and a new interest in special materials to be used in optic fiber networks makes the characterization of exotic liquid crystal phases for such applications has critically important. Students trained in these areas will be highly competitive in the job market doc11198 none Jacobson Barth The late Mesozoic to early Tertiary geology of California is characterized by an arc-forearc-accretionary wedge sequence produced during convergence with the Farallon plate. These elements have been severely disrupted in southern California, resulting in eastern facies being emplaced over western and underthrusting of the enigmatic Pelona-Orocopia-Rand Schists. This project will follow up on prior results of work on this system that indicate eastward younging in the schists, and that provenance of the schists matches the provenance in the overlying basement rocks. The results of this extensive detrital zircon dating effort is expected to discriminate between several possible tectonic scenarios for the development of this complex geology. Results are key to understanding the late Mesozoic to early tertiary tectonic environment of the California sector of the western cordillera doc10890 none The goal of this project is to determine how pink salmon in the northern Gulf of Alaska are affected by variation in the plankton production system during their first months at sea. This will be accomplished through an integrated project that includes field sampling, laboratory analyses and modeling. Pink salmon occupy surface waters of the continental shelf in the summer and fall after entering marine waters in the spring. In that period they grow rapidly and their feeding changes from small zooplankton in the summer to large zooplankton in the fall. This project will document temporal and spatial variation in prey use and availability, it will assess the effects of the shelf environment by measuring condition of pink salmon, and it will use spatially- explicit foraging bioenergetic modeling to understand observed patterns in feeding, growth and condition. Fish of hatchery origin, identified by thermal otolith marks, will be of particular interest, as the marine survival of each hatchery cohort will be available a year after those fish enter the marine environment. Spatial and temporal variation in pink salmon diets and surface zooplankton will be described through laboratory analyses of field samples, and the basis for diet shifts to larger prey will be determined by calculations of prey selectivity. Standard length weight condition measures will be calculated, and the energy content of salmon will be measured by calorimetry. The relationship between condition, growth and the environment will be examined. Habitat quality over the continental shelf will be assessed with spatially explicit models with foraging and bioenergetic components that produce weight- specific estimates of growth potential. Bioenergetic modeling will also be used to estimate daily ration and seasonal consumption by pink salmon. The relationship between diets of pink salmon and other planktivorous fishes will be assessed. This research will contribute directly to accomplishment of the GLOBEC program goal of understanding how production of upper trophic level species is linked to variation in oceanographic conditions. It is widely accepted that production of salmon in the GOA is determined by planktonic production. Detailed descriptions of spatial and temporal variation in diet, prey availability, temperature, and fish condition will substantially enhance our understanding of the connections between the marine environment and salmon production doc11200 none Hart This project is an integrated field, geochronologic, geochemical, and petrologic investigation of circa 17 to13 Ma volcanism associated with the initial late Cenozoic manifestations of the Yellowstone-Newberry hotspot system and with lithospheric extension in the Nevada - Oregon border region. The area under investigation, the Santa Rosa-Calico volcanic field, lies within the northwestern projection of a major late Miocene continental rift regime and is located between two other Oregon Plateau volcanic fields that typically are identified with the emergence of the Yellowstone-Newberry hotspot system. The field and analytical strategy is designed to provide a comprehensive view of the Santa Rosa-Calico volcanic field. Techniques to be employed include GPS GIS assisted field mapping; air photo and satellite remote sensing interpretations; petrographic, chemical and isotopic characterization of eruptive products and petrogenetic processes; and absolute eruptive history assessment via Ar-Ar age determinations. Using the Santa Rosa-Calico volcanic field as a case study this research will test and provide new constraints on hypotheses for [1] the origin of intermediate magmas in extensional settings, [2] the role of basaltic magmatism in the formation and evolution of evolved magmas, [3] the role of crustal melting and open system differentiation processes in the evolution of compositionally diverse magmatic suites, and [4] the role that pre- and syn-magmatic extension plays in controlling the location, eruptive style(s), and compositional diversity of multi-vent volcanic fields doc11201 none Pilot Study: Carbon Isotope Composition of Aptian Plant Fossils from the Arundel Formation, Western Maryland A. Hope Jahren, Johns Hopkins University Current literature reflects interest in a new potential player in the carbon cycle: methane hydrates are solids composed of methane and water that result from bacterial activity in marine sediments. In order to assess the importance of methane hydrates in long-term global climate, we propose to study the biogeochemical consequences of a methane release event during the early Aptian (~117 million years ago). Toward this, we will obtain a carbon-isotope record of plant fossils from sequences located within the Arundel Formation (within the Potomac Group) of Western Maryland. This record will be compared with a record recently obtained from terrestrial sediments from Colombia, South America, which shows a dramatic change in carbon isotope value during the early Aptian (~117 Ma doc11202 none Haggerty Diamonds were first discovered in India some four millinnia ago. Many of the world s most famous diamonds (Great Mogul, Orloff, Shah, Darya-i-Noor, Regent, Nizam), as well as many infamous stones (e.g. Hope, Koh-i-Noor), were recovered from alluvial deposits on the banks of the Krishna River in the southern state of Andra Pradesh. The primary sources of these and many other extraordinary diamonds, in terms of size and clarity, have not been located. In common with the geological setting of diamond deposits worldwide, diamonds in India are also on cratons and in mobile belts. The two prominent diamond districts are Majhgawan (known since the 13th C), which is an operating mine in the Bundelkand Craton (Madhya Pradesh), and Wajrakarur in the Dharwar Craton of Andra Pradesh. The ages of intrusions in both districts are Proterozoic, and at about 1.1 Ga are similar in age to the Premier kimberlite (source of the Cullinan, the largest diamond diamond ever reported) in South Africa, and the Argyle lamproite (the world s largest producer, over 40 M cts yr) in Australia. These two sites, along with Proterozoic alluvial deposits in central Africa and Brazil, lie along major lineaments in the reconstructed supercontinent of Rodinia. This is interpreted to be plume related. With over 50 new intrusives discovered in India over the past decade, these ancient cratons are an important new laboratory to study the state of the mantle, and its evolutionary relation the crust (TTG). The diamond host rocks in India are neither classical kimberlites nor conventional lamproites and are variously described as having both kimberlitic (mineralogically), and lamproitic (geochemically) affinities. This is a significant new challenge in mantle petrochemistry. Many intrusions have abundant mantle xenoliths, some are intensely eclogitic, and others are dominantly peridotitic, and both will provide new insights to compositions and thermal states of subcratonic lithospheric keels. India is well mapped geophysically and the mantle data base will provide an independent set of constraints to model the deep mantle. Mantle samples from 32 intrusions will be studied microscopically and analysed using electron microbeam and x-ray fluoresence techniques to obtain mineral and bulk rock compositions, respectively. Diamond morphologies will be examined by stereo- and scanning electron microscopy, and by Raman and infrared spectroscopy. These data will provide the first comprehensive study of Proterozoic mantle intrusives in India. Significant new insights are predicted and important new interpretations are anticipated, not only in India but in the broader context of diamond deposits in Rodinia doc11203 none How do children, especially children who traditionally have been unsuccessful in science, learn to see the relationships between their own and scientific accounts of phenomena and to work with these productively in support of understanding? Would all children benefit academically from close attention to the relationships between everyday and scientific meanings and ways of representing those meanings? What is the nature of these relationships, and how can they be built upon pedagogically in science? The overarching goal of this three-year project is to develop an understanding of how all children, as they develop understanding of scientific ideas, also learn to see inside the ways in which everyday and scientific accounts represent knowledge about the physical and biological world. It is motivated by our concern with the persistent achievement gap in science separating low-income ethnic, racial and linguistic minority children from more economically privileged students. To address our questions, we will engage in a series of design experiments, to be undertaken in close collaboration with practitioner researchers in heterogeneous and bilingual classrooms, grades 1-4. These will entail two main research activities. (1) We will iteratively develop a pedagogical approach that integrates progressive emphases on the centrality of students ideas and questions in inquiry-based learning with post-progressive concerns on the importance of explicit teaching about the forms and functions of language and symbol use in organizing meaning-making in science. This new pedagogical synthesis will harness the diversity in children s ideas and ways of talking and knowing as an intellectual resource in science learning and teaching and make this diversity into an explicit object of discussion and inquiry in the classroom. In this approach, students and teachers will engage in active inquiry into the ways in which core ideas in physics (e.g., motion and force) and biology (e.g., organismal growth and development) are represented in everyday and scientific accounts (e.g. spoken and written descriptions, explanations, theories, arguments; graphs; drawings; models; tables; etc.). The focus of these inquiries will be on meaning and form as well as perspective and purpose. (2) Our main conjecture is that through participation in this approach to inquiry students will develop robust scientific understanding, begin to develop command over multiple discourses and their uses, and demonstrate high achievement. Toward this end, we will study what children learn as a result of their participation in such inquiry practices. We will examine children s learning as reflected in multiple kinds of performances, including classroom benchmark discussions, performance assessments, and achievement tests doc11204 none finite groups find concrete representations as square matrices over finite number systems. The groups and representations the investigators study comprise the most important basic ingredients for creating a general theory of all finite group representations. Over the past century, similar theories for continuous groups have played a large role in quantum theory and the theory of elementary particles. Their finite analogs have already proved valuable in the design of communications and data storage devices, though this finite theory remains very incomplete. In the future, one reasonably expects that the finite discrete worlds of computers and communications will become even more important. The task of creating a viable general theory of finite group representations -- as is the investigators long-term goal -- is, thus, a central problem for the future doc11205 none Gill Radioactive disequilibria in the 238U and 235U decay chains will be measured and interpreted for young volcanic rocks from several western Pacific island arcs (Marianas, Sangihe [Indonesia], and Japan). Specifically, disequilibria between 238U-230Th, 230Th-226Ra, and 235U-231Pa will be measured. Results will be integrated with other geochemical data to be obtained for the same rocks, especially trace element concentrations measured by ICPMS and Sr-Nd-Pb isotope ratios measured by TIMS. These supplemental can fingerprint components which may be in the source region of the magmas. Special attention will be placed on determining whether results constrain the physical processes of melting (such as the porosity, upwelling rate, and melt productivity of mantle in the wedge between the arc and underlying subducting lithosphere), as is the case in other major sites of planetary magmatism. Such processes are expected to differ in subduction zones where melting occurs by fluxing from subducted waters and may be much faster. The alternative is that the radioactive disequilibria are dominated by the source components too. By comparing results from three quite different arcs, we will explore the role of different tectonic environments and source components. Results for Japan will be integrated with seismic tomographic images of melting there, which are the best in the world, but it will also be necessary to work closely with Japanese colleagues familiar with the volcanoes being studied in order to take the local geological context fully into account. Results will be disseminated through a University of California K12 partnership program doc11206 none Under the direction of Dr. Terry Hunt, Ms. Julie Field will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. She will initiate new archaeological research in the Sigatoka Valley, located in the southwestern corner of the island of Viti Levu, Fiji. This research will investigate the evolution of competitive settlement strategies between related and non-related social groups in Fijian prehistory. Ms. Field s previous analyses of aerial photographs from the Sigatoka Valley have documented the location and character of over 700 archaeological features, including fortifications, agricultural features, and unfortified settlements. Despite the quantity and richness of the archaeological record, no chronology exists for the establishment of the fortifications, or the arrival of the various patrilineal descent groups documented at the contact period. Ms. Field s doctoral dissertation research will examine the development of fortifications in the valley, and also trace the relationship between the environment and the frequency of conflict, as evinced by the occurrence of fortifications on lands traditionally held by patrilineal descent groups, known as mataqali and yavusa. Her research will incorporate an archaeological excavation and collection strategy, focusing on a sample of 15 sites from a variety of environmental zones. The acquisition of datable materials from such features as walls, ditches, and remote mountain outposts will allow for the first chronology of fortifications in this part of Fiji. Ms. Field will also couple the information gleaned from archaeological research to an environmental model generated within the framework of a geographic information system (GIS). Comparison of these data, as well as the distribution of land-holdings and hierarchical social relations that are known to exist between the patrilineal descent groups of the valley, will have the potential to indicate group fission, movement, and the various competitive stances that existed in prehistory. Archaeologists are interested in the development of conflict and warfare, and the examination of fortifications is a very direct method for the study of this phenomenon during the prehistoric period. NSF support will allow Ms. Field to conduct excavations in Fiji, and also provide for the dating of archaeological materials. This research is important because it will yield data of interest to both regional and international scholars, and it explores a topic that is of great interest to the discipline of anthropology. It will also support and assist in training a promising young scientist doc11207 none The rapid growth of the Internet as a vehicle for surveys raises important questions about this new method for data collection. Web surveys are the latest in a series of methods in which computers administer questions directly to respondents. Like many of the earlier methods, Web surveys present questions visually and offer some capability for interacting with respondents. This project encompasses a series of experiments that examine the implications of the visual and interactive character of Web surveys. One set of experiments examines how respondents interpret visual cues in Web questionnaires. These studies test the general proposition that incidental visual features of the questions (e.g., the spacing of response options) can give rise to unintended inferences about their meaning. The studies examine specific hypotheses about the heuristics respondents use in interpreting visual features of questions. These hypotheses state that respondents expect response categories to proceed in a logical progression from left to right; that they expect spatially isolated options also to differ conceptually from the other options; and that they assume that items that look alike must somehow be conceptually related. Two additional experiments examine the effects of including images to supplement the text of a question. Images are necessarily concrete, and one experiment tests whether this leads respondents to interpret the question more narrowly than they otherwise would have. Another experiment tests whether items depicted in an image may serve as standards of comparison for respondents judgments. The final series of studies examines when respondents take advantage of interactive features of a questionnaire. These experiments test three general hypotheses: Respondents are more likely to utilize information available to them interactively when 1) the information is easy to obtain, 2) it is clearly helpful, and 3) they are highly motivated to seek help. Collectively, the results are likely to lead to practical guidelines for the design of Web surveys. For example, the initial experiments should help settle some important practical questions-Does it matter whether the response categories are arrayed vertically or horizontally? Does the spacing of the response options affect the answers? Does the use of color in response scales influence the distribution of answers? The final experiments could yield better methods for getting respondents to take advantage of features that might improve their answers. This research is supported by the Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics Program and a consortium of federal statistical agencies under the Research on Survey and Statistical Methodology Funding Opportunity doc11183 none Heller Dethier Widespread remnants of Cenozoic sedimentary rocks in the central Rocky Mountains may indicate the former presence of a large post-Laramide basin fill that has subsequently been largely removed. If such a regional basin fill can be demonstrated, it would provide a regional marker for determining the extent and rate of sediment removal and provide a marker for vertical tectonic movement during the late Cenozoic. This project will combine mapping fission-track and cosmogenic nuclide geochronometry to attempt to determine the former extent and continuity of the post-Laramide basin fill, and to search for possible tectonic or geologic causes of the observed changes. Results will help clarify the competing effects of tectonic verses climatically driven uplift doc11209 none This is a study of scalar fluctuations in turbulent jet flames. Spatial and temporal structures are studied in a simplified counterflow geometry. The geometry is conducive to direct comparison between quantitative experimental results and advanced turbulent combustion models such as large-eddy simulations. A modular burner consisting of two opposed jets and providing a range of turbulent flow conditions is used. Quantitative laser diagnostics are applied to a series of flames in this burner to recover the time dependence of OH and CH concentrations, temperature, and mixture fraction. Velocity measurements are obtained on an identical burner at Technische Universitat Darmstadt. A set of simultaneous velocity and concentration measurements are made at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Using a simulation technique developed by the investigators, relationships between spatial and temporal correlations are examined quantitatively. Time-series measurements of concentrations of minor species in turbulent jet flames have been made recently. These single-point measurements permit study of time-scale statistics and are analogous to spatial-scale imaging. However, unknown mixing statistics in the jet flames complicate interpretation of these data doc11210 none Houghton The onset of flood basaltic volcanism is frequently explosive but this explosive volcanism is often overlooked with respect to the voluminous flood basalts that follow. We document here unusual voluminous basaltic breccias that predate and are interbedded with the earliest flood basalts of the Karoo Large Igneous Province (LIP), South Africa. No detailed studies or facies models for these deposits exist, nor can existing models for explosive volcanism explain them. The Karoo breccias have an outcrop area of km2, a total volume of at least 500km3, which can be divided into flow units with volumes which may be as high as 27km3. The breccias consist of juvenile vitric clasts in a matrix dominated by sedimentary sand grains. These sediment-magma mixtures infill large caldera-like collapse structures from which they were probably erupted, and also form outflow sheets interbedded with the earliest Karoo lavas. Juvenile clasts in the breccias are very similar to those of associated fluidal peperites suggesting a continuum of mixing processes from the subsurface to surface. The collapse structures contain bodies of dolerite juxtaposed with large blocks of fused sandstone, suggesting prolonged intervals of efficient heat transfer. This study will look at pre-eruptive, eruptive and emplacement mechanisms that led to the production of the Karoo lavas, by studying and comparing infill and outflow facies, and by looking at proximal to distal variations within a representative outflow sheet. We will develop and test the hypothesis that mixing was preceded by underplating of large areas of wet unconsolidated sand by sustained and constantly replenished high-level sills of basalt. Mixing and eruption may have been accompanied by upwelling of gravitationally unstable slurries, or jetting of magma-sediment mixtures issuing from close-spaced, but ephemeral vents. We will use detailed geological mapping and facies analysis to infer emplacement processes and SEM and image analysis of juvenile clasts to constrain pre-eruptive degassing and fragmentation mechanisms. In year 1, we will study the infill sequence of the Sterkspruit Complex, selected because, in addition to excellent exposure, it contains an unusual near-vent deposit on its margin. In year 2, we will extend the study beyond the Complex to characterize outflow deposition and place the complex in a regional context. We will use chemical stratigraphy to construct the interplay between effusive and explosive phase, and will constrain this work by Ar Ar age determinations. The study has implications for the onset of eruption in all flood basalt provinces. Similar deposits are currently under study, by White and students, for the stratigraphically equivalent Ferrar LIP of Antarctica. Little studied voluminous breccias also occur at the base of the flood basalts in the East Greenland area of the North Atlantic Tertiary LIP, and in the Siberian Traps LIP. Models for the global impact of flood basalts are predicated only on the effusive component. This study will add data that will enable refinement of these models doc11211 none Muawia Barazangi The Dead Sea Fault System (DSFS) is one of the largest continental strike-slip faults in the world. As the transform plate boundary between the Arabian and African plates, the DSFS represents a key tectonic feature in the eastern Mediterranean region. Despite its tectonic significance, the understanding of the DSFS as an active, seismogenic structure is relatively limited, particularly along the central and northern sections of the fault in Syria and Lebanon. Through an interdisciplinary study of DSFS in Syria and Lebanon, the ongoing research is addressing several important issues including: (1) Whether or not northern DSFS deformation fully accounts for Arabia-Africa plate motions and, hence, represents the present-day plate boundary. (2) How predictions of northward increase in slip rate and fault-normal convergence (suggested by plate tectonic models) are reflected in DSFS kinematics. (3) The role of earthquakes in plate boundary deformation along a major continental transform (the DSFS) including fault segmentation and aseismic strain release. (4) The relationship of internal deformation of the adjacent Arabian plate to kinematic variations along the DSFS, and the connection between the DSFS and the Arabian-Eurasian collision. In order to bridge the critical gap that typically exists between neotectonic and geodetic seismological assessments of strain, results of this neotectonic and geodetic work are currently integrated with a lengthy, well-documented historical record of large earthquakes (approximately M 6.5) spanning at least the past 2,000 years. Such a lengthy historical record spanning multiple earthquake cycles is generally unavailable along almost any other major plate boundary. To address the issues outlined above, the following is being accomplished: (1) Regional mapping of the active branches of the DSFS using all available remote sensing data (including aerial photos and a high-resolution elevation models produced using InSAR) to determine geometric (and possible seismogenic) segments. (2) Local studies of key fault segments (detailed mapping, surveying fault-related landforms, and paleoseismic studies) in order to delimit: long-term fault slip rates and kinemetrics (103 - 106 years); earthquake histories and recurrence over many earthquake cycles (Holocene to present), and; past earthquake sizes and their distribution along fault segments. Historical earthquake data place further limits on earthquake size and recurrence during the past ~2,000 years. (3) Tectonic geodesy (primarily GPS) in the far-field and near-field to determine short-term rates of fault slip and kinematics (several years), possible aseismic slip vs. strain accumulation, and possible internal deformation of the northern Arabian plate. Integrating and modeling neotectonic, geodetic, and historical data for the DSFS provide new insight on the kinematics and dynamics of DSFS with broader implications for active strike-slip faults, in general. Furthermore, the results of this study have significance for regional earthquake hazard assessment in Syria and Lebanon, as well as neighboring countries, where large, rapidly expanding populations heighten the need for accurate earthquake hazard assessments. The collaborative study builds upon past and ongoing joint research involving Cornell, MIT, IPG Strasbourg, and Syrian and Lebanese institutions. (4) The relationship of internal deformation of the adjacent Arabian plate to kinematic variations along the DSFS, and the connection between the DSFS and the Arabian-Eurasian collision. In order to bridge the critical gap that typically exists between neotectonic and geodetic seismological assessments of strain, results of this neotectonic and geodetic work are currently integrated with a lengthy, well-documented historical record of large earthquakes (approximately M 6.5) spanning at least the past 2,000 years. Such a lengthy historical record spanning multiple earthquake cycles is generally unavailable along almost any other major plate boundary. To address the issues outlined above, the following is being accomplished: (1) Regional mapping of the active branches of the DSFS using all available remote sensing data (including aerial photos and a high-resolution elevation models produced using InSAR) to determine geometric (and possible seismogenic) segments. (2) Local studies of key fault segments (detailed mapping, surveying fault-related landforms, and paleoseismic studies) in order to delimit: long-term fault slip rates and kinemetrics (103 - 106 years); earthquake histories and recurrence over many earthquake cycles (Holocene to present), and; past earthquake sizes and their distribution along fault segments. Historical earthquake data place further limits on earthquake size and recurrence during the past ~2,000 years. (3) Tectonic geodesy (primarily GPS) in the far-field and near-field to determine short-term rates of fault slip and kinematics (several years), possible aseismic slip vs. strain accumulation, and possible internal deformation of the northern Arabian plate. Integrating and modeling neotectonic, geodetic, and historical data for the DSFS provide new insight on the kinematics and dynamics of DSFS with broader implications for active strike-slip faults, in general. Furthermore, the results of this study have significance for regional earthquake hazard assessment in Syria and Lebanon, as well as neighboring countries, where large, rapidly expanding populations heighten the need for accurate earthquake hazard assessments. The collaborative study builds upon past and ongoing joint research involving Cornell, MIT, IPG Strasbourg, and Syrian and Lebanese institutions doc11212 none Rushmer Experimental studies on melt generation and extraction in crustal rock types are now providing testable models with which to more fully examine natural settings. The problem is that few field sites have the exposure necessary to study potential mechanisms of melt segregation via fracture and subsequent transport mechanisms. The Early Cretaceous granulite belt of Fiordland, New Zealand, however, is an exception. It is a deeply eroded continuous belt which exposes all levels of the crust, truly lowermost crustal rocks, in addition to middle and upper crust. Field observations of exposed lowermost crust have documented the presence of extensive leucosome-lined fracture networks which appear to have also been used for melt transport. Testing this scenario experimentally will provide an excellent opportunity to integrate these field observations with experimental data. We are therefore conducting an experimental investigation involving phase equilibria, static rock core and deformation studies on the source dioritic rocks to accomplish the following tasks: 1) test the hypothesis that partial melting in this hydrous-phase rich bulk composition produced the observed fractures lined with leucosome material; 2) determine melt compositions and melt-water contents produced by partial melting of diorite under granulite facies conditions to be used as tracers for melt transport; 3) determine strength behavior of the diorite during partial melting at high pressure; and 4) use the above experimental results to constrain petrologic and structural models of the evolution of the lowermost crust as exposed in the Fiordland granulite belt. Experimental determination of partial melt compositions and possible segregation mechanisms will be combined with field relationships, geochemical and petrologic studies to constrain sources and transport paths for partial melts observed in these locales in the Fiordland lower crustal section. The results of these combined studies have significant potential impact for furthering our understanding of melt-related processes in the lowermost crust and the role of melt during orogenic evolution. This three-year project provides direct support for three Masters students. Three undergraduates will participate in the project in the summers as part of their senior theses doc11213 none Crayton J. Yapp Ancient Atmospheric CO2, Paleoclimates, and the Stable Isotope Geochemistry of Low Temperature Iron (III) Oxides The geologic record has revealed that climate change on Earth occurs on a wide range of temporal and spatial scales. As a result, the search for answers to questions about causality in climate change has become more complex. Development of a deep understanding of the mechanisms by which natural systems were (and are) linked through the Earth s fluid spheres(the atmosphere and hydrosphere) requires new sources of information on both modern and ancient environments. Among the requirements are data on the composition of ancient atmospheres, surficial temperatures and the behavior of the hydrologic cycle. Studies of the oxygen and hydrogen isotope systematics of the common, low-temperature iron oxyhydroxide, goethite ( -FeOOH), have established its value as a source of information on wet, oxidizing, continental environments such as lateritic soils. Moreover, it was discovered that a small amount of CO2 is istrapped in the crystal structure of goethite as an Fe(CO3 )OH component in solid solution. This Fe(CO3 )OH serves as a proxy for the partial pressure and carbon isotope composition of CO2 present at the time of goethite crystallization. Therefore, goethite from ancient soils can be used to determine the isotopic composition of waters, paleotemperatures, the presence of ancient biological activity, soil CO2 pressures, and, under the right circumstances, the partial pressure of CO2 in the Earth s atmosphere. A continuation of efforts to contribute information on long-term changes in continental climate and atmospheric chemistry during the Phanerozoic is proposed here. Two paleosols (Late Paleocene and Middle Eocene laterites) that bracket the Early Tertiary thermal maximum have been identified as promising candidates for study. Carbon, hydrogen and oxygen isotope, chemical, XRD and petrographic data would be obtained from multiple samples of these highly leached soils. These data should provide information on atmospheric CO2 pressures, climatic temperatures, isotopic compositions of waters and biological activity doc11214 none Observations of cloud droplets and raindrops indicate that the drop concentration, regarded as a random variable, may have a probability distribution that deviates from the Poisson distribution, which would be expected if the drops had equal probability of being located anywhere and were independent of each other. Drops therefore are said to have a tendency to cluster. At any given time, some regions of space may have greater concentrations than expected for a Poisson distribution and other regions less. The deviations may be characterized quantitatively by the pair-correlation function, which in turn is related to the spatial autocorrelation function of drop concentration. Building on the theory of correlated stochastic processes, this project has three objectives: 1. Advance the understanding of the fine-scale structure of clouds and rain by analyzing data from cloud probes and disdrometers; assess the implications for droplet growth by collisions and coalescence. 2. Determine whether clustering can give rise to a coherent scattering component in radar signals from clouds and precipitation; devise methods to recognize this component. 3. Study the effects of clustering on radiative transfer; in particular, determine whether clustering can explain deviations from the Beer-Lambert law of extinction. The work contributes to the foundations of cloud physics by providing a more complete description of the random variability of drop populations. It may lead to improved understanding of rain formation by coalescence of cloud droplets and to a refinement of methods of cloud remote sensing doc11215 none Yuen Vasilyev Wavelets represent a new mathematical tool, developed mostly over the last fifteen years. The fundamental strength of wavelets lies in its inherent ability to achieve very high resolution locally using relatively few localized functions, called wavelets. However, its application in solid-earth geophysics has remained relatively limited. In this three-year proposal a multidisciplinary team, steeped in the skills of applied mathematics, numerical analysis, fluid dynamics and theoretical geophysics, will employ the latest tools from wavelets to address two classes of geophysical problems. These include finite-amplitude viscoelastic deformation in strongly variable viscosity media where thermo-mechanical coupling and mechanical compaction play mutually interacting roles, and modeling of gravity currents in both 2D and 3D geometries with strong thermo-mechanical coupling from variable viscosity and viscous heating. The aim is to disseminate the use of wavelets to the geophysical community in frontier research and basic education of graduate and undergraduate students doc11216 none This research project, supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, addresses the effect of steps on electrocatalysis and electrodeposition on platinum single crystal electrode surfaces. The electrooxidation of formic acid, and the deposition of Co Pt magnetic multilayers form the main focus of this research carried out by Professor Hector D. Abruna at Cornell University. This work provides detailed insight into the relation between structure and function of electroactive metals in fuel cell and magnetic material applications. The detailed understanding of the connection between electrode surface structure and electrode chemical activity is the focus of this research project. Using well-characterized stepped single crystal electrodes, small organic molecule reactions are being examined. In addition, the use of these stepped surfaces as templates for the structured deposition of magnetic multilayers is explored in this work. The results of these studies will provide fundamental insight into the behavior of electrocatalytic systems doc11217 none INSECT AND VERTEBRATE FAUNAS OF A UNIQUE LATE TRIASSIC FRESHWATER ECOSYSTEM IN EASTERN NORTH AMERICA Nicholas C. Fraser and David A. Grimaldi The end of the Triassic period (230 -200 mya) was a pivotal time in the evolution of modern terrestrial ecosystems. There is a good global record for tetrapods, including the first mammals, crocodiles, turtles, lissamphibians (frogs and salamanders), sphenodontians, and, by extension, their sister taxon, the lizards. By contrast the record for the most significant group of modern day animals, the insects, is considerably poorer. Only a handful of rich insect-producing Triassic sequences are known worldwide, and the majority of fossils from these localities comprise incomplete specimens such as isolated wings and elytra. A single site in the Newark Supergroup of eastern North America has been found to contain numerous complete Late Triassic insects. The Solite Quarry is situated on the Virginia-North Carolina state line, and it has produced the oldest global records for water bugs, thrips and caddisflies. Other fossils found to date include a unique gliding reptile and numerous specimens of a small aquatic reptile that frequently preserve details of their soft part anatomy. These have yet to be fully described. Only a relatively small portion of the fossiliferous sequences has been excavated and PIs will open large-scale excavations in the most productive quarry units. The next phase of the work will be to conduct detailed studies of all the finds and to compare them with the two major assemblages that share the most in common: the Madygen Formation of Kirghizistan and the Molteno Formation of South Africa. The exquisite preservation of the Solite insects will permit a complete re-evaluation of the extensive Russian and South African insect collections and thereby allow for a better understanding of the mode and tempo of insect evolution and radiation at this critical time. For a long time the Solite quarry was regarded as being largely unfossiliferous. Certainly the microscopic insect fossils can be readily overlooked under normal lighting conditions. The search image is critical to the PIs success, and using the same methods they have identified other localities nearby that also contain insect remains. Together with the diverse plant and vertebrate remains, they shall reconstruct a detailed picture of marginal freshwater ecosystems in the Late Triassic doc11218 none Medical geography is an interdisciplinary collaboration between geography and medicine to apply geographic methods to study disease distributions using the geographical information systems (GIS) containing information that can be cross-linked to hospital and county health data to examine the relationship between chronic diseases such as cancer and asthma and air quality and other environmental hazards. Substantial environmental data are currently available in the GIS, but the data are underutilized in investigating chronic health problems. Local hospitals provide emergency treatment for asthma for patients and patient addresses can be cross-linked to geographic information. Health data can be correlated to the geographic information to determine the relationships between air and water quality, and asthma emergencies. Standard statistical methods cannot be readily applied to the complex, observational data. Therefore, the analysis will use data mining techniques, including artificial neural networks, visualization, and kernel density estimation. Structural equation modeling examines the causal flow. The investigator will work with geographers in the Department of Geography Geosciences and with health researchers to expand skills to include knowledge of the GIS system and software, and to use those skills to examine the epidemiology of chronic diseases related to environmental factors. The methods studied can be applied to many chronic diseases. This IGMS project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc11219 none Anderson The proposed research focusses on the Orunaui rhyolitic ash-flow tuff, a geologically young and contrasting counterpart to the Bishop Tuff. We plan to test whether the preeruptive Oruanui magma was stably stratified. If the unsystematically erupted Oruanui pumice compositions nevertheless derive from a density stratified magma body, then the case will be strengthened that many big bodies of silicic magma probably achieve a stable density stratification by natural processes of magma formation, emplacement, crystallization and exsolution of gas. We will study the preeruptive state of the magma by studying inclusions and reentrants of glass in quartz and other phenocrysts, because these plausibly preserve a record of the preeruptive conditions, little modified by eruptive decompression, gas exsolution and crystallization. Our study will help understand the formation of silicic planetary crusts as well as the behavior of active bodies of silicic magma including their propensity for eruption and interactions with geothermal systems, which are sites of ore deposition and energy production doc11220 none Many concepts in science and mathematics are learned in the context of reading scientific textbooks and popular writings on science. This study will investigate how the meanings of words are extracted from the context of text. It is aimed at understanding the process in which concept meanings are extracted from text. The research team seeks to (a) extend and develop algorithms for computational contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA) (i.e., learning from context); (b) to unify a disparate literature on the topic of CVA from psychology and other fields, and (c) to use the knowledge gained from the computational CVA system to explore its implications for educational curriculum and learning. The knowledge gained from case studies of students using the CVA techniques will feed back into further development of computational theory. This project falls within Quadrant 2 (fundamental research on behavioral, cognitive, affective and social aspects of human learning) and Quadrant 3 (research on SMET learning in formal and informal educational settings doc11221 none Prof. George McLendon of the Department of Chemistry, Princeton University, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program of the Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, for his work on developing a general protocol to synthesize de novo proteins of optimal stability. Kinetically inert metal ligand systems will be used that allow stepwise resynthesis of the target assembly, and investigate the design by measuring thermodynamic folding parameters and by macromolecular structural analysis. The approach will be extended to select proteins that lend themselves to in vivo expression. Results from this study will lead to a greater understanding of the protein structure and folding through development of a novel technology, which will allow the design and expression of proteins of predictable function. Results from this study will have a broad societal impact in such areas as catalysis in industrial processes and synthesis of drugs. Students and post-doctoral research associates will receive excellent training in a novel developing area of bioinorganic chemistry doc11222 none Harris and Flynn Mass flux rates have been shown to vary over day-to-month long periods during effusive basaltic eruptions. These variations provide insights into eruption mechanisms, revealing whether or not the chamber was pressurized. Little data exist, however, to determine how mass fluxes vary over time scales of seconds to hours. Such data would provide insight into the variability of supply during an eruption. Over recent years unpublished data have been gathered indicating that erupted mass fluxes may vary between high and low levels over minute-long periods. If such short term cyclicity exists, then this finding will provide unique insights into the stability of supply to persistent basaltic eruptions over minute to hour long periods. The objective of this research is thus to search for and examine short term mass flux variations during ongoing basaltic eruptions defining, for the first time, any cyclicity in the short term mass flux that may exist. This will provide us insights into the supply mechanism during persistent effusive eruptions, answering the prime question: is supply steady or surging? This in turn will allow us to apply conduit convection models that explain the relevant supply mode. To achieve these objectives, two volcanoes characterized by contrasting styles of persistent activity have been selected for analysis: Kilauea (Hawai i) and Villarrica (Chile). While activity at Kilauea is dominated by the emplacement of tube-fed lava flows, Villarrica hosts a persistently active lava lake. At both of these volcanoes, preliminary data indicate that magma supply to the eruption site may cycle between high and low levels, with each cycle lasting minutes to hours. At each volcano data sets capable of revealing short term mass flux variation will be collected. At Kilauea, thermal measurements will be made every 1-2 seconds at skylights along the active master tube and at incandescent vents over the eruption site. At Villarrica, during two field campaigns, thermal data will be collected simultaneously with gas flux and seismic data. Results will be correlated and analyzed for evidence of cyclic supply to Villarrica s lava lake. At both targets, satellite thermal data collected on a daily basis will be used to construct longer mass flux time series allowing the persistence of any cyclic behavior to be examined. These data sets of multiple geophysical measurements will allow conduit convection and degassing models to be fitted to each system. This research will advance our scientific understanding of persistently erupting systems by extending knowledge of how volcanic eruptions evolve over short time periods. We will also assess the validity of popular gas-based conduit convection models that predict and explain such short term variation in terms of variable volatile content and or convective overturn. We will use these data to support educational outreach projects in 3 ways. (1) We will make the data available on the Internet for public access. (2) We will use these data to support University of Hawai i courses for teachers, allowing them to develop exciting high school lesson plans using real-time data. (3) Through the support of Hawai i Space Grant Consortium undergraduate students will benefit by using the data to support their work doc11223 none COMPLEXITY AND PALEODYNAMICS OF NATURAL SAND DUNE FIELDS Brad Werner Fields of sand dunes present some of the most intriguing patterns seen on Earth and other planets, such as Mars. The dunes form when wind transports sand grains, causing them to pile up into small mounds that eventually evolve into the graceful shapes that adorn calendars and postage stamps. The characteristics of the wind, such as its direction and the supply of sand, are imprinted on the pattern of dunes in such a way that it is possible, just by carefully examining the dune pattern, to say something about the climatic conditions that lead to its creation. As winds and sand supply change through time, the pattern of dunes slowly changes as well in ways that are not yet fully delineated. The information about climate over the past thousands to tens of thousands of years stored in the great sand dune fields of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia and North America might provide critical understanding in predicting the reaction of regional climates and landscapes to human-induced global climate change. PIs aim is to develop a methodology for inferring past climate from dune patterns and to apply it to three natural dune fields. To achieve this goal, they have developed numerical models that span the range of time periods over which dunes and dune fields can react to changes in climate: (1) a model for the overall characteristics of dune fields, including spacing between dunes and their orientation (thousands of years); (2) a model for the motion of the trace of the tops of dunes, their crestlines (hundreds of years); and (3) a model for the changes in shapes of dunes (tens of years). These models will be used to investigate the development of the Algodones dune field in southeastern California, the dunes of the Namibian desert in western Namibia, and the dunes of the deserts of western Mauritania. The interpretations PIs derive regarding past climate will be tested by attempting to recreate the patterns of these three dune fields using their climatic inferences in a wind tunnel filled with sand doc11224 none Deciphering the Complex History of Fluid Flow in Lower Carboniferous Carbonate Rocks, Irish Midlands: Geochemistry of Multiple Dolomitizing and Ore-Forming Events Kevin L. Shelton What is the relative timing of each fluid system?; What are the critical fluid-fluid and fluid-rock interactions along flow paths that led to hydrothermal dolomitization and or ore deposition?; What is the relative importance of regional-scale fluid flow through aquifers versus localized fracture-controlled flow for the development of mineral deposits? Our study will address these questions through combined application of carbonate petrology and a number of geochemical tools, including C, O and Sr isotopes, fluid inclusion microthermometry, and fluid inclusion halogen and trace element geochemistry, including new laser ablation-ICP-MS techniques. The impact of this study is profound and timely. Modelers are now expanding the capability of reactive flow hydrogeologic-geochemical models to simulate groundwater chemistry, patterns of rock alteration and ore mineralization in fractured rock. Geochemical data from our studies of chemical interactions of basinal fluids along stratigraphic and faulted pathways will provide an excellent basis for constraining theoretical models of deep fluid flow that are being developed for the Irish Midlands doc11225 none Plant The US Geological Survey routinely measures river discharge at more than sites in the United States by monitoring the height, or stage, of the rivers. This requires that the relation between stage and discharge be accurately known. Present methods of acquiring such calibration data place instruments and, often personnel, in the water. At high flow rates such measurements are both difficult and hazardous; at extremely high rates, they cannot be made at all. Yet the need for these measurements is especially acute at very high flow rates in order to monitor and predict flooding conditions. In this proposal we outline research to develop a microwave system capable of remotely measuring river discharge under nearly all flow conditions. Additionally, the system will provide infon-nation on rainfall. Our approach is to construct an array of simple continuous-wave microwave systems and algorithms for analyzing their output in order to obtain river surface velocities and rain rates remotely and continuously. The primary focus of the project will be on the algorithms needed to obtain accurate currents and rain rates since the microwave and data acquisition systems will be relatively simple. Current information is contained in the Doppler shift of the microwaves backscattered from the river while rain rates are related to the intensity of the return from raindrops. The initial application of the prototype system will be long-term measurements from a bridge on the Cowlitz River near Castle Rock, WA. The work will be carried out in collaboration with the USGS, who will mount the antenna of a ground-penetrating radar on a cableway near the bridge. The combined measurements have the potential to yield discharge. This research will provide inexpensive, portable systems for making river discharge and precipitation measurements. Continuous, remote measurements with these systems will improve development and monitoring of international and interstate agreements on allocation of water resources; provide streamflow data to manage and improve water quality; assess changes in the riverine environment that affect the quality of river and riparian habitat; and improve the estimation of flood frequency and flood inundation areas doc11226 none With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Steven Kuhn and a group of international researchers will continue archaeological excavations at UUagizli ( three mouths ) cave in south-central Turkey. The team includes professional archaeologists, physical anthropologists, geologists, and specialists in the analysis of ancient plant remains, as well as graduate students from the U.S., Turkey, and western Europe. The central goal of the project is to examine evidence for marked changes in human behavior within the earliest Upper Paleolithic period, and to place these developments in their environmental context. Archaeological deposits at the site span the period between about 30,000 and 43,000 years before present. Although humans with essentially modern skeletal anatomy had appeared much earlier, many researchers believe that it was only after 45,000 years ago that there is evidence in Eurasia for complex technologies, symbolic communication and art, and other features of material, social and intellectual life that distinguish fully modern humans from their ancestors. Results from excavations at UUagizli cave to date have helped expand our understanding of changes in economies and technology for this crucial interval in human history. The site has also yielded remains of what are among the earliest ornament-making traditions in Eurasia. These findings are especially important because they document the use of material culture as a medium of symbolic communication, long considered an important rubicon in human cognitive evolution. One issue guiding the research is whether developments in human behavior after 45,000 years ago represent local responses to changing ecological and demographic conditions, or whether they reflect the appearance of new human populations with enhanced cognitive abilities. Continuing excavations will allow us to examine in detail the timing of major shifts in behavior, and whether they occurred independently or in concert. Studies of animal bones, remains of shellfish, as well as ancient pollen and phytoliths (durable crystalline components of plant tissues) will allow us to place these developments in their environmental context, helping to distinguish broad evolutionary trends within the human species as a whole from local adaptations to changing conditions. At the same time, the project is helping to establish new links between academic institutions in Turkey and the United States. Through their participation in the research, students from Ankara University obtain training in field and lab methods. In exchange, American graduate students get valuable overseas research experience as well as material for theses and dissertations doc11227 none Bergantz Open system behavior is ubiquitous in magmatic systems but the timing and extent of mixing associated with any single event is poorly understood. The objective of this work is to develop and employ novel technologies from information science to extract new structures of data and combine them with physical models of multiphase mixing to reveal (in part) the physical history of the body. The central concept is that crystal zoning provides for a non-monotonic, but progressive time-series. We significantly extend this by doing simultaneous spatial-statistical inversion of all crystal zoning patterns for hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of samples. This provides not only the minimum number of chemical events, defined by volumes of unique chemical potential, it also allows one to estimate particle trajectories and minimum residence times in portions of the system. Once putative volumes of prior chemical potential can be identified (chambers within chambers) isotopic microdrilling will be performed on a sub-set of the samples. This leads to a significant savings in time and effort in isotopic analysis as one can focus efforts on samples of most interest. The analysis tools are innovative in that they combine a number of recent advances in 1) crystal-chemical isotopic studies, 2) information technology and spatial statistics and, 3) multiphase modeling, in a combined way that has not been applied previously to problems in petrology and volcanology doc11228 none Rubin One critical yet still incompletely resolved volcanic parameter is the time period involved in crustal processes leading to both magmatic evolution and eruption. These likely vary greatly amongst magmatic systems of differing style, tectonic setting and composition. There are a number of ways to potentially get at the time scales of crustal magmatic process. This proposal suggests a novel approach based upon U-series disequilibrium age contrasts between primitive and evolved magmas that erupted simultaneously. Evidence for such bimodal composition eruptions has become commonplace in the volcanological literature. The magmas involved may have formed through a variety of processes and over a range of time scales, which is an important aspect of this investigation. Three inter-related issues are: (a) petrological: mechanism of formation of evolved magmas; (b) volcanological: eruption triggering of relatively cool, viscous, chemically evolved magmas (dacite and rhyolite); and c) time scales: how long do these processes take in different settings. This study would examine both magmatic evolution and one of several proposed mechanisms for initiating silicic eruptions (i.e. the basalt injection trigger) using bimodal composition eruptions. Such eruptions provide a unique snapshot of processes in complex and evolving magmatic systems because the two end members magmas were erupted simultaneously and therefore are closely-related in space and time. Three working hypotheses would be tested regarding time scales and processes captured in 4 historical (or geologically very recent) bimodal-composition eruptions that are believed to represent various scenarios for petrological evolution and the role of mafic magma in causing or aiding in eruption of chemically evolved magmas. The eruptions to be studies are: Askja; Krafla; Santa Maria; and - Paricutin. Although there are numerous others examples (e.g., historical or recent eruptions of Vesuvius, Hekla, Popocatepetl, Colima, Novarupta, Mt. St. Helens, Nevado del Ruiz, Montserrat, Pinatubo), the eruptions proposed here were picked because they have been previously well-studied volcanologically and petrologically, have excellent temporal control on the eruptions themselves, have something close to compositional end members physically separable from pumices or lavas, and have available sample types suited for dating with U-series disequilibrium by internal mineral isochrons. Eruption deposits will be examined volcanologically, and samples will be examined petrographically and geochemically to arrive at as complete a picture as possible for the volcanic magmatic processes involved. Time permitting a 5th eruption (the circa Mt Tarawera Kaharoa eruption in New Zealand) would also be examined doc11229 none Burbey Aquifer tests typically involve collecting time-drawdown data in the vicinity of a pumping well for the purpose of producing plots for estimating the storage coefficient and transmissivity of the aquifer or aquifer system. Recent advances in GPS technology and INSAR (interferometric synthetic aperture radar) satellite imagery, allow for detailed and precise calculation of land surface displacements. Stationary GPS monitoring during an active pumping test in conjunction with INSAR interferograms for the same region will allow for time-compaction (and time-horizontal strain) data to be collected in conjunction with the hydrograph data providing a far more diagnostic test for estimating storage coefiricient of confined aquifers. Furthermore, in leaky aquifer systems in which the confining unit is the primary compressible unit, the time-compaction data can provide the necessary information to accurately calculate the speciric storage and vertical hydraulic conductivity of the confining unit, parameters that are typically difficult to evaluate. A new analytical solution has been developed to derive the storage coefficient from time-subsidence data and numerical simulation results applied to this semi-log (conrined) and semi-log (leaky) methodology indicates that extremely accurate estimates for storage of the aquifer and storage and vertical hydraulic conductivity of the confining unit can be made. GPS and INSAR surveys will also provide detailed information on horizontal deformation occurring at the land surface and can corroborate results from hypothetical modeling of three-dimensional deformation and flow, which indicate that more than 50 percent of pumped water is released from storage associated with horizontal strain in confined aquifers. These results may have tremendous implications with regard to measuring subsidence, the quantity of leakage that can actually be expected through confining units, and the interpretation of long-term aquifer tests. Furthermore, the strain configuration through the confining unit will be much different in the presence of three-dimensional strain, which will affect the potential compaction and leakage through the confining unit over time. The potential contribution of water from horizontal strain may require us to rethink the current definition of storage coefficient where such strains have been neglected doc11230 none Carlson This study is examining the importance of mafic (pyroxene garnet mica dominated rock types) as opposed to peridotitic (olivine-dominated rock types) sources for mantle-derived magmas. Though generally present only in volumetrically small amounts compared to peridotite, mafic material in the mantle potentially can contain a large fraction of the mantle s incompatible elements, including major elements such as sodium, iron, calcium and aluminum. Consequently, mafic components in the mantle can influence the composition of melts produced in the mantle to a degree disproportionate to their volume. Given that the incompatible element abundances in melts are used to infer mantle properties such as temperature, bulk-composition, and geodynamic history, the participation of mafic material in the melting process may lead to erroneous conclusions regarding mantle properties in models where only peridotitic sources are considered. Detecting the contribution of mafic source components is difficult because many of the properties of mantle melts will be influenced by the predominance of peridotitic wall rock. Commonly used radiogenic isotope systems such as rubidium-strontium, samarium-neodymium and uranium-lead are not sensitive indicators of a mafic source since both mafic and peridotitic materials can have similar parent daughter ratios for these systems. In contrast, the ratio of rhenium to osmium is dramatically different between mafic and peridotitic materials, which makes this radiometric system very sensitive to reflecting the abundance of mafic material in the source of a mantle derived melt. In addition, when a mafic source contribution is detected, the lutetium-hafnium isotopic system potentially is capable of discriminating between a mafic source produced by shallow (spinel stability) melting as opposed to deep (garnet stability) melting. In order to determine whether or not mafic source materials contribute significantly to mantle derived magmas, this study is examining the osmium and hafnium isotopic composition of mafic-alkalic magmas erupted in a variety of tectonic settings in the western US, Italy, Brazil, and Siberia. These compositions represent small volume melts of the mantle that may preferentially sample a mantle mafic component. Defining the chemical characteristics in these small volume melts that can be attributed to mafic sources will allow these signatures to be more unambiguously identified in larger volume magmas (ocean ridge, ocean island, and continental flood basalts) where the percentage of melt from a mafic source may be small in comparison to melt from surrounding peridotite. The study will also produce radiogenic isotope data for mafic xenoliths from the mantle beneath southern Africa and the western US to better define the expected range of isotopic compositions of mafic material in the mantle. Understanding the compositional characteristics of the source materials of mantle-derived magmas is critical to their use as tracers of mantle temperature variations, compositional heterogeneity in the mantle, and the geodynamics of mantle convection and mixing doc11231 none LATE CRETACEOUS VERTEBRATES FROM MADAGASCAR: IMPLICATIONS FOR GONDWANAN BIOGEOGRAPHY David W. Krause, Gregory A. Buckley, Catherine A. Forster, Raymond R. Rogers, and Scott D. Sampson PIs previous NSF-funded research has established the Mahajanga Basin of NW Madagascar as having some of the most complete and spectacularly preserved specimens of Late Cretaceous vertebrates from the southern hemisphere. Their discoveries have quintupled the previously known species diversity of Late Cretaceous vertebrates from the island and now include specimens of fishes, frogs, turtles, snakes, crocodyliforms, dinosaurs, birds, and mammals. More broadly, investigators involved in the Mahajanga Basin Project have elucidated the anatomy, paleobiology, and phylogenetic relationships of several vertebrate higher taxa, documented the Upper Cretaceous stratigraphy and sedimentology of the basin, provided key insights into the biogeographic origins of both the extinct and extant vertebrate faunas of the island, and shed significant new light on Gondwanan plate tectonics during the Mesozoic. Much remains to be done, however, in the vast expanses of paleontologically and geologically unexplored Cretaceous rocks of the Mahajanga Basin. It is clear that, even in the primary study area, the diversity of vertebrates remains inadequately sampled when compared to more thoroughly studied areas elsewhere in the world. Furthermore, despite the exquisite quality and completeness of the specimens of some taxa, the vast majority of species are represented by only fragmentary and isolated specimens. Finally, the unconsolidated nature of the Upper Cretaceous strata and the high annual rainfall ensures that the supply of new localities and new specimens is replenished on an annual basis. With continued work, the PIs are confident that the Mahajanga Basin vertebrate fauna will become one of the best sampled faunas of Cretaceous age and one of the primary standards against which other Gondwanan faunas are compared. The primary goals of the current proposal are to expand preliminary efforts through additional discoveries of fossil vertebrates in the still under-sampled primary field area; investigation of new field areas discovered in ; anatomical, functional, and phylogenetic analysis of specimens already discovered but still unstudied or only partly studied; additional elucidation of geologic context, including paleoenvironment and paleoclimate; and testing of biogeographic and plate tectonic hypotheses related to the breakup of Gondwana doc11232 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. James Denbow and collaborators will conduct two field seasons of archaeological excavation at the site of Bosutswe on the eastern fringes of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana. The site of Bosutswe has one of the longest Iron Age sequences in southern Africa, comparable in scale to only two other contemporary centers south of the Zambezi: Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe. The excavations thus provide an almost unique opportunity to measure social, cultural, economic, and ecological change over a thousand year period from 700 to CE. The project brings together an international team of specialists in archaeology, metallurgy, stable isotope analysis, osteology, and archeo-zoology from the United States, Botswana, and South Africa. New and innovative methods that include stable isotope and trace element source-tracking of metals, slags and alloys, lithics, ceramics, and even hunted and domestic game, will be used to examine questions related to the operation of exchange networks beyond the site. The excavations will focus on three major issues: 1) an investigation of one of the earliest incidences of bronze manufacture and trade in southern Africa; 2) an analysis of how transformations in early state development occurred as cattle, and then long distance trade in precious metals, led to major restructurings in the political economy of the region; and 3) an examination of the ways in which these changes affected not only the internal dynamics of agro-pastoralist societies, but also created new sets of relations with neighboring hunters and gatherers. This research is important because it will shed new light on the development of complex societies in southern Africa, and on the historical trajectories that have led to contemporary social formations in the region doc11233 none To attempt to constrain the future effects of global warming, geologists are increasingly focussing studies on periods of warm climate in the rock record. One of most representative intervals of such warm, greenhouse climate occurred in the Cretaceous Period from 140 to 65 million years before present. Recent investigations of Cretaceous climate have shown rapid swings that seem to have occurred over millennia or less. These changes had dramatic effects on evolution. One of the major problems facing geologists in constraining the exact environmental effects of these warming events is that they took place over periods an order of magnitude shorter than that resolvable using traditional techniques to date rocks. Thus we cannot determine the rates of important processes such as evolution nor can we constrain the fluxes of materials such as CO2 between reservoirs. This collaborative, multidisciplinary project involving the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Brown University and consulting scientists at other universities seeks to improve the precision and accuracy of the Cretaceous time scale by: (1) compiling time scales based on the fossil record (biostratigraphy) of microscopic marine organisms (foraminifera and nannoplankton) with higher resolution than previously attainable; (2) refining the calibration between time scales based on biostratigraphy, reversals in the Earth s geomagnetic polarity, and fluctuations in the Earth s orbit that are all recorded in rocks, (3) improving the correlation between biostratigraphy and recently acquired radiometric age dates; (4) calibrating large portions of the Cretaceous time scale to elapsed time using the orbital time scale, and (5) correlating and scaling the different stratigraphic elements in a logical fashion. We also propose to publish this time scale and associated data in a user-friendly format so that all geologists can estimate ages of samples with the minimum of error. To do this we will make the time scale available to the geologic community on the world wide web as downloadable Excel files. Combined with the biostratigraphic work that will be conducted in well-known rock exposures from the deep sea and land areas, these Excel files will include macros that calculate the ages of samples from their depths. Thus all a geochemist, for example, needs to do to plot data is to download the file and input the depth of samples. All of our data will also be archived on the web providing a ready means of future revision. The new generation time scale proposed will provide improved precision and resolution that will enable geologists to study abrupt changes in the Cretaceous Earth. Moreover, the mode of communication of the time scale will improve accuracy in diverse geologic applications doc11234 none This proposal concerns the development of multidimensional high-resolution finite-volume methods for solving hyperbolic partial differential equations, the development of software implementing these methods, and the application of these methods to particular problems. These methods are implemented in the CLAWPACK software package, which is freely available on the web and allows students and researchers studying a wide range of phenomena to use the technology of high-resolution methods and adaptive mesh refinement. These algorithms and the software will be further developed and brought to bear on a wider variety of problems. Particular problems of interest include: further development of adaptive refinement base on a new tree-structured code; inclusion of Cartesian-grid techniques for complex geometries; development of a general methodology for solving hyperbolic equations on curved manifolds; and wave-propagation problems (e.g., elastodynamics) in heterogeneous material, including nonlinear problems with spatially-varying flux functions. A wide range of practical problems in science and engineering involve the propagation of waves or the transport of substances in fluid flow. Examples arise in problems as diverse as the study of ultrasound waves in human tissue, the transport of contaminants in groundwater or the atmosphere, and the study of gravitational waves arising from the collision of black holes. Mathematically all of these problems lead to similar sets of partial differential equations. Solving these equations numerically requires special techniques that can deal with discontinuous functions, since often either the coefficients describing the problem or the solution (or both) are discontinuous. Examples include discontinuities in material properties at the interface between tissue and bone in an ultrasound problem, or the shock waves that arise in most nonlinear wave-propagation problems. Over the past few decades, a powerful class of numerical methods has been developed for solving such problems that have been much more heavily used in some applications areas than others. A primary goal of this project is to facilitate the transfer of this technology to new areas. The software package CLAWPACK, developed by the P.I. and coworkers, is designed to make it relatively easy to for students to learn about these methods and for researchers to apply them. There are still numerous mathematical challenges that arise in applying these methods to new situations. Research will be conducted to further improve these methods as a variety of new applications are explored. The subjects covered in this proposal are fertile ground for graduate education in computational mathematics. The P.I. is actively involved in training students and postdocs at the University of Washington as well as at other institutions by hosting visiting graduate students. The P.I. has also taught several short courses elsewhere and developed lecture notes, textbooks, software, and other educational material based on this research doc11235 none With a current population of 6 billion, there is growing recognition that humans are altering the Earth s natural systems at all scales from local to global at an unprecedented rate in the human history. In general, most human-made projects involve the interactions of non-natural systems (such as machines or infrastructures) with natural systems (biosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere). Engineering, being a central element of human society, needs to understand and take into account the relationships between natural and non-natural systems when creating structures needed to sustain the quality of life of current and future generations. Traditionally, engineering practice and engineering education have been based on the paradigm of control of nature rather than cooperation with nature. In this paradigm, humans and the natural world are divided. As a result, past engineering achievements have often been developed without considering their social, economic and environmental impacts on natural systems. A worldwide transition to a more holistic approach to engineering requires a major paradigm shift from control of nature to participation with nature. For example, the question of what represents a sustainable engineering structure or system is still an open-ended question that needs to be addressed and clarified by engineers. Engineers need to be given a much broader and integrated education than what is traditionally taught in engineering curricula today. For example, an ability to understand how engineering structures adapt and adjust to natural systems is critical. It is clear that engineers of the 21st century will be called to make decisions in a professional environment where they will have to interact with others from many technical and non-technical disciplines. In response to the global nature of the problems that Earth is facing today and is likely to face in the near future and in view of the complexity of the interaction between natural and natural systems, we are developing a new initiative called Earth Systems Engineering (ESE) in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. As a first step in this initiative, we are planning to conduct an international workshop on ESE on October 4-6, on the CU Boulder campus. The workshop will be three days in length and will bring together industry, government and university participants from engineering, physical sciences, biological sciences, and social sciences. The overall purpose of the workshop is three-fold: (1) provide an intellectual framework for interdisciplinary exchange, (2) provide recommendations on the future course of engineering education, research, and practice in the understanding of the interaction between natural and non-natural systems at multiple scales from local to regional and global, and (3) recommend new engineering concepts in water resources, geomechanical, environmental, and other sub-fields in Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering. More specifically, the workshop will consider the interaction of natural systems with non-natural systems such as civil, environmental and architectural infrastructures (e.g. the built environment). All three components of ESE research, education and outreach will be addressed throughout the workshop doc11236 none Mann The lateral transition from seafloor spreading at a narrow, well defined plate boundary to diffuse rifting of continental crust occurs today in three localities worldwide: the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and eastern Papua New Guinea. These three areas are critical for understanding how continents rupture because the spatial progression from seafloor spreading to continental rifting provides insights into the temporal and structural evolution of an oceanic spreading ridge to a continental rift. Such insights are not readily apparent from the more widespread zones of active intracontinental extension like the U.S. Basin and Range province where extension has not - and may not - eventually proceed to the point of seafloor spreading. Of these three seafloor spreading to rift transition areas, only Papua New Guinea exhibits a close spatial association between the tip of the propagating spreading ridge and low-angle normal fault earthquakes, active, low-angle normal faults in a submarine setting, and late Neogene metamorphic core complexes. The D Entrecasteaux Islands and Papuan Peninsula, fringed by late Neogene sedimentary rocks and late Quaternary coral reefs, occupy the transition area between oceanic spreading and continental rifting. These accessible land areas provide an ideal geologic setting to test several contrasting tectonic models for spreading ridge-rift transitions proposed on the basis of earthquakes, radiometric and structural studies of core complexes, and marine geophysical studies. The main elements of these previously proposed models include oceanic propagating ridge models applied to this region of continental crust, localization of metamorphic core complexes and topographic uplift adjacent to areas of propagating ridges, and lateral shifts in the location of rifting and subsequent spreading. We are using a combination of geologic studies of late Quaternary coral reefs and late Neogene sedimentary sections along hundreds of kilometers of eastern PNG coastlines to determine the pattern of late Neogene to late Quaternary vertical tectonic history, style of deformation, and tectonic mechanisms in order to test the tectonic models described above. Key questions that we are addressing in these studies include: 1) Where is the area of maximum late Quaternary coral reef uplift in the D Entrecasteaux Islands and Papuan Peninsula and what structures have affected them? 2) Are there detectable spatial migrations in the uplift pattern of this region? and 3) Are low angle normal faults present in the late Neogene marine rocks and the coral terraces themselves in the area of low angle normal fault earthquakes near Sanaroa and Fergusson Islands? Our results will aid interpretations of the tectonic effects of active ridge propagation or jumping in other active rift areas including the Red Sea, East African rifts, and Gulf of Aden where a detailed reef record such as in Papua New Guinea is not available doc11237 none With National Science Foundation support Drs. Antonio Curet and Lee Newsom will conduct preliminary archaeological survey at the site of Tibes, located adjacent to the southern coast of Puerto Rico near the city of Ponce. Discovered in the site is composed of a variety of highly distinctive archaeological features including discrete cultural deposits from two periods, middens and twelve stone structures (ball courts, plazas and causeways). Original excavations uncovered two cemeteries and other burials dispersed across the site. Likely Tibes also contains a full range of domestic deposits with the potential to reveal a complex history of space use and community pattern. This civic-ceremonial center is of significant scientific interest because it is the oldest in the Caribbean and may document the rise of a complex chiefdom level of society. The Taino native inhabitants of much of this region formed some of the most complex pre-state societies in the New World and Spanish chroniclers, attempting to apply European categories described their organization as feudal kingdoms. The highly developed social-political organization of these groups was accompanied by an intricate religious system controlled by chiefs who were able to gather labor for communal work or war, and who accumulated wealth and staple products. While much archaeological effort has been devoted to understanding the rise of social complexity in regions of North, Middle and South America the Caribbean has been relatively unstudied. Because islands constitute delimited areas where social boundaries can be clearly defined, they provide an excellent venue for study of individual group development. With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Curet and Newsom will conduct a geophysical survey of Tibes and test the utility of three techniques - resistivity, magnetometry and ground penetrating radar - to determine their ability to locate and determine the nature of buried archaeological features, including hard to locate domestic areas. They will then conduct test excavations to match remotely sensed anomalies with buried counterparts. The information gathered will be used to develop a methodology and set the stage for a longer term project which examines the rise and nature of Tanio social complexity doc11238 none This grant provides support for a conference entitled Beneficial Use of Recycled Materials in Transportation Applications) to be held November 13-15, in Washington, DC. The primary sponsor of the conference is the Federal Highway Administration through the Recycled Materals Resource Center (RMRC) at UNH. The conference will focus on research and policy topics related to the use of different types of recycled materials (e.g. asphalt pavement, reclaimed concrete, tires, contaminated soils, coal ash, slags, foundry sands, municipal solid waste ash, construction and demolition aggregates, glass, shingles and compost) in the highway environment (e.g. pavements, embankments, flowable fills and appurtenances). The conference will bring together educators, students, researchers and practitioners interested in research and policy associated with recycled materials use in the transportation sector. A special issue of a research journal, or a book, will be published containing peer-reviewed papers from the conference. Another outcome will be a research needs white paper to be published with the conference papers. This white paper will also be distributed to interested Federal and state agencies doc11239 none Gwanmesia The study is to make precise measurement of the acoustic wave velocities at simultaneous high-pressures and temperatures (P-Vp-Vs-T measurements) and the equation of state (P-V-T relations) for Mg3Al2Si3O12-pyrope garnet. The experiments will be conducted in a cubic anvil DIA-type high pressure apparatus, SAM-85, which is installed on the super conducting wiggler beam line (X17B1) at the National Synchrotron Light Source of the Brookhaven National laboratory. The high pressure and high temperature elasticity data, as well as the equation of state data, will be compared with data for Mg3Al2Si3O12-pyrope garnet obtained by other elasticity techniques using single-crystal or polycrystalline specimens. The study will utilize existing polycrystalline specimens of Mg3Al2Si3O12-pyrope garnet and other new specimens hot-pressed in a -ton uniaxial split-sphere apparatus (USSA- ) at conditions up to 5 GPa, and C. Samples will be characterized by x-ray diffraction, optical, scanning and transmission electron microscopy and by bench top ultrasonic techniques, to ensure that the specimens are singled-phase, fine-grained and pore- and crack-free doc11240 none Hole SAFOD, the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth, intends to drill through the San Andreas fault to study internal fault properties that control earthquakes. Parkfield, in central California, was chosen as the drill site because it is the best characterized seismically active segment of the fault. Interesting observations include high electrical conductivity, low seismic velocity, high Poisson s ratio, and seismic anisotropy within the fault zone. However, other than a thin low velocity zone identified by fault-zone guided waves, the earthquake data only constrain seismic velocity structure on the scale of 2 km and larger. Earthquakes are well located in a relative sense, but have up to 1 km of absolute error and do not line up with the active surface fault trace. Better site characterization can improve the drilling plan and its ability to accurately target a specific patch of repeating earthquakes on the fault. This project will perform a high resolution, 2-D seismic profile of the SAFOD site with the specific aim of imaging steeply dipping structures in and near the fault at depth. Previous work by the Principal Investigator produced the first-ever migrated image of seismic reflections from the near-vertical San Andreas fault, allowing direct imaging of the fault trace at a depth of about 1 km. This project aims to repeat this success beyond the 4 km depth at which drilling will penetrate the fault. The Principal Investigator plans a 50-km combined seismic reflection and refraction line across the San Andreas fault at the drill site. Very dense shot and receiver spacings and very long recording offsets will allow the survey to obtain detailed seismic velocity structure at a resolution of ~0.5 km horizontally and ~0.25 km vertically down to about 5 km depth. These images will better constrain the location of the fault trace and fault zone at depth, its relation to anomalous fault-zone properties, and the overall structure of surrounding geologic units and related faults doc11241 none PI s: Cecily Wolfe, Univ Hawaii Earthquakes in Hawaii are abundant, and provide key information on the nature of magmatic and tectonic processes at this oceanic hotspot. There are shallow crustal earthquakes associated with magma intrusions and eruptions, earthquakes in the middle-to-upper lithospheric mantle suggested to reflect magma migration, earthquakes that relieve stresses due to volcano growth and volcano spreading. In addition, there are enigmatic crustal and mantle earthquakes that may be due to a variety of factors, including inherited zones of structural weakness, stresses due to volcano loading and lithospheric flexure, magma movement, and thermal cooling stresses. This project will conduct two studies: 1) waveform modeling of teleseismically-recorded earthquakes (Mw 4.5) in order to constrain earthquake mechanisms and moments throughout Hawaii, including in many regions where the United States Geological Observatory Hawaii Volcano Observatory seismic network geometry is insufficient to provide a first-motion mechanism; and 2) the relocation of locally-recorded seismicity for specific targets using high-precision techniques. The combination of teleseismic waveform modeling to yield accurate mechanism solutions and high precision relocations to yield accurate hypocenters promise to improve our view of the seismotectonics of the Hawaiian Islands and will aid in the evaluation of earthquake hazards doc11242 none Philpotts Gray The goal of this research is to determine directly the amount of compaction that occurred during the solidification of the Palisades Sill, New Jersey, one of the simplest and best studied intrusive igneous bodies. Previous studies revealed that a possible explanation for the chemical variation through this sill involved compaction of crystal mush with upward expulsion of the residual liquid. The evidence, however, is entirely chemical and open to other interpretations. Recent studies of a thick flood-basalt flow have shown that plagioclase crystals link together to form a three-dimensional network of chains early in the crystallization of the magma. If compaction of crystal mush occurs during solidification, the network of plagioclase crystals is deformed, and its degree of anisotropy is a direct measure of the amount of compaction. In the case of the thick lava flow, the compaction amounts independently determined from the anisotropy of the plagioclase network and from the chemical variation through the flow agree remarkably well. Initial measurements of the fabric of rocks in the Palisades Sill document that they are indeed anisotropic and that the compaction inferred from the chemical evidence did occur. Three new, independent methods have been developed for measuring the anisotropy of a rock s fabric. The methods involve measuring various aspects of the plagioclase network in oriented thin sections. One is based on the average intercept length between plagioclase chains along mutually perpendicular traverses; another considers links in the chains as vectors whose distribution can be analyzed for anisotropy; and the third determines the average moment ellipse that can be fitted to the interstitial patches between the chains. Each of the methods is amenable to a thorough statistical analysis of the standard errors for the degree of compaction and orientation estimates. These techniques will be used on sets of three mutually perpendicular thin sections cut from a series of oriented samples through the sill. These measurements will allow us to determine, for each sample, the 3-D ellipsoid of the anisotropy of the rock1s fabric, from which will be calculated the amount and direction of compaction. Differences between the three independent methods of measuring compaction can be used to shed light on the mechanism of the compaction process and its relation to layering in the sill. The anisotropism of magnetic susceptibility, which has commonly been used as an indirect measure of the anisotropy of a rock1s fabric, will be measured in each sample to determine how it relates to the anisotropy of the plagioclase-chain network. The direct measurement of compaction in a crystal mush is of importance, because of the insight it will provide into the chemical and physical processes involved in the differentiation of magma bodies and in the extraction of magma from partly melted mantle sources doc11243 none PI s: Xiaodong Song, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign This proposal is to conduct research in the following related areas concerning the structure and dynamics of Earth s core and lowermost mantle. (1) The study will seek to constrain the inner core rotation using differential PKP travel-time measurements and joint inversion of inner core rotation and fine lateral structure of inner core and lower mantle. This study will also address uncertainties in determining inner core rotation, in particular the possibility of systematic biases from event mislocation. (2) This study will seek to constrain fine structure of the inner core by modeling of detailed waveforms and increasing lateral samples of various depths of the inner core. (3) This study will seek to constrain the structure of lowermost mantle by using differential travel times and waveforms of seismic core phases, which remove or reduce biases from upper mantle heterogeneities and source uncertainties doc11244 none Organizations have knowledge. The knowledge is typically dispersed throughout the organization. Some of it is codified in documents and policies, some is embodied in projects and strategies, and some is tacitly held by individuals and small groups. The problem of knowledge management is that an organization s knowledge is often locally produced, haphazardly disseminated, and ineffectively indexed. It is inaccessible when and where it is needed. Knowledge management techniques take a participatory approach to identifying, codifying, and integrating knowledge resources throughout the organization. Their objective is to help people make sense of their organizations, to develop and maintain trust, to make commitments and take responsibility, to more effectively challenge, negotiate, and learn, and thereby to improve the quality of the contributions people make to their organizations. This project will adapt knowledge management concepts and techniques, and the information technology they employ, to understand and enhance knowledge management in school organizations. We will work with school administrators, but chiefly with teachers. First, we will investigate and characterize knowledge management practices as they exist today, and identify needs and opportunities to improve knowledge management. We will facilitate teacher-initiated development of organizational knowledge resources, and identify, and accessibly codify the critical knowledge of the school systems. We will assess the impact of this intervention on teachers, on the school system, and on the perception of the school by the community. We will compare and contrast this analysis and intervention to knowledge management interventions now becoming typical in business organizations doc11245 none Yoshinobu Rates of processes control a wide variety of geologic phenomena. With the development of more precise and refined radiometric age dating techniques, it is becoming increasingly apparent that processes in magmatic arcs such as magma generation and ascent may occur at relatively fast rates and over a wide range of durations. In contrast, existing data sets for regional deformation suggest that rates of various processes such as faulting, shearing, and folding are several orders of magnitude slower than rates of magma generation, migration, and emplacement. This research is utilizing field, microstructural, and experimental rock deformation data sets to address the following questions: (1) What micro- and macro-scale deformation mechanisms accommodate deformation in contact aureoles? (2) What are the magnitudes of stress in the host rocks during plastic deformation associated with chamber construction? (3) What are the host rock strain rates during plastic deformation associated with chamber construction? And (4) What are typical viscosities in contact aureoles? Detailed mapping and microstructural analysis conducted on two pluton-host rock systems, exposed in the Clark Mountains of eastern California, as well as application of experimentally-derived flow laws and paleo-piezometers (paleo-stress gauges) to deformed contact aureole rocks are currently being carried out to evaluate these questions and provide constraints on contact aureole stresses, strain rates and viscosities doc11246 none Wilcock Bed surface coarsening, broadly termed armoring, is a pervasive feature of gravel rivers. Armoring strongly influences channel hydraulics, determines the population of grains available for transport, and defines the habitat for aquatic invertebrates, salmonid spawning, and juvenile fish. A general and predictive understanding of flow, transport, and benthic ecology in gravel-bed rivers requires an ability to predict the bed surface composition as a function of water and sediment supply. In general, the bed surface is not in equilibrium with contemporary conditions, so cause and effect cannot be deduced from simple correlations of field observations. Instead, we turn to the laboratory for controlled observations and to computational models to capture the varied and transient conditions in the field. Observations of armoring have been made for decades and algorithms capable of predicting armoring have been developed. Key elements are missing in both data and models, however, and the empirical and the theoretical have not yet merged into a complete model. This work aims to bridge that gap by building from both sides. On the empirical side, we will use a laboratory flume to make coupled observations of flow, transport, and bed surface composition in order to describe the evolution of surface and subsurface grain sizes with unprecedented spatial and temporal detail. On the theoretical side, we will develop a transport and armoring model that includes size-dependent vertical transfer of grains between surface and subsurface (kinematic sorting). This mechanism can be incorporated in current models, but the necessary transfer functions remain undefined and will be identified using the data from the experimental portion of this project. Testing of the model will be based on internal comparisons between different sediment supply configurations and a set of runs with progressive bed aggradation and degradation. The result will be a physically-based, tested model capable of predicting transport and armoring under the complex, transient conditions typical of the field doc11247 none Reilinger This project will use INSAR (interferometric synthetic aperture radar) and GPS (Global Positioning System) measurements to monitor detailed patterns of deformation in the continental collision zone in eastern Turkey. The project will take advantage of the synergistic aspects of these two techniques. In addition to providing quantitative constraints on the kinematics and dynamics of the early stages of continental collision, the investigators anticipate that this research will result in new and improved tools for combining INSAR and GPS for monitoring secular deformation of the Earth s surface doc11248 none Shimizu This project is an investigation of melting and melt migration processes operating for the Cascadia subduction zone using the geochemical analyses of primitive melt inclusion hosted in high-Mg olivine phenocrysts from Mt. Shasta, northern California. The Cascadia system represents one of the hottest subduction systems where contributions of slab-derived melt components could be tested quantitatively. A detailed geochemical study of primitive melt inclusions as proposed here has never been carried out for a subduction zone system. The emphasis of the proposed work is: (1) to focus on primitive melts so that new insights into processes of melt generation could be gained; (2) to focus on melt inclusions so that a representative spectrum of melt composition can be captured, and pre-eruptive volatile contents can be determined; and (3) to characterize an endmember case for hot young subduction system. The primary objective of the proposed work is to establish a geochemical characterization of melts involved in all major eruptive stages that created edifices of Mt. Shasta. The proposed work will be carried out in the following steps: (1) documentation of geochemical variabilities among melt inclusions in each sample; (2) clarification of the relationships between melt inclusions and host rock; (3) evaluation of geochemical variabilities among separate eruptive units within each eruptive stage; (4) assessment of temporal geochemical trends for the major eruptive stages. Melt inclusions in olivines will be homogenized using a Sobolev-type heating stage, and will be analyzed for major elements with an electron probe. Ion probe analyses will be made in a sequence beginning with B and Pb isotope compositions, followed by trace element analysis for light elements (Li, Be, B, H2O ), REE (La, Ce, Nd, Sm, Dy, Er, Yb), HFSE (Ti, Zr, Nb), alkaline earths (Ba, Sr) and Y doc11249 none Issen Wong Compaction bands, a recently identified type of localized deformation, form in high porosity sandstone, perpendicular to the direction of maximum compressive stress. They occur for stress states associated with the transition from brittle faulting to distributed cataclastic flow, where microstructural observations show damage partitioned between at least two damage mechanisms: axial microcracks that may grow and coalesce to form a shear fault, and pores that collapse while grains are crushed. Theoretical predictions from recent reassessments of the bifurcation approach to strain localization do not correlate well with the scarce existing experimental data. This proposal suggests that an inadequate constitutive model causes the discrepancy. Thus, a two-yield surface constitutive model, representing both damage mechanisms, will be used with experimentally derived constraints for the important material parameters to enable further theoretical analyses regarding the onset of localization. Experimental and theoretical results will be synthesized to extrapolate a model to predict failure modes and localization development in crustal settings for different stress states and loading paths. Recent theoretical works have also highlighted two potentially important, but previously neglected failure modes: dilation bands and dilating shear bands . A lack of data has hampered the mechanical analysis of analogous structures that structural geologists refer to as hybrid shear fractures or transitional tensile fractures. Theoretical work predicts formation of these bands in low porosity rocks under overall compressive loading. Thus, the proposed work also includes experimental and theoretical investigation of dilation band formation using low porosity rock in triaxial extension tests doc11250 none This research will examine the extent to which an adequate representation of flow features on the synoptic scale allows for the skillful simulation of mesoscale precipitating systems. The research will emphasize independent verification and rigorous hypothesis testing within a controlled setting in order to quantify the significance of the results. The focus of the research is on the specific problem of landfalling precipitating systems on the West Coast of United States. The Principal Investigators will explore a broad variety of landfalling systems that lead to significant rainfall in this region. The primary tools of the research will be an advanced mesoscale numerical model, NCEP and ECMWF reanalysis data sets, and independent precipitation measurements from all available surface sites in the Pacific coast states (Washington, Oregon and California). The role of lateral boundary conditions (LBC) will be explicitly accounted for by the study design and ongoing evaluation of study results will be used to control for biases that may be introduced by model physics limitations. Separating initial and boundary condition errors, LBC errors due to the placement of the boundaries of the nested grid model, and error by type of synoptic system will represent a significant advance in understanding of these weather systems. The results of this study will be of considerable interest to short term weather forecasting doc11251 none Minarik The northwestern Appalachians in New York, Vermont and Quebec experienced a complex geologic history. Mesoproterozoic collisional tectonics are recorded in rocks exposed in the Adirondack Mountains and as erosional windows in the Appalachians of New England. Subsequent rifting and development of an oceanic basin was followed by episodic Paleozoic convergence and accretion to the eastern edge of North America, forming the Appalachian chain. This was followed by Triassic-Jurassic extension and rifting resulting in the modern North Atlantic basin. Current knowledge of the lower continental crust and continental lithospheric mantle in this area is derived primarily from geophysical methods and studies of tectonically exhumed high pressure units. Upper-crustal and lower-mantle xenoliths in Cretaceous Monteregian dikes offer a unique glimpse into the northwestern Appalachian lithosphere. This study aims to determine the thermal, tectonic and geochemical evolution of rocks represented by these xenoliths. Petrography and geothermobarometry of the xenoliths will constrain the P-T history of the assemblages sampled by the dikes. Sm-Nd and Re-Os isotopic systematics of the crustal and mantle xenoliths will give the age of formation and of isolation from the convecting upper mantle. These constraints on the nature of the deep crust and lithospheric mantle will be applied to unravel questions about the evolution of the lithospheric mantle and lower crust during Appalachian deformation and accretion. The proposed Sm-Nd and Re-Os isotopic measurements represent a first for xenoliths from this area doc11252 none This is a project in the area of mathematics called number theory. Professor Katz will investigate varieties defined over finite fields, in particular their cohomology and the distribution of the zeros of L functions on such varieties. This is a project in the area of mathematics called number theory. The main focus of this project can be described as the study of certain kinds of solutions to polynomial equations called modular solutions. Many of the applications computer scientists have for number theory involve these kinds of solutions. Professor Katz is considering questions involving the number of such solutions, how this number changes as the polynomials change, and how the solution sets of different polynomials are related doc11253 none 1. The proposed project covers several topics in Probabilistic Combinatorics. The first group of questions is about graph colorings. It mainly deals with the study of chromatic and choice numbers of graphs satisfying certain local conditions. One of the open problem which investigators will study is bounding the chromatic number of a graph G with maximum degree d, which contains no copy of a fixed graph H. A variant of this problem was posed already twenty years ago by Komlos and Szemeredi and so far it was solved only for some special cases. Investigator also plans to work on a few related questions about vertex list coloring and acyclic edge coloring of graphs. Another set of questions is about asymptotic properties of random graphs and random regular graphs. Here investigators goal is to understand the distribution of independent sets of nearly optimal size in sparse random graphs, and use this to determine the asymptotic behavior of its choice number. It is sometimes the case that an existence proof, supplied by the probabilistic method, is not sufficient and it is better to have an explicit construction. One of the major open problems in this field is to construct exponentially large graphs, without a clique or an independent set of size k. In this project investigator intends to consider this problem together with its bipartite version. He also plans to study the properties of pseudo-random graphs and their applications. 2. Leave nothing to chance. This cliche embodies the common belief that randomness has no place in carefully planned methodologies. In modern Combinatorics at least, nothing can be further from the truth. Here the Probabilistic Method has been developed intensively and become one of the most powerful and widely used tools. Use of probability proved to be helpful in tackling many long standing open problems. Another major reason for the development of this method is the important role of randomness in Theoretical Computer Science. Here algorithm which make random choices during its execution proved to be simplest and fastest for many applications doc11254 none Mueller The Great Falls tectonic zone is a NE-trending feature that extends from northeastern Idaho to the Montana - Saskatchewan border, and may represent the collisional suture between the Archean Wyoming province and the Hearne province of the Canadian shield. However, recent work has raised the alternative interpretation that the Great Falls tectonic zone is an intracontinental shear zone reactivated by the Trans-Hudson orogeny and another feature represents the Wyoming-Hearne suture. This project will examine newly documented 1.86 Ga meta-igneous rocks of the Great Falls tectonic zone that will address several fundamental issues associated with the assembly of southern Laurentia and the breakup of Rodinia. Results are expected to help clarify the interpretation of the significance of the Great Falls tectonic zone in relation to the development of the Pacific Northwest doc11255 none Vogel This proposal seeks support for the PIs to participate in internationally collaborative geochemical investigations of samples now being obtained during the first phase of the Unzen Scientific Drilling Project (USDP), Japan. USDP is a developing project of the International Continental Drilling Program (ICDP), which seeks to use drilling as a tool to advance understanding of fundamental processes of continental crust. The United States is a major partner and funding source for ICDP, through the National Science Foundation. The goal of USDP is to understand the eruptive behavior of Unzen as representative of an important class of andesitic arc volcanoes. This is to be done through a program of drilling, borehole observation, and core analysis in complement with ongoing surface geological and geophysical studies as well as the remarkable suite of geophysical and geochemical observations made during the recent eruption. That devastating episode occurred during to , claimed 44 lives, and did some $2 billion in damage. In the first phase of the project, for which support is requested through this proposal, flank holes of 750 m and m are being drilled to the base of the edifice in order to obtain a complete physical and chemical record of the volcano s activity. Simultaneously, and also to be supported under this request, planning will be undertaken for the second phase in which multiple core sections through the conduit will be obtained in order to address problems of magma transport and degassing. These observations will aid in understanding the paradox of effusive eruption of water-rich magma. The overall scientific rationale and plan for this undertaking are presented in the proposals to ICDP and will be repeated in condensed form here to provide context. ICDP itself supports drilling only, not the associated science, hence the need for this request. Recent eruptions of Unzen, Pinatubo, and Soufriere Hills volcanoes have graphically demonstrated the concept that injection of mafic magma into a crustal slush is an important petrologic process and a volcanic trigger. The high visibility of these events has served to strengthen a dialog between workers on volcanic and plutonic rocks, and reinvigorated the investigation of mafic enclaves and disequilibrium phenocryst assemblages. A basic question has become: how do we fit these products of open system behavior of magma systems, produced by mafic recharge or replenishment, into the broader picture of crustal plutonism and volcanism? A subset of that question, which this proposal seeks to answer, is: What are the long term-petrologic consequences of repeated mafic inputs to the crustal magma system? Studies to date have elucidated single events as sampled by eruption products or viewed the end product of many such events in the form of mafic and silicic layered intrusions (MASLI). We wish to look at the time series provided by 500,000 years of Unzen eruptions, to characterize the inputs to the system and understand their influence on its chemical evolution. The work will be coordinated with complementary efforts in Japan on dating the sequence and documenting the geologic and chemical evolution of the volcano doc11256 none The Gordon Research Conference (GRC) for Polar Marine Sciences is seeking partial support of participants to attend its 3 rd GRC, Field Analyses and Numerical Modeling of Coupled Physical Chemical and Biological Systems , March 11-16, , in Ventura, California. The conference will provide a great opportunity for cutting-edge presentations and lively discussion of ideas in predictive system dynamics that at the forefront of polar marine science. The scientific program has been developed to foster strong controversy in a friendly environment and, hopefully, open minds about other or new possibilities to explore. The conference will be useful for the training of new polar scientists and the planning for polar research programs that impact on the polar environment and global change issues relating to these polar environments doc11257 none BSTRACT COMPLEXITY AND PALEODYNAMICS OF NATURAL SAND DUNE FIELDS Gary Kocurek Fields of sand dunes present some of the most intriguing patterns seen on Earth and other planets, such as Mars. The dunes form when wind transports sand grains, causing them to pile up into small mounds that eventually evolve into the graceful shapes that adorn calendars and postage stamps. The characteristics of the wind, such as its direction and the supply of sand, are imprinted on the pattern of dunes in such a way that it is possible, just by carefully examining the dune pattern, to say something about the climatic conditions that lead to its creation. As winds and sand supply change through time, the pattern of dunes slowly changes as well in ways that are not yet fully delineated. The information about climate over the past thousands to tens of thousands of years stored in the great sand dune fields of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia and North America might provide critical understanding in predicting the reaction of regional climates and landscapes to human-induced global climate change. PIs aim is to develop a methodology for inferring past climate from dune patterns and to apply it to three natural dune fields. To achieve this goal, they have developed numerical models that span the range of time periods over which dunes and dune fields can react to changes in climate: (1) a model for the overall characteristics of dune fields, including spacing between dunes and their orientation (thousands of years); (2) a model for the motion of the trace of the tops of dunes, their crestlines (hundreds of years); and (3) a model for the changes in shapes of dunes (tens of years). These models will be used to investigate the development of the Algodones dune field in southeastern California, the dunes of the Namibian desert in western Namibia, and the dunes of the deserts of western Mauritania. The interpretations PIs derive regarding past climate will be tested by attempting to recreate the patterns of these three dune fields using their climatic inferences in a wind tunnel filled with sand doc11258 none Huang This grant provides partial support of the costs of acquiring a bench-top gas chromatograph - mass spectrometer (GC MS) for the organic geochemistry laboratory at the Brown University. The PI, Yongsong Huang is an assistant professor at Department of Geological Sciences. In addition to Huang, several other faculties at Geology (Herbert, Prell, Webb, Clemens, Murray and Schultz) and Environmental Studies Program (Hamburg, Ward) at Brown University will have access to the GC MS for their research. This facility will also contribute significantly to the educational objectives for undergraduate and graduate students. The addition of a bench-top GC MS will allow convenient identification of organic compounds in sediments, soils and plant samples. The instrument is an important tool for various aspects of organic geochemical research, particularly those involving compound-specific isotope analyses. The identity and purity of organic compounds must be established by structural GC MS in order for their isotopic measurements to be meaningful. The instrument will also facilitate research collaboration in and outside Brown University. The bench-top GC MS will be housed in a newly renovated 650 square-foot room, specifically designed to accommodate mass spectrometers and various peripheral devices. Support for this grant is shared between the Earth Sciences Instrumentation and Facilities Program (EAR IF) and the Division of Ocean Sciences (OCE doc11259 none This research explores the preparation and study of new microstructures based on stimuli-responsive hydrogels that are coated with a lipid membraned and fabricated within a microfluidic channel. The lipid coating provides a thin permeability barrier and the hydrogel network serves as dynamic scaffolding. These soft microstructures can be used to regulate the flow of fluids in microfluidic devices without external intervention, and they may serve as models of cell and tissue surfaces. Harnessing their potential requires the development of new hydrogels as well as a deeper understanding of the assembly of lipid coatings at the gel-liquid interface. The major objectives of this project are: (1) to develop methods for fabricating lipid-coated microgels, (2) to characterize the structure and study the transport properties of the lipid coating, and (3) to study changed in the permeability of the lipid membrane induced by specific chemical or biological agents. The main methods to be employed are the design and synthesis of new monomers and reactive lipids, microfabrication and photopolymerization, chemical modification of hydrogels, and a variety of scanning confocal microscopy, and electrical measurements. %%% The understanding gained from these studies will help to lay the foundation for the long-term objective of fabricating artificial cells, and the research undertaken will provide interdisciplinary training to students and postdoctoral associates in polymer chemistry and materials science doc11260 none This proposal requests support for a meeting on basic and applied aspects of fish bioacoustics to be held in mid- in Chicago. There are investigators interested in basic issues of fish bioacoustics ( hearing, sound production, etc.), others interested in use of sound to assay fish populations, and still others are interested in the effects of intense sound on fish behavior and the potential use of sound to control fish behavior. However, there has been very little interaction or collaboration among these investigators. Each of these groups has unique knowledge and approaches to questions, and these investigators and their fields would benefit from interactions. Thus, the purpose of the proposed meeting is to bring together investigators interested in all basic and applied aspects of fish biocacoustics to present material, share ideas, and most importantly, learn from, and develop an understanding of, the questions and approaches taken by one another. The conference is designed to foster these interactions and help investigators with widely different research interests get to know one another. Long-term goals of the conference are to educate those in the field who don t normally interact professionally, and to help establish collaborations among investigators across disciplines and research fields doc11261 none Braterman Isotopic variations of transition metals have attracted attention in the last year or two, in large part because such elements may be isotopically fractionated by biological processes. So far, clear biologically produced isotopic fractionation has been measured in the laboratory only for Fe, and this led to the proposal that Fe isotopes may be a useful biosignature that may be applied to tracing the role of organisms in modern and ancient environments, and may help in understanding the origin and evolution of life on Earth or other planetary bodies. However, because significant Fe isotope variations (3-4 per mil [ ] in 56Fe 54Fe) are found only in fluids, rocks, and minerals from low temperature environments, it is possible that inorganic or abiologic Fe isotope fractionation may at least in part explain the range of Fe isotope compositions measured for natural samples. Support for inorganic or abiologic Fe isotope fractionation comes from experimental data and theoretical calculations, involving both mineral and fluid systems. Data from the U.W. Madison group on oxide and carbonate minerals from sedimentary rocks, as well as initial experimental results from mineral-fluid and Fe(II)-Fe(III) aqueous systems, indicate inorganic Fe isotope fractionations on the order of 1-3 for some (but not all) systems, similar to those calculated from theory for a few cases, but also pointing to significant discrepancies between experiments and theory. The proposed research involves an extensive set of experimental determinations of Fe isotope fractionation factors between coexisting aqueous Fe species, between minerals and fluids, and between coexisting minerals. In all of the proposed experiments, distinction between kinetic and equilibrium isotope fractionations will be accomplished through use of the three isotope method or use of enriched isotope tracers. One phase of the proposed research will focus on determining the equilibrium Fe isotope fractionation between coexisting Fe(II) and Fe(III) complexes as a function of temperature, ionic strength, pH, and ligand chemistry, including aquo, chloro, and cyanide complexes, as well as mixed complexes. Another phase of the planned work will involve determining mineral-mineral and mineral-fluid isotope fractionation factors over the T-P range 200-600 degrees C and 1-20 kbar; in many cases, this work will involve determination of both O and Fe isotope fractionation factors from the same run products so that the relative isotopic exchange rates of these two elements may be compared. Initially, the goal will be to determine isotopic fractionations between siderite, magnetite, hematite, and fluid, given the importance of these minerals in the low-temperature rock record, but our work may be extended to other minerals (such as sulfides) depending upon the results. Ultimately, combined O and Fe isotope analysis of natural minerals may provide important cross-checks of attainment of isotopic equilibrium and the sources of fluids from which they precipitated. A number of experimental strategies are outlined in the proposal, which are aimed at addressing known experimental issues, but are intended to be flexible enough so that different approaches may be tried depending upon initial results. An important component to the viability of the planned experimental program is the very high precision that is now attainable using new instrumentation at U.W. Madison, where Fe isotope compositions may be determined on real samples to an external precision of plus or minus 0.05 in 56Fe 54Fe ratios on very small (~ 100-300 ng) quantities of Fe. Given the great potential that Fe isotope geochemistry has for addressing problems that cut across several disciplines, the proposed experimental determinations of Fe isotope fractionation factors are viewed as essential before the field of Fe isotope geochemistry can move forward doc11262 none Band We request funding to help support travel expenses for invited international and domestic speakers as well as additional junior scientists and students for and AGU Chapman Conference. The Chapman Conference is entitled State-of-the-art in hillslope hydrology, and will occur in October, . It is already approved by AGU and cosponsored by the Hydrology and Biogeoscience Sections. This conference will focus on a review and assessment of our current knowledge in hillslope hydrology, with an emphasis on the processes by which water enters and moves through hillslope systems and into a receiving stream. Major subtopics for which we will solicit papers will include mechanisms and patterns of water input and output from hillslopes, the distribution and dynamics of flowpaths, spatial patterns of surface and subsurface soil moisture and soil hydraulic properties, methods of measurement or inference of these processes and states, and their representation in models. This focus has important implications for the formation of hillslope and watershed hydrographs at the storm to seasonal time scale, the transformation and export of sediment and chemical load to streams, the distribution and dynamics of the vegetation canopy, and land atmosphere interactions. The conference will bring together internationally recognized researchers in the field with younger scientists and students and will promote an extensive exchange of research finding, outstanding questions and developing theories and techniques. The conference format will include invited plenary presentations in the morning, followed by poster sessions and moderated discussion in the afternoons, and an additional plenary talk and discussion in the evening. Sufficient free time during the afternoon will be reserved to allow both recreational activity and smaller group discussion. One day will be devoted to a field trip to the HJ Andrews Experimental Watershed for brief presentations and a half day field trip revolving hillslope hydrology related research at the site. Peer review research papers will be solicited for publications of the proceedings, either as an AGU Monograph or as a special issues of Water Resources Research doc11263 none Johnson and Beard Isotopic variations of transition metals have attracted attention in the last year or two, in large part because such elements may be isotopically fractionated by biological processes. So far, clear biologically produced isotopic fractionation has been measured in the laboratory only for Fe, and this led to the proposal that Fe isotopes may be a useful biosignature that may be applied to tracing the role of organisms in modern and ancient environments, and may help in understanding the origin and evolution of life on Earth or other planetary bodies. However, because significant Fe isotope variations (3-4 per mil [ ] in 56Fe 54Fe) are found only in fluids, rocks, and minerals from low temperature environments, it is possible that inorganic or abiologic Fe isotope fractionation may at least in part explain the range of Fe isotope compositions measured for natural samples. Support for inorganic or abiologic Fe isotope fractionation comes from experimental data and theoretical calculations, involving both mineral and fluid systems. Data from the U.W. Madison group on oxide and carbonate minerals from sedimentary rocks, as well as initial experimental results from mineral-fluid and Fe(II)-Fe(III) aqueous systems, indicate inorganic Fe isotope fractionations on the order of 1-3 for some (but not all) systems, similar to those calculated from theory for a few cases, but also pointing to significant discrepancies between experiments and theory. The proposed research involves an extensive set of experimental determinations of Fe isotope fractionation factors between coexisting aqueous Fe species, between minerals and fluids, and between coexisting minerals. In all of the proposed experiments, distinction between kinetic and equilibrium isotope fractionations will be accomplished through use of the three isotope method or use of enriched isotope tracers. One phase of the proposed research will focus on determining the equilibrium Fe isotope fractionation between coexisting Fe(II) and Fe(III) complexes as a function of temperature, ionic strength, pH, and ligand chemistry, including aquo, chloro, and cyanide complexes, as well as mixed complexes. Another phase of the planned work will involve determining mineral-mineral and mineral-fluid isotope fractionation factors over the T-P range 200-600 degrees C and 1-20 kbar; in many cases, this work will involve determination of both O and Fe isotope fractionation factors from the same run products so that the relative isotopic exchange rates of these two elements may be compared. Initially, the goal will be to determine isotopic fractionations between siderite, magnetite, hematite, and fluid, given the importance of these minerals in the low-temperature rock record, but our work may be extended to other minerals (such as sulfides) depending upon the results. Ultimately, combined O and Fe isotope analysis of natural minerals may provide important cross-checks of attainment of isotopic equilibrium and the sources of fluids from which they precipitated. A number of experimental strategies are outlined in the proposal, which are aimed at addressing known experimental issues, but are intended to be flexible enough so that different approaches may be tried depending upon initial results. An important component to the viability of the planned experimental program is the very high precision that is now attainable using new instrumentation at U.W. Madison, where Fe isotope compositions may be determined on real samples to an external precision of plus or minus0.05 in 56Fe 54Fe ratios on very small (~ 100-300 ng) quantities of Fe. Given the great potential that Fe isotope geochemistry has for addressing problems that cut across several disciplines, the proposed experimental determinations of Fe isotope fractionation factors are viewed as essential before the field of Fe isotope geochemistry can move forward doc11264 none Szumowski This is a U.S.-Polish collaborative research project to support the participation of Polish scientists in DYCOMS-11 (Dynamics and Chemistry of Marine Stratocumulus) scheduled for July . The principal investigator, Marcin Szumowski, is from the University of Nevada Desert Research Institute. His Polish collaborators, Szymon Malinowski and Krzysztof Haman, are from the Institute of Geophysics at Warsaw University. The researchers will use a suite of high-frequency instruments developed in the last decade to simultaneously measure the temperature, cloud liquid water content, and microphysical structure within the cloud. This suite of instruments has never been used simultaneously before and has the potential to create an unprecedented robust data set characterizing the entrainment process and its effects on cloud microphysical evolution with very fine spatial resolution. This project in atmospheric sciences research fulfills the program objectives of bringing together leading experts in the U.S. and Central Eastern Europe to combine complementary efforts and capabilities in areas of strong mutual interest and competence on the basis of equality, reciprocity, and mutuality of benefit doc11265 none Cooper The experimental measurement of the low-frequency attenuation behavior of polycrystalline olivine, of olivine-orthopyroxene and of olivine-based partial melts is the practical emphasis of this research. Of theoretical focus is a new hypothesis concerning the physical mechanism(s) and significance of the high-temperature background mechanical absorption, specifically, that this absorption relates to the diffusion-effected relaxations of grain and solid-state phase boundaries and particularly of (deformation-induced) subgrain boundaries. The physical implication, then, is that a small-amplitude, oscillatory variation in stress, one that is added to a nominally constant differential stress that is effecting dislocation creep in a material, is sampling the deformation-induced microstructure, specifically the network of subgrains. If this hypothesis is correct--and discerning this correctness is the long-range goal of the experimental work--one can envision an effective way to do attenuation-based geophysical prospecting of active tectonic regions, e.g., for levels of differential stress and, perhaps, strain, with a calibration based on laboratory experiments. Experiments in this (one-year) funding period will emphasize dynamic ( sub-resonant oscillatory loading) and quasi-static (constant loading, i.e., creep), high-resolution torsional mechanical responses of carefully engineered aggregates of (ferromagnesian) olivine and of two-phase solid olivine-orthopyroxene. These will be studied as functions of (i) temperature ( - degC), (ii) frequency (10^[-4]-1 Hz) and (iii) grain size (5-20 micrometers; fine enough that [a] thermal-expansion-anisotropy effected grain phase boundary cracking cannot occur and [b] [for the levels of differential stress employed] lattice dislocations are not nucleated in the course of mechanical testing). In addition, benchmarking deformation experiments, comparing the high-resolution ambient-pressure measurements with the mechanical response of the same material under a confining pressure of ~300 MPa will be performed doc11266 none It is well established that long-range autocorrelation and heavy-tailed inter-packet time distributions are dominant characteristics of modern multimedia high speed network traffic, determining limits to performance and radically influencing policies for management. Incorporating such characteristics in parametric performance models has so far been difficult. This project will center about the development of powerful and efficient models to capture network behavior for varying levels of abstraction while incorporating approximations to long-range dependence and heavy tails. The model does not solely rely on steady state results, but rather on a finite horizon that can be used for online monitoring and early detection of rare events. In particular, this means that time dependent threads can be modeled which are the root cause of such dependency related problems. Decomposability techniques will be used to decrease the granularity if possible and to scale the model to time scales suitable for online analysis and control. The approach will be to extend the successful and innovative model developed for a high-speed network. Highly correlated arrival processes can be viewed as nearly-completely decomposable processes, which in turn impose a nearly-completely decomposable structure on the system as a whole. Each of these nearly decomposed systems can be solved separately and in parallel and their solutions combined to accurately evaluate the performance of the system. Theoretical work must be done to determine error bounds and robust algorithms for solutions in a wide range of applications, to allow flexible approximation of measured correlations, and to broaden the classes of results that can be computed. Additionally, experimental work must be done to exercise models and compare them with published and other artifactual data. Finally, a prototype software package will be developed that demonstrates the viability of placing this tool in the hands of practicing network engineers and equipment designers doc11267 none Presnall Kimberlite is the magma type that is the carrier of most diamonds from the deep interior (mantle) of the Earth. These magmas generally erupt at the Earth s surface, form a pipe-like throat near the surface where the diamonds are found, and are commonly associated with another magma type called carbonatite. Kimberlites are generally understood to represent the greatest depth of origin of any magma type and therefore tell us something about the Earth s interior at depths not generally sampled. Traditionally, the depth of origin has been thought to be about 220 km., but the recent discovery of exotic mineral inclusions in a very few diamonds indicates an origin much deeper in some cases, possibly even to the core-mantle boundary. Experimental data on the chemistry of melting processes at depths in excess of about 200 km are very sparse. This project is designed to examine melting relations for compositions that model the Earth s deep interior at depths up to about 430 km. The apparatus used for this study is called a multianvil press and is capable of duplicating temperatures and pressures thought to be relevant to possible melting process at these great depths. The purpose is to determine the temperature of melting as pressure increases and the compositions of the melts generated. These data will provide quantitative data that will help resolve the issue of whether melting at these depths is reasonable or if the diamonds are transported slowly from extreme depths by solid-state convective processes in the mantle, to be sampled by kimberlites generated at more traditionally accepted depths of about 220 km doc11268 none Bunge Geodynamicists have made substantial progress over the past years in developing sophisticated mantle convection models, including chemical heterogeneity, temperature and strain-rate dependent rheology, realistic 3-D spherical shell geometry and convective vigor that is nearly Earthlike. In to apply the new modeling capability to study the flow history of Earth s mantle, mantle convection models must be properly initialized, i.e. one must constrain initial conditions into the past. This is an inverse problem and the PI proposes to evaluate the potential of adjoint fluid dynamic inverse theory to track mantle heterogeneity back into the relatively recent Cenozoic and Mesozoic history of our planet. To this end, a novel 3-D spherical high-resolution adjoint model of mantle convection will be developed. The PI will apply the adjoint method in idealized mantle convection models for time periods of less than one convective overturn, in order to explore the feasibility of the method to estimate unknown initial conditions back in time. The PI will constrain unknown initial conditions in mantle convection calculation through a series of coupled forward-in-time and adjoint backward-in-time integrations, a difficult task facilitated by the rapid advance in supercomputer capabilities. The outcome of the work will be to explore the utility of adjoint fluid-dynamic inverse theory in retrieving flow structure back in time in mantle convection models. (Code benchmark is available at http: www.geophysics.princeton.edu Geodynamics TERRA HTML page5.top.html doc11269 none This project addresses the growing importance of data literacy as a fundamental skill for living in a democratic society and the disheartening fact that few people have a solid understanding of data. It addresses this need by studying how advanced visualization tools can affect teachers and students develop understanding of several crucial statistical concepts. The project focuses on how people understand distributions of data, how they compare two groups of data, and how they think about convariation; it examines the ways in which powerful visualization tools can facilitate the learning of these concepts. As a collaboration betwee educational software developers and educational researchers, the project takes advantage of the expertise of both groups in order to 1) develop a research foundation that elucidates teaching learning processes in the area of statistical covariation; 2) develop a set of design principles for statistical education tools that best support statistical learning; 3) use the largely untapped design expertise of commercial software designers in educational research; and 4) leverage NSF s investment in educational software development. The ultimate goal is to accelerate the development of both statistical education research and software in ways that would be impossible without such a collaboration doc11270 none Bass This proposal requests funds to partially support a two-day workshop entitled Phase Transitions and Mantle Discontinuities . The workshop will be held on April 5-6, , at the GeoForschungsZentrum in Potsdam, Germany. The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers from a variety of disciplines to examine what is known, as well as what is not understood, about seismic discontinuities in the mantle and their implications for the state of the Earth s deep interior. The scientific program will include presentations in the areas of seismology, mineral physics, geodynamics, and geochemistry, each of which provides an opportunity to present and debate new results with colleagues in related but distinct disciplines, and to summarize the state or our understanding in several areas related to the Earth s mantle. A high degree of cross-fertilization between disciplines is one of goals of the workshop. Funds will be allocated primarily to offset expenses associated with the travel and participation of U.S. graduate students in the workshop doc11271 none Larsen and Gardner Mineral phases in crustal magma bodies record information about magma mixing, heating, and degassing in the form of reaction textures that occur as the mineral responds to the change in state of the magma. Two minerals that commonly show these features are plagioclase and amphibole, exhibiting sieve, dusty, and patchy zoning (dissolution and growth) and reaction rims (degassing and heating) respectively. These textures are often used to estimate the rates of magma mixing and magmatic ascent processes. We propose to experimentally constrain the rates at which these textures form at conditions applicable to shallow-level crustal reservoirs, using natural (rhyo)dacite and andesite starting material, and clean, unzoned, euhedral seed crystals. Our goal for this proposed study is to provide the vital calibrations needed to make observations of these reaction textures quantitatively useful for volcanologists when examining the products of crustal magma reservoirs. Previous work (refs) investigating the rates and causes of these textures have provided a good basis for our proposed study. However, limitations to this work exist, necessitating further study to make constraints useful to a wide range of mineral-melt compositions and P-T conditions applicable to crustal magma reservoirs. We will accomplish our goals in two tasks that are designed to experimentally constrain the rates of dissolution and regrowth textures in plagioclase resulting from heating and compositional disequilibrium, and amphibole reaction rims produced by melt degassing or heating. The first task will focus on plagioclase dissolution and rim growth in Aniakchak rhyodacite and andesite, using plagioclase seed phenocrysts of An20, An37, and An80 composition, at pressures between 0.1 and 300 MPa and temperatures between 825 and degrees C. The goal of this task is to constrain rates of plagioclase dissolution as a function of heating above the plagioclase solidus, and to examine dissolution and re-growth of plagioclase due to chemical disequilibrium in melts in which plagioclase of another composition is stable. The second task will investigate pargasite and hornblende amphibole breakdown in Redoubt dacite and andesite at P-T conditions appropriate for amphibole stability in these compositions. The goal of this task is to extend known calibrations of this reaction to different melt compositions and magmatic conditions. In addition, the thermal breakdown of amphibole will be investigated in order to help petrologists distinguish between decompression and heating rims. The results of these studies will be constraints on the rates of formation of important plagioclase and amphibole reaction textures in shallow-level crustal reservoirs doc11272 none Hervig The isotopes of boron have been shown to fractionate from one another as boron is lost from a silicate melt into coexisting water vapor. Work funded by this proposal will measure the amount of boron isotope fractionation between melts and a variety of fluids for melts of basaltic, andesitic, and granitic composition. Fluids will be water or carbon dioxide, or mixtures thereof. A range of temperatures will be studied to mimic natural conditions. The evolution of silicate melts (magmas) during generation, transport, and cooling (either at the surface of the earth or below) generally involves (at one stage or another) the formation of a fluid phase. The experimental data on boron fractionation proposed here will allow the application of a new stable isotope system to unraveling the history of silicate melts. A specific application is to magmas formed along volcanic arcs. Study of these samples can help constrain the varying contribution of the subducting slab to the source regions of these melts, and can clarify the effects of degassing during the ascent of magmas doc11273 none Drs. Chapurukha Kusimba and Sibel Kusimba will conduct two field seasons of archaeological and ethnographic research in the Tsavo region of southeastern Kenya. They are studying how small-scale but diverse societies participated in and were impacted by burgeoning trading systems that moved ivory, precious metals, agricultural foodstuffs, ceramics, textiles, human beings and cultural knowledge across port cities of the Old World during the period b.c.e. - c.e. In Tsavo, hunter-gatherers, farmers, and pastoralists interacted and traded amongst themselves and with merchants from the Kenyan Coast, where Muslim urban trading polities developed from 900- c.e. The Tsavo region was an important source and conduit for African trade goods bound via Coast cities into Indian Ocean and Mediterranean trade, such as ivory, slaves, rhinoceros horns, animal skins, and rock crystal. From - AD Tsavo ivory became an increasingly valuable commodity and form of currency on the world market. The East African Coastal cities had a diverse and well-defined social hierarchy composed of a social and religious elite, commoners, foreigners, and slaves. The elite managed and financed complex and extensive interregional trade networks. They also sponsored craft specialists including ironworkers, specialized fishermen, and sailors. They owned the most productive land and leased out the land to commoners, newcomers, and slaves. They may also have financed and supported specialized hunters in the hinterland to provide export trade goods such as ivory. The actions of urban elite were no doubt important in the involvement of East Africa in global trade. However, the participation of ordinary people in hinterlands like Tsavo enabled elite accumulation of wealth, power, and status. Because elite actions have been an almost exclusive focus of East African archaeology, little is known about the impact of Coastal trade on Tsavo communities. The project team brings together Western and Kenyan specialists in archaeology, historical linguistics, geoarchaeology ethnography and archaeology to conduct a coordinated investigation into the development and cultural ecological impact of trade in Tsavo. In three field seasons, the Kusimba s and colleagues have identified over 200 sites, including an extensive iron production complex, rockshelter agropastoralist and hunter-gatherer settlements including preserved dry stonework cattle pens and human sleeping and food processing areas, open-air sites, and sites of mortuary activity, including secondary reburial. They hypothesize that Tsavo communities and individuals used alliances, competition, and intensification to increase their participation in trade. These strategies may have caused ecological disruption through overexploitation of the elephant, whose foraging of woody and shrubby vegetation maintains ecosystem biodiversity and grazing areas for human pastoralists. Their research will examine the use and ecological effects of these three strategies through excavations in four areas of Tsavo and subsequent chemical and attribute analysis of pottery, lithic artifacts, faunal remains, and site architecture and location. Paleoecological analysis, including palynology and soil chemistry, will look for evidence of environmental degredation associated with elephant overexploitation doc11274 none Griffiths This is a collaborative project between Dr. G. Vaughn Griffiths, Colorado School of Mines, and Dr. Miguel Cerrolaza, Central University of Venezuela. The proposal is focussed on improving the accuracy and efficiency of engineering analysis software, specifically the finite element method, by exploiting the power of Computer Algebra Systems (CAS) to generate and simplify lengthy and complex algebraic expressions. These will be output directly into a high level computer language, to produce a public domain library of routines that will benefit engineering practitioners and software developers. The interests of the collaborators complement each other with minimal overlap. The priority of the US group resides in software development for classical elasticity, while the Venezuelan group has a particular interest in bio-engine applications, with both groups intending to replace traditional numerical integration of finite element matrices by closed form expressions. The outcome of this work will be a public-domain suite of subprograms that will be available to all developers and users of FE software doc11275 none PI s: Jeroen Tromp and Jeroen E. Ritsema, Cal Tech Seismic tomographic models are beneficial to researchers from a wide variety of disciplines in the Earth Sciences. They provide images of the structure of oceanic and continental lithosphere, and play a central role in constraining the planform of convection in the mantle. To improve these models, we will construct new tomographic models in which we will take advantage of the extensive seismic data set that we have compiled in the past several years. It includes unique data types, such as higher-mode Rayleigh wave phase-velocity measurements and travel times of converted body-wave phases (e.g., SP, SKP), which have not been fully exploited in tomography. In a parallel research effort, we apply the new Spectral Element Method of Komatitsch and Tromp [ ] to study the effects of 3-D mantle structure on long-period body-wave propagation. Specifically, we will test the applicability of ray theory to wave propagation in `low-degree seismic models, whether small-scale structure in the deep mantle, such as plumes, produce characteristic, observable travel-time or waveform variations, and whether the large-scale pattern of long-period body-wave amplitude anomalies can be explained by large-scale variation of seismic velocity in the mantle. These analyses provide insight into the quality of present-day tomographic models and help us design the next generation of tomographic inversions when fully 3-D forward theories can be incorporated doc11276 none Whitney Crustal thickening and exhumation in highly oblique (wrench) tectonic settings typify large regions of the Himalayas, Alps, North American Cordillera, and other mountain systems, but the thermal and structural effects of oblique motion on mid- to deep crustal levels of orogens are poorly known. Simple thermal models predict that oblique zones will experience prolonged heating and delayed unroofing relative to more head-on convergent zones. Unresolved questions related to this model and its application to orogens include: What are the rates and styles of thermal and structural processes during oblique deformation at different crustal levels? How does the style and timing of deformation change from the mid- to upper crust in zones of oblique deformation? The Anatolian segment of the Alpine-Himalayan orogen contains both obliquely deformed and head-on deformed zones that record the interplay between crustal deformation and metamorphism. In central Anatolia, mid-crustal rocks were unroofed by extension during transpression and transtension in a broad zone of shearing, with the upper crustal lid preserved in an adjacent sedimentary basin. The Nigde core complex in central Anatolia provides a window into the mid-crust of a highly oblique orogenic system and permits reconstruction of the tectonic and thermal history of the upper 20 km of continental crust during oblique motion. As part of the overall study of the thermal and structural evolution of oblique orogens, ideas about wrench tectonic zones are tested using the following methods: Fieldwork to determine the distribution of rock types and structures in the context of metamorphic facies, and to collect samples for kinematic and isotopic analyses; Structural and kinematic studies to reconstruct the deformation history of different levels of the mid- to upper crust; High-temperature geochronology (U-Pb) and thermochronology (40Ar-39Ar; fission track) to determine the timing of peak metamorphism and cooling histories of various crustal levels. These data are used to determine the duration of metamorphism, timing of magmatic, metamorphic, and tectonic events, and to infer exhumation rates mechanisms doc11277 none PI s: Roelof Snieder and John Scales, Colorado School of Mines In this project new technique is developed that uses multiple scattered waves as a sensitive tool for detecting changes in the Earth. This technique is called ``Coda Wave Interferometry because the Earth acts as an interferometer for the multiple-scattered coda waves. In this technique the changes in coda waves due to changes in the Earth are used to monitor minute changes in the Earth. In this project the technique will be applied to (i) laboratory measurements of ultrasonic waves (ii) the waveforms recorded on a volcano using an air-gun as seismic source and (iii) the changes in a reservoir in which brine is injected. Coda Wave Interferometry can have a significant impact of different areas of the geosciences as well as in other fields of science and technology. Potential applications include dam-monitoring, monitoring of landslides, detecting deformation of faults zones, and measuring changes in the amount of fracturing in reservoirs. The technique can potentially also be used for non-destructive testing applications. Coda Wave Interferometry can also play an important role in industrial geophysics because it can be used to monitor the change in hydrocarbon reservoirs during enhanced recovery operations doc11278 none Whitney A novel technique for determining the mechanisms, rates, and magnitude of decompression during unroofing of mountain belts, including quantifying the magnitude of high-temperature decompression and the unroofing pressure-temperature trajectory of formerly deep rocks, involves interpreting microcrack patterns in garnet. Of particular interest are microcracks that radiate from mineral inclusions, as their formation is likely initiated by decompression. By documenting the conditions at which the difference between lithostatic pressure and the internal pressure on mineral inclusions will fracture a host garnet in a radial pattern about the inclusion, it may be possible to calculate tectonic variables related to exhumation of mid- to lower-crustal rocks. This research involves (1) determination of the fracture toughness of silicate garnets as a function of temperature, composition, and crystal orientation, and (2) documentation and comparison of garnet microstructures in inclusion-rich and inclusion-free regions of garnets with well-constrained tectonic histories. Microstructures in the vicinity of inclusions surrounded by microcracks are compared with those near inclusions with no microcracks. Garnet properties will be determined using micromechanical testing apparatus, microstructures will be observed with high-resolution transmission electron microscopy, and structural domains will be assessed using electron backscatter diffraction techniques. Results from this research have applications to other decompressed materials (e.g., garnet-bearing mantle xenoliths) and provide fundamental information about the brittle behavior of garnet doc11279 none Yin & Horton Current hypotheses concerning the formation of the Tibetan plateau are widely different in terms of their predicted strain distribution and temporal evolution of the plateau. If the uplift involved little upper crustal shortening and was passively uplifted, shortening strain should be small and synchronous. If the uplift was due to large shortening that doubled the upper crustal thickening, strain should be significant and diachronous across the plateau. This project will attempt to evaluate upper crustal deformation and therefore test these two models for the evolution of the Tibetan plateau. Results are expected to provide new constraints on how and when the Tibetan plateau was constructed and allow various mechanisms for uplifting the plateau to be quantified doc11280 none PI: Heidi Houston, University of California, Los Angeles How earthquakes initiate is a key issue in understanding the process of seismic rupture. For example, the question of how seismic ruptures grow and whether large earthquakes initiate in a different manner than small ones has attracted significant attention in recent years, but remains controversial. We propose to determine the initial rates of growth of earthquake ruptures (initial source time functions) with detailed resolution in time for many (~150) large earthquakes (with depths of 15 to 100 km and MW \204 6.7) directly from seismograms. Systematic comparison and statistical analysis of the results will enable us to determine the influences of factors such as earthquake magnitude, source depth, focal mechanism, and tectonic setting on how ruptures grow in their first few seconds. Several recent results suggest that such influences may exist. A slow beginning to rupture (seismic nucleation phase) proportional in duration to the final magnitude and lasting 4 to 10 seconds for MW 8.0 to 8.2 earthquakes has been put forward as a general feature. The work proposed here should detect its systematic presence or absence in our magnitude range. Systematic differences in the energy budgets of small earthquakes compared to large ones have been proposed, which suggest that melting or fluid pressurization occurs during large but not small events, and affects dynamic rupture. The duration of rupture is known to decrease with depth, implying an increase in the rate of initial rupture growth. Finally, rupture growth could be affected by the aspect ratio (shape) of the fault, which is closely related to tectonic regime. Differences (or their absence) in rate of initiation with magnitude, depth, or other parameters can place constraints on the physical processes acting during rupture initiation doc11281 none Montgomery Since the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, the sediment yields from watersheds draining its slopes have been the highest ever recorded. In spite of this overwhelming sediment load, rivers inundated by pyroclastic flow deposits efficiently delivered almost half of the initial deposits to downslope alluvial debris fans by . Much of this transport occurs by lahars and hyperconcentrated flow, but at low to moderate flow the channels provide end-member examples of channel response to high sediment supply. A program of field measurements in and documented extremely high bedload transport rates even at low flow due to enhanced mobility of particles moving over a smooth, fine-grained bed. Measurement of flow velocities and depths, channel properties, and the size of both mobile and stable clasts in the Pasig-Potrero and Sacobia Rivers indicates grain-size-independent dimensionless critical shear stresses of 0.015 to 0.038, and Manning s n values of 0.017 to 0.024, well below values previously reported for steep mountain channels. The dramatic bed mobility and selective transport in these extremely sediment-rich channels indicate that changes in grain size, and bed roughness can increase transport capacity in response to high sediment supply. Dimensionless bedload transport rates in the Pasig-Potrero River are substantially greater than those previously reported for temperate rivers at the same dimensionless shear stress. Over the course of three field seasons, we propose to test a series of hypotheses for river response to changes in sediment supply using this ongoing natural experiment. Specifically, we will monitor channel response to the progressive decline in sediment supply to evaluate the hypotheses that: (i) bed coarsening and armoring is occurring in response to decreased sediment delivery from hillslopes and valley walls and will lead to a change in the character of bedload transport from selective mobility to threshold mobility; (ii) that recovery of an armored, threshold mobility bed in the Pasig-Potrero River will occur faster than in the Sacobia River due to differences in watershed recovery and relative transport capacity; (iii) that the magnitude and rates of changes in the bed surface texture in rivers draining the flanks of Mount Pinatubo track differences in initial sediment loading of their watersheds by pyroclastic flow deposits; and (iv) that pebble cluster formation is a mechanism of channel response to declining sediment load that, in turn, leads to changes in the style of bed mobility and bedload transport rates doc11282 none Brown Seismic studies of Earth s solid inner core indicate that the inner core is elastically anisotropic and inhomogeneous, and that the apparent axis of inner core anisotropy may rotate differentially from Earth s mantle. In order to fully interpret these data, information is needed on shear wave propagation through dense, high-pressure metals, particularly iron. For most candidate lower mantle constituents the bulk moduli, as functions of pressure, are reasonably well constrained by experiment; less, however, is known about the behavior of the shear modulus. Efforts to understand both radial and lateral variation of seismic velocities in the lower mantle are limited by the remaining uncertainty in the pressure and temperature dependence of the shear elastic constants. Using the technique of Impulsive Stimulated Scattering, interfacial waves can be generated between the suface of an opaque sample in the high-pressure diamond-anvil cell and the surrounding pressure medium. The velocities of these waves, which are particularly sensitive to the shear elastic constants, are then determined. Specific goals include: (1) determination of full tensorial elastic and thermal properties of iron, iron alloys, and other metals at high pressures and (2) determination of isotropic elastic shear moduli at very high pressure of synthesized, polycrystalline, lower mantle phases doc11283 none Lund Paleomagnetic studies of the Earth magnetic field secular variation (PSV, both directions and paleointensity) require knowledge of its spatial and temporal pattern of variability. At present, we have no detailed PSV records in Equatorial regions prior to the last years. Yet, several recent models of field variability require an understanding of Equatorial PSV in order to properly interpret PSV records at other latitudes and make predictions about possible dynamo sources in the Earth s deep interior. This proposal has five scientific goals. (1) recover two replicate deep-sea sediment PSV records (both directions and paleointensity) spanning the last 130,000 years from Equatorial latitudes in Indonesia Philippines, (2) carry out a careful rock magnetic study of all sediments (magnetic mineralogy, ARM, IRM, CHI, plus selected AMS and hysteresis measurements) to assess where environmental effects might be biasing the directional or paleointensity data, (3) carry out a detailed statistical study of the final PSV records focussing on the temporal variability of vector and VGP angular dispersion associated (almost entirely) with quadrapole-family dynamo sources, (4) carry out a comparison of all Holocene PSV records extending from Lake Baikal (Russia) to Lake Pounui (New Zealand) including the new records from this study, (5) compare the PSV records of the Laschamp and Blake excursion time intervals in these cores with similar PSV records from the North Atlantic Ocean. Final paleomagnetic datasets will be available on the PI s website (http: earth.usc.edu ~slund). The investigators previous work indicates that they can recover high-resolution PSV records (both directions and paleointensity) for the last 130,000 years from several deep-sea cores in the Equatorial Indonesia Philippines region. Their preliminary PSV data suggest that times of low paleointensity have higher PSV angular dispersion in both Equatorial and higher-latitude bands, but the relative increase in dispersion at Equatorial latitudes appears to be significantly greater. Assuming that the quadrapole-family dispersion level is constant as a function of latitude, it could be that the quadrapole family of dynamo sources is the sole cause of PSV dispersion at mid latitudes during the Laschamp excursion! They have also recovered an excursion record equivalent in time to the Laschamp Excursion. Comparison of this record with detailed Laschamp Excursion records from the mid-latitude North Atlantic Ocean suggests that the excursions on opposite sides of the Earth are virtually identical in age. Both regions have waveform characteristics of Class I excursions, but the Laschamp excursion in the North Atlantic Ocean has two cycles of clockwise-looping excursional VGPs while the Equatorial excursion has two cycles of counterclockwise-looping excursional VGPs. Careful comparisons of the proposed Equatorial PSV records with data from other latitude bands should provide significant new insight into magnetic field variability and dynamo processes that cause it doc11284 none Zumberge Freymueller This project is a test of hypotheses regarding viscoelastic response, aseismic creep, and combinations of both processes following great earthquakes. The collaborative effort, which will take place in Alaska, will make co-located absolute gravity observations (performed by scientists at the University of California, San Diego) and GPS observations (undertaken by scientists at the University of Alaska). Different models of postseismic viscoelastic relaxation predict observable gravity changes over km length scales, with a complex spatial pattern. To date, the viscosity profile is best determined by postglacial rebound studies. Gravity and GPS measurements offer the opportunity to obtain viscosity profile estimates for the Alaskan plate boundary. The area is especially interesting, as the viscosity of subduction zone materials may be very different from that beneath the centers of continental and oceanic plates. Aseismic creep is predicted to produce deformation of a more limited and markedly different spatial character than that of viscoelastic relaxation. Determining the contribution of aseismic creep in postseismic deformation is important in estimating recurrence intervals for great earthquakes. This project will recover and re-measure previously established absolute gravity stations in Fairbanks and Palmer, Alaska. The two stations are near the minimum and maximum predicted gravity change in the far-field for proposed viscosity models. The measurements are also co-located with existing continuous GPS stations. Comparisons with prior data will be used to test the method, and to provide the basis for model testing doc11285 none basin and crustal structure PI s: Klemperer and Claerbout, Stanford Univ. We are developing a new passive-seismic imaging technique that we call Seismic Daylight Imaging (SDI), and will test its ability to image basin and crustal structure beneath the San Clara Valley in the San Francisco Bay area, California. We hope SDI can supplement more costly active-source (i.e., typically small dynamite explosions) seismic imaging, and even possibly supplant active-source shooting in cases where extreme building density and cultural noise precludes the traditional active-source methodology. We will produce a seismic image of the crustal structure beneath the Santa Clara Valley, similar to one produced by an active-source seismic survey, but with less resolution. Thus we will add to existing knowledge of central California tectonics by delineating important crustal structures such as midcrustal detachments and sedimentary basin depths. We will also improve microzonation of earthquake hazards in Santa Clara Valley by constraining basin depths and velocity profiles. SDI is a relatively simple, but time consuming process. Using existing data recently acquired in the Santa Clara Valley Seismic Experiment (SCVSE), seismic traces from the entire data set will be cross-correlated, one hour at a time, beginning with the vertical channel, and stacked. The cross-correlations will result in a cube of virtual seismic shot records, which will then be migrated to produce a 3-D seismic image of crustal structure beneath the Santa Clara Valley. Our SDI image will be compared with a linear high-resolution active-source seismic survey that has recently been conducted by the USGS in the same area doc11286 none The main theme of the proposed project is the construction of high order accurate numerical schemes for solving multi-dimensional hyperbolic systems of conservation laws, and in particular the construction of numerical schemes for simulations of multi-phase fluid flows. This includes numerical methods for compressible flow, incompressible flow and heat transfer. Recently, the PI s introduced a boundary condition capturing method for variable coefficient Poisson equation in the presence of interfaces. The method is implemented using a standard finite difference discretization on a Cartesian grid making it simple to apply in several spatial dimensions. Furthermore, the resulting linear system is symmetric positive definite allowing for straightforward application of standard black box solvers, for example, multi-grid methods. Most importantly, this new method does not suffer from the numerical smearing. Using this method, the PI s extended the Ghost Fluid Method to treat two-phase incompressible flows, in particular those consisting of water and air. The numerical experiments show that the new numerical method performs quite well in both two and three spatial dimensions. Currently, they are working on extending this method to treat a wide range of problems, including for example combustion. Of particular interest is the extension of this method to include interface motion governed by the Cahn-Hilliard equation which models the non-zero thickness interface with a molecular force balance model. This proposed research on computational fluid dynamics is focused on the design, implementation and testing of new methods for simulating fluids such as water and gas using the computer. In particular, this work addresses problems where more than one type of one phase of fluid exist, e.g. mixtures of water and air. Our interest lies in improving the current state of the art algorithms so that they are better able to treat the interface that separates two fluids such as oil and water. The results of this research should be of interest to both the military (e.g. many naval applications involve the study of water and air mixtures) and to private industry. A particularly interesting example involves the interaction of water and oil in an underground oil recovery process. The research covered in this proposal has implications for math and science education as well. Not only will the PI s be working with and training graduate students in applied mathematics and engineering, but their research in extending these techniques to other fields, such as computer graphics, can play a role attracting the next generation of young scientists. For example, figure 7 in Foster and Fedkiw, Practical Animation of Liquids, SIGGRAPH shows the lovable character Shrek , from the feature film of the same name, taking a bath in mud doc11287 none Segall The Mw = 7.5, September 21, Chi-Chi, Taiwan earthquake occurred in the center of a dense GPS network operated by the Taiwanese. Coseismic displacements were measured at 128 stations, with magnitudes of up to 12 meters. A remarkable set of transient postseismic deformation signals were also recorded. Several continuously recording GPS stations measured transient signals with amplitudes of more than 10 cm in both the vertical and horizontal components. The dense spatial coverage and extraordinary signal to noise ratio make the coseismic and postseismic deformation fields of the Chichi earthquake arguably the best ever recorded. Preliminary analysis of the coseismic displacements demonstrate that the earthquake was caused by an east-dipping thrust, consistent with field and seismological observations. However, the GPS data can not be fit with slip on a single fault surface. The surface rupture undergoes a 90 degree bend at its northern end, with a ~15 km long east-west trending break. Aftershock focal mechanisms suggest strike slip motion on this E-W striking branch. The GPS data, however, are best fit with a curved dipping fault with oblique slip on both the N-S trending and E-W trending segments. The preferred model explains 98% of the variance in the data. The residuals, however, are far too large, and spatially coherent to be explained by measurement error. The Chelungpu fault, is part of a fold thrust system, which emplaced older and stiffer rocks over sediments and the corresponding spatial variations in elastic properties may bias the modeling. The investigators and their Taiwanese collaborators propose an exhaustive analysis of the coseismic deformation accounting for vertical and lateral variations in elastic properties, non-planar fault geometry, spatial variations in slip, and possibly effects of irregular surface topography. As exciting as the coseismic displacements are, the postseismic deformations are even more significant. Accelerated post earthquake deformation has been known for decades, however the physics of the phenomenon are poorly understood. Afterslip, viscous flow of the lower crust and upper mantle, and poroelastic relaxation have all been proposed to explain transient postseismic deformation. Theoretical studies abound; the problem has been a lack of defining data sets. The data from the Chichi earthquake is of such high signal to noise ratio that we hope to finally answer these long standing problems. Specifically, the investigators propose an intensive modeling effort to compare predictions from viscoelastic, poroelastic, and afterslip models to the data. Preliminary results suggest that afterslip provides a reasonable fit to the data from the first 100 days after the mainshock, although much more analysis is needed. Inversion of the GPS data will reveal the spatiotemporal evolution of postseismic slip. These results will have important implications for the tectonics of collision zones. Numerous models of fold thrust belts show faults merging into a master decollement beneath Taiwan. By determining the geometry of the Chelungpu fault at seismogenic and subseismogenic depths the investigators will provide important insights into the structure of this classic collisional orogen. The investigators plan to develop models that both fit interseismic geodetic data and yield geologically reasonable displacements when integrated over multiple earthquake cycles. The proposed research will support tow Ph.D projects in an extensive collaboration with Taiwanese colleagues at the Institute of Earth Sciences, Academica Sinica Taiwan doc11288 none Taylor We are attempting to show that equilibrium iron-isotope fractionations among simple iron-bearing complexes and Fe metal can be accurately calculated using a combination of force-field modeling together with available measurements of vibrational frequencies from infrared and Raman spectroscopy. This is important because of its pertinence in interpreting the exciting new results by other workers of high-precision iron isotope measurements on natural materials and between species in aqueous solution and those bound to ion-exchange resins. We are also finishing up an oxygen and radiogenic isotope study of granitic plutons in Nevada and Utah for which preliminary results have shown a systematic involvement of different source rocks during each of three stages of magmatism in the Jurassic, Cretaceous, and Cenozoic. A third goal is to complete our understanding of the remarkable oxygen isotope patterns in phenocrysts and groundmass found in the upper parts of welded ash-flow tuffs, exemplified in our studies of the Bishop Tuff (Holt and Taylor, ), where we showed that the low-18O zones exhibited a one-to-one correspondence with mapped fossil fumarolic structures exposed in the uppermost 70-80 meters of the tuff We are in the process of examining the exposed upper 15 meters of the ash-flow sheet in the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes (VTTS), Alaska (where the fumaroles are known from direct observation to have terminated about 15 years after eruption), thereby linking the scientific observations made on recently active fumaroles in the VTTS with the fossil fumaroles in the Bishop Tuff doc11289 none Houghton Pauses and or abrupt shifts in eruptive intensity are a fundamental yet little studied part of many large explosive eruptions. Stable Plinian plumes may pause or fluctuate in intensity by several orders of magnitude on times scales of hours. The causes of such shifts remain poorly understood, at a time when our models for steady state eruptive processes become increasingly elegant and sophisticated. The quality of hazard advice and eruption forecasts would be significantly improved if such changes could be explained and even anticipated. This study focuses on the origin of such unsteadiness in a powerful sustained explosive eruption, for both breaks in eruptive activity of several hours duration and abrupt but short-lived changes in style intensity. The eruption of Novarupta in event was the world s largest 20th century eruption and is widely cited as an excellent example of a historical large sustained eruption. Sustained Plinian ignimbrite eruption at Novarupta stopped briefly and abruptly 16 and 45 hours after commencement of the eruption before finally giving way after 60 hours to effusion of lava domes (Hildreth and Fierstein ). Caldera collapse during the eruption occurred not at vent, but 10 km distant, thus preserving the very near-vent products of the eruption to within 100m of vent, and medial eruption products have a chemical stratigraphy that enables correlation of coeval products of highly varying character between widely spaced localities. This permits us to address this fundamental problem of abrupt changes in eruption dynamics from a very well constrained perspective and for one of the five largest eruptions recorded in the last years. Goals of the proposed study are to assess the relative influences played by: a) the rates and timing of growth and collapse of gas bubbles, degassing and syneruptive microlite crystallization; b) vent roughness and stability; and c) changes in the pre-eruptive state of the magma, including pre-eruptive volatile concentrations, in altering the dynamics of the eruption. Our starting hypothesis is that the close of each episode of explosive volcanism at Novarupta was caused by ascent-driven changes in the physical state of the volumetrically dominant dacitic magma whereas short-lived fluctuations in eruption intensity were the products of plume instability generated by irregularity and roughness of the vent walls and limited vent wall collapse. The effects of changing flow behavior in the conduit, as the magma rheology responds to decreases in the concentrations of dissolved volatiles, and increases in the abundances of bubbles and crystals, will be inferred from image analysis of the vesicle and crystal populations in carefully selected pumice samples from either side of the breaks in Plinian deposit and abrupt fluctuations in eruptive intensity. External environmental factors, (vent wall roughness and instability, vent migration and widening) will be studied by mapping changes in the nature and abundance of wall rock lithic clasts doc11290 none PI s: Donald V. Helmberger, CalTech In recent years, geologists and geophysicists have witnessed a revolution in the development and implementation of an array of new tools for measuring motions of the earth s crust, including global positioning satellites, interferometric synthetic aperture radar, and broadband digital seismic systems, allowing tremendous advances in motion detection accuracy. Japan and Taiwan took the lead in the installation of these instruments, and the recent Chi-Chi, Taiwan earthquake ( ) sequence has produced a remarkable set of data. Over 300 strong-motion acceleration records at distances less than 50 km are now available for the main event, Mw = 7.7. Eleven aftershocks with local magnitudes greater than 6 occurred in the first week, several as large as Northridge. About 10,000 digital 3-component waveforms can now be studied to answer questions about variation in rupture velocity, rise-time, nonlinear behavior, basin amplification, etc. We plan to apply an assortment of newly developed analytical tools involving wavelet transforms, modified annealing, and Pseudo-Green s Functions to explore these new data. In particular, we plan to fix the slip-histories or various sub faults using the static data and using calibrated seismic paths to constrain the rise-time and rupture velocity doc11291 none This project consists of laboratory studies of the kinetics and mechanism of the reaction of OH (hydroxyl radical) with pinenes, which are important biogenic hydrocarbons. In the atmosphere, these reactions lead to the production of numerous products, including radicals, however, the details of the mechanism are not well understood. Relative rate measurements will be carried out in a small quartz chamber with direct sampling of the gas mixture and mass spectrometric detection as well as GC MS (gas chromatography mass spectrometry) analysis of compounds with low volatility. These studies can be carried out at various temperatures. Studies of the reactions of some of the reaction products (pinonaldehyde, nopinone) themselves with OH are also planned. Absolute measurements of the rate coefficients will be carried out using the turbulent flow technique. The results of this study will improve our knowledge of the details of the oxidation mechanisms and will be valuable in determining the efficiency of these biogenic hydrocarbons in the production of photochemical smog doc11292 none To support Quality of Service (QoS) in the Next Generation Internet, new algorithms are needed for many network components, including routing, scheduling and admission control. QoS routing, which identifies paths that have sufficient resources to satisfy the QoS requirement of a connection and selects a path for that connection, is one of the most important components for QoS provision. Although many QoS routing algorithms have been proposed, a number of theoretical and practical issues remain to be addressed to achieve efficient QoS routing in large scale networks, that is, scalable QoS routing. This research will attempt to address some of these issues. Specifically, we will focus on the following four areas. Networking state aggregation. For a large network, a common approach to achieve scalable routing is to reduce the size of global network state by aggregating information according to the hierarchical structure of the network. This approach has been adopted by the ATM private network-network interface (PNNI) standard. However, when multiple QoS metrics are involved, precisely aggregating information of a domain may not be feasible since it requires memory space that grows exponentially with respect to the size of the domain. In this research, we will design various topology aggregation schemes, study the trade-offs of the schemes between the amount of space needed and the effectiveness in summarizing the domain information, investigate the QoS routing performance with different topology aggregation schemes, and determine the topology aggregation schemes that are effective in practice for QoS routing with multiple QoS metrics. Handling random imprecision of the global network state information. In large scale networks, maintaining precise global state information requires link states to be distributed frequently, which results in large protocol overheads along multiple dimensions including bandwidth, storage, update processing, and the associated context switching. To control the protocol overhead, the link state update frequency may be reduced, which results in the imprecise global state information. The imprecision caused by the infrequent link state updates is random in the sense that a router cannot estimate the accurate global network state. Thus, a practical QoS routing algorithm must be able to perform effective routing using the imprecise global network state information. In this research, we propose a novel routing scheme that performs effective routing in the presence of imprecise global state information. Our scheme is different from the existing methods in that it combines static and dynamic routing and adapts the routing schemes based on network status. We will compare our scheme with the existing methods in terms of routing performance and protocol overheads and identify the strengths and weaknesses of each method through extensive simulations. Interaction between resource reservation and QoS routing. Most current QoS routing algorithms assume a separate protocol to perform resource reservation. However, in the future large scale high speed networks, it is desirable to combine resource reservation with QoS routing. Combing resource reservation with QoS routing may have negative impacts on the routing performance, especially for large networks. This research will try to understand the impact of resource reservation on various QoS routing schemes and develop techniques to achieve effective routing in the presence of resource reservation traffic. Multi-constrained QoS routing and generic QoS routing algorithms. Multi-constrained QoS routing finds a path that satisfies multiple independent QoS constraints. This problem is NP-hard. However, distributed applications such as the Internet phone and distributed games have very diverse QoS requirements on delay, cost, delay jitter, loss ratio, bandwidth, etc. To support such applications, practical multi-constrained QoS routing algorithms must be developed. Furthermore, due to the complexity of multi-constrained QoS routing, existing QoS routing algorithms are very restrictive on the type and the number of QoS constraints, which implies that different QoS routing algorithms will be needed for different applications. In the future networks, it is desirable to use a generic QoS routing algorithm that can efficiently handle different QoS requirements. In this research, we will study the heuristic algorithms that solve the multi-constrained routing problem effectively in practice and develop a generic algorithm that performs well regardless of the number and the types of QoS requirements. We plan to evaluate our techniques by implementing the proposed techniques in Qbone and to validate the techniques through implementation and experimentation in the real network. We believe that by developing effective mechanisms to address these four issues, we will be able to integrate the mechanisms and develop efficient scalable QoS routing schemes for the future large scale high speed networks doc11293 none Microbial Degradation of Refractory Organic Carbon during Rock Weathering By K.J. Edwards, T.I. Eglinton, S.T. Petsch Department of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Woods Hole, MA An important component of the carbon cycle is transfer of organic carbon from ancient sedimentary rocks to the oceans and atmosphere. Oxidation of ancient sedimentary organic matter during rock weathering and soil formation consumes O2 and releases CO2, thus providing a strong control on the composition of Earth s atmosphere over geologic time scales. This study investigates the role of microbial activity in the degradation and oxidation of sedimentary organic matter during rock weathering. We have determined that there are microorganisms living within shallow-subsurface sedimentary rocks. Compound-specific 14C analysis of cell membrane lipids was used to establish that in culture, these organisms are assimilating refractory, rock-derived organic carbon as their carbon source. Future investigations of this study include: Compound-specific 13C and 14C analysis of microbial lipids from environmental samples to determine carbon pathways in nature environments of rock weathering. Phylogenetic analysis of microorganisms in field samples and lab cultures to establish community structure and comparison with known organisms. Fluorescent in-situ hybridizations of microbial cells with iteratively more specific probes to examine spatial relationships between microorganisms, organic matter and minerals in weathering environments Array-detector infrared spectroscopy to provide microscale description of organic matter composition within sedimentary rocks and correlations with microbial growth patterns. Analysis of abundance and composition of dissolved organic compounds released through microbial activity compared with sterile controls to contrast rates of oxidation versus dissolution of ancient sedimentary organic matter. From this study will emerge an unprecedented description of the influence microbial activity has on oxidation of ancient sedimentary organic matter during rock weathering, with direct applicability towards understanding of global scale carbon cycling and controls on the composition of Earth s atmosphere doc11294 none We propose to undertake work on two components of this project, which was originally proposed as having three major components. We have redesigned this effort as a 24-month project primarily aimed at framework development and initial work on assessment tools; the attached budget would adequately support this work. Our original proposal included two research questions: Question 1. What knowledge of algebra for teaching (mathematical knowledge, beliefs, dispositions and conceptions of mathematics) do secondary school teachers of algebra draw upon to support their instruction? Question 2. How do preservice teachers experiences in mathematics and in teacher education foster the development of knowledge of algebra for teaching? For this scaled-back version of the project we will address only the first research question. We had identified the several subquestions related to this; they are included below. We will meet as a project team to refine and narrow this list, and expect to focus on some subset of these: 1. How is teachers knowledge of algebra organized and chunked, and how does this relate to their teaching? 2. How do teachers articulate what algebra is about? How do they describe the big ideas that structure the courses they teach? Can they compare and contrast the approach they take with others? How does this relate to their teaching? 3. What kind of knowledge do teachers draw upon in responding to students ideas? 4. How do more general mathematical types of knowledge (reasoning, representing, problem solving) relate to knowledge of algebra for teaching? 5. What knowledge do teachers use in keeping their sights on longer-term mathematical goals or big ideas while also responding to student conceptions and interests? 6. What resources and strategies do teachers draw on for deepening their knowledge of algebra for teaching? In the 24 months of this project we will undertake the development of a framework for knowledge of algebra for teaching by doing the following: 1. Synthesizing literature, including: theoretical analyses of school algebra, research about the teaching and learning of algebra, research about knowledge used in teaching, investigations of how algebra teachers are using curricula. 2. Examining algebra curriculum materials and teachers manuals, and analyses of those materials 3. Interviewing developers of contemporary secondary school algebra materials 4. Examining teaching through existing videotapes 5. Gathering data from inservice classrooms selected to span a range of curricular approaches, to support the framework development. In addition, we will begin the development and piloting of an assessment tool to assess and describe teachers knowledge of algebra for teaching. Resources will not be available for full scale item development, piloting, and analysis. Rather we will design prototype tasks, probably in a relatively narrow content band within algebra, and conduct limited piloting efforts. The products of this work will be an analytic and empirically-derived framework describing algebra knowledge for teaching, and a set of prototype tasks that can be used as a basis for more extended task design in a subsequent project. In addition, we will use the framework as a basis for analysis of the algebra teaching in our teacher sample, and expect to produce a paper about teachers knowledge of algebra for teaching as it relates to their classroom practice in a variety of curricular orientations doc11295 none Molybdenum Isotope in the Geologic Record: Paleoredox Proxies? This project aims to investigate natural variations in the isotopic composition of the element molybdenum (Mo). Mo is an element that is sensitive to the presence of oxygen. As the abundance of oxygen in the environment varies, so does the chemical behavior of Mo. We have made a preliminary study and found that Mo that has accumulated from seawater under oxygen-rich conditions is lighter than Mo that accumulates in sediments under oxygen-absent conditions in the presence of sulfur. Of the two types of accumulation, it is the Mo that accumulates under oxygen-absent conditions that is similar to Mo in seawater. We therefore believe that changes in the relative proportion of light Mo extracted from the oceans under oxygen-rich conditions will be reflected in the isotopic composition of Mo in seawater and in sediments deposited under oxygen-absent conditions. The more of the ocean that is oxygen-rich, the more light Mo will be extracted from seawater and the heavier the Mo remaining in seawater will become. The key to this hypothesis is the extraction of light Mo from seawater under oxygen-rich conditions. It is therefore the purpose of this project to investigate this process both in the laboratory and in natural samples in order to understand the mechanisms involved and to quantify their effects. If we are correct, then the isotopic composition of Mo in sediments deposited under oxygen-absent waters could be used to track the relative proportions of oxygen-rich and oxygen-absent ocean water through time. An understanding of the evolution of our present-day oxygen-rich ocean is one of the keys to understanding the evolution of the Earth s environment, and of life itself, from primordial times to the present doc11296 none Modern wireless networks use feedback control of transmit power to accommodate changing channel conditions, such as propagation loss, shadowing, multi-user interference, etc. This proposal suggests the utilization of feedforward control of data rate, in addition to the existing power control schemes, in order to more effectively combat these disturbances and, in addition, accommodate channel model uncertainties. These controllers use the bit error frequency, observed in the previous packet, in order to calculate the data rate of the packet to be transmitted next. Our preliminary results indicate that ideally this approach leads to a minimum of 20% throughput improvement, without additional power expenditures, or to a minimum of 30% decrease of transmit power, without decreasing the throughput. In some scenarios, this approach may lead to as much as 300% of throughput improvement or to 600% of power saving. Moreover, the efficacy of this approach is independent of whether a single or multi-user environment is considered, and no data rate wars take place. The efficacy of feedforward data rate control is mainly due to the following two reasons: (a) Unlike feedback power control, which adapts relatively slowly due to a finite step of power increase decrease, feedforward data rate control adapts in the span of one packet transmission time. This leads to a more effective rejection of fast disturbances, such as the level of shadowing. The above-mentioned minima of throughput increase and power decrease are due to this fast adaptation capability. (b) Unlike feedback power control, which does not adapt to channel uncertainties (e.g., whether the channel is AWGN or Rayleigh), feedforward data rate control does accommodate these effects. The above-mentioned three-fold in-crease of the throughput and six-fold decrease of power are exactly due to this fact. The approach to the development of feedforward data rate controllers, considered in this proposal, is based on the following three steps: (i) First, a non-causal and non-realistic but optimal feedforward data rate controller is designed. It is non-causal because it calculates the optimal data rate as a function of bit error probability in the packet yet to be transmitted. It is non-realistic, because it uses the probability of bit error rather than the frequency of this event. It is designed solely in order to derive the least upper bound of the achievable throughput. (ii) Next, this controller is causified and made realistic. The causification is achieved by making the data rate of each packet a function of bit error probability in the previous packet. It is made realistic by using the frequency of bit error rather than its probability. Thus, an implementable controller is obtained and its performance is evaluated. It is shown that causification leads to a relatively small decrease of performance for all practical speeds of mobiles. However, using frequencies instead of probabilities may lead to a substantial performance loss. Thus, a certain level of filtering of bit error frequency is necessary. (iii) Finally, a filtered version of the above implementable controller is introduced and it is shown that a right level of filtering leads to an efficient performance. At this point, this level of filtering is investigated only experimen-tally (i.e., numerically), and a rigorous method for designing right filters is, along with others, a problem to be addressed in the proposed research. Based on the results to-date briefly mentioned above, the main tasks of the proposed research are as follows: 1. Develop methods for design of implementable feedforward data rate controllers for wireless networks. 2. Quantify the level of throughput increase and or transmit power decrease when this technology is used. 3. Develop an architecture in which feedforward data rate control can be used in both cellular and ad-hoc environ-ments. The impact of the proposed research is in providing wireless network designers with a new method for combating channel disturbances and uncertainties doc11297 none Zhang This proposal is aimed at understanding the influence of pressure, temperature and composition on deuterium-hydrogen (D H) isotopic fractionation through high-pressure, high temperature experiments. Isotope fractionation at high pressure is theoretically interesting and affects both the composition of fluids released from subducted slabs, and of the residual water that is entrained in high-pressure phases. Under favorable conditions, these water-containing phases may be sequestered at great depth in the lower mantle. The isotopic signature of such recycled water will depend in part upon fractionation processes occurring at mantle conditions. Although the D H ratio in the present upper mantle is known to be on the whole relatively constant, the primordial D H ratio for the earth is unknown. Knowledge of high-pressure D H fractionation factors relevant to degassing of the earth will help constrain the primitive D H ratio and the proportion of ocean water that originated from the mantle . The D H ratios of subduction related basalts are relatively high (e.g. Poreda, ; Dobson and O Neil, ), indicating that their source has a different D H ratio to the depleted upper mantle. Although this is attributed in part to the D H ratio of subducted water, the D H ratio of the evolved water may be affected by fractionation processes as water is released from hydrous minerals at depth. In the bulk of the mantle, nominally anhydrous minerals are thought to constitute the major reservoir for water (e.g. Bell and Rossmann, ; Kohlstedt et al., ). It has been suggested that the D H ratio of water in nominally anhydrous minerals of the upper mantle is fixed by equilibration with hydrous fluids in the mantle wedge (Bell and Ihinger, ). Thus, fractionation of D H between hydrous phases (in the slab), fluid (leaving the slab), hydrous magmas (in the mantle wedge) and nominally anhydrous minerals (the mantle residue) could explain the D H systematics of the entire upper mantle. D H fractionation factors at pressures greater than a few kilobars have not yet been measured, however, and cannot be reliably predicted; thus we propose to measure fractionation experimentally under mantle conditions. In the period of this one-year pilot project, we will carry out a preliminary investigation of the effects of pressure and temperature on D H fractionation between brucite and water at elevated pressure (3-6 GPa) and temperature (500-700 degrees C). This work will determine the magnitude of the pressure effect on D H fractionation. Working in this simple MgO-H2O system with such a water rich mineral will also allow us to develop and improve our experimental and analytical technique. The results of this systematic study will be fundamental to our understanding of isotopic fractionation at high pressure. In addition, we will begin to investigate the isotopic fractionation factor between a synthetic basalt melt and H2O vapor phase to understand the D H fractionation during mantle degassing. The effect of dissolved H2O content (hydroxyl to molecular H2O ratio) on the fractionation factor will also be examined doc11298 none Rudnick This pilot project will characterize the Li isotopic composition of the Earth s mantle. This project will concentrate on both solution and laser introduction of Li to our Nu plasma multicollector ICP-MS. We will begin by analysing international rock standards in solution, then will proceed with mineral separates from peridotites (olivine, orthopyroxene and clinopyroxene). Our ultimate goal is to determine the range of Li isotope values in the Earth s mantle, as sampled by a variety of peridotitic xenoliths derived from lithosphere of variable ages and tectonic settings that have experienced a variety of metasomatic overprinting processes. In addition, we hope to establish the degree of isotopic heterogeneity between coexisting phases doc11299 none Kesler This proposal requests funding for a study of the magnitude, possible causes and applications to ore genesis of variations in the isotopic composition of Hg in hydrothermal systems. It is designed to follow up on our recent development of a highly precise and sensitive MC-ICPMS method to measure the isotopic composition of Hg. Hydrothermal systems are the main cause of Hg migration in the upper crust and Hg could undergo both organic and inorganic isotopic fractionation during transport. The main organic process under low-temperature, anaerobic conditions is bacterially mediated production of mono-methylmercury (HgCH3+, MMHg), a critical compound in the cycling and toxicity of Hg in the environment. Inorganic processes such as evaporation, condensation, decomposition, diffusion, oxidation-reduction, precipitation, dissolution, complexation, and ion exchange, might also cause fractionation of Hg isotopes, and will dominate in hydrothermal systems because methylating bacteria are absent. Our goal is to evaluate the relative importance of inorganic fractionation processes on the isotopic composition of Hg in hydrothermal systems and then determine whether Hg isotope compositions can be used as tracers of the source of Hg in these systems. Our preliminary analyses show that Hg from deposits over boiling geothermal systems at Coso (California) and Monte Amiata (Italy) have low 198Hg 204Hg ratios that could have been produced by evaporation. Samples of native Hg and cinnabar from the Idria (Slovenia) deposit have significantly different 198Hg 204Hg ratios that could reflect oxidation-reduction or the thermal decomposition of cinnabar, respectively. Samples from different parts of the Almaden Hg deposit have the same isotopic composition, suggesting that Hg in this large deposit came from a homogeneous source. Finally, 198Hg 204Hg ratios in meteorites (as a proxy for Hg in igneous rocks) and methylmercury in fish (as a proxy for Hg in most organic sediments) differ, suggesting that Hg isotope compositions might distinguish between these two possible sources of Hg in hydrothermal systems. The proposed research will focus on studies of actual mercury mineral deposits, with two main goals. First, we will analyze Hg above and below the boiling zone in active geothermal systems at Coso and the Geysers (California) and in the paleogeothermal system at the Ivanhoe epithermal district, in order to evaluate the importance of boiling to fractionation of mercury isotopes. Second, we will evaluate the use of Hg isotope compositions as tracers by analysis of Hg from ore deposits and possible source rocks in Coast Range Hg belt (California) and Opalite district (Nevada), which represent the full range of possible sedimentary and igneous source rocks for Hg. This work is expected to provide an interpretive framework for Hg isotope studies of active and extinct water-rock systems as well as laying the groundwork for studies seeking to distinguish between natural and anthropogenic sources for Hg in modern accumulations of environmental interest doc11300 none Guccione The Lower Mississippi Valley (LMV) has the potential of understanding the linkages of upstream climate glacial vs. downstream sea level controls of a large stream system. In addition a stratigraphic and geochronologic framework for the alluvial landforms of the valley will aid in the study of tectonic activity within the New Madrid seismic zone, within the northern valley. This proposed research seeks to develop a chronologic and genetic model for evolution of the LMV during the Late Pleistocene full glacial (late Wisconsin stage) to the earliest Holocene, a period when rapid large-scale rearrangements of the North American hydrological system occurred. These rearrangements included changes in the Laurentide ice-sheet margin, drainage of pro-glacial lakes, and se level rise. This proposal focuses on a) the role of fluctuations in discharge and sediment load from the former ice margin, b) downstream effects of sea level discharge, and c) the impact of these forcing mechanisms on landscape evolution in the LMV. We hope to address the following questions: o How do landforms and deposits of the LMV correlate to ice margin changes, floods from pro-glacial lakes, and or specific meltwater and sediment spikes identified in the Gulf of Mexico? o How do landforms and deposits of the LMV correlate to the landforms and deposits of the upper Mississippi valley where climate glacail impacts were fundamental, but sea level played no role? o Does the LMV respond rapidly to high-frequency changes in discharge and sediment load during deglaciation, or are there lag times? Does the signal decay downstream or is it present to the Gulf of Mexico? What is the influence of sea level and how far upstream does it extend doc11301 none Late Ordovician Epeiric Sea Circulation, Environmental Change, and Biotic Turnover: Model and Data Synthesis One of the most difficult problems facing the earth science community today is identifying the ultimate causes of extinction and migration in the history of life. In the sedimentary record, biotic change such as extinction is often linked to evidence of environmental change, however the processes underlying environmental change are often complex and poorly understood. Numerical models of physical systems that are tested against the sedimentary record provide a means by which the ultimate causes for bioevents can be investigated. We propose to use a numerical model of ocean circulation to determine the ultimate causes for an extinction event in the Late Ordovician of North America. This study has two main components. In the first component we hypothesize that rapid shifts in environmental conditions linked to extinction during the Late Ordovician of North America were caused by changes in bathymetry, paleogeography, and precipitation associated with mountain building. We will model ocean circulation for two time intervals that span the abrupt shift in environmental conditions and related extinction event. We will test the validity of the model results against the distribution of sedimentary indicators of oceanographic conditions. In the second component of the study we will investigate the relative importance of single variables like changes in sea level, paleogeography, bathymetry, and precipitation in producing rapid oceanographic shifts in the epeiric seas that may have caused significant extinction of species. In investigating the ultimate causes of extinction, modeling has the advantage that single variables can be isolated and their effects on the system evaluated. We will identify plausible causes of the extinction event by determining how well the model results match the spatial and temporal faunal changes. By gaining insight into the causes of rapid oceanographic changes in these epeiric seas, this study has broad implications for understanding environmental change and extinction during any time in Earth s history when epeiric seas were important components of marine ecosystems doc11302 none Spear This proposal is to develop trace element partitioning as a tool to assist petrologists in the task of deciphering the metamorphic history of a terrane, and to apply this tool to further our understanding of Earth history. Detailed studies will be carried out on metapelites that have undergone partial melting (anatexis) and rocks that have undergone high P T metamorphism in order to characterize fully the trace element zoning and partitioning in major and accessory phases. An empirical calibration of a monazite-xenotime thermometer will be augmented and enhanced to include the influence of HREE, Th and U on monazite YPO4 content, and procedures developed for the application of this thermometer to yield meaningful results. Two additional thermometers, YAG-xenotime and YAG-monazite, will be similarly enhanced so that they are applicable over a wide range of conditions. Additional new, empirical thermometers based on yttrium partitioning between garnet and accessory minerals at high pressures will be explored Thermodynamic models of whole rock reactions and mineral composition variation will be developed to place accessory mineral paragenesis on a firm theoretical footing. The models will be used to make predictions about the involvement of accessory minerals in major phase reactions, and in the interpretation of natural parageneses observed in the study suites doc11303 none This study will focus on two numerical techniques for discontinuous problems and their physical applications. Particular attention will be paid to the development of a numerical method and its impact on refining the mathematical model of the physical system. Sharp gradients and discontinuities are characteristic of semiconductor device simulations. While numerical methods have been developed to handle these characteristics, these methods need to be refined and tailored to capture the features exhibited by carrier flow in semiconductor device simulations. On the other hand, the mathematical models that are used to describe carrier transport in semiconductors are constantly evaluated and changed. Steady-state weighted essentially non oscillatory methods will be refined and used to determine the validity of macroscopic models of current transport and deposition in semiconductor devices. Discontinuities are also a problem in the determination of protein structure by electron microscopy. The inherently discontinuous nature of physical structures, and the assumption that repetition of the structure in a gridlike formation is a periodic function leads to slow decay of the Fourier coefficients. Fourier coefficient extrapolation and Gegenbauer polynomial methods will be further developed and applied to the field of electron microscopy to achieve better resolution protein structures. This has the potential to be added to any electron microscopy software as a postprocessing step, and provide better resolution structures. Numerical methods for semiconductor device simulation models allow efficient and inexpensive simulation of the processes involved in semiconductor device production. However, these processes have many discontinuities that require sensitive numerical methods to capture the sharp changes in density and pressure without smearing them. Such methods, known as Weighted Essentially Non-Oscillatory methods, have been developed for use in similar problems, but are not efficient for the long time scales necessary for semiconductor simulations. The aim of this project is to further develop these numerical methods, and make them efficient for semiconductor device simulation on computers. Efficient numerical methods will also serve to compare different models, which attempt to describe the physical problem, and to evaluate which models best compare to reality. Another aspect of this project deals with the effects of discontinuities in protein structures studied by electron microscopy. Mathematical methods have been recently developed to solve the underlying problem by adding a smoothing step, which smoothes away numerical artifacts while keeping the real discontinuities. These methods have never been used on protein structures, and need to be tailored to it. These methods may improve the resolution of protein structures determined by electron microscopy doc11304 none Mathez The Bushveld Complex and other large layered intrusions have experienced a long and complex evolution following crystal accumulation and while the rocks were still partially molten. During this time the textures, compositions, and in some cases lithologies of the rocks were modified. In the Bushveld Complex this history bears on the fundamental geochemistry of the platinum group elements (PGEs) because the PGE-rich layers, namely the Merensky reef and the UG2 chromitite, exhibit evidence for extensive post-accumulation modification. The objectives of this proposal are to understand the dynamic and chemical evolution of the partially molten rocks and how the PGEs were redistributed during this evolution. The meter-thick UG2 chromitite possesses internal stratigraphic variations in texture and PGE contents. Geochemical profiles for PGEs and other elements will be produced in carefully mapped underground sections. Data on crystal size, shape, and mode will be collected to understand how the textural and geochemical variations are related and when and how they formed. The interstitial silicate minerals will be analyzed for rare earth elements to deduce the role of interstitial melt in textural and geochemical modification. Chromite grains contain inclusions of Os-bearing minerals. Their Os isotopic compositions will be measured and associated with the textural analysis to establish when and how the inclusions formed. Mapping in the mine revealed that the UG2 is associated with several complex rock layers. These will be studied to determine their origins and gain insight into the emplacement of the UG2 and its possible role as a permeability barrier to the flow of interstitial melt and fluid. The Merensky reef is believed to mark the introduction of new magma into an extant magma chamber. The complex stratigraphic profiles of Sr isotopic ratios associated with this layer are inconsistent with simple magma mixing and may have developed later, when the rocks were partially molten and compacting. A Pb isotopic study featuring analysis of individual Pb-bearing minerals will be conducted to gain insight into the geochemical development of the Merensky reef doc11305 none Cabaniss The work to develop molecular-scale understanding of the interactions of natural organic matter (NOM) with mineral surfaces would quantify how the preferential adsorption of higher molecular-weight and more aromatic NOM components to mineral surfaces (sorptive fractionation) affects both the transformation of terrestrial organic carbon and the transport of pollutants through porous media. The molecular-scale adsorption studies would pursue understanding of NOM adsorption mechanisms characterizing NOM molecular weight distributions in soil pore waters and shallow ground waters to determine whether the lognormal distribution model also holds in subsurface environments. They would quantify how sorptive fractionation of NOM affects the binding and mobility of trace metals and NOM photochemical reactivity. The three broad objectives are: (1) To expand molecular-scale studies aimed at developing a more quantitative and mechanistic understanding of NOM adsorption and fractionation processes; (2) To determine the effect of sorptive fractionation on NOM reactivity with respect to trace-metal binding and mobility with respect to photoreactions; (3) To continue to integrate laboratory and field studies, with the ultimate long-term goal of better understanding adsorption fractionation phenomena as they actually occur in the field. The proposed research has broad significance within the hydrologic sciences, because NOM is ubiquitous and helps to control mineral soil aggregate stability, and photochemical reactions. As to practical applications, little is known about watershed processes controlling the nature of NOM in water supplies. The drinking water industry must address the problem of disinfectant, with chlorine or ozone and both reactivities depend in large part on NOM aromaticity doc11306 none Award This is a study of cognitive styles (such as the visualizer-verbalizer distinction) people (both students and professionals) use in thinking through and learning science and mathematics (specifically in the topic area of kinematics). The project has two goals: (1) To investigate and revise the traditional verbalizer-visualizer cognitive style dimension, including the possibility that more than these two basic styles exist (such as object and spatial visual styles). This approach is based on findings and methods from cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience to conceptualize the nature of cognitive style and its neural underpinnings. (2) To examine the instructional implications of these cognitive styles and their relevance to educational practice. The research will proceed along three lines: behavioral studies, classroom-based studies, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Based on evidence from this research, the investigators will develop theoretically-based guidelines for teaching students to process visually spatially and materials which build on the specific strengths of each type of thinker doc11307 none Maurice The work to develop molecular-scale understanding of the interactions of natural organic matter (NOM) with mineral surfaces would quantify how the preferential adsorption of higher molecular-weight and more aromatic NOM components to mineral surfaces (sorptive fractionation) affects both the transformation of terrestrial organic carbon and the transport of pollutants through porous media. The molecular-scale adsorption studies would pursue understanding of NOM adsorption mechanisms characterizing NOM molecular weight distributions in soil pore waters and shallow ground waters to determine whether the lognormal distribution model also holds in subsurface environments. They would quantify how sorptive fractionation of NOM affects the binding and mobility of trace metals and NOM photochemical reactivity. The three broad objectives are: (1) To expand molecular-scale studies aimed at developing a more quantitative and mechanistic understanding of NOM adsorption and fractionation processes; (2) To determine the effect of sorptive fractionation on NOM reactivity with respect to trace-metal binding and mobility with respect to photoreactions; (3) To continue to integrate laboratory and field studies, with the ultimate long-term goal of better understanding adsorption fractionation phenomena as they actually occur in the field. The proposed research has broad significance within the hydrologic sciences, because NOM is ubiquitous and helps to control mineral soil aggregate stability, and photochemical reactions. As to practical applications, little is known about watershed processes controlling the nature of NOM in water supplies. The drinking water industry must address the problem of disinfectant, with chlorine or ozone and both reactivities depend in large part on NOM aromaticity doc11308 none We propose a research project to investigate the impact of qualitative analysis on undergraduate students conceptual understanding and problem-solving skills within the realistic setting of large introductory physics courses. The impact of qualitive analysis (QA) will be investigated both within a web-based homework environment and during acttive-learning, in-class formative assessment activities facilitated by a classroom communication system. The applications of web-based homework, and classroom communication systems, are proliferating in large introductory science courses nationwide. Yet, little is known about how to structure web-based homework, and active-learning in-calss activities in ways that engage students in qualitive analyses that promote a deeper understanding of scientific concepts and skilled problem solving. The QA materials that will be ddeveloped and investigated will engage students in four types of qualitative analyses performed by skilled problem solvers corresponding roughly to four stages of expert-like problem solving: conceptual alnalysis, strategic analysis. quanititative analysis, and meta analysis. We will investigate the effectiveness of these materials and their impact on: a) students understanding on concepts and their ability to analyze and solve problems, b) students approach to, and level of success with, web-based homework, and c) students attitudes as they relate tot their web-based homework and in-class experience. The proposed research will utlimately infor the design and implemention of qualitative analyses in large, techonology-assisted introductory science courses in order to promote deep conceptual understanding and skilled problem solving in students doc11309 none Klemperer The Dabie belt of east - central China exposes extensive areas of ultra high pressure rocks, and considerable resources have been expended in understanding how these rocks representing metamorphism that occurred at depths of 100 km or more, reached the surface. This project seeks to add particularly to the subsurface data concerning these rocks by reprocessing a seismic line that was collected by the Chinese Geological Survey across the Dabie belt. Results should improve the knowledge of the subsurface geometry of these rocks and aid in understanding their ascent doc11310 none Biomedical engineering (BME) could be called an exemplar interdiscipline. An evolving field which applies engineering methods to biomedical problems, BME has broken down historical disciplinary barriers traditionally existing between the life sciences and engineering. While BME research activities frequently result in clinical therapies and medical treatments for the public, the field remains intimately tied to the engineering disciplines. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that as a novel field, biomedical engineering learning poses special challenges. Bioengineers must integrate a broad base of knowledge from several disciplines including engineering, computer technology, and cell and molecular biology. They must apply quantitative, analytical methods and representations to systems understanding. The challenge for cognitive science, if it is to play a significant role in 21st century science and engineering education, is to understand the nature of thinking and practice in interdisciplines such as BME, to investigate the developmental trajectory of expertise building, and to discover the ways that learning in such communities of practice can best be supported. To begin this foundational work, we seek NSF funding from the ROLE Program to conduct an in-depth, proof-of-concept case study of BME research and pedagogical practices in two related contexts. The study objective is to discover the salient questions related to BME learning and practice that can guided future work in other interdisciplines while setting a framework for more general thinking about the extremely important issue of cognitive development across disciplinary and epistemological boundaries. This is a three-year project aimed at both providing a base-line understanding of the cognitive practices employed within this interdiscipline and developing Biomedial Education (BME) learning environments enriched through this understanding of expert practices. The study will use a mixed method approach of cognitive-historical analysis and observational interview studies. The study will examine the development of cognitive practices employed in the creation and use of representation in the domain of biomedical engineering. The goal is to investigate how the design and use of representational systems or external forms of cognitive mediation support the development of this community and advance the understanding of BME scientists doing work in laboratories. Further, the study will chronicle and describe the work conducted in two cardiovascular laboratories associated with the NSF-funded Georgia Tech Emory Center for Tissue Engineering (GTEC). The goal is to understand how scientists create representations in the context of their lab work, their meetings and their private musings, and how these coordinate between the material substances of their work and the underlying concepts, structures and processes. The study will also investigate how students novices in the labs are apprenticed to the representational and methodological practices of the BME community. Implications from this study will be used to make recommendations for the two ERC-based educational programs, for the undergraduate BME program slated for fall at Georgia Tech and for the inaugural Georgia-Tech Emory joint Ph.D. program in biomedical engineering. These implications will inform the design and refinement of problems to be used in a year long introductory undergraduate BME course titled Problems in BME that uses a PBL approach. These problems and findings from the lab focused activities will be distributed to the cognitive science, engineering education and BME communities for others to use and build upon doc11311 none The low level jets (LLJs) that occur east of Andes Mountains in Central-South America and play a major role in the inter-basin transport of water vapor from the Amazon to the La Plata river basin are not well understood or predicted. This is, in part, due to poor observational coverage locally where spatial distribution of radiosonde sites is sparse and some of them have only one launch per day. This research project attempts to fill this observational gap and seek improved understanding and prediction of these LLJs. The research work is divided into three components. The first one is to study different features of the LLJs and their interactions with large-scale anomalies during the El Nino and La Nina summers using a global telescoping model that allows local high resolution. The second component is to launch radiosondes at two sites in Bolivia and one in Paraguay for three months in the Southern Hemisphere summer of - to obtain information on the diurnal and spatial structure of the LLJs. The third component will be to carry out short-term numerical simulations to calibrate and validate both the model and the reanalysis against the summer field observations. Understanding of these features may improve prediction with regional and global models. Collaborations between scientists in the U. S. and South American countries have great potential to elevate the research activities there and improve the long- term observational efforts locally. This last goal, if achieved, will have immeasurable benefits to the meteorological research and operational community doc11312 none The objective of this project is to develop a systematic theory on a posteriori error estimation and adaptive algorithms for finite element solutions of variational inequalities. A posteriori error estimates play an essential role in assessing the reliability of numerical solutions and in developing efficient adaptive algorithms. Although several standard techniques have been developed to derive and analyze a posteriori error estimates for finite element solutions of differential equation problems, they do not work directly for a posteriori error analysis of numerical solutions of variational inequalities. In the proposed research, the duality theory of nonlinear analysis will be employed as a basic mathematical tool for the development of a posteriori error estimates of numerical solutions of variational inequalities. Variational inequalities form an important family of nonlinear problems arising in a wide range of applications. A partial list of the applications where variational inequalities arise include contact mechanics, plasticity, non-Newtonian fluid flows, metal forming, metal extrusion, financial mathematics. A systematic approach will be developed to derive a posteriori error estimates and to form and test efficient, reliable adaptive solution algorithms for finite element approximations of variational inequalities. The research results will have a direct impact on many areas of science and technology doc11313 none PI s: Wang-Ping Chen, Department of Geology and Mid-America Earthquake Center, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL This is a seismic study of the Taiwan orogen, an important case of active collision zone that has been a focus of international research for the last 20 years. Since the devastating Chi-Chi earthquake sequence of , seismicity increased remarkably in and around Taiwan. Hundreds of large- to moderate-sized earthquakes have been well recorded by arrays of state-of-the-art instruments, providing high-resolution data to investigate active arc-continent collision. We plan to study about 300 earthquakes, including precise determinations of epicenters, focal depths, fault plane solutions, and seismic moments, in order to address some key questions in active collision. The young age and fast convergence of the collision zone are particularly favorable for resolving: 1) if spatial variations reflect time-progression of collision; and 2) if reactivation of pre-existing, extensional structures is important in the early stages of collision. We will focus on these topics and cast our interpretation in the context of geological and geophysical information gathered from various sources. In addition, we will study diffuse deformation to the east of the suture zone, in the interior of the western Philippine Sea. Recent marine data showed a surprisingly old age (early Cretaceous) for the colliding edge of the Philippine Sea. This region, underlain by oceanic lithosphere, is often assumed to be mechanically strong, thus behaving as the driving edge of the collision. The proposed work will constrain the thickness of the strongest part of the colliding oceanic lithosphere, and potentially provide clues to the anomalously shallow depth of the old sea floor doc11314 none Reports from widely separated areas of the Earth have revealed a hemispherical, if not global, accumulation of mercury in the environment. While it is clear that atmospheric deposition plays a major role, and that perhaps as much as half of the annual release of mercury into the atmosphere is anthropogenic in origin, important details of the mercury cycle and fluxes are uncertain. There are six naturally occurring isotopes of mercury. Certain physical, chemical and biochemical processes produce slight separations (fractionation) of these isotopes. As a consequence, the isotopic composition of environmental mercury can potentially provide key constraints to models of mercury cycling and fluxes. Since the degree of isotope fractionation during a process like condensation of atmospheric mercury is temperature dependent, the isotopic composition of mercury recorded in well-dated material such as peat cores might also provide information on paleoclimate. Recent developments make it possible to make very precise measurement of mercury isotope ratios and these measurements have revealed differences in the isotopic composition of mercury ores and industrially processed mercury. This project is designed to test the feasibility of applying mercury isotope systematics to environmental mercury and to develop routine techniques (by improving existing techniques) for high-precision, isotope-ratio measurements at environmental levels. In order to be able to demonstrate the feasibility, a peat core that archives a well-studied record of atmospheric mercury deposition is selected as sample material doc11315 none Prior to the middle Silurian (425 Ma) when the first plants with woody tissue appeared, the fossil record of plant life on land is represented only by spores. In the past few decades, Paleobotanists have established that this spore record began about 475 million years ago and that the earliest land plants were probably related to the present day bryophytes (mosses, liverworts, and hornworts). Recent discoveries of spores from Middle Cambrian rocks in Tennessee now put the origin of land plants back yet another 50 million years, extending the tenure of this early bryophytic biome. The purpose of this research project is to collect, describe, and study this new evidence for the greater antiquity of the plant kingdom. As we work on describing new species, we hope to establish the timing and stratigraphic extent of these microfossils. With the addition of stable isotope studies, we hope to expand their usefulness in helping to constrain global geochemical models of ancient atmospheres and carbon flux in ancient ecosystems. But the primary purpose of this research is to gain fundamental knowledge about diversity and extent of plant life on the surface of the Earth during the Cambro-Ordovician (545-450 Ma) time interval. Project goals will be achieved through a combination of original fieldwork and comparative examination of museum specimens. Educational outreach for this project will be accomplished via the world wide web doc11316 none Precise Age Calibration of the Late Pennsylvanian-Early Permian Time Scale: Implications for Global Correlation and Rates of Processes in the Late Paleozoic Era Clyde Northrup, V. Davydov, Walter Snyder The geologic time scale is a fundamental tool in Earth Science research - correlation of events globally, determination of absolute ages, and the estimation of rates of process all depend on the accuracy and precision of the time scale. This project will calibrate the Late Pennsylvanian through early Permian interval of the time scale through a combination of U-Pb zircon geochronology, stratigraphy, and multitaxa paleontology. Work will focus on the marine sedimentary sections in the foreland of the southern Ural mountains in Russia-Kazakhstan, an area that offers a fantastic opportunity for time scale calibration because the late Paleozoic rocks have numerous, well-preserved fossils in addition to many interstratified volcanic ash horizons that are amenable to radiometric dating doc11317 none Williams Surface deformation at subduction zones is generally interpreted in terms of movement on the thrust boundary between the subducting slab and the overriding plate. Elastic half-space dislocation (EHSD) models are frequently used to infer a slip distribution on the fault from surface geodetic observations and seismic hazard is evaluated in terms of which portions of the fault are fully or partially locked. These models are appealing because of their simplicity, but the assumption that all surface deformation is due to movement on a fault embedded in a homogeneous elastic half-space leads to some unrealistic behavior. Rather than considering the entire system, this project will consider only the portion of the overriding plate that behaves elastically over the time period of interest. Surface deformation occurs as a result of stress changes or rates applied along the thrust fault boundary and along the base of a finite elastic region (the overriding plate). This approach offers a more promising means of understanding the physics of subduction zones and makes fewer implicit assumptions than do EHSD models. Inversion results using this method will be compared and contrasted with those using EHSD models. The investigators will initially examine the Cascadia subduction zone in Oregon and Washington, and the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska. Additional study areas will include Japan, Sumatra, the Himalayas, and New Zealand. The results of this study should have important implications in fault friction studies and earthquake hazard research, and in understanding plate driving and resistive forces doc11318 none PI s: Chi-Yuen Wang and Douglas S.Dreger, University of California, Berkeley Created by oblique collision between the Philippine Sea plate and the Eurasian plate since ~5 Ma, the island of Taiwan is one of the most rapidly rising mountain belts in the world. The Chi-Chi (Mw=7.6) earthquake, the biggest to hit the island in the last century, has created an unprecedented amount of accurate data and hence a watershed of research opportunity towards a better understanding of earthquake hazards, with a potential to significantly advance the state of knowledge. A timely interpretation of this great amount of data may benefit ongoing programs of earthquake research both in Taiwan and in the US and the other part of the world. Numerical simulation has been widely used for understanding of earthquake hazards. It provides an effective means for testing different models; it may also be used to generate information at locations where data are not available, allowing interpolation between the recording stations. However, recent investigations have shown that the results of such simulation are particularly sensitive to the subsurface structures of the sedimentary basins in the vicinity of the earthquake. Hence, as the first step to a meaningful simulation, the proposed research will focus on defining the 3D structure of the sedimentary basin adjacent to the ruptured Chelungpu fault, using the existing data. The structure so reconstructed will be a pre-requisite for reliable simulations of ground motion and for the detailed study of earthquake source complexity. Finally, the reconstructed basin structure will be useful for other proposed projects and will be made available to the research community. The data required for reconstructing the basin structure in central Taiwan include 3D crustal velocity structure, multi-channel seismic reflection profiles, drilling data and gravity anomalies. The 3D crustal velocity structure has been recently published. Other data have been collected by the Chinese Petroleum Corporation (CPC) as part of its intensive hydrocarbon exploration in this area. The PI visited CPC in December of and succeeded in getting the collaborative support of Dr. Kuo-An Lin, director of the Exploration and Development Research Institute of CPC, to provide the needed data for the proposed research doc11319 none Gunnar Carlsson This award provides partial support for participants at a conference on Algebraic Topological Methods in Computer Science to be held at Stanford University, July 30 through August 3, . There has been increasing interest in the potential applications of algebraic topology in recent years. Topology has now become a valuable tool in computational geometry, as well as a method for studying various problems in algorithms and combinatorics. This conference will cover several different themes, including topology in computational geometry, topology and algorithms, topology in combinatorics, and topology as an aid to visualization. The speakers include many of the leaders in this area, including both mathematicians with an interesting in computational questions as well as computer scientists who are applying algebraic topology in various ways. We expect substantial participation from researchers in Silicon Valley who ae working in this area. Further information, including invited speakers, schedule of talks, and housing information, is available at http: math.stanford.edu and http: www.math.uwo.ca ~jardine at-cs.html doc11320 none Zeitler Large rivers are an important element in the geodynamic - evolution of orogens, as they define base level for drainage and removal of considerable material. However, at spatial scales consistent with crustal tectonics, it is difficult to decipher the incision histories of major rivers because the erosion they facilitate removes most of the direct evidence. Helium dating of apatite has the potential to provide timing information of river incision in orogenic areas. This project will examine the Indus River incision history as it crosses the Nanga Parbat metamorphic massif in Pakistan. Results will be useful in testing theories of tectonics and topography of the Himalaya doc11321 none Murphy Strike-slip faulting clearly dominates the western margin of the Tibetan plateau, and thrust and normal faulting dominates the southern margin, but how these two systems interact is unclear. This has led to two distinct classes of models, one emphasizing orogen-parallel strike-skip faulting and the other emphasizing southward extrusion of Tibetan crust along the southern margin. This project will examine the timing and kinematics of the Karakoram fault system and other faults in the juncture between the western and southern margins of the Tibetan Plateau in order to discriminate between the viable models. Results should clarify the role that strike-slip faulting may play in controlling the dynamics of the southern margin of Tibet in the High Himalaya of Nepal doc11322 none The Evolution of Developmental Potential in Vascular Plant Leaves: Linking Biological Process and Paleontological Pattern Andrew H. Knoll and N. Michelle Holbrook NSF Grant Developmental biologists study processes that give rise to form in plants and animals. Paleontologists are interested in development, as well, because variations in developmental patterning must fuel the changes in form documented by the fossil record. Plant fossils are uniquely well suited for the synthesis of developmental and paleontological perspectives on morphology. Plant cell walls constrain developmental pathways, and walls preserved in fossils record patterns of growth and development in ancient plants. Further, the requirements for photosynthesis have resulted in the repeated evolution of functionally and morphologically similar structures in plants through time. Studies of living plants suggest that universal relationships exist between particular leaf forms (including leaf shape and venation patterns) and developmental dynamics. To date, however, this relationship has been probed in only a limited number of plants. PIs will examine leaf development in all living groups with laminar leaves, particularly a variety of fern lineages, to determine the level of correlation between basic characteristics of venation patterns (which can be recovered from fossils) and growth dynamics. They will track the growth hormone auxin in growing leaves to determine the extent to which its important role in vascular patterning is conserved across all plants, and compare developmental aberrations in fossil and extant leaves as an independent test of the developmental similarity of leaves with similar form. Their goal is to produce a new developmental framework for interpreting the rich fossil record of leaf evolution doc11323 none PI: Greg Beroza Stanford University In this study we will develop an earthquake source model that simultaneously satisfies: (1) a previously derived stochastic model of the distribution and variability of slip on the fault consistent with observations of past earthquakes and (2) a simple physical model of the earthquake source that characterizes dynamic rupture by the distribution of stress drop and fracture energy. The result will be a model for earthquakes that is consistent with both observations of the earthquake source and rupture dynamics. This will provide a complete description of the earthquake source that includes variability in the slip distribution, rupture velocity, rise time, and shape of the slip velocity function in a self-consistent way. We will use this stochastic-dynamic source model to predict the level and variability of strong ground motion for scenario earthquakes. The use of a stochastic source description and output that consists of a suite of possible ground motion time histories, will merge naturally with the probabilistic approach that is usually adopted for seismic hazard analysis doc11324 none Freymueller Strong postseismic deformation continues today, more than 35 years after the Alaska earthquake. The objective of this research is to understand the physical mechanisms responsible for postseismic deformation and variations in plate coupling in the earthquake rupture area. The problem of understanding postseismic deformation cannot be separated from the problem of understanding the shallow seismogenic zone; we measure the sum of the two. For the postseismic deformation, the investigators aim to determine the relative importance of creep afterslip and viscoelastic relaxation in explaining the present and cumulative postseismic observations. Is a combination of the two classes of mechanisms required to explain the observations? If so, what is their relative importance? For variations in plate coupling, they aim to delineate as well as possible where the boundaries between strongly and weakly coupled zones lie. How sharp are these boundaries? How well do they correspond to the asperities determined from the rupture? How does the complex velocity observed in Prince William Sound relate to the transition from subduction to collision of the Yakutat block? The investigators will carry out an integrated study of GPS observations, analysis of related geodetic data including leveling and tide gauge measurements, and development of numerical models of crustal deformation applicable to both the specific tectonic environment of southern Alaska and to subduction zones in general. Continued measurements of crustal deformation in southern Alaska, combined with advanced dislocation and viscoelastic modeling, may allow the investigating team to unravel the physical mechanisms of postseismic deformation. The research will be a cooperative effort involving personnel from the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska and the Geodynamics Branch, Laboratory for Terrestrial Physics, Goddard Space Flight Center doc11325 none PI s: Charles M. Rubin, Central Washington Univ (EAR ) and Kerry Sieh, CalTech (EAR ) OF PROPOSED WORK Understanding the sequential rupture of faults is one of the fundamental goals in earthquake science. Simply stated, the question is: How do ruptures repeat on a fault and on systems of faults? Although this question is at the heart of both practical and academic aspects of our science, it remains largely unanswered, mostly because data are difficult to obtain. Three of the most important issues are 1) How regular are intervals between fault ruptures? 2) How repeatable is the pattern of slip on a fault? 3) How does geologic structure influence fault rupture? These are questions we propose to begin to tackle through paleoseismic and neotectonic studies in Taiwan. During our first year, our reconnaissance work would focus on paleoseismic investigations along the rupture of the Chelungpu fault and on preparation of a neotectonic and earthquake source map of all of Taiwan. The record of prehistoric seismicity along the Chelungpu at one site we hope to begin to test a few plausible hypotheses, ranging from unpatterned or random recurrence to highly clustered behavior. If successful, our work will justify continued work on understanding of earthquake faults and provide constraints on theoretical models of fault interaction. Our neotectonic earthquake source map will provide the context for future studies of fault behavior there doc11326 none PI s: Oglesby, David D., and Xu, Guanshui, University of California, Riverside The goal of this project is to investigate the effects of multiple earthquakes on the dynamics of dip-slip faults. Observations and models of dip-slip earthquakes have shown that non-vertical faults behave in ways that are quite different from vertical strike-slip faults. In particular, these faults display higher motion on the hanging wall, marked changes in the direction of slip along strike, and greater motion for thrust events than for otherwise equivalent normal events. This project will help determine if these and other effects persist over multiple earthquake cycles. Additionally, the researchers will investigate whether (under reasonable physical assumptions) dip-slip faults will reach a steady state over time, or if complexity in stress and slip will grow. Finally, the researchers will analyze the effect that the long-term evolution of the fault has on near-source ground motion. The project will use a combination of the finite element and variational boundary integral methods to model the dynamics of the rupture and slip process, as well as loading and nucleation during the interseismic period. The results will have implications for both the basic physics of the earthquake process as well as seismic hazard doc11327 none Freymueller This project is a test of hypotheses regarding viscoelastic response, aseismic creep, and combinations of both processes following great earthquakes. The collaborative effort, which will take place in Alaska, will make co-located absolute gravity observations (performed by scientists at the University of California, San Diego) and GPS observations (undertaken by scientists at the University of Alaska). Different models of postseismic viscoelastic relaxation predict observable gravity changes over km length scales, with a complex spatial pattern. To date, the viscosity profile is best determined by postglacial rebound studies. Gravity and GPS measurements offer the opportunity to obtain viscosity profile estimates for the Alaskan plate boundary. The area is especially interesting, as the viscosity of subduction zone materials may be very different from that beneath the centers of continental and oceanic plates. Aseismic creep is predicted to produce deformation of a more limited and markedly different spatial character than that of viscoelastic relaxation. Determining the contribution of aseismic creep in postseismic deformation is important in estimating recurrence intervals for great earthquakes. This project will recover and re-measure previously established absolute gravity stations in Fairbanks and Palmer, Alaska. The two stations are near the minimum and maximum predicted gravity change in the far-field for proposed viscosity models. The measurements are also co-located with existing continuous GPS stations. Comparisons with prior data will be used to test the method, and to provide the basis for model testing doc11328 none Eichelberger This proposal seeks support for the PIs to participate in internationally collaborative geochemical investigations of samples now being obtained during the first phase of the Unzen Scientific Drilling Project (USDP), Japan. USDP is a developing project of the International Continental Drilling Program (ICDP), which seeks to use drilling as a tool to advance understanding of fundamental processes of continental crust. The United States is a major partner and funding source for ICDP, through the National Science Foundation. The goal of USDP is to understand the eruptive behavior of Unzen as representative of an important class of andesitic arc volcanoes. This is to be done through a program of drilling, borehole observation, and core analysis in complement with ongoing surface geological and geophysical studies as well as the remarkable suite of geophysical and geochemical observations made during the recent eruption. That devastating episode occurred during to , claimed 44 lives, and did some $2 billion in damage. In the first phase of the project, for which support is requested through this proposal, flank holes of 750 m and m are being drilled to the base of the edifice in order to obtain a complete physical and chemical record of the volcano s activity. Simultaneously, and also to be supported under this request, planning will be undertaken for the second phase in which multiple core sections through the conduit will be obtained in order to address problems of magma transport and degassing. These observations will aid in understanding the paradox of effusive eruption of water-rich magma. The overall scientific rationale and plan for this undertaking are presented in the proposals to ICDP and will be repeated in condensed form here to provide context. ICDP itself supports drilling only, not the associated science, hence the need for this request. Recent eruptions of Unzen, Pinatubo, and Soufriere Hills volcanoes have graphically demonstrated the concept that injection of mafic magma into a crustal slush is an important petrologic process and a volcanic trigger. The high visibility of these events has served to strengthen a dialog between workers on volcanic and plutonic rocks, and reinvigorated the investigation of mafic enclaves and disequilibrium phenocryst assemblages. A basic question has become: how do we fit these products of open system behavior of magma systems, produced by mafic recharge or replenishment, into the broader picture of crustal plutonism and volcanism? A subset of that question, which this proposal seeks to answer, is: What are the long term-petrologic consequences of repeated mafic inputs to the crustal magma system? Studies to date have elucidated single events as sampled by eruption products or viewed the end product of many such events in the form of mafic and silicic layered intrusions (MASLI). We wish to look at the time series provided by 500,000 years of Unzen eruptions, to characterize the inputs to the system and understand their influence on its chemical evolution. The work will be coordinated with complementary efforts in Japan on dating the sequence and documenting the geologic and chemical evolution of the volcano doc11329 none PI s: J. Revenaugh, UC Santa Cruz The scattering of elastic waves by heterogeneities in the Earth is an obvious and dominant source of waveform complexity at high frequencies, producing slowly decaying trains of energy that are visible in records for several minutes following primary (geometrical) arrivals. Studies attempting to characterize the nature of scattering traditionally have treated it either as a regionally stationary statistical process, or have restricted attention to the coherent portion of the scattered wavefield produced by crustal layering. Both approaches have yielded valuable results and will continue to do so, but each makes restrictive assumptions about the nature of scattering that ultimately limit their utility. We have developed an alternative approach, utilizing a variant of an algorithm developed by the oil industry to image scattering structures in the crust and upper mantle using regional array (aperture of order 100 km) recordings of teleseismic earthquakes. The method has been applied to data from the Southern California Seismic Network and the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory array. The results from both arrays reveal an intriguing and potentially very important geographic correlation of the strength of scattering with the density of background and aftershock earthquakes. More importantly, these results provide an all-important proof of concept that it is possible to extract reliable structural information at scale-lengths less than average station separation. In our proposal, we document a work plan to improve upon the imaging paradigm employed by our current method (referred to as Kirchhoff coda migration, or KCM) through better treatment of the physics of elastic scattering, more accurate wavefield summation, the incorporation of three-component recordings, and a regularized inversion. In so doing, we will continue to honor the usual exigencies of regional and local array recordings of earthquakes: irregular instrument deployment, data dropouts, extended source signatures (waveform complexities due to the earthquake rupture process and near-source structure), station-site effects and limited illumination back azimuths. Our goal is the production of canned algorithms of broad-spread application to the imaging of crustal and uppermost mantle scattering structures by both the PASSCAL community and to users of permanent dense local and regional array data. We will apply the algorithms to data in hand from Southern California and the island of Hawaii doc11330 none Collaborative Research. Graptolite Macroevolution: Phylogenetic Analysis and Testing Hypotheses of Directional Change . Charles E. Mitchell and Daniel Goldman. One of the most contentious issues in evolutionary theory is the notion of progress. Some scientists have argued for a qualified expectation of progress in the evolution of major groups while others have argued that we should expect evolutionary histories that are dominantly non-progressive. Efforts to quantify evolutionary patterns have produced conflicting results. Thus, the question of whether natural selection leads to long-term progressive trends remains controversial and frustrating. The central goal of the proposed research is to determine if there were significant progressive evolutionary trends within a group of fossils called graptolites. Graptolites are a group of extinct marine organisms that flourished from approximately 505 to 310 million years ago. The graptolite fossil record offers an outstanding opportunity to make a rigorous test of directional evolution for two reasons. First, graptolite evolutionary patterns have long been used as textbook examples of progressive evolution. Secondly, the fossil record of graptolites is exceptionally good, and their temporal and biogeographic distributions have been intensively studied. The work proposed here is expected to contribute substantially to an increased understanding of the mechanisms of graptolite evolution and their pathways of descent. It is also expected that it will lead to improvements in the methods paleobiologists employ to study evolutionary pattern and process. Both of these outcomes are likely, it is thought, to positively effect the broader issue of testing the fossil record for evidence of progress in evolution and the means by which it might occur doc11331 none Samson Substantial advances have been made in recent years in the understanding of the geological evolution of several major North American and European pan-African Neoproterozoic (750-550 million year old) terranes, but there is still a fundamental gap in the knowledge of pan-African orogenic belt evolution in Africa itself. Much of the uncertainty about the accretionary history of the African Neoproterozoic orogens stems from the limited database of reliable radiometric ages of structurally important units, combined with a lack of detailed modern kinematic analysis in these deformed regions. These critical data are being collected by performing combined structural, uranium-lead geochronological, and neodymium-lead-hafnium isotopic analyses of one of the pivotal Neoproterozoic African orogens, the Anti-Atlas orogen of Morocco. Through a detailed structural analysis of the deformed rocks in the region, combined with high precision uranium-lead zircon age determinations, many significant questions about the accretionary history of the southern Anti-Atlas belt are being answered. Such questions include the age and timing of obduction of ocean-floor crust (ophiolites), the relationship of these ophiolites to one another, the connections between arc-terranes to the north with ophiolites and an associated blueschist belt to the south, the age and nature of the basement of these terranes, the degree of interaction of basement with Neoproterozoic magmas, and the timing of accretion of these terranes to the West African Craton. Through modern, multi-disciplinary studies the geological family-tree of the circum-Atlantic terranes with the orogens surrounding the West African Craton is being established doc11332 none The proposed research is about the use of optimal control theory and modern numerical linear algebra techniques to improve existing power control schemes and to formulate and solve more general and more realistic formulations of power control problem in 3-G wireless CDMA networks. The first two parts of the proposal deal with the deterministic power control problem and its variants, and the third part is on stochastic versions of the same problem. In the first part of the proposed research, an improvement of distributed constrained power control algorithm (PCPC), which is presently considered in the literature as the most efficient one, is suggested via the use of the acceleration techniques for fixed-point iterations and via the use Krylov subspace iterations (presently considered as the most efficient numerical method for solving systems of linear large scale algebraic equations). The second part of the proposal considers an optimal fast closed-loop SIR-based power control scheme for 3-G wireless CDMA network, based on the recent research work of the author of this proposal and his doctoral student. In addition of being optimal, the scheme obtained theoretically converges in one iteration. This scheme follows perfectly channel variations and assumes that the link gains constantly change in time. Due to the fact that the scheme needs a scalar discrete-time estimator (predictor), it practically converges in 4-5 iterations. Simulations on a CDMA system demonstrate the effectiveness of the optimal power control algorithm and its superiority over the corresponding IS-95 algorithm and the present version of the DCPC algorithm. As a future research topic, a comparative analysis between the optimized power control algorithm and the improved versions of the DCPC algorithm (accelerated and Krylov subspace based) to be obtained in the first part of this proposal, is suggested first. Secondly, since during optimization, the weighted sum of the transmission power and the SIR (signal-to-interference) error, are jointly optimized, the power control problem can be put in the framework of Nash dynamic games. It is suggested to extend the optimized power control results to capture the conflict situation among users in a wireless network, which leads to the formulation of a Nash dynamic game problem. The third part of this proposal deals with the stochastic formulation of the power control problem. This is a pretty much new and widely open research problem. The basic problem formulation extends the deterministic optimized power control problem to a stochastic environment, and leads to the linear power evolution equation with additive Gaussian white noise. This problem formulation assumes that either link gains or background noise or both are modeled as Gaussian white noise stochastic processes. Its variant of colored background noise and colored link gains noise are also suggested for future research. In addition, more realistic situations of state- and control-dependent noise using optimal control theory results will be considered. The control variables will be the ones that regulate the convergence process of the state variables (transmission powers and SIR errors) to their optimal values in a noisy environment. Note that the state- and control-dependent noise optimal control problems in discrete-time domain have been solved recently in the optimal control literature. In the final stage of this proposal, it is suggested to study the power control problem assuming that the link gains change according to Poisson stochastic processes. The impact of the proposed research will be in the area of improvements of the capacity of 3-G wireless CDMA networks, reliability of quality of service (QoS) and durability of user s battery life. All these will be achieved by controlling interference in an optimal manner doc11333 none Tullis This research will investigate deformation mechanisms in quartzo-feldspathic rocks with the aim of enhancing our understanding of deformation history of the crust as well as to facilitate accurate modeling of the stress levels and stain partitioning in different tectonic settings. The investigators will work on 3 research projects. First they will complete an experimental calibration of the recrystallized grain size piezometer for the 3 recrystallization mechanisms and corresponding dislocation creep regimes previously identified in quartz, and will test them with application to a natural shear zone which spanned a wide temperature range including all 3 regimes. Second, they will complete an experimental study of the processes by which a relatively small amount of weak mica in a quartza-feldspathic aggregate becomes interconnected and dispersed, leading to profound strain weakening and localization into ductile shear zones. Third, they will complete a reconnaissance experimental study of the variation in deformation mechanisms and strength across the plagioclase solid solution series. Based on that study the investigators will choose 2 or 3 key compositions for further stepping experiments in a molten salt assembly to determine flow law parameters doc11334 none Brown The style, magnitude and timing of Tertiary deformation in the central Tibet Plateau remain poorly known, but such information is central to discriminating among the various models for the origin of plateaus. Subsurface data is required to document accurately the amount of shortening and other parameters. A series of seismic lines have been obtained by the China National Star Petroleum Corporation and these data have been made available for this project. Reprocessing and interpreting these data are expected to greatly improve understanding of Tertiary deformation on the Tibet Plateau doc11335 none In the aseasonal rain forests of Southeast Asia, ants of the genus Crematogaster live exclusively inside stems of trees in the genus Macaranga (Euphorbiaceae), forming an obligate partnership from which both parties benefit. The ants remove vines and herbivores from their hosts and subsist exclusively on food bodies produced by the plants and honey-dew from scale-insect which they tend inside the stems. The interaction involves ca. 8 ant lineages and ca. 26 host species. Based on a molecular phylogeny of the Crematogaster, we will investigate evolutionary trends in their association with Macaranga hosts. In particular we will examine correlations between host traits and ant traits that influence patterns of association. Preliminary results indicate that the presence or absence of copious epicuticular wax blooms on the stems of Macaranga have played an important role in determining the identity of the ant tenants on Macaranga. We also aim to address some of the mechanisms that underlie the phylogenetic patterns in host association, for example, what are the relative contributions of contemporary and historical processes in explaining patterns of association? Additionally, using the molecular phylogeny and Scanning Electron Microscopy, we seek to resolve species limits in the ants as suggested by morphological data. Because the integrity of our conclusions are contingent upon the assumption that the Macaranga-inhabiting ants form a natural group, we will verify the monophyly of the ants by including in the molecular phylogeny other members of their subgenus not found with Macaranga. The ecology, systematics and biogeography of Macaranga have been thoroughly investigated, affording a more holistic understanding of the system beyond an investigation based solely on the ants. The phylogenetically comprehensive scope of our study will afford an evolutionary perspective to the growing body of research on the ecological aspects of this interaction. This study will provide a comparison for other phylogenetically-based ant-plant studies and help illuminate ecological and evolutionary themes in ant-plant mutualisms. Contrasts with mutualistic systems where symbionts are directly inherited from the previous generation (such as yucca and yucca moths, and figs and fig wasps) may reveal why cospeciation more often explains the evolution of pollinating mutualisms than it does ant-plant mutualisms doc11336 none PI s: Jeffrey Park and Vadim Levin, Yale University Plate tectonics is driven largely by the sinking of oceanic plates at the deep-ocean trenches of subduction zones, the most common type of convergent boundary between distinct plates. The mantle wedge lies between the overriding and the sinking plates at a subduction zone, a buried strip of olivine-rich rock typically 100-200-km thick and 100-400-km wide. The chemistry and dynamics of the mantle wedge determine arc volcanism, a major product of the plate-tectonics heat engine. The mantle wedge also influences the accretion of continents, which can grow by the successive accumulation of volcanic arcs. Geologists can track the descending plate in a subduction zone by the locations of deep-focus earthquakes, but have had less success tracking the motion of the mantle wedge. Theoretical models for wedge flow differ between (1) a 2-D corner flow driven by shear-coupling to the descending plate, (2) a stagnant wedge that is already transforming to a stable continental plate, (3) trench-parallel flow induced by 3-D geometric effects, such as the rollback of the sinking oceanic plate. This project will detect sheared rock in the mantle wedge, deformed by its flow, by using seismic indicators of elastic anisotropy in the sheared rock. These seismic indicators include shear-wave birefringence, and the partial conversion of P waves (compressional) to S waves (shear) in seismograms from distant earthquakes. Preliminary results suggest that strong trench-parallel shear can develop at the top of the subducting plate, and that changes in rock fabric exist and are detectable within the mantle wedge itself doc11337 none Hannah The magma source for Proterozoic massif-type anorthosite complexes and the origin of massive sulfide bodies found in some of those complexes remain unresolved problems. We propose that rhenium-osmium (Re-Os) concentrations and Os isotope ratios for oxides, sulfides, and silicates from two well-studied anorthosite suites will shed light on these issues. Most models based on geochemical data suggest that anorthosite complexes are derived from mantle melts that pond and fractionate at the base of the crust, and are then variably contaminated by crustal materials during ascent. Considerations from phase equilibria, however, suggest that parental magmas are derived by partial melting of a gabbroic source, presumably in the lower crust. Os isotope ratios, which are particularly sensitive indicators of crustal melting or assimilation, should help discriminate between competing models. High the initial 187Os 188Os ratios in sulfides from Proterozoic anorthosite complexes suggest dominance of crustal Os. It is unclear, however, whether the crustal Os was acquired by selective volatilization and incorporation of crustal sulfide, wholesale assimilation of bulk crust, or derivation of parental melts by partial melting of a crustal gabbroic source. We will compare Os isotopic data from two systems - the apparently sulfide-free Laramie Anorthosite Complex in Wyoming, and the sulfide-bearing Hakefjorden Complex in SW Sweden - to estimate the most likely source for the sulfides and their contained metals. The results could offer an exploration tool for distinguishing sulfide-poor and sulfide-rich systems doc11338 none Rose Volcanic eruptions produce complex clouds of gas, ash and aerosol mixtures which can be observed in the Earth s atmosphere for minutes to years. Their dynamics, and the chemistry and physics of their evolution, are poorly known yet form the basis for our understanding and mitigation of aircraft hazards, local to regional health effects from fallout, and the potential for global climatic impact. Because the combination of volcanologic, geographic, and atmospheric settings is largely unique for each event, a process-oriented study combining observations, modeling, and laboratory efforts, is warranted. In this proposal, we plan to integrate remote sensing studies of several key examples of volcanic clouds from activity of the past 10 years. We combine numerical models of volcanic eruptions that include microphysical processes, ground-based observations of fallout materials, direct sampling of the clouds, meteorological data and lab-based studies of ash ice particles. Emphasis is placed on the evolution of volcanic clouds during a period lasting hours to about one week. The direct results of our efforts are expected to clarify issues related to the mechanisms of fallout and hazards of fine ash, the conversion of SO2 to sulfate, and the role of ice in various reactions and processes. The results are important in understanding a wide range of local and global scale environmental effects of eruptions, ranging from livestock poisoning to respiratory disease to hypercanes to climate change to mass extinctions. They are also significant to the mitigation of hazards to aircraft. We focus on four eruptions, all for which we have amassed considerable observational data and experience, and which span a range of volcanic and atmospheric environments: (1) The February 26, Hekla fissure eruption, which represents an ash-poor example and which fortuitously has important validation information associated with it; (2) The December 26, eruption at Soufriere Hills Volcano, Montserrat, which is marked by significant interaction with the ocean; (3) The three subplinian Spurr eruptions which have unusually extensive and complete observational constraints; and (4) The climactic June 15, Pinatubo event, the largest well-documented eruption of the past century doc11233 none To attempt to constrain the future effects of global warming, geologists are increasingly focussing studies on periods of warm climate in the rock record. One of most representative intervals of such warm, greenhouse climate occurred in the Cretaceous Period from 140 to 65 million years before present. Recent investigations of Cretaceous climate have shown rapid swings that seem to have occurred over millennia or less. These changes had dramatic effects on evolution. One of the major problems facing geologists in constraining the exact environmental effects of these warming events is that they took place over periods an order of magnitude shorter than that resolvable using traditional techniques to date rocks. Thus we cannot determine the rates of important processes such as evolution nor can we constrain the fluxes of materials such as CO2 between reservoirs. This collaborative, multidisciplinary project involving the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Brown University and consulting scientists at other universities seeks to improve the precision and accuracy of the Cretaceous time scale by: (1) compiling time scales based on the fossil record (biostratigraphy) of microscopic marine organisms (foraminifera and nannoplankton) with higher resolution than previously attainable; (2) refining the calibration between time scales based on biostratigraphy, reversals in the Earth s geomagnetic polarity, and fluctuations in the Earth s orbit that are all recorded in rocks, (3) improving the correlation between biostratigraphy and recently acquired radiometric age dates; (4) calibrating large portions of the Cretaceous time scale to elapsed time using the orbital time scale, and (5) correlating and scaling the different stratigraphic elements in a logical fashion. We also propose to publish this time scale and associated data in a user-friendly format so that all geologists can estimate ages of samples with the minimum of error. To do this we will make the time scale available to the geologic community on the world wide web as downloadable Excel files. Combined with the biostratigraphic work that will be conducted in well-known rock exposures from the deep sea and land areas, these Excel files will include macros that calculate the ages of samples from their depths. Thus all a geochemist, for example, needs to do to plot data is to download the file and input the depth of samples. All of our data will also be archived on the web providing a ready means of future revision. The new generation time scale proposed will provide improved precision and resolution that will enable geologists to study abrupt changes in the Cretaceous Earth. Moreover, the mode of communication of the time scale will improve accuracy in diverse geologic applications doc11340 none The objective of this work is to examine systems with micro-level data for which an equilibrium of some sort is to be reached. One important example is the Gas Systems Analysis Model (GSAM), a modular, reservoir-based model of the North American natural gas system developed for the U. S. Department of Energy. In its current form, GSAM is a large-scale nonlinear program that computes estimates of market equilibrium prices, quantities, flows, and other values based on the notion of maximizing total surplus less transportation costs. Unlike the classical approach in which supply curves are known in closed form, GSAM builds supply curves from the bottom up using a data base of over 17,000 natural gas reservoirs taking into account both the interregional as well as intertemporal interdependence of these curves. While this bottom up feature provides a good deal of realism, it renders the equilibrium computations much more difficult due to the lack of closed form supply curves. The proposed work has two main objectives. First, analyze the GSAM market equilibrium problem more generally by noting the functional relationships between seasonal market prices (Lagrange multipliers) and demand for gas, storage activity levels, investment decisions, etc. using the variational inequality problem (VIP) and nonlinear complementarity problem (NCP) formats. The second main task is to develop efficient methods to reach a solution to GSAM-type problems exploiting the particular problem structure. Iterative methods from optimization and equation solving is used to develop appropriate algorithms for this task. Due to recent advances in information technology, it is now possible to model the activities of individual agents in rather complicated systems. Examples of applications in scientific and engineering settings using micro-level data abound. While simulations of these systems can be rather elaborate using for example, complicated if-then type rules, determining equilibrium behavior of the system in a rigorous manner can be challenging. Part of the difficulty is due to a lack of closed form expressions for describing the system. The proposed work will examine one such system in its general form and develop both a theory for equilibrium as well as efficient mathematical algorithms to compute such a solution. The anticipated impact of this work is to greatly advance the state of the art in solving large-scale equilibrium problems that use micro-level data for modeling the economic behavior of individual agents. This is significant since many similar systems are now modeled that contain no closed form expressions for key elements but for which an equilibrium solution is desirable doc11198 none Jacobson Barth The late Mesozoic to early Tertiary geology of California is characterized by an arc-forearc-accretionary wedge sequence produced during convergence with the Farallon plate. These elements have been severely disrupted in southern California, resulting in eastern facies being emplaced over western and underthrusting of the enigmatic Pelona-Orocopia-Rand Schists. This project will follow up on prior results of work on this system that indicate eastward younging in the schists, and that provenance of the schists matches the provenance in the overlying basement rocks. The results of this extensive detrital zircon dating effort is expected to discriminate between several possible tectonic scenarios for the development of this complex geology. Results are key to understanding the late Mesozoic to early tertiary tectonic environment of the California sector of the western cordillera doc11342 none PALEOBIOLOGY AND TAPHONOMY OF LOWER CAMBRIAN BURGESS SHALE-TYPE DEPOSITS OF NEVADA AND GREENLAND Loren E. Babcock This study involves the paleobiology and taphonomy (postmortem history) of two Early Cambrian Burgess Shale-type biotas from western Nevada and North Greenland. The biotas, both from the Laurentian (North America-Greenland) paleocontinent, represent two of the oldest known assemblages of exceptionally preserved animals in the world. These assemblages overlap in part the time of the Cambrian adaptive radiation of multicellular animals. They provide important windows into the evolutionary history of the Early Cambrian, and they should provide information about the conditions under which exceptional preservation occurred. The primary purposes of this work are: 1, to collect and document the biota of the new Nevada site and continue documentation of the biota of the Greenland site; 2, to document and interpret information about the taphonomy of the Nevada and Greenland sites; 3, to describe and interpret trace fossils associated with the body fossils; 4, to describe and interpret the stratigraphic and sedimentologic context of exceptional preservation in the Nevada and Greenland sites; and 5, to determine the biogeographic affinities of nonmineralized organisms present in the Early Cambrian biotas. Completion of this work will provide important information about biologic diversity on the North America-Greenland paleocontinent prior to the terminal Early Cambrian extinction. This, in turn, is expected to provide a strong basis for biogeographic comparison with Early Cambrian biotas of Gondwanan areas, and a basis for comparison with biotas from the Middle Cambrian of Laurentia doc11343 none Collaborative Research: A Sequence-, Chemo-, Biostratigraphic Study of Late Early Cambrian Rocks, Southern Selwyn Basin, Mackenzie Mountains, Canada This project investigates how early episodes of animal evolution, which occurred roughly 520 million years ago during the so-called Cambrian radiation, were influenced by environmental changes. To investigate these issues we will study the sedimentology, paleontology, and geochemistry of the Early Cambrian rocks of the Mackenzie Mountains, Northwest Territories, Canada. This is a remote location, but it has a remarkably complete geological record for the Early Cambrian interval. This gives us a window into the life forms and environments of both shallow and deep water settings, a situation found nowhere else for this time period. The types of environmental changes we will study include both changes in the relative level of the seas as well as temperature changes: the two are partly linked. During the Cambrian radiation there may have been rapid oscillations between relatively warm and cold climates. To determine the nature of these environmental changes, it is necessary to understand the variations in the rock types, which we will study in detail. It is also necessary to study when these variations occurred; this we will accomplish by documenting the sequence of fossil species and through use of chemical isotopes. Evolutionary changes and extinction events in this region, and elsewhere, and their relationship to the environmental changes, will also be documented. In this manner, we will not only come to better understand the nature of the environmental changes that occurred during this critical interval in earth history, but we will also determine how one of the key episodes in the history of life may have been fundamentally driven by climatic changes doc11344 none Peck This proposal details approaches for using the oxygen isotope systematics of metaquartzites to: (1) retrieve peak ( 800 deg C) garnet-quartz fractionations for thermometry and (2) use water-controlled retrograde diffusion in rutile and other trace phases as a paleohygrometer. Pure ( 90% Qtz) quartzite is the ideal lithology for this study because it satisfies the infinite reservoir assumption with respect to modeling oxygen diffusion in accessory minerals. Laser fluorination will allow high-precision analysis of equilibrium mineral pairs. Samples will be selected from well-studied localities in the southern Grenville Province with published constraints on metamorphic conditions (T, P, cooling rates, and fluids). The thermometry portion of this project will use the slow oxygen diffusion rate in garnet (as determined by experimental studies) as a way to see-past multiple thermal events in polymetamorphic rocks. Garnet commonly forms below its closure temperature, so it will preserve oxygen isotope ratios from garnet formation even through subsequent granulite-facies metamorphism. Quartzite is essentially momomineralic, so closed-system retrogression will not affect quartz-garnet fractionations because quartz will have no other minerals with which to exchange during cooling. Samples will be rigorously characterized with respect to oxygen isotope ratio, and also with BSE, CL, and conventional microscopy to determine if they have behaved as closed systems. This thermometer will be extremely useful in high-grade polymetamorphic terrains where more conventional cation thermometers are not applicable. Experiments have shown that oxygen diffusion rates in minerals are a strong function of water fugacity. The proposed research will use published experiments and measured oxygen isotope ratios to constrain water fugacities in slowly cooled metamorphic rocks. Intermineral fractionations and isotopic zoning will be used, in conjunction with diffusion models, to develop an oxygen isotope hygrometer. Rutile will be a focus of this study because it behaves in the opposite manner to other rock-forming minerals with respect to water effects on oxygen diffusion rates (in rutile water causes slow oxygen diffusion). Thus, when used with other minerals, rutile provides good leverage for determining the interplay between water fugacity and oxygen diffusion rate. This oxygen isotope hygrometer will allow the detection of even chemically unreactive fluids which leave no chemical signature but can still flux melting and weaken rocks. The last decade has seen an explosion of experimental work on oxygen diffusion rates and equilibrium oxygen isotope fractionation factors, and also the modeling of oxygen exchange between minerals during cooling. Unfortunately, few studies have combined these resources with the high precision, small sample sizes, and high spatial resolution available from laser fluorination to allow genuinely new information to be extracted from rocks. High-temperature thermometry and hygrometry are important avenues of timely research which will provide new tools for understanding deep-crustal processes doc11345 none Eugene D. Humphreys The investigators address North America plate dynamics by modeling the forces applied to the plate and comparing the predicted stresses with those inferred from the style of ongoing tectonics and those observed in drill holes. Modeling is done with the finite element method. Input forces applied to modeled North America include boundary and basal forces, and those generated internal to the plate (arising from potential energy variations such as those created by topography). The relative magnitudes of applied forces are estimated to account for stress and deformation information. Furthermore, because the magnitude of many of the forces applied North America are well known a priori (such as ridge push), the magnitude of all the the applied forces will be well constrained. Tectonic stresses deform North America at a rate inversely proportional to its strength. The investigators model strength with a viscous rheology, which they estimate by ratioing the calculated stress with the (reasonably well known) strain rate. The research can be divided into several tasks: estimation of input fields, description of an appropriate finite element representation of North America, evaluation of model predictions against observables, and as modeling progresses toward resolving the input fields and assessment of their uniqueness doc11346 none Origin of Siltstone Facies in the Permian Phosphoria Formation Alan Carroll Silty marine mudrocks represent one of the most volumetrically important sedimentary rock types, but their genesis remains very poorly understood. The proposed study will investigate siltstone facies contained within the Permian Phosphoria Formation in the western U.S. A regional sedimentologic and stratigraphic investigation will be conducted to assess the importance of suspension settling versus other depositional processes, and to examine the relationship of siltstone and other facies to changing sea level. Oxygen isotopic analyses of different quartz grain size fractions will be used to constrain their temperature of crystallization and thus their origin (reworked versus primary quartz). Finally, grain size distributions from siltstone and other silty facies will be measured at a number of widely distributed sites. These measurements, combined with high-resolution stratigraphic studies, will be used to examine grainsize trends across the Phosphoria sea doc11347 none Green Subduction zone magmas have geochemical signatures atypical of mantle-derived melts. The source of their distinctive geochemistry remains controversial, as considerable uncertainty exists about the nature of processes that transport elements from the subducted plate to the overlying mantle. A central issue is determining how much of the characteristic geochemical signature results from transport processes and how much is due simply to the composition of subducted materials. Another factor is the intrinsic characteristics of the mantle wedge. Correctly identifying the importance of these different factors is critical in attempting mass balance of elements at the subduction zone and hence, in determining the flux of continental material recycled into the mantle. Basalts of the northern Cascadia subduction system share tectonic and geochemical relationships with many convergent margin volcanic suites, but occur within a geophysically well-constrained hot subduction environment for which it can be shown that (1) the thermal state of the subducted plate varies along the convergent margin; (2) the nature of the subduction component added to the mantle wedge and or the state of mantle depletion likely changes along strike of the volcanic front; and (3) the subduction signature of the basaltic lavas probably reflects processes operating primarily within the forearc region. Because slab melting may occur under hot subduction conditions, these volcanic rocks provide a unique opportunity to evaluate the extent and nature of fluid versus slab melt (sediment and or basaltic crust) contributions to the chemical budget of arc source regions in the overlying mantle. This project will utilize major-element, trace-element, and isotopic compositions of primitive to near-primitive basalts to: (1) detail the nature of arc-parallel geochemical variations in the lavas and implications for melting processes within the mantle wedge; (2) evaluate the degree of mantle source depletion and heterogeneity prior to introduction of slab-derived fluxes; (3) quantify subduction fluxes (fluids or melts) recorded in the basalts along the volcanic front; and, (4) establish the influence of slab thermal structure on the extent and nature of mantle-slab interactions. The results will provide crucial information for identifying different factors controlling the nature and origin of subduction-related fluxes (in particular, sediment melts), and will place important constraints on proposed relationships between generation of intermediate-depth earthquakes and metamorphic reactions in the subducted plate benearth convergent margins doc11348 none PI: Anne F. Sheehan, University of Colorado, Boulder Seismic estimates of existence and depth distribution of crust and mantle discontinuities are important for constraining models of composition, rheology, and temperature in the Earth. This project includes development, testing, and application of new methods for receiver function imaging. A Kirchhoff-style migration methodology which utilizes a point-scattering approach to handle nonplanar and laterally discontinuous interfaces has been developed. An uncertainty in this analysis is the biasing effects of three-dimensional discontinuity structure that could falsely project features into two-dimensional models. The migration inversion will be extended to three dimensions, and include back-scattered energy. Proper evaluation of the accuracy and resolution of these P SV migration methods will require development of a synthetic seismogram method that can handle 3-D discontinuity topography and velocity heterogeneity and which will include all converted phases and surface reflections. A hybrid method will be implemented that will use ray theory to propagate a P wavefront to a finite difference grid that will span the region between the discontinuities and the surface. These techniques will be applied to regional data sets from the southwest Pacific and eastern California. These efforts are of great utility with appropriate data sets today and will become increasingly important with data sets that will be generated by the proposed USArray and similar projects doc11349 none This project focuses on the cognitive processes that represent personally significant goals and which provide for continuous self-evaluation. Recent theory and research suggests that such processes may be linked with underlying neurophysiological mechanisms for approach and avoidance, and that such a linkage accounts for the affective consequences of self-evaluation. However, few studies have been conducted to determine whether the cognitive and neurophysiological correlates are functionally associated. A model of self-regulation postulates two regulatory systems: the promotion (approach) and prevention (avoidance) systems. These systems are thought to operate in the pursuit of specific classes of interpersonal goals and could account for the associations observed among self-regulatory cognition, motivation, and affect. Furthermore, these systems have been characterized as self brain behavior systems and bi-directional functional links between self-regulatory cognition and each system s physiological substrates have been hypothesized. If the promotion and prevention systems constitute self brain behavior systems involving cognitive, motivational, affective, and neural processes, then activation of either system should induce: (1) a pattern of neural activation consistent with the priming task, (2) a distinguishable pattern of neural activation associated with the motivational orientation represented by the cue, and (3) a separately distinguishable pattern of neural activation, and associated behavioral and physiological responses, corresponding to the affective consequences associated with an anticipated positive or negative outcome within that motivational orientation. In addition, within the limits of the temporal resolution of available measures, these three patterns should be identifiable in sequence. The purpose of this research is to test the self brain behavior systems model by determining whether the promotion and prevention systems are reliably associated with specific, discriminable neural substrates. Three studies will examine whether the presentation of goals relevant to one of the two systems leads to simultaneous activation of characteristic cognitive, affective, and neurophysiological components of the two systems, both acutely (in the presence of relevant cues) and chronically (as individual differences). In Study 1, people will participate in a replication of previous priming research examining the affective consequences of exposure to self-relevant goals, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to quantify patterns of brain activation associated with four types of motivationally significant cues: promotion success, promotion failure, prevention success, and prevention failure. Study 2 will extend the fMRI priming method to the domain of autobiographical memory, again examining patterns of brain activation in response to the motivational significance of goal-relevant cues. In Study 3, college students who have already been assessed for individual differences in prefrontal cortical asymmetry via EEG will be administered a series of measures assessing motivational orientation and self-regulatory cognition, to test the hypothesis that individual differences in orientation toward promotion versus prevention will be associated with stable differences in prefrontal brain asymmetry doc11350 none Molnar In this ABR project the PI will continue work with Greg Houseman and colleagues that examines Rayleigh-Taylor instability relevant to the earth, with the ultimate goal of understanding how thickened mantle lithosphere can become gravitationally unstable. Most of the work until now has considered simple situations in which only one layer, that simulating mantle lithosphere overlies an inviscid fluid. They plan to examine more thoroughly the effect of an imposed horizontal shortening on a three-layered model: a light viscous layer (like crust) over a heavy viscous layer (like mantle lithosphere), which in turns overlies a layer (like asthenosphere) of low viscosity and slightly lower density than mantle lithosphere. The effect of buoyant crust can profoundly affect the nature of the instability, such that in some situations downwelling blobs of the dense layer form adjacent, not below, the thickest part of the overlying layer and therefore sink beneath the equivalent of the margins of mountain belts. Preliminary calculations show, not surprisingly, that the viscosity ratio that defines the transition between one or two downwellings depends also on the density of the upper layer, with lighter layers favoring two downwellings. The investigators plan to explore the parameter space more thoroughly, in particular, by quantifying the effects of different density ratios and thickness ratios of the two layers on the configuration of downwelling. They will construct phase diagrams that show the parameter ranges for which one or two downwellings occur and will examine non-Newtonian viscosity. They will consider the effects of somewhat different boundary conditions from those used so far. In particular, they plan to use conditions that do not mix varying strain rates at the top of the deforming layer, and instead consider how laterally varying viscosity might affect unstable growth. Finally, they will relate the calculations to geological and geophysical observations from belts where mantle lithosphere seems to have thinned or been removed entirely. Processes that motivate the study include the widespread normal faulting and post-orogenic volcanism in mountain belts, both of which must be associated with the evolving sub-crustal lithospheric structure doc11351 none Surveys with complex probability sampling designs involving clustering and stratification are a major source of empirical data for governmental and scientific use. The standard approach to survey inference is design-based, with statistical inferences being based on the sampling distribution with population values treated as fixed. This approach has been a powerful force for the development of objective statistical analysis of large surveys, with reliable operating characteristics under weak assumptions about the population. However, the design-based paradigm is too limited to handle: (i) the increased availability of data from a variety of sources, such as surveys, censuses and administrative records; (ii) increasing demands for analyses that go beyond simple descriptive information such as means and totals for large domains; (iii) the development and analysis of data masked to preserve confidentiality; and (iv) the analysis of data subject to unit and item nonresponse. These questions can be addressed by a model-based Bayesian approach, with models that capture the relevant features of the population under study and take into account important features of the sample design, and non-informative priors that limit subjectivity in the analysis. Bayesian methods are enjoying a resurgence in statistics, with the development of computational tools that make them practically feasible. However, the application of Bayesian methods to sample surveys remains very limited. The goal of this research is to develop useful, practical Bayesian methods for sample survey inference that have good design-based properties. The dissemination of public use data files is crucial to the research community in order to conduct research that forms the basis for rational policy decisions. This research will develop methods for disseminating detailed micro-data files that greatly reduce the risk of disclosure of the identity of respondents to a data intruder. Methods will be based on multiple imputation of key variables, an approach that allows for valid statistical inferences using existing software and limits the degree of information loss. The methods will be tested on large government surveys collected by the National Center for Health Statistics and other federal agencies. This research also will develop Bayesian methods for three topics in the statistical analysis of complex surveys: (i) the analysis of surveys where the sampled units have differential probabilities of inclusion; (ii) the handling of unit and item nonresponse in surveys; and (iii) the analysis of samples collected using rotating panel designs. This research is supported by the Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics Program and a consortium of federal statistical agencies under the Research on Survey and Statistical Methodology Funding Opportunity doc11352 none Jordan COLLABORATION FOR EARTHQUAKE RESEARCH The University of Southern California, in collaboration with the , Columbia University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, San Diego State University, Stanford University, United States Geological Survey, Golden, United States Geological Survey, Menlo Park, United States Geological Survey, Pasadena, University of California, Los Angeles, University of California, San Diego, University of California, Santa Barbara, and University of Nevada, Reno form the core of the newly organized Southern California Earthquake Center. Other academic institutes and private corporations participate as associate members in research projects. The Center is a regionally focused organization with the mission to gather new information about earthquakes in southern California, integrate knowledge into a comprehensive and predictive understanding of earthquake phenomena, and communicate this understanding to engineers, emergency managers, government officials, and the general public. It does this through the application of research findings from the various disciplines in earthquake-related science and engineering. Extensive data bases are being developed including seismicity, strong motion and geodetic data that are available to all users both within and outside the center through remote access such as the Internet. The Center leads a consortium of university and government scientists in development of a fixed array of Global Positioning System stations to monitor crustal distortion in southern California. The Center brings together scientists from core and participating institutions, a visiting scientist program, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the user community. It is also a highly effective intellectual training ground for undergraduate students, graduate students, and post-doctoral fellows. Earthquake hazard mitigation is also done through public information and education programs, museum displays, and the training of teachers and K-12 students. The center is led by Professor Thomas H. Jordan as Principal Investigator Center Director and Professor Thomas L. Henyey as Deputy Director doc11353 none Criss A new model of solute and isotopic transport in natural waters is being refined and tested. This model can quantiy the timescales of transport without ad hoc assumptions, about ixing groundwater and surface water components. Based on diffusion theory, storm events are treated as delta functions that induce a complex series of geochemical and physical responses. The transport equations are readily transformed into linear versions whose intercepts accurately retrodict the timing of the storm events, and whose slopes reveal the time constants for transport of each creochemical constituent. The basic concept is to study the natural system with perturbations provided by natural processes. Information gained onthe geochemical and isotopic response of surface streams and springs to storm events would determine the timescales of complex natural responses. Data colllected in the first stage of this project show that different parameters (ionic concentraions, total dissolved organic compounds, nutrients, sediment, oxygen isotopes, etc.) have in a qualitatively similar manner, explicable by the model, but that the timescales vary greatly among the parameters that collectively define the response of the natural system. Rigorous tests of this model will be conducted with geochemical and isotopic data collected from several sites within an unimpounded river basin (the Meramec Basin, eastem Missouri). This endeavor will be facilitated by an autosampler installed a karst spring at Washington University s Tyson Research Center, and a new autosampler nearby on the Meramec River. These programmable devices will allow intensive sampling to resolve timescales accurately, and will permit detailed comparisons of simultaneous groundwater and riverine responses to precipitation events. Key questions concerning the sources, the reactions (solubility, ion exchange, adsorption, biological uptake, etc.), the migration paths, and the timescales of pollutant and pathogen transport through surface and near-surface environments will be explored. The new approach appears to be applicable to diverse geochemical, physical, and isotopic constituents. It has the unique potential to resolve the complexity of natural systems using natural events doc11354 none Researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers are converging on the view that online communities of practice (CoPs) in the teaching profession can be powerful catalysts for improving teaching and facilitating systemic reform. Although the promise of online CoPs is compelling and theoretically sound, the reality of online teacher communities has been less promising. The reason, we believe, is that research into the marriage of TPD pedagogy and online technology is missing a necessary third component-the infrastructure for online CoP (as distinct from particular online TPD strategies). Research cannot continue to treat community as a side effect of a TPD intervention or the inevitable outcome of a Web portal or electronic network. We must study online CoP as a valid component of the education system in its own right or risk continuing the same pattern of a few irreproducible successes and many redundant failures as practitioners and providers struggle to keep pace with emerging technologies and the rapidly changing Web landscape. To move beyond the CoP promise toward measurable benefits for SMET teacher professional development on a national scale, we must conduct the research needed to better understand the social and organizational structures of online CoPs as an integral component of the teaching profession. To embark on this research agenda, we must also break out of the constraints that popular distance learning technologies place on the research by designing and building technological infrastructures that reflect and augment the social and organizational structures of a CoP. We will apply what we and others are learning about online education CoPs and their applications to design and prototype a new technical infrastructure for supporting and studying online CoPs. We will adopt a participatory, scenario-based design approach to develop our prototype infrastructure. Our project brings together a design team representing researchers (SRI and Virginia Tech), teacher educators (Pepperdine University), technology developers (WebCT, PBS), regional education support providers (New England Aquarium, AEL, Inc.), national TPD organizations (PBS TeacherLine), and our core constituency, TAPPED IN members. The team will also include experts in Web-based systems development and graphical user interface design. The basic design will be modular to enable us to plug in new capabilities as they emerge. The prototype infrastructure will serve as a platform for online CoP research and further development by many different organizations over the next several years. We will also document the design process, artifacts, and commentary on a public Web site and solicit input from the research and practitioner communities to widely disseminate knowledge of online CoP design issues and generate design guidelines that will inform technology research and development aimed at supporting online education communities doc11249 none Issen Wong Compaction bands, a recently identified type of localized deformation, form in high porosity sandstone, perpendicular to the direction of maximum compressive stress. They occur for stress states associated with the transition from brittle faulting to distributed cataclastic flow, where microstructural observations show damage partitioned between at least two damage mechanisms: axial microcracks that may grow and coalesce to form a shear fault, and pores that collapse while grains are crushed. Theoretical predictions from recent reassessments of the bifurcation approach to strain localization do not correlate well with the scarce existing experimental data. This proposal suggests that an inadequate constitutive model causes the discrepancy. Thus, a two-yield surface constitutive model, representing both damage mechanisms, will be used with experimentally derived constraints for the important material parameters to enable further theoretical analyses regarding the onset of localization. Experimental and theoretical results will be synthesized to extrapolate a model to predict failure modes and localization development in crustal settings for different stress states and loading paths. Recent theoretical works have also highlighted two potentially important, but previously neglected failure modes: dilation bands and dilating shear bands . A lack of data has hampered the mechanical analysis of analogous structures that structural geologists refer to as hybrid shear fractures or transitional tensile fractures. Theoretical work predicts formation of these bands in low porosity rocks under overall compressive loading. Thus, the proposed work also includes experimental and theoretical investigation of dilation band formation using low porosity rock in triaxial extension tests doc11356 none The origin of geographic diversity in the Bahamian land snail Cerion: the fossil history of modern patterns Glenn A.Goodfriend, Stephen J. Gould, and M. G. Harasewych The land snail Cerion is noteable for its extreme geographic diversity in shell morphology: very different forms occur adjacent to each other, with steep character gradients between them. This study is aimed at revealing the history and possible causes of the geographic diversity along a stretch of ca. 12 km of the east coast of Long Island, Bahamas, where 5 distinctive forms occur. Starting with the geographic patterns of the modern (living) forms, we will follow these patterns back in time through excavation and analysis of the Holocene fossil record of the snails present in the eolian sand deposits along the coast. Ca. 20-35 shells from each of ca. 25-30 sites will be dated by amino acid racemization (calibrated against a series of radiocarbon ages) and analyzed morphmetrically to obtain temporal and geographic series. PIs will evaluate several alternative scenarios concerning the origin of geographic diversity in these snails: 1. The patterns are relatively stable and old, resulting from in situ differentiation of geographically continuous populations of snails. Selection would be the primary cause of geographic diversity. 2. Geographic patterns are relatively dynamic and result from population dynamic processes such as dispersal and extirpation. These patterns could have various origins: a. Destriuction of Cerion populations across a broad region by, e.g., a hurricane, opens up a broad region for recolonization by snails originating from nearly sources or long-distance dispersal; the populations expand and meet. Broad scale environmental events would be the primary control of geographic diversity. b. Cerion populations are typically in a state of flux, with local extirpations and re-establishment of populations, sometimes from long-distance dispersal. Stochastic population processes and smaller scale environmental events (e.g., washover fans from storms) would be the primary control. Based on preliminary results, we can expect to have a detailed record of Cerion back to ca. - yr BP. A parallel study will look at the relationships of living forms using mDNA sequences. These studies will contribute to understanding the origin and maintenance of geographic diversity of organisms doc11357 none The role of fluid flow in the cooling history of metamorphic core complexes Christian Teyssier, University of Minnesota Mark Person, Indiana University The aim of this project is to quantify the effects of fluid flow on the thermal history of metamorphic core complexes during exhumation using a hydrothermal model that incorporates the kinematics of crustal deformation. The numerical model is constrained by field studies based on extensive structural, metamorphic, and thermochronologic data for the Shuswap metamorphic core complex, British Columbia. The modeling allows for quantitative comparison of heat transfer with rock thermochronology and fluid-rock isotopic exchange within the Shuswap system. The modeling helps to test the sensitivity of fluid flow to fault geometry, kinematics, and permeability in the upper crust (horst and graben, domino-style blocks, listric systems), as well as ductile flow and attending heat advection in the lower crust. The modeling also evaluates the effect that fluid flow has on heat distribution and geothermal gradients below the detachment zone, which has implications for the understanding of metamorphic zoning in core complexes. Quantitative results are being compared to the large-scale thermochronology database we developed in the Shuswap metamorphic core complex, British Columbia; this type of generic modeling is directly exportable to other metamorphic core complexes as well as rift zones. The research also sheds light on the systematics of fluid-rock interactions and thermal history in the detachment zones of the Shuswap metamorphic core complex. Towards this end, we are conducting a detailed thermochronologic study based on the fission-track and (U-Th) He methods on two transects across the Columbia River detachment and fault system that bounds the metamorphic core complex to the east. In the same regions, we are examining fluid-rock interaction by analyzing the stable isotope signature and fluid inclusions within veins, fault rocks, and unfractured rock. This part of the study constrains the nature of the fluids, the extent of fluid pathways, the degree to which surficial fluids penetrate the metamorphic crust, the fluids paleo-temperatures, and possibly also fluid fluxes. We are constructing a suite of numerical experiments to represent isotopic fluid-rock interactions as well as thermochronologic data within this smaller-scale framework in order to better understand fluid flow in detachment normal fault systems. The detailed field work and geochemical results also serve as ground truth against which the modeling results are tested. The quantitative analysis of fluid flow as a major heat transfer mechanism will help to refine the method in which geologists use cooling rates to determine exhumation rates doc11358 none Mohanty Characterization of preferential flow and transport through soil macropores and fractures is one of the biggest challenges in vadose zone hydrology. Several conceptual models have been developed with different levels of complexity (e.g., equivalent continuum, dual porosity, and dual permeability approaches) to describe the macropore flow-transport process. However, no congruent conceptual model with a corroborating measurement technique is available to precisely describe this process. As gravity and or capillary forces dominate the transport processes in the porous medium near saturation, various factors contribute to the initiation of macropore flow and its intensity, including pore geometry, distribution, and continuity. In addition soil energy status, the nature of top and bottom boundary conditions and textural layering, play important roles. We propose to quantify the effects of many of these factors on preferential flow and transport in a series of carefully controlled colunm experiments using novel designs. Concurrent measurement of soil water content, water potential, and concentration across distinct macropore and no-macropore regions, as well as of the volume and concentration of inflow and outflow with high temporal resolution, are some of the new features of our proposed study. Artificial macropores with known geometry, distribution, and initial boundary conditions will make the data analysis and interpretation more thorough and meaningful. Several existing or newly developed conceptual models will be tested with the new data sets, ultimately leading to the formulation of more realistic preferential flow models that contain physically-based and measurable parameters. Findings of this research in ten-ns of different combinations of initial conditions, boundary conditions, macropore geometry and continuity, and other (controlled) flow and transport conditions that trigger, sustain, accelerate decelerate or discontinue the fast flow-transport phenomenon will be valuable for better understanding and quantification of hydrologic and environmental processes at different scales doc11359 none tHE GOAL OF THIS WORK IS TO IDENTIFY AND DEVELOP INSTRUCTIONAL PRACTICES SO THAT URBAN AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDENTS, WHO HISTORICALLY HAVE NOT ACHIEVED AT HIGH LEVELS, CAN MEET SCIENCE EDUCATION STANDARDS. FOR THIS PROJECT, WE DEFINE INSTRUCTIONAL PRACTICES AS SCAFFOLDS AND CONTENT REPRESENTATIONS OF SCIENTIFIC IDEAS. SCAFFOLDS INCLUDE STRATEGIES LIKE MODELING THINKING, STRUCTURING AND SEQUENCING TASKS, SUCH AS DATA ANALYSIS, SO THAT LEARNERS CAN EVENTUAOLLY TAKE RESPONSIBILITIY FOR THIE WORK (COLLINS, BROWN AND NEWMAN; ). CONTENT REPRESENTATION OF SCIENTIFIC IDEAS WILL INCLUDE EXAMPLES, METAPHORS, AND ACTIVIEIS TO HELP STUDENTS LEARN IDEAS SUCH AS SCIENTIFIC MODELING AND CAUSE AND EFFECT RELATIONSHIP doc11360 none The Tutoring Research Group at the University of Memphis has developed a computer tutor (called AutoTutor) that simulates the discourse patterns and pedagogical strategies of unaccomplished human tutors. The typical tutor in a school system is unaccomplished in the sense that the tutor has had no training in tutoring strategies and has only introductory-to-intermediate knowledge about the topic. The development of AutoTutor was funded by an NSF grant ( , in the Learning and Intelligent Systems program). The discourse patterns and pedagogical strategies in AutoTutor were based on a previous project that dissected 100 hours of naturalistic tutoring sessions. AutoTutor is currently targeted for college students in introductory computer literacy courses, who learn the fundamentals of hardware, operating systems, and the Internet. Instead of merely being an information delivery system, AutoTutor serves as a discourse prosthesis or collaborative scaffold that assists the student in actively constructing knowledge. AutoTutor presents questions and problems from a curriculum script, attempts to comprehend learner contributions that are entered by keyboard, answers student questions, formulates dialog moves that are sensitive to the learner s contributions (such as short feedback, pumps, prompts, assertions, corrections, and hints), and delivers the dialog moves with a talking head. The talking head displays emotions, produces synthesized speech with discourse-sensitive intonation, and points to entities on graphical displays. AutoTutor has seven modules: a curriculum script, language extraction, speech act classification, latent semantic analysis (a statistical representation of domain knowledge), topic selection, dialog management, and a talking head. Evaluations of AutoTutor have shown that the tutoring system improves learning with an effect size that is comparable to typical human tutors in school systems, but not as high as accomplished human tutors and intelligent tutoring systems. The dialog moves of AutoTutor blend in the discourse context very smoothly because students cannot distinguish whether a speech act was generated by AutoTutor or a human tutor. The proposed research will substantially expand the capabilities of AutoTutor by designing the discourse to handle more sophisticated tutoring mechanisms. These mechanisms should further enhance the active construction of knowledge. One enhancement is to get the student to articulate more knowledge, with more formal, symbolic, and precise specification; if the student doesn t say it, it is not considered covered by AutoTutor. Another enhancement is to set up the dialog so that it guides the user in manipulating a 3-dimensional microworld of a physical system; the student attempts to simulate a new state in the physical system by manipulating parameters, inputs, and formulae. The proposed research will develop AutoTutor in the domains of both computer literacy and Newtonian physics, so we will have some foundation for evaluating the generality of AutoTutor s mechanisms. AutoTutor has been designed to be generic, rather than domain-specific; an authoring tool will be developed that makes it easy for instructors to prepare new material on new topics. After the new versions of AutoTutor are completed, we will evaluate its effectiveness on learning gains, conversational smoothness, and pedagogical quality. During the course of achieving these engineering and educational objectives, the proposed project will conduct basic research in cognitive psychology, discourse processes, computer science, and computational linguistics. This research cuts across quadrant 2 (behavioral, cognitive, affective, and social aspects of human learning) and quadrant 3 (SMET learning in formal and informal educational settings doc11361 none This proposed research project is designed to analyze the strengths of four theoretically grounded model-use conditions. The investigation focuses on the process through which understanding emerges, evolves and diffuses through modeling-based inquiry and pedagogy and 3D technologies. These investigators will use a data acquisition system that allows them to record data (video, audio, screen shots, and computer log files) in the classroom setting and analyze the data through activity nodes and links to track the process by which students engage in the modeling process. The group then proposes to explore the possibility of doing similar analysis through web-base resources. Fundamentally, the project builds on the existing foundation of experience, technology, and curriculum materials in Virtual Reality modeling-based inquiry. The basic design of the project is congruent with the approach advocated by Stokes labeled use-oriented basic research. The findings will be used to develop a conceptual model of how learners learn under these modeling conditions. The proposal is well written, detailed, and grounded in extant research on isomorphic and behavioral environments. The researchers, including the proposed subcontractor, have broad knowledge and experience in the areas of virtual reality, model building, and assessment. The work will have an influence on content areas beyond astronomy, providing insight into how students learn from modeling environments. The panel generally viewed this project as having high potential. However, several issues were raised during the discussion: 1. A significant portion of the proposal was devoted to the technology, and this technology-centered focus distracted from how the technology would be used to address the research questions. 2. The ROLE goals include integrating diversity into NSF programs, projects and activities. This proposal did not address this issue, and the panel felt that this detracted from the proposal doc11362 none A Workshop on Particle Systems will be held at Iowa State University on April 28-29, . The topics covered will include hydrodynamic limits, tagged particle systems, and connections with random matrices. This grant is to assist junior researchers in attending the conference doc11363 none Humayun To better understand the mantle geochemistry of platinum group elements (PGE) and the information returned by 186Os-187Os isotopic studies, we propose to determine the PGE abundances of a global suite of komatiites by a precise isotope dilution ICP-MS technique. Based on results in this lab, this analytical technique has been successfully applied for the determination of PGEs in komatiites. Proposed localities include komatiites from the following greenstone belts: Barberton (S. Africa); Kamennoozero, Vetreny, Onega (Baltic Shield); Belingwe (S. Africa); Abitibi (Canada); Kambalda (Australia); and Gorgona (Caribbean). All samples are available in collections held by us, or will be generously provided from other geochemical studies, particularly previous Os isotopic studies. These include both alumina-depleted and alumina-undepleted komatiites, and both chondritic and suprachondritic initial gamma-187Os-bearing komatiites. Our intellectual goals for the proposed study are to: 1. Focus on establishing the rules of PGE behaviour during the extremely high degrees of partial melting experienced by komatiites, and establish a framework for future work that would include picritic lavas and primary basaltic melts; 2. Determine the PGE composition of Archean crustal materials, which are possible sources of subducted crust for Phanerozoic flood basalts and OIB lavas; 3. Study the PGE composition of each komatiite source region, presumably the Archean lower mantle, for clues to its heterogeneity, with implications for mantle dynamics in the Archean; and 4. Search for evidence of core-mantle interaction in Archean plumes, including evidence for secular changes in such outer core derived signatures. Successful completion of this project will enable us to determine whether this approach can be applied to better understand mantle processes in source regions sampled by picrites and primary basalts, and thereby extend our framework to include a larger spatiotemporal sampling of the mantle. This project also supports the continued US visit of Russian geochemist, Igor Puchtel, the holder and dedicated student of an extensively studied suite of four komatiite localities in the Baltic Shield previously inaccessible to non-Russian scientists doc11364 none Whereas much of teaching in our educational culture presumes an omniscient teacher transmitting knowledge to unknowing learners, most learning that takes place outside of the classroom is based on breakdowns in the context of real-world activities leading to reflection and learning. The traditional approach has some validity for situations in which basic knowledge needs to be communicated, but it is not well suited to the highly situated nature of lifelong learning and design problem solving. Although creative individuals are often thought of as working in isolation, the role of interaction and collaboration with other individuals is critical. Much of our intelligence and creativity results from exploiting the symmetry of ignorance (between different communities) as a source of power. Social creativity emphasizes that the heart of intelligent human performance is not the individual human mind but groups of minds in interaction with each other and in interaction with tools and artifacts. Meta-design characterizes objectives, techniques, and processes for creating new media and environments that allow users to act as designers and contribute to and benefit from the creativity of the group. The project will: (1) develop a theoretical framework and systems to support social creativity as a specific form of lifelong learning; (2) investigate principles of meta-design and how they support social creativity in the context of learning and working; (3) work with specific communities to demonstrate the scalability and sustainability of our approach; (4) focus on specific domains such as the collaborative design of course information environments; (5) explore the role of social creativity and meta-design in practice by changing classroom environments and undergraduate education; and (6) assess how our theoretical attributes of lifelong learning, social creativity, and meta-design map onto practice and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of our approach in realistic settings doc11365 none Folsom et al. ( ) developed a survey weighted hierarchical Bayes (SWHB) estimation methodology for fitting unit-level generalized linear mixed models and applied it to the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA). The SWHB solution for the logistic mixed model is robust against model misspecification because the small area estimates (SAEs) for any large sample areas are close to their robust design based analogs. It also assures that national aggregates of the SAEs are design consistent and, therefore, approximately self-calibrated to the robust design based national estimates. The use of unit level models also assures internal consistency of SAEs for different levels of aggregation even when different predictors are used at those levels. However, the Folsom et al. solution assumed that the survey design could be treated as noninformative after inclusion of certain covariates; i.e., the superpopulation model was assumed to hold for the sampled units. In the interest of robustness against model misspecifications, it is desirable to remove this assumption. The first goal of this research project is to improve the uncertainty measures of the SWHB solution by taking full account of the survey design effects. The second project goal is to improve the robustness properties of the enhanced solution by assuring exact calibration of the aggregated SAEs to the design consistent national survey estimate. To achieve these goals an approximate Gaussian likelihood is assumed for the joint sampling distribution of the input vector of survey weighted fixed and random effect estimating functions. In this approximate Gaussian likelihood, a design consistent variance-covariance matrix for the vector of estimating functions will be used to fully account for survey design. The second project goal is achieved by employing a calibrated Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm with a Metropolitan Hastings step that exactly benchmarks the SAEs to the robust design based national estimates. Simulated data with fixed and random predictors that are not included in the analysis model will be used to compare the robustness of the calibrated and uncalibrated solutions against model misspecification. Also, the improved SWHB solution will be contrasted with other solutions on one or more large survey data sets, e.g., NHSDA, NHIS, BRFSS. In spite of the wealth of information that is available at the national level, Federal, State and local agencies concerned with program planning face difficulties because of the lack of specific information at the local level. Typically, information is desired for States and for substate planning regions or counties. In principle, surveys that provide national statistics could be expanded so that the needed State and sub-state data were collected; however, government agencies seldom have the economic and infrastructure resources needed to collect this volume of data via a direct survey approach. Fortunately, new advances in statistics and increases in computing power offer a viable, affordable alternative to the prohibitively expensive direct survey approach and now permit the production of valid and reliable estimates for small areas. The goal of this project is to promote wider acceptance of model based SAEs for official statistics by improving the uncertainty measures, by providing robustness against model misspecification, and by assuring the internal consistency of SAEs for different aggregation levels. This research is supported by the Bureau of the Census under the Research on Survey and Statistical Methodology Funding Opportunity doc11366 none Kohlstedt Support is requested to complete our experimental investigation designed to quantify the dependence of the kinetics of Fe-Mg interdiffusion in olivine and magnesiowustite on water hydroxyl concentration is proposed. For many nominally anhydrous minerals, a small amount of water significantly enhances many, if not all, diffusion-dependent properties including creep rate, dislocation recovery kinetics, electrical conductivity and ionic diffusion. In most cases, however, these observations are only qualitative. Does the presence of water enhance diffusivity or rate of creep ... yes or no? We have just recently determined a quantitative relationship between diffusivity and water hydroxyl content (water fugacity) for olivine; none exists for magnesiowustite. To utilize observations determined from laboratory experiments to develop models of the geochemical evolution and geodynamical behavior of the mantle, it is critical to quantify the dependence of kinetic properties on water content. Therefore, a laboratory study is proposed to extend our investigation of the dependence of Fe-Mg interdiffusivity on water concentration in olivine and to include magnesiowustite. High-temperature, high-pressure diffusion experiments are being carried out on single crystals at controlled water fugacities at pressures in the range 0.05 to 15 GPa. Rutherford backscattering spectroscopy (RBS) and electron probe microanalysis (EPMA) are employed to measure the resulting diffusion profiles. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) analyses are used to determine the hydroxyl concentration. In addition, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and x-ray diffraction analyses are employed to check for the presence of humite-like layers. For olivine, experiments are needed to determine the dependence of diffusivity on temperature and pressure as well as to verify our initial measurement of the dependence of diffusivity on water fugacity. For magnesiowustite, all of these experiments are needed. An important goal of our experiments is to determine quantitative relationships between cation (Fe-Mg) diffusivity and water hydroxyl concentration for two important mantle minerals under well-defined thermochemical conditions. The proposed research is designed to use these results in the context of point defect thermodynamics to gain a fundamental understanding of the mechanism(s) by which water influences transport properties such as ionic diffusion and electrical conductivity. The resulting theoretical framework is essential for reliably extrapolating laboratory results to mantle environments and for utilizing experimental observations to develop models of the dynamic behavior of the Earth s interior doc11367 none Multicasting has become increasingly important for real-time applications since it is the inherent mode of delivery in several of them, e.g. teleconferencing, audio and video broadcasting, etc. The Internet, however, does not provide end-to-end bandwidth or delay guarantees for unicast or for multicast data. As a result, a number of multiple scale encoding schemes for real-time voice and video transmission have been developed; these schemes allow adaptation both to the available bandwidth and to the receiver capabilities by varying the number of levels of the information stream and therefore the corresponding bit rates. Thus, bandwidth and receiver adaptation of multi-level information streams, in multicast delivery in particular, is an issue of prime importance for the successful, large-scale deployment of those real-time applications. We propose to investigate and develop methods for bandwidth sharing and adaptation in the context of multicast- based real-time applications. A set of fairness criteria based on which the performance of different schemes can be quantified and compared is introduced. A methodology for finding bandwidth allocations that are optimal or suboptimal with respect to the different criteria is proposed. Scalability with the network size, amenability to distributed implementation in terms of required control information and speed of convergence are adopted as prime criteria, in addition to optimality, in the evaluation of the different algorithms. We propose an approach for the design of the algorithms that allows the trade-off between optimality with respect to the performance objective and practicality with respect to the other attributes (i.e. scalability etc.). A methodology for network control in multicasting in the case of unknown traffic and or network conditions is proposed as well. It involves explicit back-pressure based congestion notification feedback and dynamic per ow scheduling. Finally we propose a method for the design of congestion control policies with the objective of maximizing an aggregate network utility. A relative comparison between the two approaches (fairness based and aggregate utility maximization) is also proposed in order to be able to select the most appropriate one in each case doc11368 none Foland Dahl Potassium-bearing micas and amphiboles are widely used in 40Ar 39Ar age studies to determine thermochronologic histories and are recognized to have ages that reflect temperature, although the actual mechanism(s) and controls are neither well understood nor well documented. This research will investigate the factors governing Ar retention and 40Ar 39Ar ages of mica and amphibole in slowly-cooled terranes. Relationships in specimens from the Adirondack Lowlands of New York will be studied. The research will test the often-assumed volume diffusion control of argon loss, while also seeking to evaluate alternative mechanisms and factors governing argon retention and ages of individual mica and amphibole crystals. Specific objectives of the research are to clarify: (1) the mechanism(s) of argon loss in nature and the question of volume-diffusion control on argon retention and closure, with specific examination of the roles of stress and fluids (in addition to temperature); (2) the crystal-chemical dependence of retention; and (3) the roles of microstructures and other factors. The research will involve an array of modern microanalytical techniques on individual crystals, including: 40Ar 39Ar and Rb Sr geochronology, featuring UV laser-ablation Ar microanalysis; chemical microanalysis; transmission electron microscopy for elucidation of microtextures; X-ray diffraction determination of crystal structures; and, analyses of O and H isotopes. This research targets the next level of understanding of these mineral ages and, thus, their use in interpreting, deciphering, and refining crustal histories doc11369 none ions students typically are not familiar with. The Understandings of Consequence Project revealed that students and scientists explanations tend to have very different types of causal structures at the core. The project demonstrated that impacting students assumptions about the nature of causality is a promising approach for helping students restructure their knowledge and achieve scientific understandings. However, there are lingering questions to be answered, such as the transferability of learning about causal forms in one topic to another and the persistence of the subsequent restructuring. The current project extends The Understandings of Consequence Project to systematically investigate these questions. We will assess the transfer of understanding of causal forms to topics with isomorphic and non-isomorphic causal forms and to science learning more generally. The impact of minimal levels of student-focused and teacher-directed transfer support will be assessed. Persistence of learning will be examined later in the same school year and again two years later. Findings will result in revisions to the Understandings of Consequence curriculum units. This research has the potential to impact how deeply and lastingly all students learn science doc11370 none Anovitz and Labotka Aqueous fluids in the Earth s crust participate in nearly all geologic processes, including partial melting, heat and solute transport, reaction and alteration of host country rock, deposition of insoluble minerals in fractures, and rock deformation. The extent to which fluid participates in these processes depends on its chemical and transport properties. The H2O-CO2-NaCl system is a close approximation to real crustal fluids. An understanding of the p-V-T-x properties of this system is critical, and an experimental determination of the thermophysical properties at high temperatures and pressures is clearly required to be able to understand the fluid-rock interaction in crustal geologic processes. We, in collaboration with J. Blencoe, propose to determine experimentally the phase relations and thermodynamic properties of the H2O-CO2-NaCl system at pressures ranging from 100 to 300 MPa and temperatures from 500 to 800 degrees C. These conditions lie above the critical curve of the H2O-CO2 binary, span the critical curve in the H2O-NaCl binary, and are appropriate for many crustal fluid-rock processes. We will determine the halite saturation surface and the activities of H2O on the surface with the use of an internally heated pressure vessel equipped with hydrogen service. With these data, we will be able to determine the phase equilibria and the activity-composition relations for the ternary system. The results will be complementary to studies of the system that use synthetic fluid inclusions and will provide the basic input necessary to construct mathematical models of the thermodynamics of the H2O-CO2-NaCl system at conditions appropriate for crustal geothermal, metamorphic, and deformation systems doc11371 none This study is a three year effort to examine what students learn in two different kinds of elementary science classrooms: traditional expository, text-oriented instruction compared with hands-on, inquiry-oriented instruction. The latter describes an approach to learning in which students acquire knowledge and understanding of scientific ideas as well as first hand experiential understanding of how scientists study the natural world. The emphasis is on learning by doing and discussing, and the priority is on scientific thinking skills and conceptual understanding. In a second phase, the study examines the teaching associated with high- and low-achieving classrooms for each of the two instructional conditions. Millions of dollars have gone into supporting hands-on inquiry science reforms over the past several decades. These large-scale efforts, particularly important for less affluent students across the country, are vulnerable however, for they are viewed by some as too expensive or too demanding of teachers. Furthermore, there is little evidence of the relative merits of the two approaches. The nationwide emphasis on accountability, with an intense focus on literacy and math and a bias towards easily tested factual knowledge, pressures schools away from hands-on inquiry science. This study will contribute substantially to our knowledge base on the relationship between elemetary science instruction and student learning, with important implications for practitioners, policy makers and the public. This study compares 5th grade students learning in two instructional conditions, with 20 classes in each condition matched for key characteristics. In addition, the study explores connections between student performance and instruction, utilizing data from teacher surveys, interviews, assignments, and classroom observations. Student achievement is assessed with an array of measures, including standardized tests of language arts and math; standardized science knowledge items and a performance task from NAEP or TIMSS; other short science performance tasks; and extended science investigation tasks developed and validated for this research. The study will address long-term, important outcomes such as those called for in Project : deep conceptual understanding, persistence at difficult problems, retention of important knowledge over time, and transfer of investigation strategies to challenging novel situations doc11132 none Scholz - Burgmann - King Northeast Asia, where the Pacific, North American, and Eurasian plates come together, is one of the last frontiers of plate tectonics. The location of the North America - Eurasia plate boundary is not well established. The problem is further complicated by a number of smaller microplates in the region, including the Okhotsk, Arctic, Bering, and Amurian plates, whose existence, rates of motion, and boundaries are still uncertain. This project relies on space geodesy to study the broad zone of deformation encompassing the boundary of the Eurasian and North American plates, intervening microplates, and their interaction with the Pacific plate. This investigation is motivated by the recent initiation of high-precision GPS measurements in eastern Siberia, Korea, and Japan, which provide the opportunity for a significant advance in understanding of this enigmatic region. New GPS measurements provide constraints for tectonic models, which take into account plate tectonic angular velocities and deformation associated with strain accumulation and release at the plate boundaries. The geodetic analysis helps constrain the kinematics of deformation from central Asia to western North America through careful integration of regional and global GPS data. New measurements focus on three areas not well constrained by current data: Sakhalin, the Cherskiy Range in eastern Siberia, and the Kamchatka cusp. Expected results will include an improved location (in northern Siberia) of the pole of rotation between Eurasia and North America; more precise delineation of plate boundaries in northeast Asia; and constraints on the existence, location and present-day motion of the Okhotsk microplate and other regional blocks. The major problem preventing a straightforward inversion of GPS velocities for rigid plate motions is that displacements of many GPS stations are affected by inter-seismic strain accumulation along plate boundary faults, especially along the Pacific subduction margin. Where large earthquakes (such as the Mw = 7.0 and Mw = 6.8 Sakhalin, and the Mw = 7.7 Kamchatka events) occurred within our study region, the deformation field is further disturbed by co-seismic and post-seismic motions. Thus, the investigation addresses the inextricably linked regional plate kinematics and subduction zone dynamics. Elastic and visco-elastic models are used to evaluate the inter-seismic strain accumulation process and to estimate the amount of seismic coupling on major plate boundary faults. The modeling allows for separation of the contributions of plate boundary strain and plate tectonic angular velocities to the measured GPS velocity field doc11373 none This project examines some of the research methods currently in use for educational research projects and produce a series of reports and publications on the Design Experiment method that was developed by Ann Brown. The researchers would host meetings, develop an online graduate course, and dedicate a web site to the purpose of explicating the design experiment methodology and characterize its power and limitations for making claims. This research method has gained wide support among some education researchers and yet the method itself is interpreted differently by those using it. The purpose of this project is to clarify and provide a basis for informed use of the method in the future doc11374 none This project is intended to examine statistical data bases for the cities of Miami and Detroit to apply a statistical model of teacher hiring practices to seek improved strategies for attracting high quality teachers. It would focus on determining leverage points for maintaining a high quality instructional work force, providing the basis for selecting a policy from among options of changing wage compensation, working conditions, or district policies. The team will use econometric analysis and dynamic-system modeling. Teacher turnover will be analyzed with a statistical model that includes teacher attributes, compensation, and school factors. Then school effects will be decomposed into specific attributes that affect turnover and measurable attributes that can be observed. Finally, the researchers will build a data set that links teachers to students to examine the effect of teacher attributes to student outcomes doc11375 none Award: Principal Investigator: Christopher M. Judge The Bloomington Geometry Workshop is the first of an intended series of regional conferences on geometry. The main purpose of the Bloomington Geometry Workshop, to be held at the University of Indiana, is to promote scientific cooperation and communication between geometers and geometric analysts in a region including Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. Modern geometry addresses problems such as understanding the ways in which typical spaces are curved and how far from the flat Euclidean model a space might be, the influence of curvature upon analysis in a particular geometry, interactions of large-scale geometry with probability theory and the algebraic properties of the fundamental group, hyperbolic geometry and the portion of low-dimensional topology that increasingly depends upon hyperbolic structures, and gauge field theories and other ideas from theoretical physics doc11376 none This is a study of teaching learning science in three neighborhood high schools in Philadelphia, Pa. The study seeks to understand the teaching and learning of science in terms of student use of their existing social and cultural capital to make sense of the activities they participate in during school and after school. It would involve six teacher-researchers who are involved with a local systemic initiative in which the teachers are teaching courses in chemistry. The schools are also involved with the Philadelphia s Urban Systemic Initiative. The study would examine learning of science in different institutional settings to ascertain how students and teachers interact to give meaning to their environment. It will seek to learn how teachers in poor urban environments gain the respect of and build rapport with their students. It will answer other questions such as, when students act in ways that are resistant to the goals of the teacher, how do teachers adapt their teaching to provide opportunities doc11377 none Chamberlain Sears Doughty Upon the breakup of the supercontinent Rodinia, several Precambrian lithotectonic assemblages were truncated along the western margin of Laurentia, but present data are too sparse to unambiguously identify the matching continental blocks, and the Siberian platform, Antarctica and Australia are possible matches. This project is aimed at strengthening the geochronologic, petrographic and structural data for selected sites in northwest US in order to narrow the possible matches. Results, combined with existing and new similar data from other continental blocks are expected to clarify the nature of Rodinia and the subsequent evolution of the fragments of Rodinia after continental breakup doc11343 none Collaborative Research: A Sequence-, Chemo-, Biostratigraphic Study of Late Early Cambrian Rocks, Southern Selwyn Basin, Mackenzie Mountains, Canada This project investigates how early episodes of animal evolution, which occurred roughly 520 million years ago during the so-called Cambrian radiation, were influenced by environmental changes. To investigate these issues we will study the sedimentology, paleontology, and geochemistry of the Early Cambrian rocks of the Mackenzie Mountains, Northwest Territories, Canada. This is a remote location, but it has a remarkably complete geological record for the Early Cambrian interval. This gives us a window into the life forms and environments of both shallow and deep water settings, a situation found nowhere else for this time period. The types of environmental changes we will study include both changes in the relative level of the seas as well as temperature changes: the two are partly linked. During the Cambrian radiation there may have been rapid oscillations between relatively warm and cold climates. To determine the nature of these environmental changes, it is necessary to understand the variations in the rock types, which we will study in detail. It is also necessary to study when these variations occurred; this we will accomplish by documenting the sequence of fossil species and through use of chemical isotopes. Evolutionary changes and extinction events in this region, and elsewhere, and their relationship to the environmental changes, will also be documented. In this manner, we will not only come to better understand the nature of the environmental changes that occurred during this critical interval in earth history, but we will also determine how one of the key episodes in the history of life may have been fundamentally driven by climatic changes doc11379 none Blum The Lower Mississippi Valley (LMV) has the potential of understanding the linkages of upstream climate glacial vs. downstream sea level controls of a large stream system. In addition a stratigraphic and geochronologic framework for the alluvial landforms of the valley will aid in the study of tectonic activity within the New Madrid seismic zone, within the northern valley. This proposed research seeks to develop a chronologic and genetic model for evolution of the LMV during the Late Pleistocene full glacial (late Wisconsin stage) to the earliest Holocene, a period when rapid large-scale rearrangements of the North American hydrological system occurred. These rearrangements included changes in the Laurentide ice-sheet margin, drainage of pro-glacial lakes, and se level rise. This proposal focuses on a) the role of fluctuations in discharge and sediment load from the former ice margin, b) downstream effects of sea level discharge, and c) the impact of these forcing mechanisms on landscape evolution in the LMV. We hope to address the following questions: o How do landforms and deposits of the LMV correlate to ice margin changes, floods from pro-glacial lakes, and or specific meltwater and sediment spikes identified in the Gulf of Mexico? o How do landforms and deposits of the LMV correlate to the landforms and deposits of the upper Mississippi valley where climate glacail impacts were fundamental, but sea level played no role? o Does the LMV respond rapidly to high-frequency changes in discharge and sediment load during deglaciation, or are there lag times? Does the signal decay downstream or is it present to the Gulf of Mexico? o What is the influence of sea level and how far upstream does it extend doc11380 none Researchers, professional developers, educational institutions, funding agencies, and commercial enterprises currently make huge investments in online systems to support teacher learning with video cases of classroom instruction. However, there is little scientific knowledge about how teachers learn from such cases, how case design affects learning, and how online systems are best designed to support that learning. Specific design features of case-based teacher learning environments, such as design of instructional activities and how the cases themselves are structured for presentation, probably significantly impact teacher thinking and learning from case analysis. Given the substantial expenditure in both human and nonhuman capital, scientific knowledge is needed to guide this enterprise. This program of experimental research, grounded in cognitive science theory about case-based learning and reasoning, aims to develop a pedagogy and theory of online video case study for teacher education. The research will be conducted in the context of two innovative psychological foundations courses taught for teacher education majors at two major universities. Both programs use STEP Web, a professional development web site being developed by the PIs for use in preservice secondary teacher education. STEP Web represents a hypermedia network of instructional resources designed to support teacher learning with video cases. The goal of instruction with STEP Web is to help teachers acquire instructionally relevant scientific knowledge about student learning and development. The STEP Web design is based on Cognitive Flexibility Theory. This theory of knowledge representation and instructional design focuses on case-based learning in multimedia environments, with the goal of promoting flexible transfer in fields of professional practice, such as medicine and teaching. Using STEP Web as a test bed, the researchers will create and test alternative theoretically motivated designs for online learning environments supporting video case study for preservice teachers. They will conduct controlled studies examining how different learning-environment designs affect the individual and group learning processes of preservice teachers, as well as the form and duration of teacher education students case knowledge, and their abilities to combine and use that knowledge in reasoning about professional practice. The project will advance two integrated programs of research: 1. How to design video-based teaching cases, which consist of various components and can vary in terms of which components are included and how they are organized, segmented, and connected to learning material. 2. How to facilitate group case-based learning on line, which focuses on study and training of group facilitators, as well as design of online discussion environments. This project is expected to develop a more exact picture of what undergraduate education majors learn from video case study and to shed light on how to design good cases and online multimedia environments to support such study doc11381 none Over the past five years, the Principal Ivestigator and student assistants have developed a series of Internet-based courses in a related set of undergraduate mathematics courses utilizing locally developed software for geometric visualization and for communication betwee students and instructors and among students. These new models for teaching and learning change the timing and the level of interactivity for instructors and students, and increase the ability of students to handle complex geometric phenomena. These innovations provide new models for teaching and learning which will be further developed, tested, and evaluated during the period of the proposal. The aim is to produce effective software that can be used in a wide variety of institutions with students at different levels, for mathematics and for its applications to physical science, computer science, and engineering. (Areas of concentration: quadrats 2 and 3 doc11382 none Professor Lawrence T. Scott, of the Department of Chemistry at Boston College, is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his studies of the rational synthesis of fullerenes and other carbon-rich materials, including achiral, single-wall carbon nanotubes which are closed at one end and open at the other, with predefined uniform diameter, pitch, cap structure, and rim structure. As test cases for the methods and strategies employed, Professor Scott also explores the synthesis of low molecular weight ( amu) carbon-rich organic compounds with unusual structures, for which unusual molecular properties are anticipated. Fullerenes, carbon nanotubes, and related carbon-rich substances that are characterized by curved networks of carbon atoms have been widely acclaimed as materials of enormous potential value for future applications in materials science and the emerging field of nanotechnology. They also hold considerable intrinsic scientific interest owing to the unusual nature of their chemical structures. These fascinating substances are typically prepared by poorly-understood empirical methods, making control over which fullerenes or nanotubes are formed exceedingly difficult. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Lawrence T. Scott, of the Department of Chemistry at Boston College, is developing rational synthetic routes to fullerenes and other Buckymaterials, as well as to smaller carbon-rich organic molecules also anticipated to display unusual properties doc11368 none Foland Dahl Potassium-bearing micas and amphiboles are widely used in 40Ar 39Ar age studies to determine thermochronologic histories and are recognized to have ages that reflect temperature, although the actual mechanism(s) and controls are neither well understood nor well documented. This research will investigate the factors governing Ar retention and 40Ar 39Ar ages of mica and amphibole in slowly-cooled terranes. Relationships in specimens from the Adirondack Lowlands of New York will be studied. The research will test the often-assumed volume diffusion control of argon loss, while also seeking to evaluate alternative mechanisms and factors governing argon retention and ages of individual mica and amphibole crystals. Specific objectives of the research are to clarify: (1) the mechanism(s) of argon loss in nature and the question of volume-diffusion control on argon retention and closure, with specific examination of the roles of stress and fluids (in addition to temperature); (2) the crystal-chemical dependence of retention; and (3) the roles of microstructures and other factors. The research will involve an array of modern microanalytical techniques on individual crystals, including: 40Ar 39Ar and Rb Sr geochronology, featuring UV laser-ablation Ar microanalysis; chemical microanalysis; transmission electron microscopy for elucidation of microtextures; X-ray diffraction determination of crystal structures; and, analyses of O and H isotopes. This research targets the next level of understanding of these mineral ages and, thus, their use in interpreting, deciphering, and refining crustal histories doc11384 none the Midcontinental Rift PI s: Stephen Gao, Kelly Liu, Kansas State University The formation and evolution of continental orogenic zones is one of the most fundamental yet poorly understood problems in geoscience. Among the various types of continental orogenic zones, the two that are most pervasive are those in the vicinity of a plate boundary such as the western North American orogenic zone, and those associated with continental rifting such as the 1.1 billion-year old Midcontinent rift (MCR) in the central United States. The proposed study is aimed at improving our understanding about the formation and evolution of continental orogenic zones by using a unique broadband seismic data set that we recently recorded along an E-W profile across Kansas. We propose to locate and characterize the mantle transition between the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains, and to explore the deep structure and possible fossil anisotropy beneath the MCR by apply various of seismological techniques to the broadband data set. We will also perform geodynamic modeling aiming at looking for a model that best explains the uplift history of the Rocky Mountains since the Laramide orogeny by using the seismic results as constraints doc11330 none Collaborative Research. Graptolite Macroevolution: Phylogenetic Analysis and Testing Hypotheses of Directional Change . Charles E. Mitchell and Daniel Goldman. One of the most contentious issues in evolutionary theory is the notion of progress. Some scientists have argued for a qualified expectation of progress in the evolution of major groups while others have argued that we should expect evolutionary histories that are dominantly non-progressive. Efforts to quantify evolutionary patterns have produced conflicting results. Thus, the question of whether natural selection leads to long-term progressive trends remains controversial and frustrating. The central goal of the proposed research is to determine if there were significant progressive evolutionary trends within a group of fossils called graptolites. Graptolites are a group of extinct marine organisms that flourished from approximately 505 to 310 million years ago. The graptolite fossil record offers an outstanding opportunity to make a rigorous test of directional evolution for two reasons. First, graptolite evolutionary patterns have long been used as textbook examples of progressive evolution. Secondly, the fossil record of graptolites is exceptionally good, and their temporal and biogeographic distributions have been intensively studied. The work proposed here is expected to contribute substantially to an increased understanding of the mechanisms of graptolite evolution and their pathways of descent. It is also expected that it will lead to improvements in the methods paleobiologists employ to study evolutionary pattern and process. Both of these outcomes are likely, it is thought, to positively effect the broader issue of testing the fossil record for evidence of progress in evolution and the means by which it might occur doc11386 none Wiltschko Sharp Banded fibrous veins are common features in deformed rocks, and are classically interpreted to indicate operation of a crack-seal mechanism in which a crack event is immediately followed by a cement-precipitation event due to local pressure drop. However, recent results of mass-balance considerations have cast doubt on this being a valad mechanism. This project will examine the question of the formation of banded veins from a new perspective model that includes two simplifying processes - pressure exerted by growing crystals and geochemical self-organization whereby a nearly constant fluid composition at the vein-host walls leads to oscillations in precipitated species. A series of tests will be applied to veins sets using both geochemical microthermometric data and textural information to understand chemical and mechanical processes responsible for these types of veins. Results will help improve understanding of vein formation and therefore their use in understanding the tectonic setting in which they formed doc11387 none Karlstrom Pederson Excavation of Grand Canyon by the Colorado River, previously thought to have happened between 6.0 and 1.2 Ma, is actually relatively young, ongoing, and happening at variable rates along the length of the Grand Canyon. Information from middle-late Quaternary stream terraces in eastern Grand Canyon indicates that strong side-stream and mainstream responses to glacial interglacial climate changes have been superimposed on an overall incision rate of 0.2 to 0.6 mm yr. This suggests that up to half of the present-day relief in eastern Grand Canyon has been generated in the Quaternary Period. In contrast, new data from western Grand Canyon indicate up to an order of magnitude lower incision rate over the same time period. This discrepancy is interpreted to be due to west down Quaternary slip on the Toroweap-Hurricane fault system modulating the incision of crustal blocks in the region. Recently recognized slip rates of ~0.25 mm yr on this fault system are approximately equal to the difference between greater upstream rates (eastern Grand Canyon) and smaller downstream rates obtained within and immediately below the fault zone. A new picture is emerging of a younger, segmented Grand Canyon, which contains a sensitive record of the denudational history of the Colorado Plateau. This project is a focused test of this hypothesis using detailed geomorphic and structural field studies combined with U-Series dating of travertine within alluvial terraces and Ar-Ar dating of basalts. These data provide an improved understanding of the age of the Grand Canyon and the forces that drive and modulate the incision of this and other high plateau regions. This work also has a broad educational and outreach impact; we are working closely with the Interpretive Division of Grand Canyon National Park to design the Trail of Time to communicate geologic understanding to the 5 million visitors that come to the Park annually. Additionally, we continue to train a host of graduate and undergraduate students in the context of a multi-university collaboration that deals with numerous aspects of the tectonic and landscape evolution of the southwestern U.S.A doc11388 none The Chanka Archaeology Project under the direction of Dr. Brian Bauer is dedicated to documenting and interpreting the development of complex societies in the Andahuaylas region of the Peruvian Andes from AD 500 to AD . The Chanka who once lived in the region are of special interest to archaeologists and historians since they once rivaled and fought against the Inca State for control of the central Andes. The topic of early state development is a major theoretical issue of current anthropological research. The Chanka have been excluded from these discussions since very little original archeological research has been conducted in their core region. What theories have been presented concerning the development of the Chanka are largely derived from readings of the Spanish chronicles. Until these models are tested against archaeological data they will remain hypothetical and untested and the study of the pre-Hispanic social organization of the Chanka can not advance. The project, which will run for three field seasons, includes a systematic archaeological survey of the Chanka heartland and an extensive review of archival materials located in Peru and Spain. The survey will cover an area of approximately 200 square kilometers and provide a comprehensive data base on the location, size and age of archaeological sites in the Andahuaylas Valley. The results of the survey will be used to address a series of questions concerning the development of complex societies in the region. For example: What effect did the conquest of the region by the Wari Empire (AD 550- ) have on the indigenous populations?, Is there evidence of early state development in the valley during the Late Intermediate Period (AD - )? and, What was the social organization of the Andahuaylas area during the period of Inca rule? The archival research will take place in Cuzco, Andahuaylas, and Lima (Peru) as well as in Seville (Spain). The historical research will support, complement, and extend the archaeological field work by providing concise data on specific sites and by procuring additional information on the land holdings, populations, and social organization of Chanka kin groups. In sum, the Chanka Archaeological Project will provide a regional context to study the development of the Chanka and it will enable scholars to address questions concerning the development of Chanka society before and after Inca expansionism. The project will also enable researchers to make comparisons between the development of the Chanka and that of other important groups, both in the Andes and elsewhere in the ancient New World doc11389 none This research will describe the neural and cognitive components of learning by observing, producing, and by imitating physical representations in the human brain. This will allow developing new learning tools and pedagogical approaches that may enhance education at all levels. It will use functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain to define the involvement of the observation execution matching system in different aspects of learning by observation, production, and imitation. Specifically, the research will: - Describe mental representations underlying knowledge acquisition through representation, observation and imitation in neural and cognitive terms - Investigate the mechanisms of individual learning in relation to social and societal influences - The definition of psychological and physiological mechanisms of speech perception The findings of this research are also relevant to brain development and the relation between cognitive skill and developmental strategies doc11390 none Newman Carbonates are common lithologic units in mountain belts, and their deformation plays an important role in the development of large-scale structures. Field and experimental studies show that fracture strengths of carbonates at near-surface conditions are comparable to those of siliciclastic rocks; however, flow strengths of carbonates deformed at depth are relatively low and penetrative strains are localized within them. Deformed limestones and marbles made up primarily of calcite exhibit abundant evidence of internal strain by mechanical twinning, microcracking, solution transfer, dislocation glide, dislocation creep, and diffusional creep. Evidence of recovery and dynamic recrystallization at elevated temperatures is ubiquitous. These processes also occur in experimentally deformed calcite, carried out at known temperatures, pressures and strain rates. The measured mechanical properties from these experiments provide constraints on the environmental conditions required for deformation, and the rheologies needed to model the tectonics and structural development of continental collisions. Carbonate units made up primarily of dolomite (CaMg(CO3)2) have significantly different mechanical properties from those made up of calcite (CaCO3). Field and experimental observations of dolomite and calcite indicate that the strength of dolomite exceeds that of calcite significantly, yet dolomites deformed at high temperatures also exhibit evidence of twinning, dislocation creep, and dynamic recrystallization. Most experimental studies of dolomite deformation bear on fracture properties and only a few, exceptional studies, have been done that provide flow strengths and mechanisms of penetrative deformation. Early high temperature experiments on dolomites provide information on crystal plastic deformation mechanisms, but systematic measurements of flow strengths that can be used to determine the high temperature rheology of this carbonate are lacking. This research addresses the high temperature deformation of dolomite through controlled deformation experiments; the objectives include determining the flow law for dolomite, determining the deformation processes associated with this rheology, and evaluating the conditions required for its deformation in orogenic belts. Experiments are being conducted on natural fine-grained dolomite and hot pressed synthetic dolomite in triaxial compression at confining pressure of 400 MPa, temperatures of 400 degree to 900 degree, strain rates of 10-4 to 10-7 s-1. Optical microscopy, SEM, and TEM are being used to characterize microstructures and document deformation mechanisms. In addition to the tectonic and structural problems this research addresses, the comparison of the mechanical properties of rhombohedral carbonates of differing composition addresses fundamental questions involving the mineral physics and chemistry of deformation. The high strength of dolomite relative to that of calcite raises a number of interesting questions, including: (1) How does substitution of one cation, Mg, for another, Ca, affect the deformation process?; (2) How do bond strengths affect the strengths and thermal activation barriers to deformation processes?; (3) How does cation ordering affect deformation?; (4) How do microstructures associated with order disorder and lamellar compositional variations affect deformation and strength? Comparison of results for specimens made up of the magnesium end-member carbonate, magnesite (MgCO3), as well as a few samples of end-member calcite, deformed at comparable conditions to those of the dolomite experiments, may elucidate how deformation depends on crystal chemistry and structure. This research compares the strengths of these three carbonates at a common set of conditions, the deformation mechanisms that are activated in each, and the activation energies that presumably tell us about the rate-controlling processes doc11386 none Wiltschko Sharp Banded fibrous veins are common features in deformed rocks, and are classically interpreted to indicate operation of a crack-seal mechanism in which a crack event is immediately followed by a cement-precipitation event due to local pressure drop. However, recent results of mass-balance considerations have cast doubt on this being a valad mechanism. This project will examine the question of the formation of banded veins from a new perspective model that includes two simplifying processes - pressure exerted by growing crystals and geochemical self-organization whereby a nearly constant fluid composition at the vein-host walls leads to oscillations in precipitated species. A series of tests will be applied to veins sets using both geochemical microthermometric data and textural information to understand chemical and mechanical processes responsible for these types of veins. Results will help improve understanding of vein formation and therefore their use in understanding the tectonic setting in which they formed doc11392 none PI s: Simon L. Klemperer, Goetz Bokelmann, and Norman Sleep, Stanford University There are a number of unresolved yet fundamental questions about the nature of mantle upwellings or plumes . Specifically, can we distinguish the plume model, i.e., material upwelling from parts of the deeper mantle, from alternative models as a source for mantle hotspots? To help answer these questions, we will make measurements of shear-wave splitting for seismic waves that travel through the upper mantle. These measurements can illuminate the geometry of flow-related mantle deformation, since such deformation leads to seismic anisotropy--the cause of shear-wave splitting. We will then compare our data to those predicted by several different models of plume lithosphere interaction. In particular, the parabolic asthenospheric flow model, which is consistent with measurements from around Hawaii and Yellowstone, will be critically tested by our data. Although these data may address regional problems such as whether there is a relation between Eifel magmatism and extension in the Rhine Graben, they more fundamentally have the ability to detect the existence of plumes, answering an outstanding question in the geosciences doc11215 none Yuen Vasilyev Wavelets represent a new mathematical tool, developed mostly over the last fifteen years. The fundamental strength of wavelets lies in its inherent ability to achieve very high resolution locally using relatively few localized functions, called wavelets. However, its application in solid-earth geophysics has remained relatively limited. In this three-year proposal a multidisciplinary team, steeped in the skills of applied mathematics, numerical analysis, fluid dynamics and theoretical geophysics, will employ the latest tools from wavelets to address two classes of geophysical problems. These include finite-amplitude viscoelastic deformation in strongly variable viscosity media where thermo-mechanical coupling and mechanical compaction play mutually interacting roles, and modeling of gravity currents in both 2D and 3D geometries with strong thermo-mechanical coupling from variable viscosity and viscous heating. The aim is to disseminate the use of wavelets to the geophysical community in frontier research and basic education of graduate and undergraduate students doc11377 none Chamberlain Sears Doughty Upon the breakup of the supercontinent Rodinia, several Precambrian lithotectonic assemblages were truncated along the western margin of Laurentia, but present data are too sparse to unambiguously identify the matching continental blocks, and the Siberian platform, Antarctica and Australia are possible matches. This project is aimed at strengthening the geochronologic, petrographic and structural data for selected sites in northwest US in order to narrow the possible matches. Results, combined with existing and new similar data from other continental blocks are expected to clarify the nature of Rodinia and the subsequent evolution of the fragments of Rodinia after continental breakup doc11395 none Goldfinger Nelson Great earthquakes represent large releases of energy and the ability to predict them is of obvious importance. A number of models of earthquake temporal and spatial characteristics have been developed, but have not been adequately tested and validated, mostly because the historical record is very short in comparison to the typical time between earthquakes. This project will attempt to provide a record of large earthquakes along the Cascadia margin that spans at least 10,000 years by use of turbidites as proxies for large earthquakes. The results will be invaluable in testing earthquake recurrence models doc11396 none Miller Understanding how magma is processed on its journey from source to final rocky resting place is vital for understanding crustal evolution, the mechanics of magma ascent and emplacement and their relation to tectonics, and eruptive processes. Storage in upper crustal magma chambers has been, and still is, central to most views of this journey. However, concepts of the magma chamber, the processes that occur within it, and its relationship to plutons that are ultimately constructed have been intensely reevaluated in recent years. Many widely held views (e.g. that magma chambers are mostly crystal-poor bodies of magma throughout most of their lifespan ) have been called into question. We propose to investigate the evolution of exceptionally exposed plutons and probable equivalent volcanic sequences in the Eldorado Mountains and Highland Range, Nevada, and to test hypotheses about the mechanical and chemical processing of magma as it enters, resides in, and is extracted from magma chambers. Existing data that include general mapping and a sizable data set of 40Ar 39Ar ages and whole-rock elemental and isotopic analyses provide a sound initial basis for this study. We will add to the existing data base, but our main emphasis will be on a combination of updated traditional and new methods (very detailed mapping of internal pluton structures; detailed petrography using compositional imaging to emphasize zoning, reaction textures, and accessory mineral features; crystal size distribution analysis; in situ Pb and Sr isotope analysis of feldspars; ion probe dating of zircon). This methodology will clarify the evolution of these magma chambers, including their filling and replenishment; disruption and rearrangement by internal and external processes such as convection, mass wasting, roof collapse, and eruption; and, ultimately, pluton construction. It will also permit us to evaluate the filtering effect of magma chambers by comparing input magmas, outputs (erupted magmas), and retained materials (plutons), and to constrain eruptive triggers and controls of eruptive styles doc11397 none Illangasekare Difficulties associated with the detection and quantification of non-aqueous phase liquids (NAPLs) in the subsurface have prompted the development of innovative, less-intrusive site characterization methods that utilize partitioning and interfacial tracers. Although these techniques have been utilized at many field sites in USA and Europe, current application is limited to NAPLs that are at or near residual saturation. It is hypothesized that the combined use of these tracers may also be useful for identifying occurrences that diverge from cases of residual saturation such as isolated pools and macro-entrapment zones that occur in naturally heterogeneous subsurface formations. The goal of this research is to evaluate the behavior of partitioning, interfacial, and conservative tracers in water-saturated subsurface systems where NAPLs are entrapped under conditions of natural heterogeneity. The following research issues will be addressed: The influence of subsurface heterogeneity on the distribution of NAPL will result in tracer behavior that is not necessarily controlled by local equilibrium, an assumption that is frequently used in analyzing tracer data. However, NAPL entrapment under natural heterogeneity may have unique, identifiable tracer signatures, even under non-equilibrium conditions. These unique signatures may be distinguishable for resolving and characterizing complex NAPL occurrences. The up-scaled field behavior of NAPLs differs considerably from what is observed in one-dimensional column experiments, particularly when media heterogeneity is introduced. The ability to resolve the behavior of tracers at larger spatial scales and added dimensionality may lead to refinements in theoretical constructs and improvements in computational methods for characterizing complex NAPL distribution in the field. The approach consists of both experimental studies conducted in columns, cells and intermediate-scale soil tanks and development of methods for tracer data analysis using improved numerical models. This research has both intrinsic scientific merit in terms of the measurement and evaluation of fundamental parameters as well as practical implication for NAPL detection, remediation, and risk assessment doc11398 none This award to University of Arizona is supported by the Advanced Materials Program in the Chemistry Division.The research by Professors Seth Marder and Joseph Perry will address structure-property relationships and applications of molecules and molecular ensembles that exhibit two-photon absorption. The goals of the research are to develop a detailed understanding of how to optimize the two-photon absorption cross section in centrosymmetric and noncentrosymmetric (dipolar,quadrupolar, octupolar and hexadecapolar) molecules and to design chromophores that utilize effectively the excited states to efficiently drive chemical reactions that create reactive radicals and Bronsted or Lewis acids and bases. The research will enhance the three dimensional spatially resolved patterning of materials. Processes enabled by either photoinduced electron or energy transfer, will yield species that will microscopically photopolymerize reactive monomers, photodeposit metals and semiconductors,and photogenerate catalysts. Highly efficient two-photon initiators allowing the patterning of a range of materials,will make three dimensional microfabrication a viable technology for the production of micro-optics, micro-mechanical components and microfluidic circuits. The scope of this interdisciplinary research is broad, encompassing synthesis, materials, theory, characterization and fabrication. Students will be trained across the fields of chemistry, physics, materials and optical science doc11377 none Chamberlain Sears Doughty Upon the breakup of the supercontinent Rodinia, several Precambrian lithotectonic assemblages were truncated along the western margin of Laurentia, but present data are too sparse to unambiguously identify the matching continental blocks, and the Siberian platform, Antarctica and Australia are possible matches. This project is aimed at strengthening the geochronologic, petrographic and structural data for selected sites in northwest US in order to narrow the possible matches. Results, combined with existing and new similar data from other continental blocks are expected to clarify the nature of Rodinia and the subsequent evolution of the fragments of Rodinia after continental breakup doc11325 none PI s: Charles M. Rubin, Central Washington Univ (EAR ) and Kerry Sieh, CalTech (EAR ) OF PROPOSED WORK Understanding the sequential rupture of faults is one of the fundamental goals in earthquake science. Simply stated, the question is: How do ruptures repeat on a fault and on systems of faults? Although this question is at the heart of both practical and academic aspects of our science, it remains largely unanswered, mostly because data are difficult to obtain. Three of the most important issues are 1) How regular are intervals between fault ruptures? 2) How repeatable is the pattern of slip on a fault? 3) How does geologic structure influence fault rupture? These are questions we propose to begin to tackle through paleoseismic and neotectonic studies in Taiwan. During our first year, our reconnaissance work would focus on paleoseismic investigations along the rupture of the Chelungpu fault and on preparation of a neotectonic and earthquake source map of all of Taiwan. The record of prehistoric seismicity along the Chelungpu at one site we hope to begin to test a few plausible hypotheses, ranging from unpatterned or random recurrence to highly clustered behavior. If successful, our work will justify continued work on understanding of earthquake faults and provide constraints on theoretical models of fault interaction. Our neotectonic earthquake source map will provide the context for future studies of fault behavior there doc11387 none Karlstrom Pederson Excavation of Grand Canyon by the Colorado River, previously thought to have happened between 6.0 and 1.2 Ma, is actually relatively young, ongoing, and happening at variable rates along the length of the Grand Canyon. Information from middle-late Quaternary stream terraces in eastern Grand Canyon indicates that strong side-stream and mainstream responses to glacial interglacial climate changes have been superimposed on an overall incision rate of 0.2 to 0.6 mm yr. This suggests that up to half of the present-day relief in eastern Grand Canyon has been generated in the Quaternary Period. In contrast, new data from western Grand Canyon indicate up to an order of magnitude lower incision rate over the same time period. This discrepancy is interpreted to be due to west down Quaternary slip on the Toroweap-Hurricane fault system modulating the incision of crustal blocks in the region. Recently recognized slip rates of ~0.25 mm yr on this fault system are approximately equal to the difference between greater upstream rates (eastern Grand Canyon) and smaller downstream rates obtained within and immediately below the fault zone. A new picture is emerging of a younger, segmented Grand Canyon, which contains a sensitive record of the denudational history of the Colorado Plateau. This project is a focused test of this hypothesis using detailed geomorphic and structural field studies combined with U-Series dating of travertine within alluvial terraces and Ar-Ar dating of basalts. These data provide an improved understanding of the age of the Grand Canyon and the forces that drive and modulate the incision of this and other high plateau regions. This work also has a broad educational and outreach impact; we are working closely with the Interpretive Division of Grand Canyon National Park to design the Trail of Time to communicate geologic understanding to the 5 million visitors that come to the Park annually. Additionally, we continue to train a host of graduate and undergraduate students in the context of a multi-university collaboration that deals with numerous aspects of the tectonic and landscape evolution of the southwestern U.S.A doc11402 none Dobrizhinetskaya Microdiamonds of the Kokchetav massif in Kazakhstan grew under conditions of ultra-high-pressure (UHP) metamorphism of quartzofeldspathic sediments in a subduction zone. The recognition of this phenomenon a decade ago initiated a revolution in the understanding of continental collision terranes. Similar diamond-bearing rocks have now been discovered in the Saxony region of Germany, in the Erzgebirge of Variscan age. Erzgebirge and Kokchetav diamonds are strikingly similar. However, Erzgebirge diamonds appear to have suffered greater back-reaction to graphite and or dissolution at lower pressures. The study of diamonds in situ in garnet and zircon shows that in both terranes, diamond inclusions are very frequently accompanied by a hydrous phase and cavities indicative of a free fluid. This pilot project will pursue two studies relating to the genesis of microdiamonds. The first will be a study of inclusions in recently discovered diamonds from Saxonian Erzgebirge, Germany by TEM utilizing techniques similar to those we recently successfully developed for Kokchetav diamonds. Determinations of the composition and structure of inclusions in Erzgebirge diamonds coupled with our previous research on similar diamond formation from Kasakhstan will provide constraints for the evaluation of pressure conditions of diamond crystallization and an understanding of the depth to which crustal quartzofeldspathic rocks have been taken by tectonic processes. Such techniques could later be used in many other studies in both Earth and material sciences dealing with TEM research on the nanometric sized natural and synthetic minerals. The second study will be an experimental test of the diamond growth hypotheses suggested by De Corte et al. ( ) and Dobrzhinetskaya et al. ( ) to put constraints on the process(es) which may be responsible for preferential growth of hopper hollow, skeletal, cuboidal and cube-octahedral diamonds in fluid-rich subduction-zone environments. Traditionally, experimental attempts to replicate natural diamond formation within the diamond stability field have been based on syntheses in metal-carbon systems in a highly reduced environment. Only recently has experimental modeling of natural diamonds at high P and T conditions been extended to the carbonate-carbon system in presence of H2O. The latter ideas have been corroborated by results of fluid-inclusion studies in natural diamonds. It is now believed that C-O-H fluids can be very effective in diamond formation. Our focus will be on experimental syntheses of microdiamonds in the diamond stability field to test current models of growth. We will conduct several pilot experiments using a starting material composed of natural mineral mix of composition similar to the natural diamond-bearing felsic gneiss from Kokchetav upon which we reported in Dobrzhenitskaya et al. ( ). We will explore the effects of presence and absence of a C-O-H fluid phase, although we expect little results under fluid-absent conditions. Oxygen fugacity will be controlled by buffering with metal-oxide pairs. This pilot study will allow us to develop initial understanding of some aspects of graphite-diamond kinetics in presence of H2O as well as technical aspects of such experimentation to enable subsequent pursuit. Our experimental program will be the first study of diamond growth under such conditions. Specifically, we will synthesize diamonds under relatively oxidizing conditions (conditions under which diamonds and carbonates coexist stably) using C-O-H fluid in starting material whose bulk composition is close to Kokchetav and Erzgebirge diamond-bearing quatzofeldspathic rocks doc11396 none Miller Understanding how magma is processed on its journey from source to final rocky resting place is vital for understanding crustal evolution, the mechanics of magma ascent and emplacement and their relation to tectonics, and eruptive processes. Storage in upper crustal magma chambers has been, and still is, central to most views of this journey. However, concepts of the magma chamber, the processes that occur within it, and its relationship to plutons that are ultimately constructed have been intensely reevaluated in recent years. Many widely held views (e.g. that magma chambers are mostly crystal-poor bodies of magma throughout most of their lifespan ) have been called into question. We propose to investigate the evolution of exceptionally exposed plutons and probable equivalent volcanic sequences in the Eldorado Mountains and Highland Range, Nevada, and to test hypotheses about the mechanical and chemical processing of magma as it enters, resides in, and is extracted from magma chambers. Existing data that include general mapping and a sizable data set of 40Ar 39Ar ages and whole-rock elemental and isotopic analyses provide a sound initial basis for this study. We will add to the existing data base, but our main emphasis will be on a combination of updated traditional and new methods (very detailed mapping of internal pluton structures; detailed petrography using compositional imaging to emphasize zoning, reaction textures, and accessory mineral features; crystal size distribution analysis; in situ Pb and Sr isotope analysis of feldspars; ion probe dating of zircon). This methodology will clarify the evolution of these magma chambers, including their filling and replenishment; disruption and rearrangement by internal and external processes such as convection, mass wasting, roof collapse, and eruption; and, ultimately, pluton construction. It will also permit us to evaluate the filtering effect of magma chambers by comparing input magmas, outputs (erupted magmas), and retained materials (plutons), and to constrain eruptive triggers and controls of eruptive styles doc11395 none Goldfinger Nelson Great earthquakes represent large releases of energy and the ability to predict them is of obvious importance. A number of models of earthquake temporal and spatial characteristics have been developed, but have not been adequately tested and validated, mostly because the historical record is very short in comparison to the typical time between earthquakes. This project will attempt to provide a record of large earthquakes along the Cascadia margin that spans at least 10,000 years by use of turbidites as proxies for large earthquakes. The results will be invaluable in testing earthquake recurrence models doc11405 none Wernicke The Cambrian explosion and its Neoproterozoic precursors occurred in a context of extraordinary environmental perturbations, including extreme fluctuations between warm and cold climate, possible True Polar Wander, at least one significant impact event, and the reorganization and eventual breakup of a supercontinent. The tectonic events may have been a primary cause of both climatic and polar wander events. Despite significant progress over the last decade, the lack of absolute age control on key successions has severely limited developing reliable global correlations and a chronology of rifting and continental plate motions on a par with the Phanerozoic. For this project, the investigators are obtaining U Pb ages of authigenic xenotime overgrowths on detrital zircons, as well as standard U Pb dating on detrital zircons, on sandstones from the relatively complete Neoproterozoic succession in southwestern Laurentia (Kingston and Panamint Ranges, southern California). This succession contains a rich record of multiple rifting events and subsequent passive margin subsidence, interspersed with a record of glaciations and subsequent warming events, incisions, and a possible impact event. The investigators have sampled key areas that contain a number of structural and stratigraphic constraints on the relative timing of rifting and glaciation, and are testing a recent hypothesis that a particular sandstone horizon in the passive margin sequence contains detritus derived from the Acraman impact structure, which would provide a key time-correlative horizon between East Gondwana and Laurentia, and suggest proximity of southern Australia and southwestern Laurentia during subsidence doc11406 none PI s: David Bowman, California State University-Fullerton, and Charles Sammis, University of Southern California In recent years, observational and theoretical descriptions of spatio-temporal patterns of seismicity have focused on two fundamental (and controversial) observations: static stress (Coulomb) interactions between earthquakes and accelerating seismic moment release before large earthquakes. We have previously shown that simple stress change calculations can be used to define a region of accelerating seismicity before large earthquakes in California. In this project, we have three main goals: 1) To test the false-alarm rate of our method using seismicity in California, 2) To test the stability of our methodology in other seismically active regions worldwide, and 3) To develop a geologically realistic numerical model of a spatially-extended fault network that produces accelerating seismicity before large events. The goal of our project is to advance our understanding of fault interactions and ultimately to develop a method of monitoring the earthquake hazard in seismically active regions doc11407 none Gurnis The investigators propose to develop dynamic models of the interaction of plate tectonics with mantle convection and continental deformation. They will continue with modeling studies in which mantle dynamics is placed within an explicit plate tectonics framework, such that models are tested with observations in both the time domain (for example geological constraints on surface uplift) and present day geophysical observations (such as seismic tomography). They will explicitly focus on three problems which are well posed within a plate tectonics framework: 1.) The large-scale flow since the Early Cretaceous associated with the breakup of Gondwanaland; 2.) The time-dependent evolution of the Tonga-Kermadec subduction zone since its inception during the Eocene; 3.) The deformation of western North American lithosphere and upper mantle since the Middle Miocene. In all cases, they will use a common methodology in which the convection equations are solved within a spherical domain using a finite element code capable handling problems with very large variations in viscosity. They will solve large, well-resolved problems using the parallelized software on an in-house 312 processor Beowulf computer doc11408 none PI s: Robert S. Crosson, Kenneth Creager University of Washington In the Pacific Northwest, subduction of the Juan de Fuca plate beneath the margin of North America (Cascadia subduction zone) causes earthquakes on the plate boundary, as well as within both the continental crust and the subducting plate (slab). Seismic hazards are of particular concern in western Washington State owing to the concentration of population and earthquakes in this region. The hazard due to earthquakes in the subducting Juan de Fuca slab was underscored by the recent magnitude 6.8 earthquake of February in the southern Puget Sound region. To make progress in understanding the tectonic processes giving rise to earthquakes in this region, it is necessary to gain a better understanding of the structure of both the crust and upper mantle. Fortunately, recent seismic experiments using controlled sources of energy, such as the SHIPS (Seismic Hazards in Puget Sound) experiment, have provided extensive data which can be used to obtain high resolution images of seismic wave speed in the crust, as well as images of the subducting slab from reflections. In this project, we will combine data from several recent active source seismic experiments with extensive earthquake observations from the Pacific Northwest seismograph network (PNSN) to produce a high quality but large-scale model of P wave speed of the crust and upper mantle to a depth of 50-60 km. This model will be used to improve our knowledge of the locations of earthquake recorded by the PNSN, and also to accurately model reflected waves from the subducted slab in order to better understand the origin of slab earthquakes. We plan to provide an internet distribution site for our models and interpretations from this project doc11409 none Development of a Standard Biostratigraphic Reference Section for the Silurian Cape Phillips Formation, Canadian Arctic Paula J. Noble This study proposes to advance the status of Silurian radiolarian biostratigraphy through the collection and analysis of radiolarians from well-dated pristine sections of basinal marine strata in the Cape Phillips Formation, Canadian Arctic. Radiolarian data will be integrated with other useful biostratigraphic and geochemical datums with the goals of 1) generating a composite biostratigraphic standard for the Cape Phillips Basin, and 2) calibrating radiolarian datums that appear to have global biostratigraphic significance. This study should produce the most comprehensive and best calibrated data set ever generated for Silurian radiolarians and will be of fundamental importance in providing better age control for complexly deformed and poorly dated basinal sequences in orogenic belts around the world. Radiolarians and graptolites will be collected from at least three sections of Wenlockian - Ludlovian Strata on Devon and Cornwallis Islands and combined with six other Llandoverian-Ludlovian sections sampled by the PI and her collaborator, Dr. A. C. Lenz, during past field seasons. The graptolites are well studied and serve as the basis for biostratigraphic correlation and age control. A pilot study of carbon isotope geochemistry shows that there are at least two positive excursions that may serve as chemostratigraphic datums that may be integrated with the paleontologic data. Isotope geochemistry will be conducted on additional sections to further determine the reliability and extent of these chemostratigraphic datums doc11410 none Two major well-recognized difficulties in numerical simulation of waves propagating over unbounded domains are the accumulation of error during long time intervals and necessity to truncate the domain and subsequently set the artificial boundary conditions (ABCs) at the external artificial boundary. These two issues turn out to be closely related. In the previous work of the PI with collaborators that has been done in the framework of the scalar wave equation, we have used the inherently three-dimensional phenomenon of lacunae and developed a methodology that modifies any appropriate discrete scheme so that the long-term error buildup is fully eliminated while all of the original properties of the scheme (e.g., order of accuracy) are preserved. Moreover, the procedure allows one to replace the original infinite domain by a finite computational domain, which leads to obtaining highly accurate non-local unsteady ABCs. These ABCs are built directly for the discrete formulation of the problem, their temporal non- locality is fixed and limited, and they possess full geometric universality. The key objective of the proposed project is to extend the aforementioned methodology to wave-type models of practical interest, in particular, the Maxwell s equations (electromagnetic waves) and the linearized Euler s and full-potential equations (acoustic waves). The attainability of this goal is accounted for by the fact that the solutions to these equations have sharp aft fronts of the waves (manifestation of lacunae), which is the exact same behavior as displayed by the solutions to the wave equation. Numerical simulation of waves on unbounded domains has numerous applications that range from scattering of electromagnetic waves from aircraft and ground vehicles (radar technology) to antenna design to calculation of the acoustic fields produced by the airframe and airplane s jet engines for the purpose of reducing the noise levels around airports, as well as inside the passenger compartments. The results that we expect to obtain are going to benefit the foregoing applied areas. Indeed, we anticipate the creation of a universal framework that would allow one to modify a wide class of already existing and proven methods so that to enable two additional crucial capabilities -- long- term integration and accurate computation of infinite-domain wave fields on truncated domains. Besides, as the proposed research unfolds, it will necessarily include communication and collaboration with physicists and engineers, as well as preparation of course materials and training young researchers doc11411 none The Turtle Mountain Technical Assistance Center project will conduct leadership development and capacity building activities for a group of tribally-controlled colleges in the Upper Great Plains. The activities will be determined by the goals of the individual colleges in conjunction wit judgements made by the expert staff of the reently expired Tribal College Rural Systemic Initiative. Findings will be disseminated through the professional outreach avenues of the key leadership doc11412 none Winter, H. Henning U of Massachusetts - Amherst This research explores the creation of open-pore morphology by crystallizing polymers from a gel state. The gels used are chemically crosslinked polymers which were highly swollen in a supercritical fluid (SCF) at elevated temperature and pressure. Upon cooling below their crystallization temperature, polymer molecules begin to assemble into a three-dimensional, semicrystalline superstructure of high specific surface area and with narrow, open pores filled with SCF which then gets released. Pore sizes are in the order of 10nm to 10mm, depending on polymer and processing conditions; pore volumes might be anywhere between 0 and 90% of the entire sample. The new strategy differs from the classical foaming process (no bubble growth is needed) and from the commercial TIPS process (no polymer solution involved), but it integrates aspects of established processing methods to provide crosslinked precursors of desired shape. SCFs are used here for several reasons. SCF can be removed from the polymer without collapsing the pores. Subsequently, SCFs are recoverable, self-cleaning, and reusable; for repeated use, cleaning of the supercritical fluid comes naturally since the supercritical alkane (which we use) transforms into a poor solvent by depressurizing at the end of each processing cycle. The resulting porous polymers are exceptionally clean (free of residues), and retain shape and structural integrity. SCFs also lower surface tension and increase molecular mobility during crystallization; these are properties which could potentially have an affect on crystallization kinetics and pore formation. These are open questions which need to be pursued. Solvent character, molecular parameters of the polymer, crosslinking method, crosslink density and homogeneity, crystallization temperature, and swelling conditions are expected to be the controlling parameters for pore volume and size distribution, and for crystallinity. The research is aimed at elucidating these relationships with the objective of achieving tunable pore size and size distributions. Model polymer systems in this study are various crosslinked polyethylenes (xHDPE, xLDPE, xLLDPE) swollen in supercritical propane. The fundamental findings on polyethylenes are expected to apply to a wide range of semicrystalline polymers in catalysis separations, high performance materials and biomedical applications. Environmental Impact: Increasingly strict environmental legislation has forced many industries to re-evaluate their use of hazardous solvents. The novel process offers a process-wide design alternative for making porous polymers. It will reduce waste generation by: (a) supercritical fluids substitution of organic solvents during production. (b) complete elimination of a final cleaning step which otherwise is typical for porous materials (in comparison, cleaning of porous polymers from traditional processing is currently performed with special cleaning fluids which often are hazardous). (c) recovery and repeated use of the supercritical fluid doc11413 none The investigator and his colleagues organize the John H. Barrett Memorial Lectures in the University of Tennessee at Knoxville from May 10-12, . The Barrett Lectures have been held annually since . Each year a different topic is chosen, representing the research interests of the mathematics faculty of the University of Tennessee. Since , the lectures have consisted of three one-hour survey talks by each of three leading researchers representing different themes directions in a single field. The topic of the Barrett Lectures is: ``New Directions and Developments in Computational Mathematics . The focus of the lectures is parallel numerical algorithms for partial differential equations and their implementations and applications. The main speakers of the Barrett Lectures are Jinchao Xu of Penn State University, David Keyes of Old Dominion University and ICASE, and Mary Wheeler of University of Texas at Austin. Each of them will deliver three one-hour survey lectures on recent developments on parallel numerical algorithms with three different emphases: theory (Xu), computer implementation (Keyes), and application (Wheeler). In addition to the main speakers, six speakers are also invited to give one-hour talks on topics related to one of the main lectures. The Barrett Lectures are partly funded by a grant from Tennessee Science Alliance, and have often received additional support from the National Science Foundation. They attract wide interest, with an audience of between 40 and 50 participants from the whole country, in addition to faculty and students from Knoxville and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They represent one of the few long standing lecture series in mathematics in the southeastern United States. The main objective of the Barrett Lectures is to provide the participants with an exposition of parallel numerical algorithms for partial differential equations arising from various scientific engineering industrial applications, through in-depth survey lectures and informal discussions with the above three leading researchers in the field. Additional goals are to foster interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly with researchers in the Computer Science Department and in the College of Engineering at the University of Tennessee and several other southeastern institutions, and to generate a set of written surveys in the subject, which the organizing committee will endeavor to have published in book form. The fund being requested from the NSF will be spent providing partial support towards travel and accommodation for $20$ graduate students and recent Ph.D. s who do not have research grants doc11414 none dynamical systems theory comes into play in the work on robust persistence. Specifically, understanding chain recurrent sets and Morse decompositions of the boundary dynamics (where one or more species are absent) are key to showing that persistence for a dynamical system is robust to perturbation of that system or of its parameters. Dynamical systems that arise naturally in many areas in the biological sciences often have special features not shared by systems arising in the physical sciences. Broadly speaking, the investigator develops mathematical methods that exploit these special properties and applies them to specific problems. The main focus is on the long-term behavior of the dynamics after transient effects have disappeared. Progress in this area can help to answer important biological questions that are subject to mathematical modeling, such as whether an infectious disease becomes endemic in a population or becomes extinct, or which species in an ecosystem can survive and which will become extinct. A substantial effort is devoted to understanding the dynamics of mathematical models in three areas of the biosciences. The first is microbial growth and competition in environmental settings where biofilms may form on surfaces. Biofilms are of great importance in the health sciences and food industry where their formation typically results in negative outcomes. They are responsible for food and water contamination, dental caries and periodontal disease, and the contamination of medical implants. The investigator studies under what conditions biofilms may form and what bacterial densities can be expected. The second is a fundamental issue in population biology, the so-called paradox of the plankton : why can so many plankton species (and, more generally, species of other taxa) be supported by so few limiting resources? The investigator provides mathematically rigorous results for the existence of oscillatory coexistence states of the relevant mathematical models when the number of species exceeds the number of resources, as is typical in natural environments. The third is a more robust theory of persistence (also called permanence) for dynamical systems arising in population dynamics. In its simplest form, this theory seeks not to determine the global behavior of solutions of a dynamical system representing interacting populations but rather to answer the more basic question: What species are present at the end of the day? While past research in this area has primarily ignored the fact that population models are only approximately correct, the investigator seeks to provide answers to the basic question that hold true for all small perturbations of the model equations doc11415 none S. K. Mallapragada, Iowa State University This proposal represents a tri-national collaborative effort between the principal investigator Dr. Surya Mallapragada at Iowa State University (USA), Dr. Sacide Alsoy at Izmir Institute of Technology (Turkey) and Dr. Joseph Miltz at Technion (Israel), devoted to investigating the multicomponent drying mechanism of semicrystalline polymer packaging materials. This collaborative effort was initiated during the US-Israel-Turkey tripartite workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation and held in Haifa, Israel in March . Solvent removal is a key processing step in the production of a plethora of products such as packaging materials, adhesive tapes, photographic films and various functional coatings, many of which are made from semicrystalline polymers. The aim of this collaborative project is to investigate the mechanism of multicomponent solvent removal and the changes in the degree of crystallinity and the microstructure of semicrystalline polymers during drying. This, in turn, has a strong effect on the final properties of the polymer for various applications such as packaging. One of the important packaging materials used is cellulose acetate (CA) which will be the model system. A two pronged approach involving experimental investigations and mathematical modeling will be used to deal with the problem of multicomponent drying of semicrystalline polymers in the context of food packaging applications to enable optimization of drying conditions and dryer designs. The specific research objectives are to: 1. Develop a multicomponent model for solvent removal from semicrystalline polymer films. 2. Experimentally investigate the solvent induced crystallization kinetics of CA films and their effect on the drying kinetics. Use these to investigate the drying mechanism of CA films and validate the model. 3. Investigate the influence of drying conditions of CA films on their characteristics as packaging materials. Evaluate the permeability of the films to gases and their mechanical properties as a function of drying conditions. This work also represents the first model developed to predict non-isothermal multi-component drying kinetics of semicrystalline polymers. The model will be applicable to any polymer-solvent system by using suitable parameter values. The synergy between molecular understanding and application-based experimentation proposed in this work will enable accurate predictions of industrial drying processes doc11009 none Rausher Natural populations of the tall morning glory (Ipomoea purpurea) are commonly infected by a fungal pathogen, Coleosporium ipomoeae. This plant has a single gene with two alleles that condition either complete resistance or susceptibility to infection. Both alleles are represented in natural populations of the tall morning glory, a pattern found in many wild plant species. This observation contradicts the intuitive prediction that an allele providing resistance against a harmful pathogen should approach a frequency of one. Hypotheses proposed to explain the resistance susceptibility allele paradox suggest the net benefit of a resistance allele is mediated by inherent costs when the pathogen population is dynamic. This project will use field experiments to explore the potentially conditional benefits of the resistance allele in the tall morning glory. This work attempts to explain how natural selection may act to maintain genetic variation using the resistance susceptibility allele paradox as a case study. In addition to contributing to the resolution of a fundamental issue in evolutionary biology, this work may also have applications to crop breeders who have historically incorporated resistance alleles from the wild progenitors of crop plants. As many countries become increasingly skeptical of transgenic crops, there is a renewed need to understand how natural selection acts on resistance alleles in natural populations, both to better utilize current resistant crops and to better conserve the natural resource that resistance alleles represent doc11417 none Ferry Support is requested for acquisition of a new automation system for the JEOL JXA- electron microprobe in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. The instrument is 13 years old and a number of components are failing and unreliable including the memory devices, the LSI 11 73 computer, the energy dispersive spectrometer (EDS), and the stage motor drives. In addition, because the operating system, EDS, and computers are outdated, the instrument is incapable of a number of important functions that modern microprobes can perform such as light element detection by EDS (B through F); position-tagged spectroscopy; simultaneous collection of images and compositional data; integrated data collection, data reduction, and image processing with the same computer; and rapid exchange of images and analytical data between the microprobe and external computers. Support is also requested to replace the aging and dysfunctional carbon coater in the microprobe laboratory. An upgraded electron microprobe would be used in a wide variety of research projects including studies in metamorphic petrology, igneous petrology, mineralogy, crystallography, sedimentology, geochemistry, geochronology, radioactive waste disposal and remediation, materials science, and medicine. An electron microprobe, operating at top performance, will continue to play a key role in training the next generation of Earth scientists by serving as a principal research instrument for students at the undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels. The Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the School of Arts and Sciences have pledged to cover 16.7% and 33.3% of the cost of the acquisition, respectively. NSF is requested to cover the remaining 50%. The Department will continue to support the electron microprobe facility by paying the salary and benefits of the technician. The School of Arts and Sciences will continue to support the facility with an annual block contribution doc11418 none This award to Carnegie-Mellon University is supported by the Advanced Materials Program In the Chemistry Division.The goal of the research by Professor Richard D. McCullough is to design, synthesize, assemble and engineer new defect-free, regioregular polythiophenes in order to denonstrate and understand self-assembly in conjugated polymers as a way to optimize material properties and to create new functional properties. New synthetic routes will be developed and new insights into structure-property relationships wil be gained. Specific targets will be the development of new regioregular, amphiphilic polythiophene coplymers and polythiophene polyelectrolytes, the synthesis of new multifunctional polymers that have high conductivities, good mechanical properties and environmental stability, and the development of sensors and biosensors based on new polythiophene materials. Regioregular polythiophenes are well-defined conducting polymers whose properties can be tuned to novel applications such as ink-jet printing, wires and contacts, polymer switches and colorimetric biosensors. The scope of the research in synthesis, characterization, fabrication and performance measurement will provide students with broad interdisciplinary training doc11419 none The screening of data sets is essential to modern technology. Whenever the objective is to find positive elements in a data set, a test indicating whether at least one positive is an element of a specific part of the data set can greatly facilitate their isolation. Such tests are called binary group tests and the general mathematical method behind the identification of the positives using such tests is known as classical group testing. In many applied settings, the use of classical group testing to isolate objects that are individually positive has become standard experimental procedure. However, very little work has been done in applying group testing techniques to the identification of objects that are collectively positive. Let C be an unknown collection of subsets or complexes in a population and let P be a pool taken from the population. A pool P is said to be positive if and only if a member of C is also a subset of P. The identification of C by the application of these binary tests is called group testing for complexes. The primary aim of this proposal is the development of efficient group testing methods that lead to the identification of positive combinations of objects, namely the positive complexes. There are many scientific and technical areas where the identification of positive combinations of objects is important. Computationally feasible methods of finding combinations of entities that produce some measurable outcome or are measurably linked to some function or disfunction would have important applications to medical genetics, computer security, software testing, data mining, communications, and marketing doc11420 none The investigators will determine which physical processes are responsible for temporal variations in galactic cosmic radiation with time scales greater than 22 years, with particular emphasis on periods of order 100 years and greater. A subsidiary goal will be to establish limits for the space weather that has occurred throughout the period - AD. The main effort is to use the cosmogenic records of the time variation of the galactic cosmic radiation over the period - AD, together with the neutron monitor and satellite measurements over the past 50 years, to investigate the physical properties of the long term (100 year time scale) modulation. This study comprises several components. The investigators will set limits on the changes in beryllium-10 and carbon-14 due to changes in the geomagnetic cutoff, as a consequence of changes in the geomagnetic moment, and its vector direction, - AD, and developing a means to correct the data for these effects. They will use the known occurrence of very large solar cosmic ray events in the interval - to investigate the contributions they have made to the beryllium and carbon data, and to develop a method to remove such contributions. Using these results, they will remove geomagnetic cutoff and solar cosmic ray effects from the cosmogenic data, leaving a more accurate representation of the long-term modulation of the galactic cosmic rays. This will allow them to deduce what temporal changes in the energy spectrum of the galactic cosmic radiation are consistent with the observed long-term changes in cosmic ray intensity from AD to the present. Synthesizing the work with satellite data from near earth and from the far heliosphere, the investigators will set bounds on the nature of the mechanisms that produce the long-term modulation of the galactic cosmic radiation. They will explore the astrophysical implications of the results and establish benchmarks for space weather - doc11421 none This project will organize and hold the third International Workshop on Structural Health Monitoring at Stanford University, September 12-14, . Structural health monitoring is an emerging technology, which combines advanced sensing technology with a knowledge of material structural damage characteristics to monitor the condition of structures in real time while in service. Building on the prior to workshops focused on this topic, the objectives of the workshop are to review the progress of the current rapid technological development in the field, to identify key and emerging issues in research and development, and to promote exchanges and cross-fertilization among many disciplines and these applications, such as rotorcraft and aircraft structures, civil infrastructures, vehicle and marine structures, and hazard mitigation. Key and distinguished individuals from industry, academe, and government will be invited to give keynote lectures and presentations in the workshop. Product and technology demonstrations will also be conducted. The workshop will conclude with panel discussions on key issues and concerns to be identified during the workshop. The workshop will result in proceedings containing the presentations of the workshop. Appropriate guidelines and recommendations for government agencies and industry to promote structural health monitoring development will be developed doc11422 none Krasny The investigator develops new computer algorithms for particle simulations in fluid dynamics and molecular dynamics, and he employs the algorithms to study important application problems. The main technical tool is a new adaptive treecode algorithm for solving the N-body problem in the context of long-range particle interactions. In this algorithm, the particle forces or velocities are evaluated using Taylor approximation in Cartesian coordinates, and the necessary Taylor coefficients are computed by a recurrence relation. The adaptive features include a divide-and-conquer evaluation strategy, nonuniform rectangular clusters, variable order approximation, and a run-time choice between Taylor approximation and direct summation. The investigator develops an optimal strategy for choosing the parameters in the code, in order to maximize the accuracy and efficiency of the algorithm. The application problems to be studied in fluid dynamics include the onset of chaotic dynamics in vortex cores, high precision computation of vortex sheet roll-up and spiral formation in the Kelvin-Helmholtz problem, and breakdown and transition in vortex rings. An important component of the work is to compare regularized particle simulations with experiments and with genuine viscous flows computed by finite difference schemes. The application problems to be studied in molecular dynamics involve potential energy and force field evaluation for electrostatic interactions. The results of this research affect several areas of strategic national interest, including civil and military aviation and biotechnology. One outstanding problem in aviation is the simulation of the trailing vortex wake that forms behind an aircraft on takeoff and landing. The vortex wake is a serious hazard to other aircraft, especially in crowded airports. It imposes a minimum time and distance between takeoffs and landings on a given runway, and it is a source of wind shear, which has been implicated in accidents. The project sheds light on the structure and dynamics of vortex cores, and this helps aeronautical engineers in designing vortex wake remediation systems. In the area of biotechnology, one far-reaching problem is to simulate protein folding in a physically accurate way. This is in fact the next step required to make use of the data collected in the human genome project. The project contributes by enhancing the computer algorithms that are used by biochemists to study protein folding. In the area of education and human resources, the investigator directs an applied honors calculus course for freshman science and engineering students, develops a new graduate course on scientific computing, and mentors the professional development of undergraduate and graduate students and postdocs doc11423 none We envision the development of an innovative optical cross-connect switch based on mechanical transducers for switching between optical waveguides as shown in Figure 1. It consists of 4 input fibers connected to 4 input waveguides on the switch. At each of the interconnect points, a microactivated micro-stage can be moved along a 45 axis to allow for steering the beam at 90 with respect to the original direction. In this way, any inputs can be steered to any outputs in a non-blocking way. Contrary to what is typically done in the area of micro-opto-electro-mechanical systems, the mechanical movements of the switch are not implemented using silicon technology but are directly realized in III-V compound semiconductors [1]. This has the important advantage of permitting the monolithic integration of active (i.e. semiconductor lasers, SOA, etc.) and passive waveguide devices (like the WDM filters, arrayed waveguide gratings) with the switching fabric. It can be envisioned that this should lead to complex wavelength cross-connect systems on a single chip. Switching time will be optimized by minimizing the mass of the moving parts and by reducing the required displacements to distances of the order of 3 microns. Dissipation of activated in one of its possible states. On the 4 output waveguides, SOA s are monolithically integrated to compensate for optical losses in the same way that we recently demonstrated a lossless 1 x 2 splitter. A passive-active resonant coupler to move the mode from a passive waveguide to a vertically positioned active waveguide using the PARC platform technology [2] can be used for the integration doc11424 none Ruzek The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and its parent body the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) exemplify a national research organization that has enormous potential to positively impact SMET learning at all levels. Excellent educational programs already bridging the research and education communities can be further leveraged to reach a diverse, interdisciplinary national and international education audience by collaborating with consortia of universities and colleges seeking closer ties to research institutions. NCAR will host the Earth System Education Partnerships with Research Institutions workshop January 29-31, in Boulder, CO. The workshop will bring together a small group of Earth system education leaders with NCAR and UCAR personnel to engage in a strategic discussion of ways to enhance and expand research institution involvement with the education community doc11425 none The investigator and his colleagues study Physical Knots, bridging the gap between purely topological properties of knots and links, and physically realistic systems in which properties such as thickness, curvature, repelling forces, and randomness are evident. Focus areas include: understanding how random tangling increases with filament length in different kinds of systems; determining existence, uniqueness, and geometric properties of optimal conformations of knots; modeling gel electrophoresis of knotted DNA loops; understanding how the symmetric energy of knots models physical behavior such as accessibility of molecules to enzymes and self-irradiation of filaments that emit; determining relationships between various knot energies; understanding how knots, such as folding proteins, form in filaments with free ends. This project contributes to the understanding of one of the fundamental ways that matter behaves: a solid object occupies space; a sheet of material separates one part of space from another; and a string tangles with itself or other strings. There is growing scientific awareness that knotting and tangling happen, and are physically important, at every scale of size, from molecules such as DNA and other polymers, to magnetic field lines in the sun. But there are many basic questions that are not yet answered: How are knots and tangles created, or destroyed, in various settings? What happens when one pulls a knot tight? Why do mathematically different kinds of knots behave the way they do in physical situations? How can we model knots on the computer, and how well do the computer simulations reflect actual behavior? The combination of importance of the phenomenon, together with substantial open questions, makes this area fascinating and valuable for research. In particular, the project seeks to contribute to areas of national interest, including increasing understanding of the behavior of DNA molecules, and helping to elucidate the process of protein folding doc11426 none The work is concerned with the development of computational methods for the most-energetic traveltimes (METTs) of seismic waves and their applications to various physical problems. The METT corresponds to the highest energy level in data and has been recognized as one of most important components for image inversion processes in highly heterogeneous media. However, METTs often develop discontinuities in wavefronts. Thus, computational principles that have been utilized for the computation of continuous first-arrival traveltimes can hardly be adopted. The upwind direction of the METT is determined by the energy level (amplitudes) of wavefronts and, therefore, the amplitude accuracy is very crucial for a successful METT simulation. Since the transport equation, which solves the amplitude, incorporates the traveltime Laplacian, the traveltime should be solved by a non-oscillatory high-order numerical algorithm which can provide a mechanism for an accurate traveltime Laplacian near the discontinuities. The investigator proposes the development of accurate and efficient algorithms for the METT and the corresponding amplitude in 3D heterogeneous media, incorporating second- and third-order ENO schemes and their local extensions for intersecting wavefronts near discontinuities. A full wavefield solver of negligible numerical dissipation is to be developed and implemented for a numerical verification of the conjecture: the METT can be computed in such a way that the corresponding amplitude is continuous over the whole domain. Applications are planned for the anisotropic METT and realistic geophysical problems such as tomography in oil exploration, earthquake analysis, and shallow seismic reflection. The proposed research subjects are vitally important to energy, economic, and environmental concerns. In particular, the theoretical understanding and numerical algorithms for the METT and the corresponding amplitude will open other promising research areas. For various applications of sound waves traveling through a substance, it is necessary to compute the traveltime of the sound waves. Since the acquired data are dominated by the highest energy levels of the waves, the most reliable results can be obtained by incorporating information from the most-energetic traveltime (METT). The proposal is concerned with the development of accurate and efficient computational algorithms for the METT and applications to important geophysical image processing problems. Image processing methods allow geoscientists to find interesting underground features. In oil exploration, for example, geophysicists first compute images of rock soil structures and then detect the spots where oil reservoirs are. Thus the oil reservoir detection can be successful only with accurate and well-focused images, for which the newly developed algorithms provide the most useful information. The same arguments can be applied to the shallow sound wave reflection, the image processing techniques for the subsurface not deeper than 100 meters. These techniques have been developed for detailed images; examples can be found in waste-disposal site characterization, archaeological search, and ground security analysis. Many cracks and break-downs on buildings or roads are due to an ignorance or under-estimation of the importance of ground security analysis. The proposed work is also applicable to earthquake analysis. Since a horrible destruction happens with a close relation to the most-energetic components of the earthquake wave, the computation of the METT is necessary for a deeper understanding of the earthquake. The new algorithms are expected to provide an effective mechanism that helps geoscientists simulate seismic ground motion and helps geologists predict earthquake destruction areas, with high accuracy and efficiency. The above mentioned problems are vitally important to energy, economic, and environmental concerns and can be solved more reliably by the proposed work doc11427 none This is funding to subsidize the expenses of graduate students participating in the doctoral consortium immediately preceding the Fourth International Conference on Cognitive Modeling (ICCM ), to be held July 26-28, in Fairfax, VA. Computational modeling has emerged as a central, but complex and sometimes fractionated, theme in research on cognition. The ICCM conferences provide a unique worldwide forum where researchers from diverse backgrounds come together to compare cognitive models, to evaluate models using human data, and to further the development, accumulation and integration of cognitive theory. ICCM- will be the first of these important events to take place outside of Europe. Attending the conference and participating in the doctoral consortium which precedes it will enable the students to present their work to and receive feedback from the scientific community, will help them develop a supportive community, and will foster interaction with and mentoring by senior researchers. The students will be selected by a committee, with special consideration to be given to students from under-represented groups and from institutions where cognitive modeling is not a strength doc11428 none The investigator proposes to continue the development of efficient and accurate numerical methods for unsteady incompressible flow, with particular emphasis on (i) finding new equivalent formulations of Navier-Stokes equations, often inspired by physical considerations, better suited to numerical computation; (ii) proper handling of boundary conditions, a key difficulty in the subject since important physical interactions frequently occur near the boundary; (iii) rapid computation of three dimensional flows and generalization of schemes for flows in complex geometries; (iv) development of efficient schemes for complex fluids such as magneto-hydrodynamics, liquid crystal polymers, geodynamo, climate modeling, and large eddy turbulence simulations; (v) design of numerical schemes that preserves numerically conserved quantities such as energy and helicity for inviscid flow, and accurately captures their dissipation rates at high Reynolds number. It is widely believed that different dissipation rates for energy and helicity is the key mechanism leading to the formation of large coherent structures of turbulent flows. The numerical simulation of incompressible flows, which plays an important role in numerous scientific and industrial applications of current interest, is a challenging task for both numerical analysts and computational fluid dynamicists. The proposed fast and accurate numerical methods for incompressible flow is expected to become an important tool for simulation and analysis of complex turbulent flow phenomena including vortex breakdown, (massive) flow separation, vortex shedding, transient jets in cross-stream, wake-body interaction, high-swirl flow, etc. It is also an essential tool for the design of advanced flow control mechanisms used, for example, to reduce flow-induced noise and vibration, and to improve lift drag performance at reduced energy consumption rates. Examples include flow over bluff bodies such as ground or under-water vehicles; in engines; in around rotating machinery or in data storage units with rotating and moving parts doc11429 none Bergelson Plants can recognize gene products produced by pathogens, and this recognition triggers a strong defensive response that severely limits the pathogen s growth in the plant. An important question in the area of plant disease, is Why do pathogens carry genes which ultimately trigger a defense response against them ? In this Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, the researchers propose to look for benefits associated with the pathogen genes that elicit plant defenses. They propose to take a plant pathogenic bacteria and remove several of the elicitor genes, and then compare the performance of the original strains (which have all the genes) to the mutant strain (which possesses a subset of the genes). The researchers will investigate several factors including disease pathology, epidemiology, and survival, under both greenhouse and natural field conditions. Agriculture and the plant biotechnology industry are very interested in pathogen defense elicitor genes. It is now possible to engineer plants to express new resistance genes that recognize the elicitor genes of common plant pathogens. Before such a strategy is attempted, it would be valuable to understand how the elicitor genes function and are maintained in pathogen populations. If elicitor genes can be removed with little or no fitness cost to the pathogens, then a biotechnology strategy that depends on the expression of elicitor genes can easily fail doc11430 none The investigator will devise, improve, and analyze methods for the numerical simulation of complex physical phenomena modeled by partial differential equations, emphasizing three main areas: mixed methods for elasticity equations, discontinuous Galerkin methods, and computational general relativity. For elasticity, the investigator will build on a recent breakthrough that enabled the construction of the first stable mixed finite element methods for the displacement-stress formulations with polynomial trial functions, and also work towards the development of simpler nonconforming mixed finite element methods and extensions to three dimensional elasticity problems. Concerning discontinuous Galerkin methods--finite element methods in which the approximating piecewise polynomial functions are discontinuous, with modifications incorporated into the variational formulation to achieve consistency--the investigator will work with his collaborators to build on recent work on the unification and classification of such methods to develop a unified approach to the analysis of and discrimination among a wide class of discontinuous Galerkin methods for elliptic equations. Application will also be made to the numerical simulation of elastic plates incorporating shear. The third and largest effort concerns the numerical solution of Einstein s field equations relating mass and the curvature of space-time. The emphasis here will be on understanding the fundamental properties of the Einstein equations most relevant to their numerical solution and the basic difficulties that have beset previous attempts at numerical simulations of them. The work will be guided by the goal of simulating the coalescence of inspiralling pairs of black holes and the resulting emission of gravitational radiation, which is a problem of fundamental importance to gravitational physics and also because such simulations will be essential to realization of a new generation of observatories based on gravitational wave detectors. Computer simulation is a key tool for the design and testing of complex engineering structures. In recent decades computer simulation has also joined experiment and theory as one of the main paradigms of scientific investigation. In both areas, many of the most complex systems are first modeled by systems of partial differential equations--in which the language of calculus is used to express the variations of the relevant physical quantities in space and time--and then these systems of differential equations must be approximated by numerical algorithms, which harness the power of modern computers to perform billions of arithmetical operations a seconds to extract the solutions to the equations to the required degree of accuracy. In recent decades the principles for the design and validation of such algorithms have been developed for many of the basic systems of differential equations encountered in science in technology, but many more complex systems have so far resisted effective computation, and that is the thrust of this research. A particular emphasis will be on numerical algorithms for accurate determination of the stresses internal to elastic structures, which is essential to building safe and economic engineering structures. A second emphasis will be on developing methods to simulate Einstein s equations of general relativity, especially for predicting the output of gravitational radiation--minute ripples that propagate on the curved surface of space-time--from massive cosmological events such as black hole collisions. Computer codes capable of making such predictions are needed to realize the effectiveness of a new type of observatory based on gravitational radiation currently being constructed, which will provide mankind with its first window on the dark matter that makes up 90% of the universe doc11431 none This proposal requests support for CoFE conference that will focus on identifying food engineering priorities for the 21st century and on integrating this field with other major engineering disciplines and promoting interaction among engineers from various engineering discipline areas. The Conference is designed to help guide future research priorities and is organized around the major topical tracks including: (1) physical chemistry of foods, (2) transport processes, (3) food processing and packaging, (4) food engineering education, and (5) university and industry interaction. This Conference will provide a forum for consideration of future research directions of food process engineering in critical need, especially those research challenges emerging from the food industry. This Conference will be the 8th one of its series. It will be a topical conference within the annual meeting of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) to be held in Reno, Nevada during November 5 - 9, . The organizing committee plans to submit a final report of the Conference to the National Science Foundation soon after the Conference doc11432 none The Twenty First Fungal Genetics Conference is being held at the Asilomar Conference Center at Asilomar, California on March 13-18, . Approximately 650 scientists and students from around the world are expected to attend. The conference focuses on the molecular biology, genetics, biochemistry and cell biology of filamentous fungi. This meeting consists of four plenary sessions, four sessions devoted to concurrent workshops in specialized areas, three poster sessions and time set aside for informal discussions. Topics covered in the plenary sessions are: Comparative and Functional Genomics, Fungal-Host Interactions, Cell Biology, and Genome Structure and Maintenance. Specialized sessions cover Signal Transduction in Growth, Adaptation and Development; Comparative and Evolutionary Genomics; Mating and Heterokaryosis; Fungal Photobiology and Clocks; Mutation, DNA Repair Genome Stability; Plant Pathogenesis: Mycotoxins, Secondary Metabolism and Gene Clusters; Accessory Genetic Elements: Introns, Plasmids Prions and Transposons; Horizontal Gene Transfer; New Tools: Microarrays, Transcriptome, Knockouts and Transposon Tagging; and Fungi in Teaching. In this meeting, strong emphasis is placed on the participation of young scientists and students, particularly those from under-represented groups. The meeting actively promotes the interaction of these junior scientists with more senior scientists in the field to allow them opportunities to develop collaborations. Funds are to help defray the travel and participation costs of students, postdoctorals and others who would otherwise be financially unable to attend doc11433 none This research comprises two research projects directed at the design, synthesis and characterization of very high-spin polyradicals and chiral pi-conjugated systems The objectives of the first project, the characterization of high-spin polyradicals, are (1) to prepare organic polyradicals with the highest possible spin quantum numbers and minimum spin polydispersity, (2) to synthesis and study high-spin and or switchable polyradicals with stability at ambient conditions. Modern synthetic methodologies will be employed to obtain the proposed polyradicals. For nanometer-sized molecules (polyradicals and its derivatives), molecular sizes and shapes will be determined by small angle neutron scattering, in conjunction with the Monte Carlo conformational searches. Magnetic properties will be characterized using SQUID magnetometry. For stable polyradicals, X-ray crystallography, ESR spectroscopy, and SQUID magnetometry will be the primary characterization techniques. The objectives of the second project, characterization of chiral pi-conjugated systems, are (1) to develop new approaches to optimize interactions between pi-conjugated systems in three-dimensions, using tetra-o-phenylenes and thiophene-based chiral carbon-sulfur mixed allotropes and (2) to develop asymmetric synthesis and or optical resolutions for pi-conjugated helices (and double helices) and to characterize their redox states, including barriers for racemization. This project will rely on the development of new synthetic methods. The primary characterization for chiral molecules (their radical ions and polyions) in solution will be circular dichroism (CD); a CD spectropolarimeter will be setup with its sample compartment accessible from an inert atmosphere glovebox. The solid state characterization will include X-ray crystallography and electrical conductivity measurements. Graduate and postdoctoral students carrying out the experiments will be trained in the synthesis of molecules of mesoscopic dimensions, and the experimental and theoretical characterization of their electronic properties. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program support the educational and research activities of Dr. Andrzej Rajca of the Chemistry Department at the University of Nebraska. His work promises advances in the production and understanding of two kinds of materials: organic magnets and chiral conjugated oligomers. The research should be significant in a number of fields: chemical synthesis, the physics of magnetic materials, and the physics of conductors doc11434 none Tucker The investigator studies the effects of errors imposed by numerical computations carried out in most applied environments (e.g. commercial computers). He focuses on rigorous control of errors in the numerical solution of systems of ordinary differential equations, particularly chaotic dynamical systems. The goal is to provide accurate estimates of the errors of the actual calculations, and to introduce an accurate means of dealing with rounding truncation errors. Auto-validating methods for the numerical solution of mathematical problems or of mathematical models of science and engineering problems, especially chaotic dynamical systems, is becoming increasingly important. Rigorous error estimates, valuable for any computational model, are especially important in chaotic systems, which arise in modeling weather, neural networks, and so on. The investigator doc11435 none Recent progress in coastal ocean modeling has emphasized two main themes: 1) the use of relatively large computational domains which encompass much larger areas than the region of specific interest, the main concept being to place the open ocean boundaries far away in deep water non-resonant ocean basins, and 2) strategically providing computational resolution using unstructured grids in order to maintain an approximately constant level of localized error throughout the domain. This large domain local grid refinement strategy has led to certain computational difficulties. First, the range of flow regimes varies dramatically from the deep ocean to the shallow near shore and inland regions which include inlets, rivers, and flood plains with surrounding levee systems. Not only are the depths dramatically different, but the force balances in the descriptive equations vary dramatically as well. Various algorithms perform very differently within these widely disparate flow regimes in terms of stability, accuracy and localized mass conservation properties. Second, the high level of grid resolution provided in localized high flow gradient and or very shallow water depth regions actually degrades the stability properties of many algorithms that worked quite well with coarser discretizations, and work very well in regions with smoother solutions. The main focus of this project is to overcome these difficulties through the use of suitably coupled, finite element hp-adaptive algorithms, which are based on mathematically sound error estimates. The investigators have an extensive history in developing continuous Galerkin finite element methods for shallow water problems, and have recently investigated the use of discontinuous Galerkin methods for these problems. By exploiting the strengths of these two approaches, they plan to develop simulation tools for solving shallow water problems which can model large domains with locally refined, unstructured grids, can accurately resolve high gradient flow regions, can locally adapt to changes in flow characteristics, and which honor local mass conservation principles where necessary. Specifically, under this project, the investigators will (1) further develop and analyze discontinuous Galerkin methods for shallow water flows in two and three dimensions (2) thoroughly compare continuous and discontinuous Galerkin methods for some model problems, and (3) investigate novel multi-algorithmic approaches based on coupling the two methodologies for shallow water equations and related mathematical models. Accurate mathematical and computer modeling of coastal ocean circulation and transport of chemical species in shallow waters has significant implications from an economic, environmental and public health perspective. Major inter-related issues include coastal inundation, navigation, sediment movement, pollutant transport and fisheries. Accurate prediction of hurricane storm surges can help save lives and property in many low lying regions throughout the United States and the world. The prediction of coastal currents and water levels is also of major significance in commercial and military navigation, e.g. in the design of harbors and navigation channels. Current computer simulation tools are lacking in their ability to reliably and efficiently model these complex flow regimes. The investigators on this project, through the use of advanced mathematical modeling, numerical algorithms and distributed computing technology, will develop state-of-the-art simulation tools for these applications doc11436 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Geoff Emberling and his colleagues will conduct one season of field research and a second of analysis at the archaeological site of Tell Brak, located in Northeastern Syria. The site consists of a 65 hectare mound about 45 m high and is surrounded by a ring of five or more small sites at a radius of 0.5-1.0 km. While first excavated almost 50 years ago, only recently have the lower levels which date to the fourth millennium BC been uncovered and the limited soundings have exposed a large building with niched and buttressed walls, a massive gateway with stone door sill and door socket still intact, and an enclosed courtyard with large-scale non-domestic cooking facilities. The single associated cylinder seal impression recovered suggests a developing system of administrative control. The most recent excavations in the same level in a different part of the site have revealed a ceramic production area with kilns and a large clay pit, suggesting not only specialization of production but spatial concentration of such activities. The significance of these findings lie in both their early date and their location in northern Mesopotamia. Archaeologists have traditionally believed that the Tigris and Euphrates region of southern Mesopotamia served as the cradle of Near Eastern civilization and that the more poorly watered northern periphery was of secondary importance. While agriculturally fertile, the southern region however lacks essential natural resources such as timber and copper and archaeologists have attributed development in the North to colonization by Southerners to gain these materials. It is, in fact, clear that such settlement did take place. Tell Brak however significantly changes this picture because the recent excavations appear to reveal an unexpectedly high level of scale and social complexity which predates southern expansion and exceeds comparable developments in the South. Dr. Emberling and his colleagues will continue excavation in this early level to expand exposure both in the central area as well as an outlying region to determine the degree of social differentiation. They will address three specific questions: 1. When did Tell Brak grow in size and complexity and a series of high precision radiocarbon determinations will aid in development of a ceramic chronology. 2.In what sequence did trade, administrative control and specialization of production increase? This will provide insight into the processes with led to development at the site. 3. What were the effects of later southern expansion into the site. Dr. Emberling postulates that control over trade in crucial and abundant raw materials such as copper ore and obsidian (used to make stone tools) play a crucial role in Tell Brak s rise. Scientists wish to understand how states developed from a simple egalitarian agricultural base and how elites arise. Because states by definition incorporate large geographic regions, the process can be understood only in broad areal context. Tell Brak, because of its unexpected degree of complexity and its location at the edge of Mesopotamia has the potential to provide significant insight. A number of graduate student will participant, and thus the project will also serve an important educational function doc11437 none This individual investigator award will provide support to a professor for a project that will address the role of the phase and phase coherence in superconductor systems. One objective of the project will be to determine the symmetry of the order parameter in a series of exotic superconducting materials. Josephson interferometry experiments, instrumental in establishing the symmetry of the high temperature cuprates, will be applied to several other systems suspected to exhibit unconventional symmetry, including heavy fermion superconductors, which exhibit two distinct superconducting phases transitions, organic superconductors, believed to be d-wave, and certain ruthenate superconductors, thought to be p-wave with a complex order parameter that corresponds to a state with broken time-reversal symmetry. Supplementing these are measurements of the low temperature penetration depth in these materials, the most sensitive test of nodes in the superconducting order parameter. These experiments are crucial to identifying the pairing symmetry, thereby allowing characterization of the thermodynamic, electromagnetic, and transport properties of complex superconductors, and pointing the way to discovery of the microscopic mechanism responsible for the superconductivity. A second set of experiments will apply Scanning SQUID Microscopy to study the distribution and motion of magnetic vortices in superconducting films and crystals. Key problems to be addressed are the geometry of the vortex lattice and structure of the vortex core in unconventional superconductors, the pinning of vortices and flux creep at low temperatures, and the motion of vortices in patterned films including asymmetries in vortex flow in step and ratchet structures. In connection with this project, several significant advances of the Scanning SQUID Microscopy technique will be developed: enhancement of the spatial resolution into the submicron regime, implementation of imaging at ultralow temperatures in a dilution refrigerator, and development of schemes for moving and positioning individual vortices in superconductor systems that will enable direct tests of vortex interactions and pinning. Associated with this project will be the presentation of an established graduate level course in Superconductor Device Physics and the development of a new course in Nanoscale Devices and Probes. %%% This individual investigator award will provide support to a professor for a project that will address the role of the phase and phase coherence in superconductor systems. Superconducting materials are characterized by a quantity, the order parameter, which largely determines their electronic properties. More than any single quantity, it is the phase of this order parameter that is responsible for the fascinating properties of superconductors and leads to the unique potential and capabilities of superconductor electronic devices. Two of the most significant advances have been the identification of unconventional pairing in the cuprates superconductors that is characterized by a strong phase anisotropy (in contrast to the isotropic order parameter observed in ordinary superconductors), and the development of novel magnetic field detection instruments that make possible direct imaging of magnetic domains and vortices. This project will build on these advances in two directions: (1) Experiments will be carried out to determine the order parameter symmetry of several exotic superconducting materials that are suspected to be unconventional, including heavy fermion superconductors, organic superconductors, and ruthenate superconductors. Two complementary approaches will be used: phase-sensitive interferometry experiments which directly probe the anisotropy of the phase of the order parameter, the most definitive test of the pairing symmetry, and measurements of the low-temperature magnetic penetration depth, which is perhaps the most sensitive of the probe of the magnitude of the order parameter. (2) Scanning SQUID Microscopy will be used to study the distribution and motion of magnetic vortices in superconducting films and crystals. This instrument scans a sensitive dc SQUID detector over the surface of a sample to map out the magnetic field distribution with high magnetic field and spatial resolution. This project will provide training for a number of graduate research students in the field of superconducting phase electronics, an topic of current interest for quantum information processing and computing. Associated with this project will be the presentation of an established graduate level course in Superconductor Device Physics and the development of a new course in Nanoscale Devices and Probes doc11438 none Marino The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide 24 months of support to Dr. Stephen F. Marino to work with Professor Andreas Plueckthun at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. The goal of this project is the generation of G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) amenable to structural studies. GPCRs are integral membrane proteins that are primary receptors responsible for olfaction, vision, taste, hormonal and neuronal action. Between 1 and 3% of the vertebrate genome is thought to code for GPCR-like sequences and they are the primary targets of up to 50% of all pharmaceuticals. Structures of other GPCRs would allow the scientific community to understand how GPCRs can bind diverse ligands such as peptides, nucleotides, amino acids, lipids, ions, etc. The Plueckthun lab has pioneered ribosome display applications, making it the best place to conduct this research doc11439 none Stephenson The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide 6 months of support to Dr. Sharon L. Stephenson of Gettysburg College to work with Dr. Eduard I. Sharapov at the Joint Institute of Nuclear Physics in Dubna, Russia on a direct measurement of the neutron-neutron scattering length at YAGUAR. This project is being co-funded by the U.S.-Russia Cooperative Research Program and the MPS Directorate s Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. A direct measurement of the neutron-neutron scattering length has never been done. What is needed is a high instantaneous value for the neutron flux and a careful attention to systematic errors. The relatively new YAGUAR pulsed reactor has the necessary instantaneous flux. One way to address systematic errors is by modeling. The PI will use the Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP) transport code to model the YAGUAR pulsed reactor in Snezhinsk, Russia. She will help design and perform a first and second generation experiment; the first will achieve an accuracy in the neutron-neutron scattering length ann of 3% and the second 1%. Dr. Sharapov is a professor of nuclear physics at the Joint Institute. He is an authority on nuclear structure and is best known for leading the lanthanum parity violation experiment in the early s doc11440 none Wynn The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide eighteen months of support to Dr. Jonathan G. Wynn to work with Dr. Michael I. Bird at the Australian National University s Research School of Earth Sciences on the depth profile variability in the stable carbon isotopic composition of organic matter from Australian soils. The project involves the study of carbon isotopes from modern savanna soil of Australia. It will provide better constraints on variability in these ecosystems, which can be used to address issues of global change and paleoecology. Detailed depth-specific measurements will be taken of stable carbon isotope ratios in organic matter from diverse soil types of the tropical savanna biome in Australia. This research will expand the analytical tools which are currently being applied to studies of paleoenvironmental records derived from carbon isotope measurements of ancient soils, and contribute to studies of the processes controlling carbon sequestration and cycling in the terrestrial biosphere. Dr. Bird is currently active in a wide range of stable carbon isotopic research, which has centered around the study of natural and anthropogenic influences on the global carbon cycle. In addition to the high caliber research facilities, Australia has an environment which provides a wide diversity of savanna ecosystems and soil types within an accessible region ideal for this study doc11441 none Aufdenkampe The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The Program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four-month postdoctoral research fellowship for Dr. Anthony Aufdenkampe to work with Dr. Reynaldo L. Victoria and Dr. Alex V. Krusche of CENA and Dr. Ron Benner of the University of South Carolina. Support for this project is coming from the Ecosystem Studies Program of the BIO Division and the U.S.-Brazil Program in the Division of International Programs. These experiments are designed toward two objectives: (1) Develop empirical relationships of river metabolism as a function of water composition, discharge hydrograph, and sub-basin characteristics, to be immediately applicable to the first parameterization of the ROMBUS model. (2) Interpret microbial organic matter transformations in rivers from the more detailed perspective of bioenergetics, which is the first step toward a more mechanistic parameterization of these processes. The goal of the proposed research is to explore controls on rates of organic matter remineralization within the Amazon River system. The benefit of this project is that it will advance the knowledge of our understanding of Amazon River basin, and river ecology as well as provide us with a better understanding of river metabolism and water composition doc11442 none Okafor The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month postdoctoral research fellowship for Dr. Chudi H. Okafor to work with Dr. Daniel Obikeze at the University of Nigeria, in Enugu State, Nigeria. This study will examine the nature and role of indigenous conflict resolution strategies and practices concerning natural resource management in Nigerian society. It will provide a framework for examining dimensions of land conflict. Nigerians face numerous critical decisions that revolve around the distribution of limited resources and the development of appropriate methods for resolving disputes that emerge. They must also decide how to ensure that limited resources are provided efficiently and equitably. Within this context, Nigeria needs conflict resolution processes that commit parties to change, reduce resistance to change, and allow creative solutions to be implemented. For this to happen, the parties involved must share ideas about who and what is responsible for the conflict, type of conflict, dimensions of conflict, and resources, values and experiences for resolution processes. In this study, in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and case studies will be used to assess strategies, practices and techniques used in indigenous land conflict resolution. The study represents an effort to combine qualitative, comparative and quantitative research methodologies in understanding indigenous social conflict transformation in order to provide a knowledge base on which to design and implement programs for conflict transformation. Dr. Dan Obikeze is the director of the Center for Indigenous Knowledge on Population Resources and Environmental Management (CIKPREM) at the University of Nigeria. Dr. Obikeze and members of CIKPREM have been involved in multiplying the capacity for preventive efforts in conflict management resolution. CIKPREM s interest in agricultural programs in Africa has a special ability to contribute to food production, land, and natural resource management in Africa, as well as to foster conditions that prevent violence and destruction doc11443 none Shekelle The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide twenty-four months of support to Dr. Myron Shekelle to work with Dr. Jatna Supriatna at the University of Indonesia in Depok, Indonesia. This project is a study of the number of species and their distribution of tarsiers (small bodied, nocturnal primates), using genetic and acoustic data. The PI will coordinate activities between Columbia University and the University of Indonesia to study the biogeography of all Sulawesi vertebrates and map regions of genetic endemism - with implications for conservation. Dr. Supriatna is Director of the Center for the Study of Biodiversity and Conservation. He is also the in-country program manager for Conservation International doc11444 none Wiggins The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide three months of support to Dr. Chris H. Wiggins to work with Dr. Erwin Frey at the Hahn-Meitner Institute in Berlin, Germany to study the statistical dynamics of biopolymers and biopolymer gels. The primary focus of this research is on the dynamics of elastic materials in Stokes flow (the fluid dynamics of the very small or the very slow). Specifically, this will involve the study of the finite-temperature dynamics of semi-flexible biopolymers both to explain existing experiments and to suggest new experiments in diverse fields from polymer physics to genomics. He will also study the interrelation between single-molecule dynamics and rheological properties of naturally-occurring biopolymer gels. Professor Frey will have a joint appointment at the Freie Universitat Berlin and the Hahn-Meitner Institute. Besides working with Professor Frey, the PI will have the opportunity to interact with other researchers in Berlin, such as Professors Reinhard Lipowsky and Udo Seifert doc11445 none Ratnayeke The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide twenty-four months of support to Dr. Shyamala Ratnayeke of Spelman College to work with Dr. Kalinga Padmalal of Open University of Sri Lanka in Nugegoda, Sri Lanka on the determinants of interspecific diversity of tropical carnivora. This study will examine questions underlying variations in animal diversity and the local processes limiting the coexistence of species within an area. The findings will have direct implications for the allocation and management of protected areas in tropical regions and contributes to an increased understanding of global patterns of biodiversity. Specifically, Dr. Ratnayeke will measure species diversity in a group of animals occupying a higher trophic level and sharing a common phylogenetic ancestry, namely the mammalian Carnivora. Species diversity in this taxon will be compared in 2 tropical habitats that show marked contracts in primary productivity. Mammalian carnivores as a group occupy the highest position in the food chain, are highly mobile, and demonstrate tremendous inter- and intraspecific variation and flexibility in behavior and ecology. Dr. Padmalal is the Head of the Environmental Studies Unite at the Open University and is currently involved in avian diversity and cervid research doc11446 none Evans The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide 24 months of support to Dr. Ben J. Evans to forge a research collaboration with Dr. Jatna Supriatna at the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the University of Indonesia in Depok, Indonesia. Of this 24 months, 12 months will be spent in Indonesia working with Dr. Supriatna, eight months working with Dr. Don Melnick at Columbia University in New York, and four months in Austin, Texas working with Dr. David Cannatella at the University of Texas. This project will work to increase our understanding of how frogs dispersed to and on Sulawesi and how natural selection influences evolution of different adaptations. This research will also delineate regions of high priority for conservation management based on geographic differentiation of frogs. It is expected that dispersal to Sulawesi is rare and that when it does occur, it is followed by explosive diversification. It is also expected that fragmentation of Sulawesi played an important role in partitioning variation in frog adaptations and that existing conservation areas to not adequately protect Sulawesi s biological heritage. This study will include fieldwork on Sulawesi and surrounding islands to sample genetic specimens for analysis, molecular analysis to generate DNA sequence data from genetic specimen, and evolutionary, biogeographical, and conservation genetic analysis of molecular data. Dr. Supriatna is head of Conservation International Indonesia and a professor of biology at the University of Indonesia. As the main site for this work, Sulawesi was chosen because of its unusual amphibian fauna, complex geology, and critical conservation value. Dr. Melnick is a specialist in molecular evolution and biogeography of Southeast Asian vertebrates. Dr. Cannatella specializes in evolution and systematics of frogs and frog vocalization doc11447 none Nitschke The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide twenty-four months of support to Dr. Jonathan R. Nitschke to work with Dr. Jean-Marie Lehn at the Universite Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France on new methods of programming the self-assembly of stacked porphyrazine structures. This project is being co-funded with NSF s Math and Physical Sciences Directorate s Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. This project will involve working on new means of coaxing different porphyrin-like porphyrazine molecules to assemble into stacked structures. Self-assembly instructions will be encoded into the molecules themselves, providing new techniques for use in the field of supramolecular chemistry. These stacked porphyrazine assemblies are anticipated to have applications in the areas of solar energy and chemosensing. Dr. Lehn was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in . He is best known for his investigations of the interplay of non-covalent forces in abiological systems. A focus of his current research is the rational design of supramolecular assemblies doc11448 none Phillips The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide twenty-four months of support to Dr. Naomi E. Phillips to work with Dr. Gary W. Saunders at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, Canada. This project will use the rbcL and LSU sequence information to elucidate the ordinal and some familial relationships among the Phaeophyceae (brown algae). Brown algae are one of the most dominant and biologically diverse groups of primary producers in coastal marine environments. They exhibit a wide range of morphological forms, from simple microscopic and macroscopic filaments to large and complex parenchymatous thalli. Economically, brown algae are major sources of natural products and biomedical supplies. Despite their importance, research is just beginning to examine objectively evolutionary relationships and a consensus in terms of a natural classification system that reflects phylogenetic relationships is missing. It is critical to our conservation of these resources that we initiate comprehensive studies to understand them. The results of this research will contribute no only to our understanding of this group of organisms, but will facilitate future research in other areas, such as ecology. Dr. Gary Saunders is an established researcher in brown algal systematics with expertise in both traditional and molecular techniques doc11449 none Bee The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide twenty-four months of support to Dr. Mark A. Bee to work with Dr. Georg M. Klump at the University of Oldenburg in Bremen, Germany on the mechanisms of auditory scene analysis in the European Starling. The purpose of this research is to gain a greater understanding of the underlying neural mechanisms of auditory scene analysis, which is the organization of sounds into perceptual representations of the events that produced the sounds. The PI will study the neural basis of auditory scene analysis in the starling, a songbird that is an excellent model system of behavioral and neurobiological studies of auditory perception. He will use a methodological approach in which microelectrodes are chronically implanted into the starling s auditory cortex and neural responses to acoustic stimuli are recorded from awake, unrestrained birds via radiotelemetry. These experiments will identify areas of the auditory forebrain where different forms of auditory scene analysis occur and how these areas accomplish this complex task. The results will increase our understanding of the mechanisms of auditory scene analysis, contribute to a better understanding of human language acquisition and the evolution of hearing and potentially lead to the development of better hearing aids and voice-recognition-based computer-user interfaces. Dr. Klump, formerly of the University of Technische Universitat Munchen, is a leading expert in the study of comparative audition and hearing in birds, and is the PI on a grant held by eight research groups in the Munich area focussing on the mechanisms of auditory scene analysis doc11450 none Drury The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month postdoctoral research fellowship by Dr. William J. Drury III to work with Dr. Dr. Andreas Pfaltz at the University of Basel in Switzerland. The overall goal of this project is the development and application of new homogenous, asymmetric transition metal catalysts. The design of the proposed metal ligands is based upon an attempt to convert well-known, highly active, achiral catalysts into new chiral catalysts. The complexes will be tested in familiar arenas for both asymmetric induction, as well as catalytic efficiency. Once this has been assessed, the complexes will be used to develop new methodology. I have identified two classes of compounds for which no asymmetric route exists. The use of the rationally designed catalysts in asymmetric hydrogenation gives rapid entry into these compounds that include highly pharmacologically active 1-phenyl-2-aminopropane derivatives. Dr. Pfaltz is a world leader in the field of asymmetric catalysis. The University, as well as Dr. Pfaltz have close contacts with international corporations such as Novartis and Fluka, centered in Basel doc11451 none Ratcliffe The International Research Fellowship Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty--four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide twelve months of support to Dr. Amy Ratcliffe to work with Dr. Gijs Walraven at the United Kingdom Medical Research Council (MRC) in Banjul, The Gambia. They will do research focused on gendered interests in reproduction and contributions by men and women to their children and households in a rural West African population. This project is part of an on-going demographic study with the Reproductive Health Program at the United Kingdom MRC, Farafenni Field Station in The Gambia. The PI has been involved in work describing men and women s diverse experience with reproduction in this population. The PI will examine differences between men and women in terms of interests in reproduction as well as in personal resources, social networks, and household spending. It will provide a foundation for future work comparing reproductive experiences of both sexes across rural and urban areas of The Gambia. The understanding of changes in cultural norms will provide useful grounding for policy development that empowers women and encourages family communication and planning. This will have implications for public health policy in Africa and elsewhere. Dr. Walraven has an extensive background in epidemiology and reproductive health and has worked at the MRC Gambia since doc11452 none Abers The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide twenty-four months of support to Dr. Rebecca N. Abers to work with Dr. Luiz Pedone, at the University of Brasilia in Brazil on collective decision-making regarding water resource management and watershed committees in Brazil. The PI will use case studies and a general examination of water policy reform to explore questions related to institutional change and collective action in studying the role of participatory watershed committees in resolving conflicts over water use in Brazil. The study will examine the evolution of watershed committees in Brazil to date, focusing on some of the more consolidated experiences, in the effort to understand the extent to which this kind of decision-making forum can resolve conflicts related to water use and to develop a methodology for long term analysis. This project is linked to a larger collaborative effort, the Watermark Project , headed by Dr. Margaret Keck of Johns Hopkins University. The Watermark Project brings together scholars in Brazil, the U.S., and Great Britain in the effort to carry out a comparative analysis of basin-level water management institutions. Dr. Pedone is the chair of the Political Science Department and a founder of the Public Policy Research Center. He has extensive experience studying Brazilian public-policy and institutional change doc11453 none Rhoades The International Research Fellowship Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide twelve months of support to Dr. Anna E. Rhoades to work with Dr. Gilad Haran at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel. Co-funding for this project comes from the Math and Physical Science Directorate s Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. The goal of this project is to characterize the folding and conformational dynamics of a single cytochrome c molecule with surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy. Experiments will focus on developing this technique for measuring conformational fluctuations and using it for studies in varying equilibrium conditions, to obtain both equilibrium and kinetic information. The PI will develop a model that explains how a protein folds from a linear chain of amino acids through a series of conformational intermediates, to its functional three-dimensional structure. The protein-folding problem is sometimes referred to as the second half of the genetic code and is one of the major unresolved problems in contemporary biophysics. The impact of this research will be in areas such as the determination of the structure of a protein based on its gene sequence, understanding the misfolding and aggregation of particular proteins involved in some diseases. The laboratory of the Weizmann Institute has all the necessary equipment required to accomplish the goals described in this proposal doc11454 none Rebstock The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide six months of support to Dr. Ginger A. Rebstock to work with Dr. Young Shil Kang at the National Fisheries Research and Development Institute (NFRDI) in Pusan, Korea. The objective of this project is to describe spatial and temporal variability in the zooplankton and hydrography of the seas surrounding the Korean peninsula. Zooplankton samples have been collected bimonthly since at 88 stations around the Korean peninsula by the NFRDI. Zooplankton wet weight, counts of four important zooplankton taxa, and hydrographic and fisheries data are available in a computer database. This project will identify modes or patterns of spatial variability in each variable, using Empirical Orthogonal Functions (EOF). A time series will be calculated for each important mode to show how the strength of each mode varies over time. Modes of different variables will be compared to determine their interrelationships. The data set to be studied is one of the few multi-decadal marine zooplankton data sets in existence doc11455 none Tubiello The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twelve-month postdoctoral research fellowship by Dr. Francesco N. Tubiello to work with Dr. Gunther Fischer at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. Working with Dr. Fischer, who directs the Land Use Change Unit at IIASA, Dr. Tubiello will investigate the impacts of agricultural practices on regional climate and the carbon cycle. They will develop an interactive agricultural component for a general circulation model (GCM) using the Goddard Institute for Space Studies-CGM and the IIASA global agro-ecological zone model, GAEZ. This will provide a coupled global climate-agricultural model, with simplified rules for crop management, such as planting and harvesting schedules and water applications and a set of simulations focusing on the regional scale, to investigate the interactions among climate, carbon sequestration, and agricultural land use. IIASA is an international research institute. The necessary datasets and model for this project were developed there and are now housed at IIASA doc11456 none Knuteson The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a six month postdoctoral research fellowship for Dr. Bruce Knuteson, University of Chicago, to work with Dr. Bolek Pietrzyk at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. This project is co-funded by the Math and Physical Science Directorate s Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. The Standard Model is a very successful theory of elementary particles and their interactions, accurately predicting (or at least accommodating) nearly all particle physics measurements to date. The PI is interested in understanding the nature of electroweak symmetry breaking in the standard model through the analysis of particle interactions at extremely high energies. Dr. Pietrzyk works on ALEPH, one of four large experiments on the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) colliders at CERN. In the past ten years, the ALEPH experiment has made precision tests of the standard model doc11457 none Geiger The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide twelve months of support to Dr. Paige C. Geiger to work with Dr. Giovanni Cecchi at the University of Florence in Firenze, Italy on the role of titin-actin interactions in the development of static stiffness in skeletal muscle fibers. Muscle fiber stiffness has been attributed to cross bridge formation. However, a component of muscle stiffness, static stiffness, precedes tension development and is independent of myosin and actin interaction. The physiological significance of this non-cross bridge based stiffness is unknown. The goal of this project is to characterize static stiffness in skinned frog muscle fibers and identify structural elements of the sarcomere that contribute to static stiffness. This research experience will afford Dr. Geiger with the opportunity to learn all aspects of single fiber mechanical measurements using a variety of physiological techniques. The current research focus of Dr. Cecchi s lab concerns ultrastructural changes accompanying force generation, analysis of cross bridge state during isometric force development and isotonic shortening doc11458 none Tsai The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide 24 months of support to Dr. Kellee Tsai to work with Dr. Houyi Zhang at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, China on a study of capitalism without democracy, the political orientation of private entrepreneurs in China. The Political Science Program of NSF is providing partial support of this project. This project will analyze the political orientation of private entrepreneurs in China by conducting a national survey of private entrepreneurs in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The survey results will speak to the controversial issue of whether China s growing private sector constitutes the basis of a pro-democratic middle class. Dr. Zhang is the Director of the Rural Sociology Research Division of CASS who has worked on national projects funded by the PRC State Council, National Economic Reform Foundation, National Industry and Commercial Bureau and serves on the Board of all the key national research entities involved in private sector research doc11459 none Burnaford The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month postdoctoral research fellowship by Dr. Jennifer Burnaford to work with Dr. Peggy Turk-Boyer at CEDO Intercultural Center for the Study of Deserts and Oceans in Puerto Penasco, Sonora, Mexico (twelve months) and with Dr. Gretchen Hofmann at Arizona State University (twelve months) on the ecological and physiological significance of thermal stress. The Heat-Shock Response (HSR) is a powerful means of increasing tolerance of individual organisms to physiological stress; but the consequences of an individual s HSR expression for populations and communities are poorly understood. The principal investigator will examine the interaction between HSR physiology and the distribution, behavior and fitness of natural populations of seven species of marine snails in the northern Gulf of California. These snails experience wildly variable temperatures on daily and seasonal time scales and a number of heat hours , making them ideal for the study of HSR. By determining how frequently snails experience HSR inducing stress in the field, how the timing of the HSR varies during recovery, the long-term consequences of thermal stress in natural populations, and the importance and effectiveness of behavioral strategies for avoiding thermal stress in the field, she will significantly increase our understanding of how sub-lethal stresses affect the distribution and abundance of these species. CEDO has long-term data on species abundances and sea-surface temperatures, and several established outreach and education programs. Dr. Hofmann is a leading researcher on intertidal animals doc11460 none Metters The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide twenty-four months of support to Dr. Andrew T. Metters to work with Dr. Jeffrey Hubbell at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) and University of Zurich in Switzerland on engineered polymeric biomaterials for enhancement of cell migration and nerve regeneration. Novel, biomaterials that guide cell growth and migration offer great potential as scaffolds for the engineering of complex tissues. This research involves tailoring the three-dimensional architectures of enzymatically degradable, poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG)-co-peptide hydrogels. These specialized networks actively promote regeneration of peripheral nerves through their unique combination of chemical and structural parameters. Dr. Hubbell heads a research group at ETH that consists of approximately 30 doctoral students, postdoctoral fellows and senior researchers with multidisciplinary backgrounds. The institute contains state-of-the-art research equipment for peptide synthesis, polymer chemistry analysis, microscopy, cell culture, and biochemical analysis doc11461 none Savitt The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide twelve months of support to Dr. David L. Savitt to work with Dr. Christophe Breuil at the Universite Paris-Sud in Orsay, France on the modularity of some geometric Galois recommendations. This project is co-funded by the Math and Physical Science Directorate s Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. This research is part of a program to investigate the following fundamental question of arithmetic algebraic geometry: when can a representation of the absolute Galois group of the rational numbers be found in geometry? For example, results in this direction were the crux of Wiles s proof of Fermat s Last Theorem. The arithmetic geometry group at Paris-Sud is one of the largest and most active in the world. In addition to Breuil, the faculty at Orsay includes, among others, Laurent Clozel, Jean-Louis Colliot-Thelene, Jean-Marc Fontaine, Guy Henniart, Luc Illusie, Laurent Lafforgue, Gerard Laumon, Bernadette Perrin-Riou, Michel Raynaud, and Lucien Szpiro doc11462 none DeJong The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a six-month postdoctoral research fellowship by Dr. Jason T. DeJong to work with Dr. Mark Randolph at the University of Western Australia in Nedlands, West Australia. Deep foundations are being constructed at an ever increasing rate in regions with cemented sand deposits throughout the world. However, current empirical design methods perform inadequately, and thus advances must be made to improve design performance. Before advanced computer modeling methods can be properly implemented, the mechanisms governing deep foundation behavior must be understood and incorporated into models. This project will investigate these mechanisms and provide a preliminary framework for modeling deep foundations in cemented soils. The University of Western Australia is one of the premier institutions in the design of deep foundations. The host is a leading authority in the field of deep foundations doc11463 none Lommen The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide twenty-four months of support to Dr. Andrea N. Lommen to do research with Dr. Michiel van der Klis at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Funding for this project is being provided by NSF s Math and Physical Sciences Directorate Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. For this project, Dr. Lommen will use the new capabilities of the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT) in Dwingeloo, the Netherlands, in conjunction with the x-ray expertise of the Astronomy Institute of the University of Amsterdam to undertake three new projects to study the emission mechanism in pulsars. She will study the validity of Dispersion Measure as a widely used concept in Radio Astronomy, using the simultaneous multi-frequency capability of WSRT. Second, she will measure off-pulse emission in a collection of slow and millisecond pulsars. Third, she will use soon-to-be archival XMM and Chandra data, in conjunction with radio timing data at WSRT to perform absolute timing, and acquire phase resolved spectra of a number of x-ray emitting rotation powered pulsars. Dr. van der Klis is one of the leading authorities in the field of pulsar research. Westerbork is one of the world s premier radio telescope facilities doc11464 none Molles The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twentyfour months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month postdoctoral research fellowship for Dr. Laura E. Molles to work with Dr. Joseph Waas at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand. This project will involve the examination of duetting in an endemic New Zealand bird, the kokako, to explore the advantages of duetting over the far better-known songbird strategy of solo singing. Hypotheses regarding the mate-guarding, pair-bond maintenance, and territory defense functions of duets will be tested using recordings, observations, and playback experiments. Kokako have been decimated by deforestation and the introduction of mammalian predators to New Zealand. The islands of New Zealand are inhabited by some of the most unique and endangered bird species in the world, including the Kokako. Scientific efforts have focused intensively on issues related to preservation of threatened species. Little is known about these species social behavior and communication systems. Understanding their behavior can lead to improvements in management of endangered populations. In this study, examination of male-male and male-female duets may provide a means to identify same-sex pairs without the disturbance of capture and cost of genetic analysis. Dr. Waas has begun in-depth studies of kokako songbirds and his lab has produced the first description of their duets, documented the genetic diversity within mainland populations, and explored ranging in male-male and male-female pairs doc11465 none Travis The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide twenty-four months of support to Dr. Brandon R. Travis to do research with Dr. Hans Nygaard at the University of Aarhus in Denmark on an in vivo study of turbulence in the leakage jets of bileaflet mechanical heart valves. This project will quantify the velocity field and turbulence of the leakage of prosthetic heart valves after removing sources of error due to estimations in chamber geometry, assumptions of constant viscosity, and failure to remove cyclic variation from calculations of the turbulent stresses. Bileaflet prostheses will be implanted in the mitral position of 90 kg pigs. A high resolution ultrasound transducer positioned on the outer wall of the atrium will be used to measure the turbulent characteristics of the leakage jets immediately proximal to the valve pivots. These measurements will accurately quantify the turbulence created by the leakage of prostheses in vivo. The effects of pivot design, gap width, and exercise on leakage turbulence will be evaluated in the proposed experiments. Observations from these studies may be used to focus the efforts of valve designers on specific aspects of valve geometry, and the protocols developed in the proposed experiments may be used to predict the clinical success of prototype valve designs. The University of Aarhus has all the necessary facilities to carry out this work, as well as a staff experienced in the implantation of heart valve prostheses doc11466 none De Gouvenain The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide 11 months of support to Dr.Roland de Gouvenain to work with Professor Joelisoa Ratsirarson at the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar on the modeling of sustainable harvesting regimes for forest conservation. Of the 11 month duration, five months will be spent back in the United States at the University of Connecticut, working with Dr. John Silander, analyzing the data and writing up his results. The objective of this project is to determine whether sustainable tree harvesting is compatible with forest biodiversity conservation. The PI proposes to determine the sustainability of different tree harvesting regimes, and to analyze the possible causal relationship between harvesting and changes in forest structure, forest composition and site environmental variables from a no-harvest baseline forest condition. He will use a regeneration probability model to simulate how different harvesting regimes may impact forest regeneration and how it affects long-term forest conservation. The study forest of Tampolo is an ideal field laboratory with a range of harvesting treatments resulting from unequal protection at different sites. These harvesting regimes could be incorporated into future management and conservation plans for the study forest and other threatened forests doc11467 none Loeb The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month postdoctoral research fellowship by Dr. Michael Loeb to work with Dr. Bernard J. Crespi at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. Funding for this project is from the Americas Program of the Division of International Programs. A major goal of evolutionary biology is to develop a unified theory predicting the conditions under which natural selection favors cooperative group living over solitary existence. Central to this goal is to explain why some individuals within groups often limit their own production of offspring and instead assist others in reproduction. Thus, cooperation has costs and the key is to explain how cooperation evolves despite costs. Reproductive skew theory, an extension of kin selection theory, predicts the circumstances under which reproduction is unevenly shared (high-skew societies) or when reproduction is more equitably shared (low-skew societies). In spite of skew theory s potential to unify the study of social evolution, few manipulative field studies have tested its major predictions. The objective of this project is to test two skew theory s predictions using a communally breeding insect as a model system. Dr. Loeb will use populations of the lace bug Leptobyrsa decora introduced to Hawaii. Leptobyrsa decora is an ideal system to test skew theory because kinship among cooperatively breeding females can be manipulated while holding other factors constant. He will test the theoretical expectations that (a) highly related groups show high reproductive skew, and (b) populations with relatively poor conditions for solitary breeding should show higher skew. Dr. Crespi is an authority on insect social systems and he has incorporated reproductive skew theory into his own research program doc11468 none Yates The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a six-month postdoctoral research fellowship by Dr. Matthew Z. Yates of the University of Rochester, to work with Dr. Frank Caruso at Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam, Germany. Photonic crystals are materials that are opaque to certain wavelengths of light while allowing the transmission of other wavelengths. The wavelength region where these materials are opaque is referred to as the photonic band gap. Photonic crystals offer promise for use in the next generation of communications and computing technology in which light is used instead of electrons for information transmission and processing. The unique optical properties of photonic crystals arise from the periodic variation in the refractive index of the material on a length scale near the wavelength of light. One promising route for the synthesis of photonic crystals is the ordered stacking of colloidal particles. When monodisperse sized colloidal particles are allowed to sediment slowly, they will form a hexagonally stacked structure referred to as a colloidal crystal . It is the goal of this research project to form colloidal crystals from polymer particles coated with a thin layer of nanoparticles to modify optical properties of the colloidal crystal. Both high refractive index nanoparticles such as titanium dioxide or lead sulfide, and luminescent nanoparticles such as CdS and CdTe will be used to modify the optical properties of the photonic crystals. Caruso and coworkers have recently formed colloidal crystals of polystyrene coated with luminescent nanoparticles. The presence of the luminescent nanoparticles enhanced the photonic band gap of the polystyrene photonic crystal, as shown with UV-Vis spectroscopy. The optical properties of coated colloidal crystals remain to be investigated in detail. Key questions to answer are how the photonic band gap varies with the thickness of the coating layer, overall particle size, and optical properties of the nanoparticles in the coating layer doc11469 none Sclavi The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide twelve months of support to Dr. Bianca Sclavi to work with Dr. Malcolm Buckle at Institut Gustave Roussy in Villejuif, France on the kinetics of E-. coli RNA polymerase-promoter interactions. This project is a continuation of work with Dr. Buckle on the study of the structural kinetics of bacterial transcription in order to better understand how this process is regulated by different cellular factors such as activator or repressor proteins. They are using a combination of three different techniques - DNAase footprinting, cross linking and x-ray footprinting) that give a unique understanding of the different conformational changes taking place during the recognition of a promoter by the E.coli RNA polymerase. Dr. Buckle is the Head of the Laboratory of Enzymology and Structural Kinetics doc11470 none Francoeur The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide 12 months of support to Dr. Steven N. Francoeur to work with Dr. Barry J. F. Biggs at the National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research in Christchurch, New Zealand. The PI will conduct coupled field and laboratory investigations of the effects of low-intensity flood events on stream periphyton and invertebrates. The overall objectives of this work are to 1) discover patterns in the biotic communities of natural streams related to low-intensity flood events by using time-series sampling and correlative analyses, and 2) test the causal role of low-intensity floods in generating these patterns by conducting manipulative experiments in large, outdoor artificial streams. He expects that low-intensity flood events may cause quite different biological responses than high-intensity floods, perhaps even resulting in increased biomass or productivity. Working in New Zealand with Dr. Biggs provides an ideal setting because of the great number of streams with differing flood regimes in a small geographical area, and they already have an artificial stream facility for experimental work, plus, Dr. Biggs leads a highly productive research team specializing in investigation of the role of flood events in stream ecosystems doc11471 none Pitman The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide twelve months of support to Dr. Nigel C. Pitman to work with Dr. Eduardo E. Ceron at the Universidad Central del Ecuador in Quito, Ecuador on a study of the linking of large-scale tree inventory efforts in the world s richest forests . In the past, plant ecologists had to use data from just one or two vegetation samples, datasets often comprised of fewer individual plants than the number of species in the flora of the area they were studying. Today, there are large networks with dozens of hectares of tree plots scattered over hundreds of square kilometers. This project will link two of these large-scale datasets via a transect of new plots joining Ecuador and Iquitos, and a web-based standardization program in Ecuadorean and Peruvian herbaria. The project will provide specific answers to questions about how and why forest composition and diversity vary on a regional scale across Amazonia, and it will permit careful comparisons of patterns of habitat preferences, dominance and rarity between these two well-studied sites. Finally, the project will bring together Ecuadorean and Peruvian botanists and institutions, until recently separated by a 45-year border conflict, and provide a first demonstration of how to link other Amazonian networks in the future . Dr. Ceron has carried out quantitative inventories of Ecuadorean vegetation and has long-term experience in identifying tree species in the Amazonian lowlands doc11472 none Cavalli-Sforza The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide eight months of support to Dr. Violetta L. Cavalli-Sforza to do research with Dr. Abdelhadi Soudi of Ecole Nationale de L Industrie Minerale in Rabat, Morocco on an investigation of alternative approaches in Arabic-English French machine translation. The research proposed is first, computational morphology of Arabic for analysis and generation and the second is the development of a multi-engine machine translation for combining and comparing alternative approaches to Arabic-English French machine translation. Arabic is one of the world s major languages, used by approximately 260 million people in about twenty countries in North Africa and the Middle East as the primary language. It is also used as a second language by approximately 1.3 billion people in areas including Africa and southeastern Asia. It is gaining in importance for political, strategic and business reasons. Dr. Soudi is assistant professor at the Center for Languages and Communication and the Computer Science Department at the Ecole Nationale de l Industrie Minerale doc11473 none Prather The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide twenty-four months of support to Dr. Aysha L. Prather to work with Dr. Douglas C. Currie at the Royal Ontario Museum s Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Biology in Toronto, Ontario in Canada. This project supports a phylogenetic and taxonomic study of a family of caddisflies (Trichoptera) that includes a large number of tropical species. The research will produce a phylogeny-based definition of these taxa and resolve taxonomic questions within a tropical genus. The work will be done at the Royal Ontario Museum under the supervision of Dr. Douglas Currie, a Trichoptera and Diptera systematist who has worked extensively in Southeast Asia doc11474 none Jordan The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide eighteen months of support to Dr. Stephen D. Jordan to do research with Dr. Pierre Taberlet at Universite Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France. This project will involve working on the molecular systematics and population genetics of goats. The PI will use existing maps of the domestic goat genome to identify approximately 20 nuclear genes for sequencing in wold and domestic goats. He will use the sequence data for two major purposes. First he will generate a phylogenetic tree of all goat species relationships. He will reconstruct the evolutionary history and look for molecular signatures indicative of goat hybridization between both wild and domestic species. Second, he will use the same data set to search for genetic signatures of natural selection in goats. This project will generate one of the largest data sets (in terms of genes sequenced) assembled for a molecular systematics study or to identify selection signatures. Dr. Taberlet is a leader in studies of biogeography and intraspecific genetic variation doc11475 none Sekerina The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide three months of support to Dr. Irina A. Sekerina to work with Dr. Matthias Schlesewsky at the University of Potsdam s Institute of Linguistics in Potsdam, Germany on Event-Related Potentials (ERP) technique investigation of Russian scrambling. Recently, with interest growing in comparative psycholinguistic research focusing on linguistics phenomena in languages other than English, it has become possible to address the issue of differences between processing of languages with fixed (English) and flexible word order (German). This research project will investigate the question of how speakers of a free word order language such as Russian comprehend complex sentences with moved constituents. The goal is to conduct a pilot experiment with native Russian speakers using the Event-Related Potentials technique at the Institute of Linguistics in Potsdam. Event-related potentials are small brain potentials within the spontaneous electrical activity of the brain. Their multidimensional nature makes them suitable for differentiating between qualitatively different processes to systematically investigate language processing, particularly in the domains of semantics and syntax. The experimental sentences will be Russian constructions with Scrambling and Wh-Movement comparable to the German sentences used by Friederici, Schlesewsky, and Fiebach; results from this experiment will serve as a baseline for this comparative psycholinguistic project. The results of this study will increase our knowledge on how the human mind works in relationship to language, brain psychology, and psychology doc11476 none Hillhouse The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a six month postdoctoral research fellowship by Dr. Hugh W. Hillhouse to work with Dr. Teun M. Klapwijk at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. This project will study organic based materials that can be used in the development of semiconductors and superconductors. Recently there was an important breakthrough in the synthesis of organic molecular crystals. This resulted in high quality crystals that are insulating, but may be converted to a semiconductor, metallic, or superconducting state by simply turning a knob. This unique property provides experimenters with an extra degree of freedom to study the fundamental physics of the solid state. However, still little is known about the synthesis of these crystals. The objective of this project is to first study the growth of these crystals with particular emphasis on correlating structural order, defects, and purity to the measured electronic structure. The crystals will then be used as model systems to study the fundamentals of charge transport, the nature of the metal-insulator transition, and the origin of superconductivity. Dr. Klapwijk is an expert on superconductivity, nanoscopic phenomena, and charge transport in organic materials. He also has strong collaborative ties to Philips Research Laboratories where there is an active program to develop electronic devices based on organic transistors doc11477 none Smith The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide twelve months of support to Dr. Gregory D. Smith to work with Dr. Steve Weiner at the Weizmann Institute s Kimmel Center for Archaeological Science in Rehovot, Israel. This project involves the reconstruction of paleogeochemical environments of cave shelters in order to assess the completeness of their archaeological records. Authigenic minerals identified in situ at prehistoric sites will serve as paleoenvironmental indicators. They will be purified and their solubilities studied under varying conditions in order to predict past diagenetic conditions. Armed with such knowledge, archaeologists will know better how the archaeological record is affected or altered by post-depositional chemical diagenesis. It is expected that results from this work will be applicable not only to prehistoric cave archaeology, but to other areas of archaeology as well as geology. Dr. Weiner is the director of the newly established Kimmel Center, as well as professor of Structural Biology at the Weizmann Institute doc11478 none Henderson The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twelve-month postdoctoral research fellowship for Dr. Helen H. Henderson to work with Dr. Carl Langebaek at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. This project involves the investigation of the political strategies of prehistoric Muisca chiefdoms of Colombia by reconstructing the internal organization of two central communities from 800 AD to AD. The PI will reconstruct long term patterns in household production, wealth differentiation, long distance exchange, and the spatial organization of two central Muisca communities to evaluate current models of complex society that view early political leaders as 1) able to directly control local production or 2) able to control religious activities, long distance exchange or warfare. Dr. Langebaek has extensive knowledge of ethnohistoric sources, as well as experience in fieldwork in the Muisca area and specifically, the Valle de Leyva doc11479 none Graf The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month postdoctoral research fellowship for Dr. Erich Graf to work with Dr. Martin Lages at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. The perception of motion is one of the most important features of low-level information processing shared with all seeing creatures. While tremendous advancements in our understanding of motion processing in the cortex have occurred in the past decades, many issues are left unresolved. One issue concerns the location along the processing pathway where the integration of binocular motion information occurs. The work proposed uses psychophysical and computational approaches to attempt to find an answer. The PI and his host will use the results obtained from their investigations as well as other relevant motion literature to extend simulation studies of single cell responses to populations of binocular simple and complex cells using new algorithms inspired by analogous work in the field of audition. The Department of Psychology at the University of Glasgow has an ideal group of researchers who will work with Dr. Graf on this project. They include researchers in the areas of ophthalmology, psychophysics and computational vision doc11480 none Tyler The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will provide twelve months of support to Dr. Gaines Tyler to work with Dr. Thomas H. Cribb at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. This project will determine life-cycles for 9-12 species of tapeworms from elasmobranches (final hosts). DNA sequences from adult specimens will be used to construct a library. Larval stages will be identified by comparing their DNA sequences to sequences in the library. By identifying hosts for both adult and larva, the final stage of the life-cycle will be determined. This project will address the specificity of parasite-host relationships in these cestode species. The life cycles of tapeworms in elasmobranches are poorly known and this project will extend our knowledge. The research site, Australia s Great Barrier Reef, hosts one of the greatest diversities of elasmobranches in the world. Dr. Cribb has extensive experience in the resolution of flatworm life-cycles using molecular techniques doc11481 none Mogilner Mathematical and theoretical biology is a vital and rapidly growing subject that complements empirical work and provides model systems for study and manipulation. Such model systems can sometime suggest shortcuts when the experimetal work is difficult. More often, the models provide novel tools to disect complex biological phenomena in addition to traditional techniques. The current challenge in the field is to make quantitative modeling, on the one hand, a part of the process of fundamental biological discovery, and, on the other hand, applicable in biomedical and biotechnological situations. This requires researchers with biological skills and mathematical insight and facility. At this time such individuals are rare. The investigator and his colleagues organize an International Conference on Mathematical and Theoretical Biology at Hilo, Hawaii on July 15--19, . The goals of the meeting are to highlight current top-level research, to provide a perspective on future research areas, to provide opportunities for career development to junior researchers and under-represented categories of researchers, to foster interactions between established researchers and junior researchers and between theorists and experimentalists. The meeting highlights exciting traditional and new areas of rapid growth in mathematical biology, such as theoretical ecology and evolution, quantitative cell biology, proteomics, mathematical modeling in medicine and mathematical physiology and immunology. Plenary speakers both give a broad overview of their field and focus on areas for future research. Additional contributed and poster sessions are organized to give junior researchers the chance to be heard. Mathematical and theoretical biology is a young interdisciplinary field of science that provides quantitative models in biology. These models provide novel tools to disect complex biological phenomena. The current challenge in the field is to train researchers with biological skills and mathematical insight and facility. The conference helps to highlight current top-level research and provides opportunities for career development to junior researchers and under-represented categories of researchers doc11482 none The main objective of this research is to develop accurate, efficient, and robust numerical methods for modeling subsurface flow and transport. The research approach is based on a recently developed multiblock domain decomposition methodology. The equations hold with their usual meaning on the subdomains, with physically meaningful boundary conditions imposed on the interfaces via mortar finite elements. The formulation provides great flexibility for multiphysics and multinumerics couplings and treatment of irregular geometries and internal boundaries. It is very suitable for efficient parallel implementations. This research will study discretization issues - multiblock schemes for advection dominated problems and multilevel adaptive techniques, efficient solvers - parallel domain decomposition-Newton-Krylov-multigrid methods, and modeling issues - multiphysics couplings. Computer modeling of fluid flow and transport in the subsurface has a major economic impact on environmental and energy industries. It can provide dependable and cost-effective solutions to global problems like contaminant groundwater remediation and enhanced oil recovery. Groundwater supplies are often contaminated by organic, inorganic, and radioactive sources due to improper disposal. Remediation costs at U.S. government sites alone range into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Hydrocarbons contribute almost two-thirds of the nation s energy supply. Moreover, recoverable reserves are being increased twice as fast by enhanced oil recovery techniques as by exploration. Current computer simulators are limited in their ability to incorporate fine scale geological data and to resolve the physical processes occurring on a wide range of spatial (microns to kilometers) and temporal (microseconds to thousands of years) scales. The goal of this research is to develop new and efficient computational methods for modeling multiphase flow and transport in porous media on multiprocessor computers. These new methods will allow for more accurate resolution of the underlying multiscale phenomena and thus improve the dependability of the computer simulators doc11483 none This award is for the partial support of travel of USA participants to the Symposium on Geometric Mechanics and Symmetry at the University of Warwick. The Symposium will focus on the symplectic and differential geometry of symmetric Hamiltonian systems and applications of geometry and symmetry techniques to the classical, semi-classical and quantum mechanics doc11484 none Mischaikow The goal of this project is to better understand the relationship between dispersal rates and the spatio-temporal heterogeneity of environments. In particular, the investigator would like to understand if there are any fundamental relationships upon which a framework for this theory can be developed. Therefore, to minimize extraneous effects the investigator continues to study what is perhaps the simplest continuous model that explicitly incorporates a spatial variable: a system of reaction diffusion equations with Lotka-Volterra reaction terms, where the reaction term of each species is identical, and where the birth rate is spatially and temporally heterogeneous. This model allows for a variety of perturbations through which one can study the impact of various factors in the evolution of dispersal rates. Of course, this model has several limitations. The first is the assumption that leads to the dispersal being represented as simple diffusion. The investigator wishes to understand the effects of taxis on the relationship between dispersal rates and spatial heterogeneity. On a more general level the investigator intends to replace diffusion by an integral kernel. That ecology and evolution are fundamentally influenced by the spatial characteristics of the environment is well accepted. As an example of this one may consider the paradox of diversity. Simple mathematical models that do not include any spatial component give rise to the principle of competitive exclusion: when two species compete for the same limited resource one of the species usually becomes extinct. On the other hand it is commonly observed that in a wide variety of habitats a multitude of species coexist. This can be explained, at least in part, by including spatial effects. Of course, once spatial components are introduced, dispersal rates become a central feature. Unfortunately, our understanding of cause and effect in this more general situation is poor. The reasons for this appears to be fourfold. First, the number of variables in realistic ecological and environmental models is enormous. Second, spatial heterogeneities occur at all scales of the environment. Third, obtaining precise data for these variables from field studies is extremely difficult. Finally, current mathematical techniques for handling models that incorporate both spatial and dynamical properties seem to be inadequate. Given this state of affairs, a simple model is thoroughly investigated in the hopes of elucidating the basic biological principles and identifying the fundamental mathematical issues doc11485 none The dominant geologic feature of the New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ) is the Mississippi Embayment that extends from southern Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico. It is composed of deep, unconsolidated sediments with a maximum thickness of approximately 915 m near Memphis, TN. Relatively little data is available on the dynamic properties of soils in the Embayment. As a result, current efforts to understand the effects of the deep sediment column on earthquake site response are subject to large uncertainties. This objective of this exploratory research project is to perform geophysical logging and obtain samples from a deep well to be drilled in northeast Arkansas. The expected results are the seismic wave velocities, quality factors, and nonlinear behavior of the Embayment soils. When combined with a complementary effort to install a vertical array in the well, this project will enable the development and validation of numerical models used to predict earthquake site response in the Mississippi Embayment doc11486 none Christensen The objective of this research project is to determine the fate and transport of organic pollutants in the aquatic environment based on receptor models and related methodologies. The emphasis is on polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in dated sediment cores from lakes and rivers. The sediment record offers a convenient means of evaluating not only the present situation but also past trends in physical chemical and biological degradation, and the relative significance of the different sources. Mathematical methods include factor analysis models which do not depend on preexisting knowledge of degradation or source profiles, and chemical mass balance models in which sources and the relative amounts of various compounds or source profiles must be known. Both categories of pollutants are of concern to the environment and may be present both in point and non-point sources as well as in atmospheric fallout doc11487 none Ecologists often rely on computer-intensive Monte Carlo simulations to quantify patterns of population and community structure. These models are called null models, because they are null with respect to a certain process, such as interspecific competition. EcoSim is a Windows-based interactive simulation software application that allows for a variety of null model analyses. The program currently contains modules for the analysis of species diversity, species co-occurrence, niche overlap, body size overlap, and macroecology. The current proposal will allow for the development of new EcoSim modules for the analysis of spatial and temporal patterns at the population and community level. Community modules include tests of concordance, spatial co-occurrence, biogeographic overlap, and Markovian succession. Population modules include analyses of density-dependence, population viability, spatial pattern, and distance covariance. EcoSim is widely used by the academic and educational community, as both a research and a teaching tool. It frees researchers and educators from the time-consuming chores of programming, testing, and debugging ecologically relevant programs. The program contains extensive documentation, sample data sets, a tutorial, and an html-based help system. The program is available at no cost to the public and scientific community from the EcoSim website doc11488 none This grant will support and enhance the Community Climate System Model (CCSM) by developing several anthropogenic impact scenarios. Scenarios will be developed to simulate large-scale impacts of urbanization and soil degradation, intended for use in CCSM. Specific goals of the project include the development of new urban landuse classes for use in the CCSM s Land Surface Model (LSM). Urban and suburban landuse class will be developed for LSM using parameters estimated from the urban climatology literature. To simulate urban areas extent over time, the PIs will develop a population density database from to . A new 1 km resolution human population density database will be used along with past and future population estimates from UN and historical data sources. Urban extent will then be estimated from population density maps. In addition, the population density database will be used along with the UNEP GRID soils degradation database to develop a time series of human impacts on soils from - . This database will be used to alter soil water holding capacities over time in LSM and will be used to simulate the impacts of soil degradation on global scales doc11489 none Gurevitch Data from population responses to recent Florida wildfires offer the possibility of extending and testing demographic models we have been developing for pitch pines in a new system. The investigators propose to acquire these data, parameterize and test models on the interaction between dispersal and local population dynamics in longleaf and slash pine in Florida flatwoods. A similar opportunity is not expected to be available until, at least, the next major La Nina event. The terrestrial ecosystems of Florida and adjacent regions of the Southeastern US are strongly fire-dependent. Fire in Florida occurs frequently because rainfall is strongly seasonal. The intensity and extent of these fires varies greatly among years, largely as a result of the El Nino - Southern Oscillation. During La Nina years, Florida often experiences unusually strong spring droughts. Fires can thus be more intense and of greater spatial extent. The drought of Spring was the most extreme ever recorded, and consequently the fire season involved fires of very great spatial extent and intensity. The - La Nina, which caused the severe spring drought, appears to be over; all climate models are now predicting normal rainfall for the ensuing years. Thus, there is a time -critical aspect to data acquisition. In particular, a number of large-scale fires occurred in pine flatwoods. In much of this type of habitat - which covers much of peninsular Florida -- pine stands are naturally fragmented. What motivates this proposal as an SGER is the spatial extent of the Spring fires and this natural fragmentation. Jointly, these factors permit study the spatial component of recruitment with unusually high resolution. Because fires of this kind will not recur for many years, there is a time-critical component to this request. This research involves demography in disturbance-prone populations. The models and data have been developed in the context of pitch pines in the pine barrens of Long Island, NY. One question of particular importance is how much spatial data is needed? A principal result is that populations are expected to undergo substantial shifts from dynamics dominated by local demography to dynamics dominated by inter-stand dispersal, as the scale of disturbance increases doc11490 none With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. John Steinberg and his colleagues will conduct two seasons of archaeological fieldwork in the Skagafjordur region of Northern Iceland. The goal of the fieldwork is to survey 26 farms in five areas of this important Icelandic fjord valley to understand the changes in the settlement pattern from the Viking Age through Early Danish Rule (AD 874- ). Over this period, Iceland was transformed from a system of chiefdoms to a manorial organization incorporated into the larger Norwegian State. The research seeks to outline the factors and timing involved in this transition. Specifically, the Skagafjordur Archaeological Settlement Survey (SASS) will track the selected farms over 900 years to assess the variation in building construction and the economic potential of each farm. The result of this work will be an archaeological characterization of the household economy, which can then be related to the larger, documented, political economy described in the written sources. The Medieval sagas, written down in the 13th century, describe the events of the Settlement of Iceland (AD 874-930) and of the Commonwealth (AD 930- ). For the Late Medieval ( - ) and Danish periods ( - ) a series of tax records tell much about the manorial organization. During the Settlement and Commonwealth periods, Icelandic social structure changed from a collection of autonomous farmers who each held large territories, to a nationwide assembly of chieftains, and finally to state. Over this period, the climate became more variable and cooler. At the same time, overgrazing and forest clearance destroyed a substantial percentage of the productive land. The Medieval and Danish periods saw the rise and fall of the manorial system. In our study area, the Bishopric of H-lar and other church organizations owned upwards of 65% of the farms. The independent farmer, wooed by the local chieftains of the first period, ended up a serf on the land. While the sources tell us who was successful and who failed, they do not tell us why. Most buildings from these periods were constructed of turf and are now buried in deep wind-blown deposits, thereby making them almost impossible to identify systematically. In , Dr. Steinberg s NSF-funded High Risk Experimental Research addressed these archaeological problems with electro-magnetic remote sensing techniques. The research showed that specific electrical conductivity signatures signaled deeply buried and sometimes well preserved Viking Age houses. Once these buried structures are located, dating their construction with the sequence of volcanic tephra layers is routine. If the sagas are correct, Settlement Age Iceland is one of the relatively few examples of the formation of property rights without the presence of a strong central government. The other notable example is that of - California (before it became a state) when miners formed districts. Solving the buried-turf-structure problem opens up Iceland to the examination of the demographic changes that took place from the initial formation of property rights, through the development of chiefdoms, and to the incorporation into the Norwegian State. The archaeological data gathered by the SASS project will allow scholars to better understand the advantages of being the first to settle a landscape, the importance of farm economic potential for political success, and the changing ratio of land and labor to the fall of the chiefly and manorial systems doc11491 none The Cornell Theory Center (CTC), the university s high performance computing center, will use a Small Grant for Exploratory Research to develop a prototype online exhibit entitled Jumping Genes. The goal is to use interactive technologies to design a 3D virtual world that engages young audiences (ages 11 & up) and encourages further exploration. The content of the online exhibit will focus on transposons, small sequences of nucleic acids associated with the rice genome. The rice transposons are thought to play a part in evolution and are currently being studied for potential use in genetic engineering. By experimenting with a variety of open-ended and discrete activities, the CTC will design a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) that is comparable to exhibits found in science museums in terms of both quality and effectiveness. This final product will be disseminated via SciCentr.org, CTC s virtual science museum, as well as on Activeworlds, an online educational universe for middle and high school students that employs a virtual reality interface doc11492 none The LIGO Laboratory proposes the continued operation and development of the LIGO scientific program. The construction of LIGO by Caltech and MIT, under Cooperative Agreement No. , has been completed within budget and on the schedule defined in the rebaselining process in . The LIGO facilities are in full operation in support of the interferometer commissioning. At the end of FY , LIGO will be operating the three LIGO interferometers at the two LIGO observatory sites in Hanford, WA and Livingston, LA. During the period of this proposal, LIGO will carry out the first LIGO Science Run. This will include operation of the three LIGO interferometers in a stable and sensitive scientific configuration, at the design dimensionless strain sensitivity (h ~ 10-21), for a minimum of an integrated year of coincidence running. This data run will take place during the period through . During that period, operation of the interferometers will be interleaved with interferometer R&D and improvements. These periods of interferometer studies will improve the detector sensitivity and availability for stable, scientific running. The science goals of this run are to conduct the first broad search for astrophysical sources of gravitational waves with sensitivity never before attained. LIGO has fostered the development of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, consisting of researchers from the LIGO Laboratory and from external institutions in the U.S. and abroad. The creation of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration has enabled broad participation in LIGO. During the period of this proposal, the LIGO Scientific Collaborations will guide the gravitational wave research and the definition of the R&D toward technology improvements. LIGO will build upon its program of education at each of the four LIGO Laboratory Sites, extending the scientific excitement of LIGO to young people from elementary to graduate levels. Community outreach activities will be extended to include new demonstration and interpretive programs. LIGO collaboration with industry will address new technologies and applications stimulated by the requirements of gravitational wave observation doc11286 none The main theme of the proposed project is the construction of high order accurate numerical schemes for solving multi-dimensional hyperbolic systems of conservation laws, and in particular the construction of numerical schemes for simulations of multi-phase fluid flows. This includes numerical methods for compressible flow, incompressible flow and heat transfer. Recently, the PI s introduced a boundary condition capturing method for variable coefficient Poisson equation in the presence of interfaces. The method is implemented using a standard finite difference discretization on a Cartesian grid making it simple to apply in several spatial dimensions. Furthermore, the resulting linear system is symmetric positive definite allowing for straightforward application of standard black box solvers, for example, multi-grid methods. Most importantly, this new method does not suffer from the numerical smearing. Using this method, the PI s extended the Ghost Fluid Method to treat two-phase incompressible flows, in particular those consisting of water and air. The numerical experiments show that the new numerical method performs quite well in both two and three spatial dimensions. Currently, they are working on extending this method to treat a wide range of problems, including for example combustion. Of particular interest is the extension of this method to include interface motion governed by the Cahn-Hilliard equation which models the non-zero thickness interface with a molecular force balance model. This proposed research on computational fluid dynamics is focused on the design, implementation and testing of new methods for simulating fluids such as water and gas using the computer. In particular, this work addresses problems where more than one type of one phase of fluid exist, e.g. mixtures of water and air. Our interest lies in improving the current state of the art algorithms so that they are better able to treat the interface that separates two fluids such as oil and water. The results of this research should be of interest to both the military (e.g. many naval applications involve the study of water and air mixtures) and to private industry. A particularly interesting example involves the interaction of water and oil in an underground oil recovery process. The research covered in this proposal has implications for math and science education as well. Not only will the PI s be working with and training graduate students in applied mathematics and engineering, but their research in extending these techniques to other fields, such as computer graphics, can play a role attracting the next generation of young scientists. For example, figure 7 in Foster and Fedkiw, Practical Animation of Liquids, SIGGRAPH shows the lovable character Shrek , from the feature film of the same name, taking a bath in mud doc11494 none Sawyer The investigator studies ways to estimate the average amount of selection for or against new mutations at a particular genetic locus using information contained in aligned DNA or protein sequences. If the estimated amount of selection is significantly negative, this is an indication that the region is under stabilizing selection and may have an important biological function. If the estimated average amount of selection is positive, then new variants in this region are favored, as is common for some immune system genes. Models that allow random variation of the amounts of selection over sites are also considered. The methods studied are computationally easy to carry out and have easily obtained significance levels, but assume statistical independence between polymorphic sites instead of the more usual assumption of tight linkage. Studies have shown in many cases that short-segment gene conversion and recombination act at a greater rate than point mutation, so that tight linkage is not always a reasonable assumption. Simulations are carried out to test the assumption that small to moderate amounts of gene conversion and recombination are sufficient to guarantee enough independence between sites so that the proposed estimators will have desirable statistical properties. The models are applied to aligned sequences from public databases. They are also applied to human SNP datasets, for which the assumption of sitewise independence is clearer. Recent advances in biology have made a vast amount of data available about the human genome and about the genomes of other species. Tools for understanding the significance of this data, and in particular the significance of variation in this data between individuals, have lagged behind. One question is whether new genetic variants at a particular genetic locus (or segment of DNA) have been favored on the average in the past, have rendered their owners less fit, or have had essentially the same effect on the fate of individuals with those DNA variants. Tests are proposed that give a computationally easy way of determining which of these three cases applies at a particular genetic locus. These tests are based on the configurations of variant sites in DNA from several individuals at that locus. The results of this test can give information about the function of this stretch of DNA. They can also give information about how a particular gene is affected by or is currently being affected by evolution. Information from related biological species can give further information. The difficulty of the proposed methods is that they assume that different portions of the genetic locus are evolving approximately independently. For some genetic data (for example, SNP for single-nucleotide polymorphism data) this can generally be assumed. The sensitivity of the proposed methods to this independence assumption for non-SNP data is tested doc11495 none The proposed research addresses a fundamental question in ecology: what determines the structure of food webs? In general, a suite of manipulative field experiments is designed to quantify the control that herbivorous species can exert on stream food webs. Manipulations of the abundance and phenology of a dominant grazing invertebrate (Glossosoma), in combination with stable isotope analyses, will determine if the presence and density of Glossosoma control the use of algae and detritus (alternative energy sources in streams) by other species of consumers. Because Glossosoma is relatively invulnerable to predation as a consequence of its morphology (a stone case), it may prevent predator species from exerting controls over herbivores. This will be quantified with regard to a common predator, the Giant Pacific Salamander (Dicamptodon tenebrosus). The proposed work will test in a rigorous manner, the hypothesis that herbivores exert intermediate control over the structure of food webs doc11496 none We plan to develop and implement new high resolution finite difference and spectral algorithms which reduce the spurious Gibbs effects near the internal edges of piecewise regular data, and recover with high resolution the underlying information in between those edges. These are precisely the issues which defy classical methods and are of great research interest in various applications. Professors E. Tadmor (UCLA) and A. Gelb (ASU), will continue their ongoing cooperative research on the following. (i) Accurate realization of piecewise smooth data in one- and several space dimensions using edge detection and high-resolution reconstruction techniques. In this context we will develop, analyze and implement a spectrally accurate recovery procedures by combining localization based on appropriate concentration kernels which identify finitely many edges, followed by a novel two-parameter family of spectral mollifiers which recover the data between the edges with exponential accuracy. These techniques are at the heart of the modern high-resolution algorithms described below. (ii) Over the last decade, central schemes proved to be an extremely robust, all-purpose tool for solving general nonlinear convective-diffusive problems. We will integrate new recovery procedures and introduce further non-Cartesian enhancement procedures to the resolution of multidimensional central schemes. (iii) Further developments and applications of stable and spurious-free spectral viscosity algorithms. In particular, we plan to apply the new enhanced SV procedure to problems where piecewise smoothness forms due to mixing and instability (Richtmyer-Meshkov, Taylor, ...), simulations of the shallow water equations, and study of the critical threshold phenomena in mixed-type Euler-Poisson equations. Look around you: edges are everywhere. Much of the data we encounter -- from images to signals is piecewise smooth, that is, it consists of smooth pieces separated by sharp internal edges. This project proposes to continue the development of novel methods that combat the typical difficulties associated with problems containing piecewise smooth data. Specifically, we propose to extend our ongoing study of dealing with the reconstruction of piecewise smooth data from its spectral information. Here, the large scales represented by the smooth pieces are resolved by a variety of non-oscillatory reconstructions. The difficulty arises with the spurious oscillations due to unresolved small scales which are localized in the neighborhood of the edges. The problem is often realized in terms of the so called ringing phenomena . To this end, the location of the edges is detected and information is treated in the direction of smoothness , i.e., away from the detected edges. Application include the high resolution recovery of piecewise smooth data obtained in such inverse applications as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET), climatology data and more. Piecewise smooth data also arise in various time dependent problems, due to spontaneous breakup in waves patterns. In this case, the difficulties become even more intricate, as one has to trace moving edges. We also plan to implement the new recovery procedures for tracing the evolution of breakdown of waves, and integrate these recovery procedures with central schemes and spectral viscosity methods -- two modern high resolution methods developed by us earlier doc11497 none The focus of this project is to study a recently discovered class of inorganic closed shell nanostructures, composed of nested octahedra of layered-structure transition metal dichalcogenides that are expected to have discrete stoichiometries. The synthesis and properties of the molybdenum disulfide and -diselinide nano-octahedra as well as other layered materials such as tantalum disulfide, niobium diselinide, tungsten disulfide, molybdenum diselinide, and molybdenum diteluride, produced by laser ablation of the bulk material will be investigated. The currently used laser ablation method for inorganic fullerenes (IF) production will be optimized, and other methods for producing these novel structures such as are discharge will be explored. The structural and electronic properties of the novel IF phases will be investigated with scanning probe microscopies. Individual IF particles will be imaged and their electronic properties measured via tunneling spectroscopy, both under ambient conditions and as a function of temperature in an ultrahigh vacuum environment. The electronic density of states, measured by tunneling spectroscopy, will determine if these new materials are semiconducting or metallic. Additionally these properties will be studied as a function of size, shape and composition of the IF structures. The IF materials are potentially useful as lubricants due to a combination of low rolling and sliding friction. The intrinsically monodisperse semiconducting IFs will be useful for quantum dot applications. %%% Both graduate and undergraduate students working on this project will be exposed to the excitement of discovery associated with opening a new area of solid state chemistry and materials science. They will get experience with many different synthesis, separation and characterization techniques and learn to communicate their results to each other and the scientific community. The resulting interdisciplinary training will make them well prepared for future positions in academia, industry and government laboratories in areas of chemistry, materials science and nanotechnology doc11498 none Storm High temperature corrosion is a topic of considerable technological importance that deals with very complex systems. The purpose of this conference is to examine fundamental issues of the corrosion process in order to understand and improve material performance in high-temperature applications. The conference includes the following sessions whose topics are considered timely for discussion and where significant recent developments have been made: 1. Effect of Water Vapor; 2. Fundamentals of the Oxide Metal Interface; 3. Initial Stage Oxidation; 4. Bond Coat Oxidation; 5. Stresses in Scales and Coatings; 6. Stresses and Scale Failure; 7. High Temperature Coatings; 8. Corrosion in Aggressive Industrial Environments; and 9. Oxide Scales in Bio-Materials. Nine sections are planned for the conference, each led by a scientist familiar with the subject area to facilitate discussions. Speakers are invited by the chair for their expertise and recent progress in areas deemed to be at the frontiers of science. Ample time is allowed after each presentation for extensive discussions between the speaker and the audience. Graduate students have been encouraged to attend and present posters. The poster sessions further broaden the program and create more opportunities for the exchange of ideas. The award is used to support graduate students so that they can have an opportunity to meet and interact with experts in their field in this unique environment. %%% The Gordon Research Conferences were established with the aim of bringing together scientists in a particular area and permit them to discuss in depth all aspects of the most recent advances in the field and to stimulate new directions for future research. This goal is met today by the selection of highly qualified speakers with a meeting format that promotes interactions and discussions doc11499 none This grant supports an interdisciplinary research project in applied mathematics and aquatic ecology. Specifically, the principal investigator will spend an academic year visiting the Department of Biology at the University of Texas-Arlington to substantially broaden his background in aquatic ecology and expand his skills and knowledge in mathematical modeling of population dynamics, microbial competition, and transport processes in heterogeneous media. The main research effort in this project is to compare experimental gradostat results to those predicted by existing theoretical models of resource competition, and to develop and implement new, important mathematical and computational methods for accurate modeling of the bacteria-algae-nutrients interactions in a general gradostat. The goals of the principal investigator in the proposed research project are: (1) to participate in and assist with the modeling of ongoing experiments on microbial competition along spatial gradients of resource supply; (2) to develop a better understanding of aquatic microbial ecology and the skills necessary for continued research in this area; and (3) to create curriculum guides and supplemental materials for new graduate and undergraduate courses in the principal investigator s home department as well as in the Department of Biology at the University of Texas-Arlington. This interdisciplinary project will be the foundation for a continuing collaboration between the two departments aimed at developing a combined experimental and theoretical research program addressing microbial interactions in heterogeneous systems for application to problems in aquatic ecology and environmental engineering. This IGMS project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc11500 none Partial travel and conference fee support is requested for some of the graduate students and young faculty who shall make presentations at the Particles International Conference to be held on 24-27 February in Orlando, Florida. The purpose is to advance the interdisciplinary state of the art in the synthesis and characterization of particles and also in particle-based materials synthesis. These challenges involve most often processes at the nanoscale range, e.g. self-assembly, templating or force field approaches. Three plenary speakers of international recognition have been chosen from the disciplines of engineering, chemistry and physics. Approximately 180 specialists have accepted invitations to speak in a series of symposia which shall focus on basic particle processes, on materials, pharmaceutical and biomedical applications, etc...80 more papers have been contributed for oral presentation. Two poster sessions will enable still more people to share their concepts and results. A very detailed listing of titles and speakers is available and kept up to date through the webside nanopaarticles.org . The focus on the role of nanoparticles in such areas as advanced materials, particle formation and characterization seems to be enough of a discipline overlap to generate an interdisciplinary stimulus doc11501 none The work will continue to develop the algorithm of the LOQO interior point code for general continuous mathematical programming problems, and expand the range of problems to which it can be applied. Areas of research include better detection of infeasibility and unboundedness, better detection of linear dependence of the constraints, and better estimates of initial estimates to the optimum point. Work on higher order methods, which can greatly improve algorithmic efficiency, will be continued, with particular interest in applying filter methods. In an attempt to expand the scope of the types of problems that the algorithm can solve, the research will be concerned with solving discrete problems using interior point methods. On type of problem considered will be mixed integer quadratic programming. Problems of this type commonly arise in finance. Mixed integer linear programming problems will also be studied, with an initial focus on quickly finding feasible solutions. Further work will be concerned with general complementarity problems, especially those that arise in economics and engineering. In all cases, appropriate collections of problems arising from real applications will be modeled in AMPL. These will be made available via the internet, as will extensions to the LOQO program. The LOQO code for solving a variety of types of mathematical programming problems has been under development for the past four years as a joint research effort of the principal investigator and Professor Robert Vanderbei of Princeton University. The code is made freely available via the internet, and to date has been downloaded several thousand times. It is used to solve problems as diverse as engineering design, portfolio optimization, airline scheduling problems, and is currently being adapted for various projects in medical research. The proposed research is concentrated both on improving the efficiency of the code and increasing the set of problems for which the code can be used. The new types of problems for which it is hoped the code can be adapted efficiently are problems with variables that must be an integer, generally 0 or 1. These problems are extremely common, and of great practical value. For example, when assigning aircraft to routes, a whole plane must be assigned to a specific route, not some fraction of a plane. Including integer variables within the context an algorithm of this type is very new, and will be approached initially through important specific applications doc11502 none Under the direction of Dr. Robert Drennan, Mr. Horacio Thames will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will conduct archaeological research in the Tafi Valley in the highlands of northwest Argentina. Located in the southern Andes, the region comprises an area of 180 sq. km. and work to date indicates habitation during both Formative (200 BC -AD ) and Regional Developments (AD - ) Periods. Scanty extant archaeological evidence reflect an intermediate level society. On the one hand settlement nucleation, public architecture and agricultural intensification indicate some degree of broad scale social integration. On the other hand however household and burial data suggest the absence of social hierarchy. Too clarify the picture, Mr. Thames will conduct a two stage project. In the first, he will survey the entire valley and identify and record sites - both architecture and surface scatters. Crews will systematically walk transects and location will be recorded with geographic positioning system instruments. Areal extent of finds and their nature will also be noted. Systematic surface collections - primarily ceramics - will be obtained to cross date sites and determine activities which occurred at them. Limited test pits will also be excavated. In the second stage selected sites will be examined in greater detail. Complete maps will be constructed and more extensive test excavation carried out. Mr. Thames goal is to understand the mechanisms employed to establish and maintain the relatively large scale social units which the Tafi Valley contained. The region presents a situation which, in terms of standard archaeological theory, is anomalous. While significant numbers of individuals were integrated into a single social system, evidence of political hierarchy and control, which one would predict to exist, is apparently lacking. Mr. Thames wishes first to verify that such, in fact, is the case and if so to understand the links which bound the society together. He suggests a heterarchical rather than single hierarchical system and believes that factors such as exchange of utilitarian goods, exchange for elite products and well developed ritual and ideological systems, each acting relatively independently provided the necessary social glue. Through his mapping and excavation program it will be possible to reconstruct these systems and determine how they functioned. This research is important for several reasons. It will provide regional data of interest to many archaeologists. The social system, once understood may be potentially generalized and applied to analogous situations in many parts of the world. The project will also assist in training a promising young archaeologist doc11503 none Award: Principal Investigator: Mikhail Lyubich The International Conference on Graphs and Patterns in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at SUNY Stone Brook in will bring together researchers in several branches of mathematics and theoretical physics in which graphs play a central role, hoping to encourage fruitful interactions between these fields. This conference is a celebration of Dennis Sullivan s sixtieth birthday and addresses some of the topics of recent interest to Sullivan. Themes to be emphasized include (1) graphs and algebra, (2) graphs and discrete Riemannian geometry and discrete gauge theory, (3) graphs and bifurcation patterns in dynamical systems, (4) graphs and quantum field theory and topology. Minicourses on conference topics will be pointed towards graduate students and junior researchers. A graph in the sense used in the title of this conference is a data structure consisting of some number of vertices, usually drawn as dots, joined by edges, usually drawn as curves beginning at one vertex and ending at another. This kind of graph is a common combinatorial structure, encountered every day in problems of transportation and scheduling (consider a network of roads or telephone lines, for example), but useful in many less obvious ways. Some of the recent uses of graphs in geometry and physical theory grow out of Richard Feynman s celebrated idea of describing parts of quantum theory with graphs that represent possible lifetimes for a particle in space-time. Feynman s notion that a quantum theoretic quantity may represent a sum over all possible histories is reduced from a large, continuous calculation to a summation indexed by the different possible Feynman graphs. In a similar manner, modern geometers and physicists are exploring ways to work with the very large collections of all possible geometric structures on a particular space by reducing to manipulations of a family of graphs doc11504 none Evaluation of a hypothetical model of local community assembly in a temporally dynamic, species rich neotropical river ; PI: Kirk O. Winemiller, Co-PI: D. Albrey Arrington Results from this study will further our understanding of biological community structure and formation. Natural communities are affected by characteristics of the environment and interactions among constituent organisms. Understanding the relative importance of these factors and their interactions is highly relevant to the preservation of healthy communities and restoration of damaged communities. Our study investigates the temporal and spatial dynamics of community assembly in a tropical floodplain river with very high biodiversity. Our previous work has demonstrated consistent patterns in local fish and invertebrate communities that depend on physical habitat complexity and seasonal dynamics. In this study, we will conduct field experiments that manipulate habitat patches with variable physical complexity to evaluate the relative importance of physical and biological factors for species colonization. Our experimental design also will allow us to determine the relative importance of stochastic and deterministic processes in the formation of local communities. In other words, we hope to determine whether or not local biological communities are simply collections of individuals and species that happened to find an available habitat patch, or if community membership results from species interactions such as competition and predation. Based on previous descriptive research, we hypothesize that nonrandom processes result in highly patterned fish and invertebrate communities during the low-water period, and that colonization of local habitats becomes more random during the annual flood period doc11505 none Fox Data from population responses to recent Florida wildfires offer the possibility of extending and testing demographic models we have been developing for pitch pines in a new system. The investigators propose to acquire these data, parameterize and test models on the interaction between dispersal and local population dynamics in longleaf and slash pine in Florida flatwoods. A similar opportunity is not expected to be available until, at least, the next major La Nina event. The terrestrial ecosystems of Florida and adjacent regions of the Southeastern US are strongly fire-dependent. Fire in Florida occurs frequently because rainfall is strongly seasonal. The intensity and extent of these fires varies greatly among years, largely as a result of the El Nino - Southern Oscillation. During La Nina years, Florida often experiences unusually strong spring droughts. Fires can thus be more intense and of greater spatial extent. The drought of Spring was the most extreme ever recorded, and consequently the fire season involved fires of very great spatial extent and intensity. The - La Nina, which caused the severe spring drought, appears to be over; all climate models are now predicting normal rainfall for the ensuing years. Thus, there is a time -critical aspect to data acquisition. In particular, a number of large-scale fires occurred in pine flatwoods. In much of this type of habitat - which covers much of peninsular Florida -- pine stands are naturally fragmented. What motivates this proposal as an SGER is the spatial extent of the Spring fires and this natural fragmentation. Jointly, these factors permit study the spatial component of recruitment with unusually high resolution. Because fires of this kind will not recur for many years, there is a time-critical component to this request. This research involves demography in disturbance-prone populations. The models and data have been developed in the context of pitch pines in the pine barrens of Long Island, NY. One question of particular importance is how much spatial data is needed? A principal result is that populations are expected to undergo substantial shifts from dynamics dominated by local demography to dynamics dominated by inter-stand dispersal, as the scale of disturbance increases doc11506 none Prochlorococcus, a marine cyanobacterium, is a dominant phototroph in the world s oceans which contribute up to 50% of oceanic primary productivity. The complete genome sequences of two Prochlorococcus isolates have recently been completed by the Joint Genome Institute of the DOE. This study will develop complete genome microarrays to study gene expression in these isolates. This technology will not only help to identify the numerous unidentified genes in these organisms that have no homologues in sequence databases, but they will also provide insights into the environmental variables that have driven niche diversification in this group. Prochlorococcus thrives due to the existence of multiple ecotypes, each slightly specialized to thrive optimally under a slightly different set of environmental conditions. Pending the success of this project, a full-blown study will be conducted applying this array to the evolution and ecology of this organism. The array will also be made available to others doc11507 none The mammalian skull is an integrated complex of overlapping units that are involved in multiple functions such as breathing, vision, hearing, smelling and swallowing. Therefore most morphological features in the skull tend to be considerably inter-correlated, limiting variation. Non-independent cranial features, however, are problematic for reconstructing evolutionary relationships, because they subjectively bias efforts to group most-closely related species. This study uses CAT scans and radiographs of primate skulls to test several hypotheses about interrelationships between the brain, cranial base and face in primates, in order to assess specifically the utility of skull characters for reconstructing evolutionary relationships in primates and human ancestors. Univariate, bivariate and multivariate techniques, including scaling and matrix analyses, will be used to test patterns of constraint and integration among skull characters in 70 primate species and growth samples of 10 species of monkeys and apes. Preliminary results suggest that constraints which result from integration, while rare, considerably affect variations in primate skull form and should be taken into account when testing phylogenetic hypotheses about primate and human evolution doc11508 none Schowalter This is a three-year cooperative project between Dr. Tim Schowalter, Oregon State University, and Dr. Jung-Tai Chao, Taiwan Forestry Research Institute, to study canopy Arthropod responses to storm disturbances at the U.S. and Taiwan LTER sites. Specifically, this project will compare the arthropod response to storm disturbances in early and late successful forests in wet temperate and tropical forests. This is a good cross-site comparison that uses the facilities available from LTER sites in Taiwan and the United States to study a very important question: assessing the impacts by storm disturbances on natural ecosystems. The proposed study could provide a basis of understanding the process that regulates insect diversity and functional roles in wet forest ecosystems. This project also provides an opportunity for a U.S. graduate student to work in Pacific subtropical ecosystems. This proposal addresses an important scientific question and meets the NSF objective of human resource development. The National Science Council of Taiwan and the NSF jointly support this project doc11509 none Eva Marand Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University The Development of Mixed-Matrix Membranes Membrane separations represent a growing technological area with potentially high economic reward due to low energy requirements and facile scale-up of membrane modular design. Advances in membrane technology, especially in novel membrane materials, will make this technology even more competitive with traditional, highly energy-intensive, and costly processes such as low-temperature distillation and adsorption. In particular, there is need for large-scale gas-separation-membrane systems that can accomplish processes such as nitrogen and oxygen enrichment, hydrogen recovery, acid gas (CO2, H2S) removal from natural gas, and capture of greenhouse gases as well as separation of various hydrocarbon mixtures. Materials employed in these applications must offer durability, productivity, and highly selective separation performance if they are to be economically viable. Currently, polymers and certain inorganic membranes are the only candidates, and each of these two classes has limitations. The goal of this research is to develop structured composite zeolite polyimide thin-film membranes that will exhibit gas-separation performance superior to that of existing polymer-based membranes and which will retain their processing versatility and ruggedness compared to inorganic membranes. This work incorporates anisotropic ETS-4, ZSM-2, LTL and MFI plate-like molecular sieves in mixed-matrix membranes. These zeolites can be produced with controlled nanometer-scale size distribution and surface functionalization. The success of the mixed-matrix materials lies in the elimination of defects at the molecular sieve polymer interface and in the control of the film s microstructure at the sub-nanometer level. This can be achieved by employing zeolite nanoparticles with functionalized surfaces to promote bonding with the polymer matrix. A series of new, well-characterized polyimides has been developed with pendant carboxylic functional groups to serve as the membrane matrix. These polyimides already have excellent separation properties for various gas mixtures and are thermally stable above 400oC in air. A defect-free polymer-zeolite interface is achieved by forming hydrogen bonds or direct covalent linkages between the polyimide chains and the functionalized zeolite nano-particles doc11510 none In diverse world regions such as the Americas, Europe and South Asia, free-market policies have forced small-scale farmers to transform their productive strategies or face economic ruin. Peasant and small-farmer organizations that once were oriented almost exclusively toward national-level efforts to obtain local-level benefits are now increasingly seeking allies across national borders, attempting to affect global forces which impact their rural livelihoods. In some cases this has resulted in violent actions such as the French peasants destruction of a McDonalds restaurant in a protest against fast food ; and Indian farmers burning a field of genetically modified cotton as a protest against agribusiness. This anthropological project studies a new international peasant and small farmer organization called Via Campesina, or Peasant Road, which was founded in and has affiliates in about sixty countries. The project will interview small farmer activists and donor NGO personnel in five sites: Brussels, the headquarters of the European peasant confederation; Saskatoon, Canada, where the network s Technical Secretariat is based; Tegucigalpa, Honduras, headquarters of the network s Organizational Secretariat; Managua, Nicaragua, the base of a Central American small farmers network that helped found the Peasant Road; and Bangalore, India, home of one of the most active of the network s constituent organizations. In each site the interviews and analysis of documentary materials will focus on the political formation of activist individuals, the histories of organizational consolidation, and the mobilization of resources and alliances. The project will examine what movements defending economically marginal constituencies gain and lose by forming part of global civil society, as well as how new varieties of transnational politics have shaped peasant and small farmer identities, both within the agriculturist organizations and in relation to their NGO backers and antagonists. The new knowledge generated by this proposal will advance our understanding of how comparable grass-roots and global organizations function doc11511 none This is a continuation of work on a new approach to parameter estimation inverse problems. The coefficients in question are computed as the unique global minimum of certain non-negative functionals that also tend to have unique critical points, the latter property being of crucial importance if one seeks truly effective numerical algorithms. The core of the idea involves the observation that the Dirichlet principle for self-adjoint elliptic equations can be reformulated to produce the coefficients in the equation, rather than the solution. Recent work indicates that the techniques extend readily to parabolic and hyperbolic systems as well, which extends the range of applicability considerably. As these methods confront the nonlinear inverse problems directly, they are computationally more expensive than algorithms wherein the problem is initially linearized. On the other hand, when successful, the direct methods tend to give better images, free from the various artifact problems that surround the linearization methods. The methods also exhibit remarkable stability and accuracy in the face of significant ill-posedness. The proposal concentrates mainly on two generic cases, the (as yet unsolved) problem of the reconstruction of all the coefficient functions in the equations for groundwater flow and transport and the electrical impedance tomography problem. These examples have been chosen in part to indicate the broad applicability of this circle of ideas. The first is chosen as a representative of the class of problems in which measurements of the solution are available from inside the region, while the second is an example representative of the situation in which only boundary information on the solution is available. An indication is also given on an extension to imaging undersea regions from reflection seismological data, and landmine detection using microwave impulse radar. These methods may also have profound theoretical implications as well, in the direction of proving associated inverse problem uniqueness theorems. Complex physical processes are often represented mathematically by systems of linear ordinary or partial differential equations. A crucial part of this modeling process involves the determination of all of the coefficient functions in the equations modeling certain processes. In many situations of practical interest it is, for various reasons, impractical to measure these functions directly. In groundwater modeling, for example, one cannot easily measure most subsurface parameters, and in medical imaging, one is always trying to infer internal properties ``non-invasively. On the other hand, it is often true that one can make useful measurements of the effects of a particular physical process. For example, in groundwater flow, one can measure the height (head) of water, over time, in a grid of wells, and in electrical impedance tomography, one can apply currents at the surface of a body and measure the resulting surface voltages. Mathematically, in each of these examples one is given data on the solution of a underlying equation with the intent of using this data to estimate some or all of the parameter functions. This is the essence of an inverse problem. This project continues work on computational algorithms for inverse problems involving medical imaging, landmine detection, undersea seismic exploration, and groundwater modeling. Expected benefits would include greatly improved image quality in low energy electrical tomography and the possibility of producing complete flow and contaminant models for use in the management and remediation of underground aquifers doc11512 none The goal of this project is to develop numerical methods for layered (isopycnal) models of the general ocean circulation. In such models, the vertical coordinate is not linear distance, but instead is potential density or some other related quantity. When an isopycnal model is discretized in the vertical, the effect is to represent the ocean as a stack of layers that are approximately immiscible. This corresponds to the observation that the upper and lower regions of the ocean are approximately isolated thermodynamically from each other. However, this isolation is not complete, and in an isopycnal model the exchanges that do occur are under the control of the modeler. This type of model shows great promise for representing the long-term behavior of ocean dynamics. In the present project, the principal investigator will develop and incorporate methods for solving the momentum equation in a flux form for which momentum, not velocity, is the dependent variable. It appears that the momentum formulation may give more reliable results, such as in situations where layer thicknesses tend to zero because of layer interfaces intersecting the top or bottom of the fluid domain. This approach may also be valuable in modeling vertical transport in the ocean. Non-oscillatory or nearly non-oscillatory advection algorithms will be used to solve the momentum equation. Such methods will be analyzed and incorporated into a two-level time-stepping algorithm that the investigator has recently developed for formulations of the governing equations in which the fast and slow time scales are split into separate subsystems. The resulting algorithms will be tested on model problems for which the solution behavior is known. As time permits, the PI will then pursue the implementation and testing of these methods in existing, operational models of ocean circulation. During this project the PI will be in regular contact with ocean modelers at Oregon State University and at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The long-term objective of this work is to contribute to an understanding of the global climate system. An important tool towards understanding this system consists of computer simulations involving coupled models of the atmosphere, ocean, sea ice, and terrestrial effects. With such simulations one can test the response of the earth s climate to changes in external forcing, such as increased emissions of greenhouse gases. The world s oceans store and transport tremendous amounts of heat energy, so the oceans play a crucial role in our climate system. When the circulation of the ocean is simulated on a computer, one is using the computer to obtain approximate solutions to mathematical equations that describe the evolution of fluid flows. The goal of the present project is to improve the methods that are used to solve those equations doc11513 none The research described in this proposal is aimed at discovering how animals are able to see their surroundings. In order to see it is necessary for the eye to convert light into an electrical signal that can then be processed by the brain. The eye contains specialized cells, called photoreceptors, which convert light into an electrical signal by producing a special chemical called IP3 inside these special photoreceptor cells. IP3 can be thought of as a signal or a messenger inside of the photoreceptor cell. The photoreceptor cell also contains receivers that can respond to the IP3, and these receivers are called IP3 receptors. The eye is able to respond to light during a dark night as well as a bright sunny day. In order for this to occur the photoreceptor is able to decrease and increase the ability of the IP3 receptor to receive the signal from IP3. The research described in this proposal is aimed at understanding how the photoreceptor cell adjusts the ability of the IP3 receptor to respond to the signal from IP3. The information gained from this research will help us better understand how an eye is able to effectively respond to light over a very wide range of light intensities. This understanding is expected to help in the design of systems for artificial vision, which can be used to aid both man and machine doc11514 none Feeding activities of soil macrofauna exert critical influence upon the chemical and physical transformation of soil organic matter. In mesic and xeric habitats where earthworms are absent (e.g., parts of the Southwestern U.S.), soil isopods can be the primary detritivores. It is therefore likely that soil isopods play a pivotal role in organic matter processing, carbon and nitrogen cycling, and soil development in these regions. This research represents preliminary work on the influence of terrestrial isopods on the organic horizons of the soil profile through feeding and excretion. The research will utilize natural abundance 13C 12C ratios to investigate the source and fate of organic matter utilized by soil isopods. In feeding experiments to Armadillidium vulgare, a model organism for terrestrial isopod research due to its ubiquity, the investigators will determine feeding amount and rate across a gradient of soil organic substrates: green leaves, litter layer, and soil humus. They will also assess changes in C:N, %C and 13C composition of organic matter during feces production. The research has widespread implications to ecosystem processes in mesic and xeric habitats, due to the global distribution of Armadillidium vulgare doc11515 none Funding is provided as travel grants for the participation of about 20 scientists from lesser developed countries to attend the upcoming International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Ocean and International Association for Biological Oceanography (IAPSO IABO) Joint Assembly in Mar del Plata, Argentina. The target audience for support is scientists from Latin America, Africa, the Indian sub-continent and the Former Soviet Union. The travel grants will emphasize partial support for registration fees, on-site subsidence, and partial travel support in that order doc11516 none The investigator develops a comprehensive computational tool for modeling of the kinetics of microstructural evolution under thermo-mechanical loading in compound structures. He approximates the microstructural kinetics using first order implicit partial differential equations with a certain specific type of Dirichlet boundary conditions, and using a novel subgrid projection method. He applies this computational technique to provide an active control of vibrations and noise reduction based on the martensitic phase transformation. Implicit partial differential equations represent a large class of ordinary and partial differential equations and systems that are nonlinear in the highest derivatives, such as the Eikonal or Hamilton-Jacobi equations. They are closely related to partial differential inclusions that play a crucial role in the study of phase transitions. Typically, the solutions of imlicit partial differential equations are not smooth, they are not unique, and often they incorporate enormous amount of competing scales. These three distinctive features present a definitive challenge to the design of suitable numerical methods applicable to finding solutions of implicit partial differential equations. Recent work based on the Baire category argument shows that there exist solutions of such equations that cannot be obtained by standard analytical approaches. The existence theory itself is not constructive, does not yield any hint as to how to construct selection principles, and it does not provide a notion of a generalized solution. In regular use, machinery is subjected to periodic stresses. This results in acoustic waves travelling through the material. Since these waves are small in comparison to the potential energy of the overall machine, conversion to heat is an effective method of noise reduction. Thus highly damping materials may be used either in part or in full to accomplish this task. Shape memory alloys exhibit such significant damping properties. These are special alloys that change their microstructure from that of a stiff, rotationally symmetric phase to a ductile, less symmetric phase when cooled or put under stress. These desirable damping properties are a result of movement within the twin boundaries in the martensite phase, as well as the motion of the incoherent austenite-martensite interface, and are significantly temperature dependent. The investigator undertakes computational modeling to understand and actively control the phase transitions in shape memory alloys, based on implicit partial differential equations. The applications include such possibilities as controlled vibration of a cutting edge in non-invasive surgery, ultrasonic wave detectors, stabilization of platforms on various spacecraft as well as acoustic suppression in cockpits doc11517 none Birgitta Whaley of the University of California, Berkeley, is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to carry out microscopic theoretical analysis of two classes of novel quantum solvation phenomena that have been revealed by recent spectroscopic experiments, which remain theoretically unexplained. The aim is to uncover the role played by the underlying quantum structure and dynamics in the spectroscopic observables. The first phenomenon to be explored concerns the effect of wrapping a molecule with the solvation layer of molecular para-hydrogen and then embedding this in a helium cluster at ultra-low temperatures. The extent of nanosuperfluidity possible in the hydrogen and solvation wrap will be analyzed, along with the relation between the quantum statistics of this and the molecular spectroscopic constants. Secondly, helium solvent-induced modifications of structure and excitations of embedded molecules and complexes will be addressed, focusing on intramolecular tunneling, structures of heterocomplexes, and on the nature of the local solvation environment and associated solvent excitations around planar organic molecules. This research involves application of large-scale quantum simulation methodology, algorithmic advances in some cases, and a combination of simulations with theoretical analysis using dynamical models. Small liquid clusters of helium that are produced in molecular beam expansions are becoming an increasingly popular new medium in which atoms and molecules can be embedded and studied experimentally. The clusters act as novel environments in which to examine ultra-low temperature properties of molecules, chemical reactions, and the energies of solvation. The outcomes of this project are expected to lead to new insights into the fundamental understanding of chemical and physical behavior in cold quantum mechanical solvents doc11518 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Exploring phylogenetic trends of gene sequence, protein form and function to comprehend processes of molecular evolution. The photosynthetic gene rbcL and a large phylogeny are being used to link molecular selection linking gene sequence to protein form and function. Evolutionary trends are being used to reveal patterns of molecular selection that are otherwise invisible and are helping to generate viable theories about gene-protein relationships. The research is focused on developing generally applicable models of gene and protein evolution and providing informatic tools to question processes of molecular selection in other genes and systems doc11519 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Modeling the Effects of Hurricane and Fire Disturbances on the Population Dynamics of South Florida Slash Pine. Fires and hurricanes are frequent disturbances affecting community structure and dynamics of pine forests in the southeastern US. This research is developing spatially explicit, individual-based models of pine population dynamics, parameterized from empirical data that include hurricane and fire disturbances. The models are to be used to predict how pine populations will respond to hypothetical disturbance regimes associated with global change doc11520 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Modeling Muscle Force Generation during Posture and Locomotion. This project involves developing models of muscle force generation. The hypothesis being tested is that, during functional conditions, whole muscle models can be constructed by summing responses of constituent motor units. Specific aims are to test this hypothesis experimentally and to use nonlinear system identification to generate a database of single motor unit models doc11521 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Estimating global microbial diversity: A bioinformatics approach. Scaling law, probability and combinatorial theory are being used to quantify biodiversity patterns across a wide range of spatial scales and at different levels of phylogenetic resolution. Using computer intensive spatial statistical analyses and simulation modeling, hypotheses are being tested with a microbial genetic database two orders of magnitude larger than any previously reported (~73,000 16S rDNA clones collected over ~ 1 m2 to ~10,000 km2 in Australia, analyzed by RFLP and other sophisticated genetic techniques doc11522 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Development of alternative clustering methods for genomic expression analysis and characterization of coregulated genes in yeast. This project is developing fuzzy k-means clustering for analysis of genomic expression data, with the goal of identifying coregulated yeast genes that are not identified by traditional methods. After identifying sets of coregulated genes, multiple algorithms will be applied to identify sequence motifs that contribute to the regulation of expression doc11523 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Ab-initio prediction of membrane protein structure. Membrane proteins which play important roles in cell function are not as well-studied as soluble proteins. This research develops automated or semi-automated computational methods for predicting the structures of integral membrane proteins using publicly available data and constructs an online database of structure predications. In doing so, it brings together information from protein folding theory, the human genome project, and mutagenesis experiments on membrane proteins in a unique way doc11524 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled New techniques for analyzing the representation of auditory stimulus features by ensembles of cortical neurons. This project is concerned with the analysis of stimulus-related information contained in firing patterns of ensembles of 16 or more simultaneously-recorded neurons in auditory cortex. Statistical pattern recognition techniques are used to characterize relationships between the acoustic properties of sounds in space and information-bearing features of neural responses doc11525 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Phylogenetic analysis using ribosomal RNA structure. Ribosomal RNA genes are widely used in phylogenetics and have shaped current views of the history of life. Traditional DNA-sequence-based phylogenetic phylogenetic methods, however, fail to reliably place highly divergent sequences. This research develops probabilistic models for phylogenetics that are based on rRNA structure doc11526 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Dynamic species interactions, uncertainty and the maintenance of ecosystem robustness. The interplay between community complexity and stability is the source of one of the classic debates in ecology. Heterogeneous spatial and temporal species distributions and trophic interactions, though central to the debate, have been studied little. To address these issues this research develops new computational methods to parameterize, simulate, and analyze a multi-species, multi-patch model doc11527 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled How dinosaur locomotion evolved: Using 3D computer models to test biomechanical hypotheses. This research constructs realistic 3D computer models to visualize the physics of hindlimb muscle function in an alligator, chicken, and three extinct theropod dinosaurs. These models permit the testing of hypotheses like Could Tyrannosaurus run? and How did the bipedal stance of birds evolve? with new analytical rigor doc11528 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled The role of epigenetic signaling in the evolution of trait allometries: Integrating development with morphometrics. This series of studies is determining the proximate mechanisms by which morphological trait allometries evolve in insects, specifically the wings and bodies of butterflies . Changes in the shapes of, and allometries among, morphological traits are being produced by artificial selection. The response to selection is being quantified using statistical and morphometric methods developed by the Fellow doc11529 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled How does neural activity instruct the system-wide modifications in brain structure that occur during development of the visual system? Spontaneously generated retinal waves are required for early visual system development. This research uses a combined theoretical and experimental approach to determine (1) how physiologically relevant neural input causes appropriate modifications at individual retinogeniculate synapses, and (2) how these retinal-wave-driven modifications result in system-wide competition that drives retinogeniculate development doc11530 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled A new approach to modeling the evolution of sexual isolation. This project explores the evolutionary dynamics of sexual isolation in salamanders and Drosophila. Theoretical models are being used to simulate evolution of sexual isolation given a phylogeny. Simulated data matrices will be compared to empirical data, providing the first tests of the roles of inheritance, drift, selection, and reinforcement in the evolution of sexual isolation across clades doc11531 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Determining population structure and dynamics of Class II transposable element families in Arabidopsis thaliana, using a coalescence-based population genetic approach. Transposons are major constituents of most eukaryotic genomes that can dramatically alter genomic architecture, individual fitness, and species evolution. Little is known about population dynamics and behavior of transposons. In this research, the availability of complete genome sequence and biological informatics capability provides a novel opportunity to evaluate their impact and the forces that influence their movement doc11518 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Exploring phylogenetic trends of gene sequence, protein form and function to comprehend processes of molecular evolution. The photosynthetic gene rbcL and a large phylogeny are being used to link molecular selection linking gene sequence to protein form and function. Evolutionary trends are being used to reveal patterns of molecular selection that are otherwise invisible and are helping to generate viable theories about gene-protein relationships. The research is focused on developing generally applicable models of gene and protein evolution and providing informatic tools to question processes of molecular selection in other genes and systems doc11533 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Computer Simulations of Biological Molecules: Obtaining Unique Information on their Structure and Function from STM Images. Novel methods and tools for computer simulations of scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) images of biological molecules are being developed. These methods are being used for obtaining unique information about structure, dynamics, and function of proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids from their STM images. The methods will also facilitate tailoring STM experiments doc11534 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Development of strategies for designing novel catalytic enzymes. This work includes an informational approach followed by experimental application of the results. The informatics portion includes parameterization of a whole protein energy function based on mutant to wild-type redesigns of proteins from various structural databases. Second, a comprehensive cataloging of specific interactions in natural cytochromes is being conducted, noting the conformational positioning of the reactive centers of these molecules. The strategies developed from these sections will be applied experimentally to design a novel synthetic cytochome with heme binding and reactivity approaching that of its naturally occurring counterparts doc11535 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Inferring the nature of quantitative genetic variation: methods for integrating single and multi-locus analyses. The goal of this project is to extend quantitative genetic theory to the study of individual genes, and then to use that theory to develop methods for analyzing sequence polymorphism data from quantitative trait loci (QTL). This theoretical framework allows the testing of hypotheses about the nature of genetic variation doc11536 none Pennings Ecologists have long hypothesized that herbivore pressure is more intense and that plant defenses are better developed towards the tropics than at higher latitudes. Although some indirect evidence supports these ideas, the large geographic scale of the problem has hampered attempts at more direct studies. My recent work in Atlantic coast salt marshes directly demonstrated that southern marsh plants are less palatable to herbivores than are northern plants of the same species. The current project will test the hypothesis that herbivore pressure in these communities is greater at lower than at higher latitudes. Herbivore pressure will be assessed by planting standard plants into marshes in each geographic region and observing herbivore damage, and by herbivore counts. A second goal of the project will be to determine whether the plants require cues such as climate or herbivore damage in order to develop latitudinal differences in palatability, or whether these differences are pre-programmed . These alternatives will be compared by growing plants from both geographic regions side by side in a common greenhouse. By overcoming several of the logistical problems that have plagued past studies, this project will bring a new level of rigor and understanding to the study of latitudinal gradients in plant palatability doc11537 none Dust particles suspended in the atmosphere, known as aerosols, affect the earth s climate in two ways. They absorb and scatter solar radiation, and they affect the physical properties of clouds. Aerosols are thought to have a net cooling effect and thus they may mask the potential warming effects of anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gases. Despite their importance, aerosol-climate interactions represent a large source of uncertainty in understanding the climate system. A key reason for this uncertainty is that aerosols demonstrate high variability, both spatially and temporally, yet the extent of their variability has not been fully investigated. Constraints associated with conventional approaches to measuring total column aerosol-including the requirements for clear skies and costly equipment-have contributed to a paucity of aerosol data. Although the majority of anthropogenic aerosols (i.e. pollution) are emitted in the Northern Hemisphere, there are very few reliable long-term records of total column aerosol in the northern half of the globe. This research will employ a radiation-based model, together with satellite and climate data, to evaluate seasonal, interannual, and spatial variability of aerosols in Western Europe, regardless of cloud cover. A key product will be a more complete documentation of the amount and variability of aerosols than is currently available. Time series and spatial analyses will also be used to investigate the degree to which pollution may be augmenting the background aerosol load, and will permit detection of possible volcanic influences on the aerosol signal. The results of this research will help explain climate change and variability in Western Europe reported by other investigators, and will also help elucidate the relative roles of aerosols and greenhouse gases in the climate system. This will permit improvements in how aerosols are represented in regional and global climate models. This research will therefore enhance our understanding of climate and climate change, and will help policy makers prepare informed climate change policies doc11538 none This project is devoted to devising and studying, theoretically as well as computationally, efficient methods for numerically solving problems in which convection plays a significant role. A wide range of situations falls into this category and, although what we propose to develop can be easily applied to most of them, we are going to focus our efforts into two of them. The first, modeled by the shallow water equations, is the study of hurricane forecasting and of environmental studies in ports, and the second, modeled by the Hamilton-Jacobi equations, is the study of terrain navigation (computation of minimum time transit paths) of robotic vehicles and material etching in integrated circuit fabrication. The main focus of the project is the devising of the so-called a posteriori error estimates that are the basis for mathematically sound hp-adaptive algorithms. We consider the problem of how to efficiently obtain highly accurate computer simulations of several physical phenomena of practical interest, namely, hurricane forecasting in the Gulf of Mexico and environmental studies in ports, and the computation of minimum time transit paths of robotic vehicles and material etching in integrated circuit fabrication. Since the exact solution of these complex problems is not known, in order to guarantee a given accuracy of the simulation, special techniques have to be suitably devised in order to assess its quality. Moreover, these techniques can be employed to automatically let the computer know when and where to increase or decrease the computational effort to obtain the simulation; in this way, the efficiency of its computation can be significantly enhanced doc11539 none The Federal Facilities Council (FFC) is an element of the Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment (BICE) of the National Research Council. Since the FFC and its predecessor organizations have provided its sponsoring agencies with a mechanism for jointly identifying and addressing mutual problems and concerns in the areas of building science and technology, management, and operations. Each year, the FFC formulates a Technical Activities Program to address the major concerns of the sponsor agencies. The Activities Program includes the following activities: initiation of an NRC advisory study of Capital Project Investment Decisions; information studies and workshops to address Performance Based Condition Assessments, Best Practices for Facility Advance Planning, Best Practices for Achieving Healthy Indoor Environments, and a Compendium of Best Practices for Facility Operations and Maintenance; conferences on Post-Occupancy Evaluations (POEs) for Facilities, Outsourcing of Management Functions for the Acquisition of Federal Facilities, and Emerging Technologies for Buildings of the 21st Century. The FFC program also supports approximately 35 meetings of FFC standing committee and maintenance of the FFC Internet Home Page. Reports resulting from the FFC program are prepared in sufficient quantity to ensure their distribution to the sponsors and to other relevant parties and made available electronically through the internet doc11540 none The purpose of this project is to improve our understanding of the exchange of heat, moisture, momentum, and contaminants between the earth s surface and the lower atmosphere when the atmospheric layer near the ground is extremely stable. In these conditions, the variation of the wind with height and time and the vertical transport of heat and other material by the atmosphere do not conform to the theories appropriate for ordinary daytime conditions. During the day, surface heating causes the air next to the ground to become unstable, leading to convection, well-developed turbulence, predictable profiles of temperature, wind velocity, and humidity, and therefore predictable vertical fluxes of heat and water vapor. But at night, the surface is cold, the air stable, and the turbulence often intermittent and caused by vertical wind shear associated with terrain-induced drainage flows. The recent CASES-99 field program (Kansas, October ) showed that drainage winds often form over ground that is only gently sloping, and may be confined to only the lowest few meters of the atmosphere. The vertical flux of heat and other properties is determined by the shear and turbulence in the drainage flow, but these characteristics are not well known because measurements are ordinarily too widely separated in the vertical to give a good representation of the true structure. Two approaches are pursued in this project. One is to analyze existing data from past field programs (especially CASES-99). The analysis focuses on understanding the intermittent bursts of turbulence that account for much of the eddy transport of heat and momentum in stable conditions. The CASES data make it possible to distinguish between the turbulence generated locally by shear at the top of the drainage flow and that which is created elsewhere and advected over the observing site. The second approach is to conduct a small field program focussed on thin drainage flows employing new instruments to enable measurements with high resolution in space and time. These instruments include hot-film anemometers, sonic anemometers with short path lengths and miniaturized transducers, and laser-Doppler anemometry. The result of the research will be an improved formulation of transport processes in the very stable boundary layer for use in large-scale numerical models for weather forecasting and climate prediction doc11541 none This proposal concerns the exploration of new approaches to computational problems that arise in robotics, geographic information systems, and in biological applications. These approaches involve techniques that lie at the intersection of mathematics and computer science and the application of mathematical perspectives in the development on new algorithms to solve a variety of problems. The primary goal is to use techniques from Morse theory, homology theory, geometric group theory and combinatorics to study problems of shape, configuration, motion planning, and structure in computer science. Applications include computer graphics, visualization of scientific data, computational analysis of molecular docking problems and robotics. A key element is that this work will be done within an interdisciplinary team that includes researchers in computer science, biochemistry and chemistry at Duke, UNC and Stanford. The research in this project will be important to advance our understanding in a number of important areas. Techniques developed will give new approaches to analyzing noise in data sets such as those from x-ray Crystallography, brain scans, satellite images, and ocean temperature. The robotics work will enhance our ability to create automated devices that perform tasks in dangerous or remote environments. And the biology work has as its long term goal the development of better computational tools to help biomedical researchers find appropriate molecules that can interact with doc11542 none This project is aimed at developing a VLSI-like design methodology for Nano-electro-mechanical Systems (NEMS). Specifically, computer-aided design (CAD) tools are being developed for functional and compact modeling of nano-electro-mechanical devices. Unlike macroscopic and some microscopic devices, where continuum physical principles are valid, at nanoscales it is important to account for granular nature of the devices. A multiscale approach combining the lowest level atomistic approaches to the highest-level continuum theories are being developed for functional modeling of NEMS. The development of compact models is being investigated to enable design of large and interconnected-array of NEM devices. Finally, carbon nanotube based NEMS are being investigated as basic building blocks for nanoscale sensors, actuators, devices and systems doc11543 none The next generation integrated circuit (IC) chips will contain nano-scale high-density interconnects with thousands of I O pins. Due to the physical size of conventional needle probes, the existing probe method of characterizing and testing chips is no longer a viable technique as the number of I Os increases. This project proposes to investigate the feasibility of using micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) technology to probe CMOS circuits on wafer level. This project focuses on (1) the development of high frequency electrical models of nano-scale on-chip interconnects and CMOS circuits, (2) the fabrication of a novel MEMS probe structure for testing high-density circuits, and (3) the demonstration of the MEMS probe structure to characterize circuits in nano-scale design doc11544 none The investigator and his colleague study computational aspects of various geometric problems in two directions: (1) Design and implementation of efficient algorithms for the approximation of various convex and nonconvex objects in multidimensional space by polytopes, and research of the computational complexity as well as practical efficiency of these algorithms. (2) Application of high performance computing as a tool to solve or advance toward a solution of open theoretical problems in convex geometry, among them, Kneser s problem concerning the relationship between volumes of intersections or unions of balls in multidimensional Euclidean space and their mutual distances. Because of its practical importance in many application areas, the approximation of both convex and nonconvex polytopes by simpler polytopes is given special attention, and fully constructive solutions are developed for these cases. Extensions and variants such as approximation under various metrics, requiring the approximating object to enclose or be contained within the approximated object, and finding minimal enclosing polytopes of a specific type (like parallelotopes, for example), are also considered. Some of these variants find important applications in mobile computing and multidimensional databases. The investigators develop efficient computational solutions for the problem of approximating multidimensional bodies by polytopes (solids formed by flat faces) of a prescribed size. Such approximation is an important tool in many disciplines, including molecular modeling, optimal control, computer-aided design, and computer visualization. They also investigate the problem of enclosing and approximating multidimensional bodies by polytopes of a prescribed type, such as boxes (parallelotopes), for example. Solutions to these problems find important applications in the rapidly growing areas of mobile computing and multidimensional databases. Furthermore, due to their simplicity, polytopes are by far the most widely used form of model representation. Thus, the work is also important because it facilitates the use of the large body of methods already available for polytopes, provided that the resulting approximation is good and can be performed efficiently. Development of these algorithms produces tools of high performance computing. The investigators use these tools in turn to study long-standing geometric problems doc11545 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop techniques and equipment for simple, cheap and reliable mass production of triploid and tetraploid giant tiger shrimp (Penaeus monodon) using a new technology called Automated Polyploid Induction System (APIS). This proprietary APIS system uses a specially designed spawning tank, an automated spawn sensing device and computer applied shock treatments. The specific objective of the Phase I project is to determine the optimal values of the three key parameters for triploidy induction in P. monodon: time to start shock application, shock intensity, and shock duration. This determination will allow the complete development and demonstration of APIS during Phase II of the project. Additional objectives in Phase II will include production of tetraploid P. monodon, and completion of production trials with diploid, triploid and tetraploid shrimp. The commercial application of this project is in the farmed shrimp production market. Farmed shrimp from Asia constitutes approximately 75% of the world s farmed shrimp production, and P. monodon accounts for greater than 50% of that production. Successful mass production of the triploid P. monodon, and demonstration of superior culture performance of triploids will allow marketing of this proprietary technology throughout Asia doc11546 none Evaluation of Coastal Response to Sea-Level Rise from Holocene Stratigraphic Records: A Step Towards Coastal Forecasting Antonio Rodriguez and John B. Anderson The consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was that the rate of sea-level rise will increase in the future as a result of global warming. An increased rate of sea-level rise will have a number of adverse impacts on world coasts, such as wetlands loss and accelerated coastal erosion, but the magnitude of these changes remains unpredictable. Predictions of coastal response to future sea-level rise rates should be improved by examining the geological record of coastal change during the Holocene, when sea level was rising at rates similar to future predictions. The best records of coastal response to rising sea level are found in incised fluvial valleys. Incised valley fill from three Gulf of Mexico bays, specifically Mobile Bay, Galveston Bay, and Corpus Christi Bay will be examined and compared. These bays are located within differing climatic belts, and are fed by morphologically distinct fluvial systems. Preliminary data from all three bays has identified an episode of rapid shoreline retreat that occurred during the Holocene. In Galveston Bay, this event resulted in the estuarine environment being shifted tens of kilometers landward and the barrier shoreline being submerged and stranded on the continental shelf as a bank (Heald Bank). The hypothesis is that variations in the rate of coastal subsidence and river discharge were not the cause of the observed coastal backstepping events. The hypothesis will by tested by collecting high-resolution seismic, sediment core (up to 30 m-long cores), and paleontologic data from each bay to identify flooding surfaces. Radiocarbon age dates obtained from plant fragments and articulated mollusks sampled at numerous locations above and below the entire dip axis of flooding surfaces within each bay will constrain the timing of the events and the rates of coastal change. Correlation of flooding surfaces between the bays, together with calculations of sedimentation and compaction rates and the generation of sea-level curves from basal peat deposits, will aid in distinguishing variations in climate and subsidence from sea-level events. This work will help quantify coastal response to forcing mechanisms, and will create data sets appropriate for testing coastal forecasting models by hindcasting doc11547 none The PI will perform research on supply networks and scheduling of re-entrant manufacturing systems while in residence in the Technology and Manufacturing Group at INTEL Corporation. While transferring theoretical results and paradigms of nonlinear control into large scale industrial applications, a major objective is to develop in-depth knowledge of the practical needs, constraints, and objectives of industrial operations, sufficient for effective future collaborations with representatives from industry, business, and industrial engineering faculty, and to optimally prepare future undergraduate and graduate students. The technical focus is on problems of immediate interest to the semi-conductor industry. As a roughly $100B business in the US alone, this industry is characterized by capital intensive manufacturing plants and short product life-cycles. Together with rapidly changing demands and prices, this framework promises a particularly high return on investments to optimize operations. The first problem is to optimize the management of the global supply networks of the semiconductor industry. This includes phasing in out changing products, using facilities that are distributed around the globe, avoiding overproduction and hedging against fluctuations in demand and production. A key objective is to connect commonly used financial with optimal control. The second problem is to optimize the scheduling of re-entrant manufacturing systems. A major theoretical problem is to formulate an analogue of the dynamic programming paradigm for such systems without a distinguished direction of signal flow. This project will immediately impact the many courses taught and seminar series organized by the PI. He will also quickly communicate his insights to the larger communities in mathematical control and undergraduate education. This IGMS project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc11548 none This proposal requests funds for continuation of studies of the segmental motion of polymers at solid interfaces. Since the interfacial regions are quite thin, spectroscopic techniques are required for their characterization. In this case, the technique to be used is primarily nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The NMR studies will be done with deuterium and specifically labeled polymers. Deuterium NMR has several advantages and the polymers will be studied with line shape, two-dimensional exchange, and relaxation time studies. These will give a picture of the motion of the polymer molecules at the interface. Of particular interest is the quantification of the molecular motion with the deuterium exchange experiment. The use of the deuterium label can also provide contrast so that the interface can be studied even in the presence of an overlayer of unlabeled polymers. The result of the successful completion of this work will be that knowledge of the structure and dynamics of interfacial materials will help researchers to design interfacial systems with enhanced properties for advance applications such as advanced composite structures, electronic devices, and particle stabilization. %%% Thin films made from polymers are important in a variety of applications including structural composites, sensors, and electronics. In these systems, the properties of the thin films are critical to the success of the devices that use them. Characterization of the properties of the polymers is crucial to an understanding of how the devices work. Ultimately, the properties of devices with polymers can be improved if the behavior and their roles are understood. These determinations become even more crucial as the size of the devices, and hence the thickness of the polymer films become smaller. For example, in electronic devices, some of the properties of the polymer layers change with the thickness of the polymer layer doc11549 none The project provides the principal investigator (PI), an assistant professor of mathematics, with academic training in biostatistics so that he (1) can develop a new career that will significantly help his home institution to achieve its strategic goals in science, (2) can become a significant collaborator with and resource for his colleagues in the biological sciences, providing a unique mathematical perspective on significant biological questions and their statistical ramifications. The grant activity will enhance the teaching of statistics at the lower division undergraduate level as well as the possibility of collaborative teaching of a biostatistics course in the upper division. To obtain the requisite training in biostatistics and life sciences generally, the applicant will spend one academic year as a visitor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health in the Division of Biostatistics. The grantee will take course work in biostatistics and the life sciences, participate in departmental seminars, and frame a program of research designed to complement the biological research of the Science Department at BHSU. This IGMS project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc11550 none This Interdisciplinary Grant in the Mathematical Sciences project is twofold: formal educational training in the biological sciences and the experience of immersion in a research laboratory environment. The principal investigator will be a visiting faculty member in the Division of Endocrinolgy, School of Medicine, University of Virginia. The composition of the total effort will be 75% coursework and 25% research and laboratory exposure. The educational and experiential components of this award will allow the PI to reach that understanding of the biological sciences, including practical laboratory aspects, which is necessary for collaborative interactions at the frontier of neuroendocrinolgy. As a simple example of the anticipated experience, a general understanding of how, and the precision by which, biomolecular (DNA, RNA, protein, steroid) concentrations are calculated within a laboratory environment will be enormously valuable. Animal and human reproduction, bodily growth, and the response to stress are but three of the many critical processes, which are regulated and controlled by (neuro-)hormones produced in the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland, and remote target glands. Understanding the (mal)functioning of such neuroendocrine systems is a fundamentally important problem in contemporary biology. One of the most fascinating and challenging aspects is that the neurohormones produced in the hypothalamus, which ultimately control much of the resulting dynamics of these systems, are unobservable in most cases (for practical and ethical reasons). Guiding the award activities will be the issue of how to reconstruct such unobserved hypothalamic signals, a key link in understanding animal and human reproduction, growth, and control of physiological stress. This award will allow the PI to gain the knowledge necessary not only for collaboration at the frontier of neuroendocrinolgy, but also to design needed academic courses focusing on the important areas of computational biology, bioinformatics, and statistical genetics. The success of this award can be measured by the quality and number of both published research papers and Ph.D. theses directed in these interdisciplinary areas. The benefits of the award will be disseminated by the presentation of conference and seminar talks, publications in both the applied mathematics and the physiology literature, and publication of a book on biological modeling in space and time. This IGMS project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc11551 none O Connell, John P. U. of Virginia The International Conferences on Properties and Phase Equilibria for Product and Process Design (ICPPEPPD) are held every three years. For the Past 21 years the locations have alternated between North America and Europe; in , the conference will be held in Asia for the first time. The first eight conferences have produced highly desirable interactions between academic and industrial and government workers in this vital area of chemical process design and simulation. The meetings have also become the most important gathering for workers from all over the world; the Eighth conference held in in Nordwijkerhout, The Netherlands attracted 250 participants from 29 countries. Each conference has produced important collections of papers in review archival proceeding volumes. The Eighth Conference provided over pages of reviews and new research published in the international journal Fluid Phase Equilibria. The Ninth Conference is scheduled for May 20 -25 , in Kurashiki, Japan, with a similar format that has been successful at the previous Conferences, though with some significant enhancements in workshops and new session topics. The present proposal requests funds for travel, and meals and lodging in some cases, for as many needy US academic researchers as possible. A small request is included for communications costs between them and the PI. Those supported would include presenters of invited and contributed papers as well as young research workers who would not be able to attend without such support. No request is made for meeting organization expenses or for non-US participants doc11552 none This grant will support a preliminary study of the uses of information technologies to support multilateral collaborations between two South American countries in the topic area of drug abuse and trafficking. Important topics to be surmounted include the many differences in infrastructure and processes related to data gathering, and the differing legal and security regimes in place. There will be an element of multi-lingualism to be explored also. The collaboration will begin with the support and approval of the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission of the Organization of American States (OAS). The Commission has developed a process and procedures for multilateral government evaluation of various drug abuse parameters, which will serve as the context in which to evaluate collaboration technologies research. Researchers from several US universities and the OAS will participate doc11553 none Williams The research proposed is an innovative approach to solving the problem of visually unappealing base-station antennas. It seeks to examine how parts of existing buildings and structures might be used as transmitting and receiving antennas for these wireless applications. The major issues that must be solved to successfully develop antenna systems that are essentially invisible in a local environment include understanding - how to effectively exite existing structures - how to examine their basic radiation properties - how to predict their radiated fields - how to control their radiation characteristics. In some cases minor modifications may have to be made to the existing structure, but the visual impact of such actions would be minimal. Possible candidates for investigation include flashing and gutters around the tops of buildings, lightning protection systems, metallic window frames, building supports, power lines and supports, portions of existing towers and billboards, metal roofs or cupolas, and portions of the metal structure interior to a building. The initial phase of the proposed research program will address the following tasks: - the development of appropriate feeding and matching techniques - the evaluation of the radiation properties for the proposed radiation elements - the investigation of the use of perturbing materials and modifications of the structures for current and pattern control. Note, however, that these tasks are interrelated. Each must be accomplished to insure the success of the others. Hence, these efforts will be conducted concurrently. The impact of the successful implementation of such antenna systems on the world of telecommunications should be most significant. The final results of the proposed study should provide essential information on the feasibility of using existing structures as effective radiators, as well as providing preliminary tools and procedures for the design of these antenna systems doc11554 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Ned Porter, of the Department of Chemistry at Vanderbilt University, is studying the mechanism of peroxidation reactions of organic compounds and the chemistry of organic peroxides. New methods for the analysis of peroxides (silver coordination ion spray mass spectrometry coupled to HPLC), coupled with parallel computational analyses, have led to the investigation of dioxiranes, energetically accessible from peroxy acids and their conjugate bases. A new class of compounds, pyri(mi)dinols, will be prepared and studied for their antioxidant properties. New azo compounds that serve as radical initiators will permit the evaluation of these compounds as antioxidants in human low density liposomes. Theory and experiment will together be used to target the development of compounds which will convert a lipid soluble peroxyl radical into a water soluble superoxide radical, thereby acting as agents for the export of a free radical chain from an organic lipophilic aggregate into water. Many organic compounds react with molecular oxygen to give peroxide products, a process that has both commercial importance and relevance to human health. Professor Ned Porter, of the Department of Chemistry at Vanderbilt University, is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his study of the mechanism of the chemistry of this process, called autoxidation or peroxidation, and the chemistry of peroxide compounds. His studies also address the inhibition of autoxidation and the study of new antioxidants. Through a combination of calculational and experimental studies, Professor Porter is developing new compounds of potential activity as antioxidants and as agents for the transferral of oxidant activity from the cell membrane, where it causes cellular damage, to water, where the activity may be discharged without causing damage doc11555 none Phytoplankton receive energy from the sun (from above), and nutrients from the water column (from below). Molecular diffusion proceeds so slowly that primary producers in the euphotic zone would deplete their nutrient resources over a time scale which is well below what is observed through experiments. They must, therefore, depend sensitively on the replenishment of nutrients through upwelling processes. There are large nutrient stocks at depth due to the constant death and decomposition of organisms that populate the euphotic zone. Thus a reliable model of phytoplankton population dynamics must incorporate an accurate physical model for the upwelling process. While work on this physical component has been undertaken by a small number of researchers, the general consensus among ocean biologists is that considerable work remains to be done. For instance, Bleck et al ( ) have shown the importance of fronts to the upwelling process using the MYCOM isopyncnal vertical grid model. For coastal upwelling, a hybrid version may be more suitable. However, the physics component must be supplemented by a suite of biological considerations such as the adaptivity of diatoms to variations in light; the role of zooplankton in limiting the phytoplankton populations; and the mobilities of nutrients, phytoplankton, and zooplankton. This biological component is currently beyond the PI s realm of expertise, and it is through collaboration with Dr. Gary Hitchock at the Rosenstiel School that useful predictive models will be forged. This IGMS project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc11556 none Over the last several years,new advances have been made in creating collaborative virtual places, populated by both intelligent agents and human players. Unlike the usual homogenous simulation system, part of the strength of a Virtual World (VW) is its ability to become the common meeting ground for a variety of different types of computer-based processing capabilities. During January 7-11, the Society for Computer Simulation will hold its fourth Virtual Worlds and Simulation Conference (VWSim 01) in Phoenix, Arizona. Although this conference has always been noted for its diversity, this year we are making a special effort to bring in several users of distance education amd telemedicine. The requested funds will support researchers in the areas such as distance education and distance medical projects, teachers and healthcare practioners who will report on ongoing VW projects in The Navajo nation and in rural Alaska doc11557 none The Advanced Materials Program in the Division of Chemistry and the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research in the Office of EPSCoR make this award to New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. With the award, Professor Tanja Pietrass will study the adsorption of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrous oxide and ammonia by carbon nanotubes using in situ solid-state NMR spectroscopy, exploiting the full complement of dipolar and quadrupolar coupling studies, chemical shifts and relaxation time measurements. Gas dynamics will be probed using two-dimensional exchange spectroscopy under variable temperature and gas density conditions. Results from these studies will be beneficial to understand the storage capacity, electronic structure and binding kinetics of different gases by carbon nanotubes. New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology has a large under-represented minority student body, mainly Hispanics and Native Americans, and this award will help in their research training and education. Absorption kinetics of different gases by carbon nanotubes will be studied using solid-state NMR spectroscopy, exploiting the full complement of dipolar and quadrupolar coupling studies, chemical shifts and relaxation time measurements. These studies will provide fundamental information about storage capacity, electronic structure and binding kinetics of carbon nanotubes. Results from this research could find applications in gas storage, e.g. hydrogen gas for fuel cells, gas separations, and as gas sensor materials. In addition, the research program will provide multidisciplinary education and training opportunities to undergraduate and graduate students in material and surface chemistries, and large number of under represented minorities attending the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology will benefit from these research activities doc11558 none This project will start a long term collaboration between the mathematics department and the biology department at the University of Colorado-Boulder. There is a tremendous amount of physiological data on the Mouthner nerve cell that has been collected in the past twenty five years. This project will start the development of a sophisticated mathematical and computational model of this cell that will incorporate the known data. New computational methods will be developed for massively parallel computers to model the dynamics of this nerve cell. It is intended that this project will start a significant program in computational neuroscience that will become an option for the Ph.D. program in neuroscience at the University of Colorado. In addition, the undergraduate research program that this project grew from will continue to engage undergraduates in research in computational neuroscience. This IGMS project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc11559 none The Principal Investigator is a mathematician in the Department of Mathematics at the University of North Texas (UNT). This grant will support the PI spending a year visiting the Institute of Applied Sciences (IAS) at UNT. One objective is to establish a collaborative research program in quantitative environmental biology. Work will initially focus on developing and analyzing complex ecosystem models, and applying stochastic optimal control techniques to evaluate resource management strategies. The PI will also serve as a mathematics consultant for the UNT Department of Biology. This will help the PI develop a basic understanding of a wide range of biological research problems and so acquire necessary firsthand knowledge to direct the development of an interdisciplinary program in mathematical biology at the University of North Texas. Student participation and community outreach will be important parts of the work. Undergraduate and graduate mathematics students will be involved both in the ecosystem research and in the consulting projects. The PI will develop presentations including- three-dimensional computer visualizations- which illustrate results from the proposed work for the IAS public education center. This IGMS project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc11560 none The purpose of the conference, to be held in Banff, Canada, September 30 through October 5, , is to provide an interdisciplinary forum for emerging technologies related to microgravity research. The effort will be directed towards bringing together scientists from the fluid, thermal, biological and materials sciences and exchange technical information on research related to transport processes in these disciplines. In particular, the focus will be on complementing the technical expertise across these various areas, and exploring the avenues for interdisciplinary work. The growing interdisciplinary aspects of research in these different disciplines necessitates the sharing of expertise, and the proposed conference will provide the forum for focusing on new areas where experts will be able to blend their scientific ideas to deal with various unsolved scientific problems. The funds will help support travel for U.S. participants consisting of undergraduate and graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and non-tenured faculty with limited research funding doc11561 none Professor Jonathan L. Sessler in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of Texas at Austin is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his studies on novel polypyrrolic macrocycles that differ from naturally occurring tetrapyrrolic systems by virtue of being pyrrole-inverted or topographically non-planar. The preparation of these new materials and the study of their basic chemical properties, including those associated with anion complexation, cation coordination, and ability to stabilize unusual oxidation states, will be undertaken. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Jonathan Sessler is studying the interactions between ions and polycyclic organic compounds which function as receptors for them. Potential analytical and medical applications for these polypyrrolic materials are anion sensing and purification, radioactive waste remediation, or as fluorescent markers for the diagnosis of neoplastic or cardiovascular disease doc11562 none The objective of this project is to study mixing processes and cloud droplet growth as part of DYCOMS-II (Dynamics and Chemistry of Marine Stratocumulus), a collaborative field program conducted off the coast of California in July . The experimental program, based on the NSF C-130 research aircraft, will provide data of unprecedented high resolution on air motions, temperature, and humidity. The Particle Volume Monitor (PVM) of Dr. Gerber will also be deployed, to give information on the fine-scale variability of cloud water content. Four studies related to entrainment and mixing at cloud top will be undertaken: 1. Estimation of entrainment rate using high-resolution measurements of liquid water content, humidity, and vertical air velocity. 2. Investigation of the cause of an apparent scale break at a scale of several meters in the spectrum of liquid water content fluctuations. 3. Formulation of a conceptual model of the structure of the cloud-top layer. 4. Exploring the possibility of enhanced condensation near cloud top caused by the mixing of air parcels with different temperatures. The ultimate goal of the research is to improve the ability to model the development of marine stratocumulus clouds, taking into account mixing processes at cloud top. This will lead to better parameterization of cloud processes in climate models doc11563 none Relaxations and diffusion play an important role in many branches of science, technology and engineering. Relaxation phenomena occur widely in physics, biophysics, chemistry, materials science, metallurgy, rheology, glass sciences, polymer biopolymer physics and engineering, colloids, fiber optics, opto-electronics and electronics. It is the primary concern in basic physics as well as in very practical applications. The wide variety of areas in which relaxation enters into consideration demonstrates its interdisciplinary nature. Research finding in the last decade have shown common features of relaxation phenomena in different materials that are often studied separately in different specialised and isolated fields. This remarkable commonality of properties of relaxation in complex materials suggests an exciting opportunity for rapid development in all the specialised fields by a multidisciplinary approach. %%% Recognising the importance of providing a channel of communication between workers on relaxation phenomena in different materials and fields and the benefit it will bring to many research disciplines, a Discussion Meeting on Relaxations in Complex Systems is being organised in Crete, Greece, June 18th - 26th , . The objective of this NSF support is to help young and other investigators from academia in the United States to pay for the registration fee and, if there is sufficient money, part of the travel cost for attending this International Discussion Meeting doc11564 none This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) will investigate the propagation of power over distance using electromagnetic waves. Transmission of power from space using microwaves (a particular form of electromagnetic radiation) and lasers has been discussed for more than thirty years. It is proposed to update the discussion, review current capabilities and relevant issues, hold a workshop of interested parties, and to develop a report on the topic. This proposal presents a possible outline of the report and describes the process to be followed in developing the research report. All electromagnetic, or radio waves, contain power. The most familiar topical reference is the propagation of power in cellular radio systems. A basestation transmits power in the direction of a user. This power spreads out as the radio wave beam diverges over distance. The transmission of significant amounts of power from one point to another on earth has been demonstrated. However the main interest in microwave transmission of power is to collect power in space (where solar radiation is available 24 hours a day) and transmit it efficiently to anywhere on earth using a narrow, controlled, beam. Transmitting power as a laser beam is an alternative. Finally the microwave power is converted to power for use as mains electricity. The recent decade has seen considerable developments that would assist this process. Power could be beamed to remote locations, be used in other space-born applications, provide emergency power, or be used as top-up power as needed. A study is required to determine the current feasibility eif his means of power transmission, briefly determine the environmental impact of high power transmission, and briefly outline the economic issues. Experiments are to be proposed that will enable the issues to be explored further doc11565 none With this Research at Undergraduate Institutions award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program provides renewed support for the research of Professor Daniel J. O Leary, of the Department of Chemistry at Pomona College. Professor O Leary will carry out a number of synthetic and conformational studies, addressing issues of hydrogen bonding and polypeptide conformation. Isotopic perturbation techniques for hydrogen bond detection by NMR will be applied to the analysis of arrays of hydrogen bonds involving hydroxyl groups, and the utility of tritium NMR for detecting OH OH hydrogen bonds will be assayed. The possibility of using hydrogen bond-mediated scalar couplings to assign the relative stereochemistry of acyclic 1,3-diols will be explored, and analysis of isotopic perturbation of the rotameric distribution of methyl groups in compounds supporting N--DH2C interactions may lead to direct NMR techniques for the configurational assignment of chiral methyl groups (R-CHDT). Solution conformations of conformationally constrained polypeptides and their unconstrained analogs will be analyzed for cross-linked 3 10 helical peptides synthesized via an olefin metathesis approach. With the support of a Research at Undergraduate Institutions award from the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Daniel J. O Leary, of the Department of Chemistry at Pomona College, is carrying out a program of synthesis and analytical methods to study hydrogen bonds and other novel weak inter- and intramolecular interactions. Water is the fundamental biological solvent, and proteins, nucleic acids, and sugars are the three fundamental biopolymers. All three rely on hydrogen bonds and directed non-covalent interactions to attain their optimal structures. Understanding the nature of the interactions that control their structures is of fundamental importance, and forms the basis of Professor O Leary s studies, which are carried out with undergraduate students under this Research at Undergraduate Institutions award doc11566 none Knots are self-entangled filaments. In mathematics, they have been most commonly studied as purely topological objects. But physical knots are knots made of real physical stuff, from rope to DNA or other large flexible molecules; or purely mathematical knots endowed with physical-like properties such as energy or thickness. The goals of physical knot theory are to mathematically model and help understand real physical systems, and to use physically inspired measures of knot complexity to develop novel methods for knot recognition classification and gain deeper understanding of configuration spaces of knots. The investigator also casts a wider net, looking for connections between physical knot theory and polymer theory, as well as analogies between physical knot theory and other important optimization and configuration problems such as protein folding. Modern laboratory technology lets scientists see the tiniest structures of life. Modern computers let researchers visualize and simulate how the structures interact. This combined technology has helped make geometry and topology an essential tool in medicine, polymers, and other areas of chemistry, physics, and biology. Knotting, or other tangling of filaments, is one of the fundamental ways that matter behaves, and is a key phenomenon in this scientific interaction. Knotting and tangling happen at every scale studied by science, from microscopic DNA loops to everyday rope to tangled magnetic field loops in the solar corona. The investigator, collaborators, and students study fundamental problems that arise in all these physical systems: How are knots and tangles created? What properties of the various systems cause essentially different kinds of knots and tangles? Can the structure be simplified or completely untangled? If so, how? How do the mathematical properties of different kinds of knots or tangles influence physical behavior? The project contributes to the effort of finding good data structures and good manipulation and visualization tools for topological and geometric objects -- essential tools for work in the realm of the very small. These efforts are at the interface of information technology, nanotechnology, and biotechnology. In materials and manufacturing, as well as in biotechnology, the work could have considerable impact by providing effective models of the topological and geometric behavior of polymers in general, and DNA in the specific doc11567 none Under the direction of Dr. David Grove, Mr. Anthony Vega will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. Combining both archaeological fieldwork and laboratory analysis he will examine a series of small mound sites located near the major Olmec center of San Lorenzo in southeastern Veracruz, Mexico. The Olmec civilization is the earliest in Mesoamerica and although considerable attention has been focused on impressive centers such as San Lorenzo, relatively little is known either about the surrounding hinterland or the processes responsible for this development. In preliminary work, Mr. Vega located and conducted test excavations into a series of small mounds which dot the floodplain around San Lorenzo. The results suggest that these were housemounds, perhaps occupied by single family groups and, based on comparisons with people who inhabit the region today, it is quite likely that these early Olmec pursued a mixed subsistence strategy which incorporated significant amounts of fish, shrimp and other floodplain items into an agricultural diet. While many researchers focus on the relationship between agriculture and the emergence of complex society Mr. Vega, among others, believes that the situation in fact may be more complex and that control over a wider variety of resources played an important role in this process. Mr. Vega will conduct stratigraphic excavation to develop a detailed chronological sequence. He will also completely expose living surfaces within several mounds to gain insight into subsistence practices and social organization. Comparison across mounds will permit him to determine whether social stratification - a hallmark of complex societies - existed. More limited testing between mounds may, hopefully, provide information on agricultural practices. By placing Olmec development in a chronological context it will also be possible to address the contested issue of whether Olmec culture developed from a local base or traces its roots to other regions within Middle America. This research is important for several reasons. It will shed light on alternative routes which may lead to the emergence of civilization and provide insight into one of the earliest Middle American complex societies. It will provide data of interest to many archaeologists and contribute to training a promising young scientist doc11568 none With 646 species, the Loricariidae (suckermouth armored catfishes) is one of the largest families of fishes in the world. Loricariids are distributed throughout much of South America and part of Central America where they fill significant ecological roles as algivores, detritivores, and lignivores (wood-eaters). Particularly speciose among the Loricariidae is the tribe Ancistrini of the subfamily Hypostominae. Amongst the Ancistrini, the major taxonomic and systematic problems revolve around a group of genera with ranges centered upon the Brazilian and Guyana Shields, two areas of ancient mountain ranges. In this study, the shield endemic groups of the Ancistrini will be examined to determine what species exist in the shield region and numerous undescribed taxa will be described. Once this is completed, the relationships of the species will be determined by various aspects of their morphology (such as bones) in order to reconstruct the biogeographical history of the shield region. By analyzing several groups with similar life histories, the way in which the shield regions have been invaded by fishes can be explored in detail. Particular emphasis will be placed on the Guyana Shield. From a conservation standpoint, although much of the Guyana Shield remains sparsely populated, some rivers have been incredibly impacted by gold and diamond mining. By studying the Guyana Shield Ancistrini now, we will have a better understanding of the diversity of fishes in the area before the area becomes irreversibly impacted. On a recent trip I took to the Potaro River in Guyana, several loricariids that should have been present were not captured suggesting that the extensive mining in the area has had a detrimental effect on them. Mining practices may have a particularly detrimental effect on loricariid catfishes because loricariids feed on biofilm that may become laced with pollutants from the mining industry and which may be harmed by the increased turbidity caused by dredging. It is imperative that studies into the shield fauna be accomplished soon so that we can have a better understanding of what we need to conserve and how it needs to be conserved before it is lost. This study will also provide the means to collect in poorly studied areas of South America. Many undescribed species of fishes will likely be collected in this study. In addition, tissues of all species collected will be taken for future genetic analyses and would allow for future toxicological analyses doc11569 none Heard The astounding diversity of herbivorous insects (1-5 million species) is poorly understood, but one possible mechanism for their diversification is sympatric speciation via host race formation - that is, adaptation to and speciation on different host plants in the absence of geographic barriers to gene exchange. While a few cases of host race formation in sympatry are known, it remains un-known whether this process is rare and special or frequent and predictable. A promising avenue toward answering this question is provided by the diverse group of insects attacking the goldenrods Solidago altissima and S. gigantea. Focussing on one of these insects, the goldenrod elliptical-gall moth, Gnorimoschema gallaesolidaginis, we will use genetic data to document the geographic extent and structure of genetic differentiation, reconstruct the history of host shifting, and identify evolutionary forces driving differentiation. At the same time, we will use lab and field experiments to identify ecological mechanisms maintaining host plant affiliation and reproductive isolation (e.g. mate choice, adult and larval host choice, and or host-associated tradeoffs in larval performance). Our studies of differentiation in G. gallaesolidaginis will complement ongoing studies of differentiation in other Solidago herbivores. Together, these studies will tell us much about how (and how often) host race formation might have contributed to the spectacular diversification of herbivorous insects doc11570 none Debashish Bhattacharya A grant has been awarded to Dr. Debashish Bhattacharya at the University of Iowa to determine the phylogeny, or evolutionary tree, of the red algae (Rhodophyta). The red algae are important primary producers and key players in the genesis of a multitude of other photosynthetic cells though a process termed secondary endosymbiosis. In secondary endosymbiosis, existing algae are engulfed by other single-celled protists and maintained indefinitely as photosynthetic machines (plastids) in the cell. Genes encoded in the plastid genomes of red algae and other algae containing red algal secondary endosymbionts (e.g., brown and cryptophyte algae) will be studied to determine how often secondary endosymbiosis has occurred, and which red alga was the donor of the plastid in the different algal groups. The red algal phylogeny will also be the basis for a much-needed taxonomic revision of the Rhodophyta. The biodiversity of the algae is an infinite reservoir of organisms for fundamental biological research, and a resource for commercially important products. Furthermore, the algae are important suppliers of oxygen as well as consumers of carbon dioxide, a gas that contributes to the green-house effect. Although problems in algal biology have been studied to a much lesser extent than efforts devoted to model systems, the advent of modern molecular biology has enabled scientists to broaden their scope of investigation to all life forms. The red algal project touches on two cornerstones of modern biological research, determining the biodiversity on our planet, and using taxa in nature to address fundamental questions about the origin and diversification of individual species and whole lineages. The red algal phylogeny will provide a firm basis for addressing issues in systematics and biodiversity, whereas the plastid gene tree will help us understand when and how often novel photosynthetic lineages have been created through secondary endosymbiosis doc11571 none Pham This is a eighteen-month U.S.-Vietnam cooperative project between Dr. Hoang Pham, Rutgers University, and Dr. Thuy Bich Dong, the University of Natural Sciences, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, to study a two-stage general calibrating reliablity model for predicting software reliability under operating environments. This research is important and addresses a key quality control problem in computer and information technology. The inclusion of development process factors in software reliability models is a first important step in improving accuracy in telecommunication software. The results of this study can have a wide variety of applications including use in computer and information technology and in control and automation systems. This proposal addressess an important scientific question and meets the NSF focus area of human resource development doc11572 none Numerical modeling tools have been used in the liquid crystal arena for several years. They are typically used interactively to explore effects and to optimize the performance of devices with respect to controllable material and device parameters. Until recently, satisfactory results could be achieved by using one-dimensional (1-D) models, which treat the transverse dimensions of the structures as infinite and uniform. Current developments (smaller feature sizes, new technologies) are forcing more realistic 2-D and 3-D modeling. The numerical algorithms utilized in current modeling tools require several minutes on contemporary platforms to analyze a 2-D device; for 3-D, they take several hours. Significant improvements in the numerical approaches are needed to produce acceptable performance in these higher dimensional settings. The principal investigator will work with device-modeling physicists and experts in the applied mathematics and numerical analysis communities to adapt and develop the advanced numerical methods necessary to model realistic optical devices based upon liquid crystal materials. Modern numerical algorithms hold the promise of enabling 3-D modeling in times that are comparable to the current generation of 1-D tools (seconds). These tools are expected to have a significant impact on the development of liquid crystal optics technologies. This project is concerned with the development and analysis of numerical modeling tools for devices based on liquid crystal materials. Liquid crystals are important in technology because they can be used to control light. Numerous applications exist (e.g., lap-top and flat-panel displays), and new ones are being developed, including tablet document readers (e-books, electronic newspapers) and beam-steering devices (for soft, programmable, non-mechanical applications in communications and switching). Modern numerical algorithms hold the promise of enabling full modeling of liquid crystal devices in a matter of seconds. Such tools will be of immense practical utility and can be expected to have a big impact in the development of technologies in this and related areas doc11573 none Dr. James Smith at Boise State University is investigating the evolutionary history of a large tropical plant group, the African violet family Gesneriaceae (a major portion of which occurs in the Americas and not in Africa). The evolutionary history will be studied with comparative gene sequencing, a process that examines genes directly to trace the evolutionary history of the whole organism. Once an evolutionary tree is produced from these data, the history of the organisms will be used for several objectives. 1) Because different forms of floral symmetry occur in this group of plants, the phylogenetic tree will provide a means of determining how often switches from one form of symmetry to another have occurred. 2) Floral symmetry is known to be controlled by a few genes in related plants and the tree will provide a means of examining the evolution of one of these genes in a plant family that has different types of symmetry. 3) The tree will provide a framework for all future investigations among this group of plants, especially evolution of pollination biology and chromosomes. One of the greatest problems facing systematics is determining homology (where traits have a common evolutionary origin). Phenotypes (physical appearance of an organism) are the result of genes viewed through complex developmental mechanisms operating during the growth of the organism. Similar developmental pathways may result in similar phenotypes across non-related organisms. This uncoupling of developmental homology (identical developmental processes) from phylogenetic homology (identical history) can result in misinterpreting relationships among organisms. Few opportunities have allowed systematists to investigate the genetic mechanisms that underlie phenotypes and the changes in these mechanisms that result in patterns of diversity. The evolutionary history of selected groups of Gesneriaceae will allow an opportunity to examine the changes in floral phenotypes and changes in the genes that regulate these phenotypes to see if they share developmental and phylogenetic homology doc11574 none Malin This award will fund travel and related expenses for a group of US chemistry researchers to participate in a workshop on supra-molecular chemistry. The workshop will be part of the Fourth International Chemical Congress that will take place April 16-20, in Havana, Cuba. The Congress this year is co-sponsored by several agencies within Cuba and by the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry, and the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. The supra-molecular workshop, organized by Dr. John Malin and Dr. Luis Echegoyen for the American Chemical Society, will be coordinated with Professors Luis Montero and Robert Cao, of the University of Havana. The immediate objective is to improve communication among chemical scientists in the Americas, with the ultimate goal of strengthening ties and developing collaborations in the area of supra-molecular chemistry among chemists in the hemisphere. The workshop will feature internationally renowned scientists who will present cutting-edge results, ranging from very basic developments to more applied topics in the field doc11575 none This proposal is being recommended as a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) to develop new sampling and measurement methods and tools that can be deployed under the Arctic Ocean ice cap for a joint U.S. - German expedition to the Gakkel Ridge in August September . The current methods, such as dredging, may not be successful in ice-covered waters, so the Principal Investigator is proposing to design, test and build a new rock sampler. He is also proposing to retrofit a hydrothermal monitor, known as the miniature autonomous plume recorder (MAPR). The MAPR was developed by the Pacific Marine Environmental Lab to increase opportunities or collecting hydrothermal plume data along mid-ocean ridge and volcanic systems. This proposal is appropriate for consideration under the SGER program because the rock sampler has not been developed. Neither the rock sampler nor the retrofitted plume recorder have ever been tested under ice. Therefore, the instruments meet the SGER criterion, preliminary work on untested and novel idea. If one or all of the instruments perform successfully under ice, then the Arctic program will have several new and inexpensive sampling devises doc11576 none The focus of this project is to describe quantitatively the abundance, biomass and size-structure of the microplankton (phytoplankton and microzooplankton 200 um) prey fields as part of the Gulf of Alaska GLOBEC program. A central objective of the mesoscale studies is to determine how physical forcing affects the availability and production of zooplankton prey for juvenile pink salmon. Juvenile salmon prey (copepods, euphausiids, pteropods, amphipods) depend directly or indirectly on diverse mircroplanktonic prey, including microzooplankton (flagellates and ciliates) which have recently been recognized to be a significant dietary component of zooplankton. The size-structure, taxonomic composition and growth dynamics of the lower trophic food web are expected to be highly responsive to physical forcing and, in turn, exert strong influences on zooplankton growth, fecundity, community composition and nutritional state. Group-specific phytoplankton growth and microzooplankton grazing rates will also be measured to identify trophic pathways and responses to changing physical regimes. This study will provide critical mechanistic insight and validation for coupled biological-physical models of the Gulf of Alaska shelf ecosystem doc11577 none The project will investigate ways of making robots more user-friendly via an innovative approach whereby the robot will be able to recognized the affecting state of the interacting human and modify it s (robot s) own actions to make the human feel comfortable to work with the robot. Wearable biofeedback sensors will be used to measure a variety of physiological indices to infer the underlying affective human states doc11578 none Treseder Globally, mycorrhizal fungi are likely to sequester a substantial amount of carbon in their living and dead tissues and through the production of recalcitrant compounds such as chitin and glomalin. Dr. Treseder and colleagues will test the hypothesis that increases in nitrogen availability in soils will reduce the immobilization of nutrients in this mycorrhizal material, because nitrogen additions may decrease mycorrhizal growth but increase death rates and decomposition of dead tissue. If this is the case, increasing nitrogen deposition could reduce soil carbon storage and accelerate the current rise in atmospheric CO2 levels. The investigators will employ field and laboratory techniques to assess the effects of nitrogen fertilization on mycorrhizal carbons. The findings will be evaluated in the context of potential interactions between nitrogen deposition and elevated atmospheric CO2, and with possible implications for natural and agricultural ecosystems doc11579 none In this RUI proposal funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Cindy Samet of the Dickinson College will pursue a program of research on very weak hydrogen bonding between substituted cyclic hydrocarbons and Lewis bases. The interactions under study involve hydrocarbon-base complexes with C-H --- N (or O) hydrogen bonding. Hydrocarbon systems of interest are halogenated cyclopropane and cyclopentadiene, while bases are ammonia, trimethylamine, and dimethyl ether. Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy combined with matrix isolation in argon and nitrogen matrices will be complemented by ab initio calculations. This project will serve to elucidate conditions necessary for hydrogen bonds to form. These complexes can serve as a model for hydrogen bonding in more complicated systems such as organic liquid crystals and large biomolecules. Eventually these studies may have an impact on our understanding of how protein folding occurs, how supramolecular assemblies form, and how certain crystals grow. All of these subjects are important, for example, in designing and creating new pharmaceuticals or advanced materials doc11580 none A central goal in ecology is to develop a set of sound scientific principles that help to explain the effects of natural or human-induced disturbances on biodiversity and the functioning of natural ecosystems. This endeavor is motivated from a desire to: (1) forecast the fate of ecosystems, and the biodiversity contained within them, especially when native species are lost or exotic species invade as a consequence of the disturbances, and (2) restore the natural function of those systems through sound management. The proposed research aims to help develop the scientific principles needed to conduct sound environmental management by studying how top-predator species in New England meadow ecosystems control the diversity of plant species within those meadows and how disturbances alter that control. Past research on this system has revealed that, within a summer season, top predators such as spiders are important because they control the amount of damage that leaf-chewing herbivores such as grasshoppers and beetles inflict on plant species. It is unknown how environmental disturbances alter the ability of top-predators to control the herbivore damage. The proposed research will cause disturbances to the ecosystem by experimentally excluding spider predators from 2 m x 2m field plots for periods of 1 to 4 years. Subsequently, we will monitor how plant damage by herbivores and plant species composition of the field plots change as a consequence of short- and long-term predator exclusion. As part of this experiment, we will also reintroduce spider predators to plots after they have been excluded for 1 to 3 years. The aim is to determine whether the system can be restored to its original plant species composition and functioning following fixed periods of disturbance. Currently, ecologists believe that altering the presence of top predators in natural ecosystems should have lasting consequences for ecosystem function. Few studies, however, have evaluated the long-term responses of ecosystems when top-predators are removed and later reintroduced. The proposed work will offer key insight into the long-term consequences of disturbing the natural integrity of ecosystems on ecosystem function doc11581 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Fifth Mississippi State Conference on Differential Equations (ii) a numerical method to simulate the mathematical model; and (iii) an efficient sequential parallel distributed computing environment. Successful simulations require interdisciplinary collaboration between various scientific and engineering fields. This conference is an opportunity for workers in these fields to discuss important recent results doc11582 none The main goals of this project are concerned with the study of the regularity properties of the solutions of the nonlinear wave equations that arise in connection with the Einstein equations and more general quasilinear wave equations. In particular, we address the questions of local well posedness for the above equations. This project also investigates the global dispersive effects for the linear Schroedinger equation with variable coefficients. The Einstein equations is one of the cornerstones of the theory of relativity. They play a fundamental role in the description of the structure of the universe. Since the equations can not be solved explicitly with exception of a few very special cases, we need to understand the qualitative properties of its solutions. We try to understand whether the solutions persist in time without exhibiting an abnormal behavior. To gain insight we do it for the more general class of equations. We also interested in understanding the connections between the classical and quantum behavior of particles. This leads us to the study of the behavior of solutions of the fundamental equation of the quantum mechanics, the Schroedinger equation doc11583 none Zoltan Szabo The main theme of this project is the study of three-manifolds and smooth four-manifolds by using gauge theory and symplectic geometry. The Principal Investigator proposes to study and further develop a recent construction that give invariants for closed oriented 3-manifolds and a related construction that give invariants for smooth closed oriented 4-manifolds. These constructions use handle decompositions and a version of Lagrangian Floer-homology. The PI will also study applications of these new techniques in 3 and 4-manifold topology. In particular PI will study these invariants for three-manifolds that fiber over a circle and symplectic 4-manifolds. Gauge theory is a very important technique in smooth 4-manifold theory. It involves the theory of Donaldson invariants and Seiberg-Witten invariants. These invariants are constructed by solving certain elliptic partial differential equations inspired by mathematical physics. Both constructions have ramifications for three-manifolds as well, these are related to solving the partial differential equations over four-manifolds with a three-dimensional boundary. In addition to studying these invariants the Principal Investigator also proposes to study in detail a third construction that involves holomorphic disks and a decomposition of the manifold into elementary pieces doc11584 none Information about for FastLane website. Principal investigator: Mikhail Shubin. . It is planned to obtain necessary and sufficient conditions, as well as explicit necessary and explicit sufficient conditions, for the discreteness of spectrum of magnetic Schroedinger operators on Euclidean space and on Riemannian manifods with geometric restrictions. Presumably the conditions will be given in terms of separation of fields and effective potentials. They will use Wiener capacity and its generalization - magnetic capacity. Physically we are looking for conditions when electrons display a discrete spectrum and are confined into bounded domains for any fixed value of their energy, when such a behavior of electrons results from a joint action of electric and magnetic fields doc11585 none Organic ion molecule reactions will be explored in the gas phase with a Fourier transfolm mass spectrometer and a variable temperature flowing afterglow-triple quadrupole apparatus (190 C to 400 C). The results will be contrasted to those in condensed media and supplemented with ab initio molecular orbital and density functional theory calculations. Particular attention will be focused on antiaromatic compounds, reactive intermediates, and zwitterionic ions. Previously, long-lived cyclopropenyl anions were generated in the gas phase and solution. These species in general are discussed in all introductory organic chemistry textbooks because they are of fundamental interest and may serve as potential sources of novel materials. During this grant period, spectroscopically characterizing cyclopropenyl anion derivatives and probing their reactivities and structures are planned. The energetics of a variety of antiaromatic and homoantiaromatic compounds (ions and neutrals) also will be obtained so that these long sought after but elusive species can be better understood. Reactive intermediates play a central role in understanding chemical reactions and considerable emphasis will be placed on studying their reactivity and energetics. Some technologically important intermediates will be examined in addition to a number of strained ring compounds. Much of this work will be facilitated by the recent development of a general and highly selective method for preparing radical anions in the gas phase. Finally, electrostatic effects will be examined. These interactions are extraordinarily important in a wealth of areas ranging from organic synthesis, material design and chromatography, to molecular recognition, enzyme structure, and drug development. Recently, the first zwitterionic ion and its neutral counterpart in the gas phase were prepared. This makes it possible to explore the structure, reactivity, and energetics of dipolar ions, develop models to explain zwitterionic species, and obtain a much better understanding of electrostatic effects. With this Accomplishment-Based Renewal award the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the ongoing work of Professor Steven R. Kass at the University of Minnesota- Twin Cities. The research focuses on understanding the reactivities and thermodynamic properties of reactive organic intermediates. The work will be of interest to chemists trying to understand the fundamental factors which control several types of reactions in gases and liquids, and will provide valuable research training to both graduate and undergraduate students doc11586 none Prop: PI: Frye, Brenda Dr. Frye is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a program of research, education, and public outreach at Princeton University. Her research program focuses on efforts to measure the total mass of a galaxy cluster, an important step in understanding the distribution of total mass in the Universe. Clusters act like massive geometric lenses in space, distorting the shapes and apparent positions of the light sources behind them. One can map out the lensing galaxy by studying the effects of shear and magnification. Using a technique developed in her previous work, she will now be able to measure the magnification, which enlarges the total field of view and increases the galaxy brightness. Coupled with measurements of the shear, these determinations will lead to a unique measurement of total mass. Dr. Frye will also undertake a three-year mentoring program for girls and young women designed to encourage them in science and to identify the best ways of mentoring them doc11587 none This project addresses fundamental questions associated with the energy level structure and efficiency of blue, x-ray storage and photostimulable phosphor materials, divalent (Eu 2+ , Sm 2+ ) and trivalent (Ce 3+ ) rare earth ions in insulating oxide and sulfide lattices. These materials are currently being used or considered for applications that include tunable blue solid state lasers, the blue phosphor component of electroluminescent displays, x-ray storage phosphors for medical imaging, and optical memory based on electron trapping or spectral holeburning. Key materials issues relevant to the performance of the proposed materials for these applications include the dependence of 5d to ?4f luminescence transitions on host lattice structure and bonding, the relationship of excited 5d levels to the band structure of the host lattice, and mechanisms of excitation and stimulation processes in co-activated materials. The first of these issue requires the ability to predict effects of local coordination environment, defects, crystal field strength and bonding covalency on the energies and splittings of the 5d levels. The second issue concerns the position of the excited 5d levels relative to the conduction bandedge and its consequences for photoionization, thermalization, and electron transfer. The third issue involves charge migration, interactions between co-activators, and defect mediated phenomena. The approach is based on using high pressure to vary lattice structure, local coordination environment, 5d energy states, defect energy states and host lattice band structure in blue-UV emitting, x-ray storage and photostimulable phosphor materials. Through control of underlying electronic and structural factors responsible for determining phosphor properties, new insight is sought into excitation, emission, storage and stimulation mechanisms. The objectives of the proposed work include: understanding the dependence of the energy and intensity of 4f n-1 5d to ?4f n electronic transitions in Ce 3+ -, Eu 2+ -, and Sm 2+ -activated phosphors on local coordination environment; examining the influence of 5d electronic states on 4f to ?4f luminescence transitions; investigating the energy of 5d electronic states relative to the host lattice conduction band and its effect on luminescence, photoionization, and photostimulation processes in Ce 3+ -, Eu 2+ -, and Sm 2+ -activated phosphors; determining the relative importance of covalency and crystal field strength in establishing the energy of the emitting 5d level in blue and UV phosphors based on Ce 3+ and Eu 2+ ; elucidating the fundamental excitation, storage and photostimulation processes in Eu 2+ -activated mixed halide x-ray storage phosphors and Eu 2+ , Sm 3+ co-activated photostimulable phosphors; examining the effect of pressure on F-center formation and aggregation in Eu 2+ -activated mixed halide storage phosphors in the presence of x-ray and UV radiation; demonstrating the ability of high pressure studies to contribute to predictive capability at ambient conditions through correlations of phosphor properties with band structure, electronic states, covalency and crystal field effects. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. These studies are expected to improve fundamental understanding of factors limiting the efficiency of solid state laser materials and a variety of optical display applications. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area doc11588 none Herschel Rabitz of Princeton University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program for research that deals with development of new theoretical concepts relevant to the control of quantum phenomena and the extraction of mechanistic and other physical information from the control process. The project has four components: (A) design and analysis of molecular controls, (B) exploration of special control objectives, (C) development of closed loop algorithms to guide laboratory learning control, and (D) development of closed loop algorithms for extracting molecular interactions from laboratory control experiments. Components (A) and (B) aim to attain physical insights into the control of quantum phenomena through theoretical and computational analysis. The emphasis in items (C) and (D) is on bolstering the emerging closed loop laboratory capabilities for controlling quantum processes by the introduction of new algorithms. Close connections exist among all of the proposed research categories, with some of the design and analysis studies serving as forerunners to the closed loop algorithm development. Although this research is theoretical and computational in nature, it aims for direct impact on emerging laboratory control experiments. Several collaborative laboratory ventures have therefore been established, with the objective of transferring the proposed concepts and algorithms into the laboratory for rapid implementation. Collectively, the research aims to advance the capabilities to manipulate molecular processes and more general quantum phenomena while simultaneously extracting as much physical information as possible from the efforts. Since the invention of laser, chemists have dreamed of selectively exciting regions within a molecule and thus causing a controlled chemical reaction to occur. Long ago it was realized, however, that energy redistributes in molecules so rapidly that it is it not possible to concentrate enough energy in a selected bond to cause it to break. With the advent of laser pulse modulation techniques and the application of quantum control theory, it now appears that laser selective chemistry could potentially become a reality with ultimately practical applications doc11589 none Maurice Brookhart, Department of Chemistry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program for his continued work investigating olefin polymerization and copolymerization catalysts. These late metal catalysts offer functional group tolerance and novel polymer microstructures. Detailed mechanistic studies of these polymerizations and copolymerizations should yield insights for designing new catalysts. Particular foci include: (a) the reactivity of neutral Ni(II) catalysts with functionalized olefins such as methylacrylate and vinyl acetate; (b) the detailed mechanism of copolymerization of carbon monoxide with olefins using various Ni(II) catalysts; and (c) the mechanistic features of Ni(II) and Pd(II) diimine catalysts, their analogs and super-active iron and cobalt ethylene polymerization catalysts. Intensive research has been directed toward understanding fundamental aspects of metal-catalyzed olefin polymerization and the results ofthese studies have been used to develop new catalysts. These have been enormously important contributions since over thirty billion pounds of polyolefin are produced in the United States each year. Most of the commercial olefin polymerization catalysts are based on early transition or lanthanide metals. In this project a series of highly versatile late transition metal catalysts will be investigated. These studies will provide fundamental mechanistic information on how catalysts join olefins to one another during the polymerization process as well as guide developments of new catalyst systems with potential industrial applications doc11590 none Gremaud This award will support the Southeast Conference on Applied Mathematics (SECAM). The conference will focus on four overlapping themes: i) Mathematical Methods for Multiscale Problems, ii) Industrial Mathematics, iii) Mathematical and Computational Biology, and iv) Material Science. Multiscaled models are found in a wide range of applications and pose difficulties for both mathematical and numerical analysis. What is, for instance, the effect of the fine scale behavior on the solutions? How well should the fine scales be resolved to obtain accurate information? etc. The problems to be discussed in Industrial Mathematics come from areas such as microelectronic, chemical manufacturing and material processing, and will focus on the process of technology transfer. The extreme complexity of the problems studied in Mathematical Biology precludes a traditional pencil and paper approach and calls rather for an integrated approach between mathematical modeling and computer analyses. This trend has been accelerated by the development of productive partnerships between experimentalists, theoreticians and mathematicians with similar interests but very different areas of expertise. Successful examples will be discussed. The study of emerging applications in the Material Sciences such as granular flows, thin films or smart materials has led to the discovery of new kind of instabilities and interface propagation problems. This session will aim at facilitating the migration of the most successful analysis and computational techniques from specific areas of Material Science to other problems. The conference aims at accomplishing three main goals: Interaction, Showcase, and New Activities. Interaction: The conference will provide a forum and gathering place for applied mathematicians in the Southeast. It will reach out to several groups that are under-represented in traditional meetings. First, many successful collaborations have been established between applied mathematicians and scientists from local companies and governmental laboratories in technological parks such as Research Triangle Park, NC. Several industrial partners have been invited to give presentations. Second, there are emerging centers of excellence within the many local colleges and historically black institutions. Speakers and students from such institution have been invited to contribute to the success of the conference. Showcase: The high level of activity in Applied and Industrial Mathematics is not always accurately represented through the usual channels of communication. Indeed, by its very nature, a sizable part of the work done in Industrial Mathematics gets to be published in specialized engineering type journals, reaching only a small portion of the Applied Mathematics community. Conferences such as this one can play a fundamental role in unifying and improving approaches that may be similar in many aspects but are used in very distinct applications. Special care has been taken to provide younger scientists and graduate students with the opportunity to present their work and take an active part in the conference. New activities: The audience is expected to span a whole spectrum of expertise, experience and background, from recognized researchers in academia to engineers from the private sector and national research laboratories to students and people with limited research experience in Applied Mathematics. It is expected that not only will the conference give an accurate idea of significant ongoing and future trends in Applied Mathematics, but also will lead to new collaborations and applications doc11591 none Aksay This award for travel support of U.S. participants in a U.S.-Switzerland Forum in NanoBioSciences, in Princeton, New Jersey, December 14-15, , focuses on the role of nanoscience in biological sciences and materials. The workshop will address: (1) interdependence and synergism between scientific discovery and technology in nanoscale research in biological sciences and materials; (2) the path from fundamental discovery of new properties and phenomena to industrial applications; and (3) ways to facilitate and best utilize current and expected advances in nanobiosciences. The workshop is organized by Ilhan A. Aksay and John T. Groves of the Princeton Materials Institute, University of Princeton and Hans Leuenberger, University of Basel and Beat Butz of the Swiss National Science Foundation. The meeting will bring together leading U.S. and Swiss scientists, researchers in early stages of career development for the explicit purpose of identifying a research agenda and future collaborative activities doc11592 none Multiscaled physical systems involving processes acting on vastly different scales arise in a variety of important applications. Analyzing such systems present overwhelming challenges to mathematical analysis and therefore numerical simulation has become a centrally important tool. However, multi- scaled problems also strain the limit of current computational abilities and resources because of the resolution required to approximate behavior on the small scales accurately. The principle investigator will attack this problem by means of computational error estimation and adaptive error control. He will develop residual-based a posteriori estimates of user-chosen functionals of the solution given in terms of the computed numerical solution. The proposed approach accounts for the global effects of stability through a variational analysis and the dual problem to the original problem. The computational estimates will be used to guide the discretization resolution in order to efficiently compute numerical solutions of a desired accuracy. The research in this proposal will encompass development of computational error estimates, analysis of the reliability and accuracy of the estimates, implementation of adaptive finite element codes, and the use of these codes to investigate physical systems. The underlying applications driving this research will be investigations into the behavior of a small number of particles suspended in a low-Reynolds number flow and reaction- diffusion systems arising in shear flow problems, general relativity, modeling of pattern formation in biological systems, and population dynamics. Some physical systems involve processes that act on vastly different scales. An example is given by the motion of small particles suspended in a slow flowing fluid, as for example occurs in riverbeds. In this situation, the interactions of the particles can occur on a very rapid time scale as they approach each other compared to motion of the fluid. Other multi-scaled systems include pattern formation in biological systems like stripes on Zebras, the dynamics of diseases in populations, and problems involving general relativity. Computer simulations of such systems have become a main tool for understanding and predicting their behavior. Yet the multi-scaled aspects strain current computational ability because of the resolution needed to approximate the behavior on small scales accurately. The principle investigator will attack this problem by developing computational error estimates to be used to guide the resolution needed at each point in space and time to obtain simulations of a desired accuracy. The resolution will be adjusted through a feedback mechanism as a system evolves. The proposed research encompasses development of techniques to estimate the error and adjust the resolution of the approximation, implementation of these techniques into computer programs that will be made available to the public, and the use of these computer programs to investigate real physical systems including those mentioned above doc11593 none Grid Forum is a grass-roots community organization that began as a BOF session at SC98 in November . Grid Forum has held five highly successful workshops in the US since that time and has formed ten focused working groups, each developing best practices and standards within a particular set of technical areas. Over 500 individuals participate in Grid Forum electronic newsgroups and typical workshop attendance is 150-190 people. Grid Forum has served as the primary gathering point and collaboration vehicle for major initiatives including the NSF Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program, NASA s Information Power Grid (IPG) program, the DoD modernization program, DOE grid-based programs, and others. Two of the primary advantages to the existence of such a collaboration vehicle are that it allows these programs to leverage one another and it assures that the various agency-specific grid systems are able to interoperate. During the past year, Grid Forum has joined with similar efforts in Europe and Asia-Pacific, increasing the opportunity to leverage to major grid projects outside of the US. Beyond the advantages of leverage and ensuring interoperability, a single global standards activity ensures that grid technologies do not fragment at continental boundaries. Grid Forum will hold its sixth major workshop, Global Grid Forum 1 in Amsterdam in March . This meeting will be held in conjunction with the kick-off meeting for the European Data Grid project that is managed by CERN. This project supports travel by approximately 30 US participants, including students and researchers from Minority Serving Institutions, to that meeting. The participants will be recruited from the ranks of existing Grid Forum leaders doc11594 none The inexpensive computation of upper and lower bounds for functionals of large, possibly sparse, symmetric matrices has received a lot of attention in the last few years. This proposal is concerned with new methods and new applications, and discusses extensions that allow the matrices to be nonsymmetric. The computation of upper and lower bounds for matrix functionals is based on the evaluation of pairs of Gauss-type quadrature rules. The outlined work proposes to study new quadrature rules of Gauss-type with properties which make them suitable for estimating matrix functional of nonsymmetric matrices. The measure associated with these quadrature rules may be indefinite or complex valued. Applications of these quadrature rules to the estimation of the norm of the error in the approximate solutions determined by iterative methods for linear systems of equations with nonsymmetric matrices will be pursued. Furthermore, applications to the iterative solutions of nonlinear problems will also be studied. An important aspect of scientific computations addresses the reliability of the results. In particular, it is important to know the accuracy, measured by the error, of a computed result. One class of problems ubiquitous in scientific computing is the solution of large systems of algebraic equations. Since the solution of these kinds are equations is so widespread, they represent a class of problems for which knowledge of the numerical accuracy of the results is of great importance. This project addresses the issue by developing theory for computing the upper and lower bounds for certain measures of a system of equations. One particular application is to get the upper and lower bounds on the accuracy of approximate solutions of large systems of equations doc11595 none The Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry (IBO) program of the Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, supports Dr. Hilary Godwin (as PI)and Dr. Brian Hoffman (as co-PI) of the Department of Chemistry, Northwestern University, and Dr. Kristin Bowman-James (as co-PI)of the Department of Chemistry, University of Kansas, for the organization of the Workshop Frontiers of Inorganic Chemistry to be held September at Copper Mountain, Colorado. The Workshop will bring together experts from the various sub-disciplines of Inorganic Chemistry and from the various schools across the country to address (i) what questions remain to be examined in the various fields of inorganic chemistry? (ii) what new frontiers in Inorganic Chemistry will likely emerge and require exploration in the medium to long term? (iii) how can inorganic chemistry help to fuel technological advances? and (iv) how can inorganic chemistry best balance the desire for specific scientific advances with the fundamental and ongoing needs for non-directed basic research?. A report will be issued from the Workshop that will be submitted to NSF and made available to the entire chemical community through the web doc11594 none The inexpensive computation of upper and lower bounds for functionals of large, possibly sparse, symmetric matrices has received a lot of attention in the last few years. This proposal is concerned with new methods and new applications, and discusses extensions that allow the matrices to be nonsymmetric. The computation of upper and lower bounds for matrix functionals is based on the evaluation of pairs of Gauss-type quadrature rules. The outlined work proposes to study new quadrature rules of Gauss-type with properties which make them suitable for estimating matrix functional of nonsymmetric matrices. The measure associated with these quadrature rules may be indefinite or complex valued. Applications of these quadrature rules to the estimation of the norm of the error in the approximate solutions determined by iterative methods for linear systems of equations with nonsymmetric matrices will be pursued. Furthermore, applications to the iterative solutions of nonlinear problems will also be studied. An important aspect of scientific computations addresses the reliability of the results. In particular, it is important to know the accuracy, measured by the error, of a computed result. One class of problems ubiquitous in scientific computing is the solution of large systems of algebraic equations. Since the solution of these kinds are equations is so widespread, they represent a class of problems for which knowledge of the numerical accuracy of the results is of great importance. This project addresses the issue by developing theory for computing the upper and lower bounds for certain measures of a system of equations. One particular application is to get the upper and lower bounds on the accuracy of approximate solutions of large systems of equations doc11597 none This project is mainly concerned with the study of the regularity of solutions of partial differential equations that arise in the theory of several complex variables and on CR manifolds. In particular we plan to study various properties of subelliptic multipliers and also hypoellipticity when subellipticity fails. Related questions are Hoelder continuity and real analyticity of solutions. We also will continue our study of global regularity on CR manifolds using microlocal methods. Partial differential equations arise naturally in physics, chemistry, engineering, economics, and in several diverse areas of mathematics. Sometimes these equations can be solved explicitly but more often they cannot and, in that case, the problem is to find whether the solution exists and if so to find various of its properties and to approximate it. This is accomplished by means of estimates. Here we study estimates for certain special fundamental partial differential equations but the techniques we develop are applicable in much greater generality. The basic concept that we use are subelliptic multipliers this is a tool which converts the search for estimates into problems of algebra and geometry. This concept has proved very effective not only in proving estimates but also in the study of various algebraic and geometric problems doc11598 none Reynolds This award supports James Reynolds of Duke University and junior and senior researchers from various U.S. universities to participate in a workshop on assessment of the ecological, meteorological, and human dimensions of global desertification. Desertification is the result of a complex mixture of causes, including over-cultivation, overgrazing, fuel gathering, and climate variability. In areas affected, many perceive that the capacity of the land to support human populations, livestock, and wild herbivores has thereby been substantially reduced. Although much international effort has addressed this problem, many uncertainties and misconceptions still exist. A major challenge is to come up with a synthetic assessment framework for identifying what matters where and when in order to extrapolate results from studies in one area to other regions. To meet that challenge, the present workshop will focus directly on the synthetic framework and on forging working collaborations with international researchers from different disciplines. Especially important is that scientists recognize the need for new interdisciplinary approaches for addressing the pressing global problem of desertification and seek to explore a new paradigm for a synthetic framework that goes beyond regional concerns doc11599 none Support for a joint TMS The Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society Society of Plastics Engineers Conference on Polymer Materials November 4-8, Indianapolis, IN P.I.: Dr. L.S. Schadler Associate Professor Materials Science and Engineering Department Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute This award provide funds to support a joint Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society Society of Plastics Engineers conference on polymer materials. It will bring together traditional metallurgists and ceramicists who currently working in the polymers field and traditional polymer engineers to discuss several aspects of polymer materials. The funds will be used to support graduate and undergraduate student travel and participation in the conference. There will be a graduate undergraduate student poster contest as part of the symposia and graduate students will also present in the main symposium doc11600 none The invasion of novel habitats by populations can cause changes within the populations, and these changes can be the basis for the initial stages of speciation. Urban areas represent novel habitats. The Dark-eyed Junco, a passerine bird, recently invaded an urban habitat in San Diego, California. First, urban juncos are compared with juncos in their natural habitat, coniferous-mixed forest, to determine if and how urban juncos have changed in morphology, plumage, behavior, and genetics. Second, because the urban population is isolated, each junco can be uniquely color-banded and monitored throughout the year to determine individual reproductive and survival fates. This enables a thorough study to determine which individuals have higher survival and reproductive rates, which traits are responsible for the differential rates, and how changes in certain traits affect other traits. This research will shed light on the initial stages of speciation, a question central to biology but currently not well understood. The research will also provide knowledge of practical importance - increasing our understanding of how urbanization affects species, and why, how, and at what rate species change as a result of urbanization. There is also an important educational component to this work: each year approximately fifteen undergraduate and graduate students are involved in all aspects of the research doc11601 none This proposal seeks funding to study radon radiation level at the Homestake Mine and to gather information that the National Underground Laboratory Committee needs for converting the Homestake Mine to a National Laboratory. The tasks SDSMT proposes have to be done this calendar year because the Mine closes by January 1 of . After that time, access to the mine is impossible doc11602 none Closely related sympatric species often differ in the way they use resources or escape their natural enemies. These repeated differences can be attributed to two processes: repeated character displacement or lineage assortment. Feather lice (Insecta: Ischnocera), parasitic on birds, provide an opportunity to test for these two alternatives in a relatively diverse system that involves several host microhabitats related to parasite escape from host preening. This research will construct a phylogeny of avian feather lice based on an integration of molecular and morphological data, including DNA sequences for one mitochondrial and three nuclear genes and nearly base pairs. The phylogeny will permit a critical assessment of microhabitat specialization, the first such rigorous test in a host-parasite system. This host-parasite system of adaptations is of interest to population geneticists, systematists, and ecologists and has implications for understanding the origin of parasitic relationships of interest to medical and veterinary entomologists. Integration of morphological and molecular data will support the first rigorous, modern concepts of feather lice phylogeny and form the basis for greatly improved and predictive classifications doc11603 none Lindquist The investigator creates quantitative computational tools for the automated analysis of neural images, including software algorithms to provide automated morphology measurements both of neuron dendrites and of dendritic spines (the primary synaptic receivers). These tools are developed in close collaboration with the neural imaging research programs of two groups, led by Prof. K. Svoboda at Cold Spring Harbor Lab. and by Profs. P. Hof and S. Wearne at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. In preliminary work, automated algorithms have been developed and verified (against manual measurements) to identify and extract morphological measurements of dendritic spine length and density from 3D images. This project develops algorithms to i) provide spine volume measurements, which are currently available only through manually intensive, scanning electron microscopy measurements; ii) analyze (two-channel) images containing two dyes that fluoresce at different frequencies. One dye is a marker for spine morphology, the second is a marker for specific functionality. This allows for direct correlation studies of form and function. The primary application of these algorithms is in structural genetics work. iii) determine higher moment (shape) measures both of spines and dendrite cross sections. The primary application of these algorithms is in developing models of neural integration behavior and age-related deficits in short-term memory. Biological science technologies are now capable of producing data at a rate so fast that only with computers and sophisticated numerical and statistical algorithms can biologists analyze these data. In the past decade, laser scanning fluorescence microscopy, enabling non-invasive, three dimensional imaging of living neurons, has produced a revolution in neural research. The wealth of information available from a time sequence of three dimensional neuron images is outstripping our current information processing capacity, which has been based upon manual identification and tracing of structures of interest. Although it uses the superb recognition capability of human sight, manual measurement is tedious, susceptible to systematic and hard to characterize human biases, restricted to measurements involving only length and counting, and effective only for small data sets. The purpose of this project is to develop computer based tools for the automated analysis of neuron images, eliminating manual analysis. The resultant computer tools will make practical such studies as i) the relationship between neuron structure and age-related deficits in memory as well as some forms of mental retardation; ii) where in neurons certain proteins concentrate and how their presence and concentration correlates to the signal processing role of neurons; iii) large scale screening of drug treatments designed to correct genetic- or trauma-induced deficiencies in neuron structure. The project is supported by the DMS Computational Mathematics, DMS Applied Mathematics, and IBN Computational Neuroscience programs and by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities doc11604 none Aubry Description: This award is to support a collaborative project between a US team headed by Dr. Marie-Pierre Aubry, Department of Geological Sciences at Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey and an Egyptian team headed by Dr. Khaled Ouda, Geology Department, Assiut University, Assiut, Egypt. They plan to conduct research in the central Nile Valley (Upper Egypt) designed to recover a complete upper Paleocene-lower Eocene marine sedimentary stratigraphic section. The main thrust is the recovery of a complete stratigraphic record of the major biotic and stable isotope events that have characterized the Paleocene-Eocene boundary interval that spans the 2.55-m.y.-long Chron C24r, and, in particular, the Late Paleocene Thermal maximum (LPTM). They plan to conduct a series of analyses (integrated bio-magneto-cyclo-stable isotope stratigraphy and sedimentology) on outcrop (and corehole) material which will provide an integrated high-resolution chronologic framework for this critical interval in earth history. Reconstructions of conditions on Earth during the LPTM may unravel the general dynamics of a sudden warming and serve as the framework for a predictive model for the greenhouse world of the decades centuries ahead. Scope: The project supports collaboration between two experienced teams of investigators. The site for the fieldwork is best suited for the purpose of delineating the P E boundary. The US team members, including staff from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The research will provide for training of graduate students at Assiut University in various topics in geology and paleontology in particular, and will provide baseline studies and data in lower paleogene stratigraphy of the upper Nile Valley of Egypt, which are of interest to Egyptian and US academic geologists. One US graduate student also will participate in this research and gain experience in international research projects. The proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc11605 none This action funds a Minority Graduate Student Travel Award. These awards permit minority graduate students who plan to apply for an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship to make visits to prospective sponsoring scientists prior to submitting a fellowship application. Ms. Uriarte will visit laboratories and field stations at the University of Washington early in calendar year . Her research interests are in environmental biology and the physiology of invasive plant species doc11606 none Plants have repeatedly evolved flowers that attract bats as pollinators. Although New World and Old World bats differ in their foraging behavior (using echolocation versus vision and olfaction, respectively), flowers pollinated by bats are considered a single bat flower syndrome. This research aims to identify the various aspects of what makes a flower attractive to bats by comparing bat-pollinated plant species in a single family (Bignoniaceae). The plant family Bignoniaceae has repeatedly evolved bat flowers in separate lineages that are restricted to different continents. The bat flowers of these species found on Africa versus South America, for example, are likely to use different means of attracting (e.g., floral scents vs. flower shape) the species of bats found on these two continents. In order to identify what makes a flower attractive to bats and to determine how bat flowers evolve, bat flowers will be examined in an evolutionary framework. Bat flowers restricted to Old vs. New World will be compared and their morphology, ecology and floral odor will be contrasted. The evolutionary framework is determined by sequencing the DNA of seventeen species of Bignoniaceae that are putatively pollinated by bats and adding these sequences to an already established sequence-based set of relationships for this plant family. Furthermore, different means of analyzing the (morphological, ecological, and odor) data using an evolutionary framework will be compared by utilizing and contrasting various current approaches. This study contributes to the practical understanding of the various analytical approaches of using evolutionary relationships to explore broader questions of evolution of particular traits, such as flower types (e.g., bat flowers). Moreover, this study adds greatly to an understanding of a group of plants that is a good model for looking at questions involving ecology and evolution of rainforest trees. Finally, this study adds to the body of knowledge of how plants and animals interact and evolve in relationship to one another doc11607 none This award provides funds for a research starter grant to assist a recipient of an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Microbial Biology in establishing an independent research program after obtaining a tenure-traack position at an eligible institution in the United States. Funds are being used to provide supplies and equipment for research on fundamental and molecular aspects of microbial diversity and symbiosis. Specifically, the mechanism and impact of the microbial degradation of bacterial signaling compounds in vitro and in soils will be examined, as will the form, function, and phylogeny of microbes associated with termite hindguts doc11608 none We plan to study the so-called critical threshold phenomena associated with different nonlinear balance laws, in which the persistence of global features of the solutions hinges on a delicate balance between nonlinear convection and a variety of forcing mechanisms. Thus, for example, solutions for nonlinear hyperbolic conservation laws will develop generic singularities in finite time, whereas the existence of balancing forces in other time-dependent problems, e.g., the 2-D incompressible Euler equations, retain global smoothness for all time. This project proposes to analyze those borderline cases, where the persistence of features such as smoothness and finite-time breakdown vs. time decay etc., does not fall into any one particular category. Instead, global features depend on crossing critical threshold associated with the intrinsic configurations of our problems. The presence of various forcing mechanisms in nonlinear convection-dominated PDEs changes the physical situation, and is responsible for the complexity of the underlying problem. Our proposed research falls into four major sub-categories, all tied to the central issue of critical threshold phenomena in nonlinear balance laws: (i) The question of global smoothness finite-time breakdown for Euler-Poisson equations. We also plan to study the critical threshold phenomena for solutions of Euler-Poisson equations, its relation to semi-classical limits of nonlinear Schrodinger equations and to augment these studies by high-resolution numerical simulations; (ii) Lack of L2-concentrations (-- and hence global existence) of weak solution for Euler equations, depending on the initial configuration in appropriate borderline regularity spaces; (iii) Questions of global vs. local existence for restricted Euler and Navier-Stokes dynamics; and finally, (iv) The issue of crossing the critical sub-characteristic threshold condition in hyperbolic relaxation problems, where there is a balance between different orders of nonlinear convective waves. The breakdown of waves on the beach is a familiar phenomenon. This breakdown phenomenon depends on whether the waves accumulate sufficient strength, height etc. and in general, they depend on whether the initial configuration crosses intrinsic critical thresholds which distinguish between finite time breakdown and long term persistence of the smooth wave patterns. The goal of this project is to study a variety of critical threshold phenomena in problems governed by time-dependent problems. While many such problems develop finite-time singularities and other problems retain global smooth solutions, we focus on borderline cases, where intrinsic features of the solutions like smoothness vs. generic finite time breakdown, boundedness, time decay, etc, hinge on the delicate balance between the nonlinear convection and the (possibly nonlinear) forcing terms. In particular, the persistence of such global features does not fall to any particular category, but instead, these features depend on crossing critical threshold associated with the general configurations of our problems, very much like the conditional breakdown of waves on the beach. These are precisely the kind of problems that are of great research interest in various applications. The critical threshold phenomenon in nonlinear balance laws is not well understood, and the available techniques to study such phenomena need to be further investigated. In this context, there are many issues to be clarified, inter connections to be analyzed -- even in simplified settings, and general understanding of the critical threshold phenomena in realistic situations is sought in terms of both analytical and numerical studies. Professors E. Tadmor and H. Liu will continue their ongoing cooperative and individual research on the critical threshold phenomena in the context of Euler-Poisson equations, incompressible Euler equations, long time existence and finite time breakdown of restricted Euler and Navier-Stokes dynamics, and hyperbolic relaxation systems doc11609 none Plummer The objective of this project is to evaluate the disinfecting capability of ultrasound for the inactivation of microorganisms in drinking water treatment, used alone and in conjunction with chlorination. Specific microbes to be tested are E. coli and F-specific coliphages. Chlorine has been chosen for this initial work because it is anticipated that sonication would have application at smaller drinking water treatment facilities that typically use chlorination for disinfection. Lower chlorine demand with sonication is expected to reduce the formation of disinfection by-products. Implementation of newer or more complicated disinfection technologies that reduce disinfection by-product formation, such as ozonation or UV radiation, may not be feasible for smaller drinking water utilities. The research will first be conducted using a synthetic water with the two proposed organisms to study the disinfection effectiveness in the absence of particulate matter, organic matter and other microorganisms; subsequent experiments will be conducted using Wachusett Reservoir water. The results of this work are expected to provide a basis for improving the disinfection of drinking water, particularly in smaller drinking water utilities that require disinfection strategies that are both simple and effective doc11610 none The members of the mammalian orders Pholidota (the Old World pangolins, or scaly anteaters) and Xenarthra (the New World armadillos, anteaters and sloths and their extinct kin) are among the most unusual of all placental mammals. Despite the differences in anatomy, ecology and geographic distribution presented by these mammals, previous studies have suggested that these two orders share a close common ancestry, as evidenced by the reduction or elimination of their teeth and a handful of other detailed anatomical similarities. Unfortunately, the potential relationship of these two groups to one another or to other groups of placental mammals remains one of the least investigated portions of placental mammal phylogeny. The goal of the proposed study is twofold: (a) to support research at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. including preparation, illustration and description of a complete skeleton of the fossil pangolin Patriomanis americanus.; and (b) to conduct an analysis of the phylogenetic relationships of the order Pholidota, including all seven living species as well as the three other well-known extinct pangolins, Eomanis and Necromanis, from the Eocene and Oligo-Miocene of Europe respectively, as well as an undescribed taxon from the Eocene of Mongolia. The results from this new phylogenetic study will be combined with the results of previous studies on the systematic relationships within the order Xenarthra to form the foundation of a broader study on the phylogeny of the Cohort Edentata, a group that ostensibly includes the pholidotans, xenarthrans and an extinct early Tertiary group of burrowing mammals, the Palaeanodonta. The proposed study will examine skeletal characteristics in representatives of each of the major extinct and living family level groupings within Pholidota, Xenarthra and Palaeanodonta. These characters will then be compared to the condition in a range of living and extinct placental and marsupial ingroup and outgroup taxa. This study will be the first comprehensive cladistic investigation of edentate relationships based on anatomical features. It will also be the only such study to incorporate all the major edentate lineages, as well as a broad sampling of other placental orders, including representatives of each of the major placental supraordinal groups identified by previous studies. The results of the proposed study will serve as an important groundwork for understanding the evolution of the various unusual anatomical and ecological specializations that characterize pholidotan and xenarthran mammals, the prevalence of convergent adaptations in these groups, and the biogeographic history that underlies their diversification. Furthermore, some previous work has suggested that some or all of these edentate groups diverged from other placental mammals at or near the base of the placental radiation. If this is indeed the case, an improved understanding of edentate evolution may yield insight into the early biogeographic history and adaptive radiation of all placental mammals. One or more undergraduate students will be trained in various aspects of paleontological and systematics research doc11611 none The purpose of the 13th International Congress on Nitrogen Fixation (to be held July 2-7, in Hamilton, Ontario) is to bring together scientists from throughout the world to discuss current research needs and fundamental research findings related to all aspects of biological nitrogen fixation. Subject areas to be discussed include: genetics of microsymbiont and host plant, ecology (competition, chemotaxis, survival, etc.), agricultural implications of biological nitrogen fixation, chemistry of nitrogenase and metal complexes, international programs, physiology of nitrogen fixing microorganisms, regulation of nitrogen fixing genes, genome structure of nitrogen fixing microorganisms, physiology of nitrogen fixing symbiotic partners, etc. The objectives of the meeting are: 1:To identify factors that limit nitrogen fixation and design research approaches that will help overcome these limitations. 2:To review the status of current research efforts relating to biological nitrogen fixation. 3:To foster collaborative research efforts on common subjects. 4:To characterize the genomic structure of nitrogen-fixing species. 5:To provide a convenient arena for graduate student and postdoctoral participation in meetings. 6:To identify research goals for the first decade of the 21st century. And 7:To identify and discuss recent advances in the chemistry of nitrogen fixation and the potential for these discoveries for practical use. Funds are requested to partially support the participation of US scientists, postdoctoral associates and graduate students in the Congress. Scientists designated as plenary speakers and workshop leaders were selected based upon several criteria; including evidence of current, high quality research, evidence of success as an effective communicator, broad knowledge related to the subject matter, and geographical distribution. Postdoctoral and graduate student participants will be chosen based on need and evidence that they will present a poster presentation at the meeting. A meeting proceedings will be published that will contain review, original research contributions and poster abstracts for all presentations. The organizers, along with other members of the local organizing committee, will edit the proceedings for publication doc11612 none John Ross of Stanford University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to develop further approaches to the determination of reaction pathways and mechanisms of complex reaction systems. The effort emphasizes the need for methods with small numbers of measurements, possibly of limited accuracy. Four new methods will be explored. In the first, a pulse perturbation approach will be examined using theory, model reaction calculations, and experiments, in order to elucidate the causal connectivities of species in the reaction pathways. A variant of this approach, a delayed response method, will be studied using theory and calculations with the goal of providing information on the number of chemical species in the reaction pathways, on rate coefficients, and on the reaction mechanism. Genetic algorithm methods will be used on a model system to study the possibility that oscillatory chemical reactions may have evolved in biological systems as a result of regular periodic perturbations, focusing on evolutionary changes in a reaction mechanism due to external effects. Finally, the reaction mechanism and stochastic analysis of memory effects and oscillations in single-molecule reactions will be investigated. Establishing how chemical reactions occur is an important goal in all fields of chemistry, including biological chemistry. This task has been approached, for nearly the last hundred years, by determining the chemical species present, studying separately the rates of various elementary chemical reactions in the entire reaction system, and then guessing the reaction mechanism, which is the proper combination of elementary reaction steps that lead from reactions to products that reproduce observations. For complex chemical reaction systems, this is an arduous and often controversial task, since many different proposed reaction mechanisms frequently fit the available data. The research that will be carried out in this project approaches the solution of chemical reaction mechanism problems from an alternative viewpoint, and the outcomes may have substantial impact on the determination of the mechanisms of complex chemical and biochemical systems in vitro, and ultimately in vivo doc11613 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Israel Wachs Institution: Lehigh University The 17th North American Meeting of the Catalysis Society will be held June 3-8 in Toronto, Canada. These meetings of the Catalysis Society are held biannually. Symposium topics include recent advances in many areas of catalysis including environmental catalysis, natural gas conversion, catalyst preparation, catalyst deactivation, novel catalytic processes, photocatalysis, selective oxidations and hydrogenations, polymerization and homogeneous catalysis, zeolites, heterogeneous organic synthesis, and pharmaceutical and fine chemical production. The objective of this proposal is to defray costs of meeting attendance, especially for graduate students and young investigators. With co-funding from other sources, support for about 80 graduate students will be provided for meeting attendance. Special emphasis will be placed on bringing young researchers to the meeting doc11614 none Nason The astounding diversity of herbivorous insects (1-5 million species) is poorly understood, but one possible mechanism for their diversification is sympatric speciation via host race formation - that is, adaptation to and speciation on different host plants in the absence of geographic barriers to gene exchange. While a few cases of host race formation in sympatry are known, it remains un-known whether this process is rare and special or frequent and predictable. A promising avenue toward answering this question is provided by the diverse group of insects attacking the goldenrods Solidago altissima and S. gigantea. Focussing on one of these insects, the goldenrod elliptical-gall moth, Gnorimoschema gallaesolidaginis, we will use genetic data to document the geographic extent and structure of genetic differentiation, reconstruct the history of host shifting, and identify evolutionary forces driving differentiation. At the same time, we will use lab and field experiments to identify ecological mechanisms maintaining host plant affiliation and reproductive isolation (e.g. mate choice, adult and larval host choice, and or host-associated tradeoffs in larval performance). Our studies of differentiation in G. gallaesolidaginis will complement ongoing studies of differentiation in other Solidago herbivores. Together, these studies will tell us much about how (and how often) host race formation might have contributed to the spectacular diversification of herbivorous insects doc11615 none This project includes organization of a workshop to be conducted by NSF with support from WTEC, Inc. for a preliminary assessment of U.S. and international R&D activities in spin electronics. This topic has been identified by NSF s Engineering Directorate as the focus of a potential NSF ENG research study. The purpose of the workshop, to be held December 14, , is to gather facts and opinions from experts from the U.S. research community on how this emerging area of research should be defined for purposes of such a study, to provide an overview of U.S. and international R&D activities that fall within this definition. This information presented at the workshop will be distilled into a report for NSF ENG doc11616 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Payson Sheets and his colleagues will conduct two field seasons of archaeological research in the Arenal area of northwestern Costa Rica. His project extensively utilizes remote sensing imagery, image processing, and data analysis is assisted by Dr. Tom Sever and his colleagues at NASA s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. Sheets and Sever have discovered that they can detect something that was previously not believed to be possible: small footpaths created by people walking from their ancient villages to a cemetery on the continental divide, and from the cemetery to a spring and to sources of stone used for tomb construction. Satellite technology has recently progressed to a level that it should provide imagery that can detect the continuation of these footpaths to a village or villages that was using the cemetery. Excavations of linear anomalies will provide data to verify or negate anomalies as footpaths. Previous research by Dr. Sheets has found evidence of extensive post-interment ritual and feasting in the cemetery, that date to about years ago. If the rituals and feasting were conducted by only one village, then they functioned to reinforce community or lineage household solidarity. However, if more than one village was conducting feasting, then the rituals could have functioned as a regional integrative mechanism. If the latter is true, with communities on both sides of the continental divide participating, then this could explain the extraordinary cultural resilience of eastern villages to massive explosive eruptions of Arenal volcano. Previous research by Sheets and colleagues has documented ten great explosive eruptions of Arenal volcano over the past years, and discovered a cultural resilience during reoccupation greater than any other ancient Latin American culture studied to date. The research team includes natural scientists and social scientists from the US and Costa Rica. Publications will first appear in Spanish in Vinculos, the anthropological journal from the Costa Rican Museo Nacional, prior to publications appearing in English in US journals. A bilingual website will present all relevant imagery, trenching profiles and photography, artifacts, and literature for scholars and interested others doc11617 none The focus of this five-year program is to assess the seasonal and interannual physical and biological variability of the Alaska Coastal Current (ACC). Specifically the PIs will investigate the seasonal and interannual variability in ACC freshwater content and transport, the ACC s role in governing spring-time mixed layer evolution over the shelf, processes controlling temporal and spatial variability in the spring bloom, and processes that may produce onshore nutrient flux. These processes are inherently three-dimensional and exhibit a wide range of temporal scales. To address these sampling requirements, this program will exploit the capabilities of a new, autonomous, telemetering vehicle (Seaglider) to make continuous, high-resolution sections of the ACC. Seaglider measures temperature, conductivity, pressure, chlorophyll fluorescence, dissolved oxygen and volume scattering function, profiles from the surface to within 10 m, of the bottom and provides 2 km horizontal resolution. The vehicle will operate year-round, repeating a sampling pattern designed to provide five sections across the ACC every twenty days. The sampling strategy was designed to augment existing GLOBEC Long Term Observation Program components. The temporal and spatial resolution provided by Seaglider surveys will resolve processes such as springtime restratification and phytoplankton blooms, while the multi-year extent of these observations will explore the system s response to long timescale perturbations in forcing doc11618 none This project will explore co-speciation in a host-parasite system consisting of birds and their host-specific feather lice. Co-speciation takes place when parasite speciation (formation of new species) occurs in concert with host speciation. Repeated bouts of co-speciation result in host and parasite evolutionary trees that are mirror images of one another. The comparison of co-speciated evolutionary trees allows one to identify host-switching events, in which parasites jump from one ancestral host group to a new one. The bird-louse system provides a model in which it is possible to: 1) identify host-switching events by comparing evolutionary trees that have been reconstructed on the basis of DNA sequence data; and 2) determine under what conditions host switches are likely to occur. Specifically, are parasites more likely to jump between closely related species of hosts, or between species of hosts that are similar in body size or some other attribute? Host switching is an important evolutionary phenomenon with broad relevance to human health. For example, the HIV virus appears to have evolved as a result of a host switch from non-human primates to humans. Similarly, human malaria may have evolved from avian malaria. Birds and lice are a model system in which it is possible to uncover cases of host-switching (see above) in conjuntion with experimental simulations of switching that involve moving host-specific parasites among different species of hosts. Such experiments cannot be done with humans and must therefore be studied using animal model systems. This project has an important training component. A Ph.D. student will participate in all aspects of the work and several undergraduate research assistants will also receive training doc11619 none Karin Ruhlandt-Senge, Department of Chemistry, Syracuse University, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program for her work with organometallic complexes of calcium, strontium and barium. Sigma-bonded alkyls, aryls and thiolates can be prepared and studied by using ancillary ligands that can stabilize these large, highly electrophilic metal centers. One important goal of this work is to obtain details about the ionic or covalent character of the metal-carbon or metal-sulfur bond and to investigate periodic trends down the alkaline earth family. Another goal is to exploit the unique reactivity of these complexes to prepare desirable organic structures. Fundamental studies of bonding and reactivity of these alkaline earth compounds will lead to an increased understanding of the organometallic chemistry of these relatively unexplored metals. In addition, undergraduate and graduate students involved in the work will learn valuable skills in synthesis, characterization and catalysis by studying these reactive species doc11620 none A central problem in plant biology is understanding when and how separate sexes evolve from hermaphroditism. Recent research has pin-pointed the environment as an important element mediating this transition, however, little attention has been paid to the enemy dimension of the environment. The objective of this research is to evaluate the role of herbivory in the evolution of separate sexes from hermaphroditism using the wild strawberry and it s flower bud clipping herbivore as a model system. This research will test a long standing hypothesis for how male-biased herbivory could facilitate the evolution of separate genders as well as four newly developed hypotheses for how herbivory could impede this transition. These hypotheses will be tested using a combination of greenhouse and experimental garden studies. Herbivore levels will be manipulated and fitness through male and female function will be measured. These studies will be complemented by direct measures of the response to selection. This work will expand our understanding of the plant-animal interactions governing the evolution of separate genders to include enemies. In doing so, it will provide some of the first data on the role of antagonists in breeding system evolution. Moreover, because this study utilizes a wild relative of an agricultural species and one of its most damaging pests, data gathered on resistance and tolerance in this system will be relevant to development of alternatives to pesticide use in managed settings doc11621 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Kenneth M. Cameron at The New York Botanical Garden to continue his laboratory and field studies on the evolution and classification of the orchid subfamily Vanilloideae, which includes Vanilla planifolia -- the only orchid species out of approximately 25,000 that has significant agricultural value. These are considered an ancient lineage of relatively primitive orchids that are found worldwide in distribution. They have always been considered critical to fully understanding the evolution and classification of the large orchid family, but have resisted attempts to shoehorn them into traditional subfamilies. Previous molecular research by Dr. Cameron has shown these vanilloid orchids to represent a separate, distinct subfamily that is the most primitive of all but two genera of orchids. However, the relationships of the species within the subfamily are still unclear. These findings emphasize the evolutionarily pivotal position occupied by these plants and the need for further, in-depth systematic investigation. Specifically, the research will include a molecular component that will focus on constructing a solid evolutionary tree for the subfamily using DNA sequences from a suite of nuclear, chloroplast, and mitochondrial genes. However, the molecular aspect of the project will not be limited to DNA sequencing. In addition, select genes and their products from within the chloroplast genome will be studied in detail to better understand the pattern and process of degeneration of the photosynthetic apparatus among the non-green taxa that live as parasites on soil fungi. Already, Dr. Cameron has investigated three different classes of photosynthesis genes, and has discovered that two of the three (rbcL and psaB, but not atpB) are characterized by significant deletions in some of the non-photosynthetic taxa, and extremely high rates of mutation in others. These findings suggest that the vanilloid orchids are in the early stages of chloroplast genome degradation. They are, therefore, an ideal group of organisms in which to study this biological phenomenon. Finally, in addition to molecular research, new studies on floral morphology and pollination biology in the group will be initiated. Many of the vanilloid taxa are characterized by complex flowers with prominent petal ornamentation in the form of mobile scales and bristles. These structures, in particular, are unlike any other in the orchid family. They deserve careful examination in order to understand their form, function, and evolutionary derivation. The vanilloid orchids have been long recognized as an economically valuable and unique group of plants, but several aspects of their natural history have been the source of controversy among biologists. A more thorough knowledge of this pivotal group undoubtedly will be valuable to our understanding of the evolution and diversity within the second largest family of flowering plants on Earth. Despite the economic importance of Vanilla to humankind, there exist few thorough systematic investigations of these plants. Comparative morphological, anatomical, and pollination studies of the group are also lacking. For these reasons, the combined results of these morphological and molecular studies should provide a solid phylogeny of Vanilloideae for which nomenclatural issues, patterns of biogeography, trends in floral morphology, and genome evolution can be examined. Few of the vanilloid orchid species take to cultivation. As a consequence, many are endangered or already extinct. It is imperative and warranted, therefore, that systematic research continues on this fascinating and pivotal group of orchids if their unique interactions with fungi and animal pollinators are to be understood before they are lost to habit destruction and overcollecting doc11622 none Electrons injected in the conduction band of a quantum dot exhibit strong intraband transitions in the mid-infrared and this is interesting for potential applications. This individual investigator award provides support for a project to discern and control the mechanisms that influence the energy, coherence and lifetime of the intraband transitions, in particular the role of phonons and surface states, issues that are currently unclear. The project deals with colloid quantum dots prepared by solution chemistry that allow for the modification of the surfaces. This should provide an important element of control in the electron dynamics. The characterization of the spectroscopy and dynamics of the electrons involves steady state and picosecond time-resolved optical studies using lamp and infrared laser spectrometers. This project, combining wet organometallic chemistry along with extensive charaterization of the nanostructures, offers an excellent opportunity for training graduate students in a frontier area of optical material science. %%% Electrons inside a nanoscopic semiconductor particle are very sensitive to infared radiation and this is interesting for potential applications in the mid-infrared, from lasers to detectors, and night-vision. This individual investigator award provides support for a project to discover and control the mechanisms that influence the infrared response of the electrons. This will be necessary in order to take advantage of the flexibility with which the optical response of the electron can be engineered via the size, shape and composition of the nanostructure. Chemistry is used to make the semiconductor particles in solutions. These solutions readily exhibit the effects of quantum mechanics via their strong colors, and they can be processed to make more practical gels or thin films with identical properties. This project combines chemistry and optics of nanomaterials and it offers an excellent opportunity for training graduate students in this technologically promising area of material science doc11623 none A Gordon Research Conference on Electronic Materials will be held July 15-20, at Connecticut College. The conference will focus on the most exciting developments in synthesis, processing and usage of electronic materials. There will be extensive contributions representing nanoscience, new materials, and device concepts based on semiconductor, organic, polymeric, and biological materials. Presentations on new deposition methods, such as atomic layer deposition, will emphasize the increasing need for atomic level control of interfaces. The program is organized around invited speakers, discussion leaders, co-chairs, and co-vice-chairs; both contributed papers and posters are scheduled. Objectives are to stimulate communications among the broad community of researchers who address Electronic Materials research from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds--chemistry, physics, engineering and materials science, and to formulate and delineate critical research necessary to further basic understanding and move concepts closer to technological success. The conference is expected to provide an effective forum for discussion of critical scientific issues surrounding Electronic Materials. Topics include: Nanoscale Materials and Molecular Electronics; Patterning Strategies; Organic Optoelectronic Devices, Biological Computing and Bioelectronics; Deposition and Properties of Dielectric Films; Layered Inorganic and Organic Structures; Dendrimers and Conducting Polymers in Devices; Semiconductor Surfaces and Microelectronic Processing; and MEMS and Miniaturization. Along with the opportunity to assess the field and future directions, it is expected that new ties will be established between universities, research institutions, and industry. %%% An evaluation of the progress and status of Electronic Materials research issues associated with growth and processing of a variety of electronic materials including semiconductor, organic, polymeric, and biological materials and device related structures along with current assessments of the most important developments will be of great value to the understanding and enhanced utilization of materials in computing, data processing, and communications doc11624 none The role of predation in regulating terrestrial ecosystems, and the related question of whether terrestrial ecosystems are subject to strong trophic cascades (effects which flow from predators through herbivores to plants) are topics of current debate in ecology. The proposed research takes advantage of a multi-billion dollar experiment that has created a large number of predator-free islands in a 4,300 square-kilometer impoundment associated with a hydroelectric installation in Venezuela. The proposed research generally tests the hypothesis that the predator-free status of islands should lead initially to a hyper-abundance of herbivores (seed and leaf eating species), and then to massive impacts on the vegetation as a consequence of trophic cascades. Primary activities include continuing rodent and ant removal programs on experimental islands and re-censusing plant plots to record the dynamics of vegetation change on both untreated and treated islands. This research may provide the most direct link yet to the important functional role played by large predators in tropical forests. This has enormous implications for conservation because human-induced loss of predators from tropical forests may drastically alter plant species composition of tropical forests resulting in significant declines in diversity doc11625 none New Caledonia is an ancient island in the South Pacific that supports a highly endemic terrestrial biota. Among vertebrates, lizards are particularly diverse (~ 20 genera). The evolutionary history of the endemic New Caledonian lizards will be reconstructed in order to evaluate how events over the last 80 million years have interacted to yield high biodiversity in a small insular setting. Drs. Bauer and Jackman at Villanova University will reconstruct phylogenies for all New Caledonian lizards based on a combined data set of morphological and molecular characters (DNA sequences). Phylogenies will be used to erect hypotheses about the geographic distributions of the organisms through time. A molecular clock will be invoked to distinguish between older lineage splits associated with the fragmentation of New Caledonia from Australia in the Late Cretaceous and qualitatively later divisions indicative of over-water dispersal. The historical biogeography of New Caledonia will be examined by combining phylogenetic information from reptiles with that from other organisms showing similar patterns of diversification within the island. Regions of congruent distribution of these taxa will be recognized as areas of endemism that will be analyzed using several current analytical biogeographic approaches. This research will provide a robust phylogenetic background for subsequent studies of the evolutionary morphology and ecology of the New Caledonian lizards and will serve as the foundation for more detailed and sophisticated biogeographic studies of this biodiversity hotspot. The DNA sequence data collected will be made available for the use of other researchers, and museum material will be deposited in collections in the United States, Australia, and France for future studies. The project will promote international research cooperation (United States, Australia and New Caledonia [a French territory]) and will foster the professional development of undergraduates and a postdoctoral associate, as well as strengthen the research environment at a primarily undergraduate institution doc11626 none Harpellales, one of three orders of the class Trichomycetes, are fungi that live as symbionts in the guts of insects, particularly stoneflies (Plecoptera), mayflies (Ephemeroptera), and lower flies (Diptera: Nematocera). Typically, the fungus is transmitted from larval insect to larval insect, raising questions about how the fungi are dispersed over great geographic distances. Evidence exists that they may have a parasitic life stage in which cysts are formed in the ovaries of host insects that then disperse and deposit fungi in new habitats. Details of the association of these fungi with host insects are poorly known as are relationships among the fungi and explanations for their origins and diversification. Because host insects include many species of ecological and medical importance (e.g., mayflies and stoneflies, mosquitoes, black flies, biting midges), an understanding of parasitism that can result in sterilization of the host insect has great interest to entomologists. Field and laboratory studies will help unravel the interactions between these fungi and their hosts, including a molecular informed phylogeny for the fungi that can help explain their diversification and origins. This will permit a better understanding of a very enigmatic group of fungi, and make its species accessible to biologists interested in symbiosis, parasitism, historical biogeography, and possibly co-speciation doc11627 none DEB - Chase How do communities assemble? The influence of local conditions and regional processes on community composition. Do similar communities develop at similar sites? If local conditions, such as the primary productivity or disturbance rate, are of primary importance in community assembly, then we expect that community composition at sites with similar local conditions would converge towards the single community state favored in that environment. Alternatively, if regional processes, such as the rate at which species colonize a locality within a meta-community, and the order in which they do so, more strongly drive community assembly, then we might expect that communities developing at similar sites would diverge towards one of multiple community states. In this project, the PI will perform a long term experiment designed to discern between the influences of local conditions and regional processes on meta-community assembly. This research will provide some of the most comprehensive evidence to date examining the relative roles of local and regional scale processes in determining community structure in different environments. Further, the basic understanding of community assembly that is the focus of this project will directly relate to the conceptual foundation for the restoration of degraded ecosystems doc11628 none LTREB: MANGROVE FOREST STRUCTURE AND GAP DYNAMICS: EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES OF THE ROLES OF COMPETITION AND HERBIVORY The proposed research continues long-term monitoring of the patterns and mechanisms of gap regeneration in mangrove forests on the Caribbean coast of Panama, and their effects on forest structure and stability. Fieldwork includes sampling vegetation in a variety of permanent plots and transects along a tidal gradient as well as in natural light gaps. Soil physicochemical characteristics and the light environment will be monitored to evaluate if changes in vegetation are associated with changes in abiotic characteristics. This study includes a number of field experiments that test hypotheses that have been proposed to explain mangrove zonation, including the Physiological Specialization, Included Niche Competition, Tidal Sorting and Dominance-Predation hypotheses. In addition, an herbivore exclusion experiment will assess the impact of insect folivores and stem-borers on the growth, survival, and distribution of species along the tidal gradient, as well as the mediating effect of herbivory on interspecific competition. In general, these studies will advance our understanding of the interactions of disturbance with competition and herbivory in structuring natural ecosystems, and thereby contribute to our ability to predict the ecological consequences of various human-caused alterations of these endangered wetlands doc11629 none Coley Plants and herbivores comprise the majority of the earth s biodiversity, and nowhere are their interactions as intense as in tropical forests. The evolutionary interactions between herbivores and plants has led to an arms race in which innovations in plant defenses are met by counter adaptations on the part of herbivores. For example, plants have a battery of physical, chemical and phenological defenses which help to protect their leaves against herbivores and pathogens. And herbivores have a staggering array of mechanisms for avoiding, detoxifying and even using plant defenses for their own benefit. Despite the wide acceptance that many traits of plants and herbivores result from an arms race , we know very little about the underlying evolutionary mechanisms or ecological conditions that would lead to the evolution of novel defenses. To address this, we will study the defenses of rainforest trees in the family Leguminosae, quantifying various defenses, including alkaloids, measuring rates of leaf-feeding by herbivores and characterizing growth and defensive traits of herbivores. The work will be conducted at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and at the University of Utah. This basic research is necessary for understanding how natural selection favors the evolution of novel defenses as well as why suites of defenses tend to co-occur in different species of plants, as well as how plant defenses may constrain the behaviors, growth and defenses of the herbivores that feed on them. In addition, the research has applications for forest management, and for the development of medicinal drugs and agricultural crops using genes and defensive compounds from wild plants doc11630 none Steady growth in per-capita municipal solid waste during the past two decades has spurred a dramatic increase in the number of curbside recycling programs nationwide. As a result, local planners have at their fingertips a wealth of information on the costs of operating a variety of curbside recycling programs. They do not, however, have comparable information on the willingness of households to pay for and participate in curbside recycling. This type of benefit-side information is crucial in estimating the extent to which household monthly fees in a given community might be increased in order to cover the costs of operating its curbside recycling program, as well as the effect that changes in the fee have on household participation rates. It is particularly useful information for communities that are seriously considering the implementation of a voluntary curbside recycling program, where a household pays for the service only if it has signed up for it. Using state-of-the-art contingent valuation methods, we will survey a large number of households across a wide variety of communities (e.g., those currently with and without curbside recycling) and curbside recycling programs (e.g., voluntary vs. mandatory programs). Our primary goal is to estimate the value of curbside recycling to a typical household. Using advanced econometric techniques, we will also estimate the effects that various household- and community-specific characteristics have on this value. This will be the largest and most accurate study of household recycling behavior to date. By incorporating the most recent advances in contingent valuation methods, our study will help advance the understanding of how best to elicit household information on environmental goods such as recycling. Most importantly, our results will provide local planners with valuable information regarding the benefits of recycling necessary to undertake cost-benefit analysis doc11631 none The investigators will perform a study of acceleration and transport of energetic ions in the heliosphere via energetic neutral atoms (ENA) by comparing observation with simulation. The study encompasses the heliosphere and its immediate interstellar environment. The main effort is to continue development of simulations of the production of ENA by the dominant ion populations of the anomalous cosmic rays (ACR) at and beyond the termination shock of the solar wind and of the corotating interactions regions (CIR) in the inner heliosphere. Previously, the investigators have shown that the use of energetic neutral atoms (ENA) in the study of space plasma can provide the needed global view of the distribution of energetic charged particles in the entire heliosphere, especially in regions not easily accessible to space missions. The approach complements all existing in situ investigations. Simulating the production of ENA requires modeling the parent ion population. Modeling of the ion populations needs understanding of ion acceleration and transport as well as the ambient magnetic-field configuration. Comparing simulated distribution of ENA with the observed, then, provides a self-consistent global view of ion acceleration and transport. The main goals of the research are more realistic ACR and CIR simulations, simulation of production of ENA by other inner heliospheric ion populations, and simulation of production of energetic helium atoms in ACR, CIR and other populations. Since the University of Arizona is a student-centered research university, the project will involve the participation of one undergraduate and one graduate student doc11632 none Specimen data about mammals exist in a large number of institutions. Until now, there has been no integrated approach so that a researcher might move through various collections for research. Here, seventeen natural history institutions have come together to build and support a part of biodiversity informatics in an open, collaborative manner. The system will facilitate open access to the data from a web browser, which will enhance the value of the collections and also conserve curatorial resources. The design paradigm can be extended and modified by other groups interested in other species sets. The networked information system will permit the participating institutions to support the global use of collection data in research, education, and informed decision making. This factual information about the earth s biodiversity will be readily available to help maintain and wisely manage the earth s natural resources. The distributed database for mammal collections will represent the first time that many of these data are available online, together. The simplicity of the design will provide a low-cost opportunity for any institution to participate doc11633 none DEB- Mark A. Siddall Susan Perkins A grant has been awarded to Drs. Mark Siddall and Susan Perkins of the American Museum of Natural History to study the historical relationship between leeches and their bacterial symbionts. Species that rely on nutritionally poor diets are often reliant on obligate bacterial endosymbionts. Vertebrate blood is deficient in B vitamins and some amino acids. A broad array of blood-feeding invertebrates harbor bacterial symbionts providing some of these essential nutrients to their hosts. Leeches are known to have symbionts in organs that open into the esophagus just in front of the crop where blood is stored. A diversity of leeches will be collected from North America, South America and South Africa. Using DNA sequences amplified and sequenced from the isolated bacteria and from leeches, the project will answer significant issues regarding the evolutionary origin of the bacteria and the degree to which they have coevolved with leeches that harbor them. Modern phylogenetic analyses will determine the degree of cospeciation through time by comparing the evolutionary tree topologies from the two associated groups. Preliminary data indicate that these bacteria living inside the leech epithelial cells are closely related to Agrobacterium, Rhizobium and Sinorhizobium species including those forming symbioses for nitrogen fixation in leguminous plants (e.g., beans). If bacteria from different species of leech are each others closest relatives it would suggest that they have retained a tight coevolutionary association with each other through time. The alternative is independent acquisition of different bacterial associates by different groups of leeches. What is particularly intriguing about this symbiotic association and the phylogenetic position of the bacteria is the implication that these intracellular symbionts may be playing a role in nitrogen metabolism for their leech hosts. Furthermore the results should help to answer questions regarding the evolution of blood-feeding in annelid worms doc11634 none This project focuses on theories of parental investment strategy that predict different patterns of size distributions in offspring. This one-year, Proof-of-Concept grant will examine variance in size of males and females in natural populations of ants. The work will consist of: (1) Collections of specimens from the area surrounding the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Lab and at Stunt Ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains; (2) Morphometric measurement of specimens; and (3) Sophisticated statistical analyses of data to detect patterns. The project will examine a fundamental trade-off facing parents in their reproductive strategy: quantity of offspring (in terms of total numbers) versus quality (in terms of individual size of offspring). Older theoretical models predict that size should not vary. Parents should make all offspring roughly the same size. Newer models, however, identify conditions under which it is often advantageous to also vary offspring size. Ants are ideal for testing these competing ideas because colonies are plentiful and produce many offspring per year (i.e., patterns are readily identifiable). The results, however, will be relevant across all species, and a greater understanding of parental behavior will provide insight into the growth and regulation of species populations doc11635 none Fritz It is well know that some plant species tolerate damage by herbivores more than others, but information about how natural selection acts to change the expression of tolerance is scarce. In this project, the investigators use a hybrid willow system to examine the role of tolerance to damage as an adaptive response to browsing herbivores. The researchers will evaluate traits that confer tolerance to damage, measure the selection gradient for those traits in F2 hybrids, determine the sets of trait combinations that are generally favored by selection, use six genetic classes of willows to investigate the genetic architecture of tolerance and its traits, and determine how plant age alters tolerance and its mechanisms. To evaluate these aspects of tolerance to damage, plant cuttings propagated from controlled crosses will be grown in common gardens, given a treatment of either 50% shoot damage or 0% shoot damage, and evaluated for fitness responses and for traits that confer fitness. By measuring the selection gradient for candidate traits of tolerance, the researchers will elucidate the role that natural selection can play in the evolution of tolerance to damage. In addition, they will assess how past selection has shaped the expression of tolerance traits in each parental species. By determining how tolerance to damage is expressed, they can evaluate the influence of epistasis on the evolution of tolerance, as well as the presence or absence of additive genetic variance between the two plant species. These findings will provide insight into the potential for hybridization to enhance the adaptive responses of plants to herbivore damage doc11636 none Two distantly related plant families, the Solanaceae (potato family) and Rosaceae (rose family) use the same molecular method to reject self pollen. This project will examine diversification at the self incompatibility (S-) locus in the Rosaceae to test hypotheses about differences in S-allele evolution in the two families. Preliminary data indicate that alleles in the Rosaceae are quite young and that non-overlapping sets of alleles occur in the two subfamilies investigated. This stands in stark contrast to the lack of turnover and ancient alleles seen in the Solanaceae. This project will determine if these differences generally hold or are peculiar to the groups of Rosaceae that have been sampled and evaluate equilibrium and non-equilibrium hypotheses to explain family-level differences. This project will also use sequence and gene structure information to determine whether use RNases for self incompatibility in these two families is due to common ancestry or parallel evolution. Loci involved in self-nonself recognition exhibit the highest levels of genetic variability known. Examples include the self-incompatibility loci of flowering plants, fungi, and clonal marine invertebrates, and the disease fighting major histocompatiblity loci (MHC) of humans and other vertebrates. Extreme variability is due to the types of selection, generally called balancing selection, that act on such genes. Understanding the evolution these genes is important for many fields. First, the much greater time depth of variation allows historical inference that reaches farther back in time than is possible when using other genes. Second, analysis of diversification patterns at these genes provides information on the selective forces that drive their evolution. Third, examination of patterns of selection at the molecular level provides insight into as yet poorly understood aspects of the molecular basis of self recognition doc11637 none This project aims to quantify the relationship of environmental variables to the spatial distribution and abundance of forest tree species in montane forest landscapes. Field studies will be conducted at sites in the western Cascades (OR), the Sierra Nevada (CA), the White Mountains (NH), and the Southern Appalachians (NC). These sites have exceptional baseline data sets that will be expanded for model development and validation during this project. Complex environmental gradients will be divided into component variables (topography, soils, climate). Field studies will investigate forest establishment (including dispersal), growth, and death in response to those individual variables. A modeling framework will be used to synthesize forest response within and between sites. These models will be used to develop regionally nested sensitivity analyses indicating the relative importance of different environmental parameters and biotic variables in governing ecosystem responses. The results of this study will allow us to make more valid projections of possible forest response to environmental change doc11638 none Mitochondrial phylogenomics: Investigation of fish phylogeny and nucleotide character sampling in large-scale phylogenetic analysis Molecular systematics employs variation in DNA to reconstruct historical relationships among organisms and investigate evolutionary processes that have given rise to the earth s biodiversity. The growing volume of DNA sequence data and the increasing number of characters and or species that may be included in evolutionary investigations have placed greater importance on methods of phylogenetic analysis and experimental design. It is intuitive that the more data that can be applied to a phylogenetic question, the greater the probability of recovering an accurate estimate of the phylogeny. Although phylogenetic accuracy may be positively correlated with the number of species sampled from a particular group, a fundamental question in molecular systematics remains: How many nucleotide characters are required to resolve the phylogeny of a given number of species, particularly when all (or most) of the extant members of a group have been sampled? This project will employ a large, robust phylogeny to investigate the sensitivity of phylogenetic analysis to nucleotide character sampling. The ray-finned fishes (class Actinopterygii) exhibit extreme diversity with more extant described species than all other vertebrate groups combined and are of major ecological and economic importance. Despite extensive morphological study, phylogenetic relationships among many actinopterygian lineages remain unclear. This project will compile a data set of complete mitochondrial genomes from 73 species of ray-finned fishes, including representatives of 32 (out of 42) orders and extensive sampling from the two largest orders, Cypriniformes and Perciformes. Mitochondrial genomes are small chromosomes that are inherited independently of the majority of DNA found in the nucleus. The clonal, maternal inheritance of mitochondrial DNA makes it particularly useful in phylogenetic studies. Mitochondrial genome sequences, along with nuclear gene sequences, will be used to generate a robust hypothesis of phylogenetic relationships among the most important lineages of ray-finned fishes. This data set will reveal patterns of diversification among fishes and provide important insights on the evolution of early vertebrates. The mitochondrial data, in conjunction with the best phylogenetic hypothesis, will then be used to investigate nucleotide sampling properties in phylogenetic analysis. Sub-samples of different numbers of species will be drawn from the group of 73 species. For each sub-sample, the number of nucleotides required to recover the correct phylogeny, with various levels of support, will be determined. The influence of several important evolutionary parameters on phylogenetic accuracy will be investigated. These parameters include a) the frequency of variable nucleotide sites in the sample; b) the amount of evolutionary divergence among taxa; c) the amount of evolutionary rate variation among included lineages; and d) the extent and distribution of nucleotide compositional bias among sampled taxa. The results will provide a deeper understanding of the behavior of nucleotide data in phylogenetic analysis and should identify a range of nucleotide sample sizes required for accurate estimation of phylogeny as a function of the number of taxa under investigation and relevant evolutionary conditions. Such objective criteria for experimental design will be of practical benefit to the field of molecular systematics by providing guidance in budgeting and allocation of resources and by improving the efficiency and accuracy of molecular phylogenetic studies doc11639 none DEB- Kalisz White-tailed deer population sizes have increased dramatically over the last 50 years in the eastern half of North America. As a result of this increase, the non-woody understory vegetation in forests is being consumed to a greater degree. This has resulted in a significant decline in flowering and fruiting of the native wild flower community in the presence of deer. However, when deer were excluded via fences, some plant species that were previously consumed by deer were observed to grow to larger sizes and reproduce. Other species in the deer exclosures are not reproducing. The goal of this research is to determine the likelihood of persistence or decline of understory wild flower species in the continued presence or absence of deer. Using key species naturally occurring in deer exclosure plots (fenced) and paired control plots (no fence) we will monitor their growth, survival , flowering and fruiting. Comparative demographic analyses using data from exclosure and control plots will be conducted to determine the likelihood of persistence or extinction of these species. This research will help inform wildlife and forest management decisions doc11640 none Beetle diversity exceeds that of any other animal or plant group. Their inordinate success is related to two factors: herbivory and dietary specialization. Plant chemistry and predation are thought to be major factors responsible for the repeated evolution of dietary specialization. However, their relative importance, and the degree to which they interact to favor specialization, are unknown. This project will test a model of diet evolution, the nasty host plant hypothesis (NHPH), which states that an herbivore s diet becomes restricted to fewer plants as it increases its dependence on dietary sources of chemistry that confer protection from predators. Tortoise beetles (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae) are a widespread, hyper-diverse group of leaf-eating insects that feed upon hosts in over 10 mono- and dicotyledonous plant families. The most remarkable aspect of their biology and the project s study system - the larval shield - is a mobile appendage that can deflect attacking enemies. Shields are not only barriers, but because they are laced with host-derived, noxious metabolites, they also function as chemical defenses. Shields can be removed, chemically neutralized, augmented with test compounds, and then can be reattached without harming the larvae. The PIs will combine these micro-manipulation techniques with bioassays, and a resolved beetle phylogeny, to test the predictions of NHPH. The project s three aims are: (1) to experimentally test if, as NHPH predicts, the defenses of specialized species are more effective against major predators than are those of their congeneric, oligophagous relatives; (2) to determine if specialists make more efficient use of the host s chemistry for defense than do congeners feeding on the same plant, and; (3) to determine if selection by predators has been intense enough to produce patterns of escalation, due to the inclusion of novel, uniquely host-derived compounds that serve to increase the effectiveness of shield defenses. Chemical screening of shields and host plants will determine shield composition and compound origin (host-derived or de novo synthesis). In field bioassays using a suite of natural predators, the PIs will compare the efficacy of shields and of compounds found in them. The PIs will map shield chemical characters onto the beetle phylogeny, infer ancestor-descendent relationships, and test NHPH s central tenet that predation should produce a sequential host-shift pattern that yields increasingly effective shields - a process that would ultimately result in the colonization of fewer, but more chemically noxious hosts. Identification of the factors guiding host shifts across the tortoise beetles radiation is critical to understanding the evolution of plant-insect associations. This project will yield greater empirical insight into the origin of herbivore dietary specialization as a net response to selection by both an herbivore s predators and by its host s chemistry. In the limit, the PIs want to know how the evolution of dietary specialization has enhanced the rates of beetle speciation that produced much of Earth s biodiversity doc11641 none The goal of this research effort is to improve understanding of the role of air-sea interactions in modifying the near-surface wind structure of tropical cyclones. Of particular importance is to understand the role of these interactions as tropical cyclones pass over warm oceanic features that surround the United States Eastern Seaboard and the Gulf of Mexico states. Specific research objectives are: 1. Develop techniques to improve estimates of upper ocean heat content from in situ and radar altimetry data. 2. Examine the forcing of warm ocean features on surface stresses, fluxes and waves in the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) and the role of the ocean mixed layer (OML) feedback to the ABL. 3. Quantify the roles of mixing and horizontal advection of temperature and salinity, including the mass, heat and salt budgets in the OML and the effects of precipitation on the OML. Successful completion of this research will lead to a better understanding of the role of warm upper oceanic features on surface wind variations. This may lead to improved boundary layer parameterizations and improved hurricane intensity forecasts doc11642 none Fausch Habitat destruction and biotic invasions are the two leading agents of global environmental change causing loss of species worldwide. An estimated 40-50% of the land on Earth has been degraded by human actions, and more than 90% of riparian zones adjacent to streams have been altered. Nonnative species invasions cost $137 billion annually worldwide to control. Habitat degradation and species invasions occur simultaneously in most ecosystems and are believed to interact strongly, but there is little experimental evidence to help predict what kinds of habitat disturbances will facilitate invasions or increase their effects. The field experiments proposed here test the idea that riparian habitat disturbances that reduce inputs of terrestrial invertebrate prey from forests to headwater streams during summer magnify the direct and indirect effects of invading fish on stream food webs. In addition, effects of the fish invaders on stream invertebrates are predicted to reduce reciprocal subsidies of emerging aquatic insects from stream to forest during fall through spring. If so, this will demonstrate the potential for habitat loss and fish invasions to have negative indirect effects on terrestrial consumers like birds and spiders. Experiments by Japanese ecologists showed that excluding terrestrial insects from a stream in northern Japan using a canopy (to mimic the usual result of riparian habitat disturbance) caused native trout (charr) to deplete herbivorous stream invertebrates, producing a top-down trophic cascade that increased algal biomass. Further research showed that inputs of forest terrestrial insects (TI) to the stream during summer supplied about 50% of the annual energy budget of fishes, and that aquatic insects emerging from the stream supplied about 25% of the annual energy budget of forest birds. Rainbow trout, a globally-important nonnative stream fish, are rapidly invading streams in northern Japan, apparently exclude native charr, and specialize on TI. Therefore, the current experiments will compare controls with native charr alone in replicate stream reaches to two treatments, one where rainbow trout are added, and another with rainbow trout added but TI excluded using stream canopies. Direct effects of rainbow trout are predicted to reduce native charr growth, abundance, and ultimately to exclude native species via emigration and mortality. Exclusion of TI as well is predicted to intensify effects of rainbow trout on native charr, reduce benthic invertebrate biomass and species richness, and reduce aquatic insect emergence that supplies forest consumers. Predicted indirect effects include foraging shifts by charr that further reduce benthic invertebrate biomass, increase algal biomass via a trophic cascade, and reduce cross-habitat flux of emerging aquatic insects that subsidize forest consumers. This will be the first large-scale experiment to test the idea that human disturbance in one habitat can exacerbate effects of an invasion in another. A richer understanding of the interactions between habitat disturbances and biotic invasions in complex real-world food webs is needed to foster more complete theory in both fields, and to aid natural resource managers attempting to conserve native fish, invertebrate, and bird diversity doc11643 none This collaborative project (with ) studies a core issue in medical anthropology, the relationship between cultural beliefs and health status. The project investigates patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus to understand what strategies people use to successfully manage the disease, and whether these strategies differ by ethnic group. Three groups will be studied, Mexican, African- and European-American diabetic patients in Galveston, Texas, as well as Mexican patients in Guadalajara, Mexico (studied with Mexican colleagues). The project will also analyze whether patients whose cultural models of diabetes agree more closely with the understanding of providers enjoy better health status than patients whose understanding is more variant. The project will also study whether the co-occurrence of the folk illness susto with diabetes is associated with a generally poorer health status. Methods include ethnographic interviewing, consensus analysis, the measure of hemoglobinA1c to assess health status, standard self-report scales available in Spanish which focus on depression and stress and formal interviews about social support. The results from this research will advance our understanding of the role of cultural and individual belief systems in a person s health status; will advance the use of consensus analysis in ethnographic research; and will contribute valuable new knowledge to health professionals dealing with diabetes to help advise patients on treatment regimes doc11644 none Daniel L. Nickrent A grant has been awarded to Dr. Daniel Nickrent at Southern Illinois University Carbondale that will fund molecular phylogenetic and biogeographical (= phylogeographical) research on a group of parasitic plants called mistletoes. Although related to the Christmas mistletoes (family Viscaceae), this family (Loranthaceae) differs in several ways including flower morphology, pollination mechanisms, and geographic distributions. Whereas Viscaceae are thought to have originated on the northern Laurasian landmass, Loranthaceae evolved on the southern supercontinent called Gondwanaland. The origins of a number of plant families can be traced to Gondwanaland, and one (Nothofagaceae - the southern beeches), has been considered a model for examining the biogeographical history of the southern landmasses. Surprisingly, despite knowledge of its morphology, fossil history and phylogeny, the evolutionary origin of Nothofagus remains controversial. The research proposed here will use Loranthaceae as another model group that can be used to investigate similar biogeographical questions. Loranthaceae provide several advantages over other plants in that they have limited ability for long-distance dispersal (a factor that can complicate such biogeographic analyses) owing to their parasitic habit and host requirements . Endemic and relictual loranth genera occur on all the continents that were formerly part of Gondwanaland, thus offering many opportunities to conduct modern phylogeographical analyses. The proposed study has four primary objectives: 1) to use nuclear and chloroplast gene sequences to generate a molecular phylogeny of Loranthaceae; 2) to use the above molecular phylogenetic results to test existing biogeographical hypotheses for the family based upon chromosome number; 3) to use the resulting phylogeny to examine evolutionary patterns in morphological features such as the inflorescence, and 4) to provide a revised classification of the family. This work will attempt to be comprehensive in scope, thus sampling all or nearly all of the existing 73 genera in the family. These objectives will be achieved by building phylogenetic trees from DNA sequence data. These trees will then be transformed into taxon distribution (area) cladograms that can then be analyzed using a variety of procedures based upon cladistic principles. This work is significant because Loranthaceae represent the largest family in the sandalwood order, a family for which no modern classification or phylogeny exists. These mistletoes are a major component of tropical and subtropical ecosystems in the southern hemisphere and have been the focus of research from diverse fields such as pollination biology, cytology, coevolution with birds, and biogeography. For these reasons, a phylogeny of the family will prove extremely valuable to others wishing to place their data in the proper evolutionary context. For example, interpretation of inflorescence morphology has traditionally proven extremely difficult in many plant groups. Loranthaceae show a wide range of inflorescence types and a well-resolved molecular phylogeny will allow one to determine, for example, whether simple inflorescences arose via reduction from more complex ones or whether evolution proceeded with the opposite polarity. This research will be a component of the education and training of graduate and undergraduate students in field, laboratory, and analytical methodologies. Many of the loranth genera are susceptible to extinction owing to human-caused habitat destruction or other unknown factors. Thus the proposed collection of loranth DNA represents a unique and valuable resource not only for phylogeographic studies but also from the perspective of gene-banking. This project helps meet the challenges of the biodiversity crisis, as summarized by the Systematics Agenda , by generating a predictive classification system on Loranthaceae, a parasitic plant group that can serve as indicators of ecosystem integrity and function doc11645 none Small One of the primary foci of the field of plant systematics is to understand the genealogical relationships among present day species, and to understand the processes that gave rise to those species. This project is focused on a group of species in the genus Hibiscus in the plant family Malvaceae (the Mallow family). This group of Hibiscus, taxonomically classified as Hibiscus section Furcaria, includes over 100 species that are distributed worldwide. Ten of these species are known to be diploid (having the normal two sets of chromosomes), while the remainder are polyploid having four, six, eight or ten sets of chromosomes. These polyploids are hypothesized to have originated through hybridization between two different species followed by chromosome doubling in the offspring. In this group the polyploid species are more numerous than the diploid species, perhaps due to the genetic diversity provided by the extra sets of chromosomes. The goal of this project is to first elucidate relationships among the diploid species in this group. Subsequently selected polyploid species will also be analyzed - each polyploid will contain genes from each of its parents, some of which are likely to be diagnostic, which will allow the identification of the hybridizing parents of each polyploid species. Ultimately these data will be used to address the classification of the species into taxonomic groups, to study the geographic patterns inherent in those relationships, and the evolution of morphological characters. The data to be employed in these analyses include nuclear ribosomal genes and chloroplast gene markers, as well as DNA sequences from nuclear-encoded genes of the alcohol dehydrogenase gene family. Molecular biology has provided researchers access to a wealth of genetic data, in particular DNA sequences, for analyzing relationships among species. Plant systematists have relied primarily on sequences from two sources: chloroplast DNA and nuclear ribosomal DNA, both of which are genetically tractable and easy to isolate. There is a vast resource of DNA sequences that have remained relatively untapped, however, in the rest of the plant nuclear genome. These types of sequences have been largely ignored by systematists primarily because they are more genetically complex and thus more difficult to isolate and characterize. This additional experimental effort, however, can be outweighed by the quantity and quality of data available from these sequences. Previous work by Dr. Randall Small on cotton and related species (genus Gossypium, also in the Mallow family) has shown that these types of sequences can be reliably isolated and can be exceptionally useful for systematic studies. These studies were expedited by the wealth of knowledge of cotton genetics because of its importance as a crop plant. To facilitate the transfer of such knowledge from well-known groups like Gossypium to less well characterized wild species groups (such as Hibiscus section Furcaria) the current project will use an understanding of the alcohol dehydrogenase gene family developed in Gossypium to address species relationships Hibiscus section Furcaria. Thus, this project provides a direct test of the transferability of information gleaned from a genetically well characterized group (Gossypium) to a less well understood group (Hibiscus section Furcaria doc11643 none This collaborative project (with ) studies a core issue in medical anthropology, the relationship between cultural beliefs and health status. The project investigates patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus to understand what strategies people use to successfully manage the disease, and whether these strategies differ by ethnic group. Three groups will be studied, Mexican, African- and European-American diabetic patients in Galveston, Texas, as well as Mexican patients in Guadalajara, Mexico (studied with Mexican colleagues). The project will also analyze whether patients whose cultural models of diabetes agree more closely with the understanding of providers enjoy better health status than patients whose understanding is more variant. The project will also study whether the co-occurrence of the folk illness susto with diabetes is associated with a generally poorer health status. Methods include ethnographic interviewing, consensus analysis, the measure of hemoglobinA1c to assess health status, standard self-report scales available in Spanish which focus on depression and stress and formal interviews about social support. The results from this research will advance our understanding of the role of cultural and individual belief systems in a person s health status; will advance the use of consensus analysis in ethnographic research; and will contribute valuable new knowledge to health professionals dealing with diabetes to help advise patients on treatment regimes doc11647 none The PIs propose to use paleobotanical and paleogeochemical data with a model developed for understanding modern controls on vegetation distribution to explore the fundamental mechanisms behind complex advance, retreat, and further advance of a boreal-tundra ecotone along the Brooks Range in Alaska. The paleobotanical evidence will be used to examine several different approaches to discern movements of the ecotone with a species-level resolution with the changes in climate variables (temperature, precipitation amount, and seasonality of precipitation). The analysis will provide independent climate and vegetation datasets. The climate dataset will be used to drive an ecosystem model to simulate changing vegetation under changing climate. The results of the study will provide a useful predictive capability for separating climate-induced changes from those caused by feedbacks in the climate-vegetation system when attempting predictions of boreal forest ecosystem responses to future climate change doc11648 none Clonal reproduction, or the nonsexual production of new individuals, is widespread throughout both plant and animal species. Existing theory fails to adequately address many important details of clonal life histories, including the existence of multiple levels of organization and opportunities for selection. The overall aim is to expand evolutionary genetic models to incorporate these unique life history characteristics. Analytical models developed will combine both a population genetics framework (where, for example, allele frequencies in the entire population are followed) and demographic models (which incorporate details of the organism s particular life history). Empirically derived demographic data will be used for further numerical analyses. In order to consider multiple levels of selection, individual-level fitness will reflect genetic diversity generated by the accumulation of mutations within the individual or clone. Models will also be extended to populations that are structured in other ways (for example, spatial structure imposed by clonal growth). There are three major and unique strengths of the proposed research: (1) integration of classical population genetics theory with demographic models allows consideration of both genetic and ecological factors influencing selection, (2) combining empirical results with theoretical models allows a better and more realistic understanding of these genetic and ecological factors, and (3) the life history characteristics being considered are found in plants, in algae, and across at least two-thirds of metazoan animal phyla, including important marine invertebrates such as corals, making the results of this work widely applicable. By expanding existing population genetics theory to include organisms outside of those previously considered, the proposed research will provide crucial insight into processes such as mutation, selection at different levels of organization, and the origin and maintenance of genetic diversity doc11649 none TOTAL EVIDENCE PHYLOGENY OF GOBIOIDEI (TELEOSTEI: PERCIFORMES) AND CLADISTIC BIOGEOGRAPHY The fish suborder Gobioidei includes more than extant species of small fishes found throughout the tropical, subtropical, and temperate regions of the world, in freshwater and nearshore marine habitats. Many gobioids live on or near the bottom, often in burrows. Many others are reef-dwellers, a few are oceanic, and some estuarine representatives have the ability to breathe air. Their wide distribution and great diversity of form and ecology make gobioids ideal for studies of broad questions in vertebrate evolution and biogeography. However, the incredible gobioid diversity has also hindered investigations of their evolutionary relationships, and no comprehensive phylogenetic hypothesis for gobioids has been advanced. Previous studies have focused on small groups of taxa or restricted suites of characters, and because of the fishes small size, the morphological characters identified are often reductive and highly variable. The closest relatives of Gobioidei are unknown, and the classification has been in flux. Currently, the roughly 270 gobioid genera are classified in nine families, some containing only a single genus. The larger families (Eleotrididae, Gobiidae) are almost certainly not natural groups, and the relationships of species within those families, and among families, are unknown. This study seeks to resolve gobioid relationships using a total evidence approach and focusing primarily on basal gobioid groups and outgroups. DNA sequence data from five genes (four mitochondrial and one nuclear) will be combined with osteological and myological characters. The data will be analyzed separately and combined, and the resultant phylogeny will then be used to produce a classification for the suborder. The phylogeny will be used to examine the historical biogeography of gobioids, using cladistic biogeographical techniques to discover congruent patterns of area relationships and examine the origins of gobioid diversification. The common assumption that gobioids originated in a marine environment and diversified into freshwater once or repeatedly will be investigated by mapping the distribution of habitats on the taxon cladogram. Gobioid fishes have been studied for over a century but the group is so large, diverse, and widely distributed that a comprehensive phylogenetic and biogeographic study has never been attempted. This study will provide the first such comprehensive phylogenetic hypothesis and provide the basis for exploring the biogeography of a major group of fishes. It will also provide a historical foundation for future studies that will examine ecology, adaptation, and development, using the potential of this diverse group as a model for research on many aspects of evolutionary biology doc11650 none Eucharitidae are one of the most diverse parasitic groups attacking eusocial insects. All eucharitid larvae are specialized parasites of ant pupae. Females deposit their eggs in plant tissue, and the active first-instar larvae are responsible for gaining transport to the ant nest. They are most common in tropical regions, but a few species occur as far north as Alaska and the Yukon. Initial results from a phylogenetic analysis of the 53 genera using 75 morphological features of adults indicate a strong correlation between the relationships of Eucharitidae and their ant hosts: 1) parasitism of Myrmicinae appears correlated with use of a thrips intermediate host to gain access to the ant brood, 2) parasitism of Ponerinae is correlated with independent larvae, and 3) parasitism of Formicinae is associated with the attraction of ants to the egg mass. Preliminary results from data collected for the D2 and D3 expansion regions of 28S rDNA show a strong correspondence with results from morphology-based analyses, but not without critical areas of conflict that need to be resolved. If strongly corroborated, molecular analyses will be used to reevaluate morphological character state coding and also to imply transformation series so that a more resolved hypothesis can be proposed for all genera based on morphology alone. Preliminary analyses suggest that Gollumiella and Akapala are key elements for establishing the polarity of behavioral changes in Eucharitidae, and emphasis will be made on obtaining new collections and biological information for these genera. If use of a thrips intermediate host is shown to be an ancestral mode for Oraseminae and Eucharitinae, this would suggest the behavior as primitive for the family and might indicate how the initial host shift to ants may have occurred. In Trigonalyoidea and Elasmus (Chalcidoidea), adaptation to parasitism of eusocial hosts may have been accomplished through a host shift from ancestors that were hyperparasitic in lepidopteran hosts to the hymenopteran predators of those Lepidoptera. If adaptation through a prey item to the predator is true for each of these groups, this general hypothesis could be applied to other parasitoids of eusocial insects. In natural or agricultural systems, Chalcidoidea are one of the most important groups controlling insect populations. With only about 20,000 of the estimated 400,000 thousand species named, and far fewer with known biology, this is a relatively unknown group. Eucharitidae are unusual within this assemblage because the genera and species are well known and they have a relatively conservative biology that corresponds with the initial analyses of relationships. As well, they show a high degree of geographic endemism that corresponds with the breakup of the southern continents approximately 40 to 70 million years ago. By providing a robust phylogenetic hypothesis using multiple methods (molecular, morphological and behavioral), we can better understand the mechanism of host shifts and the correlated increase in taxonomic diversity. A resolved phylogeny and understanding of behavioral evolution for Eucharitidae would form a model system for future comparative studies across the superfamily doc11651 none New Guinea s lowland tropical forests are vast and are largely connected. Animal species living in lowland forests are often common and continuously distributed throughout these lowlands (in essentially a ring around the central mountain ranges of New Guinea). However, lowland forest species often show tremendous amounts of genetic or phenotypic variation. We hypothesize that this variation is due largely to geographic or geologic history, and we propose several testable hypotheses that might account for this variation (including specific historical events or dispersal barriers, habitat differences, and multiple competing evolutionary processes). We will use analyses of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequence variation from six common, widespread focal bird species to determine which evolutionary models best explain the pattern and sources of variation in New Guinea s lowland forests. This study will be the first to employ modern genetic data and analyses to the phylogeography of lowland New Guinea. We expect these data to identify lowland biogeographic provinces heretofore unrecognized, and it will therefore have important implications for conservation planning. Our biological evidence will provide independent estimates of the timing of geologic events. In addition, this study will employ and critically examine new phylogeographic analyses that are still maturing. We hope to critically examine the assumptions and uses of these tests in complex geographical regions, such as New Guinea. Finally, the project will train 6-8 New Guinea biology students who will receive practical experience in field techniques, systematics, and evolutionary biology doc11652 none Scott V. Edwards Peter Beerli A grant has been awarded to Drs. Scott Edwards and Peter Beerli at the University of Washington to apply molecular genetic tools to study the evolution of Australian birds. Specifically, the project will use genetic data to make inferences about (1) when in geological time a series of avian species diverged across an important ecological barrier in northern Australia, the Carpentarian barrier; (2) the size of the populations of the ancestral species from which this series of present-day bird species in Australia arose; and (3) the magnitude of genetic differences between populations of songbirds distributed across this barrier. The research will use DNA sequence variation in a class of molecular genetic markers known as single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) at many different places in the genomes of these birds, as well as novel statistical methods, to make these inferences. This project is significant because it will help clarify the timing and places of diversification of birds on an isolated continent (Australia), and thereby will facilitate comparisons with diversification of birds and other animals on other continents. This project will distinguish between two competing theories for the origin of current-day animal species, one of which says that much of this divergence took place very recently, less than 2 million years ago, the other of which, says that these divergence events probably took place much earlier. The results will help document global patterns of biological diversification, relate these patterns to environmental change, and thereby provide an historical context for conserving and even predicting evolutionary history. In addition, the data will provide measures of the amount of genetic variation within Australian bird species, thereby providing a gauge by which the genetic variability found in other species, including humans, can be compared doc11653 none Karim This award is to support travel of Dr. Nazmul Karim and Dr. Ranil Wickramasinghe, both in the Department of Chemical and Bioprocessing Engineering at Colorado State University, to Bangladesh. They plan to meet with Dr. A.K.M.A. Quader, Professor and Head, Department of Chemical Engineering at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) in Dhaka. They plan to develop a research project for removing arsenic from drinking water wells. That project is to be submitted later to NSF for funding. Their approach is to develop engineering methods to rid contaminated water from its arsenic, utilizing separation techniques currently being studied for other industrial applications doc11654 none The Third International Symposium on Radiative Transfer will be held June 17-22, in Antalya, Turkey. Funds will be used for travel by six emerging scientists for their participation in the Symposium. Three pre-tenure faculty and three doctoral students whose research focus is in the area of radiative heat transfer will be invited. Each will be expected to participate fully in the Symposium, by submitting and presenting some aspect of their research activity for review. The invited participants will receive partial travel support which will cover a portion of the estimated Symposium travel expenses, with the expectation that the remainder will be provided either from the participant s own funds or the participant s institution doc11655 none Microbial communities- complex, self-assembling entities composed of various types of microorganisms- profoundly affect human society in many ways. Examples include those that promote plant growth, those that are responsible for ruminant digestion, and those that carry out the controlled degradative processes used to treat sewage and break down environmental pollutants. Most microbial processes upon which the well-being of the biosphere depends are carried out by well-integrated microbial communities with a high level of structural sophistication and developmental control. While a microbial community may resemble a multicellular organism because it has a primitive circulatory system and a degree of cellular specialization, it differs from these life forms in significant ways. The community is not assembled from a single genome, as is a plant or animal, but from a large number of genomes that are programmed to cooperate in community formation. These ubiquitous communities are not killed by starvation or limited by reproductive necessities, so perhaps it should not be surprising that they are among the most successful inhabitants of all ecosystems on earth, including the most hostile and extreme. If scientists are to understand microbial communities sufficiently to control their development or to manipulate them for the benefit of society, they must understand their embryology and their physiology. A colloquium entitled Microbial Communities: Advantages of Multicellular Cooperation will convene May 3-5, , in Tucson, Arizona, to generate a consensus on the state of the field and to develop recommendations for its advancement. The colloquium will bring together experts in microbiology, bioinformatics, signaling, and ecology. Following the colloquium, a report will be prepared-in both print and electronic formats-that will be analytical and comprehensive, and will offer practical recommendations for the future doc11656 none This project will quantify whether flower traits such as shape, color, scent, floral display, and nectar rewards reflects an adaptive response by plants to specific animals pollinators. Three Silene species (carnation family) will be investigated that differ in flower traits and a priori appear to be adapted to different types of animal pollinators, including bees, moths and hummingbirds. Through observations and manipulations we will determine how important different pollinators are to the reproductive success of each species and whether a particular group of pollinators actually selects for the present suite of floral traits found in each of the three species. The goal of the project is to understand the role of pollinators in promoting floral diversity in the plant kingdom. For example, flowers visited by hummingbirds are generally red, scentless and flower during the day, while moth pollinated flowers are often white, richly fragrant and open at night. Thus we hope to quantify whether hummingbirds and moths favor plants that have greater expression of traits associated with either hummingbird or moth pollination and whether this leads to greater reproductive success of the plants. Whether we find that a species is successfully pollinated by many types of animals or only by specific pollinators will have conservation implications. In the former scenario, the loss of animals may decrease plant reproductive success. However, in the later case, the loss of specific pollinators my result in the loss of a plant species doc11657 none How we can use the power of technology to promote meaningful learning in math and science? PFSMETE research project consists of testing the hypothesis that rich experiential environments and reflective interactions are both necessary conditions for effective educational technology. To promote experiential cognition, students should be exposed to realistic and varied experiences in order to ensure the ability to use what they have learned to understand new and ecologically valid situations. To promote active learning through reflection, students should be asked to reflect as new concepts are being introduced in the lesson with the help, for example, of a pedagogical agent or by self-evaluation. The proposed studies set out to test the main hypothesis in two different domains (science and math), for two different student populations (elementary and college students), and with the primary dependent measure being the number of acceptable solutions that students generate for divergent problem-solving questions doc11658 none The first near-complete skull of a Late Cretaceous multituberculate to be found in North America will be described in detail. This is a skull of Meniscoessus robustus, discovered in the Maastrichtian Hell Creek Formation of South Dakota. The specimen preserves finely detailed external structures of the basicranium, ear region, nasal region, and palate. Internal features of the braincase and skull cavities will also be visible, without destructive analysis, through the use of high-resolution X-ray computed tomography (CT scanning). In addition, the site that yielded this skull produced partial skull and mandibular fragments of several individuals of the same species. Study and description of these more fragmentary specimens will make possible the assessment of intraspecies ariation. Because the mammalian skull is a rich source of morphological data useful in phylogenetic analysis, this material will allow evaluation of the hypothesis that Late Cretaceous Asian multituberculates belong to an endemic clade, an hypothesis that was not fully testable while no contemporaneous North American skulls were known. Although North America and Asia were joined by a land bridge for at least part of the Late Cretaceous, and there was faunal exchange among dinosaurs, there may have been barriers to mammalian dispersal, leading to the development of phylogenetically distinct mammalian faunas. The new material will provide a wealth of data useful in determining the relationships among North American multituberculates. Meniscoessus robustus has been hypothesized to be closely related to the Paleocene Catopsalis and Taeniolabis; now that a skull of Meniscoessus is available to be compared to those of Taeniolabis, we can discover whether this is indeed a single lineage that survived the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction, or whether it is an instance of extinction followed by immigration of a similar form. This will contribute to an improved and more reliable classification of mammals doc11659 none Exotic pests are spread throughout the world either inadvertently or intentionally by humans. This proposal evaluates two inter-related questions: (1) does the ability of these pests to invade depend on the biodiversity of the new ecosystems they encounter, and (2) are biologically impoverished ecosystems more susceptible to invasion? The proposed research will address these questions in agricultural systems that have been subjected to numerous types of exotic pest. A dramatically successful pest, the soybean aphid, Aphis glycines, was first identified in North America in . In the Upper Midwest, this invader reached outbreak levels, becoming the only serious insect pest in the otherwise insect-poor community found in soybean fields. In contrast, in alfalfa crops the pea aphid, Acyrthosiphon pisum, is a potential pest, but it never reaches outbreak levels. Unlike the low biodiversity of soybean fields, alfalfa has a high diversity of invertebrates, both herbivores and predators. My research will test whether the low diversity of the soybean community relative to the alfalfa community facilitates the invasion and outbreak of the soybean aphid, whereas predators continuously control pea aphids. Experiments will be performed to switch the invertebrate communities between soybean and alfalfa crops, thereby forcing soybean aphids to face the community of species found in alfalfa, and conversely making pea aphids face the species-poor community from soybeans. If low biodiversity of soybean crops is essential for the successful invasion of the soybean aphid, then when placed in the highly diverse community of alfalfa crops, the soybean aphid should be suppressed doc11660 none Understanding how local and regional processes balance to regulate species diversity is a fundamental goal in ecology. Our research will examine the relative significance of local-scale ecological interactions and species availability in governing relationships between grassland plant diversity, soil nutrient supply, and habitat productivity. We will conduct two factorial field experiments concurrently within a Kansas grassland. In experiment 1, we will directly manipulate soil nutrient supply and plant productivity by applying nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers to field plots. We will manipulate species availability through the use of multi-species seed additions. In experiment 2, we will manipulate species availability via seed additions in plots arrayed across a natural grassland productivity gradient. With these complimentary approaches, we seek to test a set of predictions regarding: (1) how the pool of available colonists affects the relationship between plant diversity and productivity; (2) how nitrogen and phosphorus supply interact to influence the nature of the diversity-productivity relationship; and (3) how species availability influences rates and pathways of vegetation succession under different conditions of nutrient supply and productivity. We are seeking new insights into the organization of plant communities as well as an enhanced understanding of the processes governing the development of diversity-productivity patterns in grasslands doc11661 none This project examines dislocations in single-crystal, single-polytype SiC and strives to establish their role in deformation and fracture. The approach is to produce fresh dislocations in SiC by deformation, investigate their morphology by TEM, and assess activation parameters of dislocation glide from yield behavior of the crystals. Emphasis is on dislocation formation, glide of partial dislocations, and relationships between mechanical and electrical properties of silicon carbide (SiC). SiC diode degradation is associated with the appearance of dark triangular shaped areas that correspond to stacking faults on parallel ( ) planes (sometimes forming 3C-SiC inclusions) similar to degradation of the early generations of laser diodes fabricated from GaAs and other III-V compound semiconductors by the occurrence of dark line defects. In these cases, recombination of electron-hole pairs is thought to provide the energy for formation of the lattice defects; in the case of SiC diodes, the recombination energy is used in the creation and motion of partial dislocations to produce stacking faults. More complete understanding of such effects requires knowledge of the activation energies for formation and glide of partial dislocations in SiC, and the efficiency of electron-hole recombination at preferred sites [e.g. kinks, anti-phase defects (APDs), or APD vacancy complexes] on different partials. Additionally, it is planned to directly measure the brittle-to-ductile transition temperature, TBDT , in 4H- and 6H-SiC at different strain rates and compare the results with the transition temperature Tc as measured by deformation experiments. The range of temperatures for compression tests will be extended to assess whether a transition is present for deformations at higher strain rates. The research aims to relate two different transition temperatures: one in the yield stress and the other in the fracture behavior of the crystals, and to relate both to atomic level processes. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. It is expected that the project will provide useful data for growth and practical applications of SiC, a material with many potential applications in high-temperature, high-frequency, high-power devices, as well as in optoelectronics. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area. The project is expected to provide unique opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students through experiences made possible by a forefront research environment doc11662 none Hanna Description: This award is to support a collaborative project between Dr. Adel Hanna, Manager, Environmental Research at MCNC, Raleigh, North Carolina and Dr. Mohamed El-Shahawy, Astronomy and Meteorology Department, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt. The goal of this research is to provide a clear understanding of the multiple and complex processes that contribute to air pollution episodes in Egypt. They will pursue two objectives: (1) evaluate meteorological conditions during the fall season (September, October, November) by analyzing ten years worth of data ( - ), with special emphasis on the air pollution episode of October-November ; and (2) characterize the role of biomass burning in aggravating air pollution episodes over Cairo and adjacent cities in Egypt. During the last week of October and continuing for a period of two to three weeks, Cairo, and cities to the north along the Nile Delta were exposed to especially high levels of a number of air pollutants. The incident has drawn attention to the problem of biomass burning and other anthropogenic emission sources in the Nile Delta and greater Cairo area. This study will improve our ability to predict air pollution episodes, thus allowing people with various health problems to avoid certain activities during high-pollution periods. It will also improve our understanding of the roles played by emissions, location, terrain, and meteorological conditions in aggravating air pollution conditions. Scope: The project supports collaboration between two investigators, with excellent qualifications both by training, experience and knowledge of the situation they will be studying, to carry out this research. With the meteorological data and the emissions scenario, the PIs plan to use a comprehensive air quality model that has been applied to numerous geographic locations in North America. The application in Egypt will provide insight into any limitations in the use of the air quality model. This is particularly important, as global air quality models should be in agreement with regional and local models. The proposed activity should also lead to improvements in the air quality model by including new types of environments different from those for which the air quality model was initially developed, such as biomass burning, which is likely to be a leading contributor to the air pollution. This activity strongly supports the adaptation and transfer of technology in protecting the air quality and health of the citizens of Egypt, and will provide a process for extension to other locations as well. A US graduate student will participate in this project and will gain experience in international scientific collaboration. The proposal meets INT objectives in supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest, and where there are potential societal benefits. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc11663 none Kamel Description: This award is to support a collaborative project between Dr. Ahmed Kamel, Department of Computer Science, North Dakota State University, Fargo, North Dakota and Dr. Ahmed Rafea, Department of Computer Science, The American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt. They plan to devise new capabilities for complex-problem solvers by utilizing two technologies, the knowledge-based system technology, which is a mature technology, and the intelligent agents technology which is emerging and is still evolving. They plan to develop a distributed knowledge-based intelligent architecture for cooperative problem solving, and to test the new system in an application dealing with agricultural (wheat) production management. Scope: The project supports collaboration between a US scientist and an Egyptian scientist in a research project that is timely and which has significant potential applications. The two PIs are currently collaborating on a project for the management of irrigated wheat in Egypt. That project is generating a working set of applications that will be utilized as a test bed for the distributed knowledge-based intelligent architecture developed in this research. Such architecture will be useful in many similar problems where the data sources and computer tools are geographically distributed. The research will involve one US graduate student and two graduate students from Egypt. This project meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest doc11664 none J. T. Hynes of the University of Colorado is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to calculate reaction mechanisms and rates of proton transfer reactions in solution. In addition, he will investigate the microscopic structure of surfaces and the dynamics of reactions upon them relevant to atmospheric ozone depletion. All resulting theoretical predictions will be compared to corresponding experimental studies. This research builds upon past efforts to use highly accurate theoretical calculations to investigate chemical reactions in condensed phase environments. The results of this research will provide understanding of reaction classes central to chemistry, biochemistry, and atmospheric chemistry doc11665 none This is a Focused Research Group(FRG) award co-funded by the Polymers, Ceramics and Metals Programs in the Division of Materials Research. Effective, rapid and permanent skeletal repair is one of the grand challenges of bioengineering and biomaterials research. Load-bearing bone repair is critical in cases of aging-related surgery, accident, disease, and trauma. Current metallic implant technology usually relies on solid implants with a porous coating to enhance cell attachment. Difficulties with stress-shielding and interface failure as well as prolonged recovery times however persist. Here, this Focused Research Group proposes to make a significant contribution in this area by creating a novel biohybrid implant material for bone repair. The biohybrid will consist of a biocompatible titanium foam with pores coated with bioactive organoapatite, in which a biological phase will be grown to provide a biomimetic system with improved strength, stiffness and attachment to the skeleton. %%% In the first stage, a fully porous titanium scaffold will be fabricated by a novel process based on the superplastic expansion of argon bubbles in a titanium matrix. In the second step, the inner and outer surfaces of the titanium scaffold will be coated with organoapatite, containing small quantities of organic molecules. Self-assembling molecules and supramolecular clusters will be used to bind the organoapatite to the metal surface. In the third step, bone growth will be induced by rotating the implant in an aqueous solution containing rat calvaria cells. In-vitro testing will assess ability to fully integrate bone into coated Ti foam and the influence of microstructure on mechanical properties and cell ingrowth will carefully studied. Each of the processing steps will be studied in detail, from which models will be developed to predict biologically and mechanically optimal biohybrids. The microstructure of the implant will be studied at each step with particular emphasis on (i) pores in the foamed materials (pore, size, volume fraction, shape and connectivity), (ii) coating morphology and microstructure in the biohybrid, and (iii) cell characteristics in the complete biohybrid. The mechanical properties of the implant will also be studied at each step, with emphasis on both the macroscopic scale (overall strength, stiffness, fatigue resistance) and the microscopic scale (metal ceramic bone interfaces). The experimental results will be validated using analytical and numerical mechanics models. The processing, microstructural and mechanical models will be integrate to allow for the design of an optimal biohybrid doc11666 none Conner Plant responses to herbivory can be divided into two components, plant defenses and tolerance. Tolerance refers to the ability of plants to regrow and reproduce following herbivore damage; i.e., the ability to compensate. Yet little is known about how tolerance evolves, with most studies to date focusing on plant defense. Over the past fifteen years studies have been conducted on a specialized case of tolerance in a biennial perennial herb, scarlet gilia, where plants have been observed to achieve greater reproductive success by overcompensating for tissues lost to herbivory. However, scarlet gilia s compensatory response is not universal; exhibiting tremendous variation both within and between populations. To assess whether there is a genetic basis to population differences in compensation, as well as whether selection on plant traits related to compensation differ between populations and locations, reciprocal transplant experiments and selection analyses will be conducted. These studies will be conducted within each of four populations that have been subjected to very different historical levels of herbivory; two of these overcompensate and the other two do not. Studies on the relative importance of genetic versus environmental factors and selection in different environments should contribute to our understanding of the evolutionary response of plants to herbivory, and add general understanding to the factors that do and do not lead to enhanced reproductive success following herbivory. If the mechanisms of overcompensation are genetically based, such responses to herbivory should be of great interest to agriculturists who, through recent advents in molecular genetic technique, might incorporate these traits into crop plants doc11667 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will investigate techniques for low-cost, high-efficiency, wide-bandwidth power amplifiers for magnetic-resonance-imaging (MRI) systems. To date, MRI transmitters have been based upon broadband linear power amplifiers, which are inefficient and consequently large, heavy, and expensive. Further, there is a growing demand for systems operating at higher frequencies with larger bandwidths. Existing high efficiency transmitters are relatively expensive and have limited bandwidths. The approach in Phase I is based upon high-level amplitude modulation, low cost RF power transistors, digital signal processing, and electronic tuning. The principal potential commercial application is MRI. Other applications include radio frequency communications, high frequency radar, radio frequency heating (plasmas, semiconductors), and laser drivers doc11668 none This research involves a taxonomic revision of grasshoppers of the subfamily Melanoplinae, accounting for 37% of the known species north of Panama in the Americas. This project includes collaborative activities among scientists in the U.S., Argentina, and Mexico, and will generate new collections of material from northern Mexico, Mato Grosso, Brazil, and highlands of Ecuador. Existing classifications of New World grasshoppers are almost all wholly or substantially artificial. Phylogenetic analyses in this study will form the basis for a natural, predictive classification. Special emphasis will be placed on the large and important genus Melanoplus. Described species of this genus account for more than half those of the subfamily and perhaps 20% of American species remain undescribed. The project will result in a clarification of relationships among species groups and genera of the subfamily; production of comprehensive electronic taxonomic publications including catalogs and interactive, web accessible diagnostic keys; collection of new specimens and species; an analysis of evolutionary patterns within this diverse group. Accurate identification and predictive classifications for melanopline grasshoppers will be a valuable resource for many biologists. These animals are of interest to a wide range of researchers for several reasons. Among them are documented rates of speciation more rapid than known for any other terrestrial environment. Species of the subfamily annually consume 6-12% of available forage and are serious pests in crops and gardens. Currently, it is difficult to identify species or to distinguish among those that are harmful, beneficial, or neutral with regard to agriculture. Increasingly, these insects are of interest to conservation biologists as well. The reference materials produced will have both research and teaching applications doc11669 none The origin of parasitism is one of the enduring questions in biology. Because parasitism has arisen multiple times among mites, they are an excellent taxon in which to study this phenomenon Mites show also many other types of associations, allowing hypotheses on transitions among diverse types of associations. Phoresy is of particular interest, as it is a common phenomenon in mites. In this type of association one organism (a mite) uses another organism (insect or vertebrate) to move from one place to another. It does not involve feeding on the host, or development during the period of transport. Various authors have proposed that phoresy might be a precursor to feeding associations such as parasitism, and the goal of this project is to test that idea. The test group is the mite order Parasitiformes, the smaller of the two mite orders, currently including about 77 families. Testing the phoresy to parasitism hypothesis can be done by determining whether lineages that are parasitic nest within lineages that are phoretic, a pattern predicted under this hypothesis. This approach requires good knowledge of historical relationships, but unfortunately, knowledge of such relationships in this group is incomplete. A large part of the project is therefore devoted to deriving well supported hypotheses of relationships within Parasitiformes. This will be done using a combination of morphological and molecular data. Molecular data consist of sequence data for parts of the 18S and 28S nuclear ribosomal RNA genes, and the nuclear protein coding gene Elongation Factor 1-alpha. This group is of general biological interest in part because it includes ticks of medical importance and the economically important bee parasite Varroa. Both parasitism and phoresy are common within Parasitiformes making it a good candidate for this project. By providing rigorous hypotheses of relationships among Parasitiformes, this research will improve our understanding of numerous ecologically, medically, and economically important mites and make this group of mites available as a model system for broad questions in evolutionary biology doc11670 none The goal of this study is to explore the effects of two phenomena, predators and individual variation, on the dispersal of a tropical stream fish. Their effects on dispersal are unknown. The first question addresses whether increasing predator threat, with the addition of predatory fish species, slows dispersal rate of the prey species through threatened zones of a river (a previous study found that a predatory fish increased rather than suppressed prey movement). The second question evaluates if individual boldness in the tendency to explore beyond the home range contributes to dispersal rate within a population and if so, whether individual differences are inherited. Fieldwork will be done in natural streams in Trinidad that contain the prey species, but which differ in the number of predator species that they contain. Movement in each stream will be determined by mark-recapture procedures. Individual variation in boldness will be evaluated through behavioral assays, and its heritability assessed by rearing offspring of movers and non-movers. To directly determine whether individual variation in boldness contributes to dispersal rate in nature, a reciprocal transplant experiment will be done in two sister tributaries of a river in which movers in one tributary will be exchanged for stayers in the other. If boldness is an individual characteristic, the two streams should eventually contain populations that differ in rates of dispersal. The results of the proposed studies with fish are expected to open new avenues to understanding the factors that affect the dispersal in natural habitats of tropical rivers doc11671 none Drs. Crepet and Nixon have been awarded a grant to study significant deposits of fossil flowering plants. These deposits represent some of the finest fossil sites ever discovered including a virtual treasure trove of exquisitely preserved fossil flowers-a kind of fossil with enormous potential scientific value and one once thought to be prohibitively rare and beyond the reach of science(at least 200 species-more than all other reports of similar aged fossils combined). Flowering plants are the most dominant, diverse, economically [including medicinally], and ecologically important groups of existing plants. Uncertainties exist as to origins, relationships and reasons for their success. Together, these unknowns circumscribe Darwin s Abominable Mystery and it constitutes one of the most visible voids in our understanding of the history of life. In spite of recent progress based on breakthroughs using molecular data to determine taxonomic relationships, extinct missing links would be helpful in understanding the history, relationships and success of the flowering plants by filling some of the gaps now separating living species and by introducing historical testability to hypotheses of relationships that are based exclusively on comparisons among living species. In other words, if hypothesized relationships are inconsistent with newly discovered fossil taxa (that is, if the attributes of the fossils cause them not to fit into and thus challenge modern hypotheses), then the hypothesis or the interpretation of the fossil is incorrect and a careful study should ensue. Also, the pattern of appearance of different species generated by such studies should be roughly compatible with the evolutionary sequence implied by hypotheses based only on living species-if there is a conflict further examination of all data and interpretations is in order. Yet another particularly significant benefit of this investigation is its contribution to establishing a sequence of appearance of different floral types through time. In addition to including many of the taxonomically important structural characteristics of angiosperms, flowers provide a key to the reproductive biology of their species, particularly pollination biology. Knowing the pattern of appearance of various modes of pollination from fossil evidence will be most helpful in evaluating various hypotheses seeking to explain angiosperm success-especially those relating angiosperm diversity to mode of pollination. Thus studies of fossils at this locality stand to provide important insights into what has widely been recognized as a major gap in our knowledge. The proposed research will include a diverse set of approaches to and interests in angiosperm fossil history, floral evolution, history of pollination and insect-plant interactions, phylogenetic relationships of angiosperm groups, origin of angiosperms, history of monocots, Cretaceous gymnosperm and fern diversification, and theoretical and practical aspects of cladistic analysis and phylogenetic reconstruction involving new algorithms and approaches to placing the fossils in phylogenetic context. Drs. Crepet and Nixon will continue fieldwork aimed at discovering additional species. They continue to find additional taxa of great interest and potential importance. Existing and newly collected fossils will be intensively studied in order to elucidate the structural details and taxonomic affinities of as many as possible. Particular attention will be paid to certain groups of critical interest that are well or uniquely represented in the collections. The careful explication of fossil structure depends upon light and electron microscopy (particularly SEM). Fossils, once described, will further require a significant curation and databasing effort. The next step is the evaluation of the relationships of the fossils through the process of contrasting their characteristics with those of all other known flowering plants. This process, phylogenetic analysis, involves computer algorithms and results are testable and reproducible and provide accurate assessments of the taxonomic affinities of the fossils. Thus, a carefully produced reliable pattern of angiosperm floral history is established. These fossils already encompass the earliest evidence of numerous angiosperm lineages and they include the oldest documented examples of numerous features and species with important implications for the pattern and timing of evolution of pollination mechanisms. In toto these fossils provide a breathtaking array of floral innovations from a relatively early and critical period in angiosperm diversification. The fossils include enough representatives of major taxonomic groups, including the earliest reliable evidence of the monocots (wheat, grasses, orchids etc.) to strongly alter our perception of the timing of flowering plant evolution. The project has the potential to provide quantities of unique data that will be relevant to many other workers in these areas including especially angiosperm systematists and pollination biologists. These data will in the form of primary (descriptions, phylogenetic matrices), and secondary results (e.g. phylogenetic trees including fossils, insights into the history of angiosperm-insect relationships, and minimum ages of extinct lineages). In addition to publishing the results and cooperatively sharing them with colleagues including graduate students being trained in this area, a website will be maintained that will make specific data and photographs available to the scientific community. The PI s will continue to publish results of their work in the form of popular articles in order to reach a broad segment of the public doc11672 none During a pilot project funded by the NSF International Program, researchers at Cornell University, working in Gabon in Central West Africa, have discovered a new species flock of weakly electric fishes in the genus Brienomyrus of the family Mormyridae. So far they have discovered approximately 34 new species. All of these new fishes were uncovered during two field trips to the river basins of Gabon, in West Africa s equatorial rainforests. They are often morphologically cryptic, so they cannot be easily distinguished. What makes it possible to recognize different forms is their distinctive electric organ discharges (EODs) that facilitate identification in the field. EODs are essential for species recognition and reproductive isolation. There are three goals for the research program. First, the researchers hope to continue the successful fieldwork in Africa with new studies in Gabon, Ivory Coast, and the Congo in order to more extensively document the biodiversity of this species flock. They will collect specimens, make biogeographic distribution maps, make EOD recordings, and collect tissue samples for DNA analysis. Second, they will study the nature of sensory processing of the species-specific EOD waveforms of these fishes by making electrophysiological recordings from electroreceptors, when the receptors are presented with naturalistic electric discharges. Finally, they will do behavioral studies using the technique of playback to explore the stimulus preferences of females to EODs of electric fishes from conspecific and heterospecific individuals. Proposed Research. The researchers will use DNA sequences derived from multiple loci including both mitochondrial and nuclear genes to produce a species-level phylogeny for the newly discovered Gabon clade of Brienomyrus. They propose using multi-locus DNA fingerprinting techniques with amplified fragment length polymorphisms (AFLP) to provide hundreds of binary allelic characters for phylogenetic analysis. The species-level phylogenies will be used to reconstruct the evolution of the electric organs within these clades. A centerpiece of the study of the evolution of this species flock is a good molecular understanding of the evolutionary relationships of existing forms. From this, patterns in the evolution of signal diversity can be explored. In addition to the species-level phylogenies the field data will provide the first detailed information on geographical distribution patterns of these electric fishes. Integration of biogeography with phylogeny and electrical recordings will permit a detailed analysis of reproductive character displacement in EODs and geographic variation in EOD waveforms within species. A complete taxonomic revision of the genus Brienomyrus will be done to recognize the 34 putatively new taxa in a group that currently lists only 11. Recognizing the importance of international cooperation, the Cornell researchers will initiate collaboration with Gabonese fish researchers. Because of the central importance of electric signals in the systematic biology of mormyrids, the researchers will also create a web-site database of electric organ discharges that researchers can access to obtain field recordings of EODs from voucher specimens. The database will be used to archive and catalogue thousands of similar EODs collected during more than 20 years of field work in Africa, and it will set a national standard for recording signals tied to a systematic collection. Impact. These studies should have broad interest to researchers working in evolutionary and systematic biology. To discover a new species flock has intrinsic interest, especially when it concerns a well-known vertebrate group, but this particular group has potential interest to neurobiologists interested in comparative sensory and motor systems biology. The studies of behavior, neurobiology, systematics, and evolution of the Gabon-clade mormyrids will give us a better understanding of the mechanisms of evolution of new species doc11673 none Blums This project utilizes one of the largest datasets ever assembled for free-living birds, a dataset based on a long-term study of three migratory duck species in which young ducklings and their mothers are individually marked and then located later in life. Advanced statistical procedures will be used to assess lifetime reproductive success (LRS), the best available estimate of biological fitness in wild animals. LRS combines two key measures, the number of full-grown young produced from each breeding attempt and adult survivalrates, into a single measure of individual lifetime reproductive performance. This study is an exciting extension of a previously-funded NSF project. Results will elucidate variation in LRS and trade-offs between survival and reproductive effort. A critical part of the project is the combined application of modern survival analysis techniques with other advanced statistical procedures, providing simultaneous evaluation of the relative importance of numerous possible predictors of LRS. These findings are likely to have practical management implications for adjusting the timing, length, and bag limits for hunting seasons of harvested migratory waterfowl. Furthermore, gauging the relative impact on LRS of an individual s characteristics versus external environmental variation will greatly assist the design of successful bird conservation programs doc11674 none Insectivorous bats are a highly diverse yet vulnerable component of vertebrate diversity in Old World rainforests. Nowhere is this more evident than in peninsular Malaysia, a critical country for bat conservation, with over 100 known species and local richness in excess of 50 species. Bats that are highly specialized and dependent on rainforests represent an exceptionally diverse group in Malaysia ( 40 species) and are of particular conservation concern. They are poorly suited for prey detection and forage in more open habitats that arise from disturbance events. As a consequence, they are likely to experience a severe decline in diversity as forest habitats are lost or become fragmented. This project will establish the Malaysian Bat Conservation Research Unit, comprising U.S. and Malaysian researchers. The mission of the unit includes: 1) long-term research on bat diversity and conservation; 2) the development and acquisition of skills and resources in the host country; and 3) implementation of a local and web-based education program to highlight the diversity and biology of bats, as well as the international importance of Malaysia to bat conservation. Research will focus on establishing how patterns of species abundance and distribution vary across space and time in undisturbed forest, and identifying the ecological processes that influence these patterns. To this end, we will intensively survey six bat communities within an area of contiguous primary forest and implement radio-tracking studies to test the influence of roosting and foraging ecology on bat abundance and distribution. Both research foci are key considerations for the development of conservation programs to protect this unique fauna doc11675 none Recent work by the PI s shows that at a global scale, soil carbon:nitrogen (C:N) is a very strong predictor of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) losses in surface runoff. If this relationship holds at the watershed and landscape scale, then soil C:N would provide a powerful tool for predicting and modeling changes in DOC flux. In this project, the PIs will examine the nature of the relationship between soil properties and DOC flux in wet tropical forests of Puerto Rico, the northern mixed forests of New Hampshire and a heath moorland in Scotland. The proposed research examines the value of soil D:N in predicting variability in DOC flux within the three ecosystems, and also examines some of the underlying physical and biological mechanisms which may be responsible for the linkage between DOC flux and soil C:N recently documented at the global scale. The research will include empirical and modeling components and is expected to result in a better understanding of the mechanisms regulating DOC losses in tropical and temperate sites. The broader implications of this work relate to watershed management in that dissolved organic carbon and nitrogen have important effects on surface water quality. Trace metal solubility, formation of trihalomethanes in drinking water supplies, and pesticide transport are all linked to DOC levels doc11676 none This research will test whether mast-fruiting is important to the coexistence of over 800 species of trees in a mega-diverse Southeast Asian rainforest at the Pasoh Research Forest in peninsular Malaysia. Mast-fruiting is the simultaneous seed drop of many tree species in a relatively short time. Periods of mast-fruiting are separated by irregular intervals of 3-9 years with little or no seed production. Mast-fruiting is thought to have evolved as a predator escape response to heavy mammalian seed predators in these forests. This study will be strictly comparable to a 13-year study of the dynamics of seed rain and seedling germination in a neotropical forest on Barro Colorado Island (BCI), Panama, which does not exhibit mast-fruiting. Seed traps and seedling plots will be deployed throughout the Pasoh Forest. Seed rain in the traps will be quantified each week for each tree species over a 5-year period. Species abundances and composition will be compared between adjacent seed traps and seedling plots. This will allow an evaluation of the strength of seed and seedling mortality factors during the seed to seedling transition. Strong density- and frequency-dependent seed and seedling mortality characterized the BCI site. Although these are considered good candidates as primary mechanisms of coexistence, it is unclear if the phenomenon is general or specific to BCI. The proposed research is critical for understanding if tree diversity in different tropical forests is maintained by the same mechanisms. This knowledge is important for managing tropical forests and preserving their biodiversity doc11677 none Assessing the fine root and mycorrhizal components of net primary production across a tropical rain forest landscape Allocation to fine root production has been estimated to be the largest fraction of C allocation by plants and thus may represent the largest carbon input to soils. Yet for tropical evergreen forests there is very little information on fine root production, and there have been no studies of the fungal component of belowground NPP. In this one-year project the investigators will develop a methodology for estimating the mycorrhizal component of belowground production by assays for the fungal glycoprotein glomalin, a protein that is produced exclusively by symbiotic arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. The PIs will use forest plots along a soil fertility gradient in old-growth lowland rain forest in Costa Rica. The results will determine whether glomalin can be used as an indicator for carbon allocation to symbiotic fungi, and will contribute to a more comprehensive process-level understanding of the carbon cycle than has been attained to date for any tropical forest. The study will have wide applicability for analyses of regional variations in tropical forest productivity, for managing human-influenced tropical ecosystems, and for predicting the responses and global role of tropical forests under changed global climate and atmospheric conditions doc11678 none Inputs to the global nitrogen cycle have increased significantly due to human activities and there are many uncertainties in our knowledge of how this nitrogen enrichment will impact terrestrial biotic communities and ecosystem function. Among these is the impact that nitrogen enrichment is having on decomposer organisms and the litter decomposition process. The overall objective of this research is to examine how plant litter chemistry (lignin and nitrogen content) and external nitrogen availability interact to impact the composition and or activity of the litter microbial community. Because nutrient cycles are being significantly altered by human activities, basic ecological research is needed to determine whether anthropogenic disturbance is impairing the ability of ecosystems to function sustainably. This research will contribute to our understanding of how decomposer microorganisms respond to nitrogen additions and to enhance our ability to predict how nitrogen enrichment impacts the litter decomposition process doc11679 none Krassowska This proposal seeks funding for a joint project between Duke University and Genetronics, Inc. that will focus on theoretical studies of electroporation-mediated DNA delivery. Electroporation is a broad-based technique in which strong electrical shocks are used to create pores in the cell membrane that enable biologically active molecules to enter the cell interior. Even though it is used quite extensively in biotechnology and medicine, electroporation is essentially empirical and its theoretical understanding lags behind practical applications. Genetronics, which specializes in developing technology and hardware that uses electroporation to deliver life-saving drugs or beneficial genes to patients, recognizes the importance of understanding the mechanism by which an electric field promotes the uptake of DNA by cells and explaining differences observed experimentally in the effects of electric fields on the uptake of small vs. large molecules. These issues were investigated by the PI during her six month sabbatical at Genetronics, which was funded by the NSF GOALI Faculty in Industry award ( , 8-1- to 1-31- ). This preliminary research revealed that the existing models, developed for ions and small molecules, do not describe the uptake of large and highly charged molecules such as DNA. Therefore, there is a need to develop a theory that would be applicable specifically to DNA and similar macromolecules doc11680 none There are still large gaps in our knowledge of how new species form. One of the critical stages of speciation may often be the development of mating preferences that prevent interbreeding between members of diverging populations. Servedio and Turelli are using a series of mathematical models to systematically examine the roles that a number of proposed factors may play in driving this preference evolution. They will assess the importance of several mechanisms that lower the number of healthy and fertile offspring produced by pairs of hybridizing individuals. Emerging species may also occupy divergent habitats in which different traits may contribute to survival. The role of this phenomenon in driving speciation will also be assessed. By concentrating on the consequences of contact between populations that are in the process of speciating, this project will help to elucidate what mechanisms produce and maintain biological diversity. The exploration of these processes also has implications for the conservation of this diversity. As human disturbance erodes barriers and alters species ranges, it is becoming increasingly essential to understand the conditions that promote species divergence versus extinction in the face of new contacts between closely related species doc11681 none Lovell Environmental disturbance by such factors as storms, fires and predators, is a pervasive force impacting the diversity and organization of organism communities. Because of competitive interactions, higher organism typically have their peak species diversity at intermediate disturbance levels. Microbial communities are much more dependent upon positive interactions than on competition, and are organized in mutualistic consortia. The interactions among species in these consortia facilitate vital ecological functions, such as organic matter decomposition and nutrient cycling, and are highly dependent on the physical structure of undisturbed sediments and on modifications of this structure by the organisms. Among the most dramatic modifications by the resident microbiota is biofilm formation. The biofilms stabilize consortia and provide homeostasis for the microorganisms within them. We predict that unlike higher organisms, the mutualistic nature of sediment microbial assemblages will be seriously disrupted by disturbance and will take several experimental approaches to test this theory. We seek to integrate the impacts of disturbance on sediment microbiota into the theoretical and empirical framework of disturbance effects on higher organism communities. This would serve both fields by providing much needed theoretical underpinnings to an important aspect of microbial ecology doc11649 none TOTAL EVIDENCE PHYLOGENY OF GOBIOIDEI (TELEOSTEI: PERCIFORMES) AND CLADISTIC BIOGEOGRAPHY The fish suborder Gobioidei includes more than extant species of small fishes found throughout the tropical, subtropical, and temperate regions of the world, in freshwater and nearshore marine habitats. Many gobioids live on or near the bottom, often in burrows. Many others are reef-dwellers, a few are oceanic, and some estuarine representatives have the ability to breathe air. Their wide distribution and great diversity of form and ecology make gobioids ideal for studies of broad questions in vertebrate evolution and biogeography. However, the incredible gobioid diversity has also hindered investigations of their evolutionary relationships, and no comprehensive phylogenetic hypothesis for gobioids has been advanced. Previous studies have focused on small groups of taxa or restricted suites of characters, and because of the fishes small size, the morphological characters identified are often reductive and highly variable. The closest relatives of Gobioidei are unknown, and the classification has been in flux. Currently, the roughly 270 gobioid genera are classified in nine families, some containing only a single genus. The larger families (Eleotrididae, Gobiidae) are almost certainly not natural groups, and the relationships of species within those families, and among families, are unknown. This study seeks to resolve gobioid relationships using a total evidence approach and focusing primarily on basal gobioid groups and outgroups. DNA sequence data from five genes (four mitochondrial and one nuclear) will be combined with osteological and myological characters. The data will be analyzed separately and combined, and the resultant phylogeny will then be used to produce a classification for the suborder. The phylogeny will be used to examine the historical biogeography of gobioids, using cladistic biogeographical techniques to discover congruent patterns of area relationships and examine the origins of gobioid diversification. The common assumption that gobioids originated in a marine environment and diversified into freshwater once or repeatedly will be investigated by mapping the distribution of habitats on the taxon cladogram. Gobioid fishes have been studied for over a century but the group is so large, diverse, and widely distributed that a comprehensive phylogenetic and biogeographic study has never been attempted. This study will provide the first such comprehensive phylogenetic hypothesis and provide the basis for exploring the biogeography of a major group of fishes. It will also provide a historical foundation for future studies that will examine ecology, adaptation, and development, using the potential of this diverse group as a model for research on many aspects of evolutionary biology doc11683 none Proposal Number H. F. Howe University of Illinois - Chicago CRB: MECHANISMS OF VOLE SUPPRESION OF TALL GRASS DICOTS Experimental restoration uses land reclamation techniques to test fundamental ecological theory, and thereby inform management practices. Here, we propose to maintain a highly successful example of such an attempt to (1) determine the mechanism of suppression of tallgrass vegetation by voles, and (2) follow the study for sufficient time to detect an anticipated numerical response by prairie species. Selective herbivory by voles can reduce the biomass of preferred forage species and reduce plant diversity. Subsequent increases in voles to peak densities can have an ungulate-like effect, with up to a 98% reduction in standing crop in vole-accessible plots compared to the situation in vole-protected areas. To evaluate the mechanism of suppression that explains why target species are reduce to rosettes in some plots but manage to grow, flower, and seed in others, we will use individual hardware cloth exclosures that protect shoots of target species as they emerge, with a scheduled removal of protection at two week intervals. The experiment will be maintained for three years, thereby allowing an asssessment of the numerical response of prairie species doc11684 none This project consists of two integrated parts: a detailed reconstruction of the evolutionary history of the populations that make up several closely related species of leaf-eared mice (Phyllotis), and a test of whether those species share the same inherent tendencies for the evolution of morphology. I will sequence at least 5 genes, some inherited from just the mothers, some from just the fathers, and some inherited from both, for over 200 mice collected from more than 100 localities throughout the Andes and nearby areas where Phyllotis lives. Those gene sequences will be used to estimate the evolutionary genealogy, or phylogeny, for those populations. This phylogeny will show the role that the Andes or other physical features have played in promoting speciation, estimate rates of gene flow across the species ranges, and test models of speciation. At the same time, we will establish controlled breeding colonies for 4 of the species. These breeding programs are needed to calculate the heritability of morphological traits and how much those traits are correlated with each other due to genetic control and developmental processes. These genetic parameters, summarized by the genetic variance-covariance matrix, G, will be compared among the species to determine if they remain constant over evolutionary time-scales. If the environmental effects on those G matrices is small or consistent, then the morphological data (32 measurements of the skull) will be combined with already collected measurements from more than 30 populations, and analyzed using the phylogeny discussed above, for a detailed exploration of the evolution of those inherent tendencies that are described by the G matrix. This study will address several critical questions in evolutionary biology. Most importantly, it has been suggested that microevolution (population and quantitative genetics) is decoupled from macroevolution (the long term changes we see among species). Perhaps the best method to unify these two fields is through quantitative genetics, but to do so requires that the G matrix evolves in a predictable manner. This will be the most comprehensive and phylogenetically based study to test that question. Additionally, this study will be the first to explore the biogeographic history of the southern Andes and southern South America in a comprehensive manner. Because geographic populations of Phyllotis are very distinct from each other genetically, their phylogenetic history can be estimated in great detail. That will allow robust tests of several models of how new species originate. By integrating a detailed phylogeny with the comparative quantitative genetics, we will also be able to test the interplay of geography, population history, and quantitative genetics to produce morphological evolution and diversification of species. Few if any studies have combined all these types of data to address these questions doc11685 none Bruns Epiparasitic plants are not photosynthetic, and they indirectly obtain sugars from green plants through a mycorrhizal fungus that is connected to both plants. This behavior makes them cheaters of one of the most widespread mutualisms in terrestrial ecosystems. Our goals are to understand the costs and benefits of epiparasitic plants to their direct fungal and indirect plant hosts, and to examine life history traits related to the establishment of epiparasite seedlings. We address these goals through four specific hypotheses related to conditional changes in the symbiotic continuum, to effects on host-fungal competitive interactions, and to ecological mechanisms for host specificity. These hypotheses are tested by coupling symbiotic germination experiments in the field with manipulative growth chamber experiments. We use precise molecular identification of fungi and plants in both settings. Results will provide an in-depth understanding of the nature of the interactions at the plant-parasitic end the mycorrhizal symbiosis, will yield novel data on specificity, germination, and development of these plants, and will further develop a unique experimental system of symbiotic cheating. This information will increase of our knowledge of mycorrhizal symbiosis, and will help us to manage populations of some of the rare and endangered species in the Monotropoideae doc11686 none Every year, Americans use more and more chemicals to maintain their homes and yards. Concern is increasing that pesticides and other toxic chemicals are harming living things -- ourselves, our families, our pets, and the natural world around us. The current research project poses the questions, why do we use so many chemicals? and can we get people to reduce unnecessary use of toxic products? We want to understand motivations for using toxic products. This project also helps County Health Departments educate citizens about the dangers of toxic products. It emphasizes reducing the danger in several ways: 1. teaching people about effective nontoxic alternatives they can use instead of harsh chemicals; 2. teaching proper storage for safety and to maintain the chemical s effectiveness (instead of letting chemicals become ineffective when they freeze or cook in the garage); 3. encouraging people to use up leftovers instead of disposing of them; 4. encouraging people to give away leftovers instead of disposing of them; and 5. for leftovers that cannot be used up or shared, teaching people about proper disposal, such as at county-maintained household hazardous waste facilities. The project uses informal group meetings as the setting for discussing these and other issues. During the 2.5 years we developed this educational approach, we noticed considerable variability in how audiences responded. A primary purpose of the current project is to see if we can identify what features of the audience, leader, or discussion seem to yield the most educated and satisfied participants doc11687 none Proposal Number James F. Gilliam North Carolina State University RUI: COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: PREY MOVEMENT IN HAZARDOUS ENVIRONMENTS: STUDIES IN A TROPICAL STREAM FISH COMMUNITY The goal of this study is to explore the effects of two phenomena, predators and individual variation, on the dispersal of a tropical stream fish. Their effects on dispersal are unknown. The first question addresses whether increasing predator threat, with the addition of predatory fish species, slows dispersal rate of the prey species through threatened zones of a river (a previous study found that a predatory fish increased rather than suppressed prey movement). The second question evaluates if individual boldness in the tendency to explore beyond the home range contributes to dispersal rate within a population and if so, whether individual differences are inherited. Fieldwork will be done in natural streams in Trinidad that contain the prey species, but which differ in the number of predator species that they contain. Movement in each stream will be determined by mark-recapture procedures. Individual variation in boldness will be evaluated through behavioral assays, and its heritability assessed by rearing offspring of movers and non-movers. To directly determine whether individual variation in boldness contributes to dispersal rate in nature, a reciprocal transplant experiment will be done in two sister tributaries of a river in which movers in one tributary will be exchanged for stayers in the other. If boldness is an individual characteristic, the two streams should eventually contain populations that differ in rates of dispersal. The results of the proposed studies with fish are expected to open new avenues to understanding the factors that affect the dispersal in natural habitats of tropical rivers doc11688 none Many populations, communities, and ecosystems persist in environments where some or all life stages disperse in media with a strong directional bias. Examples include plants with windborn seeds, aquatic organisms in streams, rivers and estuaries, and marine organisms with larval dispersal influenced by ocean currents. The overall objective of this research is to develop a modeling framework describing consumer-resource interactions in such systems. The approach is to study a suite of mathematical models of increasing complexity and ecological specificity. Although many of the results will have wider application, the primary emphasis is on mechanisms that are important in stream ecology doc11689 none Fertig This award supports theoretical research to explore a possible explanation for highly anisotropic metallic states revealed in experiments on high quality quantum Hall systems, and a possible mechanism for producing non-Fermi liquid metallic states. The proposed research has four aims: (1) to develop quantitative models of stripes that allow one to assess what kind of ordering is really present at low temperatures when fluctuations are included; (2) to understand how this system might avoid localization (Fermi liquid) and pinning (charge density wave); (3) to understand the transition between bubbles and stripes, particularly when disorder is present, and to search for new pinning behavior and possibly glassy behavior in these unusual systems; and (4) to explore new physics associated with interlayer phase coherence when a second layer is introduced. Various field theoretical techniques, numerical simulations, and renormalization group methods will be used to carry out the research. %%% This award supports theoretical research that pursues a possible explanation of exotic metallic states of electrons confined to two-dimensions and layers of such electrons. The research will focus on unusual metallic states that have been observed in experiments on quantum Hall systems. It is supposed that in these systems electrons participate in novel bubble phases and striped phases that are analogous to phases found in liquid crystals. Because of the good theoretical tools available for studying quantum Hall systems, these may prove to be a controlled proving ground for exploring striped phases more generally. The study of striped quantum Hall phases may illuminate the origins of unusual metallic states and striped phases observed in the high temperature superconductors. The award will support postdoctoral training in state-of-the-art methods in condensed matter theory doc11690 none Dr. Larry Prather of Michigan State University is exploring the process of diversification in the tropical subfamily Cobaeoideae of the Polemoniaceae (Phlox family) by providing comprehensive taxonomic and phylogenetic studies of all the species and by combining morphological, ecological, and phylogenetic data to explore patterns of evolution in the lineage. The tropical subfamily, as defined here, includes five genera: Acanthogilia, Bonplandia, Cantua, Cobaea and Huthia. Taxonomic studies will be based on herbarium, field, and greenhouse studies and will include new data on morphological variation, pollen and seed morphology, distribution, ecology, chromosome numbers, pollination, reproductive biology, biogeography, and phylogeny. Morphological phylogenetic studies will be complemented by molecular studies using nuclear (ITS) and chloroplast DNA sequences (trnT - trnL 5 and trnL 3 - trnF spacer regions, and partial ndhF coding region). Prather, graduate student Anna K. Wiese, and J. Mark Porter of Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, will perform twelve weeks of South American fieldwork to document morphological variation and pollination systems. Phylogenetic data will be combined with comparative morphological studies in at least two sets of species that have convergent floral morphologies associated with similar pollination mechanisms. These analyses will help to discern how homology and character evolution contribute to the repetitive evolution of similar floral syndromes. Groundbreaking evolutionary and ecological studies have been performed on members of the plant family Polemoniaceae, yet little is known about the tropical members of this group. Several of these species have important cultural contributions; they have been in cultivation since the time of the Incas, who used these beautiful plants to adorn their temples. One species, Cantua buxifolia, is the national flower of both Bolivia and Peru. These species are distributed in the neotropics and occur in environments from desert to rainforest; many are narrow endemics and are threatened with extinction, thus this study will provide the basic information needed for conservation of these species. Preliminary studies suggest that several new species may be described as a part of this study, thus furthering our understanding of tropical diversity. This study will also provide insight into the mechanisms and pattern of evolutionary diversification. For example, at least two sets of species that are unrelated, but that have the same floral shape, size, and color, will be studied in detail so that we can learn how these similar morphologies arise multiple times. These studies will provide insight into how these evolutionary patterns develop not only in the Polemoniaceae, but in plants in general doc11691 none CONSEQUENCES OF COMMUNITY STRUCTURE AND NUTRIENT SUPPLY RATE FOR DYNAMIC RESPONSES TO PERTURBATION: THEORY AND EXPERIMENTS The ability to accurately predict how ecological systems respond to perturbation is a major goal of ecology. Although ecologists have developed a rich body of theory regarding which properties of ecological systems might be reliable predictors of dynamics following perturbation, there are two major gaps in this theory. First, there have been relatively few experimental tests of theoretical expectations, despite the applied importance of such tests. Second, most studies have focused on removal perturbations that involve loss of accumulated biomass, such as hurricanes that knock down trees and stream scouring events that remove biota. However, many ecosystems are also subjected to addition perturbations such as nutrient pulses. An important question, therefore, is whether theory developed for removal perturbations is also applicable to addition perturbations. This research project addresses both needs through field experiments and simulation modeling. The experiments will test theoretical predictions in freshwater plankton communities, whereas modeling studies will determine if current theory applies to nutrient pulses. Together, these studies will result in a more broadly based theory for how ecosystems respond to perturbations, increased understanding of the short-term responses of algae to nutrient pulses, and an evaluation of the possible indirect effects of common lake management practices on algal dynamics doc11692 none Wolbachia are maternally inherited bacteria that are found in a wide range of arthropods and filarial nematodes. The proposed research will use Neotropical fig wasps as a model system to study the dynamics and fitness effects of Wolbachia in their insect hosts. Specifically, the proposed research will investigate: 1) the population dynamics of Wolbachia, 2) the effects of Wolbachia on their hosts reproduction, 3) the molecular evolution of Wolbachia and the effects of Wolbachia on mitochondrial and nuclear DNA variation in host populations, and 4) the ecological and evolutionary transmission of Wolbachia. Ultimately, combination of these data will provide the clearest picture yet of how transmission patterns, host population structure, and Wolbachia effects on host reproduction interact to influence Wolbachia dynamics in natural host populations. BECAUSE OF THEIR WIDESPREAD DISTRIBUTION AND THEIR VARIED PHENOTYPIC EFFECTS AND ABILITY TO MANIPULATE THEIR HOSTS IN NUMEROUS WAYS, WOLBACHIA CURRENTLY ARE OF INTEREST TO A BROAD SPECTRUM OF BIOLOGISTS INCLUDING THOSE STUDYING HOST-PARASITE EVOLUTION, EVOLUTION OF VIRULENCE, INTRAGENOMIC CONFLICT, SELFISH GENETIC ELEMENTS, POPULATION GENETICS, AND EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY IN GENERAL. IMPORTANTLY, BECAUSE WOLBACHIA OCCUR IN A NUMBER OF HOST SPECIES THAT ARE ASSOCIATED WITH SERIOUS HUMAN DISEASES, INCLUDING MOSQUITOES, TSETSE FLIES, AND FILARIAL NEMATODES, THESE MICROBES MAY PROVE TO BE USEFUL AGENTS FOR BIOLOGICAL MANIPULATION OF THESE SPECIES, FOR INSTANCE BY DRIVING THE SPREAD OF GENES CONFERRING RESISTANCE TO PARASITES OR SUSCEPTIBILITY TO PESTICIDES. THE PROPOSED EXPERIMENTS WILL ADDRESS BOTH THE SHORT- AND LONG-TERM DYNAMICS OF WOLBACHIA AND MITOCHONDRIAL EVOLUTION WITHIN FIG WASPS AND WILL BE RELEVANT TO DETERMINING WHETHER WOLBACHIA CAN DRIVE SLIGHTLY DELETERIOUS, MATERNALLY INHERITED GENES INTO A POPULATION doc11693 none Most multicellular organisms, like humans, form from a single cell. By contrast, the social amoeba forms a multicellular body by aggregating individual cells from a small area. This difference allows the investigators to evaluate genetic conflicts within an organism more easily than if they had to find new mutations. The investigators will characterize the genetic variation in cells in a natural habitat, and will then investigate how these cells interact when they come together in a multicellular individual. They will evaluate how often some cell lines dominate over other cell lines, forcing them to die. How cells interact with each other is an important question that bears on many fundamental problems in biology. For example, cells that escape the control of other cells and continue to divide characterize cancer. Programmed cell death is an important mechanism for ridding an organism of cells in the wrong place or that have certain kinds of defects. When the social amoeba forms a fruiting body, some cells die while others live. Understanding the process whereby some cells escape the process of programmed cell death, and perhaps force other cells to die is of potential relevance to mechanisms for understanding cancer, and human developmental diseases doc11694 none Reeder Whiptails (genus Cnemidophorus) belong to the lizard family Teiidae. Whiptails range widely throughout the New World, extending from the U.S. southward to Argentina. However, their greatest diversity is in the arid and semi-arid regions of the Southwest U.S. and Mexico where they are a conspicuous component of the reptile fauna. Whiptails are an ecologically important lizard group, which is reflected by numerous ecological and life history studies. Whiptails have been one of the most extensively studied group of lizards, third only to Sceloporus (spiny and fence lizards) and Anolis (anoles). Besides their abundance and geographic proximity to North American biologists, another reason whiptails have been intensively studied is the occurrence of parthenogenetic all-female species (of likely hybrid origin). Approximately one third of the species are unisexual, with the majority of these all-female species (=unisexuals) occurring in the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico. While whiptails have been extensively studied and much is known about their biology, ecology, and natural history, the phylogenetic relationships among whiptails is still poorly understood. Also, in northern Mexico, much confusion exists regarding the species limits within three major species complexes. Many populations cannot be allocated to current subspecies or species. It is unclear whether the confusion arises from extensive hybridization between some taxa or whether new, undescribed taxa exist. And finally, while biologists have spent some effort studying the origins of the unisexuals in this group, the maternal and paternal ancestry of many lineages is still ambiguous. DNA sequence data can be used to address these issues of phylogeny, species limits, and unisexual origins within the North American group of whiptails. However, before molecular data can be collected, tissue samples are still needed from many bisexual and unisexual whiptail populations and or species. Extensive fieldwork will be conducted in the Southwest U.S. and Mexico by Dr. Tod Reeder of San Diego State University and his colleague Dr. Adrian Nieto Montes de Oca in Mexico, to obtain the necessary tissue samples. Samples will be collected from essentially all North American bisexual and unisexual whiptail taxa. Once tissues are available, DNA sequence data will be gathered from rapidly evolving mitochondrial and nuclear genes. Besides addressing specific issues in whiptail phylogeny, species limits, and unisexual origins, the results of this research have broader scientific significance. The whiptail phylogeny can be used to re-evaluate the extensive biological ecological data on whiptails using modern comparative phylogenetic approaches and provide new insights on the evolution of this diverse group. Unisexuals occur in other animal groups; thus, more background data will be generated on the origins and persistence of unisexuals in nature. This will be one of the first studies to use rapidly evolving nuclear intron sequences to study hybridization and speciation. Thus, this study will test the utility of these gene regions for addressing issues in these areas that have been of long interest to evolutionary biologists. Undergraduate and graduate students will be involved in all aspects of this project. Students will gain valuable experience in modern field and laboratory techniques, learn basic concepts in evolutionary and systematic biology, and acquire skills in the presentation of research results (through oral presentation and written manuscripts doc11695 none Climate patterns are changing rapidly as evidenced by increases in temperature associated with global warming and in annual variability in weather conditions. The impacts of such changes on animal populations are not well understood, but can be assessed with long-term demographic studies that take advantage of temporal and spatial variation in weather across environmental gradients. This proposal intensively examines the demographic responses of the Black-throated Blue Warbler, as well as other bird species at larger geographic scales, and quantifies annual shifts in spatial distribution and abundance. The 800 m elevational gradient at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in the White Mountains provides a breadth of environmental conditions needed to compare the effects of intra- and inter-annual differences in local weather conditions and biotic factors (e.g., food abundance and predator density) on bird population dynamics and reproductive performance. Such information is key to assessing the potential local effects of climate change on bird populations, and ultimately to predicting how these populations and communities will respond in the future to climate-induced environmental change associated with human activities doc11696 none Vitousek This research will use advances in technology, theory, and vegetation-radiation models to determine the structural and chemical properties of tropical forest canopies from aircraft and spacecraft vantage points. The research will be carried out in forests of the Hawaiian Islands, that include unique species diversity, broad ranges of climates and soil types, and intensive ongoing biogeochemical research. Measurements of canopy structure and chemistry will be carried out at multiple ecological scales and across a range of Hawaiian forests conditions. Remote sensing measurements will then be obtained from a helicopter hovering above the canopy, from the aircraft-based AVIRIS instrument at 20 km altitude, and from the spaceborne Hyperion sensor. Forest structure and chemistry in a broader set of ecosystems will also be evaluated with the aircraft and satellite sensors, and checked with intensive ground and helicopter measurements. This approach offers the possibility of assessing spatial variation in canopy characteristics and ecosystem properties from the top down. Rather than being limited to a few discrete sites, it should be possible to use these new remote sensing observations to identify the magnitude and structure of spatial variation in biogeochemical properties of ecosystems. This research also will contribute to integration of remote sensing, biophysical modeling, and ecosystem ecology, and to the education of students. The results are expected to improve understanding of how forest canopies can be studied at large spatial scales, and how the measurements can be used to assess the contribution of different forest canopy conditions to ecosystem services in the region doc11697 none Barabasi Ion-beam sputtering, the removal of material from the surface of solids through the impact of energetic particles, is a widely used thin film processing technique. Due to its relevance to a number of experimental techniques, measuring tools, cleaning and patterning methods, the morphological features of surfaces eroded by ion bombardment have been much investigated of late. On the other hand, ion-beam sputtering is attracting increased interest as a potential candidate for nanoscale surface patterning. Erosion with oblique ion beams has been known to create regular self-organization ripples, potential templates for quantum wires. But the interest in this technique has boomed recently following the recent demonstration that normal sputtering can lead to regular nanoscale islands or quantum dots. The observed high density islands, whose size can be tuned with the ion energy, display a high degree of spatial ordering and form a regular hexagonal lattice. These results signal the emergence of a novel and powerful technique for surface patterning with a number of desirable features that include material independence, tunable feature size, as well as suitability for inexpensive mass fabrication. To turn these advances into a viable patterning technology, we need to develop a better understanding of the fundamental processes that affect the surface morphology. Therefore, the research goal of this grant is to obtain a coherent understanding of the primary physical factors contributing to the morphology of surfaces eroded by ion bombardment. The research will use a combination of numerical and analytical tools to model the morphological evolution during ion bombardment. Since Bradley and Harper have calculated the ripple wavelength in agreement with experiments, it is generally accepted that continuum theories offer a surprisingly useful tool in addressing the surface morphology in ion sputtering. The PI has shown that nonlinear phenomena play a crucial role in determining the long-time features of the surface morphology, being able to account for ripple stabilization and quantum dot formation. These tools will be expanded to obtain better agreement with experiments, aiming to reproduce not only the large scale features, but also the island shapes and spatial ordering. In parallel, discrete microscopic models will be developed to understand the effect of various microscopic processes (surface diffusion, atom detachment, reattachment, etc) on the surface morphology. The simultaneous use of the continuum and microscopic approaches is expected to play a crucial role in uncovering the generic features of both pattern formation and roughening. These tools will be used to investigate several problems of immediate experimental and technological interest. First, preliminary theoretical work indicates that the size dispersion, as well as its dependence of the sputtered quantum dots, depends on erosion time, and exists an optimal time at which the dispersion is minimal. This time dependence of the dispersion on the erosion parameters (such as ion energy, ion cascade parameters and temperature) will be investigated, aiming to determine the optimal condition for island formation. Second, recent experiments have demonstrated that regular islands appear if the surface is rotated. Investigations will be made into the conditions under which the size dispersion benefits from sample rotation. Third, the sputtering yield, a key quantity for various surface characterization methods, is greatly affected by the surface morphology. Methods will be developed to predict the dynamic coupling between the morphology and the yield. This research is expected to lead to a comprehensive comparison between the continuum theory, modeling results and experiments, and could offer critical theoretical guidance to turn ion sputtering into a mature patterning technology. %%% Ion-beam sputtering, the removal of material from the surface of solids through the impact of energetic particles, is a widely used thin film processing technique. Due to its relevance to a number of experimental techniques, measuring tools, cleaning and patterning methods, the morphological features of surfaces eroded by ion bombardment have been much investigated of late. On the other hand, ion-beam sputtering is attracting increased interest as a potential candidate for nanoscale surface patterning. Erosion with oblique ion beams has been known to create regular self-organization ripples, potential templates for quantum wires. But the interest in this technique has boomed recently following the recent demonstration that normal sputtering can lead to regular nanoscale islands or quantum dots. The observed high density islands, whose size can be tuned with the ion energy, display a high degree of spatial ordering and form a regular hexagonal lattice. These results signal the emergence of a novel and powerful technique for surface patterning with a number of desirable features that include material independence, tunable feature size, as well as suitability for inexpensive mass fabrication. To turn these advances into a viable patterning technology, we need to develop a better understanding of the fundamental processes that affect the surface morphology. Therefore, the research goal of this grant is to obtain a coherent understanding of the primary physical factors contributing to the morphology of surfaces eroded by ion bombardment doc11698 none Simmons College, a predominantly undergraduate women s college, and the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at Cornell University establish a partnership to develop opportunities for science students at Simmons to participate in materials-related research throughout their undergraduate careers. The overall thrust of the project focuses on establishing a collaborative Simmons Cornell research program on organic electroluminescent materials that provides opportunities for students to work with faculty on timely research projects, have access to sophisticated instrumentation, and gain related work experience in industrial settings. Another goal of the project is to interest female undergraduates in participating in material research and to encourage them to consider further career explorations in this area. This project establishes a model relationship between a predominantly undergraduate institution and a large research university and its federally funded research Center. The undergraduate institution enhances its research efforts through increased access to collaborators and instrumentation at the large research university. The latter benefits from enhanced recruitment access to a talented pool of undergraduates and from opportunities for its graduate students to interact with undergraduate faculty and to consider a postgraduate career at an undergraduate institution doc11699 none This research concerns the role of genetic variation at metabolic enzyme genes in the adaptation to heterogeneous environments. Recent work has shown that acorn barnacles (Semibalanus balanoides) carrying alternative forms of the enzyme encoded by the MPI gene experience different survivorship at opposite ends of the environmental gradient between high- and low-tide zones. Other genetic markers in the acorn barnacle genome do not show this pattern, thus implicating natural selection at or near the MPI gene. The investigators propose to clone the MPI gene, determine its DNA sequence, and identify the specific changes in MPI that confer the habitat-specific survivorship of the two enzyme forms. This will be achieved by DNA sequence analyses of the two forms of the MPI gene, by analyses of single nucleotide polymorphisms in the gene that vary between tide zones, and through growth and survivorship experiments in a flowing sea water lab where thermal stress and dietary sugars important in MPI function are manipulated. The goal of this research is to understand the functional significance of genetic variation in heterogeneous environments. All organisms face environmental unpredictability; how they respond to this uncertainty through genetic adaptations is a fundamental problem in the biological sciences. In barnacles, two crucial environmental variables are thermal and desiccation stress. Because these stresses will increase in the future, this barnacle model may help us understand the genetic impacts of climate change doc11700 none The cereal crops foxtail millet and pearl millet, and noxious weeds such as green foxtail and sandbur are all closely related members of the grass family, and are part of a group of 310 species descended from a single ancestor. These plants are all characterized by odd bristles interspersed among their flowers; the bristles are highly modified branches. This project will determine the precise relationships among as many species as possible in the bristle group using DNA sequences from the nucleus and the chloroplast. At the same time, the development of the seed head (inflorescence) and flowers will be studied for a precise description of how the species differ. Along with this, the graduate student supported on the grant will determine how many species are in the foxtail millet group, what the species look like, and will write identification guides to them. Because there is already information on the species in North and South America, this part of the project will focus on Asia and Africa. The information gained in this project will connect directly with other information already available on foxtail millet and the panicoid grasses. The genes that control morphological variation in foxtail millet are under active investigation, and some of these are similar to known genes in maize. It should soon be possible to describe morphological variation in the clade in terms of the genes involved. This will help answer questions about how species and larger groups are formed. The resulting study will provide a direct and explicit link between phylogeny, developmental morphology, and taxonomy, and will provide a framework for work on the evolution of development doc11701 none There has been an increasing interest in incorporating explicit spatial structure into ecological models. This research will investigate the effect of spatial structure on the dynamics of populations at the edges and borders of their ranges. The investigators will develop analytic and numerical approaches using methods from theoretical physics. They will study the spatial patterns that develop at different types of population margins, and how these patterns change when margins are either expanding or retreating. They will investigate how the range of a population in one dimension (as along a stream or a coastline) might differ from that of a two-dimensional population in an identical environmental gradient. The investigators will also study the effect of biotic factors, e.g. pathogens, on marginal populations, and whether margins can act as host refugia. The goal of this project is to increase general understanding of the dynamics of population margins, as well as to stimulate and direct the detailed study of such margins. In the past decade, the spatial analysis of populations has been greatly facilitated by rapid technical advances in mapping, remote sensing, and computation. A strong theoretical basis for the spatial structure of population margins is an essential guide for the interpretation of such data doc11702 none Professor Michael R. Detty in the Department of Chemistry at the State University of New York at Buffalo is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his studies incorporating organoselenides and tellurides into dendrimers. In the presence of hydrogen peroxide, these compounds may function as mild oxidants. These dendrimeric catalysts show potential as environmentally friendly oxidizing agents since the use of heavy metal oxidants and elemental halogens can be replaced by hydrogen peroxide. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Program, Professor Detty is developing catalysts which are mimics of halo- and thiolperoxidases, enzymes which catalyze the oxidation of halide salts and thiols, respectively. These catalysts avoid the use of poisonous reagents and therefore are potentially valuable as environmentally benign alternatives to heavy metal oxidants or elemental halogens doc11703 none Previous biogeographic studies of the Northern Hemisphere have emphasized the relationships of eastern Asia to other major areas, such as eastern North America, western North America, Europe, and western Asia. Biogeographic patterns within eastern Asia, however, have rarely been investigated using modern phylogenetic evidence. Most intercontinental studies treat the vast area of eastern Asia (often including the Himalayas) as a single biogeographic unit or an area of endemism, but this is certainly a gross oversimplification. Many floristic observations and studies clearly demonstrate that eastern Asia is biogeographically very diverse. In turn, the lack of testable hypotheses for biogeographic patterns within Asia has hindered more general understanding of the evolution of intercontinental biogeography of the Northern Hemisphere. The proposed study intends to employ a large Asian group of the plant family Araliaceae (the ginseng family) as a model to examine biogeographic relationships within Asia, emphasizing eastern and South Asia and the Himalayas. This region is herein referred to as Asia for the convenience of discussion. This Asian Araliaceae group comprises about 18 genera with a wide distribution throughout Asia, and several of the subgroups within the Asian Araliaceae exhibit parallel distributional patterns across this region of interest. Thus, the Asian Araliaceae represent an ideal system to examine both individual and general biogeographic patterns within Asia . The goals of the proposed study by Dr. Jun Wen and her colleagues in the U.S. and China are to (1) construct a robust genus-level phylogeny (evolutionary or genealogical relationships) of the Asian Araliaceae based on evidence from morphology, nuclear ribosomal DNA, and chloroplast DNA; (2) construct species-level phylogenies for two major lineages of the Asian Araliaceae: the Eleutherococcus - Macropanax - Metapanax group and the Brassaiopsis - Trevesia - Hedera group using four molecular data sets (sequences of nuclear ribosomal ITS, and chloroplast ndhF, atpB-rbcL spacer and trnC-trnD regions); (3) examine the biogeographic relationships of eastern and South Asia and the Himalayas based on phylogenies of at least three lineages of Araliaceae in this region (two groups mentioned above, and the Aralia - Panax complex currently being investigated by Dr. Wen); (4) re-evaluate the traditional taxonomic classification and generic delimitations of taxa within the Asian Araliaceae, including an assessment of morphological character evolution; and (5) provide a monograph of Aralia sect. Pentapanax, including the establishment of an internet page on the systematics of the Asian Araliaceae. Results from the proposed study will have several important implications. This will be one of the first studies to examine the biogeography of the vast region of eastern and South Asia and the Himalayas using a phylogenetic framework for a particular plant group. The phylogenetic analyses of the Asian Araliaceae will facilitate further systematic, evolutionary, and biogeographic studies in Asia as well as in the ginseng family worldwide doc11704 none The Fluctuation-splitting method for solving first-order partial differential equations is a distributive scheme based on evaluating residuals over piecewise linear simplex elements. The nature of the distribution step matches as closely as possible the local physics, thereby achieving minimal numerical dissipation. It is known how to implement this program is two space dimensions but new physics arises in three dimensions. In supersonic flow this is due to the replacement of characteristic lines by bicharacteristic surfaces, and in both supersonic and subsonic flow by the appearance of helicity, the streamwise component of vorticity, which interacts with the acoustics. We will attempt to design distribution schemes around the system version of the linear wave equation, which is the simplest model problem to exhibit these features, and which is embedded in the Euler equations. Application to the Euler equations themselves will be by means of a local linearization that is well established. Many phenomena in nature and technology are well enough understood that the mathematical equations describing them can be written down, but to actually solve these equations requires huge computer resources. Examples that could be cited include the flow round an aircraft, the evolution of a galaxy, or the future of the weather. Especially in the last decade, the computer resources available for such projects has grown enormously, but the scientific appetite for computing power remains unsatisfied. When new machines become available, they may initially lie idle for some fraction of the day, but are soon fully utilized, typically within a month. To extract the most information from given resources, it is important that attention be paid to the set of instructions (the algorithm) by which the computer processes the data, both from the viewpoint of efficient arithmetic and also with regard to the process that converts the mathematical equations into arithmetical form (the scheme). Numerous schemes of varying sophistication exist, but new ones are continually sought, and this research seeks to extend the scope of one particular scheme that is based on trying to mimic the physics as directly as possible with few arbitrary decisions. It is hoped that the result of this will be to reduce the amount of computer storage space needed to model a given physical situation with given accuracy. Focus will on complex fluid flows in which an important role is played by rotating vortices. Such flows are at present very difficult to compute efficiently, Advances in this area would be especially beneficial to the prediction of flow round an aircraft in its take-off or landing configuration, and to computing the flows around helicopters doc11705 none Hadly The objective of this research is to use prehistoric information to test ideas about why animal populations are distributed as they are across modern landscapes. Geographic variation of modern species contributes to our understanding of population biology. The research is important because few opportunities exist to use historic samples to investigate population structure in naturally functioning ecosystems through time. This study will use fossil and modern specimens to trace two rodent species (pocket gophers and montane voles) through the last several thousand years in the northern Rocky Mountains. The work will reveal which aspects of a species life history, such as dispersal ability, litter size and social organization, must be considered in the analysis of long-term population genetic data. The fossil deposits span several climatic warming and cooling events, thus providing a context for investigating species response to environmental change. This study is the first in the burgeoning field of ancient DNA to analyze sequential fossil populations through thousands of years. In assessing genetic variation through time and across geographic space, this study will deepen our understanding of processes underlying the history and future survival of species. Results will provide a historical context for how mammals with different life histories respond to climatic change doc11706 none Goldberg Most plants and mycorrhizal fungi have a mutually beneficial exchange of nutrients (from fungi) and carbohydrates (from plants). We propose that plants can increase their growth by choosing the most beneficial species of mycorrhizal fungus in each environment and therefore that their growth, competitive ability with other plants, and ultimate success is strongly influenced by these mutually positive interactions. This hypothesis assumes that 1) species of mycorrhizal fungi differ in their benefits to plant growth, 2) the beneficial effects of each fungal species depend on environmental conditions, and 3) the plants have the capability of choosing a particular fungal species. These assumptions that different fungi will be predominant in different environments. We will test this hypothesis using field and laboratory studies of tree seedlings and mycorrhizal fungi. First, we will survey the fungi species that associate with several species of forest seedlings in different field environments. Second, we will test the fungal species found in the field to quantify how effective they are at providing nutrients to plants in each environment and to determine the most beneficial fungus for each environment. Third, we will test whether seedlings choose the most beneficial fungus in each environment by planting seedlings with a mixture of all the fungi in each environment. Finally, we will test the importance of these processes in nature by manipulating the field environments and testing whether the fungal mutualist partners of each plant change according to the predictions generated from the previous experiments doc11707 none The main objective of this project is to organize UNIF , the 15th International Workshop on Unification. Unification is concerned with the problem of identifying given terms, either syntactically or modulo a given logical theory. Syntactic unification is the basic operation of most automated reasoning systems, and unification modulo theories can be used, for instance, to build in special equational theories into theorem provers. UNIF will be the latest in a series of annual international workshops on unification, the previous ones having been mostly in Europe (France, Germany, Italy, and Spain) and twice in the US. The aim of UNIF , as that of the previous meetings, is to bring together people interested in unification, present recent (even unfinished) work, and discuss new ideas and trends in unification and related fields. In particular, it is intended to offer a good opportunity for young researchers and researchers working in related areas to get an overview of the current state of the art in unification theory and get in contact with the experts in the field. In addition to researchers from automated reasoning and term rewriting, the traditional participants to UNIF, this year s workshop will try to attract also researchers from theoretical computer science working on unification algorithms for special theories (such as associativity) where astonishing progress has been achieved in the last two years. The workshop will also try to facilitate, with travel awards and registration fee waivers, the participation of young researchers from the United States. The intent of this is to stimulate research on unification in this country, as well as alert US researchers working in automated reasoning and verification to recent results in this field doc11708 none Jimmy McGuire Robert Dudley A grant has been awarded to Drs. Jimmy A. McGuire of Louisiana State University and Robert Dudley of the University of Texas at Austin to investigate the role that morphology and physiology have played in the evolution of flight performance in hummingbirds. More specifically, they will generate a phylogenetic tree describing the species-level genealogy for 300 species of hummingbirds and will then use this genealogy as the framework for comparative analysis. To produce this tree, they will sequence five genes (one mitochondrial and 4 nuclear) and then analyze these genetic data by applying a recently developed model-based method of phylogenetic analysis. In the second component of the project, they are measuring flight performance across the diversity of hummingbirds to evaluate how variation in morphological design affects locomotor performance, and how hummingbirds that occur at high elevation compensate for reduced air density and oxygen content in this aerodynamically challenging environment. The phylogenetic analysis is not only critical for statistical analysis of flight performance data, but will also be invaluable to the larger community of evolutionary biologists that utilize hummingbirds as the model system for their own investigations. This work is also of general importance because it will substantially improve current understanding of animal flight by utilizing comparative performance data. These data are extremely difficult to obtain for other vertebrate species, but tractable in hummingbirds because of their use of hovering flight doc11709 none Bacterial diversity patterns along gradients of primary productivity in freshwater ecosystems One of the most striking aspects of life is that it is distributed unevenly across the Earth. Some regions (such as lowland areas and the tropics) have a high diversity of plant and animal life; others (such as mountain tops and the polar regions) appear nearly devoid of life. Differences in available environmental energy are a major cause of such patterns. However, it is unknown whether the diversity of the largest group of organisms on Earth (microorganisms) also varies with available energy. Preliminary observations suggest that a relationship may exist between bacterial diversity and available environmental energy in aquatic ecosystems. The goal of this project is to verify these preliminary observations. More specifically, bacterial diversity will be estimated in ponds that differ in available energy. Because most bacteria from environmental samples cannot be grown in the laboratory, bacterial diversity will be assessed using molecular techniques that do not require bacterial growth under laboratory conditions. Bacterial diversity will be estimated by extracting bacterial ribosomal genes from pond samples and sequencing these genes. Bacterial taxonomic diversity will be estimated from the sequence diversity of these genes. The diversity within a single bacterial functional group also will be estimated by extracting and sequencing amoA genes from pond samples. The amoA gene is unique to bacteria that oxidize ammonia. The diversity of these bacteria will be estimated from the sequence diversity of these genes. This study will be the first comprehensive attempt to measure bacterial diversity along a gradient of available energy. It has the potential to generate fundamental new knowledge concerning the distribution of microorganisms and could impact fields as diverse as environmental management and the search for novel pharmaceuticals doc11710 none The Calumet Region in Chicago provides a unique opportunity to explore redevelopment options that marry environmental and economic development concerns. Several apparently competing options have been proposed but no formal economic assessment has been provided. The proposed research will develop a user-friendly PC-based software system to enable analysis of the anticipated benefits from a set of 5-10 development options. Care will be taken to integrate economic and environmental concerns by combining qualitative and quantitative information. The system will be field-tested with various environmental and economic development organizations who represent the major stakeholders in the region. A unique feature of the project is the cooperation among a diverse group of University of Illinois scholars, the City of Chicago Department of the Environment and the Chicago Academy of Sciences doc11711 none Acevedo Detailed ecological data have been used to develop computer models of forest stands that have been applied to solve resource management issues. Increasingly, however, there is a need to answer questions that are relevant for larger areas, for example the impact of changing land use and of removing forest cover on habitat and water quality. This project will contribute to the methodology for scaling forest simulators into models of vegetation cover change in order to help answer those broad scale questions. Specifically, Dr. Acevedo and colleagues will develop methods to calculate the uncertainty associated with translating the model to larger areas, to scale the effect of neighboring vegetation patches, and to determine general mathematical functions of how those changes vary across a large landscape. The investigators will engage students in research as well as international collaboration with a team that is interdisciplinary and includes modelers, a mathematician, a computer scientist doc11712 none Peter W. Houde A collaborative grant has been awarded to Dr. Peter Houde at New Mexico State University and Dr. Carey Krajewski at Southern Illinois University to determine the genealogy of one of the most diverse groups of birds known, the Order Gruiformes. Genealogical relationships of families within the order will be assessed by comparing DNA sequences of several genes. Past patterns of anatomical divergence and geographic origins will be inferred from the pattern by which characteristics of living species have changed genealogically. The ages of major groups will be estimated from levels of difference between their DNA sequences. Individual genes and anatomical characters can provide misleading information about genealogy because of convergence , so gruiform genealogy will be reconstructed from a large body of independent data, all of which will be evaluated for its consistency with the rest. Subsets of the data that are inconsistent will be scrutinized for functional and developmental correlates. This, in turn, will elucidate processes of convergence between lineages, both at the level of genes and that of anatomy. Gruiformes have singular importance in understanding the timing and geography of bird origins in general, because they are extremely diverse and geographically widespread. Many families appear to be relics of the long bygone Age of Dinosaurs when the continents were arranged quite differently than they are today. Gruiforms present many examples of convergence, providing an unparalleled opportunity for studying the processes that cause it. There is probably no other group of vertebrate animals whose relationships are so poorly understood, yet for which there is a comparable wealth of data on anatomical characteristics. There is also preliminary evidence for convergence at the genetic level, a phenomenon that has barely even been acknowledged in previous research. Thus, this group presents a truly unique opportunity for understanding the correlation between genetic and morphological change through time doc11713 none Sally MacIntyre Turbulent Mixing, Internal Waves, and Intrusions: Effects on Resource Supply and Primary Productivity in Lakes Turbulent eddies circulate phytoplankton through a gradient of light and supply nutrients from deep in a lake to the well-lit portions where phytoplankton grow. Hence, the frequency and duration of turbulent events play an important role in governing the growth rates of phytoplankton. Turbulence varies as a function of differences in the initial rates of heating after iceoff, wind forcing, and proximity to boundaries. Because the study looks in depth at seasonal heat budgets, stream inflows, intrusions, internal waves, and temporal-spatial variability of turbulence, with concomitant biological measurements and experiments, results will provide a unique perspective on the role of physical processes in governing primary productivity and will allow better predictions of within lake changes due to global warming and human activities in lake basins doc11714 none The spider infraorder Mygalomorphae includes tarantula, baboon, trapdoor, purse web, and funnel web spiders. While not as diverse as its sister lineage the Aranemorphae ( true spiders, for example the orb weavers), mygalomorphs are rich in species (over 2,500 species in 280 genera placed in 15 families) and use silks to build an amazing diversity of nests. These silk constructs, generally regarded as primitive, include trapdoors, collars, turrets, tubes, funnels, sheets, and space filling webs. Although these spiders show many interesting and unstudied patterns of morphology and show classic biogeographical patterns (e.g., members of the same family occurring in New Zealand, Madagascar, South Africa, and southern South America), much of the phylogeny of this group remains unresolved. Furthermore, all mygalomorph phylogenetic studies to date have relied solely on morphological characters, thus lacking independent corroboration. This study examines mygalomorph phylogeny using an integrated set of both morphological and molecular characters. Specimens collected in North, South, and Central America, Southern Africa, Asia, and Western Australia will be used in conjunction with specimens from major museum collections, for molecular, morphological, and natural history studies. Digitized images of all morphological characters scored and detailed natural history notes will be made available on the World Wide Web as part of a myglomorph internet database. The resulting phylogeny will support studies of the origin and diversification of silk use and spinning structures, the relationship between silk use, habits and convergent evolution, and the influence of miniaturization on morphological change. This is the first analysis of molecular sequence data for this important taxon. And two graduate students will be trained in spider systematics, an area with inadequate existing expertise doc11715 none Sinervo Predicting population regulation is a fundamental goal of ecological and evolutionary studies. Population regulation must arise from effects of interactions between individuals on rate of reproduction and progeny survival. Interactions should be intense at high density, but weak at low density. The recent discovery of a genetic basis for population regulation of side-blotched lizards facilitates study of density effects. Lizards carry a genetic color marker for alternative reproductive strategies that have cascading effects on progeny survival. Population density and frequency of two genotypes will be manipulated in large-scale field experiments. Genetic change and population regulation will be studied across two generations on replicate field plots. Furthermore, laboratory breeding studies will determine whether the color marker and associated reproductive attributes are due to a single gene, or from many genes. Mechanisms of hormonal regulation are conserved among lizards, mammals, and birds. Thus, studies on lizards provide basic information on genes and hormones that control reproduction in many free-ranging and domestic species. Furthermore, experiments on density regulation in the wild provide basic information that is vital for predicting long-term changes in animal numbers. For example, predicting long-term effects of global climate change will require an understanding of the ecological and genetic causes of population regulation doc11716 none Dr. Lucinda McDade of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences and Dr. Thomas Daniel at the California Academy of Sciences are conducting a collaborative study to resolve phylogenetic relationships at several levels within the diverse ( 4,000 species), largely tropical plant family Acanthaceae and between these plants and their closest relatives in the order Lamiales (mints and relatives). The primary source of data will be DNA sequences from chloroplast and nuclear genes; in addition, morphological information (including pollen) and chromosome counts will also be acquired whenever possible. The work to be accomplished has four goals; these were chosen to test hypotheses regarding relationships, to interpret morphological evolution, to contribute toward understanding the evolution of pollinator relationships in Acanthaceae, and to provide data for continued studies of molecular evolution. Goal 1 is to identify the closest living relatives of Acanthaceae. Goal 2 is to establish the precise phylogenetic placement of the black mangrove genus Avicennia. These plants have been shown by previous work to be closely related to Acanthaceae. Goals 3 and 4 are to clarify relationships within two sublineages of Acanthaceae, Acantheae and Justicieae. Taxon sampling and data gathering strategies will complement existing and on-going projects, with field work in Madagascar providing critical new samples along with material from Africa and South America from colleagues there. Regions of DNA to be sequenced were determined by the level of relationships to be resolved: higher level work (goals 1 and 2) requires sequences from relatively slowly evolving loci, whereas work within Acanthaceae (goals 3 and 4) requires sequences from gene regions that are evolving more rapidly. The species richness, extreme morphological diversity, and nearly worldwide distribution of Acanthaceae mean that achieving the goals of this project will have impact beyond systematics. In the context of phylogenetic relationships, derived characters can be sorted from primitive characters to clarify both the pattern of morphological evolution and suggest testable ideas about process. Plants interact with environments as morphological beings and thus morphology is key to understanding ecological and evolutionary processes. For example, by interpreting morphological evolution, the stage is set for studies of the evolution of pollinator relationships. Acanthaceae have been thought of as Gondwanan in origin, but it is clear that biogeographic history has been much more complicated than simple vicariance. The research proposed will point to groups of tractable size with which to address historical biogeography. Finally, it is clear that there are fascinating problems of molecular evolution in this group. The non-coding DNA regions for which sequences are available are not evolving in a clock-like fashion throughout the group. Adding sequences for protein-coding genes (part of the work to be accomplished during this project) will not only provide better resolution of phylogenetic relationships but will also advance knowledge of the relationship between morphological and molecular diversity doc11717 none A three-year program of comprehensive studies of ionospheric E- and F-region electrodynamics and of related aeronomic issues surrounding meteor-derived metals in the upper atmosphere is proposed. The proposed studies are based on an extensive ongoing observing program at Arecibo Observatory (AO) that involves incoherent scatter radar (ISR) and meteor-mode radar as well as proposed associated metal (Ca Ca+, Fe, K, Na) lidar observations. AO is uniquely suited for these proposed studies with the new dual-beam capability yielding the first true 3-D observations, extreme sensitivity and directivity in both ISR and meteor-modes, and the common-volume lidar capabilities. The proposed observational and theoretical studies are intended to comprehensively test and extend the hypotheses and conclusions concerning the origin and scale of the apparently new electrodynamic processes resulting plasma-sheets and related phenomena including true sporadic-E and in firmly tying micrometeoroid atmospheric-entry processes to the aeronomy of metals in the upper atmosphere and to provide whole-earth micrometeoroid mass fluxes of unprecedented accuracy doc11718 none Interdisciplinary (99) Physics (13) The project is developing software to make it easy for scientists, engineers, and their students to create computer models of physical systems that include real-time, 3D, interactive graphics. The value of 3D computer visualization in science and engineering education and research is widely recognized. 3D modeling of molecules in chemistry and biology is perhaps the most widely used 3D tool, whose high utility has justified the expensive development of appropriate software. Many math packages generate 3D representations of functions. However, more general use of 3D visualization, coupled to the flexibility of a general-purpose programming language, has been blocked by great technical difficulties which require high computer skills to overcome. This is particularly limiting for educational applications. Even in chemistry and biology where 3D tools exist, it is difficult or impossible for scientists to modify or extend these packages. These applications do not have the open-ended flexibility of a programming language. A new tool, VPython, makes it possible for many scientists and engineers, and students of science and engineering, to create 3D visualizations quickly and easily, coupled to the flexibility and power of a programming language. Moreover, these visualizations can be interactive in real time, transcending the limitations of a canned movie. The project is bringing VPython to a mature level of open source development, so that thereafter it can be easily maintained and extended, as a contribution to the infrastructure of science and engineering research and education doc11719 none This research is focused on the synthesis and properties of a new class of epitaxial heterostructures containing multi-component magnetic alloys and semiconductors. It is aimed at integrating magnetic materials and semiconductors, in order to explore phenomena involving both charge and spin degrees of freedom, for both fundamental, basic scientific studies and technological applications. The systems to be investigated will include ternary alloys containing transition metals (TM), Mn, and group B elements (Z), i.e. TMx-Mny-Zz, which will be coupled with conventional semiconductors, e.g. Si, Ge, and GaAs. The former include some predicted half-metallic Heusler alloys with fully spin-polarized conduction states, and may also include some magnetic semiconductors, both of which are excellent candidates for spin injection and analysis. The interactions between carrier charge and spin, and their long mean-free-path and spin coherence length in semiconductors are expected to give rise to many novel phenomena and spin device concepts that are not available in conventional heterostructures and can revolutionize electronic and memory devices. However, the field is limited by the lack of materials systems, and by the complex nature of the multi-component systems. The proposed approach is combinatorial molecular beam epitaxy synthesis and characterization of the structure, magnetism and transport effects. The strength of the proposal is in epitaxial synthesis and the systematic approach, from which new materials and properties will result. Graduate and undergraduate students involved in the project will be trained rigorously in novel synthesis and characterization that are essential for the current and future technologies. Pre-college summer research projects for K12 teachers and students will also be conducted to introduce these groups to the technology issues involved in this research. %%% This work is focused on the synthesis and properties of a new class of heterostructures containing single crystalline films of magnetic alloys and semiconductors. It is aimed at exploring phenomena involving both the charge and spin of electrons for both fundamental, basic scientific studies and technological applications. Current state-of-the-art systems process the electron charge and spin separately. An example of the former is the microprocessor that uses only the charge to do logic operations; in contrast the magnetic hard disc processes only the spin. The separation of the two makes these systems intrinsically slow and bulky, while integrating the two can revolutionize information technology, for example, making electronic and memory devices substantially faster and more compact. However, the field is limited by the lack of materials systems, and by the complex nature of the multi-element systems. The suitable materials candidates must be selected from an enormous number of possible combinations. The proposed approach is to systematically process and screen a large number of new materials and their properties in parallel, the so-called combinatorial approach, such that for the first time libraries of new materials and properties will be generated rapidly. Materials to be discovered from this work for the intended integration are expected to be the multi-element magnetic alloys having all of their conduction electrons polarized while compatible with conventional semiconductors like silicon. The new materials will make it possible to process both the charge and spin simultaneously, leading to novel quantum phenomena and device concepts. Graduate and undergraduate students involved in the project will be trained rigorously in processes and techniques that are essential for the current and future high technologies. Pre-college summer research projects for K12 teachers and students will also be conducted to introduce these groups to the technology issues involved in this research doc11720 none Plante Bacteria serve dual roles in sedimentary systems: as decomposers of organic detritus and as food for higher organisms. Key ecological parameters such as abundance, production, and community composition each contribute to the character of these roles. The primary objectives of the research proposed here are to determine the mechanisms by which bacterial assemblages recover from ingestion by sediment-feeding invertebrates (deposit feeders), and to assess the importance of this biological disturbance to the structure of sedimentary bacterial communities. We will determine the significance of nonequilibrium factors in creating spatio-temporal heterogeneity and maintaining diversity in microbial communities exposed to deposit feeding in particular, and disturbances in general. We hope to reveal those important variables required to construct and test patch dynamics models, thereby providing a basis for predictions regarding the community structure and metabolic activities of indigenous and introduced bacteria in sediments doc11721 none Stanley - This research offers a rare opportunity to investigate the effects of dam removal on the physical environment and biogeochemical processes, including anthropogenic disturbance impacts, ecological succession, sediment transport, and nutrient retention. This is a poorly understood area with little reliable data, and the project will capitalize on recent and upcoming dam removals in Wisconsin s Baraboo River, the longest river restored to free-flowing conditions in the Unites States. The project will obtain information critical to understanding and managing dams and dam removals. The study unites basic science with management objectives by addressing conceptual ecological models of riverine system function, and how anthropogenic structural alterations evolve over time into more natural wetland habitats. The models developed during this project have broad applicability for river management and the advancement of ecological succession theory doc11722 none This proposal aims to investigate the macroscopic response of materials, focusing on four topics. The first topic concerns creep in a two phase composite given that one knows the behavior of the constituent phases. The problem is to obtain bounds on the range of creep that might occur, and to identify microstructures having the maximum and minimum creep. The second topic concerns the complex dielectric constant of homogeneous or heterogeneous materials which governs how a material reflects, transmits and absorbs radiation. Given measurements of the complex dielectric constant over a range of frequencies, the problem is to say something definite about the response of the material over an interval of frequencies outside the measured range. The third topic, which represents a continuation of previous work, is to explore the range of values the average strain can take in a composite which is subject to a fixed average stress, as the microstructure is varied. The objective is to bound this range, and to identify optimal structures that generate strains at the boundary of the range of admissible values. Such structures should be useful as ``stress guides for channeling stress to desired locations. The particular question of what microstructures make the best possible hydrostatic compression to shear converters will be investigated. The fourth topic is to explore the properties of a rather exotic class of microstructures, called partial differential microstructures. These may turn out to be the best microstructures for solving certain optimal design problems. A better understanding of the macroscopic response of materials is of central technological importance. This importance stretches across the board, from understanding the macroscopic response of engineered materials (of critical importance to the defense, automotive, and aerospace industries), to understanding the macroscopic response of polycrystalline and porous rocks (relevant to earthquake prediction and to the oil industry), to understanding the macroscopic response of sea ice (important to climate modeling), to understanding the macroscopic response of biological materials (such as tissues, bones, shells and tendons). This proposal will enhance our understanding in ways that will (1) facilitate the development of new materials having unusual properties that are achieved by tailoring the microstructure; (2) provide limits on the response of composite materials, that could be essential for assessing the safety of such materials in desired applications; and (3) predict certain aspects of the response of materials to radiation outside frequencies where the response has been measured, which could be important if the material is biological and if one wants to know if radiation could be harmful outside frequencies where its effects are known. Date: May 30, doc11723 none The front portion of the birth canal (the superior ramus, or SPR) of the Neandertal pelvis differs from the modern human SPR in three ways: it is much longer, it is much thinner, and Neandertal males (not females) possess the longest SPR. These differences run contrary to what is expected, based on overall patterns of bony differences between Neandertals and modern humans. Many hypotheses accounting for the shape of the Neandertal SPR have been offered, but the biomechanical data needed to test them have been lacking. Four questions will be addressed by this study: 1) do the reported patterns of shape differences hold true in light of a fuller sampling of SPR of later hominids [Neandertals + modern humans]? 2) how much does the SPR vary in recent humans? 3) can any of the existing hypotheses for SPR vari-ation in later hominids be rejected or supported? 4) can the trunk torsion hypothesis, the only hypothesis to address all of the observed shape differences seen in the SPR of later hominids, be rejected or supported? Recent fossil discoveries have greatly increased the available number of SPR of later hominids, while the increased availability of CT scanners allows a more thorough analysis of internal SPR anatomy. This project will use CT scanners to gather the cross-sectional data needed for testing hypotheses of SPR function and variation. Nearly every pre-Holocene (older than 8,000 BC) Eurasian later hominid SPR will be examined, as will a large and diverse sample of recent humans in order to assess the modern range of SPR variation. The SPR plays a role in childbirth, locomotion, posture, and muscular force transmission between ab-domen and thigh. This project will help clarify the biomechanical role of the SPR in Neandertals, as well as the extent to which SPR differences between Neandertals and modern humans may be indicative of functional and behavioral differences doc11724 none The overarching goal of this research is to investigate the critical features of ten nanometer (10x10-9m), zeptojoule (10-21J) terascale ( ) integration (ZTSI) that will enable switching energy reductions approximately five decades beyond those projected by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) for the 50 nm generation of technology in . The hierarchy of limits that govern future opportunities for terascale nanoelectronics will guide these advances. The five levels of this hierarchy have been codified as: 1) fundamental, 2) material, 3) device, 4) circuit, and 5) system. The singular metric that characterizes a binary switching transition is the signal energy transfer (ES) that occurs during the transition. The minimum value of this energy ES(min) was recently derived and is given by (ln2)kT where k is Boltzmann s constant and T is absolute temperature. Clearly, the values of both parameters, k and T, are independent of the properties of any materials, devices, or circuits that are used to implement a binary transition. Consequently, the minimum value of the energy ES(min) becomes 2.88x 10-21 joules for T = 300K, defining the fundamental limit on binary switching energy. On the basis of parameter values projected in the ITRS for the 50 nm generation of technology in , calculation of system limits on gigascale integration (GSI) indicates that the system level limit on binary switching energy ES for the projected 10 GHz local clock frequency is approximately 2.88x10-16 joules. The striking contrast that is immediately evident here is that the , 50 nm generation system level binary switching energy ES of approximately 2.88x 10-16 joules is a factor of 105 larger than the fundamental limit ES(min) of 2.88x 10-21 joules. Discovering why this is so and what can be done with novel nanoelectronics to virtually eliminate this five-decade disparity is the salient objective of the proposed research doc11725 none Acid mine drainage is a common feature of the Rocky Mountain Region of the United States and in many other regions of the world. Acid mine drainage has been referred to as the greatest water quality problem facing the Western United States. The fact that so many mines are abandoned makes acid mine drainage a truly public problem. This research provides a decision making framework to help determine where to begin restoration activities. The heart of the framework is the measurement of the public s preferences for cleaning up acid mine drainage at the watershed level. The framework employs scientific information and economics to develop and evaluate acid mine drainage restoration alternatives within the watershed. The framework provides an avenue for measuring preferences for both quantifiable and non-quantifiable ecological information. Though the research uses a case study approach, the design is easily transferable to other watersheds thanks to the use of technology. The heart of the problem, and the decision making framework, is choice between alternative restoration plans. Restoration plans differ by the area of the watershed targeted for restoration and the level of restoration. When researchers use innovative and thoughtful communication protocols of the consequences of alternative restoration plans, citizens are able to make meaningful choices between restoration alternatives. Individual choices regarding the most preferred restoration alternatives are used to estimate the public s preferences over restoration alternatives. The main benefit of using this flexible framework is that although the model is based on economic principles, the information provided facilitates a broader range of perspectives. The framework allows analysis of restoration according to majority plurality rule decisions, economic efficiency, and distributional considerations. To demonstrate the framework, the research provides a case study of Colorado s Snake River Watershed which is located in Summit County, Colorado. The case study is developed in close cooperation with the Snake River Basin Task Force, the group charged with making recommendations for addressing the problem of acid mine drainage in the Basin. Ecological data collected through a separate U.S. EPA-funded research project is used to determine baseline conditions. A random sample of Summit County residents are used as subjects in the choice experiment. The choice experiment is administered using two different administration modes by split-sample design. One group has the option of participating in the choice experiment over the Internet from home, over the Internet from a workstation provided by the project at the Keystone Community Center, or by mail. A second group participates in a mail-only format. This split-sample design facilitates investigation of the effectiveness of sampling for experiments that offer Internet access as well as mail participation relative to mail-only participation. The information from the choice experiments and the split-sampling design provides the basis for conducting future similar research in the Snake River Basin as well as other watersheds affected by acid mine drainage doc11726 none Carey W. Krajewski A collaborative grant has been awarded to Dr. Peter Houde at New Mexico State University and Dr. Carey Krajewski at Southern Illinois University to determine the genealogy of one of the most diverse groups of birds known, the Order Gruiformes. Genealogical relationships of families within the order will be assessed by comparing DNA sequences of several genes. Past patterns of anatomical divergence and geographic origins will be inferred from the pattern by which characteristics of living species have changed genealogically. The ages of major groups will be estimated from levels of difference between their DNA sequences. Individual genes and anatomical characters can provide misleading information about genealogy because of convergence , so gruiform genealogy will be reconstructed from a large body of independent data, all of which will be evaluated for its consistency with the rest. Subsets of the data that are inconsistent will be scrutinized for functional and developmental correlates. This, in turn, will elucidate processes of convergence between lineages, both at the level of genes and that of anatomy. Gruiformes have singular importance in understanding the timing and geography of bird origins in general, because they are extremely diverse and geographically widespread. Many families appear to be relics of the long bygone Age of Dinosaurs when the continents were arranged quite differently than they are today. Gruiforms present many examples of convergence, providing an unparalleled opportunity for studying the processes that cause it. There is probably no other group of vertebrate animals whose relationships are so poorly understood, yet for which there is a comparable wealth of data on anatomical characteristics. There is also preliminary evidence for convergence at the genetic level, a phenomenon that has barely even been acknowledged in previous research. Thus, this group presents a truly unique opportunity for understanding the correlation between genetic and morphological change through time doc11727 none Ecosystem values are required in the conduct of cost-benefit analyses for a wide variety of regulations and policies. These range from climate change, to acid rain, to surface water protection. In this proposal, it is argued that the current state-of-the-art in contingent valuation (or stated preference methods) is inadequate to provide credible estimates of many types of ecosystem values. A review of the literature on ecosystem values shows that embedding or part-whole bias in a variety of forms is a major unresolved problem. That is, stated values for individual components of the ecosystem (e.g., spotted owls) appear to be disproportionately, and perhaps unreasonably, large relative to stated values for the entire ecosystem (e.g., old growth forests). This fundamental problem possibly results from three causes. First, embedding or other biases in values, may result from the presence of other-regarding behavior (motivated by warm glow, altruism, or fairness equity concerns). Second, part-whole bias may result from the view of many respondents that ecosystem attributes (commodities) are jointly determined so that one cannot, for example, save a particular species without preserving the entire ecosystem that it uses as habitat. Third, even where neoclassical theory may suggest that part-whole bias is theoretically unlikely, strong evidence suggests the converse, even in the controlled environment of the laboratory. Thus, behavioral anomalies, not contingent valuation in-and-of itself, may be responsible for part-whole bias. Given the complexity of possible behaviors and the cost of conducting valuation studies in the field, this project is directed toward conducting controlled laboratory economic experiments to explore the causes of embedding and part-whole bias. Although parallel hypothetical questions will be asked in some experiments, the reduced variance obtained by providing incentives and the control of a laboratory environment should allow rapid progress using relatively small samples (compared to contingent valuation) at a relatively modest cost. A demand revealing mechanism for public goods that combines majority voting rules with the Becker-deGroot-Marschak (BDM) mechanism will be developed and used in these experiments. Substantial experimental economics research has demonstrated that the BDM is readily understood and creates appropriate incentives for individuals to reveal their value for a good. Majority voting rules also have well known theoretical and empirical properties. Building on past experimental research, the goal will be to identify the possible presence of warm glow, paternalistic (merit goods) and non-paternalistic altruism, joint products, and other anomalies in the demand for a variety of public goods. Since warm glow, non-paternalistic altruism, and anomalies may produce values inconsistent with the efficiency condition for public goods provision, methods for identifying the presence or absence of such values is critical for the credibility of contingent valuation. This research will also explore alternative hypothetical elicitation mechanisms that can consistently test for and possibly isolate components of value that are inappropriate for cost-benefit analysis doc11728 none The research is for the development of mathematical and numerical models for the full numerical simulation of jetting phenomena. The principal investigators develop new mathematical and numerical models for phase change, vapor bubble formation, vapor bubble collapse, and explosive evaporation. New numerical methods for including compressibility in low speed flow are being developed. The resulting models are cast in an adaptive mesh framework in order to gain in CPU runtime and memory efficiency. This research program, the numerical simulation of jetting devices, unravels basic physical mechanisms underlying the jetting processes. This leads to improvement in design of microscale jetting devices. The simulation substantially reduces the design cycle period of such devices as ink-jet printers, soldering, and the application of DNA strands doc11729 none Dr. Paul Manos of Duke University is studying the predominantly paleotropical tree genus Lithocarpus (ca. 300 species) to better understand the biological significance of variation in fruit morphology and DNA sequences across a diverse landscape. Modifications of the common acorn-like fruit typically mark subgroups within the genus, but such changes appear to have evolved more than once. The study will explore new quantitative methods to characterize changes in fruit shape and compare and combine these data with DNA sequences to test whether certain fruit types have multiple origins. The widespread distribution of Lithocarpus on the continent of Asia and throughout the Malayan Archipelago also provides an excellent opportunity to pursue the genetics of plant demography using chloroplast DNA variation, a maternally inherited marker that tracks seed movement. By sampling individuals throughout the range of the genus, the study will address the relationship between plant migration and geological paleoecological change. A variety of methods will be used to test explicit hypotheses of refugial areas and migration routes based on paleoecological data. Trees will be sampled to examine genealogical structure within populations through contrasting nuclear and cytoplasmic molecular markers with reference to taxonomy, geography, and differential patterns of genome evolution. The study of organismal diversity and molecular evolution in tropical tree species requires a framework built upon thorough knowledge of natural history, taxonomy, morphology, and genealogical relationships. Species in the oak family present a broad spectrum of opportunities to study diversity in form and patterns of plant migration and gene flow. Tropical woody plants are poorly studied in this regard and a variety of basic biological questions have never been addressed in the ecologically important relatives of the oaks. Given the amount of carbon storage, ecosystem services, biodiversity, and physical structure provided to the tropical rainforest by this tree community, this study would be one of first of its kind to apply several powerful molecular techniques to an important tropical genus doc11730 none This project will evaluate the effectiveness of collaboration in the contentious water-resource planning arena in California, through an in-depth study of CALFED, a large-scale effort to decide the guiding policies and management strategies for the largest estuary on North America s west coast. CALFED brings together federal, state and local agencies, as well as stakeholders, to develop a comprehensive and long-term program for restoring and managing this critical environmental and economic resource. Despite the deep tensions between these aspects of California s water system, the effort has already produced significant outcomes that are changing the way California s water resources are discussed and managed by fostering constructive dialogue among participants. The principal objective of this study is to test three related hypotheses about collaborative policy dialogues. First, the better a dialogue meets certain collaboration conditions, the more likely it is to produce innovations, shared understandings, long term working relationships and politically acceptable solutions. Second, participants in collaborative dialogues change their views of the problem and of their own interests and options. Lastly, new norms, practices, and patterns of interaction emerge in some instances which spread beyond the individuals involved and persist over time. The research methods include in-depth interviews of CALFED participants, observation of meetings, and review of documents recording the debates and actions and providing supporting analysis for the discussions. The analysis will compare the more and less collaborative dialogues within CALFED in terms of their outcomes and effects on participants and on the practices and relationships among players. The researchers will also update the historical account of water policy and water issues in California prior to CALFED and will document the changes since CALFED. The underlying developmental pressures evident in the CALFED case are increasingly common and apply to water sharing situations throughout the US and to other multi-jurisdictional resource issues in many locations. Decision-makers, planners, and managers routinely must incorporate both environmental and economic concerns in their activities. The proposed research will build basic theory on these practices and on the conditions under which they do and do not work doc11731 none This project addresses basic issues of materials at nanoscale dimensions. The research will investigate thermodynamic properties of Si nanostructures and silicide interfaces using a new and highly sensitive calorimetric device. For example, the phenomenon of melting point depression for surface-supported particles can be measured for particles as small as atoms. The focus is on understanding unique properties and behavior of nanometer-sized materials. The approach is to measure thermodynamic properties of Si nanostructures and silicide interfaces including structural stability and heat capacity to establish a more complete picture of the material physics of structures at these dimensions. Earlier investigations of magic number(integers of atomic layers) nanostructures from metals to semiconductor Si nanostructures will be extended by measuring the specific heat, melting temperature, and associated enthalpy, as well as particle size using TEM. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a contemporary topical area of materials science with high potential significance and technological relevance. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area. The project is expected to provide unique opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students to develop strong technical, communication, and organizational management skills through unique experiences made possible by a forefront research environment doc11732 none Objectives. We propose an experiment - theory effort focused on the development of two classes of multifunctional organic materials to be used for information technologies. The first class of ma-terials consist of infrared compatible photorefractive polymers that are suitable for reconfigurable filters, switches and interconnects. The second class of materials are pi-conjugated polymers with emission in the infrared. This effort will capitalize on our past experience in developing photorefrac-tive and light emitting polymers through a combination of many-body calculations incorporating electron-electron interactions on these materials and the characterizations of their electrical and nonlinear optical properties. The operation of existing photorefractive and light emitting polymers is restricted to the visible region of the spectrum which prevents their use in telecommunication. Approach. To extend the spectral sensitivity of photorefractive polymers to the infrared we will use multiphoton absorption to generate photoconductivity from high energy two-photon excited states in either a pi-conjugated polymer matrix or an electro-active chromophore dopant. Theo-retical work will be performed in identifying two-photon states from which enhanced photogener-ation efficiency is expected. These results will also guide the design of one-photon photorefractive polymers with sub-millisecond response time. The search for pi-conjugated polymers with photo-luminescence in the infrared will build on our recent discovery of the principle that excited state ordering conducive to light emission at low frequencies is obtained in pi-conjugated polymers with large molecular unit cells. The specific structural requirement is that there exists molecular conju-gation transverse to the direction of conjugation along the polymer chain, leading to longitudinal confinement and transverse delocalization of the optical exciton. Experimental studies will be con-ducted on soluble derivatives of poly(isothianaphthene), which satisfy the structural requirement for infrared emission. Significance and Impact. The proposed infrared compatible photorefractive and light emitting polymers will enable new devices for telecommunication technologies. In spite of the rapid advances made in the area of organic optoelectronics, existing organic materials amid devices operate largely in the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Our work will extend the spectral range of applications, and it is expected that the outcomes of our research will have strong impact on the device physics of organic materials. The aim is not to compete with the technology utilizing con-ventional inorganic semiconductors, but to develop new functionalities and applications, utilizing the unique processing capability of organic materials. Importantly, the strong coupling between experiment and theory will lead to enhanced understanding of the fundamental processes of photo-generation, multiphoton absorption and light emission in organics, an area that is still in its infancy. Finally, the proposed research provides a unique multidisciplinary framework to integrate research and teaching. Students working on the project are exposed to chemistry, optics, engineering, and the fundamental physics of nonlinear absorption, charge-injection, charge- and energy-transfer, and light emission doc11647 none The PIs propose to use paleobotanical and paleogeochemical data with a model developed for understanding modern controls on vegetation distribution to explore the fundamental mechanisms behind complex advance, retreat, and further advance of a boreal-tundra ecotone along the Brooks Range in Alaska. The paleobotanical evidence will be used to examine several different approaches to discern movements of the ecotone with a species-level resolution with the changes in climate variables (temperature, precipitation amount, and seasonality of precipitation). The analysis will provide independent climate and vegetation datasets. The climate dataset will be used to drive an ecosystem model to simulate changing vegetation under changing climate. The results of the study will provide a useful predictive capability for separating climate-induced changes from those caused by feedbacks in the climate-vegetation system when attempting predictions of boreal forest ecosystem responses to future climate change doc11734 none Georges Placas This dissertation research by a cultural anthropology student from Rice University will study the social and cultural life of credit cards in Greece. The use of cards has increased dramatically in recent years, related to European Union integration. Through an ethnographic study in three distinct neighborhoods of Athens, from working class to upper class, the student will study how credit cards have been interpreted as cultural objects signifying modernity and will analyze the impact of the cards on those who use them as well as those who are excluded form using them. The traditional cultural meaning of indebtedness will be studied as it has developed and changed in light of the new prevalence of impersonal credit. Concerns with consumption, debt, status, and social mobility will be studied as well as general changes in Greek society affiliated with EU integration. Methods will include participant observation and a formal interview of about 100 respondents drawn from the three neighborhoods, as well as follow up intensive and repeated interviews with a small subsample of 30 respondents (10 from each neighborhood), interviews with bankers, and analysis of articles, records and documents on the credit card industry. This research will advance our understanding of how this ubiquitous financial instrument is being incorporated into a changing traditional society, and this new knowledge will help us understand the use of credit cards in our own society. The project also adds to the training of a young social scientist and increases our knowledge about this important region of the world doc11735 none Stakeholders play a critical role in managing environmental issues. Their perspectives on the issues and their interactions with policy makers often shape the direction that an environmental situation takes, particularly when it escalates into a spiraling conflict. This project aims to depict the worldviews of stakeholders in intractable environmental conflicts. It focuses on how stakeholders frame or interpret the myriad of elements that comprise a protracted environmental conflict, including (1) how disputants define and label what the problem is, (2) who should control or decide on these issues, (3) how disputants identify with the environmental problem, (4) how they view other stakeholders, (5) what type of power or authority is being exercised, (6) what are their views of natural resources, and (7) what should be done about the conflict. In effect, this study investigates stakeholder differences in defining and privileging seven different elements of environmental framing: whole story, views of social control, stakeholder identity, characterization, views of power authority, views of nature, and conflict management preferences. This study will code data from interview transcripts of 156 stakeholders, involved in four different environmental cases-resource allocation, anti-degradation, natural resource protection, and chemical pollution. It will develop profiles of stakeholder framing among groups such as developers, citizen activists, farmers and irrigators, environmentalists, local and regional regulatory agencies, state agencies, federal governmental officials, local city councils and officials, facilitators and mediators, and media reporters-profiles that move beyond broad-based descriptors. Then through the use of configural frequency analysis, the researchers will test clusters or configurations of frame types among stakeholders by examining similarities and differences in framing. Finally, the researchers will develop detailed descriptive analysis of these patterns of stakeholder framing within and across the four environmental cases. Stakeholder analysis is a complex and important problem for environmental policy making. Research to date has centered on stakeholder attitudes toward environmental issues such as conservation and risk-taking. Very little work examines the way that stakeholders perceive or approach environmental conflicts, especially ones rooted in case situations that cross diverse environmental problems. This study has both theoretical and practical value in developing a rich understanding of stakeholder perspectives. At the theoretical level, this project tests a model of environmental framing that extends stakeholder analysis, and at the practical level, this project will develop profile analyses that can be used to train agency officials, conflict interventionists, and policy makers in understanding stakeholders. This understanding could move parties beyond stereotyping toward a model of collaborative learning in managing critical but highly divergent issues doc11736 none Nutritional symbioses between plants and soil microbes are critically important to plant evolution and ecosystem function, yet we know almost nothing about the evolutionary dynamics and mechanisms of persistence of these ancient interactions. Mutualistic interactions are widespread and obligatory for many organisms, yet their evolutionary persistence in the face of cheating is theoretically puzzling. Partner-choice and partner-fidelity are mechanisms for dealing with cheaters, and can theoretically allow mutualisms to persist. Evidence for sanctions against cheaters, a form of partner-choice, has recently been uncovered in several plant-pollinator interactions. Market models assume partner choice, and hence offer useful paradigms for understanding the evolutionary dynamics of mutualisms in which individuals attempt to conduct mutually beneficial trade of resources with multiple individuals (the market). The proposed studies will test whether partner-choice can explain the evolutionary persistence of this mutualism in wild legumes of the genus Lupinus, and Bradyrhizobium, the nitrogen-fixing bacteria that inhabit their root nodules. Achieving these goals is the first step in an integrated analysis of genetic variation, symbiotic quality, and plant adaptive responses in the legume-rhizobium interaction. Our results will begin to construct a framework for understanding the persistence and evolutionary dynamics of this important mutualism doc11737 none A contentious issue in biology is whether speciation, the splitting of one species into two, can occur when no geographic barrier separates the incipient species. Speciation without geographic isolation has been hypothesized to occur in plant-feeding insects that use the host as a rendezvous for mating: if a population diverges into two populations that feed on different hosts, the resulting populations will no longer encounter each other. The proposed work will investigate whether divergence in host preference and consequent mating isolation can occur in a laboratory population of the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. In each generation, unmated flies will be allowed to choose between two hosts that require different fly attributes for successful breeding. Mating will take place only between flies that chose the same host. The extent to which the experimental population splits into two populations with different host preferences will be monitored. The results will aid biologists understanding of the mechanisms of species formation in plant-feeding insects, one of the most diverse groups of organisms on earth. The results will also shed light on the mechanisms by which insect species that feed on non-crop species can form new races on crop species doc11738 none Accurate cross section data are essential for detailed modeling of the behavior of the upper atmosphere. This directly addresses this need by seeking to provide data for atmospheric species at the relevant energies. Experiments will be continued on collisions of keV-energy oxygen and hydrogen atoms and ions with atomic oxygen and atomic hydrogen and on electron-impact ionization of molecules. A new experiment to measure charge transfer cross sections for oxygen ions with atmospheric species at energies down to a few electron-volts is also proposed doc11739 none This Doctoral Dissertation Research Support investigation examines how increased party competition --- specifically the emergence of federal-state divided government --- has transformed the Mexican Federal System during the nineties. Riker ( ) suggests that one of the conditions that helps to maintain the federal bargain is if one national party controls the federal executive and shares with other parties control over the state executives, or, what might be called federal-state divided government. The rationale behind this proposition being that the constant possibility for the relevant parties to become the next federal or state leaders actually prevents them from invading each other s areas of responsibility. The hypothesis, however, presents a problem for testing because, in democratic federal systems, federal-state divided government is a common occurrence --- or at least, a very tangible threat. For this reason, the Mexican case offers a unique opportunity for testing because it is only recently that the party system has become truly competitive. The dissertation consists of two main parts. The first part deals with the transformation of the Mexican federal system. Using qualitative and quantitative analysis, the project explores whether the increasing presence of non-PRI governors transforms the operation of the federal system (legislative activity, Supreme Court decisions, and activities of federal and state ministries). With econometric models, and qualitative analysis, the second part investigates if federal-state divided government has affected the selection, design and implementation of policies (specifically, allocation of fiscal resources, public health, public education, and management of natural resources). The second part of the project relies heavily on field research (archive work and interviews) in the Mexican states of Baja California Norte, Chihuahua and Sonora. Upon completion, the project will shed light on the operation of federal arrangements with an authoritarian history that have undergone a democratization process recently (e.g. Argentina, Brazil, Russia). We should also gain a deeper understanding of the relationships between democratization, increased party competition, and the federal system. The project will examine a critical but overlooked consequence of democratization processes: changes in the relationships among the center and the regions, and the consequences of these changes for policy. The data and information collected will be provided to the scholarly community at large doc11740 none This work will build on recent work by the PI on the multimodel superensemble approach for weather and climate forecasts. The principle of this technique contains a partitioning of the timeline with a control (training) and a forecast phase. Past results based on this technique have indicated that the superensemble outperforms in skill, multimodel forecasts, ensemble mean and climatology. The research will focus on the following areas: (1) to understand the basis for improved results from the multimodel superensemble for global numerical weather prediction, including hurricanes and forecasts of seasonal climate; (2) to further improve the methodology for the construction of superensemble forecasts; (3) to improve the initial state, i.e. superensemble of day 0 input for all variables for training and model validation; (4) to design and carry-out coupled atmosphere-ocean model based superensemble forecasts on seasonal to multiseasonal time scales; (5) to address the issue of sensitivity of superensemble forecast skills to perturbation of the training data base; and (6) to continue the preparation of real-time multimodel superensemble forecast data sets for global numerical weather prediction including hurricane track and intensity forecasts. The work is important because it has potential implications for prediction, both on weather and seasonal timescales, leading to great societal benefits doc11741 none Under the direction of Dr. Ben Nelson, Mr. Christian Wells will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will continue ongoing archaeological research at the prehispanic site of El Coyote, located in the Cacaulapa Valley of northwestern Honduras. This research will investigate the relationship between community feasting and the political organization of the polity that formed and collapsed between the seventh and tenth centuries AD. Archaeologists wish to understand the processes that integrate and differentiate individuals in ancient communities, with the greater goal of reconstructing past systems of government and their effects on the growth and change of societies. Mr. Wells previous excavations in the main civic-ceremonial plaza at the site have revealed abundant evidence for food production and consumption on a large scale, suggesting that communal feasts were a central practice in the rulership of El Coyote. Such events would have served as a mechanism for polity integration, as well as a context in which exotic items were publicly displayed to enhance the social prestige and political authority of local leaders. With NSF support, Mr. Wells doctoral dissertation research will examine the organization of feasting in the plaza, including what material culture was employed, where food consumption took place in relation to the temples that delimit the plaza, and which social segments of the polity participated. His research will incorporate archaeological excavation of the plaza and adjacent buildings, as well as trash middens that accumulated on the margins of the plaza. In addition, he will chemically characterize soil samples from the plaza to study the distribution of phosphorous and heavy metals, which will indicate the locations of activity areas. His research will also examine the composition of ceramic vessel remains from the trash areas in order to illuminate the different social groups that participated in plaza-oriented activities. Archaeologists are interested in the practice of feasting and the social relations that are reproduced during feasts. The examination of material culture and soil chemistry at El Coyote is a direct method for the study of this phenomenon, and will yield new information on the organization of feasting in ancient complex societies and the degree to which this practice was involved in the political and economic administration of El Coyote. In addition, the research will enhance our knowledge of the material signatures of feasting in the archaeological record and will assist in training a promising young scientist doc11742 none Cells of microorganisms as well as human cells encounter changes in environmental pH. Responses of cells to altered environmental pH may involve changes in gene expression. A system for the regulation of gene expression by environmental pH was first identified in the filamentous Ascomycete fungus Aspergillus nidulans. Components of this regulatory system include the pacC gene-encoded zinc-finger transcription factor and the products of the palA, B, C, F, H and I genes, which lead to activation of the PacC transcription factor at alkaline pH. This system ensures that extracellular enzymes are produced under conditions of pH where they can function: acid phosphatase under acid conditions and alkaline phosphatase under alkaline conditions, for example. The pH regulatory system is also important for alkaline adaptation (survival in alkaline environments) and for conidial development in A. nidulans. The aims of this research are to discover new components of this regulatory system and to further define the roles of known components. Research on the A. nidulans pH signalling pathway has contributed to the larger field of cell signalling. For example, the palB gene product was the first example of a calpain, calcium-activated cysteine protease in a microorganism and in a specific signalling pathway. The study of pH regulation in the model organism A. nidulans has also helped the understanding of pH regulation in fungi of medical and economic importance. The study of pH regulation is most advanced in A. nidulans. This fact and the availability of well- developed genetics tools and resources make A. nidulans one of the best systems for the study of this important eukaryotic regulatory pathway. In this research, a recently-developed gene library will be used to identify high copy number suppressors of A. nidulans strains with mutations in the pH regulatory pathway. With this library, the expression of A. nidulans genomic DNA inserts is under control of the inducible niiA (nitrite reductase) promoter. As the plasmid used to construct the library also has the AMA1 sequence, which allows extrachromosomal maintenance of plasmids, isolation of plasmids from Aspergillus transformants is straightforward. Significant preliminary results have already been achieved in this study. For example, 166 putative copy number suppressors of a pacC loss-of-function mutation have been obtained. An assay for palB protease activity will also be developed and work will be completed to determine the cellular location of the palI gene product, which may function as the pH-sensing protein. For this study, a palI-green fluorescent protein gene fusion construct has been made. In addition to the contribution to scientific knowledge of the proposed research, the project will make an important contribution to education. As undergraduate students will participate in this research, it will provide valuable training for future scientists and educators doc11743 none Professor Paul W. Bohn and Dr. Carlyle B. Storm are funded through the Analytical and Surface Chemistry program to help fund the Gordon Conference on Analytical Chemistry. This conference is focused on chemical analysis and materials chemistry. The program aims to draw together leading scientists in both fields with young scientists and those from under-represented groups to discuss how analytical methods can solve problems in materials science. The meeting is to be held in June doc11744 none P.I. Michael Lizotte Recent cruises to the Ross Sea under the JGOFS and ROAVERRS programs have documented that the removal of dissolved carbon and nutrients can be significantly different from the ratios predicted from typical Redfield ratios (e.g. 106:16:1 for C:N:P) for seawater particulates. The non-Redfield nutrient removal ratios were associated with phytoplankton species composition. For example, C:N:P uptake ratios determined from measurements of dissolved inorganic carbon, nitrate and phosphate were ca. 80:10:1 in diatom-dominated stations and ca. 140:20:1 for Phaeocystis antarctica-dominated stations. Non-Redfield dynamics could be critical for understanding the biogeochemistry of the geological record as well as predicting the impacts of climate change. Samples are to be collected from a ship of opportunity during a geophysics cruise (NBP 01-01, Hobart to Capetown) to the Indian Ocean sector of the Southern Ocean. Species composition will be quantified by microscopy from preserved water samples. Nutrient concentrations (nitrate, nitrite, phosphate, and silicate) will be measured from frozen sampled collected in conjunction with water a sampling program that is to be conducted to study carbon dynamics. These samples of opportunity will provide a data set to be used in evaluating whether the non-Redfield situation observed in the Ross Sea occurs in distant coastal systems around Antarctica, and whether it is associated with the same species or similar oceanographic conditions doc11745 none Goulden This is a workshop proposal submitted by Dr. Clyde Goulden, Academy of Natural Science of Philadelphia, to request travel expenses to enable 12 U.S. scientists to attend the meeting of the East Asian Long-Term Ecological Research Network in Ulaanbaatar, and then presentations and field experiments at Hatgal on Lake Hovsgol, Mongolia, from July 2-10, . Mongolia lies in the transition zone between the cold continental desert, and the taiga boreal forest of Siberia. The Mongolian LTER (MLTER) includes ecosystems of the Gobi, semi-desert, steppe forest, taiga forest, and freshwater habitats, and is an important network for global environmental research. The scheduled activities include focused presentations, hands-on research training and in-situ field measurements in a range of ecosystems. The purpose of this workshop is to exchange research results in ecology and to foster collaboration among the scientists from the U.S. and East Asia. The NSF and the Mongolian National Academy of Science jointly support this workshop doc11746 none Project : Thymic nurse cells (TNCs) are epithelial cells with the ability to internalize immature thymocytes into specialized intra-cytoplasmic vacuoles. The function of this interaction during thymocyte development is the focus of this proposal. TNCs have been shown a) to bind and internalize immature abTCRlowCD69- double positive thymocytes, b) to rescue a subset of the internalized population from apoptosis, and c) to allow a subset of the rescued population to mature to the abTCRhiCD69+ stage of development. These data suggest that TNCs play a pivotal role in determining the fate of developing thymocytes. To specific aims of this project are: (1) To determine the relationship between macrophages and TNCs during MHC restriction, we will monitor the intra-thymic and intra-TNC location of CFDA-stained macrophages (after homing to the thymus from the peritoneum) during the process of MHC restriction. We will determine the temporal relationship of macrophages with intra-TNC thymocytes using Nomarski and fluorescence microscopy. These studies are important because the process of MHC restriction determines the profile of T cells that function within the mammalian immune system. This unusual arrangement of the cells is like no other developmental system reported to date. Future studies of this unique cellular complex should yield unprecedented insights into T cell development. (2) To determine the role of the TNC macrophage interaction during MHC restriction, we will use H-Y transgenic mice to establish a direct correlation between TNCs and the process of MHC restriction. Each developing thymocyte in these transgenic animals produces a cell surface abTCR that recognizes the male specific H-Y antigen. The vast majority of male transgenic thymocytes are deleted through negative selection while an abnormally high percentage of positive selection is detected in female transgenic animals. TNCs are directly involved in these processes. Female H-Y transgenic mice have large TNCs that contain 5 times as many cytoplasmic thymocytes. There are 40 times as many TNCs in female versus male H-Y transgenics. This correlates well with the increased percentage of positive selection found in female animals. Further, the male transgenic animals have very few TNCs. The male TNCs are small and almost half of their cytoplasmic thymocytes are apoptotic, which would result from the high level of negative selection reported to occur in the H-Y transgenic mouse. These data imply a direct involvement of TNCs in the process of MHC restriction. Using the CDFA-staining technique, macrophages will be obtained from male H-Y transgenics (which express the HY antigen that drives negative selection) and delivered into female H-Y transgenic mice. Changes in TNC complex numbers and sizes will be determined by immunofluorescence staining of thymic sections as well as by enzymatic dissociation of the thymus and microscopic analysis. Profile changes of developing thymocytes in injected animals will be determined using FACS analyses doc11747 none The goal of this study is to determine how characteristics of the landscape and species life history traits (i.e., annuals vs. perennials and rare vs. common species) interact to determine the large-scale (i.e., 10 km to 100 km) distribution and dynamics of plant populations. Factors such as habitat patch size and the distance from the nearest neighboring population are thought to control the probabilities of population extinction and the subsequent re-colonization of a vacant location. Very few field studies have been performed to test these predictions. This investigation will focus on coastal wetland plants in Narragansett Bay, RI, USA. GPS technologies will be used to map out the location of wetland habitats and yearly surveys of 350 habitat patches within a 20 x 30 km study area will document population extinction and patch re-colonization by 12 plant species. Understanding how landscape characteristics affect the large-scale dynamics of populations is fundamental to biological conservation. For example, such information can be used to optimally design marine reserves, ensuring that networks of protected areas are large enough and close enough to each other to maintain stable populations of rare and endangered species. This study will also enable resource managers to detect and mitigate the effects of environmental impacts to this and other wetland habitats doc11748 none There is a National need to develop better-trained and educated physics and science teachers. The PhysTEC project is an effort of the APS, AIP, and AAPT, to improve teacher preparation within physics departments at a set of selected Primary Program Institutions (PPIs). The project PI s will work with six PPIs to produce a change in the way courses for pre-service teachers are taught at the university level and, by leveraging the clout and influence of professional associations, bridges will be built between physics and education departments on these campuses and eventually across the country. The efforts of this proposal are an important opportunity to make significant changes in the way teacher are taught and encouraged to continue with science education. The proposal will involve both content-people and methods-people in cooperatively attacking problems encountered in the various institutions and would give attention to what has often been overlooked in science education. The proposal will deal with structuring the training of prospective teachers in ways that integrate content knowledge and pedagogy. Also important are the mechanisms by which science faculty and school of education faculty can collaborate toward educating, encouraging and mentoring prospective science teachers for the future doc11749 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. William C. Prentiss and his colleagues will conduct archaeological research at the Keatley Creek site, a large housepit village located in the Middle Fraser Canyon of south-central British Columbia. The Keatley Creek site contains extensive and well-preserved archaeological deposits, representing a globally significant record of change in hunter-gatherer culture and community organization spanning at least years. Early in its occupational history, the site was a frequently occupied camp for generalized (socio-economically egalitarian) hunter-gatherer peoples. However, by the height of its occupation, around years ago, a permanent winter village had evolved, likely featuring a hierarchically ranked society of approximately - persons residing in housepits as large as 22 meters in diameter. Residents of this complex hunter-gatherer community participated in a large-scale exchange network and maintained a subsistence economy centered on intensive salmon fishing and storage. Some households may have even owned or at least controlled access to portions of the surrounding landscape including fishing sites and stone quarries. The Keatley Creek site thus provides an optimal opportunity for studying the processes and events associated with the emergence of social inequality in a North American hunter-gatherer context. This research will focus on the evolution of the Keatley Creek village with an emphasis on the processes which give rise to complex social organization. To accomplish this, Dr. Prentiss will direct multidisciplinary research that will include archaeological excavation, assessment of site stratigraphy, radiocarbon dating, and studies of change in subsistence behavior, technology, and organization of activities on house floors. More specifically, excavation will focus on archaeological deposits chronicling the shift from generalized to complex hunter-gatherers. Radiocarbon analysis will establish the date at which social complexity emerged in the village. Studies of plant remains, animal bones, and stone tools will permit an assessment of changes in the organization of food procurement, preparation, and consumption during this important transition. The research team will focus on several questions: 1. When did the transition to social complexity occur? 2. Was this cultural transition abrupt or gradual? 3. Was the transition accompanied by a major change in subsistence? 4. Did the transition follow a reorganization of technology? 5. How did labor organization change during this time? Results of the project will advance the anthropological understanding of the evolution of complex societies. It will also provide insight into the organization of complex hunter-gatherer communities during the late period of the Northern Plateau. Finally, it will build positive working relationships between Indian people and archaeologists in the Pacific Northwest region doc11750 none This project deals with response of thin magnetic films to microwave radiation. Microwaves can produce novel responses in the films, such as magnetic envelope (MME) solitons. The thin films provide a powerful and versatile test bed for the study of high frequency nonlinear dynamics and the fundamental properties of the envelope solitons. The results are relevant to microwave nonlinear wave propagation in magnetic films and spin-off applications of these effects in microwave and millimeter wave thin film signal processing. In addition, there is substantial interest in dynamical nonlinear magnetization processes associated with flux reversal and spin injection in multi-layer films. The new program will focus on: (1) direct measurement of the spin waves associated with or generated by MME solitons; (2) the use of new time and space resolved probe techniques to measure the spatio temporal and wave vector make up of these pulses on a nanosecond or subnanosecond time scale; and (3) the nonlinear magnetization dynamics associated with modulational instability and chaos, free precession, and spin wave generation by spin injection. Graduate students and post-docs associated with the project receive excellent training in technical magnetism, using cutting-edge research tools. They are well equipped for careers in academe, industry or government. %%% This project studies the properties of correlated magnetic dipoles (similar to tiny compass needles) in magnetic thin films. In magnetic field, the dipoles rotate, or precess, much like the precession of a spinning top due to gravitational field. This leads to so-called nonlinear effects when the precession angle is large. Chains of such precessing dipoles can be used to form nonlinear pulses in the form of solitons. Such soliton pulses are very robust and can propagate without spreading. The precession can also lead to a switching in the direction of the overall magnetic moment of a film. Both solitons and switching can lead to other nonlinear effects such as the generation of new pulses and additional waves of precessing spins at different frequencies. The unique feature of the work is in the use of special probes to map the precession dynamics on a nanosecond time scale and a sub-millimeter distance scale. The results will be useful for the understanding of nonlinear dynamics in general, with long range applications in microwave signal processing and magnetic information storage. Graduate students and post-docs associated with the project receive excellent training in technical magnetism, using cutting-edge research tools. They are well equipped for careers in academe, industry or government doc11751 none Professor S. Scott Saavedra and his co-workers at the University of Arizona are developing biocompatible coatings that can be used as a universal platform for the support of protein receptors in biosensing devices. With the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, this group is examining the use of polymerizable planar lipid bilayers for this use. Both specific and nonspecific protein interactions with the lipid bilayers are evaluated, using novel optical waveguide spectroscopic methods developed in Professor Saavedra s laboratory. Methods for generating patterned microarrays of these materials are being developed as well. Protein or peptide specific sensors show great promise for analysis of biological systems, for monitoring drug dosages and uptakes, and for detecting biomaterials in a variety of applications. The development of robust, versatile substrates for these sensor applications is the subject of this research project. Using novel polymerizable lipid bilayers, a universal platform for these biosensors is being developed doc11752 none This project seeks to sponsor engineering students to attend the American Control Conference sponsored by the American Automatic Control Council. The conference will focus on theoretical issues, engineering methodologies and industrial applications in every aspect of control research and development. The goal of this proposal is to develop an opportunity for engineering students to be informed about the most recent advances in the areas of control theory and practices. Travel support for student attendance will be advertised nationwide and women, minorities and disabled students will be especially encouraged to apply for sponsorship doc11753 none The investigators will work to understand the physical origins of solar radiative variability. The main effort is to utilize semi-empirical models of the solar atmosphere to represent features on the solar surface and, where discrepancies are discovered, redefine the models. The investigators will then determine the effect of the distribution of surface features on irradiance and combine the information with spectral synthesis lines and broad spectral bands so as to compute spectral and total irradiance for a particular state of the Sun. Ultimately, the investigators seek to determine the most efficient measurements to make in the future in order to take advantage of the basic redundancy in the solar spectrum. The aim of the RISE program is to improve physical understanding of present, past, and future radiative output variations in the extreme ultraviolet (EUV), ultraviolet (UV), visible and infrared. In a practical sense, spectrum synthesis gives insight into the reliability of the use of surrogates (also known as proxies) to estimate total and spectral irradiance in the absence of direct measurements of appropriate accuracy. This exploitation of the natural redundancy and coherence in the solar spectrum can lead to more efficient measurement and analysis programs. Previous work of the investigators illustrated the importance of the evolution and spatial distribution of both plage and network (i.e. magnetic flux emergence) in determining the detailed time variability of irradiance. This work also revealed the sensitivity of the continuum intensity variation to structures deeper in the photosphere. The continuing speculation of a link between solar and climate variability on timescales longer than a decade raises the important issue of changes in the color of the solar spectrum due to variability of lines and continuum. An accurate theoretical estimate of the total solar irradiance and the shape of the solar radiation spectrum are essential to climate studies doc11754 none This project addresses cultural and economic aspects of the making of distinctive caribou skin masks by the Nunamiut Eskimo of Anaktuvik Pass, Alaska. Devised in the s for the tourist trade and remaining little changed to the present, these masks and the motives underlying their making present a unique research opportunity. The masks have cultural significance well beyond their souvenir status. Mask-making has been, and continues to be, essential to the local economy. The masks have become a prominent feature of the Alaskan tourist art market and constitute a village signature recognized throughout and beyond Alaska. Production of these masks draws upon traditional knowledge of the land and animals of the central Brooks Range in Alaska, a knowledge that is slowly being lost. Finally, the history and development of mask making in Anaktuvuk Pass is synonymous with recent cultural change among the Nunamiut. The project will address these issues through a comprehensive study of masks and mask-making in Anaktuvuk Pass. This study will: 1) document the origin and development of mask-making; 2) document, for comparative purposes, selected museum collections of masks; 3) obtain, in narrative form, perspectives of current mask-makers on their individual work and on mask-making in general; 4) document photographically the processes and products associated with mask-making; 5) detail the economic aspects, locally and within the larger Alaskan tourist market, of mask-making; and, 6) investigate relationships among mask-making, cultural identity and traditional knowledge of Arctic fauna, with emphases on the fur-bearers that provide raw materials for the masks. This project presents an unusual opportunity to investigate the development of a significant tradition while the individuals tied to its origins are still alive. It will advance our understanding of, and provide a case study in, economic anthropology, ethnography of art, economic development, and cultural change. Results will be presented in a publisheable book-length manuscript to be submitted to the University of Washington Press doc11755 none Vladimir Mandelshtam is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to develop and apply novel theoretical computational methods, ranging from data processing in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experiments to quantum chemical dynamics calculations. The central technique that will be used and further explored is the Filter Diagonalization Method (FDM) for spectral analysis of time signals, along with variants that will be designed to target different types of spectral analysis problems. The studies will include algorithm and code development, in particular the generalization to 2D, 3D, and 4D NMR experiments, and various test calculations using real and synthesized data. Moreover, the design of new experiments that are uniquely possible with FDM data processing will be explored in collaboration with experimental NMR groups. The development and applications of numerical algorithms for quantum chemical dynamics will continue as well, focusing on physically important problems such as tunneling splittings and energy shifts (caused by the environment or isotope substitution). For both numerically exact quantum and approximate semiclassical approaches, the general two-step scheme involving signal generation followed by signal processing will be approached with several methodologies. Successful applications have the potential to reveal new information or lead to dramatic computational savings. The theoretical and computational methods developed in this spectral analysis research have broad application possibilities in science and engineering. Along with enabling major improvements to data analysis in magnetic resonance spectroscopy, outcomes from this research can potentially impact diverse areas such as communications science and economics doc11756 none This dissertation research project in cultural anthropology will examine the emergence of new forms of property rights in the recent adoption of groundwater irrigation by farmers in the Cochabamba valley of highland Bolivia. Historically farmers had used water from descending rivers and streams stored in reservoirs to irrigate their fields, but in recent times they developed the capacity to use well water. Comparable systems that have been studied at first have appeared unstructured and chaotic, but upon analysis have appeared to be products of innovation, adaptation, learning and entrepreneurial skill. The student will analyze the cultural models of property rights held by farmers as well as the transaction costs of alternative forms of property rights, study the history of institutions governing groundwater usage and use GIS and spatial analysis to identify locations and spatial systems, to analyze how local Andean property rights have adapted to a new economic strategy. The student s project will make a significant contribution by widening the New Institutional Economics approach to include cultural models, symbols and meaning, and will advance our understanding of high altitude irrigation systems, as well as our knowledge of this important region of the world. In addition the project contributes to the training of a young social scientist doc11757 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is designed to build a prototype miniature fiber optic NOx sensor for the control of auto emissions. The proposed sensor is based upon a company invention on miniature chemilluminescence detector for gas chromatography. The prototype will be miniature in size (4 cubic inch approximately), weight (1 2 lb) and capable of ppt level detection as a result of the innovative design. Commercial applications will focus on pollution monitoring, insitu auto NOx emission monitoring and reduction, and biochemical drug analysis when coupled with a miniature catalytic converter doc11758 none Richter Defining Hydro-Ecological Research Priorities This workshop will bring together 20 riverine scientists in July to focus on linkages between river flow regimes and biota. The workshop has a science focus, and will precede a large conference entitled Managing River Flows for Biodiversity. Objectives of the workshop are to: 1) identify key knowledge gaps and 2) develop a prioritized research agenda. The organizers, Dr. Richter of the Nature Conservancy and Dr. LeRoy Poff of Colorado State University, plan to host an electronic forum among participants in advance of the workshop. The product of the workshop will be a white paper posted at the conference web site identifying critical uncertainties and knowledge gaps and research priorities. The workshop report will also be published as part of the conference proceedings doc11759 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses the development of an ultrafast TOC analyzer to enable real-time recycling of spent rinse waters from semiconductor wet benches. At the present time, semiconductor fabrication facilities generate about gallons of wastewater discharge per wafer, which is equivalent to 53 million gallons of wastewater per year for facilities operating at 100 gpm (gallons per minute). Recycling spent rinse waters from semiconductor wet benches provides a viable solution to dramatically reduce the environmental impact of this manufacturing process. On-line monitoring of key contaminants in real time is necessary to successfully operate future water systems having recycle and reuse capabilities. Phase I research will be directed at developing microfluidic sensors having reliable, ultra-fast response times to trace concentrations of organic contaminants found in spent r5inse waters from simiconductor wet benches. Specific performance goals for Phase I devices include: 30 s response time, 30 ppb detection limit, operation in 10 microSiemen cm water conductivity, and 100% + - 30% recovery of key contaminants. An ultra-fast TOC analyzer will be developed that enables real-time recycling of water used by seimiconductor manufacturing to reduce their demand upon regional water supplies. This novel instrument will find widespread applications in the semiconductor industry as well as other manufacturing environments that require real-time detection of organic contaminants in aqueous effluent doc11760 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a small, portable, low-power amperometric biosensor to detect phenol in wastewater. A renewable, robust biosensor integrated into a microfluidic system is proposed and will be designed to specifically detect phenol in aqueous solutions based on an enzyme-based biosensor. This method will allow analysis of phenol without significant dilution or reduction in the sensitivity of the detected species. The microfluidic biosensor will use sol-gel modified, screen printed microband electrodes which will enhance the sensitivity and limit of detection of the device compared to electrodes of conventional size. The device will also use a simple pump and valve system for both electrolyte and analyte introduction into the sensor and proven electrochemical instrumentation for phenol detection. The proposed sensor will be applicable to real time, on-site monitoring of phenol concentrations in wastewater. The commercial application of this project will be in industries such as pulp and paper, petroleum refining and plastic resins that need a cost effective and robust device to detect phenol in wastewater doc11761 none Tuchman Collaborative Research: Elevated Atmospheric CO2 Alters Plant Detritus Nutritional Quality: Effects on Microbial and Detritivore Food Webs in Aquatic Ecosystems. Elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) resulting from the combustion of fossil fuels, directly affects the photosynthesis rate, growth, and chemical make-up of tree foliage. The investigators have demonstrated that when aspen trees are grown under elevated CO2 levels, their leaves contain less nitrogen and higher concentrations of plant defense compounds (phenolic compounds, lignins and tannins), which renders them less nutritious to their animal and microorganism consumers. Since small headwater streams in forested landscapes rely heavily on tree leaf litter to fuel their food webs, parallel field and laboratory studies will measure the effect that the CO2-induced change in food quality of aspen leaf litter will have on the growth and reproduction of stream bacteria, fungi, and invertebrate consumers. The difference in microbial and invertebrate growth rates in turn could affect food web structure and functions and carbon dynamics in aquatic ecosystems doc11762 none Williams Boron substitutes for Al in clay minerals with a relatively large isotope fractionation. Illite smectite (I S) clays incorporate more boron than other clay types and they are also most common in sedimentary basins. We want to test the hypothesis that the boron contents and isotopic ratios of these clays represent valuable monitors of the temperature and composition of the paleofluids from which they grew during burial to depths of hydrocarbon generation. Research on B in sediments has primarily focussed on the behavior of adsorbed-B and its variations as a function of T and pH. As temperatures exceed 100 degrees C, however, the distribution coefficient for adsorbed-B approaches 0. Therefore, under diagenetic conditions it is more important to understand the fractionation of B during substitution in the clay mineral lattice. There is a large increase in the amount of interlayer-B in I S during R1 ordering, when the layer charges cause partial collapse of smectite to form illite. Using a mannitol wash, followed by alkali cation saturation we were able to separate adsorbed, interlayer, and tetrahedral layer-B. Each population from different crystallographic sites had a different B-isotope ratio. Using this technique we will study the potential of B as a single-mineral geothermometer under low temperature conditions doc11763 none Rubin This investigator develops and applies mathematical techniques for the study of activity patterns in conductance-based neuronal network models incorporating features, such as continuous coupling, diffusive interactions, and heterogeneity in parameter values, that have largely been neglected in previous mathematical work on these systems. Many of the mathematical results relate to the derivation and subsequent analysis of subsystems of equations capturing dynamics on disparate time scales. One challenge in this endeavor is that the additional features considered prevent the application of known methods that could otherwise be used to reduce the subsystem sizes and thereby facilitate analysis. The particular activity patterns that are investigated are sustained, localized activity of cell populations in the thalamus involved in sleep rhythms and in tracking head direction; wave propagation, block, and reflection in inhomogeneous neuronal media such as branching, thickening, or damaged neurons; and periodic and chaotic oscillations in a heterogeneous population of respiratory pacemaker cells in the brain stem. While this work is motivated by particular neuronal systems, it provides new steps in directions with broad relevance. Thus, the results of this project yield insight into pattern formation and selection mechanisms that apply in specific neuronal contexts but that also constitute more generally occurring phenomena. Neuronal networks of the central nervous system can typically display multiple types of rhythmic activity, ranging from periodic bursts of synchronized oscillations to traveling waves of activity to more disorganized patterns. Many of these forms of activity appear to be relevant to fundamental neuronal processes. The overall goal of the investigator is to study mathematically the oscillatory population rhythms and wave propagation arising in certain models of neuronal networks, based on systems involved in such disparate tasks as navigation, respiration, and the generation of sleep rhythms. This work elucidates the mechanisms that allow these networks to support, and to modulate between, distinct activity patterns. These results lead to conclusions about the roles of various biophysical parameters in shaping network dynamics, with individual contributions teased apart in a way that may be quite difficult to achieve with a purely experimental approach. Such findings can then serve as guideposts for future biological and computational experiments doc11764 none R. Lahey and K. Jensen, RPI Two-phase turbulent flow occurs in many industrial processes including nuclear reactors, separation and washing, and many chemical and heat transfer applications. Prediction of this complex flow has been primarily based on extension of two-equation turbulent models developed for single phase turbulent flow. Although the two-equation models are effective for many industrial applications, their validity and accuracy requires more direct simulation and analysis. This proposal is on direct numerical simulation (DNS) of two phase turbulent flow using a combination of finite element method (FEM) and a level set (LS) approach. The flexibility of the FEM to map irregularly shaped interfaces will be used along with the volume-of-fluid (VOF) type approach to track the interface by solving an additional transport equations for the location and shape of the interface. To effectively capture and resolve the interface, particularly during bubble breakup and coalescence, extremely fine and adaptive grid structure is required. To this end, the proposal makes extensive use of the well established adaptive grid refinement algorithms developed at RPI over the years. The success of the proposed approach depends on the accuracy and efficient implementation of the method on massive parallel processing systems doc11765 none Verdery Chelcea This dissertation research project by a cultural anthropologist from the University of Michigan studies the role of houses in maintaining and creating kinship relations during and after state socialism. The student will compare the kinship relations of households in a neighborhood of Bucharest (Romania) whose houses were confiscated by the socialist state in with those of households who managed to avoid this tragic process. Using data from archival research and intensive interviews with about 125 persons, the student will test four hypotheses relating family property and genealogical memory; the timing of housing appropriation by the state and the stage of the family cycle; the authority of household heads and the appropriation experience; and the effects of restitution process on kinship solidarity and conflict. The project will advance our understanding of the impact of state policies on kinship networks; will extend our understanding of the impact of privatization and restitution on people s conceptions of property rights; and will provide valuable comparative data for other former socialist countries experiencing restitution of previously nationalized property. In addition the project adds to the training of a young social scientist, and advances our knowledge of this important region of the world doc11766 none gThe collared lizard (Crotaphytus collaris) lives on rocky outcrops in the Ozarks called glades. Suppression of forest fires has destroyed many glades and has transformed the surrounding forest from an open woodlands into a forest with a dense understory. By no populations of collared lizards existed within or nearby the Stegall Mountain Natural Area. Between and , we translocated three populations of collared lizards onto restored glades in this natural area. All three flourished, but we observed no animal dispersing between glades and no colonization of new glades up to . In the Missouri Department of Conservation began prescribed burns in this area. Under fire management, genetic interchanges began to occur between glades, 44 glades were colonized, and the population size increased over10-fold. We propose to (1) continue to document the lizards range expansion and characterize its genetic consequences, (2) quantify the amount of extinction and recolonization on glades under fire management, (3) measure the amount of genetic interchange among glade populations, and (4) monitor the genetic health of the populations. We rarely have the opportunity to observe drastic alterations in a species population structure. Here we can. Conservation biology places great importance upon interchange among local populations, and here we can directly test whether or not landscape-level management affects such interchanges. Another basic tool of conservation biology is effective population size, which can be used to monitor the rate of loss of genetic diversity and the rate of accumulation of potentially deleterious inbreeding. Because we know the initial state (the original three translocated populations), we can estimate effective sizes with unprecedented accuracy and compare our estimates to those based on the commonly used approximations. Such a comparison is long over due given the importance of effective size in conservation, and we are in a unique position to do it doc11767 none Donovan Landscapes (the collection of habitats in a given area) have been dramatically altered in North America in recent decades, and can affect the ecology and genetic structure of species in a variety of ways. The proposed research seeks to understand how landscape fragmentation affects demographic and genetic parameters of a migratory songbird, the black-throated blue warbler. Information on birth, death, immigration, and emigration rates will be collected on 9 forest patches in Vermont that vary in level of landscape fragmentation. Birds will be captured in nets, aged, sexed, and released, and then followed over the course of 2 years to estimate the vital rates across sites. Because fragmentation of continuous, natural landscapes is one of the most important factors contributing to the loss of biological diversity, it is a key issue in biological conservation. The question of how landscape fragmentation affects the demography and evolution of vertebrate populations is of extreme interest to land management agencies that are mandated to maintain viable populations of native species. The combined demographic and genetic approaches will yield insights into this important issue. Two graduate and 10 undergraduate students will gain educational and field training at the University of Vermont and Washington State University doc11768 none The main objective of the conference is to encourage intellectual discourse on emerging statistical topics that honor Wayne Fuller s forty plus years of contributions to statistics and fields of application. To do so, we have several goals for the conference: 1. To advance statistical knowledge in the areas of time series analysis, measurement error models, and survey sampling. To achieve this goal, we have invited a distinguished slate of statisticians who will present their work in three sessions. 2. To highlight the importance of applications and the impact that statistical developments have in other fields of inquiry. For this purpose, we have invited a set of researchers who will discuss the influence of Fuller s work in various areas, including dietary assessment, small area estimation, econometrics and economics. 3. To provide a friendly and open environment in which young statisticians can present their work and interact with senior statisticians. We plan to achieve this goal by inviting researchers in the early stages of their careers to present a talk in one of the invited sessions or in the special poster area that will be dedicated to young investigators. 4. To gather statisticians from all over the world for a two-day celebration of statistics in general and of Fuller in particular. A lively exchange of ideas and knowledge, a definition of future directions for research in these important areas, and a fostering of communication and collaboration among researchers at different stages of their careers and from different geographic locations are lasting results from the conference that we hope to produce doc11769 none Callaway The indirect effects of consumers in food webs are known to be important in natural ecological systems, and the consequences of disrupting natural food webs are sometimes disastrous. However, our knowledge of indirect effects has not been well integrated into invasive weed biological control theory and practice. Over 700 species on non-native insects have been introduced worldwide with the expectation that they will have negative direct effects on invasive weeds, resulting in indirect positive effects on native species. However, preliminary data indicate that even well-behaved biocontrol insects may have profound, negative indirect effects on native species. Research indicates that the larvae of gall fly insects introduced in the early s to control the highly invasive exotic plants, spotted knapweed (Centaurea maculosa and C. diffusa), may have substantial undesired indirect effects because they have become an abundant winter food source for deer mice. Deer mice are the primary vectors for the Sin Nombre hantavirus, which results in high mortality when contracted by humans. Results indicate that predation on gall fly larvae increases deer mouse populations and causes deer mice to seasonally aggregate in high-density knapweed patches where the mice persist on large numbers of gall fly larvae during the fall, winter and spring. Seasonal aggregations and increases in population densities of deer mice may increase the prevalence of hantavirus on the landscape - especially in areas adjacent to humans where knapweed reaches high densities. Field experiments will be conducted to test the hypothesis that gall flies increase the prevalence of hantavirus. Rapid execution of this research is critical to developing management guidelines to reduce the risk of hantavirus infection for people living in urban interface and rural settings in the West where spotted knapweed occurs. Moreover, the proposed research has the potential to provide extensive insights into how important the overlooked indirect effects of biocontrols may be to natural ecosystems, thereby introducing and extensive area of new research opportunities in both the fields of biocontrol and indirect effects in ecology doc11770 none Lyons Description: This award is to support a collaborative project between Dr. Jed Lyons and Dr. Anthony Reynolds, both in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, and Dr. Hanadi Salem, Department of Mechanical Engineering, the American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt. They plan to develop manufacturing technologies for structural metals for the transportation industry. Specifically, research will be conducted to develop a fundamental understanding of the effects of friction stir welding (FSW) on the superplastic forming (SPF) behavior and ambient temperature properties of Al-Cu-Li sheets. FSW is a new solid-state welding process. Its advantages relative to traditional fusion welding techniques are primarily attributable to the fact that no melting is required. SPF alloys are good candidates for FSW due to the need to maintain a dynamically recrystallized fine grain microstructure. Preliminary collaborative work by the PIs indicates that SPF behavior can be retained in superplastic Weldalite 049 and aluminum alloys after FSW. An understanding of the role of FSW process variables on the constituent properties and microstructure through the weld nugget and adjacent thermo-mechanically affected zones (TMAZ) is required in order to make the process commercially viable. Research techniques and instruments to be employed include an instrumented friction stir welding machine, thermo-mechanical testing facilities for measuring tensile properties and SPF behavior, computer vision technology including digital image correlation and microstructural characterization with scanning electron microscope (SEM), transmission electron microscope (TEM) and optical microscopy and x-ray spectroscopy analysis. Scope: The project supports collaboration between two teams of investigators to carry out an important research project. The US team will be responsible for determining and investigating the FSW process conditions and for making the welds. They will test the FSW process at various conditions of weld and with various weldalite alloys with variable copper and lithium contents and different thickness. Dr. Salem will, with the assistance of a US graduate student, run the SPF tests and perform TEM investigations. Dr. Salem will also direct one of her graduate students at AUC in completing the optical and SEM examinations for the same alloys. Using the resources at both the University of South Carolina and the American University in Cairo, this project contributes to the development of combined FSW SPF processes that enable the net-shape fabrication of complex multi-sheet structural components from custom blanks. The project will include two US scientists and one US graduate student who will gain experience in international cooperative research. The proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc11771 none David McMillan of Purdue University is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program to conduct research on photochemistry of complexes of late transition elements and DNA. The proposed research will use photochemical methods to gain understanding of binding of late transition metal porphyrin complexes to DNA and to devise methods to direct that binding. The research will also develop porphyrin and polypyridine complexes of late transition series elements as novel photosensitive probes for technologically important uses. Many late transition series complexes feature open coordination positions. The chemical flexibility engendered by such vacancies can be exploited to gain otherwise unattainable understanding of interactions between metallic species and DNA. Photochemical processes involving complexes of late transition metals with DNA have considerable potential for producing new agents for photodynamic therapy, as well as in clarifying factors influencing the binding of metallic species to DNA doc11772 none This project will investigate quantitative theories of backward visual masking; the project results will promote development of new experiments and theories of cognition and perception. Backward visual masking is used throughout cognitive and clinical psychology as a tool to interrupt various stages of cognitive processing. Because masking is used in virtually all areas of experimental psychology, it is important to understand how it works. Previous work has identified three general methods of masking that account for important aspects of experimental data. The project will use mathematical theorems and computer simulations to identify fundamental properties of systems that use these methods. These properties will be connected to existing data and to existing models of backward masking. The fundamental properties will also be used to generate predictions under new backward masking conditions. The project will test these predictions with new experiments that are able to compare alternative general methods of backward masking. An additional analysis will explore current mathematical models of backward visual masking to determine how these models behave relative to the general methods. This analysis will identify which part of a model s behavior is due to its use of a general method and which part is due to the specific attributes of that model. The project will provide a better understanding of the types of mechanisms that are involved in backward visual masking. Such understanding will allow experimentalists to develop more precise tests of cognitive systems and will allow modelers to develop more accurate theories of cognition and perception. In addition, the research project will provide information about backward masking that will be applicable to any situation where people interact with a rapidly changing world. Thus, results from the project will apply to situations where people are, for example, driving cars, reading text, flying planes, and working on computers doc11773 none What are the effects of money in state supreme court elections? Do these effects vary across selection systems and type of elections (incumbent-challenger versus open seat, primaries versus general)? Despite the fact that no area of political science has received greater attention than the study of elections, judicial elections, the means by which the most judges in the United States attain their positions, have been virtually ignored. This doctoral dissertation systematically analyzes and answers two central questions: 1) who contributes to state supreme court candidates, how much do they give, and to whom do they give? and 2) how do campaign contributions and expenditures affect the outcomes of state supreme court elections? The researcher examines these questions using all contested elections for state supreme courts between - in all states that require candidates for judicial office to file campaign finance reports. The researcher combines data to be collected for this project on campaign contributions and expenditures with a database on state supreme court elections collected by Melinda Gann Hall (SES- ) and Paul Brace (SES- ). This dissertation will not only answer the question of whether money affects state supreme court elections, but also how and under what circumstances. Further, by comparing the influence of money in state supreme court elections to elections for other offices as well as comparing partisan elections to nonpartisan elections and retention elections, this dissertation will enable us to gain a more complete picture of the factors influencing the electoral process doc11774 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor James M. Tanko, of the Department of Chemistry at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, is studying the principals and applications of radical ion rearrangements. Professor Tanko is exploring the structural features which govern the rate of rearrangement of radical anions derived from carbonyl compounds as well as the influence of solvent and counterion on these rearrangement reactions. Study of the oxidation potentials of cyclopropyl- and cyclobutylamines and determination of rate constants for the ring opening reactions of radical cations generated from their oxidation may shed light on the biological oxidations catalyzed by monoamine oxidase. Both electrochemical and laser flash photolysis methods will be used to generate the desired ions. Information regarding the driving force for ring opening will be obtained from appropriately constructed thermodynamic cycles, while theoretical methods will be used to provide information regarding the structure of radical ions and to estimate thermodynamic properties in situations where such information cannot be obtained experimentally. Molecules bearing both a net charge (either positive or negative) and an unpaired electron appear as key intermediates in many chemical and biological processes. Development of an understanding of the structure and dynamics of these so-called radical cations and anions is central to elucidation of the fundamental details of how such processes occur. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor James M. Tanko, of the Department of Chemistry at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, is carrying out studies of the preparation, structure, and reaction chemistry of radical anions and radical cations. Through a combination of experimental and theoretical approaches, Professor Tanko is shedding light on the nature of these elusive intermediates, addressing fundamental issues of organic reaction mechanism and leading to a deeper understanding of the function of biological catalysts such as monoamine oxidase doc11775 none Freericks This award supports a conference, Spintronics , to held August 9-11, , at Georgetown University. This conference will deal with novel aspects and possible applications of spin-polarized transport and spin dynamics in a wide range of materials, such as magnetic semiconductors, superconductors and carbon nanotubes. The feasibility of novel hybrid devices, including spin transistors, spin filters and memory devices, and their future technological impact will be the main focus of this meeting. Scientists with very diverse backgrounds will be encouraged to participate, with the goal to bring together expertise and ideas from different scientific communities and provide a broad view of the status and perspectives of spintronics research. This grant supports conference costs for young participants (graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty). %%% This award supports a conference, Spintronics , to held August 9-11, , at Georgetown University. This conference will deal with novel aspects and possible applications of spin-polarized transport and spin dynamics in a wide range of materials, such as magnetic semiconductors, superconductors and carbon nanotubes. The feasibility of novel hybrid devices, including spin transistors, spin filters and memory devices, and their future technological impact will be the main focus of this meeting. Scientists with very diverse backgrounds will be encouraged to participate, with the goal to bring together expertise and ideas from different scientific communities and provide a broad view of the status and perspectives of spintronics research. This grant supports conference costs for young participants (graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty doc11776 none Hydrogen-containing defects in semiconductors continue to be the subject of intense theoretical and experimental study because of their fascinating microscopic properties and the important role they play in determining the properties of electronic materials and devices. This individual investigator award will provide support for a project to investigate hydrogen-containing defects in Si. The project consists of several complementary thrusts for which recent advances make new studies attractive. The first concerns new opportunities for the study of H2 molecules in semiconductors by vibrational spectroscopy. Other studies are concerned with the structures, vibrational properties, and formation mechanisms of deep-level defects that are complexed with hydrogen. The primary goal of the project is to develop a fundamental understanding of hydrogen in semiconductors and its interactions with other defects and impurities. A variety of techniques will be employed, including vibrational spectroscopy, uniaxial stress, and electron irradiation of Si containing H2 molecules. This experimental research program provides an excellent means to train students in experimental semiconductor physics. The work focuses on important, current problems in semiconductor materials research and provides graduate and undergraduate students a solid foundation for successful careers in industrial research and development. %%% Hydrogen in semiconductors has been of interest for many years because of the important effect hydrogen can have on the electrical properties of device materials. For example, hydrogen is a frequent unintentional contaminant that can have deleterious effects on the controlled doping and reliability of semiconductor materials. Alternatively, hydrogen can have beneficial effects in low-cost materials that are highly defective. For example, hydrogen is intentionally introduced into solar-grade Si to increase the efficiency of solar cells. The mechanisms by which hydrogen passivates defects and participates in defect processes remain poorly understood. This individual investigator award will support a project having the primary goal developing a fundamental understanding of hydrogen in semiconductors and its interactions with other defects and impurities. This experimental research program provides an excellent means to train students in experimental semiconductor physics. The work focuses on important, current problems in semiconductor materials research and provides graduate and undergraduate students a solid foundation for successful careers in industrial research and development doc11777 none Hirschfeld Baran This dissertation research project by an anthropology student from the University of Michigan studies how children and adolescents learn about race in Belmonte, Bahia, Brazil. The project advances our understanding of the interactions between child development and the cultural environment in social category formation. The research will synthesize two lines of work: cognitive psychology s studies of child development and anthropology s work on the social and historical construction of racial classification and inequality. The research design includes participant observation in schools, extra-school social and family settings; semi-structured interviews with a sample of family members of focal children and adolescents; and a racial census with two different conditions to understand the relation between biological systems of categorization and social identification based on phenotype as a function of age. The information collected will shape anthropological theories of childhood and social categorization, and psychological notions of the universality of cognitive development. In addition the research advances our understanding of race relations in Brazil and contributes to the training of a young social scientist doc11778 none The purpose of this research is to understand the mechanisms responsible for dramatic fluctuations in the number of salamanders in subalpine wetlands in central Colorado. Boom and bust cycles are often observed in animal populations, but such cycles are poorly understood in amphibians. A combination of approaches including long-term monitoring of salamander reproduction and survival in natural populations, field experiments that manipulate food (aquatic invertebrates) and other resources, and laboratory studies will be used to study mechanisms that could lead to population cycles. These data will be used to construct mathematical models to determine which mechanisms are capable of producing long-term the fluctuations in population size observed in this amphibian. The decline of amphibians around the world is of great concern to ecologists, and it is important to be able to distinguish natural causes of change in amphibian populations from those related to human activities. Salamanders are the native top predators in subalpine wetlands and it is well documented that they play a key role in determining how many and which invertebrates coexist in the food web. This research is a first step towards understanding how cycles in the number of salamanders will affect the foodwebs and ultimately the functioning of these remote, pristine, ecosystems doc11779 none The theory of repeated games is a vital tool for understanding how groups overcome collective action problems. In such problems, decisions that are optimal for the individual may fail to be optimal for the group. So-called free rider problems manifest themselves, for example, in attempts to collude in oligopolistic industries, in attempts to achieve multilateral tariff reductions in trade negotiations, and in attempts to cooperate when group effort is required in voluntary participation problems. In repeated games, the use of intertemporal sanctions can be used to re-align individual incentives with collective incentives. It is well known that collectively optimal outcomes can be sustained in these cases if the participants are sufficiently patient. Unfortunately, in many cases the players are not patient. In these cases full cooperation often cannot be sustained. However, situations do exist in which the pattern of interaction in the game can be chosen to maximize the likelihood of collectively desirable outcomes. One example of this is found in the design of team projects in firms. A manager must choose the size and makeup of the team, given the characteristics of the pool of lower level managers at the firm. Once chosen, individual effort can be mutually enforced by repeated contact. Another example is in residential planning. Local spillovers between neighbors are common. Mowing the lawn, leaving one s porch light on, or volunteering to maintain communal gardens are examples of positive spillovers. A city planner who knows something about the aggregate population characteristics must choose among developers plans, each of which proposes a number and spatial arrangement of houses. Some plans may be more conducive to facilitating neighborly cooperation than others. This project examines the tradeoffs involved in determining which interaction pattern is optimal, and how the answer depends on the particulars of the environment. In the simplest type of such a problem, in each period every individual has a binary choice between a cooperative and an uncooperative or free-riding action. The project investigates how the size of the group and the degree of social connectivity within the group matters for achieving socially desirable outcomes. The project describes and examines two models of optimal interaction for repeated play. The first limits a planner s choice to group size. Randomly determined discount factors introduce unobserved differences in the population. A planner, knowing only the aggregate distribution of discount factors, chooses group size m to maximize expected average payoff to the group, given the anticipated strategic interaction within the group. The second model generalizes the first to allow the planner to determine, not only group size, but also the pattern of social linkage within the group. The planner s choice determines both the pattern of spillovers and the pattern of information flows. The present project also extends the investigation to analyze: (a) the effect of correlation in the types (discount factors) of individuals, particularly when congestion and crowding play a role; (b) the role of communication as a way of increasing social interaction in the optimal solution; and (c) the effect of complexity of equilibrium sanctions on the optimal pattern of interaction doc11780 none A program of laboratory experiments in gravitation is to be continued and expanded, in parallel with continued development of the cryogenic torsion pendulum as a general tool for research in gravitational physics. Much of this work will be done in collaboration with the gravitational physics group of Professor Paul Boynton at the University of Washington. Research to be conducted includes: Completion in the first year of a precision measurement of the gravitational constant G, with target accuracy of 15 ppm. Jointly with Professor Boynton s group, a test of the inverse square distance dependence of the gravitational force for mass separation on the order of 15 centimeters. Jointly with Boynton s group, tests of the equivalence principle over various distance ranges, for gravitational field sources which include laboratory masses, a nearby mountain, and the sun. These projects will be conducted in an underground laboratory that has been prepared with support from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in a former Nike missile bunker on an isolated environmental preserve near Richland, Washington. In conjunction with these projects, the performance of the cryogenic torsion pendulum will be progressively improved through development and refinement of seismic isolation, tilt control, temperature control, and fiber choice and preparation techniques. The cryogenic torsion pendulum being developed is of potential value to any research in gravitation or other fields which requires the measurement of extremely small slowly varying forces. This project provides research experience and training in a variety of widely applicable technologies, to undergraduate and graduate students as well as to a postdoctoral researcher doc11781 none Marcus Chung This dissertation research project by a cultural anthropology student examines how recent attempts in South Korea to establish and promote the growth of venture capital industry have been shaped by salient Korean cultural institutions. The project will study risk management in the venture capital industry, defined as firms that fund technology-intensive enterprises characterized by high risk with the potential for high return, as affected by traditional Korean values of the primacy of social relations over finance; the quality of human relations; and the quality of emotional reactions. Prior to the establishment of a venture capital industry in South Korea, entrepreneurs usually relied solely on their own savings, often from informal credit associations, gifts and loans from family and friends, and sometimes credit from lending institutions, to finance their business projects. Many of the strategies used to understand and minimize the risk of capital loss involved the cultivation of culturally specific social bonds. Using a variety of qualitative methods, this project will describe and assess the degree to which these culturally informed social practices inform venture capital investment in four firms: a foreign venture capital company; a domestic venture capital company; a start-up communication company seeking funding; and a more traditional rotating credit association. Hypotheses relating the specifically Korean nature of transactions to the level of foreign involvement in the relationship will be tested. The new knowledge created by this project will help locate the intersection between cultural and capitalistic frameworks in this domain of business. By understanding Korean influences on venture capital investment, we will further our understanding of the influence of US culture on similar business. In addition, the research advances our knowledge of this important region of the world, and contributes to the training of a young social scientist doc11782 none Professor Matthew B. Zimmt, of the Department of Chemistry at Brown University, is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his studies of functional architectures for electron transfer in solution and at electrodes. A molecular scaffold will hold an electron donor and acceptor at a fixed distance and orientation without providing significant electronic coupling. Function will be introduced into this test bridge by attaching materials of interest to the scaffold, directly between the donor and acceptor. The donor acceptor coupling provided by these molecular test elements will be determined through measurement and analysis of photoinduced electron transfer rate constants. A variety of test elements, representing structures found in biological and technological electron transfer systems, will be examined. Analogous introduction of function at electrode surfaces will also be explored, through the design, synthesis, and analysis of molecules which bind specifically to electrode surfaces. Electron transfer events occur in many important processes in chemistry and biology as well as in technological applications. Beyond their ubiquity, electron transfer reactions are of fundamental interest for their unique structural, thermodynamic, and medium dependence. The nature of the material lying between the electron donor and the electron acceptor exerts a considerable influence on the dynamics of the electron transfer event. The nuclear and electronic structures of the intervening material determine the nature of the transfer event, which may involve a hop into bound states of the material (conduction) or tunneling through virtual states of the material. By designing materials whose structure is susceptible to specific external stimuli and with the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Matthew B. Zimmt, of the Department of Chemistry at Brown University, is exploring the possibility of rationally controlling the nature and dynamics of electron transfer processes doc11783 none James E Keesling and Alexander N Dranishnikov This award provides partial support for active research mathematicians with limited means of support to attend and participate in the Special Year in Topology and Dynamical systems at the Univeristy of Florida, - . The main speakers are John Milnor who will give the Third Ulam Colloquium during the year. Sergei Novikov will give the Third Erdos Colloquium talk during the year. In addition the following people have agreed to give series of talks in their fields of expertise: Mladen Bestvina, Steve Ferry, John Franks, Michael Gromov, Konstantin Mischaikow, Michal Misiurewicz, De Witt Sumners, and Lai Sang Young. Further information is available at the following website which will be regularly updated http: www.math.ufl.edu ~jek SpecialYear.htm doc11784 none Fallahi Description: This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. Behrooz Fallahi and Dr. Mohamed Seif, both in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, Illinois, and Dr. Said Megahed, Mechanical Design and Production Department, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt. They plan to study the dynamics and control of a new class of adaptive Tuned Vibration Absorber (TVA: variable effective inertia absorber). The approach has two facets: spectral analysis of the excitation and online tuning of the absorber. The spectral analysis reveals the frequency content of the excitation. The online tuning uses the frequency content of the excitation to reposition a moving mass for tonal vibration suppression. The analytical work, involving linearization of equations and study of its effect, will be supplemented by experimental study to assess the effectiveness of the proposed tonal tuning method. The novelty of the method is that the absorber tuning is done online for tonal vibration suppression, that moving a secondary mass changes absorber resonant frequency, and that the dynamic equation is derived with time dependent control parameter. Scope: The proposed technique may be widely implemented in industrial cases such as civic structures, airplane wings, submarine hulls, and helicopter cabins. The stability of the vibration suppression device is always guaranteed. The US and Egyptian collaborator have strong records of research and experience in mechanical dynamic systems, vibrations and control, and application to robotics and automating systems. The two sides complement each other, as Dr. Megahed is particularly experienced in modeling and simulation, while the US team is particularly strong in the planning and execution of the experiments and in the analysis of the data. The proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc11785 none Recent research has identified several large families of prokaryotic global regulators. Results from the PI s laboratory have shown that members of the LysR, two-component, and MerR families of transcriptional regulatory proteins regulate Bradyrhizobium japonicum nod gene expression. Regulation of nod gene expression in B. japonicum may represent an interesting and useful model system in which to explore the interactions between these global regulatory systems. The focus of this project is the MerR orthologue, NolA. Recent results show that this protein is a central player in the repression of nod gene expression in response to a variety of novel signal molecules. NolA mediates its repressive effects by induction of NodD2, which represses nod gene expression. Results from the PI s laboratory indicate that NolA expression is responsive to the level of intracellular, tetrameric Nod signal produced in B. japonicum. Therefore, NolA is a component of a unique feedback, regulatory loop that controls nod gene expression. Nol1A expression is induced by a cell density factor (CDF, a glycosylated flavonoid) and a plant-produced signal that is destroyed by chitinase treatment. The objectives of this research project are to 1. confirm the chemical structure of the CDF, explore its activity, and survey other bacteria for the presence of such a novel, quorum sensing molecule; 2. identify other genes involved in NolA action using a combination of genomic and mutagenic approaches and 3. isolate and chemically characterize the chitin-like plant inducer of nolA expression. These studies should clarify the role of NolA in nod gene expression. The results obtained, when added to other on-going research, should give a more complete picture of nod gene expression in B. japonicum and may serve as a paradigm for other complex regulatory systems where global regulatory networks impinge on the expression of a single operon. The B. japonicum-soybean symbiosis is an important model system for exploring the cell signaling pathways between host and symbiont. The ultimate goal of this work is a clearer understanding of the integration of regulatory mechanisms involved in the global regulation of cellular metabolism doc11786 none One of the most common artifacts at many archaeological sites across the world are tools, ornaments and weapons made from a volcanic glass called obsidian. This versatile material was highly prized by ancient and prehistoric peoples due to its fracturing properties, its lusterous appearance and its sharp cutting edge. When properly fractured, raw obsidian blocks can be flaked into a variety of tool forms. An additional property of obsidian that makes it valuable to archaeologists is the fact that the fresh surfaces of a newly flaked obsidian tool interact with water in the atmosphere and ground, producing a hydration rim , the thickness of which is dependent on time. In , a USGS geologist, Irving Friedman, developed a method of dating obsidian artifacts by measuring the width of the thin hydrated rims (around .002 to .01 mm thick) with an optical microscope. Dr. Friedman named his technique obsidian hydration dating or OHD. Unfortunately, despite the promise of the method to produce inexpensive and accurate dates, it has failed far more often than it has succeeded. In , NSF awarded a grant to a team of researchers at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory who had done a preliminary reassessment of OHD using secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) to precisely measure the concentration of hydrogen in the hydrated rim as a function of depth from the surface. This technique provides not only precise measurement of the width of the interaction rim, but data on the glass-water chemistry as well. During the three years of NSF support, the team carried out further research on both obsidian that was experimentally hydrated under controlled laboratory conditions and independently dated archaeological specimens (mainly from Mesoamerica). As part of the laboratory work, the team developed a new type of reaction vessel system for performing in-laboratory hydration of fresh samples, and is currently under patent review. Thus far, the team s has made a number of crucial observations and discoveries. First, they demonstrated that optical measurement is inherently imprecise and cannot be used for accurate dating. Second, they showed that the rate equations used in traditional obsidian dating are incorrect, as the rate of hydration is not constant with time, but rather varies with age. Third, they noted that the glass is absorbing only hydrogen and not the whole water molecule as previously thought, indicating that the mechanics of the hydrogenation process are far more complex than previously assumed, requiring significant re-evaluation of glass-water interaction theory. Fourth, the team was able to demonstrate that using the shape and depth of the hydrogen concentration profile, a series of artifacts from the Chalco, Mexico site could be precisely and accurately dated. However, this method requires at least one independently dated artifact from any particular site for calibration. Fifth, SIMS analysis suggests that the hydrogen isotope ratios of the rim may preserve information on the average temperature of hydration, which is a crucial factor controlling hydration rates. If confirmed, this would provide a means of constraining hydration temperature, and would allow obsidian dating to be a completely independent method. Finally, the results of this study suggest that the long-term durability of nuclear waste glass forms should be re-evaluated, as previous breakdown models may be based on flawed assumptions. The research team has been awarded an additional three years support to continue this exciting and important research. Objectives of the project for the next three years include: 1) to understand the interaction chemistry and structure of the hydrogenation zone; 2) refine the hydration model to make it a fully independent and robust dating method; 3) determine if temperature data can be extracted from obsidian artifacts; and 4) test the method at various archaeological sites. To accomplish these goals, the team will expand their research to Old World obsidian (Melian obsidian from Greece) and have already established ties with a team of Greek archaeologists (University of the Aegean) to obtain the necessary samples. This makes this project truly international in scope benefiting not only U.S. scientists in multiple disciplines (e.g. archaeology, geology, chemistry, physics, materials science), but scientists throughout the world doc11787 none All plants need to acquire at least 15 elements from their environment including carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulphur. In addition to these element resources, plants also require light and water. Although the relative requirement for these resources by plants remains relatively constant, their relative availability in the environment can vary drastically in both space and time. Plants must therefore adjust to this variability in resource availability to maintain a balanced nutrition. The relative success of various species in making this adjustment will in part determine the productivity of the ecosystem, the composition of the plant community, the species diversity, the rates of nutrient cycling, and the rate of CO2 storage or loss. In this grant, a theoretical foundation is established for understanding the complex interactions among multiple resources and the consequences of these interactions on species, on communities of plants, and on ecosystem processes like nutrient cycling and carbon sequestration. The theory is then tested using data from the Arctic Tundra Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site in northern Alaska doc11788 none The researh project by Dr. Robin McCarley of Louisiana State University entitled Stabilized Molecular Assemblies is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program. The goal of the research is to control the 2-dimensional polymerization of dendrimer assemblies and then to utilize the macromolecule as a container for specific guest molecules, which can be released through electron-transfer chemistry. The investigator will study the macromolecule formation as well as, the trapping and release properties of the oligomers. A key objective is the development of selective traps with reversible release properties. This research represents an extension of the investigator s prior work, while also branching out into new fields of exploration. The ability to control the isolation, storage and release of small molecules has many potential applications with potential for societal impact. These polymerized dendrimers may have utility for the preconcentration of specific target molecules, as nanoscopic sensors, as new materials and for drug delivery. A thorough and fundamental study of the chemistry and performance of these materials is significant doc11789 none This project examines the role that accessory gland proteins play in fertilization, particularly in the context of gametic competition. It is known that these proteins play a pivotal role in sperm success, because Drosophila (fruit flies) mutants that lack the ability to produce accessory gland proteins have much reduced fertility. These mutants also exhibit characteristics that suggest that accessory gland proteins are particularly important in the sequestration and storage of sperm by females. In insects, normal females may store sperm from a single mating for several weeks, an attribute that is particularly important for sparsely distributed animals. Genomic methods are being employed to identify all of the genes encoding accessory gland proteins, and comparison of the DNA sequences of related species will allow identification of which parts of the molecules are evolving most rapidly. In addition within-species polymorphism in the Acp genes will be assessed and tested for its association with variation in gametic competitive ability. This project is a renewal and extension of a project that received prior support from NSF, and it has served as a vehicle for training and education of many students. Seven undergraduates have worked in the laboratory directly on this project, and 3 have become co-authors on publications. Postdoctoral fellow Alberto Civetta secured a faculty position at the University of Manitoba on the basis of the work he did on the project. In the coming years, student involvement will continue to be vital. The method of constructing a cDNA library and aligning multiple random genes of species X with known sequences of species Y, devised under the past NSF support, has received widespread attention as a means to exhaustively identify genes expressed in specific tissues and simultaneously to identify those that are undergoing the most rapid turnover doc11790 none Dr. Arthur J. Ashe, III, Department of Chemistry, University of Michigan, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Program of the Chemistry Division for the study of heteroaromatic compounds involving group 13 and 15 elements, their use as ligands to form zirconium complexes, and the development of these complexes as olefin polymerization catalysts. Previous research has demonstrated that boratabenzene zirconium complexes can serve as homogeneous catalysts for the polymerization of olefins. Building on this result and by analogy to ansametallocenes that are known to be active catalysts, a series of metal complexes containing heteroaromatic ligands will be designed with the goal of obtaining highly active and stereospecific olefin polymerization catalysts. Specifically, new oxaborolides, thiaborolides and azaborolides will be synthesized. These compounds along with boratabenzenes, which are bridged through boron or carbon-(2), will be used as ligands to form Group 4 metal complexes, which will be evaluated as polymerization catalysts. Additionally, the conversion of aminoboranediyl bridged zirconocenes to highly active and stereoselective Ziegler-Natta catalysts will be studied. Transition metal complexes promote very selective catalytic and stoichiometric transformations of organic compounds. Much of the unique reactivity at the metal center is a reflection of the density of electrons surrounding the metal and this electron density can be controlled by adjusting the groups that are attached to the metal. A very common group contains a ring of carbon-hydrogen units in what is called an aromatic arrangement. In this project a series of metal complexes will be prepared in which an aromatic group composed of carbon-hydrogen and boron species is attached to a metal. This will permit the electron density about the metal to be carefully adjusted in order to promote specific chemical and catalytic behavior and will set the ground work both to understand existing processes and to rationally design new catalysts doc11791 none This is a workshop proposal in biological computation and data with an emphasis on new methods in single cell and multi-cell information processing, including hardware and systems aspects. The workshop is interdisciplinary, involving engineers, neuroscientists, cell biologists, computer scientists, chemists, and material scientists doc11792 none A new multivariable measurement approach to correlate melt phase separation with microscale and nanoscale structural organization in crystal-amorphous polymer blends with technologically useful properties is proposed. Significant improvements in technologies that govern new products by the polymer industry depend on the ability to correlate polymer structure resulting from melt phase separation, crystallization and processing conditions with desired properties. For potential biological applications, the microscale and nanoscale blend morphology can determine the overall function of the tissue scaffold or drug delivery device. However, a rapid and convenient method for characterizing and correlating the nanoscale and microscale morphology simultaneously has not been developed. In the proposed study, simultaneous small-angle light scattering (SALS) differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) will be used to measure the microscale structure and averaged nanoscale quantities such as the fraction of crystallized material within the superstructures. A new SALS apparatus, which will allow one to perform scattering crystallization, will be constructed. Two blend systems, polyethylene oxide(PEO) polyenaminonitrile (PEAN) and poly(caprolactone) (PCL) poly(D, L-lactic acid) (PDLA) will be studied. PEAN is a novel amorphous polymer with excellent thermal stability and good mechanical properties for load bearing polymer film application in the aerospace and automotive industries. PCL PDLA blends have important potential biomedical uses in the production of tissue scaffolds and drug delivery devices. Several parameters that will be used to determine the microscale and nanoscale morphology, crystallization kinetics, phase behavior and the enthalpy changes of the thermal transitions will obtained in one combined measurement. Stress-strain measurements will be performed on selected PEO PEAN and PCL PDLA blends to detect useful correlation between the blend morphology and mechanical properties (specifically the stress-strain behavior, Young s modulus, tensile strength, toughness and elongation at break). In collaboration with Rena Bizios (Department of Biomedical Engineering at Rennselaer), novel systematic studies will be conducted to investigate whether control of the properties of PDLA rich regions in PCL PDLA blends by varying the phase separation process will in turn allow us to tailor their biological response including for example cell adhesion properties and the evolution of cells to functional tissue. %%% Comprehensive predictive structure-property of structure-biofunction models for polymer blends can be developed if the range of length scales probed by the proposed experiments can provide sufficient information for this purpose. If these predictive models and the proposed multivariable measurement method are integrated into the research and development process, a significant decrease in the time and effort for realizing the potential benefits of new biostable, biomedical and ecological polymer products can be made. This can help the US polymer industry gain an edge in the highly competitive mature global commodity market for new polymer products. With regard to biological applications, the used of simple, low cost biodegradable substrated for producing functional tissues could be a significant first step to alleviate the acute donor shortages for implants in the future. This SGER grant would make it possible to determine if the proposed multivariable measurement method can provide a rapid and convenient means for developing a fundamental understanding of structure-property relationships in polymer blends doc11793 none Rhoades Van De Berg Tourism is one of the world s major industries, and the impact of this industry upon local cultures is an enduring field of study. This dissertation research involves an anthropology student from the University of Georgia studying the role of river-based tourism (whitewater rafting) in local communities in Nepal. The student will study rafting company owners, river guides, and local river villages as well as the rafting tourism clients. The study will elicit the major costs and benefits of the river tourism industry from each of these groups of stakeholders; assess the level of agreement about the social, environmental and economic costs and benefits within and between each group using consensus analysis; and compare the economic contributions made by clients of river tourism along two rivers, one of shorter and one of longer trip duration. The research will advance our understanding of the role of river tourism in the subsistence of local villagers and gather data to help assess the impact of planned changes in the river environment. In addition it will advance the anthropological methodology of consensus analysis, a way of analyzing the knowledge of a group of persons about a defined topic; will contribute to the training of a young social scientist, and advance our understanding of this important region of the world doc11794 none Berlin This Americas Program award will provide support for dissertation research by Mr. George E. Luber, under the direction of Dr. Elois A. Berlin of the University of Georgia. Mr. Luber will work in Mexico with Dr. Austraberta Nazar Beutelspacher at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, in Chiapas. They will study the biological pathology and the cultural construction of illness by carrying out a comparative, cross-cultural study of two folk illnesses. Specifically, this thesis dissertation research will investigate two folk illnesses, the Tzeltal Mayan cha lam tsots and the Mixe metsk kuaay, which represent regional variations of cultural representations of potentially fatal illnesses, primarily affecting children, found in several Mesoamerican cultures. The research will involve a combination of ethnographic, clinical epidemiological and nutritional anthropometric methods to address a critical gap in the biocultural study of ethnomedical systems by clarifying the role that biology and culture each play in the identification and cultural construction of disease in two Mesoamerican linguistic groups. By working with researchers at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, this study will increase understanding of and improve efforts to develop culturally-appropriate and effective treatments for these and other ethnomedical conditions often ignored and untreated by local doctors doc11795 none This award provides partial support for the 6th Advanced Seminar on Paleodietary Research, to be held on the campus of the Univ. of California, Santa Cruz in September .The Advanced Seminars have been the premier forum for high-level discussion among anthropologists, geochemists, paleobiologists, and ecosystem scientists about the ways that fossil chemistry can be used to reconstruct the ecology, physiology, and migration patterns of humans and other mammals. Approximately 30 seminar participants will explore the diverse chemical approaches to hominid paleobiology. The list ranges from senior scientists to graduate students and from archaeologists to chemists, including speakers from 8 nations. The speakers will examine the following general topics: 1) how biological isotope signals are influenced by the effects of growth dynamics and post-mortem alteration, 2) how isotopes can be used to study the scale and pattern of human mobility, 3) new isotopic tools for studying hominid diets and habitat use, and 4) how physiology and nutritional status are reflected in the isotope composition of fossils. For example, several speakers will focus on the ecology and diet of australopithecines that are several million years old, determining the extent to which these relatives of modern humans consumed meat versus plants. Another set of speakers will focus on the diets and food processing technologies of modern humans over the past few thousand years. A number of speakers will examine shifts in human migration patterns and nutritional status, looking at the interplay between climate and cultural change as causal agents. As has been the case with all of previous seminars, we will publish a set of papers resulting from the presentations, preferably as a special issue of an archaeological journal. The publication will summarize important advances, making results available in a centralized format to both specialists and non-specialists. If the past is any guide, the chemical approaches to human and animal ecology, biogeochemistry, and environmental reconstruction explored in the publication will extend to workers in many other fields. For the past 30 years, anthropologists and archaeologists using chemical methods have been blazing a trail, a trail that has recently been picked up by wildlife biologists, terrestrial paleoclimatologists and global change researchers. The 6th Advanced Seminar on Paleodietary Research should continue this tradition doc11796 none Under the direction of Dr. Clark Erickson, Ms. Melissa Vogel will collect and analyze data for her doctoral dissertation. She will conduct archaeological excavations and continue mapping at the site of Cerro la Cruz on the north coast of Peru. Ms. Vogel s research will examine the relationship between architecture and sociopolitical change, through a diachronic analysis of the expansion and modification of Cerro La Cruz, a hillside walled settlement on the north coast of Peru. Supplementary data such as ceramics will provide indicators of cultural affiliation, while botanical remains and soil samples will be analyzed for indications of dietary or environmental changes. These various lines of evidence will be combined to reconstruct the events which occurred at Cerro La Cruz. For the archaeology of the Andes, this project will provide a method for testing and revising current models of sociopolitical organization during the late Middle Horizon (AD600- ), a time of great social and political change in the region. These periods of cultural transition are important for understanding the development of human societies. From a historic or prehistoric perspective, archaeology can explore the ways in which people have adapted to fluctuating social and political conditions. The built environment is an essential focus of anthropological research, especially for understanding architecture and the use of space as it reflects and shapes social life. Changes in architectural form and style are often taken as indices of societal change. Some styles of household architecture have been shown ethnographically to reference ethnicity or other aspects of community identity, while the enlargement of public buildings or temples may mark the accession of a new ruler. In this project, the relationship between architectural change and social life can be investigated at one site, during a period that is thought to involve widespread social and political upheaval. Rather than the traditional top-down approach of examining political relations from the perspective of those in power, this study will emphasize the perspective of local people in their interactions with an outside political entity. A thorough spatial analysis of the expansion and modification of Cerro La Cruz as a possible manifestation of sociopolitical change will provide a critical test of earlier models of Andean political organization. From the perspective of the social sciences, the results of this case study will contribute to our understanding of the catalysts for culture change and how local people adapt during periods of transition. Ms. Vogel s research will increase our knowledge of a poorly understood period in Peruvian prehistory and will also contribute to the training of a promising young scientist doc11797 none Dove McElwee The impact of native groups on tropical forests is not well understood. In some cases, analysts feel that traditional societies have a benign conservationist effect on the forest, in others, that they exploit and degrade the forest with no thought on future productivity. This project involves the dissertation research of a Forestry Environmental Studies and Anthropology student from Yale University. The student will analyze the effects of ethnicity, migration and land tenure on forest use in Vietnam through ethnographic fieldwork using participant observation, household surveys, mapping and analysis of extant records. The hypotheses to be tested are that ethnicity, migration and land tenure play a role in how different user groups manage the forest. Three different ethnic groups will be studied: indigenous Chut, in-migrant and longer-term Vietnamese, and in-migrant Muong. The new knowledge created by this project will advance our understanding of how multi-ethnic societies can manage a scarce resource, a timely question in the contemporary world. In addition the project contributes to the training of a young social scientist, and increases our knowledge of this important region of the world doc11798 none Control theory witnessed explosive growth in the latter half of the 20th century. The field matured into an elegant and rigorous scientific discipline as a result of developments in linear quadratic optimal control, geometric structure theory, robustness analysis and synthesis, H-infinity and L1 optimal control. The invited speakers include many pioneering researchers who created or contributed to, some of the above fields. The workshop will provide the opportunity for this outstanding group of system and control scientists to assemble and discuss the status of the field. Its impact on the course of this discipline cannot be overstated. For this reason we plan to assemble the papers presented at the Workshop in book form doc11799 none Hoppensteadt The investigator and his colleague study the relation between bifurcations in neural dynamics and electrophysiological features of neurons. There is growing understanding of the role of bifurcations in neuron dynamics. Indeed, knowledge of all bifurcations in a neuron model can explain some features of neuron activity, such as the existence of oscillatory potentials, synchronization, bursting, excitability, etc., without knowing electrophysiological details. However, there is little understanding of the relationship between electrophysiology and bifurcations in neural dynamics. For example, why do certain ionic currents or combinations of them result in an Andronov-Hopf bifurcation but not a saddle-node on limit cycle bifurcation? (These two types of bifurcations describe Hodgkin s classification of excitable neurons.) Over 100 different kinds of recognizable bifurcations result in bursting patterns of activity. A key question is whether or not one can determine for a given type of bursting activity what combinations of ionic currents must (or must not) be involved. The investigator and his colleague introduce here a notion of minimal electrophysiological models classified by voltage gated, second messenger gated, and variable Nernst potentials. They map this classification onto the existing classification of bifurcation mechanisms in neuron dynamics. This yields a deeper understanding of nonlinear dynamics of electrophysiological systems. How does a brain encode and process information? Mathematics has played an important role in studies of this problem to date by creating methods for analyzing results obtained by life science and medical researchers. There is a well-developed electrophysiological theory of how neural tissue can sustain and propagate electrical activity using ionic currents. At the same time there is an emerging mathematical theory based on canonical models of bifurcations, which are observable changes in a biological preparation in response to stimulation. This project brings these two lines of inquiry together by classifying dynamical systems (mathematical structures) in terms that are consistent with electrophysiology. The result is a deeper understanding of nonlinear phenomena in electrophysiological systems doc11800 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will build a small form factor silicon chip antenna for radio frequency identification (RFID) applications in smart tags. A new high-performance, low cost, small size silicon chip antenna, fabricated by wafer batch processing, will be combined with a standard, passive (no battery) RFID chip to form a low cost, high-performance RFID tag of small dimensions. The antenna and the RFID chip are stacked directly on top of each other. Phase I used a simplified process and scaled up structures. In Phase II the process will be optimized, devices with the intended dimensions will be used, and the antenna chip and the RFID chip will be stacked. Passive RFID systems are used in applications such as object tagging, asset management, hazardous materials tracking, and tracking of important documents. Existing RFID technology is limited by the need for large transponder antennas (~ 1 inch by 2 inch minimum) and costly multi-component assembly. The silicon wafer batch processed antenna chip technology will produce millimeter-scale smart tags (programmable replacement for bar codes), enabling products for large commercial markets doc11801 none Fenical Description: This award is for support of a collaborative research between Dr. William Fenical, Marine Research Division, University of California at San Diego, San Diego, California and Dr. Diaa Youssef, Department of Pharamcognosy, Suez Canal University, Ismailia, Egypt The two plan a series of expeditions and research seminars within Egypt and research visits of the Egyptian scientist to Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. The purpose is to expand our knowledge of the sources, types and reactivities of the defensive molecules produced by Red Sea invertebrates, and to explore the natural functions of these molecules in defensive adaptations. The goal is to explore the natural products chemistry and chemical ecology of these marine invertebrates, principally gorgonian and alcyonacean corals, sponges and encrusting ascidians. Scope: This award will allow a team of US scientists to collaborate with Egyptian scientists in a research project to study an area that is not well understood. The interaction should be mutually beneficial. The project will provide Fenical s group access to a new research site, and will provide them international exposure. This exposure would be particularly valuable for graduate students. It will benefit Youssef s group by providing them exposure to one of the leading natural products chemistry groups in the world, by the advanced training, and by the provided doc11802 none This project develops and implements a means of testing recent theories of current account and exchange rate determination. Recent years have witnessed a significant shift in international macroeconomic theory, with the development of an approach that combines the nominal rigidities essential to evaluating monetary policy, along with the analytical rigor of intertemporal microeconomic foundations. Widely known as the New Open Economy Macroeconomics, these models offer greater insight into sources of current account and exchange rate fluctuations, and permit a means to judge their welfare implications. This analytical approach might eventually provide a rigorous framework for analyzing macroeconomic policy, and thereby replace the more traditional Keynesian models that have long been useful but flawed workhorses for policy makers. While the theoretical literature on New Open Economy Macroeconomics has proliferated, the empirical literature has lagged far behind. The econometric techniques used for previous generations of international models cannot accommodate the more complex models of the new generation. Without empirical testing, it is difficult to know which of the many versions considered in the theoretical literature is preferable, or if the general approach is accurate enough to eventually be used for policy analysis. This project proposes and implements an empirical methodology that could facilitate the development of an empirical literature in the New Open Economy Macroeconomics. The research estimates by maximum likelihood a series of structural general equilibrium models of open economies. The research also develops and estimates an unrestricted counterpart model, so that a comparison of likelihood values can indicate if the data are generally consistent with the restrictions implied by the theory. Further, horseraces between competing theoretical models can help guide the direction of future theoretical work. Preliminary work by the investigator has tested the methodology on a benchmark open economy model with wage and price stickiness. Results are surprisingly supportive of the New Open Economy approach, in that a likelihood ratio test is unable to reject the theoretical restrictions implied by the model for two of three countries considered. Nominal rigidities appear to be an essential element in this success, since a version that assumes no such rigidities is rejected strongly for all three countries. However, the presence of rigidities is more important for explaining some variables in the data set than others. Finally, the estimated model offers some additional insight into the source of fluctuations in real and nominal exchange rates, finding a larger role for monetary policy than was uncovered in past studies. Further work is needed to apply the methodology to a wider variety of models proposed in the burgeoning theoretical literature doc11803 none The major goal of the FASEB summer research conference entitled Transport ATPases: From Genomics to Mechanism is to bring together about 150 scientists throughout the world working on transport ATPases in order to share new information and ideas about this increasingly important area. Specifically, this conference, via about 50 talks, 100 posters, and both informal and organized discussions, will disseminate new information about transport ATPases ranging from genomics to mechanism as implied by the title. The conference includes 7 session with topics as follows: l) Genomics of transport ATPases; 2) P-type ATPases I (Calcium ATPases); 3) P-type ATPases II (proton, proton potassium, and sodium potassium ATPases); 4) F-type ATPases; 5) V-type ATPases; 6) ABC transporters; and 7) new, or relatively unique, ATPase-dependent transporters or channels. This is the only established conference in the world focused entirely on transport ATPases. The new information that will be discussed at this meeting is directly relevant to how a wide variety of ions, metabolites, and drugs move across biological membranes of animals, plants, and bacteria, and how the energy of ATP hydrolysis is coupled to this movement. This conference will capitalize on a number of recent achievements including the completion of the sequencing of the human genome, the resolution of several transport ATPase structures at atomic resolution, and the discovery of several new transport ATPases of considerable significance doc11804 none The software package SLEDGE (Sturm-Liouville Estimates Determined by Global Error-control) is currently the only Sturm- Liouville code that can compute approximations to the singular spectral function of singular problems having a simple continuous spectrum. The present research will greatly reduce the amount of computation required, and thereby the computer time, by making use of a new real-variable formula for the spectral function. The new formula requires only that the zeros of the one solution that comes into the expansion formula, and its quasi-derivative at these zeros, be computed. The new code produced will be able to handle the following two cases of singular Sturm-Liouville problems having simple spectrum: (1) left endpoint regular and right endpoint OSC-NONOSC with finite cut-off value and (2) left endpoint of NONOSC type (Limit Circle or Limit Point) and a Regular Singular Point and right endpoint OSC-NONOSC with finite cut-off value. The continuing development of software for Sturm-Liouville problems to be done under this project will yield much more rapid routines for the spectral density functions for Sturm-Liouville problems that have a continuous spectrum. The existence of such a rapid computational capability is bound to stimulate activity and aid research in a wide range of disciplines where such problems arise: (1) Problems of the above type frequently arise in the Schroedinger wave mechanics which physicists developed to study the nature of atoms and atomic particles. (2) Similarly, in the study of more complicated molecules quantum chemists make use of quantum mechanical theory to describe the nature of energy exchange in molecules. (3) In the area of ocean dynamics the theory of acoustic waves in the ocean gives rise for some very interesting applications of Sturm-Liouville problems. (4) Certain types of nozzles for spraying water involve fluid flow problems for high speed jets from the nozzle which involve the above type of Sturm-Liouville problem over a finite range. In addition to a wide variety of applications in disciplines outside of mathematics, the current research can also be expected to stimulate the activity of pure and applied mathematicians and theoretical physicists who work on various related topics such as Inverse Spectral Theory (the attempt to reconstruct potential functions from scattering data), Resonance Problems in quantum theory (the problems of identifying and modelling positive energy bound states), and Periodic Potentials and Band Spectra which arise in the theory of crystals. The ability to run spectral function calculations quickly on small to medium size computers will greatly aid in the teaching and training of mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists interested in the theoretical and computational aspects of Sturm-Liouville problems and their applications doc11805 none Understanding the behavior of animals often requires knowledge of how individuals make decisions. This requires understanding the kinds of information animals possess about their environment. The proposed research will study decision-making in socially feeding starlings by examining how individuals acquire and use information obtained from other foragers. This information is known as public information and its existence and use can provide an important benefit to individuals in social aggregations. This work will test hypotheses regarding factors that affect the use of public information and evaluate how individuals combine public information with their own personal sampling information to estimate the quality of food patches. There are three potential broader implications of the proposed work. First, public information use appears to be widespread in several different contexts, including foraging, mate choice, habitat selection, and sequential assessment of opponents. Thus, a better understanding of how individuals acquire and use public information should allows greater understanding of a potentially widespread general benefit of sociality. As such, it may provide insight into the evolution and maintenance of a variety of social systems. Second, this study will employ several undergraduate students and target those students from groups traditionally under-represented in science early in their academic careers. Early exposure to the process of scientific discovery may encourage such students to pursue careers in science. Third, starlings are agricultural pests in many regions of North America. Insight from this work regarding how starlings estimate the quality of food patches, derived from understanding the factors that affect the use of public information, have the potential to be incorporated into mitigation strategies in agricultural systems doc11806 none With primary support from the National Science Foundation, Drs. Robert Blumenschine, Fidelis Masao, and Charles Peters will lead an international and multidisciplinary team to continue their long-term research on ancestral human (hominid) behavior at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. Olduvai Gorge preserves among the world s richest records of the earliest, Oldowan, stone tool industry and abundant vertebrate fossils in geological deposits dated between 1.9 and 1.6 million years ago. The stone artifacts, and fossil bones bearing butchery marks made by the stone tools, provide evidence for the diet, foraging tactics and technological activities of hominids in the lake basin that occupied the Olduvai area during Oldowan times. These archaeological traces of hominid activity are distributed patchily within an area of ca. 400 km2, providing an unusual opportunity to understand the nature of hominid adaptations to different environmental conditions within the lake basin. When fully developed, this understanding will allow us to assess the ecological factors that initially selected for humankind s unusual dependence on technology and carnivory. In order to accomplish this goal, we require a more detailed reconstruction of the landscapes occupied by Oldowan hominids in the prehistoric Olduvai lake basin. The reconstruction will be made by a team with individual expertise in geochronology, stratigraphy, sedimentology, palynology, plant phytoliths, marcro-plant fossils, stable isotopic geochemistry and small mammal taphonomy. Samples will be collected during two seven-week field seasons for analysis in specialized laboratories in the U.S., Europe, Tanzania, and South Africa. Landscape reconstructions will focus initially on the alluvial fan and lake margin settings of the eastern portion of the lake basin, in which we have already produced a large landscape archaeological sample and diverse paleoenvironmental indicators. These techniques of landscape reconstruction and additional archaeological excavations will be extended to the western portion of paleo-Olduvai Basin after we have established stratigraphic and age controls. Precise three-dimensional locational control of the archaeological and paleoenvironmental samples will be maintained using state-of-the-art mapping-level and survey-level global positioning system and optoelectronic total station equipment. Our work is designed to understand the ecological contrasts between the eastern and western portions of the basin in landscapes and hominid land use related to the repeated catastrophic volcanism that appears to have affected the eastern basin most severely, and in many cases exclusively. A small but important portion of NSF support for the project will be used to help Tanzania continue to develop its facilities and scientific personnel for archaeological and paleontological research. Improvements will be made to the laboratory and permanent research camp at Olduvai Gorge in cooperation with the Tanzanian Antiquities Unit. The storage capacity for fossil and artifact remains in the laboratory established by the researchers in Arusha in cooperation with the Tanzania National Museums. Tanzanian students and field assistants will continue to receive training in field and laboratory techniques. These efforts are critical to the long-term research viability and conservation of Olduvai Gorge, for which Tanzanians require facilities and well-trained staff to lead archaeological research and to manage archaeological collections doc11807 none Elghazawi Description: This award is to support a collaborative project between Dr. Tarek El-Ghazawi, Department of Computer Science, George Washington University, Washington, DC and Dr. Mohamed F. Tolba, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt. Dr. Nadia Hegazi of the Electronics Research Institute (ERI) in Cairo, Egypt will also be involved in the project. The project deals with two problems simultaneously. One is machine recognition of Arabic handwritten text, and the other is utilizing distributed systems to solve problems that normally require massive supercomputing facilities. The goal of the research is to develop a grid computing methodology to recognize Arabic handwritten text, using advanced techniques based on neural nets and wavelets. The project will produce results in Arabic text recognition, and in grid computing, and will provide the necessary computational resources to solve a complex problem. Scope: The project supports collaboration between two experienced investigators. El-Ghazawi has extensive experience with high performance computing which would cover the grid computing aspects of the work. The Egyptian scientists have experience in various areas, including Arabic text recognition. The involvement of the ERI is important because of the technical rescues available at that institute. The success of research will benefit research on other problems that are computationally intensive. It also will provide the foundation for practical prototypes for Arabic character recognition applications, which is a unique problem due to the complexities of the written Arabic language. The project will include exchange of students between the two countries. The proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc11808 none Sharon Dawes SUNY @ Albany Digital Government: Proposal to investigate e-business transformation at the National Science Foundation This workshop will examine today s information technology resarch status and products, and the variety of ways research granting institutions currently accomplish their missions. That examination will support an extrapolation of technology and organizational practices 5-7 years into the future, to consider how those coming technologies and practices might be employed in a granting institution s mission. Of interest also will be how the organization of such an institution might be constructed to best take advantage of those technologies and to ensure the appropriate injection of new technologies in achieving high effectiveness in the furtherance of its mission doc11809 none This is a study of the mechanisms of formation of soot. Shock-tube experiments designed to clarify he importance of several hypothesized pathways for single-, double-, and multiple-ring systems are performed. Two different shock tubes are used: a single-pulse, high-pressure shock tube with species analysis by sampling and gas chronstography mass spectrometry, and a low pressure shock tube equipped for laser schlieren and laser flash absorption analysis. Systems studied include the decomposition of 1, 5-hexadiyne, recombination of propargyl radicals, reactions of benzyne generated by pyrolysis of phthalic anhydride, and the chemistry of diacetylene and diacetylene acetylene mixtures including formation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Elucidation of ring formation pathways and the quantification of related kinetic parameters over wide range of temperature and pressure leads to improved models of soot formation doc11810 none This individual investigator award will provide funds to a senior scientist for a project investigating the adsorption of polymers from a fluid mixture onto a solid surface. Whereas considerable progress has been made in understanding the structure and thermodynamics of such polymer films near interfaces, little is known of the microscopic dynamics of these systems. This project will investigate how polymer chains move so as to anchor, diffuse, and eventually desorb from a solid surface. The particular systems to be studied are linear and branched alkane molecules of intermediate size (20 and 40 carbon atoms) on graphite and Ag(111) substrates that serve both as interesting prototype systems and which contain the principal constituents of commercial lubricants. Quasielastic neutron scattering will be used to investigate the diffusive motion within the alkane films on time scales from picoseconds to tens of nanoseconds, while their static structure will be determined by neutron diffraction and synchrotron x-ray scattering. These experiments on alkane films will provide important tests of computer simulations of selective adsorption dynamics and may ultimately lead to the development of better engine oils. Graduate students will be trained in fundamental aspects of polymer science, preparing them for careers in the petroleum and rubber industries as well as at national facilities for neutron and synchrotron x-ray scattering. %%% Processes in which one chemical component in a fluid mixture preferentially sticks to a solid surface occur widely in materials science. Of particular interest is the selective adsorption from solution of long flexible-chain molecules, a process that is important in technological applications such as lubrication and adhesion. Whereas considerable progress has been made in understanding their structure and thermal properties, little is known about motion within these polymer films at the molecular level. This individual investigator award will provide funds to a senior scientist for a project investigating this issue. This project will investigate how polymer chains move so as to anchor, crawl about, and eventually depart from a solid surface. The particular systems to be studied are linear and branched alkane molecules of intermediate size (20 and 40 carbon atoms) on graphite and silver substrates that serve both as interesting prototype systems and contain the molecules that are the principal constituents of commercial lubricants. Quasielastic neutron scattering will be used to investigate the molecular motion within the alkane films on a wide range of time scales at the atomic level, while positions of the molecules will be determined by neutron diffraction and synchrotron x-ray scattering. These experiments on alkane films will provide important tests of computer simulations of selective adsorption dynamics and may ultimately lead to the development of better engine oils. Graduate students will be trained in fundamental aspects of polymer science, preparing them for careers in the petroleum and rubber industries as well as at national facilities for neutron and synchrotron x-ray scattering doc11811 none Dr. Kenneth B. Eisenthal of the Department of Chemistry, Columbia University, is supported by the Experimental Physical Chemistry program of the Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, for his work on the utilization of the Second Harmonic Generation (SHG) technique to probe interfacial dynamics in such processes as molecular transport through bilayers as a function of composition, molecular orientation in bilayers, solvation dynamics and charge transfer across a bilayer membrane. These studies will have a high impact and provide new insights into transport of molecules across membranes that will have a great impact to the medical community (for example, in drug delivery issues), to the biochemical and biology communities, and to the physical chemistry community with regard to ultrafast femtosecond phenomena. Students and post-doctoral associates will be trained in a unique area that encompasses chemistry, biology, and biochemistry doc11812 none Mannheim Leinaweaver Many societies in the world have flexible customs of child-rearing involving adoption and fosterage to match children to adults in specific situations. This dissertation research by a cultural anthropology student will investigate the role of adoption and fosterage in rural and urban highland Peru. Internal migrants from rural to urban areas who seek education, employment, or safety have used flexible child rearing methods for years. The Peruvian government has recently begun a system of regulating and bureaucratizing domestic and international adoptions which transformed the ability of urban Andeans to develop their kinship networks through fosterage. Over a period of 12 months of research with Quechua speakers in the Ayacucho region, the student will study how Andeans respond to the content of state discourse and policy about kinship ideologies. Through participant observation, oral history and semi-structured interviews as well as a survey of 400 residents of the rural community studied, she will examine the relationship between the content of official, state discourse about proper forms of family-construction and the understandings and practices of fosterage among rural community dwellers and internal migrants to the city of Ayacucho. The general issue to be studied is whether rural models of kinship are amenable to change when they are confronted with state discourse, or whether models of kinship are so deeply embedded in Andean life that they resist changes encouraged by state discourse. This project will produce valuable new knowledge for those interested in issues surrounding both domestic and international adoption, will advance our familiarity with this important region of the world, and will contribute to the training of a young social scientist doc11813 none The past 20 years have seen the discovery of strongly correlated electron phenomena such as unconventional superconductivity, exotic non-Fermi liquid metals, intrinsically inhomogeneous electronic and magnetic phases, and novel moment configurations in a broad array of seemingly distinct material families. This award provides support for the International Conference on Strongly Correlated Electron Systems (SCES ), to be held August 6-10, in Ann Arbor, MI. The conference will explore the most recent experimental and theoretical developments, in addition there will be overview talks assessing the current status of the field. The topics for the conference include: heavy fermions, Kondo physics, and mixed valence, the interplay of superconductivity and magnetism, non-Fermi liquid phenomena and quantum criticality, correlations in low dimensional metals, novel f- and d- electron materials, and low carrier density systems. Additionally, the conference includes emerging topics such as time resolved spectroscopies of correlated materials, hidden and orbital ordering, and spin-charge separation. The NSF support will help ensure the continued vitality of this field by providing financial assistance to graduate students, postdocs, and young faculty who are attending the conference for the first time. In addition, it will foster new collaborations among established researchers from India and Eastern Europe with other conference participants by providing travel support. %%% Strong electron correlations are the origin of such technologically important phenomena as superconductivity and magnetism, and can even render a material to be electrically insulating when it would otherwise be a metal. By its nature, the strongly correlated electron problem is a central intellectual theme that cuts across traditional physics, chemistry, and materials science boundaries. The pre-eminent international conference in this area is Strongly Correlated Electron Systems (SCES), and for the first time in almost 10 years it will convene in the United States in Ann Arbor, MI from August 6-10, . It is the aim of this conference to identify and explore common issues of both experimental and theoretical importance in a variety of different classes of correlated electron materials. This award provides support to the conference to help ensure the continued vitality of this core research field in the United States by supporting the participation of young scientists - graduate students, postdocs, and new faculty. In addition, the conference will foster new collaborations between established US scientists and their counterparts in India and Eastern Europe through a satellite workshop. This award will also supplement the travel funds of these participants doc11814 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to develop a rapid and reliable method for inducing, detecting and recovering isotypic switch variants in hybridoma cell lines using in-vitro switching media, gel microdrop (GMD) technology and fluorescence activated cell sorting (FACS). Antibodies are widely used in research and clinical applications. Antibodies of the IgM subclass are generally considered the least useful due to their pentameric structure and lack of affinity for protein A and protein G which makes purification and modification of IgM antibodies difficult, and enzymatic digestion for Fab fragment production almost impossible. Many of the hybridomas produced, however, are of the IgM subclass. IgM producing hybridomas do, however, spontaneously switch the subclass of antibody they produce to IgG, although at very low frequencies. Currently there is no simple method for controlling class switching and isolating class switch variants. Several protocols have been developed to effect class switching of IgM producing hybridomas and to isolate class switch variants, but these procedures are lengthy and very labor-intensive involving multiple screening cycles. By providing a rapid method for isolating IgG switch variants, the GMD method will significantly improve bioprocessing of monoclonal antibodies for research and therapeutic use. The commercial application of this project will be in the development of monoclonal antibody products for research, therapeutic, diagnostic and imaging purposes doc11815 none The variables affecting the nanoscopic geometry of diblock copolymers will be examined for a variety of amphiphilic diblock asymmetries at the liquid-air, solid-air and solid-liquid interfaces. Because the features of diblocks tend to be molecular in scale, the sizes observed naturally fall into the range of nanometers. One aspect of this work focuses on the controlled deposition of diblock copolymers on silicon substrates using a Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) trough, where the surface density is a selectable parameter. Different asymmetries of an amphiphilic diblock have produced various morphologies due to aggregation of the water-insoluble block. In a complementary fashion to the LB studies, the kinetics and surface excess of the same selection of diblocks adsorbed from a variety of solvents to a liquid-solid interface will be determined for solution concentrations above and below the critical micelle concentration (cmc) using Fourier Transform IR spectroscopy in the mode of attenuated total reflection (FTIR-ATR). Atomic Force Microscopy neutron reflectivity and ellipsometry will aid in the interpretation of surface excess and three-dimensional structure. The combination of these approaches should provide a better understanding of the thermodynamic and kinetic parameters that can b used to control surface density and geometry. %%% Participants in the research projects will include a postdoctoral researcher and several undergraduates. In addition, the current interaction with a local high school will be enhanced with a high school student research opportunity and more interactions and follow-up experiences. An advanced course in Surface Structure and Spectroscopy will continue to be developed in order to take advantage of new technologies in education doc11816 none The PI s will participate in the Gulf of Alaska Long-Term Observation Program (GOA-LTOP) as part of Phase II of the Northeast Pacific (NEP) GLOBEC program. The GOA shelf supports a rich ecosystem that includes many commercially important fisheries. The basis for this productivity is enigmatic for the GOA shelf is deep, forced by downwelling-favorable winds, and fed by a massive nutrient-poor coastal freshwater discharge. Both the winds and the freshwater discharge are intimately linked to the strength and position of the Aleutian Low. The GOA ecosystem experiences substantial physical and biological changes on decadal and inter-annual time scales. Although some of these changes are correlated with various climatic indices a mechanistic understanding of climate change and ecosystem response is unavailable. The generic goal of this LTOP is to understand and quantify temporal (seasonal and interannual) and spatial (cross- and along-shelf) variations in the thermolialine, chemical, and biological pro-perties and relationships of this shelf. This research will support GLOBEC goals by providing the seasonal and interannual context for other concurrent studies, and by providing boundary conditions and data sets for model evaluation. The field effort involves seven, 9-day interdisciplinary cruises year in the northern GOA. The study area encompasses the 220-km long, Seward Line (sampled in the s) that extends across the shelf and slope and high resolution sampling of the Alaska Coastal Current (ACC), upstream, downstream, and with-in Prince William Sound. The ACC is an important shelf habitat for YOY salmon migrating from nursery areas in the sound and into the GOA doc11817 none D. D. Joseph, University of Minnesota The proposed effort is a GOALI association between the University of Minnesota Fluid Dynamics Lab and the oil-industry supported laboratory STIMLAB from Duncan, Oklahoma. It is an attempt to explore the application of the direct numerical simulation technique to slurry transport and also to proppant transport in reservoir fractures. In both cases, the emphasis will be to identify the force interaction between the particles and the ambient liquid. Also, numerical flow field calculations will be fitted to experimental results with the help of relevant non-dimensional power law parameters. This method of correlations should reveal self-similar properties not immediately apparent from the traditional conservation equations of fluid dynamics. The PI presents an extensive evaluation of the progress he has already accomplished in that direction, in part with NSF support. Many results have been obtained for a variety of applications, from the simple (Poiseuille flow) to the very applied (foaming bubble columns, bitumen froth transport...). Several finite element codes have been evolved (ALE, DLM), and successful correlations (some of them by other groups) are presented. Out of this abundance of results, the PI has produced a number of proposed research extensions into interdependent properties: particle life off, circulation, bifurcation, and levitation to equilibrium. A partial outline of the correlations which the PI intends to investigate is given, as well as a short statement of the more applied kind of problems where STIMLAB could use its abundant data bank: proppant transport, collision models doc11818 none This SGER project is for the development of a new fiber optic sensor assembly for continuous monitoring of temperature, moisture and strain over extended subsurface environments, such as road embankments, wall back-fills, and landfills. At present, the cost of fiber optic sensors is prohibitively expensive for large-scale applications in such Civil Engineering facilities. The proposed sensor is based on Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS) phenomenon to achieve spatially distributed measurements. It meets the necessary requirements of subsurface monitoring by measuring selected parameters at different locations with only a single fiber, rendering it a relatively low cost tool. The objectives of this project are to construct a prototype SBS sensor system, and evaluate its functions in the laboratory. The system will consist of a sensing element and a signal generator analyzer. The signal generator uses a single laser source that is modulated through an electro-optical modulator to generate both pump- and probe- lightwaves. The sensing element will be developed using standard optical fibers. Two bare fibers will be used to measure strain and temperature as calibrated to their signal variation. For moisture sensing, a third fiber will be coated intermittently with a hydrogel material along its length. A semi-rigid and permeable composite polymeric fiber braid jacket will be used to encase the hydrogel-coated optical fiber. The jacket will provide protection to the fiber as well as a constrained space for the hydrogel. The swelling of the hydrogel in a constrained space around the optical fiber is expected to induce axial strain on the encapsulated fiber. The magnitude of the axial strain will be dependent upon the degree of swelling and, in turn, to the degree of available moisture in the surrounding. Bench-scale laboratory tests will be conducted to test and verify the spatially distributed sensing capability of the SBS sensors. The strain sensing experiments will be conducted by using simple pulley and weight assemblies. The moisture and temperature sensing will be tested using test chambers instrumented with heating elements, thermocouples, humidifiers and humidity sensors to control and measure the temperature and humidity. In all the experiments, the variation of the sensor signals will be mapped to the variation of the actual measurements. The prototype sensors will be tested and evaluated for coupling effects of temperature, moisture and strain when all three parameters may induce signal variation at the same time. The final set of tests will be conducted by embedding the prototype sensors into a bench-scale test box filled with layers of soil at different moisture contents, representing near real subsurface environments. The proposed sensor assembly and its methodology is envisioned to significantly advance the state-of-art in monitoring of civil infrastructure systems in the subsurface with highly precise measurement capability over extended area and depth at a relatively low cost. This project will involve the collaboration of investigators with diverse expertise from two institutions. The graduate students will be exposed to multi-discipline subjects and research experience doc11819 none This planning proposal recognizes the constraints imposed on Alaskan schools by geography and small school populations while at the same time recognizing Alaskan opportunities for learning in context. The Renewal component will consider the constraints on -- and solutions to -- problems associated with having a distributed cohort of experienced teachers participate in a brief but intense field experience using those ubiquitous Alaskan commodities, SNOW and ICE. The Retention portion will consider the constraints and procedures necessary to involve small populations of novice teachers from Alaskan Districts in 137 hours of close mentoring using the snow- and ice-field work along with appropriate curricular materials (NSF supported GLACIER) to provide learning in context. The final planning activities involve determining through pilot work the adequacy of follow-up work in short 1-2 day workshops during spring breaks, etc. as times when teachers from distributed districts can come together doc11820 none Newman The principal investigator and his colleagues study the structure and function of real-world networked systems, particularly but not exclusively social networks. An empirical component is concerned with the discovery and analysis of the structure of networks, including networks of collaboration between scientists, networks of company directors, networks of personal preferences, and networks of citations between academic publications. Studied quantities include local observables such as transitivity and degree distribution, and nonlocal ones such as centrality and community structure. The investigator develops models to aid in the understanding of the effects of network structure. Of particular interest are random graph models of networks, percolation models of network resilience, and models of epidemics taking place on social networks. The investigator develops new algorithms for extracting and visualizing network structure, particularly the existence of communities in networks and structural properties related to network resilience, such as path counts and centrality measures. A knowledge of the structure of networks of acquaintance is crucial to the understanding of how information, such as news, rumors, consumer trends, etc., spreads through society. Similarly, networks of physical contact between people govern the way in which diseases spread. A proper understanding of the nature and progress of epidemics is impossible without good network models. In this project the investigator determines what the structure of the networks in question is, and also models the effect of that structure on, among other things, the spread of information and disease. As well as enhancing basic understanding of these problems, the project points to ways in which network structure or dynamics can be changed in order to either improve network transmission (in the case of information) or slow it down (in the case of epidemics). For disease transmission, for instance, it may be able to suggest effective targets for immunization or education campaigns to slow disease spread. The new data resources and analysis techniques developed can be used to study other problems in which network-structured processes arise doc11821 none The Advanced Materials Program in the Division of Chemistry makes this award to University of Massachusetts Amherst. With the award, Professor Paul Lahti will study the synthesis and characterization of new stable radicals that incorporates hydrogen bonding groups and coordination groups such as carboxylates, pyridines, imidazoles and fluoroarenes. This interdisciplinary research will use organic, physical and inorganic chemistry as well as physics for crystal engineering to induce ferromagnetic spin-spin interactions and alignments. As part of this award, international collaborations will be carried out with University of Zaragoza in Spain and Osaka University in Japan to study molecular magnetism in organic polymers and materials. Training and education of students in organic synthesis and characterization of novel materials for molecular magnetic applications will be greatly enhanced by this award. Hydrogen bonding, partial fluorination, co-crystallization and transition metal complexation will be used in crystal engineering to induce and enhance ferromagnetic spin-spin interactions and alignments. This interdisciplinary study will have a broad impact on different field such as physical and organic chemistry, and solid state physics. These studies will provide information about the higher critical temperatures required for ferromagnetic and ferromagnetic applications. In addition, this award will provide education and training opportunities to graduate and undergraduate students doc11822 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will design a prototype for a rapid-deployment, three-dimensional (3-D), seismic reflection system for shallow subsurface exploration. Although the 3-D seismic reflection method enjoys tremendous commercial success in marine applications, 3-D seismic systems for land-based geophysical exploration have been limited because cost-effective and environmentally friendly deployment systems have not been developed. Such a system would be useful to build models of ground water flow, track pollutants, identify mineral-laden zones, and aid the siting of large construction projects. The customer base for this seismic reflection system includes civil and environmental engineers and geophysical contractors. PFM Manufacturing and Montana Tech propose to design a rapid-deployment, 3- D, seismic reflection system that employs multiple land streamers with gimbal-mounted vertical geophones. An industrial, low-impact All Terrain Vehicle (ATV) is a critical part of the system both to pull the land streamers and minimize environmental impact. PFM builds an ideal ATV for this purpose. The primary advantage of such a system is that fewer field personnel would be needed compared to conventional surveys and data could be collected more efficiently doc11823 none Funding will be utilized for travel of US scientists and researchers to present papers at the first international workshop and conference on thermal, fluid and interfacial phenomena in physico-chemical, materials and bio- processes. The workshop will address problems on interfacial stability and transport with applications to materials and bio-processing such as electrodeposition, crystal growth, jetting, lung and corneal transport, etc. The conference will be held in Giessen, Germany, between September 12 - 16, , and the proceedings will be published. The support is meant for graduate students and post-doctoral scientists as well as non-tenured faculty in the early stages of their careers doc11824 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will integrate random, reactive ion etching (RIE) texturing techniques into low-cost, multi-crystalline (mc) silicon (Si) solar cells. RIE texturing techniques, developed in Phase I, are distinguished by their low-reflection (1 percent), large area (200 square centimeters) application, and the ability to control etched profiles. This texture control has been employed to increase near infrared absorption in Si by enhanced oblique optical coupling into the substrate. RIE-texturing techniques have potential application in several fields including low-cost substrates for surface enhanced Raman scattering and field emission devices. Phase II will be concerned with conformal emitter formation techniques uniquely suited to RIE-textured surfaces. These methods will lead to solar cell manufacturing in a cluster environment with similar chambers for texturing, emitter formation, and nitride films for surface passivation. Potential industrial applications are expected in high-efficiency, RIE-textured, mc-Si solar cells using processes suitable for their respective manufacturing environments doc11825 none This project brings together two areas of research: intergroup cognition and emotion. The goal is to investigate how social perceivers emotional states shape their attitudes of specific social targets in ways outside of their awareness and control. Although the past two decades have witnessed new and important insights into psychological processes underlying the form and function of stereotypes and prejudice, the role of the emotional system in shaping these phenomena has only recently been explored systematically. For example, research on the interplay between emotion and social cognition has revealed that specific emotional states (e.g., anger, sadness, happiness) have distinct effects on consciously reported beliefs and attitudes toward social groups, but it is silent about whether and how emotions shape nonconscious expressions of intergroup perception and behavior. Given that emotions exist to promote adaptive responses to important environmental challenges, it seems reasonable to expect that they should influence people s ability to appraise stimuli quickly and automatically as well as slowly and carefully. Moreover, given that membership in social groups, and the benefits and conflicts inherent in such affiliations, play a central role in human life, it is expected that appraisals of social groups are likely to be influenced by emotional states via both automatic and controlled mental processes. This project represents an initial attempt to examine the role of discrete emotions in shaping automatic and controlled intergroup cognition by examining whether specific negative emotions (e.g., anger, sadness) produce different effects on automatic intergroup attitudes and, if so, how such attitudes contrast with self-reported judgments generated after thoughtful consideration doc11826 none Kaplan The investigators propose to estimate the contribution of dissolved organic matter (DOM) in transport to the support of stream ecosystem metabolism. The specific objective of this project is to estimate the mass flux of DOM (e.g., the rate of flux from the water column to the streambed), to represent this as the sum of fluxes from several lability classes, and to characterize the respective concentration and uptake length coefficient of DOM in each lability class. Uptake length converts easily to mass transfer coefficient or turnover rate through scaling relationships involving depth and water velocity. Quantifying the uptake of natural DOM in the stream is analogous to describing the uptake (or spiraling) of phosphorus or ammonium, but is complicated by the diversity of natural DOM (i.e. it consists of an array of compounds of varying lability), and the fact that isotopically-labeled natural DOM is not available. This project will use 13C-labeled DOM generated by growing plants in a 13C atmosphere. The longitudinal uptake of 13C -DOm will be resolved into multiple uptake lengths (corresponding to multiple lability classes), estimated as the sum of exponential-curves. In addition, the uptake kinetics of natural (12C) DOM in laboratory bioreactors will be compared to those of the labeled 13C-DOM, and this comparison will be used to scale the results of the 13C-DOM injection, to appropriately describe the uptake of natural DOM in the stream doc11827 none The faces of primates exhibit a variety of shapes, particularly around the bony orbits, which house the eyes. It is not known whether this variety reflects differences in adaptations to feeding or adaptations to vision. Recent research has suggested that the bones around the orbit are strained very little during feeding, and a suite of nonfeeding explanations for the evolution of the primate orbital region have been proposed. It has also been suggested that the orbital region might be adapted for resisting feeding forces in some primates, but not in others. The research proposed here will determine whether there are differences between monkeys, apes and humans on one hand, and bushbabies on the other in the functioning of the orbital region during feeding. In contrast with the diversity in primate facial shape, primates seem to move their jaws in similar ways. This suggests that primates might have evolved their shape differences within the limits dictated by an ancient, conserved, behavior pattern shared with other mammals. This research will collect data on simultaneous jaw movements and muscle activity in several species of primates to determine whether changes in bony form really have proceeded without significant changes in the way primates move their jaws and fire their chewing muscles doc11828 none Weidman There are tremendous opportunities to increase our understanding of biological and biomedical research challenges through mathematical and statistical methods. But it is not easy for researchers to collaborate on these topics because of a historical gulf that separates the disciplines. In order to overcome that gulf, the Board on Mathematical Sciences of the National Research Council, in collaboration with the NRC s Board on Life Sciences, holds a workshop, involving some 70 people across the disciplines, to (1) stimulate some new collaborations and insights on the spot and (2) provide an introduction for mathematical scientists (disseminated via print and the Internet) of some mathematical research directions that contribute to important ongoing research in the biological and biomedical sciences. At the workshop, leading researchers in dynamical modeling of cellular functions, in modeling of disease states, and in neuroscience describe some of the major research challenges in their fields. They do not limit themselves to mathematical challenges; workshop discussions are focused on identifying the mathematical and statistical research that should be undertaken in order to advance the biological and biomedical research agendas. By involving a broad range of mathematical scientists, the workshop brings a number of different perspectives and ideas to bear on the open questions raised by the presentations. The aim is to stimulate a wide-ranging discussion and distill out the best ideas. The workshop s summary will be widely disseminated in order to give many more mathematical scientists the basic understanding needed to become engaged in biological and biomedical research doc11829 none This research will use ACE-Asia (Aerosol Characterizations Experiment) aerosol and radiometric observations to determine the radiative effects of the polluted aerosol coming from the Asian continent through three objectives: 1. Develop and validate an aerosol scattering model using the observed aerosol chemical, microphysical, and light scattering measurements. 2. Determine the radiative forcing of the aerosol, using this model and observed radiative fluxes at the surface and top of atmosphere. 3. Determine the context of these results by conducting a comparison of these forcing properties to those found for other regions, particularly during INDOEX (Indian Ocean Experiment). These studies will concentrate on the surface radiometric and aerosol properties measured from the R V R. H. Brown, and will include satellite data. This research is important because of its potential to add new understanding and knowledge about aerosol chemistry and microphysics and the influence of aerosols on radiative forcing, and hence climate, over East Asia and the western Pacific doc11830 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop prototype software for designing batteries based on user requirements. A user will specify an objective (such as maximize runtime) and use conditions (such as the electrical current), and the software determines, based on first principles(trade mark) models, the optimal design. The Phase I project successfully yielded, based on optimization of capacity, significant improvements in runtime for devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs). The Phase II project will develop a user-friendly, prototype system that can handle multiple battery chemistries, simulate abuse testing, and predict battery life. The software serves as an intermediary between battery developers and users by capturing expertise from both groups, allowing them to accrue benefits of simulation. Aligning development cycles of batteries to devices leads to better products (with concomitant market penetration, share growth, and lower costs). The software protects confidential information of all parties, creating opportunities for broader partnerships. The commercial benefits will come from the development of the software, which provides a ready outlet for academic research and a rational basis for product specifications. It is anticipated that if this project is successful it will open up the battery industry to innovation and will help to create new partnerships doc11831 none Numerical Analysis of Transient Slab-on-Grade Heat Transfer Building mechanical systems are selected to quickly respond to time-varying conditions that occur outside and within buildings. Designers of these systems must often balance conflicting needs such as, for example, the requirements for improved indoor air quality and reduced energy use. But where concerns dictate increased energy use, conservation measures may be employed elsewhere to offset that increase. One place in many buildings that still has the potential for significant energy savings is their foundations. Unfortunately, mechanical systems designers do not have sufficient models readily available to quickly and accurately evaluate building foundation energy use. The objectives of this grant are to model heat transfer between modern slabs-on-grade and the ground, to evaluate their dynamic behavior, to prepare enhanced simplified equations that describe that behavior, and to evaluate coefficients for these equations. To achieve these objectives a dedicated and detailed computer code will be written and hour-by-hour weather data will be used to predict and observe the transient phenomena. Via enhanced simplified equations and their coefficients found in this project, others can improve their building heating and cooling loads and energy-use prediction software. Such tools will then be used by building design engineers to further optimize energy use, predict thermal comfort, improve indoor air quality, and increase workers productivity doc11832 none Goldin Selka Brazilians of African descent can choose among several religious alternatives to express their faith. These alternatives range from traditional Catholicism to local variants of a global proselytizing religion such as Pentecostalism, and include many African-derived religions such as Candomble. This project involves the dissertation research of a cultural anthropology student from the University at Albany, SUNY, studying the relation between religious affiliation and ethnic identity in the state of Bahia, Brazil. The research will focus on two sites, the rural town of Cachoeira and the nearby capital city of Salvador, to analyze how Brazilians of African descent construct their ethnic and religious identities. Using a discourse-centered ethnographic approach as well as local surveys, the student will focus on twelve religious organizations: two Pentecostal churches, Catholic devotional associations, and Candomble centers in each place. Three hundred questionnaires will be administered to the twelve organizations and an additional 100 will be divided between local communities in the two locations. The data collected will be used to assess general demographic information, the ways in which people view and express their identities as Brazilians of African descent, and their personal opinions about cultural and racial issues of concern to the Afro-Brazilian community. The project will show how cultural tourism in Bahia, transnational movements for racial equality (of which Brazil s Movimento Negro is one expression), and international religious movements like Pentecostalism affect Brazilian s ethnic self-identity and perceptions of issues such as racism. The results should advance our understanding of Brazilian religious culture and the interaction of race, ethnicity and religious identity, as well as contribute to the training of a young social scientist and advance our knowledge of this important region of the world doc11833 none Webb The investigator studies differential equation models of structured populations. The structured models arise in considering four applications: (1) models of tumor cords structured by the cell cycle, (2) models of blood cell production systems with proliferating and quiescent compartments structured by cell maturity, (3) models of replicating prion populations structured by polymer length, and (4) models of vancomycin-resistant enterococci epidemics in dialysis clinics structured by the time since patient admission. This project applies theoretical mathematics to biological and medical research involving population interactions. The specific goals are to identify the behavior of proliferating and quiescent cell populations in the micro-architecture of vascularized tumors, to differentiate, qualitatively and quantitatively, the development of normal and abnormal blood cell population lines, to evaluate hypothetical mechanisms involved in the polymerization processes of prion population growth in transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (mad cow disease), and to predict the epidemiological effects in dialysis clinics of health care worker hygiene, patient-health care worker ratios, and screening of temporarily absent patients. Benefits to society are the project s contributions to the fundamental knowledge of biological and health sciences doc11834 none Knauft Davidson The contemporary world if full of cases of ethnic violence, where people who have been neighbors for years, if not generations, turn to violence. Theories explaining such conflict have addressed ancient animosities, political manipulation (especially during turbulent transitions to democracy), and competition for scarce resources. This dissertation research project by a cultural anthropology student will test these theories against the ethnographic reality of Guinea-Bissau, West Africa, where clashes between two groups, the Felupe and the Fula, resulted in violence and forced removal of families from the community. Through participant observation, structured interviews, household surveys and archival research, the student will explore the definition of cultural differences in inter-ethnic contexts; the modes of mobilizing ethnic solidarity; and the dynamics and trajectory of recent outbursts of ethnic violence. The relative importance of kinship, inter-ethnic marriage, land tenure, religious affiliation, initiation and socialization, and cross-national ethnic alliances will be studied. The new knowledge to be gained form this careful case study will be valuable to theorists of contemporary ethnic conflict and will advance our understanding of this important region of the world. In addition the project contributes to the training of a young social scientist doc11835 none of disordered models. In addition, the details of thermal activation and equilibration will be studied using new approaches. These will enable the study how memory effects take place in disordered magnets. Collective transport through quenched disorder occurs in a number of physical systems, including solid-on-solid friction, fluid flowing over rough surfaces, moving colloidal crystals in disordered backgrounds, and magnetic flux motion in superconductors. Some types of motion, e.g., overdamped elastic media driven through disorder, are well understood. There are many simulations and experiments for which a general understanding of plastic flow, where particles can slide by each other and the transport is inhomogeneous, is lacking. The PI plans to continue to explore a model for such flow. This model, which interpolates between well understood elastic flow and plastic flow, can be solved exactly at the mean field level. This model will be extended to more realistic applications in finite dimensions, where potentially universal critical behavior, at the transition from hysteretic to non-hysteretic flow, is amenable to experimental study in a number of systems. The PI will extend work on charge transport in arrays of metallic dots, which is a useful model for studying channel-like flow and questions of universality. The research activity supports the training of students in state of the art computational and statistical mechanical methods. %%% This award supports theoretical and computational research, and education on the statistical mechanics and driven dynamics of extended physical systems with quenched disorder. The work encompasses a wide range of physical systems, for example, random magnets, such as spin glasses, type-II superconductors, where magnetic flux is pinned by disorder, and even biologically important polymers, such as proteins and RNA. The research is interdisciplinary, involving algorithmic development that impacts both computer science and computational condensed matter and materials physics, and activities at the interface between statistical physics and computational complexity. Specific research activities lie in two general areas: (1) equilibrium and near equilibrium behavior, including memory effects, in disordered statistical mechanical systems, and (2) models for plastic flow, which are applicable to flux flow in superconductors and to transport in charge density wave materials, and a novel model for charge transport. The thrust of the work is fundamental, intended to discover universal properties of, and physical connections among, diverse disordered systems, as well as, specific physical properties of a large number of models which can be compared with experiments, many of which involve phenomena important to everyday uses of materials doc11836 none A post-Revolutionary relaxation of manumission restrictions in Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina brought about a marked increase in the proportion of free African Americans in the antebellum Upper South. While free African Americans made up just 2.4 percent of the free population in Maryland in , they grew to nearly 14.0 percent of the free population by . A similar increase occurred in Virginia; lesser ones in North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri. Although historians provide detailed and valuable accounts of the social, political, literary, artistic and religious lives of these free blacks, the economic status of free blacks remains unclear. This project fills this void. Using modern economic analysis, this project establishes the free African Americans position on the economic ladder. It first considers the ability of rural free blacks to climb the agricultural ladder, from daily farm laborer to renter to eventual farm owner operator, and shows that free blacks made unexpected moves up the ladder. Although many free blacks lived in the country, they were the most urbanized ethnic group in late antebellum America, so the second part of the project considers the economic status of free African Americans in Baltimore, Richmond, Petersburg, Louisville and Nashville. It compares wealth accumulation and occupational status of whites and blacks and shows that while whites typically held better jobs, blacks made significant inroads in certain occupations and accumulated substantial wealth. These findings are important because they place current racial differences in occupation, income and wealth accumulation in historical perspective doc11837 none Smith Norman This dissertation research by an anthropology student from the University of Washington will gather and analyze data on western Torres Strait (Australia) Islander marine resource use, in order to evaluate two competing models of human use of natural resources. Optimal foraging theory predicts that defendable territories of limited access are likely to produce conservation-oriented behaviors, such as foregoing the harvest of marine animals based on individual size or local population depletion. An alternative view of small-scale human society holds that people are often socially invested in conserving future stocks without regard for specific territorial rights. Hypotheses from these alternative theories will be tested in this research, using measurements of catch, patch time allocation, and return rates. The data and will contribute to an enhanced understanding of the microecology of fishing, and will be useful for localized and cooperative management institutions to provide them with a stronger basis of effective management of coastal resources. The project in addition contributes to the training of a young social scientist, and advances our understanding of this important region of the world doc11838 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project deals with the need for improved angle encoders or resolvers for advanced automotive powertrains. The performance of powertrains for electric vehicles (EV s) and hybrid electrical vehicles (HEV s) as well as for such concepts now being envisioned as a camless engine will require drive shaft angle encoders with higher resolution and faster response. This proposal addresses these needs in the form of an optical encoder based on an old concept, but used in an innovative fashion and executed with component technologies, both optical and electronic, that have recently become available. The design, in addition to its high performance is extremely robust, in terms of temperature, alignment and in its tolerance to high levels of electro magnetic interference (EMI). Also, and essential for the automotive industry, that performance is achieved with the reliability and low cost demanded by that industry. Angle encoding is basic to rotary drive systems. It is required for commutation and phase angle adjustment to affect the control of energy flow. Angle encoders are also essential to optical and radar scanning mechanisms doc11839 none Schaefer This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses the need for cost effective water treatment. Ultraviolet (UV) light treatment for chemical contaminants in water is attractive because contaminants are destroyed, unlike adsorption techniques that transfer the contaminant to a different media. However, the use of UV is limited by electricity costs for lamp power. This project uses a newly developed Surface Discharge (SD) UV lamp with UV efficiency three times higher than the industry standard mercury UV lamp, which will reduce electricity costs. Furthermore, the shorter wavelength UV spectrum of the SD lamp can both increase destruction rate and reduce the amount of chemical oxidant additive. Project objectives are to optimize lamp operation, to demonstrate the advantages of the SD lamp to treat atrazine and nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA), two contaminants of national concern, and to establish commercial feasibility. A successful Phase I will establish the feasibility of a water treatment process based on the SD lamp, and will lead in Phase II to a prototype system and to commercialization in Phase III. The near term commercial applications of this project will be in the large water treatment market that includes groundwater, industrial and municipal wastewater, drinking water and general disinfection doc11840 none This dissertation research by a cultural anthropology student asks how demographic, cultural, economic and political structures affect which community members participate in timber development projects in Acre, Brazil. Two projects involving the descendents of migrant rubber tappers will be studied. The benefits and costs of various project activities will be assessed, and the role of individual choice in the project activities will be studied. Multiple sources of data will be gathered, including informal interviews, observations, censuses, and formal reports. Hypotheses will be tested relating individual level variables to project participation. The student and her Brazilian colleagues will advance our understanding of participatory development by revealing the structural relations which give rise to variations in community members participation in projects, and will illustrate how social actors interpret, negotiate, resist and transform projects through their involvement. By looking at the heterogeneous ways in which individuals participate and derive benefits and costs, the research will move beyond community -level measure and provide important insight to planners and local development organizations concerns with promoting participatory timber management. In addition the project advances our knowledge of this important region of the world, and contributes to the training of a young social scientist doc11841 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I will develop new implantable electrodes for use in neurological sensing and stimulation. Neuroprostheses have been traditionally fabricated from metals such as stainless steel. The effectiveness of metallic implant devices can be compromised by exposure to the corrosive physiologic environment. Material property mismatches between body tissues and metals can also reduce the tolerability of these devices, especially of those used around muscle tissue. Plastics are finding increasing application in implants due to their more natural stress transfer properties, corrosion resistance and biocompatibility. The proposed research objective is to develop a novel molecularly ordered silicone elastomer that offers tailorable mechanical properties, excellent biocompatibility, physiological stability and high electrical conductivity. Conducting polymers will be incorporated in a polysiloxane matrix to yield ordered structures for maximizing conductivity while preserving the desired elastomer properties. Conductive composites will be prepared and tested for electrical conductivity, mechanical properties, physiological durability and suitability for implantable devices. The principal commercial application of this project is in the neuroprosthesis device market. Successful development of non-metallic electrodes having high electrical conductivity and improved biomechanical properties will have significant potential in this market. Other potential product areas include anticorrosion coatings and electrical shielding materials doc11842 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will determine the feasibility of using monolayers of bacteria to form hexagonal arrays of small holes in metal coated semiconductors. Such micron-sized patterned materials form tuned photonic bandgap structures with narrow band emission. These narrow infrared line sources allow detection of liquid or vapor chemical species through changes in absorption. Very high- resolution, high-cost lithography was required to fabricate proof of principal devices. The proposed research would significantly lower production costs by as much as a factor of ten. Phase I research would demonstrate: (1) growth of uniform sized bacteria, (2) uniform dispersal on a substrate in a hexagonal array, (3) use of inherent electrostatic repulsion to maintain uniform separation, and (4) transfer of this pattern to a treated substrate. Varying growth time and size of bacteria alters emission wavelength and chemical selectivity of the sensor. Existing infrared vapor sensors, that are more reliable than electrochemical sensors, are used for high end applications that can afford an instrument costing hundreds of dollars. The proposed materials development would reduce costs to below $10 per sensor, $50 per complete instrument, allowing IR chemical sensing applications to reach mass markets for automobiles or homes doc11843 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY . The goal of the fellowship is to prepare minority scientists for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. This program is an effort by the NSF to increase the number of research scientists from under-represented minority groups, thereby contributing to the future vitality of the Nation s scientific enterprise. It is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Investigating the Merging of Ionotropic and Metabotropic Signals at the Ionotropic Kainate Receptors. Neurotransmission at chemical synapses is carried out by two distinct classes of receptors- ionotropic and metabotropic. Ionotropic receptors are ligand-gated ion channels that respond to neurotransmitters by allowing ion flux across cell membranes. Metabotropic receptors, however, mediate neurotransmission less directly by activating second messenger molecules which subsequently modulate cellular communication. Contemporary models of neurotransmission maintain that the signals evoked by ionotropic and metabotropic receptors are autonomous and exclusive. Recent data, however, suggests that kainate receptors, members of the ionotropic glutamate receptor family, may be capable of initiating both ionotropic and metabotropic signals. This research is elucidating the merging of these distinct signaling pathways by (1) reconstituting the putative pathway in a heterologous expression system; and (2) identifying proteins that directly interact with the ionotropic kainate receptors as potential mediators of metabotropic coupling. These aims are being achieved by utilizing Xenopus oocyte expression and yeast two-hybrid screening, respectively doc11844 none The current explanations for educational disparities between minorities and non-minorities, as measured by grade point averages (GPA), standardized test scores, achievement tests, etc., range anywhere between genetic inferiority, genetic comparative advantages, and purely environmental factors. However, this entire literature, especially in economics, has for the most part, ignored a phenomenon entitled Acting White (hereafter referred to as AW ). This postdoctoral research and training plan attempts to theoretically model and empirically estimate this phenomenon, in order to shed some light on the set of possible explanations for the observed disparities in educational attainment and performance between minorities and non-minorities. It is believed that in an environment in which AW is present, one can have disparate educational outcomes between multiple groups even when they are all genetically identical. This result is due to the fact that the minority group may be required to make additional investments that may or may not be complementary to their likelihood of success in the dominant society. Furthermore, by ignoring the possibility of the AW phenomenon, current qualitative interpretations of empirical data related to educational attainment may be misplaced doc11845 none Literacy development is one of the most important components of a child s education. Both oral language skills and pre-literacy skills are strong predictors of young children s future reading ability. The child s home experiences are considered the foundation for the development of these skills. The purpose of this postdoctoral research and training project is to determine a relationship between home literacy factors and the development of language and literacy skills in young low income Hispanic children, during two major transitional periods. These transitions include moving from home into a preschool program followed by moving from preschool into a kindergarten classroom. The sample will be divided into clusters based on English and Spanish proficiency levels, determined at the beginning of pre-k. Pre-literacy skills will be assessed for the entire sample at the beginning and end of pre-k as well as once during kindergarten. Home visits to collect information on home literacy factors will occur for a subset of the sample during three time points. Analyses will be conducted to test the hypotheses that home literacy factors shape language proficiency, jointly influencing pre-literacy skills between and across languages. Additionally, changes in home literacy practices during transition will be investigated doc11846 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY . The goal of the fellowship is to prepare minority scientists for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. This program is an effort by the NSF to increase the number of research scientists from under-represented minority groups, thereby contributing to the future vitality of the Nation s scientific enterprise. It is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Analysis of a host-selective toxin gene, ToxB, from the fungus that causes tan spot disease on wheat. Toxin production is one strategy that fungi use to infect plants. The fungus, Pyrenophora tritici-repentis, is a pathogen of wheat due to the production of host-selective toxins. To better understand how this pathogen interacts with its host, this research is characterizing a toxin gene (ToxB) and its protein product(s). A similar gene (toxb) from non-pathogenic fungal isolates is also being cloned and evaluated in comparison to the pathogenic form doc11847 none This post-doctoral research fellowships focuses on the phonology and morphology of Nupe, a Nupoid language spoken in Central Nigeria and its contribution to phonological theory. It follows up on research, which examined intralinguistic variation in different domains of Nupe phonology and morphology and the implications for Optimality Theory, and it will focus on various aspects of its phonology and morphology in the light of recent developments in phonological theory. The research will involve a comprehensive description of the sound system of Nupe. A reanalysis of various controversial aspects of its phonology will be undertaken. This includes the distribution of segments, and the best analysis of Cwa and Cja sequences in such forms as egwa hand and egja `blood . These sequences are open to different analyses in different languages, depending on the phonotactics, morphological distribution, and prosodic considerations of the language in question. The sequences will be experimentally investigated with a view to determining their true phonetic characteristics in Nupe. The study of the morphology of the language will be concerned with describing its word structure, namely the structure of formatives, phonotactics, prosody, and word formation processes such as nominalization and reduplication in the context of recent developments in morphological theory. These facets of its morphology have implications for phonological and morphological theory that have not been previously explored. This research will explore these implications, and the dimensions that they bring to linguistic theory. The phonetic basis of such phonological processes as palatalization, labialization, nasalization, assimilation, and glide formation will be experimentally investigated in order to discover their interaction with Nupe prosody. Such other processes as consonant and vowel elision that interact with the prosody will be studied, and their implications for phonological theory identified and explained. The tonal system of Nupe will be studied with particular focus on its complexities, which include consonant-tone interaction in noun and verb phrases, and the interaction of tone and intonation. The experimental investigation of tone will reveal the similarities and differences between Nupe and other tone languages that have been reported to exhibit intonation features. The aim is to discover whether all three tone systems have similar intonational systems. The results of this research will be of interest not only to researchers and scholars in descriptive and theoretical linguistics, but also to those in experimental linguistics, computational linguistics, philosophy of language, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, and cognitive science doc11848 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY . The goal of the fellowship is to prepare minority scientists for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. This program is an effort by the NSF to increase the number of research scientists from under-represented minority groups, thereby contributing to the future vitality of the Nation s scientific enterprise. It is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Evolution of morphological diversity in iguanian lizards. This research compares the evolution of morphological diversity among and within two lizard families, Agamidae and Iguanidae. The goal is to identify clades that have evolved greater morphological disparity than other clades, test for common ecomorphological patterns within and between groups, and test for an association between increased morphological disparity and diversification rates using a phylogenetic context doc11849 none This postdoctoral research project will further refine and examine the construction and validation of three scales: 1) the African American Church Scale (ARCH); 2) Parental Version of the Racial Socialization Scale (PVRS); and 3) Adolescent Version of the Racial Socialization Scale (AVRS). Each scale is a theory-based self-report measure. Separate focus groups consisting of parents and their adolescents from three predominantly African American churches will be conducted to assess the multidimensionality and generate items for each scale. A CFA will be used to investigate and refine the scale underlying dimensions of the ARCS, PVRS, and AVRS. Factor scales will be produced using data from 225 African American parent and adolescent dyads. Lastly, construct and discriminant validity approaches will investigate the relationship of these scales to existing instruments doc11850 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY . The goal of the fellowship is to prepare minority scientists for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. This program is an effort by the NSF to increase the number of research scientists from under-represented minority groups, thereby contributing to the future vitality of the Nation s scientific enterprise. It is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Functional aspects of Dbl homology proteins as molecular switches in cell signaling. Communication within a cell is vital for the maintenance of normal cellular function. Studies being conducted are aimed at deciphering the basic molecular aspects of function and regulation of a Dbl homology protein, a vital component in cellular signaling. These studies are aimed at determining the general mechanism of function using structural, biochemical and cell-based approaches doc11851 none Settlement distributions of prehistoric and historic agriculturists in the arid to semiarid Southwest have changed often over the past years. Resettlements may result from associated decreases in precipitation, although the mechanisms involved are unclear and not all climate changes resulted in resettlement. Determination of the causes of resettlements will require clarification of relationships between precipitation changes and productivity of traditional Southwestern agricultural technologies. This postdoctoral research and training project will address that problem by physically modeling two of the three types of agricultural fields responsible for most traditional agricultural production. Physical modeling will estimate quantities of soil moisture across a landscape based on precipitation, soil distribution, soil hydrologic parameters and land form. The field types to be modeled are flood water and seepage fields which are still in common use by the Hopi of northern Arizona. These fields will provide excellent test cases for modeling and will allow testing of the hypothesis that fields will form at the boundaries between individual soil units. Research will involve mapping of fields, soil units and associated catchments, as well as recording and analysis of soil hydrologic parameters. A digital model of each catchment will be constructed and simulations will be run using physical hydrologic modeling software doc11852 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY . The goal of the fellowship is to prepare minority scientists for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. This program is an effort by the NSF to increase the number of research scientists from under-represented minority groups, thereby contributing to the future vitality of the Nation s scientific enterprise. It is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Genetic analysis of spinal cord circuit formation in the zebrafish embryo. Large-scale genetic screens have revealed zebrafish motility mutants that abnormally contract muscles on the left and right sides simultaneously, suggesting a disruption of spinal cord circuits that coordinate motor output. The goal of this research is to examine these mutants to elucidate the precise cellular and molecular events required for spinal cord circuit formation doc11853 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY . The goal of the fellowship is to prepare minority scientists for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. This program is an effort by the NSF to increase the number of research scientists from under-represented minority groups, thereby contributing to the future vitality of the Nation s scientific enterprise. It is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Evolution of herbivore defense strategies in an invasive plant. The invasive weed Hypericum perforatum, L. (St. John s wort) is being used in this study of the evolution of defense strategies against insect herbivory. The genetic basis of resistance and tolerance are being determined by developing a genetic map of resistance and tolerance traits, investigating tradeoffs between traits conferring resistance versus tolerance, and examining whether tradeoffs vary between native and introduced populations with differing histories of biological control doc11854 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY . The goal of the fellowship is to prepare minority scientists for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. This program is an effort by the NSF to increase the number of research scientists from under-represented minority groups, thereby contributing to the future vitality of the Nation s scientific enterprise. It is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Statistical tools for analyzing gene expression data. The goal of this research is to develop statistical tools for analyzing gene expression data derived from DNA microarray experiments and to generate an analytical framework for relating distributions of gene expression profiles to variation in phenotypic traits. Particular emphasis is being paid to developing methodologies that incorporate a priori biological knowledge and that facilitate the development and testing of biological hypotheses doc11855 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY . The goal of the fellowship is to prepare minority scientists for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. This program is an effort by the NSF to increase the number of research scientists from under-represented minority groups, thereby contributing to the future vitality of the Nation s scientific enterprise. It is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Are ant-plant mutualisms disrupted in rainforest fragments? The subtitle is Influence of fragment size and edge proximity on ant colony establishment, growth, and defense against herbivores. This research investigates how rain forest fragmentation impacts plants and the ants that defend them from herbivores. In addition to determining if the community of ant-plant mutualists is reduced in fragments, a focal ant-plant system is being used to experimentally investigate three potential mechanisms by which ant-plant mutualisms can be altered in forest fragments. The field work is being carried out in Brazil doc11856 none The purpose of this post-doctoral fellowship research project is to conduct a comparative analysis of how African American and Mexican American grassroots organizations in Austin, Texas struggle against institutional racism manifested in various levels of the education system. Through an ethnographic approach, the fellow will conduct a series of interviews with community activists to outline the political tactics and strategies created by working-class people of color in order to secure equal access to education. The fellow will also carry out participant-observation in particular school settings and interview school officials. He will work within a theoretical framework that illuminates the impetus for transformative social change to be rooted in social movements that overtime induce policy responses by the State and institutional change. The fellow will benefit from further training in policy analysis and institutional practices, and, for this reason has planned the research project in close collaboration with several interdisciplinary senior scholars working at the School of Social Work and the Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The project can increase minority representation in the social sciences by enhancing understanding of the mutually productive relationship that can develop between researchers and activists of color who share similar concerns and objectives. This project will hopefully not only draw researchers into minority communities in a collaborative role, but also draw minority activists towards the university and the important contributions that formal education can make to community-based struggles doc11857 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY . The goal of the fellowship is to prepare minority scientists for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. This program is an effort by the NSF to increase the number of research scientists from under-represented minority groups, thereby contributing to the future vitality of the Nation s scientific enterprise. It is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Understanding how membrane proteins involved in sporulation reach their proper locations. All cells can target proteins to specific locations, but the mechanism for this process is poorly understood in bacterial systems. During sporulation in Bacillus subtilis, many membrane proteins are specifically localized within the cell to division sites. Through mutant analyses and fluorescence microscopy using GFP fusions, this research is gaining a more detailed picture of how bacteria send proteins to specific regions of the cell doc11858 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY . The goal of the fellowship is to prepare minority scientists for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. This program is an effort by the NSF to increase the number of research scientists from under-represented minority groups, thereby contributing to the future vitality of the Nation s scientific enterprise. It is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Understanding the physiological and biochemical effects of increased hydrostatic pressure in seals and sea lions: how can they dive so deep? The physiological limits to diving in marine mammals focus on two restrictions: how long can the animal breath-hold and how deep can it dive? Within these limits, animals hunt by choosing a foraging strategy that balances the obligate costs with the potential energetic gains of foraging. In order to incorporate a more complete picture of the physiological and biochemical limitations to diving into optimal foraging models for diving mammals, this research is examining red blood cell membrane changes and non-glycolytic pathway responses to increased hydrostatic pressure doc11859 none This postdoctoral research and training project seeks to understand the relationship between human rights, their abuses, and the health status of Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic. The social scientific literature on the status of Haitian workers well-being does not often illuminate the health status of this population. Likewise, medical literature regarding health and disease among Haitian populations does not elucidate the broader socioeconomic context which helps structure health outcomes. Given the documented abuse of Haitian workers in the Domincan Republic, what are its likely impacts upon the health status of these workers? A study of Haitian workers presents an opportunity to examine in detail the pathogenic effects of social inequalities on this often unprotected population. This project has three objectives: 1) to assess the living and working conditions of Haitian cane cutters who reside on bateyes (shanty town dwellings) and Haitian workers in other sectors of the economy, 2) to evaluate the health status of these workers vis-a-vis these conditions, and 3) to correlate health status with gender, legal status, class, Spanish-speaking proficiency, and type of work on or off the bateyes doc11860 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY . The goal of the fellowship is to prepare minority scientists for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. This program is an effort by the NSF to increase the number of research scientists from under-represented minority groups, thereby contributing to the future vitality of the Nation s scientific enterprise. It is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Genetically defining the non-dividing state of the cell. It has been debated, for cells that have stopped growing, whether they have simply paused in their growth cycle or whether they have entered a physiologically different state, referred to as G0. To distinguish between cycle arrested and G0 cells, this research is using microarray analysis on growth arrested cells of the year, Saccharomyces cerevisiae doc11861 none The planning project will design pilot educational exhibits for an informal education center, the World Learning Center, located in the Presidio National Park at San Francisco. The exhibits will be designed to engage children and adults in activities which will highlight the integrated nature and scientific basis of agriculture, the environment and human societies. The design process will use site visits to observe interactive exhibitry, an iterative process by the team of conceptual formation to final design, and a review and evaluation by a national advisory group doc11862 none This research addresses predictability of short to medium range weather evolution. The first research component will examine reasons for the relatively small benefits of high resolution limited area models compared to more crudely resolved global models revealed in the Principal Investigator s (PI) recent studies. These studies suggest that high resolution limited area models are superior to more coarse resolution global models at 12 and 24 hours, but lose their superiority by 36 hours. The PI hypothesizes that this short period of higher accuracy may be explained by incompatibilities between the global model and limited area model that are coupled at one-way imposed lateral boundaries of the latter, and by dynamical inconsistencies between these models particularly in regard to orographic flow-blocking. It is also hypothesized that the proximity of the validation domain to the data sparse Pacific may limit accuracy of all models. The relevance of these hypotheses will be examined by repeating prior limited area experiments with a global, variable resolution model that focuses its high-resolution window upon the entire conterminous United States. This approach allows two-way global interaction between the highly resolved domain and the rest of the world and will be validated over both the western and eastern United States. The second portion the research will examine fundamental predictability issues regarding saturation of uncertainty growth, the spectral distribution of uncertainty evolution, and possible inferences for the spacing of atmospheric observations. This work follows recent studies in which initial state uncertainty is determined from the difference of two separate, equally credible atmospheric analyses obtained from the United States and European operational numerical forecast models. Those results indicate that initial state uncertainty from the larger scales contribute more to error growth than do uncertainties at the smaller scales. These results, however, were based upon studies that used relatively coarse simulations of only five days duration that did not attain uncertainty saturation. The PI will extend these investigations to higher resolution models with integrations up to two weeks in order to obtain more complete estimates of saturation of uncertainty, the spectral distribution of uncertainty evolution, and observation analysis requirements. Successful completion of this research could lead to improved weather forecasts and provide guidance for optimal siting of observational instruments doc11863 none Sherwin Singer of the Ohio State University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to study a wide range of aqueous systems, from small water clusters to bulk water and ice, using both analytical and numerical theoretical methods. One unifying thread in this research is the analysis of water structures in terms of the topology of the hydrogen bond network. Working with the hydrogen bond topology yields analytical results for systems where only numerical simulations would seem feasible. Moreover, the analytical approach allows extraction of hydrogen bonding properties from small water clusters or ice unit cells and, in a very general fashion, application of these parameters to systems large enough for statistical simulations. In this way, the results of high level ab initio calculations on small systems can be extended to predict statistical properties in the thermodynamic limit. Statistical simulations will also be performed with empirical potentials, including the PI s own dissociating water model. Other plans include checks on the performance of empirical potentials with ab initio studies, quantum Monte Carlo studies of vibrational motion, and development of new ab initio molecular dynamics methods. Modeling the behavior of biological molecules, systems in atmospheric chemistry, or pollutants in the ground water requires accurate models for liquid water, ice, and water clusters. The models for liquid water that exist are in need of improvements, which will result from the outcomes of this research doc11864 none Satpathy Description: This award supports the US-India cooperative research, Theoretical Study of Colossal Magneto-Resistive Compounds. The collaborators are Professors Sashi Satpathy, University of Missouri-Columbia and T. Saha-Dasgupta, S.N. Bose National Center for Basic Sciences, Calcutta. Colossal magnetoresistive (CMR) oxides are of considerable interest because they exhibit a variety of rich physical properties resulting from the coupling between the charge, orbital, spin, and lattice degrees of freedom. They have great potential for industrial applications, particularly in the area of magnetic devices. In recent years, a number of new CMR materials have been discovered and are being studied both experimentally and theoretically. In this joint project, the collaborators will study the electronic structure and electron-lattice interaction in CMR materials and their relationship to transport and magnetism. Scope: The PIs are both highly experienced in conducting electronic structure studies and this project will synthesize the PIs respective research skills. Theoretical study of CMR is a very current, intellectually challenging topic. This research will make important contributions to the physical understanding and technical applications of CMR materials. It will, also, encourage international exchange and greatly benefit the participants and their groups including graduate students. This project is jointly supported by the Division of International Programs and the Government of India s Department of Science & Technology doc11865 none The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and other agencies spend billions of dollars each year evaluating scientific proposals. Only the most meritorious should receive taxpayer dollars. But how should these agencies decide which proposals are the most meritorious? There are two general ways to evaluate proposals, candidates, strategies, and nearly any other entity. The first way is called holistic. Holistic ratings are characterized by a single overall number which reflects one s opinion. The second way is called disaggregated. Disaggregated ratings are characterized by one rating being given to each of several criteria. The criteria s ratings are then summed or averaged to obtain a single number, which reflects one s opinion. Some research suggests that disaggregated ratings are superior to holistic ones. However in the late s, both NIH and NSF refused to adopt disaggregated ratings in their own proposal evaluation procedures, because no prior research comparing holistic and disaggregated ratings used materials such as scientific proposals. The proposed research will fill that gap. Attendees at a scientific convention will be asked to rate oral presentations in either a holistic or disaggregated fashion. Two holistic panels of five persons each and two disaggregated panels of five persons each will rate every presentation. The correlation between the two holistic panels ratings of the presentations will be compared to the correlation between the two disaggregated panels ratings of the presentations. If prior research applies to scientific presentations, then the correlation between the disaggregated panels ratings should be higher than the correlation between the holistic panels ratings. This will provide evidence that disaggregated ratings of scientific materials yields evaluations of higher reliability than do holistic ratings. This result should in turn provide guidance to the scientific agencies as to one way in which their evaluation processes might be improved doc11866 none Ho This award supports fundamental theoretical research to study the new dilute quantum gas systems which have been made possible by recent experiments at JILA and MIT. Projects include studying the physics of Bosons and Fermions in scalar and spinor limits (i.e. in magnetic and optical traps), the physics of mixtures of quantum gases, many-body effects in optical lattices and in the fast rotating regime, and the dynamics in the strongly interacting limit, i.e. near the Feshback resonance. %%% This grant supports theoretical research to study a wide range of physics in new dilute quantum gas systems which have been made possible by recent experiments at JILA and MIT. These experiments have, for the first time, been able to create a new state of matter, the Bose-Einstein condensate, which was predicted many years ago. The PI will investigate a wide range of phenomena in these dilute quantum gas systems. The emphasis will be on fundamentally new aspects of these systems, effects of strong interaction, many-body effects and possible applications. This award also supports graduate level education in condensed matter theory doc11867 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project has as its goal the demonstration of the feasibility of an optical alloy analysis instrument based on a microchip laser excitation source. This instrument will determine elemental composition using laser-induced plasma spectroscopy (LIPS). It will have the advantage over existing portable instruments of being able to determine concentrations of light elements such as carbon, aluminum and silicon. The key to this innovation is the microchip laser, which has been shown to have several advantages in LIPS applications, while being remarkably small, lightweight and robust. In Phase I observations will be made using a laboratory LIPS apparatus, and a set of specifications will be derived for an instrument capable of determining carbon in steel at levels of interest to potential customers in industries where alloy identification is critical. This proposal involves collaboration with a manufacturer with a dominant position in the market. With their input, the optimum instrument configuration which can offer both useful capabilities and easy, portable operation will be determined. There currently exists a strong market for alloy identification instruments, even though existing devices are either limited by inability to determine some of the most important elements, or by significant drawbacks in portability and ease of use. An optical device with important advantages could lead to a much expanded market doc11868 none Norton Walters The image of Islam in contemporary American media is negative, portraying a monolithic, fundamentalist, fanatical ideology hostile to ideas of adaptation and change. However, at this time Muslim immigrants from diverse cultures are creating multi-cultural ethnic, national and linguistic religious communities in the US. The Muslim religion is this nation s fastest growing religion. This dissertation research project by a student of cultural anthropology studies the process of creating a religious community where adaptation and similarities of belief and custom are emphasized over significant differences. The research will be conducted in the Islamic Society of Vermont, in northern Vermont, where immigrants from the Middle East, Bosnia-Herzegovina, India Pakistan, Southeast Asia, North America and elsewhere are creating a Muslim center. Using ethnographic techniques of participant observation and structured in-depth interviews the student will examine how immigrants manage their significant internal differences in order to construct a cohesive religious community. Focusing on religious law, parenting strategies, community leadership and conflict management, the student will examine how a uniquely American vision of Islam is being created. The results of the study will be valuable to society at large, as a corrective to the prevalent image. In addition the new information will be valuable to policy makers dealing with immigration from Muslim regions. The project also contributes to the training of a young social scientist doc11869 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop thin film (less than 50 microns) crystalline silicon (Si) photovoltaic (PV) cells. At present, Si wafers account for approximately 50 per cent of the completed PV module cost. Weak near-infrared absorption requires 250-micron thick Si films to absorb available optical radiation. Preliminary calculations indicate that appropriately designed subwavelength structures can achieve comparable absorption in films 20-50 microns thick. These subwavelength structures can now be fabricated using recent advances in Si reactive ion etching (DRIE) technology. Preliminary tests with DRIE techniques have demonstrated aspect ratios (depth to linewidth) greater than 30 for grating periods less than 1 micron. Phases I will explore a technique of microstructured thin films lift-off from a conventional Si substrate. The lift-off film is bonded to a low-cost substrate for subsequent solar cell processing. Original wafers are re-used following a simple planarization step. Several lift-off steps from the same Si wafer will offset added processing costs and permit savings in Si material costs. The underlying technology is expected to find applications in homo- and hetero-epitaxial growth on nanostructured Si substrates. Commercial applications are anticipated in this new approach to thin film Si solar cell technology doc11870 none Irwin Shapiro, Director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is conducting a planning phase to develop a large format film about the formation, evolution and future of the earth. The goal of the film will be to convey to the public that the Earth is a dynamic body and to examine the current evidence that scientists have about the origin and possible future of the Earth. By presenting the current state of knowledge and by demonstrating the dynamic nature of science, the film will try to disabuse the beliefs held by many of the lay public that the Earth was created in the Big Bang and is virtually unchanging and that science is a collection of static facts that followed a series of discoveries by a few brilliant individuals. During the planning phase, Dr. Shapiro, the PI for the grant, will work closely with Bayley Silleck, Producer of the large format films Cosmic Voyage and Lost Worlds: Life in the Balance to develop both the science content and the cinemagraphic aspects of the film. They will call upon the expertise of a group of advisors that includes among others: David Baum, Assistant Professor of Biology, Harvard University; Alastair G. W. Cameron, Donald H. Menzel Research Professor of Astrophysics, Harvard University; Howard Dimmick, Earth Science Teacher and Chairman of the Science Department at Stoneham High School; Janice Gobert, cognitive scientist from Western Michigan University; Jim Head, Professor of Geological Sciences, Brown University; and Thomas Herring, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Specific activities to be conducted during the planning phase include: Convene three meetings of the advisors to develop an outline for the film that will assure that it maintains substantive science while, at the same time, presenting the subject in a dynamic, visual, and educationally provocative manner. Engage a third party evaluator to conduct focus groups to determine the audience reaction to the topic of the film. Form alliances with museum theaters. Develop a plan for ancillary material to support the film doc11871 none This is a proposal to organize a broadly based community assessment of the current status and future directions of the U.S. solar and space physics research programs. The study will be organized in a manner similar to the decadal survey that is regularly conducted by the astronomy and astrophysics community. The Committee on Solar and Space Physics will establish a 12-person survey committee to carry out the study with input from five panels, each of which will have up to 10 members. Most Committee on Solar and Space Physics members will serve on either the survey committee or the panels, with additional membership drawn from the relevant research communities. Special attention will be given to appropriate balance between experts from the space-based and ground-based research communities. The study will generate consensus recommendations from the solar and space physics community regarding a systems approach to theoretical, ground-based and space-based research that encompasses the flight programs and focused campaigns of NASA, the ground-based and basic research programs of NSF, and the complementary operational programs of other agencies such as DoD, DoE and NOAA. During this study, the community will survey solar and space physics and recommend priorities for the decade - . Attention will be given to effective implementation of proposed and existing programs and to the human resource aspects of the field involving education, career opportunities, and public outreach. Promising areas for the development of new technologies will be suggested. A minor but important part of the study will be the review of complementary initiatives of other nations in order to identify potential cooperative programs doc11872 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will design, fabricate and test parallel coaxial evanescent microwave probes (EMP) with integrated piezoelectric actuators and neuromorphic electronics. EMP is being developed and commercialized by MICC in collaboration with researchers at Case Western Reserve University for a variety of imaging applications including thin film quality control, semiconductor characterization, biological studies, and other applications in metrology. EMPs have very fast scan rates ( 1 cm s) and they yield information regarding the dielectric constant as well as the microwave conductivity of materials. They are also non-contact with the capability of imaging both conducting and insulating materials. Integration of actuators and neuromorphic electronics with EMP s will enable their development in manufacturing quality assessment and other high throughput applications. EMPs have very high spatial resolutions (=0.1 um -100 um and in some cases atomic resolution) and their application in manufacturing will have significant impact on quality control and assessment. The possible market for such a system is in multi-billion US dollars per year in the US alone. The proposed parallel EMP arrays will be tested using a mock pulsed-laser deposition set-up at MICC doc11873 none This project investigates the behavior of foreign exchange rates and goods prices. It provides a new time-series analysis of aggregate consumer prices and exchange rates. It offers a framework for extending new open-economy macroeconomic models. The structure proposed incorporates a local sector for distribution of imported goods. The project pursues how the volatility of the exchange rate depends on the amount of exchange-rate pass-through to importers and to consumers, and the elasticity of demand for imported goods by consumers and the derived elasticity of demand by importer distributors. There is further study of the pass-through question, taking into account the separate roles of consumers and importer distributors. Finally, empirical measures of pass-through to consumers and importers, along with other parameters are derived and used to simulate these new models. The first phase of the project proposes a new way of looking at the purchasing power parity puzzle. Real exchange rates among advanced countries have been very volatile and extremely persistent since the collapse of Bretton Woods. The extreme volatility of the real rates seems to point to a monetary or financial force driving the exchange rate, as opposed to real productivity or taste shocks. But the standard monetary model requires that real exchange rate persistence be determined by the persistence of nominal price adjustment. This project breaks the link between the speed of adjustment of nominal exchange rates and the speed of adjustment of nominal prices implicit in such models. A new approach is developed that allows measurement of the speed of adjustment of prices and exchange rates to the equilibrium levels, using an unobserved components model. The key identifying assumption of the equilibrium levels is the long-run purchasing power parity assumption. The approach does not require that the equilibrium levels follow random walks, nor is it necessary to restrict the correlation of innovations to the equilibrium component and the transitory components. The next part of the proposal advances a framework for extending recent dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium optimizing models of open economies with sticky nominal prices. It seeks to extend the analysis, and build models that reconcile the very low levels of exchange-rate pass-through to consumers with the greater degree of pass-through to import prices. Under this framework, it should be possible to understand the implications of empirical results that find expenditure- switching effects of exchange rates at the producer level, but little expenditure switching in final goods prices. One disappointment of the new open economy macro literature is its lack of progress on understanding nominal exchange rate determination. This project pursues potential avenues for understanding the high degree of nominal exchange rate volatility. The framework for generalizing open-economy models takes pass-through parameters and elasticities of demand as given. The next part of the project develops some ideas for extending the theoretical literature on pass-through and menu-cost pricing in the context of models with importer distributors that are distinct from final buyers. Finally, the project proposes uses disaggregated data on consumer prices in conjunction with industry-level price and import data to produce estimates of pass-through and elasticities that will help calibrate the general equilibrium models doc11874 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will demonstrate the feasibility of fabricating low volume, low parasitic, i.e., low series resistance and inductance, high energy density capacitors using stacked, thin-film tantalum pentoxide dielectrics fabricated on Kapton film and tantalum foil. Low resistance capacitors will shorten both charge and discharge time, as well as lower the resistive load on the battery or power source. Low inductance is also important in high voltage systems. Power supplies have high transformation ratios with many turns for secondary windings that induce high leakage inductance. Therefore, capacitor inductance must be minimized in order to reduce the total system inductance, ultimately improving power usage factors and system efficiency. Numerous high power systems are used in the medical, defense, space, and consumer electronics industries, where substantial reduction in size and weight and increased speed and performance are desired. Special anodization techniques used to form capacitor dielectrics will allow fabrication of capacitors with a wide range of high performance configurations and characteristics that are expected to benefit all of these industrial markets. Miniaturized, high energy density thin-film capacitors are used in many high power devices, such as defibrillators, DC power supplies, and automotive electronics doc11875 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop yeast strains to efficiently catalyze the conversion of cellulose to ethanol. Current technology requires the addition of purified cellulase enzymes to convert cellulose to glucose, which is then fermented to alcohol by the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The proposed research intends to make three significant improvements over the existing technology : (1) Use of a high temperature tolerant yeast Kluyveromyces marxianus to effect a very efficient fermentation, (2) Expression of genes encoding cellulase in the fermenting yeast, and 3) Isolation and selection of the yeast and the cellulase genes from the cellulosic waste specifically for optimal performance. The commercial applications of this project are in the reduction of cellulose waste material produced by agriculture and industry, and in the production of a cost effective fuel grade ethanol doc11876 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will identify commercially-important genes in Pinctada margaritifera as targets for future manipulation in order to improve the efficiency and profitability of black pearl farming. This work will also attempt to produce transgenic pearl oysters that carry the Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) transgene under a constitutive eukaryotic promoter. Transgenic animals expressing the reporter gene will be followed to monitor expression patterns of the transgene in a controlled quarantine nursery system. Concurrent experiments will isolate genes involved in growth regulation and nacre formation in this species. Candidate growth hormone and nacre protein genes will be sequenced, compared to known genes of similar function in other molluscs and verified as homologous The commercial application of this project will be at the high end of the black pearl market that is estimated to be of the order of $ 150 million in the Pacific alone. This project is expected to result in the production of faster growing oysters that yield bigger and higher quality pearls than those currently available doc11877 none Worthman Dudgeon Men in traditional communities are often thought to be less concerned about maternal health and mortality than women, the difference stemming from the traditional division of labor of men focusing outside the household, and women relating more towards inside the household events. This dissertation research project by an anthropology student from Emory University will study the role of men in maternal health and mortality in the Mayan community of Cantel, Guatemala. The study will examine patterns of men s influences on health in the context of Guatemala s recent civil violence and subsequent Mayan ethnic activism. The student will investigate men s beliefs, attitudes, and contributions to household health status through a combination of health surveys, anthropometric health indicators, and qualitative interviews and observations. Hypotheses will be tested relating maternal morbidity and mortality with household access to health care, maternal health, socioeconomic indicators, ethnic identity, and an array of men s activities. The results from this study will be valuable correctives to the relative paucity of information on men s household health contributions; will inform health interventions directed towards improving maternal and infant health; will contribute to the training of a young social scientists, and will advance our knowledge of this important region of the world doc11878 none The Gordon Research Conferences on a number of scientific topics, are held every summer to discuss recent findings and current thinking in various areas of science. Although participation is limited, the attendees usually consist of established scientists, young investigators who are making important contributions in these areas, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. The meetings are usually held in small isolated New England towns away from other distractions, and are conducive to the free exchange of ideas. These conferences have a recognized value for presenting the latest advances in research and also for indicating the future trends in research which are likely to be most productive. This award represents full or partial support of 21 conferences in the biological sciences being held in the summer of through the spring of doc11879 none This proposal requests a grant of 43.500 in student support of the Gordon Research Conference on Nonlinear Optics and Lasers to be held at the Colby-Sawyer College, New London, New Hampshire. July 29 - August 3, . The field of nonlinear optics and lasers has been and continues to be an extremely active and fruitful area of both basic and applied research. Recent Nobel Prizes in laser cooling, femtosecond chemistry, and laser diodes attest to its impact on science. The recent explosive growth of the telecommunications indusiry attest to its impact on our economy and also our daily lives. As in previous years. the purpose of this conference is to provide an informal forum for the presentation and discussion of new work on selected topics in nonlinear optics, quanium electronics and lasers, and their applications to physics, chemistry and engineering, both in academe and in industry. An informal atmosphere with a strong emphasis on discussion and interactions is intended to encourage the exchange of ideas in a manner not possible at regular meetings of professional societies. Students in particular benefit from these opportunities. A total attendance of approximately 100 scientists and students from universities, industry and government is anticipated. Participation at the conference is limited to under 135. to preserve the informal atmosphere and increase the level of interactions. It is proposed that the estimated total expense for the conference of $30,000 be shared by the National Science Foundation (43,500), the funds supplied by the Gordon Conference ($19,000). and funds to be solicited from other sources ($7,500). The National Science Foundation funds will be used to support selected graduate students who, because of limitations of their own sources of funding, require financial assistance to attend the conference. No honoraria will be paid to speakers at the conference doc11880 none Over the past forty years, many studies have collected empirical data documenting aspects of the locomotor behavior of anthropoid primates (monkeys and apes). The results of some of this research have revealed unusual characteristics of the form of quadrupedalism that primates display. This has in turn led to suggestions of distinctiveness in primates among mammals in such things as patterns of neural control of movement. However, based largely on data for anthropoids only, such conclusions are premature without comparable data on prosimian primates. The goals of the proposed study, therefore, are to undertake a set of laboratory based studies concerning aspects of locomotor behavior among prosimian primates in order to supplement the currently sparse empirical data base, and allow comparisons with the better-documented locomotor behavior of anthropoid primates as well as nonprimate mammals. The specific questions this study will address include documentation of patterns of muscle recruitment during quadrupedal locomotion in a variety of prosimian species including Lemur catta, Eulemur. fulvus, and E. rubriventer using the technique of electromyography (EMG); analysis of issues associated with the mechanics of leaping, a locomotor behavior that displays its most specialized development among certain prosimian species such as Propithecus coquereli using force-plate recordings; and examination of the locomotor behavior of Daubentonia madagascariensis, the Aye-aye, one of the most enigmatic of prosimian species, using a combination of motion analysis, EMG and force-plate recordings to attempt to interpret some of its many unusual postcranial morphological features. The results of this research will significantly expand our empirical data base on primate locomotor behavior, permitting legitimate conclusions regarding what is or isn t characteristic of the Order. Such information will contribute to a more precise definition of what it means to be a primate, and what factors were involved in the origins of the Order and its eventual dispersal and diversification doc11881 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Richard C. Larock, of the Department of Chemistry at Iowa State University, is studying novel palladium migration chemistry. Intramolecular palladium migration from an alkyl group to an arene or from an aryl group to another aryl group in biphenyl derivatives, followed by subsequent functionalization, offers promise for the synthesis of a variety of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and heterocycles. Professor Larock is exploring the generality and scope of these novel migration functionalization processes. Palladium also migrates through space from a vinylic position to an aryl position, affording access to 9-alkylidenefluorenes. Additional migration reactions can lead to synthetically useful pi-allylpalladium complexes, acylpalladium intermediates, and imidoylpalladium species. Palladium is arguably the single most versatile metal employed in modern organic synthesis. A remarkable array of organopalladium species have been generated and shown to undergo a multitude of synthetically useful processes. This versatility is being broadened still further by the work of Professor Richard C. Larock, of the Department of Chemistry at Iowa State University. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Larock is exploring novel reactions in which easily accessible organopalladium species undergo rearrangement through migration of the palladium atom to new sites within a molecule. In this way, new intermediates are generated, from which may be prepared a variety of cyclic organic compounds. By virtue of the unique structures afforded by these reaction sequences, new synthetic strategies for the preparation of the complex molecules forming the basis of the modern chemical industry are presented doc11882 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will address improved wafer contamination analysis in the microelectronics industry. Phase I will examine a new technique called focused beam total reflection x-ray fluorescence (TXRF). Based on point-focusing toroidal crystal optics, focused beam TXRF is expected to improve spatial resolution by a factor more than 100 and provide 30 times better detection sensitivity for local contaminants on silicon (Si) than the conventional TXRF method. This technique also has potential for low level aluminum (Al), sodium (Na), and other low atomic-number (Z) elements that not performed effectively by conventional TXRF and other techniques. Phase I will demonstrate improved sensitivity and resolution for transition metal detection. Theoretical calculations will be also carried out to determine the feasibility for Al and Na detection in wafer contamination control. Focused beam TXRF analysis has commercial applications in the microelectronics industry for wafer contamination control, including localized and homogeneous contaminants with high resolution. These contaminants include many important elements, such as transition metals, Al, Na and other low Z elements doc11883 none This proposal requests support for the U.S. involvement in the operations of an optical high-resolution spectrometer at the University of Canterbury s Mount John Astronomical Observatory (44 S, South Island, New Zealand), and is part of the US NZ Cooperative Science Program. Mount John is a member of the Austral Alliance, i.e. the Southern Hemisphere s international collaborative program for the investigation of the austral upper atmosphere, and includes optical and radar stations in New Zealand (Mount John and Birdlings Flat), Australia (Beveridge and Adelaide) and Antarctica (South Pole, Scott Base, Mawson, Davis, Syowa, Arrival Heights, and Halley Bay). Mount John is the only full-time optical experiment at Southern Hemisphere midlatitudes already in the process of investigating the long-term mesospheric, lower-thermospheric and ionosphere (MLTI) dynamics and thermodynamics. Further, when these proposed ground-based observations are combined with observations from satellite-borne experiments, as well as the results of both modeling and simulations, they will increase out understanding and knowledge of the Southern Hemisphere s upper atmosphere doc11884 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project will demonstrate the feasibility of constructing a low cost process control sensor for advanced alternative energy and catalysis applications. Sensor could be a component in as many as 1.2 million fuel cell vehicles projected to be on the road in and a component in the electrical generation market which could surpass $100 Billion in . The sensor will measure carbon monoxide in the part-per-million to percent range in a wet, high concentration, hydrogen stream with significant carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrogen (N2) concentrations. Although large nondispersive infrared (NDIR) instruments are the standard solution to this measurement problem, NDIR is prohibitively expensive for many applications including fuel cell power plants, and transportation applications, and quite expensive for industrial processes such as urea manufacture and oil refining. Phase II will develop an easily manufactured sensor costing a few dollars apiece in large quantity as opposed to current IR systems costing thousands to tens of thousands of dollars apiece. This project will have a direct impact on reducing United States dependence on foreign oil by making highly efficient fuel systems practical doc11885 none This project involves continued research on the geometric, probabilistic and combinatorial aspects of functional analysis and convexity theory, with particular attention to noncommutative objects and phenomena. While most of the problems considered in the project have motivation in other fields of mathematical sciences, they are typically expressed in the language of local or finite dimensional geometry of Banach spaces and or analyzed using the methods prevalent in that area. Sample research topics include: entropy of linear operators and duality of such entropy, structural properties of high-dimensional convex bodies, various analytic and geometric questions related to random matrices, some problems in the local operator theory, Gaussian correlation of convex sets, concentration phenomenon in the noncommutative context and some geometric questions related to free and quantum information theories. On an elementary level, Analysis is a study of functions, or relationships between quantities and the parameters on which they depend. As it happens, very many naturally appearing relationships are linear or at least convex. Thus, a good understanding of convex functions and, consequently, of convex sets is a prerequisite for understanding those relationships. The number of free parameters in the underlying problem can often be related to the dimension of sets in the corresponding mathematical model. Since real-life problems usually do depend on very many parameters, the high-dimensional setting is of particular interest. This is exactly the domain of Asymptotic Geometric Analysis, which studies quantitative properties of convex sets as the dimension goes to infinity. It constitutes a fertile middle ground between the classical Functional Analysis and the classical Geometry. Functional Analysis is usually concerned with the infinite-dimensional setting (which frequently is an idealization of a very large dimension), but it often provides only qualitative information. On the other hand, Geometry typically yields very precise information for a specific not-too-large dimension. For the last two decades or so the asymptotic theory has been quite successful in identifying and exploiting approximate symmetries of various problems that escaped the earlier too qualitative or too rigid methods. (This led, among others, to the discovery of many links to Computer Science.) Finally, to explain our interest in noncommutativity we point out that it simply reflects the fact that the final outcome of a process may depend on the order of operations involved; the best known, but by far not the only manifestation of that principle is quantum mechanics doc11886 none Cytochrome c and apoptosis activating factor-1 (apaf-1) are the judge and jury of mitochondrially-mediated programmed cell death (apoptosis). Their interaction seals a cell s fate by launching a tightly controlled program that ends in cellular disintegration, and imbalances in this regulation are associated with cancer, neurological diseases, and heart disease. Given the biological and medical relevance of this protein-protein reaction, it is surprising that its molecular basis is unknown. The broad long-term goal of this project is to determine the molecular basis for the interaction between cytochrome c and apaf-1. The main hypotheses are: a) Cytochrome c uses the same cationic patch to interact with apaf-1 and its redox partners. b) Apaf-1 uses specific anionic patches to interact with cytochrome c. The specific aims are 1) Quantify apaf-1 cytochrome c binding, 2) Identify probable binding sites on apaf-1 and cytochrome c, 3) Test the binding sites. Sedimentation equilibrium methods will be used to quantify binding, but alternative methods are also discussed. Probable binding sites on the WD repeat domain of apaf-1 have been identified in modeling studies, and the redox-partner binding site on cytochrome c has been known for many years. The sites will be tested by using site directed mutagenesis. To ensure that biologically significant data are obtained, the variants will first be assessed by using a quick and biologically relevant caspase activation assay. Once the biologically relevant residues have been identified, the biophysics of the variants will be characterized. Circular dichroism spectropolarimetry will be used to assess their integrity. Sedimentation velocity experiments on apaf-1 variants will be used to assess their effects on intraprotein interactions. Sedimentation equilibrium techniques from aim 1 will be used to quantify their effects on the free energy and stoichiometry of complex formation doc11887 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is designed to assess the feasibility of developing a nonintrusive diode laser sensor for oxygen contamination in drug product bottles. In this project, designs for overcoming problems associated with ambient oxygen signals and optical interferences due to etalons will be examined. In addition, the sensitivity and accuracy of the proposed technique will be demonstrated. Lastly, a preliminary examination of the possibility of performing measurements on the production line will be made. If successful, this technology will be extendable to nonintrusive measurements in a variety of packaged and bottled food and drug products doc11888 none Dr. Darryl D. DesMarteau, III, Department of Chemistry, Clemson University, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Program of the Chemistry Division for research into sulfonimides, sulfones and iodine Compounds. The research capitalizes on the unique properties of perfluoroalkylsulfonimides, a class of strong nitrogen acids, to stabilize unusual molecular structures and to promote unusual reactivity. The project has three main thrusts. First, a new class of zwitterionic diaryl iodonium salts containing both the anion and cation directly bound to the aromatic ring will be investigated. A variety of these compounds, which have a broad range of functionalization on the aromatic rings, will be prepared. These compounds have excellent potential for use in photolithography as photoacid generators and may aid in extending photolithography for integrated circuit manufacture to shorter wavelengths for smaller device geometries. Second, a novel iodonium compound that has the ability to selectively place a trifluoroethyl alkyl group onto an amino acid in a water solution will be used to prepare new, potentially bioactive compounds. Third, sulfonimides will be incorporated into dendrimer polymers to give the first examples of perfluorinated dendrimers. Parallel to this effort, a new functionalized crosslinking agent for ionene polymers will be developed in order to obtain higher molecular weights and decreased crystallinity, which will aid these species to form membranes. The proposed research combines fundamental chemical science with applications of importance in microelectronics, drug discovery, electrochemistry and catalysis. The systems selected for study have potential as polymer electrolytes in fuel cells and battery applications, as media in which nanoscale materials can be formed, and as polymer based reagents. One objective is the design of new catalysts for a number of `acid catalyzed` processes (petroleum refining, for example, often uses acidic catalysts). Another is to design ways to introduce fluorine into molecules that may have biochemical significance. This combination will provide an excellent platform to train undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral students in basic research in the chemical sciences in technological areas of high current interest doc11889 none TRANSFORMATION FIELD ANALYSIS The Transformation Field Analysis (TFA) is a new method for hierarchical modeling of many interacting physical processes in heterogeneous material systems. The research, will provide the following new theoretical results and applications of the TFA: (a) A rate form of the influence functions and governing equations, for applications involving changes in thermoelastic moduli of the phases. (b) Formulation of new shape functions for refinement of local inelastic deformation fields; and (c): Use of unit cell models in the context of the TFA, for refined analysis of local deformation and damage processes doc11890 none Srienc The Principal Investigator s overall objective is to study the biosynthesis of novel types of polyhydroxyalkanoic acids (PHA), which are spatially structured and, therefore, confer specific physical properties to this material. The microstructure will be achieved by periodic alteration of the nutrients supplied to the microorganisms that are capable of PHA synthesis. The different nutrients result in the formation of different precursors for the polymerization reaction and lead to the controlled deposition of homo- and copolymer in spherical granules with architecture structured at the nanometer length scale. Furthermore, the nutrient switching strategy can be designed to generate structure at the individual polymer chain level resulting in block-copolymers that can self-assemble into specific morphologies that could have useful physical properties. This biosynthesis approach will be further developed to generate specific diblock- and tailback-copolymers and their physical properties will be evaluated. In addition to the synthesis of such PHAs with improved value, the biosynthesis of this material will be investigated in the context of anaerobic metabolism of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae extending preliminary studies that demonstrate that anaerobic biosynthesis of PHAs is possible. The combined effort of producing smarter materials of higher value together with metabolic engineering manipulations of the organisms for more efficient production processes could have significant impact on the technology of biodegradable plastics doc11891 none This Small Business Phase Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project will investigate microencapsulation technology, including microencapsulated phase change materials (microPCMs), to improve biological control of soilborne plant diseases. Success in this program would enhance the potential of using this technology in a broad range of biocontrol arenas. Previous research has demonstrated that microPCM(s) can significantly improve bioherbicide efficacy through microclimate regulation. Biocontrol organisms for plant diseases have environmental constraints (moisture and temperature) to practical application. Additionally, many of these organisms also lack a suitable carrier or delivery system. The technology proposed in this program will address these constraints by providing supplemental moisture, supplemental nutrients and temperature regulation to a viable biocontrol bacterium that is encapsulated inside a protective capsule. Innovative microencapsulation techniques will combine water, microPCMs and nutrients in a form that can be delivered to seeds or vegetative cuttings. The key objectives of the Phase I project are as follows : (1) to evaluate compatibility of microencapsulated materials, (2) to design and to fabricate water microcapsules and microPCMs, (3) to encapsulate a test biocontrol bacterium, and 4) to evaluate these formulations individually or in combination with the test bacterium to control soilborne diseases in selected crops. The commercial applications of this project will be in the huge, multibillion dollar market for materials needed to control soilborne diseases in flowers and in crops such as corn, soybeans, cotton, grain sorghum and rice doc11892 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a new type of residual gas analyzer based on a novel ion-trapping concept. The new instrument will have significant cost and size advantages over current commercially available residual gas analyzer (RGA) systems. If the concept is successful, it has the potential to provide performance capabilities exceeding current RGA technology. The new trap also has potential application as a general purpose ion source for precision mass spectrometry. Phase I will: (1) design and construct a proof-of-principle experiment to demonstrate the novel ion trap as an ion source for a compact RGA; (2) conduct experiments to characterize the performance of the new instrument; and (3) evaluate possible extensions of the instrument and develop the conceptual design for a Phase II laboratory demonstration instrument. These new RGA instruments are expected to reduce capital and manufacturing costs in industries such as semiconductor manufacturing, vacuum coating, electro-optics, chemical processing, and environmental monitoring. It will also make RGAs more available to new users in industry and university research laboratories, who presently cannot afford such instruments doc11893 none International research interaction and exchange of ideas, particularly in the field of emerging technologies, is in the best interest of United States. Several NSF-sponsored workshops have concluded that thermal issues play an important role in many of the critical areas. NSF support is requested to partially support a team of US young scientists to visit India in January to participate in the Fifth ISHMT-ASME Heat and Mass Transfer Conference (Calcutta), jointly sponsored by the Indian Society of Heat and Mass Transfer and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The US scientists will also visit several premier institutions including the recently-established Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, and Bangladesh. It will help in developing new ties with Bangladesh Society of Mechanical Engineers. A diversified group of US researchers including graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and non-tenured faculty, will be partially supported from this grant, with special preference to under-represented groups. The visit will expand research interactions between the US and Indian scientists, build new contacts, improve our understanding of thermal science research and education in South Asia, and provide our young scientists with global perspectives of heat and mass transfer research doc11894 none A joint U.S.A. - Itlay Symposium on Composite Materials in the summer of is proposed that will involve young investigators in this area as well as mature leaders in the field. This symposium, to be based in Capri, Itlay, was the place for the first NSF sponsored joint U.S.A. - Italy Composite Symposium 20 years ago by the coauthors. This award will provide partial travel support for investigators who would not otherwise be able to attend this binational conference doc11895 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will investigate a proprietary method of measuring atmospheric temperature starting at 10 meters above the surface. Our concept, if successful, will overcome the current Radio Acoustic Sounding System (RASS) low altitude and temperature resolution limits. The temperature measurement accuracy will be increased by at least a factor of two. This system will support research by providing a continuous low altitude temperature profile for a better understanding of the atmosphere and improved weather prediction. Localized weather forecasts are particularly important for airports predicting fog, air quality control, controlled burns of grasslands and forests, and uncontrolled forest fires. The ability to predict the behavior of the smoke emanating from these fires is important since it is a threat to many segments of the population. Results from this research could provide accurate low altitude temperature profiles to businesses that need local weather data (airports, fire departments, television and radio stations, air quality control, and disaster management of nuclear or chemical mishaps, etc doc11896 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a Two-Photon Resonant Holography (TPRH) imaging technique capable of recording time-resolved number densities of atomic or molecular species. Resonant holography and the innovative application of two-photon absorption and photorefractive quantum well (PRQW) holographic devices will allow the development of high-speed systems using only low-cost, solid-state components. Phase I will develop the TPRH technique by constructing a prototype system and demonstrating its operation with a selected species. The use of two-photon absorption with resonant holography allows visible or infrared (IR) lasers to probe species with ultraviolet (UV) absorption lines. Costly UV lasers and optics can be avoided. The PRQW device enables high recording rates. These devices are capable of kiloHertz or megaHertz rates with energy requirements in the nanojoule range. Commercial applications are expected in industrial and fundamental research areas: combustion, plasmas, reacting flows, in vitro biomedical testing, supersonic mixing and reacting flows, and basic research into the nonlinear behavior of atomic or molecular electronic systems. Furthermore, TPRH may find applications in very low cost video rate systems; lightweight, low-power airborne or space-based systems; and multiple-view systems for tomographic measurements doc11897 none The purpose of the proposed study is to test two theoretical perspectives on decision-making - rational choice theory and symbolic interactionism - by examining the decision-making of flood victims to either remain in or relocate outside of the floodplain. Federal agencies have shifted their approach to managing floodplain property from focusing on recovery efforts solely to developing proactive programs to protect people and property from being damaged. One way that these agencies have attempted to break the cycle of development-destruction-redevelopment is through public acquisition of floodplain property (FEMA , ). While many of these buyout programs have been moderately successful, these programs hinge on individual homeowners deciding to participate. Yet, a study of the decision-making considerations of this population has not been conducted. This project seeks to fill that gap while advancing our understanding of the relative merits of rational choice theory and symbolic interactionism doc11898 none The AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) is to become the new encryption standard. In contrast with the development of the DES (Data Encryption Standard) and the EES (Escrow Encryption Standard), the development process of AES was open. The motivation was that a new scheme would be easily accepted by the community and widely used by the government and by industry. The outdated DES has been used extensively to protect industrial secrets, protect financial transactions in the billions of dollars, to protect internet security, etc. It is therefore expected that the new AES will also be used in such applications and new ones. After 3 years, a finalist for the AES has recently been chosen. Seeing the critical application of AES an analysis of the security of the AES finalist before it becomes a standard is primordial. After DES was developed, scientific research lead to new cryptanalytic techniques (such as Differential Cryptanalysis and Linear Cryptanalysis). These techniques are currently used when evaluating new cryptosystems. The goal of the research on the AES finalist is to develop new cryptanalytic techniques that can be used in the future to analyze the AES finalist, its variants, and other future cryptographic algorithms. The ultimate goal is to attempt to break the AES finalist. If this goal would be unachievable, the new techniques may contribute to the scientific understanding of the design of secure ciphers doc11899 none This project will document the political economy of Mayapan, the largest and most influential city in the Maya realm during the Postclassic period. Although the influence of this center throughout the Maya world achieves considerable notoriety in later retrospective mythic historical accounts, the economic foundations of this city have never been investigated with empirical archaeological data. Without this data, the comparative analysis of complex societies in the pre-capitalist world is severely hindered. Precolumbian Maya society represents one of the most innovative civilizations of the New World. Hundreds of Maya city state centers and associated territories extended across southeast Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and western Honduras over a period of years and this society invented the most elaborate set of writing, calendrical, and astronomical notation found in the Americas. Does the degree of political centralization and scale of monument building represent the primary criteria for measuring a civilization s complexity? While these traits are a characteristic of many early states and empires, maturing complex societies often culminate in vast geographic tracts of more decentralized polities that are extensively integrated through mercantile exchange. The growth in the number of literati and merchant factions in maturing old world societies and their increase in power often eroded centralized political institutions in favor of more extensive economic interaction networks that were heavily focused on long-distance trade. This pattern points to the second important issue about Postclassic Maya society that will be addressed from the investigation of Mayapan s economy. This period has been characterized as a mercantile era, and many decentralized polities across the Yucatan peninsula relied heavily on long distance maritime trade for items used in everyday life. This pattern is documented from Spanish Colonial accounts of Maya trade at the time of European contact, as well as from archaeological investigations of small sites along the Caribbean coast that yield evidence of participation in extensive exchange. After the rise of Mayapan to power in the 13th century A.D., an amplification of local production activities geared toward this exchange is observed at distant coastal settlements. An increase in their reliance on long distance household items is also observed, along with an increase in population, ritual activities, and political hierarchical development in areas outside of Mayapan s domain. Ritual and utilitarian artifact and architectural styles at sites throughout the Maya lowlands resemble those observed at Mayapan. What is the meaning of these trends? Did the activities of Mayapan s mercantile elites stimulate this trade network and political development? A greater degree of economic and ideological integration is inferred across the lowland Maya world during Mayapan s reign than during the earlier Classic period. While most of this region was organized into modest political hierarchies, Mayapan stands out as a striking anomaly for the size and elaboration of its urban settlement. It is not possible to understand the political economy of the Postclassic period without evaluating the organization and scale of production and exchange activities at the great center itself, which was governed by merchant elites. Investigations planned by this project will document the variation of production and exchange activities within house groups of different social status across the city. This work will facilitate core-hinterland comparisons and a full reconstruction of economic relationships among Postclassic settlements across the lowlands. These investigations will contribute to the cross-cultural analysis of the development of civilizations by providing critical data from a primate city at the nucleus of a New World mercantile society. This project will document the political economy of Mayapan, the largest and most influential city in the Maya realm during the Postclassic period. Although the influence of this center throughout the Maya world achieves considerable notoriety in later retrospective mythic historical accounts, the economic foundations of this city have never been investigated with empirical archaeological data. Without this data, the comparative analysis of complex societies in the pre-capitalist world is severely hindered. Precolumbian Maya society represents one of the most innovative civilizations of the New World. Hundreds of Maya city state centers and associated territories extended across southeast Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and western Honduras over a period of years and this society invented the most elaborate set of writing, calendrical, and astronomical notation found in the Americas. Two issues underscore the importance of reconstructing the economic systems of production and exchange at Mayapan. First, Postclassic Maya society was long interpreted by scholars as a devolved era, as monumental construction and hieroglyphic writing was performed on a smaller scale and of less-enduring materials than in the earlier Classic period. For this reason, little research has focused on this period. Such a deflation in monumental scale suggests that political hierarchies collapsed in many portions of the Maya area, although Mayapan stands out as an important exception. Does the degree of political centralization and scale of monument building represent the primary criteria for measuring a civilization s complexity? While these traits are a characteristic of many early states and empires, maturing complex societies often culminate in vast geographic tracts of more decentralized polities that are extensively integrated through mercantile exchange. The growth in the number of literati and merchant factions in maturing old world societies and their increase in power often eroded centralized political institutions in favor of more extensive economic interaction networks that were heavily focused on long-distance trade. This pattern points to the second important issue about Postclassic Maya society that will be addressed from the investigation of Mayapan s economy. This period has been characterized as a mercantile era, and many decentralized polities across the Yucatan peninsula relied heavily on long distance maritime trade for items used in everyday life. This pattern is documented from Spanish Colonial accounts of Maya trade at the time of European contact, as well as from archaeological investigations of small sites along the Caribbean coast that yield evidence of participation in extensive exchange. After the rise of Mayapan to power in the 13th century A.D., an amplification of local production activities geared toward this exchange is observed at distant coastal settlements. An increase in their reliance on long distance household items is also observed, along with an increase in population, ritual activities, and political hierarchical development in areas outside of Mayapan s domain. Ritual and utilitarian artifact and architectural styles at sites throughout the Maya lowlands resemble those observed at Mayapan. What is the meaning of these trends? Did the activities of Mayapan s mercantile elites stimulate this trade network and political development? A greater degree of economi doc11900 none The investigator and her colleagues collaborate in a group project at the Center for BioDynamics (CBD) to provide interdisciplinary education and training for graduate students and postdoctoral-level investigators in the context of a vigorous interdisciplinary research program that focuses on areas of mutual interest in mathematics (especially dynamical systems), biology, and engineering. Disciplines include mathematics, biomedical engineering, aerospace mechanical engineering, biology, psychology, and physics. Training extends beyond the usual classroom activities by engaging participants in a variety of research projects as well. One of the major topics is dynamics of the nervous system. The projects, which involve experiments, modeling, and analysis, all deal with the variety of rhythms in the nervous system and the potential functions of these rhythms in key cognitive states and processes such as attention, awareness, learning, and recall. A second major topic is dynamics of gene expression. Progress in genomic research is leading to maps of the building blocks of biology and fueling the study of gene regulation, where proteins often regulate their own production or that of other proteins in a complex web of interactions. CBD projects focus on using techniques from nonlinear dynamics, statistical physics, control theory, and molecular biology to model, design, and construct synthetic gene regulatory networks, and to probe naturally occurring gene regulatory networks. The third major topic is the dynamics of patterns and waves. Training activities include two weekly working seminars, extra journal clubs and reading groups, seminars to educate the CBD members in the research going on within the Center, and a CBD-initiated team-taught course. The Center for BioDynamics (CBD) helps to advance understanding of difficult interdisciplinary problems at the intersection of mathematics, biology, and engineering, and it trains mathematicians, scientists, and engineers for the 21st century workforce. It does this by combining traditional classroom education with significant engagement of students and postdocs in interdisciplinary teams working on current problems. The disciplines involved are mathematics, biomedical engineering, aerospace mechanical engineering, biology, psychology, and physics. One of the major topics is dynamics of the nervous system. The projects in this topic seek to shed light on the origin of the electrical activity in the brain, and how the brain uses this activity to process sensory information, to think, and to regulate movement. A second major topic is dynamics of gene expression. The web of interactions among the proteins that are produced by genes is complex; the projects associated with this topic involve the design and construction of artificial gene regulatory networks, and techniques to better understand naturally occurring gene regulatory networks. The third major topic is the dynamics of patterns and waves, occuring in a variety of applications. Training activities include two weekly working seminars, regular sessions to read scientific journals, seminars to educate the CBD members in the research going on within the Center, and a CBD-initiated team-taught course. The project is supported by the Computational Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, Computational Neuroscience, and Biological Databases and Informatics programs and by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities doc11901 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to develop commercially viable methods for the fabrication of high aspect ratio micro- and nano-structures for microfluidic applications using contact nano-printing. X-ray lithography will be used to produce molding tools to emboss structures in polymers. Microfluidic channels will be fabricated with ordered arrays of micro- and nano-posts filling these channels. Molding tools will be constructed from metal electroform to allow hot embossing or injection molding of various polymers. Mechanical properties of both the electroform and the polymers will be evaluated for the ability to minimize structure deformation during demolding. Various gluing and heat annealing assembly methods to enclose the microfluidic channels will be investigated. A number of post geometries will be examined for feature integrity during molding, demolding and assembly. Fluid transport through the ordered arrays will be studied in detail using confocal fluorescence microscopy. The commercial applications of this project will be in the area of micro-column separations such as for reversed phase chromatography and for micro-reactors doc11902 none D. G. Cory, MIT This proposal, based on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR), is at the forefront of analysis of the structure and flow in porous material, with emphasis to geophysical exploration. The method will significantly improve the effectiveness of NMR to explore and characterize the structure and the dynamics of fluid transport through the porous material by coherent averaging. The NMR signature is separated in to an isotropic spectrum, a frequency modulation, and an amplitude modulation. These components can report on the chemistry of the mobile phase, the basic field variations, and the time length scale correlation of the solid phase and the mobility of the mobile phase. The proposed work for next year is focused on the design philosophy for the NMR coherent averaging scheme that suppress frequency modulations, extracting the model independent metrics from the amplitude modulation term, and finally to consider the inverse problem in these complex systems. This would be a significant development at the forefront of this technology. This work is in collaboration between university industry (MIT and Schlumberger) with a co-PI from each organization. The industrial partner is making substantial contribution to the project including the time of the co-PI from the industry. BROADER IMPACT The proposed project being at the forefront of NMR technology has broader impact in two fronts. First, the program involves training graduate students with a unique set of expertise. On a more general front, the method is applicable to many industrial and biological processes including exploration of material with insight that currently is not possible. Since the proposed project is truly at the forefront of a major technology, and the scope is limited to the major innovative aspects of the overall research program, and the effective collaboration between the university and the industrial partner, the revised project is recommended for funding as a GOALI project doc11903 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I (SBIR) project seeks to develop simulation software for teaching evolutionary biology. Evolution is the core subject in biology, yet it requires concepts and ways of thinking that are challenging for most students. Moreover, it is a subject that is poorly understood by many non-scientists, with important consequences on the way science is taught in public schools. This project will lead to the development of a very flexible piece of software that allows users to design evolutionary simulations and students to graphically see evolution in action. The software will be accompanied by a set of classroom-tested laboratories teaching a variety of evolutionary topics. Students will learn by designing and performing their own experiments. The commercial potential of this project is immediate and obvious. To date, a good, general purpose teaching program of the type proposed in this project is not available and the market is very large, consisting of virtually every secondary school and college in the country doc11778 none The purpose of this research is to understand the mechanisms responsible for dramatic fluctuations in the number of salamanders in subalpine wetlands in central Colorado. Boom and bust cycles are often observed in animal populations, but such cycles are poorly understood in amphibians. A combination of approaches including long-term monitoring of salamander reproduction and survival in natural populations, field experiments that manipulate food (aquatic invertebrates) and other resources, and laboratory studies will be used to study mechanisms that could lead to population cycles. These data will be used to construct mathematical models to determine which mechanisms are capable of producing long-term the fluctuations in population size observed in this amphibian. The decline of amphibians around the world is of great concern to ecologists, and it is important to be able to distinguish natural causes of change in amphibian populations from those related to human activities. Salamanders are the native top predators in subalpine wetlands and it is well documented that they play a key role in determining how many and which invertebrates coexist in the food web. This research is a first step towards understanding how cycles in the number of salamanders will affect the foodwebs and ultimately the functioning of these remote, pristine, ecosystems doc11905 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will demonstrate photonic devices based on novel rare earth-aluminum oxide (REAl) glass. These devices exploit electronic transitions in rare earth doped and co-doped glass that potentially enable efficient laser action at wavelengths from 480 to nanometers (nm) when pumped by inexpensive diode lasers. Phase I will focus on the feasibility of devices having emissions at nm and possibly nm emission for telecommunications applications. The behavior of 480-490 nm emissions will be characterized with a view toward use in optical data storage applications. Phase I will also synthesize and characterize doped rare earth-aluminum oxide glasses, and establish protoype device performance. Measurements on the rare earth doped REAl glasses will include the spectral absorption coefficient at the pump wavelength, fluorescence cross section line shape, slope efficiency, fluorescence lifetime, single pass gain, and IR transmission. Potential commercial applications include small laser or optical amplifier devices to extend the fiber telecommunication bandwidth for use in high-density optical data storage devices doc11906 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is aimed at producing high-quality BaxSr1-xTiO3 (BST) films with low dielectric losses and high tunability on low-cost substrates (sapphire and metal). These ferroelectric thin films are of great interest for advanced tunable microwave devices that are being used in, for example, wireless telecommunication hardware. To date, there are only two process technologies (PLD and MOCVD) that allow depositing BST onto sapphire and none exists for depositing BST onto metallic substrates. Hence, there is a compelling technical and commercial need to develop an advanced deposition process that can overcome these apparent shortcomings. In related work we have shown that the proprietary Combustion Chemical Vapor Deposition (CCVD) process can deposit high-quality, epitaxial BST thin films onto a variety of substrates. The goal of this Phase I program is to demonstrate the capability of the CCVD process to produce tunable microwave devices using CCVD-grown thin films of ferroelectric BaxSr1-xTiO3 (BST). The effect of systematically varying film composition and substrate on thin-film properties will be investigated with a special focus towards the intended wireless applications. The market for low cost, tunable microwave devices continues to grow every year as the world untethers itself from the telephone lines. Over $300 million worth wireless handsets were sold this past year and that number is projected to rise to over $1.5 billion by the year . Tunable devices also benefit the manufacturers of RF radios, satellite communication equipment, and active antennas. There is a tremendous interest in low-cost phase shifters with a price target of approx. $5. This goal is achievable with the right combination of advanced thin films, low-cost substrate and high-volume deposition technology doc11907 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will demonstrate the feasibility of using magnetic tensor gradiometry to both locate and determine the depth of buried underground and or submerged underwater ferrous pipes. Detection and location of subsurface pipes is of great importance to the utility, natural gas, and petroleum industries. Existing techniques such as Ground Penetrating Radar suffer from a number of limitations, including the inability to accurately scan through multi-component soil and water. This technique uses passive magnetic gradiometry to detect underground and underwater ferrous pipes, and is unaffected by the presence of water. Commercial magnetometer-based pipe locators do not measure enough component of the magnetic field and the magnetic gradient to be able to correctly find the depth of the buried pipe. During Phase I, the feasibility of detecting and locating one ferrous pipe in the presence of other ferrous pipes in the vicinity will be studied. A magnetic tensor gradiometer based pipe locator will first find applications in the natural gas, petroleum, and the utility industries. In addition, the gradiometer could be easily adapted to find underground structures, underwater vehicles, buried current-carrying conductors, buried unexploded ordnance and mines and concealed weapons doc11908 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop mid-infrared (IR) quantum cascade lasers based on type-II indium arsenide gallium anitmonide aluminum antimonide (InAs GaSb AlSb) quantum well structures. These lasers emit radiation in the mid-IR region, enabling commercial products in fields including chemical sensing, medical diagnostics, and industrial process controls. The wavelength of Sb-based quantum cascade lasers can be tailored over a wide spectral range due to the large conduction band-offset between InAs and AlSb. In addition, because of the band-gap blocking in type-II quantum well structures, electron injection efficiencies near 100% can be achieved without requiring Bragg reflector layers. Another advantage of this material system is the small electron effective mass in InAs, contributing to reduced phonon scattering rates. Hence, the inter-sub-band quantum cascade lasers based on type-II InAs GaSb AlSb quantum well structures are excellent candidates for compact, reliable, efficient mid-infrared light sources operating at room temperature. Phase I will involve the design, molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) growth, characterization, and optimization of InAs GaInSb AlSb quantum cascade lasers to demonstrate their feasibility of operation at low threshold current and at ambient temperatures (or at temperatures accessible with a thermoelectric cooler). High performance mid-IR quantum cascade lasers would be developed in Phase II. The first mid-IR semiconductor lasers are expected to operate under continuous wave (cw) conditions at ambient temperatures. This would enable commercial products in several fields including chemical sensing. One example is detection, at the parts per billion (ppb) level, of formaldehyde and related compounds for medical diagnosis purposes. These laser sources will potentially find other commercial and defense applications doc11909 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses a major problem faced by participants and government regulators in the electrical power industry. The electric power industry in the United States and throughout much of the world is presently in a period of radical and rapid restructuring. The ultimate goal of much of this restructuring is lower prices, to be achieved through the development of competitive markets for electricity. These changes require new tools both for the market participants and for the market regulators. For the participants one such new tool is the ability to optimize their market decisions in order to maximize profit. For the regulators a new tool is needed to insure that the market operates without undue market power abuses by the participants. As will be shown in this proposal, the software tool needs of both the participants and regulators are quite similar. The goal of this project is the development of such a tool. PowerWorld Corporation s present customers include traditional utilities, power marketers, industry consultants, several state regulatory commissions, as well as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Many of these customers have expressed a great desire for PowerWorld to expand its products to include a detailed market simulation tool. PowerWorld Simulator, with further development, has a tremendous potential to be one of the most valuable new tools available in the coming years doc11910 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I (SBIR) project will use ink-jet printing technology to fabricate precision biodegradable microspheres, 20-200m in diameter, for sustained-release of bioactive substances. The microspheres will be fabricated at specific diameters, as determined by the application, thereby producing an excellent platform for delivery of drugs, hormones, growth factor, DNA vectors plasmids, cytokines, and enzymes. For the initial application, the microspheres will incorporate antineoplastic agents, such as taxol, for the treatment of head and neck cancer. The physical parameters of the microspheres will be verified with a scanning electron microscope. Release kinetics profiles of the taxol loaded microspheres will be determined by in vitro pharmacokinetic modeling. Quantification of antineoplastic agent release will be performed by High Performance Liquid Chromatography. Retention of efficacy will be tested by first fabricating the taxol microspheres and then extracting and testing the antineoplastic agent in a cell culture model of squamous cell carcinoma. The intact microspheres will also be tested in a nude mouse model of human squamous cell carcinoma. The commercial applications of this project will be in human therapeutics as an alternative to conventional administration of those drugs that have a short half-life or that cause considerable systemic effects doc11911 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will investigate the feasibility of direct measurement of live forces in civil infrastructures such as the cables of cable-stayed bridges, using a new magnetoelastic sensor. Knowledge of stress conditions is essential for detection of stress changes due to fatigue, overload, or corrosion and thereby, to prolong a structure s service life and or to improve its performance. Knowledge of the stress state is also valuable for evaluating the structural integrity of cables during and after natural disasters such as earthquakes or severe winds. These measurements should be made rapidly and cost-effectively. Conventional sensors, such as strain gages and accelerometers, do not respond to stress directly. The new magnetoelastic sensor depends on the magnetic properties of structural steels in a stressed state. The sensing circuit is external to the steel, simple to install, and sensitive to in-situ stress with an error less than 3%. A magnetic property called the anhysteresis curve is measured. The commercial application of the new magnetoelastic force corrosion sensor is in maintenance and repair of cable-stays in bridge structures and numerous other steel and metal-based infrastructural elements. The end-users include infrastructure managers, bridge engineers, and officials of transportation authorities of Federal and local governments doc11912 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop novel high-speed broadband optical switches, where the optical data do not leave a fiber waveguide. Unlike integrated optics and planar waveguides, this approach has strong advantages in lower insertion loss, higher speeds, lower drive voltages, and reduced fabrication costs. Since these devices are inherently narrow-band, they can support dramatic reduction in channel width (higher channel count) in dense wavelength division multiplexed systems. At the same time, the lower voltage and faster electro-optic switching allow greater speeds, already demonstrated in excess of 110 GigaHertz in planar devices using this technology. The commercial market for high-speed, power-efficient optical switches is among the largest in the modern economy. The potential for cost savings via improved efficiency is expected to justify the retrofit of existing infrastructure. Considering revenue increases due to capacity expansion, this technology could figure prominently in the next expansion of transcontinental, intercontinental, and metropolitan high-speed data transfer service devices, sensors, and other devices doc11913 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will demonstrate optical amplification in a single-mode polymer optical fiber. Phase I will: 1) incorporate various rare earth chelates into polymer systems; 2) demonstrate amplification in the material; 3) make a polymer fiber with a rare-earth core; and 4) demonstrate amplification in the fiber. Single mode polymer optical fiber waveguides will be made with a mode profile that matches that of standard silica glass fiber, thus making the amplifier fiber compatible with existing fiber-optic components. Besides applications in phased array radar, these amplifiers are expected to impact the long-haul fiber amplifier business, but it s largest impact will be in small and regional network applications, particularly for fiber-to-the-neighborhood and fiber-to-the-curb uses. The new technology will also impact the amplifier market for local intranets, as well as provide cost-effective amplifier solutions for small networks and hybrid fiber-coax cable TV systems doc11914 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I (SBIR) project will develop a novel antimicrobial surface modification for polymeric biomaterials. This surface modification could be used to develop antimicrobial catheters, hubs, fabrics, and surfaces for medical instruments, as well as biofilm resistant dental and water lines. The need for antimicrobial catheters is great. Every year in the U.S., twenty million hospital patients are catheterized. Use of these devices places large numbers of patients at risk for a variety of catheter-related infectious complications. In U.S. ICUs approximately 500 to patients die annually of central venous catheter-related bloodstream infections. The annual cost of caring for patients with central line-associated blood stream infections is $60 to $460 million. This Phase I project proposes a novel antimicrobial surface modification (1) that will covalently attach active groups to the surface of a variety of plastics, including polymers commonly used in medicine; (2) that can be formed on both the inner and outer surfaces of complex geometries; (3) that will inhibit bacterial adhesion by nonspecific oxidative destruction and by electrostatic repulsion of negatively charged bacteria; (4) that will be effective against bacteria, fungi, and spores; and (5) that will not promote increased antibiotic resistance. The primary commercial application of this project will be in the medical instrumentation market doc11915 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes an optical fiber sensor to determine concentrations of chloride ions in composite concrete structures such as buildings and bridges. Maintaining the integrity of this nation s infrastructure is a major challenge, and the incursion of chloride ions into concrete is a major cause of structure failure in the U.S. To solve this problem, Intelligent Optical Systems (IOS) will develop an innovative distributed intrinsic fiber optic sensor (DIFOS) that will consist of an optical fiber coated with a cladding that contains an indicator sensitive to chloride ions. The cladding changes its spectral properties in the presence of chloride, causing the fiber s optical properties to reflect chloride ion concentration. The sensor will detect chloride along its entire length, reliably indicating when structures need repair or replacement. Embedded or retrofit in a concrete structure, the sensor will detect the incursion of chloride ions and provide real-time monitoring of chloride diffusion within the structure. This sensor can be used to prevent structure degradation and potential catastrophic failures. The proposed system will be a valuable tool for safeguarding concrete structures. It will be used by civil engineering and construction companies. This sensor can be embedded into new structures during fabrication and into old structures that are being repaired. In addition, the concept of an optical fiber cladding that is sensitive to different analytes can be extended to smart structures such as aircraft, ships, and buildings to increase the safety of these structures and to decrease maintenance and inspection costs doc11916 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project seeks to develop a novel potent class of biocides for use in the food and medical industries. Over the last decade, the emergence of pathogenic microbes that resist conventional treatment, such as antibiotics and chemical disinfectants, has caused great concern to officials in the food and medical industries. Each year nearly two million patients contract an infection while hospitalized. During the last two decades the rate of nosocomial infections per 1,000 patient days has increased 36 percent, while in nosocomial infections cost 4.5 billion dollars and contributed to more than 88,000 deaths. These super bugs have also reeked havoc in the food industry as foodborne disease causes approximately 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the United States each year. The novel class of biocides proposed in this project will be generated on-site and on-demand and will contain the beneficial characteristics of ozone and carboxylic acid or alcohol-based disinfectants while eliminating their respective weaknesses. This new armamentarium of biocides will meet the criteria for an ideal disinfectant that can be recommended by public health officials for food and medical uses. The primary commercial applications of this project will be in the food and healthcare industries doc11917 none This proposal is to fund travel to a workshop in San Francisco, March 12-13, , on the subject of digital preservation and digital archiving. The workshop will identify and stimulate pilot projects in the collectin and use of born-digital information, build agreement on guidelines for servicing and use of born-digital material, and write a white paper on the role of born-digital resources in research libraries, including an outline of next steps and identification of the individuals and organizations that could take them. It will improve our understanding of how to use digital information for long-term societal benefit doc11918 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will address development of an advanced precursor evaporation module with a specific focus application to copper metalization. Rapid large area CVD is required for the copper seed layer or, preferably, for deposition of the full contact layer. CVD equipment manufacturers have responded to the deposition tool need; as have developers of the copper precursors to enable Cu CVD. However, the copper precursor of choice, Cupra Select TM (a liquid), has a relatively low vapor transport rate because of its low vapor pressure, compounded by a narrow temperature operating range (vapor pressure equals 0.4 Torr at 43 C and beyond ~ 45 C this precursor begins to decompose). Flash Evaporation is not a solution because of the low decomposition temperature. The limited vapor transport hinders high speed large area growth. This has led to the development of a multistep-multimachine copper metalization process (CVD seed layer followed by electrochemical deposition of the whole layer). This is tolerable but highly inefficient and hence costly. SMI proposes to create a patentable high volume liquid vaporization source. Our proposed source offers at minimum a 5 fold increase in available Cu vapor transport and is expected to allow CVD to replace the present two-step process. If successfully developed, SMI s source will be made available commercially. This effort will help accelerate the large scale manufacturing of ICs with Cu interconnects, and may apply to any other CVD process utilizing low volatility liquid precursors. An improved liquid vaporization source will find immediate use on all Cu CVD systems and hence be a strategic SMI component product. The unit will also find applications to similar temperature sensitive, low volatility liquids and well meets SMI s CVD components sales thrusts doc11919 none Garmastani This project is aimed at greater understanding of fundamental mechanisms of structural superplastic deformation in different aluminum alloys using the most current digital imaging and insitu microscopy techniques. It has been established that grain boundary sliding during micrograin superplasticity operates heterogeneously and in a cooperative manner. The nature of heterogeneity of cooperative grain boundary sliding remains unclear. Fundamental understanding of the origin of this important deformation mode can be fruitful for the improvement of theoretical models of superplasticity as well as for the design of advanced materials with improved superplastic properties. The main goals of this study are: (1) to determine the relationship between cooperative grain boundary sliding and grain boundary disorientation (mesotexture) in three fine-grained aluminum alloys (AA , AA and D19) that manifest different micro-mechanical behavior; (2) to study topological modes of grain boundary sliding in these alloys; (3) to investigate accommodation mechanisms for cooperative grain boundary sliding. To reach these goals two different micro-characterization techniques are combined together: Orientation Imaging Microscopy (OIM) in Scanning Electron Microscope and Nanoscratching with Scanning Probe Microscope. The work is based on insitu micro-tensile stage capability that will be used in conjunction with real time OIM analysis to provide important information on the nature of the grain boundary sliding. The funding for this research provides a first hand exposure to research in forefront of science and technology to minority students at FAMU-FSU College of Engineering. %%% This research develops new understanding of the mechanisms involved with superplasticity beyond the present state of the art. The results are applicable for cost savings for metal fabrication through near net shaping. The research will make significant contributions to minority education and research doc11920 none This is a proposal for Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to join Power Systems engineering research center (PSerc) PSerc is a consortium of universities and industries, formed to collaboratively tackle critical power systems problems. The inclusion of CMU in PSerc will benefit both institutions: CMU has resources that will enhance PSerc s problem solving capabilities, and PSerc will make it possible for CMU s researchers to work on problems that would otherwise be inaccessible to them doc11921 none The Mechanisms of Eucaryotic Transcription conference will be an open international meeting devoted to the most recent advances in the rapidly evolving field of eucaryotic transcription. This meeting follows six highly successful meetings on the same topic held in Cold Spring Harbor in , , , , , and , and will be organized according to the same basic format. The meeting will be open with attendance limited only by the facilities available to a maximum of 450 participants. Oral presentations will consist of a combination of invited presentations and selected presentations from submitted abstracts. This ensures the participation of junior and senior leaders in the field and the presentation of the most exciting results emerging at the time of the meeting. The oral presentations will be complemented by poster presentations in three poster sessions, also selected from submitted abstracts. The areas covered by the meeting include studies on 1) central components, 2) persistent effects on the template, 3) chromatin, 4) regulatory complexes I, 5) regulatory complexes II, 6) activation mechanisms, 7) regulatory pathways, and 8) promoter opening, clearance and elongation. A number of eucaryotic systems including mammalian systems, Drosophila, nematode, and yeast will be represented. Gene transcription, the process by which the information in a gene is converted into a mobile form for use by the cell, is an essential process in all living things. This meeting will help disseminate current research findings on this vital topic and will stimulate and facilitate further advances doc11922 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase II project involves the development of a catalyst to control NOx emissions from combined cycle power plants using natural gas fired turbines (natural gas fired power plants). During the Phase I effort, Guild Associates developed an environmental catalyst for the control of NOx emissions using NH3. Operating in the presence of excess (about 20-33%) NH3, the catalyst was able to achieve greater than 95% NOx reduction without NH3 slip. NH3 slip is avoided because the catalyst is able to simultaneously reduce the excess NH3 to N2 and H2O. The objective of this project is to modify the catalyst developed during the Phase I effort in order to enhance its commercial viability. Enhancing the commercial viability will involve increasing the reactivity of the catalyst and eliminating platinum metals from the formulation. Enhancing the reactivity will allow the catalyst to operate at higher space velocities. Eliminating platinum metals from the formulation will greatly reduce the cost of the catalyst. Successful completion of this effort will result in a simple, low cost technology for control of NOx emissions from natural gas fired power plants without NH3 slip. Potential Commercial Applications include the control of NOx emissions from natural gas fired power plants. Other commercial applications include controlling NOx emissions from semiconductor manufacturing, fine and specialty chemical manufacturing and nitric acid manufacturing processes doc11923 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will explore a low-frequency positioning system for locating and tracking people inside of buildings. Phase I will establish system feasibility by showing that lower frequencies will not be subject to the guided-wave propagation modes caused by typical indoor structures of hallways, partition walls, and floors. These guided-wave modes can cause unacceptably large errors in indoor positioning systems. The concept will be validated by a combination of electromagnetic modeling and experiments. It is expected that a phase-only, low-frequency approach will produce high accuracy and good penetration into buildings with modest bandwidth requirements and minimum problems for licensing approval. The principal commercial application is in the firefighter market. The system will monitor not only a firefighter s position but also vital biometric data, e.g., pulse, respiration, temperature, air tank level. Further, this system will be portable, obviating the need for a supporting infrastructure. It can also be used for tracking prison guards and rescuers entering a collapsed building after an earthquake or other natural disasters. Hospitals could use this technology to track critical mobile equipment or personnel doc11924 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will explore an improved process of manufacturing Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) wafers. The SOI process includes: (1) forming a hydrogen-rich buried layer in a donor silicon wafer; (2) prebonding the donor wafer to a handle wafer; (3) cleaving the donor wafer along the buried layer to thinner top silicon; and (4) postbonding and surface smoothing of the final SOI wafer. An initial wafer is oxidized allowing it to get the buried oxide of SOI. A new feature is an improved activation of wafer surfaces to be bonded. Activation is termination of surfaces with either hydrogen or with hydroxyl groups. Preliminary results show that the terminated surfaces contain more than a monolayer of hydrogen. And the excessive adsorbed hydrogen causes transfer faults during subsequent layer transfer. The Phase I activation process allows control of the hydrogen dose. The process uses radio frequency plasma treatment instead of wet processing. It is expected that the yield of the SOI process will be increased. The new process will be used in the silicon wafer market, which currently totals $10B annually. Estimates indicate that SOI wafers will increase to around 20% of this market within 10 years as SOI is one of the few solutions for production wafers based on less than 0.18 micron design rules doc11925 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, Prof. Alfred Redfield of Brandeis University will develop a sample shuttler for nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) relaxation studies using commercial spectrometers. The sample shuttle probe will provide an approach to obtaining the magnetic field dependence of spin-lattice relaxation constants. Thus, this new tool will provide a convenient way to separate dipolar contributions from chemical shift anisotropic contributions without the necessity of multiple NMR instruments. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. The completed shuttler should be broadly applicable and could be readily built in a university machine shop. Thus NMR relaxation measurements, which are key to understanding complex biologically relevant molecules, will become much more common-place doc11926 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a novel photonic crystal defect cavity enhanced photodetector with wavelength selectivity, fast response speed, and low noise. By introducing photonic crystals into the design of a cavity enhanced photodetector, the problems associated with lattice matched reflector growth, low refractive index contrast, and heterojunction charge accumulation will be avoided. The photonic crystal defect cavity enhanced photodetector will be easy to fabricate and have superior performance compared with traditional detectors. The design can be expanded to photodetector arrays in many materials systems. Phase I will investigate the fabrication of photonic crystal defect cavity, characterize the photonic crystal band structure, and test p-i -n photodetector structures. Phase II would produce the prototype photodetector devices and optimize their performance. Novel products utilizing a photonic crystal defect cavity enhanced photodetector are anticipated in optical communications and telecommunications. Since silicon (Si)-based photodetectors can be easily incorporated into Si-based integrated circuits, there will be immediate commercial application to the telecommunications industry. There is also long term potential application in imaging and optical communications doc11927 none The Analytical and Surface Chemistry program supports this project by Professor Allen Bard of the University of Texas at Austin in which several new scanning probe electrochemical microscopy techniques will be developed. First, scanning electrochemical microscopy (SECM) will be applied to the measurement of ion flux through a single channel of a bilayer lipid membrane, and then of living cells. Preliminary experiments have detected iodine transport across a membrane, and other researchers have used Prof. Bard s SECM method to monitor molecular ion transport through living cell membranes. There is the potential to use SECM both as an imaging device and as a quantitative tool to extract kinetic information about ion transport. A potential area of application is in the neuronal microenvironment and the release of neurotransmitters during exocytosis. A second instrument combines the SECM with electrogenerated chemiluminescence. Previous studies demonstrated the potential, but were limited by tip size and tip-substrate spacing. Newly developed probes will overcome these problems and permit detailed studies of electrochemical reactions at and near electrode surfaces. Applications include characterization of molecular electronic devices via a method termed molecular voltammetry . In molecular scale nanostructures, the discreteness of the electronic charge has been demonstrated to play a prominent role in device performance, and these can be further studied with the proposed analytical methods. Scanning probe microscopy is widely used in the study of surfaces, including chemically reactive electrode surfaces to the surface of a living cell. In this project, new techniques will be developed with a goal toward improving the quantification of the imaged features. For example, ion channels have been imaged on cell membranes. The next question is: What is the rate of ion transport through the imaged ion channel doc11928 none In this proposal funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Laurie Butler of the University of Chicago will pursue a program of research to continue studies of electronic effects on photochemical reaction-product channels. Two sets of experiments are described. The first will probe the competing unimolecular dissociation channels of isomerically selected hydrocarbon radicals as a function of internal energy in the radical. The second set continues prior work to understand the product branching in chemical reactions in which there is a large required change in electronic wavefunction in evolving from reactant to one or more of the product channels. The Chemical Dynamics Beam Line at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) in Berkeley, California will be used for many of these experiments. Radical intermediates play a key role in a wide range of chemical processes, yet even after decades of research the reactions of many key radical intermediates elude direct experimental study. The current state of knowledge can be described as crude. This project addresses the basic principles of chemical reactivity, identifying the conditions under which different products are produced from a given reaction. The results of this work will ultimately contribute to understanding of processes as diverse as combustion, photochemical smog production, and chemical vapor deposition doc11929 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will lead to the development of compact, low cost gas sensors and analyzers based on cavity ringdown spectroscopy using near-infrared lasers manufactured for fiber optic communications. Although conventional cavity ringdown spectroscopy can achieve part per trillion detection limits for many gases (water vapor, carbon dioxide, ammonia), few commercial applications require such extraordinary sensitivity. Instead, price and reliability are controlling factors for the sensors and analyzers market. That is why we propose a modified form of ringdown spectroscopy that should lead to low cost, compact, and rugged instruments. The Phase I effort is designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed technique which will lead to the development of a prototype instrument in Phase II. Commercial applications include industrial process analysis and control, bioreactor monitoring, and worker safety. Ideally, the sensors and analyzers will be low power (possibly battery operated), self-calibrating and self-checking devices that will be sufficiently rugged to allow in situ installation doc11930 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I (SBIR) project will develop high sample throughput methodologies via multiplexed capillary electrophoresis (CE) for applications in the areas of combinatorial synthesis and proteomics. CE has the potential to function as a platform for a high- throughput analysis system, but suffers from unacceptable variations in migration times and injection volumes. Furthermore, today s multiplexed CE systems use fluorescence detection only, which without labeling is ineffective in detecting ~90% of all known compounds. This project proposes the fabrication and validation of a 96-capillary array CE system that employs 1) absorbance-based detection, and 2) current measurement in each capillary. The former eliminates the need and problems with fluorescence, significantly expanding the scope of multiplexed CE. The latter uses the collected current to reduce migration time and injection volume variability to the levels required for routine analytical work. Success in Phase I will lead to a Phase II program in which the analysis system will be optimized and protocols for peptide mapping and combinatorial synthesis will be developed and standardized. Potential commercial applications of this project are in markets needing high throughput screening methods. Target customers for the technology include fine chemical makers that use combinatorial techniques to develop new catalysts and other materials, pharmaceutical firms that conduct high-throughput screening in drug discovery for the development of pharmaceutical compounds, biotechnology companies that utilize peptide mapping for the rapid fingerprinting of proteins, and clinical and forensic laboratories that require high-throughput screening to analyze samples and develop evidence in criminal investigations doc11931 none Asad Jolin This dissertation project is a study of the relationship between law and marriage practices in Khartoum, Sudan, focusing on cases in Islamic law which involve the husband s responsibility to provide for his wife and her duty to obey him. Through an examination of legal codes, marriage contracts and archives, observations of courtroom proceedings and interviews with men and women involved in divorce proceedings in two different communities, this project will provide answers to two distinct but interrelated questions: Is the Islamic law promulgated recently in Sudan substantially different from the secular law previously applied there, or is there a continuity in modern Sudanese law that distinguishes it from Sudan s pre-colonial Islamic past? If the law practiced in Sudan today is distinctively modern, how has the Islamic legal tradition evolved? The information from this study will contribute to understanding on law, tradition and the relationship between religion and the state. The data to be collected will provide information that can be compared with studies of law and marriage in other Islamic states, and will address studies of Islamic movements in secular states. It will advance our understanding of the transformation of traditional into modern societies, will advance the education of a young social scientists, and will improve our understanding of this important region of the world doc11932 none Olvera This theoretical research grant will model self-organization in certain classes of incompatible multicomponent macromolecular systems. Analytical and numerical models will be developed to determine the conformation of self-organized aggregates of charged and or multiblock macromolecules. Both, charged chains and multiblock molecules, are capable of forming highly organized self-assembled structures with specific functions. This is evident in the biological world, since nucleic acids and most proteins are charged and or heterogeneous macromolecules. We will determine the structure of simpler self-organized macromolecules designed for specific functions. In particular, we will determine the structure and thermodynamics of dilute and semidilute charged polymer solutions in various ionic media. Flexible polyelectrolytes, such as single strand DNA and polysterene sulphonate, for example, can undergo reversible expanded to compacted transformations where the size of the chains changes by orders of magnitude with the addition of multivalent particles of opposite charge. This suggests their application as sensors. Polyelectrolyte semidilute solutions, on the other hand, form physical gels in the presence of multivalent particles. We will study the self-organization of these polyelectrolytes and of other complex multiblock molecules, such as triblocks of asymmetric crystallizable rigid rods, spacer and bulky oil chains. These triblock molecules, self-organized into mushroom shaped nano-aggregates, are the first examples of achiral pure (non-mixture) longitudinal ferroelectric liquid crystals. Models to explain this organization will be developed, and the possibility of supramolecular polar order in other complex chemical structures, including charged coil units, will be determined. Finally, the project on hydrodynamic flow in multicomponent incompatible fluids, initiated during the last funding period, will be completed. We will analyze the effect of flow in ternary fluids where the minority component segregates at interfaces forming vesicle-like droplets (wetting case) or forming a liquid droplet at the interfaces (non-wetting case) by using the code developed to study flow in multicomponent liquids of different viscosities doc11933 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project will develop the technology to inhibit and or to prevent the fibrosis of peritoneal hydrogel implants. BioHybrid Technologies microreactors are hydrogel-based sustained-release devices containing living cells that manufacture and secrete therapeutic substances. By encapsulating the appropriate cells derived from primary isolates, cell lines or stem cells; BioHybrid s microreactors can be geared to the treatment of a large variety of diseases. These microreactors have been shown to protect the cells from cellular and humoral immunity. However, the current design is still prone to cellular overgrowth, resulting in suffocation of cells within the microreactor and ultimately leading to microreactor failure. The objectives of this project are to determine (1) if anti-fibrotic agents included in the microreactors or those used systemically can inhibit fibrosis of microreactors, and (2) if geometric changes made to the microreactors will render them less fibrogenic. The ability to control or to eliminate the host fibrotic reaction to such microreactors would represent a major advance in this promising technology . This is likely to be the last hurdle that must be overcome to finally bring BioHybrid s microreactor technology into the clinic. The commercial applications of this project are expected to be immediate and significant. The final refinement in BioHybrid Technologies microreactor technology is likely to lead to substantial improvements in treatment for a large number of human diseases including diabetes, Alzheimer s, liver failure, chronic pain, hemophilia, dwarfism, anemia, hypocalcemia, ALS, Parkinson s, epilepsy, Huntington s, spinal cord injuries, strokes, kidney failure, immunodeficiencies, and several others. The commercial market for these diseases is huge, measuring in billions of dollars in the U.S. alone. The therapeutic improvements that would result from this technology will lower healthcare costs and enable other technologies that can take advantage of the advances in therapeutic substance delivery doc11934 none Professor Michael D. Raftery is supported by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program for his research on NMR of single crystal surfaces. Xenon optical pumping and magic angle spinning solid-state NMR will be combined to produce unique, surface specific studies (OPMAS). Powder semiconductor surfaces passivated with organic functional groups will be studied to examine bond coordination, surface heterogeneity and surface oxidation processes. Extensions to surfaces of crystalline silicon and germanium wafers will be attempted. Experiments for measuring chemical shifts as a function of depth in diamond and group IV materials will also be performed. Techniques for improving polarization transfer from optically polarized xenon to surface nuclei will be developed. Surface phenomena have been traditionally difficult to study, and the addition of NMR to the battery of surface sensitive methods would be a large advance with possible biological and even medical outcomes. This application, hydrocarbons on silicon, is important in the semiconductor industry doc11935 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will show the efficacy of using small hollow glass microspheres, Plasma-spheres , as cellular-size gas containers for plasma display panels. Current plasma panel technology utilizes an open plasma system, which captures ionizable gas between two glass panels. This system is difficult to fabricate. Production costs are high due to time consuming gas processing techniques presently in use. If successful, the new system is expected to decrease the gas processing time significantly, thereby lowering costs, and it will allow the production of flexible plasma panels. Phase I will fabricate and gas fill the microspheres, construct prototype, monochrome Plasma-sphere panels, and compare their critical characteristics, such as efficiency, brightness, life, operating voltage requirements, with those achieved with a standard monochrome plasma panel. Successful replacement of extant open plasma systems with plasma-sphere systems can reduce costs sufficiently to make high definition television available to the home consumer market. Plasma-spheres may also extend plasma panel use to low pressure environments, e.g., high altitude and space applications, and to high-pressure environments, e.g., undersea applications. The possibility of an open flexible plastic substrate can lead to various aerospace, military, and consumer applications doc11936 none This project addresses properties of defects at silicon and other semiconductor surfaces and explores methods to control the topography of surfaces and interfaces at the atomic level. The research involves the study of surface atomic diffusion, the energetics and dynamics of surface atomic steps, oxidation-induced strain and detailed control of surface and interface morphology. Scanning tunneling microscopy and low energy electron microscopy are used to observe the connection between atomic step motion and the evolution of overall surface shape. Results are expected to be of interest to fundamental surface science and in the fabrication of advanced semiconductor devices and circuits. The research may contribute to the design and control of interfaces in heterogeneous magnetic systems such as are used in magneto-resistive applications as well. Surfaces with predetermined arrays of atomic scale features may also be of value in making patterned substrates for biological sensors. The primary project goal is to more fully understand the fundamental processes involved in Si morphology control and to explore the extension and application of these processes to other materials. Specific objectives of the project include: 1)Study of the temperature and growth rate conditions to create atomically flat mesa structures on Si(001) and Si(111) by vapor deposition plus related work on the use of chemical etching as an alternative to sublimation. 2)Study of the types of point defects existing at high temperatures through AFM and STM observations on quenched Si surfaces with extremely large terraces. 3)Develop ways to make potentially useful patterns of steps on Si and other substrates as templates for adsorbed or deposited structures. Applications will be sought with bio-molecules and with magnetic layers. 4)Study of the kinetics of oxide growth on atomically flat Si using an X-ray technique to monitor the intensity of forbidden reflections-analogous to RHEED oscillations. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area. The project assists development of technical, communication, and organizational management skills in students through unique educational experiences made possible by a forefront highly collaborative research environment. Key collaborators in this project include Cornell-based researchers Dr. C.C. Umbach (Materials Science & Eng.), Prof. J. Engstrom (Chem. Eng.), Dr R. Headrick (CHESS), Prof M. Hines (Chemistry), Dr R. Tromp (IBM), and Dr N. Bartelt (Sandia doc11937 none The Advanced Materials Program in the Division of Chemistry makes this awards to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. With this award, Professors Leonard Interrante and Thomas Apple will synthesize and study linear and hyper-branched polycarbosilanes with alternating silicon and carbon atoms in their backbone. Basic reaction chemistry and characterization of carbosilanes based functional polymers including worm-like dendrimers, copolymers, block copolymers and ionic conducting polymers will be carried out with this award. Determination of structure function relationship by solid state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, preparation of thin films and determination of ionic conductivity will be parts of this award. Pyrolysis of polycarbosilanes and polycarbosilane-boronitrides will be evaluated to prepare novel ceramics with controlled microstructures. Graduate and undergraduate students, who will be working on this project, will get training in synthesis of polymer precursors, synthesis of polymers based on carbosilanes, functionalization and characterization of these polymers. Worm-like dendrimers, copolymers, block copolymers and ionic conducting polymers will be prepared from linear and hyperbranched polycarbosilanes with alternating silicon and carbon atoms in their backbone. Basic reaction chemistry and characterization of carbosilanes based functional polymers including determination of structure function relationships; and preparation of thin films and determination of ionic conductivity will be parts of this award. Pyrolysis of polycarbosilanes and polycarbosilane-boronitrides will be evaluated to prepare novel ceramics with controlled microstructures. Graduate and undergraduate students, who will be working on this project, will get training in polymer sciences and different methods used to characterize polymers based on carbosilanes doc11938 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project will demonstrate the feasibility of using a new type of adaptive receiver as part of a low-cost laser ultrasonic inspection system for manufacturing inspection and process control. The test of feasibility will be very high detection sensitivity, while maintaining the capability to compensate for mechanical vibrations and atmospheric turbulence that are present in the factory environment. High sensitivity helps to reduce power energy requirements for lasers used in an inspection system and thus to reduce overall production costs. The cost of the receiver, itself, will also be lower as a result of simplicity of design. Phase I will develop analytical models to describe receiver performance, characterize receiver experimental performance, and evaluate a laboratory prototype eceiver. There is a broad need for low cost sensors for many manufacturing applications. Laser ultrasonic inspection can be used to inspect hot and or rapidly moving parts and to scan large structural panels. Systems cost reduction is expected to justify laser ultrasonic inspection over a wider range of manufacturing applications doc11939 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop the hardware implementation of a novel image compression signal decomposition algorithm based on the discrete wavelet transform (DWT). This fully parallel, low-power, scalable, multi-resolution implementation is particularly well suited for use in reduced bit-rate applications over wireless communication channels as found in the next generation of web enabled cell phones. This particular implementation is a highly efficient implementation of the wavelet transform and makes use of a novel overlap state wavelet decomposition algorithm that minimizes both memory usage and interprocessor communication overhead. Over the next decade, spiraling consumer demand for fast mobile communication of voice and IP over increasingly integrated terrestrial and satellite-based radio systems plagued by a limited electromagnetic spectrum allocation necessitates the pursuit and development of better compression algorithms at low bit-rates. As a consequence of extensive research, transform-coding techniques has come to virtually dominate every single image and video coding scheme proposed to-date. Consequently, efficient software and hardware based transform coding system designs and implementations have become a high priority objective at both academic and commercial research centers doc11940 none This project is divided into two parts. The objective of the first part is to develop a theory of market selection, which would determine the methods of forecasting and information gathering that are conducive to survival in a market setting. The objective of the second part is to develop a descriptive ethical theory that may be used to explain contribution to public goods, voting turnout in large elections and anomalies observed in experiments. One of the objectives of the theory of market selection is to examine influential ideas in economics such as that agents with correct beliefs will drive agents with incorrect beliefs out of the market. The results obtained so far motivate a study of this claim in different market settings. They also motivate an analysis of apparently similar (but, in fact, quite different) ideas such as that better informed agents will drive out of the market poorly informed agents. This project also seeks to determine the forecasting methods that, if employed, would tend to dominate the market. The idea is to assume that agents use dif-ferent forecasting methods to predict the probabilities of future events and then determine which agents would accumulate more wealth. So, instead of evaluating forecasting methods from an axiomatic viewpoint as usual in econometric theory, it is proposed to determine which forecasting methods should become predomi-nant in the market in the sense that the agents who adopted these methods would influence prices. The second part of this proposal constructs a model of voting turnout in large elections which should provide comparative statics that are consistent with observation and an explanation of vote choice as a function of factors like uncertainty about the distribution of preference types, costs of voting, asymmetric information and electoral rules. In a large election, voters cannot be motivated solely by the consequences of their vote because a single vote is not likely to change the outcome of the election. A motivation for voting may be the desire to act ethically. The project develops an ethical theory that would explain significant turnout in elections, but that could also be tested and applied outside the realm of elections. A starting point for this theory is rule utilitarianism doc11941 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will apply fluidic self-assembly (FSA) technology to the fabrication of large area silicon-based X-ray imaging arrays. FSA technology offers potential for cost-effective production of high-speed, high-performance X-ray imaging arrays that are now in demand for synchrotron protein crystallography, X-ray astronomy, and mammography. Silicon X-ray diode arrays and complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) circuit chips will be micro-machined into the appropriate shapes for subsequent assembly using FSA. The FSA apparatus for transporting the micro-machined chips to the receptor substrate will be assembled and evaluated. Phase I will evaluate these techniques in fabrication of an X-ray imaging array. Phase II would include the design and fabrication of optimized detector structures and custom CMOS readout circuits, and optimization of the assembly procedures for a prototype-imaging array for synchrotron protein crystallography. Potential applications are expected in the commercial production of X-ray imaging devices for medical, scientific, and other purposes doc11942 none Joseph Templeton, Department of Chemistry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program to continue his studies of fundamental reactions of ligands coordinated to transition metals. One focus of this grant involves tungsten complexes with coordinated carbynes or carbenes. Complexes such asTp I(O)W=C(CH3)(OSiR3), where Tp represents a tris-pyrazoyl borate, are unusual examples of Fischer-type carbenes bound to a high oxidation state metal. Studies will probe the bonding and reactivity of these species. Another focus of the grant is the synthesis of organometallic complexes of Pt(IV) relevant to carbon-hydrogen bond activation. Fundamental studies of the electronic structure and bonding of these ligands provide insight into important heterogeneous catalytic processes. In addition, graduate students and postdoctoral associates will learn valuable skills in synthesis, characterization and reactivity studies doc11943 none This proposal for a Small Grant for Exploratory Research outlines a collaborative project for in-depth scholarly research on the issues raised for science and technology studies (S (2) a systematic effort to gather materials, many ephemeral, to be housed in a special collection in the Cornell University library system; and (3) a follow-up workshop to discuss and refine a group of papers emanating from the first two phases of the project. The collaboration between the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University will facilitate the involvement of a broad range of scholars in creating the collection and contribute to productive interactions between science and technology studies and more traditional perspectives on government and public policy doc11944 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I (SBIR) project will apply Multi Photon Detection (MPD) to quantify the minute amounts of proteins contained in and secreted from a single cell. The successes of genomics have led to the need for improved knowledge of the protein content of cells (proteomics). The elucidation of all proteins requires better methods for the study of low abundance proteins because the majority of molecular switches are expected to be expressed at less than 10,000 copies per cell. The goals of this project are to further improve the sensitivity of the MPD-enhanced immunoassays down to the level of a few zeptomole sample, to study intracellular processing of the important family of cytokines (IL-1, IL-18) and to study the levels of caspases in a single cell. The commercial applications of the technology to be developed in this project are in the rapidly expanding proteomics market, especially in the area of low abundance proteins proteomics. This market is currently estimated at around $ 200 million and expected to grow severalfolds over the next few years doc11945 none The objective of this project is to learn how enzymes evolve to recognize new substrates. A better understanding of adaptive evolution will explain how the complex molecular machinery of life arose, and enable the artificial selection of novel catalysts for industrial or medical applications. Enzymes could theoretically adapt to new substrates by the following ordered mechanism: 1) mutations that destabilize the conformation of the active-site initially broaden substrate specificity; 2) active-site flexibility enables the occurrence of mutations that introduce novel interactions with the new substrate; 3) mutations that stabilize the new productive active-site conformation further improve catalytic activity. This hypothesis will be tested by directing the evolution of a model enzyme called beta-glucuronidase (GUS). The gene encoding GUS will be randomly mutated. The resulting library will be expressed in populations of Escherichia coli, and screened for variant enzymes exhibiting increased catalytic activity in reactions with a novel substrate analogue. The corresponding alleles will be isolated and randomly mutated for another round of screening. After three rounds of evolution, the beta- galactosidase activity of GUS has already increased 500-fold, with a 52,000,000-fold inversion of specificity. The process will be continued until the catalytic efficiency and specificity of the wild-type lacZ beta-galactosidase has been matched. The entire evolutionary process will also be repeated with different substrate analogues. The structural and functional changes that occur along each evolutionary pathway will be studied and compared, and the rules governing adaptation will be inferred doc11946 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to develop integrated, wireless transceiver Complimentary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) circuits for neuron based data acquisition (DAQ) systems. Currently available multi-channel neuron DAQ systems require a tethered connection for the surgically implanted analog head stage electronics. This wired connection limits the subject s freedom and motion. If a low power, wireless connection were possible, these limitations are eliminated. Furthermore, a wireless connection broadens the use of DAQ systems to clinical possibilities with humans. The critical design parameters for the wireless head stage transceiver circuits are 4 Million Bits per second (Mbs) data rate and 1mWatt power dissipation. The first is needed to meet the 16-channel bandwidth requirement.The second is required because of the miniature size and lightweight constraints of the battery power source needed for a wireless connection. The specific objective of the project is to design the most efficient wireless transmitter and receiver for the neuron DAQ system. Two protocols, namely, minimum Frequency Shift Keying (FSK) and Ultra Wide Band (UWB) will be considered and evaluated. This comparative evaluation, also involving Bluetooth radio chip sets, will be conducted on the basis of efficiency, layout area, noise and process immunity. Integrated CMOS filters, mixers and oscillators with off chip antennas will be simulated, designed and extracted to meet the 4Mbs and 1mWatt benchmark. The commercial application of this project will be in the area of neuroprosthetics to restore sensory and motor function in patients with neural damage doc11947 none Scherer This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project seeks to develop a low cost, disposable microfluidic manifold that includes a micropump for lab-on-a-chip (LOC) applications. The microfluidic devices will be engineered for integration with disposable chemical and biological LOC detector systems. The key objectives in this Phase I project are : (1) to construct and to test a proof of principle system, (2) to assess the compatability of the technology for an array of LOC applications, (3) to design an integrated microfluidic system, and (4) to determine specifications of the Phase II prototype. The commercial applications of this project are expected to be in a broad range of markets, extending from specialty medical industries to general consumer products. Examples of commercial devices that may potentially incorporate this technology include chemical analysis systems, drug delivery systems, MEMS actuator systems and embedded health monitoring systems doc11948 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop an optical instrument that measures velocity distribution in a flame species by species---and on multiple scale sizes---with an accuracy of 1%. This novel velocimeter is nonintrusive and passive, relying completely on light emitted by the flame itself. The instrument will be developed with experts in commercial combustion chemical-vapor deposition, a process that inexpensively produces thin-film coatings for a variety of applications, including electronics, glass, anti-corrosives, superconductors, catalytics, polymers, and nanopowders. The velocimeter will monitor species mixing and velocity in the flame, facilitating smart deposition that can streamline real-time process control and increase the reliability of the coating process. The instrument will map the velocity of the flame as a whole. Phase 1 will prove the feasibility of species-specific, variable-scale-size velocimetry. Phase II will perform a proof-of-principle demonstration with a prototype instrument. The principal commercial application is smart deposition that monitors real-time species-specific velocity distribution in a flame to maintain flame consistency and maximize deposition efficiency. Other potential applications include plasma-based manufacturing and plasma thruster control doc11949 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project, A High Power, High Efficiency W-band Amplifier, is a new W-band, high-power microwave source. A point design based on a frequency of 11.424 gigaHertz (GHz) at the input cavity produces a one megawatt output at 91.4 GHz. It has a 51.5% system efficiency and 57.9 decibel (dB) gain. Phase I will make a detailed analysis to establish credible estimates of radio-frequency power, pulse length, emittance, efficiency, gain, and other key parameters. This W-band amplifier will provide a high power, high-frequency source suitable for many applications, such as improved tracking and mapping in atmospheric and near-atmospheric studies. Benefits will accrue to: (1) High resolution planetary mapping studies using inverse synthetic aperture radar, affording an improved signal to noise ratio at short wavelengths; (2) Cloud physics studies with greater range at improved resolutions; and (3) Space debris detection and tracking of near earth asteroids with improved accuracy doc11950 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I (SBIR) project will develop a new class of real time aerosol mass spectrometers (AMSs) for analysis of respirable powder and liquid aerosol in pulmonary drug delivery systems. Three parameters control the effective delivery of drugs to the lungs: (1) the number density of entrained aerosol particles per unit volume of respirable fluid; (2) the particle size distribution; (3) the concentrations of active ingredients as a function of particle size. Aerosol Mass Spectrometers, with proper calibration, can measure all three parameters simultaneously. Aerodyne Research, Inc. (ARI), in collaboration with several university research groups, has developed, demonstrated, and commercialized an innovative and quantitative AMS system. With suitable modification and calibration, this system could greatly reduce the time and effort required to characterize pulmonary drug delivery systems, both for research and for production quality assurance. This Phase I project will design and test a real-time AMS system to characterize novel pulmonary drug delivery systems. The principal commercial application of this project will be in the pulmonary drug delivery analyzer market. Potential customers are likely to include drug delivery companies, pharmaceutical companies, academic research organizations and regulatory agencies doc11951 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will demonstrate the feasibility of fabricating a carbon nanotube based field emission device (FED) and of operating FEDs. The approach is a natural extension of the patented Nanotube Catalyst Retaining Structure (NCRS) method. Phase I is expected to overcome limitations that have prevented FEDs from successful use in the established liquid crystal display (LCD) market and to initiate a broad range of other applications that require growth of aligned carbon nanotubes as functional elements of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). This new concept in nanotechnology will be useful in application of carbon nanotubes as functional elements of integrated circuit (IC) and MEMS devices involving a multi-layered structure of metal, insulator, and carbon nanotubes. Potential commercial applications are expected in field emission displays, electron microscopes, illumination devices, sensors, and similar devices doc11952 none This Small Business Innovative Research Phase I (SBIR) project will investigate the feasibility of utilizing nanoscale molecular self-assembly methods to synthesize high performance optical fiber-based humidity sensors for breathing diagnostics. NanoSonic proposes to use molecular-level electrostatic self-assembly (ESA) processing methods to form multilayered, interleaved metal nanocluster and polymer thin films on the ends of optical fibers. Initial studies have shown that these small, robust and safe optical fiber sensors respond to humidity over a wide range of relative humidities, with a response time of milliseconds or less. All of these factors overcome current significant limitations in the fabrication of breathing monitors for clinical diagnostics. The commercial applications of this project will be in clinical research and in home health care management doc11953 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will examine the feasibility of culturing naturally occurring bacterial consortium that exist in coal seams. These bacteria generate the bulk of the 450 million cubic feet of methane now being recovered daily from coal seams in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming. However, only indirect studies have thus far been carried out on the character, environment, and activity of these organisms. Isolating the bacterial consortium will allow development of methods to detect critical parameters for biogenesis in the field and to determine conditions under which this biogenesis may be optimized. The commercial application of this project is in detection of new methane rich coal seams and in enhancement of methane production from existing coal seams doc11954 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I (SBIR) project will test Cesium Iodide cluster ion beams as an alternative to lasers for desorbing bioions from a MALDI ((Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization) matrix. This offers the possiblity of performing the post source decay tandem mass spectrometry on an event by event basis, making possible the application of coincidence techniques which allow specific correlations to be made between metastable parent ions and their ionic fragments. This is an anaolgy to what has already been demonstrated for 252Cf fission fragment plasma desorption mass spectroscopy of bioions. Thus post source decay becomes a true MS MS technique. There is also the possiblity that the use of cluster ions can increase the fragmentation and the degree of metastability of the desorbed bioions compared to using a laser. If so, the cluster deorption technique may be more suitable than lasers for imaging biomolecules on materials such as polymers or tissue slices. This Phase I project proposes to develop a cheap and reliable cluster ion source for MALDI. At the conclusion of Phase II, this ion source could be combined with a curve field reflector TOF mass spectrometer and marketed as a new approach to post source decay measurements. The commercial applications of this project will be in the area of biomolecular mass spectrometry doc11955 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project investigates advanced ultrasonic techniques for out-of-plane laboratory inspection of paper materials. Experimental ultrasonic test methods are available to probe thickness direction elasticity, predict internal bond strength of paperboard, detect delamination defects in multi-ply boards, and evaluate the softness of tissue products. However, an analysis of these methods indicates serious shortcomings in the measuring principles: presence of interfering signals, poor resolution, simplified interpretation of sound attenuation commercial ultrasonic instrument already exists to investigate wetting and liquid penetration in paper, but the technique cannot distinguish between penetrating depth and amount of penetrating liquid. Also, other measurement needs such as coating thickness evaluation are not addressed. Since the future of the U.S.Pulp and Paper Industry largely stands on the manufacturing of low volume but high quality value-added products, product development, superior quality, and end-use performance are critical elements of a competitive market environment. In that context, SoniSys plans to develop new ultrasonic measuring tools, which will sustain the subsequent development of a versatile commercial ultrasonic instrument for out-of-plane paper inspection. SoniSys anticipates at least seven market segments for its instrument in the paper industry: (1) Nondestructive prediction of internal bond strength and evaluation of board structural integrity (paperboard mills;paper testing companies); (2) Measurement of elastic stiffness for product development, quality control purposes and calibration of on-line measurements (paper and paperboard mills;R (3) Detection and localization of delamination defects (paperboard mills); (4) Investigation of amount of penetrating liquid and liquid penetrating depth in wetting and liquid penetration tests (paper and paperboard mills, R (5) Determination of coating thickness and assessment of paper substrate-coating layer interface (paper and paperboard mills,R (6) Quantitative evaluation of bulk and surface tissue softness (tissue industry); and (7) Testing of wood coupons and prediction of pulp and paper properties from raw materials (pulp and forest industries doc11956 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will initiate the development of an entirely new class of biochips, with a particular focus on biochips designed to track the expression, activation and post-translational modification of proteins involved in cell signaling processes. These biochips will be widely applicable to the field of proteomics. The technology is based on the use of liquid crystals to image biomolecular interactions at structured surfaces. The goal of this project is to demonstrate that substrates for liquid crystal-based biochips can be prepared from mechanically rubbed films of protein that are covalently attached to glass substrates. The important issues of non-specific adsorption, binding of specific target proteins and stability of rubbed protein films will be addressed. This approach to fabrication of biochips aims to leverage the manufacturing knowledge generated over past decades for liquid crystal display technology and thereby provide low cost biochips with potential for broad impact.This class of biochip has the potential to be extremely rapid (minutes), to be highly sensitive (magnitudes more sensitive than gels and ELISA), to be inexpensive (less than $0.20 determination) and when combined with microfluidics, to make possible the imaging of large numbers of proteins simultaneously . The commercial applications of the technology and the products to be developed in this project will be in well defined markets, ranging from biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to general scientific research laboratories that are conducting research in cellular signalling pathways doc11957 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I (SBIR) project will develop a novel sensing coating that will be deposited on filters for the detection of water-borne contaminants. The initial target will be the oocysts of Cryptosporidium parvum, a water- borne pthogen. C. Parvum was responsible for the outbreak of cryptosporidiosis affecting 400,000 in Milwaukee WI in and other smaller outbreaks. Cryptosporidiosis is characterized by abdominal pain and severe diarrhea, and can be fatal to immune-compromised individuals. There is currently no easy and reliable test for C. parvum that allows routine monitoring of drinking water supplies. The proposed research will develop a sensing polymer coating, with antibodies and fluorophores incorporated, on a nanoporous membrane. The membrane will be used as filter to simultaneously concentrate and detect C. parvum in water. Binding of C. parvum to the coating will lead to a fluorescent signal. The Phase I research will focus on antibody conjugation to the polymer, fluorophore incorporation, and coating preparation, with the aim of demonstrating the feasibility of the sensing material. In Phase II, the materials will be optimized and incorporated into a detector that will combine filtration and fluorescence detection for monitoring drinking water supplies. The principal commercial application of this project will be for detection of water-borne contaminants in our drinking water supplies, with a potential market comprising of a majority of public water systems in the country doc11958 none This Small Business Innovation (SBIR) Phase I Project proposes to produce soft magnetic Fe-Co nanocomposites with end applications in EMI suppression, motors, generators, magnetic bearings, magnetic recording heads and many advanced electric systems. High performance electronic color image display has become a standard feature of many modern commercial products. These products must use timing circuits and operating frequencies from as low as 30 MHz to over 130 MHz. Wide bandwidth electromagnetic interference (EMI) noises are inherent to these characteristically high frequency architecture systems. Hence development of cost effective and high performance materials are of great interest to prevent EMI. Excellent magnetic properties of nanocrystalline Fe-Co can find an important application in EMI prevention devices. In accordance with this development, Materials Modification Inc. (MMI) proposes to synthesize and process Fe-Co nanocomposites by the powder metallurgy (P M) route. MMI has expertise in nanopowder processing techniques that can be easily scaled up for production. Upon completion of this Phase I project, an advanced Fe-Co soft magnet with high permeability, large saturation magnetization, low energy loss (hysteretic and eddy current), and high temperature properties will be developed. Composition and structure will be tailored at the nano-scale to obtain the desired mechanical and magnetic properties required for EMI suppression devices. The nanocrystalline Fe-Co soft magnets can be used in EMI prevention devices, motors and transformers, generators, magnetic bearings, data communication interface components, magnetic recording heads, sensors, and reactors. Fe-Co nanocomposite with superior magnetic properties, low core-loss, and creep resistance at elevated temperatures can be used in integral starter generation (ISGs) and power units (IPUs) in a modern aircraft doc11959 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project details the roadmap to rapid commercialization of a powerful new gas chromatography (GC) detector, the Aromatic Specific Laser Ionization Detector (ArSLID). Like a conventional photoionization detector (PID), the ArSLID creates ions by photoabsorption. But its two-photon laser ionization process confers many significant advantages over the PID, including: extraordinarily low limit of detection, potentially the lowest of any GC detector; extremely fast response ideally suited for fast GC; miniscule background signal; far higher selectivity for aromatic hydrocarbons; stable esponse over long periods of time; and compatible with all carrier gases, including air. Preliminary data taken with a prototype ArSLID already show the low background, selectivity, and sensitivity; it is as sensitive as any PID (ca. 1 pg toluene injected on-column). At least an order of magnitude further improvement will be achieved in Phase I with incorporation of a compact, low cost microchip laser ionization source that also offers much higher pulse repetition frequency and shot-to-shot stability compared to the laser source used to date. The ArSLID will find numerous applications that are difficult or impossible for a PID to meet. In the case of environmental analysis, the signals from the toxic and hazardous aromatic species (specifically the BTEX fraction) are too often buried in the aliphatic signals with a PID. Similarly, in pharmaceutical analysis, approximately 75% of the drugs contain an aromatic moiety and it is often challenging to find the drugs or their metabolites in the sea of endogenous compounds. It is estimated the annual sales of PIDs for GC detectors at $21 million and expect to rapidly capture a significant fraction of this market owing to the superior performance capabilities of the ArSLID doc11960 none Medicago truncatula is a close relative of the world s most important forage legume, alfalfa (Medicago sativa). It is a rich source of natural products, such as flavonoids, isoflavonoids and triterpenes, which impact its properties as a forage legume. The main experimental approach of this project is to perturb the expression of these natural products, and other areas of metabolism, by exposing cell cultures to biotic and abiotic elicitors. Use of cell suspension cultures will allow sufficient material to be collected and analyzed in parallel. Three experimental conditions have been chosen that mimic natural environmental challenges. The ultimate goal of this project is to generate a truly functional genomics data set for control and elicited cell cultures. Such data will encompass expressed sequence information and the associated mRNA, protein and metabolite identities and concentrations. This project will produce a variety of data so it becomes imperative to establish integrative models and software to facilitate relational analysis of the data to each other and to previous knowledge on sequences and pathways. Software is a facilitator of the discovery process when it enables the user to navigate the biological data in a dynamic and transparent way, requiring only the most basic computational skills. The bioinformatics component of this project will: i) construct a relational database to store all data; ii) construct an expandable analysis server that will facilitate processing the data with several statistical and numerical algorithms; and iii) integrate the above components through a web interface. The data as well as the software will be made available publicly. The data generated by this project will be used to construct a quantitative predictive model of the time courses after elicitation, which is required to interpret the regulation of the underlying complex biological processes. The data will provide information about the extent and nature of gene expression reprogramming in response to biotic and abiotic signals at the transcription, translation and metabolic levels. There will also be practical applications in directed gene discovery for important agronomic traits involving plant natural products. Finally, this project will make available to the scientific community a bioinformatics system capable of supporting functional genomics ranging from the transcriptome to the metabolome doc11961 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a novel and flexible, dry, physiological recording electrode that conforms to non-planar surfaces and does not require extensive surface preparation or conductive gels to achieve a low impedance interface with the body. This innovative electrode will be fabricated inexpensively using microfabrication techniques and priced competitively with existing commercial electrodes despite its enhanced performance and features. The proposed dry electrode will provide substantial improvement in all areas of biomedical research and medicine that involve use of electro- physiological potentials such as EEG, EMG, EOG, and ECG signals. This unique electrode is particularly well suited for long-term and multiple electrode physiological monitoring as compared to existing commercial electrodes,since multiple electrodes can be easily fabricated into a single array with a common connector, thereby simplifying application. Additionally, by providing a low impedance interface with the body, this electrode will eliminate the need for an electrolytic gel or the need to abrade the skin prior to applying the electrode. The commercial applications of this project will follow directly from the development of the novel electrode (Orbital Research Dry Physiological Recording Electrode) that seeks to improve electro-physiological signal quality (for EEGs, EMGs, ECGs or EOGs), eliminates the harsh side effects and signal deterioration common with existing electrodes and is competitively priced. By enhancing quality of life at no additional cost, this biomedical innovation is expected to lead to new long-term monitoring applications doc11962 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop an innovative approach for targeting genes involved in a specific trait or pathway using the model cereal plant, rice. Rice is known to have highly conserved disease resistance signal transduction pathways and yet so far a very few signaling molecules have been studied. Application of Activation Tagging methods may allow for the discovery mechanisms involved in disease and other defense-related signal transduction pathways. Therefore, instead of using the common activation tagging vector, this project proposes to use a rice chitinase gene promoter RCH10 and luciferase reporter gene fusion expression cassette in activation tagging T-DNA binary vector to activate genes in defense-responsive pathways. This approach will allow the identification of chitinase or chitinase-related genes or transcription factors in luc+ expressed rice tissues and plants both at earlier and in later stages of the experiment. The RCH10 gene promoter is highly inducible during pathogen response both in plants and in cell culture and therefore, transformed and non-transformed in vitro tissues and leaf discs can easily be subjected to high throughput screening. This trait-targeted activation tagging approach will enable collection of only chitinase or chitinase-related overexpressed phenotypes and thereby expedite the process of gene isolation and recapitulation of potential disease resistance phenotypes in rice. The commercial applications of this project will be in agriculture for screening and isolation of agronomically important genes in major crops doc11963 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I Project seeks to modify insect viruses for the purpose of generating a new class of species-specific insect biocontrol agents. The approach will combine the emerging technique of RNA inhibition (RNAi) with existing baculovirus technology to generate recombinant insect viruses capable of targeting individual or closely related insect pests with great specificity . Standard molecular biology techniques will be used to engineer baculoviruses containing a portion of an essential host insect gene inserted between convergent promoters, which when activated by host transcription factors, will synthesize both the sense and antisense RNA strands of the inserted gene. This double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) molecule specifically inhibits the expression of the corresponding gene in the host insect, thereby killing the animal. Standard bioassays will be performed in which the recombinant baculovirus will be delivered to host insects by feeding or injection, and the LD50 of this virus will be compared to that for an unmodified baculovirus and for a recombinant baculovirus expressing an insect neural toxin. The commercial application of this project will be in the market for insect biocontrol agents. The recombinant insect viruses have the potential to serve as highly selective and environment- friendly insect biocontrol agents that kill pest insects faster than unmodified viruses and with greater specificity than viruses expressing insecticidal toxins that also affect beneficial insects doc11964 none objects, they have been used to represent a wide variety of real objects or processes. A familiar use of graphs is to represent the evolutionary relationships between a group of organisms -- family trees. It is a testimony to their great versatility and usefulness that graphs have been used in fields as diverse as biology, economics, and computer science. In the field of biotechnology, there has been an explosion in the use of graphs to represent the complex physical structure of the basic proteins produced by DNA. This work has important applications in understanding genetic diseases and in designing medicines to cure them. Because methods based on graph theory have been developed independently in many fields, it is extremely likely that sharing problems and results between fields will lead to advances. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together mathematicians and biologists working on problems involving graph theory to describe and discuss their work in an interdisciplinary setting doc11965 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop printable, soluble conducting polymers that can be crosslinked using ultra violet light. These printable, conducting polymers can be printed using photolithography into thin films with 2-dimensional features ranging from solid thin films for flexible displays to highly detailed features for printed wiring boards and multi chip modules. These printed conducting polymers will also be low-cost, flexible, lightweight and mechanically more robust than inorganic electronics. Soluble, conductive polymers will be synthesized with functional groups that can be crosslinked by a polymerization reaction induced by ultraviolet light. Thin films will be cast onto substrates and then rendered insoluble by the crosslinking polymerization under ultra violet light. The kinetics of photopolymerization will be measured and optimized to maximize the resolution of photoimaging for micron sized conducting features. An engineering analysis will be performed to determine if the process conditions, printing resolution and conductivity of our proposed conducting polymers is commercially attractive for electronics applications. Commercial applications for printable conducting polymers include flexible displays, printed wiring boards, multi chip modules, transistors, and light emitting diodes especially when the combination of conductivity and the properties of plastics (flexibility, mechanical stability, etc.) are desired doc11966 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a new approach for the fabrication of periodic nanoelectronic device arrays. Processing of structures on the sub-100nm scale poses significant challenges due to limited resolution of available lithographic methods. The proposed technique will address the deficiencies of the existing nanofabrication approaches by directly growing nanostructures inside a molecularly self-assembled NanoWell shadow mask, which offers an unprecedented atomic-scale control over the nanostructure size. During the proposed research, a silica shadow mask with cylindrical pores ~3-30 nm, or NanoWells, will be self-assembled employing organic surfactant molecules. Silicon nanorods will be grown inside NanoWells by both CVD and sputtering, followed by chemical removal of a shadow mask. An array of Si nanorod LEDs will be fabricated to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach as well as the quantum size effect for the Si nanorods. If successful, this cost effective, high-throughput, and ultra-high precision technique will figure into a wide range of electronic device array applications such as sensors, processors, memories and displays, and provide enhanced miniaturization, speed, and power reduction. The proposed technique will offer the dramatically improved nanoprocessing capabilities for the fabrication of flat panel displays, sensor arrays, quantum dots, nanomagnetics, image and signal processors. It will have a broad range of potential applications in commercial microelectronics and image processing industries doc11967 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses an automated vendor-managed inventory (VMI) system for distributors of small parts. Small parts inventories introduce several difficulties because of the large quantities that are maintained and the multitude of different part types that have similar physical appearances. For such systems, where inventory is stored in many racks of bins, it is labor intensive to provide continuous accountability for each part. Distributors are often left with two choices: maintain high inventory levels to avoid short-term surges in demand; or monitor levels closely by hand to ensure an adequate supply without unnecessary overhead. Phase I will develop an economical means of providing real-time usage statistics for small parts through the use of intelligent electronic sensing bins. Each bin reports the quantity of parts enclosed to a central communications module, which in turn compiles a report listing the replenishment requirements for each part. This information is then provided to vendors so that they may create a timely order for the customer. VMI technology will find use by suppliers that wish to provide VMI services to a large number of small clients. By avoiding continuous human monitoring and intervention, VMI will be applied to small contracts, resulting in savings for both parties. This technology is expected to be used in the industrial fastener market, which is growing at a rate of 3.7% annually doc11968 none Schoenfeld This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop new thermostable bacteriophage and archaeaviral DNA polymerases for use as improved reagents for DNA amplification, sequence analysis and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) detection. This will be accomplished by direct isolation of thermophilic bacteriophage and archaeaviral genomes from hot springs, construction of expression libraries and screening for novel thermostable DNA polymerase activities. The proposed approach is expected to be significantly more rapid and comprehensive than traditional approaches that have been used for enzyme discovery. These traditional approaches rely on the limiting intermediate step of culturing a microbe and its cognate virus. In contrast, the proposed approach on this project will allow screening of all expressible viral DNA polymerases present, including those from unculturable phage that is believed to predominate in the environment. The primary commercial application of this project will be in the marketing of novel thermostable DNA polymerases to organizations involved in genomics research for use as improved reagents for specific molecular biology methods doc11969 none Linda Peteanu of the Carnegie Mellon University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to study complex condensed molecular systems using Stark spectroscopy. The ability to engineer complex molecular systems such as polymers, dye-polymer complexes and aggregates to specific applications depends on a thorough understanding of how their electronic properties are impacted by their structure and the surrounding media. Stark spectroscopy can address the magnitude of electronic changes in these systems. The PI will continue investigations into these issues by studying cyanine dyes complexed with DNA as well as conducting polymers. Moreover, she will add single molecule techniques to overcome problems of heterogeneity in the Stark measurements. Optical responses of complex media such as dye aggregates and conducting polymers are important to understand for advances in sensors and nanotechnology doc11970 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I (SBIR) project will demonstrate the feasibility and value of advanced simulation methodology for the prediction of biomolecular binding on the surface of microspheres used in biosensing applications. Models in current use employ many ad-hoc assumptions, particularly related to convective mass transport. Large, systematic errors are commonly encountered in predictive efforts. Novel, high-fidelity simulations proposed here hold the promise of providing a systematic understanding of the complex interaction between multiphase flow, diffusion and surface chemistry. An integrated simulation environment featuring Discrete Particle Simulations (suited for small beads) and Chimera Particle Simulations (for larger beads) will be developed in Phase I. Detailed bead-surface chemistry models (featuring finite-rate adsorption, desorption and conversion to irreversible state) will be developed and fully coupled to the flow model. The technique will be demonstrated using Immunoflow , a food bio-sensor based on fluidization developed at Utah State University. Both flow and binding simulation results will be validated against experiments. In Phase II, both Discrete and Chimera particle techniques will be further developed along with more generalized, user specifiable surface reaction mechanisms and model development for bio-molecule specific binding phenomena. The commercial application of the technology and the software to be developed in this project is in the area of biosensors for marketing to the biotechnology community. The product will enable the rapid creation of the next generation of optimized biosensors while simultaneously enhancing the fundamental understanding of biochemical processes. The technology would also benefit research in the traditional chemical and pharmaceutical industries doc11971 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will address bulk micromachining of single crystal silicon carbide and III-V nitride semiconductors to develop miniaturized fluid density and viscosity sensors based on acoustic wave (AW) principles. Phase I will develop sensors capable of precisely measuring fluid viscosity and density over wide limits under harsh operating conditions: high pressure, high temperature, corrosive, or abrasive. The harsh environments require fabrication of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) for fluid viscosity-density sensors from silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium-aluminum nitride (GaN-AlN) compounds, which have high melting temperatures ( - degrees Centigrade) and favorable chemical and mechanical properties. Phase I will test the feasibility of the micromachined SiC-AlN fluid viscosity-density sensors by fabricating an unpackaged pre-prototype device from these materials and demonstrate the measurement of viscosity and density in a variety of fluids at various temperatures and pressures. Harsh-environment MEMS fluid viscosity and density sensors have commercial applications in boreholes for oil exploration and production, monitoring of engine fluids in automobiles, aerospace and military vehicles, and monitoring chemical synthesis and production processes. These devices are expected to increase oil-well production at reduced cost, promote more efficient use of engine fluids resulting from direct and continuous feedback of fluid characteristics, and enable real-time in situ monitoring of chemical processes doc11972 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project involves a novel technique to fabricate full-color organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays in a cost-effective manner. The proposed scanning localized evaporation methodology (SLEM) circumvents the need for using elaborate substrate patterning and large vacuum chambers (to attain film uniformity), currently employed to manufacture OLED flat-panel displays (FPDs). The benefits of SLEM over current fabrication methodologies stem from its parallel processing of various layers, as opposed to sequential techniques. Dedicating a SLEM head to a particular material, multiple evaporating heads are integrated into a unit that yields full-color OLED displays in a single pass. Current projections indicate that using this technique, deposition time for growing all layers for a 3 x4 OLED display (consisting of an array of 270 360 pixels) is estimated to be in the range of 3 to 7 minutes. Considering the wastage in material supplies and equipment infrastructure needed for conventional OLED processing, dedicated SLEM units would provide significant cost advantages in manufacturing OLED displays for various applications. SLEM represents a natural evolution of thermal evaporation that incorporates many features of ink-jet printing. This will naturally allow the production of inexpensive, larger and flexible OLED displays to claim a significant share of the FPD market doc11973 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to demonstrate how a radically new technology can be applied to real-time detection of food-borne pathogens. Current ready-to-eat food inspection test methods require 3-6 days due to the need to enrich the pathogenic population to the point to make them detectable. During this time, the food is stored, awaiting the results of the tests. This method necessitates additional expenses and resources to store and track the tested lots and reduces the market shelf-life by as much as a week. With the proposed approach, detection of pathogens can be done in real-time as part of the food processing work flow. This is possible because of an innovative technology involving the use of a proprietary amplifying polymer that greatly amplifies detection events. This polymer has been shown to detect subfemtogram masses of inorganic compounds. In the proposed research, proven methods of identifying Listeria will be coupled to the amplifying polymer, resulting in a highly sensitive detection mechanism that will eliminate the need to grow enriched cultures. The immediate commercial application of this project will be for the inspection of ready-to-eat foods that are subject to Listeria contamination. The low cost and convenience of the system will be attractive to in-plant quality control inspectors, government regulators and institutional users. The broader applications of the basic sensor platform would be for detection of other food borne pathogens and of pathogenic releases in laboratories and in the general environment doc11974 none Each function of the adult nervous system, from a simple reflex response to a complex behavior, depends on the actions of distinct neuronal circuits. These circuits operate correctly because their component neurons are appropriately connected to each other. Precise wiring of these circuits requires guided growth of nerve fibers to reach the specific targets. Recent studies have identified a variety of molecular cues that provide the road signs for growing nerve fibers to navigate through their complex environment, with some of these cues attracting but others repelling growing nerve fibers. It is believed that the tiny, motile tip of each growing nerve fiber, known as the growth cone, is responsible for reading these road signs to steer the fiber in the appropriate direction (steering). Dr. Zheng s study aims to elucidate the mechanism by which motile growth cones accurately read direction from these extracellular cues. The research team will specifically focus on the role of intracellular calcium ions (Ca2+) in the growth cone s sensing of direction from diffusible cues. The hypothesis to be tested is that tempo-spatial Ca2+ signals in the growth cone provide the cellular mechanism for encoding of the directional information in the growth cone to initiate appropriate steering responses. Dr. Zheng s research team will use a combination of high-resolution digital imaging and manipulation techniques to examine the tempo-spatial pattern of intracellular Ca2+ signals associated with growth cone steering in response to different guidance cues. Furthermore, the research team will directly generate a similar tempo-spatial pattern of Ca2+ signals in the growth cone using a sophisticated laser-induced photoactivated release method to elucidate the precise role of these Ca2+ signals in guidance. The long-term goal of the study is to understand the molecular and cellular mechanisms that allow nerve growth cones to accurately sense direction in the complex extracellular space for the generation of highly ordered brain architecture doc11975 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to design a nanoparticle-monoclonal antibody conjugate that is capable of detecting select biological warfare agents including Brucella and Francisella. This novel approach to detection is effective, sensitive, selective, inexpensive and truly portable. The system uses an innovative detection method involving two wavelengths of fluorescence, which further increases selectivity and sensitivity. The sensor mechanism uses a thin film of conjugate that can be exploited in a number of ways for detection of other pathogens of relevance to both military and non-military sectors. The commercial applications of the technology to be developed in this project will be in the area of counter-terrorism and in medical, food, agricultural and related fields where pathogen contamination must be detected doc11976 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a novel drug delivery method for treatment of diseases and symptoms that currently require intravenous, subcutaneous injections or oral intake. This method is based on the use of drugs in an extremely fine and ultra lightweight particle form called AerohalantTM that is especially formulated for advanced inhalation therapy. AerohalantTM particles will have much higher tendency to stay aloft than state-of-the-art inhalants and next generation inhalants currently under development by the pharmaceutical companies. AerohalantTM particles will reach mucous membranes of the innermost part of the patients lungs without depositing any matter in the throat or the thoracic region, and therefore, utilize most of the tennis court sized alveolar surface area inside human lungs. These ultra light drug particles, on contact with thin fluid layer on mucous membranes in the alveoli, can dissolve and reach the blood stream much faster than by state-of-the art inhalants, subcutaneous, intravenous injections and orally ingested medications. Alternately, these particles could also be designed to release slowly. This Phase I project proposes to produce one commonly injected pharmacotherapeutic agent in the special powder form and to conduct feasibility tests with respect to suspension characteristics of Aerohalant TM particulates in the air, the in vitro activity, and the rate of dissolution and absorption. The commercial applications of this project are in the medical field for production of inhalable forms of common therapeutic drugs doc11977 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a tool for fisheries biomass assessment that fuses airborne LIDAR with ship-borne SONAR data. This is expected to be an improved survey technique that extends a fishery survey area while also increasing the quality of the data that is collected. Phase I will apply the system to two important fisheries issues: the decline of the endangered Stellar Sea Lion population in the presence of commercial fishing; and the need for increased information for salmon life cycle modeling. Both of these issues impact thousands of lives in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. The mathematical relationship between LIDAR and SONAR backscatter will be established. A prototype fusion engine will be developed and validated on existing data from the North Pacific. The system will be migrated to a web-based prototype LIDAR-SONAR data fusion engine for use in the fisheries management and scientific communities. A real-time data fusion engine will be deployed for future fish survey operations doc11978 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will demonstrate the feasibility of a multiple scanned-head Critical Dimension Atomic Force Microscope (CD-AFM) with high throughput as a CD metrology tool. Phase I will develop key design innovations for commercial in-line production quality control in: (a) multiple scanned CD-AFM heads, each dedicated to scanning one site; and (b) a modular, high-performance head design that enables greatly reduced move-acquire-measure (MAM) time. The principal commercial application is to replace CD Scanning Electron Microscopes (CD-SEMs) as the semiconductor industry s primary CD metrology tool for in-line production quality control. Other applications are seen in micromanipulators for microelectronics, including mask repair, and in biology doc11979 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will test new methods to detect and distinguish similar strains of the bacteria Haemophilus influenzae. Ninety-five percent of systemic infections in childhood are caused by H. influenzae strains of the serotype b. They include meningitis, sepsis, epiglottitis, pneumonia and otitis media. Bacterial meningitis and epiglottitis are life-threatening diseases with a lethality of five percent to twenty-five percent. Thus, a real-time sensor capable of detecting specific strains of H. influenzae in the parts-per-trillion range is needed. Any new detection device must be highly sensitive and selective, miniature, self-diagnostic, low cost, have rapid response time, and require no sample preparation. This Phase I project proposes such a novel point-of-care detection device for highly sensitive determination of H. influenzae and other bacteria strains. This approach builds on recent research conducted at Oak Ridge National Laboratory using microcantilevers as sensor platforms. The BioTELL sensor will consist of an array of microcantilevers with one surface derivatized by an antibody coating receptive to H. influenzae antigens. The commercial applications of this project will be in the biosensor market for detection of H. influenzae and other disease causing microorganisms. The primary customers for products developed through this project are expected to include pediatricians, general practitioners and consumer households doc11980 none This project addresses the question of intracellular membrane traffic; i.e., how do cells move pieces of membranes from one physical location in the cell to another? While much has been learned about this extremely complicated process over the past twenty years, there are still many questions that remain unanswered. This project focuses on the function of a particular protein complex. COPI, that has been known to be involved in the specific movement of certain membranes from one place to another in the cell and in the specific inclusion of certain membrane proteins in the membranes that are moved. Coat protein I (COPI) is a macromolecular protein complex consisting of ADP-ribosylation factor 1 (ARF1) and coatomer. ARF1 is a small GTP-binding protein that recruits coatomer to Golgi membranes and coatomer is a soluble complex that contains seven protein subunits alpha- through zeta-COP; there s a beta and a beta-prime). After assembly on Golgi membranes, COPI surrounds nascent vesicles that bud from the membrane. Once a vesicle has formed, ARF1 hydrolyzes GTP and COPI dissociates from the membrane, releasing coatomer and ARF1 into the cytosol for another round of coating. Although general features of the COPI cycle are known, the function and molecular mechanism of COPI action are poorly understood. Most researchers agree that COPI-coated vesicles carry membrane in a retrograde direction, from the Golgi to the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), but there is disagreement whether COPI-coated vesicles also carry membrane in the anterograde direction, towards the plasma membrane. It is not understood how COPI binds only to certain membranes, how vesicles coated by COPI form, or precisely how COPI helps select cargo to be included in a budding vesicle. The objective of this project is to better understand the function and action of COPI. Participating in the project will be a post-doctoral fellow, a Ph.D. student, plus rotating graduate and undergraduate students. The work will be done in a university environment where the PI has teaching responsibilities in graduate and undergraduate classes as well as research responsibilities. Coatomer contains sites that bind amino acid motifs present in the cytoplasmic domains of certain transmembrane proteins. Binding of these motifs to coatomer is involved in selecting cargo to be included in a COPI-coated vesicle. The best-characterized cytoplasmic motif is the dilysine signal (KKXX and related sequences) that functions in the return back to the ER of resident ER proteins that have escaped to the Golgi complex. In published work supported by a previous NSF grant, Dr. Draper studied di-amino compounds that appear to mimic the dilysine motif and inhibit the association of beta-COP and delta-COP with Golgi membranes. The research supported by this award is an extension of that previous work and contains two related sub-projects. Sub-project 1 is to investigate changes in coatomer caused by di-amino compounds and peptides. Dr. Draper has recently discovered that certain di-amino compounds that appear to interact with the dilysine binding sites on coatomer dissociate the large coatomer complex into smaller particles. This work will be continued to determine whether coatomer is dissociated into smaller particles by peptides that are natural ligands for coatomer. Coatomer will be incubated with peptides and the formation of sub-complexes will be analyzed by velocity sedimentation centrifugation. Which coatomer subunits are in the sub-complexes will also be determined. Sub-project 2 is to understand the functional consequences of changes in coatomer caused by di-amino compounds and peptides. Dr. Draper has preliminary evidence that sub-complexes formed by coatomer in the presence of di-amino compounds retain partial function, and this work will be extended to study peptides that interact with coatomer. To assess function, Golgi membranes will be incubated with cytosol and an energy source in the presence or absence of peptides. Which coatomer subunits retain Golgi-binding ability will be determined by immunoblotting. This project will thus examine the possible specific role played by the di-lysyl bearing peptides in COPI function. If such a role is substantiated through these and subsequent experiments, it would have a major impact on our understanding of membrane trafficking and specificity. Additionally, the project will serve as a vehicle for the education of the next generation of scientists as well as for the education of scientifically literate members of our society doc11981 none This Small Business Research Phase I project will develop novel silyl protecting groups for RNA DNA oligonucleotide synthesis. The synthesis of RNA is more difficult than DNA because a more complex protection scheme for nucleoside monomers is required. The 5-silyl-2-orthoester (2-ACE) strategy addresses this problem and provides RNA of excellent purity and yield. This achievement is invaluable to RNA scientists studying molecular biology or developing therapeutic strategies. Such research absolutely requires synthetic oligonucleotides that often incorporate modifications and are made by no other means. The goal of this SBIR Phase I proposal is to reduce the cost and increase the reliability of RNA synthesis so that amidites can be provided to the scientific community. The new silyl groups to be developed will facilitate nucleoside monomer preparation by improving selectivity for 5-protection and will promote economical purification strategies including crystallization. Nucleosides 5-protected with potential silyl candidates will be examined for their stability, ease of deprotection during solid phase synthesis, and amenability to incorporation of chromophores for real-time assays of coupling efficiency The commercial application of this project will be in the rapidly growing RNA synthesis market to support research endeavors in molecular biology and drug design doc11982 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop the software platform, GeneRx, to incorporate pharmacogenetics and nonlinear adaptive algorithms toward optimizing anti-hypertension therapy on a patient specific basis. Preliminary studies on the psychotropic drug, olanzapine, show a 40% patient-by-patient error between predicted starting dose and optimal therapeutic dose, using a prototype trained only with patient chart information. This is a significant reduction from the range of starting doses for olanzapine currently used, which is from 1 to 80 mg day. Anti-hypertensive drugs, like psychotropic drugs, have a large window of therapeutic options, including significant variation in dosages, medications, and combinations of therapies used. Using patient information and blood samples from a hypertension study done elsewhere, this Phase I project proposes to apply GeneRx to include genetic data in the modeling of hypertension treatment in combination with patient chart data. Genetic data for each patient will be acquired by genotyping DNA from the blood samples, scored as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) present or absent in key hypertension-related genes. GeneRx will take a patient s individual genetic, demographic, and environmental variables and predict if initial diuretic medication or initial beta-blocker medication will be effective. A more efficient method to prescribe effective anti-hypertension therapy would expedite recovery, minimize side effects, and reduce medical costs. The commercial application of this project will be in the field of healthcare management doc11983 none This research project, supported in the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, examines the surface structure, defect structure, and surface chemistry of the semiconducting metal oxides TiO2, SnO2, and ZnO. Using scanning probe microscopy, coupled with UHV electron spectroscopic methods, a detailed understanding of the effects of surface and defect structure on the surface chemistry of these important materials is obtained. Professor Ulrike Diebold and her group in the Department of Physics at Tulane University are applying this information to the development of novel gas sensing devices. High temperature semiconducting oxide sensors are used in a variety of gas sensing and monitoring applications. The detailed understanding of the surface structure and surface chemistry of these oxide materials is crucial to the design of robust sensors in these applications. Professor Diebold s studies of the surface structure and chemistry of this class of materials is providing this information and understanding doc11984 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to develop a low cost micro droplet generator for use in creating large scale micro arrays for biotechnology applications. Conventional methods are expensive and require cleaning operations and chemicals which can be eliminated with the disposable pump unit thereby reducing the costs for pumps, chemicals, cleaning hardware and associated operations. Principal aspects of the development plan are insuring that drop volume and shape are of highest quality among disposable pump units. The commercial application of this project will be in the potentially large market for production of microarrays doc11985 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project addresses the need for relative humidity (RH) sensors that operate at high-temperature with good stability. The research objective of this project is the fabrication of composite RH sensors. The morphological stability mandated by the composite coupled with the documented excellent humidity response of the sensing material should result in enhanced durability and drift stability. Owing to the thermal stability of the composite sensing layer, these RH sensors should function at temperatures up to 300 C. If successful, the technology proposed will enable a new high temperature regime of RH sensing. The composite materials science and engineering proposed is straightforward but innovative. If successfully developed, the research project proposed is quite amenable to large-scale production and will make a significant contribution in this field doc11986 none Evidence supports the following view of meiotic recombination in yeast: Double-strand-break repair is governed by two pathways, which are distinguished by the products of resolution of their repair intermediates. One pathway (Type I) yields the crossover and noncrossover resolution types expected from the cutting of both Holliday junctions of the intermediate. The other pathway (Type II) yields only one of the two types of crossover resolution that could arise from cutting DNA strands in the intermediate, along with a single noncrossover type that appears to arise without strand cutting. Crossover resolution of Type II intermediates depends on a set of proteins demonstrably required for crossover interference. Crossover resolution of Type I intermediates occurs independently of these proteins, and Type I crossovers display little or no interference. These studies of interference in yeast, which are expected to yield findings applicable to mammals and green plants as well, promise to provide an explanation for documented differences in crossing-over in yeast as compared with Drosophila. In so doing, they will enhance our understanding of meiosis, an essential feature of sexual reproduction. Understanding this basic biological process will enable biologists to develop better solutions to many of society s most pressing problems doc11987 none This Small Business Technology Transfer Phase 1 Project (SBIR) will contribute towards the development of a near-instantaneous, all-optical biosensing technology to replace ELISA-type (enzyme-linked immunoadsorbant assay) assays. Utilizing the unique optical properties of Metal Nanoshells, a new type of nanoparticle containing a dielectric core coated with a thin metal layer, immunoassays can be performed in the near-infrared region of high physiological transmissivity (wavelengths between 800 and nm) using Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering techniques. The equipment required to perform this immunoassay will be both highly portable and inexpensive. Initial research with a model antigen has shown that the nanoshell-based assay can produce results on whole-blood samples in 20 seconds. This is quantitatively equivalent to ELISA results requiring 24 to 48 hours. The proposed research will investigate the effects of bioconjugation of clinically important antibodies onto the nanoshell surface and examination of multiple Raman dyes for multi-antigen analyte assays . The primary commercial application of the technology being developed in this project is in the $20 billion immunoassay market. The proposed research could lead to rapid immunoassay devices for ambulances, military and civilian health agencies, point-of-care analysis and high volume pharmaceutical testing. The core technology may have additional commercial applications in the area of biochips, in genomics and proteomics research, and in animal biology doc11988 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will investigate beam steered electromagnetic radar using differential synchronization signal path switching (DSSPS) to increase the operable frequency and target resolution. The research will also determine the effective imaging beam refraction as it exits opaque media, the feasibility of classifying human targets in the downrange profile, and the feasibility of implementing fractal geometries into bow-tie antennas to reduce ringing. Phase I will result in a compact system capable of penetrating thick opaque materials using high frequencies to locate targets in an arena that is otherwise reserved for low frequencies because of attenuation and the steering limitations of electronic delay methods. Potential commercial applications are expected in electromagnetic application for subsurface feature detection, including voids, contaminants, hazardous waste containers, hydrologic-lithologic interfaces, the location of buried utilities, and for locating human targets through opaque materials such as buildings, earth, rock, and snow. The smaller size of a high frequency array offers portability for the latter application doc11989 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to develop methods to prepare 60-200 base RNA DNA oligonucleotides. Current methods for preparing long oligonucleotides suffer from limitations that hinder their application in biological science. Investigators have expressed an immediate need for longer material incorporating unnatural modifications and non-canonical substitutions. Access to these oligonucleotides is critical for continued discoveries in molecular biology and nucleic acid based therapeutics. Despite such demand, the most reliable synthetic method, 2-ACE chemistry, can provide quality oligonucleotides no longer than 50 bases. This SBIR Phase I project will use 2-ACE RNA to develop a novel biochemical technique using RNA ligase to enzymatically splice oligonucleotides together. RNA substrates will be coupled as part of a complex with a complementary splint. This project will evaluate different conformations of the ligation site, the tolerance of the enzyme for different substrate sequences, the optimal design and composition of the splint, and the ideal concentrations of substrates and cofactors. Once determined in an iterative process, the best conditions will be applied to more challenging research problems identified by collaborators. This research will directly address a critical deficit in the resources available to the national biotechnology research community. The commercial applications of this project are expected to be varied and immediate. As example, site-specifically modified RNAs of 50-200 bases in length should be in high demand by investigators who are developing RNA-targeted drugs or other RNA-dependent technologies beyond the reach of current synthetic means doc11990 none This individual investigator award will fund research focussing on self- and dopant atom transport in crystalline elemental and compound semiconductors at the atomic level. Multilayer structures consisting of different stable isotopes (e.g., 28Si and 30Si) will be doped such that the equilibrium native defect concentrations remain undisturbed by the doping process. Secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) will be used to measure directly and simultaneously the concentration profiles of the host crystal isotopes and the dopant atoms as a function of depth after thermal treatment for specific times. Analysis of these concentration profiles leads to a quantitative understanding of matter transport properties. Specifically, the charge states and the diffusivity of the native defects controlling the matter transport will be determined as a function of temperature and the position of the Fermi level. The knowledge gained from these studies will be used in the formation and the study of isotopically controlled semiconductor nanostructures. Neutron transmutation will allow the doping of these crystalline nano particles at ambient temperature. The basic parameters to be determined in this research effort will benefit directly the understanding of the stability of semiconductor nano particles and the advanced modeling of future generations of semiconductor devices. Graduate and undergraduate students will be intimately involved in all aspects of this research. %%% The ever increasing performance of semiconductor devices is, in large part, due to the reduction in device dimensions and the concomitant possibility to place more functions on a chip. Introducing the dopant atoms which give semiconductor devices their functionality, is reaching limits which can only be overcome by a fundamental study of dopant atom transport at atomic dimensions. Because dopant atoms move assisted by native defects such as vacancies and or self-interstitials, it is crucial for the understanding of the atomic transport to measure simultaneously the motion of the dopant and of the host lattice atoms. This can be achieved for the first time through the use of crystalline multilayer structures consisting of different isotopes of the host semiconductor crystal. This individual investigator award will support research using secondary ion mass spectrometry to measure dopant and isotope concentration profiles after exposure of the semiconductor structures to elevated temperatures for specific times. The results of these studies will form the basis for the advanced understanding of both matter transport parameters required for processing of future semiconductor devices and the stability of semiconductor nano particles. The graduate and undergraduate students performing this research will obtain the training required for challenging positions in the semiconductor industry and in academia doc11991 none Haushalter This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop micromachined fluid handling components as part of a new technology platform for high throughput protein crystallization and the collection of single crystal x-ray diffraction data. As increasing effort is directed toward proteomics and high throughput protein structure determination, the data derived from the determination of 3-D protein structures will have enormous impact in such areas as protein engineering, recombinant DNA technology and gene therapy. This project proffers a simple design for an inexpensive device, a Microfluidic Protein Crystallization Chip (MPCC), that possesses a high-density array of vessels, each with fluid inlets and vents, and a design for simple on-chip two-way valves. Methods are proposed to rapidly prototype new designs with design modifications made on the order of a day. The MPCC will be able to dose solutions appropriate to run commercial screening matrices. Since the device will be on the order of 1 mm thick, x-ray data will be collected by simply placing the crystal-containing MPCC device directly into the x-ray beam, thereby abrogating the expensive labor and equipment intensive exercise of isolating several micron sized crystals from 20-100 nL of mother liquid. The commercial applications of this project will be in the Structural Genomics market doc11992 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is focused upon demonstrating the feasibility of developing a new class of nonlinear optical (NLO) materials. Continued advances in laser-based system components are essential for keeping the nation s technology infrastructure at the forefront. Diode-pumped solid-state (DPSS) laser systems represent one of the most important technologies being developed for many of these applications-with particular emphasis being placed on generation of coherent light at heretofore unrealized combinations of power levels and wavelengths extending from the IR to the deep UV. A limiting factor in the development of DPSS laser technology is the lack of suitable laser and nonlinear optical (NLO) crystals having optimized physical properties. The development of new, efficient, robust, versatile, and readily manufacturable fixed- or tunable-frequency laser and NLO crystals is essential for the continued advancement of DPSS technologies. Demonstrating the potential to develop materials having these required NLO properties-coupled with unprecedented transparency into the DUV combined with superior thermal and mechanical properties-is the Phase I goal. Successful completion will lead to commercialization of a new class of materials that will enable production of a variety of state-of-the-art laser-related products. In the private sector, laser materials and systems have become critical components in the manufacture of essentially all microprocessor-based electronic devices and in a variety of medical therapeutic and diagnostic procedures. Other key government and commercial uses include sensors for remote sensing of pollution and atmospheric gases such as ozone and water vapor, satellite-to-satellite communications, optical computing, and advanced communications. Clearly, the potential market for this type of next-generation technology is substantial and diverse doc11993 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop integrated optical amplifier splitters through direct writing of sol-gel-derived, erbium-doped coatings. Since optical signals decrease with transmission and manipulation, amplifiers are required. Current designs involve serial arrangements of passive (splitters) and active devices (amplifiers). This serial design is bulky and expensive, due to the number of components and interconnects. Integrated optical devices would greatly simplify optical communication networks. Phase I will incorporate amplification into passive devices, such as splitters, resulting in lossless optical devices. To provide amplification, erbium will be incorporated into ceramic films via wet-chemical processing. Subsequently, laser irradiation will selectively densify channels in porous coatings, thereby locally increasing the refractive index and providing light containment in the channels. Pumping the planar device will amplify signals as they pass. This technology in integrated amplifier splitters will be key to making more complex integrated optical circuits in telecommunication doc11994 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project comprises the design, fabrication and testing of continuous and discontinuous catalytic metal films as detection elements on a gallium nitride metal-semiconductor-field-effect transistor (MESFET) gas sensor for measuring combustion gas products in high temperature gas streams. Gas adsorbs and reacts on the metal surface. The steady state composition of adsorbed species changes the metal work function. The significant innovation is a gallium nitride (large bandgap) semiconductor device which will advance this emerging technology to high temperature (ca. 600 C) applications. The multiple catalytic metals: platinum, palladium silver and rhodium have different sensitivities and detection limits. These differences can in principle be used to distinguish the effects of up to three concentration variables. This is the first time rhodium will have been used in this kind of sensor. The outcome of this work will be a proof of the concept that quantifying high temperature gas compositions is possible with the multiple catalytic gate FET sensor technology. A work product will be: (1) the isotherms for gas (propane, methane, propylene, NO, NO2 and CO) adsorption on polycrystalline films of Pt, PdAg and Rh; (2) investigation of anticipated significant interactions of multiple gases on these metals; (3) the documentation of any solid-state reactions between the metals and the gallium nitride substrate by x-ray, TEM and other surface techniques; and, (4) the mechanical and electrical effects on the FET structure in various gases and at temperatures as high as 850 C. The goal of the research is a robust sensor structure and composition that can be used to monitor combustion gas including automobile exhaust for breakthrough of the catalytic converter and possibly engine control for better efficiency. The potential commercial applications of the research is a sensor for monitoring emission to meet anticipated regulatory requirements for ultra-low-emissions-vehicles for the future. Other applications include a variety of combustion gas environments and monitoring and real-time control of refinery and other industrial chemical processes doc11995 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project seeks to develop a novel high-resolution instrument, the Near-Field Cell Penetrating Microscope (NCPM), for analyzing and comparing molecular characteristics of cells. This instrument will adapt a Scanning Near-Field Optical Microscope (SNOM) with a probe that can penetrate the cell membrane and image the inside of intact cells. The hypothesis is that precancerous, cancerous and normal cell lines have different molecular profiles and can be differentiated with the resolution power of SNOM. The proposed instrument will be able to collect data via high-resolution imagery, thus providing the means to investigate tumor cells at the sub-cellular and the molecular level. Incorporation of this data into a signature will facilitate the molecular analysis of cell lines and their transformed counterparts. The near term commercial application of the product to be developed in this project is in the near field optical microscopy market as a research tool for the medical and biological community. The long term commercial application is in the medical diagnostic market as an early warning device for detection of diseased cells doc11996 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will investigate the problem of chlorinated solvent contamination in saturated, low permeability soils. The specific objectives of Phase I research are : (1) to quantify the effectiveness of chitin as an electron donor facilitating reductive dechlorination and enhancing bioavailability of tetrachloroethylene (PCE and TCE); ( 2) to incorporate chitin into a delivery system designed for low permeability soils; and (3) to evaluate the delivery method in the field. Preliminary studies have shown that chitin may be an ideal candidate to facilitate low cost, low maintenance bioremediation of chlorinated solvent residual sources. Obtained as a byproduct from the shellfish industry, chitin is particularly attractive as it is very commonly available. If favorable results are obtained during Phase I column and field studies, then a follow on Phase II project will further examine mechanisms controlling process efficiency and longevity. The commercial applications of this project will be in the multi-million dollar bioremediation market doc11997 none Ronald M. Weiner Steven W. Hutcheson A grant has been awarded to Drs. Weiner and Hutcheson of the University of Maryland to investigate the genetics and cell biology of insoluble complex carbohydrate (ICP) degradation by an unusual marine bacterium, Microbulbifer degradans. This bacterium was isolated from the Chesapeake Bay watershed and has the ability to degrade almost all known biological polymers, including ICP s, by forming unusual surface structures. These surface structures appear to be organized consortia of enzymes that allow the bacterium to efficiently degrade and process these very stable polymers. The degradation of such ICP s is not governed by conventional enzymology; the most efficient degradation involves contact with organized consortia of enzymes. Never before has any single organism been reported to have the capability to degrade such a broad spectrum of ICP s. It is also the only microorganism shown to degrade an ICP other than cellulose by this mechanism and the first observation of this degradative mechanism in an aerobic bacterium. This grant will fund research to understand what genes and proteins are involved in the degradation of the ICP, agar, and to determine how the agar-degrading structure is assembled on the bacterial surface. Knowledge of the genetics of this system should provide new tools for the processing of complex carbohydrates into useful byproducts and for bioremediation of the billions of tons of agricultural, aquacultural and algalcultural waste generated each year that contain very stable ICP s. In addition, little is known about how the annual production of the more than 25 billion tons of ICP s produced in the world s oceans are recycled into the biosphere. Thus, this research has potential applications in bioremediation and or processing of waste products and could provide valuable insights into evolution of bacteria and the ecological role of this marine bacterium in the carbon cycle doc11998 none Reed Certain cells in the mammalian auditory brainstem (three neurons from the periphery) show exceptionally small standard deviations in the microsecond range of the timing of the first action potential response under repeated trials of the same sound. Moreover, the latency and its standard deviation are quite independent of frequency and decibel level over large ranges. This behavior is exceptional since the inputs to these cells come from octopus and other cells in the contralateral cochlear nucleus, a nucleus which is ennervated by auditory nerve fibers that have much larger standard deviations and high dependence on frequency and decibel level. Thus, this system is an example of how the brain can use relatively sloppy and variable devices (neurons) to perform surprisingly accurate calculations. Professor Michael Reed, with colleague physiologist Joseph Blum, investigates this system with three research projects: (i) They create and investigate by machine computation a large scale mathematical model of the whole system using known physiological properties of auditory nerve fibers and recently discovered properties of octopus cells; (ii) They use mathematical analysis investigate of the improvement of the standard deviation of latency in converging networks where the target cells require coincident inputs within time windows in order to fire; (iii) They use partial differential equations to understand the special properties of dendritic information processing in octopus cells. Using mathematics and machine computation, Professor Michael Reed continues to study how groups of cells (neurons) in the auditory brainstem perform calculations that individual cells can not do by themselves. Neurons are inherently sloppy and variable devices that perform differently even under (apparently) the same conditions with the same inputs. Nevertheless, large groups of these neurons are able to perform together, reliably, highly accurate calculations. This project tries to understand this apparent paradox. The project sheds light on how and why human brains are organized the way they are and it suggests new mechanisms for the development of man-made thinking devices doc11999 none The Department of Mathematical Sciences and Center for Applied Mathematics and Statistics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology will purchase an eight node (sixteen processor) Alpha Beowolf cluster which will be dedicated to the support of research in the mathematical sciences. The equipment will be used for several projects, including in particular: 1. What lessons from small neuronal networks apply to larger ones? Victoria Booth, Amithaba Bose, and Farzan Nadim. 2. Numerical solutions of mixed functional differential equations Christopher Elmer. 3. Time-dependent oxygen transport from microvascular networks Daniel Goldman. 4. Pattern formation in thin liquid film flows Lou Kondic. 5. Full numerical simulation of microwave-enhanced chemical vapor infiltration processing Burt Tilley doc12000 none QGene is a popular, free software package for exploration and analysis of quantitative genetic (QTL, or quantitative trait locus) mapping data. It is unique among such packages in offering a richly graphical, interactive user interface and fast exploratory analysis with large datasets from a dozen mating designs. It sets a standard in a genre where human-interface design is often neglected. Converting the software to the C++ language while brining it to the state-of-the-science in statistical analysis algorithms and porting it to the Windows operating system will make the package more accessible. In addition, using a modular architecture will give it the power to share data and functionality with other packages and to communicate with various genome databases. Overall, the mapping community will have much more complete QTL software power than now available doc12001 none Under the direction of Dr. Keith Kintigh, Ms Suzanne Eckert will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. She will analyze large series of ceramics recovered from two archaeological sites, Hummingbird Pueblo and Pottery Mound located in the lower Rio Puerco drainage of New Mexico. These large multi-room sites are typical of the late prehistoric period of the region and date to approximately to AD. Within the Southwest the centuries immediately before Spanish contact are characterized by population movements from multiple widely dispersed small sites into a more limited number of larger entities. This of necessity required the development of social mechanisms which integrated previously distinct social groups. In addition to such local aggregation, long distance migration which characterized early historic Southwest groups also occurred in prehistoric times and evidence indicates that people from well outside the local region also lived at both the Hummingbird Pueblo and Pottery Mound sites. Ms Eckert wishes to understand how integrating mechanisms developed, the extent to which distinctive social identities were retained and the degree and nature of ties beyond the local Rio Puerco region. She will also examine how these factors changed over time To address these questions, she will focus on the large well controlled ceramic material excavated at both sites. Because they reflect different aspects of social interaction she will: 1. analyze pottery designs and overt stylistic attributes; 2. examine the technology, such as paste manipulation, by which pottery is produced; 3. use petrographic analysis to identify and determine source location of raw materials to determine whether specific pottery types were imported or locally made; 4. reconstruct vessel size to provide insight into function. Ms Eckert has developed a model which, through the interplay of these variables, will allow her to examine such issues as retained ethnicity and trade and the potential importance of ritual feasting. This research is important for several reasons. It will increase understanding of the complex interactions which characterize social group formation and how these develop over time. It will provide important data of interest to many archaeologists about a relatively poorly known region of the Southwest and will also contribute to training a promising young scientist doc12002 none Hanin The goal of the project is to gain a new quantitative insight, on the basis of advanced mathematical methods, into kinetics of biological processes in irradiated cell populations. The investigator formulates and analyzes a comprehensive mechanistic mathematical model of these processes, including formation of radiation-induced lesions and their repair, misrepair and fixation, cell cycling and cell death. Mathematical modeling techniques include general age-dependent branching stochastic processes, queueing systems, stochastic simulation, and modern methods of statistical inference. Parameters of the model are estimated from experimental data on kinetics and survival of cells in synchronized cultures of S3 HeLa and V79 cells exposed to continuous irradiation at various dose rates. Parameter estimation is based on a comprehensive stochastic simulation model of the underlying biological processes and on methods of stochastic optimization in the maximum likelihood setting. The model is applied to stationary and exponential cell cultures that serve as experimental counterparts of tumor cell populations at different stages of tumor development. The distribution of the number of surviving clonogenic cells at the end of radiation exposure, obtained from the comprehensive simulation model of cell population kinetics, is compared with explicit formulas for this distribution within simpler birth and death Markov models that resulted from the preliminary studies. The most important biological outcome of this work consists of the set of estimates of unobservable model parameters, which are interpretable in biologically appealing terms of repair processes and cell kinetics. The project has a significant impact on evaluation, prediction and optimization of the efficacy of radiation cancer treatment and associated methods of cure rate estimation. A remarkable progress in cell biology and radiation biology since the s has resulted in a prodigious amount of experimental data comprising all aspects of cell responses to ionizing radiation. These data represent an invaluable source of information for furthering our knowledge about intracellular processes in normal and irradiated cells. However, to a large extent, this gold mine of experimental findings amassed over years remains unclaimed. The investigator and his collaborators attempt to understand and describe mathematically the most basic processes in normal and irradiated cells. This is accomplished on the basis of advanced mathematical, statistical and computational methods applied to the original experimental data describing responses of several cell lines to radiation exposure at variable dose rate. The project was triggered by and has far-reaching implications for cancer radiotherapy doc11825 none This project brings together two areas of research: intergroup cognition and emotion. The goal is to investigate how social perceivers emotional states shape their attitudes of specific social targets in ways outside of their awareness and control. Although the past two decades have witnessed new and important insights into psychological processes underlying the form and function of stereotypes and prejudice, the role of the emotional system in shaping these phenomena has only recently been explored systematically. For example, research on the interplay between emotion and social cognition has revealed that specific emotional states (e.g., anger, sadness, happiness) have distinct effects on consciously reported beliefs and attitudes toward social groups, but it is silent about whether and how emotions shape nonconscious expressions of intergroup perception and behavior. Given that emotions exist to promote adaptive responses to important environmental challenges, it seems reasonable to expect that they should influence people s ability to appraise stimuli quickly and automatically as well as slowly and carefully. Moreover, given that membership in social groups, and the benefits and conflicts inherent in such affiliations, play a central role in human life, it is expected that appraisals of social groups are likely to be influenced by emotional states via both automatic and controlled mental processes. This project represents an initial attempt to examine the role of discrete emotions in shaping automatic and controlled intergroup cognition by examining whether specific negative emotions (e.g., anger, sadness) produce different effects on automatic intergroup attitudes and, if so, how such attitudes contrast with self-reported judgments generated after thoughtful consideration doc12004 none s, which will encourage active participation by junior scientists. The main topics covered will include catalytic mechanisms of mRNA splicing and 3 -end processing; developmental and cell-type specific regulation of gene expression by alternative splicing and polyadenylation; structure and function of snRNP and hnRNP particles; assembly of the processing machineries; mRNA transport and turnover; and localization and dynamics of RNA processing reactions. A messenger RNA (mRNA) is a molecule that carries the information encoded by a gene in a form that is useable by the cell. Various types of processing of mRNA s enable cells to regulate their use according to the cells needs. Proper processing of mRNA s is essential for their functioning. This meeting will help disseminate current research findings on this vital topic and will stimulate and facilitate further advances. This award will enable graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and young investigators working in the United States to attend the meeting doc12005 none The biochemical steps that are required for chlorophyll and bacteriochlorophyll synthesis have been identified and in most cases the genes that encode the various enzymes have been identified. One enzyme that is not as well understood is the Mg-protoporphyrin IX monomethyl ester cyclase. This enzyme converts Mg-protoporphyrin IX monomethyl ester into protochlorophyllide. To further understand this enzyme in plants and bacteria, the following research will be carried out. a) Demonstration of in vitro activity of the anaerobic cyclase from Rhodobacter capsulatus and purification of the enzyme components. Purification of the enzyme will allow determination of cofactor requirements. Determination of the cofactors is key to testing the hypothesis that the anaerobic cyclase utilizes a radical mechanism mediated by adenosylcobalamin. b) Determine components of the anaerobic cyclase by genetic analysis. It is clear from experiments in plant systems that two proteinaceous components are required for cyclase activity. Recent results suggest that two components are required for the anaerobic cyclase activity. Genetic approaches will be used to identify additional loci affecting enzymatic activity. c) Test if the putative chlE gene product from Synechocystis sp. PCC is a functional homolog to bchE from R. capsulatus. This will be accomplished by expression of the chlE gene in R. capsulatus. This hypothesis will be tested more fully by purifying the ChlE polypeptide and characterizing its function in the cyclase enzyme from Synechocystis sp. PCC . In addition, experiments will be performed to test whether the cyanobacterial enzyme can function anaerobically. d)Involve undergraduate science students in a research project that will prepare them for advanced studies or for teaching at the secondary education level. Chlorophyll is a very important compound because it is used to absorb light for photosynthesis. The goal of this project is to better understand one of the enzymes in chlorophyll synthesis. The enzyme under study is not well understood, but is required for the synthesis of chlorophyll by cells. The enzyme is also limited in iron-poor cells leading to yellowing of the plants. The project will examine the proteins from bacteria that are involved in the reaction. Other components of the cell that are required for this reaction to occur will be identified. BENNING doc12006 none Non-phosphorous polar lipids are very abundant in membranes of photosynthetic organisms. In plants and bacteria, phosphate limitation increases the ratio of non-phosphorous lipids to phospholipids and a functional substitution of phospholipids by non-phosphorous lipids has been proposed. Examples are the sulfolipid sulfoquinovosyldiacylglycerol (SQDG) substituting for phosphatidylglycerol and the betaine lipid diacylglycerol-N,N,N-trimethylhomoserine (DGTS) replacing phosphatidylcholine. The sulfolipid is present in all plants and most photosynthetic bacteria while betaine lipids are abundant in non-seed plants, bacteria and fungi. The SQDG head group is a sulfonic acid derivative of glucose (sulfoquinovose). The SQD1 protein of Arabidopsis is the key enzyme involved in the formation of the sulfolipid head group from UDP-glucose and sulfite. The crystal structure for the protein has been solved and an in vitro assay is available. These are the prerequisites for a detailed analysis of the SQD1 reaction mechanism pursued in this project. Furthermore, the interaction of SQD1 with other proteins and its true activity in vivo are under investigation. Two genes essential for betaine lipid biosynthesis in the purple bacterium Rhodobacter sphaeroides have been isolated. Based on preliminary analysis, one gene, btaA, is proposed to encode an S-adenosylmethionine:diacylglycerol 3-amino-3-carboxypropyl transferase catalyzing the first reaction of betaine lipid biosynthesis. The second enzyme presumably encodes an S-adenosylmethionine:diacylgycerolhomoserine N-methyltransferase converting diacylglycerol-homoserine to DGTS. Experiments are underway to test this hypothesis and to understand the reaction mechanism of these two enzymes in greater detail. The chemical synthesis of sulfonic acids is well known, giving rise to numerous compounds encountered by humans during daily life. The sulfolipid of plants is a prominent example of a naturally occurring sulfonic acid. Carbohydrate and sulfur metabolism meet in the biosynthesis of sulfolipid. Understanding the biosynthesis of the sulfolipid head group will provide a model for the de novo formation of sulfonates in nature. This project focuses on the detailed analysis of the function of the Arabidopsis SQD1 protein in the test tube and inside the plant chloroplast. This protein is responsible for the introduction of the sulfonic acid into a precursor of sulfolipid biosynthesis. Betaine lipid biosynthesis is mediated by two interesting proteins. The first makes an unusual use of a common metabolite, S-adenosylmethionine. A similar reaction occurs in the biosynthesis of the antibiotic nocardicin. Elucidating the basic reaction mechanism of this enzyme is one of the goals and may provide clues for the synthesis of useful compounds. The second enzyme methylates the amino group of a lipid substrate. Experiments planned to understand the mechanism of this enzyme will provide fundamental insights into the general mechanism of lipid-linked N-methylation doc12007 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop compact, all-solid-state, pulsed drivers coupled with solid-state protection circuitry for powering laser diodes diode arrays and increasing their reliability and lifetime. New high-current semiconductor switch technology will be coupled with proprietary new diode protection circuits featuring fault-mode detection and high-speed current limiting to extend laser diode lifetime tenfold. This leads directly to a tenfold reduction in annual laser operating cost. Recent breakthroughs in high power semiconductor technology, namely the Gate Commutated Thyristor (GCT) switch, also offer significant improvement in speed, power, and compact size over existing commercial devices. Phase II will develop advanced, compact pulsed power modules based on these technologies. GCT technology, coupled with a proprietary fast protection circuitry, offers a significant decrease in diode laser system size and weight and a tenfold decrease in laser cost-of-ownership made possible by increased diode lifetime. New commercial applications for the diode-pumped solid-state lasers are expected to include powering diodes for optical telecommunications and ultraviolet and X-ray point sources for Next Generation Lithography in the semiconductor industry, as well as in laser cutting and welding. Medical uses for this new fault-protected, solid-state driver technology will include oncology and gene therapy doc12008 none Townsend The resilience or vulnerability of children in developing countries is the outcome of many factors beyond a simple measure of income and economic development. This research involves a cultural anthropologist-demographer studying the complex social position of children under twelve in rural northern South Africa in order to identify the social factors contributing to their well-being. The project will concentrate on a third level of social organization, between households and the community, consisting of the social connections that link members of different households, the flows of resources, services and assistance across these connections. The project builds on six years of annual demographic and health survey data conducted by the Agincourt Health and Population Programme. Combining three months of intensive fieldwork in twelve groups of households in varying communities with analysis of data on 67,000 persons over six years, the researcher with his South African collaborators will test hypotheses that social networks are critically important resources for child welfare in this population. This new knowledge will be useful to health planners in the developing world, and will allow modifications of future censuses and survey questions to identify important social relationships. In addition the project will elucidate general principles of child welfare and social networks that could be used to develop situation-specific indicators of social connection in other research sites doc12009 none Professor Anne Kelley of Kansas State University is supported by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program to perform advanced spectroscopic studies of molecules with potential for good nonlinear optical responses. By quantitatively simulating the absolute resonance Raman intensities and optical spectra of these species in solution, the PI will experimentally determine the effect of solvent environment on the structures of both the ground and lowest excited electronic states of the molecules. Neural networks will be tried for fitting experimental data to models. The molecules will also be studied embedded in polymer matrices at 5K using single molecule emission spectroscopy. It is important to be able to quantify the relation of optical and nonlinear optical responses to solvent effects, if these molecular structures are to be incorporated into polymer matrices to fabricate devices. This work will improve our ability to convert sophisticated spectral data into predictive models for new optical materials. Optical materials are needed for advances in optical computing and communications doc12010 none Cowan This twelve-month award will provide support for Darrel Cowan of the University of Washington and seven co-principal investigators to plan a cooperative research project with Dr. Francesco Dramis at the University of Rome III on Apennine tectonics. The objective of the project is to review the US and Italian current and past research in the northern Apennines, formulate specific collaborative projects, and make a field excursion from Rome to the Bologna Apennines, to give all the co-PIs the opportunity to view together the terrain, rocks, and structures of their study area. With the cooperation of the Italian researchers, the subsequent joint project, Retreating-trench, extension, and accretion tectonics (RETREAT): a multidisciplinary study of the northern Apennines, has the potential to be a world-class study area with important broader implications for other tectonic systems doc12011 none Schmink Wallace This dissertation research project in cultural anthropology studies the effects of markets and household wealth on the extraction of resources from the tropical forest in the Brazilian Amazon. Combining theories and methods from microeconomics, economic anthropology and cognitive anthropology, the student will test hypotheses relating household wealth, income, extractive activities, market integration, and knowledge of forest resources among a sample of rubber tappers in the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve of Acre, Brazil. Although previous studies examined the effects of wealth and markets on household livelihood strategies, this project advances our understanding by studying these factors in an extractive reserve, where livelihood strategies are limited; it also advances studies in cognitive anthropology by relating intra-cultural variation in rubber tapper knowledge of forest resources to the economic factors that contribute to shape livelihood strategies. The project will examine changes over time, comparing research findings from with current data, to provide policymakers a yardstick for measuring change in the reserve. This new knowledge will be valuable for creating policy in other tropical forest protected areas. The project also advances our knowledge about this important region of the world, and contributes to the training of a young social scientist doc12012 none PI: Luke E. Achenie Institution: University of Connecticut Proposal Number: To address the issue of solvent identification and or replacement in the chemical process industries, the PI plans to systematize solvent design using a computer aided product design (CAPD) approach. CAPD can be used either by considering the compound in isolation (e.g., via overall property matching) or by considering the compound and its interaction with a system (e.g., if it is to be used in an absorption process). For the former, the designer characterizes the desirable and undesirable properties of a solvent that needs to be replaced for some reason (e.g., environmental regulations). Other solvents are screened which match the desirable properties and at the same time have minimal undesirable properties. For example, normal-methylpyrrolidone (NMP) is used by industry as a paint-stripping solvent. Current OSHA regulations require the solvent to have a flash point greater than 210oF -- but the flash point of NMP is 190oF. Hence another solvent needs to be used with the same physico-chemical properties of NMP but with a higher flash point. The overall purpose of the project is to develop a unified framework combining databases, mathematical programming models and heuristics for reactive and nonreactive solvent design, and to do this and look for a proper fit for a particular solvent using computational chemistry. The PI plans to incorporate uncertainty analysis as part of the design doc12013 none This award provides funding to Ithaca College for Heinz Koch to organize a workshop for Chemistry REU Site Directors. He is being assisted by Daniel Akins (City College of New York), Lon Knight (Furman University), Nancy Levinger (Colorado State University), and Barbara Schowen (University of Kansas). This workshop will be held at NSF headquarters on 2-3 March, and will involve all Chemistry REU site directors. The participants will be divided into four groups to address seven general issues: recruiting, participant demographics, impact on the institution, research experience for students, assessment, communications, and resources. In addition, all participants will select one of five panels with each panel preparing a report. The panels are: (1) Research Experience for Teachers, (2) Outreach and Recruitment, (3) REU and International Sites, (4) Balance between Research and Other Activities, and (5) Outcomes, Results and Assessments. A written document will be produced as an result of this workshop which will be distributed to Chemistry REU site directors, selected NSF offices, and will be available for other interested parties doc12014 none This research will elucidate the developmental biology and genetics of mating and sexual spore development in oomycete fungi, using the plant pathogenic genus Phytophthora as a model. Oomycetes are an important but understudied group of lower eukaryotes that include many economically and environmentally significant pathogens of plants and animals, biocontrol agents of other pathogens, and saprophytes. In oomycetes as in many other microbes, mating is an important element of the life cycle. Mating results in the formation of oospores, which are durable structures that can survive season-to-season to initiate disease epidemics. The sexual cycle also enables gene flow through populations, yielding strains that may be more fit due to new combinations of loci determining pathogenicity, host preference, fungicide resistance, and other traits. Much of this proposal focuses on P. infestans, which is a devastating plant pathogen (potato late blight) that causes many billions of dollars of damage per year. It is also a good model system for studying oomycete biology. P. infestans is heterothallic, and oospores are normally induced when isolates of different mating types interact through hormones. In previous work, nine genes induced during mating were identified. In this project a multidisciplinary approach will be used to address the function and regulation of such mating-regulated genes. This will entail identifying additional regulated genes, and for a subset of the genes studying their structure, cellular localization of their protein products, and the effects of silencing and forced expression. In addition to studies of P. infestans, the expression of the genes will also be characterized in a homothallic species, P. phaseoli, which produces oospores in single culture. Preliminary studies of novel chemicals secreted during mating will also be performed. Results from this investigation will have conceptual as well as practical impacts. A better understanding will be obtained of the diverse strategies used to direct eukaryotic cell differentiation, to respond to stress, and to form survival structures. Important issues in development will be addressed such as cellular communication, self nonself recognition, cell type determination, gene regulation, and signal transduction. The basis of homothallic and heterothallic mating systems will also be illuminated. It is likely that mating in oomycetes is regulated differently than in other lower eukaryotes such as ascomycetes and basidiomycetes, which lack taxonomic affinity to oomycetes. In the long term, if the factors which control mating can be identified, it might be possible to control plant diseases by manipulating the life cycles of pathogens using rational mechanism-based inhibitors instead of environmentally harmful chemicals doc12015 none Baumann Does peer review science insure that science is of interest only to peers ? Is peer reviewed science performed by mission oriented agencies (e.g. EPA, USDA & USGS) of interest only to employees of the agency or their disciplinary mission? Is the scientific curiosity of university faculty of interest to anyone other than the curious faculty member? Questions, such as the above, have been and continue to be asked by the public and their elected representatives as society faces increasingly complex water management decisions and science seems incapable of providing relevant input. UCOWR is proposing to organize a day-long series of sessions at its annual meeting in Utah to examine past and current management method enployed to plan, review, and conduct water research as well as evaluate the relevance of water research findings to society s need for new knowledge to support increasingly complex water management decision-making. A Water Resources Update issue will be produced from the day-long sessions as well as a summary dialogue paper for the dialogue section of the journal of the American Water Resources Association and or EOS doc12016 none The objective of this project is to identify bottlenecks in heterologous protein production from transgenic plant cell suspensions, and to develop genetic strategies to overcome these limitations. Three model proteins will be studied. These include, hepatitis B surface antigen, Norwalk virus capsid protein, and human secreted alkaline phosphatase. These proteins will be studied in two host systems, i. e. tobacco and soybean suspension cultures. The Principal Investigators (PIs) will test the hypothesis that transcribed mRNA may have increased opportunities for translation in the late exponential stationary phase as compared with the exponential growth phase due to competition with endogenous mRNA for translational machinery. If this is true, then inducible expression during the late exponential growth stationary phase might lead to higher product levels doc12017 none The heat shock response is characterized by the induction of transcription of genes encoding protein chaperones. Many stresses induce this response, foremost among them oxygen stresses. Most stresses that activate the heat shock response cause the unfolding and aggregation of proteins (as well as producing the oxygen radical, superoxide anion). Hence, the current paradigm suggests that regulation of the response in eukaryotes occurs through competition for chaperones between unfolded protein and the Heat Shock Transcription Factor, HSF. However, recent data indicate that HSF responds to superoxide anion in vitro, and suggest that superoxide may be critical for the heat shock response in whole cells of yeast, Drosophila, and humans. Thus, the heat shock response may be more properly characterized as a response to superoxide, with protein unfolding being a consequence of the stress but not the direct trigger of HSF activation. The purpose of this project is to distinguish whether unfolded protein or superoxide is the functional, in vivo, trigger of the response. The experiments to achieve this goal include comparing kinetics of production of superoxide and unfolded protein, examining complexes between chaperones and unfolded protein as well as chaperones and HSF, examining oxidative damage to protein, and determining the effects of stresses in yeast cells that are grown anaerobically. The project will also begin the pursuit of cellular components that counteract the effect of superoxide via biochemical activity that is dependent on reduced glutathione. To complement these biochemical approaches, genetic analyses will be performed to seek genes that, when overexpressed, interact with the heat shock system. In addition to providing genetic confirmation of the biochemistry, these experiments will provide an inroad into future analyses. a doc12018 none The proposed work will investigate the hormonal control of development and reproduction in insects by probing the molecular action of juvenile hormone (JH) in the model insect Drosophila melanogaster. Important roles for JH in insects have been identified, but the action of this hormone remains an enigma because a JH receptor has not been identified in any insect. A genetic approach identified the Methoprene-tolerant (Met) gene, and found that the protein that it encodes (MET) is involved in the action of JH in this insect, probably as a component of a JH receptor. In the proposed work Met will serve as a focus for understanding this receptor. The proposed work consists of two objectives: (1) Identification of the partner protein of MET. Met+ in D. melanogaster is a member of the bHLH-PAS family of transcriptional regulators. PAS proteins function with a partner protein in a heterodimeric complex, and there is no reason to believe that MET is an exception. An understanding of JH binding and reception must include an identification of the partner protein. One promising candidate is a homologous gene, Met-like (Met-l), recently cloned from D. melanogaster. Yeast two-hybrid technology using Met+ as bait will be employed to directly test MET-L as the partner of MET as well as search for other proteins that interact with MET. In this proven technology candidate genes are expressed together in yeast cells. Physical interaction between their gene products will drive transcription of one or more reporter genes engineered into the yeast strain, allowing ready visualization of this interaction. Interaction of each protein will be verified in vitro using antibody to MET. Any novel gene(s) will be identified, possibly by function, from the D. melanogaster sequence database, for further characterization. (2) Identification and characterization of the JH binding protein. Previous binding studies demonstrated that JH III binding affinity was much poorer in tissue extracts from Met mutants, accounting for the resistance to methoprene, and implicating MET as a receptor component. To identify the JH-binding protein and establish its binding characteristics, JH III binding to the individual proteins and to the MET: PARTNER heterodimeric complex will be measured. Additionally, a photoaffinity analog of JH III, epoxyfarnesyl diazoacetate, will be used to photoaffinity label and establish confirm which protein is the high-affinity binding protein in the heterodimeric complex. Results from these studies will define the components of the putative JH receptor and any associated proteins that physically interact with MET. The JH-binding protein will also be identified, thus clarifying the poorly understood molecular basis for JH action. These results will provide the necessary knowledge and molecular tools for further analysis of transcriptional control by JH doc12019 none This proposal requests support to develop, test, and optimize a new approach to adaptive beamfroming in coherent imaging that was recently developed by the PI [1]. The fundamental approach is based upon the physics of imaging with signals that are scattered from targets consisting of many randomly distributed scatters. The resulting alogrithmic methodology which will be refered to as the scaled Cross-Corelation Function (SCCF) algorithm provides a robust adaptive auto-focusing phase aberration correction algorithm for digitally sampled coherent imaging systems. The underlying fundamental ideas forming the basis of this discovery are far more reaching and should have broad application to inverse problems in coherent imaging such as coherent optics, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), ultrasonics, somar, etc. The initial effort will be directed towards medical ultrasound. Here extensive simulations will be performed for 1.5 and 2D dimensional transducer arrays to further develop, test and optimize the new adaptive beamforming methodolgy. These simulations require computer power beyond the capabilities of a single CPU workstation running MATLAB code. Code, either in C++ or Fortran 90, wil be developed to run these simulations on available multiprocessor super computing systems. The full implementation of the new methodology, which has been shown in limited simulation tests to be substantially more robust than the Flax-O Donnell [2,3] and the Rigby [4] beamsum algorithms, is computationally intensive as it requires the computation of N (N-1)=2 signal correlations for all focused cell in the ensemble of cells used to compute the covariance matrix. Here N represents the number of channels. This computation load is too extensive for today s existing ultrasound machines, although future generations systems will undoubtedly have these capabilities. The project effort will involve extensively testing of the suboptimal, less computationally intensive versions of the SCCF methodology that may be implementable with today s hardware. The project efforts will also consider conceptual extensions of the SCCF methodology to microwave, sonar, and optical imaging. Computer simulation testbeds will be developed for these different modalities for the purpose of developing and optimizing suitable adaptive algorithms for these disciplines. Adaptive beamforming in SAR is needed to equalize phase errors caused by unknown positioning errors of the transmit receive points (synthetic elements) in the synthetically generated array. The current techniques such as the phase gradient algorithm [23] searches for the brighest cell, and then solves for the aberrant phase using phase gradient based upon the nearest neighbor cross-correlation functions. This method is susceptible to image artifacts, persumanly caused by a combination of the instabilities inherent in a phase gradient method and the errors made using the approximation that the good phase in the brightest pixel can be neglected doc12020 none With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Patricia Urban, Edward Schortman, and Ms. Marne Ausec have worked to describe and explain changes in prehistoric power relations within the adjoining Naco and lower Cacaulapa valleys, Northwestern Honduras. The basic question has been, and remains, How did a few come to rule the many? Answering this deceptively straightforward query requires examining the ways in which local rulers marshaled political and economic forces within their societies and forged alliances with peers in neighboring realms. The hypothesis guiding this research proposes that: 1. Rulers exercised dominion by monopolizing local access to imported commodities valued and needed by the general populace, as well as locally produced items, such as ceramic vessels and stone tools; 2. Commoners surrendered their labor and loyalty to local notables in return for access to these goods; 3. Unwilling to go gently into dependence, commoners also used their skills and immediately available resources to make as many items for their own use and trade as possible, thereby minimizing reliance on local lords; 4. This competition resulted in a population divided by the power ndividuals, families, or factions could wield and the wealth they enjoyed. Work funded by the National Science Foundation in Naco, from - , was instrumental in establishing this model; investigations pursued in the lower Cacaulapa valley from - , also funded by the NSF, are crucial to testing these ideas. Survey of 7km2 in the lower Cacaulapa drainage identified a major political capital, El Coyote, with over 340 prehistoric structures covering 0.7km2. Excavation of 2,850m2 on and around 40 buildings at El Coyote and in five rural sites revealed a history of occupation that diverged markedly from the expected. Specifically, emerging data patterns suggest that first, El Coyote came to prominence during the Late Classic period (AD 600-950; the site was founded as early as AD200), possibly as an outpost of its larger Naco Valley contemporary, La Sierra. Second, rather than staying within La Sierra s shadow, El Coyote s rulers established their independence by AD . Third, building on their new-found autonomy, lower Cacaulapa notables went on to fashion a realm that was growing in size and complexity, and acquiring goods from as far away as central Mexico and Guatemala s Pacific coast, between AD - , when neighboring societies, including those in Naco, suffered profound declines. Assessing these preliminary interpretations requires further analyses of ceramics, stone tools, faunal and floral remains, as well as human skeletons, to be conducted with National Science Foundation support during May through December, . These studies will focus on: 1. stylistic studies of artifacts, particularly ceramics, designed to help date deposits, and infer the external connections enjoyed by lower Cacaulapa residents through time; 2. technological analyses aimed at identifying the range and scale of specialized production activities in which residents of El Coyote and its hinterland engaged; 3. functional studies aimed at reconstructing changes in patterns of consumption and production across time and space; 4. distributional assessments, to test for artifact patterns suggestive of wealth and power differences; 5. examination of skeletal remains to describe demographic processes as well as stresses (for example, dietary deficiencies, injuries, physical changes from movements unique to certain occupations) to which lower Cacaulapa populations were heir. The planned work is crucial to writing lower Cacaulapa valley prehistory and comparing the ways in which political and economic processes were manipulated there and within other ancient states. The research applies not just to Honduras, or even the ancient New World, but to any society in which those seeking power tried to alter their societies, while others resisted domination doc12021 none Dillon The principal investigator and his colleagues develop mathematical models and computational methods for analyzing the motion of eucaryotic cilia and flagella, the growth and development of the vertebrate limb bud and tumor growth. The objective of the cilia modeling is to develop three-dimensional models for an individual cilium or flagellum and for three-dimensional arrays of cilia. These models incorporate discrete representations of the axoneme s ultrastructure including the individual dyneins and microtubules, as well as a continuous description of the fluid mechanics using the immersed boundary method. Vertebrate limb development is a widely-used model system for the study of development. The investigator and his collaborators have developed a 2D model for vertebrate limb development that describes limb bud outgrowth and predicts the spatio-temporal distribution of growth factors and morphogens. The major goals of the limb development modeling are to further validate the 2D model, to extend it to three dimensions in order to determine what signals cells see as a function of their position in the three-dimensional limb bud and developmental history and, from this, to suggest how the signals can be integrated by cells to produce the observed spatial patterning. Limb development and tumor growth are moving boundary problems that involve tissue growth, the transport of growth factors and control of gene activity. The investigators are developing an immersed boundary model for tumor growth along with the limb development model. These mathematical models focus on the complex biological systems involved in cell motility, vertebrate development, and tumor growth. An important aspect is the development of computational tools for the study of these processes. Thus, the ciliary model is used for the computational study of dynein activation mechanisms in cilia and flagella and the multiciliary model for the study of mucociliary interaction. The vertebrate limb development model may be used as an aid in interpreting experimental results, to help identify new experiments, and to test hypotheses that may be difficult to test experimentally. Because each of the models described in this proposal includes a fluid-mechanical representation, there is a unifying element in their mathematical description. The computational methods are based in part on the immersed boundary method, and the computer codes share many of the major subroutines. An important aspect of this proposal is the development of parallel numerical methods for the solution of these problems; advances in this area can be used in a variety of problems in the field of computational biofluids doc12022 none The State Leadership Center (SLC) is proposing to move forward with its collaborative venture fto foster the use of research in support of state policies that aim to advance systemic educational reform and improvement. Dr. Arthur Sheekey, the principal investigator, will continue to work with a team of state educational technology directors and a team of highly-qualified researchers to achieve the goals as stated in the original proposal to the National Science Foundation ( ). As a member of the SLC s professional staff, he will assume responsibility for developing and field-testing an instrument process for helping states in examining statewide policies for educational technology and determining whether or not the respective state poloicies complement and reinforce the state s goals to achieve standards-based reform and improvement. The principal objectives for the initial phase of this project (December - December ) involved the identification of a set of critical related to state educational technology decision-making and to engage a cadre of researchers that could communicate efrectively on what states need to know about what works and under what conditions. The product of out efforts to date is to draft assessment instrument - a CCSSO State Policy Chart, which is designed to assist teams of state officials to determine the extent to which state policies and investment strategies for technologies and telecommunications are strengthening curriculum officers and student achievement. The objective for the next or upcoming phase of the project, January - April , will involve a critique and validation of the proposed Policy Chart [See Attachment] and assessment process. A long-term goal for this proiect is to incorporate and customize technology assessments into the ongoingStandard Benchmarking reviews that are conducted by the Council s State Leadership Center. The SLC presently works with all states involved in the processes of changing and upgrading performance statards for teachers. Recent reports from states indicate that virtually all states are attempting to broaden and deepen the disciplanary and pedagogical knowledge of teachers, ijmproving their ability to deliver more challenging and difficult courses of instruction, paraticularly, courses in science, mathematics, and technology that are available to all students. Recent reviews of the states five-year plans to attest to the fact that states recognize the integration of technology as a critical element for achieving higher performance standards. However, state officials need statewide practices and investment strategies. State policymakers want to know what legislative mandates, regulatory requirements and administrative directives are most likely to stimulate institutional reform and renewal. As advanced telecommunications infrastructures emerge and as virtually all schools and classrooms are wired, state officials increasingly are directing their attention to human issues. By concentrating on policies and programs relating to teachers, the SLC is responding to one of the most pressing concerns of states: ensuring the quality of the next generation of classroom teachers. The SLC is committed to helping state officials to learn and share information on how a state, region or school system can develop collaborative and constructive relationships with institutions of higher education or other partners to ensure that teachers will operate effectively in new and different learning environments. The upcoming State Educational Technology Leadershipe Conference, as in the past, provides an excellent opportunity to promote a dialog between key state decision-makers and a group of researchers that are familiar with states and their role in setting and achieving higher standards for all students. Several of participants will work directly the principal invest8igator for this project, and all attendees at the conference will receive a progress report and plans for moving forward doc12023 none Identifying areas rich in biological diversity is a critical step towards the conservation of biological resources. This research will evaluate traditional, geographic-based biodiversity assessment methods and develop and evaluate improved methods that use biological collection data. The traditional methods based on species range maps will be the first investigated, followed by two alternative methods using biological collection data for creating tend surface maps of occurrence. Software tools based on all of the methods will be made available. The study will have three main uses. First, it will determine whether traditional methods of biodiversity assessment are subject to error propagation from species range maps, and how and where the errors are likely to manifest. Second, new techniques with trend surfaces should reduce estimation errors in predictions. Third, the software will facilitate the use of collection databases for biodiversity assessment doc12024 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop a prototype instrument for measuring harmful bi-products of chlorination in drinking water. These disinfection bi-products are subject to EPA regulations. The Phase I project demonstrated that the concept of differential UV absorption measurement, i.e. absorption before and after chlorination, is suitable for the needed measurement. A pre-production prototype instrument will be constructed during the Phase II project. This device shall employ a multi-pass cell design using our novel dual-ratio technique that eliminates concerns about long term drifts. The overall instrument architecture design and systems design will be carried out prior to assembly of the full microprocessor-controlled recording device. Extensive laboratory and field tests will be used to review design changes before production. The potential commercial applications of the instrument proposed may be used in the laboratory or in-line at utilities. The market for the proposed product is quite substantial as EPA regulations will result in the installation of such devices at all utilities and drinking water facilities doc12025 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II Project will develop a broadband split-beam fisheries sonar system for shallow water applications. As the number of fish in rivers and streams diminishes and becomes threatened, endangered or extinct, there is a need for better fish monitoring tools for such shallow water environments. Through a series of workshops, the leaders in the riverine sonar community have highlighted several deficiencies in the current monitoring systems. This Phase II Project proposes to build a fish tracking and counting system that addresses many of these deficiencies, and that has a ten-fold better range resolution and at least a 6 dB improvement in detection. The broadband sonar system, to be built in the course of this project, will include (a) a unique bizonal shaded transceiver array, (b) a full complement of functions for collection, storage, analysis and display of data, and (c) a multi-hypothesis tracker for tracking fish in low SNR and dense target environments. The sonar system will be validated first in a comprehensive set of pool tests, and then subjected to a rigorous set of evaluation experiments in the Kenai and Copper Rivers of Alaska and in the Rogue River of Oregon. The commercial applications of this project are in a broad range of markets that require fish counting and tracking equipment. The overall market size for such equipment worldwide is estimated to be on the order of 1.8 billion dollars doc12026 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop an economically competitive, novel, catalytic process for low temperature hydrocarbon partial oxidation. An innovative process for ethylene epoxidation will be developed as a commercially significant application. Most heterogeneous hydrocarbon partial oxidation reactions utilize engineered catalysts, which incorporate novel promoters to enhance selectivity. However, reactor heat management significantly impacts process energy efficiency, catalyst selectivity, and ultimately, process profitability. The Phase II project will develop an innovative process for hydrocarbon partial oxidation which addresses these issues. In Phase I, technical and economic viability of the novel process was demonstrated. The Phase II project will focus on the intrinsic reaction kinetics, heat transfer, and mass transport. A continuous ethylene epoxidation process will be demonstrated at the bench-scale and small pilot-scale in novel, three-phase reactors. In addition, an engineering process design and cost analysis will be developed. The commercial application from this project will be the heterogeneous hydrocarbon partial oxidation, if successful would greatly increase raw material and energy efficiency as well as increase process profitability in the chemical and petrochemical industries doc12027 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will investigate production of an exciting new material CuWRAM (Copper Waste Recovery from Aqueous Media). Evaluation of these pilot procedures will support the design of full scale manufacturing facilities. A processing system utilizing the patented ISEP separations hardware obtained from Calgon Carbon Corp. and CuWRAM as the extractant material for copper extraction and separation from iron (III) will be produced. Extensive testing will provide information to: (1) establish the effectiveness of the CuWRAM - ISEP system on real samples; (2) establish the economic feasibility of this system under various conditions; and (3) develop a targeted marketing strategy based on the first two items. Results from the Phase I project have generated excitement throughout the mining community. Initial testing on actual mining solutions will be conducted with one of the largest copper producers in the U.S. Commercial applications for a CuWRAM copper extraction include use in the primary extraction circuit of copper mining operations, recovery of copper for reuse in copper plating processes and recovery of copper from remediation projects doc12028 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop a state-of-the-art Revenue Management (RM) application suite that addresses inventory allocation and supply-chain management issues. RM, a new way of approaching the supply demand concept, is best understood as the set of actions leading to revenue maximization by efficiently utilizing the available perishable resources. In Phase I a software prototype was developed based on highly optimized inventory allocation algorithms that produced 2-5% revenue improvements over algorithms used in practice. Phase II has a two-fold objective: to advance the software and produce a state-of-the-art RM application suite to be used in the airlines, hospitality and equipment rental industries; and, to add new components that address supply management decisions interconnected with the inventory allocation decisions addressed in Phase I. RM is currently applied primarily to the airlines and (to different degrees) to cruise lines, hotels, car rental companies, energy, entertainment industry and telecommunications. It is widely acknowledged that companies that neglect to implement RM techniques to maximize their revenue will risk becoming uncompetitive. Therefore, there is a large potential market for a flexible state-of-the-art RM suite built on highly sophisticated algorithms doc12029 none Impression formation theories suggest that stereotypes automatically influence judgments unless perceivers undergo the cognitive effort of individuating targets. Targets can promote this process by engaging in actions that disconfirm the stereotype (i.e., counterstereotypical behaviors). Ideally, these behaviors should promote positive impressions of targets that accurately reflect individual attributes rather than category-based judgments. However, current person perception frameworks do not acknowledge that individuation can have negative consequences for men and women. Because gender stereotypes are not only descriptive (reflecting what people are ) but also prescriptive (reflecting what people should be ), disconfirming them can lead to sanctions for atypical behavior. For example, confident and competitive female job applicants are perceived as highly knowledgeable and qualified for high status positions, but they are also viewed as socially deficient and unlikable, which results in hiring discrimination. Similarly, modest and communal men are perceived as likable, but they are also viewed as less competent and hirable than are competitive men. Past research has identified numerous ways in which counterstereotypical men and women are sanctioned. These sanctions represent social barriers to gender-atypical behaviors and are, therefore, an effective means by which sex stereotypes are maintained. Moreover, they suggest an important gap in current thinking about person perception. Several experiments will examine the processes that underlie these barriers. The mechanisms to be investigated stem from expectancy-violation, system-justification, and social comparison theories. Because each of these frameworks relies on involuntary processes, implicit as well as explicit methods will be employed. In concert, the research should afford answers to why perceivers sanction atypical targets, and thereby contribute to the development of a theory of motivated implicit social cognition. The research will also provide insight into the social psychological obstacles that prevent people from successfully counteracting group-based expectancies doc12030 none Predation strongly affects primate social evolution, and chimpanzees and red colobus monkeys have a particularly intriguing predator-prey relationship. Chimpanzees regularly prey on various mammals, but red colobus are their preferred prey wherever these two species co-occur. There are extensive data on hunting frequency and prey offtake for several sites, but few on the impact of predation on red colobus social structure and population density and on their responses to chimpanzees. This research will provide data on red colobus behavioral ecology and the impact of chimpanzee predation on red colobus group size, group composition, and population density at Ngogo, Kibale National Park, Uganda. These data will address questions about primate social evolution, red colobus anti-predation strategies, and the sustainability of predation by chimpanzee. Ngogo has the largest known chimpanzee community; predation there is unusually intense and might have caused a long-term decline in the red colobus population, but demographic data are inadequate to be sure. Monthly censuses along four transects, conducted for 21 months, will provide data on population density and group size and composition. These data, plus previous census data and data on the chimpanzees, can assess the relationship of group size to predation pressure and whether the population has declined. Data on group composition will test hypotheses about anti-predation strategies (e.g., infant and juveniles survive better in groups with many adult males). Data on ecology will examine tradeoffs between foraging efficiency and protection (e.g., feeding competition increases with group size, but individuals are safer in larger groups). Experimental playbacks of chimpanzee vocalizations to red colobus, plus observations of responses to naturally occurring vocalizations and to chimpanzee proximity, will address hypotheses about anti-predation strategies. This research will improve our understanding of how predation influences primate behavior and of the implications of hunting by chimpanzees for human evolution doc12031 none To date, the map-based cloning and characterization of genes from crop species has largely been limited to monogenic traits, such as those providing disease resistance, that are controlled by single genes causing clear phenotypic effects. Most agronomically-important traits, such as yield and yield components, however, are polygenic traits controlled by multiple genes and influenced by the environment. Over the past decade, the application of molecular markers and genetic linkage maps has allowed specific regions of the genome controlling polygenic traits, called quantitative trait loci (QTLs), to be identified in all of the major crop species. In spite of the wealth of positional information for these regions, however, few genes underlying quantitative traits have actually been cloned. As a result, many questions concerning the nature and function of these genes, as well as the molecular mechanisms behind the genetic variation of agronomically-important traits, remain unanswered. The genes underlying QTLs derived from a wild rice ancestor (O. rufipogon) that are associated with natural variation for flowering time, grain weight, and plant height in elite cultivated material will be identified and characterized. Three QTLs that map to rice chromosome 1, one of the first rice chromosomes to be completely sequenced, will be targeted. The specific objectives are to fine-map major QTLs for flowering time, grain weight, and plant height, then to isolate candidate genes that are located within those regions and, finally, to demonstrate phenotypic complementation via transformation with genes underlying the QTLs. The sequence variation from orthologs of the genes underlying the target QTLs in wild and cultivated Oryza, other grasses, and Arabidopsis will be compared to gain an evolutionary perspective and insight into functionally-important conserved domains. This work will generate significant new information about the identity and functional significance of genes associated with agronomically-important traits in the grasses and will test a multi-faceted strategy for rapid identification of genes underlying QTLs when genomic sequence is available in the target region doc12032 none High salt in plant growth media causes ion imbalance and hyperosmotic stress. As a consequence of these primary effects, secondary stresses such as oxidative damage often occur. Plant responses to salt stress are very complex, and understanding of salt tolerance mechanisms remains a formidable challenge in agriculture as well as in basic plant biology. Halophytes are naturally salt tolerant plants that have evolved efficient salt tolerance mechanisms. The proposed research aims to dissect salt tolerance mechanisms in halophytes by using the genetically tractable halophilic plant, saltcress (Thellungiella halophila). Several orthologs of Arabidopsis genes involved in salt tolerance will be cloned from saltcress. The cloned genes will be knocked out in saltcress by using the technology of RNA interference. Saltcress mutants thus constructed can be evaluated phenotypically in salt tolerance assays. The proposed studies will help understand how halophytes tolerate salt stress doc12033 none Ribonuclease H (RNase H) genes and or their activities have been identified in all systems studied to date ranging from archaebacteria to man. This suggests that they may be one of a limited number of activities required for minimal biological life. Multiple RNase H isoforms exist in prokaryotes and eukaryotes and all known for their ability to degrade the RNA strands of RNA:DNA heteroduplexes. This simple function implicates the enzymes in regulating RNA:DNA duplex formation during DNA replication, RNA transcription, chromatin ultrastructure and viral and cellular reverse transcription. The existence of multiple RNase H isoforms also suggest that what is learned of isoforms in one system may relate to our understanding of isoform structure and function elsewhere. The studies described here are broadly significant in scope, impacting conserved and novel roles for ribonucleases H in all biological systems. Furthermore,they exploit the genetics of Trypanosoma brucei, a system that has been the prototype for unmasking unusual nucleic acid metabolic events such as RNA editing and RNA trans-splicing doc12034 none Michael Greenwood, University of Maine Barbara Bond, Oregon State University Trees continue to increase in size and complexity over life spans that may last many centuries, and each year the growing regions of their shoots produce new foliage and reproductive structures. As they grow older and larger, forest trees appear to grow more slowly, produce thicker foliage and more reproductive structures. These changes are likely to be associated with age-related declines in the growth rates of forest stands, which occur before the mid-point of the lifespan of important timber species. Although similar patterns of age- and size-related change in the morphology and physiology of foliage have been described for numerous species, the mechanisms governing these changes are virtually unknown. Possible explanations for these phenomena range from decreased photosynthesis due to increased resistance of water flow to a genetically controlled ageing process that slows growth and photosynthesis. Processes regulating maturation, ageing and senescence are fundamental to biology, and some of these processes are probably unique to large, long-lived trees. A more complete understanding of the basis for this decline is necessary to model and accurately predict the growth of forests over time. Reciprocal grafting of shoots between trees of different ages offers great potential as a tool to distinguish among explanations for changes in growth behavior. In this approach, shoots from old growth trees are grafted onto juvenile and young-mature trees, and shoots from juvenile and young-mature trees are grafted into the crowns of old-growth trees. The extent, direction and time-course of changes in the growth, morphology, and physiology of foliage produced by the grafted shoots will provide insight into the mechanisms governing age-related change. This study will attempt reciprocal grafting on two species of long-lived trees, red spruce and Douglas fir. These species are adapted to substantially different climatic regimes, so a comparative study will provide insights into the universality or variability of processes associated with age-related changes in tree growth doc12035 none Kan Wang, Principal Investigator, Iowa State University Stanton Gelvin, Co- Principal Investigator, Purdue University Heidi Kaeppler, Co- Principal Investigator, University of Wisconsin-Madison Bill Thompson, Co- Principal Investigator, North Carolina State University As the Plant Genome Project matures, improved technologies for plant transformation are becoming essential. Given the rapid increase in genomic information and the need to understand the biological functions of numerous genes, it is essential to establish efficient transformation systems and make them available to researchers in the public sector. Maize is the most studied model plant that has important economic value. Although genetic transformation systems for maize have been established in private laboratories, the lack of such systems is still a key limitation for public researchers. This is because most public research groups do not have access to the resources and infrastructure necessary for maize transformation by currently available procedures. In addition, the current technology has serious limitations, including low efficiency and throughput, difficulty with inbred line transformation, unpredictable transgene copy numbers and integrity, and undesirable transgene silencing during development and over generations. The long term goal for this program is to conduct research aimed at establishing robust maize transformation technologies by: 1) developing a routine Agrobacterium-mediated transformation system, 2) enhancing transgene integration and expression, 3) investigating alternative transformation protocols using non-tissue culture approaches, and 4) expand transformation to more maize inbred lines. In addition, this program will facilitate transfer of improved protocols to the public sector by providing a more efficient transformation service, training research staff, and organizing transformation workshops doc12036 none Flagella and cilia are self-contained biological machines that convert chemical energy from ATP into useful mechanical work. If biologists are to understand how a flagellum works, they must have reliable information about the mechanical properties of a flagellum, and the forces that it produces. The goal of this project is to gather some of this vital information and incorporate it into a model of flagellar mechanics that can be described computationally. To accomplish this goal, Dr. Lindemann has developed a unique set of tools that will aid him in this endeavor. He can measure small forces using a method based on force-calibrated glass microprobes. The technique has allowed him to measure the stall-force produced by a beating bull sperm flagellum. The stall force is valuable information because it tells us a great deal about how dynein works while it is harnessed in the confines of the intact axoneme. He has also measured the torque generated by a rat sperm flagellum in response to calcium, and the passive stiffness of both rat and bull sperm flagella. All of these are new and useful pieces of information that help to describe the mechanical behavior of flagella. Much of the planned activity in this project is directed at collecting needed information by applying the force measurement technique to novel experimental protocols. In addition, adaptations will be incorporated into an Atomic Force Microscope to improve the sensitivity of the technique. This will allow the PI to make finer measurements than heretofore possible. The P. I. has developed a detailed computational model of the mechanics of the axoneme, called the Geometric Clutch model. The Geometric Clutch model is the only computational model to be specifically and successfully adapted to simulate the mammalian sperm axoneme. The Geometric Clutch model has so far been very effective at simulating, and even predicting, the behavior of bull sperm flagella. The computer model provides a framework that can be used to build a more complete representation of the mechanics of the axoneme. The data from force measurement experiments will be used to incorporate more accurate values for the active and passive elastic forces into the computer model. In turn, the model will be used to simulate the behavior of a flagellum. When experimental results and computed simulation are in agreement, the model often provides a means to understand the mechanism behind the observed result. The computed model provides the ability to compare experimental data and theory; this is a valuable tool in the process of understanding how the axoneme works. Experimental model systems have assumed immense importance in biological research. The Chlamydomonas model system, with its large collection of mutant strains, has provided a priceless resource for studying the flagellum. Because of this there has been a remarkable period of growth in our knowledge of the molecular components of cilia and flagella. The mouse model is rapidly becoming a second resource for mutations affecting flagellar function, especially for mammalian sperm studies. Dr. Lindemann s research program has a well-established base of experience with mammalian sperm. He will develop a computer model specific to the mouse sperm axoneme as has been done with bull sperm and Chlamydomonas. A working model of the mouse sperm axoneme will position Dr. Lindemann s laboratory as the only research program that can both do experimental measurements on mouse sperm and also examine the results in a theoretical framework. Molecular discoveries are latent opportunities for understanding the axoneme, but only if there is a way to quantitate their effect on function. This project provides the tools to do this, in both of the prevailing experimental model systems. The work will be done in the context of a predominantly undergraduate university environment. Undergraduates will be actively involved in the research, and will receive interdisciplinary training in physics, biomechanics, molecular biology, cell biology, and computational modeling doc12037 none The Council on Competitiveness proposes to support the establishment of an independent, 501(c)3 organization, Building Engineering and Scientific Talent (BEST) to implement the recommendations of the Congressional Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering, and Technology Development. The Report of the Commission, released in September , concludes that broadening the demographic base of the U.S. technical workforce is a national economic and social imperative. The Council will support the Report s call to action by framing a strategic vision and putting in place a structure that will enable BEST to engage national leaders at the highest level. If BEST can define itself as the nation s hub for strategic insights, proven methods, and actions plan of any community or institution in the country that wishes to meet the diversity challenge, it will gain the credibility to have the grass roots and policy impact intended by the Commission. The backing of this strategy by a prestigious board, a National Leadership Council, and a Federal Liaison Group will enable BEST to create strong nationwide, leadership networks doc12038 none This research is focused on the spin-charge correlation in magnetic nanostructures. For layered films, we will extend our research from single quantum well (QW) system to double QW system. QW states in a single layer can result in the magnetic interlayer coupling. Interaction between two QWs is expected to generate new magneto phenomena. For stepped films, we will use nanometer-sized atomic steps to laterally modulate 2D thin films at nanometer scale. Great achievements have been made in layered structures in the last decade. Lateral modulation of a 2D thin film should further shrink the dimensionality to generate new properties. New idea of spherical substrate will be applied to control the step orientation and the step-density in a systematic way. All samples will be grown by Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) and characterized by Reflection High-Energy Electron Diffraction (RHEED), Low-Energy Electron Diffraction (LEED), Auger Electron Spectroscopy (AES), and Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM). Electronic properties of the nanostructures will be measured by Angle Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy (ARPES) and the magnetic properties of the films will be measured by Surface Magneto-Optic Kerr Effect (SMOKE) technique. Graduate students involved in the project will receive training in fundamental experimental techniques using cutting edge technology. The miniaturization of of information storage technology has reached a stage that physical processes at the nanometer scale dominate the overall properties of the storage materials. This rapid development challenges fundamental research to understand materials properties in nanostructures. The goal of this proposal is to gain a deep understanding on how materials properties change as the size approaches the ultimate nanometer length scale in magnetic materials. To realize this goal, well-defined magnetic nanostructures will be built by Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) with a control at the atomic level, and investigated with state-of-the-art techniques such as Angle Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy (ARPES), Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM), and Surface Magneto-Optic Kerr Effect (SMOKE), etc. Quantum confinement of electrons inside the nanostructures will be studied to explore its role in new magnetic properties. Success of this project will be important not only to the understanding of low-dimensional magnetism, but also to the development of magnetic technology. Graduate students involved in the project will receive training in fundamental experimental techniques using cutting edge technology. This training will prepare them for a range of careers in both academe doc12039 none Genome sequencing projects are providing a wealth of knowledge about the genes carried in plant genomes. The ultimate goal of these projects is to understand the function of each of these genes. However, DNA sequence information typically only hints at potential function, and laboratory experiments are needed to characterize the details of gene action. The most powerful approach to characterizing gene function involves the analysis of mutant organisms. Thus, there is a pressing need for the development of methods that can use DNA sequence information to make directed modifications of plant genomes. The most desirable technique would give the ability to make a variety of directed modifications, and not be limited to functional knockouts. One such technique is gene targeting via homologous recombination, which is widely used in yeast and the mouse. However, a widely usable method for targeted modification of higher plant genes is not yet available. The goal of this project is to produce a gene targeting methodology based on homologous recombination for higher plants. In this procedure, three constructs are introduced into the genome. The first and second are chimeric gene constructs that enable regulated expression of the Cre Recombinase and I-SceI genes. The third construct is a modified target gene placed between two loxP sites. The modified target gene contains an I-SceI recognition sequence inserted into the middle of the gene. In plants harboring all three constructs, expression of the Cre Recombinase and I-SceI genes is induced, these enzymes catalyze the formation of a broken-ended extrachromosomal DNA molecule in the nucleus, and homologous recombination between the extrachromosomal DNA molecule and the target gene generates two tandem copies of the target gene. This gene targeting procedure can be used to inactivate a target gene or to introduce modifications into a target gene. To expedite development of a basic gene targeting procedure, Arabidopsis will initially be used as the test system. Its short generation time and small size will allow rapid technology development and testing. Furthermore, its small genome may increase homologous recombination frequency. The method to be used in these experiments provides the ability to produce an almost unlimited variety of genetic changes. Because the enzymes that carry out homologous recombination have been highly conserved throughout evolution, the methods we develop in Arabidopsis are very likely to work in a broad variety of species including commercially important crop plants. Thus, the methodology developed by the proposed experiments should benefit future efforts to improve crop yield and quality doc12040 none Support of student participation in the North American Paleontological Convention (NAPC- ) June 26-July 1, The North American Paleontological Convention is a quadrennial meeting of paleontologists from a variety of disciplines. It is supported by paleontological societies headquartered in North America, and is open to all who are interested in paleontology. The meeting planned for June 26 through July 1, in Berkeley, CA will be the seventh NAPC. Each previous convention has been judged an excellent opportunity for the presentation of the results of new research and for discussions of current areas of paleontological research. One aim of NAPC is to allow specialists who would not otherwise normally be in contact to meet and exchange ideas. Based on past experience, the Organizing Committee for NAPC- expects that over 500 professionals will attend and interact during four days of meetings and on several field trips. The Organizing Committee believes that the continued interest of students and young professionals is critical to the health of the field. Not only will they maintain the study of past life, they are the ones who will provide fresh approaches and examine old fossils with new eyes. NAPC provides an outstanding educational opportunity to obtain focused presentations of paleontological information from talks and poster presentations without the other distractions presented at a general geological meeting. It also allows students the ready opportunity to meet with leaders in the field and to discuss their research in progress, both formally and informally, in a venue not provided by a national or regional geologic meeting. This proposal requests $25,000 to support the attendance at NAPC- of students and young professionals from the U.S., Mexico and other countries where students and professionals work on North American paleontology doc12041 none Control of reproductive development in mammals is quite complex. The primary regulatory level is the hypothalamus in the brain, containing neurons (nerve cells) that synthesize and release gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH). GnRH is released in a pulsatile manner to the pituitary gland to activate the reproductive axis. Before puberty, GnRH release is low, but during puberty and maturation, increases in pulsatile GnRH release occur, and are much more dramatic during the night than the day. This project uses a physiological approach to deliver timed GnRH doses, to determine whether the nocturnal high release is obligatory for pubertal development, how the brain controls the timing of the pulsatile release, and the role of age in the pubertal increase in nocturnal GnRH release. Results will be important in understanding regulation of the onset of puberty and important for vertebrate reproduction beyond mammals. The project also has a substantial component of student training in a lab with an excellent record of mentoring doc12042 none Copper is essential for normal growth and development of mammalian cells. It serves as a cofactor for numerous enzymes mediating neurotransmitter biosynthesis, radical detoxification, oxidative phosphorylation, and iron transport. Currently, little is known on how copper became incorporated into these proteins and how concentration of copper in a cell is regulated. This project addresses these fundamental questions. The research is focused on HAH1, a copper-chaperone, which delivers copper specifically to copper-transporting ATPases in mammalian cells. The long-term goal of the studies is to understand how HAH1 functions in a cell, and how its function is regulated. The experimental approach includes combination of protein biochemistry, site-directed mutagenesis, protein fragment complementation assay in cultured cell lines, and chemical labeling. These techniques are utilized (i) to determine the oligomerization state of intracellular HAH1 in the presence of different copper concentrations, (ii) to characterize copper occupancy of HAH1 within the cell, and (iii) to determine whether the in vivo interactions between HAH1 and the copper-transporting ATPase are regulated by changes in copper concentration. The results of these experiments will generate new information regarding key copper transporters in mammalian cells and will advance understanding of basic mechanisms regulating intracellular copper distribution doc12043 none The PI will continue to investigate circulation mechanisms of tropical climate variability, using upper-air data sets, in particular the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP)-National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) 40-year reanalysis, land surface station records and long-term ship observations in the tropical oceans. The annual cycle, interannual variability, and long-term evolution will be examined. Specific tasks are the following: a) to investigate upper-air mechanisms of the Southern and North Atlantic Oscillations; b) to undertake diagnostic basis for seasonal forecasting of the Indian summer monsoon rainfall and boreal autumn rainy season of East Africa by examining upper-air processes in the Indian Ocean; c) to evaluate equatorial zonal circulations using the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting and NCEP-NCAR reanalyses datasets; d) to develop climate prediction techniques for the Indian summer monsoon rainfall and short rains of East Africa based on diagnostic methods; e) to study centers of action, in particular the long-term evolution of the North Atlantic Oscillation and climate of East Asia, using the NCEP-NCAR data set; and f) to continue synergistic activities including contributions to training courses in Tropical Meteorology in the United States doc12044 none Professor Sandra Greer of the University of Maryland is funded by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to perform experimental measurements of the phase behaviors of polymers in solution. Many of the proposed measurements will generate data that can be used to definitively test recent theoretical proposals of liquid-liquid phase separation in polymer systems. Methods include magnetic densimetry, rheometry, tensiometry and small angle neutron scattering. The polyethylene oxide polymer systems to be investigated have important applications in a broad range of industries, and the characterization of PEO solvent phases should be of direct interest in many of these areas doc12045 none Water use efficiency (WUE)is among the most fundamental constraints molding the evolution of terrestrial plant cellular anatomy, tissue structure, physiology, and whole-plant morphology. Due to extensive physiological control, modern plants of both natural and agricultural systems have a tremendous capacity to maintain high rates of growth and productivity over a wide range of often challenging environmental conditions.Nonetheless, water utilization and the WUE of growth remain the single most important determinants of terrestrial productivity in both natural and managed ecosystems. Genes that act, singly and in concert, to regulate the development and plasticity of essential plant traits controlling WUE will be characterized. WUE is defined as the ratio of carbon gain in photosynthesis (A) to the associated water loss (E). A genomic analysis of WUE will be undertaken in two crop plants, rice and tomato. Stable mapping populations already available will be the basis of the first screen in whole-genome QTL analyses of rice and tomato. Phenotypic measurements, both physiological and morphological, will be made on contrasting phenotypes at several stages.Fine-mapping efforts will focus on QTLs that condition the most interesting phenotypes. These activities will enhance understanding of the integration of plant water relations and carbon metabolism, develop the most detailed maps of WUE genes and comparative maps across multiple species, and provide new molecular markers to greatly enhance breeding programs for improved WUE doc12046 none Simon The primary goal of this proposal is to develop techniques to image two colors simultaneously at video rates ( 30 frames sec) so that either two different probes, or a single probe with two different emissions, can be imaged synchronously. Further, to develop the techniques for using multiple lasers for excitation. This goal will allow two different kinds of studies: First, it would allow multiple proteins to be studied in a single cell. This is important for addressing questions of protein-protein interactions. Second, it will allow many physiological studies using dual-emission dyes that can be used to quantify important cell signaling molecules such as calcium or pH. The spatial and temporal dynamics of these molecules are key for understanding many aspects of cellular signaling doc12047 none Floras are the mechanisms for synthesizing and disseminating knowledge about plant biodiversity. The Northwest Alliance for Computational Science and Engineering and the Oregon Flora Project will collaborate to develop a software architecture and tools for creating comprehensive electronic floras that cover a broad spectrum of data about plants. The resulting personal digital field guide (PDFG) will be comprehensive and extensible. Data will be available on the web. The architecture and toolkits will be generalizable to other domains in the natural sciences. The data set for the project represents the largest and most comprehensive resource on regional flora to date. The project will integrate the diverse sources, enabling new ways of exploring the relationships of plants to their environments. A broad range of users, including nature lovers, scientists, students, and decision makers, will be able to personalize the way they navigate through the flora, selecting the amount and type of information presented as well as how and when it will be accessed doc12048 none Ant agriculture, exemplified by the symbiosis between fungus-growing (attine) ants and their fungal cultivars, is intensively studied as a model system for understanding the general ecological and coevolutionary mechanisms that shape highly integrated symbioses. The attine ant agricultural symbiosis encompasses both mutualistic and parasitic interactions between (1) ant farmers, (2) fungal cultivars, (3) parasitic fungal weeds that infest ant gardens, and (4) antibiotic-producing bacteria that control the garden parasites and are cultured on the bodies of ants. This project specifically explores the ecological complexity of the attine ant-fungus-bacterium symbiosis and elucidates its 50-million-year coevolutionary history by testing hypotheses posed at multiple ecological and evolutionary levels, including: (1) the local ecological level within ant colonies; (2) the population and community levels; (3) the biogeographic level; and the phylogenetic level, including (4) coevolutionary processes and historical ecology; (5) symbiont-mediated speciation; and (6) the effects of symbiotic life histories on rates of evolutionary change. Because symbiosis is a major recurring theme in the history of life, this research is expected to generate general insights into the broad mechanisms that drive biological complexity and diversity. Such insights could in some cases impact issues directly relevant to human welfare, including the evolution of antibiotic resistance and the practice of sustainable agriculture doc12049 none The Nucleic Acid Database (NDB; http: ndbserver.rutgers.edu ) is a mature resource that provides information about crystalline macromolecules that contain nucleic acid. The NDB distributes information about structure through the NDB Web site and the ftp server. There are an NDB Atlas, instructional pages and a help desk available. The NDB began when nucleic acid structural biology was most concerned with relatively simple structures. Today, the NDB deals with highly complex molecular assemblies. The new demands of the science and of the user community have led to a proposed improvement in content, query capabilities and informatics infrastructure for the NDB. This will also provide better integration with the Protein Database (PDB doc12050 none Gordana Matic This award provides partial support for participants to attend the Georgia International Topology Conference to be held at the University of Georgia, May 21 through June 2, . Since the University of Georgia has organized and hosted a major international topology conference every 8 years. The , , , , and conferences came at times when fundamental new ideas were surfacing to set the direction of topology for the next few years. The theme of this year s conference is primarily on geometric topology with special emphasis on contact and symplectic topology and related geometries. Further information, including invited speakers, schedule of talks, housing and travel information and application is available at http: www.math.uga.edu ~topology doc12051 none One of the most fascinating and dramatic examples of morphological differentiation among prokaryotes is the formation of an aerial mycelium by Streptomyces coelicolor and other streptomycetes. These filamentous bacteria grow by the formation of a mold-like, branching network of multinucleoid hyphae called the substrate mycelium. The aerial mycelium consists of hyphae that grow into the air away from the colony surface to form a luxuriant lawn of hair-like filaments that eventually metamorphose into chains of pigmented spores. The formation of the aerial mycelium depends on so-called bld (i.e., bald ) genes, mutants of which produce smooth, hairless colonies. A striking property of bld mutants is their capacity to regain the ability to form an aerial mycelium when grown near, but not in contact with, certain other bld mutants. This phenotypic rescue, which is called extracellular complementation, is characteristically unidirectional, with one mutant acting as a donor and the other as a recipient. The conversion of aerial hyphae into chains of pigmented spores depends on so-called whi ( white ) genes, mutants of which produce an aerial mycelium that lacks the gray pigment characteristic of mature spores. Some bld and whi genes have been cloned and characterized, but it is not yet possible to assemble developmental genes into pathways or to construct an integrated picture for the control of morphological differentiation in this organism. The principal goal of this project is to carry out a genome wide screen for additional Streptomyces genes involved in aerial mycelium and spore formation by transposon tagging so that developmental genes can be conveniently cloned and characterized. A procedure for carrying out transposon-mediated mutagenesis in S. coelicolor was devised and applied to the discovery of seven developmental genes and gene clusters. One such cluster in which an insertion causes a whi mutant phenotype consists of three genes of unknown function. Each gene is a founding member of a large family of paralogous genes located at widely scattered sites in the chromosome. Insertional inactivation of another newly discovered gene causes a profound switch in polyketide pigment production, from the synthesis of the blue pigment (actinhorodin) characteristic of the substrate mycelium to the mislocalized synthesis of the gray pigment characteristic of spores. Yet another insertional mutation in a previously uncharacterized gene causes a severe block in aerial mycelium formation. The regulation and function of these and other newly discovered genes will be investigated. Further, additional genes involved in morphological differentiation will be sought by carrying out insertional mutagenesis on a large scale. Also, as a complementary strategy, a transposon derivative will be created that generates fusions to the gene for the Green Fluorescent Protein. Such a fusion-generating transposon should make it possible to discover developmental genes on the basis of the timing and localization of their expression doc12052 none Force-induced conformational transitions in single polysaccharide molecules by AFM Pyranose ring-based molecules are of extraordinary importance to biological systems (e.g. glucose). Many biologically important polysaccharides are composed of pyranose rings and they are placed under tensile stress in a wide variety of cellular structures such as the cell wall of plants or the extracellular matrix (ECM) in animal tissues. Mechanical stress is thought to regulate assembly and physiological properties of these complex elastic systems. The polysaccharides respond to that stress by mechanical rearrangements of their components but the underlying mechanism is not well understood. The simplest view assumes that polysaccharides are entropic springs and the pyranose ring structure is typically portrayed as inelastic and locked into a stable conformation. The development of single molecule AFM techniques allowed for critically examining these views. AFM instruments can stretch mechanically single molecules and have superb length and force resolution. Stretching of polysaccharides by AFM revealed that they do not behave as simple entropic springs but that they display yielding phenomena. The origin of these elastic deviations was pinpointed to the pyranose ring that was found to undergo, upon stretching, conformational transitions such as chair-boat or chair inversion. These forced transitions change, in a step-wise fashion, the separation of the glycosidic oxygen atoms, and therefore affect the contour length of the polysaccharide chain and its elasticity. Axial glycosidic bonds were found to drive those transitions by acting as atomic levers. The long-term objective of this proposal is to understand, at the atomic level, the mechanism of these force-induced conformational transitions in polysaccharides. During the second grant period single molecule AFM techniques will be combined with the tools of computational chemistry to examine in detail force-induced conformational transitions in the pyranose ring. The mechanical properties of the ring and its mechanical conformational transitions will be probed by pulling on the ring from various directions and by different attachment points. These studies will determine the contribution of each type of the monomer to the complex elasticity of a mixed chain and will be valuable in interpreting the molecular elasticity of many native polysaccharides. The experimental and theoretical findings of this proposal will be integrated to develop an AFM-based methodology for identifying individual polysaccharide molecules in solution from their unique force-extension spectra. Such a methodology will be an important addition to the arsenal of analytical tools for carbohydrate research doc12053 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) and the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Programs, Prof. Kent M. Ervin of the University of Nevada in Reno will develop an ion-molecule reaction dynamics imaging apparatus for chemistry research. This new analytical tool will falicitate investigations of the dynamics and energetics of ion-molecule reactions. In particular, it will allow the measurement of total reaction cross sections and product velocity and angular distributions for ion-molecule reactions with both high sensitivity and high energy and angular resolution. The design calls for crossed ion and molecular pulsed beams with three major components: a quadrupole ion trap source; a reflectron time-of-flight mass spectrometer; and a velocity mapped ion imaging detector. Applications include fundamental investigations of reaction dynamics as well as ion and neutral thermochemistry. Greater accuracy and precision in energetics measurements will be possible compared with traditional instruments because of the high-resolution measurement of the kinetic energies of products. The instrumentation design is potentially attractive for future analytical chemistry applications - for example, for on-the-fly energy-selective collision-induced dissociation analysis in gas chromatography mass spectrometry or from electrosprayed ions in liquid chromatography mass spectrometry doc12054 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop a new optically transparent intrinsically conducting polymer (ICP) that can be processed from organic solutions. Despite much information on ICPs in the technical literature, the number of commercial applications of ICPs is still very small because of their intrinsically poor stability and the lack of reasonable processing methods. Phase II will address the problem of processability. Phase I successfully prepared ICPs that are soluble up to 15% weight in alcohols. Cast films are optically transparent, have conductivity of 1-100 Siemens per centimeter, and maintain constant conductivity when elongated up to 30%. ICPs were made from commercially available monomers. Phase II will bring the polymers developed in Phase I from a feasibility stage to commercial products by optimizing their composition and synthesis and scaling up production and purification. These materials could be used to replace indium tin oxide in flat panel displays and other electronic applications. ICPs are expected to find application in the manufacture of electronic components, inks, biomedical materials, electronic devices, and specialty coatings doc12055 none Mohler The purpose of the research proposed in this project is to elucidate mechanisms by which the head of the Drosophila larva is patterned during early embryogenesis. The mechanisms by which the segments of the head are specified are not well understood, but are clearly distinct from the mechanisms used to specify the segments of the trunk. The head segments are laid down considerably later than the trunk segments in a process independent of the pair-rule genes that combinatorially specify the trunk segmentation plan. Furthermore, unlike the trunk segments, segment identity of many of the head segments is conferred by non-homeobox containing transcription factors whose genes are not members of the HOX complex. This research will specifically examine how the three cephalic segments (intercalary, antennal and ocular) are initially established, by examining the controls regulating the spatial expression of three segment polarity genes (wg, hh and en) that are essential for establishing segmentation in the Drosophila embryo. In addition, this research project will examine the molecular mechanisms by which the CNC Maf-S bZIP transcription factor regulates segment identity in the labral and mandibular segments of the head. Many of the genes that are involved in segmentation of the Drosophila embryo, including those active in head segmentation, have homologs in most animal species. Analysis of the developmental roles of these genes in Drosophila head patterning and their interrelationships is likely to provide important developmental principles involved generally in animal embryology doc12056 none Kropf Zygotes (fertilized eggs) of fucoid brown algae are ideal for investigating the mechanisms that establish polarity in developing organisms. Dr. Kropf s lab has for some time been investigating the cellular and physiological mechanisms that establish a growth axis and determine the division plane in these zygotes. From this work they have formulated hypotheses to be tested during this award period. The working hypotheses are as follows: Growth axis specification. Dr. Kropf proposes that polarity is first set in place at fertilization with the site of sperm entry specifying the rhizoid pole of the growth axis. This site is marked by local assembly of a cytoskeletal element, F-actin. The fertilized egg then settles onto the rocks in the intertidal zone, attaches and begins to monitor its environment for spatial information to help determine the direction of the rocky substratum. If relevant vectors are perceived, the sperm-induced axis is abandoned and a new axis is generated such the new rhizoid pole is toward the rock surface. Concomitantly, the actin patch at the sperm entry site is disassembled and a new patch is assembled at the nascent rhizoid site. Realignment of the axis can occur repeatedly over several hours. Finally, about 12 hours after fertilization, growth ensues at the current rhizoid pole; the rhizoid formed attaches the zygote firmly to rocks and eventually forms the holdfast of the alga. Division plane alignment. Dr. Kropf speculates that division plane is determined at telophase of mitosis such that the new cell wall is deposited transverse to the axis defined by the two telophase nuclei. The orientation of the telophase nuclei is determined by centrosomal position. Centrosomes are inherited paternally and separate to opposite sides of the zygotic nucleus. Initially, the axis defined by the two centrosomes is randomly aligned with the growth axis, but prior to cytokinesis the centrosomal axis becomes aligned with the growth axis by a combination of nuclear rotation and spindle elongation. Research in this proposal will test and extend the most important aspects of the models. The primary objectives are to 1) investigate the requirement for dynamic actin in specifying the growth axis, 2) identify actin nucleating molecules, 3) determine the role of asymmetric cell shape in division plane alignment, 4) assess whether telophase spindle position determines division plane, and 5) investigate the role of microtubules in defining the division plane doc12057 none Membrane binding, a process initiated and sustained by lipid modifications, controls the function of Ras proteins as potently as does GTP binding. Despite this importance, very little is known of how membrane tethering affects signaling. Recent studies indicate that HRas trafficking to the plasma membrane proceeds through a previously unnoticed, and still uncharacterized, vesicular endomembrane pathway that requires farnesyl modification and nearby C-terminal amino acid residues. No specific proteins that might escort HRas from these internal membranes to its working location, the plasma membrane, have been identified. Upon reaching the plasma membrane, HRas is reported to localize into cholesterol-and sphingolipid-rich subdomains ( rafts ). In vitro methods predict that the different physical properties of the farnesyl and palmitoyl lipids will give these lipids opposing roles in regulating HRas raft insertion, but studies with HRas in intact cells have not yielded clear results. Raft partitioning is proposed to increase signaling efficiency, but there is conflicting information on whether partitioning limits or encourages access of particular regulatory or effector proteins to HRas while it is associated with the membrane. Novel variants of HRas have been made, and show that changes in the lipids and residues of the C-terminus can alter HRas signaling pathways in intact cells. This new evidence indicates that the C-terminal region and lipids attached to HRas are more than a passive anchor domain, and are likely to play much more active roles during trafficking and organizing of HRas in the plasma membrane than current models envision. The objective of this project is to examine how the C-terminal amino acids, farnesyl group, and palmitates of HRas individually participate in both the trafficking and plasma membrane interaction phases of HRas membrane binding . Three aims will be pursued. A. Variants of HRas will be designed to characterize features of HRas that control its exit out of endomembranes, and to identify the vesicular paths and proteins involved in moving HRas to the cell surface. B. The influence of the farnesyl group, palmitates and GTP binding on partitioning of HRas into subdomain sites of plasma membrane will be established by expressing proteins with distinct and novel combinations of these properties. C. The membrane locations in which activation and termination of HRas signaling occurs will be identified by co-localization or co-immunoprecipitation of HRas with regulatory proteins and effectors. These studies will use biochemical co-immunoprecipitation and membrane isolation techniques, as well as direct immunofluorescence imaging of membrane fragments. The primary emphasis will be intact cells, as this is the only currently available system where HRas palmitoylation can occur, and more importantly, enables the functional impact of changes in molecular properties to be gauged by monitoring the ability of variant proteins to cause focus formation in NIH3T3 cells. The results will generate a clearer view of how HRas becomes incorporated into cellular membranes and enable development of methods to manipulate the interaction of HRas with membrane subdomains. This information will also identify new subdomain-selective targeting sequences with which other proteins, such as HRas effectors, can be re-directed to specific sites on the cell surface. These studies will help us understand what properties of the membrane-binding domain of HRas can influence biological activity and lead towards the long-term goal of learning how to guide that interaction toward beneficial outcomes doc12058 none Plant MADS-box genes encode transcriptional regulators that are required for a variety of critical developmental processes, including organ identity, flowering, fruit development, root development, and pattern formation. This family of genes has diversified dramatically during the evolution of vascular plants, and especially within the angiosperms, resulting in the large number of these genes in modern flowering plant species. The problem at hand is to define the roles of these MADS-box genes, as well as to understand the evolutionary changes that resulted in their great diversity of functions. Cloning and sequencing MADS-box genes in a variety of plant species will lay the groundwork to address this question. These sequences will be used in a series of phylogenetic analyses to determine the relationships among these genes. Understanding the diversity of functions encoded by the MADS-box genes, coupled with knowledge of how these processes have been modified through the evolution of vascular plants, will be key in developing targeted strategies for manipulating the growth and development of non-model plant species doc12059 none Plants vary greatly in their responses to cold temperatures. At one extreme are plants from tropical and subtropical regions such as soybean and rice, which suffer injury when exposed to chilling temperatures between 0 and 12 degrees Celcius. In sharp contrast, plants from temperate regions are not only chilling tolerant, but many, such as Arabidopsis and wheat, can survive freezing after exposure to low nonfreezing temperatures, a phenomenon known as cold acclimation. The overall goal of this project is to understand the genomic basis of cold tolerance. The specific focus will be to develop a more detailed understanding of how plants respond to low temperature in terms of altering gene expression. This emphasis is motivated by the recent demonstration in Arabidopsis that cold acclimation involves the action of cold-regulated genes including the CBF regulon, a group of genes that imparts freezing tolerance and is coordinately regulated by the CBF transcriptional activators. This project will comprise three related lines of investigation. In the first, a low temperature wiring diagram will be constructed that includes a definition of low temperature regulatory circuits and the gene regulons that they control. The second line of investigation will be to determine the similarities and differences of low temperature-regulated genes in plants that differ in freezing tolerance. The third line of investigation will be to determine whether the Arabidopsis CBF cold-response pathway is highly conserved in other plants and whether differences in plant cold tolerance can be traced to differences in CBF cold-response pathways. Comparative and functional genomics approaches will be used to address these issues including gene expression profiling using DNA microarrays. In sum, these lines of investigation will provide a deeper understanding of the genomic mechanisms that plants have evolved to cope with low temperature and have the potential to provide genetic tools to improve the cold tolerance of plants, traits of considerable agronomic and economic importance. In as much as the CBF regulon not only imparts freezing tolerance, but dehydration tolerance as well, the results of this project also have the potential to provide genetic tools to improve the drought and salinity tolerance of agriculturally important plants. Deliverables: Microarray data and other information about the project can be found at: http: aztec.stanford.edu cold doc8651 none This proposal studies inequalities between groups , broadly defined. Our particular line of inquiry asks to what extent informational externalities can provide a credible theory for such inequalities. We briefly mention a few other potential applications, but the proposal is focused on: (1) Cross country income differentials in a world with free trade; (2) Statistical discrimination in the labor market. In the first part of the proposal we introduce imperfectly observable human capital investments in an otherwise standard competitive trade model. We are interested whether ex post inequalities can arise between ex ante identical countries. We propose a model where this is possible because of interactions between straightforward price effects and the informational externality. Citizens in a nation specializing as a low human capital country are worse off than citizens in the country specializing as a high human capital country, but the situation is self-enforcing because incentives to invest are lower in the low human capital country. Incentives are bad because 1) with few investors someone who looks good is more likely an individual with low human capital that got a lucky draw , 2) the possibility to import goods intensive in human capital from the other country makes human capital less valuable compared to a situation where countries don t trade. In our research we will investigate how these effects interact and whether the model provides a rationale for specialization, as well as explore a number of secondary implications of the model. The second part considers statistical discrimination. Here, informational externalities belong to mainstream theory, but there is reluctance in the empirical literature to take the idea seriously. We believe there are two reasons for this. First, models of statistical discrimination have been (fairly) criticized for assuming away most any contractual solution to the information problem. We therefore propose to investigate how a richer set of admissable contracts and or possibilities of learning affect an otherwise standard model of statistical discrimination. Our preliminary analysis suggests that, in a competitive market with learning where workers cannot commit to stay with a firm, there is an interesting free-riding problem in information acquisition that may force the firms to use proxies even if better information could be acquired. Hence, ex post learning is not sufficient to dismiss statistical discrimination. We will also consider ex ante contracts (without learning). Discrimination based on irrelevant characteristics is still possible and the setup is in a sense more appealing than the standard model, because discrimination can now arise in a unique equilibrium. The second major reason for the skepticism is, we think, that it is not clear what exactly would be evidence of statistical discrimination. We propose to deal with this by designing a model that nests the two major explanations for racial differences, statistical discrimination and racism doc12061 none Museum collections are the main repository for past and current baseline biodiversity information. In order to utilize that baseline information as fully as possible for research and management decisions, the information must be available. This project will convert separate collections in Colorado into one distributed biodiversity database and research toolkit for the southern and central Rockies and adjacent plains. This area features tremendous biological diversity and has experienced and continues to experience many environmental changes that impact biodiversity. The collection involves almost 300,000 biological specimens. The format relies upon linking data to a geographic information system database. The system will allow for the query, analysis and synthesis of local and network information through a web interface, for researchers, managers and educators, as well as the public doc12062 none The large and complex genome of corn has impeded integrated mapping and sequencing efforts. The anticipated isolation of all the corn genes, however, indicates the pressing need for efficient mapping systems and or a reduction in genome complexity. This research addresses the need by developing multifunctional genetic materials that include the ability to rapidly physically map DNA sequences to chromosomes and chromosome segments of 1 Mbp or less. These materials coupled with microarray technology will allow the mapping of thousands of sequences in a single set of experiments. The complete set of oat-corn chromosome addition lines has been recovered. Hybridization of sequences to DNA of the 10 additions allows placement of sequences to chromosome including duplicated sequences or multigene families. Radiation hybrid (RH) lines are then produced by gamma irradiation of the addition lines. The research will focus on obtaining fertile lines for all 10 addition plants and on creating RH mapping panels for all 10 chromosomes. Preliminary data indicates the feasibility for efficient physical mapping of genes (ESTs and known genes) to chromosome and chromosome segment, and the identification and mapping of duplicated sequences. The ESTs isolated at Stanford University will initially be mapped. An RH physical map will complement other corn physical mapping systems by providing a scaffold at the subchromosomal fragment level. The specific objectives of this renewal are to (1) recover a complete set of fertile oat-corn addition lines and characterize the phenotype, cytology, chromosome stability and transmission of the addition and RH lines; (2) produce RH mapping panels for all 10 individual chromosomes for both low and high resolution mapping; (3) enable high-throughput mapping of ESTs to chromosomal regions for candidate gene discovery and comparative genome studies. Deliverables: 1. Fertile oat-corn addition lines for each corn chromosome; seed, tissue or DNA of the addition lines for distribution. 2. DNA panels of radiation hybrid lines for low and high-resolution mapping of each chromosome. 3. Radiation hybrid mapping panels for each chromosome, along with appropriate resources that will allow other researchers to physically map genes to within one to five megabases. 4. A database of sequences mapped to chromosome and to radiation hybrid lines as the lines become available. Data to be provided to existing web resources. 5. Data about relative quantities of repetitive sequences per chromosome measured using microarray technology with genomic DNA from the oat-corn addition lines. 6. Web resources describing genetic materials, radiation hybrid mapping, and sequences mapped. Project address: University of Minnesota, Dept. of Agronomy and Plant Genetics 411 Borlaug Hall, Upper Buford Circle, St. Paul, MN Internet Addresses (Web and E-mail) for Project Information: http: agronomy.coafes.umn.edu cornpep nsf doc12063 none Covalent modification of proteins is a well-established mechanism by which their structure and properties are altered to accommodate biological function. Principals elucidated for soluble proteins apply to integral membrane proteins as well, although many underlying molecular features in this class of proteins are less well established than for soluble proteins. The vast majority of plasma membrane integral membrane proteins are glycosylated and most are phosphorylated, modifications that introduce anionic groups. Hence, even when analyzed successfully by techniques such as isoelectric focusing and two-dimensional electrophoresis, integral membrane proteins often exhibit pIs significantly more acidic than those anticipated based upon their primary structure, now mostly deduced from the sequence of their cDNAs. Recent evidence from Dr. Hertzberg s laboratory has demonstrated that several connexins, unglycosylated integral membrane proteins comprising gap junctions, have pI variants far more acidic than can be accounted for by phosphorylation or other known modifications. The modification altering the charge of these proteins does not significantly alter their mass as detected by relatively inexact methods such as SDS-PAGE. Furthermore, it appears as though connexin modification occurs during its trafficking and is likely to occur at distinct cytoplasmic compartments through which connexins pass on their way to assembly into gap junctions in the plasma membrane. Establishing the underlying molecular mechanism responsible for alteration of connexin pIs is the key focus of this project. Mass spectrometry has emerged as the method of choice for elucidation of the molecularbasis of protein covalent modification and determination the modified residues. While notable progress has been made in recent years in the biochemical analysis of membrane proteins, including crystallographic analysis of a few, their manipulation for many types of analyses is limited by their insolubility in organic solvents or requiring the use of detergents incompatible with subsequent analyses. In the case of connexins, these difficulties are even more profound: success in their initial isolation and characterization was dependent on their insolubility in detergents. This property has compounded the difficulty of their analysis by state of the art techniques such as mass spectrometry. Preliminary experiments have established approaches to peptide purification and mass spectroscopic analysis that will serve as the basis for analysis of the modification(s) altering connexin pIs. This project is driven by efforts to identify and characterize the (novel?) low molecular weight covalent modification of connexins, a line of exploratory research that will have significant implications for understanding of the structure and function of membrane proteins. It may be that this modification, which preliminary experiments indicate is not likely to be restricted to connexins, has been overlooked because the presence of pI variants of other membrane proteins would have been attributed to phosphorylation or the presence of acidic sugars (e.g. sialic acid). Identification of the modification altering connexin pIs will permit evaluation of its role in trafficking, assembly and function of gap junction channels. Depending upon the position of the negative charges, models of the structure and function of selectivity filters, regulatory sites and the channels themselves may require rethinking. Hence, studies undertaken as part of this project may prove to be of general significance in proteome analysis doc12064 none The long-term objective of this project is to understand the signal-transduction mechanisms that control cellular morphogenesis during the eukaryotic cell cycle. Normal morphogenesis, the process by which the complex, three-dimensional organization of the cell is developed and maintained, is essential for the fidelity of cellular differentiation and reproduction. The goal of this project is to decipher the signal-transduction mechanisms controlling cell polarity process in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Polarized growth in response to different signals during the yeast cell cycle can result in the generation of several different morphological structures, such as buds, mating projections, and pseudohyphae. Two protein components of the cell polarity apparatus in yeast; the Ras-related GTPase Cdc42p and its guanine-nucleotide exchange factor (GEF) Cdc24p have previously been characterized in this laboratory. These components are integral parts of a signal-transduction pathway that leads to the generation of cell polarity during the cell cycle. These components have conserved counterparts in other eukaryotes, suggesting that common signal-transduction mechanisms controlling cell polarity may exist. The specific aims of this project are directed at understanding the regulation of the Cdc42p GTPase and how it interfaces with different cell-cycle regulatory processes. The hypotheses that will be tested with these experiments are: 1). Initiation of cell polarity signaling depends on localized targeting of Cdc24p but not Cdc42p; and 2). Cdc42p is activated and de-activated during the cell cycle. Cdc24p is targeted to the nucleus and sites of polarized growth at specific times in the cell cycle. However, recent data suggest a paradigm shift in which Cdc42p is localized around the entire periphery of the cell throughout the cell cycle and enriched at sites of polarized growth after activation. To better understand this critical regulatory process, the targeting mechanisms for both Cdc24p and Cdc42p will be determined using green fluorescent protein (GFP)-tagged wild-type and mutant proteins. S. cerevisiae Cdc42p is activated by the Cdc24p GEF and de-activated through the action of the Bem3p, Rga1p, and Rga2p GTPase-activating proteins (GAPs). Recent studies from this laboratory suggest that Cdc24p activates Cdc42p at multiple stages of the cell cycle, most probably prior to bud emergence in G 1 phase and cytokinesis in M phase. If so, then Cdc42p is likely to be de-activated in the intervening time frames by the action of its GAPs. The cell-cycle specific localization of individual GAPs will be investigated using GFP-tagged proteins. The answers to these questions will not only be relevant to the basic understanding of signal-transduction mechanisms in cell biology, but also to the understanding of the cellular morphogenesis process in yeast as well as in other eukaryotes doc12065 none Membrane-anchored, mammalian cytochromes b5 are located in the endoplasmic reticulum (microsomal or Mc cyt b5) and the outer membranes of mitochondria (OM cyt b5). Although Mc cytochromes b5 have been identified from a number of mammalian sources, the only OM cyt b5 that has been positively identified to date originates from rat liver. The three-dimensional structures of rat OM cyt b5 and the Mc cytochromes b5 are very similar. Nonetheless, rat OM cyt b5 has a much lower reduction potential and much higher stability toward chemical and thermal denaturation than the Mc cytochromes b5. Furthermore, hemin in rat OM cyt b5 is kinetically trapped at physiological temperatures. From amino acid sequence alignments, crystal structure comparisons, and molecular dynamics simulations, several amino acid residues can be identified as potential determinants of the unusual biophysical properties of rat OM cyt b5. Consequently, a systematic study will be conducted in which these residues in the rat OM protein are replaced with the corresponding residues in the bovine Mc isoform. These studies will be performed with the expectation of decreasing the stability and kinetic barriers for hemin release of rat OM cyt b5. A complementary study will be carried out in which the stability of bovine Mc cyt b5 will be increased by incorporating the stabilizing features found in the rat OM protein. It is also important to establish whether the biophysical properties of rat OM cyt b5 are restricted to this protein, or rather are common to mitochondrial cytochromes b5. Consequently, the gene coding for human testis cyt b5, a protein very likely to be the human analogue of rat OM cyt b5, will be synthesized, placed in a vector suitable for high level expression and characterized for its biophysical properties doc12066 none Initial NSF PGRP funding has permitted the development of a public sorghum unigene resource that will approach 14,000 members during the coming year. This renewal proposal is designed to augment the size, and thus value, of this resource while simultaneously using it to explore the genomic genetic biochemical basis of sorghum s special adaptation to adverse environments. The results of this research effort will reveal potential strategies for improvement of the productivity of not only this, but other, cereals that do not have sorghum s ability to withstand environmental extremes such as drought. Fusion of the differing strengths of two research groups will lead to a synergistic outcome. The University of Georgia (UGA) group has developed substantial expertise in construction of a comprehensive unigene resource and in development and mining of a secure and versatile Oracle-based relational database management system (RDBMS). The Texas A & M University and USDA ARS group has extensive experience with the experimental system (sorghum), its physiology, genetics, and genome characteristics, and has recently developed a powerful new tool for identifying on a combined physical genetic sorghum map the location of many of the ESTs that already have been, and will continue to be, developed at UGA. We propose to increase the sorghum unigene set to ~20,000 members by selective sequencing of 50,000 cDNAs from ~20 new libraries. Libraries will be enriched in full-length cDNAs through a no-cost collaboration with Dr. Sumio Sugano. The UGA RDBMS will be enhanced so that we can mine 5 and 3 UTRs to explore their participation in regulation of genome expression in this monocot. The RDBMS has already been modified to incorporate all returned BLAST data in readily mined tables. We will use this information to investigate as well the potential role of alternative splicing in regulation of genome expression. The unigene set will be maintained and distributed as a public resource, and the UGA web site will be enhanced to make this information available to the scientific community. Data will also be made available to the developing Gramene database resource. Sorghum genome function will be explored by coordinated microarray experiments designed to permit the construction of a compendium of gene expression profiles. While conducting assays that will answer specific biological questions, we will simultaneously design experimental protocols with this objective in mind. Specific immediate objectives include examination of well-characterized genotypes to explore relationships between genome expression, light perception and flowering time and to characterize pre- and post-flowering responses (drought tolerance) in contrasting genotypes. The UGA RDBMS will be expanded to include all relevant information, not only array data, but also experimental parameters, phenotype, and so on. Microarray experiments will be designed around a common core set of parameters such that variations in abiotic factors within a single genotype or between different genotypes and a standard reference genotype can inasmuch as possible be related always to this core. Such experimental design will permit the development of a true compendium that will be available for extensive mining beginning during this project period, but also extending well beyond it. Deliverables 1. sorghum ESTs ESTs are available from GenBank (dbEST) and from http: fungen.botany.uga.edu Projects Sorghum Sorghum.htm ESTs have been mapped to the rice genome at http: www.gramene.org 2. sorghum unigene set information about sorghum unigenes is available at http: fungen.botany.uga.edu Projects Sorghum Sorghum.htm unigenes have been mapped to the rice genome at http: www.gramene.org 3. sorghum cDNA clones clones are available by directing email to Dr. Marie-Michele Cordonnier-Pratt at mmpratt@uga.edu (full instructions are at http: fungen.botany.uga.edu Projects Sorghum Sorghum.htm doc12034 none Michael Greenwood, University of Maine Barbara Bond, Oregon State University Trees continue to increase in size and complexity over life spans that may last many centuries, and each year the growing regions of their shoots produce new foliage and reproductive structures. As they grow older and larger, forest trees appear to grow more slowly, produce thicker foliage and more reproductive structures. These changes are likely to be associated with age-related declines in the growth rates of forest stands, which occur before the mid-point of the lifespan of important timber species. Although similar patterns of age- and size-related change in the morphology and physiology of foliage have been described for numerous species, the mechanisms governing these changes are virtually unknown. Possible explanations for these phenomena range from decreased photosynthesis due to increased resistance of water flow to a genetically controlled ageing process that slows growth and photosynthesis. Processes regulating maturation, ageing and senescence are fundamental to biology, and some of these processes are probably unique to large, long-lived trees. A more complete understanding of the basis for this decline is necessary to model and accurately predict the growth of forests over time. Reciprocal grafting of shoots between trees of different ages offers great potential as a tool to distinguish among explanations for changes in growth behavior. In this approach, shoots from old growth trees are grafted onto juvenile and young-mature trees, and shoots from juvenile and young-mature trees are grafted into the crowns of old-growth trees. The extent, direction and time-course of changes in the growth, morphology, and physiology of foliage produced by the grafted shoots will provide insight into the mechanisms governing age-related change. This study will attempt reciprocal grafting on two species of long-lived trees, red spruce and Douglas fir. These species are adapted to substantially different climatic regimes, so a comparative study will provide insights into the universality or variability of processes associated with age-related changes in tree growth doc12068 none The maize genome probably contains between 50,000 and 100,000 genes clustered in hypomethylated gene rich regions. We have developed a new method for purifying these regions, and we will explore its use in identifying gene function. This will be accomplished by sampling gene-rich portions of the genome that are chemically distinct from the gene poor regions, and then displaying them on microarrays (DNA chips). These microarrays will then be queried using representations of the DNA corresponding to mutated genes from a large population of maize plants that carries transposable elements (jumping genes). We have previously developed one such population (the Maize Targeted Mutagenesis population) with prior funding from the Plant Genome Research Program. By using computational methods, we will combine the data from the two different resources to create an index of maize gene function, represented by maize seed corresponding to each mutated gene. We anticipate making thousands of entries into this index, allowing maize geneticists to systematically determine the functions of indexed genes doc12069 none Rice genome sequencing projects are defining thousands of new rice genes. However, the critical tools required to determine the functions of these genes are not yet available to public-sector researchers. To remedy this deficiency, novel approaches to generate collections of insertion mutants and to detect mutated genes in a complementary set of rice deletion mutants will be developed. The first objective is to develop and test vectors for creating activation-tagged rice mutants using the Ac Ds system. Activation tagging allows the identification of gene knockout mutants and mutants exhibiting gene over-expression. The vectors will contain chemical-induced promoters that will allow the controlled transposition of the Ds element. The second objective is to develop and optimize a high throughput protocol for the detection of mutated genes in an existing deletion mutant collection. The strategy is to use polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to detect the mutated genes rapidly in pools of DNA from many mutants. The rapid detection of mutated genes by this protocol will allow the identification of mutants with deletions in specific genes of interest. The international dimension of the project will enrich the training experience of the postdoctoral fellows and extend the impact of the research doc12070 none Mitochondria help to turn food into chemical energy in cells of plants and animals. Although the nucleus contains the vast majority of the cell s genes, mitochondria have their own DNA, coding for proteins vital for the survival of cells. In animals and most plants, mitochondrial genes are inherited only through the female (egg) parent. Plant mitochondrial genomes are generally much larger and more variable than those of animals. Plant mitochondria code for more proteins, including ones that can interfere with the development of pollen. This type of infertility (which does not affect female parts of flowers) is called cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS). The CMS trait can be exploited in the production of stronger and higher-yielding hybrid plants. Despite their relatively small sizes and importance, very few plant mitochondrial genomes have been sequenced. Mitochondrial protein-coding genes appear to be very similar in different types of plants; however, most of the mitochondrial DNA lies between genes and its function and origin is unknown. Furthermore, it appears that these intergenic DNA sequences have little in common in different plants. Therefore, in order to understand how rapid changes occur in plant mitochondrial DNA, we need to analyze mitochondrial genomes from very closely related species. We will sequence the mitochondrial genomes from four types of cultivated maize and one of its close wild relatives, as well as from two other more distantly related monocot crop species, Tripsacum dactyloides (eastern gamma grass) and sorghum. We will identify all the potential genes and look at how they are expressed in different tissues and stages of development. The project will contribute to an understanding of the content, organization, expression and evolution of mitochondrial genomes i doc12071 none Plant genomes are laden with local sequence duplications and clusters of homologous genes. To simplify the analysis of these duplications and gene clusters, this project will develop a new genetic technology to generate chromosomal deletions quickly and efficiently. This approach is based on the finding that transposable elements can participate in alternative transposition pathways that generate novel recombination products, including large deletions and duplications. The system described here utilizes a transgene construct containing maize Ac Ds transposon ends in tandem orientation within a I dSpm transposon (Ned1; Nested deletions 1). The Ned1 construct will be transformed into maize; subsequent crosses will introduce the En Spm transposase to mobilize Ned1 to various genomic locations, and the Ac transposase to activate the deletion process. The action of Ac transposase on the Ac termini within Ned1 generates an unlimited set of nested deletions with one end anchored at the transgene locus. The Ned1 construct contains marker genes for detection of both Ned1 transpositions and Ac--induced deletions, as well as sequences for easy cloning of deletion endpoints via plasmid rescue. The expected outcome of this project is the production of maize plants containing the Ned1 transgene construct. These plants and their progeny will be tested for 1) transposition of Ned1 by En Spm transposase; 2) induction of deletions by Ac transposase; 3) transmission of deletions to progeny plants. Additionally, the Ned1 transgenic lines, En Spm- and Ac-containing lines will be backcrossed to a commonly-used maize inbred line [B73] in order to make these materials most useful for the research community. This approach could be extended to the production of a set of maize lines containing Ned1 elements at dispersed sites throughout the genome that could be used to isolate deletions and other rearrangements in specific regions of the genome. Deliverables: 1. This project will generate maize plants containing the Ned1 transgene construct. 2. Ned1 transgenic plants and their progeny will be tested for a) transposition of Ned1 induced by En Spm transposase; b) formation of deletions induced by Ac transposase; c) transmission of deletions to progeny plants. 3. Ned1 transgenic lines, En Spm- and Ac-containing lines will be backcrossed to a commonly-used maize inbred line [B73] in order to make these materials most useful to the research community. Contact Information for Deliverables: Thomas Peterson, Molecular Biology, Iowa State University, Ames, IA thomasp@iastate.edu doc12072 none Senior personnel: Deborah P. Delmer, PI, Candace Haigler, Co-PI, Texas Tech University; Andrew Spicer, Co-PI, Texas A Allan Zipf, Co-PI, Alabama A Kanwarpal Dhugga, senior scientist and unfunded collaborator, Pioneer HiBred Cellulose (Beta-1,4-glucan) represents a major sink for carbon in plants where it exists as a key cell wall polymer. The pattern and extent of cellulose microfibril deposition contribute to patterns of morphogenesis, to the unique characteristics of specialized cell types, and to the strength and flexibility of plant stems. Cellulose is used extensively as fuel, timber, fiber, forage, and chemical cellulose. Manipulation of the patterns and extent of cellulose deposition, the dimensions and crystallinity of the microfibrils, or the ratio of cellulose to other sinks such as lignin or starch, can be expected to improve the quality of many economically important plants. This project continues work initiated in a previous NSF Plant Genome award to study the functional genomics of the CesA gene family proposed to encode the catalytic subunits of the multicomponent cellulose synthase enzyme complex. The new project also extends these objectives to include discovery and characterization of other genes that are critical for the process. Research focuses on plants of economic importance where modifications of this process could yield most benefit-on maize where stem strength and carbon partitioning are important issues and on cotton for fiber improvement. Arabidopsis and tracheary elements of Zinnia are also being used as models to test new concepts. Specific goals include: 1) Studies of expression patterns of all ten of the Arabidopsis CesA genes and their related ancestors, the CslD genes. This work will define developmental patterns of expression for all of these genes and also identify potential pairs or triplets of CesA that are required as functional units within a single cell type, examine affects of carbon status and light on gene expression, and test the hypothesis that the related CslD genes are the cellulose synthases of tip-growing cells; 2) With respect to maize, these studies will identify expression patterns for 4 key ZmCesA genes, and relate these to any phenotypes generated in the 4 different selected Mu insertion lines that are mutated in these respective genes; 3) Further testing of the hypothesis that at least two distinct CesA proteins and the Korrigan cellulase protein are all required for cellulose synthase complex formation and function; this will be done by co-expressing and analyzing complex formation and ability to make cellulose when combinations of these genes are expressed in yeast and tobacco BY-2 cells; 3) Completion of characterization of the first identified CesA gene from an alga ; 4) Determination of the comparative topology of a plant CesA protein in the plasma membrane with its related hyaluronan synthase ancestor of mammals in order to relate structure of the proteins to their functions in synthesis of the glucan chains of cellulose ; 5) A description of the evolution, diversity, and map locations of CesA genes in cotton, studies that should shed light on the evolution of tetraploid cotton and also identify polymorphisms in these genes to contribute to the genome maps of diploid and tertraploid cottons; 6) Microarray experiments to study global expression patterns of large numbers of genes in Arabidopsis, maize and cotton under conditions in which we know CesA gene expression is affected, with the goal of identifying other genes that are important for cellulose synthesis in plants. Deliverables Deliverables have and will include publications in peer-reviewed journals and sequences of cDNAs for novel CesA genes deposited in Genbank. In the future: (a) seeds of transgenic Arabidopsis plants containing CesA promoter-GUS fusions will be deposited in public seed banks; a doc12073 none Paul Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Professor Bimal K. Paul, Department of Geography, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas and Professor Shahanaz Huq-Hussain, Department of Geography and Environment, University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh. The two plan to address the problem of arsenic poisoning due to contaminated tubewell water and the way villagers in Bangladesh respond to the incidence of poisoning and how they seek health services. The research is to provide information about how arsenic patients perceive their illness, how they respond in terms of health care utilization, and what determines their health-seeking behavior. The information is intended to improve treatment compliance and offer valuable insights for future action plans to combat the arsenic problem in Bangladesh in a timely manner. Scope: In this project the collaborators plan to combine their expertise in analytical and field studies, including field surveys and interviews, participation observation, and focus group discussions to collect primary data for this research. They will employ qualified graduate students from Bangladesh to conduct the field interviews. One graduate student from Kansas State University will work with Dr. Paul using qualitative and quantitative approaches to analyze field data. The results will be disseminated as early as possible to help policy makers and others engaged in dealing with the arsenic problem in Bangladesh. This project is supported by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences doc12074 none The cereal crops, such as maize, rice, wheat, sorghum, barley, millet, and oats, account for the majority of world s nutrition. In addition to the cereal crops, there are approximately 10,000 species of wild grasses, which cover about 1 5 of the earth s land surface. Nearly all grasses are characterized by the spikelet, a short branch that contains floral meristems. Floral meristems produce the seeds that are harvested. The arrangement of these spikelets in different grasses, and the branches on which they are borne, reflects differing fates of the meristems produced during inflorescence development. Identifying the genes that determine meristem fates and understanding the mechanism by which these genes integrate their activities would be of immense value for developmental biology, evolutionary biology, and applied genetics and breeding. Development of maize as a model system assumes that information from maize should be applicable to other cereals, and indeed to any other plant. Comparisons between maize and the other cereals, and between maize and wild grasses, will test this basic assumption of model system development. Inflorescence genes will be identified that will serve as tools for three different disciplines: investigation of meristem development, quantitative trait analysis, and comparative biology in the grasses. Sequencing of expressed genes and expression profiling will be used to identify a subset of genes that are expressed at the earliest stages of development, and that correlate with the proliferation of specific meristem types in selected mutants. The function of these genes will be determined through genetics and mapping. Map positions of the inflorescence genes will provide a link to quantitative traits, and to mutations in maize and other grasses. A selected group of genes will be mutated by reverse genetics to determine their function in inflorescence development. A subset of the genes will also be studied in other cereals and wild grasses. Whether these genes have been modified over evolutionary time and whether they function in other grasses the same way as they do in maize will be determined. These comparisons will provide a valuable data set for the study of evolution and diversity across 60 million years of grass evolution doc12075 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project focuses on olefin paraffin separations. In the USA, ethylene and propylene are produced in larger quantities than any other organic chemical. Currently, olefin paraffin separation is done by distillation, an extremely energy-intensive process because of their low relative volatility. Selectivities of polymeric membranes are inadequate for these separations, but selectivities of facilitated transport membranes are higher. However, membrane instability, low gas fluxes, and a required water-saturated feed limit their industrial application. To overcome these problems a new type of facilitated transport membrane is being developed. The membrane has high gas fluxes, dramatically improved olefin paraffin selectivities over conventional facilitated transport membranes, operates with a dry feed, and is stable for several weeks. The commercial applications from this project will be membranes that will significantly lower cost and energy consumption of industrial olefin paraffin separations. Other applications include by product vent gas streams in polyethylene polypropylene, cumene, isopropanol and acrylonitrile plants. Subsequent applications are propylene recovery from FCCU off-gas and from large processes (propane dehydrogenation and steam crackers doc12076 none The legume family is one of the most important groups of plants worldwide because they have been fundamental to development of modern agricultural systems. Agronomically important members include soybean and rice in Asia, and maize and beans in the Americas. Legumes are also the third largest family of flowering plants. On a worldwide basis, this plant family contributes 33% of humankind s protein intake, while also serving as an important source of fodder and forage for animals, and of edible and industrial oils. Legumes are also distinguished by their unique property of symbiotic nitrogen fixation, providing one of the major sources of available nitrogen in the biosphere. In the US alone, legumes are grown on over 80 million acres, where they fix approximately 6 million metric tons of nitrogen worth an estimated $4.5 billion. In response to the need for a tractable genetic system in legumes, scientists have developed Medicago truncatula as a model species for study of biological and agronomic issues important to legumes. Of particular significance, Medicago is amenable to efficient molecular, genetic and reverse-genetic analyses, unlike the major crop legumes. This project involves the large-scale analysis of the genome of Medicago. A map of the organization of genes (comparative genomics), of their functions in legume biology (functional genomics), and analysis and public distribution of the data by means of computational tools (bioinformatics), are the emphases of this project. Recent results from this research team document the first indications of conserved genome structure between Medicago and crop legumes, and between Medicago and the well-characterized model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. We have described the genomic architecture of resistance gene analogs and discovered new lineages of legume resistance genes. We have contributed to the development of a public Expressed Sequence Tag (EST) resource containing in excess of 127,000 sequences, and created publicly accessible databases to relate this information to other scientists and to the public. Already this information has accelerated the pace of discovery and characterization of agronomically important legume genes and traits, in both Medicago and crop legume species. The goal of this research is to extend these analyses by contributing to a multi-institutional, international effort to develop a complete gene inventory and functional analysis of the Medicago genome. The specific objectives of this research include (1) creating a comprehensive physical map of the genome, (2) assaying the coordinate expression of thousands of genes under conditions of (a) plant development, (b) interactions with microorganisms, and (c) nutrient stress, and (3) continuing to implement and improve publicly accessible database activities. The long-term impact of this research will be to integrate genetic and functional information across legumes, and thereby expand opportunities for basic and applied research in economically important legume species. This research will allow scientists to compare genes of agronomic and scientific interest in Medicago and the related crop legumes. This knowledge will enable more efficient cloning and characterization of valuable genes and traits, such as disease resistance and crop productivity, and it will ultimately facilitate the development of improved crop varieties. The database of expressed genes generated by this research will enable the detailed analysis of the role of specific genes in plant growth and development. Many of the genes identified in the course of this research will become the focus of crop improvement strategies and of continued scientific investigation by legume biologists. The proposed work benefits enormously from previous NSF-sponsored research on the model plant Arabidopsis. Likewise, completion of the project will benefit not only research on legumes, but the broader scientific community as well doc12077 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project, The Digital Machine Shop, is a practical immersive precision modeling system. With the aid of Digital Jigs, Digital Blades, and other innovative techniques, the user sculpts and assembles precision objects in a natural fashion with his or her own two hands. Real users from many backgrounds have validated the approach, showing these new paradigms to be easy to learn and easy to use. They have achieved comfort and productivity in a fraction of the time required by conventional modeling products because natural dexterity and real-world strategies apply. The apparent absence of Repetitive Stress Injury (RSI) in the Digital Machine Shop s two-handed interface promises to be a bonus of immeasurable value. The ease of use of the Digital Machine Shop will serve to tap the talent, creativity, and expertise of a large segment of society that has been discouraged by the complexity and tedium of conventional interfaces. Those comfortable with digital methods will benefit from enhanced productivity and creativity. The Digital Machine Shop embodies enabling technologies whose impact far exceeds the scope of this project. It is through the example of practical innovation that the industry will adopt new and improved methods. The potential commercial applications include: architectural design, visual simulation modeling, game modeling, industrial design, automotive design, education, fine arts, and medicine doc12078 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II, project is aimed at the continued development and field testing of an autonomous robotic structural inspection system capable of remote powering and data collection from a network of embedded sensing nodes with remote data access via the internet. The system will utilize existing microminiature, multichannel, wireless, programmable Addressable Sensing Modules (ASM s) to sample data from a variety of sensors. These inductively powered nodes do not require batteries or interconnecting wires, which greatly enhances reliability and reduces installation cost. Networks of sensing nodes can be embedded, interrogated, and remotely accessed in applications where visual inspection by people is not practical due to: physical space constraints, remote geographic locations, high inspection costs, and high risks involved for those performing the inspections. The sensors can indicate the need for repair, replacement, or reinforcement, which will reduce the risk of catastrophic failure and will be useful after natural disasters, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods. The availability of critical structural health data on the internet would greatly assist highway engineers and scientists to acquire information about these structures, which will improve our understanding of the safety of civil structures and their requisite maintenance. Market potential is significant, as various task specific robots can be employed (with our systems) for remote inspection and internet data delivery from a broad spectrum of structures, such as: bridges, bridge footings, dams, offshore oil rigs, buildings, hazardous waste sites, and nuclear power plants. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is aimed at the continued development and field testing of an autonomous robotic structural inspection system capable of remote powering and data collection from a network of embedded sensing nodes with remote data access via the internet. The system will utilize existing microminiature, multichannel, wireless, programmable Addressable Sensing Modules (ASM s) to sample data from a variety of sensors. These inductively powered nodes do not require batteries or interconnecting wires, which greatly enhances reliability and reduces installation cost. Networks of sensing nodes can be embedded, interrogated, and remotely accessed in applications where visual inspection by people is not practical due to: physical space constraints, remote geographic locations, high inspection costs, and high risks involved for those performing the inspections. The sensors can indicate the need for repair, replacement, or reinforcement, which will reduce the risk of catastrophic failure and will be useful after natural disasters, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods. The availability of critical structural health data on the internet would greatly assist highway engineers and scientists to acquire information about these structures, which will improve our understanding of the safety of civil structures and their requisite maintenance. Market potential is significant, as various task specific robots can be employed (with our systems) for remote inspection and internet data delivery from a broad spectrum of structures, such as: bridges, bridge footings, dams, offshore oil rigs, buildings, hazardous waste sites, and nuclear power plants doc12079 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop a cost-effective procedure for the production of soluble single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNT) in commercial quantities. Phase I results demonstrated dissolution of full-length SWNTs in common organic solvents by exfoliation and covalent functionalization. It has been found that the purity of as-prepared SWNT (AP-SWNT) soot greatly influences both the cost and quality of the final product. The major emphasis for the project will be directed towards the synthesis of byproduct-free AP-SWNT soot, in purification of the SWNTs and in optimizing and scaling-up the dissolution step. The dissolution of carbon nanotubes can greatly enhance the processability of this unique material and facilitate the entry of SWNTs into commercial applications requiring high strength light weight materials, electromagnetic shielding materials, conductive composites and nanoelectronics. The development of the solution chemistry of SWNTs will facilitate applications in polymer science, and in medicine doc12080 none Storm Cava Interest in solid state chemistry has undergone explosive growth in recent years due to the broadly based recognition of the technological importance and scientific challenges involved in the discovery and study of new materials, and due to the influx of scientists from other disciplines who see the opportunities for performing exciting research in this area. The Solid State Chemistry Gordon Research Conference will be held at Queens College, Oxford, England September 16 - September 21, . The goal of the conference is to facilitate international collaborations and information exchange across a broad spectrum of researchers with interests in solid state chemistry. The NSF funds will be used to support the attendance of young American Scientists as well as senior U.S. session chairs and invited speakers. %%% The Solid State Chemistry chemistry community continues to have direct impact on technological advances of high significance to society by designing new materials such as porous solids and molecular sieves, catalysts, and magnetic and electronic materials doc12081 none Adenosine 5 -triphosphate (ATP) synthesis from adenosine 5 -diphosphate (ADP) and inorganic phosphate (Pi) is catalyzed by closely related enzymes in the energy transducing membranes of chloroplasts, mitochondria and some bacteria. Electron transport generates electrochemical proton gradients across the coupling membranes and the flow of protons down these gradients through the ATP synthase drives ATP synthesis. The chloroplast ATP synthase contains nine different polypeptides and a total of about twenty polypeptide chains. The enzyme may be separated into two parts: CF1 and CFo. CF1 contains the nucleotide binding sites of the enzyme and is catalytic. CFo anchors CF1 to the membrane and translocates protons. Interactions among the polypeptide subunits of CF1 and CFo will be studied, with emphasis on the smaller subunits of CF1 (gamma, delta and epsilon) and the regulation of activity. This project will examine roles of the binding of nucleotides in regulation. The location of the C-terminal domain of the e subunit within CF1 and its roles in ATP synthesis, regulation and proton gating will be evaluated making extensive use of site-directed mutagenesis. Whether the position of the C-terminal portion of the g subunit in CF1 differs from that in mitochondrial F1 will be investigated. The ease of preparation of large amounts of CF1, ability to manipulate its subunit composition and nucleotide content, and the high ATP synthesis activity of thylakoids, make the chloroplast ATP synthase an excellent subject for this research. The results of this work will be applicable to all ATP synthases and to protein-protein interactions, in general doc12082 none This biennial conference focuses on the frontiers of science, and some of the resulting technology, in the field of thin films of organic materials. The principal themes of this year s conference are Single molecule phenomena, Thin film properties, Self-assembled surfaces, Patterned surfaces, Polyelectrolyte surfaces, Electroactive organic materials, Photonic band gap and reflective polymers, Colloidal crystals and Biological thin films. There is a definite emphasis on developing and exploiting the ability to build in a rich array of functionality and to control inter-particle and inter-surface potentials using organic materials. Advances in the science of thin films or organic materials opening up new areas of biomolecular science and biomimetic materials, creating new ways of displaying and communication information and developing new routes to functional materials. %%% The structure of the conference will allow substantial time for discussion in that approximately 22 speakers have been invited, based on a plan to have 5 speakers per day Monday - Thursday, with 2 speakers in the opening session on Sunday evening. There will also be a poster session, given particular attention during the regular meeting time (currently planned for Tuesday morning), so that these important contributions get undivided attention early in the week to allow for substantial follow-up. A final novel feature will be a free-form discussion of key research challenges in organic thin film research, animated by a group of leaders in the field. There will also be 7 invited discussion leaders, in addition to the chair and vice chair, who will stimulate discussion at each of the sessions. The expectation is that at least 25% of the group of 29 invited speakers and discussion leaders, will be women or under-represented minorities doc12083 none Steroid hormones control a wide range of physiological and developmental processes in higher organisms, acting in conjunction with receptor proteins to regulate the stage- and tissue-specific transcription of target genes. The study of steroid receptor genetics and biochemistry has led to enormous advances in our understanding of how steroids activate gene transcription. Remarkably, a single hormone appears to be capable of inducing extremely different responses, depending on cellular and temporal context. Although much is understood about how steroid receptors control transcription in cultured mammalian cells, little is understood about how these effects on gene expression result in the dramatic stage- and tissue-specific developmental changes associated with steroid hormone action. This project makes use of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, to examine how steroid-induced changes in gene expression control specific cellular responses during development. Pulses of the steroid 20-hydroxyecdysone (ecdysone) trigger genetic regulatory hierarchies that direct both destruction of tissues by programmed cell death, and morphogenesis (the formation of structures). This project focuses on the roles of nuclear receptor beta-FTZ-F1 and the ecdysone receptor in controlling the stage- and tissue-specific expression of a set of ecdysone-inducible early genes, including BR-C, E74A, E75A and E93. In this examination of the molecular mechanism underlying these gene regulatory phenomena, particular attention is paid to the regulation of E93. E93 is precisely regulated by ecdysone in dying cells, where it induces a programmed cell death response. In certain tissues, such as the larval salivary gland, the regulation of E93 by ecdysone depends on beta-FTZ-F1, which appears to provide E93 with the competence to respond to the hormone. Goals of this project are to address how members of the nuclear receptor superfamily regulate the stage- and tissue-specific expression of E93, as well as BR-C, E74A, and E75A during development, and to shed light on the mechanisms by which steroid hormones elicit distinct biological responses doc12084 none The goal of the project is to investigate the structural basis for and functional consequences of tethering the splicing machinery to the transcription apparatus. In particular, features of a model proposed by Morris and Greenleaf (J. Biol. Chem. 275, - [ ]) will be pursued and tested. In this model the splicing factor Prp40, which binds to the phosphoCTD of RNA polymerase II, is postulated to recruit the U1snRNP to elongating RNAP II and to tether the developing commitment complex to the transcription machinery. This coupling to the transcriptase is proposed to cause early steps in the formation of spliceosomes to be more proficient. In the current project, three objectives will be pursued. One objective is to reveal a molecular basis for coupling spliceosome formation to transcription. To achieve this objective, the identity of the phosphoCTD-interacting domain of Prp40 will be ascertained. Then, the binding affinity and specificity of the newly-defined phosphoCTD-interacting domain will be measured. A second objective is to identify the steps in spliceosome assembly that are accelerated when there is coupling to RNAP II transcription. Toward this end, the rate of pre-commitment and commitment complex formation will be measured in an in vitro system in which splicing can be coupled to transcription (Ghosh, S., and Garcia-Blanco, M. A. ( ) RNA 6, - ). The third objective is to test a) whether phosphorylation of the CTD is required to tether the splicing machinery to RNAP II, and b) whether the CTD is sufficient for the tethering. The results of these experiments will contribute to an increased understanding of gene expression pathways in eukaryotes. The first step in gene expression is called transcription, a process by which the information in a DNA strand is copied into a long RNA strand. The second step is called RNA processing, wherein the long RNA strand is modified so that it can function as a messenger RNA, to direct the synthesis of a protein. A major event in RNA processing is that of splicing, during which segments of the RNA strand not meant to be in the messenger RNA are cut out and the flanking segments are spliced together. Splicing has usually been studied independently of transcription, but in cells the two processes are coupled. This project seeks to reveal how the two processes are coupled physically and to disclose how the coupling affects splicing events functionally. One objective is to characterize the molecular components that couple splicing to transcription; this characterization is necessary to understand how the two processes are physically linked. Another main objective is to identify the steps in splicing that are accelerated when splicing is linked to transcription. Defects in splicing can have severe consequences for an organism. The work described here will contribute new information that will lead to a better understanding of splicing mechanisms doc12085 none DATE: January 8, PROPOSAL NUMBER: ORGANIZATION: Combustion Science and Engineering PI: Douglas Carpenter The National Science Foundation s Office of Polar Programs operates up to six ski-equipped Lockheed LC-130 military cargo aircraft in Antarctica during the austral summer season, along with supplemental intercontinental flights of C-5, C-17, and C-141 aircraft. In addition, two ski-equipped utility deHavilland twin Otter (DHC-6) aircraft and four helicopters (Bell 212, AS 350 s) fly intra-continental flights throughout the summer season. At present, hard-surface ice runways capable of supporting wheeled aircraft operations are available at McMurdo Station, with compacted snow ski-ways available at the other sites (as well as at McMurdo) Organized airfield rescue and fire fighting services are provided only at the airfields at McMurdo and at South Pole Stations. The NSF published a request for proposals to study all military and civilian guidelines for airfield rescue and fire fighting services and define the basic fire risks those standards have been established to address. In addition, the contract is established to study recent reports by noted authorities regarding airfield rescue and fire fighting service requirements at airports to ensure that all fire risks have been identified. Three companies bid on the proposal. Combustion Science and Engineering (CSE) of Columbia, Maryland was selected by the technical and business panels to be the award recipient at a fixed price of $99,600 for a level of effort of approximately six weeks. The effort will be led by Mr. Douglas Carpenter. The PI has prior experience in Antarctica. The OPP Safety and Health Officer recommends this award be made at the fixed level of $99,600 effective 15 January for a period not to exceed six months doc12086 none Award: Principal Investigator: Mikhail Lyubich This conference on dynamical systems at SUNY Stony Brook in is held in honor of John Milnor and emphasizes areas of dynamics close to his own work: holomorphic dynamics in one and several variables, non-uniformly hyperbolic dynamics, fluid dynamics, geometric function theory and thermodynamical formalism, related topics in topology and in biology. Dynamical systems are mathematical models of phenomena that evolve in time according to deterministic laws. Some aspects of this part of mathematics are extremely classical, since the differential equations used by Newton to describe motion under the force of gravity lead to a dynamical system. Although these models are entirely determined by starting conditions and the rules for evolution over time, detailed prediction is difficult and we are obliged to seek qualitative understanding. Over the last twenty-five years much attention has concentrated on systems whose evolutionary rule is defined by a polynomial function of a complex variable, and on the behavior of these systems as the polynomial s coefficients are changed. This class of systems has been found to be a universal model in some ways for the behavior of families of dynamical behavior depending upon a parameter, but despite their simplicity of definition much remains mysterious about holomorphic dynamical systems doc12087 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Debashish Bhattacharya at the University of Iowa to determine how intervening sequences (so-called introns ) spread into novel sites in genes. Introns compose a significant portion of genomes (about 16% in humans) and play important roles in gene expression and disease, yet their means of spread remains unknown. This is because few proven cases of recent and widespread intron spread have been documented. The finding of a wealth of recently inserted introns in the ribosomal (r)RNA genes of Euascomycetes fungi makes these organisms ideal for the study of intron spread. Previous work shows that a good candidate for the mechanism by which introns get incorporated into genes is by reversal of the splicing process. The rRNAs of a diverse group of Euascomycetes will be studied to test predictions of the reverse-splicing model such as the expectation that introns are preferentially retained at target gene sequences that have a high affinity for splicing factors and that introns are non-randomly distributed, with most of them clustering in regions that are not buried in RNA tertiary structure. Introns play important roles in the evolution of eukaryotic genomes and are implicated in diseases. For example, about 15% of point mutations that are linked to human genetic disease cause defects in the splicing of introns. It is surprising, therefore, that no general model of intron spread exists. In this grant, the recent finding of widespread introns in the nuclear rDNA of Euascomycetes fungi is exploited to address the issue of intron spread. An important strength of the fungal system is the availability of robust secondary and tertiary rRNA structures. This allows the testing of the role of RNA structure in determining intron distribution, an analysis that cannot be done with most pre-mRNAs which have largely unknown folding properties doc12088 none This award provides funds for operating the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL) at Michigan State University as a national user facility; for supporting the MSU faculty and staff to conduct research in nuclear science, nuclear astrophysics, and accelerator and instrumentation physics; and for serving as a center dedicated to training the next generation of scientists. Since its inception, the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL) at Michigan State University has played a significant role in nuclear and accelerator physics research, both in the U.S. and worldwide. This role will continue at an enhanced level with the Coupled Cyclotron Upgrade now nearing completion. In the Long-Range Plan of the NSF DOE Nuclear Science Advisory Committee, this upgrade project was recommended to be the highest priority for new construction. Large intensity gains of intermediate-energy primary heavy-ion beams are made possible with the coupled cyclotron operation. Together with the increased acceptance of the new fragment separator, it will be possible to produce fast beams of rare isotopes typically more intense by factors of 100 - 10,000 than available at the previous facility, providing luminosities in the light-to-midrange mass region (A 50) that will be unsurpassed worldwide. A versatile array of new experimental devices will be brought on-line that will significantly enhance the ability of users to conduct cutting edge research with a broad range of rare isotope beams. Three of these new instruments are funded by the NSF: (1) a set of eighteen segmented germanium detectors for studies of intermediate energy coulomb excitation and knockout reactions; (2) a 4-Tesla-meter high-acceptance spectrometer that can be combined with large-area neutron time-of-flight detectors for neutron and charged-particle spectroscopy at very small angles; (3) a high-resolution silicon-strip CsI detector array that permits measurements of isotopic abundances, excited state populations, and isotopically resolved correlation functions with a high precision and efficiency that cannot be matched by any existing detector array. Other new equipment under development include a stopped-beam facility (DOE funded) and a 9.4-Tesla precision Penning ion trap (MSU funded) for precision mass measurements, weak interaction studies, and atomic spectroscopy. For the next decade, the NSCL will be the premier rare isotope research facility in the U.S., with a research focus on three major areas of forefront scientific interest: 1. exploration of the nuclear processes that occur in explosive stellar environments and that are responsible for the ongoing synthesis of the elements in the cosmos; 2. exploration of the properties of hot nuclear matter at sub- and supra-normal densities (such as those found in neutron stars); 3. exploration of exotic nuclei with unusual ratios of protons to neutrons and the determination of their properties doc12089 none PlantGDB is a database of plant genomic sequences, in particular Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) that correspond to fragments of genes that are actively transcribed under particular conditions. The database organizes the ESTs into contigs that represent tentative unique genes. The contigs are annotated and, whenever possible, linked to their genomic DNA origins. The PlantGDB web site includes a number of bioinformatics tools that facilitate gene prediction and cross-species comparisons. The database will provide snapshots of the current knowledge of plant gene composition and facilitate our understanding of plant genetics and evolution. Deliverables of this project are represented by the web site of the project: http: www.plantgdb.org This web site is the public portal to the database, PlantGDB. All derived data sets (EST clusters) are downloadable from the site, as is source code of computer programs used and developed in this project doc12090 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project proposes the development of a low-cost desktop true three dimensional (3-D) information display system suitable for commercialization during Phase III. The proposed video monitor will provide highly realistic static and dynamic 3-D images by presenting information over a volumetric space, rather than a conventional planar space. As a result, the displayed information neither suffers from the loss of actual depth information as in a conventional monitor, nor requires the use of specially designed eyeglasses needed for stereovision systems. Fullcolor true 3-D views will be generated by projecting plane-by-plane image slices onto a projection screen that moves backward and forward in synchronization with the information generated on a CRT screen. By accessing these planes-of-view 30 times per second, flicker-free true 3-D views are generated over a volumetric space that are viewable from multiple angles. The anticipated low cost of this practical system should make it affordable for personal use since it will be designed primarily with commercially available system components, aided by novel digital imaging techniques and software approaches. Thus, the proposed system is expected to find many diverse applications ranging from scientific and industrial visualization to entertainment. Some of the initial applications include biomedical image processing, scientific visualization, protein structure determination, general-purpose 3-D computer graphics, radar imaging, battlefield management, and aircraft design doc12091 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will demonstrate in actual field tests the novel room temperature dewatering process. In the Phase I project, Compact Membrane Systems, Inc. (CMS) demonstrated a stable osmotic distillation (OD) process on orange juice, grape juice, and coffee. In typical applications, solids levels were increased from approximately 10% sugar to approximately 70% sugar. Taste tests showed no significant difference between original juice and re-diluted OD product. Process stability was demonstrated by obtaining equivalent product when operating temperature was increased to 40C and maintaining performance after multiple juice dewatering and cleaning cycles. Product stability was demonstrated by leaving OD juice concentrate open to air with no microbiological growth due to very low water activity in the juice concentrate. In the OD process the solution to be dewatered is placed on one side of the hydrophobic membrane and a high salinity feed is placed on the other side. Water vapor then moves from the solution to the high salinity side. While OD has been around for 15 years, no significant commercial products have been developed due to these hydrophobic microporous membranes rapidly wetting out. This project will demonstrate a novel, non-porous perfluoromembrane that eliminates wet-out while maintaining high water vapor transport. Potential commercial applications include beverages, pharmaceuticals, neutraceuticals, and industrial chemicals doc12092 none The main objective of this projectl is to investigate the structural and catalytic properties of Fe-Only hydrogenases. Hydrogenases catalyze reversible hydrogen oxidation and function physiologically to either recycle the reduced electron carriers that accumulate during a fermentative metabolism or couple the oxidation of hydrogen to the generation of reduced electron carriers that can be utilized in energy yielding processes. The metal-containing hydrogenases are classified according to their metal content and include those that contain both Ni and Fe (NiFe-hydrogenases) and those that contain just Fe (Fe-Only hydrogenases). These enzymes are of paramount importance in the metabolism of numerous microorganisms. In addition, since hydrogen is being explored as a future alternative fuel source, there is considerable interest in the details of these hydrogen producing biological catalysts. The studies will focus primarily on testing hypotheses that were developed as a result of the detailed structural analysis of the Fe-Only hydrogenase (CpI) isolated from the anaerobic soil microorganism Clostridium pasteurianum. The specific objectives are (1) additional structural and biochemical studies on CpI probing a number of remaining key questions with respect to the H Cluster structure and the role of the accessory [FeS] clusters; (2) site-specific amino acid substitution experiments on CpI to examine the role of the polypeptide environment of the H Cluster in catalysis and stability; (3) structural characterization of the second Fe-Only hydrogenase (CpII) from C. pasteurianum to ascertain its primary sequence and structural relationship to other Fe-Only hydrogenases and to probe the contributions of the environment of the H Cluster and the accessory FeS clusters in defining hydrogen oxidation versus proton reduction activities in the Fe-Only hydrogenases. The above objectives will be pursued by a multidisciplinary approach combining biochemical methods, spectroscopic methods and structure determination by X-ray diffraction methods to answer some of the key remaining questions with respect to the structure and function of Fe-Only hydrogenases doc12093 none The Institute for Genomic Research, TIGR, has developed tools for annotation and a complex web display for presenting this information to the scientific community. The annotation system includes software that allows its annotation staff to initate a bacterial annotation project, update that data with manual curation, and to electronically publish that data on TIGR s web site and at GenBank. TIGR web display includes a database system with the capability of representing all completed microbial genomes, graphical displays, and the ability to allow users to perform complex ad hoc queries on that data. The above tools were designed strictly for the purpose of running those software locally at TIGR or on TIGR web servers. The current project will provide resources for the development of software that will be used by scientists to run those software locally on their own machines. This will allow users easy access to annotation systems that are consistent with the well-developed set of standard operational procedures developed at TIGR and will help ensure consistency of annotation across many sequencing centers. By placing the software developed at TIGR in the hands of users, they will also be able to modify and improve upon the representation system, and use the graphical display to promote individual analysis of bacterial genome information doc12094 none Plant disease causes an estimated loss worldwide of $100B annually. A variety of strategies are being developed to protect plants against disease. One approach is to induce the plant s own natural defenses. This strategy is attractive since it can provide protection against a broad spectrum of pathogens. Broad-spectrum resistance to a wide array of pathogens, know as systemic acquired resistance (SAR), can be activated by infection with a pathogen or treatment with SAR-inducing natural chemicals such as salicylic acid (SA) and its synthetic functional analogues, INA or BTH. The development of strategies that control disease by manipulating endogenous plant defense responses will be very important for sustaining agricultural production and improving our environment and health. It is now well established that SA plays a key role(s) in the development of resistance in many, but not all, plant-pathogen systems. While our understanding of SA function(s) in disease resistance is far from complete, it is becoming increasingly clear that its role(s) is complex. This increase in the complexity of SA function(s) in defense is matched by the discovery in tobacco of multiple proteins with which SA interacts. An understanding of SA function(s) in defense against microbial pathogens will require the identification and characterization of these proteins, the major objective of this research. This project focuses on SABP2 and SABP3. SABP3 was recently shown to be the tobacco carbonic anhydrase (CA) that is located in the chloroplasts. The first objective is the completion of the cloning of SABP2. The sequence of seven peptides of SABP2 have been obtained and are being used to clone its gene. High priority will be to determine SABP2 s role in disease resistance. This will be done by silencing its expression using the PVX-based silencing system and or by obtaining a knockout mutation in the corresponding gene in Arabidopsis. The second major objective of this project is to determine the nature of SABP3 CA s anti-oxidant activity and whether SA alters this activity. Several approaches will be used. Currently there are available antisense CA transgenic tobacco, which have 98-99% reduction in their carbonic anhydrase enzymatic activity. These plants will be tested for their sensitivity to oxidative stress and resistance to pathogens. In addition, the effects on tobacco SABP3 CA s anti-oxidant activity will be tested. For this a mutant strain of yeast, designated Dnce103, will be employed. Dnce103 is very sensitive to oxidative stress due to a deletion of its CA-like gene. SABP3 CA expressed in this mutant overcomes its sensitivity to oxygen. It is hoped that SA will alter SABP3 CA s effect on this mutant doc12095 none Jeffery Little is known about the remarkable evolutionary changes that have occurred in cave animals. This proposal continues Dr. Jeffery s research on the evolution of eye degeneration in Astyanax mexicanus, a teleost consisting of an eyed surface form (surface fish) and numerous conspecific eyeless cave forms (cavefish). Although cavefish lack eyes as adults, they form small eye primordia during embryogenesis, which later arrest in development and degenerate. In concert with eye degeneration, more elaborate feeding and gustatory systems have evolved in cavefish. His previous grant resulted in three new discoveries. First, he showed that eye degeneration has evolved independently in some cavefish populations. Second, he showed that lens apoptosis plays a major role in eye degeneration. Accordingly, the cavefish eye can be restored by transplantation of a surface fish lens primordium into the optic cup of a cavefish embryo. Third, he showed that Pax6, a gene required for eye development, is downregulated at the anterior midline in cavefish embryos. This discovery led to the hypothesis that cavefish exhibit enhanced midline signaling, the major focus of this proposal. He now plan to test this hypothesis and the possibility that degeneration of eyes and elaboration of feeding and gustatory organs have evolved repeatedly in cavefish due to hyperactive midline signaling during embryogenesis. The first objective is to determine whether cavefish embryos show hyperactive (hedgehog and or nodal TGFB) signaling at the anterior midline. Preliminary evidence shows that sonic hedgehog (Shh) gene expression is enhanced at the anterior midline in a single cavefish population. The second objective is to determine whether hyperactive midline signaling and Pax6 downregulation also occur in independently evolved cavefish populations. This will indicate whether the same or different developmental mechanisms have been changed during cavefish evolution. The third objective is to determine the effect of perturbing midline signaling on Pax6 expression and eye degeneration. He will test the possibility that surface fish and cavefish eye phenotypes are interchangeable by altering the levels of midline signaling gene expression in surface fish and cavefish embryos. Preliminary results show that changes in the level of Shh expression can phenocopy surface and cavefish. Time permitting, he will also determine whether eye degeneration involves changes in the organizer of cavefish embryos and whether there is a developmental tradeoff eye development and enhancement of feeding and gustatory systems, thus explaining evolutionary forces resulting in the cavefish phenotype. He expects the results of this investigation to provide new insights into the mechanisms underlying an evolutionary change in morphology doc12096 none of the fracture geometry with some predictive power. Following this proof of principle, in Phase II, this method will now be turned into an interactive tool for studying and understanding fracture system behavior for oil and gas and environmental applications. To accomplish this, the forward models will be refined, the inversion algorithm will be tuned for this specific problem, and the algorithms will be validated using case studies. This new capability will likely provide many improvements to exploration, development, and reservoir performance activities by defining realistic input parameters for reservoir fluid flow simulators. It is in our national interest to develop new innovative and cost effective exploration and reservoir simulation technologies which will extend the useful lifetime of oil and gas reservoirs and extending the period of time that competitively priced oil and natural gas can be produced in this country. l doc12097 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase II project, Workflows to Enable Agile Virtual Enterprises (WEAVE), is envisioned as an on-line service to manage workflow for virtual enterprises. Phase I feasibility was undertaken in the context of virtual enterprises that arise in supply chain management. Phase II will do full-scale implementation of WEAVE to efficiently establish and manage supply chains in an e-commerce environment. Traditional supply chains are built with a small number of long-term suppliers because of the high cost of finding and establishing new supply sources. The Web and a variety of legacy data sources provide abundant information about possible supply sources. But this information is often dynamic and unstructured requiring manual effort to discover. XSB, Inc has developed technology to infer supplier capabilities, giving manufacturers an instant view of who makes what across their own supply chain as well as thousands of potential suppliers across the web. WEAVE will implement this technology to locate sources of supply. This ability to locate sources for parts will be integrated with a system to plan and manage purchasing strategies for a user s complete bill-of-materials. Using WEAVE small-to-medium manufacturers can quickly create supply chains that is relevant for their enterprise. In the long-term WEAVE will serve as the infrastructure for establishing a peer-to-peer supply network doc12098 none SUMMARY: The muscle type nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (AChR) is located in the vertebrate neuromuscular junction and in the electric organ of some species of fish. Its function is to promote the depolarization of the endplate. As a member of the ligand-gated ion channel (LGIC) superfamily, its structural and functional properties are closely related to those of other members of the family such as the neuronal AChR, the GABAA receptor, the glycine receptor and others. The experiments in this proposal have been designed to study the very basics of the receptor-ligand interaction and channel gating, such as which residues on the receptor interact with which functional groups on the agonist, and the contributions made by the individual agonist binding sites to channel gating. The long-term goal of this project is to facilitate the understanding of the properties of the AChR and LGIC, in general. The proposed experiments will utilize single-channel patch clamp coupled to the kinetic analysis techniques which will allow detailed studies of the effects of changes in the structure of the receptor or the ligand, and to correlate them with changes in the functional response, i.e. affinity, gating or desensitization, of the receptor. The analysis of the interactions between the receptor and the ligand will be examined using thermodynamic mutant cycle analysis. This method is based on the determination of whether mutations are additive or not, and allows to establish whether amino acid residues or functional groups interact with each other. The AChR is used as a biophysical model system as it possesses relatively simple kinetic properties and a high single-channel conductance (or signal-to-noise ratio), necessary for studies involving kinetic analysis. The results of these studies can be applied in studies of other LGIC due to a high degree of homology between the members of the LGIC superfamily doc12099 none Neuman To efficiently utilize and protect subsurface water supplies, one must quantify fluid flow and solute transport in complex hydrogeologic environments. Such environments exhibit random spatial variations in hydraulic and transport properties on a multiplicity of scales. The trend has been to describe this variability geostatistically and to analyze subsurface fluid flow and solute transport stochastically. The common method of stochastic analysis is computational Monte Carlo simulation. We propose an alternative, which allows one to compute leading multiscale conditional ensemble moments of groundwater flow and transport directly on the basis of nonlocal (integro-differential) equations that are distribution free. The approach rests on a body of work published by the PI, his students and coworkers over the last few years. It provides forward predictions of flow but not transport, conditioned on measurements of hydraulic conductivity but not head or concentration. We propose to fill these gaps by developing a forward computational algorithm for transport and inverse algorithms for both flow and transport, within a multiscale framework proposed by us recently. No such inverse or multiscale algorithms presently exist, and their development would constitute an important conceptual and algorithmic breakthrough. In particular, our objectives are to develop, within a multiscale stochastic framework, (1) an inverse algorithm that allows conditioning moments equations of steady state groundwater flow on measured hydraulic head and conductivity; (2) a high-accuracy forward conditional moment algorithm to predict advective solute transport in random steady state velocity fields, and to assess prediction errors; and (3) an inverse algorithm that allows conditioning moments equations of advective solute transport on measured concentration, hydraulic head and conductivity doc12100 none This dissertation research in ecological anthropology studies the factors affecting traditional pasture use and common property management in a highland biosphere reserve in Ancash, Peru. The project studies the interaction of ecotourism and pastoral land use among subsistence-based agro-pastoral households. The theories explored in the research contribute to our understanding of individual decision-making, common property resource management, and conservation in mixed subsistence-market economies. Hypotheses will be tested that link changes in herd size and composition to incentives generated by the ecotourism industry; specifically that household earnings are being invested in livestock and that the preference is shifting toward animals suited for the portering and transport services demanded by visiting tourists. Household surveys of market participation, monetary income and livestock ownership will help to track recent changes in herd size and composition associated with recent changes in household economic activity. The study will extend the analysis of subsistence-market articulation by considering how the socio-economic changes associated with market involvement affect the use of common property pastures located in the core-protected area of the reserve. Hypotheses will be tested that link decisions regarding the use of common property pastures to differences in household wealth and labor, and will additionally explore how existing common property institutions manage the resource use of diverse households. The spatial and temporal herding behaviors of sample households will be assessed by participant observation and time allocation data, which will be linked to an existing geographic information system. Observations of spatial and temporal herding behaviors will be supplemented by vegetation soil analyses of common property pastures. This research will contribute to an understanding of the ecology of resource use at different scales of the household, community, and landscape; as well as further ongoing debates about the sustainability of development options common to many biosphere reserves. It will also contribute to the training of a young social scientist and advance our knowledge about this important highland region doc12101 none Recent studies in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana have greatly expanded our understanding of the complex light signal transduction networks mediating a range of developmental and environmental responses. However, as studies rapidly progress in Arabidopsis, our knowledge of this complex pathway in the distantly related monocots is far less complete. Differences in phytochrome gene family organization, plant physiology and selection pressures have likely contributed to the divergence of light signal transduction pathways between higher eudicots such as Arabidopsis thaliana and monocotyledonous grasses such as Zea mays. The goal of this project is to begin the detailed characterization of red far-red light signaling pathways in maize utilizing classical and reverse genetics strategies, molecular genetic analyses and microarray technologies. A comprehensive analysis of phytochrome gene family structure and expression in maize will be conducted as an important first step in the analysis of light signaling pathways in maize. Through tools developed by NSF- and government-funding genomics initiatives, transposon-tagged alleles have been identified in two of the three phytochrome gene family members in maize. Genetic and molecular characterizations of these mutants will include the use of microarray technology to compare nuclear and chloroplast gene expression profiles in wild type and these phyA and phyB mutants under a range of light conditions. Finally, red far-red light responses will be examined in a core set of 80 US, Canadian, European, and South American accessions that best represent diversity in the maize germplasm pool. These studies should provide insights into the underlying genetic diversity regulating light responses in maize doc12102 none The PIs will test the GLOBEC core hypothesis that production regimes in the Coastal Gulf of Alaska and Califomia Current System covary, and are coupled through atmospheric and oceanic forcing, through comparative analysis of zooplankton populations and measures of atmospheric and oceanic forcing in different regions of the NE Pacific. During a Phase 1 study, the PIs uncovered substantial changes in the California Current zooplankton (Region I) on interdecadal time scales (e.g., changes in salp and euphausiid regimes) as well as interannual time scales (e.g., El Nino-related changes in copepod diversity and zooplankton biomass). For Phase 2 , the PIs will focus on Region II of the CCS off central northern California to determine whether the pronounced perturbations that they detected are spatially coherent in different regions of the CCS and are linked to zooplankton fluctuations elsewhere in the NE Pacific, specifically off Oregon and in the Coastal Gulf of Alaska. In addition, estimates of instantaneous, stage-specific mortality rates for euphausiid populations of the NE Pacific will be made using lipofuscin-based measures of euphausiid age and inverse modeling techniques. Long-term stability in food web structure also will be investigated using zooplankton stable isotopes doc12103 none This grant will provide partial support for the sixth consecutive FASEB Summer Research Conference on Chromatin and Transcription, to be held on July 7-12, , at the Conference Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado. The goal of this highly successful series of meetings is to foster interactions between researchers who study DNA-templated processes with individuals who study chromatin structure and organization. These disciplines are moving together at a rapid pace and are providing much new information for the basic biological sciences. The meeting s central topic is the relationship between chromatin and transcription. The regulation of chromatin impacts other critical biological areas; for instance, there are important links between chromatin and nuclear structure, chromosome organization, and the cell cycle, particularly relating to recent discoveries about histone modification. Moreover, questions of genomic stability and instability, which are relevant to genetic disease, will be addressed in a session on developmental epigenetic regulation. The timing and location of the conference are ideal for productive and interactive discussions about data in these rapidly evolving areas. NSF support will be used to help new and young investigators to attend the meeting and present their results in an oral format doc12104 none Genetic transformation is a naturally occurring, inducible gene replacement process that is relatively simple and very efficient; yet the mechanism of this natural bacterial system for gene therapy is not understood. Competence for genetic transformation in pneumococcus (Streptococcus pneumoniae) occurs during a brief period of highly specialized protein synthesis, coordinated among all cells of an actively growing culture. During a period of approximately 10-20 minutes, the competent cells can transport DNA strands into the cytoplasm and direct them so as to replace homologous genes in the chromosome very efficiently. Central elements of the coordination mechanism are a secreted 17-amino-acid peptide pheromone, a two-component regulatory system that senses the peptide pheromone signal, and a putative accessory sigma factor. To identify genes involved in the pheromone sensing and DNA-processing mechanisms and to determine their roles, this project relies on standard genetic techniques and the efficient gene replacement provided by the natural transformation process itself, in combination with molecular methods in vitro, recombinant DNA cloning using new vectors in pneumococcus, and DNA microarray gene expression analysis. To establish the genetics of the system, gene disruption mutations are made by combining DNA cassettes obtained by polymerase chain reaction synthesis followed by direct insertion into the pneumococcal chromosome. The project will identify and determine the function of genes of this natural transformation system in two broad areas: (a) genes allowing cell-to-cell communication for regulation of this pathway in response to a measure of population density, and (b) genes of the pathway that transports extracellular DNA into the cell and processes it for genetic recombination doc12105 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop and test algorithms for active control of blade vibration and engine stability (stall and surge) using an eddy current sensor (ECS) array. The approach utilizes signal analysis and diagnostic tools in active control algorithms for the detection of engine faults. Phase II will extend the functionality of the ECS system beyond diagnostics to active and automatic real-time control of gas turbine engines. An ECS array is currently the favored sensor system for installation on the Joint Strike Fighter, in which a software system upgrade capable of using ECS data to compute the necessary indicators and estimate the disturbances needed is desirable for active vibration and engine stability control. It would reduce the number of new sensors needed for active control and potentially save millions of dollars. Large commercial markets are indicated in commercial aircraft and gas turbine power plants doc12106 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop innovations pertaining to optrodes (optical sensors) and electro-optical instrumentation for advanced material characterization. Specifically, this project will develop the first commercially available high-resolution volumetric dilatometer. In addition, the innovations will allow for: (1) a linear dilatometer that possesses a resolution that is 2-3 orders of magnitude better than its conventional linear counterparts; (2) an optical control system for micro-translation stages; (3) an optrode for thin film characterization that possesses a linear resolution exceeding 1 nanometer; and (4) an ultra-fast, high-resolution spectrometer that will enable commercialization of three optical sensors (pressure, temperature, and load) suitable for harsh environments. Potential commercial applications are expected in electronics and microelectronics manufacturing for dilatometry, thin films analysis, micro-translation stages, ultra-fast spectroscopy, and various optical sensors doc12107 none Dr. Scott L. Anderson of the University of Utah is funded for his research on mode-selective differential scattering studies of ion-molecule reaction dynamics by the Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division. This scattering technique will be used, in conjunction with theory, to elucidate the detailed mechnisms for reaction of polyatomic cations. Reactions of formaldehyde cation will be used to probe the effects of collisional energy and vibrations on resulting chemistry, and direct-dynamics simulations of the reaction dynamics will be done in collaboration with Dr. William Hase. Synchrotron radiation studies of reactions of water with other small cations, not amenable to laboratory state-selection, will be made in collaboration with Dr. Cheuk Ng and Dr. Rainer Dressler. REMPI photoelectron spectroscopy probing Rydberg state properties and developing new cation state-selection routes will be done, and the reactions of these ions will be studied. Reaction dynamics among polyatomic molecules generally depend on kinetic energy and upon how internal energy is partitioned among internal degrees of freedom. Laser excitation and ion scattering methods will be used to tune selected reactants to various states of excitation and the resulting collision and reaction dynamics will be experimentally measured and theoretically calculated and simulated. These studies will provide critically important advances in our understanding of important gas-phase reactions important in combustion and interstellar chemistries doc12108 none for DMS - This projects mainly deals with some central issues in Kaehler geometry: the uniqueness and existence of extremal Kaehler metrics and as well how to obtain such a solution. On the Kaehler Ricci flow problem, I am working with G. Tian. Our main results are: in any Kaehler-Einstein manifolds, if the initial metric has positive bisectional curvature, then the flow converges exponentially to a unique Kaehler-Einstein metric. I plan to work with him to eliminate with the assumption of positive bisectional curvature or the assumption of Kaehler Einstein metrics. On the problem of geodesic, the main results of my research are: a) there exists a geodesic with second derivatives uniformly bounded, between any two Kaehler metrics in a Kaehler class. A direct consequence of this result is that the constant scalar curvature metric is unique in each Kaehler class if the first Chern class of the manifold is negative. b) the space of Kaehler metrics is a metric space and it is non-positively curved in the sense of Alexandrov. On the problem of geodesic, I want to improve the regularity of geodesic to three derivatives uniformly bounded (or to understand when this regularity might fail). That will be a very important consequence in Kaehler geometry. Kaehler Einstein metric arose naturally from Physics, algebraic geometry and some other diverse areas of mathematics. Extremal Kaehler metric is a natural generalization of these concepts by E. Calabi. The method of finding these metrics is by solving a totally nonlinear elliptic partial differential equation on manifolds. Most of the time, one can not find solution explicitly. Then one has to rely on various kind a priori estimates to determined when there exists a solution and if the solution metric should be unique. In this project, we will develop some new techniques to handle these difficult estimates. And these techniques will have impact in other related problems of mathematics doc12109 none This project will investigate adaptations to severe oxygen lack in the freshwater turtle, Chrysemys picta bellii, generally regarded as the air-breathing vertebrate most tolerant to oxygen lack. Specific objectives are to understand the role of the turtle s shell in lactic acid buffering, to clarify the fate of lactic acid and its rate of removal during recovery from a period of anoxia, to explore further the response of the turtle s heart and heart muscle to oxygen lack, and to define the mechanisms and limitations of oxygen uptake directly from the water. A broad objective is to test the hypothesis that this animal possesses no extraordinary resistance to anoxia per se, but that its effective shell buffering and its metabolic depression slow the secondary effects of hypoxia and thereby greatly extend its tolerance duration. To achieve these specific objectives, the following approaches will be used. 1) Shell function: Shell blood supply will be established using corrosion casts. Shell blood flow will be measured using proton-activated microspheres that trap in the capillaries, and the importance of shell blood flow to exchange processes evaluated by tying off selected blood vessels. The kinetics and limits of shell blood Ca2+ and lactate exchange will be tested by incubating shell samples in acid media, and the mechanical consequences of demineralization of shell following anoxia determined. 2) Lactic acid metabolism: Lactic acid removal from the system during recovery from anoxic submergence will be compared in turtles at rest and while engaged in moderate aerobic activity swimming in a flume. Lactate metabolism by skeletal muscle will be tested using radioactively-labeled lactate, and by measuring lactate uptake by isolated muscle strips. Excretion of lactate during recovery will be tested at different plasma lactate concentrations using labeled lactate. 3) Heart function: Cardiac responses to graded hypoxia will be observed in isolated ventricular strips, in perfused hearts in vitro, and in intact surgically cannulated turtles with ECG electrodes. 4) Oxygen uptake from water: Oxygen consumption of turtles submerged in aerated water at 3 and 10oC will be measured, and the effect of blocking possible avenues of oxygen uptake will be assessed. The importance of hemoglobin to aquatic O2 uptake at low temperature will be evaluated by comparing turtles with normal and experimentally-reduced hemoglobin levels in their blood. To achieve the general objective, the comparative approach will be utilized. Shell and cardiac muscle characteristics of selected species of turtles, both aquatic and terrestrial, representing various lineages will be studied, and compared to the painted turtle. If possible, these will be animals whose anoxic tolerance has already been studied. Shell size, shell mechanical properties, mineral concentrations, and in vitro ion exchange capacities will be measured for each species. In addition, resistance to oxygen lack by ventricular muscle strips will be studied on each animal. For the latter protocol, two outgroup reptiles, an aquatic snake and a terrestrial lizard will also be studied. Hypoxia is a fundamental environmental stress experienced by many organisms. Understanding the particular adaptations that permit a specialized animal such as the freshwater turtle to resist this stress has considerable general significance. This project therefore can contribute to knowledge on a particular animal specialist, and can also reveal principles that may apply to other less-adapted species. Because the project consists of a variety of individual projects, it also lends itself well to student involvement and will provide opportunities for research experience and training to both undergraduate and graduate students doc12110 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II Project will develop a fully integrated process for applying a well-bonded, bioactive coating to the stem of an orthopedic hip implant by a novel Cold Gas Dynamic Spray (CGDS), or Hyperkinetic Deposition process. The new process is a potential major advance in the state-of-the-art for surface modification of medical implants. The medical community hitherto has relied primarily on plasma spraying to activate implant surfaces. Plasma spraying is a cost-effective means of applying the coating material but is far from ideal. In particular, the high temperatures experienced by the hydroxyapatite feed powder during plasma spraying can seriously degrade its compositional integrity and thus its bioactive properties. The cold spray process eliminates this problem, and enables, for the first time, high-surface-area nanostructured hydroxyapatite powder to be incorporated into the implant surface without sacrificing its intrinsic bioactivity. As an added benefit the implant surface is left in a state of compression, which should extend the service life of the implant by eliminating the possibility of surface cracking caused by low-cycle fatigue. The commercial applications for this project will be to improve the life of implants doc12111 none This grant supports theoretical research on the properties of strongly correlated electron systems; in particular, the behavior of liquid crystalline phases in these systems. There is strong support for the idea that the liquid crystal phases of highly correlated electronic systems have considerable local crystalline (charge) order. Various electronic liquid and liquid crystalline phases of doped Mott insulators are expected on theoretical grounds and or are known experimentally (especially from neutron diffraction and x-ray scattering experiments) to possess considerable local stripe order. There is also clear theoretical and compelling, although indirect, experimental evidence that there is a large degree of stripe order in the anisotropic metallic state observed at low temperatures in quantum Hall systems in higher Landau levels. The metallic phases of the low-density two dimensional electron gas with rs less than, but near to the critical density for Wigner crystallization, are expected, theoretically, to have a large degree of crystalline order. The normal state of quasi-one dimensional charge and spin density wave insulators has long been known to possess substantial (phase disordered) local density wave order. Even ordinary quantum Hall liquids, especially those at very low filling factor, are known to possess incipient crystalline order, as indicated by the deep magneto-roton minimum in the collective mode spectrum. It is proposed to undertake a systematic theoretical study of the implications of this statement. In particular, we will find defined limiting situations in which the intuitive, but vague, notion of local crystalline order can be made precise, and to explore the consequences of local crystallinity on the electronic properties of highly correlated electronic liquids. Special attention will be paid to the physics of the fluctuating stripe phases of the high temperature superconductors, to the incipient glassy character of such a locally crystalline liquid, and to the relation of this study to the theory of classical supercooled liquids doc12112 none When cells make proteins for export (secretory proteins), it is critically important that the proteins are as they should be. If not, there is a quality control mechanism, termed Endoplasmic Reticulum-Associated Degradation (ERAD) that detects aberrant proteins and destroys them. The importance of cleansing the secretory pathway of aberrant proteins is underscored by the fact that if mis-folded proteins accumulate in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), they induce the unfolded protein response (UPR), a cellular response that can lead in extreme cases to programmed cell death. Drs. McCracken and Brodsky originally discovered that ERAD involves the selection of aberrant proteins (ERAD substrates), transport of the substrate proteins back across the ER membrane into the cytoplasm, and subsequent proteolytic degradation of the substrate proteins via the proteasome. This pathway has since been shown by several laboratories to be involved in the degradation of at least 20 different substrate proteins and to be conserved across eukaryotic species from yeast to humans. Subsequent work demonstrated that at least two ER-lumenal chaperones, BiP (KAR2) and calnexin, are required for ERAD export of soluble protein substrates. One of these, BiP, is also required for protein import into the ER. Brodsky and McCracken have recently identified mutations in BiP that are specific for ERAD, and as part of this project they will biochemically characterize these mutations (plus others that they plan to identify or create via site-directed mutagenesis) in order to determine what aspects of BiP structure and activity are specifically required for ERAD. McCracken and Brodsky have also demonstrated that the ERAD pathway for an integral membrane protein, CFTR, is substantially different from that for soluble substrate proteins and involves a different set of chaperones. Neither BiP nor calnexin are required for CFTR degradation, but a cytosolic Hsp70 chaperone, Ssa1p, is; conversely, Ssa1p is not required for ERAD of soluble substrate proteins. As part of this project, the molecular basis for this distinction will be explored. Specifically, two hypotheses will be examined using genetic and biochemical techniques: (1) Ssa1p is required for CFTR ubiquitination; and (2) Ssa1p is required to maintain an aggregation-prone cytoplasmic domain of CFTR in solution. A tabulation of the factors necessary and dispensable for the degradation of multiple ERAD substrates indicates that the requirements for the degradation of ERAD substrates may or may not utilize common factors. Thus, the continued identification of genes required for the turnover of a given substrate is essential. To this end, Brodsky and McCracken have isolated mutations in which the degradation of the Z variant of Alpha1-Protease Inhibitor (A1PiZ) is compromised in yeast. In addition, because the presence of mis-folded proteins in the ER activate both ERAD and the UPR, known UPR-target genes that are required for the degradation of A1PiZ have been identified. As part of this project, McCracken and Brodsky will carry out a functional characterization of both classes of genes necessary for the proteolysis of A1PiZ; results from this study are expected to provide a better mechanistic understanding of the ERAD selection and targeting process. In sum, these studies represent a combination of genetic and biochemical methods aimed toward understanding a recently discovered cellular pathway in cell biology. The project will employ multiple approaches and will benefit from the synergistic expertise of the two collaborating scientists, Drs. Ardythe McCracken and Jeffrey Brodsky, who initially discovered the ERAD pathway. The project will also continue to contribute to both classroom and laboratory research instruction of undergraduate and graduate students doc12113 none Hogan Funds are requested for partial support of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Society for Developmental Biology, to be held July 18-22, at the University of Washington in Seattle. The Society has held this meeting since its founding in , missing only two years during World War II. This is an indication of its commitment and succeeding in holding meetings of the highest scientific quality, as well as a reflection of the community s interest on the field of developmental biology. In all the scientific sessions work on diverse organisms including plants, invertebrates and vertebrates will be presented. Sixty-nine speakers have been invited to tell us about some of their latest findings in the following areas: Gamete Formation and Function, Organ Building, Patterning of the Nervous System, Diversity of Form, Color Patterns, Analysis of Complex Systems, Cell Interactions and Signaling Pathways (2 session), Cell Motility and Guidance, Regulation of Proliferation and Cell Growth, Cell Fate Determination, Plasticity of the Differentiated State, and Developmental Biology and Medicine. An additional thirty speakers have been chosen from submitted abstracts for platform presentations, allowing the inclusion of the latest results and providing an opportunity for postdoctoral fellows and graduate students to talk about their works. Special interest workshops on Stem Cells, Left-Right Asymmetry, Developmental Biology and Disease Vectors, and Imaging and Cell Marking will be held. The Education Symposium will center on the very current topic of Ethics and it will include a discussion period with audience participation. Local teachers and high school students will be invited to attend this session. We expect an attendance of about 700 people, and most of them will present their new data in the two dedicated poster sessions, one after lunch and the other in the evening. We are certain that this format allows us to continue to emphasize the best science and to provide a forum to bring together junior and senior investigators, and to allow them to exchange ideas on science, education and the role of science in today s society. Merit-based travel awards will be available to students and junior postdoctoral fellows, as well as Latin American faculty and students to attend the meeting doc12114 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will further develop, test, and demonstrate a novel approach for characterizing nano-scale powders and their agglomerates. Nanostructures are a novel family of materials that allow customization of structural, electrochemical, electrical, electronic, optical, magnetic, and chemical properties. The use of nanomaterials to fabricate valuable devices and to manufacture new products depends in large part on the ability to characterize these materials during synthesis, processing, and device production. Current high resolution characterization techniques are off line, slow, expensive, and unreliable; the few on-line particle sizing instruments available make questionable assumptions (e.g., that all particles are spherical in shape) which introduce unnecessary error into the diagnosis. The commercial applications of this project is to use nano-scale powders, which are the fundamental building blocks of many products used in a wide variety of industries (e.g., advanced ceramics, pharmaceuticals, consumer products, etc.). As the technology develops, the application areas will increase. The ability to characterize nano-scale particles and agglomerates on-line is crucial for controlling the quality of products and for the invention of new products and processes. In addition, characterization of environmental particulates is critical for understanding air quality concerns and health effects - leading to improve clean air regulations and monitoring doc12115 none Dr. Gavin s laboratory has identified a novel unconventional myosin, Myo1p, in the model organism Tetrahymena thermophila, a ciliated protozoan. Approximately 2.7 kb of MYO1 have been cloned and sequenced thus far. To uncover the functions of Myo1p, targeted gene disruption was used to create a Tetrahymena strain that lacked a functional MYO1 gene. Transformed MYO1 cells had a reduced rate of food vacuole formation, and the macronucleus frequently failed to elongate properly during amitotic cell division resulting in grossly unequal segregation of DNA to progeny. In order to test additional hypotheses for Myo1p function in endocytosis and nuclear segregation, a full-length MYO1 sequence will have to be acquired and new reagents developed. This one-year project involves the completion of MYO1 cloning and sequencing and the creation of expression constructs for GFP-actin, GFP-tubulin, and GFP-Myo1p fusion proteins. PCR-based library screening of both genomic DNA and cDNA libraries will be used to complete the cloning and sequencing of MYO1. Screening is in progress and will be continued over the next year. In addition, RACE will be used to confirm the 5 and 3 ends of the cloned MYO1. Two different approaches involving standard recombinant protocols will be used to create GFP constructs for expression in Tetrahymena. In one approach, GFP-tagged genes (MYO1, actin, or tubulin) will be linked to pVGF-1, a rDNA-based replicative vector. Another approach for creating GFP constructs that will be used is to insert a GFP tagging construct at the 5 end of the gene sequence of interest. The functions and structure-function relationships of conventional myosins, such as skeletal muscle myosin, have been the subject of intense study for many years, and are reasonably well understood. In contrast, the various unconventional non-muscle myosins have only recently begun to attract serious research attention, and our understanding of the roles they play in the life and functionality of different types of cells is only slowly beginning to emerge. This project is expected to add to both the knowledge base of unconventional myosins and to our understanding of the biology of single-celled organisms such as the ciliated protozoan used in these studies doc12116 none This award to WTEC, Inc. is for organization of a workshop at NSF in February that will provide a preliminary assessment of U.S. and international research activities in quantum information science. Quantum information science (QIS) is an emerging field of science and technology that draws on the disciplines of physical science, mathematics, computer science, and engineering. Its aim is to understand how fundamental laws of quantum mechanics can be harnessed to dramatically improve the acquisition, transmission, and processing of information. The exciting scientific opportunities offered by QIS are attracting the interest of a growing community of scientists and engineers, both nationally and internationally. Although the U.S. maintains a leadership role in this research, major centers of excellence exist abroad, principally in Japan, Europe, and Australia. The goal of the workshop is to gather information by a panel of U.S. experts for the purposes of planning a more extensive global study of QIS. Its scope is to identify the leading individuals, institutions, and centers of excellence in international research and development in the field. A full international technology assessment study may then be organized separately to complete the major study. Several Divisions in the Directorates for Engineering, for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, and for Computer and Information Science and Engineering at NSF are supporting this award doc12117 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II project will develop a compact cloud spectrometer and impactor (CSI) for the measurement and study of condensed water in the atmosphere. Condensed water includes cloud droplets and ice particles. Phase I demonstrated the feasibility of integrating a counterflow virtual impactor (CVI) for condensed water content (CWC) measurement together with a new forward scattering spectrometer system for measurement of the cloud droplet size distribution. This combined airborne instrument will be considerably lighter than previous versions of the two separate instruments, and easier to use. The objective of Phase II is a commercial, integrated instrument for the study of atmospheric condensed water content and droplet size distribution. The accurate measurement of these parameters is important in weather prediction as well as understanding global climate change. This instrumentation will have worldwide application, and the users will be government, university, and commercial atmospheric research institutions doc12118 none Professor Justin DuBois in the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his studies on catalytic insertation reactions for the animation of C-H bonds. Mechanistic studies will be carried out with the aim of developing a model of the C-H insertation reaction. The new methodology will be applied towards the synthesis of polyfunctionalized amine-based targets, such as amino alcohols, amino acids, and diamines. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor DuBois is developing new catalytic methods to form bonds between carbon and nitrogen atoms. This will potentially yield a process to convert low cost, broadly available organic compounds consisting of only carbon and hydrogen into more highly functionalized, value-added organic materials doc12119 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project, ITAL-2 (Interactive Tools for Active Learning) will develop comprehensive e-Learning solution for conventional academic Science, Mathematics, and Educational Technology (SMET) education and for corporate training. The project product, Active Learning Suites (ALS), is a highly interactive online learning content delivery and management system. It includes an Active Shell, Simulations and Virtual Experiments interactive lessons, a Problem Solving Tutor, a scriptable Instructor s Agent, an Assessment system, Authoring tools, and more. ALS uses real-life objects and situations, such as those related to home, telecommunications and sports, as the context for science investigations. Immersion in these contexts that are populated with appropriate sets of objects enables learners to discover the connections between the scientific theory and its practical applications in technology. Authoring tools helps instructors to easily assemble a single e-learning environment from heterogeneous educational resources and the WWW. ALS can facilitate both problem-based learning and more conventional learning strategies. It can be used on a campus or in a school equipped with either stand-alone computers or a local network, at home (self-learning), in a corporate setting, or via distance learning over the Intranet and Internet. Active Learning Suites (ALS) offer a wide variety of lessons that can be designed to address many different audiences: (1) two-year college students enrolled in science, technology and engineering programs; (2) non-science majors; (3) high school students taking science and technology courses; and (4) instructors and technicians of telecommunications companies. The approach of immersing students or technicians in practical problems has great potential for facilitating understanding of science doc12120 none Amnesia and other related cognitive problems are often a result of dysfunction of one of three interconnected memory systems: the temporal lobe, the diencephalon, and the basal forebrain. The goal of the present research is to use behavioral and neurochemical assays to examine how the diencephalon modulates the integrative role of the hippocampus-a key temporal lobe structure in memory processing. To investigate these issues a rodent model of diencephalic amnesia, pyrithiamine-induced thiamine deficiency, will be used. Pyrithiamine-induced thiamine deficiency creates lesions within the diencephalon, disrupting many important memory pathways. The loss of diencephalic structures may down-regulate the activation of other memory-related structures such as the hippocampus thereby impairing their contributions to learning and memory processing. To investigate diencephalic-hippocampal interactions in memory processing the proposed studies will use in- vivo microdialysis to determine whether acetylcholine release in the hippocampus, a marker of memory-related activation, is altered in rats with these lesions when learning spatial tasks. The goal of this Minority Career Advancement award is to build upon the recipient s prior research on animal models of memory dysfunction and allow her to advance her research program by learning techniques (in-vivo microdialysis and HPLC) to examine functional neurochemical changes associated with learning and memory. This project will provide new insights into understanding how several memory-related brain structures interact doc12121 none Professor Paul Barbara of the University of Texas at Austin is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to study single molecule spectroscopy of organic polymer films, including poly-phenylene-vinylene polymer, a fluorescent conjugated polymer. Among the other systems to be examined are photo-driven polymeric motors and model single-molecule photonic devices. Polymer conformation, conformational relaxation, photophysics and chain-chain interactions are some of the issues. Ultrapure conducting polymers are to be prepared and their photophysics studied in the presence of charges, as in a LED device. The PI proposes to attempt femtosecond time-resolved measurements on these single molecules. The materials to be studied are important in electro-optic, opto-electronic and photovoltaic applications doc12122 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II project will continue development of a new electrochromic device based on self-assembly of organic nanomaterials. Phase I used these materials to create laboratory scale devices. Precise control of the material composition at the nanometer (nm) scale, combined with the thin layers deposited (40 nm thick), allowed switching speeds of 25-50 milliseconds for the first time, which are nearly fast enough for display applications. Further, it was found that these materials, fabricated in the solid state, could be switched by applying only 1.0 volt. Phase II will focus on optimizing device performance, developing tri-state and multi-color devices, and evaluating performance under environmental conditions necessary for commercial product development. Markets for the technology are very large and range from automotive self-dimming rear-view mirrors to smart windows for residential and commercial buildings, smart glasses, and display products. Phase III is planned for manufacturing scale-up and will be conducted in an industrial partnership doc12123 none Neural networks are dynamic systems that enable organisms to adapt to and learn about complex and variable environments. At the core of this adaptive process is the phenomenon of synaptic plasticity, an alteration in the efficacy of a synapse due either to intrinsic processes (e.g. activity of the neuron) or extrinsic processes (e.g. neuromodulators released by other neurons). The functional significance of synaptic plasticity will be examined by focusing upon a specific set of identified inhibitory neurons within a well-defined neural circuit in the marine mollusc Aplysia. Inhibitory processes can have profound consequences on neural function, yet have received comparatively little experimental emphasis. By focusing on a specific synaptic process in a specific set of inhibitory neurons, these studies will allow for a simultaneous exploration of the function of both synaptic plasticity and inhibition in behavioral regulation. Two basic issues will be examined, integrating experiments at the level of synapses with the level of behavior: (1) The role of synaptic inhibition in behavioral regulation will be explored, examining the hypothesis that plasticity of inhibition may serve as a dynamic gain control mechanism that can regulate behavior across rapidly-changing environmental conditions. (2) The role of inhibition in learning will be explored, by examining the hypothesis that plasticity of inhibition may serve to dynamically regulate the capacity for neural networks to express learning-related changes. Information obtained from this project could help to elucidate general computational principles utilized by a neural networks to generate adaptive modifications, which can potentially be employed in algorithms usable by other computational or information processing devices (e.g. smart machines). From a theoretical perspective, it could address fundamental questions concerning the nature of adaptive modifications within neural networks that are required for the expression of different forms of learning and memory doc12065 none Membrane-anchored, mammalian cytochromes b5 are located in the endoplasmic reticulum (microsomal or Mc cyt b5) and the outer membranes of mitochondria (OM cyt b5). Although Mc cytochromes b5 have been identified from a number of mammalian sources, the only OM cyt b5 that has been positively identified to date originates from rat liver. The three-dimensional structures of rat OM cyt b5 and the Mc cytochromes b5 are very similar. Nonetheless, rat OM cyt b5 has a much lower reduction potential and much higher stability toward chemical and thermal denaturation than the Mc cytochromes b5. Furthermore, hemin in rat OM cyt b5 is kinetically trapped at physiological temperatures. From amino acid sequence alignments, crystal structure comparisons, and molecular dynamics simulations, several amino acid residues can be identified as potential determinants of the unusual biophysical properties of rat OM cyt b5. Consequently, a systematic study will be conducted in which these residues in the rat OM protein are replaced with the corresponding residues in the bovine Mc isoform. These studies will be performed with the expectation of decreasing the stability and kinetic barriers for hemin release of rat OM cyt b5. A complementary study will be carried out in which the stability of bovine Mc cyt b5 will be increased by incorporating the stabilizing features found in the rat OM protein. It is also important to establish whether the biophysical properties of rat OM cyt b5 are restricted to this protein, or rather are common to mitochondrial cytochromes b5. Consequently, the gene coding for human testis cyt b5, a protein very likely to be the human analogue of rat OM cyt b5, will be synthesized, placed in a vector suitable for high level expression and characterized for its biophysical properties doc12125 none Understanding the mechanisms of stabilization of protein structure represents one of the major aspects of the protein folding problem. The contributions of various short-range interactions, such as hydrogen bonding, the hydrophobic effect, and configurational entropy, to protein stability have been well documented. However, it is becoming more and more evident that the long-range electrostatic interactions between charged protein groups are also important contributors to protein structure and stability. The proposed work has an overall goal to explore the relation between the charge-charge interactions on the protein surface and the protein stability by engineering a thermostable protein by redesigning the charge-charge interactions on the protein surface, and analyzing the optimized charge-charge interactions. The theoretical part of the work is based on the calculation of the charge-charge interactions in proteins using Tanford-Kirkwood approach with Bashford-Karplus approximation (TK-BK procedure). The experimental measurement of the stabilities of the protein variants designed using TK-BK predictions will be done using differential scanning calorimetry, or using chemical (urea) induced denaturation monitored by the changes in the circular dichroism or fluorescence intensity properties. The fundamental importance of this research is that using a combination of theoretical calculations and experimental measurements the relationship between charge-charge interactions and the protein stability will be explored. From the practical point this research will provide the foundation for the design of proteins stable at extreme temperatures. This will benefit the industrial use of proteins where thermostability of enzymes is in many cases the largest obstacle doc12126 none Honrath This two-year award for US-Portugal collaboration on assessing the impacts of continental emissions from North America and Europe upon tropospheric composition in the North Atlantic region involves Richard Honrath of Michigan Technological University and Paulo Fialho at the University of the Azores, Portugal. Measurements of ozone, carbon monoxide, black carbon, and meteorological parameters will be made at the Pico International Atmospheric Chemistry Observatory for a two-year period to test the hypothesis that significant formation of ozone occurs in plumes from North America advected toward the central North Atlantic. The US researchers bring to this collaboration expertise in atmospheric chemistry measurements at remote field sites in the North Atlantic region and they will provide the measurement station infrastructure. This is complemented by Portuguese expertise in atmospheric and land conditions in the Azores region; the Portuguese will provide black carbon measurements. The results of this research are expected to contribute to an understanding of anthropogenic impacts on the earth s radiation budget, and aid the development of improved estimates of current and future impacts on climate doc12127 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop new materials engineered for microwave electronics. As microwave applications expand, including portable wireless devices, and as digital integrated circuit speeds and clock rates increase to the millimeter wave (MMW) range, the need arises for low-loss elements of microwave MMW interconnects (EMIs) with properties uniform over a broad range of frequencies and environmental conditions. A new technique is now sought to embed EMIs based on Photonic Band Gap Structures (PBSs) in ceramic substrates at an early stage of fabrication. PBSs will reduce radiative losses in devices fabricated using the Low Temperature Co-fired Ceramic On Metal technique by preventing radiation leakage and by minimizing undesired scattering. The result will be improved performance, without increasing manufacturing costs. Phase I designed, fabricated, and tested PBS-based EMIs, wherein, cross waveguides with low cross talk were successfully tested. Phase II will automate the design and production of devices that include PBS EMIs. The technology will be demonstrated through the design and fabrication of a MMW antenna based on PBS. A PBS will lead to quite new applications: frequency-band controlled filters, perfect channel-drop filters, point-defect resonant cavities, line-defect ninety-degree waveguide bends, waveguide intersections with low crosstalk, and others. The new technique will be employed in high-volume production items for applications such as automotive radars, avionics, as well as in a variety of broadband wireless communication devices doc12128 none This proposal requests continued support for biophysical studies of the mechanism of the charge separation and recombination steps in photosynthetic reaction centers (RCs) and the higher-order organization of photosynthetic membranes. An important part of our work involves the development of new experimental and theoretical methods that can have a broad impact in other areas of science and biotechnology. Understanding the mechanisms of energy and electron transfer in photosynthetic systems has proven to be an exceptionally fertile area for such developments and for training scientists. In this project, research will be performed in the following specific areas that relate to the mechanism of charge separation in the reaction center: (i) determination of the fundamental parameters that control alternative electron transfer pathways initiated by excitation of the monomeric bacteriochlorophyll on the functional side using resonance Stark spectroscopy; (ii) application of the resonance Stark method to other pathways created by engineering the RC; (iii) measurements of the activation energy and magnetic field dependence of the decay of the special pair triplet state to determine the energetics of the primary charge separation in RC mutants; (iv) attachment of spectator dye molecules near the functional components to probe the dynamics of charge motion during the first electron transfer step(s); (v) organization of components in the photosynthetic membrane in supported bilayers. By integrating this range of approaches, our understanding of the mechanism of initial electron transfer and the related phenomenon of unidirectional electron transfer can be advanced and brought into the larger context of structure-function relationships in complex biological assemblies doc12129 none Lay for Pugh ( ) The biology and chemistry of the photoreceptor cells of the retina has been one of the most exciting and productive areas in basic and clinically relevant visual science. This field includes fundamental research on the structure and function of the molecules of biological photoreceptors cells and their G-protein cascade signaling, including the details of the generation and modulation of the electrical responses. The binannual FASEB conference on this topic has been since its beginning in a premier meeting in which scientists with different approaches, different preparations (ranging from mouse to frog to fruit flies), and overlapping goals interact productively, sharing their most recent results in a highly congenial and interactive environment. The FASEB meeting on the Biology and Chemistry of Vision well represents the best science in the field, including sessions on classic but nonetheless current topics (Phototransduction: Protein Structure and Function; Regulatory Proteins of Transduction; Phototransduction in Single Rods and Cones), topics that are very hot (The cone and rod retinoid cycles in health and disease), and topics of burning interest in the application of fundamental science to eye disease therapeutics (Animal Models and Gene Transfer to the Retina). The meeting also is strongly catholic in its view of fundamental vision processes, incorporating for example, a session on Phototransduction in Invertebrates, and a session in which non-mammalian model systems (Xenopus; zebrafish) are featured. National Science Foundation funding for the conference will be used to support travel fellowships to the meeting for young scientists, graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, who are making presentations at the meeting, and for some travel support for speakers. NSF support has played an important role in developing the careers of the young scientists in this field, by providing them the opportunity to interact personally with the leaders in the field over a five day period in an informal setting doc12130 none Ribosome biogenesis is one of the few biological processes at the crux of cell division. The long-term goal of this research is to uncover the diverse mechanisms essential to the RNA processing events that occur during ribosome biogenesis. The objective of this particular project is to understand the first steps in processing of the precursors to the 5.8S and 25S large subunit rRNAs. The central hypothesis is that the Rlp7 protein (Rlp7p) constitutes one member of a novel complex that carries out the early pre-rRNA processing reactions that generate the 5.8S and 25S large subunit rRNAs. The rationale for this research is to attain an understanding of a new class of RNA binding proteins and how they function in RNA processing, which is likely to reveal the underlying RNA processing mechanisms. The research is innovative because it will lead to the elucidation of the function of previously uncharacterized proteins in RNA processing events that are poorly understood. This, in turn, will lead to a greater comprehension of the role of nucleolar factors in cell growth in size. The results will be significant because cell growth in size is critical to cell division. This research is focused on understanding the molecular basis for how a cell grows in size before it divides. It is a process common to unicellular organisms such as baker s yeast and to multicellular organisms such as humans. The project will elucidate the function of newly discovered proteins in cell growth doc12131 none Numerous studies have demonstrated that salicylic acid (SA), jasmonic acid (JA) and ethylene play key roles in activation of various defense responses following pathogen attack. Induction of SA-mediated responses occurs via both NPR1- dependent and -independent pathways. The SA- and JA ethylene-mediated pathways appear to be coordinately regulated with extensive cross-talk occurring between them. The nature of this cross-talk is poorly understood and may involve complex regulatory mechanisms. In addition, environmental factors can significantly and sometimes dramatically influence the outcome of plant-pathogen interactions; the molecular and cellular basis for these effects is largely unknown. Two groups of Arabidopsis mutants have been isolated whose initial characterization argues that they will provide important insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying (i) the NPR1- dependent vs -independent pathway(s), (ii) the cross-talk between the SA- and JA ethylene- mediated pathways and (iii) the effects of environment on disease resistance. The discovery that the fatty acid 18:1, or a derivative of it, functions as a signal together with JA to activate expression of the defensin gene PDF1.2, but suppresses SA-dependent defense response is particularly exciting. This co-activating signal was uncovered in the ssi2 mutant. ssi2 suppresses salicylate insensitivity of the npr1-5 mutant due to a mutation in a stearoyl-ACP desaturase which results in reduced fatty acid desaturation. One of the highest priorities is to determine whether 18:1 itself, or rather a derivative of it, is the co-activating signal. Suppressor mutants of ssi2 will also be isolated in order to better characterize the co-activating signal and its role in modulating defense responses. The genes for two other ssi mutants, ssi1 and ssi4, have been cloned. In addition to isolating suppressors of each, it will be determined whether the function of other genes shown to have a role in SA signaling (ed. PAD3 or PAD4), JA ethylene signaling (eg. COI1 or ETR1) or R gene-mediated signaling (eg. NDR1 or EDS1) are required for some or all of the mutant phenotypes. The second group of mutants constitutively expresses pathogenesis-related genes (cpr). cpr22, also exhibit SA-dependent (i) lesion formation, (ii) enhanced disease resistance and (iii) homozygous lethality as well as JA ethylene-mediated constitutive PDF1.2 gene expression. Interestingly, the SA -dependent, but not JA-mediated, phenotypes are suppressed by high relative humidity (RH). High RH also suppresses the SA-dependent phenotype of ssi4. In addition, ssi4 is extremely cold sensitive, with death occurring at 16 degrees C. Thus, further characterization of cpr22 and ssi4 by conducting epistatic analyses and or isolating suppressor mutants for each of these pathways should provide valuable insights into how environmental factors (RH and temperature) influence disease resistance. It should be noted that SA may also play a signaling role in other processes, including thermogenesis, cell growth and trichome development. Thus, elucidation of the components involved in the SA defense signaling pathways may well provide insights into a much larger signaling network through which plants regulate a wide variety of responses doc12132 none The Lopes laboratory has discovered that the yeast Ino4p basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) protein dimerizes with five other bHLH proteins and regulates at least 159 genes. The primary goal of this project is to understand how different combinations of yeast bHLH transcription factors regulate gene expression. Yeast has seven well-studied bHLH proteins: Ino4p, Ino2p, Pho4p, Rg1p, Rtg3p, Sgc1p, and Cbf1p. This project will define the complete bHLH protein interaction map (PIM) by testing each possible pair-wise combination using the yeast two-hybrid system and co-purification of epitope-tagged recombinant proteins. This part of the study will also include two proteins recently assigned to the HLH class, Hms1p and YGR290Wp. The Lopes lab has used microarray hybridization to identify 159 genes that are either induced or repressed by Ino4p. The fact that Ino4p interacts with multiple bHLH proteins suggests that the target gene sets for each bHLH protein will overlap the Ino4p target gene set. Microarray hybridization will be used to identify target genes for the each bHLH protein. The binding sites for each heterodimer will be determined using epitope-tagged bHLH recombinant proteins coupled with an electrophoretic mobility shift assay (EMSA). The ability of bHLH optimal binding sites to direct transcription in vivo will be tested using reporter genes. The promoters of the bHLH target genes will be screened for the presence of the bHLH binding sites using the ScanACE program. This project will also investigate the mechanisms whereby bHLH proteins regulate target gene expression. The ability of bHLH dimers to regulate transcription may require direct binding to DNA or sequestration and prevention of bHLH proteins from binding to their target promoters. INO4 represses expression of two PHO genes and the MFalpha1 gene. A DNA-binding defective Ino4p mutant will be used to determine if this regulation is due to direct binding of Ino4p to the target genes or sequestration of a bHLH transcription factor. How cells turn on and turn off genes is a central question in biology. It is well established that proteins called transcription factors play an important role in controlling these events. This project will investigate how a group of transcription factors form multiple pairings to maximize the number of genes that they can turn on and turn off doc12133 none Modulation of Calcium Signaling in Neurons Nerve cells convert electrical signals into changes in calcium ion to trigger biochemical responses. Only during stimulation or under pathological conditions are calcium levels elevated. Under normal conditions the intracellular calcium concentration is kept very low by a complex series of pathways that pump calcium out of the cell or into organelles. The objective of this proposal is to study the regulation of three calcium regulatory processes. 1) Calcium is removed from the cell by pumps embedded in the cell-surface membrane. The mechanism by which a particular genetic variation of the calcium pump is modulated by a neurotransmitter-activated pathway will be determined. 2) The mitochondrion is an intracellular organelle that participates in cellular energy metabolism and also takes up large amounts of calcium. The possibility that mitochondria act as calcium sinks to create calcium microdomains will be examined. 3) When internal stores of calcium are depleted calcium influx pathways are activated to refill the store. How this refilling pathway controls calcium release from the store will be determined. To achieve these goals neurons will be grown in culture (in a dish), and studied individually with optical and electrophysiological instrumentation. Calcium acts as an intracellular messenger that triggers processes ranging from gene expression to the release of neurotransmitters and hormones. Thus, fluctuations in calcium trigger adaptive changes in neurons and play an essential role in cell-to-cell communication. This work will increase our understanding of how neurons process information at the molecular and cellular level, and may reveal new targets for drugs doc12134 none Amaranth and Flaveria bidentis are dicotyledonous plants that use the highly efficient C4 pathway of photosynthesis. This laboratory has previously shown that genes encoding the large subunit (LSU, produced from the plastid-encoded rbcL gene) and small subunit (SSU, produced from nuclear-encoded rbcS genes) of the CO2 fixation enzyme ribulose 1,5-bisphosphate (Rubisco) are strongly regulated by light and by developmental processes in a C4 dicot. Very rapid increases in rbcL gene expression are induced in response to illumination, and these increases are due to regulation at the translational level. In addition, alterations in the translation, processing, and stability of rbcL mRNAs have been found to occur during several C4-specific processes, including specific localization of the LSU polypeptide to bundle sheath cells, changes in leaf photosynthetic capacity, and during various stages of leaf development. To identify post-transcriptional regulators of rbcL expression in C4 plants, we have centered our investigations around the light-mediated induction of translation, which is the most manipulatable of the plant processes where post-transcriptional control has been implicated. We have demonstrated that multiple proteins interact with 5 regions of amaranth rbcL mRNA in light-grown, but not etiolated plants. Most interestingly, the p47 rbcL mRNA binding protein shows several unique properties associated with its binding activities, and is a potential candidate for a trans-acting regulatory factor involved in the light-mediated activation of rbcL translation. p47 binding occurs only in plastid extracts prepared from light-grown plants; there is no p47 binding activity in extracts from dark-grown plants. p47 is highly specific for 5 regions (UTR and coding regions) of rbcL mRNA, and binding occurs only with RNAs corresponding to mature processed rbcL transcripts (5 UTR terminating at -66). rbcL transcripts with longer 5 UTRs do not associate with p47 in vitro. Light-associated variations in the length of the rbcL 5 UTR were found to occur in vivo, and these different 5 termini may prevent or enhance p47 binding, possibly affecting rbcL expression as well. This project will elucidate the mechanisms by which light- and processing-associated differences in p47 binding to rbcL mRNA are mediated. The laboratory will determine if p47 plays a role in light-mediated polysome-association, light-mediated 5 processing, or translational activation. To accomplish these goals, the investigators will further characterize the p47 rbcL 5 UTR mRNA binding protein, determine its possible subunit structure, and mRNA binding properties. They will map sequences within rbcL 5 RNA that are necessary for p47 binding, and determine how light-dependent processing differences that occur within the 5 UTR affect this binding activity. Finally, they will determine the biological function of p47 by constitutive or induced expression (sense and antisense) of p47 in transgenic C4 F. bidentis plants. These investigations will provide novel insights about the function of mRNA binding proteins in determining photosynthetic gene expression at post-transcriptional levels in specialized C4 plants, and possibly in other plant species as well. This project will characterize RNA-protein interactions associated with control of photosynthetic activity, and may provide insights into processes responsible for the high photosynthetic productivity of the species being studied. By understanding these processes, scientists may ultimately be able to increase the photosynthetic productivity of crop species, producing plants that are more efficient at assimilating CO2 doc12135 none Arabinogalactan proteins (AGPs) are highly glycosylated hydroxyproline-rich glycoproteins unique to plants. Associated with the plasma membrane by a glycophosphatidylinositol (GPI)-anchor, AGPs also occur freely soluble in the extracellular matrix, intercellular spaces and as exudates. The involvement of AGPs in virtually all aspects of plant growth and development is of considerable biological interest. Their putative roles in adhesion, guidance, cell signaling, nutrition, cell expansion, embryogenesis, and membrane protection yield interesting speculations and promising leads. However, definitive assignment of a precise biological function for any of these glycoproteins remains elusive; this is due in large part to problems associated with their purification. Only recently has it become possible to purify a single AGP in sufficient (i.e., bulk) quantity to enable not only structural, but functional analyses. This success emerged during the tenure of the previous NSF grant and involves expression of LeAGP1 as a fusion protein tagged with green fluorescent protein (GFP) in transgenic plant cell cultures. LeAGP1 is a major AGP in tomato and is putatively GPI-anchored to the plasma membrane, consistent with the prediction of a putative GPI-anchor addition sequence from the LeAGP1 gene as well as from localization of LeAGP1 to the plasma membrane in protoplasts with the LeAGP1 antibody and in cultured plant cells with GFP-labeled LeAGP1. This project seeks to exploit the LeAGP1 transgene and its glycosylated product to test specific hypotheses relating AGP form to function within the context of the following objectives: 1. Verify that LeAGP1 is a GPI-anchored (i.e., glypiated) AGP by purifying and biochemically characterizing membrane-bound LeAGP1. 2. Determine whether hydroxyproline-glycosylation is species-specific by expressing the LeAGP1 transgene in tomato cell cultures. Glycosylation data will be determined and compared to that already obtained from transgenic tobacco cells. 3. Determine the molecular size and shape of LeAGP1 by transmission electron microscopy rotary shadowing, circular dichroism, and molecular modeling and relate it to that inferred from the primary sequence and to plasma membrane loading data. 4. Evaluate plasma membrane loading and turnover of LeAGP1 in the context of its potential dynamic, structural role at the cell surface using biochemical and microscopic analyses. 5. Elucidate the molecular interactions and functions of LeAGP1 by a) testing for binding partners in regenerating protoplasts and in bead assays using immobilized LeAGP1 and soluble fragments of cell wall components, b) determining whether exogenous LeAGP1 affects the survival or growth of cultured cells, protoplasts, and pollen, and c) characterizing the second generation of transgenic tomato plants expressing the LeAGP1 antisense gene in order to determine whether the antisense genotype is linked with the altered growth phenotype as was observed in the primary antisense tranformants. Focusing on a single, purified AGP and subjecting it to hypothesis-based testing in the context of these objectives will advance our structural understanding of AGPs and provide a viable route to pinpoint precise biological interactions and functions for AGPs doc12136 none The maintenance of water and electrolyte balance can pose a serious challenge for terrestrial animals. Consequently, the strategies used by terrestrial animals to conserve water have been well studied. This proposal emphasizes another, much less studied, aspect of osmoregulation in land animals. Unlike many animals living in dry environments, nectar feeding animals must cope with excessive water ingestion. Nectar-feeding birds respond to variation in the sugar concentration of floral nectar by modulating how much they eat. They decrease ingestion as sugar concentration increases. The intake response of nectar-feeding birds to sugar concentration has the consequence that at low to moderate sugar concentrations the birds ingest phenomenal amounts of water. The drinking rates exhibited by nectar-feeding birds would lead to pathological consequences in other terrestrial vertebrates. This project investigates how nectar-feeding birds cope with this apparent polydipsia (water over-ingestion). Hummingbirds can cope with natural voluntary polydipsia through two non-exclusive mechanisms: 1) They can avoid absorbing water in the intestine, and 2) they can get rid of ingested and absorbed water by producing copious urine. A primary objective of this project is to determine the relative importance of these two mechanisms. Because birds mix urine and feces in the cloaca, achieving this objective is not easy. A minimally invasive method that relies on a pharmacokinetic mathematical model was designed to measure the fraction of ingested water that is absorbed in the intestines of unrestrained birds. Preliminary data suggests that in hummingbirds most of the water ingested is absorbed in the intestine. Consequently, in these birds the task of disposing of ingested water seems to be assigned to the kidneys. The rate at which the kidney filters plasma is a good example of a trait whose magnitude is determined by many potentially competing demands. The need to conserve water and the need to eliminate metabolic by-products can be in discord. In this proposal another potential conflict is identified: The need to dispose of absorbed water is better served by high glomerular filtration rates, but these can be accompanied by the loss of valuable, albeit easily filterable, metabolites like glucose. Hummingbirds exhibit extremely high plasma glucose concentrations (several times higher than those of a diabetic human), and presumably show high glomerular filtration rates to get rid of absorbed dietary water. However, the concentration of glucose in the excreta of these birds is extremely low. A goal of this project is to elucidate how hummingbirds manage to avoid excreting glucose in the face of high plasma glucose levels and high levels of filtration by the kidney. The project is significant because it will allow development of an integrated quantitative description of kidney function under the range of water loads and hydration conditions that birds experience. Also, understanding the limits to water processing will provide general insights into how animals are designed, on how aspects of design constrain ecological performance of animals, and into how aspects of design in one physiological system can impose limits on other systems. The osmoregulatory processes of nectar feeding birds highlight the relevance of understanding the impact that events taking place in the gut can have for feeding behavior, and renal and metabolic function. Comparative physiologists have emphasized low water availability as a constraint on energy and microhabitat use. Our research will emphasize a novel aspect of the water-energy interaction and fill a gap in our understanding of osmoregulation in land animals doc12137 none Larkin The process of cell differentiation is the process by which cells become specialized during the development of multicellular organisms. Although a great deal is known about how cell differentiation is initiated, considerably less is known about how these early events control the actual events leading to cellular specialization. The shoot epidermal hairs (trichomes) of Arabidopsis are now well established as a model for the study of plant cell differentiation. The long-term goal of this research program is to uncover the molecular mechanisms connecting the trichome cell fate decision to the generation of the mature trichome phenotype. There is particular interest in the endoreduplication cell cycle during trichome development. The specific goals of the proposed research are to identify direct downstream targets of the trichome initation regulators GL3 and GL1, to isolate the SIM gene and determine its function in the endoreduplication cell cycle, and to isolate extragenic modifiers of sim mutants doc12138 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop platinum-transition metal alloy catalysts that are supported on high area carbon for oxygen cathodes in proton exchange membrane fuel cells. The Phase II project will build on the success of Phase I by optimizing the alloy composition and particle size of supported Platinum (Pt) alloy catalysts for efficient oxygen reduction. Low temperature synthesis methods allow T J Technologies to produce supported Pt alloys with minimal Pt aggregation. Alloy compositions that reduce the over potential toward oxygen reduction by 50 mV versus Pt alone and will be produced with particles sizes (3-5 nm) that maximize Pt utilization and oxygen reduction efficiency. Performance will be demonstrated in half-cell and full fuel cell experiments. Catalysts resulting from this project will enable PEM fuel cells to operate more efficiently. The potential commercial applications from this project would be improved oxygen reduction catalysts for proton exchange membrane fuel cells for vehicle propulsion and kilowatt-scale off-grid electric power generation. These are potentially large markets with beneficial impacts on energy efficiency, international competitiveness, and emissions reductions doc12139 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop new instrumentation for fluorescence and phosphorescence spectral measurements. Phase I produced a customized spectrofluorimeter equipped with a tunable laser source, fluorescence lifetime capability, and fiber optic probe for cryogenic measurements. However, better methods are needed to analyze benzo[c]fluorene, which researchers now believe may be an environmental concern comparable to benzo[a]pyrene. Phase II will develop an upgraded new instrument, capable of retrofitting the low temperature probe, fluorescence lifetime, and tunable laser capabilities onto laboratory spectrofluorimeters. The emission monochromator, photomultiplier tube detector, and control analysis computer can be retained from the spectrofluorimeter, and none of its functionality will be lost. Phase II is expected to produce several models of commercial spectrofluorimeters, test data for publication in technical journals and trade magazines, and instrument upgrade options as a commercial service. The market for these upgrades presently has an estimated 30,000-40,000 spectrofluorimeters in service. An additional 4,000 individuals or institutions purchase new units each year. The new instrument upgrades will be used in research and development, analytical services, quality control, environmental studies and surveys, and teaching and other applications doc12140 none The statistical nature of step and chain growth polymerization processes ensures that the products of such reactions must be heterogeneous. Conventional p9olymeric materials therefore consist of complex mixtures of chains, often characterized by broad distributions of chain length, sequence and stereochemistry. In many materials applications, this kind of molecular heterogeneity is acceptable, and in some applications it is advantageous, insofar as it may suppress crystallization and preserve desirable properties such as optical clarity, elasticity or ease of processing. On the other hand, synthetic developments that have afforded improved control of macromolecular architecture, such as Ziegler-Natta catalysis and living polymerization, have had profound impact on polymer science and technology. %%% Over the past decade, several laboratories - including the PI s - have exploited the capacity of the protein biosynthetic apparatus of bacterial cells to make new macromolecular materials characterized by essentially complete control of molecular architecture. The most important advantages of this method appear to lie in two areas: i). In the integration of material properties with biological function, and ii). In the design and fabrication of small-scale structures (sometimes called nanostructures), in which uniformity of molecular architecture is critical. This proposal addresses the latter objective, with a specific focus on the assembly behavior of systems containing monodisperse macromolecular rods related to poly (g-benzyl a,L-glutamate) (PBLG). This research is co-funded by the Polymers Program in the Division of Materials Research and the Molecular Biochemistry Program in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences doc12141 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will complete the development of a prototype, cost effective high temperature pressure sensing device that can be integrated into diesel and turbine engines. Phase I results show that it is feasible to use the proposed novel metal alloy as a sensing element in a high temperature pressure transducer. However, further work needs to be performed to optimize the fabrication process of the sensing element, improve the design of the transducer, and to establish the manufacturing process for future production. The project will address five major aspects of developing a novel, high temperature pressure transducer and present a final packaged prototype at the end of the project. These are to develop the sensing element fabrication process, develop the manufacturing process for a 400 degrees C sensor, fabricate the sensor diaphragm, design and fabricate a substrate heater, and to package the sensing element. The firm has already received significant interest from potential manufacturing and commercial partners in the diesel engine and aircraft turbine engine industries doc12142 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II project will develop advanced magnetorheological fluids for various damping applications. The Phase I project focused on a microwave plasma synthesis technique (NANOGENTM) and chemical precipitation technique; both techniques were successfully used to synthesize nanoparticles of iron, cobalt and iron oxide. NANOGENTM was selected as one of the 100 most innovative technologies in when it won the prestigious R&D 100 Award. MR fluids were prepared from these fluids and preliminary results on their damping behavior was found to be comparable with commercially available fluids. The Phase II project will scale-up the production of nanopowders and will conduct testing of their damping characteristics to help foster the development and application of MR fluids in key technology driven areas. The possible commercial applications will be in automobile suspensions, hybrid actuator valves, semi-active vibration control in turbines and bridges as well as for seismic damping doc12143 none The introduction of double-stranded RNA into cells from a variety organisms, including plants, nematodes, flies, protozoans, and mammals causes potent and specific post-transcriptional gene silencing. In animals, this is called RNA interference (RNAi). It has been hypothesized that the natural role of RNAi may be to protect the germ line from viruses, transposons, and other molecular parasites. A mysterious aspect of RNAi is that gene-specific information is communicated between cells, that is RNAi is systemic. The goal of this project is to identify and characterize C. elegans mutants that either enhance or suppress systemic RNAi, but do not affect autonomous RNAi. A transgenic strain has been constructed that allows direct monitoring of systemic RNAi of a GFP-reporter gene. This strain will be mutagenized and animals with a suppressed or enhanced systemic RNAi response will be isolated and characterized genetically and molecularly. Selected genes will then be cloned and the expression and function of their products will be further characterized doc12144 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will design, build, and test a hybrid Raman analyzer suitable for on-demand or continuous process monitoring. The Phase I project demonstrated feasibility by designing and testing a unique combination of components that yielded greater than 100 times improvement in sensitivity (defined as the signal-to-noise ratio) compared to traditional Raman analyzers. The novel design also demonstrated high resolution (1 cm -1), invariant wavelength stability, and freedom from fluorescence interference; which are critical requirements for autonomous chemical process monitoring or rapid raw-material identification. The Phase II project will further improve sensitivity, as well as demonstrate long-term temperature and vibrational immunity, and fast turn-on time. Complete internal analyzer diagnostics will allow greater than hours of unattended operation. As such, the analyzer will be rugged, compact and portable (10 x 12 footprint), low-maintenance, require minimum power, and suitable for numerous industrial applications. The commercial applications will be directed toward the chemical manufacturing industries. The Phase II prototype will be used to develop specific applications with customers during Phase III doc12145 none Photosystem II catalyzes O2 evolution and provides electrons that are used for sugar synthesis in photosynthesis. The O2-evolving reaction is catalyzed by 4 Mn atoms and requires a key protein subunit, manganese stabilizing protein, that controls Mn binding and rapid O2 evolution. This research project will characterize how manganese stabilizing protein s structure allows it to perform its role in O2 evolution. One set of experiments will identify amino acid sequences at the N-terminus of the protein that are essential for photosystem II binding, and that may also be required for Mn stability and rapid O2 production. A second research objective will further characterize manganese stabilizing protein s natively unfolded behavior in solution. The protein s unusual thermostability will be exploited as a probe to extend the characterization of its unusual solution structure and determine the extent to which the single -S-S- bond can be shown to be necessary for the thermostability of manganese stabilizing protein. Related experiments will determine whether solution structure changes in some mutant types of manganese stabilizing protein can be demonstrated to correlate with their assembly into photosystem II, and whether the integrity of the enzyme s Mn cluster affects this process. A third research project will explore the role of a highly conserved amino acid, arginine, that appears to be essential for manganese stabilizing protein s ability to promote the catalytic activity of the Mn cluster. These experiments will be coupled with analyses of structure and function of manganese stabilizing protein to discover why other changes in this amino acid residue produce unusual changes in manganese stabilizing protein activity without apparent changes in the protein s solution structure doc12146 none This Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) Phase II project will develop low-cost, composites reinforced with carbon nanofibers. Methods demonstrated in Phase I will be further developed to generate alignment and promote adhesion of nanofibers polymer systems. These efforts help to capture the extraordinary intrinsic mechanical, electrical, and thermal properties of carbon nanofibers in practical, affordable composites. One thrust of the program seeks to align nanofiber in extruded and spun flows, in materials that include polypropylene, polyester, and nylon. The composite filaments produced by these means will then be formed into net-shape composite components for a variety of applications. A second thrust focuses on fabrication of nanofiber papers for applications that include fuel cell electrodes. Potential end users of the technology and leaders in their respective markets, will evaluate materials and prototypes produced during Phase II. Specific commercial applications targeted by the Phase II work include nanofiber reinforced polyester and nylon tire cord, thermally conductive plastics for electronics packaging, nanofiber paper for fuel cell components, and conductive, high service temperature plastics for electrostatic precipitators needed to clean exhaust streams from power and chemical production. Each of these applications has an associated Phase II partner participating in the program doc12147 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project has two primary objectives: to continue the research and development of clustered software radio technology begun in the Phase I project, and to use that technology to extend current waveform implementations to a fully functional base station. A high impact application of clustered software radio is for cellular telephone base stations, changing them from fixed hardware devices into flexible software devices that can support multiple commercial standards and also public safety needs. This Phase II project will develop a clustered software radio base station that interoperates with commercial GSM mobile units and switching centers. The goal is a base station sufficiently functional to be deployed in a field trial, which is the necessary next step in commercializing the technology. The project will include innovative technology development in timing control, wideband synthesis, and intra-cluster data transport. In the telecommunications industry, many foresee that base stations for third-generation wireless systems will be software radios or software-defined radios. The development of clustered software radio technology by Vanu, Inc. for this market will improve interoperability, improve service to underserved rural areas, enable more efficient use of the radio frequency (RF) spectrum, provide substantial public safety benefits, and increase the pace of technological innovation in the wireless communication marketplace. Moreover, the firm s computing architecture has broad application to signal processing problems outside the wireless industry doc12148 none Yanofsky Plant reproductive development has been the subject of intensive investigation in recent years, and members of the MADS-box family of regulatory genes have been shown to control key aspects of this complex process. The carpels and resulting fruit are arguably the most complex plant organs, and the AGAMOUS (AG) clade of MADS-box genes is necessary for carpel and fruit development. There are four closely related genes within this monophyletic clade, including AG, SHATTERPROOF1 (SHP1), SHP2 and AGL11. The AG gene, which encodes the C function of the widely-recognized ABC model of flower organ identity, is necessary for carpel identity. The SHP genes act redundantly during fruit development to specify differentiation of the dehiscence zone, a process that is required for seed dispersal. Mutant alleles for AGL11, the final member of this important clade of genes have been isolated. The initial analyses of agl11 mutants demonstrate that AGL11 is required for normal ovule and seed development, and for the normal process of seed dispersal. Moreover, when mutations in AGL11 are combined with mutations in both SHP1 and SHP2, ovule development is completely abolished. These studies indicate that AGL11, SHP1 and SHP2 act redundantly to specify ovule identity. With agl11-mutant alleles in hand, the next step is not only to define the roles of AGL11 during ovule carpel seed fruit development, but to fully dissect the individual and redundant activities of the AG clade of genes. These studies should have far-reaching implications for the study of similar developmental processes in diverse plant species. Initial studies will focus on a detailed description of the agl11 and agl11 shp1 shp2 mutant phenotypes. Unstable alleles of AG will be made in order to fully explore the individual and overlapping activities of AG with the other members of this gene clade. Interactions will be explored between AGL11 and the other AG-clade genes with the many known genes involved in ovule and carpel development. These studies will involve the introduction of mutant alleles for these ovule carpel development genes into the agl11 and agl11 shp1 shp2 mutant backgrounds. In parallel with these genetic studies, the expression of AGL11 RNA will be monitored in each of these mutants and we will monitor the expression of each of the ovule carpel development genes in the agl11 and agl11 shp1 shp2 backgrounds. Together these studies should provide a conceptual framework for understanding the genetic and molecular interactions that underlie ovule carpel seed fruit development in Arabidopsis doc12149 none Actin is a ubiquitous and conserved protein among eukaryotes, but the structure and function of the actin cytoskeleton is remarkably diverse among cell types. This differentiation occurs by specific regulation of dynamic assembly and maintenance of actin filaments, a process mediated by a number of actin-regulatory proteins. Myofibrils in striated muscles are highly differentiated forms of actin cytoskeleton that are specialized for muscle contraction. The mechanisms by which the actin cytoskeleton is reorganized and assembled into sarcomeric structures during muscle development are largely unknown. The objective of this project is to understand the functional significance of regulators of actin polymerization and polymerization during myofibril assembly in body wall muscle of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. This project will focus on the function of the unc-78 gene that encodes a homolog of actin-interacting protein 1 (AIP1). AIP1 has been identified in a variety of eukaryotes and shown to be involved in dynamic reorganization of actin cytoskeleton. However, its role in multicellular organisms has not been clear due to lack of an AIP1 mutation in genetic model systems. Mutations recently isolated in unc-78 now make possible analysis of the role of AIP1 in muscle differentiation. In C. elegans, mutations in unc-78 cause slow-moving nematodes that have large accumulations of actin filament in body wall muscle cells. This phenotype suggests that the unc-78 gene is important for the regulation of actin filament dynamics in muscle cells. Therefore, this system provides a unique opportunity to study the in vivo function of AIP1 during myofibril assembly. In this project, the function of the unc-78 gene will be analyzed by the following five approaches: (a) Phenotypic consequences of unc-78 mutations will be characterized with respect to motility and the organization of myofibrillar components. (b) The expression pattern and subcellular localization of UNC-78 protein will be determined. (c) Biochemical interactions of wild-type or mutant UNC-78 proteins with actin and UNC-78 with unc-60 (the gene coding for ADF cofilin) and other muscle genes will be tested. (e) The second AIP1 isoform in C. elegans will be examined for functional redundancy and specificity. These molecular genetic and biochemical analyses of the unc-78 gene and its related gene will potentially reveal an important aspect of actin filament dynamics in muscle cells and provide insight into the function of the evolutionarily conserved AIP1 family of proteins doc12150 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will use a novel high throughput platform comprising of many, small gene arrays, contained within the wells of microtiter plates. This platform, termed Multi-Array Plate Screening (MAPS), allows simultaneous testing of the expression of a specific group of genes of interest and appropriate controls using RNA derived from 96 separate samples, within each well of a 96-well plate. MAPS provides the endpoint assay for a high throughput screen, in which investigators can evaluate how different chemical compounds, applied to cells, tissues, or organisms in vivo, affect the expression pattern for the genes of interest. This technology will address an unmet need of the agricultural industry to make efficient use of novel genomics information in a manner that does not require distribution of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the form of transgenic plants. The plants are grown in each well of a 96 well plate to facilitate high-throughput screening. The platform allows facile and efficient testing of gene targets including newly identified genes, and also provides important information about selectivity and specificity. The commercial potential from this project is in the agricultural market doc12151 none Transgene silencing is the unexpected lack of expression of a gene introduced into an organism through recombinant engineering. Many lines of evidence have led to the realization that gene silencing reflects a series of strategies that protect the genetic information present in an organism from interference by extraneous genetic information. Some of these strategies are related to well-known defense mechanisms that provide protection against infectious organisms, but others have not previously been recognized and their mechanisms are only just now being investigated. These considerations are reflected in the goal of this project, which is to identify genes involved in transgene silencing mechanisms and to characterize their operation in normal development. In addition to providing new insight to genetic control systems of transgene expression, this understanding will lead to the strategic design of future transgene constructs that will not be sensed by the recipient genome as being alien and thus be expressed more reliably. A premise for the experiments to be undertaken is that inactivation of genes that are responsible for the silencing machinery will re-activate the silenced gene. Three different sets of rice lines, in which a transgene is transcriptionally silenced, have been developed and characterized that are eminently suitable for reactivation studies. However, because of its rapid growth cycle and its fully-sequenced genome, Arabidopsis will be used as a model plant to expedite selection of gene targets for rice. Inactivation of the host silencing system(s) will be accomplished primarily by an RNA interference (RNAi) approach in which double-stranded RNA corresponding to the gene target is expressed. Initial gene targets include rice methyltransferase, chromo domain-containing genes and histone deacetylase genes. This is because methylation and alteration of chromatin structure is known to be associated with many gene silencing events. Once a target gene yields an interesting knock-out (silencing inactivation) phenotype in Arabidopsis, existing databases will be searched for similar genes in rice. RNAi-based knock-out constructs of these genes will be made and their ability to restore transgene expression in the silenced rice lines investigated to evaluate the role of the knocked-out gene as being one responsible for silencing doc12152 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is directed at developing a collection of software tools for use in selective extraction of information from the running text of synthetic recipes. Synthetic procedures are batch recipes used in the creation and discovery of new chemical entities for drug discovery. The ultimate aim of the project is to automate information extraction and place the information in a computer-understandable data structure that fully captures the data and semantics of the synthetic recipe. The Phase I program successfully demonstrated feasibility of the approach by constructing a prototype system and using it to solve a range of representative synthetic-recipe-related information extraction problems. In Phase II, the objectives are to (1) refine and extend the features of the prototype system; (2) implement machine learning capability for extraction rule induction, (3) construct focused demonstration applications, and (4) test, evaluate and validate the software system in conjunction with pharmaceutical-company research-collaborators. The ultimate goal of the program is to develop a commercial software toolkit that enables chemists to easily construct systems for information extraction from synthetic recipes. Recipes for more than 19 million unique compounds are contained in the public literature, and there are a comparable number in the archives of pharmaceutical companies. The vast majority of these procedures are maintained as unstructured running text. Intellichem, Inc. proffers tools for extraction of synthetic recipe information into computer-understandable data structures that will benefit the following: database construction and updating, summarization, chemical process discovery, knowledge reuse, improved productivity of the chemist, and chemistry-related e-commerce doc12153 none Hunter Genetic analysis of asymmetric cell division in C. elegans early embryos has identified a set of conserved PAR proteins important for the establishment and or maintenance of zygotic and cellular polarity. The PAR proteins are localized asymmetrically in early blastomeres and their mislocalization correlates with changes in the patterns of cell cleavage and the distribution of cell fate determinants. Drosophila and vertebrate PAR homologs are also asymmetrically localized and important for cell polarity in these animals. Therefore, investigating how the C. elegans PAR proteins become asymmetrically localized and how their activity controls cellular architecture essential for asymmetric cell division is likely to reveal universally important molecular mechanisms. Biochemical analysis in mammalian cells indicates that the highly conserved cell polarity protein Cdc42 binds to and activates the mammalian PAR homologs. Genetic analysis of cdc-42 function in C. elegans early embryos, performed in Dr. Hunter s laboratory, is consistent with these results. Dr. Hunter proposes to investigate how Cdc42 activity controls the localization and activity of the PAR proteins during the establishment of embryonic polarity. A transgenic strain expressing a PAR-6::GFP fusion protein will be constructed and PAR-6:GFP localization followed in living embryos in response to changes in Cdc42 activity. Equally important to how the PAR proteins become asymmetrically localized, is how the PAR proteins control cell polarity. Dr. Hunter proposes a second set of experiments to investigate the function of and determine the molecular identity of roc(qt1), a gene required to coordinate embryonic polarity with cytoskeletal organization doc12154 none Coevolution between slavemaking ants and their hosts Joan M. Herbers Slavemaking ants are social parasites that can survive only by capturing worker pupae from another species. Those captured workers hatch out in the slavemaker nest and start to forage, clean, feed the larvae, and so on. The slavemaker ants do virtually nothing except find other colonies of host species. When the slavemakers find a host colony, they stage a slave raid in which they enter the host nest, injure or maim those defending their nest, and remove pupae to return to their own slavemaking nest. We have uncovered geographic variation in how these two species interact: in a site near Albany, New York, slavemakers are extremely fierce and hosts resist raids strongly. By contrast, the interaction in a site in mountainous West Virginia is more benign; slavemakers kill few hosts during a raid, and the hosts themselves offer little resistance. In a third site near Burlington, Vermont, the ants show characteristics intermediate between these two extremes. The powerful tools of molecular ecology will be used uncover how often slave raids end in death of the host, how many slave raids a given slavemaker nest mounts in a year, and what the impact on their host population is. Second, mounting slave raids between ants parasites and hosts collected from the same site versus different sites will offer insight to how localized interactions can be. Finally, the genetic, ecological, and behavioral will be analyzed in terms of the coevolutionary arms race metaphor that has proven useful in studies of other parasite-host relationships doc12155 none In the establishment of infection, many mammalian and plant bacterial pathogens produce effector molecules that are delivered to host cells. Transport of these effectors is accomplished through several different mechanisms. For example, bacterial Type III secretion systems channel effectors directly into the host cell whereas bacterial Type I systems secrete effectors into the extracellular environment. In many plant pathogen interactions, host resistance responses are initiated via intracellular receptors encoded by plant disease resistance genes that recognize Type III secreted effector molecules encoded by bacterial avirulence (avr) genes. In contrast, the mechanisms by which plant cell surface receptors respond to extracellular effectors are unknown. Xa21 is a rice resistance gene encoding a presumed receptor kinase that confers resistance to Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae (Xoo) Philippine race 6, the causal agent of bacterial leaf blight, the most destructive bacterial disease of rice in Asia and Africa. Dr. Ronald has shown that the presumed extracellular leucine rich repeat domain of XA21 is responsible for specific recognition of the avirulent strain Xoo Philippine race 6. Dr. Ronald has identified 6 Xoo genes from this strain that are required for the avirulence function. Three of these genes (xooA, xooB, xooC) encode proteins that share similarity with components of Type I secretion systems of gram negative bacteria. The long-term goal of this proposal is to elucidate the relationship and function of these six Xoo avirulence determinants, identify and characterize the effector molecule and analyze the interaction between the effector and rice receptor kinase XA21. The Xa21 Xoo interaction is particularly advantageous for these studies for several reasons. Xa21 is the only disease resistance gene encoding a receptor kinase so far identified and likely recognizes an extracellular effector. Xoo is genetically tractable and the genes encoding Type I secretion systems are characterized. Finally, rice is a model for studies of all cereals and therefore the expected results will have a broad impact on understanding and controlling bacterial diseases of cereals. Accomplishment of the proposed objectives is expected to lead to the first detailed understanding of the roles of Type 1 secretion systems and sulfation in determining host specificity of phytopathogenic bacteria doc12156 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II project will further develop a revolutionary approach to nanostructure fabrication. This Near-Field Scanning Optical Nanolithographic approach, which we have already shown to be capable of writing 100nm width lines, utilizes a direct, optical write technology in conjunction with optical photoresists. The direct optical writing is performed with a customized Near-Field Scanning Optical Microscope (NSOM) tool. The major goal of the proposed work is to design and construct a commercially viable NSOM lithography tool and demonstrate processes for flexible pattern generation on 4 wafers. Phase I work demonstrated the preliminary design of the NSOM lithography tool and photoresist processes using a novel inorganic hydrogenated amorphous silicon resist, as well as conventional polymer resists. Best line widths of approximately 100nm, comparable to the probe diameter, were obtained. The commercial benefits from this project will be the construction and demonstration of the NSOM lithography tool for rapid prototyping of nanostructures in university and corporate research labs doc12157 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will enable the fabrication of waveguides in potassium titanyl phosphate (KTP) containing Bragg gratings with specified spectral and electro-optic characteristics. These characteristics include reflectivity, bandwidth, central wavelength, and electro-optic tuning range. To achieve this goal, the relationship between the processing steps used to form the Bragg grating and its resulting spectral and electro-optic properties will be fully quantified. The ability to control the spectral characteristics and electro-optically tune these gratings will enable a broad range of new and commercially useful devices. Using the processing steps developed, an array of Bragg gratings will be fabricated with each grating optimized for stabilizing the wavelength of a laser diode. Translating the waveguide array with respect to the laser diode will tune its wavelength. This novel tuning technique will have significant technical and cost advantages over other tuning techniques. Potential commercial applications include tunable filters for active dispersion compensation, high-speed add drop filters for wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), and a broadly tunable source for test and evaluation of network components. Other applications include stabilizing laser diodes for spectroscopy, seeding high power lasers, and frequency doubled diode-based replacement lasers for low power Argon-Ion and helium cadmium (HeCd) lasers doc12158 none Daniel L. Reger, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of South Carolina at Columbia, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program for his work developing new metal complexes of tris(pyrazoyl)methane (tpm) ligands. These ligands are closely related to tris(pyrazoyl)borates, but have been much more difficult to prepare. Reger has developed new synthetic pathways to tpm ligands such as HC(pz)3, HC(3,5-Me2pz)3, HC(3-Phpz)3, HC(3-tBupz)3 and HC(3-iPrpz)3. Linked bi- and poly-functional pyrazoyl methane ligands, such as all three isomers of C6H4[CH2OCH2C(pz)3]2, will form building blocks for the preparation of coordination polymers that have unusual 2-D or 3-D supramolecular structures. Metal complexes of tpm ligands may show unique reactivity or catalytic activity. The coordination polymers, especially those containing two different metals, will have interesting physical or electronic properties. In addition, several graduate students and faculty members, including coworkers from a HBCU undergraduate institution, will have the opportunity to participate in the research project doc12159 none Sergio Antoy Portland State University ITR SY: Non-Deterministic Computations for Functional Logic Programs : Narrowing allows the seamless integration of functional and logic computations. A narrowing strategy selects from an expression the subexpression(s) to evaluate and instantiates variables if necessary. Different selection strategies extend from functional to functional logic programming computational behaviors such as call-by-value and call-by-need. Sound, complete, and optimal (to varying degrees) strategies are known for both Haskell-like programs and programs that allow some forms of parallelism. Unfortunately, these classes of programs do not support non-deterministic computations. The lack of non-determinism is a severe limitation in functional logic languages. It prevents the use of familiar logic programming idioms and, in some cases, leads to programs that violate the inherent laziness of a problem. The research proposes a new computational framework, a class of programs, and a strategy for narrowing computations in this class that supports non-determinism without loss of soundness, completeness or efficiency. Within this framework, programs become textually shorter, conceptually simpler, more modular, easier to understand and maintain, and arguably more efficient. The proposed strategy has the potential to encompass strategies for other interesting classes of functional logic programs and it is expected to unify various concurrent disjoint efforts aiming at integrating different narrowing strategies within a single language doc12160 none How a worker comes to claim a particular occupation in a particular place, or how a place comes to contain a cadre of workers with a particular occupation, are vitally important economic and social questions. This research takes an institutional approach to the individual s gaining and using occupation-specific skills and to the local availability of occupation-specific labor. The objective of the research project is to compare the sources (by type and location) of computer programmers training across regions, industrial sectors, and personal characteristics. The research will first use secondary data such as censuses to investigate the relationships between rates of occupational attainment and various institutional factors for all Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the United States. Case studies of five mid-sized metropolitan areas with a high proportion of programmers will be made via phone and in-person interviews with key employers and institutional leaders. The key questions to be investigated are: sex and race; current employment arrangement and tenure; approximate age and location at which the individual gained original training as a programmer; motivations for occupational and locational choices; earlier careers and parents occupations; and incidence and sponsorship of further training. The information from both types of interviews will be used to relate local characteristics of labor-force size, employer size, employment practices, and growth rates to the locations and ways in which programmers gained and maintained their skills. For anyone in the labor force, one s occupation and one s location largely determine one s employment outcomes. For the region, the local availability of trained workers is key to local economic well-being. This project provides an understanding of the general process between location and occupational attainment. In addition, the proposed project selects one particular occupation, computer programmer, that has been the object of much interest and debate. The contribution of the proposed research lies in its combination of: recognition of institutional influences on individual behavior and regional outcomes; attention to training and migration decisions; attention to the paths of women and minorities within an occupation dominated by white men; and secondary data for all metropolitan regions as well as exploratory, interview data in five specific regions doc12161 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project continues the development of the spinning performance of melt spun fibers containing microencapsulated phase change materials (microPCMs). In Phase I, polypropylene fibers less then 3 denier per filament were demonstrated with a good balance of physical properties (tenacity, percent breaking elongation, modulus, etc.) and thermal energy storage capability (latent heat content). Phase II will focus on process and materials variables that affect, in particular, the structure and properties of the as-spun fiber, and in general, the overall spinning process. A key objective is to convert the microcapsule wet cake into a well-dispersed microPCM polymer concentrate devoid of volatilizing components for adding to virgin polymer and extruding into fiber. Innovative spinning concepts will be employed to improve the capture of microPCMs to maximize thermal energy storage properties. The commercial availability of melt spun fibers and resulting fabrics with enhanced thermal energy storage capabilities will enable products with superior performance for use in situations where comfort, endurance, or survivability in cold or hot environments is demanded. Thus, the perfection of this technology for the production of good quality fabric could be a major breakthrough in the textile industry doc12162 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II project will develop and test an autonomous, low cost, robust, precise, and miniaturized partial and total carbon dioxide measurement system. This system will be able to characterize the carbon dioxide exchange between ocean surface waters and the atmosphere, thus helping to analyze the greenhouse effect and assess global warming on a worldwide basis. The partial and total carbon dioxide systems are miniaturized for deployment by the International SeaKeepers Society in ocean and atmospheric monitoring modules on cargo ships, cruise ships, and super yachts around the world as well as for use on piers, ocean buoys, and other platforms. The prototype partial carbon dioxide system, developed in Phase I, measures carbon dioxide in seawater that has been equilibrated with air using an infrared detector. It is sensitive to five parts per million and responds to rapid changes in carbon dioxide. The prototype miniaturized total carbon dioxide system has a precision of three parts per million. Phase II will miniaturize and test both systems in the laboratory and in the field. Based on these tests and any modifications required, final commercial partial and total carbon dioxide measurement systems will be produced. The International SeaKeepers Society is expected to deploy hundreds of these carbon dioxide sensor systems. Other purchasers would include government agencies worldwide performing research and monitoring on the global warming phenomenon doc12163 none This project is aimed at developing characterization tools to be used to design self-assembling peptides that fold into defined a-helices or b-strands at polymeric biomaterial surfaces. The goal is to define peptide sequences that direct the assembly of functional peptides proteins onto polymeric surfaces when the adaptors are fused to them. The project will develop an atomic level picture of the secondary structure and dynamics of peptides proteins on biomaterial and nanoparticle surfaces and a high-resolution structural map of peptide-surface interactions. Recent studies of statherin peptides on hydroxyapatite crystals have demonstrated that there is sufficient sensitivity to perform similar solid state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (ssNMR) characterization of peptides on a wider variety of surfaces. At the same time, NMR studies of peptide protein conformation and dynamics on surfaces will be integrated with other spectroscopic-based surface characterization studies such as Near Edge X-ray Absorption Fine Structure (NEXAFS) and Time of Flight - Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (TOF-SIMS) to tie together new capabilities for the characterization of peptide conformation, orientation, and long-range order on biomaterial surfaces. The development of strategies for immobilizing functionally active proteins and peptides on polymeric surfaces is a central aspect of the biomaterials, tissue engineering, drug delivery, affinity separations, and diagnostic fields. These details are crucial to understanding why particular materials work well or don t work well, and the new molecular insights will provide important design criteria based on knowledge of peptide protein structure, dynamics, and assembly at polymeric biomaterial surfaces. Students trained in this area of biomaterials science and applications will compete very well for both academic and industrial jobs. This project is jointly funded by the Division of Materials Research and the Chemistry Division doc12164 none A general theory of reproductive behavior is imperative both to our basic understanding of evolutionary processes as well as our ability to manage threatened species. Although recent developments have greatly increased our understanding of mating systems, it has left us without a comprehensive theory for predicting and explaining general patterns of reproduction. A variety of important biological factors have been treated in isolation from one another, although we know that each one is critical to our understanding of evolution. A more comprehensive approach is necessary if we wish to explain such varied observations as females mating with multiple males in the absence of sperm limitation and a skewed mating distribution where no known male or territory trait explains success. Interactions within and between the sexes, spatial and temporal dynamics of reproduction, environmental variation are all be essential components of a comprehensive theory of mating systems. Although each of these elements has been addressed to some degree in isolation, we have not examined the connections between each of these factors to the evolution of specific mating behaviors. For example, resource dispersion and variability in social conditions will affect interactions between individuals. Concurrently stochasticity in critical resources will influence both the interactions between individuals as well as their spatial dispersion. Furthermore, although we are interested in population-level consequences, interactions only occur between individuals that encounter one another in space and time. To create a general theory, we need a framework which allows us to examine multiple interactions within and between the sexes as well as consider the importance of environmental conditions and spatial dynamics. The complexity of these interactions demand mathematical modeling. Dynamic programming games make it possible to consider the effect of an individual s social and ecological environment on reproductive behavior. I propose a new approach which makes it possible to simultaneously study a variety of phenomena that interact to create mating systems and determine reproductive strategies. This method will be used to study general models examining the interactions between stochasticity, space, and conflict on specific mating behaviors. Yet, theory is not better simply because it is more complex. Instead, the approach I am advocating will also be verified by its ability to increase our understanding of observed variation. Their ability to explain observed behavior will not only increase our understanding of a single species but also have general implications for our understanding of mating systems doc12165 none The broad, long-term objectives of this project are to determine the genetic and molecular mechanisms by which nuclear receptors control post-embryonic development. The short-term goals are to identify genes involved in nuclear receptor signaling pathways. Genes that are involved in nuclear receptor signaling will be identified in Drosophila melanogaster using both genetic and molecular approaches. A primary genetic screen will identify candidate loci that enhance phenotypes associated with sensitized stocks in which nuclear receptor signaling has been compromised. A secondary screen will identify those candidate loci in which the enhancement correlates with altered expression levels of ecdysone-responsive genes; genes whose expression is dependent upon appropriate nuclear receptor signaling. A subset of chromosomal deficiencies stocks and approximately 100 EP stocks will be tested. EP stocks carry single random insertions of a modified P-element that allows ectopic expression of the gene residing near the P-element. These genetic screens have the potential to identify genes that physically interact with nuclear receptors, genes that are direct targets of nuclear receptors, and genes that are further downstream in nuclear receptor regulated pathways. To complement this genetic approach, a yeast two-hybrid screen will b used to identify proteins that physically interact with the amino-terminal domain of the A-isoform of the ecdysone receptor (EcR-A). Understanding the genetic and molecular mechanisms by which nuclear receptors and their ligands function is significant because nuclear receptor signaling coordinates the development of virtually all organs and tissues in higher eukaryotes. Thus, to fully appreciate and understand developmental mechanisms, it is necessary to understand the role that nuclear receptors play in orchestrating the developmental program. The proposed activities are significant because they have the potential to identify biologically relevant interactions between genes involved in nuclear receptor signaling pathways doc12166 none Transposon tagging in heterologous plant systems offers a powerful tool for isolating genes for which no gene product is known, but for which a mutant phenotype can be observed. The experiments focus on existing populations of Ds-containing plants in the barley variety Golden Promise, an old malting variety, and additional populations to be developed in both Golden Promise and Oregon Wolfe Barley, a variety into which have been introgressed a combination of observable dominant and recessive mutations. Plant populations with randomly dispersed, transposed elements can be used directly to find easily screened mutations. A more powerful approach to tagging is to identify lines containing Ds insertions near genes of interest and exploit the propensity of Ds to undergo high-frequency, localized movement to achieve saturated mutagenesis of the regions of interest. Barley is an ideal cereal for this effort since it is closely related to and shares many physical and physiological characteristics with other cereals. It does not contain Ds homeologs, is a is true diploid, self-pollinating and easily grown in both greenhouse andfield environments. In addition, a vast pool of mapping data exists that is publicly available. Recent advances underpinning the proposed research include: a) efficient transposition of Ds to linked and unlinked sites in barley and its successful use in gene tagging; b) the availability of a fine structure genomic map of barley based on data from several public research consortia, including the North American Barley Mapping Project; c) the existence of many observable, dominant and recessive phenotypes in the Oregon Wolfe Barley (OWB) genetic stocks; and d) the availability of efficient transformation systems for a wide range of germplasm of barley. Taken together, these factors make possible the development of barley populations containing mapped Ds insertions. These elements, especially when mapped, will be valuable tools for performing functional genomics and gene isolation. These lines will increase understanding of basic cereal biology, instruct students about the modern tools available for genetic dissection and provide resources to improve the quality characteristics and field performance of cereals and potentially other crops doc12167 none Bacteria can change their metabolism when they suddenly encounter an environment devoid of oxygen. This ability allows bacteria to colonize and grow within diverse environments. The genes necessary for bacteria to carry out anaerobic growth are activated in response to oxygen depletion by a mechanism involving a simple signal transduction system. In the soil bacterium, Bacillus subtilis, this system is composed of the proteins ResE and ResD. The sensor kinase ResE, through an as-yet-unknown mechanism, senses oxygen limitation and responds by donating a high-energy phosphate to ResD, a response regulator, which, upon phosphorylation, stimulates the expression of genes required for anaerobic growth, such as the genes encoding an anaerobic gene regulator FNR and nitrite reductase. ResD interacts directly with the promoter region to activate transcription. Unlike the nitrite reductase genes, activation of fnr, while requiring ResD, does not seem to require ResD in its phosphorylated form. The presence of oxygen seems to stimulate removal of phosphate from ResD, a task also carried out by ResE. Mutations in aa3 quinol oxidase genes cause derepression of ResDE-controlled genes under aerobic conditions, indicating that electron flow to oxygen has an inhibitory role on the signal transduction pathway. In addition, aerobic gene activation is heightened by the presence of nitric oxide (NO), which may stimulate the ResD-phosphorylating activity of ResE. The major questions to be answered this project are: (1) How does ResD activate gene expression? (2) What is the significance behind the fact that fnr does not require phosphorylated ResD for its expression? (3) What parts of the ResE protein are important for sensing and transducing signals to ResD in response to stimuli derived from oxygen depletion? (4) How does NO result in ResDE-dependent gene activation? Studies will be carried out to precisely identify the target of ResD in the DNA that constitutes the genes under ResD control. Particular attention will be paid to the architecture and the ResD-binding characteristics of the fnr control region. The domains conserved in the putative sensing domains of ResE will be altered by directed mutagenesis to identify regions necessary for recognizing signals derived from oxygen limitation and NO. This will provide a correlation between specific signals and the functional domains of ResE and will give insight into how cells sense and respond to oxygen depletion doc12168 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop a long-lived, stable reference electrode that dramatically improves potentiometric measurements, such as pH, redox, and other ion-specific measurements. The new reference electrode exploits recent developments in microfluidics and nanotechnology to stabilize the liquid-junction potential, a source of error and a cause of frequent sensor calibration and maintenance. Stabilizing the liquid-junction potential of the reference electrode opens a new realm of potentiometric sensor design and application. The technical feasibility of this innovative electrode was demonstrated in the Phase I project. Testing in a variety of environments showed variations less than 0.5 mV in the reference electrode potential over an 8 hour period and response times less than 60 seconds, compared to potential variations up to 20 mV and response times of over an hour for conventional reference electrodes. The flow of electrolyte through the junction was less than 0.1 l per minute, or 50 ml per year of continuous operation. The Phase II project will develop assembly processes, more robust structures, and develop and build sensors for field-tests. The potential commercial application reduction in sensor calibration and sensor replacement which would save the US process industries approximately $240 million per year in sensor costs and labor expenses. Exports of US manufactured sensors with this technology will significantly increase as foreign process industries seek similar cost savings. Furthermore, this reference electrode can serve as a basic building block in microfluidic sensors, estimated to be a multi-billion dollar industry in the next decade doc12169 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop a novel non-contact strain sensor for quality control in production of polymers and fiber-reinforced composites. By measuring residual strains, good parts can be distinguished from bad parts in the production stream. Internal and surface residual strains will be measured by a strain gauge based on the principle of nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR). A small percentage of tiny additive crystals are blended into the resin during fabrication of the composite. For strain measurement, the composite is irradiated with radio frequencies (RF) to evoke a strain-dependent NQR response from the embedded crystals. Phase I manufactured parts with embedded additive via compression molding. Phase II will build a single-sided strain prototype and measure residual strains in pultruded parts. The NQR-active additive will be introduced into the pultrusion process, and several batches of different types of composites, e.g., fiberglass, will be manufactured. Pultrusion will permit several large batches of samples to obtain the statistics needed to refine the NQR-based quality control method. Potential commercial applications are expected in many industries, such as civil infrastructure, automotive, sporting goods, aerospace, and many others utilizing composite materials doc12170 none The primary goal of this project is to demonstrate the utility of a novel technology called massively parallel signature sequencing (MPSS) for the quantification of gene expression in plants. MPSS is a rapid method to produce 17 base pair sequence tags that are precisely representative of the population of messenger RNAs in a given tissue. Approximately eight libraries from diverse plant tissues will be sequenced by MPSS, generating ~500,000 tags per library, for a total of four million tags. The 17-bp tag is derived from the 3 end of a messenger RNA or transcript and provides a virtually unique, experimentally derived identifier for each expressed gene. The number of identical tags in a library for a given gene is precisely indicative of the level of expression of that gene. The MPSS sequence data provide quantitative or digital expression information for the entire transcriptome , avoiding problems inherent in microarray analysis such as cross-hybridization, pre-selection of probe sequences and low signal. Statistical methods for the analysis of quantitative expression data have demonstrated that these data are robust. In comparison to the limited sets of data derived by the EST and SAGE techniques, these data will be the first large-scale quantitative expression data for plants in the public domain. The MPSS sequence data is most informative when the tags are compared to either a completely sequenced genome or to large collections of ESTs. To take full advantage of the MPSS technology, the initial libraries will be generated from the model plant Arabidopsis (ecotype Columbia) and the MPSS tags compared to the complete genomic sequence. This comparison identifies the individual genes from which the tags are derived. These data then will be used to: quantify and experimentally confirm gene expression and mRNA transcripts in diverse wildtype and treated plant tissues (including shoot, root, inflorescence, silique, anthers, callus); estimate the frequency of alternative polyadenylation in plant tissues; study co-regulated gene pairs and estimate promoter strength and tissue specificity; assess global transcriptional changes in the disease resistance response. Sequence tags generated through this project will be accessible via the web, and the interface will provide tools for data analyses. These data also will be placed in public expression databases (such as those at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, NCBI ) for comparison to microarray data, facilitating the expression analysis of either any single gene or all genes present in these libraries. These experiments constitute a proof of concept for massively parallel signature sequencing in plants for the global analysis of gene expression doc12171 none Wikramanayake Depletion of nuclear beta-catenin in early sea urchin embryos affects the fates of multiple cell lineages along the animal-vegetal (A V) axis. It is known that the micromeres, which form the early signaling center that specifies mesendoderm, require nuclear beta-catenin to become competent to carry out their inductive functions. Beta-catenin signaling is also required in the veg2 lineage for these cells to respond to micromere signals and to become specified as mesendoderm. Identifying transcriptional targets of beta-catenin and elucidating their functions would be a critical step in defining the molecular basis of mesendoderm specification. This proposal will focus on SUWnt8, a nuclear beta-catenin-sensitive Wnt gene that is activated in the micromeres coincident with the entry of beta-catenin into the nuclei of these cells and in the veg2 tier shortly after transit of beta-catenin into the nuclei of this cell tier. Four proposed specific aims will define the function of SUWnt8 in these cell lineages and will further the understanding of mesendoderm specification in the sea urchin embryo. These aims are: (1) To determine the role of cell interactions in regulating early SUWnt8 expression in the mesendoderm domain. This will provide insight into the relative roles of cell autonomous and non cell-autonomous mechanisms in early mesendoderm specification. (2) To determine how SUWnt8 participates in early mesendoderm specification by elucidating its role in the micromeres and the veg2 tier by blocking its activity using morpholino antisense oligonucleotide-mediated translational inhibition. Additionally, a possible role for SUWnt8 in maintaining nuclear beta-catenin levels in vegetal cells and in suppressing the activity of animalizing transcription factors in vegetal cells will be determined. (3) While nuclear beta-catenin is required for normal mesendoderm specification, there is evidence that micromeres can induce mesendoderm in animal half blastomeres in the absence of detectable nuclear beta-catenin. It will be determined if SUWnt8 can signal through the planar cell polarity pathway via the Disheveled protein to participate in mesendoderm specification in parallel with the beta-catenin pathway. (4) The unique expression pattern of SUWnt8 makes it a powerful reagent for studying the transcriptional basis of mesendoderm specification. The trans-acting factors that mediate SUWnt8 expression in the micromeres and the veg2 tier will be identified. Together, these studies will further our understanding of how the sea urchin A V axis is specified and patterned and may provide insight into the evolution of the A V axis in bilaterians doc12172 none The retinoblastoma protein (pRb) and the E2F transcription factors are key regulators of cell division and differentiation in animals. Related proteins have been identified in plants, but little is known about their functions. In animals, much of our knowledge of pRb and E2F is from studies of DNA tumor viruses and their tumor antigen proteins. These viral proteins interact with under-phosphorylated pRb (the form associated with cell cycle arrest and differentiation) and disrupt pRb E2F complexes, leading to altered host gene expression and cell cycle reentry. Recent experiments suggested that geminiviruses use a similar mechanism to alter cell cycle controls in plants. The overall goals of this research are to analyze host gene expression during geminivirus infection and to use these important plant viruses as tools to study how pRb and E2F regulate plant gene expression. The first aim is to develop an Arabidopsis system for studying geminivirus-mediated host induction and pRb interactions. This system will combine geminiviruses with Arabidopsis genetic and database tools to study pRb and E2F function in plants. The second aim is characterize the global changes in Arabidopsis gene expression associated with geminivirus infection using gene profiling technology. The third aim is to generate transgenic plants that express wild type and mutant viral proteins that differ only in their pRb binding capacities. Comparison of the expression profiles of these lines will provide insight into the identities of plant genes controlled by pRb and E2F. Together, these experiments are likely to identify genes whose products are associated with the cell division cycle, endoreduplication, differentiation, and disease in plants. The studies represent a unique opportunity to study the dedifferentiation process and the return to the cell division cycle in intact mature tissues of a higher eukaryote. They have the potential to uncover plant-specific components of these two important processes and may have a profound impact on agriculture by providing insight into strategies for altering plant growth doc12173 none This project will make direct measurements of the production rate of radiocarbon in the atmosphere by exposing a known amount radiocarbon free air to atmospheric radiation at a known altitude (near 16 km), latitude, and longitude using a balloon platform. This is the first time that the production rate will be directly measured in the atmosphere near the level of maximum production. The measured rate will be compared directly with those previously calculated by extrapolation from thermal neutron measurements. An accurate measurement of the production rate is needed for using radiocarbon as a tracer of global hydroxyl radical distribution, and for developing a better understanding of the global carbon cycle doc12174 none Langeland The overall goal of the proposed study is to take advantage of the unique phylogenetic position of the lamprey, Petromyzon marinus, to address fundamental issues of developmental and molecular evolution in the vertebrate lineage. Lampreys are the simplest extant vertebrates, situated phylogenetically between the cephalochordates (represented by amphioxus) and the gnathostomes (represented by mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish). Morphologically, lampreys share several characteristics with their gnathostome sister group, including multiple brain divisions, neural crest and its derivatives, neurogenic placodes, pharyngeal arches, and a cartilaginous endoskeleton, but they lack jaws and paired appendages and retain a relatively simple axial morphology. Genetically, lampreys also appear to be less complex than gnathostomes, having undergone fewer duplications of developmental regulatory genes. Lampreys are thus a perfect system with which to investigate developmental and molecular events associated with early vertebrate evolution. Dr. Langeland has led in recent efforts to establish lampreys as a viable system for comparative developmental genetics. There are two basic thrusts to this proposal: 1) to use gene expression studies in lamprey embryos to investigate fundamental aspects of the evolution of vertebrate head patterning, and 2) to use gene phylogeny studies to test whether duplications of select regulatory genes accompanied vertebrate origins. The Langeland laboratory will clone and characterize members of the goosecoid, Emx, and snail Slug gene families in P. marinus. These genes are excellent markers for three key developmental innovations that accompanied vertebrate origins: the establishment of the head organizer, the elaboration of rostral brain patterning, and the acquisition and diversification of cephalic neural crest. Comparative expression analyses of these genes during lamprey embryogenesis will allow more precise reconstruction of developmental events associated with vertebrate origins. In addition, determination of the copy number of these genes in lampreys, and analysis of their phylogenetic relationships with their gnathostome and protochordate homologs, will provide important evidence concerning whether widespread gene duplications, or even whole genome duplication, facilitated vertebrate origins. This research will take place at a four-year undergraduate liberal arts college. Extensive involvement of undergraduates in all phases of the project will help maintain the strong record of the host institution and of the principal investigator in integrating research with teaching, and in preparing future Ph.D.s in the life sciences doc12175 none The long-term goal of this research project is to characterize and define the specific processing events necessary for cell surface expression of MHC class II molecules in a teleost species. The immediate goal of this project is to determine the molecular events necessary for proper folding, assembly, and cell surface expression of class II heterodimers. In particular, the work seeks to determine the assembly of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class II heterodimers in teleosts proceeds with assistance from the endoplasmic reticulum chaperone calnexin and the invariant chain. Preferential pairing of class II alpha and beta chains will be tested with transfection of the previously characterized encoding genes into catfish class II negative fibroblast cell lines. RNA and cell surface expression of class II genes and proteins will be examined. In other experiments, immunoprecipitations, immunoblots, flow cytometry, and immunofluorescence microscopy will be used to test the role of calnexin, calreticulin, and invariant chain in the processing and trafficking of class II molecules. The availability of catfish lymphoid, macrophage, and fibroblast cell lines, along with the previous characterization of two expressed MHC class II A and class II B loci, make the channel catfish a unique system among teleosts for the study of MHC class II assembly and cell surface expression doc12176 none Cyanobacteria can survive and flourish in a broad range of environments, and often dominate in marine habitats as well as in microbial mats and biofilms. Their ubiquitous global distribution reflects, in part, their ability to cope with wide fluctuations in temperature, nutrient, and light levels. Dr. Bhaya is particularly interested in the ability of cyanobacteria to perceive and move towards or away from a light source and thereby optimize conditions for photosynthesis. This project will help the scientific community understand the molecular basis of this critically important trait. This phenomenon, termed phototaxis, is well-known but little understood. Recently Dr.Bhaya and her colleagues have demonstrated that phototaxis in Synechocystis is a surface-dependent phenomenon that requires type IV pili, surface appendages implicated in both twitching and social motility and the association of bacterial pathogens with their hosts. This investigator has taken advantage of the fact that the Synechocystis genome has been entirely sequenced to generate a library of tagged motility mutants. She will focus her work on a class of mutants that map to chemotaxis-like (che) genes. While the role of chemotaxis proteins is fairly well-understood in enteric bacteria, it is not clear whether many of the paradigms that have been established extend to the operation of Che proteins in other systems. Synechocystis has at least three che loci, two of which are involved in motility responses. Furthermore, one of the mutants that the investigator has isolated has a lesion in a gene encoding a protein with a domain reminiscent of the chromophore-binding domain of phytochrome in vascular plants. To elucidate the elements involved in generating and controlling motility, Dr.Bhaya will use time-lapse video microscopy to record movement in real time in both wild type and mutant strains. This will allow her to observe, for the first time, movement of single cells and cell populations, and thus to ask fundamental questions about the parameters that govern motility. The second aspect of the work is to use molecular and biochemical tools to tag and or mutate specific proteins, such that the interactions among the proteins that regulate phototaxis can be better understood doc12177 none Characterization of Chemosensory Pathways in Cnidarians P. Anderson, The ability to detect and respond to chemical stimuli is a fundamental property of all organisms, and in metazoan animals, specialized sensory structures (chemosensory cells) and intercellular pathways have evolved to detect and transmit information about the chemosensory environment of the animal. Although different organisms may employ slightly different mechanisms in chemosensory pathways, the general picture that has emerged from research with a limited number of albeit widely separated groups (particularly arthropods and vertebrates) is that the underlying principles that govern chemosensory systems are remarkably similar. However, very little attention has been paid to the earliest metazoans, the first animals to bear specialized sensory cells. Cnidarians (sea anemones, corals and jellyfish) represent some of the earliest metazoans, and they are the first extant organisms to possess a recognizable nervous system. Thus, they are ideal animals with which to examine the properties of early metazoan chemosensory systems and, in particular, to determine whether the common mechanisms of chemosensory function apply to all metazoans. This proposal seeks to examine chemosensory transduction in cnidarians, by studying a system that, in and of itself, is both fascinating and remarkable, the stinging cells of jellyfish. The sting cells or cnidocytes of jellyfish and other cnidarians discharge in response to near simultaneous applications of the chemical and mechanical stimuli that signal the presence of potential prey. However, this discharge is very tightly regulated by a variety of processes, including chemoreceptors and mechanoreceptors. This proposal will examine chemoreceptors associated with cnidocytes in the tentacles of two species, the Portugese Man-of-War (Physalia physalis) and sea nettle (Chrysaora quinquecirrha), two species that are, at the very least, serious nuisances for bathers and fishermen. The broad goals of this project are to understand the mechanisms used by those receptors to detect and transduce chemical stimuli, to convey that information to the cnidocytes, and identify and characterize the cellular events that information triggers in the cnidocytes, making them receptive to the subsequent mechanical stimuli that trigger discharge. As such, this project will obtain basic information about chemosensory systems in early organisms. The project also has very applied goals inasmuch as information about the pathways and mechanisms that regulate cnidocyte discharge may provide useful insights into ways to inhibit cnidocyte discharge. Such information could ultimately be used to develop ways to protect bathers and fishermen from the painful and sometimes dihabilitating stings these animals can produce. The project will provide training to at least one postdoctoral fellow, and to several undergraduates through the Whitney Laboratory s very active and successful Research Experience for Undergraduates Program. This program has an excellent record of including minorities, and at least one minority student is expected to be trained through this project doc12178 none In the past 10 years, great strides have been made in the identification of proteins that mediate and regulate membrane vesicle trafficking in eukaryotic cells. Different proteins function in distinct steps of vesicular trafficking such as budding, transport, targeting, and fusion of vesicles. Most of these proteins are well conserved with homologs found in organisms from yeast to mammals. However, the exact roles of many of these proteins remain unclear. Furthermore, it is likely that not all proteins involved in these processes have been identified. One new candidate for a role in vesicle membrane trafficking is a family of recently discovered proteins called copines. Copines were first isolated from Paramecium in by their ability to bind phospholipids in a calcium-dependent manner. Paramecium have two closely related copine genes and analysis of current sequence databases indicates that multiple copine homologs exist not only in ciliates, but also in slime molds, green plants, nematodes, mice, and humans. The high degree of conservation of copines among diverse organisms suggests they play a fundamental role in eukaryotic cells. Structurally, copines have two C2 domains at the N-terminus and a region similar to the A domain found in integrins at the C-terminus. The C2 domain is a calcium- phospholipid- binding motif originally identified in protein kinase C. The A domain in an intracellular soluble protein is a unique characteristic of copines because this domain is typically found in extracellular proteins or extracellular portions of membrane proteins. Following the A domain, copines have a variable length C-terminal domain that is relatively rich in prolines. This domain may confer unique characteristics to the different copine family members and a site for protein-protein interactions. Several lines of evidence suggest that copines may function in vesicular trafficking. First, antibodies raised against a human copine recognize a protein that binds to chromaffin granules indicating that copines bind secretory vesicles. In addition, several proteins thought to be involved in membrane trafficking, such as synaptotagmin, rabphilin, DOC2, and munc13, contain multiple C2 domains that confer calcium phospholipid binding properties. The long-term research objective is to define in molecular terms the mechanisms underlying membrane vesicle trafficking. In the short term, the research goal is to determine the general role of copines in eukaryotic cells using the model genetic organism, Dictyostelium discoideum. Genetic studies in yeast have been fundamental to the identification and characterization of proteins involved in vesicular membrane trafficking. However, no copine homologs exist in yeast. Dictyostelium provides the same genetic advantages as yeast and preliminary research demonstrates the existence of two copine homologs in Dictyostelium. The two main objectives of the research are: 1. Determine the localization of copines in live cells by expressing green fluorescent protein tagged copines in Dictyostelium and examining the cells by fluorescence microscopy. This experimental approach will be used to determine transient changes in localization during different cellular behaviors. 2. Create copine gene knockout mutants in Dictyostelium with gene replacement by homologous recombination and analyze the mutant phenotypes. This experimental approach will be used to determine loss of function in membrane trafficking pathways due to loss of copine gene function. Once these two objectives are met, it will be possible to correlate the intracellular location of copines with loss-of-function phenotypes in copine mutants and produce a more specific hypothesis about the function of copines in eukaryotic cells doc12179 none Lall The objective of the proposed workshop is to develop an on-line hydroclimate data library through a coordinated multi-national effort. We anticipate that a position paper on the need for such a library, and desirable features (including data processing algorithms) and capabilities, will be prepared through remote interaction between some of the invitees and circulated in advance of the meeting. The two-day meeting will then focus on a discussion of this position paper, strategies for implementation and funding, and the development of one or more community proposals for different portions of the work identified. A strategy to integrate the technology developed from the project into the electronic data libraries of the USGS and other agencies will be developed as part of these deliberations. The recommendations of the workshop will be summarized in an article in EOS. The same article will also seek additional comments and expression of interest in participation from the community. This workshop will be held at the Lamont-Doherty, Earth Observatory, Palisades, New York in April doc12180 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II project will develop a reliable prototype of a novel, compact and low cost solar air conditioning system for hot and humid climates. The system will consist of an air-cooled single effect absorption machine driven by an array of high performance flat plate collectors and a thermal storage tank. A microncontroller based control system will allow an optimal system operation. The capacity of the system is projected to be in the range of 3-5 cooling tons. The marketing, manufacturing, installation, and product development of the proposed technology is envisioned as a partnership of three small businesses dedicated to: installation of A C systems, marketing and manufacturing of solar collectors, and to research doc12181 none The mechanism by which double stranded DNA viruses translocate DNA into a preformed virus coat and organize it into a structure that has a density as high as a DNA crystal is a fascinating, unsolved, biological problem. In bacteriophage T4, an E. coli lytic virus, a 56 mm long DNA molecule is packaged within an icosahedral capsid that is approximately 0.115 mm long and 0.085 mm wide. Genetic and biochemical studies suggest that an ATP-powered DNA packaging machine constituted by the prohead portal protein and two nonstructural packaging terminase proteins drives DNA packaging. This project addresses one of the central questions of the DNA packaging problem, i.e., which component of the packaging machine consumes the ATP and couples it to DNA translocation? It is hypothesized that the large terminase subunit gp17, which possesses two consensus ATP binding sites and exhibits an ATPase activity, is the translocating ATPase in phage T4. This hypothesis will be tested by a novel combinatorial mutagenesis paradigm. Mutant libraries consisting of all possible codon combinations will be constructed at the signature residues of the consensus ATP binding sites in gp17. The mutations will be transferred into phage T4 genome by a site-specific marker rescue strategy. A collection of novel mutants exhibiting null, plaque-size, and temperature sensitive phenotypes will be generated. Selected mutants will be analyzed by molecular and biochemical approaches to test the linkage between the putative ATPase centers and DNA translocation. The predictions of a rotatory model for DNA translocation will also be tested. These approaches are broadly applicable to analyze functional sites in other terminases and ATP-triggered biochemical machines, and serve as an exciting model for training undergraduate and graduate students doc12182 none Brassinosteroids (BRs) are essential growth-promoting natural products found at low levels in pollen, seeds and young vegetative tissues throughout the plant kingdom. The P.I. s group has identified a BR-insensitive mutant in Arabidopsis thaliana (bri1) that confers severe pleiotropic phenotypic effects inhibiting plant development. BRI1 has been shown by others to encode a membrane-bound leucine-rich repeat Ser Thr receptor kinase. In animals, the Transforming Growth Factor-b (TGF-b) family of peptides, acts via receptor kinases to prominently impact several pathways involved in animal development and adult homeostasis. TGF-b Receptor Interacting Protein (TRIP-1) is an intracellular substrate of the TGF-b Type II receptor kinase that plays an important role in TGF-b signaling. TRIP-1 is a WD-repeat protein that also has a dual role as an essential subunit of the eukaryotic translation initiation factor eIF3 in animals, yeast and plants, thereby revealing a putative link between a developmental signaling pathway and the control of protein translation. The P.I. s group recently found that transcript levels of TRIP-1 homologs in plants are regulated by BR treatment under a variety of conditions, and that antisense TRIP-1 plants exhibited a broad range of developmental defects including some that resemble the phenotype of BR-deficient and -insensitive mutants. Furthermore, recombinant BRI1 kinase domain phosphorylates recombinant TRIP-1 in vitro. These findings suggest that TRIP-1 may mediate some of the molecular mechanisms underlying the regulation of plant growth and development by BRs. The P.I. will test this hypothesis by performing the following two objectives: 1: TRIP-1 protein levels will be monitored under a variety of conditions, in both wild-type and BR mutants, and the effect of BR on translation initiation will be examined. The possible nuclear localization of TRIP-1 protein, in addition to its role in the eIF3 complex, will also be studied. 2: Immunoprecipitation followed by mass spectrometry will be used to identify in vivo phosphorylation sites of TRIP-1 and their dependence on an active BRI1 receptor kinase. This project should increase our understanding of BR signal transduction and the role that this hormone plays in controlling plant growth and development. Given that BRs are found throughout the plant kingdom, greater understanding of the molecular mechanisms of BR action could have practical impact on generating crop plants with altered growth properties doc12183 none Innate, non-adaptive immune reactions are the first line of defense against invading pathogenic microorganisms in all animals. Even in vertebrates, with their complex T and B lymphocyte-based adaptive immune responses, it is always the innate immune system that responds first to immune challenge. However, in invertebrates innate non-adaptive immunity is not only their first line of defense but their only line of immune defense. The innate immune system utilizes a battery of defense mechanisms, both cellular and humoral. Amongst the humoral immune effectors are the anti-microbial peptides (AMP) which have been identified essentially throughout the animal kingdom and in plants as well. Not only are AMP widely distributed, but they also show a large diversity of structures. In terms of immune studies on invertebrates, the insects (especially Drosophila) have received the majority of attention, and much is known about anti-bacterial and anti-fungal responses (including the involvement of AMPs) in this phylum. However, the crustacea, despite their importance in the environment and as both an aquacultured and a wild-caught food source, have received comparatively little attention. Recently, a new family of anti-microbial molecules, the penaeidins, has been identified in the Pacific white shrimp, Litopenaeus vannamei. The penaeidins are synthesized within the granular hemocytes, and initially 3 distinct classes of penaeidin were identified, with 3 minor structural variants being found within one of the classes (penaeidin 3). Preliminary results from my research indicate that there are at least 4 classes of penaeidin, and that there is extensive variation in structure within each class. The objectives of this project are to understand the nature and source of diversity in the penaeidins and to define the anti-microbial activities of the new (fourth) class of penaeidin that has been defined. The project will address the first objective by examining the genetic basis of penaeidin diversity. The hypothesis is that the observed variability of the penaeidins, both as multiple classes and as variants within each class, is genetically encoded. A recombinant shrimp genomic library will be created and the penaeidin genes will be cloned, mapped and sequenced. Comparison of the structure of the penaeidin gene(s) with the sequences of the penaeidin clones from hemocyte cDNA libraries will permit a full analysis of the genetic basis of penaeidin variability. The number of penaeidin genes will be defined, the contribution of alternative RNA processing pathways (alternative exon usage), and the contribution of any other source of variation to the observed diversity of penaeidins, will be deduced. The second objective will be approached in collaboration with Dr. Evelyn Bachere, of the Universite Montpellier. The newly defined class of penaeidins (penaeidin 4) will be expressed as a recombinant form in yeast, purified, and characterized for the spectrum of its anti-microbial functions. Penaeidins show, amongst the anti-microbial peptides, very high levels of variability, even within a single individual. This project will contribute to our understanding of the basis of this variability and its significance to crustacean immunity in terms of the spectrum of anti-microbial activities of these peptides doc12184 none Riley The main objective of the Gordon Research Conference on Nuclear Chemistry is to provide the international community of nuclear scientists with a unique forum in which the newest developments at the forefront of this science can be presented and subjected to detailed and extended discussions and criticism. The purpose of the conference is to encourage communication and the discussions to be conducted in an atmosphere conducive to open interactions between the scientists, provoking new and even speculative ideas for future research. To accomplish these goals requires the participation in all of the conference activities of a significant number of leaders in the field. However, a science as rapidly developing as nuclear chemistry invites and needs cooperative efforts on all levels, including efforts both national and worldwide in scope. The participation of younger scientists is essential to address the future manpower needs of this rapidly changing field. Therefore, bright and promising postdoctoral researchers and graduate students have been specially selected for participation in this conference and encouraged to present their ideas. Their participation in this conference provides them with unique and extensive access to the leaders in their field, exposes them to new research opportunities and techniques and helps prepare them for the leadership roles they will assume in the future. This award will facilitate participation from these junior scientists doc12185 none With this Minority Research Planning Grant Professor Bryant-Friedrich will gain knowledge and know-how related to the field of oxidative nucleic acid damage. She will also develop methodologies for the synthesis of modified nucleosides and nucleotides that function as C-3 -radical precursors in oligonucleotide systems. A foundation for the proposed research will be built by attending several conferences on radiation damage to DNA and on the biology of aging. These conferences will bring together practitioners in the field with expertise in chemistry, physics, biology and medicine. This will allow interaction with US and foreign researchers who investigate not only the mechanism of DNA damage but also those who study the actual induction process, the nature, structure, and distribution of DNA damage, as well as cellular effects and repair processes. The above interactions will be used as background information to establish a research program which focuses on the use of synthetic organic, physical organic, ahd bioorganic techniques for the independent generation of nucleoside radicals and the identification of the products that result from the degradation of these radical species. It will be necessary to synthesize precursors containing a wide variety of naturally occurring nucleobases as well as modified bases. These modified derivatives will be used in monomer experiments to determine the conditions necessary for efficient generation of the desired radicals, focusing on reaction times, solvents, proper derivatives, etc. When these details are established, further modification of the monomers will be carried out to facilitate their use in automated DNA synthesis. The work proposed by Professor Amanda Bryant-Friedrich in her proposal entitled C-3 -Nucleic Acid Radicals: Generation and Mechanistic Investigations is enthusiastically supported doc12186 none This grant provides partial travel support for US participants to Plasmodesma , the fourth international workshop on plasmodesmatal biology, to be held in Cape Town, South Africa, August 19-24, . The workshop will bring together junior and senior scientists from around the world to discuss many aspects of plasmodesmata science, basic and applied. These topics include: plasmodesmata structure and development, virus movement, solute transport, symplastic domains and regulation, macromolecular trafficking, and gene silencing. Plasmodesmata research is very active at present and is moving quickly on many fronts. The cross-fertilization of ideas that conferences are noted for is especially important in this multidisciplinary field, where the subject matter and techniques used by one group may be quite foreign to another. A total of approximately thirty speakers will be invited on the basis of submitted abstracts. Others will be encouraged to present posters and short talks. The funds from this award will be used to support the travel and per diem expenses of US scientists, most of junior rank (graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and assistant professors doc12187 none The major goal of the Twelfth Conversation in Stereodynamics, to be held June 19-23, is to discuss developing ideas nd discoveries in the broad context of biological sructure, dynamics, interactions and expression. About 500 scientist are expected to come together from many nations to share ideas about these topics. The conference will cover about 65 lectures, and 250 posters, with both formal and informal discussions. The focus will be on the ribosome, structure and dynamics, structural genomics and DNA based nanotechnology, among other subjects. The new information that will be discussed at this meeting is relevant to a number of emerging technologies, those that are breaking through with immense implications to the future of science and society. This conference is unique in that it focusses on such emerging areas and technologies doc12188 none Regulated protein degradation is important for normal cell function, playing a key role in such diverse processes as growth control, metabolic regulation, embryonic development, and cell cycle progression. Targeted protein breakdown is also important for protecting cells against the potentially deadly effect of accumulated damaged or malformed polypeptides. Thus, an understanding of how cells selectively identify unwanted proteins and target them for destruction has fundamental importance for the study of development, cellular metabolism, and cell fate determination. An essential component of this pathway is the proteasome, a large, multi-subunit complex that acts as the proteolytic machine that removes abnormal polypeptides and short-lived regulatory proteins from cells. Recent work, using the tools of biochemistry and cell biology, has revealed much about the physical and biochemical properties of proteasomes, but many aspects of their biological function remain unclear. As an approach toward learning more about their role during development, a genetic and molecular study of Drosophila proteasomes is being undertaken. This project is focused on two major questions: (1) what is the role of the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway in specific developmental processes, and (2) are there structurally distinct cell-type specific proteasomes that have specialized functions? To address the first question, a mutational approach is being pursued. A number of dominant proteasome mutants have been isolated, and are being used to disrupt proteasome function in vivo, so that their effects on specific biological processes can be examined. For the second question, a reverse genetics approach is being used. Several proteasome subunit genes that are expressed exclusively in male germ cells have been isolated by molecular cloning methods. A combination of molecular, cell biological, and genetic approaches are being used to investigate the importance of proteasome-mediated protein degradation in spermatogenesis, and to address the functional role of a sperm-specific proteasome in this process doc12189 none This research investigates a problem faced by all living organisms: how are proteins transported across membranes? These studies will use the model organism, Escherichia coli, which shares many aspects of the protein export process with higher organisms. In particular, the process of bacterial protein export is similar to that of eukaryotic endoplasmic reticulum targeting. The wealth of genetic and biochemical tools available make the use of E. coli ideal for these studies. This project combines bacterial genetics and biochemical assays to create novel approaches to study the protein export pathway. Most proteins are translocated across the cytoplasmic membrane of E. coli by the multisubunit Sec translocase. The essential components of the Sec system are SecA, SecE and SecY, while SecD, SecF and SecG enhance the efficiency of translocation. Export of a secretory protein requires sequential, productive, and seemingly complex interactions between the Sec proteins. The long-term goals of Dr. Flower s laboratory are to understand the functions of the Sec proteins and to elucidate the requirements for productive interactions amongst them. Undergraduate and graduate students will participate in the conduct of this research. Three specific goals will be pursued in this project. 1) The inter- and intra-molecular interactions between proteins of the translocation complex will be examined by genetic analyses, including synthetic lethality suppression and multiple mutation experiments. Novel mutations are expected from these experiments that will shed light on the interactions between SecE and SecY. 2) The mechanism of action of mutant forms of SecE and SecY, including new mutants isolated from goal 1, will be investigated using in vitro translocation and ATPase assays. The combination of new genetic screens and the biochemical assays provides a unique approach to understanding the functions of SecE and SecY. 3) The role of membrane phospholipids in protein export will be explored by examination of the effect of mutations in phospholipid biosynthesis pathways on export and by determination of phospholipid ratios in strains with specific export defects. Results obtained previously indicate that SecG function is related to membrane phospholipid content; this hypothesis will now be tested. These experiments will further our understanding of the formation and function of a complex multisubunit nanoscale biological machine, and will contribute to the training of the next generation of scientists and scientifically literate citizens doc12190 none The underrepresentation of minorities in the science, mathematics, engineering, and technology workforce is still a national problem, ten years after the National Science Foundation (NFS) initiated the Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP) Program. By all accounts great progress has been made, but not enough to turn the problem around. As one of the six oldest National Science Foundation (NSF) Alliances in the nation, Alabama has been in the forefront of efforts to increase the quantity and the quality of under-represented minorities receiving baccalaureate degrees in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) fields. Many of the Alabama Alliance s programs have been replicated by other alliances. The Alabama Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (ALSAMP) began in with a baseline of 431 minority SEM undergraduate degrees and reached a peak of 979 in , a 127% increase. The baseline minority SEM enrollment for ALSAMP is 3,301. The minority SEM enrollment for the - academic year is 5,876, a 78% increase. These are indicators of success for ALSAMP Phase I and Phase II. The ALSAMP Phase III proposal is designed to a) sustain the B.S. Degree production levels and student retention rates specified as Phase II goals and b) define a baseline level of and commitment to a significant increase in the number of previous, current, and future baccalaureate recipients entering either a SMET graduate program or a graduate program in teacher education. Thus, the project approach for LSAMP will involve sustaining and institutionalizing current LSAMP Phase II activities and the implementation of new LSAMP Phase III activities as given below. Programs to be Sustained and Institutionalized New LSAMP Phase III Programs LSAMP Summer Bridge Program GRE Preparation for All Students LSAMP Scholars Program Undergraduate Research for All Students Summer Research Internship Program GRE Required for All LSAMP Students LSAMP Graduate Bridge Program SEM Student Mentoring Program Increase Number of SMET Students Entering Graduate School through Tracking Effort Drop-In Centers Cooperative Learning Intensify Recruitment of Technology Students Summer Research Conference Increase Collaboration with Other Programs Publication of The National LSAMP Magazine National LSAMP Publication in Phase III Budget The major portion of the Phase III budget will support these new programs. Consequently, the Phase II programs will be sustained by cost sharing from participating institutions, support from private sources, and institutionalization. During the next five years, LSAMP will define a baseline level of and commit to a significant increase in the number of baccalaureate degree recipients entering either a SMET graduate program or a graduate program in teacher education. This effort will involve preparing students for success in graduate school and placement in a graduate school of choice. Students will be tracked through graduate school by means of the LSAMP Success Link Program and a graduate student database will be maintained by the Alliance. Collaboration with other NSF programs will be increased substantially, particularly with the NSF Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate Program and the NSF Urban Systemic Program. Program activities will be disseminated through the publication of the National LSAMP Magazine and a full-time program evaluator will be appointed to oversee assessment and evaluation activities doc12191 none Most investigations of molecular evolution examine single genes, without respect to their interactions with other genes. However, most genes do not act in isolation, but interact with many other genes, which are likely to influence each other s evolution. One goal of this project is to determine whether and how such interactions actually cause predictable variation among genes in their rates of evolution. Specifically, genes of the anthocyanin pigment pathway in morning glories (genus Ipomoea) will be examined to determine whether observed evolutionary rate variation is due to differences in selective constraint (i.e. whether genes downstream in the pathway are less subject to purifying natural selection because they influence fewer characters). A second goal of this project is to begin examining the relative importance of regulatory and structural genes in adaptive divergence between species by determining the molecular basis of phenotypic divergence. The long-term goal of this project is to examine a large number of species whose color pattern has diverged from the presumed ancestral type of cyanidin-based blue purple pigmentation throughout the corolla limb and throat. For each species the relative contribution of structural and regulatory genes to divergence will be determined. However, the current objective is more limited: to characterize the genetic changes that have resulted in the production of white flowers by two species, I. alba and I. igualensis. Initially, investigation will concentrate on these two species to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach doc12192 none The investigators will conduct a series of experiments that focus on crucial substantive implications of modeling social interaction as the result of a cybernetic process of meaning control whereby actors behave so as to maintain meanings in the situation. Affect Control Theory describes a control system between identities and actions, with identity meanings acting as a reference level for interpreting social interactions. Specifically, it suggests that people will not only try to maintain their own identities, but will also strive to restore the identities of others with whom they are interacting. The theory also incorporates the restorative actions of other actors into the model. If another person in the interaction takes a restorative action, it may restore the meanings so that no further reparation is necessary. The studies described here propose to test these key predictions that differentiate Affect Control Theory from the other major control perspective. Study one challenges (negatively deflects) the identity of an alter, and tests to see whether this challenge evokes restorative behavior from ego. Study two creates an atypically positive interaction for the alter, to see if this evokes negative behavior by ego toward the alter (as predicted to be restorative of original meanings). Study 3 draws on pre-test results that indicate two alternative means of restoring another s challenged identity. Here, the investigator use computer-regulated interaction to make available alternative means of restoring another s identity. The prediction involves the substitutability of different behaviors for meaning restoration. Study four elaborates the substitutability of restorative action hypothesis. The investigators will test whether or not a restorative act by one actor affects the probability of another actor s engaging in a restorative act. Study five examines whether or not the identity of the actors influences the effect of the restorative behavior. Taken together, the five experiments explore how we go about maintaining the identities of others, and how the social situation in which we are embedded affects those restorative efforts doc12193 none Lay Animal locomotion results from the intricate interplay between connections within the nervous system and sense organs that monitor the execution of commands from the central nervous system. For animals that swim by undulating the whole body, sensory receptors detect body bending and transmit that information to the central nervous system, where the commanded and realized movements are compared and compensatory actions are orchestrated. Much is already known about the neuronal wiring diagrams for some behaviors and about relevant sensory structures, but the nature of the connections between the two is largely unknown. The experiments funded by this grant are designed to advance the understanding of interactions between stretch receptors in the body wall, their connections with the central nervous system, and the importance of these interactions in generating an optimal body shape during locomotion. Experiments are conducted on animal preparations and on isolated central nervous systems with two approaches. One approach is electrophysiological, with the aim of describing stretch-sensitive receptors in greater detail and to map their interactions with neurons in the central nervous system. The other is a systems approach, with experiments designed to test the functional importance of the stretch receptors for swimming movements. Electrophysiological experiments to map neuronal interactions are conducted with standard extracellular and intracellular recording techniques. Systems experiments, employing similar techniques, include tests of whether stretch receptors form oscillatory circuits with the central nervous system and of the nature of intersegmental mechanical interactions. Because there is significant functional similarity between swimming and related locomotory movements in all animals, insights gained from this research will be widely applicable throughout the animal kingdom doc12194 none Stith Although the major event of fertilization is known to be the release of intracellular calcium, the exact cause of this calcium release is unknown. Activation of phospholipase C appears to be required for the release of calcium at fertilization; however, it is not known how this enzyme is activated. One possible path to activation of phospholipase C may be through another lipid signaling path. In an effort to quantify various lipid signaling paths, it has been noted that the mass of sphingomyelin, phosphatidylcholine and phosphatidylinositol decrease whereas choline, IP3, DAG and phosphatidic acid increase (phosphatidylethanolamine and phosphatidylserine do not change) during Xenopus fertilization. From these data and others, it is suggested that phospholipase D plays an important role in fertilization. Phosphatidic acid is a product of the reaction catalyzed by phospholipase D. Phosphatidic acid may be required for membrane fusion events (e.g.: sperm-egg merger, cortical granule-plasma membrane merger) and the DAG increase (since phosphatidic acid can be dephosphorylated to DAG) at fertilization. Most importantly, phosphatidic acid binds to and activates phospholipase C; thus, phosphatidic acid from sperm or that produced in the newly formed zygote may induce the central event of fertilization: the increase in intracellular calcium. Through the use of exogenous phosphatidic acid, or inhibition of phospholipase D, the role of this enzyme and the product phosphatidic acid in fertilization will be examined doc12195 none The presence of a single H-bond at an enzyme active site can be crucial to catalysis. Site directed mutagenesis has revealed that removing an H-bond donor or acceptor can reduce an enzyme s catalytic efficiency by a factor of as much as 105. The researchers are developing two novel methods of determining both the strength and direction of individual H-bonds between a substrate or inhibitor and functional groups in the enzyme active sites. These two methods are based on the use of stable isotopes. Preliminary results have shown that the C-D stretching frequency of a primary or secondary alcohol depends directly on the strength of the H-bond from the alcohol. This change in frequency also results in equilibrium isotope effects on the formation of the complex and kinetic isotope effects that can be used to characterize the transition state of the reaction. As an example, the H-bond in cyclic-AMP dependent protein kinase between the aspartate residue that may serve as a critical H-bond acceptor and the nucleophilic serine will be characterized. X-ray crystallography suggests that the aspartate is in the correct position to activate the hydroxyl group of a serine residue for its role as the nucleophile in an ATP-dependent phosphoryl transfer reaction. In spite of the crystallographic proximity of the aspartate, its role in catalyzing the reaction has been controversial. The incorporation of the present studies into the chemical mechanism of cAMP-dependent protein kinase will provide a paradigm for this large family of enzymes involved in signal transduction. Understanding the mechanism of protein kinases will contribute to our ability to design and manipulate these important enzymes that provide for the immediate control of many biological functions. The unique insight into the activation of the nucleophile of an ATP-dependent phosphoryl transfer will extend the current understanding of all kinase reactions doc12196 none Ancient DNA is a valuable tool with which to test hypotheses relating to population movements and expansions in prehistoric times. Advances in molecular biological techniques, including the automation of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), has made it possible to examine mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) extracted from ancient human remains. This provides an opportunity to directly investigate genetic material from prehistoric peoples. Archaeological and linguistic evidence suggest that prehistoric population movements in North America were widespread and common. Consequently, many contemporary Native American populations occupy a different geographical region from their ancestors and assessing relationships between ancient and modern populations is difficult without genetic information. In this project, ancient and modern DNA from populations in the Central Valley of California will be used to test specific hypotheses regarding the peopling and population structure of the region. Linguistic evidence suggests that a Penutian speaking population began replacing Hokan speaking populations in California Central Valley approximately ybp. While archaeological and linguistic data suggest substantial interaction among the peoples of California, the Great Basin, and the Columbia Plateau, the genetic data obtained through ancient DNA studies in these regions will provide insight into the association between cultural similarities and biological relatedness. Migrations in prehistoric California have also been tied to the spread of technology in the last years. DNA extracted from these prehistoric human remains can be used to model the speed and timing of migrations of hunter-gatherer populations, and to examine the demographic consequences of a shift in resource acquisition practices. This information bears directly on modeling the timing and mode of the initial peopling of the Americas doc12197 none Environmental stress due to salinity is one of the most serious factors limiting the productivity of agricultural crops, which are predominantly sensitive to the presence of high concentrations of salts in the soil. A comparison of ion distribution in cells and tissues of various plant species indicates that a primary characteristic of salt tolerant plants is their ability to exclude sodium out of the cell and to take up sodium and to sequester it in the cell vacuoles. Dr. Blumwald s work has identified a family of vacuolar Na+ H+ antiports that play a paramount role in the ability of plants to grow in high NaCl concentrations. These antiports actively move ions into the vacuole, removing the potentially harmful ions from the cytosol. These ions, in turn, act as an osmoticum within the vacuole, which then maintain water flow into the cell, thus allowing plants to grow in soils containing high salinity. The cloning of plant Na+ H+ antiports and the generation of transgenic Arabidopsis thaliana plants with enhanced salt tolerance provides a unique opportunity to study the role of these transporters in salt tolerance and ion homeostasis in vivo. Dr. Blumwald s proposed research aims to identify and characterize proteins regulating the vacuolar Na+ H+ antiport activity, providing insights on the role of Ca2+-dependent transduction processes in the regulation of intracellular ion balance. The second objective will serve to identify mechanisms regulating the transcription of the antiports in salt tolerant plants that could be used to design crops with enhanced salt tolerance. The third objective, will use knockout mutants and RNA interference to determine the physiological role of the vacuolar antiports in K+ nutrition doc12198 none LAY Understanding how past experience shapes future behavior is one of the fundamental challenges for modern animal behavior and neurobiology. Meeting this challenge will require characterization of physiological changes triggered by experiences known to influence specific behaviors, such as aggression during male-male encounters. Two factors have been shown to critically influence the intensity of aggression expressed in an encounter: 1) the outcomes of previous encounters, whether won or lost, and 2) the location of the encounter, whether familiar or unfamiliar. It is the goal of the proposed work to examine the physiological components that contribute to the effect winning has on future encounters (winner effect), as well as those components that contribute to aggression associated with familiarity with the encounter location. Specifically, the function of observed changes in testosterone after competitive interactions will be evaluated. In addition, neurochemical changes that occur in response to transient changes in testosterone will be documented. To begin examining the role of site familiarity in the intensity of aggression, comparisons will be made between resident-intruder aggression (site-specific aggression) and neutral aggression (aggression in a neutral arena). It is predicted that the neurochemical vasopressin will be more closely associated with resident-intruder aggression than neutral aggression. The monogamous, highly parental Peromyscus californicus (California mouse), and the promiscuous, less parental P. leucopus (white-footed mouse) will be developed as model systems for this analysis of interactions between experience and intensity of aggression. Information obtained in these studies may provide insight into some of the physiological mechanisms underlying plasticity in the intensity of aggression in mammals doc12199 none The proposed research will use the fruitfly, Drosophila melanogaster, as a model system for the evolution of water balance in insects. A total of 27 populations, derived from three collection sites, will be studied. Nine populations will be selected for resistance to desiccation stress, and 18 will serve as controls for the selection treatment. Physiological characters associated with desiccation resistance (water content, water loss, metabolic rate, activity) will be assayed at intervals of ten generations. Genetic differences between populations will be investigated using DNA microarrays (gene chips). Genes that are turned on or off in response to water stress will be identified, as well as other genes that contribute to desiccation resistance. By integrating physiological and genetic studies, it will be possible to relate specific changes in gene expression to physiological mechanisms of desiccation resistance. These experiments will also be used to identify new physiological mechanisms by identifying novel genes that respond to selection, and thereby to learn more about how insects and other organisms respond to environmental stress doc12200 none This project supports studies on the identification of phloem loading mechanisms in leaves. Sugars manufactured by photosynthesis are loaded into the phloem of minor veins for export to growing organs. There are two known phloem loading mechanisms. Apoplastic loading involves trans-membrane transport while symplastic loading takes place entirely through the plasmodesmata-connected cytoplasm. It is important to be able to distinguish between these mechanisms because they are inhibited by environmental stress, presumably in different ways. According to the current paradigm, apoplastic- and symplastic-loading species can be identified reliably by plasmodesmatal counts. An alternative hypothesis to be tested in this investigation is that apoplastic loading is universal, except for those species that translocate stachyose, or other carbohydrates of similar size, and load by polymer trapping. Phloem loading studies, based primarily on the specific inhibition of trans-membrane transport by p-chloromercuribenzenesulfonic acid, will be conducted on five species that translocate sucrose but have been putatively identified as symplastic loaders on the basis of plasmodesmatal counts. The prediction is that these plants load via the apoplast. Further studies will be conducted to test the hypothesis that plasmodesmatal frequencies in minor vein phloem reflect overall plasmodesmatal numbers in leaves, depending on plant growth habit, and are not necessarily related to phloem physiology doc12201 none In this project, we investigate the determinants and consequences of household residential location decisions. In particular, we study factors leading to stratification of households across communities by income, demographic characteristics, and preferences. For example, households may choose communities based on housing prices and the quality of local public goods and amenities such as education, public safety, and environmental quality. In addition, preferences for income, race, or other demographic characteristics of neighbors may play a role in household location choices. We also investigate how residential choices of individuals affect neighborhood and community outcomes. Such effects may operate through collective (e.g., voting) decisions that affect expenditures on education, police, and other public services. Effects may arise more directly via neighborhood effects-interactions among individuals that affect the character and quality of neighborhoods and the services they provide. For example, parental involvement and peer effects both within and outside schools may affect children s educational achievement and social development. Interactions within neighborhoods may also affect public safety and the quality of the neighborhood environment. Choices of individuals may also affect satisfaction of others with a neighborhood if households care about income, race, and other demographic characteristics of neighbors. A particular focus of our work, then, is to understand the interaction of preferences for neighborhood demographic composition and local public goods in determining the sorting of population by race and other characteristics across communities. We also investigate the importance of spillover effects and externalities within communities and across neighboring communities. Our contributions are both to development of new methods and to application of those methods. In previous research, we and others have developed strategies for studying stratification in models that impose considerable a priori structure on the patterns of household sorting across communities and associated variation in housing prices and public service quality. In particular, such models imply a common ordering across communities of household incomes, housing prices, and public service quality. While these models provide many valuable insights and have considerable predictive power, they are nonetheless restrictive. In particular, they allow for relatively limited variation across individuals in demographic characteristics and preferences, and, where multiple local public goods are present, they imply a common ordering of qualities across communities for the various goods. Our research advances the state of the art by developing models and computational and econometric methods that permit consideration of multiple observed and unobserved characteristics of individuals and multiple local public goods and amenities. The framework that we are developing also accommodates neighborhood effects and spillovers across neighborhoods. Efforts to understand the adjustments of heterogeneous households to spatial differences in local public goods, environmental amenities, and neighborhood quality have important policy implications. Our comprehensive analysis of the sorting and mixing of households provides improved understanding of racial segregation and income stratification observed in metropolitan areas. Our framework also permits investigation of the effects of large-scale changes such as tax limitations, school finance equalization programs, changes in environmental quality, and falling crime rates. In particular, our approach permits investigation of how such changes affect location decisions of households, how gains and losses arising from the changes are distributed across households, and how the changes affect the distribution of housing prices across comunities doc12202 none The goals of the present project are designed to investigate the molecular mechanism of regulation of the pathway of glutamate generation from gamma-aminobutyrate (GABA) in Bacillus subtilis. The most interesting component of this pathway is GabR, a pyridoxal 5 -phosphate (PLP)- and GABA-dependent transcriptional activator that regulates expression of an operon that encodes two enzymes of GABA utilization. GabR is a member of a novel family of unusual proteins that apparently evolved by joining a DNA-binding domain to an aminotransferase domain. Of particular interest is the requirement for PLP (an essential catalytic cofactor of aminotransferases) and the apparent PLP-binding site of GabR for transcriptional activation. The preliminary data indicate that, in order to activate expression of the target genes, GabR performs (at least) a partial aminotransferase reaction. The main goal of the project will be to show that GabR activity as a transcriptional activator is modulated by GabR-catalyzed transamination of its cofactor PLP, using GABA as an amino group donor. This goal will be achieved by analyzing interactions between GabR and its coactivators, by utilizing structural analogs of PLP and GABA, and by characterization of mutant GabR proteins defective in transcription activation or able to activate transcription constitutively. GabR properties as a specific DNA-binding protein will be characterized. GabR will be the first member of this protein family to be subjected to detailed biochemical and molecular analysis and will provide clues to the mechanism of action of other GabR-like proteins. Because the aminotransferase reaction requires an amino group-containing substrate, the prediction is that all GabR-like proteins have such compounds as their effectors doc12203 none PI: Halloran During nervous system development, individual axons navigate through an extremely complex environment to find their target cells. The motile growth cone at the axon tip senses guidance cues in the environment and directs growth of the axon. Although considerable work has focused recently on guidance molecule activity, the mechanisms by which these molecules function in vivo to coordinate axon pathfinding are largely unknown. Dr. Halloran s research focuses on one family of potential axon guidance molecules, the semaphorins. The semaphorin gene family is highly conserved from invertebrates to humans. This suggests that semaphorins have crucial functions for embryonic development and survival. Semaphorins have been implicated in the regulation of axon pathfinding, sometimes acting as inhibitory guidance molecules, and other times attractive. The semaphorin gene family is very large and diverse, however little is known about the in vivo function of most family members. The aim of this proposal is to understand the in vivo function of one semaphorin of unknown function, sema3D, and to determine how it directs the growth of axons during nervous system development. The potential role of sema3D in guiding growth cones of two neuronal types will be investigated. Dr. Halloran s strategy is to manipulate sema3D gene expression in the developing zebrafish and analyze the resultant effects on axon growth by time-lapse video microscopy of living axons in vivo. The examination of the effects of altered sema3D expression on growing axons should reveal how the axons are normally guided by sema3D. The proposed experiments will likely provide novel insights into how semaphorins regulate growth cone motile behaviors within the complex in vivo environment. The ultimate goal is to better understand how the wiring of the nervous system is established during embryonic development doc12204 none This project has as its objectives the exploration of supramolecular chemistry with special emphasis on supramolecular photochemistry. One facet of this exploration involves the changes in properties of molecules when they are contained within -- and interact with the interior surface of -- zeolites. An extension of this concept to the area of radical polymerization draws upon the analogy of the chain-end radical being contained within a polymeric vessel. Electron spin resonance and other spectroscopic techniques will be employed to charactersize these radicals and to measure their rate constants of addition to monomers. These investigations will provide knowledge concerning the crucial polymer chain propagating steps, which are of fundamental importance to critical issues in the field of free radical polymerization. Starburst dendrimers will be employed as probes inside DNA and liposome supramolecular containers, giving insight on the ability of some dendrimers to assist in the transfection of DNA into cells. With this Award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program continues its support of the research and educational activities of Professor Nicholas J. Turro of Columbia University. Professor Turro s research is in the area of suprameolecular chemistry, wherein smaller molecules are contained within or otherwise interact with larger molecules with attendant alterations in their properties. These principles are likely to have important practical consequenses in the areas of polymer chemistry as well as DNA transfection technologies. In addition, one is able to gain knowledge about the properties of molecules as discrete, individual entities. These studies provide important multidisciplinary educational and training opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students of chemistry as well as for postdoctoral associates doc12205 none Polyphosphate (polyP) is a ubiquitous polymer found in all cells from archaea, eubacteria, fungi, and protozoa to plants and mammals. PolyP is comprised of a linear chain of hundreds of phosphate residues linked by ATP-like, high-energy, phosphoanhydride metaphosphate) bonds. Several biological functions have been suggested for polyP, including a reservoir for phosphate and energy, a chelator of metal ions, a buffer against alkali, and a channel for DNA entry. PolyP also appears to have a role in two-component signal transduction, yet, its biological role is poorly understood. Complementary molecular genetic and physiology experiments will be carried out in the bacterium Escherichia coli with the goal of better understanding the function of polyP in cell biology. Experiments are being directed towards addressing two aims: the first is to define the genetic regulation of the polyP kinase (ppk)-polyP phosphatase (ppx) operon, and the second is to examine the consequences of rapidly increasing polyP levels on gene regulation in vivo doc12206 none Lynne Houck - IRC: The Evolution of a Pheromone Signaling System: From Molecules to Mating LAY SUMMARY Terrestrial salamanders have a unique system of chemical communication. This system features non-volatile pheromones (chemical signals) that a male delivers to the female during courtship. The male courtship pheromone is produced by an enlarged gland under the male s chin, and the male taps this gland on the female s nose in order to deliver his pheromone. In their subsequent evolutionary history, plethodontids modified this pheromone delivery system in a variety of ways, including delivery methods in which the pheromone is injected into the female s circulatory system. This chemical communication system -unique among vertebrates- has been retained by diverse groups of plethodontids throughout their evolutionary radiation. Recently, it has been established that the plethodontid pheromone increases female sexual receptivity, as indicated by courtships that are completed more rapidly. It also has been determined that the pheromone is a protein. The amino acid sequence of this protein has been identified, as well as the nucleotide sequence of the gene that produces the pheromone protein. Furthermore, it has been established that the pheromone protein is in a cytokine family that includes interferons and interleukins. The phylogenetic setting for these discoveries offers an outstanding opportunity to investigate the evolution of the causal pathway from gene to protein to behavior. This project embraces a conceptual framework that is generally applicable to the study of evolutionary change in communication systems at multiple levels of organization doc12207 none Fletcher The control of stem cell activity is critical for the proper development of all higher organisms, as stem cells are the precursors of the organs and tissues that comprise the body. Plants make excellent model systems in which to study and manipulate stem cells, because they maintain pools of such cells throughout their life cycle at growing tips called apical meristems. The shoot apical meristem continuously maintains a stem cell reservoir while simultaneously generating organs such as leaves, stems and flowers. How the meristem keeps a constant balance between stem cell production and organogenesis is poorly understood, but studies by Dr. Fletcher and others using the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana are uncovering genes that regulate this balance and thereby affect shoot apical meristem activity. The goal of this project is to understand how the Arabidopsis ULTRAPETALA (ULT) locus controls the activity of shoot and floral meristems. We have isolated ult mutant plants that generate extra flowers and floral organs from enlarged meristems, and also have altered organ identity in the center of the flower. ULT is therefore a candidate regulator of both shoot apical meristem function and floral patterning. Our first objective is to identify the defect(s) underlying the ult shoot and floral meristem phenotypes by analyzing the distribution of region-specific molecular markers. We will also decipher the genetic relationship between ULT and other known regulators of shoot and flower development, which act in a number of different pathways. Our third goal is to map and clone the ULT gene, and determine its mRNA expression pattern during development as a prelude to functional analysis of the gene product. These experiments will identify specific mechanisms through which ULT regulates meristem size and floral patterning, and place ULT in context with other Arabidopsis genes known to affect these processes. Analysis of ULT provides a unique opportunity to investigate the mechanisms that balance life-long stem cell production and organogenesis, and also to determine how a single molecule functions both in growth control and pattern formation to coordinate these two crucial processes during development doc12208 none In this RUI project funded by the Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Helen Leung of Mt. Holyoke College will pursue a program of research using Fourier transform microwave (FTMW) spectroscopic techniques to study intermolecular interactions in weakly bound complexes. The high-resolution spectra obtained will be used to determine the structure, quadrupole coupling constants, effects of nuclear electric field gradients, and information about the potential energy surfaces of complexes involving imidazole or the hydroxyl radical. The nitrogen quadrupole coupling constants will provide a measure of the pertubations to the electron distributions arising from intermolecular interactions in the complexes. The distortion of electron clouds in weakly bound complexes, such as those examined in this project, may affect such diverse phenomena as regulatory processes in biochemical systems or the initiation of a chemical reaction. The structures of the imidazole complexes being examined reflect an interplay of several forces, and they can provide a sensitive test of current computational methods. The studies of the various OH complexes can have a large impact on understanding the reaction dynamics of the OH radical, and thus they can aid in understanding how to make combustion reactions more efficient. Results from this project will also provide information useful in other areas, such as atmospheric science doc12209 none Two related methods have been developed to probe the structure of bacterial chromosomes inside living cells. One technique is called Muprinting, and it uses PCR reactions to generate a high-resolution picture of the transposition target sites in a bacterial population infected with phage Mu. By comparing the PCR profiles of naked DNA in vitro and protein bound DNA in vivo, it is possible to detect the location of sequence-specific DNA binding. Proteins detected with Muprinting include repressors and RNA polymerases. A new method recently developed called Mu-screening allows the identification of the transposition targets that are used efficiently in vivo during replicative Mu transposition. It is now possible to identify hot spots and cold spots for transposon insertion, and to follow changes in these structure when cells are placed in different physiological environments. Two primary objectives will be pursued. First, Mu-screening will be used in conjunction with gene micro-arrays containing ORFs in E. coli to identify the most efficient transposition targets in the genomes of E. coli and Salmonella enterica serovar typhimurium. Second, Mu transposition hotspots will be cloned and subjected to in vivo and in vitro Muprint analysis to precisely identify the regions where proteins are bound in living cells. Ultimately, the proteins bound to Mu hotspots will be characterized by biochemical and genetic methods. New methods to systematically investigate chromosome structure inside living cells are required to address the challenging problems in modern molecular evolution. With the stunning advances in the ability to efficiently acquire entire sequences of virtually any organism, new methods to understand chromosome function and structure are now urgent. Information gained from Mu-screening and Muprinting technology promises to provide insight into the area of chromosome evolution and into the question of structure in bacterial chromatin. Micro-array-driven structure analysis complements gene expression studies and should stimulate new genetic and biochemical models of chromosome function doc12210 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Stephen Marlett and his colleague Mary Moser will conduct two years of linguistic research on Seri, an indigenous language in northwestern Mexico used by under 700 people. One goal of this research is to complete the first comprehensive dictionary of Seri. The dictionary will include a brief description of the Seri grammar for both native-speaker and outsider use. The project will also produce a corpus of interlinearized texts. These texts will be based on materials edited by Seri associates and published for the language community as a contribution to the preservation of culturally-important literature. They will be presented with practical spelling, phonological spelling, interlinear Spanish and English word glosses, and free translation in Spanish and English. They complement the dictionary and grammar by showing the words in literary context. The groundwork for this research includes extensive fieldwork, circulation of drafts of the work, and personal interaction with three generations of members of the Seri people. Researchers will now verify thousands of lexical entries and their accompanying illustrative sentences. Experts will be consulted in the areas of ichthyology, ornithology, herpetology, and botany. The dictionary and interlinearized texts will be in Seri, Spanish, and English. The inclusion of Spanish will make the work useful to Seri speakers, as well as to non-Seri Spanish speakers in Mexico. The inclusion of English expands the audience to international linguists and anthropologists doing research on the area s ecology. The researchers have worked closely with native Seri authorities and other members of the Seri nation at all stages of the dictionary and grammar preparation, to ensure completeness, usefulness, appropriateness, and accessibility. The significance of this research is twofold. First, the Seri language is the sole surviving language of a linguistic family within the putative Hokan stock. Little information is available about other now-extinct languages that may have been closely related to it. The dictionary will support more historical and comparative linguistic research. The Seri people were still living by traditional hunting and gathering in the mid-twentieth century. Therefore, study of their language is as significant for the field of anthropology as it is for the field of linguistics. Second, this project s dictionary, grammar, and translated texts will be available to the Seri community in a format that is supportive of language maintenance efforts and bilingual education. These works will also aid (English- and Spanish-speaking) researchers who increasingly work with Seri associates in ecology and related fields, but who are handicapped by the language barrier. An important additional result of the project is the training that some key Seri men and women will receive in editing and processing Seri language materials. This will benefit the Seri people for years into the future doc12211 none This award, made to the University of Utah in support of Professor Joel Miller s research is supported by the Advanced Materials Program in the Chemistry Division. The research deals with the design, synthesis, characterization and properties of metalloporphyrin-based magnetic materials.The broad goals of the research are to understand the fundamental science that governs behavior in organic-based magnets, to identify new magnetic phenomena, and to to make organic-based magnets with enhanced and controllable critical temperatures and coercive fields. The research will elucidate structure-function relationships in the one dimensional manganeseporphyrin-tetracyanoethylene system including the role of the metal atoms, the pressure dependence, the photomagnetic response and the role of spins on the periphery of the porphyrin ligand. The one dimensional systems will be extended to two and three dimensions by covalent bonding and by supramolecular hydrogen bonded manganotetraphenylporphyrins. New types of magnets will be prepared based on new classes of radical-ion acceptors capable of binding two manganese moieties. A feature of the research will be extensive collaborations with experts for structural and performance measurements and for computational modeling. This research will provide a fundamental understanding of magnetic behavior in molecular and supramolecular organic magnets as well as provide more temperature-stable, higher field magnets. Soluble molecular magnets will advance thin film magneto-optical applications. Collaborations with international chemists and physicists will provide strong interdisciplinary training for students doc12212 none Molecular compounds in the brain called neuropeptides often regulate physiological functions, acting similarly to hormones. A new member of the family of neuropeptides known as galanins recently has been isolated in mammals and called galanin-like peptide (GALP). Preliminary evidence suggests that GALP plays a role in the neuroendocrine regulation of pituitary functions, but little is yet known about the functions of this compound. This project uses neuroanatomical, physiological and molecular biological techniques to reveal the anatomical circuitry of the cells containing GALP, to discover how and where the expression of GALP occurs, and to develop a mutant mouse model with a targeted deletion of the GALP gene to reveal physiological functions. Results of these studies should provide a novel understanding of possible roles for this molecule in physiological processes such as regulation of metabolism, body weight, reproduction, lactation and growth. This exploratory project has both high risk and high potential impact. It remains unknown what the specific discoveries will be, but novel data are likely to have major importance, extending beyond neuroendocrinology to regulatory physiology and developmental biology. Graduate and postdoctoral training will also be done in a laboratory with a long record of excellence doc12213 none TECHNICAL: The project is aimed at the structural characterization of the catalytic element of VS RNA, an 881 nucleotide, single-stranded plasmid present in the mitochondria of certain natural strains of Neurospora. Most ribozymes recognize a complimentary single-stranded RNA through Watson-Crick base pairing; however, the VS ribozyme recognizes its substrate primarily through tertiary interactions. How this recognition occurs is not well understood, and it is clear that more structural information is needed to augment the wealth of biochemical data currently available. Due to the size of the VS ribozyme (~154 nucleotides) the project uses a modular approach. Initially the structures of isolated domains of the RNA, stem-loops as well as helix junctions, will be determined using standard NMR methodology. These structures and resonance assignments will then serve as starting points for the analysis of their conformation as part of the intact ribozyme using a combination of recently developed NMR techniques and specific segmental labeling strategies. The results from these experiments will provide insight into how RNA tertiary structure influences the secondary structure of the building blocks and provide information about the domain structures in the functional ribozyme. In the last phase of the project residual dipolar couplings and information form other sources (NOEs, FRET studies, etc.) will be used to determine the global structure and cleavage mechanism of a functional ribozyme. NON-TECHNICAL: Ribozymes are RNA molecules with the capability to catalyze chemical reactions. This research is aimed at the structure determination of one such system: The Neurospora VS ribozyme. Multidimensional NMR spectroscopy will be used as the main tool to determine first the structures of isolated domains and then the global structure of the molecule. The information derived from the structures will provide insights into how RNA catalysis works on the molecular level doc12214 none Regenerative neurogenesis in adult echinoderms. Regeneration processes are of vital importance to repair and replace lost tissues and organs. In chordates and other animals groups, the nervous system is considered almost irreplaceable; neurons that are lost after trauma cannot be replaced and there is a limited functional reconnection of nerve fibers. This project uses a new experimental system, the sea cucumber, a member of the phylum Echinodermata, to explore the regeneration of the nervous system. Echinoderms, although invertebrate animals are closely related to the vertebrates, and posses an extraordinary regeneration capacity. The project aims to study the regeneration of the nervous system within the digestive tract and the cellular division and differentiation associated with this process. It also explores the regeneration capacities of the main echinoderm nervous tissue components to determine if the regeneration of cells and fibers constitute a general event in echinoderm tissues. Finally, it studies the expression of genes, known to be important in regenerative and embryological organogenesis, and their expression during nervous system regeneration. Results from our experiments will advance the understanding of neuronal regeneration by obtaining information from a key group of organisms, echinoderms, where regeneration is a natural regular event. The proposed work on nervous regeneration is part of our overall goal of understanding the process by which the cells that make up the nervous system are generated, and how they differentiate and assemble into a functional organ doc12215 none With this Research at Undergraduate Institutions award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting Professor Jerry R. Mohrig, of the Department of Chemistry at Carleton College, for his studies of stereochemical determinants in elimination and proton transfer reactions. These studies, focused on the stereochemistry of addition and elimination reactions involving beta-substituted esters and thioesters of butyric acid and the related aldehydes and ketones, seek a comprehensive understanding of the stereochemical consequences of the carbonyl group and substituents at C-3 on the stereochemistry of addition-elimination and proton transfer reactions involving acyclic beta-substituted carbonyl compounds. In research to be carried out by a group of undergraduate chemistry majors, the importance of substrate acidity and the leaving group in determining the stereoselectivity of base-catalyzed 1,2-elimination reactions producing conjugated carbonyl compounds will be explored through a combination of synthetic and NMR spectroscopic studies. Similarly, the stereochemistry of electrophilic attack at enolate anions will be investigated. Understanding and controlling the three-dimensional structure of noncyclic molecules remains an inportant challenge in organic chemistry. Within this context, the stereochemical details of reactions involving the addition to or elimination of fragments from molecules are of both fundamental interest and relevance to numerous biologically catalyzed processes. Professor Jerry R. Mohrig, of the Department of Chemistry at Carleton College, is supported by a Research at Undergraduate Institutions award from the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his studies related to the stereochemistry of such reactions. Through a combination of synthetic and spectroscopic studies, carried out by undergraduate chemistry majors, Professor Mohrig is developing a detailed understanding of these important chemical processes while simultaneously providing undergraduates with the opportunity to carry out research on fore-front, significant problems doc12216 none Steroid hormones can have rapid effects on nerve cells in the brain, and are known to interact with binding sites in the brain. While peripheral endocrine organs supply many steroids, it is now known that brain tissue itself can synthesize some steroids. Glial cells can convert cholesterol to other compounds, including the steroid dehydro-epiandrostenone (DHEA), one of the main neuroactive steroids synthesized in the brain. In peripheral tissues a protein enzyme known as P450c17 is responsible for DHEA formation, but this enzymatic activity has not been found in the brain. This paradox led to controversy over the role of this enzyme in brain DHEA formation, and whether regulation of neurosteroid biosynthesis occurs via a brain-specific steroid biosynthetic pathway. To help settle this debate, this project develops a genetic model of a mouse with the P450c17 gene knocked out. The expression and activity of steroidogenic enzymes in the brain cells of these mice are examined to investigate the expression of a possible novel alternative pathway for DHEA synthesis. Results will be important to resolving a current controversy in neuroendocrinology. The impact will extend beyond neuroendocrinology by leading to a better understanding of the neurochemical pathways underlying brain function in general, and so will be important for neurochemistry, developmental neuroscience, and the biopsychology of stress and aging. The project also supports postdoctoral training doc12217 none The objective of this work is to develop a comprehensive physical understanding of how lymph moves in anuran amphibians (frogs and toads) and investigate the anatomical and physiological control systems which lead to variations in the movement of lymph. Lymph is the fluid that filters from the capillaries of the circulatory system into the interstitial space as a consequence of the hydrostatic pressure generated by the heart. The principal role of the lymphatic system is to return this fluid back into the circulation. If this functional role of the lymphatic system is prevented, fluid is lost from the circulation much like a hemorrhage, and cardiovascular function declines eventually leading to circulatory shock. Anuran amphibians form lymph, at about ten times the rate of mammals. Hence the return of lymph to the circulatory system is an even more critical variable to their maintenance of blood volume. Amphibians, in relation to all vertebrate classes, have the most rapid compensatory ability to replace lost blood volume with lymph and this lymph mobilization capacity varies with a species degree of terrestriality. Understanding how lymph moves is fundamental not only to our understanding of how amphibians function at an organ system level, but also aids our understanding of what adaptations are involved in the colonization of terrestrial environments. Consequently, amphibians represent an excellent evolutionary model system for studying comparative mechanisms involved in how lymph mobilization regulates blood volume. Current models of lymph movement are untenable from a physical perspective. The working hypothesis is that lymph moves in response to pressure differences created by two mechanisms, compartmentalization of lymph sacs creating sacs of different compliance and skeletal muscle contractions varying lymph sac compliance. Compliance is the relationship between lymph volume and pressure in a lymph sac. The primary function of many of these skeletal muscles may be solely tied to lymph movement and may represent the first vertebrate example of skeletal muscle fluid pumps. The pathways for lymph movement will be delineated using dye-labeled plasma, the pressures in these pathways will be monitored via implanted cannulae and skeletal muscle contraction monitored via EMGs recorded from implanted electrodes . How blood volume status influences the lymph sac pressures and skeletal muscle activities will also be investigated. Comparative anatomical data will then be collected to test what species anatomical differences correlate with differences in lymph flow doc12218 none PI: Hartenstein, Volker : This project analyzes the partitioning of the eye field in the Drosophila embryo. The eye field in the anterior neural plate of vertebrates and the head of the Drosophila embryo exhibit a high degree of similarity regarding the fate map of the visual system, and the signaling pathways controlling this fatemap. Drosophila counterparts of Shh (Hh), BMB4 (Dpp) and EGF, as well as Pax6, Six6 and many other regulatory genes all function in the Drosophila embryonic head. Preliminary data show that Dpp is secreted in the dorsal midline and forms a dorso-ventral gradient that specifies the different domains within the eye field. Dpp is then down-regulated in the eye field, except for its posterior boundary from where it may form a posterior-anterior gradient that partitions the visual primordium into larval and adult eye, and optic lobe. Hh is secreted at the lateral boundary of the eye field and may form a gradient that antagonizes the early Dpp gradient. Dr. Hartenstein and his research group will address the topology and morphogenesis of the Drosophila eye field and test their models of Dpp and Hh function in partitioning the eye field. The first aim is to reconstruct the details of the fate map, and to investigate the morphogenesis of the visual system. The second aim addresses the function of dpp in the eye field by investigating the dpp loss of function, heterotopic and heterochronic expression of dpp, activated Dpp receptor, and dominant negative Dpp receptor. In the third aim Dr. Hartenstein will analyze the role of Hh and its interaction with Dpp. The hypothesis will be tested that Hh negatively interacts with Dpp function. This would represent an interesting parallel to the vertebrate neural tube where ventral release of Shh also antagonizes BMPs secreted from dorsal tissue. By generating Dpp:hh double mutants and expressing mutant constructs the interaction of these genes in the embryonic head will be tested. In aim four Dr. Hartenstein will address the control of Dpp activity in the embryonic head. By establishing specific differences and similarities between early eye patterning in Drosophila and vertebrates, Dr. Hartenstein anticipates to furnish relevant information that helps interpreting Shh and BMP function in neural fate determination and to provide important insights in the evolution of the brain doc12219 none Hartenstein It is proposed to analyze early neural development in embryos of the flatworm species Macrostomum sp. And Neochildia fusca that can be raised in the lab so that embryos of all stages can be obtained in sufficient numbers year round. Flatworms are generally believed to have retained several primitive features of the common bilaterian ancestor and therefore represent a highly relevant system to study basic developmental processes, such as establishment of the body axes and early neurogenesis. Given the basal phylogenetic position of flatworms the proposed experiments will contribute to our understanding of neural development and the evolution of molecular networks controlling this process. Our first aim is to reconstruct normal neurogenesis. Questions are the origin and pattern of neural progenitors, their proliferation and migration, and the pattern of axon tracts that emerges as neurons differentiate. These studies will provide a framework of data in which to interpret the expression pattern of genes that will be identified as part of the following aims. Aim 2 is the generation of a cDNA library for both species, which will greatly facilitate the screen for genes involved in neurogenesis. Aim 3 proposes to use a combined PCI and library screen approach to identify cognates of the following highly conserved genes that play fundamental roles in neural development in vertebrates and invertebrate systems: the regionalization genes vnd, ind, msh, Otx otd, Tailless, lab and cad; the proneural genes ato and ASC, and the neural fate specifying genes of the POU Homeodomain and LIM Homeodomain family. Obtaining probes for these genes will serve two purposes. It will furnish early markers for neural precursors used to analyze normal neurogenesis at a satisfactory level of detail. Secondly, the expression pattern of these conserved genes is expected to provide valuable insight into how they function during neural patterning in flatworms. This in turn will aid in reconstructing how the relationship between specific molecular networks and morphogenetic events in neurogenesis arose during evolution doc12220 none The aim of this project is to determine how proline-rich left-handed polyproline II (PPII) helices form. PPII helices are common in proteins and often play vital roles in critical processes including signal transduction, cell motility, transcription and immune response. PPII helices are involved in both structural roles (e.g., as adopted by collagen) and molecular recognition (e.g., protein-protein interactions mediated by SH3 domains). It is commonly assumed that many proline-rich regions of sequence (PRR s) adopt this confirmation. The goal of this project is to determine the physical basis for PPII helices. This will be achieved via systematic host-guest experiments using a poly(proline)-based host peptide known to form a PPII helix. A combination of experimental and computational methods will be employed. Circular dichroism will be used to measure average PPII helical content of host-guest peptides in order to determine contributions of both individual residues and pairs of residues to the formation of PPII helices. High resolution nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and molecular dynamics computer simulations will be used to examine the atomic-level interactions that lead to the favoring or disfavoring PPII helix formation. The data obtained from all of these experiments will be combined to form a comprehensive atomic-level picture of PPII helix formation by PRR s. The results of this project will be applicable to studies of a multitude of critical physiological processes ranging from signal transduction to transcription to cell motility. This project lays essential groundwork for future studies of protein-protein interactions involving PPII helices formed by PRR s doc12221 none Nelson The components of leaf vascular pattern formation will be analyzed, using a molecular genetic approach in Arabidopsis. The formation of the leaf vascular pattern has developmental consequences beyond the simple siting of veins. Provascular sites in the leaf primordium, where the precursors of vein cells are formed, appear to serve as morphogenetic centers that regulate the location and specialization of vascular and other leaf cell types. This makes functional sense, since many of the cell types must function in cooperation with the veins, requiring a defined spatial relationship. Using forward and reverse genetic approaches, potential components of this process have been identified, including likely members of provascular signaling pathways. Their roles will be analyzed and additional candidates will be characterized. These are the aims: 1) To identify the immediate signaling pathway partners of the VH1 provascular receptor-like kinase, which is a candidate for a key role in organizing vascular regions. 2) To determine the role of the cvp1 sterol methyl transferase (SMT2) in provascular cell siting or differentiation. These processes are defective in cvp1 mutants. 3) To determine the role of the SAUR gene represented by the thick vein mutant. This may represent a direct link between auxin signals and vein formation. 4) To characterize the vein patterning roles of additional genes identified by mutants with vein pattern defects doc12222 none Irish Flowers are a defining characteristic of the angiosperms, yet there is wide variation in floral form. Based on results from Arabidopsis and several other higher eudicot species, it has been proposed that, despite the wide variation in floral architecture, the molecular mechanisms controlling floral development are conserved across all angiosperms. This hypothesis, however, has not been critically tested. One key regulatory gene, the floral homeotic APETALA3 (AP3) gene, has been shown to be required for specifying petals and stamens in the higher eudicot Arabidopsis. The experiments described will address the larger question of whether the molecular mechanisms controlling floral development are conserved or have diverged by investigating the functions of AP3-like genes in other angiosperm species. These studies will be carried out in tomato and in opium poppy. Phylogenetic analyses indicate that a duplication event in the AP3 lineage occurred at the base of the higher eudicots, leading to two AP3-like lineages in these species: the euAP3 lineage and the TM6 lineage. To date, all functional analyses have focussed on the role of the euAP3 lineage genes, of which the Arabidopsis AP3 gene is a member. The roles of the paralogous TM6 lineage genes are currently unknown and will be addressed by carrying out functional studies in tomato, a species for which a number of genetic and molecular tools exist. These investigations will include screening for insertional mutations in the TM6 gene, transgenic manipulation of the TM6 gene, and genetic experiments utilizing a previously identified tomato AP3 insertional mutation. The lower eudicots and basal angiosperms contain only one AP3-like lineage. These genes are more similar in sequence to the higher eudicot TM6 genes and are termed the paleoAP3 lineage genes. The function of a paleoAP3 lineage member will be investigated using opium poppy as a model system. These studies will include cloning and characterizing the opium poppy paleoAP3 gene and determining whether any of the previously identified poppy floral homeotic mutations correspond to lesions in this gene. In addition, expression studies will be carried out in order to characterize the processes controlling floral development in this species. The results obtained from these studies will be valuable in shedding light on how gene duplication and diversification are related to changes in gene function. They will also provide a basis for developing new and more rigorous hypotheses to explain, at the molecular genetic level, how morphological innovations in floral form have arisen doc12223 none Enzyme-substrate interactions between the aminoglycoside antibiotics and aminoglycoside modifying enzymes are very interesting and challenging targets for basic research. Aminoglycoside antibiotics constitute a large group of clinically important drugs, and today, there are more than fifty known enzymes that chemically modify aminoglycosides and render them useless against pathogenic bacteria. These enzymes fall into three groups based on the type of chemical modification they catalyze. These reactions are N-acetylation, O-adenylation, and O-phosphorylation. Most notably, each enzyme can use many aminoglycosides as substrates; conversely a single aminoglycoside can be modified by a large number of enzymes. This situation makes the structural and functional studies quite challenging and currently neither a solution structure of an aminoglycoside-modifying enzyme, nor a crystal structure of an enzyme that yields information on the conformation of a bound aminoglycoside is available. This research will determine the first solution structures of aminoglycoside-modifying enzymes by NMR. The enzymes are the aminoglycoside-2 -nucleotidyltransferase-Ia, and the aminoglycoside-3-acetyltransferase-IIIb. NMR and other biochemical and biophysical methods will be used to study enzyme-antibiotic interactions in detail. The specific aims include kinetic and binding studies, determination of structures of both enzymes with and without substrates, substrate titrations using isotope-enriched enzymes or substrates, site specific mutations of the critical residues, measurement of amide exchange rates with and without substrates. It is expected that the solution structures of an aminoglycoside 2 -adenyltransferase, and an aminoglycoside 3-acetyltransferase will be determined. It is also expected that kinetic and thermodynamic properties of enzyme-substrate complexes, the residues involved in substrate binding and catalysis, conformations of tightly bound aminoglycosides, and aminoglycoside-enzyme contact site(s)will be studied. It is expected that these studies will reveal the types of interactions that occur between enzymes and aminoglycosides, thus allowing the determination of shared characteristic features of the active sites of these enzymes that allow binding of aminoglycosides in a similar conformation. This can be significant since the homology between some of the aminoglycoside-modifying enzymes can be very little or none. In general, this type of a system allows one to compare conformations of many ligands bound to the same target site as well as the comparison of active site structures of different targets (enzymes) that have no homology to each other but provide the same complementary groups to bind the same ligands in the same conformation. Data obtained in such comparisons should be helpful to determine the essential principles that affect ligand-macromolecule interactions. Furthermore, it should also lead to predictions on the expected binding modes of structurally related compounds and change in their affinities as a result of mutations at the active site(s). Results of this work should yield a better understanding of enzyme-ligand interactions and may have far reaching impact on studies of many ligand-receptor interactions doc12224 none The objective of this project is to improve the understanding of phosphorous storage and use in wheat and barley seeds. Approximately 75% of the phosphorous in wheat and barley seeds is in the form of phytic acid, which makes the phosphorous unavailable in diets of humans, poultry, swine, and fish. As a consequence, much of the phosphorous consumed is excreted, which creates a significant environmental problem in animal waste management. Moreover, humans consuming a primarily grain-based diet may suffer mineral deficiencies because of the ability of phytic acid to form tightly-bound complexes with minerals. The enzymes involved in phytic acid accumulation in seeds are not fully characterized. Low phytic acid wheat and barley selections have been identified. Using these mutants and techniques of genetic analysis, this project will further the understanding of this important metabolic process in cereal seeds. The goal is to identify, clone, and characterize genes associated with the synthesis of phytic acid and related phosphorous biochemical pathways (specifically inositol monophosphatase and inositol kinase), to better understand this pathway s role in plant biology, and ultimately to improve world grain crops to reduce animal-derived phosphorous pollution and improve mineral nutrition of humans and domesticated livestock doc12225 none This study will test theoretical predictions about how genetic relationships between traits change in response to natural selection. More specifically, it will examine how genetic relationships between traits expressed differently in males and females change in response to differing selection on males and females. Using an insect species that exhibits little sexual dimorphism, the experiments will impose artificial selection on the body size of either one sex at a time or both sexes at once (simulating patterns of natural selection often observed in nature) and examine (a) correlated evolutionary responses in the alternate (unselected) sex, (b) correlated responses of other non-selected traits (e.g., reproductive traits), and (c) the evolution of genetic variances and covariances. The experiments will also impose selection on female fecundity, and male and female development time. This will test the hypotheses that selection for increased fecundity and selection for short development time influence the evolution of sexual size dimorphism in a manner predicted by theory. Although many studies have examined how traits are genetically related to each other, few previous studies have examined how these genetic relationships change when traits are subject to natural selection. Yet natural selection is ubiquitous in nature; and human beings impose natural selection on organisms in agricultural animal and plant breeding programs, during application of pesticides to agricultural fields, in the use of antibiotics, and whenever natural biological events are manipulated. Understanding how genetic relationships among traits change as we impose natural selection on these traits is critical to understanding the long-term evolutionary responses of populations to this selection doc12226 none This project will exploit the recently completed genomic sequence of Methanosarcina acetivorans to identify novel genes proteins for two key physiological processes. A functional genomics approach will be taken to further the understanding of (i) the fermentation of acetate to methane (the pathway by which two-thirds of the global output of methane is produced) by M. acetivorans, and (ii) the response to environmental stress by M. acetivorans and the Archaea in general. A large percentage of the open reading frames of sequenced microbial genomes have no significant deduced identity to any known proteins; thus it is expected that novel proteins and enzymes will be discovered and that their characterization will uncover new biochemical principles. Whole genome DNA microarray and two-dimensional gel electrophoresis methods will be employed to identify genes that are differentially expressed during growth on acetate versus methanol or methylamines, and in media containing high and low salt. The results are expected to (i) identify genes specific for methane formation from acetate and (ii) uncover general principles of Archaeal adaptation to changing environmental conditions. The differentially expressed genes will be characterized by transcriptional mapping and the gene sequences will be analyzed for information regarding their potential function. Gene knockout experiments will be performed to validate their role in the acetate fermentation pathway or osmotic stress, and also to aid in the determination of their specific function. Selected genes will be over-expressed and the gene products characterized to determine their biochemical properties and specific physiological function By elucidating physiological processes in greater detail, the project is expected to increase the understanding of biocomplexity by revealing how M. acetivorans reacts to changing environmental conditions and how it interacts with other members in microbial consortia that comprise the anaerobic link in the global carbon cycle. In addition, students from each academic institution will be exposed to a wide variety of experimental approaches and methods from each of the collaborating academic institutions . The fundamental interactive nature of the research will provide participating students with broad exposure to genetics, genomics, fermentation, microbial physiology, and enzyme characterization. This type of broad training is designed to provide personnel for future research that will be based on the plethora of genomic information expected in the next decade and beyond doc12227 none Mitochondria have their own genomes, however, the majority of their proteins are nuclear-encoded and the expression and import of these proteins requires a highly regulated, two-way communication between organelles and the nucleus. To date, it has not been feasible to isolate the elements of mitochondrion-nucleus communication in plants. The missing component has been an easily scorable trait for mitochondrial function, one responsive to environmental signals. Plant mitochondria have a branched respiratory pathway with an alternative oxidase (AOX) not coupled to proton translocation and ATP synthesis. Cold, wounding, Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS), and pathogen attack, among others, increase alternative oxidase activity and Aox gene expression. AOX, in the laboratory, is also a dispensable activity in plants, thus its levels may be genetically modified and potential mutants lacking AOX activity recovered. Our research is centered around the isolation of mutants in mitochondrion-nucleus signaling using AOX expression to score for mitochondrial function. We have devised a visual screen for impaired AOX induction after challenge by oxidative stress. To complement this screen, we use microarray analysis to further characterize the mutants, and to identify genes and gene clusters involved in stress-induced AOX expression. Preliminary microarray experiments on mitochondrial gene expression in Arabidopsis leaves establish that this approach can be successful. [Initial data are available online: http: genome www4.stanford.edu MicroArray SMD under experimenter McIntosh ] To ensure complete coverage of the genome we will use oligoarrays, cDNA arrays and directed mitochondrial arrays. Mutants in conjunction with transgenic plants will be used to decipher mitochondrial involvement in oxidative stress signaling and cell death, and the role of AOX in the hypevirulence response. AOX and ROS involvement in cell death will be studied through cytochrome c gene family (At-Cc) expression, cytochrome c levels in the mitochondrion and cytosol, and cytochrome pathway activity doc12228 none Professor Robert J. McMahon, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his studies directed toward the elucidation of the identity, structure, properties, and reactivity of organic molecules that occur in interstellar space. A combination of experimental and computational investigations are focused on organic species that are either known to or are likely to exist in the interstellar medium. These organic species will be generated in the laboratory, and their molecular structure investigated by infrared, ultraviolet visible, electron spin resonance, and microwave spectrometry. In order to address the question of the existence of cyclic, aromatic species in interstellar space, as well as the mechanisms for their formation from acyclic molecules whose existence has been demonstrated, the fundamental chemical mechanisms by which open-chain organic molecules undergo ring closure will be investigated. Additional studies will attempt to detect aromatic species and their precursors in the interstellar medium through a combination of laboratory rotational spectroscopy and subsequent radio-astronomical searches. The origin of the so-called diffuse interstellar bands has been described as one of the fundamental problems in modern astronomy and molecular spectroscopy. At the present time, it is not known with certainty whether cyclic species displaying the unusual stabilization known as aromaticity exist in interstellar space and, if so, how these species can be formed from the acyclic molecules that are known to exist there. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Robert J. McMahon, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, is carrying out a combination of experimental and calculational studies designed to address these questions. By preparing acyclic precursors to aromatic species and examining their structure and reactivity, Professor McMahon explores the fundamental reaction chemistry which could occur in interstellar space. By probing these species with a variety of spectroscopic techniques, he both elucidates their structures and provides spectroscopic signatures which may be sought in the interstellar medium, providing evidence for the existence (or absence) of these species doc12229 none The Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization not only received much media attention, but also demonstrated the growing importance of public pressure for political accountability of international economic institutions. The importance of such pressure raises several issues about the relationships among domestic social movements, transnational organizations, and international institutions. Social movements face special problems of collective action in contending against transnational opponents. They may deal with the problems by organizing domestically against the consequences of global economic actors, by supporting transnational umbrella groups, or by creating movement organizations that span two or more nations. This project examines how and why domestic activists select certain channels to become transnational actors. In studying the transnationalization of social movements, the project focuses on five sectors of transnational activism (labor, religious human rights, indigenous groups, global warming, and genetic foods), and three international institutions (the United Nations, the European Union, and the World Trade Organization). It creates a quantitative data set from the existing archive of the Yearbook of International Organizations, and adds to the data set information obtained on protests at international conferences, on founding and government funding of activists groups, and on network links among domestic movements, transnational organizations, and international institutions. Analysis of the data set allows the investigators and others interested in transnational movements to understand how domestic forms of contention give way to transnational mobilization doc12230 none Foltz Fertilization initiates the start of the development of a new organism. Sperm binding and fusion launch the egg from a quiescent state into an active state, committed to cell cycle entry. How does the meeting of these two cells signal the activation of development? In particular, the release of Ca2+ from internal egg stores is a hallmark of egg activation and has been the focus of intensive study. Studies using echinoderm (sea urchin and sea star) gametes have suggested a model for a signal transduction pathway that leads to initiation of Ca2+ release. The working model is that sperm-egg interaction activates a Src family tyrosine kinase(s) (SFK) that in turn (directly or indirectly) activates PLCg, causing the production of IP3 and subsequent release of Ca2+ from internal stores in the egg. This research will test the current signaling pathway model by identifying and characterizing the endogenous components in the egg, evaluating their interactions, and investigating their mode of regulation. The results of the proposed experiments should provide insight into how signaling components are organized in the sea urchin egg and interact with one another to trigger egg activation. There are two specific aims. First, the Src-type egg tyrosine kinase(s) that is activated at fertilization will be identified and characterized. cDNAs encoding egg SFKs are being cloned and antibodies will be raised against the proteins. The necessity of the SFK(s) for Ca2+ release will be tested by inhibiting its function using a dominant-interfering approach. The antibodies will be used to characterize the protein s activity at fertilization, localization in the egg, and potential interaction with PLCg and other egg signaling or cytoskeletal components. The second aim will investigate the mechanism of PLCg activation. The interaction of an egg SFK(s) with egg PLCg will be investigated, as will the localization and tyrosine phosphorylation state of PLCg. Together, the results from the proposed work should provide insight into how sperm-egg interaction results in one of the most important and universal events of egg activation, the release of Ca2+ in the egg doc12112 none When cells make proteins for export (secretory proteins), it is critically important that the proteins are as they should be. If not, there is a quality control mechanism, termed Endoplasmic Reticulum-Associated Degradation (ERAD) that detects aberrant proteins and destroys them. The importance of cleansing the secretory pathway of aberrant proteins is underscored by the fact that if mis-folded proteins accumulate in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), they induce the unfolded protein response (UPR), a cellular response that can lead in extreme cases to programmed cell death. Drs. McCracken and Brodsky originally discovered that ERAD involves the selection of aberrant proteins (ERAD substrates), transport of the substrate proteins back across the ER membrane into the cytoplasm, and subsequent proteolytic degradation of the substrate proteins via the proteasome. This pathway has since been shown by several laboratories to be involved in the degradation of at least 20 different substrate proteins and to be conserved across eukaryotic species from yeast to humans. Subsequent work demonstrated that at least two ER-lumenal chaperones, BiP (KAR2) and calnexin, are required for ERAD export of soluble protein substrates. One of these, BiP, is also required for protein import into the ER. Brodsky and McCracken have recently identified mutations in BiP that are specific for ERAD, and as part of this project they will biochemically characterize these mutations (plus others that they plan to identify or create via site-directed mutagenesis) in order to determine what aspects of BiP structure and activity are specifically required for ERAD. McCracken and Brodsky have also demonstrated that the ERAD pathway for an integral membrane protein, CFTR, is substantially different from that for soluble substrate proteins and involves a different set of chaperones. Neither BiP nor calnexin are required for CFTR degradation, but a cytosolic Hsp70 chaperone, Ssa1p, is; conversely, Ssa1p is not required for ERAD of soluble substrate proteins. As part of this project, the molecular basis for this distinction will be explored. Specifically, two hypotheses will be examined using genetic and biochemical techniques: (1) Ssa1p is required for CFTR ubiquitination; and (2) Ssa1p is required to maintain an aggregation-prone cytoplasmic domain of CFTR in solution. A tabulation of the factors necessary and dispensable for the degradation of multiple ERAD substrates indicates that the requirements for the degradation of ERAD substrates may or may not utilize common factors. Thus, the continued identification of genes required for the turnover of a given substrate is essential. To this end, Brodsky and McCracken have isolated mutations in which the degradation of the Z variant of Alpha1-Protease Inhibitor (A1PiZ) is compromised in yeast. In addition, because the presence of mis-folded proteins in the ER activate both ERAD and the UPR, known UPR-target genes that are required for the degradation of A1PiZ have been identified. As part of this project, McCracken and Brodsky will carry out a functional characterization of both classes of genes necessary for the proteolysis of A1PiZ; results from this study are expected to provide a better mechanistic understanding of the ERAD selection and targeting process. In sum, these studies represent a combination of genetic and biochemical methods aimed toward understanding a recently discovered cellular pathway in cell biology. The project will employ multiple approaches and will benefit from the synergistic expertise of the two collaborating scientists, Drs. Ardythe McCracken and Jeffrey Brodsky, who initially discovered the ERAD pathway. The project will also continue to contribute to both classroom and laboratory research instruction of undergraduate and graduate students doc12232 none Professor Michael De Rosa in the Department of Chemistry at Pennsylvania State University, Delaware County Campus is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his studies on new syntheses of 2-aminopyrroles and the development of new routes to various polycyclic compounds by cycloaddition reactions of 2-aminopyrroles. Diels-Alder and inverse electron-demand Diels-Alder reactions with 2-aminopyrroles will be investigated to form novel heterocycles. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Program, Professor De Rosa is developing new methods for preparing various organic compounds which may have useful pharmaceutical applications. The research will be carried out with the assistance of undergraduate students who will receive extensive training in organic synthesis methodology doc12233 none Evolution by natural selection, or the principle of adaptation, was Charles Darwin s proposed mechanism for evolution. Darwin viewed an adaptation as any feature of an organism that arose as consequence of natural selection and enhanced the survival and reproductive potential of the individual. Yet, understanding and empirically documenting the relationship between a particular trait that appears to be adaptive and the factors that selected for the evolution of the trait remains a challenging and controversial task. In the time since Darwin, the main lessons learned from empirical studies of natural selection are that adaptations rarely occur in isolation, but rather are constrained by the function of other interacting traits, and are a ultimately a compromise between integrated aspects of the organism. Accordingly, the study of adaptation requires an understanding of how different traits constrain each other and how they are integrated to produce locally adapted phenotypes. There is only limited empirical evidence for how such constraints are manifested in real organisms. The proposed work will examine how selection acts on the integration of reproductive strategies, body shape, swimming performance, and behavior in natural populations of the guppy, Poecilia reticulata. The guppy is a model organism for the proposed work because it is one of the few organisms where adaptation has been documented. This previous work shows rapid adaptive changes in the reproductive traits of guppies in response to predatory fish. The work proposed here will first document the correlations among reproductive traits, body morphology, habitat use, foraging behavior, and stream type with field observations on female and male guppies from populations that are subject to different selection pressures. It will focus on the combined influences of stream current and predation. Because the reproductive traits of guppies are already known from these sites, the morphological and behavioral results obtained will provide the first data on whether body morphology, foraging behavior, habitat use, and reproductive strategies predictably covary with each other, or whether they vary independently in response to different selection pressures. Guppies will then be reared in the lab under different environments to test the degree to which these trait differences between populations represent fixed genetic differences or phenotypic plasticity. Finally, the proposed work will examine for the first time the consequences of pregnancy on body morphology and locomotion in an aquatic species by measuring how body profile and swimming performance change over the course of the reproductive cycle. Steady and escape swimming performance of gravid females from high and low predation localities will test the consequences of different reproductive allotments on locomotion and how adaptive changes in offspring number may compromise locomotion. By studying how reproductive strategies, morphology, locomotor performance, and behavior interact with each other and collectively respond to different selection pressures, the proposed work will provide a better understanding of the trade-offs faced by live-bearing fish adapting to their local environments doc12234 none Foxtail millet is a minor grain consumed by people in some parts of Asia, and is thus of potential value to Third-World agriculture. This project studies the genome of foxtail millet to determine how similar it is to its relative corn, and also to determine similarities to wild grasses. A genome map will be developed by studying the offspring of crosses between foxtail millet and its wild ancestor, green millet. One such cross has already been done by scientists at the John Innes Centre (JIC) in Norwich, England; they have used genes from millet and from rice to determine the structure of the millet genome. Using their plant material, several regions of the millet genome were identified that control the size and shape of the seed head, which influences the amount of grain produced. The specific goals in this project are to: 1. Locate genes from corn in the plants from the JIC. This will allow determination of which corn genes also function in millet, based on map position. 2. Place developmentally important genes on the JIC map to determine if they map to any of the regions known to affect the structure of the seed head. If they map to the same region, it will not prove that they control seed head development, but if they map elsewhere, then they can be excluded as candidates. 3. Make another cross between the two millet species to create a second, larger set of plants, to replicate the experiment. 4. Begin development of near-isogenic lines from our plants and the JIC plants, to verify the results of the mapping studies. The characterstics that distinguish green millet and foxtail millet are not unusual for grass species. They are mostly quantitative changes in the relatives sizes and numbers of parts, the sorts of changes that distinguish most species of grasses. This study will thus help understand the genes in foxtail millet, but will also provide a glimpse of the genetic basis of plant diversity doc12235 none Chemotaxis is the movement of cells up a chemical gradient. In Dictyostelium discoideum, chemotaxis is used under growth conditions to find bacteria as a food source, and under starvation conditions to promote aggregation of cells so that fruiting bodies may be formed. The basic mechanisms by which cells detect chemoattractants are conserved between Dictyostelium and mammalian cells, and the cellular machinery that drives cell migration is also conserved. Migration up a gradient involves the asymmetric remodeling of the cytoskeleton during the first minute after stimulation, and therefore requires that the activities and localization of key cytoskeletal components be tightly regulated in time and space. The long-term goal of this project is to understand the signaling pathways that control remodeling of the cytoskeleton during processes such as chemotaxis. The experimental tractability of Dictyostelium, coupled with its relative simplicity, make it an excellent model organism in which these fundamental signal transduction pathways can be worked out in detail. The general strategy is to focus on the observation that formation of an intracellular peak of cGMP is essential for chemotaxis in Dictyostelium cells. The hypothesis is that key cGMP-binding proteins in the cell directly or indirectly activate cytoskeletal components after treatment with chemoattractants. Despite the well-established importance of cGMP in signaling in chemotaxis, to date no cGMP-binding proteins have been purified or cloned in Dictyostelium. Two candidate cGMP-binding proteins have recently been identified by analyzing data from the Dictyostelium genomic database. Single and double gene disruption strains for these cGMP binding proteins will be engineered by homologous recombination, and the hypothesis that they play a central role in chemotaxis will be tested by filming cells as they respond to a micropipet filled with chemoattractant. The identification of cGMP binding proteins in Dictyostelium and determination of their role in chemotaxis will be a major advance in understanding how signaling during this process works. The project also provides the opportunity for undergraduate students to participate in independent research doc12236 none Szymanski Plant cells have many cell types with specialized functions. It is generally accepted that the microtubule and filamentous actin cytoskeletons are required to generate the cell shapes that have functional significance. Dr. Szymanski is proposing to use Arabidopsis leaf trichome development to better understand cell shape control. Trichomes are unicellular, polarized epidermal cells. Normal trichome morphogenesis is highly regulated and includes unique requirements for both the microtubule and actin-filament cytoskeletons. The distorted group of trichome mutants are specifically affected in actin-dependent cellular morphogenesis. The long-term goal of the research is to use the distorted mutants to elucidate the mechanisms of actin-dependent cell morphogenesis. The primary objective of this proposal is to define the cellular reorganization events that occur during trichome growth, and identify the responsible genes. The central hypothesis of this proposal is that the distorted mutants define a pathway of genes that are involved in actin-dependent cellular organization. The plan is to test the central hypothesis by pursuing the following specific aims: Specific Aim 1: To determine the chronology and pattern of major cytoskeletal and organelle reorganization events that occur during the transition from microtubule to actin-dependent morphogenesis. Specific aim 2: To identify, map, and measure the trichome defects of all of the distorted group mutants. Reorganization of the actin cytoskeleton in response to developmental and environmental cues is fundamentally important to plant cells. Results from this research will provide important information about the in vivo function of actin in living plant cells doc12237 none In eukaryotic cell division, the partitioning of daughter chromosomes into the daughter cells is achieved by attachment of the chromosomes to microtubules which then move the chromosomes apart prior to cytokinesis. The site of attachment of the microtubules to the chromosomes is a morphologically and biochemically distinctive chromosomal region called the kinetochore. Recent work by Dr. McEwen, employing state-of-the-art preservation and high resolution imaging technologies, has challenged the trilaminar morphological model of the kinetochore that has been accepted in the field for the past thiry years, and which was probably inaccurate due to fixation artifacts inherent in conventional fixation protocols. Now,Dr. McEwen s long-range goal is to define a high-resolution structural map of the mammalian kinetochore that explains and predicts functional mechanisms. The research combines state-of-the-art methods of light and electron microscopy with molecular approaches to compute the structural map and obtain functional characterization of key kinetochore components. The current project has four objectives, listed below. Research Objective 1. Establish a prototype high-resolution 3D structural map of the mammalian kinetochore. 1a: Identify key features of the kinetochore and look for evidence of a subunit structure. 1b. Test the hypothesis that the kinetochore has discrete structural domains that dynamically respond to microtubule attachment and deprivation, and that an enlarged outer domain is correlated with promiscuous microtubule capture and a high incidence of aneuploidy. Research Objective 2. Test three hypotheses concerning the molecular role of CENP-E in mitosis. 2a: CENP-E has a role in maintaining the stability of kinetochore microtubule attachments. 2b: CENP-E prevents monooriented chromosomes from over-traveling poleward into the spindle pole. 2c: CENP-E is not required for release of the anaphase onset checkpoint. Research objective 3. Test the hypotheses that CENP-E function is redundant with ZW10 dynein in binding kinetochore microtubules, and opposes dynein in poleward motion. Research objective 4. Test the hypothesis that the kinetochore is sequentially assembled, with kinetochore proteins CENP-C and BUB1 being required for complete assembly. This research project will provide important and significant new information on the complexities of kinetochore structure and function. It will fill a major gap in our present knowledge of how molecular components of the kinetochore are arranged and how they interact with other components of the cell division apparatus doc12238 none The primary objective of this research is to assess alterations in the genome-wide expression pattern caused by accumulation of spontaneous deleterious mutations in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Mildly deleterious mutations play a central role in a broad array of evolutionary and genetic phenomena, including the distribution of the transposable elements, the level of nucleotide diversity in various regions of the genome, the magnitude of inbreeding depression, the evolution of sex and recombination, the degeneration of Y chromosome, the senescence and extinction of endangered species. Presently the knowledge of deleterious mutations has been limited to two levels of biological organization: the DNA and the organism. Difficulty in predicting the effects of most DNA mutations on organismal phenotypes limits the first. The second is unsatisfactory, because the high phenotypic variances of the fitness-related traits obscure effects of mildly deleterious mutations. This project will survey the consequences of spontaneous deleterious mutations on the genome-wide gene expression level because microevolutionary changes in fitness are likely caused by mutations that change gene expression, rather than mutations that alter protein structure. The mutant strains used for this study will be mutation-accumulation lines, which have been created by propagating worms from single individuals from a population without selection for 400 generations. The combination of the complete genome sequence of C. elegans allowing DNA microarrays available to screen genome-wide expression, and the longest mutation-accumulation lines among eukaryotes presents an unparalleled opportunity to investigate deterioration of the global gene expression by spontaneous deleterious mutations. This work will contribute to establishing a basis for prediction of the evolutionary and genetic consequences of spontaneous mutations on genome-wide expression patterns doc12239 none The photon counting histogram (PCH) is a recently introduced technique that exploits fluorescence fluctuations to distinguish molecules by their intrinsic fluorescence brightness. For example, a homodimer A2 will appear twice as bright as its monomer A, if each protein A carries one fluorescent label. The main focus of this proposal is the development of dual-color PCH. Adding a second detection channel and splitting the photons between both channels according to color will increase the sensitivity and capability of the PCH technique tremendously. Dual-color PCH combines the benefit of separating photons of different molecules by color with the intrinsic ability of PCH to distinguish the brightness of molecules. To illustrate this point, consider two proteins A and B with differently colored labels. A mixture of their homodimers, heterodimers and monomers (A2, B2, AB, A and B) is resolvable by dual-color PCH. A single measurement will determine the brightness of each component together with their concentrations. Currently, no other technique promises to deliver comparable performance. The second goal of this proposal is the application of dual-color PCH to study subunit interactions of an oligomeric enzyme. The association and dissociation of individual subunits is directly observed by dual- color PCH analysis and allows the determination of protein assembly paths under varying external conditions. The existing theory of PCH for a single channel will be modified to describe dual-channel detection. The algorithms and software programs to analyze the data will be developed and the performance of the dual-channel detection system will be characterized on a two-photon microscope. The practical resolvability of a mixture by dual-color PCH is from an experimental point of view of crucial importance. This project will address and answer this question by analyzing the influence of the photon count statistics on dual-color PCH. Another important consideration is the emission spectrum of a fluorophore. Most pairs of fluorophores have overlapping emission spectra and a perfect separation of the two fluorophores by color is not possible. Optical filter combinations that maximize the signal-to-noise ratio of dual-color PCH for dyes with overlapping emission spectra will be determined and tested. The experimental characterization of dual-color PCH will start with binary mixtures and will continue with mixtures of increasing complexity to determine the capability of dual-color PCH. In addition, dual-color PCH with excitation at multiple wavelengths will be implemented to further increase the performance of PCH. The subunit interactions of phosphofructokinase (PFK) will be studied by dual-color PCH. Specifically, the subunit exchange between hybrid tetramers and the dissociation and association of the oligomeric protein will be examined. Individual subunits of PFK will carry specific fluorophores, which allow PCH to distinguish the subunit composition and population of each fraction by color and absolute brightness. It is important to stress that dual-color PCH will have applications well beyond the study of oligomeric enzymes. The impact of this new technique will be felt in many other biological research fields. The association of proteins to form complexes is a general concept encountered in most regulation processes of cells. Dual-color PCH can detect and identify protein association on the single molecule level. An important and pressing task of the post-genomic era is the identification of the function of a large number of unknown proteins. Dual-color PCH can assist in this task by mapping out their protein-protein interactions doc12240 none Pires Metamorphosis is a profoundly important transition in the life history of most animals. The passage from a larval to juvenile form entails destruction of some tissues, respecification of others and generation of new structures. In larvae of gastropod molluscs and in a diverse range of larvae from other phyla, metamorphosis is initiated by a chemical signal from the environment. The chemosensory induction of gastropod metamorphosis, its stereotyped behavioral context and the neuromuscular nature of some morphogenic movements, and the rapidity of morphological change all suggest pervasive control by the larval nervous system. However, very little is known of the mechanisms by which the nervous system can direct dramatic morphological change at the level of the entire organism. Dr. Pires will investigate the neural control of metamorphosis in the gastropod, Crepidula fornicata, focusing on neural signaling in the destruction of the larval velum. This ciliated swimming and feeding organ is precipitously shed by loss of adhesion among and between several types of velar cells within minutes after competent larvae come in contact with the natural cue that induces metamorphosis. The large ciliated cells that line the margin of the velum are the first to detach in metamorphosis, are electrically excitable, and have been shown in other gastropods to carry a synaptically-driven calcium-mediated action potential that causes arrest of ciliary beating. These cilia are arrested in C. fornicata and other gastropods in the moments before destruction of the velum visibly begins, yet no studies have investigated the mechanistic relationship between electrical activity in the velum and the loss of cell adhesion that occurs in metamorphosis. Previous work by Dr. Pires and others has implicated endogenous dopamine as a neuromodulator that potentiates metamorphosis, but its effects on signaling in the velum are unexplored. There is also evidence that hydrogen peroxide or other reactive oxygen species are generated in the metamophosing velum and can induce velar destruction if exogenously applied, but it is not known if reactive oxygen species have a necessary signaling role in a neural mechanism that mediates velar destruction in natural metamorphosis. Dr. Pires will exploit the large size and predictably fast metamorphosis of C. fornicata larvae, and take advantage of microsurgical methods that he developed for working with isolated velar tissues. Dr. Pires and his students will apply intracellular and extracellular electrophysiological techniques as well as pharmacological, histochemical and high-performance liquid chromatographic methods to analyze how neural signals effect a rapid loss of cell adhesion in the metamorphosing velum. This project affords undergraduate research students an unusual opportunity to engage in developmental neuroscience that cuts across several levels of biological organization. An important further training dimension of this project is that summer work will take place at the University of Washington s Friday Harbor Laboratories, where undergraduates will be immersed in a rich and exhilarating scientific community at a time when they will be making decisions about future research careers doc12241 none Eukaryotic initiation factor (eIF) 4G coordinates ribosomal binding and subsequent ribosomal scanning on the 5 NTR of an mRNA by binding to factors that are required for both steps. eIF4G is a subunit of eIF4F, which also has eIF4E (cap-binding protein) and eIF4A (helicase) subunits. This project will characterize the roles of eIF4G and associated factors in these two stages of initiation using mRNAs that depend on either the 5 -terminal cap or an internal ribosomal entry site (IRES) for ribosomal binding. Loading of the 40S ribosomal subunit onto mRNA may involve local unwinding of mRNA by bound eIF4F and interaction between eIF4G and ribosome-associated eIF3. The roles of eIF4G s interactions with RNA, eIF4A and eIF3 in ribosomal attachment and scanning will be characterized by integrating biochemical assays (such as eIF4G s influence on eIF4A s helicase activity) with reconstitution of initiation on model mRNAs. The role of Ded1p, another RNA helicase that has been implicated in scanning will also be characterized. Initiation on the encephalomyocarditis virus (EMCV) IRES requires specific binding by eIF4G 4A. The mechanisms of recognition of this IRES by eIF4G 4A, of enhancement of binding of eIF4G 4A to related IRESs by specific IRES trans-acting factors, and of promotion of ribosomal attachment by the eIF4G 4A IRES complex will be determined. The cap-binding activity of eIF4F is down-regulated during mitosis and apoptosis when some cellular IRES-containing mRNAs remain active. The hypothesis that these IRESs resemble EMCV in interacting with eIF4G 4A to promote ribosomal binding when eIF4E is inactive will be tested. These studies will provide insights into mechanisms for selective translation of specific mRNAs doc12242 none On the order of a thousand different G protein coupled receptors (GPCR) exist in mammals to mediate a diverse array of physiological responses initiated by hormones, neurotransmitters, sensory stimuli, and other signaling molecules. Each GPCR is coupled to a heterotrimeric G protein that is critical for transmitting the signal initiated by receptor binding to the intracellular environment. A large number of distinct G protein heterotrimers are capable of forming from some 20 alpha, 6 beta and 12 gamma subunits. The abundance of distinct subtypes identified for each component is a striking feature of G protein coupled signaling pathways. The functional significance of such closely related molecules remains to be appreciated, and more importantly, the molecular basis for selective interactions among the components is largely unknown. At the biochemical level, significant contributions in this area can be made by developing the ability to employ components of signaling pathways in reconstitution paradigms. The ability to functionally couple receptors expressed in Sf9 cell membranes with exogenous G proteins has been developed and will be used to examine the G protein coupling behavior of distinct subtypes of muscarinic receptors capable of functionally distinguishing among individual G alpha subunits. The molecular basis of this selectivity will be defined by comparing the abilities of G protein heterotrimers containing chimeric alpha subunits, comprised of various regions of the alpha q subunit, to interact with the muscarinic M1 receptors. Functional interactions will be assessed by examining both the ability of the G protein to induce the high affinity state of the receptor and the ability of the agonist occupied receptor to catalyze guanine nucleotide exchange on the G protein. The unique feature of this project is the ability to examine interactions of defined molecular species in a single eukaryotic membrane environment using a reconstitution paradigm where the stoichiometries can be controlled with some precision. Identification of the individual amino acids on G alpha subunits involved in functional interactions with muscarinic receptors will be required to understand the selective interaction of these GPCRs with particular G alpha subunits and is likely to reveal the precise molecular mechanism underlying receptor mediation of the guanine nucleotide exchange process, the initial intracellular step in a profusion of signal transduction cascades doc12243 none Peck This equipment grant provides partial support to enhance an environmental magnetics laboratory at the University of Akron, Ohio. The existing environmental magnetics laboratory contains a Molspin spinner magnetometer, ASC Impulse magnetizer and Bartington susceptibility equipment. This proposal and cost sharing from the University of Akron will be used to establish a fully-functional laboratory through the acquisition of a D-Tech Model D- AF demagnetizer, 2.5 m3 fluxgate-controlled field-free cage, Micromag alternating gradient magnetometer, and additional Bartington susceptibility sensors. The addition of this equipment will allow the full suite of environmental magnetic parameters of wet sediment to be measured. The rock-magnetic component of environmental magnetism involves the measurement of the concentration, grain-size, and mineralogy of the magnetic portion of the sediment and is used to interpret past environmental change. The paleomagnetic component of environmental magnetism involves the study of the natural remanent magnetization of the sediment and provides a means of global stratigraphic correlation, dating, and insight on geodynamo processes. Current NSF-funded projects in Mongolia, Africa, Russia and Turkey will make effective use of this equipment. Ongoing NSF research projects directed by PI, John Peck involve the study of past environmental change as recorded in the sediments of Mongolian lakes, Lake Bosumtwi, Ghana and Lake Baikal, Russia. Drs. Lisa Park, Ira Sasosky and Tim Matney from the University of Akron will use this equipment in their research of paleolimnology in Africa, archaeology in Turkey and clastic cave deposits in the U.S., respectively. Researchers and students from nearby Universities will have free-access to this new equipment thereby allowing them to readily utilize this equipment in their research. Geologists at nearby Kent State University, Case Western Reserve University and Oberlin College have all expressed their interest in using this equipment that is new to the region. In addition, the new equipment will serve educational goals and be used extensively in a new Geology course titled Environmental Magnetism taught by PI, Peck doc12244 none Fine-scale mapping and genetic analysis of genes involved in honey bee stinging behavior. The genetic architecture (numbers of genes and their effects) of behavioral traits is an important consideration for the field of behavioral ecology, yet little is known on this topic. The honey bee may be useful in this regard because it is becoming recognized as a model organism for behavioral and behavioral genetic studies. As a behavioral genetic model, the bee has the advantages of ease of culture, social behavior, haploid males, and the highest recombination rate ever reported for a metazoan. The high meiotic recombination rate facilitates the construction of detailed genetic maps and cloning genes based on their positions on genetic maps because genetic distance is directly related to crossover rates. The proposed project seeks to study the role of specific genes and pheromonal communication in honey bee defensive behavior. Previous studies identified and mapped quantitative trait loci (QTL) that mark the positions of genes that influence a colony-level behavioral trait, the numbers of stings that bees deposited in a behavioral assay. QTL that influence alarm pheromone production were also identified. Two of the stinging QTL were subsequently found to influence the guarding and stinging behavior of individual bees, thus confirming the QTL effects on behavior. One of the two confirmed QTL also may have an influence on alarm pheromone production. A QTL that influences levels of an unknown alarm pheromone component that correlated with colony stinging response mapped close to this defensive-behavior QTL. The proposed research would further characterize QTL effects on individual and colony behavioral phenotypes and seek to identify specific components of behavior that are influenced by each gene. In addition, crosses with haploid males would allow for further genetic dissection to pinpoint the location of genes more precisely and ultimately obtain the sequence of these genes. These crosses would generate lines of bees, each of which is descended from a different haploid male. The haploid fathers will differ from each other in key regions near the QTL. The next step in the proposed research is to identify large bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) clones of honey bee DNA that span the region containing the QTL. For example, if the gene influencing the behavioral trait can be pinpointed to 5 centimorgans of genetic distance, this represents about 250 kilobases (Kb) of honey bee DNA. This 250 Kb region can be spanned by just a few BAC clones because the current honey bee BAC library has average clone sizes of 113 Kb. Sequencing and bio-informatic analyses would then be used to identify candidate genes for these QTL doc12245 none This research project is being carried out by Professor Jillian Buriak and her group in the Department of Chemistry at Purdue University. With the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, Professor Buriak is exploring a novel method for synthesizing spatially defined functionalized silicon surfaces. Using a scanning probe mediated electrochemical reaction, alkyne molecular species are grafted to silicon and germanium surfaces. This localized functionalization of the surface allows direct electronic communication between the semiconductor substrate and attached molecular electronic devices. Using a novel electrografting method, Professor Buriak and her colleagues at Purdue University are developing synthetic approaches for locally modifying the electronic properties of silicon and germanium semiconductor surfaces. This research is likely to lead to new methods for building molecular electronic devices doc12246 none By and large, biological processes involving ligand binding specificity, protein-protein association, protein-membrane association, protonation and unprotonation of ionizable groups, and macromolecular conformational changes, are given thermodynamically by a reversible work function, the free energy, or more generally by its configuration-dependent equivalent. A quantitative determination of free energies is, therefore, a problem of central importance in theoretical biophysics. Computational approaches at different levels of complexity and sophistication can be used to try and address this problem. Those range from (relatively expensive) molecular dynamics free energy simulations (MD FES) based on all-atom models in which the solvent is treated explicitly to (relative inexpensive) Poisson-Boltzmann (PB) continuum electrostatic models in which the influence of the solvent is incorporated implicitly. The goal of this research is to refine and extend current computational approaches used in the modeling of biomolecular systems. More particularly, protocols that will provide increased accuracy and reliability in estimating free energies while remaining computationally tractable will be developed and tested. Progress in these computational methodologies is expected to have a great impact on the rational design of drugs and biomolecules doc12247 none Life science data is valuable and hard to produce; it is important to share it in order to promote discovery. Effective database interoperability will facilitate the way life science data is accessed, retrieved, analyzed, and combined with other data. The original effort with focus on life science data, specifically databases concerned with four organisms, a plant, an animal, an insect and a simple eukaryote. General purpose databases of sequence and structure will also be integrated. The provision of methods for integrating proprietary data as well as public data will enable collaborations with industry. The system is based on a mediator-wrapper approach, which will be automated through wrapper induction, by using a domain ontology and independent source data models. The system will help overcome the scalability, maintenance and upgrade challenges in many life science databases doc12248 none Jaynes This proposal is to investigate two aspects of transcriptional regulation in developing Drosophila embryos. The first is a novel long-range activity that occurs at the even-skipped (eve) locus at the blastoderm stage of development, earlier than similar long-range activities are thought to be active at other genes. The second is the mechanism of repression by the eve protein product, Eve. Long-range regulation is thought to underlie such phenomena as epigenetic control of gene expression. Epigenetic mechanisms are known to be important for maintaining the correct spatial domains of expression of HOX and other genes, mediated by genes of the Polycomb and trithorax groups. This and other epigenetic phenomena, such as position effect variegation and repression at the mating type locus in yeast, are mediated in part by the regulation of chromatin structure. In contrast to the well-studied examples of these phenomena in Drosophila, long-range regulation at eve occurs at very early stages of development, so that its analysis may provide a novel perspective on the mechanisms involved. This proposal uses an integrated biochemical and genetic approach to investigate these mechanisms, to identify specific DNA sequences that mediate the effects, to identify and study the functions of proteins that bind to those sequences, and to identify genes that contribute to long-range regulation of eve. Transcriptional repression is a crucial activity in the function of many DNA binding proteins. Through work on this project, Eve has been shown to interact functionally with the corepressor Groucho. Eve has also been shown to contain a Groucho-independent repression activity. This proposal will investigate the mechanisms of each of these activities using a genetic approach. Fusion proteins between Eve repression domains and the Gal4 DNA binding protein repress reporter transgenes both early and late in embryonic development, providing an efficient means of screening for genetic modifiers of this repression activity. This proposal will screen simultaneously for modifiers of Groucho-dependent and -independent repression activity. This work should provide novel insights into the mechanisms of repression doc12249 none This conference award to the University of Delaware is made by the Advanced Materials Program in the Chemistry Division and the Solid State Chemistry Program in the Division of Materials Research in support of the 9th-11th Materials Chemistry Workshops. The goals of the Workshops are to bring together scientists from diverse disciplines including inorganic, organic, physical, biological, polymer and analytical chemistry as well as other science and engineering backgrounds for discussion of ongoing and emerging areas of research and education in materials chemistry. In addition, the Workshops are to promote dialog between industry, government and academic scientists in their endeavor to identify and investigate fundamental and technological issues. Workshops will be held on the third week in October with up to thirty participants selected by a competitively reviewed application process. Special efforts will be made to encourage industrial, government, minority, women and young material chemists to apply for the Workshops. Specific workshop sites will be determined by the Workshop Chairpersons and are expected to be in Delaware, Wisconsin and Michigan. The Materials Chemistry Workshops will provide a forum conducive to the development of ideas, help bridge gaps among the materials chemistry constituencies in academia, industry and government laboratories, lead to new collaborations and define the frontiers of materials chemistry doc12250 none The insulin-like growth factor (IGF) signaling system is essential for normal growth and development in vertebrates. The proposed project involves studying the molecular mechanisms by which the IGF signaling system acts to control cell proliferation, differentiation and cell death (apoptosis) in developing vertebrate embryos in vivo. There are three components to the vertebrate IGF signaling system: the IGF ligands, IGF receptors, and IGF binding proteins (IGFBPs). While it is clear that the IGF ligands and receptors transduce signals that positively regulate growth, the specific role of each of the IGFBPs and their interactions with the IGF ligands and receptors in vivo is not well understood. Our laboratory has been utilizing a model teleost fish, the zebrafish (Danio rerio) to investigate the IGFs IGFBP interactions and their functional importance. We use zebrafish because of their accessible, transparent and fast-developing embryos. In addition, numerous genetic mutants are available for our studies. We have characterized the IGF signaling system in zebrafish and shown that IGFBP-2 inhibits IGF actions in developing zebrafish embryos. Our further studies have revealed the presence of several other IGFBPs in zebrafish. These IGFBPs show different structural characteristics and distinct expression patterns. The goal of this project is to understand how each of these IGFBPs interact with IGF ligands and receptors to regulate cell proliferation, differentiation, and apoptosis in developing zebrafish embryos. The overall hypothesis to be tested is that different IGFBPs are differentially regulated, and they each play a distinct role in specifying the IGF actions in defined embryonic tissues. The specific aims of the project are: 1) to determine the actions of IGFBP-2 in regulating cell proliferation, differentiation, and apoptosis in vivo by targeted expression of IGFBP-2 in the developing eyes; 2) to determine the structure of zebrafish IGFBP-1 and IGFBP-3, produce the corresponding proteins, and analyze these fish IGFBPs biochemically and functionally; 3) to determine the spatial and temporal expression patterns of these fish IGFBPs; 4) to determine the specific effects of IGFBP-1 and IGFBP-3 in controlling IGF actions in vivo by targeted expression in the developing eyes; and 5) to elucidate the physiological functions of the endogenous IGFBPs in vivo using a novel targeted gene knockdown approach. The expected results should provide novel insights for the roles of various IGFBPs in controlling IGF actions in a vertebrate embryo and will further our understanding of how the IGF signaling system acts in vivo to control growth and development in fish specifically and in vertebrates generally. Determination of the structures of fish IGFBPs and development of the corresponding protein, cDNA probe and antisera will make available valuable tools for investigation of IGFBP actions in fish. A comparison of the structure and function of IGFBPs from different vertebrate species will provide novel insight to our understanding of the evolution of this important gene family. Information gained from these studies may prove to be valuable to aquaculture for efficient production of animal protein to meet the needs of a continually growing human population doc12251 none Michael Gretz & Graham Underwood The diatoms are among the most important primary producers in the global environment. These single-cell algae are exceedingly abundant and among the most numerous aquatic organisms. The diatoms are major contributors to the base of the marine food chain, upon which economically important marine fisheries and ecologically significant marine mammal and bird populations are dependent. Oceans occupy approximately 70% of our planet and marine microalgae, of which diatoms are a predominant component, exert a powerful influence on today s atmospheric chemistry (they are the primary oxygen producers on earth) and the biogeochemical cycling of carbon and other elements. Hundreds of millions of years of past algal growth has contributed to the important petroleum deposits upon which our modern society depends. Diatoms, both in terms of the organisms themselves and the material they secrete, are of fundamental importance to overall aquatic ecology. Much of the carbon that diatoms fix is secreted in the form of extracellular polymers. These exopolymeric substances (EPS) strongly influence biogeochemical cycling in ecosystems, as they are contributors to the sediment carbon pool, important in food chains and the biostabilization of sediments. This research will characterize the production rates, composition and characteristics of diatom EPS produced by benthic diatoms under various environmental conditions (nutrient limitation, damaging irradiance levels, salinity stress). The composition and structure of different EPS will influence the role such molecules play in the environment. EPS characteristics will be correlated with the changing microenvironment within estuarine diatom biofilms, and with the response of the organisms to important environmental stresses. This information is required to define how diatoms acclimate to the changing conditions within intertidal biofilms and to determine the nature of the different EPS produced, which will lead to further studies of the role of EPS within intertidal biofilms. This work will greatly advance our knowledge of EPS and the physiological conditions in nature that trigger production of different types and may lead to advances in stabilizing sediments or identifying new polymers of commercial interest. In addition, this project will provide a valuable contribution to student training by engaging students in a multidisciplinary effort that involves integrated international cooperation between laboratories in the U.S. and the U.K doc12252 none This project focuses on structural studies designed to reveal the mechanisms of action and of regulation of 3-deoxy-D-arabino-heptulosonate-7-phosphate synthase (DAHPS) and 3-deoxy-D- manno-2-octulosonate-8-phosphate synthase (KDOPS) from E. coli. This work will complement mutational and biochemical analysis of the enzymes carried out collaboratively in the laboratory of departmental colleague and co-PI, Ronald Bauerle. DAHPS catalyzes the first step of aromatic biosynthesis, the condensation of phosphoenolpyruvate (PEP) and D-erythrose-4-phosphate (E4P). KDOPS catalyzes the condensation of PEP and D-arabinose-5-phosphate, an essential step in lipopolysaccharide biosynthesis. The two enzymes are distant homologs, possessing similar (beta alpha)8 barrel folds. However, the three DAHPS isozymes differ from KDOPS in that they require a divalent metal for activation and are regulated by feedback inhibition, each being sensitive to a different one of the three aromatic amino acids. The following goals will be pursued during the project period: (1) to refine and analyze the crystal structure of DAHPS(Phe) complexed with Mn 2+, PEP and its feedback inhibitor, phenylalanine, and to compare the structure of this complex with those of structures already determined - [Mn PEP], [Mn PEP], [Mn PGL], [Pb PEP], and [Cd PEP]; (2) to determine and refine the crystal structure of DAHPS(Trp) Mn PEP, which has already been crystallized; (3) to determine the crystal structures of DAHPS(Phe) Mn complexed with analogs of PEP and of E4P, as indicated by the modeling studies of collaborator, M. Krauss; (4) to crystallize and determine the crystal structure(s) of mutant DAHPS(Phe) enzymes generated in Bauerle s lab whose characterictics are not consistent with our model of action and regulation; and (5) to crystallize and determine the crystal structure(s) of DAHPS KDOPS chimeras generated in Bauerle s lab that have enzymatic activity doc12253 none Adenylosuccinate lyase catalyzes a critical step in purine biosynthesis by converting adenylosuccinate to AMP and fumarate. High-resolution structures of two bacterial enzymes in the absence of substrate have been reported. Three histidines, contributed by two different subunits, have been identified in the active site. However, the structure of adenylosuccinate lyase suggests that in an enzyme tetramer, three subunits actually contribute to each of the four active sites. This project s goal is to understand the major chemical and structural contributions to catalysis by normal adenylosuccinate lyase and the molecular basis for decreased activity in patients with ASL deficiency. The specific aims address three questions: 1. Which additional amino acids of adenylosuccinate lyase contribute to catalysis and or substrate binding? This issue is approached by site-directed mutagenesis of amino acids postulated as at the active site of B. subtilis adenylosuccinate lyase. Stable analogs of adenylosuccinate, inert to enzymatic cleavage, will be synthesized and used to prepare crystalline enzyme-inhibitor complexes; they will also be used to assess substrate binding by enzymes. 2. How many subunits contribute to each active site of adenylosuccinate lyase? Complementation experiments will be conducted in which pairs of different, inactive mutants are mixed and tested for restoration of activity in hybrid tetramers. 3. What is the molecular basis for the structure-function relations in the adenylosuccinate lyase? B. subtilis adenylosuccinate lyase will be engineered with amino acid substitutions equivalent to those in some human variants with adenylosuccinate lyase deficiency. These mutant enzymes will be models to elucidate further the structural chemical basis of the enzyme function. (This project is supported jointly by the Molecular Biochemistry and Metabolic Biochemistry Programs doc12254 none Wilson Inductive signals between cell populations govern much of embryonic development. A central feature of these interactions is changing competence: the response of cells to particular signaling ligands evolves in a complex and precisely regulated manner. The long-term goal of the proposed research is to understand the molecular basis of competence, using changing responses to Wnt signaling in early Xenopus development as a model. In the first hours of Xenopus development, activation of the Wnt signaling pathway drives formation of the dorsal axis; only a few hours later, this response is lost, and the pathway instead functions in mesodermal and neural patterning. The objectives of the current project are to understand why an important target gene, siamois, is activated by early but not by late Wnt signaling, and to tie competence of the Wnt pathway to induce this gene to the broader embryological response, dorsal axis formation. Using a simple promoter-reporter assay, the siamois promoter will be analyzed to identify sequence elements important in the loss of Wnt responsiveness at later stages. Competence of siamois itself to induce a dorsal axis will then be examined using inducible activated and inhibitory versions of siamois, thus linking the regulation of this gene to axis induction competence. Both aims will make use of a newly developed tool for inducible stimulation of Wnt responses, consisting of a dexamethasone-inducible, activated form of XTCF3, a DNA-binding protein known to mediate transcriptional responses to Wnt signaling. This work will contribute to elucidating the mechanism of inductive competence, an important and long-standing problem in developmental biology doc12255 none Lack of consensus on terminology and disparate uses of terms have stymied efforts to directly link discoveries in the avian brain with research on the brains of other vertebrates. Nearly 100 years ago, scientists decided that the avian brain, above the level of the thalamus, consists solely of the basal ganglia, which is a ventral part of the mammalian forebrain. In the s, using several molecular markers, this conclusion was shown to be incorrect. However, since then there has been very little agreement on how avian and mammalian brains correspond with one another. As a result, the 100-year old basal ganglia terminology is still used, creating confusion and inaccurate comparisons in scientific research. The purpose of the Avian Brain Nomenclature Forum is to bring together experts in the fields of avian neuroscience and comparative neuroanatomy for the purpose of revising avian brain nomenclature. Participants will prepare for the forum by using a website for information before they attend, and then meet for three days for presentations and discussions. Professors, postdoctoral students and graduate students will try to reach a consensus by the end of the conference. Afterwards, the results will be published and made available at the web site. Popular avian brain atlases will be revised using the consensus normenclature, and will be available via web and CD formats. The impact of this work will go far beyond simply comparative neuroanatomy, because of the strong interest across neuroscience in using birds as models for learning, for development and for studies of behavior including migration and social behavior; additionally, some of the conference output may be interesting to a broader public that is interested in birds doc12256 none Mitochondria are semiautonomous intracellular organelles evolutionarily derived from endosymbiont prokaryotes. They are the primary site in eukaryotic cells where the energy of chemical bonds is oxidatively converted to a metabolically useful form. Mitochondria are therefore often referred to as the powerhouses of the eukaryotic cell. Like chloroplasts, mitochondria are separated from the cytoplasm of the cell by a double membrane system. The long term goal of this research project is to understand in molecular detail how the structure of the double-membraned mitochondrion is controlled. This is a complex problem because the chemical and physical structures of the outer membrane and inner membrane are different. In contrast to the outer membrane, the mitochondrial inner membrane is typically convoluted. These convolutions, referred to as cristae, form as a consequence of the greater surface area of the inner membrane, and presumably function to increase the organelle s ability to make energy. Interestingly, despite their distinct structures, current data suggest that fission and fusion of both membranes occur in tandem and that the molecular components that regulate these events are exclusively associated with the outer membrane. However, the range of cristae morphologies observed in cells suggests that the inner membrane is dynamic and that dedicated mechanisms and components exist to maintain its unique structure and perhaps to coordinate the behaviors of the two membranes. Virtually nothing is known about the mechanisms that regulate inner membrane structure in mitochondria. In addition to the outer membrane-associated dynamin-related GTPase, Dnm1p, analyses from Dr. Nunnari s laboratory indicate that a second dynamin-related GTPase, Mgm1p, is localized to the mitochondrial inner membrane and that inner membrane structure in mgm1 mutant cells is specifically aberrant. Members of the dynamin GTPase family share the common function to regulate the structure of various biological membranes. Thus, based on these findings, Dr. Nunnari hypothesizes that Mgm1p regulates the structure of mitochondria in cells by functioning to remodel the inner membranes. The experiments that will be done with support from this award will test this hypothesis utilizing a combination of genetic, biochemical, and cytological techniques doc12257 none Yu This is a SGER award to support theoretical research and education in the area of bioinfomatics using methods inspired by statistical mechanics that differ from ones currently used in computational biology. The research centers on sequence alignment and clustering. An important problem in this area is how to assign an accurate statistical significance to a result obtained from these bioinfomatics tools. A novel alignment method and statistical theory recently developed by the PI will be enhanced to create a more complete statistical theory and to address the statistical significance problem. An aim of this work is to develop a better method to extract appropriate alignment parameters where insertions, deletions, and substitutions of biomonomers will be treated on an equal footing. Another focus of this work is to improve clustering methods using variants of the random-cluster model. The PI s new clustering method assumes no a priori knowledge of the nature of the existing data and is expected to be more robust against noisy data. %%% This SGER award supports theoretical research and graduate level education in the area of bioinformatics. The research is interdisciplinary with a view to bring the formidable tools of statistical physics to bear on an important part of the larger biological problem of understanding the meaning of the enormous amount of genome data that has been collected. The PI s research addresses the problem of being able to reliably identify homology among different sequences and to improve clustering tools that can be used to help identify gene expression patterns associated with a certain biological process or disease doc12258 none Dissimilatory Fe(III) reduction is a relatively recent addition to the suite of anaerobic respiratory processes carried out by microorganisms. Compared to the wealth of knowledge existing on the molecular details of aerobic respiration, denitrification, sulfate reduction and methanogenesis, little is known about dissimilatory Fe(III) reduction. Ironically, recent microbiological and geological evidence indicates that dissimilatory Fe(III) reduction may have been one of the first respiratory processes to have evolved on early Earth. In the modern biosphere, dissimilatory Fe(III) reduction is central to a variety of globally significant processes. Recent genetic studies have indicated that Type II protein secretion is required for Fe(III) respiration activity by Shewanella putrefaciens. In Type II secretion mutants, a 91 kDa heme-containing, Fe(III) reductase is missing from the set of proteins loosely attached to the outside face of the S. putrefaciens outer membrane. S. putrefaciens may therefore overcome the physiological problem of respiring on insoluble Fe(III) substrates by using the Type II secretion system to target the 91 kDa heme-containing Fe(III) reductase to the outside face of the outer membrane where it acts as a respiration-linked, Fe(III) terminal reductase. A set of molecular cloning and biochemical analyses will be carried out to address this hypothesis. Anaerobic bacteria that respire (breathe) particulate iron (solid rust) may have been the first organisms to breathe on early Earth. Ironically, little is known about the details of this process. The respiratory system of aerobic bacteria (and humans) is located inside the cell because oxygen is able to diffuse through the cell wall and contact the respiratory system. Anaerobic bacteria that breathe on solid rust are therefore presented with a unique problem: the solid rust is unable to enter the cell and contact the respiratory system. The project will demonstrate that rust breathing bacteria overcome this problem by putting their respiratory system on the cell outer surface where it is able to contact the solid rust and generate energy doc12259 none If current projections of climate warming are accurate, future global change will include the disappearance of a significant portion of the Earth s biodiversity during the 21st century, e.g. alpine tundra ecosystems in temperate and subtropical latitudes may be replaced by the subalpine forest below. Despite these predictions, mechanistic explanations for the upper elevational limits of subalpine forests across the globe have been pondered for over a century, and are still controversial today. The stability of this alpine treeline will be evaluated based on the ecophysiology of tree seedling establishment away from the forest edge and into the subalpine-alpine ecotone by the two dominant conifers, Abies lasiocarpa (subalpine fir) and Picea engelmannii (Engelmann spruce). Paradoxically, sunlight exposure during the day and leaf warming can enhance photosynthesis and growth in most plant species, while prior exposure to a clear, cold night sky (longwave thermal radiation sink) leads to lower minimum leaf temperatures, a major limiting factor at high elevation. In combination, low leaf temperatures at night followed by high sunlight the following morning can result in potentially severe low temperature photoinhibition of photosynthesis (LTP) and substantial reductions in carbon assimilation. It is hypothesized that this decrease in carbon assimilation is due primarily to excessive sky exposure and LTP, resulting in inadequate carbon gain to support the root growth necessary to survive rapidly drying soils following spring runoff. In addition, the timing and degree of mycorrhizal infection of fine roots may also play a vital role in preventing lethal water stress. Three primary venues for adaptation are proposed for seedling establishment under such a multiple stress regime: (i) microsite facilitation, (ii) seedling architecture, and (iii) photosynthetic physiology. The relative effectiveness of each of these adaptive venues for seedling establishment will be evaluated quantitatively from field measurements on photosynthesis, growth, and survival. If the hypotheses linking greater sky exposure to lower minimums in leaf temperature, greater LTP, less carbon gain and root growth, and lower seedling survival (desiccation death) are correct, conifer tree seedling establishment in this treeline ecotone could flourish under current scenarios of global warming and, thus, lead to the encroachment of subalpine forest and the potential loss of alpine tundra ecosystems doc12260 none Gross The investigators develop methods to carry out spatially explicit control to link natural and anthropogenic forces that influence the demand for biological resources with the dynamics of those resources. While there have been numerous alternative approaches taken to add spatial components to population models, few of these have attempted to deal with spatial control. The investigators evaluate extensions of optimal control methods for dynamical systems to spatial problems, with a focus on general mathematical and computational issues for spatial control linked with abiotic forcing of populations. The effort is motivated by two specific examples. The first concerns black bears in the southern Appalachians, a population with explicit environmental forcing associated with acorn mast production, which varies considerably in time and space. This interacts with hunting, which is spatially restricted. The second example involves an invasive exotic plant species, Lygodium microphyllum (Old World Climbing Fern), in the Everglades of South Florida. This species can completely cover the native tree islands of the region and spatial control of hydrology may be applied to limit its growth. Many of the current problems in regional management involve issues of spatial control -- what to do, where to do it and for what time periods. Examples include alternative plans for land use, forest harvesting, location of dams, and water control. A wide variety of the major environmental public policy issues in the US require scientific assessments of the impacts of alternative management. The investigators develop new mathematical and computational approaches that can aid managers and the public to compare alternative management plans of land and regional resources. The objective also is to allow for comparisons of alternative criteria, arising from different stakeholders, to judge the public utility of different spatial management plans. The project is supported by the Applied Mathematics, Computational Mathematics, and Population Biology programs and by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities doc12261 none Baculoviruses are unique among eukaryotic DNA viruses because the early genes are transcribed by the host RNA polymerase II, while late and very late genes are transcribed by a viral-encoded RNA polymerase. The viral RNA polymerase is a four subunit complex with intrinsic promoter recognition, mRNA capping, termination, and polyadenylation activities. The first goal of this project is to identity the cap methyltransferase that participates in the formation of 5 caps on viral RNAs. Two complementary approaches will be used; one is to purify cap methyltransferase from infected cells; the other is to test orf69 protein for cap methyltransferase activity. This protein, which is a homolog of the rRNA methyltransferase FtzJ, is the only viral protein with an S-adenosyl-methionine binding motif. The second aim of this project is to define the mechanisms that allow RNA polymerase to discriminate between late and very late templates. Again, two approaches to this problem will be used. First, a targeted analysis of the in vitro activity of VLF-1, which stimulates very late gene expression in vivo, will be conducted. Then, factors that alter the promoter specificity of RNA polymerase will be purified from infected cells. The third aim of this project is to characterize the baculovirus protein LEF-5, which has homology with transcription elongation factor TFIIS. To test whether LEF-5 functions as an elongation factor, experiments will be performed to determine whether LEF-5 binds RNApol and whether it stimulates the RNA cleavage activity of RNApol; these two activities are characteristic of TFIIS and are required for its function. This project will elucidate the mechanisms that regulate temporal expression of baculovirus genes, and should also have practical impacts on biotechnology. The baculovirus expression system has been used to produce thousands of different proteins used for basic research and commercial projects. The baculovirus RNA polymerase is central to this expression system, and an understanding of its unique properties will lead to improvements to this technology doc12262 none Higher organisms contain two copies, or alleles, of every gene, one inherited maternally and the other inherited paternally, and for most genes both copies are expressed. Having two copies of every gene, known as diploidy, is thought to protect organisms from the deleterious effects of recessive mutations. For imprinted genes, however, only one copy is expressed. Which copy of an imprinted gene pair is to be expressed is determined by which parent it was inherited from. In other words, some genes are expressed only when inherited maternally and some only when inherited paternally. About forty genes have been identified in mice, humans and other mammals that show imprinted patterns of expression, and there is evidence to suggest that there may be 200 or more imprinted genes in the mammalian genome. Because silencing of one allele of a gene pair abolishes the protection against recessive mutation, it is difficult to explain why such a system of gene expression exists and how it evolved. Of several evolutionary theories proposed to explain genomic imprinting, only one, the conflict model, has been broadly supported by molecular genetic, population genetic and embryological evidence. The conflict model posits that genomic imprinting is the outcome of a conflict between parents over their relative contributions to developing offspring. In mammals, the mother is the sole source of nutrients to gestating young. In polygamous breeding animals, the genes transmitted by fathers will evolve mechanisms, or imprints, to take advantage of the mothers exclusive resource input to his genetic offspring. This puts the mothers genes at a disadvantage since focussing resources on the offspring of one father compromises her output to the offspring of her other mates and may reduce her reproductive output altogether. Maternally transmitted genes have, therefore, evolved mechanisms to counteract the imprinted genes transmitted paternally. The conflict model predicts the general rule that growth-enhancing genes are paternally active and maternally silent, and that growth-suppressing genes are maternally active and paternally silent. This type of imprinted gene expression is peculiar to mammals, which are all viviparous, and in all of which developing embryos are supported by a placental connection with the mother. An essential test of the conflict model is to search for imprinted genes in animals that have evolved viviparity and placentation independent of mammals. This project investigates whether a genus of viviparous fish, Poeciliopsis, has evolved genomic imprinting in the context of parental conflict. This work promises not only to test the evolutionary model, but also to provide a greater insight into the molecular mechanisms underlying imprinted gene expression and the function of imprinting in embryonic development doc12263 none Asparagine synthetase is the enzyme responsible for the biosynthesis of the amino acid Asparagine, an important component of proteins in all organisms. This enzyme has been isolated and studied from a variety of sources, and recently the crystal structure of the bacterial form of the enzyme has been elucidated. The crystal structure illustrated that there was a channel that kept one of the highly reactive intermediates of the reaction from interacting and becoming inactive through reaction with water in the solvent. This mode of protecting enzyme intermediates from solvent inactivation has been reported for other cases over the last decade. In none of these cases, however, has the mechanism of the transport been elucidated. This project will utilize bacterial Asparagine Synthetase as a model for reactive intermediate transport. It involves an experimental approach to describe the components of the transport process. Elucidating the chemical components required for the channeling of intermediates will enable researchers to understand the chemistry of transport and to allow for design of novel coupled enzyme activities doc12264 none This project studies borrowing constraints and their implications for firm growth and survival. Recent empirical work suggests that financial constraints are an important determinant of the evolution of small and young firms. As repayment of loans cannot be always guaranteed, long-term contracts can often provide better incentives to borrowers. Applying recent advances in contract theory, this project considers the optimal design of such long-term lending contracts. Implications for firm dynamics --growth and survival-- of small and young firms are considered doc12265 none A new technique allows rapid and precise mapping of telomere addition sites (TASs) at chromosome ends of the hypotrichous ciliate macronucleus. The macronucleus is carved developmentally from a copy of the cell s gremlin nucleus, involving the generation of 40,000 new telomeres, following the breakage of chromatids of polytenized germline chromosomes, creating chromosomes with just one or a few genes each. Some chromosomes are created using exactly the same TAS pair (called fixed TASs ), but others are generated by alternative processing. In this case, some chromatids escape breakage altogether and use a heterogeneous set of TASs in a region dictated by cis-acting sequences (called mixed TASs). One hypothesis of how this may work is the hesitant cutter hypothesis, whereby the TAS spectrum results from the action of a loose complex of the chromatid cutter and enzyme, telomerase. This model suggests that the region is anchored by a binding site ( CBS ) for the complex and a relatively poor cut site, such that the cutter is slow to cut; meanwhile the telomerase dissociates, the cut is made, the end left unprotected to nuclease erosion. The nuclease could then proceed through the 3 strand until it pauses under the influence of a cis-acting pause site, often at dT in a string of dTs. This could allow telomerase to act when the erosion is paused. Mapping TASs in mixed regions will allow the uncovering of three types of cis-acting sequences: the CBS, cut, and pause sites. Numerous allelic variants of TAS regions will be so mapped, refining the effective site sequences. In addition, fixed TASs will be mapped to allow the refinement of a consensus site already identified, 3 TAY (Y=purine). This project will help illuminate the processes of chromosome breakage, telomere formation and the action of telomerase. Basic understanding of these processes will be key to understanding cellular senescence doc12266 none Dr. Charles Winter (PI) of the Department of Chemistry, Wayne State University, and Dr. Judith Stein (co-PI) are supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program of the Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, to host the , and NSF-sponsored Annual Inorganic Workshops. The purpose of these workshops is to assemble researchers from different geographical areas and broad diversity at different stages of their careers to encourage informal and detailed discussion of in progress investigations. The workshops will focus on emerging ideas, new techniques, and unsolved problems. The workshops will bring together inorganic chemists, particularly the younger chemists at the Assistant and Associate Professor levels to give them an occasion to test their ideas on more senior chemists. An annual report will be made available to the NSF IBO program and to the community based on input from the participants on the status of inorganic chemistry research to provide NSF and the responsible program with insight into emerging research areas doc12267 none Thyroid hormones have profound effects on growth and development of many cell types (including brain cells) and also regulate the basal metabolic rate and other functions of adult tissues. The actions of thyroid hormones in brain were believed to be limited to effects on gene expression during the early developmental period, but new evidence has shown that the hormones can influence the adult brain. Biochemical and molecular approaches are used to study the mechanism of actions of thyroid hormone in adult central nervous system. Using a synaptosomal preparation of brain tissue without cell nuclei, the details of regulation of protein phosphorylation by thyroid hormones will be examined. The research will increase the understanding of a novel mechanism of action of thyroid hormones in adult brain. The significance of the findings will extend beyond the field of neuroendocrinology to add to the general comprehension of cell signaling pathways in cell biology. The project also offers undergraduates opportunities for neuroendocrinology research training in a laboratory that has an excellent history of such education doc12268 none Proteolysis plays fundamental roles in cell homeostasis, cell cycle control, regulation of transcription, and development. Lysosomal vacuolar autophagy and the proteasome pathway handle the bulk of cellular proteolysis. Although proteasome function has been characterized in considerable detail, very little is known about the molecular mechanism of autophagy. Autophagy delivers proteins, RNAs, lipids, carbohydrates, and entire organelles to the lysosome vacuole where they are degraded by soluble acid hydrolases. Autophagy occurs by at least two morphologically distinct mechanisms that are conserved between yeast and mammals. In macroautophagy, cytoplasm and organelles are enveloped by double membrane vesicles called autophagosomes, which fuse with the vacuole membrane to release autophagic bodies into the vacuole lumen for degradation. During microautophagy, bulk cytoplasm and organelles are sequestered into invaginations of the vacuole membrane which are released into the lumen by homotypic membrane scission. It was recently discovered that nonessential portions of the yeast nucleus are degraded in the vacuole by a novel form of receptor-mediated microautophagy called Piecemeal Microautophagy of the Nucleus (PMN). PMN occurs in the physical context of Nucleus-Vacuole (NV) junctions, which are formed though physical interactions between Vac8p in the vacuole membrane and Nvj1p in the nuclear envelope. The first morphologically distinguishable phase of PMN is the development of convex bulges in NV junctions. Bulges develop into blebs that become increasingly engulfed by the vacuole until they remain attached to the nucleus by narrow tethers. PMN blebs detach from the nucleus by scission of vacuolar and nuclear membranes and are released as PMN vesicles into the vacuole lumen. Finally, PMN vesicles are degraded by soluble vacuolar hydrolases and the products either stored in the vacuole or recycled to the cytoplasm. PMN is gradually derepressed during asynchronous growth as nutrients become limiting. The nutritional control of PMN is mediated by the TOR signaling pathway and a recently described gene, PMN1 Yih1 . Cells remain viable during PMN because chromosomal DNA is excluded from blebs and vesicles. Nuclear components targeted for PMN, including nuclear pore complexes and the pre-ribosome rich portion of the nucleolus, are packaged into PMN blebs. PMN represents the first case of selective autophagy where both the vacuole receptor (Vac8p) and the cargo ligand (Nvj1p) are known. These findings provide a facile genetic, cellular, and biochemical model system for elucidating the molecular mechanism of selective microautophagy. The aims of this project focus on genes that are both conserved in humans and central to elucidating the molecular mechanism and physiological control of PMN: 1. PMN-mediated degradation of nuclear pore complexes (NPCs). This aim will test whether PMN functions to degrade and recycle excess or dispensable nuclear components. The targeting and degradation of specific PMN cargo and the rates of synthesis and degradation of NPCs in growing and starving cells will be characterized. It will be determined whether specific nucleoporins are removed from the NPC prior to their delivery into PMN blebs. For example, Mlp1p and Mlp2p normally link yeast chromosomes to the nucleoplasmic face of the NPC. Because chromatin is excluded from PMN vesicles, it will be determined whether Mlp1p and Mlp2p remain associated with telomeres and do not accompany the NPC into PMN blebs. 2. Regulation of PMN by Pmn1p Yih1p. Pmn1p Yih1p is a Nvj1p interacting protein as determined by two-hybrid assay. Also, PMN1 is necessary for the repression of PMN in rich medium, where it is likely to potentiate TOR kinase signaling. PMN1 Yih1 is conserved in mammals, although its function is not known. Experiments will be performed to elucidate the molecular mechanism by which Pmn1p Yih1p controls PMN. These include intracellular localization studies, analysis of how PMN1p Yih1p levels are controlled, determination of the physical basis by which Pmn1p Yih1p interacts with Nvj1p, and assays to determine how Pmn1p Yih1p controls the degradation of Nvj1p. The project will contribute to the integration of research and education through the participation of undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students, and through the utilization of the project as a pedagogical organizing tool in a course taught by Dr. Goldfarb doc12269 none Membrane lipids comprise diverse molecular species, and their composition differs from membrane to membrane. In addition, membrane lipid composition changes in response to internal and external cues. Furthermore, within a membrane, there may be microdomains with distinct lipid constituents and particular functions. However, it is not understood how these distinct compositions and their dynamics are generated and what their functions are in the cell. The objectives of this project are to use a metabolomic approach to determine cellular membrane lipid composition and to understand the regulation and role of membrane lipid compositional dynamics in plant responses to stresses. A highly sensitive approach based on electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry (ESI-MS MS) will be established. ESI-MS MS will be employed to profile membrane lipid molecular species and to determine the compositional dynamics in Arabidopsis plants undergoing temperature and drought stresses. To understand how lipid changes are regulated, this project will investigate enzymes involved in generating the membrane lipid compositional dynamics. Arabidopsis lines, abrogated of various isoforms of phospholipase D, the major lipolytic enzyme family, will be instrumental in the analysis. In addition, lipid molecular species of the defense mutant ssi2 that is defective in stearoyl-ACP desaturase and its suppressor lines will be profiled to determine the relationship between lipid composition and alterations in defense responses. The capability to combine full lipid profiling with cellular analysis of the machinery that generates compositional changes should yield new information on how cellular machinery and metabolites interact in a dynamic manner in the cellular response to changing environments. Membrane lipids are vital biological constituents, providing structural backbones for biological membranes and crucial resources for producing second messengers in regulating cellular and organismal functions. Membrane lipids comprise diverse molecular species, and the composition differs from membrane to membrane. The lipid composition changes in response to internal and external cues. However, it is not understood how these distinct compositions and their dynamics are generated and what their functions are in the cell. This project will establish a highly effective approach based on electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry and use it to determine cellular membrane lipid composition and the role of membrane lipid compositional changes in plant responses to stresses. Extensive profiling of membrane lipids and their metabolites will yield unprecedented information on how cellular machinery and metabolites interact in a dynamic manner in the cellular response to changing environments doc12270 none Neurotransmitter-mediated signaling is one of the basic forms of communication between neurons and their targets. The release of neurotransmitters from neuronal cells is controlled by the so-called SNARE proteins (soluble N- ethylmaleimide-sensitive fusion protein attachment protein receptor). The SNAREs are multiple proteins that form a large complex that leads to the fusion of neurotransmitter-containing vesicles with cell plasma membranes. In this application, Dr. Yuechueng Liu proposes to dissect the events that involve the assembly and disassembly of the SNARE proteins at the molecular level using engineered fluorescent SNARE proteins. By measurement of fluorescence changes in cells during neurotransmitter release, the interaction of the SNARE proteins can be monitored and studied. This research will provide us with fundamental knowledge regarding how neuronal cells communicate with each other, and it will ultimately help us to understand many normal and abnormal brain functions such as learning and memory, depression, and schizophrenia doc12271 none Mutational and biochemical studies will be combined to define the structural basis for catalytic activity and feedback regulation in the 3-deoxy-D-arabino-heptulosonate-7-phosphate synthase (DAHPS) isozyme family in Escherichia coli. This work will be complemented by structural studies of the enzyme by x-ray crystallography, carried out in the laboratory of departmental colleague and co-PI, Robert Kretsinger. DAHPS catalyzes the first step of aromatic biosynthesis, the condensation of phosphoenolpyruvate (PEP) and D-erythrose-4-phosphate (E4P). The three DAHPS isozymes in E. coli have similar catalytic properties, but differ in that each is specifically feedback regulated by one of the three aromatic amino acid end products. The crystal structure of DAHPS(Phe) complexed with PEP and metal cofactor has established that the enzyme has an embellished (beta alpha)8 barrel fold. In order to define the role of the required metal in catalysis, a strategy will be implemented to engineer metal-independent derivatives of DAHPS(Phe) by site-directed changes, loop transplantation and DNA shuffling. The strategy was derived from the superpositional analysis of the structures of DAHPS(Phe) and its metal-independent homologue, KDOP synthase. A model for the DAHPS reaction mechanism will be tested that involves the formation of a covalent Schiff s base intermediate between PEP and an active site lysine. An intramolecular signal transduction pathway responsible for the allosteric transition from R state to T state, based on changes in the three dimensional structure of the enzyme complexed with Phe, will be dissected by combined mutational, kinetic and crystallographic analysis. The organization of the regulatory site of the enzyme will also be confirmed by assessing the effects of mutations targeted to critical residues in the structural model. Lastly, rational design will be used to restructure the regulatory site such that inhibitor specificity is switched from phenylalanine to tryptophan or tyrosine doc12272 none Danilchik One of the most critical phases in the life of a new organism is cleavage, a series of rapid, synchronous cell divisions that populates the fertilized egg s volume with zygotic nuclei, clonally segregates its developmental potential, and reduces cell volume to that of somatic cells. Cleavage has long served as a favorite model for the study of animal-cell cytokinesis, since the egg s large size permits a variety of experimental manipulations and opportunities for observation unavailable in smaller cells. Nevertheless, cleavage is known to differ in several fundamental ways from somatic-cell mitosis, particularly by its synchrony, rapidity, lack of transcriptional activity, and reliance on maternally synthesized components. In amphibian embryos, cleavage is accompanied by the insertion of a new domain of plasma membrane between each new pair of cells. This membrane deposition has potential significance in events of early development, such as establishment of the body plan, since all receptor-mediated, cell-cell interactions depend on the composition of the membrane deposited between cells. Our discovery of a unique array of microtubules underlying the advancing cleavage furrow led to an investigation of the role of microtubules in the cleavage process. We now have evidence that the furrow microtubule array may be involved in delivery of vesicles to the site of new membrane expansion at the base of the cleavage furrow. Furthermore, we have detected novel membrane protrusive activity on either side of the expanding cleavage membrane domain that may be critical for pulling the new cells into close apposition as cleavage progresses. Our goal in this proposed project is to understand the function and integration of these processes in Xenopus cleavage. Specifically, our aims are to 1) learn the role of the furrow microtubule array in directing exocytotic vesicles to the growing cleavage plane, 2 ) analyze cytoskeletal assembly in furrows of living embryos, and 3) study the relationship between furrowing and membrane protrusive activity along the furrow margins doc12273 none Simple and complex animals, including humans, are always faced with the need to decide wisely upon actions using incomplete information. How the nervous system is organized to do this has been a major puzzle. However, we know that animals make most decisions using their own affective state as information, and that in their computations they integrate their own internal state with sensation and experience to arrive at decisions. The result represents a cost-benefit analysis of a behavioral decision in terms of probable benefit, resource loss and possible self-damage. This proposal describes plans to study the neural basis of cost-benefit analysis in decision-making in foraging behavior using a model predator species with simple body form, behavior and nervous system. Three goals are outlined: 1) to find how satiation and prey-avoidance learning influence decision-making mechanisms in the nervous system for attack or avoidance; 2) to determine the role of serotonin, a critical biasing factor, in the mechanisms of decision-making; and 3) to summarize and test the results in a computational model of the neural networks. The expected results are significant to the development of autonomous robots capable of making least-probable-error decisions in a noisy environment, and to the evolution of artificial intelligence for which motivation-based processes may provide the critical regulation of goal related activity, just as in real intelligence systems. The results also relate directly to health issues of weight-control in anorexia and obesity, in that they approach the organization of processes regulating nutritional homeostasis doc12274 none Animals respond to environments that are low in oxygen by increasing their breathing. This increase in breathing is stimulated by oxygen sensitive cells in a structure called the carotid body. There are a number of theories about how the carotid body cells can transduce the signal of low oxygen levels (hypoxia) in the blood into nerve signals to the brain that cause the increase in breathing, but which theory is correct remains unresolved. Oxygen is carried in the blood on hemoglobin that is present in red blood cells. Hemoglobin is a so-called heme -protein and there are other heme-proteins in other cells in the body. One of the theories about how carotid body cells sense changes in oxygen levels is via a heme-protein that can bind oxygen either inside the cell or at its membrane. Comparative studies of several species of mammals, birds and even some reptiles have demonstrated a good correlation between the affinity of hemoglobin for oxygen, or the ease with which hemoglobin binds oxygen, and the amount of decline in oxygen in the blood required to stimulate an increase in breathing. The mechanism underlying this observation may be a matching or commonality of oxygen binding characteristics of the b-type heme protein binding oxygen in the blood and a b-type heme protein binding oxygen in the oxygen sensitive cells of the carotid bodies. If this is the case, the mechanism may help elucidate not only how the carotid bodies work but how the control of breathing has evolved to be well matched to the oxygen transport properties of the blood. To explore this concept further this project will investigate two strains of rats that exhibit different breathing and metabolic responses to reduced oxygen or hypoxia. The binding characteristics of their hemoglobin will be determined to see if they differ, and the response characteristics, or sensitivity, of their carotid bodies to hypoxia will be measured to determine whether or not the differences in hypoxic sensitivity of the whole animal, in terms of breathing and metabolism, can be related to differences in the hypoxic sensitivity of the carotid body. If they are related, then future comparative studies of heme-proteins in the carotid bodies and oxygen sensitive ion channels will be conducted. If not, then alternative hypotheses about the mechanisms controlling the different hypoxic sensitivities will be pursued doc12275 none There are thousands of genes in the human genome. What forces have shaped the evolution of these genes? Recent research has suggested that the most rapidly evolving genes in many organisms may be driven by the intense competition and conflict that surrounds sexual reproduction. For example, females in many species will mate with more than one male in succession, which means that the sperm of different males must compete to fertilize eggs. Sperm competition is thought to result in an escalating, three-way tug-of-war as evolutionary conflicts are played out between the genes affecting sperm offensive abilities, sperm defensive abilities, and female control of sperm usage. This perpetual conflict surrounding fertilization success has been hypothesized to drive rapid and sustained evolutionary change, analogous to an escalating arms race. The research outlined in this proposal is designed to test the relative importance of male-male versus male-female conflict for the evolution of genes related to fertilization success in nematodes of the genus Caenorhabditis. In these species, it is possible to compare the way genes are evolving between lineages that have very different sperm competition regimes but are otherwise extremely similar to each other. Using standard techniques in molecular biology, the rates and patterns of protein evolution will be studied for two genes involved in fertilization success in these organisms doc12276 none This project uses the medically important dimorphic fungus Candida albicans to study general mechanisms of shape determination in fungi. It extends the bacterial concept of quorum sensing to more complicated organisms such as the fungi. The project explores how single celled fungi determine how many of their kind are present at a certain location. That is, are enough cells present to have achieved a threshold or quorum? For Candida albicans, the consequences of quorum sensing are that the fungi exhibit different growth patterns depending solely on their initial cell densities; they grow as single celled, budding yeasts at high cell densities and as long filaments at low cell densities. Each cell releases low levels of a specific signaling molecule and then senses the extracellular concentration of that molecule. This project focuses on whether quorum sensing is a general phenomenon in all dimorphic fungi and aims to elucidate the chemical structures of the molecules which are secreted and detected. The long term benefits from this project could include the development of novel anti-fungal drugs, designed not to kill the fungus but instead to restrict its growth to the yeast morphology. There is a dire need of effective anti-fungal antibiotics and a novel class of anti-fungal drugs would greatly benefit the treatment of both animal and plant diseases doc12277 none Leucine zippers are formed when a pair of short alpha -helices in a pair of protein molecules bind in a configuration called a coiled coil. Leucine zippers and other coiled coils are abundant in nature; they are found in about 10% of all proteins encoded in typical genomes, including many important transcription factors. The project addresses two complementary questions about leucine zippers. First, how do the subunit interactions in the context of a specific leucine zipper from the yeast transcription factor GCN4, control the specificity and stability of zipper assembly. Different interactions will be engineered into the GCN4 leucine zipper and characterized by biophysical assays including equilibrium and stopped-flow circular dichroism, sedimentation equilibrium, and X-ray crystallography. In addition, new biophysical assays for leucine zipper assembly will be implemented based on analytical ultracentrifugation and fluorescence correlation spectroscopy. Second, the project will explore the diversity of coiled coils in a whole genome. Using powerful genetic methods, the project will examine the specificity of interactions among hundreds of naturally occurring, predicted coiled-coils from the yeast genome that must coexist in the same cell. Because of their small size and simple, repetitive structures, leucine zippers have provided useful models for studying general issues in how proteins fold. By combining research on specific interactions with genome-wide studies of the properties of many zippers, this project will test whether our understanding of protein foldin is sufficient to illuminate the biology of a large and widely distributed class of important proteins doc12278 none Although several groups of animals have colonized land, the evolutionary changes that have made this possible are only superficially understood. This is due in large part to difficulties in resolving the evolutionary relationships among terrestrial taxa within a particular group, and their relationships to aquatic counterparts, problems that leave the status of both the aquatic ancestors and transitional or prototypal terrestrial species unresolved. In the case of the three most successful terrestrial taxa, the tetrapod vertebrates, the insects, and the arachnids, it is clear that living descendents of these ancestral groups no longer survive. This greatly limits our understanding of the adaptive transitions that have made terrestrial life possible. Terrestrial isopods, commonly known as woodlice or sowbugs, provide possibly the best model system for studying the evolution of physiological systems accompanying the aquatic-terrestrial transition. In contrast to the other major terrestrial animals, they are represented by living groups that occupy diverse habitats from marine aquatic to transitional intertidal and fully terrestrial. The evolutionary relationships of living species have recently been elucidated in considerable detail from comparative anatomy and molecular phylogenetic techniques, and these indicate that the aquatic and intertidal species are more basal, and thereby more closely related to other marine isopods, than the more derived terrestrial species. Furthermore, they indicate at least three independent origins of a terrestrial habit. Taken together, these factors provide an excellent basis for comparative physiological studies. By reconstructing an evolutionary lineage from marine to fully terrestrial, and comparing specific physiological traits across species taken from that lineage, it is possible to understand the physiological transitions involved. Building a picture of the physiological changes in this way allows us not only to study specific changes that have accompanied terrestriality, but also to compare adaptive solutions among the independent terrestrial radiations. Studies will focus on five main physiological systems. Water vapor absorption (WVA) is known from only one group of terrestrial isopods and allows animals to recover water in ambient humidities exceeding approximately 87%. The condensation of water vapor involves the secretion of concentrated salt solution by the gills to generate reduced vapor pressure. A key question in explaining the evolution of WVA is to unravel the ancestral functions of salt secretion in intertidal or terrestrial species. Like WVA, both nitrogenous excretion and ion regulation are closely associated with water balance. Terrestrial isopods excrete nitrogenous waste as ammonia gas, and this presents an intriguing solution to water conservation by potentially eliminating simultaneous water losses. Ammonia volatilization does, however, cause acidification of the gill surface and buffering of accumulated acid is essential for the process to work. Understanding the buffering mechanism, and its possible preadaptive functions, is thus essential in explaining how ammonia volatilization evolved. Most terrestrial animals possess efficient mechanisms for regulating blood solute concentration, protecting the tissues against osmotic hydration or dehydration and resultant changes in cell volume. Aquatic isopods are capable of regulating blood salt concentration in both elevated (hyper-osmotic) and depressed (hypo-osmotic) external salinities. Recent studies have shown that intertidal species counteract increasing blood salinities imposed by dehydration by excreting salts across the gills, as in aquatic species. Fully terrestrial species cannot excrete salts, however, since dietary salts are impoverished. One group has been shown to down-regulate blood salts by sequestration in the hindgut during dehydration. Although regulation has been demonstrated in other groups, the mechanisms await investigation. At least one group appears to have lost the ancestral capacity for osmoregulation. As well as osmotic concentration imposed by dehydration, isopods may face osmotic dilution during rain showers, a danger exacerbated by their permeable cuticles. The mechanisms by which excess water is eliminated are essentially unstudied, though recent work indicates a role of the maxillary glands in producing dilute urine. The remaining areas of study will focus on reproductive physiology, specifically maternal regulation of the embryonic environment and ion regulation of periembryonic fluid by the eggs. The eggs and newly hatched juveniles (mancas) are brooded in a fluid-filled marsupium. Marine isopods flush this with seawater, but terrestrial species either fill it from external water sources or from the blood. Desiccation and thermal stresses on land demand either maternal regulation of the marsupial environment or high physiological tolerance in early developmental stages. Recent studies have shown extreme tolerance of osmolality, pH, temperature and ammonia extremes in embryos of terrestrial isopods, and pH and ion regulation appears to employ a greatly enlarged embryonic dorsal organ . Studies will investigate ion transport mechanisms in this organ. Comparisons within lineages will reveal whether the enlargement of the dorsal organ is a unique terrestrial innovation and will test the hypothesis that its ancestral function was calcium uptake for mineralization of the cuticle doc12279 none The hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal axis in vertebrate animals is important for regulation of responses to stress, chiefly by release of adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) from the pituitary, which in turn stimulates release of steroid glucocorticoids from the adrenal glands. In birds, the peptide compound arginine vasotocin (AVT), which regulates water balance and reproduction, may be a major factor regulating ACTH release from the pituitary gland, though this function has not yet been well defined in birds. This project tests the hypothesis that a novel VT receptor molecule is expressed by certain cells in the pituitary, and mediates the stimulatory effect of AVT on ACTH release. A collaborative team with complementary skills will use molecular, cellular, biochemical and behavioral approaches in a uniquely integrative, comparative study to clone and characterize this novel receptor, to localize the cells expressing the receptors, and to establish the physiological role for the VT receptors. Results will be important in neuroendocrinology for understanding comparative aspects of pituitary function in vertebrates other than mammals; for an integrated understanding of molecular, cellular and behavioral mechanisms for stress regulation; and for general aspects of poultry reproduction. It will also have a broader impact on bird physiology, on general vertebrate endocrinology and reproductive behavior. There is also a strong impact on scientific infrastructure because the project has a training component including graduates and undergraduates, and involves three campuses in an EPSCoR state doc12280 none Bruce Johnson of Rice University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to develop and apply multiscale wavelet methods in quantum calculations. Wavelets provide the multiresolution approach that will be brought to bear on chemical applications where either electronic or nuclear motions take place on more than one scale. This characteristic challenges conventional quantum basis-set and grid-based methods over and above their limitations as far as the number of coupled degrees of freedom that can currently be accommodated. Applications to recent dissociative resonance Raman spectroscopy (DRRS) experiments on nitrosyl chloride and ongoing experiments on ozone will be the focus of the initial wavelet-Schrodinger calculations. Solution to the technical challenges and the development of freely-distributable code are expected to lead to novel outcomes which will be of use in other numerical and engineering wavelet applications. Wavelet methods have found much use in digital signal processing, and have much unrealized potential for application to complex chemical problems. Along with improving the understanding of fundamental chemical dynamics, outcomes from this effort could have signal processing impacts in areas such as magnetic resonance spectroscopy. The computer software developed in this project will be made freely available and is expected to be useful for engineering and other applications doc12281 none The objective of this project is to understand the mechanism by which Drosophila and other multicellular eukaryotes repair covalent interstrand crosslinks between the two strands of the DNA duplex. This type of damage, which can occur as a result of exposure to a number of compounds, has catastrophic implications for the ability of a cell to replicate its genome. It is unique in that crosslinking simultaneously damages sequences on both strands of the duplex, preventing use of either strand as a template for repair. From genetic screens for mutants uniquely hypersensitive to crosslinking agents, a small group of genes has been identified that appear to be play essential roles in crosslink repair, but to have no essential role in other repair pathways. This phenotype distinguishes these genes from the majority of genes involved in crosslink repair, which are essential components of other major repair pathways. The specific roles in crosslink repair of the four crosslink-specific genes are unknown. The crosslink-sensitive genes, which include mus308, snm1 and two novel mutations, will be studied at the genetic, molecular and biochemical levels to deduce their functional characteristics. The novel mutations will be genetically and molecularly characterized. The snm1 gene, for which there is no mutant allele in Drosophila, will be subjected to targeted and classical mutagenesis until a mutation is obtained. When clones and mutations are available for each of the four genes, the DNA repair phenotypes of all four will be characterized. Epistatic interactions will be determined to position these genes in repair pathways. Interactions at both the genetic and biochemical level will be determined to test the hypothesis that they function as components of a unique aspect of crosslink repair, and biochemical characterization will be performed to understand the molecular role they serve in this process doc12233 none Evolution by natural selection, or the principle of adaptation, was Charles Darwin s proposed mechanism for evolution. Darwin viewed an adaptation as any feature of an organism that arose as consequence of natural selection and enhanced the survival and reproductive potential of the individual. Yet, understanding and empirically documenting the relationship between a particular trait that appears to be adaptive and the factors that selected for the evolution of the trait remains a challenging and controversial task. In the time since Darwin, the main lessons learned from empirical studies of natural selection are that adaptations rarely occur in isolation, but rather are constrained by the function of other interacting traits, and are a ultimately a compromise between integrated aspects of the organism. Accordingly, the study of adaptation requires an understanding of how different traits constrain each other and how they are integrated to produce locally adapted phenotypes. There is only limited empirical evidence for how such constraints are manifested in real organisms. The proposed work will examine how selection acts on the integration of reproductive strategies, body shape, swimming performance, and behavior in natural populations of the guppy, Poecilia reticulata. The guppy is a model organism for the proposed work because it is one of the few organisms where adaptation has been documented. This previous work shows rapid adaptive changes in the reproductive traits of guppies in response to predatory fish. The work proposed here will first document the correlations among reproductive traits, body morphology, habitat use, foraging behavior, and stream type with field observations on female and male guppies from populations that are subject to different selection pressures. It will focus on the combined influences of stream current and predation. Because the reproductive traits of guppies are already known from these sites, the morphological and behavioral results obtained will provide the first data on whether body morphology, foraging behavior, habitat use, and reproductive strategies predictably covary with each other, or whether they vary independently in response to different selection pressures. Guppies will then be reared in the lab under different environments to test the degree to which these trait differences between populations represent fixed genetic differences or phenotypic plasticity. Finally, the proposed work will examine for the first time the consequences of pregnancy on body morphology and locomotion in an aquatic species by measuring how body profile and swimming performance change over the course of the reproductive cycle. Steady and escape swimming performance of gravid females from high and low predation localities will test the consequences of different reproductive allotments on locomotion and how adaptive changes in offspring number may compromise locomotion. By studying how reproductive strategies, morphology, locomotor performance, and behavior interact with each other and collectively respond to different selection pressures, the proposed work will provide a better understanding of the trade-offs faced by live-bearing fish adapting to their local environments doc12283 none The long-term goal of our studies is to elucidate the mechanisms of pyridoxal 5 -phosphate (PLP)-dependent enzymes that catalyze chemistry at the beta-carbon of amino acid. Studies have focused on the mechanism of the enzyme O-acetylserine sulfhydryase (OASS), which catalyzes the beta-replacement of the acetoxy group of O-acetyl-L-serine with SH to give L-cysteine. Of interest, a fraction of the OASS is in the cysteine synthetase (CS) multienzyme complex with the first enzyme in the cysteine biosynthetic pathway, serine acetyltransferase(SAT). Thus, a complete mechanistic study of the component enzymes alone and in the CS multienzyme complex is being carried out. In this regard, mechanistic studies are planned to elucidate the kinetic and chemical mechanisms of serine acetyltransferase according to the following specific aims. 1) The kinetic and acid-base chemical mechanism of STA will be determined via the pH dependence of kinetic parameters, and isotope effects. 2) The mechanismof SAT regulation by L-cysteine will make use of initial velocity studies, isotope effects, spectral studies, and analytical ultracentrifugation beta-Replacement reactions catalyzed by PLP-dependent enzymes are of interest since they generate an beta-aminoacrylate external aldimine intermediate, a hot electrophile. In addition, there is the possibility that this class of enzymes catalyze the beta elimination and beta addition reactions in a concerted, E2 , or stepwise, E1 , reaction. It is of interest to determine how OASS stabilizes its beta-aminoacrylate intermediate, and whether the mechanisms of elimination and addition are concerted or stepwise, that is whether a quinonoid intermediate is generated during the two halves of the reaction. In addition, the participation of the enzyme in the overall reaction in terms of catalytic advantage is of import. Finally, a new allosteric regulatory site for the binding of small anions has recently been identified, and a molecular mechanism of inhibition proposed that must be tested. The above questions will be answered via the following specific aims. 1) The reaction mechanism will be probed using presteady state and steady state kinetic techniques, and kinetic isotope effects to obtain information on the second half of the reaction. 2) Oligonucleotide-directed mutagenesis will be used to identify the function of enzyme residues that interact with the cofactor, and substrate. 3) The new mechanism of regulation will be tested using oligonucleotide-directed mutagenesis of residues along the pathway for transmission of the allosteric effect doc12284 none The lifecycle of many spherical (icosahedral) viruses involves co-assembly of the protein capsid around the viral genome. However, the details of this process are largely unknown. Important questions remain about how capsid protein associates with the nucleic acid to initiate assembly and complete virion, and how the viral genome becomes organized within the capsid. We will examine assembly of Cowpea Chlorotic Mottle virus (CCMV), a plus strand RNA plant virus. This is an ideal model for studying in vitro assembly because CCMV capsid protein (CP) can assemble into empty capsids, virus-like particles with non-specific RNA, and infectious virions with viral RNA. We hypothesize that virion assembly proceeds stepwise by (i) non - specific binding of CP to RNA, (ii) specific binding to viral RNA, (iii) refolding of the RNA - protein complex, and (iv) finally, cooperative association of CP to the complex, leading to completion of the capsid. This hypothesis implies that the protein - protein interactions will affect the organization of the packaged RNA and that RNA structure will have a profound effect on capsid assembly. Understanding the assembly of empty capsids is a preliminary to studying assembly of RNA-filled virions. Study of the protein-protein interaction is complicated because the CCMV capsid is an oligomer of 180 copies of CP. We have developed analyses of assembly that allow us to deduce elements of the mechanism and thermodynamic and kinetic parameters. Experimentally, assembly will be observed using light scattering, liquid chromatography, and electron microscopy. Assembly of RNA-filled capsids adds an additional layer of complexity. In vivo, only viral RNA is encapsidated; in vitro, encapsidation is promiscuous. The role of RNA in directing assembly remains to be determined. RNA binding will concentrate CP, but is also likely to affect CP - RNA quaternary structure. We have observed distinct CP - RNA complexes that are likely to play critical roles in assembly and specificity. We will physically and structurally characterize these complexes and their formation on viral and random RNA. Subsequent capsid assembly will be observed with electrophoresis, and solution assays using RNA with bound complex, bare viral RNA, and random RNA as substrates. We expect that protein - protein interaction energy, observed for formation of empty capsids, will probably contribute to the cooperativity of assembly. We anticipate that these studies will yield a detailed picture of a basic biological process, the assembly of an infectious virus. These studies will be a paradigm for understanding assembly of other viruses, identifying new targets for anti-viral intervention, and for manipulating virus assembly to yield novel nano-structures doc12285 none This project will address the evolution of the pathway for degradation of pentachlorophenol (PCP) in the soil bacterium Sphingomonas chlorophenolica. Since PCP was introduced only in , this pathway must have evolved and assembled rather recently in microorganisms. This experimental system provides an unusual opportunity to study a metabolic pathway at a very early stage in its development. The emergence of this pathway is also of special interest because PCP is highly toxic, as well as being xenobiotic, and is thus a particularly challenging target for degradation. Previous work has suggested that tetrachlorohydroquinone dehalogenase, the second enzyme in the pathway, may have originated from a glutathione-dependent double bond isomerase such as maleylacetoacetate isomerase or maleylpyruvate isomerase (enzymes involved in degradation of tyrosine and benzoate, respectively). The first objective of the project is to further explore the origin of this enzyme. Levels of dehalogenase activity in several maleylacetoacetate and maleylpyruvate isomerases will be measured in order to evaluate the hypothesis that this enzyme was recruited to serve as a dehalogenase because it fortuitously had a low but useful level of dehalogenase activity. The second objective of the project is to investigate the genetic context of the dehalogenase gene in order to determine whether it originated from a gene duplication event in S. chlorophenolica or was introduced by horizontal transfer from another organism. This project addresses the mechanisms by which soil bacteria evolve new metabolic pathways to degrade anthropogenic pollutants which have been recently introduced into the environment as a result of agricultural, industrial, military, or household uses. Such pollutants are often resistant to biodegradation and consequently persist in the environment. The ability of bacteria to evolve new pathways to degrade anthropogenic compounds is a critical factor that affects the environmental fate of these compounds. This project concerns the evolution of a new metabolic pathway for degradation of pentachlorophenol, a widely used and highly toxic wood preservative, in a soil bacterium called Sphingomonas chlorophenolica. This bacterium has apparently evolved a new pathway by recruiting proteins already present in the cell to perform new functions. The evolutionary origin of one of these enzymes, tetrachlorohydroquinone dehalogenase, will be studied during this project doc12286 none Human activities are substantially influencing the availability of nitrogen, calcium and water in north temperate forests. These changes may strongly affect forest composition and dynamics because water, nitrogen and calcium limit - in a species-specific manner -the growth and survival of trees in northern temperate forests. The ability to predict forest responses will be aided by characterizing the functional mechanisms that underlie tree species differences in growth and survival across soil resource gradients and how these species traits interact with light availability in determining species competitive abilities. We hypothesize that seedlings of tree species with greater growth and survival in low soil resource environments have collections of traits that enhance whole-plant use efficiency of and access to limiting soil resources, that these traits underlie adaptation to low soil resources, and that these traits occur at a tradeoff with shade tolerance and or high light growth rates in high soil resource environments. A seedling transplant experiment to field plots and a closely linked potted seedling experiment are proposed to address these hypotheses. Both experiments will use the same nine broad-leaved deciduous species that are common in northern temperate forests, but that vary in abundance across light and soil resource environments. For the field experiment, seedlings have been transplanted into fertilized (Ca, nitrogen, Ca + nitrogen) and unfertilized plots distributed across variation in light and independent landscape-level gradients of water and nutrients in glaciated northwestern lower Michigan. Over the three-year duration of the experiment, we will monitor seedling growth and survival and measure whole-plant morphological and physiological traits that we hypothesize underlie species differences in performance. The outdoor plastic pot experiment will allow us to more thoroughly examine fine root physiology and dynamics than could be accomplished in the field experiment. Collectively these data will allow us to determine: 1) species specific growth and survival responses to natural gradients of nitrogen, calcium, water and light; 2) with fertilized plots, the degree to which N and Ca limit growth and survival and how it varies over the landscape gradient; 3) interspecific variation in access to, and use efficiency of nitrogen, calcium and water; 4) the physiological and morphological components of whole-plant resource economies that are associated with species differences in access to, and use efficiency of soil resources; 5) whether interspecific variation in whole-plant resource economies and related traits underlie variation in growth and survival at low soil resource availability; 6) interspecific trade-offs in resource-based growth and survival and the particular morphological physiological traits underlying species differences doc12287 none Animals must alter their behavior to meet the demands of a changing environment. One mechanism that allows such behavioral flexibility in the pattern generators that drive rhythmical movements, such as locomotion and chewing, is the functional reconfiguration of neural networks by neuromodulators. The stomatogastric system, which contains the pattern generators that drive the pyloric filter and the gastric mill in the crustacean foregut, provides an ideal system in which to study neuromodulation. Both the pattern generators and the modulatory inputs in the stomatogastric system have been extensively characterized. More than 20 modulatory substances have been identified in this ganglion, raising the following question: Why are so many modulators involved in modulating such a relatively simple system? This project asks whether a comparative approach can shed light on this question and thus provide insights into the fundamental mechanisms and effects of neuromodulators. The pyloric pattern and its responses to modulators have been studied to some extent in a number of different species of decapod crustaceans. The present study will further examine the responses of six species - two closely related species of crab, two related lobster species, the California spiny lobster, and a kelp crab - to a test group of four neuromodulators. Using standard recording techniques, the basic pyloric pattern and its responses to these substances will be recorded and characterized qualitatively and quantitatively. Additionally, some of the mechanisms involved in modulation will be compared, as will the effects of these four modulators on muscle activity and contraction in the six species doc12288 none Scientists at the Kansas State University Plant Resistance to Insects Laboratory have identified several molecular markers linked to genes expressing resistance to the Russian wheat aphid, a serious pest of cereal grain crops in Africa, North America, and South America. In order to conduct more detailed research, the Principal Investigator of this Minority Career Advancement Award, Dr. Smith, will obtain hands-on research training in the use of RFLP marker linkage analysis, cDNA cloning, and cDNA and BAC sequencing. The specific new skills to be acquired will be plant RNA and plasmid DNA isolation, Southern and Northern blotting and hybridization, construction of a subtractive cDNA library, and sequence analysis of DNA clones. Experiments will be conducted during the training that will provide information about the linkages of various RFLP loci to the Dn6 Russian wheat aphid resistance gene, and initial information about possible DNA sequences related to Dn6. Thus, this information will serve as a starting point for further research on aphid resistance gene sequences. Dr. Smith will also attend a course in bioinformatics at Kansas State University and attend two continuing education conferences which emphasize bioinformatics. Knowledge gained from these educational activities will be used to update three courses dealing with plant resistance to pests in which Dr. Smith serves as instructor or co-instructor. Information and experience derived from the research and training objectives of the current proposal will provide students enrolled in these courses current information on plant genomics, bioinformatics, and gene sequencing. RFLP - restriction fragment length polymorphism; cDNA - complementary DNA; BAC- bacterial artificial chromosome doc12289 none This Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) project, supported in the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities, combines the demonstrated intellectual and physical resources at the IBM Almaden Research Center (IBM ARC) and San Jose State University (SJSU), a primarily undergraduate institution. Professors Joseph Pesek and Maureen Scharberg head the SJSU effort and Dr. Charles Wade coordinates the IBM ARC effort. Together, these two institutions will offer undergraduate students and high school teachers small college faculty research projects in many areas of analytical chemistry, interfacial science, and materials science. This academic-industrial research and education program builds on two previous NSF grants, and . . In this project, both year-round and summer programs are offered: For undergraduates, there are six positions year-round and twenty ten-week summer appointments. There are four summer positions for high school teachers and two summer positions for visiting small college faculty. Mentors come from the 22 chemistry faculty at SJSU and among the 240 scientists at IBM ARC. Students work in the areas of polymer chemistry, materials characterization, lithography, semiconductor packaging, magnetism, computational chemistry, and surface chemistry. Each of the participants will spend time working in laboratories at both SJSU and IBM ARC, giving them a broad understanding of both academic and industrial research opportunities and procedures. The assessment and evaluation of the project is evolving. Exit surveys have already been performed, and now long term tracking protocols are being developed doc12290 none The Analytical and Surface Chemistry program supports the project by Professor Mark Lonergan of the University of Oregon on fundamental studies with current-sensing atomic force microscopy of nanostructured semiconductor polymer interfaces. Well-defined nanostructures will be fabricated using e-beam lithography to imbed an array of gold metal dots into an n-InP | polypyrrole interface. Electron transfer barrier heights and transmission coefficients will be measured in and around the nanostructures with probe microscopy. The goals of this work include: (1) to understand charge depletion and charge transport at laterally nanostructured interfaces, (2) to evaluate the efficacy of barrier inhomogeneity models in explaining classic anomalies, and (3) to develop current-sensing atomic force microscopy as a characterization tool for buried semiconductor interfaces. The project addresses a long-standing problem in the understanding of metal-semiconductor contacts, namely, the failure of models to adequately describe electron transfer, a key feature of an electronic device, semiconductor electrochemistry, and semiconductor metal contacts. Model failure may be due to surface heterogeneity. Experiments are proposed to create well-defined nanostructures at a semiconductor interface, and then to measure the electron transfer rate and its temperature dependence across the nanostructure. The results will be used to assess and correct models of the semiconductor interface, accounting for nanoscopic features at the interface doc12291 none The purpose of this investigation will be to determine the structural basis for the maturation chemistry and fluorescent properties of three newly discovered green fluorescent protein homologies (Fps) which emit red light (drFP583), yellow light (zFP538) or are colored but not fluorescent (asFP595). The objective is to discover the unique chemistry and three dimensional configurations that lead to the fluorescence of these molecules. On the basis of the understanding gained form this work, in the long term the properties of these proteins will be improved for use as light emitting research tools for the study of the development and dynamic behavior of living creatures on both the subcellular and whole organism levels. The general approach will include crystallographic, physicochemical and directed mutagenesis studies. The relationships between the primary amino acid sequences and the tertiary and quaternary structures will be determined by high resolution X-ray crystallography. The roles of specific side chains in the maturation chemistry will be determined by directed mutagenesis and analysis of the light absorption and emission properties of the variants. Selected mutants will be made in order to optimize emission color, state of oligomerization and molecular response to external condition for use as visual indicators of solution conditions (e.g. pH) in real time in living cells. The end result will be to provide the research community with tools that report the timing of gene expression, localization of gene products, and changes in cellular chemistry in a noninvasive manner. For the most part, graduate students will gain training in a number of interdisciplinary areas as this work proceeds doc12292 none The soil microorganism Streptomyces makes over half of the antibiotics that are obtained from all microorganisms. The study of how antibiotics are made is a basic prerequisite for developing new antibiotics and new methods of producing antibiotics, as well as for understanding basic ecological processes in the soil microbiota. Nonactin is an antibiotic that is active against Gram positive bacteria, mycobacteria, and fungi and also blocks one of the major processes by which cancer cells are resistant to anti-cancer drugs. The microorganism Streptomyces griseus makes nonactin in fermentative culture although the exact details of this process are not presently understood. Current evidence suggests that nonactin is assembled by a number of proteins which work together as a large protein complex known as a polyketide synthase. The structure of nonactin is quite unusual in that it is made up of two forms of a precursor that are mirror images of each other. It is also not known how the organism achieves the synthesis of both mirror images of this precursor. The objectives of the research are to gain an understanding of how nonactin is made by a polyketide synthase and to determine how the formation of two mirror-image compounds is achieved and controlled. The project will use a multidisciplinary approach to study the polyketide synthase genes from Streptomyces griseus as well as the basic chemistry of the natural synthesis pathway. The research will determine which genes in the organism control the synthesis of each of the mirror image precursors and the exact manner in which these precursors are formed from simple organic acids. The basic information gained in the study of this unusual system will add to the body of existing knowledge of natural product synthesis. The long term goal of the research is to understand the natural synthesis pathways in sufficient detail that an organism can be rationally altered to produce any designed, target antibiotic by a fermentation process from cheap starting materials in an environmentally friendly manner doc12293 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Mary Lou Larson and her collaborators will combine field and laboratory research to develop an archaeological data base for a large multi-county region within Southwest Wyoming. In the course of many cultural resource management projects as well as through basic archaeological research, data has been recorded for nearly 25,000 prehistoric sites in southwestern Wyoming. These include potentially valuable information on individual types of artifacts as well as larger features such as structures. These data are curated in the Wyoming Cultural Records Office and available for potential research. However because of the method of storage - in paper form in multiple filing cabinets - they are extremely difficult to use. Collation of data on one specific distribution of one specific artifact type for example can involve hundreds of hours culling through individual site reports. An added difficulty rests in the fact that these materials, collected over a period of decades by multiple individuals, may be of variable quality. In preliminary work, Dr. Larson has organized this material and incorporated it in standardized form into a Geographic Information System thus making it readily available for analysis. In her NSF research, she and her team will continue this process. In order to assess the accuracy of these data she will conduct limited field research to compare actual and recorded spatial coordinates. Because one basic use of the data is to examine distributions of features and artifact types over space, and because observed distributions can be significantly affected by geomorphological processes such as differential erosion and deposition, the team will also examine the degree of distortion such factors induce. The GIS system will allow incorporation of landform, vegetation and hydrological data from other sources and thus permit researchers to examine cultural patterns within an environmental context. Dr. Larson notes that the Wyoming surface material provides an extensive record for Archaic period hunters and gathers and that sites from multiple periods allow one to trace changing land use and subsistence patterns over time. Wyoming is unusual in the widespread presence of underground pit dwellings - a type of house which most often is associated with more settled agricultural peoples. The Wyoming record reveals that during the early Archaic period a complementary, non-overlapping relationship is evident between pit dwellings and stone lined storage pits. She believes this results from seasonal movement across the landscape with different activities occurring in spatially segregated areas at varying times of the year. She plans to use these features as a test case, both to answer a significant anthropological question as well as to test the utility of the Wyoming records and her GIS database as a research tool. This work is important for several reasons. It will result in a data base of potentially great utility. It will also provide a test case to evaluate the research potential of state archaeological records and their incorporation into a GIS system. The work will also shed new light into early American subsistence adaptations doc12294 none With the availability of ever increasing amounts of genomic sequence information, the old adage the more we know, the more we know that we don t know rings true. Of the thousands of genes in prokaryotes, close to half code for proteins of as yet unknown function. Whereas some of these may code for structural proteins, many unidentified open reading frames are expected to encode important regulatory proteins involved with assembly or stabilization of functional protein complexes. Surprisingly, over the past years it has become clear that many of these putative proteins of unknown function do not have easily recognizable counterparts even in relatively closely related organisms. Yet the functional identification of proteins involved in regulation or stabilization of physiological processes is of major importance in understanding the molecular physiology and metabolism of an organism as a function of its genomic information. Fairly comprehensive cosmid interruption libraries that each contain 30-45 kb fragments of genomic DNA from the yanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC into which transposons have been integrated at random sites will be used to identify new genes involved in photosynthesis. Such transposon interruption libraries are available for about 90 different cosmids, together covering more than 80% of the Synechocystis sp. PCC genome. Synechocystis strains lacking photosystem I, the major sink for electrons in the plastoquinone pool in the thylakoid membrane, will be transformed with these interruption libraries and transformants will be screened for high-light tolerance. Photosystem I-less strains are light-sensitive because over-reduction of the plastoquinone pool in the thylakoid membrane, which occurs at high light intensity, apparently is lethal. A second approach will use pseudorevertants (second-site mutants restoring a particular phenotype that can be selected for positively). The two approaches (random inactivation of genes in a relatively small region of the genome resulting in positively selectable phenotypes, and pseudorevertant mapping using genomic restriction maps) together provide an excellent way to link specific open reading frames to specific functions. As this approach uses the appearance of specific phenotypes as the first selection criterion and as identification of the affected gene is a simple second step, this project provides a powerful means to identify unknown open reading frames affecting electron flow around the plastoquinone pool in thylakoid membranes. Because a clear phenotype exists, work on mutants that do not segregate wild-type and mutant genome copies or that do not show a phenotype (often a source of frustration in targeted reverse-genetics approaches) is essentially eliminated. This project will contribute significantly to the identification of new open reading frames whose products are involved in processes such as redox regulation of the plastoquinone pool or assembly and stability of photosystem II. It is anticipated that the function of a number of unidentified genes relating to photosynthesis will be found that have not been identified by other means doc12295 none De Valois De Valois ( ) Studies of Motion Vision Lay This project is designed to increase our understanding of how the brain analyzes visual motion. Telling the difference visually between stationary and moving objects is a very difficult problem. The physiological responses of neurons in the visual system of macaque monkeys to stationary and moving objects will be examined and compared to the behavioral responses of human observers in similar tasks. Two major subtopics will be considered. An early step in the analysis of visual motion is the creation in the first visual cortical area (V1) of directionally-selective neurons, neurons that respond only if an object moves in a particular direction within the limited visual region from which the cell receives inputs. One topic of investigation will be how these cells are created; in particular, where do their inputs come from and how are they combined to produce directional selectivity. A specific model will be tested by several experiments on both directional V1 cells and on the cells in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) that provide inputs to the directional cells. The results of these experiments will be compared to the results from related psychophysical studies on human observers. A second topic will be the way the color-vision system provides input to or interacts with the visual motion system. Psychophysical experiments on human observers will examine the effects of color alternation on the discrimination of the direction of motion of a luminance-varying grating. Different chromatic combinations will be used, including those that preferentially excite specific classes of photoreceptors or neurons in the LGN. Earlier work predicts differential effects for different color combinations. Physiological studies will examine the effects of color alternation on the responses of directionally-selective neurons in V1 for comparison to behavioral responses from humans. These studies will significantly advance our understanding of the initial mechanisms of the visual motion system in humans and other primates. In addition to increasing our knowledge of the brain and its organization, this work will contribute to the advancement of health and human understanding. The fuller understanding gained from these studies may also have direct application in the design of lighting systems, particularly for moving vehicles, and in other situations in which human factors concerns are significant. This project will contribute to the scientific education and training of both undergraduate and graduate students. Graduate students will be involved in the design, performance, analysis and publication of these studies. Undergraduate students will work as laboratory technicians and psychophysical subjects. When possible, they will also be involved in the design, performance, analysis and publication of the studies. Many former graduate students who have worked on similar projects in these laboratories have built distinguished careers in the study of vision. Several former undergraduates who have worked in these laboratories have become health workers or scientists. Students employed on similar projects in the past have come from both genders and many ethnic groups. This research, like previous work in these laboratories, is expected to increase the opportunities for students from minority groups to participate in scientific research and prepare for future careers of their own doc12296 none Multidimensional, multinuclear NMR spectroscopy will be used to investigate the folding, cation binding, and structures of (1) the hairpin ribozyme from the tobacco ringspot virus satellite and (2) telomerase RNA domains. The hairpin ribozyme studies are a continuation of previous structural studies of the individual domains A and B, and will focus on the folding pathway and cation interactions of the intact ribozyme. Telomerase is a ribonucleoprotein which is responsible for replication of telomere DNA found at the physical ends of chromosomes. Telomerase activity is generally undetectable in somatic cells, and high levels of telomerase activity are only found in proliferating germ cells and cancer cells. The known components of human telomerase are a reverse transcriptase (hTERT) which catalyzes the addition of the nucleotides, a 451 nucleotide RNA (hTR) which contains the template for the synthesized DNA, and telomerase associated protein 1 (TP1). The proposed secondary structure of the vertebrate telomerase RNAs based on phylogeny consists of four conserved structural domains: the pseudoknot domain, the CR4-CR5 domain, the Box H ACA domain, and the CR7 domain. This essential core structure appears to be preserved despite extensive sequence and length divergence. The conservation of the core telomerase RNA structure and a variety of functional studies both in vitro and in vivo indicate that the structure of the RNA plays an important role in telomerase function. The structures of essential subdomains of telomerase RNA, specifically in the pseudoknot and box H ACA domains, will be determined and their interactions with known telomerase binding proteins will be studied. These structural studies should complement the existing information on the molecular biology and biochemistry of these enzymes, and provide new insights into RNA folding, tertiary structure, role of cations in tertiary structure formation, and catalysis. In addition, the telomerase studies will provide basic information on the structure and assembly of the telomerase RNP complex doc12297 none The objective of this project is to provide fundamental new insight into the mechanism of water oxidation in Photosystem II. The experiments are designed to complement the high-resolution structure of Photosystem II that is expected to appear within the next 5 years. The overall goal is to understand how the reactivity of the (Mn)4-Ca cluster, located at the heart of the catalytic site, is controlled by its local protein environment. One specific goal is to characterize the changes in bonding and bond strengths that accompany the oxidation of the (Mn)4-Ca cluster through its catalytic cycle, particularly from its dark-stable S1 state to its S2 and S3 states. To relate vibrational modes to individual amino acid residues or to the (Mn)4-Ca cluster itself, FTIR difference spectra will be obtained of PSII particles that have been labeled isotopically or that contain site-directed mutations. Both mid-frequency ( - cm-1) and low-frequency ( - 350 cm-1) FTIR difference spectroscopy will be employed. A second goal of the study is to characterize the structural changes that facilitate the production of the Mn2+-Mn3+ intermediate that is formed during the light-driven assembly of the (Mn)4-Ca cluster. These structural changes will also be characterized by FTIR difference spectroscopy. A third goal is to trap and characterize the transient S4 state by freeze quenching. The formation of this state, the most oxidized state of the (Mn)4-Ca cluster, immediately precedes O2 release. The characterization of this state will provide crucial experimental constraints for proposed mechanisms of O-O bond formation doc12298 none The assembly of an infectious virus particle requires the coordinated action of a number of proteins, and complex interactions with viral DNA. Terminase enzymes are common to many double-stranded (ds) DNA viruses, including poxvirus, the herpesvirus groups, and most dsDNA bacteriophage. Terminases package viral DNA into the capsid, a critical step in virus assembly. This project centers on the terminase enzyme from bacteriophage lambda and attempts to define the biochemical, biophysical, and structural characteristics of nucleoprotein intermediates involved in DNA packaging. Three approaches designed to provide mechanistic insight into virus assembly are examined. (I) One of the most fascinating and least understood aspects of the packaging pathway is the transition from complex I, an extremely stable packaging precursor, to a mobile packaging complex. Biophysical, kinetic, and structural experiments are used to provide a mechanistic underpinning for this transition. (II) Current models describing the packaging pathway are based on genetic and crude in vitro packaging studies. Biochemical studies are used that will define, at a molecular level, the role of terminase, and inancillaryls packaging proteins at each step of the packaging pathway. (III) Genetic studies suggest a domain organization for gpA, the large terminase subunit. Biochemical and biophysical experiments will rigorously define functional domains in gpA. These three experimental approaches represent discrete research directions that are intertwined in their attempt to provide a detailed description of lambda terminase, and its role in virus assembly. This work will provide a paradigm for genome packaging on other dsDNA viruses. Moreover, mechanistic similarities exist between genome packaging and complex cellular processes such as DNA replication, transcription, and site-specific recombination. Thus, an understanding of the structural and catalytic properties of this packaging apparatus has broad implications in our understanding of DNA manipulation by large multiprotein enzyme complexes in biology doc12299 none To facilitate chemical transformations, enzymes must possess sufficient flexibility to accommodate substrate and reaction intermediates while maintaining adequate structural rigidity. How enzymes perform this delicate balancing act is critical for a meaningful understanding of catalysis and recognition. This attribute is brilliantly expressed in the enzymes that catalyze protein phosphorylation in the cell, the protein kinases. These enzymes have been crystallized in many forms that differ by movements in the amino acid backbones comprising the essential three-dimensional structure. While it is believed that these motions are important for function, little is known about the nature and catalytic relevance of these conformational changes in solution. In this project, equilibrium- and pulsed- hydrogen deuterium exchange coupled with MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry will be used to understand the solution conformation of an essential protein kinase-cAMP-dependent protein kinase [PKA]. The goal is to determine what types of structural transitions occur when nucleotides, substrates and inhibitors bind to the enzyme. Once identified, the time frame for the structural transitions will be established and correlated with the catalytic mechanism for the enzyme. The long-range goal is to determine whether structural changes limit substrate phosphorylation and, if so, which regions of the enzyme are involved in these events doc12300 none Basic helix-loop-helix proteins are important transcriptional regulators of cellular proliferation and differentiation in organisms ranging from invertebrates to vertebrates. Recently, a new gene closely related to the mammalian basic helix-loop-helix protein activated B-cell factor 1 (ABF-1), designated CeABF-1, was cloned from the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. The objectives of the research include 1) investigating the function of the CeABF-1 gene; 2) elucidating the transcriptional properties of the CeABF-1 protein; 3) identifying the target gene(s) regulated by CeABF-1. To accomplish these specific goals, gene function and expression studies will be performed to delineate the role of CeABF-1 in the nematode. The functional studies will integrate a broad spectrum of genetic and biochemical techniques, including RNA microinjections and the development of transgenic animals for expression analyses. The transcriptional properties and target gene(s) regulated by CeABF-1 will be analyzed using DNA transfections, electrophoretic-mobility shift assays and DNA microanalysis. This project will allow for the comparison of HLH gene function in both nematodes and humans and identify conserved molecular pathways important for cellular processes. The results of these studies will help to elucidate the evolutionary as well as the biological relationship between the nematode and human ABF-1 protein. Helix-loop-helix (HLH) proteins are important transcriptional regulators of cellular proliferation and differentiation in organisms ranging from invertebrates to vertebrates. The importance of HLH proteins as potent mediators of immune system function and muscle development has been well established. The significance of these studies will allow for the determination of the biological function of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans HLH gene, designated CeABF-1, and will provide data that will help to elucidate the molecular mechanisms that govern cell-restricted eukaryotic gene expression. This project will enhance the knowledge of target gene(s) controlled by the protein CeABF-1, and provide an understanding of the ancestral relationship between the worm CeABF-1 and human homologue, activated B-cell factor 1 (ABF-1 doc12301 none The gills of fish accomplish many of the same functions as the lungs, liver and kidneys in terrestrial animals. Gills are the site for gas exchange, metabolic waste excretion, salt balance, and pH adjustments. At the cellular level, certain proteins are thought to be responsible for the movement of salts like sodium (Na+) and acid (H+). The transfers of these ions across the gills may in turn assist in acid-base and ion regulation in these animals. Over the past 70 years, a variety of cellular systems have been proposed to drive these exchanges in freshwater and marine fish species. Na+ H+ exchange proteins (NHE) have been described in a number of mammalian and non-mammalian systems. These proteins are thought to function in several roles including cell volume regulation, pH balance, and Na+ uptake. Several different types of NHEs have been characterized in mammals with NHE-2 and 3 thought to be specific to transporting epithelial tissues such as kidney and intestine. In this continuing study, the authors have focused on the presence and function of similar Na+ H+ proteins in fish gills. Using RT-PCR and 3 RACE they have recently demonstrated the presence of mRNA transcripts homologous to NHE in the gills of the marine long-horned sculpin (Myoxocephalus octodecimspinosus), the euryhaline mummichog (Fundulus heteroclitus), elasmobranchs (Raja erinacea and Squalus acanthias) and a craniate (Myxine glutinosa). When M. glutinosa was made acidotic, quantitative PCR revealed that mRNA for NHE in the gills increases in a fashion parallel to net acid efflux measured in vivo. The presence of gill NHE in these species was also established using antibodies for the mammalian NHE-1 and NHE-3 isoforms. The investigators have proposed that net H+ excretion following acidosis in these marine species is driven by gill Na+ H+ exchange in a fashion similar to mammalian transporting epithelia such as the renal proximal tubule. The objectives of their research are three-fold: 1) to determine the presence and isoform distribution of Na+ H+ antiporter mRNA and protein expression in the gill tissue of marine fish; 2) to describe the specific cellular distribution of the NHE antiporters in the gill epithelium; and 3) to characterize the effects of systemic acidosis or variations in external salinity on gill NHE expression. To accomplish these goals, they propose to study gill ion transport mechanisms using a combination of molecular, physiological, and immunological techniques. They plan to design fish-specific monoclonal and or polyclonal antibodies to correlate in vivo and cellular changes following acidosis or alterations in the external salinity. The cellular distribution of these proteins will be shown using immunohistochemical localization and confocal laser microscopy. RT-PCR, 3 and 5 RACE and quantitative PCR will be used to detect and amplify regions of currently unknown NHEs. The authors have already cloned the first full-length sequence for a fish NHE isoform which is most closely related to the specialized epithelial NHE-2 in mammals. This study will provide new insight into the physiology of gill acid-base and ion regulation, and may lead to a greater understanding of the molecular structure and conserved regulatory domains of other vertebrate NHE isoforms. This four-year project will involve both undergraduate and Masters of Science students doing research at the home institution (Georgia Southern University) and at a marine field station (The Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory doc12302 none Fowler Because plant cells are immobile, and are fixed within tissues by a cell wall, their shapes and sizes (morphology) must be generated by precise regulation of the sites of cell expansion and or the planes of cell division. Current data indicate that regulation of expansion and division depends on interactions among factors associated with the cell cortex, the plasma membrane and the cell wall. However, a mechanistic understanding of these factors (proteins and signals) and their functions in plant cell morphogenesis is incomplete. Evidence is building that the plant-specific Rop subfamily of the Rho GTPases is involved in regulating these morphogenetic processes at the cell cortex, including pollen tube growth, the distribution of the actin cytoskeleton, and cell wall synthesis. However, the in vivo functions of specific Rops throughout plant growth and development are poorly understood. Using the model crop plant Zea mays, the P.I. has isolated a large collection of mutations in five rop genes, and evaluation of mutant phenotypes indicates that at least one of these rop genes, ropB, functions in the pollen tube. The P.I. will take a combined genetic, molecular, and cell biological approach to understanding the functions of the Rop family in plant development. Specifically, the P.I. will determine the in vivo functions of maize ROPB by a detailed characterization of the ropB mutant phenotype. Growth in the maize style (the silk) of mutant pollen tubes from single and double rop mutant plants will be analyzed. Mutant pollen tubes will be tested in culture with a variety of inhibitors, to dissect the signaling pathways downstream of ROPB. The P.I. will also generate and characterize maize plants expressing fluorescent reporters of the plant cytoskeleton, and use these to more precisely dissect the effects of rop mutations on cytoskeletal distribution in vivo. This work will provide insight into these important signaling molecules, and should help clarify their roles in several processes (e.g., pollination and pollen tube growth, cell wall synthesis). In addition to contributing to basic scientific knowledge, our results may suggest ways to manipulate specific rops that would lead to crop improvement. The close relationship of the monocot Zea mays to other important grass crops (rice, wheat) suggests doc12303 none Root-knot nematodes are tiny, parasitic worms that infect a wide range of plants and cause major yield losses to the world s crops. Changes to the plant after infection include the formation of galls or root-knots on root systems. Complex molecular signaling between the host and parasite mediates this interaction. Analysis of the roles of the nematode s genes in causing root galling and crop loss has not been possible because of the lack of genetic analysis of the nematode and the lack of knowledge of nematode s genome structure. A major constraint has been that several species of nematodes do not reproduce sexually, making genetic analysis very difficult. However, isolates of the nematode species, Meloidogyne hapla, do reproduce sexually, making this species an excellent model to gain information on what genes in the nematode are responsible for its destructive properties. The goal of the current research is to establish a genetic system for M. hapla. Nematode strains with differences in DNA markers and in ability to reproduce on particular plant lines have already been identified. In this study, the inheritance of ability to reproduce on a wild potato isolate with the gene Rmc1 will be investigated. A protocol to carry out controlled genetic crosses will be developed and segregation of DNA markers will be monitored. Segregation of markers and virulence in the presence of Rmc1 will be assessed to initiate a genetic linkage map. A DNA library representing the entire M. hapla genome will be produced. DNA hybridization to nematode chromosomes will be carried out to aid in determining the genome structure. The linkage map and markers will be a resource for cloning nematode genes associated with ability to parasitise different plant species. Information gained from these studies will facilitate understanding of mechanisms by which parasitic nematodes circumvent plant resistance genes and may lead to environmentally safer means of nematode control in agriculture doc12304 none The mechanisms by which cell polarity arises are fundamental to development and morphogenesis of multicellular organisms, particularly of plants because their cells are non-motile. The goal of this project is to use tip-growing pollen tubes as a model system to elucidate how polarity arises during plant growth and development. Work from prior NSF funding has demonstrated that a plant-specific Rho family GTPase, Rop, acts as a central switch to control polar growth in pollen tubes. This switch is controlled by a positive feedback loop of Rop activation and recruitment at the plasma membrane that is initiated locally and amplified laterally by unknown mechanisms. This feedback loop is inhibited globally by Rop GTPase activating proteins and guanine nucleotide dissociation inhibitors to generate a tip-focused gradient of active Rop at the plasma membrane. Recent findings indicate that the active Rop specifies the apical plasma membrane domain for tip growth and then activates growth via the regulation of both dynamic tip F-actin and tip-focused cytosolic Ca2+ gradients. Two active Rop interacting proteins (ARIPs) have been identified that may link Rop to tip actin and Ca2+, respectively. These advances have relied heavily on biochemical and cellular Rop signaling assays such as a fluorescence-based Rop activity assay, actin imaging, and complementary Arabidopsis and tobacco pollen tube systems that are suited for a multifaceted functional approach that includes genetics, transient expression of proteins, and microinjection. This research will continue to use a similar approach but also develop new assays and methods to address several significant outstanding questions regarding Rop-dependent mechanisms for polar growth in pollen tubes: 1) What is the functional interplay between Rop, Ca2+ and actin? 2) How does Rop regulate Ca2+ and actin? 3) What is the molecular basis underlying the Rop positive feedback loop? Specific experiments will include identification of Rop effectors and potential factors that may activate and recruit Rop at the plasma membrane using interactive cloning and mutant isolation, alteration of specific components in Rop signaling using genetic and chemical methods, and analysis of changes in Rop recruitment and activation and in signaling targets such as tip actin and Ca2+. This work should uncover key components and mechanisms in Rop-dependent signaling to pollen tube growth and may lead to new insights into how cells control development, polar growth and morphogenesis doc12305 none Izpisua Belmonte The vertebrate eye is a highly complex structure that is induced early in development by two different tissue layers. Various proteins have been shown to be involved in this process. Bone Morphogenetic Proteins (BMPs) belong to the TGF-b superfamily of secreted proteins, which have been shown to be crucial for correct vertebrate eye development. In the absence of BMP-signalling eyes fail to develop and or are dramatically reduced in size. Experimentally induced over-activation of BMPs change the structure and pattern of the eye. A newly described regulator of BMP-signalling is BAMBI, an inhibitor of BMP-signaling. BAMBI is active wherever BMPs are functional and represents an important component in the regulation of BMP activity. The aim of this proposal is to investigate the function of BAMBI in mouse eye development by genetically mutating and thereby abolishing the function of BAMBI. The second goal of this proposal will be to abolish the function at later stages during development, and thus study the function of BAMBI in adult eyes. The study of the extracellular modulation of BMP-signaling during eye development may eventually lead to uncover a new set of interactions that are relevant for normal eye development. In addition, the results obtained in mice are likely to stimulate research for possible genetic alterations related to BMP-signaling in humans with congenital eye malformations doc12306 none Peter Pulay of the University of Arkansas is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to develop methods using alternatives to the generally employed Gaussian basis sets in electronic structure calculations. Plane waves, wavelets, Slater functions, and semi-numerical orbitals will be explored for their potential implementation in chemical applications. A Gaussian-based local electron correlation method will be developed, with goals of reduction of the local basis size for weakly interacting orbital pairs by using pseudo-natural orbitals, inclusion of gradients, and programming of high-level correlation methods for selected localized parts of a molecule. Application of these improved techniques include the structures and vibrational spectra of metalloprotein models. Also, accurate hydrogen bond potential functions based on correlated calculations for hydrocarbons will be developed. It is anticipated that the new methods developed in this project will significantly improve computational modeling of chemical and biochemical systems. The research in this project takes advantage of the rapid technological developments in the computer industry in the past five years. The dramatic expansion in fast memory and disk capacity, in particular, makes it possible to offer viable alternatives to the computational methods presently used in chemistry and biochemistry. Successful outcomes from this project could change the way computational chemistry is done, with substantial industrial impacts in areas such as pharmaceutical chemistry and materials science doc12307 none John Weeks of the University of Maryland is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to investigate the properties of nonuniform fluids. This work concentrates on ionic systems, and addresses the following topics: 1) research in the theory of ionic liquids focusing on regimes where molecular and intermediate length scales play an important role along with long-range Coulomb interactions, 2) further development of the theory of hydrophobic interactions and application to new experiments describing the density distribution of water near hydrophobic and hydrophilic surfaces, 3) detailed examination of the relationship between this new theoretical approach and density functional theory, and 4) development of new technical extensions and improvements in the theory by incorporating known data for bulk systems and exact sum rules. This may be required for quantitative results in some of the applications, ionic liquids in particular, and is expected to facilitate the development of simple semi-empirical approaches that make use of experimental data to help uncover new qualitative effects. Problems in the area of nonuniform fluids are of great current interest due to their practical importance in biophysical and industrial applications. Experiments have shown that the static and dynamic properties of nonuniform simple fluids, particularly when confined to small pores or slits, differ dramatically from those of uniform systems. Nonuniform solutions containing ions such as salts and proteins play a key role in biological processes. The nonuniform charge distribution associated with double layer formation is believed to stabilize aqueous solutions of macromolecules and colloids doc11943 none This proposal for a Small Grant for Exploratory Research outlines a collaborative project for in-depth scholarly research on the issues raised for science and technology studies (S (2) a systematic effort to gather materials, many ephemeral, to be housed in a special collection in the Cornell University library system; and (3) a follow-up workshop to discuss and refine a group of papers emanating from the first two phases of the project. The collaboration between the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University will facilitate the involvement of a broad range of scholars in creating the collection and contribute to productive interactions between science and technology studies and more traditional perspectives on government and public policy doc12309 none Dr. Philip J. Grandinetti of Ohio State University is funded for his research on new NMR methods for investigating structure in inorganic oxide glasses by the Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division. Advanced magic angle spinning (MAS) techniques, such as rotor assisted polarization transfer (RAPT) and fast spinning gives transfer enhancement at rotary resonance (FASTER), developed at Ohio State University and elsewhere will be refined for applications to structural determinations in glasses. RAPT quadrupolar sensitivity enhancement schemes will be refined for obtaining maximal enhancements for a wide range of spin couplings and resonant offsets, and for obtaining RAPT enhanced versions of dynamic-angle spinning (DAS) and multiple-quantum (MQ)-MAS. Numerical and experimental studies of the dependence of the FASTER rotary resonances on parameters such as nuclear spin, quadrupolar coupling, asymmetry, and chemical shifts will be done in order to compare FASTER with other MQ-MAS methods. Sensitivity enhanced versions of DAS and MQ-MAS will be used to study binary (metal oxide silicates ) and ternary (bimetal oxide silicates) glass compositions, with a view towards quantifying Si-O-Si bond angles, coordination numbers, and geometries around bridging and non-bridging oxygens. The understanding of inorganic oxide glasses obtained from this research will impact researchers in several areas. The potential importance of solid-state NMR methods in structure determinations has long been thwarted by sensitivity issues. Many of these issues are being overcome by accomplishments from Dr. Grandinetti s group and by others, and will be further overcome by the the research done at Ohio State University. The methods that will be developed for enhancing solid-state NMR sensitivity will have a broad impact on researchers wanting to take full advantage of quadrupolar nuclei as structural probes doc12310 none Axial swimming in fishes is powered by the myotome, the musculature that usually constitutes the majority of the animal s mass. The myotome is composed of both red or aerobic muscle fibers and white or anaerobic muscle fibers, with the white muscle often comprising 90% and red muscle 10% or less of the swimming musculature. Slow, steady swimming is powered by the lateral strips of red muscle that run down each side of the animal. Alternating waves of muscular contraction pass down the red muscle from head to tail, leading to oscillation of the body and or tail and resulting in forward thrust. Research over the last decade on the function of red or aerobic muscle during steady, axial swimming has revealed a variety of patterns of power production. In some fish species, the power for swimming is generated in equal amounts by each longitudinal position (e.g. eels, mackerel and tuna), while others are theorized to generate much higher mechanical power from the anterior myotome (e.g. carp). Lastly, several species have been shown to power swimming primarily with the posterior myotome (e.g. scup, rainbow trout and bass). In most of the species studied the anterior myotome experiences lower muscle strains, longer activation periods and shorter phase shifts of muscle activation relative to muscle shortening, as compared to posterior muscle. These muscle activity conditions limit power production by the anterior myotome during steady swimming. However, the contraction kinetics of the red muscle also vary along the length of most fishes, and these variations in the contractile properties can mitigate the impact of disadvantageous activation conditions. For instance, faster kinetics (e.g. rates of relaxation and, in some species, rates of activation) allows anterior muscle to produce more power under a given set of activation conditions than posterior muscle. The goal of this research program is to understand the basis for variations in swimming form in different fish species. This proposal focuses at the molecular and muscle physiology levels and addresses the relationship of contraction kinetics to the protein composition of muscle. Since understanding the patterns of power production during swimming requires knowledge of the kinetics of that muscle, I propose to measure the contraction kinetics of fish red muscle and to determine the molecular correlates of longitudinal variations in kinetics. The proposal will pursue two objectives. First, what are the molecular mechanisms for physiological variations in the swimming musculature of rainbow trout? Several molecular techniques will be used to determine if previously observed longitudinal variations in contraction kinetics and power production are associated with variations in the molecular structure of swimming muscle. Molecular techniques will be developed to screen the aerobic swimming muscle of trout to see if longitudinal differences in both activation and relaxation rates correlate with variations in the protein composition of the muscle. Several muscle proteins will be targeted, including troponin, tropomyosin and myosin. Second, do the patterns of molecular variation in the red muscle vary between species? Axial based swimming in fishes varies widely, from stiff-bodied swimming in tuna and mackerel to the high body curvature of swimming eels. This research proposal extends the analysis of both contraction kinetics and molecular structure to several new species that vary in swimming mode and patterns of power production. Little is known of the patterns of contraction kinetics and muscle composition amongst fishes in general. For this objective, the same sorts of molecular approaches will be used. However, physiological measurements of muscle contractile properties will also be made, including measurements of activation and relaxation rates and shortening velocity. The targeted species include eel, mackerel, largemouth bass and scup doc12311 none Dr. George Stanley of the Department of Chemistry, Louisiana State University, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program of the Chemistry Division, National Science Foundation, for his work on the bimetallic cooperativity in homogeneous catalysis, a concept discovered in his laboratory that involves a catalyst architecture that implicates two metal atoms (in this case rhodium) bridged by a tetraphosphine ligand. This architecture has shown remarkable activity and selectivity as a hydroformylation catalyst. The work will explore further the bimetallic cooperativity and examine whether it can be applied to other bimetallic systems and whether it can also be applied to other useful catalytic reactions. The project will have a great impact on industrial catalysis, especially in hydroformylation processes. Undergraduate and graduate students will be well trained in a variety of areas connected to homogeneous catalysis, highly relevant to industrial processes in the production of (new) materials and energy. Also, efforts will be made in educational outreach to K-12 audiences involving young undergraduates doc12312 none Economists have developed a theory of sunspot equilibrium to describe situations where economic fluctuations are not driven by changes in market fundamentals, but are instead due to extrinsic, non-fundamental factors. This project involves the design of an experiment that will explore whether and how such extrinsic factors can result in market fluctuations, and whether the particular market institution also plays a role. The experiment consists of two main treatments. In the first, human subjects participate as buyers or sellers in a computerized double auction , where goods can be bought and sold continuously over a fixed trading period at mutually agreed upon prices that are observable as they occur to all participants. In the second call market treatment, subjects submit private bids and offers, and a centralized mechanism determines the single, market clearing price, as well as the quantities that each participant can buy or sell. Thus, the only information subjects receive in this environment is the resulting market price and the quantity they were able to buy or sell at this price. In both treatments, subjects face uncertainty in that they are given two sets of values or costs for the goods they can buy or sell; these two sets correspond to the state of the economy, and are referred to as high or low in reference to the equilibrium price in the two states. (the equilibrium quantity is the same in both states). Initially, subjects are told the state of the economy in advance, so that they become familiar with the two states for prices. After several rounds, subjects are informed that the true state of the economy, will henceforth be determined expost, after all trading is completed. Furthermore, the rule for the determination of the state will depend on the median trade price in the double auction environment or on the analogous market clearing price in the call market environment. If this price lies within a proscribed domain of the equilibrium low price, then the state is declared to be low and if it lies outside this domain, in that of the equilibrium high price, then the state is declared to be high. Subjects are provided with a potential coordination device (or sunspot realization) which takes the form of a random announcement by the experimenter of the forecast for the state of prices in the current period. Subjects are instructed that this announcement has no binding consequences. Preliminary findings suggest that subjects coordinate perfectly on the announcement in the highly centralized call market environment but fail to do the same in the more decentralized double auction environment. These experimental findings if replicated, have significant implications for the architecture of real financial markets doc12313 none Dr. Robert F. Curl of Rice University is funded for his research on infrarerd laser spectroscopy by the Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division. High resolution laser infrared spectroscopy of cyanomethylene (HCCN), hydroxymethyl, methoxy, vinoxy. and triplet vinylidene will be used to analyze the electronic structures, potential surfaces, and internal dynamics. Interest in HCCN eminates from the low activation to bending about the HCC angle; an experimentally derived potential for this bending motion will be generated. Jahn-Teller distorions in methoxy should be particularly evident in the unsymmetrical CH stretching modes. The experimentally determined potential surface will be used to elucidate the Jahn-Teller effect. Triplet vinylidene is a high energy isomer of acetylene. The rotational spectrum will be measured so that the structure of this isomer can be unequivocally assigned. The tuning range of cw quantum cascade lasers will be increased so as to make such lasers more ueful for general spectroscopic purposes by operating them in an extended cavity laser configuration. The value of the wider tuning window in infrared laser spectroscopy will be demonstrated experimentally. The use of high resolution infrared vibrational and rotational spectra in structure determinations of significant radicals provides important insight into basic bonding and structural questions. Many such radicals are important in chemical processes and are highly reactive, and are therefore difficult to analyze because of fleeting lifetimes. The studies by Dr. Curl at Rice University will provide novel measurements of such radicals that will advance our basic understanding of important chemical radicals, with respect to their structure and their reactivity doc12314 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Chrys Wesdemiotis, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Akron, is studying the gas phase chemistry of radicals and charged radicals. Neutralization-reionization mass spectrometry is employed to obtain experimental data regarding the stabilities and unimolecular reactions of radicals related to amino acids, peptides, and nucleobases. Focus is placed on the alteration of stability and reaction chemistry caused by the replacement of acidic hydrogen atoms with metal ions. The synthesis and characterization of distonic radical cations containing a metal ion and an organic radical site are also under investigation. These metal ion-containing (and hence, charged) radicals will be used as templates for the investigation of free radical chemistry by tandem mass spectrometry. Solvated charged radicals will be utilized to derive thermochemical data about amino acid and peptide-based radicals. Molecules and ions containing unpaired electrons ( radicals ) play central roles in many chemical and biochemical processes. Development of a detailed understanding of the structure and reactivity of these elusive species remains a key focus of modern chemical research. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Chrys Wesdemiotis, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Akron, is generating and studying radicals related to amino acids, proteins, and nucleic acid bases. Through these studies, Professor Wesdemiotis is gaining a fundamental understanding of the chemistry of these important species, implicated as key intermediates in the oxidative damage of proteins and nucleic acids doc12315 none David P. White, Chemistry Department, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program for his work on chiral recognition by organometallic complexes. The project incorporates molecular modeling, computational and synthetic approaches to better understand stereoselective prochiral olefin binding to [(eta-5-C5H4R)Re(CO)(L)(NO)]+ complexes (R = Me, t-Bu, SiMe3, CPh3; L=PMe3, PMe2Ph, PMePh2, PPh3). This award is made under the Research at Undergraduate Institutions Program (RUI) and emphasizes the training of undergraduate researchers in the complementary tools of synthesis and computation. This work on substituted cyclopentadienyl complexes of rhenium may also lead to better routes for enantioselective hydrogenation of olefins and other chiral transformations doc12316 none Professor Bruce C. Gibb in the Department of Chemistry at the University of New Orleans is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his studies on the synthesis of resorcinol-based cavitands, determination of binding constants with various small guest substrates, incorporation of a Zn(2+) catalytic site into the cavitand, and evaluation of these supramolecular hosts ability to catalyze the hydrolysis of ester substrates. The regioselective hydrolysis of diester guests based on the characteristics of the binding site will also be explored. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Gibb will prepare a series of large, cyclic organic compounds which have the capacity to bind to various smaller substrates. A catalytic active site similar to that found in the enzyme, carbonic anhydrase, will then be attached to the cyclic host compound. These enzyme mimics will be evaluated for their ability to catalyze a similar reaction to that of the natural enzyme. By varying the characteristics of the cyclic host s binding cavity, different substrates will be bound to the hosts with varying affinities. This in turn will affect the catalytic rate of these compounds with various substrates doc12317 none The project is to gather information on pricing policies by interviewing a large number of businesspeople responsible for pricing in many different types of businesses and then to report the results in articles and a book. The objective is to learn how prices are set and how they are adjusted when demand, costs, or financial conditions change. The hope is to contribute to theories of macroeconomics and industrial organization by providing knowledge of price formation and of the microeconomic mechanisms linking inflation to the general level of economic activity. I hope also to generate theoretical and empirical hypotheses that could be tested using other kinds of information, and especially quantitative data doc12318 none Interest rates have traditionally been modeled in the economics literature as following continuous-time Markov processes, and more specifically, diffusions. By contrast, recent term structure models often imply non-Markovian continuous-time dynamics. Can discretely sampled interest rate data help decide which continuous-time models are sensible? Within the Markovian world, diffusion processes are characterized by the continuity of their sample paths. It is immediately, obvious that this condition cannot be verified from the observed sample path. By nature, even if the sample path were continuous, the discretely sampled interest rate data will appear as a sequence of discrete change. This grant continues work begun under NSF award on this fundamental problem in financial economics. This project develops new likelihood-based estimation methods for discretely-sampled continuous-time models and extends our understanding of the properties of estimators in four related situations: 1. Since many realistic models in economics involve multiple state variables, the first part of the project develops a closed-form sequence of likelihood functions applicable to arbitrary multivariate diffusion models. 2. These functions are used to infer consistent dynamic models from market data. 3. Allowing now for jumps, it is shown that the lower the frequency of observation, the more difficult it is to disentangle from discrete data the respective effects of the jump and volatility components. The project makes this intuition rigorous by deriving Fisher s information matrix from an explicit expansion of the likelihood answering questions such as: How fast does the precision of the jump estimates decrease when the frequency of observation decreases? What is the influence on the identifiability of jumps of the relative magnitudes of the (continuous) volatility and (discontinuous) jump parts? 4. New issues arise when the data are not only discretely but also possibly randomly spaced in time. The project derives the properties of estimators based on maximum-likelihood with either full or partial information, the generalized method of moments, and discrete sampling schemes such as the Euler approximation. Studying the effect of the sampling randomness, the asymptotic distribution of the various estimators will be decomposed in terms that are due to the discreteness vs. terms due to the randomness of the sampling. This makes it possible to compare the relative costs of ignoring either the discreteness or the randomness of the sampling scheme producing the data. When the estimators are asymptotically biased, their biases will also be analyzed. The project integrates research and education by creating datasets and developing publicly available computer code (both made available through the web, as has been the case for past projects) for each of the main research endeavors funded by this proposal. The results will be disseminated broadly through presentations at seminars, conferences and professional association meetings doc12319 none Dr. Daniel R. Spiegel of Trinity University is funded for his research on forced Rayleigh scattering (FRS) on heterogeneous liquid crystals by the Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division. The interfacial modulation accompanying an impurity-diffusion-driven instability during nematic-directional solidification can be stimulated and probed by FRS techniques. Non-homogeneous perturbations at selected wavelengths (frequencies) of such transforming systems will be used to experimentally probe the nonlinear reaction-diffusion modeling and pattern formation of such liquid-crystal systems. FRS pump-beam interference fringes will be used to effect modulation of the nematic-isotropic interface of a directionally solidified liquid crystal. The temporal evolution of specific Fourier component amplitudes will be tracked using diffracted FRS probe beams. Fundamentally important dispersion relations relevant to the basic linear instability will be mapped experimentally. Nonlinear dynamical systems, including those that produce non-equilibrium pattern formation, are becoming increasingly upbiquitous in research and in chemcial industry. The analysis and modeling of such systems is important for developing quantitative methods for controlling such phenomena. The FRS experiments at Trinity University should provide definite means for improving our experimental approaches to developing such models, and for testing our understanding of such models. Furthermore, invaluable state-of-the-art training will be afforded the undergraduates participating in this research program doc12320 none Grzegorz Szamel of Colorado State University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to explore the fundamental statistical mechanical descriptions of the glass transition. First, a novel computer simulation technique will be implemented to test the general theory of the glass transition proposed by Parisi and collaborators, which assumes that the glass transition is associated with the vanishing of one component of the supercooled liquid s entropy, the so-called configurational entropy. Second, theoretical understanding of the glass transition will be advanced by elucidating the connection between mode-coupling theory and the Parisi approach. In addition, a new extended mode-coupling theory will be developed that is applicable to systems with stochastic (Brownian) dynamics such as colloidal suspensions. Many useful polymer materials are flexible at room temperature. Cooling these plastics below their glass transition temperature causes them to become brittle like glassy, amorphous materials with structures similar to that of a liquid but with some profoundly different properties. Among the most interesting unsolved problems in physical chemistry are a theory for the glass transition and the nature of the glassy state. The outcomes of this research project are expected to lead to new insights into glass behavior, which could have broad technological implications in advanced materials processing doc12321 none Zakin, Jacques, Ohio State University (PI); Baird, Donald, Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Co-PI) This award supports an international group travel grant for US academic researchers invited to the Second Eastern Chemical Engineering Conference for Collaborative Research to be held in Ankara, Turkey, May 20-25, . The conference participants are from the eastern Mediterranean countries of Turkey, Greece, Israel, Jordan, and also include participants from the United States. Collaborative research between Turkey, Greece, Israel, Jordan, and the United States will be very much encouraged as the key by-product of this conference. Chemical engineering research sub-disciplines to be covered at the meeting include: catalysis, advanced materials, separations, systems engineering, and biotechnology. NSF funding will be used for travel costs for about twenty Unites States chemical engineering faculty including partial support for five prominent U. S. researchers to serve as discussion leaders in their respective areas of chemical engineering. The USA participation plan for the Conference is designed to help assure the participation of young faculty and graduate students through an approximate 50% target for this group. Five, sub-discipline reports summarizing the activities and accomplishments of the meeting in each of the five areas will be provided to NSF after the meeting as part of the final report. The Turkish organizers will pay for local arrangements as well as pay for the travel of seven additional U. S. researchers in areas and for individuals they particularly want to attend. The U. S. will benefit from this program by virtue of the productive relationships that are expected to emerge leading to the transfer of expertise doc12322 none Dr. James A. Cowan, Chemistry Department, Ohio State University, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division for investigations into the mechanism of mitochondrial Fe-S cluster assembly. Recent characterization of gene products that are putatively involved in biosynthetic cluster assembly allows consideration of a range of molecular mechanisms that underlie the chemistry of cluster biogenesis. The understanding of the details of the cellular pathways requires the characterization of such proteins and the elucidation of their functional chemistry. Accordingly, this project will focus on a systematic investigation of two proteins implicated in mitochondrial ironsulfur cluster biosynthesis: IscU and IscA. The structure and function of these Fe-S cluster-containing proteins will be characterized. Particular attention will be paid to the elucidation of cognate protein partners, mechanisms of iron sulfur transfer, and the role of redox chemistry in mediating these pathways. Iron sulfur clusters are essential metal cofactors that are involved in mitochondrial respiration, cell signaling pathways, transcriptional and translational control in gene regulation, metal ion homeostasis, the biological chemistry of reactive oxygen species, and novel mechanisms for enzymatic catalysis. This study will probe the fundamental, but as yet unanswered questions of how such centers are synthesized in vivo, what proteins are involved in the syntheses, and how the proteins function doc12323 none This award to the University of California at Berkeley supports the work of Professor Jeffrey R. Long, Department of Chemistry, aimed at the synthesis and characterization of expanded clusters using multinuclear cyanometalates as building blocks to make open frame and microporous materials. These clusters prepared by solution chemistry, after dehydration will result in porous materials with large void volumes and without loss of structural integrity. Cluster-cores with edge-bridged octahedral geometry will be prepared from cobalt, zirconium and other metal chlorides with boron or beryllium for potential applications in ion exchange reactions, porous magnets and chemical sensors. In addition, inclusion properties of pores will be modified for specific applications. Students involved in this project will learn advanced synthetic methods and will gain interdisciplinary experience in chemistry, materials, and physics relevant to nanoscience and engineering. Porous clusters with large void spaces, open-framework and microporous solids will be robust and reusable. These clusters may be functionalized with inclusion groups for different applications such as ion exchange reactions, porous magnets for separations, and sensors for volatile organic compounds. In addition, students involved in the project will gain experience in solid state and inorganic chemistry doc12324 none Roundhill Description: This project supports a collaborative project between Dr. D.M. Roundhill, Department of Chemistry, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas and Dr. Mustafa Yilmaz, Department of Chemistry, Selcuk University, Konya, Turkey. The focus of the collaboration is the synthesis of new chemically modified calixarenes, and their use as liquid-liquid phase extractants for heavy metal ions. In particular, metal ions will be targeted that are presently causing environmental problems. The researchers plan to study calixarene-based receptors designed for heavy metal clean up applications. The work includes the generation of new ionophore polymer systems with specific binding strategies for Cs+ and selected cations and anions. Specifically the calixarene known as calixcrown-6 polymer will be synthesized and incorporated into copolymer resins. The material thus derived will be characterized, and will be used in liquid-liquid extractions with equal volume mixtures of metal and extractant analyzed for aqueous phase metals. The solid-liquid extraction will be determined by batchwise column methods. The plan of work involves three sequential components: synthesis of ionophores, characterization of ionophores and extraction studies that will assess the ability of the ionophores to extract metal ions. Scope: The project supports collaboration between two well-known scientists who have complementary expertise and resources to investigate an important material and environmental problem. There are substantial environmental implications of the research, as it may lead to new and improved means for decontamination of heavy metal polluted sites. Both groups have independently studied the complexation of metal ions by calixarenes and both will conduct research on liquid phase extractants of heavy metals with the use of calixarene modified polymers. Dr. Yilmaz is a synthetic organic chemist with extensive experience in calixarene chemistry, and Dr. Roundhill is an inorganic chemist who has considerable knowledge of the complexation chemistry of heavy metal ions. The proposed collaborative effort will establish stronger international ties and provide scientific benefits. This project meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest doc12325 none The hypothalamic-pituitary axis influences multiple bodily functions, such as homeostasis, growth, and reproduction. The concerted development of the primordia of the hypothalamus and pituitary (Rathke s pouch) during early embryogenesis presages the integrated neuroendocrine functions these tissues later share. Studies on the homeobox gene Rpx HesxI have allowed unique molecular access to these early developmental processes. Rpx HesxI is one of the earliest markers for the anterior region of the mouse embryo, and it is dynamically and transiently expressed in the prechordal plate, anterior forebrain and, at later stages of development, in Rathke s pouch. Targeted mutagenesis has demonstrated that Rpx plays a key role in the development of both the forebrain and the pituitary. In addition, examination of Rpx expression in other mouse pituitary mutants has allowed Rpx and other homeobox genes to be ordered in a putative regulatory hierarchy controlling pituitary organogenesis. It has been determined that multiple regulatory elements interdigitated within the Rpx gene separately control the early expression in the anterior forebrain and the late expression in Rathke s pouch in the mouse embryo. Dr. Mahon will undertake a further, more precise, delineation of the regulatory regions, focusing on sequences that are both structurally and functionally conserved between mouse and frog. Furthermore, based on the deletion analysis in frog and mouse, it will be possible to determine whether genes known to genetically regulate Rpx bind directly to Rpx regulatory sequences. This approach will further elaborate the genetic network involved in forebrain and pituitary development, and provide insight into the development of this important neuroendocrine system doc12326 none Rutherford This award will supply funding which will be used along with cost-sharing funds from Brown University to purchase a new Electron Microprobe. This instrument, with its state of the art analytical and surface imaging capability, will be an analytical centerpiece for a large number of research projects carried out by faculty, post-docs, graduate students, and undergraduates at Brown and as well as from the nearby University of Rhode Island. Research projects which will make use of the Microprobe include the following: (1) studies of minerals and glasses in volcanic rocks collected from recently active centers around the world directed at determining the nature and timing of processes involved in volcanic eruptions. (2) basic studies of diffusion and reaction kinetics in both naturally occurring and synthetic geological materials, (3) studies of deformation of geological materials in both the brittle and ductile regimes with application to understanding earthquakes fracturing processes in rocks, (4) studies of plate tectonic processes as revealed in the ages of minerals and rocks, and (5) studies of rocks and volcanic processes as they occur on other planetary bodies such as the Earth s moon and Mars. This research involves approximately ten faculty at Brown, three at nearby URI, and as many as twenty graduate students, five post-doctoral fellows, and five to ten undergraduates each year doc12327 none David S. Glueck, Department of Chemistry, Dartmouth College, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program for his work on stereoselective P-C bond formation. Glueck has recently shown that a chiral Pd(0) complex catalyzes the asymmetric coupling of a secondary phosphine (RR PH) with an aryl halide (ArX) to give a chiral tertiary phosphine (RR ArP ). The mechanism of this reaction and the factors leading to the high stereoselectivity will be explored. One key factor to be studied is the relative rate of phosphorus inversion and reductive elimination in Pd phosphido complexes. The stereochemistry and diastereoselectivity of transmetalation and of reductive elimination will also be examined. Chiral phosphines are frequently used in asymmetric catalytic transformations such as hydrogenation. The new chiral at phosphorus ligands prepared by Glueck are a complement to the better-known backbone chirality phosphines where a chiral alkyl group is attached to the phosphorus. In addition to these potential industrial applications, students working on this project will develop a broad set of skills in synthesis, characterization and catalysis doc12328 none This award will support a research program in the development of functional, nanostructured polymeric systems based on polymerizable liquid crystals (LCs). The goal of the proposed project is to design and examine nanostructured, polymeric acid catalysts based on lyotropic LC assemblies that would potentially offer the best of both worlds in terms of properties and control. One specific new research direction is the design of lyotropic LC monomers that form the Hii phase which contain strong Bronsted acid groups. To out knowledge, polymerizable amphiphiles with this combination of features are unprecedented. This aspect of the proposed work will involve investigating fundamental issues of functional group compatibility in LC monomer design, as well as investigating the effect of the nanoscale architecture and confinement on Bronsted acid-base equilibria in the resulting polymer. More applied studies will also be undertaken to determine the effectiveness of these proposed nanostructured polymer resins in acid catalysis relative to the more conventional inorganic and organic acid materials. The second new research direction is the design of new lyotropic monomers which contain strongly Lewis acidic Sc(III) headgroups. Although amorphous, polymer-supported Sc(III) catalysts have been realized, nanostructured Sc-containing polymeric catalysts are unprecedented. LC network-supported Sc(III) materials may yield unique heterogeneous Lewis acid catalysts that not only operate in water but also afford different reaction kinetics and selectivities compared to traditional isotropic Sc(III) systems. %%% In terms of broader impact, the proposed research will provide training for students in the important area of nanoscience. Nanoscale science has recently become a national science and technology priority. The proposed research provides a novel training ground for students in polymer chemistry to examine the effect of nanostructure on important materials properties, such as catalysis and reactivity. The research itself may lead to new fundamental insights for designing polymeric materials with novel capabilities as a result of control of order on the nanometer scale doc12329 none random tiling models continues with study of high codimension tilings as model amorphous structures and study of codimension-1 tilings as models of stacked membranes. %%% Aluminum-rich alloys containing transition metals form intricate crystal structures and quasicrystals. These alloys display unusual and useful mechanical properties such as low coefficients of friction, great hardness at low temperatures, and ductility at high temperatures. Quasicrystals already strengthen surgical alloys and coat surfaces of frying pans. Further applications such as coatings for ball bearings have been proposed. The greatest interest in quasicrystals lies in the fundamental scientific issues they raise. Coexistence of sharp diffraction peaks with crystallographically forbidden decagonal and icosahedral symmetry posed the paradox that initially drew researchers to the field. After recognizing that quasiperiodicity allows such symmetries, interest turned to explaining the origin and nature of quasiperiodic order. This problem, which remains unsolved today, is the focus of this theoretical research. The current grant continues the study of ternary decagonal phases. Accurate atomistic models and reliable energy calculations will be used to examine matching rule energetics and the coupling of adjacent decagonal layers. Detailed quantitative comparisons will be made of models with experimental data. The basic techniques used for decagonal phases will be adapted to stable icosahedral phases doc12330 none Elena Rybak-Akimova of Tufts University is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program to conduct research on kinetics and mechanisms of oxygen and peroxide activation by non-heme iron complexes. She has not previously been PI of NSF research grants. A main aim of the proposal is to elucidate the difference between iron-mediated biological oxidations that involve free radicals and those that proceed through radical-free pathways. Kinetic and mechanistic studies of high-valent iron oxo species supported by tris-picolyamine (TPA) ligands will be carried out at low temperatures, using cryogenic stopped-flow techniques (single and double mixing) with spectrophotometric and EPR registration. Research under this project will clarify obscure aspects of important biochemical processes and provide insights that potentially will lead to development of environmentally benign processes using oxygen and or hydrogen peroxide in chemical synthesis and oxidative detoxification of wastes. Sophisticated stopped-flow kinetic studies, such as those proposed here, are necessary to demonstrate the relationship of synthetic models of enzyme active sites to actual biological function. Few laboratories now have the capability to carry out such studies. This program will provide especially valuable training for students and postdoctoral researchers doc12331 none ith the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Grant R. Krow, of the Department of Chemistry at Temple University, is studying a novel rearrangement route of 1,2-dihydropyridines to 2-azabicyclo[2.1.1]hexanes. The scope and generality of this method will be explored with regard to the enantioselectivity, regioselectivity, and stereoselectivity. Target azabicyclic compounds will include methanoprolines as potential collagen mimics, aryl and aryloxyamines as potential antinociceptive nicotinic receptor agonists, and diamine subunits for the preparation of potential fluroroquinolone antibacterial agents. Professor Grant R. Krow in the Department of Chemistry at Temple University is studying a new synthetic procedure for constructing nitrogen-containing bicyclic organic compounds. This compounds will be used as building blocks for potential new antibacterial agents and may prove useful in preparing pharmaceutical agents for diseases such as Alzheimer s and Parkinson s doc12332 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Eric J. Enholm, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Florida, is developing new methods for free radical reactions on reusable solid supports. Professor Enholm uses ring-opening metathesis methodology to prepare new soluble polymers to serve as supports for free radical transformations. Following establishment of the methodology through the analysis of established radical reactions, including tin hydride reduction of halides, radical cyclizations, and one-electron allyl transfers, new chiral reactions will be examined. The latter will include polymer-supported versions of the asymmetric interrupted Kharasch atom transfer and catalytic asymmetric Giese reactions. Reusable chiral scaffolds, with enantiopure stereo-directing elements imbedded in the support, will be prepared, and catalytic asymmetric transformations, particularly those allowing for enantioselective acyclic stereocontrol in radical and ketyl radical-anion transformations, will be explored. Molecular species bearing unpaired electrons ( free radicals ) have historically been viewed as highly reactive and therefore relatively chemically undiscriminating intermediates. Recent studies have demonstrated that the reactivity of these radicals may be harnessed, allowing the selective and effective synthesis of a variety of significant organic molecular structures. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Eric J. Enholm, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Florida, is exploring new methods for carrying out reactions of organic radicals. By exploring radical reactions tethered to polymeric supports, the properties of the polymer may be used both to control the outcome of the radical reactions and to facilitate separation of desired materials from waste products. These studies are leading to new and general methodologies for the synthesis of complex organic molecules and to the development of polymer-supported reaction chemistry of relevance to the fields of combinatorial chemistry and solid-phase organic chemistry doc12333 none Daniel J. Myers This grant will support the coding of data in the archives of the Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence. The Lemberg Center operated at Brandeis University from - and was a key site of research on the race-related civil disturbances of the s. Since the center closed its doors and the prior director, John Spiegel, passed away, the archives of the center was presumed by many to have been discarded or lost. In early , the main elements of the archive were re-discovered and other components have been located since then. The archive contains a wealth of previously unanalyzed data about the riots and promises greater understanding of the riots from a historical perspective and of collective violence and race relations more generally. In particular, the archives contain newspaper-based documentation of civil disorder events and interview tapes and transcripts. The archival data could potentially inform and significantly modify prior understandings of these particular riots and collective violence more generally. In particular, the more extensive data will provide for more accurate modeling of the economic and structural causal mechanisms that lead to rioting, a better understanding of the spread of collective violence via social diffusion processes, additional information about the methodological and substantive implications of media selection processes and media description bias, and more direct documentation of changing racial attitudes in response to the rioting. To lay the foundation for that research, it will be necessary to translate the newspaper event record into machine-readable format doc12334 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I (SBIR) project will develop the means necessary to adapt the Local Electrode Atom Probe (LEAP) to provide three-dimensional atomic-resolution imaging and elemental analysis of biochips and other nanoscale biotechnological specimens. Hard lithography used in the microelectronics and biotechnology industries already produces nanostructures that are extremely difficult to evaluate with current instrumentation. Soft lithography, self-assembly, and other methods will produce even smaller features from biological and organic materials. Structural characterization for bio-nanotechnology is already problematic because analytical electron microscopy has substantial limitations in the quantitative imaging of carbon and other low atomic number elements. Further compounding this problem is the fact that unlike the simpler geometries of microelectronics devices, the biomacromolecules intrinsic to biotechnology are three-dimensional. Without analytical instrumentation better suited to the evaluation of 3-D bio-organic structures, industry will be flying blind as it develops complex nanoscale biotechnologies. Our project is designed to adapt and develop methods for the LEAP to perform atomic-scale analysis of bio-organic biotechnological specimens. After adaptation, LEAP should be able to rapidly image 3-D structures at atomic (0.2-0.5 nm) resolution, while providing quantum-level elemental composition of synthetic polymers, proteins, and nucleic acids critical for biochips and other biomacromolecular nanoengineered devices. The primary commercial application of the technology and the product developed in this project will be as a supplement to the existing analytical instrumentation used for the determination of structure and composition of nano-biotechnology devices and components. Additional applications are envisioned in academic and industrial research in the areas of structural biology, cell biology and pharmaceutics doc12335 none This research involves an extension and continuation of research begun with an earlier National Science Foundation award. In that project the investigators laid out a methodology for conducting interviews on a random sample of public policy issues and assessing the strategies and resources of lobbyists and other policy advocates as they attempt to influence the policy process. The researchers focused on the use of arguments and evidence in addition to the more standard variables of material resources. In the current project, the investigators complete documentation of 100 randomly selected cases of federal government policy debates. The analyses allow for the systematic comparison of advocacy efforts on a broad sample of issues in government. The researchers compare the dimensional structures of those issues, the lobbying and advocacy efforts of those involved, the degree to which government officials themselves are advocates along with those outside government, the impact of money and material resources on coalition formation and policy outcomes, the differences between highly visible and less-visible policy decisions, and the ability of advocates to affect policy outcomes through the use of arguments, targeted lobbying efforts, and other means. Further, they integrate with the research project the creation of a massive web site to serve other researchers and students. For each of the cases, not only do they collect a range of information from public and confidential sources but all of the public information they collect, including versions of legislation, public testimony, press releases by those involved, press coverage, and lobby spending reports, is released in a comprehensive web site for each issue. This allows other researchers access to a well-organized set of raw materials for all manner of subsequent analyses, as well as providing primary source material suitable for teaching courses on U.S. government, Congress, and public policy. The theoretic focus of this research is based on the ideas of rhetoric, heresthetics, and the related questions of decision-making for complex multidimensional issues. Policy advocates mastering the arts of heresthetics would be able to affect policy outcomes simply by focusing attention on new dimensions of issues or by otherwise altering the context in which policy choices are made. However, there are many constraints on these efforts, including the strategic efforts of policy advocates who disagree, institutional factors and other sources of stability in public advocacy. The researchers explore these questions of strategic redefinition of policy issues and stability in considerable detail, identifying specific hypotheses and showing how these can be systematically tested. This is a project that will allow numerous other scholars to use the dataset and do subsequent investigations to enhance substantially our understanding of the topic doc12336 none Dr. Dong-Sheng Yang of the University of Kentucky is funded for his research on spectroscopic studies of weakly bound metal-molecule complexes by the Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division. Pulsed field ionization-zero electron kinetic energy (ZEKE) spectroscopy will be used to provide the electronic structure of metal (Al, Ga, in, Sc, Y, La) ligand (ammonia, amines, phosphines, arsines) 1-1 complexes. These complexes will be prepared by pulsed laser vaporization and identified with photoionization mass spectroscopy. The ionization energies and vibrational frequencies measured by ZEKE spectroscopy will be used, in combination with ab initio calculations, to elucidate the bonding and structure of these complexes. The spectra and understanding obtained will be useful for detection and process development for semiconductor applications and for studies of the reaction mechanisms of these complexes. It is important in the semiconductor industry to have sensitive spectroscopic methods for detecting ammonia, amine, phosphine, and arsine complexes of important metals such as aluminum, gallium, and indium. Dr. Yang s work will elucidate the electronic structure of these complexes. Such results will provide critically needed data for the study of these species in industrial processes and will increase our understanding of how metals interact with such useful molecules in organometallic complexes, bioinorganic complexes, and at metal surfaces doc12337 none Economic time series are often difficult to predict and as a result different forecasters, faced with predicting the same economic variable, often come up with very different answers, reflecting their use of separate forecasting models, information sets and estimation methods. It is very rare for any individual forecast to systematically dominate the others. Many studies have found that a simple equal-weighted combination of forecasts produces better predictions than those generated by individual models. This project develops both theoretical tools and empirical techniques for explaining why simple equal-weighted forecasts do so well in practice and compares these with wider classes of combinations. The research project develops estimation and forecast combination methods that can compete with the equal-weighted forecast combination. We establish conditions under which our proposed methods can be expected to produce improved forecast. The research project also considers the performance of different forecast combination methods under a host of economic circumstances, including prediction of economic variables in the near, medium and distant future, prediction of the entire probability distribution of an economic variable and prediction with loss functions that are tailored to individual policy makers or economic decision makers. The proposal also investigates the possibility of letting the forecast combination weights vary over time since some models may work better in some situations (e.g. when the economy is in a recession) and others may prove to be better in different circumstances (e.g. an expansion state). Forecast combination techniques have already been found to be useful in practical situations. This proposal provides further understanding of why this is so and explores various alternative approaches both theoretically and in practice, particularly when many forecasts are involved, and expands the approach in new ways. The interest in developing these methods is in part driven by practical concerns of the Principal Investigators that has come through interaction with the various Federal Reserve banks and other international organizations such as the IMF and through considering their needs and requests. We expect to continue strong relations with these and other organizations through the grant period doc12338 none This research examines the utility of several validity assessment techniques for differentiating between children s accounts of true and false events. Several techniques have been developed to assess the validity of people s accounts of events, however most of these techniques (a) have been developed for use with adults and not children, (b) have not been extensively tested with children, and (c) do not incorporate relevant principles of cognitive development. This project tests the hypothesis that with children, validity assessment techniques are more successful at discriminating between accounts of familiar versus unfamiliar events than between accounts of true versus false events. Two studies will be conducted to test the utility of several validity assessment techniques for discriminating between true and false events with events that are familiar or unfamiliar to children. In the first study the event recalled is one experimentally introduced to the participants. In the second study the event recalled is a forensically relevant one -- a stressful and invasive medical procedure that has been experienced by each participating child or not. This research will contribute to the development of theories of cognitive development that apply to a wide range of memory tasks that operate during every-day cognition. More immediately, the proposed research will help researchers, legal professionals, and social service agents discriminate between children s accounts of real-world events that did occur versus those that did not occur doc12339 none Graham This study investigates the specializations for amphibious life and air breathing of fishes in the goby subfamily Oxudercinae. Included among the oxudercines are species such as the mudskippers, which are highly amphibious and air-breathing, as well as several less- and entirely non-amphibious species. The research studies the characters associated with mudskipper terrestriality and the sequence of change these characters have undergone within the Oxudercinae. DNA sequence analyses will confirm the phylogenetic relationships among the oxudercine species. Comparative study of different oxudercines examines the functional relationship between the gills and auxiliary air-breathing surfaces considering, for example, such questions as how the presence of dual respiratory surfaces affects properties such as respiration, ionic and acid-base balance, and nitrogenous waste excretion. Also studied will be how the gills and auxiliary air-breathing structures function in oxudercine recovery from exhaustive exercise. Comparisons of oxudercine eyes will reveal how changes related to aerial visual acuity developed. Fieldwork in both Japan and Australia will correlate species-specific specializations with behavior and microhabitat distribution in order to establish how different degrees of terrestrial adaptation affect oxudercine distribution and natural history. The oxudercines are unique among the vertebrates in providing evolutionary snap-shots along the phylogenetic continuum extending from aquatic to amphibious life, and are thus ideal for studying the sequence of character changes that occurred over the course of this transition. This study therefore contributes to an understanding of the suite of changes that occurred during the invasion of land by the vertebrates in the Devonian Period, 360 million years ago doc12340 none Dr. Mark A. Johnson of Yale University is funded for his research on spectroscopic studies of anion hydration and intracluster photoreactions by the Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division. Survey spectra of band origins via a mass-selected argon matrix isolation scheme will be recorded and analyzed. The clusters studied will be grown in an argon cluster and mass selected before its spectrum is scanned with an IR laser. When the laser is tuned to a resonance of the embedded complex, the absorpotion of a photon leads to heating. Evaporation of several argon atoms leads to cooling. Mass is readily determined by mass spectrometry. The structure and assembly mechanism for hydration and small water network formation around dihalides, trihalides, and organic functional groups such as carboxylates will be elucidated in such survey spectra. The fine structure hidden beneath argon-mediated spectra at rotational resolution will be obtained by using two-color laser methods, and the rotational structure will be used to refine the structures of the complexes. The solvation of anions by water molecules is one of the most basic aspects of physical chemistry and an extremely important phenomenon in nature and everyday life (e.g., the use of salt to clear highways of snow and ice is an important public safety issue in the northeast). The detailed and simple hydration reactions that will be studied will greatly advance our understanding of hydration chemistry and how to study similar complexes and chemistry involving other compounds doc12341 none Miller Description: This award is to support a collaborative project between Dr. Jan D. Miller, Department of Metallurgical Engineering, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah and Dr. Ahmed Yehia, Mineral Benficiation Department, Central Metallurgical Research and Development Institute, Helwan, Cairo, Egypt. They plan to study the fundamental aspects of wastepaper deinking in the presence of modern surfactants, fatty alcohol ethoxylates. The adsorption of these compounds on the surfaces involved in wastepaper processing will be studied at the molecular scale using soft-contact atomic force microscopy. Understanding of interaction forces between wastepaper components in the presence of fatty alcohol ethoxylates, necessary for further improvement in deinking technology, will be achieved by colloidal probe atomic force microscopy study. These results will be correlated with agglomeration tests, microcolumn flotation and bench-scale flotation of wastepaper pulp in a Denver-type cell. Also the relationship between molecular structure of the fatty alcohol ethoxylates and the conditions necessary for optimization of industrial deinking processes will be established. Scope: The project supports collaboration between two very active groups in the area of materials processing and beneficiation. The University of Utah team is well qualified and has high-tech instrumentation facilities that are needed for the project, while the Egyptian team will conduct flotation experiments using model components and real wastepaper pulp, as well as analysis of fiber brightness, recovery and yield during flotation. Dr. Yehia also has the means to test the developed technology in the industrial setting in Egypt. The results will be helpful in dealing with the problem of wastepaper. It is likely to have more economic impact in countries with few pulp resources such as Egypt. The proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc12342 none With the support of the National Science Foundation, Dr. R. E. Taylor (University of California, Riverside) and Dr. David Smith (University of California, Davis) will undertake radiocarbon (14C) measurements using accelerator mass spectrometry technology and examine the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) content in a group of 35 human skeletal samples from 15 North America sites with indicated ages ranging from approximately 5,000 to 11,000 years. Recently developed technical capabilities in the laboratories of the collaborators will provide data to address questions recently raised by what appears to be anomalous physical characteristics of several North American human skeletons dating to the early Holocene--between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago. The 14C data will provide the temporal controls and the mtDNA data will define genetic relationships between and among the group of human skeletal samples examined. The purpose of this research is to examine various questions that have recently been posed involving new understandings concerning the timing and character of earliest human migrations from Asia to North America at the very end of the Pleistocene and beginning of the Holocene. This movement of hunter and gatherer groups constitutes one of the most significant migration in the history of the human species. Precisely when and how it occurred have been the subject of long standing and sometimes contentious debates among scientists. The long-held view that the late Pleistocene North American Clovis culture represented the earliest New World human occupation has been challenged on the basis of data from several sites in both North and South America. This data appears to point to the presence of human groups in the New World at least 1,000 years prior to the earliest manifestation of Clovis occupation in North America. In addition, preliminary evaluations of physical characteristics of a number of North American human skeletons recently assigned to the early Holocene suggest that the origins of the ancestral populations of Native Americans may be much more complex than currently understood. A series of early multiple migrations may have produced a very complex late Pleistocene early Holocene genetic admixture in North America. A major research question that will be directly addressed with the data to be obtained in this study is whether some early North American human populations did not survive and thus may not be genetically related to any contemporary Native American group doc12343 none In this proposal funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, David Nesbitt of the University of Colorado will pursue a program of research on the spectroscopy and dynamics of chemical transients using state-resolved techniques. The project will examine the spectroscopy of transient species, quantum state-selected reaction dynamics, and the development and exploitation of new methods to interrogate jet-cooled transient species. Jet-cooled radicals, molecular ions, and molecular ion clusters will be investigated in slit supersonic discharges using direct absorption infrared laser methods. High sensitivity overtone spectroscopy of clusters and reaction dynamics with aligned or oriented reagents will be studied using IR-UV-UV triple resonance methods. The ultrasensitive visible absorption spectroscopy of jet-cooled chemical transients will be examined using novel optical heterodyne high finesse cavity methods combined with slit discharge sources. This research program focuses on short-lived molecules and ions that are created under extremely energetic conditions, and thus they usually are not found in nature in stable forms. Besides being of fundamental interest, these studies have practical relevance to solving problems in combustion and atmospheric chemistry as well as in astrophysical chemistry doc12344 none A supramolecular complex exists in the membranes of photosynthetic bacteria, which is responsible for absorbing light and converting this energy into an electrochemical gradient of protons. Macromolecular components of this complex include the core light-harvesting complex (LH1), the photosynthetic reaction center, most likely ubiquinol cytochrome c oxidoreductase and possibly several other components. The major focus of this research is on the interaction of LH1 with the reaction center. A newly isolated protein, PufX, is found in Rhodobacter species and has been implicated to interact with LH1 to allow reducing equivalents from the reaction center in the form of ubiquinol to reach the bc1 complex. The interactions between LH1 and PufX can be studied under equilibrium conditions using reconstitution methodology. PufX will be chemically synthesized as well as various core segments. Fluorescent probes will be covalently attached to selected positions of these PufX polypeptides as well as to the LH1 alpha and beta polypeptides. Association constants for interactions between bacteriochlorophyll, the LH1 alpha polypeptide and PufX will be determined. Cross-linking reagents will also be employed in order to determine proximity and composition of interacting systems. The structure of chemically synthesized core regions of PufX will be determined in organic solvent by NMR spectroscopy. Experiments probing interaction of LH1 and PufX with the reaction center will also be initiated. It is expected that the results obtained in these studies will be important for understanding the fundamental process of energy capture, not only in all photosynthetic bacteria, but also in oxygenic photosynthetic organisms as well doc12345 none Cetinkunt Description: This award is to support a collaborative project between Dr. Sabri Cetinkunt, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois and Dr. Magdy Abdelhameed, Design and Production Engineering Department, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt. The goal is to develop new control systems for a nano-positioner mechanism (piezoelectric tool post) used in high precision machining, specially when machining brittle materials such as mirrors, silicon wafers and ceramics. The performance of control systems used in controlling the motion of a nano-positioner is crucial in maintaining a stable and accurate trajectory tracking. These investigators will develop new control algorithms based on neural network architectures. Specifically they will use Cerebellar Model Articulation Controller (CMAC) neural network architecture to improve the dynamic control performance. They will also design and implement a hardware setup for the mechatronics control system at the laboratory at Ain Shams University. This will include a Nano-positioner mechanism, sensing system, power amplifier of the PZT actuator and the real time controller. Scope: The project supports collaboration between two experienced investigators. The laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago has the required facilities. Dr. Cetinkunt has experience using neural net-based controllers for nanomachining and fast tool post machining operations. The Egyptian collaborator has an active research program in the dynamic and control of manufacturing systems, and an active research program in mechatronics. The project will include exchange of graduate students between the two universities. The proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc12346 none Professor William Fenical in the Marine Research Division at the University of California, San Diego Scripps Institute is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his studies on the defense chemicals utilized by marine plants and animals against a diversity of pathogenic microbes. Bioassays for six known algal and invertebrate pathogens will be used to assess 1) the inhibition of microbial growth (antibiosis) and 2) the inhibition of microbial attachment (anti-settlement). New assays for additional pathogens will continue to be developed. Structure determination studies of several antifungal metabolites are ongoing and characterization of new bioactive metabolites discovered during the course of this project will be carried out. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Fenical is isolating organic compounds which marine plants and animals use as a chemical defense against various pathogenic microbes. There is a possibility that some of these novel bioactive compounds which exhibit antifungal or antibiotic activity may prove useful in controlling human infectious diseases doc12347 none This project examines the definitions of community that are mobilized by both urban neighborhood residents and by police in efforts to implement community policing. This contemporary reform movement seeks to reduce crime through more constructive interactions between citizens and the police. However, community policing assumes that there is a coherent community that can be organized in the name of crime control. In urban neighborhoods, this assumption is questionable. Specifically, this research will explore four critical tensions inherent in community politics: tensions of difference, scale, obligation, and interaction. To try to organize community is to implicitly ask: Who is included and excluded? At what scale does the group organize? What obligations can individuals be asked to assume? And how does the community interact with other agencies of power? This project will study how these questions are addressed in a neighborhood in Seattle through intensive qualitative research with both residents and officers. The resident data will include in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and observation of community group meetings. The police data will include ride-alongs and informal interviews with all officers with any responsibility for the study neighborhoods. Analysis of these data will reveal the implicit assumptions about community that shape how both residents and officers interact with one another. It will also reveal how the central tensions of community organizing are addressed and potentially resolved in these interactions doc12348 none This research project, supported in the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, explores the mechanisms and kinetics of the reactions of chlorinated hydrocarbons on iron and palladium surfaces. Using a unique suite of experimental tools, including laser induced thermal desorption and reflection absorption infrared spectroscopy, developed in Professor Donald P. Land s laboratory, Land and his colleagues at the University of California-Davis are obtaining kinetic information about the decomposition of chloroethylenes on well characterized iron and palladium in ultra-high vacuum. These model studies promise a fundamental understanding of reactions that are important in wastewater remediation chemistry. In addition, the work provides basic molecular level information about an important class of surface reactions. The decomposition of chlorine containing hydrocarbon compounds is of significant relevance to the remediation of wastewaters and ground waters in industrialized areas. The work carried out in this project at the University of California-Davis is exploring the detailed molecular mechanisms of these reactions on well characterized metal surfaces. The insight gained from these studies will enhance clean-up strategies, as well as provide fundamental understanding of an important class of surface reactions doc12349 none Knight This grant provides 50% of the costs of acquiring a Maran Ultra NMR core analyzer for the Environmental Geophysics Laboratory currently being built at Stanford University. The instrumentation will be used by the PI and graduate students investigating the use of NMR for environmental applications. In addition, it is likely that others will use the analyzer for research applications in the petroleum industry. There is growing interest in the use of NMR for characterizing the near-surface of the earth. The Maran analyzer is the central piece of equipment that will be used for laboratory studies of the relationship between measured NMR parameters and the basic physical and chemical properties of porous geological materials. The analyzer will be used to investigate the link between the NMR time constants and both the pore size distribution and tortuosity of materials. A second focus will be on improving the fundamental understanding of the mechanisms that control the NMR response in geological materials, with an emphasis on determining the role of paramagnetic species and the sensitivity to sorbed contaminants. This analyzer will be the first low field instrument of its kind at Stanford University, providing the capability to obtain laboratory data at the same frequency as that used in the collection of field and borehole data. The Maran analyzer will be housed in the Environmental Geophysics Laboratory, planned for construction in the summer of doc12350 none Kirk Peterson of Washington State University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to carry out theoretical investigations of the reactions of atomic mercury with reactive halogen species (X, HX, XO and X2 where X= chlorine, bromine, and iodine). High accuracy, large-scale potential energy surfaces for both ground and low-lying electronically excited states will be constructed using accurate ab initio electronic structure methods, i.e. multireference configuration interaction and coupled cluster methods with large one-particle basis sets. These results will be used to elucidate the thermochemistry, spectroscopy, and reaction dynamics of the relevant species involved. In calculations of potential energy surfaces, particular emphasis will be given to an accurate recovery of both scalar relativistic and spin-orbit effects. Given the lack of available information on nearly all of the systems, this project has the potential to impact significantly the knowledge of gas-phase mercury chemistry with reactive halogen species. Because of its high biological toxicity and long atmospheric residence time, mercury is considered to be a high priority among environmental pollutants. Recently, the contamination of the Arctic ecosystem by mercury has been of particular concern. In the atmosphere, mercury exists almost exclusively in the gas phase and in its elemental form, but the amount of data on its chemical reactions in the gas phase is surprisingly scarce. The outcomes of this project are expected to provide information that will improve the understanding of environmentally significant chemical reactions including mercury doc12351 none D. Dunn-Rankin, U of Cal Irvine A 10-kHz diode laser illuminator, a high-speed digital camera, and associated optics and control software are acquired for use in visualization in a variety of combustion studies. Among these are studies of droplet streams and droplet stream flames, interacting droplet combustion, flame control, and electrospray flames doc12352 none Lindsay The extracellular egg envelope plays a crucial role in regulating sperm-egg interactions both before and after fertilization, and is thus a major subject of interest in developmental biology. After initial sperm penetration and fertilization, the egg envelope is modified by egg factors to defend the egg against sperm to prevent polyspermy, a condition that is lethal to embryonic development. During this complex block to polyspermy reaction, sperm binding sites on the egg envelope are inactivated, and the envelope structure is modified so that it is hardened to impede sperm penetration and to protect the developing embryo. These observations are almost a century old but still the mechanisms behind the reactions are unknown, due primarily to the lack of biological material, especially in mammals. One hypothesis is that an egg protease is involved in the reaction, since proteolysis of a specific egg envelope glycoprotein, ZPA, has been observed following fertilization. The current research project is designed to test this hypothesis by isolating and characterizing the responsible egg protease, designated ZPAase , followed by the determination of its effects on egg envelope physical properties and function. The amphibian model system Xenopus laevis is used due to the large amounts of gametes that are available for study. Previously funded research identified ZPAase as a metalloprotease and it was partially purified. Continuing studies will complete the purification of ZPAase, and use molecular cloning techniques to determine the amino acid sequence of ZPAase for functional information and comparison to other proteases. Purified protease, obtained from eggs or through protein expression, will be used test the hypothesis of ZPA proteolysis on sperm binding to the egg envelope and envelope hardening. The results of these studies will make a significant contribution to our knowledge of the complex reactions that regulate sperm-egg interactions following fertilization and are fundamental to normal animal development doc12353 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Edward Keenan will conduct one year of linguistic research. The focus of his project is documenting quantitatively a historical change in the logical expressive power of English. In Modern English, the logical meanings of The king defended himself and The king defended him are distinct. In the former, the defender and defendee must be the same. In the latter, they must be different. But Old English (700 - ) lacked reflexives, like himself . In Old English, a sentence like He defended him was ambiguous according to whether the defender and defendee were the same person or not. Based on some 11,000 examples drawn from over 100 texts dating from c750 to c , this project will document the creation and interpretation of reflexives in English. The data show that reflexives come into being around and assume their current semantic interpretation rather suddenly in the s. The linguistic interest of the project is twofold. First, this is the first empirically substantiated study of change in logical expressive power of a natural language. The study shows that some logical distinctions that we take for granted in Modern English do not necessarily characterize languages in general. Second, the type of change that this research documents is relatively novel: New forms are created internal to the language rather than borrowed. So this research expands our understanding of how languages may change over time. Finally, this project will contribute to a large database that Dr. Keenan has been building since . The data will be publicly accessible on the web so that other scholars can verify the generalizations produced by this research doc12354 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Russell G. Schuh and his colleague Dr. Alhaji Maina Gimba of the University of Maiduguri, Nigeria, will spend three years documenting five languages of Yobe State, Nigeria. These are Bole, Karekare, Ngamo, Bade, and Ngizim, all major languages of the Chadic family. None of these languages has yet been described comprehensively in full grammars or dictionaries; nor is any used in written form by its speakers. Drs. Schuh and Gimba will train teams of native speakers to collect and transcribe data in their own languages. The teams will begin by building on existing lexical databases and collections of texts. Databases currently range from 700-800 words for Ngamo to over words for Bole. Researchers will work toward relatively large dictionaries of several thousand items per language. Texts currently emphasize folktales. Researchers will collect new texts, including oral history, descriptions of customs and traditions, poetry and song, and personal narrative. One source of new texts will be transcription of audio and video recordings of people recognized as being particularly knowledgable or skilled in various domains. One goal of the project will be to stimulate speakers to write in their native languages. To this end, the project will solicit texts in written form from people already literate in Hausa (the lingua franca of Northern Nigeria), particularly secondary school students. As collections of texts increase, they will be published locally so that people can see themselves in print. Ultimately the project will produce sizable dictionaries for each language in both paper and electronic form (CD and searchable web databases) and collections of texts both for local distribution and, with translations, in both paper and electronic form for an audience outside Nigeria. Not least, a long-term outcome, extending beyond the duration of the project, should be continued self-documentation of the languages in written form. This language documentation project is significant in four ways. First, it emphasizes linguistic structure that is encoded in the lexicon. This includes derivational processes that make nouns from verbs, make verbs passive, or create nouns indicating agent or instrument; inflectional processes that indicate gender, number, tense, or (in)definiteness; compounding creating word combinations whose overall meaning is not predictable from the parts. Second, the project s documenting of a group of related languages reveals language history. The lexicons of these languages tell us, for example, which words can be reconstructed as having been shared by the original ancestor language, how words may have shifted in meaning in individual languages, and which words have been adopted from other languages. Third, the lexicon is also a repository of ethnoecology. It includes names for flora, fauna, and natural objects, and means of constructing names for things in the environment (compounding, word derivation, etc.). Finally, the lexicon represents all aspects of culture, including words from the entire range of crafts, occupations, traditions, and social organization. The text collections are especially critical to the study of historical and cultural changes. All these issues require detailed documentation and input from natives of the culture, which this project will provide doc12192 none The investigators will conduct a series of experiments that focus on crucial substantive implications of modeling social interaction as the result of a cybernetic process of meaning control whereby actors behave so as to maintain meanings in the situation. Affect Control Theory describes a control system between identities and actions, with identity meanings acting as a reference level for interpreting social interactions. Specifically, it suggests that people will not only try to maintain their own identities, but will also strive to restore the identities of others with whom they are interacting. The theory also incorporates the restorative actions of other actors into the model. If another person in the interaction takes a restorative action, it may restore the meanings so that no further reparation is necessary. The studies described here propose to test these key predictions that differentiate Affect Control Theory from the other major control perspective. Study one challenges (negatively deflects) the identity of an alter, and tests to see whether this challenge evokes restorative behavior from ego. Study two creates an atypically positive interaction for the alter, to see if this evokes negative behavior by ego toward the alter (as predicted to be restorative of original meanings). Study 3 draws on pre-test results that indicate two alternative means of restoring another s challenged identity. Here, the investigator use computer-regulated interaction to make available alternative means of restoring another s identity. The prediction involves the substitutability of different behaviors for meaning restoration. Study four elaborates the substitutability of restorative action hypothesis. The investigators will test whether or not a restorative act by one actor affects the probability of another actor s engaging in a restorative act. Study five examines whether or not the identity of the actors influences the effect of the restorative behavior. Taken together, the five experiments explore how we go about maintaining the identities of others, and how the social situation in which we are embedded affects those restorative efforts doc12356 none Professor Horacio F. Olivo, of the Medicinal Natural Products Chemistry Department at the University of Iowa, is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his studies of the synthesis of novel marine macrolides. Professor Olivo is exploring the efficacy of the Ireland-Claisen rearrangement of products derived from biocatalytic desymmetrization of cyclopentenediesters to prepare substituted bicyclic lactones. Mild methods for the generation of enynes via palladium-catalyzed coupling of 1,1-dihalo-1-alkenes with vinylstannanes and the chemoselectivity of bis-haloalkenes in Ni Cr coupling reactions are also being examined. Newly developed methodologies are applied to the synthesis of callipeltoside-A and auriside-A. Much current effort in the field of organic synthesis is directed toward the selective preparation of molecules with precisely defined three-dimensional structures. Biological catalysis is an attractive approach, given its potentially low cost and minimal environmental impacts. By developing new methodologies for the conversion of products of biocatalysis to useful organic molecules, Professor Horacio F. Olivo, of the Medicinal Natural Products Chemistry Department at the University of Iowa, is demonstrating biocatalysis as an efficient and low-cost method for the generation of valuable intermediates in organic synthesis. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Olivo is exploring general synthetic methodology utilizing products of biological catalysis and applying this methodology to the synthesis of several complex natural products of marine origin doc12357 none This award will support a science-planning workshop on the biogeochemical and physical processes controlling climate relevant compounds (CRCs) in the Surface Ocean-Lower Atmosphere (SOLA) region. This workshop will initiate the development of a science plan for a US Surface Ocean-Lower Atmosphere Study (SOLAS). US SOLAS will be part of the international SOLAS, which is currently planned as a new international interfacial program by the IGBP, SCOR and CACGP. The international SOLAS has already been approved by SCOR and IGBP. This workshop will be structured around several interelated fundamental science issues in ocean atmosphere biogeochemical coupling: -- The Surface Ocean-Lower Atmosphere Sulfur Cycle -- Radiation and Photochemistry in the Surface Ocean-Lower Atmosphere -- Boundary Layer Dynamics of CO2 and other climate relevant gases -- Atmospheric Connections with the Marine Nitrogen Cycle -- Boundary Layer Physics Through discussions in the five science issue areas above, the overall objectives of the workshop will be to: -- Summarize recent advances in quantifying fluxes of CRCs in the SOLA region. -- Identify critical and addressable knowledge gaps to predict future concentrations of CRCs in the lower marine atmosphere. -- Prioritize which inter- and multi-disciplinary studies will further our understanding of controls on the concentrations and fluxes of CRCs in this boundary region. -- Further the development of a US science plan for study of the SOLA region and evaluate how such an effort would interface with other national and international science initiatives such as the U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Plan (CCSP), the IGBP International Global Atmospheric Chemistry (IGAC) project and the international SOLAS. The atmospheric concentrations of many CRCs are affected by physical, biological, and chemical processes in the SOLA region. Models suggest that this region is particularly susceptible to climate change, and that changes in this region can affect global concentrations of CRCs. Forecasting future levels of the CRCs thus requires better knowledge of processes in the SOLA and how the processes there will change under various climate change scenarios. Many processes in the SOLA region are closely linked on both sides of the air-water interface and must be investigated in a comprehensive interdisciplinary fashion. Advances have been made over the last decade in the study of the relevant processes, but a holistic and interlinking view of these processes has been lacking. The need for such an approach has been amply documented by increasing evidence of the interconnectivity of biogeochemical and physical cycles. Some processes, such as the effect of aeolian deposition of trace nutrients on the surface ocean s carbon cycle, have received increasing attention. Others, such as the effect of ocean-derived aerosol particles on lower atmosphere oxidation efficiency are just becoming apparent. To quantify these climate-relevant processes a partnership between scientists investigating the surface ocean and lower atmosphere is necessary. Developing a program that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries is challenging and requires significant community input from investigators who have not routinely interacted in the past. The proposed workshop is one avenue to foster such interactions. As with previous interdisciplinary efforts, such as JGOFS, the returns are high as scientific breakthroughs are often accomplished by thinking outside the box [or in this case reservoir doc12358 none The School of Mathematics of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) was formed in at the founding of the IAS. The initial goal of the School was to provide a haven for scholars where they could work in an environment that was exceptionally favorable for conducting research. Over the years, other roles have emerged and the School has assumed additional responsibilities including guiding junior visitors in their research and organizing special programs that widen the School s coverage of mathematics. Although it has functioned in an international context, the main impact of the Institute has been on the U.S. mathematical community, with a majority of its visitors having come from or been absorbed by it. The Institute frequently conducts programs in special areas of mathematics. Topics of some recent and forthcoming programs include symplectic geometry and holomorphic curves, theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, motivic homotopy theory, computational complexity, and stochastic partial differential equations and models of turbulence. This project will support postdoctoral and mid-career visiting researchers at the School of Mathematics of the Institute for Advanced Study with the goal of supporting a wide spectrum of mathematical research at the highest level. This activity will provide these researchers unique opportunities for consultation and collaboration doc12359 none Housing is an unusual good, both in terms of the way it is produced and the way it is subsequently used. On the production side, residential investment is three times as volatile as non-residential investment, and leads the business cycle whereas non-residential investment lags. On the consumption side, housing is unlike non-residential structures or producer durables in that it is rarely an input to marketed production. Rather housing is perhaps best characterized as a form of capital used to produce at home. In addition, housing is an important form of saving for most households: in aggregate the stock of housing is equal in value to annual GDP and is three times larger than the stock of consumer durables. The goal of this project is to deepen our understanding of the role of housing in the economy. The project consists of two broad components. The first component focuses on the production of new housing and attempts to understand the aggregate dynamics for residential investment, housing prices, and the relation between these variables and standard macroeconomic aggregates. The second component focuses on the role of housing and production at home for understanding behavior through the life-cycle at the household level. These two subprojects can be integrated into a single coherent framework for studying many issues to housing. The analysis takes place within calibrated artificial economies, in which households make dynamic decisions and all prices are determined in general equilibrium. Housing is carefully distinguished from other goods in the economy. More specifically, the question to be ad-dressed in the first part is whether a neoclassical growth model, augmented to include a sector producing new housing, can account for the behavior over the business cycle of residential investment and house prices. A calibrated model of the economy with explicit microfoundations is simulated and its ability to account for the stylized facts about housing at the aggregate level is assessed. Industry-level data will be collected to as-sess the model s ability to account for observed time series for macro aggregates and house prices since WWII. Previous work exploring the empirical determinants of residential investment is investigated in light of the exact equilibrium model relationship between residential investment, house prices and the real interest rate. The second part of the project focuses on the role housing and other con-sumer durables may play in explaining observed consumption and savings be-havior through the life-cycle. Two interesting empirical facts are that a large fraction of households save very little in the form of financial assets, and that household consumption typically drops significantly at retirement. The hypothesis to be explored here is that the gap between observed behavior and the predictions of a standard life-cycle model would disappear once production at home is introduced. Suppose true household consumption exceeds measured consumption, because measured consumption ignores consumption of home pro-duced goods. This measurement issue might shed light on retirement behavior if households substitute working in the market for working at home when they retire doc12312 none Economists have developed a theory of sunspot equilibrium to describe situations where economic fluctuations are not driven by changes in market fundamentals, but are instead due to extrinsic, non-fundamental factors. This project involves the design of an experiment that will explore whether and how such extrinsic factors can result in market fluctuations, and whether the particular market institution also plays a role. The experiment consists of two main treatments. In the first, human subjects participate as buyers or sellers in a computerized double auction , where goods can be bought and sold continuously over a fixed trading period at mutually agreed upon prices that are observable as they occur to all participants. In the second call market treatment, subjects submit private bids and offers, and a centralized mechanism determines the single, market clearing price, as well as the quantities that each participant can buy or sell. Thus, the only information subjects receive in this environment is the resulting market price and the quantity they were able to buy or sell at this price. In both treatments, subjects face uncertainty in that they are given two sets of values or costs for the goods they can buy or sell; these two sets correspond to the state of the economy, and are referred to as high or low in reference to the equilibrium price in the two states. (the equilibrium quantity is the same in both states). Initially, subjects are told the state of the economy in advance, so that they become familiar with the two states for prices. After several rounds, subjects are informed that the true state of the economy, will henceforth be determined expost, after all trading is completed. Furthermore, the rule for the determination of the state will depend on the median trade price in the double auction environment or on the analogous market clearing price in the call market environment. If this price lies within a proscribed domain of the equilibrium low price, then the state is declared to be low and if it lies outside this domain, in that of the equilibrium high price, then the state is declared to be high. Subjects are provided with a potential coordination device (or sunspot realization) which takes the form of a random announcement by the experimenter of the forecast for the state of prices in the current period. Subjects are instructed that this announcement has no binding consequences. Preliminary findings suggest that subjects coordinate perfectly on the announcement in the highly centralized call market environment but fail to do the same in the more decentralized double auction environment. These experimental findings if replicated, have significant implications for the architecture of real financial markets doc12361 none Professor Joshua Goodman of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Rochester, with the support of the Organic Dynamics Program, explores detailed mechanistic studies on different aspects of electron transfer reactions. The proposed research is centered on the concept that coupling the electron transfer processes to bond breaking and bond making events can increase the efficiency of electron transfer reactions. The research plan deals exclusively with the competition between return electron transfer (RET) and dissociative return electron transfer (DRET). The former is an energy-wasting decay process that has been widely studied in both singlet and triplet radical ion pairs. The latter is a rather specialized process that occurs only for triplet radical ion pairs under highly restrictive conditions for a limited set of substrates. Extensions of the scope of the DRET process will be of interest to specialists in the field of photoinduced electron transfer. Bond coupled electron transfer (BCET) reactions have the potential to drive chemical reactions. This project seeks to investigate several of these reactions. Professor Goodman will focus primarily on DRET reactions that involve cleavage of (1) C-C bonds in disubstituted cyclopropanes and diarylethanes, (2) Si-Si bonds in disilanes, and (3) C-halogen bonds in substituted benzylic halides. An improved understanding of RET processes in photoinduced electron transfer reactions may eventually lead to the ability to drive chemical reactions using light. For example, it may be possible one day to employ polymerizations induced by light in imaging applications. The proposed investigation on disilanes may have an impact on developing lithographic resists, nonlinear optical materials, and one-dimensional conductors doc12362 none Professor Patty Wisian-Neilson in the Department of Chemistry at Southern Methodist University is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for her studies on the preparation of a series of grafted poly (alkyl arylphosphazenes) using anionic, ring opening, and atom radical transfer polymerization and characterization of their fundamental properties by NMR spectroscopy, elemental analysis, differential scanning calorimetry, thermal gravimetric analysis, and gel permeation chromatography. The number, length, and type of graft will be systematically varied and correlated to their physical properties. Gas permeability, flammability, and the ability to stabilize and organize inorganic nanoparticles will be closely examined by standard ASTM flammability tests, permeation studies involving gas chromatography, and transmission electron microscopy, respectively. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Wisian-Neilson will prepare a series of inorganic polymers and examine their fundamental properties such as thermal stability, solubility in common organic solvents, miscibility, gas permeability, and flame retardancy. The ability of these polymers to stabilize and organize metal and semiconductor nanoparticles (particles with nanometer dimensions) will also be investigated doc12363 none When each individual in a group benefits more by defecting than cooperating, the situation is a social dilemma. For example, giving blood is irrational in a purely economic sense because it is costly in terms of time, effort, and pain, and because people who do not donate are still permitted access to the blood supply in a time of need. It is often the case that the economically rational response to a social dilemma is defection, because no matter what others do, a defector ends up in a superior position, whereas contributors risk being taken advantage of or exploited. However, if most act this way, everybody is worse off than if most cooperate. Theoretically, the extent to which people identify with a group should lead to more cooperative responses to a social dilemma. However, research on this relationship has been equivocal. A recently developed multidimensional model of social identity will be applied to this controversy. In the first phase of this program of research (10 studies), a multidimensional scale of group identification will be developed and evaluated. Standard psychometric procedures will be followed to establish the validity and reliability of the scale across various types of real and contrived groups. In Phase 2, hypotheses regarding the relationship between the dimensions of social identity and cooperative responses to social dilemmas will be tested across three types of groups (large-scale, small-scale, contrived) using standard laboratory procedures. Hypotheses regarding how critical sociostructural variables (group size, group status, and group assignment) affect the different dimensions of social identity and cooperative responses to social dilemmas will also be tested. Although real life social dilemmas often involve subgroups, or people with varied social identities, little empirical research has directly examined these particular social situations. Therefore, in Phase 3, laboratory experiments will test hypotheses regarding how people respond to subgroup social dilemmas compared to interpersonal or superordinate social dilemmas, and the cognitive and emotional processes underlying such responses. The impact of resource inequality between the groups and attributions regarding the inequality will also be examined. Finally, in Phase 4, the ongoing interactions between individuals caught up in a social dilemma will be examined. Both intra- and inter-group interactions will be examined. Overall, this program of research is designed to integrate and be applicable to theories of social identity, social dilemmas, intergroup relations, and small group decision making. The broader goal is to further our scientific understanding of real situations that are increasingly prevalent in society: When people with diverse backgrounds make decisions that affect both the members of their own group and the members of other groups doc12364 none This award funds a project that contributes to our understanding of international relations in two broad ways. First, from a theoretical standpoint, it addresses empirically what scholars have understood in principle for decades: that temporal factors such as history, sequence, and perceptions of the future are critical to any complete understanding of international interactions. The investigators work tests a number of central theories of conflict, including propositions linking democratization, economic interdependence, and uncertainty to war. Their proposal emphasizes that the inferences we draw about political dynamics are necessarily conditioned by both the recognition and satisfaction of one s model s assumptions, and on a close correspondence between that model and the process generating the data examined. Neither model assumptions (e.g. that of temporal stability in covariate effects) nor basic substantive facts about the phenomenon of study (such as the repeated nature of conflict in the international arena) are innocuous; different methodological treatments of prior disputes, for example, imply fundamentally different understandings of the effects of those disputes on current conflicts. In this vein, this project examines a series of related issues: 1. Do conflicts beget future conflicts? They develop two hypotheses on this question, one from a rationalist perspective and the other from a model rooted in neorealism and social psychology. They test these competing theories, using innovative techniques that account for the influence of past conflicts between two states (that is, repeated events) on the likelihood of a future dispute. 2. They examine an assertion implicit in all existing quantitative studies of international conflict, that observations are exchangeable. The investigators assert that this assumption is incorrect on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Culture and exogenous shocks clearly affect the probability of conflict. Such heterogeneity is a form of model misspecification, making the conclusions drawn using standard statistical approaches suspect. They use mixture models to address unmeasured heterogeneity, and show how such models conform closely to our understanding of international disputes and provide superior assessments of the causes of those disputes. 3. Finally, they determine whether the effects of certain influences on conflict have varying effects over time. A host of theoretical work suggests that the affect of those factors, which have been shown to foster or inhibit international conflict, vary over time. The substantive implications bear fundamentally on the validity of different theoretical perspectives in international relations, and have substantial policy implications for decision makers in the international arena. Conventional analyses do not and cannot allow for the effects of such factors on disputes to change over time. In sum, the investigators will further improve the study of international relations by paying greater and more explicit attention to the connection between a number of general theoretical expectations regarding time and conflict and the kinds of statistical tools used to model and test those expectations doc12365 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is to produce transgenic citrus and rice plants carrying novel gene fusions for the purpose of controlling citrus canker and rice blight disease. The fusions consist mainly of peptide aptamers and single chain variable region fragments from monoclonal antibodies (SCFVs) that bind to and interfere with bacterial pathogenicity (Pth) proteins that must be injected by the pathogens into host cells to cause disease. Fusions will be selected that show improved binding at physiologically appropriate pH and temperature ranges by BIAcore analyses. Binding affinities of aptamer SCFV fusions over a range of pH and temperatures will be determined. The Phase II project will lead to a new, cost-effective genetic method to control a variety of important plant diseases caused by bacterial plant pathogens. Commercial potential would be to the agricultural and forest industries doc12366 none Mark Description: This award is to support a collaborative project between Dr. James E. Mark, Department of Chemistry, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio and Dr. Mohammed Sharaf, Department of Chemistry, Helwan University, Helwan, Cairo, Egypt. They plan to devise new techniques for processing polymer chains into high-performance materials. Specifically they plan to: identify polymeric chains of sufficient stiffness to give liquid-crystalline, anisotropic phases, either homopolymers or block copolymers consisting of stiff and flexible sequences, cross-linking the chains, either by peroxide thermolysis, chemical regents, or high-energy radiation, in the presence of solvent. The cross links confer sufficient solidity for the polymer to remain in a deformed state for any length of time, and the solvent prevents the premature ordering of the stiff chains, deforming the swollen network uniaxially or biaxially to induce segmental orientation, and removing the solvent, at constant length or at constant force, causing a first-order transition, and thus yielding a single-phase, homogeneous, and highly ordered material. These techniques will be applied to polymers having a desired level of biodegradability. This control of molecular ordering will be used simultaneously to optimize mechanical properties and environmental degradability. Scope: The project supports collaboration between two well-known scientists who have complementary expertise and resources to investigate an important material and environmental problem. Their past collaboration has been productive. The project is a combination of strengths of the PIs, and issues related to molecular orientation and strength in polymers with the challenges associated with biodegradable polymers. There will be opportunities for interaction with industrial scientists in Egypt to test the impact of this collaboration. Two US graduate students will participate in the project. This project meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest doc12367 none Panel data sets play an important role in empirical work in almost all areas of economics. Formally, panel data sets are data sets where there is more than one observation for each unit of observation. Typically, this is because the data set consists of observations for the same individual over a period of time, but the methods for dealing with panel data are equally applicable to situations where the unit of observation is firms, municipalities, etc. This project develops new econometric methods for dealing with nonlinear panel data models, including duration models. The project also develops software to implement these methods. The advantage of panel data is that by following an individual over time, it is possible to investigate an individual s dynamic behavior while controlling for that individual s characteristics. It is easiest to illustrate the importance of this by considering the following simple example. Suppose, as is often the case, that one observed that individuals, who use a certain social program in one period, are also more likely to use it the next period. This ``persistence could be observed because some characteristic of the individual makes him or her more likely to use the program. If that characteristic does not change much over time, then the same people will tend to use the program in different time periods. On the other hand, the persistence is also consistent with a situation in which using the program causes the individual to be more likely to use the program in the future (for example, because the individual learns about the program by using it). Being able to distinguish between these explanations of the persistence is important because under the second explanation, a policy that changes the availability of the program in a single period will also have an indirect effect on participation in the program in future periods. This project develops econometric tools for dealing with panel data in situations like this one, although the tools are more generic and hence applicable in many other empirical situations as well doc12368 none 4 Parizek Description: This award is to support a collaborative project between a US team headed by Dr. Richard Parizek, Department of Geosciences at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania and an Egyptian team headed by Dr. Ahmed Swedan, Geological Survey of Egypt, Cairo, Egypt. They plan to study the causes and means of combating deterioration of ancient monuments due to rising ground water. Shallow groundwater levels, coupled with concentrations of salt, dissolved solids, and biological compounds, are causing rapid and significant deterioration of monuments and other structures in Egypt. Monuments that have survived for thousands of years are rapidly disintegrating, with temple reliefs and paintings often being sacrificed because they are shallow and readily exfoliated. At Hierakonpolis, a variety of monuments and materials are being degraded. For example, the granite threshold block and its sandstone foundations have lost an alarming amount of surface in the past 15 years. In order to mitigate these problems, it is first necessary to determine the hydrogeologic conditions at each site of interest. This involves measurements of the subsurface flow regime, which typically is not known at the affected areas. Practical geotechnical methods need to be developed for site-specific characterization and groundwater flow modeling leading to recommended mitigation measurements. Once these methods are shown to be effective, they can be applied to many sites by geotechnical contractors in the private sector. The teams will use a combination of geological, geophysical, geochemical and hydrologic methods to develop and validate a flow model for the Hierakonpolis site that can be used to design a practical mitigation plan. Scope: The project supports collaboration between two research teams of investigators, with extensive experience in geosciences and in material sciences, to carry out a research project of a major societal impact. The combination of these two sides is essential to carry this fieldwork, to drill boreholes and collect samples necessary for developing a groundwater flow model for this region in Upper Egypt. Using the resources at the Pennsylvania State University, and those in Egypt at the Geological Survey of Egypt, the National Research Center and at Cairo University makes it possible to conduct the field work, the laboratory analysis and to develop the models. The proposal meets INT objectives in supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc12369 none The emergent literature on expertise demonstrates the powerful role of deliberate practice in the development of high-level expertise. Yet the question remains as to whether effects of such practice and dedicated effort are constrained by individual differences in cognitive aptitude, particularly when highly demanding intellectual domains are involved, and how cognitive and motivational factors interact with each other in skill development. The objectives of this study are to (1) describe the intra-individual trajectories of skill development in the game of Go for a two-year period and inter-individual differences (variance) in these developmental trajectories among a group of elementary school children (ages 6-11); (2) determine the predictive efficacy of psychometric measures of cognitive aptitude (fluid ability), as well as initial success levels, intrinsic interest, and deliberate practice, with respect to the rate of skill development; and (3) identify developmental constraints of cognition and motivation on the development of expertise in complex skill knowledge domains. To achieve the above objectives, a longitudinal design with multiple age cohorts will be employed, and structural equation modeling will be used to model the latent growth (rate of skill development), reciprocal relationships among cognitive aptitude, initial success levels, intrinsic interest, and deliberate practice, and their effects on individual differences in the rate of the acquisition of expertise doc12370 none The importance of chloride for the formation of molecular oxygen by higher plants will be investigated in this project. Oxygen, which is required by all respiring life forms, is evolved as a byproduct of the conversion of light energy into chemical energy during photosynthesis. The production of oxygen is therefore among the most important biochemical reactions for the support of life on earth. Oxygen is formed by the oxidation of water at a cluster of manganese ions in Photosystem II, a membrane-bound protein complex. Chloride is required as a cofactor for this catalysis. The approach to be taken in this project will be to characterize the action of anions that inhibit oxygen evolution activity by competing with functional chloride. Inhibitor studies are valuable in pointing out the characteristics of normal function. Using photosystem II-enriched membranes from spinach, the effects of anion inhibitors such as F-, N3-, I-, NO2-, and NO3- on the enzyme kinetics of oxygen evolution activity will be analyzed. These results will be compared with the effects of the anions on the electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectra of the manganese cluster and other redox active centers. Studies will also be undertaken to characterize some of the anions as activators of oxygen evolution along with chloride itself and bromide. These experiments will facilitate the interpretation of the effects of the anion inhibitors at a molecular level. Since this project will be carried out at a primarily undergraduate university, this project will provide beginning researchers with laboratory experience, which is expected to influence their career choices doc12371 none Using an ultrastable low temperature scanning tunneling microscope, Professor Paul S. Weiss of Pennsylvania State University is examining the effects of local chemical environment on the chemistry of adsorbed molecules. With the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, Weiss s group is imaging and analyzing spatially dependent perturbations of the surface electronic structure at adsorbates and surface defects. Using the ability to characterize and control defects in monolayer films, selected molecules are inserted into these defects in order to probe the chemistry of these species in this local environment. Single molecule vibrational spectroscopy of the adsorbed molecule is carried out as well, using inelastic electron tunneling spectroscopy. The detailed interactions of adsorbed molecules can be examined using scanning probe microscopy and inelastic electron tunneling spectroscopy. Professor Weiss and his group at the Pennsylvania State University are using these methods to examine the effect of the local chemical environment on the chemistry of adsorbed molecules. This information is useful for the fundamental insights it provides for a number of important technologies, including molecular electronic devices, micro-sensors, and heterogeneous catalysis doc12372 none This award funded by the Chemistry Division renews support for the Laser Research Facility (LRF) at the Harrison Spectroscopy Laboratory at MIT directed by Professor Michael S. Feld. The LRF is a shared research facility in which physical scientists in chemistry, physics, biology and engineering pursue a broad range of problems using lasers and state-of-the-art spectroscopic techniques. The research is focussed in five areas: multidimensional infrared spectroscopy, high sensitivity spectroscopy for combustion and environmental science, spectroscopy of nanomaterials, proton-coupled electron transfer, and biological spectroscopy. The Laser Research Facility features training for undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students as well as outreach through dissemination of scientific results, topical seminars, and links with local schools. The Laser Research Facility, as a shared facility with state-of-the-art equipment and personnel skilled in its use, enables new research opportunities to be seized upon and carried out quickly, economically, and effectively. It leads to new collaborations and research programs that would not exist in the absence of the facility, sometimes resulting in significant discoveries that are unanticipated doc12364 none This award funds a project that contributes to our understanding of international relations in two broad ways. First, from a theoretical standpoint, it addresses empirically what scholars have understood in principle for decades: that temporal factors such as history, sequence, and perceptions of the future are critical to any complete understanding of international interactions. The investigators work tests a number of central theories of conflict, including propositions linking democratization, economic interdependence, and uncertainty to war. Their proposal emphasizes that the inferences we draw about political dynamics are necessarily conditioned by both the recognition and satisfaction of one s model s assumptions, and on a close correspondence between that model and the process generating the data examined. Neither model assumptions (e.g. that of temporal stability in covariate effects) nor basic substantive facts about the phenomenon of study (such as the repeated nature of conflict in the international arena) are innocuous; different methodological treatments of prior disputes, for example, imply fundamentally different understandings of the effects of those disputes on current conflicts. In this vein, this project examines a series of related issues: 1. Do conflicts beget future conflicts? They develop two hypotheses on this question, one from a rationalist perspective and the other from a model rooted in neorealism and social psychology. They test these competing theories, using innovative techniques that account for the influence of past conflicts between two states (that is, repeated events) on the likelihood of a future dispute. 2. They examine an assertion implicit in all existing quantitative studies of international conflict, that observations are exchangeable. The investigators assert that this assumption is incorrect on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Culture and exogenous shocks clearly affect the probability of conflict. Such heterogeneity is a form of model misspecification, making the conclusions drawn using standard statistical approaches suspect. They use mixture models to address unmeasured heterogeneity, and show how such models conform closely to our understanding of international disputes and provide superior assessments of the causes of those disputes. 3. Finally, they determine whether the effects of certain influences on conflict have varying effects over time. A host of theoretical work suggests that the affect of those factors, which have been shown to foster or inhibit international conflict, vary over time. The substantive implications bear fundamentally on the validity of different theoretical perspectives in international relations, and have substantial policy implications for decision makers in the international arena. Conventional analyses do not and cannot allow for the effects of such factors on disputes to change over time. In sum, the investigators will further improve the study of international relations by paying greater and more explicit attention to the connection between a number of general theoretical expectations regarding time and conflict and the kinds of statistical tools used to model and test those expectations doc12374 none In this project funded by the Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Martin Jarrold of Northwestern University will pursue a program of research to examine the changes in the melting of a material as it decreases in size from a macroscopic to a microscopic scale. The ion-mobility technique will be used to study the melting of metallic cluster ions in the gas phase. Using this method the volume or shape change of a cluster that occurs upon melting will be sensed. Information about the latent heat of fusion will be determined using collision-induced dissociation in an ion mobility cell. Measurements will be performed for a variety of metal and alkali-halide clusters. Very little experimental data is currently available about the change in the behavior of melting materials as the size of the bulk material shrinks to the nanometer regime. This research project will provide insight into the connection between bulk melting and analogous behavior in very small-size systems (fewer than 500 atoms) and should ultimately help explain how to prepare nanometer-sized particles. As such it has implications for turning the synthesis of nanoscale structures from an art into a science and will affect many aspects of nanotechnology doc12375 none The purpose of this research is to examine the geographic patterns of genetic variation in ponderosa pine and limber pine, with the goal of understanding how those geographic patterns were formed. This study takes advantage of unique patterns of inheritance in pines. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is inherited maternally and is dispersed only short distances in seeds. Chloroplast DNA (cpDNA) is inherited paternally, and has the potential to disperse great distances in wind-born pollen. Minimal gene flow of mtDNA allows it to detect genetic differences evolved between glacial refugia. High gene flow of cpDNA enables it to measure the degree of gene flow among populations. Sequence variation of mtDNA and cpDNA will be used to describe the variation across the ranges of both species. Biologists have studied geographic variation of plants and animals for centuries, but advances in molecular techniques have dramatically increased the information that can be collected from natural populations, and advances in the treatment of the data have dramatically increased the information that can be extracted from the data. Analyses of mtDNA will allow us to look far back into history, to see how the waxing and waning of the glaciers pushed forests across the landscape. Analyses of cpDNA will reveal the extent of pollen flow, and allow us to determine whether different populations evolve independently, or whether gene flow binds populations together, as if the distances among them were an illusion doc12376 none The Advanced Materials Program in the Division of Chemistry makes this award to University of California San Diego. With the award, Professor William Trogler will study different methods such as photochemistry, chemical reduction, electro-polymerization and thermal polymerization to prepare new layered polymeric materials based on carbon diselenides, which will be free from elemental selenium. Doped thin films prepared from poly (carbonselenide)s will be studied for electrochemical, electronic conductivity and chemical redox properties. Complexation of cadmium with poly (carbondiselenide) at the surface would produce cadmium selenide nanoparticles and quantum dots with unique optical and electronic properties for potential applications in devices. New polymeric materials based on carbon selenides and cadmium selenide quantum dots with electronic and photonic properties will be prepared. Synthetic methods to prepare poly (carbondiselenide)s free from elemental selenium and physical methods to characterize these materials would provide basic science knowledge for the future development of new electronic and photonic materials. Doped thin and flexible films of carbon diselenides would have unique electronic and photonic properties for applications in devices. The research, in addition, will provide training to graduate students in electronic and photonic materials doc12377 none The field of spatial econometrics is concerned with the use of statistical and econometric techniques to handle spatial effects in multiregional economic models and economic interaction of agents located in space. Proper spatial econometric models need to be developed to empirically validate modern spatial economic theories. Further empirical developments are motivated by the growing importance of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in regional and urban policy analyses. This project develops econometric methodologies for the estimation and testing of complex spatial econometric models including spatial models with limited dependent variables. This project proceeds in several directions. Statistical properties of some popular estimation methods in the literature are often assumed without detailed investigation into possibly distinctive features of a spatial econometric model. While some claims are correct under certain spatial scenarios, they might not be so in others. The existing literature on spatial econometrics has mainly focused on models with small group interaction but models with large group interaction have many interesting potential applications. This project continues the investigation of statistical properties of popular estimators for spatial autoregressive models with large group interaction. Estimators for spatial models with large group interaction have quite different statistical properties from those of models with small group interaction. This project explores alternative models to capture social interaction effects and addresses issues of random sample and possible incomplete spatial interactions in spatial models. In addition, statistical procedures are developed for distinguishing spatial models from social effect models. Spatial models with agents making interactive discrete choices are useful for research on innovation diffusion processes. The estimation of a discrete choice model with spatial interaction can be quite challenging as its likelihood function involves high dimensional integral. The dimension of integration can be as large as the number of sample observations. In order to develop these models to their full capacities, computationally tractable methods must be developed. This project develops estimation methods based on simulation estimation methodologies. The effectiveness of various simulation estimation methods, which include the method of simulated maximum likelihood, the method of simulated EM algorithm, the method of simulated scores, and the Gibbs sampler, are investigated. Statistical properties of those estimators are studied. In addition to estimation, test statistics for spatial correlations and diagnostics are also developed. This project develops computationally tractable generalized method of moments for the estimation of spatial autoregressive models of any finite order with or without the presence of exogenous variables. Asymptotic properties of such estimators are investigated. Dynamic discrete choice models capture various notions of dynamic effects, state dependence, heterogeneity, and spurious correlation in a panel data setting. This project generalizes existing models to incorporate possible contemporaneous and intertemporal spatial interaction effects. Spatial dynamics in discrete choices are of special interest. Special attention is paid to the specification and estimation of such panel data models. Even though the development of econometric methods is the main focus of this project, empirical studies with panel data from developing countries illustrate the useful of the new models and the feasibility of the methodologies doc12378 none Collecting information about the environment, integrating it and responding in accordance with changing conditions are fundamental abilities required of all cells. In eukaryotes, one of the most common strategies for detecting and transmitting information across the plasma membrane depends on heptihelical receptors coupled to heterotrimeric G proteins. Haploid cells of the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae use a receptor coupled G protein both to sense and adapt to mating pheromone secreted by cells of opposite mating type. The G By subunit of the G protein couples to a MAP kinase cascade, the activation of which blocks proliferation and induces the differentiation of vegetative cells into gametes. Yeast cells that are unable to mate eventually resume growth, even when continuously exposed to pheromone. Thus, the mating response pathway of yeast, like analogous signaling systems of higher eukaryotes, can adapt to a continuous signal. We have established that the pheromone responsive G a protein, Gpa1, stimulates adaptation to pheromone, and that most likely it does so by two independent mechanisms. First, it is thought that Gpa1 stimulates an unknown protein to bind and inactivate G aa. Second, there is evidence that Gpa1 inhibits the pheromone responsive MAP kinase, Fus3. The latter mechanism may serve both to inactivate Fus3, and to remove it from the nucleus. It is believed that the movement of MAP kinases into and out of the nucleus is a primary method of signal transduction regulation, but the ways in which nucleocytoplasmic transport is controlled are poorly understood. Recently, a model was posited in which Gpa1 stimulates long-term downregulation of the mating signal by inducing vacuolar localization of Fus3 and the phosphatase that regulates it, Msg5 is proposed. In this investigation, the two most important tenets of this model will be tested. Genetic and biochemical approaches will be used to determine whether Gpa1 stimulates the export of Fus3 from the nucleus during recovery from pheromone treatment, and whether Fus3 is translocated in complex with Msg5. A second goal of the project is to test the possibility that Gpa1 inhibits Fus3 kinase activity, and if so, to determine whether this effect is mediated directly, by allosteric interaction, or indirectly, via Msg5. In addition to testing specific hypotheses, a proven protocol will be used to isolate novel alleles of FUS3 that confer defects in Gpa1-mediated adaptation. The mutant forms of Fus3 will be characterized according to their kinase activity, localization, and ability to associate with Gpa1. The results of these experiments are expected to elucidate the mechanisms by which Gpa1 downregulates Fus3. Because adaptive mechanisms are a fundamental means of regulating signaling pathways, and because G proteins and MAP kinase cascades play important signaling roles in all eukaryotic cells, important precedents are likely to result from this work doc12379 none Dr. Laurence A. Nafie of Syracuse University is funded for his research on small achiral ligands as vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) probes of active sites in metalloproteins by the Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division. Improved experimental measurements and theoretical calculations will be used to complete the developement of VCD as a sensitive probe of metal-ligand active-sites in metalloproteins. New information about the solution-state structure and conformaton of metalloprotein complexes will be generated, and new insight into the (1) low-lying electronic structure of associated metal centers, (2) protein pocket environments in metalloproteins, and (3) coupling of these structural elements to the vibrational modes observed in VCD spectra will be obtained. Such studies will positively impact associated vibrational measurement techniques such as IR absorption and resonance Raman scattering in metalloprotein complexes. The use of various spectroscopies to better understand protein structure and function is a long-standing goal of experimental physical chemistry. The vibrational circular dichroism studies of metalloproteins and associated complexes at Syracuse University will extend our structure-function understanding of metalloproteins, so important to energy metabolism in biological systems doc12380 none Feng This grant provides three-years partial salary support for an Phase I Ph.D. level technician to work for the Watershed Studies Program at Dartmouth College. This program, a collaborative effort between PIs Carl Renshaw and Xiahong Feng, emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the mechanisms of contaminant transport through watersheds. The principal duties of the technician will be to work with the PIs to oversee and manage the technical requirements of the Watershed Studies analytical chemistry laboratories. Specific duties include: the assembly and testing of new instruments for high resolution monitoring of fluid and contaminant transport in heterogeneous media, including snow, soils, and streambeds; assisting the PIs with a series of pilot studies of new methods and ideas related to understanding fluid and contaminant transport through heterogeneous media; assisting the PIs in related collaborations with researchers outside of Dartmouth; and to oversee the operation, maintenance, and student training for our analytical instruments including an ICP-OES, an IC, a TOC analyzer, and isotopic extraction lines doc12381 none This research examines how Muslim activists utilize traditional gender roles and Islamic principles to offer victim-survivors of domestic violence alternatives to the criminal justice system in the Central Asian Republic of Kazakhstan. The central research question guiding the proposed project is: How do Muslim and non-Muslim service providers define and respond to domestic violence, its victims and its perpetrators through gender, religious and ethnic constructs? Theoretical approaches from cultural anthropology addressing the role of agency at the intersection of gender, nation, and religion will frame the analysis of both Muslim and non-Muslim responses to violence. The methodology for the proposed project will combine ethnographic observation with semi-structured interviews and a comparison of domestic violence cases collected from both Muslim and non-Muslim service providers. Interviews with service providers will be used to interpret the specific responses to victims in each case of intervention collected and to elicit information regarding the normative principles associated with particular responses. Ethnographic observation will address both ideal beliefs and actual practices. The project will reveal how certain culture-specific and informal responses are either more, or alternatively, less effective in reaching the goals of providing safety and services to victims of domestic violence. The study will shed light on how these informal interventions are shaped by Muslim women s negotiations between justice, gender and faith doc12382 none Human activities are flooding the biosphere with nitrogen (N), changing the biogeochemistry of terrestrial and aquatic environments. The fate of much of the anthropogenic N load to the biosphere is uncertain because mass balance studies of major watersheds show that most of the added N is not exported to the oceans but is missing, having disappeared from our accounting somewhere within these watersheds. Most of the inorganic N entering streams is in the form of nitrate. Traditionally, nitrate has been thought to flow freely downstream to coastal ecosystems. Recently, however, mass balance analyses for the Mississippi drainage have shown that large quantities of nitrate are lost as water travels through its tributary streams. This conclusion is consistent with earlier findings that smaller streams are most retentive of ammonium. This project will be an intensive, inter-site study of the fate of nitrate in streams. The investigators will evaluate whether streams are indeed important sites of N retention in the landscape and how human disturbances affect that retention. Field 15N-tracer experiments will be used to determine the rates and factors controlling nitrate uptake and retention in relatively pristine streams and in disturbed (agricultural and urban) streams. The experimental results will be used to develop a process-based model of nitrate retention in streams. The results will be extended to larger spatial scales using GIS approaches to predict nitrate retention in large river basins at each of eight study sites. These predictions will be tested with synoptic field measurements of stream nitrate concentrations within each basin. The validated river basin model will be an important land-use planning tool for controlling the N loading of lakes and coastal ecosystems. The work will have broader implications to society by explicitly evaluating the effects of human disturbance on N retention in stream networks, contributing the new knowledge needed for a more sustainable management of watersheds doc12383 none Zhong This grant provides partial support to build a 24-node dual processor PC Cluster for geodynamic modeling in the geophysics group at the University of Colorado. The PC cluster will be used by the PI, Shijie Zhong, and his group to model viscoelastic deformation for Earth s mantle with 3-D mechanical structure (a project currently funded by the NSF), 3-D thermal convection with temperature-and stress-dependent rheology, and other geophysical problems. The PC cluster will benefit geodetic and gravity modeling and seismic modeling in our geophysics group (Professors John Wahr and Mike Ritzwoller). It will also help us in high performance education for undergraduate and graduate students. The PC cluster may have the following features: 24 nodes each with two Pentium III 866 MHz processors (dual processor), 10-100 bps fast Ethernet communication, and 2 Gbytes RAM and 20 Gbytes disk space per node (total 48 Gbytes RAM and 480 Gbytes disk space for the cluster). We will mainly use the 3-D spherical finite element software CitcomS on the proposed cluster. CitcomS is a piece of software that we have developed specifically for studying thermal convection and viscoelastic deformation. CitcomS has been proven highly efficient on parallel computers including PC clusters. CitcomS along with the PC cluster will enable us to tackle various geodynamic problems with adequate accuracy and resolution doc12384 none The Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, supports the research work of Dr. Harry Gray (PI) and Dr. John Richards (co-PI) of the Beckman Institute at Caltech to develop and apply innovative intra-complex electron transfer reactions to examine reaction pathways of redox metalloenzymes, a host of proteins that have significant biological relevance. With this support, a new understanding of the chemistry of metalloenzymes will be forthcoming. The results from the proposed fundamental study will significantly add to the knowledge base that will cut across several disciplines, and will impact markedly into biological and biochemical fields. Students and post-doctoral associates will gain invaluable experience in a variety of experimental techniques and learn insights into interdisciplinary methodologies doc12385 none There are two proposal objectives. The first is to extend development of a technique, which has been developed by the PI, for correlating measurable characteristics in addition reactions of alkenes in order to gain information useful mechanistically and synthetically. The PI has applied the technique to enough systems to establish its viability, but its range is not determined. The technique enables (1) a procedure to determine relative magnitudes of steric and electronic effects in the rate-determining step, (2) a relatively simple way to predict the effects of substituents on reaction rates for synthetic purposes, and (3) a method to choose between alternative proposed reaction mechanisms in some cases. The simple technique to be extended is correlating (plotting) the logs of the relative rates (log krel) of the alkene addition reactions studied versus measurable characteristics of the alkenes, such as ionization potentials (IPs), their highest occupied molecular orbital energies (HOMOs), and in some cases their lowest unoccupied molecular orbital energies (LUMOs). There have been previous mechanistic studies making use of IP vs log krel comparisons, tables, and plots; this technique differs in that it focuses on the separation of steric versus electronic effects, and it requires more data points and substituents with a variety of electronic effects in the alkenes in order to spread out the data points and to facilitate visualization. Many of the reactions studied and to be studied are fundamental reactions, which appear in undergraduate organic chemistry texts. Surprisingly, the relative reactivities of many of these have not been studied at all, and in some cases, erroneous conclusions have been drawn by using too few data points or alkenes bearing substituents without a wide enough range of electronic effects. This project will advance the understanding of these fundamental reactions and benefit chemists using addition reactions in synthesis, because relative reactivity data will enable prediction of site selectivity when more than one double bond is present in the molecule, but it is desired to effect reaction at only one. The second objective is to increase the participation of native under-represented minorities (URMs) in chemistry. The direct influence of the grant will be limited due to its short (one year) duration, but subsequent funding can continue efforts toward the goals doc12386 none Professor Edwin Vedejs in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Michigan is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his development of methods to synthesize chiral molecules with high enantioselectivities using chiral phosphabicyclooctane (PBO) catalysts. One of the applications which will be studied is parallel kinetic resolution (PKR) using a polymer-bound PBO catalyst with a lipase catalyst to give two quasi-enantiomeric products, which can be converted into the two enantiomeric compounds. The synthesis of PBO catalysts with improved stability and selectivity will also be pursued. Many organic compounds exist as mixtures of equal amounts of mirror images, related to each other in much the same way a right hand is related to a left hand. These right-handed and left-handed components are referred to as enantiomers. Many natural products and pharmacologically active substances exist in one enantiomeric form. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Vedejs is developing new phosphorus-containing catalysts which are used to react selectively with either the right-handed or left-handed enantiomer of certain organic compounds. In a process called parallel kinetic resolution, one catalyst reacts selectively with the right-handed component of a compound A to convert it into a product B and another catalyst reacts selectively with the left-handed enantiomer to produce a product C. Compounds B and C are then separated and transformed back to A, thus leading to an efficient separation of the two enantiomers of A. The ability to prepare enantiomerically pure versions of drugs is important for the pharmaceutical industry and would represent a potentially useful application of this methodology doc12387 none This award provides for acquisition of items of equipment to replace equipment presently on loan to North Carolina State University from General Motors, the U.S. Air Force, and NASA. Items to be acquired are a Nd:YAG pumped dye laser, a digital oscilloscope, and ultraviolet lenses for existing digital cameras. They are to be used for studies of interaction between chemical kinetics and fluid dynamics in premixed and diffusion flames doc12388 none It has recently been suggested that intertidal mussel beds and seaweed canopies represent alternate community states on rocky shores in the Gulf of Maine. This theoretically appealing idea hypothesizes that these shoreline habitats are disturbance patch mosaics dominated by either seaweed or mussel communities, and that the community occurring in a given habitat is stochastic and dependent on the size of the original disturbance and recruit availability. Large disturbances are postulated to be dominated by mussel beds and barnacles which have widely dispersed larvae, while smaller disturbances are dominated by seaweeds, which have more limited dispersal. Positive feedbacks are proposed to maintain the stability of these two distinct community types. Dr. Bertness tested this hypothesis on the shores of a tidal estuary in central Maine. These habitats are conducive to exploring this idea because discrete mussel beds and seaweed canopies occur in close proximity and are easily manipulated. The results did not support the alternate stable state hypothesis. Instead, they suggest that the occurrence of mussel beds and seaweed canopies is highly deterministic. Largely independent of the size of artificial disturbances, they found that mussel beds and seaweed canopies rapidly returned to their original community type, but only in the absence of grazers. Seaweed canopies dominate habitats with little water movement, whereas mussel beds dominate habitats with high flows. In the absence of grazers, these communities predictably and rapidly returned to their original state, but with grazers present, neither community showed signs of recovery even after two years. In this project Dr. Bertness and collaborators will examine the robustness and consequences of these findings. In particular, they will: I. Continue monitoring experimental clearings to examine the time course and trajectory of natural disturbances with grazers present and examine the role of consumer refuges in the recovery of naturally occurring mussel beds and seaweed canopies; II. Explore the hypothesis that intertidal mussel and seaweed communities can represent alternate community states, but in a narrower range of intermediate flow habitats; and III. Extend the generality of the findings to coastal, wave-exposed habitats where the idea that mussel beds and seaweed canopies can represent alternate states was initially developed. The notion that natural communities can represent stochastically determined alternate stable states is an intellectually stimulating idea that has important implications for understanding the structure and dynamics of natural systems and for the management of marine and terrestrial ecosystems. Nonetheless, the very existence of alternate stable community states in nature has been difficult to establish. The work outlined in this project will critically evaluate the alternate community stable state hypothesis in the Gulf of Maine rocky intertidal zone, elucidate mechanisms underlying the stochastic and or deterministic nature of alternate stable states in this system and establish the conditions where they are most likely to occur doc12389 none This award in the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research by Professor Vincent L. Pecoraro at the University of Michigan on the synthesis of metallomacrocyclic complexes, which utilize metal ions as part of a cyclic structure surrounding a central metal ion. Goals include the preparation of chiral metallacrown complexes, selective recognition of chiral guest molecules by metallacrown complexes and the modular synthesis of chiral solids. Chiral or asymmetric molecules occur naturally in biology and are also important in new drug synthesis where molecules of different chiralities must be quantatively prepared. This research focuses on creating molecular recognition agents that may be employed in new methods for the separation of chiral molecules doc12390 none Three projects concerning the conditions that lead firms to enter new industries and that cause industries to be concentrated in narrow geographic regions are conducted. The first project analyzes the circumstances that lead employees of existing firms to leave and start competing firms in the same industry. Employees of incumbent firms are assumed to learn useful technical and marketing knowledge in the specialized domains in which they work for their employers, which they exploit in starting their own firms. Better performing firms are assumed to be richer learning environments, leading them to spawn more and better-performing employee startups. Employee startups thus serve to diffuse knowledge to new organizations, thereby increasing the strength of the competitors in an industry. These ideas are tested using data that builds on data collected in a prior NSF project on all entrants into the automobile and laser industries. For each industry, various predictions concerning the types of firms that spawn more employee startups, the market conditions that are conducive to such startups, and the relationship between employee startups and the prior experiences of their founders are tested. The second project analyzes the potential of a rare chance event, namely the location of a few very successful early entrants in the same region, to profoundly affect the evolution of the geographic structure of an industry. This can occur through the employee startup process envisioned in the first project. If employee startups drive regional concentrations, it implies that regional public policy efforts to promote industry concentrations should focus on facilitating employee startups. The importance of employee startups in regional industry concentrations is tested using the data compiled in the first project on the automobile industry, which became heavily concentrated around Detroit, Michigan. The location and heritage of every automobile producer is traced to test the extent to which the success of the Detroit producers was concentrated in firms that either directly or though other employee startups can be traced back to four of the most successful early automobile entrants, Olds Motor Works, Cadillac, Buick, and Ford, all of which located in the Detroit area. The last project explores how learning from experience leads firms to expand the repertoire of activities they conduct within industries. It is conjectured that as firms learn about the core technologies of an industry, they expand their efforts into new activities that are more challenging to master. This perspective can account for patterns in the way firms grow and also why the leaders of industries tend to produce the broadest array of the industry s products. It also implies that older and more qualified firms are the first to diversify into new industry domains created by innovations, which contrasts with recent theories about how innovations can lead to turnover in the leaders of an industry. The theory is tested using the data for the automobile and laser industries and also using data for part of the history of the tire industry developed in the same prior NSF project. The empirical examination probes the kinds of innovations that pose the greatest challenges to an industry s leading firms versus those that reinforce the positions of the industry s leaders doc12391 none The ultimate goal is to build a mathematical model that captures the cross-talk between cell proliferation and cell death signaling pathways. The focus of the proposed work is on the Ras Raf and P13K Akt pathways. Preliminary data will be gathered that investigates and illustrates the cross-talk between these pathways. With an improved understanding and a mathematical description in-hand, an improved base for optimizing cell culture or developing pharmaceutical compounds can be envisioned doc12392 none Professor David H. Waldeck, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his studies of electron transfer in supramolecular systems. Time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy will be used to study photoinduced electron transfer in well-defined supramolecular systems. The studies will explore fundamental issues of solvation and electronic coupling that are important to chemical reactivity and supramolecular chemistry. By studying electron transfer in a rigid unimolecular system which has electron donor and acceptor units on opposite sides of a molecular cleft, the importance of non-bonded contacts between the electron clouds of the donor and acceptor groups and other molecules can be assessed. Studies will be performed for two types of systems, one in which a molecular moiety is covalently bound to the rigid bridge and lies in the cleft and one in which a guest molecule hydrogen bonds to a receptor located on the bridge. Molecular solvation models, the dependence of coupling on electronic character, the transition from weak to strong coupling, and the influence of nuclear motion will be explored. Electron transfer between distinct molecular units is the primary event in many natural (e.g., photosynthesis) and technological (e.g., corrosion) processes. In addition, electron transfer is a relatively simple chemical transformation amenable to rigorous and quantitative study. On a broader level, electron transfer and charge displacement are central elements of most chemical reactions. Nonetheless, our understanding of how the two electron clouds of non-bonded molecules interact with one another, an essential element of any chemical transformation, is not well understood. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor David H. Waldeck, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, is carrying out studies designed to investigate and quantify fundamental aspects of electron transfer reactions that involve electron tunneling through non-bonded contacts doc12393 none This collaborative infrastructure project continues the development of a comprehensive database for the analysis of public policy processes in the United States, and establishes a truly interactive application system for the delivery of that database to public policy scholars, students, and policy analysts. The existing database is centered on lawmaking activity; the current project extends the work to the presidency, the executive branch, the courts, and interest group activity. The database links several independent data sets via a system of policy content codes that are constructed to be consistent across time. The approach avoids the pitfalls of relying on data collected for purposes other than policy monitoring. Numerous other variables are collected in addition to the policy content of the cases, adding to the richness and flexibility of these data sets. Data currently in the system include Congressional hearings ( - ), Public Laws ( - ), Congressional Quarterly entries ( - (, all statutes enacted ( - ), a sample of stories in the New York Times ( - ), and Congressional Budget Authority ( - ). The researchers add bills introduced in Congress (currently being integrated), legislative floor activity, executive orders and other measures of presidential activity, interest group activity tabulated in the Encyclopedia of Associations, and Supreme Court decisions. The investigators promise to explore other potential sources that contribute to the quantitative monitoring of public policy in the United States. The resulting system is unique as a research tool because of its comprehensiveness and because of its capacity to allow researchers to analyze policy processes in ways that heretofore have not been possible. These facets continue to improve the ability of social scientists to study policy dynamics and link those dynamics to the process of democratic governance---representation, public decision-making, political communication, and the operation of democratic institutions doc12394 none Dr. Arthur L. Utz of Tufts University is funded for his research on state-resolved dynamics of gas-surface reactions by the Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division. The gas-surface reaction dynamics of model reaction systems will be studied to test theoretical predictions and establish mechanistic insights into hetergeneous chemistry. Four specific areas will be examined: (1) Vibrational mode specificity in gas-surface reactivity will be examined because statistical models are inadequate. Molecular dissociation on Ni(100) (e.g., of methane) will be examined to find mode-specific dissociation probabliities in reagents and to establish predictively-useful trends. (2) Orientation, reorientation and stereochemical effects will be studied by using polarized laser light to anisotropically excite the reagent molecules. (3) Trapping-mediated reaction channels for internally excited molecules will be used to examine how internally excited molecules reactively encounter surfaces in molecular beam reflectivity experiments. (4) Bond-selective chemistry will focus on the examination of methane, trideutero-methane, and HOD dissociation on Ni(100) and the influence of vibrational mode excitation on the reaction products. Heterogeneous chemistry has a tremendous economic and technological impact in the chemical industry. The gas-surface reaction studies at Tufts University will provide means for improving our understanding of the mechanistic role of internal vibrations and internal energy on gas-surface reactions. Such reactions are commonly encountered in bulk chemical production, in pollution control devices, etc. Lasers will be used to selectively excite such internal vibrations, and their utility in controlling reaction chemistries will be extended doc12395 none Thomas Janoski University of Kentucky Naturalization rates vary considerably from country to country with rates in the United States and Australia being high, the United Kingdom and France being moderate, and Japan and Germany being very low. Naturalization rates not only measure the number of new citizens in a society, but also measure the extent to which states and societies formally integrate minorities into their realm. As such, naturalization rules and rates will have a large influence on: the quality of life of immigrants and their children, on ethnic conflict and social solidarity, on attempts at social control, and on the recent efforts at transnational unification (e.g., European Union citizenship and the possibility of North American citizenship). Given the importance of these issues, why do some countries willingly integrate and others block the transformation of strangers into full-fledged citizens? This proposal uses a political economy and institutional framework to explain naturalization rates in 20 countries, and collects new data on naturalization rates and innovative explanatory variables. Naturalization rates are explained using three methodological approaches-comparative historical analysis of law and institutions; four case studies; and pooled time series analysis. First, from a comparative historical analysis of law and institutions, it is hypothesized that experiences with colonization and settlement cause high naturalization rates, while non-colonizers have no particular reason to integrate strangers into their country. The main explanatory factors are: colonization from - , indigenous population decline from - as a measure of settler country labor supply, and a barrier index to naturalization constructed from national laws. Cross-national regression procedure will be used to explain a major part of the variance in naturalization rates from -95. Controls are used for economic, demographic, cultural, and other variables, and arguments are made against the impact of immigration itself as an explanation of naturalization. Second, in four case studies using Millsean methods, pairs of culturally similar countries are examined to identify the institutional mechanisms that affected multi-cultural approaches to naturalization. In a comparison of the primary colonizers of France and the UK, the effects of the method of colonization and the elite decisions to pursue citizenship for a larger empire are examined. A documentary and time-series analysis of Germany and Austria show Germany as a non-colonizer developed into a mono-cultural empire hostile to naturalization and Austria as a European colonizer transformed itself into a multi-cultural empire that was more friendly to naturalization. Another documentary analysis of culturally similar countries shows that the Netherlands, as an early and extensive colonizer, has a much more liberal naturalization regime than Belgium, which was a late and reluctant colonizer. And the final comparative case study is of three Anglo-Saxon settler countries where the impact of differential treatment of indigenous peoples on naturalization will be examined. Throughout the case studies, the emphasis is on demonstrating the how elites made open or restrictive decisions about naturalization. Third, in a pooled time-series and cross-sectional analysis, the unit of analysis is the yearcountry (i.e., 20 countries from -95 with about 500 cases). This allows a year-to-year analysis of political party power, unemployment, demographic changes, and other factors that are purported to influence naturalization. Zolberg s approaches to immigration) and will challenge previous economic, demographic and cultural theories of naturalization. It embeds cultural institutions within a larger political economy framework of colonization and emphasizes that theories of naturalization are clearly distinct from theories of immigration doc12396 none SES- Samuel Cohn Texas A however, restaurants and barber shops have very low average firm size, while hotels are large and subject to chain and multinational ownership. Data from the Brazilian census has already been collected and analyzed to develop an econometric model of employment in these sectors. This model allows for the statistical control of economic factors such as market size, and the estimation of the role of key costs such as rent, taxes and wages. The residuals from the econometric model have been used to identify a set of states with unusually high or low levels of service sector activity net of market factors. National Science Foundation funds will be used to support a year of fieldwork to allow for qualitative investigation of the cases selected in this manner. The principal investigator will perform a sustained contrast of three northeastern states. One, Sergipe, has an extraordinarily high level of employment n barber beauty shops, and has maintained this level since . One, Bahia, saw a resurgence of service sector activity in the s. The third, Alagoas, is average in all respects. The study will also do smaller analyses of residual employment in other states. These include a) contrasting high and low levels of service employment in two artificially-created planned capitols, Campo Grande and Brasilia, b) the slow decline of services in both of Brazil s major metropoli (Sdo Paulo and Rio de Janeiro), and c) the marked decline in residual service employment in otherwise prosperous Rio Grande do Sul. Interviews of businessmen and policy makers will be combined with relevant documentary and archival sources. The methodology of the qualitative fieldwork will resemble that standard sociological works on Brazilian economic development such as those of Peter Evans. However, this study can link those findings to econometric results from a time-series cross-section analysis providing more rigorous tests of the impacts of the phenomena observed in the field. The quantitative and qualitative analysis tests theories drawn from neoclassical economics, the orthodox state-led development literature, political economy, the new network-based economic sociology, the informal economy literature and the ethnic enclave literature. A goal of the project however is to go beyond these theories and produce a new decision-theory-like account that emphasizes the unanticipated developmental consequences of policies designed for other purposes doc12397 none Theoretical modeling of subduction zone provides an essential complement to observational and experimental approaches and a fundamental tool to test conceptual models of the dynamics of convergent margins. Despite large advances in numerical techniques and increasing computational capacity, major obstacles exist in the road to full integration of accurate and consistent modeling into subduction zone research. Large uncertainties about the dynamical controls on subduction initiation and evolution remain. This is in part due to important assumptions that have to be made about the rheology and composition of the slab and mantle wedge, and the dynamics of the seismogenic zone and overriding plate. In addition, we lack a systematic investigation into the influence of various numerical techniques or rigorous solution tests. An overview of recently published results shows that large discrepancies remain in our understanding of the thermal structure of subduction zones. Major tasks for the modeling community are to benchmark and evaluate existing numerical approaches, to guide the use of increasing computer power and improving numerical techniques, and to further the integration of numerical modeling into experimental and observational studies. A focused, technical workshop held at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI addresses these issues. The workshop format is collaborative and hands-on, with an audience consisting of subduction zone modelers, experts from observational and experimental disciplines, and a number of graduate students. To maximize discussion, the workshop is limited to 25 participants and has limited time allocated to formal presentations. The goals of the workshop include: 1) a numerical benchmark of standard cases; 2) an overview of technical improvements and limitations; 3) a survey of the parameters that are fundamental in controlling the dynamics of the slab-wedge environment; 4) a set of base models for use in the wider community; 5) information exchange and knowledge transfer between specialties; 6) increased collaboration, including code and resource sharing doc12398 none will be tested on small molecules, and then applied to study optical properties and photoinduced catalysis on titanium dioxide surfaces. The first principles prediction of technologically important material properties is a longstanding goal. The combination of efficient theoretical chemistry techniques and implementation on computer clusters or parallel computers finally can bring this elusive goal within reach. The outcomes of this research are anticipated to contribute to new knowledge of quantum dots, which have technological promise for use as optical switches. As well, studies of titanium dioxide photocatalysis are expected to improve understanding of important applications for this material that include harmful microorganism destruction, cancer cell inactivation, and oil spill cleanup doc12399 none While recent studies have found that investors common stock selling behavior is heavily influenced by their reluctance to accept losses (which has been labeled the disposition effect), little is known about what influences the buying decisions of investors. We speculate that the buying behavior of individual investors is largely determined by that which catches investors attention. Thus investors, unlike agents in most academic models, treat buying and selling asymmetrically. This study is an empirical test of the proposition that buying is driven by attention. To test whether buying behavior is driven by attention, the research will use four separate proprietary datasets. Combined, these datasets include month-end common stock positions and trading records for over 100,000 households from to . These data are compiled from three different brokerage firms: a large discount broker, a large retail broker, and a smaller broker that attracts primarily active traders. To test whether buying behavior is driven by attention, the research will analyze three types of information that are likely to catch the attention of the average investor: large price movements, the announcement of quarterly earnings, and news coverage. The research provides a simple prediction: that buying will increase around these information events regardless of the value of the information. Thus, we anticipate increased buying activity following large price increases and decreases, good and bad earnings announcements, and good and bad press coverage. The research fits neatly into a stream of recent studies that analyze the behavior of individual investors. In combination with current and planned studies of investor behavior, this research serves to enhance our understanding of investor behavior and financial markets, improve investor education, and inform policy decisions doc12400 none Hageman This grant, made through the Major Research Instrumentation Program, supports the acquisition of an Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope (FEI-Phillips XL30 ESEM-TMP) and Energy Dispersive Spectrometer (EDAX CDU-UT), to be housed in the Electron Microscopy Laboratory of the College of Arts and Sciences at Appalachian State University. This instrument will significantly improve and expand research opportunities for faculty and undergraduate students in Earth Science at Appalachian State, other departments in the College, and the regional community. The new ESEM will provide the following new capabilities not currently available from our 16 year old conventional Hitachi S570 SEM. (1) imaging of uncoated specimens; (2) elemental analysis and mapping with digital stage; (3) imaging of hydrated specimens; (4) wide angle imaging of large specimens; (5) imaging and analysis under cathode luminescence; (6) high magnification in both secondary and backscattered electron modes; (7) production, storage, and network distribution of high resolution digital image files for publication and image analysis; (8) windows driven operation for easy access by a diverse user population. The ESEM will support five primary researchers in the Department of Geology, who have had previous NSF support. Initial projects supported by this proposal include (1) Bryozoan Colonial Growth Habits: Macroevolutionary Patterns in Morpho-ecospace (S.J. Hageman); (2) Ultra High Pressure and Temperature Metamorphic Rocks (R.N. Abbott); (3) Climatic Variation and Source of Glacio-marine Sediments (E.A. Cowan); (4) Eastern North American Cretaceous Bryozoans (F.K. McKinney); and (5) Cement Stratigraphy in Carbonate Mud-mounds (B.C. Schreiber). The instrument will also be used in research and course work by faculty, graduate students and undergraduates in the departments of Geology, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Anthropology and Criminal Justice. This instrument will provide an excellent focus for community outreach because its products are visual, tangible and derived from state-of-the-art technology doc12401 none The increasing involvement of stakeholder groups in solving spatial decision problems has created a need for information technology capable of supporting collaborative spatial decision making. The goal of this project is to develop a better understanding of how groups of stakeholders may use geospatial technology to enhance collaborative approach to problem solving and decision making. Such knowledge is necessary in order to develop geospatial technology support tools capable of accommodating diverse participants involved in solving location-based decision problems. This project will use a field experiment approach to study the dynamics of collaborative work and decision making supported by geospatial information technology. The experiment will involve true stakeholders invited to engage in a realistic decision problem of water management planning in the Boise River basin in southwestern Idaho. Two groups each with 10 participants will be used: the control group will be exposed only to traditional support tools such as traditional maps, whereas the experimental group will be exposed to collaborative decision support tools such as geographic information system (GIS) -based maps and three-dimensional visualizations. The human-computer-human interaction process during the experiment will be captured using professional video cameras. A tested social-behavioral science technique called interaction coding will be employed to compile data logs from the experiment and exploratory sequential data analysis techniques will be used to analyze the data. Parametric and non-parametric statistical procedures will be used to test a number of research hypotheses. Dealing with location-based decision problems in an open manner is becoming more important as stakeholder participation increases in land use, natural resource, and environmental decision making. The primary rationale for enhanced stakeholder participation in environmental decision making is based on the democratic maxim that those affected by a decision should participate directly in the decision making process. The project results are expected to expand knowledge about the impacts of geospatial information technology on collaborative decision processes engaging diverse groups of stakeholders. Moreover, the project will help develop and share a better understanding of the integration needs for information technology involving geographic information systems, decision models, and group collaboration support tools doc12402 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Martha Macri and her colleagues will conduct two years of linguistic research on the J. P. Harrington Database Project. The goal is to increase access to the linguistic and ethnographic notes on Native California languages collected by J. P. Harrington during the first half of the twentieth century. The people Harrington interviewed were often among the last remaining speakers of their languages. His notes thus represent knowledge that would otherwise be lost. Over half of an estimated 500,000 pages of Harrington s notes are on California languages. Researchers will begin by transcribing these. They will then code the materials for linguistic and ethnographic categories that maximize their usefulness to linguists, biologists, geographers, historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and also to Native American communities. The transcribed and coded notes will be available through a database on the web. It will be possible to search these notes by language (e.g., several Native California languages), semantic domain (kin terms, toponyms, flora, etc.), and other cultural and linguistic categories. The database will also generate a running text of Harrington s notes as well as lexicons for each language with Harrington s English and Spanish glosses. Each of the world s languages represents a unique solution to the expression of human cognition and to the variety of ways in which humans categorize and interact with their social and physical environment. Most of the Native California languages that Harrington recorded are no longer spoken, or now have only a few elderly speakers. Harrington s materials are thus cherished by Native American communities engaged in language and cultural revitalization and valuable to scholars from a wide variety of disciplines. The J. P. Harrington Database Project will increase access for Native American communities as well as linguists and other scholars to these materials doc12403 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials research will allow Brandeis University to acquire a light scattering spectrometer that will be the keystone f a facility to perform both static and dynamic light scattering measurements. The facility will be multi-user and multi-disciplinary, as well as fulfill research and educational needs. The facility will consist of an ALV light scattering spectrometer ($80k), a homemade static light scattering spectrometer (built in ), and a Brookhaven differential refractometer (purchased in ). Currently there are no general-purpose light scattering spectrometers at Brandeis. The equipment will be used as a non-invasive probe to study complex fluids, such as liquid crystals, colloidal suspensions, and protein crystallization in the Physics department. Several members of Biology and Chemistry departments will have access to this facility as secondary users. Their research goals are to study protein complexes. The equipment be used to train physics graduate and undergraduate students and biology graduate students in light scattering, an important technique in its own right, which additionally shares many principles with other techniques such as neutron and x-ray scattering. Students will take either a six or nine week intensive training course in light scattering that will integrate pedagogical instruction with research experience. Instructional exercises will be developed to elucidate both physical phenomena of macromolecules and to provide training in light scattering techniques. This combination will give students a greater understanding of complex fluids in general and will enable them to participate in research, at Brandeis with a deeper understanding of scattering techniques and principles. Finally, this will be the only research-grade general-purpose light scattering instrument at Brandeis University. Thus establishment of this facility will have a large impact on research program of the investigators, as well as serve as a resource for the entire campus. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials research will allow Brandeis University to acquire a light scattering spectrometer that will be the keystone f a facility to perform both static and dynamic light scattering measurements. The facility will be multi-user and multi-disciplinary, as well as fulfill research and educational needs. The equipment will be used as a non-invasive probe to study complex fluids, such as liquid crystals, colloidal suspensions, protein crystallization, and protein complexes. The equipment be used to train physics graduate and undergraduate students and biology graduate students in light scattering, an important technique in its own right, which additionally shares many principles with other techniques such as neutron and x-ray scattering. Students will take either a six or nine week intensive training course in light scattering that will integrate pedagogical instruction with research experience. Instructional exercises will be developed to elucidate both physical phenomena of macromolecules and to provide training in light scattering techniques. This combination will give students a greater understanding of complex fluids in general, and will enable them to participate in research, at Brandeis with a deeper understanding of scattering techniques and principles. Finally, this will be the only research-grade general-purpose light scattering instrument at Brandeis University. Thus establishment of this facility will have a large impact on research program of the investigators, as well as serve as a resource for the entire campus doc12404 none This project will study a number of risk management problems in finance requiring efficient computation of optimal trading decisions that are designed to account for various frictions found in modern markets. Some examples of common frictions investigated here are: uncertain volatility, influence of competition for resources, and trading restrictions. The results will be implemented as software that can be downloaded, tested and implemented by interested parties, which may range from large trading institutions to individuals with pension funds. The spectacular growth in the size of the derivatives market over the last twenty-five years (currently it has a turnover of trillions of dollars in the US), plus recent infamous (and equally spectacular) risk (mis)management disasters, such as the Barings, Orange County and Long Term Capital Management fiascos, have created an urgent need for smart mathematical and computational models to quantify the respective risks and rewards of such investments. This project aims to build on the methodology introduced by Black, Scholes and Merton, to take into account the fluctuating nature of market volatility and other frictions. The main mathematical tools are in the realm of stochastic control and asymptotic analysis doc12405 none The Chemistry Division will support Virginia Polytechnic Institute s proposed expansion of the use of their Mobile Chemistry Laboratory (MCL) that had received initial startup support from NSF and various other private, public, and corporate funding sources. Specifically, their planned program will expand the use of their MCL into more rural regions of southwestern Virginia and will establish two additional weeks of teacher workshops. In addition, a kit-based program will be developed for those schools that have adequate lab space but limited budgets and equipment. They plan to continue to develop the curriculum they initiated this past year. There will be increased efforts in the recruiting of teachers from under-represented areas doc12406 none Dewers Particle size distribution of aggregates influences many material properties, such as strength, friction, porosity and permeability. Grain-size distributions of fine-grained sediment yield important paleoclimate proxy data. Temporal and spatial resolution of particle size distributions can be used to infer growth and nucleation rates in crystallite suspensions, and sediment sorption properties, as well as aridity and wind strength from sediment cores to name a few applications. In contrast to more traditional methods, e.g. sieving, settling, or optical microscopy, laser light scattering has emerged as an efficient, accurate, and rapid method for particle size and volume distribution of aggregates and suspensions. We propose to purchase a state-of-the-art Coulter LS230 Laser Particle Analyzer, which has an unparalleled sensitivity over the range of 0.04 to microns in a single analysis. We will use two different sample introduction modules, allowing measurements in water, organic solvents, oils, or as a dry aggregate. This instrument will be used in sedimentological, geochemical, rock mechanics, and reservoir characterization studies that include: strength and permeability evolution in fault gouge, microbial influenced nucleation and growth of carbonate and sulfate minerals, calibration and quantification of grain-size distribution information from borehole image well logs, climate interpretations of lacustrine sediment and loessite, and sanding potential of seafloor boreholes among others doc12407 none Allen Hunter, Department of Chemistry, Youngstown State University, is supported jointly by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program (Division of Chemistry) and the Solid State Chemistry and Polymers Program (Division of Materials Research) for his research in isonitrile-bridged organometallic materials. Rigid rod building blocks,-[-trans-Mo(PR3)4(mu-CN-arene-NC)]-, will be condensed with other monomers or oligomers to produce well-defined one dimensional structures and then linked by central metal atoms ions to produce star-shaped nanostructured materials. Structural and electronic properties can be finely tuned by varying the building block components. Structure property relationships will be explored in these materials, particularly the number of arms, the arm length, the degree of conjugation down the arms, and the nature of the metal vertex. Research at Undergraduate Institutions (RUI) enables undergraduates to gain valuable experience in hands-on chemistry and materials science. This project also involves local high school teachers in research. In addition to these educational benefits, the organometallic polymers have potential applications in materials science doc12408 none Nelson This grant provides partial support for the cost of acquiring two liquid scintillation counters and a benzene synthesis system [sample preparation] for isotopic studies at Brigham Young University [BYU]. The PI, Stephen Nelson, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geology. He and his colleagues in the department, Alan Mayo, Ron Harris, and Matthew Mabey, their students and collaborators will use this facility in support of hydrology, paleoclimate, and tectonic studies. In addition to NSF, BYU is sharing 40% of the cost for this system. The counters and sample preparation facilities will be housed in a laboratory that already contains vacuum lines and a Finnigan Deltaplus isotope ratio mass spectrometer for stable isotope analysis. These counters will be used primarily to make measurements of 14C and 3H activity in water and 14C activity in organic matter and carbonate materials. One low level and one ultra low level counter will be acquired to facilitate both routine counting as well as counting of low activity materials. Electrolysis cells will be constructed to permit 3H enrichment where necessary. A majority of the work conducted in this facility will support studies of ground water systems, paleoclimate studies, estimates tectonic uplift rates, and fault slip rate investigations by BYU geologists and their collaborators. Other departments at BYU provided substantial support for the facility, and it is anticipated that this facility will permit faculty and students from other departments to expand and augment their research capabilities. The facility will be unique to Utah and it is expected to support additional collaborative studies in the geosciences with colleagues in Utah and nearby states doc12409 none The research described in this proposal is directed to understanding the link between the contractual arrangements used to finance new firms and their growth and the volatility of the aggregate economy. The ability to attract external financing is crucial for the creation of new firms and the expansion of existing ones. For that reason the nature of the financial arrangements between lenders and firms has important consequences for the growth of firms. It also can have important consequences for the propagation of aggregate shocks and the volatility of the aggregate economy. This research project has three objectives. First, it studies how contractual problems affect the optimal financing of new firms and their subsequent growth. Second, it evaluates the welfare costs of these contractual problems that result because they induce an inefficient allocation of resources and studies the type of policies or institutions that alleviate these welfare consequences. Third, it studies how contractual problems affect the propagation of new investment opportunities in the macro-economy. To pursue these objectives, the project integrates the two main approaches to studying the impact of financial frictions on the investment behavior of firms. The first approach focuses on the primary sources of frictions that prevent market completeness, and the implications of this incompleteness for the behavior of individual firms. It fails to consider, however, issues of macroeconomic relevance. The second approach is concerned with the aggregate implications of market incompleteness. Given its aggregate focus, in this approach market incomplete-ness is exogenously imposed, rather than derived endogenously. Because the properties of these models depend critically on the type of financial frictions assumed, it is desirable that these frictions are endogenously generated in the model rather than imposed by assumption. This is especially important for the design of policies and institutional arrangements aimed at improving the inefficiencies generated by limited contractability. The project integrates the existing approaches to the study of financial market incompleteness, by developing a general equilibrium model with a solid micro-foundation for the incompleteness. Entrepreneurs have the ability to run an entrepreneurial project over a long time but need external funds to finance investment. Entering into a long-term relationship with a lender through an optimal long-term contract solves the financing problem. Market incompleteness derives from the ability of the entrepreneur to repudiate the financial contract (i.e. from the limited enforceability of contracts). By integrating the existing approaches to the study of market incompleteness, the model is able to address theoretical and policy-related questions. The general equilibrium structure facilitates the evaluation of the welfare costs of market incompleteness, while the micro-foundations permit the analysis of the type of policies or institutional arrangements that can support a superior allocation of resources doc12410 none In this project funded by the Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Hai-Lung Dai of the University of Pennsylvania will pursue a program of research on the dynamics of highly vibrationally excited molecules. This project will extend work on the detailed relaxation mechanisms and rates of very highly excited systems to low temperature and will investigate the underlying principles governing inelastic rovibrational processes across a broader kinetic energy regime of the same high vibrational level. A second set of experiments uses van der Waals complexes to study energy transfer from a highly vibrationally excited molecule to a nearby cold molecule to gain insight into different coupling mechanisms, super collisions, and energy transfer in molecules excited at fixed energies. Techniques such as kinetic quantum beat spectroscopy and time-resolved Fourier transform emission spectroscopy will be used to correlate the inter- and intra-molecular interactions for both types of experiment. This work will assist in understanding a wide variety of collisional phenomena, such as nucleation and low temperature reaction dynamics. As such, this work has relevance to societal concerns such as more efficient combustion of fuels and problems in atmospheric chemistry such as the formation and destruction of the Arctic and Antarctic ozone holes doc12411 none Professor Amy Howell in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Connecticut is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for her research into the synthesis and reactivity of 2,3-dimethylenoxetanes and 1,5-dioxaspiro[3.2]hexanes. The conversion of 2,3-dimethylenoxetanes into highly functionalized ketones and enynols will be studied and these key intermediates will be used in syntheses of rubifolide, a furan cembrane, and a new approach to enediynes. The 1,5-dioxaspiro[3.2]hexanes will be utilized as intermediates in the preparation of nucleoside analogs. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Program, Professor Howell is developing novel methods by which certain highly strained organic compounds can be further converted to nucleoside analogs and other natural products. The nucleoside analogs may have potential applications as new chemotherapeutic agents doc12412 none Technical changes to agriculture in Africa have long been promoted and introduced with the aim of improving food security in the region. The results of recent research on the relationship between technology transfer and agricultural production in Africa south of the Sahara are, however, inconsistent at best, indicating the need for new conceptualizations of the problem. This project examines changes to rice production systems in Ivory Coast in the context of the neo-liberal reforms of the s in order to determine the conditions under which rice growers have responded positively to the new policies. The research will test three main hypotheses:(1) that the reforms have had little impact on national rice output but that they have affected regional market orientation of rice production; (2) that farmer-led innovations can be expected in commercial rice systems but that the macro-level economic reforms will have had little impact on the regional rice cropping patterns; and (3) where small-scale milling operations provide a market outlet for rice producers, positive farmer response to the reforms will be greatest. The research will include a mix of techniques involving both qualitative and quantitative information. The methods to conduct this study include establishing accurate information on current rice production and area from data provided by local extension service offices throughout the country and interviews with local extension workers responsible for rice, rice farmers, millers, and traders. From these updated data, the project will use survey research techniques in selected villages using a farming systems approach and in selected urban milling and marketing centers using a commodity chain analysis approach. This project will contribute to debates on the role of technology transfer and market incentives to stimulate production, and in particular on the potential role of intermediary regional commodity chains in the development and diffusion of agricultural technology. This research will be of value to social scientists, applied agricultural researcher, and policymakers doc12413 none This project will apply the theory of incentives and mechanism design to various models in micro credit, conflict, and multi-community models. 1. Micro credit. The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh has achieved high repayment rates from small uncollateralized loans. The Grarneen Bank s lending has two distinctive features: joint liability and cross reporting. The microfinance literature has largely neglected the cross reporting aspect, although it appears to be crucial to Grameen s success. The project tries to understand the role of both joint liability and cross reporting. It, is commonly assumed that the villagers share information not available to the bank, and that the villagers can enforce cooperative behavior using social sanctions. The mechanism design approach makes it possible to make precise assumptions about the agents ability to side contract with each other, their shared and their private information, etc. Ashok Rai (Harvard University) is a collaborator on this part of the project. 2. Conflict. The Mechanism Design literature usually makes strong assumptions regarding the existence of a third party (such as a court) which enforces the rules of the game . In contrast, this project is interested in models where there is no such pow-erful third party and in particular institutions for the prevention of conflict. Suppose there are two nations, and each has private information about its own propensity to arm. The Bayesian Nash equilibrium may be very inefficient, since each state may arm itself in self defense, even though the probability that any state actually desires a conflict is vanishingly small. What kind of institution will solve this dilemma ? One particular institution world be an arms control agreement, which in the absence of a third party is essentially cheap talk. Other institutions might involve a mediator. Sandeep Baliga (Northwestern University) is a collaborator on this part, of the project. 3. Multi-district models. The Mechanism Design literature usually assumes that there is one monopolistic mechanism designer. In contrast, this project is interested in models with competing mechanism designers. For example, in a Tiebout type model, many communities decide on local taxes and local public goods production. These decisions will in general have externalities on members of other districts. What kind of institutions will be efficient? This project addresses such issues as the equilibrium selection of a voting mechanism or a tax system. It, is particularly interesting to allow migration among different districts, as in the original Tiebout model, since it amounts to a very direct competition between the local mechanism designers . Christian Schultz (University of Copenhagen) is a collaborator on this part of the project doc12414 none Indole-3-acetic acid is found in plants in both free and conjugated form. One of the less well-studied forms of conjugated IAA are a unique class of proteins where IAA is a prosthetic group attached directly to the protein structure. An increasing body of evidence suggests that regulation of protein stability is important to auxin function, thus making these modified proteins of particular interest. The first gene for a protein covalently modified by IAA was recently cloned from bean and found to be related to proteins present in several other plant species, including the model plant Arabadopsis. Four lines of study will further characterize these proteins in plants. 1) Experiments will define, on the molecular level, the expression, regulation and function of the bean 35 kDa protein. 2) Previous studies which focused on bean will be extended, starting with cloning the respective genes, to related proteins from species more amenable to genetic manipulation, such as Arabadopsis and Medicago. 3) IAA-protein gene expression will be analyzed at the tissue and subcellular level using reporter genes and immunological techniques. 4) The attachment of IAA to the proteins will be analyzed using complex liquid chromatography mass spectrometry methods that will allow rapid identification of this class of modified proteins. These studies should provide the biochemical, tissue and molecular information necessary to further understand the possible roles of this unique class of modified proteins in relation to phytohormone regulation doc12415 none The Electronic Field Guide Project will provide a web-accessible, distributed object-oriented database for the identification of biological specimens and also electronic methods to record field observations. The system uses Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), either alone or in conjunction with GPS units. The data management and software technologies are extensible and can be used by other developers for new applications or to add value. The user interface is designed for communicating with humans, but the rest of the software is machine-based. The components will enable users to discover and integrate biodiversity data anywhere on the internet, convey information about quality of the data, and deal with data that may be sensitive. Using XML, the components provide access to a wide variety of biological collection data sources, as well as to much government and museum data sources. Three communities of user partners are involved in the development and testing, including field biologists, naturalist educators, and community science projects doc12416 none Utilitarianism suggests that societies should be interested in maximizing the sum of individual utilities. Modern objections to utilitarianism are that it implies indifference to randomization. When society is indifferent between giving an indivisible good to one of several individuals, nothing is gained by choosing the recipient by a lottery. Nonlinear alternatives to utilitarianism can solve this problem. Such alternatives use what is technically labeled as quasi concave social welfare functions. Here we suggest another difference between utilitarianism and these alternatives. Rather than starting with situations of social indifference, we concentrate on situations of extreme inequality, and investigate the implications utilitarian and non-utilitarian have in these situations. Suppose society is facing trade-off between reducing the number of those who are worse off and improving their overall position. Both objects are desired, but often one comes at the cost of the other. Our theoretical conjecture is that the more society prefers randomization in symmetric situations, the more it will prefer improving the position of those who are at the bottom at the cost of increasing their numbers. In the less theoretical part of this research, we would like to establish the following claim: free, liberal societies move in the same direction as the one suggested by quasi concave preferences. Charity Suppose society is composed of two groups, `haves and `have nots. We have a given budget to help the second group, and the choice is between two policies: Individual help that takes individuals from the second group and transfer them into the first, and community help, where the money is spent on improving facilities for the second group. We can also choose any feasible combination of the two. Increasing the amount spent on community help means less money for individual help, therefore higher probability of being at the lower group, but the welfare of all individuals of this group is increasing with the money spent on such programs. We predict that a quasi-concave society will prefer the community to the individual help. Cruel and Unusual Punishment Harsh punishment is more deterring than mild one. By using such punishments we can reduce the number of people who will be punished, and improve the position of those who do not commit crimes, at the cost of reducing the welfare of those who are at the bottom. Our conjecture is that the utilitarian society will use harsher penalties than the quasi-concave society. Safety and Prevention Sometimes, quasi-concave societies choose outcomes whose optimality is questionable. Suppose society can choose between improving public safety, or spending money on saving people who had an accident. Suppose further that more people could be saved the first way. It follows from our conjectures that for a given budget, the quasi concave society will spend less on prevention and more on saving people after an accident happens than the utilitarian society doc12417 none This research will test theories that explain why rates of violent crime vary over time and space, including theories that emphasize economic conditions, criminal justice practices, and changes in demography. Although considerable criminological research, adopting either a cross-sectional or time-series approach, has been conducted to evaluate the importance of such characteristics in explaining violent crime, the understanding of these key factors remains limited. The most important factors affecting variation in homicide rates over time appear to differ from those affecting spatial variation. The principal investigator will explore these disparities by combining spatial and temporal information on homicide rates from to for all counties with a population of at least 100,000. This research will provide a more precise gauge for law enforcement agencies and the public in predicting future trends in homicide levels and may suggest approaches to crime fighting doc12418 none The project seeks to establish effective methods and infrastructure to transform an individual long-term ecological research (LTER) site data into a shared resource that would be accessible to a wide range of researchers. The scientific community needs to transform data management into information management practices that incorporate interoperability and metadata (data about the data) standards. The work with prototype tools will take place within the computational framework at San Diego, centered on existing metadata standards, such as the Morpho software, in collaboration with the national Center for Ecosystem Analysis and Synthesis (CEAS) at Santa Barbara. New versions of Morpho will enable the installation and testing of modules as an integrated component. Similarly, bibliographic software will be implemented using the Palmer (Antarctic) site bibliography as a test dataset. The third type of prototype will involve tools for organizational documentation, such as surveys and other communication vehicles doc12419 none Under the direction of Dr. Eve Danziger, Ms. Patience Epps will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. She will conduct linguistic research on Hupda, a little documented language of the Maku family, spoken in the Vaupes region of the northwestern Brazilian state of Amazonas. The investigation will produce materials for a grammar, orthography, lexicon, and collection of texts. Most of the estimated speakers of Hupda follow a semi-nomadic lifestyle and rely on hunting, gathering, fishing, and the cultivation of bitter manioc for subsistence. Given this relatively small population of speakers and the uncertain future of the cultures and lifestyles of indigenous groups like the Hupda people, the Hupda language may not be viable for many more years. The significance of this documentation of an endangered language is twofold. First, such efforts add to our understanding of what is possible in human language. Second, such efforts contribute to language preservation. The preservation of the world s linguistic diversity is important both for the continued richness of human knowledge and for the communities of speakers themselves, whose cultural knowledge and artistic achievements are often closely intertwined with their linguistic heritage. The creation of an orthography is especially desired by the Hupda community, and this will be an important step toward native-language literacy and the creation of pedagogical materials, which in turn will encourage the community s language preservation efforts. This research also addresses questions of language contact and intergroup relations in the history and prehistory of the region doc12420 none The Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program supports this project by Prof. Reginald Penner at the University of California at Irvine on the synthesis of nanowires of various metals and an evaluation of their use as chemical sensors. Nanowires are to be fabricated by the procedure of electrochemical step decoration, which has been demonstrated for molybdenum to make wires that are up to 150 micrometers in length, hemicylindrical in cross-section, and removable from the surfaces on which prepared. The high-aspect ratio nanowires, with diameters ranging from 10 to 500 nanometers, can be prepared size-selective on stepped graphite surfaces, transferred to a polystyrene film, and then electrodes attached. The conductivity is similar to that of bulk metal. As a sensor, the nanowires function by exposure of the metal surface to an analyte while measuring the electrical conductivity of the nanowires. For example, molybdenum wires are reactive with oxygen yielding a substantial, but stable drop in conductivity as a metal oxide coating is made. The future research directions include preparation of noble metal nanowires. One synthetic scheme to be tested is metal wire preparation via a mercury amalgam. Then, sensors are to be fabricated with nanowires, either bare metal or with a metal oxide overlayer. Yet to be determined is the physical model to connect analyte concentration with the change in metal nanowire conductivity. New generation chemical sensors will have a wide range of applications, from biomedical to pollution control. As nanotechnology moves from the laboratory to practical applications, the synthesis of devices must be improved; faster, cheaper, better. There is a great need for reliable and efficient synthesis of nanowires. Electrochemical step decoration is an application of fundamental knowledge of electrochemistry with the known step features naturally occurring on a clean graphite surface. The graphite provides a template for the controlled growth of an electrochemically grown metal wire. The nanowires have an extremely high surface area in relation to the number of metal atoms in the wire. For this reason, electrical conductivity depends upon the number and kind of molecules attached to the surface, making nanowires a logical component of new generation sensors doc12421 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor W. Dean Harman, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Virginia, is studying organic transformations using eta-2 arene complexes of rhenium. Through the selective and reversible binding of arenes or polyaromatic hydrocarbons through dihapto coordination to a transition metal, their reactivity toward electrophiles is enhanced. Reactive intermediates (e.g., arenium and allyl cations) are stabilized, facilitating the assembly of polycyclic structures. In addition, metal coordination directs the stereochemistry of various chemical transformations and protects the coordination site for additional transformations. While dihapto coordination of arenes has previously been limited to pentaammineosmium(II) complexes, Professor Harman is developing a new class of rhenium(I)-based dearomatization agents. Aromatic compounds (e.g., benzene, toluene) represent one of the most readily available classes of compounds for elaboration into more complex molecular structures. However, their unique properties place some limitations on the chemical reactions available for their elaboration. Professor W. Dean Harman, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Virginia, with the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, is developing unique metal-based reagents which allow for the dramatic alteration of the reactivity of aromatic compounds. Through his studies, new methods are being developed allowing the facile and selective conversion of these readily available starting materials to compounds of potential significance in their own right or as intermediates in the synthesis of pharmaceuticals and other fine chemical products doc12422 none Nagavajara This is a planning visit proposal submitted by Dr. Suteera Nagavajara, AAAS, to request travel funds to visit Thailand for discussions with key Thai officials and researchers about developing a project on the ecosystem dynamics and human needs of the Mekong River. The Mekong river basin is one of the most biologically and culturally diverse watersheds. For centuries its riparian network has supported its residents, serving as a rich source of diverse foods, as a mode of transport, and as a source of irrigation and drinking water. This visit will aid in the development of the AAAS long-term program on ecosystem dynamics and essential human needs. The success of this program can enhance our understanding of one of the most important watersheds in Asia doc12423 none Professor Cammers-Goodwin s research focuses on two biomimetic themes in molecular modularity. In one project the development of chiral foldamer-based molecular recognition is proposed and the other proposes the exploration of molecular encapsulation in the mimicry of the structure and function of viral bodies. The synthesis and study of solution-phase conformations of chiral oligoureas is planned. The binding phenomena between helical conformations of the proposed oligoureas will be studied. The helical conformations of the oligoureas will create hydrophilic internal and hydrophobic external molecular surface area, which will be useful when the oligoureas are included in hydrophobic membranes and on polymeric solid supports to transduce signal. These helical macromolecular conformers will possess protic and or charged internal cavities and hydrocarbon-based exteriors. Molecular architecture of this sort may find use in chemical sensors or in chiral separations. Molecular motifs will be used to assemble viral-like bodies to mimic both the structure and function of real viruses. Encapsulation of anionic species is sought in the structural and functional mimicry of natural viral particles. Perhaps structural mimicry of viral assemblies will lead to drug delivery to cells without the viral pathogenic response. The Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the research of Professor Arthur Cammers-Goodwin of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Kentucky. Professor Cammers-Goodwin s research addresses the nature of the interaction between biological molecules. Professor Cammers-Goodwin s educational activities include mentoring students and teaching a new course entitled Computational Molecular design doc12424 none The PIs will investigate the effect of including the hydrodynamic effects due to the large lakes in east Africa on climate variability of the region. Prior work by the PIs has demonstrated that the hydrodynamics of Lake Victoria plays a critical role in determining the coupled variability of the lake and regional climate. Adopting the traditional approach in which the model formulation is entirely based on thermodynamics and the motion in the lake is neglected, has not proven satisfactory for this region. The PIs will also study the role of coastal Indian Ocean thermodynamic forcing on climate variability of the region. In addition, the physical mechanisms responsible for extreme climate conditions over east Africa during the recent - El Nino Southern Oscillation event will be examined. There is strong educational collaboration related to this research between University of Nairobi, Kenya, and University of North Carolina Raleigh. The work is important because it will lead to better understanding of regional climate variability over east Africa. This has important societal benefits doc12425 none This project is a longitudinal study of parents making school and program placement decisions for their children. The study has 4 specific aims: (1) To compare the decision making of couples to that of individuals; (2) To compare the information gathering and decision structuring of people who report themselves as having different decision-making styles; (3) To examine the relationship between the performance variables (amount of information gathered, complexity of the decision structure) and affective response variables (ratings of stress, satisfaction, comfort, enjoyment with the decision-making process itself) and to eventual, retrospective evaluations of the decision making; and (4) To compare the decision-making of novice and experienced parents, and of less educated and more educated parents. The study will provide descriptive data on dyadic decision making in real life contexts, It will contribute to a better understanding of how the fit between both parents thinking, information gathering, and decision structuring influences the thoroughness of information gathering and decision structuring, affective reactions during the decision-making process, and retrospective satisfaction with the decision. This research will also improve our understanding of how making a decision with a partner is different from and similar to making a decision alone doc12426 none Switching of signals at the surface of plant cells controls plant development, hormone response, avoidance of self-pollination, and disease resistance. Transmembrane signaling in plants is exemplified by the interactions of the receptor-like kinase (RLK) CLAVATA1 with kinase-associated protein phosphatase (KAPP). This pair interacts on the inner surface of the plasma membrane to guide the development of the shoot and flower meristems of the model plant Arabidopsis. The fundamental question of how the KAPP FHA domain interacts with an RLK kinase domain will be investigated in this project. The FHA domain is a newly described class of phosphoserine phosphothreonine-binding domain which is ubiquitous among eukaryotes in diverse protein-protein signaling contexts. No three-dimensional atomic structures of KAPP or of an RLK have been reported. NMR will be used to determine high quality structures of the distinctive FHA domain of KAPP in two forms: free and bound to a phosphopeptide. Sequence determinants of the specificity of phosphopeptide interactions with the KAPP FHA domain will be explored using site-directed mutagenesis, screening of phosphoser thr peptide binding, and thermodynamics of the binding of phosphopeptides most avid for the FHA domain. To further probe how KAPP interacts with CLAVATA1, the structure of the serine kinase domain of this RLK will be modeled. The training of PhD students will be enhanced by exposure to complementary plant genetics studies in the lab of John Walker and to protein modeling in the lab of Jeff Skolnick. This project will provide insights into how a class of plant signaling proteins interacts specifically during the process of signal switching. It will also add perspective to FHA-mediated protein-protein interactions in other organisms doc12427 none The project provides estimates of a behavioral model of parental decision-making about child schooling and fertility in order to evaluate the impact of a controlled social experiment in rural Mexico designed to augment completed schooling levels of children. The program provides subsidies to parents conditional on the school attendance of their children. Social experiments are often limited in their ability to evaluate variations in the characteristics of the experimental program as well as longer run effects that extend beyond the life of the experiment, and they cannot be used at all to evaluate radically different programs. In contrast, to the extent that the estimated behavioral model is valid it can be used to evaluate the impact of counterfactual policies. The following analyses are performed. First, the impact of the program at subsidy levels not explicitly part of the program is assessed. The program itself did not experimentally vary the amount of the subsidy. Second, the impact of extending the program to some or all ineligible families is assessed. Third, because the program has been in effect for only two years, it is not possible by simply comparing the treated to the untreated households to evaluate the longer run impact of the program. For example, even if the program is viewed by the experimental group as permanent, the impact of the program on the existing families is conditioned on their current circumstances, e.g., the number of children they have. However, the longer-run impact of the program may be to affect those circumstances, e.g., the number of children new households will have. Fourth, we compare the impact of the subsidy program on schooling to the radically different policy of placing legal restrictions on the use of child labor. The project also makes a methodological contribution. Structural estimation of behavioral models requires auxiliary assumptions about functional forms, i.e., of preferences, technology and other constraints, and the distributions of unobservable random elements. Assessing the validity of such models by relying on tests of model fit to sample elements of the data used in estimation provides useful, but far from compelling, evidence on the validity of the model. Such models are often subject to a form of pre-test estimation in that the final formulation of the model is based on the fit of prior formulations to certain aspects of the data. In this research, we use a different approach to model validation. The validity of the model will be ascertained according to how well structural estimates of the model based on data from the randomized-out control group predict the experimental impacts of the program doc12428 none R. Arndt, Et. Al, University of Minnesota The PI requests funding for the purchase of a high-resolution stereoscopic particle image velocimetry. This system will be used to characterize complex turbulent flows at very small scales in four different projects under the directions of the PI and the three Co-PI s. The projects include atmospheric boundary layers, relationship between interfacial mass transfer and free-surface turbulence, effect of small-scale motion on biological systems, and two phase flows associated with partial cavitation. All four investigators have currently funded projects in each of the four proposed fields of study and research studies are in active progress doc12429 none Hammond & Chappell Life at high altitude poses a dual challenge to mammals. First, energy demands are greater because environmental temperatures are generally lower than at low altitudes in the same latitudinal range. At the same time, however, low oxygen availability (hypoxia) limits an individual s capacity for energy expenditure. One of the physiological mechanisms animals use to cope with the low oxygen availability at high altitudes is to increase the amount of oxygen that can be carried from the lungs to the cells by increasing hemoglobin oxygen binding capacity (hemoglobin oxygen affinity). These changes can occur within the lifetime of an individual, but there are also known genetic differences between animals, within a species, for hemoglobin oxygen binding ability. Alternatively, many animals are known to have the capacity to reversibly increase the size and functional capacity of various organ systems (including the cardiovascular system) in the face of increased demand (phenotypic plasticity) and some animals use this plasticity to cope with both low temperatures and hypoxia at high altitudes. A model animal for the study of hemoglobin genetics is the deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus) which has been shown, in classic studies, to have genetic differences in hemoglobin type that are strongly correlated with native altitude, affect oxygen binding, and positively influence short-term exercise performance. Deer mice have also been shown to display increases in the size of the lungs, heart and digestive tract at high altitudes. One limitation of the work to date on both deer mice hemoglobins and organ phenotypic plasticity, is that it did not incorporate the influence of the site of gestational development and maturation (birth site), because it was performed on animals that were born and allowed to mature at low altitudes before they were moved to high altitude. It is known, however, that the gestational environment can be crucial to determining the anatomical and physiological capacity of adult animals. Thus the first goal of this research is to determine how energy expenditure (aerobic performance) is affected by gestational development at specific altitudes and if the hemoglobin genetics are still significant in determining the individual s physiological capacity to cope with life at high altitudes after accounting for plasticity of organ size. To test this, aerobic performance trials will be performed on mice with different hemoglobin genotypes born and reared at either high or low altitude. Another unanswered question is the effect of hemoglobin genetics on long-term energy expenditure (i.e., over periods of days or weeks). This is an important issue new research has shown that sustainable energy demands of mice living at high altitudes can be nearly as high as previous measures of short term aerobic capacity. Young animals face an even greater challenge. Newly weaned juveniles are smaller than adults but have correspondingly higher mass-specific energy demands. Therefore it seems reasonable to expect that growth rates might be influenced by hemoglobin genotype and site of gestational development. Accordingly, the second goal of this research is to determine if hemoglobin genotype influences growth rates and sustainable metabolic rate under conditions of cold exposure and high-altitude hypoxia. To test this, mice with specific hemoglobin genotypes will be reared in semi-natural conditions at high and low test altitudes. We expect that mice with the appropriate hemoglobin genotype for a given test altitude will have the highest rates of sustainable metabolic output (measured as food consumption) and growth doc12430 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will further develop and optimize the NZP (sodium zirconium phosphate type) ceramic-based thermal barrier coating (TBC) technology for use in advanced turbine and power generation systems. These advanced systems drive the need for higher operating temperatures to achieve better efficiencies without compromising durability. Such requirements heighten the threat of: (i) microstructural changes which reduce thermal barrier effectiveness; (ii) premature oxidative spalling; and (iii) susceptibility to mechanical stresses in conventional yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ)-based TBCs. Some NZP ceramics have very low thermal and oxygen conductivity, excellent thermal cycling resistance and high temperature stability but also have low thermal expansion. Phase I demonstrated the feasibility of thermal spraying simple and functionally graded (to minimize thermal expansion mismatches) TBCs of NZP with YSZ that are better thermal barriers and also have very good thermal cycling resistance to degrees C. The primary goal for Phase II is to complete the scientific and engineering development in order to commercialize the NZP-based TBC technology. A team of academic and industrial collaborators will work under the guidance of committed end-users to achieve this goal. Potential successful development of the NZP-based TBC concept will enable applications in high efficiency power generating systems and gas turbine engines; specifically, for turbine vanes and blades, and combustors and afterburners. Coatings based on NZP can also double up as environmental barrier coatings (EBCs), and find use in diesel engines and as abradable seals. The financial benefits of the NZP-based coatings could be over $100M arising from reduced component maintenance and fuel and operational costs doc12393 none This collaborative infrastructure project continues the development of a comprehensive database for the analysis of public policy processes in the United States, and establishes a truly interactive application system for the delivery of that database to public policy scholars, students, and policy analysts. The existing database is centered on lawmaking activity; the current project extends the work to the presidency, the executive branch, the courts, and interest group activity. The database links several independent data sets via a system of policy content codes that are constructed to be consistent across time. The approach avoids the pitfalls of relying on data collected for purposes other than policy monitoring. Numerous other variables are collected in addition to the policy content of the cases, adding to the richness and flexibility of these data sets. Data currently in the system include Congressional hearings ( - ), Public Laws ( - ), Congressional Quarterly entries ( - (, all statutes enacted ( - ), a sample of stories in the New York Times ( - ), and Congressional Budget Authority ( - ). The researchers add bills introduced in Congress (currently being integrated), legislative floor activity, executive orders and other measures of presidential activity, interest group activity tabulated in the Encyclopedia of Associations, and Supreme Court decisions. The investigators promise to explore other potential sources that contribute to the quantitative monitoring of public policy in the United States. The resulting system is unique as a research tool because of its comprehensiveness and because of its capacity to allow researchers to analyze policy processes in ways that heretofore have not been possible. These facets continue to improve the ability of social scientists to study policy dynamics and link those dynamics to the process of democratic governance---representation, public decision-making, political communication, and the operation of democratic institutions doc12432 none The goal of this research is to test the theoretical possibility that personal identity concerns play an important role in how people decide whether something is fair or unfair, and to explore how these concerns relate to people s ability to generate procedures to resolve conflict. Specifically, people are highly motivated to act in ways that allow for public and private affirmation of the belief that they are authentically good and moral beings (Steele, ). Given that moral values form the core of personal identity (Rokeach, ), self-affirmation should involve endorsing self-expressive moral positions or stands, or what Skitka (in press) has referred to as moral mandates. Thinking about, experiencing, witnessing, or behaving in a way that leads to a violation of a moral mandate should be experienced as a threat to people s sense of self, and therefore should be defended more vigorously than other kinds of strong attitudes. One implication of this line of theorizing is that people should have much greater difficulty negotiating procedures to decide issues that involve moral mandates than they do for issues that involve other concerns. To test this hypothesis, research participants (college students) participating in small heterogeneous or homogeneous groups, will be asked to come to consensus on a fair procedure to decide an issue that they either (a) have a moral mandate about, (b) do not have a moral mandate about, or (c) have a strong attitude, but not a moral mandate about. Groups will have three options to end negotiations: Unanimously agree to a procedure that each participant agrees that they could accept as a binding way to decide their assigned issue; unanimously agree that they will never come to consensus on a binding procedure; or 1 hour passes (whichever occurs first). Groups ability to generate a consensually accepted procedure, perceptions of the group process and other group members, and degree of post-discussion attitude change (i.e., polarization on morally mandated as compared to non-morally mandated issues) as a function of group discussion will be assessed. A follow-up study will explore the perceived fairness of the procedures generated in the group discussion study when they are evaluated without reference to a specific issue doc12433 none It has long been known that crosses between species often fail to produce offspring and this failure occurs due to problems with fertilization; sperm of one species are incompatible with the reproductive tract or eggs of the other species. However, only recently have biologists begun to study in detail the rapidly evolving genes and proteins that govern fertilization incompatibilities between species. The aims of this highly ambitious and multi-faceted project are to identify and analyze the fertilization proteins in several groups of insects, distinguish the factors that govern the rapid evolution of these proteins, evaluate the role of the proteins in isolating closely related species, and develop mathematical models of the protein divergence process. Although the research focuses on insects, it will have broad application to other invertebrates and to vertebrates, including humans, since the patterns seen in insects match those of other animal groups. Problems with fertilization plague many human couples. This research will provide new insight into the processes that can give rise to these problems and the molecular response to these processes in groups of model organisms doc12434 none The area of collagen research has developed into an important focus for biomaterials technology. The search for robust and diverse collagen-based biomaterials has expanded into areas of drug delivery systems, ocular devices, wound healing therapies and artificial organs. In the Goodman laboratories, synthetic and biophysical strategies have been developed to design and investigate the properties of triple helical collagen mimetic structures as candidate biomaterials. %%% As an expansion of early work with n-isobutylglycine (Nleu) incorporated into the collagen trimeric building blocks Gly-Pro-Nleu and Gly-Nleu_Pro, fluorinated residues fluoroproline or N-(hexafluoro)isobutylglycine will now be incorporated into tripeptide building blocks. Their effects on triple-helical stability will be investigated by a series of biophysical measurements. The biophysical analysis includes temperature-dependent optical rotation measurements, circular dichroism (CD) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, molecular modeling, as well as studies of the thermodynamics of triple helix folding and hydrations. Biological profiles will be assessed by collaborators at Integra Life Sciences and the group of Andrea Tenner at the University of California, Irvine. In addition to novel building blocks, templates have been employed to enhance the stability of triple helices. Tris(hydroxymethyl)aminomethane (TRIS) has been successfully derivatized to create collagen mimetic arrays. The additional amine functional group provides a point of attachment to surfaces and other reactive molecules. The TRIS-terminated collagen structures will be utilized to create ditemplated molecules in which the collagen peptide chains are anchored at both the N- and C-termini. Ditemplated collagen units can be linked together in a chain as precursors for the formation of nanostructures (rod-like polymers). In line with template research, orthogonally protected scaffolds will be introduced in order to assemble heterotrimeric collagen structures to which unique biologically relevant peptide chains can be attached. This design will result in collagen mimetics that elicit specific biological responses to mimic natural collagen proteins such as collagen type I or the defense collagen protein C1q doc12435 none The research project by co-PI s Dr. Susan M. Lunte, Dr. Kenneth L. Audus and Dr. Karen J. Nordheden from the University of Kansas entitled Microanalytical Methods for the Investigation of Metabolism and Transport of Substance P is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program. There are four specific aims in the proposal 1) Continued development in microchip based analysis. The emphasis will be toward on-line microdialysis with capillary electrophoresis and electrochemical detection (CEEC). 2) Monitoring nitric oxide (NO) release from microvessel endothelial cells in vivo using microdialysis and microchip CEEC. 3) Continued studies on the transport and metabolism of Substance P using copper complexation and electrochemical detection. 4) The development of a 2-dimensional microchip separation system. This system will be used for the preconcentration and analysis of substance P and other peptides. Dr. Lunte has an established reputation for mentoring under-represented groups and for integrating education and research. This research is multidisciplinary and will have significant impact on the fields of separation science, microchip based analyses, neurotransmission and neuroregulation. There is significant potential societal impact from this research related to follow-on medical advances doc12436 none This research program entitled Asymmetric Hydrogenation at Electrode Surfaces represents a significant expansion of the prior work by Professor Bernadette Donovan-Merkert of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry program. The goal of this project is to prepare electrodes capable of chiral electrochemical hydrogenation. Metal complexes with pyrrole-modified chiral ligands will be attached to electrodes via electropolymerization of the pyrrole tether. This strategy allows several metal catalysts to be investigated, both as the pure film or copolymerized so as to increase the conductivity of the film. The chiral electrochemical hydrogenation will be evaluated with acetamidoacrylates, a class of substrates known to give high enantiomeric excess when hydrogenated under homogenous conditions. Catalytic hydrogenation is a standard chemical reaction and usually yields an equal mixture of two stereoisomers. However, for biological applications, the two stereoisomers can have quite different properties. For example, one isomer may be a sedative while the other other may cause genetic abnormalities. To obtain the desired stereoisomer, there are two routes: One can make both isomers, and then separate the good from the bad. Or, more elegantly and less wasteful, create a chiral catalyst which only makes the desired stereoisomer. This research is focussed on a new style of chiral catalysts which could operate at lower temperatures and pressures, and thus more safely, than previous chiral catalysts doc12437 none Original Message----- From: Poore, Richard Z Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 10:56 AM To: Weller, Margaret Subject: Syvitski abstract Science : This proposal requests support for a workshop to outline a strategy and protocol for constructing a community sediment model (CSM) that will incorporate a series of modules that can be used to simulate evolution of landscapes and sedimentary basins on a variety of timescales . Outcome of the workshop will be a document that outlines a strategy and framework for developing and linking the components of the CSM doc12438 none The Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, supports the work of Dr. Marcetta Darensbourg (Department of Chemistry at Texas A&M) directed at delineating structure function relationships for Ni Fe and Fe-only hydrogenase enzymes through the use of synthetic model systems. Specifically, the PI (i) will develop synthetic routes to amine-containing S--S bridges in iron carbonyl compounds, (ii) will use functionalized diphosphine ligands as models of the models for the hydrogenase active site, (iii) will explore the hydrogen activation chemistry of (-SR S)Fe2(CO)6 compounds that possess a functionalized S--S bridge, and (iv) will explore the organometallic chemistry relevant to active site cluster synthesis for the hydrogenase enzyme. Students mentored by Prof. Darensbourg are poised to make a real and significant contribution to the scientific infrastructure of the country. Their work will have a lasting impact on both the biochemical and chemical communities. The results will help in initiating efforts to design a cheaper industrial process to produce hydrogen, a potential clean source of energy doc12439 none In this project, we investigate the determinants and consequences of household residential location decisions. In particular, we study factors leading to stratification of households across communities by income, demographic characteristics, and preferences. For example, households may choose communities based on housing prices and the quality of local public goods and amenities such as education, public safety, and environmental quality. In addition, preferences for income, race, or other demographic characteristics of neighbors may play a role in household location choices. We also investigate how residential choices of individuals affect neighborhood and community outcomes. Such effects may operate through collective (e.g., voting) decisions that affect expenditures on education, police, and other public services. Effects may arise more directly via neighborhood effects-interactions among individuals that affect the character and quality of neighborhoods and the services they provide. For example, parental involvement and peer effects both within and outside schools may affect children s educational achievement and social development. Interactions within neighborhoods may also affect public safety and the quality of the neighborhood environment. Choices of individuals may also affect satisfaction of others with a neighborhood if households care about income, race, and other demographic characteristics of neighbors. A particular focus of our work, then, is to understand the interaction of preferences for neighborhood demographic composition and local public goods in determining the sorting of population by race and other characteristics across communities. We also investigate the importance of spillover effects and externalities within communities and across neighboring communities. Our contributions are both to development of new methods and to application of those methods. In previous research, we and others have developed strategies for studying stratification in models that impose considerable a priori structure on the patterns of household sorting across communities and associated variation in housing prices and public service quality. In particular, such models imply a common ordering across communities of household incomes, housing prices, and public service quality. While these models provide many valuable insights and have considerable predictive power, they are nonetheless restrictive. In particular, they allow for relatively limited variation across individuals in demographic characteristics and preferences, and, where multiple local public goods are present, they imply a common ordering of qualities across communities for the various goods. Our research advances the state of the art by developing models and computational and econometric methods that permit consideration of multiple observed and unobserved characteristics of individuals and multiple local public goods and amenities. The framework that we are developing also accommodates neighborhood effects and spillovers across neighborhoods. Efforts to understand the adjustments of heterogeneous households to spatial differences in local public goods, environmental amenities, and neighborhood quality have important policy implications. Our comprehensive analysis of the sorting and mixing of households provides improved understanding of racial segregation and income stratification observed in metropolitan areas. Our framework also permits investigation of the effects of large-scale changes such as tax limitations, school finance equalization programs, changes in environmental quality, and falling crime rates. In particular, our approach permits investigation of how such changes affect location decisions of households, how gains and losses arising from the changes are distributed across households, and how the changes affect the distribution of housing prices across communities doc12440 none Dr. Jingsong Zhang of the University of California Riverside is funded for his research on state-resolved photodissociation dynamics of small free radicals, structure, energetics, and photochemical reactivity by the Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division. Fundamentally new insigts and quantitative understanding of photochemical reactivity of small prototypical free radicals will be generated experimentally uisng laser excitation, laser probing, and time of flight mass spectroscopy. Laser spectroscopy and state-resolved photodissociation dynamics will be used to fully characterize prototypical reactive intermediates and small alkyl, unsaturated aliphatic, alkoxy, and aromatic radicals, as well as the HOCO radical. These systems will also be examined at a high level of theory (electronic and dynamic) with little or no approximation. Detailed mechanisms involving dissociation and nuclear rearrangement will be generated. Open-shell electronic states, structures and multiple potential energy surfaces of free radicals and their influences on photodissociation and unimolecular reactions will be deduced. Competitive dissociation pathways and decomposition mechanims of free radicals and product energy disposal will be mapped. Free-radical electronic states, thermodynamics, and energetics will be tabulated. The energetics and dynamics of small free radicals are important areas of physical chemistry and have practical importance in combustion and atmospheric chemistries. The experimental and theoretical analyses by Dr. Zhang will provide detailed advances in our understanding of important carbon-based radicals and the hydrogen extraction chemistry of these radicals. In addition, important teaching and training will be provided students at one of our nation s most culturally diverse universities. Multi-disciplinary approaches, for example, connections between fundamental molecular-level knowledge and practical atmospheric and combustion chemistry, as well as those between modern techniques and scientific advances, will be stressed doc12441 none The decisions of economic agents are many times made on the basis of the advice they get from others. For example, people choose doctors based on the recommendations they get from friends, buy stocks on the basis of tips from strangers, choose schools for their children on the basis word of mouth advice etc. In short much of what we do is done by incorporating advice from others into our decision process. But little is know about how and why people follow advice. Do they do so because they think that others are better at doing the task demanded of them (i.e. investing their money, choosing a school for their kids) or do they do so because they think that others have access to better information? What are the characteristics of advice givers that make us more eager to accept their opinion? Is it their characteristics (i.e. gender, area of expertise, grade point average or IQ, etc.) or their track record on the task at hand (i.e. how they performed in the past, how experienced they are)? Does advice increase the efficiency of group decision-making or markets? In this experimental research we try to isolate what it is about advice that makes it so valuable to us and try to measure exactly how informative a piece of advice is. For example, in the experiments we run we present a decision problem to a subject in a computer lab where others have tried this problem before. These predecessors will furnish a pool of advice givers for the current set of subjects. The current set of subjects will be asked to make their decision under a set of different circumstances. For some subjects we will auction off the advice of subjects who has done the decision problem before them and try to infer from the winning price what the value of the advice is to them. We will also auction off the time series of decision made by the advice giver in his or her previous interaction in the problem. In other words, the advice giver may have played the game 60 times and made 60 decisions for which he or she was paid accordingly. Instead of auctioning off the advice of this advice giver, we might auction off the right to observe their history of play in the game. If advice were more valuable than information, we would expect that the advice would sell for more on the market. This would also indicate that people feel that others are better capable than they are of processing information. These types of experiments are aimed at investigating the value of advice to individual decision makers. Advice is also important to groups in the group decision problems they face. In this part of our experiment we will see if games played with advice from people who have played the game before is efficiency increasing. In other words, do societies make better and more efficient group decisions when they are able to get advice from people who have played the game before them? We think that this research is important because while advice is such a ubiquitous phenomenon, it is practically ignored in economics since economic theory is so eager to assume that all economic agents are both fully rational and perfect calculators. In such a world there obviously is no role for advice (everyone is an expert). Hence, if advice is efficiency decreasing then it would be important to know this and be able to increase our ability doc12442 none For over 70 years psychologists have sought different ways to measure attitudes, and to understand the relationship between attitudes and behavior. This project adds to the extant body of knowledge by examining four classes of attitude measures, and by demonstrating how these measures relate to different types of behaviors. Contemporary attitude measures are generally of two types: explicit and implicit. Explicit attitude measures ask people to report their attitudes by drawing on evaluations stored in memory; implicit attitude measures similarly assess evaluative tendencies, but they do not require intentional recollection of stored information. Further, contemporary theories of attitude-behavior relations posit that explicit measures reliably predict deliberative, consciously-chosen behaviors; and that implicit measures reliably predict spontaneous, automatic behaviors. It is proposed that the previous failure of explicit measures to predict spontaneous behaviors, and of implicit measures to predict deliberative behaviors, may be due to a confounding of the type of attitude measure and the level of cognitive processing required by the attitude measure. By untangling these variables (type of measure, type of cognitive processing), four categories of measures are proposed: deliberative explicit measures, deliberative implicit measures, spontaneous explicit measures, and spontaneous implicit measures. The present research aims to demonstrate that the type of measure is secondary to the type of information processing in relating attitudes and behavior. That is, deliberative measures, whether they be explicit or implicit, should reliably predict deliberative behaviors. Similarly, spontaneous measures, whether they be explicit or implicit, should reliably predict spontaneous behaviors doc12443 none NARS-Baja: A 5-year Deployment of Broadband Seismic Instruments Around the Gulf of California NARS-Baja is a 5-year deployment of seismic instruments along the Baja-California peninsula and Sonora province in Mexico. This network fills a gap of seismic instrumentation between present-day networks in California and southern Mexico Seismic data from NARS-Baja is key to constrain the structure of the crust and mantle and to study earthquake faulting in the Gulf of California region, where active rifting is taking place. NARS-Baja involves collaboration between the (Pasadena, USA), CICESE (Ensenada. Mexico), and the University of Utrecht (Utrecht, The Netherlands). The first seismic instruments of NARS-Baja will be installed in October of . The NARS-Baja network shares many similarities with other passive-source deployments, commonly funded by the PASSCAL program of the National Science Foundation. However, in some aspects NARS-Baja stands out. (1) NARS-Baja will be in operation for at least 5 years to ensure that a large seismic database is constructed. (2) NARS-Baja bridges the gap in seismic stations between present-day broadband networks in California and the UNAM network in southern Mexico. In combination with these networks, NARS-Baja yields an unprecedented -km long array along the tectonically active Pacific margin of Mexico and California. (3) The NARS-Baja data will be made available via the Internet from the IRIS data center as soon as it is received and checked. This promotes involvement by the entire research community doc12444 none The research project submitted by Dr. Peter Williams and Dr. Richard Hervig of Arizona State University entitled Analytical, Fundamental and Instrumental Developments in Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS) is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program. The goals for the project are 1) to develop methods for real-time, quantitative analysis on the influence of oxygen on sputtered ion yields. 2) Fundamental studies in sputtered neutral analysis. This will include establishing mechanism of ionization and studying contamination problems. 3) To explore massive cluster ion source experiments for gathering information on sputtering yields and behavior. The quantitative, real-time measurements are innovative and well thought out. The massive cluster impact source experiments are challenging, and of great interest for the depth profiling of semiconductors and biological surfaces. There are potential societal impacts from this research because the quantitative calculation of impurity content and distribution at shallow depths could significantly improve microelectronics manufacture. The fundamental research is important to the field of surface mass spectrometric analysis doc12445 none This project combines a theoretical and experimental exploration of the basic chemistry of boron, structure-property relationships, long range intermolecular interactions in ordered fluids, and the potential for practical applications of some of the materials in the optoelectronics and communications industries. The focus of the project is on developing a new class of calamitic (rod-like) liquid crystals derived from inorganic boron clusters. The design of the materials takes advantage of the unique steric and electronic features of the clusters such as three-dimensional aromaticity, high electronic polarizability, variable polarity, and high rotational axes. This combination of properties is not available in purely organic systems. The proposed study focuses on nematic materials with lateral and longitudinal dipole moments, mesogenic additives to ferro- and antiferroelectric liquid crystals and mesogenic nonlinear optical chromophores. The proposed activities will include quantum mechanical calculations, synthesis, characterization and evaluation of device performance. The project is designed to have a maximum impact on education and research productivity. The project will expose students to a broad spectrum of research activities, give them versatile expertise in organic materials, and prepare them to undertake complicated projects in the materials chemistry area. The subject of this research project is the development of a new class of liquid crystals to address issues in fundamental and applied science and technology. Liquid crystals combine properties typical for solids, such as optical and dielectric anisotropies, with the fluidity of a liquid. This unique combination of properties makes these remarkable materials an indispensable component of contemporary technology, such as flat panel display, telecommunication, and sensors. The project is designed to have a maximum impact on education and research productivity doc12446 none Dunbar This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports US scientific participation in a workshop of the international Antarctic Offshore Acoustic Stratigraphy (ANTOSTRAT) program. ANTOSTRAT is sponsored by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) and it represents an important community-based group for discussing emerging research issues related to the long-term history of the Antarctic and its ice sheets. The program focuses on coordinated efforts to understand Antarctic paleoenvironments and paleoclimates of the last 130 million years (late Mesozoic and Cenozoic) as recorded in sediments and structures on the continental margin and in the surrounding ocean basins. The ANTOSTRAT activity has been instrumental in achieving several successful Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) drilling legs. This workshop will facilitate integration of results from ODP Legs 178 and 188 with results from the Cape Roberts Project and other related projects. In addition, the program aspires to delineate scientific target areas for potential drilling and to define the drilling technologies that will be required to further advance our understanding of this important time in Earth s history. This workshop will be held in Erice (Sicily), Italy, in September doc12447 none With the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, Professor Chiang and her colleagues at the University of California-Davis are carrying out studies of the microscopic mechanisms of important model catalytic systems. The decomposition of heterocyclic molecules, the cyclization of acetylene to benzene, and the dehydrogenation of cyclohexene are the model systems being investigated. The use of scanning probe microscopy in these studies allows real space imaging of these reaction processes on the well-characterized palladium or platinum surface. Surface species reactivity is correlated with the presence of defects, steps, and co-adsorbates on these surfaces. Comparison of adsorbed species images with theoretically predicted images is used to identify the adsorbed species. An understanding of the details of heterogeneous catalytic reactions is useful for the design and optimization of catalytic process chemistry. Professor Chiang at UC-Davis is using molecular resolution scanning probe microscopic methods to examine the details of model catalytic reactions in real space. Adsorbed species reactivity is being correlated with the presence of defects, steps, and co-adsorbates on these model surfaces. Information obtained from these studies will be useful in the optimization of sulfur and nitrogen removal chemistry in refining petroleum feedstocks doc12448 none Ground-based mobile observational facilities have proven to be of great value in studying transient atmospheric phenomena such as tornadoes and gust fronts. Under this Small Grant for Exploratory Research, the Principal Investigator will begin development of a small, airborne, remotely piloted vehicle. These platforms will be designed to be launched rapidly from ground based mobile facilities. The ultimate objective is to develop a command aircraft, which will be controlled from the ground, and several accompanying aircraft that will maintain a preprogrammed, fixed orientation to the command aircraft. Each aircraft will carry instruments to measure temperature, pressure and relative humidity. The work under this grant is to develop the software that will control the command and one additional slave aircraft. If this research is successful, eventual development of such a measurement system will help extend ground-based observations into the vertical dimension and allow diagnostic studies that are not currently possible doc12449 none This individual investigator award will provide support to a senior professor for a collaboration with leading scientists in Ukraine to investigate the interplay between two hostile states, superconductivity and magnetism. The rare-earth-nickel-borocarbide family of compounds which exhibit a wealth of related phenomena have been chosen for the study. Important length scales can be changed by introduction of point defects. This will be done by both chemical substitution and irradiation with high energy electrons in order to separate the effects related to physical disorder from those related to chemical pressure . The research will address the role of pair breaking mechanisms in the region of coexistence of superconductivity and magnetism, the nature of exotic electronic states in this region and the anomalies in normal state transport in these intermetallics. The results are expected to be of general applicability to the understanding of the interplay between superconductivity and magnetism, valid well beyond the particular material chosen. Students will receive training that will prepare them for careers in industry, academia or government. The close contact and interaction with leading scientists from another country will provide new perspectives on science and culture for these students. This individual investigator award will provide support to a joint effort by the principle investigator and leading scientists in Ukraine for an investigation into the intricate interplay between hostile physical states, namely magnetism and superconductivity. A family of compounds, rare-earth-nickel-borocarbides, that shows an unusual variety of phenomena related to these two states has been chosen for these studies. The effects of disorder, introduced both by chemical substitution and irradiation with high energy electrons, on the interplay will be studied. The interplay between superconductivity and magnetism is a fundamental problem in solid state physics, and the results of this investigation are expected to lead to a much better understanding of this interplay that will be applicable beyond the chosen material. Students will have the opportunity to collaborate with leading international scientists while learning state-of-the art technology and experimental skills doc12450 none Dr. Victoria DeRose of the Department of Chemistry at Texas A&M University is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program of the Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, for her work on investigating interactions between metal ions and RNA (ribonucleic acid) in the hammerhead ribozyme, a small catalytic RNA, using spectroscopic methods to probe ligands bound to manganese(II) and cadmium(II) positioned at specific sites in this ribozyme. These studies will further our understanding of the metal-dependent mechanism of catalysis of ribozymes, which are novel biocatalysts, and the contributions of metals to the structure and stability in complex RNA systems. Students and post-doctoral associates will be trained in an interdisciplinary area that encompasses inorganic, spectroscopic and biochemical disciplines doc12451 none Since the passage of the Constitution, the prosecutors of the Brazilian Public Ministry have become the watchdogs of environmental agencies, bringing investigations and lawsuits on behalf of the public interest against agencies that neglect their enforcement duties. This research seeks to determine whether a new model of environmental regulation has emerged in Brazil capable of stemming the under-enforcement of environmental laws. Two questions are asked: (1) How do Brazilian environmental agencies and the Public Ministry differ in their approaches to the enforcement of environmental law? and (2) How have the enforcement practices of Brazilian environmental agencies been reshaped by the Public Ministry s environmental watchdog activities? The researcher will conduct nine months of field research in two Brazilian states, Sao Paulo and Para, using ethnographic and quantitative data collection methods. The research contributes to three academic literatures: the sociolegal and political science literature on comparative regulatory institutions; the sociological literature on state capacity in developing countries; and scholarship on the democratization of Brazilian legal institutions doc12452 none Five countries in the world possess completely digitized individual-level censuses for the late nineteenth century: Canada, Great Britain, Iceland, Norway, and the United States. At the end of the nineteenth century, these five nations had close economic ties, shared migration flows, and were undergoing rapid social, economic, and demographic transitions. The availability of census data for these nations and this time period thus creates unprecedented opportunities for international collaborative and comparative social research. The data sets allow for study of topics such as the employment of women and children, domestic service, boarding and lodging, marriage patterns, living arrangements of the aged and children, employment by industry and occupation, self-employment, and internal migration. Moreover, because the data sets contain information on entire populations rather than samples, they allow for the study of small and dispersed population subgroups. However, taking advantage of the opportunities to use these data to advance research in a variety of fields requires collaboration among five organizations that have been central to the creation and dissemination of the data in the five countries. Funding agencies have already supported the collection of the data, but comparative research requires synchronized efforts among the five organizations to make the data comparable. This project provides for synchronization by completing the following tasks: developing common classification systems for the variables, creating web-based software that allows researchers in multiple countries to share coding information, documenting the comparability of variable definitions and coding, creating machine-readable data, and disseminating the data to researchers through mirrored websites in each country doc12453 none Voltage gated channels are one of the ways that materials move into and out of cells. They are important across biology. A channel can either be open or closed; the transition is called gating. However, these proteins do not crystallize easily and two-dimensional methods have had to be developed to consider their structure. Each channel protein consists of six hydrophobic membrane-spanning segments and a membrane insertion region. The ability to predict or at least have good models for these transmembrane proteins is a significant need for the research community. The techniques for this are now just beginning. At the moment, there are no good homologues to VGC proteins in the PDB, because of the difficulty of crystallization. However, alignment of sequence is possible. Three-dimensional protein homology models will be developed from these aligned sequences, using a variety of software packages developed by the group. The resulting tools will be available on the web. Once the first models are made, all similarly aligned proteins can be automatically predicted. This effort will produce models that could be used to refine the structure data coming from new studies and methods of considering membrane proteins doc12454 none Protein mutation occurs as part of the evolutionary process, through mutagenesis and through post-translational modification. As yet no resource has been developed that permits the systematic study of the effect of all these mutations on protein structure, and hence function, even though the literature is full of individual instances. The new resource will contain all relevant PDB structures as its starting point and will be updated along with PDB. A prototype has been established at http: pmr.sdsc.edu. The production resource will bring together sequence, structure, and literature information using novel information acquisition tools and provide query and visualization tools for global analysis of the effects of mutation. Research in protein structure and engineering will be enhanced through using the resource for prediction and for confirmation of methods. The resource will be accessible through the web and other users may write software for doing direct querying of the resource doc12455 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop and demonstrate a novel vitrification process for subgrade soil stabilization. The process includes a method to inject readily available materials into the vitrification zone eliminating subsidence that would otherwise occur as the soils densify during vitrification. The process is based on the use of modifiers that adjust the vitrified soil properties. The Phase I work demonstrated feasibility of the process and that the vitrified material was suitable for subgrade stabilization and resulted in materials having strengths qualified for structural reinforcement applications. Economic analysis completed in Phase I indicated that the method is competitive with conventional subgrade repair methods. The Phase II work will establish the commercial merit of the process by demonstrating its economy, robustness and versatility to produce subgrade synthetic rock from soils in the field. The Phase II work includes participation by a university and an end user. The proposed research and development will yield a fundamental understanding of the relationships between the vitrification process parameters, soil and synthetic rock properties. This will enable optimization of the process in commercial applications. The commercial market for the proposed technology includes soil stabilization of inadequate foundation and slope materials around many kinds of structures including building, bridges and waterways. Customers will be highway departments (state and federal), airport authorities, municipalities and the industrial sector. Essentially, the process will be useful to any entity, including contractors that deal with maintenance of subgrade and or new construction that have local subgrade instability issues to overcome doc12456 none Laboratory measurements will be carried out addressing isotope effects in reactions relevant to atmospheric processes, including gas and solution phase oxidation of SO2 (sulfur dioxide), surface catalyzed oxidation of sulfur compounds, and the oxidation of sulfur compounds with NO2 (nitrogen dioxide) and NO3 (nitrate radical). The laboratory studies are needed to better understand isotopic analysis (sulfur and oxygen) that the PI and his group have carried out on atmospheric sulfate and nitrate aerosol samples. The PI is using isotopic data to quantify the relative contributions of the different atmospheric sulfur oxidation pathways. This is of fundamental importance to understanding the chemistry of aerosols and their impact on climate doc12457 none This award is an Accomplishment Based Renewal and allows the principal investigator to continue a very productive stream of research on the general problem of prejudice and politics in Western Europe. The researcher has conducted three large-scale general population public opinion surveys, one in Italy, one in the Netherlands, and one in France. The surveys are uniquely cumulative in design. The Dutch study was expressly designed to respond to theoretical and methodological questions in the measurement of cultural and economic sources of prejudice raised by the Italian study. The French study was expressly designed to extend the Dutch analysis of the political consequences of intolerance. The first extension of this research concentrates on the Dutch study and focuses on the contemporary strains over multiculturalism. It focuses particularly on three strands: the clash over group interests, the concern over national identity, and conflicts over values built-in to modern liberal democratic societies. It aims to show both how these three sources of strain are tied together, yet nonetheless have distinct political consequences. The second study, which concentrates on the French investigation, focuses on democratic values under strain. Using a new generation of experiments imbedded in opinion interviews, it explores in a way not previously possible the willingness of citizens to abandon or qualify their commitment to democratic values in the face of different forms of political and social pressure. The third study, which takes advantage of virtually all the data sets collected by the investigator, focuses on a theory of political choice. As an alternative to the standard bottom up approach, it aims to develop an explicitly political top down perspective, emphasizing the role of strategic political actors and institutions in structuring the party system and thereby the alternatives on offer to the general public. The investigator has made numerous outstanding contributions to social and behavioral science literature on the topic of prejudice and politics in Western Europe. His contributions have substantially enhanced our understanding of the topic and this current award allows the investigator to pursue further high quality research opportunities via the Accomplishment Based Renewal mechanism doc12458 none M. Frederick Hawthorne, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California Los Angeles, is continuing his research into functionalized carboranes with the support of the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program. Methylation of carboranes leads to octamethyl derivatives. These methyl groups will be functionalized to give camoflagued carboranes with desirable properties. The methylated carboranes will be studied as ligands for electron-deficient transition metals analogous to pentamethylcyclopentadienyl. Direct hydroxylation of boranes provides route into other new classes of boron clusters with tunable electronic properties. Carboranes and boranes have interesting structures and have led to new insights into bonding. The functionalized clusters studied in this grant may have applications in water-soluble catalysis, drug delivery, and molecular electronics. The project incorporates synthesis, characterization and materials applications, making it an excellent project for training students doc12459 none As scholars struggle to understand homicide rates from their dangerous highs in to their puzzling inconsistency in the late s, long range perspectives become more essential. What precedents have there been? When? Where? What can we learn from them? Or, is the last decade shift a unique event? This project establishes age standardized homicide rates for six large American cities from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century. It uses capture-recapture sampling when needed to correct unreliable public health reports or other individual level sources known to undercount, such as indictment records. When fully complete, the data set will allow the testing of several hypotheses related to violence. Did cities converge and begin to covary? When is it legitimate to discuss a national rate? Is sex distribution s impact on homicides a purely time dependent variable? When does the negative relationship between big city size and homicide rates that prevailed in change to a positive one? Does internal migration from high (or low), affect rates doc12460 none Professor Harry Tom of the University of California Riverside is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program to use terahertz spectroscopy to study hydrogen bonded liquids and the solid liquid interface. Time-domain terahertz spectroscopy will be improved by extending the range to as low as 0.002 THz using instrumental and data analysis advances. Secondly the low frequency features will be analyzed using memory kernal formalism to extract collective molecular orientation, angular velocity, and potentially also cross-coupling strengths. These methods will be used to study ionic solutions as well as solutions of increasingly complex molecules leading up to biomolecules such as DNA. Lastly, THz pump and time-resolved second harmonic generation will be developed for the study of solid liquid interfaces (namely, phenol derivatives adsorbed at the water silica interface). Terahertz spectroscopy has only recently come on the scene as a new method for probing very low frequency motions, and this new information promises to be of importance in understanding condensed liquids, interfaces, as well as biological media doc12461 none This research program focuses on the development of comparative theories of public policy from a political economy perspective where policies are chosen within institu-tions embedded in a political system. The principal comparisons are between presidential and parliamentary systems and between public and private politics and institutions. The policy focus is on the influence of organized and unorganized interests on choices by public and private officeholders. In the context of public politics, interests attempt to influence both the choice of government and government in office. In private politics. activist and interest groups attempt to affect economic activity without reliance on public institutions by pressuring firms to change their practices, such as environmental protection policies or working conditions in factories in developing countries. The research program has three principal components. The first is a comparative study of parliamentary and presidential systems with an emphasis on the dynamics of policy choice. The model of parliamentary systems includes a proportional representation electoral system, government formation, and policy choice. The model of a presidential system includes a geography-based electoral system and a legislature with supermajority features arising from a presidential veto override and a legislative supermajority, as in the case of the filibuster in the U.S. Senate. One objective is to incorporate political parties as reputation carriers in these institutional settings. The principal focus is on the stability of governments and their policy responsiveness to economic shocks. The second component is the study of the influence of interest groups on the policies chosen in political systems. The research generalizes existing common agency and vote buying theories to incorporate forms of influence in addition to contributions; e.g., the grassroots mobilization of constituents. This interest group theory is then related to the first component of the research program by studying constituency and interest group influence in proportional representation and geography-based representation systems. This incorporates influence both on the choice of government and government in office. The third component of this research is on private politics; e.g., pressure applied directly to firms by activist groups seeking to change the practices of those firms. This pressure may take the form of an organized consumer boycott or public exposure of practices such as the working conditions in overseas factories. The game of private politics includes firms and activists as players, and the equilibrium can correspond to the establishment of a private institution to mitigate commitment, coordination, information, and free-rider problems. The research on endogenous private institutions is extended to the private law of firms that organize electronic markets doc12462 none Kroll & Sunderman With National Science Foundation support, Ms. Gretchen Sunderman will collect data for her doctoral dissertation under the direction of Dr. Judith Kroll. Her research will investigate the development of second language lexical fluency. Although it is common practice to have second language learners attempt to suppress their first language in classroom contexts, recent psycholinguistic research suggests that it is impossible to do so. Words in the first language are active and compete for selection even when learners intend to read or speak in the second language only. Ms. Sunderman s experiments will include three groups of native speakers of English at different stages of second language proficiency in Spanish. Her goal is to examine the activation of the first language as learners acquire Spanish. One set of experiments will examine the first language in comprehension, and another set of experiments will examine it in spoken production. Participants will also take a battery of individual differences tests in their first language. Comparisons of these second language learners to monolinguals matched on the individual differences measures will provide an examination of some cognitive consequences of second language learning for first language performance. This research is important for several reasons. First, it will advance our understanding of the cognitive processes involved in second language lexical acquisition. Second, it will advance our understanding of cross-language competition at different levels of second language proficiency. Finally, in examining differences in individuals ability to suppress the first language during second language comprehension and production, this research will inform second language pedagogy and enhance the success of learning and teaching of second language vocabulary doc12463 none How does a bilingual read and speak words in one language when words in the other language are available and potentially compete for selection? Recent psycholinguistic research suggests that information in both of a bilingual s two languages is active during language comprehension and production. The bilingual is thus a model system to examine the conditions that give rise to competition and the manner in which that competition is resolved. This problem will be investigated in a series of experiments in which bilinguals read and speak words in one or both of their languages. The research has two aspects, comprehension and production of language. In each, experiments will examine the activation of alternative lexical candidates and the factors that modulate the resulting cross-language competition. In experiments on comprehension, word naming will be compared in the first and second languages. By manipulating the properties of the words to be named and the contexts in which they occur, it should be possible to identify the factors that induce and control language selection. In experiments on production, performance on picture naming and translation tasks will be compared to examine spoken word production in two languages. Using cued naming and task-switching paradigms, it should prove possible to examine the effects of requiring both languages to be active prior to speaking. The approach is intended to provide complementary methods for examining the activation of words in each language when a bilingual is required to speak a word in one language and to suppress or ignore information in the other language. The goal of this research is to develop converging approaches to study language comprehension and production in bilinguals. Together with existing research on monolingual language performance, the data generated by these studies should provide the basis for a more complete model of the bilingual lexicon. The mechanism of language selection that is the focus of the bilingual research has the more general potential to illuminate current debates about the type and timing of information available during comprehension and production. In this sense, bilingualism provides a useful tool for investigating universal cognitive constraints. The outcomes of this work also hold important implications for the more general problem of learning and using two languages doc12464 none The goal of this research is to understand why incumbent firms sometimes are followers in using new technology, even when they were instrumental in developing it. The evidence suggests that they face a larger opportunity cost than entering firms. Incumbents are locked in to older technologies because of their higher productivity in using older technologies, while entering firms can only use the new technology. The primary goal is to determine how large this lock-in effect is. The data used is from the rigid drive industry. This industry is well-suited for this exercise, since technology advances are rapid and there has been evidence of both situations where incumbents have lagged behind in the use of new technology and where they have been the first to use new technology. Simulating the model to approximate the data will provide information on what changes in the environment lead to the lock-in effect. In the model, as the relative value of the product produced using the new technology increases, the lock-in effect tends to decrease. However, the simulation of the model can provide us with direct evidence of how much the relative value must increase, given the other parameters, in order to eliminate the lock-in effect. A similar experiment can be run with changes in productivity. Computationally, this means solving the equilibrium model with many agents and calculating the difference in the value of an incumbent firm from switching to the newest technology. This is a formidable task as the agent s productivity using a given technology and the distribution of the agents productivity using a given technology are state variables. Because the output from the computed model must approximate the data, this means repeating this task as the program searches for the appropriate values of the state variables, as well as the other parameters for the model doc12465 none Funding is provided for a seismic and structural geology experiment to delineate the geometries and patterns of crustal extension and rift magmatism along three main conjugate margins across Alarcon, Guaymas and Delfin Basins (to study the south to north seafloor-spreading to non-spreading mode) and a E-W profile along Wagner Basin (to study the low-angle detachment fault at depth). The questions to be addressed include, strain partitioning, volumetric and emplacement style of rift magmatism, along-axis differences in extension style and the influence of sedimentation on deformation. An integrated land-based and at sea study is planned for the next three years doc12466 none Invasive non-native plants threaten the ecological integrity and economic value of natural areas throughout the world. Despite the severity of this growing problem, our understanding of how exotic plants become established in new areas and move across the landscape is weak. The objective of this research is to describe the process by which European buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica), a shrub native to Eurasia, colonizes new areas in North America and how that process varies with ecological context. Field observations and experiments will be used to examine each stage of the colonization process in second-growth deciduous forests, conifer plantations, and abandoned agricultural fields. Differences in microclimate, soils, and resident fauna will be considered as potential sources of variation in colonization. Spatial configuration of the environment also will be considered as a factor affecting colonization. Detailed stand-level maps relating species composition, canopy gaps, edges, and streams to European buckthorn distribution will reveal factors facilitating colonization and spread. Aerial photographs and geographic information systems will allow measurement of size, shape and spatial context of areas occupied by this plant. This research will demonstrate whether fragmentation of North American forests serves to promote or inhibit the spread of European buckthorn. European buckthorn competes with native plants and is a host of oat crown rust fungus, a disease that attacks oat crops. Native birds nesting in this shrub experience high rates of predation, and leaves of European buckthorn may be toxic to native mammals. This research will lead to a greater knowledge of the physiology and ecology of this relatively unstudied species of conservation concern. In addition, this research will contribute to understanding of how invasion success is affected by the properties of invaded ecosystems. This study also will quantify how forest fragmentation due to timber harvest and abandonment of agricultural lands affects the movement of an exotic species across the landscape. Although many invasive species are found in human-modified environments, there is growing concern about the presence of invasive species within pristine natural areas. Understanding the effect of environmental context, within particular settings and among settings in the landscape, will guide land managers and scientists to identify potential threats to natural environments doc12467 none This dissertation project examines the legal activities of a native people in New Spain (now, Mexico) called Tlaxcalans between and and the consequences of their litigiousness. During this time, the native population fell to its nadir, the Spanish and casta (mixed race) population increased dramatically, and the period of conquest and expansion was being supplanted by a period of administrative consolidation. This researcher hypothesizes that Tlaxcalans responded to these changes and adjusted their legal strategies accordingly. Consequently, by accommodating to the changing political environment, Tlaxcalans accessed new legal tools that were offered by the system and, in turn, shaped the political and demographic shifts within their community, and influenced the evolving legal system of the Spanish Empire. Building on the current literature in both Spanish and native history, two bodies of literature that rarely speak to each other, this project contributes to research that investigates native people s agency in historical processes and to literature that recasts the administration of the Spanish Empire as social phenomena. For this project, the researcher examines documents pertaining to the litigiousness of Tlaxcalans and to Spanish legal thought, which are found in archives in Mexico and Spain doc12468 none Advances in information technology have provided a broad platform for anytime-anywhere interactions, creating significant challenges for leaders to lead at a distance and across diverse cultures and settings. Yet, it is not uncommon today for people to relay stories of electronic communication that they misinterpreted or that caused great distress in their relationships with fellow workers. Currently, there is no protocol for technology-mediated leadership in virtual teams. In this two-year field study at UNISYS, we will explore how virtual teams form, develop trust, and lead themselves to higher levels of performance. This study is unique in that most of the literature on virtual teams has ignored leadership, which is one of fundamental drivers of team performance doc12469 none This research has three broad aims. First, the work will examine the nature and sources of growth in cognitive, language, and literacy skills during the transition from preschool to the early school years. Utilizing an ecological perspective, the research will investigate specifically the interactive role of child (e.g., IQ, social skills), family (e.g., parental warmth sensitivity, home learning environment), and schooling (e.g., amount of instruction in alphabet recognition) factors in shaping academic trajectories from three years of age to the end of kindergarten. Second, the project will explore the utility of constructing and charting developmental pathways to literacy, employing a combination of analytic tools, including multiple regression and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The combination of methods will permit creation of frameworks for describing complex, dynamic interactions among child, family, and schooling factors that shape literacy acquisition in young children making the transition to school. Third, the pathway framework and analytic strategy will be utilized to investigate the sources of reading success or failure in early elementary school. The conceptualization will combine the child, family, and schooling factors into a broad, comprehensive model of early reading acquisition. Two hundred 3-year-old children (following attrition) who attend center-based daycare or preschool and whose parents intend to enroll them in a local elementary school will participate in this three-year longitudinal study. Children s cognitive, language, and literacy outcomes will be assessed with individually administered standardized instruments and non-standardized measures. Additionally, information will be gathered on children s temperament and social skills. Finally, parenting and schooling factors will be assessed using questionnaires and direct observation. A longitudinal design will be implemented, following children for three years from age three through age five. This research is likely to make substantial theoretical, methodological, and analytic contributions. In particular, the pathway strategy employing SEM permits a rigorous yet broad perspective capable of describing the complex, dynamic interactions among variables shaping early developmental trajectories. In addition, the research may well have important implications for educational policy. The findings will likely confirm the centrality of the early childhood years as one source of meaningful individual differences in important literacy, language, and cognitive skills. Consequently, the results are likely to highlight the crucial role of parents in shaping children s early educational trajectories. Moreover, finding important connections between children s learning-related social skills and academic growth implies that in preparing children to be maximally ready for school, socialization of children s developing independence, responsibility, and self-regulation should go hand in hand with the promotion of early literacy skills. Finally, it is anticipated that different kinds of kindergarten instruction (e.g., teacher-directed versus child-directed) are likely to differentially benefit children with different skill levels. Taken together, the findings should be of interest to parents of preschool children as well as to preschool educators, kindergarten teachers, and school personnel concerned with issues of school readiness, school transition, and risk factors of early school failure doc12470 none This research will study the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the first truly international court for the prosecution of war crimes, genocide, breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and crimes against humanity. The research will use a structural theory of social movements to explain the emergence and evolution of the ICTY by focusing on political opportunities, mobilization structures, and cultural framing through human agency. Particular emphasis is placed on the tenure of Louise Arbour, the Chief Prosecutor, as she contributed elements of human agency and cultural reframing that were essential in utilizing opportunities presented by the post-cold war period and in mobilizing the organizational potential of the Tribunal. The research will involve archival work and two panel survey waves and in-person interviews with about 200 respondents randomly sampled from 320 employees of the OTP. The survey and interviews will provide a demographic profile and ethnographic picture of how the Tribunal was established and how the investigation and trial teams operate as mobilizing structures in building personal commitment to organizational goals. The surveys and interviews is to provide a stringent test of the thesis that intense interpersonal exposure to mobilizing structures, in this case through the Tribunal work teams, is a key source of commitment to Tribunal goals involving the successful prosecution of war crimes and other crimes against humanity. The theme of this work is ultimately that the collective benefit of human agency is dependent on the way in which the leadership of figures such as Louise Arbour can be translated into the everyday and collective commitment of individuals like those who make up the investigation and trial teams of The Hague Tribunal. This is the first study to focus on the actual institutionalization and operation of the ICTY as living law, that is, as law in action doc12471 none This Doctoral Dissertation Research Support investigation examines standardized survey interview procedures to determine if these procedures depress respondents motivation and ability to engage in effortful thinking, by alienating, confusing. and rushing respondents through the interview. The investigator tests this interviewer-respondent interaction with three complementary survey experiments. These experiments provide different means of exploring how to induce effortful thinking, how to detect it, and how to determine its effects. The experiments compare political opinions constructed under standardized procedures with those constructed under ideal conditions that are designed to encourage effortful processing doc12472 none This Doctoral Dissertation Support investigation examines the way states resolve trade disputes and the role international institutions, such as the World Trade Organization, play in resolving these disputes. The investigator briefly lays out the stages common to most trade disputes and provide evidence to highlight the rarity of WTO trade disputes. The bulk of the dissertation involves two primary tasks: a) to explain the reasons why states refer only a handful of their disputes to international dispute resolution bodies, and b) to assess how an international dispute resolution body facilitates the settlement of disputes, both during those disputes member states take before the international body and those disputes they settle out of court. To test these research questions the investigator assembles a new dataset on trade disputes, which includes information on disputes taken before the WTO and NAFTA, as well as information on disputes settled without the involvement of an international organization. A series of statistical analyses and case study evidence examines which disputes go before international organizations and how the existence of an international judicial body affects international cooperation doc12473 none This project consists of three areas of research in econometrics: wavelet analysis in time series dynamic panels; evaluation of out-of-sample forecasts for densities and confidence inter-vals; and asymptotic distribution theory for nonparametric entropy measures of serial dependence. Wavelet analysis provides natural tools for estimating the spectrum of an economic time series, which typically has peaks spikes, due to strong autocorrelation, seasonality and business cycles. One example is heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation con-sistent (HAC) covariance estimation. The popular Andrews-Newey kernel methods tend to underestimate the peak (and so the HAC), leading to overrejection in testing, and too narrow confidence interval estimates. This project develops a class of wavelet-based HAC estimators. Some simulation studies show that for the size of tests, the wavelet estimators outperform their kernel counterparts, particularly when serial correlation is strong. Two substantive extensions are pursued. The first is to refine the wavelet HAC estimators via a nonparametric frequency-domain prewhitening pro-cedure. This provides a faster convergent and more stable alternative than the commonly used parametric vector autoregression (VAR) prewhitening. The second extension is wavelet HAC estimation for panel models. The cur-rent practice for kernel HAC estimation in panels uses a bandwidth depending only on the number of time periods. This project finds that for both kernels and wavelets, the optimal smoothing parameters in panels depend on both the numbers of time periods and individuals. Wavelets are also used to distinguish a trend-stationary time series from a unit root process and to test serial correlation of unknown form in panel models. Omnibus procedures for evaluating out-of-sample density and intervals forecasts are developed using a generalized spectral ap-proach. These procedures are supplemented with a class of separate inference procedures that can reveal information on sources of suboptimal density- and intervals forecasts. Appli-cations to stock markets and foreign exchange markets evaluate a variety of popular density forecast models. For a class of kernel-based smoothed nonparametric entropy measures of serial dependence, this project develops an asymptotic distribution theory and shows how it can be used to derive the limit distributions for the existing entropy measures in the literature. The project develops tests that are either not available in the literature or are asymptotically more powerful than the existing procedures. Entropy measures can be used to test the random walk hypothesis, evaluate density- forecast models, identify significant lags of a time series and check the adequacy of dynamic likelihood models doc12474 none This research will advance theoretical understanding of criminal courts by applying the concepts of court community and decision makers focal concerns to the Federal Criminal Justice System (FCJS). Its central working hypothesis is that differences in federal criminal court communities help account for inter-district differences in case disposition procedures and outcomes. With few exceptions, existing quantitative empirical research on the FCJS has focused only on the sentencing stage. It usually ignores inter-district variation in disposition procedures and outcomes. As the first empirical, theoretically oriented study of the FCJS, this study will achieve a second purpose: It will significantly expand our knowledge of the FCJS by looking at decision stages prior to sentencing and assessing the nature and causes of inter-district differences. This research employs analysis of quantitative data and interviews with FCJS officials. Phase I includes pretest interviews with key decision makers in a large federal court community and with key staff in the Department of Justice and quantitative examination of differences in outcomes and disposition modes by district. Phase II will involve interviews in six districts selected for variation by size of court and by case disposition techniques and in Washington, DC. Interviews will be conducted in two stages: The first will explore decision-making patterns informed by knowledge gained from the phase I quantitative analysis; in the second, re-interviews in these districts will focus on questions and hypotheses generated by analysis of the first stage doc12468 none Advances in information technology have provided a broad platform for anytime-anywhere interactions, creating significant challenges for leaders to lead at a distance and across diverse cultures and settings. Yet, it is not uncommon today for people to relay stories of electronic communication that they misinterpreted or that caused great distress in their relationships with fellow workers. Currently, there is no protocol for technology-mediated leadership in virtual teams. In this two-year field study at UNISYS, we will explore how virtual teams form, develop trust, and lead themselves to higher levels of performance. This study is unique in that most of the literature on virtual teams has ignored leadership, which is one of fundamental drivers of team performance doc12476 none Adaptive learning refers to a process where agents learn about the value of their actions from their direct experience with the actions. There is evidence that variants of adaptive learning well describe subjects behavior in experiments. This project investigates decisions made by agents learning adaptively from their own experience but also from indirect information about actions they did not take. In particular, we investigate the effect that distortions of such indirect information, which we interpret as representing attitudes towards the source of information, have on the quality of the decisions. We find that the pattern of behavior depends on whether the agent inflates or deflates indirect payoff information relative to the objective payoffs. If the agent inflates indirect payoff information, actions that have not been played for a while tend to look better than they truly are, leading the agent to revisit them every so often. As a result, behavior ``cycles through more than one action. On the other hand, if the agent tends to deflate indirect information, he will settle to playing a single action. Since the unplayed alternatives are perceived to be worse than they objectively are, the limit action, which the agent perceives to be the best, can be objectively suboptimal. The former pattern resembles variety seeking while the latter resembles ``lock-in behavior. Marketing research suggests that both patterns are observed in consumer choice. The second key feature of the learning rule is the degree to which past observations are discounted. In particular, whether the weight put on last period s payoff becomes arbitrarily small or not. We provide preliminary results on the role of discounting, suggesting the effect depends crucially on whether indirect payoff information is utilized or not. While discounting leads to suboptimal behavior in a stationary environment, we look for justifications for it in decision situations which involve limited doc12477 none There are widely divergent views of what constitutes a successful transition from a planned to a market economy, how well transition economies have performed, and what policies account for differences in observed performance. This project will contribute to our understanding of this process by providing rigorous evidence on the evolution and determinants of economic efficiency in two countries that represent divergent models of transition - Russia and the Czech Republic. Similar initial conditions and widely different transition experiences in these two economies provide a useful context for the analysis of policies and other factors determining the evolution of well-functioning markets. The researchers are able to carry out this analysis because they have new micro panel data on a large number of firms and workers that are linked and span the final years of the communist system through the first decade of the transition. The research project will address the following key questions: (Q.1) How has firm efficiency changed during the transition period? Which types of firms show the greatest absolute and relative gains in efficiency and which ones are losing out? Stylized facts on efficiency are being established; the productive efficiency of different types of firms will be assessed relative to the best practice in the country in a given year and the practice of western firms in each country in . (Q.2) What matters more for efficiency: ownership, economic liberalization or competition? The project ascertains the relative importance of these factors in determining the levels and changes in efficiency over time. (Q.3) Does firm turnover replace the least efficient firms with more efficient ones? The efficiency measures derived for each firm are used to assess if entering firms are more efficient than exiting firms. The analysis shows if the bankruptcy laws and continuation of subsidies slowed down the cleansing process. (Q.4) Is labor reallocation efficiency enhancing? The research assesses if workers move from firms with low marginal products of labor to firms with higher marginal products of labor, and if government policy affects these flows in a positive way. (Q.5) Are capital markets becoming more efficient? At the start of the transition, some firms had excessive and some inadequate capital stock. The project evaluates whether subsequent investment behavior corrected this misallocation doc12478 none This project tests a formal model of the laws of war-formal treaties that seek to limit violence during wartime. These international laws are of particular interest because they shape behavior to the extent that the parties can enforce them on one another or respect their limits on their own. They form the extreme case of the self-enforcing nature of political institutions. The project is a formal treatment of war where there is a strategic competition between two states. They contend for a prize in a war of attrition model where the costs they pay each round depend on the current military balance between the two. In each round, they fight a battle where a fixed strategic-form, zero-sum represents the contest of each battle. The outcome of the battle game depends on their chosen strategies This determines the shift in the military balance in this round. In equilibrium, a side quits if the military balance moves against them beyond its break point , which is endogenous to the game. A variant of this game has the costs in a given round depend on the strategies played in the battle game as well as the current military balance. In this model the laws of war are represented as a prewar agreement by both players not to play a set of strategies of the battle game. The question is when such agreements hold in equilibrium. A side considering defecting from such an agreement weighs the short-run benefits of using a banned strategy when: a) the other side cannot retaliate; b) the long-run consequences of both sides being free to use any strategy covered by the agreement; and c) any audience costs it suffers for being the first violator of the agreement. The incentive to defect is assessed by how the break points of the two sides shift as a consequence of a defection. The project tests these conclusions by collecting a data set on violations of the laws of war in the 20th century. These data include the major treaties in effect, addressing issues like prisoners of war and chemical weapons, and candidates for agreements that were not legalized in a treaty, such as aerial bombardment. Coding rules for extent and degree of violations are created and compliance with these agreements by warring states in the set of Singer-Small wars during the 20`h century are assessed through consultation with historical sources, primarily secondary sources. This data collection leads to two empirical tests of the models: first, a comparison of whether enforceable agreements as judged by the model are actually observed more often than limits judged unenforceable, and second, a test of the timing of violations, whether they tend to fall early during a war and whether the winning side is more likely to be the violator when they occur when it appears that one side is about to lose doc12479 none This project conducts a large-scale comparative analysis of the impact of social cleavages - especially those based on class, religion, race ethnicity, and gender - on voting behavior in 23 capitalist democracies since . It examines four questions that have been the subject of much controversy in recent years. One, are social cleavages declining in importance as factors predicting individual voting behavior? Two, do party strategies, issue and attitudinal differences, and social, economic, and political contexts explain the patterns of change over time across each cleavage? Three, what individual and macro-level factors explain cross-national differences in the importance of cleavages? And four, what has been the impact of these changes on the electoral coalitions of major political parties? To answer these questions, the project creates an original data set containing pooled information from over 200 surveys done in 23 countries since . The investigators recode the data to provide cross-nationally comparable information on each respondent s class location, religion, gender, political attitudes, and voting behavior. They next combine the survey data with national figures on ethnic-linguistic and religious heterogeneity, percentage of women in the labor force, percentage of regular church attendees, levels of social mobility, and welfare state expenditures. They lastly add information to the data set on party platforms for most of the nations. The investigators not only use the data to address the substantive questions about changes and national differences in social cleavage-based voting, but also make the data available to other researchers interested in comparative voting behavior doc12480 none In the standard economic theory of labor markets, employees are compensated based on the value of their individual contributions to output: the relative performance of co-workers does not affect compensation. But corporations are increasingly instituting compensation arrangements that do not reward employees in accordance with the standard theory of labor markets. In one arrangement, often referred to as a tournament, rewards are based upon the relative performance of the participants rather than their absolute performance. In another arrangement, often referred to as team production, teams rather than individuals are responsible for a set of tasks. If firms are able to measure only team output, firms cannot compensate team members in accordance with their individual contributions. Despite widespread incidence of tournaments and team production in labor markets, the economic literature contains relatively little on behavior in tournaments and under team production. These experiments assess behavior, performance, and risk taking under tournaments and team production. Such experiments provide a better understanding of behavior under various compensation schemes as well as a basis for the design of contracts. The research in this proposal provides three separate studies. The first study considers whether tournament participants are overly optimistic regarding success in tournaments (i.e. overestimate their relative performance) and whether this causes too many individuals to enter tournament markets. If too many individuals enter, we may implement public policies to reduce the inefficiencies related to overcrowding. The second study considers whether performance under team production varies based on: i) the number of team members; ii) whether team members have information about the performance of other team members; and iii) whether the firm sets production targets and rewards the team when they exceed the target. A better understanding of team production helps in the design of public policies concerning contractual relations within and between firms. The final study considers whether an irrational desire to avoid losses, referred to as loss aversion, is an important determinant of performance in tournaments and whether this effect diminishes over time. Such information is important in the design of labor contracts. To assess performance and risk taking in tournaments and under team production, we conduct controlled experiments using students at The Pennsylvania State University as subjects. Subjects complete a computer-based numerical forecasting task to measure performance. To simulate labor market decisions, subjects are paid based on the accuracy of their forecasts at the end of each experimental session doc12481 none Children, Sport, and Character Development David L. Shields This project seeks to investigate the efficacy of sport in character development. There is a surprising paucity of research evidence to support the widely acclaimed benefits of sports in character development. The project will engage a focus group of local coaches to assist in refining research ideas about the moral culture of sport teams and the means by which the moral culture can be enhanced. The intent is to develop three developmentally-tailored guidebooks for coaches, and this would greatly assist with that project. A second objective is to conduct in-depth interviews with the basketball players and coaches of 12 teams (2 male and 2 female teams at each of three levels: junior high youth sport, interscholastic, and intercollegiate). These semi-structured, open-ended interviews will focus on perceptions of team moral culture and will provide one source of in-put for the further development of the Team Culture Questionnaire (TCQ). The project will also consult with the leadership of three major training programs for coaches: Michigan State s Youth Sports Institute, the Positive Coaching Alliance at Stanford University, and Maine s Center for Coaching Education. These programs were selected because they regularly train large numbers of volunteer and part-time coaches through workshops and seminars. They represent the types of organizations, through which most youth sport coaches will be trained, if they are trained at all. It is worth noting that of the 21 graduate programs that offer degrees in coaching, none have required course that focus on the coaches role in character education, and only three - Ohio University, Smith College, and Western Michigan University - have required courses in sport ethics. The purpose of these consultations is to identify and evaluate the ways in which character education is integrated into these select institution s coach training methods. These activities, taken together, will help to develop a research agenda doc12482 none Both asset pricing and investment theory rely critically on our understanding of investors portfolio choices. One of the most studied puzzles in financial economics is that, given the returns and volatility of publicly traded equity, investors seem to allocate too little wealth to stocks. That is the premium demanded for holding equity appears too high given observed investment in the stock market. However, while most of the literature has focused on publicly traded equity, this project analyzes the holdings of households in privately held firms. The private equity market is at least as large as the public equity market. Thus, it is equally important to understand investment behavior and the risk-return trade-off in this market. The project analyzes both the risk of private equity as a whole as well as the cross-sectional distribution of realized private equity across households, using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances and the Flow of Funds Accounts and supplementary sources. Preliminary results show that most private equity is held by households who have a large proportion of their wealth invested in a single non-publicly traded company; the average returns on private and public equity are similar, but investing in a single private company is substantially riskier than investing in an index of publicly traded equity. Together these facts imply that the typical owner of private equity faces a much worse risk-return trade-off than could be obtained by investing in an index of publicly traded equity. The second part of the project explains the puzzle of poor risk -return trade-off for owners of private equity. The project examines theories of moral hazard due to partially unobservable entrepreneurial effort and theories of asymmetric information in which entrepreneurs are better informed about firm prospects than potential outside investors. making it difficult for entrepreneurs to obtain a fair value when selling equity. The project uses previously unexploited data on hours worked by entrepreneurs as well as alternative measures of ownership to provide evidence on the theory of moral hazard. To test theories of asymmetric information, the investigators have obtained data for pre- and post-IPO ownership shares for shareholders in about 400 initial public offerings. Rational entrepreneurs should realize based on observing the large average ownership shares of current entrepreneurs, that they would need to hold large undiversified positions in their companies conditional on entry. Given the poor risk-return trade-off oil private equity, it is puzzling why, entrepreneurs then decide to enter. Low entrepreneurial risk aversion. non-pecuniary benefits, and over optimism and misperceived risk are possible explanations. The project provides evidence to rule out low risk aversion, leaving the distinction between alternative explanations for future work doc12483 none The project proposes research on three related subjects in theoretical and applied microeconometrics. The first study deals with estimation of nonlinear dynamic panel data models. Panel data track individuals over time and therefore offer us an opportunity to study an individual s dynamic behavior while controlling for his her (observed and unobserved) characteristics. Econometric techniques for linear panel data models are well developed, but, in general, our knowledge of nonlinear panel data models is still very limited. In most cases, the key assumption is that the explanatory variables are strictly exogenous, which essentially requires no dynamic feedback from the outcome variable in one period to the explanatory variables in the next period (e.g. it rules out the lagged dependent variable as an explanatory variable). This assumption is not plausible in many empirical applications. For example, in an earnings model, this assumption amounts to requiring that an individual s earnings today do not affect his her earnings tomorrow. One theme of the proposed research is to relax this assumption for a particular nonlinear model, namely the censored regression model, which is the appropriate model in the presence of data top-coding. The proposed method is applied to the matched data from the Current Population Survey and Social Security Administration (CPS-SSA) Earnings Record to study the racial difference in earnings stability. In particular, I empirically investigate whether the relative earnings stability between black and white had changed before and after the Civil Rights Act of . Although a step forward, the first study considers only one special form of endogeneity, namely, the presence of the lagged dependent variable. As a result, the proposed method heavily relies on this special structure. The goal of the second element of the proposed research is to extend the basic theoretical idea to construct alternative estimators for models with more general forms of endogeneity (e.g. predetermined regressors in the panel data model and endogenous regressors in the cross-sectional model). The proposed method is relevant in many empirical applications. For example, if we are interested in estimating a life-cycle female labor supply model using panel data, then the fertility variables, such as the number of children, are predetermined instead of strict exogenous since a woman s labor supply decision for today can affect her fertility decisions for tomorrow. The third part of the project proposes a method for estimating duration models using repeated cross-section data. More specifically, we estimate the conditional probability of an individual leaving unemployment at a particular point in time using repeated cross-section data on uncompleted unemployment spells. The proposed method improves upon the existing estimators by relaxing a stationarity assumption (i.e. we allow the compositions of the inflow of individuals into unemployment to vary over time). We compare estimates between using single and repeated cross-section data (on uncompleted unemployment spells) as well as those using panel data to gauge the performance of our estimator. We also extend the theoretical results to the competing risk models that allow for multi-state exit at the end of an unemployment spell. Finally we apply the proposed method to the Spanish Labor Force Survey data to investigate, among other things, the effects of the introduction of the temporary contracts in the mid s on women s labor market experiences. In sum, the proposed research is mainly on the econometric methodology, but the problems it tackles are relevant to many empirical applications. Therefore the results from the proposed project will be important for our understanding of many issues in economics and other social sciences doc12484 none The design and analysis of exchange rate regimes has long been a research priority. The subject has attracted even more attention recently because of the emerging-market crises of the s, and the ensuing controversies over how the exchange rate was managed. In those episodes the domestic financial system often crashed along with the currency. Moreover, financial considerations -such as the health of banks or the size of dollar debt posed severe constraints on the conduct of monetary policy. For these reasons, increasingly the focus of research is on the interaction between the structure of the financial systems and the effects of exchange rate policy. For instance recent work has stressed that in the presence of liabilities denominated in foreign currency a devaluation can weaken the balance sheets of domestic firms and reduce their access to world credit markets thus causing a fall in investment. aggregate demand. and output. In joint work with Luis Felipe Cespedes of NYU, the investigators were among the first to model this channel in the context of a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model and to explore its implications for monetary and exchange rate policies. But the literature that studies monetary policies in open economies with imperfect fi-nancial markets is still in its infancy. This project advances this line of work in two directions: (i) It develops formal models of how exchange rate policy may have an impact on overall activity through the effect of exchange rates on balance sheets and, more generally, on credit constraints. Previous work relied on some very strong simplifying assumptions. (ii) It analyzes the proper choice of monetary and exchange rate policy. Almost all papers so far have looked at once and for all monetary reactions to a particular shock. This project characterizes the optimal monetary policy rule with and without commitment. The theoretical results, and the quantitative implications of calibrated simulations of the models could have important implications for a number of policy issues. Could floating be the optimal exchange rate policy in the presence of financial imperfections? What is the optimal monetary policy in a floating regime? In particular. how close should the correlation be between home and foreign nominal interest rates? Can the optimal policy be replicated or approximated by an inflation-targeting rule? If so. how should that rule be designed doc12485 none The advent of computerized communication networks and automated trade execution systems have resulted in the recent availability of real-time prices and information variables for a host of different financial markets and instruments. This project aims to expand on the ability to extract useful information about important economic phenomena from this new rich source of data. Specifically, the high-frequency data hold the promise of delivering: (i) a much better understanding of the type of information that induces important price movements and their relation to the underlying market microstructure; (ii) a deeper understanding concerning the functioning of markets and the effectiveness of various macroeconomic policies; (iii) the development of new and more accurate risk measurements; and (iv) important information about the longer-run interday volatility dependencies that play a crucial role in asset pricing and risk management. Meanwhile, it has become increasingly clear that the satisfactory empirical analysis of high -frequency data presents a host of unique and challenging problems, requiring the development of new modeling paradigms and specialized procedures relative to the techniques employed in traditional time series econometrics involving the analysis of daily or lower frequency macroeconomic and financial data. The previous NSF-sponsored research (award ) has been at the forefront of these developments. Many of the ideas and methodologies put forth in our various papers have already been successfully implemented and applied by other researchers and finance practitioners in academia, government, and the private sector. Most immediately, our findings have allowed for the construction of more accurate financial market volatility forecasts and ex-post volatility measurements. Our proposed research agenda in turn holds the promise of improved procedures for risk management, monitoring, and oversight, and should also result in a deeper understanding concerning the efficiency of markets and the effectiveness of different macroeconomic policies. The general results of the proposed activity should therefore be of relevance to applied macroeconomists, time series econometricians, financial researchers, regulators, and practitioners alike doc12486 none Business service and headquarters activities locate disproportionately in the largest metro areas, while manufacturing is found disproportionately in smaller towns and cities. The question is why; and, hence, what is the role of large metro areas versus small and medium size cities in the USA. To start to understand the forces at work, this project examines local growth patterns, productivity, and out-sourcing decisions in the service and headquarter sectors. For the case of headquarters, by locating in the largest metro areas, headquarters separate themselves from their production facilities, creating significant internal company face-to-face communication costs. To what extent do they choose to be in these metro areas to take advantage of the diversity of local intermediate service inputs such as advertising, legal, and financial services found there, as opposed to gather information about innovations, export markets, financing, and the like through local information spillovers from, say, other headquarters? Similarly, why are business services located in the largest and most expensive metro areas? To what extent is it local scale economies within the service sector, versus upstream and downstream linkages within the service sector, versus linkages to sectors using services (e.g., headquarters) where those sectors may experience high own sector scale economies? The first two sections of the project examine these issues through a detailed analysis of city growth of headquarters and service industries, out-sourcing decisions, and productivity of headquarters and service sector firms. One issue is that for headquarters, there is no direct output measure, so productivity benefits must be measured through their effects on wages and rents. Another issue concerns the role of firm structure and the relationship between operating units and their headquarters in determining out-sourcing decisions. The last section of the project looks at the determinants of industry mobility across cities and compares mobility for service versus manufacturing sector industries, an issue for cities in planning and competing for industries. Manufacturing industries are highly mobile across cities, so that over the course of a couple of decades a smaller city may switch from being a textile manufacturer to specializing in electronics. Are service sector industries so footloose doc12487 none Scales This grant provides support for the costs of acquiring laboratory equipment to study elastic wave multiple scattering and resonance ultrasound spectroscopy. The equipment includes a vibration-isolated optical bench, a 16-bit high-speed digital oscilloscope board, an arbitrary waveform generation board, lock-in amplifiers and a low-noise preamplifier. This new equipment will allow us to make a variety of measurements aimed at understanding and exploiting multiple-scattering of elastic waves and resonance ultrasound, in order to characterize the properties of geologic materials. The new equipment will complement our existing facilities for laser ultrasonics, in particular a scanning laser-Doppler vibrometer. The equipment will be housed in the Green Center at the Colorado School of Mines and jointly utilized by the Physical Acoustics Laboratory and the Rock Properties Laboratory. It will also be available for use in undergraduate and graduate teaching and research within the Geophysics Department at CSM doc12488 none The Impact of Television on Very Young Children Daniel R. Anderson Little is known about the impact of television on children younger than three years. Nevertheless, field studies indicate that exposure to television is associated with slower language and cognitive development. This research considers the impact of two types of television to which very young children are exposed. The first type is television as background, watched by others, to which the child pays little active attention. The second type is television as foreground specifically designed for very young children and to which they actively attend. The first two studies test the hypothesis that background television disrupts toy play and parent-child social interactions. If the hypothesis is correct, background television reduces the quality of these activities essential for healthy cognitive and social development. In the first study very young children s toy play is observed in the presence of a television program for adults, a television program for older children, and with no television. If background television disrupts play, it is expected that there will be systematic differences in both qualitative and quantitative aspects of toy play. In the second study parent-child interactions are observed in the presence of a television program for adults and with no television. If background television disrupts parent-child interactions, both qualitative and quantitative differences in parent-child interactions will be found. Increasingly, television programs are being developed specifically for very young children. There has been no firm determination as to when very young children begin to comprehend such programs. The third study is designed to assess the age at which very young children discriminate comprehensible and incomprehensible versions of Teletubbies. The fourth study assesses whether Teletubbies influences the quality of toy play subsequent to viewing. The research will provide significant new information relevant to the current debate concerning the impact of electronic media on very young children. Specifically, the research will indicate whether background television disrupts very young children s cognitive and social behaviors. Additionally, the research will provide an initial determination of the earliest age at which conventional television can be plausibly educational, as well as whether play behavior is stimulated or otherwise influenced by a prominent television program specifically designed for very young children. The research will also cast light on the impact of two future trends in media. One trend, the advent of high-definition and broadband television, will provide programming that is more salient as a background influence in young children s environments. The second trend is that, with the economic success of Teletubbies, other programs for very young children will soon follow. These studies will provide basic observations essential to evaluating the impact of television on very young children now and in the future doc12489 none The wireless channel is expected to play as dominant a role as the wired internet, in providing seamless information super-highway . In the future, wireless data traffic will be increasingly dominated by a variety of multimedia, such as real-time video, email, web downloads, as opposed to voice transmission. Tether-free communication and networking , as envisioned by the Information Technology Research program, requires intensive research into handling the transmission of multimedia over the wireless channel. Various multimedia have very different traffic characteristics than voice, being characterized by different delay constraints and burstiness. Handling bursty data has been addressed primarily in the networking communit. The community has focussed on the relationship among the traffic delay constraint, the packet loss rate (which is assumed to be the packet drop rate), and the channel capacity, captured by measures such as Effective bandwidth . Networking problems in wired (fiber, copper, etc.) media have been successfully solved by this approach, because this channel is inherently a low-error channel. However, the networking community has by and large ignored the fact that there is a very real, non-idea physical channel on which this data is carried. Therefore, the migration of these approaches to the wireless medium meets a significant obstacle- the fact that the wireless channel is inherently a very noisy, non-robust channel. Thus for wireless channels, it is important to consider the effect on packet loss of both, burstiness and channel errors. Researchers have been approaching the issue of considering both these effects in (the PI believes) an ad hoc manner. This proposal intends to approach the issue in a systematic and logical manner. Specifically, the PI proposes to introduce a joint measure of burstiness and channel condition, and use the measure to solve the key problem of allocating scarce resources among competing users of a wireless system. The proposed joint approach is a fundamental change in paradigm, since it attempts to synthesize ideas from the Networking and Communication Theory communities. The reason why source burstiness as well as channel errors (due to noise, fading, etc.) affect the standard notions of channel capacity, is due to the requirement of finite delay in the data communication. The PI has therefore developed an initial set of measures (details in the full proposal) that relate the delay and packet loss. The measure is based on the random coding error exponent approach, developed in an information theoretic setting. To reduce the packet drop probability, the wireless transmitter must transmit at as high a data rate as possible. But a high rate of transmission would imply a high packet error probability on the wireless channel, due to transmission errors. The measure developed by the PI attempts to capture this trade-off. Preliminary analysis indicates that using this measure indeed offers a substantial benefit (in terms of designing an optimum system) for bursty traffic transmission over fading wireless channels. The first step in the current research would be to refine the developed joint measure. This would involve using more sophisticated source traffic models, more sophisticated fading channel models, and practical channel coding schemes. The developed measure will then be used to design optimal or robust schemes (as the need may be) to allocate wireless resources to competing streams of data traffic. This will involve developing scheduling flow control algorithms, and the associated adaptive channel coding schemes, using the joint measure. In summary, this research will introduce a fundamentally new paradigm for transmission optimization of bursty data traffic over wireless channels, and then demonstrate the usefulness of the new paradigm in practical situations doc12490 none This project addresses the role of the Drosophila melanogaster gene called suppressor of sable, su(s),in the control of pre-mRNA metabolism. Recent studies from this laboratory indicate that the su(s)gene product, Su(s), associates with a hypophosphorylated form of RNA polymerse II (RNAP II) and performs a novel function in regulating both transcription and an early step in pre-mRNA processing. The project has three main objectives. The first is to gain a better understanding of how Su(s) regulates RNA production. Northern blot and RT-PCR analyses will be used to examine the effect of su(s) mutations on the synthesis and processing of transcripts from genes that have been defined in previous studies as probable targets of Su(s)-mediated regulation. Drosophila genome microarrays will be used to examine the global effect of su(s) mutations on gene expression in embryos and to identify new genes that are regulated by Su(s).The second objective is to investigate the interactions of Su(s) with other proteins and with specific regions of genes. Polytene chromosomes will be probed simultaneously with a polyclonal antibody that recognizes Su(s) and one of several different monoclonal antibodies that recognize specific phosphorylated forms of RNAP II. The chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) technique will be used to examine the distribution of Su(s) and different phosphorylated forms of RNA polymerase II in specific regions of genes. The third objective is to characterize functional domains of Su(s) through in vivo analysis of su(s) transgenes with alterations at specific sites in the coding region. Many cellular processes once thought to be distinct events, separated by time and distance, are now believed to occur at the same time and in the same place, catalyzed by molecular complexes with at least some shared components. This analysis of such a pair of processes, transcription and transcript processing, promises to provide novel insights into the mechanisms used to integrate various metabolic events in higher organisms doc12491 none This Doctoral Dissertation Research Support investigation examines the sources of 1) legislator policy location on roll call votes, and 2) legislator voting consistency, or variance around this location. The study begins with the common wisdom that legislators select a policy location based on their constituency, party, and ideology. However, legislators also decide whether their primary goal is to gain re-election, advance within the party, or pursue policy outcomes, and this determination impacts their positioning as well. Furthermore, this study posits novel models of mass voting and committee assignment behavior that influence legislator location. To test the roll call model requires an accurate measure of legislator ideology, independent of party and constituency, and a determination of legislators goals. This project surveys 700 former members of the United Sates congress to elicit their current ideology and their goals when in office. Analysis of this data will produce unbiased estimates of the impact of constituency, party, and ideology on voting behavior. Next, the study hypotheses that voting consistency is a function of district diversity, party heterogeneity, and member ambivalence. The proposed survey will yield measures of member policy ambivalence, and thus permit a variance model to be tested for the first time doc12492 none Romanowicz Karato This is a collaborative study between seismologists at UC Berkeley and mineral physicists at Yale University, to explore the feasibility of inverting seismic long period waveform data directly for 3D variations in effective temperature and major element chemistry in the upper mantle. Effective temperature will include the effects of temperature and water content, which cannot be easily separated from seismic data alone. Water content is likely to have large effects on rheology and therefore has significant influence on the dynamics of the Earth s mantle. They will use the mineral physics framework to delineate contributions from these various factors and provide estimates of relevant partial derivatives. Effects of major element chemistry can be distinguished from that of water, because water has a large influence on anelasticity whereas major element chemistry does not. On the other hand anelasticity is more strongly dependent on temperature than seismic velocity. At the heart of this study is the conjecture, supported by theoretical considerations, that the one step inversion of seismic waveforms for physical parameters such as composition C and (effective) temperature T , should yield more stable results than the standard approach of first inverting for velocity and Q structure and then interpreting the obtained maps in terms of physical parameters. The latter is currently inhibited by the poor resolution in 3D upper mantle Q, due to contamination of amplitudes by largely unmodelled, but significant, effects of focusing and scattering. In the one step inversion the effects of C and T are coupled in the inversion matrix elements, whereas in the standard approach, only the amplitudes depend on anelastic terms, while both phase and amplitudes depend on the elastic ones, leading to strong biases in the distribution of Q inferred. The coupled character of the equations in the one step approach, combined with the strong sensitivity of amplitudes to T (through anelastic terms) should offset the approximate character of the available mineral physics partial derivatives and the errors due to inadequate theoretical treatment of focusing doc12493 none The Developmental Foundations of Number and Operations Sense Arthur J. Baroody Children s counting-based knowledge of number and arithmetic builds on their nonverbal knowledge in these domains. The nature of this pre-counting phase and how children make the transition to the counting phase, however, are not clear. According to the mental model proposed by Janellan Huttenlocher and colleagues, children initially represent even small collections of 1 to 4 items inexactly, not precisely as much current theorizing suggests. With Transition 1, children develop the ability to represent collections exactly but nonverbally. This and the development of counting permit Transition 2 to an exact, verbally based representation of number. Whereas the mental model focuses on how number is represented, Lauren Resnick s developmental model focuses on what is represented. According to this model, mathematical thinking evolves from concrete (context-bound) to abstract (general). In the first phase, children form a nonverbal understanding of uncounted quantities (engage in protoquantitive reasoning). In the second phase, they construct understandings of counted collections (become capable of quantities-level reasoning). In the third phase, children construct knowledge and can reason about specific numbers in the absence of actual collections (numbers-level thinking). In the fourth phase, they discover numerical or arithmetic relations and can reason with and about generalities (abstract l-level reasoning). The proposed project will entail evaluating a model that integrates the two models discussed above. According to this integrated model, children may pass through three subphases between protoquantitative- and quantities-level thinking. After Transition 1, they may first reason sensibly but imprecisely (qualitatively) about exact representations of number (subphase 1) and then reason precisely (quantitatively) about them (subphase 2). After children learn number names but before they can enumerate collections (can use counting to determine the number of items in a collection), they may be able to reason quantitatively about exact representations of collections and attach number labels to them (subphase 3). Although the integrated model is consistent with much existing research, including that which suggests the rapid recognition of number without counting is a basis for quantitative-level thinking, specific implications of the model need to be tested. Studies 1 and 2 will involve evaluating predictions that follow from the integrated model about how the development of an exact nonverbal representation of number, verbal counting, and simple addition subtraction are inter-related. For example, according to this model, pre-counting children in subphase 1 should be to nonverbally create a matching collection for one previously seen but now hidden. Whereas, these children should can only estimate the effects of addition or subtraction on a collection, subphase 2 pre-counters can mentally determine small sums and differences accurately, and subphase 3 pre-counters can further identify such results by verbally labeling it with a number. Study 1 will entail combining a cross-sectional design, questionnaire-based interviews of children s parents or teachers (to provide context and observational data), and repeated re-testing (to examine the learning effects often induced by testing young children). Study 2 will consist of long-term case studies based on naturalistic observations and microgenetic methods (repeatedly administering selected tasks in a specific manner at a prescribed interval, particularly during a developmental transition phase). Using a combination of methods should provide richer data on number and arithmetic development than using any single method. Understanding children s performance in a microgenetic study, for instance, can be significantly improved by a detailed knowledge of their developmental readiness and performance in their natural environment (as documented by naturalistic data). In return, the focused nature of a microgenetic study can provide naturalistic observations with a clear direction (e.g., direct attention to key behaviors or patterns of behavior). Four other studies will involve examining the early development (nonverbal understanding) of the following key number and arithmetic concepts: part-whole knowledge (e.g., a whole is larger than any single part), additive composition (e.g., a sum is larger than either part), the inverse principle (addition of a certain amount is undone by the subtraction of the same amount), and additive commutativity (the order in which two collections are combined does not affect the outcome). The proposed project should have important theoretical, methodological, and practical value. Directly testing the implications of the integrated model should lead to a better understanding about the origins of number and operation sense and how it evolves. The integrated methodologies and task-specific tests developed should be useful in investigating pre-counting mathematical knowledge, exploring the transition to counting-based knowledge, and gauging the effects of the former on the latter. The more powerful developmental framework and assessment measures should be useful for those planning, developing, or implementing early childhood mathematics programs doc12494 none Many assessments, both of an individual s own ability and that of others are based in part on bilateral interactions. These interactions, which take place among colleagues and between family members and friends, can take the form of arguments over business tactics or politics, discussions of past work and of other colleagues, and many other issues. After such interactions the participants usually have an assessment of which participant came out ahead; who won or lost the debate. These interactions may influence an individual s self-assessment, and thereby choices of occupation and investment in human capital. These contests will also influence an individual s assessment of the person with whom they interacted, and hence it will influence their recommendations for these others. This in turn may influence the desire of agents to interact. This project explores how these assessments affect choices by individuals themselves and of promotions of others. In deciding which occupation to pursue individuals need information about their ability. If such signals take the form noted above, namely of wins and losses against others, the information contained in these signals will be significantly influenced by the perception of the other person s ability. It is natural to assume that different occupational classes have different abilities-which would arise from individuals choosing occupations according to their self assessment-and that children interact with parents (more generally adults) from a particular occupational class. In such an environment, the children of different occupational classes will have access to different types of signals. In particular, those from occupational classes requiring low ability will observe signals that compare them to the low ability individuals. This will lead to a form of persistence in occupational choice. The project explores this persistence in a rich model of types, contests, and occupational choice, and compares it to stylized facts regarding persistence. There is ample evidence that individuals incorrectly assess their own ability. The project explores how these incorrect assessments spillover into incorrect assessments of others. The study begins by assuming that individuals may either be correct about their own ability, or they may have a bias; in particular they may either be over- or under-confident. If these individuals are otherwise rational, then they will tend to over or under evaluate those with whom they participate in contests. This in turn will lead those who need to be assessed, say for promotion, to want to interact with certain types of assessors, in order to bias their evaluations upwards. Despite these errors, the increased interaction can improve assessment and thereby the promotion process. Of course, biases may take other forms, and the research explores in general the effect that biases in self-assessment have on the assessment of others, and thereby on promotion processes. The research will have several contributions. It will provide new models of persistence in occupational and social mobility. It will also explore how biases in perception influence promotion and other decisions in organizations doc12495 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Philip P. Garner, of the Department of Chemistry at Case Western Reserve University, is studying asymmetric synthesis using chiral heteroalkyl radicals. Professor Garner is both developing a general, iterative polymer-supported radical synthesis of polyols and extending the use of pyranosidic chiral auxiliaries to synthetically useful closed-shell processes. The optimal resin-linker strategy for this iterative approach will be defined and techniques developed for the quantification of polymer-supported reactions. Methods for reducing the number of steps required for each iteration of the radical homologation sequence and paring down the structure of the chiral auxiliary will also be explored. Pyranosidic chiral auxiliaries will be applied to a variety of useful closed-shell processes. Concerted cycloadditions, allylboron enolate alkylations, and a tandem asymmetric hydroboration Suzuki coupling sequence will be examined, both in solution and on polymer supports. While organic reactions have traditionally been carried out in solution, allowing intimate mixing of reactants, there are many advantages to finding reactions in which either a reactant or a reagent is linked to an insoluble support. If a spent reagent is attached to such a support, for example, it may be easily removed from the reaction mixture, while if a desired compound is attached, impurities may be easily washed away. Professor Philip P. Garner, of the Department of Chemistry at Case Western Reserve University, is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his efforts in this area. Professor Garner is harnessing the reaction chemistry of compounds containing an unpaired electron ( radicals ), finding ways to control their reactivity so as to allow precise geometrical control over the products of their reactions doc12496 none Since the s, numerous studies have documented a link between low socioeconomic status (SES) and high risk for disease and premature mortality. This project will provide an understanding of the long-run progress made in narrowing disparities in health outcomes by SES, by producing data on more than 5,000 decedents and more than 625,000 survivors in the census years between and in a sample of rural and urban counties. This will be accomplished by linking individuals from the morality schedules of the -80 censuses to the corresponding population schedules containing the surviving members of each decedent s household. The linked sample will contain, for each survivor and decedent, information on whether a death occurred (and if it did, its specific cause), and the household s wealth holdings, occupational status, literacy, and school attendance patterns. Together with the information on each household s location, this will make it possible to consider the link between SES and cause-specific mortality for a variety of locations and specific causes of death during three decades when the U.S. was experiencing rapid urbanization and industrialization. The ability to measure and explain the relationship between SES and mortality in the period -80 will have two substantial benefits: (1) providing historical context for understanding the present-day link between economic circumstances and health outcomes, which will be of interest to both public health researchers and social scientists interested in health as a component of the standard of living; and (2) offering a new perspective on the antebellum paradox of rising per capita income and falling life expectation and falling physical stature in the middle decades of the nineteenth century identified by economic historians. In the absence of good micro-level data on mortality, the focus of most research on the antebellum paradox has been on physical stature. The explanation of the paradox is crucial to understanding the full costs and benefits of the economic growth experienced by the U.S. in the nineteenth century doc12497 none College of William & Mary Nikos P. Chrisochoides NGS: Introducing the Next Generation of Computational Scientists in the Science and Art of Meshing International Meshing Roundtable (IMR) takes place every year in the United States. IMR attracts researchers from universities, national laboratories, and computer vendors from the US, Canada, many countries from Europe, Japan, and some countries from South America. IMR is an ideal forum to attract and excite young researchers in the field of mesh generation. Graduate students selection for travel support will be based on two criteria: ( i ) advanced students will present their own papers accepted by the IMR program committee ( ii ) not so advanced students will be asked to submit one page statements of interest signed by their advisor and or chairman of their department doc12498 none The focus of the proposal is to pursue fundamental understanding of structural transformations in materials that occur in applications and device methods to control them so that they can be either averted or enhanced, as needed by industry. The specific problem of interest is the stabilization of g-alumina that is widely used as a catalyst support and as a catalyst. At high temperatures, g-alumina, which is porous, converts to a-alumina, which is not porous, and catalytic activity stops. Empirically, it has been found that the addition of 3.5-5% lanthanum stabilizes g-alumina. In a laboratory process developed by one of the PIs, it has been found that stabilization can be achieved with only 0.3-0.5% La, but the process is not scalable for manufacturing (La is very expensive). The proposed research will use a combination of atomic-resolution Z-contrast microscopy and electron-energy-loss spectroscopy and first-principles theoretical modeling to understand the atomic-scale processes that underlie the phase transformation and the stabilization with different impurities. A second problem will be the interaction of catalytic particles with the alumina substrate in catalytic systems. The PIs at two universities, a national lab, and an industrial lab have prior expertise and collaborative synergy on similar projects in the past and also propose to develop a parallel educational program. %%% The proposed research will seek to understand the atomic-scale processes that underlie a phenomenon that has proved to be quite costly for industry: the material known as g-alumina is porous and is used as a substrate in catalytic systems. At high temperatures, it undergoes a transformation to a different phase known as a-alumina (different atomic arrangements in the crystal), which is not porous. Catalytic activity stops. Addition of 3-5% of the rather expensive element lanthanum stabilizes g-alumina. One of the PI s developed an alternative process that produces stable g-alumina with only 0.3-0.5% La, but the process cannot be scaled for manufacturing. The PIs have an assembly of unique experimental and theoretical tools and have demonstrated synergistic collaboration in the past. They will be able to determine the atomic scale processes that are responsible for the transformation and the stabilization by impurities and develop alternative approaches with either La or other impurities that will be efficient and cost-effective. In addition, they propose to study related interactions between catalytic metal particles on alumina substrates. Finally, they propose an educational program that will enable students to participate in research done at a national lab and an industrial lab doc12499 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses the problem of new non-destructive testing methods. The research will try to develop a smart composite based on inductive coupling. Objectives include successful integration of magnetic material into the composite without causing delamination and successful transmission of the signal out of the composite. The result will be a low-cost alternative to embedding sensors in composites and will be geared especially for thick composites. Commercial applications may include all types of composites where monitoring is important. This technology will be especially useful for civil structures where thickness of composites has often limited monitoring in the past doc12500 none Most fish are confined entirely to fresh water (FW) or seawater (SW) and cannot live in or adapt to the other environment. What may be surprising is that the internal salts and organic molecules (solutes) in the blood of all bony fishes are maintained in an intermediate concentration (which is actually similar to that in mammals). In other words, fish in salt water may suffer stress because they are living in a medium about 3 times as salty as their blood and therefore must pump out extra salt that is ingested. This requires molecular transport proteins (such as the sodium potassium pump and other ion pumps and channels). FW fish, on the other hand, face the problem of becoming waterlogged . In other words, the higher concentrations of salts in their tissues and blood cause the fish to gain water by diffusion (also called osmosis). These fish must rid themselves of the extra water and conserve salts. They do this by using molecular transport proteins. In general the control of internal salt and water balance (osmoregulation) requires significant metabolic energy to power it. As most people know, a small number of fish like salmon and eels spend a part of their life in FW and part of their life in SW. These fish literally switchover from the FW metabolism to the SW metabolism, a process that may be metabolically stressful. A surprising little fish (3 inches long), the killifish (Fundulus heteroclitus), has been shown to have phenomenal osmoregulatory abilities. This fish can survive indefinitely in FW or in SW up to 3 times more concentrated than ocean water. Furthermore, killifish may migrate daily from SW to FW and back to feed (and to breed and lay eggs in the Spring) making them appear to be unusually adept at osmoregulation. At present there is intense interest in the metabolic machinery and especially the molecular transport proteins that are involved. Indeed, many of the same types of proteins and their responses to salinity change that are found in killifish also are found in salmon and eels. However, with killifish (and perhaps other fish as well) another mechanism, to deal with salinity stress has been suggested, termed behavioral osmoregulation. The heart of this hypothesis is that, all other things being equal, killifish will try to swim up FW streams to the point where their internal salt and water composition resembles that of the external water (about 1 3 strength SW) and stay there conserving metabolic energy that would otherwise be expended pumping salts in or out of the fish. Preliminary data support the hypothesis that killifish may seek salinities about 1 3 that of SW. This new idea has broad implications physiologically and ecologically. The principal investigators will measure the metabolic energy requirements for osmoregulation in killifish. Using DNA based techniques, they will measure the presence of and changes in the molecular transport proteins in killifish. They also will investigate the ecology of wild killifish and attempt to correlate natural distributions and breeding behavior with projected salinity preferences. A very important part of this project is that the principal investigators will lead a team of 8 undergraduate students per year (for each of 4 years) who will work during their academic year on this research at their home institutions and then come to Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory for 2 months during the summer to do fieldwork, physiology and molecular biology. The students will have the opportunity to do original research while learning modern techniques in many fields at one of the country s finest marine laboratories. It is expected that this experience show these students the passion and fulfillment of scientific research that will motivate them in their future careers doc12501 none This project contributes to the understanding of the transmission mechanism of monetary policy, which is to say, of the way in which changes in monetary policy affect real activity and inflation. The primary aim of developing a more accurate model of these effects is to allow a more precise analysis of the consequences of adopting one or another monetary policy rule, and the calculation of an optimal rule. The analysis is grounded in optimizing private-sector behavior, in order to allow an analysis of the welfare consequences of alternative policies in terms of the extent to which private objectives are fulfilled. A defect of existing optimizing models of the monetary transmission mechanism is that they are too exclusively forward-looking : both inflation and real activity are predicted to be determined purely by current and expected future interest-rate policy, with no effect of past conditions. Empirical evidence on the effects of monetary policy instead indicate the existence of response delays, that imply both that the effects of policy changes are not observed immediately and that they persist longer than do the effects upon interest rates. The project considers the consequences of two kinds of modifications of standard models that allow for response delays while still assuming optimizing behavior on the part of the private sector. The first class of models assumes that private decisionmakers do not continuously reoptimize in the light of current conditions, but instead only reconsider their actions after a certain interval. This allows a delay in the effects of a monetary policy change upon aggregate expenditure, on the ground that not everyone immediately revises their previous spending plans. When this model of intermittent optimization is applied to consumer expenditure, it has consequences for aggregate consumption similar to those of the recently popular hypothesis of habit persistence , but without certain implications for individual household behavior that do not fit with panel data evidence. The second class of models assumes that private decisionmakers do not continually monitor current conditions with complete accuracy, in order to economize on limited information-processing capacity. It is assumed that decisionmakers monitor their environment using a noisy channel in the information-theoretic sense. This is not simply a metaphor, but provides a quantitative model of the sources of error in decisionmakers perception of their environment, and in particular provides a useful way of quantifying the assumed constraint on information-processing capacity. This allows a delay in the effects of a monetary policy change, on the ground that decisionmakers are not immediately able to discern with certainty that the change has occurred. The resulting theory has some similarities to asymmetric-information models of the s, but is able to answer important objections that were raised to those theories because the asymmetric information is based upon limitations upon individuals ability to pay attention to everything in their environment, rather than upon any claim that the relevant data are not publicly available. An interesting feature of this type of model is that significant delays in price adjustment can result even when the information of individual price-setters about current aggregate conditions is relatively accurate. It suffices that (because the errors in observation resulting from inadequate channel capacity) there be significant uncertainty about what others may believe that others may believe that others may believe ... about the aggregate state. In other words, it is not uncertainty about the state of the economy so much as the absence of common knowledge that results in response delays. This approach to explaining response delays helps to explain aspects of the observed effects of monetary policy that optimizing models with sticky prices cannot, including differential speeds of response of prices to different types of shocks, and apparent stickiness of the rate of inflation (as opposed to the price level) under certain conditions. A more sophisticated version of this class of models seeks to explain the degree of precision with which individual variables are monitored by decisionmakers, by assuming a global channel-capacity constraint (a constraint upon the overall number of bits per period of information that can be pro-cessed), subject to which decisionmakers choose an optimal information-collection strategy. This offers the prospect of a theory that yields very tight predictions, and at the same time allows for important changes in information structure in response to changes in economic conditions, including sufficiently dramatic changes in monetary policy. The project considers the design of optimal monetary policies, both when the information structure is taken as given, and when endogenous response of the information structure to the policy regime is taken into account doc12502 none The labor supply response to income taxation is a venerable topic in labor economics and public economics. It has experienced a revival in the last decade with a literature that has refocused attention on responses in earnings rather than hours of work, and with a focus on high-income individuals rather than the full distribution of workers. Generally speaking, somewhat higher elasticities for high-income earners have been .fund than were .apparent from the older hours-ofwork literature for the workforce as a whole. A major methodological issue that has emerged in the newer literature relate, to the intersection between difference-in-difference (DID) methods and panel versus repeated cross section (RCS) data. The recent literature has used DID methods for the most part because there is no plausible cross-sectional identification for assessing the effects of the federal income tax, which applies equally to all individuals in the country at a point in time. DID methods compare changes over time, from before to after a change in marginal tax rates, for high-income taxpayers to changes for taxpayers at lower levels of income. While these methods face some difficulties when applied to panel data, they face greater difficulties when applied to RCS data because income itself is an endogenous, time-varying variable. Forming treatment groups and applyingWaldtype estimators to groups defined by income leads in principle to inconsistent estimates. This is a serious problem because RCS data are far more common than panel data in this area of research and are a major continuing database for tax analysis. The research outlined in this proposal will investigate methods for the estimation of federal income tax effects on earnings and labor supply with RCS data. The starting point for the research is based on the P.I. s own work on RCS methods. The P.I. s research has sought to clarify and delineate the identification conditions for consistent estimation with RCS methods and to propose alternative estimation methods. The p.rs work has also made clear the central importance of age ami cohort in the use of kCS methods--that is, following cohorts of individuals from one cross-section to another as they age--a focus which is missing from existing tax analysis with RGS data. The research will also be based on the P.L s :_~~ .= in the tax effects area using panel data, work which has sought to clarify the identification conditions for DID methods in general. The project will investigate the estimation of tax effects with several cross-sections of the Survey of Consumer Finar.z:s (SCF), used in common in some parts of the analysis with several crosssections of SOI microdata tax files as well as several cross-sections of SOI microdata tax files. Some comparative analysis will be conducted with a - panel of the SCF as well doc12503 none Reiners This grant provides partial support for acquisition of a laser extraction system for (U-Th) He chronometry. Laser heating and gas extraction from crystals for (U-Th) He thermochronometry and geochronometry provides significantly lower He blanks, allows very small aliquots (single crystals) and very young samples to be dated, dramatically increases sample throughput, and allows dating of refractory minerals such as titanite, zircon, and garnet. The laser extraction system will be incorporated into a He mass spectrometry line and (U-Th) He dating lab at Yale University, which is supported by a new geochemistry lab manager position in the Department of Geology and Geophysics, and a new HR-ICP-MS for U-Th determinations. The lab will focus on both experimental development of new (U-Th) He approaches and applications, as well as routinely providing low-temperature cooling ages for establishing the timing and rates of tectonic and geomorphologic processes and dating of volcanic rocks. The laser extraction system will be a critical component of this lab, both because of its ability to provide relatively rapid, low-blank, He extraction from a wide variety of minerals for experimental and methodological studies, as well as its ability to process large numbers of routine samples for collaborative research projects (primarily apatite, titanite, and zircon He ages for tectonic studies doc12504 none Stein Use of the geochronometer based on the decay of rhenium (Re) to osmium (Os) is rapidly expanding, and there are no reference materials certified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for inter-laboratory comparison. Advances in chemical and mass spectrometric procedures permit high precision determination of Re and Os, even on low-ppt level samples. Molybdenite (MoS2) is uniquely suited for the Re-Os chronometer because it commonly contains high concentrations of the parent Re and essentially no initial daughter Os. Thus, the decay of 187Re to 187Os yields precise ages, even in very young samples, without correction for initial Os. With increasing demand for Re-Os dating, particularly of molybdenite, the need for an accepted reference material for inter-laboratory comparison has become crucial. We propose to calibrate a Re-Os molybdenite reference material, working together with University of Alberta and NIST. The proposed Re-Os reference molybdenite is from Henderson, Colorado, the location of a well-studied molybdenum deposit. NIST will physically mix, split, and bottle the Henderson molybdenite powder. Statistically representative sets of samples will be analyzed by the AIRIE Lab at Colorado State University and by the isotope lab at the University of Alberta. The distribution of the reference material will be fully handled by NIST, and the cost for the molybdenite reference material will reflect only the costs incurred by NIST for their part of the work doc12505 none The Workshop on Software Engineering and Mobility will be held on May 13-14, , in Toronto, Canada, in conjunction with the 23 rd International Conference on Software Engineering. The two-day meeting is designed to bring together leading software engineering researchers whose work is concerned with mobility in all its forms, i.e., both logical movement of code fragments and physical movement of hosts. This proposal seeks to stimulate the participation of graduate students in the workshop proceedings by providing travel grants in the amount of $500 to $1,000. The goal is to enable between 8 and 16 graduate students involved in doctoral research on topics related to the themes of the workshop to participate in its workings. Special attention will be paid to ensure diverse geographic, racial, and gender representation among the invited students. Specialized workshops, such as this, have a tendency to attract established researches and a very small contingent of students whose dissertations are near completion. Since discussions taking place in the workshop often reshape the research agenda of the field, students who are in the earlier stages of research could benefit the most from being involved in the workshop. Yet, they are least likely to attend. The funding we are requesting from NSF to support travel grants to the workshop will significantly affect the level of student participation. Even though the size of the travel grants is relatively small, the prestige of receiving one will make both advisors and students give serious consideration to applying for the grants. Finally, if successful, we hope to create a culture in which conference travel by students happens earlier than customary for the long-term benefit of the entire research community, e.g., improved retention in the doctoral program doc12506 none Internet referral services (IRS s) are web-based businesses that provide information about the characteristics and market prices of new cars to consumers, and allow them to request a price quote from an affiliated dealer in the region. If the quote is satisfactory, the consumer can buy the car from that dealer without further negotiation. IRS s sell subscriptions to one or two dealers in a region in exchange for giving the dealer a stream of customer leads. If the dealer does not sell to a sufficient proportion of the leads, the IRS may terminate the dealer and contract with another dealer in the area. Our dataset combines referral requests from Autobytel.com (the leading IRS) in with new car transaction data from J.D. Power and Associates that contain prices, car characteristics, and customer characteristics. We compare the prices paid by consumers who did use Autobytel.com and those who did not. We conjecture that online shoppers pay lower prices because the IRS bargains on behalf of its customers by being willing to move the group s purchases to another dealer. Also, the web site provides information about current market prices, and this may also reduce overcharging. In addition, the IRS may be contracting with more efficient dealerships that sell at lower prices to all consumers. We find that IRS users pay about 2% less for a given car than an offline consumer. However, in that analysis we do not formally distinguish between a causal role for the referral service and a selection effect. If customers who use the Internet are more educated, for example, we expect them to achieve lower than average prices regardless of the Internet. Alternatively, the Internet could be educating customers who were previously not informed so they pay lower prices. This is obviously a very important distinction both for social welfare and industry structure. We therefore to use two different econometric techniques to establish what the causal effect of an IRS is on the price that customers pay for new cars. A second goal of the expanded research program is to create an index of competition in the local dealer market to see if the IRS is creating competition in markets where there is little existing competition. The second project examines whether there is race and gender discrimination in new car prices. Since we have individual-level information on gender as well as on whether a consumer is Asian or Hispanic, we test if female, Asian, and Hispanic buyers pay above or below average for a new car. To analyze the prices paid by African-Americans we have no individual-level data and thus rely on the probability that a customer is black according to census block information. The final aspect of the project is the most exciting: to integrate the race and ethnic discrimination results with the use of the Internet. We plan to find out a) if minorities and women who use the Internet pay prices that are closer to those paid by whites and men, respectively, and b) if the Internet is causing the change. Our results have very important policy implications. If use of the Internet can reduce the effects of racial discrimination then the so-called Digital Divide is of even greater importance and concern. Our results may demonstrate the benefits of Internet usage to minority consumers, and inform the choice of policies to help disadvantaged groups get Internet access doc12507 none This project supports a national survey, focus groups, and an experiment to investigate public perceptions of the American People. Previous research on American public opinion has tended to focus on people s views of politicians, policies, institutions, and democratic values and processes. Surprisingly little work has been done on what people think about the American people as a group or on the extent to which people identify with this group, even though the people are a key political actor given the idea of popular sovereignty in the United States. The Principal Investigator contends that we need to discover how the people themselves view the American people to understand their beliefs about democracy. Two contrasting political theories highlight the importance of understanding how views of the people can affect views of democratic political systems, and the researcher draws on these theories to develop hypotheses to test. The literal view espoused by James Madison and others holds that the American people are fallible and hold wildly diverse interests. The solution to these problems is an institutional structure that protects government from the whims of the people and makes sense of the diverse demands made on government. A more communitarian view holds that people pursuing their wildly diverse interests hurt democratic government. Democratic government needs a unifying force that brings the people together, and that unifying force is a strong national collective identity. This identity helps people to fulfill their obligations to fellow Americans, trust fellow citizens, and want to pursue the common good over narrower interests. In both these theoretical approaches, beliefs about how the government ought to operate are influenced by perceptions of the people. Are the public s beliefs about government similarly affected by its perceptions of the American people? The researcher assesses this key question. The researcher discovers how Americans characterize the American people in terms of their capabilities, their political values, their demographics, and their homogeneity or heterogeneity as a people; to investigate the extent to which people identify with the American people as a group; and to determine the consequences of these characterizations and of a national collective identity for several political attitudes. This project provides the most detailed understanding yet of public attitudes toward the American people and provides an extremely valuable dataset for others interested in understanding people s attitudes toward democratic government, the American people, and group identity doc12508 none Many residents of Central Africa s forested Congo Basin rely on the meat of wild animals as their primary source of dietary protein. As a result over one million metric tons of antelope, monkeys, apes, elephants, pigs and rodents are killed and eaten each year. As the human population is growing rapidly, the threat to forest animals is severe. This research studies the reasons why people eat bushmeat, testing the proposition that it is not invariably a deeply-rooted cultural preference, but is subject to price preferences. The researchers, including a human ecologist, a cultural anthropologist and an economist will collaborate with local researchers in a qualitative ethnographic study, household surveys of game consumption, and experiments designed to parse out the effect of culture and economics in consumption decisions. The research will provide the most detailed ethnographic account of cultural attitudes towards and preferences for bushmeat consumption in a tropical rain forest; will be the first to assess the response of bushmeat consumption to changes in economic variables; will combine surveys and experiments in an innovative methodology to estimate empirical variables, and will provide a better understanding of the likely effectiveness of market-based approaches to mitigating the adverse impact of bushmeat consumption. The empirical results will be valuable to conservationists and policy makers as well as contributing to the theoretical debate about the role of culture and economics in behavior doc12509 none In the last fifty years there has been a dramatic change in the level and composition of worker hours allocated to market production. The largest change is the increase in market hours of married females. This has been accompanied by relative stability in the number of hours worked by single male and females, and by married males. In addition to the change in hours, there is a distinctive pattern of decreased fertility, especially among highly educated women, and increase in the proportion of births after age thirty. To understand the events that may have caused these substantial changes, this research constructs dynamic general equilibrium models of the macroeconomy in which households choose labor supplies, consumption and investment in both human and physical capital. Both market and non-market consumption enter utility and require both quality-adjusted time and physical capital to be produced. In our models, a household can either be a married couple or single individuals living alone. All the economic agents, single, married, male, or female; interact in aggregate markets for labor, capital, investment and market consumption. A major objective of the research is to determine what factors could explain observed gender-based wage differentials. The research will consider the impact of several types of technological change including, increased productivity of household durables, changes in the marriage market, and shocks to the costs of acquiring human capital doc12510 none In this project the methodology developed by Tripathi and Kitamura ( ) is extended to test the validity of conditional moment restrictions. This approach, referred to as the ``smoothed empirical likelihood (SEL) approach, is an extension of the empirical likelihood (EL) technique developed elsewhere in the statistical literature. An extension is necessary because the conventional EL approach fails when dealing with conditional moment restrictions where the conditioning variables are continuously distributed. It is demonstrated that a likelihood ratio type test based on the SEL procedure is easy to construct and straightforward to implement. It is asymptotically normal under the null hypothesis and is able to detect local alternatives which converge to the null at rates only slightly slower than the parametric rate. A distinguishing feature of the proposed test is that it is asymptotically optimal in terms of an average power criterion used by Wald to demonstrate the large sample optimality of the parametric likelihood ratio statistic doc12511 none Prelec, Drazen The future is unreal People often seem to pay little attention to the future. They may give future consequences little weight when making current decisions about spending or saving money, sticking to a diet, exercising, or giving up smoking. Although we know people commonly undervalue the future, researchers have little understanding of why this undervaluation occurs, particularly why the distant rewards are so weak relative to immediate rewards. The present research tests the idea that the distant future appears unreal - i.e. that people cognitively process future events as if they were hypothetical. Therefore they typically pay the future event little attention and assign it little value resulting in a very high implicit undervaluation. When forced to pay attention to an event in the future, as a first-pass people first focus on the event alone before incorporating the time information in a more analytical second-pass evaluation. The resulting explicit undervaluation may be much smaller than the proposed implicit undervaluation. The present research tests these questions in four experiments using memory, imagery and effort to investigate similarities between distant future events and hypothetical events. These findings would have significant implications for decisions in areas ranging from personal health and finance to education and public policy doc12512 none This project provides for summer workshops for computer science faculty on the use of history in improving undergraduate computer science instruction. The workshops target computer science faculty who agree to incorporate units or modules dealing with history into their courses in the year after the workshop. First year workshop participants serve as mentors to the second year participants. Speakers at the workshops are individuals known nationally for efforts on behalf of computing history and instructional curricula and materials that include computing history. This project encourages the participants to develop and adapt exemplary materials for use in their classes and includes dissemination to the computer science community for possible use and adaptation by others doc12513 none Although many of the most important issues of our time (e.g., cleaning up a nuclear waste site or choosing a medical procedure) involve thoughts and feelings about decision options, relatively little is known about how affect (feelings or emotional evaluations) and deliberation interact in such human judgment and decision processes, particularly among older adults. In the proposed research, we use a new perspective to examine how thoughts and feelings interact in decision making. Human decision making is a complex phenomenon involving multiple components that may change with age. By examining how older and younger adults make decisions in different ways, we can build better theories of how our judgment and decision making might change as we age. We suggest that the judgments and decisions of older adults (compared to younger adults) may be influenced less by deliberation and more by affect. As a result, older adults may produce different decisions than younger adults (sometimes better, sometimes worse). Funding from this grant will allow us to pursue experiments that build on recent findings about the role of affect and deliberation in the judgment and decision-making processes of older and younger adults. This research will add to the growing body of knowledge concerning how affective and deliberative ways of thinking may interact and follow particular developmental paths. Studying the judgment and decision processes of older adults has strong practical implications since the quality of the decisions that older adults make impacts the quality of life that they experience. Improving our understanding of older adult decision making will undoubtedly provide great practical benefits by pointing the way toward aiding and improving decisions. In addition to these practical benefits, coordinating decision-making research with studies of age-related changes in memory, affect, and other psychological processes may produce important scientific insights into the mechanisms that underlie the judgments and decisions of older and younger adults doc12514 none Anyone who has ever made an important decision knows that anticipated emotions play a role. There are effects of the feelings and moods we experience at the time of a choice and effects of anticipated feelings about future consequences of choice. We have developed a descriptive theory of the anticipated pleasure of outcomes called decision affect theory. The theory rests on the assumption that pleasure and pain are evaluated relative to the status quo and other salient reference points, such as counterfactual outcomes, personal goals, and social comparisons. All of these comparisons have asymmetric effects; the incremental displeasure of obtaining the worse of two outcomes is greater in magnitude than the incremental pleasure of getting the better of two outcomes. Finally, beliefs about the likelihood of outcomes moderate the effects of comparisons. Surprising outcomes lead to stronger emotional responses than expected outcomes. In past research, we have applied our theory to risky choice. We assume that people anticipate the pleasure or displeasure of each outcome of an option (as predicted by decision affect theory), weight those feelings by the chances they will occur, and sum over outcomes. This process yields an average anticipated pleasure for an option. People then compare the average pleasure of all options and select the one that maximizes expected pleasure. Our theory of choice is called subjective expected pleasure theory. This proposal builds on past work and has three primary goals. First, we will extend our theory to riskless choice and test it by conducting seven studies. Four of them examine endowment effects and the status quo bias. Three additional studies investigate other well-known phenomena in riskless choice, such as asymmetric dominance, preference reversals, and advantages vs. disadvantages. Our second goal is to examine the effects of moods on anticipated emotions, beliefs, and choice. Although we expect to find mood-congruent effects, it is quite possible that moods can have opposing effects on judgments and choice. Our third goal is to examine the accuracy of hedonic forecasts immediately after the decision has been resolved and some time later. Accuracy is essential for emotion-based choice; decisions based on faulty predictions will surely be sub-optimal. Research suggests that people focus on attributes that are salient at the moment, but not necessarily important later one. That is, they are insensitive to adaptation. We will explore affective forecasts in three real world studies and three laboratory studies. If deviations in forecasts occur, we will explore methods for improving accuracy doc12515 none This project continues the exploration of organometallic olefin metathesis reactions, which has grown into one of the key tools of modern synthetic chemists. Applications include the synthesis of small molecules, such as natural products, and the production of polymers with well-defined structures and controlled properties. During the current granting period, emphasis will be placed on developing a fuller understanding of the fundamental mechanistic underpinnings of these reactions. Further refinement and development of new catalyst systems are expected to accrue from such studies, in additional to their intrinsic scientific value. Applications of a tandem strategy coupling ring-opening metathesis with atom transfer radical polymerization will be used to produce a variety of new polymer structures such as comb and hyper-branched systems. With this Award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program of the Division of Chemistry and the Solid State Chemistry and Polymers Program of the Division of Materials Research support the research activities of Professor Robert H. Grubbs of the . Professor Grubbs has developed very powerful catalysts for the precise construction of organic molecules including those of interest to the pharmaceutical and polymer industries. The current period of funding will allow for the further understanding and refinement of the needed catalyst systems as well as their applications for the preparation of novel polymeric substances doc12516 none This research will examine the relationship between speech and speaker perception as it exists across auditory and visual modalities. Recent results have shown that familiarity with a speaker can enhance speech recognition for both auditory speech perception and lipreading. Familiarity with a speaker s voice facilitates auditory speech recognition, and familiarity with a speaker s face facilitates lipreading. These findings challenge traditional theories, which have assumed independence between voice and speech perception, as well as between face recognition and lipreading. Current explanations of speaker-speech facilitation in both modalities have focused on information that is tied to each individual sense. Alternatively, the facilitation could be based on familiarity with a speaker s style of articulation, which is conveyed in both auditory and visual speech information. If the link between speech and speaker properties is based on this modality-neutral articulatory information, then speaker facilitation of speech perception should work across, as well as within, auditory and visual modalities. Three sets of experiments will be conducted to test this hypothesis. The first set will examine whether articulatory information can be used to identify speakers across auditory and visual domains. Experiments will test whether speakers voices can be matched to their faces based on isolated articulatory information. The second set of experiments will test whether familiarization with a speaker in one modality facilitates recognition of that speaker s speech in the other modality. The final set of experiments will examine the relative influences of switching sensory modality and switching speakers within and between speech utterances. The results of this research should be illuminating about theories of speech and face perception, as well as general issues of multimodal integration. The research will address issues relevant to individuals with hearing impairments, as well as aphasic, prosopagnosic, and phonagnosic patients doc12517 none This project will examine the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation and its role in the protection of the rights of citizens. Since , tens of thousands of Russian citizens have filed petitions, asking the court to assist them in realizing their constitutionally guaranteed rights. In a typical year, the court gets more than 10,000 such petitions. While many fall outside court s jurisdiction, about half of the petitions raise a constitutional question that merits further analysis. And while the court answers few of these petitions through formal published decisions on the merits, the court answers every letter, trying to clarify petitioners legal rights on a one-to-one basis or assisting in defining the petitioners legal options without rendering a formal decision. The principal investigator will study this developing dialogue about rights by drawing a sample of petitions and examining the claims that petitioners have made, as well as the court s responses. By studying this interaction over the last ten years, this research will trace the emergence of constitutional consciousness in Russia in its first post-soviet decade doc12518 none The AIM Research Conference Center (ARCC) will foster progress in the mathematical sciences and contribute significantly to the current and future productivity of mathematicians. Through the sponsorship of focused workshops, ARCC will provide a new venue for research mathematics which will enhance and complement existing conference centers and institutes. ARCC focused workshops will be distinguished by their emphasis on a specific mathematical goal, such as a significant unsolved problem, an important new result, or the explanation of the convergence between two distinct areas of mathematics. Also planned are workshops exploring connections between mathematics and other sciences. A small team of researchers will carefully plan each workshop so as to maximize its effectiveness in achieving this goal. Central to each workshop will be a public website which, during the lead-in phase, will outline the scope of the workshop and provide resources to the participants. Most workshops will last for one week and will feature a small selection of talks coupled with several problem and discussion sessions. Immediately following the workshop, the website will be expanded to serve both as a record of the workshop and as a comprehensive resource for the current status of important problems and results. The website will remain up-to-date through the incorporation of future work and new developments. The collection of all workshop websites will grow to become a comprehensive and interconnected resource for the most important problems and results in modern mathematics. In recent years, mathematics has become an increasingly collaborative endeavor, and many of today s important unsolved problems will require techniques from several areas of the mathematical sciences. The ARCC focused workshops will provide an ideal forum for a team of researchers, working together, to map out strategies, set priorities, work toward a solution, and set in place a framework for progress on important problems. It is expected that these workshops will often lay the groundwork for significant efforts, both by focused research groups and through special, longer term programs at other institutes. When it is operating at full capacity, ARCC will sponsor 20-25 focused workshops per year, each designed to facilitate collaborative progress on an important area of the mathematical sciences. To ensure that these collaborations will be successful, the leaders in each field will be involved in the planning of the workshops. Equally importantly, junior scientists and graduate students will be actively involved in the workshops, thereby ensuring the long-term development of the ensuing work and contributing to the education of new mathematicians. Special attention will be devoted to facilitate collaborations which include women, minorities, and researchers at primarily undergraduate institutions. This will allow for a more effective use of the nation s collective mathematical knowledge and resources. The AIM Research Conference Center s emphasis on focused collaborative research will foster significant progress on important mathematical problems and will be of significant benefit to both current and future generations of mathematicians doc12519 none This study focuses on the processes involved in the editing (memory) of past decisions. Our goal is to contribute to decision theory while expanding our collective understanding of how complex auditing decisions are made. The study builds on a well-known body of preceding work, notably Festinger s cognitive dissonance reduction theory, Fischhoff s hindsight bias, and Svenson s differentiation and consolidation theory. Festinger, for example, has shown that decision makers actively reevaluate the worth of the rejected alternative after a decision has been made--frequently to reduce the risk of post-decision regret. We focus on both pre- and post-decision attribute isolation and editing: on how expert and novice auditors make sense of complex and risky judgment decision tasks, and on how feedback (or lack thereof) influences their memory of earlier supportive and counter-indicative signal ratings. Both pre- and post-decision sense-making (editing) processes are closely linked to both effective and biased learning. We hypothesize that there are significant differences in the type of data--qualitative vs. quantitative and positive vs. negative-- that the professionals and novices attend to. We also hypothesize that novices are more likely to behave in accordance with established decision theory than their professional counterparts; that domain knowledge gives rise to an interesting and largely unexplored set of mitigating factors doc12520 none Active sensing for three-dimensional auditory localization The proposed project examines the production, reception and processing of acoustic signals for spatial localization in a dynamic environment. The research described in this proposal utilizes the echolocating bat as a model system for the study of auditory localization, with particular emphasis on the coordinated operation between perception and action for the representation of three-dimensional space. The echolocating bat produces ultrasonic vocalizations and uses information contained in the returning echoes to determine the direction and distance of objects in space. With this acoustic information, the bat builds a three-dimensional auditory representation of the world. The research will combine acoustics, behavior and modeling to specify general principles of spatial information processing and orientation. The big brown bat, Eptesicus fuscus, an insectivorous North American bat that produces frequency modulated (FM) sonar sounds will serve as the subject in three inter-related studies: 1) Detailed measurements of the acoustic information available to the bat for sound localization. This study also examines how cues related to sound source direction and distance are ultimately combined to represent an auditory object s location in three-dimensional space. 2) Behavioral measurements of the bat s active control over the direction and volume of the sonar beam used to gather acoustic information from the environment. This study aims to identify the active processes that contribute to the bat s spatial orientation and tracking by echolocation, which shares important principles with other sensorimotor systems. 3) Perceptual experiments will measure the resolution of the bat s sonar receiver along the distance axis. This study complements the acoustic measures of sonar signal direction and beam width and the pressure transformation of acoustic signals at the two ears to permit modeling of active sensing for auditory localization in three-dimensional space. The interdisciplinary work described in this proposal holds importance to the public sector, contributing to education (cross-disciplinary research and scientific training), technology (teleconferencing and radar sonar) and society (human factors). Furthermore, the bat s motor control over the information extracted from three-dimensional space presents a special opportunity to examine and develop models of action and perception that bridge work in audition and vision doc12465 none Funding is provided for a seismic and structural geology experiment to delineate the geometries and patterns of crustal extension and rift magmatism along three main conjugate margins across Alarcon, Guaymas and Delfin Basins (to study the south to north seafloor-spreading to non-spreading mode) and a E-W profile along Wagner Basin (to study the low-angle detachment fault at depth). The questions to be addressed include, strain partitioning, volumetric and emplacement style of rift magmatism, along-axis differences in extension style and the influence of sedimentation on deformation. An integrated land-based and at sea study is planned for the next three years doc12522 none This Doctoral Dissertation Research Support investigation examines the process of representation in American legislatures by focusing on the effect of political party system upon legislator roll call decisions. Poole and Rosenthal ( ) found that most roll call vote can be explained by a simple one or two dimensional model, in which the primary dimension is political ideology. However, recent work suggests that this low-dimensional structure tends to break down when two-party electoral competition declines. This dissertation explores this apparent linkage between party system and the level of structure found in roll call votes by looking at three state legislative chambers. Each chamber is characterized by a different party system. Roll call data collected from these three states permits the evaluation of hypotheses regarding the impact of party electoral competition on the dimensionality of roll call voting and the distribution of member ideal points along those dimensions doc12523 none Can some candidates benefit from being in contests with more than two candidates? Traditional theories of political choice assume that increasing the number of candidates in an election campaign cannot influence voter preferences. However, a growing body of literature on consumer behavior suggests that varying the menu of alternatives can influence choices in systematic ways. This Doctoral Dissertation Research Support project tests whether these findings apply to collective choices and electoral politics. The student hypotheses that the menu of available options can influence a voter s decision. When there are more than two candidates in the race, a compromise effect benefits moderate candidates. Consequently, when there are more than two candidates, race and party influence how voters evaluate candidates differently than when there are only two candidates divided by party label and or by the candidate s race. The student focuses on how perceptions of the alternatives and affect towards the candidates are affected by the set of alternatives. The hypothesis is tested by collecting experimental data from subjects in different choice situations with a varying menu of alternatives. This interesting and innovative project promises to enhance our understanding of the topic doc12524 none This project examines the question of how and why states adopt particular prison policies. Current theories of imprisonment do not examine the processes by which state actors adopt prison policies, and social policy analysts largely ignore punishment as an area of inquiry. This doctoral dissertation research will fill this gap by developing a comparative-historical analysis of prison policy adoption, variation, and change in the American states from - . The researcher conceptualizes the practices of imprisonment as a social policy, because like social welfare, imprisonment is a means by which states manage risky populations; it is a state policy that affects structural inequality, unemployment, poverty, and crime. The researcher employs a synthetic approach that relies heavily on political institutionalist and state--centered theoretical frameworks. The historical pattern of prison policy variation and outcomes has implications for contemporary corrections policy doc12525 none This Doctoral Dissertation Research Support investigation examines the causes of cabinet instability in the presidential regimes of Latin America. The appointment of a president s cabinet and its subsequent performance generally get a high level of attention both from observers of current politics and from scholars. Notwithstanding the general perception that cabinet turnover is important in determining the outcomes of the policy making process, there has been little work done that discusses the causes of instability, that suggests theoretical arguments about the relationship between these factors and cabinet turnover, and that tests these arguments empirically in the context of presidential political systems. This project tackles these issues by proposing a theory that relates institutional features of the political environment and the rate of cabinet turnover in presidential regimes. The research has testable hypotheses and uses original data on cabinet changes to test them in 11 Latin American countries. This data set will contribute to the debate on cabinet stability by providing a means to measure different conceptions of turnover and relate these to the institutional context doc12526 none This award to Penn State University from the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in MPS is to support a Workshop entitled Analytical Instrumentation for the New Millennium- Materials to be held March 2-3, in New Orleans, LA. Materials research is becoming an increasingly interdisciplinary field, with strong links to chemistry and biological sciences. The availability of new tools for materials characterization has in large measure transformed the field over the course of the last decade. The Workshop will bring together 45 scientists from academia, industry, and national laboratories who are makers of new materials, developers of characterization tools, and users of these new tools. The Workshop will seek to provide a forward-looking assessment of major opportunities in materials research where innovative new instrumentation could make significant contributions. It will also identify existing techniques or technologies in which significant increase in sensitivity and or resolution could contribute substantively to progress in materials research. The Workshop will provide a written report with recommendations on how the community - both academic and private sectors - working in partnership with the federal support structure could facilitate the development of new instrumentation and the training of the next generation of scientists to creatively use these new tools doc12527 none for GENERAL PUBLIC Better Safe than Sorry: Precautionary Reasoning, Utility Reversals, and the Creation of Dominance How do people evaluate the possible outcomes of risky situations? Do these evaluations of possible outcomes guide people s decision-making in such circumstances? According to most theories of rational decision making, people s choices should be based on what they think might happen, how desirable or undesirable those possible outcomes are, and how likely they think those outcomes are. In other words, people should think about the possible outcomes before making decisions, so that they can make better decisions. Sometimes, however, people may jump to conclusions before considering all of the possible outcomes. This seems particularly likely when one of the possible outcomes is very bad (for example, when people are killed as the result of a dam failure because a warning was not issued soon enough). Also, it appears that jumping to a conclusion about the preferred course of action (issuing a dam-failure warning, in this case) can affect the way that people think about the other possible outcomes (for example, issuing a warning that leads to an unnecessary evaluation because the dam does not fail). When people think about the possible outcomes only after they decide what to do, the decisions that they make may not be as good as possible. In particular, jumping to conclusions can lead people to indicate that one alternative is always better than the other (for example, that warning dominates not warning) when this is not really the case. Our research is designed to assess when and how people evaluate possible outcomes after rather than before decisions, and to assess the role of precautionary reasoning in such situations. We propose to study these issues in three computer-based experiments using members of the general public. Experiment I is designed to discover whether putting a person in the role of decision maker (as opposed to a more uninvolved evaluator) increases the chances of jumping to conclusions and evaluating some outcomes after decisions are made. Experiment 2 is designed to explore the mental processes that people use when they jump to conclusions. Specifically, the experiment will assess how participants seek information about possible outcomes, how participants form their initial preferences among decision alternatives, and how these emerging preferences affect participants evaluations and use of additional information. Experiment 3 will focus on the effect of uncertainty about the possible outcomes and the effect of ambiguity about the likelihood of the event in question. The results of this research will broaden the literature on decision-making processes and should have important implications for the assessment of possible outcomes in public and private decision making. In addition, these studies will be among the first to address the relationship between the recently popularized precautionary principle and more traditional decision-making methods doc12528 none Gaetani The objectives of this project are (1) to determine the compositional characteristics and liquidus temperatures of hydrous partial melts formed through fluxing of mantle peridotite by a H2O-rich component from the subducted oceanic lithosphere, and (2) to measure mineral melt partition coefficients appropriate for modeling trace element fractionations during partial melting of hydrous peridotite in the mantle wedge. These goals are being achieved by determining experimentally (1) the compositions of hydrous silicate melts in equilibrium with a lherzolite mineral assemblage at 2.0 to 3.0 GPa, (2) the effect on partial melting of adding variable amounts of a Na2O-K2O-H2O subduction component to the peridotite, and (3) the partitioning of incompatible trace elements between mantle minerals (clinopyroxene, garnet, amphibole) and hydrous partial melts at conditions appropriate for the mantle beneath volcanic arcs. The results from this experimental study will provide petrologic and geochemical data necessary for understanding the role of H2O in generating arc magmas and determining the composition of material transferred from the mantle to the crust by subduction-related magmatic processes. The results will also help to provide a framework for interpreting samples from MARGINS Focus Sites in the Izu-Bonin-Mariana and Central American subduction systems doc12529 none This grant supports research on four topics in microeconomic theory. The first two projects questions investigate aspects of learning in games. This theory is based on the idea that equilibrium in games arises as the result of repeated observations leading players to have common forecasts of opponents play; it is one of the primary justifications for the widespread use of game-theoretic equilibrium concepts in analyzing economic problems. Most past work on learning in games has assumed that at the end of each round of play, all players observe everyone s actions, which means for examples that bidders in a sealed-bid auction get to see all of the bids, and not just the winning one. The first project relaxes this assumption, and studies the possible long-run outcomes of learning processes in games when players get less information about what the other players have been doing. A second, and related, project studies the interpretation of games of incomplete information from the learning in games viewpoint. A particular focus of the project is to question the plausibility of the solution concept Nash equilibrium without a common prior, which has been used in an increasing number of economic analyzes in recent years. The third project uses equilibrium analysis to study the conditions under which two competing auction houses for the same goods can both survive, as seems to be the case with Christie s and Sotheby s, and when the larger market will squeeze out the smaller one, as some conjecture that Ebay will do to its rivals. A preliminary insight is that buyers may be willing to patronize a market where prices tend to be higher if the variance of the price is higher as well. The fourth project studies the equilibria of infinitely repeated games with private but almost-public information and communication. Simpler models of infinitely repeated games, such as the repeated version of the prisoner s dilemma are widely used in economics and other social sciences, the project will extend this analysis to some cases where players only get imperfect and private signals of one another s actions- for example a firm might get evidence of a rival s secret price cuts from an unexpected loss of orders doc12530 none The Department of Mathematics at Southern Methodist University will purchase a highshared memory machine. . The equipment and software purchased with this grant will be used for five research projects involving seven faculty and five graduate students. These projects are: dynamics and instabilities in semiconductor lasers; modeling multiphase contaminant flows in porous media; parallel software for two-point boundary value problems; continuation methods for analyzing chemical pattern formation and multiscale methods for integral formulation of elliptic and parabolic equations doc12531 none The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) is an international collaboration of more than 50 national election studies across the world. It represents a globally coordinated comparative project to study electoral behavior under varying institutional conditions. By collecting systematically comparable survey and associated institutional context information at the time of national elections and then making the resulting data freely available to the scholarly community, it provides a unique resource for comparative research on the ways in which institutions constrain and shape electoral behavior and attitudes toward democracy. CSES is a collaborative-survey and macro-data collection and distribution project. It serves as the mechanism for planning, merging into a single file, and distributing (a) survey data collected through a collaboratively developed ten-minute module administered identically as part of each country s regular survey study; (b) commonly coded social and economic background variables of the respondents; and (c) collaboratively specified macro-data on relevant characteristics of each country s government and electoral system, their political parties, and the candidates. CSES in not intended to support any individual country s data collection. Rather it provides the infrastructure for collaboration that allows the project to exist. Specifically, CSES is the mechanism for collaboration in designing the survey modules and specifying the macro-data to be collected; the agency for creating electronically-accessible merged data sets, documentation, and an archive of related material from the individual submissions of each participating country; and the medium of communication among participating (and potentially participating) countries-and thus, a facilitator of cross-national research. The CSES micro-and macro-datasets are made available to the research community immediately once they have been processed. One of the great virtues of CSES is its efficiency as big science. All direct costs of data collection are borne by the individual participating projects which then submit the data at no cost to CSES for inclusion in the comparative dataset. As a result, funding is only needed for the centralized functions of the project, including providing organizational and administrative support to the CSES Planning Committee in designing and distributing the modules and making sure that as many countries as possible administer the module in the appropriate way; serving as the chief information office of the project, including providing organizational and administrative support to the CSES Planning Committee in designing and distributing the modules and making sure that as many countries as possible administer the module in the appropriate way; serving as the chief information office of the project, including assisting participating countries with questions they have regarding its administration; creating and distributing the merged data set and documentation files from the submissions of the participating countries; maintaining an auxiliary archive of the project; and maintaining the CSES web site, which is the primary location of the CSES archive, including further developing its capacities for international collaboration doc12532 none Mechanisms to select a public decision (voting), or to assign agents to objects, or to match a set of men and women in pairs, can not satisfy all of the basic requirements of desirable social choice when preferences allow indifferences between the indivisible decisions, or objects, or mates. As a first step toward a full treatment of complete and transitive preferences in probabilistic voting, assignment and matching, this project explores the simple yet basic domain of dichotomous preferences, namely those where feasible allocations fall in at most two indifferent classes, good and bad, acceptable or not, utility of zero or utility of one. A very appealing feature of the dichotomous domain is that, unlike the strict preference domain, the three requirements of efficiency, incentive-compatibility and fairness are compatible. Approval Voting (AV) is the most natural voting mechanism in the dichotomous domain. There is a finite set of outcomes - public decisions - among which one must be chosen. Under AV, each agent reports a certain subset of outcomes that he or she approves of and the outcome that is approved by the largest number of voters is elected; ties are resolved by a lottery in which all winners have equal probability. This project uses an axiomatic characterization of approval voting to determine the conditions under which a fair, efficient and group strategyproof (i.e., immune to misreports by any coalition at all profiles) voting method exists. Time-sharing of a public facility is a rich source of examples where dichotomous preferences are plausible. This project examines mathematical models that balance the utilitarian, i.e., choose what is desired by the largest number of users, and the egalitarian, i.e., guarantee a minimal level of satisfaction for every user. Under the fair share requirement, the existence of an efficient and strategyproof rule is determined. The project also addresses the more challenging question of whether or not group strategyproofness is within the reach of efficient and minimally fair rules (for instance AV does not meet this property). The second and third models of the project are respectively the assignment and the bilateral matching problem. Both models are formally similar and most axioms, Consistency, Strategy-proofness, Fair Share Guarantee, are easily adapted from the probabilistic voting model. One important new fact can be borrowed from the mathematical literature on matching: all efficient (deterministic) assignments (or matching) have the same number of agents receiving a good object (the same number of mutually acceptable pairs). Accordingly the uniform average of all efficient assignments (matching) is efficient among all probabilistic mechanisms. A reasonable conjecture is that this solution is characterized, like AV, by Consistency, efficiency and symmetric treatment of agents. Other interesting efficient solutions emerge as well: one can order the agents randomly and find the allocation maximizing lexicographically the utilities in that order; we could equalize as much as possible the (ex ante) utilities, which turns out to be the same thing as maximizing their Nash product, or as applying the old idea of competitive equilibrium with equal incomes. These and other rules are systematically analyzed in the light of their fairness and strategy-proofness properties doc12533 none When people are committed to one side in an athletic contest, say an American versus a Russian figure skater in the Olympics, we frequently observe a biased interpretation of the events. The opponent s small misstep is judged as fatal to her performance, while the same error by the athlete from one s own country is dismissed as insignificant. Could this distortion of physical evidence occur not only when a preference for one side is long standing and deeply held, but also when it is tentative, private, and fully reversible? The research undertaken in the present grant demonstrates that the same distortion that drives biased judgments in the case of strong beliefs seems to lead to substantial and unrecognized distortion of evidence in the case of newly developing preferences. Researchers at Cornell University are examining this phenomenon in the ordinary situation of purchase decisions. They have labeled it predecisional distortion, meaning the biased evaluation of new information to favor whichever product is currently (and tentatively) preferred while the decision is still in progress. In a consumer choice, as soon as one brand is slightly favored, new product information tends to be distorted to seem more favorable to that tentatively leading brand than it should. This, in turn, makes the currently leading option more likely to become the decision-maker s final choice. The phenomenon extends beyond consumer choice, having been observed also in managerial decisions (both by public auditors and by salespersons), and in the verdicts of mock jurors. Predecisional distortion of new information is also systematic, with distortion increasing as the commitment to the tentatively leading alternative increases. Interestingly, individuals who are in a good mood are more subject to this bias. What causes and, therefore, makes individuals prone to this bias in situations where they are genuinely trying to think accurately? The researchers propose that predecisional distortion is driven by the simple expectation that new information should be consistent with existing beliefs, combined with the lack of awareness that distortion is occurring. That is, people expect coherence between new and old information, so much so that they actually distort new information to make it more coherent with existing beliefs. The Cornell researchers have investigated a number of methods for ameliorating the distortion of information, including accountability to others for the correctness of the decision, increasing the importance of the choice, and providing financial incentives for accuracy. While these interventions sometimes help, none has reduced distortion by more than 50%. So far, it has proved impossible to eradicate, although additional methods to eliminate it are being explored. However, one major barrier to correcting the bias is that individuals seem unaware that they are engaging in predecisional distortion until after the fact. It is difficult for people to fix a mistake if they can t recognize that it is happening doc12534 none Children live in complex economic environments. They make choices about what to consume and they earn money. Children save, exchange goods, make decisions under uncertainty, and they share and bargain among themselves and with their parents and other adults. There are two main reasons why it is important to improve our understanding of these sorts of economic behavior in children. First, a better understanding of the development of children s economic behavior will lead to a better understanding of economic behavior in adults. Many economic norms, habits, and preferences are acquired in childhood and this study will improve our understanding of how these develop. Second, many of the decisions children make have consequences for the rest of their lives. We believe that an understanding of children s behavior based on economics will make it possible for society to help children make better decisions as children. The first goal of our research is to determine whether economic models are applicable to children. If so, at what age does economics become useful for understanding which different aspects of children s behavior? Second, we will use computer based economic experiments to construct a panel data set that will provide basic information on how children s economic behaviors, such as rationality, altruism, risk behaviors, and bargaining, develop with age. Our third objective is to develop an understanding of how demographic variables and family policies influence children s preferences and economic skills. A very practical and important benefit of this research will be a better understanding of how parents, schools, and society can better prepare children for the complex economic environment they will face as adults. Currently there is almost no research on how children acquire economic skills. Parents rely on information from folklore, their own experience, and advice from unscientific studies and reports. Schools do not explicitly teach what we, as economists, would regard as some of the most important economic skills. Children are left to acquire basic economic decision making skills haphazardly. This research will provide some of the basic descriptive information needed to improve this situation doc12535 none Because auctions are among the market institutions most convincingly captured by the kind of game theoretic analysis that dominates modern economic theory, auction data provide important opportunities to evaluate modeling approaches and assess the importance in practice of strategic behavior predicted by theory. Auctions also play an increasingly important role in the allocation of public resources, so goals of efficient allocation and revenue generation provide strong policy motivations for understanding auctions. This project consists of four components that contribute to this understanding through empirical studies of auction markets and development of new statistical tools for analysis of auctions. The first component addresses estimation of demand at auctions in which sellers use reserve prices. By exploiting variation in the reserve prices that results from heterogeneity in seller valuations, one can consistently estimate the full distribution characterizing demand at standard auctions---the model primitive needed for a wide range of policy simulations. This is done without parametric distributional assumptions.The second component addresses inference from bids at English auctions in which bidders may be asymmetric or have correlated valuations. This allows also environments in which bidders, but not the econometrician, observe a common factor shifting their private values---a common situation in applications. The third component develops nonparametric tests for common values at first-price auctions. Exploiting recent advancements in the econometrics of auctions, we show how one can use variation in the number of bidders to test for the presence of the winner s curse and, therefore, common values. The fourth and final project studies an online auction market with many buyers and sellers trading a homogeneous object. It addresses the effects of auction rules, seller reputation and other auction characteristics on bidder participation and bids. Arbitrage behavior is documented, and the prevalence and predictors of fraudulent seller behavior are studied doc12536 none The Mathematical Biosciences Institute (MBI) at Ohio State University will be a base for interdisciplinary work by mathematical scientists and biological scientists on a broad range of biological problems. The mission of the MBI is (i) to develop mathematical theories, statistical methods, and computational algorithms for the solution of fundamental problems in the biosciences; (ii) to involve mathematical scientists and bioscientists in the solution of these problems; and (iii) to nurture a community of scholars through education and support of students and researchers in the mathematical biosciences. To promote its mission and overall goals, the MBI will build upon existing research efforts in the mathematical biosciences and will encourage human research development and intellectual growth. The MBI will establish emphasis year programs, current topic workshops, educational problems, and research projects. Participants in MBI programs will be recruited nationally from the disciplines of the biosciences, mathematics, and statistics, and will include senior researchers, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students. To increase the impact and cohesion of the program, there will be efforts each year to connect to and build upon progress achieved in the preceding years. The MBI will hold special workshops on current topics in the biosciences that offer opportunities for mathematical involvement. The Institute will also conduct summer educational programs in the mathematical biosciences for college instructors, students, and high school teachers doc12465 none Funding is provided for a seismic and structural geology experiment to delineate the geometries and patterns of crustal extension and rift magmatism along three main conjugate margins across Alarcon, Guaymas and Delfin Basins (to study the south to north seafloor-spreading to non-spreading mode) and a E-W profile along Wagner Basin (to study the low-angle detachment fault at depth). The questions to be addressed include, strain partitioning, volumetric and emplacement style of rift magmatism, along-axis differences in extension style and the influence of sedimentation on deformation. An integrated land-based and at sea study is planned for the next three years doc12538 none This collaborative research project will examine how some of the techniques that have been used for English text recognition can be used with enhanced technologies for OCR of Indian language documents. The proposal will create data resources for testing and evaluating Devanagari recognition systems. Devanagari is the script used by a number of Indian spoken languages, prominent among which are Sanskrit, Hindi and Marathi. It is an alphabetic script, used by over 450 million people around the world. The research will be carried out by teams from the Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition at SUNY-Buffalo and the Indian Statistical Institute. The project is expected to result in new tools for Devanagari and to stimulate research in other areas of script recognition for NLP, document analysis and information retrieval doc12539 none Learning in Multiple Behavioral Contexts Daniel R. Papaj and Martha R. Weiss The study of animal learning from an ecological perspective is expanding. One area that has received relatively little attention is learning in multiple contexts. This is surprising because most animals must learn in multiple behavioral contexts, and it is reasonable to expect that learning in one context affects learning in another. In the proposed research, a butterfly will be used to address if and how learning interacts across behavioral contexts. Color learning in a species of swallowtail butterfly will be evaluated in egg-laying and nectar-foraging contexts, two situations in which associative learning of color is known to occur in this species and for which dual learning has been demonstrated. The objectives of this proposal include: (1) assess color preferences of native individuals in each behavioral context; (2) assess a butterfly s selectivity to color under training in each context singly. (3) assess a butterfly s selectivity in responses to color combinations under dual training in different contexts and; (4) explore how learning in one context might interfere with learning in the other context. To meet these objectives, a battery of laboratory and enclosure assays will be undertaken. Results of the proposed research will be of general interest to students of animal learning in diverse fields, and will provide a link between work in behavioral ecology, on the one hand, and laboratory-based studies of learning and memory from psychological, ethological, and neurobiological perspectives, on the other. With respect to broader impacts, involvement of undergraduates through university-sponsored programs at both the University of Arizona and Georgetown University will enable students to experience the pleasures and challenges of research first-hand. In addition, an undergraduate-level laboratory exercise on butterfly learning initiated by co-PI Weiss will be refined and made available to the scientific community through the Animal Behavior Society web site. Finally, taking advantage of the broad public appeal of butterflies, our findings will be disseminated not only in scientific publications but also through popular essays, public talks, and visits to primary and secondary schools doc12540 none SAMSI is a national institute that will deeply impact the future of the statistical and mathematical sciences and, through them, science in general, by catalyzing creation of the theory and methodology necessary to confront the central data- and model-driven scientific challenges of our time. SAMSI will focus on new syntheses of the statistical sciences, applied mathematics and disciplinary science. To illustrate the vision, consider an activity central to modern science and technology, and with which SAMSI will be heavily engaged: numerical modeling of complex physical processes. Developing numerical models and evaluating their fidelity to reality requires merging knowledge from multiple disciplines. Applied mathematics builds on disciplinary understanding to construct a fine-detail numerical representation of the deterministic aspects of a process; probability provides concepts and insight to characterize stochastic elements of the process; and statistics provides the mechanisms to relate these constructs to observational data on the real-world process. But, despite a multiplicity of context-specific advances, there is currently no general framework for combining these disciplines, much less a formal system for simultaneously applying them. The SAMSI efforts in this direction will focus on filling this gap, by bringing together statisticians, mathematicians and modelers from across the country (and beyond) to establish frameworks for model development and validation, at a high level that spans multiple application contexts. To carry out this synthesis of the statistical sciences, applied mathematical sciences and disciplinary sciences, SAMSI engages established researchers - from academia, industry, national laboratories and government - as well as young researchers (postdoctoral fellows and graduate students) at the formative stages of their careers. Each research program lasts from 6 months to one year, and involves a host of activities ranging from research by intensive interdisciplinary working groups to broad, energizing workshops. Outreach to undergraduate students, high-school teachers and faculty from teaching institutions extends SAMSI s impact on the essential development of the national human resource base for science. To enable activities of the breadth and depth necessary for the success of SAMSI, the institute is a partnership between the National Science Foundation and the consortium of Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the National Institute of Statistical Sciences. These partners provide a uniquely strong base for SAMSI s national scope. Scientific input to SAMSI comes, in part, from a National Advisory Council composed of eminent statistical and mathematical scientists. Most important, SAMSI will engage the entire nationwide statistical and mathematical sciences communities, by means of widely publicized opportunities to bring problems to SAMSI, or direct SAMSI s attention to them doc12541 none This Political Science Infrastructure project creates a uniform citation standard for social science data sources. Analogous to the impact of standards for citing textual sources, this facilitates connections between research and researchers. It thereby improves the scientific process and advances the accumulation of knowledge. The use of standard data source citations expands replication efforts and eases these efforts, increasing researcher productivity and allowing more resources to be devoted to new research. Science progresses as scientists create more links with other scientists. Text references are done so often that they are taken for granted for how fundamentally important they have become. In the last 50 years, quantitative work has become roughly half of what journals publish and we there is no comparable citation standard for data. This project builds a simple yet critical piece of infrastructure, a uniform standard for deep citation of data, offers startling and significant savings of time and resources and consequent gains in research productivity. One might conclude that the explosive growth of electronic press and of electronic data dissemination would solve the problem of linkages between cited and source data. The amount and rate of knowledge in circulation certainly has increased dramatically, yet in the absence of uniform standards for citing data the problem is being exacerbated, not resolved. Given the short average duration of URLs on the web, the growing citation of online data sets is a problem, or possibly an opportunity, but definitely not an answer. It is obvious that an online source cited in a manuscript printed out today may note be the same source available at the web address even tomorrow, let alone when the manuscript is published or at some future date. Citations to sources that cannot be retrieved are useless. Deep citation of text means that one text source can unambiguously reference another source or any portion of that source in a manner such that the source can be retrieved by another reader years or decades hence. For books, the author, title, publisher, and page number is enough to retrieve any specific phrase referenced. Deep citation of data means the same, but involves new technological issues, issues that are addressed in this project. Readers need to be able to retrieve the original data set, in the same version, identify the same variables, use the same recodes, and in some instances be able to conduct the same analysis. To facilitate this process, the investigators develop uniform citation standards for social science publishing and create a test-bed or prototype tools for electronic linkage of data citations and source data. Political science as a discipline has been in the forefront historically in the building of social science infrastructure, including creation of the world s largest archive of social science data (the ICPSR), development of the first general-purpose commercial statistical packages (SPSS), and the ongoing data dissemination developments at the Virtual Data Center. Each development originated from within political science, and greatly benefited political science research. But each also represents the discipline s continuing contribution to the infrastructure of scientific research well beyond the disciplines own intellectual boundaries. This project will have implications as broad. The investigators proceed on two fronts, first in the development of a standardized digital signature for cited data, second to create tools to electronically connect and to retrieve data from source data. In order to establish uniform data citation standards and create new tools for electronic linkage of data citations and sources the researchers capitalize on the digital library work already in progress at the Harvard-MIT Data Center for development of a virtual data center (VDC). This project can seamlessly extend the VDC platform at low marginal cost and adds substantial value to the VDC system as a public good in perpetuity. In this project the VDC is extended to an area where it was not originallydesigned but for which it proves to be a very powerful tool doc12542 none This Doctoral Dissertation Research Support investigation examines how women workers participation in civic and political life differs from that of their male counterparts. A related issue is the connection between workforce participation and participation in public life and whether these are the same for women and men workers. In this proposal, it is hypothesized that womens means to and types of political mobilization differ from that of men, and that women engaged with NGOs are more likely than other women workers to find the resources, rationales and opportunities to mobilize politically. In order to investigate these concerns, a random sample of female and male factory workers in Tijuana and Puebla, Mexico will be surveyed. A smaller category of women workers, NGO leaders and factory managers will be interviewed. Given the continued growth of foreign direct investment in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, Africa and the Middle East in similar assembly and manufacturing operations, the Mexican experience may well be an indicator of future developments in other regions around the globe. This project seeks to further understanding of the levels and types of political participation engaged in by women and men in the manufacturing economy of developing nations. It is designed to illuminate the means by which such workers become politically mobilized, the role that NGOs (religious and secular) may play in furthering democratic participation, and the contribution of such political activity to democratization doc12509 none In the last fifty years there has been a dramatic change in the level and composition of worker hours allocated to market production. The largest change is the increase in market hours of married females. This has been accompanied by relative stability in the number of hours worked by single male and females, and by married males. In addition to the change in hours, there is a distinctive pattern of decreased fertility, especially among highly educated women, and increase in the proportion of births after age thirty. To understand the events that may have caused these substantial changes, this research constructs dynamic general equilibrium models of the macroeconomy in which households choose labor supplies, consumption and investment in both human and physical capital. Both market and non-market consumption enter utility and require both quality-adjusted time and physical capital to be produced. In our models, a household can either be a married couple or single individuals living alone. All the economic agents, single, married, male, or female; interact in aggregate markets for labor, capital, investment and market consumption. A major objective of the research is to determine what factors could explain observed gender-based wage differentials. The research will consider the impact of several types of technological change including, increased productivity of household durables, changes in the marriage market, and shocks to the costs of acquiring human capital doc12544 none Mobility up the farm ladder came to be seen as a problem in the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century as the fraction of farm operators who were owners fell. Concerns were voiced about the continued viability of American agriculture as the number of renters, sharecroppers, and laborers rose. Commentators feared for the quality of the soil and for the quality of the nation s farmers, as the agricultural ladder (the progression from laborer to cropper to renter to owner) seemingly became more difficult to ascend. Similar concerns motivate much of the interest in farm tenancy and land reform in developing countries today. Though these are issues of importance in their own right, the causes of farm tenancy and the ascent up the agricultural ladder are also of interest because, in the South, they were an important part of the context within which black migration to the North occurred. Though much emphasis has been placed on changing Southern farm technology and Northern employment opportunities in promoting this migration, not know much is known about the extent to which limited opportunities for advancement up the agricultural ladder in the early twentieth century South influenced this massive population redistribution. This study addresses these issues. It uses individual-level data from five counties in the Census of agriculture along with a uniquely detailed survey of farmers conducted in to explore the dynamics of the agricultural ladder. We will supplement the individual-level data with county-level data from the Census. The census data contain information on: the prior farming experience of tenants and owners, the ages at which farmers ascended the ladder from wage laborer to tenant to owner, the time spent on various rungs of the ladder prior to becoming owners, and the relationship of tenants to owners. The survey data contain information on each individual s complete career history (their tenure status at each date back as far as ), their location, and a variety of their personal and farm characteristics. We develop hypotheses to explain the extent of movement up and down the agricultural ladder and why it changes over time, and across space. The preliminary examination of the data from indicate that, contrary to the pessimism of commentators at the time, we do not find dimmer prospects for farmers in the s than the previous two decades. For our sample, farmers fared worse (in terms of job mobility) in the s than the s. Consistent with expectations, the s proved to be years of general ascent up the agricultural ladder doc12545 none This proposal contains projects that develop statistical econometric methods for certain economic models of interest. The econometric issues considered include estimation in dynamic auctions, optimal estimation of procurement auction and job search models, and estimation of certain kinds of economic shifts or breaks. A substantial empirical project on daily auctions in the deregulated electric utility market in England and Wales applies some of the econometric tools. Our estimates are used to determine profitability and examine the incentives to invest in new capacity. Our model and estimates could also be used to consider outcomes associated with alternative auction designs or to analyze possible collusion among suppliers in this market For the empirical project on multi-unit electricity auctions, we have obtained a license to use the actual software used by the auctioneer to determine price and quantity outcomes (given bids), and we are also obtaining the three most recent years of data. With software and data in hand, we use an equilibrium model of firm supplier behavior to estimate start-up and fixed costs for each generator. These costs will then be used to examine profits and investment incentives. We will also incorporate a cost of capital approach to maintenance and availability decisions. The estimation method to be used in the empirical electricity auction project is developed in detail due to its more general applicability in a variety of auction settings. Similar in spirit to an Euler equation approach, our econometric method uses the first order conditions as the basis for moments of estimation. This approach avoids the computational difficulty associated with numerically solving for optimal bidding strategies. The technique extends the approach of Berry and Pakes ( ), which was designed for estimation of oligopolistic models, to work in dynamic auctions. A key challenge to a first order condition approach in auctions is the inherent discontinuity in the firm profit function. This discontinuity leads to a nondifferentiability that makes approximation of the first order condition difficult. We overcome this difficulty with a semiparametric smoothing technique and obtain parameter estimates at a nonparametric rate. Next, we consider parameter-dependent support models which include certain auction models as well as production frontier models, and some search models. While estimation in these models has been studied broadly, we examine what estimators are most efficient. We use LeCam s theory of statistical experiments to show that the maximum likelihood estimators are not asymptotically efficient in such nonregular models, while Bayes estimators are. In another project, efficient estimation in structural break models is studied. Again a limit of experiments approach will be used to explore efficiency and other issues in traditional unknown change point models. Another project considers estimation of breaks in a nonparametric regression curve model. Such estimates are useful in certain regression discontinuity settings doc12546 none The Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) database project consists of comparable cross-sectional microdata on the composition of households and the structure of their incomes for 25 industrialized economies as of January . It has also added labor force survey data for 16 nations under another subtitle, the Luxembourg Employment Study (LES). LIS is one of the (if not the) leading examples of an interdisciplinary, cross-national, cooperative data infrastructure which supports research that leads to important policy relevant insights. The plans for the next three years include several improvements in database management (more sophisticated electronic access system; better on-line documentation; fifth wave of data for ; new surveys of the labor force); in research (inequality, poverty, gender studies); in training (annual LIS workshops in the United States, in Europe and elsewhere); in continuing to set new international standards for income distribution statistics; and in developing purchasing power parities for income distribution studies; and in providing US users with more direct access to the other nations LIS surveys. Over the past 17 years, the LIS project has demonstrated its feasibility and usefulness as an internationally sponsored and researcher-lead database infrastructure project. The vast majority of its support, and all of its core operations, are funded by an international consortium of 16 nations and 22 funders such as the U.S. National Science Foundation. Because electronic access to LIS is, by design and intent, free once a privacy pledge is signed, users treat it as a public good which provides benefits at little or no direct cost to them. Hence, core funding is always a crucial issue. And so this proposal for core funding from the United States, like the proposals to the other 15 nations, is vital to the continued future of the LIS project doc12547 none Some pollution-abatement policies (including typical pollution taxes and auctioned tradeable permits) have the attraction of cost-effectiveness but impose a very large share of the economy-wide cost of regulation on the regulated firms, causing substantial losses of profit in the regulated industries. Other policies (such as systems of grandfathered tradeable permits) manage to avoid imposing such large costs on the regulated firms, but accomplishing this involves a very large sacrifice of cost-effectiveness, that is, a very large increase in the regulatory cost to the economy as a whole. The inability to avoid placing a large economic burden on key industries without significantly increasing the overall economic cost has seriously hampered the broader use of incentive-based and other policies that promise efficiency improvements. This project analyzes and evaluates the efficiency costs of addressing significant distributional concerns in environmental policy. In particular, the project examines the cost of insulating producers that have an especially large stake in the economic outcomes of pollution policy, and explores how efficiency costs change as the insulation net becomes broader to protect a wider group of industrial stakeholders. It considers a wide range of potential instruments with the aim of identifying relatively cost-effective pollution-control policies that provide a reasonable degree of compensation or insulation to key stakeholders - thus enhancing the prospects for political feasibility. Policies to be considered include those involving inframarginal exemptions to pollution taxes, partial grandfathering of pollution permits, and (in the case of downstream firms) industry-specific corporate tax cuts or tax credits. The research employs both analytically solved and numerical general equilibrium models to delineate the circumstances under which the cost of insulating key sectors is small. It considers the costs of avoiding serious impacts both on upstream suppliers of polluting fuels and on downstream firms that utilize such fuels intensively. The first major component of the project focuses on C02-abatement policies. The second component generalizes the analysis so that it can be applied to other pollutants such as NO2 and S02. The third component - to be performed in tandem with the first two - involves empirical work to improve key parameters of the theoretical and numerical models and to introduce important bottom-up details into the energy system of the numerical model doc12548 none There are two primary goals for this research project. First, the project derives new methods for iden-tification and estimation of random coefficient discrete choice models, focusing particularly on discrete choice models with a finite dimensional error term sometimes called pure hedonic models. Such models are superior economic models with which to an-alyze the effects of a policy change. Second, these new methods are applied to two important empirical applications: an analysis of housing choice and new housing policy, and measurement of the welfare gains to individuals from recent innovation in personal computers. Besides improving the theoretical economic properties of the model, these econometric methods have two distinct advantages over existing methods. The project develops a new identification strategy, using a hedonic pricing equation, which does not require the instruments that have been widely used in the recent literature. In order to achieve identification, the recent literature has typically made the assumption that observable product characteristics are uncorrelated with unobserv-able product characteristics. Such an assumption is in conflict with a long run equilibrium in which firms optimally choose their products characteristics conditional on the characteristics of their rivals products. Because the pricing equation is used to identify unobserved product characteristics, it can then be used for individual utility maximization to nonparametrically identify individual taste coefficients. Recovery of individual random coefficients is important because it allows the researcher to evaluate the distributional consequences of a policy change, and because it provides for a richer aggregate demand system. These techniques are used to evaluate important empirical questions in two industries. The first industry considered is housing. Specifically, the analysis of Bajari and Kahn ( ) is extended to address the question of why racial segregation persists. The project also studies current housing policy, specifically the question of where to locate new public housing units. Second, individual welfare from innovation in personal computers is measured over the last decade. Our approach is well suited to this problem because of its emphasis on individual heterogeneity. In particular, the investigators are able to break out the source of consumer welfare gains (e.g., product quality versus product price) and the distribution of welfare gains across different groups of individuals, evaluating such questions as a precise measurement of the form and extent of the digital divide . The investigators also revisit the important issue of how to construct an ideal price index for an industry with rapid quality change like computers doc12549 none Consider a simple world populated with two kinds of individuals; those who work and create wealth (peasants) and those who survive by taking the property of others (bandits). The presence of bandits creates an incentive for peasants to seek protection and defend their property. But protection is costly; it consumes resources and interferes with an individual s ability to create wealth. This study investigates how individuals, peasants and bandits, might make decisions in such circumstances and how those decisions aggregate into societal characteristics. This project studies the origins and existence of social institutions by creating and simulating alternative environments using an agent-based computational economic (ACE) system. ACE is a methodology that grew out of the artificial life paradigm. In ACE simulations virtual worlds containing decentralized, autonomous, interacting agents are created and those agents are observed as they wrestle with the economic problem at hand. ACE researchers are interested in the equilibrium or steady-state characteristics of the system, the dynamic path leading to the steady state, and, in particular, the spontaneous emergence of an unplanned coordination or organization of these agents. This project starts with a simple world populated with two kinds of individuals; those who work and create wealth (peasants) and those who survive by taking the property of others (bandits). The presence of bandits creates an incentive for peasants to seek protection and defend their property. But protection is costly; it consumes resources and interferes with an individual s ability to create wealth. This study investigates how individuals, peasants and bandits, might make decisions in such circumstances and how those decisions aggregate into societal characteristics. The ultimate decision of the agents is greatly affected by a variety of environmental factors introduced to their virtual world. When there is little structure to constrain their activities, these societies usually evolve into anarchy, although small populations appear to organize and invest in some social protection. Such a result suggests that primitive societies could emerge in which groups cooperate-a state may arise-but those societies are likely to be quite small. A series of alternative structures and constraints are introduced to this world and the resulting societies are compared. For example, a spatial dimension is added so that location matters. Neighborhood effects are introduced, i.e., agents are influenced by the decisions of other, nearby agents. In some models individuals find the ability to coerce others to contribute to social protection. Comparing the different social structures, their economic proficiency, and the dynamics of these alternative worlds yield insight into the attributes that influence cooperation among self-interested individuals doc12550 none Jett The morphology of neurons is a primary determinant of connectivity patterns in the adult nervous system, and the formation of functional neural circuits depends upon precise regulation of the outgrowth of axons from neurons during development of the nervous system. It is clear that developing neurons use specific environmental cues to regulate the growth of axons in space and time. One cue that is emerging as a potentially important factor in controlling axonal growth is acetylcholinesterase (AChE). While AChE is best known as the enzyme that metabolizes the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, recent evidence suggests that AChE also promotes axon outgrowth. Thus, the spatiotemporal expression of AChE in some neuronal cell types is consistent with its proposed role in axonal outgrowth. Functional studies using pharmacological inhibitors of AChE or genetic manipulations of AChE levels in cultured cells further support the hypothesis that AChE promotes axonal outgrowth, and suggest that the morphogenic activity of AChE is not dependent on its catalytic activity. It has been proposed that AChE promotes axonal growth via adhesive mechanisms since analyses of its structure indicate significant homology with cell adhesion molecules known to function in neuronal morphogenesis. However the relevance of these observations to regulation of axonal outgrowth in laboratory animals has yet to be directly tested. Dr. Jett and co-workers will address this by examining axonal morphology in the developing central and peripheral nervous systems of the recently described transgenic mouse that lacks the gene for AChE. Dr. Jett will: (1) Determine if the targeted disruption of the AChE gene alters axonal growth patterns in the nervous system of mice; and (2) Determine if aberrations in axonal morphology can be rescued by addition of exogenous AChE. The first specific aim will be accomplished by comparing spatial and temporal patterns of axonal growth of neurons in AChE knockout mice to those in wild-type mice. Axonal outgrowth will be visualized using specific labeling dyes and immunocytochemical localization. The gain-of-function studies proposed in the second specific aim will be performed by adding recombinant AChE to cultures of DRG neurons derived from AChE knockout mice. Axonal morphology will be quantified with respect to number, length and branching using computerized morphometric analyses of neuronal cultures immunostained for neurofilaments. It is anticipated that results from these studies will further our understanding of the basic mechanisms that control neuronal connectivity in the developing nervous system doc12551 none Ingram This NSF grant provides partial support for the purchase of a gas source isotope ratio mass spectrometer with peripheral sample preparation attachments, to be housed in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. The equipment includes an automated water and carbonate preparation system and an elemental analyzer. The instrumentation will be primarily used by the research groups of the three Principal Investigators B. Lynn Ingram, Michael Manga, and Kurt Cuffey. The Department of Earth and Planetary Science has recently provided newly upgraded space to house the requested equipment. The requested package will greatly enhance the research capabilities of students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty in the Departments of Earth and Planetary Science and Geography, and on the U.C. Berkeley campus in general. Research areas include the use of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen isotopes in paleoclimatological and paleoenvironmental reconstructions using estuarine, wetland, lacustrine, and coastal marine sediments and corals (Dr. Ingram, Earth and Planetary Science Department), the use of oxygen and hydrogen isotopes as tracers in hydrogeologic systems (Dr. Manga, Department of Earth and Planetary Science), and the use of oxygen and deuterium isotopic ratios of water and ice in glaciologic research (Dr. Cuffey, Department of Geography). Other users of the proposed mass spectrometer facility from the Department of Earth and Planetary Science include James Kirchner (watershed hydrology and biogeochemistry, and surface process geomorphology), Walter Alvarez (asteroid impacts, tectonics of the Mediterranean region, stratigraphy of pelagic limestones), Dr. George Brimhall (mineral resources, low temperature geochemistry, soil geochemistry), and Dr. William Berry (global climate change and paleogeographic, oceanographic and life changes in the Paleozoic). Another potential user from the Department of Geography is Roger Byrne (historical biogeography, paleoenvironments of California and Mexico, and pollen analysis doc12552 none Miller This grant supports an upgrade to the seismological computing capability and enhancements to our ability to process and interpret environmental geophysical data at the University of Texas at El Paso. The equipment will be used primarily to interrogate huge volumes of seismic data from refraction and reflection data sets and to run seismic tomography and waveform modeling codes including full waveform finite difference simulations. To accommodate these needs we will use grant funds to purchase a multi-CPU Unix server with enough computing capacity for these tasks, as well as two PCs that will be dedicated to environmental geophysics projects. The new computers will replace outdated equipment. These computing facilities will support the research of PI, Kate Miller, and Co-Pis, G. Randy Keller, Diane Doser, Steve Harder, and ca. 20 graduate and undergraduate students doc12553 none E. Meiburg, Et. Al, University of California Santa Barbara The PI together with his two colleagues at Santa Barbara request funding to purchase a mid-range parallel computer dedicated for the large scale simulations of fluid dynamics of complex liquids. The specific research areas are (1) the fluid dynamics of highly nonideal mixtures of chemical species, (2) the flow of complex fluids with microstructures, including polymer liquid crystals and suspensions, and (3) high Reynolds number flows of dilute polymers doc12554 none Harrington The objective of this research project is to develop a model integrating the chemical and microbiological phenomena that occur in chloraminated drinking water systems. As chloramines decay, disinfection potential decreases and the ammonia formed by the decay is converted to nitrites by ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB). This causes two problems: first, nitrite is a public health concern and second, nitrite accelerates the decomposition of the chloramine residual, further reducing disinfection potential and creating more ammonia for the AOB to nitrify. In general, nitrification will occur when the growth rate of AOB (due to the presence of ammonia) is larger than the inactivation rate of AOB (due to the presence of chloramines). The specific objectives of this research are to: 1) Develop a food-to-biocide ratio indicative of nitrification potential and evaluate the ability of this ratio to predict the time to onset of nitrification in various chemical environments within the distribution system, 2) Evaluate the microbial ecology of AOB and nitrite-oxidizing bacteria in chloraminated distribution systems and determine the chloramine resistance of representative strains isolated from the distribution systems and 3) Interconnect the chemical and microbiological fundamentals of nitrification in chloraminated distribution systems using a mathematical model that simulates nitrification in model distribution systems. The development of a nitrification potential indicator may help utilities establish criteria to minimize nitrification episodes. Furthermore, the evaluation of the onset of nitrification under different environmental conditions will provide relevant information to formulate strategies for nitrification control. The microbial ecology studies and the isolation of relevant chloramine resistant strains will provide the means to explore the mechanisms of disinfectant resistance doc12555 none This project studies the role of reputation and long-term relationships in overcoming the incentive problems that arise in many economic transactions. The first part of the project studies collective reputation. Just as individuals develop reputations for fair dealing or competence or ability, so do the firms, organizations, professional associations and other groups to which they belong. These groups are not unitary actors. Their reputations reflect the characteristics and behavior of their members. In turn, when individual members care about their own reputations, they will be concerned with and influenced by the group s reputation. I investigate how individual behavior, group reputation, and group composition co-evolve in a dynamic setting. Among the questions analyzed are why organizational and institutional reputations tend to persist over time, whether individuals will tend to self-select into groups solely on the basis of reputational concerns, and when groups will make collective decisions to employ mechanisms that ensure the underlying competence and good behavior of members. The second part of the project studies incentive provision in ongoing relationships. In earlier work, I developed a repeated game model of incentive contracting and showed that in a variety of settings optimal self-enforcing agreements (relational contracts) could take a simple stationary form that facilitated detailed characterization. The problem was motivated by an interest in problems of organizational design --- how firms might optimally structure relationships with employees, suppliers, customers and creditors taking into account that even well-conceived legally binding contracts might leave significant room for discretion. A continuation of this work considers relational contracting with multiple trading partners. A main question is whether the status of a firm s relationship with a given constituent (say, one set of employees) ought to be contingent on all aspects of the firm s behavior (say, its treatment of all other employees), or just those aspects that are directly relevant. The basic argument is that the while there is less temptation to renege on a multilateral contract, such contracts are costly in uncertain environments because even minor unanticipated shocks may necessitate large adjustment costs or cause a whole series of relationships to unravel doc12556 none In this proposed study the PI and collaborators (Mark Reagan, Iowa; Mike Carr, Rutgers) propose to measure the oxygen isotope values (d18O) in Central America Volcanic Arc (CAVA) lavas in order to distinguish mantle wedge processes involving subducted upper crustal materials, from assimilation contamination of rising magmas with in situ upper crustal materials. In the former case, one would expect a correlation between d18O and proxies of the extent of melting (e.g. U Th, Na6) and or mantle source tracers (e.g. 87Sr 86Sr. In the latter, one would expect correlation of d18O with proxies of contamination, assimilation, and differentiation (like MgO or Mg#). A pilot study of ~30 samples from CAVA show very surprising results- there are correlations between d18O and indices of melting, however large extents of melting and radiogenic 87Sr 86Sr are associated with low d18O, not high d18O as expected for common sources of slab-derived metasomatizing agents. The PIs propose to collect more d18O data for more well-characterized samples in order to try to understand the puzzling results of the pilot study doc12465 none Funding is provided for a seismic and structural geology experiment to delineate the geometries and patterns of crustal extension and rift magmatism along three main conjugate margins across Alarcon, Guaymas and Delfin Basins (to study the south to north seafloor-spreading to non-spreading mode) and a E-W profile along Wagner Basin (to study the low-angle detachment fault at depth). The questions to be addressed include, strain partitioning, volumetric and emplacement style of rift magmatism, along-axis differences in extension style and the influence of sedimentation on deformation. An integrated land-based and at sea study is planned for the next three years doc12465 none Funding is provided for a seismic and structural geology experiment to delineate the geometries and patterns of crustal extension and rift magmatism along three main conjugate margins across Alarcon, Guaymas and Delfin Basins (to study the south to north seafloor-spreading to non-spreading mode) and a E-W profile along Wagner Basin (to study the low-angle detachment fault at depth). The questions to be addressed include, strain partitioning, volumetric and emplacement style of rift magmatism, along-axis differences in extension style and the influence of sedimentation on deformation. An integrated land-based and at sea study is planned for the next three years doc12534 none Children live in complex economic environments. They make choices about what to consume and they earn money. Children save, exchange goods, make decisions under uncertainty, and they share and bargain among themselves and with their parents and other adults. There are two main reasons why it is important to improve our understanding of these sorts of economic behavior in children. First, a better understanding of the development of children s economic behavior will lead to a better understanding of economic behavior in adults. Many economic norms, habits, and preferences are acquired in childhood and this study will improve our understanding of how these develop. Second, many of the decisions children make have consequences for the rest of their lives. We believe that an understanding of children s behavior based on economics will make it possible for society to help children make better decisions as children. The first goal of our research is to determine whether economic models are applicable to children. If so, at what age does economics become useful for understanding which different aspects of children s behavior? Second, we will use computer based economic experiments to construct a panel data set that will provide basic information on how children s economic behaviors, such as rationality, altruism, risk behaviors, and bargaining, develop with age. Our third objective is to develop an understanding of how demographic variables and family policies influence children s preferences and economic skills. A very practical and important benefit of this research will be a better understanding of how parents, schools, and society can better prepare children for the complex economic environment they will face as adults. Currently there is almost no research on how children acquire economic skills. Parents rely on information from folklore, their own experience, and advice from unscientific studies and reports. Schools do not explicitly teach what we, as economists, would regard as some of the most important economic skills. Children are left to acquire basic economic decision making skills haphazardly. This research will provide some of the basic descriptive information needed to improve this situation doc12560 none The research in this proposal attempts to articulate the role of affect in guiding judgments and decisions. As used here, affect means the specific quality of goodness or badness (i) experienced as a feeling state (with or without awareness) and (ii) demarcating a positive or negative quality of a stimulus. Affective reactions occur rapidly and automatically - note how quickly one senses the feelings associated with the stimulus word treasure or the word hate. We have characterized reliance on such feelings when making judgments or decisions as the affect heuristic. The theoretical framework underlying this project comes from research in cognitive and social psychology and cognitive neuroscience that informs us about two basic modes of thinking, experiential and analytic. The experiential system is intuitive, automatic, image-based, fast, and intimately associated with affective feelings. The analytic system is deliberative, reason-based, and slow. There are strong elements of rationality in both systems. It was the experiential system that enabled human beings to survive during their long period of evolution. Long before there was probability theory, risk assessment, and decision analysis, there were intuition, instinct, and gut feelings to tell us whether an animal was safe to approach or the water was safe to drink. As life became more complex and humans gained more control over their environment, analytic tools were invented to boost the rationality of our experiential thinking. We now recognize that the experiential mode of thinking and the analytic mode of thinking are continually active, interacting in what we have characterized as the dance of affect and reason . While we may be able to do the right thing without analysis (e.g., dodge a falling object), it is unlikely that we can employ analytic thinking rationally without guidance from affect. Affect is thus essential to rational action. Based upon this theoretical framework and supporting research, we plan in this project to conduct a series of experiments to better understand the role of affect in decision making and the interaction between the experiential, affect-based mode of thinking and more analytic and deliberative processes. We shall also attempt to demonstrate how the findings from this research provide insight into ways to improve a wide-range of important practical decisions about matters involving finance, medical treatments, cigarette smoking, insurance, and risk perception doc12561 none Dueker This grant provides partial support for the upgrade of the University of Wyoming, Dept. of Geophysics computation center. Specific equipment to be purchased includes a central UNIX file server, an automated backup system, a 1 2 TB RAID storage system, and computational equipment to build a 10 node Beowulf cluster based on 1.2 GHz CPU s with a combined 1 GB of RAM. The enhancements will support the heavy computational needs of a growing seismology group at Wyoming including recent hires Drs. Ken Dueker, Michael Cheadle, and Dag Nummedal in addition to Drs. Scott Smithson and Steve Holbrook. The seismologists in this department are undertaking new forays into high-fold data (both onshore and offshore, and including 3D pre-stack data) and real-time acquisition and event processing of PASSCAL GSN NSN broadband seismic data via the internet. In total, they are currently processing some 3 terrabytes of data. The Geophysics UNIX computational facility at the University of Wyoming currently serves 28 users: 18 graduate students, 5 post-doctoral researchers, 6 professors, and several undergraduates using a heterogeneous, dispersed mix of UNIX hardware and operating systems. This upgrade will centralize processing power and ease the burden on a current systems administrator by adopting common operating systems and uniform hardware doc12562 none This collaborative research project will involve undergraduate students in the study of the mechanical properties and the molecular mechanisms that give rise to the functional specificity in spider silks. It is significant to biology because the diversity of silk types seems to have radiated with the diversity of spiders. This study will compare silks from the black widow cobweb weaver Latrodectus, the funnel web weaver Hololena sp., the cobweb building house spider, Pholcus sp., and a tarantula, Grammostola rosea. These species each represent one of four major clades of the spiders (Arenae). By including this broad array of spiders, this project will explore the mechanical diversity of spider silk as a function of phylogenetic relationships. The study is also significant to materials science because spider silks display an extensive range of material properties from a small range of molecular differences. Thus, they represent an ideal system for correlating molecular structure and material properties. These spider silks will be studied on three levels: 1. Primary structure using microarray technology and gene sequencing, 2. Secondary structure from NMR spectroscopy, and 3. Mechanical properties from materials testing. The material properties will be correlated with the secondary structure and the primary sequence of the silk proteins in order to construct models of each silk on a molecular level. By exploring a variety of silks through multidisciplinary undergraduate research, this project will enable the correlation of the molecular differences with mechanical differences in spider silk. In addition to its research activities, the project will also include workshops for high school teachers and, consequently, will have a significant impact on high school education doc12563 none The goal of the IGBP is to improve understanding of the interactive physical, chemical and biological processes that regulate the Earth system; the unique environment that it provides for life; the changes that are occurring in this system; and the manner in which they are influenced by, and in turn influence, human actions. The IGBP scientific program, which was implemented initially around eight core projects addressing specific multi-disciplinary aspects of the Earth system, is being restructured into a more concise and integrated structure reflecting the dynamics of the Earth system, with broad activities organized around main components of the system-atmosphere, ocean and land-and, equally importantly, at the interfaces between these components. Two overarching and integrating activities-the Global Analysis, Integration and Modeling program (GAIM) and the Study of Past Global Changes (PAGES) - will address the Earth system as a whole. This new focus on the Earth system will also address issues of major societal importance which link strongly to changes in Earth system dynamics, particularly global sustainability, e.g., cross-cutting research on (i) the global carbon cycle, (ii) food and fiber production, and (iii) water resources. The new focus for the IGBP will be developed in large part through the IGBP Open Science Conference, which will present the latest results of global change research at a series of levels: research conducted throught the individual IGBP core projects and research integrated across these projects; research that has been integrated between the IGBP and the WCRP, the IHDP, Diversitas, the Global Change System for Analysis, Research and Training(START), other regional programs, and individual research projects on which these integrated efforts are based. The Conference will also identify new approaches to study of the complex planetary system in which human activities are closely linked with natural processes. The IGBP s Scientific Committee, its IGBP s Officers, and its Secretariat will lead planning for the IGBP s scientific agenda; promote initiation, oversee and keep under review implementation of the program; foster archiving and exchange of collected data and scientific results; develop standards for measurements and data analysis; lead integration and synthesis of the research into a coherent and comprehensive global picture; avoid duplication of effort and resource use; and communicate research results and data to a number of audiences doc12564 none The investigators will produce a comprehensive picture of the coronal mass ejection (CME) phenomenon as viewed at radio wavelengths from lift-off at the sun through the response of the terrestrial magnetosphere to its passage. The main effort is to continue to synthesize radio data from the Wind and Ulysses spacecraft, SOHO coronagraph data, ground-based data, and corollary measurements from instruments monitoring the solar wind and energetic particle environment. The work builds on several significant advances made in a previous award from NSF. The investigators developed triangulation methods that permit investigators to track the sources of radio waves (CMEs and finite regions along their boundaries) as they move out from the sun long after they cease to be visible to SOHO instruments. With this technique, regions where the radio waves originate are identified to allow detailed study, using the multiple supporting datasets, of the physical processes that produce the waves doc12565 none Atzmon The International Symposium on Metastable, Mechanically Alloyed and Nanocrystalline Materials (ISMANAM ) will be held at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, during 24-29 June . Nanostructured materials (e.g., nanocrystals or nanoparticles) as well as amorphous and other metastable materials will be covered. Both fundamental issues and applications will be addressed. As a forum for novel ideas, the symposium is intended to promote contact between basic research and technological needs for industrial applications. The program will include invited and keynote lectures by internationally distinguished scientists as well as contributed papers, in either oral or poster presentations. The symposium proceedings will be published in the journal Materials Science Forum. The symposium Web site (http: www.ners.engin.umich.edu ISMANAM ) has further details about the symposium. %%% Research on nanostructured materials and amorphous and other metastable materials has increased as opportunities arise for industrial applications of these unusual materials doc12566 none This Doctoral Dissertation Research Support investigation examines the factors that affect citizen trust in government. The investigator attempts to build a complete theory of trust in govermnent. This is done by assuming trust operates as a public decision and that trust will be the result of public information and public disposition. Citizen trust in their government will vary depending on information about government performance and dispositions of ideology, party identification and social capital that are used to interpret that information. The theory and hypotheses are tested by using a quarterly measure of trust in government for the period to . This measure of trust in government demonstrates that trust in governmnent varies on a regular basis. The investigator also attempts to assess the effect of trust in government on political participation, voter turnout and elections doc12567 none Bryant Support is provided for a multi-disciplinary workshop to identify important areas of research in tribology that involve biological, biomedical, and medical issues. This workshop willhave principal goals of providing an overview of the current state of the art and recommending new directions of research. The workshop will have approximately 40 to 50 participants, and feature several keynote speakers and participants from tribology, medicine, the biomedical implant community, and biology. The 2.5 day long workshop s format will consist of the following: Introductory session Presentations by keynote speakers Posters by attendees Breakout sessions Final half day wrap up session The workshop results will be documented to provide valuable guidance for future research directions in tribology. Results of the workshop will be released into the public domain by the workshop organizing committee, as a report to NSF, and as an article to be submitted to one of the Tribology and Biomedical Engineering periodicals and as web-based documents. Special efforts will bemade to facilitate communication between the various scientific communities involved and to identify areas for future cross-disciplinary research. Special efforts will also be made to bring new researchers and graduate students to the meeting and to attract attendeed from under-represented groups doc12568 none This project will design and develop experiments of a method of determining the electron density and the magnetic field in the magnetosphere. It utilizes tomographic reconstruction using the group delay and Faraday rotation of signals from a cluster of satellites in the magnetosphere. The project will examine the accuracy of the technique under different conditions, and will include the effects of hot plasma on propagation, the characteristics of different transmitted waveforms, and different receiver properties doc12569 none Sperry A major constraint on plant productivity is the need to transport water to the foliage. This vital function is performed by the xylem tissue (wood) of the plant. The proposed research will quantify the design constraints of xylem in relation to water transport using state-of-the-art finite element methods developed for applications in fluid and solid mechanics. Advances in high performance computing make it feasible to apply these methods to the complex geometries of biological materials, including the conducting tubes (conduits) of the xylem. The result of the research will be quantitative links between the microscopic and macroscopic structure of xylem in relation to water transport and mechanical properties. Knowledge of the functional significance of wood s structural properties will have a number of broader implications ranging from the bioengineering of timber, to the interpretation of the climatic record of tree rings, and the analysis of evolutionary and ecological trends in xylem structure. The work will be interdisciplinary, involving graduate students and collaboration across three departments of the host institution (biology, math, and mechanical engineering). Hypotheses of structure-function linkages generated by computational analysis will be tested by direct experiment and with a comparative data set including xylem from different organs (root-stem-leaf), species from distantly related vascular plant groups (e.g., conifers vs. flowering plants), and plants of different growth types (vines vs. trees). The research has four specific objectives. The first objective is to quantify the relationship between conduit wall structure and reinforcement against the extremely negative water pressures required for xylem transport. The hypothesis is that conduit reinforcement will scale with operating pressure so as to minimize investment in wall material. This hypothesis is supported by preliminary work showing a strong proportionality between the ratio of conduit wall thickness to lumen diameter and a proxy of operating pressure across 12 species of conifers and 37 species of flowering plants. When scaled to the tissue level, this predicts that wood density must increase with more negative operating pressures, as was observed. The implication is that wood strength may be more related to conduit reinforcement than to support of the plant against gravity or wind loading. The present research will extend these results by using sophisticated finite element packages to analyze conduit and tissue stresses, allowing us to factor in the structure of the interconduit pits and surrounding tissue. The second objective is to quantify the mechanics of the valve function of interconduit pits and their role in causing transport failure by the air-seeding of cavitation (vaporizing of water under negative pressure). Preliminary work indicates that air seeding occurs at a constant wall stress across species. The hypothesis is that air seeding will also occur at an approximately constant pit membrane stress, meaning that cavitation resistance will be determined by pit membrane material properties, and especially by pit geometry. The third objective is to quantify the link between xylem structure and its conducting capacity. Here we will use advanced methods in fluid mechanics to solve the complex problem of flow through the irregular shapes of xylem conduits and their interconnecting pits. The fourth objective will bring together the individual structure-function relationships quantified in the first three objectives to evaluate the extent to which xylem design of diverse species maximizes conducting capacity while meeting constraints related to conduit support and prevention of cavitation doc12570 none This is a joint award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program in DMR and the Major Research Instrumentation program to Furman University. The award is for the acquisition of a scanning probe microscope for the characterization and manipulation of nanometer size materials. The study of materials in the nanometer regime is of fundamental importance to a host of emerging technologies. SPM is by far the most important tool for resolving nanometer size features of materials as well as for investigating material properties that are significant over that distance scale. The purchase of a Dimension SPM will allow Furman University to introduce the concepts central to nanoscience in various undergraduate courses as well as to enhance ongoing nanoscience research effort. Ongoing projects that will be directly impacted by this acquisition include: The characterization of nanostructures on the surfaces of electronically conducting polymers; Investigation of the formation and structure of nanoporous organic crystals and thin films; The design and operation of biosensors; The self-assembly of platinum complexes into monolayers; Dynamic studies of additive migration in polymer films, as well as several others. This is a joint award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program in DMR and the Major Research Instrumentation program to Furman University. The award is for the acquisition of a scanning probe microscope (SPM) for the characterization and manipulation of nanometer size materials. The announcement of the National Nanotechnology Initiative (www.nano.gov) illustrated the growing importance of nanometer-sized structures to the scientific and technological infrastructure of the United States. The SPM will enhance undergraduate education and research in the field of nanoscience. The instrument will be used both to expose students to the unique features of matter in this size regime and to investigate questions ranging from the interaction of molecules with DNA to the design of materials for optical computing. In addition to generating scientifically significant results, this instrument will be used to produce educational materials for the undergraduate educational community and to prepare students for graduate work in nanoscience and technology doc12571 none The Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Iowa will purchase computer equipment (a Microway Beowulf cluster for intensive computation as well as 3 workstations for individual faculty at a total cost of $ ) which will be dedicated to the support of research in computational, applied, and theoretical statistics. The equipment will be used for several research projects, including in particular: 1. The extension, implementation and application of posterior simulators (John Geweke) 2. Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms and convergence assessment in Bayesian hierarchical models with application to spatial and temporal modeling (Mary Kathryn Cowles) 3. Analysis of unreplicated experiments (Russell Lenth) 4. On Inference in Continuous-Time Models with Applications to Finance (Osnat Stramer) 5. Analysis of surface roughness data and studying the properties of fractal dimension estimator in a class of stationary non-Gaussian random fields (Grace Chan doc12572 none Historians have argued that journalists have become increasingly aggressive and adversarial in their treatment of government officials and political candidates. If so, this trend runs counter to established norms of politeness in interaction and to rituals of deference to political leaders. This project investigates whether and how a rise in adversarialness has emerged in presidential press conferences - the major venue for relationships between the press and the nations top political leader. The press conference remains a central institution of political communication where the president explains and justifies policies, and where journalists discharge their questioning task under public scrutiny. Thus recognizing the crucial importance of presidential press conferences, the project examines the evolution of the practices journalists use to question presidents, the level of deference or adversarialness embodied in the questions, and the mix of journalistic, political, and historical factors that explain patterns of questioning over the latter half of the twentieth century. Using a sample of presidential press conferences from Dwight Eisenhower ( ) to Bill Clinton ( ), the project codes each question asked on the basis of four primary dimensions of adversarialness: 1) initiative, 2) bluntness, 3) assertiveness, and 4) hostility. Analysis of the data reveals if there has been a general decline in deference and a rise of adversarialness, if changes relate to specific historical events or individual presidents, if the introduction of broadcast journalism and television cameras affects the type of questions, if political partisanship explains some of the variation in questions, and if the president s standing in the polls influences the style of questioning. The answers the project provides to these questions enhance our understanding of the institutions of the presidency and journalism, and their co-evolution over time doc12573 none Dr. Douglas B. Grotjahn, Chemistry Department, San Diego State University, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division for research into the chemistry of metal ketene complexes. Metal-ketene complexes are important intermediates in unique bond-forming reactions starting from carbene complexes and they allow rapid access to a variety of organic products, many of which would require multistep syntheses using standard organic reactions. However, nearly all of these processes are stoichiometric in the metal complex. The goal of the project is to develop catalytic reactions that are likely to become attractive synthetic organic procedures. To achieve this, new ketene complexes will be prepared and catalytic systems developed from them. Specifically, unusually stable Ir and Rh ketene complexes will be prepared, metal-ketene bonding within them will be characterized by X-ray diffraction and IR and NMR spectroscopy, the thermodynamic and kinetic relationships between(C,C)and (C,O) linkage isomers will be delineated, and the interconversion of carbene-CO and ketene complexes will be studied. Using these data, catalytic carbon-carbon bond-forming reactions involving ketene or carbene complexes as intermediates will be developed. The proposed research will contribute to the fields of organometallic and organic chemistry and catalysis, relevant to both organic synthesis and industrial chemistry. Ultimately, more convenient, less-toxic large scale synthetic preparations of organic compounds will be possible. In addition to the basic science, under-represented minority and undergraduate students will be trained during the course of the project doc12574 none This project, submitted under the Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) program, will examine the impact of legal structures and institutions on federal district court decision making. In particular, the investigator will examine proceedings in Pedreira v. Kentucky Baptist Homes in the Western District Court of Kentucky. This case presents the question of whether the use of religious organizations to provide welfare services creates a constitutional violation under the establishment clause. Using material gleaned from ongoing court hearings and the parties court filings, the investigator will test the impact of the legal structures and institutional arrangements on the policies expressed by the court. This research will advance the understanding of the influence of legal institutions on judicial decision making. This is especially pertinent at the district court level given the variance in institutional structures found across districts doc12575 none With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Peter Gordon and Randall Hendrick will conduct three years of linguistic research on the functions of human memory during language comprehension. Their focus is working memory, which is the memory that keeps track of information as people actively engage in complex tasks. Language comprehension includes complex tasks like identifying and interpreting parts of sentences. Such tasks require that intermediate representations of sentence parts be held in working memory and accessed during comprehension. The project tests the hypothesis that working memory s constraints in language, and other cognitive domains, reflect its susceptibility to interference during encoding, storage, and retrieval. This interference arises from the similarity of the items being processed. This research uses three complementary methods: eye tracking during reading, analyses of patterns in large corpora of printed language, and memory load tasks during language comprehension. The broader aims of the project are pursued by focusing each method on two central issues: How is language processing affected by the proximity of similar expressions, and what are the psychologically salient dimensions of similarity that cause interference? The significance of the project is that it will advance knowledge of the relationship between language and other aspects of cognition, particularly memory. Basic scientific research on the organization of the cognitive processes involved in crucial facets of mental life will be of benefit for later development of more applied goals. These include the creation of effective information technology, the teaching of reading, and the diagnosis and treatment of language impairment doc12576 none PROJECT SUMMARY The Department of Mathematics at University of Pittsburgh proposes to build a medium to large-scale scientific computing environment for research in the mathematical sciences. The computer equipment to be purchased includes an Intel 8 processor shared memory computational server, a four node Intel cluster and an Intel file server, all running Linux. This computing environment will enhance ongoing research in several ways. The availability of a local infrastructure for the investigation of shared and distributed memory techniques will result in a significant reduction in the time needed for developing software. The currently available computational power would be substantially expanded allowing for increased size and complexity in test problems and simulations. The investigators will be able to share a complete, constantly updated state-of-the-art computational science environment. The computing equipment will support several research projects, including in particular: computational methods for fluid dynamics, numerical modeling of flow in porous media, numerical methods for problems with complementarity constraints, and computational neuroscience doc12577 none Shimizu The investigators propose to conduct a 2-year collaborative study between high-pressure experimental geophysicists at the University of California at Berkeley and analytical geochemists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. This research will experimentally evaluate the feasibility and validate the measurement of trace-element partitioning between metal and silicate at the high pressures and temperatures of the Earth s deep mantle and core, ~100 GPa and K. The possibility of combining the capability of the laser-heated diamond cell, to reproduce conditions of the planetary interior, with that of secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), for measuring isotopic abundances at the ppm level and below on spatial scales of ms, will be evaluated. If successful, these combined tools can be used as a means of resolving major issues in geochemistry and geophysics that depend on understanding the distribution of trace elements within the mantle and core. Such studies are crucial for determining the potential consequences of chemical interactions between the core and mantle over geological time and, more generally, for deciphering the evolution of the Earth s deep interior. The experiments proposed here are intended to help develop methodologies for element-partitioning studies to be pursued in the future doc12578 none Garrick This Americas Program award will support the Second International Workshop on Iron and Copper Homeostasis , to be held in Pucon, Chile. Organized by Dr. Michael D. Garrick of SUNY in collaboration with Dr. Marco T. Nunez of the University of Chile, the objective of this workshop is to strengthen international scientific collaboration in research on iron and copper metabolism, and to stimulate the interest of young scientists and students in an area highly relevant to the understanding of toxicology, health and disease states. Iron and copper metabolisms are intimately intertwined: systemic copper deficiency generates cellular iron deficiency, which in humans results in diminished work capacity, reduced intellectual capacity, diminished growth, alterations in bone mineralization, diminished immune response and other symptoms. This workshop will try to provide a better understanding of iron and copper metabolisms and particularly of their interactions. This proposed workshop will convene leading scientists in the fields of iron and copper metabolism from North America, South America, Europe, Israel and Japan, to exchange knowledge, and to establish future avenues of collaborative research doc12579 none Bass Grand The investigators propose a collaborative effort between a mineral physicist (J Bass, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and a seismologist (S. Grand, University of Texas, Austin) aimed at elucidating the seismic structure and mineralogy of the Earth s transition zone, from 300- km in depth. The seismic structure will be determined in several regions with unprecedented resolution of the velocity jumps across transition zone discontinuities and the seismic velocity gradients between the jumps. The available mineral elasticity data and phase relations for relevant mineral systems will be used to calculate the compositions and proportions of individual phases, and the properties of candidate mantle assemblages as a function of depth for a range of bulk compositions. Two key experiments on the high temperature and pressure elasticity of beta phase and aluminous perovskite will be done to fill in the most pressing gaps in the elasticity data base. A new waveform inversion code will be used to determine acceptable fits of mineralogic models directly to the seismic data within certain imposed constraints. For example, with the percent olivine component and size of discontinuities fixed, they can search for allowable models of gradients that satisfy seismic constraints. Other initial conditions will be tried as well. In this way the investigators propose to define both the structure of the transition zone and the range of mineralogical models which are compatible with the seismic data in a more formal quantitative way than has been done before. This research will involve one student working on mineral physics aspects of the project at UIUC, and a student working on the seismological aspects at UTA doc12580 none A central issue in brain function is how patterns of sequential neural activity are created to produce sophisticated motor patterns in activities such as communication behavior, ranging from mating calls to language. In well-studied songbirds, singing-related activity occurs in a region known as RA (robust nucleus of the archistriatum), where individual neurons generate highly reproducible patterns of high-frequency bursts. Onsets and endings of these bursts show temporal correlations across large populations of neurons in this region, suggesting that RA undergoes synchronized transitions from one state of active neurons to another. The goal of this project is to develop models of how such sequence generation can occur, and test these models experimentally. A unique approach is used with a novel technology for stable cellular recordings from a sleeping bird, in which such structured bursts occur with patterns apparently replaying the patterns produced during actual singing. Results will be important for understanding mechanisms of sequence generation and of motor learning in the vertebrate brain, and could have an impact extending to mechanisms of human speech production. This combined computational and experimental work also provides a young PI with a cross-disciplinary experience that includes university-industry collaboration doc12581 none Genome remodeling occurs throughout the eukaryotic kingdom and includes well known examples such as mating type switching in yeast and recombination of immunoglobulin genes in mammals. The ciliated protozoa present an extreme example in which large amounts of DNA are eliminated and rearranged to form the transcriptionally active macronucleus as a normal part of sexual reproduction. In Paramecium tetraurelia, an estimated 50,000 short DNA elements called internal eliminated elements (IESs) are removed from the genome via site specific recombination. Previous research led to the hypothesis that Paramecium IESs are related to transposable elements. This project will define the regions of a 28 bp Paramecium IES that are required for accurate DNA splicing and compare these regions with those critical for excision of transposable elements. One series of experiments will involve the construction of specific mutations in the cloned IES. Each mutant IESs will be tested for accurate splicing by injection into cells that are undergoing macronuclear development. A second approach will involve sequencing several examples of evolutionarily related IESs from different Paramecium strains. Comparison of these sequences will identify conserved nucleotides that are presumed to be important due to their evolutionary conservation. This assumption will be tested by constructing appropriate mutations in the IES. Investigations in the related ciliate Tetrahymena thermophila will focus on a recently identified developmentally regulated translation elongation factor-2. Gene disruption and replacement experiments will determine whether this gene and its corresponding protein are involved in a translational control mechanism that is required for the genome remodeling process. The research will contribute to a broader understanding of the relationship between ciliate DNA elimination and transposable element insertion-excision, and perhaps reveal novel biochemical features of DNA splicing in this organism. The study of a developmentally regulated elongation factor 2 may reveal a novel mechanism for the control of protein synthesis in eukaryotes doc12582 none The goal of this project is to understand better the process by which embryos implant in the uterus in ferrets. Ferrets are classified in the Arctoideae that also includes other weasels, bears, raccoons, seals and walruses. A remarkable characteristic of many arctoidean species is tight control of the timing of implantation. In the black bear, for example, embryo implantation occurs months after fertilization. Unfortunately, many arctoidean species, such as the giant panda and the black-footed ferret are threatened or endangered. It is important to gain a better understanding of reproduction in these species, including the process of embryo implantation, in order to improve captive breeding techniques. Domestic ferrets are an excellent model for the study of embryo implantation in arctoidean carnivores because they are abundant and domesticated. Preliminary data indicate that the protein glucose-6-phosphate isomerase (GPI), produced by the ovary, is crucial for embryo implantation in ferrets. It is already known that GPI has multiple functions. The protein is necessary to convert sugars to energy, and it stimulates nerve cell growth. GPI also stimulates movement and invasion by tumor cells. This action is probably similar to its effect on the embryo, which must move and invade the uterus to implant there. Therefore, by studying how GPI functions in embryo implantation, insights may be gained about GPI function in tumor cells, thus furthering knowledge of cancer biology. To determine the role of GPI in embryo implantation, we will pursue 5 specific aims: 1) Is GPI required for implantation in the ferret? We will use two experiments to answer this question. In the first, ovaries will be surgically removed from pregnant ferrets. These ferrets will then be injected with GPI to determine whether GPI can trigger implantation. In the second experiment, pregnant ferrets will be given an antibody that blocks GPI to determine whether implantation can occur without GPI. 2) What is the pattern of expression of GPI by the pregnant ferret ovary? We will remove ovaries from ferrets at different stages of pregnancy to determine whether the ovaries make GPI in preparation for implantation. We will use PCR to determine expression levels of the GPI gene as mRNA, and western blotting to determine how much GPI protein is being made. 3) Is GPI secreted from the ovary during pregnancy? We will take blood samples from ferrets at different stages of pregnancy to determine how much GPI is being secreted into the blood, where it can be carried to the uterus. The amount of GPI can be measured by measuring its enzyme activity. 4) What are the target tissues for luteal GPI? To determine where GPI is acting, we will remove the uterus and embryos at various stages of pregnancy, and look for the GPI receptor mRNA and protein. We will also label GPI, and add it to uterine samples and observe where it binds. 5) Is prolactin required for the expression of luteal GPI? The pituitary hormone prolactin is needed for embryo implantation in ferrets. Therefore, it may be signaling the ovaries to make GPI. To test this, we will treat pregnant ferrets with the drug bromocriptine, which blocks prolactin. We will then determine whether the ferret ovaries still make GPI protein and mRNA. These studies will improve present knowledge of reproduction in ferrets and related species, and increase understanding of aspects of cancer biology doc12583 none During the twentieth century the U. S. economy experienced sharp accelerations and decelerations in the growth of multi-factor productivity (MFP) over medium-term intervals. This pattern of acceleration, deceleration, and reacceleration has been the point of departure for numerous hypotheses about the sources of growth earlier in the century, about the post- productivity growth slowdown, and about the post- productivity growth revival. This project aims to carry out measurement projects that question the magnitude and timing of long-term changes in MFP growth in the U. S. since the late nineteenth century. There are two separate parts to the research plan. (1) Standard MFP data prior to World War II are not consistent with official postwar government series, have not been adjusted for the changing quality of inputs, and require further adjustment for problems in the measurement of capital input. (2) In what the investigator called the Hulten-Bruegel Paradox, a factual inconsistency plagues any attempt to extrapolate backward an upward price index bias of the magnitude reported by the Boskin commission. Such backward extrapolation implies implausibly low levels of real consumption if one goes back far enough, e.g., two centuries. The paradox raises the possibility that for some time intervals, price indexes for major products may have had a zero or even downward bias. Research on topic (1) has now been completed with striking conclusions. New measures of MFP show much less of a peak in growth during -50, the period of rapid growth extends back further to , and the puzzling previous behavior of the output-capital ratio is resolved. The main emphasis in the project now turns to price measurement. Bias in government price indexes is normally assumed to be upward, that is, overstating inflation. The novelty in this project is to explore the possibility that inflation may have been understated (or overstated by substantially less) in earlier decades. This possibility, which has not heretofore been systematically investigated, implies that MFP growth may have been overstated in the golden era when measured productivity growth was rapid. Shelter services (both rent and homeownership) are the central focus of the proposed research, the aim of which is to develop new indexes of price and quality change for shelter over the full period from World War I to date. Several sources of data have been uncovered that suggest that the official CPI for residential rent, which is the basis for the deflation of home ownership in the national income accounts, may substantially understate inflation in quality-adjusted rents, particularly between and . A useful byproduct of the research on the quality of residential shelter will be to provide new information to reassess the puzzle of negative productivity growth in the construction industry over the past three decades. The proposal also provides evidence that the CPI may understate the historic inflation rate for apparel, another important component of consumer expenditure. Comparisons of average prices paid and hedonic indexes with matched-model indexes from the same data source suggest the possibility of a much more rapid rate of apparel inflation than in the matched-model indexes or in the CPI doc12584 none Hirth This grant provides partial support for acquisition of EBSD hardware and software for microstructural observations of deformed rocks. The EBSD will be installed on a SEM at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, MA. The PI, Greg Hirth, is a tenured Associate Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). The EBSD facility will be available to a diverse range of research projects being pursued by scientists in the Woods Hole community. The EBSD is now becoming a powerful phase identification tool. This capability will be particularly useful for petrologists and geochemists at WHOI that analyze fine-grained experimental charges and fine-grained metamorphic assemblages produced during hydrothermal processes in the oceanic crust. The EBSD also has important applications for geomicrobiologists (the analysis of crystallographic control on the attachment of microbial material to mineral surfaces) and scientists studying global climate change (the identification of daily growth regions in corals). Finally, education opportunities for applications of EBSD, which would be installed on an SEM at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), will be enhanced by the microscopy short courses held each summer at the MBL. Support for this grant is shared between the Earth Sciences Instrumentation and Facilities Program (EAR IF), and the Division of Ocean Sciences (OCE doc12585 none Collaborative Research: Mesce and Fahrbach Insect metamorphosis is accompanied by extensive reorganization of the central nervous system. These changes are regulated by steroid hormones, and during metamorphosis insect neurons and glia express nuclear steroid hormone receptors. A notable feature of metamorphosis in the nervous system of moths and butterflies is the formation of compound ganglia from individual segmental ganglia. In the moth Manduca sexta, a large species easily reared in the laboratory, compound ganglia form shortly after the caterpillar pupates. This collaborative project will test a model of compound ganglion formation in which two classes of glial cells are the primary steroid targets. In this model, the giant glial cells of the interganglionic connectives move clusters of neurons by changes in their cytoarchitecture while the perineurial glial cells that wrap the central nervous system alter their adhesive properties to permit the neurons to move freely. Experiments to be conducted at the University of Minnesota in Dr. Mesce s laboratory will describe the motility of giant glial cells during the formation of compound ganglia and will study how damage to the giant glial cells affects ganglionic migration and fusion. These experiments are facilitated as a result of the recent discovery that a form of fasciclin II, a protein expressed on the surface of insect cells, can be used as a marker for the giant glial cells. Experiments to be conducted in Dr. Fahrbach s laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will determine the timing of perineurial glial cell proliferation during metamorphosis and study the effects of ablation of this cell population on ganglionic migration and fusion. In addition, antibodies targeted to specific isoforms of the insect steroid hormone receptor (the ecdysone receptor, EcR) will be used to determine which form of the receptor is expressed by glial cells. This is envisioned as a first step toward identifying steroid-regulated genes involved in regulation of the glial cytoskeleton and glial cell adhesion molecules. Previous studies of metamorphosis of the insect nervous system have focused exclusively on neurons. This project will provide new information about the developmental modulation of glial cell cytoarchitecture and glial cell adhesivity during the postembryonic life of insects. The results are likely to generalize to all arthropods and, because the regulation of cell stickiness and cell shape are fundamental attributes of all multicellular organisms, to other animals as well doc12586 none The goal of this project is to attain a better understanding of signal transduction pathways in plants. These studies will focus on proteins from Arabidopsis thaliana that contain a novel phosphoprotein binding module known as the forkhead associated (FHA) domain. The FHA domain is found in many signaling proteins and mediates phosphorylation-dependent assembly of signaling complexes. In plants, a type 2C protein phosphatase, kinase associated protein phosphatase (KAPP), interacts with phosphorylated receptor-like protein kinases (RLKs) via an FHA domain. RLKs are the largest class of cell surface receptors in plants and regulated a myriad of cellular functions. KAPP is a negative regulator of RLK function and recent studies indicate kapp mutants developmentally arrest as seedlings. The specific aims of the project are to investigate the function of KAPP in control of plant growth and development and to identify other components in KAPP-mediated signaling pathways. In addition, because FHA domains are found in a wide variety of proteins involved in many different cellular processes other FHA domain-containing proteins from Arabidopsis thaliana will be analyzed. This research, which will use a combination of molecular genetics, cell biology, and biochemistry, will contribute significantly to a broader understanding of cellular communication doc12587 none This U.S.-Slovak project between William Bowman of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Lubos Halada of the Institute of Landscape Ecology, Slovak Academy of Sciences, compares the responses of two alpine sites that differ in their rates and the temporal extent of nitrogen deposition due to pollution and nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) fertilization. The US site is at Niwot Ridge in the Front Range of the Colorado Rocky Mountains and the Slovak site is in the Western Tatra Mountains, near Mt. Salatin. The goal is to assess ecosystem responses over long periods to contrasting levels of chronic atmospheric nitrogen deposition, which historically have been very high in Europe and relatively low in the Rockies. The U.S. and Slovak teams will collaborate on experimental approaches to examining plant-soil feedback and on assessing the impact of environmental change on ecosystem function. Specifically they intend to examine: 1) the response to N and P fertilization of alpine vegetation which received high rates of N deposition for several decades; 2) the importance of plant species composition and abundance to N retention in the alpine soils, and 3) the degree to which changes in the plant species composition has occurred over the past one and two decades. Results should improve our basic knowledge of alpine systems where the ratio of N deposition to plant biomass is high relative to other ecosystems. If successful, the project also may lead to better global predictions of the consequences from available nitrogen. This ecological research project fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc12588 none This is a proposal to investigate the ecological physiology of overwintering hatchlings of the North American painted turtle (Chrysemys picta). This widely-distributed and abundant species has become a model organism for studies on the ecology and evolution of freshwater chelonians. The natural history of painted turtles differs from that of most other species in an important respect, however. Whereas neonates of other aquatic turtles usually emerge from their nest in late summer or autumn and move to a nearby marsh, lake, or stream to spend their first winter, hatchling painted turtles typically remain inside their shallow, subterranean nest throughout their first winter and do not come above ground until the following spring. This behavior commonly causes neonatal painted turtles at northern localities to be exposed during winter to ice and cold with temperatures in some nests going below -10oC. Many hatchlings withstand such exposure and emerge from their nest when the ground finally thaws in the spring. Hatchlings tolerate the cold of mid-winter by becoming supercooled (i.e., they remain unfrozen at temperatures below the equilibrium freezing point for their bodily fluids). Although this adaptive strategy has many benefits for neonatal turtles, the strategy also has important consequences one of the more important of which is a shutdown of the circulation at temperatures near -10oC. The proposed investigation will focus on the use of energy reserves by liver, heart, and brain in animals subjected to the stagnant anoxia that results from shutdown of the circulation, and on the patterns of accumulation by different organs of the lactic acid that is produced in anaerobic respiration. The work will yield important new insights concerning the physiology of neonatal turtles and also may identify new methods for storing transplantable organs for use in human and or veterinary medicine doc12589 none The proposed research focuses on people s memory for past choices. Memory for choices has the potential to affect people s self-concept, well-being, attitudes, and future decisions. Regret for options not taken can cast a shadow, whereas satisfaction at having made the right choice can make a good outcome seem even better. Our memories of past options provide essential information about our tastes and experience in the context of current and future decisions. These memories have implications for other people as well (e.g., as we give advice about others choices or participate in collective decisions). Understanding the causes and consequences of distortion in memory for choices, and possible ways to avoid such distortion, can have far- reaching benefits in domains ranging from therapy and consumer education to medical decision making and the law. Theoretical explanations of memory distortion share many common themes and emphasize the constructive nature of memory (e.g., Bransford Loftus, ; Reyna Roediger Schacter, Norman, & Koutstaal, ). The current proposal uses the source monitoring framework (e.g., Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, ), one of the most well-developed theoretical approaches to memory and its distortions, to help predict how factors that have been shown to be associated with memory distortion will affect memory for choices. Preliminary work (e.g., Mather, Shafir, & Johnson, ) indicates that people have choice-supportive biases in memory, favoring the option selected over the one rejected. This choice-supportive tendency goes beyond simply selectively remembering the strengths of chosen options and the weak attributes of rejected alternatives. People also tend to make errors that favor their chosen option, misattributing positive features to their chosen option and negative features to the rejected option. The studies in the first section of the proposal investigate the mechanisms underlying such choice-supportive memory distortion. The second section investigates some potential effects of choice- supportive memory on well-being and on future decisions, and the final section investigates how choice- supportive biases may be avoided or attenuated. Remembering choices plays a central role in making future decisions. A better understanding of memory distortion and its influences may help improve decision making in important domains. Better insight into the role of memory also promises to add to our understanding of intuitive decision making practices and emergent biases. Finally, an understanding of how memory of past decisions affects our satisfaction, goals, perceived responsibility, and remembered experience may contribute to well-being in numerous ways. The proposed studies are intended to shed light on how past choices may be remembered or misremembered, on how these tendencies may be altered, and on the hedonic consequences that such alterations might have doc12590 none The extent to which Americans move from one part of the country to another is remarkable when compared with data for other countries. The research analyzes the relevance of geographical differences in income from the point of view of young people who must decide whether to accept the opportunities available in their current location, or move elsewhere in search of better opportunities. There are in fact large geographical differences in wages, despite large migration flows that might be expected to eliminate such differences. There are also large geographical differences in welfare benefits, and policy-makers express concerns that these differences might create welfare magnets in some locations. Thus there is reason to believe that differences in expected income may help explain migration decisions. A more detailed understanding of the relationship between income and migration will be useful in many applications. For example, it will lead toward better forecasts of how quickly regional differences in income and poverty are likely to dissipate; and it will greatly improve our ability to analyze the effects of changes in the welfare system. We build an economic model of individual migration decisions, and we fit it to individual histories, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Individual decisions to migrate are modeled as a job search problem in which welfare benefits or other alternative sources of income act as a floor, insuring workers against bad job search outcomes. A worker can draw a wage only by visiting a location, thereby incurring a moving cost. Locations are distinguished by known differences in mean wages, amenity values and alternative income sources. A worker starts the life-cycle in some home location and chooses an optimal sequence of moves before settling down. There is a two-dimensional ranking of locations, ex ante: some places have high wages, and others have attractive fallback options (both adjusted for amenity values). The decision problem is too complicated to be solved analytically, so we proceed by using a discrete approximation that can be solved numerically. State data on welfare benefits and Census data on wages are used to estimate the parameters describing the menu of choices available to individuals, and preference parameter values are selected so as to maximize the likelihood of the migration decisions seen in the NLSY data. The result of the project will be a structural explanation of migration behavior, that can be used to say what would have happened if the same individuals had been confronted with a different menu of choices. In particular, the results will be used to assess the extent to which migration decisions are driven by geographical wage differentials, and by welfare magnets. Preliminary empirical results indicate that a useful structural model of welfare migration is within reach, and it is likely that this can be extended to obtain a broader characterization of migration decisions of young workers. It will than be possible to analyze behavioral responses to situations not seen in the data, such as the implementation of new policies affecting the labor market doc12591 none Masters Weidner The vision of a standard model which unifies many now-distinct disciplines within the Earth sciences is one that an increasing number of geoscientists are beginning to share, largely because of recent advances in mantle flow-modeling which begin to integrate large-scale seismological models, mineral physics data, and geodynamical modeling. Unfortunately, our current progress is slow because of artificial boundaries between disciplines and the tradition of small groups working in relative isolation. As part of an ongoing CSEDI grant, seismic data sets, codes, and models have been compiled which, in principle, allow the global seismologist a more synoptic view of the problem of determining the 3D structure of the Earth. This program is now at the point where there is near-consensus on a seismological background (or long-wavelength) 3D model. A collaboration between UCSD and Harvard (with significant involvement of UC Berkeley) will work towards establishing the background elastic model (which includes a 1D model). While the outcome of this research will be a specific model (or family of models), the reference data sets will be made available to the community (as well as a wide variety of other shared data sets) to ensure broad participation in the construction of reference models. Most importantly, the current program will be extended beyond seismology and initially will include a mineral physics component (SUNY) and a flow-modeling component (U. Toronto). Tools and data sets will be developed that allow forward modeling of a wide range of potential compositions for conditions which span the mantle. The goal is to make these tools sufficiently easy to use so that non-specialists can test compositional models directly against seismic and geodetic data doc12592 none Bloxham Constable It is proposed to undertake a collaborative study of mantle influences on the geodynamo, combining geodynamics, geodynamo modeling and paleomagnetism, focusing on three timescales. First, by looking at the last 5 million years the long timescale behavior of the dynamo over a period for which both the time averaged field and the paleosecular variation can be determined paleomagnetically will be examined. Furthermore, on this timescale the lowermost mantle is essentially unchanged from that which is imaged using seismic tomography, so modern tomographic images of the mantle can be used. Second, changes in reversal frequency, concentrating on the period from the Cretaceous Normal Superchron to the present day will be examined, including the effect of plume formation at the base of the mantle on the occurrence of reverse flux patches in the magnetic field. Third, preliminary investigations will be conducted on the very long-term changes in the magnetic field occurring over timescales of several hundred million years. This work will involve a statistical re-analysis of the available paleomagnetic measurements to assess what kinds of geodynamo experiments will be relevant to understanding such long-term changes. The dynamo modeling and geodynamical modeling will be performed at Harvard; the paleomagnetic aspects of the proposal, involving data compilation, analysis, and field modeling will be performed at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The work will be coordinated between the two institutions primarily by electronic means, supplemented by visits and short-term exchange of students between the institutions doc12593 none There is a significant theoretical literature in economics that identifies various ways through which providing more information to consumers may lead to improvements in market effciency and consumer welfare in particular. The theoretical insights provide a basis for government policies that seek to increase the amount of information available to consumers. Examples of such policies include food labeling laws, accounting disclosure rules and energy effciency labels on home applicances. Meanwhile existing empirical studies into the effects of information to consumers on firm behavior find small or negligible effects, casting doubt on the importance of such policies. In this project, we analyze a regulatory change that provides an appealing context for evaluating the effects of increased product information on firms product quality choices and disclosure decisions. In , Los Angeles County introduced hygiene quality grade cards to be displayed in restaurant windows. The regulatory change provides an experiment in whether firms are subject to volun- tary disclosure (of hygiene quality) without verifiability, voluntary disclosure with verifiability or mandatory disclosure. Our research indicates substantial effects of the increased information on restaurant hygiene quality. We also find that the effects from mandatory disclosure are very similar to the effects from voluntary verifiable disclosure. A possible implication of this finding is that mandatory disclosure laws (which could be hard to introduce due to lobbying by indus- try groups) are less important than having the government provide mechanisms procedures for firms to voluntarily disclose verifiable product information. The richness of our dataset allows us to also analyze how the effects of the grade cards differ across restaurants. This is interesting because we can address questions that have received little or no attention in the existing empirical literature, such as: (i) does reputation help firms to overcome adverse selection problems, (ii) do franchised chain-restaurants free-ride on chain reputation, and (iii) what is the effect of the increased product information on firms profitability and market structure doc12594 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Thanh Truong Institution: University Of Utah The creation of an on-line Virtual Kinetic Laboratory (VKLab), an integrated web-based problem-solving environment with visualization and experimental data verification for research and education in reaction kinetics, is proposed. The specific objectives for the proposed period are 1) to design the VKLab server page and infrastructure; 2) to develop a chemical information management system for storage and retrieval of structural and thermodynamic properties of molecular species, and kinetic properties of chemical reactions; 3) to develop tools for calculating thermodynamic properties of individual molecules and reactions by using the user-supplied potential energy surface or group-additivity approach; 3) to develop ab initio dynamics tools for calculating both temperature and pressure dependent rate constants of elementary reactions; 4) to develop an automatic mechanism generation of complex reactions; 5) to interface VKLab with existing tools for mechanism sensitivity analysis and reduction. Successful development of VKLab will provide an environment in which researchers and students in science or engineering can perform research or learn computational methods in chemical thermodynamics and reaction kinetics, access information, and computational resources regardless of physical and geographic location, age, physical limitation, and personal schedule doc12595 none This project develops methods that deal with estimation of economic models while imposing minimum plausible assumptions. In particular, the class of models that the project examines are defined in terms of inequality restrictions. These inequality restrictions arise in models with incomplete data (data that are censored or top-coded), in models with multiple equilibria, or in models with measurement error, among others. The estimation techniques that are developed are applied first in estimation problems with interval data with endogeneity. Second, the methods are used to obtain more robust inference in English auction models with bids data. Third, the methods are applied to nonlinear models with measurement error. The project will also examine the issue of constructing valid tests that enables confidence regions for the estimated components of these models doc12591 none Masters Weidner The vision of a standard model which unifies many now-distinct disciplines within the Earth sciences is one that an increasing number of geoscientists are beginning to share, largely because of recent advances in mantle flow-modeling which begin to integrate large-scale seismological models, mineral physics data, and geodynamical modeling. Unfortunately, our current progress is slow because of artificial boundaries between disciplines and the tradition of small groups working in relative isolation. As part of an ongoing CSEDI grant, seismic data sets, codes, and models have been compiled which, in principle, allow the global seismologist a more synoptic view of the problem of determining the 3D structure of the Earth. This program is now at the point where there is near-consensus on a seismological background (or long-wavelength) 3D model. A collaboration between UCSD and Harvard (with significant involvement of UC Berkeley) will work towards establishing the background elastic model (which includes a 1D model). While the outcome of this research will be a specific model (or family of models), the reference data sets will be made available to the community (as well as a wide variety of other shared data sets) to ensure broad participation in the construction of reference models. Most importantly, the current program will be extended beyond seismology and initially will include a mineral physics component (SUNY) and a flow-modeling component (U. Toronto). Tools and data sets will be developed that allow forward modeling of a wide range of potential compositions for conditions which span the mantle. The goal is to make these tools sufficiently easy to use so that non-specialists can test compositional models directly against seismic and geodetic data doc12597 none INTERPHASE is a series of meetings, devoted mainly to numerical and computational aspects of free boundary problems, which have been held successfully once a year in Europe for the past 8 years. The apparent misspelling of INTERPHASE is supposed to emphasize the chief purpose of this meeting: facilitate the communication and exchange of ideas and methods between communities (`phases ) of scientists and engineers that otherwise may not interact and thus profit from each other. In fact, interfaces arise in a variety of applications from materials science and fluid dynamics, to image processing and finance, which may not have any common roots and goals but however are described by similar partial differential equations and thereby present analogous difficulties, challenges, and methodology. The 9th conference of the series will be held in College Park, MD, in September with the intention of encouraging more participation of US researchers and stimulating the exchange of ideas between American and European peers in the area of problems where there is an interface between regions of interest. We plan to have about 30 senior speakers, 12 junior speakers, and a poster session doc12598 none Thomas Beck of the University of Cincinnati is supported by the Division of Chemistry through the Information and Technology Research (ITR) program. He will develop multiscale algorithms for density functional theory, and apply them to computations of current-voltage curves for a range of prototype organic molecules which have been proposed for realistic device applications. The computing revolution of the last twenty years has been driven by the continued miniaturization of electronic components. Therefore it is of great interest to develop molecular computing devices. In this research, electron transport in synthetic organic molecules proposed as prototype molecular wires will be investigated via accurate quantum chemical calculations doc12599 none Baird An opportunity exists for a Sea Grant Fellow to participate in the development of new and revised management plans to protect both marine and terrestrial areas in Antarctica which have been designated for their unique scientific values. Guidelines exist to assist in the process, but the Fellow would be responsible for developing a finished draft plan. Additional responsibilities would involve assistance in coordinating with international organizations involved in the review of the plans to ensure that the concerns of other Antarctic Treaty parties had been taken into account before the final plans were presented at an Antarctic Treaty Consultative meeting for approval doc12600 none The Department of Mathematics at the University of California at Los Angeles will purchase a PC cluster which will be dedicated to the support of research in the mathematical sciences. This equipment will be used by researchers in the UCLA applied mathematics group to carry out the parametric studies required for the development and implementation of multi-scale mathematical models. This type of modeling effort is associated with several research projects and spans a wide range of application areas including semi-conductor growth modeling, computational fluid dynamics, and image processing doc12601 none The primary object of this project is the construction and analysis of mathematical models which introduce decoherence into the dynamics of a geometric quantum computer. A geometric quantum computer (GQC) is a particular proposal for a quantum computer which uses Berry s phase to encode the phase shift of the 2-qubit conditional-phase-shift logic-gate that generates entangled states in the GQC. The goal of this type of investigation is to examine the robustness of geometric quantum computing to errors, in particular, the manner in which decoherence will degrade and ultimately ruin the performance of a GQC doc12602 none Brearley This grant provides partial support to the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of New Mexico (UNM) for the acquisition of a new electron microprobe (EMP) for petrologic and cosmochemical research. A companion proposal submitted concurrently to NASA s Cosmochemistry program will also be funded and together with UNM matching funds, will allow the department to purchase a state-of-the-art EMP with five wavelength dispersive spectrometers and light element analytical capabilities. The new EMP will replace an aging JEOL 733 Superprobe (vintage 83) and will be maintained within the Electron Microbeam Analysis Facility at UNM which also houses a modern SEM and TEM and is staffed by a full time research associate with expertise in electron microscopy. The instrument will support a wide range of research programs within the department and in collaboration with nearby scientists from Sandia National Laboratory including petrologic studies of high pressure mantle phases, investigations of the Precambrian tectonics of the southwest U.S., low temperature geochemistry and petrologic investigations of meteorites. The instrument will also support a large and active graduate student population doc12603 none The Institute of Statistics and Decision Sciences (ISDS) at Duke University will purchase high-speed computing equipment to be dedicated to support of several linked projects in statistical and computational methodology for bioinformatics. Specific research projects involve stochastic modeling of biomolecular sequence and structure, models and computation for large-scale functional genomics, and statistical modeling for gene characterization studies. The grant will provide high-throughput networking equipment, high-speed numerical servers, a file server, and a high-throughput ethernet switch and connectors. This equipment, together with desktop machines providing platforms for local, non-numerically intensive computations, will provide a numerical file server cluster for the three faculty investigators, post-doctoral associates and graduate students working on the proposed bioinformatics projects doc12593 none There is a significant theoretical literature in economics that identifies various ways through which providing more information to consumers may lead to improvements in market effciency and consumer welfare in particular. The theoretical insights provide a basis for government policies that seek to increase the amount of information available to consumers. Examples of such policies include food labeling laws, accounting disclosure rules and energy effciency labels on home applicances. Meanwhile existing empirical studies into the effects of information to consumers on firm behavior find small or negligible effects, casting doubt on the importance of such policies. In this project, we analyze a regulatory change that provides an appealing context for evaluating the effects of increased product information on firms product quality choices and disclosure decisions. In , Los Angeles County introduced hygiene quality grade cards to be displayed in restaurant windows. The regulatory change provides an experiment in whether firms are subject to volun- tary disclosure (of hygiene quality) without verifiability, voluntary disclosure with verifiability or mandatory disclosure. Our research indicates substantial effects of the increased information on restaurant hygiene quality. We also find that the effects from mandatory disclosure are very similar to the effects from voluntary verifiable disclosure. A possible implication of this finding is that mandatory disclosure laws (which could be hard to introduce due to lobbying by indus- try groups) are less important than having the government provide mechanisms procedures for firms to voluntarily disclose verifiable product information. The richness of our dataset allows us to also analyze how the effects of the grade cards differ across restaurants. This is interesting because we can address questions that have received little or no attention in the existing empirical literature, such as: (i) does reputation help firms to overcome adverse selection problems, (ii) do franchised chain-restaurants free-ride on chain reputation, and (iii) what is the effect of the increased product information on firms profitability and market structure doc12605 none The Mutator system is a highly mutagenic family of transposable elements in maize. Mutator transposition is regulated by the MuDR class of transposons. MuDR elements encode two genes: mudrA and mudrB. The mudrA gene is the putative transposase. Although known to be a necessary component of Mu activity, the biochemical function of the mudrB gene is not known. The primary objective of this research is to elucidate the evolution and function of this gene. The mudrA gene is much more widely distributed among grasses than mudrB. Based on this, and the absence of mudrB in many apparently functional MuDR-like elements, it is hypothesized that mudrB was captured by MuDR at some point during the evolution of this transposon. To test this hypothesis, several grasses related to maize will be surveyed for the presence and composition of mudrB sequences. To investigate the function of mudrB in maize, existing derivatives that express only mudrA or only mudrB will be exploited. Experiments in which these two deletion derivatives will be combined genetically will test the hypothesis that the two can compliment each other. In addition, the derivative that lacks mudrB will be crossed to mutations that affect Mutator activity. In order to determine if mudrB can contribute to high levels of MuDR transposition in a species that lacks this gene, rice will be transformed with constitutively and inducibly expressed mudrB. Proteomic analysis of proteins binding Mu element TIRs will be employed to identify proteins involved in regulating Mu element transposition in the presence and absence of mudrA or mudrB and in the presence of mutations that affect Mutator activity. Proteomic analysis of binding of Mu termini from these mutations will also serve to identify other proteins that operate in the same pathway as the mutations that affect activity doc12606 none The Department of Applied Mathematics at the Illinois Institute of Technology will purchase a customized Linux cluster which will be dedicated to the support of research in the mathematical sciences. The equipment will be used for several research projects, including in particular: 1. Further Development of the W-Curve as a Visualization and analytic Tool for the study of Long Genomic sequences, by Douglas J. Cork and F.R. McMorris; 2. Numerical simulation of stochastic Partial Differential Equations in Fluid Dynamics, by Jinqiao Duan; 3. Parallel algorithms for Meshless Methods, by Gregory Fasshauer; 4. Numerical Investigations of Interfacial Dynamics in Fluid Dynamics, by Xiaofan Li doc12607 none An improved understanding of, and the ability to model, orographic precipitation and air mass drying would contribute to solving a number of earth science problems involving: flash flood prediction, water resources, mountain glaciers, ice core interpretation, erosion, rain-shadow deserts and inter-ocean water transport. Most current models either oversimplify or fail to resolve key moist orographic flow processes. In this research, the Principal Investigator will test existing mesoscale models and develop new theories combining airflow dynamics and microphysics. The highest priority is to compare existing model runs with data from the Mesoscale Alpine Programme (MAP). This is the only detailed data set using new technologies that allows moist air flow over a major mountain range to be diagnosed. Four MAP cases have been identified with differing characteristics. For each case, output from three numerical models will be compared with conventional and aircraft data. If the agreement is satisfactory, detailed interpretation of the output will follow. Several theoretical questions will be addressed in the analysis: the relative role of moist ascent versus flow splitting and blocking; triggered convection; the accuracy of parcel trajectories; the effect of model resolution; the testing of the threshold theory of precipitation efficiency; sensitivity to microphysical algorithms; and the conservation of equivalent potential temperature in mixing flows. The second phase of the research will include data and publications from three contemporary medium scale experiments managed by other groups. The results from these projects will be compared to put the MAP results into a broader context and allow cautious generalizations to be developed. In the final phase of the project, applications of relevant orographic precipitation models to other geoscience disciplines (see items above) will be undertaken, broadening the impact of the work. A scholarly survey of the field will be attempted. Considerable influence on educational programs should be seen from this research activity. Undergraduate and graduate students and post-docs will be involved in the field work and data analysis doc12608 none Denn, Morton M CUNY City College Size -Scale Sensitivity in Mutliphase Systems with a Liquid Crystalline Phase Liquid crystalline systems contain an intrinsic length scale, the correlation length over which the liquid crystalline order is preserved; this scale is of the order of a few micrometers in nematic liquid crystalline polymers (LCPs). The liquid crystalline order can affect the interphase structure in a multiphase system, which in turn can affect macroscopic properties. Thus, the system behavior depends on the interaction between the different length scales: the molecular nanoscale characterizing the interfacial region, the mesoscales characterizing the correlation length and the phase dimensions, and the macroscopic scale on which properties are determined. Blends containing small amounts of a LCP in a matrix of a flexible thermoplastic are of considerable technological interest. It is possible to develop self-reinforced composites that exploit the outstanding tensile properties of fibers made from LCPs by creating a fibrillar morphology in the LCP dispersed phase. In addition, LCPs can act as flow modifiers for conventional thermoplastics, effecting a reduction in extrusion pressure at low concentrations. Our prior research has shown that the linear viscoelasticity of LCP blends is insensitive to droplets smaller than the nematic correlation length, and that the dynamics of LCP droplets do not follow the same scaling as droplets of flexible polymers. Furthermore, we have shown in preliminary Monte Carlo calculations that the interfacial tension between a LCP and a flexible polymer depends on the far-field nematic orientation in the droplet. The proposed research comprises three complementary approaches to elucidate the effect of multiple length scales on the mechanics of blends containing LCPs: continuum theory, Monte Carlo calculations, and experiments. Continuum theory. The LCP orientation distribution in the droplet will be a major factor in the deformation mechanics, and transitions between radial and bipolar orientations, which will affect the interfacial tension, are expected with droplet deformation. The Principal Investigator plans initially to use a perturbation analysis of a Leslie-Ericksen (LE) material with equal Frank elastic constants to analyze the first-order effect of droplet deformation. The LE fluid is the most elementary nematic model, and it is the asymptotic limit of more complete models for LCPs that are extensions of the Doi theory. Then the Principal Investigator will undertake a full three-dimensional finite-element solution of the equilibrium distribution in a deformed sphere for a LE material with unequal Frank coefficients. The purpose of this computation is to understand the likely orientation distributions in droplets after shearing. The time scale for droplet response defines the frequency range in which interfacial effects can be observed in blend rheology. The Principal Investigator will initially determine the response of a LE fluid, using an expansion in spherical harmonics. This is an important calculation in light of the experimental observations for blend linear viscoelasticity and droplet dynamics. The principal investigator expects the transient response of the droplet in the linear regime to depend on the Frank elasticity when the elastic stresses in a domain become comparable to the Laplace pressure. Available data do not show this dependence, but they do show a dependence on initial strain that is absent for droplets of a flexible polymer. This behavior needs to be rationalized by an analysis of the type proposed here. The principal investigator will repeat the Palierne analysis of viscoelastic blends for a monodomain liquid crystalline droplet, first using the LE theory for simplicity. The computed rheological properties are likely to depend on the anchoring conditions imposed on the nematic phase at the boundary, which will define the nematic order in the domain interior. The principal investigator expects the response to be sensitive to the Frank elasticity terms in the LE equation in the neighborhood of singularities. The LE theory is structurally similar to multi-domain theories for LCPs, so these calculations should provide a framework for interpreting experimentally observed differences between multidomain and monodomain droplets. The principal investigator anticipates a dependence of the storage modulus G on a new dimensionless group involving the correlation length. The principal investigator will then carry out the comparable calculation for the Doi theory and relevant extensions. Monte Carlo Calculations. The Bond Fluctuation Model (BFM) will be used to study the effect of nematic order on the interfacial tension between a LCP droplet and an amorphous matrix, exploring chain length, energy parameters, and polydispersity. Modification of the BFM by developing a rational method for placing interpolated points on the lattice near the interface is required to account for the large size differences between LCP and flexible chain monomers. The effect of shear flow on the chain orientation near the interface and on the interfacial tension will be explored using a pseudopotential model for self-avoiding lattice chains. Experiments. Linear viscoelastic measurements intended to isolate the effect of the interface and Frank orientational elasticity from macromolecular effects will be carried out on blends containing low molar mass liquid crystals (LMMLCs). The principal investigators preliminary measurements suggest that the linear viscoelastic behavior of the LMMLCs may be unusual (negative G ) and shear history dependent. Thus, the first step will be to elucidate the linear viscoelastic behavior and to analyze the results in the context of the predictions of LE and Doi theories. The principal investigator will then study the rheology of the blends, employing LMMLCs that exhibit a phase transition to obtain nematic and isotropic dispersed phases with equal viscosities and identical chemical compositions doc12609 none Research will be completed on three different topics: First, the project develops a new approach to characterizing nonlinearities in weakly dependent time series. Nonlinear principal component decompositions are used to represent the evolution of continuous-time Markov processes and to summarize the correlation structure. These decompositions help us understand better the evolution of relative prices across locations and the nonlinearities induced by transaction or transport costs. This work draws on three literatures: functional principal component analysis; quadratic-form modeling of Markov processes; and nonlinear, stochastic modeling of real exchange rates. Nonlinear models that are strongly dependent or nonstationary are also considered. Second, the investigator continues his study of economies in which private agents and policy-makers confront model misspecification. The project explores and implements solution methods for nonlinear, stochastic equilibrium models. It studies monetary models in which the misspecification concerns of macroeconomic policy makers differ from those of private agents. It builds from insights in the time-series econometrics literature on misspecification and filtering to investigate alternative formulations of robustness in the decision-making of private agents. Finally, the project studies connections between robustness, adaptive learning and information- based models of inertia. Third, the project examines the observable implications of dynamic models under uncertainty with human capital and portfolio investment. Implications for time series and cross sections of asset returns are deduced and tested. The role of heterogeneity in the stochastic structure of labor income also is considered. Finally, the project investigates the role of financial market structures on the shadow valuation of human capital doc12610 none This Doctoral Dissertation Research Support investigation examines how the federal structure of American political institutions affects the way in which individuals translate policy opinions into voting behavior. A theoretical framework pays particular attention to citizens ability to make different attributions of responsibility for policymaking and policy performance across different levels of government in a federal system. Specific hypotheses focus on the affect such responsibility attributions have on the linkage between policy opinions and federal voting behavior. The hypothesized relationships will be analyzed by collecting original survey data on citizen attitudes about various policy areas and the level of governments they deem responsible for those policies. This dissertation has implications for understanding empirical patterns of American federal voting that heretofore have been understudied. The model produces specific predictions regarding those who would be more likely to vote for different parties at different levels of government and for those who turnout for lower offices, but not higher ones doc12611 none A 3-day workshop on fracture toughness test standardization for concrete is planned. It is now imperative that experts meet to select a single standard. The purpose of the workshop is to study a number of fracture toughness test proposals, and to select a proposal to recommend to American Society for Testing of Materials for adoption. We will invite 15 researchers from around the world, and will make every effort to include qualified women and minorities doc12612 none The Department of Mathematics at the University of Kansas will purchase advanced graphics workstations and a parallel compute server which will be dedicated to the support of research in the mathematical sciences. The equipment will be used for several research projects, including in particular: Parallel eigenvalue computations. (Ralph Byers) Higher dimensional immersive visualization of dynamical systems. (Estella Gavosto) Adaptive moving-mesh methods for numerical solution of evolutionary partial differential equations and its applications. (Wiezhang Huang) Computation in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry. (Craig Huneke) Spectral analysis of biological nanostructures. (Rodolfo Torres doc12579 none Bass Grand The investigators propose a collaborative effort between a mineral physicist (J Bass, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and a seismologist (S. Grand, University of Texas, Austin) aimed at elucidating the seismic structure and mineralogy of the Earth s transition zone, from 300- km in depth. The seismic structure will be determined in several regions with unprecedented resolution of the velocity jumps across transition zone discontinuities and the seismic velocity gradients between the jumps. The available mineral elasticity data and phase relations for relevant mineral systems will be used to calculate the compositions and proportions of individual phases, and the properties of candidate mantle assemblages as a function of depth for a range of bulk compositions. Two key experiments on the high temperature and pressure elasticity of beta phase and aluminous perovskite will be done to fill in the most pressing gaps in the elasticity data base. A new waveform inversion code will be used to determine acceptable fits of mineralogic models directly to the seismic data within certain imposed constraints. For example, with the percent olivine component and size of discontinuities fixed, they can search for allowable models of gradients that satisfy seismic constraints. Other initial conditions will be tried as well. In this way the investigators propose to define both the structure of the transition zone and the range of mineralogical models which are compatible with the seismic data in a more formal quantitative way than has been done before. This research will involve one student working on mineral physics aspects of the project at UIUC, and a student working on the seismological aspects at UTA doc12614 none The Department of Mathematics at the University of Connecticut at Storrs will purchase a file-server, a rack-mounted cluster for parallel computation and visualization equipment which will be dedicated to the support of research in the mathematical sciences. The equipment will be used for several research projects, including in particular: the following work of faculty with the assistance of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows: Prof. Choi s work on parallel algorithms to assist the virtual cell project in mathematical biology; Prof. Neumann will study the parallelization of algorithms associated to transition probabilities of Markov chains; geometric analysis and associated visualization of extensions of mappings, conformal geometry of manifolds and special surfaces such as rational minimal surfaces are the focus of investigations by Profs. Abikoff and McCune; topological computations and related algebraic and symbolic computations of 3-dimensional manifolds and of the structure of modules over the Steenrod algebra which arise from the classifying spaces of certain vector bundles will be conducted by Profs. Giambalvo and Tollefson; Computational partial differential equations with applications in the physical sciences which include coupled Schr\ odinger equations, travelling waves and the non-linear Gross-Pitaevskii equation will be studied by Profs. Choi, Koltracht and McKenna doc12615 none The Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara will purchase a Beowulf Cluster consisting of 16 dual processor node, one single processor controlling node, a network switch, backup tape drive, and a rack. This hardware will be dedicated to the support of research in the mathematical sciences. The equipment will be used for several research projects, including in particular: Computations of scaling of fluvial landscapes, computations of effectively nonlinear quantum systems, dynamically adaptive and nonstiff boundary integral methods, numerical schemes for simulations of multi-phase fluids and vorticity deformation in 2D ideal incompressible fluid flow doc12616 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Diane Brentari will conduct three years of linguistic research on the classifier systems of nine sign languages from three different families. Such systems exist in all known sign languages, but in only some spoken languages. Classifiers refer to certain properties of noun arguments but may be expressed in a variety of grammatical units. For example, they may appear in noun phrases (e.g., grain in a grain of sand in English) or verb phrases expressing motion or location (e.g., 3-handshape + go_by in American Sign Language; translation: A bike is going by ). In sign languages, they are typically expressed as handshapes. This research will ask whether nine sign languages use similar handshapes to express similar meanings and how each system compares to the set of all languages that contain well-developed classifier systems, both spoken and signed. The relatively young Israeli Sign Language is included to compare to more mature classifier systems. Dr. Brentari and a linguist in each language community will collect the data. Elicitation tasks target specific semantic distinctions such as stative active, agentive non-agentive, and telic atelic. Researchers will analyze how each sign language uses the components of the total handshape in its classifier system to express these distinctions. The Prosodic Model of sign language phonology will provide a theoretical framework within which to organize and analyze the data. Three scientific questions motivate this study of sign language classifiers. First, this project will contribute to our knowledge of sign languages by providing cross-linguistic information about a fundamental structure that is not yet well understood. Second, this project will add to our knowledge of morphology and the way that it is expressed, since morphology in sign languages is expressed predominantly by simultaneously organized phonological units rather than by sequentially organized units. Finally, this research will contribute to our understanding of the range of classifier typology in natural languages. In addition to its scientific merit, this project will recruit native-signing Deaf undergraduate students to help analyze data, and so provide an opportunity for these students to engage in first-hand scientific research on their native languages doc12617 none This Doctoral Dissertation Research Support investigation examines whether state legislatures organize themselves such that they achieve a parallel structure with the state executive branch s administrative agencies. The purpose for such organizational change is to increase policy expertise, encourage more efficient oversight, or minimize power asymmetries between the branches. The importance of this question lies in the observation that both legislative and executive reorganizations are empirical regularities in state government, and yet there is a dearth of literature explaining why such reorganizations occur. In fact, the majority of the literature on state executive reorganizations concludes that these reorganizations do not meet stated goals, or, basically, that they do not work. What the literature on both legislative and executive reorganizations has missed is the relationship between the two branches of government. That which happens in one branch of government will affect the actions of the other. This research will demonstrate that legislatures react to reorganizations in the executive branch by concomitantly changing their own structures, and, further, that they do so in order to maintain a parallel structure with the executive. Thus, at its conclusion, this research will fill the gap in the literature regarding the rationale for government reorganizations. The tests of this theory require an examination of the changes in the structure of committee systems and the structure of executive agencies. Data concerning institutional changes in U.S. state legislative committee systems and U.S. state executive agencies will be collected from - doc12492 none Romanowicz Karato This is a collaborative study between seismologists at UC Berkeley and mineral physicists at Yale University, to explore the feasibility of inverting seismic long period waveform data directly for 3D variations in effective temperature and major element chemistry in the upper mantle. Effective temperature will include the effects of temperature and water content, which cannot be easily separated from seismic data alone. Water content is likely to have large effects on rheology and therefore has significant influence on the dynamics of the Earth s mantle. They will use the mineral physics framework to delineate contributions from these various factors and provide estimates of relevant partial derivatives. Effects of major element chemistry can be distinguished from that of water, because water has a large influence on anelasticity whereas major element chemistry does not. On the other hand anelasticity is more strongly dependent on temperature than seismic velocity. At the heart of this study is the conjecture, supported by theoretical considerations, that the one step inversion of seismic waveforms for physical parameters such as composition C and (effective) temperature T , should yield more stable results than the standard approach of first inverting for velocity and Q structure and then interpreting the obtained maps in terms of physical parameters. The latter is currently inhibited by the poor resolution in 3D upper mantle Q, due to contamination of amplitudes by largely unmodelled, but significant, effects of focusing and scattering. In the one step inversion the effects of C and T are coupled in the inversion matrix elements, whereas in the standard approach, only the amplitudes depend on anelastic terms, while both phase and amplitudes depend on the elastic ones, leading to strong biases in the distribution of Q inferred. The coupled character of the equations in the one step approach, combined with the strong sensitivity of amplitudes to T (through anelastic terms) should offset the approximate character of the available mineral physics partial derivatives and the errors due to inadequate theoretical treatment of focusing doc12619 none The Scientific Computation Group (Scicomp) in the Mathematics Department at UCSD will purchase a 16-processor MPI-based parallel computer and four Linux-based graphics workstations for visualization. The equipment will be dedicated to the support of research in the mathematical sciences. The equipment will be used for several research projects, including parallel adaptive multilevel finite element methods, parallel algorithms for optimal control with PDE constraints, parallel level set algorithm development, and applications in biochemistry and physics. Supported by this computing equipment, our research program will provide graduate students and postdocs a broad educational experience in an environment in which different aspects of scientific computation are integrated. This produces scientists who are not only expert in their own area of study, but are also able to communicate across disciplinary boundaries. As part of this proposal, SDSC (San Diego Supercomputer Center) will provide fiber-optic infrastructure to connect the 16-processor parallel computer to a similar large cluster located at SDSC. The coupled clusters will be used in large production calculations requiring substantial resources, and the individual Scicomp cluster will be used for parallel algorithm development and for smaller production calculations. The Scicomp satellite with fiber link to SDSC will complement similar computational satellites recently constructed by the biochemistry group on campus and by the UCSD Medical School doc12620 none The Department of Mathematics at the University of California at Irvine will purchase a Beowulf cluster of 32 (16 dual) Intel Pentium CPUs (connected with 1Gbic ethernet and operated by Linux) together with a SGI graphics computer. The computer equipment will be dedicated as a powerful distributed computing resource to the support of research in the mathematical sciences involving numerical studies of partial differential equations. This broad area of research will include in particular the following projects: Microstructure evolution in a three-dimensional elastic system - Q. Nie and F. Wan Numerical study of surface diffusion in three dimensions - H. Zhao Computational study of the Navier-Stokes-alpha model - Q. Nie, K. Solna and E. Titi Computaiton of harmonic maps - P. Li Numerical studies for the Gauss curvature flow with flat sides - P. Daskalopoulos and R. Hamilton In addition to new understanding for the problems in material sciences, fluid mechanics and geometry investigated, the results of these studies will provide important computational tools for many other important problems in science and engineering that require large scale computation doc12621 none Indirect Genetic Effects of Parental Care Behavior Claudia M. Rauter and Charles W. Fox Numerous studies have shown that parental care can affect expression of traits in offspring. From the point of view of offspring, parental care is an environmental factor like food or air temperature. For the parents, however, parental care is a trait like any other trait; it is determined by parental genes and the environment to which the parent is exposed. Through their effects on the offspring environment, both parental genes and the parental environment can affect offspring traits such as growth and developmental time. These effects of parental genes and environment on trait expression in offspring are called indirect genetic effects and indirect environmental effects, respectively. The indirect genetic effects are of special interest, because they can influence rate and direction of response of traits to natural selection. This study will investigate how parental care affects trait evolution. The specific objectives are to 1) determine the amount of variation in progeny traits that is due to indirect genetic effects in an insect species with parental care, 2) investigate whether the influence of indirect genetic effects depends on the developmental stage in which the trait is expressed as has been observed in many mammals, and 3) examine the relative influence of indirect genetic effects in individuals reared with and without parental care. The results of this research will significantly increase our understanding of trait evolution in animals with parental care. The comparison between an insect with parental care with mammals and birds will give us insights about the generality of the evolutionary models including parental effects. These models have been developed primarily based on observations in domesticated mammals. The comparison of parental effects in animals reared with and without parental care will provide invaluable information about how parental care affects trait evolution doc12622 none Mitchell This Americas Program award will support Dr. Gary E. Mitchell, North Carolina State University in collaboration with Dr. Mahir Hussein of the Universidad de Sao Paulo in Brazil. The aim of the project is to study quantum chaos through measurement of a system that mimics chaotic behavior - acoustic resonances in quartz blocks. By studying an experimental system exhibiting chaotic behavior, the researchers intend to address some open questions in quantum mechanics that may shed light on fundamental processes in nuclear physics. The project will take advantage of a recently established experimental program in Sao Paulo and combine the expertise of the US group in analyzing nuclear spectra for signatures of quantum chaos. The collaboration will have an educational component by promoting the exchange of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows doc12623 none This research program will continue and complete an experimental investigation of the radiative properties of high temperature combustion gases, particularly CO2 and H2O. Existing property data for these gases have an average uncertainty of plus minus 30% and may be in error in some cases by as much as 70%. The PI will use a unique isothermal high-temperature gas column and an FTIR spectrometer to ensure better spectral resolution than previous high temperature measurements. The potential impact is a significantly improved capability to make radiative heat transfer calculations in arbitrary combustion gas particulate environments, including combustion chambers and furnaces, fires, and propulsion systems, and therefore improve the performance and design of these systems doc12624 none This program produces a cadre of computer scientists with strong specializations in information assurance and a commitment to federal service. Three cohorts of students complete a two-year program that integrates intense information assurance studies with research and outreach. Students also spend one summer as interns in federal agencies. Upon completion of degrees at the end of two years the students then enter the federal cyber service. The program features an emphasis on collaborative research and outreach to the community. The program components train students in information assurance theory and practice while providing an environment that fosters teamwork, strengthens motivation, and builds a sense of professionalism and commitment to service doc12625 none A growing body of research has identified the important role of shame and guilt in regulating human social behavior. Past research has discovered that shame and guilt are often evoked by similar circumstances, yet these emotions are clearly distinct. For example, whereas guilt appears to facilitate smoother social interactions and psychological adjustment, shame prompts feelings of self-consciousness and a desire to withdraw from social encounters. Although existing research on shame and guilt has focused on the experience of these emotions as it occurs after people have committed a blameworthy action themselves, almost no research has examined factors that predict when people experience shame or guilt for actions carried out by other individuals. The proposed research will test a model of vicarious shame and guilt that integrates current understandings of self-conscious emotion with theoretical perspectives on social associations to predict what types of associations make individuals susceptible to vicarious shame versus guilt for the actions of others. The perceived essentiality of one s association to a wrongdoer is predicted to intensify reactions of vicarious shame and distancing responses, whereas one s level of interpersonal interdependence with a wrongdoer is predicted to intensify reactions of vicarious guilt and efforts to repair any damage done to a victim. A series of 14 experiments will manipulate the type of association participants have to an individual who commits a wrongdoing and examine the effects of these manipulations on participants self-reported emotional reactions and cognitive appraisals, as well as their behavioral responses to both the wrongdoer and the victim. Because shame and guilt evoke such different behavioral reactions to events, the proposed research on vicarious shame and guilt promises to yield insights important for theories of intergroup and interpersonal behavior, as well as for theories of emotion doc12626 none Engineering - Other (59) Taking the Lead is a highly participatory conference bringing together Deans of Education and Engineering to form collaborations and to discuss the positive impact that such partnerships can have on the technological literacy of future K-12 teachers. This is the first time that education and engineering leaders have come together in a formal meeting. The potential benefits of these collaborations are numerous. Engineering programs can provide educators with technical expertise and real world applications of science and mathematics. Schools of education have much to contribute to engineering schools in terms of effective pedagogy, instructional design, and assessment. The outcomes of this conference will be an overall strategic plan that has broad impact on campus reform and specific action plans for the individual institutions represented doc12627 none This project will develop tools that make it possible to retrieve naturally occurring sentences from the World Wide Web on the basis of lexical content and syntactic structure, providing linguists with an immediate, easily accessible source of raw linguistic data. The PIs will investigate specific linguistic hypotheses at the lexical semantics syntax interface as an illustrative application of these tools. At a high level, the planned work constitutes an important step toward a new paradigm for linguistic research. Rather than relying entirely on introspective data generated by the linguist who is trying to (dis)prove a particular hypothesis, Web-enabled linguistics research will draw on the methodology and the tools developed by the PIs to supply naturally occurring data on which theories can rest. With regard to specific linguistic questions, the goal is to provide an explanation of the rules and constraints that govern three transitivity alternations (Middle, Unaccusative, Unspecified Object Deletion), and the PIs expect data made available by their tools to shed light on the grey area between competence and performance, that is, the linguistic behavior that seems to fall outside of rule-governed behavior. Although naturally occurring data are not accorded great emphasis in generative syntax, the use of text corpora has a tradition in the greater linguistic enterprise. An explosive new phenomenon in the world of naturally occurring text, the World Wide Web is an essentially untapped resource that embodies the rich and dynamic nature of language, presenting a data resource of unparalleled size and diversity doc12628 none Richard Hirsh, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Technological Change in a Deregulated Era: A Study of Innovation in Environmentally Preferable Technologies in a Restructured Electric Utility System This project examines how technological innovation in the American electric utility system has been affected by deregulation, specifically examining research on technologies with low environmental impact, such as renewable energy and energy-efficient devices. The subject has interest because ongoing deregulation of the utility system has highlighted apparently contradictory public policy goals relating to these technologies. On the one hand, reduction of state utility regulation in a few states has already unleashed free-market forces and spurred innovation on technologies that can provide novel services at low cost. On the other hand, reduced state oversight has diminished research efforts on technologies that produce and use electricity less wastefully; in the past, those efforts had been spurred by the same type of regulation that is now being discarded. To gain an understanding of the unusual forces driving--and hindering-technological innovation in an increasingly deregulated electric utility system, this study focuses on public interest advocacy groups, corporate entrepreneurs, government entities, and formerly regulated utilities. The technologies most affected by changes in public policy--and the technologies that will be the subject of this research-include renewable energy technologies, such as wind turbines, photovoltaics, and biopower; cogeneration, gas turbine, district heating, and other generation technologies that use fossil fuel, but at higher efficiencies (and with less environmental impact) than traditional electric utility hardware; energy-efficiency technologies (or demand-side, end-use technologies). Most generally, this research examines the effects on technological innovation of government and nongovernment parties that seek to achieve the apparently cherished--but perhaps inconsistent--goals of reduced state regulation and environmental improvement in the electric utility system. Using a systems approach that spans disciplinary boundaries, outcomes include several articles (and the foundation for a new book) dealing with technological innovation during a period of rapidly changing public and economic policy. The project contributes to this useful STS approach by focusing on a system that, unlike those studied by other scholars, has seen its momentum altered significantly because of the use of new technologies. As in past projects by this PI, this research has practical significance to STS practitioners, as well as to contemporary policy makers in the worlds of business and government doc12629 none This project develops, codes, and analyzes data from a comprehensive archive of organizational ethnographies. The archive helps advance the field of the sociology of work by combining the strengths of both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. The in-depth observations contained in ethnographic accounts of organization life provide rich qualitative information, and the systematic coding of those observations into scores appropriate for quantitative analysis provides the basis for more precise comparisons of otherwise separate case studies. The topics studied by the project with the organizational ethnographies of work include: 1) co-worker relations involving race and gender relations and discrimination, 2) the role of information technology, 3) causes of job stress, 4) worker solidarity, unionization, and resistance, 5) workplace marginality, and 6) sources of high performance. The project addresses these topics by adding data from 34 recent ethnographies to an existing archive of 108 ethnographies. Like data from the previously-archived ethnographies, which served as the basis for numerous and influential publications, additional data for the archive come from codings based on content analysis of descriptive passages in the new ethnographies. With the coded data, the analysis extensively evaluates the reliability and validity of the coding methods, and addresses relatively new workplace issues studied only by the most recent ethnographies. In making the archive public, the project allows others to quantitatively analyze a variety of topics relating to work and organizations doc12630 none This research concerns the unsupervised learning of structural information about English that is not present in current tree-banks (specifically the various Penn tree-banks). That is, one wants a machine to learn this information without having to create a corpus in which the information is annotated. The structural information to be learned often falls at the boundary between syntax and semantics; for example, does the fact that the New York Stock Exchange has as part of the name the location New York fall under syntax or semantics? What about the similarity between the expressions [to] market useless items and the market for useless items ? The intention is to learn this kind of information in a form that current statistical parsers can use so that they can output more finely structured parses. But this is not meant to suggest that parsing is the sole use for this sort of information. More and more systems for automatically extracting information from free text use coreference detection and named-entity recognition (e.g., recognizing that New York is a location, but New York Stock Exchange is an organization). There is evidence to suggest that both coreference and named-entity recognition can be improved with the finer level of analysis to be made possible by this research. Or again, language models (programs that assign a probability to strings in a language) are standard parts of all current speech-recognition systems; there is evidence that suggests that finer grained syntactic analysis can improve current language models. Thus, this research will enable a wide variety of systems to make better use of language input and so make these systems more accessible to a diverse user pool doc12631 none The meeting entitled Eighth International Meeting on Ciliate Molecular Biology . will be held as a FASEB Conference at the Vermont Academy in Saxtons River, Vermont, July 28- August 2, . The meeting will bring together researchers who employ molecular approaches for investigating diverse biological problems using ciliated protozoa as their model system. The great value of ciliates stems from their unusual genetic organization and extensive, developmentally-programmed reorganization of the genome. These features have provided remarkable insights into an array of fundamental chromosomal processes, including the discovery of self-splicing RNA, telomeres and telomerase, and chromatin remodeling by histone acetyltransferases. Recent advances, such as targeted gene replacement by homologous recombination and antisense ribosomes have been exploited to study a wide range of questions in cell and molecular biology, ranging from telomeres and telomerase, to regulated protein secretion, to tubulin modification during microtubule assembly. The pace of research has quickened due to the development and dissemination of new experimental methods. For this reason and others, the Ciliate Molecular Biology Meeting fills a critical niche that is otherwise lacking in other scientific meetings. The meeting included a workshop for assessing practical issues and justification for a Tetrahymena genome sequencing project. The Ciliate Molecular Biology meeting will be organized into nine platform sessions and two poster sessions. Platform sessions will cover leading edge research topics including chromatin remodeling, telomeres and telomerase, DNA rearrangement, DNA replication, signal transduction, the cytoskeleton, evolution and genome plasticity doc12632 none Kavner The investigators plan to provide an examination of the Earth s core-mantle boundary as an electrochemical system. They will undertake a series of piston-cylinder experiments designed to investigate the effect of an electric field on the physical and chemical behavior at metal-silicate interfaces. Both DC resistance measurements and AC impedance spectroscopy will be employed to examine the electrical behavior of a metal-silicate interface, and electron microprobe analysis will record changes in chemistry for a series of anodic and cathodic electrical loadings of the interface. These results will be used, in turn, to show how differences in chemistry and physical properties overlying local areas of the core-mantle boundary may translate into geophysical and geochemical observables such as length of day variations, the behavior of the magnetic field dynamo, and creation of physical and chemical structure in the outer core and lower mantle. The goal is to extend our understanding of the core-mantle boundary to encompass electrical and electrochemical behavior at high pressures and temperatures, examining both electrically-induced chemical partitioning and resultant core-mantle dynamic coupling doc12633 none The process of global economic change has required that social movements concerned with labor, the environment, women s rights, and fair trade organize and operate across national boundaries. Many social movements have thus forged transnational ties, possess members in more than one nation, and engage in action against global forces of economic liberalization. Although scholars have studied domestic social movements in some detail, the emergence of transnational movements raises several important questions: how do activists and organizations build coalitions across national boundaries, how do they negotiate strategies of action and identity with partners in other nations, and how do they deal with special constraints and differences inherent in cross-national action? This project investigates these questions by studying several successful, highly active, and well-funded coalitions between United States and Mexican labor unions, as well as some more temporary and less successful alliances. The project s methods rely on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with a selected sample of leaders, organizers, and rank-and-file members who have participated in cross-nation labor actions or acted as brokers between Mexican and American unions. The results describe the breadth and depth of transnational networks among labor movements, identify the organizational and cultural means by which networks emerge across national boundaries, and explain how coalitions manage to cooperate and overcome conflict in the face of differing national, ethnic, and linguistic identities. The project thus provides a clearer understanding of how transnational economic change shapes local and national labor movements, and how such movements respond to the new global environment they face doc12634 none Quartrano Within all cells, asymmetries are found in relation to gradients of external signals such as light, gravity, neighboring cells, etc. These asymmetries generate an intracellular polarity, as axis with different ends, which often results in the differentiation of subsequent daughter cells. To understand the molecular mechanisms used to interpret environmental inputs that bring about changes in cell polarity requires a system that combines experimental tractability at the cellular, molecular and genetic levels. Impressive progress has been made to establish the common moss plant (e.g. Physcomitrella patens) as an excellent model to explore the molecular basis of cellular polarity, primarily because moss is the only plant system in which homologous recombination is available for functional genetic approaches, i.e., gene knockouts and gene replacements, which can be used to confirm the role of a specific gene in polar processes. The moss system is now ideally and uniquely suited to confirm hypotheses concerning the nature of the proteins involved, e.g., proteins in the secretory system and cytoskeletal proteins. Using moss as a model, our main objective is to identify and demonstrate the function of specific genes in these polar processes by a combined molecular, cellular and genetic approach. Genes involved in the realignment of the polar axes in response to gravity in apical cells of moss will be isolated and identified using a number of random genetic approaches. A more targeted approach will focus on genes already identified that are likely to play a role in polarity, e.g. those functioning in actin cytoskeleton dynamics. The particular properties of the moss system and approaches outlined in this proposal will allow us to identify genes that play important roles in one of the most fundamental processes of living organisms, i.e., how cellular asymmetries are established and maintained to direct polar development and pattern formation doc12635 none Lay - Collaborative Research: Fahrbach and Mesce Insect metamorphosis is accompanied by extensive reorganization of the central nervous system. These changes are regulated by steroid hormones, and during metamorphosis insect neurons and glia express nuclear steroid hormone receptors. A notable feature of metamorphosis in the nervous system of moths and butterflies is the formation of compound ganglia from individual segmental ganglia. In the moth Manduca sexta, a large species easily reared in the laboratory, compound ganglia form shortly after the caterpillar pupates. This collaborative project will test a model of compound ganglion formation in which two classes of glial cells are the primary steroid targets. In this model, the giant glial cells of the interganglionic connectives move clusters of neurons by changes in their cytoarchitecture while the perineurial glial cells that wrap the central nervous system alter their adhesive properties to permit the neurons to move freely. Experiments to be conducted at the University of Minnesota in Dr. Mesce s laboratory will describe the motility of giant glial cells during the formation of compound ganglia and will study how damage to the giant glial cells affects ganglionic migration and fusion. These experiments are facilitated as a result of the recent discovery that a form of fasciclin II, a protein expressed on the surface of insect cells, can be used as a marker for the giant glial cells. Experiments to be conducted in Dr. Fahrbach s laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will determine the timing of perineurial glial cell proliferation during metamorphosis and study the effects of ablation of this cell population on ganglionic migration and fusion. In addition, antibodies targeted to specific isoforms of the insect steroid hormone receptor (the ecdysone receptor, EcR) will be used to determine which form of the receptor is expressed by glial cells. This is envisioned as a first step toward identifying steroid-regulated genes involved in regulation of the glial cytoskeleton and glial cell adhesion molecules. Previous studies of metamorphosis of the insect nervous system have focused exclusively on neurons. This project will provide new information about the developmental modulation of glial cell cytoarchitecture and glial cell adhesivity during the postembryonic life of insects. The results are likely to generalize to all arthropods and, because the regulation of cell stickiness and cell shape are fundamental attributes of all multicellular organisms, to other animals as well doc12592 none Bloxham Constable It is proposed to undertake a collaborative study of mantle influences on the geodynamo, combining geodynamics, geodynamo modeling and paleomagnetism, focusing on three timescales. First, by looking at the last 5 million years the long timescale behavior of the dynamo over a period for which both the time averaged field and the paleosecular variation can be determined paleomagnetically will be examined. Furthermore, on this timescale the lowermost mantle is essentially unchanged from that which is imaged using seismic tomography, so modern tomographic images of the mantle can be used. Second, changes in reversal frequency, concentrating on the period from the Cretaceous Normal Superchron to the present day will be examined, including the effect of plume formation at the base of the mantle on the occurrence of reverse flux patches in the magnetic field. Third, preliminary investigations will be conducted on the very long-term changes in the magnetic field occurring over timescales of several hundred million years. This work will involve a statistical re-analysis of the available paleomagnetic measurements to assess what kinds of geodynamo experiments will be relevant to understanding such long-term changes. The dynamo modeling and geodynamical modeling will be performed at Harvard; the paleomagnetic aspects of the proposal, involving data compilation, analysis, and field modeling will be performed at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The work will be coordinated between the two institutions primarily by electronic means, supplemented by visits and short-term exchange of students between the institutions doc12625 none A growing body of research has identified the important role of shame and guilt in regulating human social behavior. Past research has discovered that shame and guilt are often evoked by similar circumstances, yet these emotions are clearly distinct. For example, whereas guilt appears to facilitate smoother social interactions and psychological adjustment, shame prompts feelings of self-consciousness and a desire to withdraw from social encounters. Although existing research on shame and guilt has focused on the experience of these emotions as it occurs after people have committed a blameworthy action themselves, almost no research has examined factors that predict when people experience shame or guilt for actions carried out by other individuals. The proposed research will test a model of vicarious shame and guilt that integrates current understandings of self-conscious emotion with theoretical perspectives on social associations to predict what types of associations make individuals susceptible to vicarious shame versus guilt for the actions of others. The perceived essentiality of one s association to a wrongdoer is predicted to intensify reactions of vicarious shame and distancing responses, whereas one s level of interpersonal interdependence with a wrongdoer is predicted to intensify reactions of vicarious guilt and efforts to repair any damage done to a victim. A series of 14 experiments will manipulate the type of association participants have to an individual who commits a wrongdoing and examine the effects of these manipulations on participants self-reported emotional reactions and cognitive appraisals, as well as their behavioral responses to both the wrongdoer and the victim. Because shame and guilt evoke such different behavioral reactions to events, the proposed research on vicarious shame and guilt promises to yield insights important for theories of intergroup and interpersonal behavior, as well as for theories of emotion doc12638 none Working poverty - arising when a job fails to bring an employee s income above the poverty line - is a growing phenomenon in southern California and in the United States, but has received little attention by urban researchers. Building on existing research on welfare, labor markets, and urban economic development, and ongoing work on the geography of poverty and fiscal disparities (see previous NSF project # ), this study investigates the relationship between the intrametropolitan patterns of economic activity and working poverty, and estimates the fiscal impact on local jurisdictions in the context of southern California. More specifically, the investigators consider the extent to which the gap between a livable income and the sub-poverty income of the working poor imposes extra costs on local governments in the form of traditional anti-poverty expenditures as well as additional services such as childcare, transportation, training, job information, and work-related healthcare - costs that may only be partly offset by intergovernmental transfers or expenditures. To empirically test these relationships, the investigators will develop a model of the impact of working poverty on local public finance and the role of the intrametropolitan division of labor on this relationship during the s and s - a period of dramatic changes in fiscal federalism, welfare organization, labor market conditions and immigration. First, they will measure the incidence of working poverty, analyze its demographic characteristics, identify the industries and occupations where it prevails, and estimate its geographical distribution across municipalities in the five-county southern California region. Second, they will calculate the gap between the actual wages of the working poor and a livable wage required to avoid poverty for each city. Third, they will estimate the impact of this gap on local antipoverty expenditures, taking into account the role of fiscal disparities, local labor market characteristics, business subsidies, living wage ordinances, proportion of immigrants, and welfare-to-work factors. This last step will make use of multivariate regression analyses. This study addresses important questions that have not been systematically approached by urban geographers and other scholars of poverty. First, it provides a better understanding of who the working poor are and emphasizes the links between working poverty and the regional economy. Furthermore, it provides a valuable tool for analyzing the social, political and spatial implications of working poverty, including heightened economic and social polarization, continued central city deterioration, and rapid exurbanization. A better understanding of these issues is critical to the development of successful antipoverty policies both at the national and local levels doc12639 none During the austral spring, diatom species and the colonial prymnesiophyte Phaeocystis antarctica form large blooms in the Ross Sea. The diatom blooms are typically localized in the western Ross Sea while the P. antarctica blooms typically develop in the southeastern and south central regions of the Ross Sea. Recent data suggest that the dominance of non-siliceous phytoplankton organisms, such as P. antarctica may be responsible for the drawdown in atmospheric CO2 that occurred during the last glacial maximum. The proposed project would focus on developing a new method to test whether the algal sterol, brassicasterol, could be a useful sediment biomarker for delineating the relative abundance of P. antarctica in over-lying waters. Sediment samples from each of these regions will be analyzed to test whether a compound-specific d13C method could be used to determine the relative abundance of Phaeocystis antarctica from over-lying waters. Specifically, laboratory cultures and core materials would be used to look for a depleted d13C sediment brassicasterol signal. If the method proves valid in the Ross Sea, then it could provide some definitive answers regarding the potential role of P. antarctica during the glacial interglacial boundary. Positive results would be potentially important to a diverse array of scientists including: biogeochemists, biological oceanographers, paleoceanographers, and global climate modelers doc12640 none Elmore This award provides partial funding for the operation and maintenance of the Purdue Rare Isotope Measurement Laboratory (PRIME Lab), a multi-user national facility supported by NSF to provide accelerator-based mass spectrometry (AMS) capabilities in measuring the cosmogenic nuclides 10Be, 14C, 26Al, 36Cl, 41Ca, and 129I for the U.S. research community. The technical goals of the facility are to develop and calibrate methods for the analysis of very low concentrations of cosmogenic radionuclides found in natural samples. The analytical data are used in tracer and geochronological methods applied to studies of the geological history of rocks, soils, ground water and extraterrestrial materials doc12641 none Jeanloz Shimizu The investigators propose to conduct a 2-year collaborative study between high-pressure experimental geophysicists at the University of California at Berkeley and analytical geochemists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. This research will experimentally evaluate the feasibility and validate the measurement of trace-element partitioning between metal and silicate at the high pressures and temperatures of the Earth s deep mantle and core, ~100 GPa and K. The possibility of combining the capability of the laser-heated diamond cell, to reproduce conditions of the planetary interior, with that of secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), for measuring isotopic abundances at the ppm level and below on spatial scales of ms, will be evaluated. If successful, these combined tools can be used as a means of resolving major issues in geochemistry and geophysics that depend on understanding the distribution of trace elements within the mantle and core. Such studies are crucial for determining the potential consequences of chemical interactions between the core and mantle over geological time and, more generally, for deciphering the evolution of the Earth s deep interior. The experiments proposed here are intended to help develop methodologies for element-partitioning studies to be pursued in the future doc12642 none The proposed research will carry out a modeling and observationally-based investigation of the impact of northern Atlantic sea surface temperature anomalies (SSTAs) on the climate and atmo-spheric circulation variability over a region extending from Baffin Island to the Norwegian Sea. Mesoscale model simulations are to be performed of known, high persistent, negative SSTAs that occurred from October to September to the west of Greenland and from October to September east of Greenland. Each of these events, which are potentially associated with decadal-period ocean SSTAs, will use a modeling approach to evaluate the oceanic impact on regional temperatures, precipitation and atmospheric circulation variability including storm track shifts. The model results will be compared with SSTA sensitivity experiments in which the ocean has a positive warm anomaly during the same periods. A third model sensitivity study will employ month-long simulations for winter and summer to investigate the roles of SSTAs on the movement of storms across the Norwegian Sea and into the Arctic, and the simultaneous tendency for the subpolar low to lie far east of Iceland. Accompanying observational analyses will focus on evaluating the climatic impacts of a decadally varying warm SST pool in the northern Atlantic, especially from - , as well as other cold events prior to . By examining the effects of the anomalies in regions east of Greenland and near Labrador, the research hopes to determine whether the previously identified extremely persistent anomalies in Davis Strait are unique or common. Rotated principal component analyses will be used in an effort to determine links dur-ing all seasons between northern Atlantic SSTAs and Atlantic storm tracks. Storm track data will be used to further evaluate links between the North Atlantic and Arctic oscillations, as well as to assess how eastward storm track shifts impact sea ice transport. The end result is planned to be a comprehensive evaluation of the SST impact on Atlantic Arctic climate and circulation variability and an assessment of the dominant Atlantic storm tracks that impact the Atlantic and Arctic basins. The research will also allow an estimate of the predictability of cyclone activity anoma-lies in the northern North Atlantic. These results will contribute to our understanding of high lati-tude climate and ocean-atmosphere interactions within the context of the large changes that are at present impacting the northern Atlantic and Arctic regions doc12643 none Computer Scientists have been challenged by the existence of remarkable algorithms that work well in practice, but whose theoretical analyses suggest that these algorithms should perform poorly or are inconclusive. The root of this problem is that traditional theoretical analyses measure the performance of algorithms on their worst inputs. This research analyzes the performance of algorithms using smoothed analysis, a new measure of the performance of algorithms that can better predict practical performance. Using smoothed analysis, this research aims to explain the good practical performance of some algorithms that are famous for outperforming pessimistic worst-case analyses. In particular, algorithms that take real or complex inputs, such as those that usually occur in scientific and engineering applications, are examined under random perturbations of their worst-case inputs. The most famous of these, the simplex method for linear programming, was the subject of the paper introducing smoothed analysis. Yet, this work only investigated one rarely-used pivot rule. This research attempts smoothed analyses of the simplex method under more commonly used pivot rules. It also considers smoothed analyses of interior point methods and algorithms for convex programming. An attempt is being made to extend this analysis to algorithms that take discrete inputs doc12644 none With the rapid growth in the amount of information resources and transaction opportunities on the Internet, Internet use is becoming an important dimension of social inequality. Among those who will be significantly affected by this social and technological trend, the situation of women calls for special attention because new technologies may not necessarily lead to significant beneficial changes in their everyday lives as suggested by past studies on women s urban experiences and interaction with new technologies. This research analyzes the impact of Internet use on women s activity patterns and the gender division of household labor. It attempts to answer the following questions: (a) Is Internet use helping to relax some of women s space-time constraints, thus allowing more flexible spatial and temporal arrangement of activities in the physical world and helping women to cope with the demand of their multiple roles? (b) How do women s Internet activities affect their activities in the physical world? (c) How does the Internet use of the female and male heads of household affect the gender division of household labor? To answer these questions, data from a sample of women in Columbus, Ohio, will be collected through an activity-Internet diary survey. Hypotheses will be tested through comparing the experiences of women with different levels of Internet use using structural equation models. Geographic information System-based three-dimensional visualization will also be used to analyze the space-time activity-Internet diary data. The study will enhance our understanding of the impact of Internet use on women s activity patterns and the gender division of household labor. The results will be useful for formulating social and economic policies in several important areas. For example, sustainable transportation policies aiming at reducing the amount of travel through telecommuting need to be informed by such understanding. If women s many needs to travel cannot be substituted by working at home using the Internet (e.g. chauffeuring children), encouraging women s telecommuting will neither reduce traffic nor their stress in everyday life. Further, this research will have significant implications for economic policies aiming at promoting electronic commerce and the use of the Internet. If the use of the Internet reinforces the existing gender division of household labor rather than engenders more equitable gender relations, appropriate economic policies may be needed to compromise the goal of reducing gender inequality in society at large doc12645 none Proposal # Florida State University Van Hoeij, Mark A one day meeting, an East Coast Computer Algebra Day (ECCAD), will be held at Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, on Saturday, May 5, . The meeting is the eighth of the series, which has been held at a variety of US East Coast locations since . We expect 60-80 participants will be from the computer algebra research community or interested in scientific engineering applications of computer algebra, drawn from the eastern half of North America, but especially from the East Coast of the United States. The meeting includes invited talks and contributed poster software demo sessions, covering the breadth of computer algebra: algorithms, software, and applications. We are requesting funding to cover travel expenses of US-based participants. The organizing committee intends to give preference to funding students and recent Ph.Ds who plan to make a presentation at the meeting doc12646 none ITR Small Proposal Blum, Rick Transmit and receive antenna arrays used to form multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels have shown great potential in isolated, single link communications without cochannel interference. Provided the same number of transmit and receive antennas are used, recent research has shown that capacity scales linearly with the number of transmit antennas. This result has created an incredible flurry of interest among researchers. While these MIMO systems have received extensive study for cases without cochannel interference, cases with cochannel interference have received much less attention. Further, new simulation results indicate that cochannel interference can significantly degrade the overall capacity when MIMO channels are used in a cellular system in the same manner in which they are used for cases without interference. The investigators study the properties of MIMO systems with interference to develop new methods of using MIMO which adapt the transmission scheme to the interference environment. These new methods, called stream control algorithms, transmit several different streams, each one using a different transmit weight vector. The maximum number of streams that can be transmitted is equal to the minimum of the number of transmit and receive antennas. The exact number of streams chosen depends on the current sensed state of the interference environment. Preliminary results indicate that significant performance gains can be achieved in this manner. Using the well developed theory of power control, distributed algorithms are being developed to control the number of streams employed in a cellular system with cochannel interference. The use of space-time coding is also being studied in conjunction with stream control. Wireless channels with frequency selective fading, various correlation structures, and other practical degradations are being studied doc12647 none Subspaces for Wireless Communication in Multi-Antenna Systems The problem of communicating information between a fixed basestation and many mobile peripherals dominates much of current research in wireless communication. The problem is tecnologically challenging because the channel that connects the basestation to the peripherals is random and time-varying. The most general solution requires space-time coding and signal processing that is matched to the channel. The objective of this research program is to extend the theory of space-time array processing (STAP) developed for radar applications, to multi-antenna wireless communication over fading channnels, in order to determine when and how channel structure can be exploited for space-time signal processing gain and or diversity. Theoretically, the results of this research advance the understanding of multi-antenna wireless communication between antenna arrays. Practically, they suggest methods for adaptively communicating between fixed basestations and mobiles and between fixed computers and movable storage area networks. Prior results by the principal investigators suggest that only the span of a low-dimensional channel subspace, and not the detailed physics of its coordinate representation, is required for the design of signals that optimize transmit diversity, and tranceivers that optimize the trade off between space-time processing gain and diversity. Moreover, the optimum transceiver statistics are just estimators of output signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR), suggesting that transceiver statistics for decoding data can be used to estimate and track output SINR and network capacity. This means power and bandwidth may be adaptively allocated, using only transceiver statistics. So, in broad outline, this program is addressed to space-time channel modelling, using subspace methods; subspace signal and transceiver design for gain and diversity; and estimation of network capacity, using only transceiver statistics doc12648 none H. Meng, SUNY Buffalo Physical characterization of turbulent flow with suspended particles has remained a challenge requiring much effort in both direct computational analysis as well as accurate high resolution measurements. The holographic particle image velocimetry (HPIV) technique has been applied effectively for investigation and characterization of single phase flows seeded with tracer particles (small Stokes number). Extension of this method to particle-laden flows for high-resolution characterization of the behavior of the carrier fluid as well as characterization of the suspended particles (with large Stokes number) and particle dynamics has remained a challenge. This proposal makes use of the unique HPIV facilities developed by the PI at the host institution in an attempt to develop an extended HPIV technique for full characterization of the particle-laden turbulent flow. If successful, the approach is particularly effective since the measurements can be at the spatial resolution comparable to the resolution in direct numerical simulations (DNS). This will allow direct comparison with DNS results, as well as complement the more engineering based models and large eddy simulations doc12649 none This award continues NSF support for the core activities of the Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT), a standing committee of the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council (NAS-NRC). The committee works to improve, over the long term, the statistical methods and information on which public policy decisions are based. It strengthens, directly and indirectly, the development of data for social, behavioral, and economic science research, makes such data more accessible for research, and furthers the development of methods for measurement, collection, and analysis for research and other purposes. On its own initiative, or at the request of NSF or another agency, the committee will identify problem areas in which statistical questions are important to public policy and carry out studies within these areas by itself or by convening panels of other experts. Most of the Committee s studies will fall under three major themes: improving and furthering the development of data on social and economic conditions, including health, social welfare, and the environment; improving statistical methods and their applications; and integrating and coordinating national statistics. The Committee will select specific areas for study, develop expert panels or workshops, select participants, review study activities and reports, and widely disseminate study results that have been rigorously peer reviewed under NAS oversight. Established in at the recommendation of the President s Commission on Federal Statistics, the committee fills a critical gap as an integrative force for a highly decentralized federal statistical system, in which research interests often have lower priority than other concerns. Representing more than a series of research studies, the committee s work also is a unique process of intellectual development that is critical in a decentralized statistical system. The committee provides leadership over interdisciplinary areas by bringing methodologically oriented statisticians and quantitatively oriented social, behavioral, economic, and physical scientists together with federal agency staff to work on problems important to public policy. The committee will continue to (1) improve national statistics and further the development and application of statistical methods for research, (2) link the science research communities and federal agencies that depend on scientific methods, (3) involve academic scientists in research to improve statistics that are used and produced in the federal government, and (4) provide forums for the exchange of information and ideas doc12650 none A network effect exists when an agent values a good based on how many other agents use the good. For instance, consumers choosing between VHS and Beta VCR s are unlikely to choose based on superior technical performance. Instead, consumers choose the standard that other consumers choose, most likely in order to have access to a large library of pre-recorded movies. Network effects are present in many markets and are especially important for many high technology and information technology goods. Network goods can lead to market outcomes that present difficult problems for public policy. This project studies two such outcomes: The first is that a market can coordinate on a single proprietary good, leading to market power for the owner of the good. The second is that markets can fail to coordinate, so consumers are unsure of which standard will ultimately be adopted. Such confusion can lead to very slow adoption rates for new products. This project analyzes two specific industries that exhibit these problems. The project works through estimation issues that arise in the face of network effects and uses the results of the estimation to analyze the implications for government intervention into those markets, either by antitrust or standard setting. The first part of the project estimates the importance of a positive feedback loop in the market for Yellow Pages advertising. I estimate how much consumers prefer directories with more advertising and how much advertisers are willing to pay to advertise in a directory with more readers. I use resulting estimates to consider whether the market benefits from monopoly (which takes advantage of network effects) or oligopoly (which reduces market power). The preliminary estimates imply that a more competitive market is preferable. This result supports recent policy promoting competition in the directory market. Furthermore, techniques developed here could be usefully applied to other markets. For instance, just as consumers and advertisers prefer to coordinate on a single directory, consumers and software developers prefer to coordinate on a single operating system. A drawback of my results from the Yellow Pages market is that the estimates predict unreasonably high benefits from adding directories to the market. This problem is a common one when using discrete choice models. The second part of this project (which is joint work with Daniel Ackerberg, UCLA) proposes a new estimator that captures the fact that as products enter a market, products become more similar with regards to characteristics that are unobservable to the researcher. Our research presents structural justifications of the estimator as well as Monte Carlo studies of when the estimator is most appropriate. This estimator has many applications, and the application of this technique to the Yellow Pages market should lead to more accurate estimates, both of the strength of the network effect and of the welfare tradeoffs between competition and standardization. The third part of the project is joint work with Angelique Augereau (McKinsey) and Shane Greenstein (Kellogg). We analyze the introduction of high-speed modems and how the market failed to coordinate on a single standard. Originally, two competing but equivalent standards of 56K modems led to a situation in which consumers and Internet service providers had to coordinate their choice of modem technology. Overall, adoption was very slow and eventually, an industry group developed a single standard that was widely adopted. Our explanation of the slow initial adoption rate is that, in contrast to the incentives to coordinate, ISP s also have an incentive to differentiate across the two standards because doing so reduces price competition. Consumers then postpone adoption because they do not know which standard will win . We develop a theoretical model that formalizes these points. In addition, preliminary empirical analysis suggests that, before the arrival of the new standard, adopting ISP choices were evenly distributed between the two standards even within individual markets. As our theory predicts, ISP s perfectly differentiated instead of coordinated. We use insights and results from the study of this market to discuss the competitive determination of adoption choice and implications for the benefits of intervention into a standards war doc12651 none Body odor plays a prominent role in regulating social, sexual and endocrine responses of many species and specialized structures have evolved to produce and detect odorous signals. Individual recognition, often communicated through body odors, can be critical in mate choice, parental care, and inter-individual interactions. The goals of this project are to better understand how odors signify individuality and in what contexts individual signals modulate social behavior. The central idea underlying this project was articulated 25 years ago: Perhaps the same set of genes that code for individual identity in the immune system (i.e. those genes that insure rejection of foreign tissue and organ transplants) also provide an animal with a unique odor. These genes, termed Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) genes, form a linked set in most vertebrates and they include the most polymorphic of any known genes. They are also involved in coding for individuality of odor (providing each animal with what we have termed an odortype) as has been demonstrated in studies with mice, rats and humans. The current project explores three aspects of odortypes using the inbred domestic mouse as the model organism. First, studies conducted in the previous funding period documented the role of MHC odortypes in familial interactions. Maternal mice retrieve pups preferentially according to their MHC type and, reciprocally, pups are attracted to familial MHC odortypes. Studies in this project will investigate the roles of pre- and post-natal learning in modulating preference. Prior studies also demonstrated, for the first time in any species, that fetal odortypes are expressed in maternal odors and that the MHC type of the fetus may modulate adult male and female behavior. Studies described in the second part of the current proposal will investigate how experience with fetal odor influences subsequent behavior of the mother and the pup itself after birth. The third part of this project begins an exploration of a novel aspect of odor signaling between individual animals. Both male and female mice that are infected with mouse mammary tumor virus, a virus that causes mammary tumors in females following one or more pregnancies, develop a distinctive odor in the absence of tumors. Studies designed to explore the behavioral consequences of this observation will open a novel area of research. In sum, this multidisciplinary project links immunology, odors and olfaction, behavior, and disease to advance our understanding of the regulation of social behavior of mice and, by extension, other social mammals. It will also shed light on mechanisms underlying the maintenance of genetic diversity in MHC and other genes. This research program will continue to benefit from technical assistance provided through the Monell Chemical Senses Center s minority high school and college program. This program, which employs students from schools throughout the greater Philadelphia area including Camden, NJ, will provide training at Monell to over 40 students in the summer of . It is funded by a major grant from the Annenberg Foundation as well as from other sources including institutional funds. We expect, as has been the case in the past years, two minority students per year from this program will work on this NSF project doc12652 none The 23rd Midwest Probability Colloquium will be held at the University of Chicago, on October 19-20, . This is a regional meeting with a limited number of talks and plenty of opportunity for interaction among the researchers. It has a strong tradition of encouraging graduate students and other young investigators to attend and interact with specialists doc12653 none Duffy The investigators will develop new theoretical techniques and conduct new high pressure and temperature experiments to examine the melting curves, crystal structures, and high-temperature equations of state (EOS) of the following materials: MgO, SiO2, MgSiO3, and Au. They will accomplish this by developing a major extension of the density functional theory - molecular dynamics (DFT-MD) method and applying it to minerals of the Earth s deep mantle. The approach is to develop empirical optimal potentials from the results of a DFT-MD simulation. This optimal potential can then be used in further calculations involving much larger systems and longer run durations. From this, the investigators can determine crystal structures, melting curves, liquid viscosities, compressibilities, elastic constants and other thermoelastic properties directly at lower mantle P-T conditions. They will also carry out detailed comparison of their simulation results with laser-heated synchrotron experiments on MgO, SiO2, and Au to assess the reliability of the OP method. In particular, they will focus on measurements of melting curves of these materials at high pressure to provide a sensitive test of the optimal potential calculations doc12654 none The project examines two important topics in labor economics. The first concerns how annual hours of work are determined, with a special emphasis on the largely unresearched issue of paid and unpaid leave. One objective of the study is to provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of work leave. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Health and Retirement Survey, and other sources are used to provide a basic set of facts about how paid weeks of leave and total weeks of leave vary with wage rates, indicators of hours constraints, weekly work hours, labor market experience, job seniority, union status, supervisory status, firm size, race, gender, and occupation and industry characteristics. The study measures what happens to paid leave when workers change jobs and determines the degree to which leave is a rigid function of firm wide policy or is something that individual employees can bargain over. The broader goal of the project is to improve understanding of the extent to which people can choose between higher compensation and shorter hours and the terms of the tradeoff between them. The analysis will inform policy discussions concerning how the labor market can be modified to better accommodate men and women who are seeking to balance career goals with family obligations. The second part of the project examines the implications of downward nominal wage rigidity for a broad set of questions in labor economics. There is considerable evidence suggesting that firms are very reluctant to cut nominal wage rates, but there is little research on how barriers to wage cuts influence the personnel decisions of firms. The heart of the study is the development and estimation of a model of the hiring, wage setting, and layoff behavior of a rational, forward looking firm when nominal wages cuts for incumbent workers are too costly to impose. When choosing a wage to fill a vacancy and when setting subsequent wages, such a firm must take account of the fact that the nominal wage chosen today sets a floor on a worker s future wages. In the presence of uncertainty about current and future productivity, paying higher wages to increase hiring rates and retention increases the risk of having to either overpay the worker in a subsequent period or incur the cost of a layoff. The model is estimated and used to revisit a number of important subjects in labor economics where the consequences of nominal wage rigidity have been ignored in previous research. These include studies of the degree to which earnings rise with labor market experience and job seniority, studies of wage dynamics within jobs and across jobs, recent research on employer learning and wage dynamics, studies of statistical discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex, and research on the effects of inflation on the distribution of earnings. The study uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics doc12655 none The Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) proposes to conduct a seminar for senior staff at science centers on project planning, proposal development and project management, including grant management. The overall goal is to build capacity within science centers to develop and manage fundable projects consistent with the guidelines of the ISE program. Presenters and discussants will include successful ISE PI s and reviewers. ASTC will stipulate that participation requires teams comprised of a top-level decision-maker, project planner and a development officer or other cognizant team member from each institution. Furthermore, teams from medium- and smaller-sized institutions will be encouraged to participate and given priority consideration doc12656 none The categories that people use to organize their social world are known as stereotypes. Research over the past 50 years has shown that stereotypes can have a powerful influence on cognition and behavior. Even the subtle activation of a person s gender or ethnic identity can produce reliable cognitive and behavioral effects. When negative or unfavorable stereotypes are activated in memory, performance can be hindered on a variety of behavioral and cognitive tasks. In contrast, the activation of positive or favorable stereotypes can improve performance. This effect is termed stereotype susceptibility. Although these effects have been clearly documented, not much is known about the mechanisms underlying them. This project is designed to test key theoretical propositions regarding possible mediators of the relationship between stereotype susceptibility and behavioral effects. It is proposed that stereotype activation alters flexible aspects of cognitive processing, especially attentional resources, task orientation, and working memory. To test these propositions, psychophysiological correlates manifested in tasks involving attention, expectations, working memory and orienting to particular stimuli will be examined with regard to their potential roles in stereotype susceptibility. Several ERP components, obtained by averaging the EEG activity across repeated presentations of a particular stimulus type, will be analyzed. The main objective is to integrate current social psychology and psychophysiology theory and research to gain insight into the cognitive processes that may mediate the relationship between stereotype susceptibility and behavior. The research should have important practical consequences and applications in the areas of education and public policy doc12657 none The objectives of this project are (1) to simultaneously design optimization methods and subsurface flow and transport simulators for a variety of subsurface contaminant remediation problems, (2) to implement the optimization-simulation combination in a way that exploits parallelism in both the optimization and simulation, including some ideas for grid-based implementations of search-poll type methods, (3) to apply the new algorithms to two demonstration problems, (4) to train a generation of students in this multidisciplinary setting. Two of the PIs, Dennis and Kelley, have expertise in a wide range of optimization technology, both gradient-based methods for smooth problems and sampling methods for problems for which gradients are not available. Kelley and Miller have a long-standing collaboration in numerical methods for simulation of multi-phase flow. The PIs will exploit this expertise and design the simulators and optimization algorithms simultaneously. There will be IT-centered activity in software. Two codes, FOCUS and IFFCO, are under development by the principal investigators. The most mature of these, IFFCO an implicit filtering optimization code, will be ported to MPI from PVM, packaged for ease of installation and testing, documented as a book, and released in final form. The PIs will also continue to develop FOCUS, an implementation of the surrogate management framework ideas. Remediation of subsurface contamination is an important issue world-wise. The goal is to clean up, or render immobile, underground contaminants such as fuel spills from underground tanks or industrial waste from leaking drums, and do this at minimum cost. Management decisions must be made, and the potential financial penalty of bad decisions is great. Mathematical models of subsurface systems are often used to assist in making such decisions and these models are increasingly linked with optimization approaches to aid design and management decision making. Subsurface remediation strategies involve decisions such as the restoration approach to use, the selection of locations to install devices, such as wells, and the rates of extraction from or injection into these wells. There are open scientific problems in simulation related to fundamental modeling and choice of numerical methods that need to be addressed as part of the design of software to optimize the remediation methods. The three PIs have expertise in simulation, modeling, and experimental work in multi-phase flows as well as broad expertise in optimization methods. The objectives of this project are to design models, simulators, and optimization methods simultaneously with the goal of more efficient optimal design based on more accurate models doc12658 none While hormonal responses to stress are well known, the mechanisms of neural control in regulating such responses are not well understood. An animal under stress shows increased blood levels of adrenocorticotropic hormone, ACTH. ACTH in turn stimulates steroidogenesis in the tissue of the adrenal cortex, which generates and releases corticosterone, a steroid glucocorticoid compound. However, there has been a long-standing problem that the patterns of ACTH levels in the blood often do not match changes in circulating glucocorticoid levels. Recent discoveries suggest that this steroidogenic response of the adrenal cortex also is regulated by activity of the splanchnic nerve coming from the spinal cord. This renewal project combines physiological and molecular approaches to identify the mechanisms involved. Experiments will test how blocking neural activity changes the expression of biochemical enzymes and receptor proteins that are part of the steroidogenic pathway, how neuronal stimulation might modulate changes by regulating adrenal blood flow, and which nerve fiber types (preganglionic sympathetic or primary afferent fibers) mediate the observed changes in steroidogenesis. Results will define a novel mechanism for regulation of hormone activity in response to stress, which will have an impact on understanding neural control systems in general, and can be important for management of stress in contexts such as agriculture as well as human behavior. The project also involves student training in state-of-the-art technology in a very productive laboratory doc12659 none The ability to assimilate data into models simulations has been shown to be critical when dealing with complex systems such as weather. The Earth s magnetosphere forms part of the space weather system, and it is necessary that data assimilation techniques be developed for magnetospheric simulations. This project will investigate two approaches to magnetospheric data assimilation. The first is a statistical regression method termed optimal interpolation and the second approach is Kalman filtering doc12660 none Information security is an issue of critical importance in communication networks. We propose a novel approach for achieving integrity,authentication and privacy among the nodes of a network. The principal challenge that we address concerns the generation and establishment of secret keys in such a network for subsequent secure encrypted communication among the nodes. Our approach, which is based on information theory, provides new insights into the problem of secret key generation, and holds promise for the development of novel techniques and algorithms in the design of cryptosystems. An important strength of our approach, which is based on recent theoretical developments, lies in its ability to assure an enhanced level of information security. It uses a stringent notion of information theoretic secrecy or security rather than the notions of computational security and complexity-theoretic security on which all currently used cryptosystems are based. The statistical notion of information theoretic secrecy guarantees that legitimate messages and secret keys are, in effect, concealed from an adversary who is assumed to possess wiretapping and eavesdropping capabilities, and is, furthermore, not limited in terms of computational resources. This is in contrast with the existing notion of security which relies on the difficulty currently faced in solving certain underlying computational problems; recent advances in factorization into primes and quantum computing point to the potential vulnerability of cryptosystems based on this notion of security. A second important strength of our approach is that it enables a systematic study of secret key generation, at the outset and in layers, with different layers of secret keys being assigned to different subsets of nodes in the network. This feature is particularly relevant for guaranteeing information security in networks with changing topologies, particularly when some nodes are either disabled or cease to be authorized and reliable. In such situations, the surviving or remaining authorized nodes can switch from one layer of secret keys to another so as to maintain information security among themselves. The proposed program of research addresses several important issues associated with with the aforementioned generation of secret keys in a network. A prime objective is the establishment of secret keys by means of exchanges of correlated information over insecure public channels, and through the extraction of common randomness from noisy but secure channels; such keys must be concealed from an adversary who can eavesdrop on the public channels, and may possess additional wiretapping capabilities. Explicit \lq\lq rate constraints will be imposed on exchanges between the nodes, depicting bandwidth limitations associated with the use of shared public channels, e.g., in a wireless environment. An innovative feature, and a useful technical device, involves the introduction of a \lq\lq helper node (e.g., a centralized or trusted server in a key establishment protocol)which, when appropriate, can serve to facilitate secret key generation by the nodes by furnishing them additional correlated information or computational resources. In another significant departure from current practice, secret keys will be generated using randomization methods and drawing on techniques from the multi-user information theory of source coding and channel coding. Our proposed research is expected to lead to several significant and innovative contributions. Firstly, our information theoretic framework will provide new and valuable theoretical insights into the problem of secret key generation in a network of nodes,while complementing the current approach based on computational complexity. Second, our use of techniques for data compression and channel coding in the design of secret keys will lead to an exploration of novel practical techniques and algorithms for secret key generation in layers. Third, our proposed framework will afford a means for a quantitative and comparative assessment of the extent of information theoretic security provided by existing secret key cryptosystems, thereby buttressing or weakening current claims of security. An important component of the proposed work is the development of new algorithms and accompanying software for the layered generation of secret keys in a network. Finally, the proposed work will lead to potential advances in information theory through the introduction of new models and techniques doc12661 none Jacobsen The investigators will work on several closely related subjects that will address important problems with respect to the structure and chemical and dynamical evolution of the Earth s mantle. The work will entail a combination of approaches using geochemical reservoir models that take into account the dispersion in both radiogenic isotope ratios and parent daughter ratios in the mantle to obtain a simple theory that can combine fluxes and residence time estimates from traditional geochemical reservoir models with mixing times from three dimensional mantle convection models. Test results for the Nd and Sr isotopic systems demonstrate the validity of this approach. It is also proposed to combine reservoir models for isotopic transport and evolution with a parameterized convection model that will integrate the chemical evolution with thermal evolution. The parameterized models will include important effects that have only recently been identified, such as the bending of the lithosphere doc12662 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. R. Boopathy at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana to develop an Environmental Science Instrumentation Core Facility. The purpose of this facility is threefold: (1) to enhance training of students in environmental sciences, (2) to enable new training of traditional faculty, and (3) to facilitate faculty research. This project will equip a laboratory of analytical instrumentation, including a gas chromatograph, a high performance liquid chromatograph, a UV-VIS Spectrophotometer, a BIOLOG Microbial Identification System, and other small equipment. This essential equipment will (1) enhance educational opportunities and research activities of students, (2) enhance preparation of students for both careers and post-baccalaureate schools, (3) facilitate development of faculty as teachers and investigators, (4) both promote retention of existing faculty and facilitate attraction of new faculty, and (5) enhance the value of the University s environmental science program. The University is the service institution to south-central Louisiana, which since the s has been a region highly cultivated by the oil and gas industry. Appropriately, the analytical instruments of the facility will be used to study anaerobic biodegradation of petroleum hydrocarbon-contaminated sites such as sediments and groundwater. The GC and HPLC will be extensively used to quantify petroleum hydrocarbons and the BIOLOG System will be used to identify aerobic and anaerobic bacteria responsible for degrading petroleum hydrocarbons. In addition, the instruments will be used to analyze other industrial contaminants such as chlorinated aliphatic compounds including carbon tetrachloride and trichloroethylene in ground water and sub-surface environmental samples. The Environmental Science Instrumentation Core Facility at Nicholls State University will not only enhance the infrastructure of the University and its Environmental Science Program but also provide opportunities for students and faculty that have not been otherwise available. Achievement of project goals will help build and strengthen the research opportunities at a regional Louisiana university not traditionally recognized as capable of supporting such potentially valuable research and training. As the only university in a thirteen-parish south central Louisiana region, and through the regionally significant projects of individual investigators, the potential to stimulate economic development in a state historically lacking in economic diversity is high and significant doc12663 none PI: Rodney O. Fox Institution: Iowa State University Proposal Number: Major advances in the application of information technology to engineering simulation can be expected at a number of levels. The ultimate impact of such advances on industrial practice in the chemical process industry (CPI) will depend on their successful implementation for chemical process design and optimization. In particular, progress in the field of multiphase chemical reactors will depend on the development and validation of scalable subgrid-scale models that integrate transport and chemical processes with widely different temporal and spatial scales into macroscopic transport models based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The computational cost of solving multi-fluid CFD models is very high and modeling efforts for complex multiphase systems have been limited by the available computing resources and numerical algorithms. Multiprocessor computers now have sufficient memory, bandwidth, and processor speed to permit more detailed physics and chemistry of micro mesoscale phenomena to be included in multiphase CFD simulations. In this project, multi-fluid CFD codes will be optimized for an Alpha cluster in order to run fully-resolved simulations of canonical flows. These high-resolution simulations will include new models for inter intraphase mass transfer and efficient algorithms for complex chemistry. The results will then be employed to develop macroscopic CFD models based on Reynolds-averaged multi-fluid models that will be applicable to full-scale chemical reactors. Code optimization will be carried out in collaboration with computer scientists at the Scalable Computing Laboratory at Ames Laboratory on the Iowa Sate university campus. This laboratory has experience in the application of cluster computers to the numerical simulation of scientific and engineering problems. As part of the Vision initiative, the CPI has identified CFD as an important tool for advanced chemical reactor design and optimization. This project directly addresses shortcoming of existing CFD models that were identified in the DOE report Chemical Industry of the Future: Technology Roadmap for Computational Fluid Dynamics. The project results will thus have a direct impact on industrially-relevant issues related to multiphase reactor design and optimization doc12664 none Subspaces for Wireless Communication in Multi-Antenna Systems The problem of communicating information between a fixed basestation and many mobile peripherals dominates much of current research in wireless communication. The problem is tecnologically challenging because the channel that connects the basestation to the peripherals is random and time-varying. The most general solution requires space-time coding and signal processing that is matched to the channel. The objective of this research program is to extend the theory of space-time array processing (STAP) developed for radar applications, to multi-antenna wireless communication over fading channnels, in order to determine when and how channel structure can be exploited for space-time signal processing gain and or diversity. Theoretically, the results of this research advance the understanding of multi-antenna wireless communication between antenna arrays. Practically, they suggest methods for adaptively communicating between fixed basestations and mobiles and between fixed computers and movable storage area networks. Prior results by the principal investigators suggest that only the span of a low-dimensional channel subspace, and not the detailed physics of its coordinate representation, is required for the design of signals that optimize transmit diversity, and tranceivers that optimize the trade off between space-time processing gain and diversity. Moreover, the optimum transceiver statistics are just estimators of output signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR), suggesting that transceiver statistics for decoding data can be used to estimate and track output SINR and network capacity. This means power and bandwidth may be adaptively allocated, using only transceiver statistics. So, in broad outline, this program is addressed to space-time channel modelling, using subspace methods; subspace signal and transceiver design for gain and diversity; and estimation of network capacity, using only transceiver statistics doc12665 none This is a project in matter optics, the manipulation of matter in ways analogous to the manipulation of light waves with optical elements. The novel focus of the proposal is on the manipulation of electron, ion, and molecule matter waves with intense laser light. The construction of a coherent beam splitter for electrons is the goal of the first experiment. The realization of this goal would constitute the first demonstration of the Kapitza-Dirac effect and would elegantly illustrate particle-wave duality. The second goal of the project is the demonstration of a coherent beam splitter in which the intense laser, not locked to resonance, would be used to diffract ions and molecules. Possibilities for using the ion interferometer to test for spin-orbit dependent Aharanov-Bohm phase shifts and for using molecular diffraction to study decoherence will be pursued if the demonstration is successful doc12666 none Through a case study of the recent, rapid development of Arizona s correctional system, this study explores the contours, impacts, and practical operations of a state penal system that has largely developed in the post--rehabilitative age of prison policy. This research address two distinct but related questions: 1) Whether the nature of the state s penal policies is influenced by the state s developmental history, including economic activity, political responses to crime, and attitudes toward punishment and crime; and 2) What impact penal policies have on contemporary prisons and prisoners, including an assessment of various qualities of imprisonment in the state. To explore the first question, the principal investigator will use both quantitative and qualitative analyses of secondary data and primary archival materials related to the development and rapid expansion of Arizona s prison system over the past 50 years. The second component of the project utilizes ethnographic field observation methods and in-depth interviews to explore the contemporary state of imprisonment in Arizona doc11647 none The PIs propose to use paleobotanical and paleogeochemical data with a model developed for understanding modern controls on vegetation distribution to explore the fundamental mechanisms behind complex advance, retreat, and further advance of a boreal-tundra ecotone along the Brooks Range in Alaska. The paleobotanical evidence will be used to examine several different approaches to discern movements of the ecotone with a species-level resolution with the changes in climate variables (temperature, precipitation amount, and seasonality of precipitation). The analysis will provide independent climate and vegetation datasets. The climate dataset will be used to drive an ecosystem model to simulate changing vegetation under changing climate. The results of the study will provide a useful predictive capability for separating climate-induced changes from those caused by feedbacks in the climate-vegetation system when attempting predictions of boreal forest ecosystem responses to future climate change doc12668 none ITR Small Proposal Sayeed Popovic Reliable and seamless wireless connectivity in varied environments is a necessary requirement for the rich and diverse communications of the future. Space-time processing has emerged as a key enabling technology for future wireless communications: signal space dimensions are fundamental to reliable communication and antenna arrays augment the traditional dimensions of time and frequency with the spatial dimension. While recent theoretical and technological advances provide a tremendous boon for modern communications, the state-of-the-art is far from realizing the full potential of space-time processing due to significant gaps in our current understanding on two fronts: Fundamental mechanisms underlying the interaction of the space-time channel with the signal space in spatial, temporal, and spectral dimensions. Jointly optimized design of front-end hardware, antenna arrays, and signal processing algo-rithms. The overall goal of the work proposed here is an integrated approach to the design of antenna array hardware and space-time processing algorithms for significantly improved wireless link performance at reduced cost and complexity doc12669 none Carlson This grant is supported through funds from both the NSF Information Technology Research Program and the Department of Defense, China Lake Naval Air Weapons Center, Geothermal Program. In a collaborative effort between the Universities of Kansas, Colorado, North Carolina and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, with assistance from the USGS-Reston, the PI s will compile existing age, chemical, and isotopic data from Late Cretaceous to Holocene extrusive and intrusive igneous rocks from the western U.S., British Columbia, and northern Mexico into a web-accessible electronic database. The resultant product, the Western North America Volcanic and Intrusive Rock Database (NAVDAT), will be integrated into a geographic information system (GIS) to allow visualization of complex age-compositional patterns in volcanism throughout the study region. Ultimately, they will also develop any necessary relational and graphical tools to allow users of the database to address a wide variety of issues concerning the geologic evolution and present volcanic state of the western U.S. Data entry will be undertaken at nodes established by each PI at their home institutions-each PI will be responsible for data compilation from literature, University, and DOE sources and for the creation of metadata for igneous rocks in the geographic areas of their expertise. Dr. Jeff Grossman (USGS, Reston) will be contracted to compile igneous rock age and data for NAVDAT from USGS sources. The central hub location for NAVDAT will be the University of Kansas. Here NAVDAT will be created and maintained, and a toolbox generated of geochemical and GIS routines. The basic NAVDAT IT architecture will use a combination of an Oracle relational database server, housed in the Kansas Geological Survey (KGS) at KU, in communication with a server housing the web server, the toolbox, a web development environment, and an Internet Map Server. The KGS will work in cooperation with the KU PIs to develop, update, and maintain the relational database component of NAVDAT on the DBMS servers at KGS. The entire database will be accessible by researchers around the world with a currently available, minimal web browser doc12670 none Elsayed Description: This award is to support a collaborative project between Dr. Mostafa El-Sayed, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia and Dr. Mohamed F. R. Fouda, Department of Inorganic Chemistry, National Research Center, Cairo, Egypt. They plan to study the molecular mechanism of the phenomena of photochemical transformations in dithizone complexes. They plan to synthesize transition metal primary and secondary complexes as well as organo-mercuric compounds, and follow the photochemical transformations on the femtosecond-to-second scale by the use of optical and infrared transient laser spectroscopy. The formation and decay times of the different intermediates formed during the photochromic process will be followed in time from their electronic and vibration absorption spectra. The effect of the exciting wavelength, temperature and solvent (including different polymers) will be examined. Scope: The project supports collaboration between two very experienced investigators. Professor El-Sayed is a world-renowned expert in laser spectroscopy and in femtochemistry. Dr. Fouda has excellent experience in dithizone complexes synthesis and properties. These complexes have very important photochromic properties and represent important materials of commercial and industrial applications. The synthesis of the compounds will be made at the NRC in Cairo while the spectroscopic studies will be carried out at Georgia Tech. The project will include the two scientists and a graduate student from Egypt. Visits by these three will be exchanged in each of the three years of the project. The proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc12671 none Fauchet Today, the overall performance of a multichip computing system is dominated by the limitations of the interconnections between chips and it is predicted that this problem will migrate to the single chip level within this decade. Conventional interconnects rely on metal lines which produce increasingly unmanageable problems with speed and power dissipation. Optical interconnects provide a solution to these problems. However, one key problem that needs to be solved is the lack of a suitable laser that is fully compatible with silicon microelectronic manufacturing. The possibility of achieving lasing in silicon will be investigated. The conditions under which optical gain can be achieved in silicon nanocrystals will be established. In particular, the nanocrystal size and surface passivation, especially with silicon-oxygen bonds, will be studied. Then, an optically pumped laser will be designed and tested. The demonstration of an optically pumped silicon laser is the main objective of this work. Once the conditions required to achieve gain are established, the conditions under which electrical pumping will be examined. The results of this work will be of interest to the scientific community, as a silicon laser is commonly thought to be impossible, and to technologists, as the explosion in information technology relies on continued progress in computing power doc12672 none The general objective of this research is to examine the history of alluvial sedimentation of the Upper Mississippi River (UMR) to advance our understanding of how climate variability influences the magnitudes and timing of floods on the main channel of the UMR in western Wisconsin. This mid continent site contains a nearly continuous alluvial record that extends nearly 10,000 years and provides a unique opportunity to examine the history of long- and short-term extreme flow events in this important watershed. The specific goals of this research are to: 1) obtain high-resolution records that can help reconstruct Holocene floods in the main and secondary channels of the Upper Mississippi River (UMR); 2) quantitatively link the flood regime of the main channel to independent paleoclimate proxies obtained from other researchers; 3) quantify and contrast the response of the UMR system to extreme hydrologic events during abrupt climate change and gradual climate change; 4) quantify the response of flood hydrology to the relative changes in climate change (i.e., warmer wetter, warmer drier, etc) inferred from proxies. These specific goals will be achieved by a combination of field, laboratory, statistical, and modeling analyses. The research is important because changes in the frequency or intensity of extreme river flows have the potential to produce major impacts on both human society and the natural environment. Instrumental records are too short to adequately determine how climate changes fully influence extremes in flow hydrology on large river systems such as the UMR. Results from this research will help us understanding how terrestrial hydrologic systems respond to changes in global scale atmosphere circulation. The results also should be useful for understanding the relationship between changing climate and recurring extreme hydrologic events doc12673 none Proposal # Purdue Research Palsberg,Jens Static Timing of Interrupt-driven Software Real-time, reactive and embedded systems are widely and increasingly used throughout society (e.g., flight control, railway signaling, vehicle management systems, medical devices). This trend is likely to continue, as applications that would have been unthinkable only a few short years ago come into the reach of ever more complex processors. Many such applications are long lived, interact with their environment continuously, and are under important real-time constraints. As these reactive systems permeate our lives, bringing us everything from intelligent pace-makers to tiny freshness-tracking devices in groceries, the need for cost-effective, confidence-inspiring software validation techniques grows proportionately. This project focuses on building new tools for checking a common class of reactive real-time systems known as interrupt-driven systems. This proposed research has four facets that complement and support each other. The first continues our preliminary work on analyzing seven commercial microcontrollers to identify a static timing analysis that is sufficiently precise for a single interrupt handler. Second, ways of specifying and checking timing properties for multiple interrupt handlers are being investigated. Third, a typed assembly language is being developed with time bounds in which timing properties can be specified in a modular way, one handler at a time. Fourth, a timed interrupt-handler calculus is being designed that will embody our results in a language-independent way and make it tractable to prove key properties. The new tools will automatically derive a model of the software by static analysis and type checking, and submit the result to a model checker. The tools can lead to significantly reduced testing requirements, and provide support for maintenance throughout the system life-cycle doc12674 none David Leitner of the University of Nevada Reno is supported by the Division of Chemistry under the Information Technology Research (ITR) program to carry out computational studies of thermal transport in proteins and nanoscale clusters. This work will examine central questions directed toward broader goals of describing the events that control chemical reactions in complex mesoscopic environments, in particular the role of the energy flow into and away from a reacting system. Computations exploring the role of scale and disorder in heat transport properties of proteins and simpler cluster models will be performed, with the objective of describing thermal conductivity in terms of protein components. As well, chemical reactions in clusters will be explored, focusing on trans-stilbene photoisomerization in a glassy cluster as a prototype for photochemical isomerization reactions in proteins. Research outcomes are expected to provide detailed mechanistic understanding of events that control reactions in proteins and nanoscale machines on the picosecond timescale. In the continuing technological drive towards miniaturization, much effort is directed toward fabricating small devices that draw at least part of their energy from the same organic molecules as those that power proteins in living cells. Success with such devices is hoped one day to lead to the development of molecular machines that could interact with proteins within biological cells to manufacture medicines or repair cellular damage, enabling a revolution in the health sciences. The outcomes from these computational studies of biomolecules and clusters promise insights that will be important to address critical issues surrounding the design of efficient heat dissipation capabilities for working nanoscale devices doc12675 none This award supports travel expenses for the Principal Investigator and a Ph.D candidate to attend and present an invited paper of research results at the International Scientific conference on Digital Libraries to be held in Petrozavodsk, Russia in September, . The presentation by the Principal Investigator at this event serves multiple purposes. His area of research, image database security, is a critical one to the development of generally accessible international Digital Libraries. This conference is an important one for the active Russian Digital Libraries community and brings together international experts to discuss international research collaboration issues involved in building a global information infrastructure. Dr. Wang will be one of few US speakers and will continue to demonstrate the US digital libraries community s interest and support for Russian efforts in this area. Funding is being provided by the Division of International Programs doc12676 none I propose to initiate a lending program to share science resources and equipment with pre-service and in-service teachers and schools in the Monterey Bay region. K-12 teachers have a great need for access to scientific equipment and for support in using scientific equipment in their teaching. The University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) is well positioned to increase the access of regional schools to its own scientific equipment through its outreach wing, the Educational Partnership Center (EPC), and its Division of Natural Sciences. My Post-doctoral Fellowship in Science, Math, Engineering, and Technology Education (PFSMETE) involved the acquisition of a basic set of scientific equipment useful for various kinds of environmental monitoring by K-12 students. The lending program I propose would use this existing equipment to provide follow-up support for teachers with whom I worked on environmental monitoring projects during my post-doctoral fellowship. It would also serve as a seed project for a larger university-based equipment-sharing programs doc12677 none Recent work has pointed out the existence of power-laws in the degree distribution of real-world networks. In retrospect, these findings while widely publicized are perhaps not surprising; power-laws for various notions of size in real-world phenomena have been known for several decades. Nevertheless, these findings have sparked extensive interest in the structure and macroscopic properties of the Internet. Such interest is timely; recent work has also revealed that network topology properties may impact protocol performance Generating realistic topologies is a prerequisite for understanding the impact of topology on pro-tocol performance. Our recent work on topology generation motivates the proposed research and is driven by the perceived dichotomy between structural generators those that explicity embody some notion of hierarchy in constructing topologies and connectivity-based generators those that at-tempt to generate topologies with power-law degree distributions. Our preliminary research on this larger question reveals several interesting results: that real net-works are well-modeled by connectivity-based generators, and that these generators result in graphs with a continuum of levels of hierarchy. Continuing on from this work, our proposed research will at-tempt to increase our fundamental understanding of the structure of real networks, and their impact on protocol performance. Conceptually, our proposed research has three interrelated parts: understand-ing hierarchy in real networks, devising structural models for topology construction based on Highly Optimized Tolerance, and examining more closely the impact of topology on protocol performance. The structure of networks, and their impact on protocols, has received little attention until recently. In terms of broader impact, this work has the potential for making fundamental progress in the areas of topology modeling. In a larger sense, it may develop methods that can be used to understand the physical processes that lead to the development of other real-world networks, such as the Web topology and social networks doc12657 none The objectives of this project are (1) to simultaneously design optimization methods and subsurface flow and transport simulators for a variety of subsurface contaminant remediation problems, (2) to implement the optimization-simulation combination in a way that exploits parallelism in both the optimization and simulation, including some ideas for grid-based implementations of search-poll type methods, (3) to apply the new algorithms to two demonstration problems, (4) to train a generation of students in this multidisciplinary setting. Two of the PIs, Dennis and Kelley, have expertise in a wide range of optimization technology, both gradient-based methods for smooth problems and sampling methods for problems for which gradients are not available. Kelley and Miller have a long-standing collaboration in numerical methods for simulation of multi-phase flow. The PIs will exploit this expertise and design the simulators and optimization algorithms simultaneously. There will be IT-centered activity in software. Two codes, FOCUS and IFFCO, are under development by the principal investigators. The most mature of these, IFFCO an implicit filtering optimization code, will be ported to MPI from PVM, packaged for ease of installation and testing, documented as a book, and released in final form. The PIs will also continue to develop FOCUS, an implementation of the surrogate management framework ideas. Remediation of subsurface contamination is an important issue world-wise. The goal is to clean up, or render immobile, underground contaminants such as fuel spills from underground tanks or industrial waste from leaking drums, and do this at minimum cost. Management decisions must be made, and the potential financial penalty of bad decisions is great. Mathematical models of subsurface systems are often used to assist in making such decisions and these models are increasingly linked with optimization approaches to aid design and management decision making. Subsurface remediation strategies involve decisions such as the restoration approach to use, the selection of locations to install devices, such as wells, and the rates of extraction from or injection into these wells. There are open scientific problems in simulation related to fundamental modeling and choice of numerical methods that need to be addressed as part of the design of software to optimize the remediation methods. The three PIs have expertise in simulation, modeling, and experimental work in multi-phase flows as well as broad expertise in optimization methods. The objectives of this project are to design models, simulators, and optimization methods simultaneously with the goal of more efficient optimal design based on more accurate models doc12679 none Proposal Reliability Theory of Software Designed Using Components Dick Hamlet, Portland State University Defining, developing, and reusing software components is today accepted as the best line of attack on the problem of expensive and unreliable software systems. In other engineering disciplines, component-based systems have been the key to rational design, in which engineers can predict the behavior of complex systems before they are built and tested. This research focuses on the quality of software components. A foundational theory is developed to allow the designer of a system, working from data sheets that describe proposed components, to estimate the reliability of the system that will result. Goals of this research are: -- To develop a quantitative, mathematical description of the way in which component reliability measurements can be made and later used for calculating system reliability. -- To experiment with the theory in simple, revealing cases, to expose problems in the theory and improve it by experimental feedback. -- To implement research-prototype support tools, particularly for the system designer, that make experimentation easier doc12680 none Seber As part of this Information Technology Research project, the PIs will design and develop a US Earth Science Knowledge Node that is composed of diversified, regional scale, reviewed, high quality earth science data sets, and related web-accessible information retrieval and knowledge extraction tools. This system will assist (1) earth scientists in their research, (2) educators in their classrooms and curriculum development, (3) students in their learning and self discovery process, (4) the public at large in their curiosity driven life-long learning efforts related to earth science phenomena that affect their daily lives, and (5) decision makers in their case evaluations and assessments. The organized knowledge node will grow to become a persistent node to larger scale, information technology driven research efforts undertaken to build distributed, interoperable, multidisciplinary data and information networking by various groups, such as the NSF s National Science Digital Library (NSDL), Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE), the earth science research initiative of Geoinformatics, and the broader efforts of building a Digital Earth. Data and information management has always been a major obstacle in sharing and accessing data. High quality, organized, and ready-to-be-used data sets in the planned knowledge node will eliminate problems and help researchers save time and to effectively communicate generated and available knowledge. However, the maximum benefit of this knowledge system will come from its ability to enable multidisciplinary earth science research by providing data sets and data manipulation analysis tools that will be used to understand complex earth system dynamics. The repository will include data sets from those researchers who do not wish to manage their data for longer terms. In addition, the PIs will develop a web-based mapping and analysis interface that will allow seamless access to data sets of interest and help users retrieve information fast and efficiently doc12681 none The Effects of Sexual Selection and Predation on a Genetic Polymorphism for Body Size Alexandra Basolo The long-term goal of this study is to understand the factors that maintain variation within populations in genes that affect adult body size, and the factors that cause differences between populations. In many animal systems, variation for adult body size is common. Both natural selection and sexual selection can contribute to the maintenance of body size variation. Intrasexual selection via male-male competition often favors large male size, as larger males more often win contests. However, small males may adopt alternative mating strategies, such as sneaking, to avoid direct contests as well as subvert female choice for larger males. Natural selection via predation may also favor the maintenance of certain size classes. In some species, the level of predation risk is positively correlated with body size, and in other species, it is negatively correlated with body size. In addition, generation time may favor smaller individuals if smaller individuals reproduce at an earlier age. Thus, sexual selection, predation and generation time may affect the evolution of body size. The traditional view for the evolution of sexually-selected traits is that such traits evolve until they are countered by some source of natural selection, usually predation. When sexual selection and predation both favor larger size, however, life history correlates of size, such as age at first reproduction, may constrain the evolution of body size. Variation between individuals in age and size at sexual maturation is commonly observed, but the underlying genetic basis of this variation is rarely known. However, such knowledge is important to understand the evolutionary mechanisms responsible for body size variation. This study proposes to investigate the factors affecting allelic variation at a locus (the P-locus) that strongly influences adult body size in the southern platyfish, Xiphophorus maculatus. Alleles at this locus vary within and across natural populations. A primary effect of these alleles is the initiation of sexual maturation. Individuals with different P-alleles become sexually mature at different times. Females continue to grow after sexual maturation, but males grow very little after sexual maturation. These alleles then affect both the size at sexual maturation and adult body size in males. Genetic stocks are available with linked color patterns. It is thus possible to use these color markers to track changes in P-allele frequencies in experimental populations. X. maculatus therefore provides a known genetic system with which to test hypotheses about body size polymorphism. A set of experiments will be conducted to examine the effect of sexual selection and natural selection via predation on the evolution of P-alleles. First, male-female mating interactions will be observed in the absence of direct male-male competition for both large and small male morphs. Second, the mating success of large and small male morphs will be assessed. In these experiments, large and small males will be tested with females to determine if male mating behavior changes in the presence of another male, e.g. if smaller males adopt an alternative mating strategy. Male mating success will be determined by progeny analysis. Third, the importance of natural selection via predation on body size will be investigated and P-allele evolution will be quantified in populations with predatory fish and populations without predatory fish. Color pattern markers will be used to track changes in P-allele frequencies over time. A comparison between these populations will determine to what level predation maintains P-alleles for larger male body size by tracking the change in P-allele frequencies in each replicate and comparing the trajectories doc12682 none Researchers have advanced many hypotheses about the influence of ancient environments on the history of our species, Homo sapiens. However, reliable reconstructions of ancient environments are often unavailable for important fossil sites relevant to these hypotheses. One method of reconstructing ancient environments uses information about modes of locomotion of fossil animals found at sites to test hypotheses about the environment used by these animals. Here, the researcher will develop reconstructions of ancient environments at sites relevant to questions about the influence of environment on the late Miocene Eurasian hominoids, a group of fossil apes potentially most closely related to our first bipedal ancestors. Comparative data on limb bones of fossil three-toed horses, modern Equus, and fossil and living antelopes will be used to describe the morphological correlates of the modes of locomotion employed by these animals. This information will allow the researcher to identify the types of environments represented at fossil sites by identifying the modes of locomotion of animals common at these sites. For instance, sites with many fast-running species adapted to flight from predators across open country would indicate a plains or savanna-like environment. The comparative data collected in this study will consist of traditional metric data, digital photographs, and high resolution X-ray CT scans of fossil and rare museum specimens. Data collection is non-destructive and will create a valuable archive essential to understanding both the locomotion of extinct species, the influence of environment on human relatives, and the long ongoing history of environmental change on our planet doc12683 none This research applies networks of sensors and control devices to enhance the performance of civil infrastructure systems, particularly utility lifeline systems, under both emergency and daily operational conditions. Specific objectives of this research are to: 1) develop a conceptual system design capable of data acquisition, wireless data transmission, data processing analysis and operational control of a water delivery system; 2) develop innovative neural network-based inverse analysis algorithms and software to determine in near real-time the extent and locations of damage or malfunction sustained by system components such as pipe segments, pipe joints, pumping stations, etc., and 3) use Memphis Light, Gas and Water (MLGW) Division s water system for a pilot case study to demonstrate the improvements offered by the system design. The system thus designed represents a new generation of vastly expanded and enhanced SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems currently used by utilities. In this expanded version, the hydraulic data are sensed and transmitted through mixed wired and wireless communications through the network. The network will automatically detect aggregation points where data from a region are accumulated and trigger local processing. These points will produce summaries that can then be passed on to central observers. When necessary, observers will be able to drill down on specific details with explicit queries and control. The two geographically distant Principal Investigators provide expertise on structures mechanics, lifeline systems analysis and socio-economic impact of system failure and in computer operating systems, network protocols, and sensor networks. This combination of civil engineering and computer science expertise represents an ideal interdisciplinary coalition for this research. Each will support and advise one graduate student and communicate each other through internet and frequently scheduled meetings inviting potential end users from utility organizations. Broad impacts are expected on the frontier research in lifeline engineering, sensor network technology, simulation and neural network-based analysis of complex systems, and on the practice of lifeline operation and management doc12684 none Networked information technology has led to unprecedented opportunities for exchanging information in a population of participants whose interests and needs vary over time. In particular, this project concerns populations of consumers looking for information products, and producers who possess products that others might be seeking. Substantial research has gone into studying how producers and consumers can settle the terms of a transaction for a particular good. However, there are many possible variations and combinations of information products and their prices that can be offered. A critical and poorly understood problem is how parties should position themselves in this vast information product and price space to differentiate themselves from competitors and attract those with whom they should transact. To address this problem, the investigators will use economic analysis and computer simulation to study how producers of information goods can learn to position themselves based on criteria such as price schedules and information content, and can adapt to changing consumer tastes where consumers might be making strategic buying decisions to affect producer positioning. This project will extend economic theory to account for these concerns, and create computational agents that can make adaptive, strategic decisions about product positioning doc12685 none The time of divergence of species is a fundamental question of evolution. Some species on Earth are separated by billions of years whereas others diverged only thousands of years ago. Understanding the divergences times is critical for looking at rates of change across biology. Divergence times are obtained from the fossil record and molecular clocks, where time is measured by regular changes in DNA and proteins. A biological database of species divergence times, using fossil and molecular data, is being designed and developed to provide scientists with this information. The database will be web-based and provide molecular times at different taxonomic levels, with statistics of multigene time distribution. The ready access to this information will accelerate research in diverse fields of science ranging from molecular biology to geochemistry and astrobiology doc12686 none ITR Proposal , Doerschuk Understanding the dynamical behavior of virus particles, e.g., the self assembly and subsequent maturation steps that lead to an infectious virus particle, is a key challenge in basic biology (e.g., the understanding of protein-nucleic acid interactions) and in medicine (e.g., the development of drugs that interfere with viral replication). This research contributes to that goal by developing new computational tools for structural biology, emphasizing experimental approaches appropriate for the study of dynamics and emphasizing the bi-directional interplay of new structural biology problems and new formulations of existing structural biology problems with the development of new computational tools. Models and computation for new types of experiments are under development, e.g., x-ray scattering from solutions of labeled viral particles which are oriented by immersion in a strong electric field thereby transforming solution scattering to something analogous to the more informative fiber diffraction. New computational approaches to standard problems are also under development, e.g., phase retrieval for the x-ray crystallography of particles with non-crystallographic symmetries based on iterative phase retrieval algorithms applied to lattices that are computationally oversampled by interpolators based on the symmetry. Computational areas involved include fast 3-D Radon transform algorithms, a component of computing the cryo electron micrograph predicted from a given virus structure, and global optimization, in order to improve the values of the parameters that describe the virus structure. The PIs have a long term interest in undergraduate involvement in research and financial support for undergraduate research assistants is included doc12687 none Farmer This grant is supported through funds from both the NSF Information Technology Research Program and the Department of Defense, China Lake Naval Air Weapons Center, Geothermal Program. In a collaborative effort between the Universities of Kansas, Colorado, North Carolina and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, with assistance from the USGS-Reston, the PI s will compile existing age, chemical, and isotopic data from Late Cretaceous to Holocene extrusive and intrusive igneous rocks from the western U.S., British Columbia, and northern Mexico into a web-accessible electronic database. The resultant product, the Western North America Volcanic and Intrusive Rock Database (NAVDAT), will be integrated into a geographic information system (GIS) to allow visualization of complex age-compositional patterns in volcanism throughout the study region. Ultimately, they will also develop any necessary relational and graphical tools to allow users of the database to address a wide variety of issues concerning the geologic evolution and present volcanic state of the western U.S. Data entry will be undertaken at nodes established by each PI at their home institutions-each PI will be responsible for data compilation from literature, University, and DOE sources and for the creation of metadata for igneous rocks in the geographic areas of their expertise. Dr. Jeff Grossman (USGS, Reston) will be contracted to compile igneous rock age and data for NAVDAT from USGS sources. The central hub location for NAVDAT will be the University of Kansas. Here NAVDAT will be created and maintained, and a toolbox generated of geochemical and GIS routines. The basic NAVDAT IT architecture will use a combination of an Oracle relational database server, housed in the Kansas Geological Survey (KGS) at KU, in communication with a server housing the web server, the toolbox, a web development environment, and an Internet Map Server. The KGS will work in cooperation with the KU PIs to develop, update, and maintain the relational database component of NAVDAT on the DBMS servers at KGS. The entire database will be accessible by researchers around the world with a currently available, minimal web browser doc12688 none Melvin Thomas Donald Tomaskovic-Devey North Carolina State University The PIs will study variation in the career patterns of a late s cohort of low skilled workers by examining the impact of ethnicity and locality on these workers careers. The PI will focus on spatial variation in income inequality, local demand for labor overall and low skill labor in particular, and local variation in race ethnic inequality to explain the career dynamics of low skill workers. A prominent explanation for rising race ethnic inequality is the spatial mismatch hypothesis that points toward the spatial location of African Americans and whites relative to the location and skill requirements of available jobs. There are also well documented spatial variations in the degree of race ethnic competition, segregation, and discrimination. Therefore, it is expected that the prospects of low skilled workers are strongly tied to both their race ethnicity and their opportunities in local labor markets. The investigators will develop a model of career inequality, which focuses on the endogenous creation of human capital disparities across the career. How do local labor market opportunities and local race ethnic inequality shape the cumulative labor market experiences and earnings of low skilled workers? The investigators will develop tentative answers to this question using the National Longitudinal Survey - Youth Sample. The analytic strategy is to use three-level hierarchical linear models. In these models person-year outcomes and human capital attributes are at level one, fixed individual characteristics such as race, ethnicity, or gender are at level two, and characteristics of the local labor market are at level three. The research seeks to make two two key scientific advances. The first is the explicit conceptualization of human capital acquisition as endogenous to the labor market and so consistent with contextualized accounts of labor market opportunity and discrimination. The second is the implementation of a statistical framework, which assumes that the context of decisions and behaviors is important, and that fixed individual attributes and attributes of localities are the interactional context of human capital acquisition and returns doc12689 none The Japanese Speech Style Shift Symposium will bring together approximately 20 leading scholars from linguistics, sociology, and anthropology who are doing groundbreaking work on in style shifting in naturally occurring interactions in Japanese. The participants, who come from a variety of leading institutions in the United States and abroad, are a combination of prominent researchers in this area and younger scholars who are likely to have a major impact on this rapidly-growing field in the near future. The participants will present papers which have been pre-circulated. This will allow for a relatively lengthy and detailed discussion of each paper. There will also be a workshop devoted to examining and discussing a pre-circulated set of data. Specific goals for the symposium are 1) to determine what varieties of language tend to be used for style shifting and how pervasive the phenomenon of style shifting is, 2) to identify reasons for speech style shifts, 3) to improve our awareness of what the various disciplines represented at the symposium have to offer the study of style shifting, 4) to explore the implications speech style shifts have for our understanding of the nature of grammar, interaction, and social organization, and 5) to seek the implications our resulting understanding of style shifting has for the learning and teaching of the Japanese language. The results of the symposium will be published as an edited volume doc12690 none This award provides support for a 3-year research study to examine the changing knowledge and skill requirements for different types of Information Technology (IT) Information Systems (IS) work. It will investigate how IT IS workers acquire the knowledge and information they need for their work and how they coordinate their work effort with colleagues. It will analyze various important mechanisms that might facilitate or inhibit these processes. Finally it will also relate these work-based learning behaviors of IT IS workers to their demographic and educational background as well as to performances, professional development and turnover doc12691 none This project involves research to enable musical tele-presence employing high performance communication networks and audio-video immersive environments. The goal is to create the impression of being in the same room for geographically separated users offering complete and immediate two-way visual and auditory contact to enable two or more musicians at different locations to freely interact musically. Three linked tele-presence studios being developed at the University of Rochester will be employed to understand the sources and effects of latency in musical interactions arising from acoustic, electronic and network factors under two-way real-time links. The controlled links between the studios will allow for gradated stages between the controlled situation of a dedicated local network to the more congested state of the Internet2 and the wider Internet. Building upon existing research, the limits of tolerance for latency in musical situations will be explored for various available network protocols, important Quality of Service issues and tradeoffs found in each will be investigated, and fault tolerant data transmission applications that employ data interleaving will be developed. Resources of the University of Rochester s Eastman School of Music will help guide this development from the end-user perspective. Ultimately the development of musical tele-presence will create an infrastructure through which music lessons and master classes by the best instructors can be simulcast in an interactive way. Performers could rehearse, perform and record together over the Internet, and chamber music groups could form unencumbered by geographical distances doc12692 none Dixon This grant, supported through funds from the NSF Information Technology Research - Small Grants Program and the EAR Instrumentation and Facilities Program, will enable the development of a first-generation data and model assimilation system for volcanic hazard assessment. Essentially, this system will use Bayesian forecasting techniques to construct hazard estimates that incorporate both prior geologic information and near-real-time data types. The primary goal is to demonstrate, through the application of information technology methodologies, that such disparate geologic data types can be combined smoothly, even during volcanic crises, to yield improved estimates of hazard and risk. The focus will be on hazards associated with the dispersion and accumulation of volcanic tephra (volcanic ash), both because of the importance of this volcanic hazard and our previous experience in forecasting tephra hazards. Models will be used to relate observed tephra-stratigraphies at several volcanoes (Colima, Cerro Negro, Montserrat, Popocateptal) to sets of input parameters, including eruption duration, initial gas content, and meteorological conditions. We plan to explore several techniques (inversion, simplified models, database development) to relate observed patterns of volcano deformation directly to the parameter estimates used in tephra fallout models. The system will be constructed using parallel algorithms to exploit inexpensive and widely available PC clusters. Through the auspices of an ITR grant, we plan to clearly demonstrate the huge advantages realized by, for the first time, systematically linking the geologic record, process models, and near-real time monitoring results. For tephra accumulation hazards specifically, this approach will further lead to a clear understanding of the links between deformation, magma processes, and the fundamental parameters governing tephra dispersion and accumulation. In this sense, the results of the systematic approach advocated here will provide guidance about the volcanological research most likely to results in volcanic hazard reduction. This research will be conducted as a collaborative proposal between the University of Miami, the University of South Florida, and Southwest Research Institute (nonprofit). In addition, international collaboration with the University of Bristol will bring expertise on tephra dispersion modeling and data on the important Montserrat eruptions to the project. Students will contribute to all phases of the project, including geological research, model development, and software development. After appropriate testing, we plan to make the results of this project widely available by open-sourcing the codes and providing assistance in implementation of PC clusters to the volcanological community doc12693 none Despite high levels of inequality in home ownership across races, ethnic groups, and neighborhoods in the United States, recent trends among minorities and low-income groups reveal record high levels of home ownership. In aiming to understand this development, this project examines how the race and income of both individuals and neighborhoods affect home mortgage lending to underserved neighborhoods over the last decade. It also gives special attention to the institutional factors responsible for changes in lending and the ability of minority and low-income groups to purchase homes. On one hand, banking deregulation may have increased competition in ways that serve all income groups, and new performance guidelines under the Community Reinvestment Act may have prompted lenders covered by the law to do more for underserved markets. On the other hand, institutional factors may have had less positive effects: the rapid changes in the home mortgage lending industry may have resulted in the use of less favorable loan terms, inadequate consumer protection, and financing of poor quality housing. To address these issues, this project analyzes the consequences of institutional changes in home mortgage lending using nation-wide data from - from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. It measures characteristics of the mortgage applicants and lenders, the requested loan amount and the outcome of the request, and the census characteristics of the neighborhood of the housing. The analysis then describes changes over time in the loans made to minority and low-income groups, and in the determinants of the decision to deny a loan application. By extending the previous work of the investigator on Indiana to the nation as a whole, and using an under-studied data source, the project contributes to our understanding of how housing inequality emerges and has changed in recent years doc12694 none An effective way of using increasing powerful computer systems in improving numerical weather prediction is through ensemble forecasting. Experience shows that the ensemble forecasts do not diverge enough so that often the true state of the atmosphere lies outside the spread of the ensemble. In this project, the PIs seek to broaden the spread by exploring the variability of model s climate through the perturbation of the convective processes. The approach is to introduce stochastic noise in cumulus parameterization schemes to account for the sub-grid scale effects. The design of the fluctuations will be based on high-resolution data from cloud-resolving models, radars, aircraft, and radiosondes. These ideas will be implemented in models with different types of complexity. The results have the potential of providing new methods for improving ensemble forecast systems at major meteorological centers and also leading to improved understanding of existing cumulus parameterization. This project is being done collaboratively between Drs. Brian Mapes and Thomas Hamill, CIRES, University of Colorado and Dr. Steven Mullen, University of Arizona doc12695 none Rose This U.S.-Argentina award will support a planning visit by Dr. William I. Rose of Michigan Technological University to collaborate with Dr. Jose Viramonte of the Universidad Nacional de Salta in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The goal of this project is to build a small support group interested in volcanic clouds of the Andean region and to create stronger collaborations. This project will allow the monitoring of the movement of new volcanic products allowing the understanding of its effects. The long-term goal is to be able to send students to Salta to work with the local volcanic clouds group for several months doc12696 none This is an Information Technology Research proposal to develop a new concept of data-crawling software framework allowing a freelance sailing across various scientific datasets available on the Web. The existing World Data Center (WDC) System serves the worldwide scientific community in providing free access to a number of global geophysical parameters. However, this system still requires the (mandatory or voluntary) submission of locally collected data to the data centers, housed at certain institutions or organizations at different geographic locations and mainly organized by the corresponding scientific discipline. At the same time, a huge number of scientific digital databases are currently placed on the World Wide Web without submission to any data center, fulfilling the WDC System s goal of free access to the data, but (most importantly) promoting recognition of the local institution efforts. This creates a need for sophisticated methods to search and to recognize the data type, and then to retrieve a certain amount of data from these databases. The data-crawler to be developed will check the data types and levels their accessibility in establishing mutually agreed interconnections between a data host and a requesting data center and then supplying retrieved data samples (subsets) to this single- or multi-nested, self-populating data center. The research project will yield a working prototype of the data-crawler search engine with practical applications to the Web-based scientific datasets. This will allow users to improve their capabilities in environmental informatics and geoscience modeling and representation, as well as facilitate scientific research via the support of ubiquitous content infrastructure. The latter will help in organizing a Virtual Global Magnetic Observatory (VGMO) where the worldwide geomagnetic data can be visualized on a global scale through the feed from multi-nested data source sites. The effort will focus on the disciplines of solar-terrestrial physics and geophysics, but the proposed software framework can be applied to any scientific (or even commercial) databases distributed without a pre-set structure over the Web doc12697 none CDMA systems have achieved great commercial success in wireless communications since the first IS-95 system was deployed in Seattle in . In fact, most of the future wireless communication systems will be using CDMA technology. Yet, as far as reaching the great potential of CDMA in terms of higher system capacity, lower bit error rate, and lower packet loss rate, the problem of demodulation in the presence of multiple access interference remains as a significant bottleneck for all CDMA systems. To solve this multiple access interference problem, researchers and engineers have worked since the early s on so-called multiuser detectors (MUD). Unfortunately, thus far none of the multiuser detectors has been implemented in a real CDMA system, because of the prohibitive complexity of these structures. There are two major factors that contribute to this situation. First, CDMA systems must use long spreading sequences for several practical reasons, whereas multiuser detectors must use short spreading sequences. Second, the complexity of even the simplest multiuser detector is still too great to be implemented in the fastest electronics, for all but the smallest of data rates. In this work, we propose to address both of these problems in a collaborative effort. The collaboration will be organized so that Dr. Qingchong Liu of Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, will initially focus on the first objective, and Dr. David W. Matolak of Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, will initially (and concurrently) focus on the second objective. Results will be exchanged frequently, and meetings will be held quarterly. After some early progress, our collaboration will grow closer as we combine the work objectives and consider system (transmitter and receiver) performance. We propose first to extend some recent results obtained for the construction of long spreading sequences from short sequences. This can be termed the system objective. These new sequences will be appropriate for both conventional CDMA systems and for multiuser detectors. This method was invented by one of us and has been implemented in possibly the fastest wireless network running at 400Mbps in the Spaceway system by Hughes Electronics. It has significantly reduced receiver complexity and cost, and gives essentially optimum performance. By measuring sequence correlations at multiple levels, the method provides new insights on sequence design and tremendously reduces complexity in signal design and detection for broadband wireless communications. This method has the potential to help bridge a gap between current CDMA systems and multiuser detectors. We also propose to study reduced complexity multiuser receivers from the perspective of reduced complexity trellis search techniques, combined with one of the most promising MUD receiver structures, in a partitioned manner. This can be termed the receiver objective. The MUD receiver of interest is the minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) receiver, which is attractive for its good performance and modest complexity. The partitioning approach will aim to share the detection tasks between the MMSE front-end and the reduced-complexity trellis processor. These receivers will make use of the new spreading sequences specified for use in future 3 rd and 4 th -generation CDMA wireless communication system standards, and the multiple level sequences developed in the system objective. The reduced complexity trellis search techniques will explore use of the analogous techniques researched for equalization, but not fully applied to the problem of CDMA multiuser detection. Our goal for these two objectives is to create a fundamental bridge to connect the existing and planned CDMA systems with the theoretical multiuser detectors so that the bottleneck of the multiple access interference problem in CDMA systems can be surmounted. Both objectives of this proposed work will employ analysis, followed by computer simulations. Both objectives will also require the assistance of graduate and undergraduate students. The modeling work will aim to reconcile theory with practical implementation and thus provide engineering education in the best sense: connecting principles and practice. Training students in both system design and receiver design for CDMA will also naturally be valuable to the wireless industry. In addition, the research will provide material for inclusion in several new graduate courses, and in undergraduate design projects, at both universities doc12698 none It is planned to addresses the high-fidelity storage and manipulation of quantum information in trapped atomic ions. Rudimentary quantum logic operations will be demonstrated between a few qubits, using atomic cadmium ions confined in a rf ion trap. This will permit a demonstration of repetitive quantum error-correction schemes. Multiplexing schemes will also be investigated doc12699 none The numerical solution of large, sparse systems of linear equations and eigenvalue problems is central to many scientific and engineering applications. Iterative methods executed on parallel computers often provide the only means of solving these problems. Most parallel implementations of iterative methods have adopted a fine grain allocation of equations to different processors. However, recent architectural and computational advances suggest that fine-grain methods may be inadequate. Specifically, high network latencies and synchronization overheads may make fine grain methods ill suited to clusters of workstations (COWs) and massively parallel processors (MPPs). In addition, partitioning a problem to a large number of processors may lead to load imbalances and processor idling. The increasing use of Computational Grids consisting of heterogeneous networks only makes these problems worse. Achieving high performance requires new levels of sophistication in parallel algorithms and in the interaction of the implementation with the runtime system. This project will advance the state of the art in high performance, parallel iterative methods by exploring algorithms that combine coarse and fine granularity, and dynamic resource utilization schemes. It will build a new multigrain implementation level on top of traditional parallelization methods to introduce coarser granularity during the preconditioning step. It will identify system-aware iterative algorithms and algorithmic patterns that enable dynamic load balancing, and use them to exploit available runtime system information. The resulting codes will be made available to the community doc12700 none This research project will explore the utility of adjoint-based methods of ensemble prediction for El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), with the view to support the development of a new operational ensemble prediction scheme for ENSO. The PIs will use a hierarchy of coupled ENSO models that represent different levels of approximation of coupled ocean-atmosphere General Circulation Models (GCM). In addition to exploring singular vector and stochastic optimal based ensemble prediction techniques, they will compare these techniques with the method of bred modes that is currently used for ensemble weather prediction at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction. The ensemble prediction experiments will be analyzed using conventional statistical techniques and using a new theoretical framework based on information theory. The research builds on existing methods and ideas that have been applied successfully to Numerical Weather Prediction on timescales of 5-10 days using complex state-of-the-art atmospheric GCMs. The techniques have been applied successfully to ENSO prediction using simple coupled models, however, the application of existing ideas to complex ENSO prediction presents some significant new challenges that need to be addressed. The work is important because it has the potential to improve ENSO forecasts, which has important societal benefits doc12701 none The two main uses of much of the scientific data currently being collected are first to use the data to predict the types of future objects observed by means of computerized algorithms. For instance, one such problem is to develop algorithms that will classify the millions of stellar objects recorded on photographic images by optical and radio telescopes. Second: to understand which variables are discriminating between different types of objects. An example is in locating the gene activity that discriminates between cancerous and non cancerous DNA. This project builds on a recently discovered algorithm called random forests which, when further developed and combined with interactive graphical displays, will provide an advanced tool for answering these questions. Random forests is a new prediction algorithm coming from the Machine Learning context that functions by combining hundreds of randomly generated binary decision. It has demonstrated state-of-the-art prediction accuracy on large data sets with thousands of variables. It generates a wealth of information about the data other than the prediction. This information can be used to estimate variable importance, clustering, density estimation etc. To make this information more readily understandable to the user, interactive graphics such as parallel coordinates and hierarchical cluster diagrams linked together will be incorporated into the design of a program using a more highly developed random forests algorithm as the underlying engine doc12702 none ROVs, AUVs and other submarine robotic systems deliver quantitative data from sensors at a huge and escalating rate. Usually these data are stored for later processing and are viewed in real time as numbers flashing by on a screen. What is needed is a way to utilize these data more fully in real time to optimize the use of robotic vehicles for science. This proposal explores three ways of making progress on this goal. 1) develop interactive 3-D graphic interfaces for data display, 2) develop sensor-based macros for performing routine tasks such as surveys, docking, obstacle avoidance and other functions, 3) Test the effect on mission performance of prioritizing data transmission over low-bandwidth acoustic channels, These will be developed on full-scale dynamically positioned vehicles and will extend the present capabilities of underwater robotic vehicles for more difficult and complex tasks doc12703 none Glazner This grant is supported through funds from both the NSF Information Technology Research Program and the Department of Defense, China Lake Naval Air Weapons Center, Geothermal Program. In a collaborative effort between the Universities of Kansas, Colorado, North Carolina and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, with assistance from the USGS-Reston, the PI s will compile existing age, chemical, and isotopic data from Late Cretaceous to Holocene extrusive and intrusive igneous rocks from the western U.S., British Columbia, and northern Mexico into a web-accessible electronic database. The resultant product, the Western North America Volcanic and Intrusive Rock Database (NAVDAT), will be integrated into a geographic information system (GIS) to allow visualization of complex age-compositional patterns in volcanism throughout the study region. Ultimately, they will also develop any necessary relational and graphical tools to allow users of the database to address a wide variety of issues concerning the geologic evolution and present volcanic state of the western U.S. Data entry will be undertaken at nodes established by each PI at their home institutions-each PI will be responsible for data compilation from literature, University, and DOE sources and for the creation of metadata for igneous rocks in the geographic areas of their expertise. Dr. Jeff Grossman (USGS, Reston) will be contracted to compile igneous rock age and data for NAVDAT from USGS sources. The central hub location for NAVDAT will be the University of Kansas. Here NAVDAT will be created and maintained, and a toolbox generated of geochemical and GIS routines. The basic NAVDAT IT architecture will use a combination of an Oracle relational database server, housed in the Kansas Geological Survey (KGS) at KU, in communication with a server housing the web server, the toolbox, a web development environment, and an Internet Map Server. The KGS will work in cooperation with the KU PIs to develop, update, and maintain the relational database component of NAVDAT on the DBMS servers at KGS. The entire database will be accessible by researchers around the world with a currently available, minimal web browser doc12704 none Schimpf, Paul Washington State University ITR Comp Bio: Computational Tools for Inverse Electromagnetic Problems The principal investigator previously developed an adaptive algorithm for solving the Poisson problem in complex three-dimensional domains. This algorithm found immediate application in modeling the electric field produced by surgically implanted defibrillators as a guide to electrode placement for the cardiologist, where the algorithm reduced solution times from 3 hours to less than 10 minutes. A logical next step is the pursuit of more demanding applications, such as those with an inverse problem formulation. The inverse problem seeks to identify volume energy sources on the basis of electric field measurements on the surface or magnetic field measurements outside of the modeled domain. In general, there is no unique solution unless some a-priori knowledge of the sources is exploited. Inverse problems can be formulated for many applications with domains governed by partial differential equations. They are computationally intensive because many forward computations are typically required for a solution to the inverse problem. The primary aim of this work is to develop an efficient and practical inverse algorithm based on a hierarchical spatial decomposition of the domain, integrate it with the existing forward algorithm, and disseminate it to researchers with a need to solve such problems. Cardiology and neurology are examples of two fields that can benefit from the availability of such tools. In clinical applications, these tools can prove invaluable in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. In research applications, these tools can improve our knowledge of the fundamental behavior of the system doc12705 none The goal of this project is to develop an interactive geometric approach to creating, editing, transforming, and computing with models of spatially distributed physical phenomena. The funded effort will involve fleshing out sound theoretical foundations, developing appropriate data structures and algorithms, as well as implementing a prototype system for interactive physical modeling. At the heart of the proposal is a novel use of tools from algebraic topology and geometric algebra to describe, classify, and unify physical phenomena. The prototype system will allow users to create models of physical phenomena through an interactive geometric interface designed in terms of familiar and intuitive control elements. The created models may be interactively transformed, modified, combined, visualized, and instantiated. The successful outcome of the proposed research should have broad technological, economic, educational, and social impact. The physics editor will allow users to create, visualize, test, and experiment with new models of physical phenomena quickly and effortlessly. It could greatly enhance the ability to efficiently create and modify scientific software that is modular, reusable, and consistent across the disciplinary boundaries. Engineers may discover a practical tool that will allow them to communicate with computer-aided design systems in a visual intuitive language that does not require deep mathematical knowledge and unifies a multitude of theories and special cases. And perhaps most importantly, the proposed research could open doors of computational sciences to college and high school students and others who may have been discouraged or intimidated by traditional methods of mathematical physics and scientific computing doc12706 none The proposed project develops a numerical model for turbulent airflow over nonlinearly evolving water surfaces that overcomes the limitations of previous studies. Efficient computational algorithms for modeling airflow, efficient hydrodynamic methods to evolve the sea surface boundary, and parallel computing techniques will be combined to make statistical analyses of realistic problems in both two and three dimensions possible. Scientific visualization methods will be applied to analyze results and to improve understanding of the nonlinear interactions between wind and waves that are important for sea surface growth and dissipation. Studies will be performed to determine the conditions under which decoupling the interacting complex systems into airflow-only or hydrodynamic-only simulations is possible by including appropriate forcing terms; the form of these forcing terms, when applicable, will be compared with existing empirical and analytical models to clarify the important physical processes. Decoupled hydrodynamic-only simulations will be pursued to investigate wave-wave energy transfer effects in larger scale problems than those possible in the coupled air-water model, and resulting forms of the equilibrium sea surface spectrum will be obtained. Commonly applied approximate hydrodynamic models will also be considered to assess their performance, and wave spectra obtained from numerical studies will be extrapolated using applicable approximate models to include breaking-wave effects not captured in the full numerical simulations. Results of the project will be significant for studies of the global climate, sea wave forecasting, and interpretation of direct and remotely sensed oceanographic data. More generally, project results will clarify important physical effects that can occur in a system of coupled nonlinear turbulent systems. The generation of sea surface waves by winds is one of the fundamental air-sea interaction processes that affect the global climate. Although this topic has been studied extensively through both physical modeling and experimental measurements, understanding of the physics involved remains limited due to the nonlinear phenomena implicit in both airflow and sea surface wave evolution. Numerical simulations offer a means to improve understanding of the complex interactions of this problem, but only recently have computing resources improved to make sufficiently large scale simulations possible. The proposed project represents an interdisciplinary collaboration between applied mathematics and engineering researchers. Educational efforts also comprise a principal objective of the project, including graduate and undergraduate education and research. All participants in the project will gain information technology (IT) experience through algorithm and code development. Project results will be communicated to the external community through conference and journal publications and through use of the world-wide-web; project web resources will also be used in classes taught by the research team to introduce students to scientific applications of IT research doc12707 none This Information Technology Research project aims at developing an entropy based multi-objective genetic algorithm for design optimization. The algorithm is based on an analogy from statistical theory of gases in order to obtain a fullest possible representation of solutions. In the proposed algorithm, statistical behaviors of a sample of designs in a population will be simulated, as they evolve, according to those of the molecules of an ideal gas undergoing expansion in an enclosure. The goal of this analogy is to obtain solutions with maximum entropy, that is, maximum possible uniformity and coverage along the Pareto frontier. The investigation will involve the development of new methods for handling constraints in multi-objective design optimization as well as new quality metrics for assessing the goodness of a set of equally optimum (Pareto) solutions. The quality metrics will also be used to develop new convergence criteria for the algorithm. If successful, the outcome of the research will advance the state of the art at the level of computational tools that enable multi-objective engineering design optimization with applications to a wide class of problems. The results of this investigation will be broadly disseminated for the engineering design automation community, transferred and integrated into several courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels at the University of Maryland, and transferred to industry doc12708 none A new axisymmetric magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) code will be developed for determining the evolution of the solar wind as a function of both heliocentric distance and helioaltitude. It will include the effects of the solar wind termination shock, and the interstellar pick up ions. Stream and transient structures will be imposed at the inner boundary using single-point spacecraft measurements combined with an helioaltitude extrapolation scheme inferred from Ulysses and SOHO observations. This MHD code will be combined with an existing axisymmetric cosmic ray transport code which accounts for particle drifts and allows the prescription of a very general diffusion tensor. The resulting compound code will greatly enhance our capability to understand the primary causes of galactic cosmic ray modulation throughout the solar cycle doc12709 none This research aims at developing empirically based dynamic general equi-librium models for analyzing monetary policy based on evidence both from the U.S. and from countries that have experienced currency crises. The research agenda can be divided into two general topics: (i) understanding the link between monetary policy and private sector outcomes in the US. and (ii) understanding the links between government policy and currency crises in emerging markets. Projects under the first topic involve constructing and estimating models that can account quantitatively for the key facts about the US monetary transmission mechanism. The models investigated have four key- characteristics. First. they embody complementary sources of monetary non-neutrality steming from frictions in good, labor and asset markets. Second. they embody modifications to the real side of standard business cycle models. These modifications play a key role in the analysis because they help render the models consistent with the fact that marginal production costs are only mildly procyclical. Third, the models are designed so that individual agents, taking as given economy-wide variables, have only small incentives to overcome the nominal frictions in their environment. Nevertheless nominal frictions have a first order effect on the economy. Fourth. the models are empirically tractable and can be formally investigated using econometric methods. Preliminary evidence from a simple version of the model, embodying modest nominal rigidities, is capable of generating persistent real effects from monetary shocks consistent with those identified in the data. In addition. the model can account for the inertial behavior of inflation and real wages. Much of this research is joint research with Lawrence Christiano (Northwestern University) and Charles Evans (Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago). The second topic consists of three projects aimed at under-standing the causes and consequences of currency crises. The unifying theme between the projects is the link between government policies, the fragility of financial systems and currency crises. The first project explores why governments with similar sized prospective deficits, stemming from failing financial systems, experience exchange rate crises of different magnitudes and different post-crises inflation rates. The key observation here is that governments differ in the extent to which their lia-bilities are indexed to inflation. The inflation that follows a currency devaluation acts like a partial fiscal reform, effectively providing a government with a source of revenue other than seignorage. Ex ante heterogeneity regarding non-indexed liabilities leads to ex post heterogeneity with respect to monetary policy and inflation. In addition, the research also explores why reported inflation is so much lower than the rate of exchange rate devaluation in the wake of many currency crises. The second project examines the relationship between government guarantees, the sectoral composition of bank lending and banks hedging activities. It analyzes the impact of government guarantees on the exposure of banking systems to real shocks and the corresponding fragility of fixed exchange rate regimes. The third project investigates why governments extend guarantees to banks foreign creditors in developing countries. Much of the research in this section of the proposal is joint with Sergio Rebelo (Northwestern University) and Craig Burnside (World Bank doc12710 none Downs This grant, supported through funds from both the NSF Information Technology Research - Small Grants Program and the Earth Science Instrumentation and Facilities Program, will facilitate the development of a comprehensive database and suite of user-friendly analysis tools that will permit a wide variety of scientific and educational investigations using crystal structures and their properties over the Internet. The database will contain the known crystal structure parameters of every mineral or other earth related material published in the scientific literature since . A suite of interactive software will be developed for visualization, manipulation and analysis of the data, along with a set of guides to instruct the user and provide help for classroom education. Dissemination of the database information, the analysis tools, and the educational guides will occur via links from the websites of the Mineralogical Society of America and the Mineralogical Association of Canada, and will be expedited through traditional publications. In addition, these resources will be incorporated in the NSF Digital Library for Earth Science Education (DLESE). Students and scientists of all disciplines will be able to explore and analyze crystal structure data with state-of-the-art software. The basic features of the software will be established with default settings that allow a range of users, from the high school student in chemistry to the professional mineralogist, to investigate fundamental properties of minerals including: crystal chemical parameters such as bond lengths and angles, polyhedral volumes and distortions, thermal vibration amplitudes, and rigid body motion parameters; crystal forms; fixed wavelength or energy dispersive X-ray and neutron diffraction patterns; and electron densities and bonding analyses. Furthermore, a library of movies showing crystal structures evolving with temperature, pressure, and composition, or undergoing phase transitions, will be provided as a means to interpret the crystal structure data collected at these conditions. The software will incorporate features that allow the user to produce their own movies that can also be contributed to the library doc12711 none Computer modeling of metallurgical processes can be used to enhance process control and product quality. Full exploitation of the high-level of currently available computational tools requires improved accuracy of the physical property input data. In particular, surface tension of molten metals critically influences the characteristics of metals processing. For high-quality measurements of surface tension, it is mandatory to establish the concentration of surface-active elements present in the melt. The most ubiquitous species is oxygen; it is present under all practical conditions involving molten metals and is a major factor effecting surface tension, even at parts per million levels. Since it is practically impossible to totally eliminate the presence of oxygen in reactors and vessels, the oxygen potential needs to be closely monitored. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program support a program to build a high temperature maximum bubble pressure (MBP) device equipped with a solid electrolyte based sensor control to monitor the oxygen potential in the probe. This combination is uniquely suited for measuring surface tensions of reactive alloys since: (1) the MBP probes beneath the surface of the melt and the probed surface area is small compared to the volume of the me and (2) the oxygen potential in the gas stream responsible for creating the probed surface is monitored through an oxygen sensing controlling device. The instrumentation developed under this program will be made available to students at Carnegie Mellon during laboratory session designed to study the structure and properties of metals in their molten state. Furthermore, it is expected that the ability to establish the effect of the oxygen potential on the surface tension and the effects of the presence of 2D surface phases, will significantly contribute to ongoing and future research projects at Carnegie Mellon that study the surface thermodynamics of alloys. In order to fully appreciate the tools offered by computer models in predicting metallurgical processes for process control and product quality, it is necessary to parallel the advances in process modeling with improved accuracy of the physical data that are used as input. Surface tension of molten metals is a key property since it influences (1) the conversion of liquid droplets to solids during the production of metal-alloy powders; (2) the formation of gas pores during casting which diminish the final metal strength; and (3) the formation and shape of impurity inclusions during the processing of steels. However, it is experimentally extremely difficult to perform accurate surface tension measurements of molten reactive alloys such as stainless steels and superalloys. This is due to the fact that oxygen is always present in trace amounts, which will react with the metals. Since even low levels of dissolved oxygen in the metal can change the surface tension significantly, it is critical to control its concentration accurately. The award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program instrumentation supports the development of a novel combination of a probe that measures the surface tension under the surface of metals and an oxygen pump sensor that controls and monitors the oxygen level. The instrument will benefit the metals processing industry and increase the understanding of the physical chemistry of surfaces in the molten state and thereby positively impacting research as well as education in materials chemistry. The instrument built under this program will be implemented in laboratory classes at Carnegie Mellon changing the fact that the important molten state of materials has so far been little studied by students doc12712 none This project will develop new methods for the efficient dissemination of the data collected by wireless sensor networks. With recent and projected advances in small, low cost microelectronic and micro-electromechanical sensors, it is easy to envision that a large array of sensors, distributed over an appropriate region, will be able to measure the spatial and temporal variations of important attribute field such as temperature, moisture, sound, light, gas concentrations, etc.. However, to realize the benefits of such arrays, wireless communication networks must be devised that with low power encode and disseminate the large amounts of data they generate. With this as the goal, the project will develop new methods of distributed data compression and data dissemination for dense sensor arrays, that is, for arrays whose sensors are so close that their measurements are highly correlated. One thesis of this project is that the correlations in such arrays can be exploited in order to make the network operate essentially as efficiently as a sparse sensor network, while having the additional advantages of being resilient to sensor failures and permitting the attribute field to be measured adaptively or with higher spatial resolution. Another thesis is that the data compression and dissemination issues for such networks are deeply intertwined. Accordingly, the project focuses on the joint design of such. For example, it seeks methodology for tailoring distributed data compression methods to partcular dissemination strategies, and vice versa. In the process, it proposed to learn how the performance of sensor networks depends on a variety of issues such as the number and placement of sensors doc12713 none Hardin As the fertilized egg develops into an embryo, its shape changes dramatically as it gradually transforms into a recognizable animal, a process known as morphogenesis. Two of the major cellular movements that shape animal embryos are rearrangement of cells in a preferred direction, and spreading of cell sheets. Both processes require parts of moving cells to extend in very specific directions. The Hardin laboratory will investigate directed movements of cell sheets, using the embryonic epidermis of the nematode, C. elegans, as a model system. They seek to answer the following questions: (1) What events during epidermal morphogenesis are regulated by the dishevelled family member DSH-2? DSH-2 is required for cell rearrangement in the dorsal hypodermis, and for the subsequent epiboly event known as ventral enclosure. They will analyze the defects in dsh-2 embryos dynamically, using computer-assisted microscopy, analysis of fluorescent proteins in living embryos using the green fluorescent protein, and markers for the cytoskeleton and differentiation. (2) What cells require DSH-2 function for epidermal morphogenesis? They will determine the localization of DSH-2 during morphogenesis, and drive DSH-2 expression in specific tissues. (3) What molecular pathways require DSH-2 during epithelial morphogenesis? They will use deletion constructs to identify which parts of DSH-2 are required for epidermal morphogenesis. They will also investigate the relationship between the maternally acting Frizzled MOM-5, other candidate Wnt Frizzled molecules, and DSH-2. (4) What other genes act maternally to regulate epidermal morphogenesis in C. elegans? The Hardin laboratory has conducted an extensive pilot screen for additional genes that act in early steps of epidermal morphogenesis. They will analyze candidate mutants, using standard techniques. As a result of these studies, the Hardin laboratory will gain fundamental insights into regulation of polarized movement of epithelial sheets, a process that is fundamental to many processes in embryonic development doc12714 none The LinBox group of twelve researchers in three countries (USA, France, Canada) proposes research in the design of efficient algorithms for linear algebra, in their implementation in a software library, and in how to interface the library to widely-used scientific computing software. Algorithms will be implemented, and new algorithms designed, for the black box representation of matrices---hence the name LinBox---over entry domains that are either symbolic, that is, exact, or floating point, that is, inexact. The library is generically programmed as C++ template classes with abstract underlying arithmetics; they can be compiled with a variety of fast libraries for the basic field, floating point, and polynomial operations. A server client interface seamlessly attaches the library to the common general purpose symbolic systems Maple and Mathematica and to the numeric system MatLab. Parallel execution of the implemented algorithms is facilitated. Black box matrices are stored as functions (as linear operators in effect): the matrix is a procedure that takes an arbitrary vector as input and efficiently computes the matrix-times-vector product. Black box linear algebra generalizes sparsity. The LinBox library will contain algorithms for solving singular and non-singular systems of linear equations whose coefficient matrix is given in black box representation. Furthermore, it is proposed to develop fast methods for the rank and the minimal and characteristic polynomial of a black box matrix. Finally, LinBox will contain methods for linear Diophantine problems with black box matrices, such as computing an integral solution to a linear system with integer entries and computing the Smith normal form of an integer matrix doc12715 none The waters and soils of our environment contain naturally-occurring organic matter (NOM), which helps to regulate soil fertility, pollutant toxicity, ecosystem behavior and carbon cycling. These in turn affect agricultural production, public and ecosystem health, and global climate change. However, the processes which produce NOM from plant and animal matter are poorly understood, due to the complex nature of NOM and the multitude of possible reactions in the environment. This project will combine the efforts of ecologists, geochemists and computer scientists in an attempt to model this complex system using a novel stochastic approach. In this approach, millions of individual molecules are simulated and reacted together in silico to provide a computer model of the complex natural processes. The model will be developed and tested via an internet collaboration, and ultimately will be accessible to agricultural, environmental and earth scientists via a simple web browser interface doc12716 none Advanced materials form the backbone of our everyday life, including the hardware that supports the information technology (IT) enterprise. Thermal manufacturing of these materials involves strongly coupled transport phenomena that occur at multiple temporal and spatial scales. Process simulation models, based on description of the governing physical phenomena, play an important role in guiding process understanding and development. However, their complete potential remains unrealized in practice, for two principal reasons. First, a fundamental gap exists between simulation capabilities and practice in that whereas practical processes are carried out amidst a cloud of impreciseness and uncertainty, the simulation models are deterministic in the way they treat the process variables. Secondly, process simulations are often computationally tedious owing to the need for a rigorous resolution of the physical phenomena at multiple scales. The computational demands are tremendously intensified when the ability to account for process uncertainty is embedded in the simulation framework, and further, when the simulation models are used in an optimization endeavor. The research seeks to develop advanced computational methods aimed at addressing the foregoing challenges. A stochastic modeling framework will be developed for incorporating the effects of process uncertainties in the simulations. Towards addressing the challenge of enabling rapid and efficient computations, agent-based computing strategies in a heterogeneous environment and an innovative portfolio-based technique for large-scale optimization under uncertainty will be developed. The advanced computational methods will be applied to an optical fiber manufacturing process, which is an important process in the optical networking industry and typifies the complexities of the multiscale physical phenomena involved in general thermal manufacturing processes. The methodologies may be readily applied to other materials processing applications doc12717 none This award is the result of a proposal submitted to the Information Technology Research initiative. Advances in computational materials science depend on the development of efficient and reliable computational methods for large-scale quantum mechanical molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Linear-scaling or order-N (O(N)) methods have been developed with the aim of overcoming the bottleneck associated with the N3-scaling in the computation of the total energy and atomic forces in quantum mechanics-based simulations. Despite this progress, O(N)- ab initio-MD is still limited to systems containing relatively small numbrs of atoms because of the overhead associated with the self-consistent calculations in ab initio MD. On the other hand, MD schemes based on two-center tight-binding (TB) Hamiltonians are orders of magnitude faster than O(N)-ab initio-MD methods. However, they have been found to be unsatisfactory in systems where charge transfer or bond breaking rebonding plays a significant role. Therefore, there is a pressing need for developing transferable semi-empirical Hamiltonians that would be superior to traditional two-center TB Hamiltonians, but would include all essential ingredients of ab initio Hamiltonians without being computationally excessive. The O(N)-MD scheme using such a Hamiltonian can predict accurately the properties of complex systems of large sizes. In this research a general scheme will be developed to construct such reliable and transferable semi-empirical Hamiltonians for materials (metal or semiconductor) in the framework of linear combination of atomic orbitals (LCAO) that explicitly includes the self-consistently (SC) determined charge transfer and environment-dependent (ED) multi-center interactions. The SCED-LCAO Hamiltonian will be implemented within the O(N)-MD scheme developed previously. Using O(N) SCED-LCAO-MD as our simulation tool, we will investigate the properties of carbon multi-wall nanotubes and carbon nanorods, and evaluate their potential as components of molecular-scale devices. Specifically, we will study the following three projects of current interest: (1) Energetics, structure, electronic, mechanical and vibrational properties of carbon multiwall nanotubes (MWNT), (2) A study of the properties of contacts between metal elctrodes and MWNT, and (3) Energetics, structure, electronic, mechanical and vibrational peoperties of carbon nanorods (CNR). Project (2) will be done in collaboration with the experimetal group of Professor Alphenar of Lousiville, whereas project (3) will be done in collaboration with the experimental group of Professor Chen of Academia Sinica (Taiwan doc12718 none Gibberellins (GAs) are phytohormones that regulate many aspects of plant growth and development. The long-term goal of this research is to understand the molecular basis of GA signal transduction in arabidopsis. Loss-of-function spy mutations suppress the phenotypes caused by GA-deficiency; thus, the SPY protein is a suppressor of GA signaling. SPY has extensive sequence similarity to animal O-GlcNAc transferase, which catalyzes the addition of a single O-linked N-acetylglucosamine to specific serine and or threonine residues of nuclear and cytosolic proteins. O-GlcNAc modification of cytoplasmic and nuclear proteins is about as common as phosphorylation and is believed to be a regulatory modification. The work proposed here will test the model that SPY-catalyzed protein O-GlcNAcylation acts to negatively regulate GA signaling and begin to determine the details of how SPY functions in signaling pathway(s). SPY produced in insect cells is itself O-GlcNAc-modified and has GlcNAc transferase activity toward gp40, a plant nuclear pore protein that is known to undergo terminal O-GlcNAc modification. SPY is a component of a multiprotein complex present in both the nucleus and cytosol of arabidopsis and cauliflower. When GA-deficient plants are treated with GA, a decrease in the GlcNAc modification of several proteins is detectable 1 hr after treatment. spy mutations have similar effects. These data indicate that protein GlcNAcylation plays a role in GA signaling. A number of arabidopsis proteins that putatively interact with SPY s tetratricopeptide repeats in yeast have been identified. One of these proteins is GIGANTEA (GI), a protein involved in a number of processes that are also affected by GA. Consistent with the physical interaction between SPY and GI, with respect to the control of flowering time, spy is weakly epistatic to gi. The goals of this work are to: 1) characterize the protein modification that is produced by SPY and determine the identity of its substrates; 2) determine if the localization or activity of SPY is regulated by determining if changes in GA levels or mutations affecting GA signaling alter the localization, posttranslational modification, protein associations, or activity of SPY; and 3) perform additional tests on the proteins identified in the two-hybrid screens to identify the proteins that physically interact with SPY and then genetically characterize the function of the interacting proteins. As part of the third goal, genetic and physiological studies will be performed to further define the functional interrelationships between SPY and GI doc12719 none PROPOSAL NO.: PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Arge, Lars INSTITUTION NAME: Duke University TITLE: ITR SY(CISE): Cache-Oblivious Data Structures As the memory system in modern computers grows more complex, it is becoming increasingly important to design algorithms that are sensitive to the structure of the memory. One of the essential features of modern memory systems is that they are made up of a hierarchy of several levels of cache, main memory, and disk. While traditional theoretical memory models have assumed a flat memory with uniform access time, the access times of different levels of memory can vary by several orders of magnitude in current machines. For example, level-one cache is often around 100 times faster than main memory, while main memory is around 1,000,000 times faster than disks. In order to amortize the large access time of memory levels far away from the processor, memory systems often transfer data between memory levels in large blocks. Thus it is becoming increasingly important to obtain high data locality in memory access patterns. This project will focus on the challenging problems encountered when trying to maintain data locality in irregular and dynamic problems, where by definition the data flow is continually changing and unpredictable, making it difficult to organize data locality a priori. In particular, cache-oblivious dynamic data structures will be developed-such data structures can in turn be used to develop cache-efficient algorithms. Only very recently was the first (and only) such dynamic cache-oblivious data structure developed. This structure is a cache-oblivious version of a search tree. The ambitious goal of this project is to develop cache-oblivious structures for other fundamental problems. In the process general techniques for designing cache-oblivious data structures will be developed. Data structures with applications in a variety of application areas will be considered, but there will be a particular focus on geometric structures. Such structures often have important applications in e.g. spatial databases and geographic information systems (GIS). The project is high-risk because almost nothing is known about dynamic cache-oblivious data structures, but it has the potential to revolutionize the area of cache- and I O-efficient computation and to make a tremendous practical impact. Ultimately this research could lead to a standard library of cache-oblivious data structures. Such platform-independent data structures would enable programmers to easily develop a wide variety of applications that obtain high performance on all modern memory hierarchies doc12720 none This award is for an analysis of poll data and attempts to determine how much campaigns actually influence voters and how long the effects persist. In particular, researchers analyze how variables, such as party identification, grow and recede in importance as the campaign evolves. Using applied statistical procedures, the researchers investigate this question at both the aggregate and individual level. At the aggregate level they analyze state-level poll data for the President and other offices as well as national data for Congressional office. For the individual level, they analyze presidential preference surveys from at least every month of each election year from to doc12721 none Rahman Description: This project supports the participation of US scientists in the 26th International Nathiagali Summer College on Physics and Contemporary Needs in Islamabad, Pakistan, June 25-July 14, . Dr. Riazuddin, Director of the National Center for Physics at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan is the organizer of a one-week session on condensed matter physics (CMP) at the College. Scientists from Europe, Pakistan and the United States will make presentations. Attendees include scientists, mostly recent Ph.D. s, from a number of developing countries in the region, including Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, China, India, Iran, Nepal, Tajikistan, Turkey, as well as Pakistan. They also include graduate students from Pakistan. There are four areas covered during the three week College. The US team will participate mainly in the CMP session. The topics are selected with the aim of providing a synoptic view of latest advances and trends in these fields of research. These include the statistical mechanics of systems far from equilibrium; studies of nanostructuring and etching of metal surfaces; theory, synthesis and characterization of nanostructured materials for photocatalysis; macroscopic studies of thin film growth on semiconductor surfaces; atomistic studies of thin film growth on metal surfaces, carbon nanotubes; studies of permanent magnetic materials and magnetic multilayers; and studies of permanent magnets, magnetic nanostructures and magnet recording applications. The organizers are planning to have a publication of the proceedings of the entire College presentations. Scope: This project enables eight US scientists to attend an important meeting and to allow scientists from countries in south Asia to stay in touch with recent developments in physics, especially condensed matter physics, resulting from observations at facilities in advanced countries. This is an excellent opportunity for scientists from the advanced countries to take their knowledge and ideas for exchange, development, and application in other communities. Lecturers and speakers from Europe, China and Japan are increasingly participating in these summer colleges. This project allows the US to maintain a presence in programs like this and to remain competitive in scientific collaborations, recruiting graduate students and visitors, and to have the opportunity to disseminate results of research. Past colleges have resulted in recruitment of several new graduate students who have added significantly to US research programs. The project meets INT objectives in supporting seminars where mutual benefits and dissemination of information is likely to result doc12722 none The proposed work focuses on development of modular adaptable software for vision-based human-computer interaction. The key idea is to use local visual interaction cues on a video stream - mono or stereo, 2D or 3D - shared between the user and computer. The use of such cues has a number of advantages, such as limiting the processing to only those parts of the image where interaction takes place, allowing image processing to be dynamically driven by the interaction, and an easily parameterized modular basis for software development. Questions of how visual interaction cues can be flexibly defined and robustly detected based on local informaiton will be explored doc12723 none The modeling of complex systems using the concept of constrained objects is investigated. A constrained object is one whose internal state is regulated by a set of invariants, or constraints. When several constrained objects are aggregated to form a complex object, their internal states might further have to satisfy interface constraints. The resultant behavior of the complex object is determined using logical inference and constraint satisfaction. Thus, constrained objects are a declarative counterpart of traditional objects (found in object-oriented languages). The proposed modeling paradigm has diverse uses, including engineering and organizational modeling, and supports constraints as well as preferences. The computational model for constrained objects provides constraint satisfaction, optimization, and relaxation techniques. A visual representation for constrained objects is also provided in such a way that the components of the visual form have logical counterparts in the underlying model. Research areas of interest include language design, execution, and applicatons. In particular, issues arising in model revision (i.e., incremental constraint satisfaction) and model inconsistency (i.e., fault diagnosis) will be investigated. The results from this research will be incorporated in the modeling environment, which is expected to make a significant advance over current modeling tools for engineering design doc12724 none The research described here addresses information security issues for embedded processors and constrained environments. Embedded processors are found in a vast array of existing and emerging technologies, including mobile phones, personal digital assistants, smart cards, and remote-controlled utility network devices and are distinguished from typical (but far less prevalent) PC-level microprocessors in their relatively low power consumption and inherent limitations on memory and speed. It is predicted that the number of applications with embedded microprocessors which will be connected to our telephone and computer networks will increase dramatically over the next few years. For instance, it is anticipated that within the next few years, 50% of all Internet end-devices will have to operate in constrained environments. At the same time, these networks are enabling remote access to, and manipulation of, sensitive resources of all sorts, including bank records, medical information, alarm system, and industrial machinery. The need is clear for long-term planning and directed research in the area of cryptographic security for these devices. The challenges represented here require the attention of experts from a variety of disciplines, from engineering to computer science to mathematics. Both fundamental and immediate problems face hardware designers, software engineers, and theoretical crypytographers alike. We propose a three-pronged approach in an effort to contribute solutions to these problems. The long-term ambition of such research is to bring cryptographic security solutions to the market which are low-cost, highly scalable, and suitable for constrained environments. This project places particular focus on implementation of public-key algorithms in embedded devices and is divided into three modules as follow: Development of power-efficient and scalable cryptographic hardware for pervasive computing. Investigation of emerging public-key schemes which appear promising for implementation in constrained environments. Evaluation of combinatorial structures for public-key schemes in hardware and on embedded processors. This three-pronged approach combines a long view, cutting across disciplines, as well as a variety of very promising short-term objectives which assure practical relevance and payoff doc12725 none An application running in a distributed computing environment such as the Computational Grid must adapt to the available hardware and software resources. This requires information about the properties of Grid resources such as hosts, network switches, links and paths, software libraries and systems, user and organization rights, software services, event channels and dictionaries, and more. The information needed for an application to run, the values of the information (how fast the information changes) and the freshness of the information (how fast updates must be pushed to the application) can vary dramatically. These attributes place significant demands on the resource information service, demands that are arising with increasing prevalence in the general area of directory services as well. The Grid Forum, an international standards body for world-wide Grid computing, is developing standards for representing and querying this information. There is much that is excellent about these evolving standards, but there are many forms of highly desirable queries that will be difficult or expensive to perform in these systems. In particular, dynamic information will require very high update rates not supported by LDAP-based implementations. This project will address these concerns through a proposed (and tentatively named) Grid Resource Information Service (GRIS), a unified relational approach to grid information services. The research will start with the full ACID (Atomicity Consistency Isolation Durability) functionality of a relational database system and build down to a practical resource information system that still provides most of the benefits of the RDBMS. Such a system will provide a single highly flexible query model and language for all types of Grid resource information, no matter how dynamic. The research will culminate in an extensible implementation based on commodity database systems and the SQL language, including canned queries for non-SQL users. The project will evaluate the new system and techniques using logged updates and queries from an existing Grid information service, and comparing results with a hierarchical system such as Globus MDS2. To facilitate comparisons, the project will produce a set of benchmark queries from discussions with users, tool developers, and Grid Forum members, and will quantify the limits of these queries doc12726 none Accurate determination of protein structure and function is the focus of proteomics, the next step in the genomic revolution. Traditional knowledge discovery in molecular biology has followed a research paradigm corresponding to the information flow in functional genomics, that is from gene sequence to protein structure to function. This computational bioinformatics proposal exploits the information content of the protein structural and sequence databases following a research paradigm formulated in the title of this proposal, namely from structure to sequence to function prediction. The important postulate of this research is that spatial nearest neighbor residue motifs defined by the means of computational geometry (Delaunay tessellation) provide unique determinants of protein structure and function. The major goals of this proposal include: (1) development and validation of multibody statistical potentials on the basis of non-redundant subsets of the protein crystallographic database, (2) prediction of 3D protein structure by the means of novel implementation of the chain growth algorithm using Monte Carlo sampling, statistical potentials, and spatial constraints defined by specific residue motifs, and (3) determination of sequence and structure specific amino acid residue motifs for known proteins and large scale prediction of protein structural and functional classes for genomic sequences. The successful implementation of this proposal will have a broad impact on functional genomics and proteomics doc12727 none The project will analyze the effects of advanced telecommunications technologies on reform efforts seeking to decentralize democratic governance. Analysis will focus on technology use in the implementation of a formal neighborhood council system in the City of Los Angeles. This reform effort represents a significant and well-defined natural experiment in the political uses of information and communications technologies (ICTs). As such, it provides an opportunity to extend the technology and politics literature, which to date has focused on the national level and elections, to investigate effects on local governance, which is the primary sphere for civic engagement in policy making. The research will draw from theories in the area of political communication, organizational theory and urban political economy to develop hypotheses about the factors that influence the successful integration of ICTs in the creation of neighborhood council systems, their effects on patterns of political communication, and the effects of communications networks on political outcomes and attitudes among stakeholders at the local level. The implementation of neighborhood councils in Los Angeles is currently in the planning process and will proceed beginning June . The current plan calls for the creation of 100 to 200 advisory councils at the community level, and the implementation of an Internet-based early notification system intended to provide councils early input into city policy making processes. In addition, councils are required to create systems for communication with community stakeholders. The City in turn is mandated to provide councils with a communication system linking all neighborhood councils and training and material support for communications. This reform represents an unprecedented urban experiment with political communication, and is particularly important given the size, ethnic diversity, and global economic position of the City of Los Angeles. The research will employ multiple methods to elucidate the complex linkages between implementation inputs, communication networks, political processes, and policy and attitudinal outcomes. The methods employed will include (1) case study analysis of the design, implementation, and diffusion of neighborhood councils and communications technology; (2) analysis of the vertical communications promulgated and received by elected officials as a part of the mandated early notification system; (3) network analysis of the dynamics of communications within and between neighborhood councils and city government; and (4) preliminary analysis of the political effects of vertical and horizontal communications. Data collection will include archival and field research, interviews, and two panel surveys. These data will be employed in diffusion analyses and network analyses producing sociograms of linkages and cliques developing among members of city government and neighborhood councils. The network analysis provides a systematic framework for conceptualizing and analyzing the effects of ICTs on communication patterns and the manner in which changing communication patterns influence democratic outcomes. This analysis will illuminate the effects of ICTs on the distribution of information and political communications and the resulting effects of changing communication patterns on citizen participation and the responsiveness of political institutions. The research is expected to improve understanding of the technological factors that impede or promote political participation by traditionally under-represented groups and provide a more detailed understanding of socio-economic and communicative characteristics of citizens impede them from taking advantage of technology-based reforms. This knowledge will help policy makers develop methods by which these differences may be bridged doc12728 none The U.S. medical system faces an impending crisis: how to provide for the medical needs of a rapidly aging population. This project will investigate new technologies for just-in-time preventative health education in the home. Prior work on using computer telephony to deliver health education and counseling to people in their homes will be extended to mobile computing devices. Algorithms will be investigated that passively and actively collect data from healthy users of mobile computing devices and use that data to identify patterns of everyday activity using probabilistic models. The activity of each person will be used to present preventative health information and counseling at teachable moments -- the times when that information is most likely to impact the user s health-related decision making. A prototype system for elderly individuals interested in improving their exercise level and diet will be collaboratively developed by technologists and medical professionals. A participatory design process will be used to ensure the devices are easy to use, even for those who are not computer literate. The prototype system will be evaluated in a small focus group study doc12729 none In recent years, auction theory has been asked to provide guidance to policymakers in several important areas, including spectrum auctions, electricity auctions, and Treasury auctions. Unfortunately, the received theory had largely focused on auctions of a single object, and so had little to rigorously say about the most empirically relevant auction problems. Recent research by economists has begun to expand the boundaries of auction theory and analysis so as to encompass multiple-item auctions. In prior work, we have analyzed the theoretical properties of existing multiple-item auction formats, proposed new efficient auction formats for multiple items, proposed new applications for multiple-item auctions, and empirically evaluated recent applications of auctions for spectrum and electricity. This project builds upon this recent work, by examining the following topics: Development of the properties of a new, efficient ascending auction for heterogeneous commodities. Understanding the theoretical underpinnings for efficient ascending auctions. Analysis of auctions for heterogeneous commodities in environments with interdependent values. Study of auction theory with agency problems. Use of the reserve price in mitigating the exercise of market power. New applications for multiple-item auction designs. Empirical analysis of the European 3G spectrum auctions. The project includes a balance between further theoretical developments of multiple-item auctions, and practical applications and empirical testing of the ideas of auction theory doc12730 none Modern computation methods (parallel computing and object oriented programming) will be used to develop a plasma simulation code, which will be made freely available. A scheme for domain decomposition is planned which permits nearly arbitrary load balancing. The code will be used to simulate three dimensional problems in advanced acceleration via laser-plasma interactions doc12731 none One of the fundamental questions in molecular biology concerns the role of RNA-binding proteins in regulating the processing, transport, stability, subcellular localization, and translation of specific messages in eukaryotic cells. The long-term goal of this project is to elucidate the role of Scp160p, a 160kDa RNA-binding protein in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, as a factor contributing to the post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression in yeast. The specific objectives of this three-year project are: (1) to identify and characterize yeast proteins that interact, physically and or functionally, with Scp160p, (2) to characterize the mRNA components of Scp160p-containing complexes, and to explore the biological consequence of Scp160p interaction with these messages, and (3) to initiate structure function studies of Scp160p by using deletion mutagenesis to define regions of the protein that are essential for function. All three objectives will be pursued using a combination of genetic and biochemical approaches well-suited to the yeast model system. The results of these studies will be significant in at least five ways. First, in the course of defining yeast proteins that associate with Scp160p, novel factors not previously recognized to play a role in gene expression may be identified. Second, the specific mRNA components of Scp160p complexes to be identified in Aim 2 will represent not only targets of Scp160p function, but also may provide insight into the variety of cellular processes whose disruption leads to the scp160-null phenotype. Third, the structure function studies described in Aim 3 will address the long-standing question of whether individual KH domains in a multiple KH domain protein function independently or dependently of one another. Fourth, a number of important reagents will be developed in the course of this work, including a panel of truncated alleles of Scp160p, and both wild-type and mutant clones of genes with which Scp160p interacts. Finally, by elucidating the function and interactions of Scp160p in yeast, this project will provide a foundation to enable studies of other RNA-binding proteins in more complex systems, including humans. The long-term goal of this project is to elucidate the role of Scp160p as a factor contributing to the post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression in yeast. Studies will include both genetic and biochemical approaches to (1) identify and characterize yeast proteins that interact, physically and or functionally, with Scp160p, (2) characterize the mRNA components of Scp160p-containing complexes, and explore the biological consequence of Scp160p interaction with these messages, and (3) initiate structure function studies of Scp160p by using deletion mutagenesis to define regions of the protein that are essential for function. Because Scp160p is a member of a large family of RNA-binding proteins found in both eukaryotes and prokaryotes, the results of these studies are not only relevant to Scp160p in yeast; they may also provide a foundation for future studies of other RNA-binding proteins in more complex systems, including humans doc12732 none Recent advances in computer and network technologies and storage, the explosion of publishing, and the vast increase in data availability from sources such as the Internet and satellites, that have enabled the emergence of an unprecedented number of new computer applications, present a new challenge to the ways data and information are used and managed. This challenge will shape both the research agenda as well as the technology to be developed for the 21st century. The objective of this workshop is to bring together the PIs and Co-PIs currently funded by the Information and Data Management Program (IDM) of the National Science Foundation to: (1) cooperatively analyze and focus on the research and development issues of problems that are fundamental in making progress towards this new challenge; (2) share, provide demonstrations and interact with each other on the objectives, contributions and challenges of major research activities funded by the IDM and explore fruitful collaboration and synergism; and (3) provide an opportunity to NSF program officers, other foundations and funding agencies, and industry representatives to learn more about the current research efforts and successes of projects funded by IDM, and for such officers to share their program highlights and concerns. The workshop will generate a proceedings on all projects currently funded by IDM in both hard copy and electronic form. The workshop will also generate a report detailing future directions of research and will suggest promising modalities of research with an aim to foster innovation and technology transfer. The proceedings will provide project information searchable by different criteria and provide connections between discoveries and their use to society. The workshop website (http: itlab.uta.edu idm01) will also include links to other relevant material doc12733 none Niu Driven by both consumer and commercial needs, the Internet is becoming mobile and broadband, thus allowing the user high speed access to the world wide web from their cell phones and other wireless devices. Optical networking and mobile communication are the key enabling technologies for a mobile and broad-band Internet. Because of its high performance, low cost, and compatibility with silicon CMOS, SiGe HBT technology has recently emerged as a contender for both mobile and optical networking applications. Current SiGe HBTs designs are focused on improving the speed of these devices, while our recent experiments have shown that the optimum device structure for wireless applications are considerably different. Issues important for mobile and optical networking, such as 1 f noise, phase noise (frequency domain sideband and time domain jitter), and linearity, have not been researched as a function of the device structure, or optimized for these performance targets. This ITR proposal is aimed at systematically examining the impact of bandgap engineering and scaling on all of the device figures-of-merit that are of interest to wireless and optical communication IC s, and use of these results to optimize the SiGe profiles and geometries for various circuit applications. In the process, scientifically intriguing and technologically important questions, such as why SiGe HBTs with a nonlinear I-V can have excellent linearity, will be answered. This is a brand new area of SiGe device research, and has a high potential payoff given the exploding industry interest in applying SiGe technology to wireless and optical networking systems. The outcome will include a scientific understanding of important open questions on SiGe HBTs, a modification of the design approach and methodology, as well as hardware demonstration of the novel SiGe profiles through our close collaboration with IBM, thus ensuring a timely impact on current and future development in SiGe technology. Given the enormous amount of interest in applying SiGe technology to both wireless and optical networking applications, the PIs will develop an advanced course on SiGe HBTs using WebCT, so that the outcome of the proposed research can be remotely accessed by graduate students and practicing engineers in industry doc12734 none Zheng This ITR AP Small Group Award supports development of efficient and robust computational methods for simulating physical systems involving phenomena at drastically different length scales. The results will serve an important need in computer-aided design, analysis and modeling. A classic example is a system that involves fluid-solid interfaces with complex geometries on scales ranging from molecular to macroscopic. On one hand, computational modeling approaches based on continuum approximations (e.g., finite-element and finite -difference techniques) are capable of describing mechanical responses only at wavelengths much longer than the typical distances over which the fluid density at interfaces varies appreciably. On the other hand, the whole system is far too large to be treated by a fully atomistic simulation that would encompass responses at all scales simultaneously. To address this problem a hybrid Monte Carlo-finite element scheme, in which fluid molecules at the interface are treated explicitly, while the solid is handled by continuum techniques, will be applied. A reduced description in which the stochastic variables consist of the positions of the fluid molecules and the nodes of the finite-element mesh covering the solid phase will be developed. The stochastic nature of Monte Carlo lends itself to an efficient parallel computing scheme, which is crucial for simulating real-world systems. A multi-disciplinary team has been assembled to undertake the three-year project, the expected outcome of which is a powerful computational scheme for analyzing the thermomechanical response of realistic fluid-solid systems in which the coupling of the molecularly heterogeneous interfaces to the macroscopic continuum plays an essential role doc12735 none This project will develop a new generation of numerical simulation systems using advanced parallel computers, mathematical models, and real-time data. Modern sensor technology and the Internet have made it possible to monitor closely the performance of structures such as highway bridges. However, there are often limits on the possible number of embedded sensors, and accurate prediction the overall structural performance therefore requires other technologies, such as computer modeling, at the same time. This project will merge the two technologies, creating a computer modeling system that incorporates the live data in the numerical simulation. Using measured data as an integrated part of a numerical simulation is a challenging research project. Because data collected by the sensors must be moved continuously into the numerical simulation, the traditional paradigm of reading control parameters at the start of the computation is not possible. Instead, this project will use the ALICE memory snooper from Argonne National Laboratory to allow the constant interruption introduced by the transmission of the measured data. This will in turn allow a parallel computer to exchange information with remote sites without going through slow disk I O. To fully integrate the sensor data with the computation, the project will develop new numerical schemes based on classical multigrid methods, but using the measured data to build the coarse space. The measured data will also be used as a basis for calibrating and validating the parameters in the mathematical model. The new simulation system will be used in a high cycle fatigue test of bridge decks, which will be conducted in the Structures Laboratory at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Field tests will also be scheduled on new bridges to be constructed with a variety of installed sensors. These tests are part of ongoing projects sponsored by other agencies. The synergy of these projects will help develop and validate the proposed simulation system doc12736 none The main focus of this project is on developing computer algorithms and programs to support a technology called High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC)-Tandem Mass Spectrometry (MS-MS), a very powerful tool for high-throughput protein identification. This technology generates mass patterns for peptides, and relies on fast and accurate computer algorithms to map mass patterns to peptide sequences. This project aims at designing algorithms for multiple proteomic applications. This project addresses four fundamental computational problem areas in Proteomics: (1) the problem of peptide identification (2) the problem of de novo peptide sequencing, which aims to sequence peptides directly from tandem mass spectra without database search, (3) the problem of identifying protein cross-linking sites, which looks for a pair of cross-linked peptide sequences optimally correlated to a tandem mass spectrum, and (4) the problem of peptide mass fingerprinting, which aims to identify proteins by their masses of enzyme-digested peptide mass patterns. Novel and efficient algorithms are being designed to solve these problems doc12737 none The aim of this project is to put new and cutting-edge computational applications in the hands of high school students in after-school club settings in underserved communities. These tools will allow the students to build tangible and ubiquitous computing applications that will find genuine utility in the communities that surround the schools. For the first half of the project, we will be planning with our partner schools and making connections in the adjacent communities. We will also be crafting the initial technology platforms for the students. The final phase of the project will entail high school students working jointly with researchers to build community-centered applications. New insights will be gained on how to develop toolkits for young designers and, for the young designers, how to design and evaluate computational applications. This work will also suggest new ways to engage underserved communities in building and using the nation s information infrastructure doc12738 none This research designs and examines models in which credit constraints arise endogenously due to imperfect enforcement, and considers the consequences it has for life-cycle behavior of consumption, labor supply and investment in human and physical capital. The endogeneity of the constraints allows the models to capture the response of private markets to the policies of the government. The policies examined include taxation of labor and capital income, education subsidies, public provision of schooling, and social security. The research also analyzes changes in the institutional framework of private creditor markets, and examines the existing Guaranteed Student Loan Program . It is expected that insights and findings from the research will be used for evaluating, and suggesting possible improvements in the current student loan programs in the United States. It is important to understand how the Guaranteed Student Loan Program affects incentives to invest in human capital, interacts with credit markets, and generates incentives to default. More efficient loan programs may be possible, and can only be found by understanding the origins of credit constraints doc12739 none Motility and chemotaxis functions are not only complex behaviors in Bacillus subtilis important to cell survival in nutrient deprived and toxic environments, but require multi-level regulation of the cognate genes. However, additional strategies for survival, including sporulation, exist, and the elaboration of the structures required for motility is biosynthetically costly to the cell. Therefore, flagellar gene expression in B. subtilis must be sensitive to the global state of the cell. On-going research in this laboratory is dedicated to understanding the genetic and molecular mechanisms that monitor the nutritional state of the cell and control flagellar gene expression. Another means of conserving biosynthetic energy is by structural regulation of the flagellin gene that encodes the main component of the flagellar filament by FlgM. FlgM is an anti-sigma factor that inhibits flagellin gene expression until the multi-protein structure that tethers the filament is functionally assembled. The molecular nature of this control, as well as the mechanism that allows for FlgM inhibition by a bacterial structure, has not been determined in B. subtlis. Therefore, this project is focused on defining the specifics of FlgM control, and of its morphogenetic regulation. This work promises to provide insight into nutritional and structural regulation of an important bacterial behavior. Further, these studies are an important part of the educational activities in the Biology department at San Francisco State University and will benefit the training of undergraduate and masters degree students, many of whom are members of under-represented minority groups in science doc12740 none Geomaterials, i.e., soil and rock, are quite prevalent in nature and they are part of numerous engineering problems and solutions. All civil engineering structures have to be ultimately supported on soils or rocks. Soils and rocks play an integral part in the behavior of civil engineering structures such as buildings, bridges, dams, levees, and aqueducts during catastrophic loading events such as earthquakes. Soils are also major part of environmental problems and solutions. Production of petroleum hydrocarbons involves rocks at large depths. Geomaterials are multiphase porous media consisting of a solid skeleton and number of fluids within the pore space. Geomaterials exhibit highly nonlinear and hysteretic behavior during various loading situations. Traditionally the engineers have treated the above-mentioned processes separately and often with simplifying assumptions. With the recent advances made in Information Technology (IT) in areas such as scalable parallel computer algorithms, distributed computer systems, high speed networks, and visualization it is now possible to realize a unified geo-analysis tool for solving current and future problems involving geomaterials where unnecessary simplified assumptions need not be made and the full 3-D model of a real world system can be analyzed. A key component in achieving this unified analysis tool is a framework-based finite element application. A framework represents a collection of common software components for building applications in some common domain. The basic premise behind the use of a framework is the recognition of a common set of tasks that must be accomplished in writing the applications. These tasks can be factored out of the application codes and collected into a single set of components. Essentially a framework separates physics of a problem from the computer science aspects of solving that problem. This project is directed toward developing a scalable, parallel geo-analysis tool using a framework-based finite element application in a three-way collaboration between the University of Oklahoma (OU), the TeraScale, LLC, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This tool and the underlying framework will be readily available to the academic community and industry at a fraction of the cost of similar monolithic codes. This analysis tool will initially be capable of analyzing static and dynamic behavior of dry, unsaturated, and saturated soils (fluid flows and solid skeleton deformations). However, as opposed to the closed architecture of the proprietary monolithic codes, the open architecture of the framework will provide users with easy extendibility to include other multi-physics behavior in geomaterials. The resulting tool will be verified first using closed-form solutions of simple problems in saturated and unsaturated soils. Then the tool will be validated using centrifuge model tests results for boundary value problems. Computational experiments will be conducted to test the analysis tool s capabilities under various distributed and parallel computing environments. On the educational front the TeraScale framework will be integrated into courses such as the Introduction to Finite Element Method and thereby introducing students to this new paradigm in engineering analysis and IT concepts such as scalable parallel computing. Using Oklahoma s OneNet, High School students in Oklahoma will be provided an opportunity to manipulate and view the results from the proposed geo-analysis tool as well as conduct some simple analyses through the Internet. Seeing and interacting with visualization of exciting problems such as the earthquake loading of a dam will help recruit more High School students to science and engineering. It is expected that the geo-analysis tool developed will not only make the current advances in IT, such as the distributed computing, widely accessible to engineering community, but also advance various aspects of IT research itself in a synergetic manner. For example, the proposed geo-analysis tool will serve as a test case for evaluating the efficiency of current and future distributed computing facilities doc12741 none Arrowsmith This grant, supported through funds from the NSF Information Technology Research - Small Grants Program, facilitates a joint effort between Arizona State University and the University of Texas at El Paso to construct an integrated data system focusing on the Transition zone between the Colorado plateau and the Basin and Range province primarily in Arizona and New Mexico. This region is important for the development of an integrated geological and spatially-referenced data system as it is of fundamental significance to the geologic evolution of southwestern North America. In addition, such a system is timely as it can be used to address practical problems such as the effects of urbanization and dwindling water resources. Construction of this data system will involve three main efforts: 1) compilation of many large, scattered and heterogeneous earth science data sets into verified, standardized, and documented data bases; 2) construction of web-based interfaces that allow any interested party to access these data, receive robust metadata describing the data and how best to use them, and receive information on how to add data to the system via structured protocols; and 3) the design and construction of an extensive collection of public domain software (a toolbox) that would empower users with the capability to use and update the data in a substantial way. This project will leverage considerable support from several federal and state agencies including NASA, the U. S. Geological Survey, the National Imaging and Mapping Agency, and the Arizona Geological Survey doc12742 none Open source software relies on the expertise of developers around the world, who volunteer to produce software collaboratively. Their mode of collaboration requires participants to share the results of their work freely with others. By revealing the source code of the programs on which they work, developers participating in these collaborations are able to design new features, fix bugs in programs, and tailor the software to suit their own needs. The attractiveness of engaging in this method of producing software in the Internet environment has led to the emergence and growth of specialized, online virtual communities whose members follow rather clearly established procedures in performing their professional tasks, but are otherwise bound together by loose rules of association. This project inquires into the sustainability of such organizations, and the likely extent of their domain of viability-in terms of the kinds of goods and services that might reliably be supplied in this way. The investigation has three more proximate empirical objectives. The first is to identify typical patterns in the evolution of these communities informal organizational structures and their norms of conduct. The development of procedural authority, and other means of resolving conflicts among individuals in regard to the substance of their work, and of verifying and validating their contributions, are subjects for special study. The second objective is to characterize the distribution of effort input within these communities and its relationship to the structure and distribution of internal rewards, and derived external benefits for different levels of participation. These tasks will be approached through analysis of passively collected data, participant responses to email survey questionnaires, and in-depth case histories of particular communities. A third and larger goal is to understand the dynamics of these virtual communities and the similarities and differences they exhibit in comparisons with collaborative organizations involving spatially distributed academic ( open science ) researchers whose work is enabled by computer-mediated telecommunications doc12743 none Walker This grant is supported through funds from both the NSF Information Technology Research Program and the Department of Defense, China Lake Naval Air Weapons Center, Geothermal Program. In a collaborative effort between the Universities of Kansas, Colorado, North Carolina and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, with assistance from the USGS-Reston, the PI s will compile existing age, chemical, and isotopic data from Late Cretaceous to Holocene extrusive and intrusive igneous rocks from the western U.S., British Columbia, and northern Mexico into a web-accessible electronic database. The resultant product, the Western North America Volcanic and Intrusive Rock Database (NAVDAT), will be integrated into a geographic information system (GIS) to allow visualization of complex age-compositional patterns in volcanism throughout the study region. Ultimately, they will also develop any necessary relational and graphical tools to allow users of the database to address a wide variety of issues concerning the geologic evolution and present volcanic state of the western U.S. Data entry will be undertaken at nodes established by each PI at their home institutions-each PI will be responsible for data compilation from literature, University, and DOE sources and for the creation of metadata for igneous rocks in the geographic areas of their expertise. Dr. Jeff Grossman (USGS, Reston) will be contracted to compile igneous rock age and data for NAVDAT from USGS sources. The central hub location for NAVDAT will be the University of Kansas. Here NAVDAT will be created and maintained, and a toolbox generated of geochemical and GIS routines. The basic NAVDAT IT architecture will use a combination of an Oracle relational database server, housed in the Kansas Geological Survey (KGS) at KU, in communication with a server housing the web server, the toolbox, a web development environment, and an Internet Map Server. The KGS will work in cooperation with the KU PIs to develop, update, and maintain the relational database component of NAVDAT on the DBMS servers at KGS. The entire database will be accessible by researchers around the world with a currently available, minimal web browser doc12744 none Keller This grant, supported through funds from the NSF Information Technology Research - Small Grants Program, facilitates a joint effort between Arizona State University and the University of Texas at El Paso to construct an integrated data system focusing on the Transition zone between the Colorado plateau and the Basin and Range province primarily in Arizona and New Mexico. This region is important for the development of an integrated geological and spatially-referenced data system as it is of fundamental significance to the geologic evolution of southwestern North America. In addition, such a system is timely as it can be used to address practical problems such as the effects of urbanization and dwindling water resources. Construction of this data system will involve three main efforts: 1) compilation of many large, scattered and heterogeneous earth science data sets into verified, standardized, and documented data bases; 2) construction of web-based interfaces that allow any interested party to access these data, receive robust metadata describing the data and how best to use them, and receive information on how to add data to the system via structured protocols; and 3) the design and construction of an extensive collection of public domain software (a toolbox) that would empower users with the capability to use and update the data in a substantial way. This project will leverage considerable support from several federal and state agencies including NASA, the U. S. Geological Survey, the National Imaging and Mapping Agency, and the Arizona Geological Survey doc12745 none Future generation mobile wireless communication systems (third generation and beyond) are expected to provide high data rates, accomodate highly mobile users, and support a wide variety of services including data, voice, video and interactive multimedia. Power (battery) limitations and the scarcity of radio spectrum (relative to the ambitions of such services) will dictate the need for cellular networks in which these resources must be used highly efficiently so as to support the continued growth in demand for wireless services into the future. The essential infrastructure required at the physical layer to fulfill this demand is a power and bandwidth efficient, multi-antenna, multi-user wireless communications technology. The investigators of this project will develop several key aspects of a theory of multi-user, multi-transmit antenna communication through a study of high-performance, interference resistant receivers, signature sequence designs and multi-user signal constellation optimization. Their goal is to realize, through simple system design, the power and spectral efficiency trade-offs that are achievable for multi-antenna wireless communications over fading channels. While emphasizing fundamental limits, the investigators will also focus on complexity constrained systems as well. They will develop results in the theory of multi-user detection and signature sequence optimization for multiple receive antennas for overloaded CDMA systems. Generalization of these results will be pursued to coded modulation and multiple transmit (and receive) antenna systems in order to further improve the performance and or achievable spectral efficiencies through more sophisticated signaling strategies combined with sub-optimal, complexity-constrained, high-performance multi-user decoding methods doc12746 none This project aims to extend an existing simple saliency-based visual attention system to animated color video sequences so as to enable it to cue the object recognition module towards interesting locations in live video streams, and simultaneously to extend an existing model for object recognition to on-line adaptability through top-down signals and task- and object-dependent learning of features. The PIs will then integrate these attention and recognition models, by developing feedforward and feedback interactions between localization of regions of interest and object recognition in those regions. This will require substantial elaboration of both models, as well as specific work on their integration. The result will be a complete model of object localization and recognition in primates, with direct applicability to computer vision challenges. The PIs will next implement and deploy the combined model on a cluster of CPUs linked by very fast interconnect (just installed at USC) to allow for real-time processing, and will demonstrate its utility in a prototype video-conferencing application in which the on-line adaptive attentional component of the integrated system will quickly locate regions in the monitored environment where something interesting is happening (e.g., a user raising her hand in a conference room). The recognition part of the system will then be trained and refined on-line to recognize relatively simple hand signs (e.g., a finger pointing up, meaning that the user wishes to become the center of interest in a video-conference). This work will demonstrate two points: that a biologically-inspired approach to traditionally hard computer vision problems can yield unusually robust and versatile vision systems (which work with color video streams and quickly adapt to various environmental conditions, users, and tasks); and that computational neuroscience models of vision can be extended to yield real, useful and widely applicable computer vision systems, and are not restricted to testing neuroscience hypotheses under simple laboratory stimuli doc12747 none The objective of Labscape is to enable individual lab workers to contribute to a fine-grained formal representation of ongoing lab activities i.e., to build the database by doing the work, without having to stop and write things down in a notebook or to enter information into a computer. By eliminating the redundancy of doing the work and then recording it, accuracy and completeness will be improved. And, by capturing information at a finer detail than possible for manual entry systems, varied and novel applications can be supported. This research supports the development of both an effective scientific working environment and an effective scientific learning environment but supporting better artifacts arising from the work or learning.. There are two primary research thrusts of this proposal. The first is the highly domain specific question of how and what data should be captured in the physical context of performing an experiment -- this is both a data representation and a human-computer interaction problem. The required domain expertise is derived from close cooperation with the University of Washington s Cell Systems Initiative (CSI) and its corporate and academic affiliates. The second question is how to obtain good system properties in distributed laboratory environments characterized by high degrees of device and personal mobility. For this application, security, reliability, and functional extensibility are some of the most important properties. These issues will be investigated in concert with UW s Portolano program whose objective is to develop general device, networking, middleware, and programming technologies for ubiquitous computing applications doc12748 none The objective of this project is to capture physical properties of real world phenomenon by analyzing photographs and video. The problem of capturing motion of objects has emerged as a major research area in the fields of computer vision and computer graphics with a wide range of possible applications. This project will attempt to devise new computer vision techniques for capturing and modeling the dynamics and physical characteristics of a number of differing objects in different contexts. If successful, the new techniques will enable more accurate 3D motion estimation from a single video stream and other limited sensor data. Finally, the project will explore potentially valuable application areas for these research products doc12749 none The Department of Statistics at North Carolina State University will purchase a high-performance clustered computing facility which will be dedicated to the support of research in the mathematical sciences. The equipment will be used for several research projects, including in particular: - Simulation Methods for Data Measured With Error - Stochastic Models of Gene Regulation - Spatial Modeling, Visualization and Inference - Statistical Analysis of Large Data Sets - Models of Biological Pattern Formation doc12750 none P. Neogi, University of Missouri-Rolla Self-assembly of nanoparticles in 2-D and 3-D structures continues to receive considerable attention due to the potentially unique optical and electronic properties that can be achieved. The proposed work is on a variety of experimental and computational simulation methods to study the rate of surface diffusion and formation of the 2-D gold nanoparticles. The thin layer will first be formed with a droplet, and later in the project with a spin-coater for this study. A number of techniques, such as small angle neutron scattering, atomic force microscopy, dynamic light scattering, and quasi-elastic light scattering are proposed for this study. The computational simulations based on molecular dynamic simulations for single and two-particle interaction followed by large scale Brownian Dynamic simulations are proposed doc12751 none Only a few years ago, the exchange of chemical signals, or pheromones, between bacteria was considered the exception rather than the rule. A small number of examples of cell-cell signaling had been well described, including the bioluminescence regulatory systems of Vibrio fischeri and Vibrio harveyi, the conjugal transfer system of Enterococcus faecalis, the production of antibiotics by Streptomyces spp., and the development of multicellular fruiting bodies of Myxococcus xanthus. It was assumed that cell-cell communication was not used by most bacteria. Cell-cell signaling in bacteria was considered an interesting subject of research, but not one of fundamental importance. In the past ten years, an enormous number of new examples of inter-bacterial signaling have been reported. These systems regulate a number of processes as diverse as virulence, sporulation, antibiotic production, DNA exchange, and development of multicellular structures. It is now understood that, in fact, most bacteria communicate with one another using secreted chemical molecules. Inter-cellular communication systems are fascinating because they allow bacteria to coordinately control the gene expression of the entire community. This ability fundamentally blurs the distinction between unicellular and multicellular forms of life. Several of these signaling systems are also extremely important to human health and the health of plants and animals in our environment, because they regulate the virulence determinants of bacterial pathogens. Because of the recent explosion in research in the area of bacterial communication, the ASM decided to provide an opportunity for scientists in the field to meet and discuss their research, by sponsoring a scientific conference on this topic. The conference will be held at Snowbird, Utah, in July of . The NSF has generously supported many of the investigators that study cell-cell communication in bacteria, and now joins ASM in providing financial assistance for this conference doc12752 none One of the essential characteristics of human action is that people constantly carry on two or more overlapping behavioral sequences simultaneously. For most the part, such actions are based on well-learned and smoothly run behavioral repertoires. We drive a car, carry on conversations, and manage not to collide with others who are doing the same thing. However, when attentional resources are diverted to one of these tasks, perhaps the conversation becomes deeply personal or highly emotional or a pelting storm makes driving hazardous, the other behavioral actions become error prone, slow down dramatically, or even cease altogether. Exactly what takes place during these periods where processing resources must be diverted is complex and only partly understood. This research will explore the impact that introducing a secondary task has on performance of the primary task and will examine the temporal relations between the two. The primary task will be one in which individuals must learn the order of a complex sequence of events, such as a series of lights appearing in any of several physically separate locations on a computer monitor. The secondary task will consist of a series of tones of varying pitch, where the participants will be required to keep a running count of how many tones of a particular pitch occurred. Recent experimental results have shown a surprising but critical relationship between exactly when an individual responds to the primary stimulus and when the secondary event occurs. Specifically, the closer together in time the two occur, the less disruptive the secondary stimulus is, provided that a successful response has already been made to the primary stimulus. The implication of this finding is that the secondary task doesn t disrupt performance simply because it is a secondary task. The degree to which performance is compromised is directly related to the difficulty of each task, to the amount of time it takes to process each stimulus and respond to it, and critically related to the temporal relationships between the two. The experiments will explore in detail these temporal relationships and use the results to test a variety of theoretical models of human performance. As is clear from a moment s reflection on just what takes place in a wide variety of work place settings, from assembly-line workers to airline pilots, these seemingly mundane issues are of critical importance. Understanding and learning how to fine-tune the timing between tasks in these multiple-tasking settings will go a long way toward increases in safety and performance doc12753 none Current computing systems do not support human work effectively. They restrict human-computer interaction to one mode at a time (through a keyboard or a mouse) and are designed with an assumption that use will be by individuals (rather than groups), directing (rather than interacting) with the system. To support the ways in which humans work and interact, a new paradigm for computing is required that is multimodal, rather than unimodal, collaborative, rather than personal, and dialogue-enabled, rather than unidirectional. This research will develop principles for, implement, and assess natural, multimodal, multiuser, dialogue-enabled interfaces to geographic information systems (GIS) that make use of large-screen displays and virtual environment technology. These interfaces will support a two-way iterative dialogue between human and machine in which the human participant can use three modalities, speech, gesture, and gaze, in natural ways. Progress toward multimodal human-computer interfaces will require both an understanding of individual modalities and the fusion of information at various levels. The project is concerned, specifically, with the use of computer vision and speech processing as a means of interpreting and integrating information from spoken words, free hand gestures and gaze. It is also concerned with how to enable a human-computer dialogue with an interactive, multi-layered map in the context of a GIS and with how to enable map-mediated dialogue between human collaborators. The work will be bootstrapped through use of an existing test-bed that integrates gesture and speech for simple map queries. The research will investigate how characteristics of tasks, information, and users influence the nature of human-computer and computer-mediated human-human dialogue. In doing so, the research will determine how these factors influence the strategies required to achieve an effective easy-to-use interface that supports information access and productive work by individuals and groups. This research will advance the science of natural, multimodal human-computer interaction, while addressing, directly, the challenges of developing new knowledge through which advances in information technology can enable universal participation in geospatial information access and applications. Estimates suggest that as much as 80% of all digital data contain some form of georeferencing (coordinates, addresses, zip codes). As a result, GIS have become an important tool for managing and analyzing data across a range of science, policy analysis, resource management, business planning, and educational applications. In spite of the potential applications for GIS and the growing availability of geospatial data, GIS are underutilized because current systems are hard to use. There is a substantial gap between current GIS applications and the promise of GIS to facilitate public access to the large volume of geospatial information and to support public as well as expert input to important decisions affecting their communities and environments. Achieving the research goals outlined will, thus, enable more effective decision-making about risks to public safety and health and will support input to important public decisions by a wider range of participants doc12754 none The objective of this ITR-small award is to develop a prototype for a unified computational framework able to provide an effective expansion to global coverage of any regional model based on the grid-point method. This Globalization Framework will be augmented by a capability for local enhancement of resolution over selected areas of interest and the movement of the better-resolved domains over the globe. The globalization will be achieved through application of a class of quasi-uniform spherical grids, that avoids the well-known problem of over-resolving of the polar regions typical for the standard longitude-latitude mesh. The technique of grid overlapping will be used for local enhancement of resolution. The regional model used at National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), the eta model, will be used as a prototype for the project. The framework will be developed for a combined use on a workstation (in the pre- and post-processing stage) using an object-oriented paradigm, and on a mainframe distributed memory computer (in the execution stage). For the benefit of the broader community, the pre post-processing stage will also be tested and adjusted to the Linux environment, and the execution stage to a cluster of PCs. The work is important because it is a novel application of a numerical technique that will offer new insights into regional climate studies doc12755 none This project will use new techniques from computational optimization to design radiation therapy planning for cancer treatment. Radiation therapy applies ionizing radiation to cancerous tissue, damaging the DNA and interfering with the ability of the cancerous cells to grow and divide. This also damages healthy cells, but they are more able to repair the damage and return to normal function. The therapy planning problem is to specify the shapes of the applied radiation beams, times of exposure, etc., to deliver a specified dose to the tumor but not an excessive dose to the surrounding healthy tissue. New medical devices allow much control over the characteristics of the radiation, thus allowing much scope for the therapy planning. However, the full potential of these devices to deliver optimal treatment plans has yet to be realized due to the complexity of the treatment design process. By using advanced modeling techniques, state-of-the-art optimization algorithms, and implementations on parallel computing platforms this project will provide radiation oncologists with important new computational tools for treatment planning. These tools will be flexible enough to adapt to the varying priorities of different planners and different patients and robust enough to give good solutions to the most difficult planning problems. The project involves collaboration between three researchers whose collective expertise encompasses radiation oncology modeling, optimization algorithms, and parallel implementations. It builds on previous collaborations of these researchers on treatment planning and on NSF-funded work on algorithms for solving large optimization problems. The institutions involved in the project are the University of Wisconsin, the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and the University of Chicago doc12756 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program to Princeton University supports the acquisition of equipment to enhance the quality of quantum-confined semiconductor structures grown in a molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) system. The equipment includes special (all-metal) gate valves and new effusion cells which will be installed in the MBE growth chamber. It will allow the growth of extremely clean (low-disorder), selectively doped GaAs AlGaAs heterojunction structures in which electron interaction physics dominates. The MBE grown, high-quality structures will be used in on-going NSF-supported projects. Such structures provide a crucial and important test-bed for new many-body physics. The results can also have an impact on the realization of new devices whose fabrication and or operation is based on semiconductor structures of similar type. The improved material will impact positively the research of several collaborators who receive high-quality GaAs AlGaAs heterostructures from the PI. The equipment will be used primarily by the students and will therefore be crucial for their education and training. The award will strengthen high quality education integrated into forefront research. In addition, fabrication and the physics of advanced layered semiconductor structures are at the forefront of today s science and technology. Well-trained and educated students in this field will be invaluable resources for the US as well as the rest of the world. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program to Princeton University supports the acquisition of equipment to enhance the quality of quantum-confined semiconductor structures grown in a molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) system. The equipment will improve the growth of extremely clean (low-disorder), selectively doped GaAs AlGaAs heterojunction structures in which electron interaction physics dominates. The MBE grown, high-quality structures will be used in on-going NSF-supported projects. Such structures provide a crucial and important test-bed for new many-body physics. The results can also have an impact on the realization of new devices whose fabrication and or operation is based on semiconductor structures of similar type. The improved material will impact positively the research of several collaborators who receive high-quality GaAs AlGaAs heterostructures from the PI. The equipment will be used primarily by the students and will therefore be crucial for their education and training. The award will strengthen high quality education integrated into forefront research. In addition, fabrication and the physics of advanced layered semiconductor structures are at the forefront of today s science and technology. Well-trained and educated students in this field will be invaluable resources for the US as well as the rest of the world doc12757 none This award is the result of a proposal submitted to the Information Technology Research initiative. Modeling and simulation of the evolution of natural and artificial complex systems are of fundamental importance in both sciences and engineering. In a large class of systems, the underlying dynamic is asynchronous, the updates in the local configurations of the system are discrete events in continuous time. Examples of such systems include magnetization dynamics in condensed matter, the evolution of financial markets, call arrivals in cellular communication networks, and the spread of emerging diseases and epidemics. To design and develop faithful and scalable parallel algorithms to simulate the evolution of large asynchronous systems is one of the most challenging areas in parallel computing. The ultimate goal of this proposal is to better understand how the scalability of Parallel Discrete-Event Simulation (PDES) algorithms can be enhanced, to program and run PDES simulations for a few chosen applications in science and engineering, and to educate junior researchers to allow them to prepare for careers at the interface between basic sciences and information technology. These types of PDES can be applied to an extremely wide spectrum of computational problems in science, engineering, manufacturing, biology, and economics. PDES use the concept of local random simulated time as well as a synchronization scheme. The parallel algorithm must concurrently advance the local simulated times of each subsystem carried by a processing element (PE), without violating causality. In a conservative PDES scheme, only those PE s which are guaranteed not to violate causality attempt the updates and increment their local time. The rest of the PE s must idle. In the optimistic approach the PE s do not have to idle, but since causality is not guaranteed at every update, the simulated history on certain PE s can become corrupted. This requires a complex rollback protocol to correct erroneous computation. Both simulation approaches lead to an evolving and fluctuating time horizon during algorithm execution. The research will exploit a novel connection recently discovered by the PI s and collaborators between non-equilibrium surface growth phenomena and the evolution of the fluctuating time horizon of conservative schemes. As the number of computer nodes available to a computational science and engineering problem increases to many thousands, questions of scalability of the underlying algorithms must be answered. These questions include both how well the algorithms scale asymptotically (in the limit of an infinite number of processors) and how they approach the asymptotic limit. Recently the PI s studied the case where each PE is connected to its nearest-neighbor PE s on regular lattice topologies, and each PE has no additional computation to perform if it is not advancing time. This is close to a worst-case scenario for scalability of the algorithm. Nevertheless, it was shown that the fraction of non-idling PE s is finite and bounded away from zero in the asymptotic limit of infinitely many PE s. Hence the algorithm is scalable as the problem size and number of PE s increase. The methodology of the PI s and collaborators used to obtain these results for PDES is the powerful machinery of non-equilibrium interface surface physics, notably finite-size scaling and universality, applied to the fluctuating time horizon. This research aims to extend this type of investigation. In particular, the methods of finite-size scaling, universality, renormalization group, coarse-graining, and mean-field approaches that are commonly applied to physical surfaces will be applied to both simple model time surfaces and realistic time surfaces that arise during PDES simulations in science and engineering. Based on the morphological properties of the time horizon, the PI s will design and develop algorithms that optimize simulation speed and data management at the same time. The research is interdisciplinary at the border between computer science, non-equilibrium surface physics, and the study of complex systems. It will contribute to the engineering and fine-tuning of scalable massively parallel algorithms, while actual implementations will help to understand cooperative behavior in large asynchronous systems. This grant also puts special emphasis on the education and training of young scientists doc12758 none Bunge This project deals with the very challenging problem of the generation of the Earth s magnetic field. The P.I.s will adopt a dual strategy in which the computer hardware and software are each specifically designed to function together at peak efficiency. In particular, the hardware will consist of a 144 processor Beowulf PC-cluster, yielding an estimated peak sustained performance of 100 Gflops - competitive with high-performance National Supercomputer Center machines, but at a fraction of the cost. To take full advantage of such a cluster, the software under consideration must be easily and efficiently parallelizable. The P.I. will derive the software from a finite element mantle convection code that is already fully parallelized, and already runs at high parallel efficiency on precisely such Beowulf clusters. Much of the conversion from mantle to core convection has already been done, with no loss in parallel efficiency doc12759 none This project will use new techniques from computational optimization to design radiation therapy planning for cancer treatment. Radiation therapy applies ionizing radiation to cancerous tissue, damaging the DNA and interfering with the ability of the cancerous cells to grow and divide. This also damages healthy cells, but they are more able to repair the damage and return to normal function. The therapy planning problem is to specify the shapes of the applied radiation beams, times of exposure, etc., to deliver a specified dose to the tumor but not an excessive dose to the surrounding healthy tissue. New medical devices allow much control over the characteristics of the radiation, thus allowing much scope for the therapy planning. However, the full potential of these devices to deliver optimal treatment plans has yet to be realized due to the complexity of the treatment design process. By using advanced modeling techniques, state-of-the-art optimization algorithms, and implementations on parallel computing platforms this project will provide radiation oncologists with important new computational tools for treatment planning. These tools will be flexible enough to adapt to the varying priorities of different planners and different patients and robust enough to give good solutions to the most difficult planning problems. The project involves collaboration between three researchers whose collective expertise encompasses radiation oncology modeling, optimization algorithms, and parallel implementations. It builds on previous collaborations of these researchers on treatment planning and on NSF-funded work on algorithms for solving large optimization problems. The institutions involved in the project are the University of Wisconsin and the University of Maryland School of Medicine doc12760 none The tremendous diversity of life on the planet is mirrored by the diversity of web-based information about species. This information is often difficult to find and unfriendly to use. Web pages that are useful to scientists are often inaccessible to schoolchildren, and education pages usually hold no research interest. Unlike the parts in a well-stocked building supply warehouse, the databases and web pages about organisms are difficult to locate and combine into coherent structure. This project uses a component architecture to integrate biodiversity web information seamlessly. It introduces building blocks to locate the origin and authority of a species name, to extract maps for species distribution, and provides nuts and bolts by which unrelated databases and web site can be made to cooperate. This is achieved through using XML, the eXtensible Markup Language that has been used in solving comparable problem in other parts of the web. The project develops XML gateways to make flexible the data sources not able to produce XML and provides multiple views on the same data. This accommodates different purposes, educational background and ages, for example. To illustrate its broad utility, the framework will be provided to a group of school teachers working with biology undergraduates and graduate students to produce a web-accessible field guide to the habitats of Columbia Point, Boston, together with curricular material for classroom use doc12761 none Geophysical data sets are typically very large. For example, an operational weather radar can generate almost 0.9 terabyte of data per year. Developing continental-scale, multiyear data sets can become a major and potentially very costly undertaking. Similar statements are true for geophysical satellite data. Advances in information technology, particularly rapid increases in disk storage capacity alleviate some data access problems, but accentuate others. It may be possible to get a terabyte of geophysical data online but visualizing and analyzing the data in their native distribution format remains extremely difficult. Approaches such as data compression or using derived products sometimes work, but are simplistic and ultimately counterproductive. The problem is clearly multifaceted, but the focus of this project is on researching and developing methods for dealing with the data after distribution to the user. Specifically the Principal Investigator will develop a client-server architecture that hides the complexities of the data set management from the user. A major component is a data query language or DQL for manipulating a data set. Through DQL a user can easily and efficiently add, delete, or modify, subsets of a data set, and rapidly search for subsets that match certain criteria. The DQL client-server includes resource management so that a user may control the impact of an analysis on the client CPU, network utilization, and other computing resources. Part of the project is the completion of a multiyear, multisite data set of weather radar data. This will serve as a test bed for the research and will have tremendous intrinsic value for many other future research efforts. When technology and data become available to users other than the original audience, they often find exciting applications. The many innovative applications of the global positioning system are one example. Another more pertinent example is the novel application of weather radar data to such fields as hydrology, bird and insect studies, and climatology, to name a few. There would be many new uses if these data sets were easily usable in the way this project address doc12762 none PI: Angelo Lucia Institution: University of Rhode Island Proposal Number: The aim of this research is to find all relevant solutions and singular points to physical models by dynamically uncovering the essential features of the terrain of the least-squares function. The central idea comes from finding intelligent ways of moving both up and down the landscape of the least-squares function. The foundation of the research rests on following fundamental observations: Stationary points are smoothly connected under twice continuous differentiability; Valleys, ridges, ledges, etc., provide a natural and useful characterization of this connectedness; Valleys, ridges, etc., can be characterized as a collection of constrained minima over a set of level curves; and The natural flow of Newton-like vector fields tends to be along these distinct features of the landscape. These observations and conjectures are illustrated using both chemical engineering models and mathematical benchmarks. The methodology based on exploiting these observations results in algorithms called Global Terrain Algorithms (GTA) and consist of successive sequences of downhill (i.e., equation-solving computations) and uphill movements (i.e., predictor-corrector calculations). Downhill movement to either a singular point or solution is established using reliable, norm-reducing (complex domain) trust region methods. Uphill movement, on the other hand, is necessarily to a singular point and uses uphill Newton-like predictor steps combined with intermittent corrector steps defined in terms of neighboring extrema in the gradient norm on the current level set for the least-squares function. Initial starting points are arbitrary while starting points for subsequent subproblems defining movement from one stationary point to another are along appropriately determined eigenvectors. These eigenvectors are calculated or approximated, provide knowledge about valleys, ridges, ledges, etc., give good initiations for further downhill or uphill movement, and can be considered a generalization of the eigendecomposition (or saddle point theory) of Sridhar and Lucia. Collisions with boundaries of the feasible region and severed valleys and ridges are also considered. As the connectedness of stationary points unfolds during problem-solving, limited connectedness is revealed and used to define the termination criterion for the GTA. Similar ideas are applicable to chemical process optimization be replacing the least-squares function with some other objective function doc12763 none PI Jansen - # PI Moret - # This award provides support for a collaborative project between two biologists (Jansen and Boore) and three computer scientists (Moret, Warnow, and Bader) to develop and test new algorithms and software for constructing evolutionary trees (phylogenies) from the rapidly increasing amount of genomic data. The estimation of phylogenies is crucial to a wide range of basic and applied biological problems such as the epidemiology of AIDS, the identification of viral agents, the analysis of protein structure and function, the prediction of RNA structure; and, of course, it is the basic tool for inferring evolutionary history. Methods for the reconstruction of phylogenies are most commonly applied to DNA sequences. In many cases these sequences change at rates that are too low or too high for recovering accurate evolutionary trees. One new type data that is fast gaining favor in the biology community is gene order and content within whole genomes, but so far very few computational methods have been developed for these types of data. The three goals of the project are to: (1) develop algorithms and software for reconstructing evolutionary trees from gene order and content data; (2) assess the performance of these algorithms through extensive simulation studies under parameter-rich models of genome evolution and through application to real datasets; and (3) develop high-performance implementations of the best algorithms designed in the project using algorithm engineering techniques and a flexible approach to parallelization. This project will make significant contributions in biology, through the development of new models of genome evolution and an improved understanding of the evolution of chloroplast and mitochondrial genomes, and in computer science, through the development and testing of new algorithms for genomic data and the application of high-performance computing to problems in phylogenetic analysis doc12764 none The project uses modeling techniques originally developed in physics to understand the growth of business firms. Physicists have analyzed systems in which the behavior of one unit (an atom, perhaps) is affected by the behavior of a large number of other units. The effect of each individual interaction may be small, but the aggregate effect is not. By analogy, the growth of each business firm is affected by a large number of other firms: competitors, customers, suppliers, and the producers of related products. In , Coase published a seminal article in which he argued that firms exist to minimize transaction costs. This article provided the framework that economists still use to try to understand the size and growth of firms. Even though the logic of this framework is widely accepted, it has not yielded testable predictions about the size and growth of individual firms that have been verified empirically. In other words, it has not passed the fundamental test of a successful scientific theory. The results in models of physical systems with large numbers of interacting units are that while the behavior of any one unit is inherently unpredictable, the statistical properties of the entire system are predictable. This project develops models that are consistent with the framework suggested by Coase, that explain well-documented regularities about the distribution of firm size and growth, and that explain why the growth, size, and composition of individual firms are inherently unpredictable. While this project is basic research, the results could ultimately affect antitrust and other aspects of industrial policy doc12765 none The phenomenal growth of the World Wide Web has resulted in the emergence and popularity of several new information technology related computer applications. The emerging computer workloads involve the integration of a variety of software, protocols, and standards: GUIs, Java, CORBA, cgi, perl, TCP IP, HTTP, and HTML are just a few of them. Facilitating smooth use of the internet for emerging applications involves designing efficient computer systems and microprocessors for use in the computers that serve these applications. Most of these workloads are just emerging, and their behavior is not well-understood by computer designers and architects. Many of the microprocessors that run these applications were designed before the advent of these workloads. The proposed research consists of understanding emerging workloads of the Information Technology era and designing microprocessors and computer systems for their efficient execution. It involves identifying where the cycles are gone during execution of these workloads, and identifying sources of loss of performance. The study will pin point bottlenecks, and identify architectural enhancements to improve performance. The performance monitoring counters present on commercial processors will be used for the first level of characterization followed by detailed complete system simulations for analyzing design tradeoffs. The proposed research will be conducted in close collaboration with our industrial partners, IBM, Tivoli, Intel and AMD. The project will serve as an integral part of a long term, comprehensive research program to influence the design of microprocessors and computer systems for the information technology era doc12766 none Improving the publics understanding of the scientific enterprise and improving scientific literacy have been identified as critical goals in the United States. Science learning occurs in formal (i.e. classroom) as well as in informal (i.e. backyards) settings and there are likely to be, at least, qualitative differences in outcomes between these learning environments. It is critical that scientists collaborate with professional science educators not only to identify the components of scientific literacy, but also to understand how learning occurs in these different settings and to help provide this information to other scientists and educators who will be ultimately responsible for the education of the population in both formal and informal settings. This proposal seeks funding to continue and complete the important research that I began as a National Science Foundation PFSMETE Fellow and to support the preliminary research and development of two other projects that have resulted directly from my post-doctoral position. For the former, I am proposing to analyze, present and publish my ongoing work on understanding the factors that most affect student attitudes and motivation in an established Student Scientist Partnership, Forest Watch. The new projects include a study of the effects of a community data collection program called Neighborhood Nestwatch on scientific literacy in participants, and the development and implementation of two environmental education courses at Paul Smith s College that will be the cornerstones for the creation of an environmental science education emphasis within the Natural Resource Bachelor of Science degree doc12767 none Street A number of computational and numerical tools will be synthesized to produce an innovative and powerful coastal ocean simulation tool. The primary goal of the project is to employ numerical large-eddy simulation to generate accurate predictions of motions and transport in coastal oceans under conditions when a non-hydrostatic and terrain-following representation is essential. The model should be able to handle all processes from the free surface to the bed so that the whole range from surface waves through internal waves to sediment motions can be simulated. The second goal is to apply the best algorithms available to create a simulation code that is capable or representing the physical processes at high resolution and capable of very high speed on multiple processor parallel computer. The project code will evolve from an existing semi-implicit numerical code for nonhydrostatic free-surface flows on unstructured grids. The code is based on the three-dimensional unsteady Navier-Stokes equations and utilizes a semi-implicit algorithm that is robust, stable, and very efficient. However, the existing code was developed for serial machines and lacks a number of important elements for the coastal ocean application, e.g., a scalar or material transport module, state-of-the-art subfilter-scale models for large-eddy simulation, and a highly-resolved treatment of the bathymetric or coastal boundaries. The focus of this work is to parallelize the code and install appropriate algorithms to meet both the need to represent the physics accurately and the need to produce a fast and robust production code for the coastal zone. A fundamental concept will be to seamlessly imbed the coastal simulations in larger-scale simulations so that natural boundary conditions would be applied around the entire domain. No artificial devices would be used to filter the simulations to avoid code instabilities or boundary reflections. The unstructured grid will be employed in horizontal planes allowing accurate representation of bathymetric and coastal features, which require severe changes in grid density from one subdomain to another. The composite grid method will be employed to fit a terrain-following highly resolved grid over the bathymetry and linked to the interior domain. Two specific applications of the completed code are planned. Both involve nonhydrostatic evolution of internal tides. The first is in Monterey Bay, California, where solitons are expected to form and the internal tide signal is intensified in the bottom of the Monterey Canyon. The second is in Mamala Bay, Hawaii, where high-amplitude and nonlinear internal tides are observed and there are key questions to be answered about the nature of these waves and their behavior in the Bay. The contributions on this work include: High performance: Parallel implementation using MPI, the message passing interface; Optimized unstructured-grid, 3D parallel-solver for the nonhydrostatic pressure; Code Features: Accurate advection based on the TVD method for unstructured grids; Nonhydrostatic large-eddy simulation with a fully-validated velocity estimation method for subfilter-scale motions; State-of-the-art grid generation [unstructured in the horizontal] for accurate resolution of complex bathymetry and shore boundaries and an embedded bottom following grid; Free surface using a semi-implicit treatment; and Production-style: Detailed users manual that illustrates the use of the code for coastal-ocean scale simulations doc12768 none C. Michael Elliott of Colorado State University is supported by the Division of Chemistry under the Information Technology Research (ITR) program to study molecular systems that have potential application in developing fundamentally new ways of reading stored magnetic information. New molecules and molecular ensembles that exhibit significant chemical responses to magnetic fields in the form of changed decay kinetics of the transient, photogenerated charge-separated state will be explored to optimize the systems for magnetic field responses. Project goals are: (1) to develop an understanding of how structural features of these new systems are related to the magnetic field dependences of their electron-transfer kinetics, specifically the kinetics of photoinduced charge-separated state formation and recombination, (2) to learn if molecular designs not necessarily closely related in structure to previously discovered assemblies will give similar field dependence kinetic responses, and (3) to investigate whether reverse micelles can serve as satisfactory hosts for these systems. Characterization and analysis of the dyes and materials under study will be carried out using pulsed laser spectroscopy, magnetic field effect experiments, and other standard analytical and materials analysis methods. This research project has clear technological underpinnings, motivated by the potential for the research outcomes to enable development of optically based, magnetic field sensors. Significant practical and economic benefits will result if this work leads to fundamentally new ways of detecting magnetic fields that could be used to read magnetic data doc12769 none Proposal number: Proposal type: Investigator Initiated for International Conference Principal investigator: Andrew L. Zydney Affiliations: University of Delaware Engineering Foundation ADVANCED MEMBRANE TECHNOLOGY This award supports partially the participation by 20 American faculty and researchers in the Engineering Foundation Conference, Advanced Membrane Technology , being held in Barga, Italy, from October 14 to 19, . The conference brings together leading researchers in the areas of new membrane synthesis and membrane-process applications. It highlights new developments in the field as well as research opportunities for the future. It brings together both academic and industrial researchers from throughout the world. Topics range from membrane synthesis through separation processes for liquids and for gases to membrane reactors. Funding is provided to support partially participation costs of some invited speakers and particularly of junior-faculty, post-doctoral, graduate student attendees from the U.S. The impact of this award is not only its direct contribution to further development of effective membrane separation processes but also its stimulus in bringing academic U.S. researchers into productive contact with industrial and international colleagues doc12714 none The LinBox group of twelve researchers in three countries (USA, France, Canada) proposes research in the design of efficient algorithms for linear algebra, in their implementation in a software library, and in how to interface the library to widely-used scientific computing software. Algorithms will be implemented, and new algorithms designed, for the black box representation of matrices---hence the name LinBox---over entry domains that are either symbolic, that is, exact, or floating point, that is, inexact. The library is generically programmed as C++ template classes with abstract underlying arithmetics; they can be compiled with a variety of fast libraries for the basic field, floating point, and polynomial operations. A server client interface seamlessly attaches the library to the common general purpose symbolic systems Maple and Mathematica and to the numeric system MatLab. Parallel execution of the implemented algorithms is facilitated. Black box matrices are stored as functions (as linear operators in effect): the matrix is a procedure that takes an arbitrary vector as input and efficiently computes the matrix-times-vector product. Black box linear algebra generalizes sparsity. The LinBox library will contain algorithms for solving singular and non-singular systems of linear equations whose coefficient matrix is given in black box representation. Furthermore, it is proposed to develop fast methods for the rank and the minimal and characteristic polynomial of a black box matrix. Finally, LinBox will contain methods for linear Diophantine problems with black box matrices, such as computing an integral solution to a linear system with integer entries and computing the Smith normal form of an integer matrix doc12771 none Proposal # Antsaklis, Panos U of Notre Dame The goals of this project are to develop algorithms and prototype software for the verification and supervision of hybrid embedded control systems; also for the identification of hybrid system models. This project is developing supervisory processors to supervise and control in real time the operation of large number of control processors interacting with the outside world. The control processors interact with the physical world while the supervisory processors are responsible for monitoring and maintaining the health of the distributed control system in a highly autonomous and fault-tolerant manner. The innovative characteristics of this project are as follows: 1) the development and application of novel discrete event supervisory methods to supervise hybrid embedded systems; 2) the development and application of novel approaches to the verification and supervision of hybrid, piece-wise linear systems; 3) the development of theory and algorithms to extend these results to a class of nonlinear hybrid systems; and, 4) the development of novel model identification methodologies and algorithms for hybrid systems. The project s approach will improve the ability of hybrid embedded control systems to deal with high complexity, undecidability and nonlinearity doc12772 none This project consists of a series of experimental and theoretical investigations on multi-photon entangled states and their fundamental role in quantum information and quantum computing. Major efforts underway include experimental and theoretical investigations on N-photon (N 2 entangled states) and on partial entanglement in quantum information and quantum computation theory. Theoretical characterization of entanglement in mixed states is at the core of this project. The experimental investigations focus on two projects. The first one is the realization of source of three-photon entangled states. These may lead to experimental generation of GHz states. The second experimental project is quantum teleportation based on the improvement on the realization of Bell-state detection doc12773 none This project will design and implement a distributed rendering platform that consists of off-the-shelf commodity components, yet delivers real-time photorealism on a large scale. This parallel rendering system was inspired by a similar system recently built at Princeton University. Proposed extensions to that work include a significant expansion in scale, new task-scheduling algorithms, a new integrated network design that links graphics card drivers to network interface card drivers in distributed Linux systems, and an extension of the Keller technique, called instant radiosity, to deliver real-time, global illumination. Design and implementation of the platform should provide graduate students in computer science with valuable hands-on experience in designing large-scale systems for distributed processing. The resulting platform should serve as a valuable research tool for several groups including the NSF ERC group, which will use visualization to explore product and process design for new fibers and films. The enabling code extensions, to widely-available open software systems that this project builds, will be freely available over the Internet doc12774 none TITLE: BEHAVIORAL ECOLOGY OF PRAIRIE DOGS PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: JOHN L. HOOGLAND Utah prairie dogs are colonial, burrowing rodents that are in acute danger of extinction. Research on their ecology and social behavior at Bryce Canyon National Park will help conservation biologists to formulate a recovery plan for these rare animals. Biologists argue about the details, but they all agree that individuals should avoid extreme inbreeding. Utah prairie dogs, however, commonly mate with close kin such as parents, siblings and offspring. Long-term research will examine the reproductive success of individuals that engage in extreme inbreeding. Although infanticide is ubiquitous among animals, the frequency is usually low and the victims are usually genetically unrelated to killers. For Utah prairie dogs, however, infanticide affects 27% of litters. Further, males frequently kill the offspring of females with whom they copulated. Research will investigate reasons for these unusual features of infanticide among Utah prairie dogs. DNA- fingerprints indicate a startling result for Utah prairie dogs: females commonly rear the offspring of other females. Research will investigate whether mothers that rear foster offspring increase the safety of their own offspring from both infanticide and predation doc12775 none The proposal addresses the problem of simultaneous control of a machine - e.g. a robot - by a number of independent operators. Such situations are likely to appear, for example, when robots are controlled via Internet from various locations, and also in tele-immersion and teleworking. As a possibility, inputs from the participants may be combined to generate a single control stream - which is equivalent to the participants collaborating rather competing with each other. New fundamental reaserch issues that appear in systems with multi-user control of a single device - in the context of theory, algorithms, and system implementation - will be investigated doc12776 none Carton This project will provide improved estimates of the historical changes in the climate of the oceans by using direct and indirect observations to constrain numerical models of the global ocean circulation, temperature, and salinity through application of sequential estimation techniques. Application of sequential estimation to the problem of ocean reanalysis faces a number of problems. Full implementation is impractical on current computers. Further problems result from the presence of long spatial and temporal correlation scales in the observation minus forecast model differences. In addition, the subsurface data sets are limited and non-stationary. This project will exploit modern developments in computer science and meteorology to address these challenges. The specific focus is on variability of the global ocean during the 60-year period - . A suite of preliminary reanalyses of the monthly temperature, salinity, and velocity fields of the ocean has been conducted using data assimilation, which have helped to identify a number of problems that must be surmounted. At the same time, there have been substantial improvements in the database of historical observations. This project will support an interdisciplinary collaboration between an oceanographer and meteorologist at University of Maryland (Jim Carton and Eugenia Kalnay) and an applied mathematician at NASA GSFC (Dick Dee) to continue to explore new computational methods and algorithms developed for the problem of atmospheric data assimilation to explore seasonal to decadal variability of the oceans. The scientific objectives also address parts of the first of the scientific objectives of the CLImate Variability and predictability (CLIVAR) program: to describe and understand the physical processes responsible for climate variability and predictability on seasonal, interannual, decadal and centennial time scales, through the collection and analysis of observations and the development and application of models of the coupled climate system, in cooperation with other relevant climate research and observing programs (CLIVAR, ). Funding is provided through the Information Technology Research Initiative and the CLIVAR program. doc12777 none This project addresses the need to improve the way we access experimental data and theoretical models associated with nuclear and particle physics reactions. Tools will be developed in order to achieve: (1) more efficient searching within the database of existing measurements; (2) interactive comparisons between data and models constructed to describe them; (3) the incorporation of new measurements into the system. A wide range of capabilities will be presented in order to satisfy both the novice and advanced users. Private accounts will be available to professionals wishing to analyze preliminary experimental results, or plan for new measurements. Methodsdeveloped here will be applicable to other scientific databases as well. Linking such sites through the Internet promises to accelerate much of the background checking required in scientific research doc12778 none Carletta The speed of data processing is often of critical importance in real-time control systems. The required complexity of the real-time computations increases with the complexity of the control system model and the sophistication of the control algorithm. In addition, the sampling interval (i.e., the length of time within which the computation must be completed) decreases as the control system bandwidth increases. Thus, a complex, high-performance control system may require high-speed computational hardware. Currently, digital control systems universally rely on general-purpose microprocessors or digital signal processing (DSP) chips to compute appropriate control inputs from available sensor data. In some applications, the limits of the control system performance are determined by the speed of the processor used. A possible alternative means of implementing a feedback control algorithm would use the field programmable gate array. Recent advances in field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology have completely changed the application area for these inexpensive, off-the-shelf, reconfigurable hardware devices. Once relegated to small glue logic applications, FPGAs are now capable of implementing complex very large scale integrated (VLSI) systems. Generally, FPGA implementations can now provide an order of magnitude faster execution time than microprocessor-based implementations, without incurring the high cost of fabrication and development required for application specific integrated circuits. As yet, the potential for improved control system performance that FPGAs may allow has not been exploited or explored. This proposal describes work aimed at starting collaborative, interdisciplinary research in hardware implementation for real-time controls. It seeks to investigate the role that reconfigurable computing can play in control systems. This work aims to exploit reconfigurable computing based on field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology to provide faster hardware, so that more sophisticated and higher bandwidth real-time control systems may be implemented. First, novel FPGA synthesis methods will be developed for the implementation of general adaptive FIR filters. Such filters are the central elements in digital control systems, and in many non-control applications as well. Adaptive filters are chosen so as to exploit the capacity for run-time reconfiguration of the FPGA hardware. Second, to demonstrate the new synthesis methods, the FPGAs will be used to implement a stabilizing feedback control on a magnetic-bearing test rig. Magnetic suspension is an important and interesting control application in its own right, and will provide a suitable benchmark for FPGA implementation. The new FPGA-based control will be compared with a standard DSP-based control to demonstrate the achievable performance gains. The project will train two graduate students, and is amenable to undergraduate participation. When fully developed, the FPGA-controlled magnetic suspension system will serve as the basis for undergraduate laboratory exercises in classes on control and digital design doc12779 none LTREB: Integrated study of behavioral and morphological development in free-living carnivores Proposal #IBN Kay E. Holekamp Barbara L. Lundrigan Kim T. Scribner Spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) are long-lived, gregarious carnivores exhibiting a unique suite of behavioral, endocrine, and morphological characteristics. Since , Dr. Holekamp and associates have been studying the behavioral ecology of members of one large spotted hyena population in Kenya, focusing mainly on the development of social behavior. Age, sex, kin relations, and social status are known for all natal animals in the study population, and social histories are known for all hyenas under 13 years of age. Most adult clan members of both sexes wear radio collars so they can be regularly located and observed. The proposed LTREB project will support new aspects of long-term research with this study population. Specifically, Dr. Holekamp will join forces with a morphometrician (Dr. Lundrigan) and a geneticist (Dr. Scribner) to achieve three new goals. (1) First, a novel combination of behavioral and morphometric techniques will be used to examine age-related changes in morphology of the feeding apparatus, diet, feeding behavior, and feeding performance. This portion of the proposed work will include documentation (with new and archived data) of age-related change in chewing, foraging, feeding behavior, and diet; administration of simple performance tests in the field to assess maximal feeding capabilities at each age; and quantitative analysis of age-related changes in skull morphology. (2) The second goal is to start monitoring behavior, growth, and demography in a second spotted hyena population (one less exposed to humans) to inquire whether age-related constraints on foraging abilities might make certain age-sex classes of hyenas more vulnerable than others to effects of anthropogenic disturbance. (3) Finally, in both hyena populations, genetic markers, in conjunction with behavioral data, will be used to elucidate the relationship between behavioral responses to anthropogenic disturbance and fitness decrements associated with such disturbance. The proposed work will shed considerable light on the natural and anthropogenic selection pressures acting on hyenas during each stage of life. It will also combine several different data types, all collected in a natural ecological and evolutionary context, to integrate traditionally disjunct approaches to the study of life history evolution. The results should be important not only for understanding the unique suite of traits expressed by spotted hyenas, but more generally, for understanding the role of age-related constraints in the evolution of behavior. With the data from the two different hyena study populations, it will be possible to quantify the effects of anthropogenic disturbance concurrently on both behavior and fitness, identify ecological variables that might be responsible for population differences, and assess the relative effects of these variables on animals in different age, sex, and rank classes. This is a unique opportunity to document the adaptive consequences of behavioral change in response to human activity. It is hoped that the proposed work will serve as a model for understanding the complex relationships among behavior, morphology, fitness, demography, and human disturbance in other mammalian carnivores, including those that are rare and endangered doc12780 none This is a collaborative research award under the Information Technology Research initiative. The collaborator ( ) is Professor N. Ghoniem of UCLA. The research involves the development and application of methods for large-scale dislocation dynamics simulations. As a result of recent progress in manufacturing and engineering utilization of nano-and micro-scale structures, there is an urgent need for approaches that are capable of predicting the reliability and propensity of these structures to failure. This grant will develop Fortran 90 95 parallel computer software, based on discrete dislocation dynamics, which will predict plastic deformation and failure of sub-micron semiconductor microelectronics. Developed software will be aimed at (1) design of desired mechanical properties of semiconductor thin film-substrate material systems for optimum reliability; (2) development of new computer architectures for parallel, large-scale simulations for the dynamics of topologically complex line defects, which interact through long-range force fields; and (3) enhanced education training of graduate and undergraduate students. The following projects will be undertaken: (1) Investigation of single and collective dislocation interaction phenomena in anisotropic materials, which determine plasticity and failure in semiconductor devices; (2) Multiscale coupling of parametric dislocation dynamics with the finite element and analytical elasticity methods; (3) Development of unique software on parallel, scalable computer clusters to simulate the collective behavior of topologically complex line defects, which interact with a long-range force field; (4) Application of the developed software to investigate a number of critical physical mechanisms, including, misfit and threading dislocation loop motion; dislocation-dislocation interactions; junction and jog formation; dislocation annihilation and multiplication; dislocation interaction with grain boundaries, free surfaces and bimaterial elastic interfaces; dislocation interactions with point defects, precipitates and cracks; influence of thermal residual stress; computational design of buffer layers and superlattices; and (5) Large-scale simulation and optimization of semiconductor systems to provide guidelines for engineering design of new generations of microelectronics. The research will improve our understanding of plastic flow and failure at the nano-to-meso scale and represents a challenge to high performance computing and protocols. Models will be compared to experimental data and will also be used to design reliable microelectronics. %%% This is a collaborative research award under the Information Technology Research initiative. The collaborator ( ) is Professor N. Ghoniem at UCLA. The research involves the development and application of methods for large-scale dislocation dynamics simulations. As a result of recent progress in manufacturing and engineering utilization of nano-and micro-scale structures, there is an urgent need for approaches that are capable of predicting the reliability and propensity of these structures to failure. This grant will develop Fortran 90 95 parallel computer software, based on discrete dislocation dynamics, which will predict plastic deformation and failure of sub-micron semiconductor microelectronics. Developed software will be aimed at (1) design of desired mechanical properties of semiconductor thin film-substrate material systems for optimum reliability; (2) development of new computer architectures for parallel, large-scale simulations for the dynamics of topologically complex line defects, which interact through long-range force fields; and (3) enhanced education training of graduate and undergraduate students. The research will improve our understanding of plastic flow and failure at the nano-to-meso scale and represents a challenge to high performance computing and protocols. Models will be compared to experimental data and will also be used to design reliable microelectronics doc12781 none LTREB: Linking Individual and Spatial Variation to Demography and Population Dynamics of a Neotropical Parrot Steven R. Beissinger This long-term research project will continue studies of a South American parrot, the Green-rumped Parrotlet (Forpus passerinus), to address marked variation among individuals and across small distances in behavior, demography and population dynamics. Continued long-term studies, which have been conducted since in Venezuela since , will link social system, dispersal and demography to population dynamics. Thirteen years of similar work has revealed a complex social system dominated by large numbers of nonbreeding males which occur in various social groupings, a low rate extra-pair fertilizations that are often assigned to males residing far from the nesting pair, and unusual spatial variation in the onset of breeding between two populations (upland and lowland) located only 500 m apart and differing in elevation by 1-2 meters. They have also found different patterns of population growth in the two populations that can be attributed to: (1) higher reproductive success in the upland population, (2) young females dispersing much farther than males, often leaving the study area altogether, and (3) young males dispersing from the poorer quality lowland habitat to the better quality upland habitat. Specific objectives of the study are to: (1) determine movement patterns and affiliations of breeders and nonbreeders, and dispersal of young to understand how they might account for extra-pair parentage patterns, small-scale variation in the onset of breeding, and differences among the sexes and populations; (2) document annual variation in the onset of breeding among populations of parrotlets that occurs at small spatial scales and measure food availability to see how this affects timing of laying; and (3) understand the effects of the individual and spatial differences in demography and population dynamics by developing population models that integrate behavior with sexual- and habitat-related differences in demography. Study goals will be accomplished by expanding the number of parrotlet populations under study; using radio-telemetry to track the daily movements and interactions of breeding pairs and nonbreeding males; and continuing behavioral, demographic and environmental monitoring to refine our understanding of the social system and to estimate vital rates doc12782 none Proposal # Sitaraman Clemson University A fundamental goal of software engineering is to enable predictable and modular construction of software systems by assembling components. Any component-based approach works on the basic premise that participating components respect each other s contracts. If this premise is violated, the consequences can be both dangerous and expensive, because the problems may not surface until integration time. Even worse, a system may behave properly on test cases, though internal interface contracts are violated. Undetected failures from internal violations may be revealed ultimately only as accidents to component-based and embedded systems after deployment. This project offers a modular approach for detecting and isolating internal contractual violations. The approach allows checking at suitable levels of abstraction using formal specifications. It permits checking to be turned on or off selectively to facilitate effective regression testing, and it addresses violations of performance contracts in addition to functionality for parameterized and object-oriented components. To minimize errors in the violation checking process, the project will use and experimentally evaluate alternative combinations of automation, formal verification, model checking, and testing techniques doc12783 none The Gordon Conference on Condensed Matter Physics is aimed at bringing together world leaders, young investigators and students at all levels to present and discuss exciting new results and the inter-relations between the diverse subfields in condensed matter physics. The topics covered range from quantum electronics and transport to soft condensed matter and biophysics. In this years conference the different areas are tied together by an interest in organic molecules their properties and assembly. Dramatic new results on insulting organic crystals doped metallic and superconducting by applying a gate electrode lead to new insights into transport in carbon based systems. The results on organic crystals are to be compared contrasted with those of nanotubes, polymers and DNA. Transport in DNA is then considered in solution and leads to an understanding of its dielectric properties and the way it can be manipulated and self assembled into various structures. The information content and its value in biological systems is presented. Problems of frustrated packings and jamming are then discussed also in relation to the glasses and granular materials. The conference provides lectures, but emphasizes a large amount of time for formal and informal discussions between lecturers and students. The students are encouraged to participate directly by presenting posters on their work to serve as a focal point for interaction with more senior researchers. The Gordon Conference on Condensed Matter Physics is aimed at bringing together world leaders, young investigators and students at all levels to present and discuss exciting new results in forefront areas of the physics of new electronic, structural, organic and biological materials. The participants will be from academe, industry and government labs. Organic crystals, polymers, and biological materials have very recently been shown to be electrical conductors with controllable properties useful for data storage, light emission, computation, mobility and interesting new structures. These materials bring new insight into both fundamental science and potential and present applications. They also illustrate the relative advantages of organic and inorganic systems. Student participation is encouraged both by the large amount of time devoted to formal and informal discussion as well as poster sessions where the students present their results as a focal points for interaction with more senior researchers doc12784 none The central focus of this proposal is the development of efficient algorithms for the storage and movement of data. Specifically, we are interested in algorithms that impact the performance of large multimedia data storage systems. In algorithmic terms, some of the principal challenges that arise in the context of multimedia data storage are: (a) deciding how many copies of each data item need to be stored, (b) determining the exact layout of data on a set of servers, (c) dealing with changing workloads and dynamic data access patterns. These related challenges require the development of efficient algorithms for optimizing data layout to maximize client satisfaction, monitoring the performance of data storage systems and scheduling the movement of large amounts of data. Futhermore, what makes the issues that we consider even more significant is the fact that data storage and movement issues also arise within publicly share networks such as the Internet where the bandwidth can be dynamic and highly variable, and can result in a poor choice of paths chosen to transfer data in the network. One way to address this issue is to route data through specific holding points. By doing this we are able to increase throughput and decrease completion times by an order of magnitude to transfer data from several sources to a single destination. Algorithms related to this problem have been developed by us and are being tested with the Bistro framework, which is a framework for providing a data upload service such as one required by IRS for tax submission purposes. Our data movement algorithms are being used to schedule the transfer of data from many different locations to a final destination server. While some specific instances of the individual problems have been considered earlier, there is no work dealing comprehensively with the range of issues that we focus on doc12785 none and Union Types. PI: Assaf J. Kfoury The proposed research will investigate real-world relevance of a new framework for modular program-analysis, which uses intersection and union types. The starting point of this investigation is a recently designed polymorphic type system, called System I, for a foundational functional language, the lambda-calculus. The chief feature of System I is the use of intersection types together with the new technology of expansion variables , which allow System I to satisfy a substitution-based principal-typings property. Although fully modular, the resulting program analysis is now restricted to a foundational language (the lambda-calculus) missing many standard high-level programming features such as conditionals, recursive definitions, exceptions, assignments, input output, etc. Considerable work is necessary in order to turn System I into a type system for a full-fledged programming language such as Scheme (now considered to be the initial target language of proposed research). The proposed research is largely engineering work, aimed at producing an efficient prototype implementation, based on appropriate extensions of System I. The implementation will be evaluated --- or re-designed in parts --- by the extent to which it produces demonstrably better results in handling large software systems (enforcing larger classes of safety properties, statically detecting and ruling out larger classes of run-time errors doc12786 none The award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research and the Major Research Instrumentation program will enable James Madison University to acquire a large sample atomic force scanning tunneling microscope (AFM STM) for use by undergraduate research students at JMU in materials science and biomaterials oriented projects. These projects include in-situ monitoring of the biodegradation of polymer thin films, electrochemical etching and deposition on III-V semiconductors, determination of the surface ultrastructure on bacterial inclusion bodies, microstructural analysis of protein-DNA interactions, and non-destructive imaging of wafer-scale surface engineering through the use of self assembled monolayers (SAMs). This instrument will be used in the training of undergraduate students and local high school teachers in scanning probe microscopy, surface chemistry and physics and nanotechnology through coursework, experimental modules and demonstrations, and will help prepare future generations of scientists in the study of nanometer-scale phenomena. The award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research and the Major Research Instrumentation program will enable James Madison University to acquire a large sample atomic force scanning tunneling microscope (AFM STM) for use by undergraduate research students at JMU in materials science and biomaterials oriented projects. These projects include in-situ monitoring of the biodegradation of polymer thin films, electrochemical etching and deposition on III-V semiconductors, determination of the surface ultrastructure on bacterial inclusion bodies, microstructural analysis of protein-DNA interactions, and non-destructive imaging of wafer-scale surface engineering through the use of self assembled monolayers (SAMs). This instrument will be used in the training of undergraduate students and local high school teachers in scanning probe microscopy, surface chemistry and physics and nanotechnology through coursework, experimental modules and demonstrations, and will help prepare future generations of scientists in the study of nanometer-scale phenomena doc12787 none R. Lucht, Texas A&M University Components are acquired for development of a tunable, high-resolution optical parametric oscillator (OPO) laser source. The system features a resonant, electronically locked ring-oscillator cavity that is injection-seeded with tunable diode laser radiation. The pump source for the OPO system is a Q-switched injection-seeded Nd:YAG laser. In addition to serving as the pump source for the OPO cavity, the fundamental ( nm) and harmonic (532 nm, 355 nm, and 266 nm) laser radiation from the YAG laser is used in sum-frequency generation (SFG) processes to convert the near infrared output of the OPO into visible or ultraviolet radiation. This source will greatly improve applicability and accuracy of a wide variety of laser diagnostic techniques. Specific examples include ultraviolet polarization spectroscopy (PS) of hydroxyl and nitric oxide, amplified stimulated emission (ASE) of the carbon atom, and coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) of the hydrogen molecule doc12788 none Families are crucial institutions for intergenerational mobility. Family values influence the acquisition of marketable skills by offspring. Family social and economic status affects both skill acquisition and the next generation s access to individuals embedded in positions of authority and power. It has been argued that differences in family and neighborhood characteristics are ultimately for increasing racial wage inequality that began in the early s and that remains with us today. Researchers have also argued that ethnic and racial capital, that is, a demographic group s average level of social or economic wellbeing, interacts with parental and neighborhood socioeconomic status to determine intergenerational mobility. This research project unites the literature on family environment (that is, the combination of family values behaviors and family socioeconomic status) and intergenerational inequality with an exploration of the nature and extent of racial and gender inequality. Accordingly, this paper investigates four questions. First, do childhood family values and family status matter for young adult social and economic outcomes? Second, does accounting for individual differences in childhood family environment eliminate racial and gender differences in the wellbeing of young adult workers? Third, does the relative importance of childhood family environment on young adult wellbeing vary across racial and gender groups? Four, are there racial and gender differences in the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status? To answer these questions, the research project examines the impact of family values and family economic and social status on educational attainment, annual earnings, wealth (home value), and annual hours of employment for four race-sex groups: African American females and males, white females and males doc12789 none The process of designing or upgrading a large-scale broadband communication infrastructure involves solving several optimization problems, including the problems of optimum topology design, server placement, distribution and replication of data between the servers, and fair division of limited network resources (e.g. bandwidth, CPU cycles, etc.) among the users. As networks become larger and more complicated, it becomes imperative to use mathematically sound, scalable methods for solving the above problems. The goal of this project is to develop and implement such methods. One of the main thrusts of the project is development of new approaches for network design and sizing. In particular, the project focuses on development of optimization techniques where the goal is to construct a low cost topology, choose optimum locations (and sizes) for servers (e.g. web caches, application servers, wireless hubs, etc.), and decide how to replicated the data. A related problem is network expansion augmentation, where the goal is to decide (online) where to place new equipment and to choose which new links to lease in order to satisfy the increased demand. Due to economies of scale, topology design and augmentation problems have concave costs structure and hence can not be solved by classical flow-based approaches. The investigators work on developing principled approaches for solving the above problems and on designing and implementing a set of tools that can be used in the planning and network management process doc12790 none The aims of the project are to develop implementation architectures and conceptual foundations for SYNCHRONIZERS -- programs that reconcile copies of replicated data after disconnected updates. More specifically, the project s goals are (1) to develop high-level SPECIFICATIONS for various forms of synchronization, in particular for the domains of file system synchronization and synchronization for more general structured data presented as XML; and (2) to build and distribute IMPLEMENTATIONS embodying these specifications. These activities are tightly connected, and will proceed in parallel throughout the project s lifetime. The results of the research will both be disseminated in the form conference and journal publications and embodied in publically distributed software. The long-term intention is both to advance the conceptual foundations of synchronization tasks (in filesystems, databases, ad hoc network protocols, and cooperative middleware layers) and, by offering clean designs and compelling prototypes, to improve engineering practice in the area. http: www.cis.upenn.edu ~bcpierce unison doc12791 none Madigan - Rutgers University Digital networked environments such as the Web play an increasingly important role in our lives. More than 135 million Americans have Internet access (Source: eTForecasts) and on average use that connection 4.2 hours per week (Source: PriceWaterhouseCoopers). All this activity generates vast and complex digital traces . Appropriate analyses of these traces can lead to an unprecedented understanding of online behavior, and, in turn, to substantial improvements in the design of digital environments. These data present challenges to traditional statistical methods due to their complexity and massive scale. We will develop novel statistical technology to address these challenges. Specifically, this project will develop Bayesian statistical methodology for analyzing data from digital environments. The Bayesian approach to data analysis is uniquely suited to the kind of multi-level and hierarchically structured data that the project focuses on. Bayesian methods have a rich history but have only become practicable in recent years due to advances in computing power and numerical methods. The methodological research will ground itself in a series of applications. The essential contribution, however, will be to develop a practical Bayesian methodology for these data. There exists a significant educational barrier to the widespread use of Bayesian methods. The project will also develop and disseminate a graduate-level multidiscipliniary course in Bayesian methods doc12792 none Narendra The mathematical difficulties encountered in designing controllers for dynamical systems can be broadly classified under four headings: (i) uncertainty (ii) nonlinearity (iii) complexity, and (iv) time-variations. Adaptive control is the discipline which deals with uncertainty in systems, and the adaptive control of linear systems is currently well understood. The problem of control becomes substantially more complex when the plant characteristics are known but nonlinear, and becomes truly formidable when they are unknown and or vary with time. All four classes of problems are encountered when neural networks are used to control nonlinear plants. During the past ten years considerable progress has been made in understanding the problems that arise in neurocontrol [1]- [18]. Mathematical modeling, system identification, and synthesis of controllers to track desired output signals have all been extensively studied. The effect of different classes of disturbances have also been investigated, and the methods developed have been applied to a wide class of practical problems. In spite of this, many important questions remain unanswered, and the design of neural controllers remains in many cases more an art than a science. The proposal addresses three fundamental and closely related questions in the adaptive control of nonlinear dynamical systems. The first concerns questions of stability and convergence of neural network based control and deals with both the structure of the controllers and the tools used for proving stability. The second question deals with the important problem of generating optimal control inputs for general classes of nonlinear systems. Such problems are arising with increasing frequency in both well established areas such as process control and aircraft control, as well as new areas such as robotics and space technology. Finally, the third problem deals with the use of multiple models for controlling efficiently nonlinear systems in rapidly varying environments. In all three cases the principal questions are stated, the mathematical difficulties are discussed in detail, and potentially fruitful avenues for research are proposed. It is the opinion of the PI that, in the present state of development of neurocontrol, the three parts of the proposal represent three closely related and important aspects of nonlinear adaptive control using neural networks doc12793 none The goals of this project are to discover the universal character of reading and the specific ways that writing systems affect reading processes. It will focus on the comparison of two highly contrastive writing systems, i.e., English, representative of the world s alphabetic writing systems, and Chinese, usually considered to be a unique logographic system. Alphabetic systems use meaningless graphs (letters) as the basic unit in the system and map these units onto meaningless units in the spoken language (phonemes). Thus, the letter b maps to the sound b . In Chinese, there are no units in the writing system that correspond to phonemes. Instead, the basic graphs (characters) correspond to syllables, most of which are words. This allows written Chinese to link graphic units directly with meaning. Along with the fact that early Chinese characters had pictographic content, this fact has encouraged the hypothesis that Chinese reading occurs without reference to speech (phonology). However, recent research, including Perfetti s current NSF-funded research, has discovered that readers of Chinese make use of spoken word forms, just as readers of alphabetic systems do. In a wide variety of tasks that expose processes of word identification, Chinese readers use the pronunciations in silent reading. For example, when readers make decisions about word meanings, the pronunciation of the words interferes with the meaning judgment. To use an English example, a reader who is asked to decide whether an item is a kind of plant, may make a mistake on the word flour (or take longer to make a decision) because the word shares a pronunciation with a word that is a kind of plant ( flower ). If the reader could avoid the pronunciation, such an effect would not occur. Similar results have now been found for Chinese, suggesting that reading for meaning in both Chinese and English involves activation of pronunciations. Now the question becomes how the rapid events of word identification unfold in a fraction of a second from graphic input to pronunciation and meaning. What differences and similarities occur across the two writing systems? Are there differences in their visual processing demands? In the route from graphic form to meaning? These questions will be addressed in studies of Event Related Potentials (ERP), the electrical activity of the brain that can provide information about the time course of word reading events. The project will also include fMRI studies to add more specific information about underlying brain structures used in reading Chinese compared with those used in reading English. In addition, the project will study the important question of how a learner comes to acquire reading skill in a second writing system. American students learning to read Chinese will be studied in a range of behavioral and ERP tasks that will provide information on the course of learning and on some of the brain activities associated with this new learning doc12794 none Under the direction of Dr. Katharina Schreiber, Mr. Hendrik Van Gijseghem will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will undertake archaeological excavations at the site of La Puntilla in the Nasca drainage of the South Coast of Peru. This site, dated to the latter part of the Early Horizon (ca. 400 B.C - 1 AD), is part of what may be the earliest known permanent occupation of the Nasca drainage by sedentary agriculturalists. It is a 2.5 hectare village composed of small subrectangular rooms aligned on a series of steep terraces overlooking the Aja river. An abundance of ceramic material at the site indicates that its inhabitants probably came from further north in the Ica valley. Local development and trade cannot explain the presence of this material due to the absence of earlier settlements in the region. La Puntilla, along with similar sites, is significant both historically and theoretically. It provides us with a clear archaeological case of post-migratory reorganization that will shed light on the dynamics of migration in prehistory as well as on the elusive relationship between the Paracas (Ica Valley donor) culture and the celebrated Nasca society. Archaeologists have identified migrations in prehistory, but have only recently elaborated on their theoretical significance. This work helps define archaeology s contribution to migration literature in the social sciences by examining migration s potential effects on the social dynamics of newly-formed communities. Mr. Van Gijseghem considers that migration may provide opportunities for individuals to maintain or better their social status through the creative manipulation of existing social frameworks. Anthropological literature does suggest that this is a frequent outcome of population movements because patterns of authority, wealth and power are likely to be reevaluated in a new social and physical environment. The nature and effects of these innovations hinge upon the identity and intention of the migrants. Thus, migrations in sedentary societies represent a fundamental vector of cultural and social change. Mr. Van Gijseghem expects to recognize the archaeological correlates of the post-migration reorganization through a comparative analysis of households at La Puntilla. He theorizes that patterns of production, distribution and use of ceramic vessels bearing traditional Paracas symbols diverged from those of contemporaneous communities in the homeland. Also, the traditional symbols were likely altered and used in different overall contexts, while new canons were created and modified patterns of wealth and power emerged. This research represents one of the first explicit attempts to produce an archaeological test of models about migrations and their effects on social organization. It will also help document the transition between Paracas and Nasca societies of the Peruvian south coast and will assist in training a promising young scientist doc12795 none People working collaboratively must establish and maintain awareness of one another s intentions, actions, and results. Understanding the role of awareness in computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) and developing effective software tools to support awareness are keys to the future success of CSCW systems. This project will develop and evaluate a suite of awareness tools to support coordinated planning, action, and outcome analysis in collaborative science learning. Classroom-based field studies will be coordinated with a series of laboratory investigations, to benefit from both the scope and ecological validity of a field study and the analytical focus and control of laboratory studies. Laboratory studies will adapt task simulation methods, including the use of confederate participants, from the social psychology of communication. A key scientific objective is to investigate and develop the notion of activity awareness, the awareness of project work that supports group performance in complex and long-term tasks. Activity awareness builds upon prior research on social awareness (of the presence of one s collaborators) and action awareness (of what collaborators are doing or what they have recently done). Developing a concept of activity awareness can further integrate awareness research and tool support doc12796 none Many of the recent successes in behavioral neuroscience in both invertebrate and vertebrate systems have been attained by identifying individual neurons and assessing the role of each neuron in behavior by physiologically manipulating its activity level. There are, however, aspects of behavior that have not been adequately explained by this approach. In the case of the medicinal leech, the neuronal network controlling the initiation of swimming is well-understood at several levels, but this understanding does not account for the unpredictability with which stimulation of this pathway leads to swimming. Two possible reasons for this inadequacy will be addressed in this proposal: (1) neuronal networks provide static descriptions of the system and do not accurately reflect their dynamics, and (2) even simple behaviors are a function of large populations of neurons distributed throughout the nervous system. Because of the inherent complexity in the firing patterns of large populations of neurons, computational approaches are necessary for deciphering how the nervous system encodes behavior. This project will use linear statistical and spectral techniques and nonlinear techniques, in conjunction with discrete wavelet transforms, to test: (1) whether the state or pattern of ongoing activity in the leech nerve cord prior to stimulation determines the likelihood that swimming will be elicited by a specific input, and (2) whether the neuronal control of swim initiation is a distributed property of the entire ventral nerve cord or is localizable to neuronal activity from specific regions of the leech nervous system. This project will provide research experiences for 10 undergraduate students from a primarily undergraduate women s college doc12797 none A three-year funding period is being requested so that the PI can expand and modify his existing simulation code in order to relax key assumptions that were previously implemented only because of computational constraints. His numerical simulations describing the interaction of small-scale gravity waves with minor species and related chemical processes in the mesopause region (90 km altitude) are the most complete and realistic to date. Quite apart from causing large, highly nonlinear oscillations in minor species number densities, the waves drive a large downward transport of minor species through the effects of dissipation. In spite of the fact that the model simulates time-dependent interactions between dynamics and nonlinear chemistry, the model uses linear (versus nonlinear) dynamics and a very limited number (or incomplete set) of chemically active minor species. These simplifications have been necessary in order to be able to run the code within a reasonable amount of time on stand-alone personal computers. However, to gain a complete understanding of the interactions and in order to include both physical and chemical processes that are known to be important in this region of the atmosphere, these two idealizations will have to be relaxed. This will increase the computational burden well beyond the limits of personal computers, requiring multiprocessor computers for faster, efficient computations. The PI is thus proposing to purchase a relatively inexpensive turn-key multiprocessor machine to assist them in the in-house development and testing of code required to increase the level of realism in their model, and subsequently transfer the code to faster super-computers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The proposed work falls into the Applications in Science and Engineering (AP) section of the small class category of ITR proposals, and is most closely related to the Aeronomy Program of the Atmospheric Science Division within the Directorate for Geosciences doc12798 none Teich AAAS The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) will continue the AAAS NSF Fellowship Program for a second year. Up to five Fellows for - year will be selected and placed in offices throughout NSF, working on projects of mutual interest to the Fellows and the host directorate or office. Fellows will learn how NSF funds science, while providing scientific, engineering and educational input on issues relating to NSF s mission support of fundamental science and engineering research and education. Fellows will work with staff involved in planning, development and oversight of agency programs in all fields of fundamental research. Assignments may involve significant interagency, congressional or international activity, as well as involvement with the National Science Board, NSF s policy-setting body. The program includes an orientation on executive branch and congressional operations, as well as a yearlong seminar program on issues involving science, technology and public policy. The fellowships potentially are renewable for a second year doc12799 none The objective of the research project is the development and application of mathematically and computationally rigorous gradient-based optimization methodologies for a virtual materials process design that is based on quantified product quality and accounts for process targets and constraints including economic aspects. A framework for preform as well as process parameter optimization of multi-stage metal forming processes is considered. The design of each individual process is performed using gradient-optimization techniques that are based on an innovative continuum sensitivity analysis. Optimal microstructure evolution paths, ideal forming techniques and knowledge based expert systems are used to select the required sequence of processes and to develop feasible initial designs. If successful, the computational design simulator under development can be applied to select the necessary sequence of forming and intermediate thermal-stage processes, select appropriate dies and preforms and control design the various process parameters such that, for a given raw material with a given initial geometry, one can obtain a final product with desired microstructure and shape under various process constraints and with minimal utilization rates and overall cost. These developments will lead to a virtual process laboratory that will assist industry in reducing lead time for process and product development, in trimming the cost of an extensive experimental trial-and-error process development effort, in developing processes for tailored material properties and in increasing volume time yield doc12697 none CDMA systems have achieved great commercial success in wireless communications since the first IS-95 system was deployed in Seattle in . In fact, most of the future wireless communication systems will be using CDMA technology. Yet, as far as reaching the great potential of CDMA in terms of higher system capacity, lower bit error rate, and lower packet loss rate, the problem of demodulation in the presence of multiple access interference remains as a significant bottleneck for all CDMA systems. To solve this multiple access interference problem, researchers and engineers have worked since the early s on so-called multiuser detectors (MUD). Unfortunately, thus far none of the multiuser detectors has been implemented in a real CDMA system, because of the prohibitive complexity of these structures. There are two major factors that contribute to this situation. First, CDMA systems must use long spreading sequences for several practical reasons, whereas multiuser detectors must use short spreading sequences. Second, the complexity of even the simplest multiuser detector is still too great to be implemented in the fastest electronics, for all but the smallest of data rates. In this work, we propose to address both of these problems in a collaborative effort. The collaboration will be organized so that Dr. Qingchong Liu of Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, will initially focus on the first objective, and Dr. David W. Matolak of Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, will initially (and concurrently) focus on the second objective. Results will be exchanged frequently, and meetings will be held quarterly. After some early progress, our collaboration will grow closer as we combine the work objectives and consider system (transmitter and receiver) performance. We propose first to extend some recent results obtained for the construction of long spreading sequences from short sequences. This can be termed the system objective. These new sequences will be appropriate for both conventional CDMA systems and for multiuser detectors. This method was invented by one of us and has been implemented in possibly the fastest wireless network running at 400Mbps in the Spaceway system by Hughes Electronics. It has significantly reduced receiver complexity and cost, and gives essentially optimum performance. By measuring sequence correlations at multiple levels, the method provides new insights on sequence design and tremendously reduces complexity in signal design and detection for broadband wireless communications. This method has the potential to help bridge a gap between current CDMA systems and multiuser detectors. We also propose to study reduced complexity multiuser receivers from the perspective of reduced complexity trellis search techniques, combined with one of the most promising MUD receiver structures, in a partitioned manner. This can be termed the receiver objective. The MUD receiver of interest is the minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) receiver, which is attractive for its good performance and modest complexity. The partitioning approach will aim to share the detection tasks between the MMSE front-end and the reduced-complexity trellis processor. These receivers will make use of the new spreading sequences specified for use in future 3 rd and 4 th -generation CDMA wireless communication system standards, and the multiple level sequences developed in the system objective. The reduced complexity trellis search techniques will explore use of the analogous techniques researched for equalization, but not fully applied to the problem of CDMA multiuser detection. Our goal for these two objectives is to create a fundamental bridge to connect the existing and planned CDMA systems with the theoretical multiuser detectors so that the bottleneck of the multiple access interference problem in CDMA systems can be surmounted. Both objectives of this proposed work will employ analysis, followed by computer simulations. Both objectives will also require the assistance of graduate and undergraduate students. The modeling work will aim to reconcile theory with practical implementation and thus provide engineering education in the best sense: connecting principles and practice. Training students in both system design and receiver design for CDMA will also naturally be valuable to the wireless industry. In addition, the research will provide material for inclusion in several new graduate courses, and in undergraduate design projects, at both universities doc12801 none In this project the PIs will carry out a program of research and development to apply digital imaging techniques to the problem of low vision. The work will focus on two related thrusts. First, low vision simulation methods will be developed that accurately show people with normal vision what the world looks like to people with visual deficits. The goal is to develop simulation tools that designers can use to understand the visual limitations (and abilities) of people with low vision and thereby eliminate barriers to access from their designs. Applications in the areas of architectural design, driving safety, and the development of graphical user interfaces will be demonstrated. Second, the PIs will develop low vision image enhancement tools that can be used to transform images from digital cameras or graphics applications to create new images that are more comprehensible to people with low vision. The objective is to use computational models of low vision to develop image enhancement algorithms that can be incorporated into digital imaging systems to give people with low vision better access to the visual world. The PIs plan to use these algorithms to develop two new kinds of assistive technology: image profiling and enhancement tools for Web browsers to enable low vision access to Web-based graphical information; and portable augmented vision systems that can facilitate orientation, mobility and object recognition for people with low vision. The hope is that the methods developed will provide better understanding of the challenges facing people with low vision, and lead to effective assistive technologies that can help people with low vision live easier, fuller and more productive lives doc12802 none Zhang Korf Best-First Search Algorithms for Sequence Alignment Problems in Computational Biology Molecular biologists are currently faced with very challenging computational problems. For example, a draft of the human genome has been completed, a sequence of about three billion base pairs. A draft of the mouse genome soon will be completed. We know that mice and men share over 90% of their genetic material. What we don t know is exactly which parts of the human and mouse genomes are common to both species. This information can be used to identify human genes, and to translate results from mouse studies to studies of human health and disease. The problem of identifying the common elements between these two DNA sequences is an example of sequence alignment, which is a computational problem. Other examples of sequence alignment problems include gene identification, and RNA and protean structure prediction. Current computer algorithms are either too slow, or require too much memory, to directly solve a problem as large as the human-mouse genomic sequence alignment. We propose to develop new algorithms for various sequence-alignment problems, based on heuristic search algorithms in artificial intelligence. Our goal is to provide much more efficient sequence-alignment algorithms for use by molecular biologists doc12803 none We will study a new kind of anytime learning system, based on one to one peer interactions shielded by and facilitated on the Internet. Our pedagogical hypothesis is that students learn best when continually challenged in a diverse environment. Matching students with appropriate learning partners and curricular material can be done with today s Internet technology and peer to peer software. Existing technologies from machine learning and game theory - specifically those related to mediocrity as an equilibrium phenomenon in self organizing systems - will be implemented as practical technologies that can adapt automatically as students learn. The technology is based on simple techniques to bring humans together to learn, rather than domain-intensive knowledge-based tutoring of a single human, and can work with the existing technology infrastructure of most public schools. Internet multi-player gaming environments have been proven to scale to millions of users, as well as having high intrinsic motivation. The research incorporates fundamental research in Information Technology, sound experimental research on motivation in multi-player games, and a novel and scaleable distributed community for learning doc12804 none The primary goal of this project is to design, implement and test a new display system for digital libraries. It is motivated by the lack of display capabilities in most systems today; we need more screen resolution and screen size. This project will combine commodity video projectors and computing equipment with software to provide automatic calibration and to provide better interfaces to visualization techniques. This will be of value in virtual reality environments and scientific data analysis environments as well as in digital library implementations. The project will be done in partnership with a library at the University of Kentucky and a computing facility at the University of Puerto Rico doc12805 none Recent advances in software engineering, such as graphical user interfaces and object-oriented programming, have caused applications to become more memory intensive. These applications tend to allocate dynamic memory prolifically. Moreover, automatic dynamic memory reclamation (garbage collection, GC) has become a popular feature in modern programming languages such as Java. As a result, the time consumed by dynamic storage management can be up to one-third of the program execution time. The Dynamic Memory Management Unit (DMMU), a special-purpose hardware mechanism based on bitmaps and combinational logic can greatly diminish this overhead. The preliminary results show that the hit ratio for 2 Kbits and 8 Kbits buffer range from 84-99% and 95-99%, respectively. The hardware complexity of the proposed scheme is O(n), where n is the size of the bit-vector. For a design with 20K gates and 97% miss rate, the overall speedup can be as high as 1.41. This proposal calls for the integration of this hardware unit into SMP systems, which would allow concurrent garbage collection in multithreaded-multiprocessors environments. This can speed up the performance of server applications written in Object-oriented languages such as C++ and Java. Additionally, this proposal also calls for the study of garbage collection triggering points. The preliminary study indicates that time-based triggering point may yield higher garbage collection efficiency than the traditional space-based approach doc12806 none The goal of this research project is to develop high speed optoelectronic devices based on semiconductor optical amplifiers, for applications in optical information technologies, networks, instrumentation and signal processing. The key devices will be novel ultrahigh speed multiwavelength semiconductor laser transmitters, modulators , nonlinear optical switches and optical clock recovery oscillators. These semiconductor optical amplifier based devices will then be configured together to demonstrate unique high-speed capabilities in next generation information technology applications. An important feature of this research project is that the devices are based on an identical semiconductor layered structure and common device processing and fabrication techniques. This is significant because this philosophy allows for cost effective state-of-the-art device development, with the potential of the technology becoming readily available for commercial applications, owing to the ease of fabrication, from a manufacturing perspective. In addition, since each of the devices are realized by using a single common processing procedure on an identical semiconductor layered structure, the potential for demonstrating fully monolithic ultrahigh-speed information is great. These two features are critical in that the development of high-speed optoelectronic technologies are essential elements for commercial applications of information technology in the global economy. 1.1 Methods to be employed The research program will use standard optoelectronic device fabrication techniques to develop a set of 4 optoelectronic devices, e.g., transmitters, modulators, switches, and clock recovery oscillators, that will be used in three critical commercial information technology application areas: 1) high capacity optical links for both access and wide area networks, 2) high speed optical sampling for analogue to digital applications, and 3) wideband optical rf analog information systems using arbitrary optical waveform generation. The PI will exploit his latest findings on the fundamental physics of ultrashort pulse propagation in semiconductor optical amplifiers and the associated nonlinear optical effects, to demonstrate unique modes of operation of these devices, for high speed photonic functionality. As an example, he will exploit these novel effects to achieve both temporal and spectral control of ultrafast optical signals. Specifically, he will demonstrate: o multiwavelength modelocked operation of semiconductor diode lasers o ultra-stable, ultrahigh bit rate, single wavelength 160 Gb s semiconductor laser sources o cost-effective semiconductor optical amplifier modulators and modulator arrays o novel high-speed optical clock recovery oscillators at 40 GHz o all optical switching and processing of WDM byte wide parallel data packets, showing the potential for ultrahigh speed parallel optical signal processing. The developed device functionality will be incorporated to demonstrate o hybrid WDM-OTDM links for a) access and b) wide area networks o optical sampling in optical analog to digital converters o arbitrary optical waveform generation for wideband optical & microwave photonic applications Finally, he will use commercially available off the shelf components to realize prototypes that will facilitate technology transfer. 1.2 Significance to the Advancement of Knowledge: Educational & Scientific Impact From an educational perspective, the students trained in this research program will be exposed to a research environment that is vertically integrated. For example, the students will learn the physics and fundamentals of high speed optoelectronic device design and fabrication, the deployment of novel devices to realize unique high speed optoelectronic sub-system functionality, and finally, integrate several unique optoelectronic sub-system functions into a full ultrahigh speed optoelectronic system that will address needs in the information technology areas of networking, signal processing and instrumentation. This will allow the students to provide timely impact for prospective employers upon graduation doc12807 none This proposal requests support for the development of grid telemetry acquisition techniques for grid-enabled applications and instrumental middleware and fabric level devices. Such telemetry data can be used for monitoring a wide area distributed IT infrastructure, for providing information to resource decision making services operating in the grid environment, and importantly for providing feedback to distributed application developers and middleware toolkit designers. The grid telemetry infrastructure will be developed within the context of the distributed IT infrastructure being deployed for the ATLAS experiment currently under construction for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN Laboratory in Geneva Switzerland, the GriPhyN project, and the Particle Physics Data Grid. The NSF ITR GriPhyN project is developing the basic technologies required to realize a virtual data grid in which researchers from four experiments in particle and astrophysics will gain efficient and transparent access to distributed data and computational resources doc12808 none Buseck This grant provides partial salary support for an electron microscopist who will help maximize the geological, mineralogical, and geochemical capabilities of two TEMs that will be installed in within the ASU Center for High Resolution Electron Microscopy. These instruments were obtained to develop new techniques and measurements in materials science and physics, and the goal of the new position is to become familiar with those techniques and adapt them for research in the geological sciences. One of the instruments will have an electron beam that can be made less than 0. 2 nm in diameter. We will use this capability to analyze grain boundaries, dislocation cores, and surface layers on the atomic scale and will obtain crystallographic data from within unit cells through electron nanodiffraction. The other instrument will contain a Gatan imaging filter for measurements that will allow elemental mapping on the sub-nanometer scale. It will also have an environmental cell for studies under controlled atmospheres. This cell will maintain a relatively high gas pressure of up to 50 torr in the sample chamber, while retaining the high-resolution capabilities of the TEM. Specimen heating and dynamic image recording will allow chemical reactions to be followed at close to the atomic scale. We will use this to study minerals that are unstable in the vacuum of the electron microscopes. These include clay minerals, the green rusts, gypsum and related hydrated sulfates as well as dehydroxylation reactions and valence changes in minerals doc12809 none The technical focus of this project is to develop a unified approach for the design of low-cost batch fabricated adaptive radio frequency (RF) transceiver frontends with a goal of achieving robust, high speed and low power wireless communications. These adaptive RF frontends are suitable for either high mobility radio channels or environments with variable fading conditions, such as microwave and millimeter-wave local area networks where movements of personnel and objects can vary a channels attenuation and fading characteristics. The proposed research is an interdisciplinary effort in material science and electrical engineering that encompasses the development and characterization of adaptive RF frontends, consisting of frequency and polarization agile antenna arrays, electronically tunable delay lines, matching circuits and filters all incorporating thin film barium strontium titanate (BST). BST technology provides many advantages over conventional devices because of its miniaturization and integration features. This research investigates the development and characterization of a broad range of RF devices and components for the design of low cost smart transceivers, which entails physical and RF design, layout, simulation, fabrication and testing doc12810 none The project is to study the dynamics of the changes in cellular location of the major serine threonine protein phosphatase, PP2A, in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. From studies mainly in higher organisms, it appears that this heterotrimeric enzyme, shown to be involved in the regulation of DNA replication, cell cycle control, RNA transcription, as well as signal transduction pathways, achieves specificity through the action of its so-called regulatory subunits. One proposed activity of these regulatory subunits is to facilitate the targeting of different forms of the PP2A trimer to specific cellular locations in order to achieve enzymatic specificity. As higher organisms express a large number of different regulatory subunits, S. cerevisisae is particularly well suited to testing the notion of selective targeting by regulatory subunits because its array of regulatory subunits is far smaller. In addition, all the genes encoding PP2A subunits have been cloned and genes expressing either GFP, YFP, or CFP-tagged forms of each protein subunit have been created. Using fluorescence microscopy, the cellular locations of one or more PP2A subunits throughout the cell cycle or growth phase will be followed in real time. Preliminary data generated in the laboratory has identified certain cellular locations, such as the spindle pole body, the emerging bud tip, the bud neck, and the periphery of the vacuole, as sites at which certain PP2A subunits transiently accumulate. Using genetic and microscopic tests, other putative proteins that co-localize with PP2A will be identified. Furthermore, using strains in which one or more PP2A subunit genes are either mutated or inactivated completely, the effects of such mutations on the abilities of the other PP2A subunits to be correctly localized will be assessed. These studies should directly test the notion of whether and how PP2A regulatory subunits control the specific localization of functioning PP2A enzymes doc12811 none A Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) is a collection of mobile autonomous system of nodes connected by wireless links with multi-hop communication and no underlying infrastructure. Research in the field of MANET is receiving unprecedented attention due to their profound impact on human life. The most important problems in MANET are Routing, Quality of Service, Security, Power management and Traffic and Mobility modeling and we plan to address many of these issues. In a MANET, when a mobile node has a packet to send, it first consults its route cache to determine whether it already has a route to destination, else it initiates route discovery by broadcasting. Once a route is established, its continuation and maintenance is of prime concern for efficient communication. A route could be broken by mobility and is determined by route error packets. Rather than employing a conventional way of global re-flooding for a new route search, we address this by Local Route Repair (LLR) approach and achieve re-connectivity with minimum overhead. Further work is needed to extend our scheme by increasing the length of patch-up part. We expect this to yield a higher amount of savings in terms of routing overhead and delay when unidirectional links are present. We also plan to define an analytical framework for different protocols and determine their performance. The need for scheduling in a MANET arises primarily due to limited availability of resources. We plan to study the impact of packet level scheduling strategies that transmit packets based on a metric derived from characteristics of the data being transmitted, like the length of the packets or the length of the route being traversed by the packets or even the priority of the packets. We plan to test other routing schemes and define and formulate an analytical model for packet queue at each node so that we could determine end-to-end delay of different types of packets. Effective operation of MANETs is dependent on maintaining appropriate routing information in a distributed fashion. Confidentiality of routing information is important so that not only the payload data but also the routing message headers carrying, the location information of the mobile nodes can be exchanged securely. We have defined an authentication scheme that can prevent the external attacks. We minimize substantial overhead by performing mutual authentication using challenge-response mechanism along the reply path only when the route reply is received. We plan to propose a distributed intrusion detection system to handle them. We will build these systems based on traffic profiles that we would obtain after extensive study of the traffic patterns. We are planning to perform a detailed simulation to obtain metrics that would help us in differentiating valid and malicious data. Wireless sensor networks can be easily deployed without any installation costs or pre-planned organization. To increase fault tolerance, thousands of these sensors might be employed. The traditional routing protocols defined for wireless ad hoc network do not scale well for sensor networks as they are data centric and application-specific unlike traditional networks. Most protocols for sensor network collect data periodically from environment. We feel that there exists a need for networks geared towards responding immediately to changes in the sensed attributes. Very recently, we have proposed a protocol called TEEN for such networks. We are also looking at ways to combine the best features of both proactive and reactive protocols to form a hybrid network. We also believe that sensor networks should provide the end user with the ability to control the three-way trade-off between energy efficiency, accuracy and response time dynamically. In brief, the proposal research will have a long-term impact on the robustness and security of MANETs and sensor networks doc12812 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program and the Major Research Instrumentation program will allow James Madison University to acquire a Scanning Electron Microscope Energy Dispersive Spectrometer (SEM EDS). The SEM EDS system will serve the Materials Science Center, the College of Science and Mathematics and the College of Integrated Science and Technology at James Madison University. The instrument will provide new capabilities for micro-chemical analysis of solids, digital micro-imaging using secondary and backscatter electrons, electron beam induced current for locating p-n junctions in semiconductors, and cathodoluminescence for elemental zoning studies in crystalline substances. The instrument will be a focal point for faculty and undergraduate student research and will foster cooperative research initiatives across several departments and colleges within the university. Outreach and collaboration among neighboring colleges, universities and local industry will be encouraged. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program and the Major Research Instrumentation program will allow James Madison University to acquire a Scanning Electron Microscope Energy Dispersive Spectrometer (SEM EDS). The SEM EDS system will serve the Materials Science Center, the College of Science and Mathematics and the College of Integrated Science and Technology at James Madison University. The instrument will provide new capabilities for solid state research. The instrument will be a focal point for faculty and undergraduate student research and will foster cooperative research initiatives across several departments and colleges within the university. Outreach and collaboration among neighboring colleges, universities and local industry will be encouraged doc12813 none Proposal No: ITR SY: Combinatorial Optimization Algorithms for Information Access (Fundamental IT Models) PI: Eva Tardos The enormous growth in the amount of information online makes it vital to automate the job of searching and organizing large data collections while maintaining high accuracy. The research will consider two seemingly unrelated tasks: . Searching web pages, and . Analyzing the content of digital pictures and movies. Despite their obvious great importance, and the large efforts invested, the currently available solutions for these tasks are inadequate. The proposed research will address a difficult mathematical problem that underlies both of these tasks, the classification problem with pair-wise constraints. The traditional classification problems consist of a set of objects to be classified, and a set of labels (the classes). Classifying the topics of documents on the Web, or individual pixels or regions of an image are two examples of this general problem. The proposed research will build on the PIs recent successes in applying powerful combinatorial optimization techniques to develop algorithms for classification problems with pair-wise relationships. Pair-wise constraints can significantly enhance classification, by modeling, e.g., the relations of physically close objects in an image, or relations implicit in the hyperlink structure of the Web. The outcome of this research will be to provide powerful new tools for two important tasks in searching and organizing large data collections doc12814 none Olsen This is a project to develop and implement a web-based community model (websim3D) for the generation, storage, and dissemination of ground motion simulation results. Websim3D will initially be based on the nine long-period finite-difference (FD) earthquake scenario simulations carried out for the Los Angeles basin by the P.I. The user-friendly access to the simulated ground motion time histories will allow seismologists and engineers to analyze the broadband synthetic ground motions for desired earthquake scenarios at sites of interest. The P.I. is regarded as an authority on simulation of ground-motion for southern California earthquakes using the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) Community 3-D seismic-velocity model. His prior work set the standard for this type of simulation. Getting state-of-the-art ground-motion simulations for scenario earthquakes to the scientific and engineering community is a high priority, especially for the Los Angeles region of southern California, which contains 25% of the nation s seismic risk doc12815 none ITR Small Proposal Collaborative: Sayeed Popovic Reliable and seamless wireless connectivity in varied environments is a necessary requirement for the rich and diverse communications of the future. Space-time processing has emerged as a key enabling technology for future wireless communications: signal space dimensions are fundamental to reliable communication and antenna arrays augment the traditional dimensions of time and frequency with the spatial dimension. While recent theoretical and technological advances provide a tremendous boon for modern communications, the state-of-the-art is far from realizing the full potential of space-time processing due to significant gaps in our current understanding on two fronts: Fundamental mechanisms underlying the interaction of the space-time channel with the signal space in spatial, temporal, and spectral dimensions. Jointly optimized design of front-end hardware, antenna arrays, and signal processing algo-rithms. The overall goal of the work proposed here is an integrated approach to the design of antenna array hardware and space-time processing algorithms for significantly improved wireless link performance at reduced cost and complexity doc12816 none Although various IPSec policy issues [2,3,4] have attracted a lot of attention, within the IETF IPSP (IP Security Policy) working group, there is certain amount of confusion and concerns about the two fundamental issues: 1) How to ensure the correctness of a set of distributed security policies? 2) How to systematically determine the correct set of policies and securely distribute them across the network? Internet will be more and more dynamic in many aspects. With the capability of various wireless network technologies, users and even sub-networks can be mobile. Mobility implies potential changes in the policies or the inter-relations among distributed policies. Adaptive security is another cause of policy changes. It will be uncommon in the near future that, in reacting to a newly detected intrusion, a security management system might on-the-fly determine to strengthen the security level by modifying the IPSec security policies. Therefore, it is critically important to have a safe and rigorous solution to handle the above two issues. Policy Specification Correctness Currently, in the research community of IPSec VPN policy, to our best knowledge, no rigorous definition for IPSec VPN policy correctness has been developed. Later in this proposal, we will give a formal and reasonable definition for correctness such that we will have a basis for policy specification analysis. Such correctness analysis must be automated such that the security configuration of a network system can be adaptive to changes, faults intrusions, and mobility. On the other hand, if there are inherent constraints and conflicts among the existing security policies such that it is impossible to have a consistent policy set, the policy analysis engine should also automatically determine the impossibility. Inter-domain Secure Policy Distribution The proposed work under the first issue assumes that we have a perfect and centralized collection of information related to the policies and security requirements around the whole Internet. However, in reality, this might not always be possible as Internet is owned and managed by different administrative domains, while, for trust and privacy consideration, information regarding local policy and network topology might not be sharable across domain boundaries. The second objective of this proposed research is, under some inter-domain related constraints, to develop a collaborative framework architecture and a suite of distributed protocols such that we can still analyze the correctness of a set of decentralized IPSec VPN policies. We will study the issue of the minimum amount of policy information needed for a particular policy domain to determine whether its local policies and requirements will be consistent with other domains. Once the set of policies is decided, a policy distribution mechanism is also needed. Under this proposed research project, we will first focus on the theoretical aspect of policy and requirement specifications and their analysis. We will develop algorithms and analytical results to fundamental enhance our current technology in policy-driven networking systems such as IPSec VPN. Second, we plan on implementing a prototype to validate and evaluate our proposed approach on a realistic networking environment. The first phase will be a small testbed to run the prototype software, which will be open sourced and available to the community. Furthermore, we would like to collaborate with industry partners such as equipment venders and ISPs to further evaluate and validate our approach against real-world challenges. Furthermore, we will pay special attention to the application of our solutions in a mobile network environment. In such environment, the capability of dynamically updating IPSec security policy is extremely critical. To summarize, we will not only deliver academic publications about our proposed works but also produce a prototype system and perform extensive experiments, including the real-world data set if possible, to evaluate the performance and accuracy and to validate our theoretical model in handling difficulty issues in Policy-driven networking systems doc12817 none A high resolution neoglacial record of glacial sediment yield exposed in a jokulhlaup-drained proglacial lake Documentation of the production of sediment by glaciers is critical to our understanding of the roles of glaciers in the topographic evolution of mountain ranges and in global geochemical cycles. While proglacial lakes offer an excellent opportunity to investigate the relationship between sediment source and sink in a non-tidewater glacier environment, access to their sedimentary record is often poor. We will examine sediments impounded by Iceberg Lake, a large, stable, long-lived proglacial lake in Alaska s Chugach Mountains. Iceberg Lake unexpectedly drained in and again in , offering a tremendous (but ephemeral) opportunity to characterize the lake s accumulated sediments in three dimensions. Although glacier-dammed, there is no historical record of Iceberg Lake draining prior to . The lake s apparent stability over hundreds of years resulted in 1) a series of four well-developed shoreline deposits ringing the lake, 2) a series of four sandy deltas, and 3) strongly-varved lacustrine sediments. As the lake s main inlet stream is now rapidly cutting down through all of these deposits, virtually all of Iceberg Lake s neoglacial sedimentary record is currently exposed. In this small glacial basin, with very tight coupling between source and sink, these deposits promise a centuries-long sediment record with annual resolution. By mapping the sediments, and by detailed sampling of the varve record, we will produce a detailed time-series of coarse and fine-grained sediment delivery to Iceberg Lake. This will document year-to-year variability in the volume and type of sediment deposited in Iceberg Lake over hundreds of years, and will provide insight into glacier dynamics, sediment production and evacuation, and fluvial transport during, after, and possibly even prior to the Little Ice Age doc12818 none Networked computer systems are vulnerable to malicious attack. These attacks try to take over the control of a victim computer system by re-pointing the processor program counter (PC) to the attacker s code. This proposal explores a role for security aware compilation and processor microarchitecture in preventing unauthorized PC modifications. The two most common instances of PC compromise arise from the corruption of (1) the return address in an activation record and (2) function pointers. The basic approach to guarding PC is to apply an encoding function before any potential PC value (such as return address, or function pointer table entry) is stored in any memory location (such as a stack frame or function pointer table in the data or heap space). Any read of a memory value into the PC first has to go through a decoding function. A compromised PC value would go only through the decoding function and hence would render the malicious attack ineffective. This research investigates several variations of PC encoding decoding schemes and evaluates computational overhead of these schemes and their effectiveness. This research plans to build a hardened Linux system, gcc compiler and other public domain utilities such as Apache web server incorporating the proposed return address and function pointer protection schemes doc12819 none Proposal # U of Cal Davis Farrens, Matthew Microprocessors now rival supercomputers in raw processing power, thanks to increases in transistor densities and architectural advances such as the exploitation of parallelism. However, the bandwidth and latency of memory systems is so limited that increasing performance in the microprocessor often leads to little overall system improvement. At the same time that this is occurring, software costs are burgeoning. This research explores using some of the increasing silicon real estate to provide extra functionality. The approach is to dedicate a portion of these new transistors to provide programmable monitoring hardware to enhance software development, make debugging more efficient, increase reliability and provide run-time security. Additional applications may be found in monitoring run-time guarantees and invariants for embedded systems. Taking a specific example, this approach can address pointer-related defects occurring in software which render systems unreliable and vulnerable to hackers. A simple, auxiliary co-processor monitors address references from a compute processor via a loose coupling (e.g. via the L1 cache coherence bus). This loose coupling reduces design complexity and avoids the need for any core CPU redesign and allows this approach to be readily added to existing designs. Furthermore, the approach is complementary to static compiler analysis techniques and the research extends conventional analysis to exploit efficient run-time monitoring capabilities doc12820 none This is Information Technology Research award to develop an innovative approach by which scientists and engineers can gain access to remote instruments and data sources. This capability enables more general access to remote instrumentation that can be used for training and education without the unnecessary burden of placing students or researchers in the field. The need for such a mechanism is fundamental as each instrument deployed to a remote field site contends with similar issues of remote data storage, retrieval, transport, and control. The investigators will develop an integrated set of IT tools that will move data to and from the remote field site, irrespective of the communications link, in a reliable and robust manner. It will also quickly facilitate the exchange of data among researchers, provide data storage, and publish web-based displays. The approach is founded on an Internet-based system call Network New Transport Protocol (NNTP) that noninvasively retrieves data from instruments over a variety of communication links. The system delivers data from the remote instrument to the end user s home institution while transparently handling network outages and low-bandwidth situations. These capabilities enhance the science by notifying researchers of unique and interesting events, allowing the researcher to modify their instruments to record data optimally, providing more ready access to other instrument users, and working quickly with other researchers during real-time events. For engineering activities, the data transport service would serve to check the health and status of the instruments continuously and enable instrument control. This enabling technology would then facilitate student training and education within classroom and laboratory environments doc12821 none Internet is undergoing an overhaul unprecedented in size, diversity, and reach, with profound im- pact in all aspects of our scientific, social, economic and political life through the integration of networks of communication, transportation, entertainment, utilities, and finance. The stability and robustness of this vital infrastructure demands a rigorous theory to understand the current protocols and evolve them to meet emerging challenges. We propose to develop such a theory for TCP congestion control, and use it to drastically improve the stability, robustness and optimality of the current protocols. A key insight is to view congestion control as a distributed asynchronous computation to maxi- mize aggregate source utility over the Internet; different TCP and active queue management (AQM) schemes correspond to different utility functions and different algorithms to maximize them. Our research hastwo components. First, we will develop a new theoretical model of TCP congestion control based on duality in optimization and multivariate robust control. The theory will clarify the role of source algorithms, such as Tahoe, Reno and Vegas, and active queue management, such as DropTail, RED and REM, in the control of networks and establish performance limits of the current protocols; it will explain the effect on stability when delay, topology, capacity, and load scale up; and it will provide conditions under which the feedback stability ofTCP AQM algorithms are invariant to these effects. Indeed, such a theory is already emerging from our recent works. Even in its currently preliminary stage, it already provides a fundamental understanding on some widely observed performance and fairness behavior of the current protocols, and uncovers new and surprising stability problems. For example, it shows that the current protocols become unstable and exhibit bifurcation when network capacity increases. Moreover, maintaining stability as capacity scales up arbitrarily imposes severe constraints on how sources adjust their rates (TCP) and what congestion information is fed back (AQM). The current protocol does not satisfy the condition for such stability invariance, and hence may be ill suited for future networks where, pulled by application demand and pushed by technological advances, the capacity will be large. The second component of our research is the design of practical TCP and AQM protocols based on the theory, and the development of prototypes and experiments to demonstrate their effectiveness. We will use the theory to identify the sources of instability in the current protocols when delay, network size, capacity, and traffic load scale up. We will design both enhancements that incrementally evolve the current protocols, and drastically new protocols that have the strongly robust stability property promised by theory. As a concrete application of our algorithms, we will apply them to improve TCP performance over wireless links, both because they are ubiquitous and because they are likely to remain the most important bottlenecks in future networks doc12822 none This project will use computer shape matching algorithms to assemble the remaining fragments of the Forma Urbis Romae, a giant marble map of ancient Rome. The original, measuring 60 feet wide by 45 feet high, dates to the second century AD. The map now consists of 1,163 fragments, and is incomplete. Piecing the remaining fragments together is a unique challenge for computer graphics research. If successful, it will offer to archeologists a resource of great importance. In order to test the graphics algorithms the raw data was acquired at great cost and effort. A team of faculty and students from Stanford spent a month on site digitizing the shape and surface appearance of every known fragment using laser scanning and digital color photography. The processed raw data now consists of 8 billion polygons and 6 thousand color images, amounting to 40GB of data. The project hopes to produce and disseminate a database of 3D models and photographs of this famous archaeological document and in the process, contribute new algorithms for shape matching for objects of kind doc12823 none This project will attack several important problems in image processing and computer vision. The applications for this work include object detection and recognition (e.g. for tracking objects in video surveillance), segmentation of medical images (e.g. for recognizing white and gray matter in MRI brain data), occlusion and analysis of missing information (e.g. for finding depth from 2-D images), and direction diffusion (e.g. for analyzing fingerprints). The project will work at the boundary between computational and applied mathematics, computer science and engineering, and medical imagery. The research is based on using level set techniques applied to variational models and partial differential equations derived from the images. The work uses an active contour model without edges for object detection, based on the Osher-Sethian level set method and Mumford-Shah segmentation techniques. This model has many advantages over classical ones, including automatic detection of interior contours and robustness with respect to noise. The project will generalize and extend this basic model and provide computationally efficient implementations doc12824 none A functional quantum computer would render all public-key cryptographic protocols (e.g., RSA, Diffie-Hellman), used for secure communication over the Internet, insecure; conversely, QKD could save the Internet and enable secure public communication. Similarly, super-dense coding can potentially double the classical capacity of a channel, if the parties could share EPR pairs in advance. This project is aimed at a theoretical study of issues in quantum informatin processing, including (1) algorithms for entanglement purification and distillation, (2) Capacity results for various quantum channels, (3) efficient entanglement manipulation and pure state management via local quantum operations and classical communication (LOCC), (4) quantum key distribution using practical systems, and (5) novel informationally-secure quantum cryptographic protocols that only quantum systems might enable, but are not known to exist using classical cryptographic protocols doc12825 none Dr. Erik Winfree and Dr. Hideo Mabuchi are working together to develop techniques and instruments for high-precision quantitative analysis of the DNA molecular devices. These are being designed, characterized and optimized to investigate issues such as robustness and error-tolerance of these DNA molecular devices. The technical objectives being achieved in this project are: development of spFRET instrument capable of counting individual photons from single molecules; characterization of conformal states, kinetics, and thermodynamics of DNA switches; characterization of the activities of two enzymes, RNAP and RNase, on the DNA switches; development of stochastic models of in vitro transcriptional circuits; and investigation of robust algorithms and error-control for transcriptional circuits. Through this project, the PIs are establishing a set of experimental systems and techniques for exploring computation by biological molecules. This will provide fundamental knowledge and principles for nanoscale computation, such as models of computation, molecular algorithms, physical limits, sources of error and error correction strategies. Thus the aim is to leverage the advanced control over biochemical systems to begin establishing a broader foundation for reliable molecular computing doc12826 none A three-year program is proposed involving development of the IT-techniques necessary to make the most efficient bandwidth and science use of the available observation time at Arecibo Observatory (AO) by flexibly accelerating the data processing. The proposed IT-approach will be tested via two high-impact science test demonstration cases to be conducted at AO. The first involves simultaneous high-range time resolution dual-beam incoherent scatter radar (ISR) observations of the 50-600 km ionosphere and a simultaneous search-using the same data stream-for heliocentric orbital objects above the atmosphere. The second will search the data-stream for meteors and completely reduce the highly complex meteor data to geophysical parameters in real-time while also processing the same data-stream for ionosphere D-region spectra. These science goals will be pursued while processing for interference and satellite-returns, providing appropriate real-time display, and archiving both original and processed data. The proposed approach will allow full use of off-the-shelf technological advancements such ad the wide-bandwidth large-dynamic-range IF-sampling receivers developed for cell-phone base-stations and cheap but powerful general-purpose desktop single-board computers. This hardware plus proposed algorithm development will permit assimilation of the real-time data at the full rate thus flexibly enabling optimal interference processing, real-time data display, and multi-mode parallel-outcome scientific processing. The proposed development of this flexible data-processing environment would not only prove useful to the geophysical radar community but would also provide the same environment for wide-bandwidth multi-frequency radio astronomy observations at AO. This approach would also broadly-impact other geophysical radar and radio astronomy facilities by enabling simple adoption of this proposed low-cost general-purpose data processing interpretations environment doc12827 none Pseudomonas aeruginosa and some other common soil bacteria utilize a flagella-independent mode of movement called twitching motility (also called gliding motility). P. aeruginosa is an excellent model organism in which to study this form of motility due to its advanced genetics and newly completed genome sequence database. In twitching motility, bacteria use fibrous polar appendages (type 4 pili) to move across a surface. It is thought that the basis of this movement is the extension and retraction of these pili. Twitching motility may be assayed by stab-inoculation of an agar plate and then observation of spreading growth of the bacteria at the plate-agar interface. Dr. Cynthia Whitchurch, a collaborator on this project, has performed video microscopy of P. aeruginosa twitching motility. This may be viewed at http: www.cmcb.uq.edu.au cmcb PUBS twitch.html. Twitching motility is highly complex and involves dozens of genes at different chromosomal loci. Although many genes required for twitching have been identified, an understanding of the mechanism and regulation of twitching motility is elusive. A gene first identified as a regulator required for alginate production, algZ, is required for twitching motility. algZ encodes a ribbon-helix-helix DNA binding protein that was first identified and cloned by the principle investigator. The deletion of algZ in an environmental P. aeruginosa isolate results in a loss of twitching motility. The goal of this project is to define the role of algZ in twitching motility. These studies will define the phenotype of the algZ deletion strain. The strain will be analyzed to determine whether the defect appears to be in pili expression, processing, export, or function. Electron microscopy, whole cell ELISA, phage sensitivity, and video microscopy will be used. Biochemical, genetic, and genomic approaches will identify genes that are candidates for algZ-dependence and involvement in twitching motility. The biochemical approach involves a modified SELEX (systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment) technique utilizing purified AlgZ and genomic DNA. A transposable promoter probe in an algZ-inducible strain is used in the genetic approach. The genomic approach involves the determination of the consensus for AlgZ binding to DNA (via DNA footprinting and mutagenesis) and then interrogation of the P. aeruginosa genome database for possible AlgZ targets. The candidate gene(s) will then be tested to confirm algZ-dependence by construction of a candidate gene fusion(s) in an algZ inducible strain. The expression of the candidate gene(s) may then be monitored in response to algZ induction. Lastly, studies will be undertaken in which the expression or interruption of a candidate gene(s) (or some combination of these) will be able to restore the algZ deletion strain to a twitching phenotype. This will confirm that all algZ-dependent genes involved in twitching motility have been identified. These studies will elucidate the genetic control of twitching motility. Undergraduate students will be involved in all aspects of these studies. This will not only increase current knowledge regarding the coordinate regulation of alginate production and twitching motility, but also the ways to better use and control environmental bacteria with regard to bioremediation doc12828 none As part of an ongoing GLOBEC-funded interdisciplinary modeling effort for the Coastal Gulf of Alaska, this study includes the following technical objectives: higher spatial resolution and nested grid capabilities for regional circulation modeling, nested mesoscale atmospheric modeling and regional wind and buoyancy forcing, and a deep-ocean NPZ model to provide boundary conditions for an existing coastal NPZ model. Present single-year simulations of these models will be expanded to continuous multi-decadal integrations, designed to provide circulation and prey fields to an individual-based model of juvenile salmon. Together, these coupled models will be used to explore the mechanisms by which interannual interdecadal variability of physical fields affect the production of GLOBEC target zooplankton species and the feeding of juvenile salmon in the CGOA. The ecosystem dynamics of these models will be compared with those developed under GLOBEC for the California Current System. Central scientific issues include: 1) The optimal stability window hypothesis where Gargett has suggested that variations in the Aleutian Low affect salmon through their impact on water column stability in the CGOA and CCS systems. Typically, high nutrient but low light conditions are observed in the subarctic gyre adjacent to the CGOA, in contrast to low nutrient but high light conditions in the subtropical gyre adjacent to the CCS. And 2) The source of nutrients of the CGOA, i.e., the Coastal Gulf Alaska is a downwelling system for nearly all of the year. The adverse pressure gradient so produced should work against the supply of deep nutrients to the shelf, whether that shelf is smooth and straight or (as is the case in the CGOA) punctuated by submarine canyons. These comparison will help elucidate the observed (inverse) covariance of salmon in the two systems on decadal time scales doc12714 none The LinBox group of twelve researchers in three countries (USA, France, Canada) proposes research in the design of efficient algorithms for linear algebra, in their implementation in a software library, and in how to interface the library to widely-used scientific computing software. Algorithms will be implemented, and new algorithms designed, for the black box representation of matrices---hence the name LinBox---over entry domains that are either symbolic, that is, exact, or floating point, that is, inexact. The library is generically programmed as C++ template classes with abstract underlying arithmetics; they can be compiled with a variety of fast libraries for the basic field, floating point, and polynomial operations. A server client interface seamlessly attaches the library to the common general purpose symbolic systems Maple and Mathematica and to the numeric system MatLab. Parallel execution of the implemented algorithms is facilitated. Black box matrices are stored as functions (as linear operators in effect): the matrix is a procedure that takes an arbitrary vector as input and efficiently computes the matrix-times-vector product. Black box linear algebra generalizes sparsity. The LinBox library will contain algorithms for solving singular and non-singular systems of linear equations whose coefficient matrix is given in black box representation. Furthermore, it is proposed to develop fast methods for the rank and the minimal and characteristic polynomial of a black box matrix. Finally, LinBox will contain methods for linear Diophantine problems with black box matrices, such as computing an integral solution to a linear system with integer entries and computing the Smith normal form of an integer matrix doc12830 none Ketcham This grant, supported through funds from both the NSF Information Technology Research - Small Grants Program and the Earth Science Instrumentation and Facilities Program, will facilitate the development of the software infrastructure necessary to fully exploit the scientific potential of high-resolution X-ray computed tomographic (CT) data for geological research. Over our four years of experience in operating a high-resolution X-ray CT scanner dedicated to the geosciences at the University of Texas, we have identified the types of quantitative analysis whose necessity arises repeatedly in addressing research questions. These include identifying, separating, and characterizing up to thousands of individual objects within a scan volume, quantifying three-dimensional fabrics and textures, and measuring local and dispersed volume properties such as fracture apertures and porosity. We have laid the foundation for progress in each of these areas by developing algorithms and complete software applications in support of some of our joint research projects with outside investigators. We propose to build upon this foundation by expanding and generalizing these programming efforts, creating a suite of tools that will greatly expand the value and utility of CT data, as well as any other volumetric data set. Graduate research projects will provide the setting in which these tools are applied and tested doc12831 none The World Wide Web contains a vast and ever-growing collection of music audio files representing nearly every musical style, ensemble, genre, country, culture, and time period. However, with the exception of the information conveyed in the title, the contents of such audio files can only be understood by listening to the files. Thus searches of audio files analogous to those performed by text-based search engines are currently impossible. In this project the PI will study and implement solutions to the Signal to Score problem in which an audio file is transcribed into a format capturing information similar to that contained in a printed musical score. The PI s approach splits the task into two components: Signal to Piano Roll in which the musical signal is transcribed into a MIDI-like representation, and Rhythmic Parsing in which the piano roll representation is further transcribed into a musical score or equivalent representation. The goal is to allow the generation of searchable data bases that contain high level music descriptions, which could be used to algorithmically answer questions on musical content such as Is the audio file likely to be a blues song? or What is the time signature of the music doc12832 none This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) project focuses on computational and statistical methods to evaluate comparative genetic map data. Two new statistical approaches, the colinearity test and the genome matrix, will be explored and developed further. Both methods will be applied to an existing biological problem that needs reassessment - the comparative map of the grasses. Both methods will be implemented in computer programs that will be released to the scientific community. Eventually, these methods will prove useful not only for interpreting comparative genetic map data but also for interpreting physical map and comparative sequence data doc12833 none This project focuses on the creation of a stochastic representation for the phase-space embeddings of dynamical systems, for application to the task of speech classification and recognition. The research team will develop a general stochastic model for such signal embeddings, test the model through classification simulations, then apply the technique to both isolated and continuous speech recognition. The goal of the research is to discover time-domain analysis techniques using dynamical systems methods that will lead to improved analysis of speech signals and to improvements in speech recognition accuracy. This approach represents the integration of two traditionally distinct research fields: statistical signal processing and chaotic systems. Since signal processing is fundamentally based on linear systems theory and the study of chaos is inherently non-linear, these fields have little or no overlap outside of the fact that both attempt to model the behavior of physical systems. This research integrates these very different viewpoints by applying stochastic analysis and modeling tools from the signal processing field to the problem of analyzing embedded phase spaces obtained from chaotic systems analysis of time-series signals. The results will lead to a significant gain in our fundamental understanding of the characteristics and analysis of speech signals, with potential long-term application to other areas of speech processing such as speech coding and synthesis. The impact of developing these new technologies and applying them to the speech recognition task extends into both the machine learning and signal processing communities; specifically, the development of time-domain characterization methods is directly applicable to many problems of interest in the chaos and non-linear modeling domain, and will demonstrate an ability to concretely measure differences between the phase-space attractors of chaotic systems doc12834 none This is an award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program in DMR to Northwestern University. The award is for the acquisition of a controlled stress rheometer to support a wide array of research at Northwestern University on polymer materials and other complex fluids. The proposed instrument will be housed in a central polymer characterization facility, replacing aging equipment with limited capabilities. In addition, it will provide entirely new capabilities for controlled stress testing (such as creep recovery experiments) that have never been available to the Northwestern community, and that are of significant potential value for the classes of materials under study by the major users of the instrument. In addition to its use in research, the instrument will be used extensively for lab experiments and student projects in a regularly scheduled course on polymer viscoelasticity and flow. The instrument will serve the diverse needs of several faculty members who are presently pursuing research projects that require extensive rheological testing. These include (i) studies of flow-induced structural changes in ordered polymeric and surfactant fluids; (ii) studies of block-copolymer gels that provide a matrix for highly filled gel systems with applications in ceramic processing; (iii) thermoresponsive polymer solutions and microgels under development as matrices for advanced biopolymer separations in microchannel devices; and (iv) a variety of functionalized polymer gels and networks for biomaterials applications. In addition to the primary user community, there are several other Northwestern faculty members who are likely to take advantage of this facility intermittently for miscellaneous polymer & fluid characterization needs. %%% This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program in DMR supports the acquisition of a rheometer at Northwestern University. Rheology is the study of the flow properties of so-called complex fluids, and the primary instrumentation used for such research are rheometers, which measure the flow behavior of such complicated materials under well-defined conditions. Many technologically important materials defy simple classification as either solids or liquids. Instead, their flow properties are more complicated, frequently combining elements of both solid and liquid character. Familiar examples from everyday life include food products such as egg whites or mayonnaise, consumer products such as toothpaste, lotions, and adhesives, and biological fluids. The new rheometer will serve a broad community of materials researchers at Northwestern University. Some areas of research that will benefit from this new instrumentation include: 1. Studies of flow-induced structural changes in ordered polymeric and surfactant fluids. 2. Studies of block-copolymer gels that provide a matrix for highly filled gel systems with applications in ceramic processing. 3. Thermoresponsive polymer solutions and microgels under development as matrices for advanced biopolymer separations in microchannel devices. 4. Functionalized polymer gels and networks for biomaterials applications. New materials for tissue engineering and drug delivery are being synthesized with bio-mimetic approaches-designed to simulated nature s strategies for gel and network formation doc12835 none Proposal No: ITR SY: A Flexible Framework for Secure Information Sharing Among Collaborating Organizations PI: Jajodia Sushil This proposal seeks to develop a exible framework for secure information sharing among collaborating organizations. The approach will be to extend the Flexible Authorization Framework (FAF) designed by the PI and his colleagues. FAF is based on an authorization specication language that has rule based syntax and sound, non-monotonic logic based semantics. The rst goal of this proposal is to enhance FAF to include information ow controls, provisional authorizations, delegation of authority, and a rather broad sense of revocation capabilities of granted permissions. The second undertaking is to investigate ecient implementation of the resulting framework that is based on the best practices of the security community. The third goal of this proposal is to investigate the properties of basic constructs that are used to compose security policies. The main deliverables of this proposal are a reference architecture, mathematics and algorithms for security specications of information access and ow, their ecient implementation techniques, and an an algebra for policy compositions doc12836 none The goal of this project is to address the problems of the public resource manager in making effective use of discipline-specific data within the inherently interdisciplinary context of the coastal zone. Initially the focus will be on local users on the Oregon Coast. However, there is great potential that the technologies can serve as a general model for similar efforts throughout North America, by developing an interactive, Internet-accessible information management system that incorporates a variety of geospatial data and analysis tools within a common framework. End-user training and direct technical assistance are incorporated into the development of this system, as are back-end system maintenance tools to ensure system longevity. This will enable coastal decision-makers at all government levels, the public, and research scientists to more easily find and use relevant, timely geospatial information. In this way universal participation in coastal decision making among coastal communities can be improved by extending community-expanding infrastructure to public offices that would otherwise face difficulties accessing IT services and resources. Specifically, a web-based data sharing depot will be built, with integrated Internet mapping and tool building capabilities to provide the coordination that resource managers and scientists need to tackle the interdisciplinary topic-based issues characteristic of the coastal zone. The infrastructure will be designed so that it is scalable over time both in size and in audience and encouraging of 2-way contributions by more advanced participant users. Much of this infrastructure will be generic, of use to many areas of interdisciplinary research in the natural sciences. The infrastructure, called the Oregon Coastal Atlas (OCA) will include: 1. A web-based electronic repository that will hold not only physical observations (traditional data),text, video and graphics, but also information about computational elements (programs, models, tools, and scripts for computational processing); 2. A set of tools that facilitate the entry of new data and metadata as well as the transformation between supported formats; and 3. A new form of XML, called Coastal XML or CML, that will improve the exportability of data archive structures and tools doc12837 none Joseph Klewicki, University of Utah It is proposed to establish a repository of raw data that are obtained from the NSF-funded Surface Layer Turbulence and Environmental Science Test (SLTEST) facility in Utah. The conceptual objective is to develop software tools and data repositories so that the massive amount of data obtained from SLTEST measurements can be managed and processed in an efficient manner, and can be made available to the scientific community doc12838 none The project is taking a four pronged approach to helping Indiana University of Pennsylvania achieve Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education at the undergraduate level. 1. Faculty Development through faculty workshops conducted by Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education James Madison University in which faculty develop and deliver computer security modules that can be readily included in core courses in Computer Science, Management Information Systems, Criminology, Educational Technology and IT as well as forming part of an Interdisciplinary Security minor. 2. Curriculum Development to increase the security content in computing and criminology courses via addition of security modules in core courses, as well as through an interdisciplinary minor in Information Assurance and an upper level security track for computer science students who wish to specialize. 3. Strengthening Research and Internship opportunities in Information Assurance through creation of the Center for Applied Security involving a strategic partnership with the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), which has as its goal to develop and deliver information protection assurance (IPA) services in our region. 4. Providing the Technology for research in Information Assurance through a state of the art lab used for hands on labs, and for experimentation with new threats and vulnerabilities doc12839 none Simple RNA viruses have evolved complex interactions with their host s cellular machinery that facilitate their replication, cell-to-cell movement, and systemic transport. These interactions often lead to a disruption in the development and homeostasis of the host s cellular processes, resulting in the expression of disease symptoms that impact the host s well being and or its economic value. The goals of this project focus on the identification of host components that are either involved in or affected by virus replication. To accomplish these goals the molecular tools available for the plant virus Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) will be combined with the genetic tractability of Arabidopsis thaliana to identify novel host genes that either directly contribute to the virus life-cycle or are transcriptionally altered during the infection process. Specific studies in this project will address three objectives. 1) A map-based cloning approach will be used to identify a previously classified Arabidopsis locus that controls the rate of TMV cell-to-cell movement. Additional studies will address the function of this locus and its role in virus cell-to-cell movement. 2) Available microarray technologies will be used to identify Arabidopsis genes that are differentially regulated during distinct stages of the TMV infection cycle, including inoculated and systemically infected whole leaf tissue as well as synchronously infected protoplasts. 3) Symptoms displayed by TMV infected Arabidopsis will be used to identify Arabidopsis mutants with altered virus susceptibilities. Map-based cloning strategies will then be initiated to identify the genes that impart these altered susceptibilities. Overall, studies from this project should significantly enhance our understanding of the interactions that occur between viruses and their hosts doc12840 none Quantum information processing will be addressed using laser trapped neutral atoms as the fundamental unit of information. This component of a larger project will involve the effort to explore more flexible trap architecture based on arrays of tight-focus laser traps, which can overcome the limitations of optical lattices doc12841 none Kaner Florida Institute of Technology Improving the Education of Software Testers This is a project that lays the groundwork for significant improvements in the quality of academic and commercial courses in software testing. This is new ground since the skills used in the field are not well identified and there are few collections of exercises or drills designed to help polish those skills. Software testing is an important area of work within information technology, but it has been largely ignored within the educational community. As a result, the software industry faces a shortage of appropriately educated people to do this work. This project develops foundational material for teaching introductory and advanced classes on software testing, including: a collection of examples of software errors (posted on a web site, well-described, with screen shots, and suitable for use in class), identification and descriptions of specific skills involved in software testing (published at conferences and in articles that are available on the web), sample exercises for students (for use as course assignments or for self-paced study) and a smaller separate collection for teachers (for possible use in exams), free software versions of classroom-level versions of useful testing tools (a classroom version is intended to teach the concept of that kind of tool, and to handle tasks that are as complex as the student might run into as an undergraduate), research (and reports on the results of the research) on the usefulness of Whittaker s software fault model as an organizing structure for presenting a wide range of key testing techniques in class, extension of Kaner & Bach s characterizations of testing styles strategies, bringing together research and practitioner literature into a structure useful for presenting a wide range of key testing strategies in class, and workshops (and an email discussion group) on the teaching of software testing. The core societal benefit of this work lies in its high potential for improvement of software testing and through that, software quality doc12842 none This project examines the effects of new information technology on science in developing areas over a five year period. The project team will study the impact of the Internet on research communication within the developing world and with the international scientific community through an analysis of the conditions associated with interpersonal networking and information search behavior. The study population consists of 360 scientists in three developing areas with different levels of research capacity (Ghana, Kenya, and the Indian state of Kerala) in two organizational contexts (universities, government research institutes). Each of these areas was the subject of a comprehensive study of research communication just prior to the rapid expansion of the Internet. These scientists are located in twelve organizational sites: two universities and two research institutes in each of the three areas (Ghana, Kerala, Kenya) for a total of 120 scientists in each country. Several kinds of data will be collected for each scientist (conventional survey, network survey, Internet usage data, and email data). The project will (1) enhance basic connectivity by providing local area networks to research organizations with point connections, (2) assess the professional relationships, information search behavior, and changes in research practice over a five year period, (3) train faculty and graduate students in the social analysis of science and technology. The results will have a direct impact on scientific capacity through increased connectivity and decreased isolation of scientists in developing countries, a direct impact through training of scholars in the social analysis of science and technology, and an indirect impact through increased understanding of the types of linkages that are most likely to be utilized and sustained doc12843 none This program provides an opportunity for faculty from other universities to receive education in information assurance with the focus on being able to teach the core concepts to their students. The target audience is faculty members from 4 year colleges and universities who are teaching computer science, information systems, or related fields and have a working knowledge of computers. They participate in a summer workshop to help them integrate the material into their courses or to help them develop new courses. Participating faculty take two courses offered via distance education. They also receive support material to help them integrate the subject material into their existing courses. The delivery consists of video taped lectures and on-line support through chat-rooms, emails, and phone. Several of the courses offer a hands-on learning experience where the faculty perform experiments and use software systems remotely through the Internet doc12844 none This proposal expands the capacity of our current educational program already producing high quality graduates in information assurance primarily through 30 fellowships and a unique support infrastructure. The broad-based program includes faculty from computing, engineering, political science, mathematics and management information systems to provide students with a broad range of course opportunities and career foci. As well, faculty from the education and library colleges help to design courses and other activities to ensure student success and leadership skill development. The fellowship program includes both undergraduate and graduate students leading to increased numbers of information assurance professionals doc12845 none This is a collaborative research award under the Information Technology Research initiative. The collaborator ( ) is Professor L. Sun at the University of Iowa. The research involves the development and application of methods for large-scale dislocation dynamics simulations. As a result of recent progress in manufacturing and engineering utilization of nano-and micro-scale structures, there is an urgent need for approaches that are capable of predicting the reliability and propensity of these structures to failure. This grant will develop Fortran 90 95 parallel computer software, based on discrete dislocation dynamics, which will predict plastic deformation and failure of sub-micron semiconductor microelectronics. Developed software will be aimed at (1) design of desired mechanical properties of semiconductor thin film-substrate material systems for optimum reliability; (2) development of new computer architectures for parallel, large-scale simulations for the dynamics of topologically complex line defects, which interact through long-range force fields; and (3) enhanced education training of graduate and undergraduate students. The following projects will be undertaken: (1) Investigation of single and collective dislocation interaction phenomena in anisotropic materials, which determine plasticity and failure in semiconductor devices; (2) Multiscale coupling of parametric dislocation dynamics with the finite element and analytical elasticity methods; (3) Development of unique software on parallel, scalable computer clusters to simulate the collective behavior of topologically complex line defects, which interact with a long-range force field; (4) Application of the developed software to investigate a number of critical physical mechanisms, including, misfit and threading dislocation loop motion; dislocation-dislocation interactions; junction and jog formation; dislocation annihilation and multiplication; dislocation interaction with grain boundaries, free surfaces and bimaterial elastic interfaces; dislocation interactions with point defects, precipitates and cracks; influence of thermal residual stress; computational design of buffer layers and superlattices; and (5) Large-scale simulation and optimization of semiconductor systems to provide guidelines for engineering design of new generations of microelectronics. The research will improve our understanding of plastic flow and failure at the nano-to-meso scale and represents a challenge to high performance computing and protocols. Models will be compared to experimental data and will also be used to design reliable microelectronics. %%% This is a collaborative research award under the Information Technology Research initiative. The collaborator ( ) is Professor L. Sun at the University of Iowa. The research involves the development and application of methods for large-scale dislocation dynamics simulations. As a result of recent progress in manufacturing and engineering utilization of nano-and micro-scale structures, there is an urgent need for approaches that are capable of predicting the reliability and propensity of these structures to failure. This grant will develop Fortran 90 95 parallel computer software, based on discrete dislocation dynamics, which will predict plastic deformation and failure of sub-micron semiconductor microelectronics. Developed software will be aimed at (1) design of desired mechanical properties of semiconductor thin film-substrate material systems for optimum reliability; (2) development of new computer architectures for parallel, large-scale simulations for the dynamics of topologically complex line defects, which interact through long-range force fields; and (3) enhanced education training of graduate and undergraduate students. The research will improve our understanding of plastic flow and failure at the nano-to-meso scale and represents a challenge to high performance computing and protocols. Models will be compared to experimental data and will also be used to design reliable microelectronics doc12846 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program and the Major Research Instrumentation program supports California Polytechnic State University with the acquisition of a scanning electron microscope with electron backscatter diffraction capabilities. The research that will utilize the equipment spans the disciplines of soil science, tribology, biomaterials, thin film science, metal-joining technology and the development of intermetallic alloys. The instrument will be used in undergraduate and Master s-level -science and engineering research and education programs. The goal is to expand the research opportunities for undergraduates, enhance the current courses and laboratories, seed a greater awareness of the benefits of materials research within industry and expand the opportunities for professional development of the faculty. This will be accomplished using four mechanisms: (1) Well-structured, yearlong research teams that target involving 50% females and 50% males; (2) Short-term industry-related projects aimed at promoting research for real-world challenges; (3) Senior-level and Master s-level research projects based on individual faculty research interests; and (4) Laboratory experiments incorporated into the curriculum for the purpose of educating the students on the use of an increasingly important materials characterization tool. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program and the Major Research Instrumentation program supports California Polytechnic State University with the acquisition of a scanning electron microscope with electron backscatter diffraction capabilities. The research that will utilize the equipment spans the disciplines of soil science, tribology, biomaterials, thin film science, metal-joining technology and the development of intermetallic alloys. The instrument will be used in undergraduate and Master s-level -science and engineering research and education programs. The goal is to expand the research opportunities for undergraduates, enhance the current courses and laboratories, seed a greater awareness of the benefits of materials research within industry and expand the opportunities for professional development of the faculty doc12847 none McKeegan This award provides funding for the operation, maintenance, and further technical development of the high- transmission, high-resolution ion microprobe system housed in the W. M. Keck Geochemistry Laboratory at the University of California in Los Angeles. The UCLA laboratory will be managed as a multi-user facility providing access by U.S. researchers to the special capabilities (combined mass resolution, spatial resolution, and sensitivity) of the ion microprobe for isotopic and elemental analysis doc12848 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Stanley H. Ambrose and his colleagues will conduct three field seasons of archaeological and geological research in the central and southern Rift Valley of Kenya to conduct a coordinated investigation into the origins and evolution of modern human behavior in East Africa. The team brings together American, Australian and Kenyan specialists in archaeology, geology, geochemistry, geochronology and paleontology. Many scholars now believe that transition from archaic (neanderthal-like) to modern behavior occurred in eastern Africa between 250,000 and 50,000 years ago. The transition from the Middle Stone Age (MSA) to the Later Stone Age (LSA) is widely considered to mark the change from archaic to fully-modern human behavior. Moreover, there are several behavioral innovations during the later MSA in eastern and southern Africa that are considered components of modern behavior that do not occur in the Middle Paleolithic of Eurasia. They include intensive long distance trade of fine-grained stone tool raw materials, microlithic blade technologies, ornamental artifacts, formal shaped bone tools and effective predation. Technological innovations seem to accumulate gradually, suggesting development in Africa, rather diffusion from an earlier area of origin elsewhere. However, this period lies beyond the range of radiocarbon dating, and most other dating techniques for this time span are inaccurate and unreliable. The central and southern Kenya Rift Valley region contains a rich archaeological record spanning the past 250,000 years. Recently active volcanoes have deposited layers of ash in most archaeological sites. Argon isotope dating of volcanics is one of the only methods that can provide reliable and accurate dates for sites between 250,000 and 40,000 years old. Volcanic layers can also be chemically fingerprinted , and dating a volcanic ash once dates every site in which it occurs. Genetic and fossil evidence suggests that anatomically modern humans dispersed from eastern Africa several times during the last 100,000 years. Behavioral and technological innovations during the MSA in eastern Africa may have facilitated the expansion of modern humans out of Africa. This important era of human evolutionary history is extremely poorly documented and dated in Africa. The presence of abundant archaeological sites with stratified volcanics for dating now allows us to test the model of an eastern African origin of modern human behavior. Dr. Ambrose and his collaborators will focus on four questions: 1. How old are MSA and early LSA archaeological occurrences in the central Rift Valley? Advances in methods for single crystal laser fusion argon isotope dating and chemical correlation of young volcanics permit us to address this issue. 2. How does stone tool technology change during this transition? This will be investigated by analysis of the tool production strategies and the tool types that were produced. 3. How did stone tool raw material source use change during the transition? Expansion and contraction of trade networks and sizes of home ranges will be evaluated by chemical fingerprinting of obsidian artifacts. This prized material was widely traded. Most sources of obsidian are located in a restricted area and have unique geochemical fingerprints. 4. How did faunal resource exploitation patterns change? Were MSA hunters like modern humans, who were able to take large, healthy, mature and dangerous prey. Age structure and body part data from archaeological faunas provide insights into predation patterns. 5. What were the environmental contexts of the sites? How did settlement systems differ between the MSA and LSA Geoarchaeological approaches to reconstructing the environmental settings of archaeological sites will be employed. This research is important for several reasons. (1). It will provide the first accurate geochronology for the Middle Stone Age of Africa; (2) It will provide insights into the nature and dynamics of the transitions in technology, economy, land use and social and territorial organization; (3) It will help test models of the African origin of modern human behavior and the dispersal of modern humans from Africa doc12849 none Techniques such as program generation, partial evaluation, just-in-time compilation, and run-time code generation respond to the need for general purpose programs which do not pay unnecessary run-time overheads. The thesis of this project is that a uniform, principled, high-level, and practical view of these diverse techniques is possible through multi-stage programming, a novel paradigm for the development of maintainable, high-performance software. The key idea in multi-stage programming is the use of simple, high-level annotations to allow the programmer to break down the cost of a computation into distinct stages. The goal of this proposal is to demonstrate that the theoretical machinery that has been developed for multi-stage programming can be put to work. This project will involve the development of compilers of multi-stage programming languages, addressing both practical and theoretical problems that arise in the development of such systems, and using these compilers in interesting applications ranging from dynamic programming algorithms and rewriting systems to implementations of domain specific programming languages doc12715 none The waters and soils of our environment contain naturally-occurring organic matter (NOM), which helps to regulate soil fertility, pollutant toxicity, ecosystem behavior and carbon cycling. These in turn affect agricultural production, public and ecosystem health, and global climate change. However, the processes which produce NOM from plant and animal matter are poorly understood, due to the complex nature of NOM and the multitude of possible reactions in the environment. This project will combine the efforts of ecologists, geochemists and computer scientists in an attempt to model this complex system using a novel stochastic approach. In this approach, millions of individual molecules are simulated and reacted together in silico to provide a computer model of the complex natural processes. The model will be developed and tested via an internet collaboration, and ultimately will be accessible to agricultural, environmental and earth scientists via a simple web browser interface doc12851 none J. Stone The product of this research will be an improved general purpose solver for astrophysical gas dynamics, including magnetohydrodynamics, self-gravity, and radiative cooling effects. It will be a successor to the PI s widely used ZEUS code and will be a new generation code exploiting new hardware and software capabilities. Solvers optimized for scalar processors able to run on distributed memory parallel machines will greatly enhance the range of astrophysical problems addressable with direct numerical simulation. The project is interfaced to the graduate program of the Center for Scientific Computation and Applied Mathematical Modeling, which will allow hands on graduate training in numerical simulations for astrophysics and in use of numerical algorithms for parallel architectures doc12852 none This award is made under the Information Technology Research initiative. Electronic devices are the underpinning of information technology. Present electronic devices are microscale in size. This limits the switching speed at which information can transfer. Nanoscale systems, including carbon nanotubes, have a great potential for a new generation of electronic devices with switching speeds a thousand times faster. However, as the size and dimensionality of electronic devices approach the nanoscale, the effect of correlations and disorder become crucial. Despite their importance, the effects of correlations and disorder remain a significant fundamental challenge to the physics community. A new computational approach will be developed to address this problem. The effects of disorder and correlations are now being studied experimentally in carbon nanotubes. These nanotubes form the smallest diameter quasi-one-dimensional conductors yet produced. The rich phenomena which arise from correlations in nanotubes include Luttinger liquid power law transport observed in single-wall nanotubes, and the recently observed superconductivity in ropes. The role of disorder is seen in the wide range of conductivities measured in metallic tubes. The dynamical cluster approximation (DCA) will be further developed to simulate models of carbon nanotubes. This new technique eliminates the finite-sized errors which can be especially large in one-dimensional systems; allows for the study of intertube coupling, as well as coupling to the tube environment; and, when combined with the Maximum Entropy Method, enables the study of the dynamical response of these systems. Key objectives of the project include the development of a computational tool set to study strongly correlated nanotubes and, as a consequence, develop an understanding of the temperture dependent properties in the two-chain model of a single-walled nanotube; the competition between disorder and correlations; the superconductivity in the two-chain modle and the role of intertube coupling; and the effect of long-range Coulomb forces. %%% This award is made under the Information Technology Research initiative. Electronic devices are the underpinning of information technology. Present electronic devices are microscale in size. This limits the switching speed at which information can transfer. Nanoscale systems, including carbon nanotubes, have a great potential for a new generation of electronic devices with switching speeds a thousand times faster. However, as the size and dimensionality of electronic devices approach the nanoscale, the effect of correlations and disorder become crucial. Despite their importance, the effects of correlations and disorder remain a significant fundamental challenge to the physics community. A new computational approach will be developed to address this problem. Key objectives of the project include the development of a computational tool set to study strongly correlated nanotubes and, as a consequence, develop an understanding of the temperture dependent properties in the two-chain model of a single-walled nanotube; the competition between disorder and correlations; the superconductivity in the two-chain modle and the role of intertube coupling; and the effect of long-range Coulomb forces doc12853 none Constraints on Performance and Pelagic Periods of Larvae Richard R. Strathmann Many marine animals live on the sea bed as sedentary adults but swim and are carried by ocean currents as planktonic larvae. Many of these larvae feed and grow for weeks or months before they can settle on the bottom. Larval feeding supports growth from a small egg to a larger size at metamorphosis. There are costs to this means of supporting early growth and development, however. The longer the period of larval growth, the more larvae are eaten by predators or carried by currents away from areas of good habitat on the sea bed. Many larvae feed by concentrating algal cells and other small particles of food This food can be scarce, and food-limited growth has been demonstrated. Maximum rates of concentrating scarce food from suspension depend on traits of larvae that differ among major groups (phyla) of marine animals. Because food is often in limiting supply, one might expect larvae in the same waters, whatever their other differences, to increase their capacity to concentrate scarce planktonic food as they increase in weight and energy requirements and in order to achieve greater growth rates as they develop. Surprisingly, some animals larvae appear to be poorly adapted to low concentrations of food. They have a very limited capacity to concentrate scarce planktonic food, even though they grow from tiny eggs to much larger juveniles at metamorphosis. Moreover, these larval forms have remained unchanged during much of animal evolution. The proposed research tests the hypothesis that food-limited growth rates depend on highly conserved traits of larvae. The prediction is that some forms are particularly constrained to slower growth when food is scarce. Some of these larvae feed with short ciliary bands throughout their development. These include the larval forms of bryozoans, which are colonial animals that live on rocks and seaweeds, and nemerteans (ribbon worms), which are common predators on other small marine animals. The bryozoan and nemertean larvae do not seem to fit predictions based on the more extensively studied larvae of molluscs and sea urchins and thus challenge biologists understanding of the ecology and evolution of planktonic larvae. The growth of bryozoan and nemertean larvae at limiting and satiating concentrations of food will be compared to growth of sea urchin larvae, whose maximum rates of clearing food from suspension are greater and increase more nearly in proportion to body mass. If the hypothesis is correct, then major groups of animals differ in food-limitation for their larvae, with consequences for death rates and dispersal of their larvae. Another case of an apparently ill-equipped feeding larva is the planula larva of sea anemones. These larvae lack ciliary bands entirely and are anatomically the simplest feeding larval forms, yet some of them grow substantially before metamorphosis. In other groups of animals, larvae that are this simple do not catch particulate food. Analyses of feeding capacity and growth rates of larval sea anemones will indicate the capabilities of the simplest feeding larvae. The results will indicate constraints on the origination of ciliated feeding larvae in other groups of animals doc12854 none The goal of this project is the isolation of individual elementary reactions relevant to the sulfur nitrogen interaction in combustion systems and the characterization of their reaction kinetics over a wide range of temperature. Short-lived reactive species including atoms of nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur and diatomic radicals such as NH, NH2, CN, SO, CS, and SH are generated by pulsed ultraviolet excimer-laser or flash-lamp photolysis of precursor molecules. The concentration of transient radical species are monitored with time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy - laser-induced fluorescence for molecular radicals and vacuum-ultraviolet resonance fluorescence for atomic species - to obtain rate constants and product identification as functions of temperature and pressure. Reactions are studied under pseudo-first-order conditions with a large excess of the stable reactant. Experiments include reactions of radicals with stable molecules such as hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, and nitric oxide and also radical-radical reactions involving SO. The interaction of nitrogen and sulfur chemistry within flames and exhaust gases influences the generation of nitrogen oxides from combustion and thusly impacts acid rain, photochemical smog, and tropospheric ozone. Depending on conditions, sulfur may augment or reduce the amounts of nitrogen oxides emitted. This study investigates the underlying chemistry of this interaction. This project provides a vehicle for the participation of undergraduate and secondary-school students through the Texas Academy of Math and Science and the Upward Bound Math and Science Program doc12855 none Verification tools based on decision procedures including OBDD based tools and model-checkers have been effectively used in many application areas including hardware verification, protocol analysis and verification, static analysis and type-checking of code, byte-code verification, analysis of mobile code and proof-carrying code. These tools are however unable to deal with computations modeled using large state space (including infinite state space), partly because they do not support inductive reasoning. Induction based theorem provers, while quite powerful, lack automation and require tremendous user guidance. A novel and radical approach is proposed to combine decision procedures, rewriting and induction schemes in a restricted way so as not to lose automation. Using this approach, recursive definitions are given as terminating rewrite rules on top of decidable theories, such as Presburger arithmetic. Induction schemes are generated from these terminating definitions. By imposing structure on recursive definitions, it becomes possible to automatically decide a large class of conjectures requiring inductive reasoning. It is proposed to extend and generalize this approach to consider a large class of recursively defined functions, their interactions with each other, as well as a large class of conjectures about these functions, that can be automatically decided (without any need for user guidance doc12802 none Zhang Korf Best-First Search Algorithms for Sequence Alignment Problems in Computational Biology Molecular biologists are currently faced with very challenging computational problems. For example, a draft of the human genome has been completed, a sequence of about three billion base pairs. A draft of the mouse genome soon will be completed. We know that mice and men share over 90% of their genetic material. What we don t know is exactly which parts of the human and mouse genomes are common to both species. This information can be used to identify human genes, and to translate results from mouse studies to studies of human health and disease. The problem of identifying the common elements between these two DNA sequences is an example of sequence alignment, which is a computational problem. Other examples of sequence alignment problems include gene identification, and RNA and protean structure prediction. Current computer algorithms are either too slow, or require too much memory, to directly solve a problem as large as the human-mouse genomic sequence alignment. We propose to develop new algorithms for various sequence-alignment problems, based on heuristic search algorithms in artificial intelligence. Our goal is to provide much more efficient sequence-alignment algorithms for use by molecular biologists doc12857 none Shachar-Hill The network of one-carbon (C1) reactions provides C1 units for use in biosynthesis. It is crucial to plant metabolism, but many of the network s enzymes are known poorly or not at all. Accordingly, functions will be determined for genes that putatively encode: 10-formyl-THF deformylase, sarcosine oxidase, formamidase, 5-formyl-THF cycloligase, S-formylglutathione hydrolase, glutamate forminotransferase, methionine g-lyase, and organellar forms of 5,10-methylene-THF dehydrogenase. For all these genes determining function means finding the biochemical activities and subcellular location of the encoded proteins; for the first five it means in addition isolating Arabidopsis knockout mutants and determining the effects of the mutations on C1 metabolism using NMR, mass spectral, and biochemical procedures. GenBank numbers for the network of C1 genes are at http: www.hos.ufl.edu meteng 1Cpage1.html. This website will be used to post research results as they become available, as well as a catalog of the full-length cDNAs, antibodies, and other resources generated in the project. This website will be linked to the central project site when it is established. Results will also be presented at meetings and published. This research will meet project objectives by assigning biochemical and metabolic functions to most of the unexpected, unexplained, and unexplored genes in plant C1 metabolism. The broader impact will be three-fold. First, on crop improvement. Many efforts to genetically engineer plants for human benefit involve changes to C1 metabolism, making it vital to understand C1 metabolism so as to engineer it successfully. Second, on basic plant biochemistry, because C1 metabolism is perhaps the least well understood area of plant primary metabolism despite its central position in processes such as photorespiration, lignification, and alkaloid synthesis. Third, on biochemistry in general, because the plant C1 metabolic network is special, not merely a minor variation on those in yeast, liver, or bacteria doc12858 none With support from the National Science Foundation, the University of Washington luminescence dating laboratory headed by Dr. James Feathers will purchase a Riso automated TL OLS reader with automated processor which permits single grain luminescence determinations. Because of its increased efficiency over the instrument the laboratory currently employs, the Riso machine will both increase throughput and decrease cost per sample. The Washington laboratory is the sole facility in the United States which routinely provides several types of luminescence analysis (TL, OSL, IRSL) for archaeological samples and the resultant dates have come to play an increasingly important function for archaeologists. Because organic materials are present in only a limited number of sites many such occurrences are not amenable to radiocarbon dating and often luminescence provides the only alternative. Using a range of approaches it often possible to obtain dates from either ceramics or soil and in the former case luminescence has an advantage over radiocarbon since it can directly date the object of interest rather than associated material. Dr. Feathers has shown that luminescence may be as accurate as radiocarbon. Traditional luminescence techniques analyze bulk samples comprised of many individual grains and the results can be problematic since particles of multiple ages and exposure histories may be present. Machines such as the Riso automated reader avoid this problem since they can date individual grains. A distribution of individual readings provides insight into the nature of the sample itself - both admixture and differential degree of bleaching - and therefore the multiple determinations allow accuracy to be better determined. Dr. Feathers research is directed at both improvement of the technique itself and its application to anthropologically significant archaeological sites. He has addressed questions such as the development of complex societies in the southern United States, the time of human entry into the New World and the emergence of modern human behavior in sub Saharan Africa. Acquisition of the Riso instrument will significantly increase the effectiveness of such research doc12859 none This project produces course modules related to critical aspects of aviation for internal use and projected for external distribution. Modules are considered to be a part of a course, developed from both technical and policy perspectives, integrated with other course materials, involving both labs and lectures, and presented to bring the topic alive, and leave a lasting impression on the student s professional attitude. The first step of the project involves both external survey of the field and identification of potential module partners (importing and exporting) and internal examination of engineering and policy curricula for most productive module injection and evaluation. The long-range objective is meeting the criteria for curriculum and institutional certification as a center for academic excellence in information assurance education. The modules have an aviation engineering orientation, thus potential high impact on the aviation and related industries. The project should have a high impact on the institution, faculty, and students as well. Results are disseminated as both publications and packaged courseware with extensive website support doc12860 none Proposal # U of Arizona Andrews, Gregory A binary rewriting system is a software system that transforms a binary (executable) program into a different but functionally equivalent binary program. This project is developing binary rewriting techniques for flexible link-time and run-time code optimizations. The aim is to develop a unified binary rewriting infrastructure that is able to handle a wide variety of applications---sequential, parallel, distributed, and mobile---hardware architectures---from RISC to CISC---and optimization criteria---including execution time, power consumption, and communication bandwidth. Existing techniques for compile-time code optimization suffer from several limitations: they are unable to cross the dividing line between application code and libraries; they cannot take advantage of commonly encountered values along the critical path if such values cannot be guaranteed to be compile-time constants; and they typically focus only on improving execution time. To overcome these limitations, this project is investigating the following topics: (1) low-level cost models that can be used for cost-benefit analyses of different optimization metrics; (2) efficient computation of value profiles and their use for low-level code specialization; and (3) techniques that reduce the overheads associated with communication libraries used by parallel and mobile applications doc12861 none This project will develop tools that make it possible to retrieve naturally occurring sentences from the World Wide Web on the basis of lexical content and syntactic structure, providing linguists with an immediate, easily accessible source of raw linguistic data. The PIs will investigate specific linguistic hypotheses at the lexical semantics syntax interface as an illustrative application of these tools. At a high level, the planned work constitutes an important step toward a new paradigm for linguistic research. Rather than relying entirely on introspective data generated by the linguist who is trying to (dis)prove a particular hypothesis, Web-enabled linguistics research will draw on the methodology and the tools developed by the PIs to supply naturally occurring data on which theories can rest. With regard to specific linguistic questions, the goal is to provide an explanation of the rules and constraints that govern three transitivity alternations (Middle, Unaccusative, Unspecified Object Deletion), and the PIs expect data made available by their tools to shed light on the grey area between competence and performance, that is, the linguistic behavior that seems to fall outside of rule-governed behavior. Although naturally occurring data are not accorded great emphasis in generative syntax, the use of text corpora has a tradition in the greater linguistic enterprise. An explosive new phenomenon in the world of naturally occurring text, the World Wide Web is an essentially untapped resource that embodies the rich and dynamic nature of language, presenting a data resource of unparalleled size and diversity doc12862 none The Polymer Science and Engineering Department of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (Umass) is supported by the Chemistry Division, the Division of Undergraduate Education, and the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities under the Research Sites for Educators in Chemistry (RSEC) program. The Prinicipal Investigator,. Thomas McCarthy is joined by Sandra Burkett of Amherst College, Wei Chen of Mount Holyoke College, and Kate Queeney of Smith College. This Western Massachusetts RSEC will integrate their research efforts. The planned research themes are (1) rational heterogenation of homogeneous catalyst, (2) molecular imprinting of polymeric materials, (3) surface modification to control wettability and biocompatibility, and (4) control of protein adsorption through chemistry and topography. To expand the RSEC, the program will focus its attention on nine other two- and four-year institutions in the local area. One of the goals of this RSEC is to increase the number of undergraduate chemistry majors at the participating institutions by injecting polymer and materials chemistry into existing courses at all levels, and by developing a one-semester course in polymer chemistry complete with notes and instructor s guide. Central to the formation of these collaborations is a series sabbaticals, and summer research appointments for faculty and undergraduate students at the four core institutions. This RSEC will be managed by a Director and an Advisory Board made up of representatives from each participating institution. There will also be an Executive Advisory Board made up of administrators from the institutions and outside experts in polymer research. Research Sites for Educators in Chemistry bring together the faculty of participating two-year colleges, baccalaureate colleges, and master s universities with faculty at research universities within a geographic region, for the purpose of enhancing the research and educational opportunities for all participants. Academic and research institutions provide abundant opportunities where individuals may concurrently assume responsibilities as researchers, educators, and students, and where all can engage in joint efforts that infuse education with the excitement of discovery and enrich research through the diversity of learning perspectives. RSECs such as this one at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst provide mechanisms for disseminating the knowledge, skill, practices and ethics of research to a broader community, including those from under-represented groups; assist in developing viable, sustainable research programs at participating institutions; and involve faculty and students at the participating institutions with a broader cross-section of faculty and students doc12863 none This project develops a new technique for estimation of the state of a stochastic dynamical system, given some partial and imperfect information from measurements. Unlike traditional linear estimation methods, such as least-squares variational methods or Kalman Filter approach, this new technique is capable of handling highly nonlinear dynamics--and thus non-Gaussian statistics-- in a way that approaches the optimality of the formally exact solution by Kushner, Stratonovitch, Pardoux (KSP). Just as KSP, the new method computes the conditional statistics of the system given the measurements. However, when applied to problems of interest in information technology, such as large-scale geoscience or environmental data assimilation, the new method does not lead to functional stochastic equations that are hopelessly intractable to solve, as does KSP. The approach pursued in this project is instead to approximate the conditional statistics by means of a variational formulation, which yields the conditional mean as the minimizer of an appropriate cost function and the covariance as its Hessian. The cost function proposed is calculated by a Rayleigh-Ritz or moment-closure scheme, which should render the problem tractable to numerical computation. The main research that will be done is to develop suitable statistical techniques to model the system for the Rayleigh-Ritz calculation, to work out efficient algorithms for the numerical optimization of the cost function, and to compare with existing suboptimal estimation schemes. In many areas of the geosciences of practical importance, it is crucial to combine information from observations with the results of a sophisticated numerical model to produce the best estimate of the past or future state of the system. In the case of a chemical or radioactive spill observed by monitoring a few well sites, one wants to track the contaminant plume backward in time to its source. This must be accomplished with only statistical knowledge about the properties of the aquifer and groundwater flow field and with the measurements themselves subject to error. In numerical weather prediction, the goal is instead to combine the latest observations from satellite arrays with the output of large-scale, meteorological computer models to predict the future state of the weather. Again, the models contain stochastic or chaotic elements which prevent perfect prediction based upon partial and imperfect information. The modeling methods and numerical algorithms developed in this project should provide a practical scheme to compute the best estimate in the face of such randomness in the model and uncertainty in the observations doc12763 none PI Jansen - # PI Moret - # This award provides support for a collaborative project between two biologists (Jansen and Boore) and three computer scientists (Moret, Warnow, and Bader) to develop and test new algorithms and software for constructing evolutionary trees (phylogenies) from the rapidly increasing amount of genomic data. The estimation of phylogenies is crucial to a wide range of basic and applied biological problems such as the epidemiology of AIDS, the identification of viral agents, the analysis of protein structure and function, the prediction of RNA structure; and, of course, it is the basic tool for inferring evolutionary history. Methods for the reconstruction of phylogenies are most commonly applied to DNA sequences. In many cases these sequences change at rates that are too low or too high for recovering accurate evolutionary trees. One new type data that is fast gaining favor in the biology community is gene order and content within whole genomes, but so far very few computational methods have been developed for these types of data. The three goals of the project are to: (1) develop algorithms and software for reconstructing evolutionary trees from gene order and content data; (2) assess the performance of these algorithms through extensive simulation studies under parameter-rich models of genome evolution and through application to real datasets; and (3) develop high-performance implementations of the best algorithms designed in the project using algorithm engineering techniques and a flexible approach to parallelization. This project will make significant contributions in biology, through the development of new models of genome evolution and an improved understanding of the evolution of chloroplast and mitochondrial genomes, and in computer science, through the development and testing of new algorithms for genomic data and the application of high-performance computing to problems in phylogenetic analysis doc12865 none Disk systems have long been a source of performance and management problems, and they grow in importance as the years pass. Of particular concern are the slow-to-improve mechanical positioning delays. To address these problems, storage devices and host systems have abundant resources and knowledge. Independently, engineers of both device firmware and operating system (OS) software aggressively utilize their local knowledge and resources to mitigate disk performance problems. The overall goal of this research is to increase the cooperation between these two sets of engineers, which will increase the end-to-end performance and robustness of computer systems. This research will develop a deep understanding of available device and workload information and how it can be collectively exploited. Exploiting this understanding in real systems will require more expressive interfaces and new cooperative algorithms. Two concrete examples to be explored are: (1) device-side specializations, such as freeblock scheduling, that have access to system-provided information about priority levels and forthcoming demands, and (2) OS-side specializations, such as track-aligned extents, that have access to device-provided details about physical data layout and firmware cache algorithms. In addition, the insights generated by this research will assist end-to-end education and thinking in storage systems doc12866 none Paul Josephson, Colby College Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Scientific Management of Nature Based on an innovative approach to the analysis of notions of sustainable development at the juncture of history of technology and environmental history, this project examines comparative issues of scientific management of natural resources in the Soviet Union and Russia, Norway, the United States, Canada and Brazil. The central task of this historical survey is to track the evolution of brute-force technology in these countries from the s through the present. The focus falls on water, fish, and forest resources. The study identifies the challenges in adopting sustainable resource management techniques, designing appropriate technologies, and providing adequate resources for all citizens. Four case studies pursue the surprising richness and similarity of the subjects (in terms of research strategies, biological affinities, political and economic pressures. The first cases compares a massive Stalinist project to transform the Volga River basin into a unified transport, irrigation, and hydroelectric power system, with the taming of the Columbia River basin in Washington state. A second case study considers the Soviet conquest of Siberia and the so-called Angara-Enesei cascade in comparison with the development of Amazonia. The third study explores the role of scientific research in promoting brute force technology in the Norway and Soviet deep sea fishing industries. The final case study focuses on the forests of Arkhangelsk region of northwest Russia and the northern forest of New Hampshire and Maine. National politics, economics, culture, and science and engineering have had an impact on the genesis of scientific management and brute force technology. The study evaluates the impact these national features in shaping notions of scientific management of natural resources, and nature itself. It also describes the roots of the tendency to replace biological paradigms with industrial ones in which scientists treat nature as an efficient machine of monocultures, and look closely at the design of the technologies that powered the machine. In natural resource management, the driving force has been the effort to determine where production and biology meet. Cross-national comparisons will indicate what aspects of resource management are universal and what aspects reflect national determinants -- economic, political, social, ideological -- of scientific activity doc12867 none For the next generation Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) circuits, the signal delay will be dominated by parasitic resistance (R), capacitance (C), and inductance (L) of the interconnect. The ability to extract RCL parasitic quickly and accurately is crucial to the design and verification of large VLSI circuits. This project will develop innovative algorithms and software for fast and accurate extraction of RCL parasitic of VLSI circuits. The main goal of the project is the design of preconditioned iterative methods for solving the linear systems arising in inductance and capacitance extraction problems. Solvers for the inductance problem will use a novel solenoidal basis approach to precondition a reduced system implicitly, leading to rapid convergence of the iterative methods. Fast approximations to the matrix-vector products with dense system matrices will be computed using efficient hierarchical methods. Parallelism in the algorithms will be exploited to develop high-performance software that is capable of tackling large problems. Software developed for this project will be portable across a variety of parallel architectures. It is anticipated that the code will deliver the performance necessary for parasitic RCL extraction of deep sub-micron VLSI circuits of realistic sizes doc12868 none The goal of this project is to develop a nationally available fully automated web-based diagnostic system called ARCADE (Automated Reading Comprehension and Diagnostic Evaluation) that will be capable of assessing complex comprehension based upon student free response data. The technology used will be to combine information extraction (IE) technologies and advanced psychometric techniques in novel ways so as to provide detailed assessment and diagnostic information for use by teachers and students in the service of improving classroom instruction and learning. The ARCADE system will also contribute to a data infrastructure useable by other investigators. Specifically, computer scientists interested in the development of new information extraction technology and cognitive scientists and educators interested in the development of new theories of comprehension and assessment would be able to access the database that will be developed in the course of using ARCADE with students. Thus, in addition to improving educational effectiveness in classrooms on a national level, the ARCADE system has the potential to provide a nation-wide resource for facilitating the advancement of scientific research in both the fields of reading comprehension and information technology research. The specific research being pursued is to develop and empirically test the core mathematical algorithms of the ARCADE system with respect to their reliability and validity for assessing reading comprehension in foundational literacy in science and literature. The empirical database will consist of free response data generated by student examinees in grade school and junior high school classroom settings in response to open-ended probe questions. The core ARCADE system employs innovative combinations of information extraction and psychometric techniques to address a critical educational need, namely, ways to assess multiple dimensions of complex comprehension. Such dimensions of comprehension are specified by a set of special semantic networks (called knowledge digraphs ) which embody meaning relations among ideas in texts and documents as well as relations to prior knowledge and inferences. A new statistical model of examinee behavior is then defined which incorporates techniques from the fields of Item Response Theory (IRT), Hidden Markov Model IE technology, and Knowledge Digraph Contribution analysis. The important innovation of this new statistical model is that multiple dimensions of comprehension in conjunction with their respective standard errors can be directly estimated from examinee free response data using Monte Carlo simulation and econometric methods Moreover, using an approach analogous to that developed in IRT , these assessments of comprehension dimensions can be mathematically proven to be reliable across a given family of equivalent testing materials doc12869 none Thomas Arias of Cornell University and Angeliki Rigos of Merrimack College are supported by the Division of Chemistry under the Information Technology Research (ITR) program to use expressive software to bring quantum computational techniques to the study of surface reactions in dielectric environments. This research is inherently interdisciplinary in nature, utilizing both surface physics and solution chemistry, and will be the first effort to include not only the surface but also reactants and solvents to enable a realistic description of experimental systems. Specific aims of this project are to: (1) develop a framework for an ab initio capability for extended systems in solution, (2) implement the dielectric continuum description with ultrasoft pseudopotential capability within the density functional theory (DFT++) framework, (3) apply the resulting software to study correction initiation reactions at the surface of chromium (III) oxide, (4) teach workshops on using the new methods and software to the research, industrial, and educational communities, and (5) expose high school and undergraduate students to quantum computing capabilities. The research outcomes are expected to enable new insights into corrosion of high-performance stainless steel alloys in high-temperature aqueous-salinated environments. Most high performance stainless steels contain chromium, which forms an oxide layer on the surface that protects the metal under ordinary conditions. However, stainless steel is often used at high temperatures and in salt solutions where damaging corrosion to the metal can occur rapidly, causing expensive industrial equipment failures. The outcomes from this project may lead to new insights into chemical corrosion processes, and help to enable technological developments that can improve the industrial utility of stainless steel under a variety of extreme environmental conditions. Free internet distribution of new computational software, workshops, and student exposure to computational quantum mechanics will enhance the broader research community doc12870 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program will allow the University of Pittsburgh to purchase a video imaging system that will allow the principal investigators to follow individual particle motion and spreading of dyes in a 2D flowing soap film. The video system consists of a high-speed ( fps) video camera and a 5Watt solid-state laser. The latter serves as an intense light source for illuminating the particles and for excitation of the dye. The system is one of general utility and will serve to train graduate as well as undergraduate students in fluid dynamics and state-of-the-art measurement techniques. The idea of using topology to study 2D turbulence is entirely new and promising results just beginning to emerge. The requested video system will further our fundamental understanding of turbulence phenomena which are important for a wide range of practical problems, such as weather patterns, dispersion of biological agents in air and in water, chemical reactions, and crystal growth.. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program will allow the University of Pittsburgh to purchase a video imaging system that will allow the principal investigators to follow individual particle motion and spreading of dyes in a 2D flowing soap film. The video system consists of a high-speed video camera and a 5Watt solid-state laser. The latter serves as an intense light source for illuminating the particles and for excitation of the dye. The system is one of general utility and will serve to train graduate as well as undergraduate students in fluid dynamics and state-of-the-art measurement techniques. The idea of using topology to study 2D turbulence is entirely new and promising results just beginning to emerge. The requested video system will further our fundamental understanding of turbulence phenomena which are important for a wide range of practical problems, such as weather patterns, dispersion of biological agents in air and in water, chemical reactions, and crystal growth doc12871 none EIA- Black, Michael Brown University ITR SY: The Computer Science of Biologically-Embedded Systems Biologically-embedded systems that directly couple artificial computational devices with neural systems are emerging as a new area of information technology research. The physical structure and adaptability of the human brain make these biologically-embedded systems quite different from computational systems typically studied in Computer Science. Fundamentally, biologically-embedded systems must make inferences about the behavior of a biological system based on measurements of neural activity that are indirect, ambiguous, and uncertain. Moreover these systems must adapt to short- and long-term changes in neural activity of the brain. These problems are addressed by a multi-disciplinary team in the context of developing a robot arm that is controlled by simultaneous recordings from neurons in the motor cortex of awake behaving monkeys. The goal is to probabilistically model the behavior of these neurons as a function of arm motion and then reconstruct continuous arm trajectories based on the neural activity. To do so, the project will exploit mathematical and computational techniques from computer vision, image processing, and machine learning. This work will enhance scientific knowledge about how to design and build new types of hybrid human computer systems, will explore new devices to assist the severely disabled, will address the information technology questions raised by these biologically-embedded systems, and will contribute to the understanding of neural coding doc12872 none Proposal Altunbasak, Yucel GA Tech Res Corp - GIT ITR SI(SPS)+AP+SY: High-Resolution High-Precision Video Reconstruction with Applications to Visual Communications and Image Enhancement The problem of resolution and bit-depth enhancement from compressed data will become increasingly important for applications in the emerging, error-prone, restricted bandwidth, wireless and heterogeneous computing environments. This research involves enhancing the spatial, temporal and bit-depth resolution of video signals by means of multi-frame and multi-channel processing. The system that is developed as part of this work is applicable to various areas of video communications and multi-media processing. The number of bits assigned to represent the intensity or color information at points in an image is usually referred as the bit depth. When the bit depth is not sufficient, images suffer from ridge-like structures known as false contours. Bit-depth limitations become important when low-contrast details are required, as in medical imaging, aerial satellite photography, and high-quality scanning applications. Noting the similarity between the bit-depth and spatial resolution enhancement, this research examines a method for increasing the bit depth. Specifically, when a sequence of video frames is available, it is possible to achieve a higher bit depth and higher spatial resolution through a projections-onto-convex-sets (POCS) based data fusion method. The multiple-frame video processing algorithms and their multimedia and communication applications form an integral part of the signal processing education agenda at Georgia Tech. Motivated and encouraged by the level of interest in multi-frame processing (by the students), the project constructs a web-centric demo of image resolution and precision enhancement for the benefit of the undergraduates as well as the research community doc12873 none Project geologists, paleontologists, and anthropologists will use geological field observations and newly collected fossils to characterize the dietary resources and habitats that were available to early human ancestors along an ancient tropical coast in Java. The field area is a 20km2 outcrop of marine deltaic deposits where the Perning Mojokerto Homo erectus skull cap was discovered in . The hominid deposits are made up of material erupted from nearby volcanoes, and volcanic products from the beds have been dated by radioisotopic methods at 1.81 + - 0.04 Ma. New radioisotopic dates will be obtained in this project to more fully document the age of the hominid-bearing section, but the Perning hominid is already certain to be the oldest known from marine coast sediments. Determining the diets of fossil hominids is one of the primary ways that we track the biological and behavioral adaptations lying at the core of human evolution. Because of the great age of the Perning hominid beds, this project addresses diets at a pivotal point in human development when expansion of early Homo across the Old World doubtlessly introduced our ancestors to habitats and food resources unknown in the continental interior of Africa. Considerable information now exists on the conditions in which early Homo lived in Africa, and from Asia evidence is mounting for hominid expansion nearly two million years ago. However, the ecology and behavioral changes associated with the dispersal cannot be fully understood until there are new paleoenvironmental data from well-dated Asian sites. Java is among the most valuable places in Asia for information of this kind, since Homo erectus may have inhabited Javan rainforests and seacoasts for 1.8 million years. Paleoenvironmental reconstruction of the ancient Perning delta will be based upon pollen-, mollusk-, and vertebrate-fossils, as well as detailed observations of sedimentary facies. Comparing the paleoenvironmental results from Perning to those from contemporaneous hominid localities in Asia and Africa is expected to provide new insights into the behavioral patterns involved in the expansion of early Homo across the Old World. The geological observations and fossils collected in the project will be used, for example, to determine whether the ancient coast at Perning offered forest shoreline dietary resources similar to those in modern Indonesia, or was somehow like the savannas woodlands in which the ancient hominids of Africa and Eurasia lived. If the field program leads to new hominid discoveries, they will likely afford opportunities to radiometrically date some of Asia s earliest human inhabitants, and link them to specific coastal paleohabitats. New hominid fossils will also provide much needed information on the physical attributes of earliest Asians doc12874 none Cell Interaction-dependent Neural Development PI: Paul J. Linser Complex tissues such as the nervous system are composed of numerous distinct types of cells that work together to produce the net output of that tissue. Two major sub-categories of cells in the nervous system are neurons and neuroglia. These are highly specialized cell types that perform complementary but distinctly different tasks. How it is that these disparate cell types arise during embryonic development is a central focus of the research in the laboratory of Professor Paul J. Linser. During the course of over 20 years of research into the mechanisms that influence an embryonic cell s choice to become either a neuron or a neurglial cell, Dr. Linser s group discovered a cell surface glycoprotein that seems to participate in this developmental decision. The protein is called 5A11 basigin and is found in several tissues but is very highly expressed in neural retina and brain. A line of mice has been produced in which the gene for 5A11 basigin has been inactivated. These mice afford a remarkable opportunity for studying the actual function of this protein. Among the abnormalities exhibited by the 5A11 basigin knockout mice is blindness. Although the neural retinas of these mice initially appear to develop normally, they never actually become functional as receivers and interpreters of image (light) signals. The focus of Dr. Linser s research is on the use of the knockout mouse to help understand the specific role that 5A11 basigin plays in the development of a normal and functioning neural retina. The proposed studies will combine techniques of molecular biology and biochemistry to examine in great detail the developmental changes that have arisen in the absence of the 5A11 basigin protein. As this protein is expressed in numerous tissues, the knockout mice also exhibit a number of other characteristics that greatly diminish their biological stability. Understanding the function of the 5A11 basigin glycoprotein in the neural retina will lead to fundamental insights into how this protein and others with similar structure serve in normal animal development doc12875 none Williams Subduction zones comprise a large percentage of the tectonic plate boundaries on earth and they produce the largest and most devastating earthquakes. Large amounts of surface geodetic data are collected in these regions to estimate seismic hazard and to understand the mechanics of convergent margins. The amount and quality of such data has increased rapidly in recent years but the development of sophisticated and easy-to-use modeling tools has not proceeded at a similar pace. Although sophisticated modeling techniques exist, they are not generally easy to use and are not readily available to the same scientists collecting geodetic data. This is a project to develop web-based tools that will provide comprehensive solutions for geoscientists wishing to model surface deformation at subduction zones. This will allow general access to more powerful modeling techniques (the finite element method) while offering significant ease-of-use. Despite the increase in the quality and quantity of geodetic data, most researchers still rely on older modeling techniques in their analyses. The goal of this project is to provide a modeling environment that improves upon current methods while still being easy to use, thus allowing geoscientists to focus more on interpretation than on model development doc12876 none An interdisciplinary group of four physicists and four chemists have common research interests in molecular magnetism, new materials synthesis, and nanotechnology, and in several cases, formal interdisciplinary collaborations exist. A variety of new magnetic systems and nanodevices are prepared, and they are presently characterized by magnetotransport, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR), atomic force microscopy (AFM), near-field microscopy (NFM), and other spectroscopies including infrared, ultraviolet visible, and Raman techniques. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program will allow the University of Florida to enhance its characterization capability with the acquisition of a modern magnetometer, a Quantum Design MPMS 7 Tesla SQUID magnetometer. The new instrument will have significant impact on a number of researchers at the University of Florida with activities related to magnetic phenomena. In addition, this new instrument will serve as an important interdisciplinary educational and training tool for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who will operate the equipment. Finally, the University of Florida has committed funding which represents 30% of the total cost of the instrument. An interdisciplinary group of four physicists and four chemists have common research interests in molecular magnetism, new materials synthesis, and nanotechnology, and in several cases, formal interdisciplinary collaborations exist. A variety of new magnetic systems and nanodevices are prepared, and they are presently characterized by magnetotransport, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR), atomic force microscopy (AFM), near-field microscopy (NFM), and other spectroscopies including infrared, ultraviolet visible, and Raman techniques. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program will allow the University of Florida to enhance its characterization capability with the acquisition of a modern magnetometer, a Quantum Design MPMS 7 Tesla SQUID magnetometer. The new instrument will have significant impact on a number of researchers at the University of Florida with activities related to magnetic phenomena. In addition, this new instrument will serve as an important interdisciplinary educational and training tool for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who will operate the equipment. Finally, the University of Florida has committed funding which represents 30% of the total cost of the instrument doc12877 none Literacy with a Service-Learning Approach This is a proposal for a grant to promote service-learning as a model for the dissemination of Information Technology Literacy (ITL). Service-learning promotes mutually beneficial partnerships between academic institutions and communities. One goal is to empower communities to identify ITL needs that students can fulfill as part of their education. This grant would enable two central Iowa universities--Drake and Iowa State--to reach out to communities in need of ITL training and to assess the efficacy of service-learning interventions. Citizens are increasingly expected to interface with government using IT (ex. firstgov.gov). A number of studies have identified unequal levels of ITL as a significant barrier to equity in citizenship. While access to the Internet steadily expands, the ability to take advantage of increasing access hinges on the level of ITL among citizens. Community members, particularly in certain more vulnerable groups, often lack basic skills and concepts required when navigating an expanding electronic interface with government. Whereas IT should make it easier for all citizens to conduct their routine business with the government, in fact, it appears to be widening the gap between the IT literate and those without basic navigational skills. The primary objective of this research project is to test the efficacy of service-learning programs that seek to universalize digital citizenship. Three related objectives are to: Define Information Technology Literacy (ITL) using broad and systematic criteria. Develop, implement, and evaluate best practices for using service-learning in the dissemination of ITL. Test the hypothesis that service-learning lessens the digital divide. The proposed methodology uses experimental and control groups representing varying degrees of urbanization. A service-learning ITL class and fieldwork laboratory will establish links between undergraduates and the experimental groups. Researchers, students, and the serviced communities will develop and refine taxonomy of ITL skills. Experimental groups will be exposed to the service-learning treatment. Structured citizen surveys and focus groups will be used to analyze the data on program impact. Statistical analysis of covariance at specific points and variance over time will be employed to lay the groundwork for a predictive causal model. Several additional outcomes are expected as a result of this research. First, the study will model a new pedagogical intervention that links research, education, and community involvement in an effort to lessen the digital divide. Second, it makes the recipients of service the focus of scholarship. Most studies in this area focus on outcomes for the students rather than the recipients. Third, it focuses attention on the important distinction between IT access and IT literacy. Fourth, it promotes interdisciplinary research and training, as well as collaboration between public and private institutions seeking to incorporate IT into the campus curricula. Finally, it promotes innovation in the political science and education disciplines with the potential for a far-reaching impact on the basic definition of citizenship doc12878 none Julia Fulghum and Javed Khan of Kent State University are supported by the Division of Chemistry under the Information Technology Research (ITR) program to create new methods for the non-destructive, three-dimensional characterization of heterogeneous, solid polymeric materials. Data will be acquired from polymer samples of increasing complexity using a variety of analytical techniques, including x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. All of these methods can be used to obtain chemical information from different sample volumes, and to generate multidimensional data sets. Multivariate statistical analysis and classification methods will be used to enhance interpretation of the acquired data sets, ultimately enabling creation of a unified polymer framework, called an active knowledge mesh. The combined system will create synergy between the computer and the user in large and complex information space exploration, posing interesting challenges for multi-modal data analysis and its multi-perspective visualization. Polymers are widely used in a variety of high technology applications. For example, many current and proposed biomaterials are polymers, and polymers are contained as well in composites used for a light aircraft and automobiles. Commercially important materials often involve molecularly complex polymer blends whose surface chemistry and structure are particularly challenging to analyze. Outcomes from this project are expected to improve the understanding and evaluation of complex polymer blend characteristics, and ultimately enable enhanced control of technologically important materials properties doc12879 none This project improves instructional capability of computer science and security faculty with respect to emerging sociological, ethical, linguistic, communication, and educational issues associated with information assurance and security. This project provides an intensive institute accommodating groups of faculty members for two years. Participating faculty develop a portfolio of educational materials for use in both their own and other educational programs with the help of subject matter experts. The program objectives are designed to help improve the capability of participating computer science faculty to teach effective security practice and design. These include developing a core of multi-disciplinary subject-matter expert mentors; producing research based curricular materials; recruiting undergraduate and graduate computer science and security faculty; developing subject-matter and pedagogical knowledge and skills of faculty attendees; and facilitating adaptation and implementation of curricular materials. There are plans to evaluate project outcomes and the impact of the project model and activities and to disseminate curricular materials to the broader community doc12880 none This program establishes a scholarship program for computer science graduate students specializing in information assurance. Upon graduation, the students participate in two years of federal service. The program of study is a dual-track masters program, leading to either a master s degree in computer sciences or an interdisciplinary master s degree with specialization in information security. Students in both tracks receive special attention in seminar and advising sessions to help them understand the context and role of information security in today s society. This includes regular presentations by leaders in commerce, academia, and government. Students have the opportunity to participate in leading-edge research projects conducted by faculty. Through this program students receive a valuable educational background in information security and assurance, obtain hands-on research experience, gain perspective on industry and research trends, and provide valuable service to the government while experiencing real-world problems doc12881 none This award is to partially fund the symposium Biodiversity: the interface between systematics and conservation held 23-27 June, , in Bloomington, Indiana, at the joint meetings of the Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB), Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), and the American Society of Naturalists (ASN), as well as the Association for Tropical Biology (ATB). this symposium is co-sponsored by the SSB and ATB. It will bring together researchers from a wide variety of fields related to biodiversity and conservation to discuss the relevance of systematics to their research and to evaluate various techniques that make use of systematic and taxonomic data. The topic is timely because of the increasing recognition of the importance of systematic data in conservation biology, and the wealth of new methods available for using systematic data in this context doc12882 none The objectives of this project are (1) to simultaneously design optimization methods and subsurface flow and transport simulators for a variety of subsurface contaminant remediation problems, (2) to implement the optimization-simulation combination in a way that exploits parallelism in both the optimization and simulation, including some ideas for grid-based implementations of search-poll type methods, (3) to apply the new algorithms to two demonstration problems, (4) to train a generation of students in this multidisciplinary setting. Two of the PIs, Dennis and Kelley, have expertise in a wide range of optimization technology, both gradient-based methods for smooth problems and sampling methods for problems for which gradients are not available. Kelley and Miller have a long-standing collaboration in numerical methods for simulation of multi-phase flow. The PIs will exploit this expertise and design the simulators and optimization algorithms simultaneously. There will be IT-centered activity in software. Two codes, FOCUS and IFFCO, are under development by the principal investigators. The most mature of these, IFFCO an implicit filtering optimization code, will be ported to MPI from PVM, packaged for ease of installation and testing, documented as a book, and released in final form. The PIs will also continue to develop FOCUS, an implementation of the surrogate management framework ideas. Remediation of subsurface contamination is an important issue world-wide. The goal is to clean up, or render immobile, underground contaminants such as fuel spills from underground tanks or industrial waste from leaking drums, and do this at minimum cost. Management decisions must be made, and the potential financial penalty of bad decisions is great. Mathematical models of subsurface systems are often used to assist in making such decisions and these models are increasingly linked with optimization approaches to aid design and management decision making. Subsurface remediation strategies involve decisions such as the restoration approach to use, the selection of locations to install devices, such as wells, and the rates of extraction from or injection into these wells. There are open scientific problems in simulation related to fundamental modeling and choice of numerical methods that need to be addressed as part of the design of software to optimize the remediation methods. The three PIs have expertise in simulation, modeling, and experimental work in multi-phase flows as well as broad expertise in optimization methods. The objectives of this project are to design models, simulators, and optimization methods simultaneously with the goal of more efficient optimal design based on more accurate models doc12883 none The International Council for Science (ICSU) includes four unions, which focus on the geosciences. These are the International Unions: of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG); for the Geological Sciences (IUGS); for Quaternary Research (INQUA); and for Soil Science (IUSS). These unions play an important role in fostering wide international exchange and dissemination of information, knowledge, and ideas. They promote strong international cooperation in the various fields of geosciences covered by these unions and provide, through the participation of U.S. scientists, an important vehicle for broad dissemination of research results. They also provide a forum in which U.S. geoscientists can exercise effective international leadership in areas of the geosciences that are especially important from the perspective of U.S. science. U.S. participation in and support for these unions is provided through U.S. National Committees (USNC s) for each union. These USNC s are comprised of distinguished geoscientists who are well aware of the state of the science, both nationally and internationally. The UNSC s plan and implement U.S. participation in the unions and keep the U.S. geosciences community informed of union activities doc12884 none Ghaboussi This project is a joint multidisciplinary industry-academia research effort to develop an advanced virtual reality (VR) environment for modeling earthmoving equipment interaction with the surrounding medium such as soil. The project will take advantage of rapid developments in hardware, software and information technology to develop a real-time virtual environment for machine-medium interaction that includes realistic force-feed back. The proposed development will enhance the design of the earthmoving equipment and improve the design cycle. It will also open up new venues for application of VR for machine medium interaction. This project will greatly benefit from leveraged resources provided by Caterpillar, Inc. The research team will develop an original neural network (NN) based real-time soil medium model that can be used to simulate soil response due to manipulation by earthmoving equipment. The proposed model will be mechanistically accurate and run in real-time. It will simulate the soil resistance and the interactive forces between the medium and the earthmoving equipment. The NN model will be trained using data sets developed from non-real time simulations using the discrete element method. Data sets of soil and earthmoving equipment response will also be developed from full-scale field tests at Caterpillar, Inc. proving ground in Peoria, Illinois. The research team, in cooperation with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), will implement the new NN soil model in Cave Automated Virtual Environment (CAVE). A new object-oriented vehicle prototyping system (VPS) will be developed in this virtual environment. A force feedback link will be developed representing the medium resistance provided by the NN soil model to the vehicle dynamics model. The real-time virtual environment will enhance the design verification tools available to the earthmoving equipment manufacturing industry and reduce the number of costly field trials for new equipment designs. The ideas and methodology that will be developed for the real-time VR environment have a wide range of applications such as simulation of slope failures and avalanches as well as bulk and powder material handling in agricultural, mining and manufacturing applications. The proposed VR environment can potentially be used in space exploration of other planets where it is necessary to troubleshoot a remote controlled vehicle interacting with the soil medium on the planetary surface in real-time. This project brings together specialists in 1) computational intelligence and soil medium modeling from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UIUC, 2) virtual reality and computer science from NCSA at UIUC, and 3) earthmoving equipment design and control at Caterpillar, Inc. Close coordination among the team members will ensure a strong exchange of ideas between academia and industry doc12885 none The phase behavior of confined, multicomponent polymer mixtures is interesting in the context of application, e.g., paints and packaging, since important film properties, such as surface roughness and hence the optical quality and friction of the film surface, change dramatically when the mixture phase separates. While this problem has been the focus of theoretical interest for the last two decades, very little experimental work exists due to the challenges in obtaining reliable data from films in the 0.01-1nm thickness range. The PI has recently extended a standard characterization technique, small angle neutron scattering, to films as thin as D=10 nm and finds that experimental measures of thin film coexistence are in qualitative disagreement with past experiments and theory on comparable systems. Resolving these discrepancies is a primary thrust of the proposed research. %%% An important element in the proper delineation of thin film behavior is a quantitative understanding of their bulk miscibility. While there is considerable research on these issues, it remains hard to a - priori predict the miscibility of two arbitrarily chosen polymers. For example, current molecular simulations which account for all of the chemical details of the molecules are limited to chain lengths which are too short to be in the range where normal polymer mixtures phase separate. As part of this research the PI has developed a quantitative lattice-based method which alleviates these concerns. The primary focus of the proposed work, which exploits the availability of these novel and complementary theoretical and experimental tools, is to quantitatively understand the bulk phase behavior of model polymer blends, and how they are modified by the constraints and surface interactions in a thin film geometry in an integrated manner doc12886 none This award is the result of a proposal submitted to the Information Technology Research initiative. The goal of the research is to develop a scalable software infrastructure for large multiscale simulations on a Grid of geographically distributed, massively parallel supercomputers, as well as on future Petaflop computers. The multiscale simulation approach will combine, in a single Grid software, finite element (FE) calculation, the coarse-grained molecular dynamics (CGMD), molecular dynamics (MD) simulation, and quantum mechanical (QM) calculation based on the density functional theory (DFT). Continuum mechanics calculation based on the FE method will be performed with constitutive relations derived from the CGMD method in conjunction with MD simulations, which in turn will embed QM algorithm described by the DFT. The following will be developed: (1) Grid-based FE CGMD MD QM algorithms based on space-time multiresolution algorithms implemented with hierarchical decomposition on parallel distributed computers for scalability and constrained-dynamics-based hybridization for seamless coupling of the hybrid simulation componets; (2) Space-time partitioned multiscale simulation combined with kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) and parallel replica methods to couple disparate length and time scales; (3) Grid-computation tools including adaptive load balancing using wavelet-based computational-space decomposition and space-filling-curve-based adaptive data compression to reduce communication and storage; (4) Immersive and interactive visualization of the large simulation data using octree-based visibility culling and parallel distributed preprocessing of the visualization data with machine-learning predictive prefetch. The Gridified software will be used to study nanosystems of great importance to future information processing. Multiscale simulations involving 1,000 - 10,000 QM atoms and 100 million - 1 billion MD atoms will be performed to study atomistically-induced phenomena, with emphasis on environmental effects where chemical processes play an important role. The multiscale algorithm will relate the atomistic processes to experimentally observable quantities, by covering an order-of-magnitude larger length scale (10 micron) through continuum mechanics and extending time scales through the KMC and replica methods. The simulations will focus on stress domains and their phonon imaging in Si Si3N4 and GaAs Si3N4 nanopixels for sub-0.1 micron microelectronics applications and oxidation effects on them, and on substrate-encoded self-organized growth of lattice-mismatched semiconductor quantum dots (GaAs InAs). The project will involve close collaborations with scientists at government laboratories (Argonne, NASA Ames, Sandia, Naval Oceanographic Office), industry (Intel, Motorola) and universities, as well as international collaborations in Europe, Japan and South America doc12887 none This is an award supported jointly by the Information Technology Research program in Geosciences and the Physical Meteorology program. The objective is to use archival data from the Los Alamos Scanning Raman Lidar on the spatial distribution of water vapor to develop a remote-sensing-based method for determining the evaporation rate as a function of position on the ground. More generally, the procedure may be extended to estimate the surface distribution of emission rates for any measurable conservative passive additive. It is an inverse problem in geophysical data analysis, because the distribution of the surface evaporation rate is determined from the measured three- dimensional pattern of vapor concentration and its variation with time. The project is planned in two phases. First the forward problem will be analyzed, in which various distributions of upwind emission rates will be assumed and the resulting vertical distributions of concentration calculated, for different combinations of stability and wind speed. Next, the solution of the forward problem will be used to develop a mathematical inversion technique, whereby the spatial distribution of emission sources and their strengths will be determined from the lidar-observed 3D pattern. The research holds the promise of discovering new ways to use remotely-sensed data for atmospheric observation, analysis, and modeling doc12888 none This project develops an information security curriculum to serve students from a broad range of backgrounds. It takes an integrated approach to information security education that covers both technological and policy issues. It includes a partnership with Clark-Atlanta University to design and development of an innovative and broad curriculum that could be used to train future information security professionals. The curriculum starts with a gateway course that provides a broad introduction to the field. This is followed by an initial set of courses, each of which focuses on a coherent body of knowledge. Each course introduces students to core concepts that cover a particular aspect of information security and includes projects that provide hands-on experience with the tools and techniques that can be used to build high assurance systems. A key component of the project is the creation and testing of teaching materials and projects for the courses. The curriculum development and its implementation is part of the development of a variety of programs in the information security area for a diverse body of students. These include an undergraduate specialization and a masters certificate and a concentration area for doctoral students. The courses that support these programs are available to students from Georgia Tech, Clark-Atlanta and other institutions that are located in the Atlanta area. This enables students to meet the critical needs for information assurance specialists in our country doc12889 none We are developing and implementing an undergraduate Computer Security track at the Department of Computer and Information Sciences of Towson University. We are developing this track in close collaboration with our consultants and evaluators from industry and academia and are disseminating the results at conferences and at a forum for representatives from industry, government and academia, organized at the conclusion of this project. Seven courses are the key components of this track: Computer Ethics, Introduction to Computer Security, Introduction to Cryptography, Network Security, Database Security, Operating Systems Security and Security Seminar. The first two courses exist. The network security course and a portion of the Operating Systems Security course are being adapted from courses at the University of Idaho, which was designated as one of the Centers of Excellence in Information Assurance. The principal investigators are developing the remaining courses. Students graduating in this track have a strong background in the foundations of computer security and their applications and are better prepared to join the 21st century workforce doc12890 none NSF PROPOSAL # ITR: Aligning Societal Values, Privacy Policy, and IT Requirements Colin Potts, Georgia Institute of Technology Annie I. Anton, North Carolina State University The guarantee and assurance of privacy must be included in the design of information technologies from the onset. This research focuses on how society uses, values, and protects citizens personal information. From the perspective of system design, software engineers need methods and tools to enable them to design systems that reflect those values and protect personal information, accordingly. This research examines how privacy considerations and value systems influence the design, deployment and consequences of IT. Investigations will include study of the motivations and barriers to the use of IT when use of these technologies requires the user to provide Personally Identifiable Information (PII). In essence, this work focuses on: societal values, web site policies, and the operational functioning of web-based e-commerce systems, which are often misaligned. The goal is to develop concepts, tools and techniques that help IT professionals and policy makers bring policies and system requirements into better alignment. An action-oriented set of conceptual tools, including guidelines and privacy-relevant policy templates will be constructed and validated. The tools will be fully documented and illustrated on a web site developed for the purpose of conducting the proposed project and disseminating results and recommendations doc12891 none Affatigato This is a 36 month U.S.- China cooperative project between Dr. Mario Affatigato of Coe College and Professor Wencheng Wang, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, to study the structural origin of photosensitivity in lead glasses, and to provide an REU training opportunity for four U.S. undergraduate students. This research is designed to uncover the structural origin of photosensitivity in glass. This collaboration makes use of Coe College s expertise in glass synthesis and structure characterization, and Fudan University s work on optical properties. The expertise between the two campuses is mutually beneficial. The most impressive part of this project is the educational benefit that the U.S. students can derive from this collaboration. These exchanges will enrich the research experience of the students at Coe College, which is an undergraduate teaching college. This project provides the students a significant research experience in their undergraduate education. The proposal will be jointly supported by the National Science Foundation of China and the NSF doc12892 none NSF ITR Proposal # Compositional Connectors David Garlan For systems composed from independently developed parts, specialized forms of interaction are often needed to bridge component mismatches or to achieve extra-functional properties (e.g., security, reliability), making the design and implementation of these interaction mechanisms a critical issue. Unfortunately, system developers have few options: they must live with available, but often inadequate, generic support for interaction (such as RPC), or they must handcraft specialized mechanisms at great cost. This research investigates a new approach whereby interaction mechanisms are constructed compositionally. Specifically, basic connectors (such as RPC or data streams) can be augmented with selected adaptations or enhancements to produce a more complex connector that meets the system requirements. This work will investigate the hypothesis that (a) there exists a collection of general-purpose transformations that can be applied to connectors to produce increasingly rich forms of interaction, and (b) tools can be built to automate the application of these transformations to existing interaction mechanisms. If successful, this research will reduce the cost of component integration by partially automating the production of complex interaction mechanisms, improve the quality of systems by making it simple to add security and dependability features, and develop new foundations for specifying and reasoning about complex interaction mechanisms doc12893 none This project relieves the shortage of qualified information assurance personnel by providing generous financial support for at least 23 masters level students in the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Information Assurance Educational program. Several interdisciplinary degrees are offered in the program that allow students to specialize in their particular interest area within the field. There are a growing number of Information Assurance and Computer Security faculty and researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, and the students have outstanding opportunities to work in world-class on-campus entities such as the Software Engineering Institute and the CERT Coordination Center. Through classroom instruction, project work, and supplemental curricular activities such as an Information Technology lecture series, the student participants become leaders in the information security area. The university is also focused on the development and success of other programs in this area. To that end, Carnegie Mellon University plans to host an annual intensive seminar for current and or prospective CAE IAE institution faculty. The seminars will consist of a three-day instructional dialog offering approximately 30 faculty members access to existing CAE IAE program curricula and methodologies doc12894 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Donald Winford and his colleague Bettina Migge will conduct two years of linguistic research on the role of West African languages in the creation of Sranan Tongo and Paamaka, two creole languages of Suriname. The focus of this investigation is how time (e.g., past and future tense) and aspect (e.g., habitual and completed ) are expressed in the creoles. The hypothesis is that the West African languages of the Gbe family exerted the primary influence on tense and aspect in the creoles, with some influence from Kikongo and Akan. Other factors (e.g., internal changes in the creoles themselves) were also relevant. If the hypothesis is supported, the project will show that the creole languages were created by African slaves who selectively adapted and restructured materials from English and their own native languages. The data for the project will emphasize conversational speech and native speaker judgements. These will be tape recorded in Benin with speakers of five Gbe languages and in Suriname with speakers of the two creole languages. Data from Kikongo and Akan will be drawn from published studies of their tense and aspect systems. The tense and aspect systems of the languages will be compared, using methods of analysis that can reveal degrees of similarity between the West African languages and the creoles. The blending of different linguistic traditions into a new language is one of the most intriguing manifestations of the human language faculty. The processes by which elements from distinct languages can be restructured and the principles that regulate the processes challenge linguistic theory, especially theories of language mixture and contact-induced change. Creole languages represent an extreme case of such mixture, and the study of their origins can contribute much to our understanding of the cognitive and social factors that regulate this kind of language restructuring. Research on creole genesis provides insight into both language acquisition and language change, since similar processes and principles are involved. Such research can help us better understand the universal principles that regulate the structure of human language. This project will also contribute to greater recognition of creole languages as valid instruments of communication for the communities they serve. The creole communities of Suriname have traditionally suffered the same neglect and disparagement as their languages. This research can help legitimize these neglected languages. Objective analysis and description can provide a basis for their acceptance and instrumentalization in education and other public doc12895 none This project envisions an environment where a scientist can easily combine existing software components to create an efficient, highly parallel scientific simulation. To accomplish this, it will develop new software component technologies for high performance computing environments, including a high performance component framework and a new parallel Interface Definition Language (IDL). It will use those tools to investigate mechanisms for integrating high performance (often data parallel) computing with distributed software components. Success of this project will be measured by providing acceptable performance on at least two scientific applications using the new component framework. The applications chosen for the first test of this work (whose development has already started under separate funding) are bioelectric source localization and a combustion simulation of a high-energy material placed in a pool fire. Both applications will stress the capabilities and efficiencies of the proposed work. As software systems, including high performance parallel programs, become more complex, the use of component architectures can help manage many aspects of this complexity. However, such mechanisms are not prevalent in parallel scientific computing applications due to limitations of existing component systems. These include inefficient handling of large amounts of data, inability to express parallelism in the data or within a component, and difficulty matching parallelism in one component with parallelism in another. The new component architecture research will help overcome many of these limitations. It will, among other features, provide efficient mapping of components to processors, provide efficient communication between parallel components, facilitate migration of components (including checkpoint restart capabilities), and facilitate redistribution of components for dynamic load balancing doc12896 none Studies will focus on quantum information processing in the simple system of one or two trapped atoms in a high-finesse optical cavity, generating sets of quantum entanglements (in atom-photon, atom-photon, and photon-photon entangled pairs). Advances in optical atom trapping and cavity QED technologies will be needed. Alternative strategies for storing and manipulating quantum information will be explored doc12897 none The recently demonstrated techniques of photon state storage in collective matter excitations will be used to investigate methods for manipulation of quantum information. The specific aims are (1) experimental study of efficient transfer of quantum information between light fields and long-lived collective states of alkali atoms, (2) theoretical studies of quantum information processing based on collective states, and (3) theoretical study of the optical manipulation of solid-state qubits doc12898 none This project will produce a fundamentally new computational model of light scattering from surfaces with multiple heterogeneous layers (such as human skin and inkjet prints). The new model will remove common assumptions in current methods, including ignoring the roughness of the layer interfaces and simplifying the directional characteristics of the scattered light. Such an accurate, general model can be used in predictive simulation, a branch of information technology that already plays an important role in fields such as color science, electronic chip manufacturing, aerospace engineering, and automotive engineering. The project will extend predictive simulation to many new applications, including the development and testing of printing technologies, photographic image capture, medical diagnosis, remote sensing, and display devices. The project will combine theoretical and experimental approaches to provide a robust, efficient computer implementation of the new model. It will: - Construct an integrated array of high-quality digital cameras - Produce calibrated, complete measurements of the reflectance of printed flat samples and living human skin - Use powerful analytic and numerical tools to devise theoretical models of the scattering within the surfaces measured - Carefully implement a robust, accurate, efficient computational scattering model doc12899 none This project aims to advance the state of the art in fast iterative algorithms for large-scale semidefinite programming and eigenvalue optimization, guided by applications to first-principles computation of properties of systems of many electrons. Semidefinite optimization codes will be rewritten to replace dense linear algebra and direct matrix factorizations by iterative solution processes suited to large and sparse problems. Numerical experiments will be carried out with different mathematical formulations and implementations of the sparse optimization procedures. The guiding application is a variational formulation of the electronic structure ground state problem in which the unknowns are the one-body and two-body reduced density matrices of a many electron system. This application gives rise to a large semidefinite program having sparse solution matrices and an extremely sparse constraint set. The codes that are developed under this grant will be written and documented with the intent of wide dissemination. Semidefinite programming is a valuable framework for many scientific and engineering applications, including systems control, structural analysis, combinatorial optimization, statistical estimation and VLSI design, just to name a few well-established ones besides electronic structure theory. This project aims to increase our ability to compute solutions to problem instances whose size places them beyond the reach of current numerical methods. As to the specific application in this project, the computation of properties of many-body systems on the basis of quantum mechanics is fundamental to the understanding of molecular and solid state structure, chemical and elementary biochemical processes, and mechanical and electromagnetic properties of condensed matter. Potential benefits to technology and society from advances in the accuracy and scale of many-body quantum mechanical computations include, for example, better design of semiconductors, magnetic storage materials, high-temperature superconductors and chemical catalysts, as well as improvements in the emerging areas of rational drug design and the design of carbon nanostructures doc12900 none Galloway N - The Second International Nitrogen Conference Production of food and energy increases the amount of biologically active nitrogen that circulates among the world s atmosphere, soils, forests, and waters. The world s natural resources and environmental systems respond to nitrogen enrichment with positive benefits such as increased production of food and timber, and negative consequences, such as eutrophication of ecosystems, regional haze, and global warming. The three goals of this conference are to increase scientific knowledge about N sources and effects; stimulate communication among leaders in N production and consumption; and explore balanced policy strategies by which to increase food and energy production while decreasing environmental impacts doc12901 none Vincent Aleven Carnegie Mellon University ITR PE(CISE): Tutoring Explanation and Discovery Learning: Achieving Deep Understanding through Tutorial Dialog This multidisciplinary research project will develop new instructional software, which will be evaluated in actual classrooms. The project will yield research advances in computer science, education, and cognitive psychology. With respect to education, the project will develop and test new methods of instruction, namely, tutoring at the explanation level . These methods aim to achieve deeper student understanding, resulting in better memory (retention) of the acquired knowledge, as well as the ability to apply what was learned to unfamiliar problems (transfer). With respect to computer science, this project will advance the state-of-the-art in intelligent tutoring systems through the incorporation of natural language processing techniques for assessing student explanations and improving them through dialog. With respect to cognitive psychology, this project will create and test cognitive models of how student understanding emerges from an integration of explicit-verbal and implicit-perceptual learning processes doc12902 none This project involves the development of a web-based tool to support ad-hoc international workgroups interested in global regional-scale aerosols events such as forest fires, dust storms, air pollution transport episodes, and volcanoes. This tool will be made available to the international scientific community, disaster managers, and the lay public for use in detecting the occurrence of aerosol events, monitoring their evolution, and analyzing their impacts. The web-based tool is an XML-based system designed as a standard data description and transmission language protocol and is capable of receiving queries and delivering XML data to any other computer on the Internet. A new data integration and browsing tool for exploration and presentation is being developed that allows the superposition of spatial and temporal data submitted by work group participants or generally available through the web. Data from the system can be distributed among servers who subscribe to a common sharing standards for data and metadata doc12903 none The Million Book project is a multinational initiative to create a digital online archive of at least a million books and manuscripts freely available to anyone at any time. It will enhance research, learning and teaching by making a critical mass of scholarly information freely available to read online. It will support the needs of citizens for practical information and recreational reading as well as supporting scholarship and education. India, and possibly China, will supply the manpower for scanning centers while the U. S. provides equipment and software. This pilot project supplies the startup money for the first few scanning centers doc12904 none This award to New York University is for the acquisition of an Atomic Force Microscope for DNA nanotechnology research and education. The features of the AFM include tapping mode, lithography mode and automatic high-resolution scanning. DNA technology is an area of materials science developed at NYU over the past two decades. It is based on the combination of stable branched DNA motifs and their specific associations as directed biotechnological technique, DNA sticky-ended cohesion. Early projects in this area involved the assembly of geometrical objects, such as a DNA cube and a DNA truncated octahedron that could be characterized by gel electrophoresis. The species made at NYU are novel materials that are expected to have applications in nanoelectronics, nanorobotics, information storage, and structural biophysics. Experiments are underway to organize nanoelectronic components in 2D arrays by attaching them to DNA arrays. The incorporation of the sequence-activated device into an array will lead to the large numbers of structurally distinct states that characterize nanorobotics. Mechanical and chemical modification of arrays can lead to information storage systems. This instrumentation will accelerate significantly the development of this field. The award will contribute to the training and education of graduate students and postdocs in this new area of materials research. %%% This award to New York University is for the acquisition of an Atomic Force Microscope for DNA nanotechnology research and education. The features of the AFM include tapping mode, lithography mode and automatic high-resolution scanning. DNA technology is an area of materials science developed at NYU over the past two decades. It is based on the combination of stable branched DNA motifs and their specific associations as directed biotechnological technique, DNA sticky-ended cohesion. Early projects in this area involved the assembly of geometrical objects, such as a DNA cube and a DNA truncated octahedron that could be characterized by gel electrophoresis. The species made at NYU are novel materials that are expected to have applications in nanoelectronics, nanorobotics, information storage, and structural biophysics. Experiments are underway to organize nanoelectronic components in 2D arrays by attaching them to DNA arrays. The incorporation of the sequence-activated device into an array will lead to the large numbers of structurally distinct states that characterize nanorobotics. Mechanical and chemical modification of arrays can lead to information storage systems. This instrumentation will accelerate significantly the development of this field. The award will contribute to the training and education of graduate students and postdocs in this new area of materials research doc12905 none In this Information Technology Research (ITR) research project, a study of the design and use of auction mechanisms for the allocation of scarce resources in complex settings will be performed. The research includes four specific goals: (1) the design and development of appropriate bidding environments, (2) the identification of participants bidding strategies under well defined bidding environments, (3) the development of an understanding of the tradeoffs between computational complexity and goodness of solution under various bidding environments, and (4) the development of an educational program and educational tools for teaching the theory and practice of auctions. Amid the wide range of settings where bidding mechanisms are utilized, attention will be focused on four important applications spanning the range of issues that can arise in a bidding environment: (1) simple multi-unit auctions in e-commerce, (2) combinatorial auctions in industrial procurement, (3) coordination and control of multiple robots in uncertain environments, and (4) task allocation on a logistics network for ocean carriers. In essence, an auction is a mechanism by which a set of participants communicates information so as to result in a set of allocations taking place. Information that is communicated by a participant is called a bid. The auction designer strives to design a mechanism that has desirable characteristics, appropriate for the situation at hand. Auctions can particularly benefit environments with the following two characteristics: (1) the absence of complete information about the participants and (2) problems which cannot be solved centrally due to their high computational complexity. While the use of auctions has been applied in numerous market settings, the research in auction theory has severely lagged behind. There is little in the literature to guide bidders on how to optimally bid or to aid auctioneers in evaluating the performance of various auction formats. Even the auction consultants will admit that much of their advice is based on logic and past experiences, rather than rooted in analytical findings. It is the goal of this research to close the gap between practice and theory by advancing the state of the knowledge in the design of auction mechanisms for the allocation of scarce resources in complex settings. The successful completion of this research will broaden the understanding and use of multi-unit auctions as a transaction medium and increase the efficacy of such transactions. Since the researchers will be working closely with industry partners including IBM, Home Depot, Schneider Logistics, and Orient Overseas Container Line (OOCL), the research will be focused on realistic applications. There will also be a significant educational impact in terms of case study development, new course offerings, and the development of classroom bidding games doc12906 none Proposal: PI: Julio C. Martinez Institution: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Date: June 21, CMS ITR AP: Information Technology for Enabling Dynamic Immersive and Interactive Visualization of Construction Operations. Construction operations are spatially and temporally complex and dynamic. Virtual dynamic environments that allow immersion in such operations are invaluable for understanding, and improving. In the case of operations that have been modeled using discrete-event simulation, virtual immersive environments promise significant improvements in their verification and validation, and are essential for their credibility and subsequent use in decision-making. A proper virtual environment of a construction operation must show, in addition to the evolving facility being built, the movements and transformations of the people, machines, and materials that carry out construction in a spatially and temporally accurate manner. While most of the dynamics in these environments are continuous in nature, they must be recreated from discrete and unevenly spaced chunks of information. In addition, this information must be simple and succinct so that it can be generated by end-user programmable operations planning tools such as discrete-event simulation languages. In order to allow the creation of these virtual and dynamic environments, this research will lead to the design of a spatially and temporally accurate straight-line animation language, and implementation of this language in a wide variety of hardware platforms. Success in the design and implementation of this language is necessary to enable environments that, in addition to being dynamic and immersive, are interactive. In these environments, objects under the control of simulation models will be aware of, and react to, humans and human controlled machines. The impacts to learning, operator training, and operations design will likely be significant. Benefits extend beyond construction into other fields such as transportation (especially aviation), shipbuilding, aerospace, manufacturing, and the service industries, wherein the necessity to effectively communicate simulations is as acute as in construction doc12907 none Current interfaces employ textual representations, and restrict people from exploiting their spatial abilities to assist in dealing with the increasingly expanding information sphere they confront. This project is motivated by the view that spatial and temporal organization of images can serve as effective interface components and may offer multiple advantages over textual lists of titles and URLs. It explores several image-based applications: (1) Visual bookmarks and visual site indexes, that replace textual URLs with images from the pages; (2) Visual browsing summaries and activity histories, that use images as a way of accessing previous web-based activities; (3) Image augmented query results, that add images to the results of web searches to help disambiguate them doc12908 none The Chemistry Department of Minnesota University (MU) is supported by the Chemistry Division, and the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities under the Research Sites for Educators in Chemistry (RSEC) program. Dr. Jeffrey Roberts is the Principal Investigator. The Minnesota RSEC program will be oriented around four interdisciplinary areas: chemical biology, computational chemistry, environmental chemistry, and materials chemistry. The RSEC will support a broad range of collective modes, from standard sabbatical visits, to distance-collaborations with faculty and undergraduates from nearby colleges, to group visits involving three or more faculty from a single department. An Executive Committee consisting of Two University of Minnesota chemistry professors and two professors from undergraduate institutions will assist Dr.Roberts. Plans are for the RSEC leadership team to recruit a group of approximately 20 undergraduate chemistry departments as RSEC participants. The program will draw from institutions in the upper Midwest. The assessment and evaluation of the program will be facilitated by an Advisory Committee of five faculty form both UM and small-school departments. Research Sites for Educators in Chemistry bring together the faculty of participating two-year colleges, baccalaureate colleges, and master s universities with faculty at research universities within a geographic region, to enhance the research and educational opportunities at all participants. Academic and research institutions provide abundant opportunities where individuals may concurrently assume responsibilities as researchers, educators, and students, and where all can engage in joint efforts that infuse education with the excitement of discovery and enrich research through the diversity of learning perspectives. RSECs such as this one at the University of Minnesota provide mechanisms for disseminating the knowledge, skill, practices and ethics of research to a broader community, including those from under-represented groups; assist in developing viable, sustainable research programs at participating institutions; and involve faculty and students at the participating institutions with a broader cross-section of faculty and students doc12909 none This is an award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program in DMR to the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. The award supports the acquisition of a measurement system for research and education in magnetic heterostructures. The instrument will support research in four areas of physics and materials science: a) new materials for spin transport in magnetic semiconductor structures, b) novel magnetic oxide materials and heterostructures, c) exchange bias in ferromagnet antiferromagnet multilayers and d) two-dimensional conduction in organic crystals. The instrument, which incorporates DC and AC magnetometry and transport over a temperature range of 0.4 to 300 K and in magnetic fields up to 9 T, will be used by students involved in both growth and measurements. In particular, new materials for spin transport, including ferromagnetic semiconductors and half-metallic ferromagnets, will be developed. A variety of new magnetic oxide materials, including cobaltates such as La1-x-SrxCoO3, will be explored, and current work on oxides used as spin injectors will be continued. Microscopic mechanisms for controlling coercivity in multilayers using exchange-induced anisotropy and exchange spring magnetism will be investigated. Finally, low-dimensional transport in organic crystals, with emphasis on superconductivity, will be studied. %%% This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program in DMR to the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities supports the acquisition of a measurement system for research and education in magnetic heterostructures at the University of Minnesota. Magnetic heterostructures are sandwiches formed by growing thin layers of a magnetic material, such as iron, in combination with other metals, insulators, or even semiconductors. Depending on the particular application in mind, the magnetic material can be either the meat or the bread in the sandwich. These types of heterostructures are already in use in the latest generation of hard disk drives, and some of the research the new instrument will be dedicated to understanding the microscopic mechanism that is ultimately responsible for the way in which these new drives work. Furthermore, entirely new types of structures, based on magnetic oxides, will be investigated. A new generation of structures, combining the functionality of magnets with those of semiconductors used in transistors, will also be explored. The instrument will be used by graduate students and undergraduates in order to enhance their training in the rapidly evolving field of materials physics doc12910 none Much field data for ecology and biodiversity studies uses data collected from hundreds of mostly novice collaborators. In order to address the issues of distributed intelligence, field support, mobile computing, remote training, data quality and coordination of information across time and space, with real-time expert feedback, a BioDiversity Collaboration Environment (BDCE) will be developed. Information technology could fundamentally change the way we understand the world and the way science in done. Substantial improvements in science can be made if the information technology is carefully developed and integrated. The system will integrate collaboration, collection development, information retrieval, and information creation and management. A key component of the technology is the development of software agents that will analyze the needs of survey members, prior surveys of the same site, museum record and other resources to create a customized collection of digital support material that can be put on disk and taken to the field, thereby overcoming bandwidth problems. The DBCE will be developed within the framework of a project being conducted by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, which increases the impact of the research by it use in hundreds of surveys across Illinois. This is a largely volunteer effort, including high school students, for the data collection. The education to students and other non-scientists provides significant impact, beyond the information technology impact of smart devices doc12911 none This project will design and implement a system that will store, organize, index and make searchable course content, and preserve that content reliably over long periods of time. The specific plans include the systemic use of emerging XML standards to design a course model that supports both content and presentation markup. Course Capsules will not only archive the university generated course materials, but also the creative work of the students. Content markup will allow the Capsules to respond intelligently to requests by a user, and provide each student with a personalized depot of knowledge that remains available even after graduation. For the faculty, Capsules will form a trusted repository of course material and will encourage sharing and reuse. The archive in conjunction with extensive use tracking will provide a sound basis for ongoing review and improvement of curricula doc12912 none Currently, automatic attacks are a major threat to computer security. For example, the cheapest home PC can try thousands of probes against a targeted system. A brute-force password (or PIN number) guessing program can generate and try tens of thousands of candidate passwords each second. Or a home PC could attempt to flood a web site with thousands of bogus requests. While there methods that attempt to stop such attacks they all can be defeated to some degree. We propose a new approach to this security based on technology that can tell the difference between robots and humans. Thus, we can disallow automatic attacks. Our technology allows a new kind of restriction: now systems can insist that only humans have access to their valuable resources and they can disallow robots. The proposed solution to the problem is inspired by Turing s test for artificial intelligence. The fundamental idea of the solution is for a computer system to first ask the author of every transaction to solve a puzzle before accepting or executing the transaction. The content of the puzzle will be based on grand challenge problems in the domains of pattern recognition, visual interpretation, and natural language understanding. These problems have the essential property that people can solve them easily while computers are not likely to solve them in the foreseeable future. A typical puzzle would consist of the computer system sending the agent a bit-mapped image and the agent replying with an ascii string. The image might include a picture and a question and a question about that picture, such as Please type the following handwritten word or Which of the objects in this picture are edible? The computer system determines whether the transaction author is a human based on the answer supplied. This puzzle-solving process leads to a new framework for building secure computer systems. In this framework, a human being has to be directly involved (by solving the puzzle and typing in the answer) in the authentication or other processes that are vulnerable to automatic attacks, referred to as Mandatory Human Participation (MHP). Apparently, no automatic attack to the protected process would be possible under this framework. Our proposed research is to build a pilot system that can be used to demonstrate the basic idea of MHP. This will be based mostly on character based methods. We then, plan to carefuly test and measure how well our system performs and how well it is received by users doc12913 none In research funded by an NSF POWRE grant awarded to the investigator, the yeast DNA2 gene was found to be essential for normal life span. DNA2 encodes a replicative and post replication repair helicase distantly related to SGS1 and Werner syndrome helicases. Four dna2 mutants have average life spans from 4.9 to 8.9 generations, while wild type is 23.8 generations. The sgs1 and dna2 mutants do not appear to be epistatic. Other replication mutants also have short life spans. Two strains with all rDNA deleted and rDNA supplied by plasmids have shortened life spans. These results led to the replication block model of DNA aging in yeast, suggesting that replicative senescence can result from accumulation of blocked replication forks. In addition, Y55 diploids were recently found to reset their aging clocks in meiosis. This project tests the model of replicative aging resulting from blocked replication forks and will begin a search for genes involved in resetting the yeast aging clock. The replication fork block hypothesis is being tested by observing the aging phenotypes of size increases, sterility, nucleolar fragmentation, and rDNA amplification in replication and post replication repair mutants other than dna2 and in ribosomal deletion strains, to see whether or not aspects of normal aging are accelerated in these mutants. If so, the particular process may be related to aging pacesetting. If the rDNA deletions appear to age faster, then epistasis with mutants of the silent information regulators and helicases will be tested. The structures of the DNA, with particular emphasis on structures that would result from stalled replication forks, will be examined using fiber-FISH, 2D gels, and pulsed field and normal electrophoresis combined with nuclease digestion. In addition, resetting of the aging clock is being examined in mutants affecting budding asymmetry. Whether meiosis affects clock resetting in a different meiosis strain, BR , will be determined. If the clock is reset in meiosis, sporulation mutants will be used to test the involvement of specific steps in meiosis in the resetting. This novel research promises to further our understanding at the molecular level of the process of aging. The use of the yeast system enhances the promise of the project because of the many molecular tools available for yeast and the extensive existing body of knowledge about the system. This research will be carried out at Pomona College, an undergraduate institution. The active involvement of students there in this research is an especially attractive feature of the project doc12914 none Cryptography is a fundamental building block for building information systems, and as we enter the so-called information age of global networks, ubiquitous computing devices, and eletronic commerce, we can expert that cryptography will become only more import with time. This proposal is designed to advance the state of the art in cryptography by examining some of the implicit assumptions that underlie the field. The birth of provable security has contributed significantly to the advances of the field over the past two decades, allowing us to amass strong evidence that-as long as the attacker plays by the rules specified in our formal threat model-the cryptosystem under consideration is likely to be secure. However, one problem is that, in practice, attackers don t always play by the rules: given the opportunity, they will gladly cheat . Recent research has shown that there are a surprising number of ways to violate the designer s assumptions, for instance by observing timing measurements which the model does not allow for. The goals of practical cryptographic design, then, ought to include finding ways to reduce the opportunity for attackers to cheat , preferably by relaxing our assumptions and broadening our models enough so that the attacker s behavior cannot help but be covered by the model. This is the research agenda that we take up in this project. We propose first to study real systems and case studies of how these assumptions can be violated in practice. A next step is to build a set of practical countermeasures that can be used to strengthen future cryptosystems against these attacks. Finally, we will seek new theoretical tools, techniques, and models for extending the provable security methodology to take into account these failure modes. If we succeed, these results will make a positive contribution not only to the practice of cryptography but also to the theoretical foundations of the field doc12915 none The objective of this research is to extend the knowledge of the single player stochastic decision problems, which have been studied for years, to develop new methodologies for multi-player games and test them on large-scale problems from the domain of e-commerce and supply chain management. Such a methodology, when developed and tested, will provide a much needed resource to the corporate world for examining business policies. The Internet revolution has brought about tremendous changes in the marketplace by tearing down the barriers of time and distance. The competition among the providers of goods and services for luring the customers has reached an epic height. Consider, for example, a homebuyer s request for a mortgage loan, which is now available to virtually every lending institution (e.g., a bank) in the world. All the banks (players, in generic game theory nomenclature) seeking to capture this customer are involved in a stochastic game, where they form their bids in anticipation of other players actions. Based on the outcome of their bids, the players try to learn a strategy for the subsequent customers. In the above example, the game environment is highly stochastic and the game return is not necessarily of the zero-sum type. The main purpose of modeling and examining such problems is to foresee the equilibrium point(s) of a game, the path of the game evolution which tells us about the game returns in finite time horizons, and also the time taken by a game to reach an equilibrium point. In today s volatile market situation, short-term game returns could be of much more immediate importance. Standard game theoretic analysis, when available, is geared toward characterizing the equilibrium points. Through simulation-based approaches to the study of stochastic games, as presented in this project, one can also examine the evolutionary paths a game can follow doc12916 none This project will investigate the architecture and design of a single-chip parallel computer system. As technology continues to improve and transistor sizes decrease, the latency of on-chip interconnect wires will have a greater impact on the performance of computer systems. In the future, computer designers will need to develop architectures that avoid the use of long interconnect wires in order to reduce the effect of this latency. One such approach would be to include a number of small, simple processors together on a single chip, forming a single-chip parallel computer. This would reduce the effect of the latency because the length of the interconnect wires would depend on the size and complexity of the individual processors, not the size of the entire system. By keeping the processors simple, long interconnect wires will not be necessary. The challenge to designing such a system is determining the features that the architecture must include. This research project will investigate architectural features that provide low-overhead support for parallel programs, applying them to the design of the SCMP (Single-Chip Message-Passing) parallel computer. Through the extensive use of simulation, the design and performance of the SCMP system will be analyzed and compared to other computer architectures doc12917 none This project provides for institutional development in the area of secure and trustworthy computer systems. It expands laboratory facilities to include a computer network laboratory for information assurance classes. Course materials in computer security and trustworthy computer networks are developed and tested for eventual publication and wider dissemination. A distinguished speaker series brings in national and international experts to the campus. Faculty development is provided through a variety of methods. The area of reliable and trustworthy systems is one of emerging national need. Many of these systems contain embedded computers with software and hardware providing functionality and controlling operations of the system. This can range from use in household appliances to aircraft or medical systems. This program provides expertise and capacity that is in our national interest and adds critical core curricular components to the information assurance field doc12918 none The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) will be a web-accessible database of audio and textual data from the indigenous languages of Latin America, focusing on naturally-occurring discourse. Scholars, students, and indigenous people will be able to access the AILLA database using their web browsers, search and browse the contents of the database, and download audio and text files from the database onto their own computers, which they can then listen to or read immediately, using free, downloadable software. AILLA will archive primarily unpublished and previously unavailable audio recordings and texts, and both preserve them and make them easily accessible by creating a centralized and organized repository of digitized copies of these materials. In developing and implementing the database and web-browser interface, AILLA will create a robust information infrastructure for use by researchers, students, and indigenous peoples. It will also develop: search tools for comparative, typological, and historical research on language; language data related protocols including a metadata scheme, data structures, and applications; and standards and tools to address ethical issues of privacy and intellectual property rights for language materials on the web. The fundamental goal is to create an infrastructure for distributed scholarship in language-related disciplines concerned with indigenous Latin America. In addition to making data available for basic research, AILLA will provide a wide range of data for use in teaching courses in anthropology, linguistics, and other language-related fields. It will facilitate the interchange of data between Latin American, North American, and European scholars and between scholars and indigenous communities, and will form an important new link in the network of people working with the indigenous languages of Latin America. AILLA will also be a resource for indigenous communities working to preserve, maintain, and revitalize their languages doc12919 none The performance of graphic processors is outpacing the performance of general processors, in fact cubing the growth curve. It has been recently shown that some graphics algorithms can be performed in new ways on the graphics processor, using a novel technique known as multipass programming. Multipass programming treats the graphics processor as a SIMD processor acting on a data array stored in the screen s pixels, with each operation applied as an image-processing pass. The proposed research will extend this concept further not only within the graphics community, but also for the scientific computing and general computing communities, by developing a multipass programming language general enough to support both graphical and non-graphical programs. Existing problems of numerical range and precision will be overcome, and the fidelity of the resulting numerical implementations analyzed. Work in multipass algorithms for procedural shading will be continued our, and multipass programming applied to radiosity and physically-based animation. Multipass programming will also be extended to applications outside of computer graphics, including solving linear systems, the finite element method and computational fluid dynamics. If graphics processors continue to grow at the current rate, they will attain a four teraflop performance at the end of the proposed funding period. During this growth period a library of programming techniques and applications that will harness this otherwise untapped source of high-performance computing power will be developed. The result will be richer graphics, more realistic virtual environments, more natural simulated motion, and the ability to perform sophisticated supercomputing simulations on consumer-level personal computers doc12920 none State-of-the-art run-time systems are a poor match to diverse, dynamic distributed applications because they are designed to provide support to a wide variety of applications, without much customization to individual specific requirements. Little or no information flows from the application to the run-time system to allow the latter to fully tailor its services to the application. As a result, the performance is disappointing. To address this problem, this project will pursue application-centric computing, or Smart Applications (SMARTAPPS). The overriding philosophy of SMARTAPPS is measure, compare, and adapt if beneficial. That is, the application will continually monitor its performance and the available resources to determine if, and by how much, the application could improve its performance by restructuring. Then, if the potential performance benefit outweighs the projected overhead costs, the application will restructure itself and the underlying system accordingly. This process occurs continuously to adapt to the dynamic needs of the application and the availability of system resources. The adaptation can occur at various levels including selection of an algorithmic approach suitable for the current problem, run-time parallelization and other related compiler optimizations, tuning reconfigurable OS services (e.g. scheduling policy), and system configuration (e.g., selecting which computational resources to use). The SMARTAPPS framework provides performance monitoring and modeling components, as well as mechanisms for performing the actual restructuring, to integrate these levels of adaptation. This project will test SMARTAPPS on several important computational science applications and representative platforms throughout the development process. From computational physics, it will study discrete-ordinates codes that simulate subatomic particle transport. From computational biology, it will study a molecular dynamics code and a code that simulates protein folding and ligand binding (also known as drug docking). SMARTAPPS will be developed and run on current distributed, heterogeneous platforms, including the ASCI machines, large NUMA machines, networks of workstations, and, ultimately, the Grid doc12921 none The Chemistry Department of Wichita State University (WSU) is supported by the Chemistry Division, the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities, and EPSCOR under the Research Sites for Educators in Chemistry (RSEC) program. Dr. D. Paul Rillema is the Principal Investigator. The Wichita State RSEC program will focus its attention on some 30 two- and four- year institutions via the development of research collaborations. A minimum of two faculty from institutions will receive support to spend one or two semesters and a summer at WSU doing research. A second component of the Wichita State RSEC is a program of teaching postdoctoral fellows who will be involved in research and trained for teaching in two- or four-year institutions. The training will be provided by a team of WSU Faculty and the two- and four-year faculty participants. The teaching postdoctoral fellows will teach one course per semester under the guidance of a WSU faculty member and from a two- or four-year institution faculty participant. The faculty participants will also invite one promising student from their institution to work alongside them as team members in the laboratory during the summer thus facilitating the continued functioning of the team at their home institutions. Finally, each teaching postdoctoral fellow will select an undergraduate student either from WSU or a two- or four-year institution to learn the ropes of directing undergraduate students in research. Research Sites for Educators in Chemistry bring together the faculty of participating two-year colleges, baccalaureate colleges, and master s universities with faculty at research universities within a geographic region to enhance the research and educational opportunities at all Academic and research institutions provide abundant opportunities where individuals may concurrently assume responsibilities as researchers, educators, and students, and where all can engage in joint efforts that infuse education with the excitement of discovery and enrich research through the diversity of learner perspectives. RSECs such as this one at Wichita State University provide mechanisms for disseminating the knowledge, skill, practices and ethics of research to a broader community, including those from under-represented groups; assist in developing viable, sustainable research programs at participating institutions; and involve faculty and students at the participating institutions with a broader cross-section of faculty and students doc12922 none This project will develop a framework for studying protein folding that is based on techniques recently developed in the robotics motion planning community. In particular, this work uses Probabilistic Roadmap (PRM) motion planning techniques which have proven to be very successful for problems involving high-dimensional configuration spaces. The key advance that PRMs offer protein science is the ability to efficiently explore large conformational transitions of realistic models of proteins. The work involves research in both protein science and information technology. The project has two main research goals related to protein science. First, PRMs are expected to provide a computational method to predict the folding kinetics of proteins, when the native structure is already known. This makes PRMs ideal for investigating classical problems in protein folding kinetics such as kinetic intermediates, kinetic traps, parallel vs. series folding routes, and general folding mechanism questions related to potential energy landscapes and zippers processes. Second, PRM, used in conjunction with a new ENPOP parameter optimization strategy, has the potential to improve energy models both high-resolution and low-resolution models for predicting biomolecule conformations. The project has two main research goals related to information technology. Both are motivated by the massive computational requirements of the simulations needed to investigate the protein folding questions. First, new strategies and optimization techniques for PRMs will be needed to support the efficient extraction of high quality paths from the roadmaps for problems with hundreds of dof. Second, since PRMs are known to be amenable to parallel implementation, they will utilize high-performance computing. This will include the development and application of an adaptive parallel version of the C++ STL (Standard Templates library) called STAPL. With STAPL, the simulations can be optimized and run on various parallel and distributed systems and yield a performance approaching that of code manually optimized for each platform doc12923 none The present problems facing society-such as global warming, earthquake preparedness, safety of transport of nuclear waste, and pollutant emission from automobile engines-call for integration of a variety of computer programs, each solving numerical problems in a different discipline. The overriding concern for such complex models is their reliability: predictability, authenticity, and uncertainty. The focus of the present effort is modeling realistic uncertainty in predictions from multi-response, large-scale, nonlinear dynamic models, using a new strategy to attack this problem. This work re-examines the concept of a mathematical model associated with complex physical systems, considering experiment and theory to be an integral part of the model and treating uncertain parameters of the model as internal, state variables. In this way, the uncertainties of the experimental and theoretical foundation are transferred directly into uncertainties of model predictions. Establishing this direct relationship allows one also to address the reverse problem: to identify which specific data contribute the most to the prediction uncertainty; to determine the required accuracy of an experiment to bring the prediction uncertainty to a given level; or to assess whether a planned experiment will be able to improve the prediction uncertainty. This is accomplished by merging convex relaxations from control theory with the technique of solution mapping developed and applied to numerical modeling of chemical kinetics typical of fossil-fuel combustion. The solution mapping technique uses statistical design of computer experiments to replace complex ODE models with surrogate polynomial models. These simpler, though accurate, algebraic models are more suited to numerical optimization. The convex relaxations allow for optimization problems described by a polynomial objective and polynomial constraints (generally nonconvex) to be attacked by convex optimization, namely linear objectives with linear-matrix-inequality constraints. Nearly twenty years of use in robust control has shown these relaxations to be remarkably useful in a wide variety of physically motivated problems and applications. In this approach, surrogate models are developed for all responses, both from the training set and from the prediction set. Each surrogate model is expressed as a quadratic form in terms of internal model parameters, developed in a series of direct ODE integrations performed according to a factorial design covering a subspace of parameter uncertainties. The quadratic form of the surrogate response models is then explored by an optimization algorithm. In the initial effort, the problem of propagation of uncertainties in a natural-gas-combustion model is cast in the form amenable for the S-procedure, a method of convex optimization widely used in control theory. Even more sophisticated convex relaxations have recently been developed, centering on the observation that determining if a given polynomial is a sum-of-squares (and hence globally nonnegative), can be cast as a convex feasibility problem, and verified in polynomial-time (in the order of the polynomial). This work will investigate such possibilities for exploring novel avenues for numerically economical assessment of realistic error bounds of complex dynamic models doc12924 none The project addresses the problem of human interaction - in this case mechanical interaction - with virtual environments. Considered are locomotion interface energy-extractive devices that allow natural walking through virtual terrain. The goal is to produce a sense of immersion in the virtual world by realistic integration of walking with vision and sound, and by realistic energy expenditure in moving about. For example, the system will be expected to realistically recreate the fact that walking uphill is harder than downhill. Additional degrees of freedom will be explored to investigate a more generalized pattern of terrain walking doc12925 none In this proposal, the PIs propose to build a system that would open the SIO shipboard data archives to web access with modern tools for users that would allow data queries and data mining via the Internet. This effort is visualized as part of a larger data base infrastructure for the wide MGG and Oceanographic community. The PIs would first develop a prototype system, then test the system and ask for comments from community users, and finally add more data and tools to the system. The effort would extend over a period much longer than the present 3 year grant, and is partly supported by SIO and others. An advisory committee would help guide the efforts of the group doc12926 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program will support the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) with the acquisition of a Fluorolog 3-22 Lifetime System from ISA Jobin Yvon. The instrument consists of single excitation and double collection monochromators, with fully automated entrance and exit slit control. The instrument will have an immediate impact on the research projects of four research groups at UCLA. The first group will investigate interactions between chains of semiconducting polymers and the dynamics of energy flow in aligned conjugated polymer mesoporous silica hybrid materials. The work should provide a new understanding of these important materials that will enhance the possibility of application in organic-based displays or photovoltaic devices. The second group will study the properties of newly synthesized molecular compasses and gyroscopes, as well as explore the effects of aromatic ring rotation in conjugated molecules. The information learned from these experiments will have direct application in the production of new organic materials that should have switching properties that are faster than the fastest known ferroelectric liquid crystals. The third group will explore the synthesis and properties of novel heteroacenes, which also will have unique applications in electroluminescent and photovoltaic devices. Finally, the fourth group will use time-resolved resonance energy transfer to study the spatial distributions of molecules deliberately placed in mesostructured silicas, and time-resolved fluorescence depolarization as an in situ probe of the formation dynamics of mesostructured silica films. The information gained in these experiments will improve our understanding of how the formation of mesostructured materials can be controlled and directed. The simplicity of the instrument will ensure routine usage and great productivity, especially in an undergraduate educational environment. Undergraduate students in the physical chemistry and analytical laboratory classes will be able to routinely measure the fluorescence lifetimes of dyes and other molecules, allowing them to explore the dynamics of intramolecular electron transfer and other important photochemical reactions. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program will support the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) with the acquisition of a Fluorolog 3-22 Lifetime System from ISA Jobin Yvon. The instrument consists of single excitation and double collection monochromators, with fully automated entrance and exit slit control. The instrument will have an immediate impact on the research projects of four research groups at UCLA. The information gained in these experiments will improve our understanding of how the formation of mesostructured materials can be controlled and directed. The simplicity of the instrument will ensure routine usage and great productivity, especially in an undergraduate educational environment. Undergraduate students in the physical chemistry and analytical laboratory classes will be able to routinely measure the fluorescence lifetimes of dyes and other molecules, allowing them to explore the dynamics of intramolecular electron transfer and other important photochemical reactions doc12915 none The objective of this research is to extend the knowledge of the single player stochastic decision problems, which have been studied for years, to develop new methodologies for multi-player games and test them on large-scale problems from the domain of e-commerce and supply chain management. Such a methodology, when developed and tested, will provide a much needed resource to the corporate world for examining business policies. The Internet revolution has brought about tremendous changes in the marketplace by tearing down the barriers of time and distance. The competition among the providers of goods and services for luring the customers has reached an epic height. Consider, for example, a homebuyer s request for a mortgage loan, which is now available to virtually every lending institution (e.g., a bank) in the world. All the banks (players, in generic game theory nomenclature) seeking to capture this customer are involved in a stochastic game, where they form their bids in anticipation of other players actions. Based on the outcome of their bids, the players try to learn a strategy for the subsequent customers. In the above example, the game environment is highly stochastic and the game return is not necessarily of the zero-sum type. The main purpose of modeling and examining such problems is to foresee the equilibrium point(s) of a game, the path of the game evolution which tells us about the game returns in finite time horizons, and also the time taken by a game to reach an equilibrium point. In today s volatile market situation, short-term game returns could be of much more immediate importance. Standard game theoretic analysis, when available, is geared toward characterizing the equilibrium points. Through simulation-based approaches to the study of stochastic games, as presented in this project, one can also examine the evolutionary paths a game can follow doc12928 none Gibson-Carpenter, Alexander Ecotourism purports to protect fragile ecosystems while delivering economic development to host communities and recreation to tourists. This project studies the impact of ecotourism on the livelihoods of host community households. Using a research method known as tourism impact assessment, the two anthropologists, their students and colleagues in Costa Rica and Belize will measure household livelihood security and vulnerability using an inclusive set of proxy indicators of social, economic, and environmental well-being. The hypothesis to be tested is that household participation in ecotourism improves household livelihood security and reduces vulnerability. Eight sites (four in each of the two countries) will be studied, half of the sites engaged in ecotourism and half not, in both the high- and low-tourism seasons. Qualitative data will be gathered using participant observation, key informant interviews, household surveys, and general ethnography; quantitative anthropometric measures of health will be recorded for small children; household economic indices will be measured; and available statistics on tourism and economic development will be collected and analyzed. The resulting study will advance our understanding of the impact of tourism, one of the world s major industries, upon rural communities in the developing world. This new knowledge will be valuable to planners, local officials, and community members doc12929 none The proposed research is aimed at designing and developing new resources for information and knowledge management in a heterogeneous distributed environment for law enforcement. Important problem areas to be addressed are: system scalability, group-based monitoring of dynamically changing data, analyzing group behavior in search and notification, and incremental searching, among others The technical approach will be implemented in an agent-based framework and empirical studies will be performed to evaluate the proposed prototype in two law enforcement agencies doc12930 none We propose development of a network layer protocol necessary to increase the utility of acoustic communications in the shallow water environment. Increasing attention has been given to collecting data from difficult to access coastal waters for diverse activities, to include scientific research, industrial and commercial concerns, and military applications. The preponderance of activity has focused on developing reliable methods for transmitting the information collected through the difficult time-varying shallow water medium. However, current network layer protocols, which are responsible for determining traffic routing, do not provide for guaranteed quality of services. Current protocols also may cause unnecessary message delays. The delivery of traffic in an acoustic network is complicated by the excessive propagation delays resulting from the speed of sound in water. The effect of this propagation speed is to cause an acoustic network connected by short hops to perform similar to a wire-based network with links between neighboring nodes of over 100,000 kilometers. However, the potential benefits and increased potential for application developments that stem from the implementation of wireless underwater networks make it worthwhile to explore means of mitigating the effects of the propagation delays. Central to the problem of route determination for network traffic is the discovery of the networks topology from which network nodes extract next-hop information upon which to base traffic forwarding decisions. Two principal methods are used for discovering the route information. Proactive routing methods pre-compute route data before network traffic is generated, thus when traffic is submitted by network applications the appropriate routes are already known. Reactive routing determines the route information in response to traffic submissions. This method, referred to as on-demand routing, seeks to minimize route discovery traffic by only determining routes necessary to support actual traffic patterns. This routing information is cached to increase responsiveness to submitted traffic and adaptability to topology changes. Both methods have their merits; however, neither adequately supports resource allocations necessary to assure guaranteed levels of service quality. We proposed a novel network protocol that provides many of the benefits of proactive routing yet retains the adaptability of reactive protocols. Our protocol is based upon a central master node which periodically probes the network for active participant nodes. In responding to the probes, the nodes provide the master node with sufficient information for the master node to determine all possible data paths through the network. From this information the master node makes all routing decisions for the network and provides irnext-hoply information to each non-master node, thus reducing the workload on non-master nodes. This information also enables the master node to optimize the allocation of traffic to network paths providing for active management of delays insuring delay variance and data capacity are within the established quality of service commitments. Fundamental to this approach is the separation of control traffic from data delivery. This separation allows data to be transmitted without first having to wait for traditional handshake mechanisms to provide access to the channel. This separation significantly reduces the expected delay to which traffic is subjected resulting in potentially higher data throughput. Progress in network layer protocols will expand the usefulness of underwater acoustic networks beyond applications that are limited to very low data rate traffic and non-time sensitive data types. Specific beneficiaries of this research activity include the Deployable Autonomous Distributed System, the SeaWeb Technology Demonstrations, the Autonomous Oceanographic Sampling Network, and the National Oceanographic partnership Programs Front Resolving Observational Network with Telemetry (FRONT) project doc12931 none This project relieves the shortage of qualified information assurance personnel by providing generous financial support for graduate undergraduate students as participants in a rigorous academic program. The highlights of the program include: faculty committed to working with undergraduates in a research environment, immediate integration of students in existing research programs in information assurance, and a cyber research seminar emphasizing critical thinking, leadership, and communication skills. The program includes expanding horizons seminars presented by experts in the field of information assurance and an ethics component, in the form of an integrated sequence of lectures and discussion. The goal is to develop professional skills through mentoring, training, and experience doc12932 none The purpose of this project is to advance our understanding of the properties that limit both high-power and short-wavelength operation of laser and nonlinear optical (NLO) crystals. In addition, new and improved materials will be developed. At present, lack of a suitable combination of high birefringence and high transparency in NLO materials is limiting direct second-harmonic conversion to deep UV and VUV wavelengths. In the future, nonlinear absorption and thermal properties are likely to become limiting factors for performance at very high-power levels. To study and address these materials issues, the optical and thermal properties of several wide bandgap oxides will be examined. Linear optical properties, thermal conductivity, and thermo-optic coefficients will be studied for high-transparency nonlinear optical crystals that will allow either direct second-harmonic conversion to wavelengths shorter than 200 nm or frequency mixing for generation of tunable VUV light. The production of high powers in solid-state lasers is largely a thermal-management issue. Substantial improvements in solid-state laser output powers and efficiencies are certainly attainable by incorporating the small energy-defect emission of Yb3+ in a very high thermal-conductivity host. To achieve this combination of properties, several new materials that are rich in Y203 and BeO will be studied and developed. Detailed spectroscopic examinations will be made on the emitting Yb3+ ion; large single crystals will be grown; thermal conductivities will be assessed; and laser properties will be established. The effects of the proposed program extend well beyond optical science and engineering, as the work has direct relevance to manufacturing and micromachining of most of the high-technology devices that are currently being produced in the electronics and telecommunications industries. Moreover, in the future, such laser systems will play important roles in connecting pico-, nano-, meso-, and microscale functions to our everyday world through the fabrication of microelectromechanical devices (MEMs,) microelectrochemical systems (MECs,) and other small photonic and biodevices. The proposed project is also important for the development of human resources in science and engineering; the area is growing rapidly and experienced scientists and engineers are needed. The program involves an international collection of researchers from a variety of disciplines in both academia and industry. Graduate and undergraduate students will be exposed to many different areas of the materials and laser sciences, providing unique research and education opportunities doc12933 none This project establishes a scholarship program for master s students in the science and practice of information assurance. Selected students perform two years of federal service in the information assurance field upon graduation. Through courses, involving extensive laboratory exercises and projects, students learn first hand how to design, build, configure and manage systems and network security. Student complete thesis projects which permit them to explore a particular topic in depth and engage in research. The project addresses the current personnel gap in information assurance for the federal information infrastructure and enhances the program and capacity within the institution for further development doc12934 none This project will work to enable the design, development, and testing of standards for entries in gazetteers and explore the complexity levels of gazetteers required for research in the humanities and history of computing. Gazetteers are structured records about locations and their place names. Digital libraries research is increasingly concerned with the ability to link place names and map locations. Toponym-rich text and maps are lined effectively through the use of gazetteers. Making robust gazetteer information to users and contributors of digital libraries resources is key to achieving communicability among diverse digital resources, as indirect referencing can be employed. These resources can contribute to a variety of scholarly pursuits across a broad range of subject areas doc12935 none The goal of this research project is to develop new techniques to handle uncertainty in object-oriented dynamic databases. The approach consists of developing a new data model and associated algebra; developing query optimization techniques for inexact queries; and development of indexing methods to support probabilistic uncertainty in dynamic databases. This research effort develops new theory, tools and technology to support various types of probabilistic uncertainty in object-oriented dynamic databases. The experimental research is linked to spatial databases with applications in the field of Geographic Information Systems. By adding support for uncertainty in database management systems, this research project will substantially increase the power and flexibility of database management in a broad class of business, social, scientific and engineering endeavors where uncertainty is measured and used. http: www.vislab.ucr.edu intro.html doc12936 none The research is on a newly discovered global response of yeast cells to the depletion of oxygen. Two families of anaerobic genes -i.e. genes expressed under anaerobic conditions, the hypoxic genes and the recently discovered DAN TIR genes, are under the negative control of heme; heme also stimulates transcription of a large group of oxygen-induced genes. The DAN TIR genes encode cell wall mannoproteins; they are induced at the same time that the normal cell wall proteins, Cwp1 and Cwp2 are down-regulated, leading to remodeling of the cell surface. Three of the Dan Tir proteins are essential for anaerobic growth, indicating the importance of adaptation to oxygen depletion. Regulation of the hypoxic genes by the Rox1 and Mot3 repressors is now well understood. However, regulation of the eight DAN TIR genes needs to be elucidated. This work should help define the pathway responsible for the reciprocal heme-mediated regulation of oxygen-induced and oxygen-repressed genes. Some factors play multiple roles in this pathway, providing an illuminating example of coordinately and reciprocally regulated gene expression system. For example Mot3, under the control of heme, represses the DAN TIR genes, and simultaneously activates the CWP2 gene. The mechanism controlling the DAN TIR genes is complex, involving three factors (the Mox proteins) needed for regulated anaerobic induction of the regulon and several repressors which serve to squelch basal expression in aerobic cells, when most of these genes are not expressed. In this project the mechanism by which heme controls the activity of Mox4, the keystone regulator of the DAN TIR genes will be investigated. This binucleate zinc cluster protein is a transcriptional activator targeting a common anaerobic response element in the DAN TIR promoters. It is controlled by two repressors, Mox1 and Mox2, in response to the regulatory signal provided by the heme molecule. The guiding hypothesis is that heme stimulates Mox1 and Mox2 to interact with Mox4 and block its activation function, through a repression domain which has been identified at the C-terminus. The structure and function of Mox4 as a target of heme repression will be analyzed by deletion mutagenesis and by testing fusions of sub-fragments of the protein to LexA, a DNA-binding protein. Subsequently the interaction of Mox4 with Mox1 and Mox2 will be analyzed by genetic and biochemical means, using co-immunoprecipitation analysis, in a strategy designed to test a series of possible mechanisms by which heme controls Mox4 activity. Finally the interaction will be studied in the setting of Mox4-DNA complexes. Yeast is a facultative organism capable of rapid adaptation to changes in nutrient and oxygen supply, and it has become our best model for the regulation of gene expression by oxygen in eukaryotic cells. The proposed research will greatly increase the value of this model as a teaching and research paradigm, significantly advancing our knowledge about a key topic in gene expression. Research on the oxygen regulation in yeast has intersected propitiously with the study of transcriptional control in yeast model systems. The regulation of oxygen-induced genes, e.g. the cytochrome c gene, was an early model for metabolic control of eukaryotic gene expression. This project will focus on the other side of oxygen regulation, how the adaptation of yeast cells to oxygen depletion is generated at the level of gene expression doc12937 none This grant provides funding to create a mathematical framework to design effective aviation security system strategies. Aviation security protects vital national interests, as well as passengers and aircraft. Key components of an aviation security system include baggage and passenger screening devices and operations. The goals of this project are to determine: (1) how to measure the performance of aviation security systems, (2) where to deploy aviation security technology devices when designing such systems, (3) how to operate such devices optimally after they are deployed, and (4) how to quantify and optimize the resulting effectiveness of deployment and security operation strategies. The methodology will use discrete optimization models such as the knapsack problem, complexity analysis, and heuristics developed for intractable instances of the models to conduct the necessary analysis and to obtain the desired results. The results of this research will provide a systematic approach to compare and evaluate different types of aviation security system strategies that incorporate both new and existing aviation security technologies. This approach also has the potential to be used to design and implement new aviation security system strategies capable of enhancing the level of security attainable given the security resources and technologies that are currently available or may be available in the future. Moreover, the results of this research can be used to quantify the value of new investments in different types of aviation security technologies, to determine their potential impact on enhancing aviation security at airports within the nation. Beyond aviation security, this approach may also be applied to other screening environments, such as computer security systems screening for unauthorized users and food safety systems screening for toxic levels of bacteria. This grant provides funding to create a mathematical framework to design effective aviation security system strategies. Aviation security protects vital national interests, as well as passengers and aircraft. Key components of an aviation security system include baggage and passenger screening devices and operations. The goals of this project are to determine (1) how to measure the performance of aviation security systems, (2) where to deploy aviation security technology devices when designing such systems, (3) how to operate such devices optimally after they are deployed, and (4) how to quantify and optimize the resulting effectiveness of deployment and security operation strategies. The methodology will use discrete optimization models such as the knapsack problem, complexity analysis, and heuristics developed for intractable instances of the models to conduct the necessary analysis and to obtain the desired results. The results of this research will provide a systematic approach to compare and evaluate different types of aviation security system strategies that incorporate both new and existing aviation security technologies. This approach also has the potential to be used to design and implement new aviation security system strategies capable of enhancing the level of security attainable given the security resources and technologies that are currently available or may be available in the future. Moreover, the results of this research can be used to quantify the value of new investments in different types of aviation security technologies, to determine their potential impact on enhancing aviation security at airports within the nation. Beyond aviation security, this approach may also be applied to other screening environments, such as computer security systems screening for unauthorized users and food safety systems screening for toxic levels of bacteria doc12938 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Rowan University will acquire a 400 MHz NMR Spectrometer. In addition, funds are awarded to upgrade a 200 MHz NMR, which Rowan will donate to Richard Stockton College. The 400 MHz instrument will be used to support at least nine active investigations in two departments at Rowan University; a) the investigation of silica silicate networks in acqueous solutions of silicic acid; b) characterization of fluoroacrylate-acrylate and -methacrylate co-polymers; c) magnetization-transfer NMR analysis of network formation in polymer gels; d) studying biomolecular recognition; e) 13C NMR-supported pyrolysis studies; f) development of solid polymer electrolytes for Li+ and H+ transport; g) silicon carbide fiber processing; h) protein structure determination; and i) controlled drug release studies. The upgraded 200 MHz instrument will be used at Richard Stockton College to support laboratory instruction and the synthesis and characterization of unique surfactants. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry, biochemistry and chemical engineering doc12939 none Singer This grant provides three-years of partial salary support for the Rare Gas Geochronology Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This will comprise the initial (phase I) technician support for this laboratory that is under the supervision of Dr. Brad Singer. The new technician will be a full-time employee whose responsibilities shall include: (1) day-to-day operation and maintenance of ultra-high vacuum, mass spectrometry, laser, furnace, electronic, and computer systems, (2) scheduling analytical work, training students and outside users, (3) supervision of sample preparation, including training and oversight of graduate students, (4) irradiation and safe handling of radioactive and hazardous materials, (5) development of the UW-Madison nuclear reactor for 40Ar 39Ar geochronology, (6) completing computer automation of the gas extraction and mass spectrometry system that was built by Dr. Singer, and (7) archiving and management of analytical data. In addition, the new technician will assist in implementing capabilities for the measurement of radiogenic 4He and cosmogenic 3He. The laboratory is currently engaged in, or beginning, several research projects that span many Earth Science disciplines and involve faculty plus graduate or undergraduate students from UW-Madison or collaboration with other institutions. The technician will contribute to bringing the laboratory from its developmental state to one of full productivity. Moreover, the technician will help to expand the capabilities of current equipment so that the laboratory may fulfill its potential in both geo- and thermo-chronology doc12940 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program and the Major Research Instrumentation program will allow Rowan University to enhance experimental capabilities in the solid state sciences at a primarily undergraduate institution. The institution will purchase accessories allowing thermal measurements in an existing platform system. The award will support Rowan University to continue improving the quality and importance of research performed by undergraduate faculty, adding to the local research environment, and promoting the integration of research and education. The instrument will support research involving important outstanding questions in materials research in the areas of magnetic, superconducting and thermoelectric materials. Specifically, the requested specific heat probe will be used to investigate theoretical predictions for metamagnets and colossal magnetoresistive materials. The thermal conductivity capability will be adapted for Nernst effect measurements of superconducting multilayers with varying interlayer coupling. The thermal conductivity and Seebeck voltage will be measured for materials, which are candidates for thermoelectric devices. Student researchers will be involved in each of these activities. The instrumentation will enhance existing Advanced Laboratory and Chemistry Physics Research courses. Many students will benefit from first-hand and original observation of the interplay between the various physical properties demonstrated by the systems under investigation. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program and the Major Research Instrumentation program will allow Rowan University to enhance experimental capabilities in the solid state sciences at a primarily undergraduate institution. The institution will purchase accessories allowing thermal measurements in an existing platform system. The award will support Rowan University to continue improving the quality and importance of research performed by undergraduate faculty, adding to the local research environment, and promoting the integration of research and education. The instrument will support research involving important outstanding questions in materials research in the areas of magnetic, superconducting and thermoelectric materials. Specifically, the requested specific heat probe will be used to investigate theoretical predictions for metamagnets and colossal magnetoresistive materials. Student researchers will be involved in each of these activities. The instrumentation will enhance existing Advanced Laboratory and Chemistry Physics Research courses. Many students will benefit from first-hand and original observation of the interplay between the various physical properties demonstrated by the systems under investigation doc12941 none This dissertation project is a multi-sited ethnographic analysis of the interplay of Catholic social ethics and technological advances in healthcare science at the fourth largest US hospital system. This 48-facility corporation is the flagship of Catholic healthcare but serves diverse California constituencies. This project investigates situations where developments in medical science and technology result in conflicting ethics and value systems between Catholic hospitals and the communities they care for. It seeks to understand how these values are articulated and how conflicting demands are negotiated between people and between organizational structures. This research will focus on how values affect actual behavior within institutions and how policy is developed to respond to conflicting values systems. Ethnographic research methods in this 15 month project include: 1) daily participant observation in meetings and hospital practice, 2) modified life history interviews with 10-15 informants involved in ethics issues and policy design, 3) review and analysis of documents produced by the hospital system since . Field sites reflect an explicit effort to work in facilities where new technologies challenge operative value systems, as in secular hospitals now affiliated with the Catholic system. This research will contribute to the study of science and religious pluralism, particularly how ethics and social values affect group behavior. The results will be of interest to bioethicists, theologians, healthcare service providers and policy makers, and community groups working with faith-based organizations doc12942 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program and the Major Research Instrumentation program to Colorado state University will fund the purchase of an integrated field emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM) system for the central Electron Microscopy Center at Colorado State University. The equipment requested will allow imaging specimens at high resolution, providing resolution of structures as small as 1.5 nanometers. An energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) system will allow chemical identification, with the capability of precisely mapping multiple elements over a wide area. A third component of the instrumentation will enable investigators to produce nanoscale devices using electron beam lithography. This technique, in conjunction with the high resolution FE-SEM will allow generation of structures as small as 10 nm for applications in optoelectronic materials, superconductors, and sensors. The instrumentation will support the research efforts of seven primary investigators from five departments across campus. In addition, it will be useed by research groups in 8 other departments at CSU as well as several other investigators (both academic and industrial) from along the Colorado Front Range. Finally, the FE-SEM will be used to support and extend the teaching mission of the EM center and the University through hands-on instruction and telepresence microscopy. This award from the Instrumentation for Material Research program and the Major Research Instrumentation program to Colorado State University will fund the purchase of an integrated system of imaging and analytical tools that will greatly expand the capabilities of the Electron Microscopy (EM) Center at Colorado State University. The state-of-the-art scanning electron microscope (SEM) will allow imaging of both biological and materials specimens at the highest magnifications currently possible. In addition, an x-ray analyzer attached to the microscope will provide identification of most elements in the periodic table and will map their locations with high precision on specimen surfaces. The electron beam lithography system, coupled with the SEM will allow production of micro- and nanoscopic structures that will be used in a variety of optical and electrical devices, such as light emitting diodes, semiconductor lasers, and highly efficient sensors and detectors. The educational mission of science and engineering departments across the CSU campus will also be enhanced by the acquisition of this instrumentation through hands-on instruction and remote access via telepresence microscopy doc12943 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program supports instrument development at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS). Thee goals of this project are: (1) to develop a transmission-mode focusing x-ray monochromator optimized for the relatively large spot size and angular divergence of the x-ray beams produced by a high power wiggler; (2) to develop the electronics required to synthesize locally a high-quality timing signal that can be used to synchronize (ultrafast) laser pulses with the electron bunch structure of the synchrotron; and (3), to develop a focusing asymmetric-cut Bragg monochromator to compress the x-ray beam for small angle x-ray scattering applications. These devices will be used to perform time-resolved structural measurements on dynamically evolving materials and will be permanently installed on the new synchrotron x-ray beam lines currently under construction at CHESS (the G-lines). The central campus location of this facility allows it to be staffed primarily by graduate students from a wide variety of disciplines, creating a comprehensive educational and outreach environment. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program supports instrument development at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS).The goal of this project is to develop x-ray optics designed to take full advantage of the powerful x-ray beams produced by three new beam lines (the G-lines) at CHESS. These devices will be used to perform time-resolved measurements of the atomic scale structure of dynamically evolving materials. CHESS s location on the central campus of Cornell University enables a level of hands-on training and involvement of all levels of students which is difficult to achieve elsewhere. Indeed, the G-lines are staffed primarily by graduate students from a wide variety of scientific and engineering disciplines, working on a wide variety of materials research projects. These students have been involved in all phases of the construction of the beam lines and are heavily involved in outreach to the local community, working primarily with K-12 students and their teachers. The final result is a comprehensive educational and multi-disciplinary research environment that is accessible to students of all levels doc12944 none A different algebraic equation (DAE) is an implicit differential equation relating various quantities, their rates of changes, and control and source terms. DAEs are the natural way in which to describe many industrial and scientific processes. A DAE formulation often provides the quicker model development and more accurate modeling than when using explicit equations. However, using the DAE formulation on complex problems poses a number of technical challenges. Recently, it has been shown that a number of fundamental problems in control and systems theory including observer design, model identification, and failure detection can be naturally viewed as problems involving DAEs. In the past this has mainly been examined for lower dimensional linear systems. It is proposed to examine these problems for large complex nonlinear systems. In particular, systems with delays and mixed discrete continuous dynamics will be examined. Both theory and practical, robust, numerical algorithms will be developed. Particular questions to be examined include model identification, failure detection, observer design, system simulation, and fault isolation. The results will be applied to applications from the aerospace, chemical processing, and other industries doc12945 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program and the Major Research Instrumentation program will allow Ohio State University to replace the existing obsolete X-ray photoelectron spectrometer (XPS) with an new system having higher sensitivity, spatial resolution and novel sample handling features. The system will be located at the Center for Materials Research (CMR) and is designed for use by a variety of investigators in science and engineering departments, Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Physics, Materials Science and Engineering, and Electrical Engineering. The XPS systems will support a variety of federally funded projects, including investigations of carbon based molecular electronic devices (NSF), corrosion of light weight alloys (AFOSR, SERDP), conducting polymers and light emitting diodes (DARPA), zeolite based chemical sensors (NSF, DOE), and oxidation catalysts for exhaust gases (DOE). In addition to examining research problems from various research projects, the facility will be used to instruct undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students on the applications of XPS for surface characterization. OSU has a long history of education and outreach activities involving local and visiting students, including summer research projects for undergraduates and science education programs for K-12 students and teachers. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program and the Major Research Instrumentation program will allow Ohio State University to replace the existing obsolete X-ray photoelectron spectrometer (XPS) with an new system having higher sensitivity, spatial resolution and novel sample handling features. The system will be located at the Center for Materials Research (CMR) and is designed for use by a variety of investigators in science and engineering departments, Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Physics, Materials Science and Engineering, and Electrical Engineering. The XPS systems will support a variety of federally funded projects, including investigations of carbon based molecular electronic devices (NSF), corrosion of light weight alloys (AFOSR, SERDP), conducting polymers and light emitting diodes (DARPA), zeolite based chemical sensors (NSF, DOE), and oxidation catalysts for exhaust gases (DOE). In addition to examining research problems from various research projects, the facility will be used to instruct undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students on the applications of XPS for surface characterization. OSU has a long history of education and outreach activities involving local and visiting students, including summer research projects for undergraduates and science education programs for K-12 students and teachers doc12946 none One of the mechanisms by which rain is formed is the collision and coalescence of cloud droplets. This is usually called the warm rain mechanism, to distinguish it from the process of diffusional growth, which is important for the formation of precipitation in clouds colder than 0 degrees C containing a mixture of ice crystals and supercooled water droplets. It has long been speculated that turbulent air motions may increase the rate of droplet collisions and hence speed up the formation of precipitation. Two effects are attributed to turbulence that would tend to increase the rate of droplet collisions: (1) an inertial effect whereby collisions are caused by the inability of a drop to move with the airflow out of the path of an approaching larger drop; (2) an accumulation effect, whereby persistent vortices in the turbulent flow create regions of higher drop concentration, in which the rate of collisions will be increased. This project analyzes these effects by computing the movement of drops in turbulent air by direct numerical simulation (DNS). One objective is to quantify and parameterize the combined effects of turbulence, droplet inertia, and gravitational settling on the droplet collision kernel, a quantity that describes the probability that a larger drop will overtake and collide with a smaller drop in unit time, given that they are both present in unit concentration. Another objective is to apply the new parameterization in solving the stochastic coalescence equation, which describes the evolution of a droplet spectrum as the drops interact and collide with each other, to determine the extent to which turbulence shortens the time for precipitation-sized drops (about 0.1 mm) to form. The project requires the collaboration of a specialist in computational fluid dynamics and a cloud physicist. Basically, it brings to bear on cloud physics techniques that have been developed for the analysis of multiphase flows in engineering. The result will be a more accurate parameterization of rain formation by the warm rain process, which could help to explain discrepancies that seem to exist between current theory (which does not include turbulence) and the observed times for precipitation formation doc12947 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program supports instrument acquisition of a Fourier Transform Infrared Imaging System for Multicomponent Polymer Dynamics Research and Student Education at the University of Akron. The investigators will assemble one of the world s most powerful FTIR imaging systems that will have unprecedented sensitivity and speed for spatially resolved spectroscopic measurements and be a uniquely powerful technique for studying all types of polymer diffusion in various materials including nano-networks and nanocomposites and for studying phase separations and confinement effects. The acquisition of the proposed instrument will provide the timely training of a future generation of scientists skillful in vibrational spectroscopic imaging that will soon replace the existing 5,000 infrared microscopes in the world. The research will provide a novel learning experience in polymer science and engineering, enabling the largest interdisciplinary polymer program at University of Akron to be the first to possess this emerging technology for research and education. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program supports instrument acquisition of a Fourier Transform Infrared Imaging System for Multicomponent Polymer Dynamics Research and Student Education at the University of Akron. The investigators will assemble one of the world s most powerful FTIR imaging systems that will have unprecedented sensitivity and speed for spatially resolved spectroscopic measurements and be a uniquely powerful technique for studying all types of polymer diffusion in various materials including nano-networks and nanocomposites and for studying phase separations and confinement effects. The acquisition of the proposed instrument will provide the timely training of a future generation of scientists skillful in vibrational spectroscopic imaging that will soon replace the existing 5,000 infrared microscopes in the world. The research will provide a novel learning experience in polymer science and engineering, enabling the largest interdisciplinary polymer program at University of Akron to be the first to possess this emerging technology for research and education doc12948 none X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) is one of the most useful methods for the analysis of surfaces, interfaces and thin films; with sensitivity at the nanometer scale. It is a critical tool for basic and applied research and development of new semiconductors, biomaterials, fuel cells, gene chips, amorphous metals, optical fibers, and optical electronic polymers. This materials research is enabling to the advancement of telecommunications, computers, energy and biotechnology where XPS plays an additional role in manufacturing science and quality control. This award from the Instrumentation for Material research program will allow Penn State to purchase a new state-of-the-art XPS, increasing the availability for undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty and staff various fields of materials and engineering research. The instrument will also be vital to teaching a number of courses that detail the theory and practice of XPS, and for hands on training with access to modern equipment. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) is one of the most useful methods for the analysis of surfaces, interfaces and thin films; with sensitivity at the nanometer scale. It is a critical tool for basic and applied research and development of new semiconductors, biomaterials, fuel cells, gene chips, amorphous metals, optical fibers, and optical electronic polymers. This materials research is enabling to the advancement of telecommunications, computers, energy and biotechnology where XPS plays an additional role in manufacturing science and quality control. This award from the Instrumentation for Material research program will allow Penn State to purchase a new state-of-the-art XPS, increasing the availability for undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty and staff various fields of materials and engineering research. The instrument will also be vital to teaching a number of courses that detail the theory and practice of XPS, and for hands on training with access to modern equipment doc12949 none Jean Hertzberg, University of Colorado In this proposal, funding is requested to purchase a Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) system to enhance the research capabilities of the PI and four Co-PI s. They are actively engaged in a number of interesting research problems in fluid mechanics. These include real time simulation and control of a two-dimensional jet, evaluation of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) fluidic devices, cardiovascular fluid dynamics, and infectious aerosol generation doc12950 none The network of one-carbon (C1) reactions provides C1 units for use in biosynthesis. It is crucial to plant metabolism, but many of the network s enzymes are known poorly or not at all. Accordingly, functions will be determined for genes that putatively encode: 10-formyl-THF deformylase, sarcosine oxidase, formamidase, 5-formyl-THF cycloligase, S-formylglutathione hydrolase, glutamate forminotransferase, methionine g-lyase, and organellar forms of 5,10-methylene-THF dehydrogenase. For all these genes determining function means finding the biochemical activities and subcellular location of the encoded proteins; for the first five it means in addition isolating Arabidopsis knockout mutants and determining the effects of the mutations on C1 metabolism using NMR, mass spectral, and biochemical procedures. GenBank numbers for the network of C1 genes are at http: www.hos.ufl.edu meteng 1Cpage1.html. This website will be used to post research results as they become available, as well as a catalog of the full-length cDNAs, antibodies, and other resources generated in the project. This website will be linked to the central project site when it is established. Results will also be presented at meetings and published. This research will meet project objectives by assigning biochemical and metabolic functions to most of the unexpected, unexplained, and unexplored genes in plant C1 metabolism. The broader impact will be three-fold. First, on crop improvement. Many efforts to genetically engineer plants for human benefit involve changes to C1 metabolism, making it vital to understand C1 metabolism so as to engineer it successfully. Second, on basic plant biochemistry, because C1 metabolism is perhaps the least well understood area of plant primary metabolism despite its central position in processes such as photorespiration, lignification, and alkaloid synthesis. Third, on biochemistry in general, because the plant C1 metabolic network is special, not merely a minor variation on those in yeast, liver, or bacteria doc12951 none Lee, Lloyd L U of Oklahoma Nanostructured materials are currently being developed for use in molecular adsorption and molecular recognition. The design and selection of sensor materials [65,66] in commercial use have been mostly done by trial and error and qualitative thinking, rather than with tailor-made specificity and quantitative principles. With the development of the nanostructured materials, such as self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) and dendritic structures, there have been created a vast menu of chemical and physical properties for selection. We need to have a molecular level understanding of the nature and consequence of the molecular interactions at play. This research is aimed at establishing a microscopic framework, using molecular theory and computer simulation, for gas adsorption in three typical nanomaterials: aerogels, zeolites, and starburst dendrimers. This furnishes a quantitative principle rooted in the molecular level that shall aid in the design and development of gas adsorption and molecular recognition devices. There are, broadly speaking, older nanomaterials (e.g., zeolites, membranes, aerogels, activated carbons, etc.) and newer ones (e.g., star polymers, dendrimers, etc.) What happens to the gases (fluids) included in these substrates with respect to their molecular distributions, isosteric heats of adsorption, phase behavior, thermodynamic properties, adsorption isotherms, separation efficiency (for mixtures), selective adsorption, and partition coefficients? An accurate molecular theory and well-targeted molecular simulation are needed that give the probabilistic densities of distribution of the confined gases around the ordered substrates, as well as their theoretical connections to the thermodynamic properties. This is properly the task for our statistical mechanics of adsorption. The principal investigator will develop a new integral equation (IE) theory and perform molecular computer simulation to determine the gas structures (distribution functions) and thermodynamic properties of inclusion gases and gas mixtures around nanostructures. He uses the existing replica Ornsterin-Zernike (ROZ) equations as a starting point. New forms will be developed for the inclusion gas in random as well as regular media, and in rigid as well as deformable adsorbents. The conventional ROZ can treat only inrigidlo matrices. He uses a two-temperature quench procedure to formulate a new equation for responsive systems. In addition, consistency is achieved by designing a new closure relation satisfying a set of exact self-consistency principles. The principal investigator stresses that without this closure relation, a good one at that, no integral equations can achieve high consistency, nor accuracy. Monte Carlo molecular simulations and molecular dynamics will be carried out to determine the mechanism of adsorption and to test the theories doc12952 none This is an award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program in DMR to the College and William and Mary. The award is for acquisition of a 7 Tesla superconducting magnetooptical cryostat for the study of nonlinear magnetooptical effects and magnetotransport in ferromagnetic thin film multilayers. Such multilayers are showing great promise in technological applications, but are limited by incomplete knowledge of electron spin lifetimes and the sources of spin scattering and spin-flipping. This equipment will be incorporated into a system for ultrafast pump-probe laser spectroscopy, including frequency-dependent and time-resolved magneto-optical Kerr effect and magnetization-induced second harmonic generation, to answer questions regarding spin polarization and spin and magnetization dynamics. The instrument will also be used in training of students at the College to study materials important for magnetoelectronics. %%% This award from the Instruments for Materials Research to the College of William and Mary is for the acquisition of a low-temperature, high-field magnetooptical cryostat which will enhance research and education in the areas of magnetooptics and magnetotransport at the College. The cryostat will be incorporated into a system which uses ultrafast pulsed laser techniques (with laser pulses less than one-trillionth of a second in duration) to measure how the magnetic properties of thin-film ferromagnetic multilayers evolve in time. In these techniques, a pump beam is used to excite the material under study while a second pulsed beam probes , or takes a snapshot of the state of the system later in time. Such techniques have been successfully used, for example, to study chemical reactions as they occur, and have only recently been applied to magnetic materials. The study of the ultimate speed of magnetic processes and what determines the magnetic and electrical properties of magnetic thin films is extremely important for the design of electronic and magnetic devices such as hard drive read heads, nonvolatile computer memory and the next generation computer devices based on electron spin (dubbed Spintronics or Magnetoelectronics doc12953 none Smets The objective of this research project is to use an innovative protein engineering approach to create dioxygenases that initiate aerobic attack on trinitrotoluene (TNT) and aminodinitrotoluenes (ADNT), products of natural attenuation of TNT. The approach will be to expand the substrate range of nitroarene dioxygenases to allow oxidative transformation of ADNT and or TNT. The gene encoding the large subunit of the terminal oxygenase will be the focus of this work. DNA shuffling will be used to create variants of two 2,4-dinitrotoluene (DNT) dioxygenases individually. Burkholdria sp. strain DNT will be used as the initial host to create a complete pathway for TNT ADNT degradation. Creation of a complete, successful ADNT and or TNT mineralization pathway will be initiated. Hence, the enzymatic steps for the down-stream processing of expected transformation products will also be addressed. Using a novel, directed-evolution approach and metabolic engineering, this project aims to create the first oxidative enzyme and pathway for the biomineralization of TNT ADNT. The constructed strain will be invaluable in developing sustainable strategies for remediation of explosives contaminated environments doc12954 none One of the main functions of the plant cell vacuole is to store allelochemicals. These allelochemicals act as a chemical defense mechanism that helps protect the cell from attacks by other organisms. Allelochemical production presents somewhat of a dilemma for the cell since in order to be effective the plant must produce these compounds in relatively high concentrations. However, since many of these allelochemicals are non-specific toxins, high concentrations in the cell may result in autotoxicity. The plant cells appear to have resolved this dilemma by first conjugating the allelochemical to a water-soluble molecule such as glutathione (GSH) or glucose and sequestering the conjugate in the vacuole. These conjugates may be recognized and transported into the vacuole by a subclass of ATP-binding cassette transporters known as multidrug resistance-associated proteins (MRPs). In order to provide more information regarding the vacuolar transport of allelochemicals, this project has three general objectives. Objective 1 is to determine if glucose or GSH conjugates of trans-cinnamic acid (CA), para-coumaric acid (PC) and salicylic acid (SA) are localized in the vacuole of Arabidopsis cells. This will be determined through in vivo labeling techniques and TLC HPLC analysis of vacuolar contents. CA, PC and SA were chosen for this study because they are allelochemicals found in virtually all plants. Objective 2 is to develop a simple method for the synthesis of the glucose conjugates of SA, CA and PC. For these compounds, these are the most common conjugates found in plant cells and a facile, high-yield synthesis will provide useful substrates for detailed vacuolar transport studies. Objective 3 is to determine how the vacuolar transport of both glucose and GSH conjugates changes during a defense response. A defense response will be initiated in Arabidopsis cell suspension cultures by the addition of a fungal elicitor or known signal molecules of plant defense (e.g. SA, ethylene, jasmonate, superoxide, and H2O2). Arabidopsis cell suspension cultures will be used for this study because of the molecular tools available and the ease in which the treatments can be added. Changes in the transcription of Arabidopsis MRPs (AtMRPs) in response to the treatments will be followed through dot-blot analysis using the AtMRP expressed sequence tags as probes. Vacuolar transport activity using both glucose and GSH conjugates will be compared to the changes in AtMRP transcription and measured using isolated tonoplast vesicles from the treated cells. These changes in transport activity will also be compared to changes that occur in allelochemical production and conjugation during a defense response. If vacuolar sequestration of allelochemicals is an important aspect of a plant s defense response, then changes in allelochemical production and conjugation should be accompanied by changes in vacuolar transport. The results from these studies should provide considerable insight into the importance of vacuolar sequestration of allelochemicals during a plant cell s defense response. In the future, manipulation of vacuolar sequestration through biotechnology may be able to enhance the plants own natural defense mechanisms, which would have great agricultural significance with regard to pest control doc12955 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program supports the acquisition of a SQUID magnetometer will enable students and researchers at Northeastern University to study the physics, chemistry, and engineering of new materials and structures. The multiuser instrument from Quantum Design (model MPMS) has the capability of measuring magnetization and AC susceptibility in magnetic fields to 5 T, from 1.9 to 400 K. It has high sensitivity (10-8 emu) required for measuring small MBE-grown samples. The instrument will be used for: (i) student education in electronics courses; (ii) characterizing the synthesis of improved ferromagnetic semiconductors; (iii) investigating magnetism and superconductivity in molecules, low-D materials, magnetic oxides, semiconductors, and ferrites; and (iv) training in materials science research. Students will perform and analyze most of the measurements. %%% With this award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program, Northeastern University will be able to acquire a SQUID magnetometer enables students and researchers at Northeastern University to study the physics, chemistry, and engineering of new materials and structures. The multiuser instrument has the capability of measuring the magnetic properties of novel materials with high sensitivity. The instrument will be used for: (i) student education in electronics courses; (ii) studying the properties of materials for future spintronic and quantum computing applications; (iii) investigating superconductivity and magnetism in molecules and semiconductors; and (iv) training in materials science research. Students will perform and analyze most of the measurements. The intellectually challenging and technologically important projects could strengthen our knowledge base and impact future device technology doc12956 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program and the Major Research Instrumentation program will provide Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) partial funding for acquisition of 200 kV Field-Emission Gun, Energy-Filtering Transmission Electron Microscope, (EFTEM) LEO 923 LCs FEG OMEGA. The instrument will be for the Center for Surface Analysis of Materials (CSAM). CSAM provides instrument access to researchers and students from numerous departments across the campus as well as to researchers at any Ohio institution of higher education and to researchers at Federal laboratories, such as Wright Patterson Air Force Base and NASA Glenn Research Center. The new instrument complements the current instrumentation in CSAM with various new techniques of energy-filtering transmission electron microscopy, including zero-loss imaging, quantitative electron diffraction, and electron spectroscopic imaging. The synergy of its outstanding capabilities of high-resolution imaging, energy-filtering, and high spatial resolution chemical micro-analysis renders the LEO 923 a particularly powerful tool for studying the structure, composition, and electronic structure of a large variety of materials, including nanomaterials. EFTEM constitutes a new, enabling characterization tool in materials science. The Department of Materials Science and Engineering at CWRU has taken steps to increase the fraction of women undergraduates among the users of the proposed instrument, through programs with Ursuline College and through the Summer Program for Undergraduate Research. The award will strengthen ongoing collaborative research projects with two historically black colleges- Fisk and Tuskegee University - are already in place and more are planned. The proposed acquisition will enable a broad variety of research projects, including research in nanostructured epitaxial semiconductor heterosystems, electrodeposited metallization layers, nanocapacitors for memory devices, metal-matrix nanocomposites, micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS), thermal barrier coatings, and wide-bandgap semiconductors. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program and the Major Research Instrumentation program will provide Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) partial funding for acquisition of 200 kV Field-Emission Gun, Energy-Filtering Transmission Electron Microscope, (EFTEM) LEO 923 LCs FEG OMEGA. The instrument will be for the Center for Surface Analysis of Materials. The center provides instrument access to researchers and students from numerous departments across the campus. The Department of Materials Science and Engineering at CWRU has taken steps to increase the fraction of women undergraduates among the users of the proposed instrument, through programs with Ursuline College and through the Summer Program for Undergraduate Research. Ongoing collaborative research projects with two historically black colleges- Fisk and Tuskegee University - are already in place and more are planned. The instrument will enable a broad variety of research projects, including research in nanostructured epitaxial semiconductor heterosystems, electrodeposited metallization layers, nanocapacitors for memory devices, metal-matrix nanocomposites, micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS), thermal barrier coatings, and wide-bandgap semiconductors doc12957 none This workshop will bring together leading academic practitioners of Airborne Laser Swath Mapping (ALSM, LIDAR), Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Airborne Digital Imaging (ADI), Infrared (IR), and Hyperspectral Imaging (HI) with a cross section of both the engineering and scientific communities. The intent is to provide a forum to discuss how best to incorporate data collected by these powerful techniques into the monitoring and study of geo-surficial processes. The overall objective of the workshop is to increase the awareness of the potential uses of these advanced technologies and to obtain from the engineering and scientific communities research needs and activities that could benefit from their usage, both short and long term. The workshop will take place over two and one half days. The first two days will contain a half-day each on ALSM technology, and a half-day on a mix of the complementary technologies, including SAR, ADI, IR and HI. Each of these sessions will open with invited papers to provide the participants a state-of-the-art update on each specific technology. The second day will begin with a session on current applications, new applications expected to emerge in the immediate future and the research needs of the engineering and scientific communities. After the invited summary papers, there will be panel led discussions to maximize the exchange of information between the particular experts and researchers that have ongoing projects utilizing these innovative technologies, as well as those considering the use of them in current or future research. In addition to the invited oral presentations, participants will be invited to submit poster presentations that will be on display for the attendees to view and discuss during breaks in the formal sessions. The UF FIU ALSM aircraft will be available for viewing by the participants. The morning of the third day will be devoted to an open session with the Steering Committee serving as a panel to outline the final draft report and discuss the preliminary findings and recommendations to be included in that report. All participants will have the opportunity to provide input, and members of the Committee will be asked to draft specific sections of the final report to meet a schedule agreed to by the Committee doc6888 none R&D competitions, election campaigns, litigation, sport competitions, and all-pay auctions all have a common theme. In these situations individual agents or groups of agents compete with one another by expending limited resources in an attempt to win an exogenously determined prize. Contributions to the theoretical literature on such contests come from economics, political science, organizational theory, marketing, and strategic management. In contrast to the rapidly growing body of theoretical literature, there have been very few empirical studies designed to test the implications of the various models. We propose extending the theoretical literature as well as experimentally testing the implications of our models. Six experiments are proposed. Two experiments on multi-player contests extend our previous investigation to n (n 2) firms competing in the development of a new technology product. Both the cases of symmetric and asymmetric firms are examined. Two additional experiments on multi-level contests extend the investigation to situations that allow simultaneously for within-group conflicts and between-group competitions. These situations occur frequently in inter-organizational conflicts that elicit free riding within the competing groups. We propose to investigate the effects of different rules for sharing the prize on the level of individual contribution, and the effects of unequal group sizes. The final two experiments on multi-stage contests extend the investigation in yet another direction to within-group competitions with shortlisting in which the number of contestants decreases from stage to stage (e.g., NBA championship). Our research program is mostly driven by the game theoretic solution concepts of Nash equilibrium and subgame perfect equilibrium. The insights gained from analyzing the behavioral patterns uncovered in the proposed experiments should help in 1) assessing the descriptive power of these solution concepts, 2) stimulating new theoretical and experimental research, and 3) applying the findings to the design of optimal contests doc12959 none This research focus is on the investigation of a variety of process control schemes for regulating and improving highly reliable systems such as those found in the high volume electronics assembly environment. When the entire manufacturing process is considered, there are a large number of operations that must be performed properly in order to manufacture high quality electronics modules. The Center for Advanced Vehicle Electronics (CAVE) at Auburn University recently undertook an extensive effort to evaluate the entire solder paste process for the electronics manufacturing environment, and this effort complements that research in the area of electronics placement and visual inspection of the component devices doc12960 none With this award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program, the Department of Physics at New York University will acquire an automated vector high field superconducting magnet system. This system will be used to study magnetic nanostructures and, in particular, quantum tunneling of the magnetic moment (QTM). Understanding such characteristics of magnetic nanostructures is a major scientific challenge with important implications for the miniaturization of magnetic storage technology. This system will be used with high sensitivity Hall-effect magnetometers, that have sensitivities many orders of magnitude better than commercially available magnetometers. This sensitivity, coupled with a wide operating temperature, 0.3 K to 300 K, and the new ability to vary the field magnitude and orientation rapidly, will permit unique and advanced characterization of the magnetic properties of materials. In particular, it will greatly enhance interdisciplinary projects focused on understanding QTM in chemically synthesized nanometer-sized magnets. The equipment will also enhance the research and educational opportunities at NYU and the research capabilities available to a multi-university interdisciplinary scientific collaboration. Graduate students will use this instrument in their research. Undergraduates will also participate in the synthesis of magnetic nanostructures and their characterization at this advanced experimental facility. %%% With this award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program, the Department of Physics at New York University will acquire an automated vector high field superconducting magnet system. This system will be used to study magnetic nanostructures. The miniaturization of magnetic devices to this size is critical to advances in magnetic information storage, which is an important industry in the United States. For instance, nanoscale magnets exhibit quantum tunneling of the magnetic moment (QTM), that may seriously limit their usefulness in conventional magnetic information storage, but at the same time, could provide a medium for a much faster type of information processing known as quantum computing. This system will be used to conduct high sensitivity magnetic measurements over a wide range of magnetic fields and temperatures, not possible with commercially available instruments. In particular, it will greatly enhance interdisciplinary projects focused on understanding QTM in chemically synthesized nanometer-sized magnets. The equipment will also enhance the research and educational opportunities at NYU and the research capabilities available to a multi-university interdisciplinary scientific collaboration doc12961 none This research project consists of two, related but independent parts: (1) Modeling demographic evolution; (2) Evaluating the intergenerational aspects of the Welfare State. The issues addressed are of great social relevance. We are debating the implications of demographic changes and population aging for our society; at the same time we are considering the opportunity of reforming our social security, public health and public education systems. The two research projects are meant to study and quantify fundamental economic factors behind the working of such systems. The first project should improve our understanding of the long-run interactions between public health, fertility decisions, population growth and capital accumulation. It aims at building a quantitative model for evaluating the impact of improvements in life expectancy at various ages on fertility and saving choices. Key aspects of this research are the explicit links established between: (i) improvements in health, (ii) availability of public pensions and other forms of retirement savings, (iii) internal family structure, on the one hand, and the dynamics of fertility and capital accumulation, on the other. The second portion of this research project aims at providing tools and criteria useful for evaluating the welfare value of pay-as-you-go pension systems and their (often underestimated) connection with the provision of public education and health. This project shows that a good pay-as-you-go pension system should link pension payments to past investment in the human capital of young generations and not, as it is currently done, to previous social security contributions. Redesigning the intergenerational welfare state along these lines, not only makes the pension system immune from demographic shocks but also foster economic growth by increasing human capital accumulation and reducing labor supply distortions. A key goal of this project is to deliver a quantitative appraisal of such effects for the USA and other OECD countries. From a more general policy perspective, this investigation should provide new tools for designing the intergenerational features of the welfare state and for furthering the use of Generational Accounting methods in evaluating it doc12962 none The object of this research is to measure fluid velocities to within 0.1 mm of the body surface of a freely swimming fish, and use these measurements to determine drag and other characteristics of the unsteady flow field. Up until now, the drag of a swimming fish has not been definitively measured, yet its value is important for determining how much power a fish uses for locomotion. In the past, researchers have used a rigid-body concept, in which the drag of an equivalently shaped object stretched straight in the flow is used as a proxy for the swimming case. Such estimates have led to a number of contradictory conclusions about fish swimming ability. There is no doubt that the lateral body motion used by fish for propulsion will alter the fluid velocities near the fish body. How these changes to the velocity field affect the drag remains unknown. The major source of drag on any streamline body, rigid or swimming, is confined to a very thin layer of fluid along the body surface. Within the very thin layer, called the boundary layer , fluid velocity increases from zero at the body surface to approximately the speed of the current in only a few millimeters. In order to measure the drag of a swimming fish, high-resolution measurements of the fluid velocities must be made within this microscopic region and also just outside the boundary layer in the near-field. For this research, non-invasive techniques based on digital particle image velocimetry are used to measure flow velocity in the boundary layer and near field of swimming fish. Pressures and shear stresses over the body surface are determined from these measurements and combined to form estimates of total viscous and pressure drag. The nature of the flow is analyzed to determine if the boundary layer is laminar or turbulent and if the boundary layer has separated over any part of the fish body. These questions have been debated for years and are important for examining proposed drag-reducing capabilities in swimming fish. Five local species of fish will be used in a comparative study. These include scup, Atlantic mackerel, American eel, and two local dogfish species. These species encompass a range of swimming motions from anguilliform to carangiform modes. Scup are also included because the observed drag can be compared to existing measurements of in vivo muscle power. The results of this study will further the understanding of how fish swim and how fish power swimming with their muscles. The results will also improve understanding of energetic behavior as it applies, for example, to migration, schooling behavior, and flow sensing by the fish lateral line doc12963 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program in DMR supports instrument development and student training at Boston University. The new system under development will enable, for the first time, the in-situ study with synchrotron x-ray radiation of materials surface structure while undergoing plasma processing. The system will permit both a realistic plasma processing environment and the necessary diagnostic access while conforming to the space afforded by a standard four-circle diffractometer. An important advantage of the system is its portability, permitting transport between the synchrotron and other laboratories for multiple process characterizations. Initial studies with the system will concentrate on silicon surfaces undergoing high density plasma etching to address the void of data available on the structure of such surfaces. Future applications of the equipment will be directed at compound semiconductor surfaces. %%% This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program in DMR supports instrument development and student training at Boston University. Faculty and students at Boston University are developing a system that will enable study of the atomic structure of surfaces as they are being bombarded by energetic particles in a set of processes known collectively as plasma processing . Such information will advance our fundamental understanding of these important techniques that are widely used in the fabrication of integrated circuits and microwave devices. The system will allow the integration of a reactor used for plasma processing of materials into a high flux x-ray characterization facility. The high flux of x-rays will permit atomic surface structure characterization during plasma processing for the first time doc12964 none Pavlostathis The objective of this research is the in-depth assessment of the microbial reductive transformation and decolorization potential of anthraquinone and phthalocyanine reactive dyes. Several commercial dyes as well as model compounds will be used. The target dyes will be characterized, and their redox chemistry investigated. Specific analytical techniques, which are currently lacking, will be developed for the identification and quantification of the parent dyes as well as their transformed products. The kinetics and extent of abiotic, chemical and microbial reductive transformation and decolorization of the target dyes will be assessed. Mechanistic aspects of electron transfer during the reductive decolorization of the target dyes and the use of electron mediators for the potential enhancement of the decolorization process will be investigated. To further evaluate reductive biodecolorization under more realistic conditions, the decolorization process will be evaluated using a continuous-flow, fixed-film bioreactor under saline conditions typically encountered in commercial textile reactive dyebaths. Experimental measurements in both batch and continuous-flow systems will be used to develop mathematical models for the quantitative description of the reductive biodecolorization of the target dyes, including the potential beneficial effect of electron transfer mediators doc12965 none With this award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program in the Division of Materials Research, scientists at the University of Maryland will develop a microwave microscope based on the phenomenon of ferromagnetic resonance. Using a novel hemispherical cavity design, which focuses the microwave field, they will attain the spatial resolution of 5 micron or better with an ultimate goal of less than 1 micron. The instrument will allow mapping out many different magnetic properties including magnetization, spin-orbit coupling, and magnetic anisotropy. It will also measure magnetic homogeneity and image local stresses via magnetoelastic coupling. In addition, by using multiple cavity resonance, which range from 5 to 50 GHz, we will also be able to investigate local spin relaxation dynamics. The instrument will play a key role in the education and training of the next generation of students studying magnetic materials. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program in the Division of Materials Research is for instrument development at the University of Maryland. Scientists at the university of Maryland will develop an innovative scanning probe microscope, which allows mapping of a variety of magnetic properties of materials. Magnetism plays a critical role in many technological applications including magnetic storage and magneto-optic switches for high-speed communications. The microscope will be invaluable for investigating properties that are difficult to study by conventional magnetic techniques. This will also be used to screen combinatorial libraries to aid in the search for novel magnetic materials. This new type of scanning probe microscope will become a useful educational tool by providing spatially resolved images of various properties doc12966 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research will allow the University of North Dakota (UND) to purchase a variable temperature automated x-ray diffractometer. UND is presently in the process of expanding and improving its materials science related research and teaching activities. The instrument permits collecting high-resolution x-ray diffraction data for specimens in the temperature range of 300 to K under a wide range of environmental conditions. In addition, this system will allow for accurate and efficient analysis of the acquired data using the latest software and databases available. This diffractometer will support research on a wide range of materials such as nano-structured materials, superconductors, magnetic materials, shape-selective catalysts, photocatalytic oxidizers, and smart materials such as Terfenol-D and Invar. As UND s only modern x-ray diffractometer that provides hands-on, affordable access to its researchers, the proposed instrument is expected to facilitate the research activities of at least three academic departments and two colleges at UND. Through participation in related research projects, graduate and undergraduate research students will have the opportunity to train in modern aspects of x-ray diffraction technique. In addition, through the incorporation of laboratory experiments into existing and new classes, academic students will also benefit from the proposed facility. Finally, because UND has one of the largest Native American student populations in the nation, the instrument will present an opportunity for UND students belonging to an under-represented ethnic group to experience one of the most versatile and widely used experimental techniques in materials science. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research will allow the University of North Dakota (UND) to purchase a variable temperature automated x-ray diffractometer. UND is presently in the process of expanding and improving its materials science related research and teaching activities. The instrument permits collecting high-resolution x-ray diffraction data for specimens in the temperature range of 300 to K under a wide range of environmental conditions. In addition, this system will allow for accurate and efficient analysis of the acquired data using the latest software and databases available. This diffractometer will support research on a wide range of materials such as nano-structured materials, superconductors, magnetic materials, shape-selective catalysts, photocatalytic oxidizers, and smart materials such as Terfenol-D and Invar. As UND s only modern x-ray diffractometer that provides hands-on, affordable access to its researchers, the proposed instrument is expected to facilitate the research activities of at least three academic departments and two colleges at UND. Through participation in related research projects, graduate and undergraduate research students will have the opportunity to train in modern aspects of x-ray diffraction technique. In addition, through the incorporation of laboratory experiments into existing and new classes, academic students will also benefit from the proposed facility. Finally, because UND has one of the largest Native American student populations in the nation, the instrument will present an opportunity for UND students belonging to an under-represented ethnic group to experience one of the most versatile and widely used experimental techniques in materials science doc12967 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program will enable the University of Virginia to develop a variable temperature near field scanning acoustic microscope to map elastic properties on a nanometer scale on solids of interest to physics, chemistry, materials science, biology and engineering and to enhance teaching in the physics undergraduate laboratory. The microscope will use custom designed scanning heads with integrated cantilever sensors capable of operation at low temperatures and interfaced to existing control electronics. A low vibration refrigerator of the pulse tube type (which has no moving parts) will be acquired and used to cool the scanning head. The choice of the pulse tube refrigerator (which operate in any physical orientation) enables the positioning of the scanning head on top facilitating rapid sample access. The integrated cantilever sensing scheme will simplify the future marriage of the microscope to other instruments such as electron microscopes. It will also enable study of biological samples and solid liquid interfaces where optical detection schemes do not work.. The integrated detection scheme should also be attractive to emerging industrial microelectronics where rapid nanometer scale flaw detection is desired. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program, the University of Virginia will develop a new microscope using high frequency sound waves and operating over a wide temperature range to map elastic features on a nanometer length scale in solid state materials of interest to physics, materials science, biology and engineering as well as to enhance teaching in the physics undergraduate laboratory. The microscope will be of the scanning type and images will be obtained digitally. The acoustic sensor for the microscope will be fabricated using integrated microelectronic technologies. This integrated sensor scheme simplifies the future marriage of the proposed microscope to other instruments such as electron microscopes. It will also enable the imaging of biological samples and solid liquid interfaces with resolution better than that obtained optically. The development of this new scanning acoustic microscope will benefit the study of crystalline and non-crystalline solids and will have a wide ranging impact including in the area of emerging microelectronic processes where rapid nanometer scale flaw detection is desired doc12968 none Marine snails of the genus Conus produce conotoxins that target voltage- or ligand-gated ion channels in addition to G-protein coupled receptor subtypes with unprecedented selectivity and specificity. This project is a structure function investigation of two novel g-carboxyglutamic acid (Gla)-containing conotoxins, isolated from Conus textile. Gla is a metal-ion binding amino acid that plays a critical structural role in defining the membrane binding properties of mammalian vitamin K-dependent blood coagulation proteins. This phylogenic preservation of the enzymatic machinery necessary to synthesize Gla suggests an important role for Gla within the animal kingdom. Initially, potentiometry and fluorescence spectroscopy will be used to determine the metal-ion binding constants and number of binding sites possessed by these conotoxins. Simultaneously, metal-ion induced structural perturbations of the peptide backbone and Gla residue side chain will be monitored using circular dichroism and 1H NMR spectroscopy. The three-dimensional structure of these conotoxins in their calcium-induced conformation will be determined with NMR spectroscopy. Finally, the project will examine the structure function significance conferred upon these peptides by the disulfide bond scaffold and other post-translationally modified amino acids including; brominated tryptophan and glycosylated threonine. The current paucity of structure function information pertaining to Gla and other post-translationally modified amino acids within the genus Conus has prevented neuroscientists, pharmacologists and structural biologists from understanding the refined mechanism of protein-receptor recognition that is innate to conotoxins. Insight into the structural and functional implications of post-translational modifications has become increasingly important in this post-genomic era, as scientists attempt to understand if function follows form doc12969 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program to Boston University will enable constructing the first of its kind instrumentation for insitu and real-time characterization and control of coating microstructure. A deeper understanding crack formation mechanisms will enable custom tailoring of coating structure for different applications through use of the advanced closed loop control system. Plasma spray is a widely used deposition process since it can be economically used to engineer coating attributes. As such, it is an enabling technology in many applications in aerospace, engines, power systems, electronics, and biomedical applications. This custom designed system includes sensors for measuring the particle state, the thermal distribution and roughness characteristics of the deposit surface, as well as the actuators needed to implement real-time control of the process. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program supports instrument development at Boston University. The instrument will enable a better understanding of microstructural development and crack formation in plasma sprayed coatings, as well as design of an advanced process control system that is expected to enable manufacture of new coating structures. The interdisciplinary research team includes researchers in materials, heat transfer, mechanics, and control. Broad educational impact is planned, including the direct research experience of undergraduate and graduate students, and by incorporation of the equipment and results obtained into the course work of not only materials courses but the related process control, heat transfer, and experimental courses offered by the College doc12970 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program and the Major Research Instrumentation program supports the acquisition of a highly sensitive magnetometer at Colorado State University at Colorado Springs. The magnetometer will have a profound impact on research program and teaching and training students. The instrument will be used to fully correlate the static and dynamic properties of studied magnetic structures. The system will significantly enhance materials characterization capability on magnetic structures in three research projects currently underway at the institution: (1) studies of the exchange biased ferromagnetic antiferromagnetic structures, (2) studies of the exchange coupled Fe Pd Fe and Fe Ag Fe structures, (3) studies of the high frequency devices based on ferromagnetic metals. Furthermore, this new magnetometer will give graduate students but also undergraduate and high school students opportunity to work on research projects, further expanding their training. The interaction between students and postdoctoral fellows or faculty creates an atmosphere, which strongly stimulates education and training. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program and the Major Research Instrumentation program allows Colorado State University at Colorado Springs to acquire the acquisition of a highly sensitive magnetometer. The magnetometer will have a profound impact on research program and teaching and training students. The instrument will be used to fully correlate the static and dynamic properties of studied magnetic structures. The system will significantly enhance materials characterization capability on magnetic structures in three research projects currently underway at the institution. Furthermore, this new magnetometer will give graduate students, but also undergraduate and high school students, opportunity to work on research projects, further expanding their training. The interaction between students and postdoctoral fellows or faculty creates an atmosphere, which strongly stimulates education and training doc12971 none N. Jensen, University of California - Davis An International Conference on Computational Nanoscience is planned for the period between March 18-21, in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Its main purpose is to bring together experts from the fields of computational biology, chemistry and material sciences in combination with their industrial end users. It is to be run in parallel (space and time), with the fourth International Conference on Modeling and Simulation of Microsystems. It is hoped that maximum synergy will be obtained in this manner. In particular, emphasis will be given to the recent advances in molecular dynamics and ab initio methods, and to their applications to the design of semi-conductors, drugs and biodiagnostics. The interaction of speakers, researchers, students and private sector representative will result in the interchange of ideas and the stimulation and technical innovation. The conference is co-funded by both the Division of Chemical and Transport Systems and The Division of Materials Research doc12972 none The adrenal gland regulates essential physiological functions in the adult mammalian organism through producing gluco- and mineralocorticoids. Furthermore, through production of steroid hormones, the adrenal gland contributes to the normal maturation of fetal organ systems, including lung, liver, pancreas, brain, retina, and gastrointestinal tract. Several distinct signals have been implicated as critical for pre- and postnatal development and for maintenance of the mammalian adrenal gland. These include signals from the pituitary, such as pro-opiomelanocortin (POMC)-derived peptides, and signals derived from the cells of the adrenal itself, such as corticosterone. It is essential to know more specifically which factors are required for which aspects of adrenal development and maintenance. The principal investigator recently developed a strain of genetically engineered mutant mice lacking all POMC-derived peptides. These POMC null mice develop non-functional adrenal structures that completely disappear in the adult, thus affording a new opportunity to study the role of POMC peptides in adrenal development, maintenance, and function. In this proposal the investigators will systematically exploit the POMC knockout mouse to probe the molecular mechanisms regulating mammalian adrenal development and maintenance. The first objective is to determine whether POMC-derived peptides, either supplied from the mother or from the fetus, are essential for the prenatal development of the adrenal structure. To this end the investigators will analyze prenatal adrenal development in embryos when either the mother or the fetus or both lack POMC-derived peptides. The second objective is to determine whether POMC-derived peptides are essential for postnatal adrenal development and differentiation. The investigators will analyze postnatal adrenal development in pups lacking POMC-derived peptides, in POMC null mutant pups, which are pharmacologically reconstituted with individual or combinations of POMC peptides, and by postnatal transplantation of adrenals from wildtype and mutant donors to recipients having or lacking POMC peptides. The third objective is to assess the role of POMC-derived peptides in maintaining adult adrenal structure and function. The investigators will assess the maintenance of adrenal glands in mice lacking POMC peptides by transplanting normal adrenal tissue into POMC null mutant mice and reconstituting these mice with individual POMC peptides, and by subtraction of individual POMC peptides in POMC null mutants which have developed adrenals through postnatal reconstitution with POMC peptides. This genetic dissection of the role of POMC peptides in pre-and postnatal adrenal development and maintenance will provide a detailed and necessary framework for the study of the molecular mechanisms generating and maintaining this important organ doc12973 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program will enable North Carolina State University to purchase a specialized wide-bore 12 Tesla superconducting magnet for a High Field Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (HF EPR) Laboratory. The instrument will be used primarily in ongoing research programs at North Carolina State University that are focused on exploiting paramagnetic properties of novel materials. The new Cryogenic 12 T EPR magnet will have specialized cryostat accessories and will enable key experiments in: (1) spin-polarization experiments with novel magnetic materials; (2) measurements of zero-field splitting for effective integer spin-systems of coupled spins that are EPR-silent at lower magnetic fields; (3) quantum computing experiments with essentially pure quantum state for an ensemble of quantum dots; (4) high accuracy measurements of zero-field splitting from field dependence of EPR spectra to determine the nature of magnetic interactions; (5) studies of phase separation phenomena; (5) and cluster nanostructure in lanthanide-doped optically-active glasses. This state-of-art HF EPR facility will be available for education of students in modern magnetic resonance techniques, and will be accessible to users from the UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke as well as to researchers from the Research Triangle Park. Thus, this magnet acquisition will provide new measurement capabilities, improve the research infrastructure, and enhance student education, improve the research infrastructure, and enhance student education. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program will enable North Carolina State University to purchase a specialized wide-bore 12 Tesla superconducting magnet for a High Field Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (HF EPR) Laboratory. The instrument will be used primarily in ongoing research programs at North Carolina State University that are focused on exploiting paramagnetic properties of novel materials. The new Cryogenic 12 T EPR magnet will have specialized cryostat accessories and will enable a wide range of experiments from including quantum computing and cluster nanostructure in lanthanide-doped optically-active glasses. This state-of-art HF EPR facility will be available for education of students in modern magnetic resonance techniques, and will be accessible to users from the UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke as well as to researchers from the Research Triangle Park. Thus, this magnet acquisition will provide new measurement capabilities, improve the research infrastructure, and enhance student education, improve the research infrastructure, and enhance student education doc12974 none This symposium will bring together US, Icelandic, European, and Japanese investigators who have been working in Iceland. The symposium will synthesize the present state of knowledge regarding the Iceland plume and its mantle structure and melting process, its crustal structure and volcanism, and its interaction with adjacent spreading centers. It will also identify the outstanding scientific problems that remain to be addressed and recommend future research to solve these problems. The symposium will be supported by the National Science Foundation, the Icelandic Research Council, and the Svartsengi Geothermal Power Plant of Iceland doc12975 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program will provide support to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill for the acquisition of a micro-thermal analysis (mTA) system which is an atomic force microscope with the capabilities of thermal and thermal mechanical analysis. The local heating and local measurements of thermal properties are two critical features for the research of bulk metallic glass (BMG)-based films produced by combinatorial synthesis. In addition, local processing and manipulation of nanostructures can also be accomplished. Spatial patterning of magnetic properties could arise from locally induced nanocrystallization of magnetic BMG and patterning of carbon nanotubes can be accomplished by nano-welding on BMG substrate. In addition to graduate and undergraduate research, the mTA system will be used for outreach activities with local school systems providing a unique platform for hands-on experiences in nanoscale thermal properties. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program will provide support to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill for the acquisition of a micro-thermal analysis (mTA) system which is an atomic force microscope with the capabilities of thermal and thermal mechanical analysis. The local heating and local measurements of thermal properties are two critical features for the research of bulk metallic glass (BMG)-based films produced by combinatorial synthesis. In addition, local processing and manipulation of nanostructures can also be accomplished. Spatial patterning of magnetic properties could arise from locally induced nanocrystallization of magnetic BMG and patterning of carbon nanotubes can be accomplished by nano-welding on BMG substrate. In addition to graduate and undergraduate research, the mTA system will be used for outreach activities with local school systems providing a unique platform for hands-on experiences in nanoscale thermal properties doc12976 none With this award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program and the Major Research Instrumentation program, the University of Maryland will be able to acquire a combined scanning probe scanning electron microscope. The instrument will be used to address critical issues of nano-electronics due to the variability of nano-device electronic properties with structure. This issue is critical, for instance, in assessing how or whether electrical contacts to nano-devices, structural defects in the devices, or even thermal fluctuations will limit nano-device performance and reproducibility. It is also key to developing applications of nano-structures that derive from their intrinsic properties: i.e. where strong variations of device properties with structure and or local environment are a natural characteristic, these properties may be exploited as response mechanisms. Techniques to image the atomic structure of nanostructures while simultaneously measuring electronic transport properties will be developed. These experiments will establish the correlations between structure and the electronic properties of nanodevices, by probing the effects of dynamic changes in structure (driven by temperature, electric field, current and chemical potential) on the electrical transport properties of the nanodevices. The relationship between structure and the electrical response of nanostructures will also be investigated theoretically. The new instrument, a combined scanning probe scanning electron microscope will also be used for graduate student training in the research areas described above. Important new technological properties are expected to occur in materials structures as their size approaches the nanoscale. Location of such small structures to allow the direct measurement of their properties is a serious technical challenge, as is the measurement itself. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program and the Major Research Instrumentation program will help the University of Maryland with the purchase of an instrument that combines two microscopes and a fine positioning stage. One microscope will be used to locate small structures, and the scanning stage will be used to move the small structures into the measurement range of the second microscope. The second microscope will be an ultra-high resolution microscope with the capability of imaging the positions of individual atoms. Experiments will be performed in which the effect of changes in the positions of individual atoms in small structures are correlated with the electrical properties (e.g. the ability to carry electrical current) of the small structures. The new instrument will also be used for graduate student training in the research areas described above doc12977 none A Gordon Research Conference on Thin Film and Crystal Growth Mechanisms will be held at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, July 1-6, . The conference will cover liquid-phase crystal growth, vapor-phase crystal growth, thin film deposition, materials chemistry, and surface physics research. An aim of the conference is to develop strong interactions between these disciplines and emphasize how understanding of fundamental chemical and physical processes can be used to develop novel methods for the growth of nanostructures. The program is organized around invited speakers, discussion leaders, a chair, and vice-chair; both contributed papers and posters are scheduled. Special efforts have been made to recruit a diverse group of participants, including foreign and American scientists, younger and older researchers, and industrial, national laboratory and academic researchers. Objectives are to stimulate communications among the broad community of researchers addressing crystal growth from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds--chemistry, physics, engineering and materials science, and to formulate and delineate critical research necessary to further basic understanding. The conference is expected to provide an effective forum for discussion of critical scientific issues in crystal growth. Topics include: Crystal Growth from Solution; Novel Assembly; Organic Thin Films; Fundamentals of Nucleation and Growth; Dynamics of Structure Evolution; and Nanoscale Metals and Silicides. Along with the opportunity to assess the field and future directions, it is expected that new ties will be established between universities, research institutions, and industry. %%% An evaluation of the progress and status of crystal growth research issues along with current assessments of the most important developments will be of significant value to the understanding and enhanced utilization of electronic materials in computing, data processing, and communications doc12978 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program and the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program to the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire provides partial support for the acquisition of a x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy system for research and undergraduate education and training. The instrument will be used to investigate the physics and chemistry of semiconductors, thin films, and metallic alloys. Several different systems will be studied. These include: 1) the electronic, chemical, and structural properties of compound IV-IV semiconductors, including the passivation, oxidation, oxynitridation and metallization; 2) the chemistry of the molecular precursors typically used in gallium-nitride and indium-gallium-nitride film growth, as well as the chemistry of the molecular fragments from such precursors; 3) the growth mechanisms and structures of thin metal films on semiconductors; and 4) corrosion processes of metal alloys and thin films. Since undergraduate research is a critical component of the educational system at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, students will perform research with the new instrument. It will be used in course work and will be used to educate and train students in materials research. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program and the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program to the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire provides partial support for the acquisition of an x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) system for research and undergraduate education and training. Semiconductors, metals, and insulators are the materials that make microelectronic chips possible. Nearly all computer chips, for example, are fabricated from silicon. Similar materials and used in electro-optic devices, such as light-emitting diodes used in many consumer electronics and increasingly in the automotive industry and roadway signing, and diode lasers, which form the heart of laser printers and compact disc players. The successful fabrication of computer chip and electro-optic devices requires a detailed understanding of the physics and chemistry of the interface between two materials, as well as fundamental processes occurring on the surface of these materials. Surface properties and composition are therefore important to the fabrication of useful devices. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) is a technique that provides information about surface composition and is capable of providing information about the chemical state in which surface atoms exist. The instrument will be used to: 1) investigate semiconductor and metal surfaces, and how varying surface composition of either material influences the interface that forms between two dissimilar materials; 2) follow surface chemical reactions relevant to growing thin films of materials and how etching reactions proceed at semiconductor and metal surfaces; and 3) study how surface composition influences surface structure and morphology during film growth and etching. Undergraduate students, including students from physical sciences as well as life sciences, will be involved in all research projects and will operate and help to maintain the new instrument as part of their collaborative research projects with faculty research mentors doc12979 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program supports Penn State University with the purchase a state-of-the-art optical image furnace for the growth of up to 10 mm diameter single crystals for the study of oxide ferroic and dielectric materials. The need for the capability to grow highly uniform and sufficient size single crystals is stemmed from the necessity to separate and understand the mechanisms in the mixed valence solid solution and often refractory ferroic crystal systems. The equipment is a NEC double lamp elliptical mirror cavity image furnace is particularly suited to the study of bulk single crystal samples. The ongoing NSF supported research program carried out by this PI, as well as several current NSF, DARPA, ONR sponsored programs would benefit strongly from the proposed equipment. Future research areas particularly the meta-materials, microwave field agile dielectric materials, electrooptic and acoustooptic materials are closely aligned with the proposed capabilities. The equipment will provide invaluable enhancement of available processing and analysis resource at the Materials Research Laboratory, at Penn State. Both graduate students and postdoctoral fellows will obtain training and carry out funded research using the proposed facility. Laboratory intensive senior graduate level course on Science and Technology of Crystal Growth, currently being developed, will get invaluable enhancement from this proposed addition. Undergraduates and graduates and minority will be trained with the handling of this state-of-the-art crystal growth facility. The award is leveraged by Enthusiasm 30% cost sharing from Penn State. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program supports Penn State University with the purchase a state-of-the-art optical image furnace for the growth of up to 10 mm diameter single crystals for the study of oxide ferroic and dielectric materials. The equipment is a NEC double lamp elliptical mirror cavity image furnace is particularly suited to the study of bulk single crystal samples. The ongoing NSF supported research program carried out by this PI, as well as several current NSF, DARPA, ONR sponsored programs would benefit strongly from the proposed equipment. Future research areas particularly the meta-materials, microwave field agile dielectric materials, electrooptic and acoustooptic materials are closely aligned with the proposed capabilities. The equipment will provide invaluable enhancement of available processing and analysis resource at the Materials Research Laboratory, at Penn State. Both graduate students and postdoctoral fellows will obtain training and carry out funded research using the proposed facility. Laboratory intensive senior graduate level course on Science and Technology of Crystal Growth, currently being developed, will get invaluable enhancement from this proposed addition. Undergraduates and graduates and minority will be trained with the handling of this state-of-the-art crystal growth facility. The award is leveraged by Enthusiasm 30% cost sharing from Penn State doc12980 none Proposal : PI: Rachel Davidson Institution: Cornell University DateL July 11, : Forecasting Change in Hurricane Risk over Time The objectives of this project are to: (1) develop a methodology to quantitatively model how hurricane risk in the U.S. changes over time and how risk management strategies can affect the amount and rate of change, and (2) demonstrate the methodology through a case study on the coast of North and South Carolina. Hurricane risk (e.g., in terms of expected annual economic loss) changes over time due to population and economic growth, changing construction practices, aging infrastructure, and other forces. Since hurricane risk continuously changes, those who attempt to assess and manage it are chasing a moving target. While available regional loss estimation mosels are based on the best estimate of how the world looks today-where people live and in what types of structures, this new methodology will incorporate the dynamic nature of the urban environment. This tools will enable risk managers to anticipate how the world will change, estimate what the risk will be at the time in the future when the next hurricane occurs, and plan for that future scenario. By making loss estimation modeling dynamic, the new methodology will benefit government agencies, insurance companies, and others in risk management decision-making. The methodology also can improve risk communication. By establishing more directly and quantitatively the connection between improve risk communication. By establishing more directly and quantitatively the connection between today s actions and the effects of a hurricane 20 years from now (e.g., as a decision to build on the coast today creates structues to be damanaged in the next hurricane), hurricanes can be perceived more as a present concern, rather than an issue to be addressed at some unspecified future time. This study focuses on hurricanes and the Carolina coast, but could be extended to other hazards and other regions. The simulation-based methodology will integrate urban dynamics and regional loss estimation modeling techniques. Its development requires: (1) designing the overall hurricane risk forecasting methodology, developing the (2) loss estimation model and (3) urban dynamics model that are components of the methodology, (4) conducting the case study, (5) validating the overall hurricane risk forecasting model, and (6) using the methodology to analyze sample hurricane risk management questions doc12981 none X-ray detection is often the limiting factor in modern synchrotron-based fluorescence experiments in material science and biophysics. The brightness available from synchrotron radiation sources has increased by nearly 10 orders of magnitude in the past 20 years, but our ability to collect and discriminate emitted x-rays has not kept pace. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program to the University of California Davis will support new detector development which will greatly enhance the sensitivity of existing instrumentation for fluorescence analysis of thin films or dilute samples in material science and biophysics. This instrument development will adapt existing cryogenic detectors to the specific needs of synchrotron experiments. The origin of the spectral artifacts that presently limit the sensitivity to certain emission lines will be studied and addressed. The current detector s usable energy range will be extended beyond one kilo electronvolt by adding thick absorber films of high Z materials. The total area and count rate capabilities of the sensor will be increased by increasing This development will be done by graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in collaboration with the Advanced Detector Group at Lawrence Livermore. The cryogenic spectrometer will be available to collaborators on a proposal basis. Combining such high-sensitivity high-resolution detectors with the intensity of undulator radiation of third generation synchrotrons will open up a range of new experimental methods for previously unfeasible science. Graduate students will focus on two sets of experiments. They will develop angle-resolved soft x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy for non-destructive depth profiling of thin film samples. They will also extend fluorescence-detected L-edge absorption spectroscopy to vanadium and manganese-containing metalloenzymes to determine the chemical oxidation state of the metal site during the catalytic cycle. The long-term goal is to combine non-destructive depth profiling and in-situ chemical characterization of samples with part per million level sensitivity. X-ray detection is often the limiting factor in modern synchrotron-based fluorescence experiments in material science and biophysics. The brightness available from synchrotron radiation sources has increased by nearly 10 orders of magnitude in the past 20 years, but our ability to collect and discriminate emitted x-rays has not kept pace. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program to the University of California Davis will support new detector development which will greatly enhance the sensitivity of existing instrumentation for fluorescence analysis of thin films or dilute samples in material science and biophysics. This instrument development will adapt existing cryogenic detectors to the specific needs of synchrotron experiments. The development will be done by graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in collaboration with the Advanced Detector Group at Lawrence Livermore. The cryogenic spectrometer will be available to collaborators on a proposal basis. Combining such high-sensitivity high-resolution detectors with the intensity of undulator radiation of third generation synchrotrons will open up a range of new experimental methods for previously unfeasible science. Graduate students will focus on two sets of experiments. The long-term goal is to combine non-destructive depth profiling and in-situ chemical characterization of samples with part per million level sensitivity doc12982 none This is an instrument acquisition award from the Major Research Instrumentation program and the Instrumentation for Materials Research program to the City University of New York Queens College. The award will allow CUNY Queens College to purchase a Coherent 899-29 Autoscan II single frequency scanning laser for the study of the statistics of optical propagation in random and nearly periodic materials and photonic devices. The instrument will allow the principal investigators to extend the coherent technique developed in the microwave region of the spectrum to visible and infrared frequencies. It will allow them to characterize the statistics of transport using statistical measures of the transmitted fields and intensity, and to use the variance of intensity fluctuations as a sure test of phonon localization free of ambiguities arising from absorption of microwave resonance. Band edge and localized modes in cholesteric liquid crystals will be characterized. The objective is to clarify the conjunction of lasing and localization and guide development of homogeneous cholesteric materials in which ultra-low lasing threshold will be observed. The instrument will provide students preparing for careers in physics with a sound mix of microwave and optical techniques as well as exposure to industrial research laboratories engaged in forefront research. This is an instrument acquisition award from the Major Research Instrumentation program and the Instrumentation for Materials Research program to the City University of New York Queens College. The award will allow CUNY Queens College to purchase a Coherent 899-29 Autoscan II single frequency scanning laser for the study of the statistics of optical propagation in random and nearly periodic materials and photonic devices. The instrument will allow the principal investigators to extend the coherent technique developed in the microwave region of the spectrum to visible and infrared frequencies. The instrument will provide students preparing for careers in physics with a sound mix of microwave and optical techniques as well as exposure to industrial research laboratories engaged in forefront research doc12983 none This award supports a workshop will bring together leading scholars with expertise on longitudinal studies in cultural and physical anthropology, epidemiology, economics, sociology, public health, and psychology. During the workshop they will highlight the importance and power of using longitudinal research designs for studying questions of social and biological change; identify areas of consensus and disagreement, develop practical guidelines that cut across disciplines and qualitative or quantitative methods of doing longitudinal studies; and identify how best to join qualitative and quantitative methods in longitudinal studies. The workshop will also assess the feasibility of designing a training workshop for graduate students of cultural and physical anthropology and other disciplines to teach qualitative and quantitative research methods for longitudinal research and techniques to analyze such information. This workshop activity has the potential to make a significant advance in the scientific capacity of cultural anthropology doc12984 none Cell movement is fundamental to many other important biological processes such as embryogenesis, tissue formation, wound healing and immune function. Aberrant cell movement is involved in immune dysfunction and the development of metastatic cancer. Current studies of cell movement continue to be fueled by the potential benefits of understanding such a fundamental process. Cell movement along a surface involves repeated cycles of protrusion at the cell front followed by retraction at the rear. This coordinated series of shape changes depends on the spatial and temporal regulation of different cytoskeletal functions. Recent investigations have provided increasingly detailed information about the molecular basis of cytoskeletal function. However, one important yet relatively unexplored area concerns how the production of mechanical force integrates various aspects of cytoskeletal function to produce movement. A promising new approach to the problem of cell movement, to be used in this project, is the combined use of microscopic imaging techniques with force detection assays, to study the interrelationship between cytoskeletal behavior, force production and cell shape change during movement. Fish epidermal keratocytes are an excellent model system for this type of study because they can display a rapid mode of movement, while maintaining a simple, semicircular shape. In addition, these cells can exhibit a slower, less efficient mode of movement that is common to many other cell types. The fact that the same molecular machinery can give rise to different modes of movement, in a single cell type, points to the importance of regulatory mechanisms in governing how cells move. Recently, stretch-activated calcium channels (SAC s) have been found to regulate keratocyte cell movement, by coordinating protrusion with retraction. Thus, when retraction of the rear is impeded, cytoskeletal tension increases leading to the activation of SAC s. This triggers a transient increase in intracellular calcium concentration ([Ca2+]i) which induces retraction of the cell rear. Thus, SAC s provide a mechano-chemical feedback mechanism that coordinates protrusion with retraction and which is essential for continued cell movement. The main goal of this project is to investigate different aspects of SAC meditated regulation of cell movement. The first aim will examine which molecular mechanisms are involved in triggering retraction of the cell rear, following activation of SAC s. Selective inhibitors of each mechanism will be used to see which is effective in blocking retraction, while simultaneously monitoring [Ca2+]i, force production, adhesion morphology and cell shape. The second aim will investigate the process of force transduction via SAC s, by using a force assay together with calcium imaging, to quantify the relationship between force production and activation of SAC s. The third aim will determine how adhesion strength influences the SAC mediated regulation of cell movement, by observing the effects of transfecting keratocytes with mutant adhesion receptors. The ability to simultaneously monitor changes in cellular force production, [Ca2+]i and cell shape change, in response to defined physical and biochemical perturbations is particularly useful for studying how cell movement arises from the physical integration of molecular mechanisms. The proposed work is expected to form the basis of a new experimental and conceptual approach to the study of cell movement that can be used to study additional mechano-chemical signaling mechanisms both in keratocytes and other cell types doc12985 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program and the Solid-State Chemistry Program will help Northwestern University with the acquisition of a high-resolution magnetic-sector mass spectrometer with electron impact (EI) and liquid secondary ion mass spectrometry (LSIMS) ionization sources. This instrument will be used to characterize a wide range of materials science compounds such as mesoporous supramolecular molecules, porphyrazines, novel molecular species for electronic device structure, and other macrocyclic materials. As this research has moved toward larger and more complex species, the availability of in-house state-of- the-art mass spectrometry instrumentation has become essential for characterization of these molecules. The requested instrument will improve on the mass spectrometry capabilities for in-house molecular characterization in several ways: (1) the increased sensitivity for high-resolution mass spectrometry with either electron impact (EI) or LSIMS ionization is essential for determination of elemental composition of these species; (2) the increased mass range for mass spectrometry with LSIMS ionization will allow both low- and high-resolution characterization of the higher molecular weight species which will continue to increase in molecular weight as the research programs at NU progress; (3) air-sensitive materials may be characterized without fear of decomposition during transit to another laboratory. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program and the Solid-State Chemistry Program will help Northwestern University (NU) with the acquisition of a high-resolution magnetic-sector mass spectrometer with electron impact and liquid secondary ion mass spectrometry ionization sources and with appropriate sample inlets for compounds with a wide range of volatility and purity. This instrument will be a significant benefit to molecular characterization in the materials research efforts in the Chemistry Department. Currently such characterization is done by sending samples to external laboratories. In-house characterization with the requested instrument will benefit both the research and the educational efforts at NU. The availability of the requested instrument for in-house analysis will increase significantly the exposure of graduate students to modern analytical techniques. In addition to gaining a more complete characterization of the materials that they have synthesized, students also will gain a deeper understanding of the techniques used for the analysis, the reason for choosing different ionization techniques, and the accurate interpretation of the mass spectra gathered from this analysis doc12986 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program supports instrument development at the University of California Riverside. The ability to probe matter at low temperatures (300 mK), high magnetic fields (10 Tesla), under ultrahigh vacuum conditions (10-11 Torr), and with resolution below a tenth of a nanometer pushes back the limits of our ability to understand matter in details not hitherto possible. The development of a scanning tunneling microscope with these capabilities allows controlled imaging, manipulation, spectroscopic characterization, and chemical modification of individual atoms and molecules. In addition to the charge, the spin of the electrons can be probed at the nanoscale, enabling an understanding of nanomagnetism. The development of this microscope encompasses a wide range of experimental techniques, thus providing valuable opportunities for education and training of undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral associates. These techniques and the science made possible by the microscope will be integrated into a new course on nanoscience. It is envisioned that the microscope will serve as a centerpiece for collaborative research involving the investigation of nanoscale phenomena and bring together researchers from different disciplines. The instrument impact broad scientific research which include single molecule spectroscopy, nanocatalysis, surface and interface magnetism, nanowires, and cryogenic fluid behavior on alkali metal film. The advancement of nanotechnology depends critically on instrumentation which can be used to probe objects having nanometer dimensions. In this regard, the invention of the scanning probe microscope in by Binnig and Rohrer has played a central role in the rapid advances which have been made in the understanding of materials at the atomic and molecular scales. The desire to probe in ever greater details and to access hitherto unobservable properties of the system requires the development of new instrumentation. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program supports the development of a new more powerful microscope at the University of California. The new microscope will make it possible to probe nanometer objects whose behavior can only be revealed at minus 273 degrees Celsius and at magnetic fields two hundred thousand times greater than the earth field. The development of such an instrumentation provides unique opportunities for the education and training of undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral associates in this critical field of science and technology. In addition, activities surrounding this development will be integrated into the teaching curriculum in the form of a new course on nanoscience. The unique capabilities of the proposed instrumentation will allow researchers from different disciplines to work together on nanoscale problems. Nanotechnology naturally pulls together a wide range of scientists and engineers since everything around us are made from and involve the transformation of atoms and molecules doc12987 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program will allow the University of Kansas (UK) to acquire a deep ultraviolet infrared (UV IR) mask aligner. This instrument will support the research of five different groups for fabrication of micron-scale and nano-scale devices. These devices include superconducting thin films and tunnel junctions, semiconductor lasers and detectors, III-N devices, and microchip-based electrophoresis devices. This acquisition will enhance existing materials research infrastructure at KU and will greatly improve KU s nanoscience and technology and materials research competitiveness. In addition, the instrument will be an excellent education and training platform providing a unique opportunity to learn thin film device and integrated circuit fabrication technologies. Deep UV and IR lamps are critical features of the proposed acquisition. The acquisition of a deep UV IR mask aligner is essential to research programs that span the Physics and Astronomy, Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, and Pharmaceutical Chemistry departments. These studies will have direct impact on the development of the next-generation of information, computing, semiconductors and pharmaceutical technology. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program will allow the University of Kansas (UK) to acquire a deep ultraviolet infrared (UV IR) mask aligner. This instrument will support the research of five different groups for fabrication of micron-scale and nano-scale devices. These devices include superconducting thin films and tunnel junctions, semiconductor lasers and detectors, III-N devices, and microchip-based electrophoresis devices. This acquisition will enhance existing materials research infrastructure at KU and will greatly improve KU s nanoscience and technology and materials research competitiveness. In addition, the instrument will be an excellent education and training platform providing a unique opportunity to learn thin film device and integrated circuit fabrication technologies. Deep UV and IR lamps are critical features of the proposed acquisition. The acquisition of a deep UV IR mask aligner is essential to research programs that span the Physics and Astronomy, Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, and Pharmaceutical Chemistry departments. These studies will have direct impact on the development of the next-generation of information, computing, semiconductors and pharmaceutical technology doc12988 none Tyburczy This grant provides three years partial salary support for a technician to supervise the Multiple Anvil High Pressure Laboratory at Arizona State University (ASU). This laboratory currently consists of three Walker-type multiple anvil devices plus sample preparation stations and ancillary support equipment in a square foot space. The Laboratory Supervisor will maintain and improve the high pressure equipment, supervise laboratory usage by ASU researchers and visitors, and aid ASU researchers in development of novel experimental approaches. A Lab Supervisor is essential to proper functioning of the lab in light of the great number of earth scientists and students working in the lab and the varied nature of their of their projects. The current Laboratory Supervisor, Dr. Kurt D. Leinenweber, is a respected and significant member of the Earth Science high pressure and crystallographic communities as well as a superb supervisor, innovator and teacher of high pressure technology. He has been Laboratory Supervisor for this facility for the past 6 years. This support will facilitate important new research on high pressure synthesis and phase equilibria of earth materials, including novel work on hydrous high pressure phases, and measurements of physical properties of earth materials at high pressures, including rheological and electrical properties. In addition to Earth Science utilization, this facility will be used by chemists, materials scientists, and physicists from ASU and other institutions for synthesis and characterization of novel materials doc12989 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Michael Deem Institution: University of California Los Angeles The objective of this project is the development of strategies for searching for the best materials property using combinatorial techniques coupled with Monte Carlo methods. The techniques to be developed are aimed at improving on the current grid search methods, which are often cumbersome to employ. Monte Carlo strategies are expected to provide significant improvement, and the ability to incorporate a priori knowledge should further improve the search strategy. Several variables can be manipulated in order to seek the material with the optimal figure of merit. Variables such as composition as well as film thickness and deposition method can be investigated. The work will focus on the theoretical aspects of the problem. Virtual libraries and materials will be constructed, and the Random Phase Volume model will be used to assess the validity of the methods. Techniques developed will be applied to data generated by an industrial collaborator. A wide range of improved material properties such as superconductivity, magnetoresistance or catalytic activity have been sought using combinatorial methods. The overall goal of high-throughput methods is to hasten discovery for improved processes and materials properties doc12990 none This IGERT award supports the establishment of an interdisciplinary research training program in the emerging field of cellular engineering. The program focuses on metabolic and tissue engineering and provides science and engineering students with rigorous educational and research training in the fields of bioengineering, biochemistry, and cell biology. A co-supervision system is created in which students will have an advisor from the Department of Bioengineering and an advisor from the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology for guidance of mechanistic and design aspects of research projects. The fundamental curriculum for IGERT trainees includes coverage of scientific ethics, advanced laboratory skills, basic biosciences (biochemistry and cell biology) and engineering systems analysis. Student participants work in cooperative environments including team design projects and an industrial internship program with companies engaged in cellular engineering. This program is coordinated with a pre- and post internship seminar program to maximize the impact of the students industrial experiences. The establishment of a visiting scientist position and a focused seminar series having different annual themes provides in depth exposure to new areas. A key component of the program will be continued expansion of our successful undergraduate recruitment program for under-represented minorities to this specialized area of graduate education. Building upon established strengths in interdisciplinary research and education, this training program creates a center of excellence in cellular engineering that will train researchers who can utilize advances in biological sciences to produce innovative and cost- effective biotechnological products in the 21st century. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fourth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-two institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Engineering; Biological Sciences; and Education and Human Resources doc12991 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program in the Division of Materials Research will allow the University of Arizona to acquire a new Gel Permeation Chromatography instrument for research and education in the Department of Chemistry. The proposed GPC system will replace current outdated equipment and will be housed in the new Molecular Characterization Facility in the Department of Chemistry. This instrument will be used by students at the undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels to improve the quality and scope of integration of research and education into our curricula. Consisting of a separations module accompanied by Ultra-violet-Vis, refractive index, multi-angle laser light scattering, and viscometric detectors, this instrument will allow for more accurate and complete characterization of the organic and inorganic materials currently being synthesized by research groups within the Department. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program in the Division of Materials Research will allow the University of Arizona to acquire a new Gel Permeation Chromatography (GPC) instrument for research and education. The instrument will be housed in the Department of Chemistry and will be used to characterize new polymeric materials, in particular measure their molecular weight, or size. The molecular weight of polymers is a critical factor in their strength, behavior, and ultimate performance. This instrument will allow for more accurate and complete characterization of the polymeric materials currently being developed by research groups within the Department of Chemistry for such emerging technologies as biological sensors, organic light-emitting diodes, and drug delivery systems. Students at the undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels will use the instrument. This will improve the quality and scope of student training, thus impacting the scientific workforce doc12992 none With National Science Foundation support, Ms. Scherff and her advisor Dr. Perfetti will conduct a year long investigation of the possibility that prelinguistic infants identify the same kinds of structures in observed events that languages identify with verb argument structure. The verb argument structure is a highly constrained format for describing events in language. Infants ability to map events in the world onto concepts such as give and hug raises questions about both the structure of language and of event perception. As adults, we implicitly identify discrete events from a scene of complex and even ambiguous interactions among objects. Further, we verbally characterize these events in remarkably consistent ways, relating our cognitive representations of events to our linguistic representations of events. The difficulty in this process is that while the world of conceivable events may be fairly unconstrained, language itself is a highly constrained format for representing events. How then, do infants acquiring language learn to map the less constrained world onto highly constrained linguistic structures? Scherff and Perfetti will investigate infant event perception and the acquisition of verb argument structure in preverbal infants (10-12 months) and infants just beginning to produce word combinations (18-20 months). Their project focuses on whether infants conceptually categorize events based on the number of obligatory participants, an operation that might be critical for acquiring verbs with different argument structure. Using methods sensitive to a child s perception of novel events, Scherff and Perfetti will examine how infants knowledge of event structures correspond to linguistic argument structures. They will also examine the underlying contributions of perceptual and cognitive mechanisms to infants event representations and how language acquisition impacts infant event knowledge. By recording electrical potentials at the scalp, the investigators gain a rough idea of where in the infant brain perceived events structures are represented. This combination of methodologies and research questions can uniquely inform our understanding of how infants form bridges between their cognitive representations of events and the language acquisition process. This work will increase knowledge about how the cognitive and language functions of humans develop in the very early stages of life doc1828 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is designed to contribute to better and more efficient management of a part of our natural resources. Current analyses of fish stocks (by National Marine Fisheries Service and several state departments of fish & game) are unnecessarily expensive, time-consuming and inaccurate. Ultimately, this contributes to compromised Government resource management policy-making. The result is the risk of over fishing and considerable economic damage. Via research and development this project will produce a prototype integrated plug & play system to automate these analyses. The developed system will be marketed first to the several dozens of U. S. federal and state agencies having a need for it, and thereby will help to establish more precise measurement standards that will be accepted by the worldwide community. The subsequent result of worldwide marketing activity will benefit the fish management and research activities in more than 20 countries, and solidify the U. S. developed and promulgated standards and measurement techniques doc12994 none This IGERT award will establish an interdisciplinary, multi-institution graduate research and education program in conservation biology and sustainability of agricultural and forest systems. The need is acute for better disciplinary integration to achieve biodiversity conservation and sustainable productivity in anthropogenically fragmented landscapes. To achieve this, a new generation of professionals must be educated in a holistic fashion. Students in this program will work in interdisciplinary teams to study aspects of biodiversity conservation and sustainable productivity in three distinct geographic regions characterized by habitat fragmentation. A highly productive group of educators and researchers from three Colleges and seven Departments at the University of Idaho and four Research Areas at the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE), an international institution headquartered in Costa Rica, will participate in the project. These faculty will provide mentoring in agricultural ecology, forest ecology and management, conservation biology and biodiversity assessment, ecological genetics, soil science, watershed sciences, ethics, rural sociology, policy, social impact assessment, and environmental economics. The IGERT program will differ from traditional doctoral programs at UI in five major ways. First, graduate education will be multi-institutional with course work conducted at UI and CATIE, and dual-institution graduate committee membership. Second, student teams will address similar research questions in temperate and tropical ecosystems and will complete a research internship with their teammates in the country that is not their primary field site. Third, students working in interdisciplinary teams will produce dissertation sets that will include some co-authored chapters. Fourth, students will complete an interdisciplinary graduate curriculum including biophysical and social sciences. Fifth, students will participate in professional development activities including joint annual research symposia and interdisciplinary training workshops. Special efforts are planned to recruit Hispanic, Native American, and African American students. Professionals educated through this program will have the expertise to work effectively in interdisciplinary teams addressing the pressing scientific problems concerning management of the biosphere. Students will gain cross-cultural experience and geographic exposure to enhance their international perspective. These professionals will be uniquely prepared to pursue careers in academia, government agencies, and international research and development institutions. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fourth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-two institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Biological Sciences; Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences; and Education and Human Resources doc12995 none This program will introduce and analyze a new rapid manufacturing technology for fabrication of functional miniature devices with integrated intelligent structures and encapsulated components. This will be based on the ultrasonic welding (USW) process, a solid-state, cold joining technique, yielding strong bonding between dissimilar metals and other materials. Ultrasonic rapid manufacturing (URM) will utilize multiple material foils and fibers, that will be bonded in subsequent layers, followed by ultrasonically assisted diamond scribing to the proper contours. Fundamental understanding and comprehensive modeling of microscale USW, will be addressed by a hybrid experimental and computational process analysis. Extensive characterization of the joint structure and properties of aluminum bonds to other selected metal alloys will be performed in the laboratory. Knowledge gained from this research will define optimal process conditions, allow intensive study of microscale material effects, making it accessible through incorporation in a continuous ultrasonic transformation database. Numerical simulation of the interdependent mechanical, thermal and diffusion distributions during the USW process will be conducted in concert with the experimental work. Researchers at Tufts University and Northeastern University will collaborate on this project. This URM research will be connected with the engineering curriculum to leverage rapid manufacturing education. This will be promoted by a new undergraduate graduate course on Rapid Prototyping, Tooling and Manufacturing, as a basis for a future Rapid Manufacturing minor; a new SFF and Microfabrication Seminar series with invited industry experts; and an annual Rapid Manufacturing Contest for undergraduate student groups nationwide. The program will involve close collaboration of the partnering institutions. Industrial sponsorship through in-kind equipment and technical support will also be provided by Axcelis Technologies, Honda R&D Americas and Stapla Ultrasonics. The benefits of the new technology will be harnessed in the design and fabrication of miniature multi-material internal structures, with embedded prefabricated elements (sensors, actuators, processors, MEMS etc), providing multi-domain functionality in mechatronic, optoelectronic, microfluidic, biomedical microdevices etc doc12996 none Douglas Jesseph, North Carolina State University The Mathematical Works of Thomas Hobbes This project is a renewal of support for the preparation of three volumes of mathematical works of Thomas Hobbes. The works will appear through Oxford University Press as part of the Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes is a figure of central importance in the development of early modern science, and his prominence as a political theorist has placed him at the center of numerous studies of the social, cultural, and intellectual context of seventeenth-century science. Hobbes s significance for the development of mathematics is also profound, although scholars have tended to overlook his mathematical work. This relative neglect stems, in part, from the mistaken impression that his mathematical writings are nothing more than misguided attempts to solve such unsolvable problems as the squaring of the circle. Although Hobbes was convinced that his first principles would enable the solution of such problems, the majority of his mathematical writings concern methodological and philosophical issues that are independent of his failed circle quadratures, and many other of his writings are part of his long and bitter controversy with John Wallis and other members of the Royal Society. A proper edition of his mathematical works is of interest to STS scholarship generally, and particularly to studies of science and mathematics in the seventeenth century. A major obstacle impeding scholarly attention to Hobbes s mathematics is the fact that the current standard edition of his collected works has a completely inadequate presentation of the mathematical material. The edition is almost useless for scholarly investigation of Hobbes s mathematics. By including complete texts, adequate diagrams, introductions, translations, notes, and a critical apparatus, the mathematical volumes of the Clarendon Works will make accessible a wealth of material relevant to studies of the philosophical, social, and cultural background of seventeenth-century mathematics. The PI has assembled the printed sources in electronically editable form and has compared them line by line with the originals. In addition, all known manuscript sources (including those the PI has recently discovered) have been transcribed or photocopied, and they are being rendered in electronically editable form. Approximately one third of the material in Latin has been translated, with to be completed in the summer of . This support permits final redaction of all three volumes, (including notation of variants, writing introductions, and preparation of explanatory notes). They are to be ready for copy editing by the Press in September of doc12997 none A Cross-disciplinary Optics Research and Education (CORE) program is established at the Uni-versity of New Mexico to enhance the education and training of graduate students. The program involves the departments of Biology, Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Physics. The research and educational theme of the CORE project is centered about optical imaging and spectroscopic techniques with high spatial and temporal resolution and their appli-cation to physical, chemical, and biological problems. (i) During the project interdisciplinary teams of graduate students will work on various aspects of the CORE research, comprising the design and development of methods and tools and their application in the fields of biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering. The research projects involve the study of fundamental pro-cesses in various samples ranging from single molecules, to quantum dots, to living cells, and their utilization for the development of biosensors. (ii) In addition to the current curricula in their respective departments, IGERT students will take a set of cross-disciplinary courses designed specifically for the program. (iii) The IGERT fellows will be offered internships in the local op-tics industry, in local national laboratories, and abroad to widen their horizon and to introduce career opportunities. (iv) A weekly seminar will provide the students with training in technical writing and in presentations of their research in a multi-disciplinary environment. (v) Mentoring undergraduate students will foster team spirit and leadership skills and will help to recruit, retain, and involve undergraduates, in particular those from under-represented minorities, in research. The overall goal of our education and training activities is to produce a new cadre of engineers and scientists who are prepared to work in multidisciplinary environments. As experts in their respective home disciplines, the IGERT graduates will share a basic understanding of optics, im-aging and spectroscopy. As such, they will be prepared to work at the forefront of optics-related research, development and education in national labs, academia, and industry. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fourth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-two institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Mathematical and Physical Sciences; Engineering; Biological Sciences; and Education and Human Resources doc12998 none This IGERT project will establish a multidisciplinary graduate program in reliability and risk engineering, analysis, and management at Vanderbilt University. Twenty-five faculty participants in this program are drawn from three different schools: Engineering (Civil, Mechanical, Chemical, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Management of Technology), Management, and Arts and Sciences (Mathematics). The research theme consists of three inter-linked areas: (i) large systems reliability and risk, (ii) device- and component-level reliability, and (iii) uncertainty analysis methods. As engineering systems grow in size, complexity and cost, reliability and risk assessment is increasingly dependent on modeling and simulation, rather than on expensive (or impossible) traditional test-based methods. Therefore, the unique features of the research theme are: (i) development of the modeling and simulation-based methodology for reliability and risk assessment, (ii) systematic integration of models and tools across disciplines, and (iii) inclusion of economic, legal, regulatory, and social perspectives in risk assessment and management. The research projects will apply these concepts to infrastructure, environmental, network, mechanical, and electronic systems. The educational goals are to broaden the training with multidisciplinary perspectives, embed information technology, include model integration and high performance computing technologies, and increase the number and diversity of reliability and risk engineers and managers trained in the modeling and simulation methodology. A number of strategies are proposed to achieve these objectives: multidisciplinary coursework and dissertation topics, laboratory rotations, industry and government laboratory internships, seminars, workshops, case studies, training in professional communication and ethics, undergraduate and high school teacher participants, aggressive recruitment (especially among under-represented groups), and systematic evaluation by industry, government and academia. The program will include strong participation and support from several industries, government agencies and national laboratories, through internships, workshop and seminar participation, educational and research collaboration, and advisory committee. Through these efforts, the graduate program aims to become a self-sustaining center of national and international leadership. The IGERT award will lead to 35 Ph.D. s over 9 years, fulfilling a critical need of the American industry in this important field. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fourth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-two institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Engineering; Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences; Computer and Information Science and Engineering; Mathematical and Physical Sciences; and Education and Human Resources doc12999 none The thrust of this IGERT program in biophotonics is to produce graduates capable of crossing the existing boundaries between Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Medicine and Engineering, the combination of which constitutes the multidisciplinary research environments necessary for advancing biophotonics. Novel applications and or solutions to technological problems involving the use of photonics (lasers and optics) in biology and medicine, and the use of biological materials in photonic applications, have been slow to develop due to the lack of a common ground upon which the current researchers, who come from a variety of disciplines, can interact. Specifically, this program emphasizes graduate research, education and training through the extension of on-going integrative research that includes: (i) nanotechnology (fabrication and application) as a tool in developing new, and improving existing, optical imaging techniques for real-time imaging of cells and cellular processes, (ii) developing the next generation of biosensors and improving sensing applications, (iii) using nanotechnology and laser technology for targeting and treatment in cancer therapy, (iv) applying computer and information technologies in the development of new models and data analysis for understanding cellular mechanisms, (v) developing new photonic devices and systems that are hybrids of traditional polymeric and semiconductor materials with biological materials, and (vi) molding the existing curriculum to provide students with maximum exposure to the diversity of biophotonics and prepare them to operate effectively in this rapidly advancing and changing field. The program will involve graduate students and faculty from Engineering, Chemistry, Physics, Biological Sciences, and the Medical School at the University at Buffalo (State University of New York), from Roswell Park Cancer Institute, and from Hauptman-Woodward Medical Institute (all located in Buffalo, NY). A cross-disciplinary curriculum will be developed that will provide Ph.D and Masters degree graduates with the ability to cross the existing boundaries between the many areas of biophotonics. This program builds upon the strengths of the Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics (ILPB), at the University at Buffalo, which has as one of its goals to create a multidisciplinary environment using the common thread of photonics. Moreover, this program will capitalize on recent investments in the ILPB for the development of biophotonics: equipment, laboratory space, and educational training facilities. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fourth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-two institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Engineering; Biological Sciences; Mathematical and Physical Sciences; and Education and Human Resources doc13000 none FOCUS is a new Physics Frontiers Center devoted to Frontiers in Optical Coherent and Ultrafast Science. The FOCUS mission is to provide national leadership in the areas of coherent control, ultrafast, and high field physics. The work of FOCUS will include three frontier Major Research Components in High Field Control; Ultrafast Control; and Quantum Control. FOCUS will extend the frontiers of its discipline: the production, control and utilization of light pulses shorter than one thousandth of one trillionth of a second; physics of ultrahigh intensity laser fields, exceeding ten billion trillion watts per square centimeter; coherent manipulation of molecular bonds and molecular motion; and the control of quantum mechanics in ultracold atoms and ions. The coherent field strengths under direct control will span 18 orders of magnitude, from ultra-relativistic laser-driven plasmas (TV cm) to control fields in cooled ion traps (uV cm). Much of the coherent control physics developed in one area is applicable toanother. Science and society depend on these novel and rapid advances in coherent and ultrafast optical science now as never before. The coherent and ultrafast optical physics developed by the FOCUS center will be at the forefront of some of the most ambitious and exciting advances in physics in the next two decades. Examples extend across the fields of matter-wave precision devices, gravitational wave detectors, x-ray free electron lasers, quantum encryption and computing, coherent control of chemistry, laser-driven particle acceleration, as well as others. This award is jointly funded by the Division of Physics and the Office of Multidiscipliary Activities in the MPS Directorate doc13001 none The Center for the Study of the Origin and Structure of Matter (COSM) aims to conduct research that has the potential to advance our understanding of the world through the lens of particle and nuclear physics. The Center also aims to be a doorway for empowering a network of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU s) to participate in these highly visible science projects. There are three components of the Center: (1) Experimental research at the frontiers of particle and nuclear physics at all of the COSM network universities. (2) Building and strengthening a collaborative network of researchers at HBCU s in these research activities. (3) Outreach to K-12 teachers and students, to invite and encourage these students to pursue careers in science doc13002 none Most of today s scientific and social problems lie at the interface of many disciplines. Urban ecology is an emerging field that addresses one of the most challenging problems humanity is facing world wide: how to manage metropolitan growth by simultaneously maximizing human wellbeing and minimizing impacts on ecosystems. These problems require interdisciplinary approaches that current disciplinary doctoral education cannot teach. The vision of this IGERT program is to change the culture of graduate education from a traditional enterprise focused on an individual s discipline to one clearly emphasizing interdisciplinary teams. This will increase student retention and prepare students for leadership within and beyond academia. Team members dissertations will include a common, co-authored section based on a real-world research problem addressed by the team, plus an individually-written disciplinary section. Students will be immersed immediately into interdisciplinary research questions, using real-world problems presented to them by outside clients. Students from widely varied backgrounds will collectively analyze, evaluate, and propose strategies to address those problems. Rather than provide a set course of instruction before students begin research, the intent is to help teams decide what information and background they need as their analyses progress, then arrange for the extended faculty to provide that background (just-in-time education). The core curriculum assures that all students, regardless of the projects they work on, receive essential skills and informational training. This requires team-taught courses where Urban Ecology faculty members are in the classroom with the students at lectures and discussion sessions, and where everyone participates. The program centers on five broad research themes: (i) What socioeconomic factors drive urban development, (ii) How landscape ecology can be used to quantify urban development patterns, (iii) How urban development patterns affect biodiversity and ecosystem function, (iv) How changes in ecosystems affect human preferences and decisions, and (v) How policies influence human settlement and its effects. By integrating research and education the IGERT program will build a theoretical framework and a series of empirical studies that increase understanding of the complex mechanisms that mediate the interactions between natural and human processes in urban ecosystems. This will produce students experienced in solving real-world problems, improve working relationships between academia and business, regulatory, and urban communities, and strengthen the foundation of Urban Ecology as a field. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fourth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-two institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Biological Sciences; Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences; and Education and Human Resources doc13003 none The project is a pilot study of the Tjornes fracture zone offshore northern Iceland with the goal of demonstrating the feasibility of mapping Holocene faulting and volcanic activity in the tectonically complex fracture zone system. The project will use a SUBSCAN chirp sonar system and a high-resolution multicchannel seismic acquisition system, together with conventional bathymetric mapping. Specific objectives are to determine the current location and history of strike-slip movement along the offshore portion of the fracture system, to estimate the amount of extension of the Eyjafjardarall graben over the past 1-2 Ma, and to examine how the north-south graben structures terminate near the fracture zone. If successful, a joint Iceland-US investigation of the Tjornes fracture zone and other portions of Iceland s insular shelf are planned. The overaching goal of this research is to define strain partitioning in the Tjornes fracture zone in order to reconstruct the onshore-offshore deformation history of the region doc13004 none This project focuses on the changing economic geographies of apparel production in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). After an initial period of rapid industrial collapse and only limited persistence of apparel firms, there has been a more recent rebirth of production throughout the region, linked primarily to changes in the international structure of the industry and in European Union legislation and markets. The project investigates four aspects of these changes. First, using international trade, production, and employment data, the project documents the emergence of these complex new geographies of apparel production and trade, and assess the specific roles played by changes in the international structure of the industry and by changes in international trade regulations. Second, through interviews with brand-name manufacturers, retailers, marketers, and national buying firms in Western Europe, the U.S., and CEE, the study analyzes the important role of buyer-driven commodity chains in sourcing and controlling suppliers in CEE under conditions of intensely competitive pricing and rapidly changing demand. Third, through detailed case studies in six regions in Slovakia and Bulgaria, the project examines the ways in which international sourcing restructures existing national industries, impacts upon the creation of new firms, and produces a variety of industrial forms and practices. Fourth, in seeking to explain this diversity of apparel production, the project examines the ways in which existing social, institutional, and community conditions in different regions of each country are shaping the enterprises and regional economies that are emerging. The pace of new firm creation in these regions is astonishing and the regional impacts of these firms and the scope of their integration with European markets surprising. Through this research we hope to contribute to our understanding of the specific forms and practices of what has been more generally characterized as low-wage, assembly production for export. In particular, we hope to contribute to the literatures in economic geography, globalization debates, and post-socialist restructuring about the roles of national suppliers and markets in the operation of the new firms, the extent to which uniform or differentiated production and marketing strategies are emerging, and the impacts local conditions have on the operation of primarily international contract and assembly production. The proposed research will enable us to examine more fully the conditions and contradictions associated with international integration and local economic reconfiguration in post-socialist Europe. The project will enable us to move beyond single-region and single-country case studies by providing a cross-national and cross-regional analysis of local economic transformations in apparel producing areas. Finally, the research will contribute to our understanding of the role of other economic and social practices in shaping the internationalization of the post-socialist apparel industry and its producing regions doc13005 none A goal of natural resource management is to balance multiple uses of forest lands. One aspect has been production oriented, and is concerned with where and when timber extraction takes place. This is commonly a component of the harvest scheduling process. Another aspect of natural resource management involves the protection of species and habitat through a process known as nature reserve design. Both timber harvesting and resource conservation are integral components of public and private forest usage and planning, but do not necessarily occur in a coordinated fashion. One area of study will be a comparative evaluation of harvest scheduling optimization models for limiting spatial activity. The dominant feature of current approaches is the need to limit or restrict the local extent of harvest activity. One approach assumes that spatial units are of sufficient size to require explicit stipulations regarding what may take place in neighboring units. The alternative approach recognizes that spatial units may in fact be relatively small in relation to maximum disturbance restrictions. The differences between these two approaches are associated with how spatial impacts are limited mathematically. This project will investigate differences between these two approaches, particularly with respect to spatial scale and unit definition. The research will utilize data for two study areas: Buttercreek watershed in California and Forestal Millalemu in Chile. Exact and heuristic solution development for harvest scheduling will be examined. An important theoretical aim is to evaluate whether spatial inconsistencies exist between the two approaches. Finally, the project will integrate spatial optimization techniques with geographic information systems (GIS) to find solutions that address both harvesting production and nature preserve design. The development of exact and heuristic solution techniques based on different spatial unit constraints will contribute to the optimization literature as well as the issues of scale and unit definition in geographic information science research. Establishing reserves is an important component of natural resource management. The integrated modeling approaches developed in this research, which combine issues of production (harvest scheduling) and conservation (nature reserve design) using multi-objective optimization methods, enable conflicts to be resolved in a coordinated fashion. Such integration utilizing GIS techniques and functionality is expected to contribute significantly to planning and policy evaluation directed at sustainable forest management practices doc13006 none This IGERT program is a multi-disciplinary doctoral traineeship in Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Electronic Transactions (STIET). The extraordinarily rapid changes in communications and computing technology, and in the uses and requirements people have for these technologies, have given rise to problems that are not well-suited to narrow, traditional solutions. That these problems are important should be self-evident: electronic transactions are increasingly central to social, economic and political activity in nearly every realm of human endeavor, within and between nearly every location on the planet. The infrastructure to support safe, meaningful, efficient, equitable and productive transactions will determine the extent to which the information revolution is socially beneficial. STIET will offer a comprehensive program from matriculation to graduation that will focus on the interaction between social and technical mechanisms in order to respond to these needs through current research and the training of a corps of scholars to carry forward teaching and research in this area. The program will: (i) provide fellowships for the first two years of graduate study; (ii) require 3 STIET core courses and 2 advanced STIET electives; (iii) provide a weekly research seminar and biannual day-long workshops; (iv) develop a multi-disciplinary, cross-school community of scholars within Michigan through collective and collaborative activities, both synchronous and asynchronous (with computer-supported community and collaboration technologies); and (v) build connections to the external multi-disciplinary research community through its Web site, conference travel, and research experiences at industrial partner facilities. When fully implemented, the program is expected to engage about 35 doctoral students at various stages of their degree. Through the resources and activities of STIET, the students will be encouraged and supported so that they receive serious preparation for multi-disciplinary research and pursue multi-disciplinary approaches to understanding and solving important socio-technical problems in their dissertation research. A large group of faculty are involved from several disciplines (computer science, economics, information, business, public policy) with a long-standing commitment to multi-disciplinary and collaborative research. The team includes collaborative research partners from prominent industrial labs. A professional Master s programs in this area is already in place, which provide a graduate student community, a student services infrastructure, and a fertile recruiting ground for promising doctoral students. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fourth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-two institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences; Computer and Information Science and Engineering; and Education and Human Resources doc13007 none The objective of this Power Systems Engineering Research Center (PSERC) project is to develop a database of information for use by utilities and electricity end-users in evaluating distributed generation (DG) and distributed energy storage (DES). The information in the database can be used with utility, end-user, and investor economic evaluation methods to compare the various DG and DES technologies with central station generation and transmission and distribution improvement options doc13008 none This project aims to enhance our understanding of the role that international trade and U.S. trade policy has played in American economic history. This project focuses specifically on the antebellum period, from roughly to . (My previous research focused on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century period, from to .) The short term objective of the research is to produce articles for publication in scholarly economic journals. The long term objective is to produce a comprehensive book-length study of the history of trade and trade policy in the United States. The research on the antebellum period focuses, in particular, on three issues. The first issue is the extent to which the United States possessed market power in terms of its cotton exports. By estimating the elasticity of export demand facing the United States, the research will give us some indication of the possible economic gains from imposing an optimal export tax during this period. The second issue is the role of import tariffs in supporting the early growth and development of the cotton textile industry. Economists have been divided about whether the cotton textile industry depended on tariff protection or not, and this research aims to provide greater insight into the role of import protection during this period. The third issue is the pre-Civil War political conflict between the North and the South over the tariff. This research will focus on Congressional votes on the tariff issue in the antebellum period and determine whether Midwestern economic interests played a critical role in supporting the anti-tariff views of the South and thereby helped push tariffs down from 60 percent in the early s to 25 percent by doc13009 none This IGERT program focuses on nanoparticle science and engineering, an inherently highly interdisciplinary field that requires researchers with a broad knowledge base of both fundamental scientific and engineering issues. The program addresses the lack of a coherent and well-organized Ph.D. training in this field. Faculty from five departments and six graduate programs at the University of Minnesota have come together to develop an interdisciplinary program transcending departmental boundaries to meet this challenge. At the core of the educational approach is the establishment of a new graduate degree program - a freestanding graduate minor program in Nanoparticle Science and Engineering. Several new interdisciplinary core courses will be developed to offer students a coherent and comprehensive set of courses. Students enrolled in the IGERT program will participate in interdisciplinary research training in research groups that include faculty and students from various departments. Nanoparticle research will be conducted in five focus areas: Two areas will address the development of enabling computational and characterization tools. These areas will form the foundation for research in application oriented areas focusing on new materials, devices, and the environment. Exceptional career development opportunities will add to the appeal of the IGERT program. These include an internship program in corporate and government laboratories, international exchange opportunities, attendance of scientific meetings at an early stage in the career, an annual interdisciplinary symposium, leadership and technology management courses, and training in ethical conduct of research. IGERT Fellows will use the excellent infrastructure at the University of Minnesota, such as its Supercomputing Institute, its Microtechnology Laboratory, and its Characterization Facility. A unique collaboration with Florida A Mathematical and Physical Sciences; and Education and Human Resources doc13010 none This award supports the formation of The Center for Gravitational Wave Physics. This Physics Frontier Center is devoted to development of gravitational wave phenomenology: the physics and astrophysics that can be explored by gravitational wave observations in all wavebands. It is organized in three tightly-linked Major Research Components: i) learning how to exploit the fundamentally new perspective that gravitational waves offer, when compared to electromagnetic observations; ii) using gravitational wave observations to test and contribute to the understanding of strong-field, dynamical gravity; and iii) developing modeling tools that combine detector and source science to provide quantitative assessments of the ``science reach of advanced detector designs. To achieve its goal of crystalizing the formation of this new field, the Center functions as a National Facility with a substantial visitor program; workshops, conferences and institutes devoted to critical research areas where the focused attention of experts can be expected to lead to breakthroughs or rapid advancements; and a substantial, interactive interface to Center activities (seminar, colloquia, workshops and research group meetings) for off-site Center members and program participants. The Center s education program emphasizes middle school children nationwide, through an affiliation with the educational public television program What s In The News? . Three special programs form the core of its outreach program: to women, through its participation in the Women In Science and Engineering Expanding Your Horizons workshop (focused on grades 7--9) and the Women In Science and Engineering Research mentoring program (focused on first and second year undergraduate women), and to upper division and graduate Hispanic students, through a special liaison with the University of Texas, Brownsville. The forthcoming generation of ground and space-based gravitational wave detectors have unleashed exciting challenges and opportunities at the interface of general relativity, astrophysics, and experimental physics. The waves they will detect arise in strong, dynamical gravitational fields, offering the first opportunities to test the understanding of fully non-linear relativistic gravity. Simultaneously, the observations astrophysical implications are likely to be novel, diverse and rich as they reveal the inner dynamics of processes hidden from electromagnetic astronomy: e.g., the collision of black holes in the center of a galaxy at high redshift. A new field of physics --- gravitational wave phenomenology --- is thus poised to emerge; however, lacking a tradition of large experiments, gravitational physics lacks also a community of phenomenologists ready to fully exploit the rich physics that the forthcoming observations offer. The Center for Gravitational Wave Physics provides the intellectual platform upon which existing expertise can be combined and focused in a synergistic manner, crystallizing the formation of a coherent, flourishing field that can fully realize the promise that gravitational wave observations hold doc13011 none This IGERT project examines the problem of sequential decision-making as a unifying framework for the study of several central topics in cognitive science: selective attention, navigation, language processing, and the coordination of action in multiple-agent groups. The overarching question our students are trained to investigate is the following: how is it possible for an agent to decide what actions to take to achieve long-term goals? We recognize that decision-making in complex environments is a sequential process, involving a series of episodes in which an agent, based on information available through its senses and stored in memory, selects the action appropriate for its goals. The problem is made difficult by perceptual uncertainty arising from sensory limitations and environmental complexity, by the challenge of sorting through the large space of actions available, and by inherent delays in feedback about the long-term consequences of actions. A wide variety of fundamental cognitive tasks can be cast as sequential decision-making problems. Understanding how such problems may be solved will be a critical component of a general theory of intelligent behavior in organisms, and will be essential for the design of truly intelligent machines. To study these problems, we adopt a comparative approach, combining insights from a range of model systems, including humans, non-human animals, robots, and intelligent software agents. This multidisciplinary framework will enable students to integrate ideas and methods from different fields that have been concerned with the study of sequential decision-making (psychology, behavioral biology, linguistics, and computer science), but that have so far remained largely separate. The training program is designed to create a new generation of scientists trained in this innovative, multidisciplinary approach. Graduate training will be focused on fundamental disciplinary education, a common set of courses focused on the sequential decision-making framework, and a strong emphasis on mentored, interdisciplinary research activities that span each student s entire graduate program. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fourth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-two institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences; Computer and Information Science and Engineering; Engineering; Biological Sciences; and Education and Human Resources doc13012 none Phylogenetics , the study of the relationships among genes, individuals, populations, and species, forms the basis for all of comparative biology. This IGERT grant will support a comprehensive, interdisciplinary graduate training program in Computational Phylogenetics and Applications to Biology. The program involves 27 faculty participants from the computational and biological sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, and it will support 12 graduate trainees each year for five years. Two major research areas will be emphasized: computational phylogenetics and applied phylogenetics. Phylogenies provide a fundamental framework for all of biology, and present the computational scientist with many technical challenges. Computational phylogenetics is concerned with the computational aspects of phylogenetic inference, and applied phylogenetics uses estimated phylogenies to address a wide diversity of biological questions. The training program will involve a series of new and existing courses and seminars, a summer training program for students from under-represented areas of science, co-advisement of each graduate student by one computational and one biological faculty participant, placement of students into well-established research groups in biology and computer science, participation in spring recruitment conferences and fall phylogenetics retreats, and opportunities for internships in the bioinformatics industry, national laboratories, and non-government organizations. The goals of this project are: (i) design and implement an interdisciplinary training curriculum for graduate students across computational and biological sciences that prepares students to understand and contribute to both sides of computational biology; (ii) stimulate interdisciplinary graduate research and interdisciplinary interactions in general between computational scientists and biological scientists that will lead to development and testing of novel approaches to unsolved problems in phylogenetics and their application to problems in biology; (iii) prepare trainees for their careers beyond graduate school and help them achieve visibility in the larger research community; and (iv) evaluate and improve the program in computational and applied phylogenetics to ensure its success beyond the proposed IGERT project. This program will create a unique collaborative environment for graduate students and faculty from the computational and biological sciences. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fourth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-two institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Biological Sciences; Computer and Information Science and Engineering; and Education and Human Resources doc13013 none Despite previous long-term behavioral studies, a full understanding of the social organization and reproductive strategies of orangutans has been difficult to achieve due to their extended life histories, large home ranges, predominantly arboreal lifestyles and semi-solitary natures. Because adult individuals are normally dispersed and visibility is limited within their rainforest habitats, long distance vocalizations are likely to play an important role in regulating individual relationships and social interactions, including reproduction. There is already strong and consistent behavioral and experimental evidence for an intra-sexual spacing function, but additional hypotheses such as mate attraction or protection against sexual coercion have not been tested rigorously. It is also not yet clear if reliable assessment cues are encoded in acoustic features and calling patterns or if listeners can recognize individual males and associate a signaler s identity with past performance. This research aims to test predictions for the signal content of male long calls, examine potential functions and assess possible determinants of variation in calling behavior among Bornean and Sumatran populations. Using field recordings, focal animal sampling and carefully controlled playback experiments, this study intends to examine acoustic variation in male long calls, the patterns of calling behavior by males and behavioral responses in relation to the listener s social context, reproductive status and familiarity with the calling male. The signal content of male orangutan long calls has important repercussions for understanding female mate choice and the nature of inter-individual relationships in this endangered species doc13014 none The proposed research is aimed at constructing an image representation that improves performances of current image compression algorithms and organizes the information in a form suitable for fast patter discrimination and search algorithms. The approach relies on recently discovered bandlelet orthogonal bases, which can be adapted to curves and efficiently represent image profiles. The work will also build on and incorporate previous work in such areas as graphs matching. Developing new techniques in this area can greatly improve the efficiency of future image search engines doc13004 none This project focuses on the changing economic geographies of apparel production in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). After an initial period of rapid industrial collapse and only limited persistence of apparel firms, there has been a more recent rebirth of production throughout the region, linked primarily to changes in the international structure of the industry and in European Union legislation and markets. The project investigates four aspects of these changes. First, using international trade, production, and employment data, the project documents the emergence of these complex new geographies of apparel production and trade, and assess the specific roles played by changes in the international structure of the industry and by changes in international trade regulations. Second, through interviews with brand-name manufacturers, retailers, marketers, and national buying firms in Western Europe, the U.S., and CEE, the study analyzes the important role of buyer-driven commodity chains in sourcing and controlling suppliers in CEE under conditions of intensely competitive pricing and rapidly changing demand. Third, through detailed case studies in six regions in Slovakia and Bulgaria, the project examines the ways in which international sourcing restructures existing national industries, impacts upon the creation of new firms, and produces a variety of industrial forms and practices. Fourth, in seeking to explain this diversity of apparel production, the project examines the ways in which existing social, institutional, and community conditions in different regions of each country are shaping the enterprises and regional economies that are emerging. The pace of new firm creation in these regions is astonishing and the regional impacts of these firms and the scope of their integration with European markets surprising. Through this research we hope to contribute to our understanding of the specific forms and practices of what has been more generally characterized as low-wage, assembly production for export. In particular, we hope to contribute to the literatures in economic geography, globalization debates, and post-socialist restructuring about the roles of national suppliers and markets in the operation of the new firms, the extent to which uniform or differentiated production and marketing strategies are emerging, and the impacts local conditions have on the operation of primarily international contract and assembly production. The proposed research will enable us to examine more fully the conditions and contradictions associated with international integration and local economic reconfiguration in post-socialist Europe. The project will enable us to move beyond single-region and single-country case studies by providing a cross-national and cross-regional analysis of local economic transformations in apparel producing areas. Finally, the research will contribute to our understanding of the role of other economic and social practices in shaping the internationalization of the post-socialist apparel industry and its producing regions doc13016 none The importance of chemical and hydromechanical signaling is broadly recognized but inadequately studied. In marine and freshwater systems, chemical signals affect critical processes such as feeding, competition, mate recognition, habitat choice, host-symbiont and host-pathogen interactions. These chemical signals not only directly affect organisms but also produce a cascade of indirect effects on population structure, community organization, and ecosystem function. Numerous investigations indicate that chemical signals mediate many of these ecological interactions in aquatic systems, but exceedingly few investigations have coupled aquatic chemical ecology with microbiology, sensory biology, physiology, or an understanding of the fluid dynamics that mediate the transmission and reception of signals. Few scientists have the requisite breadth and cross-disciplinary training in ecology, chemistry, sensory biology, microbiology, physiology and small-scale hydrodynamics necessary to advance the field of chemical signaling in aquatic systems. The recent NSF workshop on challenges and opportunities in biological oceanography (OEUVRE) identified a mechanistic understanding of these small-scale chemically and physically mediated processes as a major challenge facing this diverse field. Georgia Institute of Technology, in collaboration with Skidaway and Scripps Institutions of Oceanography, is uniquely positioned to train students to meet these challenges. Under this IGERT program, graduate training at Georgia Tech will consist of a unique series of integrated core courses, an intensive, hands-on class in aquatic signaling where interdisciplinary student teams will experimentally investigate projects of their own design, intemships, and mentoring by a multidisciplinary graduate committee. Seminars will be conducted on biological, chemical and physical interactions affecting aquatic signaling, scientific ethics, special issues faced by under-represented groups and women in science, and the practical aspects of professional development in science and engineering. During the project, IGERT funds will support over 40 graduate students, produce about 26 PhDs, and start a permanent center for aquatic signaling at Georgia Tech. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fourth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-two institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Biological Sciences; Geosciences; Mathematical and Physical Sciences; Engineering; Education and Human Resources; and the Office of Polar Programs doc13017 none The University of Central Florida will establish an IGERT program with a multidisciplinary research theme in Optical Communications and Networking to train 30 Ph.D. students over the next five years. This program is a joint effort of twenty scientists, engineers and educators from the Departments Schools of Mathematics, Statistics, Optics, Physics, Material science, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Education at UCF. Optical communications and networking is a particularly well-suited IGERT theme because the diverse multidisciplinary technologies that need to be developed to enable next-generation information infrastructure. Major research efforts are grouped in four areas: advanced components, transport, switching, and networking and network management. Each IGERT thesis project is designed to build upon expertise from at least two different groups in realizing an enhanced functionality that is greater than the sum of the parts, over and above what the two groups would pursue independently. The advising team of each IGERT student, consisting of two or more faculty members from different departments, an industrial advisor and a non-technical advisor, is designed to ensure the successful integration of education, research and training. Industry, the users of technology considered in this effort, will be involved at the onset of the thesis research for each student. The research framework is complemented by the existing multidisciplinary courses, new courses in optical communications and networking to be developed under this IGERT program and being developed under an existing NSF CRCD grant, on-site training on state-of-the-art equipment at UCF, off-site training in industry, and non-technical training including business, communication interpersonal skills and ethics. The objective of this IGERT program is not only to train the participating Ph.D. students to become leaders in industry and or academia but also for this program to serve as a national model for training scientists and engineers in today s globally competitive and technology-driven market economy. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fourth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-two institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Engineering; Computer and Information Science and Engineering; Mathematical and Physical Sciences; and Education and Human Resources doc13018 none This IGERT program offers a nationally-unique, comprehensive package of new and tested approaches to graduate education in materials chemistry and physics. It is designed to prepare the next generation of graduate students for the challenges of an increasingly interdisciplinary and rapidly evolving research and development arena. The research and education activities of this IGERT program are unified by the study of the structure property relationships in electronic and optical materials whose properties are dominated by their nanoscale structure. The proposed research builds upon established activities in three major thrust areas to address the: (i) synthesis and properties of superlattice materials; (ii) preparation and study of metal and semiconductor nanoparticles, quantum dots and assemblies; and (iii) fabrication and properties of molecular assemblies. These research topics provide outstanding opportunities for interdisciplinary graduate training because both the chemistry and physics of short-length-scale systems are intertwined. This initiative has received wide-ranging support within the University and among our industrial affiliates because it provides a multidisciplinary research experience, stimulates industrial academic relations and prepares students to be successful participants in diverse and changing job markets. Our student-focused program is designed to address three goals: (i) help each student acquire diverse, adaptable and portable technical skills and the knowledge base to succeed in rapidly evolving career markets; (ii) help each student develop the critical thinking skills necessary to solve complex problems and understand new phenomena; and (iii) provide each student with comprehensive career training, i.e. development of professional skills, exposure to many career opportunities, and training tailored to specific career paths. To achieve these goals, a comprehensive and fully integrated graduate training program has been developed. Key activities of the training program include: new interdisciplinary courses, core engineering courses, research rotations during the first year, interdisciplinary research opportunities, targeted internships in industry or academia, and comprehensive career preparation. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fourth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-two institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Mathematical and Physical Sciences; Engineering; and Education and Human Resources doc13019 none This multidisciplinary IGERT program will train graduate students in areas at the interface of evolutionary biology, functional genomics, and computational biology in a way that will enable them to collaborate productively across traditional disciplinary boundaries. The emerging fields of comparative and functional genomics will reshape biological research in the next twenty years and have a profound impact on medicine and human health, agriculture, engineering, and our understanding of the origin of life and the relationships among living organisms. Research in these emerging disciplines requires the coordinated interaction of scientists with diverse backgrounds in evolution, molecular biology, and computer science, yet current departmental boundaries at most universities do not foster interactions among these areas. The comprehensive IGERT training plan at the University of Arizona is intended to meet these challenges. This program includes advising, research rotations and colloquia, two novel multidisciplinary courses that engage students in hands-on problem solving, additional lecture and laboratory courses, training in ethics, a monthly discussion group, opportunities to interact with visiting scientists, bi-annual mini-symposia, opportunities to mentor undergraduates in research, and offsite internships at other academic institutions or at leading genomics companies. Finally, the training plan includes a strategy to recruit both minority undergraduate and graduate students into science, drawing on the Hispanic and Native American populations in Arizona. Some of the proposed training initiatives build on existing structures; others are entirely new. The University of Arizona is particularly well suited for this training program because of existing strengths in evolution, functional genomics, and computation, a strong graduate program, and an institutional commitment to interdisciplinary programs. Moreover, the individual participants in this program have a long track record of success in training students and a commitment to multidisciplinary collaborations. The impact of the proposed training program uniting three research areas will be to equip the next generation of biologists with the tools to tackle the challenges of genome-scale research. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fourth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-two institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Biological Sciences; Engineering; Computer and Information Science and Engineering; and Education and Human Resources doc13020 none The Center for Cosmological Physics brings together astronomers and physicists, experimentalists and theorists, to address the most fundamental questions in modern cosmology. It establishes an interdisciplinary environment essential to address the cross-disciplinary problems, thereby fostering an ideal climate for nurturing new talent (students and postdocs) and stimulating faculty and other senior scientists to think in different directions. Measurements of the remnants of the early universe will be performed by Center scientists; this data will be interpreted by them and center theorists to reconstruct the conditions and laws in effect at the earliest moments of the Universe. Experiments in Cosmology over the past decade have revealed phenomena which are simply not understandable in our Standard Models. Thus they constitute important clues to the deepest secrets of nature. These include the fact that most of the matter in the Universe is dark and appears to only interact gravitationally; that most of the energy in the Universe is of a mysterious form whose dynamics is totally unknown; that points on the sky which have apparently never been in contact with each other have the same temperature to very high precision; and that there are particles striking the Earth with energies well beyond what we can understand. The Center exploits the interrelations among these phenomena and will address them with new experiments and new insights doc13021 none The biosphere is usually thought of as plants and animals near the Earth s surface, but the Earth s habitable zone extends to depths of hundreds or thousands of meters. The Earth s subsurface biosphere is composed mostly of bacteria, and collectively these bacteria may have a mass equivalent to that of all life in the near-surface biosphere. The emerging study of the subsurface biosphere could solve major environmental, agricultural, and industrial problems, and lead to products that will improve human health and prosperity. The key to success in this field will be an understanding of the links between subsurface microbiology and the Earth s physical and chemical environments and processes. This understanding is applicable to the transformation of toxic waste into harmless byproducts, safer drinking water, increased mining efficiency, increased flow of oil from wells, confining nuclear waste in storage facilities, improving soil and crops, reutilization of animal and human wastes, and the basics the Earth s global and local chemical cycles. To prepare graduate students for these challenges we will coordinate the training of students by internationally recognized engineers, microbiologists, geologists, oceanographers, geochemists, soil scientists, and hydrologists. Students preparation will be broadened with a new subsurface biosphere integrated minor with five related components. Some of these are: a group training effort, courses that link microbial with physical and chemical processes from molecular to global scales, and international and national internships, field programs, and symposia. Ethical and cultural issues related to subsurface science, bioengineering, and the environment will be included in courses, seminars and workshops. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fourth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-two institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Geosciences; Biological Sciences; Engineering; Education and Human Resources; and the Office of Polar Programs doc13022 none This IGERT award supports the establishment of a multidisciplinary graduate training program of education and research in the development of a virtual tribology system for future powertrains, which are the power-delivery systems of automobiles and aircraft. The current development of a powertrain tribological system is time-consuming, requiring integration of new materials, engine technologies, trial-and-error, laboratory experimentation and extensive field-testing. The vision is to shorten the development time by developing a virtual powertrain through advanced computer modeling that simulates the interfacial interactions among critical machine elements. The development of such technology requires new engineers and scientists with cross-disciplinary training. The traditional engineering Ph.D. training model based on one advisor and a single topic does not work well in this new paradigm. Creating Ph.D.s who are educated in a multidisciplinary environment represents the educational focus of this IGERT program. Because of the need for multiscale modeling and multidisciplinary research, an aggressive education plan requiring the creation of a multidisciplinary learning research environment, electronic education, industrial collaboration, international outreach and faculty re-education will be an integral part of the current program. This program is a joint effort among faculty members in chemistry, chemical engineering, civil engineering, computer engineering, materials science and mechanical engineering, as well as physics. With the successful development of virtualization technology, it is hoped to educate a new generation of engineers and scientists who have strong technical skill and are proficient in multidisciplinary collaboration and in working with computer simulations of complex systems. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fourth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-two institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Engineering; Computer and Information Science and Engineering; Mathematical and Physical Sciences; and Education and Human Resources doc13023 none The Project will (1) focus on results of large-scale K-5 science education reform on student achievement to further understand what practices and curriculum facilitate learning and benefit all students. (2) the Project will use Tennessee s unique statewide, longitudinal database to develop a comparable longitudinal database that includes several culturally diverse California school districts. (3) Student achievement findings in Tennessee s standardized assessment will be linked to two NSF-LSC projects teacher training databases. (4) An additional database will be developed using one or more appropriate assessment measures that may be better aligned with new science curriculum. (6) The TerraNova test will be used to allow value-added analysis in Tennessee and California and linked to the Stanford Achievement Test 9th Edition, used in California doc13024 none Unprecedented and accelerating rates of biological invasion are creating a unique set of environmental, economic, and social challenges. Modern agricultural societies would not exist were it not for human-mediated introductions of crops and livestock. Yet, as a result of the globalization of human commerce and travel, invasions are rapidly and profoundly changing the environment. The effects of invasions are felt at all biological scales, from genes to ecosystems, with enormous ecological and economic consequences. From every perspective, biological invasions epitomize the rapidly growing array of environmental challenges that no single discipline or constituency can solve individually. This IGERT award supports the establishment of a new multidisciplinary graduate program that includes trainers and students from ten multidisciplinary graduate groups and professional schools at UC Davis, as well as non-faculty participants from state, federal and national organizations who will strengthen ties to policymakers, legislators, regulators, and other stakeholders. In addition, the program emphasizes the global ramifications of invasions through the participation of international authorities, and provides support for international research collaborations and individual projects. Trainees will be required to satisfy the degree requirements of the graduate group to which they are admitted, as well as the specific requirements of the IGERT program that aim to build a multidisciplinary perspective and teamwork. Trainees supported for their dissertations must develop a project that integrates two or more of the IGERT core disciplines (life sciences, social sciences, law, humanities, and physical sciences), and have a similarly diverse guidance committee. The formal training program begins with an integrative first-year foundation curriculum, consisting of a lecture seminar series, discussion groups, and hands-on technical demonstrations. This foundation program will be followed by a second-year group collaborative research project, involving trainees and faculty, that analyzes an invaded habitat or ecosystem from biological, social, historical, economic, and legal perspectives, and develops a comprehensive management plan. This project will lead to an annual spring workshop, with participants from academia, the private and public sectors, and relevant stakeholders speaking directly to the problem addressed. Other key elements of the training program include requirements for collaborative internships outside the university and participation in an extensive mentorship network. This program will build multidisciplinary research teams that span the natural sciences, social sciences, engineering and humanities and that will train the next generation of environmental scientists to be conversant in the ethical, political, legal, and economic, and scientific issues pertinent to the analysis and remediation of biological invasions. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fourth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-two institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Biological Sciences; Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences; Mathematical and Physical Sciences; Engineering; and Education and Human Resources doc13025 none This IGERT brings together Arizona State University s well known basic research program in photosynthesis and photobiology with two other major research thrusts on campus: the Nanostructures Research Group in the Center for Solid State Electronics Research and the Bioengineering thrust within the Engineering College led by the newly formed Bioengineering Department. The research theme is the design and fabrication of molecular-scale devices based on the principles learned from photobiology. This effort represents a major expansion of the current NSF funded RTG training program in this area, shifting the educational and research focus towards the applied realm by including new faculty from four Engineering Departments and Physics as well as several industrial and international partners at Motorola, Lockheed Martin, Kodak, QTL, CEA-Saclay, Max Planck-Muelheim, and the University of Glasgow. In order to form an integrated graduate education program between these different disciplines, the IGERT includes the creation of a Ph.D. emphasis program that will normalize the curriculum requirements across colleges. Industry will also play a major role through scientific collaborations, student internships and classroom discussion. The IGERT curriculum includes a series of courses that center on research and discovery based learning. Students will solve problems by drawing on an extensive dynamic resource infrastructure that includes both well-equipped instrument facilities, including a new biohybrid fabrication facility, and high level personnel. In addition, the program includes a major educational thrust in science policy, science ethics, and societal impact, culminating in a two week workshop at the Center for Science, Policy and Outcomes in Washington DC. Here students will have the opportunity to consider the impact that research and development in the molecular device area will have on society and to hear the thoughts of scholars who have considered the ethical and political aspects of this expanding area of science. Students will also have the opportunity to participate in research abroad and in the Preparing Future Faculty or Preparing Future Professionals programs run by the ASU Graduate College. Finally, the three IGERTs on the ASU campus will be coordinated within a superstructure run by the Dean of the Graduate College. This will facilitate common mechanisms for recruiting and evaluation, and provide a formal avenue for information exchange between IGERT faculty and students. This larger scale integration among the ASU IGERTs should result in a practical model of interdisciplinary graduate education that can be used in the future both at ASU and elsewhere. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fourth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-two institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Biological Sciences; Engineering; Mathematical and Physical Sciences; and Education and Human Resources doc13026 none Proposal The Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research, in partnership with the British Library, will digitize the microfilm of the most important collection of 18th century English newspapers. Newspapers are recognized as a vast source of information for the historical dimension of virtually every discipline. This project will provide online access for researchers throughout the country. The digitized medium will also provide new methods of access and allow experiments in OCR, in interfaces and presentation, and in other technological questions doc13027 none This proposal will create a computerized bibliography of early printing in Latin America. The Center for Bibliographical Studies at the University of California, Riverside, will create the file in cooperation with major Latin American libraries, in particular the National Library of Mexico. This file will be of assistance to scholars in literature, printing, and languages. Experiments will investigate the means of assuring quality control, searchability, and other new computer techniques for dealing with such catalog files doc13028 none This IGERT award supports the establishment of a multidisciplinary graduate training program of education and research in environmental economics (including resource economics), integrating environmental science with economics. The vision of the Program is to provide the first truly multidisciplinary Ph.D. program in environmental economics, a program that does not compromise the depth of economics education nor the depth of education in a companion natural science discipline. Most Ph.D. programs in environmental economics are either very narrowly economic in orientation or disciplinarily broad, with some strength in a variety of disciplines, including economics. This new IGERT program seeks a third path, producing Ph.D.s who are as well trained in economics as any graduating from a good economics department but who also have Ph.D. level depth in one of four complementary fields of natural science: climate, conservation biology, hydrology and marine science. The complementary science fields specified are not intended to be comprehensive but rather to reflect faculty strengths at UCSB. IGERT fellowship support facilitates the additional curricular burden of significant coursework in a companion area of natural science. During the first half of their nominal five years in the Program, students acquire strength in economics and their companion natural science discipline, primarily through coursework. As students move into the second half of their tenure in the Program, they become absorbed in research and research workshops, culminating in the writing of the dissertation. In addition to coursework, three features of the curriculum are designed to build multidisciplinary strength: (i) research seminars in environmental policy, environmental economics, and the chosen complementary field of natural science; (ii) development of an original empirical paper as an intermediate step to the dissertation; and (iii) assisting faculty with the supervision of Masters students involved in group thesis work. Other aspects of the program are designed to strengthen student research skills, introduce issues of ethics in research and develop skills for entering the job market. It is the goal of this IGERT Program to train the next generation of environmental economists, people who can truly bridge the gap between economics and the natural sciences that underlie environmental problems. The program described is comprehensive, designed to turn out research leaders and innovative thinkers. These graduates will enrich the workplace, both academic and nonacademic. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fourth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-two institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences; Geosciences; Biological Sciences; and Education and Human Resources doc13029 none Basic information on the physical properties of materials, such as charge transport, specific heat, and magnetization, are increasingly important in a number of different fields. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program will be used to purchase a Physical Property Measurement System from Quantum Design that will form the core capability of a Physical Properties Characterization Facility at UCR. With this instrument, the specific heat, electrical transport, and AC torque magnetometry can be measured as a function of temperature from 0.5 K to 350 K and field up to 14 T. Broad interest has been expressed in the capability of this facility by researchers in condensed matter physics, chemistry, engineering, and the life sciences from UCR, several local colleges, and a government laboratory. The instrument also supports UCR s initiative in materials science. Some of the systems of interest include: biomaterials and pi-conjugated macromolecular materials with well-defined architectures, lanthanide and actinide intermetallic systems, exotic magnetic and superconducting materials, Fullerene chemistry, and molecular metals such Phenalenyl-based neutral radical conductors. Along with the research program, the instrument will be used in a required advanced laboratory course for undergraduates majoring in Physics. In recent years, there is much interest in exotic materials that exhibit new fundamental principles of nature, which can sometimes be exploited to yield useful products. As new systems are synthesized, characterizing their basic properties such as the way electric charge moves, the thermal response, and the magnetic response is important. Funds from this award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program will be used to purchase a Physical Property Measurement System from Quantum Design. This instrument is fully automated and has sophisticated control systems for performing these measurements on small samples over a large range of temperatures and as a function of applied magnetic field. Scientists working in condensed matter physics, chemistry, materials science, and the life sciences often deal with new materials or systems where this type of information is useful, and we expect researchers from several departments at UCR, some local colleges, and a government laboratory to use this equipment. The instrument will also be used in a required advanced laboratory course for undergraduates majoring in Physics doc13030 none The Materials Creation Training Program (MCTP) at UCLA will train scientists to be leaders in the design, synthesis, and production of new materials for electronic, computer, communication, and nanoscale devices. The training and mentoring faculty come from departments in Physical Sciences (Physics and Astronomy, Chemistry and Biochemistry) and Engineering (Mechanical and Aerospace, Chemical, and Electrical Engineering, and Materials Science). All are associates of the UCLA Exotic Materials Institute (EMI), which will administer the MCTP. Many are also members of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) - a state-supported venture that was created in to provide facilities and resources for materials and medical nanoscience. This resource will be available for training and research of MCTP Fellows. The MCTP unites a broad range of molecular and materials architects, synthetic chemists, and device fabricators, at UCLA and at partner industrial and national laboratories. MCTP Fellows are supported for two years of their graduate careers, during which they will work in teams with UCLA and off-campus scientist partners using state-of-the-art instrumentation and computational resources. Novel training aspects will include a new graduate course involving all aspects of materials and molecular design, synthesis, testing, and modification of materials, device fabrication and testing, and demonstration and marketing aspects of practical devices. This course will deal with science issues beyond the laboratory and will develop researchers versed in the importance of understanding materials properties across length scales, from molecular to macroscopic. Each MCTP Fellow will spend several months or more at an industrial or national laboratory partner site. Research projects will include the design and synthesis of new molecules, the transformation of these into molecular solids and polymers, the formation of new inorganic and organic information composites, and the development of devices based on these new materials. Fellows will be selected for excellence and diversity. The new graduate program will be evaluated on a yearly basis by a board including university, industrial, and government representatives. Community outreach activities will emphasize the importance and potential of scientific research and attractiveness of graduate education in science. The Materials (MCTP), Bioinformatics, and Neuroengineering IGERTs at UCLA constitute a new graduate educational paradigm, emphasizing multidisciplinary research encompassing life and physical sciences, as well as computer science and engineering. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fourth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-two institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Mathematical and Physical Sciences; Engineering; and Education and Human Resources doc13031 none In eukaryotes, the Dbf4-dependent kinase (DDK) triggers DNA synthesis at origins of replication by phosphorylating at least one component of the replicative DNA helicase, Mcm2p. This in turn leads to unwinding of DNA and establishment of the replication fork. In the filamentous fungus Aspergillus nidulans, DDK is composed of a regulatory subunit, nimO Dbf4 , and a kinase catalytic subunit, cdc7 asp . The substrate of nimOp-cdc7p kinase is encoded by the nimQ Mcm2 gene. Mutations in two newly identified genes, snoA and snoB (suppressor-of-nimO), partially alleviate the heat sensitivity of the nimO18 mutation. snoA suppressors act indirectly by stabilizing nimO18p or by elevating nimO18p levels, whereas snoB suppression may occur through direct association with nimO18p. This project is devoted to isolating the snoA and snoB genes, and to defining the molecular mechanisms by which snoAp and snoBp influence nimOp function. The specific aims of the research are as follows: (1) use a combination of walking, sequencing, and functional complementation to isolate and molecularly characterize the snoA and snoB genes; and (2) use cell biological and biochemical tools to investigate mechanisms by which snoA and snoB suppressors modify nimO function. For example, in vivo DNA labeling will be used to measure DNA synthesis, and northern blotting will be used to assess nimO mRNA levels. Epitope-tagged nimO and or cdc7 asp alleles will be used to characterize nimOp cell cycle dynamics, including turnover, phosphorylation, localization, and the influence of snoA and snoB suppressors. A nimOp-Cdc7p kinase assay will employ the tagged alleles and Mcm2p nimQ as a substrate. This project will enhance the understanding of eukaryotic DNA synthesis and cell cycle regulation by defining the functions of two genes that interact with an initiator of DNA synthesis. These discoveries may in turn provide new insights about cell division. In addition, this project will provide undergraduate students with the opportunity to play an active, substantive role in an ongoing, scientifically rigorous research project doc13032 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin in La Crosse will acquire a three-laser heterodyne frequency measurement system. The measurement system will allow the investigators to measure the wavelengths, frequencies and characteristics (relative intensity, frequency offset and polarization) of newly discovered laser emissions in the far infrared region. This equipment will then be used in conjunction with an existing optically pumped molecular laser (OPML) and Stark spectrometer. With this enhanced laser system, the principal investigators will investigate molecules that are currently of interstellar and atmospheric interest. The addition of new laser emissions greatly enhances the scope of optically pumped molecular lasers. By opening up the short-wavelength portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, complete coverage of the entire far infrared region is accomplished and a number of spectroscopic techniques will benefit. These studies will involve the active participation of undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse doc13033 none This award provides a travel grant to assure that approximately nine U.S. historians of all levels who have appropriate interest in and knowledge of the History of Telecommunications will have an opportunity to attend a conference on the history of telecommunications to be held at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John s 25 -27 July . The conference is organized by The IEEE History Committee and the IEEE History Center at Rutgers University. The grantees will be chosen by the Program Committee on the basis of merit from among those eligible participants registering for the workshop. As telecommunications become ever more important economically, politically, and socially, it is important to understand better their historical development. The conference will bring together both engineers and historians for two and a half days of paper presentations and discussions, shared breakfasts and lunches, and optional evening activities and excursions doc13034 none SGER Kargon and Anderson, Light and Enlightenment, A Digital Variorum Edition of Newton s Opticks SES 01- This project supports a two-day workshop to bring together representatives of various disciplines. The goal is to lay a secure foundation for a multi-year effort to bring into existence a digital variorum edition of Newton s Opticks. Such an edition is intended to clearly represent the changes over time in Newton s work, for during Newton s lifetime, the Opticks appeared in three English, two Latin and two French editions. The evolution of this text is a key indicator of changes in Newton s thinking about important concepts such as the aether and force, and provides important clues to Newton s views on the rapidly changing experimental sciences of chemistry and electricity over the last quarter century of his life. Variorum editions are notoriously difficult to effect. Print versions that attempt to collate changes over several versions are complicated, sometimes confusing and always difficult to use. This workshop is intended to discuss avenues for solving some of these problems, so that a scholarly instrument can be developed. This instrument will make of use of digital techniques to enable researchers in the history of science and technology to perform analyses of Newton s Opticks hitherto not possible. Most digitization work in our area of concern either (1) transfers existing patterns of research to the screen and allows text searching, or (2) makes useful materials available at a distance. This work has been useful and worthy but does not tap the power and range of digital environments. The PIs wish to develop a software tool that will enable us, though digitization, to allow our research to go beyond the paper world and to ask and answer questions not now possible. This project will require the efforts of historians of science, language specialists, historians of publishing, and software designers. Putting together such a diverse team, asking the right questions, designing an instrument useful to its intended audience, and managing the dissemination of the product is a very complex task and entails large risks: risks of our time and effort, and substantial funds for the development of technical tools that do not now exist doc13035 none The ability of plants to respond to damage by pests and pathogens is widespread, but not all plant tissues are capable of producing defensive responses. Defensive responsiveness is greatest in young leaves and decreases dramatically with age. The variation in defensive capabilities among different parts of plants affects the foraging of herbivores on plants, the ability of herbivores to develop resistance to plant defenses, and the success of predators in locating herbivores. To understand the ecology and evolution of plants and their interactions with herbivores, it is critical to understand how plant defensive responses differ among different plant tissues. The movement of carbohydrates throughout the canopies of trees may influence the ability of young foliage to develop defensive responses. For example, the ability of wounded Poplar leaves to obtain the resources they need to produce defensive chemicals (polyphenolics) appears to be affected by the rate at which carbohydrates are imported from the plant vascular system. In other words, the magnitude of the defensive response is directly related to the flow of resources to wounded leaves. This flow of resources causes variation in defensive responses among different plant tissues, because wounded tissues vary in their ability to acquire resources from the plant vascular system. The PIs propose to test this hypothesis rigorously with greenhouse and laboratory experiments on hybrid poplar and oak saplings. Chemical analyses of plant foliage will be conducted to assess defensive responses, and carbon 13 labeling experiments will be used to measure rates of resource movement in whole plants. The proposed research will result in (1) the development of a model designed to predict where and when defensive responses are likely to occur, (2) the establishment of monitoring technology that can be applied to a broad range of plant communities in the field, and (3) the training of graduate and undergraduate students in the plant sciences doc13036 none Observations of the auroral ionosphere have shown the presence of very strong, highly localized gradients in the ionospheric density. These gradients appear to be related to localized electric fields. This project will examine the features of localized electrostatic fields, and the plasma waves and density fluctuations related to such fields. The project will also examine the interaction of ions with the localized electric fields. The research will quantify the ion interaction with the fields and determine the resulting theoretical ion distribution functions, which may then be compared with direct measurements doc13037 none This is a planning grant to develop a research plan to explicitly test the comparative effectiveness of an instructional approach that teaches phoneme manipulation versus and alternative approach emphasizing general pre-literacy skills. The project outcomes will provide systematic experimental data addressing the specific types of phoneme awareness instruction that could be effective in teaching disadvantaged preschool children the reading skills that will best prepare them for later academic success. The project will be based in Boston Head Start programs doc13038 none Crisalle This Americas Program award will support Dr. Oscar D. Crisalle of the University of Florida in collaboration with Dr. Jose M. Pinto of the University of Sao Paulo, for the organization of the 2nd Pan American Workshop on Process Systems Engineering to be held in Guaruja, Sao Paulo, Brazil on September 20-21, . This project will focus on two specific areas of process systems engineering: (1) Process Control and (2) Process Planning and Optimization. The major goal of the workshop is to identify common research priorities, and to explore possible areas of joint research cooperation in process engineering research that can lead to significant scientific and economic benefits for the participating countries. Several benefits will be derived from this workshop, including (1) the development of new collaborations in the area of process control, (2) expanding the number of collaborations in the area of process planning and optimization beyond that achieved through a previous workshop, (3) increasing the number of exchanges of students and faculty between the US and South America, and (4) the publication of several articles in a special issue of computers in Chemical Engineering dedicated to covering the workshop doc13039 none In this Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Gary A. Strobel of the Department of Plant Sciences at Montana State University, will trap, isolate and characterize the volatile substances produced by Muscodor alba, a new fungal genus and species isolated from the Honoduran rainforest. It has been demonstrated that at least one of the gaseous compounds produced by M. alba is lethal to virtually all other endophytic fungi and bacteria that are present in the stem tissues of its plant host. The separation and identification of the volatile components possessing antimicrobial activity will be pursued. With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Gary A. Strobel, of the Department of Plant Sciencs at Montana State University, will isolate and identify volatile organic compounds produced by a new fungal species, M. alba. This mixture of gaseous substances has been shown to be lethal to a range of other fungi and bacteria. Isolation of the bioactive product(s) may result in the identification of compounds with potential pharmaceutical applications, including antimicrobial agents doc13040 none This project seeks to impact K-8 grade girls by disseminating information on gender equity issues, barriers, possibilities and role models, via radio to a national audience. Through radio WAMC will develop a weekly segment and 4 regional call-in shows for national distribution that will inform, enlighten, engage, and inspire listeners on the issues and possibilities of gender equity in the sciences for K-8 grade girls. This model will be shared nationally so that it can be replicated. WAMC will create, produce, air and distribute the weekly segments and call-in shows regionally through WAMC s 10 station-network, nationally and globally via Public Radio and ABC satellites, the Internet, mailings of CDs and the Armed Forces Radio. The Gender Equity segments will be incorporated into WAMC s award-winning radio programs 51Percent, their show concerning women s issues, and WAMC s current call-in program Vox Pop. This project is a collaboration with an Advisory Board of professional women, nationally known for their involvement with gender equity, and The Capital Area School Development Association, a study council affiliated with the School of Education at The University at Albany, SUNY, which serves as a cooperative planning and development unit through which affiliated schools and educational agencies may more effectively define and fulfill their purposes and functions in serving the educational needs of their communities. Both will assist in evaluation of the program and the Advisory Board will give input for program content. This project has the potential of reaching more than 300,000 listeners per month in WAMC s regional area alone. Additionally, 51Percent is heard on over 125 radio stations nationally via satellite to affiliates of the ABC Radio Networks, via satellite to stations able to access the Public Radio Satellite, and on Compact Disc to stations that are not interconnected. Additionally, the program airs worldwide via the Armed Forces Radio to 133 countries, and online via the Internet through www.wamc.org, the WAMC web site and www.ThePublicRadioStation.com, WAMC s model non-broadcast public radio style program stream doc13041 none Jackson The investigator uses mechanical models to investigate the mechanisms involved in tumor encapsulation, multiple lobe formation, and transcapsular spread. Mass and momentum balance equations are written for the normal cells, neoplastic cells, the extracellular matrix (ECM) on which they are anchored, and the interstitial fluid in which they are bathed. This system is closed by suitable constitutive relations for the mass supply, the partial stress tensor, and the momentum supply of each constituent. The former is defined on the basis of phenomenological observations of tumor cell growth and the latter is based on the mechanical properties of each phase. The model equations, consisting of a set nonlinear conservation and evolution equations, are analyzed using asymptotic analysis, bifurcation analysis, and perturbation theory in order to quantify the relative importance of chemical processes (such as ECM production and degradation) and mechanical properties of the tissue (such as ECM density and stiffness) in influencing capsule formation. A further objective is to characterize the bifurcation that leads to multiple lobe formation. Through analysis and simulation of the model, the investigator aims to discover which factors (mechanical and chemical) determine successful capsule formation and to quantify their influence. The mechanisms by which a tumor becomes encapsulated as a continuum of cells or as several lobes of different sizes, separated by connective tissue, is an interesting, important, and unsolved phenomenon in tumor biology. In fact, the presence (or absence) of a dense capsule surrounding a neoplastic mass is a major determinant of prognosis and the ultimate survival of the host. Despite the importance of capsule formation, little is known about the process by which capsules arise. The incestigator develops a mathematical modeling framework that describes tumor growth, encapsulation, multiple lobe formation, and transcapsular spread based on the physical forces and cellular interactions involved. The specific aims are to use mechanical models to assist in understanding i) the role tumor cell, normal cell, and extracellular matrix (ECM) interactions in capsule formation, ii) the effects of tumor induced ECM production and degradation on the formation of tumor capsules, iii) the role of tissue properties such as ECM density and stiffness in slowing or impeding the process of tumor encapsulation, and iv) the bifurcation that allows a simple encapsulated continuum of cells to make the transition to a multi-nodular form. There are implications for clinical diagnosis as well as for prognosis doc13042 none Joan Richards, Brown University Dividing Reason: Mathematics and Spirit in the World of Augustus and Sophia De Morgan The principal investigator is preparing a paired intellectual biography of the early Victorian couple, Augustus and Sophia De Morgan. An in-depth study that links the lives of Augustus and Sophia De Morgan will contribute to our understanding of the historical roots of modern secular society. Augustus taught mathematics at the secular University College in London; all of his prolific writings on mathematics and logic were motivated by his desire to establish a public world of reason that would transcend religious difference. The approach to truth that Sophia drew out of her experiences producing and raising their seven children was very different from those Augustus developed in his University classes. Whereas Augustus tried to capture truth through a purifying rational program, Sophia found it in empathetic listening. The contrast between the views of this husband and wife team reflects the deep structure of a secular world that mandated a strict separation between the private and public spheres; revisiting that world promises to shed light on the epistemological implications of the sharp distinctions between public and private on which many modern secular societies are built. NSF support supplements a Guggenheim Fellowship, and covers research travel in England. The investigator will examine materials in London, Oxford and Cambridge to supplement an already substantial knowledge of Augustus s work with research into Sophia. Outcomes include a scholarly monograph and presentations to the History of Science Society doc13043 none Sater The proposed work addresses the cellular mechanisms underlying neural specification in Xenopus. Neural fate is inhibited by BMP-4, and induction of anterior neural ectoderm is initiated by extracellular BMP-4 antagonists such as noggin and chordin. FGF has been implicated in the initiation of neural development; current findings indicate that the FGF effector MAP kinase is necessary for neural specification. The inhibitory effects of BMP-4 are mediated by transcriptional repression: expression of key neural-specific genes is initiated prior to gastrulation and later inhibited in non-neural ectoderm by BMP-4. The recent finding that MAP kinase can inhibit Smad1 in mammalian cells suggests that MAP kinase may antagonize BMP-4 Smad1 signals during neural specification in vivo. The proposed work tests this hypothesis, and examines the functional significance of these interactions. The studies in Aim I will determine whether transcriptional regulation via endogenous Smad1 is affected by alterations in MAPK activity. The studies in Aim II will use overexpression of Smad1 proteins carrying mutations at MAPK sites that prevent inhibitory phosphorylation. These studies will determine whether inhibitory phosphorylation of MAPK sites in Smad1 participates in neural specification and patterning. They will also address the hypothesis that inhibition of Smad1 is necessary for posterior neural specification. The studies in Aim III will determine whether antagonistic interactions between the FGF MAPK and BMP-4 pathways can affect boundaries of gene expression within gastrula ectoderm. These studies will examine the spatial patterns of activation of these pathways, and of Smad1-dependent gene expression, in ectoderm exposed to localized sources of FGF and or BMP-4. This investigation will compare the pattern of Smad1-dependent transcription in ectoderm overexpressing WT-Smad1 with that of ectoderm expressing a mutant Smad1 impervious to MAPK. The comparison will show whether antagonistic interactions contribute to the establishment of spatial boundaries. Preliminary findings indicate that MAPK and BMP-4 signals are mutually antagonistic in Xenopus ectoderm: mutations in Smad1 that prevent inhibtion by MAP kinase act collectively as a gain-of-function mutation, while BMP-4 inhibits MAP kinase activity via a TAK1-dependent pathway. Since BMPs and FGFs have opposing effects in many developmental processes, analysis of the interactions between these pathways may elucidate a key cellular mechanism of developmental regulation doc13044 none Barazangi Description: This award supports a joint workshop and cooperative research project on the Tectonics of Eastern Turkey. The workshop will be held in Istanbul, Turkey, in May . The co-organizers are Dr. Muawia Barazangi, Department of Geological Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York and Dr. Niyazi Turkelli, Professor of Geophysics at the Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute (KOERI), Bogazici University, Istanbul. The workshop will focus on the evolution and origin of the Eastern Anatolian Plateau, Bitlis suture, and East Anatolian Fault Zone (EAFZ). Scientists from Cornell and the KOERI have recently deployed a temporary NSF-funded PASSCAL array in eastern Turkey. The array is designed to improve understanding of the Bitlis Zagros thrust zones as well as the nature of continental escape along the EAFZ and North Anatolian Fault Zone (NAFZ), imaging upper mantle and crustal structure in these two fairly different tectonic environments. In order to interpret these seismic images, it is necessary to incorporate geochemical, geomorphic, and geologic observations from the region. Ten US scientists and at least six Turkish scientists are expected to participate. KOERI seismologists will make several trips to Cornell for close collaboration on the analysis of data collected from a recent broadband array in eastern Turkey. Scope: This award will encourage discussion among US and Turkish scientists on several important geological questions in light of data already collected. These questions include: Is the Arabian plate being subducted, delaminated, or neither? Is the Anatolian plateau supported dynamically or isostatically? What are the current earthquake hazards in eastern Turkey? Appropriate Turkish government officials will be invited to a special session on the implications of the results concerning the evaluation of earthquake hazard in eastern Turkey. Funding for this project is provided by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Earth Sciences doc13045 none El-Sharkawi This project will explore the possibility of using new techniques from computational intelligence in order to address the task of imputing missing values in data collected by complex arrays of sensors. Sensors in a restricted environment can have readings relating to each other in such a matter that missing data from a set of failed sensors can be restored from the measurement of those remaining. When the reconstructed sensor readings are supplied as input to a process, the operation of the system is therefore still possible. Overall performance will degrade gracefully, if at all. Discovery of data constraints can be achieved by training an autoencoder using sensor data. The trained encoder, having empirically discovered interrelations among data, can then be used to restore lost readings from failed sensors. This is achieved through either application of an alternating projection onto convex set (POCS) algorithm or a more conventional search. Successful development of missing sensor data (MISED) restoration will have significant impact on a number of current technologies. The project will focus on applications to currently open and important problem in energy and avionics. The project has strong support from both industries doc13046 none The overall objective of this project is to test the hypothesis that the phospho-protein adaptor 14-3-3.a controls the reorganization of the gill epithelium during salinity acclimation of euryhaline teleosts. Specifically, this project will investigate the mechanisms of osmotic regulation of 14-3-3.a at multiple levels (expression, posttranslational regulation, and compartmentalization) and its interaction with mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs) in the adapting gill epithelium of the euryhaline fish Fundulus heteroclitus. The focus of this project is a detailed investigation of the osmotic regulation of 14-3-3.a. This is a critical issue because 14-3-3 proteins are of general and extraordinary importance for signal transduction pathways that are based on phosphorylation. These proteins are a novel type of molecular adaptor that modulates interactions among virtually all important components involved in environmentally regulated signaling pathways, cell differentiation, and cell cycle control (Fu et al., ). 14-3-3 proteins regulate cellular activity and function by binding and sequestering proteins phosphorylated on serine or threonine. These molecules likely control the reorganization of gill epithelium during salinity adaptation of euryhaline teleosts because 1) protein phosphorylation is a major mechanism of osmosensory signal transduction and 2) 14-3-3 proteins are involved in the regulation of many mitogenic, ion transport, and cell differentiation pathways. Substantial preliminary data provide a strong foundation for the proposed project and represent a comprehensive basis for addressing all aims of this project in depth. A cloned and sequenced novel cDNA from the euryhaline fish F. heteroclitus (GB AF ) contains an open reading frame encoding the first known 14-3-3 protein from fish that is named 14-3-3.a. Recent data provide clear evidence that the 14-3-3.a gene is strongly induced in gill epithelium of F. heteroclitus transferred from seawater (SW) to fresh water (FW). The abundance and activities of the MAPKs ERK, JNK, and p38 in gill epithelium of F. heteroclitus transferred from SW to FW and vice versa show that the activity of all MAPKs is strongly modulated during salinity acclimation of euryhaline fish. The aims focus on a detailed analysis of the osmotic regulation of 14-3-3.a in gill epithelium of the euryhaline fish F. heteroclitus: 1) To know the profile of osmotic regulation of 14-3-3.a mRNA and protein expression. 2) To investigate how osmolality changes affect posttranslational modification of 14-3-3.a. 3) To know the cellular and subcellular localization of 14-3-3.a and how it is osmotically regulated. 4) To determine whether 14-3-3.a interacts with MAPKs in the osmotically adapting gill epithelium. The approach for addressing these aims will be based on recombinant DNA methodology; western blotting, northern blotting, two-dimensional electrophoresis followed by MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry, immunocytochemistry, immunoprecipitation, pull-down assays, and kinase assays. It is anticipated that this project will significantly advance the knowledge of cellular osmosensory signal transduction. It will introduce a novel euryhaline fish model to osmosensory signal transduction research. Euryhaline fishes have an extrarenal transport epithelium the gill epithelium that is directly exposed to the external milieu and can be studied in intact animals in vivo. Unlike for mammalian renal cells, the osmolality of the medium surrounding fish gill epithelial cells can be accurately and instantaneously manipulated in vivo. This research should provide comprehensive insight into the osmotic regulation of 14-3-3.a, an excellent candidate molecule for governing many aspects of osmosensory signal transduction and cell differentiation in adapting gill epithelial cells of euryhaline teleosts exposed to salinity changes doc13047 none The objective of this research project is to develop a novel technology for successful micro injection molding with respect to lower cycle time and better replication as compared to the existing technology. This will be accomplished by rapidly heating the mold surface so that the melt can fill the cavity isothermally and yet be processed within the normal injection molding cycle time. Plastics have so far played only a subordinate role in the multibillion-dollar microsystem industry. A commercial breakthrough strongly depends on means of low cost mass fabrication with dimensional accuracy and good part quality. Widely used mass-production methods involving polymeric materials such as injection molding, however, require significant modification to adapt to micro molding applications. One of the hurdles limiting the current technical capability in micro injection molding is that the molten polymer in a tiny cavity instantaneously freezes upon contacting the relatively cold cavity wall. The problem gets worse when micro features with higher aspect ratio are to be molded. The three phase research plan includes an experimental component devoted to creating a flexible micro molding fixture, the second phase will be to conduct processing experiments with several thermoplastics, and the final phase will be the characterization of micro scale flow behaviors for this micro injection molding process. This research project will also yield much needed experimental data regarding the effect of microscale phenomena on the flow behavior of polymeric materials. It is expected that development of the integrated technology will push the current technical envelope of micro injection molding further into those areas that have so far been predominated by etching- and lithography- based fabrications. This can lead to 3-D microfabrication of structurally designed parts doc13048 none Sheldon Smith, Metropolitan State College Denver Causation and the Rule of Law At least since the time of David Hume, philosophers -- including such notable ones as Immanuel Kant and Bertrand Russell -- as well as certain physicists -- including Ernst Mach and Gustav Kirchhoff -- have wondered about the connection between the laws of nature and the relation of cause and effect. This project contributes to that discussion in a way that remains closer to the content of actual physical theories than most of the literature on the subject. After criticizing various standard accounts of lawhood, this project delineates three different classes of laws of physics. The distinction between these three different classes of laws is arrived at by an examination of the structure of classical continuum mechanics, but it is shown that these classes appear in other physical theories, such as Quantum Mechanics, as well. It is further shown that what is known as the Green s function (for a differential operator) is the mathematical locus of causal claims within physics. Once the causal relation and laws have been located within a physical theory, standard views of the relationship between laws and causation including what are known as the singularist view and the covering-law approach are evaluated and found wanting. Other concepts closely related to those of law and of causation, such as the notion of physical necessity, are explored as well. The project results in an accurate and precise account of the relationship between physical laws -- of each of the three types -- and causation as embodied in the Green s function doc13049 none This grant provides funding to create a mathematical framework to design effective aviation security system strategies. Aviation security protects vital national interests, as well as passengers and aircraft. Key components of an aviation security system include baggage and passenger screening devices and operations. The goals of this project are to determine: (1) how to measure the performance of aviation security systems, (2) where to deploy aviation security technology devices when designing such systems, (3) how to operate such devices optimally after they are deployed, and (4) how to quantify and optimize the resulting effectiveness of deployment and security operation strategies. The methodology will use discrete optimization models such as the knapsack problem, complexity analysis, and heuristics developed for intractable instances of the models to conduct the necessary analysis and to obtain the desired results. The results of this research will provide a systematic approach to compare and evaluate different types of aviation security system strategies that incorporate both new and existing aviation security technologies. This approach also has the potential to be used to design and implement new aviation security system strategies capable of enhancing the level of security attainable given the security resources and technologies that are currently available or may be available in the future. Moreover, the results of this research can be used to quantify the value of new investments in different types of aviation security technologies, to determine their potential impact on enhancing aviation security at airports within the nation. Beyond aviation security, this approach may also be applied to other screening environments, such as computer security systems screening for unauthorized users and food safety systems screening for toxic levels of bacteria doc13050 none This project concerns the development and application of a unique method for the symbolic computation of linear stability boundaries in time-periodic differential-delay equations (DDEs). Such equations arise in several linearized models of chatter instability in high-speed machining, including milling with arbitrary immersion level and turning with modulated speed or impedance, as well as in other important engineering and scientific applications. In addition, the local nonlinear bifurcation analysis for the full nonlinear models is also performed. These objectives are accomplished by combining some important topics and recent methodologies in high-speed machining, symbolic computation, and nonlinear dynamics into a single research thrust. By incorporating time-delay into an existing symbolic algorithm for stability analysis of time-periodic systems, the stability boundaries (for example, in the two-parameter plane of spindle speed and depth of cut) which predict chatter in machining operations are obtained analytically. This task constitutes the first phase of the work plan and represents a significant design tool since, given a value of one parameter (say spindle speed), the critical value of the other (cutting depth) is easily obtained. Consequently, this approach provides an attractive alternative to designers who often try to operate in a narrow spindle speed range on the stability chart while retaining as high a cutting speed as possible. Since recent research on chatter instability in turning indicates that linear stability analysis alone is inadequate and should be accompanied by a full nonlinear analysis, the second phase of the work plan, namely the analytical bifurcation analysis for the time-periodic milling models, is accomplished by combining existing computational tools for time-periodic systems with the Hopf bifurcation algorithm for DDEs. The results thus obtained allows the determination of the critical parameter set for loss of global stability and the domain of attraction just prior to loss of local stability. Experimental validation of the theoretical results is made by collaborators at NIST. This project fosters cross-disciplinary education in engineering and mathematics through training graduate students and bringing current research and practice (including symbolic computation) into undergraduate classrooms doc13051 none This project seeks to characterize the entire range of Arabidopsis proteins that are regulated by interaction with 14-3-3 proteins; to identify components from metabolic and signal transduction pathways that utilize 14-3-3 regulators, and to address fundamental aspects of 14-3-3 function in plants. 14-3-3s have emerged as critical regulators of important and diverse cellular processes that extend to every tissue and organ. Indeed, 14-3-3s appear to be intrinsically necessary for regulatory events that are absolutely crucial to normal growth and development in many species, and especially in plants. Initial searches of the Arabidopsis genome predict that 14-3-3s interact with fully 10 to 20 percent of the Arabidopsis gene products. The most recognized of 14-3-3 activities involve protein kinases, phosphorylation events and signal transduction pathways involved in growth and development, with one underlying theme being that 14-3-3s bind to specific phosphorylated client proteins in order to influence the regulation of the target activity. The goals of the present project are to identify in the Arabidopsis genome client proteins that possess 14-3-3 docking sites and to assay the interaction strength of the potential docking site against the family of 14-3-3 proteins in order to provide a tested, predictive algorithm for determining of the spectrum of 14-3-3 interactions that should be expected for each client protein. These data, combined with emerging data from 14-3-3 knockouts and 14-3-3 isoform expression patterns, should provide key insights into the potential regulatory functions of the 14-3-3 signal mediating molecules, and a central, fully characterized database for predicting 14-3-3 mediated signaling in diverse pathways. By highlighting potential regulatory sites across diverse gene families and metabolic pathways, this project will provide an integrating effect on the many projects identifying specific functional aspects of Arabidopsis gene families. As genes are functionally characterized, the 14-3-3 client database will provide immediate predictions of phosphorylation and 14-3-3 dependent regulation that will accelerate the understanding of the regulation of many gene families and metabolic and signaling pathways doc13052 none Hudecki This award supports a series of workshops, to take place in April and October at the National Science Foundation in Arlington,Virginia, that will explore best practices for the development and management of international research experiences for undergraduate students. Organized by Michael S. Hudecki and Christopher A. Loretz of the State University of New York at Buffalo, the workshops bring together directors of several NSF-supported international REU (research experiences for undergraduates) sites, administrators of study abroad programs, student participants, and foreign mentor-supervisors. Their collective experience will be described as a reference on best practices for managing international REUs. Among the issues to be discussed are: program development, selection of research projects and foreign mentors, sustainability, student recruitment, management plans, pre-program activities, on-site activities, post program activities and program evaluation. The April workshop will produce a draft manual to be tested in summer by a set of new international site directors. Results from the field will be reviewed and findings incorporated into the final version at a second workshop in October. The manual will be available on the Web for public access and downloadable in print version. International undergraduate research programs and sites can promote the development of a globally competent science and engineering workforce. The undergraduate level, in fact, may prove to be an ideal time in a research career for immersion in an intensive international environment. The reference for best practices that will be made available to REU directors and the broader research community will advance future efforts in international undergraduate research and education and ensure that students and faculty receive maximum benefit from the experience doc13053 none Physiological Role and Phylogenetic Diversity of Termite Gut Symbionts Principal Investigator: John A. Breznak, Michigan State University Termites are important decomposers of earth s major form of biomass -- lignocellulosic plant material and residues derived from it, e.g. humus. In order to thrive on such relatively refractory, nitrogen-poor food resources, termites are aided by a diverse community of gut microbial symbionts. The nature of the gut microbes, and their role in termite nutrition and vitality, has been an ongoing focus of research in the PI s laboratory for many years. Research supported by the current award is largely an outgrowth of a breakthrough, which led to two major discoveries during the previous funding period. The breakthrough was the isolation in pure culture of a long-recognized, major, and morphologically distinct, but hitherto elusive, component of the termite gut microbial community, i.e. spirochetes. The discoveries were: (a) the recognition of them as novel species of Treponema capable of acetate production from a variety of substrates, including H2+CO2; and (b) the demonstration of nitrogenase structural genes (nifH) and N2 fixation in these (and subsequently in free-living) spirochetes. Inasmuch as microbially-produced acetate supports up to 100% of the daily energy requirement of termites, and N2 fixation by gut microbes can supply up to 60% of the nitrogen for termite growth, the importance of spirochetes in termite nutrition was becoming clearer. Moreover, as neither H2 CO2-acetogenesis nor N2 fixation had ever been recognized in spirochetes before, these discoveries were also providing new insight into the metabolic diversity of these fascinating bacteria. A combination of physiological, biochemical, and molecular biological methods will now be used to explore these metabolic activities in greater detail. We seek to identify factors affecting their expression and activity, and to assess the importance of spirochetes to H2 CO2-acetogenesis and N2 fixation in situ. Cooperative and antagonistic interactions of spirochetes with other members of the gut microbiota will also be examined, including: the provision of folate compounds (required for growth of termite gut spirochetes) by other gut microbes that utilize spirochete products, e.g. acetate oxidizers; and antagonisms between H2 CO2-acetogenic spirochetes and H2-consuming methanogens - two groups of microbes competing for the same energy source. Studies will also be done to test the hypothesis that many of the (non-spirochetal) gut microbes colonizing the microoxic region of hindguts near the epithelium are microaerophiles that have previously escaped isolation in pure culture, because they will not grow in air or under anoxia. It is hypothesized that such microaerophiles are acetate-oxidizers that consume inwardly diffusing O2, thereby rendering the luminal region of the gut anoxic for the fermentative production (by spirochetes and protozoa) of more acetate. This latter effort is likely to reveal new principles about life under hypoxia, a pervasive but poorly studied condition experienced by many organisms in our biosphere. This research project will involve graduate students and a postdoctoral and, hence, will expand the base of scientists trained to explore two of the most salient features of the microbial world - its enormous, but poorly understood and largely untapped diversity, and its importance to macrobial life on our planet doc13054 none The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at the University of Central Florida (UCF) has recently constructed a new large-scale structural testing facility. The new lab will allow Structures and Geotechnical engineering faculty members and students to conduct static, fatigue, ad pseudo-dynamic tests on large-scale structural components and subassemblies. This award will enable CEE UCF to purchase a 128-channel data acquisition system to supplement structural testing equipment that has already been acquired. The data acquisition system will be used to collect measurements of strains, displacements, forces, and temperature in the tests that will be conducted in the new facility doc13055 none The purpose of this research is to increase our understanding of the early career development of girls as they form opinions, develop belief structures, and make decisions about career options in science, mathematics, engineering, and or technology careers by expanding our theoretical framework and empirical base to include a more direct focus on the influence of outcome expectations, perceived barriers, and perceived support. The need to conduct inquiry into the role of outcome beliefs in the development, stability, and change in career interests, and to examine contextual factors that impact the eventual entry of young girls and women into the pipeline toward pursuing scientific and technical careers provides the framework for the research. This planning grant involves the recruitment and commitment of several collaborating researchers, research institutions, and school systems. Collaborative researchers will provide the expertise across the disciplines of counseling, educational psychology , and science. Collaboration across institutions will provide the opportunity for multiple sites to bring existing resources to bear on the problem and allow for research across widely varying demographics and locations. Multiple school systems will contribute to the opportunity to generalize to populations of rural, suburban, and urban youth, as well as varying socioeconomic groups. The planning year will include the identification of a sufficiently large and diverse sample of girls, and the design and pilot testing of both qualitative and quantitative instrumentation. This study will use a multimethod approach to examine the outcome expectations and perceived barriers and supports ofgirls, ages 10-14, the impact of these expectations on career-related interests, and, if funded through a future grant, the development of these interestS and outcome expectations over time. Focus groups will be used to identify factors to be used in the development of items for several Q-sorts and to be incorporated into assessment tools. Quantitative instruments that will measure the constructs of interest will be designed, when necessary , revised when appropriate, and then pilot tested with middle school youth doc13056 none Elimelech The objective of this research is to provide a comprehensive microscopic-level understanding of the thermodynamics and micro-hydrodynamics of concentration polarization and cake formation in crossflow membrane filtration. A major emphasis will be placed on the identification of the transition point from a disordered liquid-like phase in the concentration polarization layer to an ordered solid-like cake layer. The research will involve the following tasks: 1) Prediction of the equilibrium structure of a colloidal dispersion, 2) Evaluation of the osmotic pressure, sedimentation coefficient and diffusion coefficient, 3) Prediction of the liquid-solid transition point in colloidal systems under crossflow membrane filtration conditions, 4) Prediction of the extent of concentration polarization and or cake formation and the resulting permeate flux decline behavior, 5) Selection of a model experimental system for validation of the theory and 6) Experimental validation of the above theoretical approach using model colloidal dispersions at various background electrolyte concentrations, particle concentrations, pH, crossflow velocities and operating pressures. This research is expected to lead to a sound theoretical basis for quantification of permeate flux decline behavior in crossflow membrane filtration of colloidal dispersions. These results will become increasingly important as membrane processes, particularly nanofiltration and ultrafiltration, become more viable for treatment of natural and waste waters because these technologies offer a comprehensive approach to meeting multiple water quality objectives for a myriad of dissolved and colloidal contaminants doc13057 none Rao This award supports Vittal Rao of University of Missouri-Rolla and junior and senior researchers from various U.S. universities to participate in workshops on engineering education. The workshops will be held concomitantly with the International Conference on Engineering Education to be held in Oslo, Norway, August 6-10, . The workshop topics are internet-based course development, exchange programs for students and faculty, multidisciplinary design programs, and industry collaborations and alliances. The selection process for which participants will be supported will be open, and a special effort will be made to include junior faculty members. Special attention will be given to strengthening ties between delegates from the U.S. and those from the various other countries. A primary goal of the workshops is to catalyze the development of action plans for long-term international collaborations and partnerships, and to promote sharing of educational innovations between the schools of different countries doc13058 none Visual masking occurs when the visibility of one stimulus, called the target, is reduced by the presence of another stimulus, designated as the mask. Like the techniques of binocular rivalry and of multi-stable percepts of the same stimulus, visual masking provides a way to dissociate neural processes that are merely stimulus-dependent but not correlated with conscious perception, from neural processes that are percept-dependent and thus correlated with conscious perception of the stimulus. The broad long-term objective of this research is to use the visual masking paradigm to study the temporal dynamics in the micro-genesis of pattern processing from the time of stimulus presentation to the time of its full registration in consciousness. A modified dual-channel model of visual masking that incorporates mutual inhibitory interactions between sustained parvocellular (P) and transient magnocellular (M) pathways will be used to study how the cortical response evoked by the mask interacts with the early and late components of the cortical response evoked by the target. The project will rely on the masking paradigms of para- and metacontrast, theoretical tools based on neural-network modeling, and the additional psychophysical techniques of target disinhibition, binocular rivalry, and unconscious priming by a masked (perceptually suppressed) target. It will investigate where and when in the stream of processing the mechanisms implicated in suppression and disinhibition of target visibility are located. It will also probe whether and when the mechanisms implicated in suppression and disinhibition of target visibility relate to stimulus-dependent (unconscious) or percept-dependent (conscious) levels of neural processing. The research is expected to provide a better understanding of the perceptual processes leading to conscious registration of stimuli. The potential applications include the development of novel biomimetic engineering design principles for autonomous perceptual devices and the development of clinical diagnostic or vulnerability markers for disorders such as dyslexia and schizophrenia doc13059 none Rose Description: This award supports a US-India cooperative research project entitled A Comprehensive Digital Library of Stellar Spectra. The US PIs are Drs. James Rose, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and David Bell and Francisco Valdes of the National Optical Astronomy Observatories (NOAO). With Indian counterparts Drs. Ranjan Gupta and Harinder Singh of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCCA), they will work toward completing a comprehensive library of stellar spectra, obtained with the coude feed telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. The library will consist of spectra for more than stars, covering a large range of atmospheric parameters such as effective temperature, surface gravity, and metal-abundance. Scope: The library will be made publicly available through the NOAO archives. It will be a major resource for many investigators, given its unprecedented scope and quality in spectral resolution, signal-to-noise ratio, and coverage of stellar atmosphere parameters. The library will also be used by both the US and India investigators in their efforts to apply Artificial Neural Network techniques to the classification of stellar spectra and population synthesis of galaxy spectra. This award is supported by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Astronomical Sciences. Rose Description: This award supports US-India Cooperative Research: A Comprehensive Digital Library of Stellar Spectra. US PIs are Drs. James Rose of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and David Bell and Francisco Valdes of the National Optical Astronomy Observatories (NOAO). With Indian counterparts Drs. Ranjan and Singh of the Inter-University IUCCA, they will work toward completing a comprehensive library of stellar spectra, obtained with the coude feed telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. The library will consist of spectra for more than stars, covering a large range of atmospheric parameters such as effective temperature, surface gravity, and metal-abundance. Scope: The library will be made publicly available through the NOAO archives. It will be a major resource for many investigators, given its unprecedented scope and quality in spectral resolution, signal-to-noise ratio, and coverage of stellar atmosphere parameters. The library will also be used by both the US and India investigators in their efforts to apply Artificial Neural Network techniques to the classification of stellar spectra and to the population synthesis of galaxy spectra. This award is supported by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Astronomical Sciences doc13060 none This award provides funds to partially support the participation of up to eight Ph.D. students at the SRCOS ASA Summer Research Conference in Statistics, to be held June 3-6, , in St. Augustine, FL. This relatively small conference will have about 50 to 60 participants, mostly from the 14-state SRCOS (Southern Regional Council on Statistics) region. The format of the meeting, with a detailed background of the presented research at the beginning of each talk, provides junior researchers and Ph.D. students with a great entry point into the various areas of research. Areas of emphasis for this year s meeting are statistics education (including distance education), outlier detection, and Markov chain Monte Carlo methods in generalized linear mixed models. The meeting facilitates interaction between junior and senior researchers, and junior researchers are encouraged to present their research either in the form of a talk or a poster session doc13061 none Suki The objective of this research is to extract information about the structure and function of the lung from noninvasive acoustic measurements. The specific aims of this research are: (1) to measure sound waves produced during airway opening (crackle sound) and the lung pressure-volume (P-V) curve in normal and surfactant depleted lungs from several species with distinctly different airway geometry, (2) to analyze the airway structure from the crackle sound and the P-V curve and compare it to available morphometric data, and (3) to use airway tree models to predict the relationships between lung mechanics, lung function including Computed Tomography images, and the mechanism of lung injury during mechanical ventilation doc13062 none This award supports the attendance of students and postdoctoral researchers at the Gordon Research Conference on Laser Diagnostics in Combustion to be held July 1-6 in South Hadley MA doc13063 none John L. Rudolph, University of Wisconsin-Madison School Science Epistemology And The American Public In The Twentieth Century The integration of science into American institutional, economic, and cultural life has increasingly become a defining characteristic of modern society. The growing importance of expert knowledge and technical skill in a country that has continued to exhibit low levels of scientific literacy has prompted scholars and policymakers to devote greater attention to the various avenues of communication between science and the lay public. As useful as much of this work has been, however, it has overlooked the schools -the one place society has set aside specifically for communicating knowledge about science to the public -as an important site of study. Though traditionally viewed as a place where only scientific content knowledge is transmitted to students, science classrooms serve a more important function mediating the relationship between science and society through its portrayal of scientific epistemology -that is, the process by which science generates reliable knowledge about the world. Perceptions of how science works in the abstract provide the backdrop against which local, context-specific scientific issues are viewed, and ultimately resolved, by the public. To date, few researchers have looked carefully at or considered the social implications of these school-science epistemologies. This research project provides a historical analysis of the image of science in schools over the course of the twentieth century. The specific aim is to understand how the curricular portrayal of scientific epistemology has been used to define the role of science in American society and culture. Dr. Rudolph uses rich archival resources of both key individuals and institutions to examine how the construction of science in education has varied from the Progressive era s view of the scientific method as the sole path to objective knowledge to the more recent images of science as only one among many, equally legitimate ways of knowing. He is interested in how portrayals of science in the classroom -through textbook, homework, and lab -both have situated the individual with respect to the scientific community and its practices and how science as an institution has been placed within the larger social and political structures of the time. With this work, Dr. Rudolph provides a detailed case-study history of United States science education in its extended social context that promises to give insight into how schools and the school curriculum have functioned in the past and how they might be made to function better as a bridge between science and the lay public in the future doc13064 none The principal investigator will participate in a UK-funded research cruise to study a hydrothermal plume above the Central Indian Ridge immediately north of the Rodrigues Triple Junction in the Indian Ocean. Large-volume water samples will be collected for particulate and dissolved thorium isotope studies. Thorium will enable the quantification of rates of chemical processes occurring on particles within this hydrothermal plume. The study also will investigate the processes controlling the geochemical fractionation of 230Th and 231Pa doc13065 none The investigators will purchase an advanced high-speed camera to make sixteen frame movies of single plasma shots . The main objective is to be able to follow magnetic reconnection and the propagation of ripples of magnetic twist (such as Alfven waves) away from regions of reconnection. The framing rate will be between 8 million and 200 million frames per second. Shot-to-shot reproducibility will no longer be a constraint because the entire fine structure evolution will be captured in a single shot. Data throughput will be increased 16-fold enabling many more experiments and investigation of many important phenomena not being pursued at present. Simulated solar prominences in the laboratory have recently been demonstrated using a unique, specially designed experimental facility at Caltech. The facility uses pulsed power plasma technology to produce a short-lived plasma (10 microseconds) with large magnetic fields (several kilogauss), high currents (tens of kiloamps), and modest dimensions (tens of centimeters). This plasma has the morphology and dynamics of a solar prominence. A program is underway to investigate the topological evolution of these simulated prominences. Topological evolution involves the breaking and reconnection of magnetic field lines and is believed to be a critical process in solar prominence eruptions. The present method for diagnosing the solar prominence simulation experiments uses a single-frame high-speed digital camera, that is a camera that takes a single photograph at a time. The technique consists of creating a sequence of identical plasma shots and then making a single ten nanosecond photo of each shot, but with increasing time offsets of a few hundred nanoseconds. The shot-to-shot reproducibility is sufficient to follow the gross variation in morphology, but not the details. Because it takes about 2 minutes to recharge the pulse power capacitor banks between plasma shots, this single-shot accumulation technique is both tedious and time consuming doc13066 none The brain handles a continuous temporal flow of sensory information, but there also is noise in the physiological signal that affects the uncertainty in information processing. At the microscopic level of the synapses, which are the functional contacts between nerve cells (neurons), the relevant signals are the small variable electrophysiological events called synaptic potentials. When learning occurs, there is a change in the relative weighted value of these synaptic potentials, for how strongly they influence the targeted neurons to fire and ultimately to drive a particular behavior. At the more macroscopic level of a functional region of the brain, there are systems properties of the response to large numbers of cellular inputs. The system needs to optimize the trade-off between accuracy, which may take some time to establish, and adaptability, which often requires rapid adjustment to changes in the sensory environment. This collaborative project combines a neural network approach with computational biology and experimental neurophysiology, to test a statistical model on rules of adaptive learning. Experiments involve a species of weakly electric fish, which produces a pulsed electrical field around itself. Objects in the water distort the field, and the lateral-line sensors on the body detect these distortions. Neurons in the electrosensory lateral-line lobe (ELL) in their brain receive signals from the lateral line sensors, and also receive signals temporally locked to the motor command for the electric pulses. Responses of cells in the ELL adapt to changing electrosensory conditions, and this adaptability allows these neurons to store an image of the fish s expectation of the electrosensory field. It is not clear whether the adaptive learning seen at the cellular level can explain collective neural activity in the brain of the behaving fish. This project involves a novel aspect of modeling emphasizing statistical properties of the synaptic system in the presence of noise, and making testable predictions about how noise can affect the accuracy of the fish s stored expectation of the signal. Results of this project will clarify how synaptic learning rates and signal processing interact, and how the effects of noise are handled by the system. The impact will extend beyond electrosensory processing and computational neuroscience to studies of learning and of how cerebellar-like brain structures function, and there is highly cross-disciplinary training involved doc13067 none Decadal-scale changes in the production cycles of the sub-Arctic Pacific Ocean have been conjectured to effect population changes in fishes via their zooplankton forage base. Zooplankton populations occurring near the Gulf of Alaska continental shelf break appear to undergo dramatic oscillations in abundance over decadal time scales. These consist principally of inter-zonal (because life-history stages span shallow- and deep-water zones) zooplankton (primarily Neocalanus spp. copepods) stocks that are driven onto the shelf providing the ecosystem with an important forage base. The data arising from this project will enable the assessment of seasonal (during and ) and inter-annual 15N 14N and 13C 12C variability of large-bodied zooplankton (primarily Neocalanus) across the Gulf of Alaska continental shelf during their peak occurrence in spring and summer each year, that will be matched to analogous measurements for juvenile pink salmon and other fishes. These data will be used to isotopically characterize coastal and oceanic (offshore) organic carbon sources and their utilization by fishes. Isotopic shifts in fishes and diapausing copepods are expected to shift in synchrony varying proportionately with the intensity of cross-shelf transport. This project will augment and complement existing and continuing core LTOP observations being made along the Seward Line transect (GAK1 to GAK13) and select stations near and in Prince William Sound. Samples that were acquired by the P.I. from fall through summer on pilot LTOP project (Weingartner, P.I.) cruises will be analyzed for 13C 12C and 15N 14N content as part of this project during FY and FY . Additional samples will be collected and analyzed as part of this project from through . The data will also be used to validate the tacit assumption in NEP GLOBEC retrospective studies that 15N 14N values of lower food chain biota are constant so that so that changing values can be interpreted to reflect varying food chain length or salmon run size doc13068 none The goal of this project is to determine the biological function of genes which encode six families of structurally related proteins, called the cellulose synthase like (CSL) proteins. Based on the sequence similarity to cellulose synthase, it is hypothesized that the CSL genes encode processive glycosyltransferases that may catalyze the synthesis of some of the non-cellulosic polymers that comprise plant cell walls and other exopolysaccharides such as stylar secretions and mucilage, or the glycosyl residues on arabinogalactan proteins Because plant cell walls and exopolysaccharides are the dominant component of biomass on earth, knowledge of the enzymes and genes associated with the synthesis of these compounds may facilitate methods for the production and utilization of plant biomass. The technical approach that will be used to determine the function of the CSL genes exploits the recently completed full genome sequence of Arabidopsis to facilitate directed genetic analysis of the genes. Most of the CSL genes will be inactivated by insertional mutagenesis. In addition, the expression of the CSL genes will be altered by producing transgenic plants that have increased or decreased accumulation of mRNA for the CSL genes. The effects of the mutations and transgenic events on the growth and development of the plants, and on plant polysaccharide composition will be analyzed in order to associate each CSL gene with a specific biological role and enzyme of known catalytic activity. A list of the accession numbers of the genes to be analyzed during this project can be found at http: www.arabidopsis.org info _projects index.html. Information about the gene families can be found at http: cellwall.stanford.edu cesa index.shtml doc13035 none The ability of plants to respond to damage by pests and pathogens is widespread, but not all plant tissues are capable of producing defensive responses. Defensive responsiveness is greatest in young leaves and decreases dramatically with age. The variation in defensive capabilities among different parts of plants affects the foraging of herbivores on plants, the ability of herbivores to develop resistance to plant defenses, and the success of predators in locating herbivores. To understand the ecology and evolution of plants and their interactions with herbivores, it is critical to understand how plant defensive responses differ among different plant tissues. The movement of carbohydrates throughout the canopies of trees may influence the ability of young foliage to develop defensive responses. For example, the ability of wounded Poplar leaves to obtain the resources they need to produce defensive chemicals (polyphenolics) appears to be affected by the rate at which carbohydrates are imported from the plant vascular system. In other words, the magnitude of the defensive response is directly related to the flow of resources to wounded leaves. This flow of resources causes variation in defensive responses among different plant tissues, because wounded tissues vary in their ability to acquire resources from the plant vascular system. The PIs propose to test this hypothesis rigorously with greenhouse and laboratory experiments on hybrid poplar and oak saplings. Chemical analyses of plant foliage will be conducted to assess defensive responses, and carbon 13 labeling experiments will be used to measure rates of resource movement in whole plants. The proposed research will result in (1) the development of a model designed to predict where and when defensive responses are likely to occur, (2) the establishment of monitoring technology that can be applied to a broad range of plant communities in the field, and (3) the training of graduate and undergraduate students in the plant sciences doc13070 none The learning of movement skills is characterized by persistent change in behavior over time. There are many indices of change in motor behavior and many time scales (rates of change and time periods) over which the change in behavior occurs. A central proposition of this research is that time scales are fundamental in the description and prediction of the change in behavior that we infer as learning. The research stems from a theoretical framework based upon the concepts and tools of nonlinear dynamical systems; this framework was devised to account for both the persistent (relatively long-term, such as days, weeks, months) and transitory (relatively short-term, such as trial to trial) changes traditionally shown for the learning of motor skills. The last 100 years of research on the learning of motor skills has shown that a number of different functions of change are revealed in learning curves, such as an exponential, power law, S-shaped, logistic, sudden discontinuous . Typically, different theories of learning make different assumptions about the time scales of change that are inherent in the mathematical equations used to fit learning data. Moreover, theories of learning tend to focus on one function of learning rather accommodate the complete set of learning functions. This research will test the proposition that a small set of principles from nonlinear dynamics can produce all of the standard functions of change observed in motor learning. A series of experiments conducted within a dynamical systems framework will examine, in a range of motor tasks, the time scales of change in motor learning. This research will provide a first test of the notion that a unified and parsimonious dynamical account of time scales of change can derive the established set of short- and long-term learning functions in motor learning. The promise of this theoretical and experimental approach to the time scales of motor learning is that it will lead us beyond traditional descriptions of learning toward a predictive science of human motor learning, that links theoretically to neural net approaches to human cognition and artificial system learning doc13071 none Proposal Greg Mitman Environment, Health and Place in Global Perspective: Conference Proposal This project is a two-day workshop-style conference devoted to Environment, Health, and Place in Global Perspective, in April at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The conference aims to bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars drawing from the fields of environmental history, history of science, history of medicine, the social studies of science, and medical geography to explore the relationships between environment and health from a global perspective. One of the central theoretical questions of this conference is to explore how considerations of materiality, environment, and place can contribute to new historiographic perspectives within the history of science that move us beyond debates generated by social constructivism and its critics. A companion purpose of this conference is to discuss questions and frameworks that link the local to more global and comparative historical narratives. Through the s, many creative contributions to the history of science, as elsewhere in science studies, have revolved around the sociocultural dimensions of scientific work. These explorations, whether of scientists language, practices, or social relations have been attacked for neglecting the material engagements and interventions of science, as well as scientists own, often more naturalistic accounts of what they do. Over the last few years, within the history of science itself as well as within neighboring fields such as environmental and medical history, scholars have grown impatient with the ideological polarity of these debates. Largely granting the constructivists points about the importance of society and culture to natural knowledge, these scholars have sought new ways of reconciling these insights with a greater appreciation of the material dimensions of science. Within the history of science, this trend has led to a growing appreciation of the importance of geography and place in scientific work and in this and other fields, of the ways in which histories of place or environment both involve and invoke the human body. This conference will bring together individuals from each of these fields to discuss and chart frameworks for this new methodological terrain toward which they have been converging. Organizers also hope to steer conferees toward international comparisons and questions. Topically centered upon the history of environment, place and health, conference participants include scholars whose work ranges through two centuries and across America and Europe as well as the Third World. The case studies reexamine older world-scale narratives, such as colonialism and modernization, often invoked in the history of science and its disciplinary neighbors. Organizers also anticipate discussion about newer ones like globalization, which have sparked scholarly interests but whose implications for the history of science and these other fields have been less explored doc13072 none Modeling of many mechanical systems leads to a set of nonlinear differential equations with periodic coefficients. The dynamics and control of these systems is a very significant issue due to its impact on reliability, capability of operating under high speeds and longevity. In most instances, the linearized equations are used to design the controllers, which by no means is an efficient or a practical solution. Further, in the case when a system has linearly uncontrollable modes then a linear controller cannot be designed and one must resort to a nonlinear controller. In this study a set of practical and efficient techniques are developed that can be applied to a wide class of control problems encountered in nonlinear systems with periodically varying parameters. The main approach is based on the application of Lyapunov-Floquet transformation and time-dependent normal form theory. For linearly uncontrollable critical cases, bifurcation control is suggested through an application of the center manifold theory. Backstepping and Lyapunov s second methods are also employed to synthesize controllers. The practical significance of this study is demonstrated through applications (via computer simulations) to some typical problems including the controller designs for an asymmetric magnetic rotor-baring system, helicopter blades and structures subjected to periodic loads. As an application to cardiac dynamics, a control system is designed to change an irregular heat beat to a desired periodic rhythm doc13073 none Lombardi Description: This award is to support a collaborative project between Dr. John Lombardi, Department of Chemistry, CUNY City College, New York, NY and Dr. Serdar Ozcelik, Department of Chemistry, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. They plan to investigate the electro-optical properties of J-aggregates. They plan to measure the change in dipole moments to study the nature and relative importance of the intermolecular interactions that lead to aggregate formation. They will study the effects of electric fields on molecular events (absorption and fluorescence) to gain basic understanding of nanostructural materials that would be useful in nanotechnology. They plan to utilize Stark spectroscopic methods for these studies. Scope: The project supports collaboration between two scientists with complementary expertise and resources to investigate an important problem. The results will help with designing of materials useful for nanotechnology applications. Professor Lombardi is an expert in Stark spectroscopy. He will advise on building up a Stark spectrometer at Bilkent University and will participate in the analysis and simulation of the electroabsorption data. Dr. Ozcelik will supervise the preparation of the film sample, UV-Vis absorption, fluorescence, electroabsorption and electric field modulated fluorescence measurements. Students at CCNY CUNY will benefit from this collaboration, and one graduate student will visit Bilkent University to work on the project. This project meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest doc13074 none The Puerto Rico Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (PR-LSAMP) is an alliance of the Resource Center for Science and Engineering of the University of Puerto Rico, the University of Puerto Rico System, the Inter American University System, Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico, and Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico. During the academic year -00, these institutions had a SMET enrollment of 27,441, or 90% of the SMET undergraduate population on the Island. Ninety-nine percent of the student population is Hispanic and 80% are low-income students. The goal of the PR-LSAMP is to increase the quantity and quality of minority college students who successfully complete a BS BE degree and enter and complete a graduate degree in a SMET field. During Phase I and II ( -92 to -00), PR-LSAMP institutions awarded 21,878 BS degrees in SMET, with a 62% annual increment from baseline year, from 1,709 annual degrees in to 2,771 in - . This was achieved following a two-prong approach: (1) increasing enrollment in SMET disciplines, and (2) improving retention and graduation rates by implementing a series of strategies to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of SMET programs. In Phase III, PR-LSAMP will build upon these achievements to: (1) further increase the SMET production curve from 2,771 to 3,600, which more than doubles the Phase I baseline figure of 1,709; (2) increase to 50% the percent of BS SMET graduates from UPR institutions who enter graduate school, and to 25% for those graduating from the private institutions, and (3) increase the number of BS graduates from PR-LSAMP institutions that complete a PhD degree in SMET, either locally or nationally, from 239 to 300 by the end of year 5. During Phase I and Phase II the core of PR-LSAMP was the revision of the SMET curriculum to emphasize for depth of understanding with a less is more approach , to promote active learning based on inquiry and the use of interactive demonstrations, to incorporate technology to the learning process, and the development of broad-based mathematics skills. Teaching strategies such as cooperative learning and the development of Study Learning Skills within the Context of a Course were also implemented across SMET disciplines. Jointly with this curriculum revision, PR-LSAMP offered undergraduate SMET students mentoring and research opportunities to increase their motivation to remain in SMET careers and enhance their qualification for pursuing graduate studies. During Phase I and II a total of 2,363 research stipends were awarded, for an average of 262 stipends per year. As a result of these sustained efforts, the Index of Course Efficiency (the average number of times students have to take a SMET course to satisfactorily pass it), was reduced from an average of 2.5 to 1.7. The average graduation rate at UPR institutions increased from 48% to 62% in science, while the average graduation rate for engineering at UPR increased from 53% to 81%. At private institutions the average graduation rate increased to 49%. Also the weighted average for satisfactory grades in science and mathematics courses increased from 47.5% to 59.3%. In the case of Engineering courses, the weighted average increased from 74% to 83%. For Phase III PR-LSAMP proposes the following additional strategies to complete the construction of permanent pathways to graduate studies in SMET: 1) the development of interactive web-based learning to master hard to teach concepts in science and mathematics; (2) the development of electronic modules to expand the interdisciplinary capabilities of undergraduate SMET students to further enhance their preparation for graduate studies; 3) the scaling-up of the teaching learning strategies that have proven successful in improving student performance in SMET courses, through ongoing academic and technical assistance to faculty and an Annual Best Practices Conference; and 4) the development of Information Technology skills in SMET students so they are capable of making effective and more critical use of accurate and valid information in their professional lives. To increase the number of students pursuing undergraduate degrees in SMET, PR-LSAMP will develop a Pre-College to College Bridging Component that will induct students into research experiences, and to further enhance the number of students entering graduate school and completing a PhD in SMET, PR-LSAMP will expand its research and mentoring program to provide a larger number of students with key skills and guidance to improve their preparation and motivation for graduate studies, in coordination with the Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) Program. The results of the project will be disseminated widely in the professional community through presentations at regional and national scientific meetings. Curricular materials developed will be available to other institutions through CD format and the WWW. The general public will have access to updated information on the PR-LSAMP through its website doc13075 none Mineralized skeletons, whether they are bones, teeth, mollusc shells or crustacean exoskeletons, are all comprised of two structural components: an organic matrix and the minerals that impregnate it. The organic matrix is a complex mixture of proteins and carbohydrates; sometimes the proteins have carbohydrates attached to them and are referred to as glycoproteins, proteoglycans or mucins. The minerals may be crystalline forms of calcium phosphate, like the hydroxyapatite of bones and teeth, or calcium carbonate, like the calcite of crab exoskeletons. One of the central and most basic questions in the field of skeleton formation (biomineralization) is which of the complex of matrix molecules are the ones that actually control the initiation of skeletal hardening and control the location and form of the mineral. This project utilizes the blue crab as a model for the control of biomineralization. Because crabs molt in order to grow, they provide an ideal system in which to study the biological control of mineralization and the interaction between the organic and mineral components of the skeleton. The outer two layers (epi- and exocuticle) of the new exoskeleton of the carapace of the crab are deposited beneath the old exoskeleton in preparation for the molt (premolt). They must remain unmineralized until after the crab emerges and expands. Subsequently (postmolt), the inner and thickest layer of the exoskeleton (endocuticle) is deposited and mineralized. The same temporal sequence occurs in the exoskeleton covering the joints (arthrodial membrane), but it never mineralizes in order to remain flexible. A number of biochemical changes that occur in the epi- and exocuticle of the carapace exoskeleton that coincide with their postmolt mineralization were previously catalogued by our laboratory. To determine if these changes are really important to this process, the arthrodial membrane will be similarly analyzed during the same time period. The same biochemical changes should not occur in the arthrodial membrane if, in fact, they are associated with the initiation of mineralization. A new approach to be taken in this grant is to compare the proteins that are manufactured by the tissue that makes the mineralized cuticle to those proteins that are manufactured by the non-mineralizing arthrodial membrane. In this way, it can definitively be determined which proteins are the ones that are involved in mineralization. With the modern molecular biological tools now available, the most efficient way to see what proteins are being made by a tissue is to extract the genetic blueprint for the proteins in the form of the messenger RNAs (mRNA). The plan is to extract the mRNA from the tissues of premolt crabs that are making proteins of the new epi- and exocuticle. This will be done for the tissues underlying both the mineralizing carapace exoskeleton and the non-mineralizing arthrodial membrane. The mRNA will be extracted from the same tissues of postmolt crabs when they are synthesizing the endocuticle. The mRNAs will be compared using a technique termed differential display of expression. In essence, this technique allows the identification of those pieces of mRNA that are found in the carapace tissue but not in the arthrodial membrane tissue. The ones that are identified from premolt tissue are the likely candidates for the messages for the proteins that are intimately involved in the mineralization process of epi- and exocuticle. Those that are identified from postmolt tissue will similarly be involved in endocuticle mineralization. A large part, if not the entire sequence, of the message can be reconstructed and these candidate proteins can be synthesized. Antibodies to these proteins will be made, which, when labeled, will allow the microscopic localization of these proteins spatially and temporally within the exoskeleton and the comparison of their presence to the sites of initial mineralization. To date, no one has firmly identified all of the components of an organic matrix that are actually responsible for initiating and controlling mineralization. The crustacean exoskeleton affords a unique system in which this can be accomplished and will provide basic information that can be applied to other mineralizing tissues doc13076 none This research project has two thrusts. First, the research aims to develop a set of benchmarking and diagnostic modes based on queuing, material flow, and stochastic optimization models for generic manufacturing cells. These will be used to evaluate the current performance of a system relative to both external (industry) and internal (theoretical) standards. Second, the research will use models to classify improvement areas into broad categories and use these to develop a fundamentally new framework for organizing experiential information related to the design and improvement of cellular production systems. The ultimate goal is to create a prototype web-based knowledge management tool that will diagnose problems, suggest improvement options, and accumulate and classify information for future shared use by the organization. In theory, modern information technology makes it possible to place information previously available only to experts in the hands of users throughout the firm. But converting data to useful information presumes an ability to capture, organize, and link knowledge to the practical concerns of decision-makers. Evolving methods of artificial intelligence provide exciting new ways to search and retrieve text-based information, based largely on matching documents to user interests on the basis of keywords. However, such an approach is not entirely suited to many production environments because users do not necessarily know what keywords they should be interested in to find help with their problems. What is needed is a more proactive system for diagnosing problems and leading users to relevant information. The need for knowledge creation and sharing systems is becoming even more crucial as manufacturing systems emphasize highly customized products and quick response to customer demands. Agile manufacturing relies on production in small scale, often modular, flexible manufacturing cells that use multi-functional machinery and cross-trained workers. While there has been some recent modeling research into the design and control of agile manufacturing systems, almost nothing has been done on linking models to the information needs of managers trying to evaluate and improve their systems. This research will develop models of cellular systems and use them to establish a framework for organizing information in a knowledge management system to support the process of continual improvement in agile manufacturing systems doc13077 none Hauri This award provides partial support for the construction and testing of a large-radius high-transmission double focussing multicollector mass spectrometer to be used for trace element and isotopic measurements by SIMS. The large-radius instrument is designed to accept sputtered secondary ions from the transfer section of a Cameca 6f, but without any significant alteration in the Cameca s capabilities. The end result will be a SIMS instrument with a single primary column and secondary extraction optics, but with two mass spectrometric beamlines for analysis of the sputtered ions. This instrument will provide immediate improvements in many areas of geochemistry, cosmochemistry and geobiology at DTM. Support for this grant is shared between the Earth Sciences Instrumentation and Facilities Program (EAR IF) of NSF and the NASA doc13078 none Lo In a preceding project supported by NSF, mathematical justification and numerical feasibility of neural networks (NNs) with long- and short-term memories (LASTMs) and risk-sensitive NNs have been established for adaptive and robust identification of dynamic systems respectively. Equally important, an adaptive method of training NNs that has the ability to select a training criterion most suitable for the training data and to avoid poor local minima of the selected training criterion has been discovered. The objective of the new project is to further develop these ideas and methodologies, conduct thorough benchmarking studies, and develop more powerful algorithms in order to complete establishing this neurocomputing approach to robust and or adaptive identification of dynamic systems. Among the key tasks are: (1) development of an online recursive algorithm for adjusting linear weights of an NN with LASTMs in the presence of multicollinearity, using possibly a combination of the Kalman filter and ridge regression; (2) comparison of adaptive risk-seeking training method against existing methods using robust estimation criteria from statistics; (3) development of an algorithm using risk-seeking and risk-averting criteria alternately in identifying a dynamic system with a fine feature or an under-represented segment in the presence of outlying measurement noises; (4) development of a theory of the convergence properties of the adaptive risk-averting training method conceived in the preceding project; (5) combination of the above adaptive and robust system identification ideas for identification of a dynamic system in an uncertain environment doc13079 none With primate populations losing 125,140 km2 of habitat annually most populations exist either in isolated, scattered protected areas, or in unprotected areas facing pressures from an increasing human population. Cercopithecine monkeys, a subfamily of small, frugivorous monkeys, are now found only in tiny forest fragments and a few national parks and forest reserves throughout West and East Africa. Scientists have recognized that little progress has been made towards providing scientific information that managers can use in the conservation of this subfamily. For example, while it has been suggested that weather, disease, infanticide, and food resources may all act to regulate primates populations, little is known about the specific conditions necessary for a species to survive and prosper. Food resources have been argued to be the most common limiting factor for most species, yet little is known about how food quantity and quality interact to determine the size and distribution of primate populations. This is particularly true for frugivorous primates since fruit, unlike leaves, is typically low in protein, minerals, and lipids, making it difficult to maintain a balanced diet. Therefore, this study will use redtail monkeys in Kibale National Park, Uganda to investigate the relationship between nutrient intake and availability, reproduction, and population densities. In addition, it will determine if nutritional factors are responsible for reduced population densities of redtail monkeys in heavily logged areas. Three focal groups have been identified in the heavily logged and unlogged areas to: 1) quantify and compare seasonal nutrient intake of groups between areas and to examine relationships between nutrient availability and intake, 2) compare the relationship between nutrient intake and reproduction between groups and correlate nutrient intake and availability with reproductive rates, timing, and infant survival, and 3) identify behavioral responses to changes in seasonal nutrient availability and intake. In addition, nutrient intake and behaviors will be correlated with group size across all six groups. Finally, existing data on redtail population densities and diets across six habitats within Kibale will be used to test for correlations between nutrient availability, key food resources, and redtail population densities. This will be the first study to explicitly examine the role of nutrition in population regulation of frugivorous primates and one of only a few to quantify the mechanisms by which habitat disturbance affects primates. The results of this study have implications to our understanding of the diets and nutrition of extinct and extant primates and hominids, the role of nutrition in population regulation, and the conservation and management of frugivore populations. By identifying the tree species needed to support high densities of redtail monkeys, current and future habitat restoration and protection plans will have the information necessary to design appropriate management strategies doc13080 none Shannon Description: This award supports a collaborative research project between Dr. Curtis Shannon, Department of Chemistry, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama and Dr. Unit Demir, Department of Chemistry, Ataturk University, Erzurum, Turkey. These investigators plan to study fundamental aspects of thin film structure and growth kinetics in materials grown by electrochemical atomic layer epitaxy (EC-ALE). This is a room temperature technique for materials growth that can be used to produce high quality, epitaxially oriented polycrystalline deposits in a layer-by-layer fashion on a wide variety of conducting substrates. They will specifically use in their studies two goals for better understanding of the growth mechanism. These are scanning probe microscopy studies of thin film structure and chronoamperometric studies of the rate of deposition processes during the EC-ALE growth cycle. Scope: This award will allow a US scientist and a Turkish scientist with complementary expertise to pool their resources in a mutually beneficial study. Dr. Shannon is an established researcher in the electrosynthesis of thin film materials and their characterization by scanning probe techniques. Dr. Demir is a young scientist with expertise in the kinetics of electrodeposition. The project will involve a US graduate student from Auburn University who will work with the foreign collaborating scientist doc13081 none With National Science Foundation support, Ms. Deborah Keene will conduct doctoral dissertation research under the direction of Dr. Ervan Garrison. The project centers on the Grove s Creek Site, a Native American Village dating to the Mississippian period (AD - ). The Grove s Creek Site is on Skidaway Island, near Savannah, Georgia. There are two objectives to this project. The first is to combine geophysical data with a geographic information system (GIS) and create a subsurface map of the site. The second is to determine whether the inhabitants of the Grove s Creek Site lived there year round or seasonally. Current archaeological methods are inherently destructive; therefore, any information that is lost can never be recovered. The refinement of a mapping procedure using a limited amount of excavation will result in greater preservation of archaeological sites. The first step of this mapping procedure is to collect shallow geophysical data. During the Grove s Creek project both the conductivity and magnetism of the soil were measured. Archaeologically significant remains such as cooking hearths and burned clay will cause the conductivity and magnetism of the surrounding soil to be higher. When all of the data are plotted, contour maps are created in which these higher readings are visible. The size and shape of the contours give clues as to what subsurface features created them. We use this information to predict the types of archaeological remains and will then excavate to test several of these predictions. Ultimately, this process can be used to map an archaeological site with very little digging. Although there are many important Mississippian sites along the Georgia coast, they are still not fully understood. There is currently considerable disagreement about whether Mississippian peoples were true agriculturists and could live in their village year round or still had to do some hunting and gathering and so traveled for part of the year. Three methods shall be employed to determine whether the inhabitants of Grove s Creek lived there year round or seasonally. The first is to look at the plant and animal remains at the site. Different animals and plants are available at different times of the year. For example, certain fruits are available only in the fall and certain fish migrate nearby in particular months. By identifying the animals and plants at the site and the times that they were available for consumption, we can determine when the site was occupied. The second is to study site architecture. In many Mississippian communities, there is evidence for both summer and winter houses. Two winter houses have already been found at the site, and if a summer house is found, that would show that the site was occupied year round. The last way to determine occupation is by isotopic analysis of oyster shells. By measuring the oxygen isotopes in the growth layers of the shell, it is possible to determine water temperature and therefore the time of year when the animal was killed. Analysis of multiple shells will determine what seasons the site was occupied. This project will not only develop a mapping procedure that will protect archaeological sites; it will also address questions, which are important to the understanding of coastal subsistence and settlement patterns of Native American cultures doc13082 none Nassar Wireless networks are getting clogged in high-use areas like New York and Los Angeles. That congestion will grow almost without end over the next few years, and by , (1) more than one in every 10 individuals worldwide will carry a cell phone; (2) 126 million hand held devices will demand high data rate services; and (3) 600 million of the cell phones in use will cry out for access to the Internet. It s no wonder then that the demand for spectrum far outpaces supply, and FCC chairman William Kennard has been inviting companies to come up with more and more innovative ways to utilize the existing bandwidth. Proposing one powerful solution to the wireless bandwidth problem, William Kennard recently suggested that wireless companies start trading bits and pieces of their unused wireless spectrum, so that these scarce pieces don t go to waste. Such an idea, still far from reality in wireless, is in the testing stages in the fiber-optic market. There, companies are already suggesting that a fiber-optic bandwidth exchange could handle $12 billion worth of orders within a five year period. In a world where wireless spectrum is in short supply, a wireless exchange may be the only way to meet the rapidly growing consumer demands. To capitalize on the idea of a wireless bandwidth exchange between companies, an enabling multiple-access technology must be developed at the physical layer. This technology must be capable of using non-contiguous bands of the frequency spectrum in an optimal fashion. In this research, the PI will develop a novel form of DS-CDMA (direct sequence code division multiple access) offering the following far reaching benefits: o The technology is well suited to support wireless bandwidth exchange between companies; through this wireless exchange o Companies can best meet their consumer demands, generate additional revenues, and best use the limited wireless resource licensed to them. o Groups of companies can agree to work together to allow customers of all companies to experience the benefits of very large bandwidths In a world where spectrum is in short supply, we see a wireless world based on cooperation not competition as the only way to meet consumer demands. This research lays the foundation for such future collaborations doc13083 none Heat-shock proteins (Hsps) are types of general stress proteins produced by virtually all organisms in response to most environmental and biological stresses, and are thought to protect cells from damage during stress or facilitate recovery. The importance of variation in the cellular quantity or biochemical efficiency of Hsps is unknown, particularly for plants and for the category of Hsps referred to as the low-molecular-weight or small Hsps. Progress in understanding Hsps has been hampered by the lack of appropriate biomolecular probes for specific Hsps and methods to experimentally manipulate and assess the effect of variation in Hsps. The PIs have developed molecular probes specific to the small Hsps in chloroplasts, the cell compartment where photosynthesis takes place in plants, as well as assays to assess Hsp effectiveness. Using these tools, they have shown that chloroplast small Hsps protect photosynthesis during heat and other environmental stresses, by protecting a key stress-sensitive step of photosynthesis (electron transport in Photosystem II). However, differences among plants in the ability of chloroplast small Hsp to protect photosynthesis during stress, such as predicted differences between heat-tolerant wild plants and heat-sensitive crops, have not been examined. In this series of studies, the PIs will examine chloroplast small Hsps in stress-sensitive vs. stress-tolerant wild plants to determine how they differ in the cellular quantity and biochemical efficiency of small Hsps and how this affects the protection of photosynthesis during heat stress. This would be the first such investigation for plant Hsps. They will explore molecular and biochemical variation in small Hsps across a range of species, they will examine correlations between small Hsp content and plant performance, and they will carry out experiments in vitro, using Hsps purified from a range of species, to determine how qualitative and quantitative variation in chloroplast small Hsps affects their protective function. These results will contribute both to understanding factors that affect stress-tolerance of plants in nature and to understanding factors that may be useful in agricultural research. Given the importance of chloroplast small Hsps in protecting photosynthesis during many stresses, the central role of photosynthesis in plants, and the high sensitivity of photosynthesis to environmental stress, the results should be especially useful for the bioengineering and breeding of more stress-tolerant crops doc13083 none Heat-shock proteins (Hsps) are types of general stress proteins produced by virtually all organisms in response to most environmental and biological stresses, and are thought to protect cells from damage during stress or facilitate recovery. The importance of variation in the cellular quantity or biochemical efficiency of Hsps is unknown, particularly for plants and for the category of Hsps referred to as the low-molecular-weight or small Hsps. Progress in understanding Hsps has been hampered by the lack of appropriate biomolecular probes for specific Hsps and methods to experimentally manipulate and assess the effect of variation in Hsps. The PIs have developed molecular probes specific to the small Hsps in chloroplasts, the cell compartment where photosynthesis takes place in plants, as well as assays to assess Hsp effectiveness. Using these tools, they have shown that chloroplast small Hsps protect photosynthesis during heat and other environmental stresses, by protecting a key stress-sensitive step of photosynthesis (electron transport in Photosystem II). However, differences among plants in the ability of chloroplast small Hsp to protect photosynthesis during stress, such as predicted differences between heat-tolerant wild plants and heat-sensitive crops, have not been examined. In this series of studies, the PIs will examine chloroplast small Hsps in stress-sensitive vs. stress-tolerant wild plants to determine how they differ in the cellular quantity and biochemical efficiency of small Hsps and how this affects the protection of photosynthesis during heat stress. This would be the first such investigation for plant Hsps. They will explore molecular and biochemical variation in small Hsps across a range of species, they will examine correlations between small Hsp content and plant performance, and they will carry out experiments in vitro, using Hsps purified from a range of species, to determine how qualitative and quantitative variation in chloroplast small Hsps affects their protective function. These results will contribute both to understanding factors that affect stress-tolerance of plants in nature and to understanding factors that may be useful in agricultural research. Given the importance of chloroplast small Hsps in protecting photosynthesis during many stresses, the central role of photosynthesis in plants, and the high sensitivity of photosynthesis to environmental stress, the results should be especially useful for the bioengineering and breeding of more stress-tolerant crops doc13085 none Schiffman This grant provides partial support of the costs of acquiring a new electron microprobe for the Department of Geology at the University of California, Davis. The Principal Investigators are all teaching and research faculty members in the Department of Geology. The P.I. s, their students, and collaborators will utilize this instrument to further their research on (1) Mafic clay minerals, palagonitization, and biomineralization, (2) Metamorphic geology and tectonics of convergent plate margins, (3) Regional metamorphism and the tectonics of mountain belts, (4) Field and experimental studies in igneous processes, and (5) Thermodynamic studies of minerals and ceramics. In addition, the new electron microprobe will be used extensively by many other investigators in the Department of Geology, as well as the Departments of Chemistry, Physics, Chemical Engineering and Material Science, Agricultural Engineering, Land Air and Water Sciences, and the School of Veterinary Medicine. Although the new electron microprobe will be housed and administered within the Department of Geology, it will be part of a recognized campus-wide analytical facility that is available to researchers across the UC Davis campus as well as from other colleges, universities, and research organizations across Northern California doc13086 none Timothy Nelson Yale University Development of laser-capture microdissection for plant tissues The technique of laser-capture microdissection (LCM) will be developed and optimized for plant tissues. This is a method originally developed for animal tissues, whereby individual cells are harvested by tacking them to a plastic film with a low-power infrared laser that can be aimed at single cells while viewing the tissue slice under a microscope. Using this method, it should be possible to recover specific cell types or developmental stages from complex tissues consisting of many cell types. Cells recovered in this manner can be analyzed with regard to gene expression profiles, protein profiles, and other properties. Based on preliminary data, it will be necessary to test a variety of tissue fixation and sectioning methods to adapt the method to plants. This project will optimize the LCM technique, using a variety of plant tissue sources and purity markers for specific cells. Detailed protocols will be provided to the biological community at the website http: plantgenomics.biology.yale.edu doc13087 none The Wildlife Conservation Society Bronx Zoo seeks NSF funding to develop an exciting new three-year program designed to engage girls and young women in science. Operated with the Girl Scouts of the USA, the National 4-H Council, the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, Girls Inc., and the Children s Aid Society, the program will reach thousands of girls across the U.S. over the grant period and thousands more thereafter. The WCS is uniquely qualified to run this program, having on its staff many women science professionals who are national and international leaders in their fields, and having conducted a number of pioneering programs for young women in the recent past. The 36-month program will consist of: - An Annual Earth Summit that will introduce 80 girls ages 14-17 to environmental science, including key environmental issues in regions across the U.S., as well as to careers and women role models in environmental science. (The girls will attend the Summit in teams of two or three.) -A series of service-learning projects through which the Earth Summit participants will be strongly encouraged to apply what they have learned in a community-based project that combines knowledge, service and reflection. -A program of technical assistance, through which the participants will be provided with ongoing assistance that will enable them to more effectively plan and implement their service- learning projects; and - A ``Virtual Club House, through which the girls will be able to communicate with each other and WCS staff about the program and environmental issues. The clubhouse will also showcase projects that the Earth Summit participants will conduct and explain how other young people might undertake similar community outreach and research projects. The proposed program represents a unique means of increasing the participation of girls and young women in science. It will capitalize on the enthusiasm young people have for animals, nature, and for visiting informal science centers, such as the Bronx Zoo, to excite girls and young women about science learning. The program will also seek to increase involvement through a focus on ecology and environmental science, subjects that are of immediate relevance to students. With their world being increasingly altered by human activity, what happens to the environment is of tremendous importance to the daily lives of girls and young women today and will become even more so in the future. By focusing on content that is immediately relevant, we believe the program will significantly increase participant involvement. The program will build on a hugely successful Wildlife Science Careers Program that the Wildlife Conservation Society has been undertaking over the past three years in conjunction with the Girl Scout Council of Greater New York. This extremely popular program has involved 315 eighth- and ninth-grade Girl Scouts and trained many of them to introduce thousands of younger Girl Scouts in New York City to career opportunities in science. The new program will allow the WCS to reach girls across the U.S., to involve girls in science projects that will be of benefit to local communities, and to broaden the emphasis of the Wildlife Science Careers Program from science careers to a more general focus on environmental science and local environmental issues doc13088 none The goal of this project is to develop a novel optical technique, termed Bioluminescence Resonance Energy Transfer (BRET), as a resource for the plant functional genomics community, specifically in the model species Arabidopsis thaliana. BRET has shown promise as a tool to chart the physical contacts between specific cellular proteins, and their time-resolved interactions, in living tissue and in real time. While the importance of such interactions has long been recognized in the life sciences, the corresponding experimental tools have largely been limited to in vitro conditions or to heterologous, non-plant organisms. Therefore, the BRET technique will provide a unique contribution toward delineating the functions of the 25,000 genes thought to be contained within the Arabidopsis genome. BRET is a form of radiation-free energy transfer that can occur when two compatible optical probes are brought into molecular proximity. In detail, to probe for a protein-protein interaction between two given partner proteins, the two proteins are genetically fused to a blue light emitting luciferase and to a blue light absorbing yellow fluorescent protein. If the two hybrid proteins interact, the excitation energy of the luciferase may be transferred to the fluorescent protein, resulting in an easily detected yellow-shift in the luminescence spectrum. The first goal of this project is to construct molecular genetic tools, such as cloning vectors, for the expression of BRET hybrid proteins. Second, instrumentation and experimental protocols will be optimized for time-resolved BRET data acquisition. Moreover, as a prototype example of the efficacy of BRET for research in plants, BRET will be applied to illuminate the genetic networks that mediate the control of nuclear gene expression by light and the circadian clock. Resources developed in this project shall be widely disseminated to encourage their application within the entire plant science community (http: chicory.bio.vanderbilt.edu chj arabidopsisbret doc13089 none Wang This is a three-year cooperative project between Dr. Haimin Wang, the Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO), and the Solar Radio Array of Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVSA), New Jersey Institute of Technology ( NJIT) and Professor Guoxiang Ai, the Beijing National Observatory (BNO) in solar physics research. This study will use high-resolution vector magnetograph data from BBSO and BNO to monitor the magnetic structure of solar active region continuously and use newly developed fast camera systems to obtain images of solar flares. This is an important project, which can provide important continuous observations of the solar flares. A successful study can advance our discovery and understanding of solar activity. This proposal addresses an important scientific question and meets the NSF objective of human resource development. The National Science Foundation of China and the NSF jointly support this project doc13090 none Widely distributed in animals, plants and microbes, O-glycoside hydrolases (EC 3.2.1.-) are enzymes that catalyze the cleavage of chemical bonds between two or more carbohydrates or between a carbohydrate and a non-carbohydrate moiety. Responding to the challenge of the Project to identify the function of all Arabidopsis thaliana genes within the next decade, this collaborative research will focus on approximately 75 members of two related families of glycoside hydrolases (http: www.biol.vt.edu faculty esen glycosidase.lab.html and http: afmb.cnrs-mrs.fr ~pedro CAZY ). Family 1 includes beta -glucosidases (EC 3.2.1.21) and myrosinases (EC 3.2.3.1), which function in higher plants in chemical defense against herbivores and pathogens, lignin biosynthesis, and plant growth and development. Family 35 contains the beta -galactosidases (EC 3.2.1.23), which play key roles in fruit ripening, flower senescence, mobilization of carbohydrate reserves, and galactolipid turnover. To date, the precise biochemical roles of only three of these Arabidopsis hydrolases are known with certainty. The purpose of this multidisciplinary collaborative research is to assign biological functions to beta-glucosidases and beta-galactosidases encoded by the Arabidopsis genome. After using phylogenetic analysis to identify subfamilies that contain closely related enzymes, cDNAs encoding each target hydrolase will be obtained. Each hydrolase will then be overexpressed in foreign host (e.g. yeast and bacteria) cells and purified to ascertain its biological function by measuring its enzymatic activity toward a wide range of natural glycosidic substrates isolated primarily from Arabidopsis and related crucifers for this purpose. In parallel studies, three-dimensional structures of selected subfamily representatives will be determined by homology modeling and x-ray diffraction, providing novel insights into how these hydrolases recognize and bind their substrates. This information will be of paramount importance in future research to alter the substrate specificity of Family 1 and Family 35 hydrolases for biotechnological purposes, including biomass conversion and improvements in anti-herbivore defenses and fruit ripening doc13091 none The Miami Museum of Science proposes to design and implement an innovative model program to increase the confidence, interest and preparedness of girls to pursue academic and employment opportunities related to high end careers in the field of information technology (IT). Titled GREAT! (Girls Redesigning and Excelling in Advanced Technology), the project will build on the body of research related to girls and IT to develop and model effective methodologies for engaging girls as designers - - as opposed to simply users -- of IT applications. The overall goal of GREAT! is to raise interest and skills in advanced technology applications among middle school girls, particularly girls of color, resulting in increased representation of females in academic programs and employment opportunities leading to high end IT careers. Specific objectives of GREAT! are to build girls confidence and expertise with advanced technology applications; to engage them in the use of advanced technology to solve real world problems; to strengthen girls communication and presentation skills; to contribute to and inform the field through a comprehensive evaluation of project outcomes, and to disseminate project methodologies and findings among informal science education institutions and other interested parties. The Museum will collaborate with Miami Dade County Public School s Urban Systemic Program to recruit 40 middle school girls each year, for a total of 120 girls over the duration of the project. Over the course of a two year period, participants will assume the roles of IT designers, acquiring progressively complex technology skills culminating in the creation of a fully interactive 3 D virtual Museum exhibit experience. Girls will begin by participating in a 12 week Saturday Technology Workshop which will take place over the course of the academic year. Following completion of the Technology Workshop series, girls will take part in a 4 week intensive summer Design Studio in which they will use state of the art virtual reality (VR) technology to create a VR production showcasing an invention of their own design. Girls will work in teams of four, with each team assigned a mentor (a female college student majoring in computer technology or a related field) who will provide technical guidance and serve as a role model. Upon completing their productions, girls will strengthen their presentation skills and increase self esteem and self confidence through Family Night presentations and by exhibiting and interpreting their work to visitors in the Museum galleries for a one month period during the subsequent academic year. The Museum will contract with VR Visions and the Center for Children and Technology to provide design support. Kathleen Tyner of Media Analysis & Practice will serve as the project s external evaluator, responsible for formative and summative evaluation of project activities doc13092 none Judith Reppy John Cloud, Cornell University The Cold War and the Rise of GIS Most of the fundamental technologies of contemporary geography were devised in the last half of the 20th century and were shaped by the exigencies and opportunities of the Cold War. The technologies and their data sources were initially often deeply secret. Out of this has emerged a large and complex industry of geographic and allied technologies, at the center of which are geographic information systems (GIS), that integrate geo-referenced data by techniques of overlay. Prior research by the co-PI suggests that GIS emerged from the convergence of the geographic sciences during the Cold War. This new system of technologies and practices developed not despite, but rather through a complex and enormously productive system of classified knowledge production that transformed American scientific institutions and practices, but also thoroughly disguised the nature and sources of the exchanges. Standard histories of GIS acknowledge earlier initiatives in overlay technique, but do not pursue them. Where, how, when, and by whom did geographic integration by overlay develop? How did overlay change from analog to digital systems, and how did these systems transfer to civilian use? And why have these earlier stages of the history of GIS been ignored? Integration by overlay has complex roots in prewar regional planning, but the major part of the analog-to-digital transition occurred in near-real-time mapping systems using reconnaissance imagery that was among the most closely guarded secrets of the U.S. government. These Military Geographic Information Systems (MGIS) lost their initial M to emerge from classified programs as-GIS. The chronologies and emphasis of standard histories of GIS constitute part of the surviving cover story. This project explores the history of GIS within a framework informed by science and technology studies and the literature on dual use. Through interviews, archival research, and examination of previously classified or deliberately suppressed records the project reveals a history of GIS that is longer, darker, and altogether more interesting that previous accounts have suggested. The project advances the geographic sciences by illuminating a significant period in GIS development that has been overlooked or ignored. Examining these technological transitions in grounded detail provides an important case study in Cold War science and technology. And it discloses early applications of overlay linked to public involvement in analysis and planning with important implications for contemporary initiatives to broaden public participation in GIS. Products of the study include presentations at appropriate conferences, publications in peer-reviewed journals in the disciplines of geographic information science and studies of science and technology, a web publication with historically significant data sets from the pre-history of GIS; and an augmented essay for the Exploratory Essays Initiative of the History of Twentieth Century Cartography Project. This research recovers one of the most important stories of the secret geography of the Cold War doc13093 none Girls Incorporated seeks a planning grant of $30,000 from the National Science Foundation s Program in Gender Equity to develop a plan and proposal to reengineer our Operation SMART program. With the proposed grant, Girls Inc. will compile and assess the research, technology, and our own experience relative to girls and science, math, engineering, and technology. We will then convene a meeting of experts to discuss this body of knowledge and help map out are engineered program design and demonstration plan for Operation SMART. This will enable us to provide an informed, relevant, accessible, and exciting new program to capture and retain the interest of a new generation of girls in the areas of science, math, engineering, and technology doc13094 none This demonstration project grows out of planning grant activity, which designed a multi-level approach to adapting a successful, intensice two-week summer program to reach a broader audience of urban girls. The present project (GEMS, or Girls Explore Mathematics through Social Science) encompasses an integrated set of three programs designed to strengthen middle-school girls interest, competence and confidence in mathematics and mathematics-related activities through engaging them in social science research on adolescents. All three progams offer a curriculum that is attractive to middle-school girls, and that encourages their interest in mathematics, science and technology through their pre-existing interest in social issues. All three programs enhance girls technical skills and itnerests by building on their preference for collaboration and connection; and all three encourage contact with older, relevant model-mentors. The project includes a 10 week, Saturday morning version of the program (GO-GIRL or Gaining Options: Girls Investigate Real Life) that can be offered to urban girls, but retains the key features of high interest, hands-on experience, collaboration, and intergenerational mentoring; and a web based version of the program (SMART-GIRL or Surveys Mathematics and Research Technology: Girls Investigate Real Life) that expands the capacity of a popular existing website to teah girls how to gather and analyze survey data online. At both the University of Michigan and Wayne State University, this project will provide opportunities for the pre-service teachers of mathematics and social studies who are also students, to observe, train, and teach girls on a small scale. The project will yield an economical version of the GEMS curriculum that is usable in urban settings, a teacher professional development program that is exportable to other institutions, as well as appropriate support materials to enable others to implement this curriculum in other cities doc13095 none Henry Lambright, Syracuse University Transforming NASA: Space Technology in the Golden Years What role does the administrative leader play in change in a federal science and technology agency? There are some scholars who say that role is trivial and others who say the opposite. The answer lies in understanding the relationship between the leader and organization and circumstances in the political environment at the time the leader serves. To explore and analyze that complex relationship, the PI examines Daniel Goldin at NASA in the period to . Goldin has served longer than any administrator in NASA history, in terms of continuous service. Appointed by George Bush, retained by Bill Clinton, he has been asked by George W. Bush to stay on while the President recruits a replacement. With this much time in office, Goldin has had the opportunity to make a difference. What has he done with that time? This study tracks Goldin s role in the organizational and technological change process at NASA. During his tour, he has helped get the Space Station redesigned and linked with the Russians. Called International Space Station, this facility is currently being assembled in space. He has also used a faster, better, cheaper, management approach to bring down the cost and speed the launch rate of robotic spacecraft, particularly those associated with Mars missions. That approach has had successes (Mars Global Surveyor, Pathfinder) and failures (Mars Climate Orbiter, Mars Polar Lander). He has initiated a host of new programs, reorganized frequently and downsized his agency dramatically. Throughout his tenure, he has worked against the budgetary wind, fought one conflict after another, and become probably the most controversial administrator NASA has had. Using a policy process model, this project studies the circumstances prior to Goldin s appointment that caused President Bush to bring an outsider to NASA with a mandate for change. The PI tracks Goldin s evolution as an administrator over the years as this business executive engineer developed political skills to operate in Washington. The project also examines how the ever-shifting political environment impacted his decisions and how Goldin, in turn, influenced that environment. A key issue is how NASA administrator shaped not only an organization but its technologies, imparting to them his values. The PI also examines which of Goldin s changes have had results that were successful, unsuccessful, and mixed, and the reasons why. Finally, the study extends past Goldin s departure to investigate any policy innovations that survived him. This three-year research project culminates in a book on administrative and governmental leadership and change in the contemporary science and technology context doc13096 none It is proposed to conduct research on the design of output feedback control of nonlinear systems. The design procedure starts with the design of a state feedback control followed by the design of robust observer to recover performance achieved with a state feedback. The performance of such observers are usually hindered by difficulties due to measurement noise and excessively large transient response. The principal investigator has shown that the undesirable transient behavior can be eliminated by designing the feedback control to be globally bounded. The approach proved useful in achieving fundamental progress in semiglobal stabilization, sliding-mode control, servomechanisms, and adaptive control. While the earlier work has emphasized robustness, the goal of this proposal is to develop a comprehensive theory for the design of high-gain observer-based output feedback controllers for nonlinear systems that aims at achieving both robustness and good performance. The new element we bring in this proposal is the use of nonlinearities as a tool for improving performance. Research tasks include: improved performance of the universal integral regulator, performance issues in high-gain observer-based output feedback controllers, multivariable systems, experimental testbeds, and a pedagogic of the use of nonlinearities as a tool for improving performance. Nonlinear systems under consideration arise in many applications such as mechanical systems, aircraft control, and electric machines. Earlier results have been applied to the control of induction motors and a mechanical system known as the pendubot doc13097 none MIT s Department of Materials Science and Engineering establishes a Summer Institute in Materials Science and Materials Culture. The purpose of the Summer Institute is to assist professors at liberal arts colleges in introducing materials science and engineering to their undergraduate curricula. The Summer Institute brings together MIT faculty, faculty from undergraduate liberal art institutions, and MIT graduate students in a modular, case study format that combines materials science and engineering with social science and humanities fields. The design of the modules considers both the physical properties and cultural dimensions of materials. Each module integrates laboratory experiences in the processing and the chemical and microstructural analysis of the material under consideration. By teaching educators from liberal arts institutions, the project brings the perspectives and methodologies of materials science and engineering to a much broader and diverse audience than is usually present at engineering institutions, thus broadening the educational base for materials science and engineering doc13098 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program supports the construction of a suite of four single-molecule force spectrometers for development, training and research to be shared by the Departments of Mechanical Engineering, Chemistry, and Biochemistry at Duke University. These instruments permit the measurement of very weak forces (tens of picoNewtons) on the spectrometer tip as a function of its distance from a surface (controlled to 0.3 nm), so that the properties of individual molecules can be studied. In-house construction of the instruments will provide the expertise necessary to modify and develop the facility to meet future educational and research needs. The presence of multiple instruments provides the resources necessary to allow concurrent development and training while still meeting the research needs of the users. Students from each of the represented disciplines will receive training in the development and or use of single-molecule force spectrometry, an area of growing importance in fundamental research, biotechnology and materials science. No such general training opportunity presently exists on campus. The facility will be centrally located to encourage interactions and collaborations between users from all disciplines, and these interactions will be fostered through a course in macromolecular interactions to be taught and supervised by faculty from each department. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program supports the construction of a suite of four single-molecule force spectrometers for development, training and research to be shared by the Departments of Mechanical Engineering, Chemistry, and Biochemistry at Duke University. These instruments permit the measurement of very weak forces (tens of piconewtons) on the spectrometer tip as a function of its distance from a surface (controlled to a fraction of a nanometer), so that the properties of individual molecules can be studied. In-house construction of the instruments will provide the expertise necessary to modify and develop the facility to meet future educational and research needs. The presence of multiple instruments provides the resources necessary to allow concurrent development and training while still meeting the research needs of the users. Students from each of the represented disciplines will receive training in the development and or use of single-molecule force spectrometry, an area of growing importance in fundamental research, biotechnology and materials science. No such general training opportunity presently exists on campus. The facility will be centrally located to encourage interactions and collaborations between users from all disciplines, and these interactions will be fostered through a course in macromolecular interactions to be taught and supervised by faculty from each department doc13099 none Londa Schiebinger, Pennsylvania State University Mainstreaming Gender Analytics in Science and Technology Studies With a Small Grant for Training and Research, the Science, Medicine, and Technology in Culture (SMTC) program at Penn State supports sustained research and graduate student training focused on mainstreaming gender analysis in STS. SMTC at Penn State already has a strong gender studies focus; this proposal requests funds to reconfigure that focus in ways that facilitate training a cohort of graduate students in a new generation of interdisciplinary gender analytics. With this award, Penn State is poised to further research, teaching, and intervention in these areas. This project investigates how both working scientists and scholars in the field of STS understand how gender structures the personnel, methodologies, and results of science. The SMTC program includes a graduate course that makes gender analysis a foundational methodology to all fields of STS, examining how it might apply to areas even where sexual dimorphisms (both biological and cultural) are not immediately present. Three research applications are highlighted, one in each year of the award: 1) human origins research, 2) colonial science, and 3) the cultural production of ignorance. The award allows SMTC to support three graduate students per year for three years, a one-time workshop, and a two-year post-doctoral student. Course developments are to be disseminated to the STS community in article form, through sessions sponsored by the Committees on Education of the History of Science Society, Society for Social Studies of Science, Society for the History of Technology, and Society for Literature and Science at their annual meetings, and as part of the HSS Syllabus Samplers and similar organs. Additional outcomes include two edited volumes: one drawn from a lecture series that will explore applying gender analysis to central research fields in STS, and one drawn from the workshop on how gender analysis is changing various aspects of the natural sciences doc13100 none Prediction of protein structure based on sequence information is of great value for the interpretation of genomic sequence data. Such method would reduce the number of protein structure that must be determined experimentally to obtain a structural complement for an organism. The new method integrates tools such as secondary structure prediction and distance-based torsion angle dynamics with the idea of patch-based tertiary contact prediction and bootstrapping. The first class of proteins will be those that take on an alpha-helical structure, the class of proteins for which prediction has been most successful. The method will be extended to predict arrangements of transmembrane helices. A further extension to the structure of beta-sheet proteins will involve motif detection and accumulation of motifs into larger structures. The methods will be optimized and scored to aid in selecting the best model structure. The result will be automated high accuracy software that can be used on whole genome sequences doc13101 none This study examines energy loss mechanisms during the transition of a cable from a slack state to a taut state and undertakes optimization of the associated energy loss for use in design of low-tech low cost high performance dampers for mitigation of seismic damage in structures. Cables comprised of helical wires wound around a central core to form a strand or strands wrapped helically around another strand will be modeled to capture axial, flexural and torsional displacements. Dynamic friction at the contact points or lines between wires absorbs energy and affects the responses. Understanding these effects will enable design of a snapping cable energy dissipater that does not produce harmful shock to the structure, yet dissipates sufficient energy and or adds sufficient stiffness to be effective in reducing damage induced by seismic events. It is anticipated that this analytical, numerical, and experimental research program leads to a novel and effective tool in the effort to protect lives and property during earthquakes and other natural or man-made hazards. Additionally, during the course of the research, techniques and results will be incorporated into courses cross-listed in Civil Engineering and Mechanics at Virginia Tech and the participation of undergraduate research students will be encouraged doc13102 none Phase III Western Alliance to Expand Student Opportunities (WAESO) LSAMP proposes to (1) institutionalize its highly successful LSAMP Phase II activities, (2) double once again the degree rate from our current baseline to achieve 2,260 under-represented minority science, mathematics, engineering, andtechnology (SMET) BS degrees in the year , and (3) expand and link LSAMP graduates and Phase III LSAMP participating under-represented minority SMET undergraduate students to our MGE@MSA AGEP and other AGEPs with high technology products that will help our students and graduates both in our service region and nationally. The Phase III WAESO LSAMP is the undergraduate component of a comprehensive, concerted, sequenced effort that helps students beginning in secondary school throughundergraduate, graduate school, and beyond, including the transition of college sophomores, juniors, and seniors toward graduate school and the development of high technology products with application or dissemination both regionally and nationally. Although, our LSAMP NSF funds will focus solely on undergraduate students, we will use non-NSF funds to support thousands of pre-college students and use both NSF AGEP and non-NSF funds to help hundreds of graduate students and graduates of Ph.D. or Master level programs beginning in the 7th grade and going through the doctorate and even beyond to faculty status or careers in the corporate or government sectors. Some of the unique and highly effective features of our Phase II LSAMP that will be institutionalized in Phase III WAESO lie within the sequence and integration of the various levels of the project. For example, (1) Integrating pre-college and graduate study with our core undergraduate project in a coherent and effective way; (2) Giving scientists, specifically faculty members who are currently working with students in classrooms and laboratories and who review and rank projects which in turn also come from the field and need to compete for funds, primary control over project activities and the allocation of funds, including the flexibility to make mid-course corrections in the funding of deserving (or undeserving) projects, through their participation in the operational committees; (3) Using high-technology to produce and distribute under-represented minority-focused SMET materials as well as to coordinate project components over great distances through the use of DVDs, CD-ROMs, the Internet, and the World Wide Web; and (4) Developing and maintain special programmatic initiatives directed toward each of our participating student populations, including American Indians. Thanks to strong long-term institutional support, we have the ability to not only meet the basic LSAMP cost-sharing requirements but, even more importantly, to meet the institutionalization costs of the new, third phase of the LSAMP program. Based on the successes of Phase I in doubling the number of graduates per year of our target population and being above a similar doubling goal in Phase II, we propose to take on the formidable task of achieving B.S. degree rates reflective of the substantial under-represented minority population of our region which is 25.8% American Indian, African American, and Hispanic. Thus, our long-term numerical goal in the year of 2,858 SMET B.S. degrees awarded to American Indian, African American, and Hispanics as accomplishing parity with our regional population of these Americans. For the purposes of Phase III, we are establishing a goal of doubling the degree rate once again from our current baseline to achieve 2,260 degrees in the year , which is well on the way to achieving parity doc13103 none PI: Nigel Atkinson Different types of neurons must have different patterns of electrical activity for the nervous system to function properly. For example, neurons that initiate movement often fire high frequency bursts of action potentials, whereas neurons that control slow, rhythmic behaviors may fire only slowly, but with very precise timing. A neuron s ability to generate specific activity patterns is determined by the types and numbers of ion channels it expresses. Nerve cells pick and choose which channels to express by transcriptional regulation. Our understanding of how cells make this decision is very immature. Furthermore, our ability to inspect the sequence of a gene and to then predict its expression pattern is nonexistent. Presently, the purpose of DNA sequences that regulate gene expression (control elements) can only be empirically ascertained. Dr. Atkinson and his students will utilize the genome project, evolutionary studies and functional testing to determine the grammar of regulatory sequences that control ion channel gene expression. Using Drosophila melanogaster as a model system, Dr. Atkinson has had substantial success describing how the slowpoke Ca2+-activated K+ channel gene is transcriptionally regulated. It has an extremely complex control region. The Atkinson lab has described control elements that specify the developmental- and tissue-specific expression pattern. Most notable was the identification of control elements that differentially activate one promoter in four different muscle subtypes and the identification of an intronic region that modulates developmental specificity. In the this project Dr. Atkinson will add the Shaker gene to their list of channel genes to be studied. Shaker encodes a voltage-gated K+ channel. Work on slowpoke will also continue. Work on these to genes will enable a comparison of how genes encoding two major classes of K+ channels, the voltage-gated and Ca2+-gated K+ channels, regulate gene expression. In all cases, the focus will be on the regulation of the genes in the nervous system. Transcriptional start sites (~promoters) will be physically mapped and their expression pattern determined using transgenic animals. Because the entire fly is the expression system, the group can study expression in all tissues and organs in their natural developmental context. To identify the control elements the group will make use of the fact that important DNA sequences tend to be conserved over evolutionary time. For each gene, the transcriptional control regions from four different insect species will be sequenced and compared. Small sequences conserved in both sequence and position will be assumed to be control elements. The candidate elements will be tested for function by deleting them from a transgene and then asking how expression had been altered. These methods have been very successful in dissecting the regulation of the slowpoke gene. Furthermore, it will be determined whether the slowpoke and Shaker K+ channels genes show evidence of coordinate regulation; that is, do some of the same combinations of control elements regulate their expression. Because each control element is recognized by a specific transcription factor(s), it will be possible to infer which transcription factors are involved. Drosophila have the same families of ion channel genes found in vertebrates. In addition, most of the important regulatory cascades affecting developmental gene expression were originally discovered in or shown to exist in Drosophila. Therefore, it is expected that the description of the regulation of channel gene expression in Drosophila will also be relevant to the understanding of the same process in other organisms doc13104 none This collaborative research project is directed towards a new technology for the production of micro meso-scale components by methods whose efficiency approaches that of mass production. Key to achieving this capability will be the creation of miniaturized machine tool systems (referred to as meso-Machine Tools, mMTs) whose volume is on the order of 1 dm3. These systems are required to meet the rapidly growing demand for 3D parts and part features at the micro meso-level (0.01 - 10.00 mm range) in materials that include stainless steel, titanium, aluminum, platinum, iridium and others is currently being met by using ultra-precision CNC machine tools. It is common to have machine-to-workpiece volume ratios of 106 or higher at best, a situation that adversely affects accuracy, precision and overall efficiency. The prevalent microelectronic fabrication techniques and their spin-offs used for micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) are, in turn, are limited by their inability to produce arbitrary 3D features in a wide range of materials and by their limited relative accuracy. However, to their advantage, MEMS-based technologies are batch type, leading to cheap mass production, while ultra-precision CNC processes are serial, inherently expensive and not easily adaptable to mass production. The goal is to meet productivity requirements by applying these mMT in a massively parallel fashion. It is envisioned that the mMTs, in analogy to a computer system, will be equivalent to plug-and-play boards and treated as replaceable entities. To facilitate an integration of such machines into a system, resource and information distribution mechanisms will be established by an architecture, similar in concept to the bus of a computer, that supplies energy, control feedback information, and materials and tools to from the individual machines. It is anticipated that the project will demonstrate that it is possible to build mMT systems for costs two or three orders of magnitude below existing systems doc13105 none This demonstration project, a collaborative network of faculty, public school teachers and counselors, and professionals in both private sector non-profit organizations will deliver and evaluate activities designed to bolster and reinforce the interest of middle-school girls in SMET disciplines and careers. These activities are based on research showing that access to role models, career information, and hands-on activities have beneficial effects. A hands-on summer workshop, industrial site tours, classroom activities, visits with women scientists and engineers, activities developed in conjunction with commercial and service organizations, and a web site characterize the intervention for the 6th and 7th grade girls who participate. Furthermore, in response to research showing that professional development for teachers, interactions between teachers and scientists, and implementation of methods to address diversity and gender equity issues are of paramount importance in creating more gender equitable classrooms, middle-school and high-school teacher in science and mathematics will be invited to partner with University faculty in developing the summer workshop activities. In addition, they will be invited to participate in a graduate-level course on gender equity in science and mathematics education and conduct action research projects that can be shared within the collaborative network. Finally, packets with information on both various SMET careers and on women who are currently employed in these fields, will be distributed to school counselors, the parents of girls in Girl Scout troops, and the parents of those girls who participate in the project activities. Summative evaluation will focus on the comparison of SMET course-taking patterns and course grades of participants in the project activities compared to a matched sample of girls who did not participate doc13106 none Hiskens Interactions between continuous dynamics and discrete events are an intrinsic part of power system dynamic behavior. Physical devices such as generators exhibit continuous dynamics. On the other hand, event-driven discrete behavior is normally associated with rule-based components. Examples include protection devices and market-dispatch rules. Analysis should accurately capture those interactions. This project will attempt to develop a unified hybrid systems approach to managing power systems. The project will make novel contributions in three fundamental areas: modeling, analysis and algorithms. Earlier work has shown that many hybrid systems can be modeled by a differential-algebraic (DAE) structure that incorporates impulsive action and switching within the algebraic constraints. This representation will be used as the basis for exploring model structures that best satisfy the competing requirements of generality, utility and computational efficiency. To analyze the behavior of switched DAE systems, stability results for (non-switched) DAEs will be combined with existing stability analysis tools for switched ODEs. Lyapunov stability theory underlies this analysis. Algorithms will be developed to address parameter uncertainty, parameter estimation, border-collision bifurcations, critically stable trajectories, boundary value problems, optimal control, switching and issues of uniqueness in forwards and reverse time doc13107 none Brassinosteroids are growth-promoting hormones involved in modulating plant plasticity in response to changes in the environment. Previous studies of brassinosteroids have concentrated on either the metabolic or reception pathways for these hormones. A novel gene affecting brassinosteroid responses in plants, CYP72B1, has recently been identified. This gene appears to be involved in brassinosteroid inactivation rather than biosynthesis or perception acting as a brassinosteroid hydroxylase that catabolizes the most active form of the hormone, brassinolide, into an inactive form, 26-hydroxybrassinolide. By regulating the active levels of brassinolide in certain tissues or at certain times, CYP72B1 may be acting as a modulator of brassinosteroid responses during plant development. One hypothesis is that CYP72B1 uses brassinolide as an enzyme substrate generating the less-active brassinosteroid, 26-hydroxybrassinolide. Heterologous expression of CYP72B1 in yeast coupled with feeding experiments using radiolabeled brassinolide will test whether CYP72B1 uses brassinolide as an enzyme substrate. Physiological analysis will also be used to further characterize 26-hydroxybrassinolide activity. A second hypothesis is that CYP72B1 expression affects growth in Arabidopsis by regulating brassinolide levels. A T-DNA knockout mutation in the CYP72B1 gene will allow a detailed analysis of the role this gene plays in development. A third hypothesis is that CYP72B1 activity is regulated transcriptionally and post translationally at the tissue specific level. RT-PCR experiments show that CYP72B1 transcripts accumulate greater in the rosettes vsersus the hypocotyls of developing seedlings. CYP72B1 transcript accumulation measurements will be expanded to many different tissues of both juvenile and adult plants. CYP72B1 translational fusions with reporter genes will also be used to examine CYP72B1 protein levels in different tissues during plant development. Together, this research will increase the understanding of CYP72B1 s role in modulating brassinosteroid levels and perception during plant development. In addition to the training of one graduate student and one postdoctoral fellow, several undergraduates are likely to participate in this project. Findings from this research will be incorporated, when appropriate, into an undergraduate laboratory course on DNA manipulation taught by the Principal Investigator, Professor Michael Neff doc13108 none Proposal Warwick Anderson, University of California -San Francisco THE POSSESSION OF KURU: EXCHANGE RELATIONS IN MODERN SCIENCE This project explores the material cultures of modern by looking intensively at the case of D. Carleton Gajdusek s investigations of the disease of kuru, conducted among the Fore people of New Guinea in the s and s. This focus is on the circulation of goods in global biomedical science. This is a multi-sited historical study designed principally to describe and explain transactions involving local inhabitants, anthropologists and biomedical scientists, exchanges clustered around contested kuru material, principally brains, blood and corpses. The goal is to outline some of the basic features of the material cultures of late colonial, postwar scientific exchange, and to see how these material cultures structured and transformed the identities of transactors. The transaction of kuru material can help us to think more generally about the creation of value and the circulation of goods in global science. In view of Gajdusek s later ( s) involvement in the patenting of cell lines, this study will additionally present an unrivalled opportunity to consider how local exchange regimes of science may have changed over the last fifty years, in particular to investigate whether science has become more commodified and marketable. The study of the character of kuru transactions etches in especially clear relief the more recent global traffic of genetic material (including that proposed in the Human Genome Diversity Project). Moreover, the analysis of the changing transactional orders of global science can serve to illuminate contemporary tensions between ownership and authorship in science, and prompts us to reconsider scientific authorship as an exchange function, possibly now an imperiled form of exchange, not just as a writing process. This is essentially a historical study that addresses issues usually in the province of anthropology or sociology: it describes how scientific identities are fashioned in collection and exchange; it advances the analysis of the material cultures of late-twentieth century science; it explores new ways of describing the increasing global circulation of goods in science, and the creation of value in international scientific transactions; and it brings the Asia-Pacific region into focus in science and technology studies as an important, but previously much neglected, location of scientific production and exchange. The outcomes include a monograph, a series of articles, and enhanced graduate student education doc13109 none The St. Louis Public Schools (SLPS) serving 42,673 students, of which 81.7% are eligible for free reduced lunch, 15.3% are students with disabilities, 80% are African American, 17.4% White-non-Hispanic, 1.5% Asian Pacific Islander, and 1.1% Hispanic, through the St. Louis Urban Systemic Program (SLUSP), proposes to build upon the substantial accomplishments realized under the St. Louis Urban Systemic Initiative (USI) to implement strategies that ensure effective teaching and student success in science and mathematics in all schools throughout the District. The District s policies bearing on mathematics and science graduation requirements, teacher and other staff professional development, and accountability programs conjoined to student achievement, student assessment and program evaluation, curriculum designs objectives indicators coupled to explicit student learning outcomes, the annual performance standards for each school, school-based management, and infusion of technology into the delivery of instruction serve as the framework, enablers and direction for the overall reform process. The goals of the SLUSP include improving the implementation of standards-based, inquiry-centered science and mathematics education with technology infusion for all students, pre-K-12; increasing the competency of the science and mathematics instructional workforce; expanding the collaborations with colleges and universities for the production of science and mathematics teachers; and increasing the number of skilled entrants into the technology-based workforce. The District s program is informed by an implementation strategy that includes the following elements: - Full implementation of the standards-based, inquiry-centered science and mathematics education program with technology infusion for all students, pre-K-12; - Ensuring that the fully implemented program is a seamless, unitary teaching and learning sequence with regard to the continuum of the standards-based curriculum, instruction, and assessments with distributed accountability for student learning; - Increasing the competency of the science and mathematics instructional workforce through professional development and teacher education programs characterized by demanding content and performance standards; and - Enhancing teaching and learning outcomes through the use of state-of-the-art technologies and student support programs. The SLUSP has defined Student Achievement Benchmarks Targets, inclusive of baseline data, to be attained in four areas of student achievement: 1) performance on the mathematics and science portions of the statewide tests administered by the Missouri Achievement Program (MAP), 2) performance on the mathematics and science portions of the District-wide TerraNova achievement tests, 3) numbers enrolling in, and the percentage completing, selected advanced high school courses in mathematics and science, and 4) numbers taking, and the scores achieved on, college placement exams such as the SAT and ACT. In addition, even higher improvement benchmarks for the District s black students were formulated explicitly in order to narrow the existing differences between white and black students on higher level math and science courses and on college placement exams doc13110 none Levine Description: This award is for support of a collaborative research project involving Dr. Richard Levine, Department of Statistics, University of California at Davis, Davis, California, Dr. Emre Berk, Department of Management, and Dr. Ulku Gurler, Department of Industrial Engineering, both at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. These scientists will study the development of Bayesian updating methods to draw statistical inferences and derive optimal solutions in periodic review inventory problems. The goal is to develop realistic Bayesian models for decision-making in inventory management applications when1) inventory demands are unobservable or partially observed (lost sales); 2) customers differ in their attitudes toward immediate and delayed inventories; 3) demand processes evolve over time. In the context of inventory management, the goal is to be achieved by utilizing advanced statistical methods for modeling the uncertainty in demand processes and incorporating Bayesian methods to update available information dynamically during the course of operation as data accumulates. Scope: This award will allow an Assistant Professor at UC Davis to collaborate with two Turkish scientists, one of whom is also a recent Ph.D. This project is likely to enhance the potential for long-term productive collaboration. The topic is of scientific interest. The purpose is to bridge the gap between the purely industrial engineering operations research approach that focuses on optimization of a given system and the common statistical approach that provides a one time solution for the estimation of system parameters from a given data set. The collaboration brings experts with needed complementary expertise to deal with this complex problem. The project brings active researchers in these areas in the United States and Turkey. The project meets the INT criteria for support of collaborative research of mutual benefit doc13111 none Program for Gender Equity in Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology (PGE): Dis: Science, Gender and After School: Creating a Research Action Agenda Educational Equity Concepts, Inc. (EEC), in collaboration with the Directorate for Human Resources and Education at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the Academy for Educational Development (AED) requests $100,000 over 18 months from the National Science Foundation Program for Gender Equity for a dissemination project to create a research action agenda around SMET programming for girls in the informal, out-of-school learning arena. The overall goal of the project is to use after-school programming as a vehicle to both engage and sustain girls= interest in pursuing education and careers in SMET. Specific objectives are to: (1) bring together a multi-disciplinary group of researchers and practitioners in a working conference setting; (2) develop a research action agenda; (3) develop an action plan to carry out the agenda; and (4) disseminate the conference proceedings to researchers, practitioners, gender equity activists, policy-makers, and funders who are involved in informal and SMET education. Research focusing on girls at this juncture is critical because although there are a growing number of SMET programs, we do not know which programs are effective and which are not, especially with regard to engaging and supporting girls interest in SMET. The out-of-school learning arena encompasses community and school-based after- school programs; summer camp and Saturday weekend programs; museum programs; programs at community technology centers; college university science programs; on-line science clubs and competitions; and programs offered by girl-specific organizations. After-school as an educational field (rather than child-minding or purely recreational) is both new and growing. Moreover, we are moving rapidly toward a technology-based economy where women are an increasing part of the workforce. This conference will take advantage of a ground floor opportunity to create a research action agenda and inform the development of SMET programs that are free of gender and other forms of bias--race, ethnicity and disability that have traditionally contributed to educational inequality. The agenda created at the conference will be distributed to a broad audience of researchers, practitioners, gender equity activists, policy-makers, and funders. In doing so, the conference will extend awareness and information about the participation of girls and women in SMET education; catalyze new thinking on the subject; and serve as a springboard for research and action. Dissemination will take place via journals, publications, web sites, listservs, and professional association conferences doc13112 none The Center for Health Management Research, then based at Arizona State University (since moved to the University of Washington), received its initial designation as an Industry University Cooperative Research Center in July . From the outset, this has been a multi-university center, drawing its academic resources from a consortium of 15 universities. The goals for the Center are to: 1) Develop a research agenda in collaboration with the corporate members; 2) Undertake research, development, and evaluation projects on behalf of the corporate members; 3) Disseminate to the members findings of health services research; 4) Identify and disseminate to the members successful innovations and management practices from other health care organizations; and 4) Identify and disseminate to the members relevant research findings, successful innovations, and management practices from other industries doc13113 none The LSAMP Pacific Alliance proposes to initiate a collaborative that will effect a systemic change in the hiring patterns of Alaskan Natives, Native Americans, and Pacific Rim Islanders in the fields of SMET. The goals would be achieved by increasing the number of individuals who can access SMET careers through the increased recruitment, retention and placement within partner communities. The specific target is to double the number of Indigenous American students graduating annually, with 50% going on to graduate school doc13114 none This project concerns a family of metal transporters called YELLOW STRIPE-LIKE (YSL), which have been identified based on their very strong sequence similarity to the YS1 protein of maize. The function of YS1 is in the primary uptake of iron from the soil. However, unlike other known plant iron transporters, YS1 transports iron that is complexed by specific plant-derived Fe(III) chelators called phytosiderophores. There are eight YSL proteins encoded in the Arabidopsis thaliana genome (http: www.bio.umass.edu biology ewalker), but they cannot function in phytosiderophore uptake, since Arabidopsis (like all non-grasses) can neither synthesize nor use phytosiderophores. Arabidopsis does make and use a related compound, nicotianamine, which is the biosynthetic precursor to phytosiderophores. Preliminary evidence suggests that YSL proteins mediate transport of metals bound to nicotianamine. The many roles of nicotianamine in achieving proper metal ion allocation in plants are incompletely understood, but there is strong evidence that nicotianamine is necessary for distribution of Fe, Zn, and Mn via phloem, and that it is required for transport of Cu in xylem. The functions of the eight Arabidopsis thaliana YSL genes will be determined from the narrowest definition of function-biochemical function, to the broadest definition of function-the role of these proteins in the growth and development of the plant. A comprehensive description of the function of each YSL protein will be formed that will answer these questions: Which metals are transported by YSL proteins? Which cells express each YSL and therefore are involved in transporting these metals? Which nutrient conditions affect expression of each YSL family member? In what way(s) does abolishing specific YSL genes affect the pattern of metal ion distribution in the plant? By integrating this specific information for all eight YSL genes, our understanding of the metal ion allocation mechanisms used by plants will be greatly improved. Sequence information will be made immediately available through Genbank and on the project website. The website will also be updated with experimental data for each YSL gene as it becomes available doc13115 none In Phase II, SUNY LSAMP will be building on the infrastructure, research base and replicable models from Phase I and will scale up those programs with approaches that work and advance new initiative to address those areas of greatest challenge. The goals of SUNY LSAMP are to double the number of under-represented minority students getting bachelors degrees in SMET disciplines; to encourage students to graduate study, into the professoriate and into the SMET workforce; to encourage curricular and pedagogical change in SMET disciplines and to institutionalize SUNY LSAMP goals. Strong emphasis will be placed on strengthening the program at key transition points (high school to college, 2- to 4-year college and undergraduate to graduate study), on replicating innovative program models, providing comprehensive student support services, continuing to build undergraduate research experience and strengthening the SUNY LSAMP Alliance. SUNY LSAMP is a coalition of sixteen four-year and community colleges within the State University of New York (SUNY) system and program partners. Key program partners are Computer Associates, BP Amoco, Brookhaven National Laboratory; the New York State Collegiate Science and Technology Entry Program (CSTEP), and the SUNY Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (SUNY AGEP doc13116 none Historians and philosophers of science have studied the development and evaluation of theories in a wide variety of fields, and have developed a number of different approaches to these topics. What little attention has been devoted to modern cosmology has focused almost entirely on the controversy between the big bang theory and the steady state theory, a controversy which ended in the mid-60s. Since then a great deal of theoretical effort has been devoted to understanding the very early universe. This dissertation research project intends to develop a content-rich history of this research, with a focus on issues of theory development and evaluation. The NSF dissertation research support will allow the researcher to interview several prominent cosmologists and visit archives with collections related to modern cosmology (England, Chicago, Boston, and Princeton). These interviews and archival visits will allow the researcher to develop a more nuanced and insightful historical account of this period and to pose methodological questions to working scientists. In addition, detailed interviews with cosmologists will be a valuable resource for future historians. The research and interviews will focus on two methodological questions. Much of early universe research has been motivated by the alluring idea that fundamental physics dictates large scale properties of the universe. In particular, inflationary cosmology has won widespread acceptance due to its ability to solve a number of fine-tuning problems of standard cosmology. However, cosmologists assessments of the importance of this success differ widely. Via focused interviews with proponents and critics of inflation (and earlier theories with a similar motivation), the researcher will explore the reasons for these differing assessments. The interviews will also focus on attempts to make precision tests of inflation doc13117 none Boadu This award supports a three-year cooperative research project between Professor Fred K. Boadu, with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Duke University, and Mr. Emmanuel A. Owusu, with the Department of Geological Engineering at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, in Kumasi, Ghana. The investigators will conduct a study to investigate and assess the potential vulnerability of groundwater in a fractured terrain that is subject to indiscriminate use of pesticides. The study area is located in a farming community in the Nsawam district. In many developing countries the heavy and routine use of pesticides is a common practice, but for many areas the impact on groundwater resources is unknown. Fractures in crystalline rock serve as the main hydraulic conduits for flow of groundwater and transport of contaminants in the earth s subsurface. In Ghana farmers routinely use pesticides such as DDT, and these can easily end up in the groundwater that is used for domestic purposes, thus posing potential health risks to inhabitants in surrounding communities. The investigators will use an innovative approach that combines artificial neural networks with standard field mapping techniques and geophysical survey methods to map subsurface fractures in order to predict and map the potential flow directions of contaminated groundwater. The project will utilize Dr. Boadu s expertise in the development and use of geophysical models to predict subsurface transport properties of fractured terrain and Mr. Owusu s background in field structural mapping. Both will collaborate on the analysis and interpretation of the structural information obtained from the field. Results of this project are expected to advance current theoretical knowledge in environmental and engineering geophysics, as will as provide new information on variations in fracture parameters and orientations during past tectonic deformation. Additionally, the project will result in a valuable database of geological and geophysical information for this part of Ghana and similar environments. This project is being jointly supported by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Earth Sciences doc13118 none This project will analyze how algebraic concepts and representations are developed and introduced throughout the Chinese, Singaporean, and United States curricula for Grades K-8. Recent international assessments indicate that the level of achievement in algebra is quite different in the three countries, and this project will analyze how the differences in achievement are related to differences in curricula. Case studies of the Chinese and Singaporean curricula, as well as selected US curricula (including NSF-funded programs and others), will help explain these differences and provide guidance to curriculum developers. The project will be conducted in parallel with the comparative study organized by the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction (ICMI) entitled Mathematics Education in Different Cultural Traditions: A Comparative Study of East Asia and the West. The ICMI study provides a broader mathematical context for the more specific work of this project on the algebra curriculum. It also provides a pool of international experts in the field who can advise this project and additional opportunities for dissemination. The results of the project will be used to improve the development of K-8 mathematics curricula in the United States doc13119 none Protein phosphorylation is a major mode of regulation of metabolism, gene expression, and cellular architecture in eukaryotic cells, and defining phosphorylation-based regulatory networks is essential for understanding the function of the Arabidopsis genome. The goal of this project is to define phosphorylation networks that are related to the function of calcium-dependent protein kinases (CDPKs) and four closely related families; CDPK-related kinases (CRKs), phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase kinases (PPCKs), PPCK-related kinases (PEPRKs), and SNF-1 related kinases (SnRKs). These 88 kinases, which represent about 9% of all the protein kinases in the Arabidopsis genome, are involved in all aspects of plant development and physiology and participate in the coupling of cellular responses to environmental and developmental signals. A list of these protein kinases including gene identification numbers is available at http: www.arabidopsis.org, and further information including links to database records is available at http: plantsp.sdsc.edu. This research will investigate the function of 64 members of these families through determination of the subcellular location of each kinase and identification of downstream targets and other proteins with which the kinases associate. This information will give insight into the physiological roles of each kinase by identifying signaling networks in which each participates. This research will also determine the target sequences in substrate proteins that are phosphorylated by each kinase, and these results will contribute to understanding the overlap in kinase function and cross-talk between signaling pathways. The results of this work will be made available on a yearly basis at the two URLs given above doc13120 none Plants respond to pathogen attack through a variety of signaling pathways consisting of a large number of regulatory as well as effector genes. During the past several years, many defense-related genes have been identified through genetic analysis conducted in Arabidopsis thaliana. Importantly, Arabidopsis exhibits all of the major kinds of defense responses present in other plants. Although a relatively large number of Arabidopsis defense-related genes have been identified, progress in developing overall explanatory models of plant-pathogen interactions is currently limited by two major experimental roadblocks. First, most of the phenotypic tests that have been used to characterize pathogen-host interactions do not have sufficient discriminatory power to assign defense-related genes to specific signal response pathways. To circumvent this limitation, large-scale transcript profiling analyses will be carried out on appropriately selected Arabidopsis defense-related mutants, including double and triple mutants. Combining genetic epistasis analysis with genomic technologies should lead to the development of a much more detailed model of how the various defense-related genes function and interact in combating pathogen attack. The second factor limiting the understanding of the plant defense response is that it is simply not possible to analyze the overwhelming volume of current data using conventional methods. The large volume of microarray data that will be generated in the near future compounds this problem. Moreover, data from different laboratories are not directly comparable because standardized experimental conditions are not employed. To help mitigate the problems associated with the analysis of large data sets, a sophisticated web-accessible plant-microbe interaction database (PMIDB) will be created to provide a common repository and standardized format for experimental data. The specific aims of the project are to: 1) Use transcript-profiling analysis to identify Arabidopsis defense-related genes and construct a custom microarray (pathoarray) enriched for defense-related genes (A list the genes identified so far can be found at http: genetics.mgh.harvard.edu ausubelweb nsf NSF_ .html). These custom pathoarrays will be made available to the Arabidopsis community at a nominal cost with the expectation that the experimental results generated using these pathoarrays will be deposited in PMIDB. 2) Use the pathoarrays from Aim 1 and Arabidopsis defense-related mutants to define the expression signatures resulting from the activation of defense pathways. 3) Create a web-accessible plant-microbe interaction database (PMIDB). This database, which will be accessible at http: genetics.mgh.harvard.edu ausubelweb nsf NSF_ .html, will be developed during the next four years and will contain standardized experimental procedures for analyzing host defense responses, a list of all the pathogenesis-related mutants and their phenotypes, a list of defense-related genes with links to various sequence databases, and expression profiles of different plant-pathogen interactions and different defense-related mutants. This Project provides a unique opportunity for applying genomic approaches to genetic analysis of plant defense mechanisms. Understanding the mechanisms of plant defense is of interest not only to basic science but also to development of agriculture and protection of the environment doc13121 none This research proposes to advance theoretical understanding of public participation in decision-making about environmental and risk policies that are contentious and non-routine. Theories on public participation have emerged out of management sciences, decision theory, political science, philosophy, communication studies, and small group psychology. A recent National Research Council committee report on risk characterization advanced the idea of public participation as an iterative, non-linear combination of analysis and deliberation. However, despite these theoretical developments and wise practitioner reflections, there is little systematic research on public participation processes. What is needed is theory that captures the full breadth of principles that are important to understanding public participation and integrates insights from these different disciplines and different units of analysis. One key assumption of this project is that research must also tap the knowledge of people who actually take part in public participation processes. Theory of public participation also needs to understand how the historical and social context or the characteristics of the people involved can influence performance. The same participation model (e.g. citizen juries) may not yield the same outcomes in two different social settings. Certain handbooks for practitioners give hints as to what context features planners should pay attention to, but there is no theory that adequately explains how context matters. This research undertakes a systematic comparison of public participation processes in three different policy issue arenas: forest policy-making, watershed planning, and radiation health effects protection. For each arena researchers will inquire into participants ideas of what matters in a public participation process. By selecting individuals with vastly different points of view about the process, they will gather a wide breath of principles that theory of public participation should incorporate. To make sense of these different points of view, they will use a combination of in-depth interview methods and Q methodology. Q methodology is a way of revealing the presence of pre-existing social discourses about a topic. The researchers will also conduct a second order Q analysis across the case studies to explore whether there are stable discourses about good public participation process that are independent of characteristics of the policy venue. The analysis will involve comparing results within and between policy arenas. The interviews will be used primarily to explore the relationships between contextual features of a policy issue, personal characteristics, and beliefs about good process. Results will enable progress on theory of public participation and generation of hypotheses for future research. Such theory will be useful to planners and organizers of public participation processes and can thereby lead to improved decisions about environmental and risk issues doc13122 none This project will attempt to develop and extend a new framework for the modeling and compensation of reactive (inactive) power in electric power grids. Reactive power is essentially the result of difficulties in aligning the phases of electricity in AC power flows; in thc worst case, when a small power supply is connected to the grid with incorrect phase relations and timing, it may actua]ly take power away from the grid rather than add to the grid, even though it is burning fuel and generating electricity. Difficulties in managing such phase relatiotis are a major harrier to the greater, more efficient use of distributed generation and renewable energy sources. By developing a new way to represent and manage such phase relations, ibis proposal hopes to provide a stream of benefits, both short-term and long-term, to the electric power community. The most immediate applications would be in power systems (for evaluation of loads and metering) industrial electric drives (for design of filters and control of converters) and power electronic systems (for modeling and control of active filters and uninterruptible power supplies.) Automotive, naval and aerospace applications are also envisioned doc13123 none The aim is to emulate the reaction processes used in nature for lignin polymerization, the setting of mussel glue, and insect shell hardening. These polymerization and curing processes are enzyme-initiated and then they progress in a domino fashion. In this project, it is proposed to use tyrosinase to convert natural phenolic precursors into reactive o-quinones, which can then serve as agents for polysaccharide crosslinking and protein-polysaccharide coupling. To elucidate more mechanistic details, a combined biochemical and mechanical screening program has been devised doc13124 none Existing genefinders use information about splice sites and differences between exons and introns, but do not explicitly incorporate information about sequences known as splicing enhancers, which promote incorporation of exons into mRNA. This is a project to characterize exonic splicing enhancers in Arabidopsis. Although splicing enhancers likely function in splice site selection in many plant genes, and contribute to the regulation of alternative splicing, plant splicing enhancers have not yet been described in detail. Computational analysis of a database of Arabidopsis exons and introns will be used to identify candidate splicing enhancer sequences. The role of these sequences, and sequences from genes that are known to be alternatively spliced, will be tested in transgenic Arabidopsis using a splicing reporter construct. The activity of these enhancers will be examined in transgenes that depend on exon inclusion for expression. This will include analysis of the tissue-specificity of splicing enhancer activity and should provide an extensive database of information about the role of particular sequences in promoting splicing. This project will generate: 1) 2,000 publicly available transgenic lines, available through the ABRC, carrying splicing reporter genes with defined candidate splicing enhancer sequences 2) A description of marker gene expression for each splicing enhancer candidate. This will consist of a description of all expression patterns and images of typical and selected patterns, available through the internet (http: www.tigr.org -splicing ) and linked to the seed stocks 3) Improved genefinding and gene annotation available as improvements to the existing GlimmerM server (http: www.tigr.org softlab glimmerm ). Effective use of the complete nucleotide sequence of Arabidopsis requires improved gene annotation. Information about the messenger RNA products of genes is incomplete. This project will provide to the scientific community both experimental data on splicing enhancers that will improve gene annotation, and genetic material for further study doc13125 none This dissertation research project investigates the use of immigrant labor in the information technology industry, an industry that is recruiting foreign temporary workers in increasingly large numbers. Ethnographic research using interviews, participant-observation, and archival techniques will be conducted over the course of 12 months in Dublin, Ireland, the largest software-exporting region in the world. The main objective is to construct a model of how rapid technological change, the employment policies of IT firms and the career related attitudes of IT professionals are contributing to an intensification of labor migration in the industry. This investigation will offer significant new insights into processes within the IT industry that create the supply of and demand for immigrant workers. This knowledge can be used to inform decision making about future policies for managing the immigration of IT professionals. In addition, by documenting the ways that careers in the IT industry are changing as the pace of technological change quickens and firms reorganize around more flexible forms of production, the knowledge gained from this project can assist policymakers in evaluating future prospects for careers in an industry that will provide many of the jobs of the 21St century doc13126 none The San Antonio Urban Systemic Program The San Antonio Urban Systemic Program (SAUSP) plans to promote full implementation of K-12 standards-based, inquiry-centered curricula in a coalition of nine school districts through the organization of elementary, middle, and high schools in K-12 school-feeder patterns served by teams of coaches. In order to increase the competency of the instructional workforce to accomplish this goal, San Antonio plans to implement a comprehensive professional development program in close collaboration with local institutions of higher education. A Citywide Monitoring System will provide for evaluation of student understanding of mathematics and science. This system will include a set of performance tasks to evaluate instructional practices and curriculum implementation, a web-based curriculum network to support excellence in instruction providing high-quality assessments and examples of standards-based instruction, and the use of district-based equity teams to specifically address the achievement gaps between ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Consistent with this end, participating districts have proposed the development of a new assessment system that is fully congruent and supportive of effective implementation of standards-based curricula. Furthermore, in order to secure a permanent coordination of a community coalition comprised of K-12 educators, business and community members, and the university sector, the SAUSP will establish a K-16 Implementation Team. A comprehensive evaluation plan will enable the leadership to assess progress in every component of the Initiative; gather, interpret and use data to inform the planning and decision-making process doc13127 none Determining the function of a network of genes Definition of determining the function In our project, we will define the function of approximately 10 new genes from Arabidopsis that are functionally related because they are part of the RPM1 disease resistance pathway. Our definition of function will entail: 1. Detailed information on the role of these genes in disease resistance. 2. Broader definition of extra functions that we may uncover for these genes. For example, we already know that reduction of function of at least two of them causes meristem defects. At present, this may be simple pleiotropy. It also may be relevant, meaning that the genes in question have additional functions in plant growth. URLs where the public can get information on their accession numbers in GenBank or other identifiers in a publicly accessible database Our data will be published and our results will also be available on our lab web site at: http: www.bio.unc.edu faculty dangl lab superpage.html As an example of how we release web based data, see: http: www.bio.unc.edu faculty dangl lab sar What, how and where the results will be shared We will share our results well before publication at the annual Arabidopsis meeting. Significance of the proposed work in relation to the Project objectives Our work will dovetail with more general functional genomics proposals funded in . It is necessary to incorporate hypothesis driven functional genomics results, such as the data we intend to generate, with the gene family and whole genome data generated by others. Broader Impact Disease resistance is a significant problem in agriculture. We will add to the body of knowledge that will eventually lead to more effective control of plant disease. This is vital because we currently lose up to 30% of crop yield to pathogens and pests doc13128 none This proposal aims to develop novel and general computational tools to discover functional sites in protein structures. These sites control nearly all aspects of cellular chemistry and their identification has important applications, such as to understand the basis of protein function, and to modify cellular pathways by engineering protein mimetics or inhibitors. Until now, however, functional sites could be identified reliably only after exhaustive mutational analysis: a laboratory process that is slow, labor intensive, limited by assay sensitivity, and which is protein specific. Here, we propose instead to identify functional sites with new algorithms for sequence analysis and for the efficient geometric comparison of important features in protein structures. This builds on our preliminary work on the Evolutionary Trace (ET) method. First, in proteins with sufficient evolutionary information, we will use ET to identify the key geometric and chemical features of active sites and summarize these into 3-dimensional molds. Second, in protein structures lacking sufficient evolutionary information, we will search for look-alike areas that mimic these molds. At a time when the outpour of raw sequence and structure date overwhelms conventional means of analysis, this low-cost strategy will reveal the regions of protein structures that are most relevant to function, and therefore to experimentation doc13129 none Methanogenesis (the synthesis of methane) from methylamines is initiated in microbes by one of three methylamine methyltransferases that methylate corrinoid cofactors specifically using either trimethylamine (TMA), dimethylamine (DMA), or monomethylamine (MMA). The genes encoding the TMA, DMA, and MMA methyltransferases are non-homologous, yet each gene contains a single in-frame amber codon. If amber codons were read as stop codons, each methylamine methyltransferase gene would produce an amber termination product markedly truncated relative to the isolated and characterized methyltransferase. Sequencing of the tryptic fragments of the MMA methyltransferase revealed that readthrough occurs without a frameshift, and that the amber codon is translated as lysine in a representative methyltransferase. No editing or changes are evident in transcripts, indicating direct translation of the amber codon as lysine occurs. Two phylogenetically distinct lys-tRNA synthetase (lysRS) genes were found in Methanosarcina barkeri. A class I lysRS synthetase is found downstream of an operon with two of the amber containing methyltransferase genes and is co-regulated with the MMA methyltransferase gene. A constitutive class II synthetase is also encoded in the genome. A possible role of the class I enzyme is charging an amber lys-tRNA for translation of amber as lysine. Working hypotheses are that the amber codons are required for either proper folding and or translational processing of the methyltransferase proteins, or are involved in controlling methyltransferase transcription and translation. The regulation of amber codon readthrough, as well as cis requirements for amber translation, will be examined using either an in vitro amber readthrough assay, or alternatively, using in vivo reporters of amber translation. A mutant strain will be constructed in which the amber codon of a methylamine methyltransferase gene is changed to a canonical lysine codon, and the effect on transcripts, protein levels and enzyme activity determined. The amber lys-tRNA will be identified by one of several alternate approaches and characterized. The two lysRS enzymes will either be expressed recombinantly or isolated from the native host in order to characterize their behavior with respect to lysine and different lys-tRNAs. These studies will shed light on the function of a change in the usual genetic code found in these methane producing microorganisms. In a select group of their genes a signal that usually stops biosynthesis of a protein, instead directs the insertion of an amino acid into the protein. Since the genetic code is universal such changes in the genetic code are relatively rare. This research project will in part explain the biological driving force behind this change in the genetic code. This is expected to provide new insights into the process of protein biosynthesis, gene regulation, and the catalytic activities of enzymes in methane-producing microbes. Understanding these processes is important because methanogenesis is an essential component of the global carbon cycle doc13130 none Phase transitions at zero temperature involve fundamentally new physics. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle inextricably intertwines the static and dynamical response of the material changing state, introducing new critical exponents, new scaling laws, and a new relationship between interactions and disorder. This project will probe the fundamental nature of the quantum phase transition in two model experimental systems. The first is the metal-insulator transition in hydrogenated films of elemental Y and La. Rare earth hydride films can be converted reversibly from metallic mirrors to transparent, insulating windows simply by changing the hydrogen content or via UV exposure. The physics of the Mott-Hubbard MI transition in metal hydride films will be pursued with an emphasis on the roles played by electron-electron interactions, by different types of disorder, and by the (non-linear) dynamical response in electric and magnetic fields. The second model system involves single crystals of the only elemental antiferromagnet, Cr. Dilution of chromium with small amounts of vanadium, smoothly depresses Cr s spin-density-wave transition to T = 0. Will a simple antiferromagnet display the anomalous behavior demonstrated by the related high-Tc superconductors and heavy fermion compounds? The experimental focus will be on high resolution pressure studies at ultra-low temperatures, broadly developing the technical skills of students at the undergraduate, doctoral and postdoctoral levels. %%% Materials most commonly undergo changes of state with changing temperature. Non-thermal processes like pressure and magnetic field also can induce magnetic, electronic, and optical changes. When these transitions occur at absolute zero, where all motion stops, new quantum physics arises. Moreover, the effects can be felt up to surprisingly high temperatures. This proposal aims to probe the fundamental nature of the quantum phase transition in two model experimental systems. The first of these is the metal-insulator transition in hydrogenated films of elemental Y and La. Rare earth hydride films can be converted reversibly from metallic mirrors to transparent, insulating windows simply by changing the surrounding hydrogen gas pressure or through illumination with ultraviolet light. Switchable mirrors with both homogeneous and pixilated optical properties will be investigated, with applications in mind. The second model system involves single crystals of the only elemental antiferromagnet, Cr. Dilution of chromium with small amounts of vanadium, its neighboring element in the Periodic Table, smoothly depresses the magnetic transition temperature to absolute zero. Will a simple antiferromagnet display the anomalous behavior demonstrated by the related high-temperature superconductors? The experimental focus will be on high resolution pressure studies at ultra-low temperatures, broadly developing the technical skills of students at the undergraduate, doctoral and postdoctoral levels doc13131 none Weng Ferroelectric ceramics are an important class of engineering materials that have wide applications as sensors, actuators, transducers, and ultrasonic medical imaging. This class of materials can exist or can be fabricated in several scales: single crystals, polycrystals, composites, and thin films, but their distinctive properties are not clearly known. In order to explore the full potential for each of them and to provide a guideline for material design and selection, a research project will be undertaken to study their properties, and to develop for each of them the unique constitutive models for their nonlinear, coupled electromechanical behaviors. In this process, the change of crystal structures from the high temperature paraelectric to the low temperature ferroelectric state will be considered, and domain switch from one poled state to another under application of an electric field and or mechanical stress will be investigated. This will be carried out by consideration of the mechanics, physics, and irreversible thermodynamics involved during phase transformation and domain switch. In particular, the thermodynamics driving force arising from the change in Gibbs free energy of a heterogeneous system and the resistance force associated with the domain wall movement will be used to construct the kinetic equations. On the single crystal level, domains with lamellar structures for all potential variants will be identified under a given electromechanical field, while on the polycrystal level it will be addressed for the constituent grains considering grain interactions. For ferroelectric composites actuated with ferroelectric piezoelectric particles or rods, or spheroidal inclusions in general, the effect of microstructural features, such as particle shape, volume concentration, and distribution, will be examined. For the thin films whose thickness direction usually contains columnar grains with some preferred texture, their distinctive characteristics from the bulks will be emphasized. The theory will be checked with experimental data, some from open literature and others from work of two collaborators. The outcome of the proposed study will be a set of physically based, experimentally verified constitutive models that reveal the unique features of the electromechanical behavior for each scale. The proposed problems touch upon several novel aspects not commonly encountered simultaneously: micromechanics of heterogeneous materials, electric-mechanical coupling, nonlinear response, evolution of microstructures, irreversible thermodynamics, physics of phase transformation and domain switch, and scale-transition. As such, it will contribute to the basic advancement of scientific knowledge in this important field. The research program will be integrated into both graduate and undergraduate teaching at Rutgers. At the graduate level a new focus on the coupled phenomena in solids will be initiated. This will include the electromechanical coupling in piezoelectricity and ferroelectricity as proposed, and electrostriction, ferromagnetic behavior, magnetostriction, and shape-memory alloys. At the undergraduate level a project for the seniors with an interest in both mechanics and electronic materials will be offered through Rutgers J. J. Slade Scholars program. Participants of this project will have the unique opportunity to learn both, and gain experience to write a thesis on this interdisciplinary topic. In this process, minority and under-privileged students will be actively sought to participate doc13104 none This collaborative research project is directed towards a new technology for the production of micro meso-scale components by methods whose efficiency approaches that of mass production. Key to achieving this capability will be the creation of miniaturized machine tool systems (referred to as meso-Machine Tools, mMTs) whose volume is on the order of 1 dm3. These systems are required to meet the rapidly growing demand for 3D parts and part features at the micro meso-level (0.01 - 10.00 mm range) in materials that include stainless steel, titanium, aluminum, platinum, iridium and others is currently being met by using ultra-precision CNC machine tools. It is common to have machine-to-workpiece volume ratios of 106 or higher at best, a situation that adversely affects accuracy, precision and overall efficiency. The prevalent microelectronic fabrication techniques and their spin-offs used for micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) are, in turn, are limited by their inability to produce arbitrary 3D features in a wide range of materials and by their limited relative accuracy. However, to their advantage, MEMS-based technologies are batch type, leading to cheap mass production, while ultra-precision CNC processes are serial, inherently expensive and not easily adaptable to mass production. The goal is to meet productivity requirements by applying these mMT in a massively parallel fashion. It is envisioned that the mMTs, in analogy to a computer system, will be equivalent to plug-and-play boards and treated as replaceable entities. To facilitate an integration of such machines into a system, resource and information distribution mechanisms will be established by an architecture, similar in concept to the bus of a computer, that supplies energy, control feedback information, and materials and tools to from the individual machines. It is anticipated that the project will demonstrate that it is possible to build mMT systems for costs two or three orders of magnitude below existing systems doc13133 none This research and educational program will address the quantum-mechanical transport and storage of electrons and holes in ultra-thin, heteroinsulator nanostructures.The nanostructures are comprised of an oxide-nitride-oxide (ONO)gate dielectric. This research focuses on the quantum-mechanical aspects of charge trapping in ultra-thin ONO dielectrics. This project will employ a combination of novel test structures,such as linear voltage ramp and charge pumping,o determine the spatial and energetic distribution of traps in the silicon nitride and oxynitride storage layers and in the Si-SiO 2 interfacial region on the opposite side of the tunnel oxide. A variation of material parameters to examine retention and endurance of scaled novel SONOS devices in the program (write) and erase modes as a function of operational temperature. This research addresses the incorporation of hydrogen and deuterium in the SONOS device to provide long-term retention under extensiveerase write cycling at elevated temperatures; it will also address the effect of the gate electrode on the charge distribution and long-term memory retention. Advanced fabrication techniques are used to grow ultra-thin tunnel oxides and analytical characterization techniques, such as AFM,TEM and angle-resolved XPS are employed to analyze the spatial and compositional structure of these ultra-thin dielectrics. This research seeks to understand charge trapping and storage in ultra-thin multi-dielectrics in advanced semiconductor devices while offering a strong educational program and link to industrial partnerships doc13134 none This workshop will bring together leading scientists and engineers who are at the frontiers of electronic device and circuit research and development. Low power digital electronics, microwave power circuits, wide band gap semiconductors, nanotechnology, terahertz technology, and optoelectronics have become the foundation of today s electronics technology. This advanced workshop will be a special forum to gather some of the most creative minds and leading experts from academia, industry, and government agencies, and to review the most recent and exciting breakthroughs in the fields, the underlying physical mechanisms that link these advancements, and to exchange views on future trends and directions, the market pulls and the necessary policy and infrastructure changes doc13135 none becomes good enough, the theory may be used in a predictive fashion to determine computationally, rather than experimentally, what a material s behavior will be. Becasue it is possible to look into the simulation in a much more detailed way than is possible experimentally, this approach leads to insights that are not available otherwise, and will enable materials physicists to design new materials that have desired properties. %%% Theoretical research will be conducted on a variety of complex materials of current interest in order to understand their properties from a fundamental approach and, at the same time, to develop techniques which will provide the tools needed to design materials with specified propoerties doc13136 none This Special Grant for Exploratory Research is for the development of an item response model that better accounts for cognitive change. Towards this end, a core-unified model, called the DiBellow-Stout Unified model, is applied to two domains. The first is a high school AP chemistry course called ChemQuest that uses computer models and exercises to sustain and augment the students mental models of chemical processes. The second is an AP Statistics course called Statistics: The Craft of Data Collection, Description, and Inference . The result of this research will be a better understanding of the core-unified model, a better understanding of how statistics and chemistry are learned, and a roadmap to possible future applications of the model in a wide variety of settings. The ability to better assess student learning is a key component of the utility of high stakes testing as measures of standards of learning doc13137 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Lynne Bianchi and her colleagues at Oberlin College to purchase a confocal microscope. The confocal microscope will be used to enhance and expand the existing research programs of these faculty members. Specifically, the instrument will be used to investigate: 1) the cellular organization of developing inner ear cells; 2) the developmental fate of mammalian epiblast cells; 3) the shape and orientation of neurons that release or respond to gonadotropin releasing hormone; 4) the structural abnormalities of muscle cells from mutant C. elegans; 5) the projections of lateral line and inner ear neurites; and 6) organization of the teleost forebrain. These projects will benefit from the increased cellular detail and resolution provided by confocal microscopy. Each of the research projects described will investigate fundamental questions such as how cells are organized during development, how the nervous system is wired, and how cell structure relates to cell function. The findings will have direct relevance to the particular field of the investigator, as well as to understanding biological systems in general. The proposed instrument will not only be necessary for maintaining high-quality faculty research, but will also play an important role in recruiting and training undergraduate students. Oberlin College has a history of providing outstanding science education to a diverse body of undergraduate students and is currently constructing a new, $65 million Science Center which will further enhance undergraduate science training. These students are directly involved in the faculty member s ongoing research and will now have the opportunity to work with a state-of-the-art confocal microscope. Additionally, faculty will develop lab exercises that utilize confocal microscopy for upper division laboratory courses and a month long internship program for first year students. Oberlin faculty have found that introducing students to such instrumentation in a class often inspires them to pursue individual undergraduate research projects and enter graduate programs in the sciences. In summary, the confocal microscope will be crucial to expanding current and future faculty research programs, as well as enhancing undergraduate research and classroom training. The presence of a confocal microscope on the Oberlin College campus will be a tremendous value for both the immediate and long-term research and training needs of the college doc13138 none s and to get the best student posters into manuscripts for publication in a major journal. A special panel on Balancing Career and Family: Not for Women Only also will discuss issues important to young investigators. The promotion of students to attend this conference will have a substantial impact on their careers by exposing them to the latest discoveries and approaches, and making more senior investigators aware of their individual research doc13139 none This proposal will continue the investigation of a non-thermal annealing process. The process involves focusing a high energy laser pulse to a small (~2 mm) spot on the surface of a sample. It has been found that such a laser pulse will anneal areas of approximately 1cm 2 in ion-implanted silicon. It has been shown that the annealing occurs without the introduction of heat, and is therefore different that conventional thermal processes. The process has demonstrated 100% reproducibility on silicon that has been ion-implanted with boron, phosphorus, and arsenic. The effectiveness of the process has been demonstrated at implant energies as low as 1keV for boron. The current project would investigate methods for increasing the annealed area, and apply the process to different materials. Increasing the area will be accomplished by trying different laser focusing schemes. These involve using cylindrical lenses instead of spherical lenses, varying the laser spot size, and angle of incidence, and using other methods of launching shock waves in the material. Different material systems to be investigated include patterned silicon wafers, simple electrical structures, such as diodes, GaAs, GaN, and high-k dielectric materials. After processing, the effectiveness of the process will be determined using infrared absorption spectroscopy, secondary ion mass spectrometry, spreading resistance profiling, transmission electron microscopy, and sheet resistivity measurements. Completion of the project will increase knowledge of materials processing, and may provide a valuable processing step for the semiconductor industry. The project will also serve an educational purpose, employing both graduate and undergraduate students, who can then pursue careers in science and engineering doc13140 none This is a planning grant for a project that will investigate the current level of K-3 elementary school teachers. disciplinary knowledge, beliefs, and knowledge calibration in reading processes, development, and pedagogy. The project will use a set of workshops and development activities in the planning of how to conduct a series of experimental, longitudinal, and qualitative studies that will lead to a greater understanding of the type and depth of knowledge needed to be an effective teacher of reading (as evidenced by student performance) and the models of professional development that facilitate the growth of teachers. disciplinary knowledge, beliefs, and pedagogy in reading and literacy doc13141 none The partners of the Louis Stokes Missouri Alliance for Minority Participation (LS-MoAMP) are proposing to move the consortium into a Phase II initiative. The new phase focuses on increasing baccalaureate production by fifteen percent annually over a five-year period. A primary strategy proposed to support that objective is to include all four-year public institutions in the partnership for Phase II, increasing the collaborative by four institutions: Truman State University, Missouri Western State College, Missouri Southern State College, and Northwest Missouri State University. This addition is expected to increase participation by twenty-five percent. The alliance s baseline and degree target is adjusted to reflect this addition doc13142 none The researchers in this project will conduct three field seasons in Egypt with subsequent studies on recovered fossils to be carried out at Duke and cooperating laboratories. The objective is to learn more about the earliest forerunners of monkeys, apes and humans. Previous discoveries have made this the world s most important location for such research. During the projected seasons, sites in the Fayum region will yield skulls, jaws, and skeletal parts from many early primates of both Eocene and Oligocene age. These date between about 36 and 26 million years old. Fossils come from a dozen quarries and are seldom recovered as associated skeletons, so that great diligence over long periods of time is required to add knowledge by finding previously unknown and often unassociated limb bones and skulls of the more than twenty extinct primate species that occur there. Most of these are represented only by parts of upper and lower jaws and, hence, much remains to be discovered. Africa appears to be the continent where the group of monkeys, apes and humans experienced most of its history and the Fayum holds the only continuous sequence of deposits in Africa during the early part of the time concerned doc13143 none Brantley This SGER proposal is designed to take a unique opportunity to assess the use of eddy correlation (EC), a micrometeorological technique, to measure CO2 fluxes at the Solfatara crater in Campi Flegrei, Italy. The choice of locality was made in order to take advantage of a field season where chamber fluxes will measured concurrently with another methodology by an Italian collaborator, Dr. G. Chiodini. This project has as a goal, to collect data that will convince atmospheric scientists and geologists worldwide of the potential of EC for assessment of volcanic fluxes and surveillance of volcanoes. Funding of the project will allow a student to be involved in the early developmental stages for using EC for volcanic work and will allow her to be involved in an international collaborative setting to study a problem with potential implications for global change and volcanic hazards doc13144 none Through funding provided by the National Science Foundation, the Nature Museum of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with El Valor and James Ward School will create Girls Online: GO Team! , an innovative after-school science and technology program that targets girls between the ages of eleven and thirteen living in underserved areas of Chicago. This pilot program will offer engaging science activities and real-world applications to teachhands-on science and technology to approximately 450 girls over a three-year period. Each semester, between forty-five and ninety girls will join the GO Team! at locations in their own neighborhoods. Of the girls who excel in this after-school program, six will be selected every semester to return and team teach with Academy staff to a new group of participating girls. As the girls grow in competency and skills, they can attend a more advanced GO Team! the following semester. The participating girls will attend weekly lab sessions taught by educators and scientists from the Academy, have fun with their families at a Kick -Off celebration and a Graduation Ceremony, learn about science and technology careers during a job shadow day with museum staff and outside professionals, and learn how science and technology impact their everyday lives. Successful women mentors will function as teachers and role models to help build the girls science knowledge, career choices, and self-esteem doc13145 none Hunziker This award supports Janet Hunziker of the National Academy of Sciences and junior and senior researchers from various U.S. universities to participate in an international workshop on several current engineering topics. The four primary areas to be covered are 1) medical device technology, 2) urban engineering and planning, 3) intelligent transportation systems, and 4) environment and renewable energy. Speakers will be asked to address issues such as what the frontiers in their field are; what experiments and prototypes are in progress; what new tools and instruments are available; what the major impediments to progress are; and what the theoretical, commercial, societal, and long-term significance of the work is. Invitees will be accomplished engineers who have made recognized contributions to advancing the frontiers of engineering, with half those present from industry and half from academia. The primary benefit of the workshop will be to foster new interactions between the best junior U.S. and German engineers from different fields and sectors. Today s most exciting and powerful engineering developments are occurring at the intersection of disciplines. By creating the opportunity for sharing of research insights and techniques across a range of fields, this workshop will facilitate leaps in knowledge and applications that might otherwise take much longer to achieve doc13146 none Meinke PROJECT SUMMARY This project will establish a foundation for identifying every Arabidopsis gene with an essential function during seed development. This information is central to the Arabidopsis Project and to identifying the minimal gene set required for growth and development of a model plant. The project will focus on genes that give a visible seed phenotype when disrupted by mutation. The network of genes chosen for analysis is therefore not defined by shared biochemical or molecular features but rather by the fact that they are essential. Arabidopsis contains an estimated 500 such EMB genes required for normal seed development and another 200 genes required for normal seed pigmentation. The approach outlined here is to coordinate the collection, analysis, and presentation of information on more than half of these genes based on cloning of mutant alleles. Information on essential genes and the corresponding mutants will be obtained from a variety of public and private sources and synthesized for efficient use by the community. The resulting insights into biological functions of these diverse genes will complement research in other labs on the biochemical activities of specific gene products. The result will be an integrated view of essential gene functions within a cellular, organismal, and evolutionary context. Project objectives are to: (1) use a combination of forward and reverse genetics to approach saturation for cloned EMB genes; (2) standardize phenotypic characterization of the corresponding mutants; (3) collect related information on seed pigment mutants; (4) make seeds for all mutant lines available through ABRC; (5) understand the functions of these genes in growth and development; (6) determine through expression studies and comparative sequence analysis why these genes are essential; (7) integrate this information into a simple but robust database with a format compatible with TAIR; (8) establish a model for public release of private sector resources; and (9) develop outreach and training programs that complement research efforts in Arabidopsis functional genomics. Project deliverables include public access to synthesized information and seed stocks for 500 mutants defective in 300 different EMB genes; similar information for another 100 pigment mutants defective in 75 genes; valuable expression data for genes active in young seeds (wild type and selected mutants); and a database that should serve as a model for analyzing and presenting information on large collections of mutants. The project web page (www.seedgenes.org) will be linked through TAIR (www.arabidopsis.org). Release of the first version of the database is scheduled for March . Profiles of the first 100 essential genes examined in detail will be presented at that time. This project builds upon an existing collaboration between Oklahoma State University and Syngenta that has over the past 4 years resulted in identification of 350 tagged emb mutants and preliminary sequence data for about 200 of these mutants. This represents a significant corporate investment into a project that would be difficult and expensive to duplicate with federal funding. The current proposal includes substantial public release of private materials with minimal restrictions and provides a mechanism for collecting and analyzing community-wide information on essential genes. Such efforts are needed at the start of the Project to focus attention on genes with important biological functions doc13147 none Julie R. Newell, Southern Polytechnic State University Geology and the Emergence of Science as a Profession in the United States In the secondary literature on the history of science in America, geology has long been recognized as the first science to develop an extensive professional community. Further, geologists developed the support structures and institutions that made professional science in the United States possible. Among the critical institutions founded by geologists were the first general scientific journal, The American Journal of Science ( ), and the Association of American Geologists ( ), which would become the American Association for the Advancement of Science ( ). These achievements were critical to the emergence of professional scientists in other disciplines in the United States. No published history of science in America has, however, rooted these generalizations about the importance of geology in primary documents and archival evidence. Nor has it been explained why geology, rather than some other science, should have played this pivotal role. This project focuses on one central question with a multitude of ramifications: Why geology? Why were geologists able to garner public, political, and most importantly financial support for their scientific endeavors? What was it about the science of geology in the period before that particularly suited the cultural, political, and physical environment in the United States? Dr. Newell s thesis is that geology was a relatively new science uniquely well suited to the values and goals of the early United States and for which the United States provided unique materials for study and for the generation of truly American geological theories. Working from her earlier manuscript, Dr. Newell is conducting extensive additional archival research in order to unravel the personal and institutional relationships that underlie the development of geology in the United States and its impact on the broader history of science. The ultimate goal is an book-length manuscript that provides an integrated account of the early history of geology in the United States, including the content of the science, the goals and methods of the scientists, and the contexts that shaped, and were shaped by, American geologists and their geology. No such account exists in the published literature of the history of American geology. In addition, because of the centrality of geology to the emergence of science as a profession in the United States, this study should interest scholars concerned with the general history of science in the United States or in American intellectual history doc13148 none Subject: Elgar Herbers Guza abstract Funds are provided for development, testing, and improvement of circulation models driven by wave propagation and wave-breaking in the presence of abrupt nearshore topography. These will be tested using data collected from a California field site with two offshore canyons. Specific objectives include: determining how surface gravity waves propagate across a complex inner shelf topography, determining how bathymetrically-induced alongshore variations of the wave field affect shoaling, breaking, and nearshore circulation, and determining the characteristics of mass exchange between the surf zone and the inner shelf in the presence of abrupt topography. Four waverider buoys over the outer and mid shelf will provide offshore wave boundary conditions for the models and characterize the refraction over the outer shelf. Pressure cells at mid shelf will identify reflected waves from Scripps Canyon. PUVs (pressure and velocity sensors) and acoustic doppler current profilers (ADCPs) over the inner shelf will characterize inner shelf and surf zone circulation and wave fields. Drifters will be deployed and tracked. Moderate wave and low wave situations will be compared in an attempt to isolate flows induced by the canyon in the absence of wave forcing. The buoys, pressure cells, and PUVs will provide estimates of the evolution of the directional wave spectrum for comparison with model output. Various inner shelf models, including the NOPP community model, will be compared to the field data doc13148 none Subject: Elgar Herbers Guza abstract Funds are provided for development, testing, and improvement of circulation models driven by wave propagation and wave-breaking in the presence of abrupt nearshore topography. These will be tested using data collected from a California field site with two offshore canyons. Specific objectives include: determining how surface gravity waves propagate across a complex inner shelf topography, determining how bathymetrically-induced alongshore variations of the wave field affect shoaling, breaking, and nearshore circulation, and determining the characteristics of mass exchange between the surf zone and the inner shelf in the presence of abrupt topography. Four waverider buoys over the outer and mid shelf will provide offshore wave boundary conditions for the models and characterize the refraction over the outer shelf. Pressure cells at mid shelf will identify reflected waves from Scripps Canyon. PUVs (pressure and velocity sensors) and acoustic doppler current profilers (ADCPs) over the inner shelf will characterize inner shelf and surf zone circulation and wave fields. Drifters will be deployed and tracked. Moderate wave and low wave situations will be compared in an attempt to isolate flows induced by the canyon in the absence of wave forcing. The buoys, pressure cells, and PUVs will provide estimates of the evolution of the directional wave spectrum for comparison with model output. Various inner shelf models, including the NOPP community model, will be compared to the field data doc13150 none The Meteorology Department and Science Education program of Florida State University, in collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), will carry out a school-site meteorological project to be located in Miami Dade County Public Schools. This new collaborative project is entitled Middle School Students REALM (Really Exploring And Learning Meteorology). The project s foci are: (1) to expose more middle school girls to meteorological science content, (2) to develop a positive and supportive learning environment for participating girls and boys, (3) to provide on site technical assistance to participating science teachers for content implementation, and (4) to provide a vehicle for greater parent-girl participation in science activities. In order to maximize resources, available meteorology resources (weather stations) that are in demographically dispersed middle schools will be used. Involvement in this project will enhance girls awareness of career opportunities for women in the field of science in general and meteorology in particular. This project will also increase middle school girls self-esteem and confidence in learning science concepts, which integrate the use of mathematics and technology. This project model aims to reduce the attrition in advanced level science, mathematics and technology coursework that typically occurs as girls move from middle school to high school, which carries over into higher education doc13151 none This grant supports research for deriving new methods for accelerated degradation testing, or ADT, which involves analyzing product or system degradation in various high stress environments in order to predict product lifetime or system performance. The research concentrates on existing gaps in current test methods used in industry, and works to extend these current methods to a larger domain of problems, including non standard degradation models that describe more realistic product degradation scenarios in manufacturing. Initial work is based on applied problems with vacuum fluorescent displays (VFDs), light-emitting diodes, and fiber optics manufacturing. VFD performance helps to motivate such models. Emitted electrons from its cathode serve to eliminate impurities in the vacuum, and VFD light intensity actually increases up to a certain point of time before it decreases due to age-induced degradation. Standard ADT models cannot characterize this phenomenon. Specific developments of this research include: (1) A general framework for stress dependent degradation models based on physically motivated degradation paths; (2) Building formulas for failure times of various complex (non-linear) ADT models, along with uncertainty estimates based on statistical resampling methods; (3) Combining failure time data with separate sets of degradation data to improve product lifetime estimates; and (4) Finding optimal test procedures (in terms of information gained) based on time and cost constraints associated with product development. The ADT models include (non linear) random coefficients to reflect variability between test units. Bootstrap resampling procedures are derived to ascertain uncertainty because simpler variance approximations are not generally available with such random coefficient degradation models. With degradation data, the proposed estimates of the product failure time distribution serves as a key quality measure for evaluating a company s process improvement in highly reliable products, and can help company managers decide their product warranty policy. If successful, the results of this research can strongly affect process condition changes, material selections, equipment innovations, maintenance schedule revisions and other production operation changes. Thus, the research provides valuable information for companies to improve their operation efficiency and profitability doc13152 none Bringing Up Girls in Science (BUGS) is a demonstration project in the Department of Technology and Cognition at the University of North Texas (UNT). The goal of this project is to provide educational experiences in an outdoor learning lab for girls in grades four and five that will increase girls interest, participation, self-concept, knowledge, and achievement in the environmental sciences. During Year One, thirty 4 th and 5 th grade girls (BUGS participants) will participate in an after school outdoor science lab at Sam Houston Elementary in the Denton Independent School District in Denton, TX. Participants for the project will be recruited from across the district. BUGS participants will be mentored by female high students enrolled in the Texas Academy for Mathematics and Science (TAMS). BUGS participants and mentors will be joined the second and third year of the project by girls in special populations at distance sites through the use of two-way audio-visual desktop conferencing tools, a project WEB site, chat rooms, and computer ``pen-pals . For the second and third year special populations joining the project will include: (1) students with emotional and behavioral problems attending Rose Street Day Program and Therapeutic School in Wichita Falls, TX; (2) a school district which serves large numbers of Hispanic and Native American students in Bernalillo, New Mexico; and (3) students from a rural school district in Decatur, Texas. BUGS participants at distance sites will be able to use ``electronic field trips developed from activities that were videotaped during Year One to increase their opportunities to participate in the ``outdoor science lab experience. Family involvement will be ongoing throughout the project. Career awareness and educational opportunities materials will be housed by a local public library for the parents of BUGS participants. Three parent meetings per year will be provided to ``showcase student work and provide educational and career information doc13153 none Root This dissertation enhancement grant supports a US graduate student, Ms. Lori Lach, working under the guidance of Professor Richard Root, with the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University, to conduct a study in South Africa on Argentine ants in the South African fynbos, and their effects on proteas and their arthropod visitors. Invasive species are a threat not only to agricultural and economic systems, but also to the conservation of native flora and fauna. Argentine ants in particular are a worldwide problem. In the protea-rich South African fynbos native ants and the seeds they disperse are being endangered by the invasive Argentine ant. Ms. Lach will experimentally test the hypotheses that: 1) an invasive species, the Argentine ant, has detrimental effects on pollination in the biologically fragile area of the South African fynbos; 2) that a facultative mutualism may facilitate impacts of this invader; and 3) that the invader may be exerting these effects because it is able to escape floral defenses used on the native ant species. Dr. Michael Picker, of the Zoology Department at the University of Cape Town, will provide guidance on this project to Ms. Lach. The results are expected to increase the current knowledge about Argentine ants and their impact on fynbos flowers and their arthropod visitors, and provide additional information on the effects of invasive species on ant plant interactions. The findings should also have broad application to conservation biology and invasion ecology. This project is being jointly funded by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Environmental Biology doc13154 none Taboo tradeoffs have been identified in the context of a variety of environmental and health risk policies that involve emotional, moral, or ethical issues that are fundamentally difficult to resolve or think about. At the extreme, people asked for their opinions in these settings may resist making tradeoffs, for example by refusing to answer or by stating extreme values for questions that require a balancing of costs and benefits, because a norm that is protected or regarded as sacred is perceived as being violated. The expression of such taboo or protected values raises the questions of how and whether it is proper, in both a professional (analytical) and an ethical sense, to seek to elicit certain difficult tradeoffs because people may consider they are being asked to violate or transgress an absolute standard or rule that they have established. This proposal uses a mixture of theory-based and experiment-based research to examine the logic and treatment of such highly charged values. The proposed research is designed to distinguish between the expression of tradeoffs that truly are taboo and expressed tradeoffs that are, instead, possible to elicit but difficult, for example because they are cognitively complex (in the sense of involving multiple and or disparate dimensions) or evoke a strong moral and emotional response or encourage anticipatory regret and worry in the event that something goes awry. The research builds on the work of the psychologists Philip Tetlock (focusing on value conflicts and taboo tradeoffs), Jonathan Baron (focusing on protected values), and their colleagues, proposing a three-part investigation of (a) reasons for the apparent existence of a taboo on making tradeoffs, (b) techniques that might usefully and appropriately be employed for eliciting tradeoffs in such settings, and (c) factors that decision makers might use in determining whether and how to construct and assess tradeoffs and their implications. Benefits of the proposed two-year research effort include a more comprehensive understanding of the concept of taboo or protected values and the provision of additional guidance to public decision makers regarding methods for displaying or inquiring about tradeoffs in such a way as to facilitate responsible thought and deliberation. If successful, the end result will be better access for citizens who seek to provide input to controversial policy debates, more informed public decisions, and the adoption of policy alternatives that more clearly reflect and advance citizens underlying values doc13155 none Zaborszky It is proposed to compute in the Control Center, virtually instantly, the desired steady state condition of each building block and then subtract it from the existing state in each building block. This difference is the excess or transient energy within each building block. Then in each block utilize the series and shunt controls to eliminate this difference in voltage and current at the controlled end of each line. If this is accomplished then the transient energy of the block is drained into or out of the capacitors available for this purpose. If accomplished this would mean that the desired system state is realized virtually instantaneously at all times without transients, in a distributed manner. This idealized situation may be acceptably approximated provided the control process i is virtually instantaneous compared to the rate of variation of the desired state. Observe that the question asked here is not how to utilize newly developing technology and its tools to improve existing practice, but the converse: how to utilize existing and developing technology to solve the existing problems in the most favorable way. This then raises the question of how a transition can be found. Given the present riches of power electronics, computing and communication equipment and facilities, the question of how the total power system could be constructed for the best reliability, security, efficiency and other features. Of course, to be practical, it would be expected that current facilities such as transmission lines, generators, transformers capacitor bank etc. would be used, sometimes in novel roles. The innovation would involve a new structuring of the system e.g. an all DC bulk power system and a novel approach to controlling the restructured system doc13156 none The goal of this research project is to provide an economic analysis of the political ramifications of the decline in marriage. Arguably, the most significant development in the recent history of the family is the decline in marriage, and the rise in the proportion of single individuals in most Western countries. In the US, between and , the proportion of currently married individuals fell by a quarter (from 84 to 58 percent) while the fraction currently divorced increased threefold (from 3 to 10 percent). In so far as marriage is one of the most important institutions for resource redistribution between individuals, and redistributive preferences are central to many political choices it is relevant to examine how the decline in marriage has affected political outcomes. Our research develops a theoretical model which demonstrates that under reasonable assumptions on the underlying income distributions, marriage patterns and income-sharing within households, changes in the extent of marriage alter the income distribution and thereby political outcomes. We use the model to identify how increased non-marriage affects (i) the divergence of male and female political preferences, the so called gender gap; (ii) the aggregate demand for redistribution; (iii) the demographic and economic profile of swing voters; and (iv) the divergence in preferences between married and not married voters, the so called marriage gap. A key assumption underlying our analysis is that in general women marry men who are richer then themselves. Hence, relative to being single, marriage makes men poorer and women richer. This suggests that the decline in marriage could explain the political gender gap. The change in the overall demand for redistribution is less clear since for each woman who turns left, a man turns right. We show that if non-marriage is first prevalent amongst poor individuals, and then ``creeps up the income distribution, then initially non-marriage reduces the support for redistribution as male erstwhile left-leaning voters shift to supporting the right (cf. Reagan Democrats). As non-marriage increases amongst relatively well off groups, women in this group will start to vote at variance with their socio-economic profile (cf. Soccer moms). This finding is consistent with the marriage gap, i.e. that, relative to unmarried individuals, married individuals support the right to a greater extent. We use US data to test our hypotheses. First, using longitudinal data from the Youth-Parent Socialization survey ( and waves) we investigate whether realized changes in an individual s marital status affect his her political preferences in the hypothesized direction. Second, we examine how changes in a US state s ``marriage market over the period -96 have affected male and female political preferences. We measure changes in the state marriage market in two ways: first, by the stock of currently divorced individuals in a state (computed from the annual Current Population Survey); and second, by state divorce law changes. Our information about individual political preferences in from the National Election Survey studies ( -96 doc13157 none This project over a year period, will examine gender differences in the ways strategy use, speed of retrieval, spatial skills, confidence in mathematics, and conceptual understanding predict mathematics achievement. The longitudinal study beginning in the second grade and ending in the fourth grade, will document whether gender difference found in early strategy use, spatial skills and confidence continue through three years of elementary school and whether they promote each other s development and mathematics achievement. The elementary school years have been selected for study because although gender differences in strategy use, spatial skills, and confidence have been documented in elementary school age children, it is not clear how these differences may impact mathematics achievement. If mathematics achievement and conceptual understanding are affected by these early emerging gender differences that would suggest a need to intervene in girls mathematics in the early elementary school years as opposed to waiting until the middle school and high school years when gender differences become more pronounced.This project over a year period, will examine gender differences in the ways strategy use, speed of retrieval, spatial skills, confidence in mathematics, and conceptual understanding predict mathematics achievement. The longitudinal study beginning in the second grade and ending in the fourth grade, will document whether gender difference found in early strategy use, spatial skills and confidence continue through three years of elementary school and whether they promote each other s development and mathematics achievement. The elementary school years have been selected for study because although gender differences in strategy use, spatial skills, and confidence have been documented in elementary school age children, it is not clear how these differences may impact mathematics achievement. If mathematics achievement and conceptual understanding are affected by these early emerging gender differences that would suggest a need to intervene in girls mathematics in the early elementary school years as opposed to waiting until the middle school and high school years when gender differences become more pronounced doc13158 none The goal of the Winston-Salem Forsyth County Schools (WS FCS) proposal entitled Science and Mathematics Excellence (SciMaX) is that all students will graduate with the capacity to pursue post-secondary studies and careers in science and mathematics. Its specific objectives are (1) To complete the implementation of standards-based K-12 mathematics and science program within the District establishing high standards for all students in all classrooms; (2) To increase K-8 proficiency by 4% in End-of-Grade [test] in mathematics, by 5% in 8th grade Algebra I, and by 5 percentile points in science each year; (3) To increase enrollment in upper level mathematics and science courses by 10% each year and achieve an overall completion of 80%; and (4) To partner with universities to ensure that new teachers arrive in the school system with the training needed to teach high-quality, standards-based science and mathematics curriculum. WS FCS plans revision and compacting of the K-8 mathematics curriculum to ensure that all pre-algebra topics are addressed by the end of the 7th grade, which will facilitate successful student performance in algebra at the 8th grade. Similarly, the District has created a plan to infuse science standards-based, hands-on instruction at all grade levels through the implementation of reform instructional materials and to integrate this subject to mathematics and the Language Arts. A student safety-net program will be implemented consisting of bridge courses and pre-college programs. In order to ensure the coherent accomplishment of its objectives, WS FCS will organize Vertical Leadership Teams (VLT) consisting of a cross section of represented schools, including school principals, counselors, curriculum coordinators, teachers, students, parents, business and post-secondary partners based on a three-cohort model. A comprehensive evaluation plan will enable the leadership to assess progress in every component of the Initiative; and gather, interpret and use data to inform the planning and decision-making process doc13159 none Alfred Tauber Susan Lanzoni, Boston University Phenomenology and the Mind Sciences: Hybrid Intellectuals in German and American Culture This is a postdoctoral fellowship that focuses on the phenomenological psychiatrist and psychologist, hybrid intellectuals native to German-speaking lands in the early twentieth century who became influential in the United States in the middle of the century. Phenomenological philosophy is the study of consciousness, with roots in Franz Brentano s path breaking work on empirical psychology, but most fully identified with the work of Edmund Husserl, and then given an existential flavor by Martin Heidegger. As an approach that gave precedence to the analysis of conscious experience, it was not only an extremely influential philosophy in early twentieth century Europe, but one that a number of contemporary psychiatrists and psychologists found could be applied in scientific domains. The postdoctoral fellow explored the meeting of these two worlds in a dissertation that is a case study of Ludwig Binswanger ( - ), the Swiss psychiatrist who turned to phenomenology to explicate psychotic experience. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Alfred I. Tauber at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University, the co-PI will strengthen her philosophical understanding of phenomenology, while conducting research on the history of phenomenological psychiatry in Germany. Further training in philosophy should assist her in comprehending the intricacies of different variants of phenomenological philosophy. The research focuses on three other hybrid intellectuals of the period, Erwin Straus, V.E. von Gebsattel and Eugene Minkowski, all of whom found merit in using phenomenological methods in psychology and psychiatry. The fact that Binswanger was not alone in creating this interdisciplinary approach demonstrates that there were specific intellectual and cultural resources in the German-speaking world that enabled such projects to flourish. While examining the uses of phenomenology for these other practitioners, the PI sets their work within the larger intellectual currents of the period. A second part of the research project tracks the influence of these practitioners and their ideas in the United States. The co-PI follows both the movement of German emigrants to the US in the s and the influence of newly translated European texts in the s. The ways in which these European ideas were received on American soil demonstrates the critical importance of cultural and institutional factors in promoting different forms of interdisciplinarity. The American setting was quite different from the German: disciplinary lines between philosophy and psychology had grown more rigid, and American psychologists and psychiatrists were oriented to practical outcomes and therapeutic solutions. Therefore, American phenomenological psychiatrists and psychologists had distinct agendas, and encountered different obstacles in comparison to their earlier European counterparts. This project track these hybrid intellectuals along an historical and cultural trajectory in order to illuminate the shifting possibilities of interdisciplinarity as an historically mediated phenomenon doc13160 none This project proposes a study of the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system at Pratt and Whitney, comparing multiple sites (with different task characteristics) within a single cooperating industrial partner. The focus of interest is the apparent contrast between increasingly decentralized management practices on the one hand, and the widely-reported tendency of ERP systems to force centralized perspectives, resulting in workarounds that subvert the accuracy of central information systems. As firms move increasingly toward reliance on IT systems, inaccurate information may have serious consequences. Moreover, the potential for systemic rigidities imposed by ERPs is of concern in an increasingly interconnected, rapidly changing environment. These questions will be illuminated by a well-conceived inquiry doc13161 none Two-component systems are the primary means by which bacteria sense and respond to environmental stimuli. These systems are comprised of a number of distinct elements, namely histidine kinases, response regulators and in the case of phosphorelays, histidine phosphotransfer proteins (HPts). Genes encoding similar proteins to each of these elements have been identified in Arabidopsis, and for the majority of the 35 such genes no function has yet been definitively ascribed. An integrated approach to elucidate the function of these proteins in Arabidopsis is proposed. A combination of gene knockouts and inducible overexpression will be used to assess the roles of these genes in plant growth and development. The mutant plant lines will be characterized in terms of their response to biotic and abiotic factors such as hormones, light, and osmotic stress, and for their pattern of gene expression. Where in the plants these genes are expressed will be determined using a combination of GUS fusions and in situ RNA analysis. The location of the cognate proteins within the cell will also be delineated. To facilitate this localization, a series of 10 monoclonal antibodies will be generated to marker proteins, each of which resides on a distinct membrane. Protein complexes from Arabidopsis will be purified and analyzed to determine the interactions among these elements and to identify novel interacting proteins. Together, these studies will illuminate the signaling pathways in which each of these Arabidopsis two-component signaling elements function and how they interact to control plant growth and development. The data from these studies will be deposited on a publicly accessible web page that is currently under construction at UNC (http: www.bio.unc.edu research two-component ). A link to this web site will be established on the TAIR database, and we will coordinate with TAIR to deposit data as appropriate. The knockout seeds will be made publicly available through deposition in the ABRC Stock Center at Ohio State. The monoclonals raised against the membrane marker proteins will be available for the cost of shipping through UNH and the cell lines will also be deposited with the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC). In keeping with the goals of the project, functional analysis of the two-component signaling elements will aid in our understanding of plants at the organismal, cellular, and evolutionary levels. The research will provide functional information on the role of Arabidopsis two-component signaling systems in plant growth and development. The research will serve to define the subcellular location of the two-component signal transduction pathways, the interactions between the two-component signaling elements, and the downstream targets of the pathways. The research should clarify how a signal transduction mechanism that arose in bacteria has been adapted to plant signal transduction. These studies should uncover the functions of several gene families in Arabidopsis. The proteins encoded by these gene families are predicted to interact and thus our studies should aid in the development of a paradigm for signaling specificity among interacting members of large gene families. In addition, tools will be developed that will be generally applicable in defining the subcellular location of proteins in Arabidopsis doc13162 none The Semiconductor Industries Association (SIA) projects that the accrued benefits of the device shrinking era will continue for another decade or so, until feature sizes reach their ultimate limit of around 70 nm. Beyond then, during the post-shrinking era, newer electronic, photonic and molecular technologies must emerge to push the demands for higher system integration on a chip (SOC) and lower energy dissipation. At the present time, substantial research initia-tive focused on quantum-effect devices has demonstrated that these devices offer the best solution for next generation high-performance integrated circuits. Simulation results have shown that circuits designed using resonant-tunneling diodes (RTDs) and complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) transistors can offer an order of magnitude improvement in area-power-delay performance over conventional CMOS. These circuits alleviate the performance saturation that will limit conventional technologies due to diminishing returns from device- and feature-size scaling. While RTDs have been demonstrated for niche small-scale, high-speed ( 40 GHz) circuit applications using III-V process technology, no system-level designs have been fabricated that use RTD-based circuit design. The disadvantage of III-V technology is higher power dissipation and very low integration levels as compared to CMOS. However, the unique negative differential-resistance (NDR) characteristics of RTDs coupled with their high tunneling speeds lead to very compact and fast circuit topologies. Thus it is very attractive to envision these compact, high-functionality circuits implemented in a technology such as CMOS that offers low power dissipation and very large integration lev-els. Also, while transport properties of quantum-effect devices are substantially different from conventional devices, their fabrication and processing framework can be considered an extension of the current state-of-the-art, rather than a radical departure. This makes it possible to envision a synergism between conventional and quantum-effect circuits that will bridge the transition to giga-scale integration and beyond. Quantum electronic devices such as double-barrier resonant tunneling diodes and transistors offer the promise of increased speed and circuit compaction. However, the folded 1-V or negative differential resistance (NDR) charac-teristic of these devices implies that conventional circuit design techniques are not adequate to tackle the problem of optimal circuit design using these devices. Preliminary work, using ad-hoc circuit design techniques, has demonstrated the possibility of building innovative, ultrafast and compact circuits using resonant tunneling devices. This proposal seeks to develop the theory of circuit design using quantum-effect devices, to design accurate and fast circuit simu-lation models and algorithms for the quantum-effect devices, and to study system-level issues in the design of large computational, communication system, and signal processing circuits using quantum-effect devices. The proposed work is divided into three tasks. In the first task, circuit simulation models and algorithms will be developed for quantum-effect resonant tunneling devices. These models, based on values obtained from quantum simulation, and other physics-based models, will be enhanced with algorithms to ensure the convergence of table-driven simulation. In the second task, essential circuit theory for quantum-effect circuits will be developed. This will include stability analysis and optimization techniques for bistable and combinational logic circuits using quantum-effect devices. In the third task, the basic circuit techniques developed in the second task will be applied to the design of nanopipelined and multiple-valued logic systems using quantum-effect devices. The simulation work done in the first task will be used for performance projection of system-level application of quantum-effect devices. Circuit fabrication for QMOS prototypes will be carried out to demonstrate the advantages of the new technology doc13163 none This grant provides funding for the development of a collaborative optimization framework for the robust design of complex engineering systems such as automobiles, aircraft or consumer products. The collaborative optimization framework will account for and manage the uncertainties in the performance predictions generated by the computer simulation tools used for the design of these systems. Each computer simulation model is an abstraction of reality and has some uncertainty associated with its performance predictions. This uncertainty must be accounted for in the simulation based design process. An implicit method for estimating system performance uncertainties within a bilevel optimization algorithm that employs decomposition techniques to facilitate distributed computation will be developed. The methodology will account for both the uncertainty associated with design inputs and the uncertainty of performance predictions from each of the simulation tools. A mathematical proof of convergence will be developed to validate the bilevel optimization algorithm being developed in this investigation. The framework will be implemented in a distributed computing environment providing for parallel computation and concurrent design. Industry partners will test the framework and measure the computational improvements using a suite of benchmark test problems. It is anticipated that the use of the collaborative optimization framework developed in this research will lead to reduced product development times at reduced cost and risk. The collaborative optimization framework will facilitate the concurrent design of complex engineering systems in a parallel-computing environment. The benefits of parallel computation lead to reductions in product development times. The ability to manage uncertainty and risk in this parallel design environment will ensure robust performance of the resulting system. The development of the non-deterministic collaborative optimization framework will demonstrate that designers can effectively manage both the uncertainty and risk associated with the simulation based design of new products in a parallel computing environment doc13164 none The goal of this project is to develop a resource for the scientific community that promotes expanded use of natural genetic variation in reaching the Project objective of assigning a function to each Arabidopsis gene. At least four new sets of mapped Recombinant Inbred Lines (RILs) will be produced. Potential pairs of parents from hundreds of available wild type accessions will be systematically screened for genetic and phenotypic variance and pairwise distances. The chosen parents will include wild lines not previously exploited. Simple Sequence Length DNA Polymorphisms (SSLPs) will be used as much as possible for mapping. Ninety-five individuals, from sets of 400 RI lines will be mapped at one hundred loci, generating a map with a density of approximately 6 centiMorgans. Seeds for all RILs will be publicly available through the Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center (http: www.biosci.ohio-state.edu ~plantbio Facilities abrc ABRCHOME.HTM) and maps and mapping data will be available online through The Arabidopsis Information Resource (http: www.arabidopsis.org ) by January . During the course of this project, undergraduate and graduate students and technicians will be trained in robotics, molecular biology, genetics, and quantitative trait mapping. In addition, students in the Biotechnology Program at the Austin Community College will receive similar training through an outreach program. Conventional genetics used in a small number of laboratory strains of Arabidopsis, will not be able to reach the Project goal of complete knowledge of every plant gene s function. This project will provide a way to map and identify genes in local wild populations of Arabidopsis that are important for adaptation to many different environments and are the result of many different evolutionary histories. These different environments will include different soil types, day lengths, pest populations, moisture levels, temperatures, and other factors. This will eventually lead to a better understanding of important adaptations to incorporate into the world s crops doc13165 none The objective of this research is to improve the capability of controlling the gas tungsten arc welding process for precise joining by emulating skilled operators using intelligent automatic welding machines in order to produce quality welds consistently. To this end, a novel sensing and control system will be developed to measure and control the three-dimensional surface of the weld pool. A new technique will be used to modify the traditional gas tungsten arc welding process for better arc concentration and directionality. A numerical model will be developed to analyze the behaviors of the modified process under the varying welding parameters in order to simulate the performance of the developed control technology. The scope of work addresses basic physics, dynamic modeling, and robust control issues. The research team will closely collaborate with industrial partners and governmental scientists on both the basic research and applied issues. The investigator includes a plan to educate graduate students in both the fundamental science integration and potential for industrial applications. The investigator also plans to accept undergraduate and talented high school students, including those from under-represented groups, to work on carefully defined topics during the research. In addition to the social impact, the impact on industry should also be significant and several industrial partners are committed to case study support and equipment engineering support for the future development of this novel technology at production level doc13166 none This dissertation improvement grant is a multi-sited ethnography of the constructions of race, social class, and gender in epidemiologic and experiential accounts of cardiovascular disease (CVD) risks and causes. Data collection methods include participant observation at scientific meetings, interviews with cardiovascular epidemiologists, and interviews with persons of color living with CVD. This project explores how ideas about racial, class, and gender differences are conceptualized and stabilized in epidemiologic knowledge production. How epidemiologists manage and navigate disputes over the inclusion, measurement, and interpretation of race, class, and gender, and sustain the validity of their work in the face of such controversies are examined. This research also analyzes how individuals living with CVD understand, take up, and or reconstruct epidemiologic knowledge about racial, class, and gender differences in risk. The influence of people s social contexts and relationships with biomedical institutions on responses to and renegotiation of scientific claims are important here. Finally, this project examines how epidemiologic and experiential definitions of race, class, and gender shape what we know about the causes of CVD inequalities, and participate in processes of racial, class, and gender formation doc13167 none Because of their sessile nature, plants have evolved a wide range of strategies to respond to changes in their environment. For a number of these responses plants have co-opted (or co-evolved) systems that are shared with other taxa. However, many of the environmental (both biotic and abiotic) response systems plants utilize are apparently specific to plants and are often comprised of novel molecular components. With the recent completion of the Arabidopsis genome sequencing project we are now in a unique position to ask fundamental questions about the functions of these latter set of regulatory proteins in plants. Of the ~11,000 protein families formed by the 25,498 predicted genes of Arabidopsis, only ~150 families appear to be plant-specific. One of these plant-specific families is the NPH3 RPT2 family. This family, which is comprised of 32 novel proteins (for more information about these proteins genes, including GenBank accession numbers, see http: www.biosci.missouri.edu liscum nph3-rpt2figs.html), was first identified with the cloning of NPH3 (NONPHOTOTROPIC HYPOCOTYL 3) and RPT2 (ROOT PHOTOTROPISM 2) - genes identified in screens for mutants with altered phototropic responses. NPH3 and RPT2 function in early phototropic signaling and appear to act as modular scaffold proteins to recruit or activate enzymatic components of the transduction chains, including the respective photoreceptors themselves, mediating phototropic responses. Given the high degree of similarity in primary sequence and secondary structure between all members of the NPH3 RPT2 family it seems appropriate to hypothesize that these plant-specific proteins may act as scaffolds for sensor-containing signaling complexes utilized in a variety of abiotic and or biotic responses. The major goals proposed for this project are to determine mRNA and protein expression patterns, and biological functions for each member of the NPH3 RPT2 family. The expression studies are proposed as a means of developing logical and focused analyses of loss- and gain-of-function mutants. In such a way we expect to be able to determine what biological processes require the function of each member of the NPH3 RPT2 family. All project data will be publicly available through a project database (http: www.biosci.missouri.edu liscum NPH3-RPT2family.html), as well as The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) (http: www.arabidopsis.org home.html). Given the plant-specific and novel nature of the NPH3 RPT2 family, it is likely that elucidation of biological functions for the family will represent an important step in understanding fundamental aspects of plant growth and development doc13104 none This collaborative research project is directed towards a new technology for the production of micro meso-scale components by methods whose efficiency approaches that of mass production. Key to achieving this capability will be the creation of miniaturized machine tool systems (referred to as meso-Machine Tools, mMTs) whose volume is on the order of 1 dm3. These systems are required to meet the rapidly growing demand for 3D parts and part features at the micro meso-level (0.01 - 10.00 mm range) in materials that include stainless steel, titanium, aluminum, platinum, iridium and others is currently being met by using ultra-precision CNC machine tools. It is common to have machine-to-workpiece volume ratios of 106 or higher at best, a situation that adversely affects accuracy, precision and overall efficiency. The prevalent microelectronic fabrication techniques and their spin-offs used for micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) are, in turn, are limited by their inability to produce arbitrary 3D features in a wide range of materials and by their limited relative accuracy. However, to their advantage, MEMS-based technologies are batch type, leading to cheap mass production, while ultra-precision CNC processes are serial, inherently expensive and not easily adaptable to mass production. The goal is to meet productivity requirements by applying these mMT in a massively parallel fashion. It is envisioned that the mMTs, in analogy to a computer system, will be equivalent to plug-and-play boards and treated as replaceable entities. To facilitate an integration of such machines into a system, resource and information distribution mechanisms will be established by an architecture, similar in concept to the bus of a computer, that supplies energy, control feedback information, and materials and tools to from the individual machines. It is anticipated that the project will demonstrate that it is possible to build mMT systems for costs two or three orders of magnitude below existing systems doc13169 none JamesFleming, Colby College The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change: Emergence, Eclipse, and Reemergence This study documents the discovery and early development of the carbon dioxide theory of climate change, its eclipse during the first five decades of the twentieth century, and its reemergence after . It also examines subsequent developments in modeling, monitoring and climate reconstructions, while examining more recent social and political implications of the theory. Based on archives, interviews, expert consultations, and primary printed sources, the study provides an historical context for understanding current climate concerns. It also demonstrates the importance of intellectual and social changes in the study of global environmental change. In the nineteenth century, the work of John Tyndall, Svante Arrhenius, T.C. Chamberlin and others drew scientific attention to the role of carbon dioxide as a possible mechanism of climate change. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, however, most scientists did not think that increased carbon dioxide levels would result in global warming. It was believed that current levels of carbon dioxide already absorbed all the available long-wave radiation, so any increases would not significantly alter the radiative heat balance of the planet. Most meteorologists gave other mechanisms of climatic change more credence. Beginning in the work of Guy Steward Callendar, Gilbert Plass, Hans Seuss, Roger Revelle, Charles Keeling and others revived the carbon dioxide theory of climate change and placed it on a more solid scientific basis. Callendar based his theory on new detailed measurements of the infrared spectrum, further noting that the warming trend from about to might be related to rising fossil fuel emissions. Seuss and Revelle later named the rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide caused by industrial fuel combustion the Callendar effect. In the second half of the twentieth century, computers, satellites, and reconstructions of past climate records provided new privileged perspectives on the climate, allowing the emergence of a scientific consensus (but not unanimity) on the carbon dioxide theory of climate change. The state of climate science (in theory and in practice) during this convergence of opinion will be contrasted with that during the earlier eclipse and re-emergence phases. By the s, station temperatures around the Northern Hemisphere reached early-twentieth-century peaks, giving credence to Callendar s warnings and placing climate warming on the public agenda. Concerns were expressed in both the scientific and popular press about rising sea levels, loss of habitat, and shifting agricultural zones. This was followed by a global cooling scare in the s and the re-emergence of global warming consensus through the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Framework Convention on Climate Change. The project concludes with a reconsideration of the human dimensions of climate change in light of history, including popular perceptions, economic and public policy initiatives, and politicization of the issues. Outcomes include paper at professional historical and scientific meetings, refereed journal articles, materials posted on a WWW Center for the History of Meteorology web site, and a fully-documented book doc13170 none Prasad Description: This award is to support a collaborative project between Dr. Paras N. Prasad, Department of Chemistry and Director of Photonics Research Laboratory, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York and Dr. Raouf El-Mallawany, Department of Physics, Menofia University, Shebin El-Kom, Egypt. The objectives of the research are to develop and study new material based on tellurite glasses for their potential for non-linear applications. The study will include: Preparation of high optical quality of tellurite glasses (in the bulk & fiber form) by using new different rare earth and transition metal oxides in order to get a glass with high refractive index and low dispersion, optical measurements which include the measurements of the refractive index at different wavelengths and the wavelength of IR transmission, thermal & Elastic characterization measurements which include: glass transformation, crystallization temperatures, stability, longitudinal, shear, bulk, Young s moduli, Poisson s ratio and Debye temperature of the produced glasses, and structural determinations like x-ray Diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscope. Scope: The project supports collaboration between two well-recognized scientists who have the expertise and resources for this research. The topic is important to the field of amorphous materials, and has applications in the expanding arena of photonics. Understanding of tellurite glasses will have an impact in the development of pressure sensors and optical materials. The international team is quite suited for the project, as the Egyptian scientist has significant expertise in the synthesis of tellurite glasses of different compositions, and the US scientist has vast expertise in material characterization. This project has the potential to greatly benefit both sides by developing new materials that can have wide applications. The project will promote training of Egyptian and US graduate students who will participate in this collaborative work. This project meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest doc13171 none Apocarotenoids are a diverse set of plant secondary metabolites derived from carotenoid breakdown. They have significant roles as developmental and environmental response signals. They also have important roles as contributors to flavor and nutritional quality. A critical advance in elucidating apocarotenoid synthesis occurred when the first gene encoding a carotenoid dioxygenase, maize Vp14, was cloned. Vp14 encodes the limiting enzyme in abscisic acid synthesis, 9-cis-epoxycarotenoid dioxygenase (NCED). Arabidopsis contains nine members of a gene family encoding enzymes related to NCED, referred to hereafter as RCDs (Related to Carotenoid Dioxgenase). Only a subset of the family is directly involved in abscisic acid synthesis and the other members of the family likely encode enzymes that metabolize a range of carotenoids to multiple volatile and non-volatile apocarotenoids. One of the family members, RCD1, does indeed cleave multiple carotenoid substrates at a different position than NCED, supporting this hypothesis. Thus, the RCD family exhibits variation both in carotenoid substrates and position of cleavage. We will establish the functions of the complete Arabidopsis RCD gene family. We have identified knock-out mutants in every RCD gene and will construct double and triple knockout combinations, as appropriate. Using bacterial expression and in vitro assays, the substrate specificities and products of each member of the RCD enzyme family will be determined. The apocarotenoid metabolic profiles of each mutant, as well as appropriate double and triple mutants, will be quantified. Mutants will also be examined for phenotypic alterations associated with altered apocarotenoid profiles. Upon completion of the project, we will have defined the functions of a complete set of evolutionarily related enzymes that synthesize a broad range of apocarotenoids. We will have further isolated mutant lines deficient in synthesis of specific subsets of these biologically active moleculaes and determined the consequences of loss of subsets of apocarotenoids on plant growth and development. Current information on the RCD gene family and characterization of the individual gene products may be obtained at http: www.hos.ufl.edu kleeweb RCDprogram.htm All gene knockouts will be deposited with the Ohio State University Arabidopsis stock center (http: www.biosci.ohiostate.edu ~plantbio Facilities abrc ABRCHOME.HTM) by the end of doc13172 none The challenge for process control in many settings is that if a process is left alone it will tend to drift and wander away from target and as a result, quality will suffer. This is especially true in an industrial setting where both process inputs and outputs continuously change. Traditional process control has centered on detecting special causes that are suggested by significant patterns in the data which point to the existence of unexpected changes or signals. Many situations occur, however, where certain process signals are anticipated because they are characteristic of a system or operation. The approach to be used in this prjoect is to navigate to a good operating region using design of experiments (DOE) to evaluate a set of variables, then focus the control effort on the critical variables. Process transfer functions will be used to optimize the control adjustment of these variables and use Cuscore statistics to efficiently monitor the process by capitalizing on the structure of the anticipated signal. For process adjustment and monitoring, the following questions will be investigated: (1) What are the appropriate controllers and Cuscore statistics for common process characterizations? (2) How well will the new monitoring algorithms work in detecting signals? (3) How robust are the controllers and monitors to approximations of (or deviations from) their key parameters? The contributions of this research will include both empirical and theoretical developments to deliver improved output through better process understanding, monitoring, and control. In particular, the research is expected to provide a methodology for connecting the knowledge on experimental design and process improvement, provide a full set of adjustment and Cuscore monitoring algorithms and statistical evaluation of their properties, generate tools and charting algorithms to improve daily process operation and control, and demonstrate the feasibility of joint adjustment and monitoring for real industry applications. This work includes a partnership with Springs Window Fashions Division, Inc. (Middleton, WI). Springs is a leading manufacturer of home window treatments and their processing operations will serve as a test bed for implementation of the results. It also includes an opportunity for a graduate research assistant to work on the project and with the company doc13173 none This grant provides support for a workshop that will introduce decision theory to engineering design faculty. The goals of the workshop are to acquaint engineering faculty with the mathematics of decision theory, to ground them in the mathematics necessary to correctly apply decision theory to engineering design and other decision making processes in engineering, and to provide an exportable version of the workshop that will enable the workshop to have a broader impact than just for the faculty who can attend. The workshop will be conducted in a tutorial fashion, with invited experts representing mathematics, economics and the decision sciences, and will provide ample time for interaction between the attending faculty and the experts. Topics that will be covered include decision making under uncertainty, decision procedures, game theory, probability theory and elements of engineering microeconomics appropriate to engineering design. It is expected that the outcome of this workshop will be a heightened awareness of the principles of decision theory and its applications to engineering. This will likely affect the entirety of engineering education and practice, and will ultimately result in improved decision making across all engineering fields doc13174 none Ralph L. Cohen This award provides partial support for participants to attend a workshop to be held at Stanford University in July and August . The scientific focus of the workshop will be centered around the Mumford Standard Class conjecture, one of the most important outstanding conjectures on the topology of moduli spaces. There has been considerable progress on this conjecture in the last few years from several perspectives, including Algebraic Geometry, Algebraic Topology, and Theoretical Physics. The workshop will bring together experts working on these questions. The workshop will culminate with a five day meeting in August. Further information, including invited speakers, schedule of talks, and housing information, is available at both http: www.aimath.org and http: math.stanford.edu doc13175 none Gulseren Description: This project is to support a cooperative research project by Dr. Oguz Gulseren, Materials Science and Engineering Department, Dr. John Fischer, Physics Department, both at the University of Pennsylvania, and Dr. Selim Ciraci, Department of Physics, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. They plan to use advanced techniques to study the electronic and structural properties of carbon nanotubes and their functionalized derivatives. In particular they will investigate the phase behavior of the carbon nanotubes under external pressure and strain, and their interactions with hydrogen and various transition metals. The work will involve first principles calculations by groups from the Universities of Pennsylvania and Bilkent, as well as neutron scattering measurements performed by scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Scope: Nanoscience is an emerging field with promising important applications. The results to be obtained from this project should help guide other activities focused on novel technological applications such as nanodevices and hydrogen storage etc. The scientific methods to be used by the University of Pennsylvania and by Bilkent University are complementary in terms of material synthesis, measurement capabilities, and theoretical expertise. The American PIs have excellent track records in NSF-supported research in carbon nanotubes. Dr. Ciraci has participated in a previous NSF international program that had good results in terms of scientific progress and publications. The collaboration between American and Turkish groups will result in synergistic enhancements of the research. This project meets INT criteria for supporting meritorious collaborative research of mutual benefit to the US and the foreign country doc13176 none This dissertation research proposal requests support to improve a dissertation on the construction and representation of automata in Late Enlightenment and Early Romantic Germany ( - ). The dissertation will investigate the ways in which artificial humans , their philosophical accounts, their epistemological use, and their literary representation intersected with each other in this particular time period. The project will analyze this complex on three different levels. On the level of epistemology and natural philosophy, it will explore how automata were constructed both as models of the embodied individual and as models of the human inquirer into nature. On the level of literary and symbolic representation, it will look at the ways in which automata were productive in provoking accounts or ideas of the extent to which humans are machines, and the extent to which machines are human. Exemplary sources for this level of analysis are literary accounts. German-speaking writers in this period are well-known for their explorations of Maschinenmenschen . On the level of the actual material artifacts, finally, it will investigate closely the nature and the functioning of various automata, taking them seriously as historical sources . The project presupposes that artifacts in general inevitably suggest, and often require, specific kinds of reactions and interactions on the part of a user or on the part of a spectator, and it thus aims to develop an acute sense of their limits and capabilities both as highly sophisticated exemplars of craftsmanship as well as devices that provoked thought and wonder. Very important exemplars of automata are to be found in museums all over continental Europe, in particular in Munich, Vienna, Paris and Neuchatel (Switzerland). . Funds will support research expenses to museums and archives in Munich, Neuchatel, Switzerland, Cambridge, UK, and Paris, as well as the Jena area. Textual resources that relate directly to the automata are available in the respective archives of the museums. Funds also support visual recording equipment doc13177 none Over the last decade, the USSR has split into 15 new independent countries with distinct borders, varying kinds and levels of resources, diverse political and economic regimes, and different degrees of success and failure in meeting the challenges of post-socialism. Within every new country, though to varying degrees, the old command economy and party-state have undergone substantial change and the environment shaping people s lives has become radically different. This transition from a rather uniform social space to a new and diverse social landscape offers a unique natural experiment, and an unprecedented opportunity to understand why some people are successful in taking advantage of new emerging economic opportunities, whereas others fail to cope with the new environment, experience downward mobility, become impoverished, and develop pessimistic and negative views about their life and the new social world. This study takes advantage of the opportunity to study these changes using a unique data set. The Paths of a Generation surveys have followed samples of a cohort of adolescents since shortly before secondary school graduation. The first wave of interviews in - was followed by a second wave in -89 during the declining days of the USSR, a third wave in - in the early years of the post-socialist period, and a fourth wave in - when the adolescents had reached young adulthood. The surveys contain data on roughly 13,000 respondents in seven diverse post-Soviet countries. The project analyzes these data by considering how social background and early life experiences affect later employment, income, and material well being of this generation during a period of rapid change from socialism to capitalism doc13178 none Asymptotics and bounds for steady-state quantities of interest (such as delays, delivery dates, sojourn times, queue lengths and workload) in stochastic networks used in production, manufacturing, and telecommunications for example, are fairly well understood when component probability distributions are ``light-tailed (e.g., have tails that decay like exponential tails). The basic result is that the asymptotics and bounds are exponential. Such results have led to some very good approximations in practice for quantities of interest. But data gathered from the Internet (and other areas) supports the existence of ``heavy-tailed phenomena (e.g., tails decay slower than any exponential tail; they have infinite moment-generating functions). Here, it is proposed to derive asymptotics and bounds for complex models such as queuing networks with feedback (customers can return back to a node already visited) and general routing (non-Markovian) in which one or more of the component distributions (such as service times) is heavy-tailed (subexponential). The purpose is to obtain approximations and bounds that can be used in practice. It is also hoped that such an investigation will yield new insight results concerning stability of networks with general (dependent, non-i.i.d.) input, and shed new light on connections between stochastic fluid models with long-range dependent input and queueing networks with heavy-tailed service. Currently the Internet is witnessing explosive use and growth, and delays (waiting times) can be a considerable problem. For example, the waiting time for documents to download (or upload) between servers and desktop computers, or for links to become available to a user can become of considerable length when congestion is high. Evidence suggests that this kind of congestion is quite different from that found in classical telecommunication systems (phone congestion for example), in that it involves long random periods times, known as heavy-tailed times, that do not decay rapidly. Studying this congestion by use of mathematical modeling is a very helpful way of understanding such delays and how to control them. By creating and studying stochastic (probabilistic) models that exhibit such behavior (while capturing the relevant complexity of the real system), and also by simulating such models, the proposed research will lead to ways of more precisely measuring the congestion, help better understand how it occurs, and how to control it. The research will ultimately help future planning of various related technologies such as complex systems in manufacturing and production that increasingly involve components linked to Internet technologies (and hence are susceptible to heavy tails doc13179 none Happell This award to University of Miami s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences provides support to Operation SWAB, a program to test research ships and laboratories for low-level radioisotope contamination. The support provided here helps ensure that samples collected and analyzed for low level tracer studies will not be contaminated by spills of tritium or radiocarbon on the ship or in the lab. The program has been ongoing for twenty years, and this award extends it for an additional five years doc13180 none We develop a framework in which the incompleteness of contracts is modeled from the ground up, as arising endogenously from the costs of writing contracts. The key feature of our approach is to make explicit the language used to write contracts. This language is used to describe a set of constraints on behavior. The framework highlights that contract incompleteness can take two basic forms: excessive discretion, meaning that the contract does not specify the parties behavior with sufficient precision; and excessive rigidity, meaning that the contract does not discriminate sufficiently between different states of the world. This framework can be applied to examine a variety of important issues, such as: (i) the determinants of rigidity and discretion in contracts; (ii) the implications of writing costs for the dynamics of contracts, and in particular for the tradeoff between contingent and spot contracts; (iii) the tradeoff between formal and informal contracts; (iv) the consequences of rigidity and discretion for ex-ante investments; (v) the role of legal default rules; (vi) the role of authority in relationships doc13181 none The proposal initiates a partnership to support an LSAMP Phase I alliance of institutions to increase enrollment, retention, and graduation of under-represented minority undergraduate students in SMET. The partnership institutions are University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Northeastern University, the University of Rhode Island, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The goal of the alliance is to double the current SMET student enrollment by under-represented minorities (845) in five years, and to significantly increase (toward doubling) the number of SMET degrees awarded (120 in doc13182 none Nordberg The entire 130 million base pair genome of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana was finished last year. The objective of this project is to leverage the genome sequence to catalog the naturally occurring genetic variation in the species. The project is based on the theoretical insight that, in highly self-fertilizing organisms, like A. thaliana, it should be possible to create such a catalog very efficiently by looking at the pattern of variation in a number of small segments distributed over the genome. Rather than sequencing the entire genome of one additional individual, one should sequence 1% of the genome in 100 individuals. Specifically, the project will sequence - chromosomal segments of length 500-700 base pairs, distributed over the genome, in a sample of 96 carefully selected individuals. The data will be publicly available through GenBank, as well as through a highly flexible relational database developed specifically for this purpose. The database will be equipped with web-based bioinformatics tools to query it, and will be continuously updated. The project represents the first serious attempt to describe the genomic variation in a species. It is highly relevant to the objectives of the project in a general sense, because it will not be possible to determine the function of all genes [...] within their cellular, organismal, and evolutionary contexts without understanding how genetic variation is structured in the species. More immediately, the database will be an invaluable resource for plant geneticists interested in finding the genes responsible for variation in agriculturally important traits such as drought tolerance. In this respect, the project should be compared to the large databases of human variation that are currently being created to aid genetic epidemiology. The tools and methods created for this project will also be directly applicable to several organisms of direct economic importance, such as rice and barley. Finally, the database will serve as a very important training tool for students in computational and evolutionary biology, and in statistical genetics doc13183 none Award : This project is aimed at functionally defining the expression patterns and substrate reactivities of the Arabidopsis thaliana cytochrome P450 monooxygenase (P450) gene family that represents approximately 0.6% of this plant s genome. The proteins encoded by these genes mediate oxidative transformations in a wide array of biosynthetic and detoxicative pathways essential for plant growth. Because of their roles in this wide diversity of metabolic processes and their relative lack of post-translational modification, they serve as downstream reporters for the direct activation of many different biochemical pathways responding to chemical, developmental and environmental cues. Extensive divergence of catalytic site as well as noncatalytic site residues has resulted in a high degree of primary structure variation in this very diverse P450 gene superfamily that presents unsurpassed complexity in assigning function to individual genomic DNA sequences. We will further the functional definition of Arabidopsis P450s by creating microarrays for analysis of the mRNA expression patterns in tissues at different developmental stages. Imaging of the responses of individual P450 genes with respect to a variety of internal and external chemical cues as well as changing environmental conditions (UV damage, pathogen attack, insect attack, cold stress, etc.) and collations of these response patterns with respect to plant biochemical pathways will provide the basis for assigning prospective functions to these enzymes. Overexpression of a subset of these P450s in yeast and baculovirus protein production systems and incorporation into membrane-scaffolding protein complexes suitable for high-throughput screening of substrate reactivities will provide the basis for assigning definitive function(s) to these enzymes. These results serve to elucidate this model plant s biochemical responses to a variety of stress conditions and provide genomic technology tools needed for assessment of the diverse P450 gene family as well as other membrane protein families. Data on the organization of the 273 P450 genes, alignments of available ESTs, patterns of mRNA expression defined by microarray analysis and P450 substrate preferences defined by functional protein expression will be made available at http: arabidopsis-P450.biotec.uiuc.edu as collected doc13184 none The object of this project is to develop control algorithms for the cancellation of periodic disturbances whose frequency content varies significantly over time. Typical applications include active noise and vibration control, although the problems under consideration are generic and the algorithms are applicable in many other contexts. Two classes of algorithms are considered. They have been studied before for restricted cases and have shown promising results. The algorithms are particularly valuable because of their simplicity and because of the tools available to design them for specific performance goals. In the project, the algorithms will be developed so that they will become applicable to the most general problems with multivariable system and with disturbances having multiple harmonic components. An important intermediate goal will be the analysis of the robustness properties of adaptive algorithms using little known but powerful results of linear time-invariant system equivalence. These results will enable a precise quantification of the robustness margins of the algorithms, and may lead to new strategies for robust design. Another goal is the development of new algorithms for the estimation and tracking of the parameters of periodic signals using multiple sensors. The algorithms will be tested in active noise control or active vibration control experiments doc13185 none Yang Guanine nucleotide-binding proteins (G proteins) are universal molecular switches that control the flow of extracellular signals to intracellular signal transduction pathways in eukaryotic organisms. Arabidopsis possesses a unique subfamily of small G proteins, termed Rop. Rop regulates many signal transduction pathways in Arabidopsis. This proposed research is focused on a Rop-dependent pathway that controls the morphogenesis of leaf epidermal pavement cells. Because plant cells are encased in cell walls and are non-motile, cell morphogenesis is particularly important for plant growth and development. Having a unique cell shape with interlocking lobes and sinuses, epidermal pavement cells provide a useful model system for studying the mechanism of cell morphogenesis in plants. Previous studies using transgenic expression of Rop2 dominant mutant genes suggest that one or more Rops controls the formation of lobes. However, these studies did not reveal which of the 11 Arabidopsis Rop GTPases participate in the signaling pathway that controls the morphogenesis of pavement cells. Furthermore, other components in this pathway are unknown. As a first step in the long-term goal of elucidating the molecular mechanism of cell morphogenesis in Arabidopsis, this proposed work contains two major aims. First, knockout mutants for Arabidopsis Rop genes will be used to determine which Rop gene(s) controls the morphogenesis of leaf pavement cells. Second, components of the Rop-dependent morphogenesis pathway will be identified using the yeast two-hybrid method complemented with a high throughput proteomics approach. This research plan is expected to identify new genes that control cell morphogenesis and plant development. These genes may prove to be useful for genetically manipulating plant forms that are beneficial to agricultural and horticultural practices doc13186 none This research project aims to provide experimental data on material resistance to wrinkling under various loading conditions and to provide a reliable and robust tool for simulating wrinkling in sheet metal forming processes, which will dramatically increase the confidence level on simulation results and therefore, be extremely beneficial to product and process development. The increasing environmental concerns and global competition have pressured the auto industry to aggressively search for thinner, lighter and stronger materials. As the thickness of sheet metal decreases, the tendency towards wrinkling increases significantly. It is therefore essential to have a good understanding of the onset of wrinkling and its post-buckling behavior of sheet metal so that the development time of bringing these new materials to final goods can be minimized. The experiments will include a newly developed wedge test, a shrink flanging test and forming of an irregular three-dimensional shape. The test results will be used to verify the computability of a new simulation tool, finite element methods with meshfree-enrichment (FEMME), which is believed to be able to capture local deformation effectively without the need of remeshing. The methodology and associated software routines will be posted on our website for easy public access doc13187 none Lin This is a three-year cooperative project between Dr Tien-Sung Lin, Washington University and Professor Chung-Yuan Mou, National Taiwan University, to study the chemistry of C60, tetracene pentacene, and gold nanocrystals within the confines of mesoporous solids such as MCM-41 and -48 using electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) Spectroscopy. This is an important research in nanotechnology. MCM-41 and -48 are interesting mesoporous materials with controllable tubular pore size. Such zeolite-type materials have been widely used in catalyst support and molecular sieve applications. Advances in this area may yield substantial societal benefits. This proposal also provides an opportunity for three U.S. postdoctoral scientists and three graduate students get valuable exposure to this field of mesoporous materials. This proposal addresses an important scientific question and meets the NSF objective of human resource development. The National Science Council of Taiwan and the NSF jointly support this project doc13188 none This research project is to develop a millirobot system for rapid prototyping of complicated micromechatronic devices combining folded-sheet structures, commercial sensors, and actuators. Folded sheet structures will provide not only a method for rapid-prototyping, but also a flexible mechanical fabrication capability for 3-dimensional mechanisms in the 1 to 10 mm size range. Microassembly will provide the ability to construct 3-dimensional heterogenous microsystems by joining sensors, actuators, structures, and intelligence, which are separately fabricated, and ideally available off-the-shelf. This research will address: (1) Flexible fabrication methods using fixtures and millirobots to fold pre-cut sheets of material into 3D microstructures and bond in final configurations. (2) Microassembly techniques using millirobots capable of precisely attaching 100 micron blocks as well as 12 micron or thinner sheets (such as strain gauges) through control of interaction forces. (3) Algorithms which can compile an assembly plan, consisting of gripper and tool operations and fixture locations, which can then be used to rapidly prototype a complete microsystem, such as a 25 mm wing span micromechanical fly, including thorax structure, strain gauges, and piezoelectric actuators. The goal is to allow a micro-system designer to go from design to first prototype in several hours, with additional prototypes being produced in minutes. In the first stage of the prototype fabrication, a millirobot containing grippers and tools customizes the workspace by bonding fixtures at appropriate locations. The passive fixtures are designed to dramatically reduce the complexity of the millirobot actuation, sensing, and control. In effect, fixtures maximize off-line planning, and minimize millirobot hardware. In the second stage of fabrication, the millirobot system can construct the prototype, and future copies of the prototype can be quickly made without additional workpiece setup time. A broader impact of this research will be a low-cost rapid prototyping millirobot system which can be readily copied to provide a micro-tool construction capability for any lab or school interested in developing micromechatronic systems. Undergraduate students in the SUPERB Program will be included on the research team along with graduate students doc13189 none Arabidopsis : A Sequence-Indexed Library of Insertion Mutations in the Arabidopsis Genome. With the availability of the entire Arabidopsis genome sequence, one of the next challenges is to uncover the functions of the more than 25,000 genes in this reference plant. Given the scope of the NSF program, to identify the function of all Arabidopsis genes in the next decade, an efficient and cost effective approach is necessary to identify mutations in all genes. The goal of this program is to create a sequence-indexed library of mutations in the Arabidopsis genome. The Salk Institute Genome Analysis Laboratory (http: signal.salk.edu) will use high-throughput genome sequencing methods to identify the sites of insertion of Agrobacterium T-DNA in the Arabidopsis genome. T-DNA transformed plants from the Alonso Crosby Ecker collection will be grown, genomic DNA will be prepared, T-DNA flanking plant DNA will be recovered and sequenced. Insertion site sequences will be aligned with the Arabidopsis genome sequence and gene annotation will be added. The data will be made available via a web accessible graphical interface-T-DNAExpress-(http: signal.salk.edu cgi-bin tdnaexpress) that will provide both text and DNA searches of the insertion sequence database. All DNA sequences will be deposited into GenBank (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) and also provided to The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) (www.arabidopsis.org). Seeds from the T-DNA insertion lines will be deposited with the Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center (ABRC) at Ohio State University:http: www.biosci.ohiostate.edu ~plantbio Facilities abrc ABRCHOME.HTM. The ABRC will propagate and distribute seeds to the community. The creation of a searchable database containing the insertion site information and the availability of the corresponding mutant lines in public stock centers will provide researchers with ready access to mutants in their genes of interest, allowing the testing of hypotheses about gene function at an unprecedented rate doc13190 none The Urban Systemic Program for the San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) aggressively targets the academic success of all students in K-12 mathematics and science through a comprehensive program of support for improved instruction. The San Diego Urban Systemic Program (SDUSP) engages the public and private sector community in building an infrastructure that will support quality mathematics and science education over the long term. The goals of the SDUSP are: 1. Substantial improvement in student achievement in the fields of science and mathematics. 2. Substantial improvement of the quality of instruction in science and mathematics. 3. System-wide implementation of high quality standards-based inquiry learning in science and mathematics using exemplary curriculum materials and technology tools. 4. Ongoing collaboration to improve teacher education and the district s science and mathematics programs through well-defined partnerships among the school district, the universities, educational centers, and the private sector. The San Diego Urban Systemic Program (SDUSP) builds leadership in every school by engaging principals and enhanced department chairs in understanding the content, pedagogy and curriculum of standards-based reform, and in supporting the classroom teacher and monitoring results. The teacher in every classroom receives exemplary curriculum materials, substantial professional development, and job-embedded coaching. The students in each science and mathematics class receive instruction that is pedagogically sound and content rich, with clear course expectations, standards-based materials, and the integrated use of technology. The end result is that each student is equipped with the mathematical and scientific knowledge, skills, and dispositions to make their own choices regarding post-secondary pursuits doc13191 none Arabidopsis : Functional Genomics of Quantitative Traits. Quantitative differences in the expression of genes involved in disease resistance responses will be investigated using a functional genomics approach that involves a novel application of quantitative trait locus (QTL) analysis to microarray data. Regulatory QTLs controlling natural variation in induced gene expression patterns (i.e., expression level polymorphisms, ELPs) through QTL analysis of microarray data for ELPs from genetically segregating populations will be identified. Dissection of regulatory networks using genetic analysis of natural allelic variation will provide an efficient method for searching for regulatory loci at the systems biology level and avoids unnatural traumatic perturbations to gene regulation that are caused by extreme mutations. QTL dissection of natural variation is complementary to mutant analysis as it is likely to reveal different aspects of the regulatory network controlling disease resistance than mutant analysis because qualitatively inherited resistance genes do not account for all the aspects of complex pathways. This project aims to: 1) develop integrated molecular and statistical approaches for the dissection of quantitatively inherited traits, 2) determine if expression level polymorphisms involved in the variation of disease resistance pathways in Arabidopsis thaliana are due to regulatory QTLs, structural QTLs, or both, and 3) characterize individual genes at the molecular level that encode the regulatory QTLs. This will be accomplished by surveying accessions for natural variation in ELPs in response to induction of defense related pathways by a salicylic acid analog (dichloroisonicotinic acid) and jasmonic acid using Affymetrix chips for the preliminary global screen and spotted microarrays to confirm reproducible ELPs. Recombinant inbred lines derived from crosses between polymorphic accessions will then be phenotyped for ELPs using targeted DNA microarrays designed with novel applications of statistical methods. QTLs associated with ELPs will be mapped by employing an innovative application of established QTL mapping methodologies, including composite interval mapping and permutation thresholds. This approach will allow the identification of regulatory QTLs, a subset of which will be cloned using a combination of candidate gene and extreme allele approaches. Ultimately, these approaches will enable massively parallel QTL analysis for mRNA, protein and metabolite levels relative to the whole plant phenotypes. The data generated from this project will be available at (www.niblrrs.ucdavis.edu) and (www.genomics.purdue.edu). This project will also provide multidisciplinary training at the interface of quantitative and molecular genetics, statistics, and genomics for postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, undergraduate students, and high school students doc13192 none The Portland Public Schools (PPS) District is the largest district in the state of Oregon. It has an enrollment of almost 55,000 students in 64 elementary schools, 20 middle schools, 12 high schools and an increasing number of special focus and alternative programs. Of these schools 55 qualify for Title I assistance while approximately 49% of elementary students, 37% of middle school students and 28% of high school students participate in free reduced lunch programs. Currently an estimated 38% of the students stem from minority backgrounds. PPS employs over 3,100 certified teachers and the district serves over 90% of Portland s eligible population. The district has used the PASS college entrance requirements as the academic target of all students for a number of years. The goals of the Portland USP are: 1. To enable the district s entire diverse student enrollment to meet rigorous K-12 standards in science and mathematics and prepare for post-secondary education and future careers. To significantly reduce disparities in participation and academic performance between various student populations. 2. To increase the district s capacity to develop, support, and sustain teacher and principal leadership in implementing standards-based curricular reform and continuous improvement of K-12 science, mathematics and technology education for all students. 3. To engage families and the community in supporting improved student performance in science and mathematics and improved access to high-quality, inquiry-based educational opportunities in science, mathematics and technology. 4. To establish ongoing, collaborative partnerships with higher education, business industry, policy makers, and other key stakeholders in support of exemplary, research-based teaching and learning in science, mathematics, and technology within the context of a large and diverse urban school district. To reach these goals, some of the implementation strategies that will be used by the Portland USP during the first year are: a. After-school academic assistance tutoring in both mathematics and science. b. Parent education on standards-based curricula and support for students at home. c. After-school workshops for teachers and principals on content knowledge and pedagogy. d. Science and math courses, workshops and lecture series. e. Annual summer institutes (5 days in math and 5 days in science). f. Preparation of science and mathematics leaders doc13193 none One of 28 national alliances, CAMP is entering the ninth year of a ten-year cooperative agreement between the National Science Foundation and UC Irvine, the lead campus and administrative center. The primary numerical goal is to double the number of B.S. degrees granted to under-represented students in SMET (science, mathematics, engineering, technology) majors at the University of California. Offered at the eight general UC campuses, CAMP has created a systemwide network of faculty, program staff and students working toward a common set of measured outcomes. Goals include completion of the B.S. degree, preparation for and transition to graduate school or the professional workplace. The program serves undergraduates through enrichment opportunities and faculty mentored research supported by stipends. This effort has contributed to a 78% increase in B.S. degrees granted by UC from the baseline year ( -91). Activities center on faculty mentored research experiences, collaborative learning, presenting at scientific conferences, science writing and co-authorship, technology literacy, and preparation for graduate school. Student achievement is disseminated through the Quarterly and on-line, www.camp.uci.edu. A permanent allocation through the UC Regents Diversity Initiative supports program infrastructure, administration, and expansion. Using a synergistic approach, the California Alliance collaborates with affiliated initiatives such as UC LEADS and AGEP (Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate) that enhance baccalaureate degree completion and continuation to advanced study. Responding to the paucity of minorities in faculty positions in the university and nationwide, special emphasis is being placed on encouraging students to prepare for a career in academia, and entering the professoriate. The CAMP mission: Scientists and engineers are best prepared by other scientists and engineers who exhibit and expect scholarly excellence doc13194 none This project traces the contentious debate between Frangois Arago and JeanBaptiste Biot over the nature of light in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although often presented as a brief and pointed clash over the particle and wave theories of light, their long-standing disagreement was in fact rooted in the issues of practice: whether the images they produced in their optical instruments were transparently available to all, or only to those who knew precisely how light worked. This work explores the ways in which optical instruments, and the associated material culture and bodily techniques, participated in dividing the world into domains of visibility and invisibility, and how this in turn functioned on a political level as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion. Both Arago and Biot were explicit in tying their respective commitments to transparency and mystery to claims about who was qualified to speak on worldly matters, and thus who belonged within the bounds of the communicative public represented by the state doc13195 none Carbon nanotubes have exhibited the potential to enhance the physical and mechanical properties of polymer composites. In the past few years, various methods have been invented to produce pure nanotubes with enhanced properties and reduced cost. The two main barriers to the widespread use of nanotubes are (1) cost and (2) lack of processing techniques to disperse the nanotubes through the matrix without forming clusters and to influence their orientation behavior. This project will address these issues by exploring methods to process nanotubes in glass-fiber-reinforced composites to form hybrid nano-micro composites. Injection of the polymer resin and the carbon nanotubes suspension into glass-fiber performs will enable the manufacture of hybrid nano-micro polymeric composites. These materials will be less expensive than pure nano-composites, as the volume fraction of the nanotubes used will be small. Modifying existing processes for fiber-reinforced composites can also reduce the manufacturing cost of nano-micro composites. In this project, three innovative modifications of widely used Liquid Composite Molding (LCM) processes to manufacture composites and explore the flow-induced dispersion and orientation behavior of carbon nanotubes within fiber preforms will be introduced. It has been shown that dispersion and alignment of nanotubes can be induced by rheological actions or by drawing the nanotubes suspension through a porous medium. The new processes will use this concept of stretching the flow of the resin that carries the nanotubes by either elongation or shear. This will allow the development of qualitative understanding of the relationship between the dispersion and orientation behavior of the nanotubes and the suspension flow properties. The statement of work is divided into three main tasks; (1) preparation and characterization of the rheological properties of suspensions containing nanotubes (2) processing of hybrid micro nanocomposites specimens with three different modified LCM processes, where nanotubes and resins are introduced in a mold containing pre-placed fiber preforms (3) examination and correlation of the microstructure to processing and measurement of enhancement in mechanical properties. The Center for Composite Material has the necessary equipment to conduct the study. The long-range goal is to control the dispersion and the orientation behavior of the nanotubes by manipulating the shearing and stretching of the resin. The overall intent is to make hybrid nano-micro composites into designable materials that will benefit both the carbon-nanotubes and the continuous micro-fiber system industries doc13196 none Fan This is a three-year cooperative proposal between Dr. Haitao Fan of Georgetown University and Dr. Tong Yang of the City University of Hong Kong. Dr. Fan requests two visits, one in the summer of and the other in the summer of for conducting a joint research on hyperbolic partial differential equations (PDE) for reactive flow equations. Both the U.S. and Hong Kong P.I.s are experienced researchers in this field. The application of the PDE to reactive flow equations is a promising research area and can continue keep the U.S. at the forefront of an important mathematical field doc13197 none The enzymes produced by fungi that degrade the pectic components of plant cell walls are central to fungal pathogenicity. Two of these classes of enzymes, endopolygalacturonases (EPGs) and pectin methylesterases (PMEs), are the focus of this project. Fungi produce EPGs to hydrolyze the cell wall polysaccharide homogalacturonan as one of the first steps in invasion. Pectin methylesterases (PMEs) often act in concert with EPGs by converting methyl-esterified regions of homogalacturonan to a substrate which is susceptible to the EPG. One of plant defense mechanisms involves the interactions between fungal EPGs and plant-derived polygalacturonase-inhibiting proteins (PGIPs), that reduce the hydrolytic activity of the EPG. The ability of PMEs and EPGs to modify and fragment homogalacturonan, respectively, has led to their exploitation in a variety of commercial applications, including the clarification of juices, the texture and firmness of processed foods and purees, and control of the rheology of pectins as gelling agents. Little is known about the mechanism of action of EPGs and PMEs, despite their economic importance to both industry and agriculture. To increase our knowledge of EPGs and PMEs, this project will use amide exchange-mass spectrometry to identify the sites on both EPG and PME that bind to their respective substrates. This technique will also be used to investigate the sites of protein protein interaction between EPG and its inhibitor protein (PGIP). The information obtained from the initial experiments will identify amino acids of EPG and PME that appear to be critical to these interactions with the substrate (and in the case of EPG with PGIP). Based on these data, site-specific replacements will be designed to potentially disrupt interactions. Amide exchange-MS will then be used to determine if the resulting change in amino acid(s) has disrupted the binding interaction under investigation. Besides obtaining the information on the binding surfaces on the mutant enzymes, the project will also investigate if changes to the binding site of PME alter the products of this enzyme. This will be done by a comparison of the products of native PME action on short, methyl esterified pectic fragments to the products of a series of site-specific mutant forms of the PME on the same substrates. The detailed characterization of the protein protein and protein carbohydrate interactions in this project will provide added insight into mechanisms of host-pathogen interactions, and new avenues for increasing plant disease resistance. This knowledge will provide information on fruit ripening and plant development, and will be of great benefit in the design and selection of overexpressed enzymes to meet specific industrial requirements doc13198 none The research objective of this project is to develop sound theoretical foundations, design computer representations and algorithms, and to implement an experimental system for integrated material-shape modeling of components with continuously varying heterogeneous and anisotropic materials. The key technical challenge is to create physically meaningful models and computationally effective representations of the material density functions defined over the boundary and the interior of the solid, given their description and or variation on the known portions of the solid model. The proposed approach is based on the method for transfinite interpolation that parameterizes the interior of any solid in terms of the approximate distance fields to the specified material features. A comprehensive approach to the problem of material modeling will explore three distinct, but related, topic areas: (1) representational issues, (2) algorithms and systems, and (3) applications in design and manufacturing of parts with heterogeneous material properties. The results of the research will be tested in a prototype system based on a commercial solid modeler. Successful completion of the project should lead to substantial progress in enabling and integrating modeling, design, and manufacturing of heterogeneous and anisotropic parts. Such components are becoming increasingly important due to emerging techniques in design of functionally graded materials and solid free-form fabrication techniques (such as layered manufacturing) that allow local material composition control. The anticipated advantages of the new technology include exactness of representation, independence from interior discretizations, complete automation, guaranteed analytical properties, and compatibility with existing standards for geometric modeling and data exchange doc13199 none Zhu This is a proposal submitted by Dr. Cheng Zhu, Georgia Institute of Technology and Professor Long Mian, Chinese Academy of Science, for hosting a U.S.-China young investigator workshop on biomechanics. Dr. Zhu requests travel expenses for 10 U.S. scientists to attend this meeting, which is to be held in Beijing, China on August 1-5, . The purpose of this workshop is to bring together young scientists and engineers for an exchange of views on future trends in biomechanics, to exchange research ideas and results, and to stimulate U.S.-China collaborative research in this field. The NSF and the National Science Foundation of China jointly support this workshop doc13200 none Das As traditional integrated circuit technology reaches both physical and economic limits, nanotechnology is increasingly being viewed as an enabling technology to complement the next generation of electronic devices. The objective of this project is to identify barrier issues associated with the integration of nonlithographic nanostructure fabrication technologies and RF integrated circuits. This will be accomplished through an experimental investigation of the effects of an electrochemical nanostructure fabrication technique on the performance of an RF transceiver circuit fabricated using standard CMOS and SiGe technology. The results of this investigation will help identify technological issues which must be addressed for the integration of nonlithographic nanostructrues within RF circuit designs doc13201 none The objective of this research is to develop a simulation tool, validated by experiments, capable of predicting the evolution of key microstructural characteristics in Al-Mg-Si alloys during hot bulk forming. New models and simulation tools will be developed and used to model the phenomena the govern the evolution of the microstructure during hot forming. Carefully designed and controlled experiments will be used for model calibration and validation. Al-Mg-Si alloys are among the most common materials used in aerospace, construction and automotive industries. The ability to predict final microstructure, and therefore mechanical properties, in a final aluminum part that results from a controlled deformation process is extremely important for the US aluminum industry and its customers. This work will guide process designers to design processes that are lower in cost and produce aluminum products with improved material characteristics. If successful, this project will benefit aluminum producers and their customers, may have a positive environmental impact, and will contribute to the advanced training of engineers. The research will lead to a better understanding of the way Al-Mg-Si alloys behave during forming and could lead to the design of new forming processes resulting in improved material properties at lower cost. This would make it more economical to use aluminum components in automobiles, for example, which would result in lighter weight vehicles, and thus improved fuel efficiency. Graduate, undergraduate, and high school students will participate in the research, and the results will be widely disseminated doc13202 none This project proposes a study of how firms search for and discover opportunities to innovate. More specifically, the researchers seek to understand the role of employee motivation in this process. Building on behavioral research on individual-level innovativeness and search research on organizational-level innovation, they ask how intrinsically-motivated employees search for innovations, and how their process differs from that of extrinsically-motivated employees. The project will also examine whether differences in motivation can explain the occurrence of more radical innovations. Three topics are to be examined: 1. What are the characteristics and phases of the search and discovery process? 2. How and in what ways is motivation linked to the search and discovery process? 3. Can the search and discovery process be outsourced? Two detailed case studies, a field study and laboratory studies will be utilized to obtain important new multilevel, real-world evidence of the search and discovery process, in contrast to much past individual-level work on innovation which has been based primarily on laboratory studies. These extensions of existing theory will help to establish the role of individual and firm determinants of search and their interdependencies. This is the first study that examines individual search processes related to intrinsic extrinsic motivation and resultant radicality of innovation. The study will also extend inquiry beyond problem-solving to other significant, but less-researched phases of the innovation search process, and provide evidence for how to select for and motivate people in teams that target different types of innovations doc13203 none objects is one of the defining methodological features of the project. This study covers a major transition period in the history of the mathematical disciplines. The topic is one of the classical elements of the history of science and has been widely examined in history of science courses. Indeed, it is so important as to be often the object of specialized courses, besides being included in all history of science surveys. However, there is no recent or reliable monograph on this central topic. The project advances both knowledge and science education because the book is aimed at both scholars in the field and graduate students. The incorporation of technical material in appendices makes the main portion of the book accessible to a wide audience doc13204 none Furse The National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Aviation Pilots Association, and the Naval Air Warfare Command have identified aging aircraft wiring as one of the most significant safety issues facing aviation today. In spite of the severity of the problem, the technology to inspect the wiring to prevent serious accidents is still very limited. This grant is part of an ongoing effort to develop a Smart Wiring system for in situ testing of aging aircraft wiring that promises to dramatically improve wire testing and maintenance with resulting improvement in aircraft safety. While present technology is nearing completion for pre-flight testing, the purpose of this grant is to expand the science available for in-flight testing of live wires. This requires adapting spread spectrum communication techniques to overlay FDR signals on live wires, using matched detection filters for optimal signal detection, and use of blind source separation (signal processing) techniques to analyze the returned signals to detect damaged wires. The Smart Wire concept promises a dramatic change in how cable and wire are built, analyzed, and tested in the near future. Wire will no longer be a passive part of a system, but will actively participate in its own diagnosis and maintenance planning. The ability to test and diagnose wire failures is critical to virtually all electronic systems, and extends far beyond aircraft wiring. The space shuttle, nuclear reactors, high speed trains, critical data and communication networks, life saving medical equipment, and even the family car will benefit by an in situ cable monitoring system doc13205 none Techniques for the monitoring and control of voltage stability in electric power systems operating in a stressed environment will be developed. Emphasis will be placed on the use of probe signals to detect impending loss of stability and using the resultin warning signals in closed-loop control for system stabilization. Through such a signal-based approach, reliance on availability of accurate models and on extensive off-line computations is reduced. New control laws for stabilizing power systems near voltage instability will be developed. In previous research, the PI and his students have made important contributions to the theory of bifurcation control and, more recently, have coupled this with stability monitoring. In this proposal research project, these results will be applied to detection and control of impending instability in stressed electric power networks. One major departure from previous work is the emphasis on detection of instabilities before they are actually encountered, and achieving this with a signal- rather than purely model-based technique. Additionally, it is expected that new contributions to the theory will also naturally result from analytical problems motivated by the power system application doc13206 none Small magnetic structures are being developed for magnetic sensors (for example, exploiting the giant magnetoresistance effect, or tunneling magnetoresistance) for nonvolatile memories exploiting either the Hall effect or magnetotransport effects and for storage on a nano scale. They present challenges in design for controlling the value and reproducibility of the switching field. Temperature effects as well as fluctuation of the grain structure on a mesoscopic scale become important. At the moment, magnetic nonvolatile memories are being developed by IBM-Siemans (Infinion) and the Motorola Companies. The uniformity of the switching field is a major stumbling block in the commercilaiztaion of high density nonvolatile magnetic memories. At the moment the yield of addressable sites is very small. Nearly all current micromagnetics calculations are carried out at zero temperature and do not include the temperature effects. In addition, very few systematic investigation were carried out. We propose to study and develop a way to predict the device characteristics and enable their optimum design with techniques that we have developed over the last several years. These include (a) calculations from an analytic point of view in combination with a finite temperature Monte Carlo code that we have written and optimized; (b) experimental studies of the switching field characteristics of our in-house e-beam patterned submicron structures doc13207 none This research addresses stochastic optimization problems that are further complicated by the presence of integer decision variables to model logical and other discrete decisions in a multi-period or multistage setting. To cope with the computational complexity of multistage stochastic integer optimization problems, this research will develop new methodology, algorithms, and prototype software. Fundamental properties of the value function of integer programs will be exploited in conjunction with inherent decomposability of these optimization problems in order to develop algorithms that scale well with problem size. A large number of problems in production planning and scheduling, location, transportation, finance, and engineering design require that decisions be made in the presence of uncertainty. Uncertainty, for instance, governs the prices of fuels, the availability of electricity, and the demand for chemicals. Stochastic optimization is the branch of applied mathematics that provides systematic tools to prudent decision-making under uncertainty. A key difficulty in stochastic optimization is in dealing with an uncertainty space that is huge and which leads to very large-scale optimization models. The developed algorithms will be implemented in the investigator s widely distributed global optimization package BARON and made available to the research community. If successful, this project could have profound implications in decision-making under uncertainty in many sectors of the economy doc13208 none This project seeks to theoretically and experimentally establish a scientific basis for laser assisted machining (LAM) of various structural ceramic materials, which can significantly reduce the fabrication costs and improve end-state properties for ceramic parts. Theoretical treatments of LAM processes will be used to determine the thermo-mechanical behavior of ceramics during LAM, by developing thermal models, temperature dependent properties of the materials, constitutive models and process simulation models. Supporting experiments will be performed to characterize machining performance in terms of sub-surface damage and surface finish of machined specimens, tool wear and maximum material removal rate. The feasibility study with silicon nitride parts demonstrated the capabilities of LAM by achieving long tool life of approximately 40 minutes, surface finish commensurate with those of grinding and little sub-surface damage cracks and heat affected zone as well as significantly higher material removal rates than grinding under nominal machining conditions. Based on this successful feasibility study, laser assisted turning processes will be expanded to machining of various important structural ceramic materials such as silicon carbide (SiC), alumina (Al2O3), mullite, zirconia (ZrO2) and silicon nitride (Si3N4). In particular, the proposed research seeks to develop the capability to fabricate parts with complex geometry by developing requisite in-process monitoring and control techniques. This will lead, along with the developed modeling capabilities, to facilitating the implementation of LAM in industry doc13209 none This grant will be used to determine the feasibility of quasi-static and dynamic error compensation for precision machining applications using small diameter end mills. The prime mover for these active control schemes will be a commercially-available, magnetically-suspended, 70,000 rpm spindle. Such a spindle is capable of creating the high surface speeds needed for miniature milling tools, can adjust the center of rotation to compensate for tool deflection, and has the high bandwidth necessary to provide active chatter compensation. The control strategies will have two modes: low-frequency path correction for tool deflection and high-frequency compensation for chatter. The controller used to position the magnetic bearing spindle will require major modifications to implement the algorithms described above. The controller supplied with this spindle senses the rotor displacements and manipulates electromagnet currents to keep the spindle rotating around the inertial center. A high-speed processing board will be added to implement the proposed control strategy of estimating the magnitude and direction of dynamic tool deflections and modifying the spindle rotor setpoint to compensate for these static and dynamic deflections. If successful, the techniques demonstrated in this project will improve the capability to machine precision surfaces such as injection molds dies for plastic optical and mechanical parts. But the results will have much broader applications including a scientific basis for generalized tool deflection compensation, actively reducing the effects of chatter on surface finish, and high-bandwidth control of magnetic bearings. In addition, real-time frequency analysis techniques will be developed to analyze the displacement signals and extract high-frequency components for chatter detection and correction. It is anticipated that these results will have immediate application to both high-precision and full-scale, high-speed milling applications doc13210 none Initiation and Maintenance of Population Maxima of the Ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi in Northern Coastal Waters Substantial increases in peak concentrations of the ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi have occurred in the last decade in Narragansett Bay, an estuary at the northern boundary of the geographic distribution of this species. The seasonal timing of Mnemiopsis pulses has also shifted from late summer to early spring during years with earlier warming of bay water temperatures. Significant ecological consequences of this temporal introduction are potentially great. Mnemiopsis is now abundant during the peak period of fish spawning in the region. Severely depleted stocks of zooplankton have been observed in spring and summer of . Similar changes in seasonality and abundance of the species are likely to be occurring in other estuaries in the northeast. Despite the clear ecological importance of large pulses of ctenophores, the quantitative basis for understanding conditions giving rise to rapid population increases is limited. While temperature and food supply must ultimately be dominant variables controlling growth and reproduction of this species, there is little information about reproduction of over-wintering populations or conditions which favor growth of larvae in spring. In this study the investigators will conduct field and laboratory studies of Mnemiopsis over the full annual cycle to determine effects of temperature, food supply and food quality on reproductive rates and larval growth. The role of microzooplankton, addressed in only two previous laboratory studies will be fully addressed in both field and laboratory components. Areas of Narragansett Bay which have recently been observed to sustain unexpectedly large population of Mnemiopsis in winter, as well as areas in which populations pulses are delayed until spring will be compared. Hydrographic data will be collected and examined for both direct and indirect effects of physical factors on population growth, including the role of thermal stratification in population pulse initiation. Given the evidence for disruptive effects on ecosystems of seasonal or geographic invasions of Mnemiopis leidyi and the limited number of studies of this species at the northern edge of its geographic range, justification for this study is compelling. Quantitative information on the influence of temperature and food on both larval and adult M. leidyi at the level of detail collected in this study will significantly advance our understanding of factors required for initiation and maintenance of population pulses of this species doc13211 none Ruth Kastner Time-Symmetric Counterfactual Propositions in Quantum Theory Many interpretational problems in quantum theory involve counterfactual statements (statements of the form, \If it were that P, then it would be that Q ). In recent years, there has been controversy over the validity of counterfactual claims in explicitly time symmetric formulations of quantum theory such as that of Yakir Aharonov and Lev Vaidman, and that of Ulrich Mohrhoff. The goal of the proposed project is twofold: (a) to investigate precisely how such counterfactuals must differ from conventional counterfactuals and (b) whether a consistent and or physically meaningful account of time-symmetric quantum counterfactual is possible. The research plan is to conduct a thorough survey of the literature on counterfactuals, in order to take account of existing theories and to ascertain the domain of those theories (i.e., the kinds of counterfactual claims addressed by those theories). Then an analysis follows of the salient features of traditional counterfactual claims and of the novel counterfactual claims addressed by the current proposal (hereinafter \novel counterfactuals ), in order to uncover essential similarities and (primarily) differences. Next the project turns to a critical analysis of the predominant traditional counterfactual theories in light of differences uncovered between novel counterfactual claims and the traditional counterfactual claims. Such an analysis should provide at least a partial answer to the question of whether traditional theories can be applied to novel counterfactuals, possibly with some modifications. If it is determined that traditional counterfactual theories are fundamentally incompatible with novel counterfactuals, then an attempt follows to lay out the essential features of an alternative counterfactual theory (addressing the first point), which will then be critically analyzed (addressing the second point) . If the result of this second point is negative, alternatives to the use of counterfactual measurements are explored, to establish meaningful time-symmetric \objective quantum mechanical probabilities such as that sought by Mohrhoff doc13212 none It has been shown that replication forks formed at the origin of replication in Escherichia coli are not likely to circumnavigate the chromosome and finish a round of synthesis during normal cell growth. Replication forks are apparently derailed by endogenous DNA damage, and these forks must be reactivated in order to ensure cell division and bacterial cell survival. Reactivation requires homologous recombination functions and a replication restart primosome. The nature of the lesions that are formed under normal growth conditions are not well defined and may be either base lesions or strand breaks. Preliminary data suggest a connection between purine nucleoside metabolism and a form of DNA repair that results in stalled replication forks. The purine analog hydroxylaminopurine (HAP) will be used to mimic the effects of mutations that disrupt a repair pathway in E. coli. It is suggested that the endogenous lesions that block replication forks in E. coli under normal growth conditions arise from purine analogs that are converted into nucleoside triphosphates and then incorporated into DNA by replicative polymerases. This hypothesis leads to many predictions and raises many questions. Is it possible to identify the specific mechanism for HAP-induced cell killing? Can HAP be used as a probe of the enzymatic processes that remove endogenous aberrant purine nucleotide triphosphates from the replication precursor pool? Is it possible to identify the nucleoside triphosphates in E. coli under normal growth conditions that trigger replication fork arrest and restart? In order to answer these questions all the genes involved in the formation of nucleoside triphosphates containing base analogues and the subsequent removal of these compounds from nucleoside and nucleotide pools and from DNA will be identified doc13213 none The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries found European science in flux, as new theories and discoveries reshaped Europe s intellectual life. At the same time, Europe s religious makeup was shifting, as Protestant and Catholic reforms altered doctrine and practice. This dissertation research project examines the ways in which science and religion interacted on the ground in this pivotal period, by investigating how the Catholic Church defined and policed the boundary between the natural and the supernatural. This dissertation will contribute to these key areas by drawing upon Church investigations into two spheres of supernatural power: magic and sainthood. Research funds will support a nine-month research trip to Italy to work primarily at the Archivio di Stato, the Archivio della Curia Patriarcale, and the Marciana library doc13214 none The Cleveland Municipal School District s (CMSD) proposal was developed to use the successes of the Urban Systemic Initiative (USI) and the lessons learned from the implementation of the Language Arts and English standards to improve education in science and mathematics. Hence, building on those efforts, the intent is to bring systemic change to science and mathematics at the district level at an accelerated pace by: (1) using high-quality inquiry-driven and technology-rich curriculum, instruction, and assessment materials aligned with local mathematics, science, and technology standards; (2) supporting the recruitment and retention of K-12 teachers under a professional development learning environment; (3) reallocating existing resources to support the Cleveland USP; (4) mobilizing community stakeholders to support teachers in their efforts to instill effective and technology-rich science and mathematics learning for students; and (5) ensuring that all students will meet or exceed the state s proficiency standards (and local) for academic achievement in science and mathematics. As a result of the three-stage process, the proposal did not received ratings sufficient to recommend full funding. However, the National Science Foundation agreed to support the District via a highly monitored, task-specific technical assistance grant as suggested by the site visit team for stage three of the review process. The aim of the grant is to assist the school system in advancing its capacity to provide a solid science and mathematics education for all students. The targets of this highly specific support is directed toward: (1) Building leadership capacity in science and mathematics particularly at the middle district level; and (2) Accelerating the modification and implementation of the draft standards in science and mathematics. The duration of the grant is 12 months at a level of $500,000 doc13215 none The research objective of this grant is to develop scientific techniques for digital transformation of computer generated mechanical designs with spatially optimized topology, geometry, material composition and properties directly into physical realizations of functional mechanisms. This objective will be accomplished by developing two key components: (1) a design methodology for automated, computer aided design synthesis of compliant systems that are spatially optimized with respect to function, form and material composition; and (2) a methodology for automated, solid freeform fabrication of such systems with true, three-dimensional material heterogeneity. If successful, this project will pioneer the integrated design and fabrication of heterogeneous, multi-functional, compliant systems. The design algorithms to be developed as part of this project will introduce a new way of designing complex mechanisms. They will allow the designer to develop designs optimized not only with respect to geometric, topological and kinematic considerations, but also with spatially optimized material composition and properties. The fabrication methods developed in this project will enable the construction of multi-material, multi-functional compliant systems that cannot be fabricated by any other manufacturing methods. This is a unique marriage of digital design and digital fabrication. Therefore, this project provides a seamless integration of design synthesis, selective material deposition and freeform fabrication doc13216 none Amy Slaton, Drexel University Minority Engineering Education in the United States, to the Present Despite ongoing governmental and institutional attempts at diversification, African Americans and other minorities remain severely under-represented among university graduates in engineering fields. Many quantitative studies have measured this inequity and the impacts of individual educational reforms, but few scholars have explored historical or epistemological patterns behind the successes and failures of diversification efforts. Using archives, artifacts, and approximately 35 interviews with engineering instructors and graduates, this project compares engineering education in American universities attended primarily by black students and white students since to establish such an overview. Based on four pairs of schools, representing each of four states and four historical eras, this study describes the broad political conditions in which these universities functioned, and provides detailed accounts of practices within their engineering classrooms and laboratories. The cases of Lincoln University (Missouri) and the University of Missouri will illustrate conditions during the science and engineering manpower crisis immediately following World War II. Technical programs at Maryland State College and the University of Maryland will illustrate the impacts of integration as separate-but-equal doctrines fell away in the s. The histories of two urban schools, the Kennedy-King College and Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, will reflect the coalescence of civil rights activism and legislation in the s and s; and comparisons of Prairie View and Texas A&M Universities will document the ascendance of political conservatism and a post-industrial economy in the s and s. Engineering curricula and course materials varied greatly among these settings, and this project treats post-secondary technical education since as both a reflection of prevailing social ideologies about race and a shaping force of those values. It explores, overall, the uncertain connection between technical and social modernity in contemporary America doc13217 none This award provides funding for the research and development of a function-based representation to support concept modeling and solution synthesis in early design. The approach will focus on contributing to the standards currently under development at the National Institute of Standards and Technology for function representation and knowledge interoperability. The representation of semantics, meaning of design intent, in a modeling and synthesis environment is a challenging problem. As envisioned, the representation will include knowledge that is fuzzy (difficult to quantify but reflects engineering expertise and preference) and computable knowledge (based on scientific and engineering principles). Through close collaborations with industry partners, Pratt and Whitney and Telaxis Communications, the research will address issues that are not only fundamentally challenging, but also responsive to and informed by the needs of industry. Example problems from jet engine and telecommunication design will inform, validate, and demonstrate the research and development of the function-based representation. If successful, the generalized representation will provide the foundation needed for the exchange of design rationale, design preferences, and knowledge for modeling and design optimization currently not available in today s design systems. This project is the first step in the research needed for the development of an integrated design environment and the nation s next generation of design systems, wherein customers, designers, suppliers, manufacturers, and distributors work collaboratively in a distributed and integrated environment. The results of this work will provide the needed representation and foundation for such an environment doc13218 none Chronic or repeated exposure to stress produces plasticity in a number of neural systems, including those that regulate the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. The HPA axis has widespread effects on physiology and behavior, including modulation of metabolism and cardiovascular function. Changes in basal activity as well as subsequent stress-induced HPA activity are seen in animals exposed to repeated stress such as cold or restraint. This project uses a more naturalistic model of stress in rodents, that of repeated exposure to social defeat. Defeat in the context of social environment, including which individual is a resident or an intruder in the local area, is a familiar situation in the natural life of many social rodents such as rats. Although a single defeat produces neuroendocrine and behavioral effects that last a few weeks, it is more common in the wild to have an individual animal regularly subjected to defeat. Therefore, repeated defeat in rats represents a potentially powerful model for the study of neural plasticity associated with chronic, repeated stress. Using a novel combination of molecular biology and behavior, the goals of this project are to 1) characterize how basal and stress-induced HPA activity change in rats subject to repeated defeat; 2) study the specific role of the paraventricular thalamus, a brain region that inhibits HPA responses in other stress situations, in the repeated defeat paradigm; and 3) identify novel brain regions in which activity is increased by repeated defeat, since these are potential sites of regulation of HPA activity. Results will be important for identifying novel brain circuitry involved in the modulation of behavior, and with an impact on our understanding more about the role of social versus physical stress, and about the evolution of sociality. This project also fosters the career of a new investigator who combines an unusual background in molecular biology and behavior doc13219 none A major concern when performing deep excavations in urban environments is the impact of construction-related ground movements on adjacent buildings and utilities. Given the uncertainties associated with making movement predictions, it is usual to include a monitoring program to record the ground movements that develop during construction. Ideally, these recorded movements can be used to control the construction process and update predictions of movements given the measured deformations at early stages of constructions. However, it is quite difficult, if not impossible, to use the observed movements for these purposes in a timely enough fashion to be of use in a typical project where time is of the essence to a contractor. To improve the state-of-the-art of predicting and controlling ground movements associated with supported excavations, this project develops methods to (1) objectively update design predictions of deformations for supported excavations in clay using monitoring data obtained during construction, and (2) to evaluate critical inputs to performance predictions in design. Automated procedures, such as inverse modeling techniques, are adopted wherein a given model is calibrated by iteratively changing model input values until the simulated output values match the measured data. These procedures will be coupled with a finite element program to automatically update predictions of ground movements. Objective measures of the critical inputs to a finite element analysis of a supported excavation are developed to provide quantitative information concerning the relative importance of various input parameters. The Infrastructure Technology Institute has provided funding to help support this effort. The methodology is developed and tested using detailed ground and building movement data from a 13 m deep excavation through soft clays for a subway renovation project in Chicago. With funding from Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates through the Chicago Department of Transportation, Northwestern University collected and analyzed ground deformations and adjacent building movements at the subway excavation. An advisory committee comprised of an owner s representative and geotechnical and structural designers provides input to the project via periodic reviews of the progress of the work. Members of the advisory committee also contribute detailed case studies from their project files that are used to check the methodology initially developed based on the data from the Chicago project doc13220 none Agrawal Description: This award supports US-India cooperative research entitled High Temperature Dielectric Studies on Advanced Materials in the High Frequency Region. The US investigators are Dinesh Agrawal and Michael Lanagan, Pennsylania State University; Indian investigators are Dinesh Dube and H.C. Gupta, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi. Microwave processing is emerging as a widely accepted new processing technology for a variety of materials, especially advanced ceramics. In spite of advancements, the physical understanding of how materials absorb microwaves is not understood. The investigators will conduct structural characterization studies on advanced ceramic materials to determine the electrical dielectric properties in different frequency regions with emphasis on high frequency measurements. They intend to extend characterization to magnetic materials and to metal powders. The results are expected to shed light on the physical mechanisms responsible for microwave adsorption during microwave processing. This is a fast emerging area in processing technology. Scope: Professor Agrawal is a world leader in this area with several innovations in microwave characterization technique to his credit. The Materials Research Laboratory at Penn State University is a premier laboratory for advanced materials. The Indian researchers have long been engaged in investigating electrical properties of materials in the high frequency region. This project offers the opportunity for international collaboration and the strengthening of institutional connections between Penn State and the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. The project is jointly supported by the Division of International Programs and the Government of India s Department of Science & Technology doc13221 none This collaborative project between Michigan Technological University (MTU) and Southwest Texas State University (SWT) focuses on the fabrication and testing of waveguide photonic crystals in magnetic oxides for novel integrated photonic device prototyping. The project responds to the growing interest in photonic crystals for device applications based on their unique optical band gap properties. While various novel optical band gap structures have been fabricated in non-magnetic dielectric media for highly efficient waveguiding, filtering and resonator applications, very little work has been done on photonic crystals in magnetic systems and no work exists on monolithic planar magnetophotonic crystals. This project will focus on the electron-beam patterning of magnetic photonic crystals on ferrite waveguides for a new generation of integrated optical isolator devices. The non-reciprocal properties of magnetic oxides, such as yttrium iron garnet (YIG), make these materials a unique choice for optical isolator and circulator fabrication. Optical fiber telecommunications have developed to the point where the monolithic integration of different optical components is a serious issue to reduce costs in local area networks and long-distance data transmittal. However, conventional systems utilizing non-planar geometries are both bulky and expensive. Photonic crystal structures provide a novel alternative to address this problem since they can significantly enhance the Faraday response, making it possible to build smaller and cheaper isolators and circulators, a generation beyond the types of integrated isolators being explored at present. The proposed program will concentrate on the fabrication of patterned ridge waveguides on rf-sputtered bismuth-substituted YIG films, with special emphasis on achieving superior optical isolation by minimizing birefringence. It will also explore the fabrication of flat top transmission devices. By establishing the practical implementation of magnetic photonic crystals on chip, the project will also contribute to the development of optical filters, highly efficient Kerr reflectors for magneto-optic recording and mode converters doc13222 none This proposal will identify and overcome the difficulty associated with the reliable operation of MEMS devices, RF-MEMS in particular. This objective is addressed through the integrated modeling of electromagnetic thermal mechanical couplings in MEMS devices, experimental validation of the model, and quantification of the coupling effects for device reliability. To meet the need of simulating RF MEMS, the proposal research aims at the development of an integrated multi-physics model and its experimental verification. Research issues are 1) what is the coupling among electromagnetic, thermal, and mechanical effects in MEMS, 2) what numerical solution algorithms are suitable for an integrated multi-domain model, 3) what types of experiments can effectively verify the multi-domain coupling models. Each research issue is approached as follows (in numerical order): 1. The model will be developed for 1) Joule heating caused by RF excitation, 2) thermal strain caused by temperature change, 3) electrostatic pressure caused by the electric field, and 4) electric charge redistribution caused by mechanical deformation. 2. Considering the size and possible ill-condition of the FE matrix resulting from the proposed multi-physics model, the incomplete LU (ILU) preconditioner developed by a PI, will be used with robust solvers based on GMRES. 3. The direct observation of temperature distribution of a RF-MEMS switch during its operation will be done using a high resolution infrared imaging system and a high-speed digital signal analyzer, to verify the developed coupling model. This project combines our modeling and experimental expertise in electromagnetic, thermal, and mechanical science and engineering to address the highly multidisciplinary reliability problems associated with RF MEMS applications. Our theoretical and experimental tasks are very complementary to each other and will serve well to achieve our research goals. The aimed simulation tool, combined with our experimental capabilities, will help us develop RF MEMS with high performance and reliability, and will significantly contribute to technologies related to wireless telecommunications doc13223 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Cavanagh at North Carolina State University to assist in the purchase of a 600 MHz high-resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer. This instrument will be a driving and enabling technology in a myriad of disparate research areas. Twelve different research programs will be immediately enhanced along with many teaching programs. The problems to be addressed that will utilize and develop this state-of-the-art technology are noted below: (i) determination of the structures of proteins involved in cell response to stress, exchange of genetic material between bacteria and calcium transport in cells; (ii) modifications in RNA structures that impact binding to proteins and peptides; (iii) studies of polymers with predetermined functions, sizes, electronic optical properties and conformations; (iv) examination of how viruses enter cells; (v) electronic properties of DNA; (vi) design of quantum computer methods; (vii) study of the mechanisms by which proteins transport RNA in plants; (viii) investigation of how the proteins involved in inflammatory response fold into their active shapes; (ix) diagnostics of biological fluids; (x) study of how peptides and proteins form solid structures; (xi) examination of the catalytic properties of enzymes at high temperatures and (xii) molecular pores capable of spanning biological membranes and mediating solute transport. The acquisition of a 600 MHz NMR spectrometer will allow researchers at North Carolina State University to generate high-resolution three-dimensional structures of the proteins, nucleic acids and peptides. Determination of such accurate structures gives insight, at the molecular level, as to how the chemical biological electronic optical function of the various systems actually occurs. This information is critical if these mechanisms of action are to be enhanced or inhibited. The processes to be investigated are all fundamental phenomena that need to be studied as part of expanding our general knowledge base. However, these investigations are by no means esoteric, and all have the potential to have enormous practical impact. For example, the development of a successful quantum computer would increase computing speeds and power by orders of magnitude; studies of polymers with defined electronic and optical properties is needed in the computing and electronics fields; the proteins involved in genetic exchange, calcium transport and solid deposition will assist in the understanding of antibiotic resistance and neurodegenerative disorders; diagnostics of bodily fluids will allow cholesterol levels to be efficiently measured; pores spanning membranes offer the opportunity to deliver appropriate chemicals to cells. From a teaching point of view the new instrumentation will expand the teaching capability for undergraduates and graduates in Chemistry, Biochemistry, Structural Biology, Chemical Engineering, Genetics, Plant Pathology and Molecular Biophysics. In summary, a 600 MHz NMR spectrometer will be of enormous benefit to the North Carolina State University research community. It will be a focal point for countless interdisciplinary research programs, fostering interactions between scientists of different disciplines. Such interactions will, undoubtedly, suggest new and important research directions to pursue doc13224 none Under the direction of Dr. Mark S. Aldenderfer, Elizabeth Klarich will collect data for her doctoral dissertation during the summer and fall of . She will direct excavations at Pucara (200 BC- AD 400), a site located in the northwestern Lake Titicaca Basin of Peru at an elevation of masl. During the Upper Formative Period, Pucara was one of two major population centers in the Titicaca region. The site has been characterized as an early urban center, a ceremonial center, the center of a complex chiefdom, and more generally as the center of a ceramic style region. Previous archaeological research at Pucara has clarified the layout of the monumental public architecture and surrounding mound complexes, defined Classic Pukara decorated ceramics and monoliths, and located two areas of distinct residential architecture within the 1 km2 site. Within early complex societies such as Pucara, elites gain and maintain power using a number of economic, political, and social strategies. There are three major models for Pukara polity organization, each emphasizing different strategies used by elites during the Upper Formative Period. While the models have the potential to provide significant insights, each is based on only limited excavation data from the site. Consequently, it is impossible to evaluate these models without collecting additional data. The proposed excavations will be conducted in a central area of residential architecture in order to understand the organization of elite domestic economy in this early regional center. Broad, horizontal areas will be excavated in order to locate contemporaneous activity areas and determine general household organization within elite compounds. These compounds, originally located in by Alfred Kidder II, are not visible on the modern ground surface. Excavation blocks have been selected based on geophysical survey data (ground penetrating radar and cesium magnetometer) collected during the fall of . Excavation data from households-- the predominant location of production, consumption, and distribution activities within preindustrial societies-- will be used to determine what type of economic, political, and ritual strategies were involved in the development and maintenance of Pukara elites. The rise of complex societies occurred independently in many parts of the world Although historical contingency played a role in shaping individual trajectories, through cross region comparison archaeologists gain insight into common underlying processes. MS Klarich s research will provide additional information on one such case. It will yield data of interest to many archaeologists and assist in training a promising young scientist doc13225 none This project is a combined experimental and computational effort that aims at improving the producibility and predictability of this joining process. Reactive multilayer foils are a new class of engineered materials that can be used as local heat sources for joining. These multilayer foils are comprised of hundreds of nanoscale layers that alternate between elements with large heats of mixing, such as Al and Ni. Self-propagating reactions can be initiated in these foils at room temperature, and the reaction properties can be controlled by varying the foil composition and the thickness of individual layers. By placing a reactive foil between two braze layers and two components and initiating the reaction, heat from the foil melts the braze layers and joins the components. This new method of joining requires no vacuum furnace and, with very localized heating, limits the temperature that is seen by the bonded components. Both advantages open new possibilities in the joining of temperature-sensitive components and of dissimilar materials like metals and ceramics. Computationally, this research aims to analyze the effect of heat losses, predict the melting of braze layers, and the evolution of temperature in the bonded components. Predictions will be validated against experimental measurements and then applied to optimize the design of reactive joining applications. The physical properties and microstructure of the resulting joints will also be characterized. Combined, the mechanical characterizations and numerical predictions will provide the fundamental tools that will be needed to insert this new joining technology into various manufacturing applications. It is expected that this research will lead to significant changes in industrial joining operations and to educational experiences for high school students from a woman s high school as well undergraduate and graduate students doc13226 none Wahr Description: This project is to support a cooperative research project between Dr. John Wahr, Department of Physics, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado and Dr. Mosalam Shaltout, Solar and Space Research Department of the National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics, Helwan, Cairo, Egypt. The goal of the research is to develop a method of monitoring the large-scale distribution of ground water and soil moisture throughout Egypt, by using a combination of satellite gravity measurements and atmospheric pressure data. The gravity measurements will come from GRACE, a satellite mission expected for launch in late . GRACE will map the earth s gravity field with high accuracy every30 days, and so will provide information on month-to month variations in the distribution of mass within the Earth and on or above the surface. This will allow the monitoring of changes in the distribution of water stored on land, at a scale of few hundred kilometers, everywhere over the globe. The accuracy of these water storage estimates is expected to depend primarily on the errors in the atmospheric pressure fields used to remove atmospheric mass contributions from the gravity measurements. The work proposed will strengthen the existing atmospheric pressure network in Egypt so that the atmospheric mass contributions to gravity can be accurately modeled and removed from the GRACE data. Scope: The research planned is exploratory intended to calibrate and increase the accuracy of the GRACE data for assessing the moisture in soils. This effort can be of great importance to predicting availability of ground water and other forms of soil moisture and thus help with planning purposes for hydrologists, agriculture specialists and for social and political planners. The two scientists have complementary experiences. They have access to resources needed for the project. A female US post doctorate at the University of Colorado will participate in this research. The project is funded by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Earth Sciences doc13227 none As the role of scientists in policy-making has grown over the past half-century, there has been increasing difficulty characterizing how science should be used to formulate public policy, from debates about the role of science in the courtroom to disputes over which science should inform environmental policy. This grant will support philosophical analysis of the role of scientists in public decision-making. For the period of the grant, the investigator will consider central issues that underlie the relationship between science and society, namely the understanding of scientific objectivity, the moral responsibility of scientists, and the proper role of science in risk analysis. Scientific objectivity is often the justification given for why scientists should be heavily involved with public decision-making, but objectivity is a complex concept, and not all aspects are either possible or desirable in the public decision-making setting. A more careful examination of this concept will help clarify what the public role of scientists should be. This public role is intimately tied to the issue of whether and to what extent scientists have particular moral responsibilities to the rest of society. A divergent set of views on this issue have been expressed over the past fifty years, and a more careful examination of these views and the arguments behind them will help determine to what extent and in what situations scientists must consider certain ethical issues. Finally, both of these areas, objectivity and moral responsibility, play a crucial role in how the U.S. conceptualizes the use of scientists in risk analysis for public policy. There has been considerable debate about the appropriate risk decision-making process, and the relationship between scientists and citizens lies at the heart of these debates. Using a wide variety of sources, from scientists, philosophers, historians, and policymakers, to gather the basic arguments and positions, the primary investigator will develop three related pieces of written work on the above topics. These pieces will be submitted to peer reviewed journals for refinement and publication. In addition, these three pieces will become part of a larger written work, for which the primary investigator has additional support from her home institution. This final work should help clarify the historical development of scientists in policy-making, the philosophical understanding of science that shaped that development, and how altering that philosophical understanding should change how scientists function in the public eye doc13228 none The Military Roots of Basic Science: American Oceanography in the Cold War and Beyond Naomi Oreskes American oceanography was built on the twin pillars of military funding and logistical support. Before the s there was no `blue water oceanography in the United States, and the leaders of the field were to be found in England, Germany, and Scandinavia. By the late s, American scientists were at the forefront of the field, and their work was instrumental in transforming human knowledge of the deep seas. This project is a historical study of how this transformation occurred: how oceanographers, working with military patrons motivated by national security concerns, produced the modern scientific understanding of the oceans, the sea-floor, and the processes that shape the surface of the earth. The outcome is a book of interest to historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science, to U.S. historians, and to scientists and science policy analysts. This project challenges the standard model of a causal arrow from basic to applied science. In Cold War oceanography, `application drove science, not the other way around. Yet science was not impeded: these were years of multiple, profound discoveries. This challenges the deeply held conviction of most scientists that science must be unfettered to advance. It also challenges the Mertonian assumption that the free and open exchange of information is critical to scientific advance. The evidence from oceanography is against these convictions. However, while military patronage was good for oceanographic science, it was not always good for scientists. Costs were paid in human, intellectual, and political terms. Individual scientists had their careers derailed by security investigations, and women were excluded or marginalized in the Navy- science fraternity. Intellectually, the military agenda produced knowledge in many areas but left persistent ignorance in others. On the socio-political front, fifty years of military-scientific collaboration, in which scientists did not have to explain their work to a larger public, has left a legacy of distrust among the public, and a perception that scientists are now more self-interested than disinterested. A major contribution of the study will be an analysis of the lasting legacies of military patronage, in oceanography, and in American science. The insights offered by the project have significant implications, not only for our understanding of the history of science, but for future science policy and funding doc13229 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga will acquire a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer (GC MS). This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) study of reaction mixtures of organic products; b) the study of organomercury species found in local reservoirs and water supplies; and c) the study of the environmental fate of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Gas chromatograph with mass spectrometric detection (GC-MS) detection is an extremely powerful technique used for the separation and analysis of complex mixtures. This instrument will substantially strengthen scientific research in the Environmental Sciences, Biology and Chemistry Departments at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. It will also have a significant impact on student involvement in research at this primarily undergraduate institution doc13230 none The objective of this one year project is to demonstrate the feasibility of a novel Selective Chemical Liquid Deposition process (SCLD) that creates 3-D structures with better properties and lower fabrication-induced residual stresses than other deposition and solid freeform fabrication processes. Currently most of the technologies used in fabrication of microstructures and MEMS involve sophisticated and expensive processes, such as photo-lithography, silicon surface machining, and silicon bulk machining. For example, chemical vapor deposition processing is a moderate to high temperature deposition process that introduces defects and residual stresses into the films produced. To overcome CVD shortcomings and to explore new chemical deposition applications and new materials in the fabrication of mini-structures and microsystems, the SCLD Process will integrate chemical liquid deposition research, solid freeform fabrication, systems and control, and mini-structures and microsystems (MSMS) in one automated process. The research plan for developing SCLDP-MSMS investigates the controlled deposition as a room temperature solution or liquid reactant is sprayed from a nozzle, making contact with a hot substrate, resulting in evaporation, decomposition, or reaction. It is expected that the reacted solid products will deposit on the substrate and that by controlling the motion of the nozzle and the spray time, a desired 3-D microstructure can be formed through a layer-by-layer scanning technique. Preliminary work has been done on the conceptual design of the SCLDP-MSMS system, materials selection, and testing. The results are promising. In order to turn this new concept into a reality, the following tasks will be carried out: (1) conduct extensive materials research and testing on the chemical liquid deposition process to find more chemicals which can be used to deposit metals, ceramics, silicon, composite, and carbon structures; (2) design and build a prototype SCLDP-MSMS machine and use the prototype machine to make microstructures; and (3) perform additional experiments on the SCLDP to provide necessary data, boundary conditions and analysis information for process modeling and computer simulation doc13231 none This planning proposal funds the design a study on the influence of information and computer technology based learning activities on the social behavior and academic achievement of urban, impoverished, minority children. The project will use an ongoing collaboration with the St. Louis Public Schools and an ongoing project that introduces technology to children in primary grades. The work envisions the use of technology in support of appropriate behavior and learning in primary (pre-K through 2nd grade) classrooms. The work capitalizes upon on-going efforts to both study and improve the level of teaching and learning in select SLPS classrooms, but requires substantial preparation in order to undertake a rigorous study to advance the knowledge base and have implications beyond the specific classrooms involved doc13232 none This project supports research for an alternative to student loans as a way to finance higher education. The project utilizes the theory behind financial instruments such as call or put options to develop the alternative, an education call option. The education call option is intended to protect students from investing in higher education and then not earning an income substantial enough to afford basic living expenses, loan repayments, or future investment in education. Hence, the option functions as insurance against the risk of investing in higher education. Like any insurance policy, it is important to have a premium and deductible that are economically beneficially to both the policyholder and underwriter. A major objective of this project is to develop analytically tractable methods for pricing the education call option that can be used in practice doc13233 none Ramkrishna Description: This award supports a US-India cooperative research project entitled Investigation of Bubble Size Distribution Profiles in Gas-Liquid Systems. The collaborators are Professor D. Ramkrishna, Department of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University and Professor J.B. Joshi, Department of Chemical Technology, Bombay University. They will make a systematic investigation of the effect that bubble population balance may have on prediction of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) calculations in gas-liquid flow. Such calculations are usually done with an assumed single bubble size and coalescence, and break-up phenomena and resulting bubble size distributions are ignored. Scope: This collaboration will combine the US investigator s expertise on bubble dynamics, break-up and coalescence, and population balance with Professor Joshi s experimental facilities needed to measure model predictions. Together they can advance the current state of the art of gas-liquid flows significantly. The US and Indian graduate students involved in this project will have the advantage of exposure to the best available thinking in the field of gas-liquid bubbly flows. This research could have a profound impact on design and scale-up of gas-liquid contactors, which are common to numerous chemical processes and are of great technological and economic importance doc13234 none Zreda Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Dr. Marek Zreda, Department of Hydrology and Water Resources, University of Arizona, Tucson and Dr. Attila Ciner, Geological Engineering Department, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey. The investigators will conduct field research to map late quaternary glacial deposits and paleolake shorelines across Turkey in order to quantify equilibrium line altitude (ELA) depression during glacial advances and collect samples for cosmogenic dating. A central motivation for this study is to explore the shorter time scale (Henrich and Dansgaard-Oeschger events) synchrony of climate variation between the North Atlantic and southwest Asian. Because Turkey lies at an interesting climatic crossroads, it may provide valuable chronological data. Little is known about the glacial history of Turkey and this research may lead to new findings on the climatic history of the Eurasian subtropics. Scope: This collaboration involves two scientists with complementary expertise. Zreda is a leader in the field of cosmogenic dating of glacial feature. The Turkish researchers will organize fieldwork, provide access to scientific materials (including aerial photographs and maps that may not otherwise be accessible.), and provide the knowledge of the geology of Turkey. The US investigators will design and conduct sample collections program and will provide the technical expertise in the future isotopic dating. Together the two sides will conduct all field investigations and mapping. The proposed activity has great potential to advance knowledge within the field and across disciplines and contribute to educational curriculum doc13235 none This dissertation research project proposes to study the design of urban multimodal transportation in the United States. It will examine interdependent technical, organizational, and cultural changes directed at diversifying existing transportation infrastructures. It includes formal design processes and people s everyday experiences to understand how the street and safety are negotiated in designing for pedestrian, bicycle, automobile, bus, and rail modes. The organizing concept of multimodal design focuses the research on the negotiation of diversity in designing for multiple and potentially conflicting needs. This project will examine how diverse perspectives on these five modes grapple with the technical, organizational, and cultural inertia of existing infrastructure to design a shared infrastructure that meets the needs of pluralistic populations. In the United States, multimodal transportation is a timely topic because of the possibilities for change afforded by the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA, ) and the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21, ). Following on the completion of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, this legislation marks a shift in United States trans-portation policy away from road construction as the primary solution to transportation problems. In response to political concerns over previous highway policy, this legislation also increases the role of metropolitan- and state-level decision making. This research will examine how multimodal design addresses automobile dependence and its attendant problems of air pollution, urban sprawl, and oil dependency by providing viable transportation alternatives in people s everyday lives. It is socially significant for assessing the role of nongovernmental organizations in transportation change, opportunities for broader participation in design, and best practices in design processes, programs, and policies that foster political stability and environmental sustainability. The project uses the city of Oakland, California as a research site including pedestrian, bicycle, automobile, bus, and rail modes. Each mode will be examined through the transportation planners, elected officials, advocates, and residents who shape and are shaped by these modes. One year of field research will use the following data collection methods: 1) thirty-five focused interviews with transportation planners, elected officials, and advocates on the design of multimodal transportation; 2) fifteen informant photography and photo-elicitation interviews with residents on their everyday experiences of urban travel; and 3) participant observation in public hearings, advocacy meetings, and educational outreach on transportation projects. These three data sets will be analyzed to identify social worlds that negotiate the design of the street and safety for the five transportation modes. The field research will be situated in the context of regional, state, and federal policy and the cultural significance of these transportation modes doc13236 none This collaborative research project addresses a new large-scale optimization model, called Network Design with Service Guarantees (NDSG), that simultaneously incorporates revenue, cost, and service (end-to-end delay) considerations. Though of immense practical significance, the NDSG model is very difficult to solve both from theoretical and computational perspectives. The goal is to develop and test effective solution procedures using state-of-the-art optimization techniques that can exploit the NDSG problem s special mathematical structure. Accordingly, the project entails both theoretical and empirical investigations, including developing and characterizing alternative problem formulations, analyzing their structural properties, designing specialized solution algorithms, and testing these methods using realistic data. To solve the problem, a new family of optimization algorithms that dynamically reformulates the problem, and correspondingly adapts the solution approach by combining decomposition and model strengthening techniques will be investigated. It is expected that the core research contributions-a new modeling paradigm, a novel solution approach, and algorithmic implementation-will also extend to other large-scale optimization models. Communication and physical distribution capabilities have become critical in the new networked economy. Organizations have come to rely on these capabilities to establish tightly integrated partnerships that can effectively serve diverse market needs for products and services. Delays or failures in the movement of information or goods can have debilitating consequences not only for supply chains but also for services such as emergency operations, air traffic control, and financial systems. Decisions regarding the configuration of communication and distribution networks needed to support coordination and collaboration have strategic importance both because they entail massive investments of billions of dollars and because a network s topological design largely determines the level of service it can provide. Consequently, optimization tools are widely used in practice to design product and service fulfillment networks, and network design continues to be a very active research area. Designing optimal network configurations entails complex tradeoffs between conflicting objectives such as maximizing profitability, ensuring adequate resource utilization, improving service levels, and so on. Classical optimization models, which focus primarily on cost minimization, tend to design sparse networks that exploit economies of scale but are not robust in terms of service and reliability. The project will provide opportunities for graduate students to conduct thesis research, and enrich graduate courses in optimization and operations modeling doc13237 none Michael Lynch, Cornell University DNA Profiling and Fingerprinting: Relations between Closure and Controversy This one-year project examines the role of science and technology in criminal justice, specifically the relation of DNA profiling to traditional forms of legal evidence. In criminal investigations, DNA profiling is used to compare bodily traces collected at crime scenes (blood, semen, hair and hair follicles, skin, and cheek cells) with samples taken from suspects. State and national DNA databases are under construction worldwide. When DNA profiling was introduced in the mid- s it was called DNA fingerprinting. The nominal association with the established method of latent fingerprint analysis suggested that the new method would enable investigators to identify unique individuals. However, practical, population genetic, and probabilistic aspects of DNA profiling became controversial in the late s and early 90s. Court disputes and public debates among scientists were popularly dubbed the DNA wars. Due to a series of legal decisions, technical fixes, and science advisory recommendations, the controversy is now widely declared over, and a post-closure inversion of credibility has occurred. Where DNA fingerprinting once borrowed its name and credibility from the older method of fingerprinting, it is now so strongly trusted that it is held as a standard for judging all other forms of criminal evidence, including latent fingerprint evidence. DNA profiling methods are being used to challenge convictions from years past, and this has led to renewed debate about the death penalty and widespread concern about the adequacy of the entire criminal justice process. The PI, Michael Lynch and the co-investigator Simon Cole have conducted extensive research on DNA profiling and latent fingerprint analysis. Both investigators explore how the scientific credibility now ascribed to DNA profiling implicates older forms of criminal evidence, including common sense evidence and older forensic practices like fingerprinting. The PIs intend to interview participants in The Innocence Project -- an ongoing effort using DNA profiling to re-open criminal convictions obtained in the pre-DNA era. They draw upon court transcripts, case summaries and participant interviews from recent cases in which fingerprint evidence has been challenged, in order to assess the extent to which the now-established credibility of DNA profiling has led to questioning of traditional forms of evidence. These data are interpreted in light of longer term, international trends in methods of criminal identification. The study contributes to a growing area of S&TS research on the intertwining of law, science, and public values. It also links up with related projects on DNA profiling and criminal databases in the US, Australia, and Europe. The project and its dissemination products have scholarly and educational value by enhancing professional and public insight into some important ethical, legal, and political concerns about the uses of scientific expertise. Some of these concerns are about the impact of DNA databases on civil liberties and privacy, the ability of lay persons to understand and weigh scientific and probabilistic evidence, and the possibility that objective evidence may obscure the continued importance of critical evaluation of evidence in relation to the overall circumstances of a case doc13238 none Cundari Description: This award supports U.S.-India cooperative research entitled Novel Approaches to Quantum Modeling of Chemical Systems. Professors Thomas Cundari, University of Memphis and Shankar Bhattacharyya, Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science will collaborate on developing genetic algorithms for use in molecular modeling. Novel soft computing techniques - genetic algorithms, neural networks, and fuzzy logic - for solving the Schroedinger wave equation for chemical systems will be developed, refined and implemented. Further development and application of such algorithms are important in creating efficient computation of molecular properties in realistic systems. Scope: The international collaboration will exploit the synergy between the US and Indian research groups. The expertise of the Indian team in algorithm development and genetic algorithms will complement the US team s strengths in other branches of soft computing and the chemical applications. This project will promote mutual benefits with respect to scientific exchange and graduate student development. The project is jointly supported by the Division of International Programs and the Government of India s Department of Science and Technology doc13221 none This collaborative project between Michigan Technological University (MTU) and Southwest Texas State University (SWT) focuses on the fabrication and testing of waveguide photonic crystals in magnetic oxides for novel integrated photonic device prototyping. The project responds to the growing interest in photonic crystals for device applications based on their unique optical band gap properties. While various novel optical band gap structures have been fabricated in non-magnetic dielectric media for highly efficient waveguiding, filtering and resonator applications, very little work has been done on photonic crystals in magnetic systems and no work exists on monolithic planar magnetophotonic crystals. This project will focus on the electron-beam patterning of magnetic photonic crystals on ferrite waveguides for a new generation of integrated optical isolator devices. The non-reciprocal properties of magnetic oxides, such as yttrium iron garnet (YIG), make these materials a unique choice for optical isolator and circulator fabrication. Optical fiber telecommunications have developed to the point where the monolithic integration of different optical components is a serious issue to reduce costs in local area networks and long-distance data transmittal. However, conventional systems utilizing non-planar geometries are both bulky and expensive. Photonic crystal structures provide a novel alternative to address this problem since they can significantly enhance the Faraday response, making it possible to build smaller and cheaper isolators and circulators, a generation beyond the types of integrated isolators being explored at present. The proposed program will concentrate on the fabrication of patterned ridge waveguides on rf-sputtered bismuth-substituted YIG films, with special emphasis on achieving superior optical isolation by minimizing birefringence. It will also explore the fabrication of flat top transmission devices. By establishing the practical implementation of magnetic photonic crystals on chip, the project will also contribute to the development of optical filters, highly efficient Kerr reflectors for magneto-optic recording and mode converters doc13240 none This project will focus on the investigation of some of the basic unresolved issues in the study of the performance properties of nonlinear systems. Once these issues have been addressed, the resulting theory will be applied to the stability analysis of various systems in which single or multiple human operators are in feedback loops with active nonlinear robotic devices and are thus subject to applied forces. The objectives of the proposed work are threefold. First,the relationship between performance and robust stability for nonlinear systems will be established. This relationship is an essential part of many modern linear robust control techniques, but extensions of the relevant results to nonlinear systems have not yet been fully developed. Indeed, preliminary investigations have revealed that robust stability does not imply performance for time-invariant nonlinear systems when standard dissipativity-based criteria are used (such as L2-gain or passivity). One goal of this project is to determine which weaker versions of dissipativity lead to the desired equivalences between performance and robust stability. To this end,a new version of dissipativity called conditional dissipativity is proposed, and part of this project will be to identify its key properties. To provide analysis tools sufficient for meeting the first project objective, a behavioral approach to nonlinear system models will be developed based on the work of Willems. In particular, concepts especially important for the analysis of nonlinear system models (such as LaSalle s invariance principle) will be worked out in a behavioral context. An expected outcome of this part of the project will be the demonstration that the behavioral approach offers certain advantages to both analysis and design not available with standard approaches to nonlinear system models. Finally, the theory developed according to the first two project objectives will be applied to the stability analysis of human machine interfaces such as haptic displays and bilateral teleoperation systems. In such systems, a human operator is in direct contact with an active robotic device and is subject to forces applied through a nonlinear feedback loop.The stability of such a feedback system is important not only for the safety of the human operator but also for the accurate tactile perception of the virtual or physical environment via the force feedback.This project will significantly extend the known results on the stability of these systems and provide guidelines for system design. In fact, it will be the first to address stability issues for multi-user systems, that is, systems in which multiple human operators interact simultaneously with each other and with virtual or physical environments by means of their own ocal robotic devices. Any application of nonlinear system design techniques which relies on the relationship between performance and robust stability will directly benefit from the theory developed during the course of this project. In particular, this project will provide designers of robotic systems such as haptic displays and bilateral teleoperation systems with useful guidelines for making their systems work in a stable manner. This project thus has the potential for improving the quality of various implementations of these systems in such areas as computer-aided design, manufacturing and medicine doc13241 none A research and educational initiative to develop a new all-metal magnetic random access memory device, based on nano-contact ballistic magnetoresistance and current-induced magnetization switching is proposed. The following research goals are planned: - To understand the mechanisms that govern the electrical transport on magnetic nanoconstrictions - To understand the mechanisms for domain wall propagation using high-speed current pulses - To design and fabricate a prototype magnetic random accessmemory based on these new concepts for detection and recording. In this project, we offer a completely different operating principle for magnetic random access memory devices (MRAMS). Instead of exploiting giant magnetoresistance in multilayer devices for readback, we propose a scheme which is fundamentally different from the conventional approach in usual MRAM S, which rely on external currents to produce magnetic fields higher than the coercivity of the ferromagnetic layers. In this method, we will utilize the so called s-d exchange interaction to move domain walls. The principle is to use pulsed current to move domain walls in the direction of electron velocity. The educational efforts include the training of graduate and undergraduate students specializing in magnetism, and the development of a web-based teaching tool that visually demonstrates some of the key aspects of magnetic behavior. This project will produce animation videos of magnetic phenomena derived from actual experimental results and will be disseminated electronically via the internet to reach a broad audience. The goal is to enhance the understanding of magnetism and promote enthusiasm towards science and technology. These efforts will utilize the existing technical expertise and experimental capabilities in surface science, nanolithography, scanned probe microscopy, magnetic imaging, and device fabrication. This project is leveraged upon the results of an NSF CAREER award, and represents a related but distinct research direction doc13242 none Long-wavelength lasers emitting at ?= 1.33 or 1.55 m are one of the most important and widely used optoelectronic devices for optical fiber communication systems in the present modern information technology era. For optical-fiber communications, the lnGaAsP quaternary III-V semiconductor material system, which is lattice-matched to InP, covers the wavelength range corresponding to low dispersion or low attenuation in optical fibers. Therefore, lasers for optical communication application with low dispersion or low attenuation have been developed and commercialized using an InGaAsP active layer grown on InP substrates. However, InP-based lasers have generally inferior characteristic performance compared to GaAs-based lasers. Especially for vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs), lnP -based lasers have been problematic due to the lack of good lattice-matched distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) material combinations, which should have high refractive index contrast, low electrical resistance, and low thermal resistance. Compared to lnP-based VCSELs, GaAs-based VCSELs with AlAs GaAs DBR mirrors have better characteristics. However, the system performance characteristics, such as the transmission capacity, are limited by the bandwidth of compatible multimode fibers, since they have a short-wavelength spectral range (?~O.85 m). To obtain high-performance long-wavelength lasers, the ideal practical combination should be that of an ~active layer emitting in the long-wavelength range compatible with the well-established GaAs-based laser technologies. The GaAs system offers several important advantages over the alternate InP-based system, including larger area wafer processing, better thermal properties higher doping concentrations, an oxidation-compatible material system, and high-performance DBR materials. Several possible approaches have been proposed and investigated. One of the most promising is explored here. The study of InAlGaAsSb epitaxial growth using MOCVD is a research topic that is of increasing interest throughout the world. The realization of high-quality epitaxial layers and heterojunctions are important elements in the development of advanced semiconductor devices, in particular, VCSELS. The research proposed here will result in the practical realization of X=1.33pm VCSELs as well as for the study of the fundamental properties of Sb-based heterojunctions and in the study of Ill-Sb quantum dots. The work of the primary topic of the study of Sb growth and fundamental properties couples directly to that of a second research topic on devices, specifically, VCSELs-an area that we are already exploring with collaborators at Agilent Technologies. This research will provide new fundamental insight into the physics of two-dimensionally confined systems in Ill-Sb materials. These topics have a strong potential for broad impact in optoelectronics and also in electronics, e.g.. high-speed electronics could be developed doc13201 none The objective of this research is to develop a simulation tool, validated by experiments, capable of predicting the evolution of key microstructural characteristics in Al-Mg-Si alloys during hot bulk forming. New models and simulation tools will be developed and used to model the phenomena the govern the evolution of the microstructure during hot forming. Carefully designed and controlled experiments will be used for model calibration and validation. Al-Mg-Si alloys are among the most common materials used in aerospace, construction and automotive industries. The ability to predict final microstructure, and therefore mechanical properties, in a final aluminum part that results from a controlled deformation process is extremely important for the US aluminum industry and its customers. This work will guide process designers to design processes that are lower in cost and produce aluminum products with improved material characteristics. If successful, this project will benefit aluminum producers and their customers, may have a positive environmental impact, and will contribute to the advanced training of engineers. The research will lead to a better understanding of the way Al-Mg-Si alloys behave during forming and could lead to the design of new forming processes resulting in improved material properties at lower cost. This would make it more economical to use aluminum components in automobiles, for example, which would result in lighter weight vehicles, and thus improved fuel efficiency. Graduate, undergraduate, and high school students will participate in the research, and the results will be widely disseminated doc13244 none Garg Description: This award supports a US-India cooperative research project entitled Complete Spectroscopy at High Angular Momentum in Nuclei in the Vicinity of the Neutron Magic Number N=50. The collaborators are Professor Umesh Garg, University of Notre Dame and Professor Sandeep Ghugre, Inter-University Consortium for DAE Facilities, Calcutta Centre. The PIs will investigate nuclei in the vicinity of the N=50 closed shell. In addition to obtaining data on high-angular momentum states in the N~50 nuclei, they propose to do a complete spectroscopy of a number of nuclei with a view to understanding the evolution of nuclear structure effects. Novel effects include anti-magnetic rotation and wobbling motion in nuclei. Scope: Experiments will be performed at the Gammasphere facility in the US and at the MEHIA facility at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India. This project will actively involve graduate students and Postdocs at both institutions. In addition to providing the opportunity to work at state-of-the-art facilities, the proposed experiments will form Ph.D. dissertation projects for students in both countries. This project is jointly supported by the Division of International Programs and the Government of India s Department of Science and Technology doc13245 none This project proposes a test of the application of well-established principles of the Toyota Production System (TPS), or lean manufacturing, to health care delivery. Transferability has been limited by the system s roots in manufacturing, its reliance on manufacturing-based tools and metrics, and the difficulty of defining comparable approaches and metrics for service settings. Drawing on recent work suggesting actionable principles for the application of the TPS, the project proposes to address the following questions: (1) Can the principles of the TPS improve health care delivery? (2) If so, what implementation strategies are more likely to lead to success? Based on answers to these questions, the project will develop a user-friendly set of tools and training materials to help health care institutions nationwide improve through application of the principles of lean manufacturing. The proposed work will be carried out as a collaborative project between Community Medical Center of Missoula, MT, and Montana State University. Using participant-observation, journaling, products of redesign efforts, and interviews, the researchers propose to explore cultural and psychological barriers to TPS in healthcare, and assess the organizational strategies and the effectiveness of tools and exercises used, as well as the progress of shifts in individuals and groups required for TPS implementation. This project holds great promise for significant and lasting theoretical and practical outcomes, both through expanding knowledge of production methods in an important service industry and deepening understanding of efficient design and management emphasizing quality improvement. Potential practical benefits in improving the quality and efficiency of health care delivery are very large doc13246 none The objective of this Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) research is to develop a general Computer-Aided Design (CAD)-based method for constraint-satisfying robot motion planning in manufacturing. In particular, the research will focus on CAD-based inspection planning, namely, the automatic planning of the inspection sensor, or camera carried by a robotic device, based on given CAD model of the inspected parts. First, a CAD-based sensor planning approach will be developed that utilizes the part geometric information from the CAD model and the sensor model to generate constraint-satisfying sensor configurations. Second, to improve the efficiency and the kinematics performance of the inspection system, two optimization problems are formulated: one is to find the minimum set of viewpoints, while the other is the optimal kinematics to observe the viewpoints. By using a discretization scheme, the former is rendered as a set-partitioning problem, and the later as a weighted set-covering problem. New algorithms will be developed to solve these problems. Finally, the robot motion planning problem in the part inspection will be investigated. This is formulated as a Clustered Traveling Salesman Problem (CTSP) and a new hierarchical algorithm will be developed to obtain suboptimal solutions. In addition, the theoretical results will be implemented and experimentally tested. The potential contributions of this effort include a new methodology for optimal sensor planning for inspecting large areas of part surfaces. It can be used to easily extract the global geometric information on the part surfaces. The methodologies developed in this research could also benefit many other CAD-based planning problems such as spray painting and CNC part programming. This research will contribute to the development of technologies and human resources in the area of manufacturing automation doc13247 none This award supports a collaborative research program from Dr. Anita K. Hopper, Penn. State Univ. Coll. Medicine and Dr. Nancy C. Martin, Univ. Louisville that will examine how single genes provide proteins to more than one compartment within cells. The discovery that this occurs emerged from observations that mutations affecting cytosolic tRNA modification also affect mitochondrial tRNA. The enzymes making these modifications were called sorting isozymes because they came from a single gene and carried out the same function in multiple cellular compartments. Previous results from these investigators showed that by alternative use of in-frame translation initiation codons the yeast genes TRM1, MOD5 and CCA1 each encode multiple isozymes. For each, the isozyme initiating at the first initiator codon is mitochondrial. However, for Trm1p the amino-terminal extension is not essential for mitochondrial import and for Mod5p the long form is also found in the cytosol. The shorter forms of the proteins can be located in nuclei and or the cytosol. Earlier results from this collaborative project showed: (1) organelles can share information with the rest of the cell; (2) isozymes can be located in more than one compartment; (3) sorting information resides in additional sequences missing from the eubacterial and archaeal counterparts; (4) compartments may have activity provided by more than one isozyme; (5) mitochondrial targeting information located at amino termini prohibits nuclear import. Despite the advances, important questions remain because the mechanisms that underlie #4 and #5 are still not understood. Aim I is designed to understand how Trm1p can possess both mitochondrial and nuclear targeting information and yet not locate to the nucleus. Possible mechanisms by which commitment to mitochondrial import occurs will be tested using a novel system developed by the investigators that assesses where in a cell a protein destined to mitochondria folds. Experiments will also be performed to learn whether mRNA sorting, cytosolic retention, and or nuclear export function to prohibit nuclear accumulation of Trm1p-I. Sorting isozymes are not only distributed to different organelles; they have distinct suborganellar locations. For example, the investigators showed that two sorting isozymes have distinct subnuclear locations; Trm1p, is located at the inner nuclear membrane (INM) and Mod5p is located in the nucleoplasm and the nucleolus. Goals of Aim II are to confirm and characterize motif(s) specifying INM location and to identify gene products that tether Trm1p to the INM. Yeast mutants that fail to appropriately locate Trm1p to the INM will be characterized. The studies in Aim II will not only address how sorting isozymes locate to the correct suborganellar locations, but, in addition, will provide information concerning nuclear architecture and nuclear biogenesis - an important area of cell biology not understood for any eukaryote doc13248 none Keller Description: This project is to support a cooperative research project by Dr. Gerta Keller, Department of Geosciences, Princeton, Princeton, New Jersey and Dr. El Hassane Chellai, Department of Geology, University of Cadi Ayyad, Marrakech, Morocco. They plan to conduct a high-resolution study of the organic carbon rich pelagic carbonates of the Cenomanaian-Turonian transition exposed along NW Atlantic margin of Morocco. The primary target will be the Cenomanaian-Turonian transition interval represented by planktic foraminiferal zones R. cushmani, W. archaeocretacea and H. helvetica, an interval that is represented by up to 160m of sediments along the Atlantic margin. This study will provide the most detailed record of these global anoxic event and greenhouse conditions and serve as analogue for a potential future greenhouse event. Scope: The PI plans to carry out a multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary study that documents the Cenomanian-Turonian anoxic event and greenhouse conditions in terms of climate, sea level and productivity fluctuations and their effect on marine plankton (e.g. planktic foraminifera and calcareous nannoplankton). This study will bring together experts in sedimentology and stratigraphy, mineralogy stable isotopes, geochemistry, calcareous nannofossils and planktic foraminifera. The project will involve graduate and undergraduate students in the field work and laboratory analyses thus exposing them to working in a foreign country. An Egyptian scientist, Dr. A. A. Tantawy from South Valley University, Aswan, Egypt will also participate in the research based on his expertise in high-resolution age and biostratigraphy. This project meets INT criteria for supporting meritorious collaborative research of mutual benefit to the US and the foreign country. This project is funded by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Earth Sciences doc13249 none Feldhaus Description: This award supports the US-India Workshop: Region and Regional Consciousness in India, Pune, India, December . The conveners are PI Anne Feldhaus, Arizona State University and coPI Rajendra Vora, University of Pune, India. This symposium will bring together scholars from the humanities and social sciences that are researching various aspects of conceptualization and loyalty to regions in India. They will examine regions from differing disciplinary perspectives and a variety of scales with the goal of advancing understanding of ways in which people express, create, and foster a sense of their area as a distinct and coherent unit to which they belong. Scope: The symposium will foster new institutional arrangements between Arizona State University and the University of Pune that will promote collaborative research in the near future including the convening of a follow-up symposium at Arizona State University, December . This symposium will also provide an occasion for the founding of the Centre for the Study of Regions in Pune. Participants include senior and junior scholars, and recent Ph.Ds. This award is supported by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences doc13250 none This ambitious proposal by a researcher experienced at Eastern Bloc investigation seeks to examine organizational innovation and interactive technology use among Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in Postsocialist Eastern Europe, with the collaborative assistance of local on-site associates and foreign counterpart investigators and hosts. Drawing upon recent developments in organization theory, especially work at the Santa Fe institute on self-organizing, non-hierarchical systems as organizational forms that have the requisite flexibility for continuing adaptability in rapidly changing environments, the researchers propose to study the coevolution of organizational forms and interactive technologies by focusing on NGOs in four East Central European Societies, gathering data from 100 NGOs in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. Data collection will include field surveys augmented by in-depth, ethnographic studies of 20 of these organizations to provide more nuanced accounts of the lines of causation among critical variables in the study. NGOs are particularly appropriate for study because they are increasingly being pushed to move beyond their existing roles to facilitate economic and social dynamism, assisting their societies in developing sources of innovation and the capacity to generate it. Such capacity depends on both a rich associational life (badly atrophied under communism) and a requisite variety of organizational forms (which did not exist under communism). Information technology can play an important role in facilitating both aspects of generative capability. By examining variation across types of organizations among countries in the region, the researchers will chart how innovation in the adoption and use of interactive technologies is shaped by organizational form and, in turn, how new technologies facilitate organizational innovation. This study s robust and contemporary theoretical grounding and its multidisciplinary, multicultural setting promise especially interesting insights, especially as so much of prior organizational theory has been colored by a North American bias and the assumption of universality in findings doc13251 none Biotechnology and genetic engineering have become major social issues in the United States and around the world. In , Durant, Bauer, and Gaskell published Biotechnology in the Public Sphere, which contained profiles of twelve European nations in terms of public perceptions, policy decisions, and media discourse. At that time, a collaboration with researchers in the U.S. was developed, leading to another book to be released in the Fall , which contains surveys conducted in 17 European nations, Canada, and the U.S. Another round of surveys to measure public perceptions is scheduled to take place in late or early . These surveys will help to understand from a longitudinal perspective how the public is changing (ornot changing) their views towards such things as genetically modified crops,medical biotechnology, and food containing genetically engineered products. This project will support a national telephone survey within the U.S. and will be coordinated with the comparable survey in Europe. This survey will also support analysis and publications aimed at not only gaining an insight into the issue of biotechnology, but also social change and the social construction of social problems doc13252 none This project will focus on methods to solve certain problems in the area of revenue management. In particular, it will center on the development of techniques to determine how to dynamically manage the availability of multiple types of products comprised from a common pool of resources for sale to multiple classes of customers. The proposed methods involve the integration of techniques from two different fields: Markov decision processes and Monte Carlo-based stochastic optimization. The key idea is to exploit the strengths of both tools by using a Monte Carlo-based technique to obtain an initial static solution, and then using the exact, but computationally-intensive, Markov-decision-process approach to dynamically refine the solution. Recently, a great deal of attention has been devoted to the control of inventories of perishable items. In a number of settings, products must be sold before the resources, from which the products are made, perish. Typical examples are the airline, hotel, and rental car industries; however, similar ideas have application to other contexts as well. The area of study that addresses these issues is called revenue management. This project aims to analyze an important aspect of revenue management - namely, the development of mathematical approaches to determine the quantities of various items to sell to different classes of customers at each given point in time. This is significant to both industry and consumers, since such methods help ensure an appropriate match of supply and demand. Even with powerful computers, such problems can be intractable, because of the extremely large number of variables involved. To overcome this obstacle, this project will develop methods that blend together techniques from separate mathematical fields to efficiently solve various revenue management problems. Since quantitative methods form the cornerstone of revenue management efforts, this will support the continued growth of the field from both practical and theoretical standpoints. The major benefits of this project are as follows: (1) This research will contribute to the field of revenue management, both for academics as well as for practitioners. (2) The successful implementation of this technique will help establish such an approach as a viable alternative tool for similar problems. (3) The students involved will be introduced to new application areas and will learn new mathematical techniques that will broaden their knowledge, and improve their perception of operations research as a key ingredient to improve the performance of real systems doc13253 none This project focuses on high quality teaching of foundational skills in the areas of reading and mathematics in grades 4 and 5. This is an observational study and through a longitudinal study will develop and test multilevel models of how schools and teachers affect student achievement in reading and mathematics. A primary goal of the study is to understand how schools and teachers scale up and sustain effective pedagogy over time for multiple student populations. 20 schools in Montgomery County, Maryland will be studied - 10 from high poverty areas and 10 from moderate poverty areas. Data will be collected using standardized data collection instruments through 8 classroom observations year over a period of three years in a total of 120 classrooms. The data will track changes in school policy practices, teacher pedagogy, and student learning. The final year of the project will be devoted to data analysis and dissemination doc13254 none This proposal seeks to examine the adaptation of firms in the U.S. machine tool industry to changes in their environment, to understand the factors affecting firms capability to transition to computer-numerically controlled designs and modular production techniques, as well as more extended relationships with customers required by this equipment. Many U.S. manufacturers lacked the skills to respond, and as a result employment in the industry and its importance to the domestic economy was substantially reduced. Nevertheless, other firms not only survived but thrived in the changed environment. This study will trace the responses of U.S. machine tool incumbents to the technological and market challenges facing the industry between and to discern the differences between failing and surviving firms. Prior studies have focused on factors that lead to behavioral inertia, offering little insight for how firms act when not demonstrating inertia, or how performance is affected by these behaviors. The researchers suggest that incumbents may exhibit three types of responses to change: (1) They may continue with their existing strategy; (2) they may imitate new entrants products; or (3) they may innovate away from both their existing products and those offered by rivals. The strategy a firm enacts, and its effect on the firm s survival and performance is expected to depend upon the adaptability of the firm s competencies at the time of competitive challenge. Thus this study goes beyond extant literature by empirically investigating the proposed tradeoff between survival and performance, by focusing on survivors of radical technological change, and by exploring the relative influence of accumulated competencies and firm choice in affecting these outcomes doc13255 none Bazzaz This dissertation enhancement grant supports a US graduate student, Ms. Renee Richer, working under the guidance of Professor Fakhri Bazzaz, with the Department of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, to conduct a study in Zimbabwe on the mechanisms that control the timing of leaf emergence. The timing of leaf flush and fall (leaf phenology) can have significant impacts on rural economies, groundwater supplies, the global carbon budget, and plant and animal diversity. But in tropical savannas the cues that regulate leaf phenology are not that well understood. Dry tropical woodlands are a source of food for humans and domestic livestock and are also home to some of the world s most endangered wildlife, which may be significantly impacted by changes in seasonal forage. Ms. Richer is testing a novel hypothesis that fluctuating levels of stored carbohydrates regulate patterns of leaf flush in the dry woodlands of Zimbabwe. She will also test whether changes in the carbohydrates, as a result of elevated atmospheric carbon, induce phenological change. Dr. Robson Mhuriro, in the Indigenous Resources Department with the Forestry Commission of Zimbabwe, will provide guidance on this project to Ms. Richer. The results of this study will increase the current knowledge about the basic dynamics of dry woodlands and the potential effects of global change. This project will also support an international research experience very early in the career of an outstanding graduate student doc13256 none Sterol C-methyl transfer reactions catalyzed by the (S)-adenosyl-L-methionine: .24 -sterol methyl transferase (SMT) control the production and processing of sitosterol biosynthesis in plants. SMTs differ in physical properties, reaction complexity and the complement of C1 C2-activities. This project tests the proposal that a family of three-dimensionally similar SMT isoforms exists in plants and catalyzes the successive C-methylations of a sterol acceptor molecule from a common active site according to a similar mechanistic plan (the steric-electric plug model). Minor differences in the active site topography are considered to determine the complement of C-methylation activities and product outcome. In this project, cloned SMTs from Arabidopsis thaliana and Glycine max will be produced at high levels. The specific goals of this project are: (1) Characterization of the kinetic mechanism and product identities involved with the first and second C1-transfer reactions. For this purpose, substrate analogs and ATP will be used to probe catalytic action of the recombinant SMTs and GC-MS and NMR will be employed in product structure determination. (2) Identification of the sterol- and AdoMet-binding sites and catalytic amino acids in the active center by chemical and photoaffinity labeling techniques. Information from the active site location, plus that gained by primary sequence comparisons with related SMTs, will be used to guide site-directed mutagenesis of select amino acid residues in the active center to generate unusual product diversity that can benefit the plant defense system. Knowledge gained from this research is expected to be broadly applicable to the understanding of molecular biochemistry and biosynthetic investigations in general doc13257 none A multidisciplinary project is to develop novel polymer and polymer-ceramic based matrices for bone tissue engineering. Using principles from chemical, mechanical, and materials engineering as well as cell and molecular biology, the goal is to create and study structural replacements that provide an environment appropriate for new bone formation. The development of a matrix of this sort combined with novel tissue culture technology provides opportunities for studying polymer-cell interactions, polymer matrix effects on cellular response, and effects of transport on cellular response in matrix based systems. Moreover these matrices may find clinical applications in grafting of non-unions, surgical arthrodeses, cranio-facial defects, and prosthetic implants and or implant coatings. The researchers recently described the development of novel degradable microsphere-based matrices for bone tissue engineering. In preliminary studies these three-dimensional matrices have been shown to support the growth and maturation of osteoblast cells in vitro, and support the formation of bone in vivo. In the panned project these systems would be developed further and optimized these systems by performing innovative experiments aimed at understanding and enhancing bone formation using three dimensional matrices. The matrix would be exposed to fluid and nutrient flux via placement in a dynamic cell culturing environment. The researchers have hypothesized that in conditions where transport is enhanced, the quality of bone formation will ultimately be enhanced in such matrix systems. Additionally, a more fundamental understanding of the manner in which cells interact with these degradable polymeric matrices is to be sought. Therefore studies are proposed to evaluate cell surface receptor expression of osteoblasts seeded onto these biomimetic devices. Finally, in vivo studies will be performed, examining the ability of these tissue engineered bioreactor cultured matrices to heal non-union bone defects. Careful attention will be given to the mechanical strength of the healing defect and the short- and long-term histology and histomorphometry at the defect site. The studies to be performed in a four year time-frame should yield important new fundamental information broadly applicable in tissue engineering.The planned investigation builds on the foundation of 3-D polymer scaffolds from polymer microspheres developed by the PI in previously funded NSF studies.The major direct benefit from a successful project would be the nearly 1 million patients each year who have surgeries that require some form of bone grafting. Presently there is no consensus on the optimized scaffold design parameters, e.g. mechanical strength, pore volume, pore size, and degradation rate. All of these issues are to be addressed in the project doc13258 none In IC fabrication chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) is used to planarize surfaces of conductors like aluminum, tungsten, tantalum and copper and dielectrics like silicon dioxide, silicon nitride, and low-k polymers. The CMP process is the only technique available now to provide surfaces across the die and wafer with planarity sufficient to meet the stringent depth of focus requirements of shorter wavelength lithographic techniques. The CMP of low-k polymeric materials and architectures overlaid on these polymers is challenging. This is because the low-k polymeric materials are mechanically softer and even porous, can flow under heat, and have hydrophobic surfaces. There exists a critical need for developing low pressure, selective, and effective CMP process of the new, low-k polymers and architectures overlaid on these polymers. The primary objective of this program is to develop a novel approach using magnetically responsive slurries (MRS) to conduct CMP of low-k polymers and associated structures. The project is a joint collaborative, interdisciplinary, synergistic effort between investigators from Clarkson University and University of Pittsburgh, with collaboration with industry. A fundamental and systematic investigation of the feasibility such a magnetically assisted CMP process will be conducted. The outcome of this program has the potential for a significantly high economic payoff. This project will have significant combined impact on the: basic science that forms the underpinning of the CMP technology, research infrastructure, and development of human resources doc13247 none This award supports a collaborative research program from Dr. Anita K. Hopper, Penn. State Univ. Coll. Medicine and Dr. Nancy C. Martin, Univ. Louisville that will examine how single genes provide proteins to more than one compartment within cells. The discovery that this occurs emerged from observations that mutations affecting cytosolic tRNA modification also affect mitochondrial tRNA. The enzymes making these modifications were called sorting isozymes because they came from a single gene and carried out the same function in multiple cellular compartments. Previous results from these investigators showed that by alternative use of in-frame translation initiation codons the yeast genes TRM1, MOD5 and CCA1 each encode multiple isozymes. For each, the isozyme initiating at the first initiator codon is mitochondrial. However, for Trm1p the amino-terminal extension is not essential for mitochondrial import and for Mod5p the long form is also found in the cytosol. The shorter forms of the proteins can be located in nuclei and or the cytosol. Earlier results from this collaborative project showed: (1) organelles can share information with the rest of the cell; (2) isozymes can be located in more than one compartment; (3) sorting information resides in additional sequences missing from the eubacterial and archaeal counterparts; (4) compartments may have activity provided by more than one isozyme; (5) mitochondrial targeting information located at amino termini prohibits nuclear import. Despite the advances, important questions remain because the mechanisms that underlie #4 and #5 are still not understood. Aim I is designed to understand how Trm1p can possess both mitochondrial and nuclear targeting information and yet not locate to the nucleus. Possible mechanisms by which commitment to mitochondrial import occurs will be tested using a novel system developed by the investigators that assesses where in a cell a protein destined to mitochondria folds. Experiments will also be performed to learn whether mRNA sorting, cytosolic retention, and or nuclear export function to prohibit nuclear accumulation of Trm1p-I. Sorting isozymes are not only distributed to different organelles; they have distinct suborganellar locations. For example, the investigators showed that two sorting isozymes have distinct subnuclear locations; Trm1p, is located at the inner nuclear membrane (INM) and Mod5p is located in the nucleoplasm and the nucleolus. Goals of Aim II are to confirm and characterize motif(s) specifying INM location and to identify gene products that tether Trm1p to the INM. Yeast mutants that fail to appropriately locate Trm1p to the INM will be characterized. The studies in Aim II will not only address how sorting isozymes locate to the correct suborganellar locations, but, in addition, will provide information concerning nuclear architecture and nuclear biogenesis - an important area of cell biology not understood for any eukaryote doc13260 none Elshall Description: This project supports a US-Egypt Workshop on Advanced Materials Characterization and Metal Manufacturing Techniques to be held in Cairo, Egypt, December . The organizers are Dr. Hassan El-Shall, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, the University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida and Dr. Adel A. Nofal, President, Central Metallurgical Research and Development Institute (CMRDI), Helwan, Cairo, Egypt. The purpose of the workshop is to exchange information between the US and Egyptian sides on advances in materials characterization and manufacturing, and to discuss R&D needs that may be met through cooperative research projects. Topics to be included are: fine particles preparation and surface coating, powder metallurgy, vacuum melting and coating, high pressure die casting, shell molding of chemically bonded sand, heat treatment of super-alloys, laser use in surface treatment, cutting and welding, and material characterization. Possible avenues for collaboration will be discussed. Scope: This project enables US and Egyptian scientists to participate in a workshop to discuss an area of importance to both countries and to identify potential collaborative research where the two sides can complement each others capabilities. Dr. El-Shall is Associate Director for Research in the NSF-funded Engineering Research Center for Particle Science and Technology at the University of Florida. He has participated in past seminars and in cooperative research projects with scientists at the CMRDI. Dr. Nofal is the head of the main research center in materials science and engineering in Egypt. His institute is well equipped to organize the workshop and to secure participation from various academic and industrial research organizations in that country. Among the US participants are several junior scientists. The project meets INT objectives in supporting mutually beneficial joint workshops. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out joint scientific activities doc13261 none This project proposes a technological-economic-organizational analysis of the barriers preventing the substitution of cellulosic ethanol from replacing gasoline as a fuel for automobiles and light trucks in the United States. They propose to investigate the amount of ethanol that could be produced in the US and its cost of production, the circumstances under which it might displace gasoline as a motor fuel, and the technological, economic, and organizational barriers to ethanol use. Even if cellulosic ethanol were more attractive than gasoline as a motor fuel, hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure are presently dedicated to gasoline use. Enormous inertia together with specific technological, economic and organizational barriers would be expected to hamper the transition to ethanol. Building on prior work on alternative automobile fuels and working relationships with General Motors, Ford, Texaco, ExxonMobil and BP Amoco, the researchers will examine the conditions under which ethanol might become a more attractive fuel, and the organizational and other barriers to its adoption doc13262 none In this project a program of individualized, computer-aided reading instruction will be implemented and assessed. The computer-aided reading instruction is based on two classes of tools - one based on speech and animation technology and the other on language comprehension technology. An example of the former tool is Vocabulary Tutor which focuses on decoding practices. It includes a 3D animated talking head synchronized with recorder or synthesized speech, paired with illustrations and printed words that can be entered by the teacher or the child. Children look at the images, listen to the words, see their spelling, pronounce them, and receive feedback. An example of the second kind is Street. Street is based on a statistical theory of meaning, latent semantic analysis. Children write summaries, Street automatically compares their summaries with the text they are summarizing and provides feedback about the content and the adequacy of their summaries. These tools are classroom tested. This project extends the foundation of technology and application development to a comprehensive reading program called Colorado Literacy Tutor that will be tested throughout the state of Colorado after testing in the Boulder School district doc13263 none Shimizu This award provides funding support for the operation of the Northeast National Ion Microprobe Facility (NENIMF) at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. This multi-user facility is open to qualified researchers who need the special capabilities of a large-radius CAMECA ion microprobe instrument, e.g., precise trace element and isotopic analyses combined with spatial resolution of sampling on the order of approximately 10 microns. Research applications by the Woods Hole hosts and the U.S. earth science research community is expected to include studies of mantle geochemistry, oceanic volcanism, island arc volcanism, layered mafic intrusions, and geochronology of a wide variety of materials doc13236 none This collaborative research project addresses a new large-scale optimization model, called Network Design with Service Guarantees (NDSG), that simultaneously incorporates revenue, cost, and service (end-to-end delay) considerations. Though of immense practical significance, the NDSG model is very difficult to solve both from theoretical and computational perspectives. The goal is to develop and test effective solution procedures using state-of-the-art optimization techniques that can exploit the NDSG problem s special mathematical structure. Accordingly, the project entails both theoretical and empirical investigations, including developing and characterizing alternative problem formulations, analyzing their structural properties, designing specialized solution algorithms, and testing these methods using realistic data. To solve the problem, a new family of optimization algorithms that dynamically reformulates the problem, and correspondingly adapts the solution approach by combining decomposition and model strengthening techniques will be investigated. It is expected that the core research contributions-a new modeling paradigm, a novel solution approach, and algorithmic implementation-will also extend to other large-scale optimization models. Communication and physical distribution capabilities have become critical in the new networked economy. Organizations have come to rely on these capabilities to establish tightly integrated partnerships that can effectively serve diverse market needs for products and services. Delays or failures in the movement of information or goods can have debilitating consequences not only for supply chains but also for services such as emergency operations, air traffic control, and financial systems. Decisions regarding the configuration of communication and distribution networks needed to support coordination and collaboration have strategic importance both because they entail massive investments of billions of dollars and because a network s topological design largely determines the level of service it can provide. Consequently, optimization tools are widely used in practice to design product and service fulfillment networks, and network design continues to be a very active research area. Designing optimal network configurations entails complex tradeoffs between conflicting objectives such as maximizing profitability, ensuring adequate resource utilization, improving service levels, and so on. Classical optimization models, which focus primarily on cost minimization, tend to design sparse networks that exploit economies of scale but are not robust in terms of service and reliability. The project will provide opportunities for graduate students to conduct thesis research, and enrich graduate courses in optimization and operations modeling doc13265 none Macko This award supports a pilot program for a one-year international distance learning project in the environmental sciences to be conducted by the University of Virginia (UVA), the University of Eduardo Mondlane (UEM) in Mozambique, and the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS) in South Africa. Each participating university will transmit some of the seminars via satellite broadcast (six from UVA and two each from UEM and WITS). Southern Africa has undergone and continues to experience large-scale land use land cover changes largely brought about by human intervention with the environment. These changes can have environmental repercussions at the regional, continental, and global scales. Environmental education is essential for understanding these impacts on the global environment, and on the environment of the United States. This pilot project will explore the feasibility of exposing US and Southern African undergraduate and graduate students to leading edge technology and scientific content through a satellite-based seminar series in the environmental sciences. The seminar broadcasts will enable US students to have direct exposure to and interaction with regional expert lecturers and African students. The US and African students will also interact with each other through the internet, using the classroom internet tools provided by UVA. This project is expected to foster the transfer of knowledge and information on regional system level environmental problems by harnessing the existing broad spectrum of academic excellence within the partner universities. It is also expected to help create an internationally oriented generation of young environmental scientists in both the United States and Southern Africa. It is anticipated that up to 100 undergraduate and 20 graduate students from UVA will participate in these seminars, as well as approximately 40 students from Southern Africa. The project also includes visits by the US investigators to Southern Africa and visits by representatives from UEM and WITS to UVA for collaborative input to and evaluation of the program doc13266 none The objective of this project is to develop a continuous production manufacturing process for folding flat sheets into complex three dimensions patterns that uses a novel material flow based upon mathematical symmetry. The investigation will involve machine design and construction, and a careful analysis of the mathematical theory of the material folding mechanisms. Previous exploratory research has demonstrated that metal, polymer and paper sheets can folded into doubly periodic surfaces by folding techniques alone, and established the matematical theory to explain the folding process for one class of DPFs and to extend these methods into practical algorithms describing the explicit facet geometry and vertex locations. The focus of this project is to describe mathematically how the material transforms into the intricate three dimensions patterns inside the main roller system of the machine, complete with the knowledge of the migration and instating of fold creases, to enable us to streamline the manufacturing process for rapid and high quality production of these versatile folded structures. The interdisciplinary effort linking mathematics and engineering will benefit education in both areas with numerous opportunities for advancement of manufacturing integration and applied mathematics exploration doc13267 none Rosenberger This project is an investigation of laser action in the whispering-gallery modes (WGMs) of individual fused-silica spherical microresonators (100- um in diameter). The high quality factor (Q) of a microsphere WGM enables lasing with a very low threshold. Using a layer-by-layer assembly process, a microsphere can be coated with a thin polyelectrolyte film containing nanoparticle inclusions of HgTe. The composite film then serves as the gain medium, interacting with the evanescent component of a WGM into which pump laser light is coupled by optical tunneling via a tapered fiber. Pumping with a wavelength around 800 nm can produce lasing in the - nm range, with the laser emission coupled out of the microresonator by the same tapered fiber. The objectives of this project include the following: verify that lasing occurs; optimize the laser output; produce stable, tunable single-mode operation; and concurrently develop the theoretical counterpart, for purposes of guiding the experiment and interpreting its results. To meet these objectives, the PIs previously developed experimental techniques for tuning and frequency-locking the microsphere become invaluable. In this project, light from a probe laser around nm is coupled into the microsphere to measure optical gain. Then an output threshold is sought, and the coincident linewidth narrowing of the output provides further evidence of lasing. Analysis of the laser output spectrum is performed using a scanning monochromator, a scanning confocal optical spectrum analyzer, and a second tuned microsphere acting as a filter. By compression-tuning the lasing microsphere and using a second microsphere as a filter, tunable single-mode emission can be produced. The theoretical analysis includes an evaluation of the laser threshold and relative gain that is produced in different WGMs under various pumping conditions. Possible mode competition and instability are also explored for normal laser operation and also for the microlaser with injected signal. Two exciting new areas of research are combined here: resonant optical enhancement in microsphere WGMs and easily-fabricated nanocomposite films. The potential impact is great, because a single microlaser can act as a source for 100-channel (or more) wave-division multiplexing. In addition, with the future use of conducting and or electroluminescent polymers in the film, electrical pumping may replace optical pumping. Such a microlaser can be a tremendous asset to the telecommunications industry. This work continues and expands preliminary exploratory studies, the early results from which are promising. The requested funding is to enable a longer-term (3-year) concerted effort in this area, while providing partial support for the educational and professional development of three Ph.D. candidates, and a hands-on introduction to multidisciplinary experimental and theoretical science for two undergraduates each year doc13268 none The objective of this research is to develop visualization-based decision support tools that can be used effectively in collaborative design environments to make multiobjective decisions under uncertainty and to enable rapid trade-off decisions in the context of rapid virtual prototyping. Methods to model and visually represent the uncertainty involved with multidimensional and multiobjective design problems will be developed. Because many collaborative design problems are driven by limited resources, tools for effective rapid virtual prototyping will be developed. Quantitative and qualitative models of coupling relationships on component and system level objectives will be developed in order to better asses tradeoffs between resources such as time, money, and quality. Data mining techniques will be used to efficiently condense and filter relevant decision making information. Lastly, these techniques and tools will be implemented in web-based decision steering tools to allow collaborating designers to visualize design spaces, products, and tradeoff information simultaneously. If successful, the benefits of this research will include a foundation for the use of scientific visualization to make tradeoff decisions in collaborative product design environments. Further, the benefits will also include establishing the efficacy of using visualization-based tools to support various forms of decision making (multiattribute, with limited resources, collaborative, or under uncertainty). This foundation and subsequent tools have the potential to impact not only the engineering sector, but any scientific field where decision making is of paramount importance doc13269 none This grant provides funding for the comprehensive characterization of the non-linear rheology, particle orientation, and structure development of nanoclay polymer and carbon nanotube polymer composites, in both shear and elongation, and the development of simulation tools for control and optimization of processes for nanocomposites. Polymer nanocomposites exhibit significantly enhanced performance properties, including increased strength, stiffness, barrier properties, and heat resistance, without a significant loss in impact strength. Two types of nanoparticles, naturally occurring layered nanoclays and synthesized carbon nanotubes, show promise in improving the mechanical and electrical properties of thermoplastic and thermoset polymers. However, these improvements come with a cost in processing: small additions of the high surface-area-to-volume-ratio nanoclays and nanotubes have been observed to significantly increase the viscosity and elasticity of polymer melts and solutions, complicating the extrusion and injection molding of polymer nanocomposite products. In addition, the effect of processing on nanoparticle orientation and structure development, and hence performance properties of the product materials, is not well understood. With the proposed comprehensive rheological and structural characterization of polymer nano-composites, questions such as the following will be addressed: What are the shear and extensional viscosities of melts and solutions filled with extremely large aspect ratio nanoparticles? What are their dependencies on nanoparticle geometry, varying between tubes and discs of different aspect ratios? What is the particle orientation and structure development in shear and extensional flow? What models can be developed for process modeling of stress strain structure? To what degree do nanoparticles become aligned in an extensional flow? What are the correlations between elastic properties of nanotubes and nanoclays and the viscoelasticity of the polymer melts and solutions, between nanoparticle concentration and viscoelastic properties of solutions, between orientation and structure development and viscoelastic properties? What are the flow-aligning properties of the nanoparticles in extension and shear, and do the tubes and platelets have very different flow-aligning structures doc13270 none The objective of this research project is to produce the knowledge needed to evaluate the effectiveness of engineering design idea generation methods and to distinguish between their necessary and superfluous components. This research will combine the highly controlled lab experiments and atomic process models from cognitive science with design experiments from design research. Instead of conducting experiments by using an idea generation method in its entirety, each method will be decomposed into its key ideation components and its overall effectiveness predicted by testing the effectiveness of its components and their mutual interactions. Lab experiments will be directed at studying key ideation components individually, while the design experiments will examine interaction between components and their relation to outcome by mutating their constituent components. Explanations for why and how ideation components are effective will be researched from accepted models of atomic processes and structures already available in cognitive science. Effectiveness will be evaluated in terms of four measures: fluency, quality, variety, and novelty of design concepts generated. The results of the study will be consolidated into a model of design ideation by combining and modifying several elements from existing models. The proposed ideation model will be validated through final experiments in industry settings. Two important results should emerge from this research: (1) data from the empirical studies that can be interpreted in terms of both theory and applied practices, and (2) a system for pursuing additional research questions about ideational aspects of conceptual design theory. An understanding of the relationship of ideation processes to design outcome will help companies determine which method to use under given conditions and how to constitute design teams. This work will also help educators in finding better ways of teaching design synthesis doc13271 none The goal of this project is to explore mechanisms of signaling to the microtubule (MT)-based-cytoskeleton. Doublecortin (DCX) is a novel microtubule associated protein (MAP) and is the major gene mutated in X-Lissencephaly and Subcortical Band Heterotopia (X-LIS SCLH), a severe disorder in neuronal migration during development of the cerebral cortex. Doublecortin kinase 2 (DCK2) is a chimeric protein with a domain highly related to that of DCX fused to a protein kinase domain related to calmodulin-dependent protein kinases. The goal of this project is to investigate the functional effects and role of phosphorylation in the interaction of DCK2 with the MT-cytoskeleton, and to test the hypothesis that cellular events such as the establishment of neuronal polarity and neuronal process extension may be dependent upon rapid modulation of MT dynamics due to reversible signaling to and from members of the DCX DCK family of proteins doc13272 none The machining interface represents a situation where important phenomenological events occur over small spatial and short time scales. By combining various optical techniques with the use of transparent cutting tools; e.g., sapphire, diamond, it is possible to directly observe and analyze these events by magnifying their length and time scales. Having a visual record frequently gives clues to the physical processes taking place and is often advantageous in showing what is and what isn t happening. The nature of contact along the tool-chip-work interfaces, and the temperature distribution at these contact zones, will be studied in a novel series of experiments using optically transparent tools, high-resolution optical microscopy, high-speed, CCD-based, multi-wavelength infra-red (IR) pyrometry and high-speed micro-photography. Preliminary observations show that a complete characterization of the contact boundary conditions (e.g. extent of sticking, sliding zones, etc.) and the first detailed map of the complete temperature and velocity distributions at these interfaces can be achieved with the use of these techniques. The effect of parameters such as cutting speed both in the conventional and high speed machining regime, tool geometry, tool wear, and tool coatings, on the contact conditions and interface temperatures is being explored. The experiments represent a natural and interesting evolution of previous in-situ observational work on the low speed cutting of metals. The contact boundary conditions and the interface temperature distributions are key parameters for validation and refinement of models of the mechanics of machining; for control of tool temperatures, tool wear and work surface quality; and for realizing the long sought after goal of complete predictability of the machining process. From a technological standpoint, the results of the research may be expected to have a major impact in enhancing the efficiency of machining processes, enabling the design of tools and coatings for reducing wear and reducing the application of fluids in machining doc13273 none This Grant Opportunity for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) project will develop an integrative approach for concurrent process planning and production planning, with an emphasis on electronic assembly systems. Today, the development of process plans and production plans occurs more often due to the reduced life cycle of electronic products, more frequent introduction of new products, and continual changes in customer demand profiles. Furthermore, the transition from low volume demand to high volume demand for a product can occur rapidly. Thus, an effective means of generating complementary process plans and production plans is important to improve productivity and responsiveness in electronics manufacturing systems. The objectives of this research effort are as follows: (1) to develop an integrated framework and identify critical decision problems, (2) to develop analytical models and solution approaches for the resulting decision problems, and (3) to evaluate the impact of an integrated approach on the efficiency and productivity of the manufacturing system. With this integrative approach, the following questions can be investigated: (1) Under which demand profiles should various setup strategies be employed to maximize productivity? (2) How should products and resources be allocated for a given demand profile? (3) What levels of resource capacity are needed in order to achieve the manufacturing objectives? New decision models will be developed to efficiently integrate the process planning and production planning functions. Expected results include techniques to increase productivity through improved planning decisions, algorithms to support management decisions, and new case study results. The proposed research has the potential to increase responsiveness and productivity through the improved integration of manufacturing functions, to reduce capital expenditures through more effective use of expensive assembly equipment, and to reduce engineering time required to evaluate and implement changes. These research objectives are pursued in collaboration with Ericsson, Inc doc13274 none This project is designed to implement a process that will alter the institutional climate at Western Michigan University with respect to research ethics. Its objective is to communicate, rapidly and effectively, information about research-related ethical issues and decision-making across the several colleges that make up the university. The long term goal is to increase the level of ethical research behavior and decision-making within the university. The short term goals are: first, to create a group of change agents within the institution (the Research Ethics Fellows) who, along with the project team, will be able to help train others, serve as resource people for their peers, and model ethical behavior in research; second, to put in place a comprehensive and systematic approach to teaching research ethics that not only cuts across disciplines (colleges departments) but also across levels (faculty graduate student); and third, to implement a structural approach to research ethics training that becomes part of the institutional fabric itself. The project team is proposing a curriculum in the area of research ethics which includes a series of instructional modules. Following a baseline survey of faculty and graduate students, the modules will be presented in a workshop (with a keynote speaker), to a set of ten faculty graduate student teams (20 Research Ethics Fellows) representing departments across the institution. The modules will subsequently be offered to the faculty, graduate students, and staff of the university community. During this same time, the Fellows will continue to meet with one another in study groups, carry out projects, and also engage in dissemination efforts within their departments and colleges. Finally, the project will sponsor a university-wide conference, again with a keynote speaker, at which the research team and the Fellows will present the results of their various projects, and share their dissemination efforts. A follow-up survey of faculty and graduate students will also be carried out. Along with the baseline and follow-up surveys (covering knowledge, attitude, and behaviors of faculty and graduate students at WMU), evaluation will include the learning improvement and the satisfaction of all people who participate in the instructional modules. The second year will follow the same structure, with another set of ten faculty graduate student teams from across the institution. In addition, the previous Fellows will assist the project team in presenting the instructional modules during the year and continue to participate in the study groups. Evaluation efforts will also continue. Furthermore, representatives from other post-secondary institutions in the region will be invited to attend the spring conference as part of an effort to extend the impact of the project to other institutions. The institution has committed resources to continue the program after the initial award period doc13275 none This Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) project aims to improve the understanding of transient flow, inclusion transport and defect formation in the mold region during the continuous casting of steel slabs, through the development, validation, and application of fundamental computational models of transient fluid flow. Continued viability of the domestic steel industry depends upon improved efficiency and steel quality, relative to low cost imports. Lowering defects from internal inclusions is one way to achieve this, while simultaneously improving steel minimum strength, fatigue life, surface appearance, yield and energy efficiency (from reduced rejects). Continuous casting produces 96% of the 100 million tons of steel manufactured in the U.S. and is the last, and most important, processing step where inclusions can either be generated or removed. Plant observations have found that many serious quality problems, including inclusion entrapment, are directly associated with the flow pattern in the mold. Many mold process parameters, such as nozzle geometry and gas injection rate, are easy and inexpensive to change and yet have a profound influence on flow and corresponding quality. With many different operations and mold designs to optimize, the traditional trial and error approach is too costly. With this grant, computational models of transient flow in continuous casting will be applied to study the associated transport and entrapment of inclusion particles. The models will be calibrated, validated, and tested through water model experiments, steel plant trials, and metallographic measurements at the industrial partner, LTV Steel, and several other steel companies who are cosponsoring this research. The results will increase fundamental understanding of inclusion transport, and lead to improved mold flow patterns which minimize inclusion defects. Furthermore, the computational tools developed in this work can be applied to optimize flow in other processes doc13276 none Jull This grant provides continued facility support for the operation of the NSF Arizona Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) Facility at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The Arizona AMS facility, one of three AMS facilities at U.S. academic institutions, specializes in radiocarbon (14C) dating of a variety of matrices including wood, sediments, natural waters, fossilized bone, coral skeletons and chemical precipitates (i.e. speleothems). In addition, this lab maintains the capability to analyze for other cosmogenic nuclides including 10Be and 129I for use as tracers of geologically important processes. This facility serves the broader U.S. geosciences community through the provision of subsidized rates for AMS analyses for NSF-funded scientists. This lab supports research in a broad array of fields including geology, archaeology, meteoritics, geography, oceanography, atmospheric sciences, hydrology and biology doc13277 none Lay for Characterization of a Candidate Sweet Taste Receptor The objective of the proposed research is to elucidate the function of a novel protein, T1R3, which is present on the surface of taste buds in mice and humans. The discovery of the T1R3 gene at the chromosomal locus associated with saccharin sensitivity in mice suggests that the T1R3 protein may be (a receptor) involved in the detection of sugars and sweeteners. To gain insight into the potential role of T1R3 in taste, the co-localization in taste bud cells of the T1R3 protein with other proteins believed to be involved in taste will be examined. In individual taste cells, the co-localization of messenger RNAs (mRNAs) encoding T1R3 and other candidate taste tranduction proteins will also be studied. It is anticipated that this knowledge gained from this research will lead to a better understanding of how taste signal transduction occurs. In addition, this research may provide important information towards the development of improved non-caloric sweeteners and effective therapies for taste disorders doc13278 none Pourboghrat Optimal controller design for nonlinear systems has been the topic of much research in the past years. Although optimal controller design has been completely developed for dynamic linear systems, its nonlinear extension is still a topic of research. A general framework for dynamic optimization is the calculus of variations and the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation. Although these minimization algorithms over the years have found many important applications, the corresponding algorithm usually requires the solution of a two-point boundary value problem, which is not applicable for on-line implementation. Currently, there are several approximating techniques available that can be used for optimal regulator design. These can also be implemented on-line at the price of rendering the control sub-optimal. The problem of optimal tracking controller is even harder, since the approximating techniques, in general, cannot be implemented on-line. This project will attempt to develop a universal optimal controller for a large class of controllable and observable nonlinear systems. The objective of this research is a new generic approach for the design of optimal controllers that can be implemented on-line. The key component for the proposed control architecture is the use of a generic dynamic neural network (DNN). DNNs are shown to be capable of approximating any nonlinear dynamic system with an arbitrary degree of accuracy, provided that they have enough number of neurons. This generic model of the nonlinear system can be utilized for the derivation of the proposed universal controller for optimal tracking problem. The problem of weight adjustment (adaptation) in the network can be viewed as a controller design for an equivalent system. This allows one to formulate the two problems of parameter adaptation and controller design for a system as single problem of controller design doc13279 none The legal practice world is undergoing significant change: the changing demographics of American society and of law school applicants, combined with escalating student loan debt, the proliferation of alternative forms of practice in multinational and multidisciplinary organizations, and widening gaps between private sector and public sector salaries and between corporate and public interest law firms. The proposed research is a longitudinal study that will follow a national cohort of law school graduates, all of whom joined or passed the bar in calendar year , for ten years following graduation. The researchers will rely on mailed surveys to track the careers of over lawyers, and will conduct in-depth interviews with 500 lawyers. The study draws on a capital assets approach, which is a multidimensional concept integrating work that examines legal careers though the concepts of human and social capital. This approach suggests that law graduates with particular capital assets may be able to maximize their career opportunities and determine their career trajectories more easily than graduates with lesser capital accumulations. By examining individual choices and how they are rewarded, this project will provide crucial information about the forms of capital that are valued and rewarded within the legal profession, any geographic variation in this professional valuation, and how these processes of opportunity and reward may be changing over time. This emphasis on the career trajectories of lawyers will provide a research base that is critical to understanding the future of the legal profession, while also providing data to explore how, in different legal markets across the US, lawyers build their careers in different ways doc13280 none This grant provides funding for the development of micro-actuators, e.g., micro-motor, dynamic micro-gas bearing micro-continuously-variable speed-reducers. Inasmuch as magnetic fields, difficult to contain, have limited micro-scale use, two electrostatic motor drive concepts will be developed: (1) Variable Capacitance Motor - Variable capacitance motor minimizes energy of electric field in an air gap field that can change geometry. Rotor electrodes seek positions relative to stator electrodes of least potential energy stored in the electric field of an air gap between the rotor and stator. (2) Induced Charge Motor - Induced charge motor is based on a concept of induced polarization of charges of material in the motor creating a secondary electric field which aligns in a primary field. This variant of drive is the electric field analogy to an induction motor. To avoid stiction, contact between surfaces in relative motion must be avoided as in bearings. Among other concepts, micro-gas-bearings will be developed. Micro-grooves built into the shaft part of the motor will pump air or gas and build-up films that keep the shaft from touching the bearing and housing. In order to avoid stiction for start-stop, the bearing housing will be suitable coated with a thin film lubricant. For the above, and other actuators, advanced science-based modeling methods will be developed for underpinning design. If successful, the results of this research will lead to new methods in the relatively new arena of manufacturing in the micro-scale of three-dimensional mechanical components needed for various actuators. In developing the methods, emphasis will be given to reliability in the use of components in actuators. Envisioned are applications of actuators in bio-medical, aerospace, as well as other consumer products for which micro-size is paramount. Of course the use of micro-size actuators has the additional advantage of being environmentally friendly doc13281 none This project is to design, develop and test a novel temperature adaptive and nano-crystalline dry lubricant (MoS2+ZnO) plus hard phase (TiN) composite coating for cutting tools and advanced machining applications. The nano-crystalline dry lubricant (MoS2+ZnO) particulate coating will be deposited using an innovative electrostatic spray coating (ESC) process. In this project, nano-crystalline ZnO particles, coated with MoS2 via a ball milling process, will be sprayed onto appropriate substrates using ESC. Sequentially, a hard TiN phase will be infiltrated into the nano-crystalline particulate ZnO matrix using a chemical vapor infiltration (CVI) process. The combination of ZnO + MoS2 was selected for investigation because it forms oxythiomolybdates and molybdates, which have exhibited an excellent potential for high temperature applications. The project is a collaboration between the Materials and Manufacturing Research Laboratories (MRL) at the University of Arkansas and Materials Research and Development (MRD) at Valenite-Widia. As a part of the project, students and university faculty will perform part of the research at Valenite. The experience gained in this manner will be of great benefit to the project and will generate an outstanding workforce knowledgeable in the emerging area of nano-technology and advanced manufacturing. This program will truly add scientific and engineering innovations to the state-of-the-art, and thus, will allow the investigators to competitively address the emerging needs of the multi-billion dollar cutting tool industry for low cost, temperature adaptive lubrication, even on complex surfaces. The establishment of this technology and resulting products can be a major step in the realization of dry machining for environmentally conscious green manufacturing doc13282 none This project will concentrate on compact circuit simulation models for Silicon Carbide (SiC) devices. Namely, the power MPS diode, PiN diode, BJT, and npnp thyristor and MTO devices will be investigated. Specifically, the project objectives are to: Physically characterize MPS, PiN, BJT, and thyristor SiC devices Design & develop circuit simulation models for these devices Validate the SiC power device models against actual device measurements Demonstrate and validate SiC power device models in key power electronic applications Compact circuit simulation models enable designers to more effectively utilize a technology in circuits and systems. Power electronic designers rely on computer simulation for insight into the details of the operation of their circuits. In addition to nominal operating conditions, the designer analyzes the robustness of the design through a number of studies such as dynamic thermal analysis, worst case analysis, statistical variations in circuit performance due manufacturing tolerances on parts, and failure modes and effects to determine the safe operating area of the circuit. In order to perform these simulations, models are required. Such analysis cannot practically be performed using hardware prototypes. Silicon carbide is capable of operating temperatures of 500C because of its unique electrical and mechanical properties. Other advantages compared to silicon-based devices exist regarding reliability, higher immunity to thermal runaway, reduced switching losses, and higher current density. Due to SiC s high thermal conductivity, significant savings in system cooling requirements, mass, and cost are likely for many aircraft, shipboard, vehicle, and utility power conversion applications. Now that SiC power devices are becoming more reliable and reproducible, it is time for research and development of accurate, physical-based models to commence. As the number of commercially available SiC devices increase, designers will require an increasing number of component models (characterized parts) for use in circuit simulators. Since it takes on the order of two years to correctly construct and validate an accurate model, it is imperative that SiC device models be developed somewhat in parallel with the device technologies. Collaborators at two federal agencies, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and NASA Glenn, will provide access to SiC devices, facilities, and summer employment to the UA researchers throughout the duration of the project. Further collaboration will occur with Cree Research and Northrop-Grumman doc13283 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Vincent Cobb, Dr. Craig Clifford, Dr. Donna Smith and Monica Macklin at Northeastern State University in Oklahoma to develop problem-based laboratory experiences in their Biology curriculum. In addition, this grant will promote student and faculty research. To support these objectives, eleven environmental chambers will be purchased which will allow students and faculty to investigate the effects of temperature and light on plants and animals. Biology majors will get instruction in experimental design and data analysis early in their university training. This will begin at the introductory level in General Botany Laboratory. The experimental process will be further integrated into the curriculum at the upper level. Students in upper level courses such as Plant Physiology, Animal Physiology, and Entomology will participate in more advanced investigation-centered laboratories that examine the effects of temperature and light on plants and animals. Once students have gained familiarity with these instruments in classes, they will be more likely to participate in independent research with a faculty mentor. Although environmental chambers are simple instruments, they control two of the most important environmental variables for many living organisms, temperature and light. At the introductory level, General Botany students will work in small groups to develop experiments. Four of the purchased chambers will be Arabidopsis Growth Chambers. Arabidopsis is considered the gold standard for plant research. Many genetic variants are available of this small mustard-like plant making it an excellent model for student experimentation. In the upper level courses, laboratories will use environmental chambers to control environmental conditions, thus allowing the students to design and execute their own experiments. Possibilities include sorting genetic mutations in plants using cell signaling pathways for growth hormones or determining the effect of different nutritional diets on insect growth and reproduction. Independent student and faculty research will involve examining the effect of temperature on ectothermic animals, such as reptiles. Among the factors to be examined will be embryonic developmental rate, morphological abnormality frequency, locomotor ability, and physiological performance. Students in the sciences need numerous hands-on experiences to grasp the true nature of science and experimentation. With this grant, NSU will strengthen its students curriculum by making class laboratories more experimental and will also promote student and faculty research. Experience in designing and carrying out experiments involving the manipulation of temperature and light as variables will give students a better understanding of the scientific process and help them to develop the confidence to pursue careers in science doc13284 none Goodnick The conventional approach to analyzing circuits and or systems is to model the behavior in terms of lumped-parameter descriptions of the current-voltage relationships. Hence, device, circuit, and system modeling is often reduced to establishing the parameters that describe I-V characteristics of lumped circuit elements. However, present system operating frequencies characterized in terms of bandwidth and or clock-speed are increasing at a rate analogous (and even faster) than Moore s law for integration density. As the operating frequency (or the clock speed) increases in circuits, one must treat the signals as electromagnetic waves propagating on transmission lines, rather than the simple voltages and currents. At even higher frequencies in the tera-hertz and far-infrared regime, one has to account for radiation absorption and emission including the interaction with the whole environment. This higher frequency regime is not only being approached from increasingly higher speed devices and circuits, but also from the optoelectronics side as long-wavelength sources and detectors are sought for new optical communication channels, as well as a variety special use applications such as sensing. This requires the development of new CAD tools that combines both electromagnetic theory and semiconductor device concepts. This approach is known as Global Modeling referring to its ability to model complete circuits using one unified scheme. Herein is proposed funding for a three-year program of research with the goal of developing device and circuit simulation tools for accurate simulation of high frequency electronic circuits as well as long-wavelength optoelectronic systems. These semiconductor device tools will employ a full-band Cellular Automata Monte Carlo particle-based techniques developed under previous NSF funding for efficient accurate physical solution of the semi-classical Boltzmann transport equation, coupled hierarchically with lower level models such as hydrodynamic solvers, and distributed transistor behavioral models. These techniques will be combined with robust field solvers based on full-wave solutions of Maxwell s equations using finite difference time domain (FDTD) techniques. The 3D solution of the coupled FDTD Device problem is challenging from a computational standpoint, hence a large fraction of effort will address algorithmic improvements including parallelization in a distributed workstation environment. The device FDTD simulation kernel will be embedded in a larger simulation domain representing for example the passive elements and stripline coupling of the matching circuit for an amplifier. Comparison and calibration of the simulation tools will be performed in collaboration with industrial partners. High frequency scattering parameter measurements on devices obtained from industrial collaborators will be used to calibrate global simulation results using the above techniques. The PIs will focus on the modeling of high frequency amplifier technologies such as GaAs MESFET and HFET technology, as well as more advanced material systems such as SiGe HBTs and GaN field effect transistors. Consideration of thermal effects will be included as well for power amplifier applications. They will also apply the proposed simulation tool to the investigation of tera-hertz sources and detectors used for example in electro-optic sampling, where comparison will be made to ultrafast optical switching measurements doc13285 none Joan Cadden, University of California-Davis Conflict on the Borders of Science in Medieval Europe: Drawing Boundaries This project explores the processes by which a scientific community and society at large shape the understanding of what sorts of problems can properly be addressed by science and what sorts of problems cannot. The project takes the form of a historical case study, focusing on how scholars who undertook explanations of natural phenomena in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries ( natural philosophers ) addressed or declined to address the question of why some men experience homosexual desires. It considers not only the institutional forces, such as the Catholic Church and the universities, but also the reactions of individual natural philosophers to a subject that was widely regarded as pertaining to religion and ethics, as well as (or rather than) to the domain of scientific investigation. Although concerned with a specific society and a distant time, the study sheds light on the complex interaction of powerful institutions, prominent authorities, and ordinary scientists in adjudicating the borders of science. With NSF support, the Principal Investigator examines two aspects of this larger project. First, she undertakes an analysis of a group of medieval texts in Latin and French that treat a variety of sexual topics. She finds that medieval Christian authors sought to tame their controversial subject matter by applying well established scientific principles to it and, at the same time, made explicit or implicit attempts to justify it in various ways. Since much research and education in the Middle Ages centered on explicating and expanding upon authoritative texts inherited from the Greek and Arabic traditions, and since the subject of male homosexual desire appeared in a text attributed to Aristotle, the proposed research studies the reactions of individual authors who engaged in discussions of the subject -- or declined to do so. The sources are in manuscript form. The fact that, before the advent of printing, every book was made by hand provides the opportunity for the second aspect of the investigation: detecting the responses of individuals who made copies of the texts in question for themselves or others. By omitting or adding material --whether whole sections of a work or just a few words --and sometimes by making direct comments, copyists could express their views about what did and what did not count as proper scientific subjects. In addition, medieval manuscripts often contain marginalia and other interjections made by readers, and these too constitute evidence about how readily contemporaries accepted treating this volatile topic as a phenomenon of nature, subject to explanation in terms of natural causes. Much of the work to be done involves gathering and evaluating this fragmentary information, so that, taken together, it can provide insights into the broad participation of natural philosophers in negotiating, and perhaps expanding, the acceptable limits of the science of their day doc13286 none This project proposes a study of the organization and management of the three largest urban public school systems in America (New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles), a comparison of each with its counterpart parochial school system, and a study of three innovative, decentralized public school systems (Seattle, Houston, and Edmonton). The analysis will test the M-Form Hypothesis, which predicts that among large organizations, the decentralized form with accountability will outperform the centralized form. The study will undertake an evaluation of the managerial, budgetary, legal and economic features of each system through a multidisciplinary research team doc13287 none Radio-frequency (RF) produced plasmas are widely used in industry for materials processing, ranging from the hardening of airplane wings to the machining of microscopic features within CPU semiconductor chips. The proposed work addresses the difficult problem of uniform plasma processing of materials over an arbitrarily large surface area through the use of a distributed source: an array of smaller source elements, each covering a small portion of the surface. Proof of principle experiments have been successful; optimization studies will now be performed to determine the scaling design rules for plasma processing tools of ever increasing size. Feasibility studies of uniformity control of large-area plasma through control of the individual sources will be periDrmed by using feedback control of the RF power to each antenna. Spacing between adjacent elements within the array will be varied to determine its optimum value. Permanent magnets will be used to create the individual magnetic fields that can enhance the plasma density, and thus the plasma processing rate, from each tube in a controlled fashion. Further optimization studies of the individual source elements themselves will also be performed in order to increase their overall effectiveness in a distributed array. Successful results would be of tremendous benefit to chip manufacturers, and to other industries that use plasma processing as well. A desirable outcome of the proposed work would be a set of design rules for the construction of arbitrarily large plasma tools that maintain sufficient process uniformity to be of use in the ever growing plasma processing industry. Furthermore, the present use of highly toxic substances in wet chemical processing of large area material surfaces would be reduced, and perhaps eliminated, in favor of the relatively benign plasma processing tools developed as a result of this work doc13288 none Dzidzienyo This grant will support a second international workshop on the experiences and challenges of both US and African power industry restructuring activities. It will strengthen and broaden the scope of power restructuring technical, economic and legal activities. The experiences and lessons from the implementation of restructuring and privatization worldwide will be directed towards the enhancement of future activities in the energy sector. The workshop will involve energy experts, researchers, university scholars and students. The emergence of a competitive utility environment presents new planning, operation, reliability, and costing issues that constitute new challenges to power system managers, practicing engineers, researchers and developers. There are already conferences, workshops, symposiums and studies to address several of these important issues. However, there is a lack of dialogue and a lack of visionary goals towards identification of the most effective methods to deal with obstacles such as computational challenges, institutional barriers, policies, etc. In order to overcome these obstacles, the proposed international workshop in Abauja, Nigeria is aimed at synthesizing ideas, setting directions and developing joint projects to assist the participating countries. The objective of this proposal is to organize a focused workshop between US and Sub-Saharan Africa countries to address the following issues: promotion of effective planning, optimal strategies and paradigms for competitive power systems: development of dialogues through open exchange on different power system structures, experiences and challenges in restructuring; evaluation of available computational techniques to address technical challenges in a restructured environment, policy analysis and social sector issues; and to promote cooperation between US and African utilities vendors, universities, and policy makers in the energy sector to address the issues: economics of restructuring, incentives for capital investment, congestion management, distributed generation (DG) in a restructured utility environment, reliability assessment technology, costing and pricing of the power market, collection and billing issues, human resources training issues, policies, legal concerns, and environmental concerns doc13289 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Bates College will acquire a 400 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) the development of chiral NMR shift reagents; b) the biomimetic synthesis of paeciolospirone, a marine polyketide; and c) the development of metalloporphyrin-based heterogeneous catalysts for use in the decomposition of toxic chemicals or for environmentally-benign synthesis. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas, in particular environmental chemistry doc13290 none Chloroplasts are the organelles within plant cells that are responsible for photosynthesis in addition to many other important aspects of metabolism. However, most of the proteins needed for the functions performed by chloroplasts are encoded in nuclear genes and imported into the organelle following their synthesis in the cytosol. While the basic outlines of the import process have been described, many aspects remain unknown. This project will investigate the details of precursor protein import into chloroplasts using a site-specific cross-linking strategy. Unnatural amino acids containing a photoreactive functional group will be incorporated into specific locations within precursor proteins and then allowed to interact with the transport apparatus of isolated intact chloroplasts. Following treatment with UV light to activate the cross-linking reagent, the products will be analyzed in an effort to map the set of interactions that occur as precursor proteins are transported across the chloroplastic envelope membranes. The expertise required to perform this specialized cross-linking strategy is not widely available, but is available at the University of Nagoya in Japan. Thus the project will be done in collaboration with the laboratory of Professor Endo to accomplish these experiments doc13291 none In order to obtain the greatly needed in-situ, continuous information on hurricane properties, a balloon measuring system will be developed that can be deployed from aircraft into the eyes of hurricanes. The hybrid system includes a natural shaped balloon to carry the measurement equipment and an attached drogue near the surface to maintain the balloon altitude. The hypothesis is that the inflow into the center of a hurricane will keep the balloon system in or very near the eye for the life of the storm over water. The goal is to obtain continuous measurements in the storm center where major fluctuations of storm intensity occur. Furthermore, the measurements will serve as ground truth for satellite-based techniques for estimating storm intensity. The project is the Phase I of a broader-scale effort. In this phase, the balloon system will be developed and tested in controlled environments, in numerical simulations and, to a limited extent, in the field. If successful, a Phase II proposal will be submitted for more extensive field-testing in real hurricanes, and possible operational implementation. A subcontractor, Modelsym, Inc, will carry out the fabrication of the balloon system. The planned work, if proven to be successful, would be of tremendous value in providing an inexpensive approach to obtaining valuable data for hurricanes doc13292 none The Arabidopsis genome project uncovered a large set of genes involved in nitrogen uptake, metabolism, and allocation (600+). Expression studies on a small subset showed that nitrogen status regulates the transcription of many of these genes. Proposed signals include nitrate, ammonium, glutamine, and C:N balance. At present, there is little or no understanding of the regulatory molecules or networks involved in signaling N-status and integrating N metabolism in plant growth. We propose to use expression arrays to identify circuits of genes regulated by N-status (inorganic-N and organic-N), to use bioinformatic sequence analysis to identify N-responsive cis-elements, and to determine the function of key genes we identify by defining the phenotype of mutants lacking each gene and by determining the biochemical properties of the expressed proteins including describing meaningful interactions with other macromolecules and determining where and when each is expressed. Our analysis will allow us to place the activity of these genes and N-regulatory networks in the context of plant growth and development. A computer cluster will store the large amounts of data generated in this project and we will provide a publicly accessible Web page that will include expression databases, gene identification information, and all software developed in the proposed project. This community resource will be linked to the major plant databases for the widest possible distribution of information. It is expected that our results will substantially advance our understanding of nitrogen metabolism in the context of plant growth, as well as provide new insights into our understanding of complex regulatory networks. Given the central role of nitrogen availability and metabolism in crop productivity, these results will also have broad agricultural impacts doc13293 none Trethewey This award supports a three year collaborative research project between Professor Martin Trethewey of the Pennsylvania State University and Professor Leonhard Koss of Monash University in Victoria, Australia. This project will undertake a study of the development of Force Frequency Shifting (FFS) for low frequency structural vibrations testing. Experimental vibration testing of civil and architectural structures has proven helpful in health assessment and in developing vibration absorbers for troublesome facilities. These target systems are characterized by having 1) low natural frequencies, 2) large mass, and 3) high damping. These conditions create a demanding set of vibration excitation specifications for experimental modal testing or active control applications. The vibration excitation problem stems from the inherently difficulty in creating high amplitude forces at low natural frequencies. The goal of the research is to develop and evaluate a novel low frequency vibration excitation technique ultimately suitable for vibration excitation of civil, architectural, and heavy machinery structures. Through a mechanical modulation process, a component of an efficiently generated high frequency excitation force is shifted to a low frequency. It is this shifted low frequency excitation signal that is the focus of this research. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. The value of vibration testing of large-scale systems has developed a proven track record of delivering valuable information in relation to a number of varied issues. Research in this are could assist in the assessment of bridge structural health, building occupant acceptability, wind excited motion, earthquake isolation performance and floor vibration for sensitive installations such as medical MRI equipment. The project advances international human resources through the participation of graduate and undergraduate students. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. Results of the research will be published in international scientific journals and will also be presented at scientific meetings in the U.S. and abroad doc13294 none Laurencin Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Dr. Cato Laurencin, Professor of Chemical Engineering, and Dr. Mohamed Attawia, Research Assistant Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, Drexel University, and Dr. Wafaa Ismail, Department of Ceramics at the National Research Center (NRC), in Cairo, Egypt. They plan to develop and study novel three-dimensional matrices useful for tissue engineering of bone. These matrices, developed at Drexel and based on polymeric microspheres, demonstrate the ability to allow for attachment and growth of bone in vitro and cellular ingrowth in mineralization in vivo. Work by researchers at the NRC has demonstrated the ability of chitosan to support the growth and phenotypic expression of osteoblasts and other mesenchymal cells. Recent research for the modifications of chitosan chemistry and chitosan complexation resulted in new materials with ranges of physicochemical properties. The investigators plan to study microsphere based matrices for tissue engineered matrices made from chitosan and microsphere based matrices for tissue engineering using degradable polymeric materials combined with chitosan based complexes. Scope: This award will permit collaboration between US and Egyptian scientists who have complementary capabilities and research experience in polymers and biomaterial. The two US scientists are eminent in their field and are highly published in areas related to the problem. The Egyptian collaborator is an active researcher with skills and expertise in ceramics, polymers, and biomaterials. One US student and one Egyptian student will participate in this research and will gain experience from the international collaboration. The research topic is of broad interest both to the materials science (especially biomaterials) community and to the medical science community. This proposal meets the INT objective of increasing international scientific collaboration in areas of mutual benefit. The project is supported by the Division of Bioengineering and Environmental Systems and the Division of International Programs doc13295 none Under the direction of Dr. Gil Stein, Mr. Mark Schwartz will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. Long-distance trade has always been important in the development of civilizations throughout history. The effect that inter-regional trade has on developing societies is a current focus of debate in anthropology. An excellent area to explore this issue is the ancient Near East because the rise of the first states in Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium BC is linked closely to long-distance exchange with developing areas of Anatolia, Syria and Iran. This research will test the hypothesis that trade with Mesopotamia produced an overspecialization in Anatolian polities making them more vulnerable to economic collapse. While many earlier analyses have relied on indirect evidence of trade, this research will provide direct evidence through geo-chemical analyses of the utilitarian good, bitumen. This research is centered around Hacinebi Tepe, a local Anatolian settlement on the Euphrates River that had an enclave of Mesopotamian merchants during a later phase of its history. The stratigraphic sequence of levels before and during contact with Mesopotamians allows one to look at the impact of Mesopotamians on this Anatolian polity. An analysis of this ancient exchange system must involve the sourcing of trade goods. Unfortunately, many of the prestige goods involved are extremely rare in archaeological deposits and hard to source chemically. This has made many key economic questions concerning exchange patterns and the geographic origins of trade goods unanswerable. To remedy this, Mr. Schwartz s dissertation focuses not on prestige goods, but on the utilitarian good bitumen. This petroleum tar is found throughout the Near East, is associated with Mesopotamian and Anatolian activity, is abundant in archaeological deposits at Hacinebi and is chemically sourceable. Employing detailed geo-chemical analyses, Mr. Schwartz s pilot study used bitumen to investigate the ancient exchange of a petroleum product in the Near East. For the first time, the presence of goods from Mesopotamia in Anatolia was demonstrated with scientific evidence. Preliminary identifications of bitumen sources hint at some of the dynamics trade at Hacinebi. Stable carbon isotope analyses suggest that the ancient exchange network was complex in terms of the sources utilized, the exchange routes and the consumers involved. Only when complete, will this project have the potential to alter our view of this early exchange system and Mr. Schwartz will perform chemical analyses on all 414 bitumen samples from Hacinebi in order to develop a full regional perspective on exchange patterns. These data will be combined with functional analyses of bitumen artifacts from different stratigraphic levels and cultural contexts to determine if an increase in bitumen use, an emphasis on distant sources or a focus on trade related activities demonstrates a shifting economic specialization on long-distance exchange by the Anatolians at Hacinebi doc13296 none COLUMBUS URBAN SYSTEMIC PROGRAM The Columbus Public Schools (CPS) serving 64,339 students, in 144 schools, of which 62% are minority, 57% are poor, and 3% are Limited-English-Proficient, through the Columbus Urban Systemic Program (CUSP), proposes to build upon the results realized under the Columbus Urban Systemic Initiative (USI). During the USI, CPS developed a building-based, professional-development delivery infrastructure promoting standards-based curriculum, instruction, and assessment strategies in support of all students attaining high levels of academic achievement in mathematics and science. Through the CUSP, the District states commitments to achieving the four driving goals of the USP Solicitation, NSF 01-15, related to improved student achievement, enhanced implementation of standards-based-inquiry-centered science and mathematics, increased competency and diversity of the instructional workforce, and intensified substantive collaborations with institutions of higher education towards improved teacher education. The USP implementation process embraces three major components and attendant enabling strategies. Therein, the CUSP will: - Focus Efforts and Resources Identify and target schools that have not fully implemented the standards-based curriculum for on-site professional development, monitoring of instruction, and increased parent involvement at those sites; -Fund long-term professional development with interim follow-up, reflecting the success of past models and current technology standards; -Focus on reaching full implementation of the standards-based curriculum in the District s lowest-implementation schools each year; Sustain support for students through summer bridge activities, internships and summer camps in mathematics, science, engineering, and technology; and -Advocate and ensure that resources and facilities are sufficient to support the standards-based learning environment. -Nurture Building-Level Leadership Support existing K-12 instructional leadership teams and other in-service participants through on-going professional development and follow-up consistent with the National Staff Development Council standards; -Assure that Instructional Leadership Teams (ILT) provide professional development to their staffs, serve as resources for other teachers, and coordinate school-wide mathematics and science events; -Provide training for district-level curriculum specialists and Peer Assistance Review (PAR) consultants to ensure cohesive delivery of instruction; -Coordinate in-depth training in the principal walk-through process; -Expand incentives for the district s Performance Advancement System by encouraging university collaboration, action research, and dissemination of research related to improved student achievement in mathematics and science. -Collaborate with Universities to Improve Teacher Education Continue strengthening university alliances to impact the effectiveness of pre-service education, the diversity of the CPS workforce, the technological skill of CPS graduates, and classroom research on teaching and learning; -Support CPS classified personnel in the pursuit of degrees in mathematics and science education; -Provide a forum for cooperating and pre-service teachers in area universities to apply their knowledge of K-12 mathematics and science standards and technology utility; and -Contribute as a consequential partner in university initiatives, i.e., The Ohio State University Teacher Quality Institute, Project Discovery, the P-12 Initiative of the Ohio State University, and the Urban Academy, designed to increase student achievement by improving the quality of mathematics and science teacher education doc13297 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Yezerski at King s College to acquire an High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) system with which to study the chemical defense system of the flour beetle, Tribolium confusum . Two immediate projects have been designed to address the questions of function and effect of the production of these defenses. One project will address the effect benzoquinone compounds have on conspecifics since these compounds are known to cause death to the beetles themselves. This experiment will correlate levels of chemical production in a series of recombinant inbred lines of beetles with levels of survival using representatives from the same lines. Using the HPLC equipment, a mean level of individual benzoquinone production within a line can be measured and these values compared to the results of standard LD50 tests for the lines when representatives are placed in an environment where no absorbent material protects them from their own excretions Current and future experiments using the HPLC will address correlations of the chemical defense trait with other behavioral and physical factors including body weight, cuticle color, and fecundity. Other planned research will measure the levels of benzoquinones in natural flour beetle populations in order to assess the evolutionary pressures conferred by natural environments. Such resulting information can not only help elucidate how a complex defense system arises evolutionarily but also help enlighten us on how this stored grain product pest can be better controlled. Additionally, the HPLC system has uses far beyond the measurement of beetle exudates. With only one other antiquated HPLC available for the entire college, the acquisition of this additional modern system will allow for other undergraduate research projects in both biology and chemistry that utilizes this highly utilized piece of equipment. By conducting meaningful research using modern equipment in which there is a demand for competent researchers, undergraduates at King s College can have the opportunity to be well prepared for whatever career goals they strive to reach whether these be in industry or further schooling doc13298 none Boston Public Schools Proposal The Boston Public School District (BPS) proposes to advance significantly the science, mathematics, and technology (SMT) education of all K-12 students through the Boston Urban Systemic Program (BUSP). The District plans to accomplish this task by building on the existing infrastructure developed by reform efforts that began in . These efforts included a complete revision of the reading, Language Arts, and mathematics programs. The lessons learned from these efforts will be used to facilitate change in science and other core subjects. The foundational tenets of the extant infrastructure include a strong K-12 leadership team, a standards-based curriculum for science and mathematics based on the state s curriculum framework, an aligned assessment system, and policies specific to science and mathematics. The infrastructure also include the convergence of fiscal and intellectual resources to improve science and mathematics education, significant external support from multiple institutions of higher education, business partners, and the at-large community. The BUSP goals parallel those of the USP that seeks to: 1. Increase student achievement in science and mathematics as measured by higher scores on standards-based assessments, increasing enrollments in higher level courses, and greater articulation to institutions of higher education; 2. Advance the implementation of standards-based, inquiry-centered science and mathematics program for all students, and employ research and assessments as effective tools in improving the teaching and learning of science and mathematics; 3. Increase the competency and diversity of the science and mathematics instructional workforce; and 4. Promote collaborations with colleges and universities and the engagement of the community to improve teaching and learning for all students to meet high standards doc13299 none This is a collaborative research project between three universities. The project is a comprehensive, systemic research and development program addressing three inter-related tiers of study: student learning and development; teacher beliefs, knowledge, and practice; and professional development. The project is grounded in both sound theory of how students develop algebraic reasoning and acquire domain knowledge and skills and in the beliefs and existing practices of teachers. In the student tier a detailed developmental model of students evolving algebraic reasoning and skill acquisition will be constructed concentrating on the transition from arithmetic to algebraic reasoning. In the teaching tier a promising pedagogical approach, Bridging Instruction, will be tested. In the professional development tier a teacher professional development prototype will be implemented. The prototypeT extends an existing technology based approach. It enables the evaluation of a scalable model of teacher professional development. Technology is a central aspect of this project. The findings of this research will be implemented into a coherent educational program for students and teachers using Algebra Cognitive Tutors and the STEP web teacher professional development environments doc13300 none Proposal # Wang, Paul S. Kent State University Following the NSF sponsored IAMC 99 Workshop and reinforcing an emerging research trend in making mathematical computation and data accessible on the Internet, the workshop provides a timely forum for researchers to further exchange ideas and discuss standards. The workshop will have invited talks, contributed papers, panel discussions, and system demonstrations. The results will be made available on the Web. An article overviewing the state of the art and future developments will be prepared for wide dissemination (e.g. publication in the magazine Science or Scientific American). An IAMC working group will be organized to foster research collaboration after the workshop. The IAMC workshop is being organized by Angel Diaz of IBM, Norbert Kajler of Ecole des Mines de Paris, and Paul S. Wang (the PI) of Kent State University as a pre-conference activity of ISSAC 01. The requested budget of $4,200 covers travel reimbursements and honoraria for invited speakers. With this support, the workshop will charge no registration fee for attendees. The workshop and this proposal have strong support from ISSAC organizers doc13301 none Adelman A low-cost spectrophotometer for use with a new 0.5 meter telescope at the Etelman Observatory of the University of the Virgin Islands will be designed, fabricated, tested, aligned, calibrated. It will be integrated with CCD detector and will have a spectral resolution of 6.5 and 13 angstroms over the spectral range between 3,300 and 9,000 micrometers wavelength. The science proposed will compare stellar fluxes measured with this instrument with model atmospheres to improve determination of effective temperatures and to study chemically peculiar stars. This small non-PhD granting institution has a large education program that will engage many students in the use of this telescope both for teaching and for undergraduate research doc13302 none People differ enormously in many physical and behavioral characteristics. Height and weight are physical differences; lifestyle variables, such as occupational, hobby, or recreational activities are behavioral differences. These differences are typically observed, but many differences are not directly observable, such as beliefs, attitudes, or the ways by which people perceive the world. To understand these unobservable differences it is necessary to infer qualities of these differences through observations which we can make. An often useful vehicle for doing so employs statistical theory called finite mixtures. This approach is based on two central ideas. One is that differences in unobservables can be viewed as relatively distinct classes in the same way one might view physical differences: righthanded or left, male or female. The other central notion is to make these differences in unobservable classes equivalent to different probability distributions. As an example, suppose the heights of 100 randomly selected adults were measured. The goal is to estimate the heights of men and women. Suppose however, there was a failure to code the measurements for sex. It is still possible to estimate the mean heights of each sex, the proportions of males and females in the population, and the probability that an individual measurement is from a man or a women. The reason this can be done is because the probability distributions for height are different: Men and women differ in their average height, which means they have different probability distributions for height. This research will use analytical, empirical, and computer methods to develop finite mixture models that make weaker assumptions than standard mixture theory. Some of the approaches are nearly nonparametric in the sense that the unobserved probability distributions need not be fully specified. In particular, three of the five projects will explore the binomial mixture approach. The other two projects will examine other largely distribution free mixture strategies not tied to the binomial. The models to be developed should make it easier to identify important unobserved features of individuals such as those at risk for certain personality disorders thereby anticipating, in the future, possible intervention strategies to facilitate development doc13303 none This grant provides funding to support research in building the theoretical basis and knowledge base in embedded heat pipe technology for elimination of the use of cutting fluids in the machining industry. This research project adopts a new heat transfer concept for environmentally conscious cutting tool design. This research project will conduct the following investigations: (1) characterization of the embedded heat pipe systems in cutting tools; (2) thermodynamic and heat transfer finite element analyses to predict the temperature distribution of the specific cutting process; (3) evaluation of the performance of the embedded heat pipe for tool wear analysis. The cutting rake insert, heat pipe container, wick structure, and working fluids are design parameters to adjust the temperature distribution. The proposed research will lead to the development of predictive models for heat transfer behavior, and experimental investigation and predictive modeling of the tool wear due to the embedded heat pipes in cutting tools in machining processes. The outcome of these studies will be useful for dry machining in industry. The impact of this research will facilitate the temperature control optimization in the use of the heat pipe in achieving a balance between process productivity and environmental consciousness. The models can then be used in selecting experimental conditions to explore, to interpret the experimental results, and, ultimately, to guide industrial tool design for dry machining. Finally, the research results within this program will be integrated with education through interdisciplinary activities in curriculum development, Alliance for Minority Participation, high school joint research programs, university industry seminars and conferences, and web information center doc13304 none The Psychophysiology Laboratory within the Department of Psychology at Wheeling Jesuit University will purchase equipment for the construction of a sleep research laboratory. The primary equipment will consist of a BioPac MP100 Data Acquisition System and Samadhi Light and Sound Attenuation Chamber. The BioPac MP100 Data Acquisition System is a flexible, easy-to-use modular system designed to perform data collection and analysis. The software allows for recording, analysis, and data filtering in real time and off-line. The software also provides analysis tools for EMG, EEG, ECG, EOG, plethysmography, evoked responses, cardiovascular hemodynamics, pulmonary function, exercise physiology, sleep studies, in-vitro pharmacology, and psychophysiology. Accessory components include the hardware unit, computer cards, manuals, cables, transformers, electrode leads, galvanic skin response transducer, pulse phethysmograph transducer, respiratory effort transducer, air flow transducer, reaction timer, headphones, pressure transducer, variable range force transducer, stimulator, blood pressure cuff, stethoscope, hand dynamometer, and multi-lead cables. The Samadhi Light and Sound Attenuation Chamber is a lightweight, portable chamber designed to provide barriers to external lights, sounds, and other stimulation that might otherwise disrupt normal sleep. Light and temperature control accessories make the sleep environment as comfortable as possible for the participants, while observation cameras, a two-way intercom system, and video recording devices are installed to provide for constant participant monitoring and recording. The PI will use this equipment to assess the impact of odorant administration on (1) physiological changes during sleep, (2) measures of sleep quality and duration, and (3) measures of post-sleep cognitive performance and wakefulness. The equipment will also be used by other departmental faculty members in facilitating studies on social isolation, echo-location, child psychopathology, and cognitive mapping. This equipment will enhance current departmental research capabilities and extend the department s ability to afford undergraduates with meaningful and technologically advanced research experiences doc13305 none The carbon concentrating mechanism (CCM) plays a major role in the earth s photosynthetic productivity and its capacity to cycle carbon. The CCM is essential for photosynthesis at atmospheric levels of CO2 in Chlamydomonas and most other eukaryotic and prokaryotic algae. Knowledge gained regarding the CCM in C. reinhardtii through this three-year project, coupled with information from other laboratories, should allow a more complete understanding of how algal cells are able to survive and flourish in their CO2-limited, aqueous environment. The primary goal of this research project is to elucidate components and mechanisms of regulation of the CCM in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. The focus of the project is the complete characterization of the Cia5 gene and its role as a master regulator of the cell s response to changes in environmental CO2 and HCO3 concentrations. Based on the weight of present evidence, it appears the Cia5 gene encodes a transcription factor that is part of one or more signal transduction cascades that allow, or reverse, formation of a functional CCM. Experiments to fully characterize the Cia5 gene are outlined along with studies of the CIA5 protein, its subcellular location, post-translational modification(s), DNA binding specificities and other features required for its function in controlling assembly of the CCM. A model is proposed in which the CIA5 protein could act either as an inducer or repressor of transcription of genes whose expression is dramatically increased during a shift of cells from high to low CO2 levels. Experiments are outlined that will resolve the uncertainty of whether CIA5 acts as an inducer or repressor of gene expression. In the long term, an increased understanding of the CCM has the potential for practical application in agriculture. For example, certain crop plants have been demonstrated to produce higher yields under elevated levels of CO2. If appropriate portions of the CCM can be transferred to those crops, their resultant ability to increase internal CO2 concentrations could lead to substantially improved crop yields doc13306 none This planning grant will develop a comprehensive plan to refine, broaden and implement an interdisciplinary curriculum model that has proven effective in accelerating learning for diverse student populations in science and reading at the upper elementary grades. Collaborators are the school districts of Broward and Palm Beach Counties. The project will also contribute to the knowledge base about specific design features associated with quality teacher professional development doc13299 none This is a collaborative research project between three universities. The project is a comprehensive, systemic research and development program addressing three inter-related tiers of study: student learning and development; teacher beliefs, knowledge, and practice; and professional development. The project is grounded in both sound theory of how students develop algebraic reasoning and acquire domain knowledge and skills and in the beliefs and existing practices of teachers. In the student tier a detailed developmental model of students evolving algebraic reasoning and skill acquisition will be constructed concentrating on the transition from arithmetic to algebraic reasoning. In the teaching tier a promising pedagogical approach, Bridging Instruction, will be tested. In the professional development tier a teacher professional development prototype will be implemented. The prototypeT extends an existing technology based approach. It enables the evaluation of a scalable model of teacher professional development. Technology is a central aspect of this project. The findings of this research will be implemented into a coherent educational program for students and teachers using Algebra Cognitive Tutors and the STEP web teacher professional development environments doc13308 none This planning grant is a collaboration between George Washington University, Montgomery County Pubic Schools, AAAS Project , and the Center for Applied Linguistics. The project s goal is to study how science curriculum materials and their implementation can be improved. The project will conduct a pilot study of student achievement, motivation, and engagement for a highly rated 8th grade curriculum unit (Chemistry that Applies-CTA). This unit was one of the few that rated highly in the evaluation procedure developed by AAAS Project . The study s purpose is to determine if there are different effects of highly rated curriculum materials and to identify the modifications that can be made for the highly rated materials to be more effective for subgroups of diverse learners doc13309 none Rice blast disease, caused by the fungus Magnaporthe grisea, is a leading constraint to rice production and is a serious threat to food security worldwide. The goal of this project is to elucidate the basis of plant resistance through a comprehensive analysis of the molecular events that occur during pathogen-host recognition and the subsequent defense responses. Our ultimate goal is to design durable disease resistance. Rice blast is a compelling experimental system for conducting such analyses. A complete understanding of the interaction requires knowledge of the genes in both pathogen and host. In this project, a set of crucial ESTs involved in rice defense will be identified. This information, along with other data, will be used for functional genomics studies, specifically microarray analysis and gene knockout, to uncover many of the early events in host-pathogen recognition from the perspectives of both the pathogen and host. As a result, major new resources for distribution and long term use by the plant, cell and pathogen biology research communities will be created. To facilitate access to resources and research data, a new database (MGOS) will be developed that will serve as a bridge between plant and pathogen research communities. An interactive educational component Genomics and Food Security will be designed and developed for high school students founded on the research. The project includes a major component to promote research experiences for undergraduates from under-represented groups including the formation of a Genomics Club that will integrate other Plant Genome projects at North Carolina State University. Deliverables: 1. 50,000 mutants with corresponding phenotype information, digital photographs, and genomic DNA 2. Identification and cloning of mutated genes shown to affect fungal penetration and pathogenesis 3. Putatively secreted proteins, plant responses, and their deduced functions 4. Micro-arrays and the results of transcriptional profiling experiments looking at gene regulation in the rice host and the fungal pathogen 5. SAGE libraries from infected rice tissue 6. 35,000 ESTs from different rice tissues infected and non-infected 7. Public database (MGOS) housing all data generated during the course of this project. 8. Teaching module Genomics and food security for high school teachers and students Contact Information for Deliverables: 1. Project Leader, Thomas Mitchell, North Carolina State University, thomas_mitchell@ncsu.edu, 2. Project Director, Ralph Dean, North Carolina State University, ralph_dean@ncsu.edu, 3. Bioinformatics, Cari Soderlund, University of Arizona, cari@genome.arizona.edu 4. Education and Outreach, Brenda Wojnowski, North Carolina State University, brenda_wojnowski@ncsu.edu Internet Addresses (Web or Email) for Project Information: 1. http: www.fungalgenomics.ncsu.edu 2. http: www.riceblast.org 3. thomas_mitchell@ncsu.edu 4. ralph_dean@ncsu.edu doc13310 none Putirka This grant, made through the Major Research Instrumentation Program, provides partial support of the costs for development of an x-ray fluorescence (XRF) laboratory at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP). This grant includes acquisition of a Philips MagiX Pro x-ray fluorescence spectrometer. The new laboratory will represent the only XRF facility in the western PA region, and will thus satisfy a crucial need within the region for a flexible and precise chemical analysis tool. In particular, this laboratory will support a wide range of research activities at IUP, Penn State and the University of Pittsburgh. For reasons of flexibility, this instrument includes a He attachment, which allows for the analysis of liquid and loose powder samples, and a new crystal developed by Philips (PX-9), which increases the intensity gain on transition and rare earth elements by a factor of 1.5-1.8, compared to the LiF (200) crystal. This grant also includes funds for an array of sample preparation equipment, including furnaces, crucibles and a Claise fusion machine for the preparation of glass beads, and a press and ancillary equipment for the preparation of pressed powder pellets. The research activities at IUP that will be supported by this acquisition include: 1) An investigation of the volcanic plumbing systems within the Snake River Plain, Idaho, and at Mauna Kea volcano, Hawaii. 2) An unraveling of the paleoclimate record contained in terrigenous sediments recovered from deep-sea cores. 3) The elucidation of crystal structures and defects of organic and inorganic substances. 4) A study of InAs InxGa1-xSb and GaN GaxIn1-x solid solutions, which are being developed as electronic devices. This laboratory facility will also provide a central component to curriculum revisions at IUP that aim toward a seamless incorporation of research and undergraduate coursework. A new course will be developed that will be devoted to the instruction of analytical methods. Several of our existing courses (Mineralogy, Geochemistry, X-ray Crystallography, Igneous and Metamorphic Petrology) will also be revised to incorporate meaningful research components. IUP s existing General Chemistry sequence will also be modified so that students at the freshmen sophomore level are introduced to XRF analytical techniques; analytical methods will thus be reinforced throughout the undergraduate curriculum doc13311 none The researchers propose to scale up a study they previously conducted in which they examined the backgrounds of college science students taking introductory science courses for predictors of performance, while controlling for demographic differences. They looked at 1,933 students at 19 colleges and universities in physics using epidemiological research methods. They plan to expand the study to 24,000 college students to examine the connection between the instructional decisions made by their high school physics, chemistry, and biology teachers and success in college science classes doc13312 none PI: Lawrence L. Tavlarides Institution: Syracuse University Proposal Number: The goal of this project is to advance the existing technology of the supercritical water oxidation (SCWO) process by developing fundamental knowledge which can be used to define an efficient and environmentally safe way to destroy toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) extracted from contaminated soil sediments or from disposal sites. PCBs are highly toxic organic pollutants (POPs) included by 122 nations on a recently banned list of chemicals known as the dirty dozen. The 209 PCB congeners are approximately twice the number of the elements in the Periodic Table and 17 times the number of chlorobenzenes, offering chess0like possibilities of investigations. Systematically selected congeners and the most used industrial PCB mixtures will be oxidized in SCW both neat and methanolic solutions. Emphasis will be on the methanolic solutions due to observed rate-enhancing quality of MeOH on PCB dechlorination. Several solutions obtained by SC-CO2 MeOH extraction from PCB polluted real world sediments will also be studied to couple the extraction and oxidation steps of a soil remediation technology being developed by the PI. This approach will permit one to design and optimally operate competitive SCWO large-scale units for PCBs and other related pollutants under less severe conditions than those proposed without kinetic studies and without reaction rate enhancers. Based on experimental results, reaction kinetics and pathways and structure-reactivity relationships will be developed. PCB oxidation experiments in supercritical water will be conducted in a high-pressure, isothermal plug-flow tubular reactor capable of continuous operation at temperatures up to 873 K and pressures up to 60 MPa. The approach is to select thermodynamic, kinetic and process parameters in order to find the optimum conditions for achieving the strategic goal of safe and efficient PCB destruction under the least aggressive conditions. The main parameters considered are temperature (673 - 874 K), pressure (25 - 35 MPa), residence time (1-240 s), and solute concentration (0.1 - 10 g L in MeOH, and 10-3 - 10 mmol L in SCW). This knowledge will be disseminated to the research community through publications and presentations and will provide a model training education to students, including Native Americans living on PCB contaminated lands doc13313 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Connecticut College will acquire a 400 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) tandem intramolecular cyclization-Claisen rearrangement sequence as a facile route to the tetracyclic 5-7-6-3 ring system of phorbol; b) synthetic strategies toward the ingenol ring system; c) novel syntheses of biologically active 5,7-fused sesquiterpenoids; d) synthesis and characterization of firefly luciferin analogs; e) solution structure of the C-terminal domain of firefly luciferase; f) synthesis and characterization of doubly 15N-labeled coelenterazine; and g) the 13C-NMR characterization of nonaqueous sol-gel systems. The NMR will also be used in the undergraduate laboratory courses. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in synthetic organic chemistry doc13314 none Under the direction of Dr. William Kretzschmar, Mr. Lamont Antieau will collect linguistic data for his doctoral dissertation. He will conduct dialectology research on Western American English with particular focus on Colorado due to its status as the cultural center of the Rocky Mountain region. The project will elicit speech from representative speakers of various parts of the state and then analyze the linguistic forms found therein. A combination of tools used by dialect geographers will inform the research (e.g., more traditional methods like maps, as well as more recent innovations like computers and statistical testing). The newer tools will enable researchers to examine all levels of language, including syntax. The project has broad significance. Since the collected speech will be transcribed and made publicly available via the Linguistic Atlas website (http: us.english.uga.edu), researchers will be able to use the data for a wide range of investigations into language change. These include comparing the data collected for this project to older data sets, and studying dialectal variation between Colorado and other regions in the United States as well as variation within the Colorado corpus. The interviews will elicit names for objects because this is an area in which there is a great deal of variation between regions. So the data may also be useful to anthropologists and historians. In addition to what the project will teach us about the speech of Colorado and how it compares to speech elsewhere in the United States, this research will contribute to a better understanding of dialect in general and inform theoretical models of language and culture doc13315 none A recently built instrument capable of measuring atmospheric OH (hydroxyl radical), H2SO4 (sulfuric acid), and HNO3 (nitric acid) will be deployed during the Summer intensive of PROPHET (Program for Research on Oxidants: Photochemistry, Emissions, and Transport) in Northern Michigan. The measurement technique is based on chemical ionization mass spectrometry (CIMS). In earlier PROPHET campaigns, measurements using a fluorescence-based technique showed the surprising result of measurable levels of OH during the night. Deploying this fundamentally different technique could confirm the occurrence of nighttime OH under the conditions of the PROPHET site. The measurements of H2SO4 will complement ongoing aerosol measurements, and the measurements of HNO3 would complement measurements of other individual compounds in the reactive nitrogen (NOy) family doc13316 none The goal of this project is to substantially increase the emerging reading skills of young children by employing technology to enhance the effectiveness of the Success for All (SFA) reading program. The project will develop DVD, video, and computer technology to improve the SFA reading, ESL, tutoring, and professional development components, and systematically evaluate each component separately and then together in an integrated program. By carefully integrating technology in various of aspects of the SFA program, the PIs believe it is possible to double the effect size on reading measures from .5 to 1.0 and to halve the failure rate. A new format for instruction called DaViD (DVD incorporating assessment and instruction) will integrate DVD technology with teacher instruction, incorporating material from Between the Lions, a PBS program designed to enhance children s literacy. It will incorporate additional video DVD presentations to present vocabulary used in Reading Roots (beginning reading) lessons and to preview the content of Reading Roots stories. Additionally, a computer-assisted tutoring program, the Reading CAT, will be created to support the performance of the student, the teacher, and the tutor, by providing an electronic skills development and information hub. The Reading CAT is being developed by Concordia University who is a subcontractor to Success for All. The Reading CAT will be used for practice (by students), for assessment (by tutors and teachers), for performance support (by tutors), and for communication (by tutors, teachers, and the facilitator). A large scale evaluation will compare schools using all technology elements to matched schools using standard SFA and to control schools over a two-year period doc13299 none This is a collaborative research project between three universities. The project is a comprehensive, systemic research and development program addressing three inter-related tiers of study: student learning and development; teacher beliefs, knowledge, and practice; and professional development. The project is grounded in both sound theory of how students develop algebraic reasoning and acquire domain knowledge and skills and in the beliefs and existing practices of teachers. In the student tier a detailed developmental model of students evolving algebraic reasoning and skill acquisition will be constructed concentrating on the transition from arithmetic to algebraic reasoning. In the teaching tier a promising pedagogical approach, Bridging Instruction, will be tested. In the professional development tier a teacher professional development prototype will be implemented. The prototypeT extends an existing technology based approach. It enables the evaluation of a scalable model of teacher professional development. Technology is a central aspect of this project. The findings of this research will be implemented into a coherent educational program for students and teachers using Algebra Cognitive Tutors and the STEP web teacher professional development environments doc13318 none This Focused Research Group (FRG) will investigate the fundamental role of disorder as major factor underlying the structure and dynamics of molecules, films and bulk quantum systems. The investigative technique is precision neutron scattering at the Institut Laue Langevin, Grenoble and at ISIS, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK, currently the leading neutron facilities in the world. The goal in education is training in neutron scattering for graduate students and post doctoral associates in preparation for the Spallation Neutron Source being built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and to develop lasting collaborations in Europe for young scientists. The scientific topics include the location, orientation, tunneling and diffusion of simple and polar molecules on smooth and chemically active surfaces (e.g. MgO), and on rough novel materials (e.g. nanotubes), investigating helium and hydrogen film growth, layer transitions, layer modes on surfaces and the characteristic three dimensional excitations of bulk quantum fluids in fully filled porous media. An aim is to relate excitations to structure (e.g. gaps in modes to localization) in one dimensional (1D), 2D and 3D disordered quantum systems and the existence of well-defined modes to Bose Einstein condensation and superfluidity. The underlying physics has analogies in high Tc superconductivity and application in catalysis and porous media development. The graduate students and post-docs participating in this project will benefit from the international collaborations and the use of cutting edge research tools. They will be exceptionally well trained for careers in academe, industry and government. This project is co-funded by the International Division of the Social, Behavioral and Economics Directorate and by the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate. %%% This research is dedicated to revealing the impact of disorder on the structure and dynamics of molecules, films and bulk quantum systems. The investigative technique is precision neutron scattering at the Institut Laue Langevin, Grenoble, France and at ISIS, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK which are currently the best neutron facilities in the world. The goal in education is to provide broad training in neutron scattering for graduate students and post doctoral associates so that they can capitalize on the outstanding new scientific opportunities that will be created by the Spallation Neutron Source now being built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It is also to develop lasting scientific collaborations in Europe for young scientists. The scientific topics begin with the location, orientation, tunneling and diffusion of molecules on surfaces; surfaces of materials that are important as catalysts in chemical reactions (e.g. MgO) and structurally important materials (e.g. nanotubes). They continue to the investigation of film growth, layer transitions, layer modes and the dynamics of three dimensional quantum fluids in porous media and their to relation Bose Einstein condensation. The underlying science has analogies in high temperature superconductors and the motivations run from basic concepts in disordered systems to tailoring catalysts and developing new porous materials. The graduate students and post-docs participating in this project will benefit from the international collaborations and the use of cutting edge research tools. They will be exceptionally well trained for careers in academe, industry and government. This project is co-funded by the International Division of the Social, Behavioral and Economics Directorate and by the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate doc13319 none In the past decade, there has been a movement in the design of computational objects toward relational artifacts, computational objects designed to present themselves as having affective states that are influenced by the objects interactions with human beings. They include digital dolls for children and for the homebound elderly, for whom they can double as health-monitoring systems. The designers of such systems incorporate models of human and animal cognition and build machines that learn from experience and adapt over time. In turn, experiences with such machines provide users and designers with powerful objects to think with about how their own minds work, and about what is special about being a person. This award funds data collection to examine a range of psychological, cultural, and ethical questions raised by relational artifacts. The investigator will explore and document the experiences of the groups having first contact with relational artifacts: designers, children, `early adopters , and the elderly. The methodology includes ethnographic fieldwork, observations, and interviews; sites include academic and corporate laboratories, children s after-school programs, elder housing, and individual subjects homes. Interviews and observations will be taped and transcribed; results will be disseminated in published papers, presentations at conferences, and in a monograph. The investigator for this project has already launched preliminary pilot studies on this topic. She proposes that this new kind of computational object provokes striking changes in the ways people categorize and assign value to qualities such as emotion, relationship, and aliveness. The dynamic between a person and an interactive, evolving, caring machine is not the same as the relationship one might have with another person, a pet, or a cherished inanimate object. This research project will explore the nature and implications of this new sort of relationship. Its goal is to better understand how experiences with relational artifacts affect people s sense of who they are and their place in the world doc13320 none Four institutions working on technology-anchored curriculum reform propose to develop a collaboration to explore effective models of technology-anchored teaching and learning, determine how models can be transported and how teachers, administrators, and researchers can collaborate to support and sustain such reforms doc13321 none Hogg This Major Research Instrumentation award to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts will provide support for acquisition of mooring-related instrumentation to be managed by the Physical Oceanography Observing Laboratory (POOL) and made available on a shared-use basis to US academic researchers funded for research that requires oceanographic moorings. Specific instrumentation provided with this award includes two moored profilers with acoustic current meters and CTDs, as well as forty other acoustic current meters, plus temperature and salinity sensors, acoustic releases and deck units for general mooring support. WHOI will contribute 30% of the cost of this project from non-federal funds doc13322 none One of the goals of optical fiber communication system design and development is the realization of the full 25 THz bandwidth capability of this transmission medium. One approach currently being pursued is to transmit a large number of spectral channels at high modulation rates within the gain profile of doped optical fiber amplifiers. Therefore in order for new device technologies to be acceptable they must be characterized with high spectral resolution probes (0.10-0.20 nm; 10-25 GHz at nm) over relatively large spectral bandwidths (C-Band: - nm; L-Band: - nm). One approach to accomplishing this task is to use a tunable laser source to probe the device to measure its spectral properties over a range of wavelengths. The polarization of the incident beam can also be changed to examine the sensitivity to polarization variations that may occur in a length of fiber. The source output can also serve as a continuous wave optical source that can then be modulated with an external modulator to examine the performance of a modulator at different wavelengths. In this regard a tunable laser source is an extremely versatile tool for investigating many different aspects of high performance fiber optic devices and systems. In addition to using a tunable laser source for research purposes it also is a very useful instrument for education purposes. It can be used in laboratory experiments that evaluate devices found in modern fiber optic communications systems such as fiber Bragg gratings, spectral gain variation of optical amplifiers, and amplifier gain equalization techniques. In addition it can be used to train both undergraduate and graduate students in DWDM device characterization techniques. The purpose of this proposal is a request for a tunable laser diode with a spectral resolution of 0.02 rim and a tuning range from - nm. This source will provide our lab with the capability to investigate the performance of devices and materials for wavelength selective operations in fiber optic communications systems. it will also allow us to significantly improve the quality and relevance of laboratory experiments that we can offer in our classes on fiber optics and undergraduate and graduate research projects. A source of this type is currently not available for our research and educational facilities and is a significant obstacle to our efforts. The importance of acquiring an instrument of this type is underscored by the commitment from the University of Arizona to cost share one-third of the cost of the laser doc13323 none This project extends an individualized reading program, IRM, based on a linguistic analysis of reading errors of inner city African American children, to Latino and Euro-American school populations. In the first year of the project a comparative study will be made of the reading errors of 720 children in the 3rd and 4th grades in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and East Palo Alto, equally divided among four racial ethnic groups: African American, Euro-American, English-reading dominant Latino, and Spanish-reading dominant Latino. The analysis will lead to interventions modeled after those developed from the IRM program. In the second year these interventions will be tested for Latino and Euro-American struggling readers. In year 3 a randomized study will be done in Philadelphia and Atlanta testing the IRM intervention within the school day, during the school day and extended day care, and without IRM but with the standard reading curriculum in all four groups of children doc13324 none Variations in floral architecture are of major evolutionary and economic importance, impacting various plant processes such as pollination and gene flow, as well as fruit production and seed dispersal. However, despite the central role of flowers in plant reproduction and agriculture, questions about the origin and diversification of the flower remain fundamental problems in plant biology. Recent studies in plant developmental genetics and genomics have identified dozens of genes with specific roles in flower development in Arabidopsis and other model organisms. Still, many (if not most) genes with critical roles remain undiscovered, largely because of functional redundancy. Because most economically important species are not closely related to model plant species, novel approaches are needed to build upon existing genome projects and transfer knowledge to nonmodel organisms. THE FLORAL GENOME PROJECT will investigate the origin, conservation, and diversification of the genetic architecture of the flower, and develop conceptual and real tools for evolutionary functional genomics in plants. A set of plant exemplars was selected, based on recent phylogenetic studies, to include the basal angiosperm groups where most flower diversity is found, plus key eudicot lineages where many crop species occur. THE FLORAL GENOME PROJECT will generate large EST datasets , capturing thousands of sequences of genes expressed during early flower development in each species. New sampling approaches will be used to improve the chance of obtaining rare transcripts and of obtaining comparable gene sets from each species. Finished sequencing for up to 300 unique genes per species will allow study of the evolution of key genes and gene families expressed in flowers, and test leading hypotheses about the origin of the flower THE FLORAL GENOME PROJECT will examine the site and timing of gene expression for the unique genes detected in each species using a combination of microarray analysis and new methods of high throughput in situ hybridization. Expression patterns will be evaluated for hundreds of genes in each species, and summarized in 3-D virtual reconstructions of developing flowers. This project would generate the first comparative data set of expression patterns for a large number of genes across diverse angiosperms. These experiments will generate an enormous dataset of gene sequences and their expression in different species, and will require new informatic tools for the comparative analysis of gene history, gene function, and molecular evolution. Informatics efforts will include the generation of software for improved phylogenetic analysis of gene families and an automated data pipeline to enable researchers to move efficiently from traces to trees in an exploratory fashion. A phylogenetic database, integrated with web-based tools for flexible inquiry, will be created as a public resource to relate sequence information from expressed gene studies in a phylogenetic framework. This database will provide annotated links to genomic and functional information in Arabidopsis, rice, and maize, and to expressed gene studies in tomato, maize, and many other important crop species. THE FLORAL GENOME PROJECT will provide a key resource for generating hypotheses about common gene functions in plants and the potential sources of variation among diverse species doc13325 none With complex systems, monolithic models become impractical and it becomes necessary to model them through subsystems and components. Development of control logic for such systems also becomes complex, unless the structure of the subsystems and components can be exploited in a systematic way. In this proposal, we consider the development of methods that use the structure of discrete-state model components for synthesizing control logic and diagnostic information. These methods are automated, generating formal control logic models that can be analyzed, generating control software that can be executed, and generating diagnostic models that can provide fault diagnosis hypotheses. Such automated methods would reduce controller development time, would provide enhanced reliability compared to manually developed controllers, and would be automatically reconfigured as underlying system designs are modified. In this research, we propose to develop such tools and techniques by building upon our prior research. In our previous research, techniques were developed for: modeling common components of manufacturing systems; assembling such components together to represent custom system designs; synthesizing control logic called taskblocks for control of those components; and assembling those taskblocks together sequentially and hierarchically in order to achieve given specifications. Software tools were developed for graphical entry of the component models and the specifications, and for automatically converting the synthesized control logic into C++ code. An automatically synthesized software supervisor then coordinates the multiple concurrent control activities, steering the system around undesired states. The models we consider are a form of discrete event system, and the synthesis techniques build upon discrete event control methods. There are several unresolved issues with this current approach that will be addressed in the proposed research. One major emphasis of this work is recognizing and exploiting the multiple layers of interaction with components of the system. The modeling frame- work and our current analysis methods are ideally suited for such models of interacting components, but they must be extended in order to compactly represent components with large state spaces. A second issue involves the timed dynamics of the system. Some activities may be time critical, such as turning off an actuator within a certain period of time or immediately upon receipt of a sensing. The synthesized control software should consider such time issues, and should ensure appropriate priorities among various potentially concurrent activities. Finally, we propose to extend our current software tools to become a resource for other researchers and educators. This would allow others to test, develop, and evaluate other techniques using our graphical system editor, our code synthesis tool, and our hardware interface techniques. The automated control synthesis and diagnostic synthesis techniques will be demonstrated using both manufacturing and embedded control applications doc13326 none The project is a partnership between the Concord Consortium, Harvard, Northwestern, University of Michigan, the Center or Learning Technologies in Urban Schools (LeTUS) and the Firtchburn, Hudson, and Lowell Public Schools to study the impact of modeling on secondary science learning. Tools called CIE models incorporate core science content that students learn through interaction and exploration. The project will explore the hypothesis that students learn more through such models by testing it in real schools. Data will be collected from Pedagogica (the technological environment), annual administration of a project-generated assessment, extensive interviews, and standardized tests doc13327 none Denniston This grant, made through the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, provides full support of the costs of acquiring a bank of alpha spectrometers for uranium-series (238U-234U-230Th and 226Ra-210Pb) isotope dating of speleothems and corals. The equipment will include a Canberra Genie- benchtop alpha analyst with dual alpha spectrometers, 450 mm2 PIPS detectors, hardware and software for operation and data reduction, as well as a radon analysis system composed of Storm King R-LPSS double Rn extraction system with an Applied Techniques model AC DC-DRC-MK10-2 dual radon counting system. Acquisition of this instrument will enable two lines of research in earth systems processes at Cornell College, including the impacts of environmental change on continental and shallow marine environments: (1) construction of speleothem-based records of Holocene climate variability from the midwestern U.S.A. and central Nepal and (2) analysis of the temporal resolving power of reef coral death assemblages as a means of assessing the response of reef coral communities to global climate change. Both research areas will be addressed as faculty and faculty-guided undergraduate projects that will be combined with stable and radiogenenic isotope mass spectrometric analyses at the University of Iowa and the University of New Mexico. The research experiences students receive using this alpha spectrometry system will enhance quantitative and analytical skills, expand appreciation for independent research as a tool for scientific training, introduce a variety of environmentally-oriented research topics, and develop peripheral skills including X-ray diffraction and optical microscope methods, stable isotopic analysis, and thermal ionization mass spectrometry doc13328 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Jodi Enos-Berlage at Luther College to purchase a scanning laser confocal microscope. This instrument, which enables three-dimensional imaging and superior resolution of biological specimens, has become an essential tool for modern biological research. This microscope will be used for eight projects that will enhance research and education at Luther College. These projects span diverse areas of biological research, including studies of plant physiology, developmental biology, eukaryotic cell biology, bacterial multicellularity , and techniques in light microscopy. The eight proposed projects include four faculty student research projects and four upper division courses, representing the research and teaching activities of at least 5 science faculty in two different departments (Biology and Chemistry). Acquisition of a confocal microscope will increase student research opportunities at Luther College and is expected to result in a concomitant increase in the number of students that pursue graduate studies in science, along with preparing them better for this endeavor. Together with the faculty, we expect that 60-70 students will be users of this instrument on an annual basis. The eight projects that will utilize scanning laser confocal microscopy (SLCM) are as follows: In project 1, SCLM will be used to study various forms of bacterial multicellularity . The model organism Vibrio parahaemolyticus will be used to determine how bacterial cells are organized in colonies and biofilms, how these communities develop, and what environmental and bacterial factors are required. Project 2 will utilize SCLM to investigate lipid trafficking in eukaryotic cells. Fluorescent lipid analogs will be used as probes to study the concentration, movement, and metabolism of lipids and to determine the factors that influence the sorting mechanisms of lipids. Project 3 involves investigating the nature of plant border cells, which form at the root tips of plants and easily detach to form a specialized root tissue. SCLM will be used to examine border cell production and characterize their potential involvement in a fungal pathogen-plant interaction. The developmental biology of the model organism Drosophila is the focus of project 4. Confocal microscopy will be used to assay developmental protein localization patterns in Drosophila embryos of wild type and mutant strains. In project 5, bacterial biofilms will be investigated in a general microbiology course. Students will grow biofilms, observe their development using SCLM, and identify environmental factors that affect biofilm formation. Project 6 will incorporate confocal microscopy into an existing course in light microscopy. Various laboratories will be developed to demonstrate how SCLM is being used for current research and to train students on the operation of the instrument. In project 7, confocal microscopy will be used to demonstrate concepts in a biochemistry laboratory course. Eukaryotic cellular processes and organelle structure and function will be examined using a variety of fluorescently-labeled probes. Finally, project 8 will utilize SCLM for an integrative laboratory experience in cell biology. Specifically, students will use fluorescently-labeled antibodies that crosslink cell surface proteins to examine the structure and fluidity of the plasma membrane and functioning of the cytoskeleton. The research projects described above will increase understanding of a number of important biological processes. A better understanding of such processes has broad implications. For example, knowledge of bacterial biofilm formation will aid in control of these structures, which play a role bacterial pathogenesis. Understanding lipid trafficking will aid in diagnosis and treatment of persons with disorders caused by alterations in these processes. A more thorough understanding of plant-pathogen interactions will facilitate improvements in controlling plant infectious diseases. Knowledge of Drosophila development can be applied to developmental processes in humans. Significantly, several of the above projects involve an educational component. By using the confocal microscope, students will have a better understanding of a variety of biological processes and modern techniques. The general and scientific communities will benefit by having persons that are better educated in these areas doc13329 none This planning grant proposal will examine the professional development experiences that are most likely to help children in urban settings to be more successful learners of ambitious science. To do so, the PIs will create a data system that allows for detailed articulation of the ways that teachers opportunities for growth translate into learning outcomes for children. The model for the work begins with actual classroom practices, then examines student growth (defined by achievement test scores) and the kinds of development experiences that result in successful student learning. Specifically, the planning grant with refine and develop new measures of student learning; develop a coding scheme for professional development experiences; refine and codify the PIs existing scheme for analyzing classroom practice; and use test cases to explore the feasibility of the methodology. Panel : The panel was enthusiastic about the importance and scope of the study and viewed the ideas about enactment and the conceptualization of change in the proposal particularly favorably. The concerns raised by the panel included: the project is very ambitious given the eighteen-month timeframe; and the proposal is short on detail in both methodology and theory. However, panelists understood that some of the conceptualizations would necessarily be somewhat vague in a planning grant. An additional concern included the commitment of the PIs in other research projects. Analysis: The panelists felt that this was a planning grant with potential to yield important new measures and understandings regarding links between teacher professional development and student learning. The PIs are highly qualified. In spite of concerns about the ambition of the project and the vagueness of some aspects of the underlying theory and methodology, the Program Officer agrees with the panel that this planning grant holds great promise for producing information that will be helpful to schools and those interested in science reform. However, the PIs should take care to address the concerns raised in the review in the submission of a full proposal. Program Director Recommendation: Based on the ratings received in the panel review, the comments contained in the written reviews, the panel discussion, and the analysis described above, I recommend that this proposal be funded for 18 months as a standard grant at the level of $278,504 doc13330 none Anemia affects an estimated 700 million people worldwide. In most cases it is regarded as a disorder arising from inadequate dietary iron that requires treatment with supplementation. In recent years, however, research has demonstrated that low circulating iron levels can arise from a well-regulated non-specific immunological defense against infection, the iron withholding response. This response protects a human host by sequestering iron needed by microorganisms for growth. The research proposed here will investigate whether low circulating iron from low dietary intake similarly protects the host from infection in a high disease load environment. Specifically, this research will weigh the potential protective benefits of moderate iron deficiency against the possible adverse consequences, particularly in relation to the specific immune response. This study will investigate the effect of iron deficiency on one aspect of the specific immune response, cell-mediated immunity, using blood spots collected on filter paper from 314 Kenyan children. The investigators will refine an assay for serum transferring receptor, a marker that is currently considered the gold standard for assessing iron status. Commercial assay kits that are designed to be used with venous blood samples will be modified for use on dried capillary blood spots, resulting in an easy, minimally invasive, field-friendly method that will also be useful for future community-based assessments. The results of this study will contribute to a broader understanding of the functional tradeoffs of mild iron deficiency and the nutritional ecology of disease resistance doc13331 none The Jackson Public School District (JPS) proposes to significantly advance the science, mathematics, and technology education (SMT) of all K-12 students through the Jackson Urban Systemic Program (JUSP). The District plans to accomplish this task by building on the existing infrastructure developed primarily through the Comprehensive Partnership for Mathematics and Science Achievement, the Center for Research in Teaching and Learning funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the K-12 Higher Education Partnership funded by NSF in partnership with the National Institutes of Health. This infrastructure is characterized by an exemplary leadership team, content standards for science and mathematics, policies in support of SMT education for all, the convergence of fiscal and intellectual resources, and a shared vision for improving the capacity of principals, teachers, and students. To accomplish the goals and objectives of the USP, the District intends to provide all of its students with the fundamentals of mathematics and science so that their understanding, ability, and academic achievement will enable them to perform at or above their peers from around the world. The major goals are: (1) to increase student achievement in science and mathematics; (2) to increase competency in the science and mathematics instructional workforce; and (3) to strengthen the District s capacity to sustain SMT reform. Hence, JPS will use the USP to improve its capacity to enhance student achievement via an articulated K-12 science and mathematics curriculum, a more diverse and highly qualified instructional workforce, and stronger and more focused partnerships doc13332 none The objective of this collaborative Focused Research Group (FRG) project is to invent a new class of thermoelectric (TE) materials that will significantly enhance the efficiency of cooling and power applications. Based on the theory of electronic and heat transport in solids, a theoretical model of semiconducting TE materials has been available for several decades. However, no known material has all the needed electronic and thermal characteristics. The purpose of this collaboration is to design, synthesize and characterize new classes of semiconducting thermoelectric materials that exhibit high efficiency as device materials. Electronic structure theory will provide general guidelines in the search for such materials. The main impediment is the inability of scientists to predict the composition or structure of new compounds, unless they are chemically similar to known compounds. However, once a new material is found and its crystal structure determined, its electronic band structure as well as transport properties can be calculated. Thus this research has both strong theoretical and experimental components. A close interaction between the chemists, physicists and theorists and their students through quarterly meetings, exchange visits, and internet communication, will provide rapid feedback and planning of the next experiments and calculations. The education and research components of this interdisciplinary project are well integrated, and overall success in this complex project will be realized through exceptional synergy. %%% Thermoelectric (TE) materials allow the construction of small, purely electronic devices that provide thermal cooling on passing a current, or that produce electricity directly from heat. TE coolers eliminate the need for compressors and gasses, such as freons. However, current TE coolers have low efficiency (only 10 % of the maximum allowed, while home refrigerators operate at about 30 % of Carnot efficiency.). Yet these devices are used in applications where efficiency is less important than small size or reliability. Their use would greatly expand if the efficiency could be raised to 30 % or more, resulting in environmental improvements and economic benefits. This is an ideal training ground for students. This experimental and theoretical project is highly interactive and interdisciplinary with strong synergy exhibited among the participating chemists and physicists and their graduate and postdoctoral students doc13333 none The objective of this project is to continue collaborative efforts between Michigan State University and North Carolina State University to explore the thermophilicity of class II xylose isomerases (XIs) with the ultimate goal of providing the scientific and engineering bases for a superior isomerization process. The specific research objectives include: (1) to use protein engineering to develop a superior XI able to produce a 55% fructose syrup at high temperature and low pH in the absence of unwanted by-product formation and without the requirement for a chromatographic enrichment step; (2) to address the bioprocessing issues relevant to such biocatalysts; (3) to examine the differences and similarities among class II XIs as a basis for developing thermostabilization and thermoactivation strategies useful for other enzymes; and (4) to consider other monosaccharide biotransformations that operate at elevated temperatures and that have technological potential doc13334 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Carleton College will acquire an aerosol time-of-flight mass spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) the study of the chemical content and source origin of aerosol particles found in the Carleton College area; b) the exploration of wet deposition of particles through both rain and snow washout; and c) the study of the emissions from diesel engines as a function of various operating parameters. A deeper understanding of aerosol particles in the atmosphere is crucial to understanding the environment and health effects. This project will provide opportunities for Carleton College undergraduates, in collaboration with undergraduates and graduate students from the University of Wisconsin - Madison, and senior scientists from both institutions to work together doc13335 none This grant provides the American Mathematical Society with funds to be used over three years to support mathematically talented U.S. undergraduates for a semester of study at the MATH in MOSCOW program of the Independent University of Moscow. Funds will be used to underwrite approximately half of the typical cost for a semester of study in the program for ten undergraduate students per (academic) year. The Independent University of Moscow (IUM) is a small, elite institution of higher learning focusing primarily on mathematics. It was founded in at the initiative of a group of well-known Russian research mathematicians, who now comprise the Academic Council of the University. The faculty of the IUM has well-established connections with the research community in the U.S. and Europe. The costs to administer this program are being fully absorbed by the AMS, and all the funds provide will be used to support the students doc13336 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program provides funds to North Carolina State University for the acquisition of a unique, three-component extrusion system that would provide critically needed capability in new materials and polymer processing research at North Carolina State University. The extrusion system would become the cornerstone of several research projects including (1) Supercritical Fluid Assisted Step Growth Polymerization, (2) CO2-Asisted Depolymerization, Purification and Recycling of Step-Growth Polymers, (3) Reactive Blending, and (4) Nano-composite Foams. Specifically, this extrusion system will allow the principal investigators to develop novel polymer processing techniques, investigate CO2-assisted polymeric processing, and improve existing industrial processes. The equipment acquisition will strengthen the polymer research already established within the University. It will lead to many new initiatives in polymerization and polymer processing and support a number of projects in the NSF Science and Technology Center for Environmentally Responsible Solvents & Processes. The extrusion system will also serve to expand the institutional capability to educate both graduate and undergraduate students. The equipment will be used to directly benefit undergraduate students enrolled in the Polymer Science Option. An experiment based on the extrusion system will be introduced into, a required undergraduate laboratory course. The equipment also will be used for demonstration and project purposes in at least two graduate courses, polymer rheology and polymer blends and alloys. Finally, the equipment also will be available for graduate students and post-doctoral personnel (more than 50 campus wide) that are involved in polymer research. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program provides funds to North Carolina State University for the acquisition of a unique, three-component extrusion system that would provide critically needed capability in new materials and polymer processing research at North Carolina State University. The extrusion system would become the cornerstone of several research projects. Specifically, this extrusion system will allow the principal investigators to develop novel polymer processing techniques, investigate new polymeric processing, and improve existing industrial processes. The equipment acquisition will strengthen the polymer research already established within the University. It will lead to many new initiatives in polymerization and polymer processing and support a number of projects in the NSF Science and Technology Center for Environmentally Responsible Solvents & Processes. The extrusion system will also serve to expand the institutional capability to educate both graduate and undergraduate students. The equipment will be used to directly benefit undergraduate students enrolled in the Polymer Science Option. An experiment based on the extrusion system will be introduced into, a required undergraduate laboratory course. The equipment also will be used for demonstration and project purposes in at least two graduate courses, polymer rheology and polymer blends and alloys. Finally, the equipment also will be available for graduate students and post-doctoral personnel (more than 50 campus wide) that are involved in polymer research doc8938 none This project involves conducting a field measurements program near Cherski, Siberia to quantify the impacts of disturbance on the seasonal cycle of atmospheric carbon dioxide and the discharge of carbon and nitrogen into the Arctic Ocean in forest and shrubby tundra regions. Coastal plain tundra in the region has accumulated large stores of carbon in sediments during the Pleistocene that has been slowly released to the atmosphere and ocean through melting of previously frozen soils during the Holocene. Disturbance, particularly forest fires, of the vegetation exposes the soils to accelerated carbon loss through more direct exposure to erosion. The study will compare an undisturbed region to recently disturbed areas and determine the effects of changes in temperature and hydrology on the rate of carbon flux. The results will be utilized in models to examine possible future disturbance effects, particularly those that could be accelerated by warmer climate conditions doc13333 none The objective of this project is to continue collaborative efforts between Michigan State University and North Carolina State University to explore the thermophilicity of class II xylose isomerases (XIs) with the ultimate goal of providing the scientific and engineering bases for a superior isomerization process. The specific research objectives include: (1) to use protein engineering to develop a superior XI able to produce a 55% fructose syrup at high temperature and low pH in the absence of unwanted by-product formation and without the requirement for a chromatographic enrichment step; (2) to address the bioprocessing issues relevant to such biocatalysts; (3) to examine the differences and similarities among class II XIs as a basis for developing thermostabilization and thermoactivation strategies useful for other enzymes; and (4) to consider other monosaccharide biotransformations that operate at elevated temperatures and that have technological potential doc13339 none Notaros The central goal of the proposed research is the development of the methodology and necessary knowledge for electromagnetic modeling of cars and aircraft over a very wide range of radio and microwave frequencies. Analysis of vehicles as electromagnetic structures (antennas and scatterers) and parts of wireless communication and radar systems is, by all means, one of the most challenging and practically important problems of applied electro-magnetics and one of the mainstream tasks with highest preference, today and in the future, of the computational electromagnetics (CEM) community. A new unified general, highly efficient and accurate, hybrid large-domain (higher-order expansion) current-based method will be developed for analysis of electrically small, medium, and very large 3D electromagnetic structures consisting of metallic and dielectric parts of arbitrary shapes. Theoretical foundation of the method is a system of coupled surface integral equations for equivalent surface electric and magnetic currents. The system will be solved by the method of moments (MoM) which will be hybridized with high-frequency asymptotic techniques based on the physical optics (PO). This hybridization will provide a smooth transition between low and high frequency applications. Within the new MoM-PO method, all the surfaces in the system (metallic and dielectric surfaces, in both the MoM- and PO-regions) will be approximated by electrically relatively large bilinear quadrilateral surface elements (large domains) with higher-order polynomial vector expansions for currents. Wires will also be incorporated, in the MoM-regions. Various corrections in the PO-regions will be introduced, including an iterative improvement of the interaction between the MoM- and PO-regions. Most importantly, the memory requirements and computation time associated with the unknowns in the PO-regions can be made extremely low, which results in an enormous overall efficiency of the hybrid solution. As compared with the existing CEM methods, the proposed method will have a unique feature of efficient, accurate, and reliable electromagnetic modeling of cars and aircraft in a wide range of frequencies on small computing platforms (such as desktop and laptop PC s). An extensive new knowledge will be developed and systematized on the methodology of electromagnetic modeling of cars and aircraft from practically dc to high-frequency applications. Experimental validation of the new MoM-PO technique will be performed by measurements in the new UMass Dartmouth ATMC (Advanced Technology and Manufacturing Center) Antenna and Wireless Laboratory doc13340 none Wourms Viviparity, i.e. giving birth to living young, has evolved from oviparity (egg laying) many times in different animal groups. Among the vertebrates, it first evolved in fishes which now display an extraordinary diversity of specializations for viviparity. The evolution of viviparity established new functional relationships, such as maternal-embryonic nutrient transfer. Specialized tissues, such as the placenta, evolved for transfer. Live bearing goodeid fishes, are being used as a model system to study nutrient transfer across a placenta and to investigate the development and evolution of the embryonic portion of the placenta. Goodeid embryos undergo considerable growth ( X) due to transfer of nutrients across a placenta composed of the lumenal ovarian epithelium and trophotaeniae, external processes emanating from the embryo s vent. Trophotaeniae are derivatives of the embryonic hindgut. Previous research established the structure and function of trophotaeniae and lead to the discovery of an evolutionary intermediate, A. toweri, a species of goodeid fishes whose embryos have vestigial trophotaeniae and rely on gut-based nutrition. Comparative studies produced a robust developmental model for the evolution of trophotaeniae from the hindgut. Its key feature is the precocious formation of a new posterior gut opening (vent) instead of the typical anus. This event permits externalization of hindgut tissue. Once externalized, the hindgut tissue could evolve into trophotaeniae by incremental modifications of a gut-based developmental program. Research objectives are to: 1) extend the study of the trophotaenial placenta as part of long term studies of the evolutionary physiology of viviparity; and 2) test the model of trophotaenial evolution. Standard methods of cell-developmental biology and physiology will be used to: 1) analyze vent formation, externalization of hindgut tissue, and the origin of trophotaenial precursors; 2) analyze the development of rudimentary trophotaeniae, an evolutionary intermediate, in the blue-tailed goodeid (A. toweri) and compare the selective advantages of gut and trophotaeniae-based nutrition; 3) analyze growth and morphogenesis of trophotaeniae; and 4) analyze the temporal and structural course of events and the physiological basis for the shedding of trophotaeniae at birth. These studies will: 1) advance the general understanding of viviparity, a major form of reproduction; 2) provide a basic understanding of the function and development of the trophotaenial placenta; 3) test a developmental model of trophotaenial evolution; 4) establish the selective advantages of gut and trophotaenial-based embryonic nutrition; and 5) enhance knowledge of the reproductive biology of endangered species doc13341 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. James E. Haley of the College of Mt. St. Vincent. Recent research in the biological sciences has taken on more sophisticated methods and instrumentation. One active current area involves the use of cell tissue culture analyses of cell function especially for neurally derived cells from the rat brain including neurons and astrocytes as well as other glial cells. We are fortunate to offer such rare training experience at a small liberal arts college including a heavy emphasis on student involvement in faculty research activities. Most of our majors and graduates, about a total of 40 per year, are women and there is a growing enrollment of minority students who will have direct use and instruction with this sophisticated equipment. This type of training is critical for the preparation of future health science professionals. However, we are at present deficient in many state-of-the-art equipment necessary to expand the efficiency, skills, capacity, level of sensitivity, and potential for faculty student research in the areas of neuroscience, plant cell biology, and pharmacology. The equipment requested include the following: 1) Liquid scintillation counter to be used in tracer methodology to examine proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, and other bio-active molecules made by cells. 2) A water purification system to produce ultrapure water necessary for cell culture. 3) A fluorescent microscope with photographic capabilities to examine cultured cells for specific proteins molecules using indirect immunofluorescence staining and an efficient way to collect data. 4) An automated X-ray film processor to more proficiently develop film previously exposed to radiolabeled biomolecules resolved by gel electrophoresis to examine alterations after specific exposure to a variety of substances; for example drugs. 5) The research students as well as all graduating seniors are required to orally present their findings and conclusions or monographs at regional meetings and or to the entire faculty. The purchase of a Polaroid Propalette would greatly facilitate the professional preparation of colored slides, an essential training for the students. In summary, this equipment would greatly facilitate the training and research experience of both our students and faculty. It is hoped that this undergraduate experience will more adequately train, prepare, and attract more students into the health professions as well as biology science teachers. The research area in neuroscience, specifically, may lead to a better understanding of the interaction between nerve cells and astrocytes, the later, which represents by far the most prominent number of cells in the central nervous system. It is thought that the formation of a glial (astrocyte) scar after damage to the brain prevents reformation of neuronal connections. This may lead to potential mechanisms for the treatment of brain injury doc13342 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa will acquire digitally-enhanced data collection and processing systems for nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) equipment. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) macromolecular protein and DNA PNA solution structure determinations; b) dendrimer characterizations; c) paramagnetic chemical systems; and d) synthetic chemistry. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including biochemistry and materials chemistry doc13343 none Historical records have shown that damage to properties and loss of lives due to extreme winds have occurred almost every year, and that at current levels, the total economic loss in the US has been estimated in the order of $40 billion per year. Most wind damages occur in low-rise buildings, yet systematic fundamental studies of wind flow over them are very few. In the proposed study, interactions between extreme winds and low-rise building are investigated experimentally on building models in a water-channel facility. Flow visualization techniques are used to gain fundamental insights into complicated wind-structure interactions, in particular, the characteristics of roof flow and base flow around typical low-rise building. The effects of wind directionality and of nearby interfering structures are also investigated. Carefully controlled water flows are produced to resemble the natural wind flow in action. Stress pattern on a building envelope is investigated using the techniques of photoelasticity. Photoelastic coating is applied on a building model, which is then tested in the water channel to reveal the distribution of stresses and their magnitudes during wind-building interaction. The ability to observe simultaneously the nearby flow field and the stress distribution on the building, resulting from fluid loading, represents a significant advance towards understanding the detailed nature of wind-structure interaction. The results of the present investigation are of fundamental importance to developing a sound engineering-science base for the design of low-rise buildings against extreme wind doc13344 none Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in conjunction with the National Science Foundation (NSF) is working to transfer the ELDORA radar and C band color weather radar from the NSF Lockheed Electra aircraft operated and maintained by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), onto one of the NRL NP-3D aircraft. NRL s experience in operating flying laboratories to support researchers in the field of meteorology and oceanography similar to NCAR s mission and expertise, and will allow the atmospheric research community to make use of ELDORA for a least another 5 to 10 years doc13345 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. James R. Hodgson, St. Norbert College (SNC), De Pere Wisconsin that funds: 1) a 17-foot electrofishing boat equipped with shocker box capacities to electrofish in both hardwater and softwater systems, 2) a backpack shocker, 3) three Multi-Parameter Monitoring systems YSI Sondes, and 4) a lap top computer). This equipment is considered to share a common research focus. Additionally, the electrofishing gear and continuous monitoring limnological instrumentation will greatly increase our versatility as an undergraduate teaching institution. The boat and backpack shocker will allow us to collect fish of different species and sizes from our experimental lakes. Monitoring fish recruitment, growth rate and diet (including tracing 13C isotope though the food web) is essential to the overall goals of the current research design. Obtaining fish diet data is central to our ecosystem approach to resolving questions relative to the importance of within-system primary production versus terrestrial organic matter in fueling lake ecosystem food webs. To answer the question to what degree do top carnivores (e.g. largemouth bass) depend on lake primary producers or on terrestrial and wetland plants as a carbon source depends on reliable means of fish collection. The multi-parameter water monitoring systems will allow us to meter a suite of limnological properties at a fine scale of all our study lakes. The YSI multi-parameter monitors will allow for measurement of whole-system gross primary production and respiration using continuous diel (daily) O2 measurements over the duration of the project in all experimental lakes simultaneously. Additionally, this instrumentation will provide continued opportunities for SNC to further develop its capacity to use the Fox River and the bay of Green Bay as a convenient undergraduate aquatics laboratory (e.g. ecology, limnology and environmental chemistry) and independent student research and senior theses. Aquatic research is one of the emphases of the faculty in biology and environmental science and with the improvement of water quality of the Fox River, sampling gear appropriate for large riverine habitats becomes an ever increasingly high priority doc13346 none Sally Kohlstedt, University of Minnesota The Nature Study Movement in Education, - In the late nineteenth century for the first time educators began to make instruction in the natural sciences an integral part of the public school curriculum down to the most elementary grades. Advocacy for and experiments with science teaching had been tried in private schools and even a few public ones, but only at the turn of the century was there a national movement to introduce the natural sciences into urban and rural publicly funded school classrooms. The most visible and widely advocated pedagogical technique was nature study and its proponents offered multiple justifications for introducing children to plants, insects, birds, meteorological observation, and other phenomena. This historical project provides the first extensive discussion of the nature study movement from its origins in the early s through the s when educational leaders called for a radically distinct pedagogical approach. The often profoundly different geographic, social, and economic circumstances of children in urban centers, in suburban locations, in small towns, and in the rural countryside serviced by one and two room schools also meant programs differed in rationale, in quality of teacher preparation, in availability of resources for teaching, and in the interests of the children. Nonetheless, there were elements that made nature study a movement, including several prominent textbooks used for teacher training and for classrooms, a specialized educational journal, Nature-Study Review, and a membership organization of administrators and teachers in the movement. Increasing standardization in normal school training and in bureaucratic urban and even state-wide school systems made implementation possible, but it was broader commitment by local communities as well as school administrators and teachers that established nature study across the American landscape, although apparently not much in the poorer schools of the South. Nature study education framed a set of principles for learning first hand about the natural world that was extended into informal settings like the Boy and Girl Scouts, the new environmental nature centers ringing urban areas, and junior clubs within the Audubon and Wild Flower societies. This project allows the investigator to spend a month doing the final research that extends the discussion of the movement to geographical locations that have not been fully investigated. It also supports the efforts of a graduate student to survey the nature study literature generated during this forty-year period, including materials from Germany. Historians of science have long noted the nature study movement, often mentioning it in passing and presuming that it was ephemeral or not highly relevant. The publications from this research establish its pervasiveness over several decades and its relationship to the dynamic changes in the natural sciences during this period doc13347 none With this award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program and the Major Research Instrumentation program, Berea College will acquire an X-ray Diffractometer (XRD) for materials research undergraduate research and education. The scientific research is focussed on the study of high temperature superconductivity, colossal magnetoresistance and magnetic transitions in perovskites and ruthenites. The program includes materials synthesis and characterization using Mossbauer spectroscopy. The XRD will enhance the materials characterization capability at this undergraduate institution. The instrument will also be used for training undergraduate students, including students from under-represented groups at this EPSCoR state. With this award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program and the Major Research Instrumentation program, Berea College will acquire an X-ray Diffractometer (XRD) for materials research undergraduate research and education. The scientific research is focussed on the study of high temperature superconductivity, colossal magnetoresistance and magnetic transitions in perovskites and ruthenites. The program includes materials synthesis and characterization using Mossbauer spectroscopy. The XRD will enhance the materials characterization capability at this undergraduate institution. The instrument will also be used for training undergraduate students, including students from under-represented groups at this EPSCoR state doc13348 none Sohraby Description: This project supports collaborative research by Dr. Khosrow Sohraby, Professor of Computer Science and Telecommunications (CST), University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC), and Dr. Nail Akar, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. The investigators will study traffic modeling and analysis and traffic engineering as applied to telecommunication networks. Queuing systems are the fundamental systems in telecommunication networks, of which traffic is the major constituent. Solution of queuing systems in most cases reduce to the solution of a certain set of structured Markov chains if the traffic and server process are modeled as Markovian processes. The two scientists have introduced a new paradigm Generalized Invariant Subspace Approach, which was used to numerically solve a set of structured Markov chains, the so-called M G 1-type Markov chains. They plan to extend the applicability of the approach to a wider set of Markov chains, used in numerical solution of queues ranging from fluid queues to random servers, and from finite capacity queues to continuous-time queues. They also plan to introduce an interdisciplinary technique using optimal control to set the foundation for a theory to synthesize path-splitting mechanisms that are used in engineering of current Internet infrastructures. Scope: This project enables two qualified scientists with complementary expertise to address a problem that is important in the management of Internet and wireless data transmission. The two scientists collaborated in the - period and produced significant results. This project will allow them to combine expertise in this multidisciplinary research field to produce a very generic engine that solves most Markovian systems that arise in the field of performance evaluation of communication networks. One or more graduate students from Bilkent University are expected to join the research at UMKC doc13349 none This award provides suppplemental funding to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Sunderesh Heragu, Principla Investigator, for the support of internationa collaborative efforts in materials handling research and education. this is a supplemental activity to the Combined research-Curriculum Development (CRCD) project entitled, Multimedia Based Tools for integration of Technology, Analysis and Design in Materials Handling Education doc13350 none This award provides partial support for acquisition of an 800 MHz Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectrometer for a group of 16 investigators. The instrument will be placed in a new center for structural biology in Baltimore along with a six-year old 600 MHz NMR; both instruments will be available for use by faculty and researchers of the University of Maryland and of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Center. The request for NSF support was submitted through an joint program of the NSF and the NIH that allows both agencies to support the purchase of very expensive research instruments that will be shared by three or more independent users. Thus, in addition to funds provided by NSF through this award, partial support for the purchase is being provided by the Shared Instrumentation Grant program of the NIH. In addition to the support provided by federal sources, the University will provide approximately $1 million of its own funds to purchase the instrument. The use of NMR for study of the structure and behavior of proteins and other large molecules has rapidly expanded in recent years as the availability of instruments capable of operating at high frequencies and field strengths has increased, and techniques for their use have been perfected. Only at the highest frequencies can instruments resolve the minute differences in the NMR signals of each atom in a large protein or nucleic acid. The minute differences allow researchers to locate the relative positions of each atom with the precision needed to establish structure at the atomic level. The users of this instrument will explore varied topics, all involving the structure and dynamics of large proteins or complexes of several proteins that require use of a very high field instrument of the type to be purchased doc13351 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation will support instrument development at the University of Florida. A group of physicists and chemists with a common need for broadband spectroscopic probing of materials with ultrafast time resolution have teamed together to develop a high brightness, high repetition rate femtosecond laser chirped pulse amplifier system capable of providing high intensity pulses over a range of wavelengths spanning 3 decades from 200 nm to 20 microns. Pulses with temporal duration approaching 10 femtoseconds and intensities nearing 100 Petawatts per square centimeter will be delivered at a repetition rate of 10 Kilohertz. In addition, the instrument will have the capability to sculpt temporal pulse shapes to produce pulse shapes on demand . Applications will include investigations of ultrafast chemical reactions in dendrimers, studies of nonlinear optical properties of carbon nanotubes, investigations of protein folding, and coherent control of solid state phase transitions and molecular motion. The instrument will be operated by a campus wide shared facility serving cross disciplinary training ground for future scientists with programs in the application of ultrafast optical techniques to problems in physics, chemistry, biology and materials. It will allso be part of a teaching activity for undergraduate studenbts in science and engineering through established NSF-funded summer REU programs. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation will support instrument development at the University of Florida. A group of physicists and chemists with a common need for broadband spectroscopic capability to probe materials with ultrafast time resolution will develop a high brightness, high repetition rate femtosecond laser chirped pulse amplifier system capable of providing high intensity pulses over a range of wavelengths. The instrument will have the capability to sculpt temporal pulse shapes to produce pulse shapes on demand . Applications will include investigations of ultrafast chemical reactions in dendrimers, studies of nonlinear optical properties of carbon nanotubes, investigations of protein folding, and coherent control of solid state phase transitions and molecular motion. The instrument will be operated by a campus wide shared facility serving cross disciplinary training ground for future scientists with programs in the application of ultrafast optical techniques to problems in physics, chemistry, biology and materials. It will also be part of a teaching activity for undergraduate students in science and engineering through established NSF-funded summer REU programs doc13352 none , Acquisition of instrumentation for marine genomics and proteomics. (NSF Major Research Instrumentation Program). PI: R.S. Burton : A grant has been awarded to Dr. Burton at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) for the acquisition of instrumentation for analyses of genes and their expression in marine organisms. The instrumentation will enable researchers to study genome-wide responses to environmental stress at both the nucleic acid and protein levels and will form a core facility for use in the research projects of ten different laboratories at SIO. Although the specific research goals vary with the laboratory, the primary questions motivating the projects are similar: What are the molecular mechanisms by which organisms adapt to specific marine environments? What impact do these organismal adaptations have on ecosystem function? Specific research projects will consist of analyses of microbial communities in the ocean, including both quantitative identification of community members and functional composition of the communities. Both free-living microbes and those involved in symbiotic relationships with invertebrates will be analyzed with a focus on adaptations to temperature, pressure and nutrient regimes. Other studies will address interactions between components of the nuclear and mitochondrial genomes of invertebrate species and signal transduction pathways across marine invertebrate cell membranes. In addition to enabling multiple specific research projects, this grant will facilitate SIO s mission of training the next generation of ocean scientists. SIO students already take a variety of genomics classes and seminars across the entire UCSD campus; yet without easy access and hands-on training using modern instrumentation, students have been unable to take full advantage of existing technologies in designing their own dissertation research programs. This grant will enhance the research and training environment at SIO so that the institution will continue to attract top faculty, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students and provide a state-of-the-art research environment doc13353 none After nine years of this alliance, we have learned what the needs of our students are, and acted to produced desired results. We will continue many of the strategies put in place over the past nine years, since they are producing excellent results! GOALS: The aims of the Mississippi Alliance in Phase III will be to: 1. Increase the number of SMET graduates from an estimated 661 to 825 by ; 2. Increase the number and percentage of minority students enrolled in SMET; 3. Increase retention rates of minority students in SMET; 4. Increase the annual graduation rate of enrolled seniors; 5. Track progression of baccalaureates into graduate and professional programs and careers; 6. Double the number of baccalaureates enrolling into graduate programs in SMET by ; 7. Double the number of minority students who earn Ph.D. degrees in SMET by ; 8. Develop institutional cultures that value diversity; 9. Forge partnerships with business and government across the state and region; 10. Leverage the federal dollars into institutionalized programs; We will continue to emphasize undergraduate education but will develop productive bridges to graduated education doc13354 none Thomas A. DeFanti University of Illinois at Chicago MRI: Development of Instrumentation for AGAVE: the Access Grid Autostereo Virtual Environment This is a proposal for instrumentation development under the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program to support research and student training in tele-immersion technologies for a networked, collaborative virtual-reality environment. The focus is on AGAVE, a tiled, high-resolution autostereo display that integrates well with very-high-speed networks doc13355 none Zhou This Major Research Instrumentation award to University of Minnesota at Duluth will provide support for acquisition of a towed, profiling vehicle with physical, biological and chemical sensors for environmental and lacustrine research. It will also support the acquisition of an instrument for studying physical microstructure and turbulence in lake waters. These instruments will be managed and operated as shared-use research facilities, available to all funded users of the UMD Large Lakes Observatory s research vessel Blue Heron, which is operated as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS) academic research fleet. UMD will contribute cost-sharing of more than 30% of the cost of this project from non-federal funds doc13356 none This dissertation research project examines how scientists involved in the debate over fallout hazards managed the necessary uncertainties in the scientific, ideological, and ethical issues of the controversy. Political and public demands for a resolution to the debate over fallout hazards placed scientists in an uncomfortable position. They were asked questions for which they had no conclusive answers then or in the foreseeable future. Scientific research on fallout hazards rested on incomplete and inconclusive data. The multitude of disciplinary and institutional affiliations of the scientists involved exacerbated uncertainties in the interpretation of the data by introducing numerous different conceptual and experimental approaches. The start-to-finish public nature of the debate added to the uncertainties that confronted fallout scientists. The politicalization of many scientists after World War 11, as well as the impact of atomic energy on American culture and foreign policy, gave rise to debate over the proper role of the scientist in society. Scientists differed not only in their scientific interpretation of the data, but also in their opinions on how and to whom their interpretations should be communicated. The fallout controversy was a prototype of future controversies over environmental and health hazards such as nuclear power and global warming. Support for this project will fund trips to examine key scientific papers and archival documents related to them doc13357 none The 27th Conference on Stochastic Processes will be held July 9-13, , in Cambridge, England. There will be 15 plenary lectures and 3 survey lectures on important, current topics in probability. This award will help support US participants, especially junior researchers and members of under-represented groups doc13358 none Echelmeyer The Principal Investigators will study the distribution of basal shear stress and basal motion through detailed monitoring of surface velocities and internal ice deformation. The hypothesis is that the distribution of basal stress is related to the internal deformation field, and that temporal changes in basal conditions manifest themselves not only as changes in surface motion, but as changes in internal deformation. Such changes in internal deformation can be relatively large given the non-linear rheology of ice and the sensitivity of basal processes to variations in effective pressure. The Principal Investigators will investigate the mechanisms of basal motion using these ideas on Black Rapids Glacier, Alaska. They have previously documented the presence of a subglacial till layer and have some knowledge of its properties. Observational and modeling studies have shown that water pressure fluctuations cause changes in the strength of this till, and that these spatial and temporal changes in basal conditions then lead to measurable changes in the ice deformation field. Six boreholes will be drilled along a cross section where the till exists, and a seventh will be drilled further downglacier. They will be instrumented with tilt sensors for continuous monitoring of borehole deformation and with pressure transducers for monitoring basal water pressure. They will also measure surface velocities across the transects, and their temporal fluctuations. The observational study will be initiated before the annual spring speed-up event and carried through the summer, when various motion events occur. Logging will then continue through the more steady conditions of the winter season. A finite element model of ice deformation will then be used to interpret these data in terms of the distribution of basal shear stress and the underlying mechanisms of basal motion throughout the annual cycle. The proposed project will take full advantage of synergetic collaboration with an existing, funded program to install tilt sensors deep in the underlying basal till at the same location as our central borehole. Taken together, the Principal Investigators will be able to obtain a more complete picture of basal processes and of the interdependence of basal motion and ice deformation. Such interdependence is usually neglected in simple models of ice flow and the response of glaciers to climate variations doc13359 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. David F. Oetinger and Steven D. Wilt at Kentucky Wesleyan College. This grant will allow the investigators to purchase instrumentation to equip a transmission electron microscopy facility. Specifically, the equipment will include a transmission electron microscope for study of cellular components--in the 1,000 to 300,000 magnification range; an ultramicrotome with diamond knife for cutting tissue sections in the range of 60 to 80 nanometers in thickness; a second ultramicrotome for preparatory work and training purposes; a glass knife-maker, also for preparatory work and training; and appropriate darkroom equipment. Dr. Oetinger will study the structure and development of ommochrome pigment granules in the cells of freshwater sowbugs (isopods). Subsequently, he will seek a better understanding of how infection with larval worm parasites (acanthocephalans) interferes- structurally and biochemically with normal pigment granule formation. Dr. Wilt is interested in the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) of vertebrate eyes-specifically the junctions between cells that form a fence, restricting diffusion of lipids and proteins between adjacent cells. He will use cell cultures and chick embryos to determine the role of tight junction molecules in the development and maintenance of tight junctions. Pigmented epidermis from an age-series of aquatic isopods will be fixed, stained, embedded and sectioned. Ultrastructural examination will assess location, size, shape and number of pigment granules within cells. In certain insects, ommochrome pigments are known to be stored waste products from tryptophan metabolism: that hypothesis will be tested for freshwater isopods (crustaceans) using concurrent biochemical extraction techniques and ultrastructural examination of pigment granules. So too, study of the relationship between developing acanthocephalan larvae and altered pigmentation will be studied at the ultrastructural level. Dr. Wilt will use a Rous sarcoma retroviral expression system to overexpress subdomains of the tight junction molecule (ZO-2). Then, using traditional electron microscopy and immunogold labelling methods, he will determine the role of ZO-2 in the development and regulation of RPE tight junctions ultrastructurally. Cellular pigments and pigmented cells play of variety of biological roles in invertebrates and vertebrates: cryptic coloration, physiological color changes, ultraviolet light screening, and as important components of visual receptors. In the isopod-acanthocephalan system, Oetinger is seeking an understanding of how a parasite can mediate changes in a host s morphology--of selective advantage to the parasite. In Wilt s research, the integrity of the retinal pigment epithelium is critical for optimal vision. A better understanding of the ultrastructural-molecular relationships that maintain that integrity is important to our understanding of the evolution of the vertebrate eye and subsequent defects in structure and function doc13360 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Mark W. Miller at the University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus to establish a Laser Scanning Confocal Microscope (LSCM) facility at the Institute of Neurobiology. This facility will be shared by the investigators and students of the ten laboratories that comprise the Institute. These laboratories utilize a variety of model systems, ranging from synapse development and specification in the cockroach to retinal aging in the human, to address some of the most challenging issues facing modern Neuroscience. While diverse in scope, these research programs are unified by certain methodological considerations and limitations. In particular, they share a need to localize specific proteins, messenger RNAs, or physiological events, within highly complex tissues. The elaborate three-dimensional structures of neurons, their remarkable phenotypic heterogeneity, and their intricate sorting and trafficking capabilities present formidable obstacles to studies requiring the precise localization of fluorescent signals or markers. In many cases, however, the limitations previously imposed by these factors have been overcome by the introduction of the confocal microscope, an instrument that enables investigators to detect and localize fluorescent signals with a resolution that greatly exceeds the capabilities of traditional microscopy. The research conducted at the Institute of Neurobiology is dedicated increasing our understanding of the structure and function of nervous systems. Specific programs include: (1) Neuropeptide Y and GABA Expression in the Aging Ground Squirrel Circadian System (Dr. N. Lugo), (2) Dendritic Remodeling of Ganglion Cells after Optic Nerve Injury (Dr. R. Blanco), Survival and Regeneration of Human Spinal Cord Neurons (Dr. D. Kuffler), (4) Ultra-fast Imaging of Subcellular Calcium Signals in Vascular Smooth Muscle (Dr. L. Santana), (5) Role of Engrailed Paralogues in Specification of Neuronal Anatomy and Synaptic Connections (Dr. J.M. Blagburn), (6) Cotransmitters and the Regulation of Complex Behavior (Dr. M. W. Miller), (7) Retinal Aging in Human Populations in Puerto Rico (Dr. E. Kicliter), and (8) Functional Role of Metabotropic Glutamate Receptors in a Rhythm-generating Neuronal Network (Dr. W. Krenz). In addition to the direct enhancement of these research projects, the proposed facility will have a broad impact on the educational goals and capabilities of the Institute of Neurobiology. Numerous graduate students affiliated with the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine and the Department of Biology at the UPR Rio Piedras campus conduct their research at the Institute. Moreover, many advanced undergraduate students receive research training by participating in an Independent Investigation course, for which they may receive both credit and funding. Finally, the Institute hosts a summer program in Tropical Neuroethology that brings undergraduate students from around the country to Puerto Rico for an intensive 5-week research experience. The creation of a shared Laser Scanning Confocal Microscope facility will clearly enrich these educational programs and enhance the training objectives of the Institute of Neurobiology doc13361 none We propose research in understanding the nonlinear dynamics of MEMS gyroscopes to achieve better gyro performance. The onset of instability in MEMS gyroscopes that is reported in the literature prevents the microgyros from operating at optimum conditions. Specifically, the mismatch between the resonance frequencies in the microgyro structure was not minimized in existing designs. Since the microgyros have very low damping, operating not at perfect resonance greatly limits the gyro performances. To remove this barrier, nonlinearity in the system must be considered since the system dynamics near resonances is well-known to be greatly affected by nonlinear effects even though these nonlinear effects are otherwise small. We also propose development effort to find better fabrication techniques to make thick structures for the microgyros. This is purely motivated by the simple fact that microgyros are inertia sensors and thicker structures will accentuate the Coriolis force and make the signal detection more immune to the noise associated with the signal amplification. Despite the tremendous amount of research and development effort on MEMS inertia sensors, the crucial research results are not available in the literature. Much of the know-how about microgyro designs remains proprietary. Through the proposed research, we hope to provide the research community our findings about the design considerations and innovative fabrication techniques for the microgyros. Moreover, by involving both graduate and undergraduate students in this research and incorporating MEMS in the engineering curriculum, we hope to better prepare students for the work force. Moreover, by taking advantage of the existing program called Diversity in Engineering at University of Missouri, we hope to interest more under-represented minority students in engineering doc13362 none For reasons of cost, scale, function, and foreign policy, the governments of Japan and the United States are increasingly relying on each other as partners in what were previously considered to be primarily national technological projects such as defense and space. Through a comparative study of U.S.-Japan collaboration in environmental remote-sensing satellites and fighter aircraft, this dissertation research project analyzes how the practices and processes of building technological systems constitute intergovernmental relations that are often subsumed under the label of alliance. No previous academic study in English or Japanese has addressed this question in an empirical fashion. The project uses an interdisciplinary theoretical approach drawing from the fields of science and technology studies, technology management, and international relations theory. The contention is that an understanding of technological practices in collaborative projects is essential for interpretations, explanations, and prescriptions about the political role of technology. Scientists, engineers, and program managers create transnational technological practices and technologies that bring together knowledge and politics to build a heterogeneous and multifaceted alliance. Between state and transnational community, a U.S.-Japan alliance is built with technology doc13363 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Perrine at Anderson University to enable undergraduate students to experience research opportunities in the fields of genetics and cell biology. The goals of the study are to educate students in modern research principles and prepare them for careers in biotechnology, as well as to further understanding of paramyxovirus-mediated cell fusion. Paramyxoviruses, such as Respiratory Syncytial Virus, cause upper respiratory infections. These viruses gain access to cells in the respiratory tract by fusing with the cell membrane. The viral proteins responsible for this fusion show similarities to the fusion proteins of influenza virus and HIV. The genetic experiments will focus on the relationship between the sequence of the primary fusion protein, F, and function. The gene sequence of the cloned F gene will be altered by substitutions, deletions, and additions. The altered protein will be expressed in an artificial system that allows easy visualization of the extent of fusion. In this manner, the relationship between specific changes and the ability to fuse cells in the reporter system will be detailed. The cell biology experiments will focus on the characteristics and requirements for fusion, including the time course of expression, the requirements of pH and temperature, and the role of protein modifications. In addition, different types of cells and different paramyxoviruses will be tested for their ability to undergo fusion. This project will enrich student s undergraduate education and prepare them for careers in the research fields of genetics and cell biology. They will experience research opportunities on a similar, but smaller scale, to what is being done in major research institutions around the country, including Eli Lilly and Roche Pharmaceuticals that are located in the geographical vicinity of Anderson University in Indiana. Many of these students will continue post-graduate education in areas of medicine and biotechnology. This project will also contribute to the understanding of viral infections. Several viruses, including the paramyxoviruses, influenza, and HIV, use fusion to gain access to the cells of our bodies. An understanding of the requirements for viral fusion enables researchers to prevent infection by preventing fusion. These studies will find practical application in the development of vaccines and anti-viral therapies doc13364 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Colby College will acquire a X-ray diffractometer with CCD detector for small molecule diffractometry. This equipment will be used by five educational institutions in Maine: Colby College, Bates College, Bowdoin College, the University of Southern Maine and the University of Maine. The X-ray CCD diffractometer will enhance research in a number of areas including 1) studies of copper-arene chemistry; 2) development of new synthetic methods of selected natural products; 3) synthesis of polycyclic cage compounds with unusual architecture; 4) structure-function relationships in metalloenzymes and metalloenzymes mimics; and 5) production of C-2 symmetric lanthanocene catalyst systems and their utility in the construction of chiral molecules. The X-ray diffractometer allows accurate and precise measurements of the full three dimensional structure of a molecule, including bond distances and angles, and it provides accurate information about the spatial arrangement of the molecule relative to the neighboring molecules. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, including organic and natural products synthesis plus biological, organometallic and materials areas of inorganic chemistry. The instrument will play a major supporting role in the research efforts of all of the participating institutions, which range from bachelor s level to Ph.D.-granting schools. In addition, the diffraction system will be used for the formal education of students in advanced chemistry courses utilizing the capability of the diffractometer to be run off site doc13365 none for Proposal No. Hybrid recording is a new recording paradigm that seeks to overcome fundamental physical limits of existing magnetic and optical recording technologies. Hybridization combines thermally assisted magnetic writing with giant magnetoresistive readback, to circumvent the physical limits of both magnetic and optical recording. This approach breaks the coupling seen in magnetic recording systems among the size of a bit, the field required to write it and the length of time for which the information is stable. Thus, magnetic grains in the medium smaller than 10 nm can be stabilized, which is a critical advance for reaching densities of 1 terabit in2 and beyond. These advances will only be possible, however, if a plausible head design is demonstrated that integrates magnetic write poles with a localized source (probably optical) of thermal energy. An essential insight being pursued for this technology is how to apply magnetic write fields and heat, as well as perform MR readback with a single packaged device from a single side of the disk. It is the goal of this project to design, prototype, and test devices suitable for this application. Specific novel devices that will be investigated will include two-dimensional mode-index lenses, and near-field optical antenna structures. The Data Storage Systems Center (DSSC) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and GOALI collaborator, Seagate Technology, has extensive experience in the design and implementation of new head designs. The collaboration on head fabrication will include a program of co-design with Seagate researchers, joint wafer fabrication, and post-fabrication modification of existing heads. It is anticipated that the result of this academic-industrial collaboration will be a demonstration of a plausible integrated head design for hybrid recording, which will remove an important barrier to the advancement and eventual commercialization of this technology doc13366 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Dupras and colleagues at the University of Central Florida to acquire an isotope ratio mass spectrometer (IRMS). This instrument is a specialized class of mass spectrometer designed to measure, with high precision, small differences in natural abundances of the light stable isotopes (non-radioactive types of carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, oxygen and hydrogen). The primary application for this instrument is to measure naturally occurring stable isotope ratios in tissues of plants, humans, and other animals. In recent years, these stable isotopes have become essential tools in investigations in physical anthropology, archaeology, ecology, and conservation biology. Stable-isotope analysis is especially valuable in reconstructing diets since the isotope ratios in animal tissues reflect the isotope ratios of the foods consumed. Estimating the diets of humans and other animals with this type of instrumentation allows investigators to reconstruct environments, examine patterns of health, determine differential use of alternative foods, and detect patterns of migration. The research activities planned for this instrumentation include projects in several disciplines. The specific activities in anthropology and archaeology include: reconstructing the diet of past inhabitants of the Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt, in order to understand human bio-cultural adaptation to the harsh Saharan ecozone; determining differences and changes in diet among the inhabitants of ancient Maya sites, such as Caracol, Belize; and, analyzing patterns of prehistoric human migration. The research in ecology and conservation biology include: investigating predator-prey interactions, feeding relationships, and energy flow in the small mammal communities of coastal Florida; determining current and historical diet of Canada lynx across their range for use in developing conservation strategies for this endangered species; and, tracing the source of the diet of Florida manatees to determine feeding habits, as well as the historical foraging strategies, of this endangered marine mammal. This grant is a cooperative effort by faculty in several different disciplines to acquire basic equipment that has become integral to their fields. Recent advances in technology (decreasing the time and cost of analysis) and an increased recognition of the utility of stable-isotope ratios have promoted a dramatic increase in the use of this technique to reconstruct diets and trace the flow of energy and nutrients in ecological communities. The purchase of an IRMS for researchers at the University of Central Florida will speed the process of scientific inquiry on already existing scientific collections, and will enhance interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary scholarship. The IRMS will also have implications for undergraduate and graduate education at UCF. Use of the IMS in multi-disciplinary lab techniques courses will provide practical, hands-on experience for graduate students and advanced undergraduates; students trained in stable isotope analysis will have valuable expertise in this rapidly expanding field. Thus, the acquisition of an IRMS also will strengthen the connections between teaching, learning, and research at UCF doc13367 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. E. H. Peterson and four co-PIs at Ohio University for the purchase of a laser scanning confocal microscope for biological research. Confocal microscopy is an essential tool in modern life science research, particularly in molecular biology and neuroscience. With it, the investigator uses one or more lasers to illuminate tissues, and computerized imaging to record and analyze the resulting data. The confocal microscope will be configured with four laser lines and specialized software for three-dimensional image reconstruction and quantification and for measurement of physiological processes. Costs of the confocal microscope will be shared by Ohio University and the Ohio Board of Regents. The confocal microscope will serve several federally funded research programs including (a) biomechanics of receptors in the inner ear, (b) molecular analyses of plant cell wall function, (c) interactions between endothelial cells and nanoparticles that can be used for drug delivery, (d) biochemical and physiological precess in insects, (e) neural networks in simple biological systems, (f) transgenic tomato and tobacco cells, and (g) calcium dynamics in epileptic brain tissues. The new confocal microscope will serve faculty and students in three colleges and six academic departments. It provides a state-of-the-art imaging facility for graduate and undergraduate student training in a traditionally underserved area: rural Appalachia. Ohio University s primary mission is undergraduate education, and the science and engineering departments have a strong tradition of mentoring undergraduate research through intramural programs and federal grants. The new confocal microscope will be available to these students through their research projects with science and engineering faculty. In addition, it will enhance existing course offerings and research training for the university s science and engineering graduate students doc13148 none Subject: Elgar Herbers Guza abstract Funds are provided for development, testing, and improvement of circulation models driven by wave propagation and wave-breaking in the presence of abrupt nearshore topography. These will be tested using data collected from a California field site with two offshore canyons. Specific objectives include: determining how surface gravity waves propagate across a complex inner shelf topography, determining how bathymetrically-induced alongshore variations of the wave field affect shoaling, breaking, and nearshore circulation, and determining the characteristics of mass exchange between the surf zone and the inner shelf in the presence of abrupt topography. Four waverider buoys over the outer and mid shelf will provide offshore wave boundary conditions for the models and characterize the refraction over the outer shelf. Pressure cells at mid shelf will identify reflected waves from Scripps Canyon. PUVs (pressure and velocity sensors) and acoustic doppler current profilers (ADCPs) over the inner shelf will characterize inner shelf and surf zone circulation and wave fields. Drifters will be deployed and tracked. Moderate wave and low wave situations will be compared in an attempt to isolate flows induced by the canyon in the absence of wave forcing. The buoys, pressure cells, and PUVs will provide estimates of the evolution of the directional wave spectrum for comparison with model output. Various inner shelf models, including the NOPP community model, will be compared to the field data doc13369 none Field The objective of this research project is to develop a denitrification bioreactor using H2S as the main electron donor for the simultaneous removal of carbon, nitrogen and sulfur from refinery condensates. The denitrifying bioreactor will be the first stage of a two-stage biological process followed by a nitrification reactor, supplying nitrate via effluent recirculation. Under the joint NSF-CONACyT program, this project forms part of an international collaboration with the Mexican Institute of Petroleum (IMP) and the scientific research funded by this grant will provide a basis for the IMP to develop the proposed technology. This research is needed due to the complex microbial ecology of the system. This research will characterize the microbial consortium in the condensate-fed denitrifying bioreactor. Subsequently, the strategies of controlling the reactor to maximize the removal of sulfide, phenols and nitrogen will be identified. The effect of phenols on the autotrophic denitrification process will be studied. An important aspect of the research will be to control the oxidation of sulfide to form insoluble elemental sulfur, instead of complete oxidation to sulfate, so that it can be physically separated for reuse doc13370 none With this award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program State University of New York at Stony Brook in partnership with several other universities and Argonne National Laboratories will build an optimized, high-resolution inelastic x-ray scattering beamline at the Advanced Photon Source. The instrument will be completely dedicated to this technique, and as such will be the only general-purpose meV resolution x-ray scattering spectrometer in the United States. It will serve a large community of users working on many different problems: dynamics of matter at very high pressure, picosecond dynamics of soft condensed matter and biological systems, high temperature superconductivity, etc. It will be of high system resolution of 0.8 meV (FWHM), and be able to probe a large range of wave vectors, up to several inverse Angstrom. The design is dictated by the desire to reach sub meV energy resolution. This requires the use of diced (segmented) crystals in backscattering geometry for analyzers, a novel nested monochromator to produce a very clean resolution function, and a cryogenically cooled monochromator for maximum x-ray flux. The analyzers must be located eight to ten meters away from the sample, which dictates a large hutch and novel spectrometer designs. The instrument will be available to members of the collaborative access team (CAT) as well as to a broad group of independent investigators. For the hundred years since their discovery, x-rays have enhanced our understanding of the invisible world. The most familiar example is direct imaging of specimens ranging from the cardiac arteries of a beating human heart to pipeline welds and airplane baggage. The technique has enabled us to understand and control how the fundamental principles of how atoms fit together to make molecules, the materials of our daily lives (minerals, steel, semiconductors), and the fundamental elements of life (DNA and proteins). All of these techniques depend on using x-rays in one way or another to take snapshots of a sample. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Program to SUNY Stony Brook supports the development of an emerging technique involving the use of x-rays to measure dynamics (motion) of atoms on time scales that are inaccessible to other techniques. Among the problems to be studied are sound waves in solids at conditions in the core of the earth, the way that liquids freeze, and the way that proteins fold once they are formed. Many of the most interesting applications require measuring the energy of the x-ray to a precision of one part in thirty million. This requires very special instrumentation, and the very intense source of x-rays available at the Advanced Photon Source. There is currently no such dedicated beamline in the US. The instrument will serve a broad community access team users, with a planned strong outreach program to involve people who are not technical experts in x-ray optics. Furthermore, it is planned to be the most intense and highest resolution inelastic x-ray scattering station in the world doc13371 none Rogers Digital receiver technology to design, build, test and apply a 327 MHz array radio receiver optimized for the detection and characterization of hyperfine deuterium line in the spectra of radio sources across the sky will be completed. Measurement of the Deuterium line feature may enable the determination of the D H ratio at different parts of the sky. The D H ratio and its distribution probe fundamental physical parameters that reveal important factors in our understanding of the evolution of the Universe. The instrument development, in particular the digital receivers, RFI mitigation, beam forming, beam steering will serve as a pathfinder for the next generation ground-based radio telescopes. There is significant student participation doc13372 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Iowa will acquire a tunable solid-state laser system for applications in atmospheric chemistry, aerosol analysis, process monitoring and reaction dynamics. This equipment will be utilized in the following applications: a) laser-based probes of heterogeneous atmospheric chemistry; b) single particle mass spectrometry in real-time; c) real-time analysis of CO in fuel cell engines; d) reaction dynamics and spectroscopy of metal ion-molecule clusters; and e) photochemistry and spectroscopy of charge proton-transfer complexes. A laser provides a directed beam of coherent monochromatic visible or infrared light, which enables researchers to obtain with unprecedented detail, important information about fast chemical reactions and or the structure of molecules. Its use may enable breakthroughs in our understanding of the properties of reactive and nonreactive molecules. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas such as atmospheric chemistry and combustion chemistry doc7564 none The question of whether infants and older toddlers differentiate the world of objects into fundamentally similar kinds of categories has persisted for decades, largely due to the absence of methods for assessing categorization that are effective across a wide variety of ages. The concepts of preverbal infants must be examined through techniques that are independent of language, while language production and comprehension typically are vital to the assessment of toddlers early concepts. Determining whether younger and older infants possess similar types of concepts is relevant to broader questions concerning the degree to which cognitive development is continuous or discontinuous. On the one hand, differences between the category extensions of infants and older toddlers may be due to different methods of assessment or to different levels of experience with objects. Even within a single age group, infants may produce different patterns of category extension across different categorization tasks because the tasks vary in terms of attentional and other information-processing demands. On the other hand, fundamental differences may exist between prelinguistic infants and older infants who know names for things because they possess qualitatively different representational systems. By this account, within-group variations in categorization emerge because different procedures tap different categorization processes. This research will introduce a new method, a comprehension measure of associative generalization, that is intended to help determine the basis for between-group and within-group variations in categorization during infancy. In this method, preferred looking will serve as an index of infants understanding of conceptual boundaries and will correct for methodological problems associated with production-based responses such as imitation and labeling. Throughout three consecutive phases of the project, the comprehension measure of associative generalization will be used to explore infants understanding of the toy replicas often used in studies of early categorization as symbols for the corresponding real objects, and to differentiate among three alternative developmental sequences in the emergence of concepts: (1) Domain-first: Infants early concepts are global in nature (e.g., at the level of animal or vehicle) and broad concepts control infants associations of category properties; (2) Basic-first: Infants initial concepts are at the basic level (e.g., dog, cat, car, or truck), and domain-level generalizations obtained through production-based imitation tasks are attributable to overextensions of basic level categories; and (3) Variable specificity: Infants possess rudimentary knowledge that different types of properties are aligned with categories at different levels of specificity. The last would imply that certain properties are generalized at the basic level, and others are generalized at the domain level; such awareness would constitute evidence for rudimentary understanding of the asymmetry of class inclusion relations. The development of a comprehension-based analog to productive imitation measures has tremendous potential to serve as a methodological bridge between tasks appropriate for younger infants (e.g., habituation) and tasks suitable for older toddlers (e.g., naming, successive touching). Such a tool will enable researchers to sensitively test the degree to which categorization processes remain stable throughout the first two years of life and will provide useful data for the development of intervention programs aimed at facilitating early lexical development doc13374 none A Theoretical and Computational Basis for Micro-continuum Field Theories: From Atomic Model to Continuum Theory James D. Lee Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering The George Washington University The objective of this proposed research is to enhance the scientific understanding of and to establish a profound theoretical foundation for mechanics of materials with micro-structure and micromotion. It includes: (1) the construction of a unified theory for micro-continuum based on statistical mechanics, molecular dynamics, nonlocal theory, polar theory and thermodynamics. It will be capable of explaining and predicting a large class of microscopic phenomena in which the ratios of the external to internal characteristic length and time approach unity; (2) the development of a computational basis, including finite element method and molecular dynamics method, for the above-mentioned theory; (3) the applications of the theory through the computer simulations to the fields where the effect of length scale is predominant to the material response doc13375 none The ubiquitin (Ub) 26S proteasome proteolytic pathway plays an integral role in the growth, development, homeostasis, and defense of plants by selectively removing abnormal polypeptides and short-lived regulatory proteins. In this pathway, proteins are first covalently tagged with Ubs; these substrates are then degraded by the 26S proteasome with the concomitant release of the Ubs for reuse. The Ub-protein ligases (or E3s) determine the specificity of Ub conjugation and hence control the selectivity of the system. Their importance in plants is best demonstrated by the fact that the Arabidopsis genome encodes over 900 different E3s. Preliminary genetic analyses of just a few have identified important roles for E3s in hormone and stress responses, light signaling, circadian rhythms, enzymatic regulation, and pattern formation. To help define the depth and breath of ubiquitination in plants, this project will analyze the Arabidopsis E3 families in detail. Bioinformatic approaches will be used to assemble the E3s into subfamilies. For representative examples, protein interaction techniques will assign each with appropriate accessory factors and biochemical assays will confirm that each has Ub-ligase activity. Their expression patterns and locations will be examined by DNA microarrays and by analysis of GFP-E3 fusions. Yeast two-hybrid and mass spectrometric techniques will identify possible substrates. Functions will be further explored by the phenotypic analysis of appropriate Arabidopsis mutants. All information will be released to the scientific community in a freely accessible public web site (http: www.hort.wisc.edu vierstra vierstra1.htm). The results generated will form an essential framework for understanding E3 diversity, help reveal specific functions for each E3 type, and will develop a database of proteins whose abundance is affected by Ub-mediated proteolysis. Collectively, the project will provide comprehensive information on a large and important cluster of Arabidopsis genes proteins that ultimately can be used to devise new strategies to alter proteolysis when it interferes with crop productivity doc13376 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Kalamazoo College will acquire a nanosecond laser system. The research activities will involve measurement of vector correlations in the photodissociation of volatile organometallic nitrosyls, especially the correlations between angular momentum and velocity and between the transition dipole and velocity. The results obtained in these experiments will reveal the role of Jahn-Teller distortions in excited organometallic nitrosyl compounds and may reveal the timescale for metal-NO dissociation. These results can be extended into understanding chemical vapor deposition and NO-metal interactions in biological systems. Student researchers at this primarily undergraduate institution will participate in these studies. A nanosecond laser provides ultrafast pulses of coherent visible or infrared light, which enables researchers to obtain important information about fast occurring chemical reactions. Its use may enable breakthroughs in our understanding of the properties of reactive and nonreactive molecules. These studies will have an impact in materials chemistry and biochemistry doc13377 none Scheel This Major Research Instrumentation award to Alaska Pacific University will provide support for development of an autonomous underwater vehicle for study of marine animal behavior. In collaboration with researchers from University of Arizona and Colorado School of Mines, the team will develop a remotely-controlled vehicle for following and recording by video technique the behavior of tagged individuals of the Giant Pacific Octopus, Enteroctopus dofleini. Once developed and tested, it is expected that this instrumentation may be applied to behavioral and ecological research on a wide array of marine organisms, many of which are very difficult for humans to observe directly in their native habitats doc13378 none Melchiorre This grant, made through the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, provides partial support to purchase a Finnigan MAT DELTAplus stable isotope ratio mass spectrometer with GasBench II. This equipment will be a key part of our Environmental, Hydrology, and Geochemistry program for both undergraduate research and the research of the P.I. Instrumentation will be housed within the newly renovated $32 million Julian Science and Mathematics Building at Depauw University. The requested equipment will serve growing student interest in environmental geochemistry as well as ongoing collaborative research on acid mine drainage and basin hydrology with the Indiana Department of Natural Resources (IDNR) and Indiana Geological Survey (IGS). The P.I., his students, and colleagues will also utilize the spectrometer for research on deep basin groundwater and formation fluid migration. Ongoing projects with significant student involvement includes studies of contaminant transport from acid mine drainage sites within Indiana (with IDNR and IGS), studies of surface water groundwater interactions in the Wolf-Red (Wisconsin) and Tippecanoe-Wabash (Indiana) watersheds, isotopic studies of groundwater systems in fracture-flow and karst environments in southern Indiana, and studies of tectonic-driven formation fluid migration in California. Faculty at DePauw University with separate funding will make significant use of the laboratory to examine fluvial sediment transport and systematics and to participate in the Indiana Riverwatch Program. As a member of both the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) and the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS), the P.I. is firmly committed to promoting student participation for those groups traditionally under-represented in the Earth Sciences. This commitment is echoed and supported by DePauw University, and efforts are underway to link the environmental stable isotope laboratory with DePauw s Women in Science Program and to participate in projects with Native American Tribal Colleges in evaluating the isotope hydrology of the Red-Wolf river basin of Wisconsin. This environmental stable isotope facility will be open to in house use as well as outside students and colleagues doc13379 none Diane J. Cook University of Texas at Arlington MRI: Instrumentation for Intelligent Agent and Wireless Computing Research This is a proposal for equipment acquisition under the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program to support research and student training on intelligent agents in a mobile environment. The Wireless Intelligent Simulator Environment being established will integrate software agents, human agents, and robot agents, so that physically distributed interacting agents can perform a variety of tasks cooperatively or competitively doc13380 none Kippelen This proposal is to acquire a highly specialized organic thin film deposition system for the development and characterization of new organic electronics and nanophotonic materials. The instrumentation will impact not only research in Optical Sciences, but is also considered to be critical in the training of students in Chemistry and Physics, through established and pending collaborations between these three departments. The Principal Investigator (Kippelen) was recently awarded an NSF CAREER Program on Organic Photonic Materials and Plastic Optoelectronic Technologies, an ECS grant # and is engaged in several multidisciplinary research programs with faculty from The University of Arizona (Optical Sciences, Chemistry, and Physics) through programs funded by federal sources (AFOSR,DOE, NSF, ONR) and by industrial contracts (3M, Durel Corporation, eMagin, Intel, and Nitto Denko Corporation). The acquisition of the proposed low temperature organic thin film deposition system will complement existing high temperature deposition systems that are used for the deposition of inorganic materials and will become a key building block in the research capabilities of the Optical Sciences Center at The University of Arizona, a Center that has one of the nation s finest teaching programs in optics at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. With this new instrumentation, students and postdoctorals will be able to create multifunctional organic materials for optical storage, displays and imaging -- three technologies expected to significantly impact both local and regional economies in coming decades. The development of processable, low cost, high performance organic materials and well trained students will play a key role in enabling such technologies. Instrumentation of this type does not exist currently on this campus, but is compatible with technologies developed recently in Chemistry (Armstrong). A true symbiosis between this proposed facility, and the materials characterization capabilities in Chemistry, is anticipated. With the proposed organic thin film deposition system, the P1 will capitalize on recent breakthroughs in photorefractive and light-emitting polymers made possible by collaborations between faculty of the College of Science and the Optical Sciences Center to carry out research in the following areas: (i) highly efficient and reliable organic electroluminescent displays and organic lasers; (ii) photorefractive polymers for applications in communications and information processing, including dynamic holographic storage, and imaging; (iii) organic based photovoltaic technologies; (iv) nanometer thick patterned organic layers for organic field-effect transistors; and (v) organized nanostructures for nanoelectronics. The goals of these programs are to establish the foundations for an understanding of charge injection, charge transport, charge trapping, and light-emission in organic molecules and at interfaces with metallic electrodes. These advances will lead to new materials and disposable devices on light weight and flexible substrates that can be mass produced at low cost. The ability to fabricate organic films with nanometer thickness control is essential for the advancement of new and improved organic photonic technologies. Current deposition systems at Optical Sciences for organic materials are limiting the performance of devices under investigation and the pace at which new samples can be produced. The SPECTROS system offered by the Kurt J. Lesker Company has been specially designed for the low temperature deposition of organic materials. It combines four sources for the evaporation and co-evaporation of organic materials with two sources for the deposition of metallic contacts. This unique system enables the fabrication of organic multilayer optoelectronic devices and their electrodes without breaking the vacuum or having to transfer samples between small bell-jars in a glove-box assembly. Since exposure to air and moisture is a critical parameter in determining the intrinsic optical and electronic properties of organics, this system will provide us with the capabilities required to compete with other research groups at the National and International levels in an area of intense global competition doc13381 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Ron Milligan at The Scripps Research Institute to purchase an electron microscope. This is an advanced research instrument that can be used to record images of biological specimens at magnifications of up to 500,000X. The instrument will be used to visualize and image proteins and large assemblies composed of many different molecules that occurs inside cells and enable them to carry out various functions. The research of the user group focuses on three-dimensional (3D) molecular microscopy: determination of the near-atomic, secondary, tertiary and quaternary structure of molecules and macromolecular assemblies by cryo-electron microscopy and image analysis. The common goal of the user group is to calculate 3D structures of biological molecules and macromolecular complexes to determine how they work. Some of the work to be carried out on the instrument includes investigations of: proteins that bind to microtubules and stabilize them, motor proteins that move along microtubules, toxins from bacteria that punch holes in cells, proteins that facilitate fusion of membrane-bound compartments in cells, protein assemblies that read off (transcribe) the genome in the nucleus, membrane proteins that act as pumps, channels or signaling complexes, and plant and animal viruses. The superior performance of the new microscope is essential for getting the best possible results in these studies. The work to be undertaken is of fundamental biological importance. The results will provide insight in to many of the basic processes that occur inside cells and are essential for life. At The Scripps Research institute, the instrument will be used by 6 research groups. 12 postdoctoral associates and 6 graduate students will receive advanced training in structural biology using this instrument. 10-20 research professionals will use the instrument in the course of their work. Visiting researchers from elsewhere in the US and overseas are anticipated. The proposed new instrument will be integrated into existing EM management plan as well as training, education and outreach activities at The Scripps Research Institute. This will create a unique research and training facility, which will have a major impact on the regional, national and international research infrastructure doc13382 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Stone at Southern Oregon University to purchase major instrumentation for the establishment of an interdepartmental biotechnology center. Equipment includes a genetic analyzer (automated DNA sequencer), superspeed centrifuge, autoclave, chromatography cabinet, water filtration system, vacufuge concentrator, incubated shaker, microfuge, circulating baths, incubator, fume hood, and safety hood. Faculty in the biology and chemistry departments will develop a biotechnology center to create a supportive work environment without need for duplication of equipment. This center will house equipment and supplies needed for diverse research activities using molecular methods, provide functional bench space, and serve as a forum for interaction between faculty and students working on diverse projects that share common methodology. Research will be conducted on a range of organisms including bacteria, higher plants, invertebrates, and vertebrates. Research training will be extended to faculty and students who may update or expand their skills in molecular techniques. The areas that will be investigated span from biochemistry, developmental biology, and environmental microbiology to molecular systematics, conservation genetics, population biology, and molecular evolution. Specific research projects include: a. identifying and monitoring bacterial levels in local streams and determining possible pollution sources. b. studying the evolution of American martens using DNA sequencing and the taxonomic status of a rare subspecies of martens found in California. c. identifying bacteria associated with an exposed vein of pyrite and other bacteria involved in acid drainage from pyrite. d. developing an inexpensive, reliable method of producing high volumes of conotoxins, which are possible models for future pharmaceuticals due to their biochemical properties. e. investigating the roles of specific genes in the development of garden peas. f. investigating the evolutionary development of floral components. g. studying the genetics of variants of noble firs and firs found on Mt. Shasta which may represent hybrids between California red firs and noble firs. examining diversity of plant and microbial species on serpentine soils which have high concentrations of heavy metals such as nickel, cadmium, and chromium. characterizing the structure and function of common mycorrhizal networks on white oak. Southern Oregon University is a small, non-Ph.D. granting university whose faculty is primarily engaged in teaching. As a small college focused on quality undergraduate education with a relatively high faculty to student ratio (1:18), their students have the opportunity to be mentored individually by faculty in a way that is usually only available to graduate students. This represents a great advantage to those students who wish to explore laboratory research. All students have the opportunity to do research, and much of this research is carried out as senior capstone projects. In addition, increasing numbers of students are attracted to the prospect of jobs in biotechnology fields and the new frontiers biotechnology makes available to medicine. This biotechnology center will provide students with saleable skills needed to attain tech-level positions in industry or to further their education by attending graduate or medical school doc13383 none Caton, Daniel B. An astronomical telescope and dome system for research and training students will be developed at Appalachia State University. Appalachia State University is a small non-PhD granting institution dedicated primarily to teaching. Research will be centered on measurements of eclipsing binaries and the detection of planets at the L4 and L5 points within eclipsing binary systems. The telescope will also be used to measure planet occultation of stars to characterize planets doc13384 none This project, in conjunction with similar support from ARO, ONR, AFOSR and DoE will support travel expenses to facilitate participation of roughly 50 graduate students to the 14th U.S. National Congress of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. This workshop is held every four years under the auspices of the U.S. National Committee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics and this year it will be hosted by the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. It will provide a setting for exchanging ideas, cultivating friendships, renewing acquaintances, building networks, and educating graduate students. Key and distinguished individuals from industry, academe, and government, from all over the world will be invited to give keynote lectures and presentations in the workshop. A special emphasis will be placed on the emerging fields of nanoscience, wave propragation in heterogeneous media, fluid-structure interaction and Mechanics Education. Every effort will be made to select both an ethnically and scientifically diverse group of students to represent all areas of theoretical and applied mechanics doc13385 none King This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) award will allow the investigators to assemble a cost-effective and technically sophisticated instrument platform for coordinated biogeochemical investigations in lakes. The platform is based in a Godfrey Marine pontoon boat equipped with: four on-line FIA-based instruments (Fe, H2O2, and nutrient analysis), CTD (temperature, depth, conductivity, pH, eH, O2, fluorescence), GPS navigation, and a vibracoring system. This instrument provides the capability to measure multiple geochemical parameters in the water column and sediments over a range of scales - both temporal (seconds to centuries) and spatial (cm to km). Fieldwork will be concentrated in the Belgrade Lakes, where both general types of Maine lakes coexist and can be compared. The integrated sampling and analysis platform will be used to investigate the spatial and temporal distribution of iron, H2O2,, NO3-, and PO43- in these lakes. Critical to this investigation is an estimate of nutrient inputs from ground waters and historical burial of nutrients as it pertains to internal nutrient loading. Fluid flow through the system will be modeled using Visual MODFLOW software calibrated against actual physical and chemical fluid flow over seasonal, and watershed scales. Vibracores of watershed sediments will be obtained using the platform. Using standard sedimentological techniques a detailed historical record of the transition from marine to freshwater conditions will be developed. Stratigraphic elemental analyses across the basins, reflecting long-term temporal and spatial changes, will be mapped and assessed. Using these data, coupled with similar chemical data obtained on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis, lake geochemical dynamics will be evaluated over several scales. Student participation is an integral part of this study. Student research assistants will help with all aspects of the project during the summer months. In addition, approximately 40 students a year will actively use the integrated sampling and analysis platform as part of two Geology and two Chemistry courses. Analysis of data over a range of space and time will be used to draw connections between the research projects. Such research efforts will provide the linkages between what students generally consider unrelated disciplines, helping them to recognize that Earth processes are system processes doc13386 none In the US, various transportation systems, including long-span cable suspension bridges, have been allowed to deteriorate because of inadequate investment in maintenance and life extension technology, and particularly because of clearly insufficient support for research in the area of structural assessment and protection. In-depth inspections of the main cables in the suspension bridges in the New York metropolitan area have found a quite large number of broken wires inside the cables and at the anchorage, showing extensive deterioration and brittle fractures. These findings pose the difficult task of determining the actual strength of main suspension cables in existing bridges. The safety evaluation of suspension bridge cables has always been done considering as a safety factor the ratio between the estimated cable strength over the computed ultimate load. However, in view of the many uncertainties involved with the cable deterioration pattern and with wire corrosion mechanisms, and considering the relatively small proportion of wires that are inspected and or tested, such a safety factor is useful only as a first approximation, but not in assessing the overall safety of the bridge. A better and more appropriate measure of the overall safety of main suspension cables is the use of probabilistic indicators such as the reliability or the safety index. Without a well-defined methodology for estimating the residual strength of an existing cable, suspension bridge owner agencies do not have a clear idea of what to search for in a cable inspection and so they base their maintenance program mainly on previous experiences and on trial and error attempts. This grant proposes to go beyond the objectives of the NCHRP Project 10-57 by developing a comprehensive methodology for a rigorous safety appraisal of the cable system in existing suspension bridges. The ultimate objectives of this study will focus on 1) the estimation of the actual residual strength and of the actual safety of main cables in suspension bridges based on results of inspections and laboratory testing of cable wires, and on 2) the prediction of the remaining useful life of suspension bridge cables using the same results. In this way, the estimated overall safety of the cables of different bridges can be directly compared. A new cable model that accounts for limited and different ductility of the corroded bridge wires will also be developed, using a probabilistic framework to account for the random nature of the deterioration pattern. The determination of the statistical parameters to be used in the new prediction model will be done using a unique set of inspection and test data, collected over 30 years of bridge testing by the Carleton Laboratory at Columbia University, and on the results of current research projects on wire deterioration. This project will make a significant contribution to the bridge engineering community with the introduction of a more rigorous description of the overall safety and remaining useful life of main cables in existing suspension bridges doc13387 none Acquisition of a Preparative Ultracentrifuge and Tabletop Superspeed Centrifuge for Faculty Mentored Undergraduate Research and Training in Biology University of St. Thomas, Dept. of Biology, Houston, TX A grant has been awarded to Dr. Romagni at the University of St. Thomas to acquire a preparative ultracentrifuge and supporting desktop superspeed centrifuge. It includes the cost of several necessary rotors, service for three years, and required training for personnel using the equipment. This instrumentation is an important component of departmental research strategy and fills an obvious void in the current undergraduate biology research program. The equipment will by used by undergraduate students at the University of St. Thomas, an ethnic minority serving undergraduate institution with a majority of women students, in independent research projects and in the classroom. These investigations are part of a faculty student mentoring approach that has grown out of work originating in biology classes, and or to research that is tied to the foci of various faculty. The equipment will also be integrated into such introductory biology classes as General Biology and, more intensively, in upper division undergraduate classes, such as Molecular Ecology, Cell Biology, Plant Physiology, Plant Physiological Ecology, and Biochemistry. Current faculty research that will utilize the acquired instruments include the molecular ecology and population dynamics of marine invertebrates used as indicators of estuarine water quality. They will also investigate the population genetics of several insect vectors of plant disease, in particular, whiteflies. Another area of research includes studies of whitefly-vectored viruses of plants. Finally, the equipment will be used for the ecophysiological biochemical studies of plant secondary metabolites, the elucidation of their modes of action and their potential as environmentally friendly pesticides. With these funds, many of the current projects that require subcontracting of non-campus personnel to run experiments or that require faculty to complete some work off-campus, will be completed at the University of St. Thomas. This is a clearly advantageous for students who require a comprehensive laboratory experience as part of their science education. Not only will funding allow students to complete entire experiments protocols themselves, it would also enable them to gain valuable technical skills for future work in the biological sciences and complete projects for publication in peer reviewed journals. Finally it will permit faculty to undertake research activities currently not possible because of the lack of centrifuge capabilities at their institution doc13388 none As a grass genome model, the Sorghum genome (~760 Mb) is the most logical complement to that of rice (~420 Mb), a distant relative that will be the first grass genome to be completely sequenced. Sorghum is an important bridge to closely-related large-genome crops in its own tribe (Andropogoneae) such as maize (~ Mb) and sugarcane (~ - Mb). Analysis of the levels and patterns of genomic diversity within and between sorghum, sugarcane, rice, and maize (and others) promises to advance understanding of the biology and evolution of Poaceae grain and biomass crops, and create new opportunities for their improvement. Data and tools from rice will aid in completion of a robust sorghum physical map and also serve as an important point of comparison to identify, and gain insights into, the basis of genomic diversity. Comparative tools will foster the extension of these results to neglected crops such as Bermuda grass and millet, and to noxious weeds such as Johnson grass. Deliverables include a sorghum physical map that will support individual gene isolation and or complete sequencing in sorghum and other genomes aligned to sorghum by comparative data. The physical map will also integrate genetic, comparative, cyto-molecular and diversity data into a rich Web-accessible resource to identify and study the footprints of selection associated with plant evolution and crop improvement. A sorghum-sugarcane EST comparison is of far-reaching importance, shedding light on genes that differentiate grain and biomass crops that sustain humanity. Research is closely-tied to strong training and outreach programs with a successful history of engaging groups under-represented in the sciences, as well as K-12 students and undergraduates doc13389 none The Virtual Cognition Laboratory at Saint Anselm College was established in to support faculty research and undergraduate research training in Cognitive Psychology, Sensation and Perception, and Consciousness, as well as develop innovative, hands-on laboratories for related courses. This grant supports upgrades and expansion of the Virtual Cognition Laboratory. Today, the Virtual Cognition Laboratory Research Center has two testing computers with related peripheral devices and an EEG station to support three different programs of research: gender differences in navigation, developmental models for place learning, and the impact of daytime sleepiness on attention. In addition, the Virtual Cognition Laboratory Education Center has another six computers to support hands-on laboratories for students to complete as part of their requirements for a variety of courses. Since the inception of the Virtual Cognition Laboratory, the development of software, hardware, and peripheral devices to support highly immersive virtual reality environments (IVEs) has grown at a rapid pace. In order to offer faculty and students a state-of-the-art facility to conduct research and support research training, the laboratory will be enhanced to include two new high speed computers, software, and peripheral devices. The peripheral devices include two different delivery methods, i.e., head mounted display versus dome. The acquisition of this equipment will support both ongoing and new research activities in the following areas: developmental models for place learning, individual differences in linear optical trajectory strategies, and the impact of daytime sleepiness on a variety of cognitive processes. The Virtual Cognition Laboratory will facilitate interdisciplinary research activities on our campus and collaborations with investigators from other institutions. The Virtual Cognition Laboratory will also support research training for undergraduates and provide them with the opportunity to use state-of-the-art equipment to develop their technical skills. Finally, the Virtual Cognition Laboratory will continue to serve as a resource center for faculty to develop new laboratory modules for their courses doc13390 none Malloy This grant, funded through the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program provides support for the acquisition of a combined gas chromatography (GC) and high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) system for undergraduate research and training at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, TX. This system will be used initially for environmental and other research projects conducted by faculty and undergraduate students in Chemistry and Environmental Studies. The system comprises an automated HPLC with an autosampler, diode array detector, and a gas chromatography system with a GC autosampler system, computer and associated software, which will operate as a common interface between the two systems. In addition, maintenance supplies and a service contract are included in the grant. The initial projects supported by this equipment grant include trace detection and measurement of air pollutants, particularly those related to ozone formation, an issue of prime importance in the Houston area. Related research includes analysis for similar types of oxygenates in ozonated drinking water. The second project has to do with analysis of components in wine samples from the sophomore organic laboratory. Winemaking has been included as part of the organic curriculum for over 20 years and this addition will allow integration of analysis for various components, including multifunctional components, to be integrated as special projects in the laboratory. The automated nature of the instrumentation will allow efficient processing of the 50+ wine samples in a short time period. The third project involves the investigation of HPLC methods for the detection and quantitation of carbamates and related species in drinking water. Once the method development stage is complete, samples of local drinking water will be analyzed for the presence of these analytes and the contamination level determined. The fourth project is the use of chemical analysis in conjunction with the development of a Foraminiferal Laboratory. The environmental studies program at the University is actively engaged in research concerning the use of both benthic foraminifera and ostracodes in the determination of water quality in the environments of the bays of the Texas coast. This equipment acquisition will complement and supplement work on GC MS equipment for both electron ionization and positive and negative chemical ionization already present in the department. In addition to research projects, the automated nature of the equipment will allow integration into normal laboratory course work. Recent collaboration on projects with a member of the Biology department has led to future possibilities for use of this equipment doc13391 none Apomixis, defined as asexual reproduction through seed, is widespread among angiosperm families although 75% of the apomictic species are found in three plant families, Poaceae, Rosaceae, and Asteraceae. The plant materials examined in this proposal are members of the Poaceae family, the most important crop plant family in the human food chain. All crop plants in this family reproduce sexually, although wild relatives of maize, wheat, and pearl millet may undergo asexual (apomictic) reproduction. Seeds formed on an apomictic plant contain genetically identical embryos, thus the trait has significant potential for preserving hybrid vigor from one generation to the next in highly productive crop plant genotypes. In Pennisetum squamulatum and Cenchrus ciliaris meiosis typically aborts and unreduced aposporous embryo sacs form from nucellar cells. Genetic mapping studies in Pennisetum have revealed that the locus for the formation of unreduced embryo sacs resides in a chromosomal region with a low recombination rate. Based on genetic map information, positional cloning of gene(s) responsible for apomictic reproduction in Pennisetum is in progress. Transcriptional mapping will use the tools that have been developed for physical mapping of this region and will also use the well developed molecular tools from related diploid model species such as sorghum and rice. The exploration of colinearity in this region between two model diploids and two apomictic species will focus on highly conserved gene sequences. Candidate reproductive or novel genes in this region will be compared for their expression profiles among apomictic and sexual genotypes species. This research will provide an example of the transfer of genomic information from small-genome grasses to non-recombining regions of large-genome species doc13392 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Whitworth College will acquire a 750 Hz narrow-band argon fluoride laser. This equipment will enhance research in the following areas: 1) development of a laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) system to analyze wear on carbon-based ion thruster grids in situ; and 2) measurement of the dissociative resonance Raman spectra of several interesting molecules that photodissociate at 193 nm. Researchers from several area institutions (Gonzaga University, Eastern Washington University, New Light Industries) would also use this laser system to carry out studies on nonlinear materials, photoacoustic spectroscopy of bacteria and to develop high-spatial frequency gratings for templates in the growth of controlled orientation colloidal photonic crystals. Undergraduate students at Whitworth, Gonzaga and Eastern Washington will be heavily involved in the research efforts. A high repetition rate laser provides pulses of coherent visible or infrared light and enables researchers to obtain important information about fast occurring chemical reactions. Its use may enable breakthroughs in our understanding of the properties of reactive and nonreactive molecules. In particular, LIF is capable of detecting very small quantities of carbon atoms in the plumes of ion thrusters. This will allow for a rapid diagnostic test for wear in these advanced thruster systems. A switch to carbon-based thrusters will significantly increase the efficiency and lifetime of the ion thrusters, resulting in tremendous cost-savings doc13393 none SGER Bradshaw, An Archive of Viki, A Home Reared Chimpanzee SES 01- Beginning in , Catherine and Keith Hayes raised Viki, a common chimpanzee, as if she were a human infant. The experiment continued until Viki s untimely death in of viral encephalitis. During that time, Catherine Hayes kept a detailed daily diary of Viki s behavior, collected numerous photographs of the project, along with unpublished book chapters and manuscript materials. This is the most important cross-rearing project of its kind, given the length of the effort, the quality of the investigators, and the thorough documentation of the project. Catherine Hayes (now Catherine Nissen), preserved these extensive records of the project. She is now suffering from Alzheimer s disease, and is reluctant to make any permanent arrangements for the disposition of these invaluable scientific records. Her daughter, Diana Hovey, believes it is possible to negotiate such an arrangement. This project supports a visit by the PI to meet with Catherine Nissen in Middleton, WI, in the near future. The goal is to arrange for a donation of these invaluable scientific records. Photocopies of all material are to be made, along with copy photographs of images. The project supports an undergraduate student to conduct the preliminary sorting of the copied materials. The PI also intends to negotiate with an institution, according to Ms. Nissen s wishes, for a permanent home for the extensive records of this singularly important research project doc13394 none Poslusny This grant, made through the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, provides support for the acquisition of state-of-the-art instrumentation which will be used to integrate research on the Kanawha River Project into the educational experience of undergraduate environmental science majors at the University of Charleston (West Virginia) and K-12 students and teachers within the Appalachian region. Specifically, a graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrophotometer (AAS) and a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer (GC MS) will be purchased. The AAS will be used to carry out metal studies on the Kanawha River. Students will measure trace levels of lead, mercury, cadmium and also monitor other metals, including calcium, iron, magnesium, and tin. The GC MS will be used to determine levels of organic pollutants in the river, including polychlorinated biphenyls, chlorinated dioxins and furans, pesticides, and polyaromatic hydrocarbons. This instrument will also be used to help identify other contaminants in the river. A series of river-based research projects will enrich the educational experiences of undergraduate environmental science majors at the University of Charleston. The instrumentation will also be used in ongoing outreach projects that will bring area teachers and students on campus to participate in a variety of environmental science experiments and research activities doc13395 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Kirk, Houde, Darnell, and DebBurman in the Biology Department at Lake Forest College to acquire a state-of-the-art multi-imaging system to further biological research and enhance the undergraduate biology curriculum. Faculty in the biology department currently utilize molecular techniques to research basic aspects of biology such as chromosome replication, neural development and degeneration, and the evolution of sexual behavior. The multi-imaging system will allow the department to transition from conventional analyses of protein and DNA to a highly sensitive and quantitative approach utilizing fluorescent and radioactive signal detection. Faculty-student collaborative research and teaching at Lake Forest College relies heavily on the use of modern molecular techniques in order to visualize a particular class of DNA or protein, separated from all other molecules of its kind. For example, Dr. Karen Kirk studies the interaction of specific proteins that bind to telomeres, the ends of chromosomes, in the cell cycle of the protozoan, Tetrahymena. Dr. Diana Darnell studies the expression of certain genes affecting neural development in chick, and Dr. Shubhik DebBurman studies the effects of protein-remodeling factors on human disease-associated proteins in yeast. Dr. Anne Houde will initiate a new molecular fingerprinting project in her ongoing studies of the evolution of sexual behavior and color polymorphism in guppies. The multi-imaging system is so versatile that it can be used in all these research contexts. Data will be collected much more efficiently and quantitatively from a variety of techniques, including agarose and acrylamide gel electrophoresis of nucleic acids and proteins, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), colony library screening, and Southern, Northern, and Western blotting. Acquisition of the multi-imaging system will allow more rapid processing of the data and hence greater throughput in laboratory procedures and will extend quantification capabilities to allow faculty and students to employ new experimental approaches. Lake Forest College and its Biology Department are committed to an educational mission that stresses integration of research and teaching and provides an environment in which students can engage in original, publishable research. Students majoring in biology at Lake Forest College receive training in modern research methods through these research programs and through their course work. The undergraduate biology curriculum emphasizes student-designed investigation using current technology. This kind of environment in small colleges has been shown to contribute disproportionately to the pool of future research scientists. Lake Forest College has a strong track record in collaborative faculty-student research and will benefit substantially from the availability of a state-of-the-art multi-imaging system. Ultimately, the enhancement of the research and training capabilities of the biology department will help attract larger numbers of talented students interested in research and research careers. Currently, the majority of biology majors at Lake Forest College are women and a significant number are minority students. The college is strongly committed to recruitment of under-represented groups and improved research facilities will help to achieve this goal doc13396 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Wheeling Jesuit University will acquire an Anasazi EFT-NMR conversion package, which will allow the department to upgrade an obsolete nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer (NMR) to a Fourier transform (FT)-multinuclear system. Faculty at Wheeling Jesuit are synthesizing indium and gallium dithiocarbamates for photovoltaic applications, and this equipment will allow them to identify products and impurities. The instrument will also be used by undergraduates for their required thesis research and in their course work. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry doc13397 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Ellen Brisch at Minnesota State University Moorhead (MSUM) to build on our microscopy capabilities by upgrading our current Olympus IX-70 brightfield phase contrast microscope. The funding provided by this grant will allow us to incorporate cell injection, image capture, image analysis and high quality figure preparation capabilities into our teaching and research. This equipment will be shared between the PI; Dr. Ellen Brisch, and three Co-PIs; Dr. Chris Chastain, Dr. Joseph Provost and Dr. Mark Wallert. The equipment and instrumentation this grant will fund includes: a cell injection system, additional immunofluorescent filter cubes and high quality 100x objectives, a software package which will enable us to detect and quantify subtle changes in pH, an isolation table and motorized stage, state of the art Macintosh computers for image analysis and figure preparation, and microscopy training workshops. All four investigators are engaged in undergraduate teaching and training. Our current goals are to provide a state of the art education to our undergraduates by training them on state of the art equipment and also to bring our research programs to a higher level. The research programs led by the investigators vary. Dr. Brisch s research program focuses on how the replication and segregation of a critical cellular organelle, the mitochondrion, is coordinated during cell division. Dr. Brisch plans to examine a collection of yeast cell cycle mutants--yeast cells that fail to complete the cell division cycle correctly--by staining mitochondria and observing them with fluorescence microscopy. Dr. Chastain s research program focuses on understanding enzyme activity in the C4 photosynthetic pathway. Dr. Chastain plans to examine the distribution of a C4 photosynthetic enzyme in a C3 plant by employing immunolocalization studies. Drs. Wallert and Provost collaborate significantly in their research efforts. Their research program focuses on how mitogenic signaling pathways alter intracellular pH. They plan to perform cell injection experiments by microinjecting a variety of interfering agents designed to alter specific cell signaling pathways. They plan to quantitate the presence or absence of subtle pH changes after interfering microinjections by observing levels of immunofluorescence. Sophisticated software designed for calcium ratioing will be used for their data acquisition and analysis. MSUM is a regional comprehensive university that is committed to providing high quality research opportunities for undergraduates. The equipment and training package proposed in this application will be used to enhance the research programs of Drs. Brisch, Chastain, Provost and Wallert. It will provide their students with an advanced level of training. These projects will involve 25-30 students per year. These students will present their work at local, regional and national meetings and publish their results in review journals. Nearly 70% of the students involved in these projects will be women, and our history suggests that approximately 80% of them will continue their education in graduate or professional schools. In addition, an even greater number of students would have exposure to this state of the art equipment, as it would also be used in a number of our upper division courses. Involving students in research and incorporating research-based exercises in our teaching laboratories enhances not only the student s education, but also the effectiveness and success of our university doc13398 none For complex nanocomposite systems, the modeling and prediction methodology must cover length scale from molecular (nanometer) to meso and macroscale. The goal of this proposal is to improve and expand computational mechanics of a nanocomposite system using the experimentally determined nanomechanical properties and incorporating them into meso and macroscale models. Specifically, we propose to develop a multiscale model to simulate mechanical responses of nacre, a biomimetic layered nanocomposite of organic and an inorganic components. Numerical models using three-dimensional finite element analysis will be developed for predicting nonlinear and time dependant response of the nanocomposite. Advanced computational facilities (NCSA supercomputers) and experimental facilities (high resolution scanning probe and transmission electron microscopy, vibrational spectroscopy) will be utilized for this research. Results of this research will result in potential criteria for practical, simulation-based materials design of scalable and complex (hybrid) composites containing both a soft and a hard component using the concepts of both biomimetics and nanotechnology doc13399 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Allan, Bushar and Hearn at Arcadia University (formerly Beaver College) to conduct DNA sequence analyses of select organisms belonging to the Plant and Animal kingdoms. Dr. Allan will analyze evolutionary relationships among plant species in the Pea Family to better understand their origin and diversification in specific mediterranean environments. The study will entail analysis of DNA sequences generated by an automated DNA sequencer, and will result in the construction of a molecular phylogeny (DNA-based family tree) for approximately 150 species, some of which are agriculturally important. Dr. Bushar will conduct DNA sequence and microsatellite (tandemly repeated DNA sequences) studies to understand factors that impact the structure, variation and long-term viability of North American rattlesnakes. Dr. Hearn will use DNA sequence information to augment her work on the conservation management and evolutionary relationships of large forest mammals and nesting marine turtles on Bioko Island, Equatorial Guinea, West Africa. Methods used in this research include: the isolation of genomic DNA from different study organisms (plants, snakes, mammals); identification of target gene regions in nuclear, chloroplast and mitochondrial DNA; and the generation of DNA sequence information using a Genetic Analyzer (DNA sequencer). In the plant study, DNA sequence information will be used to generate molecular-based phylogenies, in conjunction with computer-based algorithms. These data will address questions relating to the origin and diversification of plants endemic to different mediterranean regions including western North America, Chile, the Mediterranean, western Australia and South Africa. In rattlesnakes, both DNA sequence information and microsatellite loci will be applied to genetic comparisons of spatially isolated North American species. These data will provide valuable information on the genetic structure both within and between snake populations. Relationships among large forest mammals will be analyzed using DNA sequence data in conjunction with computer-based phylogenetic analyses. These data will contribute to the conservation management of large forest mammals and nesting marine turtles on Bioko Island. The primary purpose of these DNA sequence studies is to enhance undergraduate education in biology at Arcadia University. DNA sequence technology is rapidly becoming the method of choice for a broad spectrum of biological-based questions. The development of new pharmaceutical drugs, the identification of virulent flu viruses, research on the AIDS virus, the human genome project and conservation management of biodiversity are just a few examples of studies that use DNA sequence technology. By incorporating DNA sequence methods into plant biology, advanced genetics and molecular biology courses, students will gain an understanding of the wide application DNA technology has to diverse biological questions. Students will be trained both in theoretical and applied analyses of DNA sequence data. An additional goal is to offer courses in advanced laboratory techniques to faculty from other small liberal arts colleges and to high school teachers. Ultimately, this research program constitutes a powerful heuristic tool for educating and training the next generation of young scientists and teachers. This program has a direct benefit to the public by training students who will teach and conduct research on problems that directly impact human society doc13090 none Widely distributed in animals, plants and microbes, O-glycoside hydrolases (EC 3.2.1.-) are enzymes that catalyze the cleavage of chemical bonds between two or more carbohydrates or between a carbohydrate and a non-carbohydrate moiety. Responding to the challenge of the Project to identify the function of all Arabidopsis thaliana genes within the next decade, this collaborative research will focus on approximately 75 members of two related families of glycoside hydrolases (http: www.biol.vt.edu faculty esen glycosidase.lab.html and http: afmb.cnrs-mrs.fr ~pedro CAZY ). Family 1 includes beta -glucosidases (EC 3.2.1.21) and myrosinases (EC 3.2.3.1), which function in higher plants in chemical defense against herbivores and pathogens, lignin biosynthesis, and plant growth and development. Family 35 contains the beta -galactosidases (EC 3.2.1.23), which play key roles in fruit ripening, flower senescence, mobilization of carbohydrate reserves, and galactolipid turnover. To date, the precise biochemical roles of only three of these Arabidopsis hydrolases are known with certainty. The purpose of this multidisciplinary collaborative research is to assign biological functions to beta-glucosidases and beta-galactosidases encoded by the Arabidopsis genome. After using phylogenetic analysis to identify subfamilies that contain closely related enzymes, cDNAs encoding each target hydrolase will be obtained. Each hydrolase will then be overexpressed in foreign host (e.g. yeast and bacteria) cells and purified to ascertain its biological function by measuring its enzymatic activity toward a wide range of natural glycosidic substrates isolated primarily from Arabidopsis and related crucifers for this purpose. In parallel studies, three-dimensional structures of selected subfamily representatives will be determined by homology modeling and x-ray diffraction, providing novel insights into how these hydrolases recognize and bind their substrates. This information will be of paramount importance in future research to alter the substrate specificity of Family 1 and Family 35 hydrolases for biotechnological purposes, including biomass conversion and improvements in anti-herbivore defenses and fruit ripening doc13401 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Steven James and Dr. Kazuo Hiraizumi, co-principal investigators at Gettysburg College, to procure two major items of equipment through the Major Research Instrumentation Program of the NSF. A computerized system that integrates photodocumentation with image analysis and a preparative ultracentrifuge will allow the two faculty and their students to conduct research that cannot be executed with the equipment currently available at Gettysburg College. The goals of this grant are to expand the scope and quality of training in molecular and cellular biology for undergraduates. Gettysburg College provides a research-intensive learning environment for undergraduates in the sciences. Experiential, hands-on learning is encouraged by requiring student-faculty collaborative research for the B.S. degrees in Biology and Biochemistry Molecular Biology (BMB). Students in these degree programs write a research prospectus, spend at least a full semester on their research, write a scientific paper on their work that is evaluated by faculty, and present their research to their peers during an end-of-semester colloquium. All BMB majors are required to conduct individualized research and over 60% of Biology majors choose the B.S. track; a substantial number of these students go on to graduate school. The instrumentation procured with NSF support will allow undergraduates working with Drs. James and Hiraizumi to perform cutting-edge research, thereby giving them excellent preparation for graduate school and careers in science. The focus of Dr. James research is the regulation of the cell cycle, a carefully orchestrated series of events that coordinates chromosome replication with nuclear and cell division. Dr. James studies the role of genes that regulate this process, using as a model system the bread mold Aspergillus. The focus of Dr. Hiraizumi s research is population and evolutionary genetics of gene regulation. He studies genes that code for a group of digestive enzymes called peptidases, using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Both faculty employ techniques of molecular genetics, cell biology, and biochemistry in their research. In these fields, a most fundamental question involves the relationship between the DNA sequence of a gene and the function of the protein that it encodes. Mutations in the sequence of DNA often cripple or destroy the resulting protein, which can produce devastating effects. To understand the relationship between DNA sequence, protein function, and the physiological effects of mutations requires sophisticated instrumentation for isolating molecules and measuring their activity. First, the ultracentrifuge provided by support from this NSF-MRI grant will enable isolation of large amounts of maximally pure DNA and protein. This preparative ultracentrifuge subjects particles or molecules to high centrifugal force and separates them based on differences in their density, size or shape. Second, the photodocumentation image analysis system will be used to measure the activity of both normal and mutant proteins. These proteins will be isolated and purified using the ultracentrifuge, or by a different technique called gel electrophoresis. Gel electrophoresis separates molecules through a gel matrix subjected to electrical current. DNA can also be separated in this manner. To detect and measure the molecules of interest, they are chemically stained or radioactively labeled. The resulting signals are stored as electronic files, which can be analyzed for quantitative differences with a high degree of sensitivity and precision. This helps to determine which genes are turned on under various conditions, how much of the protein is present, and whether there are differences in the activity of a protein between genetically different individuals. The research conducted by these faculty and their students addresses questions that have potential medical applications. For example, many genes that regulate cell division can undergo mutation that leads to cancer. In all organisms, cell division is governed by a similar set of genes. Thus, investigating the regulation of genes that control cell division in a simple, easy-to-study model organism such as Aspergillus aids in understanding the molecular and cellular processes leading to cancer in more complex, less tractable organisms such as humans. Recently, scientists discovered surprising similarity in the DNA sequence of human and fruit fly genes. A mutation in a peptidase-coding gene could produce debilitating effects, such as a form of neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis, a fatal hereditary neurodegenerative disease in humans. The use of the fruit fly peptidases as a model provides information on how mutations affect the physiological function of these enzymes in other organisms, including humans. Thus, with support from the NSF-MRI grant, Gettysburg College undergraduates will benefit from expanded opportunities to perform modern research on relevant biological problems. These experiences will in turn prepare them for graduate studies in molecular and cellular biology and careers in biomedical research doc13402 none Sznaier Robust control of linear time invariant systems has undergone extensive developments in the past two decades, leading to powerful formalisms such as H8, u-synthesis analysis and, more recently, l1optimal control, that have been successfully applied to challenging practical problems. In contrast, tools for handling linear parameter varying plants have just emerged and are still far from complete. An open issue, central to many practical problems, is the non-conservative handling of constraints, both on the outputs and in the control action. The proposed research is aimed at addressing this issue by incorporating into the LPV frame-work the capability to deal exactly with a broad class of performance specifications and model uncertainty. Specifically, the objectives of the proposed research are: O Development of an analytical framework for synthesizing robust LPV systems subject to hard constraints. This framework should exhibit the following properties: (a) Handle control and output constraints in a non-conservative fashion; (b) Identify the intrinsic limits of performance of the system as well as the limiting factors; and (c) Result in computationally tractable procedures leading to practically implementable controllers. O Application of the resulting theory to several problems spanning a broad spectrum of applications such as active vision and oil prospection. The proposed research will combine elements from functional analysis, viability theory and dynamical systems theory, following an approach successfully used by the co-PIs to handle constraints in the case of LTI systems. Preliminary results indicate that this approach leads to a framework with the desired features. The PI expects that this research effort will result in an expanded robust control framework for LPV systems, capable of addressing realistic problems necessitating neither potentially conservative approximations nor multiple trial and error type iterations. Moreover, in addition to advancing the state of the art in control theory, he expects that by removing some of the limitations of currently available LPV tools, it will foster progress in related areas. An example is computer vision, an area where recent technological advances have rendered a number of practical applications feasible, provided that certain related control issues can be resolved. These applications range from intelligent highway systems to remote surgery and have the potential to broadly impact society. The proposed research will also have a direct bearing upon the quality of graduate and undergraduate education both at Penn State University (PSU) and the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana (UAM). In addition to direct student involvement and incorporation of the results into the curriculum, it will allow students from the UAM to use state-of-the-art computer vision equipment available at PSU, while Penn State students will benefit from having access to proprietary data and experiments from the Mexican Petroleum Institute doc13403 none MacDonald This award supports theoretical research and education directed mainly toward the electronic properties of metals and semiconductors. The PI will continue a broad based research program on (III, Mn)V semiconductors, quantum Hall systems, high temperature superconductors, aromatic molecular crystals, carbon nanotube systems, and properties of exotic solid state q-bits. Work on (III, Mn)V semiconductors aims to develop a reliable theoretical description of transport and magnetic properties. Work on quantum Hall systems involves developing quantum field theory models for quantum Hall ferromagnets at integer fillings, investigating possible explanations of the huge longitudinal resistance discovered at Landau filling of 2 3, exploring a real-space picture of composite fermion correlations, and exploring a theory of double superfluidity and its possible extensions to the high temperature superconductors. This award also contributes to broad and rounded educational experiences in condensed matter theory at the undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels. %%% This award supports a broad-based research program in theoretical condensed matter physics. The work attacks a wide range of open problems in quantum Hall systems and ferromagnetic semiconductors with possible repercussions on the fields of high temperatures superconductivity, and the emerging field of quantum computing. This award directly contributes to the emerging fields of spintronics and nanoelectronics that may form the basis of future electronic device technologies. The PI is also committed to providing broad educational experiences in condensed matter theory from the undergraduate level on up doc13404 none DYNAMIC FAILURE OF FUNCTIONALLY GRADED MATERIALS: EXPERIMENTS, ANALYSIS AND SIMULATIONS Project ID No.: CMS- PI: Glaucio H. Paulino; Co-PIs: John M. Lambros and Philippe H. Geubelle This project involves an integrated study including experiments, analysis and simulations to develop a fundamental understanding of the effects introduced by material property gradients on the static and dynamic fracture behavior of functionally graded materials (FGMs). Two distinct material systems, exhibiting brittle-to-ductile transitions will be used: polymer-based (ECO) and ceramic metal based (ZrO2 steel) FGMs. A detailed investigation of the effects of microstructure as a function of manufacturing processes and processing history on the macroscopic properties of the FGM will be conducted. The modeling involves development of a novel cohesive volumetric finite element (CVFE) code tailored for FGMs. All the work is developed in conjunction with an educational program doc13405 none Popp This Major Research Instrumentation award to University of Hawaii Manoa will provide support for acquisition of an isotope-ratio monitoring gas chromatograph mass spectrometer system and related instrumentation for researchers at the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. It is expected that the new instrumentation will foster interdisciplinary approaches to a broad range of problems in isotopic research in marine chemistry, geology and biology, and related environmental sciences. University of Hawaii will contribute cost-sharing of more than 33% of the cost of this project from non-federal funds doc13406 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation program, Tennessee Technological University will acquire acquire a variable pressure scanning electron microscope with an energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) attachment and ancillary sample preparation equipment for multidisciplinary, integrated research and education. The instrument will provide a core facility for all departments in the College of Engineering, the College of Arts and Sciences and Tennessee Technological University s three State funded Centers of Excellence. Specific ongoing research or proposed research in the following areas will benefit: (1) hydration kinetics of waste materials in portland cement, (2) controlled deposition of boron on silicon from solid dopant sources, (3) fracture toughness determination by fractographic observation, (4) fatigue crack front evolution tracking, (5) in situ mechanical testing of microelectromechanical (MEMS) devices, (6) point defect and fracture mechanics of Laves phases, (7) environmental embrittlement of intermetalic alloys, (8) novel coatings for interconnect materials in solid oxide fuel cells, (9) trophic interactions between Legionella and protozoa, (10) interactions of protozoa and mycobacteria species, (11) community structure of protozoa, and (12) identification and characterization of microfossils. The new facility will also be used to enhance existing laboratory opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, further develop ongoing NSF funded Course Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement projects and promote greater interaction with local area elementary and high schools. With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation program, Tennessee Technological University (TTU) will acquire acquire a variable pressure scanning electron microscope (SEM) with an energy dispersive spectroscopy attachment and ancillary sample preparation equipment for multidisciplinary, integrated research and education. TTU serves Tennessee and the surrounding states by providing a highly ranked regional university environment. As such, the TTU faculty is primarily involved in applied research serving the regional industrial community. The acquisition of instruments, such as the proposed scanning electron microscope, enables TTU to achieve its mission and obligation to this community by providing state-of-the-art facilities to train students, to conduct applied research for industrial constituents and to attract and conduct basic research. The new SEM is to be a core facility in support of a wide range of ongoing and future interdisciplinary research and educational activities at TTU. Current research programs include utilization of waste in portland cement, development of materials for advanced fuel cell applications, fundamental studies regarding the mechanical behavior of metals and ceramics, microbiology of pathogen-cell interactions and single cell animal behavior and investigation of microfossils. The new facility will also be used to enhance existing laboratory opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, further develop ongoing NSF funded Course Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement projects and promote greater interaction with local area elementary and high schools doc13407 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Christina King-Smith (Principal Investigator) and Drs. Michael McCann and Karen Snetselaar (Co-Principal Investigators) at Saint Joseph s University (SJU) to acquire a transmission electron microscope (TEM) with digital imaging capabilities, an ultramicrotome, and ancillary equipment. The requested ultramicrotome will be used by faculty and students in the Biology Department for cutting ultrathin sections of biological materials which will be examined and characterized at very high magnification using the TEM. The electron microscope will also be used by members of the Chemistry and Physics departments for qualitative analysis of metallo-organic compounds and electron diffraction. The requested equipment will replace the currently available, antiquated EM equipment and will be housed in an existing Light and Electron Microscopy suite in the Biology Department. It will be available for use by all faculty and students in the Departments of Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Environmental Science as the cornerstone of an Advanced Image Analysis and Processing Center, which is proposed as part of a planned Science Center renovation program at SJU. The requested instrumentation will therefore serve both to update existing research tools and as a centerpiece for a programmatic initiative involving all of the Natural Science departments. The research activities that will benefit from this instrumentation span several disciplines in the Natural Sciences. In the Biology Department, one project focuses on the protein skeleton of retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells, a type of cell found in all vertebrate eyes. These cells are used as a model system to investigate mechanisms for transport of components through the interior of a cell, a basic cellular activity in nearly all animal and plant cells. Another research project will characterize the structure and organization of photoreceptors from the compound eyes of mantis shrimps, invertebrate animals which have extremely unusual and complicated eyes. This project will compare structure of eyes from different species of mantis shrimp found at different depths in the ocean, with the goal of discovering the structural adaptations these organisms make to maximize their visual capabilities under low light conditions in aquatic environments. The instrumentation will also be used to investigate cellular structures and life cycle events of the corn smut fungus, a pathogenic fungus of corn. Studies will include characterization of the structures the fungus uses to infect corn plants, and other features of its life cycle. The interaction between this fungus and corn represents a useful model system for understanding general mechanisms of how pathogenic fungi interact with their host plants or animals. Another project will focus on patterns of cartilage mineralization in sharks. This research has developmental and evolutionary significance, since the mineralization of cartilage in organisms such as sharks is important in understanding the origin of vertebrate skeletal tissues. Microbiological research will also make use of the instrumentation through the study of an unusual bacterium that is a predator of other, larger bacteria. These studies focus on the genes and proteins involved in the development and growth of this organism. This basic research will contribute to the understanding of fundamental patterns of genetic control of development. Researchers in the Chemistry and Physics department will use the TEM for qualitative studies of non-biological materials. One project in the Chemistry department is centered on understanding the chemical transformations that occur to organic pollutants in the environment. These studies will involve the examination of the size, shape, and physical properties, discovered by electron diffraction, of metallic particles that are formed as a result of the interaction between metallic compounds and organic pollutants. This research will enhance our knowledge of the behavior of pollutants in the environment. The overall significance of the research activities that will benefit from the requested instrumentation lie principally in the areas of basic biological and chemical research. The cell biological studies, microbiological research, and fungal pathogen studies will all contribute to our general knowledge of the way cells function, extending from single-celled organisms such as fungal pathogens and bacteria, to cells from multicellular organisms, such as RPE cells from vertebrate eyes. The ultrastructural studies on shrimp visual systems and mineralization of cartilage in sharks will expand our basic understanding of structural adaptations and development of visual systems and bone. The use of this instrumentation in materials research to investigate the reaction product of metallic compounds and organic pollutants will provide insight on how these pollutants react in the environment, with potential benefits to environmental pollutant remediation. In addition to these advances in research, this award will also have significant impact on the quality of research training for undergraduate and masters level students. Students involved in research at SJU work alongside faculty on the research projects described above. The electron microscope and digital camera will interface with all of our existing image analysis and processing equipment, and thus will greatly increase our productivity and ability to train undergraduate and masters level students in digital electron microscopy doc13408 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program to Kent State University supports the acquisition of a glove box system for an organic semiconductor processing and characterization facility. Organic semiconductors will play a central role in a variety of scientifically and technically important processes and devices including xerography, light emitting diodes, photovoltaics, thin film transistors and photorefractive media. The physical properties of these organic and organic-inorganic hybrid materials often differ significantly from those of the well known inorganic semiconductors. In order to understand the basic physical properties of these organic materials a facility for purification, deposition and device fabrication with time of flight and microwave conductivity mobility analytical capabilities is being assembled. This facility will permit the creation of device structures from novel materials in a highly controlled environment so that the intrinsic properties can accurately and reproducibly be examined. The facility will be ideal for student training as it provides a highly interdisciplinary This award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program to Kent State University supports the acquisition of a glove box system for an organic semiconductor processing and characterization facility. Organic semiconductors present major and largely unexplored opportunities for the improvement of a variety of electronic devices. To exploit these materials a sophisticated facility comprised of several components for the characterization of novel materials and systems based on organic molecules is being assembled. A glove box with an integrated and highly versatile thin-film deposition system will provide a clean environment for material purification and device (e.g., field effect transistor) fabrication. These novel systems will then be evaluated using state-of-the art electronics and optical characterization tools including tunable laser sources, microwave conductivity instrumentation and a powerful temperature-dependent x-ray diffractometer for structural determination. These facilities will provide a rich interdisciplinary training environment for students and post-doctoral researchers doc13409 none One of the most fundamental biological roles of the pancreatic hormone insulin is to promote cellular uptake of glucose and other fuels from the blood and extracellular spaces. The development of an insulin-regulated glucose transporter system is arguably a key physiological adaptation that supports the heightened energetic demands of cells and tissues in endothermic ( warm-blooded ) animals, such as mammals. Conversely, in ectothermic vertebrates, this and other aspects of insulin-regulated metabolism are hypothetically less developed. Current understanding of insulin-regulated cellular glucose transport has been dependent almost entirely on studies of the insulin-regulated GLUT-4 glucose transporter of mammals. By contrast, the status of this system before the evolution of an endothermic physiology (e.g., in fishes) is not understood, due in part to the lack of available models of insulin deficiency in ectothermic vertebrates to facilitate experimental analysis of the system. The objectives of the proposed studies are (1) to characterize a teleost fish insulin-regulated glucose transporter system at the molecular and cellular levels, (2) to elucidate its physiological role in the regulation of glucose homeostasis in this vertebrate, and (3) to identify the likely evolutionary differences relative to that which exist in mammals. The gobiid fish, Gillichthys mirabilis, is a particularly useful model for such studies, since it can be experimentally manipulated into a state of insulin-deficiency reminiscent of type-1 diabetes mellitus. Previous work on this model indicates that insulin-deficient gobies exhibit high blood glucose levels and a pronounced impairment of insulin-regulated glucose transport activity in skeletal muscle, while insulin replacement therapy corrects these metabolic deficiencies. In addition, insulin treatment stimulates glucose clearance in vivo and muscle glucose transport in vitro. It is therefore hypothesized that an insulin-regulated glucose transporter, related to mammalian GLUT-4, exists in muscle of this teleost fish and plays an important role in glucoregulation, albeit with differences likely to reflect the different metabolic strategies represented by the ectothermic fish versus endotherms. In support of this hypothesis, recent molecular cloning data in the goby and some other teleost fish species have identified at least two different cDNAs related to mammalian GLUTs 1 2) to define insulin s specific regulatory actions on the muscle glucose transporter system in the goby, both at the level of gene expression and the level of the cell-physiological response to insulin; and 3) to characterize the interaction of insulin and the hormones that antagonize its actions (so-called counterregulatory hormones) in regulating the muscle GLUT system and hepatic metabolism, in order to advance a more integrative understanding of glucoregulatory physiology in this fish. These studies should provide a novel biological perspective and understanding of a fundamental action of the hormone insulin doc13410 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Laura Jenski at Marshall University to acquire a flow cytometer. Six faculty in three units will use this instrument for their research projects, thesis projects of graduate and undergraduate students, and training students in undergraduate courses in research applications of this technology. Acquisition of a flow cytometer will bring a new and important technology to the faculty and students at Marshall University. The immediate research applications of the flow cytometer are diverse, and include exploration of fatty acid-induced changes in membrane function, protein expression during epidermal development and apoptosis in skin embryogenesis, cell cycle and quantitative gene expression during plant growth, and analysis of environmental samples for specific microbial populations. In addition, three courses are targeted for introducing flow cytometric applications as part of the independent exploration component of the courses. One is a core cell biology course and another is a combined undergraduate and graduate plant physiology course in Biological Sciences; the third is a course in the Integrated Science and Technology Program. Students pursuing graduate thesis research or undergraduate projects will have access to this instrument if properly trained and supervised by faculty, and collaborations established through the engagement of students in flow cytometry will, in addition to campus seminars and workshops, help to bring new users to the instrument. The flow cytometer will benefit students and faculty at Marshall University, and have a positive impact on the university and the state of West Virginia. Students at Marshall University will gain exposure, and in many cases hands-on experience, with flow cytometry, thereby contributing to a better trained and more scientifically sophisticated workforce in a state aiming to achieve more high technology jobs. Faculty at Marshall University will have a new technology available to them to apply to research questions, and this will improve their competitiveness in gaining funding for their projects. The availability of shared instrumentation and the intellectual exchange among the group of users will stimulate collaborative projects, also improving faculty research success. Finally, acquisition of research instrumentation will help Marshall University to build its national research presence and, in this fashion, offer modern creative experiences to its undergraduate and graduate students doc13411 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program will allow Harvey Mudd College to acquire laser system to support research on the ultrafast dynamics of electrons in metals and on the nonlinear optical behavior of ultrathin semiconductors and metals. The system will produce a femtosecond laser beam at a repetition rate of one kilohertz. This will greatly facilitate pump-probe measurements to monitor the non-equilibrium distribution of photoexcited electrons in metals. These measurements will provide information on both the energy- and momentum-scattering rates in metals and permit quantitative comparison to theories of electron dynamics in metals. Through continuum generation and frequency shifting, the laser system will allow spectral characterization of the nonlinear optical response of thin semiconductor films, providing valuable information on the strength of both bulk and surface sources of second-harmonic generation in centrosymmetric semiconductors. Undergraduate students will be trained in the operation of this state-of-the-art femtosecond laser facility. It will also be available as a resource to the members of the Claremont Consortium This award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program will allow Harvey Mudd College to acquire laser system to support research on the ultrafast dynamics of electrons in metals and on the nonlinear optical behavior of ultrathin semiconductors and metals. The high density of mobile electrons inside a metal causes electrons to interact on extremely fast time scales. A detailed understanding of these interactions is important for understanding how metals catalyze chemical reactions and how atoms adsorb on metal surfaces. The new laser system will permit researchers at Harvey Mudd College to perform time-resolved measurements of the changes to the electronic system in a metal caused by an intense pulse of laser light lasting less than fifty femtoseconds (1 fs = 10-15 s). These measurements will provide information on both the energy- and momentum-scattering rates in metals and permit quantitative comparison to theories of electron dynamics in metals. The laser system can provide useful information on both the structures of the semiconductor crystal and on the quality of surfaces. Spectroscopic study of the harmonic response will provide useful information on the relative importance of surface and bulk phenomena and will permit detailed comparisons to calculations of the nonlinear response of materials. Undergraduate research students will be trained in the operation of this state-of-the-art femtosecond laser facility. It will also be available as a resource to the members of the Claremont Consortium doc13412 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation program, Bucknell University will acquire equipment that is central to for the study positron annihilation in molecular solids. When positrons are injected in molecular solids they can form a positroniums, which are bound states with electrons. Along with the annihilation rate of free positrons, measurement of annihilation lifetime of positronium in molecular solids provides both chemical and structural information about the molecular solid. The instrument acquired through this award will allow measurement of both positron annihilation lifetime spectra and Doppler broadened annihilation spectra from in an effort to investigate these properties of a variety of molecular solids. Crucial timing resolution of two hundred picoseconds and energy resolution of the order of one kiloelectronvolts will be achieved. The instrumentation will be used in supervised research opportunities for undergraduates using positron annihilation to study structural and chemical properties of materials such as zeolites and will support an existing REU summer research program. With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation program, Bucknell University will acquire equipment that is central to for the study positron annihilation in molecular solids. When positrons are injected in molecular solids they can form a positroniums, which are bound states with electrons. Along with the annihilation rate of free positrons, measurement of annihilation lifetime of positronium in molecular solids provides both chemical and structural information about the molecular solid. The instrument acquired through this award will allow measurement of both positron annihilation lifetime spectra and Doppler broadened annihilation spectra from in an effort to investigate these properties of a variety of molecular solids. Crucial timing resolution of two hundred picoseconds and energy resolution of the order of one kiloelectronvolts will be achieved. The instrumentation will be used in supervised research opportunities for undergraduates using positron annihilation to study structural and chemical properties of materials such as zeolites and will support an existing REU summer research program doc13413 none for NSF Proposal to Dr. John La Duke A grant has been awarded to Dr. John La Duke at the University of North Dakota to purchase a Genetic Analyzer. The major function of this instrument is to gather DNA data and analyze these sequences or fragments. This is a state-of-the-art instrument that will position researchers very positively for the future in the area of DNA methodology. There are four primary researchers on this project. Their research can be divided into two main areas. Two of these faculty, Austin and La Duke, are interested in phylogenetic evolutionary questions. La Duke is examining the relationships of the species in the plant family Malvaceae. This family includes cotton and Hibiscus. Austin is interested in the relationships and distribution patterns of Pacific Island lizards. The other faculty, Detke and Young, are interested understanding the linkage of DNA sequences to biochemical pathways. Detke is interested in a protein from the parasite Leishmania that that may have implications in diseases caused by the parasite. Young is interested in proteins associated with bacterial cell walls and associated biosynthetic pathways. Each of the scientists has a history of training students at all levels and is passionate about research. The addition of this instrument will significantly enhance the research and training capabilities of the University of North Dakota. The impact of this instrument on the research programs of the Principal Investigators is only a small part of the potential impact this will have on: 1) training of students, 2) additional projects that can now be conceived, and 3) stimulating collaboration between researchers on the campus. . As the use and understanding of DNA data has become almost as standard as the microscope in biology, we believe it is essential for undergraduates to have training and exposure to the current technology in DNA data-gathering and analysis. It is expected that graduate students and faculty from both Biology and the Medical School will develop a closer interaction as a result of sharing this instrument doc13414 none Lay The revolution that has taken place in molecular biology over the past decade has revealed one of nature s best kept secrets, namely, that females across a wide range of animal species commonly mate with more than one male. Identifying the causes and consequences of such polyandrous behavior is of general significance to a broad spectrum of biological disciplines, ranging from developmental and conservation genetics to the study of new species formation. Unfortunately, however, the technical difficulties associated with evaluating the alternative material and genetic benefit hypotheses that have been proposed to explain polyandry make investigation of this behavior largely intractable in many species. The development of powerful, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) techniques for assigning paternity, in combination with a unique suite of reproductive and behavioral characteristics, make the pseudoscorpion, Cordylochernes scorpioides, a model invertebrate organism for experimental investigation of the selective forces favoring polyandry. Accurate assessment of female sexual receptivity in these pseudoscorpions is greatly facilitated by their indirect method of sperm transfer via a spermatophore deposited on the substrate. Female reproductive status and embryonic development can be readily monitored without the need for invasive techniques, due to Cordylochernes scorpioides external womb form of viviparity (live birth), in which females nourish embryos in an external, translucent brood sac overlying the genital aperture. In addition, these pseudoscorpions produce large broods, have a rapid generation time, and are highly amenable to large-scale, laboratory behavioral, rearing and genetic studies of individuals derived directly from natural populations. Previous research has established that polyandry in Cordylochernes scorpioides significantly enhances female lifetime reproductive success, and that it is an active strategy in which females recognize and reject previous mates. Over their lifetime, females mated to two different males gave birth to 32% more offspring than did females mated twice to the same male. This was primarily as a consequence of a significantly reduced rate of spontaneous abortion, strongly suggesting that polyandry reduces the risk and or cost of fertilization by genetically incompatible sperm. The goal of the proposed research is to gain a better understanding of the behavioral and physiological mechanisms underlying polyandry in Cordylochernes scorpioides. A combination of behavioral experiments and molecular techniques will be used to address the following questions: 1. What is the recognition mechanism used by females to discriminate against previous mates and preferentially accept sperm from novel males in order to access the reproductive benefits of polyandry? 2. To what extent is the enhanced lifetime reproductive success of polyandrous Cordylochernes scorpioides females due to cryptic material benefits deriving from a rescuing effect of multi-male seminal fluid products, as opposed to post-mating mechanisms that bias paternity in favor of more compatible or genetically superior males? 3. To what extent do processes acting prior to fertilization (sperm competition and or female choice of sperm) versus processes acting after fertilization has occurred (reallocation of maternal resources from defective inferior embryos to viable superior embryos during gestation) contribute to paternity biasing in polyandrous females? As the first study to investigate the relative importance of pre- versus post-fertilization paternity-biasing mechanisms in a live-bearing species, the findings of this research should contribute to a better understanding of the role that reproductive mode may play in the evolution of female mating behavior doc13415 none Malin The ongoing eruption of the Soufriere Hills Volcano (SHV) on Montserrat provides an unprecedented opportunity to investigate complex magmatic processes at an andesitic volcano. Growth of the lava dome has been unsteady and accompanied by cyclic patterns of ground deformation, seismicity, and explosive eruptions. The cycles include a short-term scale (6-18 hour), a meso-term scale (~7 weeks), and a long-term scale (~30 y). They provide insights into eruption dynamics at andesite volcanoes, with the short-term cycles suggesting that degassing, rheological stiffening of the magma, and pressurization in the upper conduits are coupled and control many of the geophysical and dynamical phenomena observed. The meso- and long- term cycles may reflect deep-seated processes involving the magma reservoir. This project will investigate the dynamics of the full system using an integrated array of specialized instruments in four strategically located 200-m boreholes, and several shallower holes, surrounding SHV. The system is active and dynamic and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Analysis of the continuous perishable data provided by these instruments should provide important new insights and specific constraints to theoretical models, involving the dynamic behavior of the andesite magmatic system. This is a collaborative project involving P.I.s from Penn State University, Carnegie Institution of Washinton, University of Arkansas, in collaboration with Montserrat Volcano Obervatory (MVO) and scientists from Bristol and Leeds Universities in the UK. The UK investigators have been funded to share drilling costs and to support UK scientific analyses. The expertise, facilities, and database of MVO also provide cost-share contributions doc13416 none With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Patricia Whitten and Trudy Turner will investigate the role of life history in divergence of populations of vervet monkeys in Kenya. This collaborative research combines data and expertise from genetics, endocrinology, morphology, demography and behavior. Life history analyses link the events and processes of an individual s life to demographic and evolutionary events at the population and species level. The timing of growth, maturation and aging have important consequences for behavior, demography and the genetic structure of populations. This research will investigate these effects using a unique data set combining genetic, morphometric and socioecological information in four ecologically distinct populations of vervet monkeys. Genetic relatedness will be assessed with 8-10 polymorphic microsatellite loci. Allele frequencies will be used to determine migration rates and differentiation among groups and populations. Paternity and maternity will be ascertained by examining allele sharing between individuals. Serum concentrations of adrenal and gonadal steroids will be assessed by radioimmunoassay. Endocrine data will be combined with morphological data to assess population differences in maturation and aging. These analyses will be used to address several questions: 1. Do males migrate to troops where they have brothers? 2. Are stress hormones higher when living in groups with more competitors and lower genetic relatedness? 3. Do stress levels in males and females and paternity in males affect behavior toward offspring? 4. Do increases in adult body size in a population result from delayed maturation and prolonged growth in males and females living in that population? 5. Do individuals in populations with richer resources mature and age more rapidly? This research is important for several reasons. The data set provides an opportunity to gain an in-depth portrait of a group of organisms that is rarely obtained in animal studies, because of both the number of animals sampled and the range of biological systems examined. These data provide a link between population level phenomena and individual physiology that will provide new insights into social behavior and life history. Within species variation in life history is poorly documented. A better understanding of the balance between facultative and evolutionary adaptations to local conditions within species can enhance our understanding of the evolution of life history differences across species doc13417 none The proposal initiates a partnership to support an LSAMP Phase I alliance of seven institutions to address the problem of underrepresentation of African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans in technological education and enterprises. The partnership institutions are Elizabeth City State University, Fisk University, James Madison University, Johnson C. Smith University, St. Augustine s College, and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. The goal of the alliance is to double the current number of SMET degrees earned by under-represented minorities (371) in five years. To achieve this the alliance will incorporate regionally focused orientation programs for first-year students, oversee program management and technical assistance aggressively, and measure progress toward the outcomes through internal and external evaluation. Skill development activities including undergraduate research experiences and mentor guidance will be provided for LSAMP participants, and enrichment activities will be provided to improve the analytical skills of K-12 students. The program will also pursue goals for graduate school matriculation by LSAMP graduates doc13418 none The project aims towards developing a unified on-line experimental methodology combined with simulation to determine the dynamic performance of complex structural systems, such as reinforced concrete building with masonry infill walls. The methodology will be developed in the framework of mixed-variable (diakoptics) pseudodynamic (PSD) approach combined with substructuring. Moreover, advanced sensors (e.g. fiber optic strain gages and grid-based pressure sensors) for distributed measurements to monitor complex structural systems is an integral part of the proposed research and education project. The detailed monitoring of the structural response is essential for feedback control during the developed diakoptic PSD testing methodology. Ultimately, this methodology will be verified using benchmark data from dynamic experiments of a generic hybrid system consisting of bare frames and an infilled frame connected by a reinforced concrete slab. The PSD testing methodology will be simultaneously applied to the main substructures of this generic hybrid system, namely the flexible bare frame as one physical substructure and the stiff infilled frame as another physical substructure with the connecting slab as a simulated substructure. The success of the project will lead to advances in experimental research on large-scale structures and recommendations on use and distribution of advanced sensors to monitor the dynamic response of complex structural systems doc13419 none Documenting and learning from observations from major earthquakes are invaluable to advancing the state-of-practice in earthquake engineering. Adapazari suffered the largest level of gross building damage and life loss of any city affected by the Kocaeli, Turkey, Earthquake of August 17, , and subsequent major shaking. The building damage patterns and widespread ground failure in Adapazari provide exceptional field performance data on critical seismic geotechnical phenomena. Because the soils and earthquake shaking in Adapazari are representative of many cases in the United States, the lessons learned from this earthquake are directly applicable to earthquake hazard mitigation in the United State. Adapazari provides an excellent opportunity to evaluate the effect of soil liquefaction and ground softening on the built environment. The effects of liquefaction included settlement, tilting, bearing failure, and lateral shifting of some buildings. The seismic interaction between buildings and softened foundation soils is an especially important feature in Adapazari, as ground failure was more severe adjacent to and under buildings. The primary goals of this research are to analyze the relationship between ground failure and building damage and to assess the cyclic response of soils with significant fines (both plastic and non-plastic). Well-documented case histories of building performance at sites undergoing severe and minor ground failure will be developed through field and laboratory testing. These case histories will then be back analyzed to evaluate the ability to numerically simulate the associated physical processes. Soil-structure interaction analyses are required to evaluate the relationship between building response and ground response on ground and building performance. The PI has formed collaborative research associations with Dr. Turan Durgunoglu of Bogazici Univ. and Dr. Akin Onalp of Sakarya Univ., both of whom will be involved in this project. This research project is a follow-on to a one-year NSF-sponsored study that documented key observations of building and ground performance in Adapazari. Interim and final results of this study will be made widely available through relevant Internet sites to ensure that all researchers and practitioners have access to the collected data. These site are the Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering Server (GEES) of the University of Southern California at http: rccg03.usc.edu , the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center at http: peer.berkeley.edu , and the EERC website at http: www.eerc.berkeley.edu . The release of interim data reports will be announced using the GEOTECH and USUCGER mailing lists. The final report will be released as a web-based report that will be available as an Adobe Acrobat file downloadable from the Internet doc13420 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Morris, McConnaughay, Gehring and Frase at Bradley University to acquire instrumentation needed to support integrated studies of C and N dynamics including controlled environment growth chambers, photosynthesis and soil respiration equipment and a nutrient auto-analyzer. The equipment requested will be used within the department for individual projects, interdepartmental collaborative projects and integrated research-training of undergraduate and graduate students. The instrumentation will support on-going collaborative research efforts to examine the effects of altered C and N dynamics on native and invasive plants in restored prairie ecosystems. Specific projects will examine plant growth characteristics in the field and in the laboratory under controlled environmental conditions in chambers subjected to elevated CO2 and N deposition. Soil nutrient dynamics, including C and N turnover, will be evaluated using laboratory mineralization rates in tandem with measurements of plant growth characteristics. In addition to answering fundamental questions about restoration ecology and ecosystem change following disturbance, the instrumentation will be used as a tool by individual researchers to introduce undergraduates in their respective laboratories to integrated large-scale projects doc13421 none A collaboration with an investigator in Mexico will be fostered through this award sponsored, in part, by the CONACyT Program. The properties and strengths of microbial adhesives will be characterized using atomic force microscopy and other methods. The counterpart in Mexico at the Universidad Autonoma de Campeche will provide putative antagonists of microbial fouling. Overall, an improved picture of biofouling will be provided as well as an exploration of using the natural compounds as potential replacements for synthetic adhesives doc13422 none Discovery Place in Charlotte, NC is planning and coordinating a visit by Chinese delegates to designated United States Science Museums toward identifying cooperative endeavors related to public understanding of science. Planning also will be done for a separate delegation of informal educators from Japan. Discovery Place will work with the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) to assist in planning and arranging portions of each delegation s visit in order to help science center professionals from all three countries meet and learn more about each other s institutions, programs and priorities. Through this networking, U.S. institutions will be encouraged to participate in exchanges and cooperative projects. The meetings also will help all sides identify potential partners and develop the relationships necessary to pursue joint activities such as staff exchanges, cooperative development of exhibits and programs and design of workshops. Specific planning activities to be undertaken by Discovery Place include: Identifying appropriate museum and media production sites for the Chinese delegation to visit; Coordinating the purposes of the visit with these sites; Working with The Institute of Pacific Asia (IPA is the NSF grantee that is handling the administrative aspects of the Chinese and Japanese visits) to develop a specific agenda for each site visit; Coordinating with ASTC to arrange such activities as: Presentations by members of the Chinese and Japanese delegation in ASTC conference sessions, Participation by members of the Chinese and Japanese delegations in ASTC conference events and sessions, and Assisting IPA in developing an agenda for a one-day US China delegation meeting immediately following the conference. This project provides rare opportunities for informal science educators and policy makers to explore a wide range of program options for the United States, China and Japan to inform the public and build support for science doc13423 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program supports the development of a femtosecond electron diffraction system development at Old Dominion Research Foundation. Time domain dynamical examination requires a probe with comparable or shorter temporal resolution than the relaxation process of the perturbed system, which for many solid-state and molecular reactions is in the few picosecond or femtosecond range. There is a significant interest in developing ultrafast time-resolved structural probes based on electron and x-ray diffraction. Time-resolved electron diffraction has been used to study phase transitions at surfaces and in thin films, and to probe the nuclear dynamics of laser excited molecules. Because of the need for instrumentation development, its use has been limited to few groups. An optimized time-resolved electron diffraction system operating at 20-50 keV with 100 fs temporal resolution and 103-104 electrons per pulse will be developed. This will provide at least several times higher temporal resolution and electron density than present time-resolved electron diffraction systems. The design will minimize electron trajectory differences due to photoelectron energy spread and space charge effects. The introduction of a special electron dispersion compensation element is also proposed. Graduate students will be involved in design, construction, and use of the femtosecond electron diffraction system to probe surface and thin film reactions. These students will gain experience in ultrafast lasers, electron optics, pump-probe techniques, and material characterization. Undergraduate students will participate as technical assistants and as part of their senior design projects. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program supports the development a high-speed electron diffraction system at Old Dominion Research Foundation. Many important reactions in solids and molecules occur in a time scale of a picosecond or shorter, therefore, there is a need to develop instrumentation capable of high-speed probing. When electrons are diffracted from a solid or a molecular jet, the produced diffraction pattern provides information on the solid or molecular structure. Using an ultrashort laser pulse to initiate a reaction and an equally ultrashort electron pulse, delayed from the laser pulse, as a probe, it is possible to time resolve the reaction. Because of the need for complex instrumentation development, the use of high-speed electron diffraction has been limited to few groups. An optimized high-speed electron diffraction system will be developed. This will provide at least several times higher temporal resolution than present time-resolved systems, enabling the observation of many phenomena not presently well understood. A new design minimizing electron pulse spread and introducing special electron dispersion compensation element for electron pulse compression will be developed. Graduate students will be involved in design, construction, and use of the femtosecond electron diffraction system to probe surface and thin film reactions of scientific and technological interest. These students will gain experience in lasers, electron optics, and material characterization. Undergraduate students will participate as technical assistants and as part of their senior design projects. This experience will prepare them for a career in high technology within an industrial, governmental and academic setting doc13424 none A major research instrumentation grant has been awarded to Dr. Ehud Isacoff at the University of California at Berkeley for the purchase of a 2-photon scanning microscope. The research goal is to probe, non-invasively, by microscopic photometry and imaging, the distribution and structure of macromolecules (RNA, DNA and proteins), and their activity and interactions in living cells. The 2-photon microscope makes it possible to image cells and tissues with high spatial and reasonable temporal resolution, with penetrating excitation, but also with optically confined irradiation, thus limiting photo-damage to cells and photo-destruction of fluorescent tags. The instrument will form a centerpiece of a recently built Berkeley Imaging Center. The Imaging Center will provide access, training and technical support for use of the 2-photon microscope for students, postdocs and faculty in the biological sciences on campus and in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and will make the instrument available to academic researchers at other Bay Area campuses. The research projects conducted with the 2-photon microscope will include; 1) studies on synaptic proteins that have been engineered to be fluorescent and to change their fluorescence upon either activation or interaction with other proteins, 2) optical probes of neural activity to measure the function of neural circuits involved in visual information processing, 3) organic and protein-based indicator dyes to study the roles of calcium ions in synaptic transmission, short- and long-term plasticity, 4) the regulation of other second messenger systems and, 5) fluorescently labeled proteins to study the localization of postsynaptic receptors, and the changes in proteins involved in exocytosis during synaptic transmission. The aim of the research using the 2-photon microscope is to employ innovative forms of microscopy that can characterize the dynamics of molecular machines in their physiological environments: inside intact cells and tissues doc13425 none The Human Factors Psychology program at the University of South Dakota (USD) will purchase an ASL Model ETS-PC eye tracker for the purposes of improving its capacity to meet critical strategic research and research training objectives. This device will enable researchers to accurately and precisely measure an observer s point of fixation in the visual field, thus allowing powerful, objective and verifiable inferences to be made regarding heretofore unobservable behavioral processes. The ETS-PC instrument has many advanced features making it uniquely compatible with the program s wide range of needs for performing quality transportation research both in the laboratory and in the field (e.g., while studying driving behavior with the USD advanced instrumented research vehicle). Three faculty members, designated as major users of the purchased device, will use the eye tracking system to significantly expand both the depth and breadth of their existing experimental research programs in transportation human factors. Four innovative projects will investigate perceptual and cognitive mechanisms mediating: (1) the legibility distances afforded by computer-enhanced symbol highway signs, (2) the visual advantages afforded by fluorescent colored traffic control devices, (3) the visual effectiveness of novel temporal-chromatic lighting signatures generated by next-generation emergency vehicle lighting technologies and (4) the visual workload demands imposed by advanced transportation-related graphical displays and interfaces. The purchase of the ETS-PC eye tracker will enhance current research capabilities and provide senior research personnel with new opportunities to attract external support from our traditional as well as new funding sources. The impact of these developments will also extend to the quality of the research training experience for graduate students enrolled in USD s Ph.D. program in Human Factors Psychology doc13426 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Marten J. Edwards at Ohio Wesleyan University to purchase a confocal laser scanning biological microscopy system. Confocal laser scanning microscopy offers significant advantages over conventional fluorescent microscopy. It improves the resolution of images by recording fluorescence or reflected light generated from a single focal plane within the sample, while rejecting all other light coming from above or below the this plane. The elimination of this out-of-focus light, which blurs conventional images, permits resolution of sub-micron structures within cells and tissue sections. It can produce optical sections through a 3-dimensional specimen - e.g., an entire cell or tissue sample. By moving the focal plane of the instrument stepwise through the depth of the specimen, a series of optical sections can be recorded. These sections can be merged to reconstruct a 3-dimensional image that would be impossible to achieve by conventional light microscopy. The digital images produced by confocal microscopy are amenable to image analysis and processing. Confocal microscopy also offers a major increase in sensitivity over conventional light microscopy. The light source is a laser, and the image is digitized by a highly sensetive photomultiplier tube. The principal user of the confocal imaging system will be Dr. Marten J. Edwards who is exploring the molecular interface between mosquitoes and the pathogens they transmit. His research has focused on the temporal and spatial dynamics of gene expression in the mosquito midgut and ovaries. Using confocal microscopy, it will be possible to detect the expression of fluorescent marker proteins in transgenic mosquitoes. The undergraduate research program at Ohio Wesleyan University will be significantly enhanced by a scanning laser confocal imaging system. Research in the Edwards lab has direct applications to the study of the transmission of LaCrosse viral encephalitis by mosquitoes. The confocal system will also serve an important role in the local research community, primarily through long-term collaborations with investigators at the USDA laboratories in Delaware, OH. The aim is to provide the highest possible level of research training in the intensive learning environment of a small liberal arts college. The confocal laser scanning confocal microscopy will provide students and faculty with access to technologies that are expanding the boundaries of the types of questions that can explored in the biology laboratory. This will provide us with a unique opportunity to expose undergraduate students to hands-on experience and discovery at the frontiers of biological research doc13427 none Widom This award by the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program provides 51% of the cost for the acquisition of a multi-collector thermal ionization mass spectrometer at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The instrument will be equipped with ion counting and negative ion capabilities, and will have a second-stage energy filter for measurements requiring high abundance sensitivity. The instrument will be used for measurement of a variety of isotope systems, including Rb-Sr, Sm-Nd, U-Th-Pb, Re-Os, Pt-Os, and U decay-series nuclides, with a wide range of geochemical and geochronological applications. Specific research areas that will be pursued with the instrument include: mantle enrichment processes at convergent boundaries; identification and dating of meteorite impact structures; sources of ocean island basalts; petrogenetic processes and timescales in active magmatic systems; isotopic dating of clay diagenesis; isotopic studies of microbial processes and elemental cycling; petrogenesis of bimodal and heterogeneous magmatic systems; spatial and temporal evolution of basalt sources and processes in continental extensional settings; applications of tephrostratigraphy and tephrochemistry; single-crystal dating methods; and U-Pb dating of paleosol carbonates doc13428 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program, the University of Pittsburgh will be able to develop a unique instrument for studying both momentum and spatially resolved charge carrier dynamics in solid state materials. The combination of photoemission electron microscopy and ultrafast laser excitation of two-photon photoemission will be used for the spatiotemporal imaging of electrons in solid-state materials with less than twenty nanometer spatial resolution and less than one femtosecond temporal resolution. The proposed time-resolved photoemission electron microscope will offer several orders-of-magnitude better resolution over the currently available technology, which is necessary to obtain dynamical images quantum mechanical phenomena in solid state materials. The expected outcome of the research is a better understanding of charge carrier dynamics in the quantum regime, discovery of new physical phenomena, improved understanding of optical and electronic devices, and education of students in instrument science and nano-science. With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program, the University of Pittsburgh will be able to develop a unique instrument for studying both momentum and spatially resolved charge carrier dynamics in solid state materials. As the size of optical and electronic devices shrinks to the nanometer scale, the physics describing their properties changes from the classical to the quantum regime. This presents a need for instrumentation for imaging of the dynamical electronic properties on nanometer scale. A unique instrument for time-resolved microscopy to be developed will provide an unprecedented ability to create movies with less than one femtosecond temporal and less than twenty nanometers spatial resolution of how electrons in a solid state material evolve in energy, space, and time. The development project will educate students in techniques of lasers, vacuum, and microscopy at the forefront of nanotechnology and device physics. The time-resolved microscope will provide an indispensable and strategic tool for understanding novel physical phenomena and for developing advanced optical and electronic devices doc13429 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Lake Superior State University will acquire an Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer. This equipment will be used for research on environmental issues of the Upper Great Lakes region; as a tool for undergraduates working on environmental research projects as part of their senior thesis; to introduce modern mass spectrophotometric techniques to the undergraduate curriculum; and to support faculty and community partnering on environmental projects. Specific projects include establishment of a long-term monitoring program for trace metals in the Lake Superior Watershed, including an emphasis on changes in isotopic ratios for key elements such as lead; and the analysis of sediments and biota for trace metals in the St. Marys River Area of Concern. Mass spectrometry (MS) is a technique used to probe intimate structural details and to obtain the molecular compositions of a vast array of organic, bioorganic, and organometallic molecules. The results from these studies will have an impact in the area of environmental chemistry and public health doc13430 none Through this Major Research Instrumentation award, physicists at Agnes Scott College, in collaboration with electrical engineers at Georgia Institute of Technology, are developing a lidar system (Light Detection and Ranging) for atmospheric research. Students will construct the instrument under the supervision of faculty members from Agnes Scott and Georgia Tech, and will operate it routinely over a period of several years. The objective is to provide hands-on experience for undergraduates, in particular undergraduate women, in state-of-the-art equipment design and research. Scientific applications include measuring the optical properties of clouds, studying the vertical structure and variability of the stratospheric aerosol layer, and monitoring low-level haze and pollution over the site of the instrument in Atlanta. The lidar is based on a diode-pumped solid state laser. It produces visible (green) light and is eye-safe even at close range. It is of a simple design, appropriate for an undergraduate teaching environment. Though the research application is atmospheric science, the experience of designing and constructing the instrument will familiarize the students with elements of engineering, data processing, and optical remote sensing doc13431 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Akron will acquire a X-ray diffractometer with CCD detector for single crystal diffractometry. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including the following: a) cyclyne and heterocyclyne chemistry; b) metal-silyl complexes; c) synthesis and characterization of electron deficient, organometallic compounds; d) coordination polymers as zeolite analogs; and e) the preparation, understanding and utilization of dendritic macromolecules. The X-ray diffractometer allows accurate and precise measurements of the full three dimensional structure of a molecule, including bond distances and angles, and it provides accurate information about the spatial arrangement of the molecule relative to the neighboring molecules. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, including the preparation of more efficient catalysts and materials chemistry doc13432 none This project addresses nanoscience studies of carbon nanotubes and bismuth nanowires. The research on carbon nanotubes is motivated by the Dresselhaus group s recent observation of the Raman spectrum from an isolated single wall carbon nanotube. This allows study of the vibrational structure of one nanotube and also provides detailed information on the electronic structure through the resonance Raman effect. It also provides, through the trigonal warping effect on the electronic levels, a unique determination of the structure of a single nanotube, including its diameter and chirality, or the orientation of the carbon hexagons with respect to the nanotube axis, expressed in terms of two integers (n; m). This ability to determine (n; m) for an individual nanotube non-destructively opens new research areas in carbon nanotube research, since many of the physical properties of a nanotube and the theoretical calculations which predict and explain physical phenomena are strongly dependent on these (n; m) indices. The proposed carbon nanotube studies are aimed specifically at resonance Raman spectroscopy studies of an isolated carbon nanotube. Each of the known spectral features of these Raman spectra will be studied in depth, including the radial breathing mode, the tangential G-band, the D-band, and overtones and combination modes of these features. The dependence of the spectra on nanotube diameter, chirality, semiconducting vs. metallic behavior, temperature, and laser power level will be investigated at the single nanotube level, from which comparisons will be made to observations on single wall carbon nanotube bundles and to theoretical predictions. The bismuth nanowire system, because of the small effective masses, small L-point band gap and small band overlap of crystalline bismuth, offers opportunities to study novel quantum phenomena on nanowires with wire diameters (~ 50 nm) that can presently be fabricated by the PI s group. The approach is to focus on the semimetal to semiconductor transition induced by decrease in nanowire diameter, and to use optical and transport techniques, building on the observations already made using temperature dependent resistance measurements. Also, changes in the electronic structure as a function of nanowire diameter and antimony concentration in the isoelectronic Bi(1-x) Sbx alloy system will be explored. Particular attention will be given to wire diameter and Sb concentration where 10 different carrier pockets (1 T-point, 3 L-point and 6 H-point) are all predicted to have a degenerate hole subband edge, thereby giving rise to a very large electronic density of states. Physical phenomena associated with this unusually high density of states will be explored by temperature dependent transport and optical properties and the interpretation of these measurements will be made using model calculations. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students and postdoctoral researchers in a fundamentally and technologically significant area. The project assists development of technical, communication, and organizational management skills in students through unique educational experiences made possible by a highly collaborative forefront research environment doc13433 none This document outlines a program of research to develop practical methods for ultrabroadband imaging with quantum enhancement of the detection sensitivity. In particular it presents several novel techniques for the characterization of ultrafast optical and X-ray waveforms, and then discusses ways to apply them to broadband dynamical imaging, including possibilities for going well beyond the shot-noise limit for phase and amplitude measurement accuracy. The program covers both development of appropriate dynamical image detection, protocols for image transmission, and the sources of particular quantum states needed for enhanced sensitivity. The program has four major experimental objectives. (I) The first goal consists of developing a novel method for measuring the conplete spatio-temporal properties of an ultrafast optical pulse. The basic idea involves extending interferometric methods of ultrafast pulse measurement into a new domain of accuracy and precision. In particular we shall develop an ultrafast multi-wavelength interferometry: for dynamical space-time imaging. (II) The second portion of our program entails the development of a novel method for obtaining attosecond temporal resolution for dynamical X ray imaging. The project will first study a recently demonstrated nonlinear optical mechanism for atomic ionization to implement an interferometric pulse measurement technique for completely characterizing the electric field of the attosecond pulse. This technique is based on the quantum interference on two pathways for ionizing an electron, which leads to an interference pattern in the electron energy spectrum. From this pattern the spectral phase of the ionizing attosecond pulse can be reconstructed using a simple, noniterative, algorithm. (III) Another project involves the use of entangled states of ultrashort photon wavepackets to implement time-resolved and quantum-enhanced sensitivity for near-field microscopy. This provides phase sensitivity in principle well beyond the shot noise limit, and will allow the development of ultrasensitive nanoscale measurement when combined with standard laboratory methods of near-field microscopy. A novel feature of the approach is that the nonclassical light does not need to enter the interferometer and probe the phase shifting object the quantum enhancement is achieved using local entanglement. (IV) The final effort will be to develop a means for the secure transmission of images encoded in ultrashort single photons: a type of ultrabroadband quantum teleportation. This work explores new avenues in quantum communications by exploring possibilities for multimode teleportation and builds upon recent work in the applications in quantum optics of high-quantum efficiency CCD array detectors. These provide a novel tool for both quantum state measurement, which itself has useful imaging applications, and for providing the broadband classical information needed for the teleportation protocol doc13434 none Pidaparti Structural materials of the 21st century will have to meet increasingly demanding standards for performance and life. The strength and integrity of a structural component deteriorates mainly due to corrosion and fatigue along with other failure mechanisms in structural materials. Among various aspects of corrosion, pitting corrosion is a complex process, and is a major problem in many engineering industries. Pitting corrosion mechanism usually initiate at the micro nano-structure level and the details of the mechanisms depend on the material composition, electrolyte and other environmental conditions. Even though much effort has been put into assessing the material loss due to corrosion over the years, the mechanical characteristics and its relationship at multiple levels due to pitting corrosion are not yet known. The material loss information along with the topology and its relationship at various material scales are necessary for better understanding and designing of corrosion resistant materials. The objective of the proposed research is to develop a three-dimensional corrosion growth model to aid in the assessment and design of materials and their effect on structural integrity. Corrosion growth model will be developed as a discrete dynamical system based on cellular automata approach. This approach incorporates both macroscopic (corrosion pit distribution and the material loss) and microscopic (chemical interaction mechanisms) scales of the corrosion process into the model. Mechanisms involving both physical and mechanistic basis will be used to obtain rules in developing corrosion growth models. The developed models will be tested and validated using real data by collaborating with Naval Surface Warfare Center, CRANE division, Indiana, and with the data obtained from Raytheon Systems Company, Texas. A three-dimensional visualization software will be developed to visualize the corrosion growth data in real time to see the corrosion growth process. Algorithms developed through this project will be directly used in materials and simulation courses in Engineering and Computer Science disciplines. The proposed research will greatly help to understand the corrosion growth process in materials. The 3D visualization capability will provide insight into better understanding of the characteristics of corrosion growth process, and may lead to the development of more efficient corrosion growth and prediction algorithms. A fundamental understanding of the macro- and micro-level corrosion growth models based on local rules will provide valuable information and tools for designing corrosion resistant materials for a variety of engineering applications. The proposed approach will provide a general solution to structural corrosion in materials so that it can be scaled up to other structural materials doc13435 none Michael A. McRobbie Indiana University - Bloomington MRI: Creation of the AVIDD Data Facility: a Distributed Facility for Managing, Analyzing, and Visualizing Instrument-Driven Data This is a proposal for equipment acquisition under the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program to support research and student training across a broad range of instrument-driven data-intensive science areas. The proposed distributed facility for managing, analyzing, and visualizing instrument-driven data would address the data life cycle consisting of data capture and remote data reduction; high speed data transfer; real time data analysis and processing; data storage; data retreival; data analysis and postprocessing; data visualization; and the use of remote data stores. Among the research projects enhanced and enabled by the proposed facility are both computer science and applications area projects, for example work on end-to-end real time data management for remote control and use of beam-line systems by X-ray crystallographers doc13436 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at John Carroll University will acquire Isothermal Titration and Differential Scanning Calorimetry Instruments. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) characterization of the effect of nonpolar solutes on coulombic interactions; b) organic and organoalkali structure and reactivity; c) determination of protein structure at solid liquid interfaces and examination of sol-gel synthetic routes to alumina films; d) measurement of binding strengths of various metals to organometallic fragments; and e) analysis of surfaces of powders. Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) is an extremely useful tool in modern analytical chemistry. Calorimetric analysis is used to measure the thermal energy (heat) exchange that occurs during molecular interactions and reactions. Thus DSC provides a very reliable and sensitive method for determining the thermodynamic properties of materials such as changes in heat capacity of liquid and solid samples doc13437 none This proposal will result in a Large Angle Beamstrahlung Monitor at CESR, an electron positron collider. Colliders have become the tool of choice for frontier experiments in particle physics. The technique proposed here has the potential to provide a wealth of information about beam overlap at the collision point of colliders which can result in substantially higher luminosity, which means more data on the rare processes of interest. In addition to improving the performance of a collider, which is of direct interest to the particle physics experimenters, extracting the information from the beam overlap could lead to improvements in the understanding of the beam-beam interaction. This idea, if can be made viable, will have application in many colliding beam accelerators doc13438 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program will enable the Chemistry Department at Rutgers University in Newark to acquire a suite of instruments for research in materials chemistry: a gel permeation chromatograph (GPC), simultaneous static and dynamic light scattering (SSDLS) instrumentation and a voltammetric analyzer. The GPC and light-scattering instrument will be used to determine molecular weights of polymers, and the voltammetric analyzer will be used to study the electrochemical properties of novel metal-containing polymers and to make critical electrochemical measurements for organic materials. Dynamic light scattering experiments allow one to determine the sizes and shapes of inorganic nanoparticles, and of self-assembled polymer superstructures, whereas the voltammetric analyzer is a critical tool when designing nanomolecular devices. These instruments are essential for materials characterization doc13439 none Linde The ongoing eruption of the Soufriere Hills Volcano (SHV) on Montserrat provides an unprecedented opportunity to investigate complex magmatic processes at an andesitic volcano. Growth of the lava dome has been unsteady and accompanied by cyclic patterns of ground deformation, seismicity, and explosive eruptions. The cycles include a short-term scale (6-18 hour), a meso-term scale (~7 weeks), and a long-term scale (~30 y). They provide insights into eruption dynamics at andesite volcanoes, with the short-term cycles suggesting that degassing, rheological stiffening of the magma, and pressurization in the upper conduits are coupled and control many of the geophysical and dynamical phenomena observed. The meso- and long- term cycles may reflect deep-seated processes involving the magma reservoir. This project will investigate the dynamics of the full system using an integrated array of specialized instruments in four strategically located 200-m boreholes, and several shallower holes, surrounding SHV. The system is active and dynamic and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Analysis of the continuous perishable data provided by these instruments should provide important new insights and specific constraints to theoretical models, involving the dynamic behavior of the andesite magmatic system. This is a collaborative project involving P.I.s from Penn State University, Carnegie Institution of Washinton, University of Arkansas, in collaboration with Montserrat Volcano Obervatory (MVO) and scientists from Bristol and Leeds Universities in the UK. The UK investigators have been funded to share drilling costs and to support UK scientific analyses. The expertise, facilities, and database of MVO also provide cost-share contributions doc13440 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation program, Rugters University will acquire instrumentation for the setup of a network of clusters of advanced workstations. This system will be used for first-principles investigations of physical properties of complex materials of technological and scientific importance. The ultimate goal is to be able to predict the physical properties of solids with the same accuracy and reliability that one can achieve for small molecules using quantum-chemistry methods. These computations will implement novel, state-of-the-art algorithms for electronic-structure calculations in a massively parallel setting. The techniques span three general areas: (i) Kohn-Sham density-functional theory in a plane-wave pseudopotential formulation, for static calculations of systems for which electronic correlations are weak or of intermediate strength; (ii) Standard extensions of density functional theory and dynamical mean-field theory for strongly-correlated electron systems; and (iii) effective-Hamiltonian statistical methods for bridging from these microscopic methods to finite-temperature simulations. The materials systems to be investigated span a wide range, including high-K dielectrics (mostly Zr, Hf, Ta, Nb, Si, and Y oxides and oxynitrides), systems exhibiting complex martensitic transitions, ferroelectrics, oxides and selenides, Yb- and Ce-based heavy-fermion compounds, actinides, high temperature superconductors, and oxygen and hydrogen absorbed on W and other transition-metal surfaces. The research will involve the training of students and postdoctoral researches in computational materials science. With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation program, Rutgers University will acquire instrumentation to build an appropriate system on the basis of low cost high performance Linux PC s. These will be used in research on complex materials and carry calculations requiring high-speed parallel computer platforms. Complex materials, with tunable properties that can be controlled and optimized for a given application, will continue to play a role of ever-increasing importance in the new century. As our understanding of the laws that govern complex materials improves, and as computer technology and computational methods advance together, our ability to design and modify such materials will have an ever-expanding impact on science and technology. Computational condensed-matter science plays a very important role in this quest by providing new approaches to the modeling of material properties and by shedding light on the unusual properties of materials via simulations at the atomistic scale. In addition to this scientific objectives, the project will have a significant impact on the education and training of graduate and undergraduate students and postdoctoral researchers in computational materials science at Rutgers University doc13441 none Sanudo-Wilhelmy This Major Research Instrumentation award to State University of New York at Stony Brook will provide support for acquisition of a high resolution inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometer with laser ablation and chromatography systems for a multi-disciplinary group of researchers in several academic departments and the Marine Sciences Research Center. Ongoing research programs can take immediate advantage of the new instrumentation, and it is expected to significantly enhance research capabilities for faculty and students. SUNY Stony Brook will contribute cost-sharing of 30% of the cost of this project from non-federal funds doc13442 none This MRI award provides for the purchase of two ultrafast laser systems that will serve as the backbone for a two-component high-intensity pulsed laser facility in the J. R. Macdonald (JRM) Laboratory in the Physics Department of Kansas State University. The program that the equipment will enable represents a marriage of intense laser technology with the ion-beam and momentum-imaging expertise and capabilities existing presently in the JRM Laboratory. Taken together, the two capabilities will allow the study of the mechanisms whereby electrons are removed from charged and neutral targets by intense laser pulses and the study the interaction of (multiply) charged ions with targets dressed by intense radiation fields. The equipment will be available to all users of the JRM facility, including graduate and undergraduate students, post-docs, faculty, and outside users doc13443 none The research equipment being acquired through this grant is an environmental scanning electron microscope (ESEM) with analytical accessories and sub-stages. Modern ESEMs offer more flexibility than conventional scanning electron microscopes in obtaining qualitative and analytical results for a wider variety of applications. The system to be acquired will combine high vacuum, low vacuum and gaseous environment operation to support a wide array of research projects. The ESEM will permit examination of non-conducting, contaminated, hydrated and even living samples, which will in turn promote a greater degree of cross-disciplinary research. Standard secondary and back-scatter electron detection can be used in high vacuum mode for conventional operation or low vacuum mode for low overview magnifications. These detectors are also compatible with gaseous environments allowing for examination of hydrated or solvent-based samples. They are also tolerant of elevated temperatures making examination of samples at temperatures up to C possible. The microscope s capability can be further improved by adding a x-ray detector for energy dispersive spectroscopy. The overall system will be integrated with several sub-stages as well. These sub-stages allow for dynamic experiments (mechanical and thermal) under any of the environments compatible with the microscope. The microscope is to be used to support various research activities at Kettering University. While the majority of research at Kettering University has focused on more applied industrial projects, an ESEM permits more fundamental research of material characterization and behavior. The research conducted using the ESEM will include in-situ characterization of the mechanical behavior of metallic samples, phase transformations in polymeric systems, biomedical research in musculoskeletal pain and bone implant interfaces and anti-oxidative mechanisms in cancer resistant cells, to name a few. The ESEM will also be used for undergraduate education and training in materials behavior and characterization. The intuitive, computer-based interface permits rapid training and ease of use. Students at Kettering University are required to participate in a co-operative employment program. Giving students the skills needed to operate an ESEM could have direct benefit to their co-op employers, possibly resulting in industry-sponsored research for faculty and an increase in external users of the equipment. Further, the potential to interface with the ESEM control software over the network will make remote control of the microscope from a classroom environment an important aspect of the educational benefits of the instrument doc13444 none The Solanaceae, which includes tomato, potato, eggplant and pepper, comprises the third most valuable crop family in the U.S. Tomato is the centerpiece for genetic and molecular research for the Solanaceae, due in part to features that make it an attractive research system. These features include 2N chromosome number, a modest-sized genome (about 950 Mb), tolerance of inbreeding, amenability to genetic transformation, and an existing collection of well-characterized genetic resources. During the course of the project, a physical map will be constructed for the nuclear genome of tomato. This physical map will comprise overlapping, ordered Bacterial Artificial Chromosomes (BACs). The physical map will be superimposed onto the tomato genetic map using a common set of genes. Together, the physical and genetic maps will provide a detailed road map of tomato chromosomes and allow scientists to more easily identify new gene functions. They will also allow comparison of the organization of the tomato genome with that of other related species (e.g. petunia, pepper, potato and eggplant) and the well-studied model plant Arabidopsis. Gene silencing approaches will be employed to study disease resistance and fruit development, two aspects of plant biology for which tomato is a model system. Finally, a series of genetic and genomic resources will be developed and disseminated to other researchers. These will include: 1) a non-redundant tomato unigene set; 2) tomato cDNA microarrays; 3) DNA, associated data sets from mapping populations, and seeds; 4) a set of ordered tomato BAC clones; and 5) new solanaceous BAC libraries. To facilitate distribution of genomic information for tomato and related species in a comparative genomic context, we will continue development of the Solanaceae Genome Network database. This is a genomics database that ties together information about sequence, genetic and physical maps among solanaceous species, and anchors this information against the Arabidopsis genome sequence doc13445 none Halfman This grant, made through the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, provides full support to acquire an automated, dual column ion chromatograph (IC), and an X-ray diffractometer (XRD) to investigate the geochemistry of the waters and sediments of Seneca Lake, the largest of upstate New York s Finger Lakes. These new instruments will complement existing instrumentation and Hobart and William Smith s 65-foot research vessel, the HWS EXPLORER, to establish at the Colleges the scientific resources needed for studying the interactions between the lake and its watershed. Specifically, the ion chromatograph will increase the accuracy, precision, and number of chemical analyses of both lake and tributary stream waters. The X-ray diffractometer will identify and characterize the mineralogy of fine-grained sediments, both in the lake and in tributary streams. Both instruments will support a continuing project to develop quantitative models of the movement of water, dissolved materials and sediment into and out of Seneca Lake. Such models have immediate applications to several current environmental concerns including the impact of exotic zebra mussels on the lake, rising concentrations of the herbicide atrazine and nitrates in the lake and its tributaries, and high concentrations of chloride in the lake. These models may also help to understand changes in climate that followed glaciation and that are recorded within the lake s sediments. Seneca Lake watershed models and the data upon which they rest will also serve as an important base line for detecting and evaluating future water quality changes in the lake. The impact of these instruments will extend beyond the data they produce and the geochemical models they will support. Much of the investigation of Seneca Lake s waters and sediments will be done by undergraduate students working collaboratively with geoscience faculty. The opportunity for these students to engage in hands-on scientific research with modern instrumentation is critical to their development as the next generation of geoscience researchers, environmental managers and environmental policy makers doc13446 none NSF Proposal # A grant has been awarded to Dr. Petrino at Barry University to acquire a Digital Image Documentation Station and a High-Speed Refrigerated Centrifuge for the Core Molecular Biology Laboratory. The scientific objective of this proposal is to comprehend the basic molecular mechanisms underlying oocyte differentiation and embryonic development using two well-established neuroendocrine model systems: the killifish (Fundulus heteroclitus) and the zebrafish (Danio rerio). The project using the killifish focuses on understanding the relationship between the pituitary gland and the ovary in controlling cyclic reproduction. The long-term goal of the zebrafish project is to evaluate the role of genes involved in embryonic development. The first part of the project will involve gene cloning techniques for which the High-Speed Refrigerated Centrifuge is crucial. Once the genes of interest are cloned, they will be used in a variety of molecular procedures in order to determine the spatial and temporal expression of these genes during egg and early embryo development, for which the Digital Image Documentation System will be used to analyze the results. Results from this study may provide new insights for understanding not only the basic reproductive process but are also expected to further clarify the regulation of gene expression in early embryonic development. Furthermore, since the loss of some of these genes has been linked to various cancers, the results are expected to lead to further studies that may help in understanding mechanisms involved in the development of cancer. In addition to the proposed research, the instruments requested will be used for summer research training activities through workshops providing hands-on experience to minority undergraduates, high school science students and high school science teachers from Miami Dade and Broward counties. Some of the techniques learned by high school teachers are then incorporated into the curriculum thus exposing more high school students to modern biotechnology techniques. These equipments will also be available to new faculty members, including under-represented female faculty, who are currently establishing their own research. Therefore, these two pieces of equipment will very much enhance the ability of this minority institution to provide an up to date research learning environment for both, faculty and its diverse student body doc13447 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Evans at Lake Superior State University to acquire an automated Genetic Analyzer. The equipment will advance faculty research and undergraduate research training involving DNA sequencing and DNA fingerprinting. The goals of the project are as follows: 1) to discover how photoreceptor opsin gene expression changes during retinal development in a variety of teleost fish species. 2) to characterize the cross-breeding (hybridization) occurring between pink salmon and chinook salmon in the St. Marys River. 3) to determine if specific DNA markers can establish whether Great Lakes sea lamprey return to their natal streams to spawn. 4) to provide research training in DNA sequencing for Biology and Clinical Laboratory Science majors, and to train students majoring in Criminalistics, and Fisheries thus DNA fingerprints created using mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) will allow the maternal species of the hybrids to be identified. Using the Genetic Analyzer, a database of mtDNA fingerprints will be established for the chinook, pink and pinook salmon hybrids to determine if the hybrid crosses are truly restricted. If so, further studies will examine the mechanisms involved. 3) Sea lamprey are a serious parasite on native Great Lakes fishes. Protein (isozyme) analysis has indicated that lamprey return to their natal spawning grounds. The current study will test the utility of using DNA fingerprints of lamprey populations to assess the gene flow between populations. Population genetic surveys commonly create DNA fingerprints using microsatellite DNA, which are unique regions of the DNA. Such methods have been used for many fish populations, but not for lamprey. The Genetic Analyzer will be used create DNA fingerprints for the lamprey using microsatellite DNA markers. The results from these genetic analyses will be compared with the previous isozyme studies to assess their usefulness for monitoring lamprey life cycles. 4) Undergraduate students will be hired as research assistants on these projects. In addition, several courses will incorporate DNA sequencing for Biology and Clinical Laboratory Science majors and DNA fingerprinting technology for Criminalistics, and Fisheries & Wildlife Management majors. Both techniques will be available for students to use in their senior thesis research. The project contributes to several fields of basic science research. 1) The neural retina of the eye is an accessible part of the central nervous system where structure and function are clearly related. Understanding how the retina is built gives insight into how other neural networks develop. The teleost fish retina is a typical vertebrate retina and presents a useful model for understanding normal development (i.e., how cells divide and differentiate into specific tissues). In addition, the change in opsin gene expression in the winter flounder eye may answer questions of how cell-cell interactions determine a cell s fate. 2) In their natural habitat, there are few opportunities for Chinook and pink salmon to crossbreed, but in the St. Marys River, the number of pinook hybrids appear to be increasing. In the laboratory, pink and chinook crosses have been made in both directions suggesting no physiological barriers to hybridization. The presence of restricted crossbreeding in the wild may be a result of behavioral barriers such as territoriality or courtship rituals. 3) Sea lampreys are a major problem in the Great Lakes, and a solution may reside in understanding their life history and spawning behavior. Protein analysis indicates that lamprey do return to the region of their birth to spawn. Use of microsatellite DNA markers to create DNA fingerprints is a method that can be automated, allowing fast, routine analysis of gene flow. A better understanding of lamprey population genetics may allow these populations to be brought under control in the future. 4) Student learning, by active participation, is central at Lake Superior State University, and faculty consider their personal research interests to be a mechanism to stimulate student curiosity. DNA technology is becoming increasingly prominent in our everyday lives. It is important that we not only train students how to perform these techniques for research careers, but also train them to recognize when these methods are being applied and interpreted correctly doc13448 none This grant supports the purchase of an Integrated Mouse Test System (IMTS), designed in conjunction with two leading manufacturers of this type of instrumentation. IMTS will enable students and faculty at Holy Cross College to conduct automated state-of-the-art experiments in comparative intelligence and in interdisciplinary research that brings together the comparative intelligence and neuroscience laboratories. This instrumentation will result in two significant enhancements in our research and research training activities. First, the system will expand the number and range of experiments that can be initiated in our labs. As a consequence, this instrumentation will permit the conduct of experiments not heretofore possible at Holy Cross and will facilitate increased collaborative work between the two laboratories. Second, this instrumentation will lead to significant improvements in the precision and reliability of our research, particularly in the automated running of experiments and recording of behavioral measures. Finally, IMTS represents a significant expansion in the available equipment in our labs. As a consequence, this system will directly result in a significant increase in the number of students who can participate in our ongoing research programs. This acquisition comes at a time when there is intense interest within the scientific community in developing behavioral mouse models. As detailed in a lead article in a recent issue of the American Psychological Association s Monitor on Psychology, there are now a number of highly sophisticated genetic techniques available for use with mice to link genes with behavior (Azar, ). Unfortunately, the powerful techniques of molecular biologists have not been matched by a parallel sophistication in the development of complex behavioral techniques using mice. There is a pressing need for new and innovative priorities in the training of scientists in this area. The research supported by this instrumentation grant will provide Holy Cross students and faculty with the means to participate significantly in this broadly-supported scientific initiative at the undergraduate level doc13449 none This grant supports theoretical research on the elastic-plastic response of crystalline solids. The objectives of the project include: (1) characterizing and understanding the thermodynamics driving coalescence of dislocations into ordered structures in two dimensions, and (2) investigating the origins of size effects in plasticity. Dislocation patterning has been extensively modeled as a non-equilibrium process governed by competing kinetics, but the thermodynamics driving the coalescence of dislocations into ordered structures is not well understood. This project considers the simple case of screw dislocations under shear in two dimensions, and models their coalescence into slip bands using both simulation and theory. Simulation studies are carried out using an idealized model of a crystal under anti-plane shear with constant strain rate, a system that is a close analog of the two-dimensional XY rotor model under driving boundary conditions. It is conjectured that slip-band formation in 2D represents a non-equilibrium quench into two-phase coexistence between defect-rich and defect-poor phases. Characterization of the underlying equilibrium phase diagram, scaling behavior, and flow properties of the defect-rich phase will be used to derive constitutive laws for plasticity in two dimensions. Dislocation patterning in three-dimensional crystalline solids is far more complex, involving dislocation entanglement and a host of inherently 3D mechanisms. While no 2D model can accurately describe a real 3D material, this work will provide at least qualitative insight into the competition between energy and entropy in evolution of dislocation microstructures. The project s second goal is to gain insight into the origin of size effects in plasticity. Recent experiments show that some mechanical properties of crystalline solids vary with sample size in the range below ~ 100 microns. Size effects are observed in torsion and bending but not in simple tension, suggesting that strain gradients play an important role. Efforts to build strain gradient effects in continuum plasticity theory point to the importance of a characteristic length scale whose origin is not fully understood. To find out what mechanisms are involved, simulation studies of dislocation patterning will be carried out using both the idelaized two-dimensional model and more realistic molecular dynamics in two and three dimensions. Geometries will include (1) a ductile slit crack loaded in shear, (2) torsion bending of a beam, and (3) pullout of a thin fiber from a soft metal matrix. In each case multiple simulations will be preformed for samples of different sizes and the results will be compared to the predictions of continuum strain gradient theories. %%% This grant supports theoretical research on the elastic-plastic response of crystalline solids. The objectives of the project include: (1) characterizing and understanding the thermodynamics driving coalescence of dislocations into ordered structures in two dimensions, and (2) investigating the origins of size effects in plasticity. Successful completion of this project will increase our knowledge of the mechanical propoerties of materials, including their failure doc13450 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program, Angelo State University will be able to acquire research instruments required to establish an advanced, modern facility capable of supporting professional research activity for faculty collaborators and essential research training for undergraduate students. The facility will enable the study of material properties under the variations of temperature, optical excitation, and magnetic and electric fields. Students, along with faculty mentors, will perform advanced electrical and optical measurements, such as photoluminescence spectroscopy, photoluminescence excitation spectroscopy, optical absorption, Raman scattering spectroscopy, photoconductivity, and Hall-effect measurements in the examination of standard and novel semiconductor materials and heterostructures and novel superconductor materials. The new instrumentation will establish a new realm of possibilities for advanced research, offering undergraduate students appropriately challenging, exciting and educational research training while conducting relevant and interesting scientific investigations. With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program, Angelo State University will acquire research instruments required to establish an advanced, modern facility capable of supporting professional research activity for faculty collaborators and essential research training for undergraduate students. The facility, aimed at the study of material properties, will support opportunities for faculty-sponsored undergraduate research projects, fulfilling an integral part of the university mission of integrating meaningful advanced research into the educational experience of physics, applied physics, and pre-engineering majors. The new instrumentation will establish a new realm of possibilities for advanced research, offering undergraduate students appropriately challenging, exciting and educational research training while conducting relevant and interesting scientific investigations doc13451 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. A. Marshall Pregnall at Vassar College develop a phytotron facility in the Biology Department in order to enhance faculty research and student research training in biology and environmental science. By acquiring seven new controlled environment chambers, the Biology Department will increase its growth chamber capacity from five to 12, which will expand the number of concurrent research projects and improve treatment replication for controlled-environment experiments on seagrass and algal physiological ecology, plant-mycorrhizal interactions, and plant reproductive ecology. Moreover, the Biology Department will be able to maintain long-term selection lines for student research on quantitative genetics, better control conditions for student experiments in plant physiology, and enhance research training for upperclassmen in biological and environmental sciences. Dr. Pregnall will utilize the phytotron facility in several research projects. Growth chambers will be used to determine seasonal and environmental cues that regulate inorganic nitrogen assimilation by the seagrass Zostera marina. Dr. Pregnall will create a matrix of photoperiod-times- temperature-times- nitrate enrichment treatments to isolate the discrete and interactive effects of winter vs. summer conditions of light and temperature along with variable nitrogen availability. Dr. Pregnall will also measure the tolerance and physiological responses of coastal macroalgae to pulsed episodes of hypoxia and anoxia by manipulating temperature, aeration and the presence of sediments. Additionally, he will assess the contribution of water-column and sediment microbial nitrification to the inorganic nitrogen cycling in a watershed. Dr. Margaret Ronsheim will use the phytotron in her studies of the interactions between plant genotype, mycorrhizal associations, and soil pathogens on reproductive allocation and success in Allium vineale. Dr. Mark Schlessman will perform experimental tests of hypotheses relating optimal plant size and flowering time using rapid-cycling Brassica rapa. Additionally, undergraduate students will utilize the phytotron facility for research projects in 200- and 300-level courses in Biology and Environmental Science, for independent honors projects and during summer research internships with individual faculty. In each of these studies, students would work with experimental designs and statistical analyses utilizing split-plot, factorial, repeated measures ANOVA, thus gaining important experience with assessing primary and interaction effects and dependence of time responses on initial conditions. The development of the phytotron facility at Vassar College will greatly expand faculty and student research in physiological ecology, plant reproductive ecology and environmental sciences by permitting statistically powerful experimental designs while simultaneously supporting long-term manipulations and organism growth in controlled conditions. Precise control of temperature, humidity, daylength, and light intensity in multiple growth chambers will allow experiments to consider more than one factor and their possible interactions as the organisms respond through time to the different treatments. Since organism and ecosystem responses are usually sensitive to multiple factors, use of the phytotron by faculty and students will allow more complex, realistic experiments with sufficient replication to achieve valid testing of hypotheses doc13452 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program to the University of Alabama Birmingham (UAB) is for the development of a multipurpose laser deposition facility for research and education in nanostructured materials. The first phase of the project consists in the development of a novel nanoparticles pulsed beam laser deposition technique that delivers size-selected nanoparticles to deposit arbitrarily shaped patterns on a substrate. The second phase of the project consists in the integration of the new technique with conventional Pulsed Laser Deposition technique into a single deposition facility. The new facility will provide a new method for creation of nano composite materials. The facility will be a multi-user tool for research and training in nanostructured material at the UAB. The instrument will help establish five new research initiatives at UAB. This instrument development project will complement an existing NSF-Supported REU -site. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program to the University of Alabama Birmingham (UAB) is for the development of a multipurpose laser deposition facility for research and education in nanostructured materials. The first phase of the project consists in the development of a novel nanoparticles pulsed beam laser deposition technique that delivers size-selected nanoparticles to deposit arbitrarily shaped patterns on a substrate. The second phase of the project consists in the integration of the new technique with conventional Pulsed Laser Deposition technique into a single deposition facility. The new facility will provide a new method for creation of nano composite materials. The facility will be a multi-user tool for research and training in nanostructured material at the UAB. The instrument will help establish five new research initiatives at UAB. This instrument development project will complement an existing NSF-Supported REU -site doc13453 none There is an urgent need to develop tools for evaluation of the efficiency, energy, environmental, and safety impacts of traffic flow improvement projects, including Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) and Intelligent Vehicle Initiative (IVI) alternatives. The development and validation of such tools requires comprehensive field data. This proposal attempts to develop a state-of-the-art real-life and comprehensive data collection environment that can be utilized for the development, validation, and testing of these highly demanded evaluation tools, and that can also be used as a test bed for testing emerging communication, traffic management, and traveler information systems. This test facility can set the stage for the US to establish its lead in field traffic, energy, and environmental data collection and the development and validation of transportation modeling tools. The goal of this Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) acquisition project is to develop a comprehensive instrumented test bed in the Town of Blacksburg to achieve the following objectives: 1. Develop a real-life test facility that can be used for the evaluation and enhancement of traffic flow theory. The test facility will also be utilized to develop, enhance, and test alternative traffic control strategies, as well as other ITS and IVI alternatives. 2. Develop a database that can be utilized for research on alternative means of disseminating real-time traveler information to the public. 3. Develop a real-life test facility for enhancing and developing tools for the evaluation of network-wide energy and environmental impacts of operational-level transportation projects. 4. Develop a real-life test facility for enhancing and developing tools for quantifying the noise impacts of operational-level transportation projects. 5. Develop a test facility to evaluate emerging ITS technologies that can benefit transit operations. 6. Develop a test bed for the evaluation of emerging surveillance and communication technologies. 7. Develop a unique educational tool that will allow practitioners, undergraduate students, and graduate students to access and analyze real-life traffic data. In achieving these objectives, surveillance technology will be installed at a total of 20 out of 38 intersections in the Blacksburg area. Funding will also be allocated to purchase on-board vehicle emission instrumentation, a fully equipped emission measurement van, in-situ emission measurement sensors, noise measurement instrumentation, transit vehicle passenger counting instrumentation, instrumentation for a Traffic Management Center, and the use of US Wireless geolocation technology to track vehicles. In particular, the proposed instrumentation will be added to the use of an existing state-of-the-art Smart Road test facility. With the requested instrumentation, multi-modal transportation research will be conducted to develop modeling tools that are reflective of real-world driving conditions. This effort includes research on vehicle acceleration behavior, car-following, lane changing and lane selection behavior at signalized intersections, as well as merge, diverge, and weaving sections. In the area of ITS and IVI systems, research will be conducted on emergency vehicle pre-emption and transit priority, on the evaluation of technologies that can benefit transit operations such as automatic passenger counting and automatic vehicle tracking and display, and on the dissemination of traffic information using web-based and in-vehicle traveler information systems. The Instrumented City will also serve as a test bed for the development, evaluation, and testing of geolocation algorithms using wireless technology. Other research will involve the development of comprehensive vehicle fuel consumption and emission databases, the development and validation of statistical tailpipe fuel consumption and emission models, and the modeling of emission dispersion. The proposal involves collaboration with four public agencies including the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT), the Town of Blacksburg Department of Public Works, and Blacksburg Transit. In addition, the proposal involves collaboration with a number of private agencies including CleanAir Technologies and US Wireless. Further collaboration will be sought between Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia s Smart Travel Laboratory to collect and exchange data in Blacksburg, the Washington DC Area, and the Hampton Roads Area doc13454 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Allegheny College will acquire a 300 MHz Fourier-Transform Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (FT-NMR) Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) development of new methods for the synthesis of sulfones; b) synthesis of natural products; c) study of active centers in metalloproteins; d) development of models to predict the stability of RNA structure from sequence; e) development of novel complexes to catalyze oxidation reactions of biological, chemical and environmental relevance. This instrument will be used for undergraduates in their research and also within the curriculum. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including environmental chemistryand biochemistry doc13455 none Yun Peng University of Maryland-Baltimore County NGS: Workshop on Manufacturing Software Integration Research: Status and Future Directions This workshop is to support travel and registration expenses for invited speakers, and students to attend The Workshop on Manufacturing Software Integration Research. It will be held at NIST and will bring together researchers to discuss systems software issues on supporting the integration of heterogeneous software components, a very important issue in enabling modern manufacturing planning and control support systems doc13456 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Scott Carlson at Luther College to acquire instrumentation necessary to pursue basic research related to control of blood pressure regulation. Specifically, the grant provides funding for purchase of a telemetric monitoring system, isolated tissue bath setup, doppler flow probe system, a microtome with a freeze stage, and a gamma counter. This equipment provides state-of-the-art technologies necessary for basic research related to rat cardiovascular physiology, and will be utilized by faculty and undergraduate students to pursue research projects related to cardiovascular control under normal and pathological conditions. Three faculty student research projects will be supported by this grant. The first project focuses on how the rat brain receives information regarding dietary intake and normally responds to prevent alterations in blood pressure. The second study will examine the effects of diabetes on blood pressure and vascular function. The third study will investigate whether estrogen protects cognitive function, in part by maintaining proper blood flow to regions of the brains associated with learning and memory. The projects described above will allow the awardee and his students to pursue basic research which addresses significant physiological questions. The projects will directly involve undergraduate students, giving them experience in cardiovascular research methods and in the scientific process. Furthermore, students will present research at national meetings and in publication format. It is expected that the equipment will increase collaborative opportunities within the college and with other institutions through the use of the instrumentation as core equipment for the Biology Department. This instrumentation will also be integrated into the classroom curriculum, through a planned Introduction to Cardiovascular Research course as well as in the current physiology laboratory courses. Thus, in addition to the 6 undergraduate students which are currently working in the awardee s laboratory, it is expected that approximately 110 students will annually utilize this equipment during their course work. Finally, the instrumentation will be used in the Summer Science Program, which exposes minority students to scientific research. Thus, acquisition of this equipment will greatly benefit the educational and research goals to which Luther College and the National Science Foundation are committed doc13457 none Reed The plant hormone auxin controls multiple developmental processes including elongation of stems, branching of shoots and roots, bending toward or away from light or gravity, and patterning of various tissues. Auxin Response Factors (ARFs) are a family transcription factors that regulate induction and repression of genes in response to auxin, and therefore have key functions in mediating these developmental processes. This project will focus on functions and interactions of ARF6 and ARF8, two ARFs in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana that activate genes in response to auxin. The aims of the project are i) to discover developmental functions of these two transcription factors by characterizing phenotypes of arf6 and arf8 mutant plants and of transgenic plants that overexpress epitope-tagged ARF6 or ARF8; ii) to identify genes that ARF6 and ARF8 regulate by hybridizing probes made from untreated or auxin-treated wild-type and mutant plants to gene chips containing DNA representing thousands of Arabidopsis genes; iii) to explore functional interactions between ARF6 and ARF8 and selected proteins of the related Aux IAA family, by constructing double mutants between arf6 and arf8 and selected mutations in IAA genes and examining their phenotypes; iv) to raise ARF6- and ARF8-specific anti-peptide antibodies; and v) to use these antibodies and the epitope-tagged proteins to study whether ARF6 and ARF8 interact with other proteins in vivo. These studies will provide a multifaceted view of the functions of ARF6 and ARF8, setting the stage for similar analyses of other doc13458 none Proposal: PI: Terry Friesz Institution: George Mason University Date: July 25, : A Multilayer Capital Budgeting Model for Comparative analyses of Infrastructure Networks This project addresses the dynamic capital budgeting problem for large scale, multi-layer infrastructure networks, comprised of transportation networks, water networks, energy networks, telecommunications networks, financial networks, and genera data flow networks. Specifically, the objective of this project is to develop a multi-layer dynamic network capital budgeting model that can be used to quantify the cost savings and efficiency enhancements that might accrue from the coordinated planning and design of infrastructure networks. In the past, infrastructure networks have only been considered in isolation. As such this project is the first step toward developing both a comprehensive theory of infrastructure network design and a new generation of infrastructure decision support systems capable of identifying and promoting synergies among individual network layers. Constraints reflecting physical, financial, economic, and information interdependencies are used to couple network layers. Network activities are further constrained by flow conservation, resource and non-negativity constraints. The state dynamics recognize the alternative gaming behaviors of individual agents active on the various network layers, so that different assumptions regarding the nature of perfect and imperfect economic competition over networks can be considered. The objective is to maximize the present value of net economic benefits. This objective is combined with the aforementioned constraints and state dynamics to create a family of differential games that are formulated as optimal control models. These models can be used to determine the most efficient allocation of infrastructure capital investments over both time and space. The research approach used in this project combines qualitative analysis and nontranditional solution techniques. That is, both classical numerical methods and combined optimization agent-based simulation (ABS) models are considered. In particular, the differential game model is used to validate the ABS model. A key task in this regard is the investigation of the sensitivity of the model dynamics to parameter values. Although a case study of an actual metropolitan infrastructure system is beyond the scope of this initial research, we will also develop an experimental design for validation of the optimization ABS model. We will also describe how the model may be used to develop an optimal capacity expansion plan for the infrastructure systems of a medium size city doc13459 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program will support Xavier University with the acquisition of a thin film deposition system for growth of thin films of materials (primarily metals) that range in thickness from tens of nanometers to several micrometers. Three main thrusts of research would benefit from this piece of equipment. These are: 1) the study of the electrical transport properties of superconductors and Josephson junction arrays; 2) the study of the growth and surface morphology of metal films; 3) and the study of the electrical properties of carbon nanotubes. Each of these areas requires metal films for sample fabrication and or preparation. The deposition system is the next logical step in building existing infrastructure at the institution. In addition, the Xavier University Department of Physics requires all of its undergraduate majors to complete a senior research project. These research projects are usually consistent with, and often directly linked to faculty research program. This deposition system would significantly advance undergraduate education and training by offering viable avenues for undergraduate students to carry out their research requirement. Its use will expose students to an important experimental research tool, as well as to important sample fabrication techniques that are not taught in class but are learned through experience. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program will support Xavier University with the acquisition of a thin film deposition system for growth of thin films of materials (primarily metals) that range in thickness from tens of nanometers to several micrometers. Three main thrusts of research would benefit from this piece of equipment. These are: 1) the study of the electrical transport properties of superconductors and Josephson junction arrays; 2) the study of the growth and surface morphology of metal films; 3) and the study of the electrical properties of carbon nanotubes. Each of these areas requires metal films for sample fabrication and or preparation. The deposition system is the next logical step in building existing infrastructure at the institution. In addition, the Xavier University Department of Physics requires all of its undergraduate majors to complete a senior research project. These research projects are usually consistent with, and often directly linked to faculty research program. This deposition system would significantly advance undergraduate education and training by offering viable avenues for undergraduate students to carry out their research requirement. Its use will expose students to an important experimental research tool, as well as to important sample fabrication techniques that are not taught in class but are learned through experience doc13460 none Brookhaven National Laboratory is hosting a workshop on May 30-31, to promote the formation of research partnerships between college and university faculty in designated EPSCoR states and the scientific staff from Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories and facilities. The workshop is sponsored by the DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences EPSCoR program and is co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation EPSCoR Program. The primary objective of the meeting is to provide a forum for research scientists from EPSCoR states to: (1) report advances in EPSCoR funded research activities, (2) update their knowledge of Department of Energy programs and initiatives, (3) learn about BNL National User Faciliti4es and research directions, (5) develop plans for future research projects, and (6) learn about DOE laboratory opportunities for training and hands-on research experience for undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral fellows and new faculty doc13461 none of creep can be put forth. These are accomplished by combined experimental work on creep testing and detailed electron microscopy analyses of dislocation characteristics; by extending the application of the model to single-phase single crystals of Ti2AI and Ti6AI; and finally by applying these models to a wider range of materials including BCC solid solutions, diamond-cubic and zinc-blend structures. The model provides a link between atomic-level processes and macroscopic properties, and is a natural platform from which to build multi-scale treatments of dislocation creep. %%% This research develops new understanding of the ftmdainental mechanisms involved with high temperature creep and has significance in several important materials systems where a fundamental knowledge of high temperature performance is crucial for present and future applications doc13462 none Lathrop This project seeks to better understand the generation mechanism for the Earth s magnetic field. This Major Research Instrumentation grant will fund development of a new device designed to self-generate magnetic fields at parameters close to the Earth. This new device will drive liquid sodium to flow in a three-meter spherical tank. The tank and the enclosed propellors rotate independently to drive a sodium flow to stretch and amplify magnetic fields. The goal is to better understand the saturation mechanism which determines the strength of the Earth s field, as well as characterize the dynamics of a saturated self-generating dynamo state (such as reversals). New diagnostics are planned to better characterize the fluctuations in the magnetic field and the fluid velocity, including ultrasound velocimetry, spherical magnetic field sensors, and a magnetic field imaging array. The effects of rotation and Lorentz forces on the velocity and magnetic fields are specific issues these diagnostics will probe. This scientific exploration seeks to shed light on the dynamics of field self-generation on a wide variety of objects showing active fields (the Earth, the Sun, Jupiter, Saturn, Io) as well as those lacking self-generation such as Venus doc13463 none Partial funding is provided for the support of a workshop (Gordon Research Conference) on coastal ocean circulation. Twenty-two invited talks and a series of contributed poster presentations will be made. These will cover a breadth of topics in coastal ocean circulation occurring on a variety of space and time scales. Related topics in coastal meteorology and biogeochemical-physical interactions will also be discussed. The priority use of the funds is to defray travel and attendance costs for young investigators doc13464 none Freeman-Gallant 1. A lay abstract, with the title of the proposal and your full name at the top. Corey R. Freeman-Gallant and Nathaniel T. Wheelwright. Inbreeding, Female Mating Fidelity, and the Major Histocompatibility Complex in Savannah Sparrows Female birds often copulate outside of the pair-bond to produce broods of mixed paternity, and in some species, as many as 60% of young derive from extra-pair fertilizations. The ubiquity of this infidelity has important implications for our understanding of avian biology. Recent work has linked female mating fidelity to the ecology and evolution of male parental care, social mating systems, breeding dispersion and synchrony, and the form and function of elaborate sexual displays. Despite its importance, the adaptive significance of multiple mating remains controversial. While several recent studies support the idea that extra-pair copulations (EPCs) allow females to obtain good genes for their offspring (by trading-up) on the genetic quality of sires), many others have found no relationship between female mating fidelity and traits likely to reflect male quality. Indeed, much variation in female mating fidelity remains unexplained, and few feasible alternatives to the good genes hypothesis have been pursued in the field. A corollary to the good genes hypothesis proposes that females do use EPCs to increase the quality of young, but it is the interaction between maternal and paternal genomes and not male quality per se that is the target of female choice. This individual optimization or genetic compatibility hypothesis has now been explored in snakes, lizards, and pseudoscorpions, but few studies in birds have considered the importance of genotype-dependent mating preferences and optima. Preliminary work with Savannah sparrows (Passerculus sandwichensis), however, strongly suggests that females pair nonrandomly (and disassortatively) with respect to the major histocompatibility complex (Mhc), a group of genes responsible for eliciting the adaptive immune response of vertebrates. Moreover, a female s genetic similarity to her social mate predicts her fidelity: females paired to similar males are more likely to produce extra-pair young than females paired to dissimilar males. These results parallel similar studies in mice and humans, and suggest either that the benefits of genetic diversity (at the Mhc) drive female mating patterns or that the avoidance of inbreeding is an ultimate cause of social and genetic mate choice in Savannah sparrows. With NSF funding, new molecular and analytical techniques will applied to samples obtained during previous field work. Preliminary results with Savannah sparrows are based on 38 pairs nesting on Kent Island, New Brunswick, Canada in . To determine whether females choose within- and extra-pair sires according to their Mhc genotype, and to incorporate other potential determinants of female mating fidelity (such as adult age, timing of breeding and phenotypic quality), the analysis will be extended to pairs nesting in . In addition, the importance of overall levels of genetic relatedness to female mating fidelity, the occurrence of egg (embryo) mortality, and the survivorship of nestlings and fledglings will be assessed by surveying sparrows during the and breeding seasons. Both the costs of inbreeding and the benefits of Mhc heterozygosity predict that females should avoid fertilizations from genetically similar males. This research benefits from the prior development of a species-specific Mhc probe and nearly 15 years of field and molecular work on the Kent Island population of Savannah sparrows. This study will provide one of the first tests of the importance of the Mhc to social and genetic mating patterns in a free-living population of songbirds doc13465 none Dalal Recently, the advent of MEMS and the ability to deposit thin film electronic devices on virtually any substrate has made many novel electronic, MEMS, microfluidic and biological devices possible. Examples of such devices would be in-situ thin-film electronic sensors and thin film transistors deposited in etched groves for detecting and controlling fluid flow in microfluidic and biological devices; neural reconnection using trenches etched in quartz or Si; electrical stimulation of nerve growth in trenches using in-situ deposited active devices; MEMS devices for sensing chemical pollutants, using ultra-thin piezoelectric membranes and selective receptor sites; DNA analysis using microchambers; implantable micropumps for drug delivery; Soi1CHIP for in-situ testing of soils; chemical lab on a chip etc. Most of these devices need the ability to etch deeply and controllably in a variety of substrates, such as Si wafers, polymers and quartz microplates. Some of the etching has to go ~100 micrometer deep. At Iowa State University, and also at the PIs sister institution, the University of Iowa, a number of innovative projects are underway in this area which integrate electronic technology with biological and microfluidic technologies. Some of the noteworthy projects involve directed nerve regrowth in severed central nervous systems, using trenches in Si ,quartz or polymers to guide the direction of the regrowth; microfluidic channels for implantable micropumps; detection of trace chemicals for forensic testing using specialized chemical coatings on MEMS type structures; analytical laboratory on a chip; development of thin film transistors in deep trenches; development of nanocoatings for surfaces in MEMS type channels; measurement of structure and stress in cytoskeletons etc. All these projects need a deep reactive ion etching system. The one the PIs have stops at about 5 micrometer. In this project, they propose to purchase a versatile, laboratory-scale, deep uv reactive ion etching system from Oxford Instruments, which uses the patented Bosch process to achieve etching as deep as 100 micrometer. It is expected that this new system will allow them to successfully carry out some of the current and future projects in these very new and exciting fields of electro-biology, chemical MEMS, medical MEMS and opto-mechanical MEMS. This instrument is capable of deep etching, using both Chlorine and Fluorine-based gases. The Oxford Instruments system is a proven lab-scale system, with a high density ICP plasma source, RE biasing of the substrate, capabilities for backside cooling of substrates and the provision for a load-lock. It is a cluster tool which can be added on to in later stages. It comes equipped with the appropriate flow controllers and corrosive service pumps. They propose to add to it, at their cost, an in-line high-resolution, computer-controlled optical emission spectroscopy (OES) system from Acton Research which will be very useful for understanding and controlling the different plasmas that one needs when etching quartz and polymers such as polyimide, PET and biological polymers. This instrument will be housed at the Microelectronics Research Center(MRC) at Iowa State University. MRC is an interdisciplinary facility set up by Iowa State to provide research capabilities in the general area of semiconductors and MEMS for faculty and students from all departments. The PIs currently have students and faculty from EE, Materials Science and Engineering, ChemE, Physics, Chemistry, Mechanical Engineering, Industrial Engineering and Biology using MRC facilities extensively. They have many federally and industrially supported projects, and this new instrument will be useful to a wide group of faculty. Nearly 30 graduate students would benefit from having this instrument at MRC. MRC has qualified, experienced, technicians available for installing and running this instrument. They have the necessary environmental monitoring and gas-disposal facilities required for such an instrument. And they have over 20 years of experience in running plasma reactors, including a PIE system, which unfortunately does not do deep etching. The instrument will also help the PIs develop new courses in this area. They already have an extensive offering in the general semiconductor field, including several lab-based courses. They expect to add two inter-disciplinary course on plasma based manufacturing of electronic, MEMS and biological devices, and on measurement techniques if we get this instrument. Note that these courses will be open to both senior--level and graduate-level students. Thus, the educational impact will be felt both at undergraduate and graduate levels. The semiconductor and MEMS industries are very interested in having trained engineers in this field. So is the biomedical industry. The PIs have planned an extensive outreach doc13466 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Rutgers University in Camden will acquire a300 MHz nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) Spectrometer with multinuclear capabilities and a variable temperature control module. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) synthesis of fluorinated organic compounds; b) characterization of various monomers and their corresponding precursors; and c) the catalytic mechanisms of lipoamide dehydrogenase by probing native and mutated enzymes with and without substrate. The investigators will also integrate the NMR spectrometer into several undergraduate and graduate level courses. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry and biochemistry doc13467 none In addition to the strong interaction between neutrons and protons which binds them in the nucleus, there is also a weak interaction. The precise strength of this interaction between neutrons and protons is not known, and current results from different experiment are contradictory. However, the weak interaction is known to possess the unique property of causing reactions that look different in a mirror. We intend to construct a detector which can sense part-per-billion mirror asymmetries in reactions involving neutrons and protons that produce gamma rays. This detector will first be used in an upcoming experiment at the LANSCE pulsed neutron source at Los Alamos which will detect the mirror asymmetry in neutron capture on protons. It will be designed and constructed at the Indiana University Cyclotron Facility doc13468 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Jean Hardwick at Ithaca College for the acquisition of a core microscopy facility for the Biology Department. This instrumentation will be used by four separate faculty members with diverse research interests in developmental biology, comparative physiology, neurobiology and plant ecology. Specifically, these funds will be used for the acquisition of a research-quality compound microscope equipped with advanced imaging capabilities such as DIC, phase contrast and fluorescence imaging. This microscope will also be equipped with a cooled digital camera (CCD) and image analysis system for the capture of publication-quality electronic images as well as advanced image analysis. In addition, this facility will included a stereomicroscope with a epi-fluorescence for imaging of fluorescently-labeled plant and animal specimens and a dual viewing bridge for training students in various procedures. This instrumentation will become a major component of a core departmental facility for microscopy which will complement existing equipment as well as expanding our facilities to include electronic imaging and analysis. Several faculty members use microscopy as part of their ongoing research efforts in projects including the localization of neuropeptides in the amphibian nervous system, analysis of the regulation of embryonic development in Xenopus, the physiology and biochemistry of mucus production in invertebrates, and the response of plants to injury. All of these projects require significant analysis of tissue specimens using a variety of optical techniques. For example, analysis of neuropeptide localization utilizes the technique of immunohistochemistry to determine the specific organization and function of neurotransmitters in the nervous system. The developmental studies use gene markers, such as the green fluorescent protein (GFP), to investigate the molecular signals underlying specific aspects of development. The study of mucus production requires histological analysis of the mucus producing organs themselves, and the analysis of plant response to injury will also use a GFP marker to determine the cellular responses to insect herbivore. Thus, this facility will become an integral part of the research facilities for a wide range of current faculty as well as future hires. The Biology department at Ithaca College has a long-standing commitment to the involvement of undergraduates in research. All biology majors are required to spend at least one semester doing research in a faculty member s lab. Undergraduates are involved in every facet of faculty research and are trained in the use of all equipment associated with that work. This would mean that, with at least four different faculty members using this facility as a part of their research program, a significant number of undergraduates will also have the opportunity to use this equipment. Undergraduates at Ithaca College routinely present their research efforts at conferences and are included as co-authors on publications. Continued involvement of undergraduates in ongoing scientific research is critical in stimulating students to pursue careers in science, as well as increasing their overall scientific literacy doc13469 none This grant supports the acquisition of a multi-channel biomagnetometer system for Magnetic Source Imaging (MSI). This system will be used for non-invasive recording of magnetic signals emitted naturally by the human brain during performance of sensory-motor, cognitive and linguistic tasks, and for constructing functional images of brain activation. These images reflect the spatio-temporal patterns of brain activity mediating the psychological and behavioral functions required by the experimental tasks. During the past three years, we have used MSI to establish (i) the reliability and validity of functional maps of the brain mechanisms underlying cognitive functions, including motor, somatosensory, and receptive language (Breier et al., a,b; Breier et al., , in press; Papanicolaou et al., ; Simos, a,b; a,b; a). These maps have proven so accurate that MSI is routinely used in our institution for outlining the borders of language-specific cortex in neurosurgical candidates in order to avoid damage to normally functioning neural mechanisms during resection of brain lesions lying close to these areas of the brain, thus reducing post-operative morbidity. (ii) We have accumulated sufficient data for constructing reliable maps of brain mechanisms associated with reading and phonological decoding in adults (Breier et al., , c, Simos et al., a, a, in press) and in school-age children (Simos et al., b,c, in press) as well as kindergarten children learning to read. (iii) We have identified brain activation maps specific to children with identified reading difficulties and children at-risk for developing reading difficulties. We are following these children as they learn to read through different instructional methods to determine how these maps change with improved reading proficiency (Simos et al., b,c,d). These discoveries led us to consider a host of experimental questions ranging from the layout of the mechanisms of oral and written language in the brains of bilingual and polyglot children and adults to questions regarding the formation of such mechanisms in the course of brain maturation and development, and to questions relating to specific spatio-temporal activation patterns underlying component cognitive and linguistic functions. We have begun addressing these questions with the support of several NSF and NIH grants (NSF grant # ; NIH grants RO1 NS and RO1 HD ) using a 148-channel biomagnetometer acquired for clinical studies belonging to Hermann Hospital. Not surprisingly, the use of that system for the conduct of basic research involving normal volunteers and children has become problematic. The system we will purchase will be located on the U of Texas- Houston campus, outside Hermann Hospital, and will be exclusively used for basic research involving children and adults. Our group has advanced MSI technology, especially in areas involving higher cortical functions. We have developed specific applications to education, literally bringing neuroscience into public schools. In order to continue to advance the technology and expand educational and training applications, a MSI laboratory dedicated to research is needed, leading to this grant under the Major Research Instrumentation Program doc13470 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program for Lamar University supports the acquisition of a multifunctional x-ray diffraction system to support interdisciplinary materials research and educational activities at Lamar University and Lamar s research and educational collaborators in other universities and industry. This system will supply the following advanced materials characterization capabilities: powder diffraction, particle sizing, strain analysis, texture, phase identification, quantitative phase composition, lattice parameter determination, amorphous component characterization, and thin layer analysis. These capabilities will be used to support research in the following areas: environmental science and engineering, polymers, nano-structured materials, structured thin films, high technology alloys, superconducting and magnetic materials, and geological and paleontological materials. The research will involve 19 senior personnel and numerous graduate and undergraduate students from Lamar University, Prairie View A&M University, Texas A&M University, and the Technological Institute of Saltillo, Mexico, as well as the steel and mining industries. The project will promote regional and international research collaboration and will give numerous research and educational projects access to high quality x-ray diffraction. With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program, Lamar University will acquire a high quality x-ray diffraction system to support interdisciplinary materials research and educational activities at Lamar University and research collaboration activities with other universities and industry. The system will provide advanced capabilities to characterize physical and chemical structural phenomena in a wide range of research and educational projects involving environmental samples, nanoscience and engineering, thin films, high technology alloys, advanced electronic and magnetic samples and geological materials. It involves several universities (Lamar, Prairie View A&M University, Texas A&M and the Technological Institute of Saltillo, Mexico). Nineteen senior personnel and numerous graduate and undergraduate students will be given access to a high quality research system that will promote regional and international collaboration doc13471 none This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI)Program grant provides funds to procure a high-power CO2 laser system for research and education in manufacturing and materials processing. The laser system consists of five major functional components, including a laser generation unit, optics and beam delivery system, a chiller and cooling system, gas control and supply system, and motion and control system. The equipment will allow both fundamental and applied research in: (1) Welding of High-Strength Aluminum Alloys; (2) Welding of Zinc-Coated Steels; (3) Dual Beam Welding and Cutting; (4) The Formation of Striations in Cutting; (5) Cladding of Functionally Graded Thermal Barrier Coating; (6) Laser-Aided Sheet Metal Forming Bending; (7) Surface Treating of Metals; (8) Laser-Material Interactions and Keyhole Formation; (9) Sintering of Ceramic Coating and Metal Films; and (10) Process Modeling and Real Time Control. Availability of the equipment will enable the institution to create new research capabilities and opportunities, to enrich the teaching of several senior and graduate courses, to stimulate cross-disciplinary teamwork, and to enhance university-industry-government collaborations. Faculty members and graduate and undergraduate students from several academic departments will form interdisciplinary teams to conduct the aforementioned research projects using the acquired laser system doc13472 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Grinnell College will acquire an electrochemical impedance instrument and a differential scanning calorimeter (DSC). The electrochemical impedance instrument will enable the principal investigator and undergraduates at Grinnell to carry out ionic conductivity studies of polymeric electrolytes; the DSC will facilitate the measurement of the thermal properties of the electrolytes. Differential Scanning Calorimetry is an extremely useful tool in modern analytical chemistry. Calorimetric analysis is used to measure the thermal energy (heat) exchange that occurs during molecular interactions and reactions. Thus DSC provides a very reliable and sensitive method for determining thermodynamic properties of materials such as changes in heat capacity of liquid and solid samples. Impedance spectroscopy measures the alternating current resistance, i.e., the impedance, of a sample as a function of frequency. Knowledge of thermodynamic properties and impedances is crucial to understanding the behavior of materials, such as polymer electrolytes, that show promise in microelectronics and lightweight, small batteries doc13473 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) will enable the Department of Chemistry at Pacific University to acquire an atomic force microscope scanning tunneling microscope (AFM STM) to enhance undergraduate research opportunities in electrochemistry and biochemistry. This equipment will enhance research in two major projects: a) the structural effects and consequences of electrochemical processes at commercially important lithium-ion cell graphite anodes will be studied in situ; and b) the study of aggregation phenomena on cell surfaces in aqueous environments. The scanning tunneling microscope (STM) enables researchers to image atoms directly. The technique uses the piezoelectric effect which involves bringing an extremely sharp metal needle within a few angstroms of the sample surface. The distance is small enough for electrons to leak or tunnel across the gap and generate a minute current. As the gap between the tip and the sample increases, the current decreases. As the probe crosses the sample, moving back and forth across the surface, it traces out a contour map of the sample s surface atoms. The AFM is used in the control of material used to fabricate semiconductor circuits doc13474 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Jason W. Kelsey at Marymount University to purchase an HPLC Chemstation and a Protector fume hood. The equipment will be used to study the bioavailability and toxicity of soil-aged organic pollutants. Important components of the research are the detection and extraction of compounds from soil and organisms that have been exposed to contaminated soil. High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) is used in the Marymount environmental science laboratory to quantify both recovery of the compound from soil as well as biological uptake. The Chemstation will greatly enhance the analysis of HPLC data. Currently, data are printed onto paper by means of an integrator, making complex analysis difficult. The fume hood will allow work on a wide range of volatile organic pollutants that are otherwise difficult to handle. The absence of a fume hood in the environmental science laboratory makes investigation of volatile compounds difficult and dangerous. The equipment will also be used in the teaching of Integrated Advanced Environmental Laboratory, a course in which upper-division biology undergraduates learn a number of analytical techniques used in experimental environmental science. The bioavailability of phenanthrene, a constituent of petroleum, and atrazine, a widely used herbicide, to earthworms and turtle eggs will be assessed. Of interest is the effect of species differences on the bioavailability of soil-aged pollutants. Sterile soil samples will be amended with phenanthrene or atrazine and allowed to age for a predetermined number of days. The experiments will be designed to yield samples in which the compounds have been aged for different lengths of time (e.g., 120, 60, 30, and 0 days). Organisms will be added to the samples and then extracted to determine the tissue concentration of the compounds. Parallel samples will be extracted to confirm that the unaltered parent compounds (i.e., the added phenanthrene or atrazine) are present in the soil after aging. Extracts will be analyzed using HPLC (with the Chemstation) to quantify uptake and recovery from soil. This work is important for the accurate assessment of the risk of pollutants in soil. Although data reported by the investigator and others demonstrate that many contaminants become progressively less available for uptake as they are aged in soil, estimations of risk of polluted sites are typically based on the total amount of compound present in (i.e., extractable from) soil and not biological availability. Consequently, the risk associated with a particular contaminant in soil is frequently overestimated. This incorrect calculation of risk could lead to the misdirection of resources in an attempt to meet unrealistic and possibly unnecessary clean-up goals. In addition, sites with the highest levels of contamination may not be the sites of highest risk to human and ecological receptors. Exposure assessments that rank environmental and human health risks in a way that appropriately reflects bioavailability will lead to more accurate risk assessments and, ultimately, to more efficient allocation of limited financial and natural resources. Information about species differences will improve predictions of the risk of pollutants in soils as well as further our understanding of the factors that influence bioavailability doc13475 none Acquisition of a Core Automated DNA Sequencing Facility A grant has been awarded to Dr. Peter F. Straub, Dr. Brian J. Rogerson and Dr. Karen P. York of the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey to setup a DNA Sequencing Facility. The new Core Genetic Analysis Facility, once established, will enable automated DNA sequencing, DNA fragment analysis and integrated computer analysis of genetic data. This facility will be used to support student undergraduate research, faculty research and to enhance teaching in the Molecular and Genetic Biosciences at Stockton College. The main instrument acquired by the grant is an automated DNA Sequencer. Other instruments useful in running the sequencing reactions, specialized software packages, and supplies have been funded to add more research capabilities to the facility. To involve large numbers of students and faculty, two collaborative demonstration projects will be supported during the first three years of the grant. The first project will use sequencing and DNA fragment analysis to fingerprint and identify bacteria in subsurface aquifers. The results will provide information helpful to the study of large-scale geothermal energy use (such as at Stockton College). The second project will generate short DNA sequences from libraries of winter flounder genes in support of fisheries research. Both of these projects invite multi-user large-scale collaboration among students and faculty and will produce knowledge that is immediately useful to the scientific community. This project has the potential to transform the way that teaching and research are performed at a primarily undergraduate college like Richard Stockton College of NJ. The grant supports a facility that focuses on collaborative student-faculty research in Genetics. These opportunities are important for training undergraduate research students since Medicine, Pharmaceuticals and Biotechnology have been among the most important sectors of the economy whose growth has been directly influence by the revolutionary advancement in biological technologies (like DNA sequencing) over the past twenty years doc13476 none Dickinson These studies focus on fundamental mechanisms and applications of nanometer scale surface manipulation involving combined stimuli, where the tip of a scanning force microscope stimulates the surface in the presence of an aggressive chemical solution. These combined stimuli can make and break bonds and reorganize material on surfaces of single crystals, glasses, and polymers in a highly localized fashion. We will examine the role of crystalline and other structural defects (e.g., steps, kinks, vacancies, and nanostructures generated by the tip) in dissolution and growth to identify the rate limiting steps (with and without stimulation by the SFM tip) and how they depend on stress, solution chemistry, and temperature. These results will be related to fundamental physical and chemical parameters governing dissolution and growth, such as activation energies and volume entropic factors. We also will examine how the apparently random mechanical vibrations in cantilevers during scanning might be related to transient surface phenomena in supersaturated solutions. These studies have considerable promise in the development of new methods for generating atomically flat surfaces, constructing novel nanometer structures, and producing textured surfaces for bonding and chemically active arrangements. The studies also support atomic level understanding of the technologically important process of chemical mechanical polishing (CMP), where the SFM tip serves as a model abrasive particle. Sensor development, MEMS, and development of new biologically active substrates and surfaces will benefit from the improved molecular-level understanding of dissolution and growth resulting from this work doc13477 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Saginaw Valley State University will acquire a liquid chromatograph with mass spectrometric detection. The research to be carried out using this instrument will define and follow the health of the Saginaw Bay Watershed in response to an EPA Superfund cleanup of a toxic waste site on the Pine River. The scientific objectives to be addressed include a) measurement of toxics in the sediment and water column; b) bioaccumulation of pollutants; c) impact of the pollutants on genetic diversity; d) methods for remediation; and e) methods for characterization of types of microorganisms. Students from this primarily undergraduate institution will be heavily involved in the research effort. Liquid chromatography with mass spectrometric detection (LC-MS) is an extremely powerful technique used for the separation and analysis of complex mixtures. This instrument will substantially strengthen scientific research within the Earth Sciences discipline at Saginaw Valley State University doc13478 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Roger McPherson at Clarion University of Pennsylvania to purchase genetic technology crucial to several important research projects and the training of undergraduate and Master s degree students in ecology and systematics. The equipment purchased is a Genetic Analyzer with gene sequencing, Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) product sizing software, and quantitation software. This system allows faculty and student researchers at Clarion University to carry out gene sequencing activities and to use genetic markers that can determine the genetic profile, or genetic fingerprint, of individuals and populations on a small geographic scale with a high degree of resolution. The instrumentation will support the efforts of four-research groups led by ecology faculty at Clarion University. One project, led by the Project Director, R. McPherson, will use genetic markers to indirectly measure the dispersal of coldwater fishes in watersheds having various degrees of fragmentation. These indirect measures of movement and more traditional direct measures will be used to test hypotheses of among stream movement of coldwater fishes. A second research group led by Dr. Andrew Turner (Co-PD) will use genetic analyses to examine the relationship of gene flow and behavioral variation among freshwater snail populations. Snail populations vary in the extent to which they shift habitat use in the presence of predators. Studies of gene flow will lead to a better understanding of local adaptation in freshwater snails. A third group directed by Dr. Charles Williams (Co-PD) would use the instrumentation to investigate population structure, gene flow, and dynamics of woody plants in a chronically browsed landscape. Many plant species have diminished greatly in abundance due to heavy browsing. However, little is known about how the loss of key understory plants has influenced forest function and structure. This research-group will be using genetic analyses to gain an understanding of this relationship. A fourth research-group under the guidance of Dr. Steven Harris (Co-PD) will use DNA sequence variation to resolve genetic relationships in Neotropical caddisflies, a highly diverse invertebrate group. Their larval stages are aquatic and along with the mayflies and stoneflies are often utilized by ecologists as indicators of streams possessing good water quality. In North America, the biodiversity of this group is fairly well known, but in the neotropics, such is not the case. Dr. Harris and his students have reached somewhat of an impasse using morphological characters, but have not yet looked at genetic analyses as a means of resolving taxonomic relationships. They will compare genetic sequences to study the biological diversity of these important stream organisms. Each of these projects will use state-of- the-art genetic technology to address fundamental questions in ecology and systematics. The broad implications of the award include the strengthening of the research infrastructure at Clarion University. Additionally, the presence of this instrumentation will expand the scope of the research training for undergraduate and Master of Science students in systematics and ecology. It will allow the students, collaborating with faculty, hands-on experience with the latest genetic techniques as these techniques apply to important issues in environmental biology and systematics. With the expansion of the capabilities in the use of these techniques a greater number of students (including female and minority undergraduates) will be afforded the opportunity to gain valuable research training doc13479 none A continuing series of grants since has made it possible for CIRES of the University of Colorado, in collaboration with the NOAA Aeronomy Laboratory, to construct, operate, and maintain VHF wind-profiling radars at four sites stretching across the equatorial Pacific: Biak, Indonesia; Pohnpei, Micronesia; Christmas Island, Kiribati; and Piura, Peru. Observations from the profiler at Christmas Island are now assimilated into operational forecast models on a routine basis. Ongoing research activities based on data from the network include: (1) documentation of seasonal and interannual variability of winds over the Tropical Pacific; (2) investigation of the structure of atmospheric Kelvin waves, Rossby waves, and gravity waves; (3) measurement of the vertical structure and amount of rainfall at the profiler sites; (4) obtaining data for the validation of atmospheric models. The network fills both research and operational needs for data on winds and precipitation in the Tropical Pacific - a region important for the global climate, but where other sources of data are scarce doc13480 none This proposal requests support for infrastructure for the design, readout, and testing of semiconductor sensors for use in high energy particle physics experiments. The equipment requested includes a probe station, wire bonders, geometry gauge, logic analyzer, plasma cleaner, voltage sources, and positioning stages. The equipment will allow the collaborating groups to broaden the range of their contributions to experiments in which they already have leadership roles (ATLAS, CLEO, CDF, and D0). The main focus of this proposal is to use this equipment to develop and construct the ATLAS pixel detector. ATLAS is a large international collaboration to which the US contributes over 20% of the effort, and which detector is currently under construction for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN Laboratory in Geneva Switzerland. Many NSF-supported groups participate in ATLAS. In addition, there is concurrent activity in the development of a silicon upgrade for the CDF detector for Run IIb at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider. Many NSF-supported groups are collaborating on the CDF experiment. The University of New Mexico proposes to lead the design and testing of the pixel sensors, which would be based on the ATLAS designs. The opportunities presented for education by this project at the collaborating universities are also described doc13481 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Detroit-Mercy will acquire a liquid chromatograph with mass spectrometric detection. This versatile system includes a photodiode array detector and a quadrupole mass spectrometry detector with atmospheric pressure electrospray and chemical ionization sources. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including characterization of verdazyl free radicals, isoflavones and their metabolites and modified peptides. Liquid chromatography with mass spectrometric detection (LCMS) is an extremely powerful technique used for the separation and analysis of complex mixtures. This instrument will substantially strengthen scientific research at this primarily undergraduate institution. The LCMS will also be used in advanced courses doc13482 none A researcher from the University of California-San Diego proposes to continue his studies on the calcium (Ca) cycle in the ocean by making additional measurements of Ca inputs and outputs. Initially, the PI will measure the Ca isotopic composition of additional river water samples to increase the available database and help constrain the present-day river input of Ca. In addition, results from these samples will be used to assess whether the lithology and maturity of the drainage basin affects the Ca isotopic composition of river samples and if adsorption of Ca onto clays influences the isotopic signal. Next, Dr. Macdougall plans to collaborate with Dr. Paytan at Stanford to ascertain if barite samples record the Ca isotopic composition of seawater without the fractionation observed in biogenic carbonate. Lastly, the PI will analyze samples of a single foraminifera (Globigerinoides sacculifer) in downcore sediments from ODP Site 806 in the western Equatorial Pacific which document the Quaternary oxygen isotopic record, to determine whether Ca isotopes can be used as a paleo-temperature proxy doc13483 none Wilhelm, Ronald A research grade 16-inch telescope and instrumentation for the Fountainhead Observatory of Southwestern University will be specified, purchased, integrated and verified. Southwestern University is a small non-PhD granting institution that focuses on teaching and undergraduate research in the astronomical sciences. This telescope and instrument system will be used in three instrument areas: 1. Photometry of RR Lyrae stars to yield masses and luminosities of these stars, 2. Photometry of active galactic nuclei, 3. Photometry of Type IIn supernovae doc13484 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Holly Boettger-Tong at Wesleyan College, an undergraduate liberal arts college for women, to acquire an imaging workstation. The specific components of this imaging workstation include an imaging research microscope with digital camera, combined with imaging software capable of high resolution image acquisition and morphologic analysis capabilities. A scanning laser densitometer, with software capable of quantifying stained electrophoresis gels, blotting membranes and autoradiographs is also an integral component of this workstation. Acquisition of this equipment is vital to the research activities of the Biology faculty, and represents a significant improvement in our ongoing efforts to integrate education and research by introducing students to modern technologies which they will use to develop independent research projects. In collaboration with faculty, students will explore the role of cytoskeletal signaling in spermatogenesis, fertilization and early development. In addition, students will examine the regulation of gene expression in epithelial tissues during differentiation. This instrumentation will greatly enhance the research training opportunities available at Wesleyan College and will directly translate into more opportunities for scientific discovery by both faculty and undergraduate researchers. At Wesleyan College, the Biology department curriculum is student-centered, with specific emphasis on student-directed research experiences. Students gain these experiences working as research assistants with department faculty, and through independent research projects in upper division Biology courses. Basic research applications of the equipment will include use of the Axioplan II and imaging software for molecular and immunohistochemical studies to analyze the expression pattern of select cytoskeletal proteins in the reproductive tract and during early development. In addition, the scanning densitometry equipment and software will be used for quantitation of mRNA expression by Northern blotting, as well as the comparison of levels of mRNA expression with protein expression by densitometry of Western blots. This equipment will also serve to modernize courses in Histology, Developmental Biology, Genetics, Cell and Molecular Biology and DNA Technology. Acquisition of this image analysis workstation will assist the Biology faculty at Wesleyan College in their goal of successfully providing women with excellent research opportunities using modern scientific methods. As a culturally diverse (35% minority) College, Wesleyan recognizes that it has a unique opportunity to favorably impact the recruitment of minority women into the sciences. This equipment will make a direct impact on the preparation of young women for careers in the sciences and will greatly enhance their competitiveness for admission at quality postgraduate institutions doc13485 none The overall objective of this research program is the development of analytical and numerical techniques to autonomously monitor the integrity of actively controlled structures. For the control system, the failure may be the loss of a sensor or actuator, or a more compensatible loss such as a change in the gain of a sensor. For the structural system, failure may be the partial or total loss of structural stiffness or mass in a region of the structure. The basis for all proposed methodologies is to utilize changes in the measured dynamics before and after a failure has occurred to determine the current state of the actively controlled structure. Specifically, we will develop methodologies to determine a statistically meaningful methodology to establish the existence of a failure using system realization theory, time-domain signal processing and outlier analysis. The proposed methodology will be able to distinguish between changes in operational environment and actual failures. With existence established, system realization redundancy will be used to isolate the failure to either the control system or the structure and once isolated to determine the individual component that has failed. Once the failure extent has been estimated, the final step is to compensate for the failure to maximize the performance of the new system using a Genetic Algorithm learning control concept and a Neural Network adaptive controller. All methods developed will be evaluating using both numerical and actual experimental tests. There are several systems which will benefit from this research, including actively controlled civil structures (buildings bridges), aircraft, offshore platforms and deep-water risers, re-useable launch vehicles, the International Space Station, and long term exploratory space probes doc13486 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Ralph Meeker at Benedictine University to acquire a multi-processor Linux computer system and a network of computer workstations with stereo viewing capability for research in biophysics, mathematics, and computer science. Faculty and undergraduate students conducting biophysics research will perform molecular modeling simulations of protein binding and use the stereo workstations to analyze and visualize the results. Faculty and undergraduate students conducting mathematics research will use computer algebra software to study group cohomology and to make extensions to modular representation theory. The research in biophyiscs and algebra will provide data for Dr. Meeker and his students to measure the performance of the multi-processor computer system for both molecular modeling and computer-based algebra software as a function of the configuration of the computer system. Large-scale scientific computations, traditionally performed at reasonable speeds on specialized, expensive supercomputers or very slowly on engineering workstations, are being performed more and more on inexpensive Linux-based clusters of computers using a Linux variant to provide the cluster support. Rapid improvement in the performance of Pentium central processors, coupled with the stability and performance of the Linux operating system, has made it possible to assemble a networked cluster of personal computers at a fraction of the cost of a supercomputer. The equipment to be acquired with this grant includes a Linux multiprocessor computer system configured as an interconnected cluster with 16 separate computers. When assembling a Linux-based computer cluster for use in high-performance computing, one must take into account not only the raw computing power of the individual central processing units, but also system requirements in terms of memory and the network interconnection between the computers. This research project will measure the performance of the Linux-based cluster for both molecular modeling and computer-based algebra software as a function of the individual computers memory configuration, the total number of clustered computers available for processing, the number of processors per computer in single-processor and dual-processor configurations, the number of simultaneous users, and what price performance improvements are obtained from using dual-processor motherboards instead of single-processor motherboards. A network of computer workstations will provide researchers access to the cluster computer system. Three of the workstations will incorporate stereo viewing screens for visualization of three-dimensional molecular models of biological interest. Here is a brief description of the typical steps involved in this kind of modeling project. Identify a pair of molecules that are known to interact as a key step in a physiological process. If the molecules are large, and typically they are, the three-dimensional structure must be known or have a reasonable homology model from which to generate spatial coordinates and sequence regions of the molecules that interact. Results of x-ray studies conducted by other researchers can be used to determine this information. The molecules are then modeled by bringing them together, calculating the minimum of their molecular energy, and running through molecular dynamic calculations to identify possible binding orientations and their associated energies. For the mathematics research, the first stage of this research program will be analysis of data collected on the cohomology rings of the groups of order 64. The data analysis will yield insight on which groups of order 128 should provide interesting cohomology rings to compute. Results of this research will contribute to three areas of science: biophysics, mathematics, and computer science. The biophysics research is particularly useful in determining the binding of a fibrinogen chain to the integrin receptor of platelet cells, an essential step in blood clotting. The mathematics computational work should help distinguish irreducible abstract algebraic modules from other more complex modules by compiling a library of these basic algebraic building blocks. The computer science research will characterize the performance of a low-cost, high-performance computer system in computationally intensive applications to biophysics and mathematics. The involvement of the undergraduate students in these projects over the years have resulted in a number of undergraduate research papers and several who are now pursuing advanced degrees in science doc13487 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Lee at Washington State University to set up a stable isotope ratio mass spectrometry (IRMS) facility for life science research. Stable isotopes occur naturally in all organisms. Virtually all biological activities involve compounds containing these isotopes. Measurements of stable isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur provide a powerful means of establishing the sources of these elements and the processes involved in their deposition. Therefore stable isotope data provide a fingerprint revealing the history of an organism and the metabolic processes occurring within. Researchers at WSU will apply stable isotope data to investigate questions in diverse disciplines including: wildlife and population ecology, physiology, plant molecular biology, agricultural science, and human nutrition. This is an exciting technology for biologists because information can be gained from wild populations without having to subject them to experimental manipulation. Minute samples can be analyzed, and can consist of leaves, feathers, blood, or a single hair. In addition, experimental investigations can be conducted using compounds labeled with stable isotopes, providing a non-radioactive method that can safely be used in humans and other organisms. C. Robbins and L. Shipley will use stable isotopes to investigate diets of wildlife that are difficult to observe in nature or have been extinct for thousands of years (e.g., grizzly bears and cave bears). Physiological investigations will be conducted by R. Lee, G. Edwards, K. Johnson, and M. Kahn to determine metabolic adaptations in unusual deep-sea vent organisms, mechanisms of photosynthesis in plants, the contribution of microorganisms to digestion in cows and sheep, and factors that promote nitrogen fixation by crop plants. M. Webster will use this technology as a novel means of tracking bird migrations. M. McGuire will use stable isotopes to determine the benefits of breastfeeding vs. formula-feeding in human infants by studying the metabolism of fatty acids found in breastmilk. While stable isotopes are finding increased use in life sciences, very few facilities are run by biologists. Consequently sample analyses are expensive and receive low priority. New studies are difficult to initiate. This newly funded facility will enhance existing research projects by enabling analyses to be performed quickly and at low cost. Acquisition of instrumentation at WSU will also allow principal investigator, postdoctoral, graduate, and undergraduate training in stable isotope methods. Expansion of use is likely, due to the large number of life science disciplines present at WSU. These disciplines are represented by academic divisions in biological sciences and molecular biosciences, as well as agriculture, veterinary medicine, natural resource science, and pharmaceutical science. The presence of a facility geared towards biological studies will likely stimulate new and innovative applications of stable isotope techniques doc13488 none Enjeti A distributed energy system (DES) is one in which electricity is generated at the location where it is consumed. Interest in the use of distributed generation and storage has increased substantially over the past five years because of the potential to provide increased reliability and lower cost of power delivery to the customer. The advent of competition in the electric power industry and customer choice have, in part, been the stimulus for this increased interest. Also contributing to this trend has been the development of small modular generation technologies, such as fuel cells, microturbines, photovoltaic systems, wind energy systems and diesel engines. In addition, flywheel type energy storage discharge systems hold promise to provide ride-through and enhance battery life in existing UPS systems. Industry estimates are that distributed resources (DR) will account for up to 30% of new power generation by the year . The environmental benefits of DR that feature renewable resources, combined heat and power, and hybrid systems are substantial. In supporting customer choice, distributed power may be the long-term foundation of competition in electric power industry. Although the application of distributed generation and storage can bring many benefits, the technologies and operational concepts to properly integrate them into existing power systems must be developed to realize these benefits and avoid negative impacts on system power quality, reliability and safety. The current power distribution system was not designed to accommodate active generation and storage at the distribution level particularly to supply energy to other distribution customers. The technical issues to allow this type of operation are significant. In view of all of the above, this project proposes to purchase advanced equipment, which will be dedicated to supporting and enhancing research in the distributed energy systems area. The new DES laboratory will have necessary facilities to conduct research, education and training in the following areas: Microturbines, Fuel Cells, Wind and Flywheel type energy systems. This project will foster the development of innovative power converter topologies, advanced electric generators and electronics needed for utility interconnection and the control and operation of DES. It will aid in the development of new protection systems for the safe and reliable operation of DES. It will also aid in investigative methods to improve the reliability of DES. The laboratory will also assist in the development of new stand alone hybrid DES such as: Fuel Cell & Battery combination for residential power systems and Microturbine & Flywheel type continuous power systems for critical loads such as buildings. Development of modular power electronic converters along with modular electric generators for the next generation of DES will be an important activity pursued with the acquired equipment. The proposed DES laboratory will also assist in the education of undergraduate, graduate students and industry personnel in this important area. The proposed DES laboratory will be developed in cooperation with DES technology companies, local utilities, power electronics & electric machine industries. The power electronics and electric machines research program at TAMU has established long standing cooperative research programs with leading utility companies and industries. Working together, the proposed laboratory will pave the way for advanced DES development and education doc13489 none Nelson This Major Research Instrumentation award to University of Washington will provide support for acquisition of a high resolution inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometer for a multi-disciplinary group of researchers in earth and ocean sciences. Ongoing research programs can take immediate advantage of the new instrumentation, and it is expected to significantly enhance research capabilities for faculty and students. University of Washington will contribute cost-sharing of more than 30% of the cost of this project from non-federal funds doc13490 none We propose an equipment grant to enhance ongoing and future lightwave communications and radar remote sensing research and education at the University of Kansas. The instrumentation we propose to acquire includes various lightwave components, a network analyzer, a portable spectrum analyzer, two arbitrary waveform generators, a high-speed data acquisition system, and a high-speed oscilloscope. The lightwave components includes lasers with integrated electro-absorption modulators, high-power erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA), a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA), a 35-GHz photo receiver with amplifier, fiber-optic delay lines, optical splitters combiners, an extended DWDM-band tunable laser, and pump laser diodes for a Raman amplifier. We propose to use the lightwave equipment to upgrade our 10 Gb s test beds to 40 Gb s to support ongoing and future research activities. We will use the high-speed oscilloscope and spectrum analyzer for testing and calibrating our existing radars as well as the new ones being developed for glacial ice studies and as prototypes for Mars observation. We will use the arbitrary waveform generators as flexible signal sources to support activities related to ongoing efforts on the development of a pulse-compression LIDAR and also investigating optimized waveforms for various remote sensing applications. We propose to use the network analyzer primarily as a dedicated source and receiver for our antenna testing range, which is needed to support our radar development activities. In lightwave communications research, the 40 Gb s per optical channel is the next signaling rate to be deployed to meet society s insatiable communication needs. Extensive experimental testing is required to study and evaluate the many questions critical to the implementation of this signaling rate. The proposed upgrades to our testbed will allow us to evaluate the performance of components, subsystems, and systems at this signaling rate. To launch and then detect 40 Gb s signals for system evaluation, short-pulse lasers, power dividers and combiners, and wide-bandwidth photodetectors are needed. In addition, to manage fiber nonlinearities for these increased signaling rates, distributed signal amplification with Raman amplifiers will need to be employed. Three ongoing projects in remote sensing will benefit significantly from the proposed test equipment: (1) measurement of ice thickness and accumulation rate over the Greenland ice sheet; (2) design and development of a radar prototype for Mars; and (3) design and development of a pulse compression LIDAR for a future satellite mission. The test equipment will allow us to improve our existing coherent radar depth sounder for obtaining ice thickness data over a few outlet glaciers that are thinning and for which no ice thickness data are available. The ice thickness data are essential to the study of the dynamics of these glaciers. The Mars radar development involves design tradeoffs in modulation waveform, frequency, sidelobe levels, and antenna size. The test equipment will contribute to testing and evaluating an optimized prototype radar for a future Mars lander or and orbiter, as well as investigating the use of single-sideband modulation techniques to improve the sensitivity of our pulse compression LIDAR. Currently 17 graduate students, seven undergraduate students, two post-doctoral research engineers, and five faculty are involved in the ongoing research projects. We anticipate similar numbers of students and research associates to be involved in future lightwave communications and remote sensing research at this institution. Thus the proposed equipment is a significant contribution to the research and education mission of the University of Kansas doc13491 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Hobart and William Smith Colleges will acquire a gel permeation chromatography size exclusion chromatography (GPC SEC) instrument for polymer characterization. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) the molecular design of organometallic oligomers and polymers; b) the synthesis, characterization and evaluation of new copolymers as transacylation catalysts; and c) the influence of allosteric ligands and aggregation state on the activity of skeletal muscle phosphofructokinase I. Gel permeation chromatography (GPC) is an extremely powerful technique used for the separation and analysis of complex mixtures, in which components are separated based on their size. This instrument will substantially strengthen scientific research at this primarily undergraduate institution and will allow for the incorporation of polymer and material sciences into the research and teaching programs doc13492 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at New York University will acquire a 400 MHz nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer and upgrade the console of an existing 500 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) metal ligand conformational dynamics and the mechanism of inversion of an element of helical chirality upon oxidation reduction in a coordination complex; b) the preparation of libraries of vitamin B12 derivatives; c) the characterization of biologically active and theoretically interesting fullerene adducts; and d) the impact of stereochemistry and DNA base sequence on the conformational mobility of chemical adducts derived from the binding of stereoisomeric benzo[a]pyrene diol epoxides to N2-guanine. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry and medicinal chemistry, among others doc13493 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Mary Spratt at William Woods University to acquire a DNA automated sequencer with associated computers and software; this will be used to determine the specific genetic alphabet of certain invertebrate organisms. Two sets of micropipetters will be purchased for use in DNA isolation and sequencing. A small ultracentrifuge with essential components will be procured for separation and analysis of the sub-cellular components of these organisms. The proposed research for which this equipment will be used focuses upon invertebrate organisms, particularly host-parasite interactions. An example of the research that will be carried out is the relationship between various hard-bodied ticks and the bacterial species that live within them. One of these groups of bacteria causes ehrlichiosis, an entire family of tick-borne diseases. When these bacteria are injected with the tick s saliva as it takes a blood meal, they can cause serious illness or death in humans and various animals. Approximately ten species of bacteria that live within different ticks cause various forms of this disease. However, little is known about the relationship between the tick and the bacteria, such as which bacteria are found in which kinds of ticks, whether a given species of bacterium in this locality is identical to the same identified species elsewhere, how similar the DNA of one bacterial species is to that of bacteria causing a different form of the disease, and whether a given tick may be co-infected with various species of Ehrlichia bacteria. This project will be carried out by obtaining ticks (primarily found by sweeping vegetation on public lands such as trails, state and national parks, and river or lake banks), extracting and purifying the DNA, amplifying it on a thermal cycler to make a billion copies of the particular DNA fragment, determining by running the DNA through a gel by an electric current which DNA samples are positive for various species of ehrlichiosis, and then through DNA sequencing and analysis, comparing these results to sequences found from other ticks and to those recorded in gene bank data. Obtaining this data will help to answer some basic biology questions in an area that is of great importance, but has received relatively little attention or research funding. Perhaps of even greater importance is the opportunity that this grant provides for the critically important training of future generations of science teachers, researchers, and technicians by providing students at William Woods University (WWU) state-of-the-art equipment on which to participate in research as undergraduates, as well as to learn essential aspects of biology. This equipment will enhance their acceptance into graduate programs and into the work force. Additional biology curricula will be developed as a result of this grant, as will outreach to high school students, exciting them about the possibilities of careers in science. WWU graduates a majority of women; many of these are first-generation college students. Less than a decade ago, the college had no science curriculum, faculty, or equipment. Largely due to the impetus provided by NSF funding, we now have a biology major with supportive course work in the physical sciences, in addition to opportunities for undergraduate science research. This equipment will greatly enhance these areas and will serve to attract both faculty and students. It is anticipated that this new equipment will be utilized as well by other small colleges in our rural mid-west area, providing faculty and students at each of our institutions with the opportunity for state-of-the art teaching and research in areas of molecular and cellular biology previously unavailable to us doc13494 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. John T. Beneski at West Chester University to purchase a Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM) and an Ultramicrotome. The addition of this equipment to the University s Center for Advanced Scientific Imaging (CASI) will (1) significantly increase the research opportunities for their faculty and students, particularly in the sciences; (2) enhance their ability attract new students from the widest diversity of backgrounds (3) enhance their ability to train students in state-of-the-art marketable skills; and (4) provide new opportunities for faculty and students to collaborate with scientists from the local high-tech corridor of pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and environmental industries. Research opportunities will be enhanced by providing faculty and students with new tools that can be used to compliment or extend their current research program or to initiate new investigations. The new electron microscope will be used extensively by faculty and students in the Departments of Biology, Geology (2) nuclear localization of the retinol metabolizing enzyme 9-cis retinol dehydrogenase within cancerous and normal mammary tissue; and (3) visualization of the early events that occur at the gap junctions of insect ovarian follicle cells following viral infection. Each of these projects will involve significant participation by both undergraduate and graduate students. Dr. Beneski will provide opportunities for students to work in the CASI by actively promoting independent student research projects and establishing a credit-bearing internship program. In addition to research and training, the new electron microscope will be used as a recruitment tool for attracting new science majors from both traditional and non-traditional backgrounds. To accomplish this, Dr. Beneski will initiate a series of hands-on demonstrations and tours that showcase the advanced imaging technologies of CASI to potential students that regularly visit the University as part of existing programs targeting area high schools, transfer students, and underserved groups. West Chester University s continued growth in providing state-of-the-art imaging technologies and resources not only serves the immediate and future needs of our faculty and students in the sciences, it also mirrors a growing emphasis on the sciences and technology by the State of Pennsylvania and PA State System of Higher Education. The acquisition of the requested equipment is a critical step in the continued development of Center for Advanced Scientific Imaging as a key resource for research and research training at West Chester University doc13495 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Bates College will acquire two gas chromatographs, one with mass spectrometric detection and one with flame ionization detection. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) the study of molecular mechanisms of metalloenzyme-mediated alkane transformations in the environment; b) studies of tributyl tin levels in organisms and their effects on gross morphological changes in snails; and c) the analysis of biomolecules (lipids, lignin, phenols, amino acids) in the sedimentary and fossil record for paleoenvironmental applications. Gas chromatograph with mass spectrometric detection (GC-MS) or gas chromatography with flame ionization detection (GC-FID) is an extremely powerful technique used for the separation and analysis of complex mixtures. This instrument will substantially strengthen scientific research within the multidisciplinary Environmental Studies program at Bates College, and will also encourage collaboration between researchers in Chemistry, Biology, and Geology doc13496 none Dias This Major Research Instrumentation award to Old Dominion University will provide support for acquisition of a stable isotope ratio mass spectrometer and related instrumentation for researchers in three departments. It is expected that the new instrumentation and the interdepartmental research and training that it offers will foster inter- and multi-disciplinary approaches to a broad range of problems in marine chemistry, biology and related environmental sciences. Old Dominion University will contribute cost-sharing of more than 47% of the cost of this project from non-federal funds doc13497 none Guidotti This award, made through the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, provides support for the acquisition of a state-of-the-art electron microprobe (EMP) for the microchemical characterization of geological materials. A new EMP will replace an aging (vintage ) ARL SEMQ in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Maine. The instrument will facilitate research on a range of topics in metamorphic petrology including, the speciation of Fe and distribution of OH- in metapelites, and light element (i.e. Li, B, Be) partitioning in granulite facies rocks. Research in paleoclimatology will also be enhanced by this instrument. The probe will be used to analyze volcanic glass shards in ice core samples for trace and major element compositions. Coupled with analyses of suspected source tephras, such chemical analyses offer the strong possibility of verifying the provenance of ice core tephra and therefore relating these discrete events to climate proxies also recorded simultaneously in ice cores. This facility will be the only modern EMP in the state of Maine and will serve not only the needs of faculty and students from several departments at the University of Maine , but also the needs of faculty and students from nearby regional institutions (i.e. Bowdoin, Univ. of Southern Maine, Bates doc13210 none Initiation and Maintenance of Population Maxima of the Ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi in Northern Coastal Waters Substantial increases in peak concentrations of the ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi have occurred in the last decade in Narragansett Bay, an estuary at the northern boundary of the geographic distribution of this species. The seasonal timing of Mnemiopsis pulses has also shifted from late summer to early spring during years with earlier warming of bay water temperatures. Significant ecological consequences of this temporal introduction are potentially great. Mnemiopsis is now abundant during the peak period of fish spawning in the region. Severely depleted stocks of zooplankton have been observed in spring and summer of . Similar changes in seasonality and abundance of the species are likely to be occurring in other estuaries in the northeast. Despite the clear ecological importance of large pulses of ctenophores, the quantitative basis for understanding conditions giving rise to rapid population increases is limited. While temperature and food supply must ultimately be dominant variables controlling growth and reproduction of this species, there is little information about reproduction of over-wintering populations or conditions which favor growth of larvae in spring. In this study the investigators will conduct field and laboratory studies of Mnemiopsis over the full annual cycle to determine effects of temperature, food supply and food quality on reproductive rates and larval growth. The role of microzooplankton, addressed in only two previous laboratory studies will be fully addressed in both field and laboratory components. Areas of Narragansett Bay which have recently been observed to sustain unexpectedly large population of Mnemiopsis in winter, as well as areas in which populations pulses are delayed until spring will be compared. Hydrographic data will be collected and examined for both direct and indirect effects of physical factors on population growth, including the role of thermal stratification in population pulse initiation. Given the evidence for disruptive effects on ecosystems of seasonal or geographic invasions of Mnemiopis leidyi and the limited number of studies of this species at the northern edge of its geographic range, justification for this study is compelling. Quantitative information on the influence of temperature and food on both larval and adult M. leidyi at the level of detail collected in this study will significantly advance our understanding of factors required for initiation and maintenance of population pulses of this species doc13499 none Weld Mechanics - Residual Stress, Material Inhomogeneity and Fracture Investigator: Yuh J. Chao, chao@sc.edu mailto:chao@sc.edu Sponsor: University of South Carolina Office of Sponsored Programs and Research Columbia, SC A major concern with weldments is to establish and quantify the role played by residual stress and material inhomogeneity in the fracture process. The researcher will investigate the mechanics of weldments in both the fabrication process and the potential fracture events in service. The theoretical work will include (a) the development of fundamental fracture mechanics parameters or advanced procedures that can characterize the fracture of solids containing residual stress and material inhomogeneity and (b) the numerical modeling of the entire process of welding, fabrication of fracture testing samples, and fracture mechanics testing. The modeling work will be integrated, refined and validated with experimental and metallurgical studies at DOE laboratories doc13500 none The investigation and analysis of the behavior of piezoceramic-elastomer composites is the focus of this work. This newly emerging class of smart-structures combines the adaptability and passive damping characteristics of elastomers with the active capabilities of piezoceramics to create smart-structures with both passive and active vibration suppression capabilities. The development of predictive constitutive models and effective control algorithms for the composites are the two primary objectives of this research project. A prototype composite, tested in a two degree of freedom vibratory system, is used as a test case. The piezoelectric-ceramic composite is modeled using a novel strain energy approach, following the rubrics of composite mechanics and rubber elasticity, that incorporates state of deformation dependence, composite geometry and anisotropy, the hyperelastic mechanical response of the elastomer and the piezoelectric component s electro-mechanical behavior. Experimental investigation of the composite s response to sinusoidal loadings is performed to develop a transfer function and thereby more robust control algorithms. Experiment and theory are combined to generate analytical control algorithms that follows from the constitutive model of the composite, but allow for model dynamic uncertainty. In completion of this project, constitutive models for the behavior of a new class of smart-structures, control algorithms for their use as vibration absorbers, and working prototypes of these absorbers are produced. The adaptability of the composites allows for the creation of highly functional surface mounted, in-line, or molded components. This work will impact the field in a variety of applications, including but not limited to, active automotive mounts, vibratory isolation of specific components in assembly such as shock-proof CD players, telescopes, or rotating machinery, and in other situations where conventional techniques can not be applied doc13501 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Mary Washington College will acquire a scanning probe microscope (SPM). This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) the study of intermolecular interactions in physisorbed self-assemblies (structures and competitive depositions); b) in situ membrane construction studies; and c) in situ visualization of drug-DNA interactions. The scanning probe microscope (SPM) enables researchers to image atoms directly. The technique uses the piezoelectric effect which involves bringing an extremely sharp metal needle within a few angstroms of the sample surface. The distance is small enough for electrons to leak or tunnel across the gap and generate a minute current. As the gap between the tip and the sample increases, the current decreases. As the probe crosses the sample, moving back and forth across its surface, it traces out a contour map of the sample s surface atoms. These studies will have impact in materials and medicinal chemistry doc13502 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at City University of New York Hunter College will acquire a X-ray diffractometer with CCD detector for small molecule diffractometry. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including the following: a) self-assembly of nano-scaled, solid-state photonic materials; b) lanthanide polyoxometalates: building blocks for new materials; c) polyoxometalate anions and metalloenzyme mimics; d) redox-mediated chiroptical materials; e) synthetic carbohydrate chemistry; f) chiral phosphorus ligands and antisense oligonucleotides; g) complexes formed by bile acids, cholesterol and other steroids with cyclodextrin derivatives and synthetic receptors; h) quantum crystallography of molecules; and i) study of geometry and electronic environment of metal sites by solid state NMR and X-ray crystallography. The X-ray diffractometer allows accurate and precise measurements of the full three dimensional structure of a molecule, including bond distances and angles, and it provides accurate information about the spatial arrangement of the molecule relative to the neighboring molecules. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, including materials chemistry and biochemistry doc13503 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Southern Oregon University will acquire a 400 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) structural elucidation of new conotoxins; b) the identification of the components of deer tarsal glands; and c) structural characterization of synthetic intermediates. The instrument will also be used in a number of advanced undergraduate courses. Students will be heavily involved in the research projects at this primarily undergraduate institution. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including synthetic chemistry and biochemistry doc13504 none Recently within the College of Engineering at Michigan State University (MSU) faculty with research interests at the micro and nano dimensions have coalesced about a new College of Engineering Center research activity entitled the Micro and Nano Engineering Center (MNEC). MNEC builds upon the past strong research capabilities of faculty within the College of Engineering, such as carbon-based materials and plasma technologies and combines them with newly hired research faculty and their associated research initiatives in nano-device technologies, miniaturized millimeter wave and optical systems and micro nano machine instrumentation. MNEC s mission is concerned with the application of frontier knowledge and techniques that synthesize, characterize, manipulate and modify materials in order to create integrated structures, electronic, and photonic devices and machines in the micro and nano environment. The emphasis of the Center s research activities is the development of novel devices, machines and systems in the micro and nano world. Faculty form synergistic interdisciplinary research teams which include cross-campus and multi-university collaborations. Notable among these are the NSF MRSEC Center for Sensor Materials and the NSF Wireless Integrated Microsystems (WIMS) ERC collaborations. Additionally, MNEC s research activities provide the university setting in which to train and educate both graduate and undergraduate students. Presently, the Center includes ten faculty and 40 graduate students of which over half are Ph.D. students. Of the ten faculty, five have been newly hired during the past five years and it is anticipated to expand to a total of 15-20 faculty over the next five years via additional faculty interest reorientation and new hires. MNEC s research activities have been and continue to be transferred to industry and commercialized into applications relevant to manufacturing, health care, the environment and national security. The rapid advance of micro nano-fabrication technology requires continual reassessment of our facilities and capabilities. Micro-scale technology has been an important economic driver for the United States as well as the entire world. MSU s MNEC faculty have pioneered several important micro-fabrication technologies, including microwave plasma processing machines for etching and diamond deposition, IC-compatible diamond processing and fabrication techniques, and diamond micro electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). Now, as we enter a new millennium, nano-scale technology is becoming increasingly important to the center, the college, the university, and the nation. The instrumentation requested in this proposal will improve the Center s faculty ability to perform research activities and student training in nano-scale and micro-scale technologies. Specific, new long-term goals of the Center have been established over the past year through many strategic planning discussions amongst the Center faculty. Current and developing micro and nano-engineering research activities in MNEC can be described and organized into five areas including: (1) carbon-based technology, (2) microwave plasma technology, (3) nanodevice technology, (4) manipulation and probe technology for micro and nano applications, and (5) miniaturized millimeter wave and optical systems. The proposed equipment acquisition described below is part of the MNEC s multiyear strategy to improve its laboratory facilities, which will facilitate research activities and student training in these five areas. In developing our request, we have considered the availability of similar instrumentation on campus and the capabilities of such instrumentation. The equipment requested in this proposal will be housed in common facilities in the Micro and Nano Engineering Center (MNEC) cleanroom located on the MSU campus. The instrumentation requested in this proposal includes the following systems: Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition (PECVD) System Multisource Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) System Scanning Probe Microscope Wet Chemical Processing Station Electrochemical Plating Station doc13505 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at DeSales University will acquire a 60 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) organic synthesis of ionic solvents and study of reactions using these solvents; b) aerosol preparation of metal oxides and organic polymer systems; and c) controlled-release kinetics of drug molecules from a microcrystalline cellulose matrix. This instrument will also be used in advanced undergraduate courses. Students will be heavily involved in the research projects at this primarily undergraduate institution. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research doc13506 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program to City University of New York-Staten Island is for the acquisition of an X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) system to carry out basic surface chemical analysis in support of innovative surface and interfacial research efforts. The research topics supported include: nanotribology; development of surface chemical sensors; surface bound photonic devices; studies of molecular interactions at interfaces, growth of II-VI wide bandgap materials and basic surface functionaliztion. XPS is a highly sensitive surface analytical tool that allows for the details of surface chemical composition and local chemical environment (such as oxidation state and to some extent molecular connectivity) to be evaluated for a variety of materials. The sensitivity of this technique provides information on chemical concentrations at the surface for routinely of fraction of monolayers of a material adsorbed on a surface. This instrumentation will also support a large number of educational activities both at The College of Staten Island and within CUNY. This includes annual use in an Instrumental Methods in Chemistry Course (taught by the PI), undergraduate research activities in The College of Staten Island s NSF supported REU program on Polymers and Biopolymers, graduate education and training in our NSF supported IGERT program on Nanostructural Materials and Devices, and as part of a 1 semester laboratory rotation course in our newly formed Ph.D. program in Nanotechnology and Materials Chemistry. The instrumentation will have wide usage and improve the overall research and educational capabilities of the participating faculty as well as the institution. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program to City University of New York-Staten Island is for the acquisition of an X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) system to carry out basic surface chemical analysis in support of innovative surface and interfacial research efforts. The research topics supported include: nanotribology; development of surface chemical sensors; surface bound photonic devices; studies of molecular interactions at interfaces, growth of II-VI wide bandgap materials and basic surface functionaliztion. XPS is a highly sensitive surface analytical tool that allows for the details of surface chemical composition and local chemical environment (such as oxidation state and to some extent molecular connectivity) to be evaluated for a variety of materials. The sensitivity of this technique provides information on chemical concentrations at the surface for routinely of fraction of monolayers of a material adsorbed on a surface. This instrumentation will also support a large number of educational activities both at The College of Staten Island and within CUNY. This includes annual use in an Instrumental Methods in Chemistry Course (taught by the PI, undergraduate research activities in The College of Staten Island s NSF supported REU program on Polymers and Biopolymers, graduate education and training in our NSF supported IGERT program on Nanostructural Materials and Devices, and as part of a 1 semester laboratory rotation course in our newly formed Ph.D. program in Nanotechnology and Materials Chemistry. The instrumentation will have wide usage and improve the overall research and educational capabilities of the participating faculty as well as the institution. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program to City University of New York Staten-Island is for the acquisition of an X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) system to carry out basic surface chemical analysis in support of innovative surface and interfacial research efforts. The instrumentation will have wide usage and improve the overall research and educational capabilities of the participating faculty as well as the institution. The research topics supported include: nanotribology; development of surface chemical sensors; surface bound photonic devices; studies of molecular interactions at interfaces, growth of II-VI wide bandgap materials and basic surface functionaliztion. XPS is a highly sensitive surface analytical tool that allows for the details of surface chemical composition and local chemical environment (such as oxidation state and to some extent molecular connectivity) to be evaluated for a variety of materials. This instrumentation will also support a large number of educational activities both at The College of Staten Island and within CUNY. This includes annual use in an Instrumental Methods in Chemistry Course (taught by the PI), undergraduate research activities in The College of Staten Island s NSF supported REU program on Polymers and Biopolymers, graduate education and training in our NSF supported IGERT program on Nanostructural Materials and Devices, and as part of a 1 semester laboratory rotation course in our newly formed Ph.D. program in Nanotechnology and Materials Chemistry doc13507 none Acquisition of a Magnetic Resonance Imaging Accessory for a 400 MHz NMR Spectrometer: Interdisciplinary Research in MRI in an Undergraduate College Setting A grant has been awarded to Dr. Nancy H. Kolodny and her colleagues at Wellesley College, an undergraduate liberal arts college for women, to establish a Magnetic Resonance Micro-Imaging Facility in Wellesley s Science Center. This facility will offer unique interdisciplinary research, teaching, and learning opportunities to Wellesley s faculty and students, with initial research projects in the emerging field of neuroscience. With the establishment of the micro-imaging facility, two different types of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) techniques, functional MRI (fMRI) and contrast enhanced MRI will be developed. These techniques will be used to answer important neurobiological questions. Functional MRI will be utilized to examine the brains of crustaceans such as lobsters, and mice. Details of activity patterns in the olfactory pathway of the crustacean brain will be elucidated. In mice, the question of whether gender and age affect brain function will be investigated, focusing on the response of the brain to stimulation of the whisker barrels. Contrast enhancement techniques will be used to address questions related to the role of serotonin, an important brain biochemical, in olfactory neurons in newborn crustaceans. An MRI experiment will be introduced into Wellesley s undergraduate introductory developmental biology course. Students will use MRI to explore the pupal development of tobacco hawkmoth. Not only will this give students experience with MRI, it will also provide an opportunity for dynamic observation of living organisms during development. The scientific problems to be examined in the new Magnetic Resonance Micro-Imaging Facility at Wellesley College are of importance in the developing basic understanding of brain and neuron function. Furthermore, training undergraduate students in the use of MRI will both inspire them to further study of science and enable them to pursue sophisticated research during their college years and beyond doc13508 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Hope College will acquire an Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectrometer (ICP-OES). The research programs that will benefit from the purchase of this instrument are centered on biogeochemical studies of the local Lake Macatawa watershed, specifically the fate and transport of metals within the watershed. This instrument will also be used to train undergraduate students in state-of-the-art analytical methods commonly employed in chemistry, geology and environmental science. Electrically generated plasmas produce energetic sources for the optical emission spectrometer. An inductively coupled plasma is a high-temperature source in which energy to form the plasma is generated by a high-frequency magnetic field. The optical emission spectrometer is an extremely useful analytical tool that allows the identification of molecular species and an understanding of the energy levels in the molecule. These studies will have a significant impact in furthering our understanding of environmental chemistry of watersheds doc13509 none The initial annotation of the complete sequence of Arabidopsis thaliana indicates that of the 11,601 distinct gene types found, only 35% are represented in the genome by one gene, while 37% are represented by gene families with five or more different members. For a majority of the larger gene families, the molecular function of the encoded proteins is known. However, the role of individual gene family members in specific physiological or development pathways is often uncertain. The focus of this project is to develop protocols to assist in describing the in planta function of individual gene family members in the AHA, Arabidopsis plasma membrane H+-ATPase, gene family. The AHA genes code for proteins that couple ATP hydrolysis to proton transport across the plasma membrane of plant cells. The proton-motive force produced by the ATPases then drives the transport of solutes via carriers and channels. In Arabidopsis, the proton pumps comprise a gene family with at least twelve gene isoforms. Expressed in different tissues, the pumps provide the underlying energy for a variety of fundamental plant processes such as cellular homeostasis, mineral and metabolite transport, cell growth and plant morphogenesis, and a variety of responses to the environment including stomatal control, tropic responses, and defense related mechanisms. As a first step towards determining the function of the AHA genes, we have screened over 80,000 Arabidopsis T-DNA insertion lines and have identified twenty-nine mutants. This collection of mutants includes ten of twelve AHA gene family members, with multiple alleles for many isoforms. Exhaustive screening of the current 80,000 lines and screening of recently available lines should make it possible to reach the goal of finding multiple alleles for each gene family member. To understand the role these genes individually and in the gene family, we will take the following approaches: - We will isolate, outcross and prepare aha mutant lines for analysis and distribution to the Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center, Columbus, OH . - We will perform genetic crosses and create multiple insert lines (i.e., double, triple mutants, etc.) in order to uncover genetic redundancy in the gene family. - We will test for conditional phenotypes in the mutant AHA lines by comparing mutants to wild-type plants under conditions designed to reveal differences in development, responses to environmental stimuli, nutrient uptake, etc. - We will establish an on-line database of experimental conditions designed for a broad range of phenotypic analysis. Preliminary protocols will be available Year 1, first quarter. Detailed protocols and associated data will be added as it is generated. The availability of twenty-nine AHA gene-family mutant alleles provides the raw materials for substantial progress into the function of the AHA genes and gene family. The availability of this resource at a predominantly undergraduate institution provides a means of integrating genomic scale research with undergraduate training. The AHA genes can be referenced at http: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80 Database index.html, via the accession numbers: At2g , AT4g , MJB24.16, T17F15.180, At2g , At2g , F27H5.120, T12K4.90, F23A5.1, F20D23.4, MRG21.9, AT4g doc13510 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. James G. Baldwin at The University of California, Riverside (UCR) for a new transmission electron microscope (TEM). The research and teaching needs of this growing campus and scheduling problems on the existing microscope will be met by adding this new TEM. The new microscope is highly complementary with the existing TEM and both instruments will be housed and administered together in the campuswide Central Facility for Advanced Microscopy and Microanalysis (CFAMM) administered within the College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences (CNAGS). This instrument provides functionality needed by experts, yet simplicity appreciated by students and less experienced microscopists. The new microscope will be scheduled for projects that leverage its ease-of-use for diverse TEM work done by many biology researchers and students that do not require high accelerating voltage nor analytical capabilities. Flexibility and scheduling conflicts will be further addressed by equipping the microscope with an electronically controlled rotating stage (required by many Cell, Molecular and Developmental Biology [CMDB]) investigators, e.g. those using stereo pairs) and digital image capture required for most CMDB scientists and crucial for cost effective printing, storage, 3D reconstruction, and easy interfacing with the adjacent Center for Visual Computing (CVC) with which it will be linked by an existing fiber optics system. A new vacuum evaporator is also awarded and is vital for sample preparation for the electron microscope. UCR is the most rapidly growing UC campus, with the highest representation of minority students in the UC system and among the highest nationally. New faculty hires and new laboratory construction are underway to accommodate a 100% increase by , with particular growth in life sciences. The new TEM is essential for research and teaching programs to keep pace with the rapidly expanding interdepartmental program in CMDB and to address a worsening scheduling crisis on the only existing modern TEM on campus and shared by both life and materials scientists. For a significant group of Federally-funded UCR researchers in the life sciences, TEM is an indispensable tool, complementary to a range of additional techniques for acquiring structural information at the cellular and sub-cellular level. These include special applications in cell biology that are relevant to basic science as well as agriculture, biomedicine, pathogenesis, mode of action of antibiotics, and exploring character changes in evolution. UCR s existing CFAMM, interfaced with the CVC, provides a unique context for the new TEM dedicated for life science CMDB research and training. The new TEM will be the primary graduate and undergraduate TEM teaching tool for seven existing courses, and the PIs of this proposal will collaborate to develop a new training course specific to TEM techniques centered around the new instrument at the CFAMM doc13511 none This is a Major Research Instrumentation award that supports the development of a portable, three-wavelength scanning radar designed for meteorological research. Called the Advanced Multi-Frequency Radar (AMFR), it consists of a single antenna capable of transmitting and receiving frequencies in the Ku-band (13 GHZ), Ka-band (33 GHz), and W-band (95 GHz). (These frequencies correspond respectively to wavelengths of 2.2, 0.91, and 0.32 cm.) Each of the three radar systems will be capable of both Doppler and polarization measurements. The PI has already developed a dual-wavelength radar called the Cloud Profiling Radar System (CPRS), which operates at 0.9 and 0.3 cm. This award enables the addition of the third radar having 2.2 cm wavelength, the construction of a new antenna, and improvement of the sensitivity of the existing systems at 0.9 and 0.3 cm. A unique feature of the radar is a system of feeds designed to insure that the single antenna produces collocated, matched beams for the three wavelengths. Measurements at all wavelengths will thus be from the same volume of cloud. The AMFR will be highly portable and relatively inexpensive to deploy. Applications will be primarily to cloud microphysics. Initial emphasis will be on layer clouds and precipitation processes in winter storms. The radar will be able to detect some precipitation-free clouds, at least at the shorter wavelengths. Moreover, rain and snow, when present, give different signals at the three receivers because the polarization characteristics of precipitation and the deviations from Rayleigh scattering both depend on wavelength. These signals can be employed in various ways to distinguish rain from snow and to give information on the shape of ice-phase precipitation particles, the drop-size distribution in rain, and the variation of these quantities with height and time. Measurements of this kind will give new insight on the formation and evolution of precipitation, contributing fundamentally to cloud physics and providing information needed to improve the treatment of precipitation in mesoscale and climate models doc13512 none PROJECT SUMMARY The University of Missouri-Rolla (UMR) was awarded funds for the acquisition of state-of-the-art equipment and associated instrumentation to increase access and promote research, research training, and integrated research education activities primarily in the area of civil infrastructure engineering. UMR has identified civil infrastructure engineering as one of six areas for development under the Mission Enhancement Program of the University of Missouri System. The awarded equipment will support activities that are in line with the research and educational goals of the University and the National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation (NSF MRI) program goals. A new state-of-the-art structural engineering research education laboratory has just been completed in the Civil Engineering Department at UMR. With this brand new facility in place and in combination with the awarded equipment, UMR will be in the position to offer experimental facilities to its faculty, graduate and undergraduate students and to carry out significant research and education activities that address the nation s needs. In addition, cooperative research and development activities with government agencies and private industries will result in the advancement and implementation of scientific knowledge that is required for the safety of state and national civil engineering infrastructures. The equipment and instrumentation awarded in this proposal consists of: (1) three hydraulic actuators with servo-controlled valves capable of static, fatigue, dynamic and high-velocity testing; (2) hydraulic service manifolds and hydraulic power pump; (3) electronic control system; and, (4) high-capacity data acquisition system unit. UMR faculty members are actively pursuing research education activities at the national and international levels that address some of the world s needs for the development of modern design and repair methodologies for civil infrastructures. These research education activities demand equipment capabilities that far exceed current levels in the state of Missouri and or at nearby regional universities. Additionally, the newly constructed and equipped laboratory will allow UMR and its centers of excellence in attracting significant corporate and government research funding and draw a larger number of graduate and undergraduate students to pursue careers in engineering. The new state-of-the-art structural engineering research education laboratory will benefit students and faculty in the Civil Engineering Department as well as students and faculty from other academic departments such as Aerospace Engineering, Engineering Mechanics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Mining Engineering. Faculty in these departments are actively pursuing and conducting interdisciplinary research projects and have been successful in obtaining the support of private industry as well as state and federal agencies. The primary areas of research, research training, and educational activities that will be supported by the proposed equipment are: (i) structural testing of components and subassemblies; (ii) earthquake engineering and intelligent control of smart structures; (iii) use of advanced materials and FRP composites in construction; (iv) repair and rehabilitation of structural components in aging aircraft; (v) behavior of cold-formed steel structures; and, (vi) behavior of reinforced prestressed concrete structures. This award will enable UMR to address the following University and NSF MRI program goals: (1) strengthen and expand existing experimental research, research training, and education activities and facilities; (2) increase the population of women and under-represented minority groups in the university s graduate and undergraduate programs through access to and use of state-of-the-art research education equipment; (3) expand university-wide integrated interdisciplinary research and education activities; and, (4) build and strengthen industrial contacts and partnerships to promote and increase the scope of research, research training, and education opportunities available nationally as well as in the state of Missouri doc13513 none This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) award provides funds for the acquisition of equipment necessary for the establishment of a Micro-Scale Fabrication Facility at the University of Vermont. Specific equipment to be acquired are a reactive ion etcher for microscopic patterning of substrates, a wedge bonder for the attachment of electrodes, a vacuum furnace for annealing, a diamond saw for dicing of individual micro-structures from substrates, and a miniature clean environment for handling and assembly of structures. This equipment will permit the precise microscopic fabrication of physical structures necessary for a number of interdisciplinary micro- and or nano-scale engineering and scientific initiatives. Planned research projects include micro-scale fluid mixing systems; design and development of micro-scale satellite thruster prototypes; advanced materials and thin film membrane development; micro-scale environmental contaminant models; nanobiology of human molecular motors ; and micro-scale ultrasonic bio-sensors for chemical vapor and gas detection. In addition to research efforts, the Micro-Scale Fabrication Facility will be used to develop new interdisciplinary curricula for undergraduate and graduate students centering broadly on issues of microfabrication, micro-scale engineering systems and nanotechnology. Lecture and lab curricula, which focus on micro-fabrication science and technology and make extensive use of the lab facilities, will be developed. The benefits of this equipment include enhanced research capabilities; improved educational opportunities and curricula; and increased opportunities with local Vermont industry. The ability to perform in-house micro-fabrication will benefit and expedite research in the areas of micro-electromechanical systems, satellite micro-propulsion concepts, microfluidic mixing, chemical analysis and detection, and advanced materials development. Results of these projects could in turn aid the advancement of miniaturized devices and sensors relevant to space satellite propulsion, pharmaceutical, biomedical, automotive, semiconductor and environmental monitoring applications. The equipment will also lead to new graduate and undergraduate curricular and research opportunities. Students will directly benefit by obtaining advanced and highly-marketable job skills. Finally, opportunities for collaborations between the University of Vermont and state and local industry will be improved. Companies which lack sufficient infrastructure to pursue micro-scale initiatives will have the ability to partner with the University of Vermont and its researchers doc13514 none Zehr This Major Research Instrumentation award to University of California Santa Cruz will provide support for acquisition of a genetic analyzer for DNA sequencing, liquid handling robotics, computer workstations and software for DNA analysis, and technical support for the Molecular Ecology and Evolutionary Genetics facility. It is expected that the new instrumentation and the interdepartmental research and training facility will foster interdisciplinary approaches to a broad range of problems in marine and terrestrial ecology and evolutionary biology. UCSC will contribute cost-sharing of more than 30% of the cost of this project from non-federal funds doc13515 none The primary driver of the information revolution is advanced silicon processing. Consequently, system design is undergoing a fundamental change, moving from multiple chip solutions to system-on-a-chip (SOC) solutions. However, as was noted in the National Science Foundation s recent planning workshops on advanced VLSI systems, the testing and measurement thoery and practice related to these heterogeneous resources integrated into a SoC solution is a major unsolved problem that could greatly limit future advances. The advancements in process technologies provide for radically new types of devices, with commensurate design challenges and test and measurement needs. An example of such a system currently under development at the UW is a human machine transducer chip-Universal Transducer Chip, a single integrated system capable of providing a speech recognition interface to a ubiquitous wireless network. Such a system is likely to become the standard interface modality for a wide range of new applications, from smart homes and smart test benches to ubiquitous high-performance computing fabrics. However, to achieve this potential, there are multiple test and measurement issues that must be addressed: o Radio frequency transceivers must be tested and characterized in the ISM (2.4GHz) and UNfl (5.6-5.8GHz) frequency bands for a broad range of emerging wireless standards o Low power, high performance wireless hardware implementations must be tested and measurement techniques must be developed and validated for future SoC applications in the LMDS bands at 17GHz, and above o Heterogeneous single-chip integration and test and measurement must be supported, allowing for the fabrication of RF, analog, high performance digital, and re-configurable subsystems within a single piece of silicon The infrastructure contained in this proposal enables an investigation into the future of testing and measuring ultra-high-frequency SoC systems, years in advance of their commercialization. We will seek to develop and demonstrate a test and measurement methodology that can provide the benefits of multiple different resource types for numerous design domains. As an initial driver of these efforts, we will characterize a Human Machine transducer chip, seeking to guide the development of future system-on-a-chip design and test methodologies. It is generally representative of future SoC systems that will operate at ever higher frequencies with ever-increasing levels of complexity. To support the design of such cutting-edge silicon systems, we will develop innovative techniques to handle numerous test issues: o Validation of techniques for integrating RF and Analog components into future ultra-low-voltage SoC designs. o Validation of high-performance, power efficient digital logic families for supporting these systems. o Integrated testing methodologies for complex, heterogeneous systems that can provide complete system test through an optimum combination of on-chip and off-chip ultra-high-frequency test environments. In addition to the development of new approaches for testing and measuring SoC chip designs, we will also develop innovative techniques for educating future high-frequency SoC designers. By providing an integrated curriculum including high-frequency test and measurement, along with a just-in-time learning environment, we will help create system architects capable of harnessing these radically new design techniques and opportunities doc13516 none Jack Morava The central idea of this proposal is a mathematical definition for the physicists notion of topological gravity (analogous to Segal s mathematical definition of conformal field theory) as a representation of a monoidal category with manifolds as objects, using the geometric realization of a category of cobordisms between those objects as its morphism spaces; these spaces are unions of classifying spaces for the diffeomorphism groups of the cobordisms. In two dimensions, the resulting category is quite similar to that considered by Segal, but it generalizes very naturally, e.g. to four dimensions, where it has close connections with classical general relativity; but there is also a version for topological (i.e, non-smooth) four-manifolds, lacking any clear classical analog. Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten theory fit naturally into this framework, which predicts that such invariants should have higer-order `gravitational descendants , e.g. higher-codimension versions of the wall-crossing obstructions. In dimension two, this formalism fits in well on the one hand with work of Madsen and Tillmann on Mumford s conjecture, and on the other with the theory of a `large quantum cohomology studied by Kontsevich, Manin, Witten, and others. One concrete goal of the project is to construct a cohomological theory related to the Atiyah-Patodi-Singer eta-invariant of a three-manifold, as Casson s invariant is related to Floer homology. Classical mechanics studies the trajectories of point particles in a smooth geometric background, and much recent work in string theory can be formulated in similar terms, with the background replaced by the (infinite-dimensional) space of smooth loops in some ambient manifold. However, the mathematics of these free loopspaces is quite challenging, and their topology (not to mention their geometry) is not yet well-understood. An added complication is that the models studied in quantum field theory involve topology change in a conceptually intrinsic way, and thus seem often to call, not for the free loopspace itself, but for a suitable completion with nice properties -- whose nature is still being worked out. This proposal suggests that the desired completion is an analog, for free loopspaces, of the dual of a finite-dimensional smooth manifold (as studied in the s by Whitehead, Spanier, Atiyah, and others). This point of view seems compatible with work of Chas and Sullivan on string topology, with work of Cohen, Jones, and Segal on Floer homotopy type, and with work of Ando and myself on the Witten genus doc13517 none Tayfun E. Tezduyar Rice University MRI: Acquisition of a Parallel Computing Facility for Computational Engineering This is a proposal for equipment acquisition under the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program to support research and student training across a range of computational engineering activities including computational mechanics, computational heat transfer, computational materials science, computational bioengineering, computational environmental engineering, computational mathematics, and computer science, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary projects. For example, work on shared memory in a network of processors has led to techniques which can be tested in a production environment in applications in large-scale turbulence control analyses and in molecular simulations of nanostructures doc13518 none This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program award provides funding to acquire a combined precision alignment system and wafer bonder. The aligner part of the instrument precisely lines up multiple wafers and substrates and puts them into contact. The bonder portion of the instrument permanently bonds the aligned substrates together. This instrument will be used at the University of Maryland for research and education in micro-electro-mechanical systems, integrated optics, chip-scale and wafer-level packaging, 3D interconnections, and hot embossing. Researchers will produce micro-turbine engines, biomedical drug delivery systems, microsurgical tools, micro-pumps for cooling high-density circuitry, and radio frequency devices. The wafer-to-wafer alignment system will be permanently located in a new 11,000 sq. ft. multi-user class clean room facility, the Engineering and Applied Sciences Building, dedicated to micro- and nano-systems research at the University of Maryland. The availability of a wafer-to-wafer alignment system at the University of Maryland will benefit the following research projects: micro-turbomachinery, micro-combustion, safety and arming micro-systems, micromachined cooling structures, 3-dimensional micro-mechanisms, conjugated polymer films for microfluidics, and actively positioned neural probes. This equipment will also enhance education by making available to undergraduate and graduate students hands-on training on state-of-the-art equipment in a modern clean room environment. Newly developed undergraduate and graduate courses in microsystems in both the Electrical and Mechanical Engineering departments will also utilize this instrument for class projects. The instrument will also assist research and interdisciplinary collaboration between the University of Maryland and surrounding universities and national laboratories doc13519 none This grant supports the acquisition of instrumentation to measure Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) in cognitive and social neuroscience research. ERPs reflect the synaptic activity of the brain that occur during mental activity. The requested instrumentation will be used with fMRI brain scanning at the Brain Research Imaging Center (BRIC) at the University of Chicago. BRIC has purchased a 3T scanner to study psychological processes such as spoken language understanding, shifts of attention, perceptuo-motor planning and motor imagery, and social categorization. Although behavioral studies have told us much about these mental processes, these studies cannot indicate the specific way in which the brain implements this processing. fMRI can identify which parts of the brain are involved in processing. Although fMRI can localize cortical areas, blood-flow responses are too slow to measure the timing of activity in these areas. ERPs provide this timing information, but cannot localize brain activity as finely as fMRI. fMRI together with ERP combines high spatial resolution and temporal resolution to investigate the functional processing in the brain. Measuring ERP activity during fMRI will aid in relating temporal and spatial information about cortical processing. Three broad projects will initially use the instrumentation. One project will investigate interactions between language-specific mechanisms and more general cognitive processes during language comprehension. This research examines how understanding uses attention and memory as well as paralinguistic information. ERP measures will investigate relative timing of cortical activity in working memory and attention compared with specifically linguistic processing. The second project will examine neural mechanisms involved in perception and production of action. Comparison of perceptual processing of symbolic cues for actions with direct human movement cues (to trigger mirror cells) will investigate neural mechanisms underlying conceptual operations in motor movements and motor imagery circuits. The third project investigates affective evaluation and social categorization addressing the theory that positive and negative attitudes are mediated by different mechanisms. fMRI and ERP will identify relevant brain areas and examine the time-course of processing in affective, perceptual, and autonomic parts of these networks to investigate how affective evaluation systems mediate stereotypic responses in social categorization doc13520 none Sharon Stansfield Ithaca College MRI: Acquisition of Computing and Peripheral Hardware to Support Collaborative Research and Undergraduate Research Education in Virtual Reality This is a proposal for equipment acquisition under the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program to support research and student training in virtual reality. The virtual reality effort will provide a platform for the investigation of human motion planning and the development of computational models to enable high fidelity object manipulation within a virtual environment doc13521 none Bogue This grant, made through the Major Research Instrumentation Program, funds the acquisition of a 2-G Enterprises 755R superconducting rock magnetometer system (SRM) for the paleomagnetic laboratory in the new Physics, Earth, and Environmental Science Center at Occidental College. The SRM will replace an aging spinner fluxgate magnetometer and allow rapid measurement of the remanence of both strongly- and weakly-magnetized geological samples. It will primarily be used by the PIs and undergraduate research assistants for projects concerning the tectonics of western North America, the magnetostratigraphy of Pacific coast Cenozoic sections, and the behavior of the geomagnetic field during polarity transitions. The Occidental College paleomagnetic laboratory will also be available for use by researchers and students from other institutions. In particular, the PIs anticipate relieving some of the pressure on Dr. Joseph Kirschvink s heavily-used lab at the doc13522 none The Energy Systems Group at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez (UPRM) proposes the acquisition of instrumentation to upgrade energy research infrastructure to 15 kVA. Proposed instrumentation includes power electronics converters, dynamometers, transformers and motors for testing, a surge generator, power quality analyzers, computers and data acquisition cards, and measuring devices. The Group is requesting these instruments to improve existing computational and experimental facilities at the Electric Energy Processing Systems Laboratory (EEPSL). Improving this research facility is vital in order to carry out research projects and meaningful industry collaborations in energy systems, especially in power electronics and power quality. The requested instruments will also be used to develop design projects and laboratory experiments that will improve research training activities (graduate and undergraduate levels). These tools will bring research to the classroom through undergraduate research projects, seminars, special topics courses and demonstrations. The proposed instrumentation will provide resources needed to expand the scope of research and education in power systems, power electronics applications, alternate energy sources, and power quality. EEPSL will be better equipped to integrate UPRM work to mainstream research of the Center for Power Electronics Systems (CPES). UPRM is a core academic partner in CPES, an NSF ERC led by Virginia Tech. Current capabilities at EEPSL only allow testing of models and equipment below 500 Watts. The equipment will provide tools for the validation of models using scaled-versions of a power system at higher power levels. The laboratory will also serve as a testing facility for devices such as motors, drives and other industrial-size loads. A facility such as EEPSL, its personnel and improved resources, does not exist in the Caribbean doc13523 none With this award from the instrumentation for Materials Research program, Rutgers University at Camden will acquire a fast, parallel computer SPCES -MYR with 3 nodes, each with four processors and 4GB shared-memory, for hybrid materials research. Chalcogenide hybrid materials, synthesized recently by experimentalists at Rutgers Camden, were found to be unexpectedly stable and have a novel structure that cannot be understood within the thermodynamic theory. These materials exhibit surprisingly large blue shifts in absorption edges compared to their parent bulk semiconductors. The proposed computer will be used to calculate the structural, electronic, and optical properties of these complex materials using density-functional theory. The new computer will also immediately enable the following exciting projects: (i) quantum dots, (ii) conducting polymers, (iii) ferroelectric materials, (iv) local correlation. The acquisition will greatly strengthen the research capability of Camden campus in materials science, and will also be employed in the undergraduate curriculum to perform large-scale electronic-structure calculations. With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation program Rutgers University at Camden will be able to acquire a fast, parallel, shared-memory computer for hybrid materials research, a major research initiative at Rutgers Camden. Semiconductor hybrid materials, formed by coherently bonding inorganic semiconductors to organic species, are a new type of material that combines all the advantages of semiconductors and polymers, both of great interest to industry. The new computer will be used to simulate the electronic, optical, and structural properties of II-VI hybrid materials. The computer will also be heavily used in the following exciting new research projects: (i) nanomaterials, (ii) conducting polymers, (iii) ferroelectric materials, (iv) novel computational techniques. The acquisition will greatly strengthen the research capability of the Camden campus in materials science, and it will significantly enhance inter-departmental collaborations between Chemistry and Physics. The computer will also be used by undergraduates participating in these projects, and will be employed in the undergraduate curriculum to perform electronic-structure calculations doc13524 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Quynh Chu-LaGraff, Barbara Boyer, Barbara Danowski, Stephen Horton, and Robert Lauzon at Union College to acquire a confocal microscope to be the centerpiece for a renovated Integrated Microscope facility. This instrument would substantially enhance and expand the research capabilities of five faculty with interests ranging from cellular motility, invertebrate development and evolution, genetic development, programmed cell death, to molecular neuroscience. Moreover, confocal technology as an innovative tool will be integrated into classroom laboratory training and individual student-faculty projects to enrich the research experience of undergraduates. Within the Biology Department, there are currently numerous projects that represent the integration of cellular, genetics, molecular, and developmental approach to biological science. Specifically, research include using fly and mouse model systems to better understand human neurological diseases, evolution of segmentation in primitive organisms, the role of centrosome reorientation in migrating cultured cells, genetic and molecular mechanisms governing mushroom development, and basic understanding of programmed cell death in colonial sea squirt Botryllus schlosseri. The instrument represents a critical investment to maintain and enhance academic research excellence both for faculty research and for the training of undergraduate researchers. It will also facilitate more active and productive faculty and student research interactions at Union College by bypassing the need to gain access to a confocal microscope elsewhere doc13525 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation program Macalester College will be able to acquire a short Titanium-Sapphire laser for Terahertz studies of semiconductor heterostructures. The laser system will permit time-resolved spectroscopy of materials at terahertz and mid-infrared frequencies. Initial research will use the instrument to support the Principal Investigator s NSF-funded program to study spin and charge dynamics in semiconductors (NSF-RUI ). Projects will include ultrafast Terahertz spectroscopy of spin-dynamics in semiconductors; time-resolved measurements of magneto-plasma oscillations in semiconductors; and quantum transitions in strongly driven semiconductor quantum wells and heterostructures. The equipment will also support undergraduate research training in Photonics and Condensed Matter Physics at Macalester College. With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation program Macalester College will be able to acquire a short Titanium-Sapphire laser for Terahertz studies of semiconductor heterostructures. As the switching rates in electronic devices are pushed to ever higher frequencies, it becomes increasingly important to understand carrier transport phenomena in semiconductors on picosecond (10-12s) and femtosecond (10-15s) time-scales. Using ultrafast terahertz spectroscopy it is possible to impulsively excite a material with a femtosecond optical pulse or single-cycle electromagnetic pulse, and record the resulting motion of charge in time. This award supports equipment to enable time-resolved spectroscopy of materials at terahertz and mid-infrared frequencies. Initial research will use the instrument to support the Principal Investigator s NSF-funded program to study spin and charge dynamics in semiconductors (NSF-RUI ). The equipment will also support undergraduate research training in Photonics and Condensed Matter Physics at Macalester College doc13526 none This dissertation project examines the effects of volcanism and other paleoenvironmental factors on the movement, boundary behavior, and settlement pattern and chronology of Late Holocene human populations on the Alaska Peninsula. Geologic sections on the Alaska Peninsula will be sampled and analyzed for both paleoenvironmental reconstruction and comparison of compositions of historic and prehistoric pyroclastic flows. A 4.5m geologic profile on the Pacific coast of the Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve will be sampled for pollen, microfossils, and other organics to reconstruct how Holocene vegetation reacted to both periodic and catastrophic volcanism. One focus here will be on the rate at which vegetation recolonized the B.P. Aniakchak pyroclastic flow, allowing the eventual cultural reoccupation of the region. Pollen and other samples will be taken at least every 5cm through much of the 4.5m profile, with sampling every centimeter after major volcanic events. Samples will be recovered from the B.P. Aniakchak pyroclastic flow and from the Katmai pyroclastic flow in the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. Comparison of variables between these two flows will determine the utility of using the Katmai PF as a historic revegetation analog for the Aniakchak flow. Surface testing and both surface and subsurface samples will be taken from the pyroclastic flow exposures, with samples compared for percent of silica, abrasiveness, and other variables. The research will contribute to the understanding of volcanism s effects on human paleogeography in other northern and maritime regions of the globe doc13527 none PI: Solomon The PI and six colleagues in the Departments of Chemical engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan are requesting funds to purchase a confocal laser scanning microscope. This will enhance their research and research training in nanoscale engineering of complex fluids and biomaterials. Specifics proposed applications of the instrument are: to quantify defect dynamics during annealing of colloidal crystals, to detect self-assembled proteins, to observe microfluidic flows on cellular development, and to facilitate the efficient design of microfabricated devices doc13528 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Miami University in Oxford will acquire a 400 MHz solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) the characterization of the membrane-bound protein phospholamban; b) an investigation of the structure and mechanism of action of CREP-1; c) an examination of the metalloenzyme metallo-beta-lactamase, believed responsible for antibiotic resistance in bacteria; d) organically modified polymers and their use in combinatorial chemistry; e) influence of dendrimers on sol-gel materials; and f) development of novel packing materials for chromatographic separations. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas, in particular, medicinal chemistry, biochemistry and materials chemistry doc13529 none Humphrey Support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) will be used to acquire a stable isotope ratio mass spectrometer coupled with a gas chromatograph, water equilibration device, automated carbonate extraction system, and an auto-sampler. This modern modular system will replace a twenty-year-old mass spectrometer and ancillary vacuum lines as the primary research instrument for obtaining stable isotope data at the Colorado School of Mines (CSM). The outdated equipment will be retained as teaching tools for graduate education. A primary advantage of a new system will be its ability to routinely handle very small sample sizes, in some cases several orders of magnitude smaller than that possible with the existing facilities. For example, carbonate samples in the 5-10 microgram range and water samples in the 200-300 microliter range can be analyzed with the new system, whereas the previous facilities could only accurately measure in the milligram and milliliter ranges, respectively. Further, sample preparation and introduction into the mass spectrometer will be fully automated, allowing for greater sample through-put and efficient use of researchers time and resources. The new equipment will be used to study a variety of earth systems for which the isotopic analysis of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur is particularly critical. Twelve faculty members at CSM currently have ongoing research programs utilizing stable isotope geochemistry. The new instrumentation will service faculty from the Department of Geology and Geological Engineering, the Department of Chemistry and Geochemistry, and the Division of Environmental Science and Engineering. Specific areas of faculty research that require stable isotope data encompass both applied and fundamental topics, including water rock interaction and diagenesis of carbonate rocks, geomicrobiology, bioremediation, petroleum reservoir characterization, hydrothermal alteration, petroleum and natural gas characterization, geochemistry of metalliferous ore deposits, continental paleoclimatology, and environmental geochemistry doc13530 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program supports the development of a high-resolution low-temperature scanning tunneling microscope (STM) for research and education in surface processing at the University of California-Riverside (UCR). The research apparatus is based on an STM with a temperature range between 10K and 350K. It will be set up to allows for in-situ sample excitation with laser pulses and electrons of several tens of electronvolts to 1kilo electronvolts energy. It will be used for the structural and spectroscopic analysis of adsorbates and films before and after their excitation similar to presently used or in the near future relevant surface process: direct optical excitation as it is used in optical lithography; optical excitation of the surface electronic temperatures to several hundred K for a time span of a few ps as induced by (ultra-)short laser pulses; excitation by impinging electrons of various energies as it is used in electron-beam lithography; excitation by low energy electrons from the tunneling current. The low-temperature capability of the instrument will permit to freeze out the reaction intermediates created by the various excitation modes. They are thus available for structural and spectroscopic analysis by STM. A comparison between the resultant products offers important insight into the elementary steps of the used reactions. The proposed instrument will be incorporated into the educational program of UCR in the context of an introductory course to semiconductor processing offered by the PI for senior undergraduate and graduate students of chemistry, physics and engineering. Additionally, it will be available to graduate students for their research projects. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program supports the development of a high-resolution low-temperature scanning tunneling microscope (STM) for research and education in surface processing at the University of California-Riverside (UCR). The research apparatus is based on an STM with a temperature range between 10K and 350K. It will be set up to allows for in-situ sample excitation with laser pulses and electrons of several tens of electronvolts to 1kilo electronvolts energy. It will be used for the structural and spectroscopic analysis of adsorbates and films before and after their excitation similar to presently used or in the near future relevant surface process: direct optical excitation as it is used in optical lithography; optical excitation of the surface electronic temperatures to several hundred K for a time span of a few ps as induced by (ultra-)short laser pulses; excitation by impinging electrons of various energies as it is used in electron-beam lithography; excitation by low energy electrons from the tunneling current. The low-temperature capability of the instrument will permit to freeze out the reaction intermediates created by the various excitation modes. They are thus available for structural and spectroscopic analysis by STM. A comparison between the resultant products offers important insight into the elementary steps of the used reactions. The proposed instrument will be incorporated into the educational program of UCR in the context of an introductory course to semiconductor processing offered by the PI for senior undergraduate and graduate students of chemistry, physics and engineering. Additionally, it will be available to graduate students for their research projects doc13531 none Proposal: PI: Srinivas Peeta Institution: Purdue Research Foundation Date: July 25, : A Multilayer Capital Budgeting Model for Comparative analyses of Infrastructure Networks This project addresses the dynamic capital budgeting problem for large scale, multi-layer infrastructure networks, comprised of transportation networks, water networks, energy networks, telecommunications networks, financial networks, and genera data flow networks. Specifically, the objective of this project is to develop a multi-layer dynamic network capital budgeting model that can be used to quantify the cost savings and efficiency enhancements that might accrue from the coordinated planning and design of infrastructure networks. In the past, infrastructure networks have only been considered in isolation. As such this project is the first step toward developing both a comprehensive theory of infrastructure network design and a new generation of infrastructure decision support systems capable of identifying and promoting synergies among individual network layers. Constraints reflecting physical, financial, economic, and information interdependencies are used to couple network layers. Network activities are further constrained by flow conservation, resource and non-negativity constraints. The state dynamics recognize the alternative gaming behaviors of individual agents active on the various network layers, so that different assumptions regarding the nature of perfect and imperfect economic competition over networks can be considered. The objective is to maximize the present value of net economic benefits. This objective is combined with the aforementioned constraints and state dynamics to create a family of differential games that are formulated as optimal control models. These models can be used to determine the most efficient allocation of infrastructure capital investments over both time and space. The research approach used in this project combines qualitative analysis and nontranditional solution techniques. That is, both classical numerical methods and combined optimization agent-based simulation (ABS) models are considered. In particular, the differential game model is used to validate the ABS model. A key task in this regard is the investigation of the sensitivity of the model dynamics to parameter values. Although a case study of an actual metropolitan infrastructure system is beyond the scope of this initial research, we will also develop an experimental design for validation of the optimization ABS model. We will also describe how the model may be used to develop an optimal capacity expansion plan for the infrastructure systems of a medium size city doc13532 none Eppell This is a proposal to: (1) build a near-field scanning optical microscope (NSOM) capable of phase, fluorescence, polarization and second harmonic generation modes, and (2) build a modified NSOM that will use a solid metallic tip, rather than a fiberoptic tip, as an aperatureless near field optical probe. The proposed NSOM, having all of the features desired, cannot be purchased commercially. The investigators will purchase all of the major components, and then modify and assemble them to yield the desired instrument. This equipment will be used in a number of biomedical engineering research projects which include studies on: (1) the mineralization of artificial bone, (2) synapse function in neurons, (3) self-assembled fluorosomes for cancer-targeted gene delivery, (4) liquid crystal alignment on solid substrates, and (5) labeled proteins in the membranes of T cells doc13533 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Sudman at Tarleton State University to purchase an automated DNA analysis system. This instrument package will be used to enhance the teaching and research activities within the Department of Biological Sciences, specifically those related to molecular biology and genetics. The use of this DNA analysis system, combined with the introduction of DNA and protein analysis components into the laboratory portions of many of their classes, will greatly enhance the educational experiences of all of the students associated with the Biology Department. This modern, technological approach to biology will give Tarleton students advantages on three different levels. Exposure to modern research techniques and instrumentation will 1) better prepare the students to enter post-baccalaureate educational settings - either traditional academic settings or medical related fields; 2) prepare future K-12 teachers with a basis for explaining and perhaps demonstrating the uses of modern molecular techniques; and 3) prepare students for entrance into the rapidly changing, high-tech workplace. From an educational standpoint, individuals that will benefit from the acquisition of a DNA analysis system will include undergraduate students, Masters level graduate students, area high school teachers, and researchers both at Tarleton State University and the Stephenville branch of the Texas A&M Agricultural Research and Extension Center. Undergraduate students enrolled in courses in the Department of Biological Sciences such as Heredity, Molecular Biology, and Laboratory Techniques in Biochemistry will utilize the automated DNA analysis system in a variety of laboratory situations. Students in the graduate course Laboratory Practicum in Molecular Biology will also benefit from the apparatus. From a research standpoint, undergraduate and graduate students involved with several ongoing projects will directly utilize the automated DNA analysis system. These research projects include generating data for investigating the past history of various mammal species, DNA variation in an endangered bird (Attwater s prairie chickens), determination of the origin of introduced crabs in freshwater Texas lakes, introducing foreign genes into baculoviruses to enhance insect resistance in plants, examining the origin of specific hybrid plant species (such as peanuts), searching for genes related to drought tolerance in plants, and investigations into the genetic diversity of immune response genes in various species of mammals. The acquisition of this DNA analysis system will have a tremendous impact on the academic and research community associated with the Department of Biological Sciences at Tarleton State University. From students seeking teacher certification to those conducting Masters level research, an onsite instrument for determining DNA sequences or other genetic differences between or within organisms will provide a vital boost to the biological teaching and research fields. The automated DNA analysis system will allow more than 100 students per year the opportunity to obtain essential training with a state-of-the-art biochemical analysis instrument. Finally, the system will provide local access for the research community at the Stephenville branch of the Texas A&M Agricultural Research and Extension Center, fostering additional collaborative research activities between the two institutions doc13534 none A computer cluster is being developed to support the University of Richmond (UR) research program in electromagnetic nuclear physics at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab). The system will consist of 50 slave nodes, a master node, and a 3-TByte RAID file server. Each of the slave computing nodes will have two 1-GHz Pentium III processors, 512 MBytes of RAM, and a 20-GByte hard disk. The computers will run the Linux operating system and will be configured on a local area network through a high-speed switch. The master node will be used to manage the execution of batch jobs and to act as a firewall to restrict access to the system and reduce network traffic among the nodes of the cluster. The cluster is modeled after a prototype system that was developed at UR and has been running successfully for the past two years. The system will be used for data analysis and Monte-Carlo simulations for the CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer (CLAS) Collaboration in Hall B at Jefferson Lab. The goal of the CLAS research program is to study baryon and meson structure and spectroscopy, gluonic degrees of freedom, and multinucleon correlations in nuclei doc13535 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Thomas C. Peeler at Susquehanna University to acquire a confocal microscope system to support student faculty collaborative research in cell and molecular biology. This instrument is an advanced laser scanning confocal microscope that offers enhanced resolution in immunofluorescent applications and the ability to reconstruct 3D images from ultathin optical sections. There will be three main faculty users of this instrument. Dr. Thomas Peeler s work examines the interaction of external signals, specifically angiotensin II, on actin cytoskeleton structure in cardiac cells. The confocal microscope will allow Dr. Peeler to visualize the cytoskeletal network in heart cells. Disruption of this network stimulated by external signals may play a role in the development of the cardiac hypertrophy associated with hypertension. Dr. David Richard s lab explores the endocrine control of vitellogenesis, or yolk deposition, in Drosophila oocytes. Dr. Richard hopes to use this instrument to better understand the role of certain key proteins in the uptake of yolk during egg development. Disruption of this process may be a key to novel methods of insect population control. Dr. Margaret Peeler s lab focuses on the role of signal transduction pathways in cell fate determination during the early development of the sea urchin embryo. The confocal microscope will be used in experiments to follow the expression of regulatory proteins believed to be responsible for directing cell fate in embryonic development. The acquisition of the confocal microscope will have significant impact on the research training of undergraduate students at Susquehanna University. Approximately 15 to 20 undergraduates will use the instrument each year as part of their capstone senior research experience. The availability of this microscope system will enhance and expand the scope of the research projects being pursued and provide significant training opportunities for these students, many of whom intend to pursue careers in biomedical research either through graduate work or through employment in academic or biotechnology labs doc13536 none Recent shake table tests on wine-barrel stacks have revealed several dislocation patterns and various modes of failure including sliding or rocking of the entire stack, sliding or rocking of an upper portion of the stack, lift-off of the top barrels and in few occasions appreciable twisting of the stack around its vertical axis. While initial observations suggested a chaotic response, further examination of the experimental results indicate that the dynamic response of rigid-block assemblies might be much more ordered than initially thought. Order emerges when the response of the block assembly is correlated with the appropriate parameters of the excitation (not just the acceleration level) and the appropriate parameters of the configuration of the entire assembly as well as these of the individual blocks. The need to improve our understanding of the dynamic response of rigid-block assemblies motivated the study proposed herein. The main objectives of this grant are: (a) to experimentally verify theoretical findings on the rocking response of single blocks; (b) to validate the performance of existing discrete and finite element software to analyze the dynamic response of rigid-block assemblies; and (c) establish a dependable procedure that engineers can use with confidence to estimate the earthquake response of rigid-block assemblies. In this project we first propose a series of shake table experiments on single free-standing and anchored blocks to validate recent theoretical findings on their rocking response under ground shaking. The study will examine the ability of numerical tools to predict the overall dislocation patterns and the appropriate model of failure and will document their advantages and limitations. Finally the most dependable existing software will be used to construct a set of drift, rotation and overturning spectra for a family of rigid-block assemblies of interest. It is expected that the study will establish a practical procedure for estimating the earthquake response of rigid-block assemblies and provide practical retrofit recommendations for enhancing their earthquake resistance doc13537 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program to Cornell University supports instrument acquisition for the National Nanofabrication User Network (NNUN). The NNUN consists of sites at Cornell, Stanford, Howard, Penn State, and Howard University, provides advanced nanofabrication resources to users from around the country. In the most recent year, NNUN served over users from fields as diverse as microelectronics, micromechanics, optics, biology, materials science, chemistry, and physics. Modern equipment is key to our ability to serve this diverse user community. This award includes funds to upgrade critical NNUN facilities. Under this award, CNF will purchase a Laser Pattern Generator. This instrument is crucial not only for fabrication of advanced photomasks but also for direct laser fabrication at dimensions as small as a quarter of a micrometer. Howard University will install an advanced ion source to its SIMS system to increase its capability for microanalysis. Under this award, the facility at Penn State will purchase an advanced field emission SEM. When combined with an integrated scanning tunneling microscope from another award, an advanced nanoscale characterization tool will be made available to NNUN users. UCSB will purchase a new computer control system to upgrade its JBX5 electron beam lithography tool to allow it to continue to support microfabrication in the sub Micrometer range. The National Nanofabrication User Network (NNUN), consisting of sites at Cornell, Stanford, Howard, Penn State, and Howard University, provides advanced nanofabrication resources to users from around the country. In the most recent year, NNUN served over users from fields as diverse as microelectronics, micromechanics, optics, biology, materials science, chemistry, and physics. Modern equipment is key to NNUN s ability to serve this diverse user community. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program includes funds to upgrade mask-making facilities at Cornell, to expand microanalysis capabilities at Penn State and Howard University, and to upgrade electron beam lithography facilities at UC Santa Barbara. This equipment is critical to enable NNUN to serve an exponentially growing number of users, faculty, students postdocs and users from industry doc13538 none The growing technological importance of ceramics has highlighted the need for new studies of the fundamental physical and chemical properties of ceramic melts, where temperatures are very high (up to and beyond 2,000 Celsius) and where much industrial processing is performed. We have built the apparatus required for both spectroscopic and time-domain NMR measurements of the properties of insulating materials at ultra-high temperatures, and have to date determined both chemical shifts and nuclear spin relaxation times of 27Al in several molten ceramics between and C. This apparatus will be used to extend these measurements in well-known refractory systems, e.g. silica-alumina, calcium-alumina and yttrium-alumina, as well as in new systems under investigation. In addition, we plan to further develop the technique of ultra high-temperature NMR measurements by incorporation of a magnetic field gradient into our NMR probe. This has the twin purposes of improving our understanding of sample temperature gradients in the apparatus, and of implementing the direct measurement of diffusivities. With the addition of these innovations to the well-known repertory of basic measurements, the application of NMR has the potential for significantly increasing our understanding of liquid phases over a broad range of ceramic systems. In molten ceramics, however, measurements are particularly challenging. The high temperatures and strong reactivities of a typical ceramic liquid s constituents preclude the use of sample containers. In our experiments a small sphere of material, about three mm in diameter, is levitated in an upward flow of argon gas and heated above ~ C by a CO2 laser. For NMR measurements the sample must also be located in a large magnetic field, at the center of a superconducting magnet. Sample temperature and composition may be varied, and the NMR data provide direct information about the effect of these variations upon the average chemical environments of different nuclei in the liquid. Diffusion rates can also be obtained. From this information a clearer understanding emerges, of the atomic scale structural and dynamic properties of molten ceramics. With this, we can better understand the macroscopic properties of a melt, for example its viscosity, and better control the properties of the resulting ceramic material for many applications. This project is co-funded with AFOSR (6.1 doc13539 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program to Montana State University is for instrument development of a movable magnetic films-growth facility designed to be connected to an X-ray synchrotron beamline for advanced in-situ characterization of as grown magnetic multilayers. The growth facility will have both chemical vapor deposition capability that will grow superior performance magnetic semiconductors and half-metallic ferromagnets (HMF) and a thermal deposition capability for growth of single-element magnetic films. It will also be available for use by other researchers through research collaboration with the PI. This project will provide a powerful means for understanding, quantify and control interfacial behavior for the creation and study of established and new phenomena that potentially have tremendous impact on the explosive growth of spintronics. This instrument development project will help train graduate students and postdocs in instrument science and forefront research. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program to Montana State University is for instrument development of a movable magnetic films-growth facility designed to be connected to an X-ray synchrotron beamline for advanced in-situ characterization of as grown magnetic multilayers. The growth facility will have both chemical vapor deposition capability that will grow superior performance magnetic semiconductors and half-metallic ferromagnets (HMF) and a thermal deposition capability for growth of single-element magnetic films. It will also be available for use by other researchers through research collaboration with the PI. This project will provide a powerful means for understanding, quantify and control interfacial behavior for the creation and study of established and new phenomena that potentially have tremendous impact on the explosive growth of spintronics. This instrument development project will help train graduate students and postdocs in instrument science and forefront research doc13540 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Reed College will acquire a 400 MHz nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) enzyme mechanisms through magnetization tansfer; b) synthesis of transition-state mimics; c) natural product synthesis; and d) mechanistic and structural studies of sugar isomerases. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research doc13541 none Luneburg This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant provides funds for the acquisition of electron microscopy equipment consisting of an environmental scanning electron microscope (ESEM) with attached Energy Dispersive X-ray (EDX) and Electron Backscatter Diffraction (EBSD) systems and partial support for a technician to oversee operations of the instrument. A carbon coater will also be purchased. This equipment is essential for innovative research and state-of-the-art education of science students and will therefore strongly benefit the State University of West Georgia in research and education. The Department of Geosciences plans to establish a center for microanalysis comprising the requested equipment as well as already available instruments such as optical microscopes and an x-ray texture goniometer. Such a facility will be unique in the southeastern United States. The wide range of users and applications from within and outside the State University of West Georgia requires an instrument like the ESEM whose particular technology allows analysis of a wide range of specimens under low or high vacuum conditions with minimum contamination. The EDX system is essential for quantitative chemical analyses of the samples. The EBSD system will allow crystallographic orientation analyses of individual minerals which, in combination with the texture goniometry measurements of bulk samples, will promote new approaches to fabric analysis in rocks. Planned research topics include fabric development in heterogeneous deformation fields such as folds and shear zones, the kinematic significance of stretching lineations, fabric development during a complex deformation history and the relationship between fabrics and physical rock anisotropy. Studies will be performed in the Southern Appalachians as well as in the Alps. The equipment would also permit novel research in the field of microbial taphonomy (decomposition and fossilization) and would permit detailed investigation into the respiratory and feeding structures of well-preserved blastoids, thus complementing existing research programs. Significant research and teaching projects would also be undertaken in biology, chemistry and physics doc13542 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Scranton will acquire a gas chromatograph with mass spectrometric detection (GC MS). This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) microwave accelerated preparation and reactions of tricyclic and tetracyclicazepines using room temperature ionic liquids as solvents; b) studies on the presence of polychlorinated biphenyls and other organic compounds in the Lackawanna River; c) development of environmentally-suited methods for chemical synthesis and processing; and d) determination of polyphenols in common fruits. The GC MS will also be used in advanced laboratory courses and by faculty at other universities in the area. Gas chromatograph with mass spectrometric detection (GC-MS) is an extremely powerful technique used for the separation and analysis of complex mixtures. This instrument will have an impact in a number of areas, in particular environmental and synthetic organic chemistry doc13543 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Maryland in College Park will acquire an X-ray photoelectron spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas: a) nanostructure reactivity and registration at solid surfaces; b) derivatization of metal and metal oxide surfaces via molecular and mesoscopic self assembly; c) chemical vapor deposition of metal oxides; d) combinatorial synthesis of functional oxides; and e) soft chemical routes to novel solid state materials. The X-ray photoelectron spectrometer (XPS) is used for chemical analysis. It irradiates a sample with a beam of monochromatic X-rays and the energies of the resulting photoelectrons are measured and related to specific elements. XPS often plays a crucial role in defining the system under study. The work to be carried out by these investigators represents a highly coherent attack on a range of issues at the forefront of materials chemistry doc13544 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, Prof. Peter C. of Spelman College will develop a state-of-the-art high speed (100 Hz) Raman-based spectroscopic detector to identify eluents from a high speed gas chromatograph (GC). The resulting instrument will be capable of rapid and accurate identification of GC eluents, able to distinguish among isomers and provide functional group information. Potential applications include a) analysis of air, water or sediment for pollutants; analysis of unknown reation products or compounds found in natural products; c) study of the degradation products of pesticides and herbicides; d) analysis of petroleum products, for example, the presence or fate of additives such as MTBE in groundwater; e) study of the presence or fate of additives or allergens in foods, flavors, feedstock and fragrances; and f) study of polymer decomposition and degassing upon heating. These studies will also provide intensive research training for undergraduate students who are members of under-represented groups. Tandem techniques that interface chromatography with spectroscopic detectors are among the most powerful tools available for analyzing mixtues. By combining two techniques, tandem instruments can overcome the limitations of a single technique, for example spectral congestion due to mixtures, or difficulty identifying unknown species using only chromatographic retention times. This high speed GC Raman instrument will advance the knowledge in high speed separation science, and find applications in many areas of science, including materials chemistry and environmental sciences doc13545 none Scherer This award, made through the Major Research Instrumentation Program, provides partial support for the acquisition of a low vacuum scanning electron microscope (LV SEM). The principal investigators include four faculty members from three different departments in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Northern Illinois University. Principal applications of the LV SEM by the PIs include: studies of glacial-sedimentary processes and polar plankton biostratigraphy and evolution entailing examination of microstructures in subglacial sediments; studies in the environmental biogeosciences, including analysis of the spatial distribution of microorganisms involved in biodegradation of organic solvents; studies of modern soils and Quaternary paleosols to examine their current and historic ability to sequester carbon; studies in plant morphology and systematics, ethnobotany, conservation biology, and botanical biocomplexity; and applications in educational programs, including research training, undergraduate coursework, and community outreach education programs. The instrument to be purchased is the JEOL LV, which can operate at either high vacuum or low vacuum, with the Noran Vantage DSI spectral imaging system X-ray analyzer (EDS). Samples for observation require virtually no pretreatment, and large samples (up to 15 cm) can be imaged without gold-coating. This is a non-destructive method, perfect for examination of unique specimens, such as holotypes or artifacts, and wet or outgassing samples can be directly analyzed doc13546 none A grant has been awarded to Ronald Stephens at Ferrum College, to purchase equipment for molecular biological techniques in order to support research which determines the sources of fecal bacteria in freshwater ecosystems by DNA fingerprinting of Escherichia coli bacteria. In the federal government passed the Clean Water Act whose mission is to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the nations waters. In Virginia, many streams are classified as being impaired because of high levels of fecal bacteria. The EPA has mandated that these problems be mediated by the implementation of the TMDL (Total Maximum Daily Load) Program. Successful water remediation cannot occur until reliable methods of identifying the source(s) of the fecal contamination can be developed. Fecal bacteria are found in the intestines of all warm-blooded animals. Therefore, potential sources of E. coli contamination could be from humans, domestic animals, wild life, or livestock. The presence of fecal bacteria indicate the possibilities of the presence of pathogenic bacteria or viruses. The purpose of this project will be to determine nonpoint (unknown) sources of fecal bacteria in the Blackwater and Pigg River watersheds in Franklin County, Virginia. The specific objectives of the project will be to: Collect fecal bacterial strains from known sources (fecal samples) and unknown sources (water samples). Determine the DNA fingerprint profile of the bacterial samples using the equipment provided. Compare DNA fingerprint profiles from known and unknown sources with existing profiles. Determine the sources of the bacteria in the unknown samples. Increase the DNA fingerprint library database. With the establishment of methodologies to determine the sources of fecal bacteria in the nations waterways, this problem can be more directly addressed and remediation more accurately designed. Otherwise, without specific knowledge of the sources of fecal pollution, expensive remediation programs such as TMDL s will be based on guesswork. The establishment of a DNA fingerprint library database will greatly increase the scientist s ability to determine the sources of fecal pollution. This database could not be established without the purchase of the molecular biology equipment doc13547 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Mary K. Montgomery at Macalester College to support on-going developmental biology research and undergraduate research training. Funds will be used to acquire a new epifluorescence microscope, deconvolution software, and a laser ablation system. The instrumentation is expected to primarily support the research program of the principal investigator, which is in the fields of developmental biology and evolution, and focuses on a comparative study of embryogenesis between the model organism C. elegans and closely related species. The research programs of other faculty in the Biology Department, particularly in the areas of neurobiology and immunology, are also expected to benefit by supporting new lines of research that require sophisticated cell imaging capabilities. Common components of all of these research programs is the involvement of undergraduate student collaborators and the utilization of immunofluorescence as a key technical approach. The use of antibodies conjugated to fluorophores allows researchers to visualize the spatial and temporal localization of specific gene products, which helps to illuminate gene function particularly when complemented with molecular genetic approaches. The requested cell imaging equipment will be used to capture fluorescence images of enhanced quality through digital confocal imaging, which can be achieved using a motorized Z-focus drive and deconvolution software. This instrumentation will support optical sectioning of live or fixed thick specimens, such as whole embryos, stained with fluorescently labeled antibodies or other cell markers; this feature will allow observations of changes in the distribution of the fluorescent label in different focal planes of the specimen. Software will be used for three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction from the series of optical sections. Multiple fluorophores will be detected using different filter sets and the software used to determine regions of colocalization. Laser ablation equipment attached to a pre-existing light microscope will be used to ablate or isolate specific cells in early embryos to determine the contribution of individual founder cells to the fully differentiated state. Three-dimensional reconstructions of wildtype, mutant, and laser-ablated embryos stained with cell-specific markers will aid these cell lineage analyses, as will 4D time lapse imaging. Although the field of developmental biology has made enormous progress in uncovering a common set of mechanisms used to pattern animal embryos, much less is known about how developmental mechanism are altered during the generation of species diversity. The research supported by this grant is expected to contribute to an understanding of how the mechanisms governing cell fate in the early embryo have evolved in a group of closely related species. Furthermore, the requested equipment will greatly enhance the quality of faculty-student collaborative research being conducted in the Biology department at Macalester College. All research programs impacted by this proposal have a common objective of providing education and research training opportunities for advanced undergraduate students. Student research training will also be enhanced through use of the instrumentation in advanced courses, such as Developmental Biology, independent projects, and senior honors theses doc13548 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Johnson C. Smith University will acquire a 90 MHz nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer and an atomic absorption spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on the fate and transport of metals in the environment. Students at this primarily undergraduate institution will be active participants in the research projects and will also use these instruments in their advanced laboratory courses. Atomic absorption (AA) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy are very powerful tools and are the mainstay of most modern analytical chemistry laboratories. NMR is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. AA spectroscopy allows for the unequivocal identification of atomic species. The results from these studies will have an impact in environmental chemistry doc13549 none Edwards This grant, made through the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, provides partial support for the purchase of a Multicollector Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer (MC-ICP-MS), associated hardware, and some technical costs associated with the instrument. The instrument will be housed in the Minnesota Isotope Laboratory at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Campus. The main focus of the laboratory as well as the new instrument will be on problems that can be solved with high-precision, high-sensitivity measurements of actinides in natural materials. The instrument will have multiple ion counting detectors, and therefore have the capability to measure more than one small ion beam simultaneously. Testing and refining of the multiple ion counting system will be a major portion of our group s effort on this proposal. The goal is a significant improvement in precision and or sensitivity in measuring rare actinide isotopes. One of the main results of such technical improvements will be increases in the precision with which uranium-series ages can be determined. This improvement should impact a wide range of fields in the natural sciences, including climate change, paleoecology, paleoceanography, igneous petrology, anthropology, and geochemistry. Among the specific areas that the new instrumentation will impact are: calibration of the carbon-14 time scale and implications for the earth s carbon cycle, factors that control rapid climate and vegetation change, factors that control the removal of particle-reactive metals in the oceans, paleo-ocean circulation, rates of late Quaternary evolution, and factors affecting the formation of silicate melts in the mantle doc13550 none This is award from the Major Instrumentation program and the NSF EPSCOR program to the University of New England is for the acquisition of a networked scanning probe microscope (SPM). The instrument will support undergraduate research and training in the fields of biophysics, biochemistry and microbiology. The SPM will provide the university with a multi-disciplinary research facility that will help to bridge the artificial divide between life sciences and the physical sciences. The SPM will support several research topics such as the study of the growth process of biofilms, the study of the structure and property relationship of metallocarbhedrenes, growth, kinetics and structure of novel four stranded G -wires, and modeling and self-assembly. Students will have networked access to the SPM. The award will provide research and training opportunity making students from this EPSCoR state more competitive in the flourishing area of biotechnology and semiconductor industry. This is award from the Major Instrumentation program and the NSF EPSCOR program to the University of New England is for the acquisition of a networked scanning probe microscope (SPM). The instrument will support undergraduate research and training in the fields of biophysics, biochemistry and microbiology. The SPM will provide the university with a multi-disciplinary research facility that will help to bridge the artificial divide between life sciences and the physical sciences. Students will have networked access to the SPM. The award will provide research and training opportunity making students from this EPSCoR state more competitive in the flourishing area of biotechnology and semiconductor industry doc13551 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Wayne Loescher and colleagues at Michigan State University to acquire controlled environment chambers for plant biological research. Such chambers are necessary for three major reasons: (1) the potential to achieve consistent, standard, or optimum environmental conditions not found in greenhouses or fields; (2) containment and sanitation to avoid contamination; and (3) the opportunities to improve experimental designs and thus the efficiency of the research. The work to be done and the methods to be used are the result of recent advances in plant genomics and proteomics, and also in plant development, biochemistry, breeding, genetics, molecular biology, and plant-environment and plant-pathogen pest interactions. Contemporary work in plant biology and particularly that in genomics often utilizes Arabidopsis thaliana as a model. Although this plant s size and short reproductive cycle make it well suited for growth in controlled-environments, it is nonetheless quite sensitive to environmental cues. Moreover, successfully using large populations for mutant selection and evaluation often depends on abundant, highly-consistent and or well-regulated environmental conditions. Beyond Arabidopsis, many Michigan State University plant researchers also utilize crop species, and attempting to grow these under defined environmental conditions can present significant challenges, e.g., high light requirements for most crops cannot be met in older growth chambers or under conventional glasshouse conditions in the winter. For molecular genetic work, and especially that with transgenic plants, containment is important, and is often required in working with such systems. Pollen and other propagules must be contained, and, conversely, unique genetic materials must be protected from foreign pollen. Avoiding contamination by pests and diseases is also essential for all plants, and this is more readily achieved in growth chambers than in glasshouses. The broader significance and scientific importance of this equipment is that modern controlled environments offer much more flexibility in manipulating temperature, light, humidity, and atmospheric composition. Computer controls and monitoring systems now allow for manipulating temperatures, light intensity and duration so as to replicate specific seasonal and daily environmental variations and combinations and monitor experimental conditions for long periods. New generation growth chamber designs minimize vertical temperature gradients, horizontal light gradients, humidity and other atmospheric differences along the borders and walls, thus maximizing the efficiency of chamber space. These factors, along with increased equipment reliability, also reduce the numbers of replicates required for experimentation. Most importantly, new generation equipment allows researchers who want specific conditions (e.g., temperature, light quality, intensity, and duration, or atmospheric manipulations such as CO2 enrichment) much improved capabilities. The new facilities will provide a multi-investigator, interdepartmental resource to support the broad spectrum of plant biology research at MSU. Progress is expected in developing new crops and new and better varieties of traditional crops, in understanding how plants function, how they respond to environmental conditions and resist environmental stresses such as temperature, drought, and salt, and how they might better resist pests and diseases doc13552 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Thomas W. Budd at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York to acquire two major instruments that will complement and expand opportunities for microscopic studies and enable the creation of an Interdisciplinary, Multi-User Microscopy-Imagery Center within the science facilities complex. The instruments to be acquired are: 1. A confocal microscope system that will bridge the resolution gap between electron microscopy and fluorescence microscopy. This instrument will allow optical sectioning and 3-D reconstructions of fluorescent images with much better resolution and a wider selection of dyes than conventional fluorescence microscopes. 2. An Energy Dispersive X-Ray Analysis (EDAX) system to be fitted onto an existing scanning electron microscope (SEM). This system allows elemental analysis and spatial elemental mapping of a wide variety of research specimens applicable to biology, chemistry, environmental studies, and geology research. Several St. Lawrence science faculty are poised to direct student projects with these instruments as part of their research programs. Dr. T. Budd (biology and PI) plans to use confocal microscopy to three-dimensionally map proteins on the surface and inside of glial-neural type cells in vitro as part of his research to characterize tissue cultured cells used to study bone formation. He will confirm the 3-D confocal results by using SEM-EDAX mapping routines. Dr. Marano (chemistry) will use confocal microscopy to detect and map the components of specialized membrane domains on the surface of T-lymphocytes. These domains have been implicated in gene regulation during immune responses. Dr. Erlichman (biology) will use confocal microscopy to three-dimensionally map sodium hydrogen exchange transport systems in the surface membranes of pH sensitive neurons that regulate breathing in mammals. Dr. Erickson (geology) will use SEM-EDAX elemental analysis and mapping to study the sequence and biogeochemistry of fossilization of clams. Several other St. Lawrence faculty are also poised to use the new instruments in their research programs, all of which involve active participation by students. This award will greatly enhance faculty and student research activity in the science departments at St. Lawrence, as well as provide instrumentation support for two new majors in biochemistry and neuroscience. As a small, private liberal arts undergraduate institution, access to state-of-the-art instrumentation is often limited. The instruments requested will enable us to better train the next generation of scientists doc13553 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, Joshua W. Hamilton and Stephen A. Bobin of Dartmouth College will acquire a Matrix-assisted Laser Desorption Ionization - Time of Flight (MALDI-TOF) Mass Spectrometer. This instrument, which will be used to obtain very accurate molecular weights of biological molecules, will be integrated into the existing Dartmough College Molecular Biology (MB) Core facility. The MALDI-TOF will be particularly important in a new initiative at Dartmough, the Structural Biology Genetics, which is an interdisciplinary, collaborative efforts among the basic science departments of the College of Arts & Sciences, the Dartmough Medical School, and the Thayer School of Engineering. The main functions of the instrument in the facility will be protein identification, peptide synthesis verification and oligonucleotide verification. Five independent investigators also cite projects ranging from the study of bipolar array of microtubules to mRNA export in yeast. The use of the instrument by under-represented groups is also addressed. Matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization (MALDI) time-of-flight (TOF) mass spectrometry is the technique of choice for obtaining accurate molecular weights on molecules up to and over 300,000 daltons, with extremely high sensitivity. Use of a MALDI-TOF mass spectrometer has therefore become a standard technique in most DNA protein core facilities. The ability to obtain very accurate molecular weights of biological molecules is fundamental to all biological and biomedical research and essential in a modern research and training environment doc10353 none Modeling and Development of Gradient Based Smart Polymer Sensors and Actuators Gregory Washington, PI Ohio State University Proposal # The goal of this study is to develop a novel gradient-based sensor for spatial measurement of distributed systems. The sensors and actuators in this study are developed from polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF). Previous studies have used spatial aperture shading techniques (spatially varying electrodes to achieve a particular performance function) to measure a myriad of distributed systems. A major limitation of the spatial aperture shading techniques was that the apertures have a heavy dependence on 1-dimensional variation for most cases. In this study spatial gradient polarization and aperture shading techniques are used to develop the next generation of sensors. In spatial polarization the material is polarized in a manner such that its piezoelectric constant is allowed to vary in controlled manner. Specifically, the objectives of this research are to: (1) Develop the analytical basis for spatial gradient polarization. Inherent in this part of the study is the development of techniques for analytically calculating weighting functions for various structural configurations. (2) Develop the experimental hardware and facilities necessary for making spatially polarized sensors and actuators. (3) Develop control techniques necessary for the production of user defined film actuators and sensors. (4) Develop a non-contact measurement technique for deflection verification. The research goals are accomplished by applying differential calculus, the principles of mechanics, and piezoelectric polymer modeling to a given sensor system. The experimental hardware that will be developed for polarizing the films consist of a corona charging system with an appropriate stretch and drive mechanism for correct placement and rastering of the film. A wide-angle stereo-photogrammetry system similar to those used in particle tracking applications will be modified to accurately measure the location of the distributed system when actuated. The sensors market is an $18 billion market and growing. These new sensors can be utilized in a host of applications including Automotive, Biomedical sensors, Aerospace Structural, and Impact sensors in Military applications, like sonar sensing equipment and so on. In addition, there is a possibility that this novel technology can be applied directly to piezoceramic actuators as well doc13555 none This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) project seeks financial support to acquire a modular, instrumented single-screw extruder with sensors and a multi-function co-injection molding machine as experimental instruments to be used at the Polymer Engineering Center (PEC), University of Wisconsin-Madison. The research proposed here responds to the call by the NSF s Directorate for Engineering, as stated in its NSF Engineering: The Long View document, for rapid development of advanced manufacturing technologies based on advanced fabrication and processing methods and advancements in the quality of education on maintaining a preeminent engineering work force. The acquisition and development of these state-of-the-art, instrumented machines will improve the quality and expand the scope of current research, research training, and integrated research and education activities related to polymer processing at the PEC. Specifically, these instrumented machines will expedite the research progress in improving existing and developing new polymer processing methods; it will also enhance the learning environment that serves nearly 250 student attendances in various polymer processing courses and lab sessions each semester at UW-Madison doc13556 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Bowdoin College will acquire a Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance (FT-ICR) mass spectrometer equipped with external matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization (MALDI) and electron ionization (EI) sources. Faculty at Bowdoin College, Bates College and the University of Southern Maine will have access to this equipment, which will enhance research in a number of areas including a) studies of gas-phase ion-molecule reactions; b) identification of biological, polymeric, and organometallic synthetic targets; and c) characterization of samples that include neurons from marine invertebrates, plant pigment extracts, soil samples, and oil residues from archaeological collections. Mass spectrometry (MS) is a technique used to probe intimate structural details and to obtain the molecular compositions of a vast array of organic, bioorganic, and organometallic molecules. This instrument will serve as a vehicle to educate students and faculty about the new technologies of MALDI and FT-ICR mass spectrometry. In addition, because this instrumental technique is well suited for the analysis of a wide range of samples, the FT-ICR will catalyze new approaches to research and new research activities in disciplines such as neuroscience, ecology, biology, environmental studies and archaeology doc13557 none Hrncir This grant, made through the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, will provide funds for the purchase of an ICP-OES spectrometer for Mesa State College. Mesa State is a predominately undergraduate institution with a growing emphasis on undergraduate research and educational outreach. The instrument will be used by the geology and environmental science programs, which are experiencing significant growth. The faculty in these programs have a number of funded research projects involving undergraduate students. Specific projects that would utilize the ICP-OES include a study of manganese biogeochemistry in streams impacted by acid mine drainage, analyses of dissolved metals in soil pore waters to elucidate factors affecting soil mineral weathering in the high desert ecosystem of western Colorado, studies of non-point source pollution to the Colorado River, and a study of the sources and fate of Selenium in shallow groundwaters of the Grand Valley of western Colorado. Acquisition of this instrument will provide support for this research. The ICP will complement other major instrumentation at Mesa State and will fill a need for modern atomic spectroscopy. Mesa State College provides higher education for a large portion of western Colorado and eastern Utah. Educational outreach programs to K-12 teachers and students are becoming increasingly important. There are a number of collaborative programs underway and more are planned. The ICP spectrometer will be used to provide access to modern atomic spectroscopy to the participants in these outreach collaborations doc13558 none This MRI Proposal involves the procurement of an Ultra-High Resolution Electron Beam (E-Beam) Nanolithography and Metrology System for research and education programs at Lehigh University. The E-Beam system offers a unique capability to university, industry and government researchers to fabricate novel device structures and to characterize the nanometric features of materials. This E-B earn system will provide an opportunity for researchers to realize nanolithographic features for the fabrication of mesoscopic and quantum devices, such as quantum-dot nonvolatile semiconductor memories, single electron transistors, biosensors, and nanoscopic-instrumented, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). In addition, the E-Beam system will provide exceptional educational instruction into nanotechnology. The fabrication of devices requires the integration of processes where literally several hundred operations are needed to realize a final device structure. In order to accomplish this seamless integration of processes an E-Beam Nanolithograpy and Metrology System must be located literally within the same physical infrastructure. For example, the close coupling of nanoelectronics devices and MEMS with the preparation of biological samples is essential to accomplish tasks such as cell characterization and electronic sequencing of DNA. Finally, the E-Beam system will serve the surrounding community within the Lehigh Valley particularly the local colleges and K-12 students to excite students into the emerging world of nanotechnology doc13559 none PI s name: Weidong Zhu Institution: University of Maryland, Baltimore County Proposal number: Proposal title: Analysis and Control of Time-Dependent Translating Media for High Speed, High Precision Mechanical Systems Project abstract: Translating media model such high-speed slender members as magnetic tapes, conveyer belts, transmission chains, and transport cables. While much is known about the dynamics of translating media with constant length and transport speed, the dynamic behavior of translating media with variable length and or transport speed is not well understood. This proposal addresses new analytical and experimental techniques to analyze and control the vibration of translating media with variable length and or transport speed. A unified method that differs from classical parametric excitation approach will be employed to analyze the stability of both systems. Analytical and computational methods will be developed to predict their free and forced responses. Active and parametric control methodologies will be explored to dissipate their energies of vibration. In conjunction with the experimental investigation, a novel scaled model will be developed for a high-rise, high-speed elevator. Experiments will be conducted on the model to validate the theoretical predictions. In collaboration with Otis Elevator Company, the methodologies developed for translating media with variable length will be applied to the design of high-rise elevators. The developments for translating media with variable speed will be applied to wiresaw manufacturing processes and magnetic tape drive systems. The success of this research will enhance our fundamental understanding in the general field of dynamic systems, as well as meet the immediate goal of enabling higher operating speeds in a variety of technological systems featuring translating media doc13560 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation program Youngstown State University will acquire a powder X-ray Diffractometer system to support the research needs of faculty, master s level students, and undergraduate students at the institution. The instrument will also support research and training of faculty and students at other colleges that are part a consortium of users affiliated with single crystal X-ray facility at Youngstown State University. The X-ray Diffractometer will provide data of sufficiently high quality to enable structure determinations of powder samples, which is not possible with multi-wire detector currently used for powder analysis. The instrument will be available on hands-on basis to students in upper level laboratory courses and thus will positively education and training at the institutions. With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation program Youngstown State University will acquire a powder X-ray Diffractometer system to support the research needs of faculty, master s level students, and undergraduate students at the institution. The instrument will also support research and training of faculty and students at other colleges that are part a consortium of users affiliated with single crystal X-ray facility at Youngstown State University. The X-ray Diffractometer will provide data of sufficiently high quality to enable structure determinations of powder samples, which is not possible with multi-wire detector currently used for powder analysis. The instrument will be available on hands-on basis to students in upper level laboratory courses and thus will positively education and training at the institutions doc13561 none The new 400-MHz solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer supported by this Major Research Instrumentation award will enable an interdisciplinary team of researchers at Iowa State University to characterize complex polymeric materials in unprecedented detail. Multidimensional NMR in particular will be applied to provide detailed and quantitative information on the chemical structure, conformations, inter segmental distances, and reorientations of molecules in disordered macromolecular solids. The insights obtained will be the basis for the rational design of improved materials and for controlling the interactions of macromolecular organic substances in the natural environment with contaminants and nutrients. Specifically, the new NMR instrument will enable the investigators to perform research on: 1) chain conformation, packing, and dynamics in amorphous synthetic polymers, and their effects on macroscopic materials properties, including physical aging; 2) the configuration and sequence distribution of polymers containing new polar, functionalized dienes; 3) nanometer-scale structures in technologically important heterogeneous polymer systems; 4) structure and dynamics in nano-composites of polymers with novel inorganic glasses of low glass-transition temperature; 5) the structure and improved properties of plastics from renewable resources; 6) the structure of soil organic matter, its formation, and its influence on the sorption of organic and inorganic contaminants; 7) mechanisms of carbon sequestration in soil, which can reduce atmospheric greenhouse gases ; 8) the development of advanced, often multidimensional NMR pulse sequences to provide an arsenal for NMR analysis of organic solids with at least three-fold increased structural resolution. The diversity of the faculty collaborating in the use of this instrument will provide an excellent environment for students of chemistry, materials science, agronomy, and food science to learn and perform research in a stimulating interdisciplinary atmosphere. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program to Iowa State University supports the acquisition of a 400 MHz Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) instrument. NMR is one of most powerful methods for analyzing complex organic materials. It uses the magnetic properties of the nuclei of many atoms. These nuclear magnets act as local spies reporting on their molecular environment, and they do so in response to radio-frequency pulses. These pulses can be designed to tease out specific information about the chemical structure, about nanometer-scale domains, or about motions of segments in the material under investigation. The new NMR instrument will help researchers to develop materials with tailored properties, such as less brittle biodegradable plastics, better membranes for use in fuel cells, strong plastics from renewable resources, improved adhesives, or lightweight materials providing increased fuel efficiency in vehicles. It will also enhance our understanding of how soil organic matter and fossil fuels are formed, and aid in the development of improved procedures for environmental clean-up and for the sequestration of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The diversity of the faculty collaborating in the use of this instrument will provide an excellent environment for students of chemistry, materials science, agronomy, and food science to learn and perform research in a stimulating interdisciplinary atmosphere doc13562 none MEMS gyroscopes are typically designed to measure angular rate of rotation. A measurement of the angle itself is useful in many applications but cannot be obtained by integrating the angular rate due to the presence of bias errors which cause a drift. This project develops an innovative design for a vibrating gyroscope that can directly measure both angle and angular rate. The proposed design is based on the principle of measuring the angle of free vibration of a suspended mass with respect to the casing of the gyroscope. The design incorporates a nonlinear feedback control system in order to address two critical challenges. First, the control system compensates for dissipative forces and keeps the mass vibrating at a constant level of energy. Second, the control system compensates for the rotary cross-coupling that occurs due to the non-ideal nature of the suspending springs. The control system is carefully designed so that it does not affect the free vibration nature of the mass and does not alter the Coriolis forces which play an important role in the measurement of angular rate. The project includes a three-phase work plan for design and in-house fabrication of the vibratory gyroscope in the University of Minnesota s Microtechnology Laboratory (MTL). The significance of the project is that it breaks new ground by introducing sophisticated control systems into the MEMS domain. The use of advanced control techniques leads to a new sensor making the measurement of a new variable (absolute angle) possible. On a lesser note, several techniques developed in the project have wide applicability to vibratory sensor design in general and would lead to technical improvements in accelerometers, rate gyroscopes and microbalances. The educational objectives of the project include curriculum development, promotion of cross-disciplinary skills, and development of benchmark models for web-based education doc13563 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, a consortium of universities in the northeastern United States will acquire a suite of high-end computers. Faculty members from Hamilton, Colgate, Vassar, Holy Cross, St. Lawrence, Connecticut, and Hobart and William Smith Colleges will share the equipment to carry out research in environmental sciences, biochemistry, materials chemistry, and bioinorganic chemistry. The consortium will purchse two workstations for each institution and a 32 processor supercomputer will be located at Hamilton College. This equipment will enable new teaching laboratories in the physical chemistry courses at these institutions and will provide hands-on training for student researchers at these primarily undergraduate institutions. A cluster of fast, modern computer workstations is vital to serving the computing needs of active research departments. Such a computer network also serves as a development environment for new theoretical codes and algorithms, provides cutting-edge graphics and visualization facilities, and supports research in state-of-the-art applications of parallel processing. These studies will have a significant impact in a number of areas, including biochemistry and materials sciences doc13564 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Brown University will acquire a high resolution magnetic sector mass spectrometer. This equipment will be used to analyze a broad range of chemical and biochemical samples that include compounds resulting from organic synthesis, enzyme inhibitors, high-molecular weight hydrocarbons, neurochemicals, carbohydrates, peptides and organometallics, as well as organic chemicals from lake sediments. Mass spectrometry (MS) is a technique used to probe intimate structural details and to obtain the molecular compositions of a vast array of organic, bioorganic, and organometallic molecules. The results from these studies will have an impact in a number of areas including environmental chemistry and biochemistry doc13565 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Paul Sotherland at Kalamazoo College to purchase a Columbus Instruments Micro-Oxymax Multiple Sensor O2 CO2 20 Chamber System and three Precision Low-temperature Incubators. The Columbus Micro-Oxymax system is the best multiple-chamber system available for sequentially measuring metabolic rates (i.e. rates of oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production) of a wide variety of small organisms, maintained at various gas concentrations , via closed-system respirometry. The Precision incubators are dependable, standard-refrigerator sized, incubators that typically are used to maintain small organisms at a constant temperature (set point + 0.5 degree C). The equipment will be used to attain the following two goals: (1) to investigate the metabolic responses of turtle embryos to hypoxia at different stages of development and, thereby, (a) elucidate general patterns of physiological response to hypoxia by three turtle species that typically experience different degrees of hypoxia in the nest during incubation, and (b) determine whether hatchery nests of leatherback turtles, one of the three species studied, would produce relatively more hatchlings if they were ventilated with humidified air toward the end of incubation; and (2) to train undergraduate students in the use of the purchased equipment while carrying out the proposed research and other research projects that involve the measurement of metabolism. The PI and undergraduate student collaborators will incubate eggs of snapping turtles (Chelydra serpentina), olive ridley turtles (Lepidochelys olivacea), and leatherback turtles (Dermochelys coriacea) (half-buried in sand in plastic boxes ventilated with air or gas maintained at levels of nest normoxia and held in two of the incubators) and assess their responses to different levels of acute hypoxia by measuring their metabolic rates (while holding them in small chambers at the incubation temperature in the third incubator). Egg and hatchling size, along with blood parameters (hematocrit and hemoglobin concentration) of hatchlings, will also be measured. This research will expand our understanding of the developmental physiology of oviparous amniotes while enriching the education of many undergraduate students. Because an embyro s environment and its genome both affect developmental trajectories followed by the embryo and phenotype of the hatchling, research on the effects of hypoxia on embryonic development will provide new insights into the ecological and evolutionary consequences of hatchling phenotypes. Experiments required to complete this research will be performed through a collaboration between the PI and Kalamazoo College undergraduate students working in the lab to measure metabolism and in the field to collect eggs at Playa Grande, Costa Rica, and at Kalamazoo College s Lillian Anderson Arboretum. These projects, and others using the equipment, will therefore have positive impacts on the life-long learning of many students doc13566 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Puerto Rico in Humacao will acquire a 300 MHz nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) structural characterization of organometallic intermediates; b) enzyme mechanisms in organic solutions; c) solution-state dynamics for semiquinones in phospholipid membranes; d) kinetics of photochemical degradation of membranes by radical peroxidation; e) structure-function relationships of molecules of biological or pharmaceutical interest; and f) polymer structure. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including biochemistry doc13567 none MRI: Controlled Vacuum Growth of Hybrid Organic Inorganic Structures and Devices Vladimir Bulovic Massachusetts Institute of Technology $239,301 This award supports development of a versatile materials-growth system for controlled deposition of organic, inorganic, and hybrid multilayer structures. It appears that this will be the first system ever built capable of solvent-free, vacuum deposition of thin films of inorganic nanocrystals (such as CdSe and CdTe nanodots) that will also accommodate solvent-free deposition and co-deposition of polymers, colloids, and molecular organic materials. The completed growth system will integrate a novel method for physical and vapor phase deposition of hybrid organic inorganic thin-films with a low-pressure RF DC sputtering chamber and an evaporative growth chamber. The completed vacuum system will be capable of depositing molecular organics, polymers, metals, metal oxides, inorganic nanodots, and colloids in a controlled layer-by-layer fashion. An in-situ shadow masking system will enable fabrication of complex patterned structures inside a vacuum environment, while the integrated N2-filled, dry glove box will facilitate handling, measuring, and packaging of organic thin film samples that are susceptible to reactions with atmospheric oxygen and water vapor. Completed samples will be tested in-situ in the analysis chamber by contacting them with an electrical probe attached to an X-Y-Z manipulator. Optical ports on the chamber allow for a telescopic view of the devices and facilitate optical excitation of probed samples. The integrated AFM STM chamber will facilitate in-situ atomic scale microscopy necessary for evaluating properties of hybrid materials. The research goal in this program is to integrate physical and functional properties of inorganic nanodots into active optoelectronic devices. The resulting nano-scale hybrid organic inorganic-materials structures are expected to have unique properties and to exceed functional capability of purely organic solids, enabling the development of devices such as photodetectors, LEDs, lasers, modulators, and waveguides with superior properties compared to the present state of the art. Development of active hybrid organic inorganic optoelectronics will lead to investigations of physical processes in hybrid materials such as exciton energy transfer, photogeneration, and charged-carrier transport. These fundamental studies will have a direct impact on practical applications of hybrid solids in optoelectronic devices, influencing development of hybrid thin films, heterojunctions, multilayers, quantum wells, and nano-patterned organic inorganic materials for a new generation of high-technology devices doc13568 none Speitel This is a proposal to acquire several instruments to upgrade analytical facilities for environmental engineering research and education. The research is in the areas of separations, biological transformations, and chemical transformations. This research requires a diverse array of analytical measurements ranging from basic analysis of contaminants of regulatory concern to detailed analysis of particle characteristics, chemical intermediates, and microbial activity. The research is focussed on developing new and more efficient processes for in situ and ex situ treatment of water, soil, and air pollution. Five advanced instruments, field flow fractionation, an FTIR-Raman spectrophotometer, a zeta potential analyzer, a thermogravimetric analysis system, and capillary electrophoresis would be used in the area of surface chemistry research doc13569 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Jan Robert Factor at Purchase College, State University of New York, to acquire a digital transmission electron microscope (TEM) and related equipment for digital image processing and microscopical image analysis. Specifically, a TEM will be acquired; an image analysis system will be upgraded; as well as an ultramicrotome and diamond knife for preparing biological samples for TEM. The TEM and related instruments will be used to carry out several research projects and research training in an undergraduate college environment. This equipment will enable research projects in the areas of cellular immune defenses in the lobster (Homarus americanus); digestive tissues of the lobster (Homarus americanus); characterization of the cell surface of Renibacterium salmoninarum; uptake and growth of Renibacterium salmoninarum in trout macrophage; cellular events induced by fatty acids. The following research projects will be carried out. 1. Cellular Immune Defenses in the Lobster, Homarus americanus, Jan Robert Factor. Removal of foreign particles from the blood of the lobster by a large population of fixed phagocytes will be studied using fluorescence light microscopy and analysis of digital images, to determine if adverse environmental conditions and anthropogenic toxins cause disease and mass mortalities. TEM will be used to elucidate the unusual mechanism of phagocytic uptake by the fixed phagocytes. 2. Digestive Tissues of the Lobster, Homarus americanus, Jan Robert Factor. Understanding of digestive processes in this ecologically and economically important species has been reliant upon electron-microscopical observations, and further progress in understanding digestive tissues absolutely requires the use of transmission electron microscopy. Studies will examine cells and tissues of the tegumental glands, complex basement membranes, connective-tissue fibers, and tissue organization. 3. Characterization of the Cell Surface of Renibacterium salmoninarum: Fimbriae and p57 Surface Proteins, James G. Daly. R. salmoninarum is a unique intracellular pathogen that causes bacterial kidney disease in salmonid fishes. Its major cell surface antigen (p57) may be important to pathogenesis. p57 and surface fimbriae may be the same, however, p57 antibody fails to attach to the fimbriae. Transmission electron microscopy will be used to examine the cell surface to determine whether p57 is indeed a fimbria or whether they are distinctive proteins. 4. Uptake and Growth of Renibacterium salmoninarum in Trout Macrophage, James G. Daly. This project will use both in vitro and in vivo infected macrophages to follow the infection and survival of R. salmoninarum within trout macrophage. 5. Ultrastructural Localization of Cellular Events Induced by Fatty Acids, Joanne Kivela Tillotson. Biochemical pathways of growth factor and eicosanoid signaling will be localized by TEM in order to define the influence of specific dietary fatty acid administration upon cell proliferation, and the effects of the fatty acids on programmed cell death. Combined with cell culture and biochemical studies, this will further our understanding of the role of exogenous factors in cell proliferation. This equipment will significantly enhance the research capabilities at Purchase College and enable faculty research that is not now possible, with an important impact on the research of more than half of the Biology faculty. The research includes several areas of practical scientific significance: disease defenses and processes in two commercially important groups of animals (the American lobster and salmonid fishes), and the influence of dietary fatty acids on cell proliferation and programmed cell death. Undergraduate students will be trained in the required techniques in two courses, providing the tools needed to participate in the faculty research projects. The requested equipment will also be used to encourage students to pursue science careers through a variety of local school programs doc13416 none With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Patricia Whitten and Trudy Turner will investigate the role of life history in divergence of populations of vervet monkeys in Kenya. This collaborative research combines data and expertise from genetics, endocrinology, morphology, demography and behavior. Life history analyses link the events and processes of an individual s life to demographic and evolutionary events at the population and species level. The timing of growth, maturation and aging have important consequences for behavior, demography and the genetic structure of populations. This research will investigate these effects using a unique data set combining genetic, morphometric and socioecological information in four ecologically distinct populations of vervet monkeys. Genetic relatedness will be assessed with 8-10 polymorphic microsatellite loci. Allele frequencies will be used to determine migration rates and differentiation among groups and populations. Paternity and maternity will be ascertained by examining allele sharing between individuals. Serum concentrations of adrenal and gonadal steroids will be assessed by radioimmunoassay. Endocrine data will be combined with morphological data to assess population differences in maturation and aging. These analyses will be used to address several questions: 1. Do males migrate to troops where they have brothers? 2. Are stress hormones higher when living in groups with more competitors and lower genetic relatedness? 3. Do stress levels in males and females and paternity in males affect behavior toward offspring? 4. Do increases in adult body size in a population result from delayed maturation and prolonged growth in males and females living in that population? 5. Do individuals in populations with richer resources mature and age more rapidly? This research is important for several reasons. The data set provides an opportunity to gain an in-depth portrait of a group of organisms that is rarely obtained in animal studies, because of both the number of animals sampled and the range of biological systems examined. These data provide a link between population level phenomena and individual physiology that will provide new insights into social behavior and life history. Within species variation in life history is poorly documented. A better understanding of the balance between facultative and evolutionary adaptations to local conditions within species can enhance our understanding of the evolution of life history differences across species doc13571 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Whittemore at Keene State College to improve the ability to detect the presence, as well as to predict the effects, of pollutants on aquatic environments for the effective management of our valuable water resources. Daphnia magna, a freshwater crustacean species, has long been used an indicator of freshwater quality. It has been well-demonstrated that these invertebrates are highly sensitive to a wide variety of aquatic contaminants. The bulk of the toxicological studies using bioassays based on Daphnia rely on measurements of the effects of contaminant exposure on survival, growth, and reproduction. The results of such studies are often difficult to detect and quantify and are not reliably reproduceable. There is a need for bioindicators of water quality that can be easily and rapidly measured and that demonstrate sensitivity to sublethal toxicant exposures. The long-term objective of our research is to further the effectiveness of this valuable bioindicator species through the identification and quantification of genes that are expressed upon exposure to specific contaminants. The grant will be used to acquire a real-time PCR system and a differential display system to further our investigations concerning the molecular physiology of stress in Daphnia magna. The differential display system will greatly enhance the efficiency with which we are able to identify genes that are expressed in Daphnia following sublethal exposure to specific aquatic contaminants. The expression of these genes will then be quantified using real-time PCR methodology with the objective of developing these genes as sensitive molecular markers of contaminant exposure. The PI, Susan Whittemore, a physiologist, and the co-PI, Scott Strong, a molecular biologist, are faculty members at a small public liberal arts college, Keene State College. The requested equipment will greatly enhance the collaborative integrated research education efforts of these two faculty members. The project provides KSC undergraduates state-of-the-art training opportunities in the field of molecular biology. Engaging in faculty-mentored research enhances the desire and ability of our undergraduates, many of whom are from underprivileged backgrounds and or are women, to pursue post-graduate training in biology doc13572 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Gamlin at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) to acquire a state-of-the-art vertical, 4.7 Tesla, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) device designed especially for use with alert, trained non-human primates. MRI, especially functional MRI, is an exciting new tool that is revolutionizing our ability to study the brain. However, this technology has limitations when applied solely to humans. A major limitation is that once a brain region is identified by fMRI as being functionally activated during a specific task, additional invasive, experimental options are limited. However, by using non-human primates, further studies are not limited to imaging alone. One can conduct electrophysiological studies using single- and multi-unit recording, and neuroanatomical and pharmacological inactivation techniques to significantly enhance the level of understanding of brain function. Therefore, this 4.7T MRI system will be used in a primate Neuroimaging Facility which, when combined with existing neurophysiological techniques, will be able to examine brain function at both microscopic and macroscopic scales and with temporal resolutions of milliseconds - experiments that are not currently feasible in humans. In addition, using this combination of techniques, new pulse sequences will be developed and validated to ensure that fMRI images more accurately reflect the spatial and temporal characteristics of the underlying neural activity. UAB has assembled a group of internationally-recognized neuroscientists with expertise in studying the underlying mechanisms of visual, sensorimotor, and oculomotor processing in alert, behaving primates. The primate visual system is the most extensively studied primate sensory system and the oculomotor system is the best understood primate motor system. Thus, these UAB investigators are in a unique position to fully exploit fMRI techniques to better understand the behavior of these model neural systems and, in so doing, contribute to a deeper understanding of brain function in general. The planned research projects will include the investigation of neural mechanisms related to vision, eye movements, plasticity, and sensorimotor integration in occipital, parietal, temporal, and frontal cortex. Other projects will involve the development of better functional and spectroscopic MRI techniques. The planned Neuroimaging Facility, which will be one of only a few facilities in the world in which research spanning single neurons to whole brain behavior can be conducted in the same research animal, will be developed into a regional national resource for research in Neuroscience. This planned facility thus has the potential to make major contributions to the field of functional brain research. The planned Neuroimaging Facility will have a major impact on recruitment and training of students in this emerging research area. Specifically, to ensure that the next generation of scientists will exploit this resource fully and develop MRI techniques further, participating faculty will ensure that students are trained in-depth in both neuroscience and MRI imaging. Further, UAB s Comprehensive Minority Faculty and Student Development Program, the NSF-funded Alliance for Minority Participation, and the Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate Program, will ensure that a significant proportion of these students are from under-represented groups doc13573 none The University of Michigan-Dearborn is a non-PhD granting institution. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program will allow the University of Michigan-Dearborn to acquire a variable pressure scanning electron microscope (VP-SEM) and with a energy dispersive x-ray (EDX) to support ongoing research and education in engineering and science. The long-term objective of the college is to establish a world-class manufacturing education base. Significant amounts of experimental data are being generated in currently existing centers at the University. However researchers are seriously limited in their ability to examine the microscopic phenomena dictating physical behavior. A scanning electron microscope with an energy dispersive x-ray analytic tool will help overcoming some of the most troublesome bottlenecks in understanding the microscopic phenomena and their impact on physical behavior. This new equipment will benefit a broad range of research involving polymers, metals, composites, electronic materials, geological sciences as well as biology. The university has committed in matching funds to make this facility. A user-fee system will be set up to cover expenses for expendable supplies and maintenance. This equipment will be located within the engineering laboratory building of the University of Michigan-Dearborn. The instrument will be integrated into several courses for education and training of students. Local industry will indirectly benefit. The University of Michigan-Dearborn is a non-PhD granting institution. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program will allow the University of Michigan-Dearborn to acquire a variable pressure scanning electron microscope (VP-SEM) and with a energy dispersive x-ray (EDX) to support ongoing research and education in engineering and science. The long-term objective of the college is to establish a world-class manufacturing education base. Significant amounts of experimental data are being generated in currently existing centers at the University. However researchers are seriously limited in their ability to examine the microscopic phenomena dictating physical behavior. A scanning electron microscope with an energy dispersive x-ray analytic tool will help overcoming some of the most troublesome bottlenecks in understanding the microscopic phenomena and their impact on physical behavior. This new equipment will benefit a broad range of research involving polymers, metals, composites, electronic materials, geological sciences as well as biology. The university has committed in matching funds to make this facility. A user-fee system will be set up to cover expenses for expendable supplies and maintenance. This equipment will be located within the engineering laboratory building of the University of Michigan-Dearborn. The instrument will be integrated into several courses for education and training of students. Local industry will indirectly benefit doc13574 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Lee and Underwood at California State University Long Beach to acquire an imaging system comprised of a fluorescence -capable microscope with motorized stage, CCD camera, computer, and software. This system will provide unbiased stereology capabilities, as well as the ability to 1) visualize immunofluorescent labeled samples; 2) produce 3-dimensional (3-D) reconstructions; and 3) establish image databases accessible via the internet. The goal of Dr. Lee s research is to understand the effects of memory formation and hormones on neurogenesis in the zebra finch hippocampus. The hippocampus of adult birds and mammals retains the capacity for substantial plasticity including the birth of new cells (cytogenesis) and neurons (neurogenesis) in response to a number of environmental influences including learning and memory formation. Dr. Lee recently found that hippocampal cells are also born as a result of injury and collect around the damaged site in the zebra finch brain. Injured brain areas become rich in aromatase as well, an enzyme that converts testosterone to estrogen. Estrogens, in turn, are known to promote differentiation and survival of neurons. These intriguing results are being used to investigate factors influencing cytogenesis and differentiation of new cells into neurons and glia. The aim then is to exploit the ability of the avian hippocampus to respond to environmental influences by training birds on learning tasks, lesioning the hippocampus, injecting them with BrdU (a mitotic marker), and assessing the patterns of cell proliferation, migration, and or differentiation through the use of immunohistochemical techniques. New BrdU-positive cells will be visualized and counted using the MicroBrightField StereoInvestigator imaging system; double labeling procedures will be used to determine whether new cells are neurons or glia. The goal of Dr. Underwood s research is to understand the relationship between chromosomal abnormalities, a biased sex ratio, and the evolution of excess males in the madrone butterfly. Dr. Underwood s research led to the discovery of abnormalities in chromosome pairing during germ cell formation in the madrone butterfly. One subspecies shows a normal complement of 26 bivalents; however, another subspecies shows extreme variations from cell to cell within the same individual. The primary sex ratio of the abnormal subspecies is 75% male while the normal subspecies appears to have a normal sex ratio of 50% males. Butterflies have chromosomal sex determination. Spermatogenesis is extremely abnormal with multivalent chromosomal associations and lagging chromosomes formed during metaphase and anaphase, and the production of micronuclei associated with sperm nuclei. NSF funding will also make it possible to digitize samples obtained from a variety of research projects. This will result in public databases to be used by interested scientists with access to the internet and thus offers an unparalleled opportunity to share information both locally and globally. Individuals from multiple labs will perform procedures remotely thus broadening the scope of research and increasing the opportunity for publication and dissemination of results, while minimizing labor and the number of animals. Beyond the immediate research applications, instructors and their students will be empowered through accessibility to data previously reserved for only a select few. Image databases, accessed as classroom exercises, will expose students to topical and exciting new research as well as train them in the use of 21st century technology thus advancing science and giving them a competitive edge doc13575 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Sacred Heart University will acquire a two-channel, pulsed-field gradient 400 MHz nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out a numbers of studies including a) the conformation, orientation and location of biologically active lipoidal amphiphilic compounds in liposomal membranes; b) protein-RNA interactions; c) structure elucidation of natural products; d) synthesis of self-assembling multi-metallic systems; e) synthesis of potential anti-hypoxia agents; and f) microwave applications in organic synthesis. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including biochemistry doc13576 none Pollock This Major Research Instrumentation grant provides funding for the acquisition of a high-performance X-ray diffraction (XRD) system and supporting computer and software. The XRD will support research projects in geology, soil science and archaeology. Primary use of the XRD will be to determine qualitative, semi-quantitative and quantitative mineralogical compositions of very fine-grained rocks, glacio - marine and glacio - lacustrine clay, mangrove swamp clay, urban soils, and pottery. Individual research and research collaborations (between the departments of Geosciences, Environmental Science & Policy and Geography & Anthropology) range from advanced research in fine-grained rocks, urban soils and archaeological artifacts to research training issues for individuals working with disabled students. Archaeological geology research characterizes archaeological stone artifacts, pottery and ceramics. Additionally this instrument will support research on very fine-grained consolidated and unconsolidated archaeological source materials. The multidisciplinary research efforts that this instrument supports are fully in line with long-term infrastructure objectives at the University of Southern Maine. MRI funding greatly enhances the research and education environment in that it broadens and deepens the research and teaching potential of three undergraduate departments. The total incorporation of the proposed scientific research with undergraduate education will greatly increase the scientific literacy of our students. University of Southern Maine undergraduates will be active participants in research that is conducted with this equipment. Students involved with this instrument will actively collaborate with faculty through in-depth involvement in data collection and interpretation. Women and other under-represented groups choosing to take courses offered by these departments will have the opportunity to gain experience and competence in working with advanced technological equipment as a normal part of their education. Instructuction will emphasize direct, hands-on experience in field and laboratory research doc13577 none de Wet This grant, made through the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, provides partial support for costs of acquiring a Thermal Jarrell Ash IRIS Advantage Inductively Coupled Argon Plasma Spectrometer (ICAP) with Extended Wavelength Range Dual Plasma. This equipment includes settings for both a vertically oriented (radial plasma) torch and a horizontally oriented (axial) torch. Such a dual system is a significant improvement over earlier types of ICP spectrometers that contained a fixed, radial plasma torch orientation because low wavelengths can be measured more accurately using the axial orientation. Long wavelength analysis is optimized using the vertically oriented torch configuration. This instrumentation provides maximum flexibility for an undergraduate institution servicing diverse research and teaching needs. This increased flexibility increases our user base and ensures maximum access to the equipment. Funds are also allocated for microdrilling equipment, specifically a New Wave Research Micromachining System with a high speed precision drill. The microdrilling system enhances small scale sampling by combining speed and precision relative to hand-held devices that are prone to user error. Both the ICAP and micromachining system work in conjunction to produce data more accurately, more precisely, at a faster rate, in a more user-friendly manner. This is important in undergraduate research where students have less time to devote to their research, but where solid research methodologies and techniques are first learned. Instrumentation that facilitates the learning process, with fewer frustrations and set-backs, is important in retaining students in science and encouraging them to continue with graduate research. Specific research areas that will benefit from the new instrumentation include: diagenesis of Cambrian microbial carbonates; trace element geochemistry of Devonian reefal carbonates from the Canning Basin, Australia; trace element distribution in igneous feldspar growth zoning; minor element chemistry of watershed and wetland sites (soil and water); and interdisciplinary studies in Archeology (local artifacts and chert provenance), and Art History (paint fleck analysis doc13578 none Jansma The ongoing eruption of the Soufriere Hills Volcano (SHV) on Montserrat provides an unprecedented opportunity to investigate complex magmatic processes at an andesitic volcano. Growth of the lava dome has been unsteady and accompanied by cyclic patterns of ground deformation, seismicity, and explosive eruptions. The cycles include a short-term scale (6-18 hour), a meso-term scale (~7 weeks), and a long-term scale (~30 y). They provide insights into eruption dynamics at andesite volcanoes, with the short-term cycles suggesting that degassing, rheological stiffening of the magma, and pressurization in the upper conduits are coupled and control many of the geophysical and dynamical phenomena observed. The meso- and long- term cycles may reflect deep-seated processes involving the magma reservoir. This project will investigate the dynamics of the full system using an integrated array of specialized instruments in four strategically located 200-m boreholes, and several shallower holes, surrounding SHV. The system is active and dynamic and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Analysis of the continuous perishable data provided by these instruments should provide important new insights and specific constraints to theoretical models, involving the dynamic behavior of the andesite magmatic system. This is a collaborative project involving P.I.s from Penn State University, Carnegie Institution of Washinton, University of Arkansas, in collaboration with Montserrat Volcano Obervatory (MVO) and scientists from Bristol and Leeds Universities in the UK. The UK investigators have been funded to share drilling costs and to support UK scientific analyses. The expertise, facilities, and database of MVO also provide cost-share contributions doc13579 none PI: McKinley The PI and three colleagues in the Mechanical Engineering Department at MIT request funding to purchase imaging instrumentation for the renovation of the Hatsopoulos Microfluids Laboratory. The instrumentation is to be used by the four faculty members who are associated with this laboratory (a) for the development and application of diagonostic techniques permitting noninvasive study of fundamental scientific fluid phenomena at microscale, and (b) to develop and optimize applications based on understanding of such phenomena doc13580 none Andersen This award made through the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, provides support for the acquisition of a suite of instruments to be used in biogeochemical research on surface waters from anthropogenically impacted and pristine rivers in the Piedmont of the southeastern U.S. Researchers and students at Furman University in Greenville, SC in addition to students and faculty from other liberal arts institutions that are a part of the Associated Colleges of the South, will have access to the following: an autoanalyzer for measurement of nutrient concentrations (i.e. NO3-, PO43-); a coulometer system for the determination of the organic carbon load in natural waters; and a fluorometer for the measurement of chlorophyll a. This instrumentation will complement existing analytical instruments at Furman and will advance teaching and training of undergraduate students in the southeastern U.S. with modern analytical methods in aqueous geochemistry doc13581 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Richmond will acquire a high field (500 MHz) nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer for undergraduate research. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) characterization of relatively small molecules prepared in organic, inorganic, and organometallic synthetic studies; and b) structure elucidation of small- to medium-sized biomolecules in biochemical studies. The NMR will also be used on a limited basis in upper level laboratory courses. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including biochemistry and synthethic chemistry doc13582 none Displacements on the Surface of Composite Materials with High Strain Gradients : The research equipment being acquired through this grant includes non-contact strain measuring apparatus that will provide all components of strain on complex geometric surfaces in the presence of high strain gradients. A Moire interferometer and video image correlation strain and displacement measuring systems will be acquired. The Moire interferometer provides high-resolution strain and displacements over a relatively small area and the video image correlation system provides medium-resolution strains and displacements over a relatively large area. These features make the two systems complementary. Also included in this grant is the renovation of a 20kip screw-driven electro-mechanical load frame. The renovation will include a rehabilitation of the load frame, upgrading of the electronics, integration of MTS TestStar control software, and a dedicated computer to run the load frame and collect data. The load frame will be fitted with custom fixtures for mounting the non-contact strain apparatus and it will be dedicated to projects that utilize this apparatus. Undergraduate research is one of the pillars of Union College s undergraduate engineering programs. Many of Union College s engineering students graduate and enter graduate programs in engineering. Union s laboratory based curriculum prepares students well for careers in engineering and continued studies in graduate programs. This program relies on maintaining laboratory facilities that expose students to the current state of the art laboratory equipment. The equipment being purchased will go to support the PI and co-PI s research programs that make extensive use of undergraduate students. The equipment will be used to investigate the optimization, characterization, and evaluation of composite structures and test specimens. This equipment will allow for strains and displacements on these structures to be evaluated and used to optimize the configurations. Programs that will be able to take advantage of this effort include the study of composite grid structures for infrastructure applications, evaluation of material performance for reusable launch vehicle applications, and for the development of composite material test methods. Additionally the equipment will be used to investigate the fracture behavior of monolithic materials. The new equipment provide undergraduate engineering students in the mechanical and civil engineering programs at Union College the opportunity to visualize surface strains on complex structures in regions of high strain gradients as part of their research projects. This will give them a unique opportunity to visualize these fields and be able to compare them to finite element and other results. This opportunity will help students to understand the complexity of strain in structures and encourage them to continue their education exploring opportunities in the field of engineering mechanics doc13583 none CTS- MRI: Acquisition of an Instrumentation Cluster to Establish a Nanomagnetics Characterization Facility Mark T. Tuominen University of Massachusetts Amherst $320,000 New nanofabrication methods are emerging that serve to provide a pathway to single-domain magnetic terabit technology. Such data-storage density is equivalent to storing 25 full-length DVD-quality movies on a disk the size of a quarter. This grant involves the acquisition of an equipment cluster for characterizing the properties of designer nanoscale magnetic materials. This facility will consist of a three instruments: a SQUID-based magnetometer, a high-resolution magnetic force microscope (MFM), and a swept-field NMR probe. These instruments provide complementary experimental information that advances the development of nanomagnetic materials fabricated using self-assembly and chemical techniques. The SQUID magnetometer will be used to obtain magnetization characteristics on arrays of nanoscopic magnetic elements, including hysteresis curves, switching fields, coercivity, saturation magnetization, and remanent magnetization. The MFM will provide local magnetic information on individual nanoscopic elements, heterostructures, and patterned nanomagnetic media. The swept-field NMR probe will developed at UMass and be used to identify different crystalline phases and crystalline orientations of magnetic nanostructures through the swept-field spectrum. These instruments will impact many different research projects and provide an education and training environment for numerous users. The facility will be used to develop techniques to engineer the magnetic properties of terabit arrays of magnetic elements made by oriented diblock copolymer templates. Magnetic behavior will be manipulated through nanowire growth conditions, array scale, and hybrid patterning. These efforts will be augmented by supplemental neutron and x-ray scattering measurements at National Laboratory facilities. The scope of this research is broadened by international, federal, and industrial collaborations. Unique configurations of magneto-transport devices will be developed and investigated using laterally patterned magnetic arrays, magnetic heterostructures, and engineered magnetic nanoparticle assemblies. New synthesis and assembly approaches will be explored in studies of molecular magnetism. Education and training activities include instrumentation training and nanofabrication process training through the use of interactive digital-video doc13584 none Multi-disciplinary Research Projects NSF Proposal No.: The objective of this NSF MRI (Major Research Instrumentation) award is to provide an X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) Spectrometer at Lamar University for research and education. X-ray fluorescence is an instrumental technique for identification and concentration determination of elements in solids or liquids. An XRF spectrometer uses X-rays to excite an unknown sample. The excited elements in the sample decay and re-emit their own characteristic fluorescent X-rays. The spectrometer detects the fluorescent X-rays and quantitatively determines which elements are present in the sample. The XRF being acquired is an Oxford Instruments Model ED equipped with a Vacuum System (XA620) and a Sample Spinner Assembly (XA618). It can analyze elements in the mass range from Na(11) to U(92), from low ppm to high percentage levels. Measurements can be made in the standard air path, an optional helium path for liquids, or in vacuum for low atomic number elements. Non-homogeneous samples such as particulates on filter papers can be optimally measured with the use of the ED sample spinner. The availability of an XRF unit at Lamar University will greatly enhance our capabilities in particle-related research and education, promote inter-disciplinary collaboration among departments, reduce long-term operation costs for elemental analyses, and strengthen our efforts in obtaining external research funds at Lamar University. Both currently funded and future proposed projects will be directly benefited by this acquisition, including measurement and analysis of outdoor indoor particulate matter, development of sorbent technology for metal and mercury emission control, chemical characterization of industrial sludge, and development of a super-porous titania-based photoreactor for environmental applications. In addition, both undergraduate and graduate students at Lamar University will have an opportunity, either through research or classroom instruction, to obtain first-hand experience in understanding and operating this modern, advanced chemical-analysis technique. The impact of this acquisition on research and instructional infrastructure at Lamar University will be considerable. It will also enhance service to the area K-12 students and efforts in recruiting potential students to science and engineering programs doc13585 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Lycoming College will acquire a glove box, Fourier-transform infrared spectrometer (FTIR) and an ultraviolet-visible (UV-VIS) spectrophotometer. Research will focus on the following studies: a) synthetic chemistry utilizing intramolecular hydroacylation; b) production of mixed metal selenides; and c) the production of carbon-based radicals. Students at this undergraduate institution will be heavily involved in these research projects. A glove box is a critical piece of equipment when handling air-sensitive chemicals. FTIR and UV-VIS spectrometers are mainstays of the modern chemical laboratory, allowing rapid identification of unknown compounds. These fundamental studies will have an impact in a variety of areas including synthetic inorganic and organic chemistry doc13586 none MRI: Acquisition of an Electron-Beam Lithography System for Nanoscience Research and Education Brian A. Korgel University of Texas Austin $784,000 An electron beam lithography (EBL) system (JEOL JBX- LS) will be acquired for nanoscience and nanotechnology research and education at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin). EBL is the standard method for defining structural features on substrates with dimensions of 100 nm or less. This EBL instrument will aid ongoing research in a diverse range of fields including resist-material development, which includes efforts to use EBL-defined structures for applications in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS-both microfluidics and sensors), characterization of electrically erasable and programmable read-only memories (EEPROM), and fundamental studies of mesoscopic physics in nanostructures, such as silicon nanowires and carbon nanotubes. UT Austin is also a leader in the area of bionanoelectronics, with the development of new evolutionarily engineered peptides for electronic materials processing, and interfacing EBL will aid these efforts. The acquisition of the EBL instrument will help promote an environment where students with diverse backgrounds work together to make small structures for future technologies. UT Austin, as an institution, has recognized the critical need for on-site EBL. The Texas Materials Institute (TMI), the Center for Nano- and Molecular Science and Technology (CNM), the Microelectronics Research Center (MRC), the College of Engineering, and the Departments of Chemical Engineering, Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Physics have committed $466K in matching funds toward the instrument purchase along with support for a full-time technician at a salary of $70K per year. The instrument will be managed through the MRC and located in the cleanroom (12,000 square feet of class 100 and class space) at the Pickel Research Campus at UT Austin where it will greatly strengthen and complement the existing microfabrication and nanofabrication facilities doc13587 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Kay C Dee at Tulane University to acquire a dual-photon laser scanning confocal microscope. This microscope will support the activities of a diverse consortium of biological researchers and educators in or near New Orleans, Louisiana (from Tulane University, the University of New Orleans, Xavier University, the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species, and the USDA Southern Regional Research Center). A broad range of biologically-oriented research and education efforts will be significantly and positively impacted by the new instrumentation, ranging from fundamental studies of embryonic development, to examinations of cellular and molecular functions, to studies of bacterial biofilms and cotton fiber organization. These distinct projects are connected through geographic location (greater New Orleans area) and through the need to obtain high-resolution, three-dimensional images of subcellular structures, in real-time or time-lapse, without associated phototoxicity or bleaching. Confocal microscopy offers image resolutions far superior to those obtainable via conventional fluorescence microscopy, and allows the collection and assembly of sequential two-dimensional images to construct three-dimensional representations of a sample. Dual-photon microscopy utilizes short pulses of a lower energy laser to control fluorescence from a sample in three dimensions, increasing sensitivity and drastically reducing the problems of photobleaching and phototoxicity. The dual-photon microscope is a state-of-the-art imaging tool, ideal for use in the research-intensive learning environments of the consortium. The microscope will be housed in the Coordinated Instrumentation Facility (CIF) at Tulane University. The mission of the CIF is to maintain, manage, and operate high-priced instrumentation for academic, non-profit, and private sector researchers; the CIF is a well-established provider of maintenance, operation, and technical support for instrumentation. The CIF microscopy laboratory at Tulane is a convenient, central location for the new microscope, easily accessible by all members of the consortium of contributing researchers. A summary list of the types of consortium research educational projects for which the microscope will be used includes: embryo development and preservation; bacterial biofilms; tissue engineering, cellular signal transduction, and biomechanics; neurophysiology, endocrinology, and renal hemodynamics; cotton genetics and fiber quality; pharmaceutical and biotechnology applications; and oocyte maturation and fertilization. By housing this state-of-the-art microscope in the CIF, whose goal is to supply instrumentation to researchers at Tulane as well as any and all neighboring institutions, the cutting-edge technology of dual-photon microscopy will certainly benefit researchers in the greater New Orleans area. Moreover, this award has potential impact far beyond New Orleans, since no instrument with similar capabilities is currently available in the entire state of Louisiana. The new microscope system will not only be accessible to researchers, but will also be used in mentored training opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students. Furthermore, programs (such as the Louisiana Alliance for Minority Participation, a 3+2 program between the Tulane School of Engineering and Xavier University, etc.) are in place to make these educational opportunities available to minority students. In summary, the installation and shared use of the microscope will significantly strengthen scientific expertise and collaborations in Louisiana, and will therefore have a major impact on an area of the country geographically under-represented in nationally-recognized scientific and engineering efforts doc13588 none This Major Research Instrumentation award will enable the purchase of two computer numerical control machine tools specifically a vertical machining center and a turning center. The award will also enable the purchase of a cutting force dynamometer, vibration and acoustic emission sensors as well as laser and ballbar calibration systems. This equipment will be used to conduct research in measuring and modeling machine tool errors for error compensation and collect process data via multiple sensors to identify the correlation between cutting conditions, material properties and part quality for optimization of manufacturing processes. This equipment will enable development of an intelligent manufacturing system, which will fully integrate quality assurance into precision machining processes and result in full manufacturing automation, yielding no defects coupled with a significant improvement in productivity, part quality and reduced manufacturing costs. The real-time process control will enable reduction in scrap, rework, lead-time, and conventional non value-added inspection activities, and thereby will increase competitiveness of part manufacturers. In addition, the equipment will provide opportunities for hands-on undergraduate research and education for the manufacturing specialist. Seven courses will be impacted by the equipment in the manufacturing curriculum and will benefit over four hundred students at Western Kentucky University during the award period. The precision machining laboratory to be developed under this grant will be used during technology competition for regional high school and middle school technology education students. The scope of the impact is broad in that the proposed research encompasses milling, turning, and drilling processes. The results will benefit not only machine tool industry but also automotive and aerospace industries and other discrete part manufacturers doc13589 none O Leary This grant, funded though the Major Research Instrumentation Program, provides support to upgrade significantly the current facilities for fossil preparation in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (SUNY-SB) Vertebrate paleontological research at SUNY-SB is conducted in four separate departments (Anatomical Sciences, Anthropology, Ecology and Evolution, Geosciences) by nine full-time faculty, one postdoctoral associate, and a host of graduate and undergraduate students. Through the establishment of a state-of-the-art vertebrate fossil preparation laboratory in the Department of Anatomical Sciences, which contains, by far, the highest proportion of paleontologists on campus, this facility will be made available to all Stony Brook paleontologists and their students. These paleontologists and paleontologists-in-training depend directly on mechanical and chemical preparation of vertebrate fossils for their research. Fossil preparation is, quite simply, the process by which fossils are carefully extracted from their entombing rock matrix. It is a very time-intensive process requiring great skill, knowledge, and experience, as well as access to state-of-the-art equipment and tools. At present SBU vertebrate paleontologists conduct some 20 field projects, many of them currently or recently supported by the National Science Foundation. These projects span over 200 million years of Earth history, on four separate continents, and are targeted at evolutionary hypotheses that can be tested by collecting new fossil data. Fund from this grant will be used to purchase sample preparation equipment (i.e. an air compressor and sand blaster, air filtration equipment, storage cabinets, hand tools, and chemical supplies) and to support a full-time technician trained in fossil preparation and curation techniques. The University has committed to providing a separate laboratory equipped with sinks, cabinetry, and a fume hood that would be dedicated strictly to fossil preparation. Additional technical support will help to eliminate the significant backlog of unprepared fossil specimens that has accumulated over the past decade, as well as to mold and cast the most scientifically significant specimens prior to their return to institutions in their country of origin. Establishment of a state-of-the-art vertebrate fossil preparation facility and the hiring of a second skilled technician will dramatically increase the research productivity of Stony Brook paleontologists, eliminate the need for outside contract work, and assist in the fundamental training of students doc13590 none A grant has been awarded to Dr Roger D. Sloboda at Dartmouth College to purchase a Microscope for laser based micromanipulation and collection of living or fixed cells and manipulation of subcellular particles. This instrument will provide new capabilities for the Department of Biological Sciences at Dartmouth, with respect to faculty and graduate student research and undergraduate instruction. The capabilities of this microscope are currently unavailable to this group of faculty anywhere else within a reasonable distance in New Hampshire or Vermont. The microscope uses laser-based technology under computer control to move, manipulate, and collect cells and subcelluar parts of cells for further analysis. The characteristics of design and ease of use indicate this microscope will bring these capabilities to the students and faculty at Dartmouth. The faculty that will make use of this instrument are members of the Molecular and Cellular Biology graduate program, and they cover in their research the biological spectrum from yeast to higher plants and animals. All of the ongoing research projects are amenable to approaches using modern, computer enhanced microscope image acquisition and analysis techniques. Thus, this instrumentation provides a unifying focus for the research efforts of the user group. Some specific examples of the projects at Dartmouth that will benefit from this instrumentation here are studies on: membrane bound vesicle trafficking during lipid homeostasis, formation and maintenance of the poles of the mitotic spindle, the cell component responsible for separating the chromosomes at cell division, the effect of endogenous and exogenous steroids on early embryological development, the axoplasmic transport of membrane bound vesicles in neurons, changes in cellular autofluorescence as an indicator of future cancerous growth of cells in culture, and the role of specific nuclear proteins in cell division. This brief list highlights just a few of the projects that will immediately benefit from the awarded equipment. High resolution light microscopy and enhanced visualization technologies have long been the focus of faculty in the Biological Sciences at Dartmouth, and this award is coincident with the historical development of this department over the past three decades. The acquisition of a microscope capable of laser ablation, laser based cell isolation, and laser trap manipulations of cells and subcellular particles will complement nicely the current instrumentation and greatly improve the research and training environment for the faculty and for the graduate and undergraduate students in this department. The laser microscope will enhance the research productivity of the faculty as well as the training environment for the undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students at Dartmouth. Thus, the research enterprise in the Biological Sciences at Dartmouth will be significantly enhanced doc13591 none Butler, Paul A planet-hunting instrument (spectrometer) for the new Southern Hemisphere telescope: Magellan will be built. A high-resolution echelle spectrograph for the southern hemisphere-located Magellan Telescope will be designed, specified, fabricated, assembled and tested. Precision radial velocities will be measured to look for the characteristic signature that indicates small dark bodies (planets) in orbit about a star. This special purpose spectrograph will be able to Doppler velocity changes, at the level of 2 to 4 m sec. This spectrograph-telescope combination will enable over 1,000. new candidate stars to be examined for orbiting planets and represents the astronomy community s first in-depth survey of those Southern Hemisphere stars not available from Northern Hemisphere telescopes. The telescope spectrograph system will be available to members of the Magellan community: Harvard, MIT, Michigan, Arizona and Carnegie Observatories doc13592 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program will allow Cornell University to acquire an Energy Filtering Transmission Electron Microscope (EFTEM). The new capabilities for atomic scale imaging provided by the LEO 922 OMEGA, particularly the abilities to rapidly obtain element-specific image contrast and to image thick samples at low beam energies, will enable an extraordinarily broad range of research. These research projects are led by principal investigators from four Colleges and eleven departments at Cornell University. It will also be available for use by outside collaborators and users, academic, government or industrial organizations. The research topics range from studies of complex polymeric, ceramic and metallic materials to biological cells, their internal structures and metal ion concentrations. Central to meeting these research goals is the training of many post-doctoral, graduate and undergraduate students in the use and exploitation of such a powerful research tool. Since it will be only the second machine of its type in the US, this will be a fantastic and almost unique opportunity to carry out frontier research. It is clear that the EFTEM will have a large institutional impact and will be an important resource for the external community of scientists and students who will be visitors and users, some of whom will be coming primarily to use the EFTEM. It will further enable us to attract and retain the best faculty and students, including women and minorities. %%% This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program will allow Cornell University to acquire an Energy Filtering Transmission Electron Microscope (EFTEM). The new capabilities for atomic scale imaging provided by the LEO 922 OMEGA, particularly the abilities to rapidly obtain element-specific image contrast and to image thick samples at low beam energies, will enable an extraordinarily broad range of research. These research projects are led by principal investigators from four Colleges and eleven Departments at Cornell University. It will also be available for use by outside collaborators and users, academic, government or industrial organizations. The research topics range from studies of complex polymeric, ceramic and metallic materials to biological cells, their internal structures and metal ion concentrations. Central to meeting these research goals is the training of many post-doctoral, graduate and undergraduate students in the use and exploitation of such a powerful research tool. This will be only the second machine of its type in the US, this will provide a unique opportunity to carry out frontier research. The EFTEM will have a large institutional impact and will be an important resource for the external community of scientists and students who will be visitors and users, some of whom will be coming primarily to use the EFTEM. It will further enable Cornell University to attract and retain the best faculty and students, including women and minorities doc13593 none Koepfler This award to Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina will provide support for acquisition of instrumentation for research on microbial ecology. It supports strong, ongoing efforts in integration of research and education at CCU, which has a large marine studies program and active programs involving undergraduates in research in environmental sciences. Specific instrumentation supported here includes a compound microscope with image analyzer, a data logging multiprobe, a multi-channel respirometer and incubators. The university will provide additional instrumentation under this project, including electrophoresis apparatus, gel documentation system, additional incubators, fluorometers, peristaltic pumps and computers for data logging and analysis. CCU is a non-Ph.D.-granting university; the university will contribute about 22% of the total cost of this project from non-federal funds doc13594 none This is a Major Research Instrumentation award to acquire equipment to upgrade the West Virginia University Plasma Physics Laboratory s new Space Physics Simulation Facility. The facility consists of a cylindrical, stainless-steel vacuum chamber 4 meters long and 1.8 meters in diameter. The objective of the upgrade is to acquire equipment necessary to launch a unique category of experiments within the subfield of dusty plasmas, a subfield with wide-ranging scientific and technological applications. The new experiments enabled will provide information about the electrostatic dust-cyclotron instability and other new waves and instabilities associated with dusty plasmas having the dust-grain gyroradius much smaller than the radius of the plasma, a parameter regime yet to be achieved in the laboratory. The experiments will provide access to a parameter regime that has commanded significant recent theoretical attention. The equipment includes electromagnets, vacuum pumps, power supply, and 16-channel waveform recorder. The long range goal is for the Space Physics Simulation Facility to assume scientific leadership in experimental studies of magnetized dusty plasmas doc13595 none Didier A grant has been awarded to Drs. Dominique A. Didier and Jon K. Gelhaus at The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia to obtain a digital imaging system for the scanning electron microscope (SEM) and a 3-D imaging system for light microscopy. This new equipment will become part the Academy s Albert M. Greenfield Digital Imaging Center, a multi-user facility that is shared by all units of the Academy s Biodiversity Research Group, including the Library and the Molecular Systematics and Evolution Group. These new acquisitions will enhance ongoing collections-based research and facilitate the collection and distribution of data from our natural history collections. Together the digital imaging system and the 3-D imaging system will enable the study of samples and specimens ranging in size from several microns in diameter to at least 30 cm in diameter. This technology is especially important for ongoing collaborative research in four of our most important collections: rotifers, insects, mollusks, and diatoms. Many of these invertebrate taxa have never been studied and may be globally rare or endangered, and may also be bio-indicators of environmental health, thus important to both taxonomists and environmental biologists. Using the combined imaging capabilities of the new systems both internal and external morphology of microscopic specimens can be visualized in perfect focus in a single image and will facilitate taxonomic research on the revision and identification of these important biological specimens. Digital images will be used in the production of publications, field guides, taxonomic keys, and Internet products. Additionally, digital images are easily shared among colleagues worldwide and will greatly facilitate international collaborations, and will be especially useful in enhancing ongoing research with colleagues in developing countries such as Mongolia. The enhanced digital imaging facilities at the Academy of Natural Sciences will significantly improve current educational opportunities at the Academy. In particular, undergraduate interns funded through an NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates Site Grant will be intimately involved in independent research that utilizes this new digital imaging technology. The Academy also offers several Fellowships including the Gallagher Postdoctoral Fellowship for research on the Academy s world-ranked collection of rotifers as well as Jessup and Mchenry Fellowships for graduate students to conduct research in our collections. These prestigious Fellowships support use of all Academy facilities, including the Digital Imaging Center. In addition, through collaborations with local colleges and Universities researchers at the Academy have colleagues as well as undergraduate, masters and doctoral students working in their laboratories, most of whom utilize digital imaging technology in their research. Most importantly, this new digital imaging technology will make it possible to bring specimen images and data to a global audience of scientists, students, hobbyists and the general public doc13596 none CONACyT: Binational Collaborative Development of Spoken Language Technology in Latin American Spanish This is a standard award. As the use of handheld computing devices becomes more widespread it will be increasingly necessary for these devices to support speech input and output that can maintain robust performance under all conditions. In this project the CMU Robust Speech Group will develop a series of complementary algorithms that will substantially improve the accuracy of automatic speech recognition systems in the presence of difficult acoustical environments including high levels of noise, sources of interference with time-varying characteristics (such as competing speech sources and background music), and a variety of transient noise sources encountered in office, highway, and industrial settings. The research includes three complementary components: the development of synergistic sets of features that when used in combination will provide better recognition accuracy than can be obtained by any single feature set in isolation; development of a series of new procedures that produce the best combination of information from multiple parallel recognizers; and development of improved methods to achieve robust speech recognition by the explicit identification and reconstruction of features in time-frequency displays of speech that are missing by virtue of being damaged by noise or other types of interference. The PI will transfer the technology developed in the course of this project to industry and to the general public by releasing the code of successful algorithms in Open Source form doc13597 none This award from the Major Instrumentation Program is for the acquisition of a confocal microscope at Harvard University. This confocal microscope will be the heart of a state-of-the-art optical microscopy facility which will be a core component of the Center for Imaging and Mesoscopic Structures (CIMS), recently established at Harvard University as part of a general initiative of renewed support for the sciences. The facility will provide the Harvard research community with a complete range of modern optical microscopy that will enable optical imaging with unprecedented resolution and sensitivity. This will facilitate a broad range of new research, and will help establish new interdisciplinary research programs at Harvard University, bridging the disciplines of chemistry, physics, engineering, materials science, biology and medicine. This will help meet the important educational aim of CIMS, and this facility, which is to ensure that students become skilled in state-of-the-art microscopy, and are well versed in interdisciplinary collaboration. The research to be conducted ranges from materials science to biology, from synthesis of novel structured materials to probing single macromolecules inside living cells. This award from the Major Instrumentation Program will help Harvard University with the acquisition of a confocal microscope. This equipment will be the heart of a state-of-the-art optical microscopy facility which will be a core component of the Center for Imaging and Mesoscopic Structures (CIMS), recently established at Harvard University as part of a general initiative of renewed support for the sciences. The facility will provide the Harvard research community with a complete range of modern optical microscopy that will enable optical imaging with unprecedented resolution and sensitivity. This will facilitate a broad range of new research, and will help establish new interdisciplinary research programs at Harvard University, bridging the disciplines of chemistry, physics, engineering, materials science, biology and medicine. This will help meet the important educational aim of CIMS, and this facility, which is to ensure that students become skilled in state-of-the-art microscopy, and are well versed in interdisciplinary collaboration doc13598 none Claudio Rebbi Boston University MRI: Acquisition of a Power4-based IBM SP and PC-based Scalable Display Wall for Multidisciplinary Computational Science Research This is a proposal for equipment acquisition under the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program to support research and student training across a broad range of advanced scientific computing applications. The proposed supercomputer and visualization instrumentation would contribute to computational investigations of subnuclear particle phenomena, the dynamics of quantum systems, space weather modeling, the electrodynamics of plasma processes in the ionosphere, managing the manufacturing supply chain, subsurface sensing and imaging systems, among many other projects doc13599 none A consortium of seven principal researchers and nine auxiliary users from the New York Capital Region are funded for a variable-pressure, field emission scanning electron microscope (VP-FESEM) equipped with an Energy Dispersive X-ray Analysis System. Support includes several ancillary instruments including a critical point drier, a freeze drier, and a high-resolution chrome sputtering device. Major research areas to be addressed include: (i)cell biological and molecular approaches addressing the origins of the skeleton; (ii) microfossil taxonomy of the oldest skeletalized animals and the Cambrian evolutionary radiation; (iii) nanotechnology in the neurosciences, (iv) the role of mitochondria in cell death, (v) the evolution of prehistoric agriculture in the northeastern United States; and (vi) post-glacial fish dispersal and assemblage community structure. This instrument will create new ties between paleontologists, biologists, and museum curators in a research web ranging back through 500 million years of biologic evolution up to the Native American development of agriculture. A novel aspect of the proposed instrument is the merging of research disciplines in two large but distinct New York State government agencies: The Wadsworth Center, the flagship research institution of the New York State Department of Health, and the New York State Museum, a major branch of the New York State Education Department. As such, the instrument will serve to link basic researchers in the biosciences and paleontology with those engaged in museum collection research, conservation, and dissemination of collection data. Both agencies have major education mandates to the citizenry of New York State, and all of the investigators in this proposal have time-tested local, regional, and national outreach commitments doc13600 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program will allow the University of Massachusetts to purchase a x-ray photoelectron spectrometer (XPS) with integrated Auger analysis. The instrument will significantly enhance the capabilities of Interface Analysis Laboratory at UMass by providing high-resolution surface analysis and depth profiling capabilities that are currently lacking. The facility is accessible to the UMass community as well as research personnel from the surrounding Five College Community that includes Smith, Mt. Holyoke, Amherst and Hampshire Colleges and local industry. The Interface Analysis Laboratory and its director play an instrumental role in the support of broadly funded research programs in the chemical biological and materials sciences and for training of graduate and undergraduate students at these and other institutions. Specific programs include assessment of composition, contamination, interfacial properties and growth mechanisms for metal and semiconductor multi-layer films deposited from supercritical fluids, characterizing the chemical composition of polymer surfaces and interfaces modified to control interfacial interactions, surface wetting and biocompatability and the rational design of constrained-geometry catalysts for olefin polymerization. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program will allow the University of Massachusetts to purchase a x-ray photoelectron spectrometer (XPS) with integrated Auger analysis. In tandem, XPS and Auger spectroscopy provide precise information regarding the atomic and molecular composition of surfaces that is crucial for the development and application of the advanced materials that are fueling today s economy. These include the assessment of metal and semiconductor films for microelectronic and photonic devices, the characterization of modified surfaces for consumer and medical applications, and the characterization of catalysts for more efficient fuel and chemical production. The instrument will be housed in an open Surface Analysis Facility that is easily accessible to the UMass Campus as well as research personnel from the surrounding Five College Community that includes Smith, Mt. Holyoke, Amherst and Hampshire Colleges and local industry. The facility plays an instrumental role in the training of graduate and undergraduate students at these and other institutions doc13601 none PI: Chen Funding is requested for the development of a non-contacting ignition system for polymer combustion studies. The system will consist of a high-power lamp and associated optics, a pyrometry system for measuring surface temperature, and a heat flux sensor to monitor the uniformity of the heating system. A supporting numerical model will also be developed to validate the system. The ignitability of plastics as determined by this system should be extendable to other geometry, energy input and oxygen level through a suitable analysis doc13602 none Sargent, Anneila I. CARMA - Development of a Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy This program will begin the process of merging two millimeter-wavelength radio astronomy arrays currently funded by AST s University Radio Observatories program into a single interferometer at a new site, to be called CARMA (Combined Array for Millimeter-wave Astronomy). The observatories are the Owens Valley Millimeter Array (6 x 10m telescopes) and the Berkeley-Illinois-Maryland Association (BIMA) Array (9 x 6m telescopes). The new array will be sited in the Inyo Mountains of central-eastern California, near the present Owens Valley site but higher in elevation. Improved atmospheric conditions at the new site will allow routine observations in the prime 1.3mm observing band. CARMA will be the world s premier millimeter-wavelength interferometer until the advent of ALMA. The scientific advantages of a combined array are many, including greater sensitivity, more usable days per year (because of the higher site), and far better image fidelity. The funds awarded will be used for long lead-time items such as broadband electronics, correlator (signal combiner) prototyping, and an antenna transporter. CARMA received the recommendation of the Astronomy Decadal Survey of the National Research Council as one of the Moderate-cost Initiatives to be constructed during - doc13603 none This project ((in collaboration with Dr. Ricardo Oropeza, ITSEM CEM, Mexico) will investigate the problem of sensor-based exploration of unknown environments by autonomous robots. The work will include autonomous construction of a representation of the environment (the mapping problem), annotating the map with landmarks for robot localization, and the use of the constructed map for navigation doc13604 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh will acquire an isothermal titration microcalorimeter for the study of solution-phase reactions, and a differential thermal analyzer for the thermal characterization of solids. The isothermal titration microcalorimeter will be used to enhance studies of the binding properties of heavy metal ions to polysaccharides such as capsules that are produced by certain cyanobacteria. The differential thermal analyzer will be used primarily for thermal characterization of nanoscale materials. Students at this primarily undergraduate campus will be heavily involved in these research projects. Calorimetry is an extremely useful tool in modern analytical chemistry. Calorimetric analysis is used to measure the thermal energy (heat) exchange that occurs during molecular interactions and reactions. The isothermal titration microcalorimetry studies have practial implications regarding the fate of heavy metal ions and possible bioremediation strategies on the Lake Winnebago Fox River ecosystem doc13605 none The Goshen College Physics Department is stepping into a new area of research and teaching in the holographic study of vibrating objects. This represents a deliberate new direction for our well-established undergraduate research program. Our aim is to move into an area of great value to students and to carry out a research program that is intrinsically interesting, pedagogically useful, and connects us to local industry including musical instrument manufacturers. We propose to study the vibration modes of musical instruments using an electronic holography system (often called TV holography). Such a system can create an image of a vibrating object decorated with a pattern of fringes, which show the vibration mode. We will also use finite element analysis (FEA) to model the vibration of these musical instruments. By comparing with the holographic results and refining the model, we will build an accurate FEA model, which can be used to try out new possibilities. The Goshen College Physics Department has a history of serving certain local industries with our x-ray diffraction expertise. Similarly an electronic-holography system will provide a nondestructive testing capability that will be of value providing studies of stress-strain deformation and location of hairline cracks and defects. This capability will be a valuable addition to internship opportunities for our (binary) engineering students doc13606 none A grant has been awarded to Drs Trebino and El-Sayed at the Georgia Institute of Technol-ogy to develop a novel ultrasensitive ultrafast intensity-and-phase spectrometer, which yields the full intensity and phase vs. time (or frequency) of luminescence and other light pulses relevant to biology and many other fields. The spectrometer will have a very high sensitivity for single-shot measurements and a 1-photon-per-pulse sensitivity for multi-shot measurements. These sensitivi-ties are approximately six orders magnitude better than those of current measurement techniques. The proposed instrument involves combining a spectrometer with a coherent reference light pulse. Specifically, it will use an ultra-short pulse with a spectrum ranging from 400 nm to nm and generated by propagating readily available, low-energy, 100-fs pulses through microstruc-ture optical fiber (recently developed by Lucent Technologies. Demonstrations of the new instru-ment will involve simple photochemical systems relevant to photobiology. Examples include dou-ble proton transfer processes in 7-azaindole and its analogues (important in understanding radiation-induced DNA mutation) and the photo-isomeri-zation around double bonds, e.g., in the merocyanine dyes (important for understanding of the primary processes in proteins of vision, such as rhodopsin and bacteriorhodopsin photosynthesis). Later, we propose to use this device to further understand the complex primary dynamics in bacteriorhodopsin and to distinguish between different theoretical models proposed for its primary photo-dynamics. This instrument will also have applications far beyond biology. For example, semi-conductor experiments often generate weak light pulses of new wavelengths, which cannot be measured with conventional methods, but potentially can with this. Also, astronomers routinely measure the intensity vs. frequency (the spectrum) of light from astrophysical sources, but they cannot currently measure the spectral phase. With this instrument it should be possible to do so and yield information previously unavailable regarding extraterrestrial light sources. In addition, the spectrometer will allow measurements of the phase of signal and idler beams in a broadband optical parametric generators-a system that is interesting because the phase of these two beams is quan-tum-mechanically entangled with many degrees of freedom and so can be used for quantum com-puting. Finally, the ultrafast intensity and phase vs. time of virtually any light-emitting medium could be studied using this highly sensitive instrument doc13607 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program will allow California State University Northridge to expand and strengthen the computational facilities at the Computational Materials Theory Center at California State University Northridge. The general goals of the Center are: (1) To conduct fundamental and applied research that enhances our knowledge in materials properties and processing through theory, modeling, simulation, visualization and computation; (2) To educate and train students through a program of studies and research activities on current and future materials-related technological challenges; and (3) To stimulate and develop strong industrial-university-national laboratory partnerships in materials research. The research programs include the electronic and mechanical properties of metals and intermetallics, the properties of strongly correlated electrons, the Quantum Hall effect and high temperature superconductivity, the optical and magneto-optical properties of materials, catalysis, and the Quantum Hall effect, the optical and magneto-optical properties of materials, catalysis, and magnetic and electronic properties of nanostructure materials in general. The award will provide a parallel computing paradigm capability allowing the center (1) to treat large numbers of atoms ab initio electronic structure codes, (2) to sample a larger number of configurations in Monte Carlo simulations and (3) to decrease the time steps in molecular dynamics simulations. The Center comprises of faculty, postdoctoral fellows, visiting scientists and students. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program will allow California State Northridge to enhance the parallel computing capability at the Computational Materials Theory Center at California State University Northridge. This award will be leveraged substantially using funds from other federal agencies. The resulting massively parallel platform state-of-the-art facility will allow enhanced capability to investigate problems that are beyond current capabilities at the institution, such as bridging different length scales, increasing the configuration space in Monte Carlo simulations, and decreasing the time scale in molecular dynamics simulations. The facility will train students, including under-represented minority students, and educate them in materials related technological challenges of the next century. The University was ranked first among master s degree-granting institutions in the number of baccalaureate graduates who went on to complete the Ph.D. in science and engineering fields doc13608 none This award funds the development of a system for the in-situ synchrotron x-ray study of thin film growth with molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) and of surface modification with plasma processing. The system will permit extensive x-ray access to the sample and incorporate standard characterization tools (e.g. RHEED) to better correlate the synchrotron results with in-house studies. In the area of film growth, particular attention is paid to surface structure during the MBE growth of III-V nitride films, both GaN and Ga-Al-In nitride alloys. Among other issues, research will focus on buffer layer formation and atomic ordering phase separation in the alloy systems. Investigations of surface structure during plasma processing will initially focus on silicon, since it has been widely studied with complementary methods. Future experiments will be directed at processing of compound semiconductor surfaces, such as those of the arsenides and nitrides. Students trained with the system will be exposed to a broad range of materials issues ranging from basic surface structure research to understanding how surface structure can effect device performance. They will be well prepared to bring their experience and new insights to industry and academia following graduation. This award funds the development of a surface scattering system for real-time x-ray studies of growth and processing. The system will enable the fundamental study of two processes that are vital for the semiconductor industry. These are, first, Molecular Beam Epitaxy, which allows the highly controlled growth of thin films a single atomic layer at a time, and, second, the modification of surfaces with energetic particles in a set of processes that is known collectively as plasma processing . Using a very intense beam of x-rays from a synchrotron source, the atomic structure of surfaces will be investigated as these technologically important processes are occurring. The basic understanding gained from these experiments may eventually lead to methods for growing new high quality materials for the optoelectronics and high power industries and to better methods of etching and passivating semiconductor surfaces throughout the electronics industry. In addition, this equipment will provide a unique resource to train students in these rapidly developing interdisciplinary areas that cut across traditional boundaries of physics, materials science and electrical engineering doc13609 none Alexander A. Sawchuk University of Southern California MRI: Acquisition of Equipment for Remote Multichannel Media Immersion This is a proposal for equipment acquisition under the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program to support research and student training in immersive technology. Immersive technology is the creation of the aural and visual ambience of a virtual space in which individuals can experience remote events or communicate naturally with others located remotely doc13610 none Acquisition of Computing Infrastructure for Bioinformatics Research and Education A grant has been awarded to Dr. Zhiping Weng at Boston University to establish a high-performance, cost-effective computing infrastructure to support the research and educational needs of the University s Bioinformatics Program. Dr. Weng and six co-investigators of this grant form the computational core of the program. Their research spans structural proteomics, functional genomics and gene expression regulatory networks. On a daily basis they work with all known sequences, all available genomes, all known protein structures, transcriptional levels of all genes in an organism, and the like. Their computational needs far exceed currently available facilities. Boston University is among the first to establish a graduate degree program in Bioinformatics. The program is currently funded by an NSF IGERT grant and has been growing very rapidly. The large number of students in the program places great demand on computing resources. This NSF grant will allow for the purchase of a computer cluster dedicated to Bioinformatics research and educational activities at Boston University. The cluster will have the following components: a file server with 1 terabyte storage, an 80-node compute server with dual Intel 1GHz processors, 2 GB RAM, and 106 GB storage per node, a backup file server and a web server. A fast giga-bit network will connect the file server and the compute server. Such a cluster coincides ideally with the high-throughput, large-scale nature of Bioinformatics research programs. The computer cluster will be able to support innovative research in biomolecular systems including functional genomics, structural proteomics, and cell systems analysis. It will enable the faculty, postdoctoral researchers, graduate and undergraduate students to attack research questions that require months of CPU time, and which could not otherwise be addressed within the constraints of currently available facilities. It will also greatly strengthen our Bioinformatics Program at Boston University, which is dedicated to training a new generation of scientists and biotech industry leaders capable of implementing high-performance computational solutions to the biological problems of the 21st century doc13611 none Kyle This award, provided by the Office of Polar Programs, the Division of Earth Sciences, and the Office of Integrative Activities at NSF, supports development of an integrated instrument package for surveillance of volcanic gas, seismic activity, and elevation change. Seismic and geodetic methods are the principal tools used to monitor volcanoes, as these have been shown to be the most useful means of forecasting volcanic eruptions through the remote sensing of deviatoric stress release and intruding and withdrawing mass fluxes of magma. During the past 10 years, technological advances have resulted in a new generation of instrumentation and data acquisition methods in both seismology and geodesy. This collaborative project involving NM Tech researchers, staff from UNAVCO, and Guralp Systems will develop and deploy a low-power cost-effective real-time integrated instrument package of seismic, geodetic and environmental sensors primarily for monitoring the activity at active volcanoes and in tectonically active areas. The Integrated Surveillance Instrumentation (ISI) stations that will be developed and installed under this project are intended to have low power requirements (approximately 2 watts) and to run unattended for periods of up to 12 months under the harshest of environmental conditions. The plan calls for deployment of 5 ISI stations at Mt. Erebus and one in New Mexico. At Mt Erebus, the project will monitor on-going volcanic activity associated with the persistent anorthoclase phonolite magma lake. The NM station will monitor ongoing seismic and long-term deformational activity associated with the inflating Socorro magma body in the Rio Grande rift. The instrumentation developed should have wide application in both applied and basic earth science projects with the potential to contribute significantly to societal goals of better predicting volcanic and seismic natural hazards doc13612 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Environmental and Chemical Sciences at Chapman College will acquire a gas chromatograph ion trap tandem mass spectrometer (GCMS). This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) studies of emission rates and mechanisms of stratospheric ozone-depleting halogenated compounds from wetland plants; b) the photochemical reactions of polyaromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) pollutants in surface waters; and c) a collaborative study using chemical tracers as indicators for anthropogenic sewage inputs to watershed run-off. Faculty will conduct a joint ongoing study of non-point pollution sources in a local salt marsh. This study will be integrated into four laboratory courses for research training in GCMS techniques through student group projects. Gas chromatograph with mass spectrometric detection (GCMS) is an extremely powerful technique used for the separation and analysis of complex mixtures. This instrument will substantially strengthen scientific research in Environmental Sciences at Chapman University doc13613 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program to Johns Hopkins University supports the development of a Multi Analyzer Crystal Spectrometer (MACS) for cold neutron spectroscopy. MACS will have two orders of magnitude greater sensitivity than current instrumentation. Located at the NIST cold neutron source, the instrument uses focusing Bragg optics to produce the most intense cold neutron beam worldwide (f 108 n cm2 s for DEi=0.2 meV). The detection system will energy-analyze neutrons scattered into a solid angle more than an order of magnitude greater than conventional instrumentation. The goal of the MACS project is greater insight into nano-scale dynamic phenomena in materials science. It will expand the scope for inelastic neutron scattering from a powerful specialized technique to a versatile probe of dynamic correlations in a wide range of condensed matter. Research enabled by MACS includes direct measurements of interactions in magnetic thin films, determination of spin density wave structure in organic metals, elucidation of spin and charge polarons in oxides, studies of dynamic correlations at pressure and field driven quantum phase transitions, determination of order parameters in weak broken symmetry phases, and studies of impurity generated composite spin. With a different foot print in Q-E phase space, MACS will complement the advanced pulsed neutron instrumentation now being developed for the Spallation Neutron Source. The project will provide undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral education to produce scientists that are knowledgeable about cutting-edge neutron scattering instrumentation and its use in materials research. Inelastic neutron scattering is a unique probe of nano-scale dynamic phenomena in solids. The experiments are crucial for determining the interactions and understanding the cooperative phenomena that govern the solid state. Unfortunately, current instrumentation limits applicability to cases where large crystalline samples are available. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program to Johns Hopkins University supports the development of a Multi Analyzer Crystal Spectrometer (MACS) for neutron scattering at the NIST Center for Neutron Research. Through its intense incident beam and its multiplexing detection system, MACS will transform inelastic neutron scattering from a powerful, specialized technique, to a versatile probe of nano-scale dynamics in solids. Research enabled by MACS, includes direct measurements of interactions in magnetic thin films, determination of spin density wave structure in organic metals, elucidation of spin and charge polarons in oxides, and analysis of impurity generated composite spin. Graduate and undergraduate students will be involved, and a post-doc will join for commissioning. The project thus educates scientists who are knowledgeable about cutting-edge neutron scattering instrumentation and its use in materials science. With a different data acquisition protocol, MACS will be complementary to instrumentation now being developed for the Spallation Neutron Source. The capability to probe excitations over a wide range of energies at the SNS and then zoom in using MACS will help scientists develop new materials for the twenty first century doc13614 none This award will allow the Department of Physics at New York University to set up a cluster of advanced workstations (48 nodes of dual 866 MHz Pentium III processors) to support computationally intensive research in a number of areas of theoretical physics and astrophysics. The proposed research projects include: 1) properties of atmospheric particle showers induced by ultra-high-energy cosmic rays [Farrar]; 2) simulation of astrophysical magnetic fields [Farrar in collaboration with Goodman and others]; 3) magnetically controlled electrical transport in layered structures [Levy]; 4) statistical mechanics of simple and complex fluids [Percus]; 5) structure formation in the early universe [Scoccimarro and Zaldarriaga]; 6) asymptotic freedom in two-dimensional $\sigma$-models, and the critical behavior of Potts antiferromagnets and of self-avoiding random walk [Sokal];and 7) confinement mechanisms in lattice quantum chromodynamics [Zwanziger]. The proposed research making use of this cluster will also provide training in high-performance scientific computing for the Department s graduate and undergraduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting faculty from other institutions, using a variety of programming languages (Fortran, C, C++, Mathematica) and advanced scientific software. This training in advanced computational techniques will be of benefit by providing broadly applicable skills, not only to those graduate students who pursue subsequent careers in academic research, but also to those who go on to careers in industrial R+D and elsewhere in society doc13615 none This project is about international collaboration between U.S. and Mexico. The work focuses on development of mobile robotic systems capable of performing sophisticated visibility-based tasks with minimal sensing requirements. The goal is to construct algorithms and control laws that use information directly from the robot sensors, such that the task at hand would be carried out without the need for elaborate measurements that are usually required doc13616 none PI: Dave The PI and four colleagues in the Mechanical Engineering and the Chemical Engineering Departments request funding for the purchase of a field emission scanning electron microscope (FESEM). This instrument will be used in their research in particle technology. It will enhance their capability to characterize particles at nano and submicron scales. When such data are incorporated into their predictive numerical model, better results are anticipated. The institutional support of NJIT is very strong with cost-sharing at ~50% level doc13617 none Almost everywhere in the world it is possible to find marine structures, even some relatively new ones, which contain cracked or spalled concrete usually involving corrosion of the reinforcement. Several methods of controlling corrosion, have been adopted, but premature corrosion in the splash zones continues to be a problem of serious concern. The basic philosophy of the 60 s to replace and not to renovate was consistent with relatively low constructional costs and the throw-away attitude. However, the current concerns regarding economic considerations, energy issues, and environmental problems have significantly altered this mode of thinking. New and innovative developments in materials technology make repair procedures feasible and very cost-effective. This is an identified need for innovative repair concepts for marine piles with lower costs than conventional patch repair methods that require expensive maintenance techniques. The repair concepts will generally be to restore or enhance one or more of the following: durability, structural strength, function, and appearance. Cost-effectiveness is an important factor for feasibility of application. The proposed project, a joint experimental investigation of Florida Atlantic University and the Universities of Mayab and Campeche in Mexico, will lead to the development of appropriate structure-specific and environment-specific repair procedures. The developed methodology will help the coastal engineer to design durable strengthening schemes, ii) select the most appropriate repair procedure from available options, and iii) predict the degree of strengthening and performance for specific options. The repair procedures will provide valuable input to Coastal Repair and Rehabilitation Manuals doc13618 none Sayler This is a proposal to acquire the instruments needed to couple a multi-purpose scanning probe microscope with a photon counting intensified CCD camera imaging system and a tunable liquid crystal filter to accomplish two objectives. First, the instrumentation will create a multi-purpose test bed for the study of luminescence and spectral processes of reporter cells, nucleic acids, and enzymes at specialized substrata, thereby advancing fundamental understanding of biomicroelectronics and nanobiotechnology. Second, the instrument will dramatically improve the infrastructure and expand the research and training efforts of the scientific and engineering communities at the University. In addition, the instrumentation will be used in courses in Microbiology, Biochemistry, Electrical Engineering, and Geology doc13619 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Edwin M. Westbrook at the Molecular Biology Consortium (MBC) in Chicago, to develop a state-of-the-art X-ray detector for structural molecular biology research. When the prototype has been completed, it will set the standard for future detectors in this class. The application for this detector is protein crystallography, to be conducted at a synchrotron beamline of the Advanced Light Source (ALS) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL). Protein crystallography is progressively taking advantage of the nation s synchrotron X-ray sources, because they provide million-fold brighter X-ray beams than can be had at home laboratories, and the beam is also much narrower and of more uniform energy. Once the molecular biology community learned to use these magnificent beamlines, enormous advances have been made in structural knowledge of biological systems at the molecular level. Recent determination of the molecular structures of the ribosome subunits and of the RNA polymerase II are merely examples of results that could not have been achieved without synchrotron X rays. The detector that will be developed in this project will further amplify the capabilities of the synchrotron beamline on which it will be installed. While the science of molecular biology is the driving reason for developing this detector, the project itself will be predominantly one of electronic engineering. The detector will feature advanced new Charge-Coupled Devices (CCDs) that have recently been developed that have lower noise and faster performance than previous CCDs. Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) and Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) will be integrated into the control system of the detector, and its readout system will be the new S-LINK parallel fiberoptic interface. The MBC electronics group is well known for its extremely low-noise analog electronics, but this detector will also feature radically new digital signal processing to reduce the uncertainty of reading the electronic charge of each CCD pixel, permitting up to 18-bit readout registration. The new detector will have a square active area 32 cm on each side, that can be repetitively observed every 0.67 seconds. It will have a dynamic range- the ratio of strongest weakest signals it can simultaneously detect- exceeding 250,000:1. Its spatial resolution will permit neighboring Bragg spots to be measured even when they are only 0.6 mm apart, so this detector will be able to resolve over 500 spots across its 32 cm width. All of these characteristic parameters exceed those of existing crystallographic detectors, and taken together as a whole this detector will be dramatically better than any now available doc13620 none Roger W. Webster Millersville University MRI: Development of Haptic Instrumentation and Software for Computer Science Research and Training Using Surgical Simulation as the Application This is a proposal for instrumentation development under the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program to support research and student training in the area of haptic human-computer interaction using surgical simulation as the application. The design and development of haptic surgical instruments which attach to a commercially available device will enable users to practice virtual surgery and will enhance the human-computer interface in realistic simulation applications doc13621 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Lawlor at Rochester Institute of Technology to purchase three pieces of research equipment: a Genetic Analyzer, a DNA synthesizer and a diode array spectrophotometer. These complementary pieces would form an equipment suite that would facilitate the research programs of four investigators in the departments of biological sciences and chemistry. The research areas are diverse; they range from molecular characterization of immune response molecules in the great apes to creation of bacterial-resistant transgenic plants. They also include the functional characterization of bacterial enzyme systems, as well as the definition of closely related Central-American iguana species. The immune response molecules regulate the activity of natural killer cells, a lymphoid cell population instrumental in detecting virus-infected cells. The transgenic plant project explores the possibility of creating plants with increased production of a naturally occurring molecule that protects against bacterial parasites. The function of threonine dehydrogenase, an essential enzyme in a key metabolic pathway for many bacterial species, will be better understood after molecular characterization of its variant forms. The iguana project is intent on enumerating the species central Mexico and determining how similar they are to one another. The projects, although disparate, share the feature that they are basic biological research projects that would benefit by being able to characterize and sequence the relevant genes. The suite of equipment will permit the requisite DNA sequencing experiments so that the apes can be tested for the presence of the natural killer genes. If present, precise comparisons can be made against those found in human. The plant transgene, created using recombinant DNA techniques, needs to be sequenced to insure proper construction of the gene. Without this quality control assessment, subsequent experiments cannot be undertaken. Preliminary sequence information obtained for gram-negative bacteria, other than E. coli, reveals major differences in the nucleotide sequence for threonine dehydrogenase. These differences will be completely defined by sequencing the gene from the various bacterial species. Earlier field trips to Mexico provided the samples required for DNA sequence analysis of genes, mitochondrial and nuclear, that will form the database for estimating relatedness amongst the species. Although the DNA sequencer is the central equipment item, the DNA synthesizer will allow oligonucleotide production for the sequencing experiments and the spectrophotometer is necessary for accurate estimations of reagent amounts. The scientific contributions from the four projects will be enhanced due to the expanded capability provided by the equipment. Experiments that couldn t be undertaken previously can now be performed in the respective laboratories. It is expected that a better definition of the evolution of the natural killer genes in humans and apes will be one result. Also, testing the hypothesis that transgenic plants are superior to non-transgenic plants in regards to bacterial invasion will be possible. The characterization of the threonine dehydrogenase gene will provide insights as to the regions of the molecule critical for its function. Finally, an understanding of the biogeography of mesoamerica will be increased from the description of the iguana species that are indigenous to that area doc13622 none With this award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program Towson University will be able to acquire equipment for a pulsed laser deposition system. The pulsed laser deposition system will be primarily used to fabricate thin films of several technologically useful and novel multi-component perovskite metal oxides and related materials. These materials include superconductors, colossal magnetoresistive manganites and other magnetic oxides, as well as other perovskite oxides suitable for sensor applications. The thin film research program will address materials physics issues that are pertinent to sensor applications as well as those of fundamental interest. The initial stage of the program will focus on the development colossal magnetoresistive manganite thin films for uncooled infrared imaging and magnetic sensor applications. The proposed research will provide a strong and versatile synthetic materials base for the development of a Regional Materials Research Laboratory at Towson University. The pulsed laser deposition system, in conjunction with the existing surface characterization facility will play a vital role in this effort. The facility will have positive impact on the education and training of undergraduates and students from under-represented groups at Towson University. With this award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program Towson University will be able to acquire equipment for a pulsed laser deposition system. Towson University has initiated the development of a Materials Research Laboratory, which will act as a regional facility for research and education. A Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD) system will be the cornerstone of this multidisciplinary facility and will service researchers at Towson University, local colleges and universities, government laboratories, and industry. The materials research facility will support investigations by the faculty and their students that seek to characterize the physical and chemical properties of both natural and synthetic materials. Initial PLD projects will focus on thin films of colossal magnetoresistive materials, High Temperature Superconductors, Ferroelectrics and other perovskite oxides of interest for various sensor applications or as metallic electrodes. The analytical methods and techniques developed during these investigations will be shared and integrated into other projects and will serve to foster the collaborative atmosphere that already exists between the geoscience, physics, and astronomy programs. The facility will have positive impact on the education and training of undergraduates and students from under-represented groups at Towson University doc13623 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) and the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Programs, W. Andreas Schroeder, Charles E. Brown and James W. Longworth of the University of Illinois in Chicago, and James R. Norris of the University of Chicago will develop an all-optical, broadband electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectrometer with picosecond time resolution. This ultrafast EPR spectrometer will allow the investigators to perform picosecond time-resolved absorption and echo spectroscopy on the formation and decay of triplet states, radicals, and radical ion pairs in both chemical systems and biochemical enzymes. The spectrometer will have 10 picosecond temporal resolution, which is three orders of magnitude faster than conventional EPR spectrometers. This instrument will require the construction of a high-power picosecond laser system, the generation of optical frequencies by optical parametric generation, the generation of ultrashort microwave pulses by optical rectification, its optical propagation, detection by electro-optic sampling and analysis of the detected microwave signals by advanced signal processing. Each of these exemplifies the current state-of-the-art and thus represents an education opportunity for both graduate and undergraduate students. This technology will become widely adopted, due to the significance of photochemistry and photobiology in both research and industry doc13624 none The Principal Investigators will acquire dedicated instrumentation for computational research in structural biology, material science, and environmental marine sciences. The investigators also lead the undergraduate & graduate computational science curricula at UNC-Chapel Hill, which will benefit from the proposed instrumentation. The proposed equipment includes clusters of linux workstations, two 16-processor beowulf-class machines for parallel programming development and education, and a next generation mid-sized shared memory machine|a 48 processor SGI Origin . These three components will be integrated using campus optical fiber, and shared file and processing systems, with consistent configuration and portability across the six departments (Chemistry, Computer Science, Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Marine Science, Mathematics, Statistics) and the Institute for Marine Sciences (IMS). High-end production work will continue to be accomplished at the nearby North Carolina Supercomputing Center, which include a tera op IBM SP system with 180 nodes and 720 processors. The proposed instrumentation, along with the NCSC facility, will yield a high-performance computational environment for the interdisciplinary computational science research and education program at UNC-CH doc13625 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. David Jenkins and Michael Lemke at the University of Illinois at Springfield (UIS) to purchase an image analysis suite to be used in aquatic ecology research and st udent (B.S., M.S.) research training. The image analysis suite will also be available to o ther scientists and students at t he UIS campus. The suite will be composed of three different research-grade Olympus microscopes: a compound light microscope with epifluorescence and phase-contrast capabilities; a stereo dissecting microscope; and an inverted light microscope. All three microscopes can be connected to a computer Image Analysis System with a digital camera, plus that camera can be used to photograph electrophoresis results. Finally, a Polaroid HR Digital Palette Color Film Recorder will allow digital images to be converted to film suitable for publication or presentation at scientific meetings or in the classroom, and a printer will provide hardcopy capability. Research with the image analysis suite will focus on two related disciplines of aquatic ecology: invertebrate and microbial ecology. Aquatic invertebrate ecology research at UIS investigates: the potential of invertebrates as wetland indicators in central Illinois; mechanisms of organismal spatial patterns in temporary freshwat er ponds; empirically-based models of metapopulation networks and gene flow; and endosymbionts in microcrustaceans. The microscopes will be used frequently for all of that research (e.g., taxonomic identification, fluorescence microscopy to indicate symbiont presence), and images of electrophoresis gels will facilitate research on population genetics. Aquatic microbial ecology research at UIS heavily relies on microscopic analysis (e.g., fluorescent staining for enumeration and biomass) to investigate: bacterial population dynamics in anthropogenically-impacted st reams, t he identification of culturable and non-culturable river microbial communities by advanced molecular biology techniques, degradation of natural and t oxic subst ances by microbial assemblage (i.e. domains Bacteria and Archaea), and rain-pulse effects on bacterial and viral abundance. Students will be trained in use of the suite, and will then conduct research for independent and honor s projects, Masters theses, and advanced courses (e.g., Aquatic Ecology, Microbial Ecology). Ot her science faculty and students will also share in use of the microscopes. The requested instruments will permit an expansion of current research and research training, and will facilitate the collaboration of UIS faculty with investigators at other institutions. UIS students will have greatly improved training and access to important scientific equipment for aquatic ecology, which will in turn advance UIS r esearch capabilities and st rengthen the curricula in the UIS Biology and Chemistry departments doc13626 none This project proposes to develop an application delivery system, in collaboration with the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), which will provide real-time distance learning opportunities. This system will be created by: (1) Establishing a high-speed, high-bandwidth Internet2 gateway at the Texas A&M University (TAMU) Center at UNAM (2) Connecting the Texas A&M University Virtual Networking Lab to the gateway (3) Linking distance learning studios at Texas A&M University and UNAM The user population for the project is as diverse as the institution s populations and includes: (1) Texas A&M University Educational Broadcasting Services (2) Texas A&M University Architecture Study Abroad students and faculty (3) Texas A&M University Latin American Study Program (4) Texas A&M University Chemistry Department (5) DGSCA-UNAM (6) Mexican students in U.S. continuing education programs (7) Mexican networking students and personnel needing hands-on continuing networking education doc13627 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program to the University of Arkansas is for the acquisition of a field emission environmental scanning electron microscope. The system is expected to provide a spatial resolution of two nanometer at thirty kilovolt accelerating voltage and at elevated chamber pressure up to ten Torr. This allows imaging of biological or other wet samples without the requirement of conducting coating. The system will be equipped with hot cold stages and micromanipulators. It includes additional features such as computerized image processing with capability to capture videos of sample evolution. Faculty and students from universities in Arkansas with under-represented minorities will have remote access to the instrument. The instrument will be used by twenty faculty members along with students and postdocs. The instrument will also support the research and training activities of the Arkansas-Oklahoma Center of Instrumentation and Science for Planetary Surfaces, the Center for Advanced Technology and the MRSEC. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program to the University of Arkansas is for the acquisition of a field emission environmental scanning electron microscope. The system is expected to provide a spatial resolution of two nanometer at thirty kilovolt accelerating voltage and at elevated chamber pressure up to ten Torr. This allows imaging of biological or other wet samples without the requirement of conducting coating. The system will be equipped with hot cold stages and micromanipulators. It includes additional features such as computerized image processing with capability to capture videos of sample evolution. Faculty and students from universities in Arkansas with under-represented minorities will have remote access to the instrument. The instrument will be used by twenty faculty members along with students and postdocs. The instrument will also support the research and training activities of the Arkansas-Oklahoma Center of Instrumentation and Science for Planetary Surfaces, the Center for Advanced Technology and the MRSEC doc13628 none The objective of this NSF-CONACyT project between Texas A&M University (College Station, Texas, USA) and the Universidad de las Americas (Puebla, Mexico) is to develop and deploy instructional material that allows the easy incorporation of global manufacturing knowledge into the industrial, mechanical, manufacturing or similar curricula. The material developed in this project will be implemented in the industrial engineering, mechanical and manufacturing curricula affecting more than 1,200 students in these institutions. The approach is to develop lecture supplements and case studies based on real industrial situations. Case studies provide the student and instructors with realistic industrial context that includes technical data, as well as, a description of the cultural and socio-economic environment of the community in which the facility is located. Companies targeted are in industry sectors where there is significant trade between Mexico and the USA including the auto, electronics and textile industries. Lecture supplements are focused analytical modules, developed within the context provided by a case study, that deal with problems specific to topics taught in engineering and science courses. Lecture supplements will be carefully designed for their easy adoption in the curricula of the participating organizations. Detailed guidelines for deployment will de developed based on the educational methodologies developed by the Foundation Coalition at Texas A&M University. Active learning and teaming will constitute the essential pedagogical method for the in-class delivery of all course material. Moreover, the use of technology-enabled education such as web technologies and instructional software will be incorporated in all CS and LS. The assessment, evaluation, and dissemination techniques developed and implemented by the Foundation Coalition will be central to these activities in the proposed project. It is expected that the results of this project will help future engineers and scientists understand how to efficiently exchange and deploy technology and scientific knowledge, and conduct business across the USA-Mexico border doc13629 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Lawrance at Otterbein College to acquire automated DNA sequencing equpiment. Otterbein College is a comprehensive liberal arts college of approximately 3,000 students founded in and located in Westerville, Ohio. The DNA sequencing equipment will be used in a variety of contexts (including faculty undergraduate student research projects, course associated laboratory experiences, middle school teacher preparation, general undergraduate education and in collaborations with scientists at academic research institutions and the private sector) to make the technologies associated with the completion of the human genome project available to more than 250 undergraduate students annually. The research applications that will be supported by the grant include student faculty research projects focusing on the genes responsible for transplant rejection, autoimmune diseases, and sugar transport; the genetic structure of populations of endangered species; and in the analysis of antibodies produced against tumors. Teaching applications will include lecture and laboratory experiences associated with disciplinary courses including Introductory Biology, Immunology, Human Genetics, Molecular Phylogenetics, Microbial Physiology, Human Microbiology, Cell Biology, Advanced Biochemistry and Developmental Biology. Interdisciplinary teaching applications will include the Integrative Studies (general education program) course Biological Sciences: Being in Nature and an education course, Introduction to Life Science, to be team taught by members of the Biology and Education Departments. The automated DNA sequencing equipment will be utilized in activities that are aligned with Otterbein s new strategic plan to modernize its science facility, enhance interdisciplinarity and research based instruction, attract more science students, increase diversity and enhance support for student research. The equipment will also be used in a variety of outreach programs, including programs for under-represented minority youth. The equipment will serve as a catalyst for further infusion of the research oriented biology of the 21st century into introductory and advanced level courses in Life Sciences, as well as courses in Chemistry, Education, Nursing and Otterbein s general education program. Ultimately, the project will contribute to greater scientific literacy and encourage more students to pursue careers in science and science education doc13630 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. s Riegel, Kilpatrick, and Robart at the University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown Campus to fund the acquisition and operation of a genetic analzer. The genetic analyzer will be used to train undergraduate students carrying out molecular biological research in the areas of virology, population genetics, and plant systematics. The genetic analyzer will be used to support the undergraduate research initiatives conducted by students directed by these three faculty members. Undergraduates working with Dr. Riegel (Department of Chemistry) study the virus which affects gypsy moths. One study involves the temporal expression of a gene and the other study involves a mutant with an aberrant morphology. The analyzer will be used to verify the DNA sequence of the mutants constructed in the course of the temporal expression study, and to sequence the aberrant morphology mutation once it is localized. This virus is important to study as it and related viruses are used as biological control agents, and one of the related viruses is used in a protein expression system. Proper understanding of the control of genetic expression and the mutations that arise are important to the optimal use of these viruses as control agents and expression systems. Students of Dr. Kilpatrick (Department of Biology) carry out research in the area of population genetics. They study fitness components in hybrid fruit flies derived from crosses among geographically diverse populations, and the role of mitochondrial DNA variation in determining organismal fitness. His students will use the analyzer to sequence multilocus genotypes of individual flies and then to analyze the patterns found. Because these data are often used to measure genetic differences and gene flow among natural populations, this work will aid in the interpretation of variations in the genetic patterns in many species. Dr. Robart s students (Department of Biology) carry out research in the area of plant molecular systematics. They are using molecular sequencing to reconstruct the phylogenetic relationship of the lousewort. Dr. Robart s students will use the analyzer to sequence particular genetic regions of the plants to construct a phylogenetic tree. In addition the analyzer s ability to carry out microsatellite and amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) analysis will allow students to measure gene flow and trace patterns of evolutionary diversification among the different varieties of the plant. This work will contribute to the understanding of the rise of new flowering plant species and the diversification of their floral characteristics. The genetic analyzer will be part of a major effort on the part of UPJ to enhance undergraduate research and training in molecular biology and biochemistry. Within the past 5 years, UPJ has added a biochemist to the chemistry department, hired a second molecular biologist and constructed and equipped new laboratory facilities for molecular biochemical research. The genetic analyzer will greatly enhance this effort. Undergraduate researchers trained on this equipment will be able to better carry out research in the field of molecular biology and its applications to virology, plant systematics, and population genetics doc13631 none Nanoscale science and engineering is an emerging technological field and has immense economic and societal impacts. This NSF MRI project presents an innovative concept of a six-axis magnetically levitated (maglev) instrument. This novel instrument can be a fundamental research tool in many crucial research activities in nanotechnology and other precision applications dealing with delicate motions and forces. They include manufacture of nanoscale structures, atomic-level manipulation, assembly and packaging of microparts, vibration isolation for instrumentation, and seismic motion detection. A compact, lightweight, single-moving part that holds the specimen will eventually be magnetically levitated in all six degrees of freedom. The objective of this MRI project is development of a maglev prototype design concept and to demonstrate its applicability in nanotechnology. Magnetic levitation is an enabling technology for high-precision multi-axis motion generation and control. During the first year of this instrument development program, we will derive a dynamic model and analyze mechanical and electromagnetic characteristics. After completing detailed design, we will construct a single-axis unit lenear actuator, compare its behavior with the theory, and calibrate it experimentally. This unit actuator will be a corner stone for the full 6-axis instrument to be constructed by the end of the second year. During the last year of this MRI project, we will design and implement real-time digital controllers based on the dynamic model obtained previously, and perform various tests and experiments doc13632 none Cayan This Major Research Instrumentation award to University of California San Diego s Scripps Institution of Oceanography will provide support for acquisition of a cluster computer system for use by the new Center for Observations, Modeling, and Prediction at Scripps (COMPAS). Research use of the system will emphasize regional to global scale ocean atmosphere modeling, fine-scale modeling of coastal and wave processes, process-oriented ocean modeling and ocean state estimation, and graduate education, to which 25% of the computational time will be allocated. The system will be housed at Scripps Institution of Oceanography; technical support and archival storage will be provided by the San Diego Supercomputer Center. UCSD will contribute 30% of the cost of this project from non-federal funds doc13633 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program, Drexel University will be able to acquire new kinds of Raman instrumentation, for ultraviolet (UV) radiation sources and scanning near-field optical microscopes (SNOM). These systems dramatically expand capabilities of Raman spectroscopy and allow addressing new problems, that cannot be resolved using conventional instruments, and to discover fundamental nanoscale phenomena in materials. An example of use of UV Raman is analysis of carbon bonding in diamond, amorphous carbon, graphite, nanotubes and fullerenes. Very thin surface layers of semiconductors or monolayers of organic molecules can be studied using UV Raman spectroscopy. Near-field Raman spectroscopy is of principal importance for electronic devices, interfaces, carbon nanotubes and other submicrometer objects, where a better spatial resolution compared to other Raman instruments can make a great difference. Raman SNOM may allow a breakthrough of Raman spectroscopy into nanotechnology. The new instruments will be an integral component of a new Raman facility at Drexel University. This will create a unique combination of Raman instruments, which will support materials research and nanotechnology programs in such diverse areas as novel carbon nanostructures, semiconductor films and devices, nanolaminate ceramics, composites and biomaterials. Graduate and undergraduate students from Drexel University and University of Pennsylvania will use the spectrometers, researchers from local companies and high school students. %%% With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation program Drexel University will be able to acquire microspectrometers using ultraviolet (UV) radiation sources and scanning near-field optical microscopes. These systems dramatically expand capabilities of Raman spectroscopy and allow addressing new problems, that cannot be resolved using conventional instruments, and to discover fundamental phenomena in materials. An example of use of UV Raman is analysis of carbon bonding in diamond, diamond-like carbon films and other novel carbon materials. Another advantages of UV over visible Raman are a lower background increase with temperature, which allows for high temperature measurements on a variety of materials, lower fluorescence and resonance enhancement. Very thin surface layers of semiconductors or monolayers of organic molecules can be studied using UV Raman spectroscopy. Near-field Raman spectroscopy is of principal importance for electronic devices, interfaces, carbon nanotubes and other submicrometer objects, where a better spatial resolution compared to other Raman instruments can make a great difference. New instruments will be an integral component of a new Raman facility at Drexel University. This will create a unique combination of Raman instruments, which will support materials research and training and nanotechnology programs in such diverse areas as novel carbon nanostructures, semiconductor films and devices, nanolaminate ceramics, composites and biomaterials doc13634 none This proposal requests support for the development of a Silicon Vertex Detector to allow discovery of the long-sought Higgs boson using the D0 detector in Run II at the Fermilab Tevatron proton-antiproton collider. The Tevatron collider is currently the only facility in the world capable of making a Higgs discovery. Simulation studies have shown that the two Tevatron collider experiments, CDF and D0, are sensitive to the Higgs over almost all its presently allowed mass range. Furthermore, there is some evidence from the recently decommissioned LEP electron-positron collider at CERN for a light Higgs (~115 GeV) in the region where the Fermilab experiments have their greatest sensitivity. A key element in the Higgs search is the ability to detect the b-quarks from Higgs decay. The b-quark lifetime is sufficiently long (~1.5 picoseconds) that it can be identified by a Silicon Vertex Detector that precisely measures charged particle tracks. The current D0 silicon detector was designed well before the potential for making a Higgs discovery was appreciated and is not sufficiently radiation-hard for the Higgs search. Thus, the D0 collaboration has embarked on designing a new Silicon Vertex Detector that is specifically optimized for the Higgs search, to be installed by when the performance of the current vertex detector will have been diminished by radiation damage. With this MRI proposal, a consortium of eight university groups, five of which are currently supported by the NSF for their D0 work, propose to develop, procure, assemble, and test the silicon sensor assemblies for five of the six layers that will be built. These assemblies are the active elements that make the charged track measurements and constitute a major contribution to the detector. The development of this new silicon vertex detector would be a joint development project between university groups and Fermilab. Much of the intellectual and technical leadership for this effort originates in the university groups. NSF support will bring strong intellectual and technical input to the project through the design, fabrication, and testing of detector components by university faculty and students working closely together at their home institutions doc13635 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. R. Howard Berg at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, St. Louis, Missouri, to acquire a high pressure freezer, a freeze substitution unit, and an energy filter transmission electron microscope (EFTEM). These instruments will be essential for the state of the art electron microscopy that will be done at the Danforth Center. The Balzers High Pressure Freezer permits preservation of plant cells for electron microscopy by a physical process: ultra-rapid freezing of plant tissues. Compared to chemical fixation, cells fixed by high pressure freezing show excellent preservation of cytoplasm, organelles, and delicate structures such as secretory structures and microtubules, and with minimum shrinkage and swelling artifacts. These cells also have heightened antigenicity when used for immunolabeling purposes. This physical fixation process (cryofixation) is currently the most practical method for uniform immobilization of cell components from small solutes to large macromolecular complexes. These qualities improve analysis of the in situ molecular environment of cells and are essential for meeting our goals in cell biology studies at the Danforth Center. Thin sections of cryofixed and freeze-substituted specimens will be imaged in an EFTEM, equipped with an energy filter and CCD camera. The energy filter is an in-column electron spectrometer that is used to select electrons of the appropriate energies (from those scattered by the specimen) to generate specimen contrast. Compared to a conventional TEM, this gives much more flexibility in generating specimen contrast. Conventional thin sections can be imaged in high contrast, even with no or poor section staining, and immunogold-labeled sections prepared to optimize antigenicity (but normally poor in contrast) can be adjusted to optimal contrast without staining in heavy metals. The energy filter can be used to minimize chromatic aberration, making it possible to image thick sections with clarity. Coupled with the EFTEM s stage-tilting goniometer, this permits depth analysis in cells via electron tomography. The EFTEM can be used to map elemental distribution in thin sections and, coupled with cryofixation and freeze substitution, this gives the potential to analyze the distribution of soluble elements in plant tissues. The current projects from Danforth personnel that will use this equipment include: investigation of the cell and molecular biology of plant pathogenic viruses (tobamoviruses and geminiviruses) by thick section electron tomography, thin section TEM, and immunogold localization of viral proteins, during infection of plant cells. All samples will be high pressure-frozen and freeze substituted, to optimally preserve infection events. Other projects include investigation of Rab protein-mediated membrane trafficking in plant cells; immunogold localization of enzyme complexes involved in inosine monophosphate metabolism, and of enzymes of lignin biosynthesis; immunolocalization of antigens produced by plant vaccines to investigate their targeting in mammalian tissue; and use of the deep etch rotary shadowing method to investigate plasmodesma structure in plant tissues. We are also encouraging scientists from regional institutes to make use of these instruments. This instrumentation will be a key element in furthering the mission of the Danforth Center. The Danforth Center is dedicated to applying new knowledge in basic plant biology to help sustain productivity in agriculture, and to contribute to the education and training of graduate and postdoctoral students, scientists and technicians from around the world doc13636 none Bulfin Description: This project supports a cooperative research project between Dr. Robert Bulfin, Department of Industrial Engineering, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama and Dr. Rym M Hallah, Department of Quantitative Methods, Institute Superior de Gestion de Sousse, Sousse, Tunisia. The focus of the research will be on using surrogate relaxation approaches to solve large scale scheduling problems with due dates. The two scientists have already modeled the weighted number of tardy jobs for single and parallel machine systems as integer programs, induced knapsack structure for surrogate bounds, and developed heuristic and exact algorithms to solve the resulting problems. This limited work has produced algorithms capable of solving the largest problem instances to date in short computer time. The present research extends these ideas to other performance measures (tardiness, number of tardy jobs and their weighted counterparts) and various machine environments (single, parallel and flow shop problems). Specifically the work will center on developing heuristic and exact algorithms to solve the single and parallel machine tardiness scheduling problems, and flow shop number of tardy jobs scheduling problems, and the flow shop number of tardy jobs scheduling problem. Scope: Dr. Bulfin s research interests are on solving real world applications in production control and scheduling. Dr. M Hallah has been working on developing computer based solutions for the industrial sector, especially the chemical and garment industries in Tunisia. She will make the results of this research available to the Tunisian garment industry and use them in a scheduling module as part of a computer-aided management software system doc13637 none Pingitore This grant, made through Major Research Instrumentation Program, provides partial support of the costs for upgrading the operating system of UTEP s 14-year-old, first generation Cameca SX-50 electron microprobe. We will acquire a control system upgrade to replace the antiquated DEC PDP-based software on our Cameca microprobe. The DEC system is no longer supported by DEC or Cameca; newly developed analytical and imaging capabilities have not been available to us. The original Kevex EDS (energy dispersive spectrometer) system likewise is seriously outdated and has no EDS imaging and mapping capability or light-element detection. We will replace this with a system featuring a full imaging and mapping package, high counting rate, and light-element detector window. UTEP s electron microprobe laboratory is a multi-user and multi-disciplinary facility. It serves research, research training and instructional functions for individuals and groups from across our campus, including members of the Colleges of Science, Engineering, Liberal Arts, and Health Sciences. The microprobe laboratory also assists individuals, businesses, educational institutions, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations in the El Paso-Juarez community and beyond. The three co-investigators and their research groups have 15 projects, currently underway, which will make use of the upgraded facility. These research projects include the following topics: tectonics, metamorphic reactions, phytoremediation, environmental bio-sensors, desert varnish, particulate matter air pollution, plutonism, biosorption of heavy metals, trace elements in corals, microprobe data quantification, speciation of metals in soil, and foram Mg Ca paleothermometry. Additional microprobe equipment use on funded projects from other UTEP researchers includes such topic areas as pigments, catalytic materials, archaeology, health, soil salination, composites, and exotic alloys. Early and continued exposure to research is an essential part of UTEP s strategy to attract and retain students in science and engineering, particularly under-represented minorities. Mexican-Americans comprise approximately 2 3 of the student body at UTEP. Two of the Co-PIs are minority members, who serve as special role models and close student mentors. Instrumentation and hands-on laboratory experience are important to establish the connection with students that often determines their academic choices, success, and ultimate career paths doc13638 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of California in San Diego will acquire a High Resolution Mass Spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) transition metal-mediated chemistry of alkynes; b) the development of novel peptidomimetic structures with interesting biological properties; c) the use of directed chemical synthesis to elucidate problems in physical organic chemistry; d) the development of fluorescent chemosensors; and e) the preparation of large and small metal clusters. Mass spectrometry (MS) is a technique used to probe intimate structural details and to obtain the molecular compositions of a vast array of organic, bioorganic, and organometallic molecules. The results from these studies will have an impact in a number of areas including the development of new catalysts doc13639 none Under this Major Research Instrumentation award the Principal Investigator will acquire a high-performance computer cluster to be used as the primary computational resource for the mesoscale dynamics and numerical modeling group within the Division of Atmospheric Sciences (DAS) at the University of Nevada. The recent expansion of DAS s research scope including two National Science Foundation funded projects focusing on mesoscale atmospheric phenomena and mesoscale numerical modeling has led to an immediate need for dedicated computational resources to better support present and planned research activities. The acquisition of a 32-node computer cluster will be a significant and cost-effective expansion of the research infrastructure at DAS. Such a dedicated, high-speed computing platform will provide supercomputer performance at a fraction of the cost of a commercial supercomputer, and is crucial for the numerical modeling group and associated students to continue to conduct competitive research aimed at improving numerical weather forecasting within current and future projects. The graduate student research training is an important part of the research enterprise at DRI. The requested equipment will provide an environment to extensively train students pursuing advanced degrees in the Atmospheric Sciences Program. It will foster a closer collaboration between the Computer and Atmospheric Science Departments. In the long term, the equipment is expected to provide a focal point for interdisciplinary collaboration and, especially, facilitate a wider adoption of high-performance parallel computing in earth sciences at the University of Nevada doc13640 none This is an award from the Major Research Instrumentation program to the University of Oklahoma Norman campus. The University of Oklahoma Norman campus will acquire the Equinox 55 (Buncker Optics INC) Fourier-Transform Raman (FT-Raman) system and a far-infrared spectral range expansion package. The instrument will have impact on an existing interdisciplinary research program of faculty in the Physics and Astronomy, and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. The researchers seek a fundamental understanding of polymer electrolyte and intercalation materials for next generation lithium rechargeable batteries. The new instrument will enhance an existing interdisciplinary research and will benefit graduate and undergraduate students. It will be integrated into an active education and research program which includes junior and senior undergraduates as well as in an existing summer REU program. This is an award from the Major Research Instrumentation program to the University of Oklahoma Norman campus. The University of Oklahoma Norman campus will acquire the Equinox 55 (Buncker Optics INC) Fourier-Transform Raman system and a far-infrared spectral range expansion package. The instrument will have impact on an existing interdisciplinary research program of faculty in the Physics and Astronomy, and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. The researchers seek a fundamental understanding of polymer electrolyte and intercalation materials for next generation lithium rechargeable batteries. The new instrument will enhance an existing interdisciplinary research and will benefit graduate and undergraduate students. It will be integrated into an active education and research program which includes junior and senior undergraduates as well as in an existing summer REU program doc13641 none Bales This award supports a Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program project for one year of funding to develop a state-of-the-art continuous flow analysis (CFA) system that will be used for measuring concentrations of eight soluble chemical species (calcium, hydrogen peroxide, ammonium, formaldehyde, nitrate, sodium, chloride and sulfate) plus electrical conductivity in polar ice cores. The system will be designed for use in either the laboratory or the field and will consist of a melter (to hold, feed, melt and monitor the core melting progress) and a liquid-flow system to distribute melted samples and mix with reagents. In addition, the system will have a detector to measure the various analytical streams and a data acquisition and processing system for manipulating the large amounts of data that will be produced. While the chemical principles used in the detectors are well established, the design of the overall system and the detailed instrumentation will be entirely new. This new instrument will enable U.S. ice core scientists to remain at the forefront of technology and will increase the quality and rate at which new ice core records can be produced. The access to new ice core records which will be produced by this instrument should result in a better understanding of climate and atmospheric chemistry doc13642 none This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) award provides funds for the acquisition of an ultra high speed camera capable of recording 16 digital images of x resolution at frame rates up to 200 million frames per second. The camera will be used to study material deformation and chip-tool interface friction in metal cutting. The ultra high framing rate will enable extension of current capabilities for determination of the velocity, strain and strain rate distribution in the primary and secondary shear zones in low speed orthogonal cutting to much higher cutting speeds. Results will be used to determine material constitutive properties at high strain, strain rate and temperature, obtain the shear stress along the chip-tool interface, and verify computational models of metal cutting at high cutting speeds. The camera will also be used in experiments in a second course in manufacturing processes doc13643 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program to Arizona State University will be used to acquire an inductively coupled plasma (ICP) etcher to support a broad spectrum of well-funded interdisciplinary research programs with a common focus on new integrated microsystems technologies for novel, high payoff applications. The unique performance of this equipment provides a critical tool that will substantially enhance wide bandgap semiconductor and silicon fabrication capabilities, and thereby open up new frontiers in microsystems concepts and applications for active exploration and discovery. The equipment is configured with two independent etch chambers and ICP sources to run a chlorine-based etch process for group III - nitrides, and a Bosch fluorine-based process for deep etching of silicon. The dual chamber system will avoid process cross-contamination and enhance overall reliability and robustness of the etching to be performed. Research supported by this equipment falls into one of two technology areas: (i) Wide Bandgap Materials, Devices and Microsystems, and (ii) Si-based Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS). Researchers in interdisciplinary teams from Materials Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Bioengineering, Mechanical Engineering, Physics, Plant Biology, Chemistry and Biochemistry will be the principal equipment users. It is anticipate that substantial breakthroughs in each of the target applications will be enabled through the new patterning capability of the ICP etch tool. The equipment will be run as a multi-user facility housed in the class M3.5 cleanroom of the interdisciplinary Center for Solid State Electronics Research (CSSER). Day-to-day operation of the equipment will be overseen by CSSER s Associate Director. The majority of the actual users of the equipment will be post-doctoral, graduate student and undergraduate student researchers. Students will benefit from hands-on training with state-of-the-art fabrication equipment and the exciting, creative environment of interdisciplinary microsystems research. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program will allow Arizona State University to create a state-of-the-art high density plasma processing facility that will provide unique micropatterning capabilities that cannot otherwise be realized. The new multi-user facility will bring catalyze research collaboration between materials scientists, chemical engineers, electrical engineers, physicists, chemists, and biologists, reflecting the highly interdisciplinary nature of the activities to be undertaken. Through this new capability and new synergies, ASU will contribute to the high technology industrial base by expanding research and education capabilities in the design, synthesis, fabrication, and application of novel microsystems. Research supported by this unique high tech processing equipment will enable advances in interdisciplinary advanced materials research in two high-payoff areas: (1) silicon-based nanostructure science and technology, and (2) wide bandgap semiconductor microsystems. Students and postdocs will benefit from hands-on training with state-of-the-art fabrication equipment and the exciting, creative environment of interdisciplinary microsystems research doc13644 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. David H. Russell at Texas A&M University (TAMU) to develop matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization (MALDI) high resolution time-of-flight (TOF) mass specroscopy for rapid, high-sensitivity analysis of peptides and proteins. The instrument development project is a collaboration involving scientist at TAMU and three of the leading manufacturers of mass spectrometry instruments. Successful completion of the project objectives will provide immediate improvements for macromolecule mass spectrometry. A secondary objective of the proposed research involves the development of a high-sensitivity, periodic focusing ion mobility (IM) drift tube, which will be used for rapid separation of peptides and or proteins present in complex biological mixtures. Following successful development of the IM drift tube it will be adapted to the high resolution TOF instrument. The combination of IM and high resolution TOF mass spectrometry will provide enhanced capabilities for protein identification, especially studies of protein expression, post-translational modifications and peptide protein sequencing. The actual construction of the high resolution TOF mass spectrometer involves extensive modifications to an existing instrument initially designed and constructed by ABI-PerSeptive, Inc. and installed at TAMU in . The instrument is highly unique, only 3 such instruments were ever built, and the basic instrument platform still represents cutting-edge capabilities in TOF mass resolution (mass resolving powers of 15,000-25,000 are routine) and mass measurement accuracy (mass errors of 10 ppm). The instrument performance will be enhanced by addition of new electronics and specially designed multi-anode ion detectors, and the geometry of the reflectron will be changed from the original co-linear configuration to a 1.5 degree reflecting angle to improve ion transmission and temporal focusing. Mass resolving power of 75,000-100,000 and mass measurement accuracy of 0.5-3 ppm is projected for the up-graded instrument. The periodic focusing ion mobility drift tube (patented by TAMU) will be designed and constructed at TAMU, and adapted to the high resolution TOF instrument by the industrial collaborators. In the last decade mass spectrometry has evolved as one of the most widely used analytical methods in biology and chemical-biology. Of the modern mass spectrometers, TOF instruments are the most user-friendly and versatile, and TOF instruments are the most widely used by biologist and chemical-biologist. Consequently, development of new, high performance TOF instruments will broadly impact biological research. The PI has developed a large number of biology and chemical-biology collaborators, which insures that the proposed instrument will be effectively used by collaborators at TAMU and across the nation. A major challenge facing biologist and chemical-biologist involves characterization and identification of small amounts of biological materials present is highly complex mixtures, and the development of IM and high-resolution TOF instruments have great potential to raise the performance bar for macromolecule mass spectrometry. The development of the instrumentation and the concomitant methods development will have significant impact in the future training of bio-analytical chemists and chemical-biologists. Lastly, the proposed research meets goals of the MRI program aimed at promoting partnerships between academic researchers and private sector instrument developers doc13645 none In this proposal, a post-operation packaging process is proposed where distributed microsensors that are too small to include data transmission electronics can be packaged and read using self-assembly after they have performed their sensing operations. There are many systems in use today where fluids move through extremely small channels. Examples include flow cytometry, fuel injection, and chemical processing. Good information about the physical state of the flow in such systems can be difficult to obtain because sensors set into the flow can be difficult to position and may interfere with the very processes that they are supposed to measure. One possible solution would be to collect data using mobile microsensors that actually travel with the flow. This is extremely appealing because sensing could be performed continuously and in-situ, but it has some basic technical difficulties since power supplies and data transmission electronics would be difficult to include due to size and cost restrictions. In addition, if an extremely large number of sensors were used, coordinating transmission protocols for all of them would be impractical. The PI proposes to solve these problems by using fluidic self-assembly (FSA) to package and read-out information from the devices after they have sensed. Since sensing operations typically consume much less power than data transmission operations, ambient energy from the environment such as light or RF could be used to drive the sensors and all interfacing for data transfer would be provided by the self-assembly process. The program has both practical engineering and fundamental scientific goals. Among the engineering goals is the development of a fluid test apparatus to investigate post-operation packaging. Power transfer to microsensors will be examined with emphasis given to the use of ambient light, laser, and RF power. Since these power sources may be intermittent, nonvolatile data storage is extremely important. Nonvolatile memory technologies that write with very little power using tunnel processes will be examined. Electronic interfacing to the self-assembled microsensors is perhaps the most critical engineering issue. Metallic bonding, micro-electro-mechanical switching, and capacitive coupling are considered. Micro-electro-mechanical switches are singled out as particularly versatile because they require no special circuitry on the microsensor and can release microsensors back into the flow after their data has been read. Scientific goals include studying the self-assembly capture process, that is, how free microsensors move into the sphere of influence of the assembly site. A study of electrostatic fine-tuning of the fluidic self-assembly process will also be performed, where micron-scale misalignments might be eliminated using capacitive coupling to guide the final stage of assembly. Studies will also be performed on device lifetimes in a flow. These will attempt to ascertain if flow dynamics can be modified or protective coatings used to minimize mechanical damage to devices that have circulated repeatedly through a flow system. The program has been designed with educational objectives in mind. Certain projects, such as the lifetime studies and parts of the self-assembly capture studies have been identified as shorter-term projects suitable for introducing undergraduates to research. Some of this work could be performed as part of the University of Minnesota s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) or Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program for under-represented students or those from small universities. Both the graduate and undergraduate level work is extremely multidisciplinary, allowing students to explore experimental as well as theoretical aspects of physics, chemistry and engineering. Finally, the technological impact of the project is broad, with potential applications in medicine, remote sensing, and industrial process control, among others. This project, since its philosophy is to include only those functions that are truly necessary on a microdevice and then package the rest later, may also be a first step in a long sought goal to create smart micro- or nanodevices with only simple initial capabilities, but the potential to self-organize new functions in response to their environment doc13646 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Samuel Galewsky and Dr. Thomas McQuistion at Millikin University. The grant is for the acquisition of a video microscopy system: including a research compound microscope equipped with DIC, phase contrast and fluorescence optics; a high resolution digital video camera for fluorescence imaging; a zoom stereo microscope with an S-video color low resolution camera attached to it; a color printer; a dedicated computer equipped with a ZIP drive; and software for morphometric and image analysis as well as time lapse videography. In Dr. Galewsky s laboratory, which focuses on the developmental regulation of genes during Drosophila embryogenesis, the system will provide significantly better image quality and resolution, enabling student researchers to thoroughly analyze complex staining patterns. In Dr. McQuistion s laboratory, which is devoted to identifying and classifying intestinal parasites in South American birds, the system will enable further work in determining parasitic prevalence and diversity among different South American host populations. And in Dr. Judith Parrish s laboratory, the system will enable researchers to view clear images of pollen grains, making possible many additional research projects in the area of pollination ecology. Students working in the laboratory will be responsible for independently using the system and its many capabilities in the course of their work. The system will also be used in multiple teaching laboratories and will thus be introduced to all Millikin biology majors (which number approximately 200 at any one time.) It will even be introduced to all Millikin students via their required science laboratory course, which features a biology laboratory component doc13647 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. David Speckhard at Loras College to purchase a high field Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectrometer. Dr. Speckhard and Loras students will use the NMR to study the three dimensional structure of molecules that are used to probe the active sites of enzymes. Enzymes are large proteins that catalyze (accelerate) the chemical reactions that occur in living cells. Each enzyme has a small pocket or cleft, called the active site, where catalysis occurs. The shape of this site determines what kind of reactions they enzyme can accelerate. Probe molecules fit in the site like a hand in a glove. The NMR is used to determine the exact shape of those probes that fit best, thereby revealing the shape of the site. In one case the NMR can be used to evaluate where the site touches the probe giving an even better picture of the site. The enzymes chosen for this study are all involved in cellular energy production, and all bind the phosphate containing compound Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP). Each enzyme can also bind other phosphate contatining compounds unique to their site shape. Examples include pyruvate kinase binding CEPA of PEP, and creatine kinase binding phosphocreatine. In the cell, a metal ion (magnesium) helps the phosphate compounds bind in the enzyme site. Substituting cobalt for magnesium creates a probe molecule that keeps its shpae long enough to study. The NMR is used to detemine which atoms of the probe mjolucule are connected to the cobalt. The NMR will also aid in the study of the glycerokinase site. In this case the probe will be carbon 13 enriched ATP. The MNR will report the distances from the carbon 13 atoms and phosphorous 31 atom in the probe to a manganese atom substituted for magnesium in the enzyme site. These distances can be used to create a good map of the glycerokinase site. The interaction of small molecules with large biomolecules is important in many areas of biochemistry. Studying the shape requirements in several kinase enzymes will help determine how enzymes have the ability to be such powerful and selective catalysts. These methods can be applied to drug receptor interactions to show how new medicines interact with biomolecules inside cells and how they may be designed to be more effective and have fewer side effects. These methods are also useful in agricultural chemistry to help produce better fertilizers and pesticides. A significant feature of the proposal is the opportunity provided to undergraduates to use the high field NMR in their research. This opportunity will significantly improve the educational experience for Loras College students since MNR techniques are so important in their future careers in medicine, biotechnology and chemical research doc13648 none This is a Small Grant for Exploratory Research to support participation in the DYCOMS-II project scheduled for July . DYCOMS (Dynamics and Chemistry of Marine Stratocumulus) is a study of mixing processes in stratocumulus clouds in the marine boundary layer off the coast of California. The main objective is to obtain high-resolution aircraft data (using the NCAR C-130) on temperature, humidity, vertical air velocity, and cloud properties, that can be used for validating large-eddy simulations of the boundary layer. The ultimate goal is to improve the parameterization of cloud-top mixing processes in large-scale models of atmospheric circulation and climate. Dr. Lilly will participate in the planning and field work of DYCOMS and use the experiments as an opportunity to evaluate a theoretical model for entrainment mixing that he has recently developed. This study will complement the main DYCOMS plan, which is to reconcile the observations of turbulent mixing with large-eddy simulations doc13649 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Patrick Larkin, Dr. Kirk Cammarata, Dr. Eugene Billiot, Dr. Feri Billiot, Dr. Patrick Louchouarn and Dr. Mark Morvant at Texas A 2) advance our understanding of the significance of organic and metal pollutants in our unique environment; and 3) develop plant-based systems (or microcosms) which can specifically detoxify contaminants in soil or water. Studies will include the analysis of seagrass species (Halodule beaudetteii, Halophila engelmannii, Cymodocea filiformis, Thalassia testudinum, and Ruppia maritima) for genetic diversity and gene flow among populations highly impacted by agricultural, recreational and industrial activity. Analysis of genetic diversity will be undertaken by the development of molecular markers, direct DNA sequencing and statistical analysis. Seagrasses and associated aquatic plants will be studied to assess their ability for the bioaccumulation and or detoxification of environmental contaminants. In particular, mechanistic studies will utilize capillary electrophoresis technology to characterize the occurrence of relevant chelators in study plants. Parameters to be identified and quantified include metal concentrations, organic acids, amino acids, phytochelatins, and transport proteins. We also wish to study how plants and seagrasses in particular, respond to remove organic pollutants, since a number of such contaminants exist along the Texas gulf coast s unique environment. We would like to: 1) quantify hydrophobic organic carbons (HOC s) in aquatic wetland plant tissues to determine partitioning and biological fate, and 2) compare HOCs in rhizosphere vs. non-rhizosphere sediments for various plants. Our research proposes to answer many questions concerning habitat requirements, potential mechanisms of pollutant phytoremediation and the importance of genetics for conservation, propagation and establishment of seagrass and associated aquatic plant beds doc13650 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program will allow the University of Arkansas to acquire an atomic probe microscope (AFM). The instrument will enhance research capability at the institution. It will be used in research (1)on charging effects on surfaces of individual powder particles and nanoaerosols, (2) in biological specimen analysis, and (3) in surface characterization of thin films. The management plan will allow efficient use of the instrument by faculty and students from several departments at the University of Arkansas. This is an important addition to the infrastructure at the institution. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program and will allow the University of Arkansas to acquire a atomic probe microscope (AFM). The instrument will enhance research capability at the institution. It will beused in research (1)on charging effects on surfaces of individual powder particles and nanoaerosols, (2) in biological specimen analysis, and (3) in surface characterization of thin films. The management plan will allow efficient use of the instrument by faculty and students from several departments at the University of Arkansas. This is an important addition to the infrastructure at the institution doc13651 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program will enable the Chemistry Department at Willamette University to acquire laser light scattering instrumentation. With these new capabilities, the PI will investigate the nature of intermolecular interactions in binary liquid mixtures by analyzing both Rayleigh and Raman scattering intensities as a function of composition and temperature. In addition, in collaboration with Dr. Jeffrey Willemsen, he will study the antispermatogenic nature of gossypol derivatives. Student researchers at this undergraduate institution will also participate in these projects. Liquid solutions and the solvation process are vital to both the scientific community and the chemical industry, but the liquid phase is a challenge to understand and model. The close proximity of molecules in a liquid makes the influence of the intermolecular potential impossible to ignore, and the lack of long range order in a liquid further complicates matters. Fortunately, motion and dynamics in a solution may be studied by directing a laser onto the liquid sample and measuring the intensity and frequency of the scattered light. Static and dynamic light scattering techniques represent an indispensable tool for the in-situ characterization of complex liquid systems doc13652 none A two-dimensional phase Doppler particle analyzer is required. This is used in an investigation of fuel sprays and air mixing in lean direct-injection four-stroke spark-ignition engines; a study of fuel air mixing in a cold-start port-injected spark-ignition engine; the development of an understanding of how oxygenates blended in diesel fuel impact in-cylinder spray combustion characteristics and pollutant formation; experiments on and modeling of port injection processes including spray wall impingement, backflow, microexplosion, and particle dispersion; and an experimental study of particle dispersion in the turbulent wake of a cylinder doc13653 none Award A grant has been awarded to Dr. Phillip Danielson at the University of Denver to fund the purchase of a real-time quantitative PCR System. Based on well-established laser fluorescence and DNA amplification technology, this system will significantly increase the productivity and cost effectiveness of undergraduate graduate research and education in molecular biology. Specific research programs that will benefit immediately include National Science Foundation-funded studies on: (1) endocrine hormones in the brain that are responsible for pain and stress responses in living organisms; (2) cytochrome P450 toxin-metabolizing enzymes - an understanding of which is critical to the control of agricultural pests and many disease-carrying organisms and; (3) the genetic diversity of endangered and threatened species which the University of Denver conducts in collaboration with the Denver Zoological Gardens and the Denver Museum of Science and Nature. Until recently, the measurement of gene expression using traditional assays has meant numerous rounds of laborious optimization, test template dilutions and post assay manipulations. Even then, the estimated concentration of a genetic message was often inaccurate owing to the unpredictable variability of traditional endpoint-based measurements. This is because small biases in amplification efficiency over the course of an assay would produce large differences in the amount of final product being measured. A solution to these problems was found in the new generation of real-time quantitative PCR Systems. The system monitors reaction kinetics in real-time making it possible to quantitate DNA and RNA concentrations in the smallest of tissue samples with unparalleled accuracy, precision and speed. An added benefit is that the PCR instrument can also be used for high-speed genotyping. The automated liquid handling capabilities already in place at the University of Denver will handle sample preparation to ensure run-to-run consistency by minimizing pipetting errors and crossover contamination. Beyond the benefit to the research activities of faculty at the University of Denver, a broad range of laboratory and classroom-oriented educational goals will be advanced at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Benefits will be particularly evident in the molecular-oriented laboratory courses that are at the heart of the new Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Arts degrees in Molecular Biology offered by the Department of Biological Sciences. On a broader level, department-sponsored biotechnology classes offered to high school students and teacher-training workshops that promote hands-on science education at the secondary school level will also be greatly enhanced. The benefit to high school outreach efforts is immeasurable given that these programs target students in urban and low-income school districts who have traditionally been under-represented in the natural sciences. In short, acquisition of the PCR System will provide significant and immediate benefits to education at the secondary, undergraduate and graduate levels, while providing a cost-efficient means of satisfying the growing DNA analysis needs of life-science researchers funded by the National Science Foundation doc13654 none Cashman This grant, funded by the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, provides support for multiple research instruments for laboratory and field investigations of fluvial sediment transport. The instrumentation requested is an interrelated group of equipment necessary for the investigation of sediment transport processes within a watershed. The proposed research instrumentation includes instrumentation for fine-scaled field data collection of suspended sediment concentration, turbidity and topography within a watershed and data collection instrumentation that allows for the quantification of flow velocity and discharge, bed load material transport, suspended load material transport and turbidity levels in the fluid flow. Examples of the instrumentation purchased with the support of this grant include a real-time kinematic (RTK) GPS mapping system, a field two-dimensional acoustic doppler velocimeter (ADV), an automated field turbidity sampling station and photographic equipment and software to analyze changes in topography due to sediment movement. The principal users of the sediment transport research instrumentation are faculty in the College of Natural Resources and Science departments at Humboldt State University (HSU). The primary research areas include: (1) identifying the effects of watershed characteristics such as channel slope, stream velocity and particle size distribution on sediment transport, (2) quantification and verification of the relationship between turbidity and suspended sediment concentration, (3) quantification of sediment transport under varying flow regimes and sediment supply conditions, and (4) laboratory calibration of mathematical modeling of transport. The acquisition of this equipment enhances the opportunity for research training of HSU students in the College of Natural Resources. This group of instrumentation facilitates research that encompasses multi-disciplines and explores the connection between field data collection, laboratory physical modeling and computer mathematical modeling. This research instrumentation has the potential to result in significant improvements to the field estimation of suspended sediment concentrations and bed load transport in rivers doc13655 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Trinity University will acquire a chemisorption-physisorption surface area and pore size analyzer. This equipment will be used to fully characterize new supported bimetallic catalysts. In addition, student researchers at this predominantly undergraduate institution will be exposed to fundamental concepts of the rapidly growing fields of solid state and materials chemistry. The determination of surface areas, pore sizes and chemisorption properties of catalysts is critical in evaluating both in evaluating new preparative procedures and in understanding how synthetic schemes affect metal particle morphology. The control over particle size and composition will allow the new catalysts to be used to understand how these fundamental factors impact activity and selectivity in oxidation reactions doc13656 none ACQUISITION OF A CIRCULAR DICHROISM SPECTROPOLARIMETER NSF Proposal # A grant has been awarded to Dr. Lisa Hibbard at Spelman College to fund the acquisition of a circular dichroism (CD) spectropolarimeter to be used for the following purposes: (1) The PIs current project involves a study of the structure and function of the eye lens protein a-crystallin using spectroscopy techniques. (2) The Chemistry Department will perform protein structure determination experiments in the teaching biochemistry laboratory course. (3) It will be used in a spectroscopy laboratory-based course that is proposed as a bridging course between the departments of Chemistry and Physics at the College. (4) There will be occasional use by researchers at Clark-Atlanta University who are collaborators with faculty at Spelman College. The research project is of significance as there is still a great deal to be learned regarding the relationship between a-crystallin structure and chaperone function. Little information is currently available on the tertiary structure of the protein and no one has studied the effects of the presence of salt in conjunction with exposure to UV radiation on structure and function. In addition, as Spelman College prides itself on producing excellent African-American women scientists, these projects will serve as a training ground for undergraduate students to perform biochemical research. The CD instrument will also be available for use in teaching lab experiments in the Chemistry and Physics Departments at Spelman and by other researchers in the Atlanta area. Students from under-represented groups will be exposed to new technologies through courses, laboratories, and research projects utilizing this new instrument doc13657 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Curt M. Peterson, Catherine Gardiner, and John Moore at the University of Northern Colorado to significantly improve the ability of faculty and students in the biological sciences to utilize modern microscopy tools in their research, enhance their opportunities to expand into new research areas, and increase the competitiveness of their research programs for external funding. The grant will be used to purchase ancillary support equipment for a scanning electron microscope (SEM) including a digital image analysis system, a critical point dryer, and a sputter coater. In addition, a confocal microscope and equipment to prepare and observe biological specimens for light and electron microscopy including a tissue processor, an ultramicrotome, and a diamond knife will be acquired. At present, there are active research programs in the department ranging from cellular biology of early embryo development to studies of soil community ecology that will benefit from the availability of this equipment. Five research projects will utilize this microscopy equipment to advance current and projected research efforts. One project will use confocal microscopy and fluorescent dyes to study the three-dimensional distribution of specific cellular compounds that protect cells during early cellular differentiation in developing mouse embryos. This study will increase our understanding of the development of mammalian embryos. A second project will use the ultramicrotome and confocal microscope to record, reconstruct and analyze sectioned tissues of venom glands in rear-fanged snakes in order to elucidate mechanisms allowing for long-term storage and stabilization of venom components. The goal of a third project is to develop a theoretical framework for the dynamics and stability of food webs that couple primary producers, detritus, consumers and nutrients. Accurate identification of invertebrate taxa using SEM and microbial biomass using confocal microscopy will provide more precise identification of food web organisms than is possible with existing techniques. The goal of a fourth study is to use SEM and confocal microscopy to investigate the positional differentiation of the separation layer leading to abscission or dropping of cotton leaves and the shattering or breaking apart of seed heads of native grasses. Both forms of microscopy will permit much clearer imaging of the cellular processes that lead to abscission and shattering. The fifth project will use this microscopy equipment to investigate the embryo anatomy and morphology of Eugenia, a very large and poorly known genus in the plant family Myrtaceae. Embryo anatomy has been shown to be an important source of variation in this genus and will further elucidate the taxonomy of this ecologically widespread genus. The equipment will not only strengthen current and projected research efforts of faculty in the biological sciences and each of the respective research areas but will have a broad impact on undergraduate and graduate research training as well. Many of the questions and problems forming the basis for the five research projects described in this grant can be answered or resolved with this modern microscopy technology. This equipment also will significantly improve access to and increase the use of modern instrumentation and state-of-the-art microscopy applications in the research training and education of both undergraduate and graduate students in biology. Finally, this equipment will have a significant impact on K-12 outreach efforts designed to increase college entrance and graduation rates of minority students traditionally under-represented in science, mathematics, and technology disciplines doc13658 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation program California State University- San Bernandino Foundation will acquire an electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectrometer for scientific research in physics, chemistry and biology at a Hispanic serving, predominately, undergraduate institute. It will improve the quality of research by providing access to a research instrument, which is currently unavailable. It will greatly expand the research capabilities in three research all from different departments. The instrument will be used to study domain dynamics in ferroelectric materials, which have applications to the electronics industry, including smart cards (physics), environmentally mediated oxidative stress in plants, which is important in evaluating ecological impact on plants (biology), and binuclear transition metal complexes, which has applications in computer memory (chemistry). The research projects would result in scientific publications, and presentations, but perhaps the most important result will be students that are motivated and capable of doing research. This project would help CSUSB add to its reputation of combining research with a strong commitment to undergraduate education, particularly for first generation and students from under-represented groups. With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation program California State University-San Bernandino Foundation will acquire an electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectrometer for scientific research in physics, chemistry and biology at a Hispanic serving, predominately, undergraduate institute. It will improve the quality of research by providing access to a research instrument, which is currently unavailable. It will greatly expand the research capabilities in three research all from different departments. The instrument will be used to study domain dynamics in ferroelectric materials, which have applications to the electronics industry, including smart cards (physics), environmentally mediated oxidative stress in plants, which is important in evaluating ecological impact on plants (biology), and binuclear transition metal complexes, which has applications in computer memory (chemistry). The research projects would result in scientific publications, and presentations, but perhaps the most important result will be students that are motivated and capable of doing research. This project would help CSUSB add to its reputation of combining research with a strong commitment to undergraduate education, particularly for first generation and students from under-represented groups doc13659 none This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) project provides for the purchase a double-focusing magnetic sector mass spectrometer to be utilized in support of research in the Department of Earth System Science and the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. The instrument will be utilized in research addressing the atmospheric chemistry and biogeochemistry of organohalogens contributing to ozone depletion, the accumulation and origin of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the use of hydrocarbons as tracers of major tropospheric sources such as biomass burning, industrial emissions, and biogenic emissions, and the role of hydrocarbons in tropospheric chemistry doc13660 none This is a Major Research Instrumentation award to enhance the existing instrumentation at Utah State University s Bear Lake Observatory. Upgrades will be made to the Fabry-Perot Interferometer, the Imaging Doppler Interferometer, and the all-sky imager. The instruments will be used to study the coupling between atmospheric regions and long-term trends in the mesosphere, lower thermosphere, and ionosphere. The Bear Lake Observatory provide data from a unique vantage point in the heart of the Rocky Mountains, which are a likely source for many of the gravity waves that influence the dynamics of the middle atmosphere. The improved instrumentation will establish BLO as a key site for investigating long-term changes in the mid-latitude mesosphere and thermosphere. The new data will add to and strengthen the existing database that has been built up during the past decade, and the facility will provide key validation and correlative measurements for current and future space-based missions doc13661 none Howe This award to University of Washington will provide support for the design and prototype of a 100 kW parallel DC power system for cabled, undersea observatories for oceanographic research. The design is intended to support a plate-scale system such as the NEPTUNE network of remote, interactive natural laboratories that is being planned for the seafloor region called the Juan de Fuca Plate, offshore of the Pacific Northwest. NEPTUNE is being designed to include thirty or more discrete observatory nodes, each capable of hosting multiple observing systems, along a system involving kilometers or more of fiber optic cable for power and communications. The power system addressed here will be designed in parallel with communications systems presently under development at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, with coordination provided by the NEPTUNE System Engineering Team. Wet testing is anticipated to take place in two submarine installations, one in California and one in Canada, in Spring doc13662 none This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant provides funds for the purchase of high speed digital imaging systems and fast processing hardware along with a droplet deposition platform, and a robotic Gas Metal Arc welder. This equipment will be used to build advanced vision based sensing capabilities that can be applied to arc welding and droplet-based manufacturing processes. These processes are intimately related, as they both involve the transfer of droplets of molten material to a work piece, although the particular method of delivery is different. This equipment will allow high-speed imaging of droplets and weld pools, with the goal of tight control of the solidification process. Because droplet processing can play a key role in advanced manufacturing processes, including net-shape manufacturing and rapid prototyping, the sensing and control of these processes will be critical. Several aspects of vision based control will be explored. For example, by extracting the dynamic behavior of the droplet deposition process and utilizing models of droplet transfer and solidification, control of the material micro-structure is possible. Similarly, dynamic imaging of the weld pool will enable the determination, and thus control, of weld quality in real time. Vision-based control of welding and droplet manufacturing processes encompasses several different theoretical areas, including fluid dynamics, heat transfer, computer vision, control systems, and robotics. This instrumentation will thus strengthen the interdisciplinary connections within the Engineering Division at the Colorado School of Mines, as well as across campus doc13663 none This award to Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College (LSU) is from the Major Research Instrumentation program and the NSF EPSCoR program. The award supports the acquisition of a combination Auger (AES) scanning Auger microscopy (SAM) and high resolution X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (ESCA) surface analysis system. This state of the art system will enable high-resolution energy, depth and spatial characterization of a variety of novel thin-film surface materials at levels that are currently unavailable at the institution. The instrument will be combined with exiting instrumentation and will constitute the nucleus of a centralized campus-wide Materials Characterization Facility. The facility will be accessible to scientists and students from Southern University, and will support several federally funded projects. It will enhance substantially the infrastructure in and impact the visibility and competitiveness of LSU and Southern University. This award to Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College (LSU)is from the Major Research Instrumentation program and the NSF EPSCoR program. The award supports the acquisition of a combination Auger (AES) scanning Auger microscopy (SAM) and high resolution X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (ESCA) surface analysis system. This state of the art system will enable high-resolution energy, depth and spatial characterization of a variety of novel thin-film surface materials at levels that are currently unavailable at the institution. The instrument will be combined with exiting instrumentation and will constitute the nucleus of a centralized campus-wide Materials Characterization Facility. The facility will be accessible to scientists and students from Southern University, and will support several federally funded projects. It will enhance substantially the infrastructure in and impact the visibility and competitiveness of LSU and Southern University doc13664 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at San Diego State University will acquire a liquid chromatograph with mass spectrometric detection (LC-MS). This equipment will enhance research in the following areas: a) the development of methods for analyzing air- and or water-sensitive materials; and studies of b) organometallic complexes and polymers containing two or more metals; c) organometallic complexes of proteins and peptides; d) protein and peptide interactions with DNA; and e) supramolecular interactions of electrogenerated radical anions with hydrogen-bond donors . Liquid chromatography with mass spectrometric detection (LC-MS) is an extremely powerful technique used for the separation and analysis of complex mixtures. This instrument will have an impact in the areas of chemistry, materials science and biochemistry doc13665 none Angkul Kongmunvattana University of Nevada Reno MRI: Acquisition of SMP Clusters for Supporting Shared-Memory Metacomputing This is a proposal for equipment acquisition under the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program to support research and student training in the development of high-performance distributed computing systems. The goal is to develop efficient system software for supporting a seamless programming environment on symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) clusters doc13666 none Lowe This is a proposal to acquire equipment to be used in the development of a field instrument for the identification and quantitation of microorganisms in environmental samples. The instrument involves nucleic acid hybridizations on the surface of microscopic, fluorescent, polystyrene beads in order to identify specific DNA sequences in heterogeneous mixtures of sequences. Specific objectives include: (1) the development of hardware specifications for the instrument, (2) specification of the calibrations which must be conducted in order to make quantitatively accurate measurements of several microorganisms, and (3) develop the software and statistical analysis procedure for analyzing the data doc13667 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Jack Herring and Dr. Tim Crews at Prescott College. The sophisticated research instrumentation provided by this grant will allow measurement of the exchange of variety of trace gases between the atmosphere and the land surface. The primary goal of the research is to better understand the cycling of nitrogen in the highlands of central Arizona. A secondary goal is to study the relationship between the cycling of nitrogen and carbon in these ecosystems. Additionally, the instruments will play a central role in training students at Prescott College in these analytical techniques. Initially, the instrumentation will be installed in chaparral, an important plant community in the southwestern U.S. for which there is little information on the dynamics of nitrogen cycling. Chaparral is interesting because it has among the highest, if not the highest, density of nitrogen-fixing woody plants in the United States. Due to the potentially high inputs of nitrogen via biological fixation, and an annual precipitation regime that favors extreme drying and wetting events, it is suspected that the interior chaparral ecosystem may support at least periodically high to very high rates of nitrogen oxide emissions. Specifically, this equipment will be used to make continuous, long-term measurements of exchanges of NO2, NO + NO2 (NOx), and N2O using a laser-based technique. The instrument tower will also be equipped with a special device for measuring vertical winds and a device for measuring CO2 and H2O concentrations. In addition to these measurements of gas exchange, supporting short-term chamber studies of N2O emissions by gas chromatography and chamber measurements of NO emissions will be conducted. These chamber studies will be conducted both in chaparral and in other ecosystems that are characterized by human alteration of the N cycle; these include fire-treated ponderosa woodlands, arid agricultural land and livestock-grazed arid grasslands. The results will guide the use of the instrumentation when the chaparral study is completed. As scientists from many disciplines work toward a better understanding of the processes underlying global change, it becomes increasingly clear that the knowledge of the interactions between living organisms and the atmosphere needs to be improved. The linkage between nitrogen cycling and global change is both direct (due to the greenhouse effect of N2O emissions) and indirect (due to the effects of nitrogen availability on the net absorption or release of key greenhouse gases CO2 and CH4). A good understanding of these ecosystem dynamics is key to understanding the potential for the biosphere to absorb the CO2 currently being released by fossil fuel combustion as well as to understanding how ecosystems will respond to the many environmental changes they are now being exposed to. Such information is vital to policymakers who are currently wrestling with issues such as that of global climate change. The answers to these questions will only come from extensive networks of such instrumentation; this will necessitate the training of large numbers of scientists in the specialized techniques involved in these measurements doc13668 none Roukes Major advances have recently been made at (Caltech) in developing and employing what are, largely, individual nanometer-scale structures for applications ranging from fundamental science to technological applications. Within the research groups of the co--P1 s, Professor Scherer and Professor Roukes, who have worked together on nanofabrication for the past fifteen years, electron beam lithography techniques have been developed and used for the construction of a wide range of functional nanometer-scale devices. Lateral dimensions below 10 nm are routinely obtained, and students in these groups have developed both expertise in the requisite electron-beam-control code and an in-depth understanding of the specialized resist processing and pattern transfer techniques enabling ultrahigh resolution. The time is now ripe to exploit these advances by creating nanosystems - i.e. advanced structures that comprise coherently coupled arrays of the individual nanoscale elements the authors are perfecting. This equipment acquisition proposal, if funded, would enable such research. Nanodevice arrays are emerging as a priority in nanoscale science and technology. As detailed in this proposal (and its accompanying letters of support), nanoscale arrays will find immediate applications within the proposers research programs. These currently involve 13 Caltech professors, in disciplines spanning fundamental physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering and materials science. Among the specific topics currently being pursued are: quantum optics, quantum computation, nanophotonics, spin electronics, nanomechanics, neurophysiology, biotechnology, electrochemistry and molecular electronics. These applications require fabrication of structures spanning a hierarchy of size scales -from the smallest dimensions accessible via state-of-the-art nanofabrication techniques, to the millimeter to centimeter domain of integrated, chip-based systems. Fabrication of these complex nanoscale arrays requires multiple, successively-aligned steps of large-field electron beam lithography over the wafer scale. A second important research thrust would be enabled by the proposed instrumentation. This focuses upon future technological applications requiring nanometer-scale features produced lithographically en masse. This scale is far below the dimensions currently accessible via deep ultraviolet lithography, the current industry standard for state-of-the-art commercial production lines. To address this technological need, much recent effort world-wide has focused upon development of new, high-resolution, high-throughput lithographic methods. Projection x-ray lithography, shaped electron beam lithography, and mechanical transfer methods (embossing, molding, or stamping) all have evolved as principle contenders for the definition of sub-I 100nm structures over large areas. All of these techniques, however, have in common the need for wafer-scale high-resolution masks. These are normally generated by vector-scanned electron beam lithography. There are currently no alternative lithographic tools which offer comparable flexibility, resolution and placement accuracy for this purpose as state-of-the-au commercial electron beam writers. Student access to such an instrument would greatly enhance research and training in the proposers university setting. An entirely new level of instrumentation is required to successfully initiate these proposed endeavors. Specifically, the capability of writing large (wafer scale) fields of features at the sub-5Onm scale is absolutely crucial. This can only be done with a state-of-the-art electron beam writer; however the acquisition of such an instrument is significantly beyond the scope of most funding programs. Here the PIs propose to purchase an electron-beam lithography system for this laboratory. The cost for this instrument will be shared by Caltech ($l.5M), the NSF ($1.OM), and DARPA DURINT ($l.OM). The laboratory established with these funds will constitute an interactive, expert facility within the larger efforts of the PI s. This select, focused group of researchers will include undergraduate and graduate students, staff and faculty members. This group will be collectively dedicated to establishing routes to next-generation structures involving large arrays of nanoscale elements doc13669 none This is a joint award from the Major Research Instrumentation program and the NSF EPSCoR program to the University of Nebraska (UN). The award supports the acquisition of a focussed ion beam (FIB) workstation for processing of single crystals and nanometer size materials in order to investigate their magnetic and magneto-optic properties. FIB is an ultra-high precision tool for etching and writing with 10-nanometer resolution. The workstation will complement existing facility at UN and will be used in a number of currently funded projects at the institution. It provides new capability for the study of devices at the nano scale with a high probability for discovery of new phenomena. The instrument will benefit the education and training of a large number of graduate and undergraduate students as well as postdocs at the University of Nebraska. %%% This is a joint award from the Major Research Instrumentation program and the NSF EPSCoR program to the University of Nebraska (UN). The award supports the acquisition of a focussed ion beam (FIB) workstation for processing of single crystals and nanometer size materials in order to investigate their magnetic and magneto-optic properties. FIB is an ultra-high precision tool for etching and writing with 10-nanometer resolution. The workstation will complement existing facility at UN and will be used in a number of currently funded projects at the institution. It provides new capability for the study of devices at the nano scale with a high probability for discovery of new phenomena. The instrument will benefit the education and training of a large number of graduate and undergraduate students as well as postdocs at the University of Nebraska doc13670 none Detailed chemical composition studies of the distribution of preserved lipid molecular markers (also termed molecular fossils or fingerprints ) in the sinking particulate matter of water columns and especially subsequently in sediments provides insight to our understanding of the inputs and processing of organic matter carbon in the ocean. Interpretation of the stable carbon isotopic composition (d 13C) of specific lipid molecular markers in aged sedimentary deposits has increasingly been suggested as a means of constraining past ocean and climate conditions and even reconstructing paleo atmospheric carbon dioxide mixing ratios (pCO2). The PI will measure isotopic d 13C fractionation effects on selected lipids using controlled laboratory experiments to simulate processes reflecting those undergone during natural diagenesis. This investigation will address the otherwise default assumption that diagenetic effects are negligible. Incubation experiments using target lipid biomarkers obtained from enriched 13C labeled algal cultures will be conducted in different biogeochemical regimes including: natural oxic and anoxic seawaters; simulated oxic vs. anoxic and cycled oxic anoxic sediment-water interfaces; and in homogenized sediment cores with and without macrofauna. Compound specific isotopic analysis of biomarker molecular fossils in sediments enhances understanding of the past conditions experienced by the marine organisms producing such molecules. Use of lipid biomarker information contained in natural archives such as deep sea sediments is key in reconstructing past climate change and helps answer fundamental questions such as how fast and how much can the planet s climate change doc13671 none Food web dynamics of benthic and pelagic ecosystems are driven, in large part, by communities of prokaryotes and micro-eukaryotes. The phylogenetic diversity of the micro-eukaryotes range from protists to various adult and larval stages of invertebrates. Many of these species are difficult to identify due to their inability to grow in culture media or due to their indistinguishable characteristics. Molecular techniques have been instrumental in unraveling the complexities and activities of these communities. The purpose of this research is to explore the use of ion-paired reversed phase (IP-RP) UPLC for nucleic acid fragment analysis, which is a system that is successfully used in biomedical research. If this technique is adaptable to marine research, the time required to identify and quantify populations will be reduced from days to minutes. IP-RP HPLC will be tested with four diverse research programs: presence of uncultured fungal populations in marine habitats; distribution of plant and animal pathogenic bacteria and fungi in African dust; community structure of copepod larvae in the Florida Bay food web, and genetic dispersal of Caribbean corals and reef fishes doc13672 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Revie and Marcey at California Lutheran University to purchase equipment to perform structural and functional genomics research. The project will meet four goals. First, the equipment will be used to more quickly sequence the genome of strain 122-1B2 of the archaeon Thermoplasma acidophilum. Archaea are a group of microorganisms that comprise a third branch of life, which are distinct from the other two branches: (1) bacteria and (2) eukaryotes, a group that includes yeast and multicellular organisms. Determining the sequence of bases in the genome of T. acidophilum will allow for the identification of proteins that are involved in respiration. Second, the equipment will be used by Dr. Marcey to study a protein involved in cellular signaling in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Third, the equipment will allow students to perform a wider variety of research projects in formal laboratory classes. For example, genomics research will be conducted in Genetics, Molecular Biology, Developmental Biology, and Recombinant DNA Techniques. Fourth, the equipment will allow Biology and Biochemistry students to engage in faculty-mentored research experiences in structural and functional genomics. The archaeon T. acidophilum can grow either aerobically under normal oxygen concentrations, under very low oxygen concentrations, or anaerobically in the presence of sulfur. The organism grows optimally at pH 1.7 and 59 degrees C, but interestingly, lacks a cell wall. Although it can reduce sulfur, little is known about this process. Even less is known about how the organism survives under very low oxygen conditions. Considering the hostile and extreme environment where T. acidophilum thrives, this flexibility of respiration is quite remarkable, making the study of its respiratory proteins an interesting and important part of the overall study of Archaea. In order to find and study the respiratory proteins, the equipment will more quickly determine the entire sequence of bases in the DNA. This will primarily be done by sequencing T. acidophilum DNA that has been cloned into a plasmid, then assembling the resulting pieces into one contiguous chromosome. The DNA will then be analyzed to determine the entire complement of genes in the organism. A gene, Dpez, that encodes a member of novel class of proteins involved in cellular communication, the FERM domain Protein Tyrosine Phosphatases (PTPs), will be studied in the model organism Drosophila melanogaster. Equipment funded by this grant will be used to determine the DNA sequences of genes encoding proteins that interact with Dpez. Also, the DNA sequences of genes that produce mutant forms of the Dpez protein will be determined. Spatial and temporal patterns of DPez expression will be investigated. Archaea are a distinct group of organisms. Many of them, including T. acidophilum, live in extreme environments such as high temperatures and low pH. This project will aid the study of proteins that enable the organism to thrive under the extreme conditions in which it grows. In addition, the ability of T. acidophilum to grow under a variety of respiratory conditions makes the study of these proteins even more interesting. Determining the entire sequence of bases in the organism will also allow for comparisons between T. acidophilum and other microorganisms that will increase knowledge of evolutionary processes. The balance between the opposite actions of protein tyrosine kinases (PTKs) and protein tyrosine phosphatases (PTPs) can regulate cell proliferation, differentiation, and morphology. PTPs have been cloned in large numbers from a variety of organisms and are targeted to subcellular locations and linked to specific signaling pathways. The Dpez protein is the first invertebrate FERM-PTP described. Investigations of the functions of DPez will be conducted with the goal of using the tractable genetics of Drosophila to discover the roles of the protein in the development and cell physiology of a model insect doc13673 none PI Eyad Masad Institution Washington State University Title Acquisition of x-Ray Computed Tomgraphy System for the Modeling and Characterization of Materials with Nanostructure This MRI award is for the acquisition of an X-ray computed tomography (CT) system for non-invasive evaluation of the microstructure of engineering materials. The system is unique for the visualization of three-dimensional of microstructural features in the interior of opaque solid objects. The X-ray CT system will be used to perform detailed observations of the microstructural features associated with granular deformation. It will also be used in the development of new generation ceramics and metal matrix composites. The focus of the first research is on the development of a microstructure based continuum model to study the deformation and locialization in granular materials. The model is based on crystal plasticity but inclused two microstructure length scales; one associated with the plastic curvature (orientation re-distribution) and the other one is related to the porosity re-distribution. This study is unique in that the microstructure model parameters are determined directly from microscopic measurements. The study will lead to analytical methods for modeling strain localization not only in laboratory specimens, but also inpractical boundary value problems in geotechnical engineering. The outcome of this work will also have implications to the modeling of other types of materials that exhibit deformation instabilities and shear banding such as metals and composites. The engineering behavior of ceramics and metal matrix composite materials is controlled by the microstructure of several levels. Therefore, the second study combines microscopic and macroscopic principles and develops multiscale mosels for their description. The multiscale model parameters are determined directly from X-ray CT measurements. Use of such models will enable the design and development of new materials with tailored microstructures. In addition to the above major studies, a host of other research activities from different disciplines at Washington State University will benefit from the proposed system. The unique capabilities of the system will contribute substantially to the extramural funding, and encourage more collaboration with other institutions and research centers doc13674 none Explorations in Science is an activity-based physics course for non-science majors. Developed during my tenure as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education (PFSMETE), Explorations in Science uses the study of common, natural phenomena and student-directed group projects to stimulate interest in a population traditionally quite apathetic towards physics. Activities use sophisticated computer tools to take, display, and interpret data. I would like to bring this curriculum to my new, permanent, institution, the Rochester Institute of Technology. While RIT is an institution of technology, it has a significant population of students who will benefit from Explorations in Science including students of imaging science, business, and the social sciences. Faculty from the College of Imaging Arts & Sciences have already expressed interest in Explorations in Science, particularly the projects dealing with human body motions as these are relevant to students studying computer animation. To successfully offer Explorations in Science at RIT, computer sensors (e.g. force sensors, temperature probes, and light sensors) must be purchased. Roughly half of this proposal is for equipment that are not currently available in our existing labs. A necessary condition for the successful implementation of new materials is faculty support. To facilitate the implementation of a research-based curricula, I would like to begin a new project on faculty objectives for introductory physics courses. RIT has a national reputation of excellence in engineering and the imaging arts. Therefore, an overwhelming majority of students taking introductory physics at RIT are not physics majors. It is important to understand why other departments require these students to take physics and what they want their students to take from the class. The traditional answers, including how to think and problem-solving ability, are too vague to be useful. Recent work in physics education has attempted to uncover exactly what is meant by how to think, i.e. what we the physics community see as the fundamental diamond in the physics rough. By using the ideas and vocabulary from this research, 1 hope to be able to better characterize how other departments see physics. This will allow physics departments to better suit the needs of the majority of their students and make it easier to introduce new curricula such as Explorations in Physics doc13675 none This proposal seeks to sponsor travel expenses for graduate students and junior faculty members to attend the 7th IEEE Real-Time Technology and Application Symposium (RTAS) to be held in Taipei, Taiwan and sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Real- Time Systems. RTAS provides a forum for presenting the latest advances in real-time systems research and for discussing the practical challenges encountered and the solutions adopted. A special mission of RTAS is to foster discussion and technology exchange in the real-time computing and communication communities between Asia and North America. As such, we have invited Dr. C. L. Liu (who developed the rate-monotonic scheduling theory in the 70 s and is currently the president of National Ching-Hua University in Hsin-Chu, Taiwan) to serve as the Honorary Chair, and top-notch researchers in both Asia, Americas, and Europe to serve on the Technical Program Committee. In addition to single-track technical sessions, we will also organize tutorials and workshops that address practical, temporal QoS issues in application domains or over the Internet. The symposium, as many other academic activities, relies on the experience of senior members of the community but requires fresh ideas and new people to join the community. As such, and to encourage graduate students and young faculty members to participate in the exciting technical program, we are requesting support to defray the travel expenses for graduate students and junior faculty attendees. The total amount requested is $12,000 on the basis of an average travel grant of $1,200 for each selected junior faculty participant and $800 for each selected graduate student. We believe attendance at this Symposium will be very beneficial to young scientists who otherwise would be unable to participlate in the gathering. Contacts for future (international) collaborations will be made and idea exchange will certainly occur. Travel support for student and junior faculty attendance will be advertised nationwide and women, minorities and disabled students will be especially encouraged to apply for sponsorship doc13676 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Northern Arizona University will acquire a High Resolution Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer for Research in Chemistry and Earth Sciences. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) atmospheric source apportionment using isotopic signatures of lead; b) arsenic speciation in the aquatic environment; c) isotopic studies of lead, thorium and uranium in the environment; d) aqueous geochemistry; and e) genotoxicity of chromium (VI). Mass spectrometry (MS) is a technique used to probe intimate structural details and to obtain the molecular compositions of a vast array of organic, bioorganic, and organometallic molecules. The results from these studies will have an impact in a number of areas, especially environment chemistry and human health doc13677 none This project investigates the magnetic properties of molecules containing clusters of magnetic atoms that are exchange coupled to produce a lattice of identical nanomagnets; in particular, Mn12-Acetate and Fe8. These materials have a number of interesting properties: resonant spin tunneling, quantum interference (Berry s phase) effects in the magnetic relaxation, quantum coherent oscillations of the spin, and evidence for an abrupt crossover between thermally assisted magnetic relaxation and relaxation by pure quantum tunneling. Although much progress has been made, a full understanding of these materials awaits the resolution of a number of important issues, including the strength of spin-phonon coupling, the roles of dipolar interactions and hyperfine fields, and the nature of the crossover between thermally-assisted and pure quantum tunneling. Through measurements at very low temperatures using micron size Hall bars, this project will study the effect of externally applied transverse magnetic fields, the effect of microwave radiation, and to search for possible ferromagnetic or dipolar ordering. Molecular magnets are interesting from a fundamental point of view because they represent the borderline between classical and quantum magnetism. They are also interesting for their possible use for very high-density storage, and as potential candidates for elements in quantum computation. Graduate students involved in the project receive training in fundamental experimental techniques with cutting edge technology. This training will prepare them for a range of careers in academe, industry or government. Mn12-acetate and Fe8 are organic molecular crystals containing a very large number of regularly spaced, magnetically identical spin-10 clusters of a size that is borderline between the quantum and classical regimes. Interest in these materials has been sparked by a remarkable series of experimental observations of quantum-mechanical effects, including quantum tunneling of the spin magnetic moment, quantum-mechanical phase interference and the superposition of quantum states. Although much progress has been made, a full understanding of these materials awaits the resolution of a number of important issues, including the strength of the coupling of the spin magnetic moment to lattice vibrations, the roles of dipolar interactions and nuclear fields, and the nature of the crossover between the quantum and classical regimes. Through measurements at very low temperatures using micron size Hall bars, we propose to investigate the effect of externally applied transverse magnetic fields, the effect of microwave radiation, and to search for possible ferromagnetic or dipolar ordering. In addition to their interest for fundamental reasons, these materials are important for their possible use in very high-density storage, and as potential candidates for elements in quantum computation. Graduate students involved in the project receive training in fundamental experimental techniques with cutting edge technology. This training will prepare them for a range of careers in academe, industry or government doc13678 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Feddersen at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities to acquire scientific instrumentation that will enhance training and research opportunities concerning the influence of ions (potassium, sodium, calcium, chloride, etc.) on cell function. Changes in ionic gradients mediate diverse processes including cellular communication, chemical transportation, information storage retrieval and energy production use. Regulation of ion concentration is the job of selective channels traversing the membranes of all cells. While ion channel diversity and conservation among species have been revealed through the recent findings of genome projects, much remains to be learned about the basic function of ion channel proteins. Seminal advances in ion channel research have been the focus of both the Nobel prize and Lasker Award in the past year serving to draw the attention of young investigators. The goal of this proposal is to improve integration of research and research training in the field of ion channel biology which is well-represented at the University of Minnesota. Cutting-edge instrumentation will be utilized in multiple laboratory courses and time-shared with research laboratories where it will enhance on-the-job research training. The award will facilitate three objectives: 1) improving the teaching capabilities of several laboratory courses, 2) expanding ion channel research opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, and 3) providing critical infrastructure for the research training of non-university students. To meet these objectives seven state-of- the-art experimental workstations will be assembled and distributed to four courses and at least six different research labs during the year. A common method to study ion gradients and the channels that affect them requires the use of sensitive physiological approaches whereby miniature sensors(electrodes) are delicately placed in a living specimen. Individual ion channels are most conveniently studied in a simple system utilizing frog eggs. This approach involves genetic engineering and synthesis of information molecules (mRNAs) coding for ion channels followed by injection of the mRNA into large, viable egg cells. The cell s translation machinery converts the mRNA into ion channel proteins that are inserted into the cell membrane. Electrodes placed in the cell collect minute signals that report ion channel function. Using this approach researchers will measure, and instructors will teach students how to measure, the response of channels to various stimuli or blockers in the presence or absence of accessory molecules. The power of genetic engineering allows the introduction of precise mutations to pinpoint the functional importance of each part of a channel. Protein expression and functional analysis in frog eggs has become a standard approach of ion channel and cell surface receptor researchers. The instrumentation allowed by this award is well matched to that application. The equipment includes microscopes, micro-manipulators, mRNA injectors, computers, analog digital converters, amplifiers and signal conditioning software that make ion channel recording efficient and informative. The equipment will also be used in basic electrophysiology training and research in more complex specimens such as cells in a variety of tissues, including neurons in brain slices isolated from the mature nervous system. Teaching laboratories expose students to the critical observations and techniques that provide the foundation of advanced life sciences research. The instrumentation awarded will directly support objective #1 because it will be used to present ion channel training exercises in several undergraduate and graduate level laboratory courses. Fundamentals taught in laboratory courses require an appropriate setting to advance research to the frontier of discovery. Therefore, when not needed for course work, the equipment will become a core utility supplied to Principal Investigator labs for undergraduate and graduate student research projects. The contemporary, fully compatible equipment will best serve the diversity of research efforts ongoing at the University of Minnesota and satisfy objective #2. As University courses become more available and convenient for a greater diversity of students the equipment will be accessed by non-university researchers and small college educators meeting objective #3. The research instrumentation will become a distributed and unifying feature across courses and contemporary research endeavors, as well as, among individual labs within departments and research sectors. Because overall research training and research will be integrated through this award, cost-sharing funds were pledged from three separate colleges at the University of Minnesota. The funded proposal will enhance the presentation of laboratory-based education, promote student participation in the achievement of independent research goals and enrich the interaction among non-traditional students and university personnel doc13679 none Bruce Lewenstein, Cornell University The Co-Production Of Knowledge By Scientists And Lay People : The Citizen Science Approach In Ornithology The proposed study utilizes qualitative methods (ethnography, semiotics, discourse-analysis, and cross-national comparison) to examine an innovative Citizen Science program developed by the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology (CLO) and its counterpart in France. The Citizen Science program enrolls volunteers from the general public into field surveys and other scientific research projects. This program is interesting from a sociological point of view because it integrates in a single project people with different skills, scientific backgrounds, and interests into a coherent research program on a continent-wide (in North America) or national (in France) level. These programs provide a unique opportunity for observing change in the way scientific communities incorporate more and more lay experts to produce knowledge; our analysis encompasses a large network of non-scientists (15,000 participants in the United States and Canada; in the French case, a different form of network defies enumeration) and a sophisticated process for concentrating data in a single center of calculation. It also exemplifies a form of hands-on science education that differs fundamentally from the more traditional forms of one- way communication from experts to novices. The Principal Investigator and a French collaborator develop their existing involvement in the CLO and in ornithology in France into a systematic analysis exploring definitions of scientist, citizen, and participation revealed by the projects, which also allows for an international comparison. The CNRS is supporting the efforts of the French co-PI. This study s objectives are: (1 identification and description of emergent forms of lay-professional collaboration that are not covered by standard models in public understanding of science; (2) description of the natural history of data transformations in the form, personal significance, and scientific value of data collected by lay participants in field surveys and relayed to a research laboratory; and (3) analysis of written, electronic, and face-to-face communications between lay and professional participants in Citizen Science projects to assess the way the process of intersubjectivity, which is instrumental for groups to identify themselves, is created by the tools of action at a distance used by laboratories like the CLO and similar projects in France. Findings from the research have intellectual value for the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (S&TS), including the particular area of public understanding of science. The study s findings also have significant importance for science education, because they identify strategies, problems, and dilemmas associated with projects that involve schools and other lay organizations in actual research projects doc13680 none Voight The ongoing eruption of the Soufriere Hills Volcano (SHV) on Montserrat provides an unprecedented opportunity to investigate complex magmatic processes at an andesitic volcano. Growth of the lava dome has been unsteady and accompanied by cyclic patterns of ground deformation, seismicity, and explosive eruptions. The cycles include a short-term scale (6-18 hour), a meso-term scale (~7 weeks), and a long-term scale (~30 y). They provide insights into eruption dynamics at andesite volcanoes, with the short-term cycles suggesting that degassing, rheological stiffening of the magma, and pressurization in the upper conduits are coupled and control many of the geophysical and dynamical phenomena observed. The meso- and long- term cycles may reflect deep-seated processes involving the magma reservoir. This project will investigate the dynamics of the full system using an integrated array of specialized instruments in four strategically located 200-m boreholes, and several shallower holes, surrounding SHV. The system is active and dynamic and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Analysis of the continuous perishable data provided by these instruments should provide important new insights and specific constraints to theoretical models, involving the dynamic behavior of the andesite magmatic system. This is a collaborative project involving P.I.s from Penn State University, Carnegie Institution of Washinton, University of Arkansas, in collaboration with Montserrat Volcano Obervatory (MVO) and scientists from Bristol and Leeds Universities in the UK. The UK investigators have been funded to share drilling costs and to support UK scientific analyses. The expertise, facilities, and database of MVO also provide cost-share contributions doc13681 none One of the most notable trends in international trade is the growth of vertical specialization. Thanks to reduced costs of international communications and transportation, firms have increasingly fragmented their production into multiple stages. Such production means that a single final good may be worked on in many countries, as each sequential production stage is performed in the location that is most advantageous for the process. By studying two U.S. programs that facilitate foreign outsourcing operations- the tariff provisions in the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States and the U.S. Foreign Trade Zones Program- this research project deepens our understanding of trends in vertical specialization and the responses of foreign outsourcing to changes in country and industry conditions. To evaluate the effects of country costs on outsourcing decisions, this project studies three questions. The first component of the project studies how outsourcing is allocated across countries. In examining this topic, it is important to identify which countries are regarded as competitors. In contrast with previous work that has assumed that all countries are in competition with all others, this analysis will examine whether factors such as geography, education, income, or other national characteristics place countries in competition with each other. The second part of this project examines whether foreign investment plays a special role in mediating firm production sharing decisions. Such a role may be expected, as foreign investment provides a physical infrastructure of manufacturing sites that are tailored to foreign assembly. In addition, foreign investments may influence sourcing decisions, as foreign investment provides a conduit for information about country characteristics. The third component of the project studies how firms decide whether to deploy resources, either keeping production at home or moving it abroad doc13682 none This award will support research to reconstruct the drought history of the eastern United States over the last 500-1,000 years using the analysis of tree-rings from two species of long-lived conifers; the eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana) and the northern white cedar (Thuja occidentalis). This data will greatly improve estimates of the full range of drought variability across the United States. The widespread discovery of ancient forests of these tree species living or preserved on steep cliff faces in the northeast will enable the development of tree-ring chronologies covering the past 1,000 years from living trees and well-preserved fossil wood. Eastern red and northern white cedar may represent the only widely distributed species that are available for developing a network of such long drought-sensitive tree-ring chronologies in the eastern United States. The dendroclimatic potential of black gum (Nyssa sylvatica) growing in wetlands and swamps in the northeastern United States will also be examined. This is one of the longest-lived hardwoods in the world with a documented age of 500-700 years. Preliminary analyses indicate that this species produces cross-datable tree rings that correlate significantly with summer temperatures. A small network of black gum chronologies will be developed to determine the feasibility of using this species to reconstruct past summer temperatures in excess of 500 years before the present doc13683 none Perelman The overall objective of the proposed exploratory study is to develop a novel high resolution spectroscopic imaging technique that utilizes light, elastically scattered from epithelial tissues in near backward direction, to extract information about macroscopic tissue composition as well as tissue structure at the cellular and sub-cellular scale. The specific aims are as follows: 1. Experimental system. Develop an experimental high resolution imaging system for imaging superficial layers of turbid media, which uses both spectral and angular information to study tissue phantoms, cells, and sub-cellular organelles. Develop experimental techniques capable of separating single scattered and multiply scattered light and extracting morphological information from tissue. 2. Modeling. Develop mathematical models that describe light scattering from individual sub-cellular organelles, cells and extra-cellular tissues. Identify spectroscopic signatures of sub-cellular organelles, and develop a mathematical procedure for extracting physical properties of those organelles, such as size distribution, refractive indices and absorption coefficients. 3. Experimental studies. Study wavelength and angular dependence of single and multiple scattering from individual cells, sub-cellular organelles, and cell monolayers. Develop methods based on spatial distribution of scattered light to obtain information about degree of organization disorganization of superficial tissues and use this information to reconstruct structural images of tissue on a cellular scale doc13684 none This three-day conference will provide a forum for in-depth dialogue on innovative research in the area of Neural Control of Behavior. The first two days will be devoted to a symposium that will be open to the scientific community. There will be four sessions: Neurosecretion Over Different Time Domains; Genetic Dissection of Behavior; Local Protein Synthesis During Neuronal Plasticity and Regeneration; and Learning and Memory: New Directions. The speakers will discuss a wide spectrum of species (use of invertebrates to mammals) and experimental approaches (from molecular and cellular to behavioral levels of analyses). The third day of the meeting will be devoted to a workshop among only the speakers, where they will explore ways in which information discussed during the symposium can be used to take their respective research areas in new directions. This conference aims to: Bring together researchers who are asking similar questions, but are using different species and different experimental approaches; Promote the use of simple systems for addressing complex biological problems; Promote interaction between junior scientists - women in particular - and established investigators and leaders in the field. The speakers use modern, cutting-edge technologies for addressing problems in the area of Neural Control of Behavior. By bringing together these researchers, and giving them a forum for discussing their work, the message can be effectively spread that these modern techniques are being used with great success in a wide variety of animal systems. This conference will provide an important interdisciplinary communications-mechanism for advancements in the neuroscience community doc13685 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Andreas Holzenburg (PI) and Dr. Richard Crooks (Co-PI) at Texas A semiconductors, high-temperature superconductors; micro-electromechanical systems; morphology and composition distribution in polymer systems; soil morphology; contaminants in near-surface geologic systems and hazardous waste sites; roles of fluids in rock deformation; evaluation of earthquake risks; creep compaction of reservoir sands; origin of magma; rheology of the Earth s crust and mantle; mechanical property-microstructure relationship of advanced materials; and phospholipid bilayers and integral membrane proteins; surface topography of biological specimens. The exact configuration was chosen to effectively underpin interdisciplinary research and training needs existing on campus at Texas A&M University (College Station) as well as within the region (Lamar University, Sam Houston Sate University and Prairie View A&M University, USDA). The instrument will also enhance educational activities directed towards undergraduate and graduate studies. Research activities at Texas A&M and other regional universities (including primarily undergraduate institutions) are intimately linked with teaching, and the FE-SEM will be used within coursework as well as to advance student research. Furthermore, ongoing educational outreach, through web-based activities, provides access to these technologies to K-12 students doc13686 none This grant supports the establishment of a 128-channel event-related potential (ERP) laboratory at an undergraduate institution, Pomona College, in order to investigate the spatial and temporal dimensions of brain activity associated with cognition. In doing so, this project meets the criteria for the NSF Cognitive Neuroscience initiative. Three projects will be conducted during the grant period. The first is an exploration of how spatial and temporal patterns of brain activity during the initial encoding of information are related to subsequent source memory judgments. Specifically, we will investigate the relationship between encoding event-related potentials during and subsequent source memory judgments, including temporal order, spatial location, and recollection versus familiarity judgments. The second line of research will investigate the extent to which stable individual differences in psychological and biological measures of stress are predictive of memory functioning and concomitant ERP activity. We are specifically interested in assessing whether individuals with high chronic stress will have impaired memory functioning and whether this will be evidenced in a decreased old new amplitude difference for the explicit but not implicit memory conditions. The third line of research will expose a diverse group of students to the use of electrophysiological imaging methods to explore issues from the classic psychological literature. We are designing a student research project to investigate an issue of particular interest to under-represented students. Specifically, we will use high-density ERP recordings to investigate how brain activity may be associated with cognitive processing of information related to the individualism-collectivism dimension of culture. The proposed research will serve as a model for how psychological issues can be explored using high-density ERP recordings. We anticipate that the knowledge gained from applying this technique to psychological problems will encourage the use of ERP techniques among other psychology and neuroscience faculty in the future doc13687 none Coale This award to San Jose State University will provide support for acquisition of a high resolution inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometer for research in biological, chemical and geological oceanography and related fields at the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories. It will serve a broad and diverse population of researchers, faculty and students from the California State University system and other researchers in the Monterey, California vicinity. San Jose State University, a non-Ph.D.-granting university, will contribute about 23% of the cost of this project from non-federal funds doc13688 none The organization of animal behavior into twenty-four hour, or circadian, rhythmic cycles is a fundamental feature of the mammalian nervous system. There appear to be many physiological systems within mammals that are capable of generating their own twenty-four rhythms, although each is probably synchronized by one master time-keeping pacemaker within the brain. This master pacemaker is located in a group of cells organized into the suprachiasmatic nucleus, found just above the optic chiasm at the base of the mammalian brain. The suprachiasmatic nucleus receives input from multiple brain regions, but the major inputs come from the retina, intergeniculate nuclei of the thalamus, and the raphe nuclei in the brainstem. The timing of the circadian clock can be adjusted by input from each of these areas, analogous to moving the hands of the clock forward or backward in time. In this study, we will be focusing on input from the intergeniculate leaflet, input that adjusts the clock in response to behavioral stimuli independent of photic information arriving from the retina. In hamsters, intergeniculate input to the suprachiasmatic nucleus is mediated in part by endogenous enkephalin opioid systems and can be mimicked by administration of delta opioid drugs that activate the receptors for enkephalins (delta opioid receptors). Circadian rhythms in hamsters are modified by running in novel wheels, and also by the administration of benzodiazepines and serotonin-like drugs. Each of these stimuli involves the intergeniculate nuclei and thus may be mediated by delta opioid receptors. Therefore, this project will examine the connection between delta opioid receptors and the modification of circadian rhythms by running behavior and benzodiazepines. The results of this project will enhance our understanding of how the suprachiasmatic nuclei integrates information from various brain regions in determining how the time of the clock will be adjusted. This project will also significantly enhance the training of undergraduate students in the sciences, many of whom are planning a career as science teachers doc13689 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of California in Los Angeles will acquire a 600 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) oligosaccharide-based glycodendrimers; b) synthesis of specific molecular probes; c) complex natural products and analogues; d) modular synthesis and polyhedral surface modification of carboranes; e) endohedral metal complexes of fullerenes; and f) interlocked molecules in electronic devices. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas, in particular nanochemistry doc13690 none Wilson Description: This award is to support a collaborative project between Dr. David Wilson, Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York and Dr. Ahmed El-Diwany, Department of Molecular Biology, and Director, Mubarak City for Scientific Research & Technology Applications, Alexandria. The research is aimed at identifying and characterizing new cellulases with properties that are desirable for certain applications. They plan to construct cellulase mixtures that have high thermostability, broad pH optima, and high activity on crystalline cellulose. They will enrich and isolate thermophilic cellulolytic microbes from various Egyptian soils. The cellulase systems produced will be analyzed and those isolates producing enzyme systems with the desired properties will be further characterized and genes encoding enzymes with interesting properties will be cloned and expressed. Scope: The project supports collaboration between two well-known scientists who have the expertise and resources for important research. The research will add to our knowledge in environmental biology and will generate useful information for producing interesting new enzymes from a relatively untapped source in the Egyptian flora. Interesting enzymes resulting from this work could be extremely valuable in biotechnological processes. Dr. Wilson is an expert in cellulase cloning, expression and characterization. Dr. El-Diwany is well published on the biotechnological aspects of this project, and has the facilities to carry out the work proposed. This project has the potential to greatly benefit both sides by developing novel cellulase systems for efficient use of biomass, e.g., in ethanol fuel production. It will promote teaching, training, and learning of Egyptian and US graduate students. The project combines the complementary strengths of the two PIs in molecular biology and biochemistry. This project meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest doc13691 none Social Behavior, Immunity and Disease Resistance in Termites James Traniello and Rebeca Rosengaus Termites live in soil and decayed wood and are continuously exposed to fungal, bacterial and other diseases. Their nesting and feeding habits have thus influenced their social behavior because individuals may contact infectious agents and transmit them to nestmates. We conduct research on termite disease resistance that bridges sociobiology, immunology and chemical ecology; the dampwood termite Zootermopsis angusticollis has been our model termite species. We have found that termites can resist infection through mutual grooming, immune response and chemical secretions and have begun to understand: 1) the benefits and costs of social living in termites, in terms of disease; 2) how colony composition can reduce infection; 3) the immune response of termites; 4) how social behavior and immunity interact to increase resistance; 5) the communication of information about pathogens within colonies; and 6) the antimicrobial properties of termite secretions. Our research proposal Social Behavior, Immunity and Disease Resistance in Termites will allow us to: 1) determine if social exchanges between immune and naive termites enhance the immune response of colony members, and the mechanisms involved; 2) understand how termites recognize infection in nestmates; 3) determine if the social control of infection is based on caste- and or individual behavioral specialization; and 4) examine the disease-resistance mechanisms of the woodroach Cryptocercus punctulatus, which is a termite ancestor that lived in families, and the drywood termite Incisitermes minor, a species which differs from Z. angusticollis in the extent to which it must cope with microbes in the nest. These studies will advance our understanding of how evolutionary history and nesting ecology, which is a central feature of termite social life, have influenced the evolution of disease resistance. This project will further our knowledge of the ways in which individuals and colonies of termites resist disease and will thus contribute to the overall understanding of how disease may influence social behavior. The proposed research, which spans several disciplines of biology, will train and educate undergraduate and graduate students. Our research also concerns a group of wood-destroying insects which have great economic importance. Through basic research on the ways termites resist disease, new and effective technologies for termite control that do not involve the use of toxic chemicals which adversely impact the environment may be identified doc13692 none Engineering - Other (59) Through a national engineering education conference, this project is supporting the formation of a cooperative coalition between community and four-year colleges, that will result in improved educational opportunities for engineering students. The conference is being held at Itasca Community College, Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Teams of high school, two-year and four-year faculty will work towards developing articulation agreements that will ensure seamless and successful educational experiences for engineering students. The outcome of this forum will be the creation of a National Collaboration for Engineering Education, a partnership that will be instrumental in reversing the current trend of declining engineering enrollment in the face of increasing need for engineers. The partnership will also be instrumental in raising the numbers of students from under-represented groups who pursue engineering careers doc13693 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Zafra Lerman and Dr. Ken Ilio at the Science Institute of Columbia College, Chicago to establish a state-of-the-art cell and tissue culture laboratory. The proposed laboratory will support the research of Dr. Kenneth Ilio (co-PI) on prostate development that he will be conducting with students taking Science Institute courses. In particular, he is devising a method to isolate stem cells, the most primitive cells in the adult prostate membranous tissue. A major component of this research is cell culture, particularly defining culture conditions that will shift differentiation of candidate primitive stem cells to a more differentiated adult cell. The long-term goal of this research is to establish both normal and transformed cell lines of specific lineages that are derived from the stem cells of the prostate. The differentiated cells that arise from stem cells could be valuable tools as cell culture models for the study of prostate normal and abnormal development, particularly cancer development. The cell culture lab complements existing laboratories in the Science Institute, namely (1) the Science Visualization and Communications Laboratory where students can produce 2-D and 3-D models of scientific concepts and processes, and (2) an analytical laboratory where students can perform and replicate sophisticated experiments similar to those used in forensic and environmental investigations. The proposed laboratory will service the cell culture needs of all the biology courses taught at the Science Institute. Students will gain hands-on exposure in and basic understanding of cell biology in both microscopic and molecular levels. In addition, acquisition of the cell culture laboratory will allow Chicago public school teachers in the Science Institute s network to conduct projects during the summer as well as during the academic year. These research projects will enhance the teachers instructional methods and materials in their classrooms. The benefits of this curriculum to the general public are substantial by providing a strong science background to Columbia College s television, radio, journalism, education and other students, and to teachers in the Chicago public schools, the Science Institute is positively influencing the education of millions of people through these professionals. Providing these communication and education students with first-hand research experience will guarantee that an accurate and positive image of science will be communicated to the public, and will dramatically improve the public understanding of science. It is anticipated that the exposure of teachers to this proposed facility and to the creative methods of teaching developed by the Science Institute will increase the number of students seeking careers in the sciences. Project results will be reported in professional conferences and in scientific journals, in addition to the print and electronic media that regularly report on programs of the Science Institute doc13694 none Hnat This is a proposal to acquire an industrial micro computed tomography (microCT) system to be used for the detailed examination of bone samples. The micro CT system includes a variable power CT, an image intensifier, a turntable, and 3D visualization software. Some of the areas of research include: (1) studying three-dimensional trabecular bone architecture, (2) investigating molecular mechanisms of bone formation and resorption, (3) assessing the quality of bone during healing of fractures, and (4) creating more accurate biomechanical joint models. Engineering applications include flaw detection, measurement of fracture or fracture propagation, feature recognition, and non-destructive evaluation doc13695 none The research equipment being acquired through this grant is a 100 KN Servo Hydraulic Axial Tension - Torsion Materials Testing System (MTS) with an environmental chamber and other supporting facilities for measuring crack propagation rates and characterizing material microstructures. On-going research projects and the mission to strengthen the graduate engineering education program at Alfred University led to this acquisition. Results from multi-axial fatigue tests of A356 aluminum alloy conducted previously by this PI and a multi-scale computational and microstructure-based fatigue analytical modeling effort conducted in conjunction with Dr. McDowell of Georgia Tech and Dr. Horstemeyer of Sandia National Labs show great potential for increasing fatigue life of particular aluminum alloys. These instruments will allow the extension of those results to industry. The new equipment will be used by faculty members and students at Alfred University. They will also be used by members of the USCAR USAMP team and companies and colleges in western New York State. Besides the above-mentioned projects, the planned activities include: - Modeling and analysis of electrostrictive, piezoelectric, and ferroelectric ceramics. - Damage and failure analysis of carbon-carbon composites under complex loading. - Testing of non-proportional cyclic plasticity of metals and light-weight alloys. - Analysis behavior of brittle materials such as glass, ceramics, and concrete. - Mechanical behavior characterization and multi-scale analysis of bio-materials. - Environmental effects on material behavior, such as moisture and temperature effects. Courses such as Fatigue, Fracture, and Mechanical Behavior of Engineering Materials doc13696 none This grant supports the acquisition of instrumentation to establish develop a state-of-the-art GIS and Remote Sensing Laboratory at the University of Toledo. The University of Toledo Department of Geography and Planning has significantly enhanced its Geographic Information Science (GIS) and Remote Sensing capabilities in recent years. These geotechnical fields are rapidly expanding world-wide and are affecting people s lives on a daily basis with applications ranging from the determination of the optimal location of emergency services, clinics and hospitals to preserving the quality of water resources. There are increasing demands for highly trained GIS and Remote Sensing specialists who have a solid background in Geography, Planning, or Environmental Studies. The Department of Geography and Planning has focused on the education and training of students in GIS and Remote Sensing Applications through research opportunities. In the last three years the department has been awarded nearly $1.5 million in federal research grants, many of which are applied in nature and focus on serving the public s needs. Department faculty have also been actively involved in the development of software tools to further advance the application of this technology in the solution of research, management and planning problems. In addition, the department is part of an extensive network that consists of academic units on and off campus as well as regional, state, and national agencies. Consequently, the Department is poised to assume a leadership role in GIS, remote sensing, and spatial decision support systems. Success in GIS and remote sensing has led the College of Arts and Sciences and the Department to invest further in this endeavor by hiring new faculty members with research foci on Geographic Information Science and Remote Sensing and the application of these tools for environmental planning and decision-making by public agencies, community groups, and citizens. The department is in a position to build upon these advances by expanding its research activity in Geographic Information Science with the goal of becoming a model department within the state of Ohio and the nation. Currently, the department has one computer lab to support both teaching and research with outdated computers. Students working on their research projects often find it difficult to find time to work in the lab around the teaching schedule. In addition, these computers are inadequate to effectively process the large volumes of data typical of GIS and remote sensing applications. The university is investing $50,000 to upgrade the lab for teaching purposes. Through this grant, we will establish a research computer laboratory facility that concentrates on GIS and remote sensing applications doc13697 none Proposal: PI: Iris Tommelein Institution: University of California at Berkeley Date: July 22, : Improving Design Fitness by Applying Tolerance Analysis, Methods Knowledge, and Set-Based Design AEC practitioners as well as academics lack a vocabulary and conceptualization to describe tolerances. Tolerances--used broadly to denote any variation from the point solution that was designed and planned--significantly affect industry performance. This lack is reflected in AEC practices, teachings, and software tools, including those for 4D CAD modeling, which are inadequate in terms of reflecting alternative futures. To alleviate this problem, this research is investigating how performance risk due to tolerances can be reduced through the application of new principles combined with software solutions. Some of these principles have already been applied in manufacturing. They involve the application of distributed set-based design for improving design fitness throughout the project life cycle and analysis of the allocation of tolerances based on production method capabilities. In contrast to contractual approaches that are commonly used in the AEC industry to allocate risk, this research is investigating means for making designs and schedules more robust, so they will withstand impact better. Design in this context broadly refers to the development of the product itself (i.e., design in the narrow sense) but also to the development of processes for production (manufacturing, fabrication, and construction), operations, maintenance, and decommissioning. Fitness denotes the ability of a design and a schedule (product and process) to withstand the impact of tolerances and the corresponding changes while adhering to project goals. The research tasks are to identify and classify various kinds of tolerances affecting AEC product process development. Case studies will illustrate and help assess how they impede system performance. For each tolerance, the key research question is Which project stakeholder(s) is (are) in the best position to manage that tolerance? The objective of the research is to develop a system for tolerance allocation. A method is needed to decide where and when in the product process development effort the tolerance has an impact, and correspondingly, to decide how this situation is best managed. Research outputs also include: a review of existing software tools and their expressiveness with respect to modeling tolerances; if appropriate, development of guidelines for new software capabilities; a methodology for capturing product and process decisions that allow for alternative futures; and a decision support system to trade off multiple objectives between project stakeholders in order to gauge design fitness doc13698 none Baker This is a planning visit proposal submitted by Dr. Bradly Baker, South Dakota School of Mines, to request funds are travel to China to finalize a research project on the effects of land use change on reactive biogenic compounds in the atmosphere. He plans to develop a cooperative research proposal with Dr. Jianhui Bai of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences to compare the effects of developing grasslands into range and cropland on the regional air quality between the selected sites in Inner Mongolia and South Dakota. The success of this research can enhance our understanding of regional air quality as a result of land use changes doc13699 none The Amaldi Conferences were initiated in by an international group of scientists involved in the search for gravitational waves in honor of Edoardo Amaldi, the Italian physicist who was one of the founders of the University of Rome Gravitational Wave group. The conferences are now a continuing series sponsored and organized by the Gravitational Wave International Committee (GWIC). GWIC has members from all of the major gravitational wave detector projects around the world. This proposal requests support for travel to the 4th Amaldi Conference to be held in Perth, Western Australia, July 8-13, , for members of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC). The Amaldi Conferences are the principal international meetings for the Gravitational Wave community. The latest developments and accomplishments in this rapidly growing scientific field will be reported at this meeting. In addition to this important exchange of ideas and advances in gravitational wave science, US members of the LSC will have an opportunity to discuss research on techniques to improve the sensitivity of LIGO interferometers with their Australian collaborators who are also members of the LSC doc13700 none Switkes Lay ( ) Studies of Spatial and Temporal Integration of Differing Chromaticities In the normal visual environment spatial contours may be defined by variations along a number of stimulus dimensions, e.g. luminance, chromaticity, texture, velocity, and depth. During the past three decades, studies of early visual processing have characterized and compared the ability of the human visual system to extract individual spatial features (lines, edges, grating components) defined by such variations. Subsequent steps of visual processing must integrate individual features to attain the global perception of form. This grant application describes a series of psychophysical experiments which investigate aspects of this mid-level visual processing involving spatial, temporal, and chromatic information. Similarities in the color or luminance contrast of features serve as an important basis for segregating objects into differing perceptual groupings; however, lighting and other factors can render variations in luminance or color among the elements comprising an individual object. The current proposal considers patterns whose elements are defined by luminance contrast or by color contrast and investigates the ability of the human visual system to perceive form and motion when integrating elemental features differing in chromaticity or luminance. In addition to analyzing integration of features in mid-level spatiotemporal processing, the proposed experiments will also investigate the mechanisms of third-stage chromatic processing. While many phenomena involving color vision can be rationalized in terms of receptor activation (first-stage) and retinal LGN opponent processes (second-stage), both electrophysiological and psychophysical studies are unclear regarding further transformations of color information in visual cortex. Experiments in this proposal will measure our ability detect correlations among individual features both as a function of their differing chromaticities and their average chromaticities. Comparative performance along various chromatic axes in three-dimensional color space will be analyzed in terms of possible third-stage mechanisms involved in processing chromatic information. Three general studies are proposed: i) the nature of contrast matching for patterns defined by luminance or color variations; ii) the ability to integrate spatial correlations where the individual elements differ in color luminance contrast; and iii) the ability to integrate in the time domain features which differ in chromaticity. The goal of the first set of studies is to establish a basic metric for the perceived salience of patterns differing in color luminance; the experiments involve contrast matching of sinusoidal gratings. In the second set of studies translational and rotational Glass patterns with luminance chromaticity variations both within and among dot-pair elements will be utilized to investigate the degree of color-blindness (or not) of mechanisms which integrate the local features in the perception of global patterns. The third area includes experiments probing two types of temporal integration across chromaticities: the visual system s ability to fuse two temporally noncoincident flashes which fall along differing chromatic axes and its ability to detect motion from the spatial and temporal displacement of dots whose chromaticity is altered during the spatiotemporal displacement. The three studies are linked by the question can the visual system integrate information initially segregated by differing second-stage chromatic mechanisms? The proposal addresses questions of fundamental importance in gaining an understanding of the linkage between brain mechanisms and visual behavior. The work is also closely associated with the PI s efforts in education and outreach. Techniques, equipment, and results associated with the scientific goals of this proposal will be utilized in activities such as the NSF funded Center for Adaptive Optics COSMOS course Photons, Proteins, and Perception which the PI has organized for ; a course aimed at allowing high school students from under-represented demographics to be exposed to a university science environment (http: www.chemistry.ucsc.edu COSVIS doc13701 none This is a Major Research Instrumentation award to enable the design and construction of a new instrument for measuring the activity spectrum of cloud condensation nuclei (CCN). The principle of operation is that air is drawn slowly and continuously through a thermal-gradient diffusion chamber in which the supersaturation increases with increasing distance into the chamber. At the exit of the chamber, the cloud droplets that have formed are counted and sized with an optical particle counter. A mathematical inversion procedure is then used to compute the CCN spectrum from the measured droplet spectrum, assuming a relationship between the size of a droplet and the critical supersaturation at which it formed. The proposed instrument is an improvement over existing designs for two reasons: modern digital electronics will be used for particle detection and counting, and by use of concentric cylindrical walls the cloud chamber will be in the shape of an annulus instead of a simple rectangular channel. The advantage of the annular shape is that undesirable edge effects associated with side walls are eliminated. The information provided by the instrument is fundamental for cloud microphysics and also bears on the way aerosol particles and their radiative effects are treated in numerical climate models doc13702 none A tsunami laboratory facility -- a component of the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) -- was funded recently at Oregon State University. This action is to support a workshop to review the present plan for this facility, to learn its physical constraints and limitations, to discuss potential research to be conducted at this facility, and to make recommendations for instrumentation needed to undertake this research. This tsunami facility will be utilized for a wide variety of research topics in tsunami hazard mitigation, as well as other research fields such as coastal engineering, nearshore oceanography, and geotechnical engineering. This facility -- a large-scale, three-dimensional, long-wave tank - will have essentially unique capabilities. This workshop will be an important step in providing input from the potential users. Also, the NEES program announcement contained the following statement, The NEES collaboratory will form an integrated network that facilitates interdisciplinary collaboration among scientists and engineers, both within the U.S. and abroad. In this regard, the advanced network technologies will permit enhanced international collaborations through this tsunami facility. Therefore the workshop participants will include both national and international key scientists and engineers, not only tsunami researchers, but also researchers from other relevant research communities. Prior to the workshop, the PI will set up an electronic mailing list to start the discussion and to provide relevant workshop information. Following the workshop, the organizing committee will distribute the workshop report, including posting it on the workshop web site, the Tsunami Bulletin Board (TBB) and the Coastal_List (CL). (TBB and CL are e-mail bulletin boards for the tsunami and coastal-engineering research communities, respectively doc13703 none Our understanding of the marine environment was fundamentally changed when it was shown that marine phage (viruses that infect bacteria) are present in extraordinary numbers (ca. per liter). Since this observation, marine microbial ecologists have attempted to incorporate phage into the microbial food web concepts. This work has shown that under various conditions phage account for 12-600% of all bacterial production via lysis. The high number of observable phage and their high production rates have called into question concepts of energy and nutrient cycles in the world s oceans. The observation of large numbers of phage in the ocean also raised two other extremely exciting questions: 1) What type of phage inhabit the marine environment?, and 2) How might phage affect genetic transfer (e.g., transduction or lysogenic conversion) in the marine environment?. Available evidence suggests that marine phage diversity is ten times as great as prokaryotic diversity and like their prokaryotic counterparts, it is believed that each phage will have a unique strategy for surviving and multiplying in the marine environment and these strategies will be reflected in the genes that each phage encodes. The life strategies adopted by phage will in turn help shape the MMFW and the biogeochemical processes of the ocean. Current methods of phage characterization rely on phage morphology, genome size, and host range. However, these approaches are extremely limited in their applicability to environmental samples, primarily because the majority of host are not culturable. Drs. Azam and Rohwer ill attempt to circumvent this problem by sequencing the genomes of uncultured phage. This will be accomplished in three steps. First, phage genomes will be separated from each other using pulse field gels. Second, randomly amplified shotgun libraries (RASLs) will be constructed from the bands isolated from the PF-gels. Finally, the shotgun libraries will be sequenced doc13704 none A grant has been award to Dr. Victor Hsu at Oregon State University to acquire a cryoprobe for their 600 MHz nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer. NMR spectroscopy is unique in that it is the only technique that yields molecular information at the atomic scale in solution. Since the installation of the 600 MHz NMR instrument in , researchers from various Departments and Colleges on the Oregon State University campus have used NMR spectroscopy to study samples ranging from 13C,15N-labeled protein-DNA complexes to anticancer antitumor agents isolated from marine algae and beer hops to measuring oil content in grass seeds to studying metabolite levels in rat urine. However, one of the limitations to the wider use of this instrument has been its inherent sensitivity. Since many of the projects involve biomolecules that are either isolated from natural sources or are synthetically obtained, collecting useful NMR spectra under sample-limited conditions is often difficult, if not impossible. Recently, however, cryogenic probes have been developed that improve the sensitivity of the instrumentation by a factor of four. The improved signal to noise (S N) ratio of these probes is obtained by reducing the operating temperature of the detection coil and the pre-amplifier to cryogenic temperatures. Thus the efficiency of the coil is increased and the thermal noise present in the coil and the pre-amplifier is reduced. What this means in practical terms is that by using cryoprobes, the same experiments that are currently used can be performed with either four times less sample, or a 16-fold reduction in the amount of time required. Among the many research projects that would greatly benefit from the increased sensitivity of the NMR cryoprobe are the following: Dr. Hsu s (Biochemistry Biophysics) projects involving understanding the effects of environmental and endogenous damage on molecular function and interactions, and his studies of DNA-binding by antitumor drugs; Dr. William Gerwick s (Pharmacy) structural studies of biologically-active natural products from marine cyanobacteria and algae; Dr. James White s and Dr. David Horne s (Chemistry) studies of synthetic methods and the total synthesis of biologically-active natural products and other complex molecules; Dr. Kaichang Li s (Forest Products) investigations into the mechanisms of fungal degradation of lignin; and Dr. Max Deinzer s (Chemistry) studies into how protein alkylation and or oxidation affects protein folding pathways. With the arrival and installation of the cryoprobe, many sample- and sensitivity-limited projects will be initiated, both by the same researchers and others. Most of these new projects would be impossible without the cryoprobe. Research projects utilizing a major involvement of the existing 600 MHz NMR spectrometer have led to more than forty peer - reviewed journal articles, review articles, and book chapters, and an even greater number of presentations at local, national, and international scientific meetings. Of equal importance, Dr. Hsu is especially pleased with the impact the NMR instrumentation has had on the University s infrastructure. This spectrometer has been used by members of over a dozen research groups on the OSU campus and additional users from other institutions. These users have included undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral associates and principal investigators. This instrument has also been very successfully utilized for teaching in classroom settings and in programs directly targeted to attracting women and minority students into the science curriculum. In fact, women and minority scientists represent more than half of the researchers trained to use the instrument. Other programs identify students at the middle and high school level, and several of these students have gained summer research employment involving the use of the NMR instrumentation. It is fully anticipated that the cryoprobe will enhance and increase these training, research, and outreach activities, and that the NMR instrument will continue to be a highly valued and utilized research resource on the OSU campus and in the Northwest region doc13705 none Hon This grant, made through the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, provides partial support to upgrade an existing ARL-SEMQ electron microprobe (EMP) in the Geology Department at the University of Hawaii-Hilo. This EMP was recently donated to the Department by the USGS and has since been upgraded with modern PC-based control and data acquisition systems. This support will replace the electron gun power supply (now 20 years old), the back-scatter imaging system, and the optical mirrors within the microprobe. In addition, as teaching and education are an important mission of this laboratory, funds will be used to develop a remote operating capability. This will allow demonstrations of EMP techniques for use in current courses, workshops and to produce outreach programs for local high schools. Additional funds will be used for the purchase of a carbon coater and an optical microscope and image analysis system. Having an operational and modern electron microscopy facility at UH-Hilo will greatly enhance their ability to attract and retain students in the sciences. In particular, Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students make up a large proportion of the student body. Researchers at the nearby USGS Hawaiian Volcanological Observatory (HVO) will also have access to the probe for initial quantitative chemical and textural analysis of basaltic lavas doc13706 none A. Naguib, Michigan State University The objective of the proposed research is to obtain by experimental means the characteristics of the flow in the separation reattachment zone of a three-dimensional boundary layer. Such a flow is to be generated downstream of a backward facing step on an axisymmetric body. Surface stresses will be measure by a Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) instrument to be developed by the PI. The data will be made available to the fluid dynamics community as bench marks for the DNS and LES computations and the testing of turbulence models for such complex flows doc13707 none Sheremet The shallow water and hydrostatic approximations do not hold for deep convection, implying that the horizontal component of the earth s rotation cannot be neglected. This proposal is to support work to determine how convection in a system where the gravity and rotation vectors are parallel differ from one in which they are not? Preliminary experiments in the latter type of system suggest an eastward advection of the convecting region and general sinking of fluid along a wedge between the directions of gravity and rotation. Two modes of sinking are identified: blobs sink parallel to gravity and leave behind tails parallel to the rotation axis while curtains sink parallel to the rotation axis. Laboratory experiments will be performed to determine the dependence of the characteristics of convection on a three-dimensional parameter space defined by the rotation, the buoyancy flux, and the angle between the rotation and gravity vectors. The PI will also compare the lab results with the output of the MIT model in a hope of verifying one of the many proposed parameterizations present in the model doc13708 none Colosi A model has been developed, which separates baroclinic and barotropic contributions to tide gauge records. Cusps are generally agreed to be due to internal tides. The model assumes phase-modulated internal waves that arrive at the gauge as evanescent waves. Phase modulation results from variable phase speed due to variable thermocline characteristics caused by processes such as Rossby waves. More rapid modulation results in more cusping and zero modulation results in the internal wave being misinterpreted as the barotropic tide. The PIs propose a complete analysis of the 108-year long Honolulu record, analysis of other long records from Hawaii (there are 4 such records on the north shore that seem to be interpretable assuming a single internal tidal wave so that phase can be estimated and other processes investigated), and analysis of other long records from non-island sites, e.g. San Francisco doc13709 none Oerther The objective of this research is to develop culture-based Biomedical Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (BioMEMS) chips to identify, enumerate, and characterize microorganisms in environmental samples. The specific objectives of this research are: (1) developing fundamental science to establish the novel concept of scaled-down, culture-based identification and quantification of Gram positive, mycolic acid containing Actinomycetes (e. g. mycobacteria and nocardioforms), and (2) demonstrating scaled-down, microbial culturing using a proof-of-concept BioMEMS chip device. This research could eventually lead to a rapid, cost-efficient technology for microbial monitoring of environmental samples doc13710 none Scientific discourses about sexuality in old age from this period thus implies associations between aging and disease, highly gendered preconceptions about the character of the elderly, powerful biological-functionalist models for sexual behavior, and uncertainty about the role of the elderly from a social-Darwinist perspective, all of which served to render late-life sexuality a problematic topic for contemporaries. One product of this network of ideas was the stereotype of the senile sex offender, or the dirty old man, a development the researcher plans to treat in depth. She argues that the image of the villainous, lascivious elder was partly a product of wide spread sex reform and social hygiene campaigns at the turn of the twentieth century, and partly a product of the popular imagination as manifest in the popular press of the time. Further examination of the image of the aged sex offender and how the different national historical contexts varied (or didn t) requires additional research. The researcher is requesting funds for research in Paris and London where she will examine both court records and the popular press, in particular newspapers, which covered legal proceedings and sex reform movements doc13711 none Phillips UIUC The aim of this project is to study the role of mixing and vorticity generated by breaking waves on the formation and evolution of Langmuir circulations in the oceanic surface mixed layer. A theoretical model, consistent with data from recent field experiments, will be developed. This model will extend GLM theory from the weak-wave regime to a regime in which the surface waves have a more realistic steepness and will include a representation of vorticity injection by breaking waves. The dynamics of the model will be explored with numerical methods. The anticipated outcome is a better model of the development and structure of Langmuir-cell scale vortical motions in the ocean mixed layer. If successful, this may be useful in the development of better mixed-layer representations in large-scale ocean and climate models doc13712 none The purpose of this project is to extend existing knowledge in the field of network traffic modeling in two ways. One objective is to develop approximation and bounding techniques that will provide first-order estimates of the performance of deterministic servers under arrival process having long-range dependence. This effort will build upon both our previous work in developing approximate solutions for closed queuing networks having analytically intractable service distributions and the more recent work of Norros which characterized the behavior of a system having a self-similar arrival process and a constant service rate doc13713 none Recently, studies on air-sea exchange have suggested that estimated evasion rates for Hg from the ocean are significantly higher that current deposition rates. One potential reason for this lack of balance is that elemental Hg is oxidized by hydroxyl or halogen radicals in the surface ocean, or via reactive halogen species in the marine boundary layer (MBL). The PI proposes to determine the importance of Hg oxidation at the air-sea exchange in controlling Hg cycling at the Earth s surface. To achieve this goal, the scientist from the University of Maryland will measure the spatial and temporal variation in the concentration of Hg species in both the surface ocean and in the MBL. In the atmosphere, reactive gaseous Hg (RGHg), particulate Hg and total gaseous Hg over the ocean will be measured on short timescales during both research cruises and from the atmospheric sampling tower at Bermuda and at a coastal site in Maryland. These measurements will be carried out across seasons to assess the temporal and spatial variability in Hg evasion and deposition. In conjunction with the air measurements, the speciation of Hg in the surface ocean (total Hg, Hg0 and methylated Hg) will be determined to allow the gas evasion from the ocean to be calculated. The parameters that affect RGHg concentrations and the controls of Hg oxidation and reduction in the MBL and in the surface ocean will be ascertained using a combination of field incubation experiments and laboratory tests. Results from this study will lead to an updated global Hg model and a revision of our understanding of how Hg cycles at the Earth s surface doc13714 none This is an SGER to do an exploratory study to assess the effects of student faculty collaboration through a variety of quantitative and qualitative measures designed to determine the extent to which these interactions affect students learning, critical thinking skills, career choices, and persistence. As an exploratory study, the goal is to identify characteristics that predict which students are most likely to benefit from an undergraduate research experience. The study will also examine different models of undergraduate research used by faculty and determine whether some approaches are more effective than others. Finally, the study will examine factors influencing students decisions of whether or not to take part in a research opportunity, with special attention aimed at uncovering hindrances that may prevent members of under-represented groups from participating doc13715 none Alvarez This Americas Program award will support Dr. Pedro J. Alvarez of the University of Iowa and Dr. Susan E. Powers of Clarkson University, in collaboration with Dr. Henry X. Corseuil of the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil. The aim of the project is to form an international research coordination group to provide a forum for timely communication among environmental scientists and engineers studying how the increased use of ethanol in gasoline might affect the fate and transport of petroleum product spills and related risk assessment and remediation activities. The group would (1) identify pertinent knowledge gaps, uncertainties, and research needs; and (2) coordinate research activities to avoid duplicative efforts and facilitate the sharing of the data. Brazil has over 20 years of experience in dealing with ethanol in gasoline. Communication among researchers will advance our basic understanding of the transport and fate of ethanol and fuel hydrocarbons in the presence of ethanol, and contribute to the development of new tools for environmental and risk assessment doc13716 none Oerther This grant funds a workshop to explore the value of applying molecular biology tools in environmental engineering. The objectives of the workshop include providing answers to four critical questions: (1) Can junior faculty in the field of environmental engineering build successful and sustainable careers by developing, implementing, and conducting research using molecular biology tools? (2) What are the advantages and disadvantages of biomolecular technologies, and how should technique development and standardization proceed within the environmental engineering community? (3) How and to what degree should the field of environmental engineering teach molecular biology tools to students, practitioners, and regulators? (4) What are current and anticipated examples of knowledge provided by molecular biology tools that were previously unavailable, and what is the real value of this knowledge to the field doc13717 none It is generally accepted that some memories, such as those associated with important events, are retained better than others. One factor that appears to be important in the modulation of memory storage processes is the degree of arousal associated with the experience. Memories of events that are associated with moderate degrees of behavioral arousal tend to be retained better than memories associated with either very low or very high levels of arousal. Research over the past two decades has demonstrated that memory modulation is mediated by the presence of hormones from the pituitary and the adrenals that are associated with arousal. For example, injection of epinephrine, norepinephrine, ACTH, vasopressin, enkephalins, or the endorphins all modulate retention performance. However, none of these substances freely crosses the blood brain barrier to influence activity in the brain that mediates memory storage. In an attempt to resolve this apparent problem, recent research suggests that the vagus nerve may be a pathway by which peripheral arousal enhances memory. These studies demonstrated in laboratory rats that subdiaphragmic vagotomy attenuates the memory modulatory effects of some of these agents and that electrical stimulation of the vagus nerve, at a moderate intensity, can enhance memory of an avoidance task. Further, low-, but not high-intensity vagus nerve stimulation can enhance verbal learning in human subjects. Therefore, it appears that arousal results in the release of adrenal and pituitary hormones that activate peripheral receptors. These receptors then initiate neural messages, which travel to the brain via the vagus to modulate mnemonic processes. The goal of the current research project is to gain a better understanding of the neural events produced by activity in the vagus nerve that alters the strength of memory storage. A series of pharmacological, electrophysiological, and behavioral studies will be conducted. The behavioral studies are linked to electrophysiological studies that focus on characterizing changes in hippocampal responses produced by vagus nerve stimulation and a search for their underlying causes. The goal of the first set of studies is to characterize changes in electrical activity in the hippocampus, a brain structure known to be importantly involved in memory, produced by vagus nerve stimulation. Other studies will determine whether pharmacological agents that enhance memory produce effects similar to those seen following vagus nerve stimulation and whether blockade of vagus nerve activity alters these responses. The results obtained from these studies should yield a better understanding of the brain mechanisms that underlie the modulation of memory storage processes doc13718 none Science : This proposal requests support for a detailed (millennial to centennial scale) multiproxy study of the surface and deep water dynamics along the continental margin in the NE Atlantic. Work will focus in the area involving interaction between the Labrador Current and the Gulf Stream. Multiproxy study of high accumulation rate cores from the Continental Shelf, Slope, and Laurentian Fan will allow identification of salinity and temperature changes and source of deep waters. The study will focus on rapid changes associated with the Little Ice Age, Medieval Warm Period, the 8.2 ka cold event, and the Younger Dryas doc13719 none The researchers will examine the potential effect of climate warming from anthropogenically induced increases of atmospheric carbon dioxide on both Arctic and global climate. The long-term variability of the Arctic Oscillation (AO) may be influenced by increased greenhouse gas concentration, and therefore, is important for understanding future climate response to the continued increase of gases. Data from a warm, ice-free geologic period will be used as a proxy in a climate system model to examine what a future warmer, ice-free Arctic resulting from a warming similar to the one underway in the Arctic might be like. The role of the AO in arctic climate and the feedback of arctic climate on global climate is a new area of research that has important implications for understanding mechanisms for global warming. Since the Arctic has been warming for over a decade and the environmental response is already obvious, the research is a timely contribution to studies of the impacts from global warming doc13720 none Arabidopsis : The Endgame for Reverse Genetics. The Arabidopsis Project is focused on determining the function of each of the 26,000 genes found in the genome of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. One of the most definitive methods for determining gene function is to create an organism in which that gene is missing and then ask the question: how does that simple genetic defect change how the organism develops and functions? Such mutant organisms are commonly called knockouts and this project is focused on developing and using new technologies to provide knockout plants to the research community. Funds from this project will continue to support the University of Wisconsin Knockout Plant Facility, established under a previous award, as well as support research on using new high throughput methods for more easily identifying large numbers of knockout plants. The research community and public can obtain information on the procedures used to screen for mutants and to obtain seeds from this project via the website already established and maintained at the University of Wisconsin Biotechnology Center Knockout Plant Facility (http: www.biotech.wisc.edu Arabidopsis ). One new technology supported under this project is the use of a recently developed method for creating DNA chips (i.e., small pieces of glass on which a very large number of different DNA sequences are synthesized and displayed) to develop new methods of finding and cataloging knockout organisms. Results from this research will be published in the appropriate scientific journals and the methodology for high-throughput screens to find new knockout plants will be described on the above website. More broadly, results from this project may provide new methods for determining the function of genes in any sequenced genome, information which is critical for further advances in agriculture and medicine doc13721 none A. Hirsa, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute This proposal is one part of a collaborative research effort between Dr. Hirsa of Rensselaer and Dr. Lopez of Arizona State University ( ) on the effects of bulk flow on monolayer formation at gas liquid interfaces. These two are renewal proposals for the present Grants at Rensselaer and at ASU. The present grants focus on the experimental and theoretical computational study of interfacial transport properties of monolayers of insoluble surfactants on the air water interface. It is proposed to extend the study to the effect of bulk liquid flow on the self-assembled monolayers along the air liquid interface. Dr. Hirsa will carry out experimental investigations and Dr. Lopez will perform theoretical computational studies doc13722 none The ultimate source of Os into the modern ocean is only partially constrained. At issue is whether radiogenic Os is derived from average upper continental crust or whether Os is the result of weathering of organic-rich sedimentary rocks. For this reason, a PI from the University of Maryland will develop the 190Pt-186Os isotope system as a tracer of chemical input into the oceans by carrying out the following research: (1) constrain the 186Os 188Os of the modern ocean via analysis of young oceanic Mn-nodules and oxidized metalliferous sediments; (2) constrain the average 186Os 188Os of the continental crust via the analysis of loess and freshwater Mn-concretions from a variety of locations in the United States, Europe and Asia; and (3) constrain the average evolution of 186Os 188Os in organic-rich sediments via the analysis black shales from the Proterozoic Chelmsford Onwatin and Virginia Formations, Cambrian shales from the Hunan Province in China and Devonian shales from the Yukon Territory of Canada. Once these analysis have been completed and if any analytically discernable differences are confirmed between the 186Os 188Os ratio of felsic crust and organic-rich sediments, then the PI also will determine the evolution of 186Os 188Os in Cenozoic seawater via analysis of metalliferous sediments of known age doc13723 none X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy and X-ray Diffraction are two scientific techniques that assist scientists in understanding the atomic structure of crystals and hence better understand the macroscopic properties of these crystals, such as growth size, strength and color. Both techniques are needed to verify the accuracy of the data. X-ray absorption data is taken at Brookhaven National Laboratory at the National Synchrotron Light Source. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program will allow Georgian Court College to purchase an X-ray Diffractometer and an X-ray Fluorescence Spectrometry instrument to be used at the home institution. This will support an ongoing research project currently funded by Research Corporation. The project specifically seeks to understand the important role that small amounts of elements have on the crystal hydroxyapaptite. This crystal is important because it is the key mineral in human bone. Success in understanding the role of these elements may lead to the better ability to grow new bones for people, as well as other uses. Undergraduates involved in this research who have had the opportunity to travel to Brookhaven National Laboratory will have the opportunity to finish the analysis of the samples at their home institution. X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy and X-ray Diffraction are two scientific techniques that assist scientists in understanding the atomic structure of crystals and hence better understand the macroscopic properties of these crystals, such as growth size, strength and color. Both techniques are needed to verify the accuracy of the data. X-ray absorption data is taken at Brookhaven National Laboratory at the National Synchrotron Light Source. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program will allow Georgian Court College to purchase an X-ray Diffractometer and an X-ray Fluorescence Spectrometry instrument to be used at the home institution. This will support an ongoing research project currently funded by Research Corporation. The project specifically seeks to understand the important role that small amounts of elements have on the crystal hydroxyapaptite. This crystal is important because it is the key mineral in human bone. Success in understanding the role of these elements may lead to the better ability to grow new bones for people, as well as other uses. Undergraduates involved in this research who have had the opportunity to travel to Brookhaven National Laboratory will have the opportunity to finish the analysis of the samples at their home institution doc13724 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Eastern Oregon State College will acquire an ion-trap gas chromatograph with mass spectrometric detection. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) development of analytical techniques to determine changes in fatty acid composition in fish during smolting; b) determination of the effects due to heat and light exposure on sex pheromones used by the US Forest Service; c) weed ecology, especially allelopathy; and d) isolation and structural eludication of biologically active naturally occurring compounds from plant and invertebrate sources. This equipment will also be used in advanced undergraduate courses. Gas chromatograph with mass spectrometric detection (GC-MS) is an extremely powerful technique used for the separation and analysis of complex mixtures. This instrument will substantially strengthen scientific research within the multidisciplinary program at Eastern Oregon State College and will have a significant impact in biochemistry and environmental chemistry doc13725 none Prentice This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports a collaborative research project between the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale and the University of New Hampshire. Foraminiferal and stable isotopic analyses of modern sediments and core samples from the Weddell Sea shelf will be used to address the mechanisms underlying the recent collapse of the Larsen Ice Shelf, Antarctica. The Larsen Ice Shelf, located on the northwestern margin of the Weddell Sea along the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula, may be collapsing due to a marked increase in mean annual atmospheric temperature (~+2.5 degrees C) that has resulted in sea-ice free conditions for at least 4 months per year. Alternatively, basal ice shelf melting due to intrusion of relatively warm deepwater may be primarily responsible. From May 6 to June 1, , the Research Vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer (NBP) was used to collect a series of surface sediment grab samples, hydrographic casts, high-resolution seismic data, and gravity cores from a large region of the Weddell Sea shelf formerly covered by the Larsen Ice Shelf-A (LIS-A). Samples collected from surface sediment grabs and gravity cores will be analyzed for foraminiferal distribution (planktonic and benthic; living and dead) data as well as planktonic and benthic foraminiferal oxygen and carbon isotopic analyses (d18O and d13C). Past work has shown a strong correlation between foraminiferal distributions and bottom water masses on the Antarctic continental shelf. Water samples collected from the major water masses in the western Weddell Sea will be measured for their d18O and d13C compositions. The extent of equilibrium d18O and d13C precipitation will be established for selected benthic foraminifers, as well as their d18O and d13C values calibrated to the modern oceanography. The modern foraminiferal distribution and geochemical data will be applied to kasten core and jumbo piston core samples, in addition to other collaborative research, to reconstruct the oceanographic and biotic changes associated with the recent collapse of the LIS-A. The following hypothesis will be tested: That incursions of relatively warm Weddell Deep Water onto the western Weddell Sea shelf has led to the retreat of the LIS-A. The results will contribute to understanding oceanic causal mechanisms for ice shelf collapse and provide a link between Northern Hemisphere climatic and oceanographic change and the Southern Hemisphere. A detailed record of benthic foraminiferal distribution and also planktonic and benthic foraminiferal d18O and d13C will be reconstructed for much of the Holocene in order to determine the natural variability of the LIS and underlying ocean. This work will contribute to detection of anthropogenic forcing of Antarctic ice shelf collapse doc13726 none Optimal design, optimal control, and parameter estimation of systems governed by partial differen-tial equations give rise to a class of problems known as PDE-constrained optimization. The size and complexity of the discretized PDE constraints often pose significant challenges for contemporary optimization methods. Recent advances in algorithms, software, and high performance computing systems have resulted in PDE simulations that can often scale to millions of variables, thousands of processors, and multiple physics interactions. As PDE solvers mature, there is increasing in-dustrial and scientific interest in solving optimization problems governed by such large-scale PDE simulations. To address the challenges of these problems the investigators have organized a workshop on PDE-constrained optimization on April 4-6, , in Santa Fe, NM. The goals of the workshop are to identify the needs and opportunities for PDE-constrained optimization in industry and the national labs, to assess the state of the art in PDE-constrained optimization, to identify barriers to PDE-constrained optimization presented by modern simulation codes, and to discuss promising algorithmic and software approaches for overcoming these barriers. Sandia National Laboratories will sponsor the workshop itself. to expose a new generation of researchers to this rapidly growing area of research, the investigators will use this grant to support students attending and participating in the workshop doc13727 none Endocytosis is required for the uptake of essential nutrients from the extracellular environment as well as to retrieve proteins and lipids that are added to the plasma membrane during fusion of regulated and constitutive secretory vesicles. A role for the actin cytoskeleton in endocytosis has been controversial. Hrs-2 is a protein that has been localized on endosomes by light and electron microscopy and interacts with eps15, a protein required for endocytosis, suggesting that hrs-2 may play a role in endocytosis. Although actin and hrs-2 do not directly interact, hrs-2 interacts with an actin binding protein, actinin-4. The interaction of hrs-2 with actinin-4 suggests a mechanism by which endosomes interact with the actin cytoskeleton, and fragments of hrs-2 that block its association with actinin-4 inhibit endosome actin association. The experiments proposed will characterize the interaction of hrs-2 with actinin-4, and examine the role of hrs-2 actinin-4 interactions in endocytosis. Biochemical, in situ and in vitro trafficking assays, will be used to test the notion that hrs-2 acts as a link between endosomes and actin via specific protein interactions with actinin-4, and to understand the role of this interaction in endocytic trafficking doc13728 none Rykiel SGER: Biocomplexity: The limits to ecological understanding A theory of ecological complexity must take into account limitations on predictability, observability, controllability, and even knowability as well as the critical role that humans play in influencing ecosystem dynamics at multiple spatial and temporal scales. This project will involve an examination of the applicability of Kolmogorov complexity theory to ecological complexity in the categories of structural, embedded, and dynamic complexity. Various nonlinear mathematical and physical systems will be examined including networks, chaos, cellular automata, and artificial life. The goals of the project are to: 1) identify the central questions that relate ecological complexity to predictability, controllability, and knowability; 2) develop a definition of complexity for ecosystems; 3) develop a methodology for estimating how complex a given ecological system is; and 4) organize current knowledge of complexity, and develop the elements of a coherent theory of ecological complexity. The PI also plans to organize a symposium for a national meeting to stimulate thinking about complexity doc13729 none This project uses a three study design to examine the response of police to protests in the United States more generally and New York State more specifically during the years from - . The first study uses an existing protest data set and statistical methods to evaluate explanations of the presence of police at protest actions, their use of force, the number of arrests, and the number of deaths. The explanations focus on the threat and power of the protesters, but also consider the socio-legal environment in which the protests and police action take place. The second study uses the same data, but different statistical methods, to examine the effects of protest timing on the several components of police response. The third study collects original data on protest policing policies, legal decisions, and police training practices to understand the context of police decisions. By combining the quantitative results from the first two studies with the qualitative results from the last study, the project provides information on how both characteristics of the protests and the organizational environment shape efforts by police to repress social movements doc13730 none J. Lopez, Arizona State University This proposal is one part of a collaborative research effort between Dr. Lopez of Arizona State University and Dr. Hirsa of Rensselaer and ( ) on the effects of bulk flow on monolayer formation at gas liquid interfaces. These two are renewal proposals for the present Grants at Rensselaer and at ASU. The present grants focus on the experimental and theoretical computational study of interfacial transport properties of monolayers of insoluble surfactants on the air water interface. It is proposed to extend the study to the effect of bulk liquid flow on the self-assembled monolayers along the air liquid interface. Dr. Hirsa will carry out experimental investigations and Dr. Lopez will perform theoretical computational studies doc13731 none Fast twitch white (type IIb) muscle fibers and slow twitch red (type I) fibers represent the structural and functional extremes of locomotory skeletal muscle cells in vertebrates. A distinguishing characteristic of type IIb fibers is the capacity to generate high power, burst contractile activity. In contrast, type I fibers provide postural support and are capable of sustaining long duration, but low intensity, locomotor activity. Type IIb fibers nevertheless contribute to endurance activity if exercise duration is sufficient to deplete carbohydrate fuel. Type I cells possess threefold greater content of mitochondria, the cellular organelles responsible for aerobic energy production, and this difference is generally considered to account for much of the superior endurance of type I fibers. Surprisingly, at rest type IIb cells respire at O2 consumption rates similar to type I fibers, while maintaining a substantially higher cellular energy status. This apparent ability of type IIb mitochondria to energetically outperform their type I counterparts at rest gives rise to interesting and illuminating examples of biological cost-benefit tradeoffs. Mitochondrial structure and function are therefore very different in the two fiber types, and these studies will contribute not only to our understanding of metabolic regulation in fast and slow vertebrate skeletal muscle, but also more generally to our appreciation of mitochondrial structure-function relationships. The central hypothesis of the proposed research is that the structure and function of type I and type IIb mitochondria reflect the physiological missions of the cells in which they reside. Type IIb mitochondria are thus able to generate higher energetic forces and flows than type I, but at the expense of efficiency. These energetic differences are predicted to be especially evident under low pH conditions, which exist in the type IIb cell during burst activity and in the recovery period that follows. It is also hypothesized that mitochondria use the cytosol-mitochondrial electron shuttles to suppress fat oxidation and, again, this regulation is predicted to be especially pronounced in type IIb mitochondria, in order to promote the oxidative disposal of glycolytic products. The proposed studies will generally evaluate thermodynamic flow:force relationships with various oxidative fuels across the physiological range of concentrations. The concepts of metabolic control analysis will be utilized in the interpretation of these studies. Mitochondria will be isolated from mammalian skeletal muscles known to be homogeneous in type I or type IIb fibers. The mitochondria will be placed in physiological buffer solutions, provided various oxidative fuels, and subjected to varying energy demand, much as they would encounter within the cell at rest and during graded, steady state contractile activity. Energetic parameters will be measured such as the rates of O2 consumption, fuel utilization, ATP production, and the energy levels of intermediates in the pathway of energy transduction. These measurements will provide the data necessary to determine 1) thermodynamic flow:force relationships, 2) fuel requirements, preferences, and interactions, and 3) the economy of O2 utilization, as they carry out oxidative energy transduction. The proposed research addresses energetic and metabolic issues that have general application to all vertebrate skeletal muscle cells. Examining these questions in types I and IIb mitochondria, extreme examples of mitochondrial structure-function relationships, may provide insight into biological design strategies doc13732 none The PI will convene, in February and again in August of , a paired workshop-conference devoted to developing wide interdisciplinary approaches to environmental issues of broad public concern. This New Directions research conference will have a two-part invitational workshop and public conference structure. This structure will enable (1) transcending disciplinary limitations in addressing environmental issues, and (2) stimulating long-term interdisciplinary research partnerships for tackling such issues. Together, the two meetings will break new ground in both the theoretical and practical aspects of interdisciplinary environmental research and education. The goals of this workshop and conference are: (a) to devise ways to more effectively situate scientific knowledge within society; (b) to bring the powerful resources of the humanities better to bear on societal questions; and (c) to create enduring partnerships across the disciplines, and between the broadest array of researchers and educators of all types and the public and private realms, in order to more successfully address environmental challenges. The February workshop will consist of 20-25 invited participants representing a wide range of perspectives: the Earth sciences, the humanities, humanistic-oriented social sciences, the corporate sector, and community groups. The August public conference will consist of the workshop participants, plus a larger group (of similarly wide background) who have responded to a call for papers on the theme of developing interdisciplinary, topical approaches to environmental challenges. The February workshop will launch a six-month period of collaboration across the disciplines and between knowledge producers and representatives of the public and private sector, helping to ensure that the August conference has the maximum possible effect. The overall goal of the paired meetings is to improve society s ability at bringing the insights of academic research to bear upon societal (especially environmental) problems, to devise ways to redirect the work of knowledge producers so that their research and scholarship is more pertinent to society doc13733 none The Evaluator s Institute provides high quality short-courses taught by nationally recognized experts in the evaluation field. Courses are scheduled to allow participants to take 2-3 courses over the period of a week. However, SMET evaluators. This award will allow approximately 90 SMET professionals per year to receive $ tuition scholarships to take courses of their choice doc13734 none This research will examine a suite of cores from Lake Bosumtwi, Ghana, for evidence of a high-resolution (i.e., interannual to millennial-scale) record of West African Monsoon dynamics over the last 20,000 years. Lake Bosumtwi is the remnant of a basin formed by a meteor impact approximately 1.1 million years ago. As such, the lake is a well-defined catchment basin that is sensitive to small changes in precipitation-evaporation balance, a fundamental aspect of climate. The research strategy is to use a multi-proxy approach to analyze cores recovered from the lake under previous NSF funding. Specifically, the researchers will develop annual resolution records of West African climate through the last 1,000 years, examine the record of West African monsoon variability through the last 20,000 years when climatic forcing functions were different than today, and establish detailed chronologies for sediments from the lake to examine abrupt climate change events in the region doc13735 none Excitatory and inhibitory transmissions in the central nervous system (CNS) are mediated primarily by glutamate and GABAA receptors respectively, both of which contain intrinsic ion channels. A group of intracellular enzymes, termed as protein kinases and phosphatases, can modify the functional properties of these channels by adding or removing phosphates at specific sites on these receptors, a process known as protein phosphorylation and dephosphorylation. This project is to study how these multifunctional signaling enzymes achieve high specificity and efficiency in regulating the activity of glutamate and GABAA receptors in central neurons. Dr. Yan s laboratory will focus on protein kinase C (PKC) and protein phosphatase 2B (PP2B), both of which are fundamental for a broad spectrum of physiological functions in the CNS. The hypothesis is that the PKC anchoring protein RACK1 and PP2B anchoring protein AKAP79 are responsible for targeting and functional coupling of these enzymes to GABAA and glutamate receptor channels, thus facilitating the precise regulation of these substrates. A combination of physiological, anatomical, biochemical, pharmacological and molecular biological approaches will be employed to achieve two specific aims: (1) To study the modulation of GABAA receptor channels by PKC RACK1 complex. (2) To study the modulation of glutamate channels by PP2B AKAP79 complex. Experimental methods include patch clamp recording with dialysis of peptides, immunocytochemistry, heterologous expression, antisense knock-down and analysis of knockout mice. Because glutamate and GABAA receptor channels are key players mediating information processing in the CNS, insights gained from this study should clarify the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying the dynamic regulation of neuronal activity by signaling complexes composed of kinases, phosphatases and their anchoring proteins. Integration of the information will not only provide potential novel targets for drugs, but also lay a solid foundation for understanding the regulation of learning and memory processes doc13736 none The most important subsurface Arctic Ocean transport system, a cyclonic (here anticlockwise) boundary current, organized along the continental slopes and major trans-Arctic ridges, distributes waters, tracers and contaminants from the Atlantic (via Fram Strait and the Barents Sea) and the Pacific (via Bering Strait) around and into the deep Arctic basins. On its circum-Arctic pathway, parts of the topographically steered current are diverted away from the continental margin, generally along topographic ridges. The most complex obstacle the boundary current encounters is the Mendeleev Ridge Chukchi Borderland complex, north of the Pacific entrance to the Arctic. This region is the cross- roads for Pacific-origin waters from the south and Atlantic waters carried from the west with the boundary current. The tortuous bathymetry offers many routes for a topographically steered current, and the spatial variability of the sparse data that exist clearly indicates the complexity of the region. These data also show significant interannual variability, in line with the major changes seen in the last decade throughout the Arctic, and they further suggest that the region diverts significant amounts of water into the deep basins, indicating this region s importance to shelf-basin exchange, deep basin ventilation, and circum- and trans-Arctic circulation (with feedback implications to the World Ocean circulation). Yet, the pathways and exchanges in this area are still unclear, both qualitatively and quantitatively, due to the lack of sufficiently concentrated observations. This research will conduct a high spatial resolution hydrographic and tracer survey, supported by short-term moored current and CTD measurements, in the region of the Chukchi Borderland and the southern end of the Mendeleev Ridge during August September . The objectives are to: - delineate the pathways of the boundary current carrying the Atlantic water past the Mendeleev Ridge and through the Chukchi Borderland; - ascertain the input from the boundary current and the shelves to the deep Arctic Ocean in the vicinity of the Mendeleev Ridge and the Chukchi Borderland; - understand and quantify the pathways and transformations of the Pacific waters through this region; - describe the horizontal and vertical structure of the boundary current, and estimate its transport; and - quantify recent temporal changes in this region by combining the spatially sparse data extending through most of the past decade with new detailed synoptic measurements. On a 35-day expedition on an ice-breaking research vessel, measurements will be made of temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, nutrients, CFCs, Ba, and 18-O on 12 sections that cross both the boundary flow and the Pacific inputs to the region before and after topographic junctions and hypothesized regions of flow diversion. This tracer suite will enable identification of the pathways of the boundary current and the Pacific-origin waters, and quantification of the different Atlantic and Pacific influences, as well as freshwater input from ice melt and different rivers. In addition, three moorings will be deployed, spanning the boundary current for the duration of the cruise. Current meters and moored conductivity and temperature sensors will quantify the vertical and horizontal extent of the boundary current, its structure and variability, and will yield an estimate of the transport and a description of eddies carried with or across the boundary current. To give a comprehensive picture of the system, the entire data set will be analyzed collectively and in tandem with hydrographic, tracer, and moored time series data from the last decade. Since the transit time of signals through this region is 2-4 years, the older data provide a temporal background for the new high spatial resolution data, whilst the newer data will supply an essential spatial framework for understanding the variability of the older surveys. The work will yield a substantially increased understanding of the role of this region in the Arctic circulation, including a determination of pathways, a quantification of exchanges, and an assessment of temporal change. Its timing in will fill a pending hiatus in hydrographic surveys in the Canadian Basin at a time when the most dramatic changes ever observed in the Arctic are propagating through this region. The project will provide necessary background and mechanistic information to the potential SEARCH and Arctic-Subarctic Ocean Flux programs, and essential far-field information to the SBI Phase II field program in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. In addition, the results will be pivotal to validating and improving high resolution computer and conceptual models of the Arctic, and will offer insights to physical mechanistic problems, such as the driving mechanism of the boundary current and the interaction of an equivalent barotropic current with steep and sharp topography doc13737 none Cutright The objective of this research is to provide the fundamentals needed for the construction of multi-enzyme systems that will affect degradation of organic waste streams containing mixed pollutants such as trichloroethylene, toluene, dichloroethylene and chlorophenols. The specific objectives of this research include: (1) development of the microbial consortium for isolating the multi-enzymatic catalytic system for the treatment of polluted wastewater, and (2) demonstrating the feasibility of immobilized multi-enzyme systems for degrading chlorinated solvents. This research will also contribute to understanding the interactions among enzymes and cofactors involved in the biodegradation pathways doc13738 none This project examines the growing importance of finance in the American economy and its relationship to state policy. It defines financialization as the phase of capitalist development in which accumulation occurs largely through financial channels in the investment, insurance, and real estate sectors. Such growth of the finance sector replaces traditional channels of accumulation through trade and commodity production. The investigator suggests that the growth began with the crisis of Keynesianism in and continued into the decade of the s. To evaluate this argument, the project uses data from national income accounts, financial newspapers, federal reserve documents, congressional records, and interviews with policy makers to answer three questions: 1) To what extent is financialization occurring in the American economy in the post- period? 2) What configuration of political forces within the state promoted the turn to finance? 3) How has financialization altered patterns of state intervention in economy doc13739 none A coupled modeling and empirical approach to the study of the life history and physiological ecology of cold seep vestimentiferans and communities. Seep vestimentiferans and their symbionts are primary producers that provide complex habitat structure in a non-toxic setting for a diverse assortment of seep-endemic and non-endemic heterotrophic species. As such, they are arguably the most important keystone species in widespread areas of seepage on the continental slope. Recent work has demonstrated that one species (at least) of seep vestimentiferan is extremely long-lived and can support its autotrophic life style with the uptake of dissolved gasses across buried portions of its body. Thus, in many ways, the seep vestimentiferans are analogous to long-lived, ecosystem-structuring, woody plant species in a terrestrial environment. We will develop models to address resource acquisition and allocation, life histories, and community productivity of cold seep vestimentiferans that will guide and focus field and laboratory studies of cold seep vestimentiferan communities. We propose to work on the upper Louisiana Slope of the Gulf of Mexico at a depth range of 540 to 1,000m and will include communities on both hard substrata and sediment that are exposed to a range of sulfide concentrations. We will use empirical studies and comparative methods to develop, test the predictions of, and refine, Dynamic Energy Budget models, while at the same time addressing specific hypotheses concerning vestimentiferan aggregation physiology and ecology. Our in situ work will be guided by these mathematical models and interfaced with very efficient and quantitative collection methods that will maximize the information gleaned from each collection and provide material for future studies, thereby minimizing our short and long-term impact on the communities. Growth rates of thousands of individuals will be measured and these data used to estimate the longevity and to calculate the resources allocated to growth by each vestimentiferan species. We will determine whether roots (posterior extensions that can be used to mine sulfide from within sediments) are a general feature of seep vestimentiferans and whether they are environmentally induced. The models will be used to explore the relative importance of root sulfide uptake to the sustenance of aggregations in different situations and the implications of vestimentiferan sulfide demand on biogeochemical models of sulfide production. To facilitate this, environmental concentrations of sulfide and diffusion distances across root tubes and tissues will be measured, and concentrations and sulfide binding properties of the hemoglobins in the different species will be determined. The biomass, size frequency, distribution, and reproductive state of the vestimentiferans will be determined for intact aggregations and collections processed so that the species richness and biomass of all associated fauna in each collection can also be determined. This will allow us to formulate life history models, to scale up the models of individuals to the levels of aggregations, and to model excess production and its use by associated fauna. Fisher has extensive experience with the Gulf of Mexico seep communities and has visited the sites. Shea is a theoretical ecologist with experience in life-history modeling of terrestrial and aquatic autotrophic systems. The proposed approach will significantly increase our understanding of these widespread and productive deep-sea communities and their impact on the surrounding deep sea, and will provide a modeling framework to focus related and future investigations. The proposed studies will yield basic insights on the ecology, physiology and reproductive biology of deep-sea systems in general and chemoautotrophic systems in particular. They will also provide new theory, and tests for existing theory on the evolution of life history strategies doc13740 none Two researcher from the State University of New York-Stony Brook will continue their research into the effects that bottom-dwelling animals have on the rates of diagenetic reactions, sediment-water solute exchange and storage of organic mineral phases in sedimentary deposits. To achieve these objectives, the PIs will focus their research along the following three, interrelated experimental efforts: (1) irrigation, diffusion structure and optimal scaling of coupled oxic-anoxic reactions; (2) diffusive permeability of burrow linings and mucoid secretions in sediments; and (3) multi-dimensional solute distributions in the bioturbated zone. This team of scientists also plans to add CO2 and specific exoenzyme sensors to their radiometric pH O2 sensor and use these planar sensor techniques for in-situ measurements on the REMOTS lander system. The long term goals of this research will be a model that outlines the types of transport and reaction balances occurring during early diagenesis in the bioturbated zone and an exploration of the corresponding elemental cycling and ecological implications doc13741 none The field of Solid Freeform Fabrication (SFF) has developed significantly over the fast 15 years. The ability to make a part quickly with minimal imitations on geometric shape has spawned applications in the fields of transportation, medicine, the military, microelectronics, and others. With this growth has developed the need for researchers to meet to discuss fundamental and developmental issues of SFF. The annual SFF Symposium was first held in to provide a forum for technical exchange of all aspects of SFF: materials, process development, physical and computational modeling, and applications. It is the oldest continuous meeting in the area and is reputed to be one of the top research meetings in the world. From the beginning, the philosophy of the SFF Symposium Organizing Committee of student involvement has been crucial to the success of the meeting and the field. Student involvement is encouraged by offering a student registration rate that is approximately one-third of the regular rate and which for the last several years has in fact been below the per capita break-even cost. This subsidy has been effective in attracting students. In , approximately 31% of the entire meeting were students. Participants represented 27 universities (10 international universities). The interaction with the scientific leaders of the field is beneficial to these young scientists and represents an investment in the future of the US scientific infrastructure doc13742 none The intent of this proposal is to study and exploit to advantage some of the properties arising from confinement of electron motion to less than three dimensions. The study of confined electron behavior has had tremendous technological impact on all semiconductor devices including transistors, light emitters, and sensors. Our particular focus is on the design, study, fabrication, characterization, and testing of novel optical detectors that use altered regime of conduction due to reduced dimensionality to simultaneously achieve: a) low dark current due to the effect of the electron cloud, b) high responsivity due to the aiding electric field that confines the electron cloud, c) high speed due to reduction of absorption depth and inclusion of a Bragg reflector that forms a resonant cavity structure, and d) wavelength-filtering capability due to Bragg condition. A comprehensive device modeling and simulation with particular stress on the study of transient behavior will be performed. Next generation devices based on different material systems will be constructed and the study of contacts between 3D and 2D will be extended to the case of metallic contacts to 1D wires. In short, we propose a fundamental study of confined electron effects that contributes to the development of a family of novel devices. These devices constitute all the required elements for making a complete high sensitivity optical sensor, be it a near infrared detector for biological imaging or a gigabit Ethernet receiver doc13743 none This research program aims at understanding the structure,function and organization of the Photosystem I reaction center in cyanobacteria and green plants.The advances made so far include a biological method to introduce alternative quinones into the A1 site,an experimental approach to determine whether electron transfer is uni-or bi-directional among the symmetrically-located electron transfer cofactors,and a determination of the 3-dimensional NMR solution structure of unbound PsaC.This,combined with newly-available structural information about the 3-dimensional spatial arrangement of atoms from X-ray crystallography and the electron spin density distribution in cofactors from magnetic resonance spectroscopy,has opened new avenues for research in PS I. One is the effect of biological incorporation of alternative quinones into the A1 site for studies of the effect of Gibbs free energy changes on rates of forward and backward electron transfer, and for studies of the electron density distribution within the A1 - acceptor. Another is the protein-protein interactions at the molecular level between the PsaA,PsaB, PsaC,and PsaD subunits,and focuses especially on the changes in secondary structure that take place when PsaC docks with its protein partners in PS I.The goal is to determine the dynamic interactions that occur among these to produce a functional PS I complex. These studies promise to have an impact on the understanding of protein factors responsible for conferring redox properties to organic cofactors and on the understanding of protein-protein interactions in the assembly of multi-component,membrane-bound complexes.Hence,this work should have relevance well beyond the realm of oxygenic photosynthesis doc13744 none Malin This grant provides support for 12 US and 13 African chemists to participate in a three-day US-Africa workshop on Environmental Chemistry and Water Quality: Exploring Collaborative Opportunities for Research, Applications, and Education, to be held in Dakar, Senegal, July 26-28, . The workshop is being jointly co-organized by Drs. John Malin and Bradley Miller, of the Office of International Activities at the American Chemical Society, and Dr. T. M. Letcher, with the Department of Chemistry at Natal University, Durban, South Africa. The workshop will precede the 8th Annual International Conference on Chemistry in Africa and the 2nd Congress of the African Association for Pure and Applied Chemistry. There will be a total of approximately 30 participants, with expertise in chemical research and remediation methods, analytical techniques, and higher level chemical education. US presenters include investigators from academia, and governmental and industrial institutions. The majority of African participants will be chemists in the early stages of their careers. Having adequate quantities of high-quality water is a critical component for Africa s social and economic development. Within the workshop s overarching theme of environmental chemistry, the main focus will be on the specific advances in the chemical sciences that can be applied to problems of water quality in Africa. Attendees will share information on their current activities and identify mutual areas of research interest for future collaborative projects. They will also explore ways to build partnerships across chemically related sectors associated with pollution prevention and control. This workshop will serve as a catalyst to provide fresh knowledge of environmental chemistry s strengths and weaknesses in the region. The project supports the participation of two junior US faculty members. This workshop is jointly supported by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Chemistry doc13745 none The relationship between identity and territory has been largely ignored, yet is of profound and growing significance in the globalizing world. With international boundaries becoming more porous and an increasing number of people residing in locations away from their traditional homelands, a fundamental question arises as to the importance of the tether between identity and territory. This question is most readily addressed by examining the de- and re-territorialization of identity within a group living in diaspora during a period of repatriation. The Mongolian-Kazakhs represent such a group, with a series of additionally salient characteristics. First, the Kazakhs of Mongolia have lived outside of their native homeland for more than 70 years, following their ancestors flight from the collectivization campaigns of the Stalinist era. Second, the Kazakh ethnic group has only recently begun to nationalize within the Soviet-constructed homeland of what has become the Republic of Kazakhstan. Third, the sudden independence of Kazakhstan and the government s active repatriation campaign provide an historical opportunity to investigate the loss and reacquisition of territorial identity through the formation of homeland conceptions and their often-controversial consideration by Kazakhs within and outside of Kazakhstan. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine those Mongolian-Kazakhs opting for repatriation to Kazakhstan, those opting to remain in Mongolia, and those opting to return to Mongolia after an attempted repatriation. This project will combine surveys, in-depth interviews, and archival research methods to triangulate data on this complex and highly subjective topic. Fieldwork will be carried out in Mongolia and Kazakhstan using local sociological institutes for assistance with surveys and in-depth interviews. This comparative structure will provide a clear picture of the ways in which identity and territory are constructed and mutually constituted. The terms de-territorialization and re-territorialization of identity are employed to extend scholarly understanding of the multifaceted relationships between diverse concepts such as territoriality, identity formation, place attachment, and homeland psychology. Literature from a wide array of disciplines will be employed in the theoretical exploration of the topic. This exploration of place making as integral to identity formation will help advance geographic theory and social theory in general. The fundamental questions addressed in this research of how people develop and sustain their attachments to place, and the degree to which our conception of where we belong informs our sense of who we are is a critical topic that has long been ignored. By advancing the theoretical literature pertaining to the relationship between territory and identity, this research will provide a framework with application beyond the specific case. The contemporary international system offers many examples of contested notions of homeland and people defined objectively as living out of place but potentially holding self-conceptions of rootedness in their current places of residence. In addition, the case study for this project is significant because the ethno-demographic landscape of Central Asia, especially Kazakhstan, is replete with ethnic diasporas attempting to reassess their place in the world . By elucidating the dynamics of de- and re-territorialization of identity, this project will provide insights that can inform policy formation among the nationalizing states throughout the world. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc13746 none Margaret Lock s pioneering research on konenki (menopause) in Japan showed that menopausal symptoms (i.e., hot flushes, night sweats) may not be universal. Lock and others have proposed that phytoestrogens (estrogenic plant chemicals) in soy, consumed in great quantities by Japanese, ameliorate midlife symptoms. This study aims to identify whether and how soy consumption affects the menopausal transition. The project will test the following hypotheses: 1A. The menopausal transition will be characterized by highly variable levels of estradiol (E2) and the pituitary gonadotropins follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) and luteinizing hormone (LH), reflecting dysfunction in the neural regulation of gonadal hormones. 1B. Women with higher phytoestrogen exposure will have less variation in FSH and LH. 2A. Women with more variable E2, FSH, and LH will have more frequent or severe midlife symptoms. 2B. Women with higher phytoestrogen exposure will have less frequent or severe midlife symptoms. These hypotheses will be tested in two populations of Japanese women, aged 45-55, from Tohoku and Kinki, regions of Japan with the highest and lowest soy consumption. In Year 1, women will be sampled longitudinally for E2, FSH, LH, and the phytoestrogens genistein and daidzein using finger prick blood spot methods. Dietary frequency questionnaires, symptom checklists, surveys, and interviews will be administered. Years 2-3 will be devoted to analysis and write-up of blood samples, surveys, and ethnographic data. These data will contribute to our understanding of cross-cultural variation in aging by enabling modeling of environmental influences on endocrinology and experience of the menopausal transition doc1601 none Antifreeze Proteins (AFPs), which lower the freezing point of water by an unusual non-colligative mechanism, have been identified in marine fish, insects and other terrestrial arthropods, plants, fungi and bacteria. There is tremendous variation in the structures of AFPs both between and within these groups of organisms. The most active known AFPs are found in insects, where they typically assist freeze-susceptible insects to avoid freezing by inhibiting inoculative freezing initiated by external ice across the cuticle, and by promoting supercooling by inhibiting potential internal ice nucleators. A few AFP-producing insects are freeze-tolerant, able to survive freezing, and in these the AFPs apparently function as a cryoprotectant to protect from freeze damage, however the mechanism is unknown. Two types of insect AFPs have been characterized. One is found in the beetles Dendroides and Tenebrio. The other is from the spruce budworm caterpillar. Interestingly, although AFPs have been found in many insects, they have not previously been described in Alaskan or Arctic insects until recently when AFPs were found in 7 of 12 insects screened from near Fairbanks, Alaska. This presents an opportunity to study AFPs in insects that are exposed to extremely cold winter temperatures. There are four aspects to the proposed study. One of these will concentrate on the role of AFPs in the cold tolerance of overwintering larvae of the beetle Cucujus clavipes. Previous studies on populations of this species from Indiana showed the presence of AFPs in these larvae which have a lower lethal temperature of -20 to -25 C. In the late s this species from near Fairbanks, Alaska was shown to have a lower lethal temperature of -55 C or less . Both the Indiana and Alaskan populations produce the Dendroides Tenebrio-type AFPs. In this study, comparisons of the role of AFPs in populations from Indiana and Alaska (from near Fairbanks, just south of the Arctic Circle, and from near Wiseman, above the Arctic Circle and near the limit of treeline). Thus, one can study this species over a tremendous latitudinal range, from a temperate climate to the interior of Alaska, one of the coldest climates in North America. A second component of the study aims to purify and characterize a new type of AFP. The stinkbug Elasmostethus interstinctus is an AFP-producing insect common in interior Alaska. Molecular probes have demonstrated that the bug s AFP is different from either the Dendroides Tenebrio-type or the spruce budworm-type AEPs. The abundance, ease of collection, large size and exposure to very cold temperatures in this insect make it an excellent system in which to identify a new insect AFP. The third aspect of this study is to screen the hemolymph of insects for thermal hysteresis activity characteristic of AFPs. This will identify which species have AFPs. Insects will be collected from two sites in the taiga of interior Alaska, near Fairbanks and near Wiseman, and especially from a true tundra site in the vicinity of the Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Toolik Field Station. These sites provide a wide diversity of insects. AFPs have not been previously investigated in insects from these regions, and no aspect of the cold tolerance of insects from Toolik has previously been studied. This screen should identify new species of AFP-producing insects from very cold environments, some of which may provide excellent model systems for future study. In addition, microhabitat temperatures and overwintering survival of selected insect species will be determined. These are important to collaborate laboratory determinations of various physiological parameters. Thus this study will integrate classical physiological ecology with biochemistry and molecular studies of antifreeze proteins in insects from these severe arctic and subarctic environments. Since their initial discovery in Antarctic fish the study of AFPs in both animals and plants has burgeoned, and today scores of laboratories study these proteins. In particular insect AFPs have tremendous potential for both basic and applied work since they are the most active AFPs known. Numerous possible uses of AFPs exist, especially in cryopreservation of biomedical materials, food preservation and agriculture. Therefore, the study of AFPs from such highly cold adapted insects may yield information of great value doc13748 none Studies of Earth s history show that climate is capable of changing rapidly (within a few years or decades) and dramatically (from glacial to interglacial conditions). The response of the Earth s ecosystems to such global-scale changes can be spatially complex. Paleoclimatic fluctuations are evident during the last glacial cycle (~12,000 and 110,000 years ago) when temperatures were generally cooler than present and were interrupted by 24 warm events during which temperature ranged from 15-20 degrees C. Understanding the mechanisms and timing of such environmental change is particularly important for the Arctic, a region particularly sensitive to climate variability. Historically, data from the Greenland ice sheet has been the foundation for paleoclimatic reconstruction for the region. Still lacking, however, is an understanding of how northern ecosystems have responded to changes in climate. This research will address this knowledge gap by providing the first continuous, high-resolution, multi-proxy record of paleovegetational and paleoclimatic change from the Arctic for the period ~22,000 to 50,000 years ago. A sediment core from Elikchan Lake in northeast Siberia will be recovered and analyzed for pollen and diatom remains as well as sediment geochemistry with sufficient temporal control to be compared to climate trends found in ice cores. These new data will be used to define the number, magnitude, and timing of climatic fluctuations to assess the similarities and differences in the climate histories between the eastern (North Atlantic) and western (northeast Siberia) Arctic. Specifically, the research will: 1) evaluate computer simulations of past temperature in northern Asia as related to climatic and oceanic changes in the North Atlantic region; 2) explore the role of Siberia in transmitting climatic fluctuations originating in the North Atlantic to the North Pacific; and 3) examine the range of ecosystem responses to various climatic conditions and the potential importance of biofeedback to the climate system (e.g., whether changes in the distribution of boreal forests, a major methane source, can affect levels of methane in the atmosphere doc13749 none Original Message----- From: Poore, Richard Z Sent: Thursday, July 12, 8:58 AM To: Weller, Margaret Subject: summary for Thunnell award Science : This proposal requests continued funding for ongoing time series sediment trap studies in the Santa Barbara Basin to calibrate climate proxies. The continuation of the sediment trap effort will establish a time series that is sufficiently long to document how well faunal and isotopic changes in planktonic foraminifers record interannual climate variability associated with ENSO doc13750 none This research will yield the first climatic and environmental records ever recovered from the center of the Tibetan Plateau by analyzing two ice cores measuring 118.6 and 214 meters that were recovered from the Puruogangri ice cap during a joint United States-China expedition between September 10 and November 10, funded by the National Science Foundation. These unique ice cores join other archives of changes in climate on the Tibetan Plateau that document an unprecedented warming of the atmosphere in the 20th century. Preliminary analyses indicate that both cores contain visible dry-season dust layers and may allow annual dating back to ~80 BC and the reconstruction of a history of precipitation fluctuations that are likely to reflect variations in the intensity of the monsoon system that is affected by El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events. These cores will be analyzed for stable isotopes of oxygen and deuterium and aerosol chemistry to aid in the reconstruction of the history of Asian aridity and provide a record of the past temperatures and atmospheric circulation patterns for the region. The ice of the Puruogangri contains information that is an essential component in linking long, high-resolution records from pole to pole to allow an assessment of the global nature of abrupt climate variations. This is important because the Tibetan Plateau and surrounding mountain ranges contain the largest volume of ice outside the Polar Regions. The meltwater from the climatically sensitive glaciers form the headwaters of such important rivers as the Indus, Yangtze, Huang (Yellow) and the Ganges doc13751 none This proposal is for the continuation of the development, calibration, testing, and deployment of in situ chemical sensors to make measurements at hydrothermal vents, especially instruments that can be left in place for long periods of monitoring, consistent with the evolving strategies involving long time series measurements. To now, successfully developed instruments measure H2, H2S, and pH. In this proposal the PIs propose to make these existing instruments smaller, more robust, and better suited for long deployments. In addition they propose to develop, calibrate and test new sensors to measure pH based on Ir IrO2 and Ti TiO2 materials, a new Na ion sensor made of NASICON ceramic (which can also serve as a reference electrode for pH measurements), and an electrochemical CO2 sensor. Developing successful instruments will require longer term testing and calibration and in situ testing at actual hydrothermal vents doc13752 none This study will provide a first look at cholesterol as a limiting nutrient and plasma membrane constituent for zooplankton. Physical and biotic conditions for which dietary sterols become limiting will be identified, and the coupling between dietary and membrane-specific requirements for sterol will be defined. The central hypotheses to be tested include: 1) Exogenous sterols are limiting factors for copepod growth. 2) Cholesterol supplementation of the diet affects growth rates but not cholesterol contents in plasma membranes (i.e., an optimal level of cholesterol is maintained despite variability in diet). 3) Cholesterol contents of membranes and dietary limitation of cholesterol are affected by growth temperature. The foci of the proposed research will encompass a range of levels of biological organization from organismal. to biochemical processes. Zooplankton (including eurythermal and other, ecologically important, species) will be raised on diets using different a) algal species and b) levels of supplemented cholesterol. Egg production rates, egg hatch rates, and or growth rates will be determined under different biotic and physical conditions. Cholesterol will be delivered in gelatin-acacia microcapsules and ingestion rates monitored by particle counter. Plasma membranes will be prepared using density-gradient centrifugation and cholesterol contents analyzed. Much of the research proposed is especially well-suited for undergraduate student involvement. Students will gain conceptual and specific knowledge of zooplankton and temperature biology as well as fundamental mechanisms in physiology biochemistry. In addition, students will learn valuable laboratory techniques from hands-on experience with a variety of methodologies. These experiences will be further enriched by interactions with researchers at a marine laboratory doc13753 none The majority of our knowledge about how animals move is based on creatures that walk, fly or swim using rigid articulated bones and exoskeletons. However, animals without backbones invertebrates are the most numerous animals on the planet and nearly all are soft-bodied with hydrostatic skeletons for at least part of their life. These crawling creatures do not escape predators by running but instead use camouflage, chemical defenses and cryptic behavior. As a consequence, crawling has evolved into a highly specialized form of locomotion that allows soft bodied animals to move in complex and confined three dimensional structures such as tubes and branches. With a soft body, joints do not restrict movements. Such animals can crumple, compress and rotate body parts with virtually unlimited freedom. Such complex movements are very interesting from a neural control perspective because movement coordination by the nervous system has co evolved with these biomechanical features. The proposed study uses a caterpillar, the tobacco hornworm, Manduca sexta, as a model system to help understand the neural control of hydrostatic movements. Two specific aspects will be examined in detail: first we will determine how crawling is controlled by the central nervous system and how it interacts with peripheral structures such as muscles and cuticle; secondly, we will examine a unique aspect of caterpillar crawling, the ability to climb using curved hooks at the tips of the abdominal prolegs. This gripping is passive but very strong like Velcro hooks and can be actively released. We will determine how this gripping is controlled and how it is integrated into normal crawling. Although focused on understanding animal locomotion, these studies have potential applications in the design and control of a new type of flexible robot. Such robots could be used to navigate through pipelines or intricate structures such as blood vessels and air tubes. Finally, in examining the mechanism of proleg gripping it is possible that new adhesive materials could be developed that attach passively but can be released actively to avoid the tearing forces in conventional hook and loop fastenings doc13754 none Loftin This US-Brazil award will support a planning visit by Dr. Loftin of Old Dominion University to travel to Concepcion, Chile, in order to plan a collaborative research project with Arquitecto Emillo Armstrong Delpin. The topic of this research is the development of a prototype computing interactive display system for a Virtual Interactive Science Museum. The system would be made available to students via the Education Internet Enlaces project of the Ministry of Education in Chile. Studying the development and impact of the museum on Chilean children in public schools should offer insights on culturally and linguistically relevant pedagogies for informal education. Other likely benefits are the diffusion of results for use in U.S. public schools and museums, culturally and linguistically relevant pedagogies for U.S. Latino populations, drivers for research in the computer and information sciences and engineering, and advances in learning science and technologies. One compelling indirect benefit of the collaboration is the development of new strategies for international collaboration regarding the intersection of technology - and education-related topics doc13755 none In response to changes in public services in recent years, faith-based community development organizations have increasingly provided social services such as job training, low-income housing, and small business loans. Although rarely studied, these organizations take the form of cooperative collective action or social movements. This projects draws from organizational and collective action theories to understand the emergence and outcomes of faith-based community development. In so doing, it evaluates hypotheses concerning the growth of bureaucratic structures in these organizations as they grow older and larger, and the growing similarity of organizations in their action frames. Field work in three faith-based community development organizations, including interviews with organizational leaders, examination of organizational documents, and observations of meetings and activities, provides the data to evaluate the theories and hypotheses. The results help understand an increasingly important social movement that the literature has largely ignored doc8595 none This collaborative research involves a literature review, background paper, and preliminary data analysis, to be followed by a planning meeting for extension of the concepts to a follow-on international collaborative project, to be proposed separately at a later date. Concern is rising within the United States about inequality. Rapid economic growth and low unemployment have not translated into equal benefits for all. Some observers have linked the growing income gap to technological change and the accompanying shifts in demands for skills. The economy is creating new high-paying jobs for the well educated in the suburbs, leaving less skilled workers behind in the inner cities, and relegating them to minimum-wage service work. Similarly, nations are growing further apart in standard of living. The gap in average income between the richest and poorest countries is also growing. In developed countries, about five percent of the population lives in extreme poverty, while 20 percent do so in Latin America and East Asia, and 40 percent in Africa and South Asia. These gaps are also linked to development strategies, which in turn depend on a nation s skills and technological infrastructure. The research proposed separately but collaboratively by Georgia Tech and AAAS will support the planning phase of a project to explore the role of science and technology policy in the complex dynamics of inequality, and to develop ways to use S&T policy to counteract the centrifugal forces inherent in technological change. Much of the literature attempts to explain income inequality, both domestically and internationally. Income is only a proxy measure, however, for the actual quality of people s lives. This project focuses instead directly on outcome inequalities. It begins from outcomes in four areas of basic human need: health, food nutrition, environment, peace security, plus two intermediate outcome areas, information technology and education employment. In each area, data on outcomes, nationally and internationally, can be used to analyze the effects of and gaps in research agendas that are linked to them through complex webs of institutional links. These analyses then provide us with conceptual tools to develop options for changes in S&T policy that can help improve outcomes for those who are furthest behind in these areas. Based upon the work of the Georgia Tech scholars, AAAS will convene a working meeting of experts familiar with research on inequalities and or science and technology policy, to review and critique the work to date and to provide guidance in designing an extension of the concepts to an international collaborative project involving scholars from several continents doc13757 none This research will examine a suite of cores from the Peten Lakes District in Guatemala to examine the pre-Holocene record of climate change in tropical lakes that did not dry out in the last glacial. The sediments of these lakes contain the potential for preserving a unique and full record of rapid climate change from an area of the world with few continuous climate records doc13718 none Science : This proposal requests support for a detailed (millennial to centennial scale) multiproxy study of the surface and deep water dynamics along the continental margin in the NE Atlantic. Work will focus in the area involving interaction between the Labrador Current and the Gulf Stream. Multiproxy study of high accumulation rate cores from the Continental Shelf, Slope, and Laurentian Fan will allow identification of salinity and temperature changes and source of deep waters. The study will focus on rapid changes associated with the Little Ice Age, Medieval Warm Period, the 8.2 ka cold event, and the Younger Dryas doc13759 none Workshop: Scaling photosynthesis from the chloroplast to the landscape Understanding the interactions of plant form and photosynthetic function among different species will be critical to the success of future management of both native and agricultural species, especially under current scenarios of global change. The purpose of this workshop is to evaluate photosynthetic limitations and adaptive solutions that emerge at the higher levels of structural organization found in the plant kingdom. The workshop will be held in conjunction with the 12th International Congress on Photosynthesis in Brisbane, Australia (August 18-23, ) and will be divided into sessions dealing with the chloroplast, cell, cell layers inside a leaf, the leaf, crown, canopy, and landscape. Across this broad structural spatial hierarchy, chloroplasts are packaged progressively into more and more complex levels of organization (e.g. cells, leaves, branches, and crowns), generating new limitations to light and CO2 capture for photosynthesis doc13760 none The concept of social norms is central to social psychology, yet the usefulness of social norms to predict and understand human behavior has been limited by conceptual and operational problems. One reason for potentially weak norm-behavior prediction is that people s motivational goals for conforming to norms are likely to vary across situations. Based on earlier social influence research, a tripartite model of motivational goals underlying norm effects is proposed: informational motives based on accuracy and successful adaptation, social motives with implications for the self, and social motives stemming from concern with others and the outcomes these others can provide. Furthermore, groups establish ideal rules of conduct and acceptable behavior, and they provide information about successful, adaptive behavior. Thus, when a particular group identity is activated, the social norms associated with that group should direct individual behavior, especially when the individual values and identifies with the group. This project focuses on the collection of pilot data to identify pre-existing norms associated with specific target groups and to develop valid measures of the motivations that underlie people s conformity to social norms. This research will improve our understanding of when and how social norms impact individual behavior, and may help us learn how the norms of one important group can override the norms of another important group doc13761 none This award will help researchers understand the interplay of climate, vegetation, and fire dynamics in the mid-latitude forests of western North and South America. The two regions offer important comparisons in terms of their present climate, vegetation, and fire regime and their environmental history. Both regions feature different vegetation types but broadly similar climate histories. The varying climate histories arise from distinct responses to large-scale climate forcing mechanisms in the Holocene (i.e., variations in summer insolation). This research will play each region s similarities and differences against each other to provide a set of natural experiments not possible in a single region. This is important because climate, fire, and vegetation are closely related components of forest ecosystems in western North and South America. The strength and nature of the linkages among these components vary depending on the time scale of interest. On intra-annual time scales, weather conditions determine the likelihood of fire events by influencing fuel moisture and ignition sources within a given season. On inter-annual to decadal time scales, climate variability is important because the sequence of wet and dry periods indirectly promotes fire occurrence. Vegetation changes on inter-annual and decadal scales also affect fire activity by determining the character and distribution of fuels. Fire events, in turn, shape forest succession and create landscape patterns that set the stage for subsequent disturbance events. On centennial-to-millennial time scales, climate governs the long-term variations in fire frequency, size, and severity as well as vegetation composition and species distributions. Vegetation characteristics on long time scales also exert a positive feedback to fire regimes by determining the nature of the fuel biomass. This research will develop a high-resolution fire-history network in western North America and Patagonia comparable to existing vegetation-history networks, discern the hierarchy of climate controls that either promote or suppress fire, and examine modern climate data to determine the large-scale climate anomalies that influence fire regimes in the study areas. This approach of developing a fire-history database and analyzing climate anomalies associated with fire at present and in the past, will allow the researchers to understand climate-fire-vegetation linkages on multiple scales. The researchers will share their data with the larger scientific community through shared databases (including the National Geophysical Data Center) and publications. In addition, the researchers will forge strong collaboration with South American colleagues to enable technology transfer between North and South American researchers. This will be accomplished, in part, through the support of foreign scientist s travel to the United States to share data and analytical techniques doc13762 none This award will enable researchers to develop high-resolution (~10 year interval) microfossil and geochemical records from sediment cores recently collected from the northern coastal waters of Lake Victoria in East Africa. Preliminary evidence indicates that the cores contain evidence of past lake level fluctuations due to climatic changes over the last millennium. From these sedimentary records, researchers hope to reconstruct the environmental history of Lake Victoria over the last 500 years, reconstruct an unprecedented high-resolution paleoclimatological record of East African droughts, gain insights into the role of century- to decade-scale climate cycles in the tropics, investigate how solar variability over time affects African climates, and examine the timing and nature of tropical climate responses to the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age. As an RUI proposal, this award will provide a unique opportunity for undergraduate students to participate in high-quality research thereby gaining invaluable experience in practical aspects of scientific research doc13763 none The study will continue the measurement of inorganic carbonate parameters (dissolved inorganic carbon, DIC, and titration alkalinity TAlk) and include a restoration of pH and surface dissolved (pCO2) measurement components of the Hawaii Ocean Time-series (HOT). The continuation of one of only a handful of long-term oceanic CO2 data sets would appear essential for assessing oceanic uptake of anthropogenic CO2 and informing and interpreting the interannual variability in the oceanic global carbon cycle doc13764 none Since the s, job stability for American workers has been falling as employers pursue increased flexibility in employment systems. Traditionally vulnerable groups such as young workers and blacks have experienced the largest decreases in stability, but even hitherto stable workers such as older managers and professionals have been affected. This project investigates the economic consequences of frequent job changes for workers who first entered the labor market in the early s. Because worker and labor market characteristics shape the relationship between mobility and wages, the economic effects of instability are unlikely to be uniform. The project thus explores the conditions under which job instability creates better or worse wage outcomes. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth from to , the analysis identifies how three main contextual factors shape the relationship between mobility patterns and wage profiles: 1) workers reasons for changing jobs, 2) patterns of job change, 3) and types of labor markets in which the changes occur. The results offer theoretical insights into the consequences of economic change for worker well-being, and policy implications for addressing the needs of workers without a permanent employer doc13765 none Calcium regulation is coupled to critically important cellular processes in such complex cellular functions as contraction, secretion, fertilization,proliferation, metabolism, heartbeat and memory. Central to these functions is the ability of calcium to act as a powerful trigger of protein conformational change. In this process of calcium regulation, calsequestrin protein (CSQ), which can bind more than 45 calcium ions,and other similar proteins found in the endoplasmic reticulum and sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR), serve as calcium storage proteins. Many physico-chemical studies have been conducted to elucidate structure function relationships regarding calcium regulation by these unusual proteins. But those studies were limited by a lack of detailed structural information until the molecular structure of CSQ was determined recently.The observed structure is ripe with implications for the detailed mechanism of CSQ function and the structural changes that underlie calcium regulation. According to this new, structure-based structure function model,as the calcium levels increase and monovalent ion (H,K,and Na)levels decrease in the SR lumen,there is a concomitant formation of CSQ polymers or aggregates and high capacity calcium binding. The focus of the research is to directly test the molecular details using both physical chemistry methods and recombinant genetic techniques.Based on the atomic resolution structures and biochemical data,the significance of CSQ folding and polymerization with respect to physiological function and the role of structural domains within the CSQ and other related proteins will be investigated doc13766 none Subject: summary for Boyle award Science : This proposal requests support to complete a high-resolution record of deepwater characteristics (Cd Ca) for all of the Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 3 stadial interstadial (S IS) events and for all of MIS 5 in piston cores from the Bermuda Rise. The Cd Ca data will be used to determine if changes in North Atlantic deep water flow are associated with S IS events and if so, determine the phase relationships between the S SI events and changes in deep water circulation. Records suitable for investigating the links between thermohaline circulation and S SI events can be developed in cores from the Bermuda Rise because the accumulation rates are rapid enough (30cm yrs) to resolve individual I IS events and benthic foraminifers are abundant enough to allow continuous measurements of Cd Ca through the S IS events doc13767 none The boundaries between community types, which are rich sources of spatial heterogeneity, are related to a wide variety of biotic and abiotic edge effects. The prevalence of boundaries in modern landscapes emphasizes the need to understand their ecological function. In order to understand boundary function, improved knowledge is needed regarding how environmental factors and vegetation vary under human influence and across multiple scales. Measuring and understanding multi-scale influences is a significant challenge in many fields. This doctoral dissertation research project focuses on evaluating the relative influence of aspect (local scale), management regime (landscape scale), and atmospheric deposition (regional scale) on the character of forest-field edges in southern Sweden. More intensive management, especially increased fertilizer application, and greater atmospheric deposition have increased soil acidity and nitrogen availability in northern Europe s forest and grassland communities, which generally are quite nutrient-poor. These trends have led to marked changes in species composition and declines in plant diversity. Such interactions have likely been intensified across forest-field edges because of their ecological function as sinks (areas where matter has accumulated). This project study will evaluate the general hypothesis that the biotic edge is directly related to abiotic controls and conditions that vary with respect to location and management regime. Specific objectives of this study are to determine abiotic and biotic variation across forest-field edges, to assess relationships between abiotic and biotic variables, and to identify edge characteristics and functions that differ with respect to location at the local, landscape, and regional scale. The study will be conducted in the southwest and east-central regions of Sweden. Locations of sampling sites reflect the regional gradient from high to low deposition. In each region, replicate sites will be located under each of two management regimes: traditional (non-fertilized) and intensively managed (fertilized) meadows. For each management regime, replicate sites will be sampled across a southwest-facing and a northeast-facing edge. Field research will consist of sampling vegetation and environmental characteristics (such as air and soil temperature, relative humidity, soil pH, and soil moisture tension) along forest-field edge gradients. Soil samples will be collected at a sub-set of sites for laboratory analyses. The results of this project will have both theoretical and management implications. Despite its often-cited importance, multi-scale complexity across edges is not well understood. The project will explore a method for measuring and quantitatively examining the relative influence of processes operating at different scales across landscape boundaries. Results therefore will provide scientists and resource managers with important insights regarding the relationship between regional- and local-scale processes in a culturally fragmented landscape. In addition, by examining change in microclimate, soil conditions, and vegetation across forest-field edges under varying rates of acidic deposition and fertilization, a better understanding can be gained of how boundaries function under human-induced environmental change. Such environmental changes may have a direct effect on forestry, agriculture, water quality, and biodiversity. Findings from this study therefore can be used in land-use planning and environmental policy formation. The project should provide empirical support for the nature of forest-field boundaries in northern Europe as well as provide information about anthropogenic effects at multiple scales. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc13768 none The plant species composition of deciduous forest communities varies considerably from place to place. It is not fully understood what determines whether or not a given plant will be located in a given area. Plants are sometimes limited to specific areas because of their inability to tolerate certain environmental conditions, which may be the result of differences in the soil where they grow or the result of changes brought about by other plants or trees already growing at a site. Elsewhere, plants may be limited by their ability to get seeds or other reproductive material to a new site. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine the role that plant dispersal and forest age have in determining spatial pattern in the herbaceous vegetation located underneath the canopy trees in the hardwood-hemlock forest of the Edmund Niles Huyck Preserve in central New York State. The Huyck Preserve provides the opportunity to study forest change over the last 150 years, because most of the area of the preserve was logged sometime during that time period, thereby providing a mosaic of forest types of varying age. The goals of this project are to determine if the type of dispersal a plant uses is related to whether or not it is present in a forest stand of a certain age and to determine if the likelihood of a species being contained in an area is dependent on that species being present in a nearby area. These relationships will be determined by examining the vegetation and the age of 30 to 40 forest stands of the Huyck Preserve. The locations of these stands will be specificed along with their distances from each other. The plant species located in these areas will be grouped by the type of dispersal they use to propogate themselves (wind, animal, gravity, etc.) as well as patterns associated with the age of forest stands. Among the hypotheses that will be explored is whether species using rapid, long-distance dispersal will appear in younger areas before species using slower, more geographically restricted modes of dispersal. Species composition in each area will be compared with species composition in adjacent areas. A hypothesis to be tested in this facet of the project is whether the species composition of an area is dependent on the species composition of other areas. This dependency may also be influenced by physical factors like wind or slope direction, as there may be greater concentration of species in areas located immediately downwind or downslope from established species. These results should help to clarify role that dispersal plays in determination of species composition patterns. This research will help advance understanding of the role plant dispersal plays in determining which species live where. This will complement what already is known about other factors that influence where plants live, such as how plants interact with the environment and how they interact with other plant species. This type of knowledge is necessary in a conservation context, because knowing the processes that maintain species diversity will help design plans for preservation of species, communities, and ecosystems. Land managers must know which processes increase or decrease species diversity on their lands before they can make informed decisions about the types of actions that should be taken to best preserve them or restore habitat. Understanding which processes are necessary to preserve maximum diversity can lead to more informed decisions about assigning protection priorities to various areas in scenarios involving limited monetary resources. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc13769 none In this study, researchers at the State University of New York at Stony Brook will attempt to identify and describe the various processes that lead to the enrichment of dissolved organic matter in the sea-surface microlayer. The sea-surface microlayer plays a major role in the exchange of matter and energy in the ocean-atmosphere system. Organic matter enriches the surface microlayer and influences its chemical, biological, and physical characteristics. Different constituents concentrate in the microlayer non-uniformly; consequently, the ratios of many dissolved elements and organic compounds therein differ from those in bulk water. These studies will focus on the transfer of dissolved free and combined amino acids between particulate and dissolved pools under the unique conditions of the interfacial laminar layer. A number of factors will be considered: increased physical stress on the biological community at the sea surface (e.g., by UV-radiation, evaporation, entrapment in spray), which causes leaching of organic matter from the resulting dead or injured organisms; dissolved organic matter decomposition by metabolically active neuston (hydrolysis, oxidation, and uptake); adsorption of dissolved matter onto particles which in the microlayer; and bubble scavenging from bulk water to the surface microlayer of proteinaceous matter that is dissolved or weakly associated with particles doc13770 none Adaptive Representations for Genetic Algorithms and Local Search This is the first year funding of a three year continuing award. The PI s recent theoretical results prove there are advantages to reflected Gray codes compared to standard binary encodings when used as a representation for search and parameter optimization problems (e.g., it is possible to use a simple mechanism to escape local optima by adaptively switching between different reflected Gray codes). Preliminary empirical results indicate that using high precision adaptive Gray codes leads to better optimization, and new convergence results have been proven. In this project, a family of high precision adaptive Gray codes will be developed for use with genetic algorithms and local search. The PI will further conduct a broad comparative evaluation of evolutionary algorithms, local search and other heuristic search methods that do not require derivative information. A real-world application will be addressed related to a new generation of much more accurate weather prediction systems. The CloudSat project will in the next few years deploy a satellite-based system for modeling cloud structures, and the search methods developed in this project will be the best and fastest way to solve a key inverse problem which lies at the heart of such models, as a consequence of which they appear to be likely candidates for inclusion in the scheduled deployment of CloudSat doc13771 none This project addresses two fundamental questions about primate biology. First, why do adult males and females share enduring bonds? In the majority of mammalian species, the sexes interact affiliatively around the period of female estrus or fertility; after that, males and females typically pursue largely separate lives. In primates, however, permanent association between males and nonfertile (anestrous) females is not only more common than in mammals generally, it is the rule in virtually all monkeys and apes. The evolutionary reasons for the ubiquity and variability of female-male relations in primates remain unknown, however. Second, why is infanticide a reproductive strategy of some males, but not others? Infanticide, the killing of dependent infants (usually by males), is widespread but variably expressed in mammals. These two apparently unrelated questions are united in a new theory that proposes that males and females form social relationships with one another in order to protect young against infanticide. The researchers will test this hypothesis in a study of two closely related savanna baboons that share similarities as well as important differences. The olive baboons (Papio cynocephalus anubis) of Kenya and the chacma baboons (P. cynocephalus ursinus) of Botswana both live in large, multi-male, multi-female groups in which lactating females maintain close bonds with particular males--popularly known as friendships . Infanticide by males, however, is common in chacma baboons, but rare in olives baboons. By comparatively studying both populations, the researchers will answer the following questions: (1) how do males benefit from friendship behavior: are males the genetic fathers of their friends infants, or, as argued for olive baboons, do they care for unrelated infants because mothers will then choose them as sires of future offspring?; (2) how do females benefit from friendships with males: do they obtain male anti-infanticide protection in chacma baboons, and some other benefit (such as protection from male harassment directed at females) in the less infanticidal olive baboon?; (3) do bonds between males and females vary in light of the male s paternity of the female s infant and due to the different benefits females may derive from friendships in the two populations? (4) does infanticide increase the reproductive success of male chacma baboons?; (5) why do some (but not all) male chacma baboons become infanticidal when reaching alpha status in the dominance hierarchy, whereas few male olive baboons ever do? Ultimately, the study of a nonhuman primate may improve our understanding of social relationships between the sexes within our own species doc13772 none Episodes of violence in schools have heightened public concern with school safety. They have also generated scholarly concern with the causes of such violence. Two theories of general aggression among adolescents may help explain acts of violence in schools. One theory emphasizes the importance for violence prevention of the social bonds individual youth have with their families, schools, and religious organizations. Another theory emphasizes the importance of social control within the school environment for individual acts of violence. Using data on a sample of seventh-grade students from schools in a representative sample of counties in Kentucky, this project addresses four questions concerning the causes of school violence? One, what are the effects of the bonding of individuals to families, schools, peers, and religion? Two, do the effects of bonding vary across schools? Three, what are the effects of school-level variables such as racial composition, student mobility, and financial resources? And four, does the organization of schools in terms of teacher supervision and intervention affect the influence of the school-level variables? The results not only contribute to the understanding of the causes of violence, but also help identify effective means to prevent school violence doc13748 none Studies of Earth s history show that climate is capable of changing rapidly (within a few years or decades) and dramatically (from glacial to interglacial conditions). The response of the Earth s ecosystems to such global-scale changes can be spatially complex. Paleoclimatic fluctuations are evident during the last glacial cycle (~12,000 and 110,000 years ago) when temperatures were generally cooler than present and were interrupted by 24 warm events during which temperature ranged from 15-20 degrees C. Understanding the mechanisms and timing of such environmental change is particularly important for the Arctic, a region particularly sensitive to climate variability. Historically, data from the Greenland ice sheet has been the foundation for paleoclimatic reconstruction for the region. Still lacking, however, is an understanding of how northern ecosystems have responded to changes in climate. This research will address this knowledge gap by providing the first continuous, high-resolution, multi-proxy record of paleovegetational and paleoclimatic change from the Arctic for the period ~22,000 to 50,000 years ago. A sediment core from Elikchan Lake in northeast Siberia will be recovered and analyzed for pollen and diatom remains as well as sediment geochemistry with sufficient temporal control to be compared to climate trends found in ice cores. These new data will be used to define the number, magnitude, and timing of climatic fluctuations to assess the similarities and differences in the climate histories between the eastern (North Atlantic) and western (northeast Siberia) Arctic. Specifically, the research will: 1) evaluate computer simulations of past temperature in northern Asia as related to climatic and oceanic changes in the North Atlantic region; 2) explore the role of Siberia in transmitting climatic fluctuations originating in the North Atlantic to the North Pacific; and 3) examine the range of ecosystem responses to various climatic conditions and the potential importance of biofeedback to the climate system (e.g., whether changes in the distribution of boreal forests, a major methane source, can affect levels of methane in the atmosphere doc13774 none Batarseh Description: This project supports a US-Jordan Workshop on Modern Power Electronics to be held in Amman, Jordan in May . The co-organizers are Dr. Issa Batarseh, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Central Florida, Orlando, and Dr. Sadeq Hamaed, Faculty of Engineering, University of Jordan, Amman. The workshop will include sessions on power electronics curriculum development, hardware and software laboratory support, possibilities for joint research collaboration projects, and academic-industry relations in both countries. It is expected that at least 25 US and Jordanian scientists from academic institutions will participate. Representatives from Jordanian industries will be invited. A publication of the proceedings is planned. Scope: This project enables eight US scientists to attend this workshop to discuss with Jordanian scientists the changes taking place in the engineering curriculum for training power electronics engineers in the two countries. With its focus on discussions of detailed course offerings, at both undergraduate and graduate levels, the workshop will explore the current industry needs for power electronics engineers doc13775 none Altricial species, such as humans and rats, have a difficult task at birth: they must be able to identify, remember and prefer their caretaker. This attachment is greatly dependent upon perinatal experiences, especially learning. For example, human infants learn their mother s voices, faces and odors; rat pups learn their mother s odor, and avian species learn to identify the mother visually and or aurally. Generally, infants that require perinatal learning for attachment exhibit unique learning abilities that have been referred to as imprinting, or sensitive period or critical period learning. One consistent aspect of early attachment is that the organism appears to have a very broad basis for learning an attachment which involves increased ability to acquire approach responses and a decreased ability to acquire aversions (Bowlby, ). These unique infant learning capabilities, which facilitate attachment, appear throughout the animal kingdom and may have evolved to ensure that altricial animals easily form a repertoire of proximity-seeking behaviors, regardless of the specific qualities of the treatment they receive from the primary caretaker. However, the sensitive periods for attachment must end as animals matures and must learn about the environment away from the nest. They must now be able to learn to acquire approach responses only to special stimuli and learn to avoid other stimuli. The research proposed in this grant will explore the neural mechanisms which help an organism make the transition from one stage of development to the next. While there is some understanding of the neural mechanisms that underlie the sensitive period, there is very little known about what neural mechanisms cause the sensitive period to end and begin the next stage of the animal s life. The results of the experiments proposed here will begin to characterize those physiological events that are involved in the termination of a sensitive period and the emergence of neural structures for the next stage of development. Recent work from this laboratory suggests that corticosterone (a neurohormone involved in stress and other behaviors) plays a critical role in the termination of the infant s unique learning abilities. Experiments have been proposed that further characterize the role of corticosterone in the termination of the sensitive period and assess the actions of corticosterone on brain areas important in learning: the amygdala, hippocampus and locus coeruleus doc1193 none Burbank Fisher Modeling of geologic features is considerably assisted by an extensive data set that quantifies an adequate number of descriptive parameters of the feature in question. Such studies on normal faults have prompted a significant step forward in understanding extensional tectonics, but no such population studies exist for thrust faults, which are common features in convergent tectonic settings. This project will generate an extensive data set quantifying geometric parameters, displacement length scaling, population statistics, displacement transfer and similar items. It is expected that this research will provide a robust statistical foundation for description of the geometric properties of thrust faults, and thus such research should under pin a significantly improved understanding of thrust faults and convergent tectonics doc13777 none Original Message----- From: Poore, Richard Z Sent: Thursday, July 12, 8:55 AM To: Weller, Margaret Subject: summary for anderson award Science : This proposal requests support for a study to test the hypothesis that reorganization of atmospheric circulation and, specifically, changes in upwelling-favorable winds, was a major factor driving millennial variability in the intensity of the oxygen minimum zone (OMZ) off the west coast of North America. The study will employ measurement of 231Pa 230Th and 10Be 230Th ratios in samples from cores forming a north-south transect along the continental margin to deduce past changes in wind-driven productivity. The proxies were selected because they are insensitive to sediment focusing and to changes in bottom water oxygen content and thus should be reliable indicators of local productivity variations doc13778 none Robert E. Hiromoto University of Texas - San Antonio Research Experiences in High-Performance Computing and Communications In this project, our goals are to (1) strengthen our ability to attract and retain undergraduate and graduate minority students, (2) increase the numbers of talented undergraduate minority students pursuing graduate education and high-tech industrial careers, (3) enhance the research productivity of the faculty and students, and (4) provide valuable industry experience to these students through industrial internships. We propose to create a dual-mentor partnership program with local industry to enhance the linkage of research and high-tech opportunities for our students. Students selected for this program will participate as NSF student scholars and will be provided financial support in the form of scholarships and research assistantships. Students will be expected to collaborate with a faculty mentor and regional industry research partners. Faculty from the Computer Science Department and the College of Engineering, will provide undergraduate student mentoring, work to develop student skills in problem solving activities, and create student research collaborations with faculty and industry. The research strengths in CS alone include: 1) parallel and distributed computing; 2) compiler technology for internet and parallel computing; 3) computer network protocols; 4) network security; 5) high-speed switching architectures; 6) data mining; and 7) biocomputing doc13779 none Science : This proposal requests support to test the hypothesis that the millennial changes in Oxygen Mimimum Zone intensity in the Arabian Sea are directly related to changes in the intensity of upwelling-favorable winds associated with the SW Indian Ocean monsoon. Past changes in monsoon-driven productivity will be traced by measuring a proxy (231Pa 230Th ratio) that is insensitive to sediment focusing and to changes in bottom water oxygen content. The study will be performed on sediment cores from the Pakistan margin doc13780 none The goal of this Arabidopsis Project is to establish the physiological function of 248 Arabidopsis enzymes and proteins presumed to be involved in various networks of phenylpropanoid-acetate metabolism. There are two main objectives: identifying networks associated with phenylpropanoid coupling polymerization (e.g. leading to lignins, lignans, suberins, sporopollenins, etc.), including how these enzymes proteins function. The second objective is to precisely identify the different networks that exist in Arabidopsis that are involved in the conversion of phenylalanine through to the monolignols. In both objectives, functions will be demonstrated in vitro, and we will also establish that this is the true physiological function by demonstrating temporal and spatial correlation with the segments of the metabolic pathway networks involved. This work will thus define the organization of the various phenylpropanoid radical-radical coupling and related metabolic processes in Arabidopsis through its entire life cycle. The benefits to the scientific community will include rapid dissemination of results (prior to publication) through a website linked to the Arabidopsis sites, and the provision of research materials (genes, constructs, recombinant proteins, transgenic and mutant plants) as needed. Another important benefit will be the new knowledge gained on these hitherto difficult systems (e.g. coupling polymerization) involving macromolecular assemblies, and the new insights that will be gained. For enzymes genes chosen that are ultimately not involved in these pathways, it is considered that metabolite profiling will provide a clue as to function, and this will then be examined also. Further, in addition to lignification, this study will shed important light on other highly regulated radical-radical phenolic coupling systems in vivo including: the construction of seed coats and metabolites therein; in generating the (strengthened) matrix of trichomes; in forming suberized tissue and in strengthening flower stalks; in biosynthesizing sporopollenin (a remarkably stable component of pollen grains); in reinforcing cutinized tissue; in cross-linking cell wall carbohydrates through hydroxycinnamic acid (phenolic) coupling, in producing a plethora of defense compounds and presumably for other purposes awaiting discovery. In addition to peerreviewed journals, our research findings, information and materials generated by this research will be made available to public databases, updated periodically on a (monthly) basis, by posting data information on a dedicated website (http: ibc.wsu.edu lewislab nsf index.html) that will be linked up to the Arabidopsis network sites relevant to the project. This information will include: recombinant protein expression vectors constructed by our laboratory; gene identification and gene function analysis; kinetic data results; gene expression profiles; metabolite and lignin analysis; in situ hybridization data; and light microscopy documentation doc13781 none The American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) is an organization based in Alexandria, Virginia, which has as its members 32 Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities (TCUs) from throughout the United States. AIHEC has a history of administering programs and providing technical assistance on a variety of matters. A Board of Directors composed of the presidents of all member colleges governs AIHEC. A full-time staff is located at the AIHEC Central Office in Alexandria, Virginia. AIHEC has a long-term commitment to improving technology and the use of technology at TCUs. This application is for a special project award to provide technical assistance to TCUs, Alaska Native and Native-Hawaiian-serving institutions to be funded under NSF s Tribal Colleges and Universities Program (TCUP). Under the two-year TCUP technical assistance proposal described below, AIHEC proposes to assist eligible applicants in developing high-quality proposals to the TCUP Program through a two-day workshop and a web-based technology collaborative and to provide on-going technical support to ensure achievement of TCUP goals and objectives doc13782 none Talley This project is an experiment conducted as a rapid response to the anomalously cold winter conditions over eastern Siberia. Mid-winter conditions appear to be comparable to those seen in . The goals are to discover the depth to which deep convection penetrates under such conditions in the Sea of Japan, the size of a typical convective patch, and the properties of the dense water formed. The experiment consists of a short cruise into a part of the Sea of Japan south of Vladivostok. The choice of location is based on survey work conducted last winter as part of a large ONR-sponsored experiment in the Japan Sea, recent AVHRR imagery, and recent data from a PALACE float in the Sea of Japan. Deep CTD and bottle casts will be made at approximately 34 stations south of Peter the Great Bay. The endeavor is a collaboration between U.S. and Russian oceanographers doc13783 none This project assesses the impact of gender mistakes on inequality. A gender mistake occurs when an actor learns that he or she has incorrectly sex categorized another. These gender mistakes may have lingering effects on the behaviors and attitudes of the actor who made the mistake, even after they are corrected. For example, when a man is mistaken for a women, he will enjoy less of a gender advantage in that interaction, even after the mistake is corrected, than he would if the mistake had never occurred. A women who is mistaken for a man, on the other hand, will suffer less of a gender disadvantage than she would have if the mistake had not happened. The project tests these claims using an experimental design common in expectations states research. The results suggest that if gender mistakes occur in many interactions, involving many actors, they might contribute to reducing gender inequality and the male advantage in interaction. They also suggest that gender equality is maintained by clear-cut displays of gender behavior in certain social situations and distinct categorization of the sexes doc13784 none Arabidopsis thaliana is a plant model organism that has become a major research tool for plant Biologists. A primary motivation for the sequencing of Arabidopsis was that it would serve as a reference for other plant genomes. For this to be realized the functions of a large number of unknown and hypothetical genes must be deduced and a cross-reference between genes in Arabidopsis and other plant species provided. Ultimately, the development of the data resources will lead to a better understanding of gene expressions and function in plants. Predicted genes will be amplified and used to construct a whole genome microarray that will be used to look at patterns of gene express through the plant life cycle. Expressions data can help provide both functional assignments for genes and used in identifying metabolic pathways. The data will be analyzed using a suite of clustering and pattern recognition tool. A number of databases will be combined and integrated to provide a web-based view of gene expression and identification in Arabidopsis doc13785 none Alessa, UAA This workshop brings together scientists from the circumpolar North to compare different approaches to the valuation process for terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems protected as wilderness. Also included are land managers, students, and local decision-makers. The goals are to assess the state of knowledge of wilderness valuation; explore the roles of nature tourism, ecological protection, and human-environment relationships among local and indigenous societies; compare national, regional, and local policy dimensions of wilderness resource use allocation; and develop a common framework for analysis of cross-disciplinary, circumpolar wilderness protection issues doc13786 none This research will develop a record of the isotopic composition of atmospheric methane from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two (GISP II) ice core for time intervals implicated in the clathrate gun hypothesis over the past 40,000 years spanning the deglaciation sequence, the Bolling warm period, and the Younger Dryas cool phase. The clathrate gun hypothesis suggests that the primary factor governing abrupt methane increases in the atmosphere is the destabilization of marine clathrate in ocean sediments as opposed to increased methane emissions from terrestrial wetlands. Evidence from the geologic records suggest that slight ocean temperature increases or oceanic slumping events (caused by instabilities in the continental shelf) may have caused catastrophic destabilization of clathrate deposits in the past and a consequent release of methane into the atmosphere. For example, throughout the last 40,000 years, a record of clathrate destabilization events in the Santa Barbara basin off the California coast closely resembles the record of abrupt increases in atmospheric methane recorded in ice cores. The strong similarity between these two records has prompted scientists to consider the origin of the abrupt methane increases in terms of their impact on climate. Because methane is a potent greenhouse gas, clathrate destabilization events may have contributed to abrupt global temperature increases in the past. This is an important idea because it identifies a previously unknown mechanism for abrupt warming of the atmosphere over geologic time. Along many continental margins and deep below the Arctic permafrost, methanogenic bacteria produce large quantities of methane as a metabolic byproduct. The liberated methane diffuses up towards the surface until it reaches a critical temperature and pressure where the gas is concentrated into an icy substance know as a clathrate or gas hydrate. Clathrate deposits are very susceptible to small changes in environmental pressure and temperature in that higher temperatures and lower pressures tend to melt the clathrate deposits leading to the release of methane. Fortuitously, marine clathrate methane is isotopically distinct from terrestrially derived methane from wetlands, so it should be possible to determine whether or not the cause of rapid methane concentration in the atmosphere was due to degassing from marine clathrates doc13787 none This award supports the field excavation and laboratory preparation of a rare whole specimen of a Miocene (i.e., 15 million years old) fossil whale preserved in a rock quarry in Virginia. Fossil specimens of once living organisms, especially those of whales, are relatively scarce and offer a unique window on environmental conditions prevailing at a particular site at a particular time. Although it is well known that whale diversity has changed over time, the reasons for such changes are unknown but the scientific evidence hints at a climatic cause. At their height, whales were represented by over twenty different genera. Today there are just six genera. It has been suggested that shifting ocean currents and sea surface temperatures in the past resulted in the radiation of modem whales and that such faunal changes might be correlated with worldwide environmental change and physical changes in the Atlantic Ocean. For example, establishment of a West Antarctic ice sheet and closure of the western opening of the Mediterranean Sea (with a consequent decrease in warm water influx) contributed to cooling, steeper temperature gradients, and more complex ocean current patterns. These changes in turn may have resulted in the development of a variety of ocean habitats and increased partitioning of food resources. The excavation of the whale will be accomplished with a crew of local volunteers serving as field assistants. The quarry excavation will provide an outstanding public educational experience for the volunteers by affording them hands-on science experience. In addition, once excavated, the specimen will be publicly displayed at the state-supported Virginia Museum of Natural History. This research presents an excellent opportunity to cost-effectively share federal and state resources for research and outreach doc13788 none This research is mostly concerned with the problem of the optimal state estimation of continuous systems based on continuous and discrete measurements, subject to arbitrary, time-varying and a priori unknown time delays. The sampling rate of discrete measurements is allowed to vary in time in a priori unknown way. The optimal filter equation in this case must be continuous to reflect the continuous nature of the process, and to account for continuous measurements. This optimal filter will be subject to discontinuous inputs at the moment when discrete measurements become available. The innovation of the research is that (1) the problem is approached directly as a continuous problem with discontinuities without simplifying assumptions, and (2) the most general case of time-varying and a priori unknown delays in discrete and continuous measurements is studies. The aims of the proposed research are to: 1. Develop the theory of optimal state estimation for continuous systems with discrete and continuous measurements; 2. Extend the developed theory for the case when sampling rates of the discrete measurements are unknown and time varying; 3. Extend the developed theory to include the case when both discrete and continuous measurements are subject to arbitrary, time varying and a priori unknown time delays; 4. Reduce the general theoretical results of an integral approach to practically important cases of state space systems and systems with plant and measurement memory; 5. Develop the software that implements the developed methods, and 6. Test and compare the developed methods using simulation and experimental studies. Additional objectives are to lay the foundation for extending the proposed integral approach for the case of discontinuities of plant structure and parameters, constraints and inputs; to extend the results on nonlinear systems; and to study the application of the developed filtering methods to dual control problems. The research will include international and industrial collaboration. The estimation, based on available measurements, of variables characterizing processes and systems during their dynamic operation, is the fundamental problem in the variety of engineering and science areas. A special case of the estimation problem when it is desirable to estimate variables that are not directly measurable requires that we use the model of the process in the estimation procedure. A particular important case of the model-based estimation methods for the case of discrete and continuous measurements with time varying and generally unknown delays is the subject of the proposed approach. The method developed during this project will be applicable in such areas as state and parameter estimation for processes with manual sampling, human-triggered data acquisition and state estimation of remote processes with time delays in measurements and actuation introduced by non-deterministic properties of the information transport through the data network. The theoretical foundation developed in the course of this research will be relevant to practically relevant cases of linear dynamic systems with any combination of discrete and continuous measurements subject to arbitrary and time-varying time delays. The extension on the case of non-linear systems is also proposed doc13789 none The goal of this research project is to develop new algorithms and systems for effectively discovering knowledge in unstructured textual data. The approach first uses trained information extraction systems to obtain structured data from unstructured natural-language documents or web pages, and then applies rule induction methods to discover interesting patterns in this extracted data. Since data automatically extracted from text is noisy, heterogeneous, and non-standardized, the project studies two approaches to effectively mining extracted data. First, methods are developed for inducing rules that only partially match extracted text. Second, methods are developed that automatically cluster noisy variations of strings into standardized data items prior to mining. Algorithms are also developed for using discovered knowledge to further improve the accuracy of information extraction. Developed methods are being evaluated on large text corpora in business, medicine, science, and technology. The research will contribute to the development of technology capable of automatically discovering significant scientific, commercial, and industrial knowledge from the ever-growing supply of textual electronic information doc13790 none Seagrasses are susceptible to attack by net-forming protists within the genus Labyrinthula (Phylum Labyrinthulomycota). These ubiquitous, largely saprophytic or weakly parasitic organisms can periodically become virulent pathogens, causing the seagrass wasting disease and contributing to sudden population declines. These scientists suggest that differences in susceptibility of seagrass populations to Labyrinthula attack arise as changing environmental conditions alter the ability of seagrasses to maintain or develop disease resistance by the production of phenolic compounds via the shikimic acid phenylpropenoid (SA PP) pathway. The concentrations of phenolic compounds in seagrass leaves and shoots are the only characteristics that have been linked with resistance to the wasting disease. Previous studies indicate that, for certain species, disease resistance is correlated with the content of phenolic acids and other polymeric phenolics, that phenolic production can be induced by Labyrinthula attack and or wounding, and that seagrass phenolics inhibit the growth of this pathogen in culture. While the evidence for a link between seagrass phenolics and disease resistance is correlative and comes from relatively few studies on a limited number of species, it indicates that seagrasses, like all terrestrial plants examined to date, exhibit induced defenses against pathogen attack. The evidence also suggests that seagrass responses involve activation of the SA PP pathway leading to the production of plant phenolics. However, the regulation of the SA PP pathway has not yet been examined in seagrasses, and we do not fully understand how environmental factors may affect disease resistance in seagrasses. Drs. Arnold, Boettcher and Tanner will investigate the regulation of the SA PP pathway and the resistance of seagrasses to infection by Labyrinthula. Specifically, the goals of the research are: (1) to test the hypothesis that key SA PP pathway enzymes are induced by Labyrinthula attack, (2) to determine which phenolics accumulate in response to SA PP pathway induction, (3) to test, in vivo, the link between phenolic acid condensed tannin levels and seagrass resistance, (4) to determine whether SA PP pathway induction and the accumulation of phenolic compounds are affected by specific environmental conditions, and (5) to test the proposed link between these conditions, altered SA PP metabolism and changes in seagrass resistance to Labyrinthula attack. These questions will be addressed in mesocosm populations of two species, the tropical subtropical seagrass Thalassia testudinum and the temperate seagrass Zostera marina, both of which are subject to periodic wasting disease outbreaks and exhibit induced production of phenolic compounds in response to pathogen attack and or wounding. Activities of SA PP pathway enzymes, concentrations of phenolic acids and polymeric phenols, and indicators of physiological health (growth, photosynthesis, concentrations of carbohydrates and proteins) will be examined in infected and pathogen-free plants. They will also compare the responses of these seagrasses to infection under different environmental conditions. Finally, artificial inhibitors of specific SA PP pathway enzymes will be used to determine the ability of plants to resist Labyrinthula attack when they are unable to produce SA PP phenolics doc13757 none This research will examine a suite of cores from the Peten Lakes District in Guatemala to examine the pre-Holocene record of climate change in tropical lakes that did not dry out in the last glacial. The sediments of these lakes contain the potential for preserving a unique and full record of rapid climate change from an area of the world with few continuous climate records doc13792 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Kathryn Weedman and her colleagues will conduct two field seasons of ethnographic and archaeological research in southern Ethiopia among the Konso, who are one of the few people in the world to continue to make and use stone tools. Their goal is to investigate the meaning behind stone tool variation, which has been a source of great archaeological interest for over 100 years, and as a result there are multiple explanations for this diversity based on inferential methods, ethnohistoric documents, and experimental archaeology. The Konso make and use stone tools on a daily basis to process hides into everyday items such as bedding, clothing, and bags. Furthermore, the Konso are unique because they represent the only known culture, where women primarily make and use stone tools. The team will focus on interviewing the hide workers, other artisans, and farmers for information concerning the social-economic-political position of hide workers and their activities within Konso society. The manufacture, use, and discard of the stone tools will be observed and stone production waste, resharpening flakes, and scrapers from each individual will be collected. They will conduct macro- and microscopic morphological analysis and DNA residue studies of the stone tools and waste products. By combining ethnographic and material studies, they will be able to provide a context for interpreting stone tool diversity. Lastly, they will excavate abandoned hide worker households to assess how the morphology, residues (DNA), and the spatial distributions of stone tools are affected by cultural and environmental factors through time. This research is important for several reasons. For most of our prehistory, stone tools were the most commonly left object by our ancestors, and in many instances they represent the only objects archaeologists have for deciphering our ancestors lifeways. The Konso, as one of the few peoples to continue to make and use stone tools, may provide archaeologists with useful insights for understanding stone tool diversity. Unique because of the use and manufacture of stone tools by women, they are especially important for enhancing our knowledge of gender roles and how they may be reflected in stone tool technology. With the influx of western clothing and other products, hide working with stone tools is a dying craft. Thus, it is imperative that they document this rare occurrence of female hide workers through both written descriptions and documentary films doc13793 none This ocean sciences technology development project will develop and construct three new broadband autonomous seismic instruments to be used for 1) compliance measurements on the seafloor, 2) the development and testing of new sensors for broadband seismology and other geophysical applications and 3) studies of the variations in ocean floor seismic noise in preparation for the installation of permanent seafloor seismic observatories. The instruments will be based on STS-2 three component seismometers. The primary work required involves fitting the sensors into motor driven gimbals within the glass pressure housings after installing a clamp unclamp system onto the sensors. Broadband seismometers such as the STS-2 are very fragile and must be clamped when not on the seafloor. The compliance technique can map regions of melt within the oceanic crust and is therefore a valuable scientific tool for understanding the formation of the oceanic crust. Better instruments are required to continue the development of this technique and to extend the use of this technique to new geophysical features such as hydrates and hydrothermal areas. Once developed and constructed, the instruments will be placed is a pool of shared-use equipment accessible by the whole research community doc13794 none Recent developments in the new science of tropical ice-core palynology have demonstrated that the fossil pollen found in ice cores drawn from alpine glaciers and polar ice caps can provide sensitive records of past vegetational and climatic changes. To date, however, this science has been done in tropical alpine environments without the full understanding of pollen dispersal and depositional characteristics; a key factor for a reliable and accurate interpretation of ice-core palynological records. This doctoral dissertation research project will study the patterns and processes of pollen dispersal and deposition on the tropical Andean ice caps of Quelccaya in Peru and Nevada Sajama in Bolivia. This project will analyze the modern pollen found on the ice caps themselves and in the surrounding vegetation zones. Aside from the ice caps, pollen surface samples will be collected from the major vegetation zones in the central Andes as well as from the subalpine and lowland zones to the west (extending to the Pacific Ocean) and east (into the Amazon lowlands). A biogeographical surface pollen study will help address questions of dispersal patterns, pollen provenance, regional pollen-rain signatures, sensitivity of the ice-core pollen records, and how each of these factors are reflected in the distribution and assemblages of pollen found on the ice caps. This project will advance fundamental understandings in the rapidly growing field of ice-core palynology. It will provide new insights into vegetation change in and near the central Andes, thereby complementing data from other sources that is examining environmental change in the region. The project will further the effectiveness of future pollen studies in the central Andes by broadening knowledge about modern relationships among pollen, vegetation, and climate in the region, thus laying the groundwork for the derivation of pollen-climate transfer functions and response surfaces. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc13795 none Control of Cellular Excitability by KCNQ-like Potassium Channels in C. elegans. Potassium channels are selectively permeable membrane proteins critical for shaping the normal electrical properties of neurons, muscles and epithelial cells. The availability of whole genomic sequences from a range of organisms has revealed a complete set of evolutionarily conserved genes underlying most potassium channel diversity. The in vivo functions of one particular conserved class of potassium channel genes, forming the KCNQ gene family, will be studied in the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans through a combination of genetic, electrophysiological and behavioral techniques. This gene family is important because members of this family likely form M-type potassium channels. These channels are active at subthreshold voltages and modulated by activation of neurohormonal receptors, and thus may act as long-term determinants of basal excitability. In addition, human members of this gene family are responsible for diverse hereditary diseases. Three KCNQ-like genes are found in the C. elegans genome (kqt-1, kqt -2, and kqt-3). The tissue expression and cellular distribution patterns of these genes will be examined using transgenic reporter constructs fusing regulatory sequences of each gene with green fluorescent protein (GFP) and by developing gene-specific antibodies. The functional properties of channels encoded by these genes will be characterized by voltage-clamp recordings from Xenopus oocytes expressing each gene, and by in situ recordings from selected C. elegans cells. Genetic strains will be created that reduce or eliminate the function of each kqt gene. Resulting mutant phenotypes will be characterized by electrophysiological and behavioral assays. Preliminary results suggest specific roles for these channels in regulating the rhythmicity of pharyngeal muscle contractions and the dynamics of intracellular calcium release in intestinal cells. These studies may reveal conserved in vivo functions for KCNQ potassium channels, and form the basis for forward genetic screens to identify novel genes that regulate these channels doc13790 none Seagrasses are susceptible to attack by net-forming protists within the genus Labyrinthula (Phylum Labyrinthulomycota). These ubiquitous, largely saprophytic or weakly parasitic organisms can periodically become virulent pathogens, causing the seagrass wasting disease and contributing to sudden population declines. These scientists suggest that differences in susceptibility of seagrass populations to Labyrinthula attack arise as changing environmental conditions alter the ability of seagrasses to maintain or develop disease resistance by the production of phenolic compounds via the shikimic acid phenylpropenoid (SA PP) pathway. The concentrations of phenolic compounds in seagrass leaves and shoots are the only characteristics that have been linked with resistance to the wasting disease. Previous studies indicate that, for certain species, disease resistance is correlated with the content of phenolic acids and other polymeric phenolics, that phenolic production can be induced by Labyrinthula attack and or wounding, and that seagrass phenolics inhibit the growth of this pathogen in culture. While the evidence for a link between seagrass phenolics and disease resistance is correlative and comes from relatively few studies on a limited number of species, it indicates that seagrasses, like all terrestrial plants examined to date, exhibit induced defenses against pathogen attack. The evidence also suggests that seagrass responses involve activation of the SA PP pathway leading to the production of plant phenolics. However, the regulation of the SA PP pathway has not yet been examined in seagrasses, and we do not fully understand how environmental factors may affect disease resistance in seagrasses. Drs. Arnold, Boettcher and Tanner will investigate the regulation of the SA PP pathway and the resistance of seagrasses to infection by Labyrinthula. Specifically, the goals of the research are: (1) to test the hypothesis that key SA PP pathway enzymes are induced by Labyrinthula attack, (2) to determine which phenolics accumulate in response to SA PP pathway induction, (3) to test, in vivo, the link between phenolic acid condensed tannin levels and seagrass resistance, (4) to determine whether SA PP pathway induction and the accumulation of phenolic compounds are affected by specific environmental conditions, and (5) to test the proposed link between these conditions, altered SA PP metabolism and changes in seagrass resistance to Labyrinthula attack. These questions will be addressed in mesocosm populations of two species, the tropical subtropical seagrass Thalassia testudinum and the temperate seagrass Zostera marina, both of which are subject to periodic wasting disease outbreaks and exhibit induced production of phenolic compounds in response to pathogen attack and or wounding. Activities of SA PP pathway enzymes, concentrations of phenolic acids and polymeric phenols, and indicators of physiological health (growth, photosynthesis, concentrations of carbohydrates and proteins) will be examined in infected and pathogen-free plants. They will also compare the responses of these seagrasses to infection under different environmental conditions. Finally, artificial inhibitors of specific SA PP pathway enzymes will be used to determine the ability of plants to resist Labyrinthula attack when they are unable to produce SA PP phenolics doc13797 none In industrial America, work careers were structured, organized, and defined by traditional employment relationships and the normal age-based transitions into and out of work. Because work in the post-industrial era involves more flexibility in both employment relationships and life course patterns, it is possible for new career patterns to emerge. This project examines how recent college graduates choose among diverse possibilities for organizing and giving meaning to their work lives. To do so, it first uses existing longitudinal cohort data on career plans and aspirations for a sample of recent college graduates. It supplements these data with in-depth, semi-structured life history interviews that help categorize diverse career strategies and experiences, and help reveal the forces behind the diverse strategies and experiences. The results contribute to the development of a theory of how highly educated adults construct their work careers in a contemporary context doc13798 none Orsi Inverse modeling techniques will be used to resolve the transports in the Southern Ocean as port of the synthesis phase of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE). The box inverse model, applied to circumpolar hydrographic sections following the Subantarctic Front and southern ACC front of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, along with multiple WOCE and other high-quality hydrographic data. The model will explicitly include air-sea transformations to solve for a set of reference velocities and property-dependent effective diapycnal velocities, and corrections to these fluxes consistent with property conservation in neutral density layers. Previous studies of the global thermohaline circulation by means of inverse box models have been severely restricted by their lack of controlling sections within the Southern Ocean, and therefore were not able to distinguish meridional exchanges among the different circulation regimes in the regions south of about 32 S doc13799 none Science : This proposal requests support to construct a detailed 14C calibration data set for the period from 15 - 55 calendar Kyr BP using sediments of the tropical Cariaco Basin. The varved sediments of the Cariaco Basin allow annual resolution. Paleoclimate records from the Caricaco Basin show identical variation to detailed records from the GISP2 ice core. The study will obtain a series of high-resolution radiocarbon dates from Cariaco Basin and calibrate them to the chronology of the GISP2 ice core record doc13800 none This proposal is an extension of previous work aimed at understanding the effects of reproductive biology on patterns of life history evolution in a colonial marine tunicate, Botryllus schlosseri. The project will test five hypotheses about factors that may determine male reproductive success in natural spawns of this colonial invertebrate. The five hypotheses specifically aim to explore the effects of timing of sperm release, relatedness of mates, population density, and allocation to male function on fertilization success in field and experimental populations of Botryllus. Previous work has shown that there is a narrow temporal window in which fertilization can result in a viable embryo, and there may be a gametic incompatibility system. Furthermore, fertilizing sperm are generally the product of nearby colonies; colonies exhibit variation in sperm production, and high levels of sperm production only increase local reproductive success when sperm competition occurs. This preliminary information suggests that male reproductive success in natural populations is a complex function of timing relative to the reproductive cycles of other colonies, gametic compatibility, sperm production, and population density. The proposed research will consist of field and laboratory studies, with preliminary work focused to maximize the information yield of a suite of nine polymorphic microsatellite loci. These genetic markers will then be used to assay paternity in natural spawns and test the series of five hypotheses about the determinants of male reproductive success doc13801 none Bernardi This award supports a planning visit to South Africa by Professor Giacomo Bernardi, Department of Biology, University of California, Santa Cruz in June . Professor Bernardi will work with Professor Paulette Bloomer, Department of Genetics, University of Pretoria to evaluate the possibility of doing a study on fish species whose populations are found across the Cape of Good Hope region. They will determine whether matching biogeographic and phylogeographic breaks would be found there. The mechanisms involved in the formation of species (speciation) in the marine environment are poorly known. Several models have been proposed to explain the processes of marine speciation. One well-studied system, in the southeastern United States, emphasized the role of genetic partitioning of populations across a defined geographic region (phylogeographic break). This phylogeographic break also matched a region of species discontinuity (biogeographic boundary). This system is now well documented, but so far has not been generalized to other systems. During the planning visit to South Africa, Bernardi and Bloomer will try to collect fishes whose populations are found on both Atlantic and Indian Ocean sides of the Cape Region and that are endemic to Southern Africa. If successful, they will formulate proposals for cooperative research proposals to US and South African funding agencies doc13802 none In the context of global climate change and increased impacts of humans on natural landscapes, increased fire occurrence is likely to be a major cause of widespread change in forested ecosystems. Although much is known about how short-term weather conditions affect the probability of fire occurrence and its intensity, much less is known about how the history of land use and the heterogeneity of the landscape affect the ways that fires spread and ecosystem responses to fire. Through a multi-scale study in northern Patagonia, Argentina, this project will address the following key questions: (1) How does landscape heterogeneity resulting from fires and other forms of disturbance over the last two centuries affect the spread of fire and subsequent post-fire vegetation and fuel changes? (2) What are the effects of climatic conditions on post-fire vegetation recovery, especially tree regeneration? (3) What are the effects of livestock and other forms of land use on the critical, early phases of post-fire vegetation and fuels recovery? These three questions will be examined by an integrated multi-scale approach to vegetation dynamics and landscape ecology across a range of ecosystem types from dry shrublands to wet forests. The researchers will integrate broad-scale spatial analyses of vegetation and fire patterns derived from historical aerial photographs and satellite images with detailed field studies of disturbance history based on tree-ring samples. These methods will be combined with experimental manipulation of moisture availability and herbivory by livestock to simulate the effects of climatic variation and land use on vegetation recovery after fire. The proposed research will advance a long-term research program initiated in focusing on the processes through which natural disturbance, climatic variability, and human activities have and continue to alter Northern Patagonian landscapes. The expected results will quantify relationships of fire behavior and effects to landscape heterogeneity at spatial and temporal scales useful for resource managers. The results will also provide a strong empirical basis for realistic application of spatial landscape-models to predicting fire behavior and fire effects in this landscape. The patterns and causal mechanisms identified in this study will guide similar approaches to understanding and predicting the ecological effects of fire, livestock, and climatic variability in other landscapes doc13736 none The most important subsurface Arctic Ocean transport system, a cyclonic (here anticlockwise) boundary current, organized along the continental slopes and major trans-Arctic ridges, distributes waters, tracers and contaminants from the Atlantic (via Fram Strait and the Barents Sea) and the Pacific (via Bering Strait) around and into the deep Arctic basins. On its circum-Arctic pathway, parts of the topographically steered current are diverted away from the continental margin, generally along topographic ridges. The most complex obstacle the boundary current encounters is the Mendeleev Ridge Chukchi Borderland complex, north of the Pacific entrance to the Arctic. This region is the cross- roads for Pacific-origin waters from the south and Atlantic waters carried from the west with the boundary current. The tortuous bathymetry offers many routes for a topographically steered current, and the spatial variability of the sparse data that exist clearly indicates the complexity of the region. These data also show significant interannual variability, in line with the major changes seen in the last decade throughout the Arctic, and they further suggest that the region diverts significant amounts of water into the deep basins, indicating this region s importance to shelf-basin exchange, deep basin ventilation, and circum- and trans-Arctic circulation (with feedback implications to the World Ocean circulation). Yet, the pathways and exchanges in this area are still unclear, both qualitatively and quantitatively, due to the lack of sufficiently concentrated observations. This research will conduct a high spatial resolution hydrographic and tracer survey, supported by short-term moored current and CTD measurements, in the region of the Chukchi Borderland and the southern end of the Mendeleev Ridge during August September . The objectives are to: - delineate the pathways of the boundary current carrying the Atlantic water past the Mendeleev Ridge and through the Chukchi Borderland; - ascertain the input from the boundary current and the shelves to the deep Arctic Ocean in the vicinity of the Mendeleev Ridge and the Chukchi Borderland; - understand and quantify the pathways and transformations of the Pacific waters through this region; - describe the horizontal and vertical structure of the boundary current, and estimate its transport; and - quantify recent temporal changes in this region by combining the spatially sparse data extending through most of the past decade with new detailed synoptic measurements. On a 35-day expedition on an ice-breaking research vessel, measurements will be made of temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, nutrients, CFCs, Ba, and 18-O on 12 sections that cross both the boundary flow and the Pacific inputs to the region before and after topographic junctions and hypothesized regions of flow diversion. This tracer suite will enable identification of the pathways of the boundary current and the Pacific-origin waters, and quantification of the different Atlantic and Pacific influences, as well as freshwater input from ice melt and different rivers. In addition, three moorings will be deployed, spanning the boundary current for the duration of the cruise. Current meters and moored conductivity and temperature sensors will quantify the vertical and horizontal extent of the boundary current, its structure and variability, and will yield an estimate of the transport and a description of eddies carried with or across the boundary current. To give a comprehensive picture of the system, the entire data set will be analyzed collectively and in tandem with hydrographic, tracer, and moored time series data from the last decade. Since the transit time of signals through this region is 2-4 years, the older data provide a temporal background for the new high spatial resolution data, whilst the newer data will supply an essential spatial framework for understanding the variability of the older surveys. The work will yield a substantially increased understanding of the role of this region in the Arctic circulation, including a determination of pathways, a quantification of exchanges, and an assessment of temporal change. Its timing in will fill a pending hiatus in hydrographic surveys in the Canadian Basin at a time when the most dramatic changes ever observed in the Arctic are propagating through this region. The project will provide necessary background and mechanistic information to the potential SEARCH and Arctic-Subarctic Ocean Flux programs, and essential far-field information to the SBI Phase II field program in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. In addition, the results will be pivotal to validating and improving high resolution computer and conceptual models of the Arctic, and will offer insights to physical mechanistic problems, such as the driving mechanism of the boundary current and the interaction of an equivalent barotropic current with steep and sharp topography doc13804 none Cole This is a collaborative proposal by the Cold Regions Engineering and Environmental Laboratory and Dartmouth College. Despite considerable progress in understanding the mechanisms of glacier flow, uncertainties still remain in understanding the relationship between stress and the resulting flow rate, and the effect of low concentrations of debris or particulate inclusions on the flow rate of ice. There are indications that power law behavior (n =3 to 4) is not universally observed at low stress levels. Laboratory experiments indicate that at low stresses, n1, and a linear stress dependence is often required to produce sensible results from calculations in ice sheet models. However, the underlying causes for the stress dependency of flow are not known and a physically based quantitative model of the process is not currently available. In fact, there is evidence that ice with small quantities of debris actually deforms faster than either pure ice or sediment-rich ice. Given the importance of the debris-laden layers to overall ice sheet movement, there is great interest in understanding the reason for this effect and developing a suitable constitutive relationship. Recent indications show that both the stress dependence of the flow rate and the influence of sediments can be addressed with a dislocation-based constitutive model. The application of dislocation-based models to ice has been hampered by an inability to quantify dislocation processes in specimens of a meaningful size. However, an approach has been developed that overcomes this obstacle, and a specimen s effective dislocation density (length of dislocation lines per unit volume of material)can now be determined as a function of its physical properties. Moreover, a combination of cyclic loading and creep experiments provides a way to track the dislocation density as a function of the specimen s stress strain path and thermal history. Such experiments will be used to establish the dislocation density-stress strain-temperature relationships for granular freshwater ice and debris-laden granular ice. Attention will be paid to the influence of debris concentration and thermal history on the grown-in (pre-deformation)dislocation density and on the dislocation density that evolves as a result of deformation. This approach has been successfully applied to ice having a variety of microstructures, but most extensively to sea ice, and a quantitative dislocation-based model has been developed. This study will verify critical aspects of the model for the case of laboratory-prepared granular freshwater ice, extend it to the case of ice with low sediment concentrations, and provide direct observations of the dislocation-particle interactions through the use of synchrotron x-ray topography on static and deforming specimens. Subsequent work will examine field cores for verification doc13805 none This award will enable researchers to reconstruct daily weather conditions for New England over the past 300 years by compiling and analyzing written archives such as diaries, journals, agricultural records, and marine logs. These archives will be used to reconstruct daily weather maps that will be compared with recent climatic conditions. New England has a large number of lengthy weather archives and is a region sensitive to changing climatic conditions. The region is influenced by storm tracks and upper-air disturbances that impact the Canadian High, Icelandic Low and the Bermuda-Azores High from year-to-year. Obtaining highly detailed and lengthy records of past climatic variability at the regional scale is important to better inform society about the range of climatic change in the lives of individuals. It is also important to develop records of past climatic conditions with daily resolution to evaluate how the number and magnitude of extreme climatic events (i.e., nor Easters, hurricanes, tornadoes, and ice storms) have changed with time. It is these extreme events that can greatly affect individuals and communities. The use of the 300-year record from New England and the reconstruction of synoptic conditions helps to infer differences in seasonality between cold years, warm years, and more common (i.e., normal) years during the Little Ice Age. Instrumental records over approximately the last 100 years provide time series for the evaluation of recent changes that may be representative of anthropogenically-induced conditions. Daily weather conditions will be compiled in electronic format and placed on the World Wide Web. These data will be available to the general public, including schools, to use when evaluating changes in climate doc13806 none Vector-borne infectious disease continues to be a major obstacle to social and economic development in less developed countries. Malaria was once thought to be eradicated from areas outside the tropics but it is making a major resurgence, possibly due to the impacts of global climate change. This doctoral dissertation research project will quantify changing spatial patterns of the incidence of malaria in Northwest Argentina during the 20th century, and it will analyze the relationship of these changes to environmental, socioeconomic, and land-use variables as well as improve understandings of the role of malaria control efforts in the Argentine state s broader political and ideological projects. Although the direct causes of malaria are well understood, the relative roles of larger associated causes are uncertain and are the subject of scientific and policy debate. Using statistical and spatial analysis, including geographic information systems (GIS), this research will determine which factors best explain variation in malaria incidence as well as variation in rates of malaria reduction. Research methods will integrate field work, archival sources, and GIS-based spatial and statistical analyses. Historical research will be both quantitative and qualitative in nature. Historical rates of malaria incidence and mortality will be documented through the use of publications of public health agencies of the Argentine government. Socioeconomic, environmental, and land-use data will be derived from various sources, including decennial census data, remote-sensing images and data, aerial photographs, agricultural censuses, property deed registers, cadastral maps, topographic maps, land division proceedings, and probate records. Once baseline data has been collected, univariate and multivariate regression analysis will be used to assess the relative weight of different variables and to analyze the regional and local differences in rates of malaria incidence. A GIS will be used to correlate socioeconomic, environmental, land use, and malaria-incidence coverages. GIS-based spatial statistical analysis and mapping output will be used to identify specific land-use practices that intensify or ameliorate malaria incidence. Qualitative archival research will focus on interpreting the rhetoric and claims of physicians, public health officials, politicians, and bureaucrats involved in the anti-malaria campaigns, especially as they pertain to issues of environmental perceptions, economic development, and national identity. This research will advance knowledge of the human-environmental interactions of malaria in the subtropics of developing countries in general and in Argentina and southern South America in specific. The related issues of disease ecology and human health and human-environment interaction in southern South America has received scant attention from geographers and other social scientists. This research will advance interdisciplinary research by developing methodological approaches that combine spatial analytical tools involving GIS with historical archival sources, to explore the interrelated nature of disease, land-use change, socioeconomic development, and national identity formation. This research will advance understanding in the broad themes of the geography of development and global environmental change, and it will draw on historical and contemporary experiences in Argentina to to determine the importance of land-use change, especially through deforestation and expansion of irrigation, in contributing to malaria incidence. Human-environmental and historical geographic studies such as this promise to contribute an important perspective on the relationship between global environmental change and disease, and to provide lessons for present-day control of vector-borne disease. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc13807 none The topic of the project is development of a framework for robust active vision, with the goal of obtaining systems capable of performing satisfactorily in the presence of uncertainty, such as due to poor calibration, noise, or a changing environment. The work will be complemented by a comprehensive experimental validation and performance characterization doc13808 none Holman OSU This project will develop and test techniques for extracting quantitative data on cross-shore and along-shore currents in the near-shore zone from video images. One of the motivations is to obtain better data on shear waves in the near-shore zone. Results of the video analysis algorithms will be compared with in situ data from the same site. Both video and in situ data were collected during an earlier experiment at Duck, N. Carolina. Measurements of currents derived from the video data at ten different sites will be incorporated into a numerical model of finite-amplitude shear waves in a study of the effects of bottom dissipation and horizontal mixing on these waves doc13809 none Infectious diseases can influence evolutionary mechanisms in a variety of ways, including extinction of host populations. While disease is rarely considered as a forcing agent in extinction, whether alone or in combination with co factors (e.g., climate change), it is nevertheless obvious from modern examples that disease can have extraordinary effects on the fitness of natural populations. In this proposal it is contended that: (1) extinctions due to disease have occurred in the recent past (late Pleistocene); (2) these losses were prompted by genetically naive populations of animals encountering infectious diseases brought from elsewhere by migrating humans, their commensals, or synanthropics), which quickly emerged thereafter in these new hosts, causing catastrophic mortality; and (2) empirical evidence of pathogens is recoverable from late Pleistocene material, utilizing molecular ( ancient DNA) and immunological approaches (thereby permitting realistic tests of the hypothesis). The target extinction event for this work is the major series of losses that occurred in North America and northern Asia ca. 11,000 years ago. The principal target taxon is Mammuthus primigenius, the woolly mammoth, chosen because it is represented by abundant, high-quality fossils (including soft tissues). This taxon is also being heavily investigated by molecular methods for systematic and phylogenetic purposes in a number of labs, providing a good database for quality control of results. Other late Pleistocene taxa will also be utilized where feasible, as will remains other than bones (especially feces). The intent is to search for evidence of pathogenic entities (in particular, viruses) in well-preserved fossils collected by team members in the Taimyr Peninsula, Siberia, as well as other locales. Hypotheses to be tested by relevant experiments are logically linked in a series of steps. Experiments may be grouped as follows: Group 1 experiments are linked to the hypothesis that exogenous virus capsid proteins or host antibodies raised against virus infection can be detected immunochemically in tissues and feces of extinct species. Purpose of experiments is to use radioimmunoassay (RIA), enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), and immuno-PCR to detect DNA and RNA viruses. Group 2 experiments are linked to the hypothesis that exogenous DNA viruses in fossil samples can be detected using ancient DNA techniques developed for single-copy nuclear DNA analysis. Purpose of experiments is to obtain sequence information on DNA viruses identified by RIA. Group 3 experiments are linked to the hypothesis that mammoth populations may have suffered from reduced fitness (and therefore increased susceptibility to disease) as the result of genetic uniformity. Experiments are designed to analyze population genetics of geographically and temporally discrete mammoth samples, to look for evidence of genetic bottlenecking. Any success in detecting and characterizing viral elements in fossil material will be groundbreaking, leading to the possibility of being able to empirically track evolutionary change in viruses at the gene level over periods of tends of thousands of years. Further, if the expected correlations between taxa, pathogens, and extinction times can be shown to be meaningful, this will have substantial impact on evolutionary biology, conservation biology, and virology. Dissemination of results through publications, symposia, and Web products is planned doc13810 none Uddin Description: This project is to support a cooperative research project by Dr. Ashraf Uddin, Department of Geology, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama and Dr. M. Mustafa Alam, Department of Geology, University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh. These scientists plan to conduct field research and to collect representative sediment samples in order to investigate Eocene through Quaternary sequences of the Bengal basin for mineralogical and geochronological evidence for basin-wide correlation and of the tectonic history of the adjacent mountain belts. They will identify techniques with the best potential for constraining basin-wide correlation. The techniques will include fission-track analysis of materials, magentostratigraphic study on several sections, and heavy-mineral studies. The resulting stratigraphic framework will be used to evaluate the Bengal basin history, with implications for both petroleum potential and a valuable record of the ongoing continental collision. Scope: Dr. Ashraf Uddin is a recent Ph.D. graduate who has made significant research on the sedimentology of the Himalayan-Bengal basin evolutionary history. In this project he will be collaborating with several senior scholars with extensive experience in some of the techniques to be used. One is Neil Opdyke, who will be working on the magnetostratigraphy, and who has also used this worked on the western Himalayas study. Another is John Garver, who will supervise the fission-track analysis, has extensive, recent experience in the rather complicated area of fission-track analysis that relates detrital grain ages to source terranes. One US graduate student from the University of Alabama and at least one from the University of Dhaka will also participate in this research and will gain experience in international scientific collaboration. The Department of Geology at the U. of Dhaka will provide facilities and support for the project. The project will benefit from the complementary expertise and facilities available to the two sides. This project meets INT criteria for supporting meritorious collaborative research of mutual benefit to the US and the foreign country. This project is funded by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Earth Sciences doc13748 none Studies of Earth s history show that climate is capable of changing rapidly (within a few years or decades) and dramatically (from glacial to interglacial conditions). The response of the Earth s ecosystems to such global-scale changes can be spatially complex. Paleoclimatic fluctuations are evident during the last glacial cycle (~12,000 and 110,000 years ago) when temperatures were generally cooler than present and were interrupted by 24 warm events during which temperature ranged from 15-20 degrees C. Understanding the mechanisms and timing of such environmental change is particularly important for the Arctic, a region particularly sensitive to climate variability. Historically, data from the Greenland ice sheet has been the foundation for paleoclimatic reconstruction for the region. Still lacking, however, is an understanding of how northern ecosystems have responded to changes in climate. This research will address this knowledge gap by providing the first continuous, high-resolution, multi-proxy record of paleovegetational and paleoclimatic change from the Arctic for the period ~22,000 to 50,000 years ago. A sediment core from Elikchan Lake in northeast Siberia will be recovered and analyzed for pollen and diatom remains as well as sediment geochemistry with sufficient temporal control to be compared to climate trends found in ice cores. These new data will be used to define the number, magnitude, and timing of climatic fluctuations to assess the similarities and differences in the climate histories between the eastern (North Atlantic) and western (northeast Siberia) Arctic. Specifically, the research will: 1) evaluate computer simulations of past temperature in northern Asia as related to climatic and oceanic changes in the North Atlantic region; 2) explore the role of Siberia in transmitting climatic fluctuations originating in the North Atlantic to the North Pacific; and 3) examine the range of ecosystem responses to various climatic conditions and the potential importance of biofeedback to the climate system (e.g., whether changes in the distribution of boreal forests, a major methane source, can affect levels of methane in the atmosphere doc13812 none D Asaro UW This is a project intended to analyze data from two deployments of Lagrangian floats in the surface mixed layer. One deployment consisted of three floats and the other, two. It is anticipated that additional data will come from an ONR-funded experiment in . The intention is to look at the relation between turbulent kinetic energy in the mixed layer, the structure of mixed layer turbulence, wind stress, and surface wave activity. The dependence of entrainment rate on wind and surface waves will also be studied. The approach used involves examining spectra of w, du dz, and density perturbations at different levels in the mixed layer (near the surface, in the interior, and near the base of the mixed layer) where different dynamics are expected to prevail (surface waves, homogeneous turbulence, internal waves). The project also includes an attempt to examine vertical heat and salt budgets. As part of this project, numerical simulations of the mixed layer, Large-Eddy Simulations will be made. These simulations will be compared to data derived from the floats with the aim of testing new parameterizations of the effects of surface waves and of the influence of stratification on mixed-layer turbulence doc13734 none This research will examine a suite of cores from Lake Bosumtwi, Ghana, for evidence of a high-resolution (i.e., interannual to millennial-scale) record of West African Monsoon dynamics over the last 20,000 years. Lake Bosumtwi is the remnant of a basin formed by a meteor impact approximately 1.1 million years ago. As such, the lake is a well-defined catchment basin that is sensitive to small changes in precipitation-evaporation balance, a fundamental aspect of climate. The research strategy is to use a multi-proxy approach to analyze cores recovered from the lake under previous NSF funding. Specifically, the researchers will develop annual resolution records of West African climate through the last 1,000 years, examine the record of West African monsoon variability through the last 20,000 years when climatic forcing functions were different than today, and establish detailed chronologies for sediments from the lake to examine abrupt climate change events in the region doc13814 none This dissertation examines how a nation s defense posture influences its efforts and successes at achieving social policy objects. The maintenance of large standing armed forces amounts to a significant state intervention in labor market outcomes, influences the need for and commitments to public social programs, and confers the politically-salient status of citizen on large segments of the population. Despite such connections between military personnel policies and public policy, however, the military component of the welfare state has received little scholarly attention. The project addresses this gap by examining how the size of the military and the level of defense spending affect public spending for social security and family benefits. The data come from two sources: published figures from19 advanced industrial nations over the period of - , and from national and state-level data for the United States over the period of - doc13815 none A researcher from Cornell University plans to measure the hafnium (Hf) isotopic composition (176Hf 177Hf) and eHf values (isotopic composition of Hf normalized to CHUR, a chondrite with a 176Hf 177Hf ratio of 0. ) of seawater samples recovered from both the Atlantic (North Atlantic Deep Water, Arctic Intermediate Water, Mediterranean Outflow Water and modified Antarctic Intermediate and Deep Water) and Pacific Ocean (Equatorial Water, Arctic Intermediate Water, North Central Pacific Water and Ocean Common Water). In addition, the PI will analyze hydrothermal fluids from 9 N on the East Pacific Rise and metalliferous sediments collected from the Nazca Plate. The goal of these measurements is to provide new insights into the geochemistry of this element and ascertain that ferromanganese crusts indeed record the composition of Hf in seawater. If ferromanganese crust record seawater Hf concentrations, then the PI contends that the isotopic composition of Hf can be used as a paleo indicator of weathering intensity doc13816 none This research will establish the long-term trends, variations, and extremes of regional climate by examining variations in annual growth rings of old-aged trees in Mongolia and China dating back to 800 A.D. Mongolia and the surrounding region are the center of the Asian High, the most extreme atmospheric pressure center of the Northern Hemisphere and a strong influence on winter atmospheric circulation. The goal of the research is to understand climate trends that impact global weather patterns. The effects of changing climate may be severe on Mongolia and changes in the Asian High can have effects far beyond the immediate region. The tree-ring samples, obtained nondestructively, will be used to develop calendar-dated, annual to millennial-length records of climate variations. Long records are essential because recorded information (approximately 50 years) does not reveal the full range of variability and trends in climate. Sampling sites are high in mountains or at the edge of dry grasslands where the trees are stressed by climate. Such tree-rings record the effects of warm and cold years in the mountains and wet and dry years near the grasslands. The resulting records will yield valuable information about temperature trends, severe winters, droughts, floods, and other climatic variations. The project is conducted in cooperation with Mongolian Universities, institutions, and government agencies. A Tree-Ring Laboratory has been organized at the National University and seminars and workshops are planned to teach and train students and scientists for cooperative and independent research doc13817 none Over the last few decades, the temporary help service industry (THSI) in the United States has grown significantly. Prevailing explanations for this growth focus on increases in demand for flexible labor to reduce costs to companies using temporary workers and changes in labor supply owing to workers increasing preferences for flexible work schedules. Because forms of work other than temporary agencies can also fulfill these supply and demand requirements, however, neither explanation is sufficient to explain why the THSI has emerged. This doctoral dissertation research project hypothesizes that the growth of the THSI is in part a result of the increasing decentralization of companies to suburban areas. This relocation provides relatively little social access to low-wage workers, who continue to face few opportunities to move to suburban areas. The project explores whether firms use the labor services provided by the THSI to access and mobilize labor under conditions they would not otherwise be able to achieve. Empirical work conducted as part of this study is a multi-faceted exploration of low-wage clerical and light industrial temporary work in Worcester, Massachusetts. Data will be collected through in-depth interviews with 30 temporary agencies and 60 firms who use THSI services. In-depth interviews will allow a more complex explanation of the specific reasons that firms use temporary workers and will shed light on the process of matching and mobilizing labor that temporary agencies perform. The firms and agencies to be interviewed are chosen randomly from a geographically stratified sample that will allow an assessment of the relationship between a company s ease of access to low-wage labor and the firm s use of THSI workers. A mailed survey to companies will test the results of the trends observed in the interview phase. Analysis of the data collected from both the interviews and mail survey will focus on why and how firms use temporary agencies to substitute for their own recruiting efforts. This research will provide data on the likelihood, intensity, and variety of temporary worker use by firms with greater or lesser access to their desired labor pools. Analyses also will be made of the location, recruiting strategies, and labor services provided by temporary agencies. This project will provide new insights into the processes that have resulted in the rapid growth of THSI, and it will shed light on the potential for continued growth of the industry. The project s results also will enhance understandings of the conditions that underlie growth in the THSI, and it will provide practical information regarding access to employment information, which can improve the job opportunities of low-income workers. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc13818 none In a suite of seismic experiments conducted in and microseismicity, regional and teleseismic earthquake events were recorded on an array of twenty seafloor instruments and 23 PASSCAL stations deployed on islands around the Western Woodlark Basin. Preliminary data analysis was completed in the original grant period, and this project will continue that effort. More data were collected than anticipated, and in particular, the preliminary receiver function data have proven a fertile source of information on regional crustal structure doc13819 none Forest edges are areas of vulnerability and diversity that are distinct from interior forest in structure and function. The unique characteristics of forest-edge vegetation arise due to edge effects such as additional light, greater dryness, and increased risk of wind and fire damage. At broader scales, edge effects vary across ecosystems and are frequently associated with forest fragmentation, losses in biodiversity, and reduced spatial distribution of forest species. Edge effects in forest ecosystems have been studied primarily in tropical wet and temperate forests, but differential distances of edge effects are expected to exist for different forest types. This doctoral dissertation research project will develop empirical evidence to test the hypothesis that edge effects in tropical dry forest are different from edge effects documented in tropical wet forest. Edge effects in tropical dry forest are examined by synthesizing field, remote sensing, and geographic information system-based methods to determine the distance of edge influence for vegetation surrounding timber harvest clearings, develop methods to identify low-contrast edges associated with adjacent forest-management zones with different cutting schedules, and link vegetative edge response to bird distributions in a habitat model. The study area is in Oaxaca, Mexico. The Mexican tropical dry forest has a very high level of biodiversity and endemism, but little is known about edge influence on the system or the extent of edge influence. The Mexican tropical dry forest is important economically for timber production and other natural resources extraction, impacts that are also important from a forest management perspective. The study combines the remote sensing technique of spectral mixture analysis with geostatistics to identify and determine the distance of edge influence from a clearing to surrounding interior forest and to locate low-contrast edges. Multivariable statistics are used to determine relationships between vegetation structure and bird community composition in a spatial context. It is expected that edge effects in a tropical dry forest will be more subtle than in other forest types, particularly in the distance of edge influence and the actual responses to edge in vegetation and bird species. The results of this project should improve bird habitat inventories based on remote sensing, extend current applications of the remote sensing technique of spectral mixture analysis, improve understanding of tropical dry forest response to disturbance, and contribute to conservation and management of tropical dry forest ecosystems. Overall the project will improve methods that quantify land-use change effects on biodiversity by converting maps of forest cover to assessments of habitat. This research will contribute to scientific knowledge and reflect societal concerns by increasing the sparse understanding of how edges change tropical dry forests, addressing issues of forest and habitat loss, and improving the methods used to study forests. The results will be applicable to local management activities because they will describe the response of local forest bird populations to edge-affected habitat and provide information that is relevant to sustainable forest use and management in the study area. The methods developed for this project to determine the extent of edge effects are also expected to be useful to land managers in other parts of the world, where inexpensive forest and habitat assessments are needed. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc13820 none Rural producers of primary commodities face increasingly unfavorable and volatile terms of world trade, and the resulting poverty causes both social and ecological deterioration. A growing fair trade movement offers a model of more sustainable rural development by building alternative trade relations between Southern producers and Northern consumers. The trade bypasses traditional intermediaries, thus returning a larger proportion of the purchase price to small farmers, directing capital to local development, and protecting the environment with sustainable practices. However, the consequences of these fair trade practices have not been studied. This project assesses the social and environmental benefits of fair trade markets by comparing conventional and alternative production of coffee and cocoa by peasant farmer cooperatives in Chiapas, Mexico, and Beni, Bolivia. In making the assessment, the analysis combines qualitative and quantitative field research at eight producer cooperatives in these locations. The results provide information on the consequences of economic globalization for small agricultural producers. They also suggest how alternative trade arrangements can deal with those consequences doc13821 none Science : This proposal requests support for a multiproxy study to test the theory that atmospheric cooling beginning about years ago lead to increased production of North Atlantic Deep Water in the western North Atlantic primarily through an increase in Denmark Strait Overflow water. The sequence of events in the last years is very similar to events observed at the end of the last interglacial (MIS 5e) and suggests that the increase of deep water production in the western North Atlantic marks the beginning of the end of the current interglacial. This study will include detailed analysis of samples from cores in separate transects to determine sea surface temperature and rates of Holocene and MIS 5e deep water production across the North Atlantic. Proxies to be studied include faunal counts, stable isotope measurements of N. pachyderma (left and right coiling), IRD and IRD petrology. In addition trace element analyses (Cd Ca, Zn Ca, and Mg Ca) will assist and check interpretations based on faunal and stable isotope data doc13822 none Especially at this time of rapidly changing institutions, the normative claims of professions raise interesting and important questions to explore. In , the world s two largest associations of those who design, develop, test, and maintain software (the IEEE Computer Society and the Association of Computing Machinery) formed a joint committee to organize software engineering as a profession. A product of that effort is a Code of Ethics and Professional Practice adopted by both IEEE-CS and ACM late in . The writing of the code, carried out in substantial part by e-mail, has produced a record of the writing of a professional code that is far fuller than that of any other, though much of that record is now in danger of being lost. Using interviews as well as retrieving electronic information, the project will create a publicly acccessible electronic archive of all e-mail, memos, and interviews it can obtain relating to the writing of the code. That record, together with additional materials, including the interviews with participants, will form the basis for a a book length study of the drafting, debate, and ultimate adoption of the code. This research can help to engender a more sophisticated conception of profession with respect to normative and ethical issues. The project involves a team of researchers including several graduate students at two institutions, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions (CSEP), of Illinois Institute of Technology, with the Software Engineering Ethics Research Institute (SEERI), of East Tennessee State University. An advisory board provides additional expertise to the project doc13823 none This research will explore spatial cognition and spatial language in children and adults, using evidence from a rare genetic deficit, Williams syndrome, to shed light on the nature of normal spatial cognition. Individuals with Williams syndrome typically have a cognitive profile of profoundly impaired spatial cognition together with relatively spared language. This syndrome therefore provides a unique opportunity to understand the nature of spatial cognition and spatial language, their development, and their interaction. The goal of this research is to determine (a) whether spatial breakdown is selective, occurring for only certain spatial capacities but not others, and (b) whether spatial language can be acquired and used normally in the absence of interaction with normal spatial cognition. The question of selectivity will be addressed by experiments in four spatial domains, object representation, perception of space vs. visual-manual action in space, navigation, and spatial language. If some aspects of spatial cognition are spared, but others are not, this would be consistent with the idea that spatial cognition is specialized, and that different kinds of spatial capacities develop from different origins. In contrast, if all aspects of spatial cognition are impaired, this would be consistent with the idea that there are general principles of development that affect all kinds of spatial cognition equally. The question of interaction between spatial language and non-linguistic spatial cognition will be addressed by experiments on the relationship between the two kinds of spatial knowledge. If both are equally impaired, this would suggest a highly interactive organization of the brain in which spatial cognition and spatial language are tightly coupled. In contrast, if spatial language is selectively spared, this would be consistent with a high degree of selectivity, and would mean that language development need not be affected by certain kinds of cognitive impairment. As a whole, these studies should elucidate the nature of normal spatial cognition by determining whether development and its breakdown occur along the lines of normal cognitive architecture, which would suggest cognitive specialization. They should elucidate the nature of spatial language by determining whether it can develop normally in the absence of normal non-linguistic spatial cognition, which would suggest a high degree of independence between the two systems. And they should shed light on developmental processes, by determining whether breakdown in one system inevitably forces changes in other systems, or whether developmental breakdown can apply selectively across sub-systems of cognition doc13736 none The most important subsurface Arctic Ocean transport system, a cyclonic (here anticlockwise) boundary current, organized along the continental slopes and major trans-Arctic ridges, distributes waters, tracers and contaminants from the Atlantic (via Fram Strait and the Barents Sea) and the Pacific (via Bering Strait) around and into the deep Arctic basins. On its circum-Arctic pathway, parts of the topographically steered current are diverted away from the continental margin, generally along topographic ridges. The most complex obstacle the boundary current encounters is the Mendeleev Ridge Chukchi Borderland complex, north of the Pacific entrance to the Arctic. This region is the cross- roads for Pacific-origin waters from the south and Atlantic waters carried from the west with the boundary current. The tortuous bathymetry offers many routes for a topographically steered current, and the spatial variability of the sparse data that exist clearly indicates the complexity of the region. These data also show significant interannual variability, in line with the major changes seen in the last decade throughout the Arctic, and they further suggest that the region diverts significant amounts of water into the deep basins, indicating this region s importance to shelf-basin exchange, deep basin ventilation, and circum- and trans-Arctic circulation (with feedback implications to the World Ocean circulation). Yet, the pathways and exchanges in this area are still unclear, both qualitatively and quantitatively, due to the lack of sufficiently concentrated observations. This research will conduct a high spatial resolution hydrographic and tracer survey, supported by short-term moored current and CTD measurements, in the region of the Chukchi Borderland and the southern end of the Mendeleev Ridge during August September . The objectives are to: - delineate the pathways of the boundary current carrying the Atlantic water past the Mendeleev Ridge and through the Chukchi Borderland; - ascertain the input from the boundary current and the shelves to the deep Arctic Ocean in the vicinity of the Mendeleev Ridge and the Chukchi Borderland; - understand and quantify the pathways and transformations of the Pacific waters through this region; - describe the horizontal and vertical structure of the boundary current, and estimate its transport; and - quantify recent temporal changes in this region by combining the spatially sparse data extending through most of the past decade with new detailed synoptic measurements. On a 35-day expedition on an ice-breaking research vessel, measurements will be made of temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, nutrients, CFCs, Ba, and 18-O on 12 sections that cross both the boundary flow and the Pacific inputs to the region before and after topographic junctions and hypothesized regions of flow diversion. This tracer suite will enable identification of the pathways of the boundary current and the Pacific-origin waters, and quantification of the different Atlantic and Pacific influences, as well as freshwater input from ice melt and different rivers. In addition, three moorings will be deployed, spanning the boundary current for the duration of the cruise. Current meters and moored conductivity and temperature sensors will quantify the vertical and horizontal extent of the boundary current, its structure and variability, and will yield an estimate of the transport and a description of eddies carried with or across the boundary current. To give a comprehensive picture of the system, the entire data set will be analyzed collectively and in tandem with hydrographic, tracer, and moored time series data from the last decade. Since the transit time of signals through this region is 2-4 years, the older data provide a temporal background for the new high spatial resolution data, whilst the newer data will supply an essential spatial framework for understanding the variability of the older surveys. The work will yield a substantially increased understanding of the role of this region in the Arctic circulation, including a determination of pathways, a quantification of exchanges, and an assessment of temporal change. Its timing in will fill a pending hiatus in hydrographic surveys in the Canadian Basin at a time when the most dramatic changes ever observed in the Arctic are propagating through this region. The project will provide necessary background and mechanistic information to the potential SEARCH and Arctic-Subarctic Ocean Flux programs, and essential far-field information to the SBI Phase II field program in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. In addition, the results will be pivotal to validating and improving high resolution computer and conceptual models of the Arctic, and will offer insights to physical mechanistic problems, such as the driving mechanism of the boundary current and the interaction of an equivalent barotropic current with steep and sharp topography doc13825 none The long-term objective of this project is to establish effective techniques for fingertip haptics - the direct fingertip exploration of virtual surfaces. This includes direct touch of objects as well as distal attribution (touching using an intermediate object such as a pencil or knife). In the course of the work, two novel devices will be built and studied, a tactile-haptic device with contrary motion , and a novel tangent plane device, to help achieve the tangent position of the operator s finger relative the virtual surface doc13826 none Carl H. Smith, University of Maryland $8,500 - 12 mos (joint funding with IDM program, total awad $17,000) Discovery Science This is a standard award to provide funding for 2 plenary speakers and up to 10 graduate students attending the fourth conference on Discovery Science to be held in Washington DC in November . The goal of the new field of Discovery Science is to automate (as much as possible) the process by which scientific insights are distilled from large data sets. The intellectual scope of the field is very broad, covering topics from philosophy, logic, automated reasoning and computational learning theory, as well as empirical investigations of various implemented discovery algorithms. An important contribution of the conferences is that they assemble a wide range of perspectives on the process of discovery in the hopes of generating synergy. This year s conference will be the first to be held in this country, and the PI is the local organizer of the meeting. Student participants will be selected by the Steering Committee from among the student authors, based primarily on the rankings of the papers by the Program Committee but moderated slightly by a desire to achieve diversity. The two invited speakers will be senior researchers from related fields, chosen by the Steering Committee with a view to building bridges to related research communities doc13827 none This research focuses on the use of sonification to increase trust between humans and automated systems. Sonification is analogous to visualization and surpasses traditional auditory warnings by conveying a rich array of continuous dynamic information. The concept of trust provides a theoretical basis for using sonification to reveal the capabilities of automated systems and promote appropriate reliance. There are four objectives, 1) identify how sonification can calibrate trust, 2) expand the understanding of trust and its role in human-automation partnerships, 3) apply dynamical systems theory to describe human-automation coordination, and 4) evaluate the generality of sonfication for settings in which multiple people share control of automated systems. The proposed work contributes to the scientific basis of sonification and its relation to group dynamics and should benefit society by increasing human safety in automated environments doc13828 none Because state governments can play an important role in national development, and most Third World states were created during colonialism, colonial state legacies likely shape post-colonial development in the modern Third World. Moreover, because colonial rule occurred in diverse forms throughout the world, its effects on post-colonial development likely vary from case to case. For example, among the British colonies, some were allowed direct rule and some only indirect rule. This project examines the effects in British colonies of the form of legal domination on later development of the economy, social welfare state, and democratic polity. The investigator collects and analyzes quantitative data on these relationships for all former British colonies still under British domination in . The investigator also collects and analyzes colonial documents in Kenya, Sierra Leone, Mauritius, and Botswana to further explore the relationships with qualitative data doc13829 none The objectives of this multi-campus research Center are 1) to explore, conduct research and to bring about innovation and practical solutions by focusing on the industrially relevant research needs; 2) to foster collaborative research projects between industrial and academic engineers and scientists; and 3) to promote interdisciplinary and intra-university research activities and to nurture students through testbed and collaborative projects. The Center proposed four key program areas, namely 1) production equipment e-monitoring and e-maintenance systems; 2) web-enabled industrial systems management and optimization program; 3) smart business to devices technologies program; and 4) web-enabled development tools for e-maintenance application systems doc13830 none The 12th International Conference on Arabidopsis Research will be held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison WI, June 23 - 27, . The aim of this conference is to provide an opportunity for the exchange of ideas among researchers of the international Arabidopsis research community. The conference will include sessions on genomics, metabolism and metabolic regulation, cell biology, inductive processes, genetic mechanisms, evolution, responses to the biotic environment, responses to the abiotic environment, pattern formation and cell fate, and sex and reproductive development. An important component of the conference is that approximately 40 speakers will be chosen by the session chairs from submitted abstracts for short talks. The majority of these talks will be given by graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, or PIs at early stages of their careers. This will ensure presentation of the latest results and provide important career development for the selected speakers. The conference will also include workshops on topics put forward by the Arabidopsis community. A workshop to foster international collaboration on Arabidopsis functional genomics and the NSF-supported Arabidopsis initiative is already planned. Last year s Arabidopsis Conference at this same site attracted approximately 900 participants. At least this many participants are expected this year due to the accelerated pace of Arabidopsis research resulting in part from the completion of the genome sequence for this organism, and due to the small number of plant-related conferences scheduled for summer . Facilities are available to accommodate up to participants doc13831 none Growing interest in understanding the processes of environmental change have highlighted the need for deeper understanding of complex interactions among different natural and human systems in critical regions and localities. This doctoral dissertation research project aims to produce a history of environmental change in the San Francisco Bay Estuary using stable carbon isotopes, fossil pollen, sediment analysis and carbon-14 dating spanning the last 2,000 to 3,000 years. This research has two distinct but interrelated primary objectives: (1) to elucidate the history of environmental change in the Bay Estuary; and (2) to test and elaborate models of vegetation responses to environmental change which are based on modern distributions. The spatial distribution of marsh plant species in the San Francisco Estuary is primarily determined by salinity, with other physical and biological factors of lesser importance. A series of sediment cores have been recovered from four marsh sites selected along a salinity gradient extending from the western edge of San Pablo Bay (highest salinity) to the eastern edge of Suisun Bay (near fresh water conditions). The carbon isotopic composition (13C 12C) of organic carbon in marsh sediments is a direct reflection of the source plants, with only slight changes over time due to decomposition. The two salt marsh grasses, Distichlis spicata and Spartina foliosa, operate with the C4-type photosynthetic pathway, with distinct carbon isotope signatures. The ability to distinguish these C4 grass species in the sediment record is an important complement to pollen analysis, as grass pollen is indistinguishable below the family level. Records produced in this research will be compared with other published records of paleosalinity in the estuary, which have revealed alternating periods of increased and decreased water salinity (relative to the present) during the late Holocene. This comparison will ascertain the degree to which temporal distributions of plant species at specific sites are analogous to modern spatial distributions. The record of vegetation change from marshes can then be used to expand the record of environmental change. Preliminary results from two marsh sites in this research indicate that the plant assemblages have responded consistently to past changes in estuarine salinity. An important part of this research will be to determine what natural process (including tectonic activity, sea level rise or climate variation) was dominant in causing changes detected in the sediment records. A strategy that establishes high-resolution chronologies from several sites will be used. The sites must be carefully selected relative to tectonic faults and compared not only for timing of vegetation changes, but also for sedimentation rates. Integral to this approach will be comprehensive dating of the sediment cores, employing both radiocarbon dating and lead-210 dating. This project will result in records that are important and relevant because present knowledge about rates of long-term fresh water inflow, salinity variability, and vegetation responses in the San Francisco Bay Estuary is limited. Earlier published studies of Estuarine paleosalinity are chronologically incomplete and do not include vegetation responses. Successful application of combining these methods in the San Francisco Estuary can be transferred to other estuarine settings. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc13832 none Original Message----- From: Poore, Richard Z Sent: Thursday, July 12, 8:56 AM To: Weller, Margaret Subject: summary for Zachosl award Science : This proposal requests support for a study to test a new hypothesis on the origin of intermittent transient glaciations of the early and middle Miocene (the Mi-events) and possibly the late Oligocene. New findings suggest that the largest of the glaciations (Mi-1) at the Oligocene Miocene boundary coincided with a rare congruence of an extended low-amplitude orbital obliquity node with a period of low orbital eccentricity. The study focus on developing isotope records that will test the prediction that similar climate anomalies occur at 18.2 and 27 Ma when orbital calculations indicate extended low-amplitude obliquity nodes also correspond with intervals of low eccentricity doc13833 none The proposed research will examine how patterns of muscle growth and development translate into growth and swimming ability in tadpoles of three toad species. Although much is known about the cellular mechanisms of muscle development, remarkably little is known about how this translates into performance of the individual in the real world. Recent work in fish and pilot work for this proposal already suggest one obvious consequence, namely that fast growing individuals are slower swimmers than their slow growing counterparts. This research examines the consequences of a trade-off between growth rate and swimming speed at several levels including: a mechanistic level (how recruitment and growth of muscle cells influences growth and swimming ability), a genetic level (comparing across species), an environmental level (by manipulating temperature and food levels), and an ecological level (in terms of predator avoidance and escaping pond drying). One species being studied breeds in rain pools which dry within weeks. Rapid muscle development in this situation accelerates metamorphosis allowing toadlets to escape the pond before it dries. Another species breeds in permanent ponds where predators are abundant. Rapid growth allows these tadpoles to outgrow potential predators. The third species breeds in ponds of intermediate duration with intermediate predator levels, and is expected to fall mid-way between the other two in terms of both growth rate and swimming speed. Tadpoles are being used because muscle structure is relatively simple and because skeletal development does not interfere with muscle development (unlike other vertebrates, including people, frogs and toads do not begin to form mineralized bones until metamorphosis). This research will forge bridges among developmental biology, physiology, and ecology and has potential applications in agriculture where selection for rapid growth is common, often without considering potential costs of rapid growth. This relates most directly to the proposed research where meat quality (muscle composition) may be compromised to by selection for rapid growth doc13834 none This project examines how social identities and network ties in Ghana affect the success of small-scale entrepreneurs. Ghana has an uncertain economy where warranties on manufactured products are not common. In order to sell products, manufacturers must earn trust from customers and convince them that their products are good quality and that they will take good care of them when the products have problems. Like other African countries, however, Ghana is an ethnically divided society, and it is often difficult to develop trust relationships across ethnic groups. If such relationships were confined within one s own ethnic group, the market would be severely limited. However, pilot study results conducted by the investigator in Ghana indicate that some manufacturers have more customers from varied ethnic groups and more total sales than others. One possible explanation is that successful ones rely on broad identities based on religion rather that on narrower identities based on ethnicity. Building on data and analyses of the pilot study, the project collects and analyzes additional data on ethnic and religious identities in Ghana, and their influence on entrepreneurial success doc13835 none Cole This Americas Program award will support the participation of U.S. and Latin American students in the Fourth Latin American Symposium on Nuclear Physics (IV LASNP) that will take place in Mexico City, Mexico, September 24-28, . The award will support a workshop organized by Dr. Phillip Cole of the University of Texas at El Paso, Dr. David Ernst of Vanderbilt University, and Dr. Efrain Chavez of the Instituto de Fisica at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. This award is partially supported by the Physics Division of NSF. The workshop will cover a wide range of timely and important issues in nuclear physics such as heavy ion reactions in the low to medium-energy range, exotic nuclei, as well as photo- and electron-nuclear physics. The meeting seeks to promote dialog between faculty members of North American and Latin-American institutions by finding common interests in research and through this effort strengthen existing links and forge new ones within the broad scope of the international nuclear physics community. Strengthening this link between the United States and Latin America will foster the recruitment of high-caliber graduate-level students to pursue research at U.S. institutions and laboratories doc13836 none The investigators will organize a workshop to review the current state of theoretical and numerical modeling and high resolution observations of several important processes in the solar atmosphere, and to develop recommendations for future observations. The workshop will focus on physics of small-scale processes including those that take place before and during initiation of the coronal mass ejections, which are crucial for understanding CME phenomena and space weather. The last few years have seen exciting development of numerical simulations and theory of small-scale solar processes. However, these numerical simulations and theory alone cannot solve the puzzling aspects of many solar phenomena - high-resolution observations are crucial. On the other hand, observers need clues from theorists and modelers on what they shall try to observe. This workshop will foster a discussion between theorists and modelers on one side and observers on the other and will help to refine the requirements for the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST). Sacramento Peak Summer Workshops are topical meetings sponsored by the National Solar Observatory and have a tradition of bringing together an international group of observers and theoreticians for productive interactions that are not normally available through the format of larger meetings. The intimate setting of the observatory in the Lincoln National Forest, combined with the proximity to telescopes and observing hardware provides a unique environment for these events. Travel grants will be made on a competitive and need basis doc13837 none This project builds on previous studies and extend them to the more relevant time scales for climate studies, i.e. the interannual to decadal variability of tropical subtropical interaction in the Atlantic ocean. New research avenues will be pursued: the degree to which decadal-scale changes in the circulation may result from the role of nonlinearities and eddies in determining multiple equilibria states versus more slowly evolving surface forced decadal oscillations. Two hypotheses will be tested. The first one is that The oceanic component of the tropical subtropical connections in the Atlantic ocean as represented by the STCs significantly affects the interannual to decadal low-latitude SST variability and hence plays a significant role in climate variability. The second one poses that Low-frequency variability in the multi-annual and decadal time scales exist in the tropical.subtropical wind-driven circulation that are associated with nonlinear eddy processes and lead to multiple states characterized by different energetics which produce lo-frequency variability in the meridional heat transport. Most studies of the variability of tropical subtropical interactions have focused on the deterministic response to surface forcings in the same spectral range. The PI s will explore a venue of low-frequency variability to our knowledge never investigated before in the tropical ocean, i.e. to assess the possible role of internal modes of variability linked to multiple states of the wind-driven circulation produced by eddy-mean flow interactions, modes possibly connected to the analogous modes of decadal variability already found for the subtropical circulation. The approach will use models data comparisons, model model comparisons, model data synthesis through data assimilation, coarse resolution experiments aimed to address hypothesis I and eddy-resolving experiments aimed to address both hypothesis I and II doc13838 none This SGER is an outgrowth of a proposal that was reviewed by the MG&G program last year. Reviews of the initial proposal were mixed and the proposal was declined because of the mixed reviews. It is clear that the use of Mg Ca and Sr Ca ratios in marine carbonate microfossils are emerging techniques that are being used more and more in paleoceanography studies. It is also clear that there can be major diferences in results on the same or similar materials between laboratories or in some cases seven within laboratories that complicate the interpretation of the measurements. Based on the mixed mail reviews and limited panel comments, Program concluded that work was need to determine if differences in laboratory procedures and methods were causing the discrepancies. This issue needs to be resolved soon because a number of investigators are starting to use this new proxy and data from the new laboratories are bein generated at a rapid pace. Thus Program invited the PI to develop a modest SGER proposal to run an inter-laboratory comparison that involved a number of workers that existing labs are setting up labs or are setting up labw to do Mg Ca and Sr Ca measurements for paleoceanography. The current SGER responds to the Program request. The PI has included a wide range of laboratories in the text and has arranged for a neutral investigator to evaluate the results of the text doc13790 none Seagrasses are susceptible to attack by net-forming protists within the genus Labyrinthula (Phylum Labyrinthulomycota). These ubiquitous, largely saprophytic or weakly parasitic organisms can periodically become virulent pathogens, causing the seagrass wasting disease and contributing to sudden population declines. These scientists suggest that differences in susceptibility of seagrass populations to Labyrinthula attack arise as changing environmental conditions alter the ability of seagrasses to maintain or develop disease resistance by the production of phenolic compounds via the shikimic acid phenylpropenoid (SA PP) pathway. The concentrations of phenolic compounds in seagrass leaves and shoots are the only characteristics that have been linked with resistance to the wasting disease. Previous studies indicate that, for certain species, disease resistance is correlated with the content of phenolic acids and other polymeric phenolics, that phenolic production can be induced by Labyrinthula attack and or wounding, and that seagrass phenolics inhibit the growth of this pathogen in culture. While the evidence for a link between seagrass phenolics and disease resistance is correlative and comes from relatively few studies on a limited number of species, it indicates that seagrasses, like all terrestrial plants examined to date, exhibit induced defenses against pathogen attack. The evidence also suggests that seagrass responses involve activation of the SA PP pathway leading to the production of plant phenolics. However, the regulation of the SA PP pathway has not yet been examined in seagrasses, and we do not fully understand how environmental factors may affect disease resistance in seagrasses. Drs. Arnold, Boettcher and Tanner will investigate the regulation of the SA PP pathway and the resistance of seagrasses to infection by Labyrinthula. Specifically, the goals of the research are: (1) to test the hypothesis that key SA PP pathway enzymes are induced by Labyrinthula attack, (2) to determine which phenolics accumulate in response to SA PP pathway induction, (3) to test, in vivo, the link between phenolic acid condensed tannin levels and seagrass resistance, (4) to determine whether SA PP pathway induction and the accumulation of phenolic compounds are affected by specific environmental conditions, and (5) to test the proposed link between these conditions, altered SA PP metabolism and changes in seagrass resistance to Labyrinthula attack. These questions will be addressed in mesocosm populations of two species, the tropical subtropical seagrass Thalassia testudinum and the temperate seagrass Zostera marina, both of which are subject to periodic wasting disease outbreaks and exhibit induced production of phenolic compounds in response to pathogen attack and or wounding. Activities of SA PP pathway enzymes, concentrations of phenolic acids and polymeric phenols, and indicators of physiological health (growth, photosynthesis, concentrations of carbohydrates and proteins) will be examined in infected and pathogen-free plants. They will also compare the responses of these seagrasses to infection under different environmental conditions. Finally, artificial inhibitors of specific SA PP pathway enzymes will be used to determine the ability of plants to resist Labyrinthula attack when they are unable to produce SA PP phenolics doc13840 none The Summer School for Chemical Engineering faculty is organized by the Chemical Engineering Division of the American Society for Engineering Education and is currently held every five years. The Summer School will be the thirteenth in the series begun in and will be held on the campus of the University of Colorado in Boulder from July 27 through August 2. This Summer School is unique amongst the various engineering disciplines as it strives to promote development of primarily new faculty with the assistance of established faculty, representatives from governmental agencies such as NSF and EPA, and industrial participants. The main purpose of the Summer School for Chemical Engineering Faculty is to disseminate innovative and effective teaching methods to a wide spectrum of primarily new chemical engineering faculty who will be teaching courses and laboratories in undergraduate programs. Additionally, the Summer School will introduce new faculty to a number of promising research areas from which concepts, principles, problems, and laboratory experiments can be incorporated into undergraduate course work. The Summer School also brings new faculty together with mid- career and senior faculty to discuss educational methods and educational delivery and to provide tested educational materials directly to new faculty for use in a variety of courses. Workshops are planned in many areas that receive NSF and EPA research support, including molecular modeling, nanoparticle technology, bioengineering, green chemical engineering, and effective use of computers and educational technology. The educational techniques and extensive course and laboratory materials produced will be distributed widely via CD-ROMs and the Internet to the entire chemical engineering educational community. It is the objective of the upcoming Summer School to have an impact on every single B.S. graduate in chemical engineering as early as the spring of , as well as all those graduates who will follow doc13841 none McCartney WHOI a study of the pathways of exchange of deep water across the ACC; the transformation, by ventilation and mixing, of warm water along the ACC; exchange between the ACC and subtropical gyres; secular changes in the structure of the Southern Ocean. This work will help determine the role played by the Southern Ocean in establishing the density structure of the world s ocean. It will also provide a baseline for later evaluations of long-term change in the structure of the Southern Ocean doc13842 none Neurons communicate with each other through chemical substances, neurotransmitters. Glutamate is the predominant fast excitatory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system (CNS) that is secreted by some neurons and activates other neurons. A decreased level of glutamate activity can be found in the CNS during embryonic development and during some pathological conditions. Recent studies indicate that during a long-term decrease in glutamate activity, the activity of another less predominant excitatory neurotransmitter, acetylcholine (ACh), is dramatically increased. It was hypothesized that in the absence of glutamate, ACh plays the role of the major excitatory neurotransmitter in some regions of the CNS. However, the mechanisms that increase ACh activity when glutamate activity is decreased have not yet been studied. They will be studied in the proposed research. Using neuronal cultures obtained from the hypothalamic region of the brain, two hypotheses will be tested. The first hypothesis is that during a decrease in glutamate activity neurons that secrete glutamate change their phenotype and begin to secrete ACh. The second hypothesis is that the change in phenotype is due to the decrease in Ca2+ influx to the neurons and the inactivation of certain intracellular Ca2+ signaling pathways. Since glutamate is a major excitatory neurotransmitter in the CNS and is involved in many functions of the brain, it is very important to know the mechanisms that regulate the functions of neuronal networks when glutamate activity is decreased. Increased ACh transmission is likely one of such mechanisms. This project addresses the investigation of the fundamental mechanisms of neuronal plasticity and the regulation of neuronal activity that can take place in neuronal circuits during a decrease in glutamate excitation doc13843 none Although social scientists have often studied fear of crime, they know little about the underlying character and dynamics of that fear, and how it affects the social life of urban communities. This project therefore examines how actors socially construct fear of crime as a means of understanding places, events, relationships, and groups in society. In turn, it examines how people experience crime and cope with its risks. The data on these topics come from direct observation of and face-to-face interviews with residents of two neighborhoods (the Lower East Side and Flatbush Midwood areas of New York City). The detailed case study of these two areas and their inhabitants not only offers information on the sources of fear of crime, but also has implications for the vitality, safety, and future of urban neighborhoods doc13844 none In many parts of the world, religious organizations provide an important set of support and services for local residents. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine the impact of religious organizations on livelihoods in predominantly Quechua communities of the central and southern Andes of Peru. The project will evaluate how religious organizations, such as churches, missionary groups, and humanitarian organizations, influence the ways that rural Peruvians have secured beneficial livelihoods in the wake of the struggle between the Peruvian state and the Shining Path revolutionary movement. The theoretical underpinnings of this project suggest that social organizations play an important role in determining how development will occur. Further, the outcomes of development interventions will vary according to the compositions, beliefs, and experiences embodied by different forms of social organization. Existing research has explored how state-run development agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and social movements impact the livelihoods of specific populations in distinct ways. This project seeks to contribute to these discussions by examining another influential form of organization, that of religion, and its impacts on livelihood. To do so, the project focuses on three central questions: (1) How do the religious organizations in these communities impact access to social, material and political resources? (2) How does religious affiliation shape the ways that individuals identify themselves and their neighbors, and with what consequences? (3) How do contemporary religious organizations interact with and intervene in other governing structures, such as local government or informal community groups? Data will be collected through archival research, interviews, and participant observation in two Quechua communities that were directly affected by the violence that occurred throughout the southern and central Andes through the s and early s. These data will be analyzed and compared through textual and narrative analysis to construct a local history of livelihood intervention by religious organizations, to determine how the most recent forms of intervention have affected local households and individuals, and to decipher the different avenues contemporary religious organizations have used to shape how individuals secure a livelihood. Comparison of the two communities, one which has seen high levels of development intervention by religious organizations and one which has not, will provide an opportunity to understand how religious-sponsored intervention differs from secular intervention. This research will address the need to conduct analytically and theoretically rigorous inquiry into the relationships between religion and livelihoods in regions that have experienced violent conflict. The centralized position of NGOs in development, combined with the rise of liberation theology throughout the s, created space for a new phase of indirect and direct intervention by religious organizations in the livelihood of the world s poor. This space was extended throughout the s and s when religious-sponsored organizations and their members often were the only groups able to intervene on behalf of humanitarian needs during violent conflict. Through increased intervention, the flow of capital between religious groups in developed and developing nations has increased as missionary activities incorporate livelihood concerns. The project is especially timely given the increasing conversion of Latin Americans from Catholic to Protestant faiths, a trend that some researchers argue alters social networks in significant and varied ways. The outcomes of this project will suggest different models for examining the role of religion in development and situations of conflict. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc13845 none Understanding the history of Holocene landscape evolution is critical because the range of climate change during this time interval is generally considered to be within the realm of foreseeable environmental fluctuations. Reconstructing post-glacial geomorphic events therefore demonstrates the potential range of landscape change that may occur in the future. This doctoral dissertation research project will reconstruct the post-glacial geomorphic history of the upper Muskegon River system in Michigan in order to test the links between fluvial systems and climate fluctuations that apparently occurred during the Holocene. The size and number of preserved paleochannels and terraces in the upper Muskegon indicate that substantial changes occurred in channel geometry through post-glacial time. Paleochannels will be measured to determine the cross-sectional form and bankfull dimensions. Several cores of sediment from paleochannels and adjacent alluvial deposits will be extracted to determine types and amounts of sediment moving through these streams as well as to identify discontinuities in the stratigraphic sequence. A chronology based on radiocarbon dating of organic material from alluvial deposits and paleochannel peats will determine the sequence of geomorphic events. Results of these analyses are expected to show that significant geomorphic events correlate with known climatic fluctuations or are linked to autogenic controls. The research also will attempt to determine the impact of 19th century logging on the system. The General Land Office pre-settlement survey records of Michigan will be examined for data on the position, size, and streambed sediment of the Muskegon River prior to logging. This will be compared to current conditions to determine historic changes in the Muskegon River. This research is part of an ongoing research program that is focusing on post-glacial landscape development in Michigan, which lies in the core of the Great Lakes basin. In contrast to the glacial history of the region, very little is known about Holocene landscape evolution and associated forcing variables. The results from this study will contribute to understanding landscape sensitivity to climate change and human impact in the Great Lakes region during the Holocene. This study will improve understanding of the response of streams to climate change and logging as well as to other kinds of adjustments. In addition, it will provide important data that can be used to test prehistoric climate models. Rivers are especially important because they are a critical part of the ecosystem and heavily utilized. This study is of particular interest to society considering the economic costs of flooding, stream erosion, and increased sediment load, all of which are affected by climate change and or logging. Proper management should consider future responses to climate change and human impact, which can be predicted more accurately when the past record is known. In most cases, management decisions are based on very short records (less than 100 years) without considering the longer geomorphic history of the stream system. This is especially true in the Great Lakes basin, because very little is known about prehistoric stream response. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc13846 none This project explores public discourse regarding three developments that transformed the American family during the twentieth century. They are the rise in single-parent families, the increase in wives and mothers working outside the home, and the decline in family size. Public discourse on these topics may differ in popular magazines and scholarly journals, and may change with demographic developments and public opinion. The project therefore addresses these central questions: 1) What causes the quantity of media and scholarly discourse on these topics to change over time? 2) How important are demographic trends, conditions within journalism and academia, competition from other social problems, and interaction between scholars and journalists in explaining the changing quantity of this discourse? 3) How does the content of media and scholarly discourse on these topics compare and relate over time? 4) How do changes in the content of media and scholarly discourse relate to changes in public opinion on these topics? Using time-series data to answer the first two questions, and content analysis to answer the second two, the study examines both the quantity and content of public discourse over an entire century doc13847 none Smith Description: This award is to support a collaborative project between a US team headed by Dr. Scot E. Smith, Department of Civil and Coastal Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida and a team headed by Dr. Hesham E. Monsef, Department of Geology, Suez Canal University, Ismailia, Egypt. They plan to address the question of sediment deposition and filling by sand dune encroachment in the Lake Nasser Reservoir (LNR) which was formed by the Aswan High Dam in southern Egypt. Specifically, they will examine available satellite images and actual data taken on the ground and in the lake, conduct preliminary field work on the phenomena of sediment transport and sediment deposition within the LNR, examine the usefulness of satellite remote sensing data in monitoring sediment deposition patterns in the LNR, and plan a study of sand dune migration in the vicinity of the LNR and sand dune encroachment into the reservoir. They expect to describe a plan of research for developing models to utilize satellite data for predicting sand migration and deposition in the reservoir. Scope: The project supports collaboration between two experienced teams, with the appropriate instruments, and with access to the necessary data and facilities. The project addresses an important topic for Egypt and for other countries with similar reservoir conditions. The large surface area of the lake and the hostile weather conditions most of the year, in that area of Egypt, impede the taking of ground measurements, and makes the use of remote sensing a very desirable approach. In addition to the University of Florida and the Suez Canal University, the project will involve investigators from the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation and from the Ministry of Agriculture in Egypt. One US graduate student will participate in the research. This project meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest doc13848 none Lumpkin Inverse modeling techniques will be used to resolve the transports in the Southern Ocean as port of the synthesis phase of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE). The box inverse model, applied to circumpolar hydrographic sections following the Subantarctic Front and southern ACC front of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, along with multiple WOCE and other high-quality hydrographic data. The model will explicitly include air-sea transformations to solve for a set of reference velocities and property-dependent effective diapycnal velocities, and corrections to these fluxes consistent with property conservation in neutral density layers. Previous studies of the global thermohaline circulation by means of inverse box models have been severely restricted by their lack of controlling sections within the Southern Ocean, and therefore were not able to distinguish meridional exchanges among the different circulation regimes in the regions south of about 32 S doc13849 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Spike Gildea and his colleague Desrey Fox will conduct three years of linguistic research on Akawaio, an indigenous language in Guyana that is a member of the Cariban language family. One goal of their research is to create the first comprehensive reference grammar of Akawaio. Another is to publish on the web the collection of transcribed, translated, and annotated Akawaio texts that Ms. Fox will prepare as part of her doctoral dissertation. Preliminary research indicates that certain aspects of Akawaio grammar are unlike anything ever documented before, so a careful grammatical description supplemented and illustrated by annotated texts will benefit linguistic theory. The grammatical description will expand Dr. Gildea s reconstruction of the grammar of Proto-Carib, the ancestor language for all modern Cariban languages. It is already clear that Akawaio forms a group with its closest neighbors (the Pemong Group), but relationships between this group and other languages and or groups in the Cariban family are unclear, in large part because there is so little reliable information about many of the languages (including Akawaio). The grammar and associated wordlist will provide additional bases for connecting the Pemong Group to other Cariban languages groups. The collection of texts will also be of great interest to anthropologists, as they address traditional ways of life, oral history, Akawaio cosmology, and shamanistic practices. They will be especially valuable because they were recorded by Ms. Fox, a native Akawaio with anthropological training. Two important scientific debates motivate the documentation of little-known languages. First, each new language tests theories about the human capacity for language. Second, each comparative reconstruction provides information that can inform hypotheses about early connections among peoples, including their migration patterns. The indigenous languages of Guyana are virtually unknown, and thus have not contributed significantly to either debate until now. Such documentation is urgent because so many languages are in danger of disappearing in the near future. In addition, documentation of endangered languages like Akawaio is a prerequisite to the creation of educational materials that may help prevent language loss doc13850 none Somasundaran Description: This award supports US-India cooperative research entitled Modeling Flocculation-Dispersion of Colloidal Suspensions in a Particle Population Balance Framework. Flocculation and dispersion of colloidal suspensions are important unit operations in many industrial activities such as pulp and papermaking, mineral and ceramics processing, and water treatment. The investigators will undertake a detailed study of the nine enumerated steps in the flocculation dispersion process. They will develop a comprehensive mathematical model that includes a variety of phenomena such as aggregation, interparticle forces, hydrodynamics and polymer adsorption. Although flocculation processes have been extensively modeled, the proposed work will be the first attempt to integrate the various subprocesses. The new model will be validated by comparison with existing experimental data. Predictions from the model will then be tested by performing new experiments. Scope: The collaborators for this research are P. Somasundaran, Columbia University and P. Pradip and P.C. Kapur, Tata Research Design and Development Centre, Pune, India. The PIs are a team of world class scientists that have an excellent chance of achieving their research objectives. Development of a comprehensive model to predict the kinetics of flocculation will be very useful for water purification, waste treatment, product formulation, mineral beneficiation schemes, and environmental remediation. This project is jointly funded by the Division of International Programs and the Government of India s Department of Science & Technology doc13800 none This proposal is an extension of previous work aimed at understanding the effects of reproductive biology on patterns of life history evolution in a colonial marine tunicate, Botryllus schlosseri. The project will test five hypotheses about factors that may determine male reproductive success in natural spawns of this colonial invertebrate. The five hypotheses specifically aim to explore the effects of timing of sperm release, relatedness of mates, population density, and allocation to male function on fertilization success in field and experimental populations of Botryllus. Previous work has shown that there is a narrow temporal window in which fertilization can result in a viable embryo, and there may be a gametic incompatibility system. Furthermore, fertilizing sperm are generally the product of nearby colonies; colonies exhibit variation in sperm production, and high levels of sperm production only increase local reproductive success when sperm competition occurs. This preliminary information suggests that male reproductive success in natural populations is a complex function of timing relative to the reproductive cycles of other colonies, gametic compatibility, sperm production, and population density. The proposed research will consist of field and laboratory studies, with preliminary work focused to maximize the information yield of a suite of nine polymorphic microsatellite loci. These genetic markers will then be used to assay paternity in natural spawns and test the series of five hypotheses about the determinants of male reproductive success doc13852 none Somasundaran Description: This award supports US-India cooperative research entitled Microbe-Mineral Interaction Mechanisms Relevant to Precious Metal Extraction with Environmental Control. The PIs will investigate bioprocessing for the enhanced recovery of precious metals such as gold, silver and platinum and will focus on the mechanisms by which certain microbes adhere to different mineral surfaces and alter interfacial properties. These mechanisms are as yet not very clear. During leaching, metal ions accumulate; some of which may confer toxicity to bacteria. There is need to understand the toxic metal tolerance of selected bacteria and develop more efficient metal tolerant strains. Scope: The collaborators for this research, P. Somasundaran, Columbia University and K. Natarajan, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, have worked successfully in the past and have published in major international journals. Due to growing environmental awareness during the past decade, the use of biotechnology has become attractive as an environmentally benign, cost and energy efficient means for mineral beneficiation and environmental control. This project is jointly supported by the Division of International Programs and the Government of India s Department of Science & Technology doc13853 none Sociological theories and studies of the welfare state did much to explain its unprecedented growth after World War II, but now face another challenge. They need to account for the current period of crisis, retrenchment, and limits to growth as well as for previous periods of increasing state capacity. This project addresses this challenge using the methods of comparative historical sociology. Concentrating on the tax revolt in the U.S. during the s that led to a series of dramatic legislative victories, it considers why the movement emerged when it did, what it did to gain initial policy success, and how it affected later political debates about taxes and welfare policy. The methods used involve analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data. First, the project compares the grassroots protests in the United States with those in Denmark, and compares both to the lack of such protests in Sweden and Britain. Second, it compares the varied movement success in California, New York, and Massachusetts. Third, it uses quantitative event history analyses to explore the adoption of anti-tax legislation in 27 of 50 states. The results show how the initial policy success of the tax revolt changed the direction of American politics and the effectiveness of later challenges to tax policy doc13854 none In aiming to explain the existence of environmental inequality - the disproportionate location of environmental hazards near low income and minority neighborhoods - this project contrasts two theories. One is based on direct racial discrimination, and another is based on the indirect consequences of housing inequality by class and race. The evaluation of the contrasting theories comes from the analysis of data from three sources. One source identifies the location of toxic facilities, another provides figures on home ownership, and a third uses figures from the U.S. census. With data over the - period for eight selected areas, the analysis examines the relationship between housing segregation and environmental inequality. The results not only help evaluate the alternative theories and the relative roles of class and race in promoting environmental inequality, but also address policy options in alleviating the problem doc13855 none Jefferies Since , the duration of the ice cover on Northern Hemisphere lakes and rivers has decreased by almost 20 days. A three week reduction in ice duration on lakes in Ontario, Canada since has caused major limnological and ecological changes. Since the late s early s, there has been significant environmental change in the ocean, atmosphere, and cryosphere of the Arctic. The recently released third assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, indicates that the sensitive and already changing northern high latitude cryosphere faces further change as winter temperatures and precipitation increase at high northern latitudes. Lake ice in Alaska may be responding to late twentieth century environmental changes and may respond to further climatic perturbations. However, the observational record is neither sufficiently long and continuous, nor covers the appropriate period to allow for a proper assessment of past lake ice variability and the likely magnitude of future change. The objective of this study is to use numerical modeling to simulate the variability of lake ice growth and decay at the present time and during the period of meteorological record in the different climate zones of Alaska, and to understand the factors responsible for that variability in order to predict the response of the ice to future climate change. Lake ice growth and decay variables include freezing, ice thickness, modes of thickening [congelation ice, snow ice], and break-up. This is a larger and more comprehensive set of variables than has been considered previously and they integrate the effects of both temperature and precipitation variability. Successful completion of this study will yield well-validated lake ice growth and decay model that will enable us to identify the key factors responsible for the variability of lake ice growth and decay. This will fill a major gap in the knowledge and understanding of the response of the Arctic and sub-Arctic cryosphere to past climate variability and change, and the prediction of future response. This will benefit physical, chemical, and biological limnologists, and ecological and water resource managers. Teacher and student participation will give them a better appreciation for teaching and learning in the local context, an understanding of the scientific process, and interesting and relevant examples of the impact of climate variability and change on Alaska physical processes and interactions doc13856 none While previous studies in the Atlantic Ocean and Arabian Sea have documented a direct relationship between atmospheric dust deposition and reactive trace element additions to surface waters, little is known about the effect that the Asian dust plume has on the distribution of reactive trace elements in surface waters of the western North Pacific. For this reason, PIs from the University of Hawaii, Old Dominion University and Florida State University will participate in a cruise to the central and western North Pacific during April May , a time period coincident with maximum Asian dust over that region. During this cruise the following four research objectives will be addressed: (1) quantify the areal extent and concentration of atmospheric dust in this region using dissolved Al concentrations in surface water samples and compare results with estimates obtained during field studies carried out as part of the ACE-ASIA program in , as well as historical deposition models; (2) compare the solubility of bioactive trace metals in aerosols and rainwater along with their concentration and distribution in surface water samples versus Al values to assess the role that atmospheric deposition has in controlling altering the upper ocean biogeochemical cycles of these elements; (3) ascertain the magnitude and pathways via which atmospheric inputs get incorporated into the thermocline and central waters of the North Pacific; and (4) provide baseline concentrations for trace metals. The PIs will collect surface samples while underway by pumping water onto the ship through a Teflon-lined, polyethylene tube mounted on a modified bathythermograph and vertical profiles at 8 stations that will encompass the key hydrographic regimes of the area. Samples (total, particulate, dissolved, colloidal) will be analyzed for the metals Ag, Al, Cd, Cu, Co, Fe, Mn, Ni, Pb, Zn and the metalloids As, Sb, Se. Aerosols and rainfall samples also will be collected and analyzed for metals major ions and metals metalloids, respectively. In addition, selected samples also will be analyzed for nutrients, salinity, oxygen, chlorophyll a, particulate organic carbon, particulate organic nitrogen, particulate organic sulfur, dissolved organic carbon and dissolved organic nitrogen doc13857 none Wang SUNY-SB This project will analyze data from repeated transects across the continental shelf and upper slope off the East Coast of the U.S. These will be used to study the structure and variability of the shelf-break front and the flows on either side of this front. The data consist of over 700 sections of ADCP data, collected over approximately 9 years from a container ship making routine trips between New York and Bermuda, together with XBT data spanning two decades. In addition to providing information about the short-term variability of the circulation in this region, this unique data set should permit the study of the inter-annual variability of a current system that affects conditions in the economically important and biologically doc13856 none While previous studies in the Atlantic Ocean and Arabian Sea have documented a direct relationship between atmospheric dust deposition and reactive trace element additions to surface waters, little is known about the effect that the Asian dust plume has on the distribution of reactive trace elements in surface waters of the western North Pacific. For this reason, PIs from the University of Hawaii, Old Dominion University and Florida State University will participate in a cruise to the central and western North Pacific during April May , a time period coincident with maximum Asian dust over that region. During this cruise the following four research objectives will be addressed: (1) quantify the areal extent and concentration of atmospheric dust in this region using dissolved Al concentrations in surface water samples and compare results with estimates obtained during field studies carried out as part of the ACE-ASIA program in , as well as historical deposition models; (2) compare the solubility of bioactive trace metals in aerosols and rainwater along with their concentration and distribution in surface water samples versus Al values to assess the role that atmospheric deposition has in controlling altering the upper ocean biogeochemical cycles of these elements; (3) ascertain the magnitude and pathways via which atmospheric inputs get incorporated into the thermocline and central waters of the North Pacific; and (4) provide baseline concentrations for trace metals. The PIs will collect surface samples while underway by pumping water onto the ship through a Teflon-lined, polyethylene tube mounted on a modified bathythermograph and vertical profiles at 8 stations that will encompass the key hydrographic regimes of the area. Samples (total, particulate, dissolved, colloidal) will be analyzed for the metals Ag, Al, Cd, Cu, Co, Fe, Mn, Ni, Pb, Zn and the metalloids As, Sb, Se. Aerosols and rainfall samples also will be collected and analyzed for metals major ions and metals metalloids, respectively. In addition, selected samples also will be analyzed for nutrients, salinity, oxygen, chlorophyll a, particulate organic carbon, particulate organic nitrogen, particulate organic sulfur, dissolved organic carbon and dissolved organic nitrogen doc13859 none Making it Easier to Interact with Technology through Handheld Personal Universal Controllers This is a standard award. In this project the PI will investigate how a hand-held computer exploiting wireless communications technologies can be used as a Personal Universal Controller (PUC) to control all kinds of home, office and factory equipment. When users point their PUC at a light switch, at a photocopier in an office, at a machine tool in a factory, at a VCR at home, at a piece of test equipment in the field, or at almost any other kind of device, the device will send to the hand-held a description of its control parameters. The PUC will use this information to create an appropriate control panel, taking into account the properties of the controls that are needed, the properties of the hand-held (the display type and input techniques available), and the properties of the user (what language is preferred, whether left or right handed, how big the buttons should be based on whether the user prefers using a finger or a stylus). The user can then control the device using the PUC. The device will not need to dedicate much processing power, hardware, or cost to the user interface, since it will only need to contain a description of its capabilities and storage for the current settings, along with hardware for wireless communication. PUC programs will use intelligent model-based techniques to create useful and appropriate interfaces that are customized for each user. The PI s preliminary research suggests that an interface on a hand-held can be significantly better than the interface supplied by the manufacturer, so the PUC should enable people to make more effective use of their equipment, as well as making it practical to add intelligence to a broader range of appliances. The PUC can also facilitate access for people with disabilities, since the interfaces will be customized to the individual s preferences and needs. But this research will have benefits beyond just remote control devices for appliances, in that it will help further the cause of separating the user interface from the application code, which has been a basic goal of user interface software research from the beginning doc13860 none Hebert URI This project is an attempt to get direct information about isopycnal dispersion and property fluxes in the ocean, over scales from O(1) Km to O(100) Km, by deploying clusters of isopycnal RAFOS floats. Over their two-year missions, these floats will map out the turbulent flow along two different density surfaces in a region of the eastern, tropical Atlantic, roughly Km west of Africa. The floats will measure position, pressure, temperature and oxygen. Data on the trajectories of the floats, together with data from a hydrographic survey carried out at the time of float deployment, will be analyzed to provide estimates of absolute and relative dispersion rates as well as strain, vorticity and mean flow. Fluxes of temperature and oxygen will also be estimated. The experimental region coincides with the edge of a tongue of low oxygen water that stretches westward from the African coast. A secondary objective of the work is to obtain a better description of the low oxygen tongue and, by obtaining data about flow and eddy fluxes, determine the processes responsible for its structure doc13861 none The objective of the project is to document methane leakage to the Arctic Shelf near the MacKenzie River Delta and Tuktoyktuk Peninsula from gas hydrates decomposition. Decomposition is occurring due to thermal change on the Arctic Shelf by with warmer water resulting from sea level rise. Simultaneously, heat flow from below may also be helping to dissociate the base of the hydrate zone. Much of this seeping methane in the sediments may be oxidized by anaerobic bacteria and thus not reach the seafloor, or be trapped until overpressure rapidly releases the methane via hydro-fractures and or sediment plugs. Funds are provided to carry out an 18-day cruise to collect vibracores, side-scan images and water-column samples and the subsequent hydrocarbon and stable-isotopic analyses and C-14 dating fro chronology doc13862 none Gas hydrates are important as a potential resource, and also because of their possible influence on climate and the global carbon cycle. Their formation is well understood, but their source(s) is not. Pore waters associated with gas hydrates have elevated halogen content, making dating by 129I (AMS) feasible, as has been shown by a pilot study. The idea of this proposal is to date the pore waters and to use their chemistry and that of the sediments to begin to unravel the origin of methane hydrates. Japanese collaborators will provide samples and data relevant to the study. In this proposal, the PI requests support for the sample preparation (Rochester) and AMS dating to be done at Purdue Univ doc13863 none Albonesi Description: This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. David Albonesi, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York and Dr. Salwa Nassar, Computer and Systems Department, Electronics Research Institute, Cairo, Egypt. They plan to investigate novel computing systems, which can be configured into one of several different parallel system organizations in order to meet the diverse requirements of software programs. A simulation-based model of the hardware will be developed and used to evaluate how diverse multimedia, scientific, commercial database, and business programs can be accelerated with this architecture. Key to this effort will be the development of compilers that can analyze application software characteristics so as to select the optimal hardware configuration for each phase of program execution. Scope: The proposed research will leverage the expertise of the US team in developing high performance adaptive architecture, and the Egyptian team in designing parallel software and compilers. This collaboration is expected to significantly benefit research in the information technology area in each country. The project will involve a US graduate student who will gain an experience in international scientific collaboration. The proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc13864 none A critical facet of research on global change has been paleoenvironmental studies aimed at discerning past forms of global climatic and environmental change, especially in time periods since the last continental glaciation. This doctoral dissertation research project will identify factors that influenced yew tree (Taxus baccata L.) populations in the Irish parish of Youghal over the last 6,000 years, when human activity increased in Ireland. The Celts revered the yew tree as noble and considered it a symbol of life and death. The Normans used it as raw material for the longbow. All species in the genus contain taxol, which has cured ovarian cancer. Yew is the longest-lived tree species in Europe. Scotland s Fortinghall yew is reputed to be 3,000 years old. Palynological analyses in Ireland are extensive, but the yew s former distribution and abundance is largely unknown, because its pollen has only recently been recognized. These qualities make it a worthy subject for cultural and paleoecological research. Regrettably, the yew now is not commonly found in Ireland. Youghal (Eo-chaill in Celtic, meaning yew forest ) has only a few living yews remaining. This study hypothesizes that yew once was abundant in Ireland, as archival mentions of yew forests are common and toponymic analysis has revealed 124 Irish locations named after the tree. Youghal is home to freshwater peatlands (excellent for microfossil analysis), macrofossils (a forest of yew stumps adequate for dendrochronological analysis), and a well-documented history. Paleoecological and historical methods will be applied to identify climatological (temperature and precipitation) and sociological (cultural, economic, and political) factors that caused population fluctuations, and an eventual rarity, of yews in Youghal. These data should help determine whether human interference has been a more significant factor than climate change in the depletion of the yew, with levels of decline directly related to the scale and needs of human enterprise. This paleoecological project will contribute to knowledge of Holocene species declines and multidecadal scale climate reconstructions. Early paleoecological investigators assumed vegetational assemblages were primarily controlled by climate change. It has been realized that human activity may tremendously influence these assemblages. Humans have introduced exotic flora and fauna to compete with indigenous forms and executed further change by exhausting resources via deforestation and overkill. Paul Martin s Blitzkrieg Model suggests that fauna can become extinct as a result of human interference within a few hundred years. This research should help determine whether yew populations were depleted over a similar timespan, thereby providing a test as to whether flora are subject to human-induced rapid extinction. Every case of species decline is unique. In this case it is not believed that the arrival of humans lead to the immediate decline of this species but the arrival of a new cultural group (the Normans) with a different resource perception. The research will also contribute to Holocene climate reconstruction. Concerns about global warming have necessitated Holocene climate research in order to use the data to model future climates. Palynological data will reveal increases decreases of yew pollen thus indicating changes in climate or human activity. These changes will be cross referenced with global Holocene climate data, analyzed in terms of other arboreal pollen changes, and compared to archival data. Dendrochronological data retrieved from the macrofossils will reveal climate conditions via tree ring anomalies. It will also complement the microfossil data in terms of dating events seen in the pollen profile. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc13865 none Iskander Description: This project supports a US-Egypt Workshop on Research and Development in Telecommunication Technology to be held in Cairo, Egypt, December - January . The organizers are Dr. Magdy Iskander, Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and Dr. Ayman El-Dessouki, President, Electronics Research Institute (ERI), Cairo, Egypt. Dr. Fatma El-Hefnawi, ERI, will also help plan the meeting. Discussions will focus on advances in telecommunication technologies and R&D needs for next-generation telecommunication systems. Example of topics to be discussed include: multidisciplinary research, MEMS technology, low-cost phased area antennas, innovative device designs based on photonic band gap structures, and advanced propagation models. Scope: This award encourages discussion among US and Egyptian scientists on an area of great importance to both countries. Potential collaborative research areas will be identified. Dr. Iskander has successfully managed an NSF program to promote wireless communications research in the United States. Dr. El-Dessouki is the head of the largest research organization in this field in Egypt and will invite persons from academia, industry, and government labs to the workshop. Several junior scientists will be among the US workshop participants. This workshop is also funded the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out collaborative activities, by funds from the Division of International Programs and from the Division of Electrical and Communication Systems doc13866 none A long-standing controversy in mid-ocean ridge dynamics is whether upwelling beneath fast spreading ridges is sheet-like with a relatively uniform magma supply along axis, or more three-dimensional with diapiric-like upwelling near segment centers and lateral redistribution of melt along axis at shallow magma chamber levels and or by lower crustal, ductile flow. The UNDERSHOOT experiment was designed to address this problem by mapping the pattern of magma delivery from the mantle to the crust along the entire length of a transform bounded segment of the East Pacific Rise between the Siqueiros and Clipperton fracture zones. The quality of the data are the important issues that remain warrant further analyses. Models of crustal thickness will be refined by employing improved algorithms that allow all data collected in the experiment to be modeled simultaneously. Understanding of the properties of the Moho transition and uppermost mantle will be improved. Improved models of along axis variations in the structure of the mantle and lower crust low velocity zones will be developed doc13867 none The project addresses an important, and somewhat neglected so far, topic in robotics - long reach robots. Cable-based robotic devices will be explored, covering questions of configuration design, trajectory planning, feedback control, fine motion control, and metrics for intelligent design. Experimental validation will be performed on an eight degrees-of-freedom cable robot built in the PI s laboratory. The PI has adequate access to outside resources critical for the project doc13868 none Although Internet traffic is routinely quite heavy, there has usually been more than enough storage, processing and bandwidth capacity to provide acceptable performance. However, it is well known that, more and more frequently, demands for network resources are mushrooming locally into hotspots or data storms, and in such cases the affected web sites and subnetworks founder almost completely, creating revenue losses and client dissatisfaction on a large scale. We propose a novel collaborative technology to alleviate the effects of these hotspots, a technology that we will apply by designing and prototyping a Hotspot Rescue Service (HRS). This work will build on the past research of the PI s in networking, operating systems, and distributed caching. A key premise on which the technology is founded lies in the observation that existing Internet band-width resources are sufficient to deal effectively with hotspots. In other words, rescues of heavily-overloaded sites can be assembled from underutilized resources lying elsewhere. It follows that there is no inherent need for resources held in reserve uniquely for this purpose, i.e., there is no need for over-provisioned, under-utilized resources such as distributed caches to protect against hotspots. We propose instead a paradigm shift in which efficient mechanisms that we provide will enable communities of participating sites to share their resources to suppress hotspots. The service in action will be transparent, in part self-regulating and will take the form of automated traffic redirection to sites with available bandwidth. The proposed Columbia HRS will be proactive as well as reactive. We will amass hotspot data that will be modeled and analyzed with the aim of designing hotspot daemons or plugins, software devices for monitoring traffic behavior and signalling incipient hotspots via hotspot watches and advisories, along with relevant statistics. We will implement two complementary approaches to the technology, a server-based approach and a client-based, peer-to-peer (P2P) approach. In the server-based approach, servers monitor their own loads, the loads of a small set of servers that they would service in the event that the other server overloads, and, via probes between servers, network conditions. When a server or network component is identified as going into possible overload, the system activates a replication mechanism to duplicate the hot content. Clients can then retrieve the content from the server sites acting as replicas, alleviating the load on the original overloaded resource. In the P2P approach, clients install a plugin into their browser that communicates with similar plugins installed on other clients browsers, as well as with a distributed directory service. Clients cache their recent downloads, and, through the plugin, inform the directory service of the objects that are cached. The directory service can then identify the most popular content, as well as cached locations and notify additional clients of these alternative locations for download. By using client machines to store and deliver the hot content and if requests for the given content can be redirected to the client machines, the hotspot at the server can be eliminated. In this way, hotspot response becomes self-organizing and self-regulatory. There are several issues that need to be addressed as we develop this rescue service. First, we will use experimentation and analysis of collected data (including data sets obtained via a company partnerships) to develop models of causes and effects of network hotspot activity. Next, we will analytically evaluate the effect on server and network load that techniques such as caching, redirecting, and migrating have upon hotspots within the network. Last, we will implement and evaluate prototype systems to validate their effectiveness, either upon simulated hotspot activity within a testbed, or if possible, on actual hotspots through agreements with content providers. Development of the HRS will provide research opportunities to multiple students at Columbia, and its deployment will improve web performance of objects served from academic institutions and non-profit companies whose content is to date not hosted by commerical third-party content delivery companies doc13823 none This research will explore spatial cognition and spatial language in children and adults, using evidence from a rare genetic deficit, Williams syndrome, to shed light on the nature of normal spatial cognition. Individuals with Williams syndrome typically have a cognitive profile of profoundly impaired spatial cognition together with relatively spared language. This syndrome therefore provides a unique opportunity to understand the nature of spatial cognition and spatial language, their development, and their interaction. The goal of this research is to determine (a) whether spatial breakdown is selective, occurring for only certain spatial capacities but not others, and (b) whether spatial language can be acquired and used normally in the absence of interaction with normal spatial cognition. The question of selectivity will be addressed by experiments in four spatial domains, object representation, perception of space vs. visual-manual action in space, navigation, and spatial language. If some aspects of spatial cognition are spared, but others are not, this would be consistent with the idea that spatial cognition is specialized, and that different kinds of spatial capacities develop from different origins. In contrast, if all aspects of spatial cognition are impaired, this would be consistent with the idea that there are general principles of development that affect all kinds of spatial cognition equally. The question of interaction between spatial language and non-linguistic spatial cognition will be addressed by experiments on the relationship between the two kinds of spatial knowledge. If both are equally impaired, this would suggest a highly interactive organization of the brain in which spatial cognition and spatial language are tightly coupled. In contrast, if spatial language is selectively spared, this would be consistent with a high degree of selectivity, and would mean that language development need not be affected by certain kinds of cognitive impairment. As a whole, these studies should elucidate the nature of normal spatial cognition by determining whether development and its breakdown occur along the lines of normal cognitive architecture, which would suggest cognitive specialization. They should elucidate the nature of spatial language by determining whether it can develop normally in the absence of normal non-linguistic spatial cognition, which would suggest a high degree of independence between the two systems. And they should shed light on developmental processes, by determining whether breakdown in one system inevitably forces changes in other systems, or whether developmental breakdown can apply selectively across sub-systems of cognition doc13870 none This Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center award to Columbia University is co-funded by Divisions of Chemistry (MPS), Materials Research (MPS) and International Programs (IN). Columbia University Nanocenter will conduct research to establish the foundation for new paradigms for information processing through the development of fundamental understanding of charge transport phenomena unique to nanoscale molecular structures with special emphasis on crystalline organic conductors and carbon nanotube materials. Single-molecule structures will be fabricated by the Center through a fusion of advanced semiconductor technology and tailored molecular synthesis. The research will elucidate the control of charge transport through single molecules in terms of the chemical structure and also will examine underlying mechanistic questions. The research program will place strong emphasis on the modulation of charge transport through molecules, with the goal of developing a molecular transistor. Scientists from Canada, Germany, Japan and Switzerland will collaborate with the Center in solid state surface analysis, single crystal growth, and the determination of electron transport properties of crystalline nanomaterials. Nanoscale structures and devices will be fabricated and characterized in collaboration with Lucent and IBM research facilities. In addition to electronics, these studies of molecular transport in nanomaterials will have potential impact to other disciplines such as photonics, biology, neuroscience, and medicine. Through partnership with Barnard College, City College of New York, and Rowan University, the Center will incorporate an innovative educational program directed toward a wide variety of students at graduate, undergraduate, and high school levels. Educational and outreach programs will be designed to attract students to nanotechnology, with particular attention to groups, which have been historically under-represented in science. Columbia University Nanocenter will conduct research to develop knowledge of charge transport phenomena unique to nanoscale molecular structures such as crystalline organic conductors and carbon nanotube materials. Single-molecule structures will be fabricated by the Center to elucidate the control of charge transport through single molecules in terms of the chemical structure and to examine underlying mechanisms, with the goal of developing a molecular transistor. Industrial collaborations with Lucent and IBM will be carried out to fabricate and characterize nanoscale structures and devices. In addition to electronics, these studies of molecular transport in nanomaterials will have potential impact to other disciplines, such as photonics, biology, neuroscience, and medicine. In collaboration with Barnard College, City College of New York, and Rowan University, the Center will incorporate an innovative educational program directed toward a wide variety of students at graduate, undergraduate and high school levels. Educational and outreach programs will be tailored to attract students to nanotechnology, with particular attention to groups, which have been historically under-represented in science doc13871 none This project investigates social change in a small town in the same spirit that Chicago-school researchers investigated urban communities in the last century. Although it shares the aims and methods of traditional community studies, it differs in two important ways. First, while most ethnographies from this period investigate the impact of urbanization, bureaucratization, and industrialization on urban life, this ethnography concentrates on a small town. Second, while traditional community studies concentrate on cities where crime and poverty are serious problems, small towns must deal with different problems. They face a declining agricultural economy, threats to locally-owned businesses from chain stores, and shrinking populations and resources. This study therefore examines one town of four thousand people, Viroqua, Wisconsin, that has successfully responded to outside forces that have devastated other small towns. In identifying the conditions that enabled the residents of Viroqua to overcome the town s problems, the project not only offers insights into the nature of community life, but also provides information on improving the quality of life of residents in small towns doc13872 none Ward Watt Spatial patterns of inherited variation in natural populations can give important clues to the means by which living creatures adapt to their habitats. But patterns alone can result from different causes (e.g., natural selection by local conditions, migration patterns of organisms with different traits, historical artifacts, etc.). This study attempts to elucidate causes of an interesting pattern of variation in which, despite extensive migration among habitats, groups of individuals living in adjacent habitat types are less similar to each other than they are to groups living in a similar habitat types hundreds of kilometers away. This research will focus on in the insect genus, Colias, and will focus on variation in a key enzyme in the energy-processing system that supports the insects flight in the wild, phosphoglucose isomerase (PGI). Extensive previous work on selection and energetics on Colias in the wild and the insect s distribution patterns in montane areas make it an ideal system for addressing these questions. The investigators will test several alternative plausible explanations for this phenomenon, examining the multiple potential causes of geographical variation in organismal traits. These tests will include studies of the mechanistic links between variation in molecular structure of enzymes, enzyme function, organismal performance, and other factors that influence population genetics. The results will illuminate the relationship between local adaptations to habitat and more general and longer-term questions of how adaptive specialization varies among species and how different kinds of organisms may or may not adapt to common environmental stresses in the same or parallel ways. They will also help inform important issues in the genetics of conservation, the genetics of agriculture, and the biological impacts of potential global change as manifested in changes of local habitat types doc13873 none Swift This project will complete the data assembly, verification, adjustments, examination by data quality experts, documentation, availability and archive of hydrographic and tracers data collected by the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) Hydrographic Program (WHP). As the WOCE program winds down at the end of , the WHP Office will complete the clean-up of the repeat Hydrography data set, prepare the WHP contents for the final WOCE CD-ROM (version 3) and will transition the activities of the office to optimally the anticipated needs of the Climate Variability and predictability (CLIVAR) program as it ramps up its re-survey activities. The WHP office enables discovery and understanding by making the high-quality WOCE data set freely available together with the appropriate documentation and tools that also facilitates teaching. This activity not only supports the WOCE community but also enables research and teaching more broadly across many areas of physical oceanography, the application of oceanographic knowledge to climate issues and its application in biological issues. It enables research and teaching across the full spectrum of US institutions and also internationally doc13874 none This award establishes a Nanoscience and Engineering Center (NSEC) for Nanoscale Systems in Information Technologies (CNS) at Cornell University. The Center will aim to make major advances in the ultra-high performance processing, sensing, storage, and transmission of information. The Center will undertake three major nanoscale science and Engineering initiatives to develop and expolit the electronic, photonic, and magnetic properties of devices and materials at nanoscale. The largest thrust will be in nanoelectronics where new, practical architecture will be developed within which the physics of charge confinement and electrostatic energy in nanostructures will provide unique benefits for dense information-processing systems and employ embedded memory elements as logic. The Center will collaborate with industry for expertise, unique materials, specialized instrumentation, and critical pathways to speed results to application. The collaboration will provide industrial experience to the Center s graduate students. The education, human resources development, and outreach activities include: (1) mentoring program to attract and retain a more diverse population of young researchers; (2) interdisciplinary curriculum, including a major laboratory component for graduate and undergraduate levels; and (3) outreach to secondary education to enhance the teaching and student appreciation of nanoscale science and engineering topics doc13875 none PEET: Taxonomic and Monographic Studies in Noetropical Trichoptera R.W. Holzenthal, P.I., University of Minnesota R.J. Blahnik, Co-P.I., University of Minnesota S.C. Harris, Co-P.I., University of Minnesota Non-technical Trichoptera, commonly known as caddisflies, constitute the largest order of exclusively aquatic insects. They are well known and studied because of the interesting net-spinning and case-making behavior of the larvae. Most species live in rivers and streams, where they are important elements of the ecosystem. They consume and recycle leaves and other organic matter and in turn are fed on by other aquatic species, including fish. A primary goal of this PEET project is to study the taxonomy and biodiversity of several important genera of caddisflies from the Neotropics of Central and South America. Many species in this region are undescribed (up to 75% in some places) or poorly known. Augmenting the technical taxonomic revisions and monographs will be the construction of identification keys to genera of both larval and adult caddisflies to be made available over the World Wide Web (WWW). Much of the material for these revisions already exists in collections in Minnesota and at the Smithsonian, and other material will be collected by field work in Venezuela. Collectively, as many as 44 genera and 400 described species will be revised, and up to 300 new species may be described. In addition, all museum and collection records of the caddisflies treated during the project will be bar-coded, databased, and the information made accessible over the WWW. Caddisflies are important biological monitors of water quality because most species are intolerant of most forms of pollution. Biomonitoring is widely used in water quality assessment in North America and Europe because the caddisflies there can be easily identified. In the Neotropics, caddisflies are very poorly known, making it difficult to use them as biological monitors. An important aspect of this PEET project will be to make the Neotropical caddisfly fauna better known and information accessible to Latin American workers. This will lay a foundation for the use of caddisflies in biomonitoring programs in the Neotropics. Two doctoral students trained at the University of Minnesota, two masters students trained at Clarion University, and a full-time research associate will be funded off the project. At least one of the doctoral students will be recruited from Latin America where there are very few Trichoptera experts. It is expected that this project will stimulate and facilitate the study of Trichoptera in Latin America and contribute to the protection and preservation of the aquatic ecosystems of the region doc13876 none EIA- Carol A. Hert Syracuse University Digital Government: Challenges in Statistical Digital Government: A Workshop promoting Agency-Research institution interaction This workshop will bring together the grantee researchers in the Digital Government program who are working in areas related to the collection, maintenance, delivery and use of statistical data. Attendees will include researchers and agency employees and upper-level managers. The research technologies developed under theses grants in their first year or two will be demonstrated and there will be an opportunity to discuss mechanisms for transitioning these laboratory technologies to operational production at the participating agencies. In addition, participants will discuss and bring up to date a research agenda for work on information technologies in statistical settings doc13877 none Rehmann UIUC This project is a study of how the dynamics of a thermohaline intrusion changes as a function of stratification, shear strength, and ambient turbulence. A particular focus is the interaction between salt-fingers and mechanically generated turbulence and the way the two combine to produce vertical fluxes. The study will be carried out in a laboratory setting designed to permit the detailed observation of an arrested wedge of cold, fresh water in an ambient warm, salty flow. Experiments will be conducted with and without turbulence generated by stationary and oscillating grids. The experiment seeks to obtain a qualitative and quantitative description of a ubiquitous oceanic phenomenon that is difficult to observe in situ. If successful, it will provide significant insight into the mixing of water masses with different temperature and salinity properties doc13878 none Although China and South Korea share Confucian values, China has a socialist economy while South Korea has a market economy. These different types of economic and political systems translate into different policies regarding gender equality, women s employment, childcare, and housework in families. Do these different systems and policies produce differences in gender roles and family relations in the two countries? This project addresses that question by examining father s participation in childcare, the division of housework, and gender attitudes in China and South Korea. To do so, it uses quantitative data from large samples, and qualitative data from small focus groups in each nation. The results not only provide a more detailed description of national differences in gender and family roles in Asia, but also offer insights into the public policy and economic sources of these differences doc13879 none In exploring the sources of political democracy in developing nations, this project examines how religion indirectly promoted democracy in former British colonies. Because religious groups gained more independence from state control in British (and American) colonies, they had more power to fight for their interests in dealing with governments in the colonizing nations. For example, despite the opposition of most colonial governments, religious groups in British colonies advocated mass education in order to foster conversion. This led to high literacy rates and successful democracies in the colonized countries. To test these arguments, the project gathers data on education from missionary records, and merges the data with digitalized maps of British colonies. It also collects and codes reports from missionary committees. The findings help identify the mechanisms behind diverse colonial outcomes and contribute to literature on world systems and cultural imperialism doc13880 none This project examines a long-overlooked source of educational disadvantage in inner-city communities - the increased involvement of youth in general and urban minority youth in particular in the juvenile justice system. On one hand, juvenile justice systems have long attempted to include education in its rehabilitative mission. One the other hand, criminalization of youth may make school achievement all the more difficult. The project thus investigates how arrest and detention of juveniles exert positive and negative effects on academic performance. To do so, the investigator first analyzes quantitative data on 876 poor and minority Chicago youth arrested or detained between and . Second, the investigator conducts face-to-face informal interviews with a random sample of 20 youths ages 18-19 to obtain qualitative data on experiences in school before and after criminal sanctions. The results from both data sources provide unique insights into how the juvenile justice system shapes the experiences and educational outcomes of juvenile offenders doc13881 none The goal of this NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC) for Directed Assembly of Nanostructures at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign (UIUC) is to address fundamental scientific issues underlying the design and synthesis of new materials, structures, and devices with dramatically improved capabilities for many industrial and biomedical applications. The work will focus on discovering and developing the means to assemble nanoscale building blocks with unique properties into functional structures under well-controlled, intentionally directed conditions. Directed assembly is the fundamental gateway to the eventual success of nanotechnology. The Center will integrate research, education, and technology dissemination, and will serve as a national resource for fundamental knowledge and applications of nanoscale science and technology. Partnering with major industry, with quality undergraduate colleges with diverse student populations, and with innovative K-1 2 educational outreach programs will ensure that the fruits of the Center s research, education, and outreach efforts will have a significant impact on society. The integrated research program combines computational design with experimentation to focus on the discovery of novel pathways to assemble functional multiscale nanostructures with junctions and interfaces between structurally, dimensionally, and compositionally different building blocks. A partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) will enhance significantly the theoretical effort. The Center s core research program consists of two interdisciplinary thrusts: Nanoparticle Gels and Polymer Nanocomposites and Nanostructured Biomolecule Composite Architectures. It will be supported by crosscutting theory and characterization efforts and complemented by a new research effort on socioeconomic impacts of nanotechnology in areas of radical innovation pertaining to core competency, knowledge management, and globalization. Thus, the overall vision for the Center encompasses research, education, and outreach through interactions with students of all ages and members of industry. The results of this ambitious program will lead to new methodologies for assembling novel functional materials and devices from nanoscale building blocks, to an interdisciplinary cadre of students and researchers trained in nanoscale science and engineering, and to novel applications of nanotechnology to spur industry into the 21 century. The Center includes participation of 21 senior investigators at RPI, UIUC, and LANL, 6 postdoctoral associates, 18 graduate students, a similar number of undergraduates, and administrative and technical support personnel doc13882 none The goal of this Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center is to study the fundamental properties of nanoscale structures with a view toward their possible use in novel electronic and magnetic devices. The work will concentrate on the movement of spins and charges, including their quantum behavior. The following important questions will be addressed at the same time: How can nanoscale structures be grown and fabricated? How can they be images and probed? What are the fundamental behaviors of charge and spin? The Center addresses these questions through research that encompasses four areas: the Growth of Nanoscale Structures; Scanned Probed Microscopy of Charges and Spins; Spin and Charge in Nanocrystals and Nanomagnets; and Coherent Electronics. These interdisciplinary topics bring together sixteen participants from three universities, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. The Center maintains close collaborations with Sandia, Oak Ridge, and Brookhaven National Laboratories, and active international collaborations with the Delft University of Technology and the University of Tokyo. The Center presents the basic concepts and the possible benefits of nanoscale science and engineering to the public at all levels. The Museum of Science in Boston works with Center faculty to develop exhibits and workshops for the general public. An early awareness outreach program for the Cambridge public schools brings middle school students to Harvard to learn about college education from faculty and students, a program that is being expanded to include Boston public schools. These activities are supplemented by active involvement of undergraduates and high school teachers in the research activities ongoing at the Center. A Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for Women and Minorities is being established to attract outstanding candidates to university research doc13883 none In order to use either O2 or nitrogen for current or paleo isotopic studies of their respective marine cycles, it is imperative that we know their fractionation during sedimentary consumption and if possible determine the mechanisms. A few estimates of O2 and NO3- isotope fractionation during sedimentary consumption have been made which showed that fractionation was much less (approaching zero) than the theoretical ones. Because these observations were made only in the eastern North Pacific where productivity is high and mid-water oxygen levels are low, two research investigators from the University of Washington and the University of Texas Marine Science Institute plan to carry out a laboratory methods development and field experimentation exercise to address two questions. Question number one asks whether the near absence of isotopic fractionation observed for both oxygen consumption and denitrification in highly respiring sediments of the Pacific Northwest continental margin a ubiquitous characteristic of shelf and upper slope sediments. The second question asks to what extent N2 production and the lack of N and O isotopic fractionation is related to abiotic or microbially mediated reoxidation of reduced products of metabolism. The PIs will conduct a field program in the Gulf of Mexico to (1) measure oxidant isotopic fractionation of O2 and NO3-, as well as related species such as N2 and NH4+ in incubated sediments, both on deck and in-situ; (2) conduct on-deck core manipulation experiments with added substrates (NO3-, 15NO3-, HN4+, 15HN4+, organic material and reducing substances) and inhibitors to elucidate possible mechanisms of isotopic fractionation and (3) make porewater and benthic chamber measurements of diagenesis rates to help elucidate the processes responsible for fractionation or lack thereof doc13884 none This grant supports a workshop on Environmentally Benign Manufacturing (EBM) and Remanufacturing in the Transport Industries, to be held in Ypsilanti, Michigan, October 4-6, . Ford Motor Company and the Integrated Manufacturing Technology Initiative (IMTI) are also supporting the workshop. The objective of the workshop is to invite participants from industry and academia to discuss future directions and opportunities for research collaboration in EBM that will serve as a roadmap for the development of future research projects. While research in the fields of Design for the Environment (DfE) and Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) have focused on the product, there is a need to focus on processes and their impact both on the manufacturing aspects and on the product life cycle. This workshop will explore the EBM issues to establish the fundamental research needs to address current and future manufacturing enterprise doc13885 none The process of species extinction represents both a basic ecological and societal concern. Despite interest in extinction processes, there is little empirical information on mechanisms leading to extinction, particularly in marine systems, because extinction events involve small population sizes and are infrequent. Small population size is thought to increase the risk of extinction through several different mechanisms. Ecological mechanisms include increased variation in population growth rates due to chance events (demographic stochasticity), and positive density dependence (i.e., reduced population growth at low density). Genetic mechanisms include loss of favorable alleles due to chance events (genetic drift) and inbreeding depression. This project will experimentally disentangle the effects of different mechanisms associated with small population size in a commercially-harvested marine kelp, the sea palm Postelsia palmaeformis. To test effects of genetic variation, experimental populations will be established from either a single founder, multiple founders from the same population, or multiple founders from different source populations. The genetic treatment will be combined with a density manipulation (large and small populations) to test for ecological effects of population size. Experimental populations will be monitored for times to extinction, and the underlying processes will be studied in detail by marking individual plants and measuring survival, fecundity, and growth rates. These data will be incorporated into a population model to determine the relative sensitivity of population growth to different effects of small population size and to different life stages. Concurrent monitoring of genetic structure of the experimental populations using AFLP fingerprinting techniques will provide an independent measurement of genetic dynamics and effects on population performance, and will validate basic assumptions of the study. The study will increase our understanding of the effects of small population size on extinction risk, help to characterize the life cycle of marine kelps, and provide important information for developing effective conservation and remediation strategies for exploited marine species doc13886 none Groups interested in preserving natural environments have developed a suite of approaches toward achieving this goal. One of those strategies has been the development of conservation corridor. This environmental conservation plan that is based on principles of connectivity and networks between landscape patches. The design aims to connect isolated, managed landscapes, such as national parks and nature reserves, by preserving, restoring, or conserving the surrounding landscape. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine the viability of the conservation corridor approach in the Cordillera Blanca and the Cordillera Huayhuash of Peru. A conservation corridor has been proposed to connect the protected Huascaran National Park, which contains the Cordillera Blanca, and the unprotected Cordillera Huayhuash to the south. National and International environmental organizations in the region advocate the establishment of a corridor to protect the mountain ecosystem and to develop a connected network of protected areas. While ecological data support conservation plans for a corridor, the social context and consequences of a conservation corridor have not been studies. This project will address the human dimensions of this conservation agenda by investigating the various actions and articulations of people involved in a corridor initiative and by examining the spatial attributes and the land use and land cover of the proposed corridor. The research will use qualitative and spatially quantitative data to assess and analyze the social and spatial dynamics of the conservation corridor. Formal and informal interviews as well as participant observation will elucidate how local people are becoming engaged in the corridor and becoming socially networked within the boundary of the corridor. Integrated conservation and development projects throughout the corridor will be visited and cataloged. Satellite imagery and a geographic information system (GIS) will facilitate a spatially explicit analysis for data about the land use and land cover of the corridor and areas where conservation and development projects are targeted. Fieldwork in Peru will reveal the land-use decisions and conservation concerns of informants and will be combined with land-cover data from training samples. These data will be compiled into an attribute database to analyze the location and the type of conservation activities taking place within the corridor boundary. Spatial and statistical analysis will be conducted in order to assess the role of social and spatial networks involved in conservation corridors and to test the hypothesis that social linkages formed in the corridor are creating new opportunities and building social capital for local people. Conservation corridors are being widely accepted as a means of landscape management. This research will address the potential social benefits of conservation and community development planning by focusing on the social linkages and networks that are formed as a result of conservation initiatives. The results of this project should help strengthen or challenge existing conservation and park agendas. The project will provide socioeconomic, land-use, and land-cover data for this region of Peru, and it will contribute to broader understandings of the human dimensions of global change. The project will also provide insights into social aspects of regional conservation plans and the linkages that are involved at different political and geographic scales. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc13887 none This proposal seeks funding for research in the design, implementation, and instrumentation of new methods for scalable wide-area on-demand reliable digital (SWORD) streaming. The larger goal of the research is to enable new streaming media applications, such as immediate access to a television show whenever a client anywhere would like to view it, by devising new practical cost-effective methods for on-demand real-time streaming of very popular streaming media content. The key aspects of the research to be undertaken are: 1. The development of innovative practical new reliable multicast techniques that optimize client stream sharing to conserve server and network bandwidth, improve bandwidth cost-sharing, and maximize system scalability. 2. The design of delivery techniques that work over the Internet or over satellite cable networks, or any combination of these network technologies. 3. The development of new metrics and models to determine which popular streams or partial streams should be cached at regional (or proxy) servers in order to minimize delivery cost for the data. 4. The development of new network instrumentation facilities for the streaming media delivery protocols that enable deep understanding of the impact of network events and conditions on the performance of the protocols. 5. The use of the new on-line network instrumentation facilities to develop new streaming methods that optimally adapt to current network conditions. 6. The development of a novel testbed that allows experimentation with alternative new reliable multicast methods as well as alternative algorithms for caching streaming content closer to the clients, uses the new instrumentation facilities, and operates seamlessly and transparently in a live environment with ordinary clients accessing widely used media servers over large-scale networks such as Internet2 or the Internet MBONE doc13888 none In many parts of the world, changes in economic activity associated with the continued growth and interconnection of global markets have had profound impacts on local residents. For some groups of people, globally oriented economic activity has created new opportunities; for others, the forces of change have been adverse. In nearly every case, changing economic systems have been accompanied by changes in the social, cultural, and political milieu within which the groups have operated. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine the resiliency and change in a Miskitu logging village in the North Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN) of Nicaragua as it engages in increasing rates of harvesting for the global lumber market. While Nicaragua has some of the most advanced indigenous self-determination legislation in the Americas, violations of cultural and land rights remain commonplace due to the institutional, economic, ecological, and political landscape. As in numerous other locations, increasing multinational extraction and processes of political decentralization have resulted in extensive shifts in socially and politically constructed identities at multiple scales. This research will investigate the structure and function of municipal, regional, national, and global institutions that influence lumber extraction from the village of Alamikamba. At the core of this investigation will be the village Elder Council, a traditional but dynamic institution for resource management. Some local actors recently became conduits through which multinational companies expand forest extraction from communal indigenous land, while other community members opposed these same forces. While sensitive to heterogeneity within Alamikamba, this study questions prevailing academic assumptions that decentralized decision making inherently fosters empowerment and local control. To achieve this goal, this project will combine archival, survey, interview, ethnographic (field walks, oral histories, participant observation), and community mapping methods. Documentation of the Elder Council and wider village decision-making processes will amplify understanding of indigenous self-governance and community-based forest management, including the administration of common property land and resources. The comparison of Nicaragua with other decentralizing, multiethnic countries in the hemisphere, such as Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Mexico, and Panama, will provide valuable contributions to development and resource management theory. Through the examination of a village on the forest extraction frontier, which is similar to many other internal colonization fronts in Latin America, the research will demonstrate processes of transition in decision-making, power, and governance that broadly influence the local ecology and indigenous cultures. By analyzing the devolution of environmental management authority, this project will further strengthen networks between geography and related fields such as political science, policy studies, development studies, and rural sociology. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc13889 none The difficulties of obtaining data on homicide victims means that studies have to either rely on small and atypical samples, or study differences in aggregate rates across geographical areas. This makes it difficult to tests theories of individual-level risk taking that posit the importance of behaviors such as drinking, carrying a gun, or fighting frequently for homicide victimization. This project uses a special data set, The National Mortality Followback Survey, based on a sample of 22,957 citizens age 15 and over who died in . The survey obtains data from the next-of-kin and friends of the decedent, and, importantly for this project, oversamples victims of homicide. To consider multilevel influences, the project links this survey data to neighborhood variables. The results contribute to a test of theories of risk-taking and fill a gap in the literature on homicide victimization doc13890 none Blooms of the toxic dinoflagellates of the genus Alexandrium have become a chronic problem affecting large areas of the Gulf of Maine (GOM) on a near-annual basis. These algae are the causative agents of paralytic shellfish poisoning, a potentially fatal neurological disorder. Concerns for public health have resulted in frequent shellfish quarantines, permanent closure of some shellfish beds, and the implementation of costly PSP toxin monitoring programs in the GOM. Although considerable effort has been made to determine the environmental factors that influence Alexandrium spp. population dynamics in the GOM, the factors that control in situ growth and decline of Alexandrium populations remain poorly understood. Interactions between the marine bacteria and toxic phytoplankton are thought to play a major role in controlling toxic algal blooms, but their potentially important role in the GOM has received little attention. It is well known that bacteria and phytoplankton dynamics are tightly linked in coastal marine environments, with strong associations frequently observed between bacterial and phytoplankton biomass. In addition, both positive and negative influences of bacteria on specific harmful algal bloom (HAB) organisms have been documented. Initial research results have indicated GOM bacteria capable of dramatically stimulating Alexandrium under laboratory conditions and that these interactions may vary seasonally. This project will elucidate the role of bacteria in Alexandrium spp. population dynamics in the GOM. Several aspects of bacteria-Alexandrium interactions will be investigated, including: the seasonal and spatial distribution of bacteria that inhibit or promote Alexandrium growth; the specificity of bacteria-Alexandrium interactions; and the biotic and abiotic factors that influence bacterial community dynamics. Field research will be conducted in the southwestern Bay of Fundy with Canadian collaborators. In addition, archived bacterial community samples that were collected from the eastern and southwestern GOM in collaboration with the ECOHAB-GOM sampling program in and will be analyzed to determine the geographic distribution of specific bacteria found to interact with Alexandrium. Close collaboration with the ECOHAB-GOM team and the DFO HAB program will provide an extensive array of data and access to research vessels. Experimental methods to analyze bacteria-Alexandrium interactions will include: (1) molecular phylogenetic (PCR-DGGE and MPN-PCR) and cultivation-based analysis of the seasonal and geographic distribution of bacterial assemblages that inhibit or promote Alexandrium; (2) enrichment and isolation of novel bacterial strains that interact closely with Alexandrium; (3) analysis of the influence of Alexandrium- promoting or Alexandrium-inhibiting bacteria on other algal species present in the GOM; and (4) analysis of the isolates influence on Alexandrium growth in mixed cultures. The study will provide insight into interactions between Alexandrium and bacteria in the GOM and may ultimately improve our ability to simulate and predict Alexandrium dynamics within a given body of water. This research will determine whether certain bacterial assemblages are associated with Alexandrium spp. in the GOM and will also explore Alexandrium -bacteria interactions that may promote or inhibit Alexandrium growth doc13891 none Although not widely publicized in the United States, children have been used in a variety of ways by protagonists in a broad range of armed conflicts around the world. In some cases, they have been trained to carry arms and engage in fighting. In other settings, they have been used to help supply and support armed troops, or they have been used as buffers to provide protection for military units. Furthermore, even if not directly involved in the fighting, children have been adversely affected by conflicts, as schools often cease to function and health risks increase dramatically. To address these problems, the United Nations and many other organizations have tried to implement policies and take actions that will reduce the risks of armed conflict to children. The doctoral dissertation research improvement project will investigate relationships between the category of childhood and the production of humanitarian space during the Sri Lankan civil war. Six humanitarian cease-fires established between and and an anticipated seventh cease-fire scheduled for September and October will be analyzed. This study will examine the specific qualities associated with children and childhood in the production of humanitarian space as well as the role of children in opening and stabilizing space in the violently contested territory of Sri Lanka. Using a variety of ethnographic techniques, such as participant observation, semi-structured interview, and document compilation, an archive will be constructed that includes a chronicle of events and sites related to the cease-fires, the identification of key actors, organizational interrelationships and decision-making structures, and an inventory of relevant policy texts. Analyses of this archive will include the identification and comparison of geographs (geopolitical descriptions involving children, policy strategies and events affecting the cease-fires) and consideration of how cease-fire policy is related to the specific case of contested territory in Sri Lanka. This research will contribute to the growing literature on state sovereignty and the continued interrogation of state-centric concepts found within political geographic and international relations discourses. By examining the political significance of conceptions of children in modern life and a spatial analysis of the child s role in geopolitical events, this project will contribute to scholarship on children and geography, and it will enhance understandings of children in cross-cultural perspective. The project will provide original material on the initial aspects of the construction of humanitarian space, particularly as a space of diverse organizational interrelations and the goals set by individual actors and in combination. The database established through this project will provide a basis from which to theorize about humanitarian space and address debates involving sovereignty and humanitarian actions, transnational relations, and complex emergencies from both a geographic and an international relations perspective. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc13892 none The study, a collaboration between Skidaway researchers and a group at Texel (NIOZ -Netherlands) will carry out molecular biomarker studies of particulate organic matter (POM) and surface sediments of the Black Sea in order to delineate the distributions of archaeal and bacterial biomarkers, and putatively their source microorganisms. The Black Sea environment is chosen to provide a strongly stratified, yet readily sampled, bioreactor system that is characteristic of anoxic marine basins, past and present. Anaerobic methane oxidation, a globally important but poorly understood process in such systems is of considerable interest, given recent suggestions that archael species may be much more common in oxic and euphotic oceanic environments than previously thought. Membrane lipids, derived from the isoprenoid skeletons of di- and tetraethers, are a diverse group of compounds whose presence provides a useful diagnostic for the presence of thermophilic, psychrophilic and other groups amongst the Archaea. The identification of which archael groups inhabit what microhabitat (oxic, anoxic, hypoxic etc) zones within the water column and underlying sediments is likely to be an important key to the interpretation of other synoptic assessments of their microbial ecology, community structure and function. Lipid measurements, readily made by modern GC, GC-MS and LC-MS techniques, may enhance and extend proposed detailed and exacting genomic probing of these complex microbial systems. Additional insight into carbon cycling and preservation in the Black Sea system will be gained from investigation of the 13C stable isotopic composition of these molecular biological indicators. Such measurements are increasingly made possible by compound specific isotopic analysis (csia) methods. Broader impacts into the study of organic matter cycling in the Black Sea relate to continued definition of the impact of archaeal prokaryotes on the earth s biogeochemical cycles, their role in consuming sedimentary and water column CH4 (which may otherwise be a very important greenhouse gas), use of their lipid biomarkers in reconstructing past climate change, and clues to further specification of their exotic cellular and enzymic biochemistries doc13893 none Marine invertebrate communities on vertical or undercut rock walls often differ dramatically from those on horizontal surfaces. Vertical walls typically harbor high-diversity assemblages of sessile suspension-feeding invertebrates, while horizontal surfaces tend to be dominated by macroalgae. Commonly invoked explanations for this pattern include: 1) Shading, which may slow algal growth and therefore favor invertebrate dominance. 2) Lack of disturbance, particularly predation, on vertical surfaces. 3) Lack of sedimentation on walls, thus freeing suspension feeders from clogged filtration systems. 4) Increased water flow on walls, which may enhance larval recruitment and food supply to suspension feeders. However, the actual roles of these different processes in shaping this ubiquitous pattern have yet to be tested experimentally. This project will investigate the relative importance of shading, predation, and flow in creating differences in community structure and composition between vertical and horizontal surfaces. The main predictions to be tested are: 1) Rich invertebrate animal communities develop on walls due to reduced light levels. This hypothesis will be tested by using neutral-density tinted acrylic to shade horizontal rock surfaces and using mirrors to augment light on vertical surfaces. 2) Predation limits the development of invertebrate communities on horizontal surfaces. This hypothesis will be tested via two separate treatments: removal of sea urchins (major invertebrate predators) from experimental plots, and caging to exclude all predators. 3) Increased water flow facilitates development of invertebrate communities. Flow over horizontal surfaces will be augmented via acrylic baffles mounted above the substratum. Experimental treatments will be executed in all possible combinations to detect the relative importance of each of the processes examined, as well as interactions among processes. All work will be conducted at a field site in Nahant, Massachusetts, in the southern Gulf of Maine. Sessile suspension feeding invertebrates can be very long-lived, and may be keystone habitat modifiers for a diverse marine community. The forces maintaining subtidal rock wall communities have yet to be rigorously examined. This study will provide important insight into the processes that regulate subtidal community structure, and enable prediction of the impact of anthropogenic changes on these processes. The generality of the pattern to be investigated suggests that results may apply to subtidal habitats globally doc13894 none coding technique, and the error-concealment method. 2. Security An adaptive and scalable security protocols: We propose to employ finite-field wavelets to develop novel and innovative public key security techniques that address ubiquity, scalability, mobility, and usability. We propose efficient security protocols for mobile devices with limited processing power. 3. Transport Layer Heterogeneous Packet Flows: We proposetoinvestigate transport protocols that can support a much richer set of semantics, adapting to the reliability semantics chosen by applications on a per-frame basis. Heterogeneous Network Characteristics: We propose to build a single transport protocol that will adapt itself to the characteristics of a variety of wireless network environments. Heterogeneous Network Architectures: We propose to explore transport layer adaptivity to the underlying network model (cellular, peer-to-peer, or hybrid). 4. Network Layer Application Requirements: We will explore network layer constructs that enable heterogeneous applications to implement custom network layer policies. Heterogeneous Network Architectures: We will explore the use of novel state propagation schemes and virtual backbone approaches to enhance transport layer performance and help in adapting to heterogeneous network models. 5. Data Link Layer Rate-compatible error control coding: We develop new types of rate-compatible convolutional codes using finite-field wavelet transforms. The protocol suite requires a new Protocol Suite Integration Plan. The project will consist of four phases. During the first phase we will design the details of all the proposed components protocols methods of the protocol suite. During the second phase we will assess their performance in a simulation testbed. During the third phase we will integrate the individual modules into the suite and finally in the fourth phase we willprototype the proposed protocol suite and we will assess its performance on a physical testbed doc13895 none New initial paleornagrictic results froni ODP Leg 72 estimate the pattern of secular variation for the entire Brunhes Epoch and identi I v 13 Brunhes-aged magnetic field excursions. This is the first data set that allows ~i directional look at secular variations over such a ]on - time interval and a! lows consideration within the framework of excursions and paleointenslt~. Detailed anilysis ol thc individtitif excursion records suggests that there are two basically different types ol, cxcursions, one t\ t~c that is closely related to normal secular variation and another type that nilght he considei Cd an aborted reversal. The project will analyze and s\ nthesize PIVVIOLIS palcornagnetic rcults and make selective new discretesample ineastirements on cleven exci-ii-sions and fh(,iii, contiguous secular variation doc13896 none This award from the Division of Chemistry supports the research of Professor Ahmed Zewail and colleagues at the for continuation of a program of research at the Laboratory for Molecular Science (LMS). The LMS is a multidisciplinary research laboratory for studying fundamental processes in complex molecular systems with atomic scale resolution in both structure and dynamics. The development of time-resolved diffraction and imaging methods represents a major focus for examining structures and their changes with time, both experimentally and theoretically. The research program at the LMS involves several members of the Cal Tech faculty who will collaborate to examine chemical and biological systems exhibiting a wide range of complexity. These faculty come from several disciplinary departments, such as chemistry, physics, biology, and engineering. The Laboratory is equipped with state-of-the-art ultrafast lasers, high-speed computers, biochemical and electrochemical instrumentation, and mass spectrometry. Research topics to be examined include molecular recognition, macromolecular transient structural changes, electrochemical catalysis, nanostructures, and imaging by optical tweezers. Over the last two decades great strides have been made in attaining both spatial and temporal resolution of chemical systems down to the atomic scale. This capability has provided new opportunities for studying molecular structure and dynamics in many disciplines. From the elementary dynamics of reactions and protein folding to the dynamics of molecular assemblies and condensed phases, theory and experiment at the fundamental scale of atomic resolution provides the key to understanding molecular function and materials properties. The field of molecular sciences is in the midst of a revolution, especially at the interface between chemistry and biology, where new experimental tools, such as those being developed and used at the LMS, are used to elucidate the structure and dynamics of complex molecular systems doc13897 none The George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) is a project funded under the National Science Foundation (NSF) Major Research Equipment appropriation. The goal of NEES is to provide a national, networked simulation resource of geographically-distributed, shared use next-generation experimental research equipment sites, with teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities, which will transform the environment for earthquake engineering research and education through collaborative and integrated experimentation, computation, theory, databases, and model-based simulation to improve the seismic design and performance of U.S. civil and mechanical infrastructure systems. NEES will be constructed through September 30, , and then enter its operational period from October 1, through September 30, , during which time it will be operated by a NEES Consortium (to be established). This 39-month, $10,000,000 cooperative agreement with The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, Champaign, Illinois, for the project entitled NEESgrid: A Distributed Virtual Laboratory for Advanced Earthquake Experimentation and Simulation is the outcome of the peer review of proposals submitted to program solicitation NSF 00-7, NEES: System Integration. The NEESgrid project will be led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Champaign, Illinois, in partnership with the University of Chicago, Chicago, llinois; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan; University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California; and TeraScale, LLC, Cedar Crest, New Mexico. This multi-organizational team will design, develop, implement, test, and make operational the Internet-based, national-scale high performance network system for NEES, called NEESgrid in accordance with the NEESgrid Project Execution Plan. NEESgrid will build on proven, existing Grid technology. Its design will integrate existing best practice tools from the commercial and research sectors. NEESgrid will be a layered, modular architecture that is flexible and highly extensible and will enable rapid development of new end-user applications, the introduction of new services, and the integration of new simulation software and experimental facilities as they are developed. NEESgrid will connect, through a high performance Internet network, distributed major earthquake engineering research equipment that includes shake tables, geotechnical centrifuges, a tsunami wave basin, large-scale laboratory experimentation systems, and field experimentation and monitoring installations funded through separate NEES equipment awards made by the NSF NEES program. A dedicated computer system at each experimental facility, called a NEES Point-of-Presence (NEESpop), will enable teleobservation, teleoperation, and network monitoring. Collaborative technologies will enable planning for and teleobservation of experiments as they occur. In addition to providing access for telepresence at the NEES equipment sites, NEESgrid will use cutting-edge tools to link leading edge computational resources and data storage facilities, including a curated repository that will archive experimental and analytical earthquake engineering and related data. NEESgrid also will provide distributed physical and numerical simulation capabilities and resources for visualization of experimental and computed data. NEESgrid support nodes will maintain online knowledge bases that contain tutorials and operate help desks for using NEESgrid. UIUC and its partners will work closely with NEES equipment sites, NEES Consortium Development awardee, NEES Consortium, and the earthquake engineering community to develop the user requirements and performance specifications for NEESgrid design. NEESgrid must be operational by September 30, . During , UIUC will transition operation of NEESgrid to the NEES Consortium for operation by the Consortium starting on October 1, doc13898 none The relationship between new production, organic carbon cycling, and nutrient uptake into coral reef systems is not well understood. Nutrient uptake into experimental coral reef communities has been shown to be mass-transfer limited, or limited by the rate at which nutrients can be physically delivered to the active surfaces of reef autotrophs. A set of simple, mass transfer relationships have been developed to predict uptake of dissolved inorganic nutrients. These relationships were derived from experiments which were conducted in 10-20 m long flumes and under steady, non-oscillatory flow conditions. Drs. Atkinson and Monismith reason that these mass transfer equations are inappropriate for understanding nutrient uptake by shallow-water reef communities in natural reef environments, where wave-drive water motion dominates the surrounding flow field. They have argued with both theoretical and empirical evidence that there should be some enhancement of mass transfer due to oscillatory flow. They emphasize that there are no mass transfer studies with both waves and naturally rough surfaces and that this is a problem unique to the study of benthic ecosystems. The project has three general goals: 1) To understand how waves influence rates of mass transfer to naturally rough surfaces; 2) To determine how waves influence nutrient uptake into reef communities adapted to wave-driven flow environments; 3) To actually demonstrate that waves enhance in situ rates of nutrient uptake by natural reef communities. To achieve these goals, these scientists propose an interlocking set of two lab studies and one field study. The first of these, a laboratory experiment on nutrient uptake by a coral community under both steady and oscillating flow conditions, will be conducted at the HIMB lab on Coconut Island. The second, a detailed study of the fluid mechanics of stress and mass transfer over corals will be carried out at the Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory at Stanford. Finally, to test the application of the lab results, a series of field experiments will be carried out to determine whether rates of nutrient uptake by natural reef communities under wave-driven flow conditions are positively correlated with incident wave energy, and, to determine whether these rates scale with estimates of bottom shear stress according to mass transfer correlations derived from laboratory experiments. Results of these experiments will give us the quantitative basis to determine the spatial variability in rates of nutrient uptake into reef communities, and to promote an understanding of how the dynamic physical environment typical of reef communities may be defining their metabolism doc13899 none Although many catastrophic events like earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes may be characterized as natural disasters, the amount of devastation associated with such events often is as much a product of the people and human landscapes where they occur as the natural forces themselves. This is especially true if one tries to consider the risks associated with natural hazards. This doctoral dissertation research project will develop an integrative methodology for the analysis of the ecology of urban earthquake risks based on the techniques of remote sensing, geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial analysis. The research is guided by a conceptual framework that takes a human ecological perspective and suggests the use of the built and natural environments as contextual filters to understand social processes associated with urban earthquake disasters. The major thrust of the research is oriented toward the exploration of the utility of remote sensing and GIS techniques in identifying urban land-cover attributes that are strongly associated with high and low levels of social vulnerability to earthquake hazards. The research will test the hypothesis that social vulnerability is reflected in the characteristics of the spatial structure of the urban neighborhoods that various population groups occupy, such as geographic conditions, the form and development of settlements, and structure of open spaces. Many of these characteristics are physically represented by certain urban land-cover attributes, such as constructions materials and soil types, thus providing a means of measuring the relative importance of such characteristics through the use of remote sensing and GIS. The basic hypothesis of this research will be tested in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, a dynamic, data-rich urban region which was affected in by a major earthquake disaster. The research plan consists of three interrelated tasks. First, a GIS prototype will be developed using a set of measures for assessing vulnerability in the contemporary urban realm of American cities without the inclusion of remotely sensed variables. Second, the utility of remote sensing imagery will be demonstrated using data collected before the earthquake event. These data will provide spatially explicit variables regarding land-cover attributes associated with variations of social vulnerability in the study sites. The third task will consist of a test of the validity of the remotely sensed variables by re-assessing vulnerability in the study sites based exclusively on such variables. The results of the first and third tasks will be compared and validated against reported damage figures from the earthquake disaster. The motivation for this project comes from the desire to develop an empirical base for a flexible approach to vulnerability analysis that can balance two competing demands. The first need is to improve the understanding of the linkage among various contextual and social factors that produce vulnerability patterns. The second is the need for offering a practical way for planners and decision makers undertaking local mitigation efforts to generate concrete profiles of vulnerable communities and to monitor changes in these profiles. The broader contributions of this project therefore are both theoretical and empirical. From a theoretical perspective, the research will contribute to hazard research by answering questions regarding the ecology of earthquake risk and how differential social vulnerability is connected to variations in the physical settings of urban areas. From an empirical viewpoint, the product of this project will contribute to hazard mitigation efforts by providing decision makers with tools for exploring patterns of vulnerability and hence for implementing policies in a manner that fulfills the needs of sustainable hazard mitigation. The methods employed offer a model of how to translate the technology for assessing vulnerability into procedures for easy use by local governments, which can increase the effectiveness of locally applied measures that could prevent earthquake hazards from becoming major human disasters. The techniques in question are relatively low-cost and therefore the approach could suitably be modified to save lives in other developed and developing countries. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc13900 none Proposal Lindy Biggs, Auburn University The Factory and the Child Labor Question in Early Industrial Britain: A Study in Technology and Change This project examines a debate in late 18th and early 19th century England concerning, apparently, the labor of children in the nation s cotton textile factories. In fact, the aim of this project is to show that, at a deeper level, the debate was about the shifting social and moral economy that resulted from industrialization. It is a story of men seeking profit through new technology and the conflicts they encountered. It is at the same time about fundamental social and cultural change. The project grows from an interest in the way technology participates in peoples lives; how it shapes the way we live and think and view the world. The project describes the needs of a new technological system and the way they reshaped life in British society. The intensity of the conflict over the factory and its technology was possible because technology could be questioned at this time, before new technology came to be viewed as a panacea and equivalent to progress. This story provides a unique look into a society debating its technological future. This is a book-length study of the early British textile factory and its impact on political and social ideologies. It sees the transition to an industrial society as social, cultural, and political history rather than economic. It seeks to develop a social geography of the factory, describing the factory building, its machines and their operations, the work force and the work culture, and its impact on local culture. And it explores the wide-ranging discourse all levels of British society about the nature of the factory and the morality of child factory workers. The discourse has to be examined in the context of broad changes in British social and political ideology, particularly the laws regarding the treatment of the poor. A cry arose at the end of the eighteenth century in England to regulate the employment of children in cotton textile mills. Manchester physicians had traced epidemic disease to the cotton spinning mill of Robert Peel, where children, who had been purchased as isparish apprentices from London orphanages, worked under unhealthful conditions. These physicians began the child labor reform movement when they wrote letters to Parliament requesting government attention. The concern over child labor grew over the next decades until it became a prominent and highly emotional reform debate. Many groups had an interest in shaping the laws regulating child labor because those laws also regulated the factory and manufacturing. The stakes were high indeed, for whoever controlled the use and regulation of the factory would have a major role in shaping the future moral and economic order of the country. The intensity of debate suggests that the stakeholders were aware of the potential consequences of the outcome doc13901 none Interactive Multimodal Interfaces: Designing for Human Performance This is a creativity extension to the PI s continuing award. The PI plans to conduct a study involving mobile testing of her multimodal system. Subjects will be a mixture of adults and 7-to-9-year-old children. The goals include: (1) establishing the full research infrastructure needed to support extensive mobile testing and semi-automated data analysis; (2) documenting mutual disambiguation during mobile testing of a multimodal system, and studying the factors associated with its enhancement; (3) examining the relation between system recognition performance in a mobile environment and users signal characteristics, ambient noise levels, and signal-to-noise ratio information; and (4) exploring mobile speech signal patterns and system recognition performance in diverse user groups. The study will provide critical information about multimodal interface designs appropriate for supporting robust mobile use in real-world contexts and by varied users, and in particular for creating adaptive multimodal architectures that are capable of monitoring the environment on a command-by-command basis and adapting mode weights intelligently to avoid recognition failure and stabilize system performance. The data collected during the use of the PI s mobile system will assist in identifying a variety of new research issues and interface design challenges that have neither been recognized nor probed by the broader research community doc13902 none A numerical modeling study of short internal waves and their approach to dissipation (through breaking) and mixing in the presence of longer waves is proposed. Important processes, which will be studied, include: refraction by steady shear, refraction by the vertical divergence of the background flows, interactions amongst short waves, phase-group interactions, ray convergence divergence, and short-wave induced mean flows. The PIs will develop a variety of different numerical codes to attack these problems. The level of intensity with which they approach each problem will be adaptive and depend upon ongoing developments within their research program doc13903 none Lea Funds are provided for the PI to continue his work on linked Mg Ca paleothermometry and Delta 0-18 in planktic foraminifera to further the understanding of climate variability in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans on millennial and orbital time scales using four cores from Ceara Rise, Cariaco Basin, Galapagos Platform and Carnegie Ridge. The PI will deconvolve the temperature and salinity paleorecords in the tropical western Atlantic and eastern Pacific by measuring the Mg Ca and d18-0 in foraminifera from these four sites. The PI also hopes that the results of the proposed research will enable him to address issues related to the Pacific-Atlantic salinity differences on millennial. and orbital time scales doc13904 none As the demand for error-free data transmission and data storage increases, error control becomes increasingly important in data communication and data storage systems. It has become an integral part in almost every data communication or storage system design. Today very sophisticated error control schemes are being used in a broad range of communication and data storage systems to achieve reliable data transmission and storage, such as wireless communication, satellite communication, optical communication, hard disc drives, compact disks and many others. The objective of this research is to devise methods for constructing good error control codes and to develop efficient error control schemes which have great potential to achieve error-free communication and data storage for the future generation of data communication and storage systems. Recently, there have been dramatic developments in error control codes and decoding algorithms. Two families of powerful codes, known as turbo and low density parity check (lDPC) codes, have been discovered and rediscovered. These two families of codes with iterative decoding have been shown to perform close to Shannon s theoretical limits with reasonable implementation complexity. As a result of their amazing error performance and practical implementation, it is anticipated that these two classes of codes will have an enormous impact on virtually all applications of error control coding over the next 10 years or so. This research involves in two important aspects of these two classes of Shannon limit approaching codes: construction of LDPC codes and turbo decoding of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes. The construction of LDPC codes is based on combinatoric appraches, such as finite geometries over finite fields, statistical experimental designs, permutation groups and graphs. In these approaches, points, lines, hyperplanes in finite geometries, balanced incomplete block designs, affine permutation groups, and paths and independent sets of graphs are used for constructing LDPC codes whose Tanner graphs do not contain short cycles. All the construction methods are systematic and codes constructed have good structural properties which simplify encoding and decoding implementations. Turbo decoding of a RS code is based on binary decomposition of the code into a set of simple binary component codes and formulating the code as a self concatenated code with the RS code itself as the outer code and the component codes as inner codes in a turbo coding arrangement. The decoding is carried out in two stages, turbo inner decoding and outer algebraic soft-decision decoding doc13905 none The source functions and geochemical pathways of 26Al (half-life 0.72 My) and 10Be (1.5 My) in the sea are closely linked. These radioisotopes, produced mainly by the interaction of cosmic rays with the atmospheric constituents, enter the ocean via wet and dry fallout with a nearly constant ratio and deposit to the seafloor through particle scavenging. The scavenging time of 10Be is comparable to the ocean mixing time of ~103 years,but that of 26Al is about 30 times shorter. As a consequence, 10Be is more readily transported to areas of high particle flux or high productivity such as ocean margins, where the deposition ratio of 10Be 26Al becomes much higher than their production ratio. These features -relatively stable source function, constant production ratio,and high particle reactivity with differential removal -render the two nuclides as a pair suitable for tracing geochemical and geophysical processes. In this project, researchers at the University of Southern California will evaluate the utility of the 10Be 26Al ratio in sediments as a proxy for paleo-particle flux or paleoproductivity, and the use of the 3He 26Al ratio in sediment cores to probe the factors affecting the flux of earth-bound interplanetary dust particles (IDP) and its variation with time. Measurements of 10Be and 26Al will be carried out on samples of seawater, sediment-trap material, and sediment, and of 3He in sediment cores. Measurements of U-Th isotopes, 27Al, 9Be, opal, carbonates and other chemical components will also be made on sediment trap and sediment samples. Data so obtained will be used to study the spatial and temporal variations in the distribution and flux of 10Be and 26Al and the mechanisms causing the variations. The influence of particle composition and remineralization on the sedimentary 10Be 26Al signals will be investigated to constrain better the 10Be 26Al proxy which will be applied to sediment cores from the equatorial Pacific and the Antarctic to provide an understanding of the productivity changes in areas characterized by high-nutrients and low-chlorophyll of the surface water. Past variations in IDP will be examined by the coupled measurements of 3He 26Al and 3He 230Th in sediment cores doc13906 none In the face of the climate change treaty being negotiated under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, oil corporations have responded differently. Some have expressed support for the climate change treaty, while most have challenged climate change science and lobbied against mandated carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emission reductions. Understanding this split in business views on the climate debates offers insights into the importance of transnational organizations for international politics, and into the role of non-state actors in negotiating international treaties among governments. Using qualitative data on four oil corporations, and quantitative data on the 50 largest oil corporations, the project thus addresses four questions: 1) what climate strategies have the oil corporations pursued, 2) what factors have accounted for differences in strategies, 3) how have the oil corporations responded to advocacy efforts of environmentalists, and 4) how has the split in the oil industry affected the progress and outcomes of the climate change negotiations doc13907 none Making Dysarthric Speech Intelligible This is the first year funding of a three year continuing award. Of the 2.5 million or more adult Americans with significant disability due to chronic neurologic impairment, a large percentage present with dysarthria, or speech impairment, as one of their disabling conditions, and there are no known cures. Dysarthric individuals report loss of employment, educational opportunities, social integration, and quality of life. Despite some strategies for compensating, the isolation caused by communication impairment is pervasive. In this project, the PI will develop new algorithms that, when implemented in wearable devices, will enable dysarthric individuals to be more easily understood. Currently available devices are essentially (digital or analog) spectral filters and amplifiers that enhance certain parts of the spectrum. While these can help certain types of dysarthria, many dysarthric persons suffer from speech problems that require forms of speech modification that are much more profound and complex such as: irregular sub-glottal pressure, resulting in loudness bursts that can be difficult to adjust to; absence, or poor control, of voicing; systematic mispronunciation of certain phoneme groups, resulting in certain sounds becoming indistinguishable or unrecognizable; variable mispronunciation; and poor prosody (pitch control, timing, and loudness). For these difficult problems, new approaches are needed that do not merely filter the speech signal but analyze it at acoustic, articulatory, phonetic, and linguistic levels. These approaches can be combined to generate an output speech signal that, while preserving certain features of the input speech, modifies the input speech along as many dimensions as is needed to achieve intelligibility. The past decade has seen a revolution in speech technology that can be applied to these problems; while little of the currently developed technologies are in their present form applicable to dysarthria, the underlying algorithms can form a basis for the creation of innovative techniques that are specifically targeted to address these more difficult speech problems. The PI will create these technologies in a diagnostic framework, so that the appropriate technology is used for a given type of dysarthria. The results will be of great value for dysarthric individuals; the scientific challenges are formidable, and meeting them will produce insights that will be broadly useful for other speech technologies as well doc13856 none While previous studies in the Atlantic Ocean and Arabian Sea have documented a direct relationship between atmospheric dust deposition and reactive trace element additions to surface waters, little is known about the effect that the Asian dust plume has on the distribution of reactive trace elements in surface waters of the western North Pacific. For this reason, PIs from the University of Hawaii, Old Dominion University and Florida State University will participate in a cruise to the central and western North Pacific during April May , a time period coincident with maximum Asian dust over that region. During this cruise the following four research objectives will be addressed: (1) quantify the areal extent and concentration of atmospheric dust in this region using dissolved Al concentrations in surface water samples and compare results with estimates obtained during field studies carried out as part of the ACE-ASIA program in , as well as historical deposition models; (2) compare the solubility of bioactive trace metals in aerosols and rainwater along with their concentration and distribution in surface water samples versus Al values to assess the role that atmospheric deposition has in controlling altering the upper ocean biogeochemical cycles of these elements; (3) ascertain the magnitude and pathways via which atmospheric inputs get incorporated into the thermocline and central waters of the North Pacific; and (4) provide baseline concentrations for trace metals. The PIs will collect surface samples while underway by pumping water onto the ship through a Teflon-lined, polyethylene tube mounted on a modified bathythermograph and vertical profiles at 8 stations that will encompass the key hydrographic regimes of the area. Samples (total, particulate, dissolved, colloidal) will be analyzed for the metals Ag, Al, Cd, Cu, Co, Fe, Mn, Ni, Pb, Zn and the metalloids As, Sb, Se. Aerosols and rainfall samples also will be collected and analyzed for metals major ions and metals metalloids, respectively. In addition, selected samples also will be analyzed for nutrients, salinity, oxygen, chlorophyll a, particulate organic carbon, particulate organic nitrogen, particulate organic sulfur, dissolved organic carbon and dissolved organic nitrogen doc13909 none Lukas This project focuses on observing and understanding ocean-climate related processes in the North pacific subtropical gyre by conducting two additional year of hydrographic sampling at the Hawaiian Ocean Time-Series (HOT) to extend the record to 15 years. This work also support the biogeochemistry research component of HOT. The analysis of the time series will seek to improve our description of ocean climate variability by combining observation from HOT with numerical models to understand the causes of this variability. In particular, the subduction process at the subtropical front will be studied in relation to water mass variability observed at the HOT site, including surface layer variations due to air-sea interactions. This project will also contribute to the Climate Variability and Predictability (CLIVAR) Program doc13910 none In this project, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will develop a technique independent of sediment traps for determining particle flux throughout the oceanic water column. It is based on the known rate of production of 230Th and 231Pa from decay of U isotopes dissolved in seawater and is similar in concept to the use of 234Th to determine export flux from the euphotic zone. Particles of various size ranges will be sampled by large- volume ( - liters), in-situ filtration and analyzed for the two radionuclides and for their major components (organic matter, carbonate, opal, aluminosilicate). The whole water column will be sampled, but a major emphasis will be on remineralization of organic matter in the mesopelagic zone (~150 - m), where there is a large decrease of the flux with depth but where direct measurement of the flux with sediment traps is difficult and subject to large errors. The Hawaii Ocean Time-series (HOT) Station ALOHA is the site chosen for this initial study because it is remote from the complicating effects of ocean margins and because of the logistical ease and the supporting data provided by the ongoing time-series program. The proposed method is made feasible by the recent development of high-sensitivity analytical methods for measurement of 230Th and 231Pa in small samples by inductively-coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). If the concept proves in this project to be successful, the method could be applied to other oceanic areas and could be extended to a variety of specific elements and compounds doc13911 none As the volume of migration of people from one nation to another has increased around the globe, an equally significant facet of global economic transactions has become the remittance of funds from those who have emigrated to those who have been left behind. This is especially true in poorer nations, including those states whose state-run economies have not performed as well as market-based economies in other nations. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine the hypothesis that remittances sent to Cubans from relatives abroad play the positive role in Cuba of allowing their recipients to maintain an acceptable basic standard of living, thereby enabling them to continue to maintain their participation in relatively low-paying professional occupations. Studies of the rise of the informal economy have suggested that participation in the informal economy has increased during the time of transition from socialist to market economies. The opportunity to earn more money in this sector attracts workers to leave their trained profession to work in the informal economy. Do remittances play an important countervailing role? No previous studies have provided data regarding the ways that remittances may affect the motivation and actual participation in the informal economy. The project will combine a quantitative survey of 300 households followed by intensive in-depth personal interviews and household budgets for 15 households. The data will be used to test the links between the receipt of a steady and significant flow of remittances and type of employment. The research will provide new insights and information regarding the potential for informal activities to draw away professionals from their occupations and lower the use of human capital in Cuban society and transitional socialist societies in general. Whereas other studies have argued that increased participation in the informal economy has been detrimental to the process of transformation from a socialist to a mixed market economy, this study will shed light on what motivates individuals to engage in or withdraw from the informal economy and where individuals place their primary occupational emphasis. The research also will broaden scholarly contacts with Cuba and facilitate future research in a nation that previously has been inaccessible for most U.S. researchers. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc13912 none Seible This award provides funding to the University of California, San Diego to conduct a national earthquake engineering research equipment workshop for the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES). NEES is a project funded under the National Science Foundation (NSF) Major Research Equipment program and has been authorized by Congress for $81.9 million during FY -FY . In February , NSF announced the NEES Earthquake Engineering Research Equipment Portfolio, Phase 1, consisting of eleven awards to ten institutions for $45 million. These eleven awards include new and upgraded shake tables, upgraded centrifuges, an upgraded wave basin for tsunami research, large-scale laboratory experimentation systems, and geotechnical and structural earthquake engineering field equipment. These equipment sites will be part of the NEES collaboratory and serve as national, shared-use earthquake engineering experimental research equipment installations, with teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities, networked together through the high performance Internet. In addition to providing access for telepresence at the NEES equipment sites, the network will use cutting-edge tools to link high performance computational and data storage facilities, including a curated repository for experimental and analytical earthquake engineering and related data. The network will also provide distributed physical and numerical simulation capabilities and resources for visualization of experimental and computed data. Through NEES, the earthquake engineering community will use these advanced experimental capabilities to test and validate more complex and comprehensive analytical and computer numerical models that will improve the seismic design and performance of our Nation s civil and mechanical systems. NSF intends to issue a Phase 2 program solicitation during to complete the NEES Equipment Portfolio. The purpose of this workshop is to bring the earthquake engineering community together to (a) summarize the NEES Equipment Portfolio, Phase 1, (b) assess other existing earthquake engineering facilities equipment available in the United States, (c) identify possible missing components of the NEES Equipment Portfolio, Phase 1, and (d) recommend strategies to complete the NEES Equipment Portfolio during Phase 2. The earthquake engineering community can participate in this workshop via input on the web prior to the workshop and or through attendance at the workshop. A report summarizing the recommendations from this workshop will be posted on the web for broad dissemination doc13913 none The goals of this proposed study are to better understand the behavior of platinum group elements (PGEs) during dehydration of the downgoing slab and flux melting of the mantle wedge above it. What are the parent-daughter fractionations that occur and how do these contribute to creation of mantle heterogeneities. Since the Tonga-Lau basin system is intraoceanic, the complications due to continental crust can be avoided. Analyses of Re, PGEs and Os isotopes plus 0 and S isotopes will be done for existing ODP samples from the Tonga system and old Pacific crust that have been characterized for other trace elements and isotope systems. Having a well-characterized suite of representative samples should allow an assessment of the relative contributions of subducted sediments, altered ocean crust, and the mantle wedge in arc and back arc volcanic rocks doc13914 none This project is a second-generation analysis of the ICEMELT and HOTSPOT data sets that will focus on four areas where additional work could lead to a fundamental new understanding of plume dynamics and plume-ridge interactions at Iceland. This work will (1) determine seismic velocity structure in the crust and uppermost mantle, (2) constrain upper mantle flow from mantle anisotropy, (3) improve mantle velocity structures by application of advanced methods, and (4) integrate seismic and geodynamic models doc13915 none Information about the species of the earth resides in a wide variety of databases scattered over the earth. Four institutions that each support environmental and species information across many taxa will do a feasibility study on the development of software tools that will enable cross platform querying and virtual integration of the data. The team will use common data exchange standards to insure the broad utility of their developed software. The consortium will develop this prototype infrastructure framework for retrieving and disseminating comprehensive information on species of the world. This prototype can then be extended to other species related data resources and may form the basis for future development of a widely accepted standard for species data exchange. All of the documents generated will be available on the Species web site doc13916 none of ; Physical and Chemical constraints on fluxes at LExEn and proposed ODP sites in the Gulf of Mexico The proposed project will focus on unraveling the dynamics of the gas hydrate reservoir at and between moderate and high flux sites. Through 1.) direct measurement of fluid flux with osmotic flux meters, 2) acquisition of high resolution heat flow data, 3) use of porewater and solid-phase proxies for gas flux and 4) imaging of flux conduits with high-resolution, deep-tow Chirp profiles, the study will constrain spatial and temporal variations in fluxes critical to the formation and long-term stability of gas hydrates. The results provide a test of the hypothesis that quantifiable spatial variations in energy, fluid and gas flux are related to observable changes in the distribution of free gas and gas hydrate. The study sites coincide with two sites chosen for focused microbiological research as part of an NSF funded Life in Extreme Environments project. The study sites also coincide with two sites proposed for Gulf of Mexico gas hydrates drilling and the project will provide additional site survey data for the proposed drilling doc13917 none This project organizes efforts to study patterns of human health in Europe over the past several millennia using skeletal remains, which are the most complete and useful source of information about the distant past, containing information on nutrition and physical growth during childhood as well as processes of degeneration associated with aging, including dental decay and degenerative joint disease. Health and nutrition were driving forces in social, political and economic change that ultimately contributed to the rise and fall of civilizations. Research on prehistoric and historic skeletons also advances understanding of various modern medical problems because numerous modern diseases evolved with humans, adapting to people living in proximity to one another and to animals in a wide variety of ecological environments. The workshop will bring 20 to 25 scholars to Ohio State University, including physical anthropologists, archaeologists, economists, climate historians and historians. They will plan a research agenda by first discussing details of preparing a large database that documents the long-term evolution of health in Europe. They will also formulate a plan for integrating and skeletal information with climatic, ecological, archaeological and historical data in the study of health patterns and their determinants. Europe is chosen as a starting point as it has the richest source of other historical information. These efforts will lead to submission of a large grant proposal that will provide funding to actually conduct the research. The research results will be distributed to the public through books, journal publications, conferences, and via the Internet doc13918 none The meeting of the Eukaryotic DNA Replication biennial conference will be held September 5 - 9, , at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The meeting will be devoted to fundamental research topics related to chromosome duplication and structure and function, and will include important topics of biological research in the areas of cell cycle and growth control, DNA replication, replication-associated gene regulation, and genome amplification. The need for this meeting is evidenced by the rapid advances made in this field over recent years. The meeting will ensure that recent results will be communicated and discussed in an atmosphere conducive to the open, lively, and productive exchange of ideas. The participation of younger investigators and women scientists will be encouraged. The areas to be covered by the meeting will include studies on the following: (1) The replication of virus chromosomes, including SV40, polyomavirus, cytomegalovirus, herpesvirus, papillomaviruses, and Epstein-Barr virus (2) Chromosomal replication and gene amplification in organisms as diverse as yeast, Drosophila, Xenopus and mammalian cells (3) Control of DNA replication in the cell cycle (4) Structure and function of chromosomal elements such as origins of replication and telomeres (5) Control of cell cycle progression and S phase specific gene expression (6) DNA replication checkpoints and DNA repair. DNA replication is an essential process in all organisms. This meeting will help disseminate current research findings on this vital topic and will stimulate and facilitate further advances. The financial support provided by the National Science Foundation will enable students, postdoctoral fellows, and young investigators to attend this important meeting doc13919 none SES 01- Joseph E. Taylor III, Department of History, Iowa State University Pilgrims of the Vertical: Recreational Technology, Consumerism, and Nature This project examines the innovation, production, and uses of recreational technology through a history of modern rock climbing in Yosemite National Park. Yosemite Valley has been a principal site for developing climbing technology and techniques during the 20th century, and locals became leading innovators in the sport in order to solve challenges presented by the local environment. Climbers placed a premium on avoiding permanent anchors, reducing weight, and minimizing erosion, but these were not necessarily mutually compatible demands. Gear designers (ranging from highly educated individuals such as Sierra Club President Dick Leonard and Cal-Tech engineer Charles Wilts to vagabond blacksmiths such as John Salathea nd Yvon Chouinard) used a wide array of materials from found objects such as construction anchors, cast iron stove legs, and car axles, to the newest breakthroughs in nylon, metal alloys, and space-age materials such as Kevlar. Some products became standard climbing tools, others were soon forgotten, but all contained social, cultural, and environmental consequences that were neither expected nor desired. A history of rock climbing in Yosemite will reveal critical lessons about recreation, consumerism, and environmentalism in modern society. The research strategy for this portion of a larger project on the environmental history of Yosemite Valley rock climbing focuses on inspecting public archives and private collections in California, Oregon, Washington, and Colorado. The PI has already identified many important innovators, including: Leonard, Raffi Bedayan, Salathe, Wilts, Frank Tarver, Chouinard, Tom Frost, William Feuerer, Edward Leeper, Steve Komito, Jim Bridwell, Jeffrey Lowe, and Raymond Jardine. Relevant archival records for these people exist at the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford University; ; the University of Oregon; the University of Washington, Seattle; and the University of Colorado, Boulder. Important business and correspondence records for merchants and climbers are located around the western states, and owners of some documents will allow access. The research is to be conducted during the summer break doc13920 none This project investigates the ways in which public culture promoted technological change in Britain and Germany from the late nineteenth century to the end of World War II. While a Visiting Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, Dr. Rieger is gathering archival material for a comparative monograph detailing similarities and differences between British and German debates about processes of innovation. This project identifies similarities alongside national differences evident in the ways in which public discussions about technology worked to create cultural climates conducive to innovation in Britain and Germany between the s and the end of World War II. In his treatment of how enthusiasm for, and unease about, innovative technologies interacted during this period, the principal investigator studies the intersecting debates about the following five technologies: aviation, passenger shipping, the motor car, photography, and film. Drawing on pictorial and textual evidence, this inquiry approaches public debates about technological change as productions of knowledge which ascribed meaning to artifacts whose workings most contemporaries were unable to understand. Public debates about the new modern wonders that continually appeared on the scene were torn between fears of novel risks and cultural decay on the one side, and passionate support generated by nationalism and social fantasies on the other. While investigating the links between public technophobia and euphoria, the impact of liberal and illiberal ideologies in Britain and Germany requires particular attention in order to uncover the cultural and political mechanisms behind the political appropriation of technological innovations. Thus, this comparative study takes the cultural history of British and German technology beyond the currently dominant inquiries into productivism or into contemporary philosophical debates about the question of technology (Friedrich Dessauer). Instead, Rieger advances a comprehensive explanation for the varying reasons why British and German public culture promoted technological innovation between and doc13921 none This exploratory research focuses on time sensitive data and field research related to the Gujarat, India Earthquake of 26 January . The severity of this earthquake and the magnitude of the losses in lives and property render it an important case study in seismic risk mitigation. The research will focus on how different types of information technology are used in mobilizing disater response and the extent to which each increases or decreases the efficiency in inter-organizational response to disaster. The broader implications of this research are the foundations it lays for developing and practically implementing sound models of mitigation and inter-organizational learning to contain the cost of natural disasters in both lives and property. The results of this research will be used to develop a preliminary decision support model, which links knowledge to action at the first line of response - the community. The proposed field research will be carried out within an interdisciplinary, international reconnaissance team, organized by the Western Seismic Safety Institute and the Earthquakes in Megacities Initiative involving researchers from different disciplines and nations. Thus another outcome of the research will be an expanded global network of hazards researchers. Three different types of data will be collected: 1) interviews with public, private, and nonprofit organizations will yield information on the types of information technologies use during the hazard response; how well those technologies met their needs; and areas of improvement will be identified; 2) Global Positioning Systems (GPS) data will be collected to locate major disaster sites to identify primary locations and types of information infrastructures that were used to mobilize the response; and 3) documentary data will be collected regarding the disaster operations process. Based on these data, a map of information flows between the organizations will be generated. The GPS data will be used to develop a GIS map. A final report will be generated and submitted to the NSF doc13922 none This proposal requests support to test new observations indicating that the current model for deep water circulation patterns and structure derived from studies of the last glacial maximum are not typical of most Pleistocene glacial intervals. Preliminary results suggest that, in contrast to the established conveyor belt model, Labrador Sea Water (LSW) and Norwegian Sea Overflow Water (NSOW) continued to form albeit with different d13C signatures during many Pleistocene glacials. The concept will be tested by developing multiproxy data sets forming depth transects of the North Atlantic at three time intervals to map conditions at different depths and between sediment drift sites (path of NSOW) and non-sediment drift sites (path of LSW doc13923 none There is increasing experimental evidence suggesting that extracellular and intracellular mechanical forces have a profound influence on a wide range of cell behavior. They include growth, differentiation, apoptosis. gene expression, adhesion and signal transduction. Thus it is important to understand how the mechanical forces are transmitted into the cell and what corresponding molecular changes do they initiate, and how do cells exhibit such changes. Although advances have been made towards understanding such questions, a significant challenge remains- quantitative evaluation of cell force response at a cellular and subcellular level. In the engineering world, a revolution is underway through miniaturization of mechanical components, giving rise to the field of micro electro mechanical systems (MEMS). Our (UIUC and Harvard Medical School) preliminary experiments with bio-MEMS sensors show that local mechanical deformation can be applied on single cells and embryos, and their force response can be measured quantitatively. The experiments have demonstrated the potential of a new class of microinstruments that may lead to fundamental breakthroughs in the understanding of cellular mechanics, mechanotransduction, tissue engineering, drug discovery and cancer research. Professor Donald Ingber of Harvard Medical school will serve as the consultant to this project. The project is highly multidisciplinary. It merges micro systems engineering with cellular biology. The engineering students will gain extensive experience with cell culture, cell manipulation, advanced imaging of cytoskeletal structures using florescenece techniques, as well as micro fabrication and micro mechanics. Interesting experimental results from the project will be presented to undergraduate students in mechanical engineering and biology. Videos of experiments with Bio-MEMS will also be presented to the University High School on UIUC campus - a current project of the P1 supported by NSF through REU program doc13922 none This proposal requests support to test new observations indicating that the current model for deep water circulation patterns and structure derived from studies of the last glacial maximum are not typical of most Pleistocene glacial intervals. Preliminary results suggest that, in contrast to the established conveyor belt model, Labrador Sea Water (LSW) and Norwegian Sea Overflow Water (NSOW) continued to form albeit with different d13C signatures during many Pleistocene glacials. The concept will be tested by developing multiproxy data sets forming depth transects of the North Atlantic at three time intervals to map conditions at different depths and between sediment drift sites (path of NSOW) and non-sediment drift sites (path of LSW doc13925 none This award establishes a Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology at Rice University. The Center will foster the development of nanotechnology through an integrated set of programs that aim to address the scientific, technological, environmental, human resource, commercialization issues. The Center s research program is organized under three themes: (1) wet nanoscience integrating biology and nanochemistry; (2) nanomaterials in bioengineering; and (3) environmental applications, origin and impacts of nanostructured materials. Fundamental questions concerning how in organic materials interact with biochemical and cellular processes will be investigated. The research will also address the applications of nanomaterials to biomedical and environmental problems. The Center will work in collaboration with industry and government laboratories in developing bench-top and pilot scale proof-of-concept testbeds. A multi-user nanoparticle fabrication facility will be established with state-of-the art instrumentation. The research outreach will include the University of Texas Health Science Center and Geoscience and Environmental Laboratory of CNRS, France. The Center will foster nanoscience and engineering education by implementing course modules for upper level undergraduates, publication of a new textbook, and creating of an interactive web page. The education outreach activities will include training of middle and high school teachers in nanoscience and engineering. The Center will offer lectures and tutoring, experience in research laboratories and a sabbatical semester to focus on integrating their experiences into their teaching. The industrial affiliate program will enable member companies to send their senior scientists to the Center for research residency and tutorial courses. The Center will offer a year-long team taught graduate course on entrepreneurship in nanotechnology doc13926 none PROJECT Serrell and Associates requests an 18-month grant to conduct research that seeks a valid and reliable way for museum professionals to judge the excellence of science exhibitions in museums from a visitor-experience point of view. This is a novel and untested idea for practitioners of exhibition development in science museums. The need for this research arises from a lack of agreed-upon standards of excellence (or even competence) for science museum exhibitions. Museums that receive funding from the National Science Foundation are called upon to document the effectiveness and merit of their exhibit projects, yet they have few shared, standardized methods to help them do so. This grant would allow Serrell and Associates to conduct a series of meetings with local (Chicago) museum professionals and a national advisory panel to facilitate the development and testing of an audience-based, peer-reviewed criteria for recognizing excellence through empirical definition and exemplars. The research question for this project is: If different museum officials used the same set of standards to visit, review and judge the same group of exhibitions, would their ratings agree on the degree of excellence for each of the exhibitions? The proposed research methods will be informed by the science education research of John R. Frederiksen (University of California at Berkeley and the Educational Testing Service, California) who has developed techniques and criteria for performance evaluation of science teaching. His scoring methods incorporate direct and positive ways in which assessment can be used to improve science teaching. There are very clear parallels between Frederiksen s assessment techniques for science educators and the goals of this project for science museum exhibit developers. These include, but are not limited to: practitioner-developed and practitioner-trained criteria; criteria based upon a combination of ground-up and top-down theories; content-free, intention-free criteria; and criteria that benefit the process, the product and measurement of the impacts. The long-term goal of this research is to improve the quality of visitors experiences in science museum exhibitions doc13927 none The deeply dissected terrain of extreme northwestern Kansas and adjacent parts of Colorado and Nebraska is known regionally as The Breaks. This rugged terrain has developed as the North Fork Republican River and its tributaries have eroded their way into loess, which is wind-deposited silt. Although The Breaks of Cheyenne County, Kansas provides a striking example of this process, with gullies extending as much as 100 meters below the upland surface and sufficient stratigraphic expression for detailed investigation, this dissection is by no means unique. The rapid but episodic change evident in gully systems throughout the Great Plains necessitates a study of their history and factors that control their growth. This doctoral dissertation research project aims to ascertain the role of climate in the development of The Breaks. The first task will be to decipher the spatial distribution and temporal patterns of canyon development. From this, a model using a geographic information system (GIS) and containing the information about the morphology of current gullies and the primary and reworked loess stratigraphy will be used to reconstruct gully cut and fill events. The second task will then be to correlate and compare the temporal record of gully development and canyon growth to local and regional records of paleoclimatic proxies. Preliminary radiocarbon data suggest that the region experienced widespread stability from the late Pleistocene to about 9,000 years ago, after which gully activity accelerated. Paleoenvironmental data derived from the rock magnetic, stable carbon isotopic, and trace element signatures of the loess stratigraphy will be applied to support and enhance existing knowledge of the environmental history of the central Great Plains, while radiocarbon and optically-stimulated luminescence dating will provide absolute time control. Grasslands have a greater capacity than other biomes to respond to changes in rainfall regime associated with climate change. Since northwest Kansas has remained grassland throughout the climatic changes of the late Pleistocene and Holocene, and loess accumulation during that time has recorded those changes, the region is ideal for a paleoclimatic study. In light of global circulation model predictions of greenhouse warming and increasing aridity in the central Great Plains, better understanding of the role of climate in landscape evolution is necessary to aid in the planning and response of agricultural activity. Better understanding of the relationships between climatic change and gully erosion also has significant practical implications, because loess-based soils currently produce at least 20 percent of the world s wheat supply and significant contributions of other grain crops. Within the study region, the undissected uplands are used for dryland winter wheat production and cattle feed grains, whereas cattle grazing is the dominant activity in the gullied canyon terrain. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc13928 none Hurtado, Hill Throughout South America, indigenous communities are less economically prosperous and more vulnerable to infectious diseases than are neighboring rural peasant non-indigenous communities. Little is known about the extent to which economic prosperity is affected by the health status of adults in diverse rural communities. This project will study the relationship between health and economic productivity. In association with a public health project funded by NIH, the NSF project will do preliminary work to prepare for a major project to test hypotheses derived from a causal path model with adult health status as the predictor variable, economic productivity and various aspects of economic decision making as intermediate variables, and the well-being of household members as the outcome variable; examine and control for the effects of ethnicity on causal variables in the model; determine to what extent variation in health status across communities accounts for differences in economic prosperity in the communities in the Mbaracayu Reserve in eastern Paraguay doc13929 none The project provides for continued operation of the CHILL radar as a national facility. The radar allows cutting edge research into convective storm initiation and evolution and will enhance scientific understanding of storm microphysics. The proposed cooperative agreement specifies the management, staffing, testing, operation, technical upgrades and educational and outreach activities for the proposed 5 year period. The project is an interdisciplinary activity between the Departments of Atmospheric Science and Engineering, and it serves the broad research community as a primary radar remote sensing facility. The combination of engineering and atmospheric sciences gives faculty and students the opportunity to explore technical and scientific topics in radar meteorology. In research projects CHILL also provides high quality, real-time dual doppler information to coordinate the flight of a storm penetration aircraft in and around convective storms. Enhanced use of the Internet allows real time access of data from any institution and faculty and students can operate the CHILL from remote locations. The project provide far-reaching educational opportunities doc13930 none Das Description: This award supports US-Nepal cooperative research entitled Theoretical and Experimental Investigations on Some Current Electronic Structure Related Topics in Condensed Matter Systems and Ozone-UV Interaction. This is an initiating activity among the Theoretical Electronic Structure and Properties Research Group, University at Albany, State University of New York, the Condensed Matter and Atmospheric Physics Research Group, Tribhuvan University (TU), and the Condensed Matter and Materials Physics Experimental Research Group, University of Central Florida (UCF). This project covers five diverse areas of research that include glasses, quantum computation dealing with solar radiation and upper atmosphere chemistry, studies of hyperfine interactions of electron distributions in materials, ozone depletion and environmental impacts in Nepal, and a solar cell fabrication capability at TU. Scope: This award launches joint activities between two US universities and the Tribhuvan University, Nepal. Topics were selected according to common interests at these institutions between theory and experimental groups in a way that complement their expertise and enhance the potential for future interactions among the three groups. Faculty and students at TU will gain expertise in experimental aspects of Moessbauer spectroscopy and characterization of electronic structures of materials. In the long-term, research on solar cell thin films and nanocrystalline particles corresponds to Nepalese national development interests. This is the first cooperative research project in physics supported under the US-Nepal Cooperative Science Program. It is jointly supported by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Materials Research, Condensed Matter Physics Program doc13931 none This award establishes a Nanoscience and Engineering Center (NSEC) for Integrated Nanopatterning and Detection Technologiesat the Northwestern University. The Center will develop state-of-the-art nanopattering capabilities that are compatible with soft materials and can be used for the development of powerful new detection systems. Several emerging patterning tools and synthetic methods will be developed to fabricate nanostructured materials and devices. The Center s research strategy focuses on (1) the science and technology of surface template-driven assemblies that rely on chemical and biochemical recognition events, and (b) the experimental and theoretical study of signal transduction in soft matter nanostructures. The research program is organized under three themes: (1) Chemical and Biological recognition; (2) Nanostructured Assembly; (3) Transport and Transduction in Nanostructures Formed via Surface-Directed Assembly. As the research progresses, focus will be placed upon the development of biological (nuicleic acids and proteins) and chemical (small molecule) sensors. The research outreach will include University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Harold Washington University, and Argonne National Laboratory. The Center will establish formal programs with international comp[anies, universities, and laboratories in the area of nanoscale research. The Center will take a lead to establish the first global network of centers and institutes in the area of nanoscience and engineering. In the area of undergraduate education, the Center will establish Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) and the Minority Internships in Nanotechnology (MIN) programs. The MIN program will be promoted through the minority institutions in the area. Middle and high school teachers will be provided research experience through Research Experience for Teachers (RET) program. A web-based highly flexible Functional Nanostructure module will be developed and distributed. New courses in nanotechnology will be developed for undergraduate and graduate levels. Industry participates in the Center activities by providing company personnel as student mentors, and by supplying source codes for software development. The Center has a program to advice on formation of startup companies doc13932 none Zhang This study is aimed at improving the quantification of these ocean surface parameters through advanced observational experiments. From analysis surface images from the laboratory, the surface currents in the wave boundary and small-scale wave breaking will be measured. A wave boundary layer is defined as a top layer within a depth of order (kp) -1 . kp is wavenumber of dominant wind waves. The method developed here will overcome the problem of having sensor in the boundary layer, a difficulty of early measurements. The surface waves and near surface turbulence will also be measured at the same time. These will make it possible to access the interactions among surface currents, waves, and turbulence, to quantify these quantities for parameterization. Recent free surface turbulence studies have showed there are fundamental differences between wall boundary layer turbulence and free surface turbulence. At sea, wind blows over the ocean surface generating waves and shear currents. The ocean surface layer is more complex due to the existence of these energetic waves. Wave breaking and surface drift can enhance one another. The surface shear currents are inherently unstable due to Craik-Leibovich span-wise instability. The Langmuir circulations increase the vertical mixing which reduces the surface shear. It is questionable that a simple wall turbulence analogy would adequately represent the dynamics of a free surface boundary layer. To assess the contributions from different ocean surface processes, it is critical to observe key surface quantities, such as surface waves, surface current, surface turbulence, rate of wave breaking, and vertical transport doc13933 none Monismith The PI hypothesizes that river plume conditions at the river mouth control the angle of impact at the stagnation point, which then controls the split of waters that flow into the downstream coastal current and the bulge associated with the outflow plume. Laboratory experiments, complemented by numerical modeling, is proposed. Questions to be answered include: Are river plumes inherently time dependent? How do river mouth parameters affect alongshore and cross-shore transport? Is the assumption of a geostrophic balance in the coastal current uniformly valid? The studies will define the structure of he plume, the stagnation point, and the coastal current, and describe the transport field within the coastal current. Five lab cases include a standard, low inflow angle, high Rossby number, high Froude number, and non-zero bottom slope situations. Reproducibility of the lab runs allows data from multiple runs (at least for the first 7-10 rotations) to be combined for analysis doc13934 none Shraiman The proposal seeks support for the developmental biologists participating in the interdisciplinary work on Cell Signaling Networks at the Aspen Center for Physics scheduled to take place Aug. 19 - Sept. 9, . This workshop will bring together biologists studying a variety of eukaryotic signal transduction pathways and the role of cell signaling in embryonic development with a group of physicists and engineers interested in quantitative modeling of complex biological systems. The goal of the workshop is to seek ways to assimilate and interpret the rapidly accumulating empirical knowledge on signaling, to identify most useful subjects and approaches in quantitative modeling and to discuss the best experimental strategies for disecting complex signaling networks doc13935 none Swift This project focuses on understanding the interactions of the Arctic Ocean outflow waters and Nordic Sea waters as they create the Denmark Strait Overflow Water (DSOW) and the Iceland-Scotland Overflow water (ISOW) on the one hand and the Arctic Ocean influenced layers in the Nordic Seas on the other. Specific goals include: (1) determining the sources and pathways of fresh water out of the Arctic Ocean and studying the processes modifying downstream water masses; (2) determining the sources and characteristics of intermediate and deep waters of Arctic origin and their subsequent modification as they are exported in the Nordic Seas and North Atlantic Ocean; and (3) determining the pathways of Atlantic water through the Nordic Seas and into the Arctic Ocean and how it transforms Nordic Seas water masses. This new synoptic survey of the Nordic Seas will provide a baseline observation to understand the links between the various ocean basins in the region. This project is collaborative with Swedish scientists and is a contribution to the Climate variability and predictability program (CLIVAR doc13736 none The most important subsurface Arctic Ocean transport system, a cyclonic (here anticlockwise) boundary current, organized along the continental slopes and major trans-Arctic ridges, distributes waters, tracers and contaminants from the Atlantic (via Fram Strait and the Barents Sea) and the Pacific (via Bering Strait) around and into the deep Arctic basins. On its circum-Arctic pathway, parts of the topographically steered current are diverted away from the continental margin, generally along topographic ridges. The most complex obstacle the boundary current encounters is the Mendeleev Ridge Chukchi Borderland complex, north of the Pacific entrance to the Arctic. This region is the cross- roads for Pacific-origin waters from the south and Atlantic waters carried from the west with the boundary current. The tortuous bathymetry offers many routes for a topographically steered current, and the spatial variability of the sparse data that exist clearly indicates the complexity of the region. These data also show significant interannual variability, in line with the major changes seen in the last decade throughout the Arctic, and they further suggest that the region diverts significant amounts of water into the deep basins, indicating this region s importance to shelf-basin exchange, deep basin ventilation, and circum- and trans-Arctic circulation (with feedback implications to the World Ocean circulation). Yet, the pathways and exchanges in this area are still unclear, both qualitatively and quantitatively, due to the lack of sufficiently concentrated observations. This research will conduct a high spatial resolution hydrographic and tracer survey, supported by short-term moored current and CTD measurements, in the region of the Chukchi Borderland and the southern end of the Mendeleev Ridge during August September . The objectives are to: - delineate the pathways of the boundary current carrying the Atlantic water past the Mendeleev Ridge and through the Chukchi Borderland; - ascertain the input from the boundary current and the shelves to the deep Arctic Ocean in the vicinity of the Mendeleev Ridge and the Chukchi Borderland; - understand and quantify the pathways and transformations of the Pacific waters through this region; - describe the horizontal and vertical structure of the boundary current, and estimate its transport; and - quantify recent temporal changes in this region by combining the spatially sparse data extending through most of the past decade with new detailed synoptic measurements. On a 35-day expedition on an ice-breaking research vessel, measurements will be made of temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, nutrients, CFCs, Ba, and 18-O on 12 sections that cross both the boundary flow and the Pacific inputs to the region before and after topographic junctions and hypothesized regions of flow diversion. This tracer suite will enable identification of the pathways of the boundary current and the Pacific-origin waters, and quantification of the different Atlantic and Pacific influences, as well as freshwater input from ice melt and different rivers. In addition, three moorings will be deployed, spanning the boundary current for the duration of the cruise. Current meters and moored conductivity and temperature sensors will quantify the vertical and horizontal extent of the boundary current, its structure and variability, and will yield an estimate of the transport and a description of eddies carried with or across the boundary current. To give a comprehensive picture of the system, the entire data set will be analyzed collectively and in tandem with hydrographic, tracer, and moored time series data from the last decade. Since the transit time of signals through this region is 2-4 years, the older data provide a temporal background for the new high spatial resolution data, whilst the newer data will supply an essential spatial framework for understanding the variability of the older surveys. The work will yield a substantially increased understanding of the role of this region in the Arctic circulation, including a determination of pathways, a quantification of exchanges, and an assessment of temporal change. Its timing in will fill a pending hiatus in hydrographic surveys in the Canadian Basin at a time when the most dramatic changes ever observed in the Arctic are propagating through this region. The project will provide necessary background and mechanistic information to the potential SEARCH and Arctic-Subarctic Ocean Flux programs, and essential far-field information to the SBI Phase II field program in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. In addition, the results will be pivotal to validating and improving high resolution computer and conceptual models of the Arctic, and will offer insights to physical mechanistic problems, such as the driving mechanism of the boundary current and the interaction of an equivalent barotropic current with steep and sharp topography doc13883 none In order to use either O2 or nitrogen for current or paleo isotopic studies of their respective marine cycles, it is imperative that we know their fractionation during sedimentary consumption and if possible determine the mechanisms. A few estimates of O2 and NO3- isotope fractionation during sedimentary consumption have been made which showed that fractionation was much less (approaching zero) than the theoretical ones. Because these observations were made only in the eastern North Pacific where productivity is high and mid-water oxygen levels are low, two research investigators from the University of Washington and the University of Texas Marine Science Institute plan to carry out a laboratory methods development and field experimentation exercise to address two questions. Question number one asks whether the near absence of isotopic fractionation observed for both oxygen consumption and denitrification in highly respiring sediments of the Pacific Northwest continental margin a ubiquitous characteristic of shelf and upper slope sediments. The second question asks to what extent N2 production and the lack of N and O isotopic fractionation is related to abiotic or microbially mediated reoxidation of reduced products of metabolism. The PIs will conduct a field program in the Gulf of Mexico to (1) measure oxidant isotopic fractionation of O2 and NO3-, as well as related species such as N2 and NH4+ in incubated sediments, both on deck and in-situ; (2) conduct on-deck core manipulation experiments with added substrates (NO3-, 15NO3-, HN4+, 15HN4+, organic material and reducing substances) and inhibitors to elucidate possible mechanisms of isotopic fractionation and (3) make porewater and benthic chamber measurements of diagenesis rates to help elucidate the processes responsible for fractionation or lack thereof doc13938 none Photoautotrophic picoplankton contribute significantly to phytoplankton biomass and primary production in the ocean. The smallest known photoautotroph is Prochlorococcus sp. It is unusual because its primary photosynthetic pigment is divinyl-chlorophyll a (Chl a2), a unique biomarker for this organism. The traditional view of the marine food web suggests that carbon assimilated by Prochlorococcus, and other picoautotrophs, is primarily recycled within the microbial web. High concentrations of Chl a2-degradation products found in surficial sediments and sediment trap material from the Eastern Tropical North Pacific suggest that Prochlorococcus may nonetheless contribute significantly to export production in that environment. This inference depends on the assumptions that 1) water column concentrations of Chl a2 and Chl a1 are equally good proxies for the biomass of Prochlorococcus and other phytoplankters, respectively, 2) the chlorin-conversion efficiencies of Chl a1 and Chl a2, when ingested by herbivores, are similar and 3) the diagenesis of chlorins in sediments does not alter the ratio of Chl a1 and Chl a2-derived chlorins. The first objective of this proposal is to test these assumptions to place inferences based Chl a1 a2-ratios on a firm basis. Knowing the relative contributions of Prochlorococcus to export production would allow one to calculate the contributions of picoplankton in general. These fluxes are likely mediated by pelagic tunicates, assuming that chlorins entering the microbial loop are quickly degraded and that pelagic tunicates, or at least some of these, are the only macrozooplankters capable of grazing on Prochlorococcus. Testing these two assumptions in the field is the second objective of this proposal. The proposed work constitutes a biomarker approach that will enable us to measure the contribution of Prochlorococcus and picoplankters to export production. These tools will help us understand the sources and controls of export production in the open ocean. This added understanding will contribute to our ability to predict the effects of environmental change on open ocean ecosystem doc13939 none Phytoplankton blooms are major events in the pelagic environment of temperate to subpolar coastal seas. Because blooms are large and relatively reliable seasonal pulses of food resources, the life histories of many pelagic consumer populations, both planktonic grazers and higher trophic level types such as fish, appear synchronized with them. Yet there is an apparent paradox. Results from numerous recent laboratory studies indicate that some species of diatoms, including species that may be biomass dominants during phytoplankton blooms, can inhibit egg production and or embryonic and postembryonic development of several species of planktonic suspension-feeding copepods. The specific mechanism underlying the inhibition is currently under debate. Diatoms may be nutritionally deficient, but they also contain toxic substances that induce deleterious effects in copepods. However, the general relevance of these laboratory studies for natural populations of copepods is uncertain, as field investigations of the effects of diatom blooms have yielded contradictory results. The goal of this research project is to test in the sea the hypothesis that diatom-dominated phytoplankton blooms have inhibitory effects on egg production rate and or postembryonic development of natural populations of the planktonic suspension-feeding copepods Calanus pacificus and Pseudocalanus newmani. The study will be done in Dabob Bay (Washington State) where intense, diatom-dominated phytoplankton blooms occur reliably in March. During these blooms, diatom concentrations reach or exceed levels known from laboratory studies to have deleterious effects on copepods. Previous field studies elsewhere of effects of diatom blooms on copepods have not met this condition. To test the hypothesis a combination of approaches is proposed: (1) observations on the distribution and abundance of copepods, diatoms, and other potential prey; (2) analysis of fecal pellets of adult copepods to verify that they are ingesting diatoms in situ; (3) experiments providing adequate control and replication to determine feeding rates of adult copepods on diatoms and other prey; (4) incubations to estimate in situ egg production rate and hatching success of both copepod species; (5) experiments to test for the direct effects of diatoms on egg production rate and hatching success and postembryonic development of the two copepod species. The possibility that diatoms may impact metazoan grazers such as copepods is of enormous basic and applied scientific interest. At a basic level, the problem is central to understanding the structure and function of marine planktonic systems. Any process by which phytoplankton inhibit reproduction or development of grazing zooplankton could markedly affect the pelagic food web well beyond the level of primary consumers. That is, a process affecting the population response of grazers would ramify through the food web, directly impacting other consumer species whose reproduction and growth depend on occurrence and abundance of eggs and immature stages of grazers. Thus, it is crucial to know whether diatoms are deleterious to natural populations of copepods and, if so, the specific nature of the effect, how frequently it occurs, and what the implications are for higher trophic levels. On a practical level, the magnitude of sustainable harvest of fish from the ocean is ultimately dependent not just on the level of primary production, but how that production is (or is not) transferred through the food web to higher (harvestable) trophic levels. An unambiguous test of the effects of diatom blooms on natural populations of planktonic grazers could therefore represent a major advance in understanding for pelagic biological oceanography doc13940 none Bacteriochlorophyll A (bChl a) is a photosynthetic pigment which has been formerly considered a unique molecular biomarker for the anoxic photoheterotrophic bacteria. Although anoxygenic photoheterotrophic bacteria which live in oxic waters were discovered some 20 years ago, bChl a was considered to be expressed solely during, and thus diagnostic of, anoxygenic bacterial photosynthesis. These bacteria require anoxic conditions to synthesize their bacteriochlorophylls and, in the presence of light, use molecules other than water (e.g. sulfide, sulfur compounds, hydrogen, Fe etc) as photosynthetic electron donors. This is to be contrasted to the mode of existence of cynanobacteria and eukaryotes whose primary pigment, chlorophyll a (or one of its close derivatives), enables water to serve as the electron donor for photosynthesis, incidentally forming molecular oxygen as a waste product. Recent biophysical methods that detect bChl a have suggested that aerobic bacterial photosynthesis may be much more prevalent in the world s surface ocean, and also not limited to niche (anoxic microzonal) environments. As well as limiting the use of bChl a as a paleoecological biomarker for anoxic environments (a subject of this study), confirmation of the presence of a significant concentration of bChl a in the global surface ocean implies a significant biomass and photosynthetic energy flux due to aerobic anoxygenic phototrophs. This may or may not have important implications to carbon fixation and ocean carbon transport, but certainly is important in explaining the marine ecology of aerobic anoxygenic phototrophs in relation to non-phototrophic bacteria, especially in oligotrophic waters. In order to systematically confirm the importance of the bChl a signal in oxic seawater, this study will, in water samples from several sites: i) rigorously chemically identify the pigment, bChla, and its related forms, ii) investigate associated particle size relationships of its occurrence (indicative of microzonal anoxia) iii) conduct preliminary microbiological studies of its occurrence in likely target microbial (e.g Roseobacter clade) cultures iv) investigate the biogeochemical transformation of bChla in water columns and sedimentary environments doc13941 none Talley This project will produce a printed and an online atlas of the Indian Ocean WOCE (World Ocean Circulation Experiment) Hydrographic Program (WHP) data. The goals of the Indian Ocean WHP were similar to those for the other basins -to obtain basic hydrographic and chemical tracer data to allow basin-wide estimates of transports. Specific goals included obtaining as much information as possible about Indian Ocean overturning and quantifying the throughput of near-surface water from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The project requires acquiring and processing the Indian Ocean WHP data sets from the WHP Office (WHPO), assisting the WHPO if needed in completing these data sets, gridding, plotting each of the WHP parameters, providing online access to the preliminary graphics for interaction with the individual investigators, final drafting of the plots, and forwarding to the International WOCE Project Office in Southampton for printing. Online atlas development will proceed in parallel with that for the Pacific, Southern Ocean and Atlantic. The printed WHP atlases will likely also contain maps showing the mean flow and statistics from the Lagrangian float and drifter measurements. If included, the mapped values will be provided by the float and drifter groups doc13942 none Nayfeh The objective of the proposed research is to develop biophotonic markers for fluorescent biosensors that are smaller, brighter, less fragile, and more practical than existing markers. The specific components of this research include: (1) an examination of the time dynamics of emission, photostability, and bleaching under a variety of incident excitation intensities, in the UV, visible, and near-infrared range of frequencies, (2) an examination of the solubility of particles and their integrity of brightness under diverse environmental conditions, such as those encountered in vivo, and (3) the development of cladding methods to improve biocompatibility, (4) develop methods to refine synthesis and scale the throughput to meet high-demand commercial applications, and (5) examine the feasibility of modifying the particles by attaching additional molecules to their surfaces to produce smart particles that are able to seek out specific biological targets, for imaging, targeted drug delivery, or destruction of a pathogenic invader doc13943 none This award supports graduate students and young researchers to participate in the Chapman Conference, Atmospheric Absorption , to be held August 13-17, at Estes Park, Colorado. The purpose of the conference is to bring together a small number of experts from a wide range of disciplines to focus attention on the fundamental concepts of measuring and modeling atmospheric absorption of solar radiation in an effort to solve a problem that has plagued the atmospheric sciences community for a number of years. This is the so-called excess absorption issue, i.e., theoretical models under-predict atmospheric solar absorption when compared with (some) published measurements. The parenthetic some is the basis for the intense controversy that surrounds this issue. This is an important issue because the excess absorption is thought to be relatively large, ~25-30 watts m2, and so would have a strong impact on the details of atmospheric heating and circulation in climate model simulations doc13944 none Spilhaus, A. Frederick This award will provide funds for a Chapman Conference on Exploration Geodynamics. Chapman Conferences are topical meetings sponsored by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and are designed to promote opportunities not normally available through the format of larger meetings. Funds will be used to support participant travel expenses. Travel grants will be made on a competitive and need basis. The convenors expect to issue approximately 12 awards at an average of $1,000 per award. The conveners of the conference seek to bring together an international cross section of the geodynamics modeling community, with the likely industry beneficiaries of exploration geodynamics in mineral and petroleum exploration. The targeted audience will be leading practitioners of geodynamic modeling, exploration managers and scientists from exploration divisions of leading resource companies, and, to catalyze the interaction, consultants and academics who have been instrumental in bringing basic science through to industry. Graduate students will be strongly encouraged to attend through a reduced registration fee and preferential access to travel grants doc13945 none On January 17, , a medium size oil spill hit the Galapagos islands, Ecuador, a Natural World Heritage site. Although few animals were killed immediately, there is strong concern about the long-term impacts on the endemic wildlife. Long-lived species, like the marine iguana (Amblyrhynchus cristatus) in particular, offer ideal model systems to study potential chronic effects of environmental pollution. Marine iguanas forage on intertidal algae and are therefore highly exposed to water-borne pollutants. I have 14 years of physiological and demographic data for the marine iguana population most strongly affected, on Santa Fe island. Furthermore, as part of my most recent field project, I collected baseline data on environmental stress (plasma corticosterone levels), algae quality and digestive endosymbionts up to two days before the oil spill (Jan 17, ). Ample pre-oil spill data are also available for El Nino, La Nina and regular seasons. To quantify the impacts of oiling I propose to measure the following parameters immediately, 3 months, 6 months and 9 months after the spill: i) baseline and stress-induced corticosterone levels, ii) blood cell counts, iii) activity of hindgut endosymbiontic microbes, iv) standing algae crop, and v) survival rates of individually marked animals. Furthermore, an Ecuadorian assistant will conduct an experiment simulating an oil spill on captive marine iguanas at the Charles Darwin Research Station. This experiment will also allow us to test the feasibility of re-inoculating the hindgut of oiled marine iguanas with microbes from unaffected conspecifics. My detailed pre-spill data will allow me to quantify behavioral and physiological consequences of a severe environmental perturbation. These data will be immensely important for conservation and policy measures in Galapagos but will also be scientifically useful for global conservation issues doc13946 none of OCE-0 ; Physical and Chemical constraints on fluxes at LExEn and proposed ODP sites in the Gulf of Mexico The proposed project will focus on unraveling the dynamics of the gas hydrate reservoir at and between moderate and high flux sites. Through 1.) direct measurement of fluid flux with osmotic flux meters, 2) acquisition of high resolution heat flow data, 3) use of porewater and solid-phase proxies for gas flux and 4) imaging of flux conduits with high-resolution, deep-tow Chirp profiles, the study will constrain spatial and temporal variations in fluxes critical to the formation and long-term stability of gas hydrates. The results provide a test of the hypothesis that quantifiable spatial variations in energy, fluid and gas flux are related to observable changes in the distribution of free gas and gas hydrate. The study sites coincide with two sites chosen for focused microbiological research as part of an NSF funded Life in Extreme Environments project. The study sites also coincide with two sites proposed for Gulf of Mexico gas hydrates drilling and the project will provide additional site survey data for the proposed drilling doc13947 none This work is proposed as a starter grant to support a follow-on effort to PFSIVIETE fellowship grant number , A Longitudinal Study of Eight Engineering Colleges using the SUCCEED Longitudinal Database. The primary goal of the original fellowship was to prioritize factors that contribute to engineering student success by studying programs designed to help engineering students at nine institutions. The breadth of data required to conduct such an analysis could not be collected within the fellowship tenure, so this greater goal remains a subject for continuing research. During the fellowship tenure, a number of individual studies were completed, and results from these have been published or are being developed in collaboration with the investigators who originally designed and implemented the programs under study. This request asks for support necessary to complete the study of data already collected and to collect additional data needed to begin to address the more aggressive goal of characterizing factors that contribute to engineering student success. The Southeastern University and College Coalition for Engineering Education (SUCCEED) will continue to significantly leverage this work doc13948 none Keyhani The collapse of the California electric energy market has made it imperative to recognize that market forces motivated by profit cannot guarantee a secure and reliable energy supply because of the inherent characteristics of electric energy production, transmission and distribution networks. No other systems, such as transportation, gas distribution, airline, trucking are subjected to high prices because of an outage due to maintenance of one of its components. Therefore, it is essential that the electricity market be designed such that the market players profit motives will mesh with system security and reliability. This proposal will undertake the study of this problem and possible solutions using the appropriate market structure. The Ohio State University (OSU), Illinois Institute of Technology University (lIT), ABB Energy Information Systems (ABB) and Perot Systems (PS) will undertake fundamental research in system game theory to develop a new market structure for planned operation of electric energy services. The PIs propose to develop algorithms to create an efficient, reliable, and secure energy market with the ISO as a market leader who is also a market maker armed with incentive functions, and followers who compete to provide energy for stable operation of the system. The approach is based on the Stackelberg market design strategy developed in the s. We will design a Virtual Market Simulator (VMS) to evaluate the proposed market structure. The VMS simulator will be used for evaluation of system operation yearly on monthly basis, monthly on a weekly basis, weekly on a daily basis, daily on an hourly basis, and hourly on a minute basis up to AGC cycle. The PIs will use the VMS test bed to demonstrate that a market based on leader- follower algorithms can attain perfect market prices for the energy and ancillary services markets. To achieve this goal, they will develop a VMS simulator test bed in collaboration with their industrial partners, ABB and PS, using ABB and PS Systems knowledge of PJM and California systems historical data. In their VMS simulator, they will construct neural network based predictors to forecast energy demands and time-varying cost of the system load centers (monthly, weekly, daily and hourly). They will formulate an incentive function for each type of generation that the followers must satisfy in their bid prices. The incentive functions will be determined by the leader, taking into account the rational profit motives of the players as well as the system security and reliability. In such market environments, all market players will be followers. In the proposed market structure, the leader will use the knowledge of the systems that he or she is controlling and will estimate the production cost of each type of generation. The leader will thus have the ability to formulate leader-follower optimization strategies and design an appropriate incentive function for each type of generation system. At the same time the market leader can formulate a cost function for the system operation based on the mandated security and reliability by state power boards. In this market structure, the state power board will determine the overall energy policy and set up an auction market for market players to compete in the market under leader-follower market structure. In our formulation, the market leader position is assigned to ISO s. The significance of the proposed work is the creation of a new market structure that will make it feasible for market forces to participate in the development of electric energy systems and to compete in the market while ensuring the reliability and security of systems. The proposed market structure will allow the state government to formulate energy policy and, through proposed incentive functions, to encourage the citizen to participate in its implementation. The proposed market structure will also help market forces develop energy sources, since it will remove the uncertainties of planning plants where they may face bottlenecks in transmissions. Energy users will also benefit by reducing the cost of energy through participation in a load response program and being assured of reliable and secure service doc13949 none As part of her doctoral dissertation research under the direction of Dr. Gil J. Stein, Rana Ozbal will co-direct excavations at Tell Kurdu, a Halaf Period site, in southeastern Turkey. Traditionally Halaf society of the fifth millennium BC is believed to consist of small-scale farming communities with no clear evidence for hierarchical social organization. Public buildings such as temples or palaces, as well as large villages or towns are conspicuously absent from all Halaf excavations in the Halaf heartland of northern Iraq. Recently however, archaeologists, prompted by a newfound academic interest to investigate the Halaf hinterlands , have begun to conduct research in southeastern Anatolia, modern day Turkey. They have discovered that Turkey harbors several Halaf sites of previously unheard-of sizes. These sites, substantially larger (10-20 hectares) than contemporaneous sites in Iraq (rarely more than 2-3 hectares) are most probably regional centers. Domuztepe, the most intensively investigated of these large sites, yielded evidence for substantial architectural complexes and complex ideological manifestations. In other words, the existing notion that Anatolia was inhabited during the Halaf Period by small farming communities needs to be reexamined. At 15 hectares, Tell Kurdu is an ideal site to investigate new questions on the socio-political organization in Anatolia in the fifth millennium BC. As a co-field director of the Kurdu excavations, Rana Ozbal will be researching the intra-site organization of the site to provide a firsthand look at the functioning of this Anatolian Halaf center. Excavations in will focus on the expansion of a trench that yielded the remains of a large monumental building. The size and construction style of this 20 x 20 meter structure, with walls over one meter in thickness, suggest that it may be something other than a domestic residence, possibly having public and or ritual significance. In order to understand what the building may have been used for, Rana Ozbal will rely on two sources of data. The first will consist of the traditional archaeological materials that the building yields, such as pottery, tools and other artifacts. The second source of information will be gathered from methodologically innovative micro-analyses, which involve chemical testing of the building s floors and recovery and identification of embedded micro-artifacts (artifacts that are less than 1 cm2). This combined research methodology will provide a finer level of resolution for inferring the function of this unusual building and hence for understanding the organizational complexity of Halaf society doc13950 none Gilmore Monsters are familiar figures in folklore, myth and art around the world. Threatening mythical creatures share common features wherever they are found, including large size, hybrid shapes combining human and beastly form, violence, cannibalism and of course malevolence. In most cultures mythical monsters serve as metaphors for abstract evil as well as antisocial impulses, despised and feared others such as deviants, pariahs and outsiders. This pilot research project by an anthropologist from the State University of New York-Stony Brook will explore research sites in Spain for a study of the social role of monsters in community rituals. In town and village festivities occurring between January and July, colorful demonic effigies attack neighbors, eat children, and threaten normative standards until they are defeated by united, heroic community action. The research will integrate psychodynamic and social interpretations to gain insight into the processes which create monsters in the ritual context. Combining a psychoanalytic perspective which assumes that monsters are created from dreamlike images with empirically real aspects reflecting repressed desire, guilt, awe and dread, with anthropological theories of categorical natural schemes, contradiction and conflict, the anthropologist will observe monster rituals, interview community members, and discuss the meanings of the rituals with Spanish experts in folk culture. The results from this pilot project will be used in preparing a major research proposal doc13951 none The project Design Parameterization for CHD-Based Mechanism Optimization , is studying how product solid models can be parameterized following a systematic approach to capture design intents in multiple CAD systems and determine if an accurate and efficient design sensitivity analysis can be developed that supports CAD-based mechanism optimization for industrial applications doc13952 none This RUI project is devoted to studies concerning the implementation, visualization, and analysis of Probabilistic Road Maps (PRMs). The PRM has been actively studied in recent years, and is increasingly seen as an important, if not the best, tool for certain robotic motion planning problems. New probabilistic roadmap heuristics will be developed and experimentally verified. To study the underlying problem and to verify developed strategies, supporting visualization software will be developed. This work will provide a research experience for up to nine undergrads at a place, which is primarily a teaching university doc13916 none of ; Physical and Chemical constraints on fluxes at LExEn and proposed ODP sites in the Gulf of Mexico The proposed project will focus on unraveling the dynamics of the gas hydrate reservoir at and between moderate and high flux sites. Through 1.) direct measurement of fluid flux with osmotic flux meters, 2) acquisition of high resolution heat flow data, 3) use of porewater and solid-phase proxies for gas flux and 4) imaging of flux conduits with high-resolution, deep-tow Chirp profiles, the study will constrain spatial and temporal variations in fluxes critical to the formation and long-term stability of gas hydrates. The results provide a test of the hypothesis that quantifiable spatial variations in energy, fluid and gas flux are related to observable changes in the distribution of free gas and gas hydrate. The study sites coincide with two sites chosen for focused microbiological research as part of an NSF funded Life in Extreme Environments project. The study sites also coincide with two sites proposed for Gulf of Mexico gas hydrates drilling and the project will provide additional site survey data for the proposed drilling doc13914 none This project is a second-generation analysis of the ICEMELT and HOTSPOT data sets that will focus on four areas where additional work could lead to a fundamental new understanding of plume dynamics and plume-ridge interactions at Iceland. This work will (1) determine seismic velocity structure in the crust and uppermost mantle, (2) constrain upper mantle flow from mantle anisotropy, (3) improve mantle velocity structures by application of advanced methods, and (4) integrate seismic and geodynamic models doc13955 none Rhythmic oscillating activity is a property of many biological systems, and we are still far from understanding the theoretical basis for mechanisms driving such rhythms. In the nervous systems of many animals, networks that produce oscillations often have to be stable, yet capable of modulation or switching between different modes. These networks often have individual properties that have made it difficult to sort out what key elements are responsible for stability in oscillators. This project develops new analytical methods to predict oscillatory patterns exhibited by neural circuits composed of physiological neurons (living nerve cells, not just modeled ones), using only data that are readily obtainable from the isolated component neurons. A novel approach here uses computational analysis of phase-resetting curves to make theoretical predictions of network behavior, and to test whether these theoretical methods apply to physiological data from small neuronal circuits in crustaceans. Results will have a substantial impact on understanding oscillating systems in the brain (such as those for locomotion, respiration, and sleep-wake cycles), and could extend beyond neuroscience into areas such as ecology and even non-living physical oscillating systems. This project also develops a fruitful collaboration among four women scientists at a range of levels in the computational field, where they are under-represented, with consequent opportunities for mentoring, and an impact on women s careers doc13956 none Smethie In collaboration with a previously funded program by Pickart (WHOI), the PIs will contribute to the identification of the origin of Classical Labrador Sea Water (CLSW) in the Irminger Basin, map the pathways of CLSW, Denmark Strait Overflow Water (DSOW), and Iceland-Scotland Overflow Water (ISOW) IN THE Irminger Basin, estimate the rate of DSOW flow to the Irminger Basin, and document variations of DSOW and ISOW in the Irminger Basin and the source of these variations. They will use, primarily, CFC-11, -12, and -113. They will perform inverse modeling to understand diapycnal mixing in the Deep Western Boundary Current and controls on how the overflow water mixes with and entrains surrounding waters doc13957 none This proposal describes a three year collaborative research program by a multi-university team of device, electronics, and biomedical investigators applying and extending newly emerging technologies for monolithic optoelectronic integration to address problems and needs of biomedical research and diagnosis. Researchers at MIT have recently demonstrated unique monolithic optoelectronic integrated circuits (OEICs) of unprecedented complexity and performance, and their ability now to monolithically integrate light sources and detectors with complex high density, high performance electronic circuitry opens the way to the invention and realization of a wide variety of sensors and measurement arrays for medical research and diagnostics. It is this area which the proposed effort will address. The technologies for monolithic optoelectronic integration which are under development at MIT are sufficiently advanced that they can be applied immediately to solve a variety of problems, and one area that is ripe with applications and needs that are addressable with the current technology is biomedical research and practice. From the numerous possible target applications in biomedicine, we have identified as an initial vehicle for applying this technology a integrated source detector array for diffuse optical tomography (DOT). The proposed unit will permit DOT observations with a resolution exceeding that of present techniques and will lead to the use of DOT in procedures and situations in which it is currently unfeasible. Stated in the most general terms, the proposed effort will be directed at developing, applying, and making available a technology to monolithically integrate III-V optical emitters and detectors with commercially fabricated, custom-designed integrated circuits to produce high resolution two-dimensional arrays of individually addressable smart excitor sensor pixels tailored for biomedical research applications and studies. A representative pixel might measure 250 to 500 microns on a side, and contain, for example, a diode light emitter (LED or laser), one or more light sensors, and a significant amount of electronic signal processing circuitry. This basic unit is a building block from which a wide variety of biomedical optical measurement systems can be realized in a very rugged, compact chip-size format. It promises to lead, in the future, to totally new sensor geometries and measurement procedures. The challenges that the program will face include continuing development of the OEIC technology and adapting this technology for biomedical research; developing suitable signal processing algorithms and designing compact, high performance signal processing circuit arrays in the relevant electronics technologies to interface with the optoelectronic devices; and suitably packaging the OEIC chips for their biomedical utilization. The project team will be aided in this effort by its strong links with the Northeastern University Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems, the Massachusetts General Hospital NMR Center, the University of Utah NIH NCRR Center for Bioelectric Field Modeling, Simulations and Visualization, and the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratory, and by integrated circuit processing support from Vitesse Semiconductor Corporation doc13958 none The project focuses on general purpose trajectory design algorithms for high dimensional, highly nonlinear systems evolving in complex environments. The goal is to solve the currently intractable problem of trajectory generation and optimization for high-fidelity models of various types of autonomous vehicles, using an approach that combines methods from differential geometry, nonlinear control theory, robot motion planning, randomized algorithms, and mathematical programming doc13959 none Schatz This award supports a one-year Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) postdoctoral Fellowship for Bruce R. Schatz of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He will be undertaking his research with Professor Toru Ishida in the Department of Social Informatics at Kyoto University in Japan. Dr. Schatz will be researching trends in the information infrastructure. He hopes to determine if there are Laws of the Net which predict the behavior of effective algorithms for future technologies of information retrieval. He will be researching the evolution of information infrastructure placing the past, present and future technology in its proper historical context. He will explore the 30-year period from syntactic to structure to semantics. In addition, he will be studying the mass infrastructure for network information systems, such as the 300-year period from 19th century Networks to 20th century Spaces to 21st century Models. He will further explore the philosophical foundations of new technologies for information retrieval in the Net. The research should result in new paradigms for information technology, with broad impact on the field especially in the area of digital libraries. The exposure of the awardee to a new research setting will be intellectually stimulating. The collaboration should also facilitate further international cooperation in science and technology, and help to facilitate the number of excellent students from the Asian region to the doc13960 none Proposal David Kaiser, Program in Science, Technology, and Society Department of Physics, MIT Training Scientists, Crafting Science: A Workshop for Putting Pedagogy on the Map for Science Studies Questions of pedagogy, training, and the crafting of scientific research practices have usually fallen between the cracks separating traditional institutional and disciplinary studies on the one hand, and intellectual or conceptual studies on the other. A small but growing literature within the history, sociology, and anthropology of science, however, scrutinizes the intersection of these domains. This project involves a two-part workshop in order to probe the deep interrelations between scientists training, learning, and research efforts --and to sharpen and consolidate this nascent segment of the science studies literature. The 19 participants in the workshop include several distinguished leaders in the field, together with many early-career scholars. The workshop convenes in Spring at MIT and again in Fall , to discuss and analyze original pre-circulated papers. The discussions and papers are to be disseminated in an edited volume. The goals for the workshop and edited volume are twofold. First, this meeting should help solidify the small community of science-studies scholars who share interests in pedagogy, raining, and learning, thereby building connections between otherwise isolated case studies. Second, it is to catalyze the larger science-studies field to consider the constitutive roles played by pedagogy in making modern science happen doc13898 none The relationship between new production, organic carbon cycling, and nutrient uptake into coral reef systems is not well understood. Nutrient uptake into experimental coral reef communities has been shown to be mass-transfer limited, or limited by the rate at which nutrients can be physically delivered to the active surfaces of reef autotrophs. A set of simple, mass transfer relationships have been developed to predict uptake of dissolved inorganic nutrients. These relationships were derived from experiments which were conducted in 10-20 m long flumes and under steady, non-oscillatory flow conditions. Drs. Atkinson and Monismith reason that these mass transfer equations are inappropriate for understanding nutrient uptake by shallow-water reef communities in natural reef environments, where wave-drive water motion dominates the surrounding flow field. They have argued with both theoretical and empirical evidence that there should be some enhancement of mass transfer due to oscillatory flow. They emphasize that there are no mass transfer studies with both waves and naturally rough surfaces and that this is a problem unique to the study of benthic ecosystems. The project has three general goals: 1) To understand how waves influence rates of mass transfer to naturally rough surfaces; 2) To determine how waves influence nutrient uptake into reef communities adapted to wave-driven flow environments; 3) To actually demonstrate that waves enhance in situ rates of nutrient uptake by natural reef communities. To achieve these goals, these scientists propose an interlocking set of two lab studies and one field study. The first of these, a laboratory experiment on nutrient uptake by a coral community under both steady and oscillating flow conditions, will be conducted at the HIMB lab on Coconut Island. The second, a detailed study of the fluid mechanics of stress and mass transfer over corals will be carried out at the Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory at Stanford. Finally, to test the application of the lab results, a series of field experiments will be carried out to determine whether rates of nutrient uptake by natural reef communities under wave-driven flow conditions are positively correlated with incident wave energy, and, to determine whether these rates scale with estimates of bottom shear stress according to mass transfer correlations derived from laboratory experiments. Results of these experiments will give us the quantitative basis to determine the spatial variability in rates of nutrient uptake into reef communities, and to promote an understanding of how the dynamic physical environment typical of reef communities may be defining their metabolism doc13962 none For many recent applications, the concept of a data stream, possibly infinite, is more appropriate than a data set. By nature, a stored data set is appropriate when significant portions of the data are queried again and again, and updates are small and or relatively infrequent. In contrast, a data stream is appropriate when the data is changing constantly (often exclusively through insertions of new elements), and it is either unnecessary or impractical to operate on large portions of the data multiple times. The goal of this research project is to develop models and techniques for the management and processing of data streams. Sampling, summarization, and online approximation algorithms will be employed to facilitate query processing and data mining over streams. The results of this project will provide efficient data stream techniques for data management, memory management, query processing, data mining, and data analysis. In addition, a software prototype will be developed for experimentation with algorithms and query processing, and as a testbed for some sample applications of significant scope, such as networking monitoring and traffic engineering, and medical monitoring data doc13963 none In this project, funds are requested for a two-year research program to investigate basic plasma processes that seem to be responsible for the surprisingly strong energetics that have been observed in the midlatitude E region. The research plan is to utilize a numerical model of the phenomenon already developed by the PI to model realistic distortions of an Es layer, apply the results to the design of radar experiments at SRI, and to the design of the SEEK-2 rocket campaign, in order to determine if the model can explain the experimental findings doc13964 none The objective of this study is to improve the capability of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM) by helping to develop and implement a dynamic vegetation component into the CCSM land model. The present land model, while providing detailed information of water, heat, momentum, and carbon dioxide (CO2) exchanges between land atmosphere, uses a prescribed vegetation structure and coverage and thus cannot assess important feedbacks between vegetation and climate. A dynamic vegetation model, whose vegetation structure and coverage is most compatible with the land model prescription, has been chosen to integrate into the CCSM land model. Major-coupled experiments will consist of a pre-industrial model run, enhanced CO2 experiments, and a paleo-simulation of the mid-Holocene ( years ago). The work is important because it will increase our understanding of vegetation-climate interactions, on both paleo and shorter time-scales doc13965 none The PI proposes to conduct experiments on the melting of peridotite in order to quantitatively determine the effect of melt structure on trace element partitioning at the peridotite, solidus at pressures of 1.5 to 3.0 Gpa. The experiments will test the hypothesis that isobaric differences in trace element partitioning can be related to differences in the extent of polymerization of the melt-to be evaluated with new measurements of viscosity. The experiments will be carried out on appropriate bulk compositions doped with a few ppm of the elements of interest (a range of REE, LIL, and I-IFSE), with analyses of partitioning to be done with the ion microprobe on cpx, opx, and garnet and glass in quenched experimental charges. The results will have numerous applications to melting in the earth s mantle doc13966 none Kamenkovich USM It is proposed to study transport between the Pacific and Indian Oceans by assimilating current meter data collected in the Makassar Strait into a regional circulation model. Results of the model will be compared with observations of the distribution of chlorofluorocarbons in the waters of the region and with the trajectories of drifting floats. The goal is to develop a clearer picture of the regional circulation and its variability and to understand the mechanisms controlling the bifurcation of the flow leaving the Makassar Strait. The work will include an analysis of momentum and energy budgets and a study of the dependence of transport through the Makassar Strait on the pressure head. In addition to work with a numerical model in a realistic domain, the project will also include an idealized process study to examine the influence of different aspects of the regional topography on the flow bifurcation at the southern end of the Makassar Strait. By developing a better understanding of the nature of the regional circulation and of the mechanisms that control it, the project will contribute to an improved knowledge of the processes controlling the exchange of heat and fresh water between two major oceans doc13967 none T. R. Blake and K. Jakus University of Massachusetts Amherst One of the major needs in particle manufacturing is the separation of fine particles into a narrow size distribution. This is particularly important in manufacturing of nanoscale particles where separation becomes very difficult and inefficient. Regular gas-particle separation techniques will not work when the particles are very small because of the small ratio of particle inertia to drag. The idea proposed in this project is to increase this ratio and, therefore, significantly increase the efficiency of the fine particle separation by decreasing the pressure in the separation chamber to near vacuum. As pressure decreases, the drag on the particle decreases relative to the particle inertia resulting in larger deviation of particle trajectory with the air streamline. This will allow more efficient separation of the particles in an impact separator. The proposed project is to demonstrate the effectiveness of the idea by experiments and computational modeling of the process. The proposed idea is innovative with considerable benefits to fine particle manufacturing industry, if successful. The project contains a strong education and research integration component with extensive outreach and community service. The Principal Investigators have considerable knowledge and experience in this area, as well doc13968 none The objective of this project is to investigate the problem of protein folding unfolding, and in particular, the mediation of this process by the chaperone DnaK. This project involves both modeling and experimental studies. First, folding-aggregation competition will be studied. Measurements of interprotein interactions at varied external conditions, e.g. temperature, pH, and ionic strength, will help identify separate contributions to the overall interprotein potentials and their role in molecular association. The Principal Investigators (PIs) have developed a three dimensional periodic Monte Carlo simulator for capturing the competition between refolding and aggregation of initially unfolded protein-like chains. In this system various interactions on short length scales will be considered. Also, the PIs have predicted that the presence of pre-folded proteins improves the folding rate of unfolded proteins because of enhanced surface interactions. This provides a basis for modeling the chaperone-unfolded protein interaction so crucial in vivo. Other computational tasks include an understanding of the kinetics of the refolding process, since both folded and unfolded forms are thermodynamically feasible so that the kinetics may define the overall extent of folding doc13969 none Proposal number: Proposal type: Investigator Initiated for International Conference Principal investigator: Edward L. Cussler Affiliations: University of Minnesota Engineering Foundation Chemical Separations: Refocusing Chemical Engineering This award supports partially the participation by 30 American faculty in the Engineering Foundation Conference, Chemical Separations: Refocusing Chemical Engineering , to be held in Barga, Italy, from May 27 to June 1, . This conference is the successor to earlier conferences on chemical separations. This particular meeting will explore the changing nature of the chemical industry and the implications for chemical-engineering research and education. Case studies will be used to seek new ways of organizing the field, both in education and research, in order to meet emerging needs. Funding is provided to support partially participation by ten invited speakers and twenty junior faculty from the U.S. Both academic and industrial researchers will participate in sessions on Process Intensification, Chemical Products, and New Paradigms doc13970 none Kardar This grant supports research and education aimed at understanding static and dynamic fluctuation phenomena in polymers, gels, flux lines, surfaces, complex fluids, and social networks. Field theory and numerical methods, e.g. Monte Carlo simulation, will be used to extract universal features of these interacting systems. New theoretical methods may be developed in the course of the work. Research will focus on several specific questions: Are knots and entanglements in polymers such as DNA localized by energy or entropy effects on shorter segments? How are fluctuations modified in the vicinity of a deformed surface, and can they be used to provide indirect information about deformations? Can we describe the emergence of patterns in biological systems (cortical maps, cell motility, and structural constructs from molecular motors and microtubules) by continuum field equations, and what do we learn from such modeling? What is the interplay of order and fluctuations in the non-equilibrium contexts of growing films and drifting lattices? Can simple biological systems be mimicked by imprinting desired information in seemingly random gels at the molecular level? %%% This grant supports fundamental theoretical research and education in an area of statistical physics dealing with static and dynamic fluctuation phenomena in polymers, gels, flux lines, surfaces, complex fluids, biological systems, and social networks. The PI will use advanced theoretical techniques to address specific questions involving equilibrium and nonequilibrium phenomena in polymer physics, film and crystal growth, cortical maps, and molecular biology. Students will be trained in advanced theoretical methods for statistical physics and their applications to a wide range of systems including biological systems doc13971 none Egami International Conference on LOCAL AND NANOSCALE STRUCTURE IN COMPLEX SYSTEMS will be held September 16-21, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. The purpose of this meeting is to discuss how the nanoscale arrangements of atoms in solids and molecules determine the properties of complex systems, from experimental as well as theoretical perspective. Examples of complex systems include strongly correlated electron systems such as superconducting cuprates and magnetostrictive (CMR) manganites, heavy fermion metals, relaxor ferroelectrics, catalysts, polymers and other soft or molecular compounds, and proteins. %%% The subject of this conference is at the cutting edge of condensed matter and materials physics. Graduate students and postdoctoral fellows will be greatly stimulated and learn from attending this conference. We plan to spend 60 % of the grant on students and postdoctoral fellows who do not have other means of support. The rest will be spent for inviting young and promising researchers who will not be able to attend the conference without support doc13957 none This proposal describes a three year collaborative research program by a multi-university team of device, electronics, and biomedical investigators applying and extending newly emerging technologies for monolithic optoelectronic integration to address problems and needs of biomedical research and diagnosis. Researchers at MIT have recently demonstrated unique monolithic optoelectronic integrated circuits (OEICs) of unprecedented complexity and performance, and their ability now to monolithically integrate light sources and detectors with complex high density, high performance electronic circuitry opens the way to the invention and realization of a wide variety of sensors and measurement arrays for medical research and diagnostics. It is this area which the proposed effort will address. The technologies for monolithic optoelectronic integration which are under development at MIT are sufficiently advanced that they can be applied immediately to solve a variety of problems, and one area that is ripe with applications and needs that are addressable with the current technology is biomedical research and practice. From the numerous possible target applications in biomedicine, we have identified as an initial vehicle for applying this technology a integrated source detector array for diffuse optical tomography (DOT). The proposed unit will permit DOT observations with a resolution exceeding that of present techniques and will lead to the use of DOT in procedures and situations in which it is currently unfeasible. Stated in the most general terms, the proposed effort will be directed at developing, applying, and making available a technology to monolithically integrate III-V optical emitters and detectors with commercially fabricated, custom-designed integrated circuits to produce high resolution two-dimensional arrays of individually addressable smart excitor sensor pixels tailored for biomedical research applications and studies. A representative pixel might measure 250 to 500 microns on a side, and contain, for example, a diode light emitter (LED or laser), one or more light sensors, and a significant amount of electronic signal processing circuitry. This basic unit is a building block from which a wide variety of biomedical optical measurement systems can be realized in a very rugged, compact chip-size format. It promises to lead, in the future, to totally new sensor geometries and measurement procedures. The challenges that the program will face include continuing development of the OEIC technology and adapting this technology for biomedical research; developing suitable signal processing algorithms and designing compact, high performance signal processing circuit arrays in the relevant electronics technologies to interface with the optoelectronic devices; and suitably packaging the OEIC chips for their biomedical utilization. The project team will be aided in this effort by its strong links with the Northeastern University Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems, the Massachusetts General Hospital NMR Center, the University of Utah NIH NCRR Center for Bioelectric Field Modeling, Simulations and Visualization, and the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratory, and by integrated circuit processing support from Vitesse Semiconductor Corporation doc13973 none The researchers will investigate the interaction of microorganisms with their geochernical environment in chimney deposits that are actively forming in the Guaymas Basin hydrothermal system. The specific objectives of this study are twofold. First, they will trace the evolution of the thermal chemical physical environment within newly formed chimney walls over time-scales of minutes to months and determine the distribution of microorganisms within this temporal chemical thermal spatiaI framework. Second, they will assess subsurface geochemical processes responsible for the delivery of organic and inorganic metabolic energy sources and nutrients from deep-seated reaction zones to near seafloor environments. These goals will be attained by identifying microbial populations that inhabit well-constrained temperature and compositional domains within the walls of newly formed and existing chimneys through a collaborative and interdisciplinary study with Drs. Debra Stakes (MBARI), Randy Koski (USGS), and Geoff Wheat (University of Alaska Fairbanks-MBARI campus), using the MBARI RN Western Flyer and ROV Tiburon. Temperature within the walls of newly formed chimneys will be monitored using thermocouple arrays that are enveloped during chimney growth. The new chimneys will subsequently be recovered and the solid material in the immediate vicinity of each thermocouple used for enrichment cultures, molecular phylogenetic approaches, and fluorescent in situ hybridization with 16S rRNA-specific probes, while splits of the same material will be fully characterized with respect to their mineralogic, chemical, and isotopic composition. Vent fluids delivering nutrients and chemical energy from deep-seated subsurface reaction zones to the seafloor will be analyzed using a comprehensive analytical plan that involves quantitative determination of the abundance of aqueous organic, inorganic, and gaseous species. Compositional data for fluids and solids will be used to constrain thermodynamic and diffusive-advective models that allow estimation of fluid composition and temperature within chimney walls, information that will facilitate calculation of the amounts and sources of chemical energy available for metabolic activity. Mineralogical, chemical, and isotopic analyses of chimney minerals will provide key information on conditions present as the chimneys have evolved that can be compared to the thermal history as recorded by the thermocouples, and to the results of model calculations. The resultant understanding of the time dependent colonization of chimney environments in which the P-T-X conditions are known will address important questions about how microorganisms grow in these extreme environments, and what the geochemical constraints are on microbial diversity and succession. The methods the investigators will use have all been applied successfully at other vent sites. What makes this research unique is the combination of these technologies and interdisciplinary expertise to assess biogeochemical processes within vent environments doc13974 none This is a study of a family of complementary fragments from oxidized E. coli thioredoxin (Trx) and their heterodimeric reassemblies around different interfaces. The values of estimated buried surface from DSC studies of intrinsically unstructured protein fragments will be correlated with NMR studies of conformational preferences and rigidity of the backbone at the residue level. This project combines three areas of expertise (protein fragment complementation, calorimetry of proteins, and NMR analysis of structure and dynamics of proteins) and centers on two main hypotheses: (1) Isolated Trx fragments which comprise the regions of the native 2 and 4 strands have substantial nonlocal interactions between them, while remaining intrinsically unstructured. (2) The differences in delta G of folding binding among the different heterodimeric reassemblies are mainly due to differences in the degree of folding and rigidity in the isolated fragments. In order to test these hypotheses, the delta G of folding binding and low-resolution structural characterization of the initial and final states for a family of complementary fragments will be determined. High sensitivity DSC studies of selected isolated fragments and heterodimeric reassemblies will be undertaken, and NMR studies of the structures of the initial and final states of selected complementary fragments will be done to study the dynamics of such a selected pair in both states. The long-term objective of these studies is to characterize the conformational space of the unfolded state of proteins and understand protein-protein interactions covering a range of affinities and degree of folding associated with binding through a synergistic interaction between experimenation and theory doc13975 none The Mantle Electromagnetic and Tomography (MELT) geophysical experiment, carried out around 17 degrees south on the East Pacific Rise, utilized seismic and electromagnetic observations to determine the geometry of the region of partial melting and the pattern of upwelling beneath a spreading ridge. This project will further the analysis of the MELT electromagnetic data by : (1) developing an improved, numberical-based approach for stripping out the topographic effects from the seafloor, (2) developing an anisotropic version of a 2D inversion algorithm, (3) applying both of these tools to the MELT data, and (4) conducting an integration of the MELT seismic and electromagnetic data doc13976 none Dodelson This funding is for a 3-week workshop titled Structure Formation and Dark Matter: Theory vs. Observations. The Elementary Particles and Field Theory Group of Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Cosmology Group at the University of Chicago are coordinating the workshop. The workshop is designed to promote discussion through both formal and informal talks. The funds for this grant will be used to support travel expenses for approximately six students, thus enhancing their training in the field of Cosmology. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc13977 none This SGER proposal requests support for an experimental campaign to perform correlative studies of lightning and lightning-induced ionospheric effects using the Arecibo Observatory (AO) UHF and co-axial VHF radars, a VHF radio interferometer, and a VLF receiver. The campaign will be performed during a three-week period in August-September in Puerto Rico. The radar data taking modes necessary for the proposed effort exist as do the basic analysis and display routines. The proposed program will employ combination of instruments which has never been used before and uniquely qualifies for SGER program as small-scale, exploratory research, which can potentially lead to major discoveries in the fields of lightning physics and lightning induced lower ionospheric effects doc13978 none Lubin, Philip M. The White Mountain Research Station (WMRS) Barcroft Observatory site will be used make measurements of the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB) in order to assess the site for its usefulness for mm and submillimeter wavelength astronomy and to perform cutting edge original scientific research on a very important aspect of CMB: its polarization. Measurements of the amplitude and spatial distribution of CMB polarization along with its correlation with the temperature anisotropy will provide profound information about the structure, evolution and ionization history of the University. Assessing the site, which looks very promising, will open up a US mainland site for sub-submillimeter wave astronomy enabling less expensive site visits than now possible using off-shore observatories and thus enable its frequent scientifically productive use by students doc13979 none The power industry must undertake a managed redesign of the Nation s power system so that it can adapt to deregulation and to rapid changes in the power requirements and regional economic conditions. The need for research in this area is vividly illustrated by the recent California power problems. This second five year continuing grant funds the University of California, Berkeley as part of a multi-university Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC) for Power Systems Engineering (PSERC). The I UCRC involves 10 university research sites generating over $1.5 million. The four universities, Cornell University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Illinois-Champaign, and the University of California-Berkeley, being addressed in identical proposals as a group have generated over $600,000 in the last year. The Center addresses research projects in marketing, transmission and distribution and systems in electric power generation and transmission doc13980 none This grant will provide support towards a conference to bring together the leading researchers in metaheuristics, both from the U. S. and abroad, to report their latest research tat is providing advancers in the important and fast-growing domains of scatter search and tabu search. These combined domains have proved responsible for providing significant improvements in our ability to solve complex real world optimization problems in many areas, including telecommunications, transportation, information systems, data mining, biomolecular design, resource management, financial planning, logistics CAD CAM systems, water remediation, environmental systems and many others. The conference will be held March 08 - March 10, at the University of Mississippi, Oxford, Mississippi doc13981 none Beal Recent observations of a strong, apparently persistent, Agulhas Undercurrent (AUC) raise a multitude of provocative questions. The big questions addressed by this study are What are the latitudinal extent of the AUC and its role in the thermohaline circulation? What are the evolution and forcing of the velocity, potential vorticity, and water mass structure along the AUC path? How does one quantify the mixing entrainment with western boundary current waters and determine the absolute fluxes of heat and mass within the AUC? What are the mean and temporal variability of the transport of the AUC? A hydrographic cruise is proposed during which 4 conductivity-temperature-depth and lowered acoustic Doppler current profiler sections of the AUC will be measured. A short mooring array along 32S will be deployed, as well. Three moorings will each contain 3 meters spaced to capture the AUC transport. They will be confined to the lower m of the water column and be designed to monitor for up to 2 years, but may be retrieved earlier. The dominant fluctuations are expected to have periods of 30 - 40 days. The moorings, meters, and associated technicians will be provided at no cost to NSF by Southampton Oceanography Centre. A line of stations at 50 km spacing will connect the offshore ends of the sections closing boxes to allow property balance estimation to be done. A line of stations at 100 km spacing will be made along m from 26S to 37S to estimate the latitudinal extent of the undercurrent. Each station will include conductivity-temperature-depth, dissolved oxygen, and lowered acoustic Doppler current profiler data with 24 bottles for calibration to WOCE standards by ODF personnel. The cruise should require about 28 days doc13982 none Sociological work on the operation of economic markets focuses primarily on how firms relate to and compete with one another, but ignores consumption issues. Work on consumption looks at how people use objects and what they mean, but usually ignores production. This project examines how both producers and consumers contribute to the formation and operation of markets. To do so, it investigates two single-product markets that differed in their outcomes. While a bicycle market developed in both France and the United States during the s, the market in France continued to expand for decades. In contrast, the market in the United States collapsed around - twenty years before a mass automobile market was possible. Using data stored in archives in France and the United States, the project explores the roles played by marketing strategies, class and ethnic differences in consumption, and road systems in determining the contrasting market outcomes doc13983 none This award funds a conference in algebraic geometry at the University of Missouri-Columbia, April 5-6, . The conference focuses on Hilbert schemes, vector bundles and their interplay with representation theory. It has two main goals. The first is to provide a forum for algebraic geometers to meet with colleagues and learn of recent research developments in these focused areas. The second is to give graduate students, recent Ph.D s and women an opportunity to broaden their mathematical horizons. The conference includes 8 hour-long invited talks addressed by leading mathematicians, and about 20 shorter communications. The focused areaes of the conference are at the central stage of recent confluence between mathematics and physics. The mathematical achievements in these focused areaes provide solid mathematical foundation to the physics theories which are vital to explain the universe. In addition, the conference will have a high impact on diversity, as well as scientific and educational activities doc13984 none Several behaviors are differentially expressed in male and female mammals as adults, typically regulated by the levels of steroid hormones that were present during early postnatal development. A number of differences in the brain also have been correlated with sex differences in behavior, including differences in numbers and density of particular nuclei (clusters of nerve cells) in parts of the brain. Changes in these neural parameters suggest that changes also are required in the afferent and efferent neural connections of these nuclei. This project combines hormonal treatments with quantitative neuroanatomy to test the hypothesis that neonatal steroids regulate male sexual behavior by regulating the development of the number, density, and interconnections of neurons in the magnocellular part of the medial preoptic nucleus (MPN mag), which is involved in olfactory-driven male sexual behavior. This study provides a unique opportunity to clarify functional roles of neuronal differences in sexually dimorphic structures in the brain, and will be important for future molecular studies underlying dimorphic neurogenesis, so the impact will extend to developmental biology. In addition, the broader impact promotes research by a woman investigator from an under-represented group, who is actively involved in increasing the representation of minority students in scientific research doc13985 none Under the direction of Dr. Sally McBrearty, Mr. Christian Tryon will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. His goal is to use closely dated archaeological and paleontological occurrences in the Kapthurin stratigraphic sequence in the Baringo region of Kenya to examine the emergence of anatomically and behaviorally modern humans. The Kapthurin formation is crucial for understanding this transformation because materials spanning the last ca. 2 million years are interbedded with volcanic ash which is amenable to potassium argon dating. Different ashes - the result of individual eruptions - have distinct trace element compositions and through their analysis, individual ashfalls can be fingerprinted and their distribution mapped across the formation. Thus they provide a relatively secure framework to track behavioral and biological change. Careful crafted hafted stone tools from both the Kapthurin as well as elsewhere in Africa are termed Middle Stone Age (MSA) and they provide the first evidence for humans with cognitive abilities similar to our own. The earliest date, ca. 285,000 years ago comes from the Kapthurin and Mr. Tryon wishes to gain insight into this early phase of the process. Research to date in the northern Kapthurin exposures has significantly changed archaeological views of this process because it has demonstrated that three separate stone working traditions, the MSA and two supposedly preceding ones are in fact interbedded and do not form a chronologically coherent developmental sequence. Researchers do not know whether this variability results from a single culture which manufactured different types of tools in different situations, or whether three separate and distinct cultures existed. In the Near East at a slightly younger date, such replacement occurred with different groups ebbing and flowing in response to changing environmental conditions. While much work has taken place in the northern Kapthurin deposits, their southern counterparts are more poorly known. Mr. Tryon is conducting a geological and archaeological survey of this area both to locate sites and to establish a detailed chronological sequence. With NSF support he will characterize the volcanic ashes collected and will conduct archaeological excavation to provide additional information on cultural variation. This research is important because it will shed light on the emergence of behavioral modern humans. It will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc13986 none The Cariaco Basin is a 1,400-m deep depression on the continental shelf off Venezuela in which anoxic waters cover laminated sediments with high organic matter content (1-5 wt%). These laminae, which result from seasonal variations in primary productivity and terrigenous sediment input along the southern the Caribbean Sea, contain a high-resolution record of past climate change in the tropical Atlantic Ocean. In this collaborative effort, researchers at the University of South Florida (USF), the University of South Carolina (USC), and the State University of New York (SUNY) seek to integrate hydrographic, primary productivity, water column microbial activity, vertical particulate flux, and sediment accumulation rate measurements in the Cariaco Basin into a synthesis to understand how contemporary sedimentation patterns reflect this climatic and oceanographic variability. The central objective is to understand the factors that control the relationship between primary production and the vertical flux of particles in the Cariaco Basin. This project will continue the current time series of monthly observations at 10 30 N, 64 40 W that began in November, , under the CARIACO (CArbon Retention In A Colored Ocean) Program. This includes continuing deployment of a mooring with four sediment traps (275, 350, 450, and 1,200 m) to provide bi-weekly sample collections at each depth. Complementing the traps will be a mooring with two Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (ADCP), one looking up and the other looking down from a depth of about 250 m, to measure currents from below the sill depth to the surface for a three-year period. Each year, one transect will be conducted between the CARIACO station and 11 40 N, 64 40 W outside the basin, to help understand the characteristics of source water involved in intrusions and upwelling. Regional wind and sea level will be examined using both local and remotely-sensed data to establish whether forcing for upwelling occurs primarily through local or gyre-scale processes. Sediments from the Cariaco basin will be collected and analyzed to reconstruct the oceanographic condition in the Cariaco Basin over the past century and provide a window for longer-scale paleoceanographic studies. The program is significant because it provides groundtruthing needed for proper interpretation of past climate changes recorded in the Cariaco sediments doc13987 none This is funding for a jointly sponsored NSF EU workshop to be held May 22-25, , at the Pousada D. Afonso II situated in Alcacer do Sal outside of Lisbon, Portugal. This relatively secluded site has been chosen by the organizers so that attendees can participate without distraction in the workshop, which will bring together 35-45 leaders in the fields of universal access research, business, academics and policy to review the current state-of-the-art and produce a set of research agenda items for near and long term activities whose goal is to assure universal accessibility of ubiquitous computing by the elderly. Particular emphasis will be placed on articulating an integrated approach to addressing the problems in the context of technology and human rights and values, paying attention to challenges due not only to physical limitations but also to differences in perception, culture and background. Prior to arrival, all attendees will provide background papers highlighting their individual perspectives. The workshop will begin with a plenary session setting the framework for what is to follow; subsequent sessions will each include a short formal presentation followed by a facilitator-led discussion. The tentative list of session topics includes: pervasive mobile computing and the aging population; exploratory user centered design for all citizens; accessibility and the elderly; accessibility for people with cognitive impairments; user-centered design with senior citizens; sociological integration facilitated by technology; and profile of the senior citizen s varied needs. Approximately half a dozen graduate students will be included among the invitees; they will have a unique opportunity to share the direction of their thesis work and receive mentoring from senior members of the field. The revised, peer-reviewed workshop proceedings will be published as a book by a respected publisher (negotiations are currently under way by the organizers with ACM Press and North-Holland). Additionally, a report and research agenda will be submitted to the two major funding bodies (NSF and the EU), and workshop contributions, summaries and discussions will be made available online through a Web site to ensure timely dissemination to the community at large. The organizers have received expressions of support from IFIP TC13 (HCI) and WG13.3 (People with Disabilities), and from ACM SIGCHI, SIGCAPH, and SIGGRAPH. NSF funds will be used primarily to support American attendees, as well as some general expenses doc13988 none This project proposed by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) will collect and analyze data from sample surveys and data systems towards three goals: (1) evaluate the quality of initial preparation and professional development of math and science teachers in the nation and by state, and assess trends toward improved preparation, (2) assess change in the quality of teaching practices being used in schools in relation to science and math education standards, and (3) establish a web-based system for collecting data and evaluating the quality of professional development activities with science and math teachers, using criteria based on recent research on quality programs. This will be led by CCSSO with assistance from an expert panel, and a subcontractor organization, Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER doc13989 none Matano OSU The purpose of the is project is to use numerical modeling to examine the routes by which the upper return flow in the South Atlantic carries heat and salt across the basin and the role that mesoscale eddies play in this transport. First, diagnostic studies of existing global and Atlantic simulations will be made. This will be followed by process studies designed to test hypotheses about the paths of Pacific and Indian Ocean upper thermocline waters through the South Atlantic to the tropics. The project s broad goals are: (1) to understand how changes in magnitude of southern sources of water, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and the Agulhas Current, affect the magnitude and relative composition of South Atlantic upper ocean export to the tropics, (2) to understand the mechanisms that regulate the mean circulation and variability of the subtropical gyre and their linkage to interocean exchanges, and (3) to determine the sensitivity of the South Atlantic circulation to changes in wind forcing in the southern hemisphere doc13990 none Grigoropoulos The work is focused on laser-driven crystal growth in thin semiconductor films for fabricating thin film transistors (TFTs) utilized in large area electronics including high-definition flat panel displays. The goal is to achieve production of device-quality polycrystalline material through one-step manufacturing process with superior control of the single crystal growth location, orientation and size. The temporal and spatial distribution of the rapidly changing temperature field and solid liquid interface propagation will be investigated at the microscale level. The following tasks will be carried out: 1) One-step production of single crystal regions that are sufficiently large for fabricating TFTs via the novel double laser recrystallization technique. A new laser-based processing tool will be developed and instrumented for advanced process control and enhanced throughput. Schemes involving processing of patterned regions in conjunction with spatially modified beam profiles will be tested. 2) Fabrication and characterization of TFTs on the produced poly-Si films in order to examine the quality of the poly-Si and hence evaluate the effectiveness of the controlled laser recrystallization and lateral crystal growth process. The results will be utilized to identify optimal combinations of the laser beam parameters and pattern configurations. 3) Design and implementation of a new temporally and spatially resolved microscale temperature measurement technique based on thermal emission. The measured temperature distribution in conjunction with direct in-situ imaging will provide information on the microstructural evolution including the quenching rate, the degree of supercooling, the nucleation temperature and the solid liquid interface velocity. The experimental findings will enable construction of validated and accurate computational models of the complex phase transformation process. These models will be then used for improving the process sequence doc13991 none The axon serves as a long line of communication that makes up the hard wiring of the nervous system. Its long term maintenance and potential for structural plasticity depends on a continuous supply of proteins. It was generally assumed that all axoplasmic proteins were synthesized in the cell body and transported at slow rates to the axon. The reasoning was based on an apparent lack of axoplasmic ribosomes, the ultrastructural correlates of a protein synthesizing machinery, despite metabolic and biochemical evidence to the contrary. Recently, periodic small discrete ribosome-containing domains were documented in the periphery of axoplasm isolated from myelinated axons. The research proposal is concerned with testing the hypothesis that periaxoplasmic ribosomal domains serve as centers of protein synthesis, which supply immediate surrounding regions with essential proteins, such as actin. Experiments will be performed in the Mauthner neuron, which is a large identifiable cell in the goldfish brain stem that projects its myelinated axon along the full length of spinal cord. They will determine (1) whether a cDNA construct that codes for a fusion protein, comprised of actin and green fluorescent protein (GFP), in which the latter serves as a reporter, will result in the transport of the mRNA from the cell body to the axon, (2) localization of the mRNA in periaxoplasmic ribosomal domains and (3) synthesis and subsequent distribution of the fusion protein product to surrounding axoplasm. Additional experiments will test the hypothesis in rabbit myelinated motor axons, in which sites of initial metabolic uptake of [35S]methionine along axons will be analyzed and related to the localization of periaxoplasmic ribosomal domains. Subsequent time-dependent distribution of radioactive proteins to surrounding axoplasm will be mapped, and analysis of radiolabeled proteins will also be undertaken. A complementary issue is whether any membrane proteins are also synthesized in the axon compartment, for which signal recognition particles (SRPs) would be required. Experiments are proposed to analyze (1) for the occurrence of SRPs, (2) for the presence and localization of SNAP-25 mRNA, which codes for a membrane protein involved in transmitter release, and (3) for glycosylation, a process of cotranslationally adding sugars to newly synthesized membrane proteins. Specifically, the experiments will address an important question as to whether periaxoplasmic ribosomal domains are metabolically active in synthesizing proteins for local utilization in the axon compartment. More generally, however, the findings will add substantially to a better fundamental understanding of the complex biology of the axon doc13992 none Recent studies of fish red blood cells found that a regular paracrystalline array of hemoglobin (Hb) tetamers formed under low oxygen conditions in 2 species of boreal fishes, Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) and toadfish, (Opsanus tau). This phenomenon is termed hemoglobin gelation and its physiological characteristics and importance to survival of boreal fishes is unknown. The study outlined in this proposal will obtain preliminary data on the frequency and physiological nature of the phenomenon of hemoglobin (Hb) gelation in red blood cells of fishes that inhabit cold-water temperate and Arctic environments. The present study will test the hypothesis that hemoglobin gelation within fish red blood cells may be a feature of normal fish respiratory physiology and might be adaptive in extreme cold-water environments. Twelve fish species have been examined to date, and only the cold-water boreal marine fishes exhibited Hb gelation. In one species, Atlantic cod, gelation was relatively mild and did not result in changes in the gross morphology of the blood cells. In a second species, toadfish, gelation resulted in large crystalline structures that disrupted the red cell membranes and ruptured blood cells. The differences in type and severity of Hb gelation among fish species may directly affect their physiology and ultimately play an important part in their capacity for survival. However, too few species have been assayed to determine the extent of hemoglobin gelation in boreal fishes and no data exists on the physiological conditions that facilitate gelation. Few experimental links have been established between gelation and fish hemoglobin structure or between the variation in hemoglobin type and physiology. In this study blood will be sampled from a large number of boreal and Arctic fishes and tested for Hb gelation and the presence of the Hb paracrystalline matrix. These data will provide an accurate assessment of the distribution of the gelation phenomenon within boreal fishes and any correlation with genetic variation within species. Some species of fishes, such as Atlantic cod, have polymorphic hemoglobin in which multiple hemoglobin allotypes are expressed within the red blood cells of the same species. To determine if gelation is associated with hematocrit or with the physiological characteristics of the isoHb components of a species, blood from a representative boreal fish species, Atlantic cod, will be separated into its Hb components and each component will be characterized for oxygen binding functionality and its gelation capacity. The scientific relevance of this is to determine if there are common morphological and physiological traits among hemoglobins of boreal fishes that exhibit gelation and whether these traits are adaptive in extreme environments characteristic of polar regions doc13993 none Following advances in information and communication technologies and the rapid evolution of E-Commerce and financial engineering during the past few years, optimization has begun to play a crucial role in sharpening the competitive edge of conventional business and organization operations. Because of the expected growth in many information related areas and what is perceived as a critical demand for focused research attention on future directions and applications of large scale simulation optimization, a workshop will be organized at Harvard University on June 23 and 24, . This workshop will bring together leading government, industrial, and academic researchers and practitioners of systems simulation modeling and optimization for the purpose of identifying research issues, targets of opportunity, application areas and other unforeseen points relevant to this promising research area doc13994 none Proposal: PI: Symeon Christodoulou Institution: Polytechnic University of New York Date: August 2, : Water Distribution Infrastructure Management System: an Analytical Decision-Making Framework for the Planning of Rehabilitation Integrating Statistical failure Models The overall objective of this research is to enrich the state of decision-making as it applies to water pipes assets management and rehabilitation programs. The essential questions are: (1) what actions should be taken to ensure that the physical assets are managed in a cost efficient way? (2) when should such actions be taken? The proposed research expands upon the current studies conducted at Polytechnic University s Urban Infrastructure Institute (UII) in cooperation with European research centers. It will focus on the evaluation of degradation models, and on the development of an analytical framework for risk management using New York City as a case study doc13995 none This project will continuously monitor the pressure, fluid chemistry, and hydrology in two instrumented boreholes at the Costa Rica subduction zone, using long-term observatories (CORK and ACORK) installed during ODP Leg 203. The field program will 1) deploy pressure gauges and data loggers, OsmoSamplers, and osmotic flow meters in 3 CORKed boreholes along a transect across the deformation front of the subduction zone and 2) retrieve the OsmoSamplers, data stored in the data loggers and deploying new OsmoSamplers and pressure gauges, with the submersible Alvin. The fluid stored in the OsmoSamplers will provide a continuous 1.3 year record of fluid conditions collected at in situ conditions at weekly resolution, in three distinct hydrogeologic systems. The first flow system is the upper oceanic crust of the incoming Cocos Plate, the second is the return of a deeply sourced fluid along the decollement and the third is in the underthrust sediment section driven by compaction dewatering. By documenting the nature of these hydrogeologic systems it will be possible to better understand the effects of fluid flow at convergent margins on the shallow thermal structure and fluid content of the downgoing plate, the physical properties of the subduction zone interface, deformation style and transport of elements to the oceans doc13996 none The PIs propose to collect records of S s and more limited from DSDP sites 522 and 574 plus an on-land site in the Italian Appenines across the late Eocene- Oligocene boundary to confirm their preliminary data that show a dip and then a dramatic increase in S I 880s across the boundary. This boundary also marks the beginning of the deterioration (cooling) in global climate after the long Eocene warm period. The cause of this cooling is presently undetermined and controversial with many possible causes. This research could help narrow the causes because the Os record will be compared with record of ice volume at site 522. In addition, the on-land section will be used to compare the Os record with an independent He proxy for interplanetary dust particle (IDP) flux that is capable of lowering global ocean S I Os. The new study will establish whether the excursion Of S s is a global event or not, and will help to narrow the possibilities for its cause. It will also develop the possible potential of Os isotopes as a proxy for continental weathering doc13866 none A long-standing controversy in mid-ocean ridge dynamics is whether upwelling beneath fast spreading ridges is sheet-like with a relatively uniform magma supply along axis, or more three-dimensional with diapiric-like upwelling near segment centers and lateral redistribution of melt along axis at shallow magma chamber levels and or by lower crustal, ductile flow. The UNDERSHOOT experiment was designed to address this problem by mapping the pattern of magma delivery from the mantle to the crust along the entire length of a transform bounded segment of the East Pacific Rise between the Siqueiros and Clipperton fracture zones. The quality of the data are the important issues that remain warrant further analyses. Models of crustal thickness will be refined by employing improved algorithms that allow all data collected in the experiment to be modeled simultaneously. Understanding of the properties of the Moho transition and uppermost mantle will be improved. Improved models of along axis variations in the structure of the mantle and lower crust low velocity zones will be developed doc13998 none The primary objective is to update and expand the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) database, focused on the high-mountain areas of Central Asia. The data set will be compiled from meteorological measurements conducted by the National Hydrometeorological Services (NHMS) of the Central Asian states in the Former Soviet Union. The goal is to extend the time series of 40 climate stations from Central Asia that are currently in the GHCN database, and add 200 stations to that data set. Most of the new stations are located above the m elevation. Monthly mean data for air temperature and cumulative monthly precipitation values collected by NHMS, along with a subset of maximum minimum monthly temperature data will be constructed. The database will include three different data sets: (i) the original data; (ii) a homogeneity-adjusted data set that has undergone rigorous quality assessment and control; and (iii) station metadata. The data set will be archived at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). The work is important because it will result in a climate database useful to assess long-term climate in a region known to be a sensitive indicator of climate change doc13999 none The complement system consists of a complex group of more than 30 soluble proteins and receptors that play an important role in innate and adaptive immunity. The key component of the complement system is the protein C3. Upon activation, the C3 molecule is cleaved into C3b and C3a fragments, enabling C3b to covalently bind to foreign particles such as viruses, bacteria, fungi, and protozoans. The targeted particles can be recognized and destroyed by phagocytic cells bearing complement receptors on their surfaces, or they can be further lysed. With the exception of teleost fish, each of the animal species studied to date contains only a single form of functionally active C3 that is the product of a single gene. In contrast, teleost fish demonstrate a unique diversity of functionally active C3 proteins, which are the products of different genes. This C3 diversity may have important biological consequences for the wide array of immune mechanisms involving the C3 molecule. It is hypothesized that the functional relevance behind this C3 diversity may be reflected in a diversification and or fine tuning of the C3 functions, which in turn may both broaden and strengthen the innate immune response of fish. Therefore, in this project the functional relevance of C3 diversity in innate immunity in teleost fish will be analyzed. The C3 protein is involved in two major innate immune mechanisms: phagocytosis and respiratory burst. These functions are exerted through two main C3 activation fragments, C3b and iC3b. The specific Aims of this project are: AIM 1: To purify and biochemically characterize the C3b and iC3b fragments from each of the three trout C3 isoforms, along with generating the corresponding IgM C3b iC3b-coated particles. Although these components are not commercially available for trout, protocols developed from previous work with trout complement has enabled Dr. Synyer to purify the various C3 isoforms, along with the other proteins required for the generation of C3b and iC3b. AIM 2: To analyze the interaction of the various C3b and iC3b fragments with putative C3 receptors present on trout phagocytes. The action exerted by C3b and iC3b is intimately related to the receptors to which these C3 derivatives bind. Dr. Sunyer plans to test two alternative hypotheses; that the diversification of the C3 molecules has also resulted in a diversification of the C3-receptors and their biological roles, or the various C3 proteins share the same receptors to which they may bind with similar or different affinities. To address these hypotheses, the binding and internalization of the various C3b and iC3b molecules to trout phagocytes will be analyzed. In addition, the investigator will also assess possible post-receptor events (changes in intracellular calcium concentration and analysis of intracellular signalling events using the patch-clamp recording technique) resulting from the interaction of the C3b iC3b fragments with their receptors. This analysis of the interaction of the C3b and iC3b molecules with their putative receptors will be useful in interpreting the functional data obtained in Aim 3 concerning the function of the various trout C3 isoforms in innate immunity. AIM 3: To examine the role of the various C3 isoforms in two major innate immune processes, phagocytosis and respiratory burst. It is hypothesized that the diversity generated in the C3 molecule of teleost fish may have also resulted in a diversification and or fine tuning and specialization of some of the C3-mediated functions. Thus, the most critical question to assess here is whether the various C3b and iC3b fragments from the various C3 isoforms have different effects on phagocytosis and respiratory burst and whether such differences relate to the binding, internalization and post-receptor events observed upon interaction of the C3b and iC3b molecules with the trout leukocytes (Aim 2). Here, a two-color flow cytometric method (FACS) will be used for simultaneous measurement of phagocytosis and respiratory burst. In these studies, the rainbow trout will be used as the teleost fish model, since the investigator has already generated many of the specific reagents that are required for these studies, including purified trout complement molecules and antibodies recognizing all of these molecules. These studies should shed new light on the biological significance of the fascinating diversity in C3 that makes the teleost fish complement system such a unique immune mechanism. These studies are also expected to provide new insights into the role of the complement system in the innate immune reactions of teleost fish. Many of these studies involve both the use of homologous components (purified trout molecules) and innovative techniques that are not commonly used in the field of comparative immunology. Therefore these studies will establish new directions for the study of the fish immune system and are expected to expand understanding of the evolution of immune reactions doc14000 none The porous walls of hydrothermal chimneys are ideal habitats for microorganisms because of the steep chemical and thermal gradients present there. In this proposed study, the PI team will study the physical and chemical conditions in growing chimneys over time scales of minutes to months and then determine the distribution of microorganisms in this framework. In addition, there will be a modeling component of the study that will try to determine what subsurface geochemical processes are occurring in the deep reaction zones that bring nutrients and other chemicals to the surface. This is a collaboration with Stakes, Wheat, and Koski, and will use the R V Western Flyer (MBARI ship) and the ROV Tiburon to stud growing chimneys. Thermocouple arrays will be placed on growing chimnes and then will be enveloped as the chimney grows. Later, the chimneys will be recovered and the microbiota studied in wide variety of ways including culturing and molecular phylogenetic methods. At the same time, the sulfide minerals of the chimneys and associated vent fluids will also be studied in detail to yield mineralogic, chemical and isotopic data that constrain the chemical conditions of microbial growth, succession, and diversity. Thermodynamic and advective-diffusive modeling will be carried out to constrain the amounts and sources of chemical energy available for metabolic activity. This study will provide a multidisciplinary study of the interaction between growing sulfide chimneys and microbes doc14001 none Polzin WHOI The project supports the design, construction and testing of a new instrument to measure velocity on vertical scales that range from the microscale to the depth of the ocean. This instrument will have the unique capacity to obtain profiles of turbulent quantities to within a few meters of the bottom of the deep ocean and thus be able to sample both the upper part of the bottom boundary layer and the ocean interior. The design is based on an existing profiler that is nearing the end of its working life. However, design enhancements will permit closer approaches to the sea-floor, more accurate measurements and greater data storage. It is anticipated that the instrument will be used in future research into a variety of scientific questions about the ocean in which small-scale mixing and small-scale structure in the density field are important. These include questions about the maintenance and evolution of the large-scale stratification and circulation of the ocean as well as questions concerned with how tracers are mixed through the ocean doc14002 none Gray This Americas Program award will support a workshop organized by Dr. Charles M. Gray, Montana State University, and Dr. Pedro E. Maldonado of the University of Chile, to be held in Pucon, Chile in March . The workshop will focus on the theoretical and experimental foundations of cooperative cortical dynamics with the goal of discussing different and complementary approaches to improve our understanding of brain function. Participants will discuss theoretical and empirical approaches to characterizing and modeling neuronal activity in different structures of the nervous system, using a variety of methods ranging from electrophysiological techniques for the recording of large numbers of neurons to the mathematical analysis of spike trains. An added benefit of this activity will be the introduction of advances in systems neuroscience and techniques employed to examine cortical function to students from the U.S. and throughout Latin America doc13841 none McCartney WHOI a study of the pathways of exchange of deep water across the ACC; the transformation, by ventilation and mixing, of warm water along the ACC; exchange between the ACC and subtropical gyres; secular changes in the structure of the Southern Ocean. This work will help determine the role played by the Southern Ocean in establishing the density structure of the world s ocean. It will also provide a baseline for later evaluations of long-term change in the structure of the Southern Ocean doc14004 none Support is requested for an international conference on plant growth and development to be held in Brno, Czech Republic from July 1-6, . This conference will be the 17th in a series of conferences sponsored by the International Plant Growth Substance Association (IPGSA). These meetings are held every three years and the last two were convened in Minnesota ( ) and Makuhari Messe, Tokyo ( ). Progress in understanding the perception and action of plant hormones has advanced at a rapid pace as a result of advances in the areas of genetics and molecular cloning. These advances have led to the identification of genes that are involved in the perception of hormonal signals, and plant biologists are now beginning to unravel the signal transduction pathways that link hormone receptors to cellular response. The recent publication of the complete Arabidopsis thaliana and rice genome sequences will see an even more dramatic advances in our understanding of hormone action, and genomics approaches will feature prominently in the Brno meeting. The goals of the 17th International Conference on Plant Growth Substances are to bring together researchers who are working in this field to report on new developments and to share new ideas. Our goal is to introduce younger investigators to this exciting area and the funds provided from this grant will be used to support the travel and lodging of junior US investigators to this meeting. Topics to be covered in plenary sessions and symposia include signal transduction, hormone homeostasis, the roles of hormones in responses to environmental stresses, the use and application of transgenic plants in hormone research, the identification of new signalling molecules, the interaction of hormones with pathogens and symbionts, and hormone perception and sensitivity. The program promises to be exciting and to stimulate research on plant growth regulators. These compounds have long been established as important for U.S. agriculture, and our understanding of the cellular and molecular basis of their action is essential for the long-term sustainability of agriculture doc13995 none This project will continuously monitor the pressure, fluid chemistry, and hydrology in two instrumented boreholes at the Costa Rica subduction zone, using long-term observatories (CORK and ACORK) installed during ODP Leg 203. The field program will 1) deploy pressure gauges and data loggers, OsmoSamplers, and osmotic flow meters in 3 CORKed boreholes along a transect across the deformation front of the subduction zone and 2) retrieve the OsmoSamplers, data stored in the data loggers and deploying new OsmoSamplers and pressure gauges, with the submersible Alvin. The fluid stored in the OsmoSamplers will provide a continuous 1.3 year record of fluid conditions collected at in situ conditions at weekly resolution, in three distinct hydrogeologic systems. The first flow system is the upper oceanic crust of the incoming Cocos Plate, the second is the return of a deeply sourced fluid along the decollement and the third is in the underthrust sediment section driven by compaction dewatering. By documenting the nature of these hydrogeologic systems it will be possible to better understand the effects of fluid flow at convergent margins on the shallow thermal structure and fluid content of the downgoing plate, the physical properties of the subduction zone interface, deformation style and transport of elements to the oceans doc14006 none The central question of Comparative Immunology is how immune mechanisms have evolved. How do they change and adapt in response to the diverse microbial challenges present in the many and different environments that are occupied by animals? The tremendous diversity of animal life poses, in itself, a great challenge to such studies. Although it is clearly impossible (indeed counterproductive) to investigate the immune system of all animals, are we seriously restricting our knowledge by studying relatively few species? Are we missing important aspects of the diverse immune systems that function so effectively in animals? This workshop will discuss the current status and potential future developments of evolutionary immunobiology while coming to grips with the following two issues. First, are there model species that, while offering ease of experimental manipulation and or potential economic importance, occupy key phylogenetic positions? Second, can the chosen model species be used to establish paradigms (the equivalent of the Rosetta Stone) through which evolutionary and immunological processes in other species can be interpreted? In addition, the final session of the proposed Workshop will deal with the application of concepts from evolutionary immunobiology to understanding and managing problems of infectious diseases that affect and alter ecosystems. Biology is going through a revolution resulting from the application of genome-wide approaches to understanding organisms. Results from those projects which have been, or are about to be, accomplished (including human, mouse, Drosophila, C. elegans, pufferfish, zebrafish) have demonstrated the extraordinary power of genomics to contribute to the solution of problems in genetics, and molecular cell biology. Genomic approaches yield detailed information about a species, answering questions and generating new hypotheses at a remarkable rate. Yet the advances to be gained from genomic approaches can go far beyond simple analyses of the genes present in any given species, and an understanding of the control of expression of those genes. For example, we now have opportunities to study evolutionary processes through comparisons between complete genomes. In addition, as patterns of organization become apparent at the level of the whole genome, we will be able to extrapolate efficiently and effectively from the findings in favored key species, to make novel and testable predictions about other species that have been studied less intensively. This workshop has, as a major theme, the actual and potential impact of genomics on the field of evolutionary immunobiology doc14007 none This proposal requests support for the design, construction and testing of a towed video instrument for surveying and identifying macrozooplankton and micronekton in the water column. Called the Large Area Plankton Imaging System (LAPIS), the device would fill a scale gap between existing optical instruments designed for small particles and zooplankton, such as the Video Plankton Recorder, and acoustic systems that have a greater range but currently lack the resolution to identify different taxa of organisms. We intend to build a device that would illuminate and image objects ranging from 0.5 to 100 cm in size, within a field of view ranging from 2 to 4 m2. Towed at 1-2 knots, LAPIS would survey volumes of water approaching those filtered by Midwater trawls. Power, operational data and video signals would be transmitted between the surface and LAPIS via standard electro-optical cable. The instrument would use an array of high efficiency LEDs to create a field of intense red light, imaged by a high resolution (4 Mpixel) digital camera operating at 8 frames s-1. Red light is invisible to most marine organisms, and together with a hydrodynamically quiet profile, will render the instrument inconspicuous to target organisms. We will take advantage of several technologies that are either existent or in development by other groups at WHOI, including the control and data telemetry electronics built for the SeaSoar, and the video processing and Telemetry being developed for the next generation Video Plankton Recorder. Existing winches, wire and slip rings are WHOI will be available for evaluation and use of LAPIS. We believe this device will fill an important niche in optical survey instruments, allowing rapid and extensive quantification of larger organisms, including gelatinous plankton, larger crustaceans and midwater fishes. Although proposed now as a towed instrument, the basic configuration could be adapted for use on ROVs, packaged with acoustics instruments, or on profiling or fixed moorings. Expected applications in the near future include survey of salp swarms, of gelatinous predators in the Gulf of Maine, and future midwater exploration and quantification in connection with the Census of Marine Life doc14008 none of Tivey The proposed project will study the Kane megamullion, which is interpreted to be the exhumed footwall of a long-lived normal detachment fault near the Kane Fracture Zone on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The faulting appears to have exposed a deep-crustal and possibly upper mantle, section of lithosphere, making it accessible to survey, sampling and eventual drilling. The proposed field program will use the autonomous underwater vehicle (ABE), ROV Jason and dredging, together with laboratory analyses to address the questions of 1) how are magnetization and polarity -reversal history of Earth s magnetic field recorded at mid-crustal and deeper levels?, 2) what conditions of magmatism at the rift axis attend formation of megamullions,and what are the resulting composition and intrusive relations at mid-crustal and deeper levels? and 3) what are the nature of strain accomodation and evolution of strain localization in the shear zone of a major normal fault in ocean crust? This is a uniquely accessible section where survey and sampling will allow significant new insights into the processes of accretion and dissection of slow-spreading crust. The survey data will provide data to extend and constrain interpretations from drilling into megamullions, into three dimensions doc14009 none Melville Wind gustiness produces small waves that modulate the surface shear implying a transition from laminar to turbulent flow in the near surface layer and causing disruption of the surface skin layer. The PIs propose to confirm the presence of small scale Langmuir circulations under typical wind conditions, to determine the space and time scales associated with the surface turbulence, to examine the impact on the associated surface renewal, and to compare the experimental results with numerical and theoretical model predictions. Deployment of their laser-based PIV system in a lake will occur in year one (and possibly a FLIP deployment). A FLIP deployment will occur in year two with emphasis on understanding the heat flux budget in the ocean surface layers. Year three will include analysis, study of ancillary processes such as the role of surfactants, modeling, a second FLIP experiment with a focus on the relationships of renewal and turbulence-laminar flow transition to gustiness and its associated scales. Year four will be devoted to analysis and writing doc13866 none A long-standing controversy in mid-ocean ridge dynamics is whether upwelling beneath fast spreading ridges is sheet-like with a relatively uniform magma supply along axis, or more three-dimensional with diapiric-like upwelling near segment centers and lateral redistribution of melt along axis at shallow magma chamber levels and or by lower crustal, ductile flow. The UNDERSHOOT experiment was designed to address this problem by mapping the pattern of magma delivery from the mantle to the crust along the entire length of a transform bounded segment of the East Pacific Rise between the Siqueiros and Clipperton fracture zones. The quality of the data are the important issues that remain warrant further analyses. Models of crustal thickness will be refined by employing improved algorithms that allow all data collected in the experiment to be modeled simultaneously. Understanding of the properties of the Moho transition and uppermost mantle will be improved. Improved models of along axis variations in the structure of the mantle and lower crust low velocity zones will be developed doc14011 none This award provides continued support of the Foundation s long-term commitment for the American National Election Studies (ANES) as a major data gathering and archiving resource. The major purpose of ANES is to sustain and enhance the diversified database that supports basic research on voting, public opinion, and political participation in the United States. The importance of the project derives from the significance of these topics. Voting, public opinion, and participation are essential elements in the grand and complex story of politics and citizenship. Over the last twenty-five years, ANES has successfully provided the empirical and conceptual foundations for research that has deepened an understanding of the part that Americans play in this process. Thousands of scholars have used the ANES database. This project involves a continuation of the American National Election Studies. The investigators carry out a study of a national probability sample of individuals interviewed in the pre-presidential election period. Approximately eighty five percent of those respondents are re-interviewed in the post-election period. Both interviews last 50 minutes each on average and all are carried out face-to-face. All data are made available quickly via a Web site and via the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. A Board of Overseers, consisting of outstanding scholars from the electoral research community, advises the principal investigators and serves as representatives of the larger community of users of the ANES data. There are opportunities for the diverse national social science community to participate directly in the design and execution of ANES studies. There are resources for improving the quality of the core ANES time-series data and for testing innovations in theory, measurement, and data collection. This research constitutes the most important database for the study of American politics and American political behavior doc14012 none Stoltman This award supports travel of eight US participants to the Conference of the Social Studies Education Consortium (SSEC) at Oxford University in the United Kingdom, June 30 -July 7, and their participation in pre- and post-conference project development workshops. The organizers are Joseph P. Stoltman and James E. Davis of Western Michigan University and Ashley Kent of the London Institute of Education and Andrew Convey of the University of Sheffield. The objective of the project is to engage newly established US and European scientist researchers in international research collaboration on instruction in and learning of geography and science in the middle and secondary school years (grades 7 - 12). Participants will discuss specific research foci in pre- and post-conference workshop devoted to development of a research agenda and writing of proposals. Established scholars and researchers will serve as mentors and reviewers of the research proposals and designs. In addition each US participant will receive funds to initiate an international collaborative project. Among the topics proposed for collaborative research in geography science education are: differential performance between boys and girls; relationship between collaboration among teachers within schools and student performance; action agendas to promote instructional opportunities; comparison of integrated science approaches in teaching with other curricular and instruction approaches; and effects of parental participation in learning. The workshop will enhance understanding of European instruction in geography at comparable grade levels and take advantage of European advances and achievements in this area doc14013 none Farmer This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports a collaborative research project to study glacio-marine sediments from the Ross Sea toward an understanding of the history of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). Reliable predictions of the future response of the WAIS to changing climate and rising sea level depend, to a large extent, on improving our knowledge and understanding of its ice dynamics during the last glacial maximum (~18,000 yrs ago). Sediments from the Ross Sea, Antarctica, contain a detailed physical record that can be used to reconstruct past glacier flow patterns. Although significant progress has been made in constraining the extent of ice and the timing of its maximum extent, reconstructions of ice flow paths vary substantially. Studies have predicted that ice streams (regions of fast flowing ice) derived primarily from West Antarctica were dominant features of the Ross Ice Sheet, whereas an ice sheet modeling reconstruction showed roughly equal input from East and West Antarctic ice. Fundamental differences in rock types and ages beneath these source areas should allow the provenance of tills across the Ross Sea to be determined, facilitating the reconstruction of past ice flow paths. Thus the Ross Embayment provides an exciting opportunity to relate modern ice flow dynamics to past ice sheet dynamics and deposits. A detailed provenance study of sediment collected in cores taken from across the Ross Sea floor will be carried out by linking the mineralogical, geochemical, and isotopic characteristics of the sediments from these cores to reference sediments collected from the probable source areas. From these data, the patterns of ice flow across the shelf can be constrained for the last glacial maximum. For this study, existing samples collected from the Ross Sea, and the source areas of East and West Antarctica will be utilized. Composition of the till deposited during the last ice advance will be characterized by examining the sand and pebble size fraction of the sediment, the clay mineralogy, elemental abundance and samarium-neodymium (Sm-Nd) isotopic composition of the silt and clay size fraction. The source of silt and clay fraction may be problematic because of possible mixing of continental and marine sources. This problem will be addressed by determining the composition of modern marine samples which can then be subtracted from the till composition. Samples from the source areas will be analyzed first to determine the compositional fingerprint of each area. Ice flow paths will be determined based on the correspondence between the source areas and the measured values across the Ross Sea. The goal of this project is to characterize both lateral and vertical variations in diagnostic aspects of till mineralogy and isotopic composition in order to make a significant contribution to the understanding of changes in ice sheet dynamics on time scale of the past 30,000 years. Results of this study will allow assessment of the hypothesis that ice streams played a significant role in the most recent disintegration of the WAIS by testing the validity of various ice sheet reconstructions. Additionally, better characterization of the configuration of the Ross Ice Sheet during the last glacial maximum will improve the quality and reliability of models of the past and future characteristics of Antarctic ice sheet behavior doc14014 none Kent Biscaye This is a collaborative proposal between Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Rutgers University. The magnetic properties of Greenland ice were tested in samples of Holocene (interglacial) and Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) age. The dominant diamagnetism of ice prevented useful measurements of magnetic susceptibility, but the samples contain a sufficient concentration of iron oxide magnetic minerals that can be estimated using isothermal remanent magnetization (IRM) intensity. Some unusual problems had to be solved in order to obtain reliable measurements. Coercivity spectra in the Greenland ice samples are consistent with a dominant magnetite carrier. An unusual aspect of the preliminary magnetic data is that the LGM ice samples tend to have lower IRM values than interglacial ice samples, although LGM ice generally contains much higher concentrations of eolian dust than interglacial ice. The magnetic minerals constitute only a small fraction of the wind transported dust, but may reflect variations in pedogenesis and other environmental conditions in the source area(s), as well as differences in the possible source areas and or atmospheric circulation and transport. The source area is presumed to be eastern Asia, and is presently the Takla Makan and other Inner Mongolian and Mongolian deserts, which were also the source areas for the sediments of the Chinese Loess Plateau. The objectives of this research are to validate a methodology of ice magnetic measurements by calibrating the ice magnetic data with direct measurements of dust extracts, and to compare the magnetic properties of polar dust in Greenland ice with those of possible source area(s), such as Chinese loess and desert sediments. These data will allow us to assess the feasibility of using magnetic properties as an independent provenance tracer of Greenland dust and to increase our understanding of the processes responsible for the profound paleoclimatically-dependent variations in magnetic properties of ice and loess deposits doc14015 none Under the supervision of Dr. Adria LaViolette, Lynn Koplin will direct archaeological excavations at Gede on the Kenyan coast, where she is conducting research for her doctoral dissertation. The project examines social differentiation in areas of earth-and-thatch domestic architecture at the major 11th-16th-century Swahili stonetown site. Because archaeologists have primarily concentrated on the stone components of these large, architecturally-mixed sites, currently little is known about activities, diet and material culture among the majority, the inhabitants of earthen dwellings, often assumed to have been undifferentiated non-elites. The proposed research will compare frequency and spatial organization of craft production, diet and wealth between stone and earth-and-thatch components of the same town, with a view to elucidating social differentiation within earth-and-thatch areas. When the distribution of activities and goods in non-stone neighborhoods are better understood, spatial variation in production and consumption may suggest axes of social differentiation, with which to trace social reorganization through time. The need to focus on intrasite variation, expressed in archaeologically-recoverable forms of production and consumption, is important as archaeologists attempt to elucidate indigenous forms of social complexity in sub-Saharan Africa. This is especially important as it relates to Swahili society, which until recently was attributed to external factors. This research is part of a new impetus on a larger level to search within Africa for the constitutive dynamics of African societies, and on Swahili sites in general this requires dismantling monolithic conceptions of the society by examining the overlooked majority, those in non-stone dwellings. Beyond the level of Swahili archaeology, this research draws on and will contribute to archaeological literature on the East African Iron Age, rise of complex societies, spatial organization and activity areas. The changes that accompanied the foundation, growth, contraction and abandonment of Gede fit into the larger history of the Iron Age efflorescence on the continent, and Africanist archaeologists are attempting to fill out the magnitude of activities such as pottery making, increased trade, specialized production, farming and other foodways that accompanied social expansion. Additionally, preliminary insights into the principles organizing neighborhoods of earthen architecture will engage the anthropological debates on spatial organization doc14014 none Kent Biscaye This is a collaborative proposal between Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Rutgers University. The magnetic properties of Greenland ice were tested in samples of Holocene (interglacial) and Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) age. The dominant diamagnetism of ice prevented useful measurements of magnetic susceptibility, but the samples contain a sufficient concentration of iron oxide magnetic minerals that can be estimated using isothermal remanent magnetization (IRM) intensity. Some unusual problems had to be solved in order to obtain reliable measurements. Coercivity spectra in the Greenland ice samples are consistent with a dominant magnetite carrier. An unusual aspect of the preliminary magnetic data is that the LGM ice samples tend to have lower IRM values than interglacial ice samples, although LGM ice generally contains much higher concentrations of eolian dust than interglacial ice. The magnetic minerals constitute only a small fraction of the wind transported dust, but may reflect variations in pedogenesis and other environmental conditions in the source area(s), as well as differences in the possible source areas and or atmospheric circulation and transport. The source area is presumed to be eastern Asia, and is presently the Takla Makan and other Inner Mongolian and Mongolian deserts, which were also the source areas for the sediments of the Chinese Loess Plateau. The objectives of this research are to validate a methodology of ice magnetic measurements by calibrating the ice magnetic data with direct measurements of dust extracts, and to compare the magnetic properties of polar dust in Greenland ice with those of possible source area(s), such as Chinese loess and desert sediments. These data will allow us to assess the feasibility of using magnetic properties as an independent provenance tracer of Greenland dust and to increase our understanding of the processes responsible for the profound paleoclimatically-dependent variations in magnetic properties of ice and loess deposits doc13995 none This project will continuously monitor the pressure, fluid chemistry, and hydrology in two instrumented boreholes at the Costa Rica subduction zone, using long-term observatories (CORK and ACORK) installed during ODP Leg 203. The field program will 1) deploy pressure gauges and data loggers, OsmoSamplers, and osmotic flow meters in 3 CORKed boreholes along a transect across the deformation front of the subduction zone and 2) retrieve the OsmoSamplers, data stored in the data loggers and deploying new OsmoSamplers and pressure gauges, with the submersible Alvin. The fluid stored in the OsmoSamplers will provide a continuous 1.3 year record of fluid conditions collected at in situ conditions at weekly resolution, in three distinct hydrogeologic systems. The first flow system is the upper oceanic crust of the incoming Cocos Plate, the second is the return of a deeply sourced fluid along the decollement and the third is in the underthrust sediment section driven by compaction dewatering. By documenting the nature of these hydrogeologic systems it will be possible to better understand the effects of fluid flow at convergent margins on the shallow thermal structure and fluid content of the downgoing plate, the physical properties of the subduction zone interface, deformation style and transport of elements to the oceans doc14018 none Rodney K. Guy, Bradford Gibson and Irwin Kuntz of the University of California San Francisco and the University of California Santa Barbara are jointly supported by the Division of Chemistry, Special Projects Office, for their interdisciplinary collaboration on protein structure determinations by mass spectrometry. They will design and synthesize cross-linking agents that will selectively bind to pairs of amino acid sidechains when they are within a certain distance. By using a variety of crosslinking agents singly or in combination, they will be able to chemically connect residues that are 5-20 Angstroms apart. Isotopically labeled crosslinkers or crosslinkers that incorporate an affinity purification tag will also be investigated. After crosslinking, the modified proteins will be digested, purified by HPLC, then analyzed by mass spectrometry. Computational techniques will be developed to analyze the mass spectrometric data and derive the tertiary structure of the protein. Initial proteins to be studied include FGF-2 and HIV-integrase. This method will also be used to study protein-protein or domain-domain interactions. Determining the tertiary or three dimensional structure of proteins or protein complexes is a key problem. This mass spectrometric tool will provide a complement to existing techniques of nuclear magnetic resonance and single crystal x-ray diffraction. The goal is to develop a highly automated, high-throughput system that can infer tertiary structure using small amounts of protein. Collaborative Research in Chemistry (CRC) awards are given to interdisciplinary teams of scientists working on problems of broad chemical interest. The emphasis in these awards is on new collaborative modes of research and training doc14019 none Harper Pfeffer Basal sliding is the principle form of movement of most temperate glaciers and leads to glacier surging, causes glaciers to erode their beds, and often controls the overall glacier s mass distribution. A glacier s deformational velocity field can be modeled with some confidence, but there are no working models that will accurately predict the sliding motion of glaciers. In fact, the variables that would potentially go into a sliding model have not been fully established. Theoretically, sliding is promoted by both elevated water pressure and water storage at the bed. Previous field programs, however, have correlated sliding rate with either pressure or storage, with the majority of associations made with pressure. These observational programs have correlated sliding and subglacial conditions by using only limited spatially and temporally distributed measurements. This has made the task very difficult because the subglacial drainage system is transient and internal ice dynamics (e.g., longitudinal coupling) complicate the glacier s response to change at its lower boundary. The Principal Investigators will conduct a multifaceted study focusing on time space variability in coupling between the subglacial hydrology and ice dynamics system which they believe is key to a new understanding of sliding dynamics. They will conduct a field campaign on the Bench Glacier, a temperate valley glacier in southeast Alaska. Various types of instrumentation will be used to collect a comprehensive data set of measurements of basal water pressure, surface motion, internal deformation, sliding velocity, video observations of the bed, and slug, pump, and tracer experiments on subglacial water flow. These data will include at least three elements which have not been previously addressed, thus enabling new explorations of the linkages between subglacial hydrology and glacier motion: 1) data will be collected at two length scales, including measurements spanning the entire glacier and detailed measurements focused on a small reach; 2) measurements will be made over a time period of at least a year, allowing short to long period cycles to be investigated; and 3) an automated survey instrument will allow for uninterrupted high-time resolution studies of glacier motion. During the first field season, they will focus on the long length scale (kilometers), with measurements of basal conditions and velocity made at locations spanning the length of the glacier. Data will be used to investigate the longitudinal coupling between the bed and ice dynamics. During the second field season, they will address a short length scale (10-100 meters), enabling local observations to be placed within the context of regional processes. This will permit measurements of surface uplift to be fully compared with both ice dynamics and hydrology to investigate the cause of the uplift. The resulting data set and analyses will be used to test and refine conceptual and numerical models for subglacial water flow and to establish links between hydrology and ice dynamics doc13986 none The Cariaco Basin is a 1,400-m deep depression on the continental shelf off Venezuela in which anoxic waters cover laminated sediments with high organic matter content (1-5 wt%). These laminae, which result from seasonal variations in primary productivity and terrigenous sediment input along the southern the Caribbean Sea, contain a high-resolution record of past climate change in the tropical Atlantic Ocean. In this collaborative effort, researchers at the University of South Florida (USF), the University of South Carolina (USC), and the State University of New York (SUNY) seek to integrate hydrographic, primary productivity, water column microbial activity, vertical particulate flux, and sediment accumulation rate measurements in the Cariaco Basin into a synthesis to understand how contemporary sedimentation patterns reflect this climatic and oceanographic variability. The central objective is to understand the factors that control the relationship between primary production and the vertical flux of particles in the Cariaco Basin. This project will continue the current time series of monthly observations at 10 30 N, 64 40 W that began in November, , under the CARIACO (CArbon Retention In A Colored Ocean) Program. This includes continuing deployment of a mooring with four sediment traps (275, 350, 450, and 1,200 m) to provide bi-weekly sample collections at each depth. Complementing the traps will be a mooring with two Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (ADCP), one looking up and the other looking down from a depth of about 250 m, to measure currents from below the sill depth to the surface for a three-year period. Each year, one transect will be conducted between the CARIACO station and 11 40 N, 64 40 W outside the basin, to help understand the characteristics of source water involved in intrusions and upwelling. Regional wind and sea level will be examined using both local and remotely-sensed data to establish whether forcing for upwelling occurs primarily through local or gyre-scale processes. Sediments from the Cariaco basin will be collected and analyzed to reconstruct the oceanographic condition in the Cariaco Basin over the past century and provide a window for longer-scale paleoceanographic studies. The program is significant because it provides groundtruthing needed for proper interpretation of past climate changes recorded in the Cariaco sediments doc14021 none PI: Michael Nikolaou and Brian McMillan Institution: University of Houston Proposal Number: Increasing functionality and wafer sizes are challenging integrated circuit manufacturing practices that rely on the execution of open-loop recipes. To ensure high yields, reliable sensor-based methods for the prevention, detection and correction (control) of abnormal situations are gradually being used and need to be further developed. To that end, this four-month GOALI project will serve to catalyze interaction between the microelectronics industry and the University of Houston, providing important input to the PI s future work in the area. The work will be conducted at Lam Research Corporation s facilities and will focus on plasma etching. Two commercial software products will be used to determine the potential for yield improvements on the basis of prevention, detection, and correction (control) methods that use data provided by sensors in existing tools. The limits of software-based methods will be examined, and promising directions will be outlined for short and long-term development of sensor, monitoring, and control systems for plasma etching yield improvements. Continuation of this work will be further pursued after the PI returns to his academic position doc14022 none Scott This action supports the Third International Symposium on Structural Intermetallics (ISSI-3), a major international conference that is held once every four years. These funds are used to facilitate the participation of young investigators (students, post-doctoral fellows and young faculty) and to maintain reasonable registration fees for all participants. The symposium will be held from September 23 - 27, at the Snow King Resort in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The ISSI-3 symposium has a strong emphasis on the role that affordability, reliability and design play in developing new materials for use in aerospace applications. Invited and contributed presentations will outline the design and business constraints associated with the introduction of new materials, address reliability and performance issues specific to intermetallic alloys, and highlight recent advances in the understanding of processing-structure-property relations in intermetallic alloys. %%% This meeting provides a forum in which engineering designers interact with materials and process engineers. ISSI-3 builds on the past success of previous ISSI conferences that were attended by over 200 participants from approximately 19 countries and received extremely high satisfaction ratings doc13818 none In a suite of seismic experiments conducted in and microseismicity, regional and teleseismic earthquake events were recorded on an array of twenty seafloor instruments and 23 PASSCAL stations deployed on islands around the Western Woodlark Basin. Preliminary data analysis was completed in the original grant period, and this project will continue that effort. More data were collected than anticipated, and in particular, the preliminary receiver function data have proven a fertile source of information on regional crustal structure doc14024 none This ocean sciences technology development project will develop, and make available to the oceanographic community, an inexpensive next-generation RAFOS float using a modern, energy-efficient microprocessor and a robust operating system. The RAFOS-specific functions will be built around a commercially available microprocessor system adapted for our application. The technology will be made available to the community either through a bidding process or via a vendor committed to providing service at a reasonable price. The goal is to achieve a material cost per float of about $ when produced in volume. The work addresses a need for an inexpensive float that can be deployed in large numbers in order to properly sample the wide range of variability inherent to ocean currents and in order to obtain statistically significant estimates of mean flow. Work entails development of a surface mount electronics board and operating system that will make it much easier for present and new users to undertake a wide variety of Lagrangian studies doc14025 none The proposal requests travel expenses for US researchers to participate in a DELOS workshop on Personalisation and Recommender Systems in Digital Libraries to be held at Dublin City University in Dublin, Ireland June 18-20, . DELOS is a major forum for and organizer of digital libraries research and planning activities in Europe. It is funded by Information Societies Technologies (IST) 5th Framework Programme of the European Commission. This proposal seeks travel support for six participants from the American research community. The workshop continues the planning and research agenda put forward by the multi-year NSF-EU working groups process jointly sponsored by CISE IIS, SBE INT and the European Union. In the groups final report An International Research Agenda for Digital Libraries , increased levels of collaboration and interaction was seen as critical to building multi-lingual, multi-national digital libraries doc14026 none This award provides support for student attendance at the annual meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics (DAMOP) of the American Physical Society. The meeting will be held jointly with the Division of Atomic and Molecular Physics of the Canadian Physical Society in London, Ontario, 16-19 May, . This is the principal meeting covering principles of AMO physics held each year, and this award gives students the opportunity to participate in DAMOP sponsored events doc14027 none Bohs This proposal is a continuation of the NSF-supported (award ) program at Duke University in which students design and build custom projects for people with disabilities. The objectives of the design projects are to enhance engineering education, provide students with insight into careers in rehabilitation, improve the quality of life of people with disabilities, and serve the community. These projects will address special needs not met by commercial devices. The program will comprise a course, summer support of student interns, and follow-up service for projects already delivered. During the past five years the course was offered only in the fall semester; however, because of increasing student interest, now it is to be offered in both fall and spring semesters. The expanded program will allow approximately ten projects to be completed each year. Students will undertake a real-world design as they develop assistive, recreational, and therapeutic devices for people with disabilities. A health care professional familiar with the client will meet regularly with the student design team to insure that the project meets the client s needs. In addition to this capstone design experience, the course will provide students with exposure to engineering design procedures and ethics, and the overall program will help establish and strengthen ties between the university and the local community doc14028 none The objective of the proposed research is to determine how carotenoid biosynthesis can be evolved to increase the variety of carotenoid structures that can be synthesized. This research will proceed at two levels. Individual biosynthetic enzymes are to be subjected to sequential rounds of mutagenesis and recombination. Carefully designed screens will detect altered biosynthetic function. Carotenoid biosynthetic enzymes with altered functions will then be combined to create new pathways. By correlating amino acid changes with changes in biosynthetic function, insights can be gleaned into how biosynthetic function may be further altered as well as how nature may evolve pathway function. Also, this research could provide the requisite understanding to approach modifications of more difficult or complex pathways doc13986 none The Cariaco Basin is a 1,400-m deep depression on the continental shelf off Venezuela in which anoxic waters cover laminated sediments with high organic matter content (1-5 wt%). These laminae, which result from seasonal variations in primary productivity and terrigenous sediment input along the southern the Caribbean Sea, contain a high-resolution record of past climate change in the tropical Atlantic Ocean. In this collaborative effort, researchers at the University of South Florida (USF), the University of South Carolina (USC), and the State University of New York (SUNY) seek to integrate hydrographic, primary productivity, water column microbial activity, vertical particulate flux, and sediment accumulation rate measurements in the Cariaco Basin into a synthesis to understand how contemporary sedimentation patterns reflect this climatic and oceanographic variability. The central objective is to understand the factors that control the relationship between primary production and the vertical flux of particles in the Cariaco Basin. This project will continue the current time series of monthly observations at 10 30 N, 64 40 W that began in November, , under the CARIACO (CArbon Retention In A Colored Ocean) Program. This includes continuing deployment of a mooring with four sediment traps (275, 350, 450, and 1,200 m) to provide bi-weekly sample collections at each depth. Complementing the traps will be a mooring with two Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (ADCP), one looking up and the other looking down from a depth of about 250 m, to measure currents from below the sill depth to the surface for a three-year period. Each year, one transect will be conducted between the CARIACO station and 11 40 N, 64 40 W outside the basin, to help understand the characteristics of source water involved in intrusions and upwelling. Regional wind and sea level will be examined using both local and remotely-sensed data to establish whether forcing for upwelling occurs primarily through local or gyre-scale processes. Sediments from the Cariaco basin will be collected and analyzed to reconstruct the oceanographic condition in the Cariaco Basin over the past century and provide a window for longer-scale paleoceanographic studies. The program is significant because it provides groundtruthing needed for proper interpretation of past climate changes recorded in the Cariaco sediments doc13818 none In a suite of seismic experiments conducted in and microseismicity, regional and teleseismic earthquake events were recorded on an array of twenty seafloor instruments and 23 PASSCAL stations deployed on islands around the Western Woodlark Basin. Preliminary data analysis was completed in the original grant period, and this project will continue that effort. More data were collected than anticipated, and in particular, the preliminary receiver function data have proven a fertile source of information on regional crustal structure doc14031 none This is a proposal for continued work on the mantle section of the Oman ophiolite by the PIs and a PhD student whose salary is the major item requested in this proposal. The study is focused on the study of dunite veins and the student (Michael Braun) will measure their size, distribution, abundance, microstructures, and, in the lab, their compositions. The aim is to provide quantitative constrains on how MORB magma is extracted from the mantle, the fluid dynamics of reactive porous flow during melt migration through the mantle, and how these processes affect mantle rheology. Specifically, these new studies will approach the question of how much melt has flowed through harzburgite as they travel in dunite channels. The main idea is to test between two possible origins of the dunites; reaction haloes around cracks vs. diffusive infiltration. This work complements studies by the PIs of the lower crust sections in Oman and has application for studies of the origin of ocean crust doc14032 none Hemley This twelve-month award will provide support for15 US students and junior researchers to participate in the first multidisciplinary summer school on High Pressure Phenomena held at the Enrico Fermi International School of Physics in Varenna, Italy, from July 3-13, . The course spans fundamental physics and chemistry, earth and planetary science, materials science and technology, and biology. The PI will co-direct this school with Guido Chiarotti of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy. The course is largely financed by the Enrico Fermi school, the Italian Society of Physics (SIF), Italy s National Research Council (CNR), and UNESCO. At least 80 participants - students, observers, and lecturers - are expected to attend. The course offers opportunities for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows to learn many fundamental concepts applications of high-pressure research. It provides as well the opportunity to develop further international research experiences or collaborations in these fields doc14033 none This project focuses on characterizing the water-insoluble component of size-segregated atmospheric aerosols. This can be a significant fraction of the aerosol and consists primarily of carbonaceous material or minerals (dust). The insoluble fraction could affect human health, can influence the hygroscopic cloud nucleating properties of the aerosol, and can deposit on leaves and thus decrease the amount of radiation available to the plants for photosynthesis and thus crop production. A novel technique will be developed to measure the number concentration of the insoluble aerosol in real time. In addition, aerosol samples will be collected on micro-orifice impactors, the filters rinsed, and the mass of the insoluble component determined for each size fraction. The trace metal composition of the insoluble fraction will be measured, and the elemental and organic carbon fractions (EC OC) quantified. Field measurement data will be used to study the impact of insoluble aerosol on plant photosynthesis due to the scattering and absorption of solar radiation by insoluble aerosols deposited onto leaves doc14034 none Rose This award will support Dr. William I. Rose, Michigan Technological University, in a collaboration with Dr. Eddie Sanchez Bennet, General Director, Instituto Nacional de Sismologia, Guatemala, and Dr. Carlos Pullinger, Instituto de Investigacion de Riesgos Naturales, San Salvador, for a study of volcanic hazard mitigation efforts in those countries, which are part of the second most consistently active volcano zone on earth. Many of those volcanoes are close to population centers, and this proposal will focus on specific research problems addressing areas with high risk such as those. The researchers plan to address mitigation by the use of satellite remote sensing and kinematic GPS survey techniques along with digital topography, conventional field mapping, and laboratory simulation of volcanic processes. Through these methods they plan to develop a model of current and prospective hazards to be used to delineate changing hazard doc14035 none Miller This award supports a planning visit for PIs Kate Miller, University of Texas at El Paso and Lincoln Hollister, Princeton University to travel to the Kingdom of Bhutan. Their research goals require that they first visit the country where they will work with Bhutanese geoscientists to deploy a seismic network in Bhutan. They will also train scientists at the Bhutanese Geological Survey (BGS) in modern seismic monitoring techniques. Once they have finalized this work, they will prepare a full proposal for submission to the Geosciences research directorate. This activity will initiate seismic studies in a unique and previously inaccessible region of the Himalayas and will enhance current seismic research on the Himalayan region. Collaboration and training of Bhutanese scientists in seismic hazard assessment will constitute the first steps toward establishing a national seismic monitoring network in a region with significant seismic hazard doc14036 none Over the last decade and during four separate field programs, the PI has collected a wide variety of basalt samples from the Southeast Indian Ridge (SEIR) between -80 E and -135 E. Overall, there are - samples comprising -300 glass groups from 150 localities. The PI proposes to consolidate and synthesize these results and to interpret the explained observations, which include chemical variations related to regional depth variations of over 2 km. This is a very interesting area in terms of the observed variations in depth, ridge morphology and mantle domains. In addition to the synthesis, the PI requests some support to carry out analyses of trace elements in minerals and their melt inclusions using ELA-ICPMS (Excimer laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry doc13866 none A long-standing controversy in mid-ocean ridge dynamics is whether upwelling beneath fast spreading ridges is sheet-like with a relatively uniform magma supply along axis, or more three-dimensional with diapiric-like upwelling near segment centers and lateral redistribution of melt along axis at shallow magma chamber levels and or by lower crustal, ductile flow. The UNDERSHOOT experiment was designed to address this problem by mapping the pattern of magma delivery from the mantle to the crust along the entire length of a transform bounded segment of the East Pacific Rise between the Siqueiros and Clipperton fracture zones. The quality of the data are the important issues that remain warrant further analyses. Models of crustal thickness will be refined by employing improved algorithms that allow all data collected in the experiment to be modeled simultaneously. Understanding of the properties of the Moho transition and uppermost mantle will be improved. Improved models of along axis variations in the structure of the mantle and lower crust low velocity zones will be developed doc14038 none The research considers the impact of improved Information Technology (IT) on the structure of organizations. Recent empirical work suggests that as IT improves, the organizations using it may find it advantageous to enlarge the scope of individual or departmental decision-making (i.e., to decentralize) and at the same time to make the organization s final actions more sensitive to the information gathered by all departments (i.e., to coordinate). The research will study formal models to determine the assumptions under which these claims indeed hold up. That will require precise specification of the organization s actions, goals, and information-processing activities and precise assumptions about the self-interested behavior of the organization s members when the organization decentralizes. In the main class of models, the relevant IT is the ability to search large databases. To choose appropriate actions, the organization has to track its changing external environment. Each member of the organization specializes in some aspect of the environment, and improved database-search capability allows the member to learn more about that aspect for a given search cost. Search cost will be measured in several alternative ways. The results of the research should be useful in suggesting new hypotheses and methods for future empirical work on the impact of IT at the level of organizations doc14039 none A workshop focused on international networking opportunities in materials research and education will be held in conjunction with the Seventh International Union of Materials Research Societies lnternational Conference on Advanced Materials (RJURS-ICAM) in Cancun, Mexico, in August . This conference provides a unique opportunity for materials scientists from around the world to present their latest discoveries and discuss their findings with colleagues. The conference participants will be able to take advantage of the specialized topical symposia while simultaneously meeting with potential collaborators through the networking workshop. The workshop is part of a broader effort to establish a global materials research network. It consists of a collaboration fairin which linkages to create three global networks in the areas of materials education, materials for energy and for the environment will be developed doc14040 none The aim of this Workshop on Composite Sheet Forming is to address key issues related to improving the viability of the composite sheet forming process in manufacturing. To accomplish this, the workshop will provide a forum for experimentalists, modeling specialists, statisticians, material suppliers and end users with the goal of formulating a feasible and representative benchmark and organizing for its execution. The benchmark will be used to standardize materials testing procedures for this new class of materials and to examine the current state-of-the-art in simulation. It is expected that the workshop will have significant international representation and will stimulate this kind of research in the U.S., which is unfortunately less active than our counterparts in Europe and Asia. Composite sheet forming has demonstrated great potential as a valuable alternative to provide high-strength and low-weight products at a much-reduced manufacturing cost. This cost reduction is due primarily to significantly shorter cycle times and parts consolidation. Over the past several years, an international group of academic and industry researchers has conducted studies of the material behavior and the forming process, in conjunction with fabrication of prototype parts. The outcome of this work is a substantial body of experimental and modeling data. However, as the research in this area is still relatively new, as compared to the longer history of sheet metal forming, much of these results have lead to more questions than answers, which was well echoed at recent technical conferences. The state of the research efforts in composite sheet forming are at a critical point where benchmarking will lead to major advances in our understanding of the strengths and limitations of existing experimental and modeling approaches doc14041 none Humans, unlike most animals, cannot synthesize vitamin C and thus have an absolute dietary requirement for this nutrient. Plants are the primary source of dietary vitamin C, which is key to several metabolic functions including collagen synthesis. Because vitamin C is a good anti-oxidant it can also be used as a natural preservative. Fresh produce with higher levels of vitamin C should therefore have improved shelf-life and consumer appeal. Additionally, increasing vitamin C in plants would result in higher intake per portion of fresh fruit or vegetables that would have a positive impact on human health. Toward this goal we will engineer the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana for higher steady state levels of vitamin C. Arabidopsis, while not part of human diet, is an essential model because it is the only plant with a fully sequenced genome. Unlike animals, the vitamin C biosynthetic metabolic network in plants is at present still not completely known. A pathway for plant systems has been proposed however, a parallel pathway, possibly similar to the animal pathway, may also operate in plants. Evidence for this pathway comes from experiments in which a cDNA encoding L-gulono-g-lactone oxidase (GLOase), the terminal enzyme in the animal pathway was expressed in tobacco and lettuce, which resulted in a 5-7 fold increase in vitamin C levels. Specific aims of the project include metabolically engineering normal and vitamin C-deficient Arabidopsis mutants to express GLOase to determine if any of the plant pathway intermediates directly supply GLOase or its precursors. Genes encoding vitamin C pathway(s) enzymes will be identified in activation tagged Arabidopsis lines by ozone screening and vitamin C analysis to fill in remaining gaps in the pathway(s). The outcomes of this project are anticipated to result in (a) Arabidopsis transformants with larger pools of vitamin C than the wild type, (b) identification of plant genes related to metabolic steps of vitamin C synthesis, and (c) further knowledge of which steps of the animal pathway also operate in plants doc14042 none The focus of this research is the development of algorithms, theory, and applications for the identification of all minimal representatives, for implicitly given monotone systems. Such systems are a frequent target of knowledge discovery as they represent important information hidden in large databases, complex networks, etc. Problems involving the determination of monotone systems arise naturally in a multitude of areas including: data mining (finding all maximal frequent, minimal infrequent sets); text mining (finding the best linear query in vector space models); machine learning (finding the best rules or patterns); hypergraph dualization (generating all minimal transversals); reliability theory (generating all minimal working and or maximal failing states); integer programming (generating all minimal feasible solutions); stochastic programming (constructing deterministic equivalents to certain stochastic models); etc. A coherent theory of identification problems for monotone systems based on several recent mathematical results will be developed. Tractable classes will be outlined, efficient algorithms for such classes created and realized by programs. The resulting new methods will be tested on a variety of applications, such as data mining, logical data analysis, machine learning and text mining doc14043 none The rapidly emerging areas of nanoscale science and technology are focussed on the design, fabrication, and characterization of functional objects having dimensions at the nanometer length scale. New advances in this emerging area are expected to have long range implications in a wide variety of different scientific and engineering disciplines. The importance of nanoscale science is growing worldwide and it is now widely recognized as a critical component to the future growth of the US economy. The U.S. National Science and Technology Council has identified this area as a major contributor to the 21st Century science and technology workforce. As a consequence, former President Clinton has made the National Nanotechnology Initiative a top priority within US funding agencies. In response to the growing awareness of the importance of nantechnology, many conferences are being organized worldwide to discuss the latest advances. A travel grant is requested to allow approximately 12 US scientists plus 10 US graduate students to participate and attend an important international event, the annual Trends in Nanotechnology Conference (TNT200I) - one of the premier European conferences devoted to nanoscale science and technology doc14044 none Rebhun This Americas Program thesis enhancement will support thesis dissertation research by Ms. Yasmina Katsulis under the supervision of Dr. Linda-Anne Rebhun of Yale University. Dr. Gudelia Rangel of El Colegio de la Frontera Norte has agreed to act as field supervisor for the fieldwork in Mexico. The aim of this project is to examine career trajectories among 300 female commercial sex workers (FCSW s) in Tijuana, Mexico, and more specifically, the relationship between migration patterns, work sites and HIV risk. In particular, the project will: (1) examine the relationship between migration and the various career trajectories of 300 FCSW s in Tijuana, Mexico; (2) measure their knowledge, attitudes, and practices for risk management in a variety of work sites; (3) examine how risk management is either complicated or facilitated by structural factors, most importantly female urban migration; (4) generate an epidemiological profile of HIV infection for the population in question. Using integrated qualitative and quantitative methods, this research will help to provide a more comprehensive portrait of those aspects of human experience critical in determining health outcomes. The findings will contribute to the literature on health beliefs in Latin America, the political economy of health, and the use of qualitative methods to address public health issues doc14045 none The National Research Council (NRC) through its Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences, will conduct a workshop to investigate the potential role for NSF in innovative research for improved fire safety. The purpose of this workshop will be to survey and assess the current state of knowledge, research, education, and training in the fire safety field. The results of the workshop will help to define how best to marshal U.S. intellectual, financial, and institutional resources to develop the knowledge necessary to save lives and reduce injuries and property loss from fire. The final report will specifically address the potential of the National Science Foundation to serve as an incubator for basic and interdisciplinary research, professional collaboration, graduate and undergraduate education, and technology transfer in the field of fire safety doc14046 none Harwood This award, provided by the Office of Polar Programs of the National Science Foundation, provides support for US participation in workshop and planning activities of the international Antarctic Drilling Consortium (ANDRILL). Cenozoic stratigraphic records recovered through drilling from continental shelf and deep-sea areas around Antarctica have provided an interesting yet incomplete history of paleoclimate, ice sheet and tectonic evolution of this region. The paucity of exposures of Cenozoic strata, due to the present ice cover, requires the collection of geological data from drillcores. Much has been learned over the last 20 years of drilling by the DSDP, ODP and via the fast-ice drilling of the MSSTS, CIROS and Cape Roberts projects. A new drilling initiative, ANDRILL, is in an early stage of development, with an initial focus in the McMurdo Sound area, using the Cape Roberts Project technology. A workshop at Oxford University will bring together key scientists with the goal of establishing the scientific objectives and a structure of international collaboration to launch this major initiative in the Earth sciences. The development of the Cape Roberts Project followed a similar course of workshops and planning meetings in the late s and s. ANDRILL will continue to build on the success and approach of the Cape Roberts Project, but will be of broader temporal, spatial, and thematic scale. Major aims of ANDRILL are: 1) to obtain high-resolution (1 to 100 thousand-year), seismically linked, chronologically well-constrained, stratigraphic records from the Antarctic continental margin; 2) to determine the fundamental behavior of ancient ice sheets, and to understand better the factors driving ice sheet growth and decay on decadal to million year time scales; 3) to investigate the role of Antarctic ice sheets on long- and short-order Cenozoic-Recent global climate sea-level elevation and ocean circulation; and 4) to document the evolution and timing of major Antarctic rift and tectonic systems and the stratigraphic development of associated sedimentary basins, uplift of the adjacent rift shoulders, volcanic history, stress regimes and tectonic forcing of climate. This award supports the development and initial management of the U.S. involvement in the ANDRILL Program through the travel of U.S. scientists to the workshop in Oxford and to cover the cost of the U.S. subscription into ANDRILL for the first three years. Results of the workshop will be circulated to the wider geological community, within and beyond the Antarctic sphere, through the production and dissemination of a workshop report, a glossy summary document, and the construction of an ANDRILL web site. In addition to the support for the ANDRILL Workshop, funds are requested to support the management of U.S. efforts in ANDRILL, including the communication and interaction with ODP, ANTOSTRAT, and the SHALDRIL initiative. International collaboration established through the Cape Roberts Project will be nurtured and expanded under ANDRILL. Initial drilling targets are in the Western Ross Sea, where eight drilling objectives have been proposed (the McMurdo Sound Portfolio doc14047 none Scarab beetles are prominent members of the insect fauna and are important biocontrol agents, pollinators, agricultural pests, and habitat indicators. Despite their economic importance, diversity, and ecological significance, less than 50% of the New World genera of scarabs can be identified with reliability. The New World tropics contains the greatest diversity of scarab species, yet it is the poorest known taxonomically. Scarab groups from this region were selected for training in monography, phylogeny, and bioinformatics. The proposed research will create comprehensive catalogs and electronic databases of specimen-level information, including character data, geographic and temporal distributions, host plant associations, and images. It will produce monographs, an identification guide to genera of New World scarabs, and a database of New World genera of scarabs that are retrievable electronically. Phylogenetic research will stabilize the higher-level classification of the Scarabaeoidea by targeting enigmatic and poorly known groups. The research will contribute to the development of computer infrastructure for organizing and accessing knowledge about scarab beetles, and it will provide the foundation for future work in scarab systematics. This research extends the goals of our previous NSF-PEET support by creating keys and databases to all genera of New World scarab beetles (approximately 600), and it builds on our existing foundation in scarab systematics to monograph poorly known groups of New World scarab beetles and train students in scarab systematics. These activities will contribute directly to the training of a new generation of systematists as well as advance our knowledge of a prominent (but poorly known) superfamily of insects. Monographic works, electronic databases, interactive keys, and newly trained systematists are needed in order to meet the global needs for knowledge of biodiversity and to strengthen the foundation for all fields of biology. One of the most important benefits of monographic research is a predictive system of classification. Results of the phylogenetic analyses will be used to stabilize the current classification of scarabs in this study. A natural classification of scarab groups can be used to address other questions that include: evolution of parental care, evolution of horns, biogeography, evolution of myrmecophily, and others. The on-line key and bioinformatics resources for all New World scarab genera will create the bench-mark for Scarabaeoidea systematics. It will be useful to people engaged in agriculture, research, education, and natural resource management. The guide will form the foundation for keys to all world Scarabaeoidea, a future project that would involve participants from around the world doc14048 none for NSF Proposal Reliable Communication Near Capacity on Nonstandard Channels. In the American mathematician Claude Shannon ( - ) ushered in the digital age with the publication of his classic paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Of the many seminal ideas in Shannon s paper, perhaps the most important is the notion of channel capacity. In brief, the capacity (often called the Shannon limit) of a communications channel, is the maximum possible rate at which information can be transmitted reliably over the channel. Shannon showed how to calculate the limit but did not explain how it could be achieved practically. Since , however, generations of communications researchers have made steady progress towards the ultimate goal of building practical systems that operate near the Shannon limit. An historic milestone was reached in May of with the introduction of turbo codes by a group of French researchers led by Claude Berrou. Berrou showed that turbo codes attain practically near Shannon-limit performance on an important but restricted class of channels, the Gaussian channels, which are good models for satellite and deep-space communication. This research is concerned with using the underlying turbo code ideas to extend the range of channels for which near Shannon-limit communication can be attained. The channel models to be considered include channels for optical communication, mass storage of data, and the channels encountered in cellular phone and other multi-user systems. 2. The discovery of turbo codes by Berrou et al., which was closely followed by the rediscovery of, and improvement on, Gallager s low-density parity-check codes, and the subsequent invention of repeat-accumulate codes, has revolutionized and energized the field of error-correcting codes. However, most of this extraordinary research has been restricted to a relatively small set of standard channel models, predominantly the binary erasure channel (BEC), the binary symmetric channel (BSC), and the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. For these channels, Shannon s Problem, viz., the problem of communicating reliably and practically at rates close to channel capacity, has now been solved. But Shannon s theorem tells us that reliable communication at rates near capacity is possible on any channel, not just the BEC, the BSC, and the AWGN. From this viewpoint, Shannon s problem has barely been scratched. It is believed, however, that the turbolike codes mentioned above (together with the associated iterative decoding algorithms) can be used, after suitable modifications, to solve Shannon s Problem on virtually any channel. Thus the object of this research is to study the effectiveness of binary turbolike codes on a variety of nonstandard channel models, including nonbinary and nonsymmetric channels doc14049 none This project will continue modeling studies of the dynamics of flow in the oceanic upper mantle. The emphasis ofthese studies will be shifted to intraplate, off-axis processes, exploring mechanisms of oceanic matle dynamics that can explain intraplate volcanism and tectonics. Numerical and labratory experiments will be carried out. Initially, three mechanisms will be explored; convective instability, tensile cracks in the lithosphere, and viscous fingering of low-viscosity mantle into higher viscosity mantle during return flow doc14050 none Beddor With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Patrice Beddor will conduct three years of linguistic research on the variability of speech sounds. This project investigates how a particular kind of variability can eventually become a systematic property of a language, leading to language change. The focus is the overlapping articulation of adjacent or nearby sounds known as coarticulation . In some sound changes, the sound that triggered the coarticulation is lost over time, leaving behind only its coarticulatory effects. For example, in French, Hindi, and hundreds of other languages, coarticulatory nasality in vowels was originally triggered only by a following nasal consonant, such as m or n . But the nasal consonant dropped out over time, leaving vowel nasality as a systematic and now required property of the word. Dr. Beddor hypothesizes that the loss of a coarticulatory trigger and the linking of its properties to another sound involve a stage in which shortened duration of the trigger is offset by more extensive coarticulatory influences (e.g., nasal consonants shorten as nearby vowels become more nasal). She further hypothesizes that listeners facilitate these changes by being perceptually insensitive to variation in such timing relationships. Dr. Beddor s research mimics the stages of a language s change by studying four languages that differ in the relevant timing patterns: English, Thai, Greek, and Ikalanga. Acoustic analyses of these languages will be conducted to verify the timing patterns that emerged in preliminary studies. These analyses will be followed by perceptual testing and further phonological investigations. This multi-language research has theoretical and practical significance across domains affected by speech science. First, it will broaden the empirical database on which theories of sound change, speech production, and speech perception are grounded. Second, better understanding of speech variation and speech sound change reveals how some dialect differences emerge. Better understanding of dialect emergence may reduce the social stigmatization attached to some speech varieties. Third, the perceptual tests that explore listener sensitivity to speech variation have implications for theories of how infants extract phonetic regularities in the languages they are learning. Finally, these results will bear on speech technology. Computer speech recognition systems make more errors than humans do. This is partly because computer recognizers display greater sensitivity to coarticulatory variation. Study of the kinds of speech variability that human listeners are sensitive to may help solve this practical challenge in speech engineering doc14051 none Fostering Peripheral Information Awareness through Personalized Expressive Art This is a standard award. In today s information-rich society, people who are busy and deeply engaged in work or other activities often are unable to maintain awareness of peripheral, but useful, information such as weather, traffic, and financial news. In this project the PI will explore the concept of Information Art, the process of promoting awareness of peripheral information through personalized, expressive art. This new form of information access and presentation system combines elements of both ambient displays and information visualizations. Information Art allows people to identify information of interest and then to design a customized, aesthetically-pleasing representation of that information. The primary goal of the project is to explore techniques for calmly communicating information without interrupting a person s concentration and without robbing space from his her desktop displays. As people gain access to more and more information, it is crucial to develop techniques and tools that aid them in managing and utilizing that information. Many computer technologies only seem to exacerbate the situation, however, by contributing more (often unwanted) information. This project will create techniques and tools that will empower people to choose information of interest to them, and to represent and communicate this information in a manner that is personally meaningful and pleasing. An even broader impact of the project will be to explore the space of new, pervasive information displays and understand their place in future work and home environments doc14052 none The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) Working Group on Women in Physics is undertaking an international benchmarking effort to learn about the status and trends relating to women in physics internationally and it is organizing an International Conference on Women in Physics to be held in Paris, France in March . Funds from the National Science Foundation will support part of the benchmarking effort, the analysis and publication of its results, the participation of US physicists - especially students and early-career physicists - in the conference, the publication and dissemination of the conference proceedings and action plan, and some follow up. These NSF funds will be supplemented by other grants and in-kind contributions from other Federal agencies, scientific organizations, international sources, and industry. Essentially this same proposal is being sent to the US Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), with complementary but not overlapping budget requests. The National Academy of Sciences has already committed to provide $25K in general, unrestricted support, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has committed $10K doc14053 none The project will address the need for taxonomic research and training on one of the dominant faunal groups in the marine environment, the polychaete annelid worms. Four families will form the core of taxonomic work, the Cirratulidae, Orbiniidae, Scalibregmatidae, and Spionidae. The primary monographic focus will be on the Cirratulidae in which homology of characters is controversial and genera currently poorly defined. Data base activities will focus on making as much information as possible accessible for these four polychaete families. Comparative studies will use a wide range of techniques and characters including light microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, reproductive biology, larval morphology and development, and development, and molecular techniques where appropriate. This work will make many common and important components of marine environments accurately identifiable and will train a doctoral student in modern systematic methods. This student will develop a dissertation based upon a portion of the monograph of Cirratulidae, thereby acquiring the special knowledge and skills needed for a career in polychaete taxonomy. Conclusions will be made accessible to a wide user community via the World Wide Web doc14054 none In a continuation of productive studies of the taxonomy and phylogeny of the Sordariales, a large and ecologically important group of ascomycete fungi, Dr. Sabine Huhndorf of the Field Museum and her students and colleagues are focusing on the genus Podospora, one of the largest and most complex in the group (138 species worldwide), and related taxa. The genus is key to understanding relationships in the group, and is ecologically important as a dominant component of the dung decomposer mycota. Previous studies have shown that the large genera Lasiosphaeria and Cercophora form a monophyletic group together with Podospora and the model organisms Neurospora crassa and Sordaria fimicola. These relationships are significantly different from traditional classification schemes. While Podospora species have had a great deal of attention from a morphological standpoint, they have not previously been included in molecular systematic studies; and a revision of the genus incorporating molecular characters is essential for understanding their relationship among other taxa in the Sordariales. This study will serve as a model system for future studies in ascomycete systematics by using a multi-gene approach, incorporating both protein-coding and ribosomal genes, along with morphological characters for determining phylogenetic relationships at the specific, generic and familial levels. Both the monographic and the family level phylogenetic studies will be based on morphological and molecular data obtained from type and other herbarium specimens, newly collected specimens, and cultures. With the aid of digital image capturing systems, this study will produce detailed identification guides for taxa in the Sordariales. Results will be available via hard copy and over the Field Museum Mycology WWW site. The publication of the resulting monographs, specimen databases, on-line image catalog and interactive identification system will greatly assist further studies of ascomycetes by researchers worldwide. The research and training enterprise involves colleague Dr. Greg Mueller at the Field Museum as well as others in Denmark and New Zealand who will assist also with the fieldwork in those countries. Students will also participate in ongoing field work in Costa Rica and Ecuador. This program directly addresses several of the major challenges currently facing ascomycete systematics including: a) rigorously examining patterns of variation in some of the key morphological characters currently used in ascomycete taxonomy, b) stabilizing generic, familial and ordinal concepts using a phylogenetic approach, c) determining taxonomic diversity in tropical countries, d) integrating these data into monographic treatments, and e) training students to become well versed in traditional as well as modern tools and analyses. Understanding the phylogenetic relationships among ascomycetes is important because these fungi play an important role in our living world as decomposers of organic matter and as agents of plant and animal diseases, and as sources of medically and industrially significant compounds doc14055 none Adaptive changes in the expression and structures of brain functioning proteins may have been the crucial process responsible for humankind s unrivaled cognitive abilities and complex mental behavior. A search for the underlying positively selected genomic changes will be conducted by the methods of functional genomics and molecular phylogenetics. This search will focus on the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a neocortical region involved in monitoring and modifying task-specific behaviors (executive function) that require novel responses or overriding interfering responses and that may separate humans from other primates. A unique population of spindle shaped projection neurons is present in the ACC in humans and with lesser numbers of cells in common and bonobo chimpanzees (the sister-group of humans), gorillas (next closest relative), and orangutans but not in any other primates or other mammals. Moreover, among the five ape species, the orangutan ACC has the least spindle neurons and the bonobo ACC has the most. Thus, there is reason to hypothesize that Darwinian positive selection acted during the more recent stages of humankind s evolutionary history on the genes encoding proteins involved in the ACC s cellular architecture and function. DNA arrays will be used to analyze gene expression levels of thousands of genes that encode proteins that function in the ACC. Comparing the expression levels of these thousands of genes in the human vs. chimpanzee ACC will identify candidate genes, the subset of genes that show marked species differences in expression levels. In situ hybridization will be used to locate the cell populations that express the candidate genes, thereby testing the prediction that the candidate genes will co-localize in the spindle shaped projection neurons. As the candidate genes are likely to be involved in functionally interacting biochemical pathways, this gene expression data in the ACC should assist cognitive neuroscientists in elucidating the role of the ACC in human cognition. These and other candidate genes will be analyzed in a series of anthropoid and prosimian primates to look for changes in the cis-regulatory elements that control expression of the genes and to determine whether the encoded proteins underwent bursts of rapid amino acid replacements during humankind s ancestry. This approach builds upon previous work showing a number of proteins that are part of the mitochondrial oxidative energy metabolism pathway have undergone such bursts of positively selected amino acid replacements. This one-year project will show the validity of this approach and will set the stage for a more widespread and comprehensive attack in the future to characterize some of the important genetic changes that allowed the emergence of the large-brained primates doc14056 none In recent years, low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have been shown to have the power to perform within thousandths of decibels of the Shannon channel capacity of memoryless communications channels. This project seeks to answer a natural question: how good are these codes for transmission over channels with memory? The channels under consideration are Markovian memory channels, including both channels where the memory is dependent and independent of the transmitted symbols. Such channels arise in several applications, such as disk drives or other storage media. The analysis and design of LDPC codes has benefited from representing these codes as graphs, where the decoding is done by passing messages along the graph edges. This graph model allows an analysis using martingales that underlies recent advances, including the density evolution design technique. The investigators study how to extend this graphical modeling approach to channels with memory. More specifically, the project is divided into four major tasks: designing density evolution algorithms under new channel models; evaluating noise tolerance thresholds; engineering codes for short block lengths and rapid decoding; and achieving spectral shaping with low-density parity-check codes doc14057 none Jackie Ying, MIT It is proposed to investigate the design feasibility of an intelligent drug delivery system. Its design would be based on nanometer components organized into mass, surface and chemistry distributions which will optimize the delivery, while adapting to the nature of its body environment. Such would be the delivery of insulin with a synthetic carrier nanodevice, which would typically protect the insulin load from gastrointestinal acidity, and also have an adaptive chemical distribution which will release the contained insulin when the carrier would reach a part of the flow showing predetermined ambient chemical properties doc14058 none Schlosser This project focuses on understanding the interactions of the Arctic Ocean outflow waters and Nordic Sea waters as they create the Denmark Strait Overflow Water (DSOW) and the Iceland-Scotland Overflow water (ISOW) on the one hand and the Arctic Ocean influenced layers in the Nordic Seas on the other. Specific goals include: (1) determining the sources and pathways of fresh water out of the Arctic Ocean and studying the processes modifying downstream water masses; (2) determining the sources and characteristics of intermediate and deep waters of Arctic origin and their subsequent modification as they are exported in the Nordic Seas and North Atlantic Ocean; and (3) determining the pathways of Atlantic water through the Nordic Seas and into the Arctic Ocean and how it transforms Nordic Seas water masses. This new synoptic survey of the Nordic Seas will provide a baseline observation to understand the links between the various ocean basins in the region. This project is collaborative with Swedish scientists and is a contribution to the Climate variability and predictability program (CLIVAR doc14059 none The scale insects (Insecta: Hemiptera: Coccoidea) are small, plant-sucking insects with extraordinary biological and morphological characteristics. They display unusual development, sexual dimorphism, and have a remarkable diversity of genetic systems, including parthenogenesis, hermaphroditism and paternal genome elimination. Many species are important pests, causing plant damage via sap removal, growth distortion, pathogen vectoring and honeydew contamination. Although more than species of scale insects have been described, there are many additional undescribed species, and a substantial proportion of the named species, especially in the tropics and southern hemisphere, are difficult or impossible to identify with existing literature. Scale insect taxonomy is based largely on microscopic cuticular features of adult females and identification requires special technical skills in microscope slide preparation. Worldwide the number of scale insect researchers (coccidologists), especially taxonomists, is declining and recruitment via student training is minimal. This project combines the expertise of scale insect systematists, Drs. P.J. Gullan and D.R. Miller, and molecular systematist, Dr. B.B. Normark, to train coccidology students in taxonomic monography, phylogenetic systematics and computer-based data analysis, illustration and dissemination. Three clades of Coccoidea that display unusual modes of reproduction and are poorly-known and or difficult to identify are targeted for study. These are (1) the tribe Iceryini of the Margarodidae, (2) the genus Chionaspis Signoret, tribe Diaspidini, of the armored scale family, Diaspididae, and (3) the subfamily Myzolecaniinae of the soft scale family, Coccidae. Students will be trained in field techniques and in taxonomic and curatorial methods, as well as in phylogenetic analysis of morphological and molecular character data. The trainee researchers will utilize the specimens and specialist libraries of the two largest scale insect collections in North America - the United States National Collection of Coccoidea at the United States Department of Agriculture, Maryland, and the Bohart Museum of Entomology, University of California, Davis. Students will learn to score morphological and molecular characters, to manage those data using computer programs, to use the data to infer phylogenetic trees, and to use those trees to construct classifications and infer the evolution of biological traits. This will result in training a new generation of taxonomic specialists on these important insects. Products of the project will include published monographs, databases, and web-based interactive keys that employ digital images that will have broad impact and utility to ecologists, agriculturists, conservation biologists, geneticists, and others doc14019 none Harper Pfeffer Basal sliding is the principle form of movement of most temperate glaciers and leads to glacier surging, causes glaciers to erode their beds, and often controls the overall glacier s mass distribution. A glacier s deformational velocity field can be modeled with some confidence, but there are no working models that will accurately predict the sliding motion of glaciers. In fact, the variables that would potentially go into a sliding model have not been fully established. Theoretically, sliding is promoted by both elevated water pressure and water storage at the bed. Previous field programs, however, have correlated sliding rate with either pressure or storage, with the majority of associations made with pressure. These observational programs have correlated sliding and subglacial conditions by using only limited spatially and temporally distributed measurements. This has made the task very difficult because the subglacial drainage system is transient and internal ice dynamics (e.g., longitudinal coupling) complicate the glacier s response to change at its lower boundary. The Principal Investigators will conduct a multifaceted study focusing on time space variability in coupling between the subglacial hydrology and ice dynamics system which they believe is key to a new understanding of sliding dynamics. They will conduct a field campaign on the Bench Glacier, a temperate valley glacier in southeast Alaska. Various types of instrumentation will be used to collect a comprehensive data set of measurements of basal water pressure, surface motion, internal deformation, sliding velocity, video observations of the bed, and slug, pump, and tracer experiments on subglacial water flow. These data will include at least three elements which have not been previously addressed, thus enabling new explorations of the linkages between subglacial hydrology and glacier motion: 1) data will be collected at two length scales, including measurements spanning the entire glacier and detailed measurements focused on a small reach; 2) measurements will be made over a time period of at least a year, allowing short to long period cycles to be investigated; and 3) an automated survey instrument will allow for uninterrupted high-time resolution studies of glacier motion. During the first field season, they will focus on the long length scale (kilometers), with measurements of basal conditions and velocity made at locations spanning the length of the glacier. Data will be used to investigate the longitudinal coupling between the bed and ice dynamics. During the second field season, they will address a short length scale (10-100 meters), enabling local observations to be placed within the context of regional processes. This will permit measurements of surface uplift to be fully compared with both ice dynamics and hydrology to investigate the cause of the uplift. The resulting data set and analyses will be used to test and refine conceptual and numerical models for subglacial water flow and to establish links between hydrology and ice dynamics doc14061 none This study will examine the ways in which Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) enable the development of collaborative, boundary-spanning networks between academic and industry scientists working in three disciplinary areas, 1) oceanography, 2) marine biology and 3) astronomy. The methodology combines survey techniques with semi-structured interviews, in-depth case studies, and network analysis to provide a detailed view of how these scientists use ICTs to gather data, store and share information, and communicate with one another. The results of this research will provide a better understanding of the use of ICTs in inter-organizational scientific collaborations, and the ways in which these collaborations may enable economic development, technological innovation, and advances in science doc14062 none The project focuses on perception issues, with the goal of achieving a flexible and consistent representation of large scale man-made environments that can be acquired via visual sensing. The work will enhance the autonomy of robotic agents and their interactions with humans, or used to help humans with impaired vision doc14063 none Heterotrophic deep-sea animals require a downward flux of material in order to survive and reproduce, whereas animals with chemoautotrophic symbionts at hydrothermal vents or cold seeps should theoretically be capable of producing gametes more-or-less continuously without the benefit of surface-derived detritus. Mixotrophic mussels at cold seeps are intermediate between these two situations. They can grow and survive using only methane or sulfide as an energy source, but are also capable of filter-feeding on detrital particles or plankton in the benthic boundary layer. Available evidence suggests that supplemental filtration on bacterioplankton may be necessary to provide sufficient nitrogen to the mussels. The cold-seep mussel Bathymodiolus childressi, which lives at methane seeps on the Louisiana slope, demonstrates periodic rather than continuous reproduction, a pattern not predicted by the commonly accepted paradigm that food limitation controls reproductive timing in the deep sea. Thus, mixotrophic mussels present a unique opportunity to investigate the role of detrital input in the control of gametogenic timing in the deep sea. Lipid biomarkers and compound specific stable isotopes will be used to determine if energy from surfacederived detritus is differentially partitioned between the gonads and somatic tissues of B. childressi. In the deep-sea megafauna, seasonal breeders virtually always produce feeding larvae, suggesting a possible mechanistic or evolutionary link between surface production and larval success. Crisp s rule, the prediction that animals with planktotrophic larvae will time their breeding to assure optimal nutrition for the larvae, is one such possible link. Crisp s Rule will be examined in this study by rearing the larvae of B. childressi in natural water collected at various depths doc14064 none Force feedback devices, or haptic interfaces, have the potential to increase the qualityof human-computer interaction by adding the sense of touch. However, there are still few practical force feedback applications, due in large part to the stringent computational requirements of haptic rendering. In order to maintain a high fidelity system, haptic update rates must be as high as Hz, rather than the 30 Hz updates for graphical displays. This is especially challenging for 6-degree of freedom (DOF) haptic devices which are used to display forces and torques for arbitrary pairs of objects. This requires accurate contact determination and contact force and torque computation of all collision points in less than a millisecond. This project focuses on three aspects of high fidelity haptic display or virtual touch . The first goal includes developing new geometric and physically-based algorithms that can improve the state of the art by more than an order of magnitude, in addition to the expected improvements in processor speed and computing power over that time. This will be based on hybrid spatial data structures, simplification hierarchies, multi-resolution representations, bounded error approximations, and massively parallel rasterization hardware. The second goal is to pursue applications that can benefit significantly from the use of high-fidelity 6-DOF haptic displays. This includes virtual prototyping of nano-structures, haptic visualization of biological interaction between molecules, maintenance analysis and interactive modeling and painting. The third goal is the evaluation of 6-DOF haptic rendering systems as a tool for human-computer interface. This will be done in collaboration with Boeing, Sandia Labs, and Sensable Technologies. If successful, the proposed research will provide enabling algorithms and a prototype software system for designing a high-fidelity virtual touch system doc14065 none Six to seven speakers each have been invited from the United States of America, Argentina and Brazil to cover topics on exploration of microbial diversity, uses of biodiversity, plant-microbe interactions and genomics. The aim of this workshop is to explore the possibilities of interaction between North and South scientific groups of Brazil, Argentina and the United States in the fields of microbial diversity and biocomplexity. The primary goals of the meeting consist of exploring and using microbial diversity for biotechnological purposes; starting studies of biocomplexity beginning at the level of interactions between microorganisms and other biological, physical, and chemical systems and proposing possible joint projects. This meeting promotes the participation of not only senior investigators, but also graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from Argentina and Brazil. This award provides funds to cover roundtrip airfare costs from the USA to Buenos Aires, the site of the workshop, for the seven participants from the United States. The final program, conclusions and recommendations will be forwarded to the NSF and distributed to the participants doc14066 none Rove beetles (Staphylinidae) are a huge and abundant beetle family in most terrestrial ecosystems, but outside Central Europe they are not well known. We will study several subgroups, each occurring in three or four separate areas in the southern hemisphere (Australia, New Zealand, Chile and southern Argentina, South Africa). Using existing museum specimens and newly collected material, one of us will study each selected subgroup to: determine how many and which species belong to it, describe the (many) new species and map their distributions, and analyze phylogenetic (evolutionary) relationships among the species. Each study seeks to reconstruct the biogeographic history of its subgroup. We will combine these, seeking repeated patterns of historical connections among the different areas, compare the patterns with those found in other groups, and consider whether they resulted from ancient geological changes (e.g., breakup of Gondwana, starting 170-150 million years ago) and or other causes (e.g., later dispersal between separated areas or from the north). Results will include (1) a well-illustrated revisionary study of each subgroup, (2) a more general paper about the biogeographic histories of all (and other groups of organisms), and (3) a web site presenting these results -- enhanced with color photos and interactive identification tools -- with extensive supplementary information, such as taxonomic catalogs and databases of the specimens studied. Better knowledge of rove beetles will permit using this megadiverse group in evolutionary and ecological studies: full understanding of nearly any land-based natural community is incomplete without considering this very diverse, mostly predatory, component (easily 100-200 species per site). Many wholly southern temperate habitats have been reduced in extent even more than tropical rainforest, and are under serious threat. This lends urgency to studying their unique inhabitants, which include many poorly-known and evolutionarily isolated species. Our data on several staphylinid groups can also provide valuable insights into the overall evolutionary history of the southern temperate areas fauna and flora. We will train a post-doctoral fellow and a graduate student in theory and practice of modern systematics (including field work and use of external and internal structural features, DNA sequencing, and numerous computer tools) and introduce them to the international network of museum- and university-based curators and researchers. Each year an undergraduate intern will help in the project, gaining exposure to systematic research and to the dramatic biodiversity of arthropods, and perhaps the inspiration to pursue a career in a related discipline. The field work in the four southern temperate areas will include a local student or other individual as part of international partnership-building. We will improve collections at host-country museums and the Field Museum by depositing new specimens (from poorly known habitats) and by sorting and identifying existing holdings. These improvements will bear fruit far into the future for studies not just of rove beetles, but of other arthropods as well doc14067 none This research examines the health impact of the Wari empire (AD 600 - ) on populations in the state s heartland and periphery through paleopathological, dietary, and demographic analyses of archaeological human remains. The Wari state originated in the central Andean highlands (near modern-day Ayacucho) and incorporated populations throughout the Andes, including those of the Majes valley in south-central Peru. Demographic, paleopathological, and stable isotopic bone composition data are collected from three archaeological skeletal samples-two from the peripheral Majes valley (sites, La Real and Beringa) and one from the heartland urban Wari site in the Ayacucho valley, Conchopata-to document past rural and urban community health during the period of the Wari rule. These data are then used to compare differences in health status, if any, between those in the heartland and periphery, as well as document (dis)similarities between the two peripheral Majes valley skeletal populations that experienced interaction with Wari. Finally, data on sex- and class-based health and dietary differences are used to consider past social and gender roles and organization doc14068 none This proposal is to solicit support for exchanging experience in civil infrastructures for a group of prospective participants from the United States at the International Conference and Exhibition on Extending the Life of Bridges, Civil and Building Structures, London, United Kingdom, July 4-6, . The focus of the conference is on bridge investigation and repair, concrete and composites, and buildings and civil structures All these topics are important issues pertaining to the performance and safety of civil infrastructure systems in the United States. It is expected that the conference will help identify potential cooperative research topics between the participants from the United States and the United Kingdom on advancing both the state-of-the-art and the state-of-the-practice in performance evaluation, safety assessment and life-cycle management of civil infrastructure systems. Research is needed in these fields to enhance our understanding of the performance of civil infrastructure systems, to improve current methods for design and safety assessment of new and existing structural systems, and to permit an optimal management of the civil infrastructure systems in the United States doc14069 none As 3D volume data becomes more prevalent from simulations and sensing equipment, and as volume rendering APIs are becoming available in software and hardware implementations, the need to manipulate volume models arises. However, the work on manipulating volume models for analysis and computer graphics applications is sparse. The few methods that are available are computationally expensive and non-intuitive. This project avoids these problems by using volumetric skeletons to control manipulation. The skeleton acts as a ubiquitous data structure for volumes and allows manipulation in a much more intuitive and general manner. The skeleton is computed from the actual volume with a reversible thinning procedure based upon the distance transform. The skeletal points are connected and arranged in a skeleton-tree structure. The key to this process is the reconstruction phase that maps the sampled voxels around the skeleton-tree. The skeleton is an intuitive mechanism for manipulation. For example, a user can deform the skeleton to create the corresponding deformations in the volume. The skeleton-tree allows the user to reshape volumes and create new visualizations. Among other things, this allows culling sections of a volume logically, morphing volumes to simulate changes in a 3D feature over time, detecting collisions for interactive volume-based virtual reality applications, and volume animation and volume graphics (mimicking the standard graphics pipeline with volumes). Because skeletons can be generated hierarchically, they can be used to perform a variety of tasks including volume smoothing and level-of-detail representation. The goal of this project is to extend and fundamentally enhance previous research in volume skeletonization. It will develop a full range of robust skeletal algorithms and interactive tools. The researchers will investigate the exciting new visualization applications of the parameter-based volume skeleton. This should have a wide impact in the visualization and computer graphics communities doc14070 none The Acari, ticks and mites, includes the greatest diversity of animals outside of the insects. In spite of its great diversity, the study of acarine systematics, evolution, and ecology is hampered by a declining number of active taxonomic specialists. This study focuses on two major lineages of parasitic mites associated with mammals: Dermanyssoidea and Sarcoptoidea. These groups, with more than 1,000 species, have never been analyzed phylogenetically at the suprageneric level. Field studies will concentrate on poorly known faunas in Madagascar and the Philippines. Taxonomic monographs will be produced for several families for these insular areas including descriptions of many new species, phylogenetic hypotheses integrating morphological and molecular evidence, and catalogs of mammalian hosts for all dermanyssoid and sarcoptoid groups worldwide. This research will have immediate and longterm benefits to a wide range of biologists. It will provide a predictive, conceptual framework for a large number of mites of medical, veterinary, ecological, and evolutionary interest as well as an easily accessible source for identification and host information. Concentration on the endangered faunas of Madagascar and the Philippines may also aid conservation biologists and epidemiologists in understanding the interactions of native and introduced host-parasite systems and their roles in these rapidly changing ecosystems. Students will develop skills and knowledge in both morphological and molecular methods of systematic analysis. In all, three graduate students and a great number of undergraduate students will be trained in the systematics, ecology, and evolution of parasitic mites. Results of the research will be made accessible electronically doc14071 none This project extends peer-to-peer communication networks to better support formation of virtual communities in wide area computer networks. Virtual communities bring together individuals with similar interests, but the difficulty of forming them and sustaining critical mass discourages communities that serve small populations or compete with existing communities. Large-scale peer-to-peer networks offer the possibility of self-organizing communities, in which nodes recognize and create relatively stable connections to other nodes with similar interests. The solution includes nodes that learn about their network neighborhoods, nodes that offer partial (and competing) directory services, new methods of routing messages efficiently in peer-to-peer networks, more accurate methods of making resource selection decisions in environments containing many resources, and a utility-theoretic model for decision-making by individual nodes that incorporate multiple task requirements (e.g., cost, accuracy, and reliability). The scientific results will be more robust and efficient peer-to-peer networks, new techniques for forming virtual communities, and a better understanding of how complex peer-to-peer networks work. A software simulator will enable CS, MIS, and Business students to study virtual communities, for example testing hypotheses about why marketplaces fail or policies that encourage community formation. The basic science can be used to build search tools that explicitly consider tens of thousands of databases, software that supports dynamic creation of virtual communities within organizational intranets in response to unforeseen developments (e.g., the DoD), and wireless networks in which devices work whenever they are in range of another device doc14072 none Saprotrophic fungi play major ecological roles in litter decomposition, nutrient recycling and retention, soil genesis, litter binding that inhibits erosion, and as food sources for innumerable animals. Additionally, some mushroom species cause extensive damage to economically important food crops, while others produce biomedically important antibiotics. Understanding the diversity, ecological roles, and phylogenetic relationships of these decomposer organisms is essential to understanding how ecosystems function and persist, especially in tropical ecosystems where nutrient turnover is so rapid. Dr. Dennis Desjardin at San Francisco State University, a mycologist with a productive record of research on the mushrooms of the Pacific Rim and especially Indonesia, will conduct monographic studies of the saprotrophic agarics (gilled mushrooms) from underexplored regions of Southeast Asia. Special emphasis will be given to the genera Marasmius, Marasmiellus, and Mycena, which are the most diverse yet understudied genera of decomposer mushrooms in tropical ecosystems. Approximately 25% of all mushroom species encountered in Southeast Asia belong to these three genera, and nearly one third of them represent species new to science. Monographic studies are imperative in order to build a taxonomic foundation to support biodiversity studies, and to provide raw materials for phylogenetic analyses and for the screening of biomedically important compounds. A central focus of this five-year project is on the integration of traditional morphological and ecological studies with molecular phylogenetic analyses. Training of undergraduate and graduate students from Southeast Asia and the US entails coursework in systematics, laboratory and museum studies, and extensive fieldwork in Southeast Asia. All aspects of data documentation will be computerized and Internet-distributed, including specimen databasing, taxonomic and phylogenetic analyses, nomenclature and bibliographic databasing. Collaborations with colleagues and students from Southeast Asia will build lifelong partnerships that enhance taxonomic expertise across international borders doc14073 none The design of efficient wireless communication systems relies on a deep understanding of the basic characteristics of the underlying channel. The most fundamental and unique characteristic of wireless channels is the random time-variation of the channel strengths, a phenomenon known as fading. Communication over fading channels has been a topic of study since the 60 s. A very different view of the problem, however, emerges from recent research. The traditional view of fading is that it is a source of unreliability that has to be compensated for by various diversity techniques. The modern view is much more powerful and considers fading as a source of randomization from nature that can be exploited to get very significant capacity boost. The research project addresses several key problems within this modern paradigm. They will be centered around two areas: 1) opportunistic communication : the dynamic rate and power allocation over the dimensions of time, frequency, antennas and users so that transmission is done when and where the channel is strong; 2) multi-antenna communication: the use of multiple transmit and receive antennas to increase the number of degrees of freedom available for communication in richly scattered fading environments. The issues studied are focused on how the random fading can be exploited even in the face of channel uncertainty, and the interplay between the modern and traditional views of channel fading doc14074 none Project : Conspicuousness and Concealment: The Visual Ecology of Signaling and Camouflage All visual tasks that animals perform take place in natural scenes. Consequently, the visual systems of animals are adapted for efficient (often nearly optimal) analysis of the scenes they view in natural circumstances. Animals are rarely concerned with general scene properties, however. Rather, most objects of visual interest are other animals or plant food items such as fruits or flowers. Sometimes the visual object is decorated to become a strong signal. Other times, it may conceal itself using patterns that are confused with its natural background - it is camouflaged. Systems of signaling and camouflage must contend with both vision of other animals and properties of the background. Furthermore, neither the background nor the organism has a constant appearance because of continuous variations in the patterns of illumination falling upon them. These changing conditions strongly influence the visual appearances of scenes and signals. This project considers the interrelationships among illuminants, scenes, signals, and animal vision. Research will concentrate on marine systems that offer excellent preliminary understanding of vision, color, and behavioral context: coral reef fishes, mantis shrimps, and cuttlefish. The primary goals are to learn how colors (i.e. spectral reflectances) and patterns of animals are adapted for enhanced conspicuousness or concealment, and how visual systems of animals are specialized to detect signals and to break camouflage. The power of this approach is that it compares a diverse selection of animals, all of which must form and recognize biological signals in shallow, clear marine waters. The research will be a pioneering effort to learn how systems of vision, signaling, and camouflage operate in extremely colorful (or well camouflaged) marine species in the specific contexts of their natural illuminants and backgrounds. The proposed research will contribute significantly to the fields of sensory biology, visual ecology, and animal behavior. It will similarly be of special interest to engineers and scientists working in remote sensing, machine vision, and artificial systems of object detection (including camouflaged objects). It will contribute to the training of graduate students and enhance the research experiences of undergraduates working in the P.I.s laboratory, including women and minority students. (who are already involved with similar research in this laboratory). Last - and far from least - the project holds promise for stimulating scientific interest in the general public and all those interested in animal vision, color, and crypsis doc14075 none Collaborative research and training activities at the University of Utah s Price Institute for Phthirapteran Research and the Illinois Natural History Survey will result in the first comprehensive world catalog of chewing lice in half a century, a monographic revision of the family Goniodidae, and training a new generation of scientists with expertise in the taxonomy of chewing lice. Intensive field research will result in much new material and in important experiences for students in the project. Morphological and molecular data will be integrated to hypothesize a phylogeny for Goniodidae, and support the multi-authored monograph of the family. Chewing lice of are great interest because of their accessibility as models for population biology, parasitic adaptation, host selection, and co-speciation and because of their medical and veterinary importance. There are few living experts on chewing lice. This project will contribute directly to the training of one postdoctoral researcher and three doctoral students who will be involved in all aspects of the research from field work to taxonomic revisions and monography. Among the results will be web accessibility to a world catalog of chewing lice and the first modern, phylogenetic monograph of a large, important family of chewing lice doc14076 none Among the small invertebrates living between sand grains in the marine environment, are tiny, cryptic worms that many consider to be the most primitive of all bilaterally symmetrical animals (that is, all animals excluding the cnidarians and sponges). These worms include two small groups called acoel and catenulid turbellarians which are now classified in the phylum Platyhelminthes (flatworms) but that, according to some systematists, may not even be related to the more familiar flatworms such as planarians and polyclads. Another of these primitive worm groups is the Gnathostomulida, whose relationships to other phyla of invertebrates have been similarly controversial; by some theories, gnathostomulids are like the ancestors of the flatworms. S. Tyler and W. Sterrer, who have long studied these worms, propose training new students in how to find and handle them and in how to decipher systematic relationships. Students working in S. Tyler s laboratory at the University of Maine will concentrate on microscopical techniques and taxonomy of flatworm groups. New characters discerned through applying fluorescence and electron microscopy on these animals show that the relationships among them are not well represented by the current classification system. Students working with Sterrer in his laboratory in Bermuda and accompanying him on sampling trips will gauge patterns of distribution of flatworms and gnathostomulids and gather specimens for the microscopical and molecular studies. He will also train students in curatorial techniques. The major focus of this project is the training of students-to give them the tools to discover and describe the many species of these difficult-to-find, yet remarkably abundant, enigmatic animals and to make sense of their diversity. Without new researchers being trained to identify these cryptic animals, we will lose the expertise needed to address important questions of animal origins. The knowledge these students unearth will likely provide critical clues to resolve far-reaching questions of how the major groups of animals are related. Identifying and characterizing the many undescribed species of lower flatworms will provide a better understanding of their biodiversity; knowledge of the geographic distribution of both these flatworms and gnathostomulids should provide a means for seeing where they arose and how they diversified and spread around the Earth. The results of these students research will be displayed on a Web site so that anyone with a Web browser can use that data to identify similar worms they might find or to gauge the historical relationships of geographic sites doc14077 none The objective of the proposed research is to study the microbial production of flavor compounds based on metabolic and genetic engineering. The primary objective is to investigate the response of the central metabolic pathway in Escherichia coli in the presence of perturbations in the cofactor CoA. The specific goals of the research are to: (1) study the redistribution of metabolic fluxes in E. coli with alteration of CoA metabolism by the use of mutant strains with perturbations either in the synthesis or in the usage pathways of the cofactor CoA, (2) examine the effect of these genetic manipulations on the cellular capacity to produce flavor compounds under defined bioreactor experiments, and (3) perform directed evolution of the alcohol acetyltransferase to alter its specificity to make a different pattern of esters. The framework developed in this research could be applied to the improvement of metabolic function for bioprocess applications related to biobased industrial products doc14078 none The objective of the proposed research is to use in vitro metabolic engineering combined with combinatorial biology and microscale processing to evaluate the functional diversity of a complex metabolic network, namely, polyketide synthesis. The investigators will develop a microscale, microfluidic device for the in vitro combinatorial biosynthesis of complex polyketides. Also, because of the microscale component and the modularity of the polyketide synthesis, the investigators expect to use the principles of multi-step enzymatic networks (e.g., a metabolic pathway) to alter the progress of the pathway and generate unique compounds. The class of polyketides used in this research consists of a small number of polypeptides each containing multiple modules. Each module is responsible for one round of chain extension and post-condensation modifications. The modules will be immobilized into the channels of the microfabricated device, a mutant thioesterase domain will be engineered into each module (necessary for release and transport to the next module), and the products will be transported from one module to the next. This research could enable the synthesis of molecules with new and unusual functions. Also, this research could add to the fundamental understanding of metabolic pathways and microfluidics doc14079 none The primary problem addressed is the deleterious effect of dynamic multipath propagation on high-speed wireless digital communications supporting real-time video and multimedia applications. Digital TV (DTV) is a target application along with Fourth Generation Cellular Communication Systems. Reflections off buildings and other structures cause ghosts and other artifacts in the reconstructed video stream. These multipath effects can wreak havoc on all functions of the receiver causing loss of synchronization and loss of carrier timing recovery as well as inter-symbol interference. Discrete ghosts are often associated with multipath conditions of large, flat surfaces, such as tall steel buildings. However, multipath conditions can occur in areas with hills and dense foliage where a signal can travel through many paths to the receiver. When the signal is bounced back from a moving object, complex ghosts can arise with a time-varying nature that is very challenging for the equalizer to overcome. To accommodate delay spreads of up to 40 microseconds, current generation Digital TV receiver chips employ a Decision Feedback Equalizer (DFE) with more than 100 Feed-Forward taps and more than 400 Feed-Back taps. This constitutes a large number of taps to adapt implying slow convergence and high computational complexity. Future high-speed wireless multimedia applications will place even more stressful demands on equalizer performance. The investigator will develop fundamental advances in the area of reduced-dimension Decision Feedback Equalizers (DFE s). These include methods for dimensionality reduction based on a powerful reduced-rank adaptive filtering algorithm referred to as the Multi-Stage Nested Wiener Filter (MSNWF). The MSNWF provides convergence speeds better than the Recursive Least Squares (RLS) algorithm, but at a much reduced computational complexity due to the fact that that the MSNWF constrains the overall weight vector to lie in a data-adaptive, low-dimensional subspace. The MSNWF has been successfully employed to effect a reduced-rank, linear equalizer for applications in Third Generation Cellular Communications based on both CDMA Technology and the European GSM EDGE System. The investigator will also develop other means for dimensionality reduction including the use of the channel shortening concept employed in OFDM systems to reduce the length of the cyclic prefix, and symbol waveform compression achieved through simple linear filtering at the receiver. In addition, the investigator will study the use of reduced-dimension DFE s for equalization when block space-time coding is employed under frequency selective multipath conditions doc14080 none Under the direction of Dr. Gayle Fritz, Katherine Roberts will complete The Tensas Paleoethnobotanical Project. This project dissertation will document the emergence of aboriginal farming, in the form of both horticulture and agriculture, in the Tensas Basin of Northeast Louisiana located in the Lower Mississippi Valley. It will employ basic models and tenets from evolutionary ecology as the main interpretive framework to enable examination of these processes in sociopolitical context. Specifically, it will investigate how risk reduction may have influenced decisions about resource utilization. Evidence will be taken from plant remains, archaeological data, and ecological information.. Current data suggest that although a certain level of complexity was achieved in the Tensas based on nut and fruit management, with the advent and subsequent intensification of maize, Tensas Basin society became noticeably more complex. In contrast, farming of native seeds had fewer discernible social ramifications. These patterns require further substantiation and explanation. Plant remain analyses are an excellent means for testing hypotheses about the dynamics of the evolution of economic and cultural systems. This study, combined with application of predictions from particular models derived from evolutionary ecology, will help focus interpretation on the nature and consequences of the interaction between people and their food plants. The project dissertation will expand an already impressive plant remain database and critically examine factors effecting foodways in the Tensas basin through a localized case study. Completion of this project will augment knowledge of the patterns and processes of food production during the time period spanning A.D. 700 - A.D. , focusing on the effect of agriculture on indigenous economic strategies. Hypotheses concerning the local population s dependence on maize versus native resources will be examined on the basis of empirical evidence with consideration of the ecological and historical context in which these behavioral changes took place. Results of this study will provide insight into the interplay among environment, risk, and the evolution of subsistence and social structure, ultimately shedding light on developmental processes in other regions as well. The Tensas Paleoethnobotanical Project will provide some clarification of why and how these fisher-hunter-collectors eventually became farmers and in so doing, the study will fulfill the larger objective of developing explanations for the origin of food production in the Tensas Basin. Why the hunter-collector-fisher economy in the Tensas persisted as long as it did, and why local groups were seemingly so reluctant to embrace maize agriculture, will be discussed. This dissertation will provide a well studied example of sedentary and socially complex moundbuilders who subsequently adopted maize. Ecologically based explanations for the adoption of agriculture and the socio-political changes it brings will confront arguments of increased complexity in Mississippian times deriving from aggrandizing individuals striving for power. Additionally, explanations of population pressure and climatic change need not be invoked as exogenous variables for the shift to. Finally, data collection and hypothesis testing involved in this project will provide an empirical case study to aid evaluation of proposals for subsistence patterning in the region doc14081 none ed and generalized to what is now known as the Turbo Principle. Because of its remarkable performance, it is expected that the Turbo Principle will have an enormous impact on virtually all aspects of digital communication systems. The main goal of this research is to explore the fundamental limits of the Turbo Principle while offering practical implementations. The first research thrust aims at developing an analytical approach for computing the convergence thresholds of Turbo decoders. In addition to the expected savings in computational complexity, the analytical approach is sought to offer more useful insights for code design. The convergence analysis will facilitate constructing irregular ``Turbo-like codes that approach the capacity limit of Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channels. The code performance with small and moderate block lengths will be considered as an additional design criterion. This research will also investigate graphical code design for multi-path fading channels. Code constructions will be optimized for parametric fading models that capture the different limitations in practical systems. Furthermore, The convergence analysis will be used to explore fundamental limits on the performance of Turbo multi-user receivers in generalized fading channels doc14082 none New production is that component of total phytoplankton production fueled by nitrate uptake and the fixation of N2. In a nitrogen-limited model of ocean plankton growth, new production can be used to define an upper limit for the export of organic material from the surface to deeper layers. Thus, new production is an important starting point to determine the ocean s role in the vertical flux of bio-active materials such as carbon dioxide. A second critical factor is the amount of new production that is exported to depth. Both export and new production can vary independently and both need to be understood to predict how efficiently material will be removed from surface waters. Previous time series measurements in the Cariaco Basin off northeast Venezuela recorded prodigious productivity associated with the winter upwelling period and lower (although still moderate) production in summer as well as the possible contribution of chemosynthesis at depth to the total organic export. Thus, the region is a useful example of a low-latitude eutrophic-ocean margin region in which much of the production reaches deep water. In this project, researchers from the Lamont-Dougherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University will study the relative contribution of nitrate uptake and N2 fixation to total particulate export and how these sources vary seasonally in the Cariaco Basin. The proposed work is a companion effort with the ongoing CARIACO Time-Series Project. While the latter core effort will provide the basic logistics, physical and chemical and productivity measurements, the work undertaken in this project will focus on the source, amount and export efficiency of new production. Direct incubation methods will be used to measure the seasonal changes in nitrate uptake and N2 fixation in surface waters using both 15 N tracer techniques for nitrate and di-nitrogen gas as well as the acetylene reduction for N2 fixation. Seasonal sampling of these rates over two years will provide a basis for estimating the relative importance of N2 fixation, a potentially important input of combined nitrogen to the ocean. In addition to sediment trap comparisons, the overall efficiency of export also will be measured with a recently developed 13C dilution method for estimating sub-surface carbon respiration. Finally, these rate measurements will be used to calibrate a model of new production and export in the region based on remotely sensed information. The model will explicitly estimate N2 fixation. This work will help to constrain the cumulative role of tropical margins in the supply of combined nitrogen to the ocean as well as in total-ocean carbon uptake doc14083 none Caira and Ruhnke This is a collaboration between the University of Connecticut and West Virginia State College. The research efforts of this project will focus on the generation of taxonomic monographs for four of the largest groups in the most diverse order of tapeworms that parasitize sharks and rays, the Tetraphyllidea. The monographic research will involve examination of museum specimens throughout the world. Collections of new tapeworms will be made from geographic regions previously unexplored for tetraphyllideans including Senegal, Madagascar and Western Australia. In addition to morphological data from light and scanning electron microscopy, the monographs will include complete illustrations and information on geographic distributions and evolutionary relationships of each group. This work will be complemented by evolutionary trees generated using molecular sequence information in collaboration with Dr. Tim Littlewood at the British Museum of Natural History, London. The tapeworm database developed as a result of an initial PEET award will be expanded to include complete data on all species in the four target groups of Tetraphyllidea. This database will also be expanded to treat representatives of other tapeworm groups in cooperation with individuals from around the world expert on the taxonomy of the non-tetraphyllidean tapeworm groups. These experts will be familiarized with the database at a workshop to be held at the University of Connecticut in the first year of the project and will be assisted by participants in this project with data entry on their respective groups. The training components of this project will involve a minimum of two Ph.D students, one of which has already been identified, as well as a number of masters-level and undergraduate students. These students will be involved with all aspects of the project including taxonomy and systematics of tetraphyllidean tapeworms, museum work, field collections, light and scanning electron microscopy and databasing. The PI, Co-PI and two Ph.D. students will each have responsibility for one of the monographs. The tetraphyllidean tapeworms remain among the most poorly known, but most host specific and morphologically spectacular of the tapeworm orders. Their enormous potential as indicators of shark and ray biology remains under-explored. This project will train the next generation of tetraphyllidean tapeworm taxonomic experts. Taxonomic information on all tapeworm groups will be made easily accessible through the internet. Finally, this project will serve to centralize taxonomic information on tapeworms in general, making it available globally doc14084 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Theriot and Jansen at the University of Texas at Austin to train scientists in the identification and ecology of microorganisms known as diatoms. Diatoms are single-celled organisms that can dominate the microscopical life in lakes, oceans, and rivers. They are of interest to basic science because they are diverse (thousands of species), are easily manipulated in cell cultures for experiments, and have many unusual cell properties (e.g., their cell wall is literally made out of glass!). The latter fact also makes them abundant in the fossil record, which makes them important more practical uses such as the study of natural cycles of climate change, the impact of human activities on lake ecology, and the discovery of oil. The practical uses of diatoms have drawn so much attention to diatom studies, in fact, that few people are actually devoted to basic diatom studies. On the other hand, new technologies have attracted many students to fields such as molecular biology and away from traditional fields of study. This is the problem addressed by this project and is highlighted by the fact that Dr. Theriot is the only person in North America with a university faculty appointment who also has formal training in the most basic element of diatom studies, their classification. His colleague, Dr. Jansen, is a leader in the field of using DNA and molecular biology to classify higher plants. Their labs have conducted important collaborations essential to the success of this project. This proposal is designed to ensure that there will be a new generation of diatom scientists with a background in both the classical elements of classification and the tools to further our understanding of diatoms in the 21st century. Drs. Theriot and Jansen will train, at a minimum, two postdoctoral associates, three graduate students, and two undergraduates in the science of diatom identification and classification (= taxonomy, or systematics). The training program is centered on three studies of the classification, physiology, ecology, geological distribution and molecular biology of different groups of diatoms. The basic research component of each study is centered on reconstructing evolutionary relationships by comparing the DNA (the genetic makeup of the cells), the morphology (shape and form of the cell and its components) with the known fossil record of these species. The evolutionary relationships will then be studied in relationship to environmental conditions in which the diatoms originally evolved and in which they are found today. The students will create computerized catalogues of the Texas Memorial Museum of Science and History diatom collections, as well as computerize all related data including illustrations of the species. This information will be available on the World Wide Web. The students thus will receive the field and laboratory skills necessary to become competent modern biologists capable of independent investigations into further aspects of diatom biology and or to apply their knowledge of diatom biology to problems of societal and economic importance. All studies, basic and applied, using diatoms require expert identification of diatoms. This project will ensure a new generation of diatom taxonomists with the combination of old and new skills necessary to be successful in the next century. They will be able to compete for academic positions, to train other experts, to be a resource for those needing to know about practical application of knowledge about diatoms, and to contribute directly to the growth of our basic understanding of these important links in the food web and indicators of the health of the natural environment doc14085 none The Center for Health Management Research, then based at Arizona State University (since moved to the University of Washington), received its initial designation by NSF as an Industry University Cooperative Research Center in . The goals for the Center are to: Develop a research agenda in collaboration with the corporate members; undertake research, development, and evaluation projects on behalf of the corporate members; disseminate to the members findings of health services research; identify and disseminate to the members successful innovations and management practices from other health care organizations; and identify and disseminate to the members relevant research findings, successful innovation, and management practices from other industries doc14086 none The topic of proposed work is development of robust algorithms for vision-based mobile robot navigation. A probabilistic framework is proposed for reliable navigation between landmarks in an unmodeled environment. In the considered strategy, the robot first explores its environment to learn the landmarks, and then uses the graph produced in the process for navigation doc14087 none Scientific Visualization is fast becoming a key technology that provides scientists with insights that enable them to steer their numerical simulations towards solving previously unsolvable problems. However, the size of scientific datasets has witnessed exponential growth in the past few years. This sheer size often makes interactive exploration impossible, as only a small portion of data can fit into main memory at a time and the computation cost is often too high to run in real-time. Despite the importance of time-varying datasets, most previous research has focused on the visualization of steady-state data (i.e., data with only a single time step). This project will attack the challenges of large input sizes posed by time-varying data visualization. There are two important and promising research directions towards handling large-scale problems: data compression techniques and out-of-core techniques. This project will develop integrated lossless compression and out-of-core techniques for large time-varying data visualization, including isosurface extraction and direct volume rendering. It will mainly consider the class of irregular-grid volume datasets represented as tetrahedral meshes, which often arises in computational fluid dynamics, partial differential equation solvers, and other fields. Specifically, the project will develop new lossless compression techniques for vertex coordinates and scalar values for tetrahedral time-varying volume data. It will also develop new out-of-core isosurface extraction and direct volume rendering techniques for tetrahedral time-varying volume data, and integrate the compression and out-of-core visualization techniques together under a unified infrastructure. The expected results would be a collection of new techniques and a unified, proof-of-the-concept visualization system that will minimize the disk space requirement and the visualization rendering time cost. If successful, the system will efficiently support full visualization functionalities (isosurface extraction and volume rendering) for time-varying datasets much larger than can fit in main memory, with performance expected to be independent of the main memory size available doc14088 none This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) will focus on the manufacture of integrated circuits (ICs) and the provision of air travel as the central examples of such manufacturing and service industries. The goal is to develop mathematical models that provide a basis for determining how to allocate scarce resources among a variety of possible methods available to improve yield. Among the key questions to be addressed are: (1) How do different yield-altering interventions affect the parameters of the yield distribution? (2) How are operational decisions affected by changes in yield distributions? (3) Under which stochastic and or parametric orders of yield distributions does a company benefit economically? (4) How can the magnitude of this benefit be quantified? These questions will be answered using techniques from operations research, including Markov decision processes, stochastic variability orderings, and stochastic programming. The increasing complexity of production processes and the ability to create and manage a large number of market segments in service industries have served to elevate the importance of yield management to manufacturers and service providers alike. There is an extensive body of literature dealing with mathematical models necessary to make production-inventory decisions in the manufacturing context, or analogously, to decide how much capacity to make available in a particular fare-class, or how much to overbook, in the service industry context. This research will provide a bridge between two disparate bodies of literature by developing common models to evaluate yield-altering interventions doc14089 none Human-Computer Interaction for Direct Brain-Computer Interfaces This is a the first year funding of a 3-year continuing award. Recent developments in medical technology have brought closer the possibility of direct control of a computer by the human brain, e.g. using recordings from electrodes placed on the scalp or a neurotrophic electrode that is implanted in the brain. Although advances in these biometric interface device technologies hold much promise, there are many aspects yet to be researched. For the half-million people with locked-in syndrome (completely paralyzed and unable to speak), and for many others with severe and progressive disabilities such as quadriplegia or ALS, the potential impact of BCI technology are staggering; preliminary results achieved by the PI encourage vigorous pursuit of refinements and improvements in BCI technology. In this project the PI s objectives will be: to establish a theoretical framework for the field of Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) research; to investigate the effectiveness of various user interaction styles for existing brain-computer interface device technologies; and to validate various interaction styles in two quality-of-life application domains, a basic communications application and an environmental control application doc13995 none This project will continuously monitor the pressure, fluid chemistry, and hydrology in two instrumented boreholes at the Costa Rica subduction zone, using long-term observatories (CORK and ACORK) installed during ODP Leg 203. The field program will 1) deploy pressure gauges and data loggers, OsmoSamplers, and osmotic flow meters in 3 CORKed boreholes along a transect across the deformation front of the subduction zone and 2) retrieve the OsmoSamplers, data stored in the data loggers and deploying new OsmoSamplers and pressure gauges, with the submersible Alvin. The fluid stored in the OsmoSamplers will provide a continuous 1.3 year record of fluid conditions collected at in situ conditions at weekly resolution, in three distinct hydrogeologic systems. The first flow system is the upper oceanic crust of the incoming Cocos Plate, the second is the return of a deeply sourced fluid along the decollement and the third is in the underthrust sediment section driven by compaction dewatering. By documenting the nature of these hydrogeologic systems it will be possible to better understand the effects of fluid flow at convergent margins on the shallow thermal structure and fluid content of the downgoing plate, the physical properties of the subduction zone interface, deformation style and transport of elements to the oceans doc14078 none The objective of the proposed research is to use in vitro metabolic engineering combined with combinatorial biology and microscale processing to evaluate the functional diversity of a complex metabolic network, namely, polyketide synthesis. The investigators will develop a microscale, microfluidic device for the in vitro combinatorial biosynthesis of complex polyketides. Also, because of the microscale component and the modularity of the polyketide synthesis, the investigators expect to use the principles of multi-step enzymatic networks (e.g., a metabolic pathway) to alter the progress of the pathway and generate unique compounds. The class of polyketides used in this research consists of a small number of polypeptides each containing multiple modules. Each module is responsible for one round of chain extension and post-condensation modifications. The modules will be immobilized into the channels of the microfabricated device, a mutant thioesterase domain will be engineered into each module (necessary for release and transport to the next module), and the products will be transported from one module to the next. This research could enable the synthesis of molecules with new and unusual functions. Also, this research could add to the fundamental understanding of metabolic pathways and microfluidics doc14092 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Arthur W. Toga at the Laboratory of Neuro-Imaging (LONI) of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to enhance the graphic and compute capabilities of an existing supercomputer for distributed use in neuroinformatics. Unabated advancements in imaging technology today has provided researchers with the ability to produce very high-resolution, time-varying, multidimensional data sets of the structural and functional development of the dynamic human brain. The complexity of the new data, however, require immense computing power for effective analyzation and study. LONI and its collaborators will upgrade the facility s SGI Onyx2 supercomputer with additional graphics pipelines, computational nodes, and the incorporation of high speed networking equipment. The graphics pipelines will allow the visual interpretation of brain data and, in addition, drive a Data Immersive Visualization Environment (DIVE). The premise behind the DIVE is to provide investigators with the unique ability to visually step inside their data and analyze it in new, unexpected ways. The additional computational nodes will accelerate the speed of both interactive manipulation of multidimensional brain data sets and complex offline computations. The incorporation of high speed networking equipment will facilitate local and offsite network access to these computer resources and improve overall communication between the local, national, and international communities of neuroscientists. This instrumentation not only benefits ongoing research in brain development, heritability and function but because analysis and interpretation of multidimensional brain data is elevated to the next level, it will open the doors to new insights and better understanding of brain structure and function in health and disease doc14093 none Bio-Link s mission is to strengthen and expand biotechnology technician education at community and technical colleges throughout the nation in order to 1) increase the number and diversity of well-trained technicians in the workforce; 2) meet the needs of industry for appropriately trained technicians; and 3) institutionalize community college educational practices that make modern, high-quality education in the concepts, skills, and ethics of biotechnology available to all students. Bio-Link s National Center at City College of San Francisco provides leadership to seven Regional Centers using a coordinated national strategy that is implemented through the Regional Centers. The Regional Centers are located at community colleges throughout the United States: Northeast-New Hampshire Community and Technical College; Southeast-Alamance Community College; North Central-Madison Area Technical College; South Central-Austin Community College; Northwest-Seattle Central Community College; Northern California Biotechnology Center-City College of San Francisco; and Southwest-San Diego City College. Regional Centers pursue a number of specific substantive activities that help Bio-Link achieve its objectives. Each region also develops relations with local industry and educational institutions in order to understand and meet regional needs and to distribute information locally. The goals Bio-Link established are key to fulfilling its mission: 1) Provide support for students and technicians, 2) improve instruction an annual Summer Fellows Forum for community college and high school instructors from around the country to share best practices and learn new techniques; and the Bio-Link Website that contains information on a myriad of topics from job and workshop announcements to a virtual laboratory, equipment lists, and instructional materials. In addition, Bio-Link solicits, tests, and reviews instructional materials; assists in program development; devises means for attracting students, especially under-represented minorities, into biotechnology; and works with high schools and baccalaureate institutions to improve articulation. In general Bio-Link helps educators keep up with an industry that is not only increasing in size, but expanding from research and development to manufacturing and computer analysis. In doing so, Bio-Link best prepares students to meet the evolving needs of the biotechnology industry doc14094 none Furlong The accommodation of transpression along plate boundaries can be accomplished in many ways. Along the Australian - Pacific plate boundary within the South Island of New Zealand, there is a profound change in the style of transpressional tectonics between the crustal lithospheric shortening and uplift of the Southern Alps segment of the plate boundary and the localized subduction-like behavior of the Fiordland segment. Why such a substantial change in plate boundary tectonics occurs over distances of only tens of kilometers without any significant change in plate kinematics is a fundamental issue of lithospheric geodynamics and most likely reflects the complex interplay of tectonic history, local lithospheric structure, and 3-D plate kinematics. Unraveling this complex set of processes requires truly interdisciplinary studies. In order to foster such interdisciplinary research and develop plans for future collaborative projects, we are holding a research workshop focusing on the geodynamics and active tectonics of the Fiordland plate boundary region. The workshop will occur in January (the New Zealand summer). The meeting segment of the workshop is at the University of Otago in Dunedin, while the field segment of the workshop (involving a subset of the meeting attendees) is based out of Te Anau, a small town on the eastern margin of Fiordland. The university setting provides suitable facilities for scientific presentations (both oral and poster) and discussions, while Te Anau is an excellent base for sorties into Fiordland. In order to encourage focused discussions of our current understanding of the tectonics of the region, poster presentations and substantial discussion time are the main component of the meeting part of the workshop. To provide an overview of the interdisciplinary issues, there is one background presentation for each half-day session of the meeting doc14063 none Heterotrophic deep-sea animals require a downward flux of material in order to survive and reproduce, whereas animals with chemoautotrophic symbionts at hydrothermal vents or cold seeps should theoretically be capable of producing gametes more-or-less continuously without the benefit of surface-derived detritus. Mixotrophic mussels at cold seeps are intermediate between these two situations. They can grow and survive using only methane or sulfide as an energy source, but are also capable of filter-feeding on detrital particles or plankton in the benthic boundary layer. Available evidence suggests that supplemental filtration on bacterioplankton may be necessary to provide sufficient nitrogen to the mussels. The cold-seep mussel Bathymodiolus childressi, which lives at methane seeps on the Louisiana slope, demonstrates periodic rather than continuous reproduction, a pattern not predicted by the commonly accepted paradigm that food limitation controls reproductive timing in the deep sea. Thus, mixotrophic mussels present a unique opportunity to investigate the role of detrital input in the control of gametogenic timing in the deep sea. Lipid biomarkers and compound specific stable isotopes will be used to determine if energy from surfacederived detritus is differentially partitioned between the gonads and somatic tissues of B. childressi. In the deep-sea megafauna, seasonal breeders virtually always produce feeding larvae, suggesting a possible mechanistic or evolutionary link between surface production and larval success. Crisp s rule, the prediction that animals with planktotrophic larvae will time their breeding to assure optimal nutrition for the larvae, is one such possible link. Crisp s Rule will be examined in this study by rearing the larvae of B. childressi in natural water collected at various depths doc14096 none Tumay Description: This award is for support of a US-Turkey Workshop on Geothechnical Engineering Research to be held in conjunction with the International Conference on Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ICSMGE) in Istanbul, Turkey. The ICSMGE is planned for August 27-31, and the workshop will to follow on September 1, . The US organizer is Dr. Mehmet Tumay, Professor of Civil Engineering, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The Turkish co-organizer is Dr. Ergun Togrol, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey. The purpose of the workshop is to discuss the emerging issues and technologies in geotechnical engineering that will result from the ICSMGE, and to identify selected research areas for mutually beneficial collaboration. Scope: This award will support a US-Turkey workshop in an area that is increasingly gaining importance in both countries and in countries of west Asia and the Caucasus. The study of soil behavior is important for assessing the safety of structures in unusual or severe loading conditions, such as during liquifaction due to increased water content (floods) or due to strong ground motion (earthquakes). The development of guidelines for design and use of structures in these conditions will benefit all countries involved in this research. Most of the supported US participants are junior scientists who will have a unique opportunity to meet with colleagues from Turkey and several countries in the region during the ICSMGE Conference and the US-Turkey Workshop. They will also visit Turkish laboratories to discuss possible joint research. Both the US and Turkish organizers have excellent experiences and capabilities in the field, and they will have the backing of important organizations such as the American Society of Civil Engineers and Istanbul Technical University. Funding for this project is provided by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Civil and Mechanical Systems doc14097 none The objective of the proposed research is the metabolic engineering of Bacillus subtilis for reduced acid formation and enhanced product yield. Preliminary work in both E. coli and B. subtilis showed that the addition of citrate allowed enhancements in growth and product formation. Acid formation was also substantially lowered. These improvements were tied to the level of pyruvate in the cell. Direct deletion of the pyk gene, NMR experiments, and flux modeling confirmed these results. The specific objectives of this research include: (1) improving the performance of B. subtilis which shows reduced growth with the pyk mutant, and (2) utilization of these results for the improvement of toxin production in Bacillus thuringiensis doc14098 none The Ameircan Association of Botanical Gardens and Arboreta (AAGBA) requests a 24-month conference grant for a professional development workshop, Starting Right: Team Building and Project Planning, to be presented at all six of the AAGBA regional meetings. The emphasis of this worshop is on the critical early planning stages of an informal learning project. In order to increase the professional capacity of those working in botanical gardens and arboreta, the primary goals for this workshop are to enhance the ability of institutionally-based teams to work together and to define clear goals and objectives for a project on which they are working doc14099 none Soboyejo A U.S. Africa workshop on Materials and Infrastructure for Development will be organized in San Diego from June 25-27, . The workshop is an extension of one of the break-out sessions at the NSF-sponsored US Africa workshop that was held in Pretoria in August, . The workshop will bring together researchers from Africa, South America, Europe and the United States to interact within a basic research framework that will stimulate materials and infrastructure development within the U.S., Africa and a global framework. The workshop will also provide opportunities between African and U.S. researchers that could result ultimately in synergisms that are not possible within national or continental boundaries. In an effort to ensure subsequent interactions, participants from outside the U.S. will be given the opportunity to visit potential collaborators within the U.S. before returning to their home countries. The highlights of the symposium will be published on a web-site that will be developed to disseminate the information from the workshop to a worldwide audience. The technical papers from the workshop will be published in the International Journal of Concrete and Cement Composites after a rigorous review process. Travel assistance will be provided to 12 invited speakers, two graduate students and one post-doctoral research associate. An undergraduate student will also be supported to assist with the development of the workshop web-site doc14100 none With this for a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER), Dr. Feist is investigating a paradox in math and science in the US: our high school students are average and mediocre compared to international standards and yet our professional scientists are the best in the world. He is also interested in the question of whether, during the journey from adolescent talent to adult achievement, gifted women and minorities more likely than men and majorities to opt out of math and science careers? If this is so, Dr. Feist is examining some of the psychological influences on these differential rates of attrition. This project explores these issues from the perspective of the psychology of science. This is a pilot project that will explore and test the basic methodology and the primary survey questions. Specifically, Dr. Feist intends to examine issues related to scientific potential and the scientific achievement. First, a sample of 160 (40 each from , , , and ) past winners of the prestigious Westinghouse Science Fair are assessed on outcome measures, namely degrees obtained, career paths chosen (especially science v. non-science) and level of eminence obtained within their careers. Moreover, gender and ethnicity are examined in relation to such outcomes. Second, 100 members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) are compared with 100 matched non-NAS scientists to determine what the early career markers of world-class scientific achievement are. Outcome measures consist of career eminence (titles, honors, awards) and predictor measures include gender, productivity (publication and citation rates over the entire lifespan) data as well as early indicators of scientific talent. Early indicators include school performance, age of first publication, as well the age that they and others recognized their talent for science. Regression analyses determine the relative importance of each predictor variable in influencing scientific achievement and eminence. The goal of such research is to provide answers to the question: Who develops interest in, and talent for, science during high school and who among those with the most talent are likely to go on to productive and eminent careers in science doc14101 none The 40th IEEE Decision and Control Conference (CD01) is the premiere, annual international conference on systems and automatic control research. It is sponsored by the IEEE Control Systems Society and conducted in cooperation with the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the Institute For Operations Research and the Management Sciences. This year it will be held at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress in Orlando Florida, December 4-7, . Pre-conference workshops will be held on Monday December 3, . The Conference provides an excellent opportunity for researchers to present the latest developments in the field, promote new ideas, and discuss and evaluate past accomplishments. The technical content of the Conference has traditionally been of the highest quality drawing leading scientific researches from all over the world. The Conference typically draws some one thousand participants each year. Such a venue is of special importance for the training of new researchers and graduate students in systems and control. The National Science Foundation has consistently supported these activities over the years by providing partial travel support for graduate students participating in the Conference. In this proposal we are asking that NFS continue this long-standing tradition and provide travel support for graduate students who will be participating in the IEEE CDC doc14102 none There is good evidence that poor nutrition in the earliest stages of life (including the fetal stage) can affect health profoundly in individuals at much later ages. This is known as the Fetal Origins Hypothesis. Another major factor affecting peoples lives and their health is the process of modernization, or the cultural transition that people undergo during the process of being incorporated into a Western style of life. These two processes (poor early nutrition and modernization) will be studied in Hmong refugees who left Laos during the Secret War ( - ) and who are between the ages of 19 and 40 years. Two populations will be studied: Hmong who have resettled in rural, isolated farming villages in French Guiana, and Hmong living in the urban setting of Providence, Rhode Island. Information gathered will include life histories by questionnaire and interview and demographic data related to early environment, and anthropometric, body composition, and physiological measures for estimating outcome. Sorting out the effects of early environment and later modernization will be possible by statistical comparisons of the Hmong of French Guiana and of Providence. This study will contribute to our knowledge of: (1) the influence of poor early nutrition on chronic diseases in adulthood, (2) environmental effects on body fat distribution, (3) Hmong ethnography during the war in Southeast Asia, and (4) the health effects of modernization on the resettled Hmong people doc14103 none In the past, social movement and collective action research in sociology has concentrated largely on mobilization in democratic states. In contrast, studies of the mobilization-repression nexus in political science focus on protest in principally authoritarian contexts. Both areas have neglected important insights provided by the other. Recently, as new data from repressive as well as democratic regimes have become available, and as new theoretical perspectives on state building, political control, and culture have found their way into social movement studies as well as research on repression human rights, there is growing interest among scholars to reexamine and reconceptualize this relationship. This research involves a workshop designed to bring together twenty junior and senior researchers who are working in diverse settings. The primary goal is to address the hiatus in theory concerning how the range of repressive tactics in democratic and authoritarian states shapes repertoires of contention, mobilizing structures, and the framing of opportunities and collective identities as various points in cycles of resistance, protest, and rebellion. The workshop output will be a book edited by the organizers. The activity is to contribute to the creation of a network of scholars who come to these issues embracing both single-state as well as global comparative approaches doc14104 none Genetics of biological nitrogen fixation is very complex and requires a coordinated expression of about 20 nif genes. The enzyme nitrogenase is composed of two separate proteins designated the Fe-protein, a homodimer coded by the nifH gene and the MoFe-protein, a heterotetramer coded by the nifDK genes. Apart from these structural genes (nifHDK), a number of nif accessory genes whose products are essential for the maturation and assembly of nitrogenase are identified. One of them is the nifM gene whose product is necessary for the production of the functional Fe-protein in Klebsiellapneumoniae and in Azotobacter vinelandii. Initial genetic analyses of nifM mutants generated by chemical mutagenesis, site-directed mutagenesis, and of a chimeric NifM:PpiC protein, indicate that the NifM protein functions as a peptidyl-prolyl cis trans isomerase (PPIase). Moreover, studies on purified NifM protein also showed that this protein has PPIase activity. Based on these observations and also on the high homology shared by the PPIases and C-terminal region of the NifM, it is hypothesized that the peptidyl-prolyl cis trans isomerase activity of NifM is essential for this protein to exert its effect on the maturation (activity and stability) of the Fe-protein. The aim of this research is to carry out molecular and genetic analysis on the nifM gene in order to understand the functions of the nifM in nitrogen fixation. To achieve this goal, the following specific objectives will be pursued: 1) to characterize the nifM point mutants of K. pneumoniae that were previously isolated by chemical mutagenesis in order to understand the molecular basis of NifM function; 2) to identify region(s) of the A. vinelandii NifM protein that are essential for PPIase activity; 3) to identify the regions of NifM protein that are essential for interaction with the Fe-protein; and 4) to isolate and characterize nifM-independent Nif A. vinelandii mutants. These experiments are directed toward understanding how the Genetic organization of the nifM gene contributes to the role of its product in the maturation of Fe-protein. Preliminary data from mutational analysis indicate that mutations in both the N-terminal region of NifM and the C-terminal region of NifM affect the ability of NifM to participate in the maturation of the Fe-protein. These studies will help to assess the role of the C-terminal region of NifM and the PPIase activity of the NifM in the NifM ability to participate in the maturation of the Fe-protein. Moreover, these studies will help to delineate the role of the N-terminal region of the NifM in determining the NifM ability. Besides, the research projects outlined here make excellent teaching tools, utilizing many techniques in modern molecular microbiology and having easily grasped objectives. The PIs have started a series of lecture courses that deal with biotechnology and one of major goals during this grant period is to start a molecular biology laboratory course to conduct active learning, experimental learning and mentoring activities with undergraduate students at Bowling Green State University doc14105 none Marine organisms have proven to be a prolific source of novel, biologically active natural products. A growing number of these are entering clinical trials and many more are in preclinical development. In general, the production of these compounds through synthesis is not feasible on a commercial scale and consequently, the supply of such compounds presents an escalating problem. This project is directed at the development of seco-pseudopterosins and related metabolites, anti-inflammatory agents from the soft coral Pseudopterogorgia elisabethae. These compounds have been shown to be anti-inflammatory and analgesic agents in mouse ear models with potencies superior to that of pseudopterosins which are in clinical use, and existing drugs such as indomethacin. A biotechnological production method of these compounds will be developed based on the cloning of a key biosynthetic enzyme. In addition to addressing the supply issue of these specific metabolites, completion of these goals will provide useful models for the development of a growing number of anti-inflammatory terpenes being discovered from marine invertebrates. Since all of the pseudopterosin used commercially is obtained through collections from nature, success with this project will provide a sustainable source of these valuable compounds and save delicate reef environments from the effects of large scale collecting. The synthesis of the targeted anti-inflammatory agents will be approached as follows. Firstly, the first biosynthetic intermediate will be generated by sequencing the coral s diterpene cyclase and cloning this into E. coli. via the construction of a P. elisabethae cDNA library. The cyclase product will serve as a key intermediate in the syntheses and will be modified to the seco-pseudopterosin aglycone by chemical methods. This would then set the state for the ultimate glycosylation to complete the synthesis of the seco-pseudopterosins. ( This last step is not a goal of the present project.) This research represents a collaboration between two labs with complementary expertise. R. Kerr (PI, FAU) will conduct the natural products chemistry, enzymology and some of the molecular work J. Lopez (Co-PI, HBOI) will compete the cDNA library construction and work with Kerr on the cloning experiments doc14106 none Funds are provided for the PIs to study the Upper Cretaceous to Lower Paleogene and Quaternary unconformities and stratal patterns on the New York and New Jersey margins. Two separate but fundamental questions to stratigraphy of the margins are to be addresed: how sequence boundaries and stratigraphic discontinuities formed during times of reduced sealevel fluctuations, and why the Quaternary section does not have unconformities associated with each sealevel cycle. The PIs plan to acquire side-scan sonar images, Chirp images (for subseafloor shallow features), MCS images and vinracores from this area. They will also use ODP site for chronology. These data will provide a high-resolution physical stratigraphy and precise chronology leading to understanding of eustatic vs. other factors in building sequences doc14107 none This individual investigator award will support the continuation of a project to study the dynamics of Quantum Phase Transitions (QPT) and in particular the effects of dissipation. During the past three years this program has been a major source for new experimental data and re-analyses of data in other systems, that point to the occurrence of phase separation and the existence of metallic phases in two-dimensional Superconductor-Insulator-Transition (SIT) films. Through new choices of model-system materials the current project will try to complete the true phase diagram of two-dimensional SIT in the presence of dissipation. In particular it will emphasize the electronic microstructure of the SIT system near the transition, the issue of phase separation, and the possible sources of dissipation. Obtaining more insight into the SIT with dissipation problem will shed light on other outstanding problems such as high-Tc superconductivity, colossal magnetoresistance and strongly correlated magnets. Through graduate students thesis work, undergraduate students involvement, and a new course on quantum coherence and dissipation to be designed by the PI, the project will continue to have a strong educational component. %%% Many physical systems, although very different in nature, can be described by similar physical principles. Thus, finding appropriate model systems for outstanding physics problems, and in particular problems that relate to both, basic science and applications is of fundamental importance. The problem of Superconductor-Insulator-Transition (SIT) in two dimensional films has been shown to exhibit physics relevant to the understanding of high-Tc superconductors (important for superconductive electronics and low-loss conductors for power handling,) as well as to two-dimensional electron gas systems (important for electronic-device applications in the quantum limit.) The present program extends our study of SIT systems to include more materials (i.e. extending parameter space of the model system) and design new probes to study the system at the microscopic scale. The program will continue to have a strong educational component to it through graduate students thesis work, undergraduate students involvement, and a new course on quantum coherence and dissipation to be designed by the PI doc14108 none The El Paso Partnership for Excellence in Teacher Education (PETE), a project funded through the NSF Collaboratives for Excellence in Teacher Preparation (CETP) program, has established a partnership of regional educational institutions including the University of Texas at El Paso and El Paso Community College to reform science and mathematics teacher preparation. This follow-on project includes evaluation activities and research studies designed to document and assess the impact of PETE at the university, at the community college, in K-12 classrooms, and on new and future teachers. Evaluation research studies are designed to assess the impact of the project in five areas: institutionalization and sustainability, the relationship between teacher preparation and the context of school reform; new teacher knowledge and its relationship to student outcomes; the development of content knowledge and pedagogy in reformed courses; and the viability of a model of teacher development and assessment. Teacher induction activities designed and implemented by former CETP PETE scholars under the direction of science and mathematics faculty members are providing support for novice teachers. Former CETP PETE scholars pursuing graduate degrees in science and mathematics education engage in peer mentoring of new teachers and or mentoring of future teachers and participate with faculty and evaluators in classroom research activities designed to support the data collection and analyses of the proposed evaluation research studies. The evaluation studies are linked to the CETP Core Summative Evaluation Study, an NSF-funded project at the University of Minnesota, through the alignment of CETP Core evaluation Questions with evaluation research questions specific to the PETE context. To strengthen the collegiality among former CETP PETE Scholars pursuing graduate degrees, new teachers, and faculty members, new teacher induction activities will be designed and implemented by former scholars under the direction of science and mathematics faculty members. The project is assessing the impact of PETE and activities designed to increase the likelihood of new teachers remaining in the profession doc14109 none Pajarola, Renato U of Cal Irvine In recent years a new rendering paradigm based on the reuse of two-dimensional imagery to generate 3D renderings has evolved, called Image Based Rendering (IBR). Based on a set of input images, so called reference views, IBR methods can generate new images from arbitrary view points. One of the main advantages of IBR techniques is that the rendering cost is independent of the scene complexity and bound by the image resolution. The use of IBR techniques thus allows in certain situations to achieve real-time display performance for other-wise non-interactive rendering of complex geometric scenes. The main target applications are interactive rendering of highly complex scenes (virtual reality systems), and rendering on time-budgets (simulations and computer-game like environments). This grant will improve and explore new techniques for interactive rendering applications on the basis of the depth-image warping approach. Our goal is not to restrict computation of reference views to a preprocessing step, but to explore and develop algorithms and data structures that allow the generation and reuse of depth-image reference views dynamically in an interactive visualization environment. Depth-image warping is a powerful approach, and using multiple reference views to limit visibility artifacts it is possible to create new renderings for a wide range of views. However, the user s movements in a virtual environment are unpredictable, and thus reference views have to be generated dynamically to optimize their use. Therefore, from acquiring image based representations for the reference views to rendering from image data everything has to be done dynamically in an interactive visualization framework doc14110 none This project will examine the potential effect of climate warming on the annual storage and or release of carbon dioxide from tundra on the western Alaska North Slope. The measurements will be made with eddy flux towers in Barrow, Atqasuk, and Ivotuk Alaska and the results compared to remote sensing data from the MODIS satellite instruments. This study represents a continuation and expansion of a long-term examination of terrestrial responses to climate change on the Alaska North Slope. This phase of the study will examine variations of carbon dioxide flux in response to oscillations of the Arctic Oscillation on seasonal, annual, and decadal time scales. The regional results will be used in computer simulations of the ecosystem in order to build a predictive capacity to the research as more is known about climate change in the region. The acclimation of the ecosystem and soil moisture from temporal changes in net ecosystem carbon flux will be determined over varying time-scales. The study is important to understanding regional and annual patterns, particularly the variability, of carbon dioxide flux from tundra ecosystems at a time when climate warming appears to be affecting the terrestrial environment doc14111 none Wessner, Charles National Academy of Sciences ITR: Measuring and Sustaining the New Economy The Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy will conduct a study designed to identify and address the policy issues associated with the development and growth of the New Economy, stimulated by the growth of information technology. The Board will identify and evaluate key issues associated with the measurement and analysis of the New Economy, the technologies underpinning its development, and the government-industry collaboration and regulatory framework necessary to sustain its growth doc14112 none This project will complete an extensive database on the personal, social, economic, career, and political attributes of judges who served on the U.S. Courts of Appeals. Under a prior NSF award, , information was assembled for all judges who were commissioned from through . This project will now add the judges appointed by Bill Clinton. The database will include conventional social background variables, such as appointing president, religion, political party affiliation, education, and prior experience, along with unique items such as the temporal sequence of prior career experiences, the timing of and reason for leaving the bench, position histories, rating by the American Bar Association, and net worth. This project will also merge the appellate court database with a parallel database on U.S. district court judges. The merged data will contain the widest range of information on all lower federal court judges to serve from to doc14113 none Garbini The Marine Board of the National Research Council s (NRC) Transportation Research Board (TRB) serves the national interest by providing evaluations and advice concerning ocean developments and uses and the nation s ability to meet its marine and maritime goals. The Board considers questions of the relationship of engineering and technology to coastal and offshore resource development and operations; to navigation and the commerce of the seas, waterways and ports; to related human resources and onshore activities; and their relationship to the establishment and implementation of public policies. The Board identifies opportunities and needs for new technologies and other developments and recommends appropriate actions. It stimulates the exchange of information and cooperative activities and provides a forum for the national and international professional community. The activities through which the Board accomplishes its programs are: (1) assessments of the technical capability to undertake and manage offshore and maritime developments and uses, including the adequacy of knowledge to support technology development; (2) evaluations of safety of personnel and of the environment; (3) assistance in the preparation and assessment of the government s programs directed to ocean and maritime developments and uses and (4) identification of future opportunities for the integration of advanced technology into marine and maritime systems and the influence of technical advances on the establishment and implementation of public policy doc14114 none This is an experimental and theoretical investigation of the structure and extinction behavior of gaseous diffusion flames at low stretch rates. The low-stretch condition is created by bottom-burning of a fuel mixture discharged from a porous axisymmetric burner of very large radius. Fuels studied include methane, hydrogen, carbon monoxide hydrogen, and carbon monoxide methane. Spatially resolved species, temperature, and velocity profiles are measured with laser diagnostics. Flame radiation and burner-surface radiation are also examined. Corresponding theoretical models are developed incorporating a narrowband radiation model. The study consists of five elements: (1) experimental determination of the flammability limit boundaries as functions of stretch rate and the amount of fuel dilution with emphasis on the radiation- induced extinction; (2) experimental exploration for the existence of flamelets ; (3) experimental mapping of flame structure including hydrodynamic, thermal, and species profiles and radiation intensities from the flame and burner surface; (4) detailed modeling of low-stretch diffusion with detailed chemistry, transport properties, and flame surface radiation; and (5) development of detailed radiation models including flame-surface interaction in a spectral manner and reevaluation of mean band parameters doc14115 none This research and evaluation project is examining the effects of training prospective teachers to deliver math and science instruction in conformity with newly established content and pedagogical standards. The specific context in which this initiative is being investigated is the New York City Collaborative for Excellence in Teacher Education (NYCETP), a consortium of five campuses of the City University of New York (CUNY) and New York University (NYU). Since (with a grant from NSF), these six colleges have embarked on a collaborative journey of curricular reform in which 30 math and science content and math and science methods courses have been CETP reformed, in keeping with nationally recognized standards (e.g., NCTM performance on the math and science content sections of the New York State Teacher Certification Exam; and actual teacher performance as measured by the University of Minnesota Core Classroom Observation Protocol. In addition, data is being collected regarding the degree to which the school context is supportive of CETP teaching goals. Specific research questions posed in this study include: How does the CETP treatment group compare to the non-treatment group on the outcome measures above? Are teacher education students at different levels of academic ability affected differentially as a function of their CETP non-CETP participation? To what extent does the treatment group s performance in the classroom change over time (from student teaching to employment) as a function of CETP involvement compared to the non-treatment group? The significance of this study is in its potential to provide evidence to support math science curricular reform in teacher education programs nationwide, its ability to shed light on how new models of teacher training can narrow the performance gap among students with different levels of prior academic attainment, how new approaches to teacher training (CETP) can stand up to the pressures of urban school environments that have differential supports for new teachers, and its modeling of the utility of developing and using a comprehensive teacher education tracking system doc14116 none This proposal requests funds for an international conference called Climate and Biota of the Early Paleogene, which will bring together scientists from multiple disciplines. including climate and ocean modeling, paleoceanography, a variety of subdisciplines in paleontology, stable isotope and trace element geochemistry, paleosols, stratigraphy, sedimentology and tectonics. During the 2 days of talk and poster sessions participants will lay out the most recent results of their research, and discuss avenues for research in the next decade. During the 1 days of field trips, participants will be guided through the classic continental sequences of Paleocene-Eocene rocks in the Bighorn Basin by the researchers who have done the primary work in this area. Participation by international scientists from a variety of disciplines is key to integrating records of climatic and biotic change from different parts of the world, and to broadening the perspectives of all participants. Three published products will result from this meeting: 1) an abstract volume to be published privately and distributed at the meeting to all participants; 2) a series of papers on the paleontology and geology of the Paleocene-Eocene sequence in the Bighorn Basin, along with a field guide and road log for the field trips to be published as a University of Michigan Paper on Paleontology; 3) GSA Special Papers may also publish a proceedings volume from this meeting doc14117 none Under the direction of Dr. Richard M. Leventhal, Andrew Kindon will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will continue his participation in the Maya Mountains Archaeological Project (MMAP), a multidisciplinary scientific research project based in southern Belize, Central America combining the efforts of archaeologists, geologists, and biologists. Since , the MMAP has focused its attention on two sizable sites in the Upper Bladen River drainage of the Maya Mountains called Ek Xux and Muklebal Tzul. These sites include well-developed central core areas with large mounds surrounded by extensive settlement in the form of smaller residential mounds and plazuela groups. Evidence indicates that the sites were inhabited during the Classic period, about 300 AD - 900 AD. These sites are particularly significant because, while they are located only 3 kilometers away from each other, preliminary evidence suggests that there are major differences between them. Burial patterns at the sites differed markedly, with the residents of Ek Xux burying their dead in rock shelters surrounding the site and the residents of Muklebal Tzul burying their dead in tombs within their house platforms. In addition, initial survey work carried out by Kindon from - showed significant differences in the settlement patterns of the communities. It has been speculated that these differences are due to differences in the nature of social organization and control at the two sites. However, issues of contemporaneity and differential developmental stages are also very important, and the temporal relationship between the two sites must be clarified. Kindon s dissertation research will investigate the prehispanic settlement systems of both Ek Xux and Muklebal Tzul. Intensive study of settlement distribution combined with architectural, artifact, and carbon analysis will address three primary research goals: 1. the clarification of temporal relationships between the two sites; 2. the identification of regional and local patterns of settlement organization and the exploration of the way these settlement patterns relate to levels of social organization and control; 3. the evaluation of the degree to which kin-based and centralized elite social organization and power were elaborated within the communities, as well as the amount of variability that existed at both a regional and local level in terms of social organization and control. Kindon s work has the potential to make several important contributions to current anthropological and archaeological theory. First and foremost, the research will increase current understanding of the nature of social power, especially as it relates to the emergence and functioning of complex polities. With relatively simple technology prehistoric Mayans were able to incorporate large numbers of individuals into functioning social entities and Mr. Kindon s research will shed light on the mechanisms involved. The project will also contribute to training a promising young scientist doc14118 none The scientific exploration of vision and particularly color vision has its historical roots as far back as the eighteenth century, when scientists such as Dalton and Young attempted to explain color vision and color blindness. Color vision allows an animal to make distinctions based on chromatic information rather than luminosity. Color vision helps an animal identify important objects in their environment The study color vision in aquatic mammals provides an unique opportunity to examine the adaptation of the mammalian visual system to the unique properties of an aquatic visual envirom-nent. We have recently demonstrated that the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) lacks the common cone-based dichromatic form of color vision typical of most terrestrial mammals. This is an exciting finding, and it is the beginning of a comprehensive molecular study of the visual pigments of aquatic mammals for two different mammalian orders and one suborder (whales, seals and manatees) have independently adapted to life in an aquatic environment. This research project will determine if all aquatic mammals: Cetacea, Pinnipedia and Sirenia have a visual system similar to that of the dolphin and express only two spectrally distinct classes of visual pigments: one rhodopsin and one cone pigment and hence lack typical mammalian dichromatic color vision. This comparative study of color vision in aquatic mammals will examine the adaptive processes that occurred as these distinct orders and suborder of mammals with different terrestrial ancestors moved from a land to an aquatic environment. This research project will allow my laboratory to continue to successfully train both women and minority science students. Of the ten minority and women undergraduates who have worked in my laboratory, two are enrolled in MD Ph.D. programs, five are currently in graduate school and two are in medical school doc14119 none Thonnard This award provides partial support to complete development of technology necessary for measuring the abundance of two rare krypton isotopes, Kr-81 and Kr-85. These isotopes, whose concentration in the atmosphere is stable and known, are potentially ideal tracers for a variety of environmental studies. Kr-81, with a 229,000 year half-life, can determine how long ancient ice or ground water has been isolated from the atmosphere in the 20,000 to 1,000,000 year time range. Similarly, Kr-85, with its 10.8 year half-life, can determine isolation times in the 1 to 50 year time range. These type of measurements can, for instance, provide important insight into the movement of groundwater, identify pathways for pollution infiltration, and provide input to overall resource management. Being chemically inert, it is anticipated that the krypton isotopes will provide more reliable results than other, chemically active tracers, by eliminating the complexity of interactions with the underground environment. The work sponsored by this grant includes completion of the necessary improvements to existing instrumentation, and application of the technique to several important groundwater problems to highlight its utility doc14120 none This award will provide partial support for the Stig Lundquist Research Conference: The Advancing Frontiers of Condensed Matter Physics . The Conference will be held in Trieste, Italy, July 2-6, , under the sponsorship of the Abdus Salam International Centre of Theoretical Physics (ICTP. The theme of the Conference is Non-Conventional Systems and New Directions . Funds will be used to support the travel and local expenses of advanced graduate students, postdocs and young faculty from the United States. Core support for the Conference will be provided by the ICTP, with additional support provided by the Office of Naval Research. An excellent agenda and speaker list will address major developments taking place in hard and soft condensed matter physics, and the interface between physics and biology. %%% This award will provide partial support for the travel and local expenses of advanced graduate students, postdocs and young faculty from the United States to attend an international Conference in Trieste, Italy, July 2-6, . The Conference deals with the frontiers of condensed matter physics, and will address traditional areas of solid state physics, such as superconductivity, as well as areas of soft condensed matter, like colloids, polymers, rheology, etc. These topics relate to biological materials such as bone minerals (hard materials) and tissue (soft materials). Thus the interface between physics and biology will also be addressed during the conference doc14121 none A researcher from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will participate in the cruises and field experiments of the Coastal Ocean Advances in Shelf Transport (COAST) project funded by the Coastal Oceans Processes (CoOP) program. The participation of this PI in the study will add a phosphorus component to the project thereby allowing the coupled dynamics of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus cycling in the coastal system off Oregon to be resolved. Taking advantage of the high temporal and spatial resolution provided by the COAST sampling plan, the PI plans to carry out the following research: (1) determine the 3-dimensional distributions of dissolved organic phosphorus (DOP) and particulate organic phosphorus (POP), and how they relate to distributions of dissolved organic carbon (DOC), particulate organic carbon, dissolved organic nitrogen (DON), particulate organic nitrogen and other biological parameters; (2) ascertain the dynamic variability of the C:N:P ratios of the dissolved and particulate organic pools; (3) assess the short term (during transect re-sampling on each 21-day cruise) versus seasonal variations in coupled DOC, DON, DOP; and (4) evaluate the effects that topography has on DOP and POP cycling and cross-shelf transport. In addition, DOP bioavailability will be evaluated by monitoring the extent of enzymatic DOP hydrolysis in field samples. The nutritional status of in-situ phytoplankton with regard to phosphate stress will be determined by bulk and cell-specific Enzyme Labeled Fluorescence (ELF) Alkaline phosphatase (APase) and the species-specific response of phytoplankton to induced or alleviated P-limitation will be assessed using ELF-APase in shipboard nutrient amendment incubations doc14122 none This SGER will explore the development of algorithms that abstract biological information processes into software. The algorithms will work on different computer systems using CORBA middleware technology and agents. The abstraction of biological complexity will enable the modeling of high level objects. The original focus will be on developing graphical interfaces and modeling genomic objects and computational models of emotion. The choice of the model systems was determined by considering how many different areas of science might have input and get something out of the tools that are developed. The results will feed into learning issues at both the computational and pedagogical levels, as well as how biological objects interact from a computer science perspective. This in turn will enable research into gene regulatory networks, functional genomics and signal encoding in ensembles of neurons doc14123 none As the amount of information available in online data sources explodes, there is a growing concern about the consistency and quality of answers to user queries. This project addresses the issue of using logical integrity constraints to gauge the consistency and quality of query answers. Although it is impractical to enforce global integrity constraints across different data sources and correct integrity violations by updating individual sources, integrity constraints capture important semantic properties of data. This project studies the formal notions of database repair and consistent query answer: a consistent answer is true in every minimal repair of the database. The information about answer consistency serves as an important indication of its quality and reliability. A variety of procedures for computing consistent query answers in the context of the relational data model and SQL are developed, and their computational complexity analyzed. The procedures exploit the properties of specific subsets of SQL and specific classes of integrity constraints. By providing information about query answer consistency, such procedures will enhance the functionality of existing DBMS in a non-intrusive way, particularly in the context of data integration applications doc14124 none The response of the Earth s magnetosphere to the effects of the solar wind is complex and non-linear. The behavior exhibits features characteristic of coupling over multiple spatial and temporal scales. This project will develop models of the magnetosphere based on the framework of phase transitions and multi-scale coupling. Data from ground-based and spacecraft-based instruments will be used to study the time evolution of various features in the magnetosphere. Techniques such as nonlinear filters, multifractal spectra, mutual information, and multi-scale singular spectrum analysis will be used to characterize the observed features. These studies will complement models based on first principles doc14125 none Zollweg for Project Collaborative Research: Field Investigation of Transient Effects of the Republic Day, India Earthquake Field seismological and geological studies of the devastating earthquake of January 26, in India are being carried out to collect information about transient phenomena, including aftershocks and surface effects. This earthquake, called the Republic Day earthquake, had a magnitude of about 7.7 and was an unusual earthquake. It occurred in western India, far from the plate boundary between India and Eurasia. The Republic Day earthquake was an intraplate earthquake, with unusual characteristics. A network of about two dozen seismographs is to be operated for a period of 3 to 6 months to record and locate aftershocks. Related field geological studies are to be done to learn about the liquefaction and other surface effects produced by the mainshock. The hypocenter of the mainshock was relatively deep in the crust for such a large earthquake (25 km) and no surface faulting has been found from it. Recordings from the temporary network will help confirm the depth of the mainshock as well as information about the mainshock fault mechanism doc14126 none Lyons The McMurdo Dry Valleys in southern Victoria Land, Antarctica, are the most expansive tracts of ice free land on the Antarctic continent. Since March, , two workshops have been supported by the National Science Foundation to address environmental concerns in the Dry Valleys and to begin to formulate a management plan for the area. Increasing scientific activity as well as the potential for increased tourism have been the motivation for developing a more systematic approach to protection and management of activities in the Dry Valleys. The first workshop produced a Code of Conduct that was recommended for use in planning and implementing activities in the Dry Valleys. The workshop participants also recommended that a management plan be developed and that the plan be both interdisciplinary and international in nature. The second workshop dealt primarily with environmental impacts on the lakes in the Dry Valleys. The participants strongly recommended that the McMurdo Dry Valleys should be designated as an Antarctic Specially Managed Area (ASMA). This proposal is for a workshop that brings together a small group of individuals, representing the various scientific and international interests in the area, to develop a draft ASMA plan that could then be vetted through appropriate channels for consideration within the Antarctic Treaty System doc13979 none The power industry must undertake a managed redesign of the Nation s power system so that it can adapt to deregulation and to rapid changes in the power requirements and regional economic conditions. The need for research in this area is vividly illustrated by the recent California power problems. This second five year continuing grant funds the University of California, Berkeley as part of a multi-university Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC) for Power Systems Engineering (PSERC). The I UCRC involves 10 university research sites generating over $1.5 million. The four universities, Cornell University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Illinois-Champaign, and the University of California-Berkeley, being addressed in identical proposals as a group have generated over $600,000 in the last year. The Center addresses research projects in marketing, transmission and distribution and systems in electric power generation and transmission doc14128 none The award provides support for a two-day workshop on the plant hormone cytokinin to be attended primarily by U.S. and Czech scientists. The workshop will be held in Prague on June 28 and 29, prior to the meeting of the International Plant Growth Substances Association (IPGSA) in Brno, to maximize participation. The objective is to enhance existing and initiate new collaboration, particularly between junior faculty, postdoctoral students, and graduate students, with the goal of extending research partnership to the next generation of scientists. The funds will be used for organization of the workshop and for travel of young scientists (faculty, postdoctorals, and graduate students) to the workshop and the IPGSA meeting. The program will include reviews of recent advances in cytokinin research and discussions of future opportunities. Recent findings in selected areas will be introduced by lead scientists, followed by round-table discussions and small group sessions. The subjects will include: (1) biosynthetic and metabolic pathways; (2) receptors and signal transduction pathways; (3) genomics and proteomics; (4) genetic and functional analyses including mutants, knock-outs and transgenics; (5) methods and significance of cytokinin quantitation; (6) antibodies and immunology; and (7) regulation of cytokinin levels and physiological significance. This workshop should promote innovative research through collaborations between U.S. and Czech laboratories doc14129 none The increasing sophistication of automated systems has allowed more complex unmanned tasks to be performed. However, robotic instruments lack the ability to perceive and interact with their environment in the same way humans can. Simultaneously, humans operating remote instruments are limited by the lack of feel they are accustomed to in their own activity. Robotic instruments currently use localized-sensors to measure their environment. This has been necessitated by the inflexibility of microelectronic devices. Recently innovations in flexible substrates, polymer semiconductors, and thin film transistors have occurred. The PIs propose to investigate the development of a flexible skin that incorporates distributed monolithic sensor arrays to provide a greater measurement of the environment. Micromachined sensors are capable of measuring pressure, flow, temperature, and radiant energy. This investigation will focus on the development of micromachined sensors over the surface of a polymer substrate or artificial skin . The Pls will utilize micromachined infrared microbolometers and thermal emitters as a test bed towards the development of micromachining techniques on flexible polymer substrates that are relevant to a broad base of applications. Integrating distributed, staring microbolometer arrays over the surface of a flexible skin can allow a robot to remotely measure temperature and avoid hot objects that can cause damage. The distributed arrays of detectors spaced with a millimeter pitch will provide insect-like vision. The motion of hot objects such as people can be tracked. Microlensed optical detectors will measure the optical radiation flux; thin film reference thermometers will measure the substrate (skin) temperature, while the thermal emitters will be used for display purposes or may be combined with detector arrays and gratings to produce a micro-spectrometer. The ability to flex would allow the devices to be incorporated and distributed over compliant surfaces such as the fabric of gloves for humans and machines to provide operators a remote sense of touch and feel of temperature both in-contact and in-proximity to the skin. In addition, chemical analysis is possible using these micro-spectrometers. Wearable infrared spectrometers using flexible substrates would allow people to monitor physiological parameters such as glucose and insulin levels, scan for bacteriological agents and toxic gases doc14130 none This research aims to understand and automate the mechanisms by which language can emerge among artificial, knowledge-based and rational agents that interact in open, heterogeneous, and distributed environments. The intent is to design and implement agents that, upon encountering other agent(s) with which they do not share an agent communication language, are able to initiate creation of, and further are able to evolve and enrich, a mutually understandable communication language. The novelty of this research is that it enables the agents to develop and evolve, on their own, the capacity of communicating via a common language, as opposed to relying on this ability to be pre-designed and built into the agents by their designers. This research is supported by two streams of research, 1) the design of rational, socially competent artificial agents, and 2) the mechanism of negotiation as developed in game theory and automated in artificial intelligence research. This work will contribute to fundamental research in heterogeneous and open multiagent systems, effective communication among artificial agents in realistic settings, practical multiagent system design and the training of undergraduate and graduate students doc14131 none Arnold The applicant proposes to investigate photonic sensors based on dielectric microspheres evanescently coupled to optical fibers, and to develop microsphere sensors for biochemical and biological sensing. The unprecedentedly narrow optical resonances in such microspheres open an avenue for a novel class of all-optical sensors which can measure local properties by detecting optical frequency shifts of the resonances. Many photonic resonance modes occur in a microsphere in an extremely narrow linewidth. The resonance spectrum is obtained by scanning the wavelength of the laser transmitted through the fiber into the microsphere and observing the intensity through a read-out fiber coupled to the microsphere. Resonance wavelength shifts are extremely sensitive to changes in the diameter and the refractive index of the sphere as well as the refractive index of the medium surrounding the sphere. The latter quantities are determined by the temperature, adsorption of a second substance onto the sphere surface, the isotropic and anisotropic stress, and the concentration of a chemical in the solution surrounding the sphere. Efforts will be especially targeted at developing microscopic sensing heads for biofluids. For this purpose fibers and microspheres, all made of polymers that can be rendered biocompatible will be used. The high specificity in biomolecular interactions will enable detection of a specific RNA, protein, enzyme, substrate, and antigen. The goal is to allow one to prepare as many kinds of sensors as the number of biomolecules. Availability of miniature, high-sensitivity biophotonic sensors will facilitate the development of device on a chip and other parallel chemical and biological analysis systems in combinatorial chemistry doc14132 none The focus of this research project is to develop visualization, interaction, and data management technologies to address the problems of high dimensionality and data type heterogeneity in large-scale visual data mining. The basic approach is to apply multiresolution clustering strategies across the dimensions of a data set as well as within individual dimensions containing nominal or categorical values, and exploit the ordering and positioning of data axes and data points to emphasize relationships within the data. For visualization, the tasks involve the development of methods for determining ordering and variable spacing within and between data and dimensions as well as clustering of dimensions into multi-resolution abstractions, and integrating them into several existing multivariate display techniques. For interaction, tools for intuitive navigation and exploration within the multiresolution spaces are developed. This includes interactive reclustering tools to allow users to guide the process of splitting and grouping clusters of data objects and dimensions. For data management the tasks involve the development of high-dimensional indexing and multi-resolution data view management for high-dimensional data access, and caching and prefetching strategies to support real-time visual exploration. The ease of use as well as performance of the display and interactive tools over large data sets is assessed. The results of this research will provide data analysts in domains such as bioinformatics, earth and space sciences, and e-commerce the ability to interactively explore the increasingly large and complex data sets being generated doc14133 none PI: J. Weertman Northwestern U. for NSF Proposal Request for Travel Grant for Graduate Students to Attend a Conference on the Structure and Mechanical Properties of Nanostructured Materials This proposal requests funds to support 5 graduate students to attend a United Engineering Foundation Conference. The title of the conference is Structure and Mechanical Properties of Nanostructured Materials: Promoting a Synergy Among Computer Simulations, Experiments and Theory. The students will be paired with an equal number of prominent senior attendees. The graduate students will thus not only increase their professional and scientific education by attending an international conference on their thesis subject but also begin to network with leaders in their field. The scholarship offer would be limited to US citizens and permanent residents, and special consideration will be given to increase the diversity of the awardees to include women and under-represented minorities doc14134 none Ishman This Americas award will support a planning visit by Dr. Scott E. Ishman of Southern Illinois University-Carbondale to finalize a cooperative research project with Drs. Ruben E. Martinez of the National Museum of Natural History, Rodolfo Martinez of San Pedro Nolasco College and Luis A. Chirino of Museo Fonck, all in Chile, respectively. The researchers will meet in Antofagasta and Santiago, Chile and will do site visits to localities in the Mejillones region of Chile. The northern region of Chile provides a unique geographic setting to investigate the oceanographic and climatic sensitivity of the eastern South Pacific to significant changes in Antarctic ice volume change as interpreted from sea-level records. The Mejillones Basin is ideal for this research. It represents a shallow marine setting developed on an active margin with nearby volcanism and other significant tectonic features. Results from this proposed project will provide a better understanding of the interconnection between Antarctic ice volume change, oceanographic and atmospheric circulation, and the impacts these have on recurring oceanographic and meteorological events such as El Nino, which have global and economic significance doc13979 none The power industry must undertake a managed redesign of the Nation s power system so that it can adapt to deregulation and to rapid changes in the power requirements and regional economic conditions. The need for research in this area is vividly illustrated by the recent California power problems. This second five year continuing grant funds the University of California, Berkeley as part of a multi-university Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC) for Power Systems Engineering (PSERC). The I UCRC involves 10 university research sites generating over $1.5 million. The four universities, Cornell University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Illinois-Champaign, and the University of California-Berkeley, being addressed in identical proposals as a group have generated over $600,000 in the last year. The Center addresses research projects in marketing, transmission and distribution and systems in electric power generation and transmission doc14136 none This award provides partial support for the purchase of an 800 MHz NMR spectrometer to be used to study the structure, function and dynamics of a variety of biological macromolecules. The use of NMR for study of the structure and behavior large biological molecules has rapidly expanded in recent years as the availability of instruments capable of operating at high frequencies and field strengths has increased, and as techniques for the use of high-field NMR have been perfected. Only at the highest frequencies can instruments resolve the minute differences in the NMR signals of each atom in a large protein or nucleic acid. These minute differences allow researchers to locate the relative positions of each atom with the precision needed to establish structure at the atomic level. The three major users of this instrument will study the structure of NtrC, a bacterial two-component signaling system, the design of sequence-specific DNA binding proteins, the structures of RNAs with group I introns, and the structure of the 3 ends of the RNA genome of brome mosaic virus, among other problems. Six other users will investigate free energy landscapes for protein folding, tubulin interactions with transcription factors, RNA folding, the structure of ribonucleoprotein complexes, and the structures of a variety of proteins that function in multi-subunit complexes. The request for NSF support was submitted through a joint program of the NSF and the NIH that allows both agencies to support the purchase of very expensive research instruments to be shared by three or more independent users. NSF funds for this award are provided jointly by the Division of Biological Infrastructure and by the Office of Multi-Disciplinary Activities of the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences. In addition to funds provided by NSF, partial support for the purchase is being provided by the Shared Instrumentation Grant program of the NIH. In addition to the support provided by federal sources, the University will provide approximately $1 million of its own funds to purchase the instrument doc14137 none Ayres, Thomas This award will be used to partially support a workshop on cool stars, stellar systems and the Sun. It is one of a regularly held series and is titled The Future of Cool-Star Astrophysics . It will be held between July 30 and August 3, at the University of Colorado, Boulder CO doc14138 none Siddall and Burreson Dr. Mark Siddall of the American Museum of Natural History and his co-PI Dr. Eugene Burreson of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science are collaborating to assess and document the biodiversity of leech families of the world (the annelid order Hirudinea, with an estimated species worldwide). The basis for this work involves thorough determination and photodocumentation of leeches in natural history museums worldwide as well as several field expeditions to regions of poorly studied but high leech diversity globally. This work comes at a time when leeches have experienced renewed interest from the biomedical community and yet the field is in danger of losing the knowledge of those few scientists who have devoted themselves to understanding the scope of the world s hirudifauna. Using various data-gathering technologies (for morphological and molecular sequence data) and data-analyzing algorithms, students will be trained in collecting, identifying and monographing species in the principal families, and will compile the information in a world-wide accessible database connecting taxon descriptions with images and publications related to them. Leeches occur in habitats that range from terrestrial to both marine and freshwater environments and are found on all continents. The remarkable diversity in morphology and behavior of leeches has been of interest to several fields of biology. The last fifteen years have seen an increase in the biomedical utility of leeches especially the promise of finding powerful anticoagulants and tumor-inhibiting antistasins in leech saliva. Leeches are enjoying a renaissance in their application (quite literally) to post-operative hematomas. Their use routinely has led to faster healing following the reattachment of tissues with microsurgical procedures. Leeches also are used extensively in neurobiological and developmental studies. So far, only two or three species of leech are exploited for these purposes, largely because the world s diversity and family relationships are not well understood (usually Hirudo medicinalis and Limnatis nilotica, the European and African medicinal leeches respectively). This grant seeks to make available that knowledge and to extend its scope in a comprehensive manner, while training a new generation of taxonomic specialists working in annelid systematics and biology doc14139 none On January 26, at 8:46 AM (local time), a magnitude Mw 7.5 earthquake struck the Kachchh area in Gujarat, India. This is the most damaging earthquake in India in the last 50 years. The earthquake epicenter is located to the north of Bacchau about 160 miles (250 km) west of Ahmadabad, India or about 180 miles (290 km) southeast of Hyderabad, Pakistan. The epicenter was at N23.399 E70.316 and a depth of 23.6 km according to USGS. The earthquake damaged dams, ports and bridges, obliterated small villages in Gujarat, and caused damage to Ahmedabad, a large city 250 km away from the epicenter. As of 2 February , the Department of Agriculture and Cooperation of the Indian Government reported more than 15,000 dead as the result of the earthquake. There are reports of ten of thousands of collapsed and damaged buildings, and a great number of people homeless. The January 26, earthquake took place in the Kachchh region, and appears to be an intraplate event with similarities with the - New Madrid sequence, which struck New Madrid, Missouri from December through January - . First reports indicate that damage in Western India extends over large areas, as was observed in New Madrid, Missouri. The extent of casualties and damage and the similarities with existing conditions in the United States of America required the immediate dispatch of a NSF reconnaissance geotechnical team to document the geotechnical and engineering geology seismology features of this earthquake. This project provides funding necessary for sending a small advanced reconnaissance team to the area damaged by the January 26, , Bhuj, India earthquake, and for documenting the geotechnical, and engineering seismology features of the earthquake in as much detail as possible. The reconnaissance team will be sent to India as soon as the emergency rescue efforts have slowed down, and the means of transport have been reestablished. The advanced reconnaissance team will be coordinated by J.P. Bardet of the University of Southern California. The advanced reconnaissance team will be followed by a larger reconnaissance team coordinated by Raymond Seed of the University of California, Berkeley. This larger team will be supported by a separate SGER grant from the National Science Foundation. The proposed reconnaissance of this devastating earthquake is expected to yield useful information and data to understand the effects of large-scale intraplate events, and to apply those findings to the mitigation of similar earthquake hazards in mid-America doc14140 none The research is focused on high speed coating of optical fibers, a step in the draw process that is critical to the quality and low cost fabrication of optical fibers for telecommunications and other applications. It involves four main aspects (a) modeling and simulation of the transport processes within coating applicator die systems, (b) experimentation with a laboratory off-line system developed previously, allowing measurements with different operating conditions, (c) experimentation on a full-scale draw tower, and (d) measurement of specific properties (thickness, concentricity, integrity, presence of bubbles, etc) of coatings produced under controlled conditions. The models will be validated by experiments on the two facilities, particularly at large speeds. The dependence of coating characteristics on the operating conditions will be established. This approach will therefore provide a quantitative, systematic, and validated means to predict and control fiber-coating characteristics doc14141 none A key advantage in mouse molecular genetics is the ability to tailor transgene expression to particular tissues at particular times in development. Such ability allows for increasingly more sophisticated analysis of gene function and detailed understanding of developmental fates, and the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying those fates. These methodologies rely on germ-line manipulations in mouse embryos and are not directly applicable to other models of development, such as chick embryogenesis. Dr. Ragsdale and his coworkers will explore a more broadly applicable method of heritable, conditional transgenesis, one that could be used in a range of animal embryos. Avian retroviruses have a restricted host range, and even among chickens there are strains of birds that are susceptible to infection by only certain viral subgroups. The relevant viral receptors have now been cloned and can confer viral infectivity to heterologous cells. In addition, in a growing number of experimental systems, transient transgenesis can be achieved by direct tissue electroporation of embryos. Dr. Ragsdale will develop a transgenesis system in which electroporation delivers avian retroviral receptors for transient misexpression. The location and timing of the exogenous receptor expression is controlled by the time and site of the electroporation and can be further restricted by tissue-specific promoters. Subsequent retroviral infection then provides for heritable transgene delivery only to those cells expressing the viral receptor at the time of the infection. Dr. Ragsdale will explore this system in chick neural development, but its applicability is potentially much broader and includes the range of embryos, from ascidians to mice, where in vivo electroporation can be used to introduce plasmid DNA into developing organs doc14142 none The project will take aerial photographs of the same terrain photographed approximately 50 years previously to examine changes in the environment, particularly the expansion of areas dominated by shrubs. Shrub size, density, and extent will be compared between the old scenes and the new photographs to see if previous results from a pilot study are applicable to a wider area of the North Slope. The northward expansion of shrubs is an expected response to climate warming and will have important implications for global change research in an area expected to experience the first impacts from global warming. On-site measurements of vegetation indices (e.g. vegetation age, size, dimensions, composition, spacing, growth rates) will be used in comparison with temperature history to assess the impacts of warming climate on shrub growth expansion in the region doc14143 none This award supports a US-Italian bilateral workshop entitled New Technologies and Cultural Heritage in Venice, Italy on April 23 and 24, , and is jointly funded by the Engineering Directorate and International Program. Cultural artifacts link mankind to its artistic and cultural past. It is important that they be preserved as closely as possible to the state in which they were created. Deterioration of cultural artifacts has become a major concern around the world. Broad issues include the preservation of ancient buildings, monuments, and archeological sites; construction materials; artifact collections; and collection materials. The workshop is expected to reach two major goals. The first goal is to bring together specialists from various disciplines to explore how advanced technologies can contribute to the assessment and improvement of the objects that are part of our cultural heritage. The participants will consist of engineers, scientists, and conservators, among others. They can be divided into two main groups. One group consists of experts in the preservation and management of the artifacts themselves, including historic stone monuments and museum collections. A second group of experts focuses on materials or environmental research and on advanced technologies that could be applied for beneficial purposes in the diagnosis, monitoring, protection, and or restoration of cultural objects. Traditionally, these two groups have not interacted much. The workshop constitutes a special effort to promote exchange of information and ultimately create synergy and collaboration between these groups. The second goal of the workshop is to bring together US and Italian researchers and institutions to explore topics of common interest and to identify opportunities for constructive future bilateral research and information exchange. The workshop will provide a meeting of the minds and bring together participants with diverse educational and professional backgrounds. The workshop will be attended by 21 participants from the U.S. and 26 participants from Italy doc14144 none Tung The goal of this proposal is to develop new tools that will ultimately allow in vivo sensing of multiple protease activity. The project will focus on specific proteases prominently involved in angiogenesis, cancerogenesis, metastasis and which are being pursued as therapeutic drug targets, i.e., cathepsin B, cathepsin D and matrix metalloproteinase. This newly developed technology may be applied to tumor detection, localization, metastatic characterization and evaluation of anti-tumor therapies doc14145 none Marilyn A. Walker Association for Computational Linguistics $7,000 - 6 mos WORKSHOP: ACL Student Research Workshop This is funding to subsidize expenses of student participants in the Student Research Workshop organized in conjunction with the Association for Computational Linguistics Conference (ACL ), which will be held July 6-11, , in Toulouse, France. The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the primary international organization in the field of natural language processing and language engineering, with two regional chapters, Europe (EACL) and North America (NAACL), of approximately equal size. The Association s annual conference, which is the major international meeting in the field, has traditionally rotated between North America and Europe but was held last year for the first time in a Pacific Rim location (Hong Kong). The ACL Student Workshop is an inexpensive yet highly effective means of encouraging young and upcoming computational linguists. The intimate workshop format, in addition to affording student participants sufficient time to present their research (20 minutes) and receive feedback from a panel of established researchers in the field (15 minutes), encourages them to begin building a rapport with established researchers. Through feedback from the panel and other student participants, this nurturing effort will pay dividends by providing the students with invaluable exposure to outside perspectives and guidance on their work at a critical time in their research in this rapidly changing research field doc14146 none Ezenwa The objectives of this project are: (1) to encourage undergraduate electrical, mechanical, computer engineering, and Allied Health students to conduct senior-year design projects in rehabilitation engineering, and (2) to focus such design projects towards the needs of specific individuals with orthopedic and or neuromuscular disabilities. Students are recruited from the class rosters of the Departments of Allied Health, Occupational Therapy (OT), and Electrical Engineering, and elective course registrants from the mechanical, industrial and computer engineering departments. It is expected that 7 design projects will be completed each year of the three year program. Clients have been identified in the greater Milwaukee area who would benefit from the proposed senior design projects. The significance of the program is (I) exposing undergraduate engineering students to the field of rehabilitation engineering at a formative stage in their educational development might sensitize them towards the role of this profession in a rehabilitation setting; (II) exposing occupational therapy students to more in-depth characteristics of assistive technology device performance in order for them to be able to determine demands imposed on a device by a person with a disability; (III) by forming small design groups that comprise engineering and OT students, engineering students may grasp the physiologic and functional limitations necessary for effective problem formulation and solution; (IV) the students from Allied Health should learn why certain engineering components are used and to acquire the knowledge necessary to deal with vendors of assistive technology; (V) the students will be rewarded in contributing towards solving limitations imposed by physical impairments, and; (VI) the client will benefit by having the specialized technology that could enable independence, potential employment, or completion of schooling doc14147 none The National Science Foundation supports the Boston University Conference on Language Development to be held at Boston University, 2-4 November, . The conference is an internationally recognized meeting for researchers in the areas of first and second language acquisition, bilingualism, language disorders, and literacy development. It is attended by 400-500 researchers from around the world. Its presentations are chosen by anonymous peer review, and its proceedings are published by Cascadilla Press. This year s keynote speaker is Susan Carey; this year s plenary speaker is Daniel Dinnsen. Since , the faculty and students of Boston University s Applied Linguistics Program have organized and run the conference. Dr. Shanley Allen leads this year s team of students and faculty doc14148 none An advanced numerical cloud model will be used to simulate the types of storms observed in the Severe Thunderstorm Electrification and Precipitation Study (STEPS) of the summer of . The three-dimensional dynamic simulation model includes detailed microphysical, electrical, and lightning parameterizations and produces realistic storms and lightning in simulations of several types of thunderstorms. Observations during STEPS were among the most complete ever taken for electrification studies. They included polarimetric radar measurements, dual-Doppler measurements, three- dimensional lightning flash patterns obtained by the Lightning Mapping Array, in-situ cloud and electrical measurements obtained by instrumented balloons and a storm-penetrating aircraft, and surface observations from a mobile mesoscale network. The data will be compared with simulations to improve the understanding of interactions among kinematics, precipitation production, and electrification in severe storms. Examples of the topics to be investigated are (1) the influence of vertical air motions and precipitation on the production of lightning; (2) the influence of storm type (e.g., unicell, multicell, supercell) on flash rates and other lightning characteristics; (3) conditions attendant to the production of unusual lightning activity, such as exceptionally high flash rates or positive cloud-to-ground lightning. It is expected that the research will lead to ways of using lightning data to help diagnose and forecast severe weather doc14149 none This developmental proposal aims to create an integrated South Texas CLT. The three institutional partners are The University of Texas -- Pan American, The University of Texas -- San Antonio, and The University of Texas -- Austin. The CLT will work primarily with school districts in San Antonio and the lower Rio Grande Valley of south Texas. More than 70% of the K-12 students are economically disadvantaged and almost 80% are Hispanic. During the developmental phase they will explicitly assess the regional science, mathematics and technology (SMT) educational needs and the specific responsibilities of the participating institutions for meeting those needs within a CLT. They will also evaluate relevant existing models and project strategies dealing with defined goals and objectives (e.g., recruitment, professional development, and or pipeline infrastructures career pathways for SMT educator preparation) especially those appropriate for the preparation of teachers of Hispanic students from bilingual, bicultural and low socio-economic environments. Part of the developmental process will focus on developing models appropriate for meeting these goals and for identifying other institutional partners including community colleges and professional organizations doc14150 none American Association for the Advancement of Science Stern The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the recipient of an award for summer internship support for the ENTRY POINT! Program. ENTRY POINT! a national effort to discover and develop talent among students with disabilities, seeks summer internship opportunities for students majoring in science, mathematics and engineering. Through the program academically prepared students have received quality internship assignments throughout federal government agencies and industry. Participants are exposed to various career options in the Federal sector that serve as a basis in helping students make informed career choices and solidify career objectives. By partnering with the Federal government, AAAS has been able to successfully place over 175 students in summer positions since ENTRY POINT! commenced in . In an effort to continue its collaboration with AAAS, the National Science Foundation, one of two of the participating government agencies, will offer challenging assignments that will broaden the exposure of participants pursuing careers in science, mathematics, engineering and technology (SMET). Internship opportunities create an unique opportunity to assist in the fulfillment of two core strategies related the goals of NSF s mission: developing intellectual capital, and integrating research and education. As a result the Foundation actively participates in strengthening the infrastructure to achieve excellence in SMET education doc14151 none Land-use continues to change throughout the world as economies and populations grow. Land-use change often has large adverse impacts on natural capital and the ecosystem services that this capital provides. The long-term goals of this project are 1) to improve understanding and prediction of land-use change and its effects on biocomplexity in watersheds, and 2) to improve the capacity of decision makers to use this information in their efforts to foster both economic well being and preservation of natural capital. In this incubation activity, the investigators will work at the watershed scale toward integrated biophysical economic systems models that respond to thresholds and episodic events. This is a significant departure from the approach taken by much preceding work, in which information has been analyzed using regression relationships based on continuous functions that cannot handle threshold and episodic events. The investigators plan to hold three workshops for team development, assessment of the state of knowledge, and the articulation of the conceptual framework and methods for a larger and more in-depth study doc14152 none The objectives of this Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) are to develop innovative and powerful approaches for solving problems of decision making under uncertainty applied to large scale design, manufacturing, planning, and management related problems. However, efficient estimation of performance in the presence of uncertainty is a critical first step. The problem of decision making under uncertainty is posed as a stochastic optimization problem, which fundamentally involves constrained optimization of one or more probabilistic output functions constructed from multiple deterministic simulations for input parameter sets obtained by sampling uncertain input parameter distributions. The power and usefulness of the approach has been demonstrated by the Principal Investigators, but the computational burden of this approach can be extreme and depends on the sample size used for characterizing the parametric uncertainties. Sampling accuracy plays an important role in enhancing the efficiency of these optimization algorithms. The proposed approach is aimed at filling an important void in assessing the width of the sampling error-bandwidth in specialized Monte Carlo approaches. It draws on concepts from fractal geometry to derive error estimates. Robust decision making amidst a cloud of parameter uncertainties is of fundamental importance in many applications. These uncertainties can arise from operational, environmental, and market parameters (e.g., ambient temperature, customer demand), erroneous model representations (model simplifications and assumptions),and model parameters and data (e.g. reaction constants, physical properties, errors in measurements), to name a few. Furthermore, a decision maker has to deal with discrete decisions, like whether to choose a particular option or not, and also with decisions on a continuous space such as the choice of the operating temperature in a plant doc14153 none The beta-hydroxyacid dehydrogenases are a structurally and mechanistically related family of enzymes with a predominance of homologues specific to bacteria and plants. The only two known mammalian family members include beta-hydroxyisobutyrate dehydrogenase and 6-phosphogluconate dehydrogenase. Two of the bacterial family members have recently been identified as isozymes of tartronate semialdehyde reductase (TSR) with differences in substrate specificity. TSR is part of a pathway for glycerate biosynthesis from glyoxylate, hydroxypyruvate, and other substrates in bacteria and plants. Most bacterial and plant genomes display multiple homologues of TSR. The Escherichia coli genome contains 4 homologues, of which two have been cloned and enzymatically characterized. The Arabidopsis thaliana genome contains 6 homologues of TSR, none of which have been cloned or identified in terms of substrate specificity and enzymatic properties. Most of the bacterial beta-hydroxyacid dehydrogenase genes contain apparent binding sites for cAMP-CRP and are likely regulated by catabolite repression. These enzymes may serve alternative metabolic pathways, such as glycerate biosynthesis, in anaerobiosis and in conditions of nutrient deprivation when TCA cycle activity is inadequate. This hypothesis is fitting with the organization of surrounding genes and cAMP-CRP sites observed in E. coli and Haemophilus influenzae loci containing beta-hydroxyacid dehydrogenase genes. This project will examine the enzymatic properties and substrate specificities of cloned and over-expressed beta-hydroxyacid dehydrogenases of A. thaliana, to determine what biological functions the plant TSR isozymes may serve. The identities and relative quantities of these and other co-expressed proteins will be determined by a proteomic approach, utilizing isotope-coded affinity tags, in order to understand more clearly what metabolic pathways are functioning together under conditions of specific substrate limitation and or anaerobiosis in E. coli and H. influenzae. It is not clear, biologically, why certain bacteria and plants should require multiple isoforms of TSR, but this genetic capacity may reflect a previously unrecognized importance of glycerate biosynthesis in bacteria and plants. This project will expand our understanding of this recently discovered family of enzymes, and their apparently specific metabolic roles in plants and bacteria. This research will also bring new information about what enzymes and other proteins are predominantly expressed in two different bacterial species when grown under various limiting and anaerobic conditions doc14154 none This award provides funding for student participation at the upcoming OSA sponsored conference on the Applications of High Field and Short Wavelength Sources, to be held in Palm Springs, CA, from 21-24 October, . The funds will be used to waive graduate student registration fees and will aid in defraying travel costs. An expanded poster session at the conference will be dedicated primarily to students doc14155 none Richards-Kortum This proposal brings together scientists from very diverse areas with the goal of developing new photonic probes and contrast agents for highly sensitive and selective detection of pre-cancers in vivo . Dr. Andrew Ellington will use the approaches of combinatorial chemistry to develop a library of aptamer molecules specific for biomolecular targets on the surface of cervical cancerous and pre-cancerous cells. He will use well-established cervical cell lines at different stages of cancer development provided by Dr. Lotan. Drs. Brian Korgel and Konstantin Sokolov will develop new photonic probes based on quantum dots (BK) and metal nanoparticles (KS). They will utilize both the aptamers developed by Dr. Ellington as well as well-known antibodies currently used in clinical histopathology. Dr. Rebecca Richards- Kortum will test the conjugates as molecular specific contrast agents using optical microscopy and spectroscopy. She will use cervical cancer cell lines provided by Dr. Lotan, three-dimensional tissue phantoms and fresh cervical tissue slices from Dr. Follen. Experiments with all three biological systems representing properties of normal and neoplastic cervix at different levels of complexity will be used to assess and refine the performance and detection scheme for the new contrast agents. This refinement will include preparing bioengineered aptamers with high affinity to cancer specific targets, tailoring optical properties of metal nanoparticles and quantum dots, optimizing conjugation procedures, and developing optimal imaging geometries doc14156 none Fujimoto The development and application of biomedical imaging technologies such as multiphoton confocal microscopy and optical coherence tomography are critically dependent on the availability of ultrashort pulse laser light sources. The lack of compact and low cost ultrashort pulse light sources is a critical factor which limits wider spread research and clinical applications of many of these imaging technologies. The objective will be to develop a third generation ultrashort pulse laser technology which achieves shorter pulse durations, broader bandwidths and broader tunability, as well as being one order of magnitude lower in cost than current technology. The design principles that are developed will be applicable to a wide range of different solid state laser materials. This proposed project is a continuation of an ongoing collaboration between Profs. Fujimoto and Kaertner at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Franz Kaertner is currently at the University of Karlsruhe, but will be joining the faculty in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Summer of doc14157 none This action funds a one-year renewal for support of the US Committees for the bioscience unions that are part of the International Council for Science (ICSU) and administered through the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The U.S. biology community is represented by NAS in five international scientific unions: the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS), the International Union of Physiological Sciences (IUPS), the International Union of Pure and Applied Biophysics (IUPAB), the International Union of Microbiological Sciences (IUMS), and the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (IUBMB). There are two overarching issues to which the five committees of U.S. scientists who represent U.S. interests in these international organizations have assigned high priority. The first is the need for new, inclusive, multidisciplinary, and integrative approaches to biological questions. The second is the need to build human and research capacity in developing countries. This award will permit the NAS to continue to manage U.S. participation and assert U.S. leadership in these bioscience unions. Further it provides dues have to the five international organizations and funds to support the activities of the five corresponding U.S. National Committees. This award will also fund a new US National Committee for DIVERSITAS, an international cooperative research program on biological diversity under the sponsorship of the IUBS doc14158 none Simon The objective of the proposed research is to develop a method of optically imaging proteins. This research will adapt newly developed methods for peptide protein ligation for labeling various proteins and imaging them via improved fluorescence or other molecular imaging probes. The ability to study proteins in situ has come from the introduction of the green Fluorescent protein (GFP). The goal of this research is to generate reporters that share the power of GFP, but without its limitations. The specific goals of this research are to generate reporters that: (1) can be genetically engineered into proteins, (2) are significantly smaller than GFP, (3) have a narrower emission spectra than GFP, (4) emit further in the red range or have a larger Stokes shift than GFP, (5) are more photostable than GFP, (6) can be used to simultaneously label and distinguish different proteins in living cells, and (7) can be used to track proteins or cells as they move throughout an animal s body doc14159 none EIA- Ophir Frieder Illinois Institute of Technology Educational Innovation: Enhancing the CS Undergraduate Curriculum to Include Data Mining and Information Retrieval This project involves the development (and introduction into the undergraduate computer science curriculum) of two new courses: Data Mining and Information Retrieval. In this sequence, students build systems that implement key data mining and information retrieval algorithms and learn how to apply these algorithms to solve real-world problems. At the end of this sequence, students understand and use the fundamental algorithms and existing state-of-the-art in web search engines, intranets, data mining, and customer relationship management. Two significant group projects provide students with experience as participants of a software development team. These projects enable larger implementation achievements that further the understanding of algorithms, implementation trade-offs and software project management. In addition, such a group project is a critical experience that future employers and graduate schools look for doc14160 none Zharov The objective of the proposed research is to develop a new method for laser photothermal phase-contrast imaging (LPPI) which has high absorption sensitivity and high resolution for sensing nano-scale non-fluorescent structures at the cellular and sub-cellular levels. The specific research objectives are to: (1) evaluate spatial resolution and sensitivity of LPPI in a time-resolved mode by calibrating LPPI by using nano-scale liposomes as photothermal (PT) probes, (2) examine the effects of a laser pulse on a cell visualized by LPPI by comparing the time-resolved PT-image structure as a function of pump laser energy and wavelength with conventional biochemical data, and (3) develop cell PT spectral lifetime imaging and algorithms of PT time-resolved analysis of complex nano-scale absorbing structures verified with a multi-color PT probe model doc14161 none This grant supports a continuation of the analysis of lightning flash and stroke characteristics across the United States using data from the National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN). These data extend back to . To the American data will be added data from the Canadian Lightning Detection Network (CLDN), which was established in . The two networks combined comprise 187 sensors and provide data extending from 25 degrees to 60 degrees N latitude and from 50 degrees to 135 degrees W longitude. The number of recorded flashes on these networks exceeds 300 million. The data are used for characterizing different properties of cloud-to-ground lightning, including flash polarity, the number of flashes per unit area, the peak current, and stroke multiplicity. Studies are under way on the variation of these quantities with season and geographical location, and their dependence on local features such as mountains and cities. There is already evidence of increased flash rates over urban areas, explained perhaps by increased convection over heated cities or by microphysical effects of pollution aerosols. Other findings to now are that the highest peak currents are in the upper Midwest and the highest percentage of positive flashes to ground are along the West Coast of the United States. Physical explanations for these findings will be sought as part of the project doc14162 none Odde The objective of this project will be to use LGDW to deliver vascular-endothelial growth factor (VEGF)-coated microspheres to undifferentiated multipotent adult progenitor cells (MAPCs) to induce the endothelial (blood vessel lining) cell phenotype locally. The particle materials to be studied will include polystyrene and polylactic-glycolic acid with sizes ranging from 1-10 um. VEGF will be covalently immobilized to the particles via commercially available surface chemistry doc14163 none Kotov Recent advances in nanotechnology and bioengineering have opened the exciting prospect for promoting direct interaction of electronics, optics and biological systems. The primary obstacle to realizing this goal in the fields of neuroscience and medical devices such as prostheses is the inadequate understanding of the molecular processes involved in coupling between living neurons and nanomaterials, and how to optimize the coupling between man made materials and living systems. In this project, the intent is to investigate the dynamics and mechanisms of the live lifeless matter interaction in a model system consisting of a thin film composed of nanoparticles and cultured nerve cells. The multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional Linked Collaborative Proposals bring together several research groups with broad expertise and research interest to conduct experimental and theoretical studies aimed at characterizing the interaction that occur at the interface of nanomaterials and neurons and optimizing the interface for effective photon-activation of neurons following photonic probing of the interface of nanomaterials that are attached to the cells. The partners at Oklahoma State University lead by Dr. Kotov will carry out the materials science aspect of this project, while the investigation at the University of Texas Medical Branch lead by Dr. Motamedi will concentrate on the bioengineering and electrophysiological components of this work. Specifically, the objectives of the proje ct are the following. (1) Preparation of biocompatible nanoparticle multilayers that can be attached to nerve cells. (2) Registration and characterization of the photoinduced nerve cell membrane currents and potentials following optical excitation of the interface as function of NP and biological structures. (3) Optimization of NP-cell coupling for different interface structure doc14164 none Achilefu The objective of the proposed research is to design, synthesize, and evaluate novel Arginine-Glycine-Aspartic acid (RGD) peptide-dye conjugates for optical imaging of tumor angiogenesis. This will be accomplished by targeting integrin receptors which are overexpressed in malignant tumors. The conjugation on near infrared carbocyanine dyes to integrin receptor-avid RGD peptides would yield novel tumor-specific optical contrast agents. The bioconjugates will be evaluated in vitro to determine their receptor binding affinity, and in vivo to compare the efficacy of integrin receptor-specific and nonspecific optical contrast agents. If successful, this research could develop new infrared fluorescent probes for cancer detection doc14165 none The principal investigators (PIs) will investigate the mechanisms of tropical cyclone (TC) initiation and their roles in the maintenance of synoptic wavetrains observed in the Northwest Pacific. They hypothesize that the Rossby wave energy dispersion from northwest moving TCs induces equatorward and eastward synoptic wave disturbances. Through convective-circulation feedback, these disturbances have the potential of forming new tropical cyclones and repeating the cycle, thus maintaining the synoptic wavetrains. A three-dimensional, high-resolution tropical cyclone model, developed by one of the PIs, will be used to study this mechanism and related issues. An ocean model will be coupled with the TC model to investigate the effects of ocean feedback. This planned research holds promise for resolving a long-standing problem in tropical dynamics by identifying the processes responsible for the coexistence of tropical cyclones and wave-like disturbances. Resolution of the pertinent issues would expand our knowledge of tropical circulation systems doc14166 none Meghan Miller The PANGA consortium will install 8 continuously operating GPS stations in Puget Sound in a rapid response deployment to the Nisqually earthquake. This enhancement of PANGA is aimed at gathering basic data to answer opportune scientific questions. It also provides a demonstration of the ability of the Plate Boundary Observatory community to master the technical challenges of a post-earthquake response in a collaborative manner. The continuous GPS observations will further our understanding of these scientific issues: 1. Is the series of slab deformation events recorded in , and a typical sequence, and will we observe a similar sequence in the Grays Harbor, Nisqually, and some near term future event(s)? 2. How is deformation propagated from a down going slab through a viscoelastic lower lithosphere, to surface deformation? What are the rheologies that govern this complex scenario and how is deformation propagated or dissipated? 3. How do these processes reveal the budget of seismic vs. aseismic slip? 4. Is there a causal relationship between intra-slab earthquakes and deformation in the brittle upper crust? 5. How does the concentration of deformation across the Puget Lowlands, where fore-arc migration ends in a zone of concentrated strain, relate to arching of the down-going slab and its consequent deformation? 6. Is there an observable role between deeper, slab events with their broad deformation field, and teconomagmatic deformation? Page A 011 doc14167 none Scherer The objective of the proposed research is to develop and build compact absorption spectrometers and fluorescence measurement systems with the capability to test and identify the composition of picoliters of analyte. The approach is to integrate microfabrication techniques for both microfluidic and photonic devices in order to create monolithic analysis chips for bio-analysis applications. Specifically, three optical technologies will be developed and integrated into microfluidic systems: (1) Fabry-Perot optical resonators with high-finesse for optical spectroscopy, (2) photonic crystal nanocavities for interferometric sensing with high sensitivity, and (3) development of manufacturable solid immersion lenses for high numerical aperture examination of microfluidic samples doc14168 none Wu The development of a technology for performing endoscopic cellular level imaging inside the body would have a powerful impact on biomedical research and health care. This program is a collaboration between investigators at UCLA specializing in MEMS optical technology and investigators at MIT specializing in biomedical optical imaging. The investigators propose to develop new microscanning MEMS devices and endoscopically integrate them with optical coherence tomography, confocal microscopy, and optical coherence microscopy, creating a new technology for internal body imaging. Vertically integrated studies combining novel MEMS device design with biomedical imaging and clinical feasibility studies will be performed doc14169 none This grant supports an ongoing research program investigating aerosols, clouds, and precipitation, using the unique capabilities of the Facility for Atmospheric Remote Sensing (FARS) at the University of Utah. Instruments include visible, infrared, and microwave radiometers, a ruby (0.694 micrometres wavelength) Cloud Polarization Lidar (CPL), a scanning dual-wavelength (0.532 and 1.06 micrometres) high-resolution Polarization Diversity Lidar (PDL), and a W-band (3.2 millimetres) polarimetric Doppler radar. To this battery of equipment will be added a nitrogen Raman channel for the PDL, which will enable the determination of the aerosol extinction coefficient independently of the backscattering coefficient, and provision for scanning the PDL in elevation, to study the shapes and orientations of hydrometeors and the anisotropy of clouds as scattering media. Emphasis to now has been on improving fundamental understanding of midlatitude cirrus clouds by monitoring their spectral scattering and emission properties as they move over the FARS site. New objectives include the study of precipitation development in mixed-phase (ice and water) clouds, investigations of the shapes and orientations of ice crystals as revealed by their optical and microwave properties, and studies of the optical properties and vertical structure of aerosol layers that originate from local and sometimes distant sources. The work is highly relevant to the interpretation of present and proposed satellite remote sensing measurements and to the treatment of clouds and aerosols in climate models doc14170 none Vidale The Pls propose to hold a Gordon Research Conference on the Interior of the Earth from June 10-15, at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. As discussed in detail in the proposal, the conference is being held to bring together an interdisciplinary group of experts to discuss major unanswered questions about the composition, structure and dynamics of the Earth s interior. Funds will be used to cover travel and accommodations to enhance participation of student and early-career scientists. It is expected that a broad and interdisciplinary cross-section of researchers from academia, government labs, and the broad international community will participate in the conference doc14171 none A Proton-Transfer-Reaction Mass Spectrometer (PTR-MS) instrument will be purchased and used for real-time, in-situ measurements of concentrations and fluxes of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), in particular, terpenes. These compounds play an important role in the tropospheric photochemistry of forested regions. In situ concentrations and flux measurements carried out with the PTR-MS coupled to the eddy covariance method will be compared to measurements using gas chromatography coupled to relaxed eddy accumulation. Extension to ecosystem scale fluxes will be attempted. The PTR-MS will also be used for in situ measurements of oxidation products of terpenes. In addition, the PI will collaborate with the research group of Prof. John Seinfeld at Caltech on laboratory studies of VOC oxidation processes by using the PTR-MS as a product analysis tool doc14172 none Proposal 01- John K. Brown, Liberal Studies and the Integrated Engineering Education of ABET : A Planning Conference at the University of Virginia Under the impetus of new accrediting guidelines and goals (EC ), America s engineering colleges are poised to embark on far-reaching curricular innovation, responding especially to the new standards insistence on integration across the curriculum and their determination to merge technical and humanistic studies. But the difficult work has barely begun: How will educators translate the inspired goals of EC into integrated courses, holistic design experiences, and comprehensive degree programs? In particular, how can liberal studies educators take a leadership role in fostering a truly integrated education for undergraduate engineers? With a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER), this project involves a planning conference that explores specific obstacles, goals, and models in achieving this curricular revolution. The holistic approach of EC builds upon some highly useful precedents in integrative education developed at a range of engineering schools, some well known and others that have worked largely in isolation. The conference takes these scattered reform efforts, develops new concepts for integrative education, and traces out their benefits, limits, and adaptability to other institutions and contexts. The gathering draws upon the expertise of leaders from five groups with a vital interest in engineering education today: engineering school deans, faculty from the technical disciplines of engineering, liberal studies educators, engineers and managers employed in industry and government, and historians of technology. Each group has a vital stake in assuring the success of EC , while each comes to the table with unique perspectives necessary in forging realistic plans to achieve that success. This project is intended as the first step in laying out the parameters and approaches for a broader effort to provide information and guidance for engineering and liberal studies and spocialscience faculty seeking to integrate the techical and non-technical elements of engineering curricula and educational experiences doc14173 none entities. And, elements of music and story schemata can be simultaneously mapped onto the architecture, further personalizing the interface. The goal of the project is to develop practitioners who understand both the formalisms of visualization and the practical aspects of human communication that deal with aesthetic interpretation doc14174 none Motamedi Recent advances in nanotechnology and bioengineering have opened the exciting prospect for promoting direct interaction of electronics, optics and biological systems. The primary obstacle to realizing this goal in the fields of neuroscience and medical devices such as prostheses is the inadequate understanding of the molecular processes involved in coupling between living neurons and nanomaterials, and how to optimize the coupling between man made materials and living systems. In this project, the intent is to investigate the dynamics and mechanisms of the live lifeless matter interaction in a model system consisting of a thin film composed of nanoparticles and cultured nerve cells. The multi-disciplinary and multi- institutional Linked Collaborative Proposals bring together several research groups with broad expertise and research interest to conduct experimental and theoretical studies aimed at characterizing the interaction that occur at the interface of nanomaterials and neurons and optimizing the interface for effective photon-activation of neurons following photonic probing of the interface of nanomaterials that are attached to the cells. The partners at Oklahoma State University lead by Dr. Kotov will carry out the materials science aspect of this project, while the investigation at the University of Texas Medical Branch lead by Dr. Motamedi will concentrate on the bioengineering and electrophysiological components of this work. Specifically, the objectives of the project are the following. (1) Preparation of biocompatible nanoparticle multilayers that can be attached to nerve cells. (2) Registration and characterization of the photoinduced nerve cell membrane currents and potentials following optical excitation of the interface as function of NP and biological structures. (3) Optimization of NP-cell coupling for different interface structure doc14175 none This project provides three years of partial core support of the Board on Mathematical Sciences (BMS) and full core support of its Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics (CATS), both groups being committees of the National Research Council. The BMS is the only prominent group in the United States wherein representatives from all the mathematical sciences---core mathematics, statistics, applied mathematics, operations research, and scientific computing---regularly meet to discuss ways to ensure and improve the intellectual vigor of the field. CATS is perhaps the premier assemblage of statistical researchers in the country, and it is similarly concerned with the intellectual vigor of its field. Both the BMS and CATS actively promote that vigor by organizing workshops and studies that focus attention on research opportunities that are ripe for exploration and, often, help to build links between the mathematical sciences and other fields of science, engineering, and medicine. To a lesser extent, they occasionally study policy issues that directly affect the health of the mathematical sciences. The requested core funding provides for two meetings each year of both CATS and BMS, an annual Department Chairs Colloquium, initiation of all projects, continuous oversight of all activities, and continuing cognizance of issues that need the attention of BMS and or CATS doc14176 none Understanding the role of individual, collective, and institutional human behavior is fundamental to an understanding of land-use and land-cover change. Human dimensions have been difficult to model, however, because of the need to incorporate the stochastic behavior of social units at multiple levels of social organization, the need to make human actions spatially explicit, and the need to be more explicit about what humans are doing and why, particularly at specific locations for specific time periods. This project examines the consequences of land-use and land-cover change in the Nang Rong district of northeast Thailand. The overall goal of this project is to develop a better understanding of human behavior in the transformation of the Earth s surface. Nang Rong serves as an appropriate laboratory for this purpose. The data available for Nang Rong are unique in their coverage of social, biophysical, and spatial domains and include three panels of individual, household, and village-level data, which were collected in , , and . A time series of remotely sensed data that includes aerial photography (beginning in ) and satellite data (beginning in ) also has been collected for the district along with a digitized base-map and a collection of derived GIS thematic coverages. Verification data has been obtained during multiple field visits, and qualitative interviews will be conducted as part of the project. The project s first aim is to develop, calibrate, and validate a cellular automaton (CA) model representing land use and land cover change over the past half century in Nang Rong. CA models provide a formal framework for investigating the behavior of complex, extended systems. The CA model to be developed in this project focuses on the spatial and temporal dynamics of deforestation, agricultural extensification, and plant succession. Rules for the CA modeling will be derived from formal theories of growth and change, and models will incorporate the results of empirical analyses. The second aim of the project is to use the CA model in dynamic simulations to explore land-use and land-cover change as both cause and consequence of patterns of village settlement in a frontier environment; road development and increases in vehicular traffic; migration and household formation as the frontier closes; land tenure; monsoonal variability; agricultural intensification; cooperative use of the hydrological layer; major shifts in world markets; electrification; the rise in television ownership; and the spread of consumerism. Results of the simulations will be used to examine the spatial distribution as well as composition of land-use and land-cover change, and they will be used to evaluate trajectories for a sample of pixels and other spatial units. The project s third aim is to package the simulations into a multimedia GIS database. This database, together with other materials explaining the situation, will be adapted to and tested for use at the secondary and college levels and then made publicly available via the Internet. Through the conduct of this project, the challengers of understanding the role of human behavior in land-use and land-cover change will be met through the development, elaboration, and evaluation of the cellular automaton (CA) modeling described above for the Nang Rong district. The temporal depth, areal extent, and grain size of the social surveys, remote images, and GIS data afford a unique capability to examine complex systems operating within a complexity theory context. The coupling of the simulation power of CA modeling, with its ability to allow for nonlinearities and feedbacks, and a rich set of empirically derived relationships will provide valuable new insights into the complex interactions among natural and human systems. The project also will facilitate collaborations between U.S. scientists and scientists at Mahidol University in Thailand. This project is an award emanating from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc14177 none Platnick This award provides support for the development of a completely automated system capable of providing species-level identifications of organisms based on digital images of specimens. The technology uses an artificial neural network and can use, as input, images transmitted over the internet. At present, obtaining species-level identifications of specimens can be a difficult undertaking. The number of trained systematizes for most groups of organisms is low; the success rate of non-specialists trying to achieve accurate identifications is often lower. Such a system has the potential to radically increase the use of biodiversity information in conservation as well as science. This project is aimed at developing software technology capable of species identification using spiders as test subjects. The approach is based on digital images of taxonomically relevant structures of the organism taken through a camera-equipped dissecting microscope. The images are subjected to wavelet transformation, a procedure that extracts shape information from the image while removing less useful, high-resolution information. By this procedure, the image is reduced to a set of wavelet coefficients that can be supplied to a computing algorithm known as an artificial neural network. Such networks are capable of learning to classify objects. The goal is creation of a system with a 95% accuracy in identification. In the first phase of the project, three datasets will be used: images of two families of Australasian spiders (Trochanteriidae and Prodidomidae), and third set of images defined geographically rather than taxonomically. This geographic set includes specimens from three consecutive years of collecting at selected sites in Tennessee, and is typical of ecological inventory data. In the second phase, a web interface that allows submission of images for identification over the internet will be developed. At present, a severely limiting factor on our understanding of community structure, diversity, and how diversity relates to ecosystem function and resulting human services is the lack of experts capable of identifying biological specimens to species. Thus, the potential impact of automated identification is enormous. A system that can identify any species in a particular family, or from a particular area, without requiring the user to have more than the most basic knowledge of the organism to be identified, has the potential to drastically improve the efficiency and scope of biological inventories, and subsequent monitoring efforts doc14178 none Eshleman SGER: Biogeochemical response mechanisms controlling nitrogen export from defoliated forests in the Eastern U.S. The excessive leakage of dissolved nitrogen (N) from forests defoliated by insects has water quality ramifications for small acid-sensitive streams as well as for downstream receiving waters such as Chesapeake Bay. Controlled laboratory experiments have shed some light on these mechanisms, but they are of limited applicability to actual forest ecosystems. Few field studies have been conducted, primarily due to the relative unpredictability of defoliation outbreaks. The goal of this Small Grant for Exploratory Research project is to take advantage of the recently-forecasted reoccurrence of extensive gypsy moth defoliation in western Maryland. The investigators will conduct a detailed, process-based study of the biogeochemical mechanisms controlling N leakage from disturbed forests in this area by comparing rates of key biogeochemical processes controlling N leakage in forested plots subjected to gypsy moth defoliation with rates in plots not defoliated. In addition, the investigators intend to compare concentrations of dissolved N species in streams draining defoliated and reference watersheds and use remote sensing imagery to detect, map, and estimate the regional-scale extent and intensity of gypsy moth defoliation during the growing season doc14179 none The conference, Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology, provides a general forum for disseminating the most recent developments in bioinformatics. Bioinformatics has become an increasingly important tool for understanding biology, driven by genomic sequence efforts and other large data sets in biology. The meeting brings together scientists from computer science, molecular biology, mathematics and statistics. The systems include cutting-edge software and database technologies. Emphasis is placed on validation of methods using real data sets, on practical applications in the biological science and on development of novel computational techniques. The funds will provide travel support for students and young investigators who submit applications and are required to present either a paper or poster at the meeting doc14180 none This project is investigating the thermodynamic properties associated with the growth of small aerosols (approximately 3-50 nm) in the laboratory as a function of composition, temperature and size. At present, very little is known about very small particles that serve as the critical nuclei for nucleation and input for models of aerosol formation and growth in the atmosphere and large discrepancies exist between model predictions and field observations. This work is expected to lead to a greater understanding of the Kelvin effect (particle surface-tension effect) on particle phase transitions and the new particle formation of pure aerosols. During the final phase of the study, size-selected field samples will be collected and analyzed for comparison with the laboratory results doc14181 none This proposal argues that spatial complexity of vegetation plays a central role in the structure and function of temporally variable, arid and semi-arid ecosystems. Complexity results from movement-mediated linking of less complex spatial units by herbivores and humans into spatially extensive, complex systems. But modern human land use and land tenure systems tend to deplete spatial biocomplexity through fragmentation of ecosystems into isolated and simplified units. Ecosystem fragmentation is often justified as a means of economic intensification in the neo-classical framework, but in fact, it costs money to replace the natural capital lost through fragmentation. As a result of fragmentation, many of the world s arid and semi-arid grazed ecosystems are dysfunctional to varying degrees. The goal of this project is to demonstrate the importance of spatial complexity, the costs of fragmentation, and to identify options for sustainability at sites around the world by linking ecological and socio-economic research, and in the process, create an international network of scientists addressing these issues. The project focuses on 21 sites in nine countries on four continents. The interdisciplinary scientific team includes ecologists, anthropologists, economists, and political scientists. The project will include case study syntheses, field-based investigations, and model experiments and analyses. The project is expected to promote a higher level of understanding of spatial-temporal distribution of complexity, its importance in grazed systems, why and how complexity is reduced through fragmentation, and what this means for ecosystems and economic activities doc14182 none Because of its high performance, low cost, and compatibility with silicon CMOS, SiGe HBT technology has recently emerged as a contender for both mobile and optical networking applications. Current SiGe HBTs designs are focused on improving the speed of these devices, while our recent experiments have shown that the optimum device structure for wireless applications are considerably different. Issues important for mobile and optical networking, such as 1 f noise, phase noise (frequency domain sideband and time domain jitter), and linearity, have not been researched as a function of the device structure, or optimized for these performance targets. This proposal is aimed at systematically examining the impact of bandgap engineering and scaling on all of the device figures-of-merit that are of interest to both wireless and optical communication IC s, and use of these results to optimize the SiGe profiles and geometries for next generation SiGe HBTs. We expect the design tradeoffs to be much more complicated than in first generation SiGe HBTs, because of aggressive vertical and horizontal scaling to achieve high speed operation (as high as 200GHz cutoff frequency and maximum oscillation frequency). In the process, we will answer scientifically intriguing and technologically important questions, such as why SiGe HBTs with a nonlinear I-V can have excellent linearity. This is a brand new area of SiGe device research, and has a high potential payoff given the exploding industry interest in applying SiGe technology to wireless and optical networking systems. The outcome will include a scientific understanding of important open questions on SiGe HBTs, a modification of the design approach and methodology, as well as data of the key device figures-of-merit as a function of SiGe profile. Given the enormous amount of interest in applying SiGe technology to both wireless and optical networking applications, we will develop an advanced course on SiGe HBTs, so that the outcome of the proposed research can be remotely accessed by graduate students and practicing engineers in industry doc14183 none The Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU) is the recipient of an award for summer internship support. HACU, a national, non-profit organization, has a long and distinguished record of providing summer internship opportunities through the organization s National Internship Program (NIP). Through the NIP academically prepared students throughout the US and Puerto Rico have received quality internship assignments through various federal government agencies. Students who participate in the NIP are exposed to various career options in the Federal sector that serve as a basis in helping them make informed career choices and solidify career objectives. By partnering with the Federal government, HACU has been able to successfully place over 2,700 students, representing 27 states and PR, in summer positions since NIP commenced in . In an effort to continue its collaboration with HACU, the National Science Foundation, a participating government agency for the last five years, will offer challenging assignments that will broaden the exposure of participants pursuing careers in science, mathematics, engineering and technology (SMET). Internship opportunities create an unique opportunity to assist in the fulfillment of two core strategies related the goals of NSF s mission: developing intellectual capital, and integrating research and education. As a result the Foundation actively participates in strengthening the infrastructure to achieve excellence in SMET education doc14184 none Granick This work will provide a critical experimental assessment of the stick boundary condition of continuum hydrodynamics. The stick assumption is presently one of the cornerstones of calculation regarding fluid flow in tribology yet recent theories and experiments raise the exciting possibility that surfaces can be engineering to produce the boundary condition of partial slip. The approach will consist of testing the classical Reynolds Equation of continuum hydrodynamics for cases where systematic prior experiments do not yet exist: partially-wetted surfaces (finite contact angle of the fluid on the surface) and variable surface roughness (the roughness will be topographical, chemical, and lubrication additives). For measurement, a modified surface forces apparatus will be operated at spacings large enough (10-200 nm) that intervening Newtonian fluids are believed to behave as a continuum. Nanometer-level oscillatory modulations of film spacing will be performed such that the amplitude and frequency of modulation are varied independently, allowing the mean velocity to vary over a wide range without large change of the film thickness. First, we will put to direct test recent theoretical predictions and molecular dynamics simulations that predict breakdown of stick boundary conditions when low-viscosity fluids fail to wet completely a smooth solid boundary. Secondly, we will extend this work to patchy surfaces - surfaces that are chemically and geometrically rough - to test theoretical predictions that stick boundary conditions of fluid flow stem from the presence of roughness. Third, we will extend this work to hairy surfaces - surfaces that bear surface-attached polymer chains. This is the situation that prevails in oil lubrication owing to the presence of polymer additives. It is the situation that prevails in biolubrication owing to the presence of surface-attached biomacromolecules. The engineering impact will be to point the way to new ways by which energy dissipation can be controlled during lubricant flow. The main applications will pertain not so much to the high-load conditions characteristic of heavy machines, as to the low-load conditions characteristic of emerging nanotechnologies and micromachines doc14185 none Pruning Techniques for More Expressive Planning This is the first year funding of a two year continuing award. Solving more expressive planning problems is important because many practical problems fall in this category. It is important to be able to control search in the synthesis of these plans. This project involves development of various pruning techniques for more expressive planning. These are based on identifying various flaws in partial plans and the costs of resolving them. An efficient conjunctive planner and an efficient disjunctive planner will be modified to handle universal quantifiers, functions, metric time and continuous variables. These planners will use pruning techniques developed in this project. The results of the project will improve understanding of efficient synthesis of plans in more expressive domains like NASA s Deep Space One mission doc14186 none WTTW, the public television station in Chicago, is developing a science education project targeted at children aged 6 to 10. The major components of the project will be a 13-part animated television series, an interactive webpage and multiple outreach components for individuals and families. The television series features a pair of animal astronauts -- an eager dog named Billie and a reluctant flea named Miles -- as they travel through space in search of science adventure. The two work together to explore problems, solve mysteries and survive adventures while aboard their doghouse-shaped spaceship and on the worlds they discover throughout the universe. In each episode, using an inquiry-based method of problem solving, Billie and Miles embark on a new adventure and explore a single science concept in depth, approaching it from many different ways appropriate to their respective personalities. Science content for the series is being developed by Ian Saunders, previously Head Science Writer for Bill Nye the Science Guy; Dr. Edward Atkins, President of Science Productions for TV who has developed science programming for Children s Television Workshop and WNET; and Dr. Jose Rios, Assistant Professor for Science Education at the University of Washington, Tacoma. The series will be produced by WTTW in partnership with Nelvana Ltd., the animation company for The Magic School Bus. Formative evaluation during the planning phase will be conducted by Dr. Barbara Flagg of Multimedia Research. The major activities during the planning stage include: 1) Convening the core advisors to develop the science content bible, finalize age-appropriate content goals, suggest ideas and strategies for presenting the science, and organizing principles consistent with the National Science Education Standards and the AAAS Benchmarks. 2) The group also will examine a range of creative issues that bear directly on the effective delivery of science content. 3) Development and formative testing for a short animation prototype that will illustrate one of the series science concepts. This segment will be tested to assess the appeal of its style and its efficacy in communicating science. 4) Continuation of work with Nelvana to develop character sketches and background, create storylines and write a pilot script. 5) Validate and expand on the current outreach concept doc14187 none Jeffrey A. Walker When an object, such as a cube, is reduced to smaller and smaller sizes, its surface area to volume ratio increases proportionally. This scaling relationship has large consequences on how animals move through air and water because inertia (mass) and friction are functions of volume and area, respectively. Animals slightly larger or faster than a fruitfly (about 2 mm long) live in a world dominated by inertia. In this world, oscillating wings or fins create swirling vortexes that result from the fluid separating from the propulsive structure as it flows by. These separations create unusually large forces that wreak havoc for airplanes with rigid wings (they are the source of stall) but recent work has shown that the separations and sometimes the vortices can be exploited by animals with oscillating appendages. Animals that are slightly smaller or slower than a fruitfly live in a world where friction results in a significant component of the net force generated by a propulsive structure. Friction weakens vortices and delays or entirely stops separation. A large friction component, then, must have profound effects on the design of small swimming and flying animals and, indeed, the propulsive appendages of small animals show remarkable convergence among diverse taxa (the phyla Arthropoda, Chordata, and Mollusca), anatomy (antennae, wings, fins, legs, feet), behaviors (swimming and flying) and fluid media (air and water). The objective of the current proposal is to investigate how small, oscillating appendages generate forces in air or water, how the propulsive mechanisms change with scale (size and speed), and how the optimal design of an appendage changes with scale. Appendage shape and motion will be measured in various groups of small animals that span the relevant size range including the sea butterflies (swimming snails with reduced or lost shells), small wasps, and water beetles. Forces on oscillating plates that replicate the conditions found in oscillating appendages of small animals will be measured across a range of sizes. Despite the fact that animals swimming or flying with oscillating appendages at small scales comprise a large portion of described animal species, little is known about how oscillating appendages work at the low end of this range and how the force generating mechanisms scale with size and speed. The proposed research will be the first to systematically study the scaling of appendage shape, motion, and function in this important size range doc14188 none Submitted under the guidelines for Developmental Centers for Learning and Teaching, this twelve-month project would do the developmental planning to establish a center for SMET education for grades 5-12 in greater Philadelphia. The project would be based at Temple University. The region served would be southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey. Other players in the collaboration include Millersville and Cheney Universities in PA, Delaware State, and several community colleges in PA and NJ. Also included are Philadelphia (PA), Salem County, Gloucester County, and Cherry Hill (NJ) school districts. The primary mission of the proposed center will be to examine the unique needs of teaching mathematics and science to urban and urban-fringe students. There are three major goals: 1) Enhance the content and pedagogical skills of current and future mathematics and science teachers and to increase both the numbers of, and quality of, these teachers by designing programs to attract, train and mentor pre-service, novice, experienced in-service and apprentice teachers. This will include the development of a model middle school Certification Program. 2) Reshape the institutional infrastructure of faculty and graduate students who instruct math and science pre-service and in-service teachers and the infrastructure of the school districts to support these teachers. This includes attracting, training and retaining doctoral students who will be future SMET professors. 3)Design and support research in relevant aspects of mathematics and science education, with a strong emphasis on determining the role of, and value of, technology in education doc14189 none Due to the inherent instability of protein peptide drugs in aqueous solution, the successful formulation of these compounds in lyophilized form has become an important activity within the pharmaceutical industry. However, the extent to which the stability of a given protein peptide is improved in the amorphous solid-state depends on many variables including moisture, temperature, the viscoelastic properties of the solid, chemical nature of the excipients and impurities present, and the nature of the degradation pathways. Molecular dynamics simulations are uniquely suited to the exploration of various molecular details which are important in the degradation of proteins peptides in amorphous solids. The researchers will investigate how changes in molecular mobility and conformational flexibility in amorphous matrices influence both the formation of reactive intermediates and the subsequent partitioning of these reactive intermediates to products, which depends on the relative translational and rotational mobility of either the protein itself or smaller molecules which may be participants in the overall reaction doc14190 none This project aims to show how an X-ray spectroscopy apparatus can be used to probe detailed microscopic aspects of pollutant formation that occur at interfaces in combustion sources. Many pollutants are introduced into the environment as a result of combustion processes, and there is a growing realization that important pathways related to the production of the pollutants involve heterogeneous processes, i.e., surface reactions, for which, there is no clear mechanistic picture of the reaction pathways or kinetics. This project carries to develop instrumentation that generates essential information regarding how pollutants with significant health effects are formed, and thereby provide the knowledge required for reducing their production. An end-station for synchrotron-based x-ray spectroscopy experiments will be developed for monitoring microscopic aspects of combustion processes. The end-station will be a vacuum system with a temperature-regulated sample holder that can be dosed with reactants of interest. The system will be designed so that fluorescence yield XAFS(s-ray absorption fine structure) spectroscopy can be performed in a variety of ways. Different types of x-ray spectra will be generated. Extended x-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) spectroscopy will be used for determining structural information, and x-ray absorption near edge structure (XANES) spectroscopy will be used for chemical fingerprinting applications. Specifically, this end-station will be optimized for probing how chlorine-containing aromatic species (e.g., chlorophenols) are adsorbed on metal oxide surfaces, and how they react to form polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins and dibensofurans (PCDD Fs). EXAFS spectra will be used to determine how aromatic compounds (such as 2-chlorophenol) are adsorbed on oxidized metal surfaces. Also, EXAFS spectra will be used to determine structural information on reaction intermediates after the reaction has been allowed to progress. It will also be possible to generate kinetic data on combustion processes by probing a more limited spectral range, the XANES region. %%% The key point unifying these ideas is that by combining techniques from environmental science and x-ray spectroscopy, wholly new types of data can generated to elucidate chemical pathways that generate pollutants in combustion processes. Students trained in areas of instrumentation development and applications to environmental sciences, which are also priorities for U.S. industry, will be highly competitive in this job market doc14191 none Submitted under the guidelines for Centers for Learning and Teaching, the Appalachian Collaborative Center for Learning, Assessment and Instruction in Mathematics (ACCLAIM) is a five-year project designed to build a mathematics infrastructure in the Appalachian regions of Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia. ACCLAIM is a collaborative partnership among the University of Kentucky (UK), Ohio University (OU), the University of Tennessee (UT), and Marshall (MU) with the Appalachian Rural Systemic Initiative (ARSI). The mathematics infrastructure in Appalachia will be enhanced through: (a) advanced degree programs in mathematics and mathematics education, (b) job-embedded teacher preparation and professional development programs, and (c) education research in a rural context. The two goals are to: (a) build mathematics capacity and expertise in the Appalachian regions of Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia through advanced degree programs in mathematics education and through research that connects mathematics and rural education; and (b) improve the quality of mathematics teaching at the middle and high school levels in the Appalachian region through the development of collaborative networks and innovative delivery systems. To meet these goals, ACCLAIM will create and implement four interconnected initiatives: 1. Capacity Building: Doctoral cohorts of 20 students every two years, masters specialists cohorts of 30 students every year. 2. Professional Development: Professional Development Teams in middle and high schools. 3. Teacher Education: Appalachian Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators -- (AAMTE) fall and spring conferences and a listserv, needs assessment of teacher education programs, and undergraduate courses online and telelink. 4. Research: Research agenda focused on mathematics education in rural contexts: a) stimulate research, b) oversee and coordinate data collection and analysis, c) publish or disseminate best practices, d) serve as a clearinghouse for research findings, publish a newsletter -- The Rural Mathematics Educator doc14192 none Carl Akerlof Gamma ray burst sources have been observed by gamma ray sensitive instruments onboard spacecraft for several years. The nature of these sources remain a mystery. It has been known for sometime that there may be an optical event associated with the source that emits the Gamma Ray burst. This optical event associated with the Gamma ray burst source has not been confirmed. Light curves of this optical event will reveal basic physical processes and the high spatial frequency sampling will provide information sufficient to provide positions accurate enough for rapid follow-up. This experiment may enable the detection and characterization of the Gamma Ray burst source in the optical and infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum and thus lead to a critical analysis of the engine responsible for the burst doc14193 none The investigators will work towards an understanding of the region of the solar atmosphere known as the streamer belt. The main effort is to apply new tools to analyze the topology of coronal mass ejections in the solar wind and the local structure of the principal remnant of the streamer belt in the solar wind, the heliospheric current sheet. On a global scale the current sheet forms a tilted, warped, heliospheric equatorial plane, but data patterns consistent with convoluted, intertwined magnetic structures are found on the local scale. Tools used to untangle this structure will be combined with newer tools to analyze other streamer belt structures and their interrelationships. Primary among the newer tools will be composition data, which give fingerprints of solar sources. The anticipated results will advance our understanding of the sources and structure of the most complicated part of the solar wind. Some of the open questions are: To what extent does slow flow come from the edges of the coronal holes, from the streamer belt proper, or in the form of multiscale transients? To what extent can complex structures in the slow wind be ascribed to interplanetary processes rather than to solar origins? What are the magnetic topologies of the many types of structures identified in the slow wind? Why do coronal mass ejections observed as intrusions in fast flow have composition fingerprints of coronal holes if their origins are in the streamer belt? Do coronal mass ejections gradually evolve from magnetically closed to open structures? To what extent can answers to these questions be resolved in terms of a recently proposed model of general circulation of the footpoints of solar magnetic fields, which requires ubiquitous merging between open and closed field lines in the streamer belt? In addition to basic research, a handbook will be prepared as a public outreach project. Its primary purpose will be to provide guidelines for communicating to the public how coronal mass ejections can cause geomagnetic storms. In terms intelligible to the lay reader, it will point out common misconceptions and provide material for attention-grabbing descriptions that do not misinform. The handbook will be suitable not only for the press but for use as supplemental educational material for introductory courses in solar-terrestrial physics doc14194 none This project is to build the institutional capacity and partnerships needed to develop a full center for teaching and learning at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. A full center as it is envisioned will focus on issues of importance for teaching middle school science and mathematics in an urban setting. Included are such issues as the recruitment of second career professionals, upgrading the knowledge and skills of existing teachers through improved professional development programs, learning how to take advantage of the abundant resources of informal science institutions that tend to be located in urban settings, and improving the undergraduate preparation of science and math teachers. During this developmental project relationships will be developed with business, industry, the military and other sources of second-career teachers; a program will be developed to provide high school students with opportunities to teach science and mathematics to younger students; a leadership training program will be established to begin building the capacity to provide professional development to the teachers of Birmingham; and relationships will be developed with the McWane Science Center, existing outreach programs at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the Birmingham Public Schools doc14195 none Echelmeyer The Principal Investigator is requesting funds from the Antarctic Glaciology and Arctic Natural Sciences Programs to support the participation of several foreign scientists and U.S. graduate students at an International Symposium on Fast Glacier Flow. In , a Chapman Conference on Fast Glacier Flow was held to bring together scientists who were actively involved in the study of surging and fast tidewater glaciers, and ice stream flow. The meeting illuminated several outstanding problems which contributed to numerous inter-disciplinary studies in the Antarctic and Arctic. Since , there have been many important new developments in our understanding of the properties and processes involved in fast glacier flow and of its consequences in the global climate and ocean systems. For example, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet initiative has brought the roles of highly deformable subglacial till and marginal shear-zone ice dynamics to the forefront as important processes in fast glacier motion. This research has led to new approaches in the study of surging glaciers in the Arctic. Detailed studies of outlet glaciers in Greenland and tidewater glaciers in Alaska have been important in determining the roles of fast glacier flow and iceberg calving in ice sheet mass balance, as well as their roles in ice sheet disintegration and their effects on ocean circulation through Heinrich-type events. New remote sensing techniques have been used to illuminate features of ice stream flow and surge-type glaciers in both Antarctica and the Arctic, including the identification of a large ice stream in northeast Greenland and possible rapid drawdown of the Pine Island Thwaites drainage basins in Antarctica. Because of these exciting new developments, the Principal Investigator will host an International Symposium on Fast Glacier Flow in sponsored by the International Glaciological Society in Yakutat, Alaska. Yakutat is located among the largest and most active tidewater and surging glaciers in the North America. The meeting will be organized through the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska - Fairbanks. This proposal seeks funds to partially defray the cost of organizing and carrying out this symposium. Bringing together Antarctic and Arctic scientists working on these different aspects of rapid ice motion should promote vigorous discussion and an exchange of ideas on the current state of knowledge. The symposium will focus on the most pressing unanswered questions of fast glacier flow, leading to discussions of future directions for international, inter-disciplinary research. Peer-reviewed papers resulting from oral and poster presentations at the symposium will be published in the Annals of Glaciology doc14196 none This proposal is to build the institutional capactiy and partnerships needed to develop a full center for teaching and learning at West Virginia University. A full center as it is envisioned will focus on issues of importance for teaching science and mathematics in rural settings. These issues include aspects of geography, the importance of indigenous knowledge, infrastructure needs and limited financial resources. The center will also focus on ways to integrate and coordinate the various sciences, mathematics and technology content areas at the middle and high school levels, both within and across subject areas. During this developmental project a study group will be formed to assess the needs at each of eight regional math and science consortia (RMSCs) and another set of study groups will be formed to study issues of concern to the project. These include research on learning and teaching in rural settings, characterizing indigenous knowledge, ways to provide learning support to students with special needs, legislative and industrial support, barriers to implementation, professional development programs and interdisciplinary math and science content doc14197 none The Diversity in Mathematics Education Center for Learning and Teaching (DiME-CLT) is building an integrated program to develop and enhance the instructional workforce from kindergarten through graduate school. The program consists of three interrelated components: a doctoral postdoctoral component; a teacher education component for teachers and instructional leaders; and a comprehensive research agenda. These components are integrated by a strong focus on the ideas of algebra and issues related to learners with diverse cultural, language and cognitive backgrounds. The Center is a consortium led by mathematics and education faculty of three research universities, two school-system partners, and a group of teacher professional development providers -- the University of Wisconsin--Madison, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, Los Angeles, the Madison Metropolitan School District, the Berkeley Unified School District, and the California Subject Matter Project. The University of Wisconsin is the grantee institution. Two cohorts of 15 students are being recruited into the doctoral programs at the three institutions (five per institution). Four new courses are being developed to become a common core for these programs. Master s programs and existing in-service work with the Madison and Berkeley schools and the California Subject Matter Project are preparing a diverse group of mathematics teachers to assume leadership roles in their schools, districts and states. The centerpiece of the DiME-CLT is the community of scholars, including the faculty, doctoral and masters students, participating teachers, and undergraduates, who engage in the collective analysis of cases of mathematical learning and teaching using Web-based software. Cases are developed and placed on the common Web site and participants analyze the cases in multiple ways using different sets of theoretical lenses. This cross-institutional, cross-disciplinary collaboration is being studied as part of the Center s evaluation; the results of that study are being published so that other institutions can launch their own efforts at preparing people to teach mathematics to an increasingly diverse student population doc14198 none Submitted under the guidelines for Developmental Centers for Learning and Teaching, this one-year project is a collaboration among Appalachian State University, Louisiana State University, Rice University and the University of Houston, Downtown. The universities will partner with school systems, museums, observatories and industries to provide a support network that will enhance the preparation and continuing professional development of teachers, while involving mathematicians, scientists and their students in mutually beneficial collaborative activities with teachers, their school systems and their students. All the institutions already have working relationships with school systems that serve at-risk students. Support by a foundation grant in their professional development of mathematics and science teachers first brought the four institutions together. As research aims, the proposed Center will explore two recurring themes: the importance of context (geographic, social, economic, etc.) and of informal enrichment of formal methods of instruction in learning mathematics and science. Working with science museums, observatories, school districts and industrial partners, they will develop plans to integrate and expand their science and mathematics education activities to address critical national needs in the following ways: increase the quality and number of teachers of mathematics and science being prepared at the four partner universities through scholarships and increased opportunities for meaningful field-based experiences; strengthen and extend mathematics and science programs for in-service teachers, especially in the development of support teachers -- those who will take leading roles in interactions with novice teachers and university students; increase the quality and number of doctorates of mathematics and science education being prepared at LSU through scholarships and through internships with the other partner universities; develop fertile environments for research in mathematics and science education in the partner universities, schools, museums, and observatories; and support doctoral dissertation studies within this research environment doc14199 none Online Weather Studies: Promoting Diversity and Collegial Faculty Development in Undergraduate Institutions Serving Minority Populations The American Meteorological Society (AMS) proposes a project that will enable thousands of undergraduate minority students who would not otherwise have the opportunity to be introduced to studies in meteorology. In cooperation with the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS), the Department of Geosciences at Elizabeth City State University, NC as focal point for a broad HBCU initiative, faculty members at numerous other minority-serving institutions across the country, and the highly regarded UCAR SOARS Program, the AMS proposes to increase access and opportunities for the educational and research participation of significant numbers of undergraduate students who are members of groups under-represented in the geosciences. This project will attain this goal by making available to minority-serving colleges and universities Online Weather Studies, an existing NSF-supported AMS-developed distance-learning course on the basics of meteorology, coupled with substantial faculty professional development and student mentoring programs. Faculty development in this project features scientific and pedagogical components, along with in-depth treatment of diversity issues, appropriate to offering compelling meteorological student learning experiences. Highly motivational learning experiences are designed to encourage students to consider additional study in the geosciences leading to scientific or Earth science teaching careers doc14200 none The southern Bering Sea and central North Pacific region is considered to be one of the world s most important fisheries. Yet recent catastrophic declines in many species including salmon, Steller sea lion, sea otter, and some pelagic birds show that this ecosystem is neither healthy nor sustainable given modern harvesting rates. Explanations for declines in many species, particularly in relation to several species of salmon, have been monocausal and political without detailed investigations of the relationships between predators (humans and sea mammals) and their prey in this region. Using biological and ecological data, paleoclimatic reconstructions, archaeological data on subsistence and harvesting rates, historic and modern catch and escapement records, ethnographic reports and traditional ecological knowledge, this project will use Swarm agent-based modeling routines to investigate the dynamics of human-salmon-ecosystem interactions in the southern Bering Sea region of Alaska. The multidisciplinary investigative team will develop methods to directly test a number of relationships associated with direct and indirect impacts of changes in one or more sets of human and or natural systems on the others. This project will begin with a series of monocausal simulations based on natural predator-prey interactions, cultural harvesting strategies, and long-term changes in the Bering Sea ecosystem. The investigators will follow these simulations with multivariate tests in order to investigate interactions between various possible agents. This multivariate testing of simulations should help identify important interaction effects among different agents, even when individual agents have been shown no substantial influence on salmon fisheries. This project will assess the independent and interdependent roles of both human and non-human agents in the modeling process. Humans have lived in the Bering Sea region for at least 10,000 years, and there has never been a time in recent history where humans did not play an important role in the regional ecosystem. This project also will add to knowledge regarding the interplay of agents across multiple temporal and spatial scales. Data will be included from such diverse scales as seasonal catch records of an individual boat, 4,000-year nutrient cycles from lake cores, and a 6,000-year archaeological record of faunal remains. The project also will use of local and indigenous knowledge and will involve local residents in the evaluation of the models and results. The project also should have significant practical implications as it assesses the structure and dynamics of salmon productivity and success in the complex Bering Sea ecosystem. This project is an award emanating from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc14201 none This development grant is a collaborative effort of three informal science education institutions (St. Louis Science Center, The Missouri Botanical Gardenand the Saint Louis Zoo), Washington University in St. Louis and St. Louis Public Schools. The project will build on and learn from elements of informal settings and free-choice learning to enhance learning and teaching in formal settings. Specific goals for the developmental period are to (1) strengthen the collaboration among the institutions; (2) test and refine ideas related to the focus on informal science institutions as a primary vehicle for SMT education in an urban setting; (3) identify strengths and barriers to existing and proposed professional development models; and (4) evaluate the models. To accomplish the goals, the collaborating institutions will conduct a series of focus groups, identify and bring together other potential partners, commission a case study by the John M. Olin School of Business at Washington University for a supply warehouse to circulate hands-on science supplies for classroom use, and develop a model for reciprocal internships between schools and the informal sites. They will continue to refine their research goals of identifying the most appropriate combination of informal science institution and formal institutional attributes which will result in the most effective science and mathematics learning for students and professional development for teachers. The developmental project will also allow for the further development of graduate level courses focused on the effective use of informal science institution resources in formal settings doc14202 none Dr. Rose and his collaborators will conduct two intensive excavation and analysis seasons at Hierakonpolis, located 650 miles south of Cairo. The site is clearly associated with the birth of the ancient Egyptian state, and has produced spectacular finds, such as the Narmer Palette and the large ceremonial mace-heads of King Scorpion and Narmer, the earliest Egyptian kings. These objects and the size of the site indicate its importance as a possible capital of an early kingdom prior to unification. No other site can tell us as much about when and how Egypt was transformed from a scatter of farming villages into a great kingdom of the ancient world. Hierakonpolis is the first where there are three widely separated and distinct class cemeteries: elites, skilled middle class, and laboring poor. We focus on the cemetery of the working class. The site is also unique for the level of preservation where the hot dry sand has preserved delicate matting, basketry, fabric and food stuffs, as well as human skin, fingernails, hair, internal organs, stomach contents and human feces. Teams of will excavate and comprehensively analyze 200 skeletons each season. Skeletal and dental analyses will be used to reconstruct differences in diet, disease, stress, and work loads between social classes. We propose to use the skeletal and archaeological data to test the following: if the elites, skilled middle class, and laboring poor all derived from the same population; if disease, stress, and parasite loads low enough not to suppress per capita production of the laboring poor; if the laboring class received sufficient nutrition to maintained a high level of economic output; and if the laboring class was able to produce the surpluses necessary to support the other classes without exceeding normal levels of effort by looking at arthritis. This site is highly threatened by agricultural development and within several years will be completely destroyed by bulldozing. Increased soil moisture which results from irrigation will also cause the deterioration of fragile materials which have been preserved in the dry desert environment. Thus this research must be conducted now doc14203 none Two interdisciplinary workshops will focus on ecological change and human impacts during the Holocene on the Aleutian Islands. The Aleutian Islands represent a model ecosystem to track human-environment interactions over the past 10,000 years. The Aleutians contain a 9,000-year record of human occupation. For most of the Holocene, the archipelago has formed the boundary between the North Pacific Rim and Bering Sea. The region is a rich ecotone with ocean fisheries, large sea mammal populations, thick kelp forests, complex near-shore ecosystems and intertidal zones, spawning streams, and a highly diverse avian fauna. The workshops will be used to (1) identify existing oceanographic, climatological, geophysical, and biological data that document complex environmental change in the Aleutians; (2) identify research areas and investigators needed to provide additional data necessary to reconstruct environmental change in the Aleutians; and (3) correlate existing data from the physical and biological sciences with the recorded history of human occupation of, and adaptation to, the island chain; and (4) design a research strategy to provide a more precise temporal framework for Holocene environmental change and concomitant human responses. This project is an award emanating from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc14204 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Stephen Sulkin at the Shannon Point Marine Center (SPMC), Western Washington University (WWU) to renovate a current lecture hall into a training and research laboratory. The goal of SPMC is to develop a facilities base that can support the research of resident and visiting scientists; can promote a focused, sophisticated instructional opportunity for students; and can contribute scientific information to marine resource agencies. The new facility will meet a critical need at SPMC for appropriately designed space that can support the maintenance of marine organisms in laboratory culture. The marine plants and animals cultured in this facility will be used to train undergraduates and Masters of Science students. These cultured species are used extensively by resident and visiting scientists and form the basis of collaborative scientific efforts among scientists and students at SPMC and between SPMC and other institutions nationwide. The space to be renovated has become available with the completion of a lecture hall in a new building. Project renovations will include installation of a glassware wash sink, laboratory preparation area, and laboratory benches, replacement of carpeting with tile flooring, addition of ventilation to an adjacent microscope room, provision of seawater to the main lab room, and extension of emergency standby electrical power to support temperature control cabinets. Research and training of undergraduates are closely linked at SPMC. Students from around the nation participating in a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site and Minorities in Marine Science Undergraduate Program will use the new facility, as will WWU undergraduates and graduate students. The renovated facility will support student research on the role of climate change on food webs and coral reef biology, the use of chemical defenses by prey to avoid predation (and thus influence food web dynamics), and the importance of early life stages in the population dynamics of ecologically and commercially important fisheries species (such as the Dungeness crab and Pacific herring doc14205 none The process for designing an integrated circuit (IC) system-on-a-chip (SoC) shares many similarities with the hardware design of a system on a board or on several boards. The hardware system designer knows the characteristics of the set of system input signals that are to be processed, and the characteristics of the set of system output signals. There are usually several signal processing architectures that can accomplish the goal and the designer must evaluate the tradeoffs that are inherent in the various designs. Board-level hardware system designers have to use available standard commercial components for the most part to create the system of desired functionality. Sometimes requirements allow for the creation of custom ICs, and occasionally a few transistors and discrete components are used to provide proper interfaces among chips. Designers evaluate the potential that various components have for meeting overall system performance requirements based upon the components terminal characteristics. From the designers skill and insight, an architecture is selected, the hardware realization breadboarded, and evaluated. In the process of designing an SoC IC, the terminal characteristics of the SoC inputs and outputs must be known. Often, proven board-level hardware realizations of the function are referred to as possible architectures for the SoC. These proven board-level architectures are defined in terms of the interconnection of the group of commercial products that provide various signal processing sub-functions. The SoC architecture can also be defined in terms of these sub-function modules. Partitioning the SoC into blocks that correspond to the sub-functions successfully used in board-level designs is usually convenient because the characteristics of the sub-functions interconnecting signals are well understood. The performance required of each of the SoC sub-functions must be inferred from the performance specifications of the overall SoC. However, the SoC IC designers do not have available these sub-functions as performance-characterized cells laid out in the target fabrication technology. The SoC IC design team usually has to create each of the sub-function blocks as a custom IC cell. The transistor-level topologies of analog and digital functional blocks are then identified and evaluated. Existing CAD tools are capable of sizing MOS transistors of circuits with modest complexity to customize the circuit to meet design specifications through performance function minimization. One SoC IC design problem is to select the sub-function performance requirements in such a way as to optimize the overall SoC performance. It is possible to find these optimized sub-functions performance requirements using the overall SoC performance specifications and performance function optimization techniques. A new CAD tool that can optimize the SoC sub-function performances based upon the overall SoC performance requirements will be created. The resultant optimized sub-function performance requirements can then become the inputs to other existing design optimization CAD tools that perform subsequent more-detailed design automation steps to create the transistor-level circuit realizations. Integrated micro-systems, systems-on-a-chip, will be very complex combinations of analog, digital, mixed-signal, photonic, and MEMS signal processing functions. The analysis, design, and design verification of such a system is incredibly complicated, and will require the use of many very sophisticated CAD tools. At the present time and in the near future, it is unrealistic to expect a single integrated suite of CAD design tools to be able to provide all of the capabilities needed to design, layout, and verify the functionality of an SoC that includes extensive digital functionality, and analog, mixed-signal, photonic, and MEMS signal processing sub-systems. Research will be undertaken on an integrated micro-system design automation tool that will optimize the performance of a complex mixed-signal signal-processing SoC entirely at the conceptual level. Research in behavioral modeling, high-level system performance specification, and performance optimization by objective function minimization will be undertaken to support this effort. To facilitate this overall goal, flexible, accurate, computationally efficient, technology-independent, implementation-independent, high-conceptual-level behavioral models that reflect all important limiting effects of the function that could influence SoC performance are required that represent the many diverse possible actions that can be taken by the various subsystems of an SoC. Analog, digital, mixed-signal, photonic, and MEMS devices that may be included on an SoC will considered in this research. One deliverable is a fully documented design environment that supports the capture of an SoC functional description as an interconnection of sub-functions defined in a library of high-conceptual-level behavioral models, and capture of the SoC performance requirements and specifications. This design environment will also facilitate highly efficient system simulation using the behavioral models and an analysis engine. Another deliverable is a fully documented library of technology-independent, implementation-independent, high-conceptual-level, behavioral models. All results will be available for use by others on a project web site. Libraries of behavioral models and behavioral modeling tools will be organized into a designer toolbox . This CAD tool will be created in standard programming languages and will be easily disseminated doc14206 none Santelmann Ecologically healthy urban landscapes, including wetlands and natural areas, can help maintain water quality, water quantity, and biodiversity and fulfill human social and aesthetic needs. However, some of the functions we desire urban wetlands to perform can impair the ability of these urban wetlands to perform other desired functions well. This project will establish partnerships among public agencies, educators, and interdisciplinary teams of scientists from three regions of the US to summarize the state of our knowledge of wetlands in the urban landscape, and propose directions for future research. A product of this research will be improved understanding of complex relationships among wetland functions, as well as an understanding of social systems and community characteristics of urban areas in which wetlands are included and valued in the urban landscape. This knowledge may assist planners in efforts to achieve optimal functioning of urban wetlands and natural areas at a landscape scale doc14207 none Shaking up the future of Hispanic students in rural southwest Arizona Arizona Western College (AWC), a two-year institution situated in rural southwestern Arizona, has a student population of about 62% under-represented minorities, most of whom are first-generation, low-income students of Hispanic origin. Shaking up the future of Hispanic students in rural southwest Ariona is a three-phase geoscience education program to indentify, recruit, and train talented under-represented students in geoscience. The linchpin of the program is a local reserach-quality seismic network comprising three broadband seismometers. Yuma is situated on the east perimeter of the seismically-active Salton Trough; a transtensional basin located at the southern end of the San Andreas Transform system. Most area residents have felt earthquakes and students in geosciece classes show an interest and enthusiasm in their origin and potential societal impact. The project will recruit local minority high school students by engaging them in a topical sciecne issue that impacts border communities in Arizona and California. The AWC Seismic Observatory in geoscience education is a joint effort of the Arizona Western College and the University of Arizona s Southern Arizona Seismic Observatory (SASO). Phase I of the three-phase program involves an annual 2.5 week summer seismic program where high school students and AWC geoscience majors explore the nature of earthquakes in the field and laboratory. In Phaes II, high school students will bridge up to one AWC s three geoscience programs. As part of the geoscience curriculum, students will work in the seismic observatory with a graduate student from SASO and participate in frequent regional field trips. In Phase III, student participants move to geoscience programs at the University of Arizona or other institutions. The relationships fostered in Phase I and II will serve as an academic bridge connecting AWC students to faculty in the Geoscience Department at the University of Arizona doc14208 none The Center for Learning and Teaching in the West (CLT-West) is a consortium of five universities -- Montana State University, Portland State University, the University of Montana, Colorado State University, and the University of Northern Colorado -- formed to meet the needs of under-represented students who have traditionally not benefited from SMET educational reform. It includes partnerships with Ft. Belknap College in Montana, other community and tribal colleges, Portland Public Schools, and sixty-eight rural and reservation schools in Montana and Colorado. The project s goals are to increase the number of qualified mathematics and science teachers; provide professional development and support to math and science teachers in low-income and high minority schools in the West s inner city and rural schools; investigate how technology can improve graduate education programs; and prepare leaders in science and mathematics education. The project addresses CLT program goals in a variety of ways. It builds an infrastructure that is likely to be institutionalized in these states and supports new approaches to reaching a broader community. CLT-West establishes Fellows , a multi-disciplinary group of pre-doctoral and post-doctoral students, and Faculty Fellows to conduct research, team teach new courses, work with colleagues on the reform of upper division science and mathematics courses for preservice teachers and or provide professional development to schools and districts involved with the Center. The Center will educate 75 pre-doctoral and post-doctoral students. In addition, the professional development plan will impact 520 math and science teachers with programs consistent with the Center s goals yet catered to the local needs. Those teachers come from schools that serve just under 40,000 students, who are predominantly from under-represented groups in SMET. The extensive collaborative effort across departments, campuses and states is a model for sharing expertise, curricula and reform methods, and the utilization of technology to maximize learning. CLT-West s work with targeted populations and districts should produce a national research base for connecting university and college faculties with the needs of under-represented students in science and mathematics doc14209 none The Center for Informal Learning and Schools (CILS) is a five-year collaborative effort between the Exploratorium in San Francisco, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and King s College London. The purpose of the Center is to study the intersection of informal science learning that takes place in museums and science centers and formal learning that takes place in schools, and to prepare leaders in informal science education. Through the efforts of the center, new doctoral level leaders will be prepared who understand how informal science learning takes place and how informal institutions can contribute to science education reform. A Ph.D. program will be offered to 16 individuals at King s College London (two cohorts of eight) and a post-doctoral program to six scientists interested in issues of learning and teaching in informal settings. A doctoral program is planned at the University of California at Santa Cruz for 24 students, 12 whose interests are primarily in education and 12 who come from the sciences. In addition to doctoral level training, there will be a certification program for existing informal science professionals to better enable them to support teachers, students and the general public. That program will provide 160 informal science educators 120 hours of professional development experiences, and an additional 24 informal science educators with a master s degree in informal science education at UC Santa Cruz. A Bay Area Institute will be developed to serve as a central focus for all CILS activities. It will bring together researchers and practitioners; it will offer courses and workshops for graduate students; and it will provide a central location for reporting research findings and methodologies that focus on how informal learning institutions can best contribute to science education reform doc14210 none The Center for Assessment and Evaluation of Student Learning (CAESL) addresses the national need for increasing the assessment capacity within the K-12 science education system. Increasing assessment capacity means enhancing the expertise, designs, structures and supports that enable local districts and schools to use assessment as a critical tool for enhancing science learning. The primary focus of the Center will be classroom assessment practices. However, because of the enormous pressure that standardized and or state-mandated assessments place on students and teachers, the project also seeks to better align large-scale assessments with ongoing formative classroom assessments that inform teaching and improve learning. The Center is a collaboration among: the Concord Consortium; the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) University of California, Los Angeles; Stanford University; Lawrence Hall of Science; the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley; and WestEd, who will act as the coordinator. There are several major school district partners that will collaborate with the Center and serve as testbeds for Center activities and resources. The project also works with San Jose State University, a major teacher preparation institution, to co-develop and integrate a variety of assessment resources into its preservice and graduate programs. The Center s graduate programs are aimed to make significant practical, conceptual and methodological contributions to the assessment of science learning and achievement. The Graduate Schools of Education at UC-Berkeley, UCLA and Stanford will develop a cooperative approach to the masters and doctoral programs to be called the Learning and Assessment Program (LAP) for 43 students. The LAP includes a series of core courses on science, learning, cognition and assessment; testing and assessment; and curriculum, teaching and assessment. Students can telecommute to take courses at institutions other than their own, and all students will participate in a practicum on assessment development. The professional development component will be led by the Lawrence Hall of Science, the Concord Consortium, and WestEd. Participating districts will be part of three-year cohorts and assemble teams of teachers and district administrators who will participate in 15 days of professional development each year over three years, along with follow-up sessions at school sites. The professional development focuses on testing and using formative classroom assessments. Experiences and products developed as part of this component will be disseminated widely to other schools or districts through the extensive networks of the Lawrence Hall and WestEd. The applied research component examines (1) the formative and summative assessment strategies that most effectively increase student learning and understanding; and (2) how educational technology can enhance assessment practices. Finally, the project targets public understanding of assessment and the Lawrence Hall of Science and CRESST UCLA will mount a public outreach effort that translates the work of the Center for school administrators, parents and community members doc14211 none This award provides support for the development and testing of a self-contained, transportable module that will provide a sheltered, temperature-controlled interior environment for standard, rack-mounted equipment. Electric power will be provided by solar panels and a wind generator, backed up by batteries of several days capacity. The module will offer both AC and DC power for internal and external use, and will include datalogging and communications capability for practical application in a polar environment. At the South Pole Station, McMurdo Station, and almost all other inhabited camps in Antarctica, exhaust is released from aircraft, helicopters, ground vehicles, diesel generators and other sources, all of which have a potential impact on the environment. The collection of real-time pollution data at downwind locations can be used to assess the amount of pollution and the effectiveness of efforts to improve air quality. At the current time, optimal placement of the measuring instruments is severely limited by the availability of power and shelter, a limitation that the module is intended to overcome. Although designed to facilitate measurements at the South Pole, the module will be of use in a variety of other situations where remotely located equipment is to be used for long-term monitoring of environmental phenomena. The module will have zero emissions, thereby not affecting the environment that it is designed to study: and it could be placed at any location as called for by the research need doc14212 none This workshop brings together a range of researchers, including graduate students and junior faculty, from a variety of natural and social science disciplines to understand the Human Dimensions of the Arctic System (HARC). The close linkages between people and the environment, the great variability in both human and natural systems, and predictions that the polar regions will experience large impacts of global change make the Arctic a compelling region for research in to the dynamics of coupled natural and human systems. The workshop will include strong participation from the Arctic indigenous community. Research partnerships between disciplines and among researchers and indigenous representatives will be fostered by the opportunity to discuss pressing environmental, social, and cultural concerns. This project is an award emanating from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc14213 none The complex interaction among current landscape conditions, cultural values and norms, policy prescriptions, and market forces dramatically limits the usefulness of linear models as tools for understanding the complex interactions among human and natural systems in many different settings, especially the transition zones between urban and rural areas. The development of policies and other solutions for minimizing negative ecological effects and introducing possible positive ecological effects of land-use change requires tools for anticipating and evaluating the complex interactions between humans and ecological systems. To have some predictive power, these tools should characterize the nature of land-use decision making at the levels of individual households, firms, and local governments, and they should permit evaluation of the ecological effects of various decisions. Such tools should recognize economic, political, and psychological motivations for land-use and management decisions on the urban fringe as well as utilities for sale of undeveloped land. This project focuses a multidisciplinary team on developing, evaluating, and applying agent-based models of land-use and land-cover change processes and on assessing their interactions with ecosystem structure and function. The primary objectives of the project are (1) to develop agent-based models of land-use decision making at the urban fringe, (2) to compile time-series spatial land-use and land-cover data in southeastern Michigan from roughly to the present, (3) to develop and apply spatial data, indicators, and models of ecological structure and function as associated with land-use change, and (4) to evaluate policy and design options for maintaining ecosystem viability as land-use patterns change. Complementing the research activities of this multidisciplinary team will be a suite of educational activities, including the formal incorporation of the integrated land-use, decision-making, and ecosystem models into both content classes (such as environmental economics, ecology, sociology, and policy development) and methods classes (such as complex systems modeling, GIS, spatial analysis, and remote sensing). The models and tools resulting from this project will have direct utility for understanding both human and natural landscape dynamics within urban systems, and they will assist in projecting patterns of ecological change at the urban-rural fringe. Because the project focuses on enhanced understandings of individual decision making that drives land-use decisions, it will enhance capabilities to formulate and test alternative policies and interventions that could reduce environmental costs and enhance environmental benefits. Furthermore, the project s deliberate focus on the model development and application process and should result in innovative approaches for integrating agent-based models of the land-use change process with empirical observations of land purchaser, seller, developer, and agency attitudes as well as with land-use, land-cover, and ecosystem change. The project also will have a direct impact on the graduate and undergraduate education through their incorporation in a broad range of courses at the University of Michigan, and it will have broader educational and application impacts through its dissemination to the broader research, education, and practitioner communities. This project is an award emanating from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc14214 none The project will study the complex, dynamic interactions between an isolated human population and its natural environment over the course of 1,000 years, focusing on two sample landscapes in the Hawaiian Islands (specifically, Maui and Hawaii Islands). Four main research themes motivate this research: (1) determining how processes of agricultural development were linked to geomorphological and biogeochemical mosaics and gradients; (2) assessing the dynamic links between human population growth and agricultural development and intensification; (3) tracking emerging sociocultural complexity in relation to demographic growth and agricultural change; and (4) understanding how a growing human population, with an intensive agricultural economic base, affected the natural resource base. The project is multidisciplinary, and will involve collaborative fieldwork by a team of scientists representing the disciplines of archaeology, soil science, ecology, demography, and paleobotany. Fieldwork will build upon prior intensive archaeological, ecological, and pedological research by team members, but will emphasize new, integrative work on biogeochemical variation across the study landscapes, and on acquiring additional paleo-demographic and paleobotanical data necessary to address the research themes noted above. The varied data sets will be integrated using a geographic information systems approach, and hierarchical modeling will be used to test hypotheses regarding human-environment interactions over time. The project focuses on the Hawaiian Islands because this archipelago offers unique opportunities to constrain the analysis of human-environment interactions (e.g., short time scale, isolation, pronounced biogeochemical gradients). The issues to be addressed, however, are global. The cultural and natural evolutionary processes to be studied--such as unprecedented population growth, widespread deforestation, soil degradation through nutrient depletion, population migrations into marginal lands, and increased political and economic centralization and control--are all taking place today on a global scale. By studying these processes on a controlled time scale of approximately 1,000 years, this research will produce dynamic models of the causal links between such key factors, models which can help us to understand the irreversible environmental and cultural changes driven by the coupling of human and natural systems. Such models should be of considerable relevance to on-going attempts to develop sustainable human ecosystems. The results of this project will therefore be of wide interest to a range of disciplines, including ecology, demography, anthropology, economics, and biogeography. This project is an award emanating from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc14215 none This planning grant supports activities that will lead to a full research proposal on the interactions between land use change, land cover change, and climate change at the regional scale in East Africa. Plans include a workshop in East Africa, concept development for modeling, and a concept paper. The grant will enable team members from the U.S., Africa, and the U.K. to collaborate effectively in these activities and to establish modalities for collaborative preparation of the full proposal and implementation of the research project. Foreign partner institutions include the University of East Anglia, U.K., and the International Livestock Research Institute, located in Nairobi, Kenya. The research proposes application of methods, models, and analytical frameworks used in Climate Change analysis and Land Use Cover Change studies for integrated assessment of climate and its interactions with land use. The scientific focus will be on examination of the linkages between climate and land-use change, between land-use change and land-cover change, and between land-cover change and regional climate modeling. Important issues fundamental to an understanding of these linkages include interactions between spational and temporal scales, indirect and non-linear affects, and uncertainty and complexity. A more effective understanding of these linkages will have societal benefits under climate change, providing guidance for land and resource managers in East Africa and elsehwere. The project will facilitate development of international interdisciplinary collaborations, with education and training opportunities for U.S. and African graduate students. This project is an award emanating from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc14216 none The pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries play a vital role in maintaining and promoting a healthy population, and constitute a major sector of the US economy. These industries have evolved from the empirical treatment of disease to a sophisticated approach for drug development which requires a deeper understanding of the biochemistry of life processes. As a consequence, the accurate description of biomolecular interactions has become a central element in understanding disease mechanisms, and now is an essential ingredient for devising safe and effective pharmaceuticals. A variety of instruments and methods are used to characterize biomolecular interactions. This I UCRC will enable pharmaceutical and biotechnological, and instrumentation companies to work together toward the development of advanced technologies for characterizing molecular interactions doc14217 none The relative importance of human and biophysical factors in vegetation change is often not apparent in the case of slow vegetation degradation processes. One form of vegetation degradation common to rangelands is bush encroachment, which can result from chronic grazing and fire suppression. The investigators in this project have chosen to study an encroached landscape on the Botswana-South Africa border. The PIs will map historic bush encroachment and fires using historical aerial photographs and satellite images, and statistically relate these observations to several human and biophysical factors that vary spatially across the study area. They will then develop a computer model that can simulate the complex interactions between the important human and biophysical factors over time, in a manner the reproduces observed patterns in bush encroachment. This adaptive management model could prove helpful for guiding land management decisions not only in this study area but also similarly degraded rangelands elsewhere doc14218 none Reaching Out to Kids and Community with Science in San Francisco The Reaching Out to Kids and Community with Science in San Francisco (SF-ROCKS) program at San Francisco State University (SFSU) aims to increase the number of traditionally under-represented students who enter college as geoscience majors through a multi-faceted collaborative research project that will provide teacher training, student education, and several tiers of mentoring relationships. The activities include: (1) strengthening partnerships with the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) by engaging high school teachers and their students in supervised environmental research projects and training; (2) building bridges between SFSU and City College of San Francisco (CCSF), where many under-represented students in San Francisco are first introduced to geoscience at the college level; and (3) fostering mentoring relationships among SFSU geosciences faculty, undergraduate students, and high school students through guidance and supervision of field projects. SF-ROCKS also partners with local community groups and government agencies for project support and mutual benefit. The collaborative program has a research base at SFSU and satellite centers at CCSF and five high schools in eastern San Francisco in the Islais and Mission creek watersheds. At each satellite center, instructors responsible for teaching earth and environmental science work with SFSU Department of Geosciences project scientist to develop a community- centered, multi-layered, hands-on mapping and sampling partnership to identify and to monitor environmental hazards and watershed characteristics. Each satellite center focuses on the area around their school, with connections to the other centers via teacher workshops, interactions with the SFSU research base, and a comprehensive interactive web site doc14219 none This ITWF award provides support for a study of graduates of an information systems graduate program (MSIS) at Northeastern University, as well as men and women currently working in Information Technology (IT) positions, to understand the factors that influence entry and persistence of women in IT positions. The MSIS program was designed for adult learners who wished to make a career transition to the IT field. The research team will use the longitudinal data collected in the study to develop and validate a model that will predict women s IT career pathways doc14220 none This work will investigate the details of how the plasma transported by the solar wind interacts with the plasma inside the magnetosphere near the dayside magnetopause. The study will use semi-global, three-dimensional hybrid simulations in which the electrons are treated using a fluid approximation, but the ions are treated using a kinetic particle description. The 3-D simulations will provide a study of the magnetopause with more realistic boundaries than have been studied in the past. Shear flow, curvature of the boundary, and coupling of boundaries and the motion of boundaries will all be included. The regions of study will include the bow shock, the magnetosheath and the magnetopause doc14221 none INGEOS Indians into Geological Sciences This program establishes, develops, and enhances INGEOS (Indians into Geological Sciences). INGEOS is designed to build collaboration between a tribal college (White Earth Tribal and Community College, Mahnomen, Minnesota) and a major geoscience research institution (the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, North Dakota). INGEOS inititates a three-year pilot, dual-institution (major research university and tribal college), co-principal investigator-managed program specifically designed to bring Indian students up to and above the baccalaureate and masters level in the geosciences and to prepare them competitively for successful geoscience careers. INGEOS initiates an eight-point approach to academic success in a comprehensive retention-oriented program. These eight points include: mental health and challenge, physical health, social integration, financial management, technical exposure and experience, research exposure and experience, teaching experience (graduate students), and conference attendance doc14222 none Agricultural production is a complex natural-human system that involves multiple value-laden objectives and various sources of risk. One of the major risk sources to agriculture is climate variability. In many parts of the world, the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon is the major single source of climate variability on seasonal-to-interannual scales. Links between ENSO-related climate variability and agricultural production have been established for many regions, including the Pampas of Argentina, a major production region and the geographic focus of the proposed effort. Recent scientific and technological advances have made it possible to forecast, with moderate skill, ENSO events with a lead time of months. In the agricultural sector, ENSO-related climate forecasts may help to reduce risks of adverse conditions or to take advantage of favorable conditions. Simply documenting the effects of climate variability and providing better climate forecasts is not sufficient to derive benefits from the emerging predictive capability, however. The factors that make many farmers reluctant to respond to climate information requires scientific attention in order to derive significant benefits from to the climate predictions. This collaborative project between U.S. and Argentine researchers seeks to enhance understandings of the use of probabilistic climate information to support decision making in agricultural production systems; to anticipate and possibly prevent unintended negative societal consequences of climate prediction, and to inform the design of a future operational system to disseminate climate information relevant and useful to decision and policy making in agriculture. The project will involve planning workshops and preliminary research to inform the planning effort. Two planning workshops will help to frame the problems to be addressed during the planning process, identify major research needs, and design a detailed plan for future work. Major issues to be addressed during planning workshops include the major sources of uncertainty in each component of the modeling approach and the identification and explication of the assumptions and limitations associated with all models that are used. Preliminary research activities to be undertaken include individual interviews and focus groups with farmers and technical advisors in the Argentine Pampas. The preliminary work also will include a survey of institutions that produce and disseminate climate information or agricultural advice and a description of existing decision-support tools that could be adapted to include climate forecast information. This end-to-end exploration of components of a system for the use of climate information and forecasts in agriculture and other sectors will help assemble an effective multidisciplinary team of researchers drawn from the natural and social sciences. This project should foster greater knowledge about the ways through which newly available climate information can influence the complex interactions among human and natural systems like agricultural production in the Argentine Pampas may respond to the. The project should also help to lay the foundation for future work on the constraints and incentives for the effective use of climate information in benefit of society. This project is an award emanating from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc14223 none Our Ocean: Enhancing Minority Education in the Marine Sciences at a Caribbean HBCU The project is conducted by faculty in the Marine Sciences at the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI), a predominantly undergraduate, Historically Black university with campuses on the islands of St. Thomas and St. Croix. The project takes advantage of the strengths of UVI-the accessible tropical marine environment of the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean, high academic standards, and a strong track record of preparing minority undergraduates for postgraduate study in the sciences. The program works synergistically with other programs, including an NSF Historically Black Colleges and Universities Undergraduate Program cooperative agreement ( ) to address the education, economic, and cultural barriers to entry into the marine sciences that Virgin Islanders face. This project increases the number of minority Virgin Islanders entering into the marine sciences at the undergraduate and graduate levels by reducing educational, economic, and cultural barriers to entry and retention. Specific activities supporting this goal include: enhancing the interest and preparation in the marine sciences of minority high school students through a six-week, on-campus summer enrichment activity; increasing enrollment and retention in UVI s Marine Biology BS curriculum by providing one new 4-year tuition scholarship to a minority Virgin Island student each year for 3 years; strengthening preparation for post-baccalaureate study and or careers in marine sciences by supporting mentored undergraduate research projects per semester for three years; and developing programs to increase awareness and interest in marine fields doc14224 none This award provides support for a 3-year study to better understand the factors relevant to Latino s involvement in Information Technology (IT) careers. The study will examine various factors influencing the attenuated representation of Latinos in IT jobs, career paths, and appropriate educational experiences. The research approach will be longitudinal using a cross-sectional approach to gather quantifiable as well as qualitative data that encompasses the many decisions and influences that occur between late-adolescence and early IT careers. The research approach will also be multi-level examining the decisions and behaviors of Latinos as affected by: (1) family dynamics including socioeconomic standing, role models, and immigration history; (2) school structure, policies, student population, and programs, at three levels within K-16; (3) community characteristics and dynamics; and (4) regional economies and markets. Data will be gathered from four metropolitan areas with high concentrations of Latino residents: Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago and New York doc14225 none SACNAS: Initiatives for Equity in the Geosciences This project of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) seeks to recruit Native American and Chicano Latino undergraduate students in the geosciences, environmental sciences, earth sciences, and astronomy each year for the next five years to attend and to participate in the SACNAS National Conference. The project also supports a session at the annual SACNAS conference that will focus on advances in the geosciences. Prospective student candidates are contacted and informed of the SACNAS initiative and offered financial assistance in the form of travel and lodging grants to attend the National Conference. At the conference, students attend small group workshops, present research posters, participate in scientific symposia, and exchange ideas in meaningful one-on-one interactions with scientists, teachers, engineers, and professionals. In an effort to theorize and measure the impact of outreach efforts SACNAS will add a tracking dimension to the model for purposes of demonstrating whether programmatic efforts impact student decisions to continue their education into graduate school and beyond. The tracking system will survey students at the end of each academic year and after graduation across a number of educational variables and academic practices. Ultimately, this project increases the representation of Native American and Chicano Latino geoscience students and scientists within NSF-supported research and education initiatives doc14226 none Mountain regions provide a unique and important setting within which to examine the interplay of global climate change and globalization. This project seeks to strengthen an international, interdisciplinary research network whose goal is to advance understandings of the dynamics of coupled natural and human systems by characterizing the sources of vulnerability of mountain systems to the combined effects of global warming and global economic restructuring. The strategy underlying the project is to develop research ties among scientists from multiple disciplines studying two mountain regions where the individual impacts of climate change and globalization are already strongly manifest and well documented. These regions are: the Greater Yellowstone Region in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho in the United States and the Mount Kilimanjaro Region in Kenya and Tanzania. U.S. and African scientists from the natural and social sciences will meet at workshops held in Montana and Kenya to address a range of emerging questions, such as how biophysical heterogeneity and diversity of institutional arrangements and economic strategies in mountain systems may enhance, reduce, or change in kind and scale the vulnerability of these regions to climate change. Participants from mountain regions in Asia, Europe, and South America also will be invited to participate in these workshops as a first step in expanding the research network globally. This project will lay the groundwork to develop a global research strategy to address the vulnerability of mountain systems to the interacting influences of global change and globalization. Scientifically, mountain regions provide an ideal setting to develop comparative case studies of differential impacts of global change and globalization given that mountain regions are distributed all over the globe, from the Equator almost to the poles and from oceanic to highly continental climates and are experiencing globalization at widely varying rates. Mountain regions also are critically important in assessing the impacts of global change given that they occupy about one-fifth of the Earth s surface and provide goods and services to about half of humanity. This project is an award emanating from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc14227 none Enhancing Diversity in Buffalo, New York, Area Geoscience Programs A consortium of three State University of New York Institutions, led by the University at Buffalo, is developing a comprehensive program for the attraction of under-represented groups to their geoscience programs and for the retention of these students. The program begins with the offering of new earth science courses at Erie Community College (ECC), and then leads either to the earth science education program (BSEd MSEd) at Buffalo State College (BSC) or to the geology BA BS program at the University at Buffalo (UB). ECC s City Campus serves a student population that includes over 50% under-represented groups. It is the most common destination of students from the Buffalo Public Schools, whose student body is comprised of over 70% individuals from under-represented groups. The UB program includes: a continuing research program in which every student participates in ongoing research in one of the laboratories in the department; a research development seminar in which preparation of proposals and presentation of results is emphasized; a weekly seminar which includes attending professional talks, plus attendance at selected professional meetings, and discussion of the talks; a summer course in field techniques, including soil and hydrologic methods used in the consulting industry; a program of regular mentoring and tutoring for all participants; and participation in geology department club activities on a regular basis. The program is designed to prepare the student to continue on for a Master s degree and potentially for a Ph.D. At BSC the program includes participation in ongoing research in the department plus a summer transition program and a field experience in a secondary education course. Students in the program may also continue graduate work at UB. The program is fully integrated with the extensive existing programs for students from under-represented groups at each institution doc14228 none This project brings faculty from the social and natural sciences at the University of California at Berkeley into a comparative analysis of how the use and presentation of models of coupled human and natural systems can be improved. With no single model representing the full complexity in a manageable way, both scientific and public understanding must come through piecing together findings from separate models that emphasize different parts of complex systems. This process of piecing together is currently not working very well. There are, for example, communication barriers between scientists of different disciplines as well as between scientists and the public. In some cases, different models provide conflicting insights, or information with conflicting policy implications, for which there is no scientific resolution. In such cases, different political and economic interests find it advantageous to emphasize selective information from particular models. This project will explore whether the process of communicating information from disparate models might be improved, for example, through the establishment of scientific and public standards. The possibilities for using new institutions such as science juries also will be considered, as well as how the training of scientists could be modified to reduce the problem. This project facilitates the development of new approaches and their application; the comparison of case studies; serious, open discussion in a workshop that will include philosophers of science and graduate students; and the drafting of a textbook for graduate students who are preparing to work at the interface of science and policy. People are now aware that the overall level and especially some types of human activity are having profound, and largely irreversible, effects on the global environment. Scientists who study these effects, however, are having difficulty grappling with the complexity of the couplings between human and natural systems. These difficulties that are internal to science become amplified as scientists try to communicate what they know to the public, and different public s listen selectively according to their economic and political interests. Communication problems make it very difficult to transform what scientists do know into effective policy. This project explores ways that these difficulties can be reduced through standards for the presentation of scientific information about complex systems, the training of scientists, and the development of new institutions for connecting scientific information to the public. This project is an award emanating from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc14229 none This workship will bring together biologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists engaged in research on etnobiology, together with applied mathematicians, to identify future directions to facilitate growth and maturation on the field. The workshop will be organized in two parts: an initial 3-day workshop of the organizing committee of mid-career leaders in the field, followed by a widely advertised seminar to which attendance will be open. The workshop will attempt to define and focus research objectives; explore modern methodology appropriate for studying plant animal-people interactions; assess and strengthen techniques for quantitative analyses of multidisciplinary data; develop interdisciplinary education models to train students and practicioners of ethnobiology; and develop strategies to improve access to academic funding sources. International research partners from the International Society of Ethnobiology will attend. The participants will be pledged to apply the insights and collaborative linkages developed in the workshop to preparing competitive proposals in etchnobiology to submit to relevant programs in NSF. The output will be a bulletin defining the intellectual imperatives in ethnobiology, which will be broadly distributed to professional societies, universities, government agencies and nongovernmental organizations. There are a variety of practical problems that would benefit from a more holistic and theoretically strong ethnobiology discipline. Due to the global nature of the workshop and the involvemente of foreign participants, the impact on research and education could be global in scope. This project is an award emananting from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Envionment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc14230 none This award provides support for Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) to develop culturally-situated design tools to motivate ethnic minority students to learn mathematics and to pursue careers in Information Technology. The tools will be integrated into standard curricula for use by approximately one thousand middle school students in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute s local GEAR-UP program (the U.S. Department of Education s Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Program). The use of the design tools will be evaluated over a 3-year period and the results will be disseminated widely doc14231 none BUILDING ON OUR SUCCESS: A PROPOSAL TO ENHANCE AND IMPROVE MINORITY STUDENT RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION IN THE GEOSCIENCES AT THE UNIVERISTY OF NEW ORLEANS For the past 27 years, the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of New Orleans (UNO) has managed a program for recruiting and graduating BS and MS African-American and Hispanic geoscientists. The primary tools for minority student recruitment have been a summer field trip for outstanding high school juniors and seniors, and scholarship support. This program emphasizes not only recruitment of outstanding high school students, but also the training and certification of local teachers through a Masters in Science Teaching (MAST) program. This award will expand and enhance the existing program of recruitment, retention, and graduation of minority students and teachers by taking actions that will also help to it become self-sustaining at the end of the period. Creating an advisory panel that consists mostly of former UNO minority-student graduates, now employed in local industry, academia, and government agencies is an important first step. The panel will assist in mentoring middle-high school, undergraduate and graduate students, and serve as a resource to faculty to better understand recruitment issues. The award will also expand a competitive, high school level summer program in environmental science open to local students in their freshman through senior years of high school. The outreach program will be expanded to include local middle schools where earth science is taught. A visiting scholars program will also be established doc14232 none White Invasive organisms pose serious threats to ecological and socioeconomic systems but in many cases can be controlled or at least managed through the use of an integrated analysis designed to consider the network of complex interactions among natural, economic, political, and cultural systems. In this research, the investigators examine the coupled natural and human system controlling the dispersion of the glassy winged sharpshooter, an insect carrying the deadly bacterial Pierce s Disease currently infesting Californian wine-producing regions. The project goals are to: (1) conduct a workshop in which an international group of experts will gather to discuss factors controlling the organism s dispersal, and (2) based on these discussions, develop a proof-of-concept model to simulate sharpshooter dispersal. The final product will be a modeling framework with which to test the effect of policy decisions on organism dispersal. This approach, focused here on the sharpshooter, is designed to be applicable to invasive organism in general doc14233 none THE CSULB GEOSCIENCE DIVERSITY ENHANCEMENT PROGRAM (G-DEP) Underrepresentation of minorities in the geosciences is a recognized problem, and little is known about the specific cause of or solutions to the problem. The California Sate University, Long Beach (CSULB) Departments of Geological Sciences, Geography, Archaeology, Anthropology, and the Environmental Sciences and Policy degree program proposes to created an innovative, collaborative partnership with several community colleges and local high schools to improve the research and educational experiences of under-represented students in the geoscience disciplines. The G-DEP model leverages the resources arising from of CSULB s involvement in the Long Beach Educational Partnership. In addition, G-DEP builds on interdisciplinary activities among CSULB s Geography, Geology, Archeology, Anthropology and Environmental Science disciplines to create a working prototype for a comprehensive, integrated Earth Sciences program. Underrepresented students will be encouraged to learn science by actively participating in geoscience research. They will be more adequately prepared to become undergraduates, and more sufficiently supported as they matriculate. With a firm commitment to dissemination of lessons learned, G-DEP will advance the literature on models that promote participation for under-represented groups in geoscience research and education, particularly for the comprehensive, urban university doc14234 none Parlange The objective of the proposed research is to focus on the measurement of the emission and transport of biological aerosols (focusing on pollens) in the atmosphere. Several instruments that cover the size range of microns for the particles themselves to particulate dispersal over many kilometers will be developed. The behavior of individual pollen particles and the emission of pollen from the plant will be observed and modeled. At the larger scales, particulate dispersal will be studied in a wind tunnel and in field studies, and the experimental results will be used to refine large eddy simulation models. The field studies will be carried out at four sites in the Chesapeake Bay region. Pollen transport is of interest because of species cross-fertilization and genetic diversity concerns that have arisen due to human disruption of the natural landscape, as well as concerns about transport distances of genetically altered pollens doc14235 none Through a grant from the NSF Collaboratives for Excellence in Teacher Preparation (CETP), the Virginia Collaborative for Excellence in the Preparation of Teachers has accomplished a complete redesign of the mathematics and science preparation programs for future K-8 teachers. The participating institutions (Virginia Commonwealth University, Longwood College, Mary Washington College, Norfolk State University, and regional community colleges) increased the credit hours required of future elementary school teachers from an average of 9-12 credits to an average of more than 24 and developed entirely new programs for future middle school teachers requiring substantial course work in the subjects to be taught by these teachers. In making the program modifications, the faculty completely redesigned the content and nature of instruction provided in the courses taken by future teachers. In addition, the institutions strengthened the in-school experiences provided to future teachers by preparing a cadre of outstanding current teachers to serve as Clinical Faculty in the teacher preparation programs, providing enhanced practicum, class visitation and student teaching experiences for the future teachers. Finally, a Teaching Apprentice Program was put in place at each institution to aid in the recruitment and retention of prospective teachers. A follow-on project at Virginia Commonwealth University is conducting an assessment of the classroom effectiveness of teachers prepared under the new programs. The summative evaluation is focusing on the extent to which project goals were met; the impact of the project on faculty, preservice students and participating institutions; and the effectiveness of the VCEPT teacher graduates. The project is also providing mentoring to effectively transition a group of new teachers into their profession, by assigning a Clinical Faculty Member to mentor new graduates. Virginia Commonwealth University continues as the lead institution for the follow-on proposal doc14236 none Landscapes increasingly are altered by human activity worldwide, and predicting the response of native organisms to human-dominated landscapes requires an understanding of how ecological and socio-economic processes are influenced by land use, habitat fragmentation, and the sharp boundaries formed between native and human-altered areas. The purpose of the project is to build an international, interdisciplinary research team devoted to constructing models that link social and ecological systems in human-dominated landscapes. The research team will extend the practical value of metapopulation models by incorporating the hierarchical nature of ecological and human systems. Specifically, research will focus on metapopulation processes operating at multiple spatial scales, heterogeneity of patch and matrix types, and temporal dynamics of landscapes. Humans dramatically alter the physical and biological characteristics of ecological landscapes, often with adverse consequences for native species. Predicting the impacts of human activities on native fauna and flora will enable more informed decisions to be made regarding land-use planning and conservation efforts. Traditionally, ecological models designed to predict the responses of organisms to disturbance have been incomplete because they have ignored the socio-economic processes that lead to landscape change. This project will focus on explicitly linking the dynamics of ecological systems with the social and economic systems that determine the type and magnitude of change in human-dominated landscapes. As a result of this research, models will be formulated that can lead to an enhanced ability to predict species responses and prescribe appropriate strategies to minimize negative consequences of human activity. This project is an award emanating from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc14237 none This project is supported by the program Biocomplexity in the Environment, subprogram Instrumentation Development for Environmental Activities (BE-IDEA). The objective is to develop instrumentation and software for automated in situ monitoring of marine microbial communities. Microbes account for almost all the primary productivity and a majority of the biomass in the ocean, and the structure of the microbial community affects higher trophic levels, including species consumed by humans. A fundamental understanding of the complex interaction between physical and biological factors that regulate community structure requires more detailed and sustained observations than are possible with current equipment. This project will develop and deploy in situ instrumentation to monitor individual cells of microscopic plankton. The planned approach will combine in situ flow cytometry and imaging-in-flow techniques to measure the abundance and properties of cells (and other particles) ranging from the smallest phytoplankton (less than 1 um) to large chain diatoms ( 100 um). An automated image analysis system will be used to determine taxonomic affiliation of each cell for the larger size classes. Smaller cells (which often lack distinctive morphological features) will be evaluated by pulse-shape analysis of individual cell light scattering and fluorescence. For more detailed investigation of particular groups or species, a module capable of applying group-specific rRNA probes (via Peptide Nucleic Acid in situ hybridization) will be developed. The probed samples will be analyzed in real time by the in situ flow cytometer. The same module will also be used to apply fluorescent probes for other properties such as DNA content and cell viability. Software to analyze and integrate the flow cytometric and image data in near-real time will also be developed. The instrument will be based on an in situ flow cytometer developed at WHOI (plus hybridization technology currently under development) and integrated with a commercially available imaging-in-flow system. When completed, the instrument package will be field tested near the Marthas Vineyard Coastal Observatory (MVCO). In combination with physical oceanographic, meteorological, and bulk fluorescence data, individual particle data will facilitate an understanding of processes affecting coastal ecosystems, including the mechanisms regulating phytoplankton blooms, species succession, and trophic interactions. The planned work will form the foundation for an unprecedented long term high resolution time series of natural microbial populations, whose members vary in size by many orders of magnitude. These kinds of observations are critical for evaluating and developing models of long-term ecological change doc14238 none Stephen L. Bloom Axiomatizing Fixed Points Stevens Inst. of Technology The purpose of the proposed work is to obtain complete, but simple, descriptions of the properties of the fixed point or iteration operation in computation. Simpler axioms may lead to concrete discreptions of free structures and we intend to use the axioms and or these concrete descriptions to find and improve decision algorithms. Previous work by Bloom, Esik and others has resulted in a complete description of the equational laws satisfied by the iteration operation. This description takes the form of the axioms for Iteration Theories, which capture important features of many classes of structures of interest in the theory of computation. The original axiomatization of iteration theories contained a complicated equational scheme. Recently, this scheme has been replaced by the group identities . Nevertheless, further simplifications seem to be possible. Another goal is to find relative finite axiomatizations of iteration theories enriched by additional operations and or relations. If successful, there are major beneficial corollaries. For example, a relatively simple set of axioms for the concurrent behavior of finite state processes (both for bisimilarity equivalence and for trace equivalence), for Kleene relation algebras with and without conversion, for the behavioral equivalence of recursive program schemes or recursive data type definitions and others. Lastly, some previous work of the investigators and others has indicated that the laws of iteration theories hold in the extremely general setting of 2-categories, and we intend to investigate this phenomenon in detail doc14239 none The Oklahoma Teacher Education Collaborative (O-TEC) has developed a systemic approach to the recruitment, training, and retention of science and mathematics teachers in Oklahoma. In this follow-on project, a long term summative evaluation is being conducted that is 1) documenting the effectiveness of the original grant activities, and 2) contributing to the CORE evaluation project that is serving all projects funded in the NSF Collaboratives for Excellence in Teacher Preparation Program. The evaluation is guided by the CORE research questions and use instruments and protocols developed by that project. As triangulation, the evaluation is employing several tests and measures specific to Oklahoma students that have been part of previous evaluations and are closely associated with educational advancement and curriculum reform. Four higher education institutions will sevre as evaluation sites to facilitate data collection doc14240 none Van Geen Arsenic concentrations in groundwater of Bangladesh can vary by three orders magnitude within lateral and vertical spatial scales of tens of meters. This extreme variability is the result of a poorly understood set of hydrological, microbial, and geochemical interactions that reflect the complex evolution of the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta over the past 10,000 years. There may also be a temporal dimension to these complex pattems on shorter time scales with, potentially, a response of groundwater arsenic to the monsoon and to increased groundwater usage for irrigation. Understanding these pattems has immediate societal relevance because at least 25 million people are currently poisoned by drinking groundwater from millions of tube wells containing 50 ug L arsenic, the Bangladesh and (until very recently) US drinking water standard. T his proposal for exploratory work under the topical area Instrumentation Development for Environmental Activities (IDEA) is centered around the notion that the principles underlying the distribution of arsenic in Bangladesh groundwater can be understood only through the collection of geophysical, geochemical, and eventually microbiological, data representative of in situ conditions on spatial scales ranging from meters to kilometers. With this objective in mind, and as a complement to its current work in Bangladesh supported by the NIEHS Superfund Basic Research Program, this interdisciplinary team of scientists seeks to develop and test two portable devices that measure key properties of the subsurface by taking advantage of the enonnous ar-ray of existing tube wells: (1) groundwater arsenic concentrations with a high-precision, double-beam calorimeter, (2) the vertical sediment structure by electromagnetic conductivity. In parallel, we will start to develop the statistical tools needed to interpret and integrate the complex data sets that can be generated with these instruments. Our intention is to set the stage for a full-scale Biocomplexity proposal aimed at improving our ftindamental understanding of the complex set of interactions, including microbial and societal factors, that resulted in a human tragedy of staggering dimension. doc14241 none Earth Science Pipeline: Recruiting and Retaining Under-Represented Ethnic Groups in Earth Sciences California State University San Bernardino (CSUSB) has a minority student population large enough for it to have been designated a Hispanic Serving Institution. However the Department of Geological Sciences has an enrollment of under-represented ethnic groups not only less than the surrounding community but also below that of the national average. CSUSB has initiated a project entitled Earth Science Pipeline: Recruiting and Retaining Under-Represented Ethnic Groups in the Earth Sciences . This project conducts activities designed to (1) increase under-represented minority enrollment in the Department of Geological Sciences, (2) retain these students once they have entered the program, and (3) feed these students into the geosciences pipeline so that they either enter graduate school or the geosciences profession. The overall theme that unifies the proposed activities is that studying geology can be exciting, and that it is possible to pursue a rewarding career in geosciences. Specific activities include the development of a collaborative program for the teaching of geological sciences with local schools with high minority enrollments, and interaction with, and training of sixth to twelfth grade teachers through activities such as workshops, demonstrations and formal field trips. Teachers will also be involved in designing demonstrations and hands-on activities for use in their classrooms. Activities include annual summer geological field trips conducted by faculty from the Department. Students will also be invited to participate during the summer and or academic year in research projects under the supervision of a faculty member from the Department of Geological Sciences at CSUSB doc14242 none Mentoring through Research: Catalyst for Success in the Geosciences The Department of Geological Sciences at California State University Northridge (CSUN) will develop a program to attract and retain under-represented minorities in its geosciences curriculum. The three-year Catalyst Program centers on peer-mentored research groups composed of graduate (CSUN MS candidates), undergraduate (from CSUN and local community colleges), and high-school students from under-represented groups. The multi-tiered approach connects students with mentors both horizontally (peer) and vertically (near-peer and advisor). The three-year scope of the project allows mentoring relationships developed during the first year to continue into subsequent years and for continuing students to step into roles of increasing responsibility and experience. Mentor-protege connections are initiated in a classroom setting through a course designed to teach mentoring and research concepts, and to familiarize students with each other, the research projects, and the faculty advisors. Students then join one of four focused research groups centered on exciting and engaging research projects of local to global significance. The selected research projects have significant topical overlap (e.g., seismology, structure active tectonics, sedimentation and tectonics, and sedimentology and low temperature geochemistry), providing common grounds for student interaction through coursework and facilitating student transfer from group to group if research interests change. The Catalyst Program provides mentoring and research training for the 30 or more students who will participate in the program to ensure success in academe and industry. It also enhances the mentoring skills and research productivity of the faculty mentors and strengthens the research capacity of the department, increasing the likelihood of continued funding from a variety of sources doc14243 none The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem has been described as both the quintessential American wilderness and a battle zone that pits humans against nature. Controversial issues range from socio-economic concerns (e.g., rural development and subdivisions) to basic ecology (e.g., the relationship between elk and vegetation). The future health of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem depends as much on human decision-making dynamics as on biophysical processes and environmental change. The long-term goal of this project is to integrate biophysical and decision-making models into a framework that allows exploration of future scenarios that include likely social and environmental stressors. This incubation project will enable a team-building and data-gathering exercise as part of the larger effort to couple mass balance and bioenergetics models with cognitive models that represent the decision making process. An interdisciplinary research team will be assembled to guide model design, and stakeholder perspectives will be collected during the project doc14244 none Enhancing Diversity through the Penn State Weather Camp Minorities are poorly represented in the geosciences in general and in the atmospheric sciences in particular. Research experiences such as summer science camps are an effective means of introducing minority students to science. The Penn State Weather camp provides an excellent opportunity to increase exposure to the atmospheric sciences of students from traditionally under-represented groups. This award will provide travel and registration costs for students from traditionally under-represented groups to attend the Penn State Weather Camp during the - period. Two one-week sessions are expected during this time period. This camp provides a hands-on opportunity for students entering grades 8 through 10 to learn about fundamental aspects of meteorology. Highlights of this camp include forecast contests, balloon launches, weather analysis, role playing as policy makers for climate change and creating a short TV broadcast. On-camera meteorologists from the Weather Channel Inc. and WeatherWorld will train students. Students from traditionally under-represented groups will be surveyed at the camp and tracked afterward to determine if the camp has directly led to these students entering the geosciences or sciences doc14245 none Due to the sensitivity of ecosystems at the land-water interface and our dependence on them, it is increasingly imperative that we understand how they function and manage them wisely. This will require the combined efforts of physical, social and natural scientists, mathematicians, and modelers. Yet graduate students are not trained to interact across these disciplines. To add breadth to graduate training, this project will bring together established leaders in the social and natural sciences and recent graduates to design a capstone educational program. The objective of the educational program is to better prepare graduates for interdisciplinary careers dedicated to understanding, prediction and management of environments and resources at the land-water interface. The recommendations of the assembled group will be used to develop a model program to enhance interdisciplinary understanding, leadership training and networking doc14246 none Ratchford, Marina S. American Association for Advancement of Science The Plata Basin comprises the Paraguay-Parana rivers system and the Uruguay river system; it is shared by Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. This large and complex river system has high levels of biodiversity and human use, making it an ideal location to test a novel interdisciplinary, multi-stakeholder approach for studying the interaction of natural and human systems as well as for planning alternative strategies of sustainable development. The Plata Basin pilot project will focus on the effects of expanding agricultural and cattle-raising activities on biogeochemical cycles, land-use change, levels of biodiversity, and the changing hydrological cycles of the Paraguay and Parana rivers. Computer-based models, using variables reflecting land-use changes, socio-economic data, and climatic information, will be used to better understand the consequences of the flooding cycles of the Paraguay and Parana rivers in the next fifty years. A two-session planning workshop will take place in Argentina in March to construct a research agenda for the Plata Basin. The workshop will include key political, industrial, and local community stakeholders from the Plata Basin countries, as well as researchers from the region and the U.S. The planning workshop will seek to assess the extent, rate, and impact of the expansion of the agrarian frontier in the Plata Basin. It will also establish a long-term, interdisciplinary research agenda and will evaluate methods of incorporating stakeholder input into appropriate models. A website, with the relevant papers and workshop outcomes will be posted by AAAS, and will include interactive functions to facilitate dialogue and data exchange between members of the scientific community interested in the interaction between natural and human systems. This project is an award emanating from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc14247 none Increasing diversity in the Geosciences: A Bridging Program from Middle School to College Increasing diversity in the geosciences requires a multi-faceted program that offers enrichment opportunities for students throughout their educational process. The approach used in this project develops a pathway from middle school to college that expands the pipeline of diverse students entering advanced education and careers in the geosciences. Hampton University, a Historically Black College and University (HBCU), will provide minority role models, mentors, and research opportunities. Unique to Hampton University is the collaboration between the Center for Atmospheric Sciences (CAS) and the Interdisciplinary Science Center (ISC). These work to increase the pipeline of under-represented students enabling them to access careers in science. The active partnership between CAS and the ISC provides a connection between the scientists of CAS and the science educators of the ISC, which extends to the K-14 education community and informal science education. The activities in this project target three primary areas of activity that will provide opportunities and participation of under-represented groups in the geosciences and bridge those activities from middle school through college and into careers. These areas include Informal K-14 Education Outreach, Formal K-14 Education Outreach, and University Education and Outreach doc14248 none Connecting with the River: Geoscience Research and Education for Hartford, CT The students in the Hartford public school system come from ethnic backgrounds not widely represented in the geosciences (51% Hispanic, 42% African-American and 3% Asian). This two-year collaborative program seeks to enhance geoscience and technological literacy among these urban youth by drawing upon the rich educational value of the Connecticut River. This river, the longest in New England, and an American Heritage River, flows through Hartford CT and provides an excellent earth science laboratory. Connecting these students with the river provides an ideal opportunity for them to learn about earth science process, to develop a toolbox of research skills and to understand the relevance of earth science to their lives. This diverse group of high school students will be engaged in the design and implementation of an environmental monitoring initiative that will document the physical processes and biological health of the river. Students at the Greater Hartford Academy of Math and Science (GHAMS), a magnet high school, and other area students will conduct this research as part of their regular school curriculum and during weekends, and in an intensive summer program. Many community organizations will be involved with the collection and presentation of the data. Data will be distributed among fellow student scientists and displayed on a student created website and the project will be promoted at various public buildings and museums and in print media doc14249 none Jawitz This exploratory project will investigate the development of fiber optic sensors to measure groundwater contaminant mass fluxes and cumulative contaminant-specific microbial activity in-situ and real time. A novel, integrative mass-flux based assessment approach is proposed in preference to traditional concentration-based approaches. Mass flux quantification is necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of remediation, through either intrinsic (i.e., natural attenuation) or active (e.g., pump and treat of in situ flushing) means. The contaminants of interest are chlorinated hydrocarbons, specifically TCE and PCE and their degradation products. Quantification of contaminant mass flux will be especially useful in characterizing risks to humans and the environment from groundwater contamination doc14250 none PI: Brumbaugh Proposal: The project by Daniel R. Brumbaugh, American Museum of Natural History, and colleagues is supported by the program Biocomplexity in the Environment, subprogram Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems (BE-CHN). This project will integrate theory and data from oceanography, biology, and social sciences to address major questions about the design of marine reserve networks. The researchers plan to establish a general theoretical framework with linked circulation, population, habitat, and socioeconomic submodels. This structure will allow systematic exploration of several core questions, including: (1) what are the crucial cascades and feedbacks among physical, biological, and social systems that influence how reserve networks function? (2) What are the roles of different stakeholder groups, such as various fisher groups, local residents, tourists, etc, in this network function? and (3) how compatible are network systems based largely on criteria to promote local acceptability of reserves versus those more centrally optimized around biophysical criteria? In all questions, network function will be addressed through the effects on fisheries, biodiversity, and social cultural systems. In this way, The analyses will be able to directly address and compare a range of common network goals. The project will revolve around the development of a series of integrated models with increasing spatial complexity and the acquisition of data to parameterize them. The modeling will start with analytical models and will then extend to spatially explicit (e.g., grid-based) and realistic (e.g., map-based) versions. Data collection will initially focus on intensive mining of published literature and databases for existing information, followed by targeted field work, including habitat mapping, surveys of species - habitat relationships, sampling for population genetic structure, and ethnographic studies of stakeholders. Models and data will eventually be incorporated into a dynamic GIS spatial-simulation tool- allowing users to run network design and management experiments via interactive simulation. This product will be made available to researchers, educators, and managers interested in the analysis of reserve network function. The researchers, distributed among multiple institutions, are adopting the Bahamas as their study system. This country, an archipelago of hundreds of island, is currently in the political process of expanding their set of marine protected areas (MPAs) into an interconnected network of marine reserves (to include up to 40 sites). Because of this, several Bahamas government and conservation agencies are welcoming scientific contributions to their policy-making discussions. In comparison to many other Caribbean countries, marine resources in the Bahamas also remain relatively intact because of the county s large size and relatively small population. The country s close proximity to Florida also makes it logistically feasible for project researchers to conduct fieldwork while remaining in close contact with their home institutions and other project collaborators. This project, taking advantage of special opportunities in the Bahamas, will develop new understanding about global phenomena- the anthropogenic degradation of reef ecosystems and the paradigmatic turn to marine reserves for better resource management. In exploring these concerns and answering the questions above, we also plan to support ongoing decision-making and educational activities in the Bahamas. This double strategy exemplifies the role of strategic (versus traditionally defined basic or applied) science to elucidate important processes while helping to solve problems. The proposed work will also have substantial educational spin-offs in both the US and the Bahamas. Informal education products, including multimedia presentations and web-base materials will be produced and disseminated by the museum. In addition, researchers will work with partner organizations in the Bahamas to develop project-related materials for teacher training and college courses doc14251 none This project seeks to understand the long-term interaction of humans, their culture(s) and their environment in southwestern Colorado, USA, from A.D. 600- . The research employs agent-based simulation to examine various models for how farmers locate themselves and use resources on this landscape. Further, the simulation will examine the exchange of agricultural goods among households, and whether exchange causes households to aggregate into villages in certain times and places, and disperse into smaller settlements during other times. Finally, the simulation will examine why this area is depopulated in the late A.D. s. Households in this model act in a virtual environment where the elevation, soil type, temperature, vegetation, potential agricultural production, and precipitation vary over an -sq-km study area. The simulation is possible because high-resolution archaeological and environmental records are available for the study area during this period, including an inventory of thousands of archaeological sites, tree-ring records, and estimates of available surface water and ground water. Estimates of agricultural production change annually according to climatic inputs reconstructed from tree-ring records, and possibly in response to landscape degradation due to farming as well. Over longer periods, the same factors affect the availability of surface water and ground water, and changes in the location and availability of water will also be incorporated into the simulation. Population size and the location of settlement on the landscape vary according to the experiences of the households during the period under investigation, and population flows from and to other areas. The simulation will employ cultural algorithms (variants of genetic algorithms) through which households may optimize their landscape and resource use with respect to other households with whom they exchange corn and compete for agricultural land. These algorithms will also be used to simulate selection of farming strategies, including those that use surface water for irrigation. In this way, the simulation will be used to determine how exchange of agricultural goods, competition for land, and changing farming strategies affected household movement and formation of villages. The behavior of households in all variants of the simulation will be compared against a database for archaeological sites in the study area that specifies their location, size, function, and period of occupation, allowing an assessment of how well each variant fits the archaeological record. This work contributes to understanding changing land-use strategies in small-scale farming societies experiencing significant climate change and population growth. It also contributes to understanding the evolution of economic systems and population aggregation in such societies. In particular, the study will clarify the factors that resulted in village formation and the depopulation in one of the most famous archaeological areas in the world: the Mesa Verde region. In addition, the research will develop tools to make the future examination of such systems more effective. The groundwater model will help to predict what might happen to groundwater supplies in this area as climate changes in the future. Finally, by clarifying the relationships between climate, culture, and behavior this research will be useful in unraveling the complexities of coupled human and natural systems in other areas. This project is an award emanating from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc14252 none Price This award provides support for one year of funding to construct and operate a biospectrologger (BSL) in a borehole in polar ice. Such an optical device has already been developed and tested for measuring dust in polar ice. The same general principle can be exploited to study microbes and biomolocules as a function of depth in glacial ice. Microbes adapted to oligotrophic, low-temperature environments are found in glacial ice, frigid lakes, in permafrost and in cold, deep ocean water and sediments. Polar ice contains the lowest concentrations, from a few hundred to about 104 cells cm3, probably transported by wind into the atmosphere, precipitated with snow, and compacted into ice. The great majority are dormant or dead. With varying success, cultivation of microbes recovered from ice cores yields colony-forming units in a fraction (~10-4 to ~10-2 ) of dormant cells. Chemical, physical and biological arguments indicate that as many as 103 microbes cm3 can extract enough energy from acids confined in narrow liquid veins in otherwise solid ice to survive for a few thousand years (or a smaller population for a correspondingly longer time). No search has yet been carried out for living bacteria in liquid veins. The biospectrologger will be field tested at Siple Dome, Antarctica during the 02 field season as part of an existing borehole logging program there doc14253 none Mediterranean systems offer an abundance of water over short, unpredictable time periods, usually between November and April in California. Time periods with scarce water can be long-lasting, making it difficult to manage water and land use and to supply consistent goods and services to large population centers. The primary goal of this developmental project is to develop a theoretical framework that will allow for an integration of human and biophysical Mediterranean watershed dynamics. This requires a greater understanding of the inherent biocomplexity of Mediterranean watersheds and the dynamic relationships among these environmental systems and human actions, institutions, and policies. A multidisciplinary team of researchers drawn from both the natural and social sciences will explore the consistency between hydrologic, biotic, and socioeconomic models that are used to explain and to regulate watershed ecosystem behavior and the realities of watershed behavior in Mediterranean environments. Prevailing scientific models of watersheds and regulatory systems developed to manage natural resources in watersheds commonly have evolved without a thorough understanding of Mediterranean watershed dynamics. The investigators hypothesize that these scientific models are better suited to relatively homogenous environments with fairly predictable rainfall and tight relations between stream flow and proximate land uses than they are to Mediterranean watersheds with their episodic hydrology and frequent disturbance. The validity of this hypothesis will be tested as a basis for potentially more useful formulations of Mediterranean problems. In doing so, the investigators will explore the influence of physical, biological, social, and institutional processes on the function and health of Mediterranean ecosystems at various spatial scales ranging stream reaches and individual watersheds to entire river systems. They will conduct a series of facilitated workshops and field days to help critically assess the suitability of existing models for Mediterranean conditions. These workshops and field days will help to identify shared variables among disciplines and their use in developing interdisciplinary models; design a comparative research framework to test new models and hypotheses; provide an operational watershed forum and academic advancement for the broader community; and enhance support for comparative interdisciplinary research. Human population growth in Mediterranean-climate regions has placed considerable pressure on scarce freshwater resources, resulting in widespread impairment of river and stream systems. A great deal of capital is being invested in restoring Mediterranean watersheds with a very shallow conceptual awareness of where, how, and what is being restored. This has led to many restoration project failures in California and elsewhere. By integrating theories, perspectives, and methods from the physical, biological, and social sciences, this project will provide a sounder basis for the restoration of Mediterranean watersheds, and it will help address existing laws and institutional structures that are not well-equipped to deal with this kind of dynamic system. This project is an award emanating from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc14254 none Novel instrumentation will be developed to measure the fluxes of trace gases between the atmosphere and the biosphere. The measurement systems, based on disjunct eddy flux methods, will be applicable to both tower based and airborne platforms. A complete airborne flux system will be maintained at Purdue University and made available to the biosphere atmosphere science community. The technology will also be made available for duplication for different applications. The Disjunct Eddy Sampler (DES) will be coupled with an Fourier-Transform Infrared (FTIR) system capable of quantifying stable carbon isotope ratios. These measurements provide a means to partition the net ecosystem exchange of carbon dioxide into its gross components, photosynthetic uptake by vegetation and respiratory emissions by plants and soils. The DES system will also be employed to quantify fluxes of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) by combining it with a proton transfer reaction mass spectrometer (PTR-MS). Emphasis in this application will be in determining landscape scale fluxes. The third application area will be to couple the DES with nitrogen detectors for determination of deposition rates of atmospheric nitrogen containing species. The development of this instrumentation will provide undergraduate and graduate research training opportunities. All team members are participants in the NSF IGERT program at the University of Michigan Biological Station and intend to involve IGERT students in this project. Scientifically, the broader impact of this work will be in the area of biosphere-atmosphere exchange which is an integral part of all biogeochemical cycles. The determination of accurate transfer rates for inorganic and organic species between terrestrial and atmospheric reservoirs is a critically important need to enable reliable prediction of the future state of global climate and the oxidative capacity of the atmosphere doc14255 none Smart Sensors for In Situ Monitoring of Hydrothermal Vent Systems. Proposal: Date: June 27, PI: Booksh Institution: Arizona State University This project is supported by the program Biocomplexity in the Environment, subprogram Instrumentation Development for Environmental Activities (BE-IDEA). The objective of this project is to develop a suite of five sensors designed for in situ analysis of the ecosystem in and around hydrothermal deep-sea vents. This ecosystem may be one of the most ancient of Earth and have had a long-term effect on global geochemical cycles, yet it is one of the least well understood. Hydrothermal vent ecosystems are in a turbulent state of disequilibrium with large gradients of thermal and chemical energy. Along this thermal chemical gradient a complex ecosystem of tube worms, thermophilic microbes, and specially adapted crustaceans and fish survive The sensors are chosen that best monitor the physical, chemical, and biological environment of the vent ecosystem to better understand the inter-relationship between this unique environment and the life that it supports. The development of in situ chemical sensors will provide a significant advancement in the state of the art of hydrothermal vent monitoring. We will employ a fiber optic surface plasmon resonance (SPR) based sensor integrated with a thermocouple and conductivity sensor to better measure the density hydrothermal vent fluid and salinity of the seawater surrounding the vent. Fiber optic SPR sensors can be made sufficiently small and sensitive to probe the vent fluid sea water gradient where many thermophilic microbes reside. A fiber optic coupled grating light reflectance spectroscopy (GLRS) sensor will be employed to monitor the size distribution and relative abundance of mineral precipitates that form during the mixing of vent fluid and sea water. This precipitate forms the vent chimney walls where most microbes reside. Fiber optic Raman spectroscopy probes will be tested to detect trace organic molecules that may be forming biotically or abiotically in the vent fluid. Raman spectroscopy will also be tested to survey the mineral and microbial distribution on the vent walls. An ambient pressure driven liquid chromatography-Raman spectroscopy system will be developed to enhance the selectivity and sensitivity of Raman spectroscopy to simple organic molecules that may serve as food for or originate as waste from microbes in the vent ecosystem. Sensitivity enhancement will come from novel waveguide technology that has been demonstrated to push Raman detection limits to low ppb for simple alcohols. Finally, a fiber optic, single measurement excitation-emission matrix (EEM) fluorometer will be adapted to detect and characterize larger biomolecules such as amino acids, proteins, and DNA fragments that may prove indicative of biological activity in the vent ecosystem Each of the proposed sensors has been previously developed past the proof of concept stage for environmental or industrial process monitoring. The project will adapt and test the sensors for the more challenging application of deep sea vent monitoring. The sensors represent a promising technology that fills a large need in the oceanographic life in extreme environments community. If the proposed NEPTUNE network of deep-sea research nodes were built, these sensors would be ideal for long-term field deployment. Successful development of these sensors would lead to expansion of the technology for other biological and environmental process monitoring applications doc14256 none This is a one-year planning activity to develop a collaborative working relationship among research groups at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Louisiana State University, the Environmental Protection Agency, and SRI International. The objective is the development and demonstration of a jet-REMPI (resonantly enhanced multiphoton ionization) instrument for analyzing combustion byproduct emissions that are environmental hazards such as dioxins, furans, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Current methods of analysis for these chemicals in the different and disparate research studies at LSU, GIT, and EPA are very time consuming, requiring up to a month for a single analysis. In contrast, SRI s jet-REMPI device can analyze low levels of simple chlorinated hydrocarbons in seconds. Adaptation of this technique to the research environment will remove a major impediment to progress in several areas of environmental chemistry doc14257 none The objectives of this project are to develop the concepts for robust multiplexed arrays of sensors for the detection of inorganic and organic analytes as well as microorganisms and to develop instrumentation to quantify heterogeneous kinetics and molecule surface interactions in complex, groundwater and surface water, and extreme ecosystems. Electrochemical, Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) and Surface Enhance Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) method will be used as detection schemes for the quantification of inorganic and organic analytes in hydrothermal fluids. The development of robust polymeric thin film sensors will be assisted by current Hydrothermal Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) instrumentation. The investigators will also further the development of the AFM instrumentation to enable intermittent-contact imaging of soft materials and surface adsorbed molecules and organisms in hydrothermal conditions. Groundwork will be laid for the development of a low-power, lightweight AFM for potential development into a field-deployable instrument. %%% The results from this project could lead to new methods for obtaining chemical and biological information from complex ecosystems. Furthermore, the research will be used to enhance educational opportunities in this growing field of scientific discovery. Students trained in these areas will be very competitive in the job market as these are areas of high priority in industry doc14258 none Around the world, regional ecosystems dominated by resource-based extractive economies (agriculture, forestry and fisheries) are in crisis, facing painful transitions imposed by the convergence of processes operating at local and global scales. The Red River of the North (that forms the border of Minnesota and North Dakota flowing north into Manitoba and Hudson Bay), an area of intensive and industrialized agriculture that has long been considered one of the most fertile farming regions in the world, is one such system in a painful transition. Crop disease, abnormally wet climate patterns, and low commodity prices have combined with long-term economic, social, and ecological declines to generate an increasingly severe regional crisis. The objective of this project is to distill from the multiplicity of causal factors a simple systems model that can be used to explore the natural, economic and social dynamics observed in this most recent crisis in the Red River Valley (RRV), and to use the model to explore alternative policies with stakeholders and decision makers in the RRV. Through the use of an interdisciplinary dynamic simulation process (Adaptive Environmental Assessment) involving citizens, scientists and resource managers, the project seeks to generate insight into the small and tractable set of key processes that have precipitated the simultaneous collapse of regional systems and to explore what other outcomes might have been possible under different decision-making scenarios. The model will have both practical and theoretical significance. By exploring how a stable but brittle regional system collapsed through a series of subtle multiple and reinforcing discontinuities, and by simulating the response of that system under different decision-making and reorganization scenarios, the model will advance understanding of resilience dynamics in coupled social-ecological systems. It also will provide a solid, practical foundation for expanding dialogue among diverse stakeholders, develop additional modeling and outreach efforts, and build capacity for regional problem-solving. Insights and understanding derived from this model may prove valuable to agro-ecosystems in other regions facing similar challenges that have not yet experienced large-scale collapse. What are the implications for other commodity based agricultural economies around the world (e.g., the corn belt of the Upper Midwest)? Can agro-ecosystems and other economic activities in the RRV be reorganized to arrive at longer-term, more resilient solutions that will allow the region to escape from the vicious cycle of spiraling ecological and economic crisis? This project is an award emanating from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc14259 none Snowmass will consider experiments at the highest energies, experiments of exceptional sensitivity, and experiments that explore very high scales through virtual effects; accelerators to address a broad range of scientific opportunities; accelerator research to provide information for knowledgeable decisions about future projects, and accelerator research and technology development for the long term; theory that develops hand-in-hand with experiment and visionary theory that hasn t yet engaged experimental particle physics directly. The workshop will examine accelerator experiments as well as astroparticle, particle astrophysics, and cosmological studies that use natural sources. It will examine the interplay between particle physics and new technologies, and will explore the interactions between particle physics and related fields. Snowmass will be a forum for the critical examination of future projects, and will provide crucial community input to the long-range planning activities undertaken by the science funding agencies and the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel. It will be an ideal place for a broad community of scientists to examine initiatives for new accelerators and new detectors that are being developed throughout the world. The entire request is for funds for education and outreach activities and to subsidize the attendance of students and post-doctoral associates who would otherwise be unable to attend this important meeting doc14260 none Building Pathways into the Geosciences for an Hispanic Community of Learners in El Paso The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), with an enrollment of about 15,000 students of which 70% are Hispanic and 10% are Mexican Nationals, is one of the largest Hispanic-serving institutions in the country. The demographics of the UTEP student body (85% of whom come from the El Paso region) reflect those of the dominantly Hispanic metroplex of more than two million inhabitants on both sides of the US-Mexican border that the university serves. Thus, the characteristics of the community give UTEP advantages in recruiting minority students into the geosciences. UTEP has both MS and Ph.D. programs in Geological Sciences. This project expands minority participation in the geosciences at the university by increasing the number of Hispanic students who major in either Geological Sciences or in a new interdisciplinary program in Environmental Sciences. It proposes to build a community of aspiring geoscientists in El Paso by establishing an outreach program to enhance awareness of the geosciences among local high school students. The program offers stipends to college students in exchange for progress towards a bachelors degree in Geological or Environmental Sciences and participation in research with geoscience faculty and graduate students. The centerpiece of the outreach program is a two-week summer camp for high school juniors that introduces students and teachers to a variety of topics in the geosciences and demonstrates how the biology, chemistry, and physics covered in high school courses integrates with geoscience. Students are encouraged to enroll in introductory environmental science or geology as freshmen and given the opportunity to serve as peer mentors in subsequent summer programs doc14261 none Complex patterns in river systems emerge because of the interdependence of biophysical and human processes, non-linearity in factors that shape process and pattern, and the unique behavior of linear patchwork mosaics within river networks. This research project combines field studies, biological models, complex systems techniques, and alternative future depictions to explore two interrelated aspects of biocomplexity: complexity of biotic communities and complexity of coupled human natural resource systems. The investigators hypothesize that as biotic resources become scarce or impaired, a human riverine system becomes more tightly coupled. This research will examine the ecological vulnerability of these emergent landscapes from the perspectives of likelihood and reversibility under different policies. The objectives are to explore system behaviors through a combination of field and model studies. These models apply complex systems approaches to explore coevolution of policies and landscape patterns, building on relationships identified through field studies of biotic complexity in large rivers and their floodplains. The 4-yr research project is focused on lowland rivers of the Pacific Northwest and is expected to develop of a set of transferable models of ecological and human interactions in river floodplains. The project will foster interactions between students, researchers, river guardians, and the Willamette Restoration Initiative to create a unique learning environment for students and the public doc14262 none The interactions between urban development and ecological processes are extraordinarily complex. Urban development evolves over time and space as the outcome of microscopic interactions of individual choices and actions taken by multiple agents. These decisions affect ecosystem structures and functions through the conversion of land, fragmentation of natural habitat use, disruption of hydrological systems, and modification of energy flow and nutrient cycles. Environmental changes at local and regional scales affect human well-being and preferences as well as the decisions people make. This project will develop an integrated model of urban development and land-cover change in the central Puget Sound region that can interface with models representing a large set of ecosystem processes. The focus of this project will be on linking urban development to bird diversity as a test case for an integrated modeling approach. This approach builds on model traditions in urban economics, landscape ecology, bird population dynamics, and complex system science, each of which offers different perspectives on modeling urban ecological interactions. The project will apply Bayesian networks and a multi-agent microsimulation approach because of the potential for those approaches to support complex inference modeling in problem domains with inherent uncertainty. Instead of separately simulating urban growth and its impacts on birds habitats, this project will develop a framework to simulate metropolitan areas as they evolve through the dynamic interactions between urban development and ecological processes and link them through a spatially explicit representation of the urban landscape. Assessments of ecological impacts of urban growth that are timely, accurate, and transparent are crucial to sound policy and management decisions. Although extensive urban research has focused on the dynamics of urban systems and their ecological interactions, these diverse urban processes have yet to be synthesized into one coherent modeling framework. Simulation models of urban and ecological dynamics have evolved in separate knowledge domains. While both of these research areas deal with human-environmental interactions, they do so with very different emphases, scale, methodology and objectives. This research will investigate how best to model complexity and uncertainty of coupled socioeconomic and biophysical processes in metropolitan regions and their interactions with the policy domain. This project will emphasize the importance of explicitly representing human and ecological processes in modeling urban systems, including patterns, processes, and impacts. Ultimately, this project will assist in identifying answers to questions related to the potential use of public policy to intervene in urban ecological systems in ways that may reduce ecological damage from urban processes while sustaining economically and socially viable urban communities for people. The project therefore should help in the development of tools for policy makers to explore the links between human behaviors and environmental change. This project is an award emanating from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc14263 none Kim This award will support Dr. Dong-Shik Kim, Assistant Professor at the University of Toledo, for a planning visit to develop collaborative research with Dr. Sang Jun Sim, Senior Research Scientist at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), in the area of water treatment design. A hybrid water treatment system, using both ozonation and biofiltration, will be explored. Dr. Kim has expertise on biofilms, while KIST offers expertise in system design and pilot plant operation. This planning visit is meant to enable Dr. Kim to develop detailed plans for a synergistic, mutually beneficial collaborative research project doc14264 none This 1-year empirical pilot study will investigate the reasons for the under-representation women majoring in Information Technology(IT) related disciplines in institutions of higher education. The study will focus on two questions: 1) Why do women who have the potential to succeed in the study of IT disciplines, take alternative educational paths? 2) What barriers and obstacles must be overcome to attract more women to IT education and careers doc14265 none This award provides support for a study examining media messages about Information Technology (IT) careers that middle school students receive from television, popular magazines, videotapes, movies, and from books, brochures and Internet sites that provide career information. The analysis will concentrate on the media portrayal of IT occupations, especially in terms of gender and race, that students are likely to encounter during the middle school years. Sixth and Seventh grade students in 12 demographically diverse classrooms across the nation will participate in classroom-based action research employing mathematics, language arts, and social science skills in surveying their peers and conducting their own content analysis of media messages about IT careers doc14266 none Crawford This award supports the participation of American scientists in a U.S.-Korea seminar on information technology for product development to be held in Bokwang, Korea in July . The co-organizers are Professor Richard Crawford of the University of Texas at Austin and Professor Yong Se Kim of Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. Information technology has revolutionized the entire product development design cycle, and will continue to do so. The seminar will enable U.S. and Korean researchers and graduate students to exchange the latest research findings in the areas of Internet-aided distributed design, virtual systems and environment, enterprise integration and product data management, solid freeform fabrication, and computer-aided process planning. The objectives of the seminar and associated activities are to 1) exchange information on recent advances; 2) visit Korean laboratories to gain an understanding of available expertise and facilities; 3) identify research areas that are particularly suited for U.S.-Korea collaboration; and 4) introduce American graduate students to research opportunities in Korea. The exchange of ideas and data with Korean experts in this field will enable U.S. participants to advance their own work, and will set the stage for future collaborative projects. Seminar organizers have made a special effort to involve students. Findings of the meeting will be publicized via professional journals and conferences doc14267 none In this renewal proposal, Dr. Klewicki plans to carry out further experimental investigations on the effect large Reynolds number on the cross-stream transport in a turbulent boundary layer. Even though much has been learned form the experiments carried out under the current Grant , better understanding of such transport mechanisms can be obtained when the experimental parameter range is extended, and additional transport terms measured. The experiments will be carried out in a wind tunnel and in an environmental test facility in the Great Salt Lake Desert in Utah. In the current Grant, 3 undergraduate students participated in the experimental work through the REU program doc14268 none A grant has been awarded to Alison Withey at the University of California, San Diego to convene a workshop to investigate user requirements, enabling technologies, and costs for building scalable information networks for the environmental sciences. The workshop, hosted by the Partnership for Biodiversity Informatics , will assemble research scientists, directors of field stations and marine laboratories, as well as experts in computational and information sciences to discuss the technical requirements for building local, regional, and national-level networks designed to deliver continuous, integrated, high-quality data in real or near real time. Each of these audiences will contribute to and learn from the information exchange. Scientists will share their experiences in expanding site-specific science to broader spatial scales, and will discuss future information infrastructure needs in light of new sensors (field and satellite) and data collection capabilities. Directors of field stations and marine laboratories will ground the workshop in the present-day realities of existing infrastructure and capabilities, and will contribute to a new vision for how field stations and marine laboratories can expand to meet the needs for a national capability for observing and understanding environmental complexity. Computational and information scientists will present state-of-the-art developments in sensor technologies, networking, information delivery, and knowledge generation. Workshop presentations, discussion, and working group sessions will focus on three topics: 1) Enabling technologies and user requirements for data and information management and delivery, 2) Building distributed sensor networks: design and implementation issues, and 3) Building a scalable environmental information networks: from researchers to field stations to a national architecture. As environmental research becomes more complex and multidisciplinary, gains in our understanding of ecosystem biocomplexity can be furthered through the application of technologies that improve data management and delivery; enhance modeling and prediction capabilities; and facilitate communication among individuals, environmental sensors, computers, and databases. This workshop will be the first attempt to envision a scalable national environmental information infrastructure that meets the needs of scientists working at local and broader scales, as well as decision-makers and educators that may require information at regional to national scales. Consequently, the discussions and working group reports are anticipated to be of broad interest to many disciplines. Workshop products will be made available to a broader community via a webcast and web archive of the presentations; a white paper of the proceedings and recommendations which will be posted online; and peer reviewed article(s) outlining present technical capabilities, the design of a future environmental information infrastructure, and a research and implementation plan that will enable this goal to be achieved. The Partnership for Biodiversity Informatics (PBI) is a consortium consisting of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center at the University of Kansas (KU-BRC), and the Network Office of the Long Term Ecological Research Program (LTER doc14269 none The American Geophysical Union (AGU) will provide partial support for travel of more than ninety students and young scientists from the United States to participate in the major international Assemblies of five international geosciences associations under the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG): the International Association of Geodesy (IAG); the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy (IAGA); the International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth s Interior (IASPEI); the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS); the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences (IAMAS); and the International Association of the Physical Sciences of the Ocean (IAPSO). All of these Associations are members of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics IUGG). This effort will promote and encourage international communication, collaboration and coordination in the geosciences, especially among scientists at an early point in their career. It is intended that this will lead to long-term international interactions among these scientists as they advance in their research careers in their respective institutions and countries. The five Assemblies will address a wide range of important geosciences problems. The AGU will advertise widely opportunities for applying for such support and will undertake a thoughtful and balanced review and selection process doc14270 none This ITWF award provides support for the University of Wisconsin to conduct a study that will identify the job, organizational and quality of working life (QWL) factors that influence turnover intention within the current IT workforce, and the way gender and minority status play a role in the relationships between job and organizational factors, QWL and intention to turnover. Two different models of the role of gender and minority status will be used and tested and compared in a sample of IT employees across a range of companies and jobs. The first research model postulates that gender and minority status have direct effects on job and organizational factors and both direct and indirect effects on QWL and intention to turnover. The second research model postulates that gender and minority status play a moderating role in the relationship between job and organizational factors and QWL and intention to turnover doc14271 none This award provides support for a 2-year study to research design criteria of electronic games that affirm and support 8-14 year old girls positive notions of (Information Technology) IT professions. While much is known about general characteristics of games that appeal to girls and boys, there is a little information about the specific game design features, characteristics and problems that might successfully attract different children into IT. The study is expected to result in the development of specific design criteria for game designers and practical guidance for educators interested in using games to foster children s IT skills and interests doc14272 none This award to CSR, Incorporated provides support for a 3-year study to examine the secondary and postsecondary educational pathways that African-American youth follow to pursue information technology(IT) careers. The study will distinguish specific factors linked to the successful pursuit of IT education from other generic predictors of educational attainment. The finding are intended to guide sound policy and program decisions that will support an equitable participation of African -Americans in the IT education and workforce. The study will compare the educational pathways taken by African-Americans to pursue careers in IT with similar pursuits in other pre-professional careers in law, medicine, and business administration, and the fields of science, mathematics, engineering, and technology doc14273 none The ultimate goal is to engineer artificial viruses for deployment as gene therapy vehicles. The goal of the proposed work is to unravel how DNA polymer complexes navigate through the cell. In particular, the movement between endocytic vesicles and transit across the nuclear envelope will be explored. Polymers will be chosen and functionalized to have different buffering and nuclear import properties in order to facilitate the tracking within the cell. Single cells will be observed as well as cell populations. Success will contribute to improving the understanding and efficacy of cell transformation and gene therapy technologies doc14274 none This proposal provides support for the University of California Santa Barbara to conduct three studies which together address questions pertaining to the college major choices of young women, and to the persistence and labor market success of college-educated women in Information Technology Workforce (IT) careers. The first study will examine the career paths of women who already have IT degrees and will explore whether there are labor market barriers that make IT careers less appealing to women. The second is a longitudinal study that will utilize decision theory to scrutinize common assumptions of economic models of career choice. The third study will survey young women s beliefs (or stereotypes) about the characteristics of IT jobs and the women who fill them. The information from this last survey will be linked to the longitudinal second study so that correlations between these beliefs and later career outcomes can be determined doc14275 none Under the direction of Dr. Garth Bawden, Mr. Gregory Lockard will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. Through archaeological excavation at the site of Galindo, located in the Moche Valley of northern coastal Peru, he will examine the processes which gave rise to the Chimu Empire. This, the largest coastal polity in South American prehistory encompassed, at its height two-thirds of all irrigated land along the Pacific desert coast. The empire was ruled by a small group of powerful elites who resided in the capital city of Chan Chan, also located in the Moche Valley. Chan Chan was founded ca. AD and over the next four and a half centuries Chan Chan elites directed the conquest of over km of Pacific coastline. Their power and territorial ambitions came to an end only after a long and bitter war with the Inka, who finally prevailed and conquered the Chimu Empire ca AD . Archaeological evidence and ethnohistoric documents have revealed much concerning the political power of Chimu elites. The origins of this power however must be sought earlier and because Chimu elites emerged at Chan Chan in the Moche Valley, this area holds the key to understanding this development. Through excavation at Galindo, which was occupied immediately before and was a direct precursor to the Chimu, Mr. Lockard hopes to gain insight into this process. The site itself covers an area of approximately four square kilometers and a combination of physical and cultural features (walls and ditches) divide the site into at least six distinct zones. Survey of the site by Mr. Lockard has shown that architectural remains within each of these zones are relatively homogeneous and functionally differentiated from those of other areas of the site. Based on the method and quality of construction, surface area and artifactual content, they can be divided into low, moderate and high status residences and thus demonstrate that a hierarchical social structure existed at this time. Through a program of mapping and careful excavation to collect faunal and botanical remains, Mr. Lockard plans to reconstruct the Galindo social organization. It is quite likely that elites, at least in part, exercised power through the control of scarce goods and analysis of how food remains as well as other valuable materials are distributed should provide insight into this system. This research is important for several reasons. Complex societies arose independently in many parts of the world and through multiple case comparison it is possible to determine the controlling factors which underlie this development. Prehistoric Peru provides one example and Mr. Lockard s work will help to fill a major gap. The data he collects will be of interest to many archaeologists and the project will help to train a promising young scientist doc14276 none Fullagar This award will support Drs. Paul D. Fullagar and Timothy J. Bralower, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in collaboration with Maria Lorente, and Eglee J. Zapata, Universidad Central de Venezuela, for a study to determine the strontium- and carbon-isotope stratigraphy for La Luna Formation, a major source of petroleum in Venezuela. The proposal plans to provide a chemostratigraphy framework (based on strontium and carbon isotopes) that would allow correlation of La Luna Formation sections in Venezuela, and thus a better understanding of its environment of deposition and the accumulation of these organic carbon-rich deposits. This stratigraphy will be an integral part of a nearly completed biostratigraphic-chemostratigraphic age model for the formation. The investigation will enhance our understanding of the processes that control the accumulation of marine Cretaceous organic carbon-rich sediments (CORG) known as black shales deposits throughout earth history doc14277 none The CMOS technology is now being ushered from l8Onm node to 13Onm node. For lOOnm-l3Onm generation technology, many key issues of transistor design must be reexamined. One of them is non-equilibrium transport which takes place in nonoscale MOS devices. Because of continuous down-scaling of the device, the gate length now becomes comparable to or smaller than the inelastic mean-free-path. In this regime, the non-equilibrium non-local transport of carriers in MOS devices requires substantially different formulation from that of the conventional one. In this research project, it is proposed to construct a unified mobility model for carriers in the channel of bulk, SOI, thin-body SOI, and DG MOSFETs applicable to gate length below lOOnm. Based on sound physics of non-equilibrium transport including quantum effects, the conventional low-field inversion layer mobility will be extended to the high-field regime by seeking an effective average carrier energy which characterizes the non-local transport occurring in the device. A series of self-consistent Monte Carlo (MC) simulations of carriers in inversion layers with a quantum mechanically corrected potential will be carried out in the region encompassing retarding-, low-, and high-fields. A unified channel mobility will be constructed in such a way that it can accurately predict velocity overshoot at the drain end of the channel, quantization effects in the inversion layer including tunneling, as well as thermionic emission-limited current density across the source-channel barrier. This unified channel mobility will then be incorporated in the quantum hydrodynamic (QHD) transport equations for numerical simulation of nanometer-scale bulk, SOI, thin-body SOI, and DG MOSFETs. It is expected that this research will provide a consistent and easy means of moving the simulation hierachy from drift-diffusion to MC Boltzmann via a hydrodynamic (HD) formulation. The project will enable simulation of MOS devices with the channel length of 100nm and below. Such capability is required of simulation of next generation of integrated circuits, which are expected in a few years. The proposed research will also benefit both graduate and undergraduate students on campus and engineers in industry who take P.I. s device simulation course through the distance learning. The P.I. has constantly updated course materials based on research results of the past NSF projects and other research projects supported by the industry doc14278 none S. McLean, University of California Santa Barbara This is a renewal proposal of the Grant Mechanism of sediment transport in complex flows which ended in August . In this Grant, the research is focused on the interaction mechanisms between the bed forms and the flow, and the processes by which the flow field moves the sediment grains as bedload or suspended load. The investigations were carried out by experiments in a flume and simple method of predicting sediment flux over a two-dimensional dune was developed. In the present proposal, the PI plans to investigate the processes governing how gradients in sediment flux give rise to changes in bed topography. More specifically, it is proposed to investigate five different types of flow with increasing complexity doc14279 none This proposal provides support for California Lutheran University to conduct a research project to examine why so few male and female African American and Latino students are studying computer science at the college level. The three cohorts, Upward Bound students, Math Upward Bound students and non-Upward Bound students, will be studied as to their experiences, opportunities, attitudes and aspirations with respect to information technology (the federally-funded Upward Bound program is made up of two different programs, the traditional Upward Bound program and the Math Science Upward Bound program). The sites of the study are schools in the three-county Southern California region IX of Upward Bound, Los Angeles, Ventura and Orange Counties doc14280 none Langer There are approximately 1.2 million new cases of cancer each year in the US and about half undergo treatment with radiation therapy. External beam treatment directs a collection of high energy beams from outside the patient s body towards the tumor. Using the widespread method of conformal radiotherapy, beams are positioned at multiple angles, each shaped to match the tumor. The newest technique, intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT), breaks down whole beams into finer beamlets, each of which can, in effect, be assigned a separate intensity. The radiation therapy planning problem is to choose a set of beams beamlets and assign intensities to them to push tumor dose as high as the tolerances of nearby healthy tissue will allow. Even small increments in tumor dose consistent with tolerance constraints can improve thousands of lives per year. The objective of the proposed research is to develop computational methods tailored to radiation therapy that can compute feasible plans provably within a specified percent of the best possible within the 24-48 hours available for treatment planning. To determine volume distributions of dose, oncologists typically model the irregular geometry of tissue structures as the union of a large number of embedded discrete points. Given that the dose delivered to a point can be approximated as linear in the beam intensities, the task of treatment planning optimization can be modeled as mixed-integer program (MIP) with variables corresponding to those intensities, and constraints limiting the dose at each of the tissue points. Dose-volume constraints, which require a specified fraction of each normal organ volume receive a dose below its threshold for damage, are enforced by collecting point constraints for each tissue in a multiple-choice group with alternatives delineated with binary variables. The research will develop and test two contributions to generic MIP methodology in order to enable computationally efficient solutions to be be found for the radiotherapy planning problem. The aim is to provide solutions that satisfy prescribed constraints with an objective value that lies within a provable bound around the optimum. The first of these will strengthen LP relaxations of MIP formulations for the multiple-choice (dose--volume) constraints by constructing and adding new valid inequalities. The second will adapt a column-generation approach to deal with the massive IMRT formulations. Instead of modeling the intensity of each beamlet within an IMRT beam, whole patterns of beamlet intensities will be represented as single columns and generated as required doc14281 none This SGER award has the following objectives: (i) To upgrade the radiation scheme to include improved treatments of radiative transfer and parameterizations of optical properties; and (ii) To provide expanded capabilities including the ability to provide radiances, fluxes, photo-synthetically active radiation (PAR) and other quantities required of other modules of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM). The work is important because it will lead to flexible tools to allow either the existing CCSM radiation code or the new code to be used for future work on simulated satellite radiances, actinic fluxes and other parameters of broad interest to the community doc13979 none The power industry must undertake a managed redesign of the Nation s power system so that it can adapt to deregulation and to rapid changes in the power requirements and regional economic conditions. The need for research in this area is vividly illustrated by the recent California power problems. This second five year continuing grant funds the University of California, Berkeley as part of a multi-university Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC) for Power Systems Engineering (PSERC). The I UCRC involves 10 university research sites generating over $1.5 million. The four universities, Cornell University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Illinois-Champaign, and the University of California-Berkeley, being addressed in identical proposals as a group have generated over $600,000 in the last year. The Center addresses research projects in marketing, transmission and distribution and systems in electric power generation and transmission doc14283 none Karne, Ramesh Towson University SGER: Application-Oriented Object Architecture This SGER project studies the feasibility of an application-oriented object architecture (AOA) to revolutionize the way computer systems are built and drastically reduce the problems of obsolescence and reengineering. The proposed 2-layer architecture consists of an application unit (AU) and an application object (AO). The two form a substrate-software pair with all software functionality in the AO: no additional software is needed and the AU is optimized for the particular AO. This architecture is demonstrated by using an existing computer system such as a desktop and a commonly used resume document application, using a simulation environment prototype for the AU. The work is exploratory in nature and intends to lay the groundwork for a more substantial project. The project intends to make significant contributions to computer systems development and redefine the roles of traditional software, hardware, and applications, providing a new foundation for computer systems based on applications instead of environments doc14284 none An important goal in ecological and evolutionary physiology is to reveal the underlying mechanisms behind differences in habitat use. Studies of locomotor capacity have played a key role in this goal because many species have evolved locomotor abilities in concert with the use of different habitats. Most studies of locomotion are modeled after relatively simple terrestrial habitats (i.e., broad surfaces), and therefore are not ecologically realistic for arboreal species. However, understanding how variables commonly encountered in arboreal habitats (steep inclines, narrow perch diameters) affect locomotion could provide general insights into specialization to different habitats. The tremendous morphological and phylogenetic diversity of lizards exploiting arboreal habitats makes them ideally suited for studying arboreal locomotion. We propose to build on prior work with a group of eight species of Anolis lizards because their phylogeny is well resolved and these species have been characterized as belonging to distinct ecomorphs that occur in different arboreal habitats. The sprinting performance of these Anolis species has been correlated with limb length and the diameters of surfaces in laboratory studies, but virtually nothing is known regarding how the limbs are used on different surfaces and inclines. Thus, in laboratory studies we will conduct three experiments: (1) Examine the effects of incline and surface diameter on the kinematics of steady-speed locomotion in three species of Anolis lizards. (2) Focus on the effects of surface diameter on the kinematics of steady-speed locomotion in 8 species of Anolis lizards. This second experiment will provide a comparative basis for understanding how surface diameter affects locomotion. (3) Study how acceleration and performance is affected by surface diameter for a group of diverse Anolis species. Together, these experiments will reveal the underlying mechanistic and behavioral bases for why some anole species are affected by incline while others are not. Further, they will provide a valuable link between habitat use and quantitative functional morphology. More generally, we will also test whether function, morphology, and habitat use have co-evolved among species, and whether locomotion in arboreal environments differs from locomotion in terrestrial environments. The second goal will be achieved by comparing data from the proposed experiments to those recently performed on terrestrial lizard locomotion doc14285 none Soil food webs are complex assemblages of diverse species that couple mineral nutrient cycles in the soil to primary productivity of plants in root-zone ecosystems known as rhizospheres. These interactions link carbon from plant root exudates to a variety of predator-prey relationships that return excess nitrogen through mineralization to the growing plant. Previous work shows that the presence of predators in the rhizosphere food web can increase plant growth 50 to 150%. This project will use mass-isotope and molecular genetic techniques to identify processes involved in regulating these interactions. Work will be guided by a hierarchical mathematical model designed to predict how increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature influence carbon storage in the rhizosphere. Linkages between the carbon and nitrogen cycles in soil will be clarified by experiments under different levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature that move the ecosystem to new equilibria. One importance of this project lies in its contribution to the debate over whether additional carbon from increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide can be stored in soil. Other aspects of the work will identify mechanisms that promote plant growth while sustaining beneficial interactions among bacteria, nematodes and mites that prey on nematodes doc14286 none The international survey of living conditions among indigenous peoples across the Arctic involves a partnership of researchers and indigenous organizations in Greenland, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Russia, and the United States. This portion of the project focuses on indigenous households in Alaska s North Slope, Northwest Arctic, and Bering Straits regions. The goal of the international study is to develop an integrated set of individual, household, community, and regional databases for use in comparative analyses of living conditions among Arctic populations doc14287 none Many psychologists have studied the influential role of personality in mediating how humans approach life. Physical anthropologists and primatologists have largely ignored this variable in nonhuman primates, focusing instead on the significance of a group-living individual s dominance rank in the social hierarchy. But using dominance rank to predict variables such as stress levels often proves unsatisfactory: dominance has been found to only weakly correlate with variables such as baseline hormone levels. In this project the researcher will consider the role of personality or behavioral style as an additional variable that explains differences between nonhuman primate individuals. Specifically, behavioral and physiological data from captive, peer-housed groups of young chimpanzees at the University of Southwest Louisiana Research Center in New Iberia, Louisiana will be collected. Individuals of similar rank with respect to variables that define behavioral styles will then be compared. For example, how good is individual X at picking fights that he she can win? How adept is individual Y at forming valuable friendships? It is expected that these variables may not perfectly correlate with rank; a low-ranking individual may actually be quite good at picking winnable fights, for example. Individuals with different behavioral styles will be compared for urinary and serum hormone levels in order to assess the relative effects of dominance rank and behavioral style on stress physiology, health, and growth. It is predicted that consideration of behavioral style will provide for a fuller understanding of the factors affecting intra-group relations and physiological parameters than dominance rank alone, and will broaden our approach to primate socioecology doc14288 none The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Women in Engineering Programs WITEC -- Women in Science, Engineering and Technology; Encounter AB (a women-owned company to promote equal opportunity programs in Sweden); the National Agency for Higher Education (part of the Swedish Ministry for Education and Science); and the Swedish Ministry of Industry, Employment, and Communications. Specific goals and objectives for this project are to identify challenges, appropriate strategies, and partnering organizations to implement action plans to: (1) Foster pathways to leadership for women in the engineering and scientific technology workforce, during both the higher education and career years. (2) Better understand the gender perspective in the engineering design process. Participants will include representatives from higher education, business, government, and professional associations. Pre-meeting literature and Internet searches will be conducted to determine what is already known and what programs already exist in these two areas, in both the U.S. and Sweden. Short surveys will be sent to selected engineering schools, business, and professional associations to identify existing strategies in these two areas. Before the study group meeting, participants will receive a written report of the findings. Proceedings of the study group will be produced and posted on the web sites of both the Global Alliance and the Swedish Embassy of the United States of America doc14289 none This is funding to subsidize travel and housing expenses of students selected to participate in the Student Research Workshop to be held in conjunction with the 2nd Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL- ), which will take place June 3-7, in Pittsburgh. The intimate workshop format will encourage student participants to begin building a rapport with established researchers. Students will have sufficient time to present their research (25 minutes) and then receive feedback from a panel of established researchers in the field (15 minutes). The workshop will provide students with invaluable exposure to outside perspectives on their work at a critical time in their research, and will also allow them to put their work into perspective based on feedback from the panel and from fellow participants doc14290 none SGER) MEYER Principal Investigator: Alan D. Meyer, University of Oregon - Eugene Corporate Venture Capital: Fostering Innovation Through Equity Analysis: This highly innovative project proposes to investigate the emerging practice of corporate venture investing whereby corporations seek to invest in start-up ventures, often as an alternative to investment in in-house R Develop a typology of alternative organizational structures being used to house and pursue CVI; Conduct a real-time longitudinal analysis of the rapid coevolution of CVI units and the venturing environment; Identify best practices for corporate venturing. Cooperation has been arranged with Atrium Capital, IBF (International Business Forum), Allegis Capital, Sun Microsystems, 3M Enterprise Development, Compaq Computer Corporate Development, Adobe Systems, and Intel. There exists no other work examining this emerging area of corporate innovation, nor any comparing internal versus independent venture capital. In light of extensive outsourcing of R&D, information as to the potential for this practice as well as its hazards seems highly likely to yield interesting insights of theoretical and practical impact. In the judgment of the Program Director, the cooperation of these corporations and the track record of the researcher argues strongly for important contributions from this Small Grant for Exploratory Research doc14291 none This award is for the partial support of the International Conference on Differential Equations and Mathematical Physics. The conference is a part of the series of conferences that were held six times at the University of Alabama and twice at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The conference will cover a broad range of topics, including: analysis of Schrodinger operators, quantum electrodynamics, fluid dynamics, conservation laws, evolution equations, spectral and scattering theory, inverse problems and many related topics. The list of plenary speakers includes many world class established researchers and young talented mathematicians doc14292 none The goal of the proposed work is to develop efficient metal-ion separation systems based upon the development of a new class of organo-ceramic hybrid materials which can be used as adsorbents for the extraction of toxic and valuable metal ions from aqueous streams. These organic-inorganic hybrid materials are designed at a molecular level to take advantage of desirable properties from both components such as a high reactivity of functional organic molecules for metal extraction and a high physico-chemical strength of the ceramic structure as well as fast metal transport in the pores. The development of these hybrid adsorbents is a multi-disciplinary work in which organic synthesis chemistry, nano-scale materials science, and engineering technology of chemical and environmental applications are closely interrelated. In this project, over 10 functional organic compounds will be developed and tested for their affinity for the proposed target metal ions, chromium and arsenic. After prescreening, two or three functional organic compounds will be selected for further evaluation with each metal ion to develop the most desirable adsorbent materials. These materials will be used to demonstrate their applicability for separating the target metals in a variety of industrial and environmental fluid streams. Successful developments in the proposed project will lead to the understanding and advancement of the sol-gel processing technology and the identification of methodologies to produce and characterize organo-ceramic hybrid adsorbents for separation of toxic and industrially important metals. For example, a hybrid adsorbent developed for arsenic separation might be employed to produce safe drinking water from arsenic-contaminated ground water in many regions. Similarly efficient adsorbents for chromium separations could be applied to recycle this metal from contaminated effluent streams in the electroplating industry. In addition, the technology might be extended to other industrial applications to produce catalysts or new additives for polymers, flame-retardants, and lubricants. The project will also disseminate basic knowledge through research publications and novel industrial applications through patents, and it will provide training and education to students, including Native Americans concerned with contaminated lands doc14293 none Building Diversity in, and through, Environmental Journalism This award seeks to strengthen the understanding of the Earth and environment among populations under-represented in geosciences by improving the quality and quantity of coverage of the environment in media that reach these communities. The Society of Environmental Journalists and the Earth raise awareness among non-minority journalists and editors of how minority audiences can be served through environmental reporting; exchange skills and information resources for better reporting on environmental issues of special interest to minority communities; foster grassroots collegial relationships and collaborations between individual journalists of color and environmental journalists; foster institutional partnerships between the professional societies of environmental journalists and minority journalists; showcase and reward exemplary environmental journalism by journalists who are members of under-represented minorities doc14294 none The worldwide rate of extinctions of living species is near the highest level that has occurred since the asteroid collision of 65 million years ago. Unlike that past natural event, present extinctions are mostly the direct or indirect results of human activities. Massive modifications in habitats plus global climate changes are combining with comparably massive introductions of exotic species (some willful, but most inadvertent or accidental) to destroy naturally evolved native floras and faunas on all continents. Modern experimental biology is making a variety of important contributions to international efforts to at least slow, and in rare cases to halt, this destruction of major parts of the planet s biological environmental infrastructure. To highlight some of the most important of these efforts, and to provide a lasting written record that might serve as the basis for additional work, the PI and a group of his associates are organizing an international conference devoted to these topics. Primary sponsors for the conference are the UCLA Institute of the Environment and the International Commission on Comparative Physiology of the International Union of Physiological Sciences. A major university press will subsequently publish a book summarizing the proceedings. The title of the conference is: EXPERIMENTAL APPROACHES TO CONSERVATION BIOLOGY: The roles of experimental biology in the protection of endangered species and the control of exotic species. It will take place on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from September 11-14, . The central portions of the conference will consist of three days of both invited and contributed papers, plus several panel and workshop discussions and poster sessions. The first day will be devoted to endangered species, the second day to exotic species, and the third day to policy and regulatory issues. Participants will be professionals active in the subject areas of the conference (including researchers, managers, and regulators) and interested students. Information about the conference may be found at its website: www.ioe.ucla.edu biodiversity doc14295 none The FASEB Summer Conference on Prokaryotic Transcription Initiation will be held July 14-19, , at the Vermont Academy in Saxton s River, Vermont. The meeting will bring together biochemists, biophysicists, and geneticists. It will focus on eubacteria, but there will be consideration of both archaea and eukaryotes where comparison is interesting. Areas of intense study that will be featured at the FASEB conference include the following: 1. Structure of DNA-dependent RNA polymerases 2. Sigma factors and core interactions 3. Promoter recognition and initiation 4. Transcription activation 5. Complex regulation 6. Global regulation 7. Formation and stability of elongation complexes All cells regulate the flow of information from DNA to protein at several different levels. A primary, and most economical, target of regulation is the initiation of transcription, the process by which the information in a gene on a chromosome is encoded in a small (relative to a chromosome) mobile form for use by the cell. Using easily manipulated bacterial systems, scientists have discovered many fundamental principles of transcriptional regulation and are exploring many more today. This meeting will facilitate the free exchange of experimental results and ideas so essential to this scientific search. The financial support provided by the National Science Foundation will enable students and postdoctoral fellows to attend this important meeting doc14296 none This proposal deals with new design techniques and chipsets for the coming generations of wireless systems, which provide a wider domain of services and work with different standards. The emphasis will be on the design of low power RF, analog and mixed-signal transceiver front-ends in standard MOS technology. Interdisciplinary research work is proposed at the architecture, block, circuit, and device levels leading to CMOS chipsets and single chip front-end design for both cellular and indoor wireless applications. Transceiver architectures for the implementation of multi-standard TDMA and CDMA wireless systems are proposed. Research is then proposed in three main thrusts encompassing RF, baseband and frequency synthesis CMOS design techniques. In the RF part, MOS modeling of GHz Nonlinearities will be studied and optimization techniques using device widths and bias currents as design parameters to achieve low power and high linearity will be developed. The proposed modeling and optimization techniques will then be used in the design of low noise amplifiers, linear power-efficient power amplifiers and mixers with controllable gain settings. In the baseband part, a multi-standard Sigma-Delta data converter architecture is proposed for TDMA (GSM family and DECT) systems while a pipeline architecture is proposed for CDMA systems. Digitally programmable variable gain amplifiers and filters are proposed as part of a CMOS cell library for baseband signal processing. In the frequency synthesis part, techniques for multi-standard frequency synthesizers together with tuning schemes for multi-standard voltage controlled oscillators are proposed. Based on the proposed ideas, several chipsets at the sub-system level will be demonstrated togther with two multi-standard single chip CMOS receivers at the system level, one for TDMA systems and one for CDMA systems (WCDMA, CDMA ). A management plan for the proposed activities is provided and a discussion on the education component of this work is included. The proposed work should contribute to the preparation of the nation s critical mass of well trained engineers and scientists that is desperately needed in integrated circuits and systems for future wireless systems. This will enable us to compete effectively on the global scale doc14297 none PI: Christodoulos Floudas and James R. Broach Institution: Princeton University Proposal Number: The aim of the proposed work is to combine molecular genetics with computational analysis to map the signal transduction pathways in eucaryotic cells. Of special interest is the topology connectivity of the metabolic pathways. The initial system will be the Ras and Tor signaling pathways in Saccahromyces cerevisiae. Data for whole genome expression will be used to develop and validate pathway maps doc14298 none Matthews This grant supports a planning visit to Hong Kong by Dr. Alexander Matthews, Kansas State University. Dr. Matthews plans to carry out a series of discussions with senior researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology to develop research protocols for a multi-year program of cooperative research and exchange of students in the area of environmental quality control doc14299 none The overall goal is to develop quantitative descriptions of bacterial metabolism to help elucidate the genotype-phenotype relation. The focus is on augmenting network analysis and phenotype prediction by accounting for genetic-level capabilities and control mechanisms. The tasks are to perform a sensitivity analysis of a simplified E. coli network model contained using Lagrange multipliers from nonlinear programming and to collect data on constraints for a large scale dynamic FBA simulation from the literature and existing online databases. The union of biochemical engineering and system analysis investigators will provide significant cross-training to the student involved doc14300 none Leshin This grant provides support for the 3rd Biennial Geochemical SIMS (Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry) Workshop to be held at The Buttes Hotel and Conference Center in Tempe, AZ, October 12-14, . The third in a series of biennial workshops, this meeting will bring together the bulk of U.S. geoscientists who either manage, maintain and or utilize secondary ion mass spectrometry for microspatial trace element and isotopic analyses of natural and man made materials. The workshop will focus on presentations from the community that address developing new SIMS techniques for geological and cosmochemical applications, providing improved service to the community through NSF-sponsored SIMS facilities (i.e. WHOI; and UCLA; ) and the sharing and development of laboratory standards. The PI, Laurie Leshin, currently oversees a newly established ( ) CAMECA 6f SIMS facility at Arizona State University and has included a list of invitees from the preeminent SIMS labs in U.S. academia and government labs. Additional attendees will include representatives from the manufactures of SIMS instrument (CAMECA and Australian Scientific Instruments) and should ensure that the analytical needs of U.S. geoscientists who use SIMS will be effectively transmitted to the private sector capable of facilitating instrumental improvements doc14301 none Xavier University of Louisiana is using a planning grant to develop a research project aimed at understanding more about African American female students who are drawn to and succeed in computer sciences. The research plan is to characterize students in this group who are interested in computing sciences, find the motivating factors of success, and classify the views they have of the profession. Based on this research, undergraduate programs could be shaped to increase the numbers of African American females entering undergraduate computing sciences and encourage those in the field of study to continue through graduate school. Xavier is developing partnerships with other HBCUs and universities to collaborate in the future project, develop corporate partners, develop graduate school partners (in particular those experience with research procedures and women s issues), establish an advisory board, and obtain definitions of roles and cooperative agreements doc14302 none The ecological basis for pair-wise aggressive encounters has been investigated in many species of non-human primates. Some species also form aggressive coalitions while searching for food, but the ecological correlates of such coalitions have yet to be studied. A coalition is defined as cooperation by two or more individuals in an aggressive encounter against one or more other individuals. This study will focus on pair-wise and coalitional aggression in the white-faced capuchin, Cebus capucinus in the context of feeding. The objectives of this study are (1) to measure the ecological factors that may affect the rates of aggressive contests by quantifying the costs and benefits associated with resource competition and (2) to test an ecological explanation for the evolution of coalition behavior in non-human primates. Data will be collected at two dry-forest study sites in Costa Rica. The researchers will examine whether the ecological costs and benefits associated with coalition formation differ systematically from those that prevail during pair-wise contests, and whether males and females are equally likely to form coalitions. Because males are usually dominant to females in C. capucinus, one would expect females to form coalitions to gain access to food patches occupied by a male. The ecological benefit of fighting over a food patch will be measured as the nutritional gain available to contestants in the patch, whereas the cost to an individual includes both the cost of a physical injury and the time needed to find alternate food patches if it loses. The ecological explanation will be tested against the simple alternative that the frequency of fights and coalitions reflect overcrowding or the availability of coalition partners in a food patch. This study will help us to understand the origins of cooperative behavior in non-human primates and humans doc14303 none Chief objectives of this international workshop are: sharing of latest research results on product sound quality, noise engineering, and human factors and psychoacoustics; understanding industry s current practices and future needs; defining joint research projects that will improve understanding of how people perceive and are affected by the complex sounds produced by machinery; and exploring mechanisms by which that understanding can be put to good use by practicing engineers. The forum will provide a unique opportunity for a closer interaction between leading U.S. academics and industry parctitioners and experts from Western Europe, Japan and Korea. The 3-day symposium activities will be supplemented with a 2-day visit to several industry facilities including two new automaotive company Noise-Vibration-Harshness (NVH) facitities which are engage in extensive activities in sound quality. reports on the PSQ 01 workshop based on both workshop proceedings and those projects sparked by the workshop will be presented at meetings of the Acoustical Society and the Institute of Noise Control Engineering. This symposium intends to identify common international interests and priorities in the area of noise and product sound quality and focus on important relevant scientific issues doc14304 none Recent developments in mixed-signal systems, especially those integrating computing and communication in a system-on-a-chip, have focused on the goal to communicate information via wireless devices and networks. While digital system design to process baseband information is moving into the low gigahertz (GHz) frequency range, the mixed-signal transceivers have to operate in the ISM bands (2.5 GHz up to 5.8 GHz) with even higher frequencies in the near future to satisfy bandwidth demands. Analog design advances have produced several transceiver designs up to 5 GHz, using CMOS, BiCMOS, and other technologies. To reduce noise, these designs tend to separate the transmitter and receiver, and so far, have provided only a single physical link (one transmitter and one receiver) in a wireless device. In the design area, this proposal addresses the creation and verification of scalable systematic design methods to integrate two or more physical links on one single chip to provide more bandwidth and flexibility in communication applications. A methodology to incorporate multi-links is scalable in the sense that more links can be added by application demands. To create this methodology, we propose the following design approaches: 1. Noise cancellation techniques and circuits to deal with digital switching noise. 2. Noise cancellation techniques and circuits to deal with RF noise interference between different transceiver links and circuits. These circuits will be validated using case studies from industry with whom we have had close collaborations: Texas Instruments, Motorola, and National Semiconductors, who will provide advanced fabrication technologies and simulation models for this study. The designs will be fully tested and the development of scalable test methods is the second focus of this proposal. Mixed-signal test advances, despite intense activities, have been rather slow, especially in high-frequency (GHz) test. We propose to investigate the following approaches and distill the results into a test methodology that can be scaled with respect to operating frequencies and process advances: 1. End-to-end digital test methods using one transmit link and one receive link on the same chip to verify correct information transmission. 2. Designs of on-chip delay and phase measurement circuits, operating at the same frequency as the transceivers. 3. Interface between ATE and on-chip test circuits to use test resources efficiently. During the validation of these test methodologies, we will need access to advance test equipment for comparison purposes, and these equipment will be provided by our collaborator at Teradyne (Tualatin, OR) and Wavecrest (San Jose, CA). Another level of integration involves the curriculum - research aspects of the proposed work, which is being implemented in our current curriculum revision. Dissemination approaches re-used the distance learning methods and assessment supported by NSF, FIPSE, and our own university. The proposal will deliver fundamental methodologies and techniques, and train the first-generation system architects in high-frequency mixed-signal design and test doc14305 none Herbert Schorr University of Southern California SGER: Digital Government: Fedstats Secure Collaborative Environment This grant will support preliminary explorations of the needs of statistical researchers and Federal statistical agencies to collaborate at a distance, using the Internet, over potentially confidential information. Issues such as security, privacy and authenticated data arise, particularly when some of the collaborators are connected from behind Federal agency firewalls Data analysis, visualization, Internet-based teleconferencing and other collaboration tools will be explored, as will the applicability of new Internet protocols doc14306 none A recent analysis of data acquired viewing the Earth limb edge-on from the space shuttle has demonstrated that the present model of the nightglow emission is incomplete. The observations were made by the Arizona Airglow Experiment (GLO). It uses a new technique referred to as hyperspectral imaging in which vertical profiles of all of the prominent nightglow emissions are recorded simultaneously. This proposal requests support to continue the analysis of archival data with the main purpose of providing a more appropriate nightglow model. A review of all present model parameters will be undertaken. That will be followed by static and finally dynamic representations of nightglow condition. The GLO data archive is extensive. Many conditions have been observed that will be used to constrain the model process doc14307 none The Wildlands Project is producing a four-hour television series for PBS and the CBC. The television series, The Sacred Balance, will feature geneticist and environmental scientist David Suzuki as he examines a new vision of the human place in nature. The series aims to enrich and expand the scientific world view by looking at traditional knowledge, myth, literature and art, and by incorporating aspects of human spirituality into the insights presented by science. The aim of the project is to show that the world-view human beings have celebrated since ancient times is reemerging, transformed, from the laboratories of modern science. Moving away from reductionist techniques, researchers from many different disciplines are studying diversity, whole organisms, systems and relationships that begin in the individual cell and extend to the entire planet. The television series is designed to change the way the public acts in the world by demonstrating that what we do to the Earth we do to ourselves. Dr. Suzuki will work closely with an advisory committee in shaping the series. The members of this committee include: Lane Lubchenco: Professor of Marine Biology and Zoology, Oregon State University David Schindler: Environmental Ecologist, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta E. O. Wilson: Biologist, Harvard University Sylvia Earl: Marine Ecologist and Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic Society, Washington, DC James Parks Morton: Former Dean, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, currently at the Interfaith Center of New York The television series will be supplemented by a new, interactive Sacred Balance website and a teachers guide. Ancillary material also will include Dr. Suzuki s trade book, The Sacred Balance doc14308 none This award provides partial support for the operation and the improvement of the La Selva field station in Costa Rica, one of three stations in Costa Rica owned and operated by the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS), a U.S. nonprofit consortium of 58 universities and research institutions in the United States, Costa Rica, Peru and Australia. The La Selva station encompasses 1,515 hectares of classic lowland tropical rain forest in northeastern Costa Rica where it adjoins Braulio Carrillo National Park. This allows the station to offer access to protected forests from near sea level within the La Selva reserve to the summit of Barva Volcano (2,906 m) within the park. The station s research potential has been noted by the Committee on Research Priorities in Tropical Biology of the National Research Council, which has recommended La Selva as one of four tropical forest sites in the world where ecosystem-level studies should be focused. In the 48 years since its establishment, La Selva has hosted 3,000 research projects, resulting in over 2,000 scientific publications and 160 theses and dissertations, and a number of important books. In alone, La Selva hosted 282 researchers and research staff working on 118 separate projects, representing over 9,000 person-days. Use of the station for education and training of high school, undergraduate and graduate students is as significant as its research use, with nearly 10,000 person-days distributed among 3,000 students and faculty in . A major focus of the support provided with this award will be provisions and planning for modern, high speed computer and communications infrastructure that will significantly improve outside access to data acquired and stored at the station, and also improve the ability of researchers and students to organize and save such data while at the station or in the field doc14309 none With the proliferation of RF ICs in consumer electronic products there is a critical need for simulation and modeling tools that enable first pass success in silicon. The trend towards integrating complete systems on a chip, requires very high performance digital, analog, and RF circuits to be integrated on the same silicon substrate. Successful integration of these complex systems requires new design tools and design approaches that significantly advance the state-of-the-art. Certain aspects of RF system performance are easier to characterize and verify in steady state. Examples of these are distortion, power, frequency, noise, and transfer characteristics such as gain and impedance. The proposed work focuses on developing a coupled device and circuit simulator that will accurately address the modeling and simulation needs of critical and noise sensitive analog and RF devices and circuits. A coupled device and circuit simulator provides a direct link between the IC fabrication technology, device design and the higher level of circuit design. Since the models from the device simulator (numerical models) are predictive, they can be used to evaluate the impact of technology on circuit performance. Additionally, this work provides the foundation for new design approaches that will advance the state-of-the-art for analog and RF circuits blocks. This research will focus on modeling, simulation, and design of high performance and high frequency analog and RF circuits. The key contributions of this work will be: A software architecture for incorporating general purpose device simulators in the coupled device and circuit simulator CODECS. The architecture will allow integration without extensive modifications to the device simulator and enable simulation of technologies such as SiGe and SOI, and also simulation of optical devices. This tool architecture also facilitates parallelization over a cluster of workstations. Availability of time-domain and frequency-domain steady-state simulation methods within one simulator. Numerical (physical) models and compact circuit models can be used within this simulator. Capability of simulating device-to-device interactions including substrate and thermal couplings. Coupled device and circuit noise simulation techniques for RF circuits. Validation of simulator with fabrication of improved designs for the following RF circuitry: low noise amplifier (LNA), mixer, and voltage controlled oscillator (VCO). These circuits are critical blocks in a transceiver and are particularly sensitive to noise. The research in this proposal is tightly integrated with a significant educational component. This will include development of courses in RF integrated circuits, and modeling and simulation for RF applications. A new undergraduate course will be developed. This course will focus on transceiver architectures and discrete design and will include a lab in which students will gain hands-on experience in radio design. The emphasis will be on projects related to transceiver design. The research results, including the software, circuit designs, and course-related materials will be available on the world wide web. In addition, results from the proposed work will be presented at meetings of the Semiconductor Research Corporation and the NSF Center for Design of Analog and Digital ICs doc14310 none The aim of the proposed work is to extend the use of linear and other network analysis tools. The addition of logical information in model constraints to emulate regulatory logic will be pursued. Mixed integer linear programming will be among the tools employed. Two general approaches will be used. The first entails encoding a check to see if a flux solution is consistent with the kinetic and regulatory structure of the network. The second involves superimposing transcript ratio data from DNA arrays within probabilistic framework that account for the lack of linearity between transcript level and gene product activity doc14311 none This research effort is directed to providing a novel solution to the problems that occur with mixed-signal integration by using three-dimensional implementation of planar silicon transistors. The planned research will explore mixed signal technology s viability through research and development of device and process technology incorporating digital and analog planar transistor structures in different single-crystal device planes using techniques of single-crystal silicon layer transfer at low temperatures and by isolating the digital and analog functions with a ground-plane in between. This will be done while continuing to allow a large interconnection density in the horizontal and vertical direction for signal transmission. In order to make this feasible, transfer of thin (100 s of nm) layers of single-crystal silicon on a planarized low roughness silicon dioxide surface at temperatures below 550 C has been demonstrated. Interconnections and ground planes based on doped poly-silicon and or tungsten are incorporated in between the single-crystal silicon planes. The use of multiple planes, with oxide in between, also allows incorporation of other passive elements while limiting the increase in area together with a reduction in the loss effects of high frequencies. It is expected that this approach will reduce noise and cross-talk through the use of ground-planes and reduced coupling. This should provide additional freedom in the design of analog transistors, such as the metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors in this project. This approach is also compatible with and can incorporate other developments in passive elements, such as high quality factor inductors, filters, etc., in back-end of the fabrication process. This research addresses significant issues for potential industrial applications , as analog and digital technologies can differ from each other in quite substantial ways because of the design requirements inherent to high frequency or low power. Maintaining low cost, the need for operation at low power, and the circuit and systems issues arising from interference between analog signals and digital signals are a few of these challenges doc14312 none The overall aim is to elucidate the operating and design principles of metabolic and genetic networks. Two complementary strategies will be merged. The first is a theoretical analysis of small, modular pathways, which form the building blocks of biochemical systems, and of composites of these modules. The analysis will elucidate the dynamic activation profiles of enzymes that yield optimal responses to demands like brief peak availability of a metabolite or sustained change in metabolite composition. The second strategy will entail reconstituting sphingolipid metabolism in E. coli and using this as an experimental model for studying fluxes and the effects of specific regulatory interventions. The system thus has the potential to provide an in vivo laboratory for studying de novo pathway design doc14313 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled From genome to gene expression: Mapping and understanding genetic networks in Dictyostelium development. Upon starvation, Dictyostelium amoeba communicate, sort, and adhere to each other to form ``tissues . This transformation, resulting in a resistant spore, utilizes all the mechanisms crucial for normal development of multicellular organisms. Promoters, repressors, and the architecture of genetic networks involved in development in Dictyostelium are being explored using both genomic and gene expression data and mathematical modeling doc14314 none The long range goal of this project is to build methods to infer genetic networks from gene chip or microarray transcription profiles. The methods developed are also envisioned to enable experimental design. The approach proposed is a staged one consisting of initially building a low-resolution dynamic model that fits observed data, and then to improve such a model to identify hidden variables in order to increase its predictive power. To achieve that objective, a series of kinetic functions for gene expression will be developed and made available on the Internet (where they will be peer-reviewed). These models will be used to generate artificial gene expression data. The data analysis algorithms will thus be developed and tested using a known in silico source to assess robustness and areas for further improvement doc14315 none Principles of Efficient Inference This is the first year funding of a three year continuing award. This project seeks to uncover fundamental principles for the construction of real-time AI systems that employ declarative knowledge representations and general reasoning engines. To achieve this goal, the PI will (a) study the fine grained structure of problem hardness based on notions coming out of work on phase transitions in random problem distributions; (b) develop faster complete and incomplete reasoning engines, including systems that employ decision-theoretic control of reasoning; and (c) apply and test the new algorithms to planning problems in a robotics testbed. This research will lead to the creation of useful new algorithms for solving hard combinatorial problems in areas such as knowledge-based expert systems, autonomous systems, and operations research. The results will also promote interdisciplinary work on logic and reasoning in the AI, theory, OR, robotics, and verification communities doc14316 none The research aims to develop a chip-package co-design methodology using System on a Chip and System on a Package technologies. This is necessary to span multiple domains both in technology and circuitry in integrated RF microsystems. These systems include RF, analog and digital circuits and are sensitive to the constraints imposed by each domain on the other domains and the package. Most systems are currently being designed in CMOS technology and are driven by the requirements of the digital domain. This research will be conducted in three phases. In the first phase of this project, limits of RF circuit performance will be investigated. The constraints of the digital physical design environment on Rf circuit design will also be examined. In the second phase, emerging technologies such as Copper metal layers and deposition of Ferrite material will be studied for RF passive components, and compared with standard Al metal technology. In the third phase, a co-design methodology will be developed for the chip and the package, that includes component optimization, floor planning and routing. The developed methodology will be used on a test bed that will be fabricated and tested. The RIT collaboration with Georgia Tech brings expertise in microsystems science and engineering together with design, modeling and characterization of electronic packaging. Graduate students and undergraduates will benefit from the breadth of the research collaboration that includes the synthesis of chip design and packaging, and the advances in integrated RF microsystems doc14317 none The recent completion of a draft of the human genome leaves us with a staggering number of sequences, an impressive number of surprising statistics, and the task of making sense of it, by linking the genetic code to observable characters (phenotypes). And one of the surprising statistics emerged from this first draft can hold the key to unlock the code. On average, the genomes of any two human individuals are identical at 99.9% of all nucleotides. While this extremely high degree of identity is striking, the enormous size of the genome (over 3 x 109 base pairs) means that a 0.1% rate of divergence is still equivalent to over 3 million differences between any two people, which translates, on the average, into one difference every bases. These subtle variations, called polymorphisms, have been proven to be invaluable tools to relate genetic code to phenotypes. By far the most common type of polymorphism is the alteration of a single base (A, C, G or T), known as a Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP). Although only a small fraction of these variations resides in coding parts of the genome (i.e. segments that actually affect the expression of the genetic code), SNPs act as unique markers on the genetic code and allow to follow along families (pedigrees) the simultaneous inheritance of code segments and phenotypic characters. This phenomenon allows us to assess the relationship between characters and some areas of the genetic code. The signal of these variations is so strong that simple Mendelian in-heritance was able to reveal the genetic basis of important diseases, such as Huntington s disease or cystic fibrosis. These phenotypes, however, are easy to discover because they follow a simple pattern of inheritance of a single gene. The next challenge is to discover the genetic bases of complex traits caused by more than one coding region or by the interplay between genetic predisposition and environmental conditions. This project seeks a solutions to this problem by mean of an unsupervised machine learning technology known as Bayesian networks (BBNs), born at the confluence between Statistics and Artificial Intelligence. A BBN is a direct acyclic graph in which nodes represent stochastic variables and links represent dependencies among variables. Recent developments of the technology have made possible learning these networks from databases comprising values of several variables and, in so doing, discovering the most probable model of dependence among these variables. BBNs are not restricted to pairwise models of interactions but they can describe and therefore help to assess models where more than one variable is responsible for changes in others. SNPs, environmental conditions and observable characters are represented as stochastic variables, thus allowing a seamless integration of the information. The first technological chal-lenge of the project is the integration of the hierarchical structure of pedigree information (i.e. the information about family inheritance) in the flat structure of the BBNs, where all variables are equally interacting. The second issue tackled by the project will be understanding of the stochastic nature of the mechanism causing missing data (such as failed enotyping, missing phenotypes on ancestors), the development of appropriate treatment for the incomplete databases, and the assessment of the reliability of the resulting models. The third aspect of the project is the integration with existing SNPs databases to provide fast access to the available SNPs information doc14318 none This is an award to Mississippi State University with a subaward to Florida State University. It is a renewal of an ongoing research program on state of the art computational studies of nanomagnetism. As such, it captures the spirit of recent NSF initiatives on ITR and NSE, in that its impact will be felt on new algorithms for complex interacting systems, understanding magnetism on the nanoscale, and the design of new ultrahigh-density magnetic strorage systems. One technological motivation of the research is the ongoing effort to increase the information storage density of magnetic recording media. It is likely that ultrahigh-density magnetic recording media that can store one bit of information on one single-domain, nanoscale magnetic particle may become available in the next few years. To achieve this goal with acceptable data integrity and read write speeds at room temperature, it is necessary to improve the scientific understanding of magnetization-reversal dynamics in magnetic nanoparticles, molecules, and ultrathin films, at nonzero temperatures. This will require large-scale numerical simulations of realistic models of technologically important magnetic materials. This research project will further develop novel simulation algorithms for hysteresis and thermally driven magnetization reversal in models of nanoscale magnets. The materials objective of the project is to improve understanding of dynamical phenomena in real nanoscale ferromagnetic materials at nonzero temperature over a large range of time scales. Previous work will be extended by conducting simulations of a wider range of real materials through increased emphasis on quantum mechanical systems and less strongly anisotropic materials. These generalizations will include continuous spin models with finite spin anisotropy, systems with defects and quenched disorder, three-dimensional models and quantum spin models of magnetic molecules. In order to study these models, novel algorithms capable of covering a wide range of time scales will be adapted and developed, in particular the Projective Dynamics and Monte Carlo with Absorbing Markov Chains algorithms previously developed on this project. The studies of continuous spin models will also use Langevin Micromagnetics methods for finite-temperature simulations developed during the previous grant period. Particular emphasis will be given to developing methods that enable these simulations to cover a wide range of time scales. It is also proposed to use quantum density matrices to predict experimental EPR line widths for magnetic molecules and to provide ab initio transition probabilities for kinetic Monte Carlo and Langevin simulations. The suitability of these algorithms for various parallelization paradigms will be studied and they will be implemented on scalable parallel computers. The scaling properties of parallel simulation algorithms will be studied using mappings to non-equilibrium interface-growth problems that were discovered on this project. These algorithmic and parallelization methods constitute the computational objectives of the research. %%% This is an award to Mississippi State University with a subaward to Florida State University. It is a renewal of an ongoing research program on state of the art computational studies of nanomagnetism. As such, it captures the spirit of recent NSF initiatives on ITR and NSE, in that its impact will be felt on new algorithms for complex interacting systems, understanding magnetism on the nanoscale, and the design of new ultrahigh-density magnetic strorage systems doc14319 none The aim is to develop a meaningful mathematical description of translation, which can provide insights into the mRNA-protein expression relationship in Escherichia coli. The two overarching objectives of the proposed efforts are: (i) the identification of the parameters that affect the correlation of mRNA and protein expression based on the formulation and computational analysis of mathematical models of the translation processes, and (ii) the quantification of these parameters using the information derived within the experimental component of the proposed work doc14320 none In this renewal proposal, the PI proposes to continue his investigation of turbulent flow especially in terms of Large Eddy Simulation (LES) modeling. In order to obtain accurate LES modeling, transport in the small scales, sub-grid scale, of momentum as well as scalar quantities such as temperature and concentration need to be known. In this proposal, the PI will concentrate on the study of passive scalar dynamics in turbulence. Experiments will be performed on heated cylinder wake, heated jet, and grid turbulence with temperature gradient to obtain the sub-grid scale transport of heat and momentum in these flows. Results of the experiments will used to formulate appropriate SGS modeling for application in LES doc14321 none Future mobile communications technologies are expected to provide a wide variety of services, high-quality audio, high-definition video and quick response control data, through wide-band access channels. Future systems will acquire multimedia capability and will facilitate the use of high-speed wireless local area networks (W-LAN) and Home Broadcasting networks in place of traditional architectures. These systems will be designed to address user demands for broadband wireless communications and will drive the development of new microwave and mm-wave devices and circuits. Possible in-home application scenarios for both analog and digital transmission will require very compact, low-cost and high efficiency receive transmit devices that can provide asymmetric data transmission from a home server to various appliances for quality operation and control. In response to the above technology needs, this program proposes to develop a novel RF front-end receiver architecture that consumes very little power, is highly compact, very low-cost and high-performance. The proposed architecture is based on a CMOS on SOI implementation for both the RF and digital parts of the circuit and allows for an intimate integration of the circuit with the RF filters and antenna structure. The new receiver architecture will be based on the use of metamaterial substrates for the development of highly integrated filter banks, will rely on vertical integration for the development of highly compact three-dimensional wireless front ends, will have a novel antenna structure intimately integrated with the highly selective multi-frequency substrate and have a novel mixed signal digital IF circuitry. The design of the receiver will be accomplished through a holistic mixed circuit approach that accurately takes into account high frequency effects including dispersion, radiation and electromagnetic coupling. The modeling and simulation problem encountered in the implementation of the above vision is typical to mixed-signal RFICs. The proposed technical approach represents a solution to the broader problem and has the potential to alleviate the design bottleneck at the analog RF package interface. The University of Michigan will use its own fabrication facilities together with the IBM Blue Logic Cu-11 CMOS on SOI 0.11m facilities to develop the proposed receiver. North Carolina State University will provide modeling and simulations necessary for the design of the receiver. A prototype 4-channel 5-10GHz receiver will be simulated, designed, fabricated, packaged and tested during the course of this work. In addition, 16-channel very high-Q electromagnetic bandgap filter bank will be designed, fabricated and tested. Moreover, topics such as manufacturing tolerance, temperature effects, filter tuning and frequency scaling will be studied. The proposed work will be performed in close collaboration with IBM High performance logic development and RF Technology development. Graduate and undergraduate student research investigators in both Universities will execute the research tasks. A number of these students may spend part of their summer at IBM on internships to facilitate the collaboration and take the opportunity to interact with IBM scientists. Furthermore, the research outcomes of this effort, in terms of the design of the mixed-signal circuit architectures, will become the basis of a new senior graduate-level course in high frequency circuits. Special effort will be placed in attracting under-represented students through the University of Michigan UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunities) and Maria Sara Parker Programs specifically designed to provide research experiences to undergraduate and graduate female and minority students. The results of these efforts will be disseminated broadly via publications in scientific journal and or presentations in technical conferences and the development of an interactive web site doc14322 none The use of the microcantilever-based sensors for detecting onset of protein expression will be tested in a model cell line. The device consists of a piezoelectric cantilever smaller than 5 microns in length coupled to antibody proteins immobilized at the cantilever tip. Binding of target molecules is detected by monitoring the resonance frequency shift. Due to the small size, the cantilever potentially allows for high sensitivity. Because the proposed piezoelectric cantilever sensors use electrical signal for actuation and detection, the sensor and all necessary electronics can be organized in a compact form thereby enabling use in applications such as bioreactor monitoring and genomics-inspired proteomics doc14323 none Kan This proposal focuses on investigating innovative circuits based on double-gate MOSFET structures in the mixed-signal environment. The research efforts will establish a whole suite of knowledge on circuit design, device modeling, device design, and device fabrication for optimal performance and reliable operations in the deep submicron double-gate MOSFET technology. The comprehensive aspects from circuit to fabrication will not only provide a thorough understanding of the mixed-signal circuit design trade-off, but also will enable a balance development for graduate and undergraduate students participating in the program. Initial scaling studies on double-gate MOSFET device design has been performed by analytical solutions and the full-2D electrostatic solver. Design variables such as channel length, Si film thickness, gate oxide thickness, and contact work functions will be selected according to different benchmark in circuit applications. The static coupling between the two channels can be maximized or minimized, the dynamic coupling can be tuned to fit the circuit operations. Steep subthreshold slope including DIBL (drain-induced barrier lowering) consideration can be achieved through appropriate design consideration on quantum-mechanical effects. Novel Schottky S D contact technology by the PI s group will be employed and evaluated in the overall device operations and circuit requirements. This modeling study will serve as the scaling guidelines for device and process design. Simultaneously with the fabrication process development of double-gate CMOS technology, pre-Si prediction of device parameters will be obtained from detailed modeling and scaling studies based on experimental measurement on the larger devices with similar structures. A scalable compact model for double-gate CMOS will be developed based on the preliminary analytical and numerical solutions. The predicted parameter set and the scalable device model will enable early analysis of mixed-signal circuit design, which will in turn give directives to fabrication process trade-off. Novel mixed-signal circuits will be constructed using the tight (no contact parasitic) and fast (down to 0.1ps, i.e., 10THz, limited by either the dielectric relaxation time or carrier transit time of carriers travelling between two channels) coupling between the two MOS structures. The PI expects that this task will result in new low-voltage circuit topologies that exploit both gates of the double-gate MOSFET to achieve high-performance operation with low power consumption. He also expects to determine a great deal about how the double-gate MOSFET structure can be optimized for different circuit applications. Innovative Claims Novel mixed-signal circuit functionality can be obtained from using the tight and fast coupling between the two gates of the proposed structure. Methodology for device and circuit co-design can be demonstrated through double-gate MOSFET analog and mixed-signal circuits. Novel low-voltage, low-power mixed-signal circuits with high performance can be designed utilizing the unique double-gate structure of the proposed devices doc14324 none The topic of balanced flow and its breakdown is of fundamental importance to geophysical fluid dynamics and weather prediction, yet the dynamics associated with it remain largely unknown. The objective of this project is to investigate the nature of balance in upper-tropospheric jets and fronts, the conditions for it to breakdown and the generation of inertia-gravity waves, and the physical mechanisms responsible for it. The approach is to start with a simple two-layer primitive equation for the examination of the fundamental dynamics and then extended to frameworks with increasing complexity, such as including the stratosphere. Numerical simulations using these models will examine the life cycles of baroclinic waves in which frontal systems develop and inertia-gravity waves are generated. Based on the results from the numerical studies, an idealized analytic model will be developed to describe the essential dynamic behavior of the generation of inertia-gravity waves. This project will enhance the understanding of the inertia-gravity waves that are important to weather forecasting. The importance of this work extends beyond the pedagogical applications to include potential benefits to aviation and weather forecasting. If an analytical approach for forecasting significant gravity wave activity generated by some kind of flow imbalance can be formulated, then it will have direct applications to forecasts of clear-air turbulence associated with upper-level jet streams, and to the generation of severe weather resulting from gravity wave forcing. Results from the project can demonstrate the roles that breaking waves from frontal systems may play in the atmospheric general circulation doc14325 none Analog to Digital Converters (ADCs) are one of the key components that are needed in many integrated circuits today and the application and demand for the converters will only accelerate throughout the next decade as applications expand and the ability to put large systems on a chip becomes reality. Paralleling and enabling this growing demand is an evolution in semiconductor technology with processes that have a continued shrinking of feature sizes and supply voltages. Although these evolutions are providing dramatic speed and transistor density improvements in most digital circuits, they are presenting increasing challenges for realizing analog and mixed-signal functions and the two decade-old strategy of using the same basic circuit structures to implement key functional blocks such as the analog to digital converter will no longer be successful in the sub-100nm processes that are now under development. This research is focused on developing design methodologies that can be used to design high-performance analog to digital converters in sub-100nm semiconductor processes in which not only the supply voltages are decreasing but also the gain characteristics of the basic transistor are deteriorating. The three major initiatives in the project are a) developing techniques for building fast high-gain operational amplifiers that can operate with very low supply voltages, b) developing built-in self-calibration and built-in self-test algorithms for pipelined data converters, and c) incorporating these results into a prototype converter than will be fabricated in a fine resolution process so that the theoretical performance characteristics can be experimentally validated. The low voltage operational amplifiers should find applications in sub-100nm processes well beyond their use in pipelined data converters. The self-calibration strategy is based upon treating the pipelined data converter as a system, which is identified through the use of a dedicated digital signal processing block. This approach will provide for yield enhancement and will inherently provide capability for built-in self-test which will be of increasing importance as increasingly complex analog and mixed-signal functions become deeply embedded in large single-chip systems doc14326 none A Bayesian statistical approach and size-exclusion DNA microarray experimentation, which complement each other, will be developed to achieve the complete mapping of operons. With the precise operon structures determined, the regulational analysis can accurately address the regulation on each mRNA species. This project addresses the fundamental issue of deducing regulatory circuitry at the genomic scale. It is one of the early attempts for combining prior mechanistic knowledge with large amounts of DNA microarray data. The project also attempts to represent the genome-wide regulation features by a smaller subset of regulatory proteins doc14327 none The long range goal of this project is to develop models of how the cellular environment influences gene expression and metabolic network response. The approach entails probing and modeling how viruses can redirect metabolic function in a host. Viruses encode a manageable amount of information and thus a virus-host system may prove to be a tractable system. After performing quantitative kinetic studies of the growth of duck Hepatitis B (duck) virus, stochastic and deterministic models will be developed and contrasted doc14328 none This effort will develop the computational tools that will enable the integrative analysis of the multi-genetic functions that metabolic maps represent. Transcriptional regulatory events will be represented by applying time-dependent Boolean constraints. With this description one can potentially interpret, analyze, and predict the effects of transcriptional regulation on cellular metabolism. Additionally, it is proposed to extract how different regulatory mechanisms can drive the solution to the edges of a solution space, where optimal solutions are calculated and where experimental data is available. Overall, integrating metabolic fluxes with the Boolean representation of regulatory structures will lead to the broadening of genome-scale models of microbes, by which optimal growth and metabolic secretion patterns are represented. Several graduate students will acquire cross-training in computation, life science, biochemical engineering, and biotechnology doc14329 none Woo The PIs propose to investigate the design of CMOS devices, circuits, and architectures in the sub-100nm regime with emphasis on high-performance mixed-signal, and RF applications. The thrust of this work will be device circuit architecture co-design targeting critical building blocks of mixed-mode systems. The goals are (1) to understand the fundamental device circuit issues of deeply scaled CMOS, and (2) investigate and develop novel device engineering with novel thin film materials and new circuit architectures that will enable much superior speed, power, and noise performance. Recently, there is much discussion concerning the scaling of MOSFETs into sub-100nm dimensions. Topics such as alternative high-k gate dielectrics, gate leakage, shallow junction formation, source drain extension engineering, and channel doping engineering are under intensive investigation. Many fundamental device problems such as short channel effects (DIBL and VTH roll-off), off-state leakage current, parasitic capacitance and resistance, and gate tunneling current are currently being examined. It is apparent that sub-50nm transistors can be realized with very high performance limited primarily by parasitics such as series resistance and capacitance. The challenge is mainly how to reduce the off current. This is fundamentally due to the electro-static coupling between the channel region and the source drain. Although the PIs can reduce the coupling by scaling the junction depth, the ultra-shallow junction implies high series resistance and worse transistor performance. In order to expand the device-design window and to overcome the above-mentioned difficulties, novel device structures and new material systems need to be explored. So far, most of the advance device technology studies have concentrated on digital applications despite the growing interest in RF CMOS and high-speed mixed-mode circuits for communication and multimedia applications. Until now, technology development does not adequately address the issues of concern to analog circuits. Device models are also not sufficient for accurate circuit simulation. In this project, they propose to investigate the design of CMOS devices, circuits, and architectures in the sub-100nm regime with emphasis on high-performance mixed-signal, and RF applications. They propose to study the analog nonidealities of short-channel devices, e.g., gate current, nonlinearity, noise, intrinsic gain, variation of output impedance with the drain-source voltage. CMOS on SOI has been suggested as an alternative to bulk CMOS in sub-150nm regime. In the case of digital applications, the key advantage is probably in low-power circuits. For analog circuits, the choice of partially-depleted technology versus fully-depleted technology is still under debate. In the case of RF applications, the small parasitic capacitance of SOI CMOS is particularly attractive. However, many issues related to the floating body need to be clarified. In this project, the PIs will examine the many issues, such as noise, frequency performance, gain, and linearity of SOI MOSFETs for use in high-speed analog circuits. They will also examine novel sub-50nm device structures such as SiGe CMOS, low noise (buried channel) CMOS on SOI, high-performance LBJT as well as DTCMOS. In the case of SiGe, by having the smaller bandgap SiGe source drain regions, the built-in potential is reduced and can substantially reduce the DIBL and other short channel effects. In addition, the higher mobilities can also improve the source drain series resistances doc14330 none Xie Technological demand exists for mixed-signal integrated circuits based on Si VLSI. Such technology will enable the reduction of the form factor, power consumption, and circuit design complexity of mixed-signal IC s that are the core of portable electronics, personal communicators, the read-write channels of computer hard drives, and modems for internet access. The advancement of the technology is currently hampered by the cross-talk issue, for which there is no viable solution insight. The PIs propose an innovative solution to the problem. Through-the-wafer porous Si regions analogous to a moat are inserted between the noise producing and noise sensitive circuits to isolate electromagnetic interference (EMI). Such isolation is achieved via the high impedance nature of the porous Si region comparing to the alternative pathway of Si substrate for the EMI to reach true ground. The same porous Si regions can also be used to isolate high performance passive components (inductors and capacitors) from the substrate. Similar porous Si moat can be converted to highly conductive regions by coating the internal pore surfaces with metal. Highly conductive regions can serve as grounded shields for RF interference. Alternatively, through-the-wafer porous Si posts can be fabricated with porous Si removed afterward. This will result in deep vias. Metal can be introduced into the vias, resulting in Faraday cage type of structures for shielding electromagnetic interference. An appropriate name for the proposed research is three-dimensional impedance engineering of the substrate. In the proposed research, The PIs will scrutinize the effectiveness of all three approaches for RF cross-talk isolation. They will focus on the frequency range from 100 MHz up to above 40 GHz. This is the targeted frequency range by Si-based mixed-signal integrated circuits for the near future. By introducing this porous Si-based comprehensive process module into Si VLSI process flow, they will provide a unique solution to several of the most challenging issues present today in the Si mixed-signal IC technology. Their research will address the following critical issues relevant to the realization of the innovation. The issues include the isolation effectiveness, long-term stability of the isolation region, the preferred masking scheme and material, the method for introducing metal into the porous Si region, the mechanical integrity of the porous Si with and without metal coatings, the compatibility with Si VLSI processing, and potential contamination concerns. The proposed research encompasses materials science and electrical engineering. It will migrate from mostly material and processing issues at the beginning of the project, to RF circuit fabrication and testing towards the end of the project. The research will be carried out in collaboration with Conexant where their test chips will be fabricated, and Agere Systems (supporting our research in porous Si via SRC) where their initial study into this strategically important field started. In addition to the expected technological impact, the proposed research will serve the important function of educating a new generation of engineers by exposing them to the frontier of the information technology. Conducting thesis research on such a project will give them an education in the combined areas of fundamental materials science and a keen sense of the requirement of practical devices through the collaboration with industry. They will become members of the innovative workforce that has been the drive force for the prosperity of our society doc14331 none Although digital signal representation has become almost universal, there are still many areas where an analog representation is required to interface with an analog world or to meet various other objectives such as power dissipation, frequency, or cost. In these domains analog signal representation is essential for many input modalities such as instrumentation, sensor interfaces, and communications. Likewise, there are related output applications, such as biomedical actuation and industrial control. In addition, the needs of wireless and fiber-optical communication have reinvigorated analog design. However, there are serious problems concerning how to keep these analog components on a reasonable scaling curve as Moore s law continues unabated in the digital domain, and in integrating analog representations into large, complex digital systems ( system on a chip ). The purpose of this proposal is to study a new approach to representing analog signals that we believe will integrate more cleanly into these deep submicron, single-chip systems. Today analog signals are almost exclusively represented by current or voltage quantities. Our proposal is to borrow a page from neuroscience and to use the Inter-Pulse-Interval (IPI) between single-bit, asynchronous pulses to represent analog quantities. We are proposing to develop a mixed-mode analog digital cell library and design methodology based on IPI representation and the associated computation elements, and to engineer a case study to illustrate the outcomes. As we move to deep submicron and then on to the nanometer molecular devices, the problems that digital encounters with scaling, such as threshold inconsistency, subthreshold currents, hot-electron effects, doping variability, substrate coupling, and transmission line and complex cross-talk effects, are even more serious for analog circuitry. IPI representations will provide significantly better immunity to these effects, as well as to the more traditional process, temperature, and reference voltage variations. For most applications, pulse based analog systems will require less power. There are numerous advantages to using pulses or pulses to communicate. They are significantly more immune to noise. An approximate analogy would be that of AM versus FM radio signal representation. The outcomes of the proposed research are Create a library of basic communication, computation (arithmetic and logic) and conversion building blocks; Design, implementation and testing of a case study using the derived building blocks and methodology; Document an IPI-based design methodology doc14332 none This project aims at developing fast algorithms for rapid simulation of giga-scale systems-on-chip, where coupled circuit, logic, and electromagnetic (EM) effects (including RLC parasitics, coupling, cross talk, skin and thermal effects---both quasi-static and full-wave), are becoming increasingly important. For coupled EM and circuit simulation, we propose to investigate a novel partial-element equivalent electric circuit (PEEC) approach. For coupled EM and digital simulation, we propose to investigate variant time stepping in EM analysis and to use conservative synchronization with digital events. More specifically, our approach consists of the following key elements: Developing fast integral-equation-based solution methods that will make feasible EM simulation in these settings, and will permit hierarchical or multilevel EM analyses at varying degrees of model complexity. Implementation of fast and hierarchical schemes through a variation of the partial equivalent electric circuit method for triangular mesh tessellations. Coupling of EM simulation schemes directly to digital logic simulation in order to analyze switching and ground bounce in power-ground plane situations. Exploitation of structure and redundancies present in EM, circuit-level as well as coupled-system matrices in order to drastically reduce memory and computation time to a degree such that rigorous and complete coupled simulation will be feasible for complex-systems-on-chip. Sensitivity analysis, reduced-order modeling, and multi-physics simulations are targeted in addition. Development of optimized compilation techniques for generating ordinary differential equation (ODE) code for circuit simulation, and for exploiting the circuit structural regularity for fast hierarchical circuit EM simulation. The application drivers for testing proposed coupled EM circuit and EM digital simulation will include (1) Giga-hertz CMOS transceivers on chip, and (2) Power ground network of giga-hertz digital circuits including gate switching activity modeling. It is intended that the development of fast and rigorous EM circuit and EM logic simulation will enable accurate yet efficient sign-off simulation of next generation mixed-signal circuits and systems, enable simulation in the loop design optimization and architecture tradeoff, and finally enable design for testability where EM effects are becoming hard to characterize, predict, and measure doc14333 none The focus of the proposed research is on high-speed serial-links, where the goal is to maximize data rates between IC chips. As fabrication technology improves, the challenge in next-generation serial-link design is in handling transistor mismatches and on-chip noise, both of which are expected to grow sharply. Consequently, future serial-link architectures must be able to tolerate high-levels of transistor mismatches and on-chip noise. The general approach followed by most researchers is to use advanced circuit techniques to mitigate their adverse effects. In contrast, we propose to use signal processing techniques in addition to circuit techniques to overcome these problems. This integrated design approach motivates a new class of high-speed serial-link architecture that is fundamentally more robust to transistor mismatches and on-chip noise. The proposed architecture also enjoys many other important implementation advantages, making it well suited for future generation high-speed serial-link systems. This research will demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed architecture for reception and transmission of broadband signals. We will provide a complete design frame-work based on a clear understanding of various design options and the corresponding trade-offs in performance and implementation complexity. Furthermore, we will demonstrate the feasibility and the advantages of the proposed architecture by realizing it on silicon. Our goal is to achieve faster data rates than the fastest published serial-link system. The concepts and techniques developed in the proposed research are not limited to serial-link systems. They are easily applicable to any high-bandwidth communication systems where the symbol rates exceed the achievable on-chip clock frequency. Some specific examples of such applications are ultra-wideband and high-speed satellite communication systems doc14334 none This grant establishes the Davidson Data Center and Network (DDCN), a center and an international network of institutions to make widely available micro and macroeconomic data on transition economies (those moving from central planning to a market system). The DDCN has been discussed and formulated with the leading institutions in the field of transition and emerging markets. Providing access to these data is important for many reasons. In addition to providing valuable information on the unprecedented process of reform in transition economies, data from these economies allow better tests of basic economic theories since mature market economies rarely display sizable variation in key variables and since transition economies provide opportunities to analyze the emergence of phenomena that have been long established in market economies. Research based on these data will also have considerable policy impact. The transition economies comprise over one-third of the world s population and a better understanding of how public policy can improve the functioning of these economies will have a tremendous impact on the welfare of the poor. Moreover, major reforms in transition economies have so far been made largely on the basis of the experience of advanced economies, and at times they have generated undesirable outcomes. The DDCN will have a significant beneficial impact on graduate education and academic as well as non-academic research in several respects. First, it will promote research on transition economies by significantly lowering both the costs of and the risks associated with such research. Second, it will increase collaboration among researchers already studying the transition economies, helping to eliminate wasteful duplication of effort in collecting data. Third, the DDCN will have a particularly great benefit for graduate students, many of whom depend on readily obtainable data for the success of their dissertation research doc14335 none Obtaining a suitable tracer that can estimate lateral mixing of shelf waters into the open ocean or can determine the intensity of upwelling in response to ENSO forcing has been hindered by (1) the timescale of these processes (decadal), (2) the fact that simple mixing of radioisotopes with older water masses can result in an aging artifact, and (3) the effects of multiple endmembers. Based on some preliminary results, a PI from the University of South Carolina-Columbia has demonstrated that the activity ratio of 228Ra 227Ac shows great promise as a tracer of lateral mixing processes in the ocean. Because this proposed application is so novel, the PI will use SGER funds to improve the analytical technique for determining these radionuclides and the parent isotopes, as well as carry out additional field tests to verify the utility of this approach. The PI also plans to develop an in-line cartridge system that can be installed on ships of opportunity thereby increasing the spatial distribution of ex228Ra ex227Ac activity ratios of surface waters to determine the stability of lateral mixing rates on timescales of years to decades doc14336 none Akay The 23rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE EMBS (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society) is to held in Istanbul, October 25-28, . The technical program of the meeting includes the five mini-symposia of Bioinformatics, Nanotechnology in Biomedicine, Functional Imaging, Modeling as a Tool in Neuromuscular and Rehabilitation Research, and Neural Imaging and Computational Imaging. The mini-symposia will introduce prospective investigators to the state-of-the-science in these increasingly important areas of biomedical engineering research. Support is being provided to cover partial travel costs for 20 speaker-participants in the mini-symposia. Individuals who receive support are to be selected based on the following: participation in the mini-symposia; young investigators; diversity (gender; minority; disabled); symposia organizers. Participants in the mini-symposia will learn about current research that will contribute to the development of technologies leading to new applications in medicine. Each recipient of support is expected to submit a report describing the research discussed at the mini-symposia having the greatest potential for dramatically influencing the development of new medical technologies doc14337 none Symposium for ABS: Behavior Genetics for the Next Decade:Beyond Heritability PI: Christine Boake This is a proposal for a symposium and related activities that are designed to educate behavioral biologists about the developing field that integrates behavior and biotechnology. The symposium will be held at the annual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society in Corvallis, OR on 15 July . It is a follow-up to the workshop on integrating biotechnology and behavior that was held at NSF in August . The symposium was one of the major specific recommendations from the workshop. The related activities are to publish the symposium proceedings as a special issue of the professional journal The American Naturalist, and to include in the special issue an introductory paper that discuss reasons to investigate the genetic architecture of behavioral traits. The symposium speakers either attended at least one of the two biotechnology and behavior workshops, or are in the lab of a participant. The topics of the symposium talks are (a) microarray analyses of the genetic basis of learning and memory, (b) the relationship between the major histocompatibiltiy complex and mating preferences in bird species, (c) the genetics of behavior in guppies, (d) the effects of gene interactions on animal behavior, (e) genetics and social interactions among kin, (f) genetic influences on maternal care, (g) molecular genetics and social behavior, and (h) neurogenetics of fruitfly behavior. These topics were chosen in order to show the listeners the sophisticated genetic techniques can be applied to a great breadth of species and many kinds of behavior doc14338 none This research proposes to design a 1GHz receiver equalizer in CMOS technology for system-on-chip (SOC) implementation of high-speed long transmission distance transceivers. Analog FIR filter will be used as the equalizing filter, which has higher speed than the equalizing filters commonly used today. This proposal will address the challenges in designing high-speed FIR filters, including analog tap delay line and the learning algorithms. A low-noise error detection scheme is proposed and will be studied in terms of communication theory for better understanding and improvements. Potential application of the proposed equalizer in high-speed wireless data communications will also be studied. In addition, we propose to explore design for test methodology for low-cost test, diagnostics, and characterization of the proposed adaptive mixed-signal equalizer. In data transmissions, the signal containing the data is attenuated when transmitted through media and the attenuation is a function of the transmission distance and frequency. Frequency dependent attenuation within the signal bandwidth causes inter-symbol-interference (ISI) in the received signal. ISI in turn causes errors in data recovery, thus limits the transmission distance and transmission rate. To reduce ISI, the frequency dependent attenuation must be compensated, or equalized. Depending on the transmission media, the state of the art CMOS transceivers operate at the speeds ranging from 100-Mbit s to about 10-Gbit s. Currently, equalization is only used in lower speed (100- to 200-Mbit s) data transmission over low-cost cables (around 130-meter UTP5 cables). For transmission bit rates in the order of Gbit s, pre-emphasizing filters have been used to boost high frequency components in the transmitter. Multiplexing techniques, such as multilevel signaling and multi-phase clocks, allow the pre-emphasizing filters to operate at several-hundred-MHz, while enabling multi-Gbit s data transmission. But, pre-emphasizing filter boosts the high frequency components of the transmitted signal and introduces strong emission in the transmitter. To avoid emission problems, receiver equalizer is more desirable. The main challenges of receiver equalizer are the design of high-speed equalizing filters and the complexity of filter adaptation algorithm. One of the broader impacts of the proposed activity is on providing trained mixed-signal design engineers for the industry. There has been growing concern over the expected shortage of graduating engineers specialized in the mixed-signal circuit design area. The proposed research will strengthen the mixed-signal circuit design program in university for educating skilled design engineers for industry doc14339 none Russel It is important to understand and quantitatively model the linear and nonlinear rheology of highly concentrated micellar and colloidal systems. The goal of the proposed research is to reproducibly formulate two types of systems with prescribed rheology. These are the highly viscous and viscoelastic micellar solutions of telechetic polymers, as well as nanosize particles bearing terminally grafted chains that form brushes. Although considerable work has been done to understand the behavior of associative polymers, this study will provide the fundamental understanding of the underlying structure of the micelles. There is little information on the rheology of the nanosized brush-like particles. Therefore, this study should provide new and exciting insight in the rheology of soft particles with the potential for unusual variations with concentration and the stress field doc14340 none Biogeochemical Cycles of Carbon and Nitrogen in an Ice-Covered Volcanic Crater Lake Project Description This is a 1 year research planning and exploratory proposal to investigate the microbial ecology of and ice-covered crater lake within the active Grimsvotn Volcano in Iceland. The proposal anticpates that there is an active microbial community under the Grimsvotn ice-covered lake. Because of the simplicity of the biogeochemical environment and its isolation from other inputs other than volcanic and glacial, it is suggested to be an excellent location to pursue coupled biocomplexity studies. The proposal will evaluate four hypotheses by sampling the lake through the ice using hot-water drilling equipment. Samples will be collected from different lake depths and examined using: microscopy, cultivation, stable isotopic analyses, molecular biological tools, C and N fixation assays, and phylogentic analysis of genes involved in N fixation doc14341 none Partial Travel Grant for ICTACEM December , IIT Kharagpur , India 100 word abstract by Gautam Dasgupta, Columbia University After a productive International Conference on Theoretical, Applied, Computational and Experimental Mechanics efforts are made to invite US researchers from Civil, Mechanical, Aerospace, Bio and Environmental Engineering at the ICTACEM 12 01 and post conference symposia in IIT Madras and Delhi. The focus is on new technology, mechanics education research and future joint NSF proposals with Indian researchers. Only 50% air fare is requested for three female and seven male participants: four chair professors, two full professors, two associateprofessors, and two PhD students. A modest sum to disseminate proceedings (printed CD and free web download) is included doc14342 none The workshop will be convened to address the issues raised in the recent report from the National Research Council, Grand Challenges in the Environmental Sciences, concerning the use of materials. The objective of the workshop is to recommend a research agenda needed to reinvent the use of materials. Topics will include material budgets and cycles, their resource and environmental implications, the next generation of products and materials, optimization of material cycles, and scenarios for the future use of materials. Participants will include research scientists in academia, industry, and relevant agencies. The expected outcomes will include a 5-year plan for the implementation of an initial detailed research program, a strategy for developing the necessary research integration across the disciplines, a program for training individuals in the topical area of materials use, and a strategy for coordinating the program results with those of the other grand challenge initiatives doc14343 none PI: Paul I. Barton Institution: MIT Proposal Number: The objective of this research is to develop deterministic global optimization algorithms for nonconvex dynamic embedded optimization problems, mixed-integer dynamic optimization problems and nonconvex variational problems. The approaches need to be practically implementable and they should provide theoretical guarantees of locating the global optimum. Research: In the first research task, the PI will develop a convexity theory and convex underestimators for optimization problems with a very general integral objective function and linear time varying dynamic system embedded. With these theoretical foundation, it will be possible to adapt existing deterministic global optimization algorithms for nonconvex nonlinear programs and mixed-integer nonlinear program, hence also addressing mixed-integer dynamic optimization problems. Next, the PI will explore how this composite function approach can be extended to problems with nonlinear dynamic systems embedded. This extension will draw heavily on the theory developed for the linear case. In the final research task, he will explore the construction of convex underestimators for variational and optimal control problems, i.e., convex underestimators on linear spaces of functions. A number of major research challenges exist in the application of these variational convex underestimators, including the numerical generation of rigorous lower bounds from the convex underestimating problems, and how to partition a linear space of function in, for example, a branch-and-bound procedure. Impact: The research will make fundamental contributions via developing a convexity theory for dynamic embedded optimization problems, and developing methods for the construction of convex underestimators for dynamic embedded optimization problems and variational problems. This theory will lead to a series of practical deterministic global optimization algorithms for the solution of these problems. The capability to solve such problems to guaranteed global optimality will have broad practical implications. For example, in the area of process operations there is hope for solving problems such as formal safety verification, the synthesis of integrated batch processes, and the design of major process transients such as start-up and shut-down procedures, using detailed dynamic models. Most serious industrial accidents occur during such transient events. Furthermore, the method will have applicability in other engineering disciplines as well as applied mathematics doc14344 none This proposalwill design, build, test, and evaluate a long base line navigation system that can serve several deep-ocean vehicles simultaneously. Current transponder based navigation methods for use in underwater vehicles such as Alvin, Jason, and ABE can only serve one vehicle at a time. The work proposed will augment standard transponders to include a precision clock and control circuits so that the transponders may be operated as accurately timed beacons. This will enable any number of vehicles to calculate their position using data obtained from passive tracking. The proposed system will improve productivity in the conventional expeditionary mode as well as enabling multiple vehicle navigation as part of a seafloor observatory network. To ensure a smooth transition with present operations, the PI s propose to retain conventional transponder capabilities on the beacons. Thus, a deployed net will always remain able to operate in the current transponder mode if only one vehicle is in use doc14345 none Scientists have long recognized that reproduction is costly to females. Research in various species finds that sexually active females have shorter lives than virgin females. Recent studies, in fruit flies, have discovered toxic compounds in the seminal fluid of males that shorten the longevity of females after copulation. What the toxic compounds are doing and why they have evolved is a largely unresolved question. Previous experiments conducted in the fruit fly indicate that the mating frequency of parents affects the fitness of offspring. The goal of this project is to determine whether females exposed to toxic seminal fluid compounds have offspring with improved fitness. This project will compare the fitness of offspring from females that re-mate after holding them for one week 1) as virgins, 2) with males, 3) with genetically altered males that produce seminal fluid but not sperm, 4) with genetically altered males that do not produce seminal fluid or sperm. This study will help determine whether female reproductive costs occur to improve the quality of offspring. This work is important for our general understanding of maternal care, sexual and parent-offspring conflict, and for the evolution of reproductive strategies doc14346 none A team based at Colorado College is conducting a study of undergraduate physics departments with high and average participation by women, in order to learn what works in attracting and retaining women in the undergraduate physics major. Ten schools that offer a bachelor s degree in physics, but no graduate degrees, were selected. Both public and private schools are included, and at least two are HBCU s. The project has several goals: oTo study some of the many things that have been tried by the physics community and learn what works to increase the number of women majoring in physics. oTo investigate the unusual success of some primarily undergraduate institutions in cultivating women physics majors. oTo find examples of common errors in programs and practices that could be corrected if they were recognized and understood. oTo see whether and how innovations in physics pedagogy have improved the climate for women. oTo communicate our results back to the physics community. A team consisting of two physics professors, one social science professor, and one student assistant are collecting demographic information about the faculty and students at each department. The team is making a two-day site visit to each department, which includes interviews with students, faculty, and administrators, and visits to classes and laboratories. The team is investigating departmental climate, the quality of teaching and advising, the style of classes, and other factors that have been proposed to make physics departments more comfortable for women students. The high participation departments will be compared with the average participation departments to determine what works to recruit and retain women in the undergraduate physics major. Results of this study will be reported in a peer-reviewed journal, and publicized in talks, journal articles, and on the Web. It is hoped that the results of this project will help the physics community evaluate its efforts to attract more women, and find ways to further improve its efforts. The physics community has been concerned about the low participation by women for a decade or so, and much progress had been made; the percentage of bachelors degrees awarded to women has more than doubled in the last twenty-five years. But physics continues to lag behind the other sciences; in , 19% of bachelor s degrees in physics were awarded to women, in contrast to 40% of bachelor s degrees in mathematics and chemistry, and more than half in the life sciences. Several national initiatives are devoted to making physics more attractive to women and other members of under-represented groups. In addition, individual physics departments are trying a variety of formal and informal programs to increase the level of participation by women. These efforts are unevenly distributed among physics departments, and departments vary widely in the percentage of women majors, some departments have as many as 40% women, and others are far below the national average doc14347 none Bacteria play crucial roles in cycling of elements and thus the functioning of the biosphere. We know a great deal about the metabolic diversity of bacteria, and the pathways of the reactions they perform. Outside of simple laboratory systems, however, we cannot predict with any certainty the rates at which bacteria grow, metabolize, and mineralize organic matter. This project is about understanding, at a mechanistic and thus quantitative level, what affects the activity of bacteria in nature. While initially the problem seems straightforward, the investigators believe that its solution has been elusive because there are complex processes involved. This complexity exists over several levels of biological organization (individual, population, community), and in the microscale spatial heterogeneity of the environments in which bacteria function. The ultimate goal of this study is to develop, and test, a model that will predict the rates of organic matter cycling in natural systems. Such a model must include the physical and chemical factors controlling the availability of resources (reactants) to bacteria, interactions (potentially competitive) among different bacterial populations, and interactions among bacteria and their predators. The shorter-term goal, and the explicit goal of this project, is to focus on one type of environment - estuarine sediments - and one category of organic matter - polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in a background of natural organic matter. The approach centers on a tight coupling between modeling and empiricism, since it is our belief that models and experiments lead to new, useful knowledge only when there is a steady interaction. The model we will develop considers both bottom-up (e.g., resource availability) and to-down (e.g., predation) controls on bacterial activity. Estuarine sediment will be used as the environmental matrix for modeling and experimental testing inasmuch as these sediments are inherently complex and heterogeneous due to their widely varied chemical and physical properties, the mixtures of organic and inorganic constituents of which they are composed, and the simultaneous occurrence of chemical, physical, and biological processes. Bicyclic and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) will be chosen as a type of reactant that is used by only certain types of bacteria in the system. Thus, the time rate of change in PAHs will be used as a barometer of the activity of some members of the community. This will provide a sensitive and specific comparison of model predictions and experimental data. Models will be structured to account for variability in properties of the biological and abiotic components. The framework of the models will include spatial heterogeneity in sediment properties, population dynamics including competition and predation, nutrient and PAH mass transfer, and molecular dynamic simulations. Complexity will be added incrementally, as indicated by closely coupling model predictions with experimental results. The expertise of the group assembled to conduct the proposed research encompasses ecology, engineering, environmental geochemistry, and microbiology. Educational and training opportunities, on a variety of levels, will be built into this research. Specifically, the project will include mechanisms to enhance coursework in both undergraduate and graduate programs in environmental technology and engineering education; to broaden student research training that will explore dynamic interactions within and among environmental systems and will be directed by a multidisciplinary team of faculty investigators; and to provide enrichment opportunities for in-service teachers of science courses in grades 5-8 through a partners-in-learning program doc14348 none The Women in Information Technology: Pivotal Transitions from School to Careers project is gathering primary research data for K-12 and university educators, policy makers, and administrators about those pivotal transition points in girls lives that result in their positive or negative view of information technology as a viable career choice. It is gathering new information about how the total environment - at the high school, community college, and university levels, both inside and outside the school -- helps shape girls perceptions of technology as friendly or unfriendly to them. It will document longitudinally the impact of family, peers, school, and community on girls perceptions of IT careers; examine the key transition points in girls experiences with technology; and determine how the choice of a nontraditional career is associated with the development of self-authorship. The project combines standard interview and survey techniques within the theoretical framework of self-authorship. Methods include a pre- and post-survey; individual interviews; small group interviews; a videotape documentary and case studies of the longitudinal development of girls career transitions and choices; and group activities using computer programs to stimulate girls interest in and understanding of IT careers. A set of IT careers workshops are planned as an incentive for participating students and parents, as another data collection point, and as a model for IT career exploration. The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration among faculty with expertise in the areas of gender and science, quantitative and qualitative research methods in the social sciences, and information technology impacts on children, youth, and families. Dr. Marcia Baxter Magolda, leading expert in the study of how college students and young adults self-authorship effects their learning capacity, will act as an advisor for this project. The other advisors include a former school principal and superintendent, evaluation and data analysis expert, educational technology expert, state technology workforce director, and a communications researcher doc14349 none This project aims to use hydrothermal synthesis techniques to expand the inorganic materials chemistry of metal oxides and specifically to discover new open framework structures with potential for use as sorbents or heterogeneous catalysts. An important direction is an emphasis on microporous solids with stability and intracrystalline reactivity. Two major classes of inorganic materials have been targeted, the group VB transition metal phosphates, and the group VB transition metal silicates and germanates. Initial studies indicate that many new microporous framework silicates can be constructed and this a major focus of the research. New synthesis techniques that will be developed include the modification of standard hydrothermal reaction conditions and the use of higher pressures where necessary. Training of both undergraduate and graduate students will be emphasized. In particular the participation of women and other under-represented groups in the research will be emphasized. New nanoporous inorganic solids with improved properties that will have applications in molecule separations and as catalysts in chemical reactions are vital to the needs of the petrochemical industry in areas that include oil refining and chemicals production. Improvements in chemical processing are important for more effective use of U.S. hydrocarbon resources and to increase energy efficiency doc14350 none The project will produce on-line tutorials for SMET students and faculty at colleges and universities, and for anyone else interested in a summary of research about the role of gender in science careers. The tutorials will be developed using Powerpoint slides with voice-over narration. Each will include an annotated bibliography, a questionnaire for site visitors to fill out (voluntarily), the opportunity to send queries and comments to PI, and question and answer material from those emailed messages. The work will be performed at Hunter College - CUNY and the tutorials will be mounted on a Hunter College server. The tutorials can thus be reached by anyone in the world with access to the web. Once a demonstration tutorial is created, the PI will contact educational institutions and groups concerned with gender equity in science in order to invite such groups to evaluate the tutorial and to provide a link to the Hunter College site. As the project continues, more organizations and groups will be invited to create links to the site. Tutorials like these do not currently exist. The PI is uniquely qualified as the author of a published book on women s advancement in the professions (extensively summarizing research), as a cognitive psychologist who has developed new courses related to gender, as a frequent presenter on the topic (having given 100+ presentations to and discussions with science students and educators), and as the developer of a web site for prospective graduate students to Hunter s MA Program in Psychology. The PI in particular will leverage experience giving lectures to diverse audiences. Outcome measures will be evaluated from a) the number of visits to the site and to each tutorial, b) the number of educational institutions and organizations with links to the site, c) analysis of questionnaires and emailed messages. Feedback results that are relevant to the larger community will be posted to the site once they have been analyzed. Science-based information about inadvertent bias in evaluations of men and women is available in technical sources but is not known to most students or educators. The resulting product will provide a suite of 15-minute tutorials that could be incorporated into workshops, briefings, classroom discussions, web sites, and on-line courses aimed at anyone studying the underrepresentation of women in SMET. The content drawing on many research findings and results is a substantive and accessible complement to many briefings and reports that primarily present summaries of statistics doc14351 none This project will characterize and quantify the feedback mechanisms among terrestrial ecosystems, the climatic system, and air pollution involving cycles of water, energy, and various chemical species. A coupled model that links dynamic terrestrial hydrology and ecology, physical climate (atmosphere and ocean), and atmospheric chemistry will be developed that also, and perhaps, uniquely, includes two-way linkages with land-use change and emissions prediction and policy. The model will be used to quantify the combined effects of air pollution and climate change on the productivity and distribution of vegetation globally. Recognizing the large uncertainties in various feedback processes, the principal investigators (PIs), Drs. Prinn and Melillo, will undertake a comprehensive analysis of the sensitivity of their conclusions, and provide probability distributions for the key model output variables. The PIs expect this research to provide significant information for understanding how our future global environment will evolve under the joint effects of growing world population, changing technological and agricultural practices, and economic development. This project is being supported through the Biocomplexity in the Environment: Coupled Biogeochemical Cycles Research Program doc14352 none Riley Evolution has long served to unify the study of biology, but it has now acquired a more central role. Today evolution informs and directs data acquisition, analysis and interpretation in all of the life sciences. This transformation comes in part from the explosion of raw data, from sources as far-ranging as genome sequences, adaptive physiology, population genetics, long-term behavioral studies, developmental mechanisms, ecological genetics, large-scale ecosystem studies, functional genomics, and phylogenetics. Such data can only be interpreted and synthesized using highly developed database management and analysis tools and requires the comparative tools of evolution. There is no institution dedicated to the consolidation, synthesis and dissemination of this broad sweep of evolutionarily relevant information. Therefore the goal of the proposed workshop is to discuss the need for an evolutionary synthesis center, as well as the practical, data-related capacities required for such a center. A center for evolutionary synthesis would serve the needs of the evolutionary biology community by providing mechanisms to foster collaborative, cross-disciplinary synthesis of existing and newly-produced datasets. The center would also play a critical role in the further unification of the biological sciences as it draws together knowledge from disparate fields to increase our general understanding of biological form and function. Finally, the center would also play a valuable role in organizing and synthesizing evolutionary knowledge that will inform non-academics, for example, in areas of applied evolution such as infectious disease, drug design, and bioremediation doc14353 none This proposal discusses the planning phase of a proposed I UCRC Research Site of the Ohio State University Center for Advanced Polymer and Composite Engineering (CAPCE) at FAMU-FSU College of Engineering. CAPCE is an existing, successful I UCRC. The proposed Florida Research Site compliments CAPCE by bringing to the joint I UCRC (1) strong partners in the aerospace and construction industries as well as federal labs, and (2) additional capabilities in composite process design, modeling and simulation, and advanced material testing and characterization. This is in addition to conducting advanced polymer and composite materials research and manufacturing technology research similar to CAPCE s research focus doc14354 none Proposal #: OCE PI: Barrie Walden This award will support a design study for a + Meter human occupied submersible for the National Deep Submergence Facility (DSF) operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and dedicated to support ocean science research. The Ship Acquisition and Upgrade Program provides funds for ship constructions, upgrades, acquisitions, and design studies. This project will allow the PI to begin a conceptual design study for a deep submergence vehicle that may eventually replace the aging deep submergence vehicle (DSV) Alvin. A submersible capable of operating to depths greater than meters would provide US scientists access to an additional 35% of the ocean floor to carryout studies pertaining to biodiversity, biomass, and processes at work on the abyssal plain and in deep sea trenches. The study will include a detailed evaluation of new technology and hardware options. Other countries, such as France, Japan, and Russia, already have manned submersibles capable of operating to this depth. The Project Director, Barrie Walden is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in supervising the DSV Alvin, and other submersibles through his management of the DSF doc14355 none Middle Tennessee State University is using a planning grant to design a demonstration program, WISUP@MTSU, (Women in SMET Undergraduate Programs @ MTSU). The project team is investigating and identifying the best practices to attract and to retain women in all fields of science, mathematics, engineering, and technology and to to build on successful programs already in place at MTSU. The goal is to design a technology intensive and supportive program to attract and to retain high school senior and undergraduate freshmen women into SMET disciplines at MTSU. The experience, technical and scientific talents of the WISUP Team and the strong support from the College of Basic and Applied Sciences and the university will result in a successful planning grant and the submission of a full demonstration proposal in the next NSF PGE funding cycle. MTSU is currently graduating slightly less than the national percentage of women in the SMET disciplines, yet university-wide the majority of both undergraduate and graduate students are female (54%). The institution is uniquely situated to serve rural and urban, low-income, and first generation students. MTSU also graduates more teachers than any university in Tennessee (more than 25% of all teachers in the entire state). The full program to be proposed should reach not only potential SMET students but also public school teachers who can encourage their student to consider SMET majors and careers doc14356 none The Indianapolis Zoo, in collaboration with the Metro Toronto Zoo, the Milwaukee Public Zoo, the Phoenix Zoo, the Oregon Zoo and the Fort Worth Zoo will engage in a planning effort to enable the group of zoos to form the Zoo Exhibit Collaborative. The Collaborative will develop a series of traveling exhibitions and collateral materials at member zoos and for the broader zoo and acquarium industry doc14357 none This U.S.-Croatian research project between Martin Saunders of Yale University and his partner, Olga Kronja of the University of Zagreb, examines the biological pathways important in the formation of steroids and triterpenoids. The researchers seek new fundamental knowledge about the physical organic chemistry of carbocations, including protosteryl cation in animals and dammarenyl cation in plants. These are to be investigated using both experimental techniques and quantum chemical calculations. The US-Croatian team intends to determine the structural features specific for rearrangement of naturally occurring carbocation in biosynthesis. To do so the researchers will investigate the following groups of model carbocations and their parent alcohols or chlorides: 1) the tert-amyl cation, 2) the methylated and deuterated derivatives of 2-cyclopenyl-e-propyl cation and 3) the carbocation derivatives of bicyclo[3.2.0]noname with various alkyl groups at C-1 and C-8. The research plan includes: (a) NMR spectroscopic studies on stable solutions of model carbocations and their isotopically labeled analogues in non-nucleophillic solution, (b) quantum chemical calculations with the model cation and natural cations themselves, and (c) analysis of the rearrangement processes of the model compound in aqueous or nonpolar solvents. Results should yield new insight into details of structure and rearrangements related to chemical behavior of the carbocations involved in biosynthesis of steroids. If successful, this may have implications for future medical research designed to synthesize artificial hormones. This project in organic dynamics of chemistry fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling leading experts in the United States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and pool resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc14358 none Workshop: Computational Approaches to Theoretical Morphology Douglas Erwin and David M. Raup Increased computer graphics capability and new software tools has facilitated the development of new approaches to Theoretical Morphology, the analysis of potential morphologies of groups of organisms independent of the morphologies which are known from today or from the fossil record. This workshop will bring together computer scientists, paleontologists and biologists to develop new theoretical morphological models. The focus of the workshop will be to further develop a mathematical model and associated computer simulation of the multi-plate sea urchin skeleton. The wealth of paleontological, evolutionary and developmental information about sea urchins makes this an excellent choice for such a model. Moreover, sea urchin growth involves multiple plates in a close-packing configuration, which is also true of a number of other groups. At this workshop we will further develop this sea urchin morphometric model, consider several, alternative, previously developed models, and consider initial tests of the model doc14359 none Numerical integrations will be performed to study the 2-day wave in a generally-unstable mean flow. Modal period and structure and its amplification will be calculated in the presence of zonal-mean structure representative of observations. Those calculated features will then be compared with observed space-time behavior of the 2-day wave. Finite amplitude considerations, leading to transport and to interaction with other planetary waves, will be addressed in fully-nonlinear integrations. Together with observed behavior, those integrations will be used to evaluate the impact that 2-day wave nonlinearity has on dynamical and chemical structure. The research outlined here promises a unified understanding of the 2-day wave and its role in the general circulation of the middle and upper atmosphere doc14360 none The Revolution of and the subsequent Eight Year War with Iraq resulted in the cessation of systematic fieldwork in Iran by foreign archaeologists. With the support of the Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization, an international team co-directed by Abbas Alizadeh and Nicholas Kouchoukos will begin a new program of field research in the arid southwest region of the country. Here, archaeologists in the s and early s produced a rich material record of fundamental transformations in the economic and political organization of human societies, including the emergence of sedentary agriculture, nomadic pastoralism, cities, states and empires. To accomplish this, they developed a powerful synthesis of archaeological method and anthropological theory that moved Near Eastern prehistory from an orientalist antiquarianism to the forefront of the influential New Archaeology. To resume work in southwest Iran after nearly 25 years is therefore to take up again an enduring set of research problems and a lapsed conversation between archaeology and social theory. With these goals in mind, Drs. Abbas Alizadeh, Nicholas Kouchoukos and their colleagues will conduct six weeks of exploratory survey and excavation on the Mehran Plain in autumn . Their research will address interrelated sets of questions concerning: 1) the history of human-environment interactions, specifically the domestication of sheep and goat, the adoption of agriculture, and the development of canal irrigation; 2) the interaction between pastoral nomads and settled farmers in the emergence and development of social and political complexity in the region; and 3) the relationship between emerging polities of southwest Iran and the neighboring, more precocious city-states of southern Mesopotamia. Located near the natural habitat of the wild ancestors of domesticated cereals and caprines, within the traditional winter grazing lands of mobile pastoralists, and along the most important historic route between Mesopotamia and Iran, the Mehran Plain is ideally located for such investigations. Field research will focus on the excavation of two known sites which together provide a continuous, stratified sequence of artifact, floral, and faunal assemblages spanning the 9th through 4th millennia BC. Fieldwork and subsequent analysis will focus in particular on changing practices of plant and animal exploitation and the social logics and intersecting institutional forms through which agricultural and pastoral production were valorized, intensified and integrated. Ultimately, the project will attempt to understand the development of these practices and structures in their local, regional and global context doc14361 none This project will fund an Albert Einstein Fellow to work in the Division of Elementary, Secondary, and Informal Education of the National Science Foundation for ten months, beginning August 15, . ESIE, the Program Director, and the Fellow will determine the specific duties of the Einstein Fellow. The majority of the time the Fellow will work on the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching program (PAEMST). It is anticipated the Einstein Fellow will: 1. Work on the professional development component of the PAEMST Program. The PAEMST program works with major national mathematics and science teacher organizations to provide precessions for the Presidential Awardees attending annual meetings of these groups. The Fellow will help design these activities for the past awardees and identify other possible professional development opportunities. This will include but not be limited to helping the Program Director make arrangements for the audiovisual needs of the speakers; conference meals; and selection and coordination of speakers. 2. Act as a liaison with former awardees in the field. 3. Review and screen all state nominee s applications for eligibility and prepare them for the National Selection Committee. 4. Help the Program Director organize the National Selection Committee meeting. 5. Monitor and encourage the submission of requested data from State Coordinators. Collect, organize, and analyze requested data. This includes but is not limited to annual reports, number and category of applications received, and opinion surveys. 6. Assume various responsibilities with respect to the PAEMST Website. 7. Assist in the planning and conduction of the awards week. 8. Review and edit PAEMST correspondence including but not limited to letters, posters, the BioBook, and brochures. The NSF Einstein Fellow will not perform the work of a Program Officer, handle any NSF proposals (including proposals for the PAEMST Program), conduct any part of the review process, or access NSF data systems where access is restricted under the Privacy Act to NSF employees and contractors. The Fellow will provide three written reports to the Triangle Coalition, which will describe her responsibilities and on-going activities. These will be used to evaluate the Fellow s accomplishments during the Fellowship period and to offer personal perspectives and recommendations to the Fellowship program doc14362 none The sixth workshop in a series of international materials workshops is being planned for the Middle East in . The U.S.-Middle East Materials Workshop is an international workshop dedicated to materials research, education, and technology. The goals of the workshop are to clarify in detail the major materials science issues in the Middle East through plenary sessions and breakout group discussions; further the development of collaboration via the establishment of a Materials World Net; and strengthen the relationships between the participants and their colleagues. To these ends, the organizing committee plans to invite approximately 20 participants from the U.S., 40 from the Middle East, and 15 government officials from various countries. Previous NSF sponsored materials workshops held in the NAFTA countries, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa have consistently expressed the desire to establish a Materials World Net, which would link materials scientists and engineers around the world by providing them with access to comprehensive databases and collaborative research and education programs.There is evidence to support the conclusion that the World Net is also desirable among researchers in the Middle East. The principal organizer (PI) of the workshop, Professor R.P.H. Chang at Northwestern University, will work together with the co-organizer Dr. Albert Narath from the U.S. and an organizing committee (OC), with members drawn from Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Israel and additional Arab countries. Those parties will come together at a planning meeting in Turkey in late . Over the course of two days, the group will determine an appropriate location, time, speakers, topics, and an agenda for the workshop to be held the following year. The planning meeting will serve as the beginning of a dialogue among the organizing committee members during the next year. The culmination of the planning will be a workshop in focused on materials research, education, and specialty topics that the planning meeting participants will have identified. %%% Previous NSF co-sponsored international workshops have involved NAFTA countries ( ), European countries ( ), Pan-American countries ( ), Asian Pacific countries ( ), and Africa ( ). All of these workshops shared the common goal of fostering greater international cooperation and collaboration in the broad field of materials research. Topics which are presumably important to the region include corrosion, thin films, concrete, minerals, petroleum and natural gas, and polymers. The participants will be asked to make recommendations in each area and devote special attention to the development of virtual institutes as a vehicle for furthering cooperation. The U.S.-Middle East Materials Workshop is being jointly supported by the Division of Materials Research, the Office of Multidisciplinary Affairs, the International Division, and the Division of Chemical and the Division of Chemical and Transport Systems doc14363 none Stanford The conceptual foundation of this biocomplexity proposal is that river flood plains are regional centers of ecological organization. This system is dependent on interactions among dynamic, nonlinear physical and biological processes linking water, heat and materials (biota, sediment, and plant-growth nutrients), flux and retention to fluvial landscape change. Strong interactions between short-duration, high stream-power floods, channel and sediment movement, increased roughness due to presence of vegetation and dead wood and upwelling of groundwater creates a complex, dynamic distribution of resource patches, which we refer to as the shifting habitat mosaic. This rnosaic promotes biodiversity and complex food webs that sequester and transform energy and materials. Using this conceptual foundation and the implications of two decades of research on expansive gravel-cobble flood plains in western USA rivers. we propose a set of working hypotheses that address emergent properties of these and other similar flood plains. We will improve and integrate our existing 3D hydrologic model with new channel change, heat flux and nutrient cycling model in a dynamic flood plain biogeochemical simulator that is initialized from remote sensing information. The goal is spatially explicit quantification of heat and nutrient fluxes in relation to the habitat dynamics. We propose an educational component that proactively links the floodplain research with the summer academic program at the Flathead Lake Biological Station (FLBS), the natural resources curriculum of our local Native American college (Salish and Kootenai College) and an annual national workshop for environmental professionals and high school teachers doc14364 none This project will extend a long-term program to measure trends of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) in seawater, and their 13C 12C isotopic ratios. These measurements, that date back several decades, will be used along with other climatic data, such as satellite-borne radiometric data of greenness of land vegetation, to estimate net exchanges of CO2 between the oceans, the atmosphere, and the terrestrial biosphere. This research is relevant to understanding the impacts of climate and human activities on the global carbon cycle. Data collected as part of this project will become part of the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) data archive doc14365 none The Triangle Coalition for Science and Technology Education initiated the Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship program in . This program provides outstanding secondary mathematics and science teachers with an opportunity to serve in the national public policy arena. NSF funding will support an Einstein Fellow in the Informal Science Education (ISE) program. The Fellow will bring practical insight derived from being a classroom teacher to ISE and contribute to the program development and management. The ISE program supports large regional and national projects targeting informal learners that include linkages to formal education. The Einstein Fellow can contribute feasible suggestions on how those linkages can occur, while learning about the proposal development, submission, peer review and award process. The 11-month experience will enable the educator to learn about the field of informal science education from a national perspective through direct interaction with practitioners and participation in professional development. Collegial exchange occurs monthly as Fellows serving in other Federal agencies meet to discuss their experiences. Additionally, participants are required to submit three written reports to document their experiences doc14366 none This project will intercompare three techniques that focus on air-sea gas exchange of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) to help evaluate the utility and accuracy of flux measurements in the field. Accurate measurements of DMS flux are important in estimating the oceanic source of reduced sulfur to the atmosphere and calculating the uptake of CO2 by the oceans. This research is important for climate change research since DMS can lead to sulfate aerosols that in turn can lead to cloud formation. The P.I. will use a gradient flux in-situ method to measure DMS flux and compare their results with several eddy correlation methods being used by other researchers from a highly instrumented platform in the North Sea off the Netherlands doc14367 none Verdugo The objective of the proposed research is to test the hypothesis that a major fraction of dissolved organic matter in seawater occurs as self-assembled polymer gels with unique properties that differ from those of their constituent macromolecules or from rigid colloids of comparable size. These properties affect bioavailability of the organic constituents in this colloidal matter. The hypothesis will be tested in parallel laboratory and field experiments involving biophysics, biogeochemistry and marine microbiology. The validity of the hypothesis is tested by addressing five subquestions which include: (1) What are the spatial and temporal distributions of the gel? (2) What are the chemical properties? (3) How are the physics of marine gels related to their sources and reactions? (4) What are the biological sources? (5) What biodegradation processes alter or remove the gels? This research could help explain how organic polymer gels affect the function of the oceans microbial loop, and hence the marine food web and global carbon cycle doc14368 none Furbish Salt marshes are important ecosystems that are frequently impacted by human activities. Because of the nonlinear nature of many salt marsh processes and the complex interactions among them, computer modeling based on experiments, field studies and emerging remote sensing techniques offers a critical opportunity for achieving significant advances in understanding and predicting salt marsh dynamics. During this project we will: (i) identify essential key physical, biological and chemical components that should become the foci of predictive models of salt marsh dynamics; (ii) identify and assemble key personnel necessary to pursue a collaborative modeling effort, coordinating our efforts with scientists pursuing related work at Pace, Yale and Rutgers Universities; (iii) identify key theoretical concepts, computational tools and field-based studies necessary for rigorous model development and testing; and (iv) prepare a full-scale proposal for a comprehensive research program that effectively combines these theoretical, computational and field-based components. The centerpiece of our efforts during the 1.5-year project period involves organizing and convening two novel workshops. The first will be focused on salt marsh processes and dynamics; the second will be focused on implementing and testing predictive modeling, and the coupling of remote sensing techniques with modeling. Both will involve field excursions to wetland salt marsh sites. Project activities will be organized through the Center for Earth Surface Processes Research (CESD), an interdisciplinary Center of Excellence at FSU, and involve mutual participation of scientists at FSU and the Pace-Yale-Rutgers group doc14369 none Bode It is becoming increasingly clear that understanding how an organism interacts with its environment will require a complete accounting of the genes which make up the organism and the expression patterns of the genes under various conditions. Members of the phylum Cnidaria (jellyfish, corals, sea anemones, and hydras) are key members of their environments, yet very little is known about their genetic makeup. To address this problem, a collection of cloned DNAs representing the messenger RNA populations (cDNAs) of two well-studied cnidarians will be generated. The two organisms that will be used are the freshwater cnidarian Hydra and the colonial marine cnidarian Podocoryne. Bacteria containing the cloned cDNAs will be robotically arrayed to generate archives of the clones. Sequence data will be obtained from approximately 50,000 of the cDNA clones from each organism. The resulting sequence data will be analyzed in various ways using bioinformatic computing tools. The analyses will provide information on what genes are present in cnidarians and how those genes are evolutionarily related to those in animals which diverged more recently than cnidarians, such as vertebrates and insects. Such information will be very valuable for defining the processes by which multicellular animals have evolved. The availability of cloned cDNA sets from two model cnidarians will also make it possible to examine the expression of large numbers of genes in these organisms using the technique of DNA array analysis. In particular it will be possible to identify genes whose expression changes when the organisms are placed under conditions which reflect those present during periods of environmental stress (e.g. elevated temperature). Genes whose expression levels change under stress conditions in the laboratory may be useful tools for monitoring the health of cnidarians (e.g. corals) in their natural setting doc14370 none Life in restrictive environments and its interaction with biogeochemical cycling and mineralization are of paramount importance for understanding modern and ancient biogeochemical cycles, as well as similar interactions in bioengineered systems. Anaerobic, acidic, sulfidic, thermal springs (AASTS) represent potentially important settings for the earliest organisms on Earth, and the phototrophs inhabiting them (e.g., green sulfur bacteria) are excellent candidates for Earth s earliest photosynthesizers. If environments similar to AASTS were more widespread on the early Earth, the paleo-significance of thermophilic green sulfur bacteria for the global biogeochemical cycling of carbon and sulfur could be immense, and its implications to other element metallic cycling and mineralization could also be very significant. Understanding phototrophic communities in AASTS could also have practical implications for waste treatment and energy production. The long-term goal of this incubation project is to model the linkage between (i) coupled biogeochemical cycling of sulfur, carbon and other nutrients and (ii) the metabolic activities of phototrophic communities in AASTS. The working hypothesis is that the existence and biodiversity of phototrophic communities are emergent properties of the coupled geochemical cycles in these environments. The cycling of carbon and sulfur in AASTS, along with other environmental parameters (e.g., pO2, pH, T), stabilizes the community composition, which in turn affects the distribution of carbon and sulfur compounds available to microbial communities downstream. This incubation project is specifically designed to establish the basic microbiological and biogeochemical characteristics of AASTS, and lay the foundation for quantitative modeling of the interactions between the two. Modeling of emergent properties of AASTS, specifically the non-linear interactions and feedback between the microbial community and the abiotic environment, requires absolute estimates of microbial diversity and quantification of fluxes of crucial life-sustaining components (e.g., sulfur and carbon). To accomplish this goal classical microbiological and 16S rRNA-based molecular techniques are being utilized to characterize the microbial composition of two recently discovered AASTS inhabited by thermophilic green sulfur bacteria in the Philippines. In parallel, field studies of sulfur, carbon and overall geochemical cycling in the same AASTS are being carried out, focusing on characterizing sulfur and carbon speciation, and using stable S, C and H isotope compositions of isolated species and select biomarkers to study the cycling of these components in these unique microbial habitats. Examining the isotope composition of inorganic sulfur and carbon species in the associated thermal waters will allow the assessment of the magnitude and sequence of S utilization and C fixation in these microbial communities. Finally, preliminary modeling of coupled S and C cycling in relation to the microbial distribution and structure in AASTS will be performed. The initial model will examine species fluxes, transport and transformation in the water column of AASTS, specifically focusing on the interaction between geochemical fluxes and microbial occurrence, composition and distribution. This project plans to foster interdisciplinary scientific research and education for undergraduates, graduate students, international collaborators and the public. Highlights include development of a web-based multi-level Virtual School on Biocomplexity in AASTS and workshops for the Philippine and US collaborators on the same topic. Given the global recognition of the need to preserve and understand unique microbial systems for fundamental and biotechnical reasons, plans are incorporated for strong international partnerships in research and education doc14371 none Boreal and subarctic peatland ecosystems cover only about 3-4 % of the earth s land surface (346-500 Mha) yet they store about 1 3 of the world s soil carbon as incompletely decayed organic matter, or peat. Most of these peatlands ( ca. 384 million ha) are found in Russia, the Baltic Republics, Fennoscandia, Alaska and Canada. In terms of the global C cycle, peatlands represent a major C pool, yet it is unclear whether they function as sources or sinks of atmospheric C, although Gorham s ( , , ) estimates that northern peatlands represent a net sink of atmospheric CO2 (76 Tg C yr -1 ) an a net source of atmospheric CH4 (46 Tg C yr -1 ) remain widely cited. Although the central importance of peat microbial populations as mediators of both aerobic and anaerobic decomposition, including the production of both CO2 and CH4, has long been recognized, little is known about the linkages between microbial community structure and C cycling in peat. Recent developments in molecular ecological techniques now permit quantitative characterization of microbial (Archaeal, eubacterial, and fungal) community structure in peat, so that we can begin to link microbial community structure to ecosystem function, the overall goal of this proposal. In this proposal, researchers at Villanova University seek to integrate quantitative biogeochemical approaches, quantitative molecular ecological approaches, and education and training of students in striving to understand how microbial community structure related to carbon cycling at the process level in peatlands that appear to be responding to global change on two separate continents. They will collect intact 1-m long peat cores from the discontinuous permafrost areas of both continental western Canada and central Siberia, the latter with the technical and logistical assistance of colleagues at the Siberian Research Institute of Peat. At 10-cm depth intervals in each core, they will quantitatively evaluate various aspects of ecosystem function including CO2 and CH4 production potentials, activities of process-specific soil enzymes (phenol oxidase, chitinase, acid phosphatase, arylsulfatase), concentrations of low molecular weight dissolved organic anions (acetate, lactate, proprionate, formate, pyruvate, oxalate and tartrate), and bacterial and fungal biomass (using muramic acid and ergosterol assays). In addition, they will use total peat genomic DNA extractions, PCR amplification, plasmid cloning and sequence analysis to identify specific Archaeal, eubacterial and fungal species in each peat sample. Using this approach, the investigators expect to be able to link microbial community structure to peatland ecosystem function in peatland regions where permafrost is actively melting, possibly representing a harbinger of climate change doc14372 none The Gulf of Mexico is an ideal natural laboratory for studying the complexity of biological communities associated with gas hydrates. The development of growth-fault networks provide conduits for the migration to the sea floor of hydrocarbons formed in deep reservoirs. The resulting hydrocarbon seeps and solid gas hydrates on the sea floor support a diverse and abundant micro- and macro-biota. In addition, biologically mediated processes of hydrocarbon oxidation and sulfate reduction lead to the deposition of massive quantities of carbonates that modify sea floor geology and are critical to development of invertebrate communities. The long-term goal of this project is to understand the feedback relationships between carbon and sulfur cycling and community dynamics in gas hydrate systems in the Gulf of Mexico. This will be a one-year pilot study involving investigators from the University of Missouri - Columbia, Texas A (2) methane oxidation coupled to sulfate reduction below the sediment surface provides reduced sulfur compounds that diffuse upward and serve as the energy source for sulfur-oxidizing bacteria at the sediment or gas hydrate surface where oxygen is available; (3) microbial oxidation of methane and other hydrocarbons strongly affects carbonate diagenesis. The experimental approach includes (1) culture-independent DNA-based molecular methods, lipid biomarkers, microscopic, and radioactive isotope tracer techniques to determine microbial abundance, activity, and species diversity, and (2) stable carbon and sulfur isotope fractionation, and pore-water chemistry to understand the kinetics and mechanisms of element cycles. Results of this project are expected to speak broadly to the evolution of biocomplexity in the marine biosphere given the wide occurrence of gas hydrates throughout geological time doc14373 none Ruben G. Carbonell of North Carolina State University, Mary A. Brittain of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, and Joseph M. DeSimone of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill have support from the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities to establish a Math and Physical Sciences-Internship in Public Science Education (MPS-IPSE) in the area of Carbon Dioxide in Nature and Technology. The program is a joint effort of the Kenan Institute for Engineering, Technology and Science at NC State University, the NSF Science and Technology Center for Environmentally Responsible Solvents and Processes (CERSP) led by UNC Chapel Hill, and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Outstanding math and science K-12 teachers from the Research Triangle area in North Carolina will be recruited as MPS Fellows for a three-year program. During this time period, the Fellows will have summer internships at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences and the NSF CERSP facilities at NC State University and the UNC Chapel Hill. Scientists in the CERSP and staff in the museum will serve as mentors throughout the three-year program to help the teachers develop novel curriculum tools for K-12 education, and educational programs and displays for the museum public. At the same time, the teachers will be able to obtain graduate credit for advanced degrees in education at local universities, and they will participate in professional and personal leadership training programs throughout the academic year doc14374 none Levandowsky The purposes of this planning grant are: (1) to bring together a group of scientists with various specialties, from several universities, who have been studying salt marshes in the vicinity of the Hudson River estuary; and (2) to allow this group to interact with a group of scientists at Florida State University who are studying salt marshes in Florida. We wish to develop a proposal, to be submitted a year from now to NSF s Biocomplexity program, that will integrate our various skills and interests to explore the biocomplexity of these systems and the effects of urban anthropogenic stress upon it. We will develop a program using new mathematical approaches to analyze the connectivity of components of the marshes, and also the nature of inherent space and time scales in these systems. Regarding time scales, we will develop a research program to detect the existence of nonlinear, chaotic phenomena. The locations of the New York area marshes to be studied are: (1) the New York shore of the Arthur Kill, in Staten Island, highly impacted by oil pollution; (2) the Meadowlands of New Jersey, with high levels of mercury and other heavy metals; (3) Tuckerton, in Southern New Jersey, relatively unimpacted by anthropogenic sources. The group will hold several workshops at the Meadowland Environmental Research lnstitute s environmental center to which the FSU scientists will be invited, and will also participate in workshops held at FSU. At these workshops we will plan the scope and operational details of an eventual full scale research proposal doc14375 none Miles This research program will explore the potential of electron beam sustained MHD power generation for enhancing the electrical efficiency of advanced ground based coal fired power plants. In conventional MHD, the high temperatures that are required (even with seeding) lead to significant oxides of nitrogen production. The electron beam sustained MHD has the capability of operating at relatively cool temperatures, without the need for seed material to be added to the flow. The lower temperature allows of a variety of new, possibly high efficiency, low polluting approaches to be explored, the most desirable of which would be the utilization of the high flame temperature to drive a high velocity, low temperature supersonic flow with rapid quenching of the formation of oxides of nitrogen through a supersonic expansion. The active control of the conductivity that electron beam sustained MHD affords also opens the door to advanced methods of control for MHD processes, particularly to suppress parasitic current paths and permit operation in dynamic modes that might allow for improved performance. The electron beams enter the MHD channel along magnetic field lines, and the conductivity is sustained by the secondary electrons that are produced. To suppress the electron loss rate, the channel must be operated at low pressure. For ground based facilities, this means the flow will need to be supersonic. Since the presence of coal slag along the walls will cause difficulty with electron beam transmission into the MHD channel, the main focus of the research will be to examine the coupling of the electron beam MHD concept together with new membrane technology gasification processes that convert coal to hydrogen and CO2. MHD has the potential for more efficient electrical conversion of hydrogen through combustion at a temperature higher than is possible with turbine inlet temperature limits. This research explores the possibility of e-beam sustained MHD for high efficiency conversion by independently controlling the combustion temperature through combustion in a supersonic nozzle, the formation of oxides of nitrogen through kinetic rate differentials, and the optimization of the conductivity profiles. Modeling indicates that the cost of the electron beams can be relatively small if the electron loss rate is minimized doc14376 none Biocomplexity in African savannas Niall P. Hanan, Robert J. Scholes, Michael B. Coughenour, Luanne Otter, Philip Omi, Gerhard Dangelmayr Savannas are globally important ecosystems of great significance to human welfare and economies, especially in many less developed countries in Africa and Eurasia. In Africa, the savannas are also home to the greatest density and diversity of large herbivores and carnivores of any ecosystem on earth. However, the mixture of trees and grasses that defines savanna systems is inherently unstable and multiple factors related to soil type, climate, herbivore density, and wild-fire frequency are thought to contribute to their coexistence. Thus savannas are biocomplex systems where processes such as grazing intensity and fire frequency simultaneously depend on and control savanna structure, productivity and nutrient recycling. This project will investigate biocomplexity in the context of African savannas. We are developing the conceptual and numerical understanding of savanna ecosystems that will allow prediction of savanna structure and function resulting from the complex interactions and feedback between driving variables. This will include the change in stable states under varying conditions, the resilience of the different forms of savanna to change, and the thresholds between stable states. The project will further use savanna systems as a general model for understanding complexity in biological systems and to develop methods of analysis and interpretive tools that promote a broader public understanding of the inter-relatedness of environmental systems doc14377 none Bruneau This award supports a six-month collaborative research project between Professor Michael Bruneau of SUNY, Buffalo, Professor Akira Wada of the Tokyo Institute of Technology and Masayoshi Nakashima at Kyoto University in Japan. The researchers will be undertaking a study of hybrid testing at large scale high performance shake table earthquake simulation facilities. The U.S. PI s are developing the world s most versatile next generation earthquake engineering research facility designed to provide testing capabilities that will revolutionize the fundamental understanding of how large structures behave during earthquakes and will feature advanced shake tables. It is a part of the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES). The NEES collaboratory will include approximately 20 equipment sites (shake tables, centrifuges, tsunami wave basin, large-scale laboratory experimentation systems, and field experimentation and monitoring installations) networked together through the high performance Internet. The scientific objective is to add a new international frontier to the NEES project in order to 1) foster international collaboration aimed at exchange of experiences by the Japanese counterparts; 2) identify common challenges facing the developers of such facilities, inclusion of such experiences in the actual design development integration of the proposed facility at Buffalo and other NEES locations; and 3) cultivate collaborative partnerships for future sharing of facilities to extend testing capabilities to further the common goals. The project brings together the efforts of laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our knowledge base and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish the results of their collaborations on the NEES web site doc14378 none Clifford Cunningham, Joel Martin, Jermoe Regier, Jeffrey Schultz & Jeffrey Thorne A grant has been awarded to an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Duke University, University of Maryland, University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute, North Carolina State University, and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. This grant will support the largest effort to date to solve the major questions in the evolution of the arthropods. The arthropods -- which include insects, shrimp, centipedes, horshoe crabs, spiders and ticks -- represent more species than the rest of the animals combined. Despite more than a decade of molecular work, the relationships of these major groups of arthropods are not known. This grant will use information from the three completely sequenced animal genomes (human, worm, and fly) to help us obtain a giant dataset of nuclear protein coding sequences from 85 representative arthropod species. This dataset will include approximately 50,000 base pairs of DNA sequences per species, which is more than 10 times larger than the largest existing dataset. This project will not only decide the relationships of the major groups of arthropods, but will tell us which group of marine crustaceans (shrimps , lobsters and crabs) are the closest relatives to the insects, which represent the most successful invasion of land by any animal group. This grant will also support development of new statistical methods to estimate the dates of the major events in arthropod evolution, and, includes an innovative plan to develop teaching modules to expose underprivileged K-12 students in the Los Angeles region, and elsewhere in the country, to the evolution of the charismatic Arthropoda doc14379 none This project will develop standardized, exportable and comparable assessment instruments and models for Women In Engineering (WIE) programs nationwide, thus allowing them to assess their program s activities and ultimately provide data for making well-informed evaluations. To accomplish this goal, the principal investigators at the University of Missouri and Penn State University will work over a three-year period with their institutions WIE programs and three cooperating programs at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Georgia Tech, and University of Texas at Austin. With these five programs that collectively represent a variety of private and public, years of experience for WIE directors and student body characteristics, the investigators will pilot, revise, implement, conduct preliminary data analysis and disseminate easy-to-access, reliable and valid assessment instruments. The principles of formative evaluation will be applied to all instruments and products. All institutions will use the same set of instruments, thus allowing them to have access to powerful benchmarking data in addition to the data from each of their respective institutions. A prior project, the Women s Experience in College Engineering Project (WECE) sought to characterize the factors that influence women students experiences and decisions by studying college environments, events and support programs that affect women s satisfaction with their engineering major, and their decisions to persist or leave these majors. In contrast to WECE s macro-level and student focus, this proposal s target audience is WIE directors, with a focus on WIE programs, not students. Women in Engineering programs around the United States are a crucial part of our country s response to the need for more women in engineering professions. There are about 50 WIE programs nationwide. Half have expressed interest in this effort. WIE directors will benefit by having ready-made assessment tools that will allow them to collect data on programs, evaluate these programs, and make decisions on how to revise programs and or redistribute limited resources to maximize overall program effectiveness. Data from these instruments will also provide substantiated evidence for administrators, advisory boards and potential funding agencies. Finally, because these instruments will be available nationwide, programs will have the opportunity to take advantage of powerful benchmarking data for their decision-making processes. This project provides the next logical step in the national movement to recruit and retain women in engineering doc14380 none WormNet: Reconstructing the early evolution of segmented annelid worms K. M. Halanych, M. Martindale, E. Seaver, D. McHugh, and the Joint Genome Institute (J. Boore, D. Rokhsar) Understanding metazoan phylogeny has been confounded by interpretations of the degree and nature of segmentation in body plans. In particular, the Annelida, commonly called segmented worms, has been central to debates on the role of segmentation in animal evolution. Recent evidence suggests that several non-segmented or partially segmented worm taxa, that were previously regarded as separate phyla, are within the annelid radiation. These recent results conflict with the only comprehensive phylogenetic analyses to date on the annelids, the morphological analyses of Rouse and Fauchald ( ). Furthermore, because annelids are one of the most evolutionarily successful phyla and because they diversified in the late PreCambrian to early Cambrian, understanding their early evolutionary history is paramount to understanding the evolution of animal life. The proposed work has two goals: 1) Genomic approaches will be used to reconstruct the early phylogenetic events of the Annelida , which includes several previously recognized phyla, and 2) Functional genomic techniques will be used to characterize the developmental mechanisms employed in segmentation in several key lineages. Interpreting the segmentation, a hallmark of annelids, in the context of the phylogeny will allow novel insights on the role and plasticity of segmentation during animal evolution. This project has been called WormNet because it represents an interdisciplinary network of researchers, at four institutions, focusing on these goals in a manner that enhances education and outreach activities. Additionally, this program is designed to jumpstart other areas of research in the major metazoan clade Lophotrochozoa (annelids, mollusks, lophophorates, and their allies). Publicly available cDNA and genomic BAC libraries will be produced, and data from approximately 130 completely sequenced mitochondrial genomes will provide needed markers for population genetic and systematic studies. Given that annelids are the most abundant and ubiquitous animal phlyum in the deep sea (which covers 70% of the planet), serve as bioindicators, have a role in bioremediation, and include up-and-coming model organisms, the importance of understanding their evolution cannot be understated doc14381 none PI: Cary Proposal: The project by S. Craig Cary, University of Delaware is supported by the program Biocomplexity in the Environment, subprogram Genomic-Enabled Environmental Science and Engineering (BE GEN-EN). The project focuses on symbiotic associations in deep-sea thermal vent communities. Closely integrated symbiotic associations between bacteria and eukaryotic hosts abound in nature. This is particularly the case in marine systems where novel associations are being routinely discovered. Whether the bacteria reside externally to the host or endosymbiotically the functional role of these associations often remain poorly understood. This lack of understanding, in part, stems from our inability to cultivate the majority of these symbionts free from their host. Even in instances where cultivation is possible, it is unlikely that the physiological capacities of bacteria measured in the laboratory truly represent those in the natural ecosystem. The majority of episymbiont associations exist as a phenotypically and phylogenetically mixed population making it extremely difficult to decipher the role of independent members. This project will employ a community level genomic approach to understand the metabolic potential and phenotypes of the members of a diverse episymbiotic bacterial community found associated with the tube-dwelling polychaete, Alvinella pompejana. This association exists in an extreme deep-sea hydrothermal vent biotope characterized by high concentrations of heavy metals and the steepest thermal gradient experienced by any organism yet described. It is likely that such an environment imposes strong selective pressures on the symbiont host association. In depth rRNA analysis of the episymbiotic communities associated with A. Pompejana demonstrated the dominance of a diverse assemblage of a single bacterial subdivision (epsilon Proteobacteria). This constraint, found in the episymbiotic communities throughout A. pompejana geographic and physiochemical range, has not been described in any other symbiotic association. Because of the complex nature of this association, no specific roles have been defined for this unique symbiosis by habitat characterizations, in situ enzyme assays, classical cultivation techniques or molecular analysis. This project will address a central hypothesis that by understanding the collective genetic complexity of the episymbiont community one can resolve a core metabolic strategy that defines the community in the context of its environment. Our approach assumes that by placing the genome biocomplexity of this community directly into an environmental context we will be able to resolve the ecological role and interrelationships of this microbial invertebrate association. To achieve this goal, we will conduct a meta-genome scale analysis of the complex microbial community found intimately associated with A. pompejana. By coupling tightly integrated bioinformatic and modeling components with both environmental characterizations and microarray expression analyses we will then have the ability to genetically dissect the episymbiont community and query their functionality under various physiochemical conditions. The research will involve an interdisciplinary, international team of investigators that bring to the program expertise in microbial ecology, geochemistry, genomic sciences, proteomics and bioinformatics. The productive partnerships between academia and industry that were developed during previous work will allow access to essential technical resources and expertise otherwise unavailable for this type of investigation doc14382 none This award supports the planning and meeting of groups of researchers working on Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites ranging from the Alaskan tundra to the Florida Everglades to compare data and develop a cross biome study comparing carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous dynamics to test the central scientific hypothesis that in systems characterized by low nutrient availability, there exists a pattern of differential nutrient limitation among the primary producers and the heterotrophs doc14383 none This project features seven interrelated activities designed to advance community college leadership in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) education, to encourage the development of ATE-related programs in more community colleges, and to share information about the value, accomplishments, and community impact of the ATE program in and beyond the education field. The activities build upon the successes of AACC s previous efforts supported by the National Science Foundation. They support the network of community colleges dedicated to improving SMET education, and help to expand and focus the future of the ATE program as it positions itself to meet the challenges presented by a new century and an increasing demand for a trained technical workforce. There is activity in seven areas: Three National ATE Principal Investigators Conferences in , , and , Development of an ATE Leadership Program to include three ATE Centers Meetings, three ATE Presidents Meetings, and a Summit on Technological Education that combines community college and business representatives to develop strategies to strengthen the nation s technical workforce and faculty pipeline, Continuation of the AACC ATE Mentoring Program to help ten community colleges establish new programs in science, mathematics, engineering, and or technology, Two AACC Briefs, one focusing on the outcomes of the ATE Mentoring Program, and one focusing on impact and results of the ATE PI Conference. A summary of recommendations and findings from the Summit on Technological Education, Dissemination of information about ATE programs and goals through AACC publications, presentations, feature stories, conference proceedings, a listserv, and a Web page, and Evaluation doc14384 none This U.S.-Hungary research project between Michael Penkava of the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, and Alice Fialowski of Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, features versal deformations of infinity algebras. The collaboration builds upon Penkava s strengths in infinity algebras and deformation theory and Fialowski s in deformation of Lie algebras. A qualified undergraduate from the U.S. institution will participate. Their joint research plan entails automated computing of the Lie brackets in the cohomology as a continuation of their study of versal deformations of Lie algebras equipped with an invariant inner product. They anticipate that the cohomology of the infinity algebra inherits a natural filtration and that this filtration can be used to give a definition of a graded dual space which is small enough to be useful in the construction of the versal deformation. Related work by this US-Hungarian team on application of generalized Massey products to computations of miniversal deformations of Lie algebras will be extended as well. The combined work is expected to improve current understanding of the structure of versal deformations of Lie algebras with invariant inner products as well as the homology of the graph complex. If successful, the results may be useful in physics where the algebra of observables can describe physical reality, as a deformation quantization of the commutative algebra of classical physics. This mathematical research project fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc14385 none PI: Taylor Proposal: The project by Ronald Taylor, Dartmouth College is supported by the program Biocomplexity in the Environment, subprogram Genomic-Enabled Environmental Science and Engineering (BE GEN-EN). Heterotrophic bacteria play a key role in pelagic nutrient cycling because they remineralize organic matter before it sinks out of the system. Two key bacterial behaviors that may influence remineralization rates are dormancy and attachment to plankton. Both of these behaviors are phenotypically plastic, allowing bacteria to respond to changes in their environment. For example, a high dormancy rate (30-95%) suggests that the bacterial community has a tremendous capability to respond rapidly to changes in environmental conditions that trigger the transition back to a metabolically active state. In contrast, little is known about the potential impact of bacteria living on planktonic substrates on ecosystem processes. The goal of this research project is to study the interaction between dormancy and attachment behaviors using whole-genome expression profiles for a focal species (Vibrio cholerae) under contrasting environmental conditions in both the field and laboratory. We are particularly interested in determining (1) the extent to which dormancy and attachment may be co-regulated under realistic environmental conditions and (2) how these behaviors might be altered by anthropogenic activities such as land use change or organic pollution. We will conduct three interrelated studies, each using microarrays, that will make major contributions to our understanding of the genetic processes that instigate transitions between active and dormant states and between unattached and attached states. Aim 1 contrasts the temporal dynamics of gene expression in unattached and attached bacteria under favorable vs. unfavorable environmental conditions over a two-week period. This will be the first comprehensive analysis of genetic co-regulation of dormancy and SRBs. Aim 2 will determine the direct effects and interactions of four key environmental parameters (temperature, salinity, pH, and nutrients) on gene expression in bacteria exposed to three different microhabitats (unattached, attached to zooplankton, attached to phytoplankton). This will be one of the first multi-factor experiments with microarrays, and will require introduction of new methods for analyzing microarray data. Aim 3 will quantify gene expression under seasonally varying field conditions using in situ incubations of bacteria in Bangladeshi ponds with contrasting anthropogenic impacts. As such, this will be one of the first projects to use microarrays to evaluate gene expression in a natural system rather than under laboratory conditions. The focal species, V. cholerae, is ideal for investigating these questions: it is found in plankton communities worldwide, is representative of a large family of bacteria (the Vibrionaceae), and has a fully sequenced and well-studied genome which enables the use of microarray technology. V. cholerae is also of considerable medical importance as the etiological agent of cholera. This research will be accomplished by an interdisciplinary and international team of researchers who specialize in ecology, microbiology, genetics and statistics. We plan to make all microarray results publicly available, and to educate the scientific community and the public about our results through a website, talks at scientific meetings, and our undergraduate and graduate courses doc783 none The secretion of heterologous proteins that contain disulfide bonds is not at its full potential. Evidence suggests that the regulation of the redox state of the endoplasmic reticulum may be a bottleneck. A multifaceted approach is proposed to probe and manage the redox state in yeast in order to investigate the bottleneck hypothesis further and to ultimately increase secretion efficiency. The four elements of the proposed work are: (1) amplify the products of the individual genes now thought to be involved redox management to assess the effect, (2) use display methods to uncover possibly missing pathway elements, (3) add redox altering compounds to the growth medium to alter redox state, and (4) develop a tachyplesin I substrate-based diagnostic system doc14387 none The goal of this Biocomplexity incubation study is to develop an approach for studying coupled biogeochemical cycles in urban and agricultural ecosystems, with a primary focus on nitrogen. A series of focused workshops will be held addressing topics including: identification of knowledge gaps regarding key processes, issues regarding temporal and spatial scales, developing a modeling framework, and integration and education. The study regions for the full-scale research program will be the Central Arizona-Phoenix ecosystem (currently site of a Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program) and the Minnesota River-Twin Cities ecosystem (currently subject of an interdisciplinary watershed study). The existing extensive databases from these and other studies will facilitate the initiation of this project. Understanding coupled biogeochemical cycles in human ecosystems (cities and farms) will lead to a holistic, integrated approach for effective pollution management doc14388 none On several billions of hectares, modern land uses are transforming soil biocomplexity, the interactions between the extremely diverse soil biota and biogeochemical pattern and process. Regrettably, our understanding of this transformation lags far behind our impact. This award constitutes an ambitious planning grant, composed of a variety of the nation s leading soil biologists and biogeochemists as well as highly talented young scientists, to evaluate how and why soil biocomplexity is altered by long-practiced land uses. The project features the soils of the old cotton belt of the southern United States, soils highly disturbed by long-continued agriculture and forestry. The team will meet on two occasions as a full group to conceptualize a model of land use impacts on soil biota and biogeochemistry, and perform preliminary work on novel collections and samples from the long-term Calhoun Experimental Forest, located near Spartanburg, South Carolina. The team will apply new expertise in a variety of complex analytical and sampling techniques doc14389 none This award supports theoretical research and education to study quantum fluctuations in low-dimensional superconductors. Three projects are planned: (1) The investigators will calculate corrections to the existing mean-field theory of the upper critical field in thin superconducting films. They will consider mesoscopic effects in the distribution of impurities that lead to the appearance of superconducting droplets above the BCS upper critical field. The Josephson network of the superconducting droplets may become macroscopically superconducting at low temperatures. The genuine transition point is determined by the interplay of the quantum fluctuations of the order parameter and the proximity effect. The behavior of various physical quantities near the transition will be considered and contact with the existing scaling theory will be made. (2) The investigators will construct a theory of the zero-temperature superconducting transition in finite-length wires and chains of Josephson junctions. This work is motivated by experiments that show deviations from a thermally activated resistivity at low temperatures. (3) The investigators will calculate I-V characteristics for a ferromagnet - d-wave superconductor junction including the effects of spin-orbit coupling. Diagrammatic expansions and the Keldysh technique are among the variety of analytical techniques that will be used. %%% This award supports theoretical research and education on quantum mechanical fluctuations in superconductors at low temperatures. The investigators will use advanced theoretical methods to study the role of quantum fluctuations in thin superconducting films, superconducting wires, and junctions involving superconductors. This research is fundamental and has potential impact on our understanding of quantum phase transitions in other systems doc14390 none Jansen, Raubeson, and Warnow A Biocomplexity grant has been awarded to an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Texas, Central Washington University, University of New Mexico, the DoE Joint Genomics Institute, and Penn State University to undertake comparative evolutionary analyses of complete chloroplast genomes from more than 50 representative land plants. The team of four biologists (Jansen, Raubeson, Boore and dePamphilis) and five computer scientists (Warnow, Moret, Bader, Sankoff and Miller) will address a number of important issues in three areas at the intersection of biology and computer science: phylogeny of land plants, chloroplast genome evolution, and computational genomics. Fifty-five complete genomic sequences will be generated (greatly augmenting the 10 or so now known), new computational approaches for examining relationships using genomic data will be designed and implemented, and bioinformatic tools and resources for genomics will be developed. Then, the data and approaches will be used to study the relationships of plants and the patterns and processes of mutation as they affect the chloroplast genome. These results will be made available to both the scientific and lay communities. In addition, students in the fields of computational biology, bioinformatics, phylogenetic analysis, and genomics will be trained. Understanding relationships among organisms is an essential prerequisite for all areas of Biological Science, including such diverse fields as ecology, evolution, forensics, medicine, and molecular biology. Land plants, the focus of this study, include over 300,000 species and form the basis of terrestrial ecosystems. The phylogenetic history of this important group of organisms, only imperfectly understood, will be clarified by this research. This project also will make major contributions to our understanding of the mutational mechanisms and evolutionary processes acting within the chloroplast genome. This genome contains genes essential to plant function; studying its evolution should provide basic information of fundamental importance to plant scientists. Finally, this project will have important implications for computational biology, one of the fastest growing fields of science today. This includes the development and testing of new algorithms in comparative genomics, such as gene-order changes, that will increase the scope of theoretical computational biology. All software developed by the team will be made freely available doc14391 none Whiting A Biocomplexity in the Environment: Genome-Enabled grant has been awarded to an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the Brigham Young University that combines expertise in computer science, statistics, and phylogenetic systematics to address three fundamental questions in evolutionary biology, genomics, and computational biology. (1) What are the major relationships among Hexapods (insects and related taxa)? (2) How has mitochondrial genome evolution occurred relative to Hexapod diversity? (3) How can we develop fast, parallel computer algorithms to reconstruct phylogenetic relationships for large data sets? To answer these questions, the investigators will sequence about species across hexapod diversity for about 12 nuclear genes representing a total sequencing effort of 30 million base pairs. They will then sequence about 120 mitochondrial genomes across the major lineages representing each of the hexapod orders to examine mitochondrial genome evolution in the context of a well established phylogeny from the 12 nuclear genes. This represents another 1.8 million nucleotides of sequence. Parallel-processing algorithms will be developed for computational analysis of large nucleotide sequence data sets. The results will provide a framework for understanding Hexapod diversity (crucial for understanding agricultural pests, disease vectors, etc.), mitochondrial genome evolution (instrumental in understanding the functional significance of gene rearrangements), and easily available parallel approaches for phylogenetics. Because phylogenetics is becoming an instrumental tool in the study of human disease (both due to infection and the genetic component of complex diseases such as cancer and coronary artery disease), the ability to reconstruct phylogenetic relationships accurately and with great speed for ever-increasing data sets is key to making the link between genetic changes and disease risk factors. The investigators will heavily involve undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows in every phase of this work and provide outlets in the form of publications and informational websites. Michael Whiting, Keith Crandall, Mark Clement, Quin Snell, David Whiting A grant has been awarded to an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the Brigham Young University that combines expertise in computer science, statistics, and phylogenetic systematics to address three fundamental questions in evolutionary biology, genomics, and computational biology: 1) What are the major relationships among Hexapods (insects and related taxa)? 2) How has mitochondrial genome evolution occurred relative to Hexapod diversity? And 3) how can we develop fast, parallel computer algorithms to reconstruct phylogenetic relationships for large data sets? To answer these questions, the investigators will sequence ~ species across hexapod diversity for ~12 genes representing a total sequencing effort of 30 million base pairs. They will then sequence ~120 mitochondrial genomes across the major lineages representing each of the hexapod orders to examine mitochondrial genome evolution in the context of our well established phylogeny from the 12 nuclear genes. This represents another 1.8 million nucleotides of sequence. Finally we will develop parallel algorithms for computational analysis of nucleotide sequence data. The results will provide a framework for understanding Hexapod diversity (crucial for understanding agricultural pests, disease vectors, etc.), mitochondrial genome evolution (instrumental in understanding the functional significance of gene rearrangements), and easily available parallel approaches for phylogenetics. Since phylogenetics is becoming an instrumental tool in the study of human disease (both due to infection and the genetic component of complex diseases such as cancer and coronary artery disease), the ability to reconstruct phylogenetic relationships accurately and with great speed for ever-increasing data sets is key to making the link between genetic changes and disease risk factors. The investigators will heavily involve undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows in every phase of this work and provide outlets in the form of publications and informational websites doc14392 none The research focus of the NSF I UCRC for Membrane Applied Science and Technology (MAST) is membranes, microporous films, and barrier layers. Membranes are permable films that permit separation or the controlled release of solutes. They are used for water desalination, wastewater treatment, artificial kidneys, and in the controlled release of pharmaceuticals, flavors, cosmetics, inscticides, and herbicides. Microporous films are used in breathable fabrics, surgical dressings, artificial lungs, batteries, and fuel cells. Barrier layers are used in breathable contact lenses, food packaging, water barriers, and protective coatings. Membranes offer exceptional potential for smart sensor and bioMEMS technologies since tey are the only separations technology that will work on the microscale doc14393 none This award will support an international workshop entitled 10th International Conference on Luminescence and Electron-Spin-Resonance Dating. The conference will examine the utility of trapped-electron dating (TED) for establishing the age of geologic and archaeological materials. The purpose of the conference is to bring together international experts, practitioners, and students to share the latest developments in this dating technique. NSF support for this conference will enable the University of Nevada Desert Research Institute to serve as the first host of this conference in the Western Hemisphere. This is important because TED is gaining use among American scientists as a dating technique. Having experts from Europe gather in the United States is a cost-effective way for American researchers to gain first-hand knowledge of the technique doc14394 none Consequences of Greenhouse Warming for Biocomplexity and Biogeochemical Cycles: a Multidisciplinary Case Study Across the Paleocene-Eocene Boundary Approximately 55 Ma, the Earth experienced a rapid and extreme episode of global warming that was the product of an unusually massive release of carbon into the ocean-atmosphere system. This event, known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), had far reaching and significant impacts on global marine and terrestrial ecosystems that ranged from mass extinction of deep sea foraminifera to dispersal and subsequent radiation of plants and ungulates. The combination of these climatic and biotic perturbations initiated dramatic changes in the planet s biogeochemical cycles that eventually worked to restore equilibrium to the global carbon cycle. However, the recovery process took nearly 200,000 yrs. We propose a multi-institutional interdisciplinary program to investigate the effects of the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) on the global biosphere and coupled biogeochemical cycles of carbon and nutrients. This project will bring together an international team of experts that includes 11 senior investigators from the US, and 5 from Europe, New Zealand, and China. Building on a foundation of existing work, this study will utilize an array of models to determine the coupling of inorganic and organic chemical processes, to evaluate the relative contributions of these processes in sequestering excess carbon, on short and long-time scales. Empirical data representing marine and terrestrial systems will be generated and used to constrain and evaluate model results. We will evaluate and test existing hypotheses concerning the nature of first order effects and feedbacks of the PETM perturbation on the biosphere and coupled biogeochemical cycles. There are many parallels between the events of 55 Ma and the present day in terms of forcing and response. There are also many differences in the structure of biotic communities and the configuration of continents and oceans. Nevertheless, at a fundamental level, biogeochemical systems and the biosphere would have responded much as they do today. As such, the PETM provides a unique and, possibly the only, opportunity to investigate the short and long-term effects of abrupt greenhouse gas induced warming on global environments doc14395 none Bier A major challenge following the completion of genome sequencing is to determine the expression patterns of all genes during development and in the adult. Obtaining this data is critical if we are to unravel the complex regulatory networks that regulate genome expression. Although whole genome gene expression can be analyzed by current microarray techniques, this method lacks spacial discrimination and is relatively low resolution in time and magnitude, since by its nature, it measures average gene expression levels over large heterogeneous cell populations. To understand the regulatory interrelationships between genes, many of which are regulated in highly dynamic and spatially restricted patterns, one must ultimately know how the genome is expressed on a cell-by cell basis throughout development. The most obvious way to obtain fine scale gene expression data at single cell resolution is by performing genome scale in situ hybridization experiments. Dr. Bier, Dr. McGinnis, and Dr. Pevzner will address this problem jointly by developing a multiplex in situ hybridization method that will greatly facilitate and enable the acquisition of genome expression data at single cell resolution. In addition, this collaborative team will validate the method by applying it to two well defined hypothesis driven questions. The specific goals of this proposal are to: 1) Develop a multiplex RNA in situ hybridization labeling technique, 2) Analyze Hox gene regulatory networks repressing limb development, and 3) Identify genes mediating cross-talk between signaling pathways. Impact Statement: Because the same genetic systems create pattern during development in diverse metazoans, fine spatial and temporal scale analysis of these regulatory relationships in Drosophila will provide an essential framework for analyzing how these core genetic pathways have served as substrates for modification by natural selection during evolution to tailor body plans to different environments and ecological niches. This knowledge is essential for resolving deep structures of metazoan phylogeny and may reveal whether multicellular metazoans co-opted a polarity generating mechanism present in facultative colonial unicellular organisms to create metameric pattern along the A P axis. In addition, the methodologies we develop and the understanding we gain of cellular responses to developmental signals will form the basis for creating detailed mathematical models of cellular states and will be critical for evaluating how adult organisms respond doc14396 none REGULATION OF HYDROLOGIC AND C CYCLES BY NATIVE SHRUBS IN SUB-SAHELIAN AFRICA R.P. Dick PI, Oregon State University, Corvallis OR Soil degradation in relation to desertification of Sub-Sahelian Africa is a major concern. Farmers of semiarid land are being considered to be paid for practices that sequester C in soils, which could enable farmers in vulnerable ecological landscapes to adopt practices that promote sustainability and improve soil quality and degraded environments. However, assessing soil degradation and the potential to sequester C is spatially and temporally complex in this semiarid landscape. In particular, we have identified a largely unrecognized component in the landscape of the vast semi-arid Sahel, namely woody shrubs (Piliostigma reticulatum and Guiera senegalensis) that voluntarily regrow in farmers fields after the summer cropping season. These shrubs seem to be much more important than trees or other organic inputs such as animal manure at the landscape level in regulating C inputs sequestration and hydrologic processes. Under current management farmers who cut and burn the shrub biomass each spring are not utilizing this organic matter effectively. An intriguing ancillary theory is that these shrubs may do hydraulic lift . This has been documented in other semiarid regions and is the process of water movement from moist subsoil to dry surface layers using root systems as a conduit which can be released from roots to surrounding soil during periods when transpiration ceases (usually at night) This could drive rhizosphere processes in dry soil such as nutrient mineralization and mobility and possibly provide small amounts of water to shallow rooting crop species during dry periods. The overall objectives are to (1) quantify annual C cycling and storage, water balance, and litter decomposition of two dominant shrubs of Sub-Sahelian agroecosystems; (2) couple indigenous knowledge to biogeochemical and hydrological results with the ecology of these shrubs; and (3) use modeling to determine the effect of alternative shrub management systems on soil C and soil quality at the landscape level. The work has implications for large areas of Sub Sahelian West Africa that have similar agroecosystems to Senegal. The approach will be multidisciplinary and the ecological research of these shrubs would be a basis for practical applications in agricultural nutrient and water management, and as a viable management tool to off set soil degradation and promote C sequestration to reduce global climate change doc14397 none Holben More than a century of metal mining in the Northwest region of the U.S. has created numerous open water extreme environments with unusual metal and chemical composition. In addition to their status as Superfund sites, these environments also represent large-scale outdoor laboratories in which it is highly likely that unusual biogeochemical cycles and microbial metabolic strategies exist. We are requesting one year of funding through the SGER component of this program to facilitate development of a multidisciplinary, polyphasic approach that is generally applicable to resolving the chemical and biological components of biogeochemical cycling in a series of these extreme and unusual aquatic environments that vary in key biogeochemical parameters. Considering the unique nature of these environments, and the paucity of information on the biological component of the biogeochemical cycles, preliminary fundino, is necessary to develop appropriate sampling strategies, equipment and analytical techniques, assemble the requisite expertise, determine the key parameters to measure, and develop a model framework adequate for dealing with a suite of extreme aquatic environments proposed for future study. The requested year of funding will provide preliminary data, methodologies, and demonstration of feasibility that will allow us to prepare a full proposal for the Biocomplexity Program Call doc14398 none The central goal of this project is to understand the complex linkages between biogeochemical cycles, vegetation, disturbance, and climate across the full summer temperature gradient in the Arctic in order to better predict ecosystem responses to changing climate. The project focuses on frost-boils because: (1) The processes that are involved in the self-organization of these landforms drive biogeochemical cycling and vegetation succession of extensive arctic ecosystems. (2) These ecosystems contain perhaps the most diverse and ecologically important zonal ecosystems in the Arctic and are important to global carbon budgets. (3) The complex ecological relationships between patterned-ground formation, biogeochemical cycles, and vegetation and the significance of these relationships at multiple scales have not been studied. (4) The responses of the system to changes in temperature are likely to be nonlinear, but can be understood and modeled by examining the relative strengths of feedbacks between the components of the system at several sites along the natural arctic temperature gradient doc14399 none The proposed continued affiliation is considered crucial to the mission of the Center in at least three ways. First, the affiliation adds immeasurably to the credibility and salability of the Center to prospective members of the U.S. Glass industry and the continuation of the present members. Second it allows the NSF to carry out an annual evaluation of the Center (a total quality management function). Third, it permits the Center Directors to participate in the national I UCRC meetings and programs offered by NSF. Beyond this, of course, the additional funding from NSF relieves some of the financial burden of Center administration from the members and university doc14400 none This planning grant proposal presents information supporting a multi-university, multi-disciplinary Center for Engineering Logistics and Distribution (CELDi). The proposed center will be a National Science Foundation sponsored Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC). The vision for the center is to provide integrated solutions to logistics problems, through modeling, analysis and intelligent-systems technologies, building upon the knowledge and expertise available at the three member campuses, the University of Arkansas, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Louisville doc14401 none The proposed center s goal is to develop state of the art techniques for micro and nanoscale contamination control, removal and characterization in manufacturing and fabrication processes. The center will contribute to the competitiveness of the semiconductor, information technology, pharmaceutical, imaging, aerospace and other industries affected by particulate and ionic contamination. The center will especially focus on surface cleaning of patterned, structured and flat substrates. Faculty in the center have identified mechanisms to effectively clean ionic contamination from patterned wafers doc14402 none The objective of the Industry University Cooperative Research Center is to establish a leading edge Industry University Cooperative Research Center for Technology and Innovation Management (CTIM), challenge and advance the field of technology and innovation management with emphasis on creation and analysis of concepts, tools and processes. The Center will leverage and apply the unusual industry-academic partnership of the Northwestern University and the MATI - a consortium of 17 multi-billion dollar, multinational, technology-intensive firms and the central node in a domestic and international network of other industry-academic collaborations. This Center will contribute to the practical knowledge and application of technology and innovation management. Practice-driven, CTIM will constantly interact with domestic and global firms and institutions. This link will highlight fertile and important topics and provide a dynamic laboratory for research and review of Center output. Membership will consist of actively participating industrial, consulting, legal and other firms and affiliates doc14403 none West Virginia University at Parkersburg will partner with Ritchie County High School and Williamstown High School to provide research experiences for female high school students in the Appalachian region known as the Mid-Ohio Valley. Mentoring and peer groups will be important components of the project. In West Virginia, women are less likely to seek a college education let alone pursue a career in science or math. One of the most exciting experiences that a female high school student interested in the sciences can have is one that involves interaction with a teacher and peers in a group setting participating in a scientific project. This is particularly valuable for women students in Appalachia who have attended K-12 schools in isolated areas where there is little opportunity for advanced study of science, who have not had personal role models or do not picture themselves doing science. The research component is the key to the project s impact on high school students and their decisions regarding entering the sciences as a career. It will give students their first experience with original research, teach them how to deal with the open-ended nature of the research process, and give them the self-confidence to see themselves not just as students, but as actual researchers. It is anticipated that lessons learned from the project will inform a full proposal for an expanded Women in Science program at additional public schools in partnership with WVU Parkersburg. The goal is to impact how young women perceive careers in science and mathematics and encourage their pursuit of a college education in these studies doc14404 none The Committee on Women in Science and Engineering (CWSE), National Research Council, of the National Academy of Sciences is preparing a guide to the best policies and programs that academic institutions have implemented to recruit, retain, and advance women in science and engineering in academia. The guide is meant to be a practical tool in the replication of successful programs at many academic institutions across the country. CWSE will use both formal and informal networks to identify the most successful programs for each level, e.g., undergraduate recruitment, reducing attrition in freshman and sophomore years, graduate student recruitment and retention, transition to postdoctoral fellowships. This will include contacting granting organizations, disciplinary societies, academic administration societies, faculty groups, and non-profit advocacy organizations. Programs from different size institutions, both public and private, will be reviewed. Identified programs will be asked to provide data on the increased participation of women resulting from the implementation of their programs. From this group a subset of programs will be selected for site visits. The project will include up to five site visits to institutions with successful programs to interview the students, faculty, and administrators involved. No institution will be identified by name in the guide. The target audience for the guide includes college and university presidents, deans, provosts and other administration officials, department chairs, faculty, and other individuals with the interest and capacity for establishing a successful program that promotes the participation of women in science and engineering. Other guides produced by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) have had a wide impact. Tens of thousands of copies of previous NAS guides have been disseminated worldwide. On Being A Scientist, the NAS guide on science ethics, has been reprinted in several languages. The NAS guide on mentoring, on which this guide will be modeled, Advisor, Teacher, Role Model, Friend: On Being a Mentor to Students in Science and Engineering, is distributed by some institutions to all their faculty, and serves as the basis of their mentoring efforts. Many other faculty mentoring programs are based on the mentoring guide doc14405 none U of Calif - Los Angeles The research focus of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) will be the fundamental science and engineering research needed to create scalable, robust, adaptive, sensor actuator networks. The vision of densely distributed, networked sensing and actuation requires advances in many areas of information technology. Moreover, there is a critical interplay between the technology and the applications and physical context in which it is embedded. By conducting research in the context of specific and high-impact scientific applications, CENS will enable new scientific discovery through high resolution, in situ monitoring and actuation. At the same time, CENS will explore the fundamental principles and technologies needed to apply embedded networked sensing to a wide range of applications. The Center will focus initially on fundamental technology and on four experimental application drivers: habitat monitoring for bio-complexity studies, spatially-dense seismic sensing and structure response, monitoring and modeling contaminant flows, and detection and identification of marine microorganisms. To support this scope, CENS will combine the expertise of faculty from diverse engineering disciplines with the expertise of biological, environmental and earth scientists. During the lifetime of the Center, additional opportunities for applying the technology to natural and engineered systems will be pursued. The CENS educational focus will be twofold: new hands-on experimental capabilities for grades 7-12 science curriculum through access to real-world, real-time, sensor-network interrogation, along with materials for teacher-training, and undergraduate research opportunities in cutting-edge technologies (e.g., wireless systems, MEMS, embedded software) and scientific applications (e.g., bio-complexity, seismic and environmental monitoring), with emphasis on under-represented minority students. CENS will benefit from and contribute to a large number of related activities on its participating campuses, and in the larger research and education community, including: UCLA s California Nanosystems Institute, Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, Nanoelectronics Research Facility; USC s Information Sciences Institute, Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies; UC Reserve systems; Cal State and GLOBE Teacher training programs; INEEL, JPL government laboratories; DARPA, and NSF-related research activities. Many of the constituent technologies will have near- and long-term commercial relevance doc14406 none This study investigates the impact of interpersonal and interorganizational networks on the formation of high technology strategic alliances in two countries: the United States and Israel. The project significantly expands the purview of prior work, making use of a model recognizing that different exchanges create two types of relationships - interpersonal and interorganizational - which represent the starting points for network formation processes reported by Doz, Olk and interpersonal relationships both in terms of formal, role-based relationships and informal friendship ties, and their relationship with strategic alliance characteristics. The study will control for the influence of the alliance s technology, the strategic interests and organizational characteristics of the partners and the institutional settings, while examining these networks relationship to the performance of the strategic alliance. The study focuses on two of the world s extremely high-growth high technology communities of similar size and growth rates, Colorado and Israel, taking advantage of the formation of some 40 strategic alliances in the immediate vicinity of two institutions - the University of Denver and the Technion - with relationships to the communities. It is anticipated that this study will be the first, pilot stage of an eventual multi-stage project doc14407 none The University of Maryland is testing an educational intervention program designed to address aspects of both external (contextual) and internal (individually based) barriers to success and persistence of women in science and engineering. The program -- called RISE: Research Internships in Science and Engineering -- offers a hands-on introductory orientation program for freshmen (Level One) and an enhanced team research experience for upper class students (Level Two) . The enhanced team experience consists of participation in all-female research teams, mentoring by female faculty members and advanced female students (undergraduates and graduate students) who are paid and trained to perform significant mentoring and teaching of undergraduate women. The female faculty member s own research program is the setting for the student teamwork and mentoring. Specifically, the intervention addresses the external factors of the chilly climate of science, the lack of female role models and mentors, and the lack of a female critical mass among students and faculty in SMET academic departments. Regarding internal barriers, we identify underestimation of abilities as operationalized by self-efficacy as the most useful psychological construct for understanding the ambivalence related to career choice and persistence in SMET undergraduate majors. Self-efficacy describes the notion that students develop beliefs about their personal capabilities at different academic pursuits (e.g., whether or not they can do math ). Self-efficacy has been the basis for a large body of findings in the vocational literature, much of it focusing on the debilitating effects of low self-efficacy on the selection and persistence of career options including engineering and science fields. Female faculty are supported in their mentoring of young women (both in terms of training and finances), and at the same time make progress in their own research program. The entire research team (consisting of the faculty member, RISE Fellows and up to four RISE participants) is taking part in training on mentorship, team functioning, and psychological constructs key to enhancing the successful learning of women students This demonstration program has the potential to bring some of the advantages of an all-female learning environment, epitomized by women s colleges, into more mainstream higher education such as the University of Maryland College Park. Replicable features include: role model hierarchies, mentor training, and all-female research teams. Also replicable is the notion of a two level program, beginning with a front end experience that excites and prepares entering female college students, moving on to an extended research internship in the later years that involves close contact with successful woman scientists and engineers doc14408 none The organizers are requesting funding to support a student-organized symposium and workshop to be held at the next annual meeting (November 9-12, ) of the Western Society of Naturalists (WSN). The symposium, entitled Integrative Approaches to Natural History , will explore the role of non-traditional research to the study natural history. The proposed speakers represent diverse fields, ranging from evolutionary biology and ecology to molecular biology; some work in terrestrial systems and some in marine systems. The common thread uniting these scientists from different disciplines is the way that they use techniques from other fields of biology (e.g. genetics, biochemistry, molecular biology, physiology) to gain insight into the ecology and evolution of their systems. The workshop, entitled Communicating Science to Non-scientists , will be an interactive tutorial on how to disseminate research results to the media, policy makers, and general public. Therefore, unlike most symposia and workshops at ecology or evolutionary biology meetings that focus on specific topics within a field, these events seek to cut across diverse biological fields to discuss general themes in the way scientists conduct and disseminate their research. The purpose of the symposium and workshop is not only to explore these important and timely topics, but also to provide students with the valuable experience of organizing and running their own events and participating in the governance of a scientific society doc14409 none The biological sciences have the potential to become substantially more quantitative because emerging computational and mathematical tools could facilitate collection and analysis of vast amounts of biological data. New methods for computational analysis and mathematical modeling of complex biological processes and signals can be used for characterizing variability and uncertainty of biological data across scales of space and time. For example, such signals or measurements are direct indicators of the biological state of the corresponding cells or organs in an organism. There is an increasing demand for interactions among biologists, engineers, mathematicians, computer scientists and medical researchers in the use of these emerging technologies and methods to be able to develop a new interdisciplinary workforce that is able to understand and facilitate reliable quantitative approaches and answers to the major integrative biological challenges. The main objective of this summer school is to expose undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral biological science and bioengineering students to the relatively new approaches of nonlinear dynamical analysis and biosignal interpretation in complex biological systems, and to facilitate rapid diffusion of these mathematical and computational tools in the biological sciences. These methods will be helpful, also, to both students and post-doctoral fellows in computer science and mathematics who are interested in pursuing research in biology and bioengineering, since the summer school provides exceptional insights into the fundamental challenges in biological sciences. The summer school uses lectures, oriented toward biological science students, by expert faculty. The faculty will describe their research areas, and focus on ways to use the mathematical and computational tools to understand the underlying mechanisms of complex biological systems and processes. In addition to these lectures, the summer school will employ a two-hour panel discussion, with active participation of undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral fellows, focused on future developments in biocomplexity and their potential impacts on biology and medicine. In addition, tutorials and hands-on research projects using computers will allow students to explore real-world biological applications of the new computational and modeling approaches. Students will present the results of their projects in a culminating poster session, which will facilitate discussion of both the biology and computational approaches. The summer school will stimulate further interdisciplinary research and collaborations among engineers, mathematicians, computer scientists, and medical researchers, and will help in identifying new, challenging directions in complex biological science and bioengineering research doc14400 none This planning grant proposal presents information supporting a multi-university, multi-disciplinary Center for Engineering Logistics and Distribution (CELDi). The proposed center will be a National Science Foundation sponsored Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC). The vision for the center is to provide integrated solutions to logistics problems, through modeling, analysis and intelligent-systems technologies, building upon the knowledge and expertise available at the three member campuses, the University of Arkansas, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Louisville doc14411 none The Small Group Mathematical Modeling Approaches to Improved Gender Equity in Engineering (SGMM) Project is a collaboration between the engineering and mathematics education faculty at Purdue University. The plan is to demonstrate that innovations in collegiate engineering courses have the potential to address gender differences in interest and persistence, and that the implementation is systemic. The proposed effort will be designed to address mathematical topics that have been identified as foundational to engineering and likely barriers for women in these courses, and to design environments where skills and abilities women bring to engineering are rewarded and valued. The modeling activities will be incorporated into selected early engineering courses at Purdue University, including those required of all incoming freshmen engineering students. Those involved are over engineering students (~600 women) in freshman engineering courses, all instructors in freshman engineering (including faculty and graduate assistants), and a number engineering faculty teaching sophomore level courses. During Phase I, a small technical team, realistic, modeling activity will be a required of all freshmen. The activity will be delivered via WebCT, an internet-based instructional tool [www.webct.com]. During Phase II additional realistic modeling activities will be incorporated in sophomore-level materials engineering courses. Complementary research efforts will be used to build a case study of this innovation. The purpose of the research is to inform (1) how these modeling activities are used to identify emerging student talent, (2) how the various constituencies react to the use of these activities (male and female students, instructors), (3) how these activities address the targeted mathematical areas, and (4) how students vision of their future engineering career and their gender identity interact. The information will provide insights into the potential effects of the small technical team, realistic, modeling activities in engineering courses, the dynamics of gender-equity issues of the Purdue engineering program, and factors outside the engineering program that may influence the interest and persistence of students (especially women) in the field. The proposed project studies gender-related issues at the student, the instructor, and the programmatic level. The activities and supporting materials will be available to other universities on a web site already sponsored by Purdue University, and linked to the Purdue Women in Engineering Program web site doc14412 none The proposed Compact High Performance Cooling Technologies Research Center will address research and development needs of industries in the area of high-performance heat removal from compact spaces. All product sectors in the electronics industry (high-performance, Cost Performance, Telecommunications, Hand-held, Automotive, and Military Avionics) face critical electronics cooling challenges, and the Center brings together an excellent team of faculty to address these needs. Faculty participants in the proposed Center are from the Schools of Mechanical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering and Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue University, and contribute complimentary competencies in heat transfer, microfluidics, microfabrication, mechatronics, controls, acoustics, sensing and actuation, diagnostics and measurements, and systems-level research doc14413 none Inspection of aging civil structures, after-earthquake buildings and bridges, aging aircraft, and mechanical systems under fatigue loading requires a method that can perform on-site quick and accurate damage detection of large structures. Unfortunately most of conventional non-destructive inspection methods are local methods; it is slow and expensive to use them for on-site inspection of large structures. Because damage signals are always contained in dynamic responses of structures, this research project is to develop a dynamics-based global inspection method for the detection and estimation of defects in large composite and built-up structures. Toward a global inspection method a scanning laser vibrometer will be used to provide accurate and dense measurement of Operational Deflection Shapes (ODSs) of structures, and a newly developed Boundary Effect Evaluation (BEE) method will be used to extract damage-induced boundary effects from the ODSs to reveal damage locations. The BEE method is a model-independent method; it uses a sliding-window least-squares curve-fitting method to decompose an ODS into central solutions and boundary solutions. Because damage introduces new boundaries to a structure, boundary solutions exist around damage and structural boundaries and hence can reveal damage locations. Moreover, crack sizes can be estimated by using stress intensity factors from fracture mechanics. Experiments have been performed to verify the capability of this BEE method in locating surface slots, edge slots, surface holes, internal holes, fatigue cracks, and stiffened sections. Numerical and experimental results indicate that the BEE method is more sensitive and reliable than other dynamics- or deformation-based methods. The accuracy and capability of this BEE method will be improved by investigating the noise patterns of ODSs, the use of low-order transverse ODSs, a new data acquisition method using a lock-in amplifier, and a systematic method of selecting ODSs for examination. This project will result in an efficient and reliable damage detection and estimation method for performing condition-based structural safety inspection of large civil, mechanical, and aerospace structures doc14414 none The SERC addresses the needs for software productivity and quality. It also provides a focal point for the exchange of ideas among industry and academia and serves as a direct infusion of these ideas, thereby accelerating technology transfer. SERC resources include over 50 faculty and 100 students at 9 universities working with practitioners from software intensive industries to solve software problems and advance the state-of-the-practice in software engineering doc14415 none This award establishes a research site at the Arizona State University of the Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC) for Water Quality (WQC) located at the University of Arizona. The research will focus on applied health-related water microbiology and environmental engineering. The overall objective is to perform research to improve the quality of drinking water and investigate physical, chemical and microbial processes that affect the quality of potable water supplies. In addition, the IUCRC at Arizona State University will establish an undergraduate training program for the minority students. A number of area municipalities and industries will form an industrial consortium to provide financial and intellectual support of the research site doc14416 none Some national assessments show that the gender gap in math achievement has narrowed dramatically in the last decade, and that there has been a significant increase in the number of mathematics courses taken by high school women. However, other data indicate that female students do not confront the critical transition from high school to college with deep, conceptually based mathematical competence that supports entry into STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) careers. Specifically, female students perform much less well than males on complex problem solving, when they must apply novel problem solving approaches, and when they must work under time pressure or transfer skills to problems not previously seen. Other research points to differences in female and male students learning styles; female students require more structured, concrete and repetitive instruction whereas males do equally well with more abstract hints and help, suggesting that they have a deeper understanding of mathematical concepts. A related concern is that female students increased math course taking has not translated into a higher number of women in the pipeline towards careers; that is, women are taking additional math but are not planning to utilize it in their careers. The consequences are seen in the continued under-representation of females in STEM majors and careers, and the critical lack of mathematically sophisticated workers in numbers sufficient to meet our nations needs. This project is designed to investigate the factors that contribute to female students shallower mathematical competence, as well as the learning styles that characterize male and female students at the critical transition from high school to college. Our investigations take place in the context of a multimedia, multi-component simulation environment: AnimalWorld. AnimalWorld provides high school women (and men) with 1) an intelligent tutor for high school mathematics (fractions; algebra; geometry; ratios proportions decimals; probability) that provides gender adaptive instruction and allows for analysis of male and female learning styles; 2) a virtual mentor component, in which students who are solving math problems in the simulated world can meet real female researchers and experts (through video clips embedded in the simulation) who discuss their training and the importance of math for their careers; 3) a math at your fingertips module in which students periodically rehearse math facts to free cognitive resources for higher-order problem solving, predicting increased math test scores; 4) a module to enhance students spatial cognition through dynamic manipulation of objects in simulated three-dimensional environments, which will allow us to provide a strong test of the hypothesis that females poorer math achievement reflects less well developed spatial cognition; and 5) an SAT-Math preparation module designed to narrow the striking gender gap on this critical achievement test. Our prediction is that female students who work with AnimalWorld will show significant increases in their complex math problem-solving skill, including their SAT-Math exam performance; that gender adaptive instruction will foster greater conceptual understanding in female students; and that virtual mentors will encourage female students to report greater interest in STEM careers. The results will increase our understanding of male and female learning styles, as well as provide new approaches to effective mathematics instruction for all students doc14417 none The Semantic Web is a vision: the idea of having data on the Web defined and linked in a way that it can be used by computers not just for display purposes, but for automation, integration and reuse of data across various applications. The goal of the International Semantic Web Working Symposium (SWWS) (July 30-August 1, Stanford, California) is to bring together researchers and practitioners (1) to present the state-of-the-art in the development of the Semantic Web; (2) to examine the research issues that relate to the different components of what constitutes the Semantic Web technology; (3) to cross-fertilize ideas on the development of Semantic Web information systems among different domains. SWWS is both the first workshop on this topic in North America and the first one sponsored or in corporation with three major funding agencies from the U.S. and from Europe, namely NSF, DARPA, and the European Commission. It also has strong ties with the W3C Semantic Web Activity. The expected outcome of the workshop is a better common knowledge and synergy for those wishing to develop new exciting basic technology and applications for the Semantic Web. It should guide the future cooperation for enabling future standards to be adopted worldwide. A written report will be produced following the workshop, summarizing the main conclusions and research directions to follow, which will be published at http: www.semanticweb.org SWWS . We expect that this workshop and the follow-up report can serve as guidance for future international collaboration in research projects on the Semantic Web topic doc14418 none The Multi-university Center for Dielectrics will target research in three focal areas: evolutionary, revolutionary, and basic. Evolutionary topics will emphasize near-term industrial needs such as dielectric degradation mechanisms, which affect component reliability. Revolutionary research involves a paradigm shift in the industry. For example, nanoparticle deposition by electrophoresis will produce new capacitor structures with submicron layers. Basic topics will permit in-depth investigation of defect chemistry and microwave dielectric relaxation mechanisms which opens new research areas in pulse power and wireless components doc14419 none The research focus of the NSF I UCRC for Membrane Applied Science and Technology (MAST) is membranes, microporous films, and barrier layers. Membranes are permable films that permit separation or the controlled release of solutes. They are used for water desalination, wastewater treatment, artificial kidneys, and in the controlled release of pharmaceuticals, flavors, cosmetics, inscticides, and herbicides. Microporous films are used in breathable fabrics, surgical dressings, artificial lungs, batteries, and fuel cells. Barrier layers are used in breathable contact lenses, food packaging, water barriers, and protective coatings. Membranes offer exceptional potential for smart sensor and bioMEMS technologies since tey are the only separations technology that will work on the microscale. This Center will expand the MAST Center to a Multi-University I UCRC doc14420 none The Dwight Look College of Engineering and the College of Science at Texas A therefore, development of learner-centered educational environments rests on helping faculty develop the mental and interpersonal disciplines that provide the foundation for such environments. Changing how women are treated, how the classroom is managed, how teaching is performed, how graduate students are mentored, all depend on numerous individual faculty. However, university campuses are not analogous to neural networks that can be trained by feeding back quantitative error measurements through algorithms such as the back-propagation method. Instead, university campuses more closely resemble complex adaptive systems in which diversity, interaction and selection of numerous and complicated agents gives rise to observable, emergent properties. If the aim is to create learning environments that are both more inviting and more welcoming, it is not sufficient to bombard faculty with messages such as Be inviting! or Be welcoming! . Instead, it is important to identify disciplines that should be nurtured and developed across the entire faculty with the conviction that if faculty members practice these disciplines, then they will create learning environments that are inviting and welcoming. As faculty members become more proficient in the four strategic disciplines, the project should observe changes in attitudes about learning, teaching and the role of women and minorities in SMET. The project also should observe increasing participation in the workshops and faculty learning communities sponsored by the project. Finally, the project should observe improvement in retention of women in undergraduate physical science and engineering; improvement in the enrollment in graduate study; and improvement in retention of women in graduate physical science and engineering doc14421 none The proposed research examines distributed sensing and control as an integral component of self-healing structures. This research integrates structural health monitoring methods with smart materials, statistical pattern recognition, and control to produce a class of structures having the ability to detect damage and to perform active control to compensate for the damage. The objectives of the proposed research consist of: 1) Integrating pattern recognition and data compression into the impedance-based health monitoring technique; 2) Integrating elements of health monitoring and control to create self-repairing structures and machines; 3) Investigating temperature and pressure effects on simultaneous health monitoring and control; 4) Experimentally verifying our results and using the results of our experiments to modify and improve our theories; The engineering results of this research are systems that detect a problem, warn of the existence of the detected damage and then make a temporary repair, all while remaining in service. This scenario would allow systems to remain in service after a problem develops and to continue in operation until a convenient time for a more permanent repair is possible. By making the structures substantially easier to inspect and resistant to failure, costly periodic down-time of equipment will be significantly reduced. Industrial structures such as airframes, automobiles and machines can benefit from the application of the technology developed in this proposal doc14422 none The New Mexico Museum of Natural History is developing a large format film on the Pantanal in Brazil, the world s largest wetland. The film will focus on the Hyacinth Macaw, an indicator species whose health reflects the health of the entire ecosystem, and will explore the relationship between the climate, geology, hydrology and ecology of the region. It also will examine three threats to the region: a large scale river channeling project which would drain 50% of the marsh, gold mining activities that dump millions of tons of sediment into streams, and large-scale corporate farming which pollutes the region with pesticide and fertilizer run-off. Science content for the series will be under the direction of Dr. Richard Smartt, former Director of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. The series will be co-produced by Timothy Aydelott, from the museum, and Constance Bennecke, an independent producer in Brazil. Barrie Howells will be executive producer and Rodney Taylor will be director of photography. Both Mr. Howells and Mr. Taylor have extensive large format film experience. Ralph Adler of RMC Research will conduct audience research during the planning phase The major activities during the planning stage include: Conducting audience research to determine the familiarity of the public with the ecosystem and with the concepts to be presented in the film. In addition to topic testing, the research will assess the audience s current knowledge or misconceptions about wetland ecosystems and the Pantanal. Convening the project advisors to develop the science content, finalize content goals, and to suggest ideas and strategies for presenting the science. Attending a regional planning conference in the Pantanal to establish working relationships with scientists in the field. Developing a script treatment for the film doc14423 none Tank Anadromous salmon are the life-blood of the Pacific Northwest, on which are based considerable economic, social, and cultural values. Normally, a massive quantity of organic material is transported from the ocean to streams annually via salmon migration. Presently, salmon stocks have declined, and lawmakers, resource managers, and the scientific community are beginning to ask what role salmon carcasses play in stream ecosystems. The PIs will address this critical knowledge gap by tracing the flow of the heavy isotope of nitrogen (15N) added to an Alaskan stream before, during, and after a salmon carcass addition. This will quantify how the pulse of marine derived nutrients (MDN) alters rates of stream N cycling from both a food web and whole-stream perspective. This research builds on the insight gained from an ongoing USDA-funded study by using the 15N tracer technique in a novel way and will help to clarify the role MDN plays in stream ecosystems doc14424 none R. Dougherty, University of Kansas Center for Research Inc. Physical characterizing of the suspended particles in liquid is required for many particulate processing systems such as applications in pharmaceutical, chemical, oil, and other industries. Dynamic light scattering has been successfully used in the laboratory with limited success in industrial processes involving particulate transport. Although for single scattered light, the particle size can be accurately determined. However, multiple scattering occurring in suspension transport prevents accurate particle size or velocity measurements. To resolve this problem, previous efforts have been focused on development of correlation theories in multiple scattered problem with limited success. A novel approach is proposed here where the signals from two detectors with small but finite angular separation are cross-correlated to detect only the single scattered speckle patter. This method is proposed in combination of flow suppression technique where the scattered wave vector perpendicular to the flow direction is used to avoid the disturbance due to the fluid velocity, allowing more accurate measurement of the particle size in a flowing suspension. The preliminary results for submicron particles at low velocities show some potential doc14425 none OPTIONS is a demonstration project designed to create small-scale learning communities that assist girls in achieving in advanced science and mathematics courses at the high school level, and encourage them to pursue science and math college degrees and business careers. The project targets high school girls, who have demonstrated average to above average abilities in math and science and who are enrolled in one of the seven Shelby County Schools (SCS) high schools. In the OPTIONS program, 70 students per year for four years are forming learning communities. Teachers are studying how to craft proactive approaches to math and science for girls. The objectives of the program are to: 1 ) increase the interest, confidence, knowledge and test scores of girls in science and math concentrations 2) train high school math and science teachers and guidance counselors in gender-equitable approaches to decrease barriers and assist to aid girls in pursuing science and math majors or careers; and 3) increase the number of all students who plan to enroll in classes, choose college majors, or pursue careers in science or math related fields. In order to obtain the objectives, SCS is creating learning communities of students, teachers, and mentors who engage in specific after school, professional development, and summer camp activities. The program includes professional development workshops to modify teacher and counselor attitudes and skills; project-based, problem-solving exercises to stimulate girls interest in science and math; mentoring by professional women; exploration of college options; and internships at local corporations and organizations. The project has broad implications. For educators, OPTIONS will identify factors for women that inhibit their academic pursuits and career choices in science and math areas, and begin building new approaches to encourage those choices. Participating female high school students will achieve a new understanding of the vast opportunities available in science and math-related industries and learn to work in a small group to solve real world problems. Corporations that rely on these disciplines will interact with educators in the design and evaluation of industry specific intern programs to prepare the next generation of workers and to generate enthusiasm for that work. Schools, school systems, and local communities will benefit from the increased emphasis on science and math classes and the career opportunities that come from that focus doc14426 none The Association for Women in Science (AWIS) will develop a guide to mentoring aimed at the Latino community, called Una Mano al Futuro. Studies demonstrate that students are more likely to pursue science if they have mentors, have opportunities to explore potential careers, and learn in a supportive environment. Una Mano al Futuro will focus on reaching high school Latino girls at a critical stage and providing resources that can be used by the young women, their parents, teachers, and community leaders to create the environment that allows the women to explore their interest in science and technology careers. For the past 10 years, AWIS has established and improved community mentoring programs for pre-college, undergraduate and graduate students with funding from the Sloan Foundation, NSF and the NEC Corporation. AWIS s prior projects built on the knowledge and success of the Sloan mentoring program and produced a new publication: Creating Tomorrow s Scientists: Models of Community Mentoring. AWIS will edit and revise their award-winning mentoring books, including A Hand Up: Women Mentoring Women in Science and Mentoring Means Future Scientists, and produce Spanish language editions with on-line companion materials in both English and Spanish. AWIS will work with several partners in developing materials and in dissemination to the Latino community: ASPIRA, a non-profit organization committed to Latino youth issues, and Minority Women in Science (MWIS). Members of AWIS, throughout its 76 local chapters, will distribute materials and assist in planning community-based events to reinforce the message of the materials doc14427 none Espinosa A GOALI award supports study of materials properties and problems relevant to the integration of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) with IC components for wireless applications. These systems offer unique advantages over other technologies because of their low power consumption, high sensitivity, physical size, and low cost. The technology is ideal for next generation of cell phones, base stations for wireless systems, and highly-efficient software-controlled digital radio for military communications. In these applications the MEMS devices are typically used as filters or switches. Filters with Q-factors of 94,000 can be employed to pre-select a communication band and a specific channel within that band. Switches with insertion losses bellow 0.1 dB per switch can be used for electromagnetic beam steering in radar antennas, accomplished through phase shifting. This feature enables antennas to transmit and receive signals without the need for physical reorientation. However, despite the large industrial interest, the technology is not yet commercially viable because a number of technical obstacles have to be overcome first. Key among these are packaging and mechanical modeling of MEMS materials at the micron scale. For instance, in the case of RF-switches, the effect of the environment can result in stiction of the membranes due to humidity or other sources. This requires the development of a cheap hermetic package. From a reliability standpoint, it is necessary to consider the plasticity limit and its temperature dependence with the materials involved. Temperatures as low as minus 50 degrees Celcius can be reached in satellite and airplane wireless applications while temperatures of a few hundred degrees can be present during device packaging. Another important failure mechanism is fatigue caused by excessive actuation cycles. Most of these devices are actuated trillions cycles pushing the design envelope and our current knowledge of material behavior beyond known parameters. In this project the reliability of capacitive RF-MEMS switch materials and components will be investigated. The effect of temperature and number of cycles on material degradation as a result of defects generation and evolution will be examined for aluminum alloy and doped nanocrystalline diamond films. Likewise, the evolution of the built-in stresses will be identified with a nanoindentation technique for use in the SEM, recently developed in the PI s laboratory. Experiments will consist of the deflection of freestanding films, to assess the elastic and inelastic properties of the films, and fatigue analysis by means of successive electrostatic actuation. Evolution of built-in stresses and material microstructure will be assessed as a function of the number of actuation cycles. Modeling of the experiments will be performed at several length scales, from ab initio calculations and molecular dynamics to discrete dislocation and continuously distributed dislocation networks; extensive simulations will link modeling and experiment doc14428 none University of Arizona (UA) in partnership with Pima Community College (PCC; a multi-campus institution) proposes a comprehensive program to increase the enrollment, retention, and graduation of women especially minority women of Hispanic and American Indian origins, in tracks leading to BS and graduate degrees in astronomy, biosciences, chemistry, physics, engineering and related fields. This project strengthens previous activities by 1) building on collaboration between PCC and UA science departments in research internship programs, extending these efforts to highlight the needs of women especially minority women students; 2) integrating community college level programs into UA s Women in Science and Engineering K-12 and university programs; 3) paying new attention to differences within groups and fields; and 4) identifying and initiating strategies for long-term institutional changes. PCC s multifaceted program will include 1) increasing recruitment; 2) individual student mentoring and academic advising; 3) enrichment efforts to strengthen students preparedness and widen their knowledge of career choices; 4) improvement of institutional instructional and support programs focusing on interactive learning, classroom climate, enhanced outreach to high school science teachers, and coordination of minority and support programs; and 5) financial support for students. Activities at the UA will include new efforts to enhance students motivation, performance and financial support and will foster their use of existing units serving minority and women undergraduates. Collaboration with the Graduate College and Women of Color Consortium will address advancement to graduate education. We will compare students GPAs and progress towards BS and Graduate education for the target group to those of all PCC science and engineering students. The prime target group is women who have been consistently highlighted as most under-represented and most difficult to retain and advance in science-related areas. We will address different needs and issues across fields and among groups, reflecting the multiple intersections of gender and ethnicity. The most under-represented of all -- minority women, will be a special focus. Strategies that work with these populations can be applied to all students. The project offers a potential model for improving on articulation of community college students into four-year undergraduate and graduate institutions. Since nationally, community colleges are an entry into higher education particularly for women and minorities, increased articulation with a focus on science and engineering could increase participation of these groups at higher levels doc14429 none Project PRISM promotes the success and persistence of girls and ethnic minority students, particularly Native American students, through sustainable reform focusing on gender and cultural issues in secondary math and science classrooms and a university course for education students. The project is initiating changes that will increase the recruitment of women and ethnic minority practitioners into the SMET workforce. The target populations include pre-service teachers at Washington State University (WSU) and Lewis-Clark State College (LCSC), in-service teachers, counselors, and administrators from eight school districts, five of which serve the Colville Confederated Tribes (CCT), and CCT secondary students. This collaborative demonstration project uses a powerful, multi-faceted approach to achieve changes in teaching and curriculum and in student success. The project promotes an increased secondary teacher and counselor awareness of gender and cultural issues that affect the learning and persistence of students, particularly girls and Native American students, in science, math, engineering and technology (SMET) classrooms. It likewise stimulates commitment to inclusive teaching and curricula and facilitates ongoing reform. Teachers and counselors participate in interactive in-service development opportunities on gender, culture, and education and a summer institute focused on the process of SMET classroom and curriculum reform. Participants in faculty development components are supported in their revision and reform efforts by faculty learning communities. A university course for pre- and in-service teachers introduces students to issues of gender, culture, and science as well as foster increased computer skills and SMET teaching abilities. All faculty development components are designed and developed by teams of secondary and university faculty in cooperation with Colville Confederated Tribes (CCT) personnel and a CCT Advisory Council. Cultural awareness and appreciation events are ongoing at the schools serving CCT students. Through field trips, hands-on projects, community service projects, and career planning, CCT students are developing an increased awareness of and interest in careers, especially SMET careers, and increased persistence in the education necessary to succeed in those careers. Local leadership for and commitment to the project efforts are being developed, so that project components will be sustained after the life of the grant. Manuals detailing the faculty in-service workshops and the summer institute teaching and curriculum reform process will be produced and disseminated. The project is yielding important information on the efficacy of these intervention strategies incorporating both gender and cultural issues. In particular, it adds information to the knowledge base on the success of these strategies with Native American students, and especially Native American girls doc14430 none This IPSE award, funded by the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities of the Directorate for Mathematics and Physical Sciences, involves a partnership between Materials Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) on Nanostructured Materials and Interfaces at UW-Madison (UW) and the Discovery World (DW) science museum in Milwaukee aimed at bringing cutting-edge research on advanced materials and nanoscale science and technology into the museum and K-12 school settings. This multi-faceted project will enable Internships for Public Science Education (IPSE) participants to enhance their communication skills substantially while bringing the excitement of state-of-the-art MRSEC research themes to pre-college and public audiences. Through the IPSE program, a diverse group of graduate and undergraduate students will team with UW MRSEC researchers, DW personnel, and K-12 educators to develop grade-appropriate curriculum materials. %%% Initially, laboratory experiments and demonstrations will be developed around existing MRSEC-created education products, making the materials science and engineering concepts associated with such advanced materials as ferrofluids, shape memory alloys, and amorphous metals accessible. New initiatives will create instructional materials for DW and K-12 teachers and students around he current research themes of fullerenes, nanotubes, and Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR). A new module teaching students about polymers in chemical engineering using polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) will be produced. An innovative museum program, the Test Pilot Training Program (TPTP), will link IPSE participants with middle and high school students to provide mentoring on scientific themes and career development related to materials science and engineering. These pre-college students will serve as ambassadors for DW, making presentations at DW and local schools, and assisting with the training of newly recruited TPTP participants. Nearly 50 graduate and undergraduate students will participate over the three-year project period. Program results will be disseminated through meetings and publications of professional disciplinary and pan-disciplinary organizations, workshops for regional K-12 teachers that will be held as part of the project, and a workshop held in partnership with the Association for Science-Technology Centers (ASTC). Formal evaluations of the program s impact on museum visitors and on the IPSE participants will be conducted. The UW-DW IPSE project can serve as a model for the professional development of technically oriented students, providing them with rich opportunities for sharing their scientific knowledge and enthusiasm with pre-college and museum audiences. This will enhance the communication skills of IPSE participants while also making the public and K-12 teachers and students aware of exciting research developments. The project will thus contribute to science literacy and to the development of a diverse, technically trained workforce doc14431 none The goal of the Fifth Annual Conference on Computational Genomics (CG ) is to bring together leading scientists from around the world to discuss advances in computational methods for analysis of genome sequences. The meeting addresses these topics from the perspective of biological scientists attempting to make sense of the vast quantities of data now becoming available. The goal of the meeting is to provide a forum for a combination of invited speakers, speakers selected from submitted abstracts, and poster presenters to discuss their work and exchange ideas. The support from NSF will provide new funding for student travel fellowships, in order to increase the level of student participation in the meeting. This will also help in the professional development of the students and the long-term development of the field of computational genomics doc14432 none The objective of this project is to improve the chemical characterization of polar organic compounds within the lower troposphere. Polar organic compounds contribute to degradation in air quality and may be associated with the adverse health impacts of air pollution. The project includes the development of a relatively new instrument configuration to identify polar organic material by combining Liquid Chromatography Mass Spectrometry with Atmospheric Pressure Electrospray Ionization Analysis. Protocols will be developed for extracting polar organic compounds from fine particulate samples into aqueous solutions and using high-pressure liquid chromatography for separating complex mixtures containing polar organic compounds before introducing them into the instrument. A searchable library of polar organic compounds will be generated using prepared standards that are analyzed by this technique doc14433 none This is a collaborative research project between UC Berkeley and Stanford University to develop a validated analytical methodology for designing control systems where some of the feedback loops are closed over wireless communication links. The proposed work is an interdisciplinary effort between two very disparate research areas: wireless communications and control theory. This work will have a great impact on many fields where wireless communication is beginning to see an increasing presence such as transportation, manufacturing and remote sensing applications. Most current controller designs assume that communication between the sensors and actuators and the central logic system is done over hard-wired lines providing essentially perfect transmission. Thus, the controller design typically assumes no rate constraints, delay, or loss of information. However, there are many applications where this communication must take place over imperfect wireless links where these imperfections can lead to loss of performance and even instability. There currently exists no unified theory for the design of closed loop control systems using wireless links. This proposal is aimed at developing such a theory. The first stage of the proposed work will focus on characterizing the communications network carrying the sensor, actuator, and control information in terms of its rate constraints, and delay and packet loss statistics. The next stage will investigate joint optimization of the controller and communication system. The research results will be presented at both communications and controls conferences. The final results will be incorporated into advanced graduate courses. A very important aspect of this project is the involvement of undergraduate students in the research. Both UC Berkeley and Stanford have active UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programs). The area of communication control is very attractive to undergraduates and it is anticipated that undergraduates will participate in the project due to its interdisciplinary nature and its potential to impact real world problems doc14434 none National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics Gary Parker, Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, Christopher Paola , University of Minnesota The National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics (NCED) is a Science and Technology Center focused on understanding the processes that shape the Earth s surface, and on communicating that understanding with a broad range of stakeholders. NCED s work will support a larger, community-based effort to develop a suite of quantitative models of the Earth s surface: a Community Sediment Model (CSM). Results of the NCED-CSM collaboration will be used for both short-term prediction of surface response to natural and anthropogenic change and long-term interpretation of how past conditions are recorded in landscapes and sedimentary strata. This will in turn help solve pressing societal problems such as estimation and mitigation of landscape-related risk; responsible management of landscape resources including forests, agricultural, and recreational areas; forecasting landscape response to possible climatic and other changes; and wise development of resources like groundwater and hydrocarbons that are hosted in buried sediments. NCED education and knowledge transfer programs include exhibits and educational programs at the Science Museum of Minnesota, internships and programs for students from tribal colleges and other under-represented populations, and research opportunities for participants from outside core NCED institutions. The Earth s surface is the dynamic interface among the lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere. It is intimately interwoven with the life that inhabits it. Surface processes span environments ranging from high mountains to the deep ocean and time scales from fractions of a second to millions of years. Because of this range in forms, processes, and scales, the study of surface dynamics has involved many disciplines and approaches. A major goal of NCED is to foster the development of a unified, quantitative science of Earth-surface dynamics that combines efforts in geomorphology, civil engineering, biology, sedimentary geology, oceanography, and geophysics. Our research program has four major themes: (1) landscape evolution, (2) basin evolution, (3) biological sediment dynamics, and (4) integration of morphodynamic processes across environments and scales. Each theme area provides opportunities for exchange of information and ideas with a wide range of stakeholders, including teachers and learners at all levels; researchers, managers, and policy makers in both the commercial and public sectors; and the general public. NCED is headquartered at St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, University of Minnesota. Participating institutions are the University of Minnesota, the Science Museum of Minnesota, Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College, the University of California at Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Princeton University. To learn more about NCED, including opportunities to participate, please contact us at St. Anthony Falls Laboratory or via the NCED website: www.nced.edu doc14433 none This is a collaborative research project between UC Berkeley and Stanford University to develop a validated analytical methodology for designing control systems where some of the feedback loops are closed over wireless communication links. The proposed work is an interdisciplinary effort between two very disparate research areas: wireless communications and control theory. This work will have a great impact on many fields where wireless communication is beginning to see an increasing presence such as transportation, manufacturing and remote sensing applications. Most current controller designs assume that communication between the sensors and actuators and the central logic system is done over hard-wired lines providing essentially perfect transmission. Thus, the controller design typically assumes no rate constraints, delay, or loss of information. However, there are many applications where this communication must take place over imperfect wireless links where these imperfections can lead to loss of performance and even instability. There currently exists no unified theory for the design of closed loop control systems using wireless links. This proposal is aimed at developing such a theory. The first stage of the proposed work will focus on characterizing the communications network carrying the sensor, actuator, and control information in terms of its rate constraints, and delay and packet loss statistics. The next stage will investigate joint optimization of the controller and communication system. The research results will be presented at both communications and controls conferences. The final results will be incorporated into advanced graduate courses. A very important aspect of this project is the involvement of undergraduate students in the research. Both UC Berkeley and Stanford have active UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programs). The area of communication control is very attractive to undergraduates and it is anticipated that undergraduates will participate in the project due to its interdisciplinary nature and its potential to impact real world problems doc14436 none The objectives of the Symposium on RNA Biology IV. RNA: Tool and Target are: To promote communication in a variety of research areas central to understanding the role of the structure and function of RNA in biological systems in a focused and intimate manner not obtainable at regular society, or other group meetings. To provide an educational experience for young investigators, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students (especially women and minorities) in a setting conducive to open discussions with access to established investigators who have broad experience in all fields of RNA biology. To stimulate inclusive discussion and the sharing of ideas and techniques by postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, as well as principal researchers. To bring researchers to a venue where three major universities, federal research institutions and laboratories, and many corporate research centers are located. RNA research, especially RNA as target and tool, has spawned a dozen biotechnology companies in the US alone and has been funded extensively by several large, well-established corporations, including those in North Carolina s Research Triangle. This proposal requests funds to cover the costs of bringing several major speakers to the meeting, to cover the registration fees for selected young speakers and for covering some of operating expenses that will be incurred during the symposium doc14437 none Collaborative Research: ITR AP&IM Data Intense Challenge: The Instrumented Oil Field of the Future Mary Wheeler - University of Texas at Austin - Alan Sussman - University of Maryland, College Park - Joel Saltz - Ohio State University Research Foundation - Manish Parashar - Rutgers University - Increasing production from existing oil and natural gas reservoirs is crucial for the US economy. In order to better monitor and optimize oil and gas production, advanced technologies from field instrumentation to information technology and computational science are essential. Field technologies include time-lapse surface and borehole seismic, permanent downhole sensors, intelligent well completions, fiber optics, and remote control operations. IT technologies include data management, data visualization, parallel computing, and decision-making tools such as new wave propagation and multiphase, multi-component flow and transport computational portals. These diverse technologies can be integrated to achieve real-time monitoring and optimization of reservoir production: The Instrumented Oilfield. A major outcome of the proposed research is a computing portal which will enable reservoir simulation and geophysical calculations to interact dynamically with the data and with each other and which will provide a variety of visual and quantitative tools. Test data will be provided by oil and service companies currently participating in UT Austin industrial affiliate programs. Since the proposed research is directed towards the general problem of modeling and characterization of the earth s subsurface, it has immediate application to other areas, including environmental remediation and storage of hazardous wastes doc14438 none The goal of this research project is to develop new query evaluation and optimization techniques for processing relational queries in main-memory databases. Recent improvements in main memory size and cost suggest that large classes of applications may obtain the performance benefits of having the data in main memory. The project focuses on issues in computer architecture that influence main memory performance, including cache miss latency and branch misprediction penalties. Algorithms for database operations will be developed that are sensitive to these and other issues, and thus perform well on modern architectures. Broader questions such as how to design a comprehensive architecture-sensitive query processing framework will be studied. The algorithms and techniques resulting from this project could have application in commercial and experimental database systems, where they could improve the speed of query processing. Results from the project will be disseminated as research papers and as freely available prototype software doc14439 none This is a tie project between the Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC) for Photopolymerization at the University of Colorado and the I UCRC for Coatings at the University of Southern Mississippi. The objectives of the research are to synthesize a series of novel thiol-ene monomers and study their photopolymerization behavior under a variety of conditions. The mechanisms and kinetics of photopolymerization will be investigated. The fundamental knowledge about the structure-property relations will be used to develop stable photopolymers as industrial coatings doc14440 none This award will establish a Center for Integrated Space Weather Modeling (CISM). The overall goal of CISM is to develop advanced computer models to specify and predict space weather from the surface of the sun to the surface of Earth. Space Weather is a term rapidly entering the common lexicon. It describes the ways in which the Sun, acting through the intervening space encompassing the solar wind, the magnetosphere, and the upper atmosphere, adversely affects the performance and reliability of space borne and ground based technological systems, or can endanger human life or health. CISM will focus on building a comprehensive, physics-based, numerical model that describes the environment from the Sun to the Earth, and can predict arrival time, intensity and duration of space storms. The Center will achieve three complementary goals: 1) it will do fundamentally new science, increasing our understanding of the complex, but closely coupled Sun-Earth system; 2) in partnership with other groups, it will convert the results of its research into robust and operationally useful forecasting tools to be used by both civilian and military space weather forecasters; and 3) it will educate the next generation of space scientists - taking advantage of the ability of space weather to capture imaginations through models and visualization tools. The principal knowledge transfer goal of CISM is to convert research results and models into robust operationally useful forecasting tools to be used by space weather forecasters and private industry. The most important legacy of the center will be improvements in the ability to respond to potential space weather hazards, thus protecting the nation s technological systems that are increasingly susceptible to conditions in the space environment doc14441 none The PI will address large-scale low-frequency phenomena that dominate tropical processes and have sources either within the tropics or higher latitudes. The principal phenomena of interest are the Asian-Australian monsoon and El Nino Southern Oscillation and their component modes, all of which range in time scale from intraseasonal to interannual. The PI proposes to focus on the following four specific research themes: (1) the monsoon as a coupled ocean-atmosphere phenomena; (2) monsoon intraseasonal variability in a coupled ocean-atmosphere context; (3) mechanisms by which the tropics influence the extratropics and vice versa on time scales that range from synoptic to interannual; and (4) the variable nature of the long-term relationships between boundary forcing and climate variability. The work is important because it will lead to improved understanding of major climate phenomena, especially the monsoon over a wide range of time scales doc14442 none PI: Craig, Matthew Inst: Minnesota State Univ. Moorhead With this award under the MPS Internships in Public Science Education Program, Minnesota State University Moorhead (MSUM) and the MSUM Regional Science Center (RSC) will develop a traveling public exhibit and associated curricular material in each of four topics : dark matter in spiral galaxies, probability games of chance and beyond, X-ray microtomography, and green chemistry. The underlying theme of these topics is Seeing is Believing . Using regional resources and examples, participating teachers and students will be able to visualize the underlying concepts and develop material to increase public understanding of this topical research. Each summer five teachers, six undergraduates, and a member of the White Earth Tribal and Community College staff will work with MSUM scientists and educators and RSC staff to develop material for two projects. Exhibits will be introduced to the general public during a multi-day exhibit at WETCC scheduled to coincide with the White Earth Reservation s annual pow-wow. Exhibits will then be displayed at the Regional Science Center over the summer and circulate through local classrooms during the academic year. Curricular materials will be disseminated through a yearly educational workshop offered at MSUM. This award is funded by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities doc14443 none This is a tie project between the Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC) for Coatings at the University of Southern Mississippi and the I UCRC for Photopolymerization at the University of Colorado. The objectives of the research are to synthesize a series of novel thiol-ene monomers and study their photopolymerization behavior under a variety of conditions. The mechanisms and kinetics of photopolymerization will be investigated. The fundamental knowledge about the structure-property relations will be used to develop stable photopolymers as industrial coatings doc14444 none The Science and Technology Center on Materials and Devices for Information Technology Research, University of Washington, Seattle is a multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional activity designed to support a goal-directed, sustained effort to broadly advance the science and technology of materials, devices and systems for advancing information technology. Center activities involve six universities, University of Washington (UW: lead institution), plus the U. of Arizona (UA), (Caltech), U. of Southern California (USC), U. of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Berkeley (UCB). The STC emphasizes vertical integration of knowledge and applications that span the intellectual range in fundamental optoelectronic materials and engineering research from molecules to integrated devices and systems for improved signal generation and detection and for improved information transport, processing, and storage. Research is divided among four strategic thrust areas: 1) Electro-Optic and All-Optical Materials and Devices; 2) Infrared Organic Light-Emitting Diodes, Amplifiers, and Lasers; 3) Advanced Assembly and Patterning Approaches to Integrated Optics; 4) Theory. The educational activity is planned around three primary elements: 1) Under-represented groups and institutions in the STC including Minority and HBCU partnerships, emphasis on undergraduate participation in research, and an aggressive outreach effort; 2) A vertically integrated program on education in optical science, materials, and devices; 3) Integration of science, engineering, and business education. The Center includes assessment strategies for evaluation of the effectiveness of new approaches in their educational activities which have a strong web based component. The Center aims to create a vertically integrated, web-based, modular resource emphasizing optical science, materials and devices, offering 1) resources for developing courses and for students independent studies, 2) web-based courses, and 3) an STC- IT news-page (with links to industrial websites) describing new technical advances, job opportunities, conferences, professional courses, and academic curricula. The Center has a strong, collaborative program for fostering outreach to and participation by non-center researchers in research activities. Interaction with industry and Federal Laboratories will be implemented at several levels. Projects with early societal impact will be integrated with longer-term projects. For example, development of 3D integrated circuitry, the exploitation of photonic bandgap device structures, and the exploitation of controlled coupling to microresonators will be a theme of both short-term (e.g., electro-optic information processing) and longer-range (e.g., all-optical information processing) impact projects to advance knowledge, understanding, and technology performance in information technology. This center is projected to become a focal point in the U.S. for education of the workforce in the fields of telecommunication and information processing; photonics; and opto-electronics doc14445 none Center for Advanced Materials for Water Purification, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ( ) The U.S. and the world are facing the very real dangers of depleted aquifers, inadequate surface water supplies, and contamination from a variety of sources including agricultural runoff, industrial discharges, acid rain, and ground-water pollutants. Waterborne pathogens are also a growing threat for water supplies. These dangers are expected to increase as populations continue to grow. Numerous technologies are being implemented to purify water, but current membrane and adsorbent materials used in water purification are not sufficient to solve all contamination problems and meet increasingly stringent new standards being proposed to protect health. The best state-of-the-art materials have well-known shortcomings that are due to shortfalls in the current understanding of the underlying science. Indeed, to develop the revolutionary new materials and systems for safe and economical water-purification technology needed to counter the impending water crisis requires a coordinated, intensive, multi-year effort of scientists and engineers. The vision of this Center is to forge multi-disciplinary groups of researchers, educators, and practitioners into a cohesive team with the overarching goal of developing new functional materials and systems to purify water for the peoples of the United States and the world. This Science and Technology Center (STC) has several distinguishing features. First and foremost, it provides coordinated participation of researchers in the following areas: water quality at Stanford and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), material science at UIUC, basic physical science (chemistry and physics) at the University of California at Berkeley, Clark Atlanta University, Stanford, and UIUC, and system-level experts at Stanford and UIUC. Furthermore, the Center facilitates the technology transfer and feedback from practitioners in water treatment through linkages with the UIUC Waste Management Research Center, and the Orange County (CA)Water District, as well as other water-quality organizations. Another distinguishing feature of the STC is its establishment of a collaborative laboratory (collaboratory) for its education, research, and outreach functions, to ensure the integration of the activities. In this multi-disciplinary collaboratory, chemists, material scientists, physicists, biologists, and engineers will work together with library and information-science experts in the Center to disseminate information and research results showing how to synthesize, characterize, and understand new material systems designed to separate compounds from water and or transform them. The premise of this STC is that advanced, selective and efficient water-treatment technologies will be based on membrane filters, adsorbents, and catalytic surfaces. Rational development of the required materials requires a firm grasp of the basic science of the aqueous interface. The key issue is to observe and to manipulate on the Angstrom to nanometer scale interactions between the aqueous solution and the solid substrate. The goals of the STC are: (i) to advance the basic understanding of these interactions; (ii) to use the results to radically improve membranes, filters, adsorbents, and ion-exchange materials through the synthesis of new materials that are able to separate selectively and or transform compounds in water; (iii) to integrate these new materials into viable water purification systems; and (iv) to integrate the human and knowledge infrastructure with the research mission to implement effectively the science and technology. To accomplish these goals, the STC is organized in four core teams: (i) Interfacial Processes and Molecular Characterization, (ii) Materials Synthesis and Development, (iii) System Analysis and Integration, and (iv) Collaboratory Education and Outreach. The Center supports education and outreach activities for: (i) K-12 teachers and students to learn why clean water is important and how fundamental research and sound engineering can help make water cleaner; (ii) under-represented groups in science and engineering, encouraging members of such groups to pursue careers related to water purification, material science, and engineering; (iii) citizen groups, water industry professionals, and local governments to help formulate, debate, and implement policies related to water quality control; and (iv) the general public to understand the need for basic research on water purification. All constituent groups are supported by a web-based collaborative laboratory to support knowledge dissemination, mentoring, learning, public debate, and discussion. The main tool used for the collaboratory is the INQUIRY-based learning and research environment developed in the UIUC School of Library and Information Science, which allows two-way research and education to be conducted between the partners and all the participants and constituent groups of the Center. The STC seeks aggressively to increase diversity in education, research, and outreach. Diversity is essential for increasing the numbers of under-represented groups in science and technology. The STC can make the greatest impact if the knowledge and technologies developed are implemented throughout the U.S. and the world by diverse educators and researchers. To achieve this impact, the proposed STC has partnered with the Environmental Technology Consortium (ETC) of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and other minority institutions (MIs) to increase minority participation. In addition, CAU is an active water-treatment research partner, which supports the training of a diverse group of students in water purification research. Due to the critical need for improved materials and processes for water purification, this STC has an immediate opportunity to transfer the knowledge gained from basic science and engineering research to the practitioners in the field. In addition to the usual modes of dissemination in conferences, proceedings, journal articles, and courses, the collaboratory two-way learning and research tools developed through the STC quickly transmit knowledge between the academic partners and the partner organizations doc14446 none This is a standard award to one of three institutions collaborating as partners on Thompson s project ( ). No current system allows a person to naturally walk through a large-scale virtual environment. The availability of such a locomotion interface would have impacts on a broad range of applications, including education and training, design and prototyping, physical fitness, and rehabilitation; for some of these applications natural walking provides a level of realism not obtainable if movement through the simulated world is controlled by devices such as a joystick, while for others realistic walking is a fundamental requirement. Prototypes have been built for a variety of computer-controlled devices on which a person can walk, but there has been little investigation of the utility of such devices as interfaces to a virtual world and almost no study at all of the interactions of visual and biomechanical perceptual cues in such devices. This project addresses key open questions, the answers to which are needed if locomotion interfaces are to offer effective interaction between users and computer simulations. An effective locomotion interface must provide users with accurate visual and biomechanical sensations of walking; thus, a key objective of this work is to determine how to synergistically combine visual information generated by computer graphics with biomechanical information generated by devices that simulate walking on real surfaces. Thompson and his collaborators will investigates methods that allow more accurate walking in a locomotion interface while accurately conveying a sense of the spaces being walked through. Specific issues to be considered include how to facilitate the perception of speed and distance traveled, how to provide a compelling sense of turning when actual walking along a curved path is not possible, how to give a user the sense that he she is walking over a sloped surface, and more generally how to give a user a clear sense of the scale and structure of the spaces being walked through. The team s findings on these issues will be relevant across the spectrum of possible approaches to locomotion interfaces doc14447 none PI: Gyuk, Geza Inst: Adler Planetarium With this award under the MPS Internships in Public Science Education Program, the Adler Planetarium will sponsor a unique graduate fellowship program. The Adler Public Education Fellowship is aimed at drawing young researchers into closer ties with public education and outreach. Each year, a graduate student actively involved in research will be selected as a Fellow and will be responsible for planning, developing, managing and teaching a 4-5 week summer program for local high school students and carrying out a program of public observing demonstrations on the Apache Point 3.5meter telescope. The Astro-Science Workshop will be a themed, research-based experience combining lectures by prominent astronomers astrophysicists and hands-on student research and exploration. Because the Fellowship is intended to promote the development of researchers educators, the Fellow is also expected to continue a vigorous program of research at their home institution. This award is funded by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities doc14448 none This project focuses on the synthesis of new ternary transition metal pnictide and pnictide oxide phases. It combines exploratory synthesis with systematic structure-property studies. The primary emphasis is on property measurements and characterization of compounds involving alkaline earth or rare earth with transition metals and the group 15 pnictide elements, along with the suboxides of these mixtures. This group utilizes the Zintl concept to direct the synthesis of new magnetic and electronic compounds. The approach provides a good starting place for the discovery of new structures and properties. In order to explore new compounds and to measure properties, fluxes will be used to produce large crystals. In addition novel properties and structure-property relationship of these pnictide and layered pnictide-oxides will be investigated. The primary goal is to train students in solid state synthesis and characterization techniques. Students are involved in all aspects of new discovery and property measurements. Some of the experiments outlined in the proposal make use of national facilities such as the Advance Light Source and the National Center for Electron Microscopy at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. In addition, there is a strong collaboration with chemistry, physics, and materials science groups at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This type of synergism provides the student with a well-rounded education and prepares them for the multidisciplinary science of today s industry. In addition, the education of undergraduates and outreach to the general public in the importance of materials synthesis to our future technological advances is included as a theme of the project. The development of new materials is an important cornerstone of new technologies. One of the fundamental issues in this development is the synthesis of new materials coupled with property measurements. Combining synthesis with state-of-the-art characterization tools with an aim towards discovering new magnetic, and electronic materials significantly enhances the chances of timely technological impacts doc14449 none This award to Arizona Science Center (ASC) funded by the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities of the Directorate for Mathematics and Physical Sciences provides paid Internships in Public Science Education for undergraduate students and school teachers affiliated with the Center for Solid State Science at Arizona State University (ASU). The interns from the university will work with science center staff to develop programs for the public and for school outreaches on topics in materials science, with an emphasis on nanotechnology. The ASC-ASU collaboration will create internships for three students per academic year for three years and internships for two local high school teachers per summer for two summers. %%% ASC exhibits and programs focus on science as experienced and applied by people in Arizona and is visited by over 400,000 people annually. ASU promotes research, outreach, and education in a variety of cross-discipline areas in the physical sciences. In the proposed program, student interns will work with research faculty of the Center for Solid State Science and with educators at the Science Center. They will create public demonstrations, table-top activities, and multimedia domed planetarium theater presentations in which important developments and concepts in materials science research are presented in an accessible way. Teacher interns who have participated in a summer program in materials science will work with researchers and educators at the two institutions during the summer to develop education programs in materials science subjects suitable for inclusion in ASC s school and after school outreach programs. The three-year project would produce 13 new programs, delivered beyond the life of the project to an estimated 160, 000 visitor s to the Center per year and to over children per year attending ASC s outreach programs in their schools. Write-ups of the presentations and the results of the project will be disseminated through publications and presentations to museum, science education, and science professionals doc14450 none Biophotonics is the science of generating and using light and other forms of radiant energy whose quantum unit is the photon for visualization, measurements, analysis, and manipulation of biological materials. The discipline strives to exploit the high spatial resolution, sensitivity, and spectral specificity of photonics to understand and affect biological structure and or function. The Center for Biophotonics Science and Technology (CBST), an NSF Science and Technology Center, is a multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional activity designed to support a goal-directed, sustained effort to broadly advance the science of biophotonics. Center activities are spread over four university campuses, UC Davis, UC San Francisco, UC Berkeley, and Stanford University, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The CBST emphasizes vertical integration of knowledge and applications that span the intellectual landscape, from creating new instrumentation and techniques to helping understand molecular mechanisms to providing technology that will enable the creation and development of important new biomedical tools. Research at the Center is divided among four strategic thrust areas: 1) biomolecular mechanisms; 2) imaging and diagnostics; 3) computational biophotonics; and 4) biomedical applications. The area of biomolecular mechanisms concentrates on experiments and tools related to the newly emerging field of single molecule imaging and detection, methodologies that are used in individual projects to investigate on a sub-cellular level molecular mechanisms related to DNA-protein interactions. The area of imaging and diagnostics focuses on the development of new instruments for a number of imaging methodologies, including ultra-high resolution optical microscopy, imaging non-linear optical properties of tissues, optical interference imaging through otherwise opaque tissue, and imaging tissue oxygenation by NIR imaging. Computational biophotonics focuses on the application of new simulation codes and supercomputers to support the projects in areas one and two and, in general, increase the understanding of photonic transport in and interaction with tissue. The area of biomedical applications focuses on optimizing and applying existing technologies to significant medical problems, including hyperspectral microscopy for searching for new optical signatures of disease, development of new, light-activated materials for surgical applications, and the utilization of x-ray sources for protein crystallography and live cell imaging. The centerpiece of the educational activity is the development of a series of six teaching modules, or stepping stones, that bring the concepts of light, biology, and biophotonics to students from kindergarten (Step One, K-3) through graduate and post-doctoral research (Step Six). Central to the concept of the stepping stones approach is that the modules emphasize hands-on science activities promoting scientific inquiry and concept development. The stepping stones modules are disseminated widely to schools in the community through various mechanisms, among them the MESA and 4-H Youth Development Program. The Center has a strong, collaborative program for fostering outreach to and participation by non-center researchers in research activities. An Industry Partners Consortium (IPC) is used to bring interested members from industry together with CBST participants for the purpose of knowledge exchange, collaborative research, and the direct transfer of intellectual property and technology know-how to the commercial sector doc14451 none This proposal is one part of a collaborative research effort between Dr. Yeung of Georgia Tech ( ) and Dr. Sreenivasan of Yale University on the Reynolds and Schmidt number scalings in turbulence and turbulent mixing. The research will include simulations and experiments. Dr. Yeung who has access to the Teraflop IBM SP at the San Diego Supercomputer Center under NPACI will make direct numerical simulations of the flow. With Teraflop capability, simulations will be carried out at much higher resolutions than here-to-fore. Dr. Sreenivasan will carry out experiments in a tunnel using cryogenic liquid helium or nitrogen as the working fluid, which will result in much higher Reynolds number flows. The data generated at high Reynolds numbers both by DNS and cryogenic experiments will be used together with existing data at lower Reynolds numbers to test the scaling laws. Both proposals were sent to the reviewers at the same time, and they were requested to return a single evaluation doc14452 none California State University, Los Angeles (Cal State LA) and the University of Southern California (USC) propose to establish a Collaborative to Integrate Research and Education (CIRE) in the areas of controls and multimedia technologies. Under this collaboration the collective strengths of the Structures, Pointing and Control Engineering (SPACE) laboratory-a NASA supported facility within the School of Engineering and Technology at Cal State LA-the Integrated Media Systems Center, an Engineering Research Center at USC-will be combined. The major goal of the program is to increase the number of under-represented minority students exposed to interdisciplinary research and cutting-edge technologies and prepare them for future employment and advanced degrees in engineering doc14453 none The PIs will develop a flexible modeling environment that they will make broadly available to the climate change community. This requires a radically new approach to the organization, development, documentation and dissemination of climate models. There is collaboration with Argonne National Laboratories for development of the open source, providing an online textbook documenting its use, and providing a system for collecting, testing, certifying and disseminating modules developed elsewhere. The system will be developed within the interpreted object-oriented Python language. This has been used successfully for a range of other scientific applications. Work under this award will resolve the grand-challenge mysteries facing climate science using coupled ocean-atmosphere modeling. A confluence of developments of physical understanding, numerical methods and computing power makes it feasible to address questions related to different epochs in the paleoclimate record. The work is important because it represents a testbed for novel software development approaches to climate modeling doc14454 none This proposal is one part of a collaborative research effort between Dr. Yeung of Georgia Tech and Dr. Sreenivasan of Yale University ( ) on the Reynolds and Schmidt number scalings in turbulence and turbulent mixing. The research will include simulations and experiments. Dr. Yeung who has access to the Teraflop IBM SP at the San Diego Supercomputer Center under NPACI will make direct numerical simulations of the flow. With Teraflop capability, simulations will be carried out at much higher resolutions than here-to-fore. Dr. Sreenivasan will carry out experiments in a tunnel using cryogenic liquid helium or nitrogen as the working fluid, which will result in much higher Reynolds number flows. The data generated at high Reynolds numbers both by DNS and cryogenic experiments will be used together with existing data at lower Reynolds numbers to test the scaling laws. Both proposals were sent to the reviewers at the same time, and they were requested to return a single evaluation doc14446 none This is a standard award to one of three institutions collaborating as partners on Thompson s project ( ). No current system allows a person to naturally walk through a large-scale virtual environment. The availability of such a locomotion interface would have impacts on a broad range of applications, including education and training, design and prototyping, physical fitness, and rehabilitation; for some of these applications natural walking provides a level of realism not obtainable if movement through the simulated world is controlled by devices such as a joystick, while for others realistic walking is a fundamental requirement. Prototypes have been built for a variety of computer-controlled devices on which a person can walk, but there has been little investigation of the utility of such devices as interfaces to a virtual world and almost no study at all of the interactions of visual and biomechanical perceptual cues in such devices. This project addresses key open questions, the answers to which are needed if locomotion interfaces are to offer effective interaction between users and computer simulations. An effective locomotion interface must provide users with accurate visual and biomechanical sensations of walking; thus, a key objective of this work is to determine how to synergistically combine visual information generated by computer graphics with biomechanical information generated by devices that simulate walking on real surfaces. Thompson and his collaborators will investigates methods that allow more accurate walking in a locomotion interface while accurately conveying a sense of the spaces being walked through. Specific issues to be considered include how to facilitate the perception of speed and distance traveled, how to provide a compelling sense of turning when actual walking along a curved path is not possible, how to give a user the sense that he she is walking over a sloped surface, and more generally how to give a user a clear sense of the scale and structure of the spaces being walked through. The team s findings on these issues will be relevant across the spectrum of possible approaches to locomotion interfaces doc14446 none This is a standard award to one of three institutions collaborating as partners on Thompson s project ( ). No current system allows a person to naturally walk through a large-scale virtual environment. The availability of such a locomotion interface would have impacts on a broad range of applications, including education and training, design and prototyping, physical fitness, and rehabilitation; for some of these applications natural walking provides a level of realism not obtainable if movement through the simulated world is controlled by devices such as a joystick, while for others realistic walking is a fundamental requirement. Prototypes have been built for a variety of computer-controlled devices on which a person can walk, but there has been little investigation of the utility of such devices as interfaces to a virtual world and almost no study at all of the interactions of visual and biomechanical perceptual cues in such devices. This project addresses key open questions, the answers to which are needed if locomotion interfaces are to offer effective interaction between users and computer simulations. An effective locomotion interface must provide users with accurate visual and biomechanical sensations of walking; thus, a key objective of this work is to determine how to synergistically combine visual information generated by computer graphics with biomechanical information generated by devices that simulate walking on real surfaces. Thompson and his collaborators will investigates methods that allow more accurate walking in a locomotion interface while accurately conveying a sense of the spaces being walked through. Specific issues to be considered include how to facilitate the perception of speed and distance traveled, how to provide a compelling sense of turning when actual walking along a curved path is not possible, how to give a user the sense that he she is walking over a sloped surface, and more generally how to give a user a clear sense of the scale and structure of the spaces being walked through. The team s findings on these issues will be relevant across the spectrum of possible approaches to locomotion interfaces doc14457 none Rivers are the primary interface between terrestrial and ocean environments and play a central and multi-faceted role in linking the terrestrial and marine cycles of bioactive elements --- carbon in particular. The magnitude of weathering and erosion processes on land, sediment storage within the river system, and cycling and burial processes in adjacent ocean margins collectively support the premise that rivers and RiOMar environments play an important role in global change. We seek support for a community workshop, to be held on the Tulane University campus (Fall, ), in which approximately 50 scientists from the earth and ocean science communities will participate. Major goals to be addressed at this RiOMar workshop are: (1) To assess the current state-of-knowledge regarding the role of rivers and associated margins in the global cycles of carbon and other bioactive elements. (2) To identify, by community consensus, the major unresolved questions regarding RiOMar environments and their role in these global cycles. Outstanding iuburning questionslg will be prioritized as a means to focus future research efforts. (3) To identify salient areas of research in which interdisciplinary and or cross-cutting research approaches will be needed, and to evaluate the manner in which these various research approaches can be facilitated. The central goal of RiOMar is to evaluate the role of rivers and associated ocean margins in the global cycles of carbon and other bioactive elements, and to better characterize the processes that govern the cycling and fate of bioactive elements in these environments doc14458 none The Principal Investigator will perform research in the areas of: 1) tornadoes and tornadogenesis, 2) structure of bow echoes, 3) mesoscale documentation of warm fronts, and 4) participation in the field phase of the international water vapor project (IHOP). The research on the first three areas is based upon a thorough analysis of existing data collected from past field experiments. Two case studies based on data collected during VORTEX (Verification on the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment) are being examined. A well-documented tornado associated with a supercell that developed near Sweetwater, Texas will be studied in order to investigate the generality of prior research results. The Sweetwater storm also spawned several low-level mesocyclones that did not produce tornadoes. Accordingly, there is a unique opportunity to compare tornadic and non-tornadic low-level mesocyclones associated with the same supercell using data of comparable spatial and temporal resolution. A second case study is based on airborne Doppler data collected on a bow echo that developed within a squall line. The bow echo is a common radar signature that is often associated with downbursts and derechos. The present case provides an opportunity to examine the evolution of this echo from a linear structure into a bow-shape. During the winter of , an international field experiment called FASTEX (Fronts and Atlantic Storm Track Experiment) was organized to study oceanic cyclogenesis. The primary data platforms were several research aircraft which released dropwindsondes, recorded in situ measurements at flight level, and collected high-resolution radar reflectivity and Doppler velocity information using on-board radars. Observational and numerical studies on cold fronts have dominated the literature largely because of its well-defined structure, often manifested as abrupt wind shifts and temperature discontinuities, and its frequent association with severe convective weather. In comparison, there have been relatively few observational studies of surface warm fronts. This is due, in part, to the fact that warm fronts are often not associated with strong discontinuities especially over the continents. A unique data set was collected on a warm front during FASTEX. Detailed kinematic and thermodynamic data were collected on the frontal zone using Doppler wind syntheses and dropwindsonde information. Specific goals of this research include examining the degree to which the flow was in geostrophic balance and the terms of the frontogenesis equation. The primary goal of IHOP (International H20 Project) is to improve measurements of the four-dimensional distribution of water vapor and better understand the impact of water vapor on precipitation forecasting. The field phase of the experiment is planned for Spring . In this project the PI will address a number of research objectives that deal with the convection initiation component of IHOP. These objectives include: 1) a thorough documentation of the impact of horizontal convective rolls on moisture variations within the convective boundary layer; 2) determining the generating mechanism(s) of inflections circulations that develop along convergence boundaries and their impact on the evolving moisture fields; and 3) a quantitative assessment of the importance of the balance between the horizontal vorticity generated by the cold pool from thunderstorm outflows with the environmental vorticity produced by the low-level shear vector in determining the potential for convection initiation doc14459 none Karban Over the past two decades ecologists have come to recognize that indirect effects are widespread and important in many communities. Induced resistance represents one type of indirect effect that has received a lot of study, although ecologists are very skeptical about plant-plant communication as a mechanism for induced resistance. In fact, most ecologists discount the possibility of communication between plants because early reports of this phenomenon were not convincing. However, my recent fieldwork suggests that wild tobacco plants eavesdrop on clipped sagebrush neighbors and induce higher levels of resistance to their shared herbivores. This communication appears to be mediated by an airborne cue released by sagebrush, perhaps methyl jasmonate. This proposal asks two questions: 1) How general is eavesdropping? 2) Is methyl jasmonate the airborne cue? If eavesdropping proves to be widespread then the spectrum of interactions within plant communities may be much richer than we now appreciate. Widespread eavesdropping suggests a much greater role for associational resistance and susceptibility, and for spatial structure in general doc14460 none This is a study of the propagation of ignition and extinction fronts (edge flames) on diffusion-flame sheets using a combination of analytical methods and numerical simulations. The scope and utility of the previously articulated parabolic flame path assumption (PFPA) and its incorporation into the activation-energy asymptotics framework are tested. Systems examined include extinction fronts, colliding triple flames, and circular ignition fronts. The work has implications for describing a member of important practical phenomena including lift-off and blow-out of jet flames, autoignition in diesel engines, flame spread over fuel beds, and local extinction in turbulent nonpremixed combustion doc14461 none M. Moskovits, UCSB Partial travel support is requested for the U.S. academic speakers at the IBM Almaden Laboratory workshop on Grand Challenges of Nanotechnology to be organized on April 23-25 in San Jose, California. The main purpose of the meeting is to develop a set of scientific and technological challenge issues for the future development of nanotechnology. The deliberations and conclusions will be made available to the scientific and engineering communities and to the interested government agencies. The workshop will bring together leading senior and young scientists from academe, industry and government from U.S. and several invited leading experts from abroad. A group of young scientists will be invited to participate at the workshop based on nominations received from the community at large. The information collected at the meeting will help community to guide the research in the most rewarding area, help industry and government agencies in setting up their priorities. The IBM Journal or Research and Development will publish a selected number of contributions. The speakers will address issues related to the scope of various grand challenges and the way to solve them, the role of technology, their implications, and the priority in funding future R&D projects doc14462 none The proposal focuses on the development and validation of an innovative methodology for Multi-criteria Design Optimization (MDO) in engineering which integrates concurrent experiment and simulation. This methodology, denoted Data Driven Design Optimization Methodology (DDDOM), represents a major change from current engineering design practice which uses experiment and simulation in a sequential manner. The methodology will leverage the inherent advantages of experiment and simulation in a Dynamic Data Driven Application System. The methodology will be validated for the optimal design of three cases: a flush mounted inlet for a generic ogive-cylinder body, a cooling system for electronic components, and a lumbar vertebral spinal structure. The experiments and simulations will be performed at Rutgers University. The proposal includes an integrated educational program involving students at the high school, undergraduate and graduate levels with specific emphasis on women and minorities. The research program will draw students from five existing programs of the Rutgers School of Engineering Office of Special Programs. Four research teams will be formed with participants drawn from each of these programs. These teams will provide a unique opportunity for research experience and leadership development. Endorsing organizations include Boeing, IBM, and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey doc14463 none The objective of this proposal is to request funds to organize ECS-EPSCoR, NSF Grantees Conference on Electronics, Photonics and Device Technologies. The conference will be conducted during summer of at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas. Arkansas is an EPSCoR state where significant progress has been demonstrated in the conference related topics through major NSF sponsored programs. Another important objective is to establish an interactive platform of leading researchers from the states with leading as well as evolving research programs in the areas related to the conference. The meeting will invite grantees from EPSCoR states (over 60% out of the total number) and from non-EPSCoR states. This will be a singular opportunity to generate and discuss new academic concepts, research and education directions by establishing teams of leading researchers. The conference will provide a basis for discussing recent research findings as well as sharing first-hand-teaching experiences in interdisciplinary education across cultural, age and gender boundaries. The choices of conference venue is conducive for the subjects as well as inter and intra state teaming due to presence of outstanding research and education programs in the related areas on this campus. For example, this campus houses various leading NSF funded laboratories, centers, programs and projects including the Arkansas Center for Electronic-Photonic Materials Innovation (ACEMI), Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC), Distributed seed Program at AR-NB-OK for Science and Engineering Research Center (SERC) for Durable Nano and Micro System, femtosecond laser microvias drilling at Materials and Manufacturing Research Laboratories (MRL), Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) in Microelectronics and Photonics, and MEMS packaging at High Density Electronics Center (HiDEC). The conference will result in promoting interaction among scientists and engineers leading to germination of new ideas and themes, team formation, new proposal submissions, student involvement and exchange, proceedings of extended abstracts, and generation of more fiscal and intellectual resources at EPSCoR states, K-12 and school teacher outreach, more technology transfer. The outcome of the conference will be disseminated through proceedings and related material on internet, recordable media, and at various related technical conferences doc14464 none Davis, Ronald Stanford University Collaborative Prosposal-ITR SY: Molecular Computational with Automated Microfluide Sensors\(MCAMS\) The main objective of this cross-disciplinary project between Princeton University, Stanford University and UC Berkeley is to combine microfluidic technology with recently-developed algorithms of RNA-based computing to create a compact, automated nucelotide-based computational device capable of rapid detection of the computational output. Realization of such a device would greatly impact not only the field of molecular computing but also the general field of molecular biology, as the proposed platform technologies would provide novel, advanced tools for biological research. The project is addressing three main questions: - Can a microfluidic device be used to automate RNA-based computation? - Can alternative detection methods be used to avoid labor-intensive readout steps in RNA-based computation? -Can these detection methods be applied to other problems encountered in general biological v research? The success of this project will represent a leap forward in the direction of hands-free molecular computation. In addition, it will provide the necessary platform technologies to accelerate biological research, particularly in the areas of rapid DNA sequencing and fingerprinting doc14465 none Two international workshops on Industrial Ecology and Environmentally Benign Manufacturing towards Dematerialization are to be held October 2 - 5, at Tokai University in Hawaii. Two - 2 day sessions will be held in conjunction with the International Conference on Ecomaterials (Oct 2-4) with a final day dedicated to summarizing results of the meetings and producing a report. It is expected that participants will come from universities, governmental organizations, and corporations and trade organizations from around the world. The organizing committee is represented by Japanese universities, industry and national laboratories. This ecomaterials conference will be the fifth in a series of international conferences that have been sponsored by the Japanese. All previous conferences have taken place in Japan or the Far East. With this conference the founders hope to expand the venue and include American and other nationalities to discuss many different aspects of manufacturing, design and materials processing and their impact on the environment doc14466 none No current system allows a person to naturally walk through a large-scale virtual environment. The availability of such a locomotion interface would have impacts on a broad range of applications, including education and training, design and prototyping, physical fitness, and rehabilitation; for some of these applications natural walking provides a level of realism not obtainable if movement through the simulated world is controlled by devices such as a joystick, while for others realistic walking is a fundamental requirement. Prototypes have been built for a variety of computer-controlled devices on which a person can walk, but there has been little investigation of the utility of such devices as interfaces to a virtual world and almost no study at all of the interactions of visual and biomechanical perceptual cues in such devices. This project addresses key open questions, the answers to which are needed if locomotion interfaces are to offer effective interaction between users and computer simulations. An effective locomotion interface must provide users with accurate visual and biomechanical sensations of walking; thus, a key objective of this work is to determine how to synergistically combine visual information generated by computer graphics with biomechanical information generated by devices that simulate walking on real surfaces. The PI and his collaborators will investigates methods that allow more accurate walking in a locomotion interface while accurately conveying a sense of the spaces being walked through. Specific issues to be considered include how to facilitate the perception of speed and distance traveled, how to provide a compelling sense of turning when actual walking along a curved path is not possible, how to give a user the sense that he she is walking over a sloped surface, and more generally how to give a user a clear sense of the scale and structure of the spaces being walked through. The PI s findings on these issues will be relevant across the spectrum of possible approaches to locomotion interfaces doc14467 none This award supports theoretical and computational research and education on quantum fluids. Accurate numerical simulations, based on quantum Monte Carlo methods, will be performed to study the adsorption of Helium on a variety of substrates with the aim of investigating novel physical phenomena involving superfluidity and Bose condensation in confined systems. The PI will study physisorption of quantum fluids inside carbon nanotubes, in zeolites, and on alkali metal substrates to include helium mixtures and molecular hydrogen. His earlier exploration of helium confined in bundles of nanotubes suggested the possibility of a low temperature transition to a novel anisotropic superfluid phase and a possible commensurate to incommensurate transition. In this award, a theoretical investigation of the phase diagram of helium and molecular hydrogen inside carbon nanotubes will be carried out. It is thought that the confinement of molecular hydrogen will prevent crystallization at low temperatures enabling the observation of a superfluid state. Simulations will be performed using realistic interactions of helium atoms and hydrogen molecules with the confining system. %%% This award supports theoretical and computational research and education on quantum fluids. The PI will use quantum Monte Carlo methods to study helium trapped inside of bundles of carbon nanotubes. The confinement of the helium atoms inside the carbon nanotube structures alters the properties of the helium quantum liquid leading to possible novel physical properties. The system is at sufficiently low temperature that quantum mechanical effects become important. The PI will also study molecular hydrogen in carbon nanotubes and the interaction of both liquids with zeolites and alkali metal surfaces that confine or reduce the dimensionality of the liquid. This research contributes to the fundamental knowledge of nanostructures and the study of materials on the nanoscale doc14468 none Salim Hariri University of Arizona NGS: Support for the Third International Workshop on Active middleware Services This workshop will provide support for invited speakers and students to attend the Third Annual International Workshop on Active Middleware Services, being held on August 6, in conjunction with the 10th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing in San Francisco, CA. This workshop will bring together researchers to discuss systems software issues on middleware for supporting distributed, heterogeneous, networked and grid environments doc14469 none Conlon The primary purpose of this assignment is to assist , by way of technical and administrative functions, the internal management and inter-agency coordination of the High Latitude Dynamics Program. Dr. Robin Muench of Earth & Space Research will serve at ONR Headquarters, full time, under the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPPA) Mobility Program, as an Assistant Program Manager, ONR 322HL. Approximately half of his time will be spent on assignment at the National Science Foundation, which is providing half of the cost of funds for this IPA. The period of the assignment will be for 24 months, from 01 October to 30 September , with an option to extend two additional years if the assignment is of continued benefit to ONR. This proposed IPAP assignee is uniquely qualified and available for this assignment. In assessing the relative benefits to INR and the parent organization of this IPA, ONR is determined to be the principal beneficiary because of its critical need for his expertise and agrees to pay 100% of the salary, fringe benefit and travel costs. Because of its own critical need for the expertise provided by this IPA, the National Science Foundation by seperate arrangement is providing 50% of the funds required to fund this IPA doc14470 none Funds are being provided via an interagency transfer to provide cost sharing for ongoing and new projects being conducted under the auspices of the National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP). FY funds are provided for cost sharing the following six projects: 1) support of the National Ocean Sciences Bowl; 2) year three incremental support for the FY NOPP project entitled in Front Resolving Observational Network; 3) supplemental support for a FY NOPP project regarding the NEPTUNE Feasibility Study; 4) support of the Ocean Information Technology Infrastructure committee and report; 5) support for the NOPP Interagency Ocean.US Office; and 6) support of an NAS NRC Ocean Studies Board study on Ambient Noise in the Ocean and Potential Impacts on Marine Mammals doc14471 none Mahaffey Genetic analyses of Drosophila melanogaster have yielded substantial insight into the mechanisms governing many aspects animal development and life. However, though we have learned much from these studies, there is still much that we do not know. This became alarmingly apparent upon examining the initial phase of the annotated genome where it was found that over two thirds of Drosophila genes had not been identified from prior studies. Further, though numerous genetic screens have been completed, there are still many gaps in our understanding, even in well-studied processes. There may be several reasons for this; one significant reason is that some genes are refractory to analysis by conventional genetic screens because of genetic redundancy. Given that genes with redundant or overlapping functions are likely to have important roles, and that there may be numerous cases of overlapping gene functions in Drosophila, it is essential that we develop methods to detect and to test the function of potentially redundant genes, yet a systematic method to identify redundant genes has not been employed in the past. Dr. Mahaffey will conduct a screen to identify potentially redundant gene pairs functioning during Drosophila embryonic development. The scheme involves first identifying potential candidates by similarity, then cloning and using in situ hybridization to determine if there is overlap in expression. Finally, RNA interference will be used to determine whether or not the gene pairs have overlapping roles. To test the validity of this method, Dr. Mahaffey will initially select candidate gene pairs that encode zinc finger proteins. It is important to note that the design of this project is not limited to Drosophila; it should be useful in studies of redundant genes in other organisms (certainly; C. elegans, and in other model organisms using morpholino antisense procedures doc14472 none High-power ultrafast lasers offer significant advantages for next-generation laser materials processing, particularly at small length scales, which makes them well suited for micromachining and MEMS structures. The extremely high laser intensities associated with ultrafast lasers result in unique, nonlinear laser-material interactions that provide innovative new possibilities for laser-material processing. This proposal presents a unified series of research tasks that address both fundamental scientific issues while presenting practical techniques and solutions for real-world applications. The proposed tasks include 1) novel beam delivery techniques for delivering a high-quality, minimal distortion ultrafast laser beam to a workpiece for processing without the need for a vacuum chamber, 2) sub-surface machining of transparent materials in which features can be fabricated underneath the surface of transparent materials for true three-dimensional micromachining, 3) modeling breakdown and material removal to predict a given material s response and removal rates from specific ultrafast laser parameters, and 4) precision processing of novel materials such as SU-8 for MEMS applications, which presents unique capabilities over traditional manufacturing. A central focus of the research tasks is to provide both fundamental understanding while at the same time providing practical knowledge for industrial and other real-world users. As an educational tool for both graduate and undergraduate students, the project will provide excellent training in optics, lasers, and engineering on the microscale (both time and space). These topics are often only minimally covered, if at all, in traditional mechanical engineering programs, and this project will provide much needed training in these areas doc14473 none Johnston, Arch C. for Project Collaborative Research: Field Investigation of Transient Effects of the Republic Day, India Earthquake Field seismological and geological studies of the devastating earthquake of January 26, in India are being carried out to collect information about transient phenomena, including aftershocks and surface effects. This earthquake, called the Republic Day earthquake, had a magnitude of about 7.7 and was an unusual earthquake. It occurred in western India, far from the plate boundary between India and Eurasia. The Republic Day earthquake was an intraplate earthquake, with unusual characteristics. A network of about two dozen seismographs is to be operated for a period of 3 to 6 months to record and locate aftershocks. Related field geological studies are to be done to learn about the liquefaction and other surface effects produced by the mainshock. The hypocenter of the mainshock was relatively deep in the crust for such a large earthquake (25 km) and no surface faulting has been found from it. Recordings from the temporary network will help confirm the depth of the mainshock as well as information about the mainshock fault mechanism doc14474 none Requicha, Aristides University of Southern California ITR SI+AP: Active Sensor Networks with Applications in Marine Microorganism Monitoring The proposed research combines networking, distributed robotics, nanorobotics, and microbiology in an effort to develop and apply technology for the in-situ, real-time monitoring of microbial populations in aquatic environments, such as the ocean or water supply systems. The application context provides feedback from experiments with realistic systems, and this feedback is essential to the progress of the Information Technology (IT) research proposed here. This project addresses two key challenges for IT during this decade: moving from virtual to physical applications, and moving from macro to micro and nano. The IT focus is on the study of Physically-Coupled Scalable Information Infrastructures (PCSIIs), which effectively embed the internet . The sensors and actuators in the proposed PCSII must have small physical dimensions, comparable to those of the microorganisms to be monitored. They must be deployed in very large numbers to achieve the unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution necessary to investigate the causal relationships between environmental conditions and microorganisms. Control and coordination of a multitude of such devices of limited and heterogeneous capabilities raise major challenges for networking, distributed coordination and distributed algorithms. Sensing for detection and identification of microorganisms is another challenge, which will be tackled by using nanorobotic Scanning Probe Microscope technology doc14475 none This award is for the partial support of the Southeastern-Atlantic Regional Conference on Differential Equations (SEARCDE) that has met annually since . Conferences traditionally cover broad range of topics in the areas of ordinary and partial differential equations, numerical methods, inverse problems and provide a necessary forum for communication and collaboration between senior and junior investigators doc14476 none OCE - Whitledge This proposal requests support for the second phase of the design and model testing of a Marginal Ice Zone (MIZ) Research Vessel. The Science Mission Requirements have been established and reviewed by UNOLS, and the concept design was started in the fall of . The proposed vessel will replace the current UNOLS regional research vessel, the R V Alpha Helix, with a more capable, multi-purpose and somewhat larger ship, better able to address the contemporary research support needs of a variety of users. The waters surrounding Alaska Stretch from the southeastern Alaskan fjords, to the Bering Sea and north to the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. This vast region accounts for the majority of the United States continental shelf and its only Arctic waters. Some of the most productive fisheries in the world are found here, and there is strong demand for research on the marine ecosystems that support these populations. Marine mammal and bird research is increasing, and is likely to increase even more due to the need to know for management and legal purposes. Indigenous people live along the coasts, and use marine resources for subsistence. Increasing support for research in the Bering Sea and northern Gulf of Alaska, is, in part, driven by these considerations. Little is understood of major decadal and interannual variability in oceanographic and atmospheric conditions or the role of high latitude marine systems in global climatic processes. As a result, there is increasing demand for ship support in the region, and this year the R V Alpha Helix is providing the maximum number of sea days possible, given her size, capabilities and seasonal restrictions imposed by the challenging subarctic conditions. This demand is expected to increase with a more capable vessel doc14477 none This grant is the result of a proposal submitted to the Information Technology Research (ITR) Initiative. The grant supports a Center for Modeling of Quantum Dynamics, Relaxation and Decoherence in Solid State Physics for Information Technology Applications. The theoretical research center will investigate solid state implementation of coherent, controlled quantum dynamics in support of the recently established experimental efforts in quantum information processing. The initial research focus of the center will be on the theoretical study of few- and multi-qubit systems where the medium for the qubit interaction, relaxation, and decoherence is a semiconductor heterostructure containing a two-dimensional electron gas. For quantum computing applications, the latter is frequently considered at low temperature and high magnetic fields, corresponding to the conditions of the quantum Hall effect. This project includes exploration of the main research topics of relevance to quantum computing in the solid state, for instance, transport associated with single-quantum (single-spin) measurement ideas, or effects of gates on qubit interaction control, relaxation and decoherence. Owing to the emergence of several large-scale experimental efforts in implementing quantum coherent devices for computation, the center will respond to the growing need for research into promising directions of the design of such devices. The theory center will provide an added fundamental and overarching approach complementing goal-oriented experimental efforts. The center will provide research in the application of many-body physics techniques to the analysis of quantum information systems, including relaxation, decoherence, measurement, and quantum transport features; education of the next generation of scientists who will be concerned with the implementation and application of quantum computers; formation of the scientific network in this emerging field of solid state physics by means of publications, conferences, seminars and exchange visits. Members of this interdisciplinary center include those with backgrounds in mathematics and computer science, electrical and computer engineering, materials science and physics doc14478 none The P.I. will investigate the potential impacts of agriculture on methyl halide emissions to the atmosphere by quantifying biochemically related sources of methyl bromide, methyl iodide, and methyl chloride. Controlled experiments will take place on a variety of rice cultivars and other crops in a greenhouse to evaluate the factors that influence methyl halide emission rates, such as temperature, light level, and plant-development state. A hypothesized enzyme-driven process of production of methyl halides will be investigated by assaying enzyme activity in leaf-disk samples as emissions are measured, along with enzyme-inhibition experiments using caffeic acid. Experiments will cover the growing season of rice to determine if emissions are concentrated during any plant-development stage and if emissions correlate with those of methane. Similar experiments will study other crop plants (wheat, barley, broccoli, rapeseed). Ectomycorrhizal fungi (EF) are also newly identified sources of methyl bromide and iodide; related fungi have been known as significant emitters of methyl chloride. The environmental occurrence of these fungi is great enough to indicate potential significance for the global atmosphere. This project will survey emissions from EF species in lab studies and will study environmental controls on these emissions. The project will also measure emissions from salt marshes and mangroves, building on new observations of methyl halide emissions from these habitats. Researchers from Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania will collaborate in the project. The results of the project will be useful as input to atmospheric photochemical transport models to assess impact on regional tropospheric ozone amounts. The emissions data should lead to significant improvement in our understanding of the relative roles of natural and anthropogenic sources of methyl chloride and methyl bromide, and also to new views of terrestrial sources of methyl iodide doc14479 none Algorithmic Issues in Large Scale Dynamic Networks Michael Mitzenmacher, Harvard University Eli Upfal, Brown University We propose to develop a theoretically well-founded framework for the design and analysis of algorithms for large scale dynamic networks. In particular, for the Web and related dynamic networks, such as the underlying Internet topology and Internet-based peer to peer ad hoc networks. We plan to develop rigorous mathematical models that capture key characteristics and can make reliable predictions about features such as connectivity, information content, and dynamic of these networks. We plan to apply this framework to test existing algorithms and construct improved new algorithms. The mail benefits of developing the mathematical models of the Web structure and dynamics will be the improved theoretical foundation for the design, analysis, and testing of algorithms that operate in the web environment. The tangible results of this work will therefore be models that can be subjected to experimental verification, analyses of algorithms based upon these models, new algorithms that benefit from these analyses, and, finally, proof-of-concept demonstrations and experimental evaluations of such algorithms doc14437 none Collaborative Research: ITR AP&IM Data Intense Challenge: The Instrumented Oil Field of the Future Mary Wheeler - University of Texas at Austin - Alan Sussman - University of Maryland, College Park - Joel Saltz - Ohio State University Research Foundation - Manish Parashar - Rutgers University - Increasing production from existing oil and natural gas reservoirs is crucial for the US economy. In order to better monitor and optimize oil and gas production, advanced technologies from field instrumentation to information technology and computational science are essential. Field technologies include time-lapse surface and borehole seismic, permanent downhole sensors, intelligent well completions, fiber optics, and remote control operations. IT technologies include data management, data visualization, parallel computing, and decision-making tools such as new wave propagation and multiphase, multi-component flow and transport computational portals. These diverse technologies can be integrated to achieve real-time monitoring and optimization of reservoir production: The Instrumented Oilfield. A major outcome of the proposed research is a computing portal which will enable reservoir simulation and geophysical calculations to interact dynamically with the data and with each other and which will provide a variety of visual and quantitative tools. Test data will be provided by oil and service companies currently participating in UT Austin industrial affiliate programs. Since the proposed research is directed towards the general problem of modeling and characterization of the earth s subsurface, it has immediate application to other areas, including environmental remediation and storage of hazardous wastes doc14481 none Lonsdale The goals of this project are to produce a computer-model which will serve as a data simulator for a new type of radio telescope (a 400-km, low frequency, radio telescope that will work in the 10-240 MHz wavelength range). The output of this computer model will be used to study a variety of different instrument designs as well as develop techniques for the post-processing data analysis. The latter will include the development of a network architecture and protocol to support the data rates, support for dynamic range and fidelity levels that are beyond the present state-of-the-art, and the calibration of the ionospheric propagation delays and instrumental characteristics that require new techniques and algorithms. The project is part of the US participation in an international collaboration (designated LOFAR for Low Frequency Array) which is projected for operation in . An additional $9-10 million is being invested in the design by Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy (NFRA, [ASTRON in Dutch]) and the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). The National Academy of Sciences Decadal Survey of Astronomy ( ) recommended the project for NSF support. This effort is a major new astronomy initiative. NSF participation will guarantee wide access to the instrument by the US astronomical community, although the primary funding will come from NRL and ASTRON doc14482 none David R. Foster Harvard University SGER: Digital Government: Harvard Forest Carbon Exchange Modeling Work in Connection with Digital Aerial Image Analysis by UMass, Amherst. This grant will support preliminary explorations for applying digital video aerial image analysis to long-term issues of global warming, in particular carbon cycle modeling, in the government arena. Many government agencies are already using GIS heavily, but in a less dynamic way, relying on single images in time, without fine-grain time references. This project will explore government uses of real-time imaging, at resolutions beyond what can be achieved with commercial satellite images, allowing the digital film to be geo-referenced, integrated with data streams from other sensors, and viewed in 3D through polarized glasses doc14483 none Berlin This Americas Program thesis enhancement project will support thesis dissertation research by Mr. Cameron Adams under the supervision of Dr. Eloise A. Berlin of the University of Georgia. The study, in collaboration with El Colegio de la Frontera Sur (ECOSUR) in Chiapas, Mexico, aims to use cognitive methods to establish whether the Highland Maya have a shared ethnophysiology. A model of such a physiology will be developed and transcripts of open-ended interviews will be analyzed for structured metaphor usage. Because perceptions of body function inform much of culturally defined medical behavior, including practices such as behavioral and medicinal prescriptions and or proscriptions, researchers have argued that a thorough understanding of concepts of physiology lead to a greater understanding of any medical system. Through its modeling of Highland Maya ethnophysiology, the proposed research will serve to address various issues in medical and cognitive anthropology and advance efforts at developing culturally appropriate health care delivery systems for indigenous populations in Mexico and elsewhere doc14484 none This award to the Materials Research Society (MRS) will provide support for a two year series of hands on workshops aimed at middle and high school students. These workshops will be held during the spring and fall MRS conferences. The objective is to promote middle and high school students interest in materials science while providing interaction between students and the extremely diverse group of researchers and exhibitors attending the MRS meetings. In addition, through discussions and questionnaires information concerning influences on the career choices of this age group will be collected, enabling a better understanding of the pipeline of science students in the US. %%% This award to the Materials Research Society (MRS) will provide support for a two year series of hands on workshops aimed at middle and high school students. These workshops will be held during the spring and fall MRS conferences. The objective is to promote middle and high school students interest in materials science while providing interaction between students and the extremely diverse group of researchers and exhibitors attending the MRS meetings. In addition, through discussions and questionnaires information concerning influences on the career choices of this age group will be collected, enabling a better understanding of the pipeline of science students in the US doc14485 none Data mining is one of the very promising information technologies today. This project studies decision trees, one of the most widely used data mining models. The approach addresses three complementary components of decision tree construction: Bias in split selection, pruning, and regression tree construction. Bias in split selection is a very important problem, as the choice of the wrong split attribute destroys the interpretability of the decision tree, and users can no longer trust the information from the tree. Through a large experimental study and a theoretical investigation, this project develops a framework to devise split selection methods with absolutely zero bias. The new methods will permit users of decision trees to interpret the tree without any doubt of misinformation. The second topic addresses pruning of decision trees. Through a large experimental study of pruning of decision trees for large datasets, the project investigates the computational and qualitative trade-offs between different pruning methods, solving an ongoing debate about how to prune with large datasets. Third, this research investigates scalable regression tree construction, developing methods to construct regression trees with linear models in the leaf nodes of the tree and multivariate splits at intermediate nodes - all completely scalable over very large datasets with millions of records. The results are implemented in a publicly available decision tree construction tool and performance testbed and software contribution to the research community. This research has many applications in electronic commerce, scientific data analysis, and computational biology doc14486 none A modular system for ocean data assimilation has recently been developed. It has already been implemented in an unsophisticated way, with a variety of models of the ocean and the coupled ocean-atmosphere. This project will enhance the system using Information Technology, including modern software engineering concepts, new visualization techniques and interactive web-based training. Together with effective outreach and advanced optimization algorithms, these elements of IT will be linked through the modular system to a wide range of coastal, basin-scale and global ocean models. Variational data assimilation is also coming into use in operational weather forecasting and ocean forecasting, in ocean biogeochemistry, in groundwater hydrology and in solid-earth geophysics. The new modular system will thus be of immediate benefit throughout the geosciences. The team includes 14 physical oceanographers, civil engineers and computer scientists in six universities, a national laboratory, and private industry. The project is funded under the Information Technology Research Initiative doc14437 none Collaborative Research: ITR AP&IM Data Intense Challenge: The Instrumented Oil Field of the Future Mary Wheeler - University of Texas at Austin - Alan Sussman - University of Maryland, College Park - Joel Saltz - Ohio State University Research Foundation - Manish Parashar - Rutgers University - Increasing production from existing oil and natural gas reservoirs is crucial for the US economy. In order to better monitor and optimize oil and gas production, advanced technologies from field instrumentation to information technology and computational science are essential. Field technologies include time-lapse surface and borehole seismic, permanent downhole sensors, intelligent well completions, fiber optics, and remote control operations. IT technologies include data management, data visualization, parallel computing, and decision-making tools such as new wave propagation and multiphase, multi-component flow and transport computational portals. These diverse technologies can be integrated to achieve real-time monitoring and optimization of reservoir production: The Instrumented Oilfield. A major outcome of the proposed research is a computing portal which will enable reservoir simulation and geophysical calculations to interact dynamically with the data and with each other and which will provide a variety of visual and quantitative tools. Test data will be provided by oil and service companies currently participating in UT Austin industrial affiliate programs. Since the proposed research is directed towards the general problem of modeling and characterization of the earth s subsurface, it has immediate application to other areas, including environmental remediation and storage of hazardous wastes doc14488 none ITR AP: An Ensemble Approach to Data Assimilation in the Earth Sciences New data sources are beginning to have a dramatic impact on our ability to understand the earth as an integrated system. Our prospects for dealing with the environmental issues of the 21st century -- climate change, population pressures on natural resources, and major modifications in global element cycles -- depend largely on this new information. However, our ability to process and interpret environmental data is not keeping pace with the dramatic increase in available information, especially information from airborne and orbital remote sensing platforms. If we are to realize the potential benefits of new sensing technologies we will need to develop intelligent environmental data assimilation procedures that are able to efficiently extract useful information about the earth from a diverse set of data sources. Environmental data assimilation can be posed as a problem of estimating a large number of unobservable or highly uncertain variables (e.g. sea surface heights, atmospheric pressures, hydrologic fluxes, etc.) from a large number of related but noisy measurements (e.g. microwave radiances or backscatter detected by a satellite sensor). The estimation procedure relies on mathematical models that relate unknowns to measurements. Environmental estimation problems are challenging because the systems of interest: 1) are spatially distributed and highly variable over a wide range of space and time scales, 2) are difficult to describe with precision, 3) are often nonlinear, even chaotic, and 4) are often characterized by non-unique relationships between unknowns and measurements. This project is concerned with very large problems (many measurements and many unknowns) which are not amenable to traditional data assimilation techniques but are of crucial interest to researchers in the earth sciences. An interdisciplinary team will develop a better understanding of the issues of dimensionality reduction and uncertainty propagation that are crucial to large-scale data assimilation. So-called ensemble methods provide a particularly informative way to identify these key features. A new generation of intelligent data assimilation methods will be developed that build on the understanding gained from the reduced problem. The applicability of these methods will be investigated on problems of broad interest in the earth sciences, including problems that 1) deal with coupled systems, 2) cut across traditional disciplines, and 3) work with remote sensing data sets. This ITR project brings together acknowledged experts on environmental data assimilation. It is a group ITR project, rather than several individual projects, which cuts across earth science disciplines. The research will be coordinated with: 1) a seminar series, 2) joint supervision of Ph.D. students and post-doctoral researchers, 3) a Ph.D. mentoring program, 4) a selection of cross-cutting sample problems, and 5) co-authored publications doc14489 none A pronounced feature in atmospheric weather patterns is the onset and subsequent development of wintertime large-scale cyclogenesis (LSC) over the Northern Pacific Ocean, extending to North America. The project will use singular vector (SV) diagnostic techniques, a fairly new approach, to identify and understand the precursors for the establishment of cyclogenesis events through an examination of the spatial patterns of errors in weather prediction models for periods before, during, and after occurrences of the enhanced jet flow within the cyclogenesis lifecycles. The research will be conducted through the analysis of global observational data sets, simulations with numerical models, and ensemble forecasts from operational models. An analysis of the characteristic evolution of differences between members of ensemble forecasts will be used to understand the sensitivity of LSC forecasts to initial condition uncertainties. Other problems the PIs will investigate include: the role of dynamical instability on the transient growth in LSCs and possible degradation in predictability during LSC events. Understanding the dynamics and predictability during LSC events will contribute to the improvement in the medium range weather prediction. The research will contribute to educating a new generation in a fairly new scientific area, namely, singular vectors and adjoint systems associated with numerical models. The principal investigators will organize two workshops that will be tailored for weather forecasters to share information on predictability and to educate the weather forecasting community on how to use SV analysis in daily forecasts. Presently, SV analysis remains a formidable topic to many. This project may provide an opportunity to transform a complicated mathematical formulation into practical applications doc14490 none Efficient management of large science facilities requires experience and skills not usually found in the repertoire of research scientists. This proposal plans to address this need by establishing a program conducted by a cadre of knowledgeable project managers that includes workshops and summer schools to which mid-career research scientists, as well as other interested groups, with an interest in project management will be invited. The first steps will proceed through prototype activities that will identify the detailed needs as perceived by institutions and groups involved with major scientific projects. Training workshops and courses will then be developed through a series of such prototypes. The first prototype workshop will target a single emerging project and will involve leaders, middle level managers, individual scientists and students associated with the selected project. This workshop will yield a set of recommendations for the targeted project, and will begin the collection of tasks and solutions that will form the basis for the remaining work of this proposal. A week-long workshop will be planned using lessons learned from earlier prototypes. Attendance at this workshop is anticipated to be between 50 and 100 students , and would complete the definition of training and management materials to be delivered by this proposal. The proposers will author a set of materials and lecture notes for a university course in facilities management doc14491 none Kintsch, Walter University of Colorado Boulder ITR PE: Latent Semantic Analysis: Theory and Technology This research program is designed to motivate, create and evaluate a new theory and methodology of learning, in which computer analysis of writing and speech is used to teach students to process and comprehend information more effectively. This work will inform educators on instructional and assessment strategies for improved reading comprehension to a degree not yet present in schools today. The methodology will teach students to read more effectively and to comprehend and learn more from what they read. Since the methodology can be applied to any text, it can be incorporated into reading programs to improve reading achievement, and be used as an effective tool to improve achievement in science and mathematics. The work is intended to achieve both theoretical and research breakthroughs in four areas: (1) extend LSA to incorporate syntactic as well as semantic information; (2) extend the power and scope of LSA by advancing its conceptual and mathematical framework to include other psychological process models that handle phenomena such as metaphor and causal inferences; and (3) extend LSA to process transcriptions of natural continuous speech, enabling LSA to be used to teach comprehension of both read and spoken text by children who cannot write or type well enough to produce textual responses; and (4) demonstrate that these theoretical advances improve comprehension of speech and text by students in different grades, ethic backgrounds, and in different subjects doc14492 none This project seeks to develop dynamic multiple photon laser microscopic methods to non-invasively quantify plasmid retention, transfer, and expression within model bacterial biofilms. Recent literature has confirmed that adherent bacteria are phenotypically different than their freely suspended counterparts. Being bound within a biofilm may also enhance the segregational stability, expression, and rate of conjugative transfer of plasmid-DNA between bacteria. This is important since plasmid-bearing bacteria, in a biofilm, may transfer genes and phenotypes (e.g., disinfectant and antibiotic resistance, xenobiotic degradation capacity) more readily to neighboring bacteria. To date, little quantitative data exists regarding plasmid retention, transfer, and expression in mixed culture biofilm ecosystems. Specific aims are to: (1) Develop recombinant bacterial species and recombinant plasmid(s) that will allow non-invasive microscopic determination of areal concentrations of all biofilm inhabitants including plasmid-bearing hosts, plasmid-free recipients, and transconjugants in a developing model biofilm; (2) Evaluate the segregational and structural stability of the transfer recombinant plasmid in developing pure cultures; (3) Refine existing non-invasive microscopic methods to quantify plasmid retention and transfer within developing binary-and tertiary culture biofilms; and (4) Quantify plasmid transfer kinetics and heterologous gene expression within a model tertiary culture biofilm community as a function of environmental conditions (nutrient concentration, O2 concentration, pH), donor species (gram positive vs. gram negative), and donor fluid phase concentration doc14493 none This project will create and apply algorithms and software tools for on-line simulations that continuously (1) assimilate sensor data from dynamic physical processes, and (2) generate optimal strategies for their control. A number of critical industrial, scientific, and societal problems stand to benefit from this research such as aerodynamics, energy, geophysics, infrastructure, manufacturing, medicine, chemical process and environmental applications; two of these will be the focus of the current research. In these and many other cases, the underlying models have become capable of sufficient fidelity to yield meaningful predictions, provided unknown parameters (typically initial boundary conditions, material coefficients, sources, or geometry) can be estimated appropriately using observational data. The critical step is the solution of a large-scale nonlinear optimization problem that is constrained by the simulation equations, typically PDEs or their reduced order models. A data assimilation phase will seek to minimize the mismatch between sensor data and model-based predictions by adjusting unknown parameters of the PDE simulation, and the optimal control phase will find an optimal control strategy based on the updated model. Despite advances in hardware, networks, parallel PDE solvers, large-scale optimization algorithms, and real-time ODE optimization, significant algorithmic and software challenges must be overcome before the ultimate goal of real-time PDE data assimilation and optimal control can be realized. Needed are fundamentally new PDE optimization algorithms that must: (1) run sufficiently quickly to permit decision-making at time scales of interest; (2) scale to the large numbers of variables and constraints that characterize PDE optimization and processors that characterize high-end systems; (3) adjust to different solution accuracy requirements; (4) target time-dependent objectives and constraints; (5) tolerate incomplete, uncertain, or errant data; (6) be capable of bootstrapping current solutions; (7) yield meaningful results when terminated prematurely; and (8) be robust in the face of ill-posedness. To create, apply, and disseminate the enabling technologies for real-time PDE data assimilation and optimal control, the project will: (1) Develop algorithms and tools for real-time data assimilation and optimal control that meet the above specifications for a class of important applications. (2) Implement and publicly distribute these algorithms within an object-oriented framework that incorporates problem structure, interfaces easily with high performance PDE solver libraries fosters applicability of our tools to a broad range of real-time data assimilation and optimal control problems, and enables extension of the algorithms without interfering with applications. (3) Apply these algorithms and tools to two critical environmental and industrial problems: modeling and control of chemical vapor deposition (CVD) reactors and of wildland firespread. (4) Interact and work with other user communities to ensure that the algorithms and software we produce are useful across a broad range of applications doc14494 none Aitken The objective of the proposed research is to examine bacterial chemotaxis to organic contaminants. This research will examine if chemotaxis is a significant process with respect to overall biodegradation rates near nonaqueous-phase liquid sources. The importance of chemotaxis in the presence of multiple effectors on the biodegradation rate will be examined. Also, a model of chemotaxis flux will be further developed and validated. The results of this research could provide increased understanding of the relevant mechanisms that govern in situ biodegradation. This could help to quantify and predict biodegradation rates doc14495 none Bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) regulate many aspects of neural development and they are also neuroprotective in mature animals. It is, therefore, important to understand the mechanism of action of these neurotrophic factors. Previous studies of BMP signaling pathways have focused on the transcriptional activities of these proteins and have emphasized their ability to alter neural cell fate by inducing or repressing gene expression. Preliminary studies from this laboratory, however, indicate that BMPs can also induce rapid ( 1 second) changes in the conductance state of ionotropic glutamate receptors and that this occurs in both mature (adult human retinal) and developing (rat hippocampal) neural cell populations. Thus, there may be a second, parallel pathway for BMP signaling that acts independently of nuclear events and that alters neural function by acutely regulating existing ion channels in cultured neurons. The experiments in this project will characterize this pathway by comparing the effects of BMPs on the three types of ionotropic glutamate receptors and by determining whether BMPs also affect voltage-sensitive ion channels. In addition, the project will characterize the types of receptors mediating the effects of BMPs on glutamate receptors and will determine whether BMPs modulate glutamatergic synaptic transmission in tissue culture. It is anticipated that these experiments will substantially expand our knowledge of BMP signaling mechanisms and that they will also provide an initial assessment of the ability of BMPs to function as synaptic modulators doc14496 none ITR \(PE+SY\): Responsive Virtual Human Technology Research Responsive virtual human technology (RVHT) is used in diverse fields (computer generated forces, manufacturing, medicine, theater), but not for interaction skills training. Yet interaction skills are usually critical. Specific situations identified where improved interaction skills would be important include: Medical practitioners taking patient histories or interacting with children; Law officers handling crisis situations involving mental illness, trauma, or violence; and Military officers interviewing refugees or settling stressed civilians. This project will address multiple research issues relevant for RVHT to reach the sophistication required for robust interaction skills training. Important questions to be answered include: How is behavior modeled under normal conditions (i.e., a calm adult) and derivative conditions (e.g., anger, schizophrenia, pain, and childhood)? What expressions, gestures, movement, and other behaviors will users interpret as serene, angry, schizophrenic, pained, or childlike? What skills can be acquired, practiced, and validated using RVHT? What is involved in providing a convincing simulation of human interaction where acquired skills transfer to a live environment? The research results will expose a range of additional training and educational opportunities, such as interviewing risky behavior and presenting rare, traumatic events. Combinations of RVHT-based training and instructor-led training offer significantly reduced training development and delivery costs, and increased student throughput, while maintaining training effectiveness and consistency doc14497 none The Department of Mathematics at Eastern Illinois University will host a Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences Regional Conference during the week of June 9 through June 15, . The topic of the conference will be the dynamical behavior of the Newtonian N-body problem. The N-body problem is one of the oldest and most challenging problems in the history of mathematics requiring knowledge in dynamical systems, geometry, physics and analysis. Donald Saari, of the University of California-Irvine, will give a series of lectures on the history, present state and future outlook of the N-body problem. These lectures will be published by the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences doc14498 none The basic theoretical and empirical foci are the social impacts of information and communications technologies, especially the wired and wireless Internet, on individuals social and work lives in four institutional contexts-households, workplaces, governments, and schools - and on the four institutions themselves. The analyses are integrated by an interest in the ways in which ITs create information networks which enable individuals and work groups to engage in multiple functions from a particular contextual location and possibly to link these functions and these social institutions in novel ways. The project is grounded in the analysis of data gathered in field studies and in longitudinal surveys of more than 4,000 individuals in household, workplace and school samples from 16 localities distributed across the four U.S. regions. These systematic, empirical analyses will advance our scientific understanding of how IT use affects individuals across multiple roles within these networked institutions and will inform explanatory theories of IT-related change and transformation at the individual and organizational levels of analysis doc14499 none e are proposing to develop computational tools for researchers and students to model, visualize, and analyze historic and ancient sites. This proposal addresses four major scientific components to support this research. First, we are proposing new methods of creating complex, 3-D, photorealistic models of large sites. This includes a mobile robot sensing system that can be used as an intelligent sensing device over a large scale. Second, we are proposing to develop new methods to image below-ground data accurately and efficiently. These methods are especially suited to modeling the wealth of subsurface information at archaeological sites. Third, we will be developing new database technology to catalog and access a site s structures, artifacts, objects, and historical references. This will significantly improve a user s ability to query and analyze a site s information. Fourth, we have created a wearable augmented reality system for presenting georegistered information to mobile users, using overlaid graphics and sound. We will extend this system to create a new class of information visualization systems that integrate 3-D above- and below-ground models, 2-D images, text and other web-based resources to annotate the physical environment We will apply this system to support scientists in the field, as well to allow on-site and remote tours of historic and ancient sites. The research will utilize a local testbed, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, and a unique and important archaeological excavation at the Dakhleh Oasis in Egypt. The project will attract students and the public to the study of world heritage; provide an exceptional opportunity for active learning; and develop our ability to explore, analyze, critically evaluate and interpret material culture within historical contexts. The challenge is to bring the on-site experiences that develop these skills to the classroom and the public in general. Through critical inquiry and a variety of techniques, teachers and students can reconstruct examples of material culture to develop a complex understanding of the past. In this way, we can resist the temptation to replicate with new technologies what we have done successfully with other means and instead expand the possibilities for learning. Through learning in context, this project will bring together the primary sources of various fields and draw the social sciences out of the classroom into the historical milieu. This project will hopefully redefine the relationships among technology, faculty research and curriculum content. Most important, it will disseminate this information to as wide an audience as possible doc14500 none Real-time Environmental Observation and Forecasting Systems (EOFS) will revolutionize the way scientists share information about the environment and represent an opportunity to break traditional information barriers separating scientists from society at large. EOFS are already in use, but they tend to be small-scale, application- and domain- specific, stand-alone systems. There is a need for evolution towards multi-purpose shared systems designed to adapt flexibly to evolving needs of information consumers. What is required are large-scale, shared, heterogeneous distributed systems that make extensive use of diverse sensor-based inputs, sophisticated numerical simulations, mobile and embedded real-time system components, wireless and wired communications, high-performance computers, and high capacity storage systems. This ITR medium project has assembled an inter-disciplinary team, including computer science and environmental science researchers in addition to a heterogeneous base of pilot users. This group will collaborate to develop software technology which will enable EOFS to evolve efficiently, and to deliver quantifiably reliable information about the environment at the right time and in the right form to the right users. The project focus is on EOFS for estuarine and coastal regions. These regions are selected because they are highly variable natural systems subject to intense human activity and with great social, environmental, economic and cultural value. The research will include: i. Developing missing integration concepts and technologies for EOFS, with emphasis on quality-scalable information processing, storage and access (the computer science research). ii. Closing the loop between environmental models and sensors, and implementing a next generation EOFS based on an existing prototype for an estuary with multiple and often conflicting uses (the environmental observation and forecasting systems research); iii. Using, evaluating and refining the EOFS prototype for scientific discovery, natural resources stewardship and emergency response, thus incorporating sound science in operational and management decisions of critical regional importance and national significance (the environmental science and management applications); iv. Developing pilot multi-level, inter-disciplinary educational programs that cross-train young people, computer scientists, environmental scientists and practitioners in the conceptualization, development and use of environmental information technology (the education impact doc14501 none Patrikalakis, Nicholas M MIT ITR AP+IM: Poseidon- Rapid Real-Time Interdisciplinary Ocean Forecasting: Adaptive Sampling and Adaptive Modeling in a Distributed Environment Progress in understanding the complex coupled physics, biology and acoustics of the oceans is accelerating via research on realistic nonlinear multiscale interdisciplinary processes, interactions and variabilities. To cope with the variabilities of such economies in space and time, dynamical model structures must evolve during the prediction, i.e., by adaptive modeling. The objective of this project is to enable by an effective union of information technologies and ocean sciences, efficient mulitscale interdisciplinary ocean prediction with real-time objective adaptive sampling, assimilation of multiple streams of interdisciplinary data, and autonomous adaptive modeling doc14502 none This project is developing a Personalized Content Delivery System (PCDS) to promote and showcase NSDL materials and services, while at the same time collecting and disseminating information about the best new online SMET resources from outside the NSDL. Project objectives include: i) development of a set of current awareness services that deliver information about high quality, online SMET resources (from both NSDL projects and outside sources) to NSDL users in a fashion that best suits their needs; ii) extension and improvement of access to NSDL collections and services; iii) collaboration in the development of shared metadata across multiple disciplines; and iv) contribution to the overall digital library knowledge base by actively working with standard-setting bodies and organizations doc14503 none The objective of this project is to advance science in information management, focusing in particular on geospatial information. It addresses the development of concepts, algorithms, and system architectures to enable users on a grid to query, analyze, and contribute to multivariate, quality-aware geospatial information. The approach consists of three complementary research areas: (1) establishing a statistical framework for assessing geospatial data quality; (2) developing uncertainty-based query processing capabilities; and (3) supporting the development of space- and accuracy-aware adaptive systems for geospatial datasets. The results of this project will support the extension of the concept of the computational grid to facilitate ubiquitous access, interaction, and contributions of quality-aware next generation geospatial information. By developing novel query processes as well as quality and similarity metrics the project aims to enable the integration and use of large collections of disperse information of varying quality and accuracy. This supports the evolution of a novel geocomputational paradigm, moving away from current standards-driven approaches to an inclusive, adaptive system, with example potential applications in mobile computing, bioinformatics, and geographic information systems. This experimental research is linked to educational activities in three different academic programs among the three participating sites. The outreach activities of this project include collaboration with U.S. federal agencies involved in geospatial data collection, an international partner (Brazil s National Institute for Space Research), and the organization of a 2-day workshop with the participation of U.S. and international experts doc14504 none Roberto Car and Annabella Selloni of Princeton University are supported under the Information Technology Research Program (ITR) by the Division of Chemistry, the Division of Materials Research, and the Division of Advanced Computational Infrastructure and Research to make ab initio molecular dynamics simulations more effective and more accessible on high performance computing platforms. Co-PI s include Josep Torrellas and Laxmikant Kale of University of Illinois, Michael Klein of the University of Pennsylvania, Mark Tuckerman of New York University, Glenn Martyna of Indiana University, and Nicholas Nystrom of Carnegie Mellon University (via collaborative proposals , , , , and , respectively). This team of computational chemists and computer scientists will develop new efficient and high accuracy methods, extensible open source software modules with desirable scaling properties, and novel hardware designs that will enable modeling of complex events and environments of interest to chemistry, materials science and engineering, geoscience, and biology. Information technology (IT) has transformed computational science to the extent that realistic, atom-based simulations of key processes in chemistry, nanoscience and engineering, and biology can now be addressed using highly accurate simulations. This research can potentially impact the design of polymer-generating catalysts, nanoscale electronic devices, and artificial biomimetic catalysts doc14505 none This project is developing and analyzing algorithms to solve problems of communication and data sharing in highly dynamic distributed environments such as found in networks of mobile and embedded devices. The term dynamic here encompasses many types of changes, including changing network topology, processor mobility, changing sets of participating client processes, a wide range of types of processor and network failures, and timing variations. The properties being studied include ordering and reliability guarantees for communication and coherence guarantees for data sharing. The algorithmic results are accompanied by lower bound and impossibility results, which describe inherent limitations on what problems can be solved, and at what cost. This is particulary important in the networks of embedded devices that need to operate subject to the resource constraints such limited battery power, storage capacity, communication bandwidth and computation power. The communication and data-sharing problems to be solved are viewed as high level global services, which span network locations. These services generally provide performance and fault-tolerance guarantees, conditioned on assumptions about the behavior of the environment and of the underlying network substrate. Traditionally, research on distributed services has emphasized specification and correctness, while research on distributed algorithms has emphasized complexity and performance. This project combines and synthesizes these two concerns: It yields algorithms that perform efficiently and degrade gracefully in dynamic distributed systems, and whose correctness, performance, and fault-tolerance guarantees are expressed by precisely-defined global services. Because the setting is so complex, the algorithms are also be very complex, which means that it it is necessary to decompose them into smaller, more manageable pieces. In this project, many of those smaller pieces are being viewed as lower-level, auxiliary global services. These auxiliary services provide lower-level communication and data-sharing capabilities, plus other capabilities such as failure detection, progress detection, consensus, group membership, leader election, reconfiguration, resource allocation, workload distribution, location determination, and routing. This work is being carried out in terms of a mathematical framework based on interacting state machines. The state machines include features to express issues of timing, continuous behavior, and probabilistic behavior. The theoretical work in this project is guided by the requirements of systems that include networks of mobile and embedded devices and examples chosen from several prototype applications, including distributed file management, information collection and dissemination, computer-supported cooperative work, distributed games, and multimedia transmission doc14506 none This is a research project in the design and implementation of novel Human Computer Interfaces for educational use in structural molecular biology. This project will explore, define, and assess the role of computer-generated physical models in teaching scientific content and concepts. The purpose is to enhance the understanding and communication of the complex world of life s molecular machinery to a broad community. Using structural data on biological molecules and their complexes, the participants will prototype novel physical models via automated design and fabrication technologies and develop replication processes for broader distribution. The models will be used directly for enhance visualization and as input output devices that interactively integrate with commutation and computer graphics for information retrieval, manipulation, and simulation. This project will provide new, tangible modes of interacting with, and understanding of, both the fundamental concepts and the complex data that are coming from the rapid advances in genomics, proteomics, and other areas of structural molecular biology. It will enable a broad range of students to learn, query, and explore in a field of growing scientific and social importance - the molecular basis of life. Physical models will give both haptic and visual support of the importance of shape in biological function. Use of physical models as tangible computer interfaces will revolutionize how students explore and understand biomolecular structure, interaction, and function doc14507 none The conference is to cover the topic of Nonhomogenous Harmonic Analysis . The principal lecturer will be Sasha Volberg. He will show how the Bellman technique from the area of Operations Research can be modified to solve many difficult problems in the area noted. He will in particular address deep questions to Calderon-Zygmund kernels, Tb theorems, two weight problems, capacity problems, some questions in Quasi-conformal mappings as well as several other topics. The material will cover the topics in the most general settings (i.e. R^n), non-regular measures, etc doc14508 none We propose to organize yearly, intensive six-week research workshops at Johns Hopkins University, focusing on Language Engineering, including the mutually related areas of automatic speech recognition and synthesis, natural language processing, machine translation, information extraction and summarization. Applications of language engineering techniques to other domains such as language instruction or bioinformatics will also be appropriate workshop topics. These workshops will bring together teams of leading professionals and graduate and undergraduate students in a cooperative effort to advance the state of the art. The first goal of the proposed workshop series is to establish new research directions in Language Engineering. The second goal is to attract students to the field and to offer them an intensive hands-on mentored research education. The third is to engender extensive cross-fertilization between researchers distributed across industrial, academic and government institutions, forging intensive links in the 6-week summer period and offering a shared research environment for follow-on collaborative work. To ensure that the projects address current problems in the state of the art, each year an open call for workshop project proposals will be issued to researchers in the worldwide language engineering community. The proposals received will be evaluated competitively at planning meetings held each year. The meetings will draw together project proponents, government representatives, and experts from related fields to assess the viability and promise of the proposals and to identify three candidate projects for the summer workshop. Throughout this process of soliciting proposals and recruiting the personnel to carry them out, we will make a diligent attempt to include researchers from under-represented institutions and communities doc14509 none Primates use diverse sensory channels in their communication among social partners, ranging from the pungent urine washing of ring-tailed lemurs to the flamboyant lip flip gesture of gelada baboons to the complex rhythms of human speech. These signals are often highly nuanced and produced in a flexible, context-sensitive manner. Since the nervous system has a central role in the planning and execution of communicative behavior, one would expect significant species differences in the brain structures that subserve communication. To date, however, little is known about species differences in the brain s control of the orofacial system that is so vital to the production of facial expression and vocalization. This research project will contribute to our knowledge of the neural substrates underlying two important transformations in the evolution of primate communication: (1) the more dominant use of facial expressions among great apes and humans, and (2) the skilled use of the tongue and lips in the service of human spoken language. In a sample that includes New World monkeys, Old World monkeys, apes, and humans, brainstem regions that directly supply the muscles of facial expression and the tongue will be analyzed using techniques to reveal their chemical composition and cellular structure. The results of this study will help to clarify how neural organization determines species-specific communicative signals, including human speech, and will provide insights into the evolution of the primate brain doc14510 none Tele-immersion, an ability to share presence with distant individuals, situations, and environments, may provide vast new possibilities for human experience and interaction in the near future. In order to make these dreams a reality, a host of technical difficulties must be solved: acquisition, communication, display, and interaction. This project focuses on answering two of the major questions: 1) Is tele-immersion as good as its promise or is there some inherent weakness? By using overwhelming computation power, the PI hopes to accelerate development so a real system can be tried within three years. 2) Is there a show-stopper with tele-immersion over long distances? The PI will try it for real, not just simulated distance via artificial delays. Specifically, the PI will build a 60-camera system at the University of Pennsylvania, compute depth on the -processor Terascale Computing System at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and display at the University of North Carolina. The PI will have a more modest acquisition system at UNC (15 cameras) and a more modest display system at UPenn to enable local development and two-way collaboration. The testbed application will be remote medical consultation by a trauma surgeon, chosen because of its inherent demand for real-time response and its great potential benefit to societal. The PI expects to be able to provide demonstrable progress within the three year period of the project. Team members who are leading trauma surgeons will guide the design; evaluation will be by other trauma surgeons. The three years of effort will lead to a testable prototype with sufficient power and scope to be evaluated by application experts not on the research team. The results will indicate the likely success of other tele-immersion applications, as well as providing experience in building real-time applications on a remote terascale facility over fast wide-area networks doc14511 none Goodman The goals of this project are to explore the development of a data model that will define the abstract set of rules to permit the National Virtual Observatory (NVO) to operate on large, diverse data sets. The project is part of the larger US astronomy effort to build an NVO. The National Academy of Sciences Decadal Survey of Astronomy ( ) strongly endorsed the NVO project and recommended that both NSF and NASA fund it. This project is one of the important first steps in the NVO. The rudiments of a well-defined data model must be in place before extensive development can begin on the access engine for the NVO, and the access engine must be in place before extensive development of the final, science-driven, analysis tools can be carried out. Since, however, the development of a data model, an access engine, and analysis tools can not be done successfully as a sequential process, there must be testing and redevelopment of each aspect of the NVO at every stage in an iterative process with analysis tools, access engine, and data model tested together and then re-engineered to fit the final science drivers. The scientists and computer specialists involved in this particular project have access to a wide-range of different data (from X-ray to radio) in their local community and plan to use these different data as a testing ground for an experimental data model. This project has been funded as an initial development test, for two years, to assure that it will maintain the flexibility needed to re-engineer the data model in the light of future developmental challenges doc14512 none The MavHome project views a smart home as an intelligent agent, which is able to perceive its environment through the use of sensors and act upon the environment through the use of actuators. The home has overall goals, such as minimizing the cost of maintaining the home and maximizing the comfort and productivity of its inhabitants. In order to meet these goals, the house must be able to reason about and adapt to information using knowledge about databases, machine learning, multiagent systems, robotics, smart sensors, wireless mobile computing, and multimedia computing. Smart homes can potentially minimize home operating costs in a time when utilities fees are becoming prohibitive, and can assist individuals with disabilities to lead independent lives. Through the university visitor program, minority recruitment, course development, and dissemination of results, the project will impact research and education in the area of smart space technologies doc14513 none Extinct West Indian Vertebrates on the World Wide Web: A Digital Museum for Geoscience Conservation, Education and Research This is a pilot project, focusing on the extinct vertebrates of Puerto Rico. The project assembles and disseminates interactive, digital library of late Quaternary extinct vertebrates from the West Indies, an expansion of a decade-long research and education program. The late Quaternary history of West Indian vertebrates, especially mammals, is of special interest because it is dominated by a wave of extinctions unprecedented elsewhere. West Indian Quaternary vertebrate fossils are preserved almost exclusively in caves. High human population densities in the Caribbean are significantly impacting caves, with the irreplaceable loss of both paleontological and paleoclimatic evidence. The survival and elucidation of the paleoecological and paleoclimatic archive in West Indian caves depends on a collaboration of local scientists, amateur natural historians, cavers and informed members of the general public. Participation by these diverse interest groups is severely limited by a lack of access to comparative materials, which for practical and historic reasons have generally been accessioned into the collections of the major museums in the United States. This project makes these materials widely available in digital form, via both the World-Wide-Web and distribution on CD-ROM Methods doc14514 none This NSF-CBMS Regional Conference in the Mathematical Sciences on `Numerical Methods in Forward and Inverse Electromagnetic Scattering at the Department of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Colorado School of Mines will be held June 3 to June 7, . The principal lecturer will be Professor Peter Monk of the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Delaware. The theme of his ten lectures will be Maxwell s equations, and methods for their solution. This classical topic still offers many challenges today, especially as the need to solve Maxwell s equations has increased rapidly in recent years with applications including electromagnetic compatibility testing (to ensure different components like a car generator and electronic control unit do not interfere with one another) and safety (for example predicting the effects of cell phones on users), as well as familiar applications such as radar. Topics covered will include: variational methods for cavity problems; finite elements and their application to cavity problems; coupling between finite elements and boundary integral equations; perfectly matched layers; adaptive methods; and methods for solving various inverse problems, such as locating obstacles doc14504 none Roberto Car and Annabella Selloni of Princeton University are supported under the Information Technology Research Program (ITR) by the Division of Chemistry, the Division of Materials Research, and the Division of Advanced Computational Infrastructure and Research to make ab initio molecular dynamics simulations more effective and more accessible on high performance computing platforms. Co-PI s include Josep Torrellas and Laxmikant Kale of University of Illinois, Michael Klein of the University of Pennsylvania, Mark Tuckerman of New York University, Glenn Martyna of Indiana University, and Nicholas Nystrom of Carnegie Mellon University (via collaborative proposals , , , , and , respectively). This team of computational chemists and computer scientists will develop new efficient and high accuracy methods, extensible open source software modules with desirable scaling properties, and novel hardware designs that will enable modeling of complex events and environments of interest to chemistry, materials science and engineering, geoscience, and biology. Information technology (IT) has transformed computational science to the extent that realistic, atom-based simulations of key processes in chemistry, nanoscience and engineering, and biology can now be addressed using highly accurate simulations. This research can potentially impact the design of polymer-generating catalysts, nanoscale electronic devices, and artificial biomimetic catalysts doc14516 none The proposed research site is an extension to the current active Industry University Cooperative Research Center entitled: Repair of Buildings and Bridges with Composites (RB2C) located at the University of Missouri-Rolla (UMR). The Research Site of the Center, at North Carolina State University will focus on addressing the needs of the construction industry in development of new innovative structural components and systems using advanced composite materials doc14517 none A modular system for ocean data assimilation has recently been developed. It has already been implemented in an unsophisticated way, with a variety of models of the ocean and the coupled ocean-atmosphere. This project will enhance the system using Information Technology, including modern software engineering concepts, new visualization techniques and interactive web-based training. Together with effective outreach and advanced optimization algorithms, these elements of IT will be linked through the modular system to a wide range of coastal, basin-scale and global ocean models. Variational data assimilation is also coming into use in operational weather forecasting and ocean forecasting, in ocean biogeochemistry, in groundwater hydrology and in solid-earth geophysics. The new modular system will thus be of immediate benefit throughout the geosciences. The team includes 14 physical oceanographers, civil engineers and computer scientists in six universities, a national laboratory, and private industry. The project is funded under the Information Technology Research Initiative doc14518 none Webb The investigation of a new class of diffractive structures having optimized irregular wavelength-scale elements is proposed. One interpretation of this class of structures is as a generalized photonic bandgap system, either within a waveguide or in unbounded media. While the characteristics of photonic bandgap structures, being based on classical periodic systems, is well known, the physical characteristics (attributes, limitations etc.) of irregular structures are essentially unknown. Webb introduced the concept of compact, wavelength-scale irregular field transformation elements in the context of a microwave mode converter, showed spectacular performance, a dramatic reduction in size, and increased functionality relative to traditional periodic (perturbation) approaches, and fabricated and tested an example. Generalized interpretations of this new class of diffractive structures offer tremendous application potential, such as revolutionary broad area vertical cavity surface emitting laser diode mode control and optical fiber wavelength division multiplexing elements, once the physics and synthesis approaches are taken from the current anecdotal stage to a more fundamental level of understanding. It is the purpose of this proposed research effort to do just that by addressing the following two objectives. o Physical Characteristics and Performance Metrics: The PI proposes to investigate the attributes of irregular, sub-wavelength diffractive structures, synthesized using a nonlinear optimization algorithm coupled to a forward numerical electromagnetic solver, in order to develop the phys-ical understanding necessary to exploit a variety of possible applications. He will study field control using wavelength-scale structures having conducting and or refractive index variations in waveguide arid unbounded media systems that utilize evanescent field. Using a functional metric for the required field transformation, search algorithms will be developed and sensitivity analyses to degrees of freedom, wavelength and input field performed. o Synthesis: Nonlinear optimization techniques, while widely applied in areas such as imaging and signal processing, are not well developed for the synthesis of electromagnetic structures. The PI used a relatively simple multi-resolution algorithm in the design of irregular waveguide mode converters. He proposes the development of more rigorous and efficient synthesis tech-niques suitable for irregular diffractive structures by studying both continuous and discrete optimization approaches doc14519 none Borning, Alan University of Washington ITR PE: Interaction and Participation in Integrated Urban Land Use, Transportation, and Environmental Modeling Patterns of land use and transportation play a critical role in determining the economic vitality, livability, and sustainability of urban areas. Transportation interacts strongly with land use: different kinds of transportation systems induce different patterns of land use, while at the same time, different kinds of land use induce demands for different kinds of transportation systems. Both have significant environmental effects. This integrated research program will support the construction and deployment of sophisticated models of land use, transportation, and environmental impact. The goal is to provide tools for stakeholders, such as urban planners, government staff, and citizens groups, to help predict future patterns of urban development under different possible scenarios over periods of twenty or more years, allowing them to make more informed choices. Anticipated scientific advances include: in human-computer interaction, more effective ways of understanding the results from and interacting with complex simulations, and ways of linking stakeholder values with design choices in simulations and their interfaces; in graphics, capabilities for producing simulated street-level animations of urban environments from a policy-driven simulation; and in software engineering, new software structures that allow us to design, integrate, and evolve complex and diverse urban submodels doc14520 none This project will develop a social intelligence capability for computers, for use in educational software applications. Social intelligence plays a critical role in human tutoring and teaching. By modeling social intelligence in software it should be possible to create educational software that is aware of the learners attitudes, that interacts harmoniously and responds to learner needs, that is able to develop rapport with learners, and that uses responsiveness and rapport to influence learner motivation. This could be particularly valuable for learners who have motivational problems such as low self-confidence. The social intelligence model will be realized in an animated pedagogical agent, that uses a combination of speech and nonverbal gestures, that can express emotions and attitudes, and that reacts to and adapts to learners over time. It will respond to a variety of learner inputs, including learner performance on assigned problems, conversational dialog, and eye gaze and facial expressions recognized using computer vision techniques. The model will be applied in the context of the Virtual Factory Teaching System, a simulation-based learning system for teaching industrial engineering concepts. The effectiveness of the model will be tested by comparing learner performance with and without the assistance of a socially intelligent agent doc14486 none A modular system for ocean data assimilation has recently been developed. It has already been implemented in an unsophisticated way, with a variety of models of the ocean and the coupled ocean-atmosphere. This project will enhance the system using Information Technology, including modern software engineering concepts, new visualization techniques and interactive web-based training. Together with effective outreach and advanced optimization algorithms, these elements of IT will be linked through the modular system to a wide range of coastal, basin-scale and global ocean models. Variational data assimilation is also coming into use in operational weather forecasting and ocean forecasting, in ocean biogeochemistry, in groundwater hydrology and in solid-earth geophysics. The new modular system will thus be of immediate benefit throughout the geosciences. The team includes 14 physical oceanographers, civil engineers and computer scientists in six universities, a national laboratory, and private industry. The project is funded under the Information Technology Research Initiative doc14522 none M. Wu, Occidental College It is proposed to carry out experimental studies to extend our understanding of the physical mechanisms responsible for the instabilities in the path of rising air bubbles in a liquid. Such motion is encountered in a number of industrial processes and geophysical phenomena. The PI proposes to develop a novel three-dimensional imaging system that would allow precise measurements of the bubble trajectories in the neighborhood of the instability point. Results of some preliminary experiments show two distinct paths of rise depending on the rising velocity. It is expected that with the 3D imaging system, more accurate data will be obtained doc14523 none The explosive popularity and exponentially increasing scale of the World Wide Web has severely stressed the Internet s content-delivery infrastructure. This stress has begun to expose the inefficiencies and limitations of the Web s traditional client-server architecture. A progression of new mechanisms and alternative architectures have recently appeared, including content delivery networks (CDNs), such as Akamai, and peer-to-peer overlay networks, such as Napster. Despite the rapid deployment and global use of these architectures, however, little is understood about their behavior in many cases. The goals of this research project are threefold. First, the effectiveness of existing Internet content-delivery architectures will be quantitatively analyzed, specifically focusing on (1) cache infrastructure, (2) content-delivery networks, and (3) peer-to-peer networks. Second, based upon these measurements, the design of new or enhanced architectures for Web content delivery will be explored. Third, new designs will be implemented, deployed, and measured. One particular focus will be the design and implementation of adaptive systems that make heavy use of self-measurement and on-line algorithms, e.g., to dynamically optimize request routing, content placement, or the topology of the peer-to-peer overlay network. Overall, the hope is to increase the understanding of content-delivery architectures and to develop new content-delivery mechanisms that greatly improve the behavior of the Internet doc14506 none This is a research project in the design and implementation of novel Human Computer Interfaces for educational use in structural molecular biology. This project will explore, define, and assess the role of computer-generated physical models in teaching scientific content and concepts. The purpose is to enhance the understanding and communication of the complex world of life s molecular machinery to a broad community. Using structural data on biological molecules and their complexes, the participants will prototype novel physical models via automated design and fabrication technologies and develop replication processes for broader distribution. The models will be used directly for enhance visualization and as input output devices that interactively integrate with commutation and computer graphics for information retrieval, manipulation, and simulation. This project will provide new, tangible modes of interacting with, and understanding of, both the fundamental concepts and the complex data that are coming from the rapid advances in genomics, proteomics, and other areas of structural molecular biology. It will enable a broad range of students to learn, query, and explore in a field of growing scientific and social importance - the molecular basis of life. Physical models will give both haptic and visual support of the importance of shape in biological function. Use of physical models as tangible computer interfaces will revolutionize how students explore and understand biomolecular structure, interaction, and function doc14525 none Tanimoto, Steven University of Washington ITR PE: A Learning Environment for Information Technology Concepts Using Intensive, Unobtrusive Assessment Although many learning environments have been developed that effectively engage students in assembling computational objects, simulations, or mathematical constructions, for the most part these systems fail to take pedagogical advantage of the wealth of assessment-related data that results from the fact that the students are working on computers. This is due less to the newness of these environments than to the challenges of effectively utilizing the event logs, student writing, and student constructions as evidence of cognitive state, learning preferences, and skills. We propose to integrate and extend two software systems for online education in order to perform a series of experiments that assess the impact of using intensive, unobtrusive assessment tightly integrated with a constructive learning environment upon learning outcomes and efficiencies. The integrated learning environment will be tested primarily with University of Washington freshmen but also with Mercer Island High School seniors, in problem solving and construction activities involving digital image representation and processing, web-based communication, and computer programming. The students writing, online constructions, online sketches and computer-generated activity logs will be analyzed using a combination of computer-assisted and automated mark-up. The results of mark-up will trigger pedagogical recommendations to instructors, and in some cases, directly to the students. Such interventions may take a variety of forms; for example, a group of students stuck at the point of frustration in solving some problem may benefit by having a key step, performed well by a student in another group, called to their attention. Our objective will be to determine effective methods both for extracting pedagogically useful information from the products and byproducts of online learning and for designing the instruction to enable and benefit from the use of this information doc14526 none Van Veen Characterization of propagation in the near THz band has been limited to scalar absorption measurements having low spectral resolution. As with cellular and PCS bands, this level of knowledge is grossly inadequate to assess communication system performance and design. The PIs will perform initial measurements and modeling of transmission, multipath scattering, and fading effects in the near-THz band to set the stage for a more comprehensive proposal and effort to develop communications techniques that exploit the unique and substantial opportunity this band offers. The proposed measurements will help them identify suitable environments and ranges for communication using the near THz band. They also expect to gain insight on the nature of transmitter and receiver structures that will be required to obtain acceptable performance doc14504 none Roberto Car and Annabella Selloni of Princeton University are supported under the Information Technology Research Program (ITR) by the Division of Chemistry, the Division of Materials Research, and the Division of Advanced Computational Infrastructure and Research to make ab initio molecular dynamics simulations more effective and more accessible on high performance computing platforms. Co-PI s include Josep Torrellas and Laxmikant Kale of University of Illinois, Michael Klein of the University of Pennsylvania, Mark Tuckerman of New York University, Glenn Martyna of Indiana University, and Nicholas Nystrom of Carnegie Mellon University (via collaborative proposals , , , , and , respectively). This team of computational chemists and computer scientists will develop new efficient and high accuracy methods, extensible open source software modules with desirable scaling properties, and novel hardware designs that will enable modeling of complex events and environments of interest to chemistry, materials science and engineering, geoscience, and biology. Information technology (IT) has transformed computational science to the extent that realistic, atom-based simulations of key processes in chemistry, nanoscience and engineering, and biology can now be addressed using highly accurate simulations. This research can potentially impact the design of polymer-generating catalysts, nanoscale electronic devices, and artificial biomimetic catalysts doc14493 none This project will create and apply algorithms and software tools for on-line simulations that continuously (1) assimilate sensor data from dynamic physical processes, and (2) generate optimal strategies for their control. A number of critical industrial, scientific, and societal problems stand to benefit from this research such as aerodynamics, energy, geophysics, infrastructure, manufacturing, medicine, chemical process and environmental applications; two of these will be the focus of the current research. In these and many other cases, the underlying models have become capable of sufficient fidelity to yield meaningful predictions, provided unknown parameters (typically initial boundary conditions, material coefficients, sources, or geometry) can be estimated appropriately using observational data. The critical step is the solution of a large-scale nonlinear optimization problem that is constrained by the simulation equations, typically PDEs or their reduced order models. A data assimilation phase will seek to minimize the mismatch between sensor data and model-based predictions by adjusting unknown parameters of the PDE simulation, and the optimal control phase will find an optimal control strategy based on the updated model. Despite advances in hardware, networks, parallel PDE solvers, large-scale optimization algorithms, and real-time ODE optimization, significant algorithmic and software challenges must be overcome before the ultimate goal of real-time PDE data assimilation and optimal control can be realized. Needed are fundamentally new PDE optimization algorithms that must: (1) run sufficiently quickly to permit decision-making at time scales of interest; (2) scale to the large numbers of variables and constraints that characterize PDE optimization and processors that characterize high-end systems; (3) adjust to different solution accuracy requirements; (4) target time-dependent objectives and constraints; (5) tolerate incomplete, uncertain, or errant data; (6) be capable of bootstrapping current solutions; (7) yield meaningful results when terminated prematurely; and (8) be robust in the face of ill-posedness. To create, apply, and disseminate the enabling technologies for real-time PDE data assimilation and optimal control, the project will: (1) Develop algorithms and tools for real-time data assimilation and optimal control that meet the above specifications for a class of important applications. (2) Implement and publicly distribute these algorithms within an object-oriented framework that incorporates problem structure, interfaces easily with high performance PDE solver libraries fosters applicability of our tools to a broad range of real-time data assimilation and optimal control problems, and enables extension of the algorithms without interfering with applications. (3) Apply these algorithms and tools to two critical environmental and industrial problems: modeling and control of chemical vapor deposition (CVD) reactors and of wildland firespread. (4) Interact and work with other user communities to ensure that the algorithms and software we produce are useful across a broad range of applications doc14529 none This award is the result of a proposal submitted to the Information Technology Research (ITR) Initiative. The grant is being funded jointly by the Divisions of Materials Research, Chemistry, Biological Infrastructure and Molecular and Cellular Biosciences. Large-scale electronic structure and atomistic simulations have proven themselves to be essential in advancing our understanding of the complex physical and chemical transformations undertaken by biomolecules in carrying out their cellular functions. The breathtaking progress in computer performance and recent advances in algorithms for molecular simulations systems are opening unprecedented opportunities to investigate the biomolecular processes in silico, i.e., by accurate modeling of fundamental natural laws and processes through their computer representations. The overarching goal of this project is to seize this opportunity and develop a set of computational methods and tools which will achieve a qualitatively new level of usefulness, flexibility, accuracy and scientific impact. These goals will be achieved by combining significant new developments of both quantum and classical simulation methods, exploring their interoperabilities, and by the exploitation of parallelism and recent algorithmic advances. Realistic biomolecular simulations are notoriously difficult because they typically involve very large and complex mamcromolecules such as DNA or proteins, which need to be simulated in a proper solvent environment. While ideally one would like to describe biomolecules and all their transformations with ab initio accuracy, this is clearly an unreasonable goal given the computational demands of such simulations. What is, however, well within reach is an integrated multiscale approach that treats different parts of the biomolecular system with differing levels of accuracy, depending on their imporatnce. For instance, in order to understand enzymatic reactions, there is a need to understand the structure and chemistry of the complex reaction centers built up by the three-dimensional folding of proteins as accurately as possible. Our strategy is to decompose the large system into a set of overlapping nested regions, using an appropriate physical representation (quantum, classical, or continuum) and to develop interfaces that provides a physically consistent description and keeps the fundamental physical laws intact. To achieve these goals we aim to develop a set of modular tools for biomolecular simulations which treat parts of the system at a quantum, classical atomistic or continuum level, as needed for efficient studies of large moelcular complexes. At the quantum level, we will treat the system with a combination of quantum Monte Carlo (QMC), quantum chemical post-Hartree-Fock and density functional methods (DFT). At an intermediate level, calssical molecular dynamics with empirical force fields will be used, while continuum methods may serve to describe the large length-scale properties of the solvent environment. In order to build such tools, substantial algorithmic improvements to current methods need to be developed at each level of the physical representation, along with proper interfaces between the different descriptions of the system. The most important innovative features of our approach will be the following: (i) the unprecedented use of the highly accurate QMC approach and its new developments for biological simulations; (ii) at a density functional level, algorithmic improvements will enable routine calculations of thousands of atoms including quantum molecular dynamics, and also dynamically call the QMC approach for checking the accuracy of the DFT functionals in problematic cases; (iii) the electrostatic interactions will be treated in a highly accurate manner in the classical mechanics regions, with the implementation of point multipolar expansions, polarizabilities and low-order continuous wavefunctions, which will provide a robust interface between the quantum and classical regions; (iv) the codes will be based on real-space grids as these enable true O(N) scaling on parallel machines, are more flexible in terms of boundary conditions, and allow for additional gains in accuracy, while preserving stability, via the introduction of non-uniform grids; (v) our methodology relies on proven multigrid methods that allow for an accelerated convergence to the proper solution on different length scales; (vi) the codes will be developed under an Open Source GPL license and made available to the public as add-on packages to existing codes, such as AMBER; (vii) the codes will be scalable and portable, running on both massively parallel supercomputers and workstations. They will use modern Web-based technologies for providing access to simulations and their results. The new capabilities will enable us to attack key challenges and paradigmatic biomolecular problems, such as enzymatic reactions, blood coagulation proteins, and others, both as a part of our ITR program and through the efforts of the scientific community at large. Ultimately, we will distribute our codes freely to the biosimulation community via the GPL license in order to achieve a wide spread dissemination of results and maximum scientific impact. In addition to the research goals, this program has considerable educational goals, aimed at developing a set of interdisciplinary modern courses that will generate student interest and excitement about computational and simulation science and technology. Toward this end, we will develop a curriculum for the Center for High Performance Supercomputing being currently formed at NCSU, build a set of educational tools which will be introduced and disseminated during summer workshops for students and postdocs doc14504 none Roberto Car and Annabella Selloni of Princeton University are supported under the Information Technology Research Program (ITR) by the Division of Chemistry, the Division of Materials Research, and the Division of Advanced Computational Infrastructure and Research to make ab initio molecular dynamics simulations more effective and more accessible on high performance computing platforms. Co-PI s include Josep Torrellas and Laxmikant Kale of University of Illinois, Michael Klein of the University of Pennsylvania, Mark Tuckerman of New York University, Glenn Martyna of Indiana University, and Nicholas Nystrom of Carnegie Mellon University (via collaborative proposals , , , , and , respectively). This team of computational chemists and computer scientists will develop new efficient and high accuracy methods, extensible open source software modules with desirable scaling properties, and novel hardware designs that will enable modeling of complex events and environments of interest to chemistry, materials science and engineering, geoscience, and biology. Information technology (IT) has transformed computational science to the extent that realistic, atom-based simulations of key processes in chemistry, nanoscience and engineering, and biology can now be addressed using highly accurate simulations. This research can potentially impact the design of polymer-generating catalysts, nanoscale electronic devices, and artificial biomimetic catalysts doc14531 none Alivisatos, Paul University of California-Berkeley Collaborative Prosposal-ITR SY: Molecular Computational with Automated Microfluide Sensors\(MCAMS\) The main objective of this cross-disciplinary project between Princeton University, Stanford University and UC Berkeley is to combine microfluidic technology with recently-developed algorithms of RNA-based computing to create a compact, automated nucelotide-based computational device capable of rapid detection of the computational output. Realization of such a device would greatly impact not only the field of molecular computing but also the general field of molecular biology, as the proposed platform technologies would provide novel, advanced tools for biological research. The project is addressing three main questions: - Can a microfluidic device be used to automate RNA-based computation? - Can alternative detection methods be used to avoid labor-intensive readout steps in RNA-based computation? -Can these detection methods be applied to other problems encountered in general biological v research? The success of this project will represent a leap forward in the direction of hands-free molecular computation. In addition, it will provide the necessary platform technologies to accelerate biological research, particularly in the areas of rapid DNA sequencing and fingerprinting doc14504 none Roberto Car and Annabella Selloni of Princeton University are supported under the Information Technology Research Program (ITR) by the Division of Chemistry, the Division of Materials Research, and the Division of Advanced Computational Infrastructure and Research to make ab initio molecular dynamics simulations more effective and more accessible on high performance computing platforms. Co-PI s include Josep Torrellas and Laxmikant Kale of University of Illinois, Michael Klein of the University of Pennsylvania, Mark Tuckerman of New York University, Glenn Martyna of Indiana University, and Nicholas Nystrom of Carnegie Mellon University (via collaborative proposals , , , , and , respectively). This team of computational chemists and computer scientists will develop new efficient and high accuracy methods, extensible open source software modules with desirable scaling properties, and novel hardware designs that will enable modeling of complex events and environments of interest to chemistry, materials science and engineering, geoscience, and biology. Information technology (IT) has transformed computational science to the extent that realistic, atom-based simulations of key processes in chemistry, nanoscience and engineering, and biology can now be addressed using highly accurate simulations. This research can potentially impact the design of polymer-generating catalysts, nanoscale electronic devices, and artificial biomimetic catalysts doc14533 none Moret, Bernard M University of New Mexico Collaborative Research: ITR AP: Reconstructing Complex Evolutionary Histories Reconstruction of the evolutionary history of a group of organisms has changed the face of biology and is being used increasingly in drug discovery, epidemiology, and genetic engineering. Unfortunately, such reconstructions typically involve solving difficult optimization problems, so that even moderately large datasets can require months to years of computation. In addition, almost all evolutionary reconstructions presently assume that the historical pattern is one of strict divergence that can be represented by a binary tree. This assumption is frequently violated, especially by plants which often hybridize readily and thus produce networks of relationships. This project brings together computer scientists and biologists from two institutions to develop new models and algorithms to address these two problems. Successful completion of this project will have an enormous impact by providing tools for reconstructing phylogenies of large datasets, and the first tools for inferring network models of evolution appropriate to hybridizing speciation. Such network models will alter how biologists think about speciation, while the development of methods for large-scale analyses will strongly benefit medical and pharmaceutical practice. Information technology will be advanced in fundamental ways as well, as the project will demonstrate how algorithm design and high-performance algorithm engineering can jointly solve very difficult discrete optimization problems doc14534 none A group of Mechanical Engineering Department Heads proposes to hold a 2-day workshop to develop new ideas by which to broaden the basis upon which mechanical engineering profession has relied. The goal of the workshop is the redefine the field of mechanical engineering by increasing the breadth of mechanical engineering from one that is traditionally based on physics to one that is based also on other fields of science and engineering, such as biological sciences, information technology, material science, and medicine. The changing nature of engineering, one that no longer has clear demarcations or boundaries with other disciplines and technologies, requires new emphasis in mechanical engineering on areas of research and education that have not been considered as part of the traditional discipline. The objective of the workshop is to explore ways by which we can make mechanical engineering education and research more responsive to the changes in other technologies and disciplines, and also make it more attractive to the best and the brightest, including women and traditionally under-represented, groups of students and faculty doc14535 none Ponnuswamy Sadayappan of Ohio State is supported by the Chemistry Division under the Information Technology Research (ITR) program to develop program synthesis tools that will facilitate high-performance parallel programming for electronic structure calculations. Co-PI s include Gerald Baumgartner and Russ Pitzer of Ohio State, Jagannathan Ramanujam of Louisiana State, and Marcel Nooijen of Princeton, (the latter two via collaborative proposals and ). This team of computer scientists and computational chemists will develop a tensor contraction engine that can synthesize efficient parallel code in Fortran or C from an input specification expressed in a high-level notation, for a number of target architectures. This tool will be made freely available to other developers of quantum chemistry software. The development of high-performance parallel programs for scientific applications is complicated by the effects of algorithm choice on memory access costs and communication overhead. Currently available tools for software development and performance modeling optimization do not provide adequate support to developers of scientific code. This research will provide a novel approach to the automated synthesis of high-performance parallel programs, with the particular emphasis on electronic structure codes widely employed in chemistry, physics, and materials science doc14536 none Physics (13) This project consists of a series of workshops for new physics faculty that provide undergraduate teaching enhancement activities in a concentrated four-day workshop accompanied by a continuing program of follow-up activities that seek to solidify and expand the gains of the workshop. The audience is newly-hired physics faculty, usually in the first three years of their initial tenure-track position. The workshops aim to involve 20-25% of the entire number of U.S. physics faculty hires at four-year colleges and universities during the project, and thus the program has a significant impact on physics teaching throughout the U.S. The project is based on prior workshops. Those activities are expanded in several ways: (1) The size of the annual program is being increased from 50 to 70 participants, and faculty from all 4-year colleges and universities are invited. (2) Along with AAPT, the American Physical Society (APS) is a joint sponsor of the program and plays a significant role in the follow-up activities. (3) The American Astronomical Society (AAS) is also sponsoring the program, departments of astronomy are being invited to nominate participants, and about 10 astronomers are included among the annual participants. The AAS is also sharing in promoting the follow-up activities. (4) There is a national steering committee to provide oversight to the program. The follow-up activities are a particularly important component of this program. By scheduling followup sessions at national and regional meetings of the AAPT, APS, and AAS, the participants in these workshops can participate in discussions relevant to the improvement of teaching and to general problems faced by new faculty. In this way the project promotes a continuing active interest in these topics among former participants and also brings into the discussions new faculty who were not able to attend the Workshops as well as postdocs and advanced graduate students who are contemplating faculty careers. The program thus enlists a significant share of the resources of the national physics and astronomy communities to the advancement of undergraduate teaching doc14537 none Hughes The explosive growth in demand for broadband wireless data services has underscored the importance of low-complexity, bandwidth-efficient communication techniques for multipath radio channels. Recent information theoretic results have demonstrated that deploying multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver can dramatically increase the capacity of wireless channels. In order to realize the full potential of this approach, it is important to develop new antenna designs and low-complexity signal processing techniques that more fully exploit the space-time structure of multi-input multi-output radio channels. The aim of this project is to improve the performance of wireless communication systems by jointly optimizing the antenna array geometry, coding and modulation, and receiver processing. Four general issues are addressed: (1) design of new antenna arrays inspired by information theory; (2) design of space-time constellations that achieve full diversity and preserve channel capacity; (3) low-complexity space-time coding methods based on multilevel serial concatenation; and (4) new scalable receiver architectures for joint iterative space-time decoding and array processing. The proposed research is an interdisciplinary effort in communications, signal processing, and RF antenna design. The ultimate goal of this work is to increase spectral efficiency and reduce the power requirements of wireless communication systems doc14538 none This project is collecting solid earth science data sets and complementing them with a system of easy-to-use, interactive user tools to provide a dynamic and engaging learning environment for students at all levels ranging from K-12, to undergraduate, graduate, and lifelong learners. In addition, evaluation of the system for use in undergraduate and high school classes is underway. Through this project a unique digital library environment is created for users to interactively study the same data sets that earth science researchers are utilizing to learn about the dynamics of the planet, and how changes in the earth system affect daily life. In addition, collaboration with the staff of the Cornell University libraries enables the investigation of the requirements needed to maintain a persistent digital collection. Partial co-funding for this project is being provided by the Division of Earth Sciences in NSF s Geosciences Directorate doc14539 none This research examines electronic market mechanisms as a means of coordination and communication in the industrial supply chain. The research focuses on two main components: (1) innovative market mechanisms (exploring the theoretical and computational foundations for electronic market intermediaries in the supply chain, thereby deriving market mechanisms beyond price determination to include activity, resource, and structural coordination), and (2) focused industry survey (understanding the economic realities and key development trends in the industry by conducting in-depth field studies and empirical analyses). Insights developed from the research will lead to the development of efficient market mechanisms for supply chain coordination, and versatile market analysis tools. This research will extend the current literature in market microstructures, mechanism design, and supply chain coordination by (1) exploring the synergy between game theory, optimization, and computational economics approaches, (2) examining the roles of intermediaries in emerging supply chain markets, and their implications to market efficiency, and (3) suggesting engineering methodologies that convert market insights into implementable market instruments (e.g., contracts, protocols) and monitoring tools. The industry survey, to be conducted with McKinsey & Company, will document and classify emerging e-supply chain practices, and identify key issues relating to supply chain strategy in different industry sectors doc14540 none Meetings are essential and ongoing processes in almost every enterprise. To record meetings is to provide a history of human interactions. However, two central challenges remain: (1) how to make sense of the group dynamics in those meetings and (2) how to search through a history of those interactions to find the information one may want. This research aims to develop automatic information processing systems based on the metaphor of a meeting map , a structured representation that supports the presentation of multiple views of a meeting at different scales. The project will focus on two broad map categories: content maps, portraying topics discussed and decisions made; and interaction maps, identifying the roles and relationships of the participants and the level of concurrence. Building content and interaction maps will involve automatic classification of information from topic changes and salience to disagreement consensus. These maps will be used for generating simple indicative summaries, and off-the-shelf visualization tools will be used for map presentation. The project will build on analyses of 100 hours of meetings. Evaluations will use objective recognition accuracies and expert assessments of automatic summaries. Meeting maps respect the diversity of information present in meeting scenarios, and provide effective support for human-to-human interactions doc14541 none Pfeffer This proposal is being recommended as a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) to document to continuing retreat of the Columbia Glacier, Alaska by rapid calving . The Glacier is presently retreating at a rate of approximately 1.67 kilometers (Km) per year. This rapid retreat has been accompanied by flow speeds up to 34 meters (m) per day, making it now the world s fastest-moving glacier. Since , the glacier terminus has retreated more than 12 Km since the mid-eighteenth century and thinned seaward (10-15 kilometers) by approximately 200 m. Significant changes may be occurring in the glacier s pattern and speed of retreat during the next nine months as the glacier terminus passes through a gap which confines its flow. The activities over the next few months may provide important clues about the longer-term fate of Columbia Glacier as the retreat progresses up the channel where the glacier bed lies below sea-level. Recent calculations suggest that, depending on whether flow speeds continue at their present fast rate or decline moderately, the portion of the glacier grounded below sea level (the lowermost 25 km, with an ice volume of ca. 8 x m3) will be removed by flotation or calving within 5 to 20 years. The Principal Investigators are continuing their analysis of photogrammetric data from and , and will submit a proposal to OPP ANS in September . However, the present terminus position and newly calculated subglacial topography may mean that that the glacier is at a critical state in its retreat, and that significant events may occur before the end of . The funds will allow them to continue the aerial photography through when important changes may occur as the terminus enters deeper water and passes a major lateral constriction doc14542 none The objective of this project is to develop a methodology to design the optimization component of a compiler that learns from experience. The strategy to be studied involves the use of an explanation-based learning (EBL) sub-system that, based on analytical and empirical information, will generate policies to control the optimization component of the compiler. The analytical information will relate program characteristics to performance. The empirical information will be obtained by profiling the program and will be stored in a database containing information from earlier versions of the program and from other programs in the same problem domain. An experimental compiler will be implemented to evaluate the methodolog,. The core of the compiler will be a translator controlled by parameters that could be selected from a standard collection, in which case the compiler will behave like a conventional compiler, or be generated by the machine learning sub-system. Specific topics to be studied as part of this project include: compiler organization, program transformations and their interaction, performance prediction based on both static and dynamic information, machine learning techniques and the integration of both prior knowledge (performance abstractions in our case) and empirical data, and context-adaptive computing systems doc14543 none This U.S.-Hungary workshop will bring together expert scientists and engineers as well as postdoctoral associates and students to examine the environmental issues associated with metal contamination of the Hungarian Tisza River throughout its floodplain and wetlands. The organizers are Prof. Domy Adriano of the University of Georgia and Prof. Nemeth Tamas, of the Hungarian Research Institute for Soil Science and Agricultural Chemistry. Their objective is to determine the key scientific issues and to help define research priorities that are longer-term and cross-disciplinary. To accomplish this, workshop discussions will feature pollutant cycling and the effects on local aquatic and terrestrial environments. Specifically, the U.S. and Hungarian organizers intend to use this forum to: 1) formulate hypotheses regarding the rates and mechanisms of natural attenuation, from the landscape to molecular levels; 2) determine bio-availability and the natural attenuation of metals in the Tisza s chronically contaminated landscape; 3) relate the kinetics of metal attenuation to biological responses and chemical indices; and 4) develop novel monitoring protocols and enhanced predictive models for managing ecological habitats, in the context of land use and water management policies. Overall the participants are motivated by the goal of defining suitable environmental management and mitigation strategies. If successful, this workshop should lead to the delineation of collaborative and linked US-Hungarian subprojects on ecological and engineering topics that will yield results applicable to the metal pollution problems found in big rivers around the world. This workshop in environmental engineering fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc14544 none ion, including decision procedures for fragments of first order logic and automated deduction for first-order logic. The second theme involves the use of computational logic for computer-assisted analysis of designs in three application areas of critical importance: networking, hybrid systems, and computer security. The third theme is the development and use in the classroom of instructional courseware for mathematical concepts relevant to computer science. This work is in collaboration with Stanford s Educational Program for Gifted Children (EPGY). The impact of this work follows from making computational logic accessible and available. Computational logic components will make it easier to construct sophisticated software applications, by providing powerful off-the-shelf building blocks for solving problems that would not otherwise be tractable. Improved analysis tools and techniques will result in superior system designs achieved faster and at lower cost. Instructional software will enhance the sophistication and problem-solving abilities of computer science students doc14545 none Sohn, Lydia L Princeton University Collaborative Proposal-ITR SY: Molecular Computation with Automated Microfluidic Sensors (MCAMS) The main objective of this cross-disciplinary project between Princeton University, Stanford University and UC Berkeley is to combine microfluidic technology with recently-developed algorithms of RNA-based computing to create a compact, automated nucelotide-based computational device capable of rapid detection of the computational output. Realization of such a device would greatly impact not only the field of molecular computing but also the general field of molecular biology, as the proposed platform technologies would provide novel, advanced tools for biological research. The project is addressing three main questions: - Can a microfluidic device be used to automate RNA-based computation? - Can alternative detection methods be used to avoid labor-intensive readout steps in RNA-based computation? -Can these detection methods be applied to other problems encountered in general biological v research? The success of this project will represent a leap forward in the direction of hands-free molecular computation. In addition, it will provide the necessary platform technologies to accelerate biological research, particularly in the areas of rapid DNA sequencing and fingerprinting doc14546 none Maxwell This is a planning visit grant for Professor Lorraine E. Maxwell, with the Department of Design and Environmental Analysis at Cornell University, to travel to Ghana to participate in a Faculty Development Seminar sponsored by the Council on Educational Exchange, which will be held at the University of Ghana in Legon. She will discuss the results of her NSF-supported project ( ) on the long-term effects of residential and school crowding on children s cognitive and social development with participating Ghanaian faculty members for the purpose of identifying potential collaborators for a cross-cultural research project on the topic doc14547 none The objective of the proposed work is to develop an integrated computational-communication a chitecture for large scale netwo ks of embedded systems,called cooperative computin .Unlike distributed comput- ing,coope ative computing is pe formed ove a dynamic ad-hoc network with volatile nodes and connections, and expects statistically correct executions.E .ective esource management,in pa ticula power and energy management,will be c ucial since most devices in the netwo k will be mobile and will ely on batte y.The basic idea in coope ative computing is that nodes coope ate in pe forming a global task in an ad-hoc manne using thei local esou ces and state information to att act task s computation o communication.Caching, routing,topology discove y,o any speci .c use -de .ned application,can be implemented as a global task over the cooperative computing model. To effectively cooperate,the nodes that are involved need to know the esources and constraints they face in successfully accomplishing the ta get task.In such a power and esource constrained environment,the coope ating nodes must intelligently make the best decisions to ensu e the quality of esult (QoR). With these goals in mind,the p oposed esea ch is to develop a system a chitectu e to support coope ative computing ove dynamic netwo ks of embedded systems.Our resea ch will address the following issues: How to de .ne a global task at the application and ope ating system levels? How to prog am very large networks of embedded systems to execute a global task without handling each node individually? How to implement self-outing using peer-to-peer communication only? How to measure a pa tially successful execution? How to predict the powe dissipation and energy consumption of individual nodes,and nodes cooper- ating ac oss the network? How to optimize a task to reduce its powe and ene gy budget running on individual nodes,and across nodes in network? The system a chitectu e for coope ative computing is based on Smart Messages (SM),which can be viewed as intelligent ca ie s of data in a netwo k.Sma t Messages a e collections of code and mobile data that migrate th ough the netwo k,a single network hop at a time,executing at each step.Smart Messages a e self-outing,namely they a e esponsible fo dete mining thei own paths th ough the netwo k,utilizing a minimal set of facilities p ovided by nodes in the netwo k.An SM may be denied a equest to oute th ough a node due to the node s esou ce limitations,in pa ticula its emaining ene gy level.We conjectu e that Smart Messages p ovide a .exible support for a wide variety of applications,anging from data collection and dissemination,content-based outing and object t acking,to more t aditional dist ibuted computing applications in which execution of a task is sp ead across a collection of devices. As pa t of this p oposal we plan to implement and extensively evaluate seve al p ototype implementations of the Smart Message a chitectu e.Ou testbed will consist of networks of embedded multicontrollers and PDAs based on Bluetooth sho t-range wi eless communication doc14548 none The maize genome is thought to comprise islands of lightly methylated genes in a sea of highly methylated, repetitive DNA. Complete sequencing and assembly of the whole maize genome is currently not feasible because of the repetitive DNA. Methods are beginning to be developed that will allow the regions of the maize genome that contain the genes to be filtered out for sequencing. It is expected that once validated in maize, such methods could be used for similar sequencing projects in other crop species having complex genomes. A novel expression vector system has been developed to rescue directly open reading frames (ORFs) from genomic DNA. Preliminary data suggest that this ORF Rescue vector system is a potentially powerful tool for gene discovery in complex crop genomes. Experiments will be performed to validate the utility of this vector system for preparing filtered template DNA for genome sequencing. The three specific aims of the project are to: 1] evaluate the ability of the ORF Rescue vector to filter genes from maize genomic DNA; 2] evaluate the ability of the ORF Rescue vector to filter genes from maize DNA cloned into Bacterial Artificial Chromosomes (BACs); 3] determine whether novel ORFs define monocot-specific genes. This work merits funding as a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) because it represents work on an untested and novel idea that is needed urgently doc14549 none Compact objects (neutron stars or black holes) can be found in nature in close binary systems orbiting each other. Such systems are expected to emit gravitational radiation of high frequency and therefore are thought to be excellent source candidates for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) planned to become operational in the next couple of years. Theoretical studies of such astrophysical sources of gravitational waves will be undertaken by the PI and a postdoctoral fellow, and a number of questions will be addressed: (A) what is the predicted frequency with which binary compact objects of interest form in our Galaxy and out to extragalactic distances, what are the uncertainties of these predictions, and what do they imply about gravitational-wave detection, (B) what are the physical properties of these binaries (e.g., masses, eccentricities, spins, velocities) and how can gravitational-wave data analysis methods be optimized for their detection. Undoubted confirmation of the existence of gravitational waves as fundamentally predicted by the theory of general relativity can be provided only by their direct detection, expected by observatories such as LIGO. The detectability of binary compact objects depends on a number of factors related both to the astrophysical properties of the sources and the capabilities of the observatory. The research described above will contribute to the advancement of our understanding of the most promising gravitational-wave sources, optimize the relevant data analysis methods, and therefore improve the detectability prospects for LIGO doc14550 none This research will focus on the interplay between molecular biology, computer science, and evolution to probe a complex form of biological information processing: gene unscrambling in hypotrichous ciliates. The long term goal is to develop a multidisciplinary approach to this problem that will enable us to tap into this biological process as a computational tool. The proposed research combines three approaches that first improve our understanding of the function, mechanism and logic of this phenomenon. Specifically, this proposal uses gene unscrambling as a model system to explore the mechanisms underlying complex gene rearrangements in ciliates the steps through which these processes have evolved, and their capacity to solve hard computational problems in vivo. The impact of the award would be an influx of new ideas and direction from computational sciences into the study of a complex biological system involving programmed genome rearrangements in ciliated protozoa, with the ultimate goal of harnessing the process for the purpose of performing in vivo computation doc14551 none Soon, autonomous mobile robots will be used in settings such as elderly communities, schools, and hospitals to carry out intelligent but unskilled tasks such as delivering food or teaching calisthenics. Humans are integral in these systems-as operators, as users, and as people who live and work where robots are employed. This proposal targets critical questions of human-robot interaction, and of robotic assistants in personal and work settings. The research involves experiments on mental models of robots and robotic assistants, ethnographic design research, and organizational field research. The initial research will aim at design of appropriate roles, tasks, and interactions of robotic assistants in elderly environments. Later research will address other domains for using assistive robots. This research builds on cognitive and social psychology, and design. The research will contribute to theory on people s interactions with robots, facilitate useful and graceful interactions between people and robotic assistants, and advance robotic technology and dialogue on ethical issues surrounding deployment of life-like robots. The research team is highly multidisciplinary. This project will address major NSF concerns including: bringing technology to bear for special populations, extending human capabilities, using technology for collective work, and integrating technology into social contexts doc14552 none Averin, Dmitri V SUNY at Stony Brook ITR SY Reversible Computing Using Superconducting Quantum Devices This project is exploring two options of using the unique macroscopic quantum properties of superconductor devices for implementation of classical and quantum reversible computing. Under the first objective of classical reversible computing, experimental demonstration of reversible processing of digital information in a basic integrated circuit using Parametric-Quantuton type devices, with bits coded by single quanta of magnetic field are investigated. The implementation of this type of computing device is opening a way to information processing at a rate of about bits per second per Centimeter Square. Under the second objective of quantum reversible computing, the experimental studies of decoherence in the charge-based qubit ( single-Cooper-Pair Box ), using the radio-frequency single-electron transistor as the readout, is being achieved. Measurement of the decoherence time and investigation of possible ways of suppressing the decoherence is facilitating more rapid development of a scalable quantum computer doc14553 none ions, property-preserving bisimulation-based reductions of continuous differential equations, and assume-guarantee reasoning. The results of this research are being integrated in software tools for modeling and analysis of hybrid systems. The benefits of the techniques for developing embedded systems with higher assurance for safety and reliability are evaluated in an experimental testbed of multiple, autonomous, mobile robots doc14504 none Roberto Car and Annabella Selloni of Princeton University are supported under the Information Technology Research Program (ITR) by the Division of Chemistry, the Division of Materials Research, and the Division of Advanced Computational Infrastructure and Research to make ab initio molecular dynamics simulations more effective and more accessible on high performance computing platforms. Co-PI s include Josep Torrellas and Laxmikant Kale of University of Illinois, Michael Klein of the University of Pennsylvania, Mark Tuckerman of New York University, Glenn Martyna of Indiana University, and Nicholas Nystrom of Carnegie Mellon University (via collaborative proposals , , , , and , respectively). This team of computational chemists and computer scientists will develop new efficient and high accuracy methods, extensible open source software modules with desirable scaling properties, and novel hardware designs that will enable modeling of complex events and environments of interest to chemistry, materials science and engineering, geoscience, and biology. Information technology (IT) has transformed computational science to the extent that realistic, atom-based simulations of key processes in chemistry, nanoscience and engineering, and biology can now be addressed using highly accurate simulations. This research can potentially impact the design of polymer-generating catalysts, nanoscale electronic devices, and artificial biomimetic catalysts doc14555 none The goal of this project is to research and develop high-quality, scalable, and reconfigurable acquisition and display systems for digital library collections accessed via the Internet. We will acquire new digital collections at the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico and provide access to them through end-user displays that are scalable and reconfigurable. These displays will cooperate with a remote model server to provide the highest possible display fidelity under the current network conditions. In order to allow the widespread acquisition and dissemination of digital collections, revolutionary advances in 3D model acquistion, content delivery, and display are required. To thisend,we will focus on the following research challenges: Acquisition: we willprovide new acquisition strategies designed to produce high-quality layered, image-based representations, 3-D shape descriptions, and multi-layerd data. These new strategies will enable efficient access and high-resolution end-user display. hybrid representation of texture, shape, and metadata. Representation: we will encode the acquired collection in a way that moves toward the features provided in the MPEG-4 multimedia standard. This encoding will preserve the richness and fidelity of the data while achieving standardization for access, manipulation, and evolution of collections over time. Remote Access: we will develop new techniques supporting distributed access to digital col- lections in a heterogeneous networked environment. These techniques will be designed to satisfy access requirements across a spectrum that varies from very high quality local display and low- latency interactive manipulation, to remote access over wide-area, potentially low bitrate links. Display: we will develop new techniques for deploying scalable tiled projection displays for institutions and users who do not have access to sophisticated and dedicated technical support and high-cost hardware. These scalable display systems can be assembled from commodity hardware and provide automatic, continuous calibration, and rapid reconfigurability. The motivation for this work stems from the need for high-quality preservation, access, and display techniques for digitized collections. Libraries, museums, and research scholars who want to acquire, manipulate, and provide remote access to (and high-definition display of)digitized artifacts need cost effective, non-intrusive, easily configurable methods for creating and viewing high-quality collections. New techniques will be evaluated on real-world library collections with particular focus on the preser- vation and dissemination of artifacts at our partner institution for this work, the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico . With the aid of expert consultants who will contribute significant effort towards this project at our partner institution (see attached letter), we willdevelop and deploy a prototype system for acqusition and display using the techniques developed as part of this project. The resulting digital archive will be made accessible to patrons of the museum as well as a much larger audience around the world via the Internet. We believe that this research will have significant immediate, medium-term and long-term impact. The immediate impact of the project will be the development of new acquisition, access, and display methods that will be deployed and tested at the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, making parts of their collections available in forms not previously possible. In the medium term, our new technical approaches will be valuable not only to the digital library community, but also to other research, instructional, and commercial areas where configurable large-scale display systems are needed (e.g., classroom, research visualization centers, conference venues, etc). In the long term, we believe this proposed work has the potential to substantially impact the way people view and interact with data, whether the data is a collection of historical artifacts, a visual representation of a complex simulation, data illustrations presenting in the classroom, etc. Moreover, the cost effectiveness of our approach means that it will be affordable to a wide range of users doc14556 none This research will investigate methods for automatic retrieval and analysis of 3D models. It will develop computational representations of 3D shape for which indices can be built, similarity queries can be answered efficiently, and interesting features can be computed robustly. Next, it will build user interfaces which permit untrained users to specify shape-based queries. This will include queries specified with text, 3D models, 2D sketching, and high-level methods based on constraints and rules. It will combine elements of computer graphics, computer vision, and computational geometry. Applications of shape-based query methods will include Internet search engines, computer-aided design, molecular biology, medicine, and security. In each application the researchers will work with domain experts to understand the critical elements of the 3D databases and the challenging shape queries for which new methods are required. For example, working with molecular biologists will help develop query tools for the Protein Data Bank to find macromolecules matching a given shape. These methods will aid classification of proteins for which only low-resolution electron density maps are available, and aid searches for proteins matching a specific binding site doc14486 none A modular system for ocean data assimilation has recently been developed. It has already been implemented in an unsophisticated way, with a variety of models of the ocean and the coupled ocean-atmosphere. This project will enhance the system using Information Technology, including modern software engineering concepts, new visualization techniques and interactive web-based training. Together with effective outreach and advanced optimization algorithms, these elements of IT will be linked through the modular system to a wide range of coastal, basin-scale and global ocean models. Variational data assimilation is also coming into use in operational weather forecasting and ocean forecasting, in ocean biogeochemistry, in groundwater hydrology and in solid-earth geophysics. The new modular system will thus be of immediate benefit throughout the geosciences. The team includes 14 physical oceanographers, civil engineers and computer scientists in six universities, a national laboratory, and private industry. The project is funded under the Information Technology Research Initiative doc14558 none This project is developing a lightweight infrastructure for deploying workflow services into digital libraries that can be tailored to meet users unique needs. Such workflow requirements typically involve multiple stakeholders distributed across different organizations who must coordinate their actions. Recent advances in event messaging systems, hypermedia, and Web-based technologies (such as XML), are being used to create a lightweight workflow technology to help the stakeholders of a digital library coordinate their shared activities. The technology is being designed to support a low entry barrier to use, multiple computing platforms, and a certain level of autonomy to the individual organizations that adopt it. Evaluation of the project s techniques and technology is being undertaken using the workflow processes of three real-world digital libraries: the Web Portal to the Scientific Computing Division of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the JESSE electronic journal, associated with the Digital Library for Earth System Education, and the JIME electronic journal doc14559 none Derby, J U of Minnesota - Twin Cities Modeling the Growth of Crystals from Solution: Nonlinear Interactions of Kinetics and Transport The growth of crystalline materials ranges from the one-time creation of milligrams of single-crystal protein pharmaceuticals to the annual production of metric tons of electronic-grade silicon. Due to these broad applications, the great variety of crystals needed, and the exacting quality typically required of single-crystal materials, their successful growth ranks among the most difficult challenges of modern materials processing. The work proposed here is part of longer-term effort to employ mathematical modeling coupled with numerical methods and high performance computing to understand crystal growth processes and the influence of processing conditions on crystal structure and composition. The primary goal of the research contained in this proposal is to develop and apply modeling tools to understand the interactions of transport phenomena and crystal growth kinetics in solution crystal growth processes. The specific tasks proposed here include the study of fluid dynamics and mass transfer at the continuum level, the continued development of step-growth model to describe the growth of vicinal facet, and the linking of these two models in self-consistent manner. The proposed research will significantly extend the modeling capabilities and understanding of solution crystal growth systems. The multi-scale model proposed here couples methods for computing three-dimensional, time-dependent flow and transport in the bulk with detailed surface kinetic models based on ideas of step growth dynamics. Such an approach has yet to be successfully implemented for describing realistic solution crystal growth processes. In addition, powerful ideas from nonlinear dynamics, namely chaotic mixing to describe the bulk system and nonlinear dynamics to describe step growth on the facet, will be applied to study solution crystal growth systems in novel manner. The predictive capability provided from the models developed in this work will be of great utility for understanding solution crystal growth experiments and for the rational optimization of growth processes. More importantly, knowledge generated from this work will ultimately lead to the ability to link crystal properties with growth conditions and the macroscopic factors which influence them. In general terms, the understanding gained from successful modeling of crystal growth systems will lead to better process operation and design, ultimately yielding better quality crystals at higher production rates and lower costs. As another outcome of this work, the computational challenges of realistically modeling these systems are significant, and the continued development of algorithms for high performance computing will be noteworthy. Such developments are needed to advance them realistic modeling of materials processing systems using state-of-the-art scientific computation. There are also broader impacts of this proposed activity. The fundamental issues addressed here are applicable to many other processes, including the hydrothermal and flux growth of crystals, liquid-phase epitaxy, and industrial crystallization (including protein crystals and other organic crystals). The development of the theoretical tools and the increased understanding of the coupling of transport and kinetics during the growth of crystalline materials obtained from this research will undoubtedly impact these areas. Finally, significant component of this activity is the training of Ph.D. graduate students and undergraduate students in research involving crystal growth, mathematical modeling, and high performance computing doc14560 none Ding The imminent commercial deployment of the 3rd generation 3rd wireless communications systems has placed the development of future high rate wireless internet and mobile computing at the top of wireless R o Turbo equalization amid multiuser detection algorithms for transmit diversity with variable rate codes that are exploited by the transmitter amid demodulator; o Broadband spatial turbo equalization combined with H-ARQ diversity utilizing codes of different levels of error protection as well as iteratively decodable multilevel codes; o New type II hybrid ARQ based on integration of parity retransmission, concatenation, Reed-Solomon (RS) outer code, low-density parity check (LDPC) inner code, arid turbo coding. o VLSI design amid implementation of high speed decoders for integrated equalization, LDPC, and RS turbo decoding. o Low complexity two-stage turbo decoding of Reed-Solomon codes through their binary decomposition into binary component codes with relatively small state complexity; Rather than pursuing incremental advances separately in diversity combining, H-ARQ, equalization, and coding, this project presents a new and specific network integration approach that will have a strong impact on the design of future wireless data networks. The VLSI design amid implementation will represent the latest technology for broadband high speed communication systems doc14500 none Real-time Environmental Observation and Forecasting Systems (EOFS) will revolutionize the way scientists share information about the environment and represent an opportunity to break traditional information barriers separating scientists from society at large. EOFS are already in use, but they tend to be small-scale, application- and domain- specific, stand-alone systems. There is a need for evolution towards multi-purpose shared systems designed to adapt flexibly to evolving needs of information consumers. What is required are large-scale, shared, heterogeneous distributed systems that make extensive use of diverse sensor-based inputs, sophisticated numerical simulations, mobile and embedded real-time system components, wireless and wired communications, high-performance computers, and high capacity storage systems. This ITR medium project has assembled an inter-disciplinary team, including computer science and environmental science researchers in addition to a heterogeneous base of pilot users. This group will collaborate to develop software technology which will enable EOFS to evolve efficiently, and to deliver quantifiably reliable information about the environment at the right time and in the right form to the right users. The project focus is on EOFS for estuarine and coastal regions. These regions are selected because they are highly variable natural systems subject to intense human activity and with great social, environmental, economic and cultural value. The research will include: i. Developing missing integration concepts and technologies for EOFS, with emphasis on quality-scalable information processing, storage and access (the computer science research). ii. Closing the loop between environmental models and sensors, and implementing a next generation EOFS based on an existing prototype for an estuary with multiple and often conflicting uses (the environmental observation and forecasting systems research); iii. Using, evaluating and refining the EOFS prototype for scientific discovery, natural resources stewardship and emergency response, thus incorporating sound science in operational and management decisions of critical regional importance and national significance (the environmental science and management applications); iv. Developing pilot multi-level, inter-disciplinary educational programs that cross-train young people, computer scientists, environmental scientists and practitioners in the conceptualization, development and use of environmental information technology (the education impact doc14562 none Mechanisms allow individuals with dispersed information to achieve desired group outcomes. Experiments confirm theoretical predictions that different parameter values and different mechanism rules can have important effects on the efficiency of outcomes and the speed of convergence. A computer-based behavioral model will be developed to test a wide range of mechanisms and institutions. The model is to be based on evolutionary algorithms. Each smart agent has a collection of different strategies to use in its decision-making processes. Strategies compete for the right to make agent decisions through a selection process based on an evaluation of each strategy s hypothetical and actual performance. The model will first be tuned with mechanisms for which there are significant experimental data. Examples include the Groves-Ledyard mechanism, the voluntary contribution mechanism for public goods, the double auction, and simultaneous trading in a set of parallel markets. Then the model will be used to make predictions about behavior under those mechanisms that have not already been tested in experiments with human subjects. This project will develop a new methodology for economics research that has potential to be better, faster, and cheaper than experimental economics doc14563 none Computing services in the future should become just as available and easy to use as any of the modern utilities: power, water, or telephone service. A compute utility should work reliably and invisibly, providing users with simple, efficient access to their data and individualized computing environments anywhere in the world. Data kept in the utility may be private, publicly available, or shared between designated parties. Our proposed compute utility architecture is based on the idea of a compute capsule, which captures the entire logical state of an active computing environment. A capsule is portable, persistent, host-independent, self-contained and can be suspended on disk, arbitrarily bound to different machines, and transparently resumed. Compute servers in a utility run a small trusted computing base, which manages the compute capsules like a cache. Users capsules can be run on any of the compute servers in the utility and are typically run on local machines for enhanced interactive performance. Capsules provide users with customizabililty as well as a guarantee of isolation from other users. As persistent objects that can be shared, duplicated and version-controlled, capsules can be easily managed and administered. The compute utility model has significant advantages over our current environment. First, instead of requiring end users to procure, administer and upgrade their equipment individually, resources of a utility are shared and managed centrally by experts, thus resulting in a more efficient system. Second, a global utility allows users efficient access to their computing environment everywhere. They need not juggle a large number of different interfaces and deal with the discontinuities as they move between home and work every day. Third, a professionally managed compute utility designed to support global mobility and sharing can provide greater security than our current environment. In contrast, today novice users are responsible for keeping their systems secure, and the lack of adequate support for sharing and mobility leads to practices that jeopardize security. Fourth, the infrastructure of a utility serves as an excellent platform for several emerging computing trends: software hosted remotely by application service providers, support of ubiquitous access devices, and large-scale distributed computing. The goal of this research project is to investigate the viability of a compute utility and to lay the technical foundation for such an infrastructure. The techniques developed can also be applied to manage an institution s distributed resources. First, we will investigate the concept of capsules fully by studying their design and applications. Capsules can be implemented at the machine, operating system and application level; trade-offs between these different approaches will be studied. We will also explore novel uses of capsules: capsules can be used to run untrusted software; they can provide secure and shared environments for group projects; capsules can also serve as pre-installed software packages ready to run on any machine. We will develop the associated tools to make capsuleseasy to use. Second, we will develop the technologies to ensure security in a compute utility. Security will be provided at three levels: a small trusted kernel that provides isolation between capsules and monitors capsules for added security; the use of certified capsules to create trusted computing environments; data security will be provided by encryption, and sharing will be supported by a flexible key management scheme. We plan to conduct a careful analysis of the vulnerabilities of the system. Third, this research will produce the technologies useful for creating scalable, efficient, and easily maintainable compute utilities. They include techniques for managing machines in a globally distributed environment by treating them as caches of capsules, and techniques that combine capsule caching and remote display technology to support global mobility and sharing. This research will develop a prototype compute utility to validate the technology developed. To make extensive experimentation possible, the prototype will support legacy software. The experiments will be designed especially to address the information technology needs of universities. Computer systems have gone through two major eras, time-sharing on mainframes and personal computing. The success of this research may usher in a new era of compute utility and have a significant impact on our future computing practice doc14564 none This award is for the design and construction of the Advanced Modular Incoherent Scatter Radar (AMISR). Originally conceived to be a large steerable, dish-type radar, the project now features a powerful, modular, solid-state, electronically steerable phased-array design capable of observing many properties of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere. The modular design will enable the radar to observe properties of Earth s atmosphere from the equator to the pole. Pulse-to-pulse beam swinging will be used for observing rapidly evolving ionospheric structure. The AMISR design includes unique features that allow cost-effective dismantling, shipping, and re-assembly in about six months. The antenna consists of three faces that can be deployed independently. As an initial deployment strategy, the first face will be constructed at the Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska, while the second two faces will be assembled at Resolute Bay in the Canadian Arctic. AMISR will provide the means for practically unlimited new scientific observations via two significant features that have not been technically feasible in the past, and that will greatly enhance the way observations and campaigns are conducted. First, an incoherent scatter radar with a solid-state transmitter and no moving parts will increase immunity to single point radar failures and allow extended operating periods with remote internet access and minimal on-site personnel. Second, the phased-array concept will allow pulse-to-pulse beam steering, thus enabling three-dimensional imaging of electron density features in high signal-to-noise environments such as discrete auroral structures. Broader Impacts: Scientific studies enabled by the radar include those related to space weather, global change, atmospheric physics, and plasma science. The data will be widely disseminated to researchers world-wide, and will be an excellent teaching tool for the next generation of atmospheric and radio scientists doc14565 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Robert Wyatt of the Highlands Biological Station, an interinstitutional center of the University of North Carolina administered by Western Carolina University, to construct new housing for visiting researchers, faculty, and students. Since its founding in , HBS has served to facilitate research on the biota and ecosystems of the Southern Appalachian Mountains. Located in the mountains of southwestern North Carolina near its borders with Georgia and South Carolina, the region is the wettest in eastern North America, receiving 80 to 100 inches of precipitation per year. Because of the varied topography and soils of this unglaciated area, it is a hotspot for biodiversity, especially of groups such as salamanders, fungi, spiders, tree species, and land snails. The Station has a long and distinguished history as a base of operations for biological research, graduate training, and public outreach. Beginning in the fall of , select undergraduates from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill s new Carolina Environmental Program will spend a semester in residence at HBS. Currently, HBS can house up to 38 people at one time, and the Station often operates at capacity during the summer months. A constraint on the programs in research and education is lack of suitable space for faculty teaching courses or senior investigators who wish to bring their families. Moreover, most of the existing housing is not winterized. NSF support will enable construction of a small complex of four two-bedroom apartments, completed in two phases. In the summer these units will be used to house teaching faculty and senior researchers. During the academic year they will serve as the living quarters for groups of up to 16 students from the Carolina Environmental Program. Each unit will include about 787 square feet of living space, with one unit modified to provide handicapped access. The availability of this added, flexible housing will enhance our ability to attract the very best faculty to teach courses and the very best biologists to establish long-term research programs based at HBS. The new dormitory will also provide much more suitable, winterized dormitory space for use by teams of undergraduates who will do their capstone training at HBS in biodiversity and land preservation. These students will also do internships with local government and non-government agencies, such as the USDA Forest Service and Highlands Land Trust. Availability of this new housing will also enhance the ability of HBS to accommodate speakers in our free, public lecture series at the Highlands Nature Center and in our annual Conference on Landscaping and Gardening with Native Plants. Indirectly, this new housing will increase flexibility in scheduling teacher training workshops, as it will free up existing dormitory space for other uses, such as teacher housing. Thus, all efforts in research and education at HBS will benefit directly or indirectly from the availability of new housing doc14566 none Electronic markets are emerging as a primary medium of trade in business-to-business, business-to-consumer, and consumer-to-consumer settings. In order to design viable electronic marketplaces, a host of novel interrelated game-theoretic and computational issues must be addressed. With a team of interdisciplinary researchers from multiple institutions, this project will develop a unified theory of games and computing to guide and facilitate the growth of such markets. Specific research directions of the project include the following: (1) Market designs will be generalized to incorporate combinatorial bidding, multi-attribute preferences, multi-stage mechanisms, continuous mechanisms, and multi-unit sale; (2) New algorithms for clearing, quoting, incentive-compatible pricing as well as new incentive-compatible tractable mechanisms will be designed with particular emphasis on online and incremental updating of market states; (3) Bounded rationality of the agents will be investigated under a wide spectrum of models of computations, equilibrium concepts of game theory, and trade-offs between centers and agents; and (4) Novel approaches to relaxing the classic common prior assumption will be explored in order to develop practically useful models for ecommerce. The successful completion of this project will make significant contributions to both theory and practice in the areas of electronic commerce, multi-agent systems, algorithms, computational complexity theory, and game theory doc14567 none Optimization is the science that integrates information into a mathematical model whose solution yields optimal decisions. It has developed into a scientific discipline with useful applications, which are routinely used in industry. However, there are many real optimization problems for which solutions are not known. For example, suppose a snowstorm is approaching Chicago. At its operations center, an airline is reacting by making plans to cancel and reroute flights. Substantial information on weather forecasts, plane and crew status, passenger itineraries, and hotels is available to make an optimal plan. However, this information is typically not exploited to its fullest extent. Why is this the case, especially as the airline is a very sophisticated user of optimization for planning? Because the application is a large-scale stochastic combinatorial optimization problem for which there is no known algorithm producing good solutions in reasonable time. This project aims to carry out fundamental research in this relatively new area of science to obtain good solutions to these problems. It will investigate two complementary areas: (1) the integration of constraint and integer programming that provide orthogonal strengths in approaching stochastic combinatorial optimization problems; and (2) stochastic substructures to design efficient solutions or approximations for typical instances. This research will advance our knowledge about large-scale stochastic combinatorial optimization problems and allow for their solutions to be used in complex and critical operations doc14568 none This ITR research medium research project will put together an interdisciplinary research group whose aim will be to develop a new modeling and a solution framework that nontrivially integrates a wide class of solution methods, including mathematical programming, constraint satisfaction, and a variety of heuristic algorithms. The objective of this framework is to be able to effectively tackle challenging engineering optimization problems. The group will be composed of faculty and students from Computer Science, Operations Research and Chemical Engineering. The key goal for the group will be to identify principles according to which algorithms can be integrated. These principles will then form the basis for a modeling language that guides the integration. Furthermore, new solution techniques will be developed for hybrid models and for global optimization of nonconvex discrete continuous problems. Two paths of integration will be investigated. One is to exploit problem structure at the modeling stage by using an idea developed in constraint logic programming: namely, by writing the problem in the form of global constraints that individually invoke algorithms tailored to the special structure of each constraint. A second is to make a fundamental distinction, at both the modeling and solution stage, between two types of algorithms: checkers and solvers. The research will be applied primarily to the optimization of process systems, with a focus on synthesis of reactive distillation systems and the integrated testing of new products and batch manufacturing. Because these problems have both discrete and continuous aspects, and the second involves difficult nonlinearities, they provide a natural context for combining optimization and logic-based methods. However, the research will develop a general-purpose approach to modeling and solution, rather than one that is exclusively for process systems applications doc14486 none A modular system for ocean data assimilation has recently been developed. It has already been implemented in an unsophisticated way, with a variety of models of the ocean and the coupled ocean-atmosphere. This project will enhance the system using Information Technology, including modern software engineering concepts, new visualization techniques and interactive web-based training. Together with effective outreach and advanced optimization algorithms, these elements of IT will be linked through the modular system to a wide range of coastal, basin-scale and global ocean models. Variational data assimilation is also coming into use in operational weather forecasting and ocean forecasting, in ocean biogeochemistry, in groundwater hydrology and in solid-earth geophysics. The new modular system will thus be of immediate benefit throughout the geosciences. The team includes 14 physical oceanographers, civil engineers and computer scientists in six universities, a national laboratory, and private industry. The project is funded under the Information Technology Research Initiative doc14570 none This conference grant will conduct and document a conference that brings together teams from the eight NSF funded Implementation and Dissemination Centers and key leaders from curriculum development projects, to share lessons learned as they have made efforts to increase the use of research-based curricula across the country. These are relatively new projects and there is great interest in them as possible vehicles for assistance to states and school districts. The conference, to be held in July , is therefore extremely timely. A white paper will be produced that captures successful approaches and strategies. This paper will be helpful to the field in providing documentation about successful and promising approaches to implementing curriculum reform doc14571 none Mariano This award supports Professor Patrick S. Mariano, Department of Chemistry, University of New Mexico, to conduct collaborative research with Professor Ung Chan Yoon, Pusan National University in Korea. The joint study will focus on electron transfer photochemistry. Among the various types of reactions occurring in electronic excited states of organic substrates are those that involve intramolecular transfer of atoms and groups. These reactions proceed by concerted or multi-stepped routes. This collaborative research between U.S. and Korean researchers is to develop new and useful photochemical reactions doc14572 none Two different physical mechanisms account for the formation of precipitation. In clouds cold enough to contain a mixture of ice crystals and supercooled water droplets, the crystals grow by the diffusion of water vapor to sizes large enough to coagulate with one another to form snowflakes or to accrete cloud droplets and form graupel, snow pellets, or denser forms of ice precipitation. All of these forms of ice-phase precipitation may melt when falling through warmer air and reach the ground as rain. In so-called warm clouds, which are not cold enough for ice to form, precipitation can be created by an all-water process. Cloud droplets grow initially by condensation - though at a rate slower than ice crystals, because the cloud environment is only slightly supersaturated relative to water though it may be strongly supersaturated relative to ice. Once some of the droplets reach a radius of about 20 micrometer, they begin to collide with smaller droplets and grow by coalescence. Either the collision-coalescence process or the ice-crystal process, depending on cloud temperature, can explain the development of precipitation. However, an uncertain link in the collision-coalescence process is the slowness of drop growth by condensation and the consequent long time for drops to reach a size where collisions become important. The goal of this continuing research project is to develop a physically consistent understanding of the development and evolution of rain in warm clouds. The approach is based on (1) analysis of data from radars, instrumented aircraft, and surface observations, and (2) simulations with a detailed cloud microphysical model to examine physical processes that cannot be inferred from observations alone. Key unresolved questions are: (1) How do giant nuclei (hygroscopic particles larger than 1 micrometer) affect the rate of precipitation onset in different kinds of clouds? (2) What are the microphysical mechanisms that account for the observed radar characteristics of growing cumulus clouds? (3) How do these clouds modify the environment for subsequent cloud development? (4) How do environmental parameters such as wind shear influence the rate of precipitation production? (5) Do giant nuclei affect the total precipitation falling from clouds of different kinds? Answers to these questions are critical for understanding precipitation development and have significance for questions related to artificial cloud modification, global precipitation measurements, and climate studies doc14573 none This award is establishing the Analytical Sciences Digital Library (ASDL) as a Collection in the NSDL. An Internet web site is being developed that classifies, catalogs, links and references information or discovery material pertinent to innovations in curricular development and supporting resources in the analytical sciences. Due to the diverse and multi-disciplinary nature of the subject, the site is accessible to a wide audience of users, teachers, students, and practitioners interested in the teaching and delivery of educational material to improve the literacy, skills and thought processes of analytical scientists. Of special interest to ASDL is material pertinent to classroom and laboratory instruction based or inquiry-driven and problem-based learning. A Review Committee is assuring quality control of material submitted and accepted into ASDL doc14574 none Engineering - Other (59) This is a project to complete a promising research agenda focused on the assessment of engineering education and funded initially by the Engineering Education and Centers Action Agenda initiative ( ). Specifically, the critical problem of how to best assure that engineering students receive a quality education is being addressed through outcomes assessment. With the introduction of the ABET EC accreditation criteria, engineering faculty must develop and implement systems for continuous improvement. The project is involving a multidisciplinary team from five universities: Colorado School of Mines, Columbia University, University of Pittsburgh, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, and the University of Washington. The objectives are to identify and evaluate a variety of methodologies for assessing engineering education and to provide engineering educators with a comprehensive set of attributes to describe student learning outcomes, identify existing instruments for each method to assess student achievement outcomes, and develop instruments where none can be found. The particular focus of this phase of the project is to use triangulation experiments using multiple assessment methodologies to measure specific undergraduate outcomes on student cohorts at all five institutions. The research is intended to determine which methods are most effective for particular outcomes as well as to better understand how engineering students progress toward achieving stated learning outcome objectives over the course of their undergraduate education. All findings and materials from this work will continue to be available at http: www.engrng.pitt.edu ~ec doc14437 none Collaborative Research: ITR AP&IM Data Intense Challenge: The Instrumented Oil Field of the Future Mary Wheeler - University of Texas at Austin - Alan Sussman - University of Maryland, College Park - Joel Saltz - Ohio State University Research Foundation - Manish Parashar - Rutgers University - Increasing production from existing oil and natural gas reservoirs is crucial for the US economy. In order to better monitor and optimize oil and gas production, advanced technologies from field instrumentation to information technology and computational science are essential. Field technologies include time-lapse surface and borehole seismic, permanent downhole sensors, intelligent well completions, fiber optics, and remote control operations. IT technologies include data management, data visualization, parallel computing, and decision-making tools such as new wave propagation and multiphase, multi-component flow and transport computational portals. These diverse technologies can be integrated to achieve real-time monitoring and optimization of reservoir production: The Instrumented Oilfield. A major outcome of the proposed research is a computing portal which will enable reservoir simulation and geophysical calculations to interact dynamically with the data and with each other and which will provide a variety of visual and quantitative tools. Test data will be provided by oil and service companies currently participating in UT Austin industrial affiliate programs. Since the proposed research is directed towards the general problem of modeling and characterization of the earth s subsurface, it has immediate application to other areas, including environmental remediation and storage of hazardous wastes doc14576 none Through this project, the Information Institute of Syracuse is integrating human expertise into the evolving digital library being developed through the NSDL program and is building a virtual reference desk to support the library. In particular, a research study is exploring how the integration of reference and collection building may lead to a more effective information service. The research questions shall ask when and why users seek help online, and how an NSDL virtual reference desk may be evaluated. Multiple qualitative (content analysis and talk aloud protocols ) and quantitative (web usage analysis and surveys) methods shall be used to ascertain a better understanding of the digital reference process. The project s second objective is to build an operational virtual reference desk system for the NSDL. This system will build on the extensive digital reference expertise the Information Institute of Syracuse gained through its AskERIC and Virtual Reference Desk projects. The NSDL operational system will use in-place math, science, and technology expertise as well as digital reference systems experience to build a functioning distributed virtual reference desk doc14577 none This targeted research project is investigating and developing tools and social protocols to make more feasible the management and maintenance of distributed digital library collections in which authors put material into the library and librarians (collection managers) organize and annotate it for the library patrons. While such author-based approaches enable a digital library to grow rapidly, they can create confusion as resources are added, deleted, or changed without warning. In the case of web sites that are pointed to, noticing when those web sites go away, are rehosted, or change their underlying structure is very time consuming. Additionally, when changes are made to the content of the resources, the collection manager must decide if the new version is still suitable for the collection and, if so, whether the document needs to be recategorized. Towards the goal of improving the ability of collection managers to maintain distributed digital libraries this project is developing: i) algorithms and heuristics for identifying resources no longer available; ii) methods for identifying the relocation of resources; iii) methods for categorizing and evaluating the significance of changes to resources; and iv) tools supporting social mechanisms (between resource authors, library managers, and library patrons) to contend with document changes. The project plan includes the evaluation of identification and categorization algorithms based on technical and social metrics. These evaluations answer whether the algorithms correctly identify network and server problems, whether resources that have been moved are successfully located, and whether ratings of significance of change match those of human evaluators doc14578 none This project is seamlessly integrating telescopes equipped with remote access and control capabilities into one virtual observatory. Building on the current Telescopes in Education (TIE) effort that involves some twenty such telescopes, Virtual TIE is providing the services required to operate this facility, including a scheduling service, tools for data manipulation, an online proposal review environment, an online Virtual TIE Student Astrophysical Journal for publication of results, and access to related educational materials provided by the TIE community. This effort leverages ongoing projects of the collaborators to increase access to astronomy education at the K-12 and undergraduate levels, especially among traditionally under-served communities. Results of this effort are also being used to enhance ongoing educational efforts in astronomy and computer science. This project represents a collaborative effort among the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Tennessee State University, the Telescopes in Education Foundation, Raytheon ITSS, and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Other partners include the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Rochester Institute of Technology, and TIE project affiliates at Little Thompson Observatory and Howard University doc14506 none This is a research project in the design and implementation of novel Human Computer Interfaces for educational use in structural molecular biology. This project will explore, define, and assess the role of computer-generated physical models in teaching scientific content and concepts. The purpose is to enhance the understanding and communication of the complex world of life s molecular machinery to a broad community. Using structural data on biological molecules and their complexes, the participants will prototype novel physical models via automated design and fabrication technologies and develop replication processes for broader distribution. The models will be used directly for enhance visualization and as input output devices that interactively integrate with commutation and computer graphics for information retrieval, manipulation, and simulation. This project will provide new, tangible modes of interacting with, and understanding of, both the fundamental concepts and the complex data that are coming from the rapid advances in genomics, proteomics, and other areas of structural molecular biology. It will enable a broad range of students to learn, query, and explore in a field of growing scientific and social importance - the molecular basis of life. Physical models will give both haptic and visual support of the importance of shape in biological function. Use of physical models as tangible computer interfaces will revolutionize how students explore and understand biomolecular structure, interaction, and function doc14580 none This project is creating a digital library of microstructures for functional ceramics with emphasis on materials used for structural, electronic, and thermal applications. This library will be used in ceramic education to (1) illustrate the role of microstructure in dictating the macroscopic properties, (2) highlight changes in the microstructure resulting from degradation processes associated with the intended function, and (3) conduct virtual measurements of selected properties. Digital images of these materials are being collected and compiled into a master database. For each material, representative property data (e.g., strength and fracture toughness for structural ceramics, dielectric constant for the electrical ceramics, and thermal conductivity, thermal expansion, and compressive creep for refractories) are being included in the database as well. Software is being developed to (1) access this database via the Internet, (2) measure microstructural features such as grain size and distribution, (3) illustrate key property data appropriate for the microstructure being examined, and (4) conduct virtual measurements. The database and software is being beta tested and then refined based upon the results. Ultimately, the digital library of ceramic microstructures (DLCM) is being transferred to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and will be linked with an existing Web site, Ceramics WebBook, which provides a guide to data centers, tools, and resources. This project is a partnership among three universities, University of Missouri at Rolla, Georgia Tech, and North Carolina A and the University of Dayton Research Institute. Significant co-funding of this project is being provided by the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the NSF Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences in recognition of the emphasis on collections development in the area of materials science doc14566 none Electronic markets are emerging as a primary medium of trade in business-to-business, business-to-consumer, and consumer-to-consumer settings. In order to design viable electronic marketplaces, a host of novel interrelated game-theoretic and computational issues must be addressed. With a team of interdisciplinary researchers from multiple institutions, this project will develop a unified theory of games and computing to guide and facilitate the growth of such markets. Specific research directions of the project include the following: (1) Market designs will be generalized to incorporate combinatorial bidding, multi-attribute preferences, multi-stage mechanisms, continuous mechanisms, and multi-unit sale; (2) New algorithms for clearing, quoting, incentive-compatible pricing as well as new incentive-compatible tractable mechanisms will be designed with particular emphasis on online and incremental updating of market states; (3) Bounded rationality of the agents will be investigated under a wide spectrum of models of computations, equilibrium concepts of game theory, and trade-offs between centers and agents; and (4) Novel approaches to relaxing the classic common prior assumption will be explored in order to develop practically useful models for ecommerce. The successful completion of this project will make significant contributions to both theory and practice in the areas of electronic commerce, multi-agent systems, algorithms, computational complexity theory, and game theory doc14486 none A modular system for ocean data assimilation has recently been developed. It has already been implemented in an unsophisticated way, with a variety of models of the ocean and the coupled ocean-atmosphere. This project will enhance the system using Information Technology, including modern software engineering concepts, new visualization techniques and interactive web-based training. Together with effective outreach and advanced optimization algorithms, these elements of IT will be linked through the modular system to a wide range of coastal, basin-scale and global ocean models. Variational data assimilation is also coming into use in operational weather forecasting and ocean forecasting, in ocean biogeochemistry, in groundwater hydrology and in solid-earth geophysics. The new modular system will thus be of immediate benefit throughout the geosciences. The team includes 14 physical oceanographers, civil engineers and computer scientists in six universities, a national laboratory, and private industry. The project is funded under the Information Technology Research Initiative doc14583 none This is a collaborative project with Award No. (University of Washington; Stuart A. Sutton, Principal Investigator). Researchers at the University of Washington s Information School and Syracuse University s Center for Natural Language Processing are leading this effort, with assistance from Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) and Achieve, Inc. The investigators are developing a natural language processing tool ( StandardConnection ) for the automatic assignment of content standards and benchmarks to educational resources in the collections of the National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL) and to other educational resources on the Web. The standards and benchmarks come from the Compendium of Standards and Benchmarks developed by McREL, and the Achieve Standards Database. Supplementing general descriptive metadata, the content standards metadata generated by the StandardConnection tool will make it possible for a teacher in any state to use the NSDL to locate appropriate teaching resources for helping students achieve a particular competency set by the state. The project entails acquiring a training and testing collection of educational resources for analysis; cultivating a sophisticated level of understanding of the human cognitive processes involved in manually assigning content standard metadata tags to resources; designing and developing the technology based on this understanding; running the StandardConnection tool on an unseen set of data; analyzing the results and adjusting the tool, through iterations, until a highly reliable tagging is produced; and employing a group of teacher-experts to analyze the quality of the tool s mappings of resources to standards and benchmarks. This project constitutes a logical extension of work conducted under Award Nos. and , Breaking the Metadata Generation Bottleneck, in which the investigators are processing the text of educational resources to automatically assign Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) metatags for the descriptive and subject aspects of educational resources doc14584 none To facilitate research and education in Green s functions and their applications, this project is developing an education-oriented digital library focusing on Green s functions and their applications - the Green s Functions Research and Education Enhancement Network (GREEN). GREEN will serve undergraduate, graduate and professional education user communities and support Green s functions research and application development in academia and industry. The project is providing an integrated learning environment and set of digital resources for science, mathematics, engineering and technology education (SMETE) and is aggregating and organizing learning materials related to Green s functions and their applications. This project has two primary objectives. The first objective is to implement a solution for transforming and expanding the existing digital resources of an on-line collaborative work group (the National Institute of Standards and Technology Green s Functions Working Group or NIST-GFWG) from a loose collection of useful digital resources to an NSDL-SMETE digital library. The second objective is to enhance the educational value of the proposed NSDL-SMETE library by applying an education-oriented metadata schema (Learning Object Metadata schema from the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee) to the collection and coupling that schema with a quality assurance process and support tool that will provide for the continual evolution and refinement of the collection materials during their lifecycle. Significant co-funding of this project is being provided by the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the NSF Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences in recognition of the emphasis on collections in the area of Green s functions represented in this work doc14585 none Through this Information Technology Research award, electrical engineers, computer scientists, and meteorologists at Colorado State University are developing a networked radar environment that will link multiple sensors in a distributed information environment and provide internet-based access to fused multi-dimensional data gathered from different radars and other meteorological sensors. It is an interdisciplinary project involving research in networking, radar technology, data fusion, and radar meteorology. Tasks include research on data fusion from multiple sensors with widely differing spatial and temporal scales and bandwidths, and novel methods of assuring data quality and data dissemination using principles of meta-data. The project will be centered on the CSU-CHILL national radar facility, a polarimetric Doppler radar operated by Colorado State University through a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. Other data to be employed in the networking experiments are from NEXRAD radars at the National Weather Service offices in Denver and Cheyenne, the CSU Pawnee radar, located 48 km north of the CHILL radar, from satellite data, and from a surface network of rain gauges and other instruments. Several other universities will participate as remote test sites by using the networked environment created by this project. The experiment provides unique educational opportunities in networking research, radar science and technology, data fusion, neuro fuzzy systems, cloud and precipitation physics, and severe storm research doc14586 none This research project is developing a new generation of formal verification tools that can be integrated into design environments for the complex, high-assurance embedded and autonomous systems of today and of the future. Such systems are increasingly distributed, complex, and dynamic; they must operate with a high degree of autonomy and survivability in diverse and unpredictable environments. This project will focus on the development of new verification methods and tools to provide a rigorous means for checking the integrity and correctness of designs for these systems before they are deployed. The project has two broad research thrusts: 1. Verifying System Integrity. System integrity refers to correctness with respect to the interactions among the distributed software and hardware components. Systems must satisfy synchronization, resource, and real-time constraints imposed by the implementation architecture and application requirements. This project will extend automated verification methods that have been successful in hardware and protocol applications to their use with embedded and autonomous systems. 2. Modeling the Environment. Embedded and autonomous systems must interact in complex ways with physical systems and adverse environments. It is thus essential to capture correctly and effectively the continuous dynamics, feedback loops, and unpredictable features of the environment in the models used for formal verification. This project will draw on recent developments in hybrid system verification to integrate continuous state dynamics with discrete-state models used in formal verification doc14587 none The construction industry suffers from costly remedies associated with late defect detection at construction sites. Frequent and accurate assessment of the status of work-in-place, identifying critical spatio-temporal and quality related deviations, and predicting the impacts of these deviations during a construction project are necessary for active project control and for developing an accurate project history. This research project builds on, combines and extends the advances in generating 3D environments using laser scanners, collecting quality information about built environments using embedded sensors, and generation and utilization of semantically-rich Architecture Engineering Construction (A E C) project models, in developing an integrated early defect detection system. The research objectives include: (1) formulating strategies mechanisms to utilize laser scanning and embedded sensor systems for frequent and accurate collection and representation of spatial and quality related as-built data, (2) developing mechanisms for integrating and interpreting data acquired from these systems with the project model, (3) developing a general, flexible and integrated representation schema to model product, process and as-built information, and (4) formalizing mechanisms for automated defect detection and management. The expected contributions of this research fall within the fields of robotics, embedded sensing in civil engineering, A E C project modeling and analysis. The societal impacts of this research include potential savings in rework and maintenance costs doc14588 none This NSDL Services project is developing an initial set of data discovery tools to enable students to manipulate real (and real-time if needed) data sets for visualization purposes. In addition, an Internet-based community center for further tool building, the Foundry , is being created. The proposed data discovery tools are based on a novel technology that combines the data visualization and analysis capabilities of Kodak s Interactive Data Language (IDL) product with the interactive, multimedia authoring capabilities of Macromedia s Director. The key to this authoring technology is the EDMI (Earth Data Multimedia Instrument) software. The EDMI is a very simply a cross-platform Windows and MacOS compatible IDL plug-in to Macromedia Director. Since the proposed tools are all based on leading off-the-shelf software, there are already many potential partners within the NSDL community capable of joining in this effort on the tool development side. The initial set of tools and those developed subsequently by the community are linked to Internet-based curricular material, which means that teachers looking for a digital laboratory exercise can either find an existing tool that does precisely what they need to accomplish in the classroom, or they can make use of the Foundry to collaboratively create a new tool or a new lab exercise for an existing tool doc14589 none The object of this proposal is to explore the feasibility of controlling various modes of a structure under seismic loading through the installation of various groups of tuned mass dampers with the frequency range of each group distributed around a different modal frequency. The proposed scheme is called multiple distributed tuned mass damper (MDTMD). A MDTMD could combine the robustness and efficiency already demonstrated for single mode distributed TMD (in general referred to as multiple TMD, or MTMD), with the efficacy of highly damped and high mass devices proposed for some single TMD. The exploratory study will proceed in stages. First, some analytical studies reported in the literature will be simulated experimentally, on a shake table. The aim is to better understand why different studies yielded inconclusive results. Second, one optimization criteria already developed in the literature for single TMD will be extended to the case of a single distributed TMD (controlling one mode), and then to the case of a MDTMD controlling several modes. One benchmark case study, available to the seismic engineering research community, will be retrofitted with the MDTMD. Simple analytical and laboratory tests will be carried out on the reduced scale model to verify the potential effectiveness of the dampers. The aim is to explore the feasibility of the MDTMD for controlling multi-modal response for earthquake excitation. Significance and impact of the project. This exploratory work should advance the understanding of an important passive control device, and indicate whether or not TMD have the potential to be used for multi-modal control. If the answer in the exploratory study is positive, a more in depth research effort will be proposed. The expected outcome of the research will be a versatile, robust, and efficient methodology for vibration control of structures. The research will also provide much needed experimental data regarding the behavior of TMD subjected to ground excitation doc14590 none The research is centered on four major computational themes which are linked in various ways: 1. Quantum Computation: A study of novel quantum algorithms, of entanglement as a computational resource, and of connections to fundamental issues in quantum physics, such as the transition from classical to quantum. 2. Modeling the Regulatory Processes of the Cell: In the post-genomic era, the computational modeling of the operation of an entire cell at the level of interactions among genes, proteins and environmental conditions. 3. Statistical Physics and Computational Complexity: A study of central concepts of statistical physics, such as phase transitions and critical exponents, with emphasis on their computational manifestations and their relevance to the analysis of large systems with local interactions. 4. Mathematical Economics and the Internet: A study of the Internet as a novel computational artifact and a complex economic arena, as well as of the algorithmic adaptations of Game Theory and Mechanism Design necessary for such a study. The four PIs --- Richard Karp, Christos Papadimitriou, Alistair Sinclair and Umesh Vazirani --- are all based in the Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley. Each of them has a track record of research in at least one of the above areas, and a substantial interest in at least one other. The project also includes one senior scientist from each of the four areas: Birgitta Whaley (Quantum Physics), Adam Arkin (Quantitative Biology), Yuval Peres (Probability and Statistical Physics), and Scott Shenker (Economics and the Internet). The research is rooted in a realization that a computational perspective is becoming increasingly important in the Natural and Mathematical Sciences, and conversely that the Sciences are posing new challenges for the theory of computation, many of which are related. It aims to foster this connection within a dedicated program of research and graduate education doc14591 none We are poised at the threshold of an information rich world with devices and services able to deliver that information to nearly anyone, at any place, and at any time. Humans have evolved social mechanisms for smoothly and flexibly managing interpersonal communications; however, current computational and communications devices are, almost without exception, utterly unaware of the social and attentional state of the user. They know little or nothing of the personal, social, and task situations in which they are used, and they do little or nothing to account for, and minimize, the human costs they induce. In this project, the PI and his team will explore situationally appropriate interfaces that retrieve, generate, and deliver information in a manner that is sensitive to the situation of the user. These interfaces will allow for communication and information systems that maneuver, rather than blunder, through the social world. To accomplish this ambitious goal, the team will pursue a three-part research plan. First, they will use behavioral theory and research to model social mechanisms for managing interpersonal communications. The comparatively unexploited research we will draw on examines the affordances of situations and consistent patterns of human nonverbal social behavior within situations. Second, they will extract key situational and user behavior data from these models via input from new sensing technologies, using noninvasive (e.g., vision-based) sensing technology to provide information about situations and users. Third, leveraging knowledge from sensory, perceptual, and cognitive psychology, as well as from the fields of visual and interaction design, the team will create displays and interaction designs that are far more situationally appropriate than today s interfaces. To address the substantial challenges that this breadth of work presents, the PI has assembled a strong multidisciplinary team that brings expertise from computer science, social, sensory, perceptual, and cognitive psychology, and the field of design doc14566 none Electronic markets are emerging as a primary medium of trade in business-to-business, business-to-consumer, and consumer-to-consumer settings. In order to design viable electronic marketplaces, a host of novel interrelated game-theoretic and computational issues must be addressed. With a team of interdisciplinary researchers from multiple institutions, this project will develop a unified theory of games and computing to guide and facilitate the growth of such markets. Specific research directions of the project include the following: (1) Market designs will be generalized to incorporate combinatorial bidding, multi-attribute preferences, multi-stage mechanisms, continuous mechanisms, and multi-unit sale; (2) New algorithms for clearing, quoting, incentive-compatible pricing as well as new incentive-compatible tractable mechanisms will be designed with particular emphasis on online and incremental updating of market states; (3) Bounded rationality of the agents will be investigated under a wide spectrum of models of computations, equilibrium concepts of game theory, and trade-offs between centers and agents; and (4) Novel approaches to relaxing the classic common prior assumption will be explored in order to develop practically useful models for ecommerce. The successful completion of this project will make significant contributions to both theory and practice in the areas of electronic commerce, multi-agent systems, algorithms, computational complexity theory, and game theory doc14593 none Ostrom This Americas Program award will support thesis dissertation research by Dr. Maria Angelica Toniolo under the direction of Dr. Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University-Bloomington and in collaboration with Dr. Daniel Nepstad of the Intituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazonia (IPAM). Ms. Toniolo plans to explore the impact of different property regimes on the incidence of accidental fires in smallholder communities in Tapajos National Park in the Santarem region of Para state in north central Brazil. The ultimate objective of this comparative study is to produce a rigorous assessment of the relationship between accidental fires, small farming practices, forest fragmentation, and property regimes and, thereby, contribute to the understanding of deforestation processes and the formulation of conservation policy in the Amazon. Results of this proposal will be relevant for improving current understanding of the underlying interactions among land tenure, decision making regarding land use and management of accidental fires. It will allow for the creation of a fire-risk map at the farm-community level, which can be used to indicate and minimize risk in areas that need special attention in terms of fire prevention. The study will apply two different approaches based on Geographic Information System (GIS) to model the likelihood of accidental fires at the farm community level. It will also add new information to the National Program of Prevention and Control of Fires in the Deforestation Arch (PROARCO) and to the Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA doc14594 none The project will investigate the dynamical influence of the stratosphere on tropospheric variability in the middle and high latitudes of the Northern hemisphere. Interest in stratospheric circulation, including sudden warming, has recently been rekindled by observational analyses which suggest that a primary mode of tropospheric variability in polar latitudes--the annular mode--is influenced by the downward migration of annular anomalies from the stratosphere. Variations in stratospheric polar vortex have been linked to seasonal anomalies in the tropospheric zonal-mean zonal winds and circulation patterns such as the Arctic Oscillation North Atlantic Oscillation. These patterns have profound impact on European and North American climate and weather. Drs. Ortland and Dunkerton will conduct a dynamically oriented analysis of the mechanisms coupling the troposphere and stratosphere, and the subtropics and midlatitudes. The PIs will use a quasi-linear primitive equation model to study the interaction of zonal-mean zonal flow (annular component) and the planetary-scale Rossby waves. The project will advance the understanding and modeling of dynamical interactions of the troposphere and stratosphere, and shed light on the evolution of the annular mode. This research will also be helpful in understanding the mechanisms producing the observed climate trends doc14595 none The convenience of wireless communications and the ever-increasing demand for higher data rates has motivated the proposed study of more efficient methods of transmission. One highly spectrally efficient link architecture is the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) architecture, which uses multiple transmit antennas and multiple receive antennas. Under ideal conditions, the theoretical capacity of a MIMO channel increases linearly in the number of transmit receive antennas. In other words, the theory promises that more bits can be conveyed through the same bandwidth by simply adding more antennas at each end of the link. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a high-data rate modulation technique that is already part of some single-transmitter communications standards and is known for its scalability and its convenient and cost-effective implementation using standard digital signal processing architectures. This study seeks to determine how to combine OFDM with MIMO architectures over real channels. A challenging goal of this research is to arrive at a flexible, scaleable, wireless modem with bandwidth efficiency on the order of 4 to 10 bits per second per Hertz. The study will include analysis of the major functions of the physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layers. Hardware experimentation will include MIMO channel measurements, including characterization of MIMO interference, and verification of the MIMO OFDM link in real-time on a software radio test-bed. Methods for performing MIMO OFDM channel estimation and synchronization jointly over the spatial channels are being investigated, taking into account noise and channel estimation and synchronization errors. An adaptive transmitter is also being studied that combines space-time processing based on singular-value decomposition (SVD) with adaptive modulation. Solutions to the major transmission impairments in OFDM systems, which include intersymbol interference (ISI) due to insufficient guard interval, interference from co-channel systems, and the effects of amplifier non-linearities on OFDM will be sought for MIMO OFDM systems. To provide data reliability, the combination of space-time coding, Turbo coding with iterative receivers, and hybrid ARQ strategies for error control across the PHY and MAC layers are being considered. Finally, media access protocols will be optimized to work with the parameters of the OFDM air interface, such as the OFDM symbol period doc14596 none Kwait, Paul G University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign ITR SY: Foundations of Solid-State Quantum Information Processing Quantum Information Processing (QIP) lies at the forefront of revolutionary computing research, promising radically new powers to computation and communication, e.g., unconditionally secure quantum cryptography and quantum logic for greatly enhanced speed on certain computational problems. This project addresses the critical question of how to achieve a physical system capable of meeting the two most challenging requirements for building a quantum computer -- scalability, the fabrication and coupling of a large number of quantum bits ( qubits ), and quantum coherence, the control of noise and external coupling effects so that the exquisitely fragile quantum mechanical circuits will not be perturbed by unwanted influences. An interdisciplinary research team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is exploring a wide range of solid state systems based on the manipulation and measurement of magnetic moments to perform quantum logic operations. By studying the full range, from single spins to small clusters of spins (in quantum dots), to large current loops in superconductors, they are attempting to assess the relative merit of different techniques, and determine the physical size limits for magnetic systems acting as qubits. The ultimate goal is the physical realization of a small system for performing quantum logic operations. A key component is the integration of research and education via a highly interactive program involving undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral investigators. This project is providing a crucial role for an explosive new field such as QIP, by providing general awareness of the issues involved and by training a pool of experienced researchers doc14597 none As mobile computing becomes more pervasive, users enjoy increased flexibility in terms of where and when they record, retrieve, and transmit information; at the same time, the conditions under which these devices are used are becoming more variable, less predictable, and in many situations less hospitable. With increasing frequency, computers are being used when lighting is poor, noise is unpredictable, or when the user is on the move (e.g., walking, driving a vehicle). In addition, mobile devices often cause users to interrupt an ongoing activity in order to perform secondary computer-based tasks: examples include individuals replying to e-mails during meetings, doctors reviewing operating room schedules while interacting with patients, and individuals retrieving directions from their in-vehicle navigation system while driving. The goal of this research is to address the issues involved in developing effective computer systems for individuals experiencing such situationally-induced impairments (SII). Like disability-induced impairments (DII), SII exist when the physical, cognitive, or perceptual demands placed on the user exceed their abilities. Unlike DII, SII are temporary, resulting from the environment in which the work is being performed or the tasks in which the user is engaged. Through this research, the PI and his team will develop new techniques for identifying and documenting the factors that contribute to SII, will identify methods for developing solutions that address the temporary and dynamic nature of SII, and will compare the interaction strategies of individuals experiencing SII to those of individuals with comparable DII doc14598 none In many important combustion applications, heat transfer is dominated by thermal radiation from combustion gases and soot. Thermal radiation from combustion gases, even in the absence of turbulence interactions, is extremely complicated; accurate and efficient predictions are only now becoming possible. The coupling between turbulence and radiation has to date essentially been ignored due to their extreme complexity, although preliminary calculations have shown that turbulence-radiation interactions (TRI) can more than double the radiative loss from a flame. Integration of finite volume and finite element methods, stochastic methods based on a probability density function (PDF), and ray tracing Monte Carlo schemes, exploiting the strengths of each method, can potentially produce a formidable computational tool to describe the highly nonlinear interaction between turbulence, chemical reactions and thermal radiation in turbulent flames over a broad range of conditions. An interdisciplinary team of Co-PI s, together with collaborators from industry and national laboratories, will address these issues using an innovative IT-based approach. The goal of this study is to develop modular, portable, scalable, parallel computational tools that address the interactions of all three phenomena doc14599 none The University of Tennessee, School of Information Sciences and Center for Information Studies, is partnering with the Department of Energy s Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) in this project to help undergraduate users recognize, access, and evaluate high quality scientific and technical information. The project s intent is to ameliorate the fact that college students, in particular lower division undergraduates, often do not recognize the importance of high quality scientific journal literature. Faced with many choices, they may opt for accessing information that is most convenient, rather than carefully evaluating the content and quality of the many digital resources available to them. The work builds on OSTI s efforts to enable access to scientific and technical report literature, through web-based services such as DOE Information Bridge and the PrePRINT Network. These resources are available to undergraduate users, yet they do not have components that will bring undergraduate science students to them. Such collections have great potential for undergraduate use via collaborative learning environments and provide testbeds for enhancing educational access to all parts of a national digital network of learning environments for SMET education. Focus groups are identifying useful search and retrieval features for undergraduates, graduate students, and science faculty; and selected features are being implemented and tested doc14600 none The emerging National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL) includes many sets of items whose representations, while different at the user level, contain semantically related information. Consider, for example, the association between land-use maps of some region, and references to that region in a book concerning agricultural practices. The NSDL aims to support its users with services that help them find and integrate such semantically related information in such heterogeneously represented items. This project is constructing operational services to make it easy for users of the NSDL to have integrated access to information from texts, maps, and images--specifically, information that is semantically related in terms of geospatial features and regions. These services will help users find: -- maps or images containing features or places that are referred to implicitly within texts, and -- texts that implicitly reference features and places contained in maps and images. More advanced services will help users evaluate the consistency between geospatial information obtained from such varying sources. Collectively, these services will allow large collections of texts to be indexed and accessed geospatially, even if their cataloging records do not contain explicit geospatial references. To implement these services, the project team is integrating the geospatial search services of the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL; http: www.alexandria.ucsb.edu) at the University of California at Santa Barbara with the high-performance information retrieval (IR) services developed by the Illinois Institute of Technology s Information Retrieval Laboratory (http: www.ir.iit.edu). The key component in this integration is the 4+ million item gazetteer and associated services developed for ADL. (A gazetteer provides a mapping between textual representations of places and features, and coordinate-based representations of their geospatial footprints, thus allowing a semantic mapping to be made in either direction between textual and map image representations of related phenomena.) Specifically, the project team is integrating a gazetteer into an IR engine, integrating an IR engine into a geospatial digital library, and developing services that check the consistency of alternative geospatial references. These services will allow seamless geospatial queries across distributed heterogeneous (text and non-text) digital libraries and will enable geospatial referencing of texts that have not otherwise been geographically cataloged (i.e., almost all texts currently available doc14601 none The Decentralized Image Retrieval for Education (DIRECT) project is developing a peer-to-peer content based image retrieval (CBIR) service for the National SMETE Digital Library program. CBIR allows the user to designate a query image so that the service can search the library for images of similar content. DIRECT matches images not by text metadata but by the color, texture, and shape of the image objects. With such a system the users of the NSDL do not need to know specialized languages to initiate a search. Furthermore, the matching process does not depend on a match between the cataloguer description and the user description. The system is available to all collections in the NSDL without imposing new standards or protocols. This offers the promise for the NSDL to support images that have not yet been cataloged or have incomplete metadata, without the image collection provider or aggregator having to incur additional cataloging overhead doc14602 none The objective of this research is to develop new computational design tools with rigorous experimental validation to enable design and development of distributed, heterogeneous mixed-technology systems. Mixed-technology system development requires research on two fronts: The first is the component or the device level and the second is the integration of heterogeneous components at the system level. At the component or the device level, the research will focus on four building-blocks: Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS), Biological Microelectromechanical Systems (Bio-MEMS), Nanoelectromechanical Systems (NEMS) and Biological ion channels integrated with nanoelectronics (nanobioelectronics). Efficient computational design tools integrated with experimental validation will be developed for each of these building blocks. At the system level the research focuses on integration of MEMS and Bio-MEMS with conventional electronics. Device level modeling research will focus on development of new scattered point computational methods for fast, efficient and flexible analysis of micro and nanoscale devices, development of multiscale approaches combining continuum and molecular approaches, development of enhanced continuum models to capture microscopic phenomena, and development of efficient reduced-order modeling approaches for fast dynamic analysis. System level modeling research will focus on development of new algorithms and techniques to integrate various micro-device partial differential equations solvers with the circuit simulator (SPICE3) and development of efficient time stepping schemes with different numerical devices for simulation of the complete system. The experimental effort will focus on development of new fabrication approaches for realizing nanobioelectronics, NEMS and systems level integration of MEMS and Bio-MEMS with conventional electronics doc14603 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Harold Kung Institution: Northwestern University The objective of this proposal is to develop a collaborative effort with investigators from South Africa to study several model reactions on gold nanoparticles. This research area was identified as a prime candidate for the joint investigation at the US-South Africa Workshop on Heterogeneous Catalysis held in Pretoria in June, . The focus of the work is to elucidate the nature of the active sites and the effects of modifiers on these sites. A combination of organogold complexes and gold salts will be used to prepare catalysts containing clusters of controlled distributions of metallic gold atoms and gold ions. The performance of these catalysts in CO oxidation, propene oxidation, and acetylene hydrogenation will be tested and compared with results derived from a model. In-situ methods used to probe active sites include atomic-resolution microscopy, Mossbauer spectroscopy, and synchrotron radiation techniques. To foster collaboration among the seven investigators, the US faculty will invite several South African graduate students to spend one to two years in their laboratories, and US students will visit South Africa to perform research. The results of the research are expected to advance an understanding of the mechanisms of gold catalysis and to further opportunities for new applications of gold in industrial catalysis doc14604 none The UCAR Unidata program is developing an organizational infrastructure and a software infrastructure, Thematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services (THREDDS), to enable educators and researchers to locate, analyze, visualize, and publish a wide variety of environmental data in both their classrooms and laboratories. The framework for this infrastructure is based on the concept of publishable (data) inventories and catalogs (PICats) and ties together a set of technologies already in use in existing, extensive collections of environmental data that reside on remote, distributed servers. These include client server data-access protocols from the University of Rhode Island and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the real-time Internet Data Distribution system from Unidata, the discovery system at the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE), and an extensive set of client visualization tools. Based on the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), metadata in the form of PICats are created in many different ways. Sites receiving real-time environmental data instrument decoders to create PICats describing data products as they arrive. Crawlers can also create PICats by traversing existing retrospective data collections. Since the PICats do not necessarily reside on the server with the data, researchers can create PICats for research publications that point to datasets residing on several data servers. Likewise educators can incorporate PICats of illustrative datasets into educational modules that also include the tools for data analysis and visualization. Students may also use PICats to point to datasets related to their research projects, just as they now use URLs to point to relevant documents. Finally, the text-based nature of PICats allows them to be harvested and indexed in digital libraries not only by current document search engines, but also by specialized tools that make use of the internal structure and semantic content of the PICats. Partial co-funding of this project is being provided by the Division of Earth Sciences in NSF s Geosciences Directorate doc14605 none The PI will design and build human-computer interfaces that improve human memory, which he terms infocockpits. The basic approach is to take well-understood psychology principles and apply them to the design of information displays, in particular the fact that human beings are adept at remembering information based on its location relative to their body and on the place where they were when they learned it. The implementations will use two basic strategies: multiple spatial displays surrounding the user, to engage human memory for location; and ambient context displays (both visual and auditory), to engage human memory for place. This work leverages prior collaborative efforts by the PI and Co-PI in virtual reality. The project relates to, and represents a new paradigm for, the retention of information instead of its manipulation. Although the PIs postulate just two fundamental design principles, the design space is very large. The basic research apparatus - the infocockpit - will be a computer system with a number of traditional display monitors arrayed relative to the user s body. These display screens are then placed in a room where images can be projected onto the walls. This projected imagery, plus ambient 3D surround sound, creates a distinctive place in which information is viewed. The PI will systematically vary the configuration, and will run controlled experiments, in which users access information and then later are tested for their ability to recall it, to examine the benefits of: multiple monitors arrayed around the user vs. a single monitor; the addition of projected background context; stationary vs. animated background contexts; having the context semantically related to the accessed information; having ambient and or localized sound as part of the context; and using hierarchical places to avoid having confusions between many different contexts. The PI will partner with the Virginia Center for Digital History which will employ the new design principles to build and provide content for infocockpit systems for teaching American history; this will allow the PI to observe how the new techniques work in a real world educational application developed by others. A preliminary study conducted by the PI has found a 63% increase in users memory capabilities; moreover, functional brain imaging assessment of the participants from this study and found that experience in the infocockpit resulted in brain activations in areas associated with spatial representation, working memory, and visualization. Thus, the question is no longer whether this approach can improve the user s ability to remember information; the question is by how much doc14606 none Our primary research goal is to develop a prototype voice-enabled translating communicator which will deliver information services across the linguistic divide for minority languages in order allow remote linguistically-diverse users to communicate directly with Internet content and databases, and more importantly to communicate with others speaking a different language from their own. The latter will enable information, education, and, for example, health services, to reach remote minority-language communities. Achieving this goal requires major advances in machine learning for translation and in cross-language speech-recognition adaptability to wider language phenomena. Traditional transfer-rule-based MT requires up to a person-century to build and perfect a new language pair. Statistical and Example-Based MT replaces human coding effort by vast amounts of bilingual training data, which are virtually unobtainable for most minority languages. Without a radical advance, leading to an over-an-order-of-magnitude improvement in development time, the only commercially justifiable MT applications involve the major European languages, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic and perhaps a couple more relatively-popular languages. The vast majority of human languages are currently relegated to the proverbial MT dust heap. We propose new MT approaches based on extended and new machine learning methods. The first approach consists of statistical MT methods that learn from orders of magnitude less training data, and that can more effectively incorporate prior linguistic information (including dictionaries, word classes, and known linguistic rule classes or constraints) by using the joint source-channel modeling approach combined with exponential (maximum entropy) models. The second approach is a new method for acquiring high-quality MT transfer rules from native informants which decreases dependence on human experts and reduces development time. Semantically-conditioned transfer rules are generalized via a new locally-constrained Seeded Version-Space method based on a controlled bilingual corpus and interactive tools to elicit information from native informants. The third method builds general phone models across multiple language families for speech recognition and adapts the recognizer to new languages with minimal new- language training data. All of these methods are based on new and existing machine learning algorithms that combine prior knowledge with limited amounts of new data in order to converge quickly on working machine translation and speech recognition and synthesis systems. The primary societal impact will be a significant contribution to the global democratization of informa- tion, a process that requires bridging current linguistic barriers, especially for low-density or economically- disadvantaged languages. Additionally, preservation and teaching of endangered languages will be directly enabled by the new linguistic and acoustic knowledge coupled with existing tutorial software. If successful, Avenue (Adaptable Voice-Enabled Natural-translator for Universal Empowerment) will be the prototype of an MT system that will empower world-wide access to multilingual information doc14607 none CR- ITR SY+SI: Language Technology for Trustless Software Dissemination Karl Crary, Robert Harper, Peter Lee, Frank Pfenning : The project investigates the theoretical and engineering basis for the trustless dissemination of software in an untrusted environment. To make this possible the project investigates machine-checkable certificates of compliance with security, integrity, and privacy requirements. Such checkable certificates allow participants to verify the intrinsic properties of disseminated software, rather than extrinsic properties such as the software s point of origin. To obtain checkable certificates the project develops certifying compilers that equip their object code with formal representations of proofs of properties of the code. Specifically, the project investigates the use of proof-carrying code, typed intermediate languages, and typed assembly languages for this purpose. In each case certificate verification is reduced to type-checking in a suitable type system. To demonstrate the utility of trustless software dissemination, the project develops an infrastructure for building applications that exploit the computational resources of a network of computers. The infrastructure consists of a steward running on host computers that accepts and verifies certified binaries before installing and executing them, and certifying compilers that generate certified binaries for distribution on the network. The scope of the investigation includes the theory of specification and certification, and the systems building required to implement these ideas doc14608 none This collaborative project (with personnel at the University of California Berkeley) is investigating the creation of a learner-centered metathesaurus based on the analysis of transactions between learners and two learning resources - the Math Forum and www.smete.org. Three modes of interaction are being considered. The first involves data in which many students respond to the same problem (the Problem of the Week at the Math Forum). The second interactional mode involves data from transactions between learners and experts (the Math Forum s Ask Dr. Math feature). The final interactional mode under study uses collections at a third resource, www.smete.org, where learner usage is more in the traditional library mode of search-retrieve. Additional feedback information in the form of the viewed and selected resources enables the construction of a map between the learners language and resource metadata, which has potential to permit the extension of the metathesaurus across domain boundaries doc14609 none TeachersDomain.org (w.t.), a digital library collection, is being developed to harness WGBH s extensive broadcast, video, and interactive programming resources in the Life Sciences to support standards-based teaching and learning from elementary through high school. The product is a searchable, Web-based repository of contextualized multimedia materials that teachers are able to access easily and productively for their own professional development, as well as to enrich classroom activities with students. WGBH is expanding this library from its current focus on the topic of Diversity and Adaptation, to include resources that span the Life Sciences across the entire K-12 curriculum. These materials are being organized to reflect alignment with commonly taught classroom units as well as with the performance standards currently applied at both state and national levels. These multimedia assets are being metatagged and presented with extensive contextual information to allow for effective use. Annotations, background essays, standards correlations, and lesson plans accompany each archival resource, and features such as personalized resource bins and community discussion boards enable ease of use and maximum impact. The initiative grew from WGBH s longstanding commitment to the support of educational reform efforts nationwide, a commitment perhaps most evident in the subject area of science. The WGBH archives are rich with high quality, multimedia assets, especially within the subject area of science. The overarching intent in TeachersDomain.org is to get these resources out of the vaults and into the hands of teachers and students in digital form that is directly targeted to their teaching and learning needs doc14610 none Real-time, reactive and embedded systems are widely and increasingly used throughout society (e.g., flight control, railway signaling, vehicle management systems, medical devices). This trend is likely to continue, as applications that would have been unthinkable only a few short years ago come into the reach of ever more complex processors. Many such applications are long lived, interact with their environment continuously, and are under important real-time constraints. As these reactive systems permeate our lives, bringing us everything from intelligent pace-makers to tiny freshness-tracking devices in groceries, the need for cost-effective, confidence-inspiring software validation techniques grows proportionately. This project focuses on building new tools for checking a common class of reactive real-time systems known as interrupt-driven systems. The proposed research has four facets that complement and support each other. First, this effort will build on preliminary work in analyzing seven commercial microcontrollers to identify a static timing analysis that is sufficiently precise for a single interrupt handler. Second, ways to specify and check timing properties for multiple interrupt handlers will be investigated. Third, a typed assembly language will be designed with time bounds in which timing properties can be specified in a modular way, one handler at a time. Fourth, a timed interrupt-handler calculus will be designed that will embody the results in a language-independent way and make it tractable to prove key properties. The new tools will automatically derive a model of the software by static analysis and type checking, and submit the result to a model checker. The tools can lead to significantly reduced testing requirements, and provide support for maintenance throughout the system life-cycle doc14611 none This work will develop algorithms and systems enabling people to query and communicate a synthesized record of human experiences derived from individual perspectives captured during selected personal and group activities. For this research, an experience is defined through what you see, what you hear, where you are, and associated sensor data and electronic communications. The research will transform this record into a meaningful, accessible information resource, available contemporaneously and retrospectively. We will validate our vision with two societally relevant applications: (1) providing memory aids as a personal prosthetic or behavioral monitor for the elderly; and (2) coordinating emergency response activity in disaster scenarios. This project assumes that within ten years technology will be capable of creating a continuously recorded, digital, high fidelity record of a person s activities and observations in video form. This research will prototype personal experience capture units to record audio, video, location and sensory data, and electronic communications. Each constituent unit captures, manages, secures and associates information from its unique point of view. Each operates as a portable, interoperable, information system, allowing search and retrieval by both its human operator and remote collaborating systems. An individual cannot see everything, nor remember everything that was seen or heard. The integration of multiple points of view provides more comprehensive coverage of an event, especially when coupled with support for vastly improving the memory from each perspective. The research thus enables the following technological advances: Enhanced memory for individuals from an intelligent assistant using an automatically analyzed and fully indexed archive of captured personal experiences. Coordination of distributed group activity, such as management of an emergency response team in a disaster relief situation, utilizing multiple synchronized streams of incoming observation data to construct a collective experience. Expertise synthesized across individuals and maintained over generations, retrieved and summarized on demand to enable example-based training and retrospective analysis. Understanding of privacy, security and other societal implications of ubiquitous experience collection. The foundation for this work, the Informedia Digital Video Library, has demonstrated the successful application of speech, image, and natural language processing in automatically creating a rich, indexed, searchable multimedia information resource for broadcast-quality video. The proposed work builds from these technologies, moving well beyond a digital video library into new information spaces composed of unedited personal experience video augmented with additional sensory and position data. Tools will be created to analyze large amounts of continuously captured digital experience data in order to extract salient features, describe scenes and characterize events. The research will address summarization and collaboration of multiple simultaneous experiences integrated across time, space and people doc14612 none As applications enabled by the Internet become information rich, ensuring access to quality information in the presence of potentially malicious entities will be a major challenge. The goal of this research project is to develop defensive techniques to counter denial-of-information (DoI) attacks. Such attacks attempt to confuse an information system by deliberately introducing noise that appears to be useful information. The mere availability of information is insufficient if the user must find a needle in a haystack of noise that is created by an adversary to hide critical information. The research focuses on the characterization of information quality metrics that are relevant in the presence of DoI attacks. In particular, two complementary metrics are explored. Information regularity captures predictability in the patterns of information creation and access. The second metric, information quality trust, captures the known ability of an information source to meet the needs of its clients. The development of techniques to derive the values of these metrics for information sources is a key goal of the research. Other planned research activities include the building of a distributed information infrastructure and experimental evaluation of defensive techniques against DoI attacks doc14613 none This award provides support for the construction of a multi-use housing facility that will diminish overcrowding in the housing provided to students participating in summer laboratory research, and enhance the ability of the laboratory to accommodate students, teachers and investigators attending courses, conferences, and symposia year round. The Laboratory provides access for visiting students and scientists who study the unique marine ecosystems of coastal Maine and use cold water marine species for the purpose of investigating basic biological mechanisms such as osmoregulation, cell division, reproduction and the function of vertebrate organs. The laboratory also offers educational programs for students at various levels from high school to postdoctoral. The ability of MDIBL to accommodate participants in its various activities is currently limited by the quality and quantity of available housing, in particular the housing for undergraduate students during the peak summer season, student faculty groups taking marine related short courses during the academic year, and investigators seeking short stays for research during the winter months. These funds will be used to help construct the second of two housing units whose design was chosen to maximize flexibility of current and future use, economy of construction and harmony with the surrounding land and community. This unit will be insulated and heated to provide much needed accommodations in the colder months doc14614 none The International Technology Education Association (ITEA) and the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse (ENC) are establishing a comprehensive (broad and deep) digital collection of resources that supports the teaching and learning of technological literacy. K-12 classroom teachers, teaching faculty, museum directors, and parents are using the proposed collection to discover technological literacy resources; interact with those resources and other users; locate relevant research; and link to online professional development. ITEA provides content oversight, which includes the development of categories for technological literacy and descriptors; identification of digital information sources; and evaluation of candidate resources. ENC is building a robust electronic infrastructure to support: the development of relevant and appropriate metadata (in conjunction with other synergistic NSDL projects); the processing of records and abstracts; the development of value-added user interfaces; and the maintenance of computer services for optimum and continuous digital library operations. An advisory board is providing annual input into digital library development and identification of quality digital resources. Field testing of the collection and its services is being undertaken with diverse groups of users to evaluate ease of navigation and discovery of content-rich, pedagogically sound resources. Finally, a variety of methods of sustainability for the collection are being explored including public and or private sponsorship and subscriber support doc14615 none Amenta, Hillis, and St. John Defining and understanding the evolutionary relationships among species is fundamental to contemporary biology and the application of the comparative method in the life sciences. The results of such evolutionary research can be represented by a branching sequence of relatedness among species known as a phylogeny. Because of the geometric resemblance of a phylogeny to the branches of a tree, a phylogeny can be thought of as a tree of life. The proposed collaborative research by biologists and computer scientists at University of Texas-Austin and at CUNY-Lehman College in New York will provide specialized visualization and data mining tools to facilitate creation of a Tree of Life for all living organisms on the earth. This includes the development and refinement of algorithms to visualize and analyze multiple complex data sets for large numbers of species. More specifically, this project will: (1) integrate biological data through visualization and clustering techniques developed by computer scientists, and (2) apply these tools to taxa which comprise very large numbers of species with topologically complex and varied tree structures. The interdisciplinary team of biologists and computer scientists will integrate their newly developed software with existing computational tools in systematic biology, and make them freely available to and easily used by the scientific community. The project involves substantive efforts to provide undergraduates and students from under-represented groups with the opportunity to collaborate with scientists throughout the academic year and summer doc14616 none This project is building an Open Archives Initiative (OAI) compliant federated digital library with an emphasis on physics for the National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL). This physics digital library will federate holdings from the physics e-print server arXiv (http: arXiv.org), Physical Review D from the American Physical Society (http: prd.aps.org), and the collected holdings from the Technical Report Interchange (TRI) project (http: egbert.cs.odu.edu tri html ). TRI includes reports from the NASA Langley Research Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Air Force Research Laboratory. Other holdings are being imported from the Arc project (http: arc.cs.odu.edu). To federate collections with varying degrees of richness of metadata elements poses a number of challenging questions, which the investigators are addressing, in the areas of resource discovery, creation and maintenance of harvested metadata, and economic sustainability. Regarding resource discovery: (1) How do we enable users to search across diverse collections within one common interface without losing the ability of searching with richer metadata elements for collections that support them? (2) How do we address the lack of a uniform controlled vocabulary? (3) How do we map the user s view of the domain into the metadata models of the participating archives? Regarding creation and maintenance: (1) What is the most effective way of keeping the metadata between data providers and the federation service consistent almost all the time? Are the current OAI protocols sufficiently developed and robust enough to support the consistency? (2) How do we address the dynamic nature of the collections? The Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in NSF s Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences is providing significant co-funding for this project in recognition of its emphasis on developing collections and services in the area of physics doc14617 none Tele-immersion will provide a dramatic new medium for groups of people remote from each other to work and share experiences together in an immersive 3D virtual environment, much as if they were co-located in a shared physical space. Immersive electronic books that in effect blend a time machine with 3D hypermedia, will add an additional important dimension, that of being able to record experiences in which a viewer, immersed in the 3D reconstruction, can literally walk through the scene or move backward and forward in time. While there are many potential application areas for such novel technologies (e.g., design and virtual prototyping, maintenance and repair, paleontological and archaeological reconstruction), the focus here will be on a societally important and technologically challenging driving application, teaching surgical management of difficult, potentially lethal, injuries. Today, the pace of surgical innovations has increased dramatically, yet the mechanisms for training and re-training suffer from inflexible timing, extended time commitments, and limited content. Traditional videotaped instruction has long been available to help surgeons learn new procedures, but this approach is only marginally effective due to the fixed point of view that is integral to the narration, lack of depth perception and interactivity, and missing information; in short, the experience of watching a video is not sufficiently close to being there and seeing the procedure. In this project the PI will develop a new paradigm for teaching surgical procedures that allows surgeons to witness and explore (in time and space) a past surgical procedure as if they were there, with the added benefit of instruction from the original surgeon or another instructor, as well as integrated 3D illustrations, annotations, and relevant medical metadata. The trainees should be able to freely and naturally walk around a life-sized, high-fidelity, 3D graphical reconstruction of the original time-varying events, pausing or stepping forward and backward in time to satisfy curiosity or allay confusion. To make this reality, the PI and his team bring together experts in several disciplines, and will be able to collectively leverage their prior work in tele-immersion, time-varying 3D scene capture, interaction metaphors, cinematic techniques. and authoring tools doc14618 none This proposal requests support for research to develop methodologies and tools for designing and implementing very large-scale real-time embedded computer systems that (a) achieve ultra high computational performance through use of parallel hardware architectures, (b) achieve and maintain functional integrity via distributed, hierarchical monitoring and control, (c) are required to be highly available, and (d) are dynamically reconfigurable, maintainable, and evolvable. The specific application that will drive this research and provide a test platform for it is the trigger and data acquisition system for BTeV, an accelerator-based High Energy Physics (HEP) experiment to study matter-antimatter asymmetries (also known as Charge-Parity violation) in the decays of particles containing the b-quark. BTeV has been approved by Fermilab management and is expected to be constructed over the next 5-6 years to run in conjunction with the Fermilab Tevatron Collider. The data-taking phase of the experiment is expected to be at least five years. It requires a massively parallel, heterogeneous cluster of computing elements to reconstruct 15 million particle interactions (events) per second and to use the reconstruction data to decide which events to retain for further data analysis. Creating usable software for this type of real-time embedded system will require research into solutions of general problems in the fields of computer science and engineering. The proponents plan to approach these problems in a way that is general, and to produce methodologies and tools that can be applied to many scientific and commercial problems. During this project, the research results will be carried into the high-school system through projects, which enhance existing infrastructure for attracting students into science and engineering disciplines. The classes of systems targeted by this research include those imbedded in environments, like BTeV, that produce very large data streams which must be processed in real-time using data-dependent computation strategies. These systems require ultra high performance (~ operations per second), necessitating parallel hardware architectures, which in the case of BTeV is composed of a mix of thousands of commodity processors, special purpose processors such as Digital Signal Processors (DSPs), and specialized hardware such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), all connected by very high-speed networks. The systems must be dynamically reconfigurable to allow maximum performance from the available and potentially changing resources. The systems must be highly available, since the environments produce the data streams continuously over a long period of time, and interesting phenomena important to the analysis are rare and could occur at any time. To achieve the high availability, the systems must be fault tolerant, self-aware, and fault adaptive, since any malfunction of processing elements, the interconnection switches, or the front-end sensors (which provide the input stream) can result in an unrecoverable loss of data. Faults must be corrected in the shortest possible time, and corrected semi-autonomously (i.e., with as little human intervention as possible). Hence, distributed and hierarchical monitoring and control are vital doc14619 none This is a standard award. The focus of this project is on development of a domestic environment that is cognizant of the whereabouts and activities of its occupants and can support them in their everyday life. While the technology is applicable to a range of domestic situations, the emphasis in this work will be on support for aging in place; through collaboration with experts in assistive care and cognitive aging, the PI and his team will design, demonstrate, and evaluate a series of domestic services that aim to maintain the quality of life for an aging population, with the goal of increasing the likelihood of a stay at home alternative to assisted living that satisfies the needs of an aging individual and his her distributed family. In particular, the PI will explore two areas that are key to sustaining quality of life for an independent senior adult: maintaining familial vigilance, and supporting daily routines. The intention is to serve as an active partner, aiding the senior occupant without taking control. This research will lead to advances in three research areas: human-computer interaction; computational perception; and software engineering. To achieve the desired goals, the PI will conduct the research and experimentation in an authentic domestic setting, a novel research facility called the Residential Laboratory recently completed next to the Georgia Tech campus. Together with experts in theoretical and practical aspects of aging, the PI will establish a pattern of research in which informed design of ubiquitous computing technology can be rapidly deployed, evaluated and evolved in an authentic setting. Special attention will be paid throughout to issues relating to privacy and trust implications. The PI will transition the products of this project to researchers and practitioners interested in performing more large-scale observations of the social and economic impact of Aware Home technologies doc14620 none We propose to explore the architecture and device development issues necessary to develop optical LAN s that are ready to interface with optical MAN s. Our goal is to develop a clear plan for integration of LAN s and MAN s in order to improve the degree to which the benefits of high bandwidth in the MAN s are delivered to end users on the LAN s. The application of architectural techniques to this problem cannot be effectively pursued without understanding the capabilities of proposed and available devices, yet the needs of architecture should strongly guide device development to ensure usefulness and relevance. To address these issues, we have formed a synergistic partnership between network architecture and hardware technology groups. At the architectural level, we will explore issues in the design and evaluation of robust optical LAN architectures with explicit focus on the means of access to MAN s and on the capabilities necessary for both LAN nodes and the MAN-LAN interfaces (MLI s). The MLI s will serve as both hub and head-end for the LAN and will provide a simple interface between the LAN and the MAN. We will explore the robustness of these architectures to faults and will quantify the benefits of exploiting wavelength conversion and tunable sources to improve a network s robustness to failures with a range of automatic protection algorithms. Using wavelength conversion at MLI s, we will study the impact of wavelength conversion on robustness and network routing. Using wavelength conversion to enhance robustness has received very little attention, whereas routing is the focus of substantial previous work. We will also explore the effectiveness of optically transparent paths as limited by noise and insertion loss in the devices, and will study the tradeoffs between network capacity and robustness given these routing limitations. At the device level, we will explore devices and subsystems that trade some functionality for increased simplicity or improved cost-effectiveness. The first of these elements is a multi-cavity VCSEL, which exploits the underlying physics to produce wavelength-tunable transmitters at a fraction of the cost of current tunable sources. These VC-SEL s will fill the gap between inexpensive, non-tunable VCSEL s available in a small range of wavelengths, and high-end, carrier-grade lasers. Our proposed tunable VCSEL s are intended to fulfill the requirements of MAN LAN environments, which are a hybrid of current core networks and current LAN s. We also plan to develop optical wavelength converters based on dual-pump, four-wave mixing. The dual-pump design enhances both the efficiency and the range of the converter, and can also provide polarization independence. High efficiency is necessary to reduce or to eliminate the need for regeneration of optical signals within the MAN-LAN environment. Only a single wavelength enters the wavelength converter, thus the filter eliminates the effects of coherent and incoherent crosstalk between wavelengths that arises through four-wave mixing. SOA-based wavelength conversion is typically cheaper than other approaches, but suffers from poorer noise figures stemming from the use of the SOA, which make them less attractive for long-distance applications in core networks. For the MAN-LAN environment, SOA s present an attractive and economical alternative that allows ubiquitous availability of wavelength converters at switching nodes. Third, we will develop high-speed photodetectors based on indium-phosphide materials. The development of high-speed photodetectors helps to maintain fairly lean wavelength requirements in local and metropolitan areas, avoiding the challenges of dense WDM. While more aggressive scalability is attractive in many ways, a single 80 Gbps wavelength can move a terabyte of data in less than two minutes. A single wavelength with effective access mecha-nisms can be used as a virtual private network if appropriately deployed over a LAN MAN infrastructure. Finally, we propose to develop tunable 2x2 switch elements based on indium phosphide ring resonators. Such devices allow a single wavelength to be selected and exchanged by the switch while all other wavelengths pass through untouched. These switches serve as building blocks for several important components, including tunable receivers and low insertion loss, low-crosstalk, high-speed optical crossconnects. The development of these network elements will guide the types of systems that the network architecture group examines. At the same time, results from the network architecture group in terms of maximum system gain for a given approach (i.e., wavelength conversion, add-drop capability) will influence the direction of the hardware technology development. We believe that this approach is the best method for optimizing the architecture of next-generation fiber-optic WDM systems within the framework of the network element technology. The research will be conducted by a group of five faculty (S. L. Chuang, K. Choquette, I. Adesida, and S. Lumetta from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and M. Medard from MIT) in the optoelectronic device and computer networking areas. This project will foster collaboration between system and device researchers to realize next-generation, high-performance, wavelength-agile optical networks doc14621 none Shape is a key element in successful communication, interpretation, and understanding of complex data in virtually every area of engineering, art, science, and medicine. While in recent years the communication of both form and complex data have been greatly enhanced by visualization that is based on planar images, computational power has reached the point where it is possible to consider real-time interactive 3D physical communication. In this project, the PI will develop a novel interactive 2D or 3D haptic computer interface that enables both user-specified display of shapes as output from a computer, and user-directed input of shapes to a computer. This so-called digital clay will allow users to convey and or sense multiple-element, parallel information strands. It is a distributed input display device, the surface of which can be shaped by a user and acquired by a computer; alternatively, the clay can be shaped by the computer for the user to examine. Like ordinary clay, digital clay will allow an area of moderate size to be touched, reshaped with pressure, and seen by the user in true 3D form. Unlike ordinary clay, digital clay also provides parameters to the computer that will represent the shape to the computer for further analysis, storage, replication, communication and or modification; or, will allow the computer to prescribe its shape. This combined input and output feature of the clay enables two-way communication between the computer and the user. Some previous implementations of digital-clay-like devices have focused on reshaping of non-physical volumes of virtual clay using glove-like or haptic manipulator interfaces to a computer in which the virtual clay is stored. The PI s approach is different; digital clay comprises an instrumented, actuated, computer-interfaced physical volume bounded by an actuatable surface that acts as the haptic interface. This surface is displaced by rows or arrays of controllable interconnected fluidic-driven actuators, which together act to convey the surface topography of 3D objects by means of manipulation of a stereolithographed scaffold internal to the volume of the clay. Each actuator comprises a discrete fluidically-inflatable cell that is connected to two common pressurized reservoirs (within a base) through a dedicated two-way miniature valve integrated with a pressure sensor, manufactured by MEMS technology existing at Georgia Tech. The position of each discrete surface element can be altered either by the user or by the host computer. The simple measurement of volume flow rate combined with suitable software-based kinematic analysis allows the determination of the entire volume of the clay, and therefore the coordinates of its surface. A unique feature of the digital clay is that the force that is necessary to actuate the discretized surface is derived entirely from the two fluidic reservoirs, thus eliminating the need for small-scale, electrically-driven actuators that may have limited torque or linear force. This fluidic approach overcomes the constraints imposed by actuator energy density limits, and distributed wiring and sensing requirements, that have heretofore prevented structures such as digital clay from becoming a reality. Furthermore, the user can activate the device interactively with the host computer by sensing and overcoming the force that is exerted by the liquid pressure to concomitantly set (or reset) the shape of the device to a desired state. In this project the PI will develop and demonstrate the digital clay hardware, its computer interface, and associated software, and will further illustrate its efficacy in applications of interest (e.g., computer-aided design, medical and bioengineering diagnostics, and reconfigurable input output displays). Of particular note is the potential of digital clay to aid visually impaired persons in receiving sending haptic information from to a computer doc14493 none This project will create and apply algorithms and software tools for on-line simulations that continuously (1) assimilate sensor data from dynamic physical processes, and (2) generate optimal strategies for their control. A number of critical industrial, scientific, and societal problems stand to benefit from this research such as aerodynamics, energy, geophysics, infrastructure, manufacturing, medicine, chemical process and environmental applications; two of these will be the focus of the current research. In these and many other cases, the underlying models have become capable of sufficient fidelity to yield meaningful predictions, provided unknown parameters (typically initial boundary conditions, material coefficients, sources, or geometry) can be estimated appropriately using observational data. The critical step is the solution of a large-scale nonlinear optimization problem that is constrained by the simulation equations, typically PDEs or their reduced order models. A data assimilation phase will seek to minimize the mismatch between sensor data and model-based predictions by adjusting unknown parameters of the PDE simulation, and the optimal control phase will find an optimal control strategy based on the updated model. Despite advances in hardware, networks, parallel PDE solvers, large-scale optimization algorithms, and real-time ODE optimization, significant algorithmic and software challenges must be overcome before the ultimate goal of real-time PDE data assimilation and optimal control can be realized. Needed are fundamentally new PDE optimization algorithms that must: (1) run sufficiently quickly to permit decision-making at time scales of interest; (2) scale to the large numbers of variables and constraints that characterize PDE optimization and processors that characterize high-end systems; (3) adjust to different solution accuracy requirements; (4) target time-dependent objectives and constraints; (5) tolerate incomplete, uncertain, or errant data; (6) be capable of bootstrapping current solutions; (7) yield meaningful results when terminated prematurely; and (8) be robust in the face of ill-posedness. To create, apply, and disseminate the enabling technologies for real-time PDE data assimilation and optimal control, the project will: (1) Develop algorithms and tools for real-time data assimilation and optimal control that meet the above specifications for a class of important applications. (2) Implement and publicly distribute these algorithms within an object-oriented framework that incorporates problem structure, interfaces easily with high performance PDE solver libraries fosters applicability of our tools to a broad range of real-time data assimilation and optimal control problems, and enables extension of the algorithms without interfering with applications. (3) Apply these algorithms and tools to two critical environmental and industrial problems: modeling and control of chemical vapor deposition (CVD) reactors and of wildland firespread. (4) Interact and work with other user communities to ensure that the algorithms and software we produce are useful across a broad range of applications doc14623 none This project is creating an active collection of high-quality numerical software for science and engineering education. It is intended to support a rich, highly interactive, and inquiry-based learning environment needed to enable learners at various levels to master the use of numerical methods and software libraries. The PIs argue that the emergence of scientific computing as a third scientific methodology on par with experimentation and theory-building, is placing increasingly greater demands on the ability of end-users to locate and determine the appropriateness of good algorithms for computing. This NSDL collection is based on Netlib, the on-line repository of choice for numerical software for science and engineering for the past decade and a half. This premier public collection of high quality mathematical software is maintained through the work of experts in the field who both moderate new submissions and organize and catalogue them with appropriate metadata for simple accurate searching. The collection is being extended and enhanced through the integration of two technologies: NetSolve and Repository in a Box . NetSolve makes the Netlib s numerical software directly usable on computational servers over the network from a variety of familiar client interfaces (e.g. Matlab, Mathematica, Fortran, C), without requiring end-user downloads and installation of the software. An adaptive solver interface guides users in selecting appropriate software, in setting parameters correctly, and in interpreting numerical results. This interface is being further extended to provide more detailed feedback to users about the heuristics it uses and the decisions it makes in selecting and parameterizing software to solve a particular problem. The Repository in a Box (RIB) toolkit supports the creation of an interoperable network of software repositories through the use of an IEEE standard for software metadata. It is being used to catalog software from the Netlib collection and its installation on NetSolve servers, so that all project participants can selectively mirror the active software content and contribute to it. RIB s data model is being extended to allow cataloging of additional information about software and related resources, such as teaching modules, evaluations, and user interface modules doc14624 none Scientists are now confronted with many very large high-quality data sets. The potential scientific benefits of these data are offset by the laborious process of analyzing them to answer questions and test theories. This project will develop new data mining algorithms in pursuit of the goal of computer assisted discovery. Two key issues in achieving this are computational efficiency and autonomy. If scientists are to focus their energy on understanding, answers must arrive in minutes rather than days, hence the need for efficiency. Autonomy is important both from the data mining and the statistical perspective. Detailed searches for relationships, models, and parameters are too large for humans to undertake manually. New statistical methods will have to autonomously and quickly select models, test their significance, and report the results to search algorithms looking for new discoveries. The National Virtual Observatory (NVO) currently under construction is a model of the future of science. The NVO will assemble petabytes of data from many multi-wavelength sky surveys into a single repository. The new methods to be developed will be implemented in the domain of cosmology, but they will be applicable to all other sciences. The members of this project are computer scientists, physicists and statisticians who have a track record of collaborating closely. Working together they have produced: new algorithmic theory, new statistical theory, and publicly fielded software packages resulting from the theory, while developing new courseware and training students. This proposal involves research and education in the following areas: Nonparametric data analysis. Nonparametric statistical models enable powerful analysis techniques that make minimal assumptions, which is critical for scientific accuracy. Automated discovery. Statistical models can be used directly for discovery. Individual objects are compared to models to identify anomalies and data generated models are compared to theoretical models to refute or confirm hypotheses. Computational methods for fast analysis. The project will build on past successes of getting orders of magnitude speedups on operations such as Expectation Maximization based clustering and n-point correlations to make the new methods fast. Automated simulation parameter searching. Using all of the above methods, a system will be developed that starts with a parameterized simulation and some observational data. The system will search the space of parameters, testing the resulting simulation against the real data using nonparametric methods to determine the best settings doc14535 none Ponnuswamy Sadayappan of Ohio State is supported by the Chemistry Division under the Information Technology Research (ITR) program to develop program synthesis tools that will facilitate high-performance parallel programming for electronic structure calculations. Co-PI s include Gerald Baumgartner and Russ Pitzer of Ohio State, Jagannathan Ramanujam of Louisiana State, and Marcel Nooijen of Princeton, (the latter two via collaborative proposals and ). This team of computer scientists and computational chemists will develop a tensor contraction engine that can synthesize efficient parallel code in Fortran or C from an input specification expressed in a high-level notation, for a number of target architectures. This tool will be made freely available to other developers of quantum chemistry software. The development of high-performance parallel programs for scientific applications is complicated by the effects of algorithm choice on memory access costs and communication overhead. Currently available tools for software development and performance modeling optimization do not provide adequate support to developers of scientific code. This research will provide a novel approach to the automated synthesis of high-performance parallel programs, with the particular emphasis on electronic structure codes widely employed in chemistry, physics, and materials science doc14626 none The Gender and Science Digital Library (GSDL), a collaborative project between the Gender and Diversities Institute at Education Development Center, Inc. and the Eisenhower NationalClearinghouse (ENC) at Ohio State University, seeks to create a high-quality, interactive library of K-16 gender and science resources. The GSDL assists educators in promoting and implementing gender-equitable science education in both formal and informal settings. This is accomplished by developing, piloting, and launching a cohesive collection focused primarily on classroom climate, curriculum, and practice, including copies of print materials, videos, interactive websites, and other resources. Focus groups with a diverse population of K-16 educators and students, and teacher preparation faculty and students are used in developing an intuitive interface that allow multiple approaches for users. These approaches are integrated into the existing ENC digital library structure. While the primary audience is K-16 science educators, teacher educators, and gender equity specialists, the collection is also be useful to families, community organizations, and to researchers, and students in post-secondary education. Materials for the GSDL are from the ENC and Women s Educational Equity Act (WEEA) Resource Center, NSF grants, and the collections of various science education centers and equity assistance centers. The project also aggressively solicits submissions through its websites, listservs, and links to equity and science networks and to publishers. Guidelines for submissions to assist publishers, or for developers to place their work into the collection are in place. Submissions are reviewed, catalogued and abstracted according to a criteria developed with our national advisors and collaborating organizations. The library infrastructure uses a structured, query-language relational database and the USMARC framework, thus aligning the GSDL with the national digital library system doc14566 none Electronic markets are emerging as a primary medium of trade in business-to-business, business-to-consumer, and consumer-to-consumer settings. In order to design viable electronic marketplaces, a host of novel interrelated game-theoretic and computational issues must be addressed. With a team of interdisciplinary researchers from multiple institutions, this project will develop a unified theory of games and computing to guide and facilitate the growth of such markets. Specific research directions of the project include the following: (1) Market designs will be generalized to incorporate combinatorial bidding, multi-attribute preferences, multi-stage mechanisms, continuous mechanisms, and multi-unit sale; (2) New algorithms for clearing, quoting, incentive-compatible pricing as well as new incentive-compatible tractable mechanisms will be designed with particular emphasis on online and incremental updating of market states; (3) Bounded rationality of the agents will be investigated under a wide spectrum of models of computations, equilibrium concepts of game theory, and trade-offs between centers and agents; and (4) Novel approaches to relaxing the classic common prior assumption will be explored in order to develop practically useful models for ecommerce. The successful completion of this project will make significant contributions to both theory and practice in the areas of electronic commerce, multi-agent systems, algorithms, computational complexity theory, and game theory doc14628 none A consortium led by Virginia Tech, with Hofstra University, The College of New Jersey, The Pennsylvania State University, and Villanova University, is building the Computing and Information Technology Interactive Digital Education Library (CITIDEL) to serve the computing education community in all its diversity and at all levels. Topics include computer engineering, computer science, information science, information systems, information technology, software engineering, and all other variations of title and substance in these and related fields doc14629 none Warnow, Tandy J University of Texas at Austin Collaborative Research: ITR AP: Reconstructing Complex Evolutionary Reconstruction of the evolutionary history of a group of organisms has changed the face of biology and is being used increasingly in drug discovery, epidemiology, and genetic engineering. Unfortunately, such reconstructions typically involve solving difficult optimization problems, so that even moderately large datasets can require months to years of computation. In addition, almost all evolutionary reconstructions presently assume that the historical pattern is one of strict divergence that can be represented by a binary tree. This assumption is frequently violated, especially by plants which often hybridize readily and thus produce networks of relationships. This project brings together computer scientists and biologists from two institutions to develop new models and algorithms to address these two problems. Successful completion of this project will have an enormous impact by providing tools for reconstructing phylogenies of large datasets, and the first tools for inferring network models of evolution appropriate to hybridizing speciation. Such network models will alter how biologists think about speciation, while the development of methods for large-scale analyses will strongly benefit medical and pharmaceutical practice. Information technology will be advanced in fundamental ways as well, as the project will demonstrate how algorithm design and high-performance algorithm engineering can jointly solve very difficult discrete optimization problems doc14630 none and Amenta, Hillis, and St. John Defining and understanding the evolutionary relationships among species is fundamental to contemporary biology and the application of the comparative method in the life sciences. The results of such evolutionary research can be represented by a branching sequence of relatedness among species known as a phylogeny. Because of the geometric resemblance of a phylogeny to the branches of a tree, a phylogeny can be thought of as a tree of life. The proposed collaborative research by biologists and computer scientists at University of Texas-Austin and at CUNY-Lehman College in New York will provide specialized visualization and data mining tools to facilitate creation of a Tree of Life for all living organisms on the earth. This includes the development and refinement of algorithms to visualize and analyze multiple complex data sets for large numbers of species. More specifically, this project will: (1) integrate biological data through visualization and clustering techniques developed by computer scientists, and (2) apply these tools to taxa which comprise very large numbers of species with topologically complex and varied tree structures. The interdisciplinary team of biologists and computer scientists will integrate their newly developed software with existing computational tools in systematic biology, and make them freely available to and easily used by the scientific community. The project involves substantive efforts to provide undergraduates and students from under-represented groups with the opportunity to collaborate with scientists throughout the academic year and summer doc14631 none An oceanography collection providing access to nearly 50 years of shipboard data, integrating historical documents, samples, research publications, and maps from global databases is being developed into a searchable digital library. This project uses modern technologies to bridge the gap between content-related, but disparate holdings within libraries, data archives, and historical archives to create a digital library that facilitates both research and learning. The digital library is being presented to the user as an in Ocean Exploration Center supporting inquiry into the history of ocean exploration as well as oceanographic databases. From a global map of approximately oceanographic cruises, users are able to identify and retrieve relevant materials appropriate to their interest and educational level, from photographs and diaries to scientific papers and data. The maps and archival images provide K-12 and college educators with content and tools to communicate the excitement of oceanographic discovery. At the same time, students and researchers are able to use the site to locate and download data for further analysis and research. The project is serving as a model for other fields by merging materials previously segregated and accessible only to specialists and making them available to a broad audience doc14632 none Rzhetsky, Andrey Columbia University ITR IM+AP: Automated compilation and computational analysis of regulatory networks This project will provide advanced information management systems as well as software applications relevant to the fields of bioinformaticis, molecular biology, and medicine. It will contribute to fundamental Information Management by developing advanced algorithms for the efficient retrieval of information about biological pathways from research articles (using natural language processing techniques), machine-learning-assisted data mining in biological texts, and information management via a uniquely designed database with two levels of representation of biological information. The specific aims of the project are the following: to implement and test natural language processing techniques for the automatic retrieval of signal-transduction pathways from the research literature; to develop general and portable text-mining techniques for the automatic recognition of genes, proteins, and other domain terms, and of relationships between them; and to develop a mathematical framework for the statistical analysis of heterogeneous data on regulatory pathways doc14633 none This project is promoting wide-spread access to quality information, resources, and activities in support of learning, teaching, and research in the areas of geotechnical engineering, rock engineering, and water and its use. The effort is envisioned as a component of a larger national civil engineering digital library providing one-stop access to resources to meet the learning, teaching and research needs of a wide audience including higher education, professionals, and the community at large. The project expects significant benefits to accrue as citizens gain awareness of the importance of these areas of civil engineering activities in their daily lives. In formal educational settings a direct impact is expected on undergraduate, graduate and continuing education as users gain rapid access to educational resources dealing with cutting edge civil engineering advances. A host portal provides access to collections of reviewed and ranked resources in the three target areas, and growth of the collection is planned in other areas of civil engineering. An advisory panel is assisting the project in areas of user needs assessment, testing of learning objects, and dissemination of information about the project doc14634 none Building on the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) Virtual Library Project (http: www.communitytechnology.org aihec_vl ), this project is organizing and convening two task force meetings and a larger national conference that will result in a plan of action for coordinating and leveraging the research, development, and training activities involving digital libraries and advanced technologies within AIHEC and the related activities evolving in the community of grantees of NSF s National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL) program. Participants in the conferences will include faculty and administrators from tribal colleges, librarians, technology experts, experts in Native American culture and learning, and leaders of selected NSDL projects. Goals of the project include: -- determining and implementing strategies for making the NSDL more accessible, meaningful, and useful to American Indians; -- providing opportunities for tribal colleges to participate in and inform the NSDL during its early development and into the future; and -- creating and extending metadata and classification schemes that incorporate the cultures and views of various American Indians and Alaska Natives. AIHEC is conducting the project in collaboration with the Alliance for Community Technology at the University of Michigan s School of Information, which has supported the development of the AIHEC Virtual Library with funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation doc14635 none Sitar This project involves a 3-year interdisciplinary effort to build on new advances in information technology to develop an adaptive real-time system for active management, processing, modeling and visualization of environmental and geoscience data. The P.I.s will develop a set of real-time, integrated data base management and field data acquisition tools for rapid and adaptive assessment of the various phenomena following and during major catastrophic events, such as earthquakes, fires, hurricanes, and floods. The P.I. s interest is in real-time integration of the incoming information such that predictive models of expected site and structure response are continuously updated. Specifically, the P.I.s will integrate their efforts in the following areas: a) development of GIS databases capable of real time updating with multiple streams of information; b) adaptive digital field data acquisition mapping; c) development of robust, low cost, intelligent field instrumentation capable of real time data transmission (MOTEs); and d) data visualization and adaptive modeling of the observed phenomena doc14636 none ion frameworks that enhance programmer productivity in parallel applications development; run-time load-balancing strategies for heterogeneous parallel applications exhibiting dynamic behavior; formulation and analysis of space-time discontinuous Galerkin methods, space-time mesh generation and 4-D visualization; and, new techniques for interface tracking and variable-topology shape optimization. %%% This grant is the result of a proposal submitted to the Information Technology Research (ITR) Initiative. The award is co-funded equally by the Divisions of Materials Research and Advanced Computation Infrastructure and Research. The research is an interdisciplinary effort to simulate the evolution of microstructure during materials processing, including the effects of microstructure on bulk material properties. The project advances a set of mutually-informative models that, collectively, span atomistic to macroscopic length scales and that couple thermal, chemical and mechanical response. It will lead to improved predictive capabilities for optimizing existing materials systems, and to the prospect of new engineered materials and processes. The rich physical basis of the models makes them computationally intensive, so a closely-coupled program of information technology research is planned to support applications research. The project brings together engineers, materials scientists, computer scientists and mathematicians. It links two existing NSF-sponsored research centeres at Illinois: the Center for Process Simulation and Design (CPSD), and the Materials Computation Center (MCC). This link is strategic, because it reflects the significant coupling between the meso- and macroscopic phenomena that CPSD studies and the largely atomistic behavior that MCC investigates. Three particular applications, listed in order of ascending scale, are (i) coupled quantum and continuum models of material interfaces; (ii) dendritic solidification with fluid flow in metallic microstructures; and (iii) microstructure evolution and process optimization in extrusion and quench processes doc14637 none The Reciprocal Net project is constructing and deploying an extensive distributed and open digital collection of molecular structures. Associated with the collection are software tools for visualizing, interacting with, and rendering printable images of the contents; software for the automated conversion of local database representations into standard formats which can be globally shared; tools and components for constructing educational modules based on the collection; and examples of such modules as the beginning of a public repository for educational materials based on the collection. The contents of this collection come principally from structures contributed by participating crystallography laboratories, thus providing a means for teachers, students, and the general public to connect with current chemistry research. The collection will be fully integrated into the emerging NSDL framework, constituting a resource of outstanding value for education at every level. The methodologies and tools of the project enable it to be fully distributed and self-sustaining after the initial startup period doc14638 none This project is expanding a pilot version of the web-based Electronic Encyclopedia of Earthquakes (E^3) into a major collection under the auspices of the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), the Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering (CUREE), and the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS). E^3 provides a portal for students, educators, and others seeking information about the science of earthquakes, earthquake engineering, and the practical aspects of hazard characterization and loss reduction. Access to a wide variety of teaching materials is enabled, along with curricular linkages to interfaces to many types of archived and real-time databases, including data from global and regional seismic networks, national seismic hazard maps, and elastic and inelastic response histories of structures exposed to real or simulated (e.g. shake table) earthquakes. The collection facilitates the use of large data sets as part of an on-line learning environment that encourages and facilitates inquiry and exploration. Furthermore, E^3 is informed by the National Science Education Standards content recommendations for grades 5-8 and 9-12. As an entry-based collection built on three tiers of content: (1) Glossary & Outline, (2) Synopsis, and (3) Content In Depth and Curricular Connections, E^3 promotes a user s ability to access knowledge on a simple level quickly or probe deeper for more detailed information. Three types of search interfaces will be included: keyword search, controlled vocabulary, and map-based. Important co-funding of this project is being provided by the Division of Earth Sciences in NSF s Geosciences Directorate doc14639 none Calcium plays a critical role in many metabolic processes in eukaryotic organisms, serving as a key intracellular signaling molecule that ultimately affects numerous cellular activities. However, a systematic analysis of the role of calcium function has not been performed in any prokaryote. The goal of this project is to investigate the involvement of calcium in bacterial cellular processes, metabolism, and regulation. The marine bacterium Vibrio parahaemolyticus will be used as a model system. This organism has a number of attributes that make it attractive for this study. V. parahaemolyticus undergoes significant phenotypic changes in response to altered calcium levels, including changes in colony morphology. In addition, data strongly suggest that calcium levels regulate gene expression in V. parahaemolyticus. Thus, calcium is likely to play a role in cellular processes in this organism. In this project, experiments will be performed to: (i) obtain biochemical support for an involvement of calcium in V. parahaemolyticus metabolism, (ii) identify and characterize cellular processes in V. parahaemolyticus that are affected by calcium levels, and (iii) identify genes involved in calcium metabolism or that are regulated by calcium. Many biological processes in numerous organisms, including plants and animals, require calcium ions. The project described above is important because, although calcium ions are likely to play important roles in bacterial processes, a thorough investigation of the involvement of calcium in these organisms has not been performed. The experiments described above are expected to significantly increase understanding of the role of calcium in bacteria at the biochemical, cellular, and molecular level doc14535 none Ponnuswamy Sadayappan of Ohio State is supported by the Chemistry Division under the Information Technology Research (ITR) program to develop program synthesis tools that will facilitate high-performance parallel programming for electronic structure calculations. Co-PI s include Gerald Baumgartner and Russ Pitzer of Ohio State, Jagannathan Ramanujam of Louisiana State, and Marcel Nooijen of Princeton, (the latter two via collaborative proposals and ). This team of computer scientists and computational chemists will develop a tensor contraction engine that can synthesize efficient parallel code in Fortran or C from an input specification expressed in a high-level notation, for a number of target architectures. This tool will be made freely available to other developers of quantum chemistry software. The development of high-performance parallel programs for scientific applications is complicated by the effects of algorithm choice on memory access costs and communication overhead. Currently available tools for software development and performance modeling optimization do not provide adequate support to developers of scientific code. This research will provide a novel approach to the automated synthesis of high-performance parallel programs, with the particular emphasis on electronic structure codes widely employed in chemistry, physics, and materials science doc14641 none This award has established a digital library collection for anthropological materials. Faculty, students, and staff affiliated with the Archaeology Technologies Laboratory (ATL) and the World Wide Web Instructional Committee (WWWIC) at North Dakota State University (NDSU) are developing and implementing the pilot program for the Digital Archive Network for Anthropology (DANA), a network infrastructure for the seamless linking of distributed databases with content of relevance to the domain of anthropology. The PI s are actively collaborating with other individuals and institutions to develop a management process for the operation of the digital archive and the policies and practices necessary for quality assurance. Through this collaboration, standards that promote stability, interoperability, and reusability of materials and products are being developed. A unique feature of this Archive is the inclusion of accurate, measurable, three-dimensional (3D) models of the material objects along with 2D images and digitized documents. Specific goals of the project are as follows: - Refine the protocol for creating accurate, measurable 3D models through digitization that can be retrieved, inspected, and analyzed; - Develop applications and protocols to enable the sharing of data worldwide; - Improve current Java applications and client servlets for data searching and retrieval; - Continuously evaluate the efficacy of our Java applications and our servlets; - Develop software modules to enable search and retrieval access to linked databases by way of specially designed searching interfaces and common search protocols; - Collaborate with colleagues across the country and abroad to develop metadata compliant information structure for archiving and accessing digital models; - Use eXtensible Markup Language (XML) as the primary medium for information exchange; - Create an anthropology markup language (AnthML) for facilitating information exchange; - Develop a series of software tools that provide varying levels of morphometric analyses so users can select the level of search and analysis appropriate to their needs; - Establish a set of collaborating institutions that will develop and maintain participating databases; - Establish a DANA Advisory Board; - Establish a set of criteria for content standards and quality control; - Provide academic training in all of the areas covered by ATL activities mentioned above. State-of-the-art technology for digital archiving and distributed networking is being employed to develop DANA, the content of which will be available via the Internet and will promote sharing of data while still protecting pre-published data and culturally sensitive objects and information doc14642 none This is a collaborative project with Award No. (Syracuse University; Elizabeth D. Liddy, Principal Investigator). Researchers at the University of Washington s Information School and Syracuse University s Center for Natural Language Processing are leading this effort, with assistance from Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) and Achieve, Inc. The investigators are developing a natural language processing tool ( StandardConnection ) for the automatic assignment of content standards and benchmarks to educational resources in the collections of the National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL) and to other educational resources on the Web. The standards and benchmarks come from the Compendium of Standards and Benchmarks developed by McREL, and the Achieve Standards Database. Supplementing general descriptive metadata, the content standards metadata generated by the StandardConnection tool will make it possible for a teacher in any state to use the NSDL to locate appropriate teaching resources for helping students achieve a particular competency set by the state. The project entails acquiring a training and testing collection of educational resources for analysis; cultivating a sophisticated level of understanding of the human cognitive processes involved in manually assigning content standard metadata tags to resources; designing and developing the technology based on this understanding; running the StandardConnection tool on an unseen set of data; analyzing the results and adjusting the tool, through iterations, until a highly reliable tagging is produced; and employing a group of teacher-experts to analyze the quality of the tool s mappings of resources to standards and benchmarks. This project constitutes a logical extension of work conducted under Award Nos. and , Breaking the Metadata Generation Bottleneck, in which the investigators are processing the text of educational resources to automatically assign Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) metatags for the descriptive and subject aspects of educational resources doc14643 none A collection of digital K-12 materials and resources built around the theme of Water in the Earth System (WES) is being created to enhance the ability of K-12 teachers, students, and parents to easily find, access, and use high-quality, standards-based water resources in their classrooms, at home, and in informal learning environments. The collection of approximately 500 exemplary K-12 water resources (scientific, economic, and policy) is being used to investigate and learn about important water concepts, processes, and issues. The resource materials and associated tools and services are identified, reviewed, and cataloged by K - 12 teachers in collaboration with university scientists and educators. These individuals are working closely with a number of other organizations including: federal and state government agencies, professional scientific and education societies, academic institutions and centers, and several other National SMETE Digital Library projects. Important co-funding of this project is being provided by the Division of Earth Sciences in NSF s Geosciences Directorate doc14644 none Orcutt This project seeks to integrate disparate efforts in both the Earth sciences and information technology to develop a model approach for modern data collection and integration. The approach is to build upon existing sensor networks and wireless communications to develop the hardware and software needed for supporting research of the future and to make information available for emergency response, informed decision-making, outreach and education, and enhanced scientific discovery. In particular the existing southern California scientific and educational wireless network will be extended along the coast from San Diego to Santa Barbara and to the oceans beyond the Channel Islands. Because of southern California s reliance on water from the Sierra snow pack and the dependence of this source of water on climate, we will extend the network to include Yosemite National Park. Using this test bed the requirements and utility of wireless networks for collecting and streaming environmental sensor data in real-time will be demonstrated. Multidisciplinary data sets (e.g. earthquake, ocean current, hydrometeorological, and ecological) will be integrated to advance our understanding and management of coastal, ocean, riparian, and terrestrial geophysical phenomena and ecosystems in Southern California and well off shore. The software tools which must be developed for this integration do not exist, although limited prototype systems are available. In particular, existing concepts in object ring buffers (ORB) for collecting disciplinary data to virtual ORBs (VORB) for managing multiple connections to multiple field sensors will be extended. These VORBs will not only provide data to multiple users in real time, but will provide interfaces with archival ORB and more traditional databases. Many of these interactions will be mediated through XML wrappers which will provide the basis for data discovery. A rule-based programmable interface will be developed to dynamically reconfigure and prioritize data capture and analysis from this multiplicity of sensor networks. This approach should be scalable as network speeds increase and data volumes grow, likely geometrically. Funding is provided under the Information Technology Research Initiative doc14645 none Proposal number: Proposal type: Investigator Initiated for Conference Support Principal investigator: Azelia Cutts Affiliations: American Chemical Society 5th Annual Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference This award supports partially the expenses for participation by 15 graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and young faculty in Fifth Annual Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference, which will be held at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, on June 26-28, . The subtitle of this conference A New Generation of Professionals---A New Generation of Processes . Like its predecessor conferences, this meeting is organized around the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards and is intended to accelerate the adoption of cleaner processes in all sectors of industry. In addition to presentation by award winners, research papers and posters on relevant topics are given. This year s conference is also putting emphasis on improving education to support the development of clean processing. The NSF support is given to expand exposure and participation of young scientists and engineering and thus to contribute to education and expansion of research activities in this important environmental area doc14646 none Geometric Graph Theory is a new discipline at the borderline of discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science which has been developed to deal with the fundamental problems that arise from the drawings of graphs. During the past 10 years Geometric Graph Theory has been effectively used to settle several important problems in combinatorial and computational geometry. An NSF-CBMS Regional Research Conference titled Geometric Graph Theory will be held at the University of North Texas in Denton from May 28, through June 1, . Professor Janos Pach, a leading authority in this area, will be the principal lecturer. We expect that the conference will attract advanced researchers, as well as beginners and graduate students in all areas of discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science doc14647 none Under the direction of Dr. Patricia Crown, MS Elizabeth Bagwell will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. She will direct a crew of experienced volunteers in intensive architectural recording at four cliff-dwellings located in the Sierra Madre Occidental along the border between the states of Sonora and Chihuahua, Mexico. These five to twenty room adobe buildings are believed to be contemporaneous with the regional center of Casas Grandes (or Paquime) 40 km to the east, which dates to ca. A.D. - . MS Bagwell will examine these sites to determine how the production of architecture was organized among prehistoric societies in Northern Mexico. While full-time building specialists were probably necessary to build the pyramids and palaces common in more complex societies like the Aztecs, archaeologists know very little about the role of specialists in the every-day construction of the homes of the common people. A technological analysis of architecture is one way to determine if specialists helped produce these buildings. Buildings built by specialists should be more uniform than those built by non-specialists. Raw material composition, manufacturing techniques and planned construction of more than one structure at a time has been associated with architectural specialists. Therefore this work will compare these attributes and their production through time. One way of gaining a fine-grained understanding of architectural production through time is with tree-ring dating, a technique that uses the pattern of thick and thin growth rings in a tree, much like a bar code, to determine the year that the tree died and by association the year that the structure was built. Temporal information resulting from tree-rings will be combined with technological data to create construction histories and settlement growth patterns. Ultimately, if uniform attributes are identified, they will be interpreted as evidence of prehistoric architectural specialists. MS Bagwell s research will contribute to the understanding of the way architectural production was organized in non-state societies. It will also expand our knowledge of a poorly understood Northern Mexico and establish the relationship between these sites and other contemporary groups such as the Hohokam, Casas Grandes, Rio Sonora and Animas. Finally, this research will move one step closer to establishing a badly needed chronology for the region doc14648 none The AI Lab at The University of Arizona is researching, developing, and enhancing tools to augment the knowledge, skills and abilities that users bring in various degrees to the information search process. Results from three areas of research are being used: information analysis and visualization; data mining; and search agents. The platform for this research and development is an integrated system that allows for the retrieval, analysis, categorization, analysis and visualization of information from documents housed in a digital library. In addition, through the use of transaction logs from the library, a mechanism is provided whereby instructors can gauge the use of resources and their students paths through the learning experience; such transaction logs can also prove valuable to students as a record of their learning experience within a given course or even throughout their college career. The testbed for this work includes two application domains that provide significant differences in domain language and subject matter: computer science and information technology, and the life sciences. Undergraduate students, professors and librarians are assisting in the evaluation of the system. The team also expects to investigate several issues: (1) whether use of a search agent improves the search results of digital library users over those obtained using a conventional search engine; (2) whether visualization of search results in the browser window reduces user disorientation in the information space; and (3) whether synchronous or asynchronous collaboration improves student performance over the course of a semester doc14649 none This collaborative project (with personnel at the University of Maryland Baltimore County) is investigating the creation of a learner-centered metathesaurus based on the analysis of transactions between learners and two learning resources - the Math Forum and www.smete.org. Three modes of interaction are being considered. The first involves data in which many students respond to the same problem (the Problem of the Week at the Math Forum). The second interactional mode involves data from transactions between learners and experts (the Math Forum s Ask Dr. Math feature). The final interactional mode under study uses collections at a third resource, www.smete.org, where learner usage is more in the traditional library mode of search-retrieve. Additional feedback information in the form of the viewed and selected resources enables the construction of a map between the learners language and resource metadata, which has potential to permit the extension of the metathesaurus across domain boundaries doc14650 none Pacific Resources for Education and Learning (PREL) is the lead agency in a network of institutions of higher education working together to establish and maintain the Ethnomathematics Digital Library (EDL). Collaborative partners, including the Australian Academy of Science, the University of the South Pacific, the University of Guam, the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and Ohio State University s Eisenhower National Clearinghouse for Mathematics and Science Education, comprise the Pacific Ethnomathematics Collections Network (PECN). EDL is an interactive learning environment and resource network for ethnomathematics of the Pacific region. The project involves identifying, collecting, cataloging, and organizing high quality ethnomathematics curriculum and instructional materials, research articles, and other professional resources of interest to elementary, secondary and tertiary students and teachers, curriculum developers, researchers, and members of institutions of higher education. The library provides users with a premier and readily accessible source of documents and materials describing the mathematics created and used by indigenous cultures around the world. The source for much of this material is contained in the PECN libraries and partner organizations, thereby providing reliable regional, national, and international accessibility to information on the Pacific island communities particular mathematical ways of knowing. The creation of a central, reliable, and easily accessible repository of high quality ethnomathematics information has the potential to further the advancement of current understandings of the mathematical constructs of indigenous communities. It also has the potential to foster the creation and distribution of classroom instructional materials that acknowledge and honor these constructs. EDL encourages teachers to search the database for relevant ethnomathematics information, create customized classroom materials based on this information, and submit these materials for review and possible archiving. The digitized ethnomathematics library promotes interactivity between resource users and resource providers and the integration of research and education doc14651 none In the proposed project, the nonlinear vibration of rotating disks, induced by fluid-structure interaction, is investigated because rotating disks are extensively used as computer disk drives, turbine disks, automotive disk brakes, and circular machine tools and saws. The objectives of this project are to develop an accurate mathematical model to describe such a nonlinear vibration of rotating disks, and to further determine the corresponding stability for a better understanding of nonlinear dynamics for these fluid-structural systems and the development of control strategies for vibration and instability suppression. To solve the aforementioned problem, the Galerkin method and perturbation approach are used for the reduction of the vibration problem to a dynamical system, and the bifurcation and stability theories in nonlinear dynamical systems are used for obtaining the stability conditions. The work plan includes: the vibration model for disks rotating on the air film close to the rigid wall is developed; the steady state response and stability and bifurcation conditions are obtained, and numerical simulations are completed; and the achieved results and further research directions in this area are summarized. The impact and significance of this research include that the approaches and methodology, and results achieved in this research are applicable for other problems in nonlinear fluid-structure interaction. Additionally the proposed understanding of harmonic vibration, stability and solitary waves in a disk rotating on the air film will bring an improvement of hard-disk drive technology doc14652 none The movement of population from rural towns to large centers remains one of the most common but striking trends in human settlement. Researchers have had little trouble in formulating explanations for this population nucleation in market societies. However, these market-based approaches have proven of little utility in societies - - or segments of societies - - not dominated by market institutions. Because these societies were generally non-literate and left no written records, archaeology provides the only means to study long-term demographic change in such societies. Viviana Siveroni will investigate chronological settlement trends in a non-market population of the prehispanic Andes in the Nasca Valley, Peru. Recent archaeological research has revealed massive regional changes between AD 550 and AD 950, including: (a) the abandonment of many rural homesteads and settlements as people flocked to large centers; (b) the end of a long-standing ideology and ceremonial practice (including that associated with the famous Nasca lines ); and (c) an increase in social stratification even as political decentralization grew. Nothing is known of the changes at the household or community levels that accompanied these broad regional changes. Siveroni will investigate potential changes by excavating and comparing residential areas from a rural village (Las Carretas) dating to early in this period to those at a center dating to late in the period (Huayuri). Her work will explore community religious practices, social structure, and political organization, while focusing on potential shifts in economic activities. One critical goal of the research is to explore the relationship dynamics between population nucleation and reorganization of the household economy. The importance of this project is that Siveroni will assess several theoretical models in which household and communal level processes are themselves the cause of regional population nucleation. This research thus represents an attempt to link levels of analysis in a new way. Processes such as population nucleation must be observed and studied at the regional level, but their causes may reside at the sub-regional level, even the level of the household or individual actor. Documenting human motivations and social processes in a world not governed by rational market forces is an important contribution of this kind of explanatory archaeology; placing this work squarely in current debates in locational geography and political science doc14653 none The Rustbelt RNA Meeting will be held November 2-3, , in the Lodge at Deer Creek State Park in Mt.Sterling,Ohio.The Rustbelt RNA Meeting (RRM)is the only major Midwest regional meeting of RNA researchers. Approximately 100 participants are expected. The Rustbelt RNA Meeting was originally envisioned by Drs.Dan Schoenberg, Chris Milcarek and Tim Nilson, among others ,to address the needs of Midwestern RNA researchers for a regional meeting. A need was perceived for a meeting venue that would include not only faculty,but also postdoctoral researchers and students, in a location readily accessible to universities in the area bounded by Cleveland, Columbus and Pittsburgh.The geographical scope was later expanded to include researchers from neighboring states because of their enthusiasm for the idea. The objective of the RRM is to provide an inexpensive, high caliber, interdisciplinary regional meeting for RNA researchers in the Midwest. An emphasis is placed on participation by undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral trainees such that in the previous two years trainees made up 75-80% of the attendees and gave 80-85% of the presentations.The RRM has also attracted and served young independent investigators as a place to showcase their emerging research program. For each of the past two years approximately a third of the attending PI s were junior faculty. The meeting is open to principal investigators, postdoctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate students who are interested in the broad interdisciplinary field of RNA research. The meeting format is designed to foster interaction between trainees at the participating institutions with each other and with the participating principal investigators doc14654 none This project brings together a diverse array of scholars from around the country, including computer scientists, 3D modellers and animators, theater practioners, and theater and music historians. The objective is to use digital technology to address a problem fundamental to performance scholarship and pedagogy: how to represent and communicate the phenomenon of live performance using media. This problem becomes especially pressing when the objective is to represent a performance tradition from the past. Neither a written description nor a filmed recreation is capable of conveying the experience of attending a live performance, an experience that encompasses not only the way the performance on stage looks and sounds from the perspective of spectators in different parts of the theatre, but also spectator s perceptions of and interactions with one another. Our proposed solution to this problem is to recreate historical performances in a virtual reality environment. The central objective is to simulate a feeling of liveness in this environment: the sensation of being surrounded by human activity onstage, in the audience and backstage, and the ability to choose where to look at any given time (onstage or off) and to move within the environment. With respect to the performers themselves, a critical concern is to find a way to bring the nuances of great stage performances into the virtual environment. To this end, we propose to use motion capture technology to capture real-world performances by professional, highly skilled actors, singers, dancers, acrobats and musicians. Key to our project is the depth of the proposed collaboration between technology, scholarship, pedagogy and art. This project is conceived to make a significant contribution to all four domains simultaneously, rather than merely using any one in the service of the others. The end result will represent an important advance in the design and implementation of virtual environments, building on recent successes in creating photo-realistic simulations of real 3D environments. The scale of this simulation, and in particular the complexity and precision of the character animation, pose an important technical challenge: how to integrate the complex pre-defined motion capture-generated animations of the onstage performances with the autonomous behaviors of characters in the audience and backstage.The project also constitute an invaluable work of applied scholarship, an unprecedented resource for visualizing past performances and testing hypotheses about historical performance practices. It will provide an unprecedented resource for students to engage with historical performance traditions as performance (and not as literature or film). Finally, from an artistic perspective, the Virtual Vaudeville project will test the potential of virtual environments to provide truly high-quality theater experiences to remote audiences doc14655 none This is a study of fuel-doped flames designed to identify possible chemical mechanisms responsible for the formation and destruction of toxic hydrocarbons and soot in coflow nonpremixed flames of practical fuel components. The basic methodology is to study flames that are perturbed by doping the fuel in systematic ways to address specific mechanistic issues related to the formation of small aromatics. This strategy allows perturbation analysis, which offers mechanistic insight and model discrimination for systems with many coupled unknowns. Hydrocarbons, such as two-ring aromatics, branched aromatics, large linear or cyclic hydrocarbons, and other compounds typically found in liquid fuels, are doped into methane used as a fuel in an air nonpremixed coflowing flame, and profiles of intermediate and product hydrocarbons are measured. Hydrocarbons are measured with an on-line single-photon photoionization time-of-flight mass sprectrometer. Small species are measured with electron-impact mass spectroscopy, laser-induced fluorescence, and resonantly enhanced multiphoton ionization, temperature with thermocouples, and soot with laser-induced incandescence doc14656 none Reible This Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute (PASI) award, jointly supported by the NSF and the Department of Energy (DOE), will consist of an intense two-week training course on many aspects of environmental contamination. The goal of the course is to familiarize young and mid-career professionals in the field of remediation of contaminated sites with the latest research on in-sites assessment and clean up methods. Organized by Dr. Danny D. Reible of Louisiana State University, the course will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 15-27, and will involve approximately 50 students and 12 leaders in the field. Publications of the lectures and supporting information will be made available in audio-linked web format for the use of others unable to attend and participate in the PASI doc14657 none Under the auspices of the Association of Research Libraries this project is modifying and repurposing the existing LibQUAL+ protocol for assessing the services provided for the user community of the National Science, Math, Engineering and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL) program. Project goals include: (a) defining the dimensions of digital library service quality from the perspective of the users; (b) creating a tool for measuring user perceptions and expectations of digital library service quality across NSDL digital library contexts; (c) identifying digital library best practices that permit generalizations across operations and development platforms; (d) enhancing student learning by managing effectively user perceptions and expectations of digital library services; (e) establishing a digital library service quality assessment program as an integral part of the library service quality assessment program at the Association of Research Libraries; and (f) institutionalizing continuous product and process evaluation efforts directed toward positive and timely management of outcomes doc14658 none Preparing Meteorology Undergraduates for the Grand Challenge : a Prototype Course for Hands-on Observations of Climate Variables The principal investigator is developing an innovative, undergraduate level course that focuses on meteorological instrumentation and observations of climate variables, along with the analysis and interpretation of climate data, and community interactions to develop cause-effect associations. The course involves hands-on training with meteorological instrumentation and analysis of climate variables using real-time and archived data, and web-based models. The curriculum introduces undergraduate students to practical applications of field instrumentation, measurements and observations while introducing them to the synthesis of heterogeneous instrumentation output with human observations. The project promotes and emphasizes student - community interactions for understanding the microvariability in climatological observations, and its feedback on regional perceptions. It focuses on educating students on climate analysis both as a monitoring and outlook problem, and employs a variety of field-tested instrumentation (radiation, micrometeorological and air pollution related) and calibration facilities doc795 none This proposal builds on an ongoing interdisciplinary effort to examine the interrelationship between enzymatic modification of water-soluble polymers and the resulting rheological consequences. The expanded scope of this project has the following objectives: (1) biochemical and biophysical characterization of promising wild-type and mutated hyperthermophilic galactomannanases and galactosidases, with respect to polysaccharide modification; (2) investigation of the mobility and distribution of enzymes within the biopolymer matrix during enzymatic modification along with the concomitant changes in the aggregation pattern of the biopolymer-enzyme system; and (3) correlation of enzyme activity to changes in rheology and galactomannan molecular architecture. Such an effort, based on the collective expertise of this research team, i.e., polysaccharide systems, enzymology at elevated temperatures, and the rheology of gels and solutions, will provide a comprehensive understanding of the fundamental and technological issues governing polymer modification resulting from enzyme action. While the focus here is on galactomannans, the long-term impact of this work will extend to strategic biocatalytic approaches to enhance the efficacy and use of other carbohydrate biopolymers doc14660 none This project is supported by a Small Grant for Exploratory Research. It s basic assumption is that a transition is taking place in national science policy due to the end of the Cold War, globalization, the quest for economy and efficiency in government, increased demands for cooperation across agencies and governments and the enlarged role of the private sector and other trends. A number of reports by NAS, AAAS, and Congress make it clear that the management of change is a major challenge facing the federal research and development establishment in the post-Cold War, early 21st-century era. However, these reports treat science policy in broad brush, and do not investigate what the agencies experiencing change are doing. The objective of this proposal is to explore, from the perspective of the field of public administration, how the federal various research and development agencies are adapting to new priorities and pressures facing them. After conducting field work in Washington (interviews and archival research), the PI prepares a scoping paper to frame the principal new issues facing federal science managers and their strategies in addressing them. On the basis of this scoping paper, a workshop conference involving science policy scholars and practitioners will be designed and proposed. The workshop conference will address and illuminate issues of utmost importance in the relation of government to science and technology. It can aid policy and its administration, as well as stimulate further research. However, getting to this point (the delineation of a conference), requires the exploratory research carried out under this award doc14661 none This is a collaborative research project between the Engineering Research Center (ERC) for Computational Field Simulations at the Mississippi State Univesity and NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and stennis space Center. The objective of the research is to address the issues related to improving the quakity of numerical simualtions of rocket engines, both in operational and testing environments. The critical science barriers will be addressed in this grant. NASA will provide funds to develop the test-bed systems that will validate the computational and simulation results in the Ejector-Mode Rocket Based Combined Cycle (RBCC) engine performance and survivability studies doc14662 none In this project, optical properties of nanomaterials with different structures will be theoretically studied. The fundamental problem to address is how the symmetry of a nanostructured material influences its optical properties and, related to this, what geometrical structure should be chosen for best performance of the material. We specifically focus on metal-dielectric crystals and composites that can support various plasmon modes, resulting in strongly enhanced optical responses. In our research we particularly consider local optical phenomena that occur in sub-wavelength, nanometer-sized areas of the material. We plan to study photonic crystals made of periodically structured metal, which we refer to as i) plasmonic crystals. The goal here is to develop robust band-gap materials, with large and scaleable gaps in the visible and near-infrared. Because of large and negative permittivity of metals, they are intrinsically gap materials and can dramatically improve performance of photonic band-gap crystals and ease their fabrication. By employing the skin effect that expels light from metal, losses can be dramatically decreased, which is a major foe for metals. By taking control of losses we hope to open new avenues for various applications of plasmonic crystals in photonics. By combining plasmonic crystals with submicron-sized resonators made of nearly percolating composites, we will develop ii) left-handed materials in the visible and near-IR, which have a negative refractive index in this spectral range. The plasmonic mesh-like crystals, in this case, can provide negative permittivity, whereas the composite resonators lead to negative permeability. Such material with simultaneously negative permittivity and permeability should have negative refraction. Another possibility for developing left-handed materials, which we also plan to explore, is based on periodical arrays of metal needles. The left-handed materials have unique optical properties and can find a number of novel applications, for example for developing super-lenses, which are capable of perfect image reconstruction. In these projects we also plan to study iii) light-managed extraordinary optical transmittance through an optically-thick metal film. This new idea stems from our recent theory that has successfully explained the earlier observed extraordinary transmittance through subwavelength hole arrays. Because of the optical Kerr nonlinearity of a film, the interfering light beams can result in a periodic modulation of the refractive index in the film. This modulation can act as a periodic hole array, created by light itself, allowing the extraordinary light transmittance through the film. This idea, when developed into a theory, can open new avenues for manipulating light with light and for developing all-optical transistors, switchers, and modulators. %%% In this project, optical properties of nanomaterials with different structures will be theoretically studied. The fundamental problem to address is how the symmetry of a nanostructured material influences its optical properties and, related to this, what geometrical structure should be chosen for best performance of the material. We specifically focus on metal-dielectric crystals and composites that can support various plasmon modes, resulting in strongly enhanced optical responses. In our research we particularly consider local optical phenomena that occur in sub-wavelength, nanometer-sized areas of the material doc14663 none This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) will investigate methods for evaluating and comparing heuristically derived solutions to multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems. Almost all such problems are NP-Hard, so characterizing the Pareto-optimal efficient set is computationally intractable. The research will draw on heuristic and approximate solution methods for these models, and structure a approach to comparing them based on distance to the (possibly) unknown Pareto set. Drawing on promising preliminary results for small models, the research will seek to develop and extend the methods to higher dimension. Multi-objective optimization problems model important tradeoffs that decision makers face in many settings. For example, in strategic facilities location problems, decision makers must trade off minimizing cost and maximizing service. Most of these problems are also combinatorial, in that discrete decisions such as build or don t build require choice of one option or another without the opportunity to compromise the difference. Such models are so common in engineering practice that advances in methods for treating them have great potential significance to the broad field of operations research doc14664 none EIA - Roberts, Fred S Rutgers University Special Projects: DIMACS Workshop: Complexity in Biosystems: Innovative Approaches at the Interface of Experimental Modeling and Computational Simulation This workshop focuses on the new research area of complex biosystems modeling and simulation, bringing together scientists who are developing this field along with interested newcomers. It will serve to build a community of researchers across disciplinary boundaries in computer and mathematical sciences and biology, leading to a continuing collaborative working group in this area. The workshop proposal requests participant support for 3 nonlocal organizers and 18 invited speakers, with additional participant support set aside for nonlocal graduate student participation doc14665 none Tapestry of Times Past A Paleontological Portal for North America David Lindberg The University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP) will host a meeting of representatives of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, the Paleontological Society, and the United States Geologic Survey (USGS) in order to plan the development of a paleontology portal for North America based upon the color-coded geologic map developed by the USGS. Using web-based technology and relational databases, the map and its associated stratigraphic column can be made interactive, allowing access to information about particular geographic regions, geologic time periods and environmental depositions - the flora and fauna, major events, fossil evidence, etc. This portal will be enhanced by links developed by individual museums and institutions, specific to particular geographic regions and or time periods. Because it is dynamic, the map becomes a scalable portal for all current exhibits (both real and virtual) as well as those yet to be developed. Such a paleontology portal will provide personalized access to researchers, teachers, and to the inquisitive learner. Consider the following scenarios: A researcher clicks on a section of the Permian in Texas to learn about current research efforts related to Permian exposures in that state. A middle school class in Florida uses the maps to construct and test hypotheses as to why most dinosaur fossils are found in the Midwest rather than Florida. A user clicks on the map and finds himself in the Devonian of New York. Besides the generalized information of the time period, the local site link is to the Geologic History of the State of New York, a project of the Paleontological Research Institute. This project provides a unique opportunity for paleontological societies to come together for a unified purpose-the sharing of their research with the public. The portal becomes a single entry point into the paleontological history of the United States - the flora and fauna, the events, the processes at work. It will facilitate and integrate an exploration through geologic time and geographic location doc14666 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Krumhansl will conduct a year long investigation of the hypothesis that dynamic changes in emotions experienced while listening to music are produced by the interplay of expectations and the sound events. Recent research has documented new interdependencies between cognition and emotion. Music is an outstanding model to explore such interdependencies because people report that their primary motivation for listening to music is its emotional effects, and these effects are described as having great personal and social significance. Likewise, psychological research on music emphasizes the role of cognition in the experience of music, specifically, on how it is perceived, organized, remembered, and performed. Many issues are still poorly understood such as: How is it that patterns of sound in time can have such a profound effect? What is it in the music that causes the emotion? Are musical emotions like other emotions? How do the responses depend on the listeners previous musical experience and training? Krumhansl s project will explore these questions by way of examining the neural substrates underlying the perception of music. One study will uses both functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electrical potential recorded at the scalp (ERPs) on excerpts that conform to varying degrees to statistical predictability, principles of perceptual organization, and conventions of tonal-harmonic music. A second study uses fMRI to investigate possible dissociations between sources of expectation, in particular, dissonance, tonality, meter, and temporal order. A third study uses fMRI on the brain of volunteers listening to musical excerpts that have been found in previous research to produce distinctive patterns of psychophysiological changes associated with the basic emotions of sad, happy, fearful. A last study uses ERPs to look for brain correlates of descriptions of musical structure based on formal music theory. This research promises to yield insights into the neural structures involved in music at both cognitive and affective levels, and the links between them. It will also broaden current conceptions and methodologies in the study of emotion. Greater knowledge about the effect of music on emotion and the nature of music may lead to novel practical applications doc14667 none Geosciences in Alaska Field Explorations and Research for K-12 Teachers Geosciences in Alaska is a collaborative project among the University of Alaska Museum, the University of California Museum of Paleontology, and the West Contra Costa Unified School District. It provides a professional development opportunity for teachers that combines both field and research experiences and evaluates the impact of these experiences on their teaching. Working with faculty and staff associated with the University of Alaska Museum and the University of California Museum of Paleontology, teachers participate in an introductory local field trip, and four weeks of field experience in Alaska, followed by an additional excursion locally in which they will apply what they have learned. This comparison between two distinct yet similar geological settings, Alaska and California, reinforces the major concepts learned and allows for a better understanding of the Earth as a dynamic system. Using an inquiry-based approach, the field and research experiences focus on geologic processes, evidence for tectonics, and paleontology. Following the field experiences, teachers work with one another and their mentors throughout the school year to incorporate what they have learned into their classrooms, develop a rigorous course of study in the geosciences for the district, and expand the project to reach a total of 60 teachers doc14668 none The objective of this research is to develop an integrated structural health monitoring system that utilizes advanced sensing, micro-processing, digital signal processing, wireless communication and damage diagnostic methods. The current project customizes and implements state-of-the-art miniaturized sensor units using MEMS technology and advanced wireless data communication methods that employ up-to-date components and architecture. A structure with such a distributed smart sensor network is thought of as a Wireless IP Cloud of Sensors . New micro-accelerometers of high resolution are developed allowing for measurement of high amplitude vibration (i.e., earthquakes) as well as low amplitude vibrations (i.e., ambient vibrations) integrated with advanced wireless communication technologies and embedded systems for structural health monitoring applications. The research team is collaborating with Sandia National Laboratory in developing MEM-based accelerometers manufactured simultaneously along side CMOS circuitry on one die coupling the computation and sensor. The goal is to change the practices from extensive cabling and high cost labor, equipment and maintenance to the instrumentation of inexpensive wireless embedded systems. The proposed damage assessment algorithms are to perform (a) system level screening for quick identification of deterioration or damage; and (b) global diagnosis for structural performance and damage location identification. Statistical signal processing, energy dissipation and filtering methods are utilized that enable the computations to be performed locally at the sensor unit. A prototype system is to be tested both in the laboratory and the field. Significance and Broad Impact: The technology developed under this proposal will enable practical, cost-effective, long-term and quick response assessment of civil structures that estimates the degree of damage or degradation. The information provided by the system is critical following catastrophic events for reducing fatalities and for timely closure or continued operation of essential facilities (hospitals, fire stations, etc.). The system will also enable reliable systematic maintenance to prevent catastrophic failures under long-term deterioration doc14669 none The project will investigate the dynamical mechanisms producing interannual changes in stratospheric circulation and ozone, which also influence the seasonal climate of the troposphere, notably in winter. Variations in stratospheric polar vortex have been shown linked to seasonal anomalies in tropospheric zonal-mean zonal winds and circulation patterns (e.g., North Atlantic Oscillation Arctic Oscillation), which profoundly impact the European and North American climate and weather. Ozone variations in the lower stratosphere are also strongly linked with dynamics: The ozone distribution in the high latitudes is determined by the Brewer-Dobson overturning circulation, and radiative heating from ozone absorption in the ultraviolet and thermal bands, in turn, influences the temperature and thermal wind distribution. Drs. Salby and Callaghan will conduct a dynamically oriented analysis of interannual variability to ascertain the sensitivity of the stratosphere circulation to tropospheric forcing (upward fluxes of planetary wave activity) and stratospheric dynamical structure (Quasi-biennial oscillation phase). The PIs will use a 3D primitive equation model in isentropic coordinates for the analysis. The project will advance understanding of the forcing of circulation and constituent variability in the stratosphere, which will lead to improved modeling of troposphere-stratosphere interactions and variability on the seasonal-to-interannual time scales. This research should also significantly contribute in understanding the causes of observed ozone depletion in the northern hemisphere doc14670 none With National Science Foundation support, Mr. Orduna and his advisor Dr. Gluck will conduct a year long investigation of how auditory discrimination training affects cortical representations of complex sounds. The natural environment is full of complex sounds containing a variety of information relevant to behavior. Learning about sounds or images can lead to changes in perceptual sensitivities that facilitate the processing of behaviorally relevant events. Although the neural mechanisms underlying these changes are not well understood, they are thought to depend on the brain s capacity to adaptively modify its cortical representations of sensations. Orduna and Gluck will measure electrophysiological responses of rats and humans to complex sounds before and after subjects have been trained to discriminate these sounds. Computational models of cortical and hippocampal processing suggest that the hippocampus modifies cortical representations to facilitate learning. The investigators will evaluate the role of the hippocampus in auditory learning by comparing learning-induced representational changes (measured as changes in evoked responses) in the auditory cortices of normal and hippocampal-lesioned rats. The joint use of behavioral and electrophysiological techniques, in combination with lesion techniques, will facilitate comparisons between the neural mechanisms underlying auditory learning in humans and other mammals. This project will illustrate a new way of evaluating current theories of how the cortex and the hippocampus interact during learning and memory processes. These scientific results should provide new knowledge about the brain basis of learning and memory doc14671 none The proposed research site will be based at the University of Illinois - Chicago (UIC) and the R&D activities conducted will be to address the needs of the construction and manufacturing industry in the area of sensors and nondestructive testing technologies for repair of buildings and bridges with composites. The focus of the R&D activities will be development of technologies, manufacturing, implementation, and evaluation of the technologies developed doc14672 none Castillo This Pan-American Advanced Studies Institutes (PASI) award, jointly supported by the NSF and the Department of Energy (DOE), will disseminate current and advanced computational science and engineering methodologies through a series of short courses of two weeks duration. Organized by Dr. Jose E. Castillo of San Diego State University, the PASI will take place in Cordoba, Argentina, July . The lectures aim to promote in-depth computational science and engineering knowledge, encourage training, and foster cooperation among diverse researchers and lecturers of the Americas. Course content will focus on research in areas of computational fluid dynamics, numerical optimization, parallel computing, grid generation, and geostatistical methods. Discussion, collaboration and examination of new methods will form part of the overall strategy of the lectures. Lectures and results of the scientific program will be disseminated electronically via a web site to be developed for the Institute doc14673 none Costerton This project is in partnership between the ERC for Biofilm Engineering (CBE) at Montana State University and ERC for Engineered Biomaterials (UWEB) at the University of Washington. The objective is to investigate the potential of prevention and destruction of biofilm colonization on medical devices by controlled release of an antibiotic from a specially prepared plastic coating. The rate and kinetics of controlled release of the antibiotic or other biofilm destroying agent will be investigated in CBE s Biofilm Behavior Laboratory (BBL) and Prokaryotic Cell Imaging Facility. Research on biomaterials and coatings will be performed at UWEB. Graduate and undergraduate students will be exchanged doc14674 none A 3-year program is proposed to explore the interactions of atomic oxygen with ice surfaces at temperatures relevant to the high-latitude summertime mesosphere. In particular, experiments are proposed to quantify the loss rate of atomic oxygen on ice surfaces and to investigate atomic oxygen effects on the heterogeneous formation and growth rates of ice. Oxygen atom recombination will be studied using a Knudsen cell reactor, together with laser-induced fluorescence and mass spectroscopic species detection. Atomic oxygen effects on ice formation and growth will be investigated using a cryogenic test chamber, Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, and optical thin-film measurement techniques. The overall goal is this work is to provide experimental information to identify and clarify possible roles of mesospheric atomic oxygen in heterogeneous atmospheric chemistry and ice dynamics. The results of this project will aid in interpreting measurements of oxygen-atom and ice-particle distributions in the high-latitude summertime mesosphere and will provide insight for constructing numerical models for mesospheric phenomena such as noctilucent clouds (NLCs) and polar mesospheric summertime echoes (PMSEs doc14675 none Kenkre This Pan American Advanced Studies Institutes (PASI) award, jointly supported by NSF and the Department of Energy (DOE), will take place in Bariloche, Argentina in the spring of , on the topic of modern challenges in statistical mechanics and its applications. Organized by Dr. V.M. Kenkre of the University of New Mexico, the institute will bring scientists from several fields together to conduct an intensive school for students from the U.S and Latin America focused on two major areas: nonlinear phenomena and pattern formation in biology, and the validity of the methodology of statistical mechanics for complex fluids. A third focus area on modern computational methods in statistical mechanics will serve as general support for the other two. The subjects discussed will center around current areas of much activity in statistical mechanics, in particular: in the formation of patterns, the role of noise in inducing order as well as disorder, and applications and implications of statistical mechanics to complex systems in biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, and other contexts. Dissemination of this PASI will be accomplished by publishing the proceedings of the school in book form doc14676 none Auciello This Pan-American Advanced Studies Institutes (PASI) award, jointly supported by the NSF and the Department of Energy (DOE), will take place in Rosario, Argentina, October, , on the topic of ferroelectric thin film technology. Organized by Dr. Orlando Auciello of the Argonne National Laboratory, the institute will involve approximately 40 students and 17 active researchers in the field from the U.S. and Latin America. The main goal is to facilitate extensive scientific discussions and allow students to specialize in this interdisciplinary activity, which brings together leaders of the ferroelectric materials field. The design of the program should also help to initiate new collaborations between the next generation of scientists and engineers from the region. Lectures and results of the scientific program will be disseminated electronically via a web site to be developed for the Institute doc14677 none The IEEE-AP-S International Symposium & USNC USRI National Radio Science Meeting is an annual international conference co-sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and the Union of Radio Science International (URSI). The conference regularly draws about one thousand participants representing academia and industry. The Antennas and Propagation Society (AP-S) of the IEEE along with several subgroups of URSI will meet in San Antonio, Texas in June . Each year, the Antennas and Propagation Society promotes student participation in the conference through a number of mechanisms. One of the most important is the Student Paper Competition at the conference. This selective program brings the world s best students together in an integrated program in which they present their work to a technical audience including a group of judges. The program helps develop the students technical acumen as well as their communication and presentation skills. It also helps introduce them to the international technical community and helps to build a community of students who will lead the next generation of electromagnetic technologists. The AP-S provides financial support of various forms including assistance in finding low cost housing. but does not reimburse travel expenses. Travel support from NSF will aid students from U.S. universities only and will ensure that the program is open to the widest range of interested applicants from the U.S. universities. This proposal requests support to defray the travel expenses for young investigators whose papers have been selected for presentation at the Conference, but who lack funds and might not be able to attend without such support. It is proposed that the AP-S Technical Program Committee select those from U.S. universities to receive the support doc14678 none Valocchi The objective of the proposed research is to improve fundamental understanding of reactive transport with the ultimate application to remediation processes and the management and regulation of hazardous waste sites. A particular goal is to determine the effects of pore-scale mixing on reactive transport. The specific objectives of this research are to: (1) determine the effects of local velocity, pore geometry, and reaction rate constant on the extent of reaction in a homogenous pore network, (2) determine the effects of local velocity, pore geometry, and reaction rate constant on the extent of reaction in heterogeneous pore networks, and (3) develop relationships that allow the effects of pore scale-mixing on reactive transport to be accounted for at the continuum-scale. A combination of micromodel experiments and Lattice-Boltzmann (LB) simulations will be used to quantify these phenomena. The LB method is a kinetic theory-based numerical technique for solving hydrodynamic and diffusive transport problems in complex pore structures doc14679 none This Scalable Enterprise Systems Phase II project effort will build upon the work in Phase I by: (1) extending the relational decision framework to support efficient integration of distributed heterogeneous databases into a global decision framework; (2) building on the theory of co-evolutionary search algorithms using intelligent agents to address issues in multi-criteria decision-making; and (3) developing a comprehensive model of dynamic decision networks, integrating characteristics of software algorithms and network hardware and software for communications in order to evaluate performance and guide system design. Advances in information technologies are driving fundamental changes in the processes and organizations of global enterprises. Innovations in software, networks, and database systems enable widely distributed organizations to integrate activities, share information, collaborate on decisions, and execute transactions. While many existing tools and techniques of information infrastructure may be adopted and implemented to support these enterprise applications, there has been little focused research to provide a scientific basis to support these developments. A major outcome of this research will be an integrated demonstration of network-based distributed decision methods applied to real industrial problems and evaluated through sophisticate evaluation and simulation methods. The outcomes of this work offer advantages of local autonomy, reliability, improved performance, scalability, shareability, data confidentiality, and efficient software support for a new class of enterprise-level software systems. This research project includes efforts to incorporate these ideas into existing and new educational programs and courses with special attention to the recruiting and retention of under-represented groups doc14680 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Van Horn will spend a year developing and validating methods and tools needed for examining continuous motor-sensory tasks performed while brain activity is monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Current experimental frameworks for monitoring brain activity via fMRI during psychological tasks rely principally upon discretely presented stimulus periods or events. Such approaches are ideal for the study of perception-based cognitive processes, yet many real-world behaviors (such as motor acts) are continuous in nature, suggesting a need for new methodological frameworks designed for use with fMRI. The statistical approaches designed and applied in this project will be used to extend the continuous performance framework into a new class of fMRI paradigm. This project involves the custom design and fabrication of specialized stimulus input devices for the MR environment that will permit a continuously sampled response domain. Moreover, it involves computationally intense statistical modeling of data because the paradigms require measuring concurrent performance variables, potentially confounding variables (e.g. heart rate, respiration, eye-movements, etc.), and fMRI acquisition parameters, in order to include these in the experimental design. To examine the validity of the continuous task methodology, a variety of tasks will be studied. The techniques developed in this project will assist in developing new approaches to studying brain activation paradigms for fMRI. These new approaches emphasize dynamic aspects of brain-behavior relationships. The work in this project will facilitate the development of computational models of continuously performed psychological processes doc14681 none Uhlmann This Pan-American Advanced Studies Institutes (PASI) award, jointly supported by the NSF and the Department of Energy (DOE), aims to bring many of the developments of the last 20 years or so in the mathematical theory of inverse problems to advanced graduate students, postdocs, and other scientists in the Americas interested in the topic and its applications. The PASI, organized by Dr. Gunther Uhlmann of the University of Washington, will be held at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California from October 29 to November 2, . This PASI will be followed by a MSRI-organized workshop on Inverse Problems and Applications at the same site, thus allowing some of the participants and lecturers to attend both events. The emphasis of the PASI will be on open problems in the field but also on promoting international collaborations by bringing experts in different areas together in one event. Approximately 25 participants will be expected, from various countries in the Americas doc14682 none The objective of this research is to gain a better understanding of the brain mechanisms underlying sensory-motor adaptation. Humans display a remarkable ability to adapt to a new situation, especially when available sensory information conflicts. Behaviorally, this adaptive ability has been well described. One way researchers have investigated this adaptation is by having subjects attempt to manually point at a visual target while wearing prism goggles. Initial reaching attempts are inaccurate because the prism systematically bends the light before it enters the eyes such that the target appears to shift left or right of its actual location. However, with repeated trials, the subject is able to adapt to the altered visual input and generate accurate responses. When the goggles are removed there is an aftereffect in which the reaching responses are inaccurate in the opposite direction to that observed during the prism exposure period. Based on these behavioral characteristics of prism adaptation, recent neurophysiological, clinical and human brain imaging studies have begun to identify the network of brain sites that contribute to this simple form of learning, but a more complete understanding of the potentially different contributions of the network s components is required. This goal will be accomplished by examining the degree to which adaptation is disrupted in normal, healthy human subjects when transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is applied over the cerebellum, posterior parietal cortex, or premotor cortex during the training period. It is predicted that TMS delivered over each of these sites will have different effects on the degree of adaptation that occurs depending upon when the stimulation is given and the availability of visual feedback from the hand. In addition to expanding our basic understanding of the nature of sensorimotor adaptation and its underlying mechanisms, the proposed research may also be useful in contributing to the design of motor rehabilitation therapies doc14683 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Hampson will conduct a year-long investigation of techniques for using the covariation in activity of brain regions during periods of unconstrained cognition (without a psychological task) to build maps of the connected neural systems that support reading and understanding language. Recent advances in neuroimaging have led to the production of a plethora of new data on brain function. However, methods for deploying such data to develop models of interacting brain regions are presently limited. One new functional neuroimaging technique for studying brain interactions (or connectivity) examines low-frequency temporal correlations between resting state activity levels in different brain areas. This technique is used with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Dr. Hampson s project will apply this technique to the neural circuitry of reading in order to evaluate and refine the method. She will investigate the relationship between such maps of connectivity and psychological measures of reading performance. She will also assess whether resting state fMRI data can provide information regarding the existence and strength of interregional connections in individual subjects. The connectivity of this system has been previously investigated using imaging methodologies that examine across-subject correlations between brain areas. In the present project, the pattern of connections found between brain areas involved in reading will be correlated across individuals with their scores on a range of reading skills tests to determine which neural connections are most important for the different sub-processes of reading. The techniques developed in this project are likely to lead to general methods that could be used to study relationships between brain connectivity patterns and psychological measures across subjects in many different high level cognitive systems. Such methods will be an important tool for investigating brain function at the systems level. Moreover, the findings will be incorporated into a new model of the neural substrate underlying reading ability. This model is intended to provide a framework for understanding reading disorders and to guide future experimental efforts doc14684 none In the study of skilled performance, it is fairly well accepted that the cerebellum provides a timing process that is involved in the production of motor skills. This project looks at whether different types of timing tasks use the same cerebellar-timing system. It is expected that discrete tasks with a clear beginning and end (such as tapping) use a cerebellar timing system, because such tasks involve an explicit timing process. Other tasks, however, are not expected to use an explicit timing process. One example is continuous circle drawing. In these cases, continuous timing processes may not depend upon a normal functioning cerebellum. Individuals who have brain damage to one side of the cerebellum will be tested. These patients exhibit a normal, unimpaired hand which is controlled by the normal side cerebellum, and a movement-damaged hand controlled by the damaged side of the cerebellum. By comparing performance of the impaired and unimpaired hand for continuous and discrete tapping and circle drawing, it can be ascertained whether the cerebellum is important for such performance. For smooth continuous tasks such as circle drawing, it is expected that the cerebellum is not crucial for timing performance. However, discrete tasks should require an intact cerebellum. This project will provide important new insight into cerebellar functioning and motor skills doc14685 none Silevitch This project will support a pilot program for a University without Walls, including Northeastern University s ERC for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems (CenSSIS), Confocal-microscopy Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Biomedical Research Partnership (BRP) Laboratory at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Collaboration between biomedical researchers and engineers is essential in creating breakthroughs in sensing an imaging that will be necessary to solve complex biological processes. A three-year program is proposed involving graduate students. Each student will have an academic advisor in the home institution, responsible for directing the students academic activity, and two technical advisors, one in engineering an done in biology or medicine. The research will focus on three areas: hyperspectral imaging, confocal microscopy and quadrature tomographic microscope doc14686 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Vaidya will conduct a year long investigation of the role, across stages of human development, of specific brain regions in mediating the ability to consciously record, retain, and recall past experience. Late childhood is marked by rapid mastery of a variety of cognitive skills that are instrumental to educational, emotional, and social development. One such cognitive skill is declarative memory, the ability to consciously record, retain, and recall past experience. Between the ages of 7 and 13 years, the human brain undergoes profound physical changes that are thought to underlie improved memory abilities. These childhood years are also marked by a great amount of individual variation such that children of the same age differ considerably in the level of memory performance. Currently, there is little understanding of what specific brain changes mediate memory skills in childhood. Dr. Vaidya s study examines how neural networks mediating memory for verbal materials differ in individuals of different ages and in individuals of the same age but different levels of memory performance. Her study examines the role of two brain regions, medial temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex, in mediating memory in 7-9 year old children, 11-13 year old children, and 20-22 year old adults. Functional magnetic resonance imaging is used to examine brain activity related to memories strengthened by the use of strategies and memories simply forgotten. The findings in this study are expected to lead to important information about the neurobiology of memory development. This work will advance the understanding of brain function and organization and its role in individual and developmental differences in a primary form of memory. This work is also likely to have implications for understanding the effects of closed head injury in individuals of different age doc14687 none word such as faith may have weaker connections to perceptual systems and more reliance on connections within the language system. To explore these possibilities, fMRI methods will examine blood flow to specific brain regions when adults perform simple tasks that involve the meanings of words. The initial goal of this project is to identify the promise of this method for providing information about the organization of word meanings. The longer term goal for research of this kind is to learn how brain areas work together to support the human ability to grasp concepts that are only indirectly connected to everyday experience. Increased knowledge of this type is important to a scientific understanding of human intellectual abilities and to the loss, recovery, and reorganization of these abilities that can follow impairments of various kinds doc14688 none With National Science Foundation support, Mr. Adams and his advisor Dr. Kleck will conduct a year long investigation to identify areas of the brain where eye gaze perception and facial expression perception are integrated in the processing of facially expressed affect. Previous research has demonstrated that both perceived direction of eye gaze and perceived facial expression are social cues of great importance to humans, however these cues have been examined independent of one another. There is good reason to believe that eye gaze and perceived facial expression are not independent. Eye gaze direction is likely associated with the production of emotional expression during experienced emotion. Eye gaze direction and at least some facial expressions of emotion may share a common information value as signals of either approach or avoidance. Such signals may be traced to a more primitive behavioral repertoire that likely evolved into present day emotion relevant behavior. Thus, it is possible that perception of eye gaze direction and facial expression share common neural substrates enabling integrated processing of these two cues to occur. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Adams and Kleck will image the brain of volunteers as they perform psychological tasks measuring whether direct eye gaze will increase the perceived salience of anger and joy expressions and whether averted eye gaze will increase the perceived salience of fear and sadness expressions. This research will serve to increase our understanding of the facial cues that contribute to the perception of facially expressed affect and of the neural processes involved in the processing of such facial displays. The findings will provide new insight into the interactions amongst brain systems representing emotion, facial expression, and gaze. Insight into these systems, which play critical roles in everyday social interactions, will be useful for a variety of social and psychological issues doc14689 none With National Science Foundation support, Ms. Kessler and her advisor Dr. Martohardjono will conduct a year long investigation of the processing of three types of errors commonly observed in second language learning. The specific source of grammatical errors produced by second language learners is not well understood. Certain persistent types of errors may be linked to grammatical operations of the second languages. Kessler and Martohardjono will use timing and spatial distribution of electrical potentials from the brain (ERPs) as people respond to syntactic, morphosyntactic and morphological errors. These different errors involve different kinds of operations: syntactic errors involve word order violations, morphosyntactic errors involve the omission of inflection, and morphological errors involve word structure violations. The investigators will compare brain electrical patterns of native speakers with those of non-native speakers at various levels of proficiency and test of correlations between behavioral data (detection of errors through grammaticality judgements) and brain electrical data associated with the perception of these errors. This research will contribute to our understanding of the acquisition and processing of structural and inflectional information in adult second language learning. Furthermore, it will serve as a baseline for future investigation of both adult and child learners of a second language that will enhance our understanding of differences in how child and adult L2 learners process different types of linguistic information doc14690 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Poldrack will conduct a year long investigation of a new approach to enhancing brain plasticity and increasing the speed of learning in adult humans. It has long been known that the brain changes extensively early in life, and that these changes are dependent upon particular experiences in the child s environment. However, more recent research has discovered that the brain continues to change throughout adulthood in response to experience. This ability to change is called plasticity, and is thought to underlie many forms of learning. Dr. Poldrack s project will explore an approach based upon results from studies of experimental animals, which have shown that plasticity in the cerebral cortex can be greatly enhanced by increasing the levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. New drugs, known as cholinesterase inhibitors, that safely and effectively increase acetylcholine levels in humans have recently been developed and FDA-approved. The specific drug that Dr. Poldrack will use is galanthamine hydrobromide (tradename Reminyl). The effect of the drug on cortical plasticity will be assessed using both visual behavioral testing and functional magnetic resonance imaging, which is a non-invasive method for measuring the brain activity that occurs as a person performs a cognitive or perceptual task. The behavioral measure will be the rate at which the subjects learn to more accurately perform a simple visual perceptual learning task: learning to discriminate the orientation of a grating. The hypothesis to be tested is that learning of the visual task that takes place under the influence of the drug will proceed more quickly than learning that is paired with a placebo. Functional magnetic resonance imaging will be used to assess the effect of the drug on cortical plasticity, by comparing the pre-training versus post-training brain activation changes that are caused by learning the visual task while on the drug against those caused by learning the task on placebo. If this new method of enhancing plasticity should turn out to be successful, it will provide fundamentally important and novel knowledge about the nature of plasticity in the adult human brain, and could also lead to a wide range of potential clinical and practical applications. Understanding how brain plasticity works in adult humans is of critical importance, because recent research suggests that plasticity can be capitalized upon in order to remediate neurological problems, such as movement disorders resulting from stroke or from repetitive strain injury, and reading and language disorders doc14691 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Walker will conduct a year long investigation of the human brain systems which control the descent from full consciousness into the reduced consciousness of sleep and produce the cognitive experience of sleep onset dreaming. Sleep is an essential part of human life, occupying approximately one third of our time. The shift from wake to sleep arguably represents the most striking transition that the human brain and mind normally experiences. Although we are beginning to understand what brain mechanisms trigger this shift, the actual processes that produce the state of sleep remain unknown. Of additional interest is the type of mental experience that accompanies this wake-sleep transition, often involving brief hallucinations dreams containing visual and auditory events as well as feelings of movement. Recent studies have suggested that these sleep-onset dreams are related to the re-play and consolidation of memories of novel daytime experiences, particularly those requiring the learning of new skills (e.g. engage in novel physical or mental activities for extended periods of time such as the first day of skiing). Dr. Walker and colleagues have been able to reliably produce near identical, stereotyped sleep-onset dreams by having human subjects play a ski simulator game for extended periods during the day. The present project uses this method to observe and control the cognitive processes of sleep onset dreaming as volunteers brains are being imaged in functional magnetic resonance scanner. Identifying the brain mechanisms involved in the sleep-onset process would provide information of wide value to both the basic neurosciences and to clinical research. It would not only increase our understanding of the neurocognitive basis of both the sleeping brain and the dreaming mind, but would also expand our understanding of human sensory and perceptual experience and of how new knowledge and skills are acquired, learned and reprocessed. This information would also provide a platform for new theories of human perception, cognition and learning, and will assist in the formulation of new treatments for a variety of neurological and sleep disorders doc14692 none Brain imaging using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) is a rapidly growing research discipline which utilizes technology for basic research investigation that was originally developed for clinical medicine. There are serious safety challenges related to expanding basic research fMRI. These are related to the rapid training of many non-medically trained investigators joining the field; codifying the knowledge of best practices that is not easily available; providing targeted safety training for non-medical MR researchers; dealing with special safety issues in research fMRI; addressing differences between FDA regulations and current practices; assisting Institutional Review Boards in handling detailed technical oversight; and evaluating liability exposure of research procedures. A working group of investigators, regulators, and vendors will identify the problems, and plan methods for effectively addressing these problems. Specific objectives of the workshop are: 1) to bring together members of the basic research, clinical, regulatory (FDA), and vendor communities to identify the risks, precautions, and good practices that should be applied to basic research fMRI imaging procedures; 2) evaluate potential programs that might be initiated to improve the level of safety and quality of imaging done by basic researchers; 3) devise model practices or guidelines for the training of non-medical basic researchers in the areas of patient screening, operating in a magnet, equipment evaluation, scanner operation, use of equipment, and pulse sequence selection; 4) create guidelines for stand-alone MR centers regarding participant safety and responsibility procedures; 5) review existing regulations and practices to determine how they relate to basic research MRI neuroimaging and evaluate the advisability of changes in those regulations; 6) create a plan for production of materials that could be distributed to improve MR training of new basic researchers for fMRI-based research and a plan to encourage adoption of safety guidelines for fMRI- based research; 7) review materials developed following the workshop for distribution via the worldwide web; and 8) present materials regarding the recommendations at major society and researcher meetings. The two-day workshop will be held in Pittsburgh, PA doc14693 none Huang The objective of the proposed research is to study the role of black carbon and kerogen in soils on the sorption of organic pollutants. The goals of this research are to: (1) develop a comprehensive chemical procedure for the isolation and fractionation of black carbon and kerogen, (2) characterize the isolated materials, (3) measure hydrophobic organic chemicals (HOCs) sorption and desorption for the isolated materials as well as the original soils, and (4) establish a predictive relationship among sorption, the contents and properties of black carbon and kerogen, and the properties of the tested HOCs. This research could provide improved understanding of both the chemistry of soil organic matter and the mechanisms for the binding, sequestration, and attenuation of HOCs in soils. This could have impact on our knowledge of contaminant fate and transport, and pollutant attenuation in the environment doc14694 none Humans are incredibly skilled at visually recognizing the actions of others, even when the optical information portraying those actions is reduced to a sparse collection of light points attached to the individual s joints. In these point-light animations, accurate perception of body movements can only be recovered from the integration of the associated motion signals over space and time. Brain imaging research has disclosed that a region on the ventral bank of the posterior temporal sulcus (posterior STS) becomes active when people view human activity portrayed by these point-light animations. This project will examine the relationship between activity levels in posterior STS and the quality of the perceptual experience associated with viewing biological motion. Observers will view single trials of biological motion animations that range in coherence from completely biological to completely scrambled and will rate them according to perceived coherence. The experiments will also examine the extent to which posterior STS is specialized for whole-body human movement. Measures of neural activity will be taken as observers view point-light animations of animal motion, hand movements and face movements. Finally, the anatomical location of posterior STS is quite near neural areas involved in auditory perception. If posterior STS lies within multi-modal cortical areas, then measures will be made of the extent to which neural signals originating from STS can be modulated by congruent versus incongruent auditory and visual events doc14695 none Orographic precipitation is important both economically and from a public safety (flash flooding) standpoint. In this research, the Principal Investigator will investigate the physical processes that control orographic precipitation. Four questions to be addressed: 1. What are the relative contributions of coalescence and riming to accretional growth of precipitation in storms that extend several km above the freezing level? 2. Is there a significant difference in precipitation growth due to coalescence between storms that do and do not extend above the freezing level? 3. What is the size distribution of and spacing between precipitating convective elements that contribute to the observed small-scale variability of precipitation? 4. Is there a significant difference in the characteristics of the raindrop size distribution within fallstreaks and between fallstreaks? The study will be observationally based and will utilize data collected from two completed field programs - the Mesoscale Alpine Programme and the Pacific Landfalling Jets Experiment. The answers to the above questions will contribute to improvement of parameterized and explicit descriptions of cloud microphysics within numerical models of orographic precipitation and to better characterization of sampling and beam filling errors for satellite remote sensing applications doc14696 none The sponsorship and funding of the Division of Electrical and Communication Systems (ECS) of NSF, is requested to partially support the International Semiconductor Device Research Symposium (ISDRS Ol), December 5-7, , in Washington DC. NSF has been a valued sponsor in the past (ISDRS 99). The Symposium is encouraging student participation and provides a highly interactive international forum for engineers, scientists, and students in the areas of advanced materials for devices, novel semiconductor devices, and processing technologies. We propose to use the funds to partially support student and faculty participation (partial travel reimbursement), symposium supplies and printing, and plenary speaker stipends. The sponsorship, participation and endorsement of NSF is invited doc14697 none With National Science Foundation support, Ms. Beer and her advisor Dr. Knight will conduct a year-long investigation of brain areas that may be involved in successful social interaction. Human social interaction occurs in specific contexts in which there are norms dictating which behaviors are appropriate. Previous research suggests that the orbital prefrontal cortex may be involved when individuals restrain their social behavior. This area is thought to be active when individuals inhibit their emotional behavior or use emotional information to make social judgments. In two studies, Beer and Knight will examine whether orbital prefrontal cortex mediates emotional regulation (i.e., the ability to control the expression of emotion), whether the regulatory processes of orbital prefrontal cortex extend to self-disclosure (i.e., any information about oneself that is personally communicated to another individual), and whether the orbital prefrontal cortex is important for utilizing emotional information when making social judgments? Beer and Knight will compare individuals with orbital prefrontal cortex damage to individuals with intact orbital prefrontal cortex. Both groups will be asked a series of personal questions by a stranger and subsequently watch a videotape of this interaction. If the orbital prefrontal cortex is involved in restraining social behavior in accordance with social norms, the group with orbital prefrontal cortex damage will inappropriately express emotion and disclose more personal information than the healthy group. Similarly, if the orbital prefrontal cortex is involved in applying emotion information to social judgments, the group with orbital prefrontal cortex damage will inaccurately judge their behavior after watching the videotape of their social interaction. This research is likely to increase knowledge about the brain basis of emotional regulation, self-disclosure, and the application of emotional information to behavioral judgments. These behavioral and brain functions have significant roles in personal and social life doc14698 none EEC- Silevitch This project is in partnership between the ERC for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems (CenSSIS) at the Northeastern University and the ERC for Computer-Integrates Surgical Systems and Technology (CISST) at the Johns Hopkins University. The common objective of the two collaborating groups is to develop core imaging and computer technologies to assist the physician in the treatment of diseases of the eye. The two teams will address the problem of integrating a variety of medical images into a common description in the form of a quantitative anatomical atlas of the human eye. The research is expected to deliver an interventional tool to the correct area on the retina, in a manner that maximizes the dosage to the region of interest and minimizes the dosage to healthy areas. The ERC at Northeastern University will bring its expertise in subsurface sensing, and the ERC at the Johns Hopkins University will contribute its expertise in steady hand robotics doc14667 none Geosciences in Alaska Field Explorations and Research for K-12 Teachers Geosciences in Alaska is a collaborative project among the University of Alaska Museum, the University of California Museum of Paleontology, and the West Contra Costa Unified School District. It provides a professional development opportunity for teachers that combines both field and research experiences and evaluates the impact of these experiences on their teaching. Working with faculty and staff associated with the University of Alaska Museum and the University of California Museum of Paleontology, teachers participate in an introductory local field trip, and four weeks of field experience in Alaska, followed by an additional excursion locally in which they will apply what they have learned. This comparison between two distinct yet similar geological settings, Alaska and California, reinforces the major concepts learned and allows for a better understanding of the Earth as a dynamic system. Using an inquiry-based approach, the field and research experiences focus on geologic processes, evidence for tectonics, and paleontology. Following the field experiences, teachers work with one another and their mentors throughout the school year to incorporate what they have learned into their classrooms, develop a rigorous course of study in the geosciences for the district, and expand the project to reach a total of 60 teachers doc14700 none This project is a partnership is a partnership between the ERC for Particle Science and Technology at the University of Florida and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The objective is to provide fundamental information concerning the effectiveness of polymeric and surfactant dispersant layers during chemical and mechanical interactions with surfaces. Direct measurement of surfaces force and characterization of dispersant layers under high applied loads, shear rates, and solution conditions will be used to develop dispersant selection criteria for optimal performance in extreme conditions. The ERC s graduate students and researchers will be working in NIST laboratories and NIST personnel will visit the ERC to present seminars and teach students in new characterization techniques doc14701 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Allen will conduct a year-long investigation of a theory that the function of the cerebellum is to predict and prepare the internal conditions needed for mental or motor operations. The cerebellum was thought for many decades to be devoted solely to the coordination of movement. However, a number of recent neurology, psychiatry, and neuroimaging findings indicate the cerebellum may be involved in a wide range of cognitive, emotional, and sensory. These findings do not yet clearly indicate what role the cerebellum serves. One recent proposal is that the cerebellum is involved in predicting and preparing for mental and motor operations and that to perform this function, it learns predictive relationships within sequences of neural activities. Dr. Allen will attempt to test this proposal using functional magnetic resonance imaging of humans performing a visual selection attention task. Blood flow activity in the cerebellum will be recorded as human volunteers alternate between passive viewing of and selective attention to visual stimuli. During the visual selective attention tasks, subjects will passively listen to a structured sequence of tones that predicts the appearance of visual targets. As subjects learn to improve their performance by attending to the predictive pattern of the tones, the intensity and distribution of activity in the cerebellum and elsewhere will be used to evaluate Dr. Allen s hypothesis. The findings of this study should be useful for the development of a new account of cerebellar function. The proposed theory is one of the few to adequately encompass the apparent diversity of the cerebellar function and testing it should bring us closer to understanding the fundamental role the cerebellum plays in the central nervous system. The cerebellum is a large and intricate brain structure with connections to many other neural systems. Clarifying its function will modify our understanding of many other aspects of brain function. Such advances are also expected to have significant implications for understanding symptoms of cerebellar dysfunction doc14702 none This award from the Engineering Research Centers Program is to connect the expertise in large-scale computational simulation and visualization at the Engineering Research Center on Computational Field Simulation at Mississippi State University, in geotechnical and structural response simulation at the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and in advanced computational ground motion and soil-foundation-structure-interaction modeling at Carnegie Mellon University to develop an advanced computational capability for modeling and visualizing the effects of earthquakes in urban regions on the built infrastructure, and to apply this capability to simulate the performance of collections of buildings and other structures in an urban region. The ultimate goal is to forecast the amount and distribution of damage throughout an urban region. The proposed methodology will integrate end-to-end the earthquake source, path, basin, and surficial effects of the geological structure of the region on ground motion, with realistic models of buildings and bridges, including soil-foundation-structure-interaction effects, to develop a distributed, high resolution simulation capability. Key features of the proposed distributed high-performance computational simulation environment are the following: realistic representation of the structure type, geometry and properties; detailed modeling of the soil structure in the near region of the structure; use of real surface topology and sub-surface geotechnical properties; high resolution in the node density of the ground motion to capture the higher frequencies required for determining structural response; explicit consideration of soil-structure-foundation interaction effects; analysis of the simultaneous earthquake response of a portfolio of buildings to examine structure-to-structure interaction effects through the soil and the effects of the built environment on the free-field earthquake ground motion; automated data storage, access, and transport; visualization of complex and large datasets representing behavior of individual structures and aggregates; and integration of these components in a distributed computational environment. This project will use the simulation environment to investigate the effects of earthquakes in the Los Angeles urban region. This problem is of great importance to hazard mitigation and seismic risk reduction because assessing the ground motion to which structures will be exposed during their lifetimes, and predicting their response to this ground motion, including potential damage, is an essential step for the appropriate design and retrofit of earthquake-resistant built infrastructure. Performance-based earthquake engineering methodologies are motivated by the need for scientific and transparent methods to relate seismic hazard to structural performance and loss. Forecasting damage and loss can also be of great use for emergency planning and management purposes. Visualization of damage in an urban region can aid policy makers and stakeholders in making informed decisions on how to reduce earthquake losses. The proposed simulation environment will use the Globus toolkit for access to the computational grid, the deployment of which NSF plans to support as part of the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES). When developed, the simulation environment will be accessible to the earthquake engineering community through NEES doc14703 none Earthquakes and Tectonics of the Pacific Northwest: An Educational Outreach for Teachers, Students and Communities This project supports development of an online geological exhibit and a visiting geologist program as part of an educational outreach initiative for students, teachers and the public by The Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture of the University of Washington. The initiative consists of three integrated and complementary programs: 1) A traveling exhibit entitled in Earthquakes and Tectonics of the Pacific Northwest, 2) a visiting geologist program to interact personally with local schools and citizen groups, and 3) a new generation Internet exhibit entitled, Northwest Origins: Geologic Evolution of the Pacific Northwest that explores the initiative topics and promotes engaging visualization of the large-scale tectonic processes that have created the Pacific Northwest over geologic time. The initiative is in response to the recent major earthquake that broadly affected residents throughout western Washington and Oregon. Personal experience with a major seismic event has greatly heightened public interest in tectonic processes active in the Pacific Northwest. The goals of the project are to better educate citizens and students about the geologic events that create earthquakes, the different tectonic settings in which earthquakes occur, the role these tectonic processes have played in creating the lands of the Pacific Northwest over geologic time, and the significance of ongoing research programs doc14704 none The National Science Foundation s Biological Field Stations and Marine Laboratories (FSML) has awarded a grant to the Romberg Tiburon Center (RTC), the marine science laboratory and teaching facility of San Francisco State University. This grant will fund the purchase of a long-term environmental monitoring system that will be located on the north shore of San Francisco Bay at the RTC. Because of the dynamics of marine physics, chemistry, and biology in the region, the San Francisco Bay estuary is a site of constantly changing conditions of weather, salinity, temperature, clarity, current direction, solar irradiance and phytoplankton (microscopic algae) concentrations. Marine scientists need a long-term record of these conditions to place project-specific observations into the context of changes in Bay conditions over various temporal scales. Furthermore, anticipated long-term changes in climate can only be assessed via a record of conditions in the Bay. Funds from the grant will be used to establish a weather station that will record temperature, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, rainfall and solar irradiance. In addition, sensors will be placed at a series of seawater depths off the RTC pier to record water quality conditions. All data will be collected continuously, saved on a workstation computer at the RTC, and graphed to show minute by minute trends. The information will be available to scientists from other laboratories both on the Bay and at nearby marine laboratories outside the Bay. There are many immediate applications for the information collected by this system. For example, the data will help a scientist working on a research ship to understand how his or her observations fit into trends in the biology and physics of the estuary. Long term changes in warming or in salinity of the Bay water can be documented. A Data Center will be constructed at a site at the RTC that is easily accessible to the public. SFSU will also make the data available to the public via a website. The University anticipates that students will find the information to be an excellent learning tool in which they can study the interplay among the tides, seasons, weather and the biology of bay waters doc14705 none Why Some Students have Trouble with Maps & Spatial Representations: an On-line Tutorial for Geoscience Faculty This project develops an on-line interactive tutorial which addresses a topic of widespread concern to geoscience educators. The topic for the proposed tutorial is maps and related spatial representations. Making and interpreting maps and other spatial representations is central to most of the geoscience disciplines, yet it is a skill that a substantial minority of undergraduates struggles with. Most college professors have little or no professional training in how people learn or think, and they have little time or infrastructure for professional development as educators on the job. Cognitive and developmental researchers have extensively studied the cognitive processes that underlie the comprehension and generation of maps, but few of those insights have reached geoscience faculty. DLESE has the potential to help this situation by providing on-line professional development materials, designed for college faculty, focusing on specific problems or issues that arise commonly in teaching geoscience concepts and skills doc14706 none Looking Forward --Scaling Up the Digital Image Archive of Landscape Change This is phase two of work begun under an earlier award. Geologic archives of landscape response to climate change and human impact (pond and alluvial fan sediments) are the subjects of this project. The first phase demonstrated the feasibility of the project, the high level of interest in the high school community, and the value of the resulting image bank to a variety of constituencies. Phase two of the pilot project continues to bridge gaps both between university research and high-school education and between history and science. The program connects high-school students and teachers, University of Vermont faculty, staff, and students, museum curators, town officials and librarians, and the Education Specialist for the Perkins Geology Museum at the University of Vermont. Townspeople work with each student to find at least two historic photographs clearly showing human landscape interaction and assist the students as they attempt to relocate the place from which each photo was taken. Students and townspeople submit their work over the web using templates developed under this funding project doc14707 none With National Science Foundation support, Ms. Hart and her advisor Dr. Perfetti will conduct a year long investigation of the hypothesis that reading comprehension problems are caused by poor quality lexical representations. Much research has been undertaken to find the causes of reading comprehension problems. For example, it is well known that college age readers who have trouble comprehending what they read have smaller vocabularies, more trouble making inferences, finding main ideas, and maintaining motivation. While all of these factors are correlated with reading comprehension, it is plausible that they are manifestations of a deeper source - that of poor quality lexical representations. A single word in the mental lexicon is composed of phonological, orthographic, and semantic information. In order to support good reading comprehension, these representations must be reliable (one input connects to one lexical entry) and coherent (e.g. phonology and orthography code for the same lexical entry). When reliability and coherence break down, comprehension suffers. In the present project, Hart and Perfetti aim to describe the lexical basis of comprehension skill by equating skilled and less skilled comprehenders on reading experience. Subjects learn an artificial language under conditions where experimenters have control over subjects experience with the language and over properties such as word frequency and homophony. At early and late stages of mastering this language, subjects receive language tests and have the electrical potentials at the scalp measured (using ERP methods) while reading the artificial language. The hypothesis being tested predicts that when tested after little experience, all subjects will behave like less-skilled comprehenders do in other experiments, and after extensive experience, all subjects will behave like skilled comprehenders. The findings from this study are expected to clarify the nature of reading comprehension problems. Explaining comprehension difficulties at a lexical level has implications for interventions designed to improve reading comprehension doc14708 none Geoscience Education in Public Parks: Harriman State Park, New York A universal model is being developed for Geoscience education in public parks near urban centers. This phase of the project will be to develop an educational videotape and a website. The model is being developed in the 75,000 acre Harriman-Bear Mountain-Sterling Forest State Park, 25 miles to the north of New York City in the Hudson Highlands. The park now receives 4.2 million visitors annually including a large proportion of groups who are traditionally under-represented in the sciences. Outstanding roadside and trailside rock exposures beautifully illustrate fundamental principles of Geology, Mining, Environmental Science, and Civil Engineering. Through them, visitors will be provided with an exciting, hands-on science education experience. One area of geology that is especially well illustrated is that developed during the Rodinian tectonic cycle. An ongoing research project on this aspect of the geology involves five researchers from different schools and their students. The results of these ongoing investigations will be integrated into both the videotape and website. The videotape will be made using new footage from the park as well as film resources donated by ABC Inc. and will be widely distributed to participating museums,schools, and recreational groups. Interlinks within the site will explain the science and scientific data that leads to the explanations presented. Topics for field trips will be largely based upon NJ and NY Science Educational Standards for ready use in K-12 curricula doc14709 none Integrating Undergraduate Geoscience Education and Research via a Watershed Management Approach This project enhances undergraduate training in the geoscience component of the interdisciplinary Environmental Science Program through curriculum development revision and expanding student research training opportunities, with particular focus on watershed management approaches. The geoscience component in the Louisiana State University at Shreveport (LSUS) Environmental Science Program is enhanced by the inclusion of a comprehensive watershed and ecosystems approach in several new and revised undergraduate courses. The focus of the curricular enhancement and related student research and experiential learning opportunities is on the Red River watershed and ecosystems in Louisiana. This project integrates research and education, offering undergraduate students interdisciplinary curricular education and experiential learning opportunities, and builds upon collaborative linkages with partner agencies such as USGS. LSUS students participate in public outreach efforts and in publication and dissemination of research results via papers and presentations. Dissemination is aided via a tri-state Red River Public Radio network, headquartered on campus, and through a new inter-agency working group composed of faculty and government agency personnel who are developing a broad regional initiative doc14710 none The investigators will design and develop a computer-based radar simulator that includes the transmitter, ionospheric scattering, and receiver system. The simulator provides a framework by which experimenters can optimally configure a radar system for particular ionospheric conditions. There is a long-standing need in the space science radar community for more well-trained students and scientific radar users. The Advanced Radar System addresses both of those needs. If successful, it can be used in a classroom setting in which students can interactively modify different parts of the system and examine the resulting effect on the received radar signal. This is an excellent means for training the next generation of radar experts. For radar users, the Advance Radar System provides a means to configure a radar-operating mode in a virtual fashion prior to the actual experiment. This will enable the experimenter to modify the operating mode to gain the optimal results from the observations. Finally, the proposed system may eventually replace outdated hardware and software at existing and planned radar systems. The versatility of the digital approach to signal analysis will be demonstrated by configuring the simulator to reproduce the functions of a simple AM radio doc14711 none The Rising Tide Project: Changing How University Researchers and Secondary Educators Work Together The Rising Tide Project raises the level of scientific awareness and confidence on a local level by making collaboration between researchers and educators the norm, rather than the exception. Teacher student teams, each consisting of one local high school teacher and one Coastal Carolina University (CCU) undergraduate, work with CCU marine science faculty mentors on summer research projects. Each team participates in a different local marine-related research project. Using the methodology and data from its research experience, each team designs locally relevant discovery and inquiry based classroom activities for high school students. Activities are designed in a web-based format, tested and assessed in the classroom, and incorporated into the South Carolina Aquarium s web site where they become part of the Aquarium s statewide aquatic curriculum. The goals of this program are to improve the scientific competence of local high school science teachers and enable local high school science teachers to motivate their classrooms by incorporating classroom activities based on locally relevant scientific research that is pedagogically sound and is consistent with national and state standards doc14712 none Rigidified Pneumatic Composites: Use of space technologies to build the next generation of American Homes Rigidified Pneumatic Composites (RPC) structures are defined as thin flexible membrane structures that are pneumatically deployed. After deployment, these structures harden due to chemical or physical change of the membrane. Because of this change, such structures no longer require pneumatic pressure to maintain their shape or provide structural stability. As a result, a structural skin is obtained that can be used to construct a variety of three-dimensional structures. These include for example advanced panel systems, simple columns and beams, and complex truss systems. Current research related to RPC technology is mainly focusing on space structure design. The potential of this class of structures for achieving affordable space systems, robust deployment, very small-stowed volume, and low weight is recognized by an increasing segment of the space structure design community. Our previous studies have indicated that RPC technology might also be extremely beneficial for use in residential construction. RPC technology for example possesses many of the characteristics of wood light framing in that such structures are low cost, require no special tools, are extremely resource efficient, and are very versatile in terms of design flexibility. In addition, RPC technology lends itself very well to low cost manufacturing and streamlined technology delivery. Applications in residential construction however differ significantly from space applications; no direct displacement is therefore possible. The research and development objective of this project is therefore to investigate the application of rigidified pneumatic composite technology specifically for residential construction. The project proposes to develop and demonstrate a design methodology that allows for rational comparison of Rigidified Pneumatic Composite (RPC) systems with alternate RPC designs and building systems. The long-term objectives of this grant are to develop commercially viable and environmentally conscious housing technologies that utilize state-of-the-art materials and manufacturing processes. The proposed research is expected to lead to the development of houses that are safer to construct, less expensive to build, operate, and maintain, and will use significantly less resources relative to wood light doc14713 none Taylor This project is in partnership between the ERC for Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology (CISST) at the Johns Hopkins University and the ERC for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems (CenSSIS) at the Northeastern University. The common objective of the two collaborating groups is to develop core imaging and computer technologies to assist the physician in the treatment of the diseases of human eye. The two teams will address the problem of integrating a variety of medical images into a common description in the form of a quantitative anatomical atlas of the eye. The research is expected to deliver an interventional tool to the correct area on the retina, in a manner that maximizes the dosage to the region of interest and minimizes the dosage to healthy areas. The expertise of steady hand robotics of the Johns Hopkins University will be combined with the expertise in subsurface sensing and imaging of the Northeastern University doc14714 none Visualization Learning Environments for Teaching Inquiry and Earth Science Concepts: A Model for Improving Earth Science Teaching This project develops a pilot model for improving elementary teacher preparation in earth sciences, scalable for broader systematic change. The model consists of a framework for implementing visualization learning environments (simulations, modeling, and imagery of real data sets) in undergraduate science courses for the purpose of constructing inquiry-based learning. The pilot model is based on an eighteen-month longitudinal study on the use of visualization learning environments in an elementary teacher preparation science course taught at the University of Northern Colorado, Principles of Scientific Inquiry.. The longitudinal study is crucial in assessing the long-term impact of visualization learning environments on content literacy and inquiry skill development. The project contributes significantly to the evaluation section of the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) as a beta test site for DLESE s Evaluator Tool-kit, an instrument for methods and protocols for assessing activities and courses that utilize inquiry-based activities. Faculty teaching general education science courses could adapt the model created by this project for use in their classes doc14715 none This is a proposal for a two-day meeting. The meeting will host system reform researchers in science, mathematics emphasizing technology. These researchers represent a number of distinct disciplines including mathematics and science education, organization research, technology and policy. The goal of the meeting is to produce a working research framework by taking stock of the research from these cross-disciplinary fields. The framework will bring some coherence to the systemic movement from the perspective of research. The deliverable will be a report that compares and contrasts what research models work and don t work in an effort to better map this now burgeoning field. The ultimate deliverable will be a series of adaptation studies that will shed light on the possibility for research based systemic studies fundable in ROLE s quadrant IV doc14716 none EXTRUDED FIBER-REINFORCED CEMENT COMPOSITES FOR RESIDENTIAL CONSTRUCTION PROPOSAL Concrete can be stronger, more durable, more fire-resistant, and perform more consistently than wood, making it a good material for residential construction. However, plain concrete is relatively brittle and heavy. Those drawbacks can be overcome with special processing techniques and fiber reinforcement. Recently extrusion technology has been adapted for the production of high-performance, fiber-reinforced composites at Northwestern University s ACBM Center. In this process, a highly viscous mixture of cement paste and micro-fibers is forced through a die of desired cross-section. Extruded compositions are stronger, more ductile and more impervious to water than conventional concrete. The objective of this proposed research is to develop extruded, high-performance composites suitable for residential construction, particularly advanced panel systems. The composites will be designed to accomplish the PATH goals of improved durability, reduced maintenance costs, and reduced risk of life, injury, and property destruction from natural hazards. Different cross-sections, with a focus on cellular construction, will be developed for the production of lightweight elements and advanced panel systems. Collaboration with the Chicago Board of Housing and suppliers to the construction industry will provide avenues to introduce these products to builders and contractors doc14717 none Establishing a Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) Evaluation Toolkit and Community This project develops an Earth systems education evaluation resource for users of the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) and other geoscience educators. The resource, conceptualized as an accessible evaluation toolkit , is grounded in the needs of Earth system educators, and provides a virtual home for a geoscience education evaluation community. An evaluation resource specifically tied to the needs of Earth systems education will enable principal investigators to infuse evaluation into their projects more readily, and will provide knowledge about how best to engender learning in Earth systems education. This project establishes a forum and community for evaluation dialogue within DLESE and provides a robust collection of evaluation resources useful for Earth systems educators. The resource will be disseminated through the DLESE infrastructure and through professional society meetings and workshops doc14718 none PATH: Microcellular Polymers Processing for Lightweight and Energy Efficient Advanced Panel Systems This award supports a PATH research project to explore the manufacture of thick sheets of microcellular polymers for load-bearing applications such as advanced panel systems for house construction. Microcellular Plastics refer to closed-cell thermoplastic foams with a very large number of very small bubbles. Typically, the cells are of order of 10 micrometers in diameter, and there are 108 or more cells per cubic centimeter (cm3) of the foam. The microcellular polymers offer a number of unique advantages for house construction applications. For example, the microcellular structure can reduce the density, leading to a reduction in the weight of the panels. Lighter panels are more cost effective and promote safety during house construction. In addition, reducing material density leads to conservation of natural resources by only using what is truly needed. Further, the microcellular structure can reduce the thermal conductivity and thus improve the energy efficiency of the panel systems. The basic solid-state microcellular process is a two-stage batch process. In the first stage, the polymer is placed in a pressure vessel with a high-pressure and non-reacting gas. This step is usually conducted at room temperature. Over time, the gas diffuses into the polymer, and attains a uniform concentration throughout the polymer specimen. When the specimen is removed from the pressure vessel and brought to the atmospheric pressure, a supersaturated specimen that is thermodynamically unstable due to the excessive gas dissolved into the polymer is produced. In the second stage, the specimen is heated to what is termed the foaming temperature. This step is typically carried out in a heated bath with temperature control. The dissolved gas lowers the glass transition temperature of the polymer and the foaming temperature needs only to be above the glass transition temperature of the gas-polymer system in order for the bubbles to nucleate and grow. Since the polymer is still in a solid state, the foams thus produced are called solid-state foams to distinguish them from the conventional foams that are produced in an extruder from a polymer melt. The funded research will explore the feasibility of producing thick microcellular specimens using a number of polymers, including PVC, a common plastic used in building materials today; PET, a polymer considered cost-competitive with PVC; and some of the more recently introduced high-strength polymers such as PEEK and PEI. A number of gases will be explored as a physical blowing agent. These gases include carbon dioxide and nitrogen. The research will advance the state-of-the-art of the emerging microcellular polymers technology by adding the new dimension of load-bearing applications. It will also provide an excellent opportunity for both undergraduate and graduate students to learn and grow in an environment of discovery and scientific understanding doc14719 none Moisture Control in Walls Moisture constitutes a hazard for buildings and their occupants. There are at least two good reasons to ensure that the presence and movement of moisture across the enclosure of buildings is controlled, especially the exterior walls of houses; first, to avoid the health hazards (mold, etc.) and, second, to avoid deterioration of the materials within the wall. To control moisture requires knowledge of how wetting, storage, and drying occurs and some idea of the performance thresholds for the materials involved. For many building professionals and educational institutions, this is a new science. This project is directed at understanding, modeling, and evaluating the potential for ventilation and convective drying within various wall systems. Houses with pitched roofs commonly make use of the circulation of air to remove moisture from the attic space; hence the familiar vented roof with both soffit and ridge vents for letting cold, dry air in and warm, moist air out in the winter. The contribution of convection to the drying of walls needs to be much better understood.. This project will contribute to improving the durability and the safety of wall systems in houses, leading to reduced maintenance and repair costs. The project meets more than one of the stated PATH goals. The most important involves computer modeling and the investigation of a number of design and development issues. Practical concerns are sizing the flow chamber, assessing the contribution the of sheathing membranes (house wrap, building paper); venting strategies and how best to transfer the technology to the various target audiences: namely the researchers, the design professionals and manufacturers, and the house builder community. An applied R and D project awarded to Eric Burnett of the PHRC by NSF, under the PATH program doc14720 none A Proposal to Create an Online, Student Managed Journal for Undergraduate Research in Marine and Aquatic Sciences This project launches an online, student-managed and reviewed, research journal in the marine and aquatic sciences. The journal is published online only, in order to be accessed by anyone, anytime, anywhere. It encourages quality undergraduate research by providing a publishing forum that is managed by a nationwide community of undergraduate learners mentored by faculty and graduate students. Students experience the process of scientific publishing from the viewpoints of all involved stakeholders, i.e., as authors, peer reviewers, and editorial staff. Through its mission, the journal emphasizes to the larger scientific and educational community the importance of research experience in undergraduate learning. It also bridges research and learning, by using a research activity to enhance learning. The students learn and master communication, networking, and critical thinking skills. Graduate mentors benefit through student mentorship experience and potentially developing into pedagogically more aware geoscience education professionals doc14721 none PATH: An Integrated Program to Examine the Moisture-related Performance of Fiber-cement Composites The effect of wet dry cycling on fiber-cement composites and the resulting mechanisms of damage have not been the subject of an extensive systematic examination. This lack of fundamental knowledge limits our ability to accurately predict service lives of fiber-cement materials and our ability to select materials for fiber-cement composites which are expected to exhibit good performance in exposures where moisture fluctuations are expected. A comprehensive research plan is necessary to fully understand the implications of fiber swelling shrinking on the fiber-cement composite system - the changes that occur in the fiber, surrounding brittle matrix, and the performance of the composite as a whole. The objective of the integrated research project, to be undertaken by a research team composed of concrete technologists from Civil Engineering and paper physicists from Paper Science and Technology, is to link changes that occur on a microstructural level as a result of cyclical moisture changes to the changes in macroscale mechanical properties of the fiber-cement composite. The goals of the proposed research are (1) to assess the effects of repeated wetting and drying (rain and heat) cycles on dimensional changes of wood fibers, physical bonding at the fiber cement paste interface, and bond strength between the fiber and matrix and (2) to assess if improved bonding can be produced through tailoring the fiber processing for this application. The proposal includes preparation of special aligned fiber cement-composites that will offer improved opportunities for both qualitative and quantitative microstructural analysis doc14722 none NSF Proposal Engineered Wood Frame Wall Panel System Integrating Prefabricated Truss Technology PI: Robert N. Emerson An engineered wood frame wall panel system will be investigated that integrates prefabricated metal plate connected truss technology with conventional wood frame wall construction. The wall panel system will appear and handle like conventional walls and be readily adaptable to current construction techniques and applications. However, the engineered wall panel system will be more affordable, durable, safer, and have less environmental impact than conventional site built wood frame construction. Conventional wood frame walls are designed by prescriptive guidelines. They are typically constructed of dimension lumber framework connected together with nails and then sheathed with structural panels (plywood & oriented strand board), insulation panels, or finishing panels (drywall). An engineered wood frame wall panel system will be developed using conventional materials but the dimension lumber framework will be connected with toothed metal plate connectors instead of nails. These moment resistant connections will transform the framework into moment resistant frames that will increase resistance to lateral loads. In addition to the increased structural performance the innovative wall system will gain the benefits of engineered and prefabricated construction. The prefabricated metal plate connected truss industry employs computer-aided design to rapidly engineer custom roof and floor trusses for residential and light-commercial construction. These trusses are then constructed at a factory, shipped to the job site and erected into place. The whole process lends itself to improved efficiency, worker safety, and environmental friendliness. Current prefabricated metal plate connected truss technology will be integrated into a wall panel system that will originally use conventional building materials but will be readily adaptable to new materials. The design and behavior of the engineered wall panel system will be investigated for the proposed research. The technical research will consist of the following phases. 1. Integrating the toothed metal plate connector design process into moment resistant frame design. 2. Behavior and comparison testing between conventional framework and moment resistant framework. 3. Developing design methodology for combining the lateral resistance provided by moment resistant frames with that provided by the conventional sheathing effect doc14723 none An Advanced All Natural Composite Roof For Residential Construction The objective of the proposed research is to develop a monolithic, all-natural composite roof system for residential construction. The roof will be fabricated from novel composite materials made from soybean oil resins and natural fibers. The composite resins are derived from soy beans, a seasonal crop that is already grown in large quantities in the U.S.; the natural fibers to be used are derived from seasonal crops grown specifically for the fiber or are byproducts and waste of other crops. The roof will be designed to carry all of the loads a conventional roof is designed for, will have an integral weather protection surface, and will offer intrinsic insulation. The specific objectives of the proposed project are to (1) design and optimize the soy-based resin, all-natural composite material for roof applications; (2) develop and test a weather protection layer that is integral to the composite roof; and (3) design, analyze, and test the roof structural system. Organized through the University of Delaware Center for Composite Materials, the interdisciplinary effort brings together expertise in chemical engineering, materials science and engineering, and civil engineering. The research plan is organized into two primary thrusts: (1) materials research and (2) structural design and testing. The materials research thrust will comprise (a) tailoring of all-natural resins for the composite roof system, (b) tailoring of composites for the roof system, and (c) aging, durability and development of a weather protection surface. The structural design and testing thrust will address (a) preliminary designs, (b) analysis and testing of small components, and (c) analysis and testing of large roof components. The all-natural composite roof system combines a number of unique features that together will achieve the four PATH goals and bring about a significant advance in residential construction doc14724 none Island Institute Islesboro GIS Technology Collaboration This project proposes a three-year pilot project designed to study and then implement a community-integrated Geographic Information system with an island community in the Penobscot Bay region of Maine. The project will be developed and implemented in conjunction with community members in the school, in the local land trust and on municipal committees. The project implements community integrated GIS as it transfers skills from GIS professionals to ordinary citizens to empower the community of Islesboro. A Major goal is to integrate GIS technology into the existing community through the school and the land trust and the islands municipal committees. GIS skills and abilities will be transferred to the larger community by introducing GIS technology in practical day-to-day decision-making at the community level. The objective is to give Isleboro the tools, skills and resources necessary to access and utilize scientific data and information for the benefit of sustaining their community in the future. The efficacy of this approach will lead to replication of the project in other communities doc14725 none Collaboratory for Oceanographic Research Instrumentation as On-line Laboratory Instruction Sources (CORIOLIS) This project is building and testing an on-line instrumented collaboratory for use in college-level oceanography courses. The goal is to test the educational merits of conducting laboratory exercises online, relative to traditional hands-on access to instrumentation. Instrumented systems that can be accessed via the Internet, and from which students will be able to remotely control instruments, monitor data and sample collection, share and analyze their data, and use links to on-line information sources are located at teaching laboratories. For two consecutive semesters, laboratory sections of the same oceanography course will be used as test groups (on-line laboratory users) and as control groups (in-house labs). The project will be assessed for both technical success (construction of a functioning collaboratory) and student outcomes. The collaboratory also provides a proof-of-concept for sharing access to expensive scientific instrumentation via the Internet (for education or research). Sharing allows concentration of expensive resources at centralized on-line facilities eliminates the prohibitive costs of purchasing and maintaining instrumentation at thousands of educational institutions doc14726 none This Scalable Enterprise Systems Phase II grant funds an investigation of scalable techniques for real-time order promising by discrete build-to-order environments facing dynamic order arrivals. The algorithms to be developed in this project for calculating due dates accurately consider current time-phased availability of resources and materials, prior order commitments, and the current system state. The presence of various alternates (resource paths or material sources) creates combinatorial complexity. To increase performance, the promising algorithms will integrate (1) theoretically sound heuristic techniques developed through research, (2) scalable optimal algorithms such as shortest path, and (3) computational technology. One of the heuristics to be examined is based on a novel, even controversial, idea-- for the purposes of promising, the time when a resource will be available to process an operation can be estimated with sufficient accuracy by considering only a partially ordered task plan. Current support for this principle is based on practical experience but little scientific evidence. A key tenet of this project is that the results be highly scalable. Consequently, joint research occurring at the intersection of Industrial Engineering and Computer Science is both necessary and synergistic in this project since the algorithmic aspects of promising and advanced computational approaches for technological realization are intertwined when research is performed in a large-scale systems context. Algorithms will be implemented in an object-oriented, event-driven, memory-resident, multi-threaded architecture for detailed study and empirical evaluation. One of the most important short-term customer service decisions is making accurate promises in response to requests from customers or business partners. Surprisingly, very little research has been done in this area. While a vast body of literature exists on scheduling to meet prescribed due dates, very little work addresses how due dates that are tight yet achievable may be assigned. Results of this research will increase the accuracy and speed with which these due date promises can be made, which in turn will have a very significant impact on revenues, operating expenses, and customer satisfaction. This research is directly applicable to manufacturers that increasingly are selling built-to-order products direct to customers via the Internet and to a future where collaborative commerce freely occurs among dynamically recombinant business partners doc14727 none Arctic Alive Arctic Alive is an e-learning project that brings cutting-edge geosciences research to the K-12 classroom, integrates geosciences curriculum, provides opportunities for K-12 teachers to work with scientists, and promotes global understanding about the value and worldwide significance of the Arctic region. Arctic Alive focuses on arctic research, the importance of the arctic region including its role in global climate change, and its extraordinary environments and diverse cultures. Science is the central curriculum theme, while technology is the catalyst. Arctic Alive is an interactive, real-time, and unique web-based education program. It uses a variety of delivery methods and e-learning strategies to deliver arctic research to the classroom. Two key program components are a teacher in the field with the geoscientists to facilitate activities in the classroom, and student interactions with the researchers. Educators and students integrate the Arctic Alive program not only into their sciences curriculum but also social studies and technology curricula. The Arctic Alive program aligns with National Education Standards in technology, science, and math, as well as Alaska Content Standards for Students doc14728 none Under the direction of Dr. T. Douglas Price, Mr. Lane Fargher will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. The research problem is the nature of the household economy in prehispanic Mexico. He will continue work on a study of economic activities at a series of prehispanic settlements located in the Valley of Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico. These sites include San Juan Guelavla, a 32.8 hectare site that was occupied between AD 700 and AD 950, and Santa Cecilia Jalieza, a 26.6 hectare site that was occupied between AD 250 and AD 500. These sites are important because they are both located in areas that have limited agricultural potential, making non-agricultural activities (handicraft production; i.e., pottery production, stone tool production, basketry, or cloth production) important for the survival of site occupants. In order to understand how site inhabitants supported themselves economically a combination of archaeological survey and microscopic analysis of artifacts collected during survey will be used at each site. This information will be refined through the use of ceramic and lithic petrography to identify the source of raw materials used in handicraft production and, in the case of ceramics, to collect information on mass production of vessels. Currently some scholars argue that prehispanic households, in Mexico, were self-sufficient (i.e. households produced everything needed for survival within the house), while others argue that the prehispanic economy was specialized (i.e. households intentionally overproduced a limited number of handicrafts that were exchanged for other items required by the household, including food). However, known examples of specialization are relatively few in number. As a result, the degree to which specialized economies supplanted self-sufficient households, and how households organized handicraft production in relation to agricultural production between AD 300 and AD remains unknown. Mr. Fargher s research will provide important new data relating to the nature of the prehispanic economy of Mexico. This research is also important because it will provide data on small and medium sized settlements which have generally been ignored by Oaxacan archaeologists working on issues related to the later prehispanic era. Finally, as modern population expands in the Valley of Oaxaca, archaeological sites are destroyed by construction and looted as people attempt to support themselves. Therefore, Mr. Fargher s research will help preserve the cultural heritage of Mexico and save important scientific information doc14729 none Bio-composites from Engineered Natural Fibers for Housing Panel Applications L. T. Drzal and A. K. Mohanty Composite Materials and Structures Center Michigan State University, MI This proposal will have as its objective, the development of natural fiber (bio-based) composites for housing panel applications as an environmentally friendly alternative to contemporary synthetic glass fiber - polyester composite materials. Research under this project will investigate the utility of combining surface treated bast fibers (e.g., kenaf, hemp) with leaf fibers (e.g. pineapple leaf) in order to synergistically obtain the desired mechanical properties of strength, stiffness and toughness. The bast fiber bio-composites alone show high flexural tensile properties while the leaf fiber based bio-composites alone show the best impact properties. The agricultural origin of the biofibers will create a new value-added use for pineapple leaf, at present a waste underutilized product. This project will be executed through effective collaboration of University (MSU), a housing panel manufacturing company (Kemlite), and a natural fiber company (Flaxcraft) in order to understand the changing demand and requirements of paneling systems by industry so that the use of bio-composites is maximized. The fundamental knowledge of the relevant structure-processing-property relationships gained will be the basis for the commercialization of biocomposites into the housing market doc14730 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Thomas W. Steele of the University of Wisconsin-Madison to construct a new dormitory at the university s Kemp Natural Resources Station, Woodruff, WI. Kemp Station is a multi-disciplinary research and teaching facility located in the ecologically diverse Northern Highland Region of north central Wisconsin. During the s, Kemp Station experienced a substantial increase in scientific and educational activity. In , lodging demands began to exceed available space. This unmet demand has grown each year so that the Station now turns away some 700 person-nights of lodging requests annually. The proposed dormitory will address the lodging shortfall, allowing Kemp Station to better fulfill its mission of environmental research, instruction and outreach. Lodging capacity will be expanded via construction of a modern, 150-m2 (1,600-ft2), all-season dormitory. The new building will consist of 6 3-person suites, bath areas, and large kitchen and living area. The dormitory will be connected to the Station s research laboratory via a fiber optic cable, providing users with convenient computer network and Internet access. Construction of a new dormitory is fundamental to Kemp Station s comprehensive program of research, instruction and outreach. The Station s research activities are incredibly diverse. For example, the Station has supported microscopic and molecular studies of green algae. This work has enhanced our knowledge about the origins, evolution, and early diversification of land plants. At the other end of the scale, the Station is currently facilitating landscape-level studies examining the exchange of carbon dioxide between the atmosphere and temperate forests. This research has already expanded our knowledge of biosphere-atmosphere interactions and will ultimately improve our understanding of ecological responses to climate change. The knowledge gained from these and other scientific endeavors are used directly in the Station s instructional and public outreach programs. The Station hosts approximately 15 undergraduate courses annually, providing today s students with the skills and knowledge necessary to become tomorrow s natural resource managers. In addition, the Station s outreach program puts science to work. It strives to increase public understanding of current environmental issues and promote wise resource stewardship. Thus, expansion of the lodging facilities at the Kemp Natural Resources Station will provide the infrastructure necessary to advance environmental science and education in northern Wisconsin and throughout the Great Lakes Region doc14731 none Development and Implication of New Technologies for Teaching Field Geology The project is developing a digital field geology (DFG) system that will enable a new generation of university-level courses in field geology. Electronic devices will simplify and accelerate the process of data collection in order to give students and instructors the opportunity to focus on critical thinking and data analysis in the field. The DFG system performs automated functions that closely emulate and complement traditional field methods, provides simple software smart tools that will aid in the collection and first-order analysis of field data and expedites and facilitates the translation of field data to a geographic infomration system (GIS) environment. The DFG system incorporates hardware and software advances such as wireless, hand-held devices with GPS cards, voice input, and networks links to access more powerful computers remotely. The DFG system is innovative in its integration of the latest technologies with a distributed-type architectural design. While particularly well suited to the teaching fo field geology, this system should enhance the efficiency of proofessional geologist doing field-based research and could be readily adapted for commercial applications. A wesite will distribute software and aid faculty from other universities to adopt the DFG system for their courses and offers a forum for discussions on best practices for the development of technology-enabled research tools for field geology doc14732 none NSF PROPOSAL # , ADVANCED REPLACEMENTS FOR MECHANICAL FASTENERS IN HOUSING CONSTRUCTION FOR HIGH WIND ZONES Adhesives offer several design benefits over conventional mechanical fasteners including nails and rivets. The acrylic foam tape is a unique adhesive product that requires no curing and yet offers substantial property advantages for certain semi-structural applications. Virginia Tech proposes to implement an innovative assembly process in the construction industry through the development of materials, design, and application databases. The assembly process will be based on generic acrylic foam tapes and the test bed will be shear walls and diaphragms in light-frame construction for wind-critical areas, a very large market segment. The assembly process meets PATH (Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing) goals of promoting housing affordability, durability, and wind-damage resistance. PATH s technical areas addressed are advanced panel systems and whole-house and building process redesign. The fundamental research component of the project will generate material data with emphasis on tape durability. Numerical structural modeling and cyclic tests of the assemblies will provide a basis for showing the adequacy of the tape to resist the dynamic loads associated with high wind events. A design methodology will be developed to enable field engineers to recommend and direct successful tape applications on construction sites. Shear wall and diaphragm models will be constructed for testing and demonstration. Walls and diaphragms will be designed to take full advantage of load re-distribution capabilities, increased flexibility and damping, and improved fatigue resistance provided by the tapes. The advantages of the resilient foam tape in wind critical applications will be highlighted as meeting the PATH goal of improved disaster resistance. The application of the tape increases overall system stiffness, increases the resistance of the roof sheathing to wind uplift from hurricane loading, and tape sealing reduces water damage, the major property damage under hurricane conditions. In addition to simplifying the assembly construction process, the design may offer enhanced performance including longer life, better appearance, reduced transportation costs, and environmentally friendly alternatives over the use of conventional fastening systems. Collaboration with the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) through the PATH program will facilitate timely interactions with end users of technologies developed in the project and will speed up widespread adoption. A national homebuilder company will build a demonstration home if laboratory tests show feasibility. The output of the project will be materials, joint performance, and application data on a simple but innovative assembly process. The databases and demonstration models will be focused on specific applications for wind-critical areas but will be applicable to a broad range of advanced adhesive tapes for use in housing construction doc14733 none Geoscience Education Research to Enhance Effective Professional Development for In-Service Teachers: New Research Opportunities in the San Diego Region Due to increased demand for Geosciences in schools, there is a surge in the demand for geoscience professional development workshops for both pre- service and in-service teachers. One of the largest professional development programs in California is run by the K-12 Alliance, a multi-agency collaborative organization. The PI and his research group are participating as content facilitators and researchers in this program and are assessing portions of the project including immediate impacts on classroom practice. This project supports students who will perform some of these assessment activities to conduct research on the impact and effectiveness of a new field-based, inquiry-driven unit on sedimentary rocks, depositional environments and change through time using a well exposed sequence of Eocene through Pleistocene rocks at Torrey Pines State Park. All participants undergo pre- and post-test summative evaluation, and selected participants will be interviewed before and after the field experience, and tracked to measure the impact of the field exercise on classroom practice over the coming school year doc14734 none THE UPPER NEWPORT BAY PROJECT: A COLLABORATIVE APPROACH TO GEOSCIENCE EDUCATION IN THE ORANGE COUNTY COMMUNITY PROJECT SUMMARY FOR A GEOSCIENCE EDUCATION PROPOSAL This project begins to establish Chapman University as the leader in providing the critical scientific data needed for responsible policy decisions concerning the Upper Newport Bay (UNB). UNB serves as Orange County s most visible natural environment. Surrounded by high-density urban development, the Bay receives pollutants from urban and agricultural run-off, marinas, storm water, nurseries, and creeks. Recent development in the area has focused public interest on potential impacts in the estuary. Yet, the Bay has no centralized environmental data repository. This project establishes a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) database of scientific (mostly geochemical) data for the Upper Newport Bay in Orange County, California, in a manner that maximizes geoscience education in the community. This project establishes a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) teaching laboratory at Chapman University, and develops a unit aimed at future elementary and intermediate (K-8) school teachers that will combine geoscience field and laboratory investigations with use of GIS technology. Term projects in two upper division Environmental Sciences courses give students the opportunity to do field and laboratory research applied towards a tangible product. A pilot program is designed to give high school science students, teachers, and potential future secondary school teachers an opportunity to do applied field and laboratory research leading to the presentation of valuable data doc14735 none Designing Panelized Systems to Minimize Impact on Indoor Air Quality in Tightly-Sealed Buildings John C. Little The use of Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs) to create very tight building envelopes will help achieve PATH s goals of simultaneously reducing the environmental impact and improving the energy efficiency of new and existing homes. Typically, SIPs use oriented strand board and rigid foam in a multi-layered, sandwich-like structure. Although environmental advantages make these panelized systems very attractive, the tighter building envelope construction may degrade indoor air quality. For example, formaldehyde, other aldehydes, and terpene hydrocarbons are commonly found in new manufactured and site-built houses, and these compounds are associated with strong sensory irritation. The release of these contaminants must therefore be taken into account when designing homes constructed with SIPs. A diffusion model that predicts emissions from single-layer materials has recently been developed and successfully validated. A logical and very promising extension of this approach is to apply the model to predict emissions from multi-layer systems like SIPs. This research will characterize emissions from the individual layers used in the fabrication of SIPs; independently measure the model parameters for the different material layers; validate the single-layer model by comparing predicted emissions to observations obtained in experimental chamber studies; extend the single-layer model to a composite multi-layer model with boundary conditions appropriate for SIPs construction; validate the multi-layer emissions model for SIPs, with and without the presence of an installed barrier material; and use the multi-layer model to optimize the position and properties of barrier materials that can be used to significantly reduce emissions from other advanced panel systems. This research builds on an existing and successful partnership with Alfred Hodgson, of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and forges a new collaboration with Dr. Daniel Dolan, Professor and Director of the Center for Integrated Systems in Housing at Virginia Tech, thereby ensuring rapid translation of fundamental research into practical applications doc14736 none This U.S.-Hungary research project between Victor Hruby of the University of Arizona and Katalin Kover of the University of Debrecen features the study of bioactive peptide function. Specifically, conformations and dynamics of oligopeptides, peptide mimetics, proteins and peptide protein complexes in both the solution and gas phases will be examined using multi-dimensional NMR, tandem mass spectrometry and theoretical methods. The researchers intend to examine the role of three-dimensional structures and molecular dynamics in the biological activity of peptides and proteins with the goal of better understanding the behavior of synthetic oligopeptides, proteins and peptide-protein complexes. If successful, results may yield new information leading to the definition of peptidomimetic compounds that are potentially useful as reagents or in drug development. This biophysics research project fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources inn areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc14737 none This Scalable Enterprise Systems Phase II project s primary goal is to develop models of emergent enterprises that capture the independent behavior of the organizations involved, as well as the effects of interactions among individual organizations, in order to accurately predict dynamics of the emergent enterprise and performance of the system in the long run. Participants in the enterprise can use these results to select appropriate operational strategies in order to improve local performance measures such as profit or cash flow over a fixed planning horizon. In addition, these models will provide insight into the mechanisms that result in effective alliances and organizational designs. The modeling approach has three steps. First, a representation scheme is developed for capturing characteristics of individual participants that incorporates task information, organizational relationships, local and system level goals, and possible changes in the environment. An enterprise is thus a collection of several of such detailed representations for each organization and the interactions between these organizations. Second, a micro-macro modeling approach is developed, where the details of each agent s tasks (represented in the micro-level simulation framework) are aggregated into a set of interaction parameters at the macro-level. The macro-level enterprise model is formulated as an interacting particle system. Finally, the third step involves validation of the theories developed using field data. Field data will be collected from different industries that have large number of participants in the supply network, such as the food industry and the automotive industry, to construct practical agent representations and to verify the theoretical performance estimates. Large-scale simulations using a multi-agent simulator will also be used to empirically estimate the performance of a given organizational configuration. This research will allow planners to estimate a priori the overall enterprise performance under different operating conditions, and eventually, design optimal emergent societies. Moreover, systems composed of distributed decision-makers are encountered in various application domains, such as traffic on highway networks, air traffic management systems, design teams composed of dispersed designers, distributed sensor networks, multi-agent systems, etc. The fundamental advances made in this research will have significant impact on our ability to predict the performance of such systems, and therefore devise appropriate planning and control strategies doc14738 none The District 11 Weather and Earth Studies Program (DEWS) in Community School District 11 (CSD 11) is designed to improve the teaching and learning of the atmospheric, earth, physical and life sciences in grades 5-8 throughout the district. Beginning in September , an atmospheric Earth Systems Science (ESS) program of science instruction will be in place across these grade levels. The new approach to science instruction involves the use of atmospheric science themes as the basis of an integrated and interdisciplinary program that unifies the atmospheric, earth, physical and life sciences in conformance with the National Science Education Standards, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Project Benchmarks for Science Literacy, the New York State Intermediate Level Science Core Curriculum Grades 5-8, and the New York City New Standards Performance Standards for Science doc14739 none Carriquiry The Latin American Congress on Probability and Mathematical Statistics (Congreso Latinoamericano de Probabilidad y Estadistica Matematica, (CLAPEM), will take place during November 12-16, in La Habana, Cuba and will be hosted by the Universidad de la Habana. Organizers are Dr. Alicia Carriquiry, Iowa State University and Dr. Andrea Rotnizky, Harvard School of Public Health. Applied probability and statistics have only recently become important areas of research to areas of inquiry such as biology, engineering, and economics, and only recently has Latin America begun serious interaction with scientists in other disciplines. The goal of this activity is to provide opportunity to young Latin American and US researchers to establish long-term cooperation, and to encourage young Latin American scientists to pursue graduate studies in the US. The activity will include short courses, talks, and posters. The short courses will provide the young scientists the opportunity to be taught by international leaders in this area, while the poster sessions will give them an excellent venue to present their work and to interact with more senior conference participants. It will most likely play a significant role in the development of the scientific enterprise in Latin America doc14740 none This award provides partial funding for expansion and modernization of the library at The Darling Marine Center. The library currently contains more marine-related holdings than any other library in Maine, and is an important resource for researchers and students interested in the biology of the Gulf of Maine and the Maine coast. Because of current space limitations, a third of the library s holdings are stored in other buildings and attic spaces. The library is not wheelchair accessible, has no significant study space, and provides only limited access to electronic databases. The proposed changes include: 1) construction of a 1,500 sq. ft. addition to the main floor of the Library, 2) the reallocation and renovation of 1,650 sq. ft. of existing space on the main floor and second floor, thus providing a total of total of 3,150 sq. ft. of additional space for library use, and 3) the purchase of computers, interactive videoconferencing hardware, and related equipment that will facilitate access to electronic information and data stored electronically. The planned increase in amount and quality of library space, and improvements in communications equipment available to library users, will significantly improve the ability of this important regional resource to serve the needs of resident and visiting faculty, students and other users doc14741 none Proposal: PI: Joachim Hammer Institution: University of Florida Date: July 21, CMS - Flexible Production Networks Phase II: SEEK - Scalable Extraction of Enterprise Knowledge This grant provides funding to support development of new theory and technologies to allow the seamless, rapid interconnection of diverse legacy systems with enterprise decision support tools to allow extraction of data and knowledge across those legacy systems. Such a capability is critically important to allow rapid configuration of computing systems that support extended enterprise collaboration. The application domain is the flexible production network. Flexible production networks (FPNs) consist of firms that operate in a project oriented, customized production environment. Most construction (totaling approximately 8% of GNP) and growing parts of manufacturing industry operate in this form. Characterized by rapid assembly and disassembly of business networks based on project needs, FPNs are particularly well-suited users for the proposed research. We call our technology SEEK - Scalable Extraction of Enterprise Knowledge. Knowledge extraction is difficult because data resident in the firm does not map directly to the input needed by a decision support system. Existing approaches do not support SEEK s fundamental capabilities: (1) rapid connection to legacy data and applications with little programmatic setup; and (2) linking source knowledge with decision support tools not natively available to the source. Our novel approach to provide these capabilities is to use encoded domain knowledge about the types of information that would be stored in applications to enable semiautomatic connection to those applications. Our approach is application independent, supporting extraction of legacy data from both structured and unstructured sources. This approach is inherently more scalable and robust than building application specific tools. Successful conclusion of our research will significantly increase the speed and reduce the amount of human input necessary to instantiate an extended enterprise computing platform with heterogeneous sources doc14742 none This proposal is to cover expenses associated with hosting the Digital Libraries Initiative All Projects Meeting in June . The All Projects Meetings have been held semi-annually since the program s inception in and have been essential to building collaborations between funded projects, establishing and maintaining program identity and direction, and stimulating valuable personal interactions between researchers, graduate students, and information professionals from all sectors. The meeting agenda is structured to allow projects to report and demonstrate research products, and discuss and assess the relative merits and promise of new capabilities doc14743 none The objective of this Phase II Scalable Enterprise Systems project is to develop a Supply Chain Optimization and Protocol Environment that emulates the behavior of supply chains involving multiple, independent, goal-seeking entities over time. Entities will be represented by novel optimization models that capture the key decision variables and technological constraints, while retaining enough special structure to allow efficient solution. Interactions among entities will be described through protocols that specify what goods, money, and information pass among entities, in what order entities make decisions, how information is processed by each entity to make its decisions, and how entities respond to unforeseen events that do not match their plans. The approach will allow users to represent a range of different modes of interaction among entities in the supply chain, which, although simplified relative to industrial practice, should provide insights into many cases of practical interest. By focusing on the policy level of analysis, it provides sufficient granularity for evaluating high-value supply chain opportunities, and assessing the associated risks, unencumbered by the transactional detail of existing modeling systems. If successful, this project would provide managers with a tool for rapid prototyping of supply chain proposals that would permit them to evaluate possibilities without either implementing an untested idea or waiting for competitors to do it and risking loss of market share. Researchers would be provided a test bed for assessing how well theoretically derived results generalize to different modes of operation that strain some of the original assumptions, and for experimenting with forms of supply chain collaboration too complex for treatment analytically. Educators will be able to explore realistic cases with students by varying model parameters and displaying the results in near real time doc14744 none The Mathematics Department at North Carolina A Mathematical models; Pulse propagation in fibers; Mathematical modeling and simulation; Optical solitons; Phase modulation and solitons; Optimization Problems; Planar waveguides and Elliptical core fibers; Pulse design in fibers; Retrospective, review and research directions. In addition to these lectures, there shall be semi-structured discussion sessions led by other leading research mathematicians and engineers in nonlinear mathematics and fiber optics. The chosen topic, motivated by the study of the propagation of pulses through nonlinear optical fibers, underlies a fertile and briskly active interdisciplinary area, rendering it particularly timely in applied mathematics research. By providing a focal point to an otherwise diverse set of specialized mathematical areas, the topic creates opportunities for collaboration amongst mathematicians of different specialties, while at the same time laying a foundation for interdisciplinary collaboration. This conference is in particular intended as an effort to introduce new researchers to this exciting field, with a focus on HBCU MI faculty, whose activities are normally confined to teaching. While participation is mainly expected from within North Carolina and the Southeastern-Atlantic region, other participants are expected from the wider mathematical sciences community. An intended outcome of the conference is that it will act as an incubator for mathematical and interdisciplinary collaborative activities among established and new researchers, thus serving to stimulate research activity in applied mathematics at minority serving institutions doc4394 none Toole Robbins This project is intended as a continuation of an attempt to synthesize a broad picture of the three-dimensional circulation of the Pacific using observations of deep hydrography and nutrients from the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) together with data from subsurface floats. The approach to be taken will divide the Pacific into approximately 70 boxes and use a linearly constrained inverse estimation technique to deduce a circulation that best fits the observations while conserving mass and tracer fluxes doc14746 none The objective of this Scalable Enterprise Systems award is the creation of an agent-based framework for the simulation of product design, marketing and supply-chain as collaborative processes. This project will develop the enabling theories and technologies needed to support its realization. The framework will use computational agents modeling the human behavior, artificial agents modeling synthetic economies, and constructive agents to address strategic, tactical and operational decision-making problems in simulating product life cycle. These agents use both analytic models and adaptive algorithms such as generic algorithms, fuzzy logic, and neural networks. The agents will compete to provide solutions in these simulations using innovative market metaphors such as auctions and recommendation systems. The research tasks include requirements analysis, preliminary functional analysis, methodology development, initial prototyping, testing, and specifications for the framework. If successful, this research will allow organizations to become aligned to and focused on to changing markets and changing customer values. The proposed collaborative design framework will test strategies necessary to ensure that the product delivery process, the product development process, and marketing initiatives are aligned to address the multiple dimensions of customer values simultaneously. The results will apply in the modeling of the supply chain for convergence technologies and the development of business models for electronic bandwidth exchange. The prototype will be used to support teaching in several courses in Economics and Management doc14747 none One of the most fundamental problems in mathematics is that of solving polynomial equations. Such systems are ubiquitous in applied mathematics, arising in robotics, coding theory, optimization, mathematical biology, computer vision, statistics, and numerous other areas. Of course, the study of polynomial systems is a beautiful topic in its own right and is the subject of algebraic geometry, which is traditionally regarded as a deep and difficult subject in pure mathematics. In recent years, an explosive development in explicit algorithms and practical software for geometric calculations has revolutionized the area, making many formerly inaccessable problems tractable, and providing a fertile ground for experimentation and conjecture. These algorithms have also generated a surprising interest in algebraic geometry among scientists, engineers, and applied mathematicians. The tools of the trade employed in this field span the spectrum of mathematics, ranging from numerical methods and differential equations to algebraic geometry to combinatorics. The purpose of these lectures is to provide an overview of recent results and the ``state of the art ; and to discuss the wealth of open questions raised by these results and suggest new directions ripe for exploration doc14748 none This research examines household social organization and economic activities at the Early Postclassic (A.D. 800- ) site of Rio Viejo in coastal Oaxaca, Mexico, through a meticulous examination of micro-residues. The project not only serves as one of the first major studies of Early Postclassic period households in Oaxaca, but should also prove useful for archaeologists working in other regions and other parts of the world who are interested in applying micro-scale methods to household research. Household archaeology conventionally uses architecture, burials, and artifacts to reconstruct domestic activities. But artifacts present problems for understanding household activities, because they are normally recovered in trash deposits or fill, potentially far removed from where they were used. Micro-residues, including microscopic plant remains, fine-scale changes in soil deposition, and chemical residues of organic debris, in contrast, are less likely to have traveled from their locations of use. The techniques of paleoethnobotany, micromorphology, and soil chemistry detect food processing and cooking activities, which are important because sharing food often defines membership in household social groups. At Rio Viejo, excavations of twelve buildings in two neighborhoods of modest, single-roomed houses revealed similarities in artifacts and architecture that suggest commoner status, yet burial practices and other features differ in each area. The research will address questions about similarities and differences in the organization of domestic activities that traditional data alone cannot answer. Uniformity in artifacts and architecture could mask real differences between the two areas, and the distribution of food-related activities might better reflect household divisions than the buildings themselves. Also, since productive activities in residential settings are linked with larger-scale political and economic goals, this project will consider how Rio Viejo s Early Postclassic occupants cooperated economically within a newly reconceived political framework following the collapse of urban centers doc14749 none This Scalable Enterprise Systems Phase II project will develop the Discrete Event System Specification (DEVS) Formal Framework for Scalable Enterprise Design and extend earlier-developed DEVS-based modeling and simulation environments to support several real world test cases. As the Internet expands toward 1 billion nodes forming a highly interconnected and computationally powerful medium, and companies increase specialization and horizontal layered organization, new complexity and dynamics are emerging. Scalability, the ability to avoid performance degradation and system breakdown as the scale of activity greatly increases, is one of the urgent global problems that needs to be addressed. This research will seek to enhance scalability at three inter-related levels of abstraction: the Enterprise Architecture level, the Information Technology Infrastructure level, and the Modeling and Simulation level. Earlier research developed a theoretical foundation for architecting a major responsibility of enterprise systems -- to ensure that the right information about the enterprise is available to decision makers at the right time. Having extended the DEVS formalism to express time-critical behaviors in enterprise data management, the researcher proposes to implement the extended DEVS functionality by suitably extending the distributed real-time execution environment previously developed in NSF-sponsored research. This environment will be tested by two diverse applications: a small scale but complete and real factory automation test bed and a large-scale web-hosting service for e-business. The Integrated Manufacturing Technology Initiative (IMTI) sponsored by the primary governmental funding agencies (NIST, DOE, NSF, and DARPA) states that modeling and simulation are emerging as key technologies to support manufacturing in the 21st century. This research will attempt to fill in some of the gap between the current state of the art and the IMTI vision of the future. In this vision enterprise processes, equipment and systems are linked via a robust communications infrastructure that delivers the right information at the right time; and integrated enterprise management systems that ensure that decisions to be made in real-time and on the basis of enterprise-wide impact. Achieving scalability in M&S and IT infrastructure will enable a wide array of M&S studies and implementations, as well as supporting the scalability of the future M&S-based networked, extended and distributed enterprise systems envisioned by IMTI doc14750 none This award provides support for construction of housing and docks at two remote field stations that are part of a group of stations operated by the Fisheries Research Institute of the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington. The stations are located on two nearly pristine lake systems within or adjacent to parks and preserves; their use has helped provide information on the carrying capacities of salmon spawning and rearing environments and interactions between salmon and other aquatic species. Research at these field stations has expanded in the last decade beyond the historical focus on sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) to include a range of new topics including cycling of marine-derived nutrients from salmon carcasses into aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, behavioral and evolutionary ecology, and effects of climate change on aquatic ecosystems. As part of the research, long-term datasets have been maintained for juvenile and adult fishes, zooplankton, phytoplankton, temperature and other biological and environmental variables, some for over 50 years. An intensive field course for undergraduate students that covers the methods and principles of aquatic ecology is taught each summer. The support is intended to improve the infrastructure of these field stations so that their teaching and research missions can be expanded. In conjunction with funds from the University of Washington, the funds will support construction of a multipurpose laboratory classroom dormitory facility at the Porcupine Island station as well as new docks at both Porcupine Island and the Aleknagik station. These improvements will permit the stations to accommodate a larger number of visiting scientists and students, provide space specifically designed for teaching, and improve safety by separating laboratories from sleeping quarters doc14751 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. David Hartnett at Kansas State University to construct a duplex-unit housing facility at the Konza Prairie Biological Station (KPBS) in Kansas to expand housing accommodations for visiting research scientists and students. KPBS is a 8,600 acre tallgrass prairie preserve and research station managed by Kansas State University for basic biological research, long-term ecological research on grassland ecosystems, science education, and conservation. The station has become recognized internationally as the premier grasslands research station in the United States and has attracted scores of researchers and students from institutions throughout the U.S. and several foreign countries. The construction of this additional facility will meet the increasing needs for accommodating visiting scientists and will enhance the research capacity and support facilities at the station. A 1,750 square-foot duplex housing unit will be constructed at the KPBS near Manhattan, Kansas. Each of two self-contained living units will contain two multiple-occupancy bedrooms, living area, and completely equipped kitchen, laundry, and bath facilities. The building will be constructed at the station headquarters site adjacent to the KPBS research laboratories, library and other facilities. The addition of this housing facility will double the lodging capacity at KPBS and will complement current dormitory-style accommodations by providing private, self-contained housing units suitable for longer-term residency by visiting scientists. KPBS is a center for important research on global climate change, conservation of biodiversity, rangeland management, agriculture, and water quality. The station is conducting research on important global environmental issues in grassland ecosystems including exotic species invasions, the role of grasslands in global carbon cycling and sequestration, and loss of grassland due to regional expansion of woody vegetation. New approaches in remote sensing and other technologies are also being developed to address these important research questions. In addition, KPBS serves as a regional center for K-12, university, and adult community education programs in ecology focused on both regional and global problems. Expansion of on-site housing accommodations at KPBS will aid in attracting leading scientists to help address these issues. This expansion of station facilities and support infrastructure at KPBS will significantly enhance these important on-going and new research programs and on-site undergraduate and graduate training and public education programs doc14752 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Andrew L. Mack at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) for upgrading infrastructure of the Crater Mountain Biological Research Station (CMBRS). The stations is located in Papua New Guinea (PNG), the young democracy occupying the eastern half of the island of New Guinea, the world s second largest island after Greenland. The island is home to over 5% of Earth s biodiversity and is one of three remaining tropical rainforest wilderness areas on our planet. Despite the unique biota PNG is one of the least-studied and poorest-known major ecoregions. The CMBRS and the WCS programs undertaken there are dedicated to furthering our knowledge of this critically important ecoregion and providing outstanding education opportunities for biology students in a pristine rainforest wilderness. CMBRS has been the premier rainforest research destination in PNG for over a decade-- nearly 100 researchers have worked here resulting in over 50 publications. Despite substantial efforts by WCS to maintain the station, the degradation from the tropical climate and twenty feet of annual rainfall is taking its toll on the station. It has become necessary to rebuild the station and upgrade its facilities to meet the increasing demands of visiting scientists and students. A new facility constructed of welded steel and vinyl siding will replace the present all-wood structure. This new facility will have an expected lifespan of over forty years. The materials will be pre-fabricated in PNG by a company that supplies mining camps and delivered to the remote CMBRS site by helicopter. The grant will also upgrade the current solar-powered electrical service and enable improved, modern computing facilities in this remote field site. The station is in the heart of PNG s second largest (260,000 hectares) and one of the most successful conservation areas. CMBRS provides scientific guidance for the conservation project, providing data for viable management planning. The station also serves as a unique educational facility; enabling university students from the US and other nations access to pristine tropical forests and its diverse and endemic biota. Student training programs at CMBRS immerse US undergraduate students in an intensive research-training program where they focus on biological field studies and natural history for at least three months. The station and WCS also oversee a wide range of training programs for PNG nationals who otherwise have little access to field-based research in the nation s rainforests. The education and research programs at CMBRS have significantly improved our knowledge of this unique ecosystem and promise to have even greater impact after the infrastructure improvements allow more work to be accomplished there doc14753 none Kasal This U.S.-Czech project between Bohumil Kasal of North Carolina State University and Milos Drdacky of the Czech Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics features research, field studies, and development of new methodologies for evaluating historic timber structures. The techniques used will combine classical nondestructive methods, semi-destructive methods, statistical data analysis and simulation, and laboratory verification. The planned semi-destructive methods measure mechanical and physical properties and involve removing micro- wood specimens using a core drill and evaluating compression strength to measure the modulus of elasticity. The nondestructive methods employ stress wave timing, resistance drilling and digital radioscopy. The team s overall goal is to systematically derive a comprehensive assessment technology for historic buildings that can contribute to our knowledge of asset management for wooden structures. This engineering project concerning infrastructural materials and structural mechanics fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc14754 none This is a collaborative research project between the Engineering Research Center for Reconfigurable Machining Systems (RmS) at the University of Michigan and the Center for Intelligent Maintenance Systems (IMS) at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. The objective of this research is to develop a methodology of web-based informatics platform toenable an implementation of remote monitoring and assessment of production machinery in internet-augmented reconfigurable manufacturing environment. The methodology will address the underlying issues in correlating machine condition and manufacturing process data into predictable and usable machine health and performance over time doc14755 none This award provides partial support in the amount of $30,000 for an eighteen-month study and report on material flow accounting of natural resources. Support is also being requested from the following federal agencies: Department of Energy, Department of Defense, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Geological Survey. Materials flow accounting, which can be used to track the flow of a material from the time it is extracted to its ultimate disposal, provides a means for making better economic and environmental decisions at all process stages. This study will examine (1) the usefulness of creating and maintaining materials flow accounts for developing sound public policy on the environment, materials, and energy; (2) the technical basis for materials flow analysis; (3) the current state of materials flow information, including what data are collected, where it resides, quality, scale and completeness of the data, formats, accessibility, and the tools and methods available for analyzing the data; (4) the ways the public and private sectors are currently using this information and how materials flow accounts can be improved through partnerships or access to additional data; and (5) who should have institutional responsibility for collecting, maintaining and providing access to additional data for materials flow accounts doc14756 none To transfer $185,205 to Department of Veterans Affairs on behalf of the National Science Foundation to procure healthcare services from Hummer Whole Health Management, Inc. through VA and Hummer Whole Health s contractual agreement during the period of May 1, through September 30, doc14757 none Figueroa The objective of this research is to develop an improved biological process for the treatment of wastewater with high phosphorus content. This research focuses on improved understanding of the aerobic sequence of the enhanced biological phosphorus removal (EBPR) process by investigating aerobic metabolism as it relates to generating storage and growth products from poly-b-hydroxybutyrate. The specific tasks of this research are: (1) to establish and operate a pilot-scale sequencing batch reactor to achieve phosphorus removal via a stable, enriched community of phosphate-accumulating organisms (PAOs), (2) to complete a series of batch reactor radioactive carbon tracer studies involving isolation of intracellular components for PAOs during the anaerobic aerobic EBPR process cycle, (3) to perform mass balances on individual samples from the tracer studies, and (4) to test the applicability of a proposed metabolic mechanism involved in the EBPR process doc14758 none The University of California, San Diego, in collaboration with University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is funded by a Cooperative Agreement from the Division of Advanced Computational Infrastructure in the amount of $26,450,500 to construct a Distributed Terascale Facility (DTF) that will span four institutions: 1) San Diego Supercomputer Center, 2)National Center for Supercomputing Applications , 3) and 4) Argonne National Laboratory . In partnership with IBM, Intel, Myrinet, Qwest, Oracle and SUN, they will construct a DTF based on multiple terascale Linux clusters, as well as large-scale storage archives and data management software. A 40 gigabit second optical mesh will interconnect the DTF s components. The DTF hardware will be integrated, using Globus middleware and other Computational Grid technologies develop by the Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI), to create a system with an aggregate of 11.6 TF of computing capability and 525 TB of disk storage to support terascale computing (6.1 TF and 153 TB at NCSA), distributed data management (4.1 TF and 248 TB at SDSC), remote rendering and visualization (1 TF and 31 TB at Argonne), and data-intensive scientific application analysis (0.4 TF and 93 TB at Caltech). A unified Operations Center will coordinate management, user support, and access. The DTF TeraGrid will have broad impact on the computational science community and will ultimately benefit society as a whole. First, the TeraGrid will advance discovery and promote understanding by making available to academic researchers next generation information technologies that are an order of magnitude more capable than now generally available. Second, the TeraGrid will empower broad scientific and engineering communities through its focus on commodity clusters, common usage models and community codes. Third, experience gained through DTF operation, insights and software from the TeraGrid will be packaged in a series of software distributions for community use. This software packaging will extend TeraGrid technologies to the broader national community, including Minority Serving Institutions (MSI) and EPSCoR Institutions doc14759 none This award provides funds for the purchase of a 28 foot pontoon boat equipped with 90 hp. motor and davit for the Fred Telonicher Marine Laboratory. The boat, which will be capable of carrying 15 persons, will be used for courses and research, largely in shallow areas near the Laboratory . The Laboratory provides a diverse set of marine-oriented research and education programs, including graduate, undergraduate and K-12 programs, but with emphasis on college level classes. The boat will facilitate access to estuarine habitats at or near the mouths of several nearby rivers, and will allow use of bottom-sampling devices for research into the physical composition of the ocean floor and the physiology and population biology of various plants, animals and microbes that inhabit the areas doc14760 none This grant provides funding for a workshop on Engineering the Service Sector (ESS) to be held at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia. The workshop will help shape a small initiative on ESS planned for the late Fall of that will transition into a new program element within the Division of Design and Industrial Innovation (DMII). Issues include the boundaries of the basic research agenda for using engineering tools and problem solving techniques to address critical problems in major service industries such as health care, finance, retail and transportation, and how solutions already available in manufacturing can be adapted to service applications. Success with this workshop should position the Division of Design, Manufacture and Industrial InnovationI and the National Science Foundation to play a more active role in understanding and improving the roughly 80% of the U.S. economy involved in service activity, as well as raise new modeling and analysis challenges that will yield tools for all engineering doc14761 none The NSF-CBMS Regional Research Conference, Structure and Decompositions of Graphs, to be held during the period August 12--16 at East Tennessee State University (ETSU), will: feature ten keynote lectures by one of the most prominent researchers in structural graph theory; allow mathematicians at ETSU to utilize their past experience with CBMS and other conferences to offer a very high level of organization; bring together a diverse collection of researchers into a communion of learning; and attract a group of scientists with primary interests in a variety of fields. The Principal Lecturer (PL) Robin Thomas of the Georgia Institute of Technology will deliver ten cohesive lectures that build bridges between various fields; expose the audience to dominant themes and trends in graph theory; and lay the foundation for many research partnerships. A dedicated and inspirational researcher, Robin s impact on future generations of mathematical talent is already evident. His dynamic lectures are well known for their organization and easy availability. The conference lectures will survey major ideas and recent results in the area of graph structure and decompositions. Topics to be covered in depth include graph planarity; tree decompositions; the graph minors project; spatial embeddings of graphs; Pfaffian orientations; and a tantalizing set of possibilities for directed graphs. The PL has agreed to deliver to the CBMS a monograph entitled Structure and Decompositions of Graphs by June 1, ; it will subsequently be published by the AMS. He will give two lectures on each of the five days of the conference. Several leading authorities will be present at the conference, and there will be four invited auxiliary talks that put the keynote lectures in an even wider perspective. Lectures will be held in a multi-media classroom in the D.P. Culp Student Center on the ETSU campus. Three classrooms will be set aside all week for informal discussions between participants. Attendees will stay in single efficiency-style apartments on campus; eat three meals in the Culp Center cafeteria; have full access to the ETSU athletic and library facilities; and have accounts in the Departmental Technology Lab. Several organized social activities will be planned, including sharing the region s beauty on a three hour hike of the Appalachian Trail. A conference website will be created and updated regularly as attendees reap the benefits of Thomas lectures by starting research projects; publishing papers, etc doc14762 none Competition among closely related species is thought to be an important factor driving species distributions. Though competition among salamanders in the genus Plethodon appears to be common, the consequences of competition on morphology are less well understood. In this project, hypotheses about morphological change will be tested in two well-characterized species pairs. Several methods will be used to quantify morphology, including linear distance measurements and landmark-based geometric morphometric methods. For P. jordani and P. teyahalee, it is hypothesized that morphological differences are more extreme in the Smoky Mountains than in the Balsam Mountains. This hypothesis is based on knowledge of ecological and behavioral interactions of these species in the two mountain ranges. For P. cinereus and P. shenandoah, it is hypothesized that an extinct population of P. shenandoah and a nearby population of P. cinereus are more morphologically similar than populations in other regions where both species coexist. This hypothesis is based on knowledge of behavioral and aggressive interactions. Results from this project will help us understand how interspecific competition affects morphological variability in Plethodon, which has important consequences for how organisms interact with their environment. On a larger scale, results from this project will provide a better understanding of the relative importance of competition as a driving force behind community assemblages, and help us understand the influence of competition on the geographic distribution of organisms doc14763 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. David L. Bechler and John B. Pascarella at Valdosta State University, Valdosta, Georgia, to bring in consultants for the purpose of assessment and improvement of the Lake Louis Field Station. In December , the field station was acquired from Mars Hill College. The station, which is relatively undeveloped, is unique in that within its 173.1 acres there exists a 14-acre sinkhole lake feeding the Floridian Aquifer, extensive wetlands, a mixed deciduous forest, and remnants of an upland pine forest. The station lies 8 km south of the City of Valdosta, and 20 km north of the Florida State line. Residential movement out of Valdosta has resulted in some housing development around the property. Currently, the station is being used as a natural laboratory for field based science classes and research. VSU wishes to develop a comprehensive five-year plan and mission statement that will allow the university to gain maximum benefit from the station while preserving as much of its original natural environment as possible. In order to best utilize the Lake Louise Field Station, VSU proposes to bring in independent consultants to examine the station and produce a report advising the university on the best way to utilize the station for teaching, research, and public outreach. Specifically, they wish to have the consultants examine and advise them on the following key points: (1) How to best utilize existing natural habitats without damaging them. (2) The applicability of converting the upland pinelands from slash pines to its original longleaf pines. (3) The advisability of purchasing additional land to expand specific habitat types and serve as a buffer around the station. (4) Applicability, structural layout, and best location of a proposed classroom laboratory complex for teaching and research. (5) The practicality and feasibility of the current five-year mission statement for the field stations use and development. Development of the station is important for several reasons. The station is the only field station in the southern half of the state owned by a state educational institution that is available for teaching, research and public outreach. Its location close to the City of Valdosta and major roads in the southern portion of the state make it easily accessable for VSU as well as local school districts and community organizations. Most importantly is its value as an educational center for the citizens of South Georgia. Many of VSU s 8,820 students are first generation college students. The citizenry of South Georgia has for generations viewed the environment as something to exploit, but not necessarily preserve and renew. By expanding the facilities at the station so that it can be more readily used for teaching, research and public outreach, VSU will be better able to fulfill its mission of public education and service to the South Georgia community doc14764 none The SCRSI is an outshoot of the UCAN-RSI. Unsuccessfully attempted as an implementation award last year, it has been redesigned and reconsidered as a developmental. Anchored at Adams State College in rural Southern Colorado, the SCRSI plans to improve science, mathematics and technology education through a partnership of 18 school districts, two Boards of Cooperative Educational Service Centers (BOCES), two Regional Assistance Centers (RAC) 2 junior colleges and 2 four-year colleges. The school districts encompass 47 K-12 schools in an economically disadvantaged area with approximately 12,000 students. Over 75% of the students in the schools are Hispanic. The 47 schools are members of three coalitions, the San Luis Valley, the Arkansas Valley and the South Central Coalitions. There are four major components to the SCRSI: 1. Creation of an infrastructure for managing the project and completing the scope-of-work throughout the established consortium. Action: Establish site-based leadership teams, Coalition leadership teams and project leadership teams. 2. Completion of a site analysis of individual schools to identify strengths and weaknesses in order to direct future implementation strategies. Action: Complete matrices on full implementation and assessment at each school, conduct teacher surveys and school walk-throughs, compile and analyze student data. 3. Establishment of strong collaboration across schools, partnerships and networks across all levels of the region. Action: Conduct team meetings and three strategic planning meetings. 4. Development of the implementation plan supported by all partners including specific partnership commitments. Action: Submit a report and propose an implementation plan doc14765 none Proposal U of Ill Urbana-Champaign PI: Bresler, Yoram In spite of the focus in recent years on lossy compression of audio, images, and video, lossless data compression remains crucial in applications such as text files, facsimiles, software executables, and medical imaging. Universal source coding algorithms, which deal with sources whose statistics are unknown, are of particular importance. Universal coding methods are designed for universal performance over a broad class of possible sources. In these methods the source parameters are estimated, either implicitly or explicitly, and the sequence itself is encoded accordingly. Therefore the coding length for universal methods is g eater than the entropy; the extra coding length, called the redundancy satisfies a fundamental lower bound by Rissanen. The focus of research in universal data compression has been on reducing redundancies. In this sense, context tree weighting (CTW) has achieved the ultimate goal for the important class of tree sources, because it has essentially achieved Rissanen s bound. However, in addition to low redundancies, a universal coding method must be computationally fast, and consume little memory. Neither of the two leading methods, CTW or PPM, a compression method that has been fine-tuned by various heuristics for practical use, are particularly strong performers in these respects. Therefore, the main goal of the proposed research is to develop algorithms featuring fast computation and low memory use, while providing compression near Rissanen s bound. Like some of the most efficient high-performance universal compression algorithms to-date, the proposed approach is based on the Burrows Wheeler transform (BWT). The BWT is an invertible transform whose output contains segments in which symbols are approximately independent identically distributed. Owing to this similarity to piecewise i.i.d. (PIID), compressing the BWT output using PIID methods yields good compression results. However, such methods cannot achieve universal coding redundancies close to Rissanen s bound because they require (whether implicitly or Explicitly) extra bits to encode the positions of transitions between segments in the BWT output. Recognizing this hidden overhead, this project proposes to take a fresh look at BWT based-methods and the relationship to the fundamental redundancy bounds. The project will explore ways to close the gap between traditional BWT-based methods and Rissanen s bound while retaining the computational efficiency of the BWT. A particular challenge will be to apply this approach to lossless image compression. The resulting algorithms will have linear complexity, and be better than any current algorithm with comparable asymptotic compression performance, in terms of computation and or memory use. Some versions of these algorithms will also have simple structure, admitting fast hardware implementations. Furthermore, this research will reveal the role of context modeling in universal lossless image compression. Since near-Rissanen redundancies with linear complexity are hard to beat, we expect a shift in the universal coding literature from compression improvement to implementation and practicality doc14766 none The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in collaboration with University of California, San Diego, is funded by a Cooperative Agreement from the Division of Advanced Computational Infrastructure in the amount of $26,450,500 to construct a Distributed Terascale Facility (DTF) that will span four institutions: 1) National Center for Supercomputing Applications, 2) San Diego Supercomputer Center, 3) Argonne National Laboratory and 4) . In partnership with IBM, Intel, Myrinet, Qwest, Oracle and SUN, they will construct a DTF based on multiple terascale Linux clusters, as well as large-scale storage archives and data management software. A 40 gigabit second optical mesh will interconnect the DTF s components. The DTF hardware will be integrated, using Globus middleware and other Computational Grid technologies develop by the Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI), to create a system with an aggregate of 11.6 TF of computing capability and 525 TB of disk storage to support terascale computing (6.1 TF and 153 TB at NCSA), distributed data management (4.1 TF and 248 TB at SDSC), remote rendering and visualization (1 TF and 31 TB at Argonne), and data-intensive scientific application analysis (0.4 TF and 93 TB at Caltech). A unified Operations Center will coordinate management, user support, and access. The DTF TeraGrid will have broad impact on the computational science community and will ultimately benefit society as a whole. First, the TeraGrid will advance discovery and promote understanding by making available to academic researchers next generation information technologies that are an order of magnitude more capable than now generally available. Second, the TeraGrid will empower broad scientific and engineering communities through its focus on commodity clusters, common usage models and community codes. Third, experience gained through DTF operation, insights and software from the TeraGrid will be packaged in a series of software distributions for community use. This software packaging will extend TeraGrid technologies to the broader national community, including Minority Serving Institutions (MSI) and EPSCoR Institutions doc14767 none The project would conduct Development phase activities necessary to implement a systemic reform effort in schools on the Cheyenne River Reservation, in South Dakota. The proposed activities of the project include conducting a series of community school meetings to help the personnel, parents, and communities to understand systemic reform. The recommendations that arise from the meetings will serve as the foundation for a five-year Implementation strategy doc14768 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Power and Luby at the University of California, Berkeley, to conduct two planning workshops at the University s Angelo Coast Range Reserve, located in Mendocino County, California. These workshops will supply the campus with expert assessments of the facilities at the reserve for conducting research in how ecosystems function, how habitats become degraded, and how best to conduct research within the framework of governmental rules and regulations that protects endangered species. These workshops will allow the campus to plan the future of the Reserve in a careful and informed manner, just as a new, $1.2 million Center for Environmental Science is built there, with support from the Goldman fund. In order to ensure the success of the reserve s research initiatives, experts in three specific research areas will be invited to Angelo to participate in the two different planning workshops. Experts will evaluate reserve facilities, and assess whether or not they are adequate to support research in river and watershed studies, tree canopy biology, and sediment habitat degradation studies. Researchers for the UC Berkeley campus would also attend. Both groups would make presentations, examine the facilities, meet campus administrators, and participate in facilitated discussions. The central question asked of the group would be the following: Given the current facilities, and the specific research directions that have been proposed, are the facilities at Angelo adequate, and if not, what do you recommend be done to improve them? In the end, the visiting experts would submit a written report in which they offered an assessment of the adequacy of the facilities for implementing these research initiatives and recommendations for improvements. The Angelo Coast Range Reserve contains the largest tract of unlogged coastal conifer forest remaining in the state of California, as well as the entire watersheds of two salmon-bearing tributaries of a major river. As natural reserves become more and more isolated in the andscape, with pressure from development, they increasingly serve as lifeboat refuges for certain species. Understanding how ecosystems function, change, and become degraded is important for protecting and managing these species, as well as for species residing in more threatened settings outside the borders of reserves. Funding for the planning workshops will therefore support efforts to continue the global influence of scientific studies conducted at Angelo, and involve researchers, educators, and government representatives in efforts to investigate pressing environmental threats doc14769 none The Gordon Research Conference on Polymers to be held July 8-13, , will be focusing on the following areas: Precision Synthesis of Polymers Catalysis of Polymerization Reactions Shape Control, Nanoparticles, Functional Dispersions Functional Macromolecules and Nanosystems Tissue Engineering, Biomaterials Nanostructure Engineering by Self-organizing Macromolecules Functional Materials and Inorganic Organic Hybrids %%% Partial funding is provided to enable attendance of some of the Conference participants doc14770 none The NSF- AWM Travel Mentor Grant Program supports the travel of women mathematicians who wish to participate in research conferences, as well as, longer term visits to work with a mentor. This program enhances the research activities and visibility and advances the careers of women mathematicians. All awards will be determined on a competitive basis by selection panels consisting of distinguished mathematicians appointed by AWM . An assessment of the results of these travel mentor grants will be done annually. AWM will administer these regular and mentoring travel grants and will continue to attract strong women mathematicians to be involved in all aspects of the program . The NSF-AWM Travel Mentor Program will promote a strong support and recognition for outstanding young women mathematicians, and hence it will increase the chance of establishing their research program and getting tenure doc14771 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. James Reinartz, Dr. Peter Dunn, Dr. Jeffrey Karron, Dr. Gretchen Meyer, and Dr. Linda Whittingham at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee to expand the laboratory facilities at the Field Station. The UWM Field Station is a productive research site and is actively used for teaching. Since the Field Station was established in , it has produced over 190 scientific publications and 111 graduate student dissertations. In the past five years alone, the Field Station has been used for 108 research projects by 94 different scientists from 28 institutions. More than 15 different universities regularly use the Field Station for instruction in a wide variety of courses, and the Station has averaged between 5 and 6 undergraduate independent study projects annually in the past five years. In addition, the Field Station conducts a workshop short course program each year. These courses offer college level instruction on focused topics in natural history, and are available for advanced undergraduate graduate credit through UWM. In the past five years, 34 short courses providing instruction to approximately 680 students have been held at the Station. The Field Station also has an active outreach program offering many educational opportunities to groups and the general public. The UWM Field Station has a six-year plan for a three-phase facilities improvement project that will accommodate its existing use and a modest level of projected growth in programs. The planned expansion of facilities includes: 1) a small addition to the Station s two-story lab office building and remodeling of the existing building, 2) a larger, single-story addition to the lab building, and 3) construction of new sleeping quarters. This grant will fund the first phase of the project: a 1,280 gross ft 2 addition to the two-story lab office building and a remodeling of the existing building. These first-phase improvements will add two research rooms: a room to house the biological collections maintained by the Field Station that will also provide lab space and one 300 ft 2 research lab. This project will also add a 490 ft 2 lab that can be dedicated for teaching use. The research and teaching labs will include sinks and fume hoods. In addition, the basement of the current lab office building is not handicapped-accessible and the building lacks handicapped-accessible bathrooms; these deficiencies will be remedied in the remodelling. This grant will greatly increase the UWM Field Station s ability to support research use and to maintain its high quality of instruction. The construction of new research rooms will increase from one to three the number of lab spaces that can be used by researchers without interruption from teaching use of the facility. The wide diversity of research conducted at the site has already contributed greatly to the baseline information available on the Station s plant and animal communities, soils, hydrology, and geology, as has the Station s long-term data base development program. Expansion of the laboratory facilities will allow these productive research projects to continue with fewer conflicts over space, and will make the site more attractive to additional researchers. This grant will also add a dedicated teaching lab with a sink and fume hood, which will allow expansion of the workshop short course program and greater use of the station by courses from UWM and other universities. In sum, new laboratory and teaching space will greatly increase the Field Station s research productivity and give more students the opportunity to study natural history and other topics at the Field Station doc14772 none Under the direction of Dr. Michelle Hegmon, Ms Jannette Mobley-Tanaka will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. Using ceramic analysis she will reconstruct social organization in a prehistoric southwest USA Pueblo community. Analysis of community interaction has been critical to archaeologists understanding of the abandonment of the Mesa Verde region (southwest Colorado) around AD . Communities - important places on the landscape - persisted for generations, even as individuals and households shifted residences frequently, thus these communities were much more than groups of individuals. Communities also became larger and more densely packed over time, and eventually controlled access to agricultural lands and served as units of defense and conflict. This picture, while fascinating, is based almost exclusively on analyses of the interaction among communities, rather than the social dynamics within communities. Mobley-Tanaka s research will fill this gap, utilizing data from the large Yellow Jacket community in southwest Colorado to analyze intra-community interaction. Archaeologists rarely are able to undertake such detailed analyses, but they are possible in this case because of (1) many years of research at Yellow Jacket; (2) deposits that are clearly associated with individual residences; (3) the identification of three pottery-making kilns at the site. These circumstances will allow Mobley-Tanaka to determine where households obtained their domestic goods - information that can be used to trace patterns of consumption and exchange at the intra-community level. NSF funds will support analyses concerning the production and distribution of pottery. Petrographic analysis will allow identification of where the pottery was made and thus how it was distributed across the community. These data can answer questions about the nature of inter-household interaction within the community: Were households relatively independent or strongly interdependent? Were there various networks of interacting households? Results regarding intra-community dynamics will be combined with extant understandings of inter-community interaction to illuminate the role of communities in the abandonment of the Mesa Verde region and to better understand the nature of community in the past. They will also increase understanding of an important aspect of US prehistory and assist in training a promising young scientist doc14773 none Blood pressure regulation, salt and water balance, and nervous system control are significantly influenced by the kidney. A hormonal renin (ren-1)-angiotensin system in the kidney is critical for appropriate regulation, balance, and control. Ren-1 is upregulated conventionally by a cyclic-AMP signal transduction pathway, although the signaling intermediates have not been discovered on account of impoverished technology. Paradoxically, ren-1 is downregulated unconventionally by a calcium signal transduction pathway, but again the signaling intermediates have not been discovered. The objective of this project is to discover and describe the signaling intermediates in the calcium-mediated downregulation of ren-1 gene expression, using kidneys and ren-1-producing cells under different stresses to alter the calcium signal transduction pathway. The approaches are to scan kidneys and ren-1-producing cells using microarray technology, and to use proteomic tools to discover the cluster of genes associated with the calcium-signal transduction pathway. This project will simultaneously screen 2,400 arbitrarily chosen but verified transcripts against mRNAs from isolated perfused kidneys and ren-1-producing cells in culture to define a cluster of genes most consistently associated with ren-1 expression. This cluster will be used to test the hypothesis that ren-1 downregulation is associated with increased expression of not just 2 signaling intermediates as currently believed, but with at least 14 other intermediates. These observations will be important not only because it is the first time the intermediates of an antagonistic signal transduction system has been measured and described, but also because it may clarify the paradoxical molecular nature of calcium and ren-1 in blood pressure regulation and salt and water balance doc14774 none Slane, Patrick This award will be used to partially support a workshop Neutron Stars in Supernova Remnants to be held from August 14 to 17, in Boston, MA. At the conclusion of the workshop, the Organizing Committee will edit and publish electronically manuscripts submitted at the meeting doc14775 none This award provides support for the construction of a laboratory, a housing unit and a conference center at the Anheuser Busch Coastal Research Center (ABCRC) of the University of Virginia in Oyster, VA. This field station, located close to the point at which the Chesapeake Bay joins the Atlantic Ocean at the southern tip of the Delmarva peninsula, provides researchers and students access to an area where they can investigate the ecological, chemical and geomorphological processes that regulate coastal systems and landscapes. Until recently, the station has had relatively little physical infrastructure. An expanding research user base and the need to develop educational facilities have motivated a facilities development plan of which this project is the first stage. Although a relatively new station, the ABCRC has a strong history of supporting research and training. The proposed improvements will foster a fundamental change in the use of the ABCRC site. Existing facilities are able to support only a short-term presence by researchers at the station. With the proposed laboratory, housing and commons facilities, researchers will be able to spend more time on site, leading to more productive use of field research time. Additionally, graduate and undergraduate courses can be offered at the station once space is available for class and laboratory activities. The planned construction consists of a laboratory (5,000 sq. ft.), accommodations (4,750 sq ft.) and an education and conference building (a 3,500 sq. ft.). The total cost of construction of the three buildings is approximately $1.5 million; the institution will provide the funds required in addition to those provided by the NSF doc14776 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Craig Plante and Louis Burnett at the College of Charleston to establish a core facility for molecular genomic research at the Grice Marine Laboratory. The Grice Marine Laboratory (GML) serves as the primary facility in support of the undergraduate and the graduate programs in marine biology of the College of Charleston and the University of Charleston, SC. As the College of Charleston student population has rapidly grown to over , the size of the Biology Department has increased from 20 to 32 faculty since . Reflecting the department s goal to offer more opportunities for research to its undergraduates, research success has been emphasized in these recent hirings to a greater extent than in the past. Consequently, the scope and scale of research has expanded over the past decade, requiring a higher level of methodological sophistication. These shifts have necessitated the use of more contemporary protocols, including modern molecular approaches. This modernization will allow the GML to better fulfill its mission to support undergraduate and graduate student education; acquire and disseminate knowledge about marine organisms, processes, and environmental issues; and encourage collaborative interdisciplinary marine research among academic and other marine research facilities. Acquisition of an automated DNA sequencer, image analysis system, thermal cyclers, PCR work station and additional versatile equipment will make available new and exciting capabilities for scientists and students at the College of Charleston and beyond. Projects of the nine resident GML faculty and their students include study of microbial diversity in marine sediments, molecular mechanisms of immune responses in fish and shrimp, patterns of paternity in sea turtles, antibiotic-resistant pathogenic bacteria in aquaculture, and phylogenetic studies of marine invertebrates and fish. This shared-use facility will benefit faculty and student research, undergraduate and graduate students, and a broader group of visiting scientists and summer interns at the GML. Furthermore, these resources will be available to our partners in the larger community at the Fort Johnson research complex, which includes scientists at the laboratories of the South Carolina Marine Resources Research Institute, the Marine Biomedical and Environmental Studies Program of the Medical University of South Carolina, and the Charleston laboratories of the National Ocean Service and the National Institute of Standards and Technology doc14777 none This award provides partial support for construction of two bunkhouse-style dormitories, a small laboratory building, a dining lecture hall and related physical improvements at the Indio Mountains Research Station (IMRS). Funds are also provided for a professional-grade weather station that will provide short and long term climatic information. The IMRS occupies 38,000-acres in the Chihuahua Desert of west Texas, adjacent to the U.S.- Mexican border. The station, which consists of a former ranch house with three rooms and a small storage building, is used by scientists, educators and students from the University of Texas at El Paso, Southwest Texas State University, University of New Mexico, Sul Ross State University, and El Paso Community College. Use of the station is currently at the level of 700 person-days per year, reflecting both research and educational uses. However, use is limited by the relatively primitive accommodations and lack of laboratory facilities on site. The planned improvements will allow the station to host researchers and provide education activities that require participants to reside at the station for several days at a time, and will improve the quality of work that can be done on site doc14778 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Richard S. Nemeth at University of the Virgin Islands (UVI) to develop a plan for the renovation of the Virgin Islands Environmental Resource Station (VIERS) located on St. John, US Virgin Islands. Although VIERS has provided 35 years of continuous service as a learning center for environmental education and research, the outdated laboratory facilities currently limit the use of this facility. Nestled within the pristine environment of the Virgin Islands National Park, VIERS offers a wealth of biological diversity and tremendous potential as a modernized field station. The primary goal of modernizing the VIERS facility will be to stimulate teaching, research, and outreach activities, which, in turn, will facilitate the exchange of information and ideas between visiting scientists, educators, students and the surrounding Virgin Islands community. During this planning effort, UVI intends to gather information from expert sources and incorporate the best features of a variety of marine labs into the VIERS facility. A local planning committee will be established and will focus on assessing criteria in five core areas: (1) integrating goals with the Virgin Islands National Park vision, (2) defining the basic functionality of a modern marine facility, (3) determining needs of research scientists, (4) determining needs of educational institutions, (5) developing facility infrastructure including housing, education and research space, and (6) integrating information technology for data processing and communication. The planning committee will assemble a team of marine lab directors or individuals intimately involved in the management of such facilities. Information will be solicited from past, present and potential future researchers from institutes of higher education and government on basic and specialized research equipment and information technology requirements. Faculty leading college courses at VIERS will be interviewed for ways to improve the educational resources. Researchers and educators who cannot be interviewed on site will be consulted via a written survey. Architects will provide plans for facility design to maximize the efficiency of structures and ensure that they are integrated into the natural surroundings. The final step will be to complete and submit a grant proposal for funding from the NSF Field Stations and Marine Laboratories Improvement Program for upgrading the VIERS facility. The University of the Virgin Islands Center for Marine and Environmental Studies (CMES) has launched an initiative to strengthen UVI s marine science program with the goal of expanding the opportunities in education and research for the culturally diverse student body at UVI. Improving the facilities at VIERS will facilitate teaching and research and, through community interaction with VIERS outreach activities, will increase public interest and involvement in their natural resources. Because of the close proximity of all representative terrestrial and coastal marine environments, VIERS provides significant opportunities for both researchers and educators doc14779 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Jack Grubaugh at the University of Memphis to construct living quarters at the Meeman Biological Field Station (MBFS) in Shelby County, Tennessee. The primary missions of the field station are to: 1) provide a unique, field-oriented curriculum to urban undergraduate students, and 2) serve as a focal point for ecological studies of the lower Mississippi River, its floodplains and tributaries. While use of the station as both a teaching and research venue has increased over the past five years, development of these missions has been hampered by the lack of living quarters to house students, instructors, and visiting researchers. This grant will support the first phase of a two-phase plan to provide critically needed living quarters at MBFS. This first phase includes the construction of a dormitory to accommodate approximately 24 students, instructors, and researchers. In addition, a kitchen area and a multi-purpose dining and meeting facility will be constructed in this first phase of the project. Thus, the first phase will provide fully functional living quarters to support station use. The second phase of construction will focus on the development of additional student and faculty housing. This grant will greatly enhance the teaching and research missions of MBFS. The living quarters will allow University of Memphis faculty to increase the number of field courses taught at the station and to offer courses on a year-round basis. Furthermore, housing will eliminate the need for time-consuming daily commutes from Memphis in order to conduct on-site research or to launch research efforts on the river and floodplains of the lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley doc14780 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Wright at the State University of New York at Stony Brook to continue the upgrade of the research station at Ranomafana National Park. This upgrade will improve the ability of the station to meet its twin goals of training and research. Annual use of the Ranomafana National Park Research Station (RNPRS) in Madagascar has grown from 75 to up to 182 scientists in the past five years. However the facilities are too small for these usage levels, provide inadequate laboratory facilities for modern scientific research techniques, and have no direct communication with the international community. Previous NSF support ( and ) contributed to the planning of the upgrade and the construction of a classroom dining room and administrative complex. This grant provides funds to construct an air-conditioned laboratory to permit modern scientific research techniques in this remote rainforest site. The new laboratory will be adjacent to and connected to the Dining Classroom and Administration building being constructed during Phase I. The building will be three stories high, providing 675 m2 of floor space and 150 m2 of veranda. All labs will have sinks, lab benches, ample electrical outlets at 110V and 220V, and locked storage. The labs will be designed to be general-use, but each floor will include specialized equipment to address current research needs. Windows on the south side will overlook the scenic Namorona River and the forested national park across the river. Madagascar is one of the world s top ten biodiversity hot spots, containing a disproportionately high number of the world s plant and animal species for its area. Most of Madagascar s species are endemic (found nowhere else in the world) because the island has been separated from the mainland for 88 million years and species have evolved in isolation. The rain forest habitat of Madagascar is severely threatened by human activities (logging, slash and burn agriculture, hunting) resulting in the disappearance of 79% of the original rain forest habitat. High species diversity, long isolation, high endemicity, and severe threat make Madagascar rain forests a focus of intense scientific and conservation interest. For these same reasons, the rain forest at Ranomafana National Park serves as an excellent comparison to some of the better-studied rain forest sites in the Neotropics, Africa, and Asia. Ranomafana National Park Research Station is located in Ranomafana National Park, which protects 43,500 ha. of rain forest in southeast Madagascar. The station is operated by the Institute for the Conservation of Tropical Environments (ICTE), affiliated with the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Over 125 faculty-level researchers and over twice that number of students, most from US universities, have conducted research at RNP since the station was built in . The RNPRS is the most important center for rain forest research and training in Madagascar and the only research station with more than one permanent building. Research at the RNPRS will contribute to local, national, and international understanding of the dynamics of this unique rain forest, as well as how to protect it s threatened biodiversity. Training programs at the RNPRS will reach greater numbers of US undergraduate and graduate students, and Malagasy students, scientists, and policy makers doc14781 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Robert R. Parmenter and Dr. James R. Gosz at the University of New Mexico for a renovation project at the Sevilleta Research Field Station, located on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service s Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge in central New Mexico. The Sevilleta Research Field Station provides field support to a large number of scientists and students studying the ecology, geology, anthropology, and climatology of the Middle Rio Grande Valley. The research and training use of the field station has increased dramatically in the s, and demand for laboratory space at the field station has outstripped available facilities; in addition, new long-term initiatives for collecting and storing dried preserved samples of soils, plant materials, and arthropods, will require expanded laboratory and long-term storage space. With this NSF grant, and with cost share from the University of New Mexico, the UNM scientists will implement a three-part plan in which they will build a new sample storage building and renovate the station s current shop storage building into laboratory space. The plan includes: (1) moving the station s shop operations into a new, shared shop facility being constructed by FWS, thereby enhancing shop capabilities and creating new lab space, (2) constructing a new storage building for existing field equipment and long-term storage of field samples, and (3) renovating the old shop storage building into a sample processing laboratory, complete with laboratory benches, casework and increased drying-oven capacities for processing soil and vegetation samples. These improvements will result in a net gain of 1,500 square feet of laboratory space, and nearly double the station s available storage and shop space. The net result will be more usable work space for visiting researchers and students, and a more efficient use of combined building space with FWS. The improved facilities will allow increases in both the quantity and efficiency of research activities in the Middle Rio Grande Valley conducted at the Sevilleta Research Field Station, and therefore will contribute to a large spectrum of databases on the ecology of this region in the American Southwest doc14782 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Scott Smedley, Joan Morrison, Craig Schneider, and Mr. Michael O Donnell at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut to develop a strategic plan for the College s newly acquired field station. The Trinity College Field Station (TCFS) at Church Farm, readily accessible from the College s urban campus, is a rural site of 256 acres (102 ha) in northeastern Connecticut, consisting of diverse terrestrial and aquatic habitats. TCFS s three-fold mission is to promote the area s use for research in the natural sciences, educational endeavors with an environmental emphasis, and conservation of open space. A comprehensive strategic plan is crucial to fulfilling TCFS s mission. Development of the strategic plan will occur over eighteen months beginning in September . The planning process will be directed by the TCFS Advisory Committee, which includes, in addition to the project directors, other Trinity faculty, administrators, and a representative of the local land trust. A survey of environmental researchers and educators in the Northeast will identify external stakeholders. Site visits to other field stations will permit examination of their infrastructure, programs, and management, with the aim of adopting successful models. Three planning workshops will provide additional opportunities to consult with relevant experts. The first two, with outside participants drawn largely from regional field stations, will focus on TCFS s research and educational programs, respectively. The final workshop, with outside participants drawn nationally, will focus on the integration of these two programs and will consider inherent operational issues. Findings from the surveys, site visits, and workshops will all contribute to the strategic plan document, which will guide Trinity s administration towards development of a first-rate field station, particularly in these important early years. Given that TCFS currently lacks physical structures for its research and educational programs, the strategic plan will be critical to Trinity s efforts to design, finance, construct, and manage a facility. Besides providing opportunities for field research and environmental education previously unavailable to Trinity, the field station is significant in several other respects. Located within the National Parks Service s Quinebaug and Shetucket Rivers National Heritage Corridor, TCFS is well positioned to study this rare rural remnant within the Boston-Washington megalopolis. Occupied by Europeans since , TCFS is among few field stations with such a long recorded land-use history and can thus contribute to our understanding of how previous human activities have influenced today s environment. Finally, Trinity College hopes that TCFS can benefit other educational institutions. Southern New England has one of the highest concentrations of colleges and universities in the nation, yet most lack a field station. Through Trinity s sponsorship of the Learning Corridor (a new complex of K-12 schools serving Trinity s inner-city neighborhood) and through its consortial affiliation with Hartford-area colleges and universities, the College has excellent opportunities to engage minority students in research and education at TCFS doc14783 none Improvements in Facilities and Equipment at Mpala Research Centre, Kenya Daniel I.Rubenstein, P.I. The goal of the project is to enhance the quality of ecological research in the arid lands of East Africa by improving the physical infrastructure and the research capabilities of the Mpala Research Centre. The Centre, whose purpose is to advance research in the environmental, biological, and conservation sciences, lies at the heart of the Laikipia ecosystem, a diverse savanna maintaining prodigious wildlife populations, much of it not formally protected in National Parks or Reserves. This landscape is prone to severe environmental fluctuations that produce periodic droughts and floods which challenges the ability of indigenous peoples, commercial ranchers and the wildlife itself to survive. It is part of the Centre s mission to shape research programs that will provide scientific insights that help maintain the ecosystem while enhancing the quality of life of the people utilizing the ecosystem s resources. Fulfilling this mission requires melding institutionally driven mission-motivated research with applications emerging from fundamental research projects initiated by individual investigators. Improving the ability of scientists from all over the world, but mostly those from the US whose research is already supported by the National Science Foundation, to carry out these different types of research requires that the Centre enhance and enlarge its physical plant and provide additional common research support facilities. In particular the Centre will improve its: 1) electrical system to provide uninterrupted electricity to run laboratory equipment and computers essential for data recording and analysis; 2) research space so that the large and integrated projects have adequate space for the teams to function coherently; 3) housing stock to accommodate the Resident Scientist who serves as the local research coordinator and the newly hired Geographical Information System specialist who will provide support for the analysis of spatial problems so important for the understanding of climate patterns and wildlife as well as livestock movements and population dynamics; 4) monitoring equipment both on the ground and in the air to provide the long-term data bases so essential for forecasting changes in environmental conditions, wildlife numbers and livestock levels so that rational and sustainable programs of management and conservation can be formulated; and 5) stock of shared and communal research, communication and computer equipment along with 4 x 4 vehicles for traveling over the rugged terrain. Research at Mpala Research Centre is intended to advance an informed and integrated approach to natural resource management and conservation within the Laikipia savanna ecosystem. In doing so the research provides the scientific background that is used by commercial ranches and the group ranches composed of indigenous peoples to better manage their lands, stock and wildlife in economically and ecologically sensible ways. Policies based on research are helping ensure that wildlife helps pay for its protection by means of sustainable regimes of culling and consumption on some lands and ecotourism enterprises on others. In addition, outreach to these various communities on how to live with predators and wildlife competitors is helping maintain the dynamics of this harsh ecosystem. Courses taught with hands on projects to wildlife professionals from governmental and non-governmental organization as well as student groups from Kenyan and international Universities are common and are helping transform the minds of the next generation of environmental leaders along with those who are making critical decisions today doc14784 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. William Schuster at The Black Rock Forest Consortium, a group of eighteen New York-area academic institutions, to construct accommodations for visiting scientists and students to complete its new research and training Center at its Field Station, the hectare ( acre) Black Rock Forest. The Forest is located in the Hudson Highlands, 80 km (50 miles) north of New York City, and possesses a wide variety of terrestrial and aquatic habitats for study. It has been carefully protected and managed for nearly a century, and has been utilized by the Black Rock Forest Consortium since . The Forest has become a focal point for scientific field studies and education for thousands of students and faculty from Consortium institutions. In the past three years, the Consortium has produced a Master Plan, raised over $2.5 million for construction costs, and has completed and begun operations from the Center for Science and Education. Despite many natural features that make it an excellent location for scientific fieldwork, the Black Rock Forest has lacked until now suitable facilities to support on-site research, training, and education. Over the past few years an increase in scientific activity has occurred due to a suite of factors that include the creation and development of the Center for Environmental Research and Conservation (CERC) at Columbia University. Black Rock serves as CERC s primary facility for local scientific research and intensive field training. Expansions of programs in ecological and environmental sciences are also underway at several of the Black Rock Forest Consortium s other member institutions. The Consortium now will construct and equip a 500 sq.m ( sq.ft) lodging and meeting facility. This Lodge will house up to 50 visitors at a time and will complete the Consortium s facilities Master Plan. This grant will allow the Consortium to successfully complete the construction of what is becoming an intensively used facility for scientific research, training, and education at all levels. The gathering space will enable meetings, seminars, and presentations for large groups. The Consortium anticipates at least visitor nights per year in the first few years, and the development of new programs such as summer institutes, residential field courses, and science camps. Thus the grant will allow completion of construction of basic facilities for what is becoming an intensively used facility for scientific research, training, and education doc14785 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Eric R. Lacy at the Medical University of South Carolina to fund equipment for studying the genetic responses of marine organisms to environmental stress. Increased pressure on the coastal environment has focused attention on how marine organisms respond to this stress. It has long been known that animals defend themselves against environmental insults through hundreds if not thousands of molecular and cellular responses. Until recently scientists had to laboriously measure each response of individual animals to various environmental challenges to try to understand which physiological systems (e.g., immune, respiratory, reproductive) were protected and which had failed. With the advent of molecular genetics, scientists have new tools to look at genes and determine which ones are turned off and turned on when the animals are environmentally stressed. However, there are tens of thousands of genes and examining them manually, a few at a time, would take years to get the answers needed. The gene arrayer and reader obtained from this grant will be used by the Marine Genome Project in Charleston, SC, to simultaneously examine thousands of genes from shrimp, oysters, dolphins, stingrays, corals, and algae. The experimental goals of this group are to use functional genomics (changes in gene expression correlated with changes in marine environmental stress) to: 1) find early genetic markers of stress in marine organisms, 2) use the genetic information to diagnose and predict the particular stress or infection the animal may have, 3) identify new genes that might protect these marine animals from infection and stress, and 4) detect interactions among genes. Expressed genes are isolated from target tissues in the animals before, during and after stress. Then a comparison is made for each animal to see which genes are turned on and which are turned off under each of these conditions. The results of these studies will show which genes are important in an animal s defense mechanisms. These findings have broad implications for environmental and human health because the two are intimately linked. For example, early genetic changes in an organism may predict changes occurring in the environment that cannot be monitored in any other way. This information also should help selective marine animal breeding programs for aquatic food suppliers. Furthermore, the information from this study should assist scientists in better understanding the mechanisms of the current world-wide decline of coral reefs. The equipment purchased under this award will reside in the newly constructed Hollings Marine Lab, an inter-institutional lab that houses all partners of the Marine Genome Project and the College of Charleston. Students at all levels (high school, undergraduate and graduate) will be trained to use this equipment through internships doc14786 none Dr Kim Holland of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB), University of Hawaii, has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to renovate and expand the salt water life support system at HIMB s Coconut Island laboratory. HIMB is a leading tropical marine biology research facility, and a reliable supply of high quality seawater is central to its research and education missions. The existing seawater pumping and distribution system is several decades old and does not serve many of the newer buildings at the lab. This grant will also help underwrite the construction of a new large seawater tank that will be used to hold large marine fish such as sharks and tuna. The current inefficient maze of saltwater feeder pipes will be dismantled and replaced by an entirely new distribution system which will be more efficient and environmentally friendly. The new system will feature dual parallel pipes to all use locations and will be constructed so that the pipes can be automatically cleaned without disruption of supply. The more frequent cleaning possible in this new system will eliminate the discharge of heavily silt-laden effluent. Similarly, the installation of modern pumps and pump controls will allow a better supply of seawater while reducing the amount of electricity consumed. A forty-foot by twenty-foot reinforced fiberglass tank will be constructed on an existing concrete pad. This tank will be fed by the new seawater system and will hold seawater to a depth of five feet. The tank will be surrounded by a catwalk that will be used for experimental observations and service access. The University of Hawaii has identified marine science as an area of excellence to be emphasized as the university enters the twenty-first century. This emphasis is reflected in the recent construction of new laboratory facilities and funding for four additional faculty positions. The renovation and expansion of Coconut Island s seawater system will be crucial to the success of the university s initiative. Because of its location, HIMB can play a leading role in areas such as coral reef biology and the study of large tropical species such as sharks and tunas. HIMB is a major destination for scientists from all around the world who wish to work on these topics. This NSF grant will greatly assist HIMB in providing modern facilities for its faculty and visitors doc14787 none Future embedded real time control systems will increasingly be wireless, distributed, large-scale, and will be inherently hybrid, combining discrete or digital components with continuous time nonlinear dynamics. The complexity of such networked systems presents new challenges that lie at the confluence of communication, computing, and control. In this proposal we will investigate the design and analysis of networked real-time control systems treating complexity, delays, reliability, and other issues. Our goal is to develop control strategies for networked control systems that are application independent and enable the convergence of sensing and actuation with communication and computing. Potential applications of our results include autonomous vehicles and autonomous locomotion systems, remote construction, remote surgery, work in hazardous and remote environments, surveillance, search and rescue robots, haptic devices, and distance education. Our research will focus on the development of new theoretical tools for analysis and control of networked systems with time-varying delays. On the implementation side, we will develop proof-of concept type experiments on in-house designed and built systems, including networks of remotely controllable cars and robots doc14788 none and through a network of partnerships deploy these capabilities for the greatest global impact. Along the way, it seeks to fundamentally revisit the notion of what is a computer, and what is a computation. The CBA s program is based on the belief that the most significant of all the obstacles to progress has been the isolation of the investigation of each these pieces from that of the larger whole that they promise to enable. The research agenda is organized into three layers, in order of accessibility and importance. The first of these addresses system-level questions, asking how to extend networks of (relatively) conventional processors up to and beyond billions of interacting entities. Such coming complexity is being driven by countless practical applications, but will break the existing protocols used to operate the Internet as well as the techniques used for managing it. The approach taken here will be to de-layer the divisions between physical transport, logical connection, and application implementation, so that when devices are connected they simultaneously create a network, a distributed data structure, and the computer to manipulate it. The algorithms for processing and routing information are crucially assembled as the components are assembled, and autonomously adapt as nodes come and go, so that scalability is literally built in as the system grows. De-layering also beneficially exposes the capabilities of low-level devices to high-level applications (and vice versa), so that rich interfaces such as sensor networks can become the norm rather than the exception. The second layer builds on this system-level insight to ask about technologies to meet the demand for embedding billions of computers into everyday objects. Even though the cost per transistor has fallen exponentially for decades, the minimum cost per packaged part has remained relatively unchanged over the whole VLSI scaling era. For such large-scale systems to be compatible with the global GDP, it s necessary to fundamentally rethink the nature of device fabrication. The approach in the CBA will be to seek to eliminate central chip fabs entirely, using table-top printing technologies to move the production of computers to where and when they are needed. The fundamental enabling insight that makes this possible is the use of nanocrystalline electronically-active inks. Not only does this promise to dramatically reduce the cost per part, it offers a route from mass-production to the customization of the design of computers, as well as a way to grow from 2D to 3D architectures. The third (and most speculative) layer asks about the fundamental mechanisms for manipulating information that will be enabled by this agenda. It seeks to apply the insights that will be developed into programming enormous imperfect distributed systems and accessibly fabricating nanoscale structures in order to harness the intrinsic computational capabilities of natural systems. Fundamental to this approach is the conviction that progress towards these long-standing goals has been more limited by lack of insight into appropriate computational models than by a lack of experimental candidates; the research will build on encouraging early work on manipulating the dynamics of molecular systems. This program will be grounded in two ways. First, by working with partners to apply the results (starting with the expected early insights into deploying and managing networks of ultra-lightweight processors) to compelling applications of computing that have been beyond the reach of traditional computers. And second, by developing an instructional program to help educate a generation that can reason across the traditional hardware software boundary, and can program systems whose complex behavior emerges from the interaction of many simple elements doc14789 none Partial support is provided to produce and distribute an issue of Oceanography magazine highlighting Dr. John Knauss contributions to the Marine Sciences on the occasion of his 75th birthday. To mark this milestone, The Oceanography Society will publish a special issue of Oceanography magazine to honor his many contributions to the marine sciences. Topics to be featured include: a biography, legacy of Stratton Commission emphasizing Sea Grant and how this impacted federal activities, UNOLS and the academic fleet, Physical Oceanography at the Equator, Law of the Sea, Advances in Instrumentation, and marine education. Oceanography magazine is in its fourteenth year of publication. It is published four times per year, with issues going to the worldwide membership as well as to libraries of oceanographic institutions doc14790 none Although methyl halides catalyze atmospheric ozone depletion, a significant portion of their sources remains undescribed. Ectomycorrhizal fungi may account for much of the missing source. This research will test the hypothesis that anthropogenic nitrogen deposition will alter production of methyl halides by ectomycorrhizal fungi, because nitrogen additions frequently reduce ectomycorrhizal growth. Nitrogen experiments will be conducted at three scales: on laboratory-grown cultures, on excised root tips with fungi, and on undisturbed soils in the field. This research will lead to refinements in estimates of current global methyl halide production, and consideration of consequences of nitrogen deposition for future methyl halide emission doc14791 none Inst : Johns Hopkins University PI: Szalay, Alexander Under this award, a broad collaboration led by Johns Hopkins University will establish the framework and foundation for the National Virtual Observatory (NVO). Establishing the framework for the NVO is the first step towards a system that can provide seamless integration of data-intensive resources in astronomy. When fully implemented, the NVO will serve as an engine of discovery for astronomy. Large scale surveys of the sky from space and the ground are being initiated at wavelengths from radio to x-ray, generating vast amounts of high quality, irreplaceable data. The potential for scientific discovery afforded by these new surveys is enormous. Entirely new and unexpected scientific results of major significance will emerge from the combined use of the resulting datasets, science that would not be possible from such sets used singly. Their large size and complexity require tools and structures to discover the complex phenomena encoded within them. The NVO framework will be built by coordinating the diverse efforts already in existence and provide a focus for the development of capabilities that do not yet exist. The NVO will act as an enabling and coordinating entity to foster the development of further tools, protocols, and collaborations necessary to realize the full scientific potential of large astronomical datasets in the coming decade. The components of the NVO include not only the archives, but also metadata standards, a standardized data access layer, query and computing services, and data mining applications. The new capabilities of the NVO will be essential to realize the full value of the tera petabyte datasets that are in hand or soon to be created. Rapid querying of multiple large-scale catalogs, establishment of statistical correlations, discovery of new data patterns and temporal variations, and confrontation with sophisticated numerical simulations are all avenues for new science that will be made possible through the NVO. Future surveys will have well defined templates available to enable them to publish their data more easily. The NVO, through its rich content and special portals designed for students, teachers and the public, will have major impact on a wide range of science education and public outreach projects. The goal of the NVO is international in scope and the project will coordinate its development activities with the international community, to assure that the end result is a Global Virtual Observatory doc14792 none Jordan It is now possible, because of recent advances in geophysics, to create for the first time, fully three-dimensional simulations of earthquake fault-rupture and fault-system dynamics. Such physics-based simulations are crucial to gaining a fundamental understanding of earthquake phenomena, and they can potentially provide enormous practical benefits for assessing and mitigating earthquake risks through improvements in seismic hazard analysis. The Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) has embarked on an ambitious program to develop physics-based models of earthquake processes and integrate these models into a new scientific framework for seismic hazard analysis and risk management. This project involves a collaboration among SCEC, the Information Sciences Institute (ISI), the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the Incorporated Institutions for Seismology (IRIS), and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to develop a Community Modeling Environment , which will function as a virtual collaboratory for the purposes of knowledge quantification and synthesis, hypothesis formulation and testing, data assimilation and conciliation, and prediction. To achieve its objectives, the environment must provide a means for describing, configuring, initiating, and executing complex computational pathways that result from the composition of various earthquake simulation models. This entails solving a number of challenging problems in information technology. To solve these problems, the principal investigators will draw on several distinct computer science disciplines: 1) Knowledge representation and reasoning techniques; 2) Grid technologies; 3) Digital library technology; and 4) Interactive knowledge acquisition techniques. A central element of this project will be a Knowledge Transfer, Education and Outreach program with four primary goals: 1) to transfer the technology developed under this project to the end users of earthquake information, including engineers, emergency managers, decision makers, and the general public; 2) to cross-educate advanced students in the fields of geoscience and computer-science; 3) to make the general public aware of the benefits of applying advanced information technology to the problems of earthquake risk; and 4) to use public interest in earthquake information to attract beginning students into geoscience and computer science. A specific objective will be to engage young Hispanic Americans in the intellectual challenges of earthquake information technology doc14793 none The project proposes to advance the state of the art in automatic speech recognition by detecting emotional and highly accented speech and differences based on age and gender, and then optimizing the acoustic model for those conditions. It will apply long-term adaptation techniques to improve robustness, and will implement an innovative second-pass decoding technique to improve accuracy by using side information such as thesaurus terms and human-prepared summaries. The techniques to be developed will dramatically improve the efficiency of professional catalogers, leveraging automatic segmentation to suggest topic boundaries in interviews, using domain-tuned classification algorithms to recommend thesaurus terms, and providing automated tools to support generation of event timelines. Volunteers will help assign metadata and provide transcripts. Efforts will be made to automate transferring capabilities developed originally for English to other languages. Access to multilingual materials will be done by combining knowledge-based and corpus-based techniques to extend existing thesauri to new languages and by supporting cross-language searching of manually prepared segment-level summaries and automatic speech recognition transcripts. Each component will be evaluated and user studies done to measure the overall impact on support for cataloging, search and exploration. This will produce significant impact, both through improved access to our cultural heritage and through the application of the techniques to other important problems. The collection of spoken material used in this project will be the 116,000 hours held by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a set of already digitized video recordings of great historical importance doc14794 none The Hilltopper Mathematics and Computer Science Scholarship (HMCSS) project provides support to 20 students for a period of three years. The target audience will be current freshmen enrolled at St. Edward s University and transfer students articulating from Community Colleges. The HMCSS projectl builds on the existing College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP) which is designed to offer an educational opportunity to the sons and daughters of migrant and seasonal farm workers doc14795 none This award supports the Gordon Research Conference on Atmospheric Chemistry in Newport, RI on June 17-21, . This Gordon Research Conference is one of the major meetings in this field. This year, the conference will cover a broad range of areas in atmospheric chemistry, including measurements of the troposphere from space, tropospheric aerosols, urban and regional chemistry, global tropospheric chemistry, snowpack and high-latitude boundary layer phenomena, Sun Earth coupling in atmospheric chemistry, interactions between laboratory and theoretical studies of atmospheric reactions, and stratospheric chemistry and dynamics. The meeting will be attended by both established researchers and young scientists, among them the participants of the preceding Atmospheric Chemistry Colloquium for Emerging Senior Scientists (ACCESS doc14796 none This international collaborative research project will create advanced digital library applications to adapt existing computational linguistic and data mining techniques for the special requirements associated with humanities content and build an international framework for issues such as the long-term preservation of data, metadata standards and interoperability. The results of the project will lower the barriers for researchers and students to reading classical Greek, Latin, and old Norse texts. The suite of applications envisioned include multi-lingual information retrieval capabilities, concept identification, vocabulary and syntactic parsing tools, text analysis and visualization tools, scholar-user text annotation and emendation, and related capabilities. Storage of resources and data will be in numerous locations and offer open access via the internet. This is a international collaborative effort involving multiple institutions in the US and European Union countries doc14797 none This is a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) to support research on the physical and chemical properties of cloud condensation nuclei. The experiments will be conducted in the winter of -02 at two, or possibly three, mountaintop observatories in the southwestern United States. Central to the experiment is a novel instrument called the Cloud Condensation Nuclei Remover (CCNR). It is a thermal gradient diffusion chamber through which an air sample is slowly drawn. It flows as a thin, laminar ribbon between two saturated plates having different temperatures. The supersaturation at the center of the chamber is regulated by adjusting the temperatures of the plates. Depending on the supersaturation, some of the aerosols in the sample are activated, grow, and settle out as droplets on the bottom of the chamber as the air moves through. The size distribution of the surviving particles is compared with that of the particles entering the chamber to determine the sizes of the particles that served as centers for cloud condensation. By comparing electron microscope images and the chemical composition of the particles before and after exposure to the supersaturation it may be possible to learn more about the aerosol particles that are active in cloud formation. The project is designed to resolve the discrepancies that currently exist between observations of the physical and chemical properties of aerosol particles and their cloud-forming ability doc14798 none This is a study of char deactivation processes emphasizing surface oxides formed from oxidative pyrolysis of coal using four oxidants individually and in combination. The oxidants are oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitric oxide, and water. In addition, rates of scavenging by carbon monoxide are measured. Oxidation and desorption products are monitored using gas chromatography mass spectrometry. Transient kinetics and temperature-programmed desorption are used to charcterize the surface species on the young chars. Isotopically labelled oxidants are used to further identify the mechanisms of char formation doc14799 none Williams The Conifer Microsatellite Workshop at Texas A&M lab is part of an effort to transfer pine microsatellite technology to other labs. The June 4-7 workshop will train investigators, postdocs and graduate students from government, universities and industry. The workshop has the following components: lectures, lab and computational training, a seminar series on case study applications, a roundtable discussion on direction of ecological and evolutionary genomics and a handbook of lab protocols and computational resources. As part of the lab training, the participants will test whether Pinus taeda microsatellites are useful in other conifer species. Instructional quality will be evaluated by the Center of Teaching Excellence. Microsatellites and other sequence-based genomics tools facilitate cross-disciplinary research in evolution, ecological genetics and functional genomics(EEFG). The emerging EEFG paradigm is powerful for the conifer research community because 1) conifers are the oldest extant seed plants, thus EEFG research can make significant inferences to land plant evolution and 2) conifers have highly duplicated, leviathan genomes in need of novel approaches for studying genome organization and function. Nuclear microsatellites from conserved parts of the conifer genome is one of the first specialized tools to be developed for EEFG research in conifers doc14800 none This high risk project is designed to assess the feasibility of habituating a new population of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) to the presence of human researchers in southeastern Senegal. This population of savanna chimpanzees inhabits perhaps the hottest, driest, and most open habitat used by chimpanzees today - a habitat similar to the one in which early humans are thought to have evolved. A long-term goal of the project is to examine savanna chimpanzee behavior and ecology in comparison to chimpanzees at forested sites. In Senegal, humans and chimpanzees co-exist in some areas, and chimpanzees here are used to human presence. In addition to monitoring the process of habituating chimpanzees to the presence of human researchers, another immediate goal is to understand the success of the chimpanzee population in areas inhabited by humans. The findings can be applied to the conservation of chimpanzees elsewhere. As human populations continue to increase across Africa, understanding how humans and chimpanzees can peacefully co-exist will be a major contribution to conservation biology. Understanding the ecology of savanna chimpanzees can help shed light on the behavioral ecology of humans who used similar environments, and this project initiates the difficult habituation process necessary to study these endangered primates doc14801 none Gogineni Sea level has been rising over the last century. Although the immediate impact of sea level rise may be less severe than other effects of global climate change, the long-term consequences can be much more devastating since nearly 60% of the world population lives in coastal regions. Scientists have postulated that excess water is being released from polar ice sheets due to long-term, global climate change, but there are insufficient data to confirm these theories. Understanding the interactions between the ice sheets, oceans and atmosphere is essential to quantifying the role of ice sheets in sea level rise. Toward that end, this research project involves the innovative application of information technology in the development and deployment of intelligent radar sensors for measuring key glaciological parameters. Radar instrumentation will consist of a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) that can operate in bistatic or monostatic mode. One important application of the SAR will be in the determination of basal conditions, particularly the presence and distribution of basal water. Basal water lubricates the ice bed interface, enhancing flow, and increasing the amount of ice discharged into the ocean. Another application of the SAR will be to measure ice thickness and map internal layers in both shallow and deep ice. Information on near-surface internal layers will be used to estimate the average, recent accumulation rate, while the deeper layers provide a history of past accumulation and flow rates. A tracked vehicle and an automated snowmobile will be used to test and demonstrate the utility of an intelligent radar in glaciological investigations. The system will be developed to collect, process and analyze data in real time and in conjunction with a priori information derived from archived sources. The combined real time and archived information will be used onboard the vehicles to select and generate an optimum sensor configuration. This project thus involves innovative research in intelligent systems, sounding radars and ice sheet modeling. In addition it has a very strong public outreach and education program, which include near-real-time image broadcasts via the world wide web doc14802 none This award supports theoretical research with a computational emphasis, on colossal magneto resistance materials, high temperature superconductors, and other correlated transition metal materials. The research has several aims: (1) A complex mixed-phase paramagnetic-insulating state arises from the competition between metallic and insulating phases; the idea that this colossal magneto resistance also arises from this competition will be investigated. (2) Charge ordering in models for manganites will be analyzed with emphasis on the unexplored region of intermediate hole densities where correlated polaron physics has been revealed in recent experiments. The possibility of pseudogap formation in this region will be explored. (3) Physics common to the cuprates, manganates and other transition metal oxides in the inhomogeneous states will be examined. Stripes and superconductivity will be explored in the copper oxides using advanced methods to search for pairing and models that reproduce known experimental results reasonably well. These large-scale structures appear to be part of the common physics in cuprates and manganates. (4) Models for dilute magnetic semiconductors, Mn-doped GaAs semiconductors, will be studied. It is anticipated that the electronic properties of these materials will have features in common with those of the mixed-phases in the manganese oxides. %%% This award supports theoretical research with a computational emphasis, on colossal magneto resistance materials, high temperature superconductors, ruthenates and doped magnetic semiconductors. Colossal magneto resistance materials show an enormous change in resistivity with the application of modest magnetic fields and like the doped magnetic semiconductors, may be important in the emerging field of spintronics. These transition metal materials with strong electronic correlations can exhibit exotic electronic states, including large-scale structure or striped phases and the appearance of a pseudogap in the electronic excitation spectrum. In one thrust of the research, the PIs will use state of the art Monte-Carlo methods to investigate whether these phenomena share a common physical basis. The PIs will also investigate the common features of manganates and materials useful for spintronics applications, and elucidate the physical origin of the complex phase diagram of Ca2-x Srx RuO4 which includes paramagnetic, ferromagnetic, and antiferromagnetic phases doc14803 none Basu An SGER award supports a study of the feasibility of depositing compositionally graded coatings in the mullite-iota alumina system. The intent is to develop coatings which will provide high temperature oxidation and corrosion resistance to SiC and Si3N4 ceramics without spalling during thermal cycles. The intent is to CVD deposit a coating which is mullite (3Al2O3.2SiO2) at the interface with the ceramic substrate and to gradually change the composition to pure alumina of the iota-alumina phase, which has the same crystal structure as mullite. The coatings will be evaluated for crystal structure, thermal expansion properties, and high temperature oxidation resistance doc14804 none This program provides scholarships for academically talented but needy computer science and mathematics majors who are entering their junior year. Particular attention is given to recruiting women and minority students. Each CSMES scholar is assigned at least one faculty mentor and all scholarship recipients will participate in an undergraduate research experience. CSEMS scholars have access to the Advanced Computational Laboratory and the Visualization Laboratory doc14805 none The computational GRID vision is that everyone at a desktop machine could eventually have the power of a supercomputer at his or her fingertips. The GRID takes its name from the electrical utility analogy. GRID computing holds the promise of transforming the Internet, now used for communication, mainly e- mail and instant messaging, while the Web is an information retrieval system, enabling computer users to have access to text, images and music. Grid computing builds on the result of previous and ongoing research in networking, distributed computing, seamless computing, meta computing, web technologies, and other related topics. In this proposal, the National Virtual Observatory, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Large Hadron Collider experiments, all well-presented science projects (two of which have support via NSF Major Research Equipment funds) have data needs appropriate for GRID based technologies and are depending on such technologies for the successful operations of their experiments. The experiments will serve as test beds for GRID concepts doc14806 none Computer Science (31) This project brings fosters computer science education research by providing educators the opportunity to conduct principled, large-scale teaching and learning research, to bring them together and build upon expertise in research theory, design, and methods, and to support practioners when they engage in high-quality computer science education research. This project comprises a set of integrated activities leading to a practioner designed experiment kit consisting of the detailed design of a piece of research, from methodology to analysis, which is situated within a theoretical framework. Practioners develop their kit during a week-long workshop in the first year, implement it with support during the academic year and re-convene to discuss results and plan for dissemination in the following summer. This project will lead to the improvement of the computer science education research community by developing educators skills and by exposing them to the relevant theory and methods of educational research doc14807 none Sengupta The objective of this research is to develop a physico-chemical process that has the potential of meeting the twin objectives of nitrogen and phosphorus removal from wastewater and generation of a high-quality fertilizer. In this process, a potential gradient is applied perpendicular to the flow of a continuous reactor and three different ion-exchangers are placed at appropriate electrodes. These different ion-exchangers are selective for ammonium, nitrate, and phosphate ions. The specific objectives of this research include: (1) correlation of the potential gradient, electrode distance, and the pH profile for efficient operation, (2) a study of the effects of background constituents (competing ions) and electrode material on process efficiency, (3) a study of ion-exchanger fouling and regeneration, and (4) quantification of process performance by mathematical modeling of the system with process parameters and solution chemistry as input variables doc14808 none This is a theoretical investigation of the excitation and scattering of acoustic waves by turbulent flames. Specifically, it examines the acoustic radiation characteristics of moving, convoluted flame fronts of various scales of roughness. It also looks at how the spatial and temporal characteristics of the scattered and excited waves can be used as a diagnostic of turbulent flame fronts. The study uses a coupled integral equation approach to analyze the acoustic field. The complete solution requires the solution of two such equations, describing the field upstream and downstream of the flame, that are coupled by mass, momentum, and energy conservation conditions. Analytical solutions are obtained in certain limiting cases, while a numerical boundary-element approach is used for analytically intractable cases. This effort complements an experimental study of the same phenomena supported by a CAREER award to the principal investigator doc14809 none Algorithms are the basic procedures by which computers solve problems. With the explosion in the use and connectivity of computers, and in the sizes of the data sets being used, the performance of algorithms is becoming increasingly important. Being able to solve a problem ten times faster, for example, could mean designing a drug next year instead of several years later, or reducing the cost of developing a new space structure by allowing faster and more extensive computer simulations. Over the past 30 years there have been significant advances in the basic theory of algorithms. These advances have led to a core knowledge concerning algorithms and algorithmic techniques that has now been applied across an amazing diversity of fields and applications---surely more broadly than calculus is now applied. The problem, however, is that there is a large gap between ongoing theoretical research, and the current use of algorithms in applications. It often takes more than ten years for the core ideas in a new algorithm to make it into an application, and ongoing theoretical research often does not properly address the needs of the applications. The purpose of the Center is to bridge this gap so that efficient and effective algorithms can be deployed more rapidly. This will be achieved through (1) a set of Problem Oriented Explorations (PROBEs), (2) developing an extensive set of web resources on algorithms, and (3) educational activities including holding workshops for educating teachers. The PROBEs will bring together algorithm designers and domain experts to rapidly deploy new algorithmic ideas within a specific domain doc14810 none EIA- Raymer, Michael Wright State University EI: An Integrated Undergraduate Program in Bioinformatics This project involves the development of an interdisciplinary, integrated undergraduate program in bioinformatics. In particular, the project s goal includes the design of a program of undergraduate study that embodies an interdisciplinary synthesis of the topics in computer science and biology required for graduates to successfully pursue careers in bioinformatics. The project also plans to implement, test, and refine the program of study so that it may be used as a prototype for similar curricula at universities nation-wide. Pedagogy foci are to design, integrate, and test approaches for teaching topics in bioinformatics while providing research experiences for all students in the program. The project is strengthened by the participation of a group of academic, government, and industry bioinformatics researchers and professionals who act as an advisory committee. The emerging science of bioinformatics seeks to develop computational algorithms and techniques for analyzing large biological databases in search of information that can be applied to specific problems in the life sciences. This project addresses the education of professionals with a background in this field and contributes to satisfying a nationally growing workforce need doc14811 none This program provides non-traditional students majoring in computer science or engineering with financial aid in the form of scholarships. A coordinated system of faculty advising, mentoring, counseling and tutoring especially tailored for the more mature non-traditional student is available to aid the student during re-entry to the demands of academic studies. Faculty mentors are helping the students connect with regional industry via a program of topical talks, professional society meetings, workshops and internships. These activities are enhancing the students employment opportunities doc14812 none ITR SI: Societal Scale Information Systems: Technologies, design and applications James Demmel, University of California, Berkeley Information technology (IT) is transforming society at an accelerating pace, but critical research is needed to realize IT s potential for solving complex societal problems, including energy, disaster response and education. We are establishing the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) to sponsor collaborative, IT-focused research to find solutions to grand-challenge societal problems affecting the quality of life of individuals and organizations. CITRIS is a multi-campus center, including UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz and UC Merced, with many industrial partners. CITRIS s driving applications include (1) boosting efficiency of energy production and consumption, and (2) saving lives and property and establishing emergency response IT infrastructure in the wake of disasters, among others. The solutions to these applications share a need for highly-distributed, reliable, and secure information systems that can evolve and adapt to radical changes in their environment, delivering networked information services and up-to-date sensor network data stores over ad-hoc, flexible and fault tolerant networks that adapt to the people and organizations that need them. We call such systems Societal-Scale Information Systems. Our research and outreach partner is UC Merced, a new research campus to be constructed, with a special mission to expand participation of under-represented, first generation college-going, low income and rural students doc14813 none EIA- Panchanathan, Sethuraman Arizona State University Educational Innovation: A Concentration Track in Embedded Systems This project presents a novel structure for a concentration track in embedded systems. The new curriculum combines important aspects of content, synthesized from the latest research in academia, with industry research aspects channeled through a capstone project (implemented as internships in industry). The curriculum spans a spectrum of activities related to the design and delivery of educational and research efforts and is characterized by three main innovative components namely; a new industry-university collaborative model for integrating basic and applied research, creation and delivery of state-of-the-art course content and appropriate laboratories, delivery of a capstone project through internships. The embedded systems curriculum emphasizes fundamental issues such as the balance between hardware and software and the respective trade-offs in building embedded systems. Practical design experience is fostered through the courses, laboratory experiments, and capstone projects that expose the students to the state-of-the-art design methodologies. In addition, internships, funded by industry, expose the students to work on applied projects mentored by the industrial supervisors and faculty fellows doc14814 none Dunne This US-Mexico award will fund a collaborative project between Dr. Gerald Dunne, of the University of Connecticut, in collaboration with Dr. Christian Shubert of the Universidad Michoacana in Morelia, Mexico. The researchers aim to study the development of powerful new computational techniques in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and quantum electrodynamics (QED), with the expectation that they will also apply to physically important backgrounds, and to many other situations in quantum field theory and gravitational theories. The research will involve a blend of analytic and computer-based methods, providing a balanced approach that is accessible to students. The collaboration will bring together expertise on complementary aspects of the proposed research with the partner in Mexico contributing his knowledge of the world-line method, while the US partner contributes his experience with higher-order derivative expansions and symmetry aspects of gauge theories doc14815 none Semicrystalline polymers are of particular interest to the polymer community today because of their high performance and low cost characteristics. It has been shown that control of crystalline morphology can result in greatly improved properties. The emergence of new and more powerful characterization techniques has led to new knowledge of structure evolution as well as deformation processes in semi-crystalline polymers. This allows theoreticians to perform nanometer scale modeling of deformation and structural evolution of semicrystalline polymers. The main objective of this symposium is to highlight the latest research and help shape the direction of future research in this field doc14816 none This project will utilize data from the international Geotail satellite to examine the properties of the dense sheet of plasma that is found in the equatorial region of the Earth s magnetotail. The work will determine the properties of the particle drifts, the pressure tensor, the transport of magnetic flux, the structure of the current sheet, field-aligned currents, and magnetic reconnection. The data will be binned according to solar wind and geomagnetic parameters in order to determine how the solar wind and the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) control the properties of the plasma sheet. Three-dimensional models will be generated for different solar wind and IMF conditions doc14817 none This award supports theoretical and computational research and education to study the evolution of microsctructure in solids. The main scientific objective of this proposal is to understand the effect of external constraints on phase transformations and microstructure evolution, and the mutual interactions between phase and defect microstructures. The PI will investigate two specific problems using the phase-field approach in combination with mesoscale elasticity theory. The first problem is concerned with phase transformations and domain structure evolution in ferroelectric thin films constrained by a substrate. A phase-field model will be developed for ferroelectric domain evolution in single-crystal films. The model will include long-range elastic and electric dipole-dipole interactions, and the appropriate mechanical and electrical boundary conditions. The initial focus will be on a number of important oxides, PbTiO3, BaTiO3, PbZrxTi1-xO3, for which there have been extensive experimental measurements and theoretical thermodynamic analyses. The PI will systematically investigate the effect of substrate constraints and film thickness on transformation temperatures, volume fractions, and the size of each orientation domain. The focus will be on the temporal evolution of ferroelectric domain structures during nucleation, growth and coarsening, as well as during the domain-wall motion and polarization switching under an electric field. The effect of internal defects, both immobile and diffusive, on domain-wall mobility and ferroelectric dielectric responses will be studied. The second problem involves the mutual interactions between phase and dislocation microstructures in advanced alloys. Based on recent advances in phase-field modeling of dislocations, a comprehensive model for the simultaneous temporal evolution of phase and dislocation microstructures will be developed, incorporating both elastic anisotropy and elastic inhomogeneity. The PI will study the local phase equilibria, solute segregation kinetics, and nucleation and growth processes around both static and moving dislocations, by varying the solute-solvent size mismatch, elastic inhomogeneity, and the relative solute diffusivity and dislocation mobility. A major effort will be devoted to modeling the influence of solute segregation and second-phase precipitates on the dynamics of both isolated and an ensemble of dislocations under applied stresses. In particular, for a given strain rate, the effect of solute concentration, solute diffusivity, precipitate size and shape, precipitate-precipitate spacing, lattice mismatch, and elastic inhomogeneity, on the critical yield stress of an alloy will be systematically studied. Financial support for two graduate students is requested. The PI will interact closely with experimentalists for validation of theoretical predictions. He also plans collaborations with other theorists to link electronic structure calculations and mesoscale phase-field simulations for modeling phase transformations and microstructure evolution. The proposed research will impact graduate education in materials, as phase-field simulations of phase transformations and microstructure evolution are being incorporated into a graduate course as part of an educational program on thermodynamics and kinetics. User-friendly software with graphical interfaces will be developed and distributed to other institutions for educational purposes. The proposed project will also result in new computational tools that can potentially be applied to industrially important materials problems as evidenced by the existing collaborations between the PI and industry. %%% This award supports theoretical and computational research and education to study the structure of materials on length scales between the atomic and the macroscopic, the microstructure, its role in phase transformations, and its evolution in the presence of external constraints and internal defects. This is a difficult fundamental problem which directly impacts materials processing. The PI will use phase field methods and focus on evolution of domains in ferroelectric materials and the mutual interactions between phase and dislocation microstructures in advanced alloys. Dislocations play an important role in diffusion processes and phase transformations of solids. Ferroelectric materials have applications in sensors and optical components doc14818 none This project is designed to award scholarship assistance to full-time students in the Computer Science degree program who are academically talented, but who may be at high risk due to financial need. The goal of this program is for each of the students participating to succeed in the associate degree program in computer science. These skilled graduates are then becoming employed in the Information Technology (IT) industry or transferring to a bachelor degree program at a four-year university. The program objectives are to: 1) Recruit 10 full-time students in the Computer Science degree program each year to receive scholarships. 2) Assess the academic skills and weaknesses of all selected program participants and prepare an Individual Educational Plan for each scholarship student. 3) Provide all participants with access to all available computer software and hardware as well as the technical and instructional guidance in order to help them succeed academically; 4) Provide instruction, learning community experiences, tutoring, mentoring and other support services to all program participants. 5) Provide participants with intensive career advising and job placement services designed to ensure that they either enter the job market or continue to pursue a bachelor s degree program upon graduation. The student support structure of the project is providing a wide range of specific mentoring and advising services, special academic intervention, peer and professional tutoring, learning community experiences, and increased involvement with faculty and IT representatives. In addition, work-based learning opportunities provide students with hands-on experience and an increased understanding of the workplace and learning environment doc14819 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Andra Michl Institution: Electric Power Research Institute A workshop, jointly sponsored with EPRI, will be held at the NSF on May 3 - 4. Eleven speakers will be invited to lead the discussion on topics that will include new methods for enhancing the activity and selectivity of catalytic processes. In particular, enhancements due to the passage of small electric currents passed through catalysts deposited on ionically conducting supports will be discussed. This discovery is called the non-faradaic electrochemical modification of catalytic activity (NEMCA). This phenomenon has been observed empirically to promote industrially important reactions such as oxidation of ethylene to ethylene oxide on supported silver catalysts, oxidation of CO and hydrocarbons on Pt, Pd, and Rh, and the isomerization of butene on Pd. The objectives of this workshop will be to address the fundamental issues regarding the basis for the phenomenon and to target specific systems of particular industrial interest, which might include ammonia synthesis, SO2 oxidation, and NOx reduction. A workshop report detailing the recommendations will be issued in August doc14820 none This program provides scholarships for students who are majoring in computer science or mathematics or who are completing a double major combining engineering with biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, or physics. The program includes a special orientation, scholar-based and peer-based mentoring (emphasizing both academic and socialization skills), formal collaborations with the office of career development, a dedicated web site, the establishment of a CSEMS Club, in addition to peer tutoring and internships with high-technology partner firms doc14821 none This project includes a comprehensive field and laboratory measurement program to study nitrous acid (HONO) in the boundary layer of non-urban environments. Two hypotheses will be tested. The first will examine the possibility that nitric acid photolysis on surfaces constitutes a major daytime source of HONO and serves as a remobilization pathway for nitrogen oxides in the non-urban environment. The second will evaluate the potential for the ground vegetation surfaces to influence both temporal and spatial HONO distributions in the atmosphere. The field measurements will be conducted at the University of Michigan Biological Station, the location of the Program for Research on Oxidants: PHotochemistry, Emissions, and Transport (PROPHET doc14822 none Abruna This two-year award for US-Spain collaboration on enzyme immobilization methodologies giving rise to oriented layers of enzymes leading to amperometric biosensor applications involves Hector Abruna and students at Cornell University and Encarnacion Lorenzo at the Universidad Autonoma of Madrid in Spain. Enzymes represent some of the most sophisticated catalysts known. Immobilization of active enzymes onto solid substrates can be used to generate sensors that exploit these features. Immobilization approaches tend to alter, if not destroy, an enzyme s activity, there is interest in new enzyme immobilization methodologies that will allow for the oriented immobilization of the enzyme layer while retaining enzymatic activity. The US researchers bring to this collaboration expertise in electrochemical techniques and in the synthesis and characterization of transition metal complexes. This is complemented by Spanish expertise in the preparation and characterization of a variety of sensors and in their application to the analysis of pesticides in foods and in environmental samples. This work, coupling diverse aspects of chemistry and biology, will be of interest and utility in environmental studies and monitoring of pollutants and in biotechnological applications doc14823 none Pignatello The objective of this research is to obtain a fundamental understanding of two kinds of adsorption-desorption hysteresis. These include thermodynamically irreversible sorption, in which adsorption and desorption follow different microscopic pathways, and hysteresis due to abiotic surface-catalyzed chemical transformation of the adsorbate where the products remain irretrievably bound to the solid. This research will focus on the principle thermodynamic sorbents of organic compounds in natural settings: macromolecular organic carbon (humic substances) and micrographitic OC (black carbon). Sorption experiments will be performed on well-characterized model sorbents, whose behavior can be better related to mechanism than whole natural geosorbents. Adsorption and desorption data will be used to compute an irreversibility index to quantify irreversible sorption hysteresis. Non-reactive test compounds will be trichloromethane, trichloroethene, benzene, and naphthalene, and the reactive test compounds will be phenol, catechol, and pyrogallol. An understanding of hysteresis is crucial to modeling a chemical s fate, defining soil or sediment quality criteria, developing remediation technologies, and setting standards for acceptable levels of contamination after remediation. This is a collaborative research grant between Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station ( ) and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute doc14824 none This project is providing scholarships to allow students to pursue degrees in mathematics or engineering. The project is also designed to impact two year terminal and transfer computer science programs. The overall objective of the program is to provide a firm foundation in skills necessary for students to transfer from the community college to a four-year university and successfully complete a Bachelor s Degree. The project has four main goals : 1) to recruit students to major in computer science, engineering, or mathematics (CSEM). 2) to provide students the needed faculty and facilities support to major in a CSEM discipline. 3) to use proven educational techniques in combination with effective use of instructional technology in a positive atmosphere. 4) to retain students as CSEM majors by providing tutoring, mentoring and peer support. This project builds on another NSF supported project Improving Student Learning in PreCalculus and Calculus Through Effective Implementation of Technology. This project is enabling the college to install a mathematics computer lab which permits the math faculty to incorporate lab exercises into precalculus and calculus courses. The grant also provides funds for math faculty professional development. This project is designed to recruit and retain students that have the academic ability but lack the financial means to attend a university as CSEM major. In particular this project is targeting financially needy students from small rural schools doc14825 none Scholarships are being awarded to 29 academically talented, low-income students majoring in mathematics, computer science and eligible fields of engineering technology. The program is providing faculty mentoring to all scholarship recipients and tutoring to aid in the transition from high school to university level studies. Special efforts are underway to aid the students in overcoming the barrier presented by traditionally high attrition rate courses. Both cooperative work programs and research participation are available to the students doc14826 none The investigators will study the morphology and small-scale vertical structure of intense radar echoes from the polar mesopause. Possible generation mechanisms for these unique echoes, called polar mesospheric summer echoes (PMSE), are not well understood, and observations have been limited by the lack of needed resolution. Frequency domain interferometry (FDI) measurements can potentially provide information about the vertical structure of the echoes, but the technique only works when a single layer is present. The investigators have developed a modified approach called Range Imaging (RIM). In this technique, numerous transmitter frequencies are used and sophisticated reconstruction schemes are employed to obtain the desired vertical resolution. The RIM approach will be applied to data obtained from a very high frequency radar in Tromso, Norway. Studying mesospheric chemistry and dynamics is important for understanding the temperature structure of the middle atmosphere. Middle atmosphere temperature is a sensitive indicator of long-term changes associated with global change doc14827 none Two sets of related measurements are proposed that build upon the PI s previous work in studying small-scale, fast atmospheric acoustic-gravity waves. During the past year and a half, a new Aerospace built infrared (1.5 - 1.7 um wavelength) airglow imager has operated at the Starfire Optical Site in New Mexico. It is now proposed to move this new fast imager to Maui to take advantage of the placement of the lidar at that site. Previous work has shown the existence of acoustic waves in time series spectra from a Hawaii based IR spectrograph. The emphasis here will be on studying the as yet poorly explored short period ( 5 minute observed period) acoustic-gravity waves, and the very small scale (a few km horizontal wavelength) instabilities. These results will complement the studies of the longer period gravity waves undertaken by other investigators using their imaging instruments at Maui. Further, there is strong experimental evidence that small-scale waves seen in airglow images are ducted from a source region in the troposphere that could be located a thousand kilometers or more from the observation site. Previous data suggest that the waves seen over Adelaide, Australia around summer solstice are ducted from a source region of strong convective activity well to the north perhaps as far away as the north coast. The PIs propose work in wave sources and propagation enabled by a unique capability for imaging and by the fortuitous nature of the climate and topography of Australia. Specifically, they propose to obtain data from two airglow imagers; one located at Adelaide and another at Alice Springs, Australia about km to the north. These will be part of a four imager chain, to begin operating in late , that extends from the northern to the southern coast of Australia as part of the Darwin Wave Experiment (DAWEX) in late doc14828 none The Geological Society of America (GSA) Graduate Research Grants Program has become one of the largest and most prestigious funding programs for graduate students in the geosciences. The program helps fund field and laboratory costs of geoscience projects proposed and conducted by masters and doctoral students at universities in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Central America. NSF funds would cover about 23% of the Program s total costs. GSA and GSA Foundation will contribute the Program s administration costs; so all NSF funding will go directly to students. GSA is also committed to seeking additional funding from non-NSF sources to allow the Program to expand in the future doc14829 none The Department of Engineering at the University of Denver established, The Making of an Engineer, as an engineering experience course for high-school students fourteen years ago. The summer program works to engage the interest of capable second tier students in engineering fields, and the follow up program supports them in their academic and career development. The program provides a good balance of research activities, group work and individual exploration with faculty and student role models, all based on a central element: a three-week college-level course in problem solving. The quality and outcomes of a well-articulated quantitative and qualitative evaluation program are impressive. The program surveys indicate that eighty-two percent of the student participants chose to attend college, with sixty-one percent majoring in engineering. The program in included 68 participants, of which forty-four (sixty-five percent) were members of groups under-represented in science and engineering: three were African-American, ten were American Indians, and thirty-one were Hispanic Latino. The strategy of recruiting capable students from diverse regions across the United States and its protectorates, including Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and American Samoa, makes it a truly exceptional approach reflecting awareness of the need to broaden opportunities in SMET fields beyond identifying those traditionally participating. The program components reflect incorporation of the recommendations from research literature on best practices in human resource development. The program has become well integrated into the heart of the institution, now needing no additional staff beyond those who are tutors and mentors doc14830 none The Center for Science Excellence Program (CSE) of Contra Costa College is a strong program that helps science, mathematics and engineering students from traditionally under-represented populations successfully transfer from two-year to four-year colleges. Contra Costa College is a two-year community college in an urban, disadvantaged area. The goal of the Center for Science Excellence program is for CCC students to transfer to four-year colleges and universities as science, mathematics or engineering majors. In fact, 80% of CSE s first class of has done so. The program has served 350 students since its inception six years ago. The program provides multi-faceted mentoring for students, which is the heart of the program. The mentors are experienced scientists. Their mentoring activities include a wide range of academic tutoring, problem-solving workplace scenarios, mock interviews, and so on. Mentors have regular meetings together to share experiences and improve their mentoring methods. Several of the mentors work in area institutions such as Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories, and students often visit these places and or engage in internships. As one professor said the mentoring is consistent and regular rather than casual doc14831 none The American Chemical Society (ACS) has supported the increased participation of minorities in the chemical sciences through programs for minorities and economically disadvantaged students since . Through Project SEED (Summer Educational Experiences for the Disadvantaged), the Society encourages about 200 to 300 economically disadvantaged minority high-school students each year to enter careers in science through summer experiences in research. Over the past thirty-three years, more than 6,000 students nation-wide - 86% under-represented ethnic minorities - had opportunities to establish mentoring relationships with chemists at colleges, in industry and in government through summer research experiences, with 55% subsequently selecting college majors in the sciences. ACS s local sections work to recruit both students and mentors for SEED, where the mentoring activity includes guidance on a research project for 8-10 weeks, reporting on project findings, and professional development including attending scientific lectures, visiting local industries and universities, and providing assistance with college applications. A survey showed that 70% of the program participants majored in a science in college following their SEED experience, with 63% earning BS degrees, 13% earning MS degrees,7% earning doctoral degrees, and 9% earning other degrees. ACS also provides financial support for economically disadvantaged minority students (and has done so since ) through a multi-million dollar scholarship program to assist students in achieving degrees in the chemical sciences. More than 900 students have received support, of whom 56% are female, 44% are male; their ethnic groups include African-American (56%,), Hispanic Latino (38.5%), and American Indian (5.5%). Those graduated thus far total 276, of whom 56% are female, 44% are male; their ethnicity are African-American (52%,), Hispanic Latino (43%), and American Indian (5%); with 43% enrolled in graduate programs and 34% employed in the chemical science workforce. Program graduates become part of the Scholars Program Alumni Network, which provides ongoing information about ACS and the scholars program, and provides alumni with opportunities to serve as mentors to current scholars doc14832 none The Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research (SOARS) program of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), was established in and provides summer internship experiences to minorities and women to enhance the professional development of students from under-represented groups in atmospheric and related sciences. Participants complete a research project and report their findings to the UCAR community. SOARS also provides up to two years of support for graduate education at UCAR-affiliated universities. Since , SOARS has included 61 student participants, of whom 70.5% are female, 29.5% are male; the under-represented ethnic groups include African-American (38%,), Chicano Hispanic Latino (34%), and American Indian (16%), with additional participants who are Euro-American (8%) and Asian-American (3%). The program provides mentoring and support of students during critical transitions - from 11th and 12th grades through graduate degrees and has achieved a retention rate of 80%. SOARS attributes its success to a highly structured mentoring program. During the summer program, SOARS participants work with mentors in well-defined and well-documented relationships that include support in selecting and engaging in a research program, attending scientific seminars at the National Corporation for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and local research institutions, a program in science writing, and presenting the outcomes of their research at a colloquium. During the academic year, mentoring continues through advisory contact and through financial support. Advisors provide guidance on academic and personal development, graduate school applications, and education and career opportunities. Financial support includes up to 50% of costs for two years of graduate school and for travel to professional society meetings to give presentations. SOARS demonstrates long institutional commitment with broad-based participation from more than 40 UCAR universities doc14833 none The Office of Outreach of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of North Texas Health Science Center was established in to help to recruit under-represented minority student into the biomedical sciences. The implemenatation includes activities from students from elementary and secondary schools (K-12) through undergraduate and graduate university. The outreach program works to encourage students to enter science fields. That activity is supported by an annual mentoring workshop for faculty. Other program elements include the Adopt-A-School program for support of K-12 students, the Summer Multicultural Advanced Research Training (SMART) and McNair programs to build student relationships with faculty mentors. Bridge partner programs connect institutions to support students in transferring smoothly into doctoral programs. The program has become the state s leader in the enrollment percentage of Hispanic and African-American students, with the enrolling undergraduate class for Fall at 35 percent Hispanic and African-American students (35 percent white, 24 percent foreign, 6 percent Asian-American). Similarly, the graduate population of the biomedical program is 1 percent Hispanic and 10 percent African American, compared to national figures for science enrollment at less than 4 percent of Hispanic and African-American students. The Center anticipates graduating ten students with Ph.D. degrees in May , of whom half are African-American or Hispanic doc14834 none The Olin-Yale-Bayer New Haven Public School Science program of the New Haven Public Schools demonstrates an ability to assemble scientists from diverse disciplines to work with students and teachers on K-12 science projects. The program began six years ago as a partnership among seven schools -- it now encompasses more than forty schools in New Haven. It is a comprehensive program with multiple components that align goals with outcomes. Students learn the scientific method and associated skills by interacting with scientists; the scientists train participating teachers. Students are provided with authentic research opportunities, where teamwork is promoted and self-esteem is enhanced as a result. Older students are able to get academic course credit for their work. This program serves a significant number of minority students. As a result of program activities, student test scores in science have risen. The program has produced a network of mentors that are provided with training and support. More than 130 volunteer mentors participated in the - program. In the Connecticut science fair, thirty-four projects were based from this program -- those projects involved eleven mentors and forty-eight students (58% minority), seven of whom were medallists and ten of whom received special awards doc14835 none This project seeks to continue and extends investigations involving the energetics, dynamics, and variability of the low latitude atmosphere and ionosphere. The very general goals are to test, evaluate, and improve the NCAR upper atmosphere models; to use the models to investigate the effects of lower atmosphere waves on the thermosphere and ionosphere; to (attempt to) resolve some discrepancies between the observed and modeled upper atmosphere ionosphere temperatures; and to investigate several selected topics such as the midnight temperature maximum, the behavior of the ion drifts, and the development of large neutral winds in the lower thermosphere. This project will continue the important task of validating the NCAR models, which are community resources with wide-ranging applications. The region of interest, the tropical ionosphere, plays an important role in global communications and navigation and is a major focus for space weather research. The project will support the research of a female space scientist physics faculty member along with a graduate student doc14836 none The research of the PI (Miller) focuses on the analytic theory of automorphic forms. The proposed research concentrates on two analytic tools in the subject. The first is the trace formula. The PI hopes to sharpen Arthur s trace formula for GL(n) so that it can be applied to analytic questions in the same fashion that Selberg s original trace formula for GL(2) has been. One of the expected applications is to counting various types of automorphic forms, for example a general Weyl law for arithmetic quotients of reductive Lie groups. The second tool is that of automorphic L-functions. The PI and his coworker Wilfried Schmid (Harvard University) are engaged in a research program to study automorphic forms using the boundary distributions of eigenfunctions on symmetric spaces. These boundary techniques allow new constructions of L-functions, and offer a new way to investigate many problems in automorphic forms. The proposed research involves developing this technique and its applications. The study of automorphic forms slices across many important areas of modern mathematical research, including number theory, representation theory, geometry, analysis, and mathematical physics. Through L-functions, Langlands has conjectured many deep and interesting structural relationships between automorphic forms which have implications in the above areas. As an example, the work of Wiles et al demonstrates the link between certain automorphic forms and the ancient problem of solving equations between squares and cubes. The proposed research aims to apply and develop new tools for automorphic forms and L-functions from analysis, which is the branch of mathematics expanding calculus, and representation theory, the concrete study of symmetry. Current applications of automorphic forms and L-functions are manifest in constructing the sophisticated codes which enable high-speed and secure transactions over the internet doc14837 none Dr. Max L. Warshauer has worked with students in grades K-12 as well as his undergraduate and graduate students for the past 22 years. He has worked to recruit students, and uses innovative but sound pedagogical techniques to mentor and motivate a diverse range of students to achieve and excel in mathematics. Warshauer developed the Honors Summer Math Camp at Southwest Texas State University twelve years ago; it is a program for high-school students which is recognized as one of the top programs of this type in the country. Six years ago he developed the Junior Summer Math Camp, which will engage one hundred twenty-five teachers and more than twenty-five hundred students at six sites to improve their skills in algebra and other areas of mathematics where they experience difficulty. Those he has mentored include under-represented minority students (ethnicity and or socio-economic status) in science and mathematics fields. Approximately half of his students are women, and he encourages all to explore research as a part of the learning process. His mentor programs, particularly the summer math camps, are nationally known, and he has a strong reputation for continuously refining his programs and building replicable models that can be used by other mentors and other universities doc14838 none Project Fort Peck Community College (FPCC), a tribal college, is located on the Fort Peck Reservation in northeastern Montana. FPCC provides academic and vocational programs and community service to the 10,000 members of the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes and area residents. In - , FPCC had an average enrollment of 233 students. Approximately 85% of the students are Native American - nearly all are enrolled members of the Sioux and Assiniboine Tribes. In June , there were 30 graduates with Associate Degrees. Of these, only 4 (13%) were in science, mathematics, engineering and technology (SMET) disciplines. Curriculum Enhancement: Objectives and Anticipated Outcomes 1-1. By Fall , all entering students will be advised to enroll in appropriate levels of SMET courses based on assessment scores and previous achievement. 1-2. By Fall , instructors will have integrated technology into 6 introductory SMET courses. 1-3. By Fall , instructors will have integrated technology into 6 advanced SMET courses. Faculty Development: Objectives and Anticipated Outcomes 2-1. Each year, two SMET instructors will attend one regional or one national conference specifically focused on integrating technology into courses according to national standards. 2-2. By Spring , all eight SMET instructors will have completed one semester of faculty exchange or sabbatical at another academic institution or national laboratory. 2-3. By Fall , each SMET instructor will have designed and implemented a Web- based course based on national standards. Undergraduate Training: Objectives and Anticipated Outcomes 3-1. By Fall , student enrollment in SMET courses will increase by 10%. 3-2. By Fall , ten students will be selected for internship placement in local sites. 3-3. By Spring , five students will graduate with SMET majors and or transfers to four-year institutions. 3-4. By Spring , five students will enter SMET careers. Expected Impact. This project will impact the college and reservation in several ways. Implementation of an appropriate system of assessment and student placement in beginning SMET classes will increase the completion rate to 70%. The addition of the computer laboratories and wireless communication will increase the FPCC capacity to offer additional SMET classes and research and increase enrollment in advanced SMET classes by 10%. As a result of the student internships, the percent of SMET majors entering math, science and technology careers is expected to increase by 10%. The students assigned to internships will become aware of career opportunities in math, science and computer technology especially in the region. The addition of the Web-based courses, especially advanced courses, will further increase enrollment and course completions. Involvement of the Advisory Committee will increase potential training and service opportunities. FPCC will enter into partnerships with tribal businesses and private companies for training and education especially in computer applications doc14839 none Dr. Earlene Armstrong has clearly encouraged young minority students during her twenty years on faculty at University of Maryland at College Park. She has served as the primary advisor to undergraduate students in the Department of Entomology, formally advising more than one hundred students each year. Armstrong has served as the director of the Prefreshman Academic Enrichment Program, which prepares and retains at risk students during their first year at Maryland, focusing on strengthening their skills in mathematics and science. Armstrong is noted for taking a personal interest in working with students, and for helping the student to develop important practical skills, such as good time management and study habits. As a result, the program s students earn higher grades, have a retention rate of eighty-seven percent and a fifty-five percent retention rate in the sciences. Those mentoring relationships remain active long after the students graduate from the university. Armstrong s success with her students is reflected in honors she has received, such as the Faculty Minority Achievement Award from the University of Maryland President s Commission on Ethnic Minority Issues, the Outstanding Advisor of the Year Award from the University s Parents Association doc14840 none This project is annually awarding 29 scholarships to fulltime students majoring in computer science, engineering or mathematics. Recipients are academically-talented U. S. citizens or nationals, refugee aliens or permanent residents with financial need as established by application of the U. S. Dept. of Education guidelines. The focus is on students entering their junior year and those maintaining a 3.0 4.0 GPA are eligible to have the scholarship continued through the senior year. Faculty members are serving as mentors and encouraging students to undertake independent research. Travel funds are available to students whose research reports are accepted for presentation at professional meetings doc14841 none Dr. Melvin Webb began developing mentoring activities in with the Saturday Science Academy program in Atlanta, which provided educational enhancement in science, mathematics, computer application and communication skills for elementary-school students, and a Summer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Institute for high-school students. His efforts to increase the participation of women and minorities span more than twenty-two years. The Saturday Science Academy enrolled more than 5,000 local students between and , and posed as a national model for similar programs. Dr. Webb s activities have progressed based on solid planning developing funds and implementation strategies that have had profound effects on minority success in SMET. From his faculty post in the Biology Department at Clark Atlanta University, Dr. Webb subsequently began to develop programs supporting undergraduate students. He led the effort to develop a multi-departmental honors program through which students could earn both a BS and an MS in five years; this became the Program for Research Integration and Support for Matriculation to the Doctorate (PRISM-D). The first cohort of students was in -91. Thus far six cohorts have graduated and 131of the 145 participants have earned BS degrees (90.3 percent), and 80 of the 131 BS degree recipients have earned MS degrees in the sciences (61 percent). Several students have earned doctorate degrees or are in graduate or professional schools. Dr. Webb has published and presented numerous papers detailing his success at local, regional and national levels, providing dissemination of the mentoring models that pose as successful practices in SMET education. Also noteworthy is the network of K-12 schools, government and industry participants partnering in the programs that Dr. Webb has built doc14842 none Dr. Gray has established an outstanding record in support of minorities and especially women in mathematics for more than thirty years at American University. Gray s academic history includes serving as department chair on multiple occasions, and as director of the women s studies program, as well as an extensive list of publications, including several on mentoring. The American Association for the Advancement of Science recognized her achievements in mentoring with its Lifetime mentoring Award. The American Association of University Professors bestowed the Georgina Smith Award on Gray in for her work on the status of women in collective bargaining. Gray is the founder and president of the Association of Women in Mathematics. Gray has mentored twenty-three students through successful doctoral dissertations, including fourteen women and eight African-American students. She co-directed the Patricia Roberts Harris Fellowship program at AU, providing tuition and stipends for thirteen doctoral students, including eleven women and five minority students. Her students have gone on to lead illustrious careers, including academic administrative posts such as College Dean and Provost, and becoming active mentors themselves doc14843 none This proposal request support for continuing the publication of D-lib Magazine during a transitional period to a new support model. Since , D-Lib has been funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as a part of the Digital Libraries Initiative activities. Recent changes in DARPA program directions now place this activity outside of planned emphases and funding for D-Lib has been ended . D-Lib is only published on the World Wide Web, and is widely considered the most influential and respected source of Information on digital libraries today. For the near term, the primary goals will be to continue to serve as a source of information and dissemination, while simultaneously serve as a testbed for new methods of scientific communication and their financial implications doc14844 none Dr. Clinton Dixon has been actively engaged in mentoring students at Fort Valley State University since he joined the faculty in . He has focused on developing and maintaining support from early contact with pre-college students through to their graduate degrees and careers, and was noted for his high standards, personal involvement, and extending himself outside the classroom. In , Dixon established the program, Increasing Minority Admissions and Enrollment in Health Professions, which has provided mentoring and program support to Georgia s African-American youth. In six years, that program has involved more than four hundred thirty-one high-school students in activities that focused on their preparation for college through Scholastic Aptitude Test preparation workshops, rigorous academic curricular activities, computer literacy sessions, and field trips site visits. At least twenty-seven participants have enrolled in graduate degree programs. More recently, the program has been extended to include middle-school students. Dixon s activities with college students feature peer mentoring, with students assisting in taking science activities to middle schools, and assisting in judging science fairs. Undergraduates also present papers in national scientific meetings and participate in monthly seminars that support their transition to graduate and professional schools. Dixon was also commended for disseminating his mentorship model to his faculty at FVSU, who have also developed skills in working well with students and supporting their development, as they award-winning scientists doc14845 none Dr. Theodore Williams began mentoring undergraduate students in the late s at Wooster College (Ohio) as a member of the chemistry department faculty. The independent study program he implemented has resulted in thirty-four individuals earning doctorates in SMET. A summer research program for undergraduate students has resulted in seven medical doctors and another seventeen doctorate degrees. In addition, Williams has developed and implemented programs for junior high school girls in science (100 students participate annually), a targeted career development program, high-school student mentoring (about 25 students annually) and provided science workshops to elementary schools. He has also served as the research advisor for many students. Williams adopted a very personal style of advising in the early part of his career, as was feasible with the small number of minority students at Wooster College. His method of advising has changed with his increased expertise and with changing circumstances, including an increased number of minority students. Williams mentions that he has continually honed his mentoring skills with improved approaches for the student in the 21st century. The professions and commentary of his former students clearly demonstrate the very positive interactions that have occurred between Williams and his mentees, such as the famous walk around the campus talks that changed their lives doc14846 none Dr. Bharati Mehrotra has an exemplary record of mentoring and encouraging African-American students through college and into graduate or professional schools in the sciences that spans thirty years of her academic career at Tougaloo College. She has served as chair of the Department of Biology for more than twenty years, she is credited with improving the curriculum and increasing the enrollment of biology majors. Mehrotra has been the director of the Minority Access to Research Career (MARC) program since . More than one hundred twenty-eight students have completed the program; twenty-eight have completed graduate school in the sciences, with fifty percent of the remainder en route to doctorates or medical degrees. As director of MARC, Mehrotra has worked to develop a supportive learning environment by bringing experts to campus and visiting research universities, motivating talented students to complete their degrees. She goes yet farther, establishing linkages with graduate institutions to facilitate her students access to post-graduate opportunities. She maintains contact with those she has mentored long after they have graduated, and her students attest to a large number of successes directly related to her mentorship. She was particularly commended for implementing these activities while rigorously pursuing an active and credible research program, all under challenging circumstances of limited institutional resources doc14847 none Karlstrom This is a planning grant for a Trial of Time exhibit at the Grand Canyon, which will be the centerpiece of an effort to provide a unique and dynamic interaction of scientists, educators, the National Park Service and geoscience students of every level and age. The Trail may be integrated with the Heritage Education Center , a concept that is evolving at the Park. Once the scientific and information technologies infrastructure exists, the PIs will develop geoscience education components at three separate educational levels: a college-level curriculum component, a K-12 component, and an informal education component. The spectacular and varied geology of the Grand Canyon and the Trail of Time present an unparalleled educational opportunity at all these levels doc14848 none Under the direction of Dr. William H. Isbell, Mr. Rodrigo Nararrete will conduct archaeological and ethnohistorical research in Venezuela, collecting data for his doctoral dissertation. His primary objective is to gain a better understanding of the nature and development of complex human societies, focusing on a perplexing Native American example. Cultures of the Caribbean region have long been recognized as superb examples of what anthropologists call chiefdoms, political systems intermediate between simple bands or tribes, and complex state governments. Indeed, it is believed that the chiefdom represents humanity s first experiment with complex social organization. Consequently, if we are to understand the evolution of social complexity, chiefdoms must be studied and comprehended, and the Caribbean offers an exceptional laboratory using archaeology and ethnohistory. Venezuela s Unare River Basin is an important area that probably provided an avenue of migration between riverine Amazonian lowlands and the Caribbean Coast. It could shed light on debates about differences in social complexity between the Amazonian and the Caribbean culture areas, but early descriptions of the cultures occupying Venezuela s Unare River are curiously contradictory. Sixteenth and early seventeenth century chroniclers describe complex Carib societies. But eighteenth century chronicles describe only simple cultures like the Cariban Karinas. How is this to be understood? Should these descriptions be considered historically accurate, fostering questions about the conditions in which societies experience cultural collapse. Alternatively, do these descriptions reflect changes in the way Europeans viewed and described the other, as well, perhaps, as changes in the political goals that colored European perceptions and accounts? The way to definitively resolve this is to compare ethnohistorical accounts with archaeological information. Navarrete has completed a study of the chronicles. Funded by NSF he will conduct the first systematic archaeological survey in the Unare Depression, employing a transects-and-shovel-test-pits strategy appropriate for heavily vegetated environment. The survey is designed to reveal material correlates of social complexity as well as materials correlates of cultural simplification. The results will reveal the history of social complexity in the Unare Basin, and their implications for the ways changes in European philosophy and politics influenced conceptualizations of natives and their social conditions. The dissertation will also establish valuable foundations for more comprehensive archaeological investigations of the Venezuelan past doc14849 none This project will test a new idea related to the prediction of seasonal to interannual climate using coupled atmosphere-ocean General Circulation Models (AGCM and OGCM, respectively). The methodology builds on the notion that ensembles of AGCM realizations (probabilistic predictions) can be used to reduce the model noise or non-meaningful signal in the predicted fields, and isolate and improve the climate signal at the air-sea interface. The multiple realizations, or solutions, of a particular AGCM, or multiple realizations from different AGCMs, will be coupled to a single OGCM and the ensemble mean atmospheric fluxes will be used to drive the ocean model and make the coupled climate probabilistic predictions. If successful, this project could significantly improve climate predictions at extended range to interannual time scales doc14850 none The Infinity Scholars program at Iowa Lakes Community College provides scholarship assistance to 32 academically talented, financially needy students enrolled full-time in computer science, computer technology, engineering and mathematics programs. The overarching goal of the program is to increase the number of talented, low-income students enrolled and retained in these degree programs enabling them to enter the high technology workforce. The program establishes and maintains an infrastructure of support services for Infinity Scholars that includes a one credit hour Infinity Scholars Course that concludes with the completion of a capstone project. The Infinity Scholars program focuses on delivering a menu of educational services and learning experiences that retain students and support a seamless transition to job placement upon degree attainment from the community college, or transfer of students to 4-year institutions doc14851 none Kilduff The objective of this research is to obtain a fundamental understanding of two kinds of adsorption-desorption hysteresis. These include thermodynamically irreversible sorption, in which adsorption and desorption follow different microscopic pathways, and hysteresis due to abiotic surface-catalyzed chemical transformation of the adsorbate where the products remain irretrievably bound to the solid. This research will focus on the principle thermodynamic sorbents of organic compounds in natural settings: macromolecular organic carbon (humic substances) and micrographitic OC (black carbon). Sorption experiments will be performed on well-characterized model sorbents, whose behavior can be better related to mechanism than whole natural geosorbents. Adsorption and desorption data will be used to compute an irreversibility index to quantify irreversible sorption hysteresis. Non-reactive test compounds will be trichloromethane, trichloroethene, benzene, and naphthalene, and the reactive test compounds will be phenol, catechol, and pyrogallol. An understanding of hysteresis is crucial to modeling a chemical s fate, defining soil or sediment quality criteria, developing remediation technologies, and setting standards for acceptable levels of contamination after remediation. This is a collaborative research grant between Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station ( ) and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute doc14852 none This project, called the Appalachian Scholars in Computer Science and Mathematics (ASCSM) Program, awards scholarships worth $ per year to low-income, academically talented undergraduate students majoring in mathematics or computer science. Incoming freshmen that meet established academic and financial criteria are eligible for the awards. Recruitment is carried out through high school visits, web page publicity and the annual Tennessee Mathematics Contest, which draws up to Tennessee high school students to the campus each fall. The proposed program addresses two issues: 1) under-representation of students from low-income families at the university and 2) devastating attrition rates for students in lower level mathematics and computer science courses. The program builds upon existing student support programs, including the mathematics tutorial lab, counseling, and mentoring. However, ASCSM scholarship recipients receive additional academic support through departmental advising, peer and faculty mentors, and twice monthly meetings of scholars doc14853 none Lin Burgmann The investigators propose to perform a set of 3-D numerical modeling experiments, focusing on three recent California earthquake sequences: (1) the Landers earthquake, its potential role in triggering the Hector Mine event, and their combined effects on the southern San Andreas fau (2) the Coalinga and Kettleman Hills blind-thrust quakes and their potential effects on delaying seismic rupture on the Parkfield segment of the San Andreas fau and (3) the most recent sequence of historical quakes in the Los Angeles region, including the Long Beach, Kern County, San Fernando, Whittier Narrows, and Northridge events, and their implications on seismic hazard migration in the Los Angeles region. Recently the investigators have successfully developed preliminary 3-D viscoelastic models for a small subset of the above California sequences. This project will allow them to carry out a much more comprehensive investigation through (1) extending the models to include all relevant quakes, (2) verifying the robustness of the model solutions and their sensitivity to assumptions in crustal rheology and fault geometry, and (3) comparing the model results with geodetic observations. Results of this modeling investigation, together with advances in space geodesy and seismic monitoring capabilities, should provide us with a much clearer understanding of the seismic properties of the California crust, the mechanisms of earthquake triggering, and the regularities in seismic hazard migration in California. This is a collaborative project between the UC Berkeley (Andy Freed) and WHOI (Jian Lin). Freed will lead 3-D modeling experiments using the I-deas viscoelastic modeling code, while Lin will lead tasks of comparing the I-deas solutions to independent results from the GENPro boundary-element code and analyzing the geodetic and earthquake data in the study regions to constrain modeling doc14854 none Over the last three years, a 3D nonlinear fluid code has been developed by the PIs to investigate the generation of small-scale size (1-100 km) irregularities in the high latitude plasma patches. This intermediate scale size regime, which is attributed to naturally occurring instabilities on the larger patch size scales, is of interest to the High Latitude Plasma Structure (HLPS) group of the NSF-sponsored CEDAR (Coupling, Energetics, and Dynamics of the Atmospheric Regions) initiative. The successful completion of the development of the 3D code, which has the potential for explaining many of the observed features now leads to a stage where detailed comparison with observations and realistic event modeling can be readily undertaken. Thus a three-year program is proposed to investigate the observed variability in the structuring. An important output from the 3D code is the characteristics of the fluctuations along the field line. Though unlikely that two satellites at different heights will be located along the same field line, a sampling of the relative amplitudes of the irregularities could provide a useful comparison with simulations doc14855 none This project addresses variability of the tropical diurnal tide in the mesosphere on timescales of the intraseasonal, or Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO, approximately 30-60 days) and the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO, approximately 2-10 years). Low-latitude medium frequency (MF) radar wind measurements suggest that diurnal tide amplitudes are modulated on intraseasonal (IS) and interannual time scales. The propagating diurnal tides are a strong agent of coupling between the tropical troposphere and the upper atmosphere. Thus, if the forcing of tropospheric diurnal tides undergoes systematic, large-scale variations on MJO and ENSO time scales, such variability may be transmitted into the upper atmosphere by means of the tide s vertical propagation at low latitudes. The tropical radars at Kauai (22 degrees N, 159 degrees W) and at Rarotonga (22 degrees S, and 160 degrees W) are uniquely situated with almost perfect symmetry around the equator. These are key locations for monitoring the structure and temporal variability of the diurnal tide, since they are near the latitude where the tidal wind amplitude maximizes. In addition to supporting scientific analyses of tidal variability, this project will provide operational support for the tropical radars. The operational support includes maintenance, system upgrades, minor repairs and data archival. We anticipate that this support would allow the radars to operate continuously, reliably and with enhanced capability for the duration of the TIMED mission doc14856 none This Award is to provide for support of an Annual Grantees Conference of Metabolic Engineering Projects funded by Agencies participating in the Interagency Metabolic Engineering Working Group (MEWG). The Conference is scheduled to be held at the National Science Foundation (NSF) on June 28, . The objective of this Conference is to provide the funding Agencies with an opportunity to review progress on their Metabolic Engineering Awards. This Conference will also provide an important service to the research community in the area of Metabolic Engineering and may identify opportunities for future research directions. Information generated at this Conference may be useful for planning purposes for the MEWG and the Biotechnology and Biochemical Engineering Programs in the Bioengineering and Environmental Systems Division of the NSF Engineering Directorate. Information presented at the Conference will be distilled into a report for NSF and the MEWG doc14857 none While both plant ecophysiology and animal ecophysiology have enjoyed strong growth over the past decades, the fields have developed differently, accompanied by an increasing gap between plant and animal ecophysiology. Plant physiological ecology has increasingly developed links to ecosystem science by scaling up physiological process, whereas animal ecophysiologists have developed more strongly in the realm of evolutionary physiology. Despite this, both communities study fundamentally similar ecophysiological processes. Researchers and professional society members in the Ecological Society of America (one of the principal societies for plant ecophysiology) and in Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (the principal society for animal ecophysiology), recognize the problem. They also recognize the gains to both fields that will accrue from increased sharing of both methods and foci. This symposium focuses on commonalities and differences in plant, animal, and microbial ecophysiology, exploring the benefits of increased cross-talk among different communities of researchers. It will be held at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Madison, WI, in August . In addition to reaching participants at this large, widely attended meeting, results from the symposium will be published in the journal, BioScience doc14858 none This project involves the measurement of the isotopic and mixing ratios of methane and carbon monoxide from a shipboard transect in the Pacific Ocean between Los Angeles and New Zealand. These combined measurements, made through four trips per year for three years, will help answer questions related to the growth rate of methane in the atmosphere and provide constraints on the overall global budgets of methane and carbon monoxide. The resultant methane data will be combined with data from other researchers and used in a 3-D model to evaluate the changes concentrations of atmospheric methane and how these changes affect the oxidizing power of the atmosphere. This project involves collaboration with a research group in Wellington, New Zealand that is making similar measurements and collaboration with the University of Oslo where the modeling and analysis will take place. These collaborations greatly enhance the ability of this effort to produce information with broader societal relevance, such as developing an improved understanding of the global methane budget that has implications for understanding human impact on climate change doc14859 none Project This project provides 29 scholarships per year to talented low-income students in computer science and mathematics. The project encourages community college (CC) graduates with AS degrees to continue their education through the BS degree. The scholarships are used as a recruiting tool to attract students to computer science and mathematics. Four categories of scholarships are offered for CS and Mathematics students: (1) four-year scholarships for incoming first-year students (offered during year one of the project), (2) two-year scholarships for CC transfer students (offered during the first three years of the project), (3) two-year scholarships for CS graduate students (offered during the first three years of the project), and (4) one-year scholarships (offered in the first and last years of the project). Scholarship recipients are selected on the basis of financial need, according to established guidelines, and according to ability, based upon GPA, standard test scores, demonstrated professional ability, and overall class ranking. For retention, existing student support programs are used and expanded, including supplemental instruction, tutoring, internship placement, and career placement. Students also have access to clubs and organizations that offer mutual support, including: chapters of ACM, IEEE, and MAA; Upsilon Pi Epsilon (CS) and Pi Mu Epsilon (mathematics) honor societies; an active mathematics club; and a local student-led Unix users group doc14860 none This program provides financial and academic support for undergraduate students in science and mathematics and masters students in computer science, mathematics, and statistics. Participants are given an intensive orientation, followed by close monitoring throughout the duration of the program. Special aspects of the program include internships, group sessions, outside speakers relating to the disciplines and possible employment. Expected outcomes for undergraduate students are that they are well-prepared for employment in fields requiring intensive computer science or mathematics background or for graduate programs in these fields. Expected outcomes for graduate students are that they obtain a masters degree and employment in a position appropriate to their professional training or will continue with doctoral study doc14861 none The objective of the proposed research is to establish a revolutionary new class of vertical cavity photonic integrated circuits. The coupling between the elements of a 2-dimensional array will be achieved by using defect engineering within 2D photonic crystal lattices. Equally important, this research will provide a new context to extend the understanding of microcavity physics as well as the nano-fabrication techniques for novel optical materials. Therefore highly dense, high performance 2D optical circuits for optical processing applications or 2D optical interconnects (suitable for the chip level!) is a target of this esearch. However, this research may also have major impact on high-performance communication applications, such as for wavelength division multiplexing or high-capacity photonic integrated circut for the next generation of telecommunications doc14862 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Alan West Institution: Columbia University A collaborative effort to study nucleation and growth during the early stages of thin film growth by electrodeposition will be carried out. This work will build on a recently developed mathematical model of electrochemical nucleation that allows inclusion of phenomena not previously considered. The model will be used in the simulation of difficult cases, such as copper deposition from pyrophosphate bath, where conventional models fail. Simulated results will be compared with both measured current transients and atomic force microscopy (AFM) imaging of deposited nuclei. Instantaneous nucleation will involve rotating disk experiments to characterize growth processes as a function of overpotential, cupric ion concentration, pyrophosphate concentration, pH and convective conditions. These results are expected to provide mechanistic information and growth rate constants. Progressive nucleation will be pursued with chronoamperometry and AFM measurements on gold cyanide baths. This work could have significant impact outside of electrodeposition, and areas such as emulsions, aerosols, micelles, and crystallization could also benefit from this project. This work may find more immediate application in microfabrication processes doc14863 none Kondic This Americas Program award will support Dr. Ljubinko Lou Kondic of the New Jersey Institute of Technology in collaboration with Dr. Javier A. Diez of the Institute of Physics of the Universidad Nacional del Centro in Tandil, Argentina. The researchers intend to work on the computational and theoretical analysis of the interface dynamics and instabilities in thin film flows. The main subject of the proposed research is to apply existing, and develop new compu- tational methods for a variety of problems related to thin film flows. In particular the researchers will concentrate on problems where the fundamental issues related to the development of instability are still not well understood. This includes thin film flows on imperfect surfaces, flows of non-Newtonian fluids, and surfactant flows. They also plan to extend computational and theoretical methods to other areas (such as spin coating) that are relevant, not only because of challenging theoretical and computational issues, but also because of their importance in a variety of technological applications. The research will combine the U.S. researcher s expertise with the computational aspects of the project with the Argentinean researcher s theoretical expertise doc14864 none Lehigh Carbon Community College (LCCC) is providing scholarships each year to approximately 36 to 50 academically talented, financially needy full-time students enrolled in associate degree programs in the fields of computer science, computer technology, engineering, engineering technology, and mathematics. These CSEMS scholarships enable students, including those from under-represented groups, to reduce their dependence on loans to meet their living expenses and decrease the number of hours they work, allowing them more time to study and receive support services in very demanding disciplines. The scholarships are also an incentive for part-time students to enroll full time and for students in one-year certificate programs to change their major to an associate degree program doc14865 none PI: Joshua U. Otaigbe Institution: Iowa State University Proposal Number: This is a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) to enable the principal investigator (PI) to explore the feasibility of reactive extrusion based on the fast anionic ring-opening polymerization of cyclic amides in a matrix of a commercial polymer such as polypropylene (PP), to yield a nanostructured PP polyamide 6 blend with unique properties. Nanostructured is used because the dispersion of one polymer phase in the other is below 100 nanometers. The research is to demonstrate proof of concept of generating these structures in reactive extrusion using ring-opening polymerization of cyclic amides. The potential versatility of the nanostructures polymer blends will make them useful in applications such as optics, drug delivery, tissue engineering and permeable membranes for separation phenomena. Blending of polymers is one method used to obtain new polymeric materials. Over 30% of commercial polymers used worldwide are polymer bends or alloys. An example is acrylonitrile copolymer and polybudatiene grafted styrene-acrylontitrile copolymer. The evolution of morphology during melt blending of a polymer blend is poorly understood and the ability to predict this morphological evolution is a goal of this project doc14866 none A minimum of 25 scholarships are being awarded annually to academically talented, low-income students pursuing degrees in computer science, engineering or mathematics. The program is providing faculty mentoring to all scholarship recipients and tutoring to aid in the transition from high school to university level studies. Undergraduate research in association with a faculty member is an integral part of the educational experience and presentation at the annual research seminar is expected doc14867 none The four-year project provides scholarships to undergraduate students majoring in computing and information science. All scholarship recipients will complete requirements for the baccalaureate degree by the end of the spring semester . The program prepares students for the high technology workforce through internship participation, involvement in undergraduate research, and substantive interaction with mentors from technology fields. Strategies for assessing student learning outcomes in the project include portfolios of students academic work, internship evaluations, career placements, and alumni surveys doc14868 none This is a proposal for a planning grant that aims to prepare a full proposal in the future to develop professional development materials for teachers in the area of environmental science. Most of the funds requested in the planning grant are to assemble a group of scientists, science educators (some of whom have led the development of national standards in science, math, and geography) and teachers for a two-day conference. The purpose of the conference is to develop a synthesis of best practices toward education about the environment. The ultimate goal is to produce a publication (tentatively titled Resources for Environmental Literacy ) that will identify the concepts and principles every American should know in order to make thoughtful public and private choices; to participate in a rational discourse about issues related to the environment; and to appreciate the interrelation of the human and natural worlds. This publication will assist teachers by demonstrating how environmental knowledge can be achieved through the integration and application of learning across the disciplines, on issues that are of considerable interest and great importance to students doc14869 none TMCC LDMT The project would work with teachers who are involved in the RSI reform. It would provide professional development opportunities to the teachers in the RSI schools, and would develop and institutionalize standards-based curriculum for reservation schools. These activities are strongly aligned with the goals of the RSI project. The professional development offered to teachers would be heavily content-oriented, with some pedagogical training doc14870 none The MCIS (Mathematics, Computer Science and Mathematics Education) Department at Mississippi Valley State University developed the Odyssey Scholarship program to recruit under-represented students from the Mississippi Delta region of the state. Odyssey Scholarships help to increase the number of community college transfer students at the University and to assist students in successfully completing the gatekeeper courses required by CSEM majors. Scholars participate in research opportunities and internships before joining the workforce at graduation doc14871 none Project A Scholarship Program for Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Students: An Industry-Academia Partnership Approach This program provides 25 undergraduate students $ per academic year provided the students are within two years of graduation. The program is managed to especially encourage applications from under-represented groups and transfer students. All engineering majors as well as computer science and mathematics majors are eligible for scholarships. The program strengthens existing resources, as well as partnerships with community colleges and industry. The primary goal of the program is to supplement existing resources within the University to facilitate a life-altering, environmental change for financially disadvantaged, upper-division undergraduate CSEM students with academic potential. The goal is achieved by providing twenty-five, two-year scholarships supplemented with summer industry or research internships between the junior and senior years. The program has the following supporting objectives, each with specific, measurable outcomes, which are analyzed and serve as feedback to continually improve the program: 1) Increase the graduation rate of CSEM students particularly minority and female students 2) Decrease the average time to degree completion for CSEM students 3) Decrease the number of CSEM students working in non-intellectually engaging jobs by increasing opportunities for students to work on a faculty member s funded research or through approved co-op or summer internships with industry partners of the program 4) Improve employment placement in highly sought-after positions 5) Increase the number of CSEM graduates who enroll in graduate school The objectives are achieved through a unique combination of student environment modifications, scholarships, retention and intervention, professional development and research activities, industrial collaborations, and academic support while leveraging and not replacing existing resources doc14872 none Scholarships are being granted to academically talented, low-income students as they seek to complete their degrees in mathematics, computer science or engineering. Scholarship recipients have access to an extensive academic support infrastructure that includes faculty mentoring, opportunities for cooperative education, seminars on topics in mathematics and engineering, workshops on career preparation, and advising on graduate education. Part-time employment on campus as tutors is available for juniors and seniors doc14873 none This program provides scholarships to recruit and retain talented but financially disadvantaged students majoring in mathematics and computer science. Preference is given to under-represented and female students. The program seeks to improve retention rates, provide academic support for CSEMS awardees, utilize CSEMS awardees as tutors and role models, increase the number of mathematics and computer science majors coming from families with financial need, and link each CSEMS awardee with a faculty adviser mentor. Additional academic support is offered to CSEMS students through faculty mentoring and tutoring, the Mathematics Assistance Center, and the University tutorial services center doc14874 none This scholarship program provides financial, academic, and motivational support to enable academically gifted low-income students to receive a bachelor of science degree in mathematics. These students are involved in internship and research opportunities that make them highly attractive to high technology companies. Scholarship recipients also have access to a special mentoring program that supplements the strong support systems that are available to all students at the university doc14875 none This project is creating a cohort of Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics (CSEMS) scholars and incorporating the CSEMS Scholars Program into the college s five-year enrollment enhancement plan. A complete array of student support services are being provided to the members of the CSEMS cohort. Selection of the scholars is the responsibility of a committee comprised of faculty, staff and industry leaders. As a precursor, the college is undertaking a diligent and thorough process of recruiting applicants for the program. This process includes a conscious and consistent effort to recruit an increased number of women for careers in the CSEM areas. As additional support for the CSEMS Scholars, internship and business networking opportunities are being provided. Group and individual support mechanisms include regularly scheduled cohort meetings, academic and career advising, appropriate off-campus experiences, presentations by experts in the CSEM fields and a preparation course for the GRE or GMAT Exams. Those CSEMS Scholars who express an interest in pursuing a career in education are being afforded the opportunity to participate in the Teaching Scholars Program doc14876 none Yan This award supports Mingdi Yan and students from Portland State University in a collaboration with Olof Ramstrom of the Department of Organic Chemistry at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. The project will focus on the difficult tasks of synthesis and use of in aqueous solutions of tailor-made polymeric receptors that are capable of selectively recognizing small differences in ligand structure. New chemistry and fabrication techniques will be applied to molecular imprinting in order to meet the challenge, which is of utmost importance in biological applications. The imprinting chemistry employs reversible, but stable bonds that survive the water environment. The technique of micromoulding in capillary will be used for the synthesis of molecularly imprinted polymers. The same technique will make it possible to accomplish the synthesis of libraries of such polymers that can be screened for optimal imprinting chemistry as well as for biological assays. The long-term goals of the project are to integrate the synthesis and analysis of combinatorial molecularly imprinted polymers on a single chip and to construct multi-analyte sensors based on the microfabricated arrays doc14877 none OF THE POPULATION TO BE SERVED BY THE PROJECT The proposal will serve primarily American Indian students currently attending or projected to attend Stone Child College. PROJECT S The overall goal of our project is to ``to measurably increase the number of graduates in SMET and related fields at SCC by providing a high quality learning environment capable of meeting or exceeding the instruction received at four-year institutions. SCC is adamant in our belief that in order to attract more students into these disciplines, our instructional methodologies, as well as advanced teaching devices, are the key to induce student curiosity and eventual enrollment into SMET fields. By developing a five-year plan based on research, we believe we can successfully pursue other resources for the implementation of our SMET plan. Therefore, SCC has developed the following major objective which will guide us during this initial 12-month planning process: Major Project Objective During the project period of January 1, through December 31, , SCC will develop a researched-based five-year institutional plan to enhance our SMET program as measured by internal and external evaluation results and the plan being formally adopted by the SCC Board of Regents prior to the end of the project period. COLLABORATIVE PARTNERS Stone Child College will coordinate this project with our Packard Foundation project, DoD project, MSEIP projects, as well as other proposed projects SCC has currently written and are awaiting approval disapproval. TOTAL FUNDS REQUESTED $50,000. (NSF funds) PROPOSAL NO.: PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Stamper, Edward INSTITUTION NAME: Stone Child College TITLE: Stone Child College SMET Planning Grant Application NSF RECEIVED DATE: 04 30 doc14878 none Planning Grant for Restructuring Math Delivery Systems at Fort Belknap College The goal of this project is to develop a comprehensive plan for increasing student success in mathematics at Fort Belknap College (FBC). The college will achieve this goal through the successful completion of three specific project objectives. During the one-year planning period, project personnel will: (1)perform a thorough self-assessment of the current math curriculum in place at FBC; (2)conduct an in-depth review of alternative instructional methods, curricula and delivery systems that have proven successful with minority students (and, specifically, American Indians) across the country; and (3)develop a comprehensive planning document for designing and implementing a math program that addresses specific local and institutional needs, while incorporating best practices from model programs. The results of these planning efforts will provide the basis for developing an implementation design proposal to be submitted under NSF s TCUP solicitation. Ms. Mary John Taylor, Dean of Academic Affairs, and Ms. Billie Jo Foote, Math Science Instructor, will serve as co-principal investigators for the project. Fort Belknap College is requesting $50,000 to carry out this project over a 12-month period. PROPOSAL NO.: PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Taylor, Mary INSTITUTION NAME: Fort Belknap College TITLE: Planning Grant for Restructuring Math Delivery Systems at Fort Belknap College NSF RECEIVED DATE: 04 30 doc14879 none Scholarships are available for 32 academically talented, low income students majoring in computer science or mathematics. A team approach coupled with an advising and academic support center is ensuring the success of students in completing mathematics and computer science degrees, and increasing the number who continue on to graduate-level programs upon graduation doc14880 none 01- ) ROSENBERG KNEXUS and its Symposium series reflect a highly innovative, multidisciplinary approach that addresses change at the level of the economy or society. It blends new understandings in human cognition; economics, economic history and institutions; new methods of data analysis; and evolutionary theories of economics and society to focus on change. Any serious study of change in economies, polities and societies must acknowledge uncertainty. To do so effectively, however, the starting point must be an account of human cognition, through which human beings individually and in larger groupings understand and by means of which they generate change. This Symposium will address the cognitive foundationos of change, and the consequent processes of change at social, political and economic levels. Recent advancements in network analysis offer promise of a theoretical approach that can yield empirically testable models, and thus the Symposium will address the role of networks in a theory of social and economic change. The proposed Symposium will bring together scholars from diverse relevant disciplines (including, but not limited to, economics, economic history, technology studies, intellectual history, human cognition and sociology, organization and management studies doc14881 none The project would work with teachers who are involved in the RSI reform. It would provide professional development opportunities to the teachers in the RSI schools, and would develop a culturally-relevant, standards-based curriculum for reservation schools. These activities are strongly aligned with the goals of the RSI project. The professional development offered to teachers would be heavily content-oriented, with some pedagogical training doc14882 none The Scholarships in Mathematics and Computer Science (SIMACS) program is awarding scholarships to qualified students majoring in the relevant disciplines. The scholarships are increasing the number of women enrolled in computing science and mathematics degree programs. Selection of the scholars is based leadership and school and or community involvement in addition to academic ability. Bi-weekly group meetings of scholars and faculty mentors, as well as individual meetings scheduled in the alternate weeks serve to ease the transition from high school to college and from junior college to the four year institution doc14883 none Scholarships are available to students majoring in computer science, computer engineering, and mathematics. These scholarships are increasing the number of students majoring in these disciplines while providing co-curricular support leading to improved retention rates and consequently, higher graduation rates. The support systems include peer mentoring, study groups, and cooperative learning doc14884 none The St. Ambrose University CSEMS Program provides 30 low-income or disadvantaged computer and information science majors the financial, academic, social, and peer support they need to persist to graduation. We offer four eligible majors: bachelor s degrees in computer science (CS), computer and information science (CIS), and computer network administration (CNA) and a new master s degree in information technology management (ITM). Students are selected based on financial need and academic promise. Students selected for the CSEMS program will receive the following support: enrollment in learning communities (for first year students); assignment to peer, professional and faculty mentors; monthly professional seminars (e.g., college transition for entering students, career planning and placement for upper level students); and academic support (tutoring). Upper-level students will participate in job shadowing and either an internship or practicum to get on-the-job experience and for career preparation doc14885 none PROJECT SUMMARY This program provides finical aid and academic support for talented low-income students majoring in Computer Science, Engineering or Mathematics. There is a strong recruitment plan for Hispanic students that attend surrounding high schools and community colleges. The program actively seeks Hispanic students but does not discriminate against other minority or non-minority students. The program has developed partnerships between Coral Park Senior High School (CPSHS) and Miami Dade Community College (MDCC) that helps to identify candidates in terms of need, well roundedness and scholarship. However, the program is not limited to these students. Indeed, information of the program is mailed to all the Miami Dade High Schools and Florida Community Colleges. The goal of the program is for the entering first year students to graduate with a Bachelors degree in 4 years and for the community college transfer students to finish their Bachelors degree in 2 years. A counseling program is in place with the purpose of providing the scholars with the adequate support mechanisms to make the above goals successful. As part of the retention effort, tutorial assistance and an internship program are in place. There also is a group of specialists to assist the scholars in coping with the everyday problems they face during their college experience doc14886 none This project is providing scholarships to students who enroll in one of the following associate degree programs: Mechanical Design Technology, Electrical Engineering Technology, Bio-Medical Electronics, Electromechanical Technology, Electronics Technology, Programmer Analyst, Microcomputer Specialist and Network Specialist programs. The objectives of the project are: (1) Over the course of four years, to award approximately 160 scholarships, 15% of which are awarded to minority students and 40% to women. (2) To have 75% of Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics (CSEM) scholars participate in at least one student support service. (3) To assure that 97% of the graduates in the CSEM scholarship program obtain employment related to their program or continue on to a four-year college. Recruitment of students for the project includes (a) incorporation of an interactive web page to motivate women towards occupations in mechanical design and electronics; (b) provision to the pre-college minority student program information about the mechanical design, computer science and electronics programs and the scholarships available; (c) distribution of brochures advertising the project and scholarships; (d) direct mailings about the scholarships to program students; (e) classroom presentations and distribution to college counselors and instructors, high school counselors and high school math and science instructors information and scholarship brochures; (f) visits to the high school math and science classes by college program instructors to recruit students and distribute CSEMS brochures; and (g) distribution of brochures and scholarship applications to high school students visiting the college on fieldtrips. Support and career placement services include the college s Academic Success Center, case management, specialized tutoring and retention services for students; technical support in the electronics, math, or computer labs; designated counselor instructor scholar appointment; scholar study groups; scholar mentorship program; computer science peer tutoring program; internships; and special recognition at the annual Foundation Scholarship Dinner doc14887 none This project is creating a scholarship program for Computer Information Systems, Engineering and Industrial Technologies, and Mathematics majors at the associate degree level. Faculty and staff are working together across institutional divisions to meet students educational needs and facilitate their success. The program builds upon a current Sinclair NSF project aimed at increasing participation in engineering technology programs: Image and Marketing of Engineering Technology Education ( ). The program is increasing the number of students obtaining associate degrees or transferring to four-year institutions in the areas of computer science, computer technology, engineering, engineering technology, and mathematics (CSEMS). It also support students entering the workforce in CSEMS disciplines. The program has three primary goals: 1. To increase the success of CSEMS students through scholarships and the provision of support services that promote full-time enrollment and the attainment of Associate Degrees in CSEMS disciplines. 2. To assist student transfer to four year institutions to continue their education in a CSEMS discipline. 3. To increase the participation of low-income, academically talented students in CSEMS careers, especially students of under-represented groups. The project is meeting a growing demand for entry-level technicians in computer science and engineering disciplines. It is being led by a collaborative team of faculty from the Computer Information Systems Division, the Division of Engineering and Industrial Technologies Division, and the Mathematics Department. To support these efforts, these faculty are drawing upon the expertise of four Senior Personnel of the Financial Aid Office, Student Support Services Program, and Academic Counseling Services doc14888 none The investigators will develop a new method to obtain two-dimensional images of sporadic clouds of mesospheric sodium. These images will be constructed by combining data from a sodium lidar and an optical spectrometer obtained during arctic summer months. The project involves minor modifications to existing instruments at Poker Flat, Alaska, and the development of analysis and calibration software to perform the two-dimensional imaging with high reliability. The mesopause region hosts persistent layers of neutral and ionized metallic atoms that are replenished by the ablation of meteors. These metal layers can be used as tracers of the thermal, chemical, and dynamical conditions near the mesopause. Although the altitude distribution of these layers have been studied using various techniques, the horizontal structure of the layers remains unknown. This investigation aims to observe the two-dimensional structure of metallic layers using the sun to illuminate sodium atoms, and sensitive instrumentation to detect the scattered sunlight. The simultaneous lidar measurements will provide information about the altitude distribution of the layers. Various models have shown that the temperature structure in the mesopause may be a sensitive indicator of global change. Understanding the distribution of sporadic layers in the mesosphere is important in studying processes that heat and cool the middle atmosphere doc14889 none This project focuses on recruiting students to high technology disciplines, increasing retention through mentoring and support and facilitating career placement through industry partnerships. To meet these ends, the School of Natural and Applied Sciences (NAS) awards 29 NSF scholarships in each of four years in the areas of Computer Science, Computer Information Systems, Computer Systems Engineering and Mathematics. A strong mentoring component grounds the project. In addition to joining an NSF Scholars Organization, students meet with faculty and peer mentors regularly to address academic, career and personal progress. Mentoring strategies tap institutional resources as well as established industry linkages to further career goals. A Steering Committee, composed of industry, community college and institutional representatives, ensures effective integration and communication of all project components and resources doc14890 none Righter This US-Mexico award will fund a collaborative project between Dr. Kevin Righter, of the University of Arizona, in collaboration with Dr. Jose Rosas-Elguera of the University of Guadalajara, Mexico. The researchers aim to study the Cenozoic volcanic and tectonic evolution of western Mexico. The project will help to determine ages of more recent volcanic activity in western Mexico, and improve our understanding of the spatial and temporal distribution of volcanism. The Division of Earth Sciences will also contribute partial support for this project. The Cenozoic volcanic and tectonic evolution of western Mexico has been influenced by two processes - extension from opening of the Gulf of California, and compression from the subduction of the Rivera Plate beneath the North American Plate. Although there is some evidence for uplift in western Mexico, the timing of that uplift is uncertain. It may be young and related entirely to the current subduction environment. Or it could date back to the mid-Cenozoic, when the region started undergoing change as a result of the transfer of Baja California to the Pacific Plate. In order to understand the uplift history of this region, the researchers propose to determine regional uplift rates in the Atenguillo region of western Mexico, using new isotopic methods. The technique has been tested successfully on a small suite of samples. In addition, a selected suite of very young volcanic rocks will be dated from the western Mexico region. Results of this study will be integrated with geologic studies of the area, and also with the results of recent and ongoing regional plate motion and GPS studies doc14891 none Project Thirty-two academically talented low-income students majoring in computer science or mathematics fields are receiving scholarships enabling them to complete the degree requirements in a timely fashion. In addition to the scholarships they receive enhanced faculty mentoring, increased availability of no cost tutoring, cooperative study groups, and monthly gatherings combining discipline and social activities. Limited funds are also available to support student attendance at professional meetings for undergraduates doc14892 none This program provides financial and academic support for students at the upper-level sophomore, junior and senior level who possess the potential to graduate with a baccalaureate degree with majors in computer science, engineering, engineering technology, and mathematics. The program strives to attract under-represented individuals into these disciplines. Academic support structures include close faculty advising, professional development events, and internships and career positions through an industrial advisory board doc14893 none This program provides support to talented, low-income students seeking associate degrees in computer science, engineering, or mathematics at one of four community colleges: Capital, Gateway, Manchester, and Tunxis. Computer science, engineering technology, and mathematics faculty on each campus serve as mentors and advisors to the CSEMS scholars. Group and peer mentoring activities, industrial externships, and research opportunities are offered during two, two-year scholarship cycles doc14894 none Ten (10) new Scholarships for Success are to be awarded each of the first two years and twenty-five (25) new scholarships are to be awarded in the third and fourth years to academically capable, low-income students in computer science, computer technology, engineering, and engineering technology. Each cohort of scholars receives assistance from The Career Center in finding part-time employment opportunities and opportunities for cooperative education, internships, and on-the-job training, career development, planning and job selection. In addition a faculty mentor is assigned to each scholarship recipient cohort doc14895 none This program provides scholarships to low-income, academically talented students, many from under-represented groups, to complete associates degrees in computer information systems, engineering, and mathematics. In addition to expanded and individualized academic support services, the project supports a wide range of activities for students, including internships, mentoring and research opportunities. There is significant involvement in the program by high schools, industry government, and four-year colleges for recruitment, retention, and transfer of students doc14826 none The investigators will study the morphology and small-scale vertical structure of intense radar echoes from the polar mesopause. Possible generation mechanisms for these unique echoes, called polar mesospheric summer echoes (PMSE), are not well understood, and observations have been limited by the lack of needed resolution. Frequency domain interferometry (FDI) measurements can potentially provide information about the vertical structure of the echoes, but the technique only works when a single layer is present. The investigators have developed a modified approach called Range Imaging (RIM). In this technique, numerous transmitter frequencies are used and sophisticated reconstruction schemes are employed to obtain the desired vertical resolution. The RIM approach will be applied to data obtained from a very high frequency radar in Tromso, Norway. Studying mesospheric chemistry and dynamics is important for understanding the temperature structure of the middle atmosphere. Middle atmosphere temperature is a sensitive indicator of long-term changes associated with global change doc14897 none Project This project is providing scholarships to 29 low-income, academically talented engineering students. There are student service programs available to the recipients that focus on retention, academic excellence, industrial or research experience and professional development. In addition, the scholars have access to career guidance and placement services doc14898 none Under the direction of Dr. T. Patrick Culbert, Mr. Arturo Munoz will collect data for his dissertation. For the last four years Mr. Munoz has been a member of the archaeological team excavating the ruins of the Classic Maya city of Piedras Negras, Guatemala. Piedras Negras is located in a remote corner of the Peten rainforest and is renowned for the excellent quality of its sculpture and for the unusually complete sequence of dated stelae erected by the cities rulers between A.D. 650 and 800. Piedras Negras is particularly notable because of the heavy emphasis on resist decoration on locally made ceramics. This technique, virtually unknown in other parts of the Maya Lowlands, dominates the Late Classic polychrome ceramic tradition at Piedras Negras. Because of the unusually complete historical record for the site as well as the excellent provenance data available as a result of the recent excavations it is possible to track the development and spread of resist decorated ceramics with a rare degree of precision. Resist decorated ceramic appear first in elite contexts. They are carefully decorated and well fired. Later, more crudely executed resist types become common and are recovered from all levels of settlement. These observations lead to several hypotheses amenable to testing utilizing a variety of quantitative measures. In general terms, this research is a diachronic study of changing ceramic styles, framing the development of resist-decorated ceramics first as a result of particular historical and social circumstances at Piedras Negras and second, and more broadly, as a result if general processes linking crafting and the possession of cultural goods to processes of political legitimation. With very few exceptions, Americanist archaeologists rarely consider the social component of technological change, becoming what have been described as somnambulists adopting the position that technological change unfolds automatically according to its own inevitable logic and independently of social and cultural processes. As a result, most archaeological research focusing on technological change has emphasized the effects of increased efficiency on mitigating changing environmental or other conditions. If this research is successful, it will present a model for understanding processes of technological change emphasizing the importance social processes in determining not only the content of emerging technologies, but also their success or failure. For a variety of reasons the Usumacinta Basin is one of the most understudied part so the Maya Lowlands. This research will provide some of the very first detailed data for the region, and will provide key information on one of the preeminent Lowland Maya sites. This research will not only be a valuable reference for future archaeologists working in the area, it will also interest any member of Guatemalan society curious about their country s ancient past. Finally, this research will assist in the training of a promising young scientist doc14899 none This three year effort will investigate the mesospheric effects of gravity waves generated by strong convection activity in large area multicell thunderstorms at tropospheric altitudes. Due to their large sizes, the multicell thunderstorms cannot be treated as point sources and require generalization of the existing gravity wave theory for cylindrical, aperture type, sources with inclusion of the resultant diffraction effects. The purpose of the project is to undertake a systematic and focused study of mesospheric effects of two and three dimensional fully nonlinear numerical models. The outstanding scientific questions which motivate this research program are (1) What is the dynamics of mesospheric cylindrical gravity waves generated by distributed convective sources at tropospheric altitudes? (2) What are effects of the convectively generated cylindrical gravity waves on mesospheric heating rates, wind profiles, and density perturbations? In order to answer these questions, the PI will develop and apply two and three dimensional, fully non-linear, compressible models of gravity waves launched upward by distributed convective sources at tropospheric altitudes. These models will be solving a standard set of equations expressing conservation of mass, momentum and energy, and will account for realistic convective properties of tropospheric thunderstorms as well as realistic parameters of the ambient atmosphere (i.e., temperature, Brunt-Vaisala frequency, and wind profiles doc14900 none The CSAM (Computer Science and Mathematics) Scholars program at the College of William and Mary annually provides financial and academic assistance to 26 academically talented, financially needy students who express a desire to pursue degrees in mathematics and computer science. Each student is assigned a faculty-mentor from the Departments of Mathematics or Computer Science for entire degree program. The faculty-mentors are trained by the Offices of Academic Advising and Multicultural Affairs. In addition to scholarships, funds are also provided for travel, special projects, and summer research. At the end of each academic year, an assessment expert from the School of Education conducts an analysis of the criteria for selection of CSAM Scholars, their success in maintaining the award, and its benefits. A summary of this is used for continuation of funding for the students doc14901 none The Information Technology Scholars (ITS) program is using a grant from the National Science Foundation s Computer Science, Engineering and Mathematics Scholarship (CSEMS) program to establish ongoing support for academically promising students with financial need to graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from St. Bonaventure University and to enter the workforce as information technology professionals. The CSEMS funds are used to support four students for four years and an additional four students for three years. The university will continue the program by funding the final year of the second cohort of students and by providing four-year awards to two students per year annually. The program is designed to attract students who have demonstrated a strong work ethic and commitment to computer science as high school students. The Department will use the one hundred and fifty high school teachers who have participated in departmental outreach programs to recommend students for the program. The Department has an exemplary record for preparing undergraduates for entry-level positions in information technology. Since 100% of its graduates have entered the workforce as computer professionals or have gone on for further study at the graduate level in computer science doc14902 none Harrison This award supports travel of eleven US participants, including junior researchers, to a transatlantic workshop, Electronic Networks and Democratic Life. The organizers are Teresa Harrison of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Nicholas Jankowski of the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands. The objective of the workshop is to articulate major research questions that will establish research priorities, generate collaborative projects, and lay the basis for comparative studies. Specifically, the workshop will address relationships between system characteristics and user behaviors, uses of new technologies for political and government action, and the nature and consequences of online civic discourse. The goal of the workshop is the development of an international research community participating in collaborative research projects on e-networks and democratic life doc14903 none PROJECT SUMMARY This project is providing the equivalent of 32 full-time scholarships per year to students from educationally under-served backgrounds ranging from rural to inner-city environments. In addition to access to a quality education, the students receive both faculty and peer mentoring, time and resource management counseling, and, if needed, tutoring at no cost. During the junior and senior years, students have the opportunity to undertake research, participate in technological leadership seminars and engage in cooperative education which allows them to simultaneously earn money for educationally related expenses and obtain experience in their chosen career field doc14904 none This program provides scholarships for deserving and financially needy students in computer science, mathematics, and engineering curricula. Scholarship recipients experience research-based teaching and learning and have access to mentoring and development activities. Partnerships with external agencies provide enrichment activities and internship opportunities for scholarship holders doc14905 none This program recruits computer science and mathematics students who have successfully completed a college-level calculus course, paying particular attention to under-represented populations. Each CSEMS scholar is supported for up to four years, through completion of the bachelor s degree. CSEMS scholars benefit from the South Carolina Alliance for Minority Participation, peer supplemental instruction programs and other services in the Center for Student Learning, and the strong support for minorities provided by Intercultural Programs. Each CSEMS scholar participates in an industry internship, an undergraduate research experience, or supplemental instructional leadership doc14906 none Howard Community College (HCC) in Columbia, Maryland is providing twenty-five (25) scholarships for full-time, financially eligible students majoring in computer science, computer support technology, engineering, and mathematics. These scholarships expand enrollment by reducing economic barriers to increased student retention and articulation. The project provides a challenging and supportive program that prepares them for engineering, computer science, computer technology or mathematics at four-year colleges or universities. Retention and success in the program involves program advising and counseling, a strong focus on assessing and developing the skills necessary for their success, tutoring and study groups, a Learning community support from peers. The graduates of this program are available to help alleviate the shortage of trained personnel needed by the high technology industries located in central Maryland doc14907 none This program is providing educational and financial support services to thirty talented and financially disadvantaged mathematics and engineering students. The scholarships are increasing the rate of degree completion and subsequent entry into the workforce or postgraduate studies. In addition to the financial support an ongoing comprehensive mentoring and guidance system designed to build leadership skills, maturity and responsibility has been established doc14908 none The R-Cubed program is providing scholarships of $3,125 each to computer science, engineering, and mathematics majors who have demonstrated financial need and academic potential. Preference for scholarships is given to women and American Indians. Professional presentations, meetings, and social functions all facilitate academic and social development of the R-Cubed scholars. The program also helps the department to serve the people of Montana as the state s economy shifts away from one dependent on natural resources. Success of the program in achieving retention and recruitment objectives is systematically evaluated and reported by a professional evaluator doc14909 none A minimum of 29 low-income, academically talented students pursuing baccalaureate degrees in computer science and computer technology are receiving scholarship awards of up to $ per academic year. These awards are allowing these students to pursue their education on a full-time instead of part-time basis. A host of support activities including tutoring and study-skills programs, an honors program, personal and financial counseling, and a full range of cooperative education and career services are available to the students. Each scholarship receipent is assigned a faculty mentor who maintains a portfolio on the student s progress doc14910 none Scholarships are being awarded to academically talented low-income students majoring in mathematics, computer science or engineering. The selection process includes academic merit, science and mathematics background, and motivation. A special effort is being be made to attract applications from among qualified graduates of Arkansas community colleges. The scholarship recipients are being nurtured through proactive advising, community-building activities, presentations on career opportunities by industry representatives, and access to research opportunities doc14911 none PROJECT SUMMARY This project is providing a minimum of 28 scholarships in varying amounts to a maximum of $ per year to students majoring in computer science or engineering. Recipients are fulltime students who are U. S. citizens or nationals, refugee aliens or permanent residents with financial need as established by application of U. S. Dept. of Education guidelines. Students maintaining their academic eligibility receive a scholarship for as many as four years. The academic programs are bolstered by support services, including tutoring services at no cost to the student, career advisement, and both faculty and peer mentoring doc14912 none This project reaches out to attract a heterogeneous mix of students, including ethnically diverse and under-represented minorities, as well as women into engineering and engineering technology programs. We have developed methods for motivating students to pursue a degree program, in part, by offering financial incentives to academically talented but economically disadvantaged students in Engineering Technology (Electrical, Computer, and Telecommunication) and Engineering Science programs. The program increases retention rates of these students by providing enhanced support structures and prepares the students to be successful employees in the technical work force. The support is provided by forming a learning community comprised of students, faculty advisors mentors from each discipline, and industry mentors doc14913 none A number of opportunities exist for COLLEGE OF MENOMINEE NATION that require further development of SMET programs currently offered at the College. To forward its 8,000 years of stewardship and expertise in sustainable forest management, the Menominee Nation is committed to ensuring that future generations are prepared as stewards well-schooled in sound sciences and best practices in Menominee autochthony. Our challenge is to assure that quality in SMET education is commensurate with that stewardship. COLLEGE OF MENOMINEE NATION will enhance student opportunities in science, math, engineering and technology through a planning process that will provide assessment of the SMET infrastructure and the development of an institutional plan to enhance its SMET program. The process will also assess the needs of the communities on the Menominee Reservation, as well as the Oneida, Mohican and Potowatomi Nations and neighboring non-Indian communities to determine the constellation of SMET programs that will promote sustainable development in the communities of northeastern Wisconsin. In addition, assessment of the current math offerings as a necessary interface is a priority. We envision such an analysis as the key to our delivery of student research opportunities in eco-toxicology, environmental science and environmental health doc14914 none The Computer Science, Engineering and Mathematics Scholars Program This project is creating an environment for success for academically talented, yet disadvantaged engineering, mathematics, and computer science students by matching them with an engineer or scientist to work side by side on a research project as well as actively participate in academic and professional development activities. Further, each CSEM Scholar has an industrial mentor who works with the scholar for professional development. These activities provide experience and foster confidence in each recipient thereby producing better qualified and well- rounded graduates to enter the workforce or graduate school doc14915 none Twenty nine scholarships in the amount of $ are available annually to academically talented, low-income students majoring in computer science or mathematics. Several strategies are used to ease the transition from high school to college helping to ensure student achievement and success. These strategies include small class sizes, an emphasis on collaborative learning, a student mentorship program, internship opportunities with local business and industry, and active student organizations focused on professional development in computer science and mathematics. The program is resulting in increased numbers of students electing to major in the targeted disciplines doc14916 none The investigators will study short period gravity waves using data from a clustered set of instruments, including an all-sky imager, a Rayleigh lidar, a Doppler interferometer, and a meteor radar. Short period gravity waves oscillations contribute significantly to the dynamics in the 80 to 150 km altitude region of Earth s atmosphere. Several important parameters are responsible for wave propagations, such as local temperature and wind velocity. Information about these parameters is needed to describe fully and to understand more thoroughly the wave propagation conditions. This study uses co-located instruments capable of making such measurements along with data analysis and numerical modeling. The instruments are located in the vicinity of the Millstone Hill Observatory in Massachusetts. The joint measurements will be used to investigate the relationship between the occurrence of monochromatic gravity waves in the nighttime mesospheric sodium and oxygen emissions and the simultaneous temperature and wind structure. The results are important for understanding dynamical processes in the middle atmosphere and how they are influenced by the temperature and composition of the atmosphere doc14917 none The Texas Rural Systemic Initiative (TRSI) currently has 450 Teacher Partners roughly divided into 5 regions. The Leadership Development Project intends to select 15 members of this group to give them three years of training to become Leadership Fellows. The group will be diverse in geography (around the state, distributed among the regions), area of expertise (science or mathematics) and grade level (elementary or secondary). The members will commit to the three-years of training up-front. Given the dire need for science and mathematics teachers, especially in rural areas, the Leadership Project opted not to seek the release of teachers from the classroom any more than necessary. The potential Leadership Fellows would participate in the TRSI Leadership Academy for the 3 years. They would be required to participate each year in three four-day intensive sessions, and in addition a one-week summer session at the Texas A & M campus in Corpus Christie. These leadership sessions would emphasize leadership strands as well as major topics associated with systemic reform. The Fellows will form regional groups mentored by regional science and mathematics specialists. The Fellows will be under a learn, implement, share dictum, and thus will be encouraged to communicate with and support each other, especially within regional groups. Electronic communication on a regular basis will be encouraged. There will be a TRSI Leadership Fellows Advisory Board and each of the Fellows will select an advisor from this board. Under the guide of this advisor, the Leader will work on a Fellowship Project with the intent of impacting their school or district. The first year each Fellow will develop their project, which will be implemented in each of the following two years of the project. The evaluator for the Texas RSI will act in the same function for the Leadership Academy. The main source of dissemination is intended to be the Fellows themselves-both through their pronouncement of learn, implement, share, and their expected return to the Leadership Academy to help train future leaders doc14918 none The Emerging Mathematics, Engineering and Technology Scholars program supports students who major in computer science, mathematics, engineering, or technology. Students are chosen based on merit and need. The program provides enhanced advising and financial support to assist in recruitment and retention. The scholars join the NSF HBCU-UP, MARC (Minority Access to Research Careers) and NASA scholars in the Emerging Caribbean Scientists (ECS) program for monthly meetings which provide a support group for the students doc14919 none The Connecticut College NSF Math and Computer Science Scholarship Program has three primary objectives: to enhance both the quantity and quality of students entering our existing math and computer science program, especially those from under-represented minorities such as women and students of color; to increase retention of students who are enrolled in the math and computer science programs through extensive support services and through programs which increase the knowledge and skills of the students; and to expand the number of high school students considering math and computer science as career options by encouraging the scholarship students to become leaders and role models. The scholarship program specifically targets high school students, especially women and ethnic and racial minorities, with an interest in or an aptitude for math and computer science. Students in this program are mentored by faculty advisors in their field and by alumni or others in the local community with related careers. The students obtain applied skills through participation in internships, independent studies, and math practicums. In addition, they present results of their work at conferences, open houses, and to others outside the department. They learn leadership and teaching skills through work-study appointments in the Math and Computer Science Help Centers or in Information Services, as well as from the experience of mentoring incoming students. Finally, students in this program are guided toward appropriate job placement or graduate school by career counselors doc14920 none The Computer Science and Mathematics Majors Scholars Corps Program is a four-year plan to encourage and enable academically talented but financially needy students to enter the high technology workforce following completion of a baccalaureate degree in computer science or mathematics at Elizabeth City State University. The project includes establishing and institutionalizing a pre-second year summer program for computer science and mathematics majors; supporting faculty and students to engage in mentoring, research, and internship activities on campus and at industry sites, providing tailored and enhanced academic support services, and providing coordinated career counseling and job placement services. This four-year project incorporates and builds on existing strengths, addresses deficiencies, and ensures that the 75 scholarship recipients are well prepared for mathematics and computer science related careers doc14921 none This program attracts and retains financially needy mathematics and computer science students, with particular attention focused on those students in under-represented groups; establishes connections with businesses that recruit and employ Truman s math and computer science graduates through a variety of activities including on-site visits to the businesses; provides a supportive atmosphere, including assisting in the formation of learning communities among CSEMS scholars, mentoring, and personal tutoring; and helps participants to develop an interest and appreciation for mathematics and computer science by introducing them to experts and outstanding speakers in the field. Faculty coordinate and oversee all activities relating to the program doc14922 none This scholarship program serves engineering students with strong academic and leadership potential. A pre-college summer program introduces prospective students to medical applications of engineering. The orientation program, designed and facilitated by student leaders, facilitates academic success and social success and assists in identifying support systems in the work setting. A team of industry representatives assists in mentoring student employees and an e-mail mentor network connects incoming students to graduates of Kettering University doc14923 none This program provides support for students pursuing baccalaureate and graduate degrees in electrical and computer engineering or computer science to prepare for careers in information science, engineering, and technology. Each ISET scholar has a faculty mentor who plays a key role in promoting scholarship and career development. Scholars are engaged in the research activities of the Center for Advanced Computation and Telecommunications (CACT), the Algorithms Laboratory, and other IT Labs at the University of Massachusetts Lowell doc14924 none This program provides scholarships to academically talented but financially needy students, including those from under-represented groups, to enable them to pursue degrees in computer science, engineering and mathematics. Project components include: recruitment; selection; financial assistance; student support services including mentoring; and professional development of the scholarship recipients, including research and internship opportunities. Attention is given to improving students educational experiences through technology utilization, connections to the work environment, improved support programs, and strengthening industry partnerships doc14925 none Fifteen students majoring in computer science or software engineering are receiving scholarships annually. These academically-talented students are financially needy and the scholarships are allowing them to undertake fulltime study. The university in cooperation with local business and industry is providing internship and cooperative work experiences, career guidance and opportunities, reviews of software projects and honors theses, and classroom discussion regarding real world practices. These activities are improving the academic and professional performance of the scholars and increasing the number of students continuing on to graduate school doc14926 none Piedmont Technical College s project increases enrollment, retention and graduation rates in associate degree programs in computer technology, science, engineering, and mathematics (CSEM) for low-income, academically talented students, particularly those from under-represented populations. This is accomplished through the provision of targeted, comprehensive academic support services, coupled with up to 30 scholarship awards per year. PTC CSEM Scholars are recruited in partnership with school districts and community agencies, with an emphasis on populations that are typically under-represented in CSEM fields. The project also includes the creation of a student ambassador corps to assist in recruitment of high school students, targeted supplementary peer tutoring for students in barrier courses, and peer mentoring by senior CSEM students for students enrolled in developmental courses doc14927 none The project would work with teachers who are involved in the RSI reform. It would provide professional development opportunities to the teachers in the RSI schools, and would develop a sustainable leadership component for the central Appalachian region. These activities are strongly aligned with the goals of the RSI project. The professional development offered to teachers would be heavily content-oriented, with some pedagogical training doc14928 none The project goal is to offer a variety of academic services to low-income college students from under-represented groups to enable them to complete a bachelor s degree and compete in the work force as professionals or continue graduate studies in computer science or electronic engineering technology. The services that the project provides to achieve this goal include scholarship stipends; a program of scholarly activities to prepare students to carry out research; an individual research project; seminars, and other educational activities; tutoring; academic counseling; motivational activities; internship in industry; and activities to assist participants in securing admission to and financial assistance for enrollment in graduate programs, especially in computer science and electronics engineering technology. The one-hundred twenty students selected for the project will be students who are academically talented, have potential to succeed in their studies, but have not had the opportunity to develop their talents and potential due to economic and other limitations doc14929 none The PI proposes to investigate oxygen atom reactions on dust and ice surfaces characteristic of particles in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere (MLT). Atomic oxygen is the most abundant reactive species in this altitude range, and its reactions on and with surfaces may contribute significantly to the chemistry in the MLT. Ice particles present in the mesosphere are observed as noctilucent clouds (NLCs), polar mesospheric clouds (PMCs), and polar mesospheric summer echoes (PMSEs). The initial reaction to be studied is the heterogeneous recombination of atomic oxygen on ice under conditions representative of the mesosphere (80-90 km) -a phenomenon suggested by recent rocket measurement of atomic oxygen profiles during NLC events. Other heterogeneous reaction schemes suggested in the literature that involve oxygen atom reactions with hydrogen molecules, oxygen molecules, and ice surfaces will then be explored. This proposal was submitted by the PI, Dr. Jochen Marschall, for James E. Boulter, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Colorado, Boulder doc14930 none This program provides academic and financial support to talented low-income students in applied computer science, mathematics, and industrial computer systems. Program objectives include expanding the professional development opportunities for students, strengthening partnerships between the university and employment sectors related to the targeted disciplines, and retaining project students at a rate that exceeds the retention of non-project students in the same disciplines. Student support structures include group meetings, faculty mentors for scholars, involvement in professional organizations, industrial internships, and shadowing of working professionals in industry doc14931 none This project was developed as a result of a technology and science planning process that Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College (FDLTCC) initiated in and is still continuing. This planning effort involved a large number of college and community stakeholder groups and provided both the underlying concepts for this proposal as well as the outline for specific curriculum programs and hardware software infrastructure needs. The project proposed has several interrelated elements. High performance computing assets, including Internet2 hookup, cluster installation, and visualization panels, are put into place to support both curriculum and research agendas. The research agenda is centered in ongoing research efforts at the college in environmental science, soil mapping, computational science, and information technology (IT). The research effort is designed to provide students with experience in research, experience with the collaborative research environment, and experimential activities related to what they are studying. The grant also proposes to build a partnership with the University of Minnesota s Laboratory for Computational Science and Engineering, both to provide help with constructing the high performance infrastructure, as well as a research agenda that will involve students in computational science, physics, and other SMET-related curriculum areas. Other collaborative efforts will be implemented with current partners involved in FDLTCC research projects. At the proposed project s heart are curriculum development and implementation activities designed to not only build on the enhanced research projects, but to also initiate new SMET degrees. Research with FDLTCC s target student population has indicated that these degrees and a one-year certificate program will increase the number of Native American students majoring in SMET-related programs. These degrees are all designed to launch a new curriculum track design, which provides a core of Information Technology courses that students can use to build either baccalaureate or associate degrees in a number of different disciplines. The degrees and certificate initiated through the project will include: A GIS GPS certificate which can be earned in conjunction with the environmental science, computer science, and law enforcement associate degrees; a baccalaureate in computer science with the IT core; an associate degree in E-Crime and Computer Security that can be earned with the IT core, the GIS GPS certificate, and the college s current Minnesota Transfer or Law Enforcement associate degrees in order to complete the requirements for a baccalaureate. The new IT core will also be available to baccalaureate students in Elementary Education at FDLTCC. By the end of the grant, enrollment in these curriculum areas will support continuation of each program based on the timetable described in the grant. The last two elements of the grant include the plan to develop an associate degree online for students located at FDLTCC s Augsburg Offsite program that serves the Native American community in St. Paul Minneapolis. This effort will also use the high performance computing resources built through the project. SMET related faculty and staff development activities are also included designed to increase IT sophistication at FDLTCC as well as to increase the number of MS and Ph.D.-qualified faculty in SMET-related areas doc14932 none Building the Technology Workforce in Indiana: Undergraduate Scholarships in Information Technology, Computer Science, and Electronic and Computer Technology This project provides thirty-two scholarships to academically talented low-income students enrolled in a newly created Information Technology degree program, or in existing and highly regarded programs in Computer Science, and Electronic and Computer Technology. As part of the program, scholars are embraced in a unique First Year learning community designed to provide academic and social support to ensure their continued success toward their degree and in the university environment. Faculty advisor mentors build relationships with the scholars, providing critical support as they monitor and guide. Internships with high tech industry partners offer scholars valuable career related experiences. Placement of graduating scholars in the workplace is facilitated through workshops and individual assistance. The program incorporates a wide range of student support services aimed to improve scholarship, retention to graduation, and successful employment in appropriate high technology careers. PROPOSAL NO.: PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: INSTITUTION NAME: TITLE: NSF RECEIVED DATE: Easton, Richard Indiana State University Building the Technology Workforce in Indiana: NSF Undergraduate Scholarships in Information Technology, Computer Science, MIS, and Electronic and Compu 05 01 doc14933 none This program is a multi-faceted approach to retain and graduate talented, but financially needy, juniors and seniors in mechanical engineering, civil engineering, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, engineering administration, computer-aided drafting and design technology, mathematics and computer science and to assist them with career placement. The project builds on well-established academic support services, a mentoring program, career services and placement, established and thriving cooperative education and internship programs, and industrial partnerships through industrial advisory boards and research projects. The student support structure includes mentoring by both faculty and industry representatives through learning communities, as well as synchronous and asynchronous on-line conversations among scholars, faculty, and industry representatives doc14934 none This program provides scholarships for students pursuing degrees in mathematics, electrical engineering technology, mechanical engineering technology, pre-engineering, and computer science. Technology Scholars are supported through a series of orientations, seminars, mentoring activities, internships, and other special events to ensure that they persist in their educational and career goals. Scholars develop experiential knowledge of job prospects in high technology fields and establish valuable connections with other professionals, prospective employers, and higher education representatives. Scholars maintain an on-line personal growth portfolio that is monitored by faculty advisors doc14935 none This program provides financial and academic support for students in marine engineering technology, marine engineering technology with license option and maritime systems engineering. Students from eight especially diverse high schools in the Houston Galveston area are recruited to participate in the program as entering freshmen, and are tracked as a cohort over the four year duration. Selection of participants is based on an application process reviewed by a selection committee and is competitive based on standard criteria including financial need and merit. The program provides specialized diagnostic testing, tutoring, supplemental instruction, mentoring and career services to help them successfully persist, graduate and find employment or pursue a graduate degree in the engineering field. A summer bridge workshop in mathematics is a critical element in preparing the entering students doc14936 none Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute (SIPI) in partnership with the National Science Foundation will increase the number of Native Americans matriculating into science, mathematics, engineering and technology (SMET) baccalaureate programs and or entering the science and technology workforce. This will be accomplished through a comprehensive program, irVision-21le which includes: a) curriculum development in calculus, physics and chemistry; b) standards-based faculty development in problem-solving instructional strategies and in the use of instructional technologies; c) two-year student experiences in research; and, c) an expanded program for networking professionals leading to industry certification to address the need for information technology workers in Native American communities. The project is designed to improve student-learning outcomes in calculus, physics, and chemistry. Students will participate in inquiry-based learning strategies delivered through a technology-enriched curriculum that is delivered facilitated by a skilled faculty. Native American undergraduates will also participate in meaningful research experiences that will lead to improved diverse career opportunities, particularly in the SMET fields. Students will learn and write about the research process, and develop presentations for professional student forums. This is a learning experience that is rarely afforded to two-year undergraduates. Finally to address the need for certified information technology professionals in the U.S., and especially among Tribal Nations, SIPI will expand its networking training program, allowing for industry certification. Project staff in collaboration with faculty will develop an extensive evaluation and assessment program. Staff will encourage and monitor student enrollment and success in college courses that will prepare students for science, mathematics, engineering and technology careers. Curricula products will be packaged and shared with Native serving institutions, and evaluation and assessment results will be electronically disseminated doc14937 none The PIs propose to use astronomical sky spectra to investigate the terrestrial nightglow under solar maximum conditions, and in the declining phase of solar cycle 23. The work is directly relevant to the goal of improving our understanding of solar-terrestrial interactions, as outlined in the phase III agenda of the CEDAR program. From limited data collected in , they have identified most of the Rydberg transitions from atomic oxygen in the visible and near-infrared regions of the spectrum. Except for the lines at 777.4 and 844.6 nm, these emissions have not previously been seen in the nightglow. Of two types of Rydberg transitions, triplets and quintets, the quintets have been little studied even in the laboratory, yet they tend to be the stronger in the sky spectra. The PIs will compare both triplets and quintets against theoretical calculations, with the goals of (1) using the observed intensities as a relative intensity calibration standard and (2) determining variability in the triplets as a consequence of radiation trapping doc14938 none The scholarship program is structured to support 32 minority and or female student participants. Scholars are selected from students who have or will receive associate degrees in science and technology from appropriate programs and who express intent to major in one of the CSEMS disciplines. Students are recruited primarily, but not exclusively, from the local state community college(s) participating in articulation agreement(s) with Southern University. Scholars are selected based on financial need and academic achievement. Students are co-advised by academic mentors. They participate in structured mentoring programs and various student development seminars workshops, register with the SU Career Services Office, and participate in Career Services-offered career workshops. The scholarship program helps improve retention rates for capable students citing financial difficulties as reasons not to complete bachelor s degrees in CSEMS fields. Retention will also improve due to better preparedness of students having received needed remedial instruction before they come to the four-year college doc14939 none Project . The Centennial Scholars Project is allowing students with high academic potential and financial need to benefit from a laboratory-intensive curriculum providing hands-on education, partnerships with industry, and access to senior faculty in small classes. Twenty-nine scholarships of $3,125 each are being awarded annually to students majoring in mathematics, industrial and manufacturing engineering, mechanical engineering, or computer science. The majority of the scholarships are two-year awards for freshmen; these scholarships are automatically renewed providing the students maintain eligibility. A special emphasis is placed on assisting the scholars in overcoming points of unusually high attrition (normally the first five quarters of enrollment for freshmen and the first year for transfer students) more successfully than a demographically comparable group. The support services available include mentoring by alumni with industry experience, supplemental instruction in mathematics and physics, prioritized access to academic enrichment resources, and opportunities for hands-on research. PROPOSAL NO.: PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: INSTITUTION NAME: TITLE: NSF RECEIVED DATE: Patton, Linda California Polytechnic State University Foundation Centennial Scholars: Access to Learn by Doing Polytechnic Education NSF Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Scholarships Program 05 01 doc14940 none The Academic Success Project (ASP) for Engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics combines academic courses with supplemental instruction and guidance, field trips to businesses and universities, lab tutoring and mentoring programs, guest speakers, and access to an intensive summer program for designed to help mathematics, engineering, and science majors stay on-target with their studies, as well as to become familiar with the 4-year college environment doc14941 none This project supports undergraduate students in computer science and mathematics through scholarships, mentoring, internships, research experience, conference participation and other activities. The project provides four scholarships each academic year: two for lower division students, and two for upper division students. Scholarships are awarded to students with demonstrated financial need on the basis of academic record, professional promise, and character. Scholarship recipients are encouraged to take advantage of various opportunities in the Math and Computer Science Departments that will be enhanced by this project. Students obtain professional training through internship programs with local high technology companies, participation in research with faculty members, and attendance at seminars and professional meetings. Scholars receive support and mentoring by faculty, and are provided additional activities and mentoring opportunities specially designed to meet the needs of female students. Leadership skills are developed through community service, teaching assignments (both within the Department and in the local area), and administration of the annual mathematics contest for high school students. Scholarship recipients are expected to take leadership roles in community-building activities sponsored by the Department doc14942 none The investigators will use observations from the Atmospheric Lidar Observatory at Utah State University to study the temperature structure of the mesosphere and lower thermosphere. A recent upgrade to the lidar has increased the sensitivity of the system by a factor of 30. The first task is to continue and extend ongoing research that involves comparison of measured temperatures with those computed using a first-principles model. Resolution of discrepancies will reveal information about the role of gravity waves and chemistry in heating, and the effects of the large-scale circulation pattern. The second task is to relate processes occurring below 80 km altitude with processes at higher altitudes where measurements have not been possible before. The third task is to look for effects of stratospheric winds and waves in the lower thermosphere. Finally, the lidar will be used to look for further evidence of noctilucent cloud formation at mid-latitudes. Previously confined to high latitudes only, the appearance of a noctilucent cloud over Utah in June of may be an indication of cooler mesospheric temperatures caused by global climate change doc14943 none Arizona State University College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS) NSF CEAS Collaborative Interdisciplinary Research Community (CIRC) Scholars Program This project provides 40 scholarships to talented low-income students majoring in computer science and engineering. The program called the Collaborative Interdisciplinary Research Community (CIRC) Scholars Program, includes a CIRC Academic Enrichment Program and the Research Orientation Workshops (ROW) Program. This project enables ASU to recruit and to retain high quality students with financial need who, without this support, might not be able to continue their education on a full time basis. The focus of the recruitment is on students of junior or higher standing and transfer students, but also includes some sophomores and some graduate students with special financial needs. Underrepresented minority students in computer science and engineering (African American, Hispanic, Native American, and women) are especially recruited for these scholarships. The College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS) at ASU has a well, established infrastructure to support the project. Key to the support of the scholars, is the requirement to participate in an Academic Enrichment Program that includes workshops on study skills and close mentoring and monitoring by ASU staff and faculty, as well as the Research Orientation Workshops (ROW) Program, which concentrates on research and graduate school. Scholars are also offered the opportunity to participate in one of ASU s high profile research groups in the CEAS. PROPOSAL NO.: PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: INSTITUTION NAME: TITLE: NSF RECEIVED DATE: Anderson-Rowland, Mary Arizona State University Department of Collaborative Interdisciplinary Research Community (CIRC) 05 01 doc14944 none The Hutlee Umyuarchdelee proposal (Athabascan Yupik words for leader, boss, a good thinker)is a five-year project based on a hybrid of models with proven success in educating minoritystudents. The project will include academic enhancement for gatekeeper math and sciencecourses integrating active learning pedagogies, intensive sessions, and relevant ways of learningfor Native students. To sustain student success the project will provide faculty sponsorship, vigilant student support skills, incorporate a Master Learner curriculum to strengthen students-social contexts, and integrate job shadowing and internships with industry and Native organizations. The Interior-Aleutians Campus and Bristol Bay Campus service area comprises 235,000 squaremiles and 74% Native population. Less than .5% of the students enrolling through these two campuses are full time students. Recruiting students from 90 (of Alaska s 220) villages, this project proposes to enroll five cohorts in a two-year village-based program. Through course work and intensive weeklong sessions during the semester as well as intensive math summer sessions, student cohorts will build an academic learning community. This learning community will carry on after students complete project coursework and transition to urban-based four-year SMET degree programs. Strategic goals of this project are: To increase Alaska Native participation and success in SMET degree gatekeeper courses. To significantly increase the number of Alaska Native students who pursue baccalaureate degrees in SMET disciplines or enter SMET careers. To develop a collaborative program among the University of Alaska Campuses, industry, and Tribal organizations to strengthen SMET academic infrastructure for Alaska Native students. To provide faculty and students with the tools and education to actively use technology in academic courses. The Hutlee Umyuarchdelee method of delivering gatekeeper math and science courses will include curricular enhancements that employ active learning pedagogies and include a holistic pedagogical philosophy. Methods of curricular enhancements are: Additional faculty contact time extending math courses from three to five days by adding math labs which integrate methods for active learning such as hands-on manipulatives. Six and eight weeks summer math intensives with relevant industry internships. Weeklong semester-based intensive sessions that integrate academics, problem solving, and Master Learner curricular activities. Building a student cohort academic learning community. Potential impacts of the Hutlee Umyuarchdelee project are: To develop SMET knowledgeable Alaska Native engineers. To develop SMET knowledgeable Alaska Native leaders who will participate in making decisions about tribal lands that will forever change the lifestyles, economics, and existence of rural Alaskan communities. To develop curricula and a delivery model which will impact not only students and communities affected though this program, extend to other SMET students in different geographical areas doc14945 none Oglala Lakota College (OLC) is a tribally controlled and community governed four-year academic institution with students located in ten college centers across the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota (SD). The student base is approximately 90% American Indian. As one of six NSF-designated Model Institutions for Excellence (MIE), OLC has developed the infrastructure to offer Science, Engineering, Math and Technology (SMET) degrees and increase the number of Native Americans continuing on to graduate school. We currently have general collaboration agreements with the SD School of Mines & Technology (SDSM&T) and SD State University. Since , the MIE Program at OLC has developed five new accredited degrees in the SMET areas. Presently the Oglala Lakota Nation is forced to outsource all analytical work to off- reservation labs due to the lack of qualified facilities and expertise. Our long-term goal is to train a pool of highly skilled scientists and lab technicians who will serve their communities as self-employed entrepreneurs or hired employees. Also, one of the major shortcomings of our SMET programs is the lack of lab facilities with modern analytical equipment. This creates a disadvantage for our students at every level of their career. We propose a multifaceted approach to develop the technological infrastructure of our institution and the reservation as a whole. We will build a research center housing several federal and state certified labs that will provide us with the capacity to conduct research and routine analytical work in the areas of chemistry, environmental science, and biology. Collaboration agreements with three faculty members at SDSM&T and Black Hills State University in these areas are procured for this proposal. We will actively seek partnerships with tribal agencies to provide research and analytic services. This insures that a significant portion of the funding allocated by tribal agencies would be re-infused into the reservation economy. This would also sustain the project beyond NSF funding. Our faculty and students will be trained on the equipment by the collaborators and through industrial short courses, workshops and seminars. Both collaborators and faculty will initiate research projects involving our students utilizing the new equipment. We will strengthen our curriculum by developing new analytical lab classes and by enhancing existing sciencecourses. Finally, students and faculty will reach out to reservation communities to help them address their concerns about economic development and the environment. Students and faculty will also teach SMET classes at reservation schools and will open up the labs for teachers and students to stimulate scientific knowledge and curiosity doc14946 none This award supports the United States contribution to the Past Global Changes (PAGES) International Project Office (IPO) in Bern, Switzerland. PAGES is one of several scientific programs that operates under the broad umbrella of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP). Operated as a partnership between the US National Science Foundation and the Swiss National Science Foundation, the PAGES program has enabled the collaboration of international teams of scientists and students from developed and developing nations on projects searching for answers to critical questions in paleoclimate science. The specific responsibilities of the IPO include organizing meetings and workshops, publishing peer-reviewed manuscripts and books, producing newsletters, and maintaining and facilitating contacts among international scientists. The scientific data generated by PAGES-coordinated research projects are readily available through various publicly accessible databases including those of the National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) in Boulder, Colorado operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In addition, PAGES actively seeks participation in research projects by scientists in developing countries thereby enabling technological transfer and capacity building within the scientific community doc14947 none This project builds on the PI s research in computational geometry, a branch of computer science with deep mathematical roots and ties to many applications areas, including computer graphics, robotics, and manufacturing. The PI s recent research on folding and unfolding, is a topic brimming with easily comprehended unsolved mathematical problems, and with connections to protein folding, to manufacturing by sheet metal bending, and to a host of other application areas. This project aims to incorporate the latest research in this developing area into educational levels from grade school through graduate school and industrial research: origami constructions in grade school, creating folding toys in middle school, a two-week summer high school course, a new interdisciplinary college course, Folding and Unfolding in Engineering touching on topics from design of the Space Shuttle robotic arms to automotive air bag unfurling, an academic monograph readable at several levels, and software addressing industrial needs. The goal of the project is to communicate the depth of frontier research, the joy of exploring it and its practical usefulness, to all these different constituencies, capitalizing on the rare accessibility of the research doc14948 none This award supports theoretical research on strongly correlated electron systems, focusing on high temperature superconductors and quantum Hall systems. Research focuses on three areas: (1) The PI takes the view that underdoped high temperature superconductors have a non-fermi liquid metallic state that exhibits spin-charge separation. Research will focus on holon dynamics and the properties of a non-condensing quantum degenerate holon gas. The transition to the superconducting state will be studied with the aim of understanding how the superconducting transition is related to spin-charge recombination and how coherent quasiparticles can grow out of incoherent spinons and holons. The transition to the striped phase will also be studied; this is expected not to be a usual CDW transition. (2) The PI plans to develop a more complete theory of fractional quantum Hall states, with an aim to elucidate the mathematical structure of topological order. The chiral operator product algebra will be examined to see if it could form the basis of a general theory of topological order. It is expected that a deeper understanding of topological order will enable the calculation of the physical properties of non-Abelian fractional quantum Hall states and so enable their identification in experiments. (3) The PI plans to study continuous phase transitions between topological orders. Continuous phase transitions can occur between clean fractional quantum Hall states as long as these states contain neutral quasiparticles. The properties of the critical point depend on the topological orders of the two states involved and so, provide a useful way to study topological order experimentally. The PI plans to find general effective theories for continuous topological phase transitions and to understand the close relation between the topological order and the critical theory. The PI will also explore how neutral gapless excitations at the critical point interact with surface acoustic phonons and other experimental probes. %%% This award supports theoretical research on strongly correlated electron systems with a particular focus on high temperature superconductors and quantum Hall systems. The PI plans to use advanced theoretical methods to understand the nature of a proposed exotic metallic state of the high temperature superconductors and the nature of the phase transition from this state to the superconducting state. The metallic state is unlike that of an ordinary metal and the transition to superconductivity may differ qualitatively from that which occurs in well-understood superconductors. The PI will also study fractional quantum Hall states that exhibit internal order. A kind of continuous phase transition can occur between two such states with the same symmetry. The PI intends to develop a more comprehensive theory of these states and the phase transitions that can occur among them. This research contributes to fundamental understanding of strongly correlated electron materials doc14949 none The major objective of this program is to increase the overall number of graduates in computer science and mathematics coming from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. We are especially interested in increasing the opportunities for students from the Northwest North Carolina region to pursue a degree in computer science or mathematical sciences. In order to achieve this goal, we are improving the student support infrastructure available for the CSEMS scholars community, and building partnerships with regional high technology industries. Scholars in the program participate in a variety of activities and use support services designed to achieve program goals. Community building is by participation in Freshmen Learning Communities, membership in student organizations like ACM and MAA student chapters, and departmental receptions and seminars. Academic success is bolstered through faculty mentors, lab tutors, and the extensive university support services. Through the Cooperative Education program, the Computer Science Industry Advisory Board, and ASU s Career Development Center, scholars are positioned to take advantage of a variety of employment opportunities in the high technology workforce doc14950 none This program provides scholarships to talented, low-income students enrolled in the Computational Mathematics Program (CMP). The Humacao Research Scholarship (HRS) program uses existing programs to recruit high school students and provide them with academic support. The program uses undergraduate research as a strategy to increase student academic achievement and retention and to establish mentorship relations. This strategy has proved to be successful in the CMP. A summer bridge program is offered to HRS students admitted from high school to the CMP. Another component of the program are workshops, which cover topics such as careers in the mathematical sciences and information on graduate programs. Faculty coordinate and oversee all activities relating to the program doc14951 none The 21st Century Scholars Program is providing scholarships for students studying in the areas of computer science, mathematics and engineering (CSEM). This important program provides a vital link between the workforce needs of Danville s employers and a pool of potential employees in need of the resources to gain vital skills. Objectives are to (a) provide financial assistance for students to earn an associate s degree in a CSEM field and (b) allow area residents to prepare for jobs in the areas that impact the local economy doc14952 none Staehelin This award supports a two-year collaborative research project between Professor Andrew Staehelin of the University of Colorado, Boulder and Professor Yoshinobu Mineyuki of Hiroshima University in Japan. The researchers will undertake a study of the involvement of clathrin-coated vesicles in preprophase band formation in plants. This is part of a larger ongoing research effort to produce a 3-D structural database of the cytokinetic apparatus of plant cells at a resolution of 6nm. To produce this database, cells and tissues will be high-pressure frozen and freeze-substituted, and then reconstructed from dual-axis tomograms. The preprophase band (PPB) of cortical MTs, the focus of this study, defines a plasma membrane zone that becomes depleted of cortical actin filaments and serves as the site where the cell plate links up with the parental wall. Preliminary studies have shown that ultra rapid freezing freeze-substitution techniques can not only provide exceptionally clear images of cortical MTs and MFs in the PPB zone, including images depicting the dynamic state of individual MTs, but also that forming PPB regions contain increased numbers of clathrin-coated pits and vesicles, suggestive of an increased amount of endocytosis and membrane recycling. Although clathrin-coated pits have been seen previously in electron micrographs of PPBs, the idea of endocytosis being an important element of PPB formation has not been investigated to date. However, based on the initial findings, endocytosis could play an important role in PPB formation. The researchers goals are: 1) to determine if the number of clathrin-coated pits and vesicles increases in the plasma membrane zones involved in PPB narrowing and formation; 2) to determine the spatial relationship between these pits and vesicles to MTs and MFs; and 3) to show that these clathrin-coated pits and vesicles are involved in endocytosis. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. Results of the research could determine how PPBs are formed and what drives the narrowing of the cortical tubule array into a PPB. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of the research in scientific journals and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc14953 none This award, provided by the Office of Polar Programs (OPP) of the National Science Foundation (NSF), provides support for U.S. participation in an international workshop and associated planning activities of the Antarctic Neotectonics (ANTEC) initiative. The goal of the ANTEC program is to improve understanding of the unique character of the neotectonic regime of the Antarctic plate, including measurement of, and discrimination between, glacial and tectonic kinematic signals, mapping the structure of the Antarctic lithosphere and asthenosphere, investigating the stress field and seismotectonic features of the Antarctic plate, and understanding the nature of coupling between tectonics, climate and erosion. A workshop at the Certosa di Pontignano, Siena, Italy, will bring together scientists active in Antarctic neotectonics research to assess the current status of neotectonic research programs, and to develop a detailed science plan for future research. Nearly 45% of the research projects currently funded by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of NSF-OPP are either focused directly on, or are pertinent to, Antarctic neotectonic science themes. Consequently, broad representation of the U.S. research community at the ANTEC workshop is important. Funds provided by this award will support U.S. participation in the workshop and will cover costs associated with dissemination of the workshop results through publication of a workshop report, a brochure summarizing the ANTEC initiative, and via the ANTEC web site doc14954 none The goal of this scholarship project is to help produce additional computer science graduates to meet industry demands. Computer science graduates from the college have been successful in both industry and graduate school, and the college has a very strong relationship with the local technology-related industry. The curriculum in computer science has been evaluated and refined recently by both internal and external reviewers and shown to produce high quality graduates. Students also have the opportunity to participate in a variety of service activities, including community service. The program is producing graduates who are making a contribution to the computing profession by maintaining high standards and a rigorous curriculum that has evolved with the changes in the discipline. Programs like this project are enabling the college to further leverage the almost 20 year investment in computer science by increasing retention and enrollment doc14955 none Purchase College, State University of New York (SUNY) is unlike many institutions of higher education in the U.S. because it has outstanding Mathematics Computer Science and New Media technology undergraduate research programs that serve a combined total of 60% economically disadvantaged students, 30% minority students, 29% women, and 5% disabled. These programs successfully place graduates in the high technology workforce or graduate school. They also maintain strong partnerships with other local colleges and high technology industry. Due to these strengths, Purchase has established a consortium with Dutchess Community College (DCC), Orange County Community College (OCCC), Rockland Community College (RCC), Westchester Community College (WCC), IBM, Modem Media, and seven successful Purchase programs that serve economically disadvantaged and under-represented minority students. The Consortium, with Purchase as its leader, is developing and implementing a Mathematics, Computer Science and Technology Pipeline Scholarship Program. The specific objectives of the Program are: 1. To recruit 30 academically talented, economically disadvantaged, under-represented minority, women, and disabled students into AA, AS, AAS, and BA degree programs in mathematics, computer science and technology. 2. To provide research opportunities and academic and financial support for 100% of program participants to increase their retention to degree achievement. 3. To assist 100% of degree recipients with job graduate school placement in the fields of mathematics, computer science and technology. 4. To increase collaborative arrangements among associate and baccalaureate degree-granting institutions and the local high technology industry. 5. To assess, document, and disseminate the effectiveness of 100% of the proposed activities implemented through this model Pipeline Scholarship Program. This Program will be managed by Principle Investigator (PI) Dr. Peter Ohring, in cooperation with six Co-PIs and a Steering Committee consisting of representatives from each of the five Consortium institutions and local high technology industry. The PI will oversee publicity, student recruitment and selection, monitoring of student progress, financial administration, and Program assessment. The Co-PIs will coordinate student support programs and services. Concluding the four-year grant cycle, a total of 120 students will receive AA, AS, AAS, or BA degrees, and be placed in the mathematics, computer science, and technology workforce or graduate programs doc14956 none The mission of Northwest Indian College (NWIC) is to provide post-secondary educational opportunities for Native Americans that is sensitive to their worldviews, background, and academic needs and goals, and prepare them for the challenges of leadership in their tribal communities. In addition to providing effective opportunities for students to develop academic competence, the NWIC mission is to infuse students with clear communication skills, critical thinking skills, and a developed sense of civic responsibility. The Northwest Indian College Division of Math and Science is proposing implementation of a SMET learning community educational plan that begins with entering freshman and supports them through to the completion of an AA or AS degree. The first-year goal of this program would be to generate student interest and growth toward further education in math and science. Building on this foundation, the overall goal would be to have these students then obtain associates and baccalaureate degrees in science or math-related fields. The first year would be a developmental year for students whose test scores indicate that this is necessary. (Note: The majority of students entering NWIC would have test scores reflecting this need. It is often the lack of a growth or preparation period that contributes to student failure in math and science.) During the first year, the plan would be as follows: Each eligible student would enter into an integrated academic group or cohort. A testing specialist would evaluate math and science competencies for each student. All students would be enrolled in the following courses: Public Speaking, Introduction to Computers, Native American History Philosophy, and Introduction to Successful Learning during fall quarter and throughout their first (or developmental) year. These courses, which are required for graduation from Northwest Indian College, would be fully integrated among each other while also being integrated with introductory science and math courses in which students are placed according to their initial test scores. Example: The cohort would be assigned a relevant science topic such as iswater quality.lo Individually and as a group, students would research the topic, using math to compute statistics, the Internet to find background material and group discussions to enhance individual research. Students would give oral and written presentations using the principles discussed in the cohort instruction. (Note: A somewhat different form of this schedule and approach has been used successfully with our NSF funded Tribal Environmental and Natural Resource Management program (TENRM). The result has been much higher than average retention and completion for students lacking needed skills.) By combining required courses where NWIC students typically do well (i.e. Speech), with developmental science and math courses, students will be more likely to successfully complete essential coursework for graduation. Northwest Indian College students have demonstrated they must be immersed in their culture, history, and philosophy if they are to effectively understand and build upon their role inthe Native communities. The college knows they must also develop the science and math skills necessary to help their culture survive and intends to meet these needs by offering introductory science and math courses fully integrated with curriculum related to Native culture, history, and philosophy. As they build increased self-esteem while finding success in the classroom, students will recognize their capacity to do science and math. They will then feel comfortable pursuing further science and math-related courses as they eventually enter baccalaureate programs and the SMET workforce doc14957 none The purpose of this planning grant is to conduct an assessment of Dull Knife Memorial College s SMET curriculum and infrastructure in order to develop an institutional SMET action plan that will be used as the basis for a full TCUP grant to be submitted by May . In addition, the College will develop assessment instruments to determine the effectiveness of its SMET instructional programs and to develop a system to track SMET graduates that transfer to 4-year colleges and universities. The planning period will be for 12 months and will include three phases: Phase 1 (October 1, - December 15, ) assessment of SMET infrastructure. Phase 2 (January 1, - May 1, ) development of institutional plan and full TCUP proposal. Phase 3 (August 15, - September 30, ) development of assessment instruments. By the end of the grant period Dull Knife will have developed an assessment of its SMET programs, developed an institutional plan to enhance its SMET program, submitted a full TCUP grant, developed instruments to evaluate its SMET courses, and developed a student tracking system doc14958 none The Scholarship Assistance for Technology Students program at Northwest-Shoals Community College has the primary goal of inspiring motivation in academically talented program participants to complete a college core curriculum and graduate with AS degrees in computer science, engineering, or mathematics. The Alabama Appalachian area the College serves contains significant numbers of needy students from under-represented groups who are currently enrolled in math, engineering, and or computer science degree and non-degree programs. Students are given financial assistance and opportunity to study in these fields, graduate with either a two-year terminal degree in these fields or transfer to four-year colleges to complete their degrees. A solid foundation of networking between the College and local employers is used as a base for mentoring scholars and for placing the trained students into a career related to their education doc14959 none This grant provides funding for exploring the development of a novel fiber optic acoustic system for high-frequency bandwidth measurements. The novelty of the sensor system will be derived from the inclusion of extrinsic sensing capabilities based on a Fabry-Perot cavity, an integrated optical circuit based phase modulator, a high-speed photo detector, and a digital demodulation scheme based on a new multi-step phase stepping algorithm. The Fabry-Perot cavity will be located between the fiber tip and the diaphragm structure of the sensor, and the Mach-Zehnder interferometer in the phase modulator will be path matched with the Fabry-Perot arrangement to act as a read-out interferometer. Both experimental efforts and analytical efforts will be pursued for developing the sensor and understanding the sensor mechanics. A potential risk involved in the development of this sensor system is that it may not be amenable to multiplexing as the other fiber-optic sensors. If successful, the development of this sensor system will have a tremendous impact on integrated active control systems for sound and vibration transmission problems where currently multiplexable sensors for high-frequency bandwidth applications are not readily available. Furthermore, if the sensor system is adapted, it can be used for high-frequency bandwidth pressure measurements in underwater flows. The sensor system may also have applications in the automotive industry such as ignition chambers doc14960 none This program is designed to encourage talented but economically disadvantaged students to major in mathematics, computer science, and CIS at Towson University and to assist them in being successful in its completion. The program pro-actively solicits applications from districts that have significant populations of women and ethnic minority students, since those groups have not chosen these programs in large numbers. Towson University coordinates and supervises the designated cohort groups through three management committees, provides support services, and provides additional financial support from the two centers in the College of Science and Mathematics and from existing corporate partners. Regular academic support services are available to these scholars, including matriculation and admission assistance, advisement and counseling, tutoring, career advisement, securing internships or part-time employment, and assistance with job placement at graduation. In addition to these services, scholars are expected to participate in a special support community, have access to specialized tutoring assistance, and be given financial assistance for joining a student chapter of a national professional association. Though all the regular student support mechanisms on campus are available for this group, a coalition of educators, students, and local professionals serve to support them and to provide a nurturing community of scholars to assure their success doc14961 none Kohlstedt This award supports David Kohlstedt and students from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in a collaboration with Stephen Mackwell of the Bayerisches Geoinstitut at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. The project will focus on the evolution of melt topology during deformation of partially molten mantle rocks. The research is motivated by the observation that a small amount of melt has a large effect on the physical properties of a partially molten rock. The connectivity and geometry of the melt network control permeability, rheology, electrical conductivity, seismic velocities, and seismic attenuation. A new torsion apparatus in the German lab provides the best test bed to investigate the evolution of melt topology; quantification of the dependence of melt distribution on stress state for developing models of melt redistribution is best accomplished by direct comparison of results of experiments performed in each lab separately. The work plan provides for extensive participation by graduate students in the international travel and research doc14962 none Statement of Objectives. The Fort Berthold Community College Technology and Instruction Enhancement Project is proposed to increase the numbers and persistence of American Indian SMET majors and potential majors - The technology infrastructure of the college will be strengthened by expanded band width and high tech access for students, faculty and staff. - The SMET curriculum will integrate constructivist methods and technology applications to improve SMET student learning outcomes and persistence rates. - The college faculty and staff will build teaching and learning capacities through constructivist methodologies and techniques and technology applications. - American Indian SMET students persistence will be increased by 10% per year through a student retention model called Family Based Education. - SMET students will have expanded internships and community service placements, workforce placement and transfer opportunities through formal community outreach relationships. Methods to be Employed. The Technology and Instruction Enhancement Project of Fort Berthold Community College will focus on the recruitment and retention of American Indian Students toward graduation and transfer or workforce placement. First, the technology infrastructure will be expanded by improving the band width to speed up and broaden technology capacities. The student access to high tech equipment and applications will include the additionof high tech laboratories for student learning Web-conferencing capacities will be installed in theMentor Sites in three remote satellite campus locations. Second, constructivist teaching learning methods and techniques that heightened student experiential learning and active discovery based activity; and increased technology applications will be integrated across the curriculum. The computer science networking program will deliver professional certificationsand two full time faculty members will make this a technology centerpiece in the curriculum. Third, the curriculum and college services will be vastly improved through faculty and staff development opportunities in constructivist teaching learning methods and technology applications. Faculty development opportunities will include individual professional conferences and mini-grants for research projects that involve SMET student interns as assistants. Fourth, to improve student retention rates, the student services division will acquire a full time retention officer to implement an aggressive, pro-active retention strategy called the Family Based Education Model. Pressure points in the family based American Indian students lives are identified and through a team analysis, referral and intervention strategies are prescribed to each student itat-risk.ln Community outreach will expand SMET student opportunities for internship and community service placements. Project Outcomes. The project outcome will be increased American Indian SMET student retention rates, 10% increases annually during the project period. The technology infrastructure will advance according to campus-wide plans. The faculty and staff will have long term capacities and skills reflecting constructivist methods and technology applications. The Family Based Education Model will have intervened with at-risk SMET students, to heighten retention rates. Broad-based community relationships will support SMET majors and graduates and the college as an educational institution doc14963 none This Leadership Award is to recognize and support the role of Prof. Richmond in increasing the participation and advancement of women in the chemical sciences through her leadership role in COACh. The funds will allow her to maintain her very active research program at the University of Oregon while providing her with more time to direct the COACh activities at a level appropriate for the demands and needs of women chemists, chemical engineers, and the chemical community in this country. Over the past twenty years the number of women getting undergraduate degrees in chemistry, entering graduate school in chemistry and obtaining doctorate degrees in chemistry has been increasing. Women currently receive ca. 41% of the bachelor s degrees and almost one-third of the Ph.Ds granted in this field. Unfortunately, this increased number of women in the pipeline is not resulting in the significant changes in the chemical workforce that many had predicted. This is particularly noticeable in the academic workforce. Women make up approximately 16% of chemistry faculty in four-year colleges and less than 10% of the chemistry faculty at doctoral granting institutions. Given the profound role of academic institutions in shaping the workforce in the chemical sciences and the expectations of future, efforts to enhance the numbers, success, and visibility of women chemists in academia are essential to improving the participation of women in the broader chemical sciences workforce. With the anticipated high turn-over in faculty positions in the coming decade, it is imperative that swift action be taken to assure that under-represented groups are actively recruited and promoted into these vacated positions to produce a more balanced representation of gender and race in academia in the chemical sciences. COACh was developed in response to these concerns. This project is supported by the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc14964 none Ilisagvik College in Barrow, Alaska is the lead college in the Consortium for Alaska Native Higher Education, Inc. (CANHE), a non-profit group of Alaska Native organizations creating and supporting new Alaska Native-serving colleges in Alaska. CANHE was established, in part, because only 4% of Alaska Natives ( ) have achieved baccalaureate degrees. Alaska Natives are poorly represented as students in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology (SMET) programs in Alaska s universities and colleges, as teachers in the Alaska schools, and in the occupations requiring these skills. Data on Alaska Native higher education achievement is not well collected. It is obvious to Alaska natives, however, that different techniques must be used to attract and retain Native and rural students in SMET programs than those used for years by the state university. Ilisagvik will serve as the lead and mentor institution for the planning and assessment effort over the10 months of the project. Ilisagvik will engage a project manager to conduct the assessment. A CANHE member task force will create a mission statement defining the planning goals, priorities and project milestones. An external advisory board will be chaired by Dr. Edna MacLean, the president of Ilisagvik College, and will review the planning effort and evaluate the progress. The task force and manager will gather data from each of the six members and examine their missions, their long-term goals and priorities. The regional needs and strengths will become part of the CANHE SMET master plan which will include the colleges resources, governance, culture, technology requirements, and funding strategies. The plan will include assessment of faculty needed and the skills available for staff instruction, and inventory the technology requirements and the infrastructure support needed in each region. Beyond the specific benefits of the assessment to Ilisagvik College, the benefits will multiply by involving all the CANHE members in the process and the ultimate implementation of the plan. The group will design practical cost-effective methods to create, expand and collaboratively improve SMET programs for the dispersed potential student body including collaboration with other regions, some centralizing support activities, and integrating incentives to be involved for faculty and students. Given the vast roadless distances between communities, the primitive state of rural Alaska telecommunications and information infrastructure and the high cost of such services when available, there are numerous problems of distance delivery to be identified, understood and resolved. Ilisagvik developed a new Information Technology A.A.S. curriculum and acquired some of the infrastructure to carry out the classes through previous funding from NSF, the American Association of Community Colleges, the M. J. Murdock Foundation, and the Microsoft Corporation. Other programs are being developed by CANHE members. These assets can be shared across the state to improve SMET delivery. Collectively the colleges can register a greater number of students for these courses from the multi-regional Native student body and deliver them with a smaller number of faculty also taking administrative advantages of cross-registration benefits. The data, assessment, and draft plan will be reviewed with the board and organizational leadership of each regional colleges prior to adoption to affirm, and modified if required, so that it addresses the needs, direction and resources of each region doc14965 none The proposed project will establish a SMET task force to assess the current state of the math science program and its facilities at Leech Lake Tribal College in order to identify current strengths and weaknesses. The project will also involve conducting surveys to determine student enrollment, completion, interest in, and satisfaction of students with relationship to SMET programs. In addition, the project will serve to identify issues LLTC students face when they transfer to four-year institutions, and to identify programmatic trends and opportunities to which the college should respond. The project will identify: State and federal funding opportunities for SMET programs; Bridges-type programs that are available to faculty and students; regional research programs that could involve faculty and students; online SMET-content courses that are available to faculty and students. As a result of the above, a set of goals will be identified and a SMET development plan will be drafted to target identified department needs, partnership opportunities with schools, regional, tribal and other baccalaureate and graduate-degree institutions, private sector, and federal agencies doc14966 none The survival of many environ- mentally sensitive vertebrate lineages (Archibald and Bryant ) belies the hypothesized severity of the K T boundary event. Testing alternative hypotheses of extinction and survival across the K T boundary requires a more detailed understanding of environmental change and biotic response preceding the bolide impact. To develop this context, we need an integrated picture of change in the flora, fauna and physical environment in the latest Cretaceous. Such an integration has not yet been possible because fossil floras and faunas are preserved in different depositional environments at different localities within an outcrop belt. To unite these records, a method for detailed correlation among localities is needed. I propose to develop the framework for carbon isotope chemostratigraphic correlation of fossil localities within the Hell Creek Formation (mostly latest Maastrichtian) in northeastern Montana. The proposed work will test the following hypotheses essential to the development of the chemostratigraphic framework: o Secular variation in the carbon isotope signature of land plant organic carbon in the Hell Creek Formation exceeds that expected by random variation and spatially averaged plant vital effects. o Features of the secular carbon isotope curve are recognized at different localities and can act as stratigraphic tie points to correlate within the Hell Creek Formation. I will test the first hypothesis by examining the curve for quantitative variation that exceeds that expected by random variation and plant vital effects (Arens et al. ).I will then test the second hypothesis by correlating among individual localities, and to the marine record,using features of the reference curve. If successful, this approach could be widely applied in rocks younger than the Devonian, when vascular plants colonized land. It will allow fossil collections from various localities to be more precisely integrated, opening a new spectrum of questions to terrestrial paleoecologists doc14967 none McBay Quality Education for Minorities (QEM) Network, a non-profit organization, has been instrumental in improving the education of under-represented groups that have been historically undeserved by the nation s educational system. A successor to the Quality Education for Minorities Project based at MIT, QEM continues to develop effective strategies of SMET education for minorities, and focuses on issues and barriers that prevent minorities for receiving a high quality education. In order for minority serving institutions to offer competitive research and research training programs in the sciences, faculty and students must have access to state-of-the-art instrumentation to enable them to conduct high quality research. This award to QEM will make it possible to provide technical assistance to minority -serving institutions; equipping faculty with the essential tools needed develop competitive instrumentation proposals to NSF s equipment programs, including the Major Research Instrumentation Program. As a result all US institutions will have opportunity to secure funds needed to facilitate their efforts in the quest to unravel the challenges presented by the universe doc14968 none The Workshop on Future Directions in Solid State Chemistry will deal with the present status and likely future challenges and opportunities, especially in interdisciplinary research areas. The Solid State Chemistry Workshop which will take place at the University of California Davis from October 12-14, . This is the second NSF sponsored Solid-State Chemistry workshop. Discussions at the first workshop (Journal of Solid State Chemistry 149, 3-8, ) centered on future opportunities and challenges at the core of the solid-state chemistry discipline. This second workshop will address the challenges and future opportunities at the interfaces of solid-state chemistry with other disciplines in both the biological and physical sciences. %%% With a focus on the integration of research with education in interdisciplinary areas, the Workshop on Solid State Chemistry will have a very broad impact. It is a particularly timely venture given that most of the important issues in contemporary materials science and education are clearly multidisciplinary. Eight topical areas focused on the integration of research and educaion are at the interfaces between solid-state chemistry and (1) nanoscale science, (2) biology, (3) theory and condensed matter physics, (4) molecular and macromolecular materials, (5) earth, planetary, and environmental science, (6) interdisciplinary and graduate education, (7) energy storage and conversion, and (8) national facilities. Publication of the results of the discussions is anticipated for the benefit of the whole materials science community doc14969 none Computer Science (31) This projects provides funding for faculty to participate in workshops on the Personal Software Process and the Team Software Process leading to enhanced ability to teach these software engineering methodologies to undergraduate students. The workshops are a joint activity of Southern Polytechnic State University and the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. The funding is used to support faculty who otherwise would not be able to attend doc14970 none Marinas The objective of the proposed research is to develop a fundamental understanding of the pore blockage and solute displacement mechanisms of competitive adsorption of trace organic compounds on powdered activated carbon (PAC). This information will be used to develop equations for these effects that will be incorporated into mathematical models of hybrid sorption-membrane processes. Adsorption studies will be conducted using model compounds or probes, as well as with natural organic matter (NOM). The competitive effects in porous adsorbents will be modeled for the PAC membrane system using the probe data first. After the model has been verified using probes, the general form of the model will be tested for applicability to NOM trace compound competitive adsorption. The results of this research could be used to develop recommendations for the optimum design and operation of full-scale hybrid sorption-membrane processes for the removal of trace organic compounds from water doc14971 none This SGER is to investigate to what degree it is feasible, given to the constraints of a typical in-service teacher enhancement program, to teach high school mathematics teachers to use a CCS [Classroom Communication System] effectively and make their teaching become more learner-centered, assessment-centered, and community-centered. The research is tied to the release of a new generation of networkable calculators within the past few months and a unique opportunity to work with teachers this summer who are being introduced to this technology. The PIs are researching how readily teachers change their teaching to incorporate some of the opportunities provided by this technology. Follow-up visits to classrooms are included doc14972 none The Silicon Run Series consists of topical videos on semiconductor manufacturing. This format, which includes overviews as well as process specific videos, has proven invaluable to instructors who often must teach courses to students at different levels of technical understanding. The Silicon Run series currently consists of the following videos: Introductory: Overview Silicon Run Lite 30 min. Intermediate: Overview Silicon Run I - 2nd Edition 40 min. Silicon Run II 35 min. Advanced: Process-Specific: Silicon Run Deposition 31 min. Silicon Run Lithography 31 min. Silicon Run Etch 37 min. Silicon Run Ion Implantation (to be produced) The objective of Silicon Run Ion Implantation is to complete the Series with a 30 minute video production featuring the process whereby impurities, known as dopants, are introduced into silicon wafers to alter the electrical conductivity of specific regions. As with the rest of the Series, this video is designed for undergraduate electrical engineering and engineering technology courses and for industry s semiconductor technician training programs. Educators who use the Series to supplement their courses are specifically requesting the production of this last video to ensure they have in-depth coverage of all four semiconductor processes. To them, the videos provide their students what they themselves can not; an intimate close-up view inside an IC fabrication facility. Industry s restrictive policies, due to clean room procedures and competitive issues, make manufacturing sites unavailable to the public and even to in-house employees. This inaccessibility has proven an educational challenge which the Silicon Run Series has addressed through its videos. The production of quality educational videos is the method being employed to visually document state-of-the-art ion implantation and make it relevant to semiconductor education and technician training programs. This requires the participation of professors and industrial trainers to ensure content accuracy; corporate sponsors to provide funding and access to industrial locations: and media artists to capture the process in a professional video format that can be edit into an engaging storyline. Animation, microscopic filming, and special effects are used to enhance understanding. The production of Ion Implantation will complete the Silicon Run Series so it can serve these programs as an educational tool that provides a realistic look at semiconductor manufacturing doc14973 none Graham, James R. The solar neighborhood within 50 parsecs will be examined for spectral type L and T dwarf companions using the adaptive optics system at the Advanced Electro-Optical System telescope on Haleakela, Maui Hawaii. Late-type binaries of low magnitude contrast will be examined to search for these companions. So few of these stars are known to exist today using classical techniques of observation, that discovery of new ones, which may result from the application of adaptive optics, will have a profound effect on our understanding of these objects doc14974 none Mentor Net is an innovative program that uses the Internet as a vehicle to do large-scale mentoring, especially of women. During the - program year, two thousand students were matched with one thousand nine hundred and thirteen mentors representing six hundred and ninety companies; seventy affiliated colleges and universities participated. The large network of mentors from industry and government laboratories it has developed provide those mentored with a better understanding of a field, occupation, or organization, including cultural factors, typical professional and personal rewards, likely challenges, and strategies for success. This program is particularly beneficial in its support of undergraduate and graduate women students who are currently enrolled in engineering or science programs in higher education. The program is successful in the retention of women in mathematics, science, and engineering majors and careers. Involving a large and increasing number of diverse companies is a key benefit. There is also a strong emphasis on the evaluation of the program, which works to continually improve the MentorNet operation, and also documents the program s impressive statistics in supporting the retention of diverse students in science, engineering, and technology. The training and feedback mechanism for mentors makes this program even more effective, ensuring that the mentors know how to interact with the students successfully doc14975 none Dr. Judith K. Gwathmey has given exceedingly personal attention to her mentees from the time she identifies them. She is said to frequently identify a diamond in the rough, who she supports through their formal education and into their careers. Gwathmey currently heads the Institute for Cardiovascular Diseases and Muscle Research Institute, and holds a faculty position at Boston University School of Medicine, as well as adjunct or lecturer positions with Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine. Along with her active research, teaching, and consulting activities, she is an active mentor, described as personally generous with time and financial resources to support her mentees. Gwathmey has provided students with financial support for tuition and books from her personal income. Her direct, hands-on mentoring style provides students with research opportunities, guidance on presenting research outcomes, and lessons in how to compete successfully in academic science. Those she has mentored include high-school students through doctoral students and faculty; fifty-six persons mentored. She has demonstrated a keen interest in students from under-represented groups, and has employed a diverse, multi-national staff in her laboratory. Although her efforts are not aligned with the programs of a traditional education institution, she has had broad success with many individuals who are likely to replicate her mentoring in their own careers doc14976 none Dr. Therese Markow has worked to involve significant numbers of undergraduate and graduate students in active research, including co-authoring scientific papers with undergraduate students at Arizona State University, where she held a faculty position in the biological sciences. She initiated the Minority Access to Research Careers program at ASU in . The program works to improve support for students from under-represented groups who may enter research careers in bioscience. ASU MARC participants receive a wide range of support. The program has helped many minority students pursue research careers in the general biological sciences, with particular focus on and success among Native American students; more than twenty-eight undergraduate students, twenty-one graduate students, and nine post-doctoral students were mentored. Dr. Markow was especially noted by her students for conveying her passion and integrity as a scientist. Her international research record and partnership with her students in research publication are meaningful reflections of her dedication. Although Dr. Markow is now Regents Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, the ASU MARC program continues doc14977 none Ms. Pamela Dase is a gifted teacher of high-school mathematics who has made an extraordinary effort to mentor high-school students. In support her classes at Centennial High School in the Columbus Public School system, she advocated for the Algebra for All pilot program for all students in her building. Centennial High School is described as an urban school with a significantly diverse student population, including students for who English is a second language. Dase is a champion for increased math requirements; she has high expectations of her students and they respond. She provides after-school support to ensure that students are successful. One indicator of the outcome may be that Centennial s students tend to score higher that the district average on statewide proficiency tests. Her principal describes Dase as a veteran teacher (thirty-two years) who is a trendsetter and role model, working with more junior staff to incorporate technology throughout the curriculum and in all classes. Dase s students have gone on to achieve doctorates in molecular biology, physics, and mathematics, as well as baccalaureate degrees in diverse areas. Several of her students have become teachers of mathematics; one such student is now a teacher at the same school doc14978 none The Maryland Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement (MESA) Program was founded in by the Applied Physics Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University. MESA works to create a superior education process that enables American students of African, Latino, and Native American heritage to achieve and contribute their full potential in mathematics, engineering, science, and technology. The program has shown steady growth since its inception and number and the percent of participants going on to enroll in college has steadily increased. Maryland MESA currently includes partnerships with colleges and universities, business and industry, government, community organizations, parents, and more than 143 schools in 15 counties across Maryland. MESA activities are multi-faceted and include academic tutorials, Saturday academies, field trips, communications skills training, science and engineering projects, and advisor workshops. The program s success is reflected in the 84% of the program graduates who go on to college, and the 79% who pursue degrees in science, mathematics, or engineering. In the most recent program year, - , more than 2,200 elementary, middle- and high-school students participated, of whom 1,332 (58%) are female, 957 (42%) male; with the ethnic distribution of 1,720 (75%) African Americans, 33 Latinos (1.5%), and 11 (.5%) Native Americans, as well as 376 (16.5%) Caucasians, 123 (5.5%) Asian Americans, and 26 (1%) others. Maryland MESA students also earn higher scores on the SAT than the national and state averages doc14979 none The Department of Science and Engineering Support (DSES) of the National Technical Institution for the Deaf (NTID) has provided access and educational serves to hearing disabled impaired students at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) for more than thirty years. Each year the program serves100 students who receive degrees in science, mathematics, and engineering, and 10-15 underprepared high-school students in a pre-baccalaureate program, as well as 150-200 students who are matriculating in other majors and taking science mathematics as part of their curricular requirements. NTID DSES provides mentoring through advising counseling, tutoring, instruction, note-taking and interpretive services, and as a liaison with host colleges as advocates for students. Those activities are deemed as critical for this population of students who are otherwise ignored or invisible in mainstream education. Also, it is especially beneficial to the greater population of students who are not hearing impaired, to be mentored in relating to the hearing impaired. This is a positive effect for global society. Programs and networks within the NTID are well planned, carefully documented, and provide a trusted base for participants doc14980 none The AAAS Project on Science, Technology, and Disability has played a leadership role in supporting the advancement of people with disabilities in science, mathematics and engineering since , more than a decade before the mandate of the Americans with Disabilities Act. This program encourages scientists and engineers to self-identify and thus created the AAAS Resource Group of Scientists and Engineers with Disabilities, producing a group of about 1,000 scientists and engineers who serve as mentors. The AAAS Disability Project has become the most important resource for individuals and organizations seeking to encourage the entry and advancement of person with disabilities in science and engineering. The AAAS Disability Project, has a new program: Entry Point!, which has made more than 245 placements of students with disabilities in paid summer internships. The students are diverse in ethnicity, gender, and type of disability. All are mentored through the process of application, internship offer, relocation, research work, and follow up doc10755 none Raskin The objective of this research is to develop and optimize biologically active carbon (BAC) filtration systems to remove low concentrations of perchlorate from drinking water. These systems must produce water that meets all regulatory standards, is biologically stable so that its quality does not degrade during distribution, is free of odorous substances, and has a low chlorine demand so that excessive chlorination by-product formation will not be an issue. The proposed research could result in an efficient, bench-scale perchlorate treatment process that can produce water meeting these requirements. The specific objectives are: (1) to develop methods for microbial identification and quantification in BAC filters, (2) to develop a biofilm modeling approach for optimizing BAC filter operation and design, and (3) to integrate process engineering optimization, microbial characterization and biofilm modeling doc14982 none This is a detailed computational analysis of the elementary reaction steps leading to the growth of planar and curved polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and subsequently to carbon particles. Thermodynamic properties are computed by means of density functional theory (DFT) using BLYP and B3LYP functionals. Vibrational analysis is performed on the optimized geometries followed by determination of entropies and heat capacities. Uncertainties are assessed by comparing the results with higher-level computations using the complete basis set (CBS) method. Kinetic parameters at the high-pressure limit are determined by transition-state theory, while pressure dependence of chemically activated reactions is analyzed with quantum Rice-Ramsperger-Kassel (QRRK) theory. Competitive reactions of PAH radicals with acetylene, hydrogen, oxygen, and hydroxyl are assessed. The data predictions are incorporated into an existing kinetic model and tested for benzene, acetylene, and ethylene flames using data previously generated on flame structures in these systems including mole-fraction profiles of planar and curved PAHs and fullerenes doc14983 none Eknoyan This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation NSF 01-65 on Ultra-High Capacity Optical Communications and Networking. The goal of this project is to demonstrate unprecedented tuning range and speed in electrooptic tunable filters for dense wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) using recently developed design principles and fabrication methods. The filters, which will be produced on LiNb03 substrates, are expected to provide a combination of faster tuning ( 50 ns) and wider tuning range ( 10 THz) than has previously been achieved in any tunable filter technology. Optical frequency selection in the proposed filters is based upon phase-matched polarization mode conversion by a spatially periodic strain perturbation in a single mode optical waveguide. Tuning is accomplished by an applied electric field which alters the waveguide birefringence, and hence the phase-match frequency at which near-complete polarization conversion occurs. The devices are inherently polarization independent because the TE TM and TM TE coupling are reciprocal processes. Innovations from the research at Texas A&M which will be incorporated into these devices include: (1) The use of spatially periodic strips of SiO2 to induce polarization coupling of light via the strain-optic effect. The SiO2 is deposited at an elevated temperature on the LiNb03 substrates and patterned at room temperature, so that longitudinal strain results from thermal expansion mismatch. (2) A new filter design which eliminates the need for polarizing beam splitters and thus gives an extra degree of freedom in the fabrication process. (3) The use of a sparse, apodized strain grating to achieve polarization coupling. This gives an etalon-like periodicity to the filter response, with nulls which are almost evenly spaced in frequency. This design technique should make it possible to extend the spectral range by an order of magnitude over previous EOTF designs. Preliminary laboratory work directed towards the optimization of LiNb03 circuit elements has prepared the way for the proposed research. Phase-matched polarization coupling with 99.3% efficiency for both TE TM and TM TE conversion has been achieved in straight waveguides at a wavelength of nm, and electrooptic tuning of the peak conversion wavelength over a range 15 nm (2 THz) was also demonstrated. Response speed for polarization conversion was measured to be 52 ns. Both polarizing beam splitters with splitting ratios 25 dB and non-polarizing beam splitters suitable for EOTF application have been produced and characterized. Under this project, four-port spectral slicing filters, two-port bandpass filters, and four-port add-drop filters with 50 GHz and 100 GHz channel spacing will be fabricated on LiNb03 substrates. Spectral and temporal response of the filters and their tuning range will be characterized doc14984 none This award, provided by the Office of Polar Programs (OPP) of the National Science Foundation (NSF), provides support, along with matching funds from the Environmental Studies Program at Hamilton College, for a workshop to be held at Hamilton College in September of . The workshop will involve scientists from several other countries, in addition to the United States, who are actively involved in environmental research in the region. In addition, the workshop will take an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the environmental changes taking place in the region of the Antarctic Peninsula. The past several decades have demonstrated severe and rapid changes in the ecosystems and physical environment of the Antarctic Peninsula and the region stands out in the most recent IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report as the strongest regional hot spot for increased temperature trends. Global climate models that incorporate greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosols demonstrate a striking correspondence to the observed temperature trends. The workshop will address this correspondence and will place historical data into the context of geological and glaciological records of climate change over the last 12,000 years. Oceanographic and atmospheric linkages will be discussed and examined for decadal to millennial time scales. The results will be published in a bound volume of the Antarctic Research Series, pending approval by the editorial committee doc14985 none THERMES is a workshop conference which will focus on the recent advances in thermal management and characterization schemes, as well as forecasts and analyses of future trends. It is to be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in early . Thermal issues are key in electronic product development at all levels of the electronic product hierarchy, from the chip to the ultimate system. Shrinking system sizes are resulting in increasing volumetric heat generation rates and surface heat fluxes in many products. In addition to the U.S. participants, a significant international participation from Europe and Asia is expected. Invited talks in selected emerging areas will be complemented with contributed papers. Panel discussions focusing on technology and market trends and identification of research challenges will be included. The funds will help support travel for U.S. participants consisting of undergraduate and graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and non-tenured faculty with limited research funding doc14986 none A workshop will be conducted by Florida International University (FIU) to discuss the current and future needs and activities of researchers needing a high performance network for their research projects associated with activities and projects in South and Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean. These projects will focus on the interests and benefits to US science. The participants in the works hop will be scientist from the United States and scientists from the region countries. The expected output from the workshop will be : A report of the factual situation on the present and foreseeable future needs of scientific research projects in the region A statement of recommendation for action concerning these needs doc14987 none Atmospheric flows such as mid-latitude jets are, in general, time-dependent so that a comprehensive stability theory for these systems must address the influence of temporal variation in the background flow on the growth and structure of perturbations. Another important application of time-dependent instability theory is in relation to the growth of initial errors in tangent linear models. In this project, the PI plans to pursue further the non-modal stability theory he and his group developed for time-varying flows to study deterministic stability problems related to the origin and maintenance of upper level short waves. In addition, the PI will investigate the statistical mean structure and dynamics of synoptic scale variance through stochastic forcing. The project has the potential of obtaining new insight into linear instability with time-varying flows that may provide new understanding for mid-latitude synoptic weather phenomena such as storm tracks doc14988 none Kuhn, Jeffrey This project is to design, fabricate, build, test and integrate an optical system to be placed on the US Air Force AEOS telescope system for the purpose of detecting and characterizing circumstellar matter in the infrared. The goal is to identify star systems most likely to have proto-planetary and planetary systems. The unique innovation in this proposal is the merging of coronagraphic and polarimetric techniques with the adaptive optics capabilities of a major telescope doc14989 none This SGER is to investigate to what degree it is feasible, given the constraints of a typical in-service Teacher Enhancement program, to teach high school mathematics teachers to use a CCS [Classroom Communication System] effectively and make their teaching become more learner-centered, knowledge-centered, assessment-centered and community-centered. The research is tied to the release of a new generation of networkable calculators within the past few months and a unique opportunity to work with teachers this summer who are being introduced to this technology. The PIs are researching how readily teachers change their teaching to incorporate some of the opportunities provided by this technology. Follow-up visits to classrooms are included doc14990 none A two-year, systematic observational study of the seasonal variations in mid-latitude metal layer dynamics is proposed at the Arecibo Observatory. The occurrence and behavior of various metal layers (Na, Fe, K, Ca) will be investigated using the Arecibo lidars and the incoherent scatter radar during summer, winter and equinox periods. Such a study will provide a comprehensive view of metal layer dynamics as a function of season allowing us to explore the coupling between neutral dynamics, chemistry and the plasma. Past studies at Arecibo have concentrated on case studies of metal species at particular times of year, but the PI proposes a systematic year-round study utilizing the complete capabilities of the Arecibo lidars. In addition, observations during summer Es maximum coupled with observations at other times of year will provide insight into the relationship between metal layer dynamics and the formation of Es and associated plasma irregularities. Past observations at Arecibo have shown that sporadic ionization layers are often associated with sporadic metal layers, such as sodium, but the relationship between such layers when instabilities are present has not been explored in detail. The proposed study represents an exciting opportunity to establish a baseline for the understanding of metal layer morphology and dynamics at mid-latitudes. It will also produce important insights into Es formation and associated irregularities doc14991 none Semmens The objective of this research is to investigate the behavior of membrane aerated biofilms in carefully designed studies. Existing computer models will be used to select conditions for experimental testing and experimental design. A combination of microscopic techniques, chemical measurements made with microprobes and bio-molecular assays of the biofilms will be used to characterize biofilm behavior under a variety of operating conditions. The data will be used to calibrate and refine the computer model to improve process simulation with the ultimate objective of providing a useful tool for bioreactor design. Membrane aerated biofilm reactors are used in water treatment for the degradation of soluble organics, and nitrogen removal doc14992 none At the end of this decade, national and international-scale scientific collaborative applications will need intelligent signaling and dynamic control of very-high-performance optical networks. The software proposed here will allow scientific applications to directly control an advanced, all-optical, IP-over-wavelength metropolitan-scale network, based on Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) and photonic switching. Optical networking technology is rapidly migrating from ultra-expensive long-haul implementations to regional- and metro-area networks. The trend is to provide a general infrastructure with a wide range of common services. However, the flexibility inherent in these new technologies provides the research community with an opportunity to move beyond general requirements and support large-scale e-science applications that require advanced networking capabilities. We propose a software development effort that will lead to 21st-century applications over -fiber, -wavelength photonic networks. These evolving, extreme applications requiring optical networks include high-energy physics, astrophysics, climate modeling, oceanographic modeling, architectural design, molecular modeling, industrial design, advanced photon source experimentation, materials science, and industrial engineering. Underlying such applications are cross-cutting support technologies, such as advanced digital video, remote access to scientific instruments, specialized visualization displays, data-mining, cluster supercomputing and high-performance distributed computational systems. To enable the full potential of such applications, it is not sufficient to simply provide high-performance networks; these applications need intelligent, dynamic controls to adjust network resources. The proposed software development efforts will leverage the significant potential of a newly installed metro optical testbed for application-level dynamic control of resource discovery, allocation and adjustment. Efforts at many levels are required to make such flexibility available in service provisioning, infrastructure and service resource management: Research into the behavior of advanced scientific applications, not just on extremely high-performance optical network, but on one that can be dynamically adjusted at a granular level Identify application-level networking requirements, investigate management techniques for optical networks, and study new service provisioning models related to application needs Research new methods for application signaling Investigate interconnections between application signaling and IP-based control-plane methods, such as through GMPLS Test deployment of those techniques on an advanced testbed and analyze results Experiment with multiple-service provisioning to ensure gateways to traditional networks and protocols Develop a system for performance metrics, monitoring and analysis Create a testbed for StarLight, the next-generation, optically based STAR TAP, and for other advanced research networks. The testbed for this project is an a four-node optical network, OMNInet, initially linking a core node on Northwestern University s Chicago campus with a node at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Canadian Network for the Advancement of Research, Industry and Education (CANARIE) CA net4 node at its Chicago Point of Presence and a node at Northwestern s Evanston campus. The sites are separated by distances of 5 to 20 miles, connected by dedicated technology trial-fiber service provided by SBC Ameritech. Each node includes a Nortel Networks WDM photonic switch, an Optical Fiber Amplifier (OFA) and high performance router switches. These sites will also have access to Nortel and SBC Ameritech testing personnel, expertise, and equipment. Participants in this project, led by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, include the International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University, CANARIE, Argonne National Laboratory, MREN (Metropolitan Area Research and Education Network), Nortel and Ameritech doc14993 none In this proposal, three researchers from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), specializing in the fields of optics, communications, and computer networks, are collaborating on the Ultra-High-Capacity Optical Communications and Networking initiative. It is felt by many researchers that the most efficient and economical way to utilize optical transmission technology for large scale networking is to use wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) in a circuit switched mode, overlaid with packet switching implemented with electronics. While this may indeed be the case, it is important to investigate alternative approaches that have great potential. The UCSD team has been investigating novel techniques of information transmission via optical fiber, where code division multiple access (CDMA) using ultrashort laser pulses is employed. Compact, low cost fiber-based ultrashort pulse sources are currently being developed, making the technology suitable for future practical networks. When an ultrashort pulse is encoded for CDMA, the pulse spreads out in time and resembles a noise burst that is transmitted on the optical fiber. At the receiving node, a decoder is applied to the received signals from multiple users, which matches only the encoding of the desired transmitter. The matching signal component is transformed back to an ultrashort pulse form that can be detected over the remaining interference from other users with nonlinear optical techniques. A novel high resolution pulse synthesis and detection technique for ultrashort pulses developed at UCSD enable various data transmission formats to be considered, such as ultrafast packet transmission with on off keying, pulse position modulation, and amplitude modulation. The CDMA scheme enables large scale, asynchronous, concurrent access to the transmission resources. With a suitable architecture, this can be exploited to simplify network control, and increase reliability and flexibility. The objective of this proposal is to conduct basic research by investigating theoretically and verifying experimentally data modulation schemes for efficient information transmission in conjunction with CDMA encoded ultrashort pulses in an optical fiber network. Efficient modulation formats will result in aggregate transmission rates exceeding 10 s of terabits second, with individual user rates on the order of 1-10 gigabits second. The specific objectives of this proposal include modeling of the optical CDMA for ultrashort Gaussian pulses, complete statistical analysis of the transmitted waveforms, investigation of various optical CDMA codes that support thousands of users with minimal interference, bit error rate analysis of received optical signals for various modulation schemes, modeling and characterization of the distortions induced by the fiber channel, adaptive equalization techniques for reducing dispersion and other fiber distortions, computer simulations of the modulation schemes, and experimental evaluation of the communication system: transmitter, optical channel, and receiver. The various phases of the proposed project complement each other. Combined together, they provide for in-depth knowledge of the theoretical and experimental issues of communicating with CDMA encoded ultrashort pulses. These findings will be shared with the scientific community, enhancing not only the knowledge base of other researchers in the field, but also of the students conducting the research. We shall demonstrate a prototype optical network with several users employing the modulation format that will carry over 10 terabits per second of information, when scaled up to the full number of users. The potential impact of the work will be in the proof that optical CDMA encoding of ultrashort pulses is a realizable and desirable alternative to WDM. Currently, WDM is the preferred multiplexing method due to its simplicity and low cost. While WDM does increase the transmitted bandwidth significantly, it still does not fully utilize the available optical bandwidth due to both the need for guard bands between channels and the under utilization of channels. In contrast, CDMA encoded ultrashort pulses share the entire bandwidth without the need for guard bands, leading to efficient utilization of transmission resources. Using CDMA can also provide a highly flexible and robust infrastructure, upon which packet switching can be overlaid. The CDMA format also provides a degree of security, as no data can be extracted without knowledge of the codes employed doc14994 none Proposal # Adali, Tulay U of Maryland-Baltimore County Within the last fifteen years, the maximum data rate that a backbone communications line can handle has grown by five orders of magnitude. A key enabling technology for this impressive growth has been the advent of commercial wavelength-division-multiplexed systems that has allowed systems designers to fill the available bandwidth far more efficiently than in the past. Recently, the physical impairments in the optical fiber transmission lines have become the major factors limiting the obtainable data rates. The chromatic dispersion, fiber nonlinearities, polarization effects, and amplified spontaneous emission noise from the amplifiers, all interact limiting the data rates and or transmission distances. Polarization mode dispersion (PMD), in particular, introduces intersymbol and intercarrier interference and is the primary limitation in increasing transmission rates and distances in installed terrestrial fiber systems. Though it has been noted that signal processing approaches hold great promise for mitigating PMD and other impairments in optical communications systems, the area is still in its infancy, and the current activity in the area is limited to ``off-the-shelf techniques that do not take into account characteristics of the optical domain, thus unable to truly take advantage of the possibilities that signal processing offer. By bringing in expertise from two complementary research areas: signal processing for communications and optical communications, this research develops effective electrical domain (post-detection) approaches for optical communications by taking into account the physical properties of the optical transmission medium. The investigators introduce a new class of receiver structures for optical communications that exploit polarization diversity and study their performance by accurate modeling of the physical phenomena and using efficient simulation techniques that they have developed. The two research groups have expertise in both areas relevant to the proposed work: (1) theoretical and computational study and modeling of optical communication systems and (2) development of error compensation mitigation techniques for communications. Their collaboration within the last couple of years has demonstrated the potential of solutions developed with this approach for significant performance gains in optical communications systems. An important additional benefit of the project is establishing meaningful communication between the two research communities and the emphasis on the importance of their full collaboration. The research also offers the potential for a more unified view of communications systems doc14995 none Sauer This project supports the travel of U.S. academic researchers to attend the fifth in a series of major international symposia on bulk power systems dynamics and control. This particular symposium will be held in Onomichi City, Japan on August 26-31, and will focus on Security and Reliability in a changing environment . The purpose of this project is to stimulate participation by U.S. faculty and students by providing a portion of their travel expenses doc14996 none This project will explore new connections between fundamental concepts in quantum theory, developed for use in nuclear physics, with areas of practical application in optical communication. On the theoretical side, the proposal will extend recent research on three-dimensional topological solitons or skyrmions . Existing theories describe the electron either as a kind of pure point of infinite energy (which leads to many well-known mathematical problems) or as a vibration of a string or membrane in an 11-dimensional space (which leads to rather intractable computations). In nuclear physics, skyrmion models have made it possible to describe basic particles as stable whirlpools of force in three dimensions, whirlpools whose properties can be computed and predicted more easily than those of vibrating strings. As part of this proposal, a leading expert in skyrmions will try to apply this approach to develop a new theory of how the electron behaves. The behavior of the electron is fundamental to all of electronics. On the application side, the proposal will also use skyrmion mathematics and concepts to try to develop optical bullets for high-speed optical communications. Simpler one-dimensional soliton mathematics have been used already in optical communications, but the success so far - while significant - has been limited by the severe approximations used in that mathematics. It is hoped that the use of more complete and exact three- dimensional theory will lead to more powerful and more reliable design of new optical communication systems. Furthermore, because optical experiments and technology depend on the details of the interaction between light and electrons, it is hoped that new experiments on these interactions, designed around the concept of skyrmion, will enrich both the applications side and the theoretical side, together doc14997 none The need for more bandwidth and capacity in wireless systems currently is the main culprit for the great interest in the development of wireless communications systems operating at millimeter wave frequencies and higher. The future needs of broad-band interactive services (1Gb s) demand the application of optical fiber feed networks for distribution of the radio signals to and from the antennas at the various base stations. Fiber-optic technologies have reached the stage where insertions into various commercial RF systems are being considered. Today, there are three main steps in the evolution of RF Photonics systems for wireless communications. The first step has been in the direction of using photonics to slowly replace conventional RF components, such as, the coax that is used to interconnect the antenna to the electronics. Optical fibers, in contrast to coaxial cable, provide a more ideal medium for broadband RF communication systems. The light weight property of fibers, and its immunity from other signal interference make them very critical in the development of future RF distribution systems. The second, and more challenging step, is in the seamless integration of photonics and RF wireless circuits. The challenge in this step is to use photonics and RF circuits as complementary systems and blend them together. Finally, the third step is towards the development of optically coupled antennas. In this step the aim is to eliminate the need of local oscillators, mixers, amplifiers and a host of other parts by directly feeding an antenna through a fiber at millimeter wave frequencies. Here, it is proposed that an array of RF modulator photodetectors be integrated directly to an array of antennas. This new RF photonic antenna array system, with the appropriate space-time processing and coding, will form a iosmart antennaln that can enhance network coverage, capacity, and quality. It is envisioned that a large number of such RF Photonic antenna elements could be networked together into a star configuration, feeding in and out of a radio hub. As a transmitter, the proposed optoelectronic device operates as a photodiode, while as a receiver the device operates as an optical modulator. It has already been demonstrated that this dual function of a semiconductor electroabsorption modulator and photodiode in the same device for duplex operation, can occur, using bias control as a transmit receive mode control. For full duplex operation, two modulator photodiode devices need to be incorporated in the each transceiver element. We propose to directly drive a coplanar waveguide (CPW)-fed slot antenna by converting optical power into microwave power and vice versa using these RF modulator photodetectors. As a transmitter, the CPW line is connected to the active surface of the photodetector, from which the microwave power propagates to feed the radiating slot. The photodetector is fed via an optical fiber from beneath. When the device functions as an optical modulator, the receive function can also be achieved. Preliminary results for a single antenna show that a very good bandwidth and radiation patterns can be achieved. It should be noted that these elements can be interconnected via the fiber to achieve summation, mixing and other signal processing functions, at the antenna site or at a remote site. Some preliminary results have been achieved in the area of multiple functionality for the optoelectronic components, such as modulation, photodetection, self-biasing and RF frequency mixing. They have shown properties, such as high bandwidth and high power, that are desirable for the antenna applications. A main emphasis here is to further investigate the material and device designs for the optoelectronic component that can incorporate into the smart antenna architecture. The proposed approach will have significant impacts on wireless communication systems by providing higher system bandwidth capacity and enhancing their reliability. It may lead to a new type of long distance, broadband network infrastructure that supports transparent transport of optical signals. Our team is formed to provide the expertise in the four key elements for this proposed research. Our project will provide a good opportunity to train graduate and undergraduate students in one of the most exciting interdisciplinary areas in science (RF, photonics, signal processing and communications). The interactions between the researchers at the different institutions will be aided by the close collaboration that exists between the members of the group doc14998 none This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation NSF 01-65 on Ultra-High Capacity Optical Communications and Networking. In this proposed research project, we study methods to achieve ultra-broadband gain materials for broadband optical communications and networking. Broadband materials with a gain profile of more than 500 nm wide are possible to be achieved in a single thin-film waveguide device. The materials include the Esaki-junction type of multi-band multi-quantum well gain material and the selective-area-growth (SAG) type broadband gain material. With the proposed methods, a multiple-quantum-well (MQW) material with a very broad and smooth gain profile of more than 250 nm has been obtained. Using the fabricated material, semiconductor lasers with a very wide tuning range of more than 200 nm and wavelength converters that can convert signals across 250 nm wavelength range, from nm to nm, have been demonstrated. In this research work, we will try to understand the limitations of these proposed methods and explore techniques to overcome them. It is highly possible to extend the full operational wavelength range from nm to nm. More than 500 nm bandwidth all optical operations of amplifying, switching, and wavelength conversions are targeted to be accomplished. The issues of using semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) as an amplifying material have been their fast gain recovery time. The fast gain recovery time, caused by the short carrier lifetime, produces problems like high channel-crosstalk in a WDM system and high amplified-spontaneous-emission (ASE) noise. In the proposed research work we will study methods to increase carrier lifetime in a broadband SOA. In our previous work, we have grown quasi-indirect bandgap superlattice materials and observed materials changing from direct to indirect bandgaps when the superlattice period is varying. It is highly possible to change the carrier lifetime from the nanosecond scale to the microsecond scale with the quasi-indirect bandgap material. We have also grown the nm InGaAsP type II delta-doping gain material. We expect such a material will have a longer carrier lifetime due to the spatial separation of electrons and holes in the material. By combining the broadband gain material and the long carrier lifetime material techniques, it is highly possible we can obtain an ideal gain material with noise and crosstalk performance similar to the Er doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) but with an extremely broad wavelength-operation range of larger than 500 nm. Such a material can also be integrated with other thin-film waveguide optical components to obtain multiple-function integrated photonic devices. We believe this work will have a significant impact to the ultra-broadband optical communications doc14999 none We propose to develop technologies which will enable communication on a single optical fiber at rates in excess of 100 Tb s within a few years. To accomplish this in the low-loss window of silica fibers ( - nm), there will be a need for novel very wideband devices, particularly optical amplifiers. In addition, modulation techniques with spectral efficiencies well in excess of unity will be needed. Our research activities will be centered in these two areas. We will investigate modulation techniques, and associated detection schemes, suitable to obtain a spectral efficiency of 4 b s Hz by the end of the project. The techniques will be designed to be resistant to impairments due to PMD and fiber nonlinearities. In particular, we will investigate novel techniques using appropriate combinations of PSK, QAM, and polarization-based techniques. Coherent detection will be utilized where indicated to boost spectral efficiency. We will investigate fiber optical parametric amplifiers (OPAs) and discrete Raman amplifiers made from novel highly-nonlinear fibers. These fibers will have nonlinearity coefficients exceeding those of today s most nonlinear fibers by several orders of magnitude. These fibers will enable the development of novel nonlinear amplifiers , with gain bandwidth of a single device covering most of the - nm window. These devices will also use shorter fibers and lower pump powers than their current versions, and may thus lead to practical applications in a relatively short time doc15000 none Chanover, Nancy J. The Advanced Electro-Optical System (AEOS) on Haleakela, Maui, Hawaii of the US Air Force will be used with an Acousto-Optics Tunable Filter (AOTF) instrument provided by the principal investigator to study in detail, the dynamics, vertical structure and thermal balance of the atmospheres of the gaseous outer planets Jupiter and Saturn. Graduate students and undergraduate students will participate in all aspects of the project. Hyperspectral images at the high spatial resolution (20 milliarcseconds) provided by the adaptive optics of the AEOS will be used to create data at different elevations in the planetary atmosphere and for different interacting molecular species of gas and for atmosperic aerosols. These data will be analyzed to determine the origins of the colors observed on the planetary disk and to understand physical and chemical aspects of the atmospheres of these planets doc15001 none Nisenson, Peter This effort is to design, build, integrate and test a camera system to detect and characterize extra-solar planetary systems using a unique square aperture and dark speckle in the field. Direct imaging is extremely difficult because of the large dynamic range required to separate out the scattered light from the parent star and the weak reflected light from a planetary object. The camera system will be used with the 900+ element adaptive optics system at the US Air Force Advanced Electro-Optical System telescope at Haleakela Hawaii for astronomical research doc15002 none Shinnar, Reuel CUNY City College The PI s main achievement so far has been to show, both experimentally and theoretically, that phase separation of low-viscosity liquid mixture is driven by the convection induced by a non-equilibrium force due to gradients of chemical potential and that this force can act over distances of a few centimeters. While the investigation has produced novel and unexpected results, much work is required to achieve the ultimate goal and model the flow of liquid mixtures during phase transition in the presence of surface-active compounds. As has been stressed, the results so far have opened a new and till now unknown area of research which they do not expect to exhaust within the time frame of the proposed investigation. What the PI s would like to do, instead, is to focus on the most needed areas, to enhance the understanding of the dynamics of phase separation and increase the applicability of its unique properties to the solution of practical problems. In fact, they expect that coalescence can be eventually retarded increasing the amount of surfactants and of thickeners, thereby increasing the viscosity of the mixtures, or when quenching the mixture into its metastable region. Therefore, they intend to determine the thresholds of the surfactant concentration and of the mixture viscosity and composition beyond which surfactants start to slow down significantly the separation process, just as they do in the absence of phase transition. In addition, the PI s want to study how mixing, which is necessary to rapidly cool the system, can counteract the effect of phase transition, causing the formation of stable emulsions. As in the past, the experimental work will be accompanied by modeling and simulation, in such a way that these two activities will interact and compliment with each other. The results should not only lead to a better understanding of spinodal decomposition and nucleation, but will also be of great value to any industrial applications of this approach to phase separation. In particular, the PI s want to focus on the following areas of research, to be addressed both experimentally and numerically doc15003 none This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation NSF 01-65 on Ultra-High Capacity Optical Communications and Networking. III-nitride optoelectronic devices offer benefits including UV blue emission, the ability to operate at very high temperatures and power levels. Large band offsets of GaN AlGaN or InGaN AlGaN heterostructures allowing novel quantum well devices, and high emission efficiencies. But the research in III-nitrides has been so far focused on their applications in the blue UV optoelectronic devices. We propose a combined effort to develop novel photonic components and photonic integrated circuits based on III-nitride wide band gap semiconductors for fiber-optical communications. High-speed optical switches and wavelength routers are indispensable in future all-optical networks. Presently opto-mechnical switches and thermal tuning of silica-based array waveguide gratings (AWG) are not fast enough to perform optical packet switching. On the other hand, InP--based AWGs have high optical loss and temperature sensitivity due to high refractive index of the material and small waveguide size. The refractive index of GaN is about 2.2 in infrared, which is much better matched to the index of optical fiber (1.5) than InP (3.2). The index-controllable nature of Al Ga N and In Ga N alloys makes them an ideal candidate for optical waveguide devices. These together may allow the creation of photonic devices with unprecedented properties and functions. Since Il1-nitrides are semiconductor materials, carrier injection can be used to modulate the refractive index and change the phase delay of the waveguide. Another objective of this research is to make electrically pumped waveguide optical amplifiers in the optical communication windows. Currently, InGaAsP-based semiconductor optical amplifiers have sub-nanosecond carrier lifetime and they are not suitable for WDM optical systems because of the fast cross-gain saturation. Er-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA) are suitable for WDM applications; however, optoelectronic integration is not possible with EDFAs because of the fiber length. III-nitride semiconductors appear to be able to host erbium ions. Electrical pumping on InGaN GaN heterostructures generates photons at the wavelength of approximately 400 nm, which can be used to optically excite the erbium ions. Since erbium has much higher absorption efficiency in the short wavelengths than the currently used pumping wavelengths of either 980 nm or nm, the amplifier may potentially be made very short doc15004 none This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation NSF 01-65 on Ultra-High Capacity Optical Communications and Networking. The objective of the proposed research is conversion of ultra-high bitrates of electrical data to optical signals. The goal of the proposed research is demonstration of GaN unipolar lasers operating at C-, L- and S-band wavelengths, exhibiting a direct modulation bandwidth between 100-250 GHz. This goal will be pursued by elimination of the principle source of speed limitation in conventional bipolar structures exhibiting ten s of GHz bandwidth. Until recently, all semiconductor lasers utilized both holes and electrons for stimulated emission. The low field transport of holes in the active region of such lasers limits the direct modulation bandwidth. A unipolar laser which can be modulated at speeds limited only by very fast high field electron transport and parasitic RC time constants is proposed. Quantum cascade lasers and LEDs made from GaN-based semiconductor materials will be designed, fabricated and characterized. This form of laser utilizes only n-type, and undoped, material to inject electrons into an upper confined quantum well state followed by an optical transition to a lower energy state. The proposed technology could also see application to 100-250 GHz bandwidth modulators and detectors. These lasers will also be valuable as high power IR lasers for such applications as nm pump lasers. High temperature operation of GaN has been demonstrated in FETs where channel temperatures of 300 C are possible due to the wide bandgap and good thermal conductivity of GaN. Superior chemical stability will permit much higher optical output powers without laser mirror degradation compared to the arsenide-phosphide laser materials. These broad bandwidth lasers would dramatically reduce number of active and passive elements required for achieving a desired system capacity. In optical architectures where 2N or N2 elements are required, moving from 20 Gbit second today to 120 Gbit sec with GaN quantum cascade lasers could reduce optical systems parts count by figures between 12 and 36 doc15005 none This award supports the development and implementation of a workshop for prospective and current female professors in science and engineering fields as part of the NSF ADVANCE Leadership Awards Program by a group of researchers from the George Washington University and Gallaudet University who have collaborated for the past five years on projects to increase the numbers of women and other under-represented minorities in advanced Science, Engineering and Mathematics (SEM) careers. Using experience from earlier efforts to bring together students from different institutions, large and small, local and far away, specialized communities (e.g. women s colleges, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and comprehensive, to consider and be prepared for graduate school in science, engineering and math (SEM), the PIs propose to develop and run a similar workshop for potential and current female faculty members in SEM. The proposed activity will benefit from the pipeline created by the FORWARD program: participants from this program started in will be reaching graduation and the stage of securing a faculty position within the proposed timeline of the award. Participation will be solicited from across the country and will feature speakers from successful programs and careers in SEM. This project is supported by the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc15006 none Raghavan This Americas Program award will support Dr. Madhavan Raghavan of the University of Iowa to make a planning visit to work in collaboration with Dr. Erasmo S. da Silva from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. This planning visit will permit the researchers to perform pilot studies and plan a collaborative research proposal. The overall objectives of the proposed research are: (1) To study the biomechanical properties of abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) using specimens obtained during autopsies performed at Sao Paulo University School of Medicine and (2) To evaluate the practicalities of the long-term collaboration. The structure of the planning visit takes into account the intellectual and physical assets of both participating investigators. The long-term goal is to comprehensively study the biomechanical properties of abdominal aortic aneurysm. Both of the participants in the study, and their associates, will learn much about the science and the technique practiced by their counterparts. If the follow up were successful, the results would be of significant benefit worldwide doc15007 none This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation NSF 01-65 on Ultra-High Capacity Optical Communications and Networking. We have recently introduced a hollow dielectric optical fiber which utilizes a one-dimensional photonic crystal to guide light. This fiber is predicted to have an unrivaled degree of confinement of the electromagnetic energy density in the hollow core - allowing for broad-band and low loss transmission with substantially decreased non-linear behavior. In this proposal we will focus our efforts on creating novel in-fiber optical devices based on the unique characteristics of this hollow waveguide. We will theoretically examine the effects of inducing large periodic modulations along the axial direction of the fiber. These are expected to open large photonic band gaps in the direction of propagation. In particular we will study the possibility of creating high Q cavities within the fiber. Application to high speed all-optical switching and other novel devices will be illustrated. The ability to form all-optical devices in a fiber has many technical advantages, reduction of coupling losses to transmission line - not being the least. It also opens new opportunities to low cost fabrication of optical devices based on fiber production processes. Our efforts will be directed towards the formulation of a general theoretical approach, the design, development and the experimental realization of in-fiber optical devices based on the axially modulated hollow dielectric omnidirectional waveguide doc15008 none Roggemann, Michael C. This work will develop and validate a technique to derive long exposure Point Spread Functions as a function of Field of View using on-axis wavefront statistics measured at the Advanced Electro-Optical System adaptive optics wavefront sensor. The technique will use existing models of the well-characterized turbulence profiles at the Maui site on Haleakela. This approach, if demonstrated successfully, may lead to a new technique that will be an alternative to the more expensive and complex Multiple Conjugate Adaptive Optics systems planned for the future. It promises to be a useful tool for the entire astronomy community studying extended objects doc15009 none This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation NSF 01-65 on Ultra-High Capacity Optical Communications and Networking. Future systems for optical signal processing and communications will require large scale integration of photonic devices. Ferroelectric oxides have long been recognized as highly non-linear optical materials with significant advantages, especially when used as optical waveguides. In the form of high-index-contrast, thin film structures, high-density integrated optics can be potentially achieved. The intrinsic confinement of the electromagnetic field in the thin film guide leads to high power densities and strong optical nonlinearities. Their utilization in thin film waveguide structures, however, has been limited because of difficulties in preparing low loss materials with bulk-like non-linear optical properties. Recent advances in the epitaxy of ferroelectrics, however, indicate that thin-film guided -wave devices are now realizable. In the proposed program epitaxial ferroelectric oxide thin film waveguide structures for microphotonic devices and integrated optical systems will be investigated. The proposed work builds upon our demonstration of low loss epitaxial ferroelectric thin films prepared by metalorganic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE) and the demonstration of large band width guided wave electro-optic modulators. MOVPE enables the preparation of ferroelectric oxides with high electro-optic coefficients that are not available as large single crystals. Specific systems to be investigated include BaTiO3, and other ferroelectrics. Thin film guided wave electro-optic devices will be fabricated including Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulators and beam steering devices. Thin film modulators with bandwidths of 20-100 GHz will be designed and fabricated. By using highly nonlinear ferroelectric thin films, significant improvements in bandwidth, and operating voltage are anticipated compared to conventional bulk ferroelectric devices. The feasibility of integrating epitaxial ferroelectrics with silicon will be investigated. Metalorganic molecular beam epitaxy (MOMBE) will be used to form low index, epitaxial buffer layers that act as a stable interfacial layer between the ferroelectric oxide and the silicon substrate. Devices will be fabricated using both conventional and e-beam lithography. Potential applications for microphotonic devices and systems are in terabit per second optical communications, local area networks, and optical interconnects doc15010 none Murphy, James The Advanced Electro-Optical System (AEOS) on Haleakela, Maui, Hawaii of the US Air Force with its adaptive optics system and the standard imaging focal plane will be used to study the visible and infrared character of the atmospheres of Mars, Saturn and Jupiter. The Mars observations monitor inter-annual variations of the Martian surface albino and its relation to global dust storms. The observations of Jupiter and Saturn monitor the location and properties of aerosols in their atmospheres. The unique capabilities of this telescope system enable the recording of very high spatial resolution images of the planets. These high resolutions approaching 20 milliarc seconds are essential to observe motions of clouds across the surface disk of the planet doc15011 none This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation NSF 01-65 on Ultra-High Capacity Optical Communications and Networking. This proposal deals with an innovative liquid space optical switching (LISOS) method based on surface-tension-driven microfluidics. The final goal of this research targets ultra high capacity, e.g., x , optical cross connect switching systems. Some of the featured aspects of performance include fast switching time (~ 100s), low insertion loss (~ 0.2 dB), low crosstalk (~ 40dB), low power consumption (~ 10W per switch), inherent latching function (i.e., no continuous power), and reversible switching action. This technology will enable next generation ultra high-speed optical communication at a very low cost. As the signal traffic for optical fiber communication rapidly increases, all-optical switching technology without opto-electronic conversion is considered the ultimate goal. The conventional switching scheme using optical-electrical-optical signal conversion simply cannot follow the high signal rate (e.g., GHz - THz range) requirement for next generation network communication. The use of micromachined mirrors for the direct switching of light signals, which eliminates the signal conversion process, has been a major alternative to the conventional approach. However, the extension of the micromirror approach to ultra high capacity optical cross connect is facing the fundamental limits in loss characteristics and manufacturing costs (labor and time). The use of thermal-bubble-actuated index matching liquid has been recently proposed as an alternative to the micromirror-based approach. The actuation characteristic, however, is not desirable due to large, continuous power requirement. Furthermore, the thermal stability requirement of the liquid restricts the choices of optically optimum working liquids. In this research, surface tension - a dominant force in microscale fluid motion - is proposed as an actuation mechanism for LISOS. The novel electrical and mechanical control of surface tension (Electrowetting and Mechanical Wetting) are used as microactuation mechanisms with extremely low power consumption, reliable operation, and high speed actuation. The proposed team, combining microfluidics technology with the photonics capability, will design, fabricate, and test a surface-tension-driven LISOS system (SLISOS) suitable to the high volume, high speed requirement of the emerging optical communication requirements with the aforementioned performance doc15012 none Stegeman This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation NSF 01-65 on Ultra-High Capacity Optical Communications and Networking. The continuously growing demand for communications channels in short and long distance networks necessitates an expansion of the available spectral region near the loss minimum of silica-based fibers. Dramatic reduction of the water absorption peak at nm opened up the available communications window from to nm, corresponding to about 50 THz. Such a large bandwidth rules out existing erbium doped fibers and semiconductor lasers leaving Raman gain as the prime amplification mechanism. However, the Raman bandwidth in silica fibers is only 10 THz, and gain coefficients in silica glass are small. As a solution the PIs propose to investigate new materials for signal amplification by Raman gain for local networks, intermediate distance networks and long-haul fiber transmission. New Raman gain media will be considered in both bulk and fiber form, the first for local area networks and specialized applications, and the second for longer distance transmission. New glass, molecular and polymeric materials will be fabricated, and characterized by spontaneous Raman scattering, Raman gain measurements. and the evaluation of the Raman gain materials in a fiber network environment. A selection of those will be fabricated into fibers and the Raman gain evaluated in network scenarios. The PIs propose to explore new classes of oxide and non-oxide glasses to optimize the structure-property relations that give the best properties for Raman gain. These will include chalcogenide glasses with varying As, S, and Se content, and heavy metal halides such as the TeX glasses. Oxide glasses of interest are phosphates, heavy metal oxides, and borophosphates which exhibit spectrally broad Raman bands. A variety of organic species will be examined, mostly in polymer form. The diversity of functional groups in organic media can cover the fully desired 50 THz bandwidth, and more, for Raman gain. Polymer blends and composites will be prepared that contain specifically designed molecules that cover this spectral range and their Raman signal strength measured. Families of interest will include polythiophenes and related polymers that have previously shown strong Raman scattering. Also investigated will be the fluorenyl family of chromophores which possess high thermal and photochemical stability. Inorganic and organic components can be combined in virtually any ratio to obtain hybrid sol-gel nano-composites extremely versatile in their composition, processing characteristics, and properties. Thus through judicious selection of the organic component, particular optical properties can be realized such as extended Raman bandwidth and gain coefficient doc15013 none Smith, Ian A sensitive CCD camera system to enable imaging photometry, spectroscopy and polarimetry of the out burst and the following brightness decay of Gamma Ray Bursters will be designed, fabricated, assembled, aligned, tested, integrated and calibrated. In year 1 of this proposal the instrument will be located at the Coude room of the Air Force Advanced Electro-Optical System (AEOS) on Haleakela Hawaii. During year 2 the instrument will be mounted on the trunion axle of the alt-azimuth mount of the telescope. The instrument s operation will be documented to the extent that Air Force instruments scientists in residence on Maui will maintain the routine operation of the instrument doc15014 none I propose to initiate an innovative, collaborative small grants program that fosters basic research by undergraduate and graduate students on fundamental questions related to plant conservation biology. With a third year of funding following on my NSF Post-doctoral Fellowship in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education, I will forge partnerships between my host institution, the New England Wild Flower Society (NEWFS), and academic centers in New England to establish a student research program addressing the ecology of rare plants, called the NSF NEPCoP Fellows Program. During fall , I will solicit research proposals from advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students from academic institutions in New England. I will fund six field research studies selected via peer-review and will advise these studies during summer, . I will assist students in empirical design, data interpretation, and publication. Results from these studies will be published as appropriate in scientific journals, and promulgated to relevant conservation organizations to facilitate management of rare plant populations. This program will: Enable students to hone both strong empirical research skills and clear communication skills that will enhance their. Professional development and broaden their opportunities for employment; yield valuable new data to advance the science of conservation biology; fund opportunities for research in conservation biology not currently covered by grant sources; provide. Critically needed data on species biology to NEWFS and other conservation organizations to promote scientifically-based. Conservation efforts; serve as a self-sustaining model for collaboration among academic and extramural institutions to strengthen data collection efforts and to train a new generation of conservation biologists doc15015 none The proposed activity aims to improve the recruitment and retention of women in engineering academia and to enhance career development of women engineering academics by addressing publications in refereed scholarly journals. This project will develop a CD ROM that demystifies the journal publication process. The CD ROM will contain both text material and digital video. An overview of how the system works and the differences, both in procedure and in impact, of journal articles, journal short papers, journal notes, refereed proceedings and book chapters will be documented in clear and general terms. How the editorial board of a journal operates from editor-in-chief down to individual reviewers will be explained with suggestions on how to become involved with a journal in an editorial capacity. Then, a set of best practices case studies that follow engineering papers from first submittal through publication will be included. These will take the user through the review and revision process step by step and at least one case study will involve a rejected paper that is successfully transformed for another journal. The video clips will provide comments and discussion by article authors, journal editors and reviewers, using women engineering academics where possible. While the focus is on journal papers, this CD ROM will assist the users in developing other peer reviewed publications including proposals. Dissemination will be in two phases and will be aligned with assessment efforts involving surveys and interviews. This project will benefit a large number of women academics and potential academics by addressing an issue vital to scholarly success. This project is supported by the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc15016 none This project is for The American Mathematical Society to administer a program for selecting approximately 130 U.S. mathematicians for whom travel awards of about $ each will be provided to attend the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing, China, August 20-28, (ICM-02). Held every four years, the International Congress of Mathematicians is one of the most important gatherings of the world s leading mathematicians, where major mathematical developments across subdisciplines are discussed. The Congress promotes cross-fertilization among the different subcommunities of the mathematical world. Significant U.S. representation at ICM-02 is important to the scientific health of the nation. Applications will be evaluated by a panel of professional mathematicians, who use their judgment both in evaluating professional qualifications and guaranteeing that early career and minority applicants are not overlooked. The awards are intended to cover travel, and a portion of subsistence or registration fee coverage, except in the case of early career mathematicians, who will be awarded more subsistence. The AMS administered similar programs for ICM-90 in Kyoto, Japan, ICM-94 in Zurich, Switzerland and ICM-98 in Berlin, Germany doc15017 none The high demand likely to be placed on the capacity of telecommunication networks in the near future urges conversion of hybrid electro-optical signal processing to all-optical processing, exploiting the largest bandwidth available in the optical domain. One way of catering to this demand is by multiplexing in time as well as wavelength domains. Using picosecond-duration optical pulses, which could be soliton-like over portions of the network, one can first perform multiplexing in the time domain (i.e., time-division multiplexing, or TDM) for local to metropolitan-area network applications and then in the wavelength domain (wavelength-division multiplexing, or WDM) for wide area coverage. This scenario leads one to conclude that the key issue to be addressed is how to take advantage of the powerful digital-processing techniques in the pure-optical domain, that minimize the detrimental effects of noise at a very fundamental level. The idea is that, for digitally encoded data [1 s (0 s) represented by the presence (absence) of pulses], instead of using linear amplifiers which act on signals in an analog fashion and inevitably introduce 3 dB of noise one can employ digital-switching amplifiers or optical regenerators. At the same time, pure-optical digital switching is potentially much more reliable and faster than electro-optical switching. Furthermore, optical switching will also be needed to implement other networking functions, such as demultiplexing to process at very high speed the header of a data packet used for addressing to different users on the network. Our preliminary experiments show that the parametric nonlinearity of optical fibers can be exploited to perform functionalities that will be needed in packet-switched all-optical networks, such as fiber-optic cache-memory buffers, picosecond-pulse all-optical regenerators, all-optical limiters, and tunable clock re-covery modules. These devices take advantage of the ultrafast parametric nonlinearity of glass fiber and hence are capable of operating at speeds in excess of 100 Gb s. Moreover, they will be essential for deploying packet-switched, ultrahigh-speed time-division and wavelength-division multiplexed all-optical networks. In all of our experiments thus far, standard dispersion-shifted fiber (DSF) has been used. Fiber lengths on the order of 100 s of meters are required for used with ps-duration pulses of a few watts peak power to achieve the data processing functions. Here we propose to explore the use of high-nonlinearity fiber, such as microstructure fiber (MF, which is only now becoming commercially available), to perform essential functions in high-speed all-optical processing. Because of their strongly guiding behavior, the MFs can be wound into very tight loops, suggesting that they could potentially fit into a compact modular switching package. Specifically, we propose to utilize the high-nonlinearity microstructure fibers to develop all-optical data processing modules. These include a cache storage buffer based upon parametric amplification that will be capable of operating in the 10 s of Gb s range. With use of the high-nonlinearity fiber, the average pump power requirement can be met with commercially-available watt-class optical amplifiers. We will carry out experiments to explore various ways of reading, writing, and erasing the stored data patterns. Our work has shown that the ultrafast parametric nonlinearity can be exploited either to provide broadband tunable gain or dynamic gain modulation for clock-recovery. We propose to combine the two to demonstrate optical phase-lock loops, which in principle can be extremely fast as they rely on the Kerr nonlinearity for envelope-phase discrimination. Simultaneous to the above experimental studies we will also develop numerical models of the various optical systems. This will provide a design tool to determine the parameter values allowing the most efficient operation of the experimental setups. We have previously demonstrated the possibility of stably propagating sub-picosecond pulses in fiber lines in which conjugating gain is used to compensate the linear loss. We propose to assemble a re-circulating loop experiment in which linear loss will be compensated by a pair of non-degenerate parametric (conjugating) amplifiers. The location of the two amplifiers will be chosen based upon further theoretical numerical results. We will experimentally and theoretically study the stability properties of the sub-picosecond pulses by making various signal and noise measurements, and will compare the experimental results directly with numerical simulations doc15018 none Khammash The objective of the proposed research is to study examples of biological feedback regulation mechanisms using the tools of dynamical systems and feedback control theory, and to use the results to shed new understanding on the operation of these systems in health and disease. In achieving this objective, The PI seeks to identify functional modules that serve specific feedback control roles, to determine the physiological basis of these modules, and to understand the extent to which such modules generalize to other regulatory systems and across hierarchical scales. These questions are key in addressing the long-term objective to develop a unified framework for analyzing homeostatic mechanisms--one that is centered on feedback control theory concepts and language, and takes into account known physiology. It is believed that such a framework will make it possible to make new progress in the understanding of those complex biological and chemical processes involved in homeostasis and the functional modules that these processes constitute, based on the functional constraints that are imposed on these modules by the necessities of feedback and robustness doc15019 none This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation NSF 01-65 on Ultra-High Capacity Optical Communications and Networking. Advanced data and telecom communication systems will require development and integration of diverse hardware technologies (e.g. fiber optics, integrated optics, electronics, and MEMs) to achieve reliable functionality and to satisfy large capacity and high data rate throughput. In the past, the best designs have shown great promise in the research lab, but have demonstrated degraded response once packaged. Optoelectronic device design is complex and has been simplified by de-coupling the electronic design from the optical aspect of design. At high data rates, unresolved electrical issues can result in significant optical response degradation. In the future both mechanical and electrical issues must be linked together in device and package design to offer an improved performance of packaged devices with reduced design cycle time and cost. Hence, successful development of high data rate systems above 50 Gbps will require development of approaches to offer transparent package integration in optoelectronic (OE) design. A key issue for high-speed optoelectronic design is development of optics-centered electronic design methods. Such co-design methods are now possible, given the current knowledge in high-speed electronic design. This research seeks to investigate the development of co-design methods for the design and integration of high speed electronic interconnects into device and optoelectronic packages. The impact of this research could provide revolutionary package design methods for photonic technology that could lead to the development of the first integrated optoelectronic package design techniques. Two objectives are sought during this research period. Objective 1 seeks to investigate the design of high speed electrical interconnects with high isolation for optoelectronic devices. Objective 2 seeks to investigate the development of co-design approaches for transparent optoelectronic package integration. Focusing on two topics - interconnects and packaging, we propose to investigate the use of silicon micromachining techniques as a vehicle for combining optical microbench packaging technology with high performance interconnect design to form novel high speed integrated packages. We will achieve our objectives by working on the following research problems: The first is an interconnect study for isolated and high-density designs used to package lasers into the silicon optical microbench technology. The second is a packaged traveling wave electrode study for use in optical modulator applications. The third is integration study for heterogeneous packaging of Si microbench technology in low temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) substrate boards to provide signal transfer between high frequency connectors and the silicon micro-bench. This research project will provide important experience and knowledge for training the next generation of high frequency engineers in co-design methods for optics with high data rate electronic interfaces doc15020 none This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation NSF 01-65 on Ultra-High Capacity Optical Communications and Networking. The present state-of-the-art in wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM), ~100 signal transmission channels in the fiber C-band ( - nm), employs only a small fraction of available fiber bandwidth. While erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) for the L-band ( - nm) are presently being developed and deployed, there is a widely-recognized need to develop systems for other portions of silica glass fiber s low-loss transmission spectral window ( - nm). Present C-band systems utilize various approaches for hybrid integration of both active InP-based optoelectronic devices (photon laser sources, amplifiers, and detectors) and passive InP or silica-on-silicon planar lightwave circuits (or PLCs, for multiplexing, demultiplexing, and add drop functions). Greater functional and or monolithic integration of the active and passive components used in WDM systems will reduce their costs and accelerate deployment. Researchers have recently demonstrated GalnNAs quantum well heterostructure semiconductor lasers operating at nm (cw, 300 K) and nm (pulsed, 300 K). These devices overcome the performance limitations inherent to lnP-based heterostructures due to weak carrier confinement by low potential barriers. This exciting development also has enabled GaAs-based heterostructures to access optical fiber communication system wavelengths for the first time. The potential for complex lightwave circuitry with monolithic integration of active and passive components for optical communications is much greater than exists in the InP material system due to the much larger range of material parameters afforded by GaAs-based 111-V alloys. In particular, the compatibility with A1GaAs and InAlP alloys, which can be converted through wet thermal oxidation to insulating and transparent low refractive index oxides, provides a significant advantage for advanced waveguide integration techniques. In this project, the development of new approaches for the fabrication of GaAs-based photonic integrated circuits for WDM applications in optical communications will be explored. Wet thermal oxidation of A1GaAs and InA1P alloys will be applied to low-loss waveguide fabrication for both active and passive waveguide devices. Novel structure designs and processing approaches will be combined to realize fully-oxidized A1GaAs heterostructures as broadband passive ridge waveguides for monolithic integration with active components. Rare-earth doping of native oxide waveguides will be explored using both Pr3+- and Er3+-doping for 1.3 um and 1.55 um band amplifiers, respectively. Phased-array (PHASAR) based WDM devices will be designed, fabricated and characterized in native-oxide based waveguides. This will lead to curriculum enhancement in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame doc15021 none Young, Eliot The Advanced Electro-Optical System (AEOS) on Haleakela, Maui, Hawaii of the US Air Force with its adaptive optics system will be used to determine the density as a function of altitude and the structure of the atmosphere of the satellite of Saturn: Titan. The observational plan is to observe a stellar occultation and measure intensity and spatial distribution as the light from a background star passes (refracts) through the atmosphere of Titan. The A O system has been shown to lock-up and correct wavefront errors using Titan as the source doc15022 none Chang-Hasnain This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation NSF 01-65 on Ultra-High Capacity Optical Communications and Networking. It is well accepted that future, high-speed, highly efficient optical networks must migrate from being circuit switched to ultimately packet switched. One of the key functions for any efficient packet-based network is the ability to avoid contention and blocking by using local buffers at the switching nodes. However, after more than 20 years of research, there has been scant progress in developing a practical all-optical buffer. The PIs propose to research the fundamental building blocks (i.e., primitives ) across different disciplines that will truly enable a bufferless packet-switched all-optical network. This research will be vertically integrated, to investigate unique fundamental primitives including devices, systems, and network architectures. The PIs will investigate the key functionalities, opportunities, and limitations when combining these primitives across these diverse disciplines. The PIs will demonstrate a new repetition statistical algorithm code at the packet level in which packets are replicated at the transmitter array and sent along different network paths that will minimize the packet latency and packet loss, as well as reduce the complexity of each switching node inside the core network. This algorithm will accommodate and adjust to the transmission and device limitations that exist at the physical layer. Implementing this scheme will require unique 30-nm-wide wavelength-tunable laser devices that can be tuned in a few ns, a novel 3-dimensional fast (ns) high-port-count optical switch, the transmission and reception of packets that are statistical multicast, and all-optical synchronization and packet-header recognition at a switching node. Given the statistical multicasting that is needed to achieve a bufferless network the PI s algorithm design will attempt to conserve the use of the available spectral, temporal, and spatial domains. They will solve unique problems by enabling ultra-wide-wavelength-tunable lasers and by limiting the nonlinear interactions (i.e., Brillouin, FWM) when channel wavelength spacings decrease to below a fraction of the channel information bandwidth. It is not uncommon to have efficiencies as low as 5% for peak rate allocation of bursty video streams. Statistical multiplexing will give an order of magnitude gain over circuit switching even for long-lived data streams. Therefore, their new algorithms and experimental implementations will result in overall deflection loss probability much lower than can otherwise be achieved. This integrated research will take into account that each device and systems limitation will impact the network routing algorithm, and switching and routing efficiencies will drive the device and transmission requirements doc15023 none Brown, Michael E. The Advanced Electro-Optical System (AEOS) on Haleakela, Maui, Hawaii of the US Air Force with its adaptive optics system will be used to monitor the weather on Titan to determine the location, formation rate and evolution of large scale cloud outbursts. Measurements of the speed of the winds made in this work will provide data for an estimate of the drift of the Huygens Titan probe on the Cassini spacecraft. This will establish how long the probe can be expected to remain in communication contact with scientists. The behavior of the Methane condensation (clouds on Titan) events is of immediate interest to the interpretation of Huygens data and will provide important insight into the dynamical behavior of the atmosphere and possible localized sources of condensable Methane. A graduate student will carry out much of this work doc15024 none It has long been a comfortable fallacy that the optical fiber has infinite bandwidth, and, therefore, we have bandwidth to burn. With the explosion of multiple-channel communications through the use wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM), available bandwidth now takes center stage. When comparing optical communications with other types of communications, we lag far behind in terms of spectral efficiency (i.e., bits Hz) and we are not even close to the Shannon capacity limit. In fact, higher spectral efficiency is probably the area of least creative activity within the field, and yet it holds the promise for revolutionary increases in future systems capacity. One of the technical areas within optical communications that has shown the most bandwidth waste and has many future potential applications is subcarrier multiplexing (SCM) of many lower-speed channels on a single wavelength carrier. In SCM, half the data bandwidth is wasted since either: (i) transmitting double-sideband signals will, in essence, duplicate the data being sent given that each sideband carries the full information needed for reception, or (ii) transmitting single-sideband signals requires that the mirror frequencies on the other side of the carrier wave (i.e., where the second sideband would have been located) remain unoccupied by any other data signals. Subcarrier multiplexing has many advantages for future optical communications systems, including: (a) the transmission of many lower-speed digital data signals on a single high-capacity wavelength, (b) the transmission of many analog-modulated signals, (c) the transmission medium for networks that accommodate wireless microwave-based optical signals, and (d) the transmission of control labels for efficient routing in packet-switched networks. We propose implementing a new multiplexing scheme that enables double the spectral efficiency for optical systems that use subcarrier multiplexing. The scheme is called dispersion-division-multiplexing (DDM) and relies on placing two data channels simultaneously in the same frequency space away from an optical carrrier. For example, one double-sideband data channel is transmitted conventionally, and a second double-sideband channel is transmitted in the shadow of the first channel. Shadowing occurs due to the chromatic dispersion of the optical fiber. Due to dispersion, each of the two double sidebands of a single channel will travel at slightly different speeds. These sidebands will periodically be out-of-phase will each other relative to the optical carrier wave, thereby canceling each other and inducing RF power fading (i.e., a nearly complete disappearing of the given channel s power at a receiver). One channel would be faded when the other channel would be in-phase and have full power. By using a tunable dispersion-inducing element, a receiver can change the relative phase between each cannel s two sidebands and thus recover either of the two frequency-co-located channels. Our research program will investigate unique functionalities, opportunities, and limitations when using spectrally-efficient dispersion-division-multiplexing that could bear significant fruit in the 5-10 year time frame. The key fundamental features of our systems and networking research program are as follows. We will: (a) demonstrate highly-spectrally-efficient DDM for many WDM channels, (b) demonstrate the utility of DDM for interconnecting nodes in a wireless-based photonic network, (c) demonstrate SCM label swapping and routing in a WDM photonic network, and (d) investigate the fundamental limitations of generating, transmitting, and receiving DDM channels when considering SNR, extinction ratio, and data bandwidth. TABLE OF CONTENTS doc15025 none This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation NSF 01-65 on Ultra-High Capacity Optical Communications and Networking. Semiconductor fabrication technology has advanced to a state where revolutionary new devices can now be fabricated that bring new functionality and applications to fiber optic interconnects. Two of these new technologies, photonic crystals and self-organized quantum dots (QDs), enable a synergistic match of nanostructured materials that are particularly interesting. Photonic crystal defects enable ultra-small semiconductor microcavities with 3-dimensional mode confinement that intrinsically sets the wavelength of the light source. They also provide a mechanism for routing light signals on chip in sharp bends between elements, for example to multiplex the outputs of several laser sources into a single optical output. Because of these unique features, photonic crystals enable a new type of monolithicaliy integrated chip technology ideally suited for wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). This new chip technology offers revolutionary advances for low cost, high performance, ultra-small form factor transceivers for ultra-high bandwidth fiber optic communication. Such a WDM chip technology can easily provide single fiber bandwidth in excess of 100 GB sec. Here we propose to demonstrate the multi-wavelength source for such a chip. We propose to design, and demonstrate a nanophotonic WDM source that is a multi-wavelength laser array in which each element of the array consists of coupled photonic crystal defect cavities emitting at a single wavelength with quantum dot active regions. This work relies on the design and nanofabrication of photonic crystals for the optical mode definition and the ability to define the output wavelength of an array element. It also relies on quantum dots for reducing or eliminating surface recombination and for eliminating the laser chirp. This WDM source is to be electrically pumped. Our program emphasizes the following technological developments 1) electrically pumped photonic crystal lasers 2) high efficiency photonic crystal lasers with quantum dot active regions and sampled- grating photonic crystal reflectors 3) edge-emitting multi-wavelength photonic crystal quantum dot laser arrays doc15026 none The international mobility of highly skilled workers, in particular human resources in science and technology (HRST) is an important and growing policy issue with a number of countries. The project is a preliminary investigation of the statistical, methodological, economic and policy issues involved in the international mobility of skilled workers, especially IT specialists, research scientists and engineers or entrepreneurs. Results from the statistical components of this work will feed into the revision of the Canberra manual which sets international guidelines for the measurement of human resources in science and technology. Expected outcomes of the project are (1) new indicators reflecting international mobility for a range of countries to be published in ; (2) An international conference on the issue scheduled for ; (3) a compendium of country studies and international statistics will be published in 2 containing revised and expanded versions of works presented at the conference doc15027 none The demand for patent-based indicators has been growing steadily over the past decades, both for macro and micro-economic analysis as well as for policy use, as reflected in national S (2) guidelines for calculating indicators: published as working papers, they will feed into a revised version of the OECD Patents manual; (3) indicators published on a regular basis by the OECD and made available to institutions such as the NSF in OECD member countries; (4) an international workshop in on patents indicators, with participation of experts from the institutions supporting the project; and (5) a compendium of patent statistics published in , collecting new indicators, an analysis of technological trends drawn from these indicators, and methodological explanations doc15028 none This project will carry out an invitational conference for 35 U.S. and Russian experts in mathematics education, mathematics, materials development and psychology in late January, . The conference will determine the usefulness of the Elkonin-Davydov mathematics curriculum for the U.S. The conference, a collaborative project of a non-profit organization with expertise in international education (Best Practices in Education) and the University of Hawaii s Curriculum Research and Development Group, is expected to be the first phase of a multi-year effort in curriculum analysis, materials development, field testing and professional development. The project will investigate how the key features of the Russian (Elkonin-Davydov) curriculum, with its emphasis on mathematics as an integrated whole and its foundation in Russian research on mathematics learning, make it responsive to concerns that traditional U.S. curricula are fragmented and lack a sound basis in research. The results of the project will be published by Information Age Publishing Company doc15029 none The goal of this project is to contribute to the development of a national science and engineering academic workforce that includes the full participation of women in all levels of faculty and academic administration, particularly at the senior academic ranks, through the transformation of institutional practices, policies, climate and culture. The Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) proposes an integrated approach to institutional factors that will support the full participation and advancement of women, and provide a model of best practices, in academic science and engineering. Georgia Tech will build upon previous activities and momentum for the advancement of women. The Georgia Tech ADVANCE team includes: the Provost and the Deans, faculty, and campus leaders from four cooperating Colleges: Computing, Engineering, Sciences, and Ivan Allen College, representing a full range of science and engineering fields. Through this project, Georgia Tech will emphasize organizational features and factors that shape outcomes for women in science and engineering, and will clarify and portray the ways in which resources, processes of evaluation, organizational culture and climate, including leadership, and family policies affect the full participation and advancement of women by field, career-stage, and family parental status. In doing so, they will address critical transitions to senior status, and the meaning of full participation in academic science and engineering. Proposed activities include1) creating an inter-college network of termed professorships that promotes the goals of ADVANCE; 2) institutionalizing a formal training process for committees involved in tenure and promotion; 3) collecting and using resource-allocation data for equity and development of best practices; 4) holding annual retreats of women faculty, provost, deans, and school chairs to review and refine goals and progress; and 5) strengthening and extending the scope and impact of family-friendly practices. This project is supported by the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc15030 none Stone This project will support the first three years of the Intermountain Southwest Conference on Industrial and Interdisciplinary Mathematics to be held at Utah State University, Colorado State University, and Arizona State University. The conference series, which will rotate among these institutions on an annual basis, would provide both a venue for the presentation of problems in industrial and interdisciplinary mathematics and a forum for the discussion of ways to broaden the traditional curriculum in order to prepare mathematicians for industrial and interdisciplinary positions. The conferences would bring together researchers from both academia and industry, enabling cross- fertilization between the programs in the Intermountain Southwest region, and providing a venue for the students to present their work and interact with other students, faculty, and representatives from industry. The first of these annual meetings will be held at Utah State University in Logan, UT in February . The two-day meeting will include sessions for invited talks by researchers from academia and industry, a round-table discussion involving faculty and industry representatives, sessions of shorter contributed talks and or poster sessions, a special session involving only graduate students, and an informational session for undergraduates. The round-table discussion would focus on (a) integrating the needs of local industry into the mathematics curriculum and (b) current research activities in the region. For the first meeting, representatives from the Boeing Company have already agreed to attend and individuals at Motorola, Intel, IBM, and Hewlett Packard have been approached. Participation is also expected by faculty members from departments of physics, electrical and computer engineering, computer science, and industrial engineering. Faculty and students from other universities in the region and from broader areas will be invited to attend. This conference series will be jointly supported by the Applied Mathematics Program and the Infrastructure Program of the Division of Mathematical Sciences and by the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities of the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences doc15031 none The goal of this project is to contribute to the development of a national science and engineering academic workforce that includes the full participation of women in all levels of faculty and academic administration, particularly at the senior academic ranks, through the transformation of institutional practices, policies, climate and culture. The University of Washington (UW) recognizes the important contributions that women make in science, engineering, and mathematics (SEM), and the factors that still inhibit women s full participation. The University proposes to create the Center for Institutional Change (CIC) to design and implement programs to help eliminate obstacles to women s full participation and advancement in the SEM disciplines. Many of these challenges occur in departments, so changing departmental culture will be a part of the CIC mission. The CIC will focus on these issues in SEM on campus: Leadership development for chairs and deans Department cultural change Policy change Leadership development Short-term support program for faculty in times of transition The work of the CIC will seve all groups (men, women, under-represented) and improve the environment for everyone in SEM. UW will share its experiences with other institutions, professional societies, and industrial partners that are addressing the issues of low representation of women faculty in engineering and science. A network will be established to facilitate dissemination, and UW will work with Boeing, Weyerhaeuser, CH2M Hill, and REI to share best practices. This project is supported by the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc15032 none Danyluk Funds are provided for attendance of thirty NSF funded researchers at a joint AFOSR ONR NSF grantees meeting in the topic areas of surface materials science and engineering and tribology. The meeting will take place in Florida on June 4-8, . The NSF delegation will include eight students and a number of young researchers from under-represented groups. The delegation members will present oral and poster reports and will participate in discussions and panels on potential future research directions. The abstracts of the presentations will be published by the AFOSR subsequent to the meeting doc15033 none The investigators will analyze data from an equatorial scintillation station at Ancon, Peru, and conduct modeling studies associated with the electrodynamics of the low latitude ionosphere under quiet and disturbed magnetic conditions. The effort includes experimental campaigns in South America in the first and third years. Other instruments to be operated during the campaigns are Fabry-Perot interferometers, GPS receivers, digisondes, and the low power mode of the Jicamarca Radar (JULIA). The primary goal of the study is to understand what conditions determine the onset of equatorial scintillations. Merging different data sets will allow the investigators to determine the background conditions of the ionosphere during the onset of scintillation and expand our view of the unstable plasma region. Specific areas of research include identifying the spatial coherence of the zonal irregularity drifts, the relation between scintillations and F-region irregularities, and the effect of geomagnetic disturbances on irregularity growth. The results of the study will contribute to the development of models for specifying and predicting scintillation conditions that might cause disruptions in transionospheric communication and navigation signals doc15034 none The project aims to address the problem that physics, or more specifically physics courses, are widely held to be difficult, unpleasant, and irrelevant, even though physics provides the foundation of much of modern technology. The objective of this work is to change the curriculum and method of presentation of undergraduate physics courses to make them popular, engaging, and more effective at providing widespread understanding of physics concepts as they apply to the world around us. The approach that is being taken to achieve this goal is to first develop a novel introductory course for non-science students that will build on the unique curriculum put forth in the new textbook How things work; the physics of everyday life . Interactive Java applets and interactive lecture demonstrations (ILDs) are being developed that cover the topics in this text, and thereby provide novel presentation formats to go with this novel curriculum. Applets and ILDs are two of the innovations that science education research has shown contribute substantially to student conceptual learning. Through the use of readily available technology these can also be easily and inexpensively implemented in the standard large lecture course format. The physics for nonscientists course is specifically targeted because it has the capability of reaching large numbers of students, but the institutional and disciplinary barriers to introducing such radical changes in it are uniquely low compared to other physics courses. However, demonstrated success in this course is likely to result in similar changes being adopted in the rest of the undergraduate physics curriculum, and the applets and ILDs being developed can be used equally well in a variety of courses. The development of these applets and ILDs heavily utilize the same skills that have made the PI a highly successful experimental physicist, and their effectiveness is being assessed using standard techniques of education research. The Wiley publishing company will vigorously pursue the implementation and distribution of these innovations doc15035 none The goal of this project is to contribute to the development of a national science and engineering academic workforce that includes the full participation of women at all levels of faculty and academic leadership, particularly at the senior academic ranks, through the transformation of institutional practices, policies, climate and culture. The University of Michigan proposes to undertake three different types of interventions to improve the opportunities and circumstances of tenure-track women faculty in basic science and engineering fields. These include: (1) a campus climate initiative, which will focus on activities (e.g., workshops, focus groups, climate surveys, consultation on increasing pools of female applicants in searches) that have been identified, or will be created, and made available to any interested science or engineering unit (a department or college) throughout the University; (2) a gender equity resource fund, which will provide new types of direct support to individuals; and (3) a departmental transformation initiative, which will permit a sequenced program of activities to be developed and tailored to a small number of units on a competitive basis. This sequenced program (including internal review or self-study, goal-setting, and a series of targeted activities addressing recruitment, retention and or climate issues) will enable a sustained, committed intervention within a single department, as well as provide a model of change for other institutional units. All three sets of programs will be evaluated by independent researchers. Evaluations will be conducted throughout the course of the Award, using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Results of early evaluations will be used to revise Programs. This multi-level program is designed to improve the campus environment for women faculty in science and engineering at the University of Michigan, and as a result to increase the successful recruitment, retention and promotion of tenure-track women faculty in basic science fields. The presence and success of these women faculty will in turn affect the expectations and attitudes of the many women and men who are graduate and undergraduate students in science and engineering fields. Many of these individuals will go on to have science and engineering careers themselves; because UM trains so many students, it is anticipated that the impact of this program will reach well beyond this university. Creation of a more equitable climate at UM will affect other campuses through the next generation of science and engineering faculty who will themselves train students, as well as non-academic work settings in which scientists and engineers trained at UM are employed. This project is supported by the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc15036 none This award supports the development of a new database of science and engineering department chairs and the development and administration of a comprehensive survey of department chairs. The department chairs survey will collect information about the respondents personal and professional background, their career-related perceptions and attitudes, and the institutional setting of their department. This data will support detailed multivariate analysis examining the determinants of women s entry into, or lack of movement into, positions of departmental leadership. The lack of demographic data on department chairs and the processes by which they are chosen represents a significant gap in the knowledge about the progress of women in assuming a key academic leadership position. To address this gap in knowledge, project objectives are to develop and implement a department chairs survey and to construct a new database of demographic and career-related information on science and engineering department chairs. This study will help to achieve significant change by bringing to light the criteria and processes used to select chairs. Institutional accountability and presence of public data on the proportions of female chairs can make a profound difference in the level of attention paid to the appointments. Systemic change must include not only increasing leadership diversity in the upper administrative levels, but also at the local level (i.e., the department). The chair is also critical to initiating other change within the department. This project is jointly supported by the NSF ADVANCE Program and the National Institutes of Health. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc15037 none Higgins This U.S.-Mexico award will support a research collaboration between Dr. Linden E. Higgins of the University of Massachusetts and Dr. Juan Nunez Farfan of the Instituto de Ecologia of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. The researchers intend to study the mechanisms of evolution of local adaptation in organisms found in diverse habitats. Not all species found in diverse habitats show local adaptation, and an improved understanding of why species fail to evolve local specialization will improve our understanding of how and when evolutionary diversification can proceed. A central question of their project is: Why do some species remain coherent units over diverse habitats? The large, orb-weaving spider Nephila clavipes (Araneae: Tetraglathidae) is found throughout central and southern Mexico, continuously distributed along a cline from the Gulf Coast to the Pacific coast and in isolated peripheral populations in mid-altitude mountainous locations. There is little local differentiation among these populations, and the species exhibits great phenotypic plasticity in many aspects of its biology. Two alternative models will provide the researchers with testable predictions concerning the amount of genetic differentiation and local adaptation among populations. Predictions arising from these two alternative models of species coherence will be tested using field observations, molecular genetics, and laboratory experiments. The collaboration will benefit from bringing together the U.S. PI s expertise on the ecology, development, behavior, and physiology of the chosen spider species, with the Mexican PI s work on the phenotypic evolution in different organisms using the framework of quantitative and population genetics doc15038 none PI: Clifton, C. A three-day workshop on Separability of cognitive functions: What can be learned from Williams Syndrome? will be held in late August of . The workshop is designed to encourage researchers in the Five Colleges and other colleges in New England the the North East states to engage in research involving young people with Williams syndrome. Its secondary goal is to bring the Berkshire Hills Music Academy facility and its future potential for facilitating research to the attention of the world-wide community of Williams researchers. A third goal is to promote the exchange of ideas among researchers with various kinds of expertise in Williams syndrome. All three goals are directed to the larger objective of understanding the diwssociations among cognitive abilities exhibited by Williams syndrome people and exploring their implications for the basic structure of human cognition and the interconnections among distinct cognitive abilities doc15039 none This award is to continue the work of Bryn Mawr College in the promotion and support of the next generation of women in the mathematical sciences. The award supports the outreach, mentoring, and research projects of Professor Rhonda Hughes of the Department of Mathematics. This effort builds on previous efforts of the Principal Investigator and the College, aims to further identify and replicate effective structures that promote the successful advancement of women mathematical scientists, so that they might eventually assume positions of leadership in the science, engineering, and mathematics community. A significant portion of the work involves collaboration with Professor Sylvia Bozeman of Spelman College, as well as cooperation between Spelman and Bryn Mawr Colleges. The activity involves four major components:(1)The EDGE Publication Program, which would provide for the broad dissemination of information about successful strategies for increasing the retention of women in graduate programs in mathematics, and supporting the advancement of their careers;(2)The Capacity Building Program for Women, which would establish a three-tiered mentoring program in order to increase the capacity of women to advance to positions of leadership in the academic community;(3) The EDGE Symposium ,which would provide a forum for identifying and disseminating information about institutional and individual paradigms that contribute to this advancement, and include an EDGE Reunion and mentoring workshops; and (4)The Re- search Program of the Principal Investigator, which would enable the Principal Investigator to intensify her research program in functional analysis and operator theory, and permit the increased involvement of undergraduate and graduate students in timely areas of mathematical research, with the long-range goal of their pursuing careers in the mathematical sciences. This project is supported by the National Institutes of Health through the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc15005 none This award supports the development and implementation of a workshop for prospective and current female professors in science and engineering fields as part of the NSF ADVANCE Leadership Awards Program by a group of researchers from the George Washington University and Gallaudet University who have collaborated for the past five years on projects to increase the numbers of women and other under-represented minorities in advanced Science, Engineering and Mathematics (SEM) careers. Using experience from earlier efforts to bring together students from different institutions, large and small, local and far away, specialized communities (e.g. women s colleges, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and comprehensive, to consider and be prepared for graduate school in science, engineering and math (SEM), the PIs propose to develop and run a similar workshop for potential and current female faculty members in SEM. The proposed activity will benefit from the pipeline created by the FORWARD program: participants from this program started in will be reaching graduation and the stage of securing a faculty position within the proposed timeline of the award. Participation will be solicited from across the country and will feature speakers from successful programs and careers in SEM. This project is supported by the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc15041 none This award provides support for reconfiguration and revitalization of a project called Women in Linguistics Mentoring Alliance (WILMA). WILMA was started in to provide women in linguistics with mentors to help them acquire general survival skills and guide them through the early stages of their careers, thus increasing the numbers of women in linguistics. WILMA grew out of discussions among members of COSWL (the Committee on the Status of Women in Linguistics) and others which indicated a need for consistent mentoring practices for women in linguistics. In this project a new program which makes use of the internet for identifying and arranging mentorships will be initiated. The goal is to create a self-sustaining website where women in linguistics can go to search for mentors who share their interests and attributes. Effective mentoring is critically important for academic advancement and personal development in any field of study. WILMA is based on a model that supplements rather than replaces other mentoring, on the premise that students and faculty benefit from exposure to a range of points of view and alternative responses to practical questions. There is also additional benefit to developing contacts beyond the home department and campus. Thus, the kind of mentoring provided through WILMA can be useful even to women lucky enough to have good mentors and advisors at their home institutions. This project is supported by the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc15042 none This award in the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic program supports research on the synthesis and study of single molecule magnets (SMMs) by Professor George Christou of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Florida. These molecules behave macroscopically as magnets at low temperature but exhibit quantum tunnelling of magnetization (QTM) which is responsible for loss of magnetic behavior at increasing temperature. A series of new SMMs will be produced from carboxylic acid derivatives of polynuclear manganese complexes as well as from some iron compounds. Supramolecular aggregates of SMMs will be synthesized in order to raise the barrier to QTM and allow them to operate as magnets at temperatures higher than a few degrees Kelvin. The goal of this research is to develop molecular magnets which ultimately can operate at practical temperatures, analogous to the development of higher-temperature superconductors. The results of this research will lead to an enhanced understanding of the factors which produce magnetic behavior in these molecules, as well as to the factors controlling its loss at higher temperatures. The students involved in this multidisciplinary project will receive broad training which will prepare them for careers in both industry and academia doc15043 none This is a proposal to support an expansion of the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) Project in the Women s and Gender Studies (WGS) Program at North Carolina State University. The WISE project promotes the advancement of women and people of color in science and engineering through the integration of women s studies into the undergraduate and graduate curriculum via faculty development seminars. The current proposal is for two years of funding to support companion seminars for interested faculty and graduate students. The immediate goals of the proposed seminar project are to foster community among the participants, address their interests in theory and research from women s studies, and promote informed conversation within science and engineering departments and classrooms. The long-term goals of the proposed seminar project are to provide an institutionally sustainable vehicle for the recruitment and retention of women and people of color as faculty and graduate students in science and engineering, promote the national dialogue about best practices in accomplishing this, and contribute new scholarship by and about women in science and engineering to the field of women s studies. This project is supported by the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc15044 none The goal of this project is to contribute to the development of a national science and engineering academic workforce that includes the full participation of women in all levels of faculty and academic administration, particularly at the senior academic ranks, through the transformation of institutional practices, policies, climate and culture. With this award, Hunter College will design and implement a program to improve the institutional practices and culture that affect the hiring, retention, promotion, salary, and professional development of women in the natural and social sciences. As part of the largest public urban university in the nation, Hunter College will be a model for the other CUNY colleges and for urban public universities generally. Goals include: a) to develop, test, and disseminate measures for identifying, measuring, and reporting hidden and subtle, as well as visible and obvious, indicators of gender equity; b) to correct unintended institutional practices that work against the advancement of women scientists; c) to educate administrators and other evaluators, via workshops and training manuals, about inadvertent gender biases in evaluating and recognizing scientists contributions and about strategies for equalizing men s and women s ability to advance; d) to develop interventions to advance junior and mid-level women scientists via a sponsorship program. This project is supported by the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc15045 none The problem of under-representation of women in engineering and sciences is critical. This is particularly true of senior women in engineering. To address this urgent problem of under-representation and to meet the marketplace demand for the technological workforce in the 21 st century, a program is proposed that provides for mentoring and leadership development. The aim of the Mentoring and Leadership Program is to sustain and broaden the existing initiatives at Syracuse University to promote the advancement of women faculty in engineering and sciences. Some of the existing initiatives are the brainchild of WISE, which the PI co-directs with the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and others are the direct results of the PI s Meredith Professorship initiatives. The proposed Mentoring and Leadership Program will capitalize on the existing initiatives and will introduce new features that reflect current knowledge of leadership development. The ADVANCE Leadership Award will also enable the PI to maintain an active research program while she develops and implements initiatives aimed at the advancement of women students and faculty at Syracuse University. This project is supported by the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc15046 none The goal of this project is to contribute to the development of a national science and engineering academic workforce that includes the full participation of women in all levels of faculty and academic administration, particularly at the senior academic ranks, through the transformation of institutional practices, policies, climate and culture. Through the Leadership Education for Advancement and Promotion Program (LEAP), the University of Colorado seeks to transform the makeup of the science and engineering faculties at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and to increase the number of women trained in the scientific, mathematical, engineering, and technology (SMET) disciplines serving in key administrative positions. The University of Colorado, Boulder seeks to improve the environment for all faculty members, by improving the level of managerial and leadership skills possessed by the faculty. Providing all the tools needed to work effectively will reduce the stresses commonly associated with achieving tenure. LEAP will therefore accelerate the promotion rate of women faculty by increasing retention rates and making their environment more supportive. The program is designed to keep faculty members on track for tenure, to identify potential leaders, and to give people more leadership opportunities. The program is designed to work with efforts already underway at the University of Colorado. Formative evaluation of the program will maximize the effectiveness of the funds used over the lifetime of the program. At the end of the five-year period the University of Colorado, Boulder expects to have more women in leadership positions in the University. In addition, they will have trained a cadre of faculty better able to pursue long term change, and have developed an effective way to continue to train faculty for success. This program will permanently impact the institution and the changes it initiates will be self-sustainable through internal support. This project is supported by the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc15047 none The goal of this project is to contribute to the development of a national science and engineering academic workforce that includes the full participation of women in all levels of faculty and academic administration, particularly at the senior academic ranks, through the transformation of institutional practices, policies, climate and culture. The Unviersity of Puerto Rico, Hamacao proposes to implement a five year program to increase the participation and advancement of women in the natural and social sciences. The University of Puerto Rico (UPR), Humacao Campus is an undergraduate institution with approximately 4,300 students; 99% of Puerto Rican origin and 65% women. For years UPR has had one of the highest rates of recruitment and graduation of undergraduate women in science, mathematics, and engineering in the United States. At the Humacao campus, 68% of the students in the Biology and Chemistry programs and 50% in Mathematics are women. In Physics, the only program with a minority of women the number has increased to 26% after the efforts of the last 7 years. Although the number of women in science is high compared to universities in the US mainland, women are still under-represented in the faculty and do not advance to the highest academic ranks at the same rate of male faculty. The proposed project includes the following activities: Investigate the causes and consequences of the participation of women in science in the UPR-Humacao to develop strategies that can be used in UPR and elsewhere. Identify problems that inhibit the advancement of women faculty and determine how they might differ between universities in Puerto Rico and other US universities. Set-up a coordinated campus effort to revise procedures, and to define and implement policies and practices for the recruitment, retention and advancement of faculty to increase the participation and advancement of women faculty. Set-up training for new faculty on career transitions, including on gender related issues and how to advance in academic positions.. Set-up training for administrators on approaches to improving gender equality and diversity. Increase the recruitment of women in Physics and Electronics and Computational Mathematics by providing scholarships for graduate studies (with funds from UPR-H) to talented students. UPR-H will carry out an assessment and evaluation program on the proposed activities throughout the project to develop short and longterm interventions, and to measure the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The program will serve as a model for other Hispanic universities, both in Puerto Rico and elsewhere in the US. This project is supported by the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc15048 none The primary goal of this proposal is to create a self-sustaining mentoring program for women in the Department of Biology at Arizona State University. SWIS will be based on a vertical integration scheme where faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students and undergraduates work together in a mentoring network to foster the advancement of women in biological research careers. The project is based upon two key observations. First, in the Biology Department, they have numerous unconnected resources that have not been used to the full advantage of mentoring women, particularly at the graduate and undergraduate level. With this proposal, they plan to consolidate resources in the Department and connect pre-existing resources in such a way that new opportunities for growth and mentoring will be created. Second, although the ASU Biology women faculty are leaders in their field and have been extremely successful at mentoring individual students, no one faculty member has sufficient time and energy to create a self-sustaining organization such as the proposed SWIS program. The SWIS program has 2 components: the development of a mentoring network through a seminar series and invited seminar speakers, and the development of a mentoring workshop focused on issues pertaining to the successful recruiting and retaining of women in science careers. The former is seen as a mechanism to concentrate the efforts of individual women in the Biology Department, and the later as a mechanism to promote permanent cultural change. This project is supported by the National Institutes of Health through the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc15049 none Berry This Americas Program award will support Dr. Paul E. Berry of the University of Wisconsin Madison in collaboration with Dr. George J. Shepherd and Dr. Maria de Carmo Amaral, both of the Instituto de Biologia (UNICAMP). The aim of this project is to initiate the revaluation of Martius great work and explore the feasibility of presenting Flora Brasiliensis in facsimile form on the World Wide Web, including corrections for the now outdated taxonomy. The following steps will be taken: (1) Develop a pilot Web page, (2) Evaluate the cost of digitizing and indexing images only, (3) Contact and recruit active systematists worldwide to update the taxonomy and nomenclature of the published treatments in the Flora, (4) Use the concept of this project as a springboard to help produce new regional and national floristic treatments in Brazil and neighboring areas. The long-term goal is to develop a complete Neotropical checklist of vascular plants and contribute more fully towards floristic treatments within tropical South America. This project will build strong and lasting international ties between key institutions involved in plant diversity efforts as well as strengthen international ties between systematic biologists and discourage isolationist tendencies in individual countries where the greatest biodiversity is found doc15050 none The goal of this project is to contribute to the development of a national science and engineering academic workforce that includes the full participation of women at all levels of faculty and academic leadership, particularly at the senior academic ranks, through the transformation of institutional practices, policies, climate and culture. This proposal presents a comprehensive, multi-layered approach addressing the institutional barriers inhibiting the progress of women in science and engineering. The research questions to be addressed are 1) what are the climate-related factors, barriers, attitudes, and experiences of women in science and engineering at UW-Madison, 2) to what extent are the current programs and the proposed initiatives successful in addressing these factors, 3) to what extent can the eventual institutional transformation model be replicated and extended to other campuses. A National Women in Science and Engineering Leadership Institute (WISELI) will be established to centralize collected data, monitor the success of the proposed efforts, implement a longitudinal data system, and ensure dissemination of best practices. In addition to establishing WISELI as a visible entity with campus-wide endorsement, new initiatives will include national workshops for academic women as well as chairs and deans; establishing 10 professorships chairs to support the advancement of women in science and engineering in the Chancellor s endowment goals; awarding Life Cycle Research Grants at vulnerable career junctures; sponsoring Celebrating Women in Science and Engineering Seminar Series. Existing programs such as the Chancellor s Climate Initiative, dual-career hiring programs, the Women Faculty Mentoring Program, the Committee on Women, Sexual Harassment Information Sessions, and Gender Pay Equity studies will be evaluated for effectiveness and modified as needed for women in science and engineering. While the proposed project focuses on sustainable institutional change, it incorporates interventions to foster networking, mentoring, and role modeling for women graduate and postdoctoral trainees with the goal of filling the academic pipeline. Evaluation, directed by the Learning through Evaluation, Adaptation, and Dissemination (LEAD) Center, will be on-going and will inform development and redirection of initiatives in an iterative process of implementation, evaluation, and modification. Complementing the evaluation, an ethnographic study and linguistic discourse analysis will be conducted by a cultural anthropologist and linguist, respectively. The Chancellor has committed to making the program sustainable beyond the funding period by continuing support for a research position dedicated to the institutional study of the status of women, the endowed professorships, and planned efforts to raise funds to make WISELI a permanent element of the campus. The UW-Madison has all of the scientific, historical, administrative, and cultural ingredients to make it an ideal campus to develop and study innovative initiatives for true institutional change for women in science, both locally and as a model for other campuses. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc15051 none The PIs propose to educate women geoscientists on the barriers to their progress in academia and on strategies to overcome those barriers. Their goal is to increase the proportion of women in geoscience tenure track and tenured positions in academia in the United States. Project objectives are to: 1) determine the current status of women in academia through a survey of geoscience departments in the United States, 2) conduct focus groups and surveys of students, tenured and untenured faculty and non-tenure track faculty at national geoscience meetings to determine what is the perception of barriers to women s progress in the field, 3) hold a 1-day workshop to investigate the causes of the low representation of women in academic geoscience positions in the United States, and 4) Disseminate the information to geoscience students, junior faculty and to academic administrators to educate women students and faculty on strategies to overcome barriers, encourage women to pursue academic geoscience careers and teach administrators how to recruit and retain qualified women in geoscience. This approach to increasing women s representation in the geosciences takes a supply-side or mentoring approach, with a focus on teaching women what they need to know to become (i) educated in the field without discrimination, (ii) to negotiate salaries and contracts, and (iii) to find out what is required to achieve tenure at their institutions. This project is supported by the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc15052 none Over the past thirty years Spelman College has made great strides in its efforts to increase the number of women and the number of African American students who complete bachelor s degrees in mathematics and who enter into and persist in graduate programs in the sciences, mathematics and engineering. Those efforts have resulted in a greater understanding of the academic training and early professional development needs, and the support mechanisms required to attract these students into the higher levels of academic excellence and academic leadership. It has also resulted in a cadre of women faculty who hold leadership positions throughout the SEM areas in their own disciplines. The current ADVANCE project intends to capitalize on past success by pursuing the following goals: a. Use scholarly writings to disseminate information regarding support structures aimed at increasing retention among women in graduate mathematics programs; and information on support mechanisms to advance the careers of women in the scientific community. b. Facilitate the transition of the PI back to a full-time research and teaching position following a period of long-term leadership in efforts to expand the pipeline of academic leaders in SEM areas. c. Increase the capacity of women to assume academic positions in higher education as mathematicians and to advance to leadership roles in the science, engineering and mathematics academic community, with a particular emphasis on minority women. This project is supported by the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc15053 none The goal of this project is to contribute to the development of a national science and engineering academic workforce that includes the full participation of women in all levels of faculty and academic administration, particularly at the senior academic ranks through the transformation of institutional practices, policies, climate and culture. The central administration of UCI is committed to diversity and equity and realizes that to maintain and increase its competitive edge the problems contributing to the low representation of women in academic science and engineering need to be addressed. This sense of urgency is compounded by the impending growth of the campus as a result of Tidal Wave II . With the influx of new students comes a rare opportunity to hire up to 50 new faculty, which added to the turnover in hiring, results in a projection of more than 80 new hires a year for the next decade. UCI intends to seize this opportunity to transform UCI into a diverse campus with flexible approaches and innovative solutions to problems that affect both science and the training of the workforce of the future. UCI s goals are: to increase the recruitment of women into Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology (SMET) disciplines, provide a network of support and guidance through to tenure, monitor progress by collecting and analyzing data about the objective and subjective aspects of equity, promote networking and mentoring activities for tenured women to ensure that they develop to their fullest potential, including facilitating nominations for awards at the local, national and international levels. To accomplish these goals, UCI will appoint a senior faculty member as an Equity Advisor in each of the 8 SMET schools, to tailor an equity program for that school that meets its particular needs. Their involvement in recruiting will include assisting search committees to develop diverse candidate pools containing highly qualified women. They will also set up a mentoring program for junior faculty based on a successful UCI model. To increase awareness among administrators and search committees of the ways in which our judgment of individuals is altered by their gender, UCI will make use of workshops successfully implemented in the corporate world by one of the faculty. To encourage networking among women scientists, UCI will organize a series of scientific conferences, focused on different scientific disciplines, at which women scientists will be invited to speak about their research. Workshops will allow an exploration of the issues standing in the way of full participation of women in academia, and all faculty, students, and postdoctoral fellows will be invited to participate. Finally, to provide a tangible demonstration of the value of activities that promote gender equity, UCI will establish two ADVANCE Chairs, to be awarded to tenured faculty in the sciences with both excellent academic credentials as well as demonstrated commitment to gender equity. These Chairs will be continued after the period of the grant by funds raised from private donations. To evaluate the success of these strategies, UCI s annual self-assessment surveys will be complemented by two assessments by external evaluators to be conducted in years three and five. This project is supported by the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc15054 none The goal of this project is to contribute to the development of a national science and engineering academic workforce that includes the full participation of women in all levels of faculty and academic administration, particularly at the senior academic ranks, through the transformation of institutional practices, policies, climate and culture. New Mexico State University proposes a five year program to increase by 20 percent (net) the overall number of women in faculty science, math, and engineering tenure-track positions. NMSU is a public, land-grant university with a research focus, diverse student body, and commitment to minority participation in science, mathematics, and engineering (SME). NMSU s program of institutional transformation seeks to create an environment which supports the advancement of women SME faculty to leadership positions in the professoriate and in academic administration. Under this program, a Committee on the Status of Women in SME will form the central administrative unit to bring about these changes. The Committee will include the associate deans of the Colleges of Agriculture and Home Economics, Arts and Sciences, Engineering, and the Graduate School, department heads and senior faculty from departments within these colleges, and key advisory personnel with experience in diversity issues in higher education. The NMSU Committee on the Status of Women in SME will: (1) conduct a self-study of the current status of women in SME faculty positions at NMSU and institutionalize an annual review of the status of women faculty at NMSU to insure gains made toward equity under this program continue after the grant period; (2) distribute research, travel, and start-up funds with the goal of recruiting and retaining women SME faculty; (3) establish an endowment and long-term funding campaign to provide financial resources to sustain ADVANCE initiatives after the grant period ends; (4) coordinate Faculty Development and Visiting Scholar programs; (5) serve as consultants to SME Departmental Faculty Search Committees; (6) disseminate programmatic results within NMSU and at professional conferences. As a Hispanic serving institution, NMSU will also encourage participation in SME fields among under- represented ethnic groups. This project is supported by the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc15055 none The Association for Women in Science (AWIS) is a recognized national leader and innovator in developing mentoring and leadership programs. AWIS proposes to build on a previous project on academic climate funded by the Sloan Foundation. This project developed surveys for assessing the institutional climate for undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty. In addition to surveys, site visit protocols were developed for campus visits. Nine central issues for faculty emerged from this work: (1) Recruitment, hiring, and retention; (2) Tenure and promotion; (3) Dual careers; (4) Family and work; (5) communication; (6) Mentoring faculty; (7) Mentoring students; (8) Informal networking and socializing; and (9) Career development. Recommendations were developed to address these issues and sample model policies were collected. AWIS has been involved in the dissemination of these materials for the past three years. Recently, with the MIT Report, the demand has outpaced the ability of AWIS to supply materials on an individual basis. AWIS proposes to develop an on-line Institutional Climate Assessment Kit that institutions can use to implement their own programs. In addition to the kit, AWIS will have a section on Model Academic Policies that address many of the nine topics listed above and a bi-weekly on-line column that tackles these issues. As a result of the proposed project, AWIS anticipates three clear and realistic outcomes, including (1) An institutional Climate Assessment Kit that will provide an evaluated and tested model for replication by the institutions; (2) Model Academic Policies that can be used by science societies and institutions; and (3) explicit professional science society linkages that will facilitate replication and sustainability of the project. This project is supported by the National Institutes of Health through the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc15056 none The proposal is a collaborative proposal involving University of Pittsburgh & Case Western Reserve University. The proposal plans to explore fundamental questions and associated middleware development issues to support broadcast and multicast data dissemination. When many people try to access the same information (for example, news sites during the Election), servers are often overwhelmed resulting in long delays. If an effective multicast capability existed across the Internet, a single server could have served all the requests, saving both computer power as well as reducing the amount of overall Internet traffic. The approach will highlight gaps in the state-of-the-art and will research and explore new techniques and algorithms. The objectives include 1. transparently provide applications with data management services such as caching, scheduling and consistency maintenance, 2. improve internet functionality, performance, and cost-effectiveness, and 3. reduce the application development time while improving performance and reliability. The proposal plans to make the information and developed software available to doc15057 none This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) project is to explore the development of a unified mechanics model for prediction of chatter during high-speed milling; in particular, for systems with flexible tools and flexible workpieces. The developed model will include time-delay effects and loss of contact effects, and it will allow for features such as partial engagement of a tool with the workpiece. Stability information will be obtained by using tools from the nonlinear dynamics area. This model will be analytically and numerically studied to determine stability charts in terms of parameters such as spindle speed and axial depth of cut and the sensitivity of these charts to feed rate and feed direction will be examined. Experiments will be conducted to validate the model predictions. A potential risk involved in the development of the model is due to the lack of readily available cutting force data for high-speed milling operations. If successful, the development of this model will have a tremendous impact on simulating workpiece-tool interactions, selecting machining parameters, and redesigning tools for important industrial problems such as the machining of T-shaped stiffeners and return flanges with long end mills and the machining of difficult-to-machine materials doc15058 none Rock Mechanics in Extreme Environments: A Workshop to Explore Applications of Rock Mechanics in Challenging Settings will take place on July 7, , as part of DC Rocks : The 38th U.S. Rock Mechanics Symposium in Washington, DC. The workshop will probe areas of national concern, such as resource development, national security, scientific exploration, and building and infrastructure. An extreme environment is one in which rock is exposed to a change in its environment caused by the activities of humans. The workshop will consist of a series of presentations by experts on the unique mechanical and engineering properties of rock under extreme environmental conditions, and technologies that make it possible to subject rocks to extreme environments. These presentations will include research initiatives underway and the problems inherent in working under these environmental conditions. After the presentations, workshop participants will discuss how the many unknown characteristics of rock under extreme conditions can be better understood. How can research and technology development help in this quest? Workshop topics include rock and rock structures under high dynamic loading, caving method mining, difficult rock conditions in the new Transalpine Tunnels, blasting in urban environments, stone in architecture, rock as a building material, fractured bedrock, and rock mechanics for deep drilling on Mars. All discussion transcripts will be compiled, edited and published in a document that will be distributed at no cost through the ARMA Foundation and its Web site doc15059 none Allen L. Ambler and Jennifer L. Leopold, University of Kansas $26,250 - 12 mos Children s Programming Odyssey This is a standard award. The IEEE Symposia on Human-Centric Computing Languages and Environments (HCC 01), to be held in Stresa, Italy on September 5-7, will include a special event - the Children s Programming Odyssey - featuring some of the world s premier researchers in children s programming languages, including Alan Kay (Squeak), Ken Kahn (Toontalk), Allan Cypher (Stagecast), and Alex Repenning (AgentSheets). This is funding to support participation in the Odyssey of up to ten graduate students from the United States, who will each give brief presentations of their thesis work followed by a positive critique from the panel of experts. Student participants will be invited based on materials submitted to a selection committee, to consist of the PI (who is also organizer of the Odyssey), Margaret Burnett from Oregon State University, and another member yet to be named. The primary criterion to be used by the selection committee is relevance of the student s dissertation research to children s programming, computer-based construction environments for learning, or end-user programming. In addition, the student must have done sufficient work so that s he can talk from some experience. The selected students will be expected to submit a 5-page written paper describing their current work, to attend HCC 01, and to make a 10-minute presentation in the Odyssey. The students will benefit immensely from this unique opportunity to expose their ideas to and to interact with the leading researchers in this area; this nurturing effort is an inexpensive yet effective means of encouraging young and upcoming scientists doc15060 none Efficient and effective change detection and notification is becoming increasingly important for environments such as WWW and distributed heterogeneous systems. Change detection for structured data has been studied extensively. Change detection and notification for unstructured data in the form of html and XML documents is the goal of this project. The objectives of this proposal are to investigate the specification, management, and propagation of changes as requested by a user in a timely manner, and meeting the quality of service requirements. The user is allowed to specify the kind of changes to documents s he is interested in, at different levels of granularity. They also specify how they need to be notified (email, mobile host, PDA, etc.) when the requested information becomes available. Quality of service (QoS) information such as timing constraints, aggregated vs. individual changes is part of the user specification. User specifications are translated into a set of rules that are used for extracting documents, monitoring changes, and propagation of relevant information. Special attention is paid to scalability issues, as it is an important aspect of the solution. The ability to selectively monitor and be informed of changes (push) augments the current strategy of pulling information periodically and checking for interesting changes. By disseminating the resulting prototype and the results over the Internet, scientists can benefit from it. Through integration of research into courses taught at UTA and into student research, this project will impact education at UTA and other universities doc15061 none Sin Nombre Hantavirus (SNV) is a highly virulent, rodent-borne virus that causes the often fatal Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome (HPS) in humans. The highest frequencies of this disease are found in the US Southwest. The rodent vector of the pathogen is the common deer mouse, Peromyscus maniculatus. The antiquity of the virus, and the high frequency of HPS in the Southwest, raise questions about its role in human prehistory in the region. Prehistoric populations of the region were sedentary, high population density maize agriculturalists. Grain storage and processing practices of the time would have increased human-mouse contact. This exploratory project will use established ancient DNA methods to attempt to recover diagnostic nucleic acids of Sin Nombre Virus from archaeologically recovered remains of P. maniculatus in the US Southwest. Samples are expected to be 1,000-2,000 years old and will be directly dated using carbon-14. In addition to ancient DNA methods, immunohistochemical and immunoflorescent methods for the detection of antigens and antibodies specific to SNV will be attempted. The purpose of the project is to document the presence of SNV as a potential disease vector during Southwestern prehistory. Demonstration of SNV presence as a disease vector in antiquity has a variety of implications for prehistoric population dynamics in the region doc15062 none This award provides funding to initiate a master s level graduate program in Marine Sciences and further develop an educational partnership between Savannah State University (SSU), a Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), and Skidaway Insitute of Oceanography (SkIO), an oceanographic research institution. This program will greatly expand the opportunities for minority students to conduct marine research at a graduate level while attending an HBCU. SSU and SkIO have collaborated for the past three years to develop a highly successful program in marine science for undergraduate students. The existing program includes opportunities for SSU undergraduates to complete research internships at SkIO and for SkIO faculty to teach at SSU. Both institutions have benefited greatly from this program, which was initiated with funding from NSF HRD. In recognition of the growth and success of the undergraduate program, the University System of Georgia (USG) approved a new M.S. degree program in marine science at SSU. USG will provide new faculty lines and funds for construction of a new building in support of this program. This award provides funding to initiate the M.S. program while additional state resources are brought on-line and while funds for graduate students are sought via traditional research awards. The program could provide an important model for successful collaborations that will increase minority participation in science. Joint funding for this program will be provided by NSF s IGERT program and the Office of Naval Research (ONR). The intellectual merit of this program lies in the development of a collaborative graduate education program between an HBCU and a major marine science research institution. Such collaboration will be unique to this field and may provide a model for such efforts, both in geosciences and other scientific fields. Two important societal impacts should be realized from this award. First, a unique graduate program in marine sciences will be established and should become institutionalized within five years. Second, if this program is able to attract minority students who either would not have attended graduate school or who would have gone into other fields, it should greatly increase the number of minority students receiving Master s degrees in ocean sciences. The link to the IGERT program strengthens the possibility that ultimately these students may choose to continue in the field of geosciences for a PhD. Since the percentage of minority students who receive Master s degrees in the physical sciences is about 2.8% (NSF Publication #00-327, Table 4-6), and the number of students who receive PhD s in ocean or marine sciences is typically one or two per year (NSF Publication #00-327, Table 4-12), this program could have a very important impact on diversity of ocean sciences graduates within a five to ten year time-frame doc15063 none A new generation of sophisticated, multi-party distributed applications are being proposed and implemented over the Internet. Many of these applications, such as distributed publish-subscribe services, ubiquitous files system and distributed auctions, require the location and coordination of a large number of resources dispersed throughout the network. A fundamental building block for these applications, is a distributed directory. The distributed directory enables applications to locate required resources in a timely and efficient manner, and helps the application to scale. The proposal describes TerraDir; a set of protocols for implementing customizable, distributed, peer-to-peer directories over which a range of wide-area resource discovery applications can be implemented. The architecture addresses scalability and flexibility. The research will concentrate on: - dynamic view implementation (decoupling naming from location) - configurability (applications are not monolithic, must address wide needs) - caching (multiple locations of caches) - fault tolerance (required for success), and - network layer techniques for finding peers and distributing applications. Each TerraDir Directory is a private namespace, and multiple TerraDirs can be active at the same time to provide other virtual directors. Since the TerraDir is designed to be implemented over the existing Internet, the protocols address end-to-end requirements and do not require any special network support doc15064 none Thadhani This proposal is to study and develop a model of international research experience based on the team travel of a graduate student, an REU undergraduate student, and a RET teacher participant, to Japan. The results of the model study will be used during a subsequent site visit by the P.I. s for developing international REU RET sites at national laboratories and academic institutions in East Asia. The institutions being targeted are those that have extensively interacted with the P.I. s during the last ten years, in conducting collaborative experiments, as well as via exchange of post-docs and faculty sabbaticals. The purpose of the international research experience is to allow the team members to gain an understanding of the research culture, as well as the philosophy of baccalaureate and higher education in East Asian countries doc15065 none This award will serve to develop and apply a mesoscale modeling system for studying past variability in tropical climates of Africa and South America during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). The modeling system consists of two models. A mesoscale climate model (MCM) will simulate climate on space scales of tens of kilometers. A general circulation model (GCM) will generate lateral boundary conditions on wind, temperature, and moisture for the mesoscale model. Simulations of the dry climates of the present day and LGM (~21,000 years ago) over northern Africa will be contrasted with simulations for the African Humid Period, approximately 6,000 years ago when Sahelian and Saharan Africa supported numerous lakes and extensive vegetation. The research will address the following questions: -What are the individual and combined roles of insolation, changes in land surface conditions, regional SST differences, and differences in large-scale climate (i.e., MCM lateral boundary conditions) in causing differences in surface wetness over northern Africa among the present day, African Humid Period and the LGM? -Are the differences in wetness associated with changes in precipitation only, or do changes in evaporation and or water table levels play an important role? -What mechanisms are involved in changing the atmospheric column water vapor budget? -Are any important mechanisms nonlinear in a way that helps explain the speed with which the climate can change in this region? What are the implications for future climate change (global warming)? Simulations with various combinations of lateral and surface boundary conditions, as well as other forcing functions such as insolation and atmospheric composition, will identify the important factors and physical mechanisms that lead to the wet conditions and the rapid climate change that is hypothesized to have occurred in Amazonia during the Holocene. The mesoscale modeling system will also be used to study South American climate of the LGM. The research will address the following questions: -What was the distribution of drying and cooling during the LGM in the Amazon Basin and what mechanisms are associated with the differences from the present day climate? -What differences in aridity in the Central Andes are simulated with the MCM, and what mechanisms account for differences from the present day? -How are the simulated differences in both regions related to global-scale climate conditions and how are they linked? -Does the model support the idea that there are different aridity trends in different areas of the high Central Andes? If so, are these trends providing information about inter-hemispheric symmetry or asymmetry of climate change during the last glacial cycle doc15066 none Bernardi This award supports a one-year collaborative research project between Professor Giacomo Bernardi and Karen Crow at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Professor Hiroyuki Munehara of Hokkaido University in Japan as well as Professor Andrey Balanov of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Vladivostok. The researchers will undertake a study of the involvement of speciation with hybridization of the Japanese Hexagrammids. Reinforcement is the build up of assortative mating resulting from natural selection against hybrids upon secondary contact of allopatric species. It has been theorized that reinforcement could be an important force driving speciation. Evidence for reinforcement in laboratory experiments has been difficult to generate, and studies in natural settings have been lacking, especially in marine systems. However, theoretical and empirical support has grown in the last five years and additional studies need to be done to further test these predictions. Fishes of the genus Hexagrammos meet criteria theorized to favor speciation by reinforcement. The research will involve testing whether assortative mating is being built up in conjunction with reduced fitness of hybrids to determine if reinforcement is an important force maintaining species boundaries in this system. The main focus of the proposed research is to determine the role of hybridization in processes of speciation within the genus Hexagrammos. The specific goals are to: 1) characterize the relative proportions of hybrids occurring in nature at three sites in the Northern Sea of Japan; 2) measure post-zygotic reproductive isolation between parental species by estimating differential costs in fitness associated with larvae produced from hybrid, specific and F1-hybrid backcrosses; and 3) estimate pre-zygotic reproductive isolation by comparing differences in assortative mate selection in parental species from both sympatric and allopatric populations. The project brings together the efforts of three international laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. The process of reinforcement of premating isolation is of great interest in evolutionary biology. Results of this research are likely to provide a major contribution to our understanding of speciation processes, particularly in the area of reinforcement as a mechanism for speciation. The project advances international human resources through the participation of a graduate student. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of the research in scientific journals and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc15067 none This grant provides partial support of the fifth in a series of international conferences on applications of airborne remote sensing to be held at San Francisco, CA on 17-20 September . It is estimated that approximately 800 people will attend the San Francisco meeting and that the technical program will consist of at least 300 papers on different aspects of airborne remote sensing. The purpose of the conference is to foster communication and collaboration between the scientific, governmental, and commercial communities in the use of recent developments in airborne remote sensing technology doc15068 none This comprehensive scholarship program is promoting the success of 30 Information Technology, Engineering (2) To improve educational opportunities for talented NSF-CSEMS students from special populations, such as low-income, disabled, educationally disadvantaged or under-represented; (3) To increase student retention rates for degree achievement and transfer; and (4) To strengthen partnerships between the college, area high schools and colleges, and local high technology industries. (5) To expand research experiences for students in ITETM disciplines by forming and strengthening partnerships with high tech industries on Long Island. The ITETM Project is being evaluated in terms of: (1) student retention, graduation and transfer (to four-year colleges) rates and or attainment of employment in computer science, engineering, and other technology areas; (2) success rates in passing specific industry certification exams; and (3) satisfaction of local industry and communities with the results of the program doc15069 none Braslau This is a three-year project submitted by Dr. Rebecca Braslau of the University of California at Santa Cruz, for establishing a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site focusing on organic chemistry in Bangkok, Thailand. This site will be an American Workforce and Research Education Program (AWARE)-REU site including the following collaborative institutes in Thailand: Chulalongkorn University,Mahidol University, and Chulabhorn Research Institute. The program will support a ten-week, summer international REU for 6-8 upper division U.S. undergraduates in Bangkok, Thailand. The U.S. participants will be matched to research faculty at three of the Thailand s best universities and will be able to select from among research projects in supramoledular chemistry, novel organic polymers, natural product isolation and synthesis, bioorganic chemistry and synthethic organic chemistry methodology. Thailand is an important country in Southeast Asia that few young Americans have a chance to visit. Exposure to Thailand and its research establishsment and especially the personal relationships that result will constitute an extraordinary educational experience. This presents a strong AWARE-REU opportunity. This proposal addresses an important educational need in AWARE and could provide an excellent experience for U.S. undergraduates in chemistry doc15070 none This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation NSF 01-65 on Ultra-High Capacity Optical Communications and Networking. Ultra-fast optical packet communications, with packet bit rates exceeding 160 Gbps, is a key next step in the evolution of ultra-high capacity optical networks. Ultra high bit rate packet communications is a regime difficult to implement electronically. Photonic technologies hold promise to realize these high bandwidth systems, but integration of photonic technologies severely limits the ability to realize high density circuits comparable to that of electronics. New technologies are required to bring photonics through the same level of integration that electronics experienced in the s and 70s. This program will address nano-photonic integration of the building blocks for ultra-high capacity optical communications systems and networks with smaller, integrable components. The research objectives are to investigate nano-technologies that extend optical scaling to bit rates in excess of 160 Gbps and hundreds to thousands of wavelengths. The proposed project will also address how the physics and materials of nano-photonic devices and the nonlinear dynamics and control are coupled to each other and to the systems requirements. This interdisciplinary approach is carried across the research and educational training aspects of this program. The design, performance, processing, fabrication and integration of these technologies must be understood and a new generation of scientists and engineers to lead and support this new technology base must be trained. This proposal brings together researchers from multiple fields under the common goal of nano-photonic integration for ultra-high speed WDM optical communications systems. New critical problems will be solved by integrating research in optical networks and communications with nano-photonic devices and materials and nonlinear dynamics and controls. The educational objectives involve integrating student education that incorporates material growth, device fabrication, control theory and systems. Students will take joint, team-based responsibility for mentoring undergraduate students - giving those students a truly unique perspective on a real, exciting and technologically critical problem. We expect that this dynamic, multidisciplinary research program will attract a diverse set of graduate students from under-represented groups, and these large scale photonic integration investigations will help train a new generation of scientists and engineers that will be needed over the next five to ten years to support future ultra-high capacity optical communications networks. The potential impact of this type of research can be as fundamental as that which occurred in the electronics industry in the late s through the early s doc15071 none A newly acquired aerosol mass spectrometer (AMS) will be deployed at the PROPHET (Program for Research on Oxidants: Photochemistry, Emissions, and Transport) site in Northern Michigan during the summer of . The PI will attempt to measure deposition fluxes of individual species associated with aerosol particles. The size-segregated ambient aerosol composition will be measured at a fast rate, including the ions sulfate, nitrate, and ammonium. Fluxes will be determined using the eddy correlation method. This project is supported as a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) and is a collaboration with Aerodyne Research Inc., the manufacturers of the AMS instruments doc15072 none Over the past ten years, it has become widely recognized that engineering students need skills that go beyond their technical strengths: skills in communication, project planning, and teamwork, as well as an awareness of the customer in an engineering design project, of ethical and professional issues, and of the social and global context in which their engineering is employed. A key component of this broader education is experience in collaborating with people from many disciplines. At the same time that engineering students are faced with the need to learn soft skills, students from essentially all other disciplines are faced with a need to understand and appreciate technology. A powerful vehicle for enhancing the technical fluency of non-technical students is participation on design-oriented project teams with students from technical disciplines. The PI is leading a faculty team from education, organizational psychology, organizational communication, and engineering to address the issue of fostering effective multidisciplinary student teams. The EPICS (Engineering Projects in Community Service) program provides the framework for the proposed work. EPICS students earn academic credit for long-term, multidisciplinary, team-based projects that solve technology-based problems faced by not-for-profit community service agencies, K-12 schools, museums, and municipal organizations. Founded at Purdue in , EPICS programs are in progress at six universities and planned at two more, with over 500 students participating on over 50 project teams paired with community partners. Although EPICS projects are engineering-centered, effective real-world solutions rarely depend on a single discipline. The quality of the teams solutions and the breadth of the students educational experience will therefore be profoundly affected if the institutional and educational challenges to creating well-functioning multidisciplinary teams can be addressed. Outcomes of the project are anticipated in three areas: Student learning outcomes: The project is developing vehicles to enhance students ability to work effectively on multidisciplinary teams. As a result of their experience, students should be able to: identify and articulate areas of contribution from their discipline; apply their disciplinary knowledge to advance the team s goals; respect the contributions of individuals from other disciplines; describe how different disciplines add to the effectiveness of the team; enjoy the interactions with other disciplines in accomplishing the team s objectives. EPICS Program outcomes: The increased effectiveness of the student teams enhances the ability of the teams to meet their community partner s needs. Pedagogical Methods outcomes: The project is developing a body of experience that draws on research and practice from several fields, and recasting the findings to apply them to the specific problems faced by teams of undergraduates in an academic setting. By developing structures and processes that transform EPICS into a truly multidisciplinary program, the potential impact extends beyond the student, program, and pedagogical outcomes. EPICS provides a framework for the in-context integration of faculty research and undergraduate education by the faculty from the many disciplines who will advise teams, bringing the full spectrum of research into the classroom. The collaboration of Engineering, Science, Education, and Liberal Arts has the potential to break down institutional barriers, transforming the way we think about the university. The partnership between student teams and the community gives both students and the people with whom they work a new view of the university, with the potential to transform the image of science and engineering doc15073 none Churchill This is a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) project to modify and test an infrared camera and spectrograph (the JCAM) which will be used to obtain spectra on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) at the McDonald Observatory of the University of Texas. This data will then be used to test the suitability of the modified equipment for measuring spectra of very faint Quasars in the wavelength range of 0.95 to 1.35 millimicrons which corresponds to redshifts of z= 2.4 to 3.8 In the MgII, - Angstrom absorption line. The potential scientific impact of obtaining this data for Quasar research is very high. There is a risk that this potentially very important data may not be obtainable with the HET. Extrapolating from the present performance of the telescope in the visual, it is clear that the proposed, modified spectrograph is expected to be useful for obtaining data on sources brighter than V=17 mag. However, the quasars at this redshift range lie in the magnitude range V=18 to 19 mag. Simulations show that the absorption lines in the quasars are detectable against the night sky background for 18th mag objects with an image disk of 1.5 arc seconds but the HET does not at present have the long-term, on-target stability necessary to maintain image sizes of 1.3 to 1.5 arc seconds. Although a telescope upgrade may provide the necessary image quality, the only meaningful way to determine the limiting capabilities of this instrument is to conduct actual tests. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc15074 none In recent years, problems in science education in American high schools, colleges, and universities have been widely publicized and have aroused great concern. In particular, the traditional lecture approach, common in college and university introductory science courses, often fails to help students master key concepts. Students may learn to follow recipe-like algorithms for solving problems, but they lack understanding of some of the most basic ideas. A number of strategies have been developed to improve the teaching of these courses, several of which can be used in a variety of disciplines. Over the past ten years, we have established that one effective way to improve student learning in undergraduate science courses is to incorporate cooperative learning exercises into otherwise traditional lectures, using a strategy called Peer Instruction (PI). Use of PI has spread rapidly around the world; many faculty tell us that they have found PI both successful in improving their students learning and easy to implement and adapt to their particular contexts. Peer Instruction is used widely in physics, chemistry, and astronomy, and implementation is beginning in biology, engineering, and mathematics. The goals of this project are to make Peer Instruction easier to implement for instructors, and to reinforce active learning habits for students in Peer Instruction-taught classes, through development of web-based electronic resources. Specifically,the project is developing Internet utilities that allow instructors to download class-ready materials and to automate production of a course web site for courses taught using Peer Instruction. A self-test and self-study facility for students is also being developed. These resources aim to lower the threshold to implementing Peer Instruction or similar techniques to promote cooperative learning doc15075 none This project aims to create and disseminate instructional materials on nanoscale science and technology for use in undergraduate science and engineering curricula. A text, demonstrations, and laboratory experiments are being developed around the themes of nanoparticles, nanoporous materials, and nanoarchitectures. Examples of nanoparticles include colloidal metals, ferrofluids, semiconductor quantum dots, and artificial atoms. Nanoporous materials include aerogels, dendrimers, micelles, and zeolites. Nanoarchitectures focuses on nanotubes, amorphous metals and quasicrystals, giant magnetoresistance (GMR) structures, LEDs diode lasers, self-assembly, and surface reconstruction. Collectively, these products illustrate the importance of surface effects, the limitations of scaling laws, and the onset of quantum effects as nanoscale dimensions are approached. They also demonstrate the tools and techniques required for nanoscale studies, including scanning probe microscopies, lithographic and contact printing techniques, and mechanical, electrical, optical, and magnetic characterization of materials and devices. The project is being conducted with assistance from experts from academia, industry, and national laboratories, and with resources from the University of Wisconsin-Madison NSF-supported Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) on Nanostructured Materials and Interfaces. The inherently interdisciplinary themes of nanoscale science and technology will be adapted for use in a variety of science, mathematics, engineering and echnology (SMET) classes through a pair of workshops. The first workshop aims to acquaint leading individuals from various SMET disciplines with the materials being developed so as to customize them for use across disciplines. The second workshop aims to introduce publishers and textbook writers to the materials. In addition to publications, products, and presentations, dissemination involves partnerships with www.SMETE.ORG, a Core Integration project of the NSF National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL); and with the University of Wisconsin System, through its Department of Defense-supported Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Collaborative Laboratory. A collection of web-based learning objects is being created from the instructional materials that will be readily accessible, adaptable, and affordable. Field testing is an integral part of the project and includes volunteers from the full spectrum of post-secondary institutions. Evaluation of the project is being conducted using a variety of tools and techniques. Project participants include undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctorals, who have the opportunity to contribute to this integration of cutting-edge research and education. The project aims to enhance science literacy and help attract a diverse group of talented undergraduates to technical careers and to teaching careers doc15076 none A major trend in day-to-day computing involves moving seamlessly from workstation to wireless handheld devices. A second major trend is continuous collaboration with colleagues. Accommodating and supporting these trends is extremely difficult because of the vastly different platforms and communication networks. The objective of the proposal is to develop and demonstrate a middleware framework for performance-optimized ubiquitous collaboration over heterogeneous networks. It will enable quality-of-service applications and support selective data distribution. The key component of the proposed framework is the collaboration bus, which is a middleware to support group communication in data-centric groupware. The proposed research includes: a) algorithms and methods for dynamic monitoring of network capabilities, b) data transformation and adaptation policies for adjusting network traffic, and c) assessing and controlling the performance impact involving in broadcasting each message. Some of the key elements of the research are the development of Data Adaptation Agents. These agents transform and change the data so that it can be used by different applications and hardware. The proposed research will bring new capabilities for multi-user collaboration within reach doc15077 none As the Internet evolves, so must the monitoring capabilities. This is especially important for evolving applications which require dynamic resource allocation such as collaborative applications, GRID technologies and distributed computing. In addition, because of the complexity of the network and the rapidly changing requirements of the applications, it is very difficult to predict performance or capability. This proposal plans to develop a scalable performance monitoring and dynamic prediction infrastructure based on The Network Weather Service (NWS). The NWS operates a distributed set of performance sensors, applies a set of fast statistical forecasting techniques in near real-time, and generates forecast reports for the resources being monitored. The implementation is portable among all the Grid middleware infrastructures. The proposal has two research foci; 1. research and development to extend NWS Scalability 2. deployment as research infrastructure The goal will be to develop and deploy The Network Performance Oracle which will provide a persistent, internet-accessible service for forecasting end-to-end network performance doc15078 none The focus of this project is on the development of multinational student faculty project-based approaches to integrating research and education. Most major practical problems, such as environment, public health and the access to technology, are inherently interdisciplinary and are shared across national boundaries. Internationally, we also face the challenge of transforming higher education itself to become more accessible and more responsive to the needs of our communities. Faculty at the University of Washington have been working on models for coupling collaborative multinational research addressing common scientific and engineering challenges to mutual assistance in the reform of our institutions. The essence of this approach is to tap into the rich and vibrant spectrum of international research and service activities, which are at the very heart of faculty interests and enthusiasms, while simultaneously creating opportunities that can be embedded in the core of undergraduate curricula. The current project builds on work to date in this promising arena by creating a small alliance of universities, both within the US and worldwide, which will collaborate on further refining, scaling-up, and institutionalizing this approach to integrating international research, education and service. There are several design features to this multinational project-based strategy. Prioritized projects : 1) Are embedded in genuine faculty research interests on all sides; 2) Can take place within curricular structures that affect large numbers of undergraduate students on all sides, rather than the fortunate few; 3) Contribute to the solution of practical regional problems, and 4) Invoke deep partnerships with other allies, including industry, state and local government, and non-profit organizations. A collaboration on first-year engineering design with Tohoku University, in Sendai, Japan, has been created and is currently in its third year. A four-year collaborative project on environmental challenges facing two regions with Sichuan University, in Chengdu, China has been launched. To further catalyze a fundamental re-formulation of international education and research, this project is supporting two major activities. The first is to help seed the creation of a small alliance of institutions, each of which shares the vision of strategically coupling undergraduate education reform to the solution of complex regional problems. This is particularly important in increasing the range of diversity of institutions that are able to participate. The second is to disseminate the lessons learned by the core group concerning the pragmatics of multinational collaborations that integrate education and research. The University of Washington has made a major commitment to the success of this project, including faculty release time, staff support and cash, totalling approximately 50% of the amount requested from the National Science Foundation doc15079 none Hartshorn This Americas Program proposal requests support to Dr. Gary S. Hartshorn of Duke University for sponsorship of eight undergraduate students to participate in a research-oriented tropical biology program in Costa Rica. The goal of this project, to be conducted in collaboration with the Organization of Tropical Studies in Costa Rica, is to provide field oriented research opportunities for the students. Costa Rica s richness of ecosystems and biodiversity will provide the students with a rich research experience in tropical biology, and lead them to a greater understanding of the ecology and biodiversity of this world resource. This project will also help to develop well-trained researchers, capable of working in an international setting doc15080 none The proposal is to establish a US-EU DELOS working group on Spoken Word Digital Audio Collections. The working group will meet over the next year to discuss and evaluate fruitful joint activities and research paths for collaborative activities in this general topical area. The EU component of the effort is funded and managed by the DELOS Forum, a major organizer of digital libraries research and planning activities in Europe. DELOS receives support from the Information Societies Technologies (IST) 5th Framework Programme of the European Commission. This effort continues the planning and assessment activities begun by an earlier NSF-EU working groups process. In their final report An International Research Agenda for Digital Libraries , delivered in Brussels in October , increased levels of collaboration and interaction was seen as critical to building multi-lingual, multi-national digital libraries. The objective of the new working groups, of which this is one, is to define a research agenda on a specific topic and identify areas and activities for cooperation between EU and US researchers. The efforts of this particular group take the next step in the planning process by assessing fruitful research activities and resource development related to spoken word digital audio collections doc15056 none The proposal is a collaborative proposal involving University of Pittsburgh & Case Western Reserve University. The proposal plans to explore fundamental questions and associated middleware development issues to support broadcast and multicast data dissemination. When many people try to access the same information (for example, news sites during the Election), servers are often overwhelmed resulting in long delays. If an effective multicast capability existed across the Internet, a single server could have served all the requests, saving both computer power as well as reducing the amount of overall Internet traffic. The approach will highlight gaps in the state-of-the-art and will research and explore new techniques and algorithms. The objectives include 1. transparently provide applications with data management services such as caching, scheduling and consistency maintenance, 2. improve internet functionality, performance, and cost-effectiveness, and 3. reduce the application development time while improving performance and reliability. The proposal plans to make the information and developed software available to doc15082 none Mobility is a primary functionality of next generation computing, and intensive work has been done in recent years on mobile agents and mobile computing. However, most of the current successes are based on safe-languages such as Java. While this safe-language approach provides a satisfactory solution for many applications, it has inherent limitations, especially for technical computing applications which use legacy code such as C, Fortran, or C++. And since most technical computing and applications use these legacy systems, they will not be able to take advantage of the work that has been done on safe-languages such as Java. The proposal plans to develop the High Performance Computing Mobility (HPCM) middleware, which will increase the mobility of legacy codes written in C, Fortran or C++. HPCM consists of different components including middleware interface, pre-compiler system, run-time libraries and so forth. HPCM can also be used as a low-level layer under Java to support mobility of local native codes. HPCM can support complex data strutures, heterogenous netework evnironments, and scalable parallel computing. HPCM is designed to increase the mobility while maintaining the high performance of legacy codes. There are a number of research questions which the proposal plans to address, and, the success of HPCM will benefit many on-going and future research projects doc15083 none A primary goal of this symposium is to bring together, engineers, scientists and applied mathematicians from a variety of scientific disciplines who are working on duality, Complementarity and symmetry in nonlinear mechanics and computational methods. The original proposal of this IUTAM symposium has been approved by the IUTAM Symposia Committee with the maximum grade A. The purpose of this proposal is to apply for a very limit grant from NSF to cover partially the travel expenses for about ten important participants from different institutions in US. The symposium proceedings will be published in a hardbound volume by Chapman & Hall CRC in the book series Advances in Modern Mechanics and Mathematics. It is expected that this IUTAM Symposium will lead a new trend of nonlinear mechanics, and the proceedings will be an important IUTAM documentation in the development of this fascinating subject doc15084 none The proposal focuses on designing and building the NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI), and will be one of two System Integrators as well as playing a Service Provider role. The NMI program will expedite the development of middleware functions and services to support the national research and scientific community, and will also accelerate the deployment and use of new and emerging applications across the Internet. The purpose of the NMI program is to enable members of the advanced networking community to collaborate in developing and assembling common network services and resources (middleware) to optimize the network for applications and to share limited resources for the common good of all users. UCAID, along with its EDUCAUSE and SURA partners, will help define, develop and deploy the NMI and will integrate across three different streams of developing middleware applications and initiatives; one stream is the middleware being developed and deployed by the GRIDS community and the GRIDS Center, another stream is the set of middleware initiative being worked on by the Internet2 community of research institutions and universities, and a third stream is middleware which is being developed by independent researchers and communities. This proposal focuses on the deployment and support of this middleware architecture, and in particular is a focused outreach to the larger academic communities. While the other two Cooperative Agreements primarily focus on GRID technologies and then work with the larger academic and research community, this proposal focuses on the campus infrastructure, discipline and desktop and then works with the GRID technologies, among others. In order for middleware to be successful to the broad education and research community, it must specifically address; a) Integration with campus infrastructure: core middleware services (such as identifiers, basic directory services, and first levels of authentication and authorization) are typical activities that will be supplied by the campus infrastructure. b) Integration with vertical discipline-oriented applications and middleware; such as workbenches and tool sets and application portals. c) Integration at the desktop (i.e., operating systems, user interface, personal production tools), d) coordinate its activities and efforts with the other two partners of the NMI e) Integrate with the components of the developing high performance and GRID technologies doc15085 none The convergence of telecommunications networks rely heavily on the interconnection of networks and related Quality of Service (QoS). The Internet is evolving into a multi-class service, integrated network, which is trying to support various applications, which require QoS in addition to the traditional best-effort applications. The goal of the proposal is to design, evaluate, develop and test new dynamic Quality of Service and bandwidth management mechanisms and systems that allow secure and scalable dynamic open provisioning for the interconnection of Differentiated services. The proposal will develop a Bandwidth Management Point to manage scalable and secure control, and performs the functions of service assignment, admission control, traffic conditioning and class routing. The Bandwidth Management Point will support intra-domain communications, which is useful for applications within the same domain. It will also support inter-domain applications including policy information such as reservation process, edge-to-edge admission control and peer-to-peer access control. The deliverables include the design, analysis and implementation of software doc15086 none Genetic mutation can be caused by external mutagenic agents such as chemical mutagens or radiation, or it can occur without the impact of external agents. Natural mutagenesis due to transposable elements is understood primarily from research in fruit flies; it results when a gene is affected by the movement of another gene causing a change in phenotype. Activity of a Mariner element was observable in Drosophila mauritiana as a high frequency of mosaicism or speckling in the eye controlled by the Mos1 gene (Hartl, ). Although it appears that many transposable elements have become silenced leaving an inactive sequence in the host genome, the mechanism of regulation is not understood. There are few models of natural mutagenesis apart from those in fruit flies. The objective of this project is to develop a new genetic model for natural mutagenesis, focusing on understanding the mechanism by which multiple spontaneous mutations of pigmentation (black eye, golden eye, et al.) and patterning (striped eye) arose in a lineage of a moth, Heliothis virescens (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae). While there are many possible mechanisms for this phenomenon, this project will focus on one working hypothesis that each of the various phenotypes is controlled by mutation in a corresponding gene. Each putative gene will be purified while gathering physiological data on mechanisms of altered pigmentation so that the mutations and any novel genetic mechanism involved can be identified subsequently. This project bears the risks of disproving the stated hypothesis; however, in that case this approach will provide information applicable to an alternate hypothesis. The significance of discovering a new type of natural mutagenesis if present will be in advancing the basic science of eukaryotic genetics leading to scientific applications to benefit society. Examples of present and anticipated applications of understanding mutation include defense against genetic weapons and genetic control of mosquitoes and other pests doc15087 none The rapid development of wireless communications technologies and their impact on everyday life has greatly increased over the last couple of years. But, the traditional client server architecture, where the client relies completely on the server for information, is not useful in the wireless environment, as the server is often not reachable because it is not connected. The proposal focuses on the development of wireless communications technologies and plans to design, develop and implement a client proxy server system in which a client-side proxy assumes the role of a local server during the disconnections. Preliminary work shows that the approach has great potential to improve data access, computation and service. The targeted application areas include distance learning, fast mobile Internet as well as 3rd and 4th generation wireless cellular networks doc15088 none The aim of this project is to explore ways of integrating forefront research into undergraduate education. The PI is creating a collaborative environment in which research faculty scholars at universities translate their cutting-edge scientific research into meaningful undergraduate educational experiences. Participating faculty have a) free access to the PI s open source core software tools, which ease the development of new software, b) a full set of assessment-based curriculum development frameworks based on the PI s prior education efforts, c) access to the education and research staff of the PI and collaborating institutions, and d) web-based community support. The PI is also developing collaborations with teaching faculty scholars from 2- and 4-year colleges and community colleges to facilitate the introduction of research-based educational materials into their science courses and encourage science research opportunities for undergraduates. Participating faculty have a) free access to all educational technologies developed through prior and concurrent development collaborations, b) free access to assessment-based curriculum activities, c) an ongoing collaboration with a research university and the research staff of the PI and collaborators, and d) Web-based community support doc15089 none Signal transduction networks are essential in eukaryotes, allowing cells to perceive and respond to continuous changes in extracellular conditions. Multiple signaling pathways co-exist in individual cells controlling essential responses, including hormone signaling, mitogenesis and apoptosis. Understanding the molecular mechanisms by which signaling pathways cross talk with one another or by which specificity is conferred within a complex signaling network is an area of present intensive research in eukaryotic biology. It has long been recognized that most aspects of plant growth and development are regulated by networks of signaling mechanisms rather than linear signal transduction pathways. Furthermore, most plant cells express receptors for the six major classes of plant hormones and additional light and pathogen responsive receptors and need to process each pathway, while also making use of cross talk among these pathways. Recent interdisciplinary studies using new genetic, biochemical and genomic approaches have led to rapid and accelerating progress in understanding mechanisms that mediate cross talk and specificity in plant signal transduction. Hormones, light, pathogens and stress stimuli trigger signal transduction cascades that are essential for growth, development and survival of plants. The Keystone Symposium on Specificity and Cross Talk in Plant Signal Transduction will be focused on presentations on newly recognized reception and transduction mechanisms in these responses. The organizers have set up important avenues that will ensure diversity among presenters at the conference and are requesting funds, that will enable travel support for graduate students, post doctoral associates and selected speakers, towards achieving the goal of diversity and multidisciplinarity. The goal of the meeting will be to highlight major advances in this rapidly moving field and to synthesize an integrated understanding of which mechanisms mediate cross talk among pathways and which mechanisms allow specific modulation of plant growth and developmental responses. Understanding of these mechanisms is essential for manipulation of plant growth and development and for developing new biotechnological applications, that will ultimately benefit human health doc15090 none The proposal focuses on the deployment and support of the NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI) and is designed to serve as the Service Provider for the NMI program. The NMI program will expedite the development of middleware functions and services to support the national research and scientific community, and will also accelerate the deployment and use of new and emerging applications across the Internet. The purpose of the NMI program is to enable members of the advanced networking community to collaborate in developing and assembling common network services and resources (middleware) to optimize the network for applications and to share limited resources for the common good of all users. This proposal has three primary goals; - Provide production-quality software releases, support, training, and outreach, with the goals of ensuring that early adopter user communities are successful and that new user communities are trained in the use of the infrastructure. - Leverage the PI s long history in running production facilities to develop tools and procedures to ensure that the resulting software is acceptable, deployable and supportable on a wide variety of end systems, including production environments at campus and laboratories. - Provide dedicated operations capability providing 24x7 support for infrastructure elements, monitoring of grid infrastructure, and capture and analysis of grid usage data. In doing so, NMI will enable the construction of a national scale infrastructure that can be used by application communities such as NEES and GriPhyN, or discipline-specific communities, or research communities, to explore the use of the middleware infrastructure on full scale, meaningful applications The program will will build on widely used research middleware, such as the Globus Toolkit, the de facto standard for Grid environments, Condor, and Storage Resource Broker, heavily leveraging open (e.g., IETF and W3C standard) protocols. The results of the project will rely on open protocols and open source implementations. In undertaking these activities, NCSA will work closely with major U.S. projects including the NSF PACIs, which will help reach out to other user communities, and with UCAID, which has committed to working to address the challenging and important problem of integration with campus infrastructures and the larger education and research communities. NCSA will work aggressively to support interoperability, transition relevant technologies to standards, and develop strong industrial relationships doc15091 none EAR- Crystals with nanometer-scale dimensions formed by chemical weathering and biomineralization reactions are found in rivers, lakes, oceans, soils, sediments, and atmospheric dust. Because of their novel size-dependent properties, nanoparticles may play disprotionately large roles in environmental processes. However, the variation of reactivity of geologically important nanomaterials with particle size has received little attention. The tendency of ions to adsorb onto nanocrystalline metal oxide surfaces is predicted to be size-dependent. Adsorption will be studied experimentally over the temperature range of 0 - 150 degrees C in gases and environmentally-relevant aqueous solutions. Models will be developed to quantitatively explain differences between results for nanoparticles and those obtained on macroscopic equivalents. If nanocrystals grow via oriented aggregations, as has been shown previously, adsorbed ions (e.g. phosphate, arsenate, and zinc adsorbed from solution onto iron oxyhydroxide surfaces), may be incorporated into point defects. This may represent an important environmental ion sequestration pathway, with direct relevance to the long-term fate of nutrients and contaminants. Coupling of aggregation and adsorption under controlled conditions may also provide a new approach for creation of synthetic materials with technologically interesting properties. Ion sequestration during nanocystal growth will be tested experimentally and explored via molecular modeling and simulation. Calorimetric studies designed to measure surface and adsorption energies will provide date to be used in models that will explore size-dependent reactivity. This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119 doc15092 none The proposal focuses on designing and building the NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI), and will be one of two System Integrators. The NMI program will expedite the development of middleware functions and services to support the national research and scientific community, and will also accelerate the deployment and use of new and emerging applications across the Internet. The purpose of the NMI program is to enable members of the advanced networking community to collaborate in developing and assembling common network services and resources (middleware) to optimize the network for applications and to share limited resources for the common good of all users. The proposal will be based on an open extensible architecture by building on the success of the GRID activities (primarily Globus) and other middleware technologies. The project would enhance and extend this architecture to the larger research community and has three primary goals; Define an integrated, modular, and extensible Grid architecture addressing a large fraction of current and projected future middleware requirements for the scientific and engineering communities, as well as the larger academic communities. Instantiate the NMI architecture, creating robust, tested, packaged, and documented middleware solutions that address a significant fraction of these requirements, and that involve community extensions over the next several years to address other requirements. Work with middleware research community and to evolve the architecture and to integrate selected components into the NMI middleware infrastructure. In constructing the NMI, ISI will build on widely used research middleware, such as the Globus Toolkit, the de facto standard for Grid environments, Condor, and Storage Resource Broker, heavily leveraging open (e.g., IETF and W3C standard) protocols, as well as middleware which is being developed by independent researchers and communities. The results of the project will rely on open protocols, open source implementations and interoperability. In undertaking these activities, ISI will work closely with major U.S. projects including the NSF PACIs, which will help us to reach out to other user communities, and UCAID, which has committed to working with ISI to address the challenging and important problem of integration with campus infrastructures and the broader academic science and research communities. ISI will also work with other international users communities as identified by NSF, will help transition relevant technologies to standards and products, and will develop industrial relationships doc15093 none This proposal is for partial support of the conference, New Directions in Cluster Supercomputing , being held June 12-14, in New York City. The conference will examine the impact of low-cost distributed supercomputing in areas of science and technology and other application areas. A goal of the event is to stimulate the exchange of ideas and examine general approaches and techniques, and encourage increased interaction among members of the systems, algorithms and natural science applications communities. The conference will run concurrently with the Museum s first major public exhibition on the human genome, The Genomic Revolution. Support for the conference is also being provided by NASA and public sector technology corporations doc15094 none A major trend in distributed computing is toward environments consisting of numerous wearable, handheld and embedded devices. Rapid growth in inexpensive, short range, and low-power wireless communications and hardware, are now enabling experimentation with ubiquitous computing environments. In order for ubiquitous environments to work well, it is essential that devices be able to detect their current context, that they must be aware of relationships between the users and the devices, and handle ad-hoc groups and their communications. The proposal plans to take an integrated hardware and software approach to developing essential services to support a wide variety of distributed applications in heterogeneous environments. The services include investigation of: situation-aware inter-object communications group management service to establish device communities feasibility of using cellular automata computational model to design a scalable dissemination service a service that will use the concept of context-sensitivity to perform trade-offs between transparent and QoS assisted adaptations. The proposal will develop a Reconfigurable and Context-Sensitive Middleware, which will be open-source, open-schematic and open standard middleware based on top of Bluetooth standards doc15095 none Distributed systems are becoming ever more important as they provide information support for basic infrastructures such as electrical and telephone service, and as a means for corporations to manage worldwide operettas. They are also becoming ubiquitous because many applications demand greater computational power and require distributed resources. The net impact is that a vast amount of data needs to be shared across a broad array of users. The proposal plans to investigate the long-term issues of mobility and efficiency in the design of scalable middleware for distributed systems. The effort will include the implementation of a distributed middleware for mobile environments. Specific research themes to be pursued are: - formalization and implementation of consistency requirements for middleware - algorithms for data placement and replication - protocols for support of conflict resolution and the support of mobility, and - incorporation of stream data in a computational framework. The results of these investigations will be the development of an experimental prototype that uses the researched algorithms and protocols. In order to experiment with the prototype, a number of applications will be implemented in a campus environment. The goal of the research is to help guide long-term development of middleware at large scale doc15091 none EAR- Crystals with nanometer-scale dimensions formed by chemical weathering and biomineralization reactions are found in rivers, lakes, oceans, soils, sediments, and atmospheric dust. Because of their novel size-dependent properties, nanoparticles may play disprotionately large roles in environmental processes. However, the variation of reactivity of geologically important nanomaterials with particle size has received little attention. The tendency of ions to adsorb onto nanocrystalline metal oxide surfaces is predicted to be size-dependent. Adsorption will be studied experimentally over the temperature range of 0 - 150 degrees C in gases and environmentally-relevant aqueous solutions. Models will be developed to quantitatively explain differences between results for nanoparticles and those obtained on macroscopic equivalents. If nanocrystals grow via oriented aggregations, as has been shown previously, adsorbed ions (e.g. phosphate, arsenate, and zinc adsorbed from solution onto iron oxyhydroxide surfaces), may be incorporated into point defects. This may represent an important environmental ion sequestration pathway, with direct relevance to the long-term fate of nutrients and contaminants. Coupling of aggregation and adsorption under controlled conditions may also provide a new approach for creation of synthetic materials with technologically interesting properties. Ion sequestration during nanocystal growth will be tested experimentally and explored via molecular modeling and simulation. Calorimetric studies designed to measure surface and adsorption energies will provide date to be used in models that will explore size-dependent reactivity. This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119 doc15097 none The project will investigate a number of fundamental processes governing the past, present, and future climates of the Earth. The major themes are intermediate complexity climate models applied to climate change and paleoclimate problems, observational and theoretical work relating to water vapor feedback, and statistical theories of scalar tracers and mixing with applications in both the troposphere and stratosphere. A notable feature of this effort is its emphasis on theoretical understanding. The project s focus is to improve understanding of the coupling between tropical and extratropical regions. The linkage between tropical moisture sources and moisture distribution in the extratropics (where water vapor can significantly impact the radiative cooling to space) motivates project activities in statistical mechanics of the mixing of atmospheric constituents, and Hadley cell dynamics and transports. Dr. Pierrehumbert will investigate the role of these processes in climate variability and global change by conducting experiments with climate models that are simpler and faster than general circulation models but which retain sufficient dynamics and resolution to represent realistically heat transport, water vapor feedback, and other physical processes. The project will advance theoretical understanding and modeling of dynamical, thermodynamical, and chemical interactions between the tropics and extratropics, in context of climate variability and global change doc15091 none EAR- Crystals with nanometer-scale dimensions formed by chemical weathering and biomineralization reactions are found in rivers, lakes, oceans, soils, sediments, and atmospheric dust. Because of their novel size-dependent properties, nanoparticles may play disprotionately large roles in environmental processes. However, the variation of reactivity of geologically important nanomaterials with particle size has received little attention. The tendency of ions to adsorb onto nanocrystalline metal oxide surfaces is predicted to be size-dependent. Adsorption will be studied experimentally over the temperature range of 0 - 150 degrees C in gases and environmentally-relevant aqueous solutions. Models will be developed to quantitatively explain differences between results for nanoparticles and those obtained on macroscopic equivalents. If nanocrystals grow via oriented aggregations, as has been shown previously, adsorbed ions (e.g. phosphate, arsenate, and zinc adsorbed from solution onto iron oxyhydroxide surfaces), may be incorporated into point defects. This may represent an important environmental ion sequestration pathway, with direct relevance to the long-term fate of nutrients and contaminants. Coupling of aggregation and adsorption under controlled conditions may also provide a new approach for creation of synthetic materials with technologically interesting properties. Ion sequestration during nanocystal growth will be tested experimentally and explored via molecular modeling and simulation. Calorimetric studies designed to measure surface and adsorption energies will provide date to be used in models that will explore size-dependent reactivity. This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119 doc15099 none This project will continue work on developing equipment and methodology to monitor complex polymerization reactions in real time. Such a capability could benefit both academic and industrial scientists nd engineers. At the fundamental level, polymer chemists can immediately observe the effects of different synthetic strategies, monomers, initiators, and other factors and how they influence kinetics and ploymer properties. This could advance the discovery of new materials. Industrial researchers could use it as a tool for pilot plant optimization of industrial processes. One goal of the work is to apply the methodology to full scale industrial reactors, integrated into a feedback loop than can control reactions. This in turn could lead to better uses of non-renewable resources, reactor and personnel time, conserve energy, lead to less pollution, and enhance product quality. The fundamental work to be done is threefold: 1) Extension of the PI s Automatic, Continuous Monitoring of Polymer Reaction or ACOMP to copolymerization, controlled radicl polymerization, and emulsion polymerization. This includes development of instrumentation, software, theory, and kinetic modeling to deal with these complex reactions. 2) Further develop and use associated, automated equilibrium characterization and modeling techniques for to the behavior of the polymers whose growth was monitored. This includes auto-assocition, and interactions in multi-component solutions; e.g. those involving polymer, solvent, micelles and slts. 3) Introduction o simultaneous multiple sample light scattering to high throughput screening in polymerization and other polymer-based kinetic processes. It is expected that this portion will provide new tools for polymer discovery and synthesis. The project has potential infrastructure benefits in that students trained in developing this methodoloty would be of great use to industry doc15100 none This request would support college students (graduate and undergraduate) to attend an international conference on Computer Support for Collaborative Learning (CSCL) of about 700 researchers and practitioners in Boulder Colorado in January . The theme for the conference is: foundations of the research field in theory, technology, methodology, and community building. The requested funds will support activities at conference such as creating a community memory which involves digital video, the Web, and DVD media to capture and disseminate ideas from the conference. It will also support activities that involve teachers directly in the conference process in order to provide the other participants with the perspective of practitioners. Also, it will support a doctoral consortium to introduce graduate students to the research community as they explain their dissertation work doc15101 none The Center for Innovative Learning Technologies (CILT) was founded in October with a four-year grant from the National Science Foundation. The invited Accomplishment Based Renewal (ABR) proposal describes CILT s planned activities during this ABR period. CILT was formed to stimulate the development and implementation of important, technology-enabled solutions to critical problems in K-14 science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) learning. CILT has engaged the collaborative efforts of an exceptionally wide range of people, institutions, and organizations including hundreds of cognitive scientists, computer scientists, natural scientists, engineers, classroom teachers, educational researchers, learning technology industry leaders, and policy analysts. CILT is designed as an inclusive national effort led by five institutions -SRI International, Stanford University , University of California at Berkeley, Vanderbilt University, and the Concord Consortium - each with a broad range of expertise and an international reputation for making effective, innovative contributions to technology-enhanced SMET learning. During the ABR period, CILT will continue its current work of hosting workshops that encourage collaboration throughout the field; funding and facilitating a new round of seed grants; and fostering the development of new researchers through its post doctoral researcher program. In addition, CILT team will find ways to sustain the promising aspects of CILT by refocusing the theme teams, nurturing the community that CILT has created, institutionalizing effective components of CILT, and exploring next steps. More can be learned about CILT and its current activities at http: www.cilt.org doc15102 none This award provides support of the ACS Polymer Division symposium Nobel Laureates n Polymer Chemistry, to be held on Monday, 27 August at the National ACS Meeting in Chicago, Illinois. These funds will be used to facilitate attendance of 1 young faculty member and 3 graduate students postdocs. %%% The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was won by Professors Hideki Shirakawa (Tskuba University), Alan MacDiarmid (University of Pennsylvania), and Alan Heeger (UC California, Santa Barbara). In the Nobel laureates in Polymer Chemistry Symposium, the winners of the Nobel Laureates in Polymer Chemistry Symposium, the winners of the Nobel prize in Chemistry will give lectures in the exact order of their Nobel addresses that were given in Stockholm in December . This Symposium is scheduled for Monday, 27 August at the Chicago ACS Meeting. To recognize the importance of international interdisciplinary research in polymer science and the longstanding research collaborations with Japanese polymer scientists, The Society of Polymer Science of Japan (SPSJ) was asked to cosponsor the Nobel Laureates in Polymer Chemistry symposium and has responded enthusiastically. The President of SPSJ, Professor Tisato Kajiama (Fukuoka University), will give opening remarks highlighting the close friendships and research collaborations of U.S. and Japanese polymer scientists. Industrial participation in this symposium includes a talk by a research leader and session chairing by key industrial technology managers who are involved in transitioning basic research into conducting polymer and optoelectronic technologies doc15103 none Hall This award supports a project to add to the understanding of what drives glacial cycles. Most researchers agree that Milankovitch seasonal forcing paces the ice ages but how these insolation changes are leveraged into abrupt global climate change remains unknown. A current popular view is that the climate of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean leads that of the rest of the world by a couple thousand years at Termination I and by even greater margins during previous terminations. This project will integrate the geomorphological record of glacial history with a series of cores taken from the lake bottoms in the Dry Valleys of the McMurdo Sound region of Antarctica. Using a modified Livingstone corer, transects of long cores will be obtained from Lakes Fryxell, Bonney, Joyce, and Vanda. A multiparameter approach will be employed which is designed to extract the greatest possible amount of former water-level, glaciological, and paleoenvironmental data from Dry Valleys lakes. Estimates of hydrologic changes will come from different proxies, including grain size, stratigraphy, evaporite mineralogy, stable isotope and trace element chemistry, and diatom assemblage analysis. The chronology, necessary to integrate the cores with the geomorphological record, as well as for comparisons with Antarctic ice-core and glacial records, will come from Uranium-Thorium, Uranium-Helium, and Carbon-14 dating of carbonates, as well as luminescence sediment dating. Evaluation of the link between lake-level and climate will come from hydrological and energy-balance modelling. Combination of the more continuous lake-core sequences with the spatially extensive geomorphological record will result in an integrated Antarctic lake-level and paleoclimate dataset that extends back at least 30,000 years. This record will be compared to Dry Valleys glacier records and to the Antarctic ice cores to address questions of regional climate variability, and then to other Southern Hemisphere and Northern Hemisphere records to assess interhemispheric synchrony or asynchrony of climate change doc15104 none Ralph D. Kopperman This award provides partial support for participants at the Sixteenth Summer Conference on Topology and Its Applications, to take place July 18-21, at City College in New York, NY. This Conference series addresses the need of topologists to share new ideas at a time of year when most are free of academic commitments, a need demonstrated by its continued growth. This series began in at the City College of New York with 35 participants and 13 talks. Over the past decade, attendance has averaged about 150, with participants all inhabited continents and about 100 talks. Today, after much concentration on problems internal to topology, emphasis in this field is again turning toward applications to other areas. Thus we have organized the following Special Sessions: Asymmetric Topology and Computer Science, Dynamical Systems, Topological Algebra and Functional Analysis, Set-theoretic Topology, and Topological Groups and Semigroups. Further information, including invited speakers, schedule of talks, and housing information, is available at sumtopo.att.net doc15105 none The PI received a postdoctoral fellowship in ( ) to explore how changing climate might affect the long-term demographic strategies of plants and red deer in Norway. Dr. Post collaborated with Dr. Stenseth in Norway on quantitative aspects of the project. The PI in now in a tenure track position at The Pennsylvania State University. He proposes to use highly resolved field data at multiple spatial and temporal scales to resolve the interactions between climate and trophic structure (predators, herbivores, and plants) using cutting-edge individual-based models. This project will advance ecological understanding in that hypothesis-driven and process-oriented perspectives will replace current approaches involving retrospective time-series analyses. The integration of well designed field studies of wolves, moose, and vegetation in the environs of Denali Park in Alaska, and advanced quantitative modeling will facilitate development of a unifying theory regarding the effects of climate change on community stability doc15091 none EAR- Crystals with nanometer-scale dimensions formed by chemical weathering and biomineralization reactions are found in rivers, lakes, oceans, soils, sediments, and atmospheric dust. Because of their novel size-dependent properties, nanoparticles may play disprotionately large roles in environmental processes. However, the variation of reactivity of geologically important nanomaterials with particle size has received little attention. The tendency of ions to adsorb onto nanocrystalline metal oxide surfaces is predicted to be size-dependent. Adsorption will be studied experimentally over the temperature range of 0 - 150 degrees C in gases and environmentally-relevant aqueous solutions. Models will be developed to quantitatively explain differences between results for nanoparticles and those obtained on macroscopic equivalents. If nanocrystals grow via oriented aggregations, as has been shown previously, adsorbed ions (e.g. phosphate, arsenate, and zinc adsorbed from solution onto iron oxyhydroxide surfaces), may be incorporated into point defects. This may represent an important environmental ion sequestration pathway, with direct relevance to the long-term fate of nutrients and contaminants. Coupling of aggregation and adsorption under controlled conditions may also provide a new approach for creation of synthetic materials with technologically interesting properties. Ion sequestration during nanocystal growth will be tested experimentally and explored via molecular modeling and simulation. Calorimetric studies designed to measure surface and adsorption energies will provide date to be used in models that will explore size-dependent reactivity. This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 00-119 doc15107 none This is a tie project between the Industry University Cooperative Research Center for Biocatalysis and Bioprocessing of Macromolecules at the Polytechnic University of New York, and the I UCRC for Advanced Studies on Novel Surfactants at Columbia University, New York. The research program includes (1) synthesis of new functional polymers from renewable resources by selective biocatalytic transformations, and (2) investigation of fundamental relationships between the polymer structures, adsorption and conformational characteristics at surfaces and interfaces. Surface and interfacial properties of the polymers and copolymers synthesized at the Polytechnic University will be studied at the I UCRC at Columbia University. A companion award ( ) will support the research at the Columbia University doc15108 none Berger This award supports a project to add to the understanding of what drives glacial cycles. Most researchers agree that Milankovitch seasonal forcing paces the ice ages but how these insolation changes are leveraged into abrupt global climate change remains unknown. A current popular view is that the climate of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean leads that of the rest of the world by a couple thousand years at Termination I and by even greater margins during previous terminations. This project will integrate the geomorphological record of glacial history with a series of cores taken from the lake bottoms in the Dry Valleys of the McMurdo Sound region of Antarctica. Using a modified Livingstone corer, transects of long cores will be obtained from Lakes Fryxell, Bonney, Joyce, and Vanda. A multiparameter approach will be employed which is designed to extract the greatest possible amount of former water-level, glaciological, and paleoenvironmental data from Dry Valleys lakes. Estimates of hydrologic changes will come from different proxies, including grain size, stratigraphy, evaporite mineralogy, stable isotope and trace element chemistry, and diatom assemblage analysis. The chronology, necessary to integrate the cores with the geomorphological record, as well as for comparisons with Antarctic ice-core and glacial records, will come from Uranium-Thorium, Uranium-Helium, and Carbon-14 dating of carbonates, as well as luminescence sediment dating. Evaluation of the link between lake-level and climate will come from hydrological and energy-balance modelling. Combination of the more continuous lake-core sequences with the spatially extensive geomorphological record will result in an integrated Antarctic lake-level and paleoclimate dataset that extends back at least 30,000 years. This record will be compared to Dry Valleys glacier records and to the Antarctic ice cores to address questions of regional climate variability, and then to other Southern Hemisphere and Northern Hemisphere records to assess interhemispheric synchrony or asynchrony of climate change doc15109 none Nazarewicz This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Witold Nazarewicz at the University of Tennessee and Professor Kenichi Matsuyanagi of Kyoto University in Japan. The researchers will undertake a study of the mean-field approach to collective excitations in unstable medium-mass and heavy nuclei. The focus of the research is in those aspects of nuclear structure physics which are of highest priority in the community: 1) radioactive nuclear beam physics which will access nuclei at the limits of stability around the proton and neutron drip lines, and 2) gamma ray spectroscopy which accesses discrete nuclear states in rapidly rotating nuclei up to the fission limit. The intent is the further development of techniques that can treat the special properties of weakly bound nuclei, where the Fermi energy is close to zero. Hartree-Bogolyubov (HFB) programs that include unbound states are needed. Current programs that include the continuum states are usually restricted to spherical shapes. The proposal will continue the development of HFB programs that include non-spherical shapes as well as the continuum states. This is necessary for a more realistic description of nuclei around the neutron drip line. An interesting possibility of different shapes for neutrons and protons, including neutron halos, can then be investigated. The development of the program will permit investigation of double beta decay, which has fundamental interest not only to nuclear physics, but also particle physics and astrophysics. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. The research addresses a number of questions that are of great importance for Japanese and U.S. low-energy nuclear structure communities. The number of nuclear structure theorists in the U.S. and Japan is small and the groups are isolated. The project will offer a good opportunity to join efforts between the two countries. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The project advances international human resources through the participation of postdocs and a graduate student. The researchers plan to publish results of the research in scientific journals and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc15110 none This research focuses on the nonsteady evolution of the convective boundary layer (CBL) in an atmosphere with complex vertical structure. As the CBL grows, air from the free atmosphere is entrained into the top of the CBL by turbulent mixing. The structure of the entrainment layer and the entrainment dynamics depend on the static stability of the atmosphere, as measured by the temperature profile, and the vertical wind shear. Convective entrainment in conditions when the wind and temperature vary smoothly with height has been studied extensively in laboratory tanks, numerical large-eddy simulations (LES), and simple bulk models of the CBL. Less studied is the development of the CBL in fluids with more complex stratification, though there is evidence that the CBL in such cases grows in an unsteady way, passing through a sequence of transition regimes accompanied by strong variations in the intensity and vertical structure of the entrainment. In this study, the CBL entrainment dynamics will be investigated numerically, by means of high-resolution LES, and compared with observations from atmospheric, laboratory, and other numerical studies. Emphasis will be placed on the influence of discrete and nonlinear temperature stratification on the entrainment characteristics with and without wind shear. Elements of the work include: (1) improvement of the characterization of subgrid-scale turbulence in LES models; (2) numerical studies of convective entrainment in conjunction with analysis of observational and experimental data; (3) developing a parameterization of convective entrainment in a heterogeneously stratified atmosphere with wind shear doc15111 none This is a U.S.-Bulgarian cooperative research project that will focus on synthesizing large quantities of conductive nanoparticles for possible applications to battery technology. The principal investigators are Dr. Kenneth Klabunde from Kansas State University and Dr. Iovka Dragieva from the Central Laboratory of Electrochemical Power Sources in Sofia. The researchers will devise strategies for the synthesis of large quantities of conductive and semiconductive nanoparticies. The strategies will be based on two approaches: 1) modified sol-gel aerogel procedures employing metal alkoxide molecular precursors leading to metal oxide nanoparticles, and conversation of metal oxide nanoparticles to metal sulfide (or selenide or telluride) nanoparticles by catalyzed solid-gas reactions and 2) borohydride reduction of mixed metal salts to yield bimetallic metal particles and metal hydrides, and metal vapor-solvent cocondensation to form nanocrystalline metals and bimetallics. Through this research the researchers expect to discover and develop better porous conducting materials for applications as electrodes in Li ion batteries, metal-hydride batteries, and zinc-air batteries. This project in materials research fulfills the program objectives of bringing together leading experts in the U.S. and Central Eastern Europe to combine complementary efforts and capabilities in areas of strong mutual interest and competence on the basis of equality, reciprocity, and mutuality of benefit doc15112 none Cole This Americas Program award will support Dr. Milton W. Cole of the Pennsylvania State University Park in collaboration with Dr. Susana Hernandez of the University of Buenos Aires. The research aim is to predict the behavior of fluids in confined geometries. These include films, carbon nanotubes and porous media. The emphasis will be on quantum fluids but some attention will be given to classical fluids as well. The research effort will bring together successful research groups with the U.S. side contributing their expertise in forces and statistical mechanics associated with physically absorbed film, while the Argentina side will contribute their expertise in many-body theory to treat quantum films, clusters, and their excitations doc15107 none This is a tie project between the Industry University Cooperative Research Center for Biocatalysis and Bioprocessing of Macromolecules at the Polytechnic University of New York, and the I UCRC for Advanced Studies on Novel Surfactants at Columbia University, New York. The research program includes (1) synthesis of new functional polymers from renewable resources by selective biocatalytic transformations, and (2) investigation of fundamental relationships between the polymer structures, adsorption and conformational characteristics at surfaces and interfaces. Surface and interfacial properties of the polymers and copolymers synthesized at the Polytechnic University will be studied at the I UCRC at Columbia University. A companion award ( ) will support the research at the Columbia University doc15114 none The Keystone Symposium on Chromatin Structure and Activity will be held January 26-31, , in Sante Fe, New Mexico. The objective of this meeting is to provide a forum for graduate students, postdocs and leading chromatin researchers to interact and discuss the current status of the fiels. Many exciting discoveries have revealed an intimate relation between chromatin structure and transcriptional activity. Some transcriptional coregulators function to modulate chromatin structure. Other coregulators catalyze reversible chemical modifications of chromatin that enhance or repress gene expression. Beyond the basic chromatin filament, higher-order chromatin structures are involved in the regulation of enhancer activity and in global transcriptional repression. In addition, new experimental approaches to the study of chromatin structure and function are being devised. It is anticipated that current models will be refined and, in some instances, disputed. In this manner, there will emerge new concepts and ideas on the molecular mechanisms by which chromatin functions in the cell. This project will provide funding for the participation of graduate students, postdocs, and new independent investigators that lack funding. Specific emphasis will be placed upon the financial support of individuals from under-represented racial ethnic groups doc15115 none The Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship program provides an opportunity for current elementary and secondary mathematics, science, and technology classroom teachers with demonstrated excellence in teaching to serve in federal agencies that impact science and mathematics education. All Einstein Fellowship candidates have been recognized for excellence through the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics or Science Teaching or a similar meritorious award. Einstein Fellows bring to Congress and selected federal agencies the insights, extensive knowledge and practical experience of teachers working in science and mathematics classrooms. This project supports one Einstein Fellow assigned to NSF s Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE) for an 11-month period. The Fellow serves as a valuable resource by working with DUE Program Officers on programs focusing on effective mathematics and science classroom teaching, preservice teacher preparation, projects that link teacher preservice and inservice activities, and national teacher education issues doc15116 none of physical phenomena, and elliptic equations describe (roughly speaking) one third of these. The efficient harvesting of biological mass, modeling of star birth and death, and the fundamental equations governing quantum physics all rely on elliptic equations. Significant progress in this research area has the potential to make a real difference, scientifically and economically, to the world at large. The aim is to trigger a vibrant renewed surge of interest and effort towards solving these types of problems. The conference and corresponding proceedings volume will be of equal parts research and educationally oriented. Beginning researchers will be exposed to research in mathematics to the physical importance of the field, unsolved problems will be suggested for their pursuit, and analytical and numerical tools essential to that research will be introduced. These new researchers who attend or, more generally, have access to the resulting proceedings volume, will in the long run be the key contributors. The aim is to encourage informal discussion, where real mathematics is done, but guide the process with a focus on the ultimate goal of producing a cohesive document doc15117 none The origin of Antarctic biota remains uncertain. Shallow-water, circum-antarctic habitats have been isolated from the rest of the world since Antarctica separated from Australia forty million years. With the separation of Antarctica from South American 25 million years ago, and the inception of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and the Polar Frontal zone, the isolation of the Antarctic biota from the rest of the world s oceans was nearly complete. The exception is the deep sea, which is replenished by cold, sinking Antarctic bottomwater. Many Antarctic species are endemic with apparent affinities to species in the deep sea. A major question about the Antarctic biota is whether deep-sea organisms invaded and radiated into the Antarctic benthos after it was isolated and cooled or the Antarctic biota is a refugium and or source of deep-sea organisms and Antarctic species invaded the deep sea. This research will focus on cidaroid sea urchins, as part of an international Antarctic deep-sea biodiversity program to be conducted on the German Antarctic program s research vessel Polarstern. The cruise will be conducted in the Scotia and Weddell Seas. Material collected from the Antarctic shelf to the floor of the adjacent deep sea will form the basis for a phylogenetic analysis to help resolve origin of this group of organisms. Studies will also include a focus on larval development, which is unknown in some species. Finally, an examination of a fungus-like parasite which occurs on the spines of some species of Antarctic cidaroids, will be conducted in order to place this parasite into a recognized higher taxonomic category, and to open the possibility for understanding how it influences echinoid development. This project will provide new information on a understudied part of the world s ocean and will contribute to the study of the world s biodiversity doc15118 none Under the direction of Dr. Brian Stross, Mr. Kerry Hull will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will conduct linguistic research on the Ch orti Maya language spoken in Guatemala. This language is the closest direct descendent of the language comprising most Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions. Hull s year of fieldwork in Ch orti -speaking communities will involve participant observation of oral recitation, direct elicitation, and recording through audio media of healing, agricultural, and other ceremonies. The transcriptions of ceremonies and oral traditions will then form the basis for analytic discussions with native speakers to flesh out critical details and opaque allusions in these ancient forms of expression. The results will then be compared to features found in the Maya hieroglyphic script with intent of correlating the poetic discourse forms and archaic metaphorical references in Ch orti with those of its ancestral language in the Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions. At the present stage of decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic writing, a large number of expressions can be read syllabically without a full understanding of their metaphorical or ritual meaning. Ch orti s linguistic affinity to the language of the Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions suggests both languages may also share similar poetic structures and archaic formalized expressions. The significance of this research is twofold. First, the project will directly benefit the ongoing decipherment of the Maya hieroglyphic script. The data gathered from living Ch orti speakers will also form the most thorough study so far of the poetic styles of Ch orti ritual speech. Hidden within such speech are vestiges of ancient cultural conceptions and metaphorical imagery that will inform research on the language, cultural conceptions, and ritual practices of the ancient Maya. The Ch orti data will provide a basis for analyses of stylistically similar ritual forms found in Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions. This aspect of the study will carry the discussion of Maya hieroglyphic writing beyond grammar and vocabulary, showing that this writing system is complex in other domains as well. Second, this project will preserve the currently disappearing forms of poetic speech and ritual knowledge among the Ch orti . This documentation will be useful both for future generations of Ch orti -speakers and also for scholars of Latin American studies, history, epigraphy, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, ethnopoetics, and ethnography doc15119 none London & Dewers Three projects will assess or utilize mass transport by diffusion in silicate melts to better understand the properties of granitic liquids. In Project I, we will complete a self-consistent thermodynamic, kinetic, and transport model for the crystallization of water-bearing granite melts under near- and far-from-equilibrium conditions. The mathematical algorithms are now mostly developed, and we have recently completed a large number of experiments that provide constraints on the kinetics of crystallization in the granite system. Project II addresses a simple but intriguing question, namely how do granitic melts become homogeneous by diffusion through the melt (i.e., once eutectic grain-boundary contacts are lost)? Preliminary experiments indicate that rapid diffusion of alkalis promotes the attainment of an equilibrium proportion of alkali feldspar components throughout the melt, and that mixing then occurs between this alkali feldspar component and silica derived from the melting of quartz. Project III will address longstanding presumptions about the relationships among ore-forming metals (e.g., Nb, Ta, Sn, W, Zr, Hf, and REE) and potential ligands (halogens F, and Cl, and oxyanions of H, B, P). Not only will the case for speciation be tested, but the stoichiometry of the probable melt species, along with their diffusion coefficients, will be derived. The results of Project III will elucidate the extent to which anions other than oxygen enhance or decrease the solubility of ore-forming metals in melt doc15120 none This award will provide funds to partially support 10 junior researchers and 5 invited speakers to participate in an international research workshop on Developments and Challenges in bump hunting, mixtures and measurement error models to be held in Cleveland, June 2-4, . The workshop has multiple purposes. It brings together statisticians and a collection of scientists from different fields, yet all working towards similar scientific goals, to exchange new techniques and explore merging ideas. The workshop provides a unique opportunity for young statisticians to interact with leaders in these related fields. It invites experts with a national reputation from astronomy, biology and medicine, to discuss challenges to statistics, particularly in bump hunting, mixture modeling, clustering and measurement error models doc15121 none Tsang This award supports a two-year collaborative research project between Professor ManYee B Tsang at Michigan State University and Professor Akira Ono of Tohoku University in Japan. The researchers will undertake a study of collision dynamics of nuclei with high isospin asymmetry. The focus of this project is the theoretical interpretation of nuclear multifragmentation, a process that may provide insight into the liquid-gas phase transition of nuclear matter and the equation of the state of asymmetric nuclear matter. The first goal will be to study the role of symmetry energy in the production of isotopes in heavy ion collisions. The second goal will be to develop transport equations that accurately describe the isotopic yields and to compare the predictions of these equations to a wide variety of experimental data produced in central collisions. The third goal is to isolate experimental signals that are especially sensitive to the non-equilibrium aspects of the multifragment break up. Included in this latter effort will be the study of processes such as the neck fragmentation, for example, that are expected to be rather sensitive to the interplay between reaction dynamics and fragment formation. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. The Japanese scientists pioneered the development of the Antisymmetrized Molecular Dynamics (AMD) Model and the U.S. scientists have expertise in the development of Boltzmann-Uehling-Uhlenbeck (BUU) transport equations. It is anticipated that the research will benefit the development of quantal reaction models. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The project advances international human resources through the participation of a postdoc and a graduate student. The researchers plan to publish results of the research in scientific journals and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc15122 none The objective of the US-European Workshop on Bridges is to the recent advancements in bridge engineering, focusing on new materials and technology, monitoring and diagnostics involving integrated sensor systems, new methods of analysis, design, evaluation, repair and rehabilitation of bridges used in Europe, and identify the most suitable topics for joint research projects. The major areas to be covered include: (1) advanced materials (high-strength high-performance concrete and steel, composites, fiber-reinforced concrete, smart materials), (2) development of load and resistance models for steel and reinforced concrete and prestressed concrete structures, (3) diagnostic procedures (tests, performance monitors, nondestructive techniques, signal processing, integrated sensor systems, acoustic and optical techniques), (4) materials and techniques for repair and rehabilitation of concrete structures (reinforced and prestressed concrete, steel, new composite materials). Accordingly the Workshop attempts to state of the art summary of main topics as viewed on one hand in the U.S. and, on the other hand, in Europe, identify the research needs, in particular topics for cooperative projects; and derive some recommendations that reflect the needs in manpower, technology transfer and education for the near future. The Workshop involves researchers and consultants. The local organizers also organize special meetings, a conference, and field trips to the construction sites. The results will be presented in the final report doc15123 none This project focuses on the issue of integrated versus segregated primary and secondary schools and their effects on academic achievement. The first objective of the study is to thoroughly document previous studies modeling academic achievement as a function of the school s racial composition. Preliminary investigation suggests that while there has been substantial research on academic achievement of the general population and on the white male population, little has focused on determinants of academic achievement of black students, and on the effects of racial composition on academic achievement. The second objective of this study is to use data from the National Survey of Black Americans (NSBA) to empirically investigate the issue of the impact of school and neighborhood racial composition on educational achievement. This allows an indirect test of the effectiveness of actions stemming from the Brown v. Board of Education decision to integrate schools. The NSBA data, however, lack one critical variable - school quality. Therefore, the third and final objective of this study is to determine a feasible method of collecting these data, to improve estimates of the impact of racial composition doc15124 none This research examines the relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic policy reforms among a small sample of countries in Africa. The first objective is to conduct a spectral analysis of the decentralization process in four countries on the basis of selected indicators of fiscal decentralization. This allows a ranking of each country s reform process on a spectral continuum between the two extremes of absolute centralization and absolute decentralization. The second objective is to conduct an empirical test of the relationship between decentralization and central government fiscal position, using a non-parametric approach to analyze correlations between and among the decentralization and macroeconomic indicators. The hypothesis to be tested is that if fiscal decentralization is enacted in the context of a strong, transparent, and credible institutional and political framework, fiscal decentralization need not undermine reforms at the national level. The results of this research will enable the development of a larger research proposal that considers data and empirical models that capture the effects of decentralization on the fiscal position of central government for a larger sample of countries in Africa doc15125 none The goals of this project are to help facilitate development of community consensus regarding planning for ocean observations, long time series and observatory systems and to provide technical expertise to OCEAN.US. This will be accomplished through workshops designed to bring disparate participants together for strategic discussions on the future of technology and through coordination with other planning activities internationally doc15126 none New Mexico State University will be the lead institution for a Regional Alliance for Students with Disabilities in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology (SMET). The project, entitled RASEM Squared (or RASEM 2), is based on the successes of an earlier project named RASEM (Regional Alliance For Science, Engineering, and Mathematics for Students with Disabilities) funded by NSF. The project s primary goal over the five years of the program is to increase the number of students with disabilities who graduate with baccalaureate degrees leading directly to graduate training or to employment in their desired fields. To achieve these goals, RASEM 2 is instituting a comprehensive educational approach composed of six innovative actions, five previously field-tested by RASEM and an additional one that prepares faculty for full participation of students with disabilities in SMET curricula. The actions will affect students throughout the education continuum from K-12, through community colleges, and to universities in New Mexico and far west Texas. The six actions are: 1. Hands-on science experiences in pre-college science education environments. 2. Formal research experiences as undergraduates and graduates. 3. Preparation of faculty for full participation of students with disabilities in a SMET curricula. 4. Bridge programs between academic levels. 5. Mentoring by successful SMET professionals and SMET students with disabilities. 6. Securing co-op, summer internships, and professional employment. Each of the six actions will be evaluated using outcome measures that provide evidence of the program s efficacy. The RASEM 2 Alliance is made up of numerous entities in New Mexico (seventeen 2-year community colleges, six 4-year colleges and universities, and nine school district regional center cooperatives) and West Texas (two universities and two educational service centers representing school districts). The Alliance also includes two national laboratories, the statewide agencies serving people with disabilities, and a national organization for the advancement of science. These entities are located in a region that has a broad spectrum of culturally diverse, economically impoverished constituencies of students with disabilities and student families. RASEM 2 project coordinators in three sub-regions will work to strengthen existing ties (or develop new ones) with public schools in their areas. They will facilitate efforts to provide a bridge between public schools and higher education institutions and promote summer programs in their geographical areas doc15127 none Robin Forman In recent years ideas from geometry have driven some of the most exciting developments in combinatorics such as Gromov hyperbolic groups and CAT(0) spaces, combinatorial Morse theory, combinatorial Ricci curvature, combinatorial differential manifolds and matroid bundles. The central unifying notion in geometry is that of curvature. Now, through these diverse geometric and combinatorial theories, curvature is emerging as a powerful tool and fundamental unifying concept in combinatorics as well. This Focused Research Group will explore some of the specific notions of combinatorial curvature driving current combinatorial work, and also the role of curvature as the basis for a coherent geometric vision of combinatorics itself. The notion of curvature has been one of the grand unifying concepts in geometry and physics for well over a century. For example, Gauss, the originator of our modern understanding of curvature, showed that Euclidean geometry was distinguished from other geometries as being the geometry of a space with zero curvature. As an application he showed that it is precisely the curvature of the surface of the Earth which makes it impossible to draw a map of the Earth s surface (on a flat piece of paper) that accurately portrays all lengths and angles. Riemann generalized Gauss s work to smooth spaces of higher dimensions, and Einstein observed that Riemannian geometry was precisely the right setting in which to describe his theory of general relativity (in which the curvature of the universe is the result of gravitational forces). Partly as a result of Einstein s work, the last century saw an intensive investigation into the curvature of smooth spaces. Combinatorics, roughly defined, is the study of objects which can be described by a finite amount of information. This is precisely the mathematics that computers can do. This type of mathematics seems far removed from the geometric investigations of Gauss, Riemann and countless others. However, there is a growing collection of combinatorial phenomena which can best be viewed as being finite analogues of facts about the curvature of smooth spaces. The goal of this proposal is to come to a coherent understanding of curvature as a combinatorial notion. In addition, bringing together researchers from a variety of mathematical disciplines, we wish to bridge the chasms between geometry, combinatorics, algebra and topology, using curvature as the unifying theme doc15128 none During secondary aluminum processing, oxidation of the aluminum in reverberatory furnaces leads to the formation of dross, which contains aluminum in metallic form that is entrapped within its oxide. Among the detrimental effects are loss of aluminum, promotion of metallurgical defects in aluminum products and reduced furnace efficiency, due to the insulation effects of the dross layer. The PI proposes to study the transport processes that lead to dross formation through a numerical and experimental study of the oxidation of molten aluminum alloys in a furnace environment. The goal will be to determine optimal furnace conditions that will minimize the formation of dross. The project is collaborative between the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Gas Technology Institute. Reduction of dross formation has potential for significant increases in energy efficiency and reduction of waste in this industry, which produces 1 3 of the aluminum produced in the United States doc15129 none Delineation of crustal elements of different origins and histories found in ancient orogenic belts is a prerequisite to meaningful tectonic analysis. In the S. Appalachian orogen, a classic collisional system, it has proven difficult to convincingly assign units to Laurentia or to the opposing continental mass, Gondwana. Lack of clear-cut evidence has stymied full understanding of the otherwise well-known belt that has been instrumental in the development of major tectonic concepts. This project will investigate the hypothesis that the Smith River Allochthon in the Piedmont Zone, previously thought to be of peri-Laurentian or transitional affinity is, in fact, of exotic (Gondwana) origin. Results are of considerable local importance, and because the Appalachians provide an influential model for interpretation of other ancient tectonic belts, has broad significance doc15130 none an Huef This award supports a three-year collaborative research project in mathematics between Dr. Astrid an Huef of the University of Denver, Dr. Dana Williams of Dartmouth University, and Dr. Iain Raeburn of the University of Newcastle in Australia. This project will focus on three goals: 1) to prove a symmetric imprimitivity theorem for commuting proper actions on a non-commutative C-algebra, 2) to show that this new symmetric imprimitivity theorem applies in a wide variety of examples, and 3) to extend related results known for reduced crossed products to full crossed products. The proposed research is central in operator algebra theory and has applications to representation theory. The project brings together the efforts of three laboratories (two in the United States and one in Australia) that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. An Huef is well versed in the modern theory of integrable and proper actions, Williams has expertise in vector-valued integration and harmonic analysis, and Raeburn is an expert on nonabelian duality. This project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation doc15131 none Proposal - P.I. - Alberts The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, on behalf of the Academic Research Fleet proposes to undertake a multiple procurement of electro-mechanical oceanographic cables, torque-balanced wire rope, and fiber optic cable to meet the needs of the research fleet for a 12-month period beginning 1 November . Since similar efforts in the procurement of both electro-mechanical oceanographic cable and wire rope have resulted in substantial cost savings as compared to procurement by individual laboratories, as well as a better utilization of available stock. In the past reels of cable were consigned directly to universities at the time of manufacture to meet their immediate needs. Subsequent requirements were filled from Pool inventories. In , the procedure of delivering all new procurements to the cable pools in San Diego and Woods Hole was initiated. The result is that currently all cables are allotted to UNOLS vessels from the pools as the need arises. This will continue. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution proposes to act in the management role for the inspection, acceptance, maintenance, record keeping and storage of the cables and ropes. The pools will remain under the control of the National Science Foundation doc15132 none CTS- Toxic and Nutrient Pollution Prevention by Use of Anion Binding Polymeric Hydrogels Peter Kofinas, University of Maryland Methods that will effectively remove nutrient and toxic anion pollutants even at extremely low concentrations from wastewater effluents are a major environmental need. This work develops an approach that introduces novel crosslinked cationic polymeric materials for removal of such anions from aqueous waste streams. Phosphate, nitrate, and perchlorate-binding polymeric amine hydrogels are being synthesized using various crosslinkers. Their morphology is being characterized by use of atomic force microscopy, and the rate of anion transport as well as anion-binding capacity of these hydrogels is being optimized though testing in various wastewater conditions in batch experiments and lab-scale packed column systems. An economic evaluation of the cost to produce bulk quantities of the polymers will be developed, and the possibilities for adsorbent regeneration or disposal will be explored. This project has local and regional significance within the vicinity of the Chesapeake Bay, but it also addresses national issues important to environmental managers and the general public concerned with the eutrophication of aquatic ecosystems. Missile propellants containing toxic perchlorate anions and poultry farms and aquaculture facilities which discharge nutrient pollutants to natural waters pose a serious pollution problem. The ability of the proposed hydrogels to bind phosphates, nitrates, and perchlorates from such effluents may lead to a cheap and efficient way to remove nutrient and toxic anions in wastewater-generating systems before the water is discharged and to control pollution at the source for some of the most difficult environmental problems facing the U.S doc15133 none WORKSHOP: SIGART AAAI Doctoral Consortium This is a standard award to support the 6th SIGART AAAI Doctoral Consortium, to be held as a workshop during the 17th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 01), August 4-10 in Seattle. The Doctoral Consortium will provide a unique opportunity for a group of PhD students to discuss and explore their research interests and career objectives together with a panel of established researchers. The event is similar in spirit to that funded by NSF last year, and has once again attracted a diverse group of student participants who reflect a wide range of topic areas and methodologies within artificial intelligence, and who have settled on their thesis directions but who still have significant research left to do. Selection was based on clarity and completeness of the submission packet, stage of research, advisor s letter, and other evidence of promise such as published papers or technical reports; a complete list of the 14 participants names and affiliations may be found at http: www.acm.org sigart DCparticipants.html. s of the participants presentations will be published in the issue of SIGART Intelligence that follows the consortium. The request for NSF support is higher this year than last, because Microsoft corporation chose not to cosponsor the event this time. Doctoral Consortium co-chairs are the PI and Marie desJardins, University of Maryland at Baltimore County; the organizing committee also included Janyce M. Wiebe, University of Pittsburgh; Mary P. Harper, Purdue University; Vibhu O. Mittal, Just Research and CMU; and Evangelos Milios, Dalhousie University. Panelists for the 2-day event will include: Robert St. Amant, North Carolina State University; Maria Gini, University of Minnesota; Craig Knoblock, ISI Gerhard Lakemeyer, Aachen University of Technology; Evangelos Milios, Dalhousie University; Shlomo Zilberstein, University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Stuart Shapiro, SUNY Buffalo; Foster Provost, NYU; and Rebecca Bruce, University of North Carolina at Asheville doc15129 none Delineation of crustal elements of different origins and histories found in ancient orogenic belts is a prerequisite to meaningful tectonic analysis. In the S. Appalachian orogen, a classic collisional system, it has proven difficult to convincingly assign units to Laurentia or to the opposing continental mass, Gondwana. Lack of clear-cut evidence has stymied full understanding of the otherwise well-known belt that has been instrumental in the development of major tectonic concepts. This project will investigate the hypothesis that the Smith River Allochthon in the Piedmont Zone, previously thought to be of peri-Laurentian or transitional affinity is, in fact, of exotic (Gondwana) origin. Results are of considerable local importance, and because the Appalachians provide an influential model for interpretation of other ancient tectonic belts, has broad significance doc15135 none The main goal of this research project is to place constraints on the mechanism of isostatic compensation for topographic and intracrustal loads beneath a portion of the southern Appalachians. Although it is frequently asserted that the Appalachians possess no crustal root, the Moho beneath the highest elevations in the Blue Ridge and Valley 2) map variations in averaged P- and S-wave velocities to constrain variations in the bulk composition of basement rocks across the study area; 3) test models for elastic bending of the continental lithosphere by incorporating the new estimates for relief on the Moho; 4) isolate the crustal contribution to the observed gravity by modeling the gravity field predicted by seismically determined variations in composition (density structure) and crustal thickness (this places constraints on any density variations within the uppermost mantle that help to support topographic and intracrustal loads); and 5) determine the extent to which the original deep structure of this orogen survived the effects of subsequent collapse and extension. The results are being used to assess the long-term stability of individual terranes crustal blocks within Paleozoic orogens. The experiments are targeting the regional gravity low associated with the Blue Ridge province. Both instantaneous blasts at dimension-stone quarries and delay-fired blasts at crushed-stone quarries are being used as seismic sources. The use of quarry blasts, a valuable but largely untapped energy source for refraction wide-angle reflection profiling, eliminates the high costs of drilling and explosives normally associated with crustal-scale, active-source experiments. The new experiments are helping to link the crustal images and velocity estimates from previous studies in the Carolina Terrane and associated East Coast gravity high, the Tennessee Valley & Ridge, and the Inner Piedmont and associated gravity gradient. The combined results provide high-frequency control on crustal velocity structure across an important part of the orogen, allowing future passive-source experiments to focus on related structures within the uppermost mantle doc15136 none The focus of this research is the development of highly reactive catalysts for synthetically useful reactions such as the Heck, Suzuki and Buchwald-Hartwig couplings. To this end, water-soluble alkylphosphines will be synthesized and used in conjunction with aqueous-phase palladium-catalyzed coupling reactions. These reactions efficiently provide structures of interest in areas ranging from pharmaceuticals and agricultural chemicals to electronic materials and commodity chemicals. With this new NSF EPA Technology for a Sustainable Environment (TSE) award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities of the Directorate of Mathematics and Physical Sciences are supporting the research efforts of Dr. Kevin H. Shaughnessy of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Professor Shaughnessy will focus his research on developing methodology for the use of a new class of sterically demanding, water-soluble alkylphosphines in palladium-catalyzed C-C and C-heteroatom bond forming reactions using environmentally benign aqueous solvent. Adoption of this methodology by industry could result in the decrease of hazardous waste generation, decrease in energy consumption and decrease in the use of volatile organic solvents. The undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral students working on this project will gain a fundamental education in organic and organometallic chemistry and approaches to developing environmentally benign chemical reactions doc15137 none The PIs will combine recent compilations of optical properties of various atmospheric-borne minerals and their regional distribution in order that dust optical properties reflect the mineralogy of their source region. They will address the following questions: (i) How does the composition of a dust plume vary along its trajectory away from the source region, as the size distribution changes with the preferential deposition of larger particles? Is the fraction of certain minerals enriched with distance from the source? (ii) What is the horizontal distribution of atmospheric concentration and deposition for particular minerals, e.g., carbonates, clays such as illite and kaolinite, and hematite? (iii) What is the radiative forcing by dust aerosols and the climate response if the mineralogy of the source region is accounted for? (iv) What regional errors in forcing and the associated climate response result from assigning optical properties of far-traveled Saharan dust to each source region? (v) What is the radiative effect of treating particles as external mixtures? To address these questions the PIs will undertake modeling that includes the effect of subgrid scale fluctuations of surface wind upon dust emission. The work is important because it will enhance our understanding of the role of dust particle mineralogy upon climate doc15138 none The proposal plans to connect SLU to the Abilene Network to enable research in the areas of meteorological research in conjunction with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, radar data analysis in conjunction with the Center for the Analysis and Prediction of Storms in Oklahoma and the National Weather Service, neuroscience where surgery is guided via real-time, remote supercomputing to analyze tissue images, and in silico experiments in genomic sequence doc15139 none Gorelick Accurately characterizing flow and solute transport in groundwater systems is a critical problem in hydrology. In order to predict the fate and long-term transport of contaminants, an accurate depiction of the spatial variability of the hydraulic conductivity field is essential. Hydraulic conductivity measurements are generally too sparse to obtain a high-resolution image of the subsurface. Given the large volume of data required to develop an accurate model of subsurface flow, and the cost of direct sampling, the use of geophysical methods can contribute significantly to information about the subsurface. The focus of this research is two-fold. First is the use of electrical resistance topography (ERT) as a tool to map subsurface relative flow paths and flow barriers in detail. Second is the establishment of a systematic procedure capable of delineating hydraulic conductivity through integrated analysis of multiple data types. By analyzing these data together in a simulation-inversion framework, we intend to provide images of aquifer properties consistent with all data inversion framework, we intend to provide images of aquifer properties consistent with all data types. We plan to develop a multiple data type simulation-framework, and test it using results from laboratory-scale experiments collected in 6 x 8 x 6 foot sand tank at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University (funded independently by NSF) and field-scale demonstration at the Massachusetts Military Reservation on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. This work will quantify the worth of different types of data, and their combination, to develop high-resolution maps of aquifer properties. It will also improve the understanding of the relationship between electrical resistance and hydraulic conductivity. Both of these results will be valuable to physical hydrogeologist, contaminant hydrogeologists, and geophysicists doc15140 none The proposal plans to connect Mount Holyoke College to the University of Massachusets and then to the Abilene Network for the purpose of advancing research in the areas of fish embryo biology, remote sensing and remote supercomputing for physics doc15141 none Wyneken This award supports Jeanette Wyneken of Florida Atlantic University and primarily junior researchers from various U.S. universities to participate participation in an international symposium on turtle research in Jena, Germany. The goals of the symposium include identifying important integrative directions in the field, exchanging ideas among experts with varying perspectives, facilitating contacts between those early in their careers and experienced researchers, and enhancing the opportunities for researchers on both sides of the Atlantic to engage in longer-term collaboration doc15142 none This proposal seeks funding for an advanced network connection in order to facilitate research and education in the areas of real-time surfzone wave, current and morphology observations, impacts of mesoscale processes on biogeochemical fluxes in the North Atlantic, topics in the role of the Arctic Ocean, organic geochemistry of subsurface gas flow, and subsurface sensing and imaging systems. In addition, this award will enable new projects in the areas of a 10 Gigabit per second network on the seafloor around the Juan de Fuca plate (offshore Oregon and Washington), a Martha s Vineyard Coastal Observatory, and the temporal and spatial dependence of broadband ambient seismic noise doc15143 none This project will develop a prioritized research agenda for studies of the effects of climate change and variability on estuarine systems. Although there is a general understanding of the physical effects of such changes, the consequences to the biodiversity and functioning of these ecosystems-or their biocomplexity-are poorly understood. The investigators are particularly interested in the mechanisms by which estuarine and coastal biocomplexity allows ecosystems to adapt to climate forcing in the context of human population impacts. Drs. Boesch and Giblin plan a community town meeting at the biennial conference of the Estuarine Research Federation, and a focused workshop involving estuarine, social and climate scientists. The objective of these meetings is to facilitate idea sharing and team building among climate change scientists, social scientists and scientists working in traditional estuarine disciplines. This project is expected to accelerate the involvement of the estuarine science community in addressing the complex and critically important questions of climate change effects in the fragile coastal zone doc15144 none CTS- de Pablo, Juan J U of Wisconsin - Madison It is proposed to organize a series of lectures at universities and research institutions whose goal will be to disseminate recent advances in the area of molecular thermodynamics and complex-fluid behavior, and to foster collaborations and exchanges between the U.S. and Mexico. The speakers will be selected in order to represent a broad overview of current research activities and new directions being pursued at U.S. institutions. While in Mexico, the speakers will be hosted by scientists and engineers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the Metropolitan University (UAM), the Polytechnic Institute (IPN), and the Mexican Petroleum Institute (IMP). The net result of this project will be an increased level of interaction and collaboration between U.S. scientists and engineers, their Mexican counterparts, and Mexican students doc15145 none This Small Business Innovation Research project has as its primary objective the investigation of the feasibility of a novel 360-degree display monitor concept for video conferencing. Videoconferencing technology has long sought to facilitate more natural and effective one-on-one and group communications and collaboration among people separated by distance. The plan is to build a 360-degree monitor to show panoramic video images from the center of the table to all 360-degree viewing angles. All participants can see the displayed image from where he she is seated. At the same time, all participants in the conference room can see each other directly, while communicating with people from the other site via the 360-degree display monitor and a 360-degree camera. Genex Technologies proffered technology will be of interest for a broad range to a broad range of consumers. Its applications include videoconferencing, security, and the entertainment industry doc15146 none Laura M. Anderson In recent years ideas from geometry have driven some of the most exciting developments in combinatorics such as Gromov hyperbolic groups and CAT(0) spaces, combinatorial Morse theory, combinatorial Ricci curvature, combinatorial differential manifolds and matroid bundles. The central unifying notion in geometry is that of curvature. Now, through these diverse geometric and combinatorial theories, curvature is emerging as a powerful tool and fundamental unifying concept in combinatorics as well. This Focused Research Group will explore some of the specific notions of combinatorial curvature driving current combinatorial work, and also the role of curvature as the basis for a coherent geometric vision of combinatorics itself. The notion of curvature has been one of the grand unifying concepts in geometry and physics for well over a century. For example, Gauss, the originator of our modern understanding of curvature, showed that Euclidean geometry was distinguished from other geometries as being the geometry of a space with zero curvature. As an application he showed that it is precisely the curvature of the surface of the Earth which makes it impossible to draw a map of the Earth s surface (on a flat piece of paper) that accurately portrays all lengths and angles. Riemann generalized Gauss s work to smooth spaces of higher dimensions, and Einstein observed that Riemannian geometry was precisely the right setting in which to describe his theory of general relativity (in which the curvature of the universe is the result of gravitational forces). Partly as a result of Einstein s work, the last century saw an intensive investigation into the curvature of smooth spaces. Combinatorics, roughly defined, is the study of objects which can be described by a finite amount of information. This is precisely the mathematics that computers can do. This type of mathematics seems far removed from the geometric investigations of Gauss, Riemann and countless others. However, there is a growing collection of combinatorial phenomena which can best be viewed as being finite analogues of facts about the curvature of smooth spaces. The goal of this proposal is to come to a coherent understanding of curvature as a combinatorial notion. In addition, bringing together researchers from a variety of mathematical disciplines, we wish to bridge the chasms between geometry, combinatorics, algebra and topology, using curvature as the unifying theme doc15147 none The proposal focuses on determining the mechanisms of reactions catalyzed by heteropolyacids. A goal of the work is to understand the role of trace amounts of water in enhancing the performance of these catalysts. The experimental tasks will focus on catalyst characterization and the computational one will make use of DFT calculations to characterize reaction mechanisms. The effects of water treatments on catalyst activity will be examined during hydrocarbon isomerization and alkylation reactions over supported heteropolyacids. Other important goals are to develop stable solid acid alkylation catalysts that are active at low temperatures and to identify factors controlling acid site density and strength in solid acid catalysts. Computational efforts will be aimed at understanding plausible mechanisms for hydrocarbon activation, which can lead to isomerization and alkylation, over tungsten heteropolyacids. The role of water on the structure of the working catalyst and the relationships between the degree of hydration and the activity of these materials will be investigated. This work has the potential to lead to the development of improved solid acid catalysts, which can replace environmentally less desirable liquid acid based processes doc15148 none Noel Brady In recent years ideas from geometry have driven some of the most exciting developments in combinatorics such as Gromov hyperbolic groups and CAT(0) spaces, combinatorial Morse theory, combinatorial Ricci curvature, combinatorial differential manifolds and matroid bundles. The central unifying notion in geometry is that of curvature. Now, through these diverse geometric and combinatorial theories, curvature is emerging as a powerful tool and fundamental unifying concept in combinatorics as well. This Focused Research Group will explore some of the specific notions of combinatorial curvature driving current combinatorial work, and also the role of curvature as the basis for a coherent geometric vision of combinatorics itself. The notion of curvature has been one of the grand unifying concepts in geometry and physics for well over a century. For example, Gauss, the originator of our modern understanding of curvature, showed that Euclidean geometry was distinguished from other geometries as being the geometry of a space with zero curvature. As an application he showed that it is precisely the curvature of the surface of the Earth which makes it impossible to draw a map of the Earth s surface (on a flat piece of paper) that accurately portrays all lengths and angles. Riemann generalized Gauss s work to smooth spaces of higher dimensions, and Einstein observed that Riemannian geometry was precisely the right setting in which to describe his theory of general relativity (in which the curvature of the universe is the result of gravitational forces). Partly as a result of Einstein s work, the last century saw an intensive investigation into the curvature of smooth spaces. Combinatorics, roughly defined, is the study of objects which can be described by a finite amount of information. This is precisely the mathematics that computers can do. This type of mathematics seems far removed from the geometric investigations of Gauss, Riemann and countless others. However, there is a growing collection of combinatorial phenomena which can best be viewed as being finite analogues of facts about the curvature of smooth spaces. The goal of this proposal is to come to a coherent understanding of curvature as a combinatorial notion. In addition, bringing together researchers from a variety of mathematical disciplines, we wish to bridge the chasms between geometry, combinatorics, algebra and topology, using curvature as the unifying theme doc15149 none INTEGRATION OF CHRONOSTRATIGRAPHIC DATABASES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY James G. Ogg and Paul J. Sikora This 3-day workshop will assemble quantitative stratigraphers and database specialists from diverse research teams. The goals are to coordinate database standards and compatibility; design strategies and tools for information retrieval and analysis of all types of global and regional stratigraphic data; and to discuss future directions for database integration and centralization of currently distributed depositories. The workshop will (1) propose standards for stratigraphic data storage, formatting, retrieval and conversions, (2) identify key needs for data acquisition, accessibility and manipulation tools, and (3) recommend a development strategy for the necessary integration of infrastructure for present and future growth of a distributed stratigraphic database system doc15150 none This Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) award will support a project investigating the application of near-field enhanced micro-Raman Spectroscopy to ferroelectric thin films. Micro-Raman spectroscopy has been shown to be a useful tool for material characterization. However, in transparent ferroelectric thin films grown on insulating substrates the Raman signal drops to undetectable levels. In some materials the Raman signal can be enhanced through the use of the surface enhanced Raman scattering effect (SERS). An attempt will be made to create SERS conditions in thin ferroelectric films of interest by introducing metallic (Au) nano-particles at the surface, the substrate interface, or within the bulk of the films. A second method will employ a gold plated atomic force microscope (AFM) tip to act as a single metallic particle placed on the back side of a transparent substrate. This second method will also be explored as a way to map out, on the nano-scale, properties of extended ferroelectric thin films. %%% Ferroelectric materials play a great role in many technological applications. The next generation of advanced and compact integrated electronics will require thin films of new classes of complex electroceramic and other optoelectronic materials. Recent developments in material processing and thin film fabrication techniques have made available high quality thin films suitable for these applications. Ferroelectrics are a class of electroceramics that offer a wide range of useful properties that could be used to develop devices, such as smart sensors and structures, radiation-hard non-volatile computer memories, and pyroelectric detectors. Successful implementation of these devices will require materials with well-defined properties and device figures of merit. Micro-Raman spectroscopy has emerged as an excellent non-destructive tool for comprehensive materials characterization by investigating the effects of size, stress strain, temperature, pressure, and electric field on the dynamic scattering behavior. To obtain Raman signals of measurable strength from thin films, it is necessary to enhance the electric field strength of the exciting radiation. The method of surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) has proven to be extremely successful in applications to macroscopic systems. The present exploratory research will investigate methods of applying the SERS process to characterize ferroelectric thin films in the nano-domain doc15151 none It is proposed to explore semiconductor nanocrystals such as quantum dots, rods and tetrapods, as templates for self-assembled 3D architectures of themselves and of core-shell nanocomposites . Multiscale simulations will be performed on Cd-S, Cd-Se, Zn-S, Ga-As, and In-As and their core shell nanocomposites. The relevant dimensional range in most cases will extend from the nanometer to the continuum, or part of it. They will be accomplished by a seamless combination of finite element continuum theories, molecular dynamics, and quantum mechanical calculations. Successful three-dimensional accounts of the resulting space distribution of atoms will yield a number of property and structural changes, at both bulk and atomistic levels. Among others, they will bring out the effects of nanocrystal size and shape, of organic molecules surface termination, and of nanoindentation testing on tetrapods and their arrays. The multimillion-atom multiscale simulation will be displayed and steered in an immersive and interactive visualization program, its infrastructure being made available by the State of Louisiana . The three PIs have already accumulated an extensive practice with molecular dynamics applications (~10 million atoms). In addition, the they have initiated a close cooperative collaboration with Dr. Alivisatos experimental program at the University of California- Berkeley. There are also plans to offer a number of cross disciplinary courses, leading to a dual-degree program ( physical biological and computer sciences), to web-based global courses and to mentoring activities. In summary, the PIs have accumulated an extensive experience in the field of parallel multiscale simulation, and have proceeded to obtain access to the corresponding high performance hardware and software. This should give them now a chance to test the behavior of a number of semiconductors, in a more diversified range of circumstances. To explore such a promising possibility, it is recommended that a one-year SCER award of $94,962 be granted, with a starting date of September 1, doc15152 none Chemistry (12) Electrochemiluminescence (ECL), combining elements of electrochemistry and photochemistry, involves the production of light near an electrode surface by species that can undergo highly energetic electron transfer reactions. ECL is a powerful technique that can be used to study a variety of analytes (e.g., organic, inorganic, biochemical). It is unfortunate that it is usually thought of as a tool only of the research and clinical laboratory since using analytical techniques that have real-world applications (e.g., in the clinical analysis of biomolecules) can greatly enhance teaching at the undergraduate level. We are adapting experiments from the research and educational literature and are developing new experiments, all of which use ECL techniques that can be carried out using an ECL analyzer. These experiments are being implemented in laboratory courses across our general chemistry and analytical curriculum, including courses for non-science majors and courses enrolling pre-service teachers. For example, in Fundamentals of Chemistry and in Chemistry for the Citizen students study claims about the purity of bottled water by determining the amount of copper in commercial water samples. Therefore, this state of the art instrument makes it possible for students to actually carry out environmental and water testing analyses. In Quantitative Analysis ECL allows the incorporation of quality assurance quality control and regulatory issues into the undergraduate curriculum. Our goal is to have students gain experience with ECL techniques, and develop an appreciation for the applicability of these techniques to a wide range of problems. These improvements also reflect modern analytical science and emphasize the development of sound analytical technique while exposing students to the types of problems dealt with by professionals in the real world. A secondary goal is to modernize the undergraduate curriculum and to produce graduates who are competent in the use of modern instrumentation. The ECL analyzer also is being used in undergraduate research projects. Evaluation of the project will occur in a number of ways, including pre-and post-exposure assessment in the affected courses, and compilation of data from exit interviews with our senior majors. Procedures for the new experiments will be made available on the internet, and tested experiments will also be published in appropriate journals doc15153 none The proposal plans to connect Temple to the MAGPI GigaPoP and then to the Abilene Advanced Network for the purpose of advancing research in the following areas: Protein Disorder Analysis Data-Reduction for Spatial-Temporal Knowledge Discovery Mining Human Brain Data doc15154 none The proposal plans to connect Gallaudet to MAX and then to the Abilene Network to enhance research into quality of service at a national level with experiments focused on improving the delivery of sign language and captioned video over the Internet. The proposed connectivity will more closely connect researchers at Gallaudet University to their current collaborators at other universities and will enable Gallaudet researchers to expand their efforts to move the applications they are developing beyond the edge of their campus. Although the research described in the proposal is not standard or traditional, it may contribute significantly to improving applications which will improve accessibility to the Internet doc15155 none CTS- Beckman, Eric U of Pittsburgh Design and Optimization of Non-Fluorous CO2-Philic Polymers The application of CO2 to chemical processing continues to elicit significant interest, as CO2 generally poses fewer hazards than conventional organic solvents. At one time it was thought that CO2 could simply replace many organic solvents, but subsequent work showed that CO2 is a rather feeble solvent, and hence unrealistically high pressures are needed to dissolve compounds of interest. The discovery during the s of CO2-philes suddenly rendered a number of applications technically possible, greatly raising interest in CO2 as a solvent. These new CO2-philes, primarily fluoropolymers, allowed a host of new applications for CO2, from heterogeneous polymerization to homogeneous catalysis. Although fluorinated amphiphiles were technically successful, their high cost renders the economics of a process unfavorable unless the CO2-phile can be recycled at greater than 99% efficiency. The drawbacks inherent to the use of fluorinated precursors have greatly inhibited the commercialization of most new applications for CO2, and thus the full promise of CO2-based technology has yet to be realized. Consequently, we have investigated the design of non-fluorous CO2-philes. First, a set of thermodynamic heuristics for the design of non-fluorous CO2-philes was developed. The applicability of these rules-of-thumb was demonstrated by the design of poly(ether-carbonates), polymers that exhibit lower miscibility pressures in CO2 than perfluoropolyethers and are biodegradable. The method of synthesis of these materials readily allows generation of surfactants and other functional molecules, opening the economical use of CO2 to a variety of processes. To date, we have used our simple heuristics to design three types of non-fluorous CO2-phile; we expect that others will ultimately be found, greatly broadening the applicability of CO2 as a solvent. The number of possible design variables (copolymer composition and topology) creates an impractically large program if we continue to synthesize and test all potentially useful structures. Further, conventional thermodynamic models are incapable of predicting the behavior of all of the possible permutations. Consequently, we propose to conduct a program whose ultimate aim is to fully understand the effect of composition and topology on the phase behavior of our new CO2-philes in carbon dioxide. We propose to combine targeted synthesis, measurement of selected thermophysical properties, high pressure FT-IR, and development of an accurate potential function from first principles to mathematically describe the thermodynamics of mixing of our materials with CO2. Success will allow us to numerically optimize the structure of non-fluorous CO2-philes. Research at the University of Pittsburgh will focus on the synthesis of model materials, investigation of phase behavior, and creation of a thermodynamic model that describes the effects of molecular structure on phase behavior. These tasks will be coordinated with research underway at Auburn University (C.R. Roberts), where high pressure IR measurements will be employed to evaluate the strength of specific interactions of CO2 with the Lewis base groups incorporated into our model polymers. The high pressure IR work provides input both to the synthetic design and the construction of an accurate potential model for CO2-polymer interactions doc15156 none Wood The objective of this project is to optimize the activity and expression of monooxygenases for the purpose of converting naphthalene to 1-naphthol and (chiral) styrene epoxide. Replacing the current method for producing 1-naphthol and styrene epoxide with the proposed enzymatic alternative may prove to be more environmentally benign in that less solvent and by-product wastes will result. There are two components to the work: (1) enzyme breeding (University of Connecticut) and (2) regulation of expression and bioprocess optimization (University of Maryland), which are highly synergistic doc15157 none Computer Science (31) This project is developing a curriculum framework for undergraduate and graduate programs in Information Assurance. The framework includes: identification of broad areas of knowledge considered important for practicing professionals in information assurance, identification of key learning objectives for each of these areas, identification of a body of core knowledge and skills that all programs should contain, and a model curriculum including scope and sequence. The framework s development is undertaken via a workshop of leading information assurance educators leading to a draft document which will then be widely distributed for comment and dissemination doc15158 none Saitou The goal of the proposed research is to develop a general method for designing products with embedded disassembly processes that can be invoked by pressing a disassembly button . This will be achieved by developing a new class of reversible integral attachments (RIAs) that can be detached by the application of localized heat. Design methodologies will be developed that will facilitate: (1) the identification of the components to be recovered, and (2) the embedding of RIAs into the product to facilitate the most efficient access to the components of interest upon product disassembly. Specific research tasks include: (1) extension of existing approaches toward determining recovery targets to include environmental validation metrics with the intent of considering both environmental and financial factors during design for disassembly, (2) development of a design method for a new class of RIAs that can be detached by application of localized heat, based on the structural topology optimization algorithm, and (3) development of a systematic procedure to generate the design specifications (attachment location, engagement type, removal direction, heating spot location) for RIAs using computer aided design technology in order to realize the most efficient access to components, based on the overall product geometry and the desired disassembly sequence doc15159 none This experimental project will address a major theme in condensed matter physics, the effect of the Coulomb interaction in an otherwise band-free electron system, that is the alkali metals, largely in thin film form or with transition metal impurities. The latter systems are excellent probes because they introduce a strong local exchange repulsion between the d-states of the impurities coupling to the conduction electrons. However, there are several difficulties to overcome for the experimental investigations: (a) transition metal impurities do not dissolve in alkali hosts and (b) the magnetization of the transition metal impurities is very small and difficult to measure. In this project the method of quenched condensation is used to prepare alkali films with small concentrations of 3d and 4d impurities. The magnetization as a function of temperature and magnetic field is measured with the method of the anomalous Hall effect. Presently there are no other laboratories in the world that can perform this task. The experimental goal is two-fold: (a) to determine the effect of the magnetic impurities on the polarization of the host and (b) to determine the magnetic moment of the impurities These experiments should stimulate renewed theoretical effort to rationalize the currently poorly understood measurements. The experiments introduce graduate students to the technique of high vacuum and low temperature physics with sophisticated evaporation methods. During the period of the last several undergraduate students also performed these difficult experiments, co-authored several publications in major physics journals, presented their results at American Physical Society meetings, and won first and second prizes for undergraduate research at the University of Southern California Alkali metals are a special group of metals. The wave length of the conduction electrons is larger than the atomic distance so that the atomic ions hardly disturb the motion of the electrons. Furthermore the volume of the atomic ions occupies only a fraction of the total volume. This makes the alkali metals the best representation of the jelly model in which the electrons move undisturbed by the ions through the metal and interact only with each other through their electrical charge, the repulsive Coulomb interaction. Therefore the alkali metals are the ideal system to study fundamental aspects of Coulomb interaction, which underlies many of the properties exhibited by solids: ferro-magnetism, high temperature superconductivity, etc. The effect of the Coulomb interaction can be probed in the alkali metals by introducing transition metal impurities (for example atoms of iron, cobalt, nickel, vanadium, titanium,..). These impurities introduce locally an additional strong Coulomb repulsion which pulls on the electrons like the bow of a violinist pulls on the string of a violin. The resulting magnetic moments reveal information about the energetic state of the electrons and the effect of the Coulomb interaction on them. However, for experimental investigations there are several difficulties to overcome: (a) transition metal impurities do not dissolve in alkali hosts and (b) the magnetization of the impurities is very small and difficult to measure. Two techniques, quenched condensation and the anomalous Hall effect overcome these experimental hurdles. Presently there are no other laboratories in the world that can perform this task. The experiments introduce graduate students to the techniques of high vacuum and low temperature physics with sophisticated evaporation methods. During the period of the last grant several undergraduate students also performed these difficult experiments, co-authored several publications in leading physics journals, presented their results at American Physical Society meetings, and won first and second prizes for undergraduate research at the University of Southern California doc15160 none This award is made under the NSF EPA Partnership for Environmental Research TSE . The research objective of this effort is to demonstrate the technical feasibility of mass replication of high-aspect-ratio metallic miroparts by fabricating aluminum cross-flow heat exchanges. Currently a major technical barrier to mass replication of aluminum parts by high temperature micromolding is the undesirable interaction between the hot molten aluminum and micromold. This leads to soldering and consequently the inability to separate the mold from the molded aluminum part. The approach to be taken is to uniformly coat highly nonplanar micromolds in a manner that it makes it possible to eject the aluminum part from the miromold after molding operation. This will be achieved by using plasma-assisted, vapor-phase deposition technology to deposit conformal coatings with uniform chemical and mechanical properties onto the surfaces of high-aspect-ratio micromolds. Mircomolds are fabricated using the deep X-ray lithography electrodeposition based microfabrication technique at the Center for Advanced Microstructures and Devices at Louisiana State University. If successful, this research will allow modification of the near-surface properties of the micromold to enable easy and repeated mold part separation, hence removing a major existing technical barrier in mass replication of aluminum parts by high temperature micromolding. This will lead to increased end-use energy savings and efficiencies associated with the creation of compact heat exchangers doc15161 none New Methods for Carbon Dioxide Separation and Recovery M. Rakowski DuBois and R. D. Noble University of Colorado, Boulder, CO The broad objective of this project is to develop an efficient electrochemical pumping process for separating an acid gas from emission sources and concentrating it for recovery and or disposal. The electrochemical pumping approach is being applied to the specific problem of removing and recovering CO2 from dilute gas streams. The research activities include the identification and synthesis of appropriate molecular carriers for CO2. Three different types of molecular-based carriers for CO2, which differ in their advantages and disadvantages, are being evaluated. In one approach, a redox-active quinone is reduced to produce a base of sufficient strength to bind CO2 directly in absorption from the waste-stream source. After CO2 is captured in this manner, the quinone-CO2 complex is oxidized electrochemically to release concentrated CO2 and to regenerate the oxidized form of the carrier. A second approach develops redox-active metal complexes that function in a similar cycle with bicarbonate ion. These have the advantage of being air-stable and water-soluble. A third approach investigates quinone carriers that produce an electrochemically controlled pH swing. CO2 is complexed at high pH by hydroxide ions generated by quinone reduction and released at low pH produced by quinone oxidation. Work on each carrier system includes electrochemical studies of the reaction-absorption rates and binding constants of CO2 as functions of carrier oxidation state and studies of the electrochemical-pumping systems to determine appropriate operating parameters, characteristics of reproducibility and stability, and energy efficiencies. In addition, process-modeling studies and investigations of absorption desorption and related mass transport phenomena are being carried out. Current CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have increased significantly from pre-industrial levels, and as the use of fossil fuels continues, CO2 levels will continue to rise. In this scenario, climate models predict a significant global warming with serious environmental impacts. Efficient methods must be developed in which CO2 is captured and stored for future use or sequestered in a stable form. The easiest point to capture CO2 is from the waste streams of large producers such as power plants, chemical plants, etc. before the CO2 is diluted by mixing with the atmosphere. It is estimated, however, that with today s best technology the recovery of CO2 from the exhaust of power plants will result in a 20-30% reduction in their overall efficiency. Estimates based on prior research and modeling studies suggest that an electrochemical pumping process with appropriate molecular carriers can be much more efficient than current conventional approaches for CO2 recovery. As appropriate carriers are developed, this process should find application in the efficient removal of CO2 as well as other acid gases from waste streams of industrial plants doc15162 none Sufficiently fast fluid flows over erodible beds of sand and gravel entrain surface particles, which then roll and hop along as bedload. This project aims to develop quantitative predictive relations between fluid flow and bedload transport that more precisely incorporate the role of the fluctuating flow velocities due to turbulence, which always is present. Such relations will apply to the non-uniform or unsteady flows that are ubiquitous in streams and beneath waves and will provide new insight into the formation of erosional and depositional sedimentary features from ripples and dunes to bars and channels to sorting and grading. The project will investigate (1) turbulence structure and bedload transport over simple bedforms such as bedload sheets and low dunes, (2) turbulence structure over abrupt streamwise changes in bed roughness, (3) turbulence structure and the fluctuating forces on fixed natural bed particles, (4) turbulence structure and the fluid forces that act on bedload particles during entrainment, and (5) the modification of fluid velocity and turbulence structure by moving bedload particles. In addition, the project will further develop our discrete-particle computational model for sediment transport by (1) incorporating into it better treatment of the lift forces on bed and bedload particles and of the reaction forces on the fluid as the particles accelerate and (2) coupling it with an existing numerical simulation of turbulent flow over three-dimensional bedforms. The proposed research addresses three intertwined issues: how the forces exerted on particles on the bed and moving over it are related to the temporal and spatial distribution of the near-bed fluid velocities, how the entrainment and motion of those particles are related to the forces, and how the near-bed fluid velocities are modified by the presence of the moving bedload doc15163 none SGER: Development of an Interactive Virtual Environment for Delivery of Rehabilitatitve Intervention to Children with Social Cognitive Deficits This is an eighteen month standard award. This project explores issues in the application of virtual reality environments to assist pre-school-aged children newly diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder. The PI will develop and evaluate a tool that integrates virtual reality display with eye-tracking and sensing of other physiological and intentional signals in an appealing non-restrictive play environment, in order to deliver a rehabilitative intervention. The system to be developed is driven both by empirical findings and by theory. The literature reports a high degree of success for discrete trial training with some autistic children, with greater success the younger the age at which intervention is begun. Computerized implementation of discrete trial technology may improve its effectiveness, since eye-tracking and other sensors will record target behaviors more precisely and displays will deliver immediate contingent rewards more reliably than human trainers can accomplish. The theory that informs our approach is that failure to establish social attention in infancy is a key factor in the autistic developmental syndrome. The intervention, therefore, uses the discrete trial methods to teach social attention and other basic social skills that the typically-developing child acquires (without training) in the first year of life, and that children with autism lack. A Virtual Playmate will share enjoyable experiences with the child (music, interactive games, and rides in the motorized chair in which the child is seated) as rewards for gains in target behaviors such as visual fixation on the playmate s eyes, vocal response to the playmate s expressions of emotion, joint attention (looking where the virtual playmate is looking), and other social skills that are vital to social interaction. Training for skill maintenance and generalization will incorporate virtual versions of toys and models of individuals from the child s actual environment. A successful outcome to this project will ultimately improve autistic children s ability to take part in peer social interactions and move them closer to a typical developmental path so that they can become participating members of society doc15164 none This starter-grant is for 2:1 matching (institutional:NSF) for start up equipment costs for a researcher who has completed two years of an NSF post-doctoral fellowship and now has a tenure-track position at San Francisco State University. The equipment costs support an analysis of how social fragmentation, characterized by racial, class, and economic inequality, are related to spatial inequalities in pollution exposures and associated health risks. The research will address the question of how racial and economic segregation relate to disparities in exposures to environmental hazards and associated health impacts among diverse communities and whether communities characterized by high levels of segregation and socioeconomic inequality experience higher levels of environmental health risks overall. These questions will be examined at both the regional and state levels, using the Los Angeles Air Basin and California as a geographic area of analysis. Study results from this research in California will have implications for the development of public health interventions and policy initiatives for community and economic development.Indices of social and racial stratification (such as race, class, and income segregation, rapid demographic change and indicators of economic inequality, such as the Gini coefficient) for regions and counties in California will be derived using variables from the and US Census. Using conventional environmental health risk assessment methods, air toxics exposures and health risks indicators will be calculated by combining modeled air toxics concentration estimates with cancer and non-cancer toxicity information. Multivariate regression analysis will be used to assess the relationship between environmental health risks (dependent variables) and social stratification indicators (independent variables) while controlling for important covariates such as population density, land use, political power and civic participation. Furthermore, a theoretical framework will be developed for understanding how inequality diminishes social capital and social cohesion which in turn can increase community vulnerability to the placement of environmental hazards and exposures to pollution doc15165 none Snyder This award will support Michael Snyder and colleagues at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to travel to Seoul, Korea for a feasibility study aimed at developing plans for the pilot program of an international science and engineering youth summer camp in South Korea. AAAS will work with the Korea Science Foundation and the Korea-US Science Cooperation Center in developing their plans. The primary objective of the study is to explore the possibilities of giving American youth with demonstrated interest in science and technology a hands-on research and educational experience in an international context doc15166 none The proposal plans to connect SIUC to the Illinois Century Network, MREN, and then to the Abilene Network for research and education purposes: Soybean Genome Integration and Publication Project requiring real time instructional access to large remote data sets; Apoliptoprotein Structure Project requiring an advanced connection due to delay sensitive tranfer of NMR control information and its latency sensitivy vs. bandwidth requirements; and 3-D vizualization of Geological Structures doc15167 none This proposal seeks funding for an advanced network connection in order to facilitate research and education in the following ways: Computational Astrophysics-Use of remote supercomputer for large-scale, 3D simulations of supersonic gas dynamics and magnetohydrodynamics to study star formation (funded by NSF Career Award, NASA and NSF Awards); Observational Astrophysics-Survey for High Proper-Motion Stars-This will speed up the investigation and cataloging of millions of stars and answer some fundamental questions about the nature of white dwarf stars based on terrabytes of data at the Johns Hopkins Space Telescope Science Institute (funded by NSF, NASA); Digital Library Project-Sharing of Museum Data (32 million specimens and cultural artifacts) to the scientific community at large; Comparative Genomics Evolutionary Biology-Multiple projects (funded by NSF, NASA) High resolution Virtual Specimens for Morphometrics-Dissemination of very large 3D specimen object datasets over high speed networks to provide a database of virtual objects (funded by NSF) ; Center for Biodiversity-Various Projects including humpback whale research, remote sensing research taking place worldwide, including Vietnam, Madagascar, Bahamas (funded by NSF, NASA, Private) ; Geology-Improve the remote operation of a microprobe, housed at AMNH, from Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University (funded by NSF) Interdepartmental Labs-Remote collaborative work via remote operation of telescopes and microscopes; Hayden Planetarium-Development of new Digital Dome shows which involves the acquisition of images, remote supercomputing for rendering of visualizations, remote collaboration in development doc15168 none The proposal plans to connect WSU to KanREN, to the Great Plains Network (GPN), and then to the Abilene Network in support of research and education in the following areas: experimental therapeutics and cancer biology, molecular modeling of ionic liquids, collaborative design techniques for integrated product development, low temperature astrophysics doc15169 none G. Harrison, Clemson University This project will investigate the effect of small amounts of elasticity on the performance of fluids flowing through spray nozzles. The work is motivated by a desire in the agricultural spraying industry to produce relatively monodisperse drop size distributions that can be effectively targeted to specific crop regions and can avoid dispersion over adjacent land. This general problem is complicated by several issues, including (1) variations in nozzle design and application method, (2) variations in fluid properties, and (3) requirements for different sized drops for different applications. The research described in this project will provide fundamental experimental results that will address all of the issues outlined above. It is well known that adding polymer can enhance the drop properties in spraying applications. This work will focus on well-characterized elastic liquids that will be employed in carefully designed nozzles to determine the impact of material properties and geometry on spray properties doc15170 none Most research on foreign direct investment (FDI) examines the manufacturing sector yet the service sector has been growing significantly over the last decade. For example, in the late s, the average annual inflow of foreign acquisitions in services amounted to $22 billion, nearly three times the yearly amount in the first half of the decade and at a rate comparable with investments in manufacturing. Between and , the worldwide stock of service foreign direct investment by Japan, West Germany, and France, increased by more than 20 percent per annum totaling $757 billion dollars. This suggests that the foreign presence in U.S. service sectors is expanding rapidly; however, research in this area remains sparse. This project involves planning research to answer three important questions related to Japanese foreign direct investment into U.S. service sectors: (1) Do volatile exchange rates deter Japanese service FDI? (2) Are Japanese plants less likely to fail if they invest in U.S. service industries that support their U.S. manufacturing operations, and (3) What determines whether a Japanese firm acquires a U.S. firm, builds a new plant in the U.S., or enters into a joint venture with a U.S. firm? This project aids in answering important questions regarding policy on Japanese FDI into the U.S. and U.S. competition with Japanese firms. Many services can only be delivered to foreign markets if they are produced in those markets, hence understanding the motives for service FDI and firm behavior after entry is imperative doc15171 none The proposal plans to connect Fond du Lac to the University of Minnesota at Duluth and then to the Abilene Network. Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College (FLTCC) has excellent existing computing facilities for a community college and is able to leverage their facilities and projects jointly with the University of Minnesota. The connection will be used to enable ongoing collaborations with the forestry institute and the University of Minnesota doc15172 none The Mathematical Education of Teachers (MET), published in book form in August, , (and currently available on the CBMS web site www.maa.org cbms), is the mathematics community s agenda for improving the mathematical preparation of future teachers. The Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences (CBMS), which guided the development of this document, is launching MET with a Press Conference in September, , (funded by the ExxonMobil Foundation) and a National Summit on the Mathematical Education of Teachers in November, , both to be held in Washington DC. The Press Conference involves high profile leaders of the business community, the mathematics community, policy making organizations, and funding agencies, and focuses upon the policy implications of this report, positioning it as the mathematics community s plan to improve teacher education in mathematics. The National Summit engages 250 college and university mathematics faculty in the hard work of beginning to implement the vision of the mathematical education of teachers presented in MET. Participants are being invited in teams from about 75 diverse institutions across the country. Plenary sessions frame the issues and problems and set them in broader context. Small group working sessions engage the participants in thinking about how to address specific challenges in carrying out the recommendations MET locally doc15173 none This project will investigate the properties of ultrafine (particle diameters less than 0.1 micrometer) aerosol aggregates in the atmosphere. Aerosol aggregates with high carbon content may significantly affect light absorption and scattering and hence the global radiation balance. Particles in this size range are also of public health concern. The morphology of aerosol aggregates in the atmosphere will be studied, including the fractal dimension and number and size of the primary particles that compose the aggregates, concentrations and size distribution of the aggregates, and fraction of total ultrafine particles that are aggregates. These properties are important because aerosol transport rates and gas-particle partitioning factors can vary as a function of aggregate morphology, affecting the atmospheric residence time and patterns of deposition of aerosols in the lung and on other surfaces doc15174 none The Biochemical Engineering Conference serves as the premier meeting for the Biochemical Engineering community. The focus of this Conference will include important core areas of Biochemical Engineering (fermentation cell culture and downstream process development) as well as exciting new frontiers of Biochemical Engineering (nanotechnologies, the omics of proteomics, genomics and physiomics, marine and environmental biotechnology). The Conference will illustrate how the same engineering fundamentals (unit operations, mass and energy transport, thermodynamics, and kinetics) that form the basis of traditional areas of Biochemical Engineering are being applied to drive advances in both areas. In addition to the regular sessions, two workshops are planned. A workshop entitled Biochemical Engineering Education: fundamentals versus state-of-the-art will focus on the often-competing needs to incorporate engineering fundamental into the curriculum as well as state-of-the-art applications. This workshop will feature representatives from industry and academe. A second workshop entitled New Directions in Biochemical Engineering Research will focus on potentially new areas for research in Biochemical Engineering. The discussion will have as panelists both academic and industrial representatives. Each panelist will be asked to prepare a single transparency and speak for no longer than 5 minutes. Following the presentations, input from the audience will be requested doc15175 none The ability to effectively convey information about a person s social status is fundamental to the creation of ethnic identities and social hierarchies. The custom of cranial vault modification, permanently altering the head shape of children to create social distinctions, was widespread among Native Americans during the pre-conquest period. Analysis of this practice has the potential to provide important insights into aspects of prehistoric social relations that are available from no other source. In this Ph.D. dissertation research, the health and social organizational correlates of cranial vault modification are analyzed from a broad temporal and spatial perspective in the pre-Columbian Andes. This work focuses on the social functions of cranial modification, both within and between groups, and its relationship to the rise of social complexity in the Andes. The goal of the research is to integrate physical anthropological and archaeological data into an analysis that clarifies the social factors that motivate body modification. Collections were carefully selected to encompass a broad spectrum of social systems. The research will include a large-scale survey of the cranial vault modification exhibited by more than 2,500 pre-Columbian skulls from the Andes housed in museums in the United States and Chile. The methods used in the analysis follow the recommendations in the Standards for Data Collection from Human Skeletal Remains. Analysis of cranial modification in a large number of individuals from a variety of cultural contexts is a powerful tool for testing hypotheses concerning the factors responsible for the development of socially stratified societies. The bioarchaeological approach, with its emphasis on the reconstruction of human behavior patterns and health status provides a direct means through which theories of cultural complexity and the biological consequences of inequality can be explored. The issues of social differentiation and cultural complexity addressed in this research have many implications for understanding the social relations of modern ethnic groups doc15176 none Yi Hu The investigator proposes to give topological constructions of the Chow quotient by introducing moduli spaces of stable orbits with prescribed momentum charges and moduli spaces of stable action-manifolds, respectively. The introductions of stable orbits and stable action-manifolds follow closely the idea of investigator s earlier work on stable degeneration of polygons. Note that just like a stable polygon is a collection of ordinary polygons, a stable orbit is a collection of ordinary orbits. The connections from stable orbits and stable action-manifolds to the corresponding Chow cycles are to be established by moment map. Next, he also attempts to interpret the Uhlenbeck compactification as a topological analogy of a Chow quotient. In the same vein, the investigator proposes a moduli problem for stable tuples of homogeneous polynomials of a fixed total degree in two variables. The investigator anticipates that the resulting moduli space is the smooth compactification of the variety of holomorphic maps from one-dimensional projective space to n-dimensional projective space as constructed in his earlier work on blowups along arrangements of subvarieties. This proposal deals with the fruitful interaction between topology and algebraic geometry. Algebraic Geometry as a field is both old and new. It is old because of its long history, it is new because it is still vigorously developing as one of the main stream mathematics. It has numerous beautiful connections and applications to other subjects. Roughly speaking, Algebraic Geometry studies spaces which are locally the set of solutions of some polynomial equations. Topology is another amazing mathematical achievement of this century and is the study of flexible geometrical properties of spaces. One of central problems in algebraic geometry is the classification of spaces in algebraic geometry. A key idea here is to treat every type of spaces as a point in a master set which is technically called a moduli space. This paper focus on the topological and geometrical aspects of moduli spaces. The proposal consists of some new ideas and methods which are substantially based upon investigator s earlier papers, among others doc15177 none Duennebier Funds are requested for the design, construction and testing of a small experiment module (SEM) for use in ocean bottom observatories. The purpose of this module is to reduce the effort necessary to conduct relatively simple observatory experiments at the ocean floor. Ocean bottom observatories will soon be providing opportunities for investigators to conduct scientific investigations using power from the observatory and transmitting data to shore through the observatory. The interface between the observatory and the scientist s sensors is intimidating for many investigators, requiring consideration of sampling, filtering, digitizing, timing, power, and data formatting, as well as construction of sophisticated electronics, pressure vessels, buoyancy devices, and related hardware. The proposed module will greatly simplify this task, allowing investigators to concentrate on their science, rather than on engineering. While those investigators with engineering expertise available will not necessarily need such an interface, the installation of relatively simple experiments coupled to a SEM will be far less complicated, making it easier and more cost effective for many to participate in observatory science. We envision a package similar to the SEM available at nearly every science node of major ocean bottom observatories. The prototype proposed here should point out any shortcomings in our conceptual design for such a device, and establish its usefulness to the community. The prototype of this package will include ports for connection of up to twelve sensors, including an absolute pressure sensor for tsunami detection. It is proposed that the first SEM at the Hawaii-2 Observatory will be installed during the next visit to the site in or . Future versions of the SEM can be modified to the needs of a particular observatory doc15178 none Pilyugin The investigator and his colleagues organize a conference on theoretical immunology. The field of theoretical immunology has become a prominent direction in biomathematics and it concerns mathematical modeling of the biocomplexity in the immune system, and more specifically the generation of immune responses to infections, generation and maintenance of immune memory, understanding the mechanisms that govern persistent infections, designing optimal strategies for antibiotic treatment of infectious diseases, and vaccine development. The main goals of this conference are to advance the interaction between theoretical and experimental directions of immunological research and to facilitate a better communication between science and medicine. The conference focuses on modern approaches to mathematical modeling of immune processes using differential equations and dynamical systems, game theory, mathematical statistics, stochastic processes and computer simulations, as well as mathematical algorithms for data mining and data fitting. The conference features lectures by prominent scientists on fundamental results in the field as well as reports on work in progress. A special session is devoted to the discussion of new directions and most significant problems of theoretical immunology in the near future. The immune system is our primary defense against viruses and infections. Theoretical immunology is a relatively young field of science that deals with theoretical modeling of interactions between immune system and invading parasites. Mathematical and computer models are used to unify our understanding of the extremely complex functioning of the immune system. Such theoretical models allow scientists to sort through the growing wealth of experimental and clinical data and extract fundamentally important features of immunity, design new experiments, and optimize the performance of drugs and vaccines. The meeting aims to bridge the gap between theoretical and experimental biology and medicine and advance the theory of immune processes to address the current needs of medicine and biotechnology. The conference has an educational impact by exposing younger researchers and graduate students to the present challenges in immunology and facilitating their future scientific careers doc15179 none Morava This award supports the participation of American scientists in a U.S.-Japan seminar on primes and knots to be held at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland from March 15-22, . The co-organizers are professors Jack Morava of the Johns Hopkins University and Professor Toshitake Kohno at the University of Tokyo in Japan. The theory of primes and the theory of knots are perhaps the most venerated branches of algebra and of topology, and in many ways, they are both still the most accessible. However, it is only relatively recently that researchers have begun to perceive deep relations between them, via analogies between the Galois groups of number fields and the fundamental groups of link complements. The topic has the advantage of being approachable from many directions and on many levels. The theory of knots and the theory of primes are both intuitively accessible, and the participants expect this seminar to foster the development of a common language between researchers in these areas. A prime resembles a knot, and the ideal generated by an algebraic integer is like the boundary of an embedded surface. In both subjects, relations between abelian constructions such as Alexander invariants are relatively well-understood, and much current research centers on deeper nonabelian questions; for example, it is now known that {5, 41, 61} is the first set of Borromean primes (in which no two are nontrivially linked, but all three are). Seminar organizers have made a special effort to involve younger researchers and graduate students as both participants and observers. The exchange of ideas and data with Japanese experts in this field will enable U.S. participants to advance their own work, and will set the stage for future collaborative projects. Dissemination of information on the seminar will be available on the World Wide Web doc15180 none Source-Based Pollution Prevention through Depolymerization of Poly (ethylene terephthalate) with Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Technical Description: This research represents a new approach to pollution prevention through elimination of waste polymer that is generated during the manufacture of poly (ethylene terephthalate) (PET). A one-step process will be investigated to depolymerize PET and recover purified monomeric and oligimeric units for repolymerization. The key features of the process are: 1) use of a twin-screw extruder to continuously create the fresh surface that is required for a depolymerizing agent (methanol or ethylene glycol) to penetrate into polymer; 2) use of supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO2) as a processing aid. Molten polymer is contacted with a mixture of scCO2 and either methanol or ethylene glycol in a twin-screw extruder. The methanol or ethylene glycol causes the PET to depolymerize as it passes through the extruder. The scCO2 plasticizes the PET, facilitating penetration of the methanol ethylene glycol into the polymer. The scCO2 also reduces the viscosity of the melt and enhances chain mobility, improving the overall reaction rate. Finally, the scCO2 extracts organic contaminants from the polymer. The scCO2 containing dissolved contaminants,unreacted ethylene glycol or methanol, and some of the monomers produced is removed in a vent on the extruder. The potential advantages of this process are: (1) elimination of the solvents and processing steps that otherwise are required for separation of monomers and oligomers from contaminants; (2) much higher depolymerization rates; (3) integration of multiple processes, i.e., depolymerization and extraction, into a single step. The process parameters will be studied include the depolymerizing gent, the depolymerizing agent polymer ratio, pressure, temperature, CO2 polymer ratio, and average residence time in the extruder. Broader Significance: Approximately 100 million pounds of waste PET is generated annually in U.S. manufacturing facilities. While some of this waste is used in low-value products such as fillers, a large portion remains unusable. Successful development of this new technology could help to solve a serious waste disposal problem and increase the competitiveness of U.S. PET manufacturers. A fundamental understanding of the depolymerization of PET could provide a basis for several technology extensions. First is the application to post-consumer waste PET, the annual volume of which is about 30 times the volume of in-plant waste. Second, this new process should be applicable to other step-growth polymers such as poly (bisphenol A carbonate) and various nylons doc15181 none The goal of this project is to increase the number of women entering graduate programs in CISE areas by providing opportunities for female undergraduates to be involved in research projects with mentors at major research universities so as to experience research and graduate life. The Distributed Mentor Project (DMP) has been running successfully since and CRA proposes to build on that success by significantly increasing the number of students participating in DMP. To do this, CRA will initiate a new outreach program targeted at undergraduate institutions and universities without active research programs. The project will initially provide support for 30 students and will increase that number by 5 each year until, by the fifth year, 45 students will be working with experienced qualified mentors during the summer months. In addition, the project includes a significant evaluation component, a plan for dissemination of the results of the evaluation, and a plan to secure long-term funding and therefore institutionalization of the project from industry and other foundations doc15182 none Technology for a Sustainable Environment: Novel Hydrogen Reactor Separator Design for a Fuel Cell Vehicle Infrastructure James M. Fenton University of Connecticut This project explores the merits of a new type of membrane for high-temperature hydrogen purification so that pure hydrogen can be obtained directly from a hydrocarbon steam reformer. The new membrane is fabricated from a class of ceramic compounds called perovskites that can be formulated to be both electron and proton conductors. These conductivities allow the hydrogen produced by the reforming reaction to be converted to electrons and protons on one surface of the membrane and converted to pure hydrogen on the other surface. In addition to producing pure hydrogen for fuel-cell use, extracting the hydrogen directly from the reformer shifts the reaction equilibrium to favor the formation of more hydrogen. Samples of these membrane materials are being fabricated and their properties determined for use in this application. Hydrogen permeability is measured and calculations performed to design an integrated reformer-purifier. Current proton-exchange-membrane fuel-cell systems require a complex fuel processor containing several components to produce a hydrogen gas of suitable purity for use in the fuel cell. This new hydrogen reactor separator provides a smaller, simpler fuel processor for use in fuel cell systems. For on-board vehicular hydrogen production from gasoline, fuel-cell-system power density will be increased, startup time and transient thermal response will be improved, and cost reduced. Also, for either vehicles or stationary power generation, this unit will allow use of the existing natural-gas infrastructure for the formation of a hydrogen infrastructure through a network of small, low cost natural-gas reformers. These advances could have a significant impact on the rate of fuel cell commercialization to maintain a sustainable environment. Pollution that now results from fuel combustion will be prevented doc15183 none Since its inception as a formal program, one of the unique characteristics of the I UCRC Program has been its commitment to a systematic and objective evaluation effort. As it has evolved over the years, the evaluation effort relies heavily on standardized collection of data by independent on-site evaluators at every IUCRC Center. An evaluation system built upon a national network of local evaluators requires a considerable amount of support and coordination. Although the support and coordination provided by NSF staff and the evaluators coordinating committee are essential to the program s success, these mechanisms are not adequate to meet the needs of an evaluation project that has grown to be national in scope. Funding is also being provided for a one-year project, Quantifying Industry IUCRC Benefits The project will attempt to develop quantitative measures of some of the benefits firms might receive via their participation in IUCRCs doc15184 none Bronzino Bioinformatics is a scientifically broad discipline involving the use of computer technology to develop new medical (virtual) instruments, create and protect computerized patient records, enhance the operation of medical imaging systems, utilize artificial intelligence techniques (i.e. expert systems, neural networks, etc.) to develop decision support systems, create efficient and effective data mining and modeling approaches, and use robotics in a host of medical applications. This field is vast and it is difficult to cover all of the topics. Therefore, the Symposium is to focus on computer-based instrumentation in medical systems. The primary objectives of the Bioinformatics Symposium are: Present insights into the new research and development efforts underway in virtual instrumentation, medical imaging and storage, and decision support systems. Present examples of successful academic industrial collaborations in these areas. Provide an opportunity for students in biomedical engineering, computer science and health sciences to learn more about the field of Bioinformatics. The convening of academic and industrial professionals from the various disciplines involved in Bioinformatics at the Symposium and associated Technology Fair will facilitate interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaborations in research and development efforts within the realm of Bioinformatics. The Bioinformatics Symposium and associated Technology Fair offers a timely opportunity to facilitate the development of innovations in this emerging area of biomedical engineering. This award provides support for the publication of printed proceedings of the meeting doc15185 none Marincovich This Americas Program SGER (Small Grants for Exploratory Research) award will allow Dr. Louie Marincovich and a group of U.S. and Canadian researchers to undertake a three-week trip in July , near Bay Fiord in west-central Ellesmere Island, as a pilot study that will, for the first time, coordinate the efforts of several specialists to decipher the paleobiogeographic and paleoclimatic importance of the unique biota of this area. The award will be jointly supported between the Division of International Programs and the Geology and Paleontology Program of NSF. Rocks of the Eureka Sound Group on Ellesmere Island, northern Canada (78-79 degree N latitude), record an unusual time, 50-60 million years ago, when the high Arctic was home to alligators, giant tortoises, diverse mammals, (including primates and rhinoceroses), woodlands and vast lowland swamps. Mollusks thrived on land and in the adjacent warm ocean. Although little-known overall, these diverse and abundant fossils are the only well-preserved record of the Earth s early Cenozoic arctic climate, and comprise the northernmost known marine and terrestrial biota of this age These animals and plants lived in an extinct environment, combining a warm-temperate climate with an arctic light regime of bright summers and dark winters. The presence of this diverse and abundant early Cenozoic marine and terrestrial biota at such high latitudes comprises what may be the most profound paleontological mystery in the Arctic. Studying the fossil vertebrates, plants and mollusks will increase our understanding of this rich biota, refine its age, provide insights into long-severed European-North American land connections, and decipher the polar expression of the warmest global climate of the past 65 million years doc15186 none Logan This project is to develop a new technology to create a biologically based source of clean hydrogen from wastewater. The main barrier to efficient conversion of dissolved organic matter in wastewater is preventing interspecies hydrogen transfer so that hydrogen generated through fermentation processes is not lost to anaerobic microorganisms. To prevent interspecies transfer, the microbes responsible for fermentation will be separated from those responsible for methane production using a two-tank membrane bioreactor. The purpose of the membrane is to control cell detention time in the first reactor so that slow-growing methanogens are not able to exist in the first tank and will therefore be unable to significantly degrade the hydrogen produced from fermentation. The reactor is to be operated in a mode that has been shown to limit membrane biofouling in suspended growth reactors doc15187 none A central goal of the Shelf-Basin Interactions (SBI) program is to understand the processes affecting carbon transformations and fluxes within and between Arctic shelf and basin ecosystems, and how climate change might impact these processes. The cycling of carbon in Arctic shelf and basin habitats depends on the structure and functioning of both micro- and meso- zooplankton acting as significant consumers of primary production. The partitioning of primary production between the fractions remaining in the water column or accumulating to the seafloor (where organic matter is less available for export from the shelf) can be greatly affected by the relative grazing rates of microzooplankton versus mesozooplankton herbivores. Microplankton grazing dampens export flux, while mesozooplankton grazing enhances it. The primary focus of this project is an analysis of the impact of microzooplankton and mesozooplankton grazers on the fluxes and exchanges of carbon within the oceanic waters of the Canada Basin and the shelf waters of the Chukchi Beaufort Seas. This study will explicitly address trophic linkages previously unexplored in this region of the Arctic. The hypothesize is that changing ecosystem structure resulting from climate change will alter the role of these trophic interactions in the utilization and cycling of carbon in arctic shelves and basin systems. This project will provide rate measurements for microzooplankton and mesozooplankton grazing and reproduction, parameters that are a high priority for the seasonal process cruises in the SBI project doc15188 none The proposal plans to connect Bowling Green to OARNet and then to the Abilene Network to enable parallel rendering research in the areas of numerical relativity and relativistic astrophysics. The PI also proposes the development of an Internet2 Task Force on campus to help promote the use of the high-speed network resources by other researchers doc15189 none Weller This award supports Henry Weller and students from Duke in a collaboration with Hans Arends of the Institute for Nuclear Physics at the University of Mainz, Germany. The project will focus on measuring the validity of the Gerasimov-Drell-Hearn sum rule for the deuteron. The low-energy part or the measurement will be performed in the US, with participation by the German group, and the high-energy part of the measurement will be performed on the Mainz Microtron in Germany. The measurements will compare the sum rules on the neutron and proton to that on the deuteron, for which both high- and low-energy measurements are required. A possible continuation of the collaboration could then work on measuring the sum rule for Helium-3. The work plan provides for extensive participation by graduate students in the international travel and research doc15190 none This National Science Foundation and Environmental Protection Agency Technologies for a Sustainable Environment project proposes a new technology to enable continuous casting of molten metals, in a single step, to the specifications of the designer. Bessemer s vision ( ) of solidifying raw material directly into final product, without downstream processing steps (rolling, annealing), may now be realized for thin flat product, to marked environmental advantage. To cast aluminum foil, e.g., in a single step, would reduce CO2 emissions to the atmosphere by 250,000 tons per year, in the US alone. Every kilogram of aluminum saved in reducing manufacturing waste translates into electricity saved at the energy-hungry smelter. The technology is based on controlling length scales previously inaccessible to control. The idea is a marriage between laser and single-roll spin casting technologies. The laser offers a unique way to bring energy into the zone of contact between molten metal and substrate. The contact zone is a region of adverse conditions, generally inhospitable to mechanical intrusion. Successful casting by design, or tunable casting, will use laser energy to manipulate product quality. One approach is to condition the substrate by imposing thermal gradients before the contact zone. Grey-scales in ink-jet printing are produced by the spacing and arrangements of ink dots of the same size. In much the same way, the proposed gradients will be established with arrangements and spacing of hot spots. Laser heating will induce the hot spots at fine scales. This project will have significant societal benefits in reducing environmental impact and energy consumption, as well as providing improved scaled-down processing requirements for industry doc15191 none This recommendation memo provides support and justification for funding the Principal Investigator to participate in a DELOS Digital Libraries Workshop to be held in San Cassiano, Italy in June, . This meeting, entitled Digital Libraries: Future Research Directions for a European Research Programme, is expected to be a seminal event for producing the core intellectual agenda and operational framework for the next phase of European activities in digital libraries research and applications. The US and EU agendas are naturally linked by common goals to achieve interoperability at the networking, systems, content, usage and other stages in the information lifecycle. A long-term overall goal is the development of shared resources for a global information cyber-infrastructure. The meeting is being organized by the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries, in cooperation with the Cultural Heritage Applications Unit of the 5th FP IST Programme of the European Commission doc15192 none To calculate the elastic deformation experienced by soils subjected to static or dynamic loads, knowledge of the elastic moduli is required. Although the response of soils to these kinds of loads may not be strictly represented as linear elastic, solutions based on linear elastic behavior are commonly used for the estimation of stresses or strains in the field. The elastic moduli are normally evaluated in the laboratory using conventional triaxial compressive tests on cylindrical samples. For meaningful test results, it is necessary to maintain a ratio of sample diameter to the maximum particle size of approximately 6:1 or greater. For the conventional triaxial specimen diameter of 2.8 in., the maximum grain size that can be tested is 0.5 in. Thus, when soils are tested in the conventional triaxial apparatus, it is common practice to remove oversize particles with an average diameter greater than 0.5 in. Samples larger than 2.8 in. can be used in triaxial testing; however this requires the use of large cells and large loading systems, making the tests too expensive and time consuming to be used routinely. The removal of material larger than 0.5 in. from the samples tested in the conventional triaxial apparatus will provide unreliable elastic moduli values for the calculation of stresses and deformations associated with civil engineering projects built in soils with large rock particles (i.e. glacial tills, residual and colluvial soils). This proposal presents a theoretical method developed by Hashin that calculates the elastic moduli of a composite made of an elastic material containing dispersed large rigid particles. The Hashin method requires only knowledge of the elastic moduli of the matrix that surrounds the particles coupled with the concentration by volume of the rigid large particles in the composite in order to calculate the elastic moduli of the mixture. The objective of this one year exploratory investigation is to assess the validity of the Hashin method by conducting ultrasonic velocity tests on dry mixtures of soils (clay, silt, and sand) and dispersed oversize particles (gravel, glass beads, sands). Also, stress-strain curves reported in the geotechnical literature obtained from conventional static triaxial compression tests on laboratory prepared soils-large particles mixtures will be used to obtain the static elastic moduli. Using the ultrasonic velocity measurements, the laboratory dynamic elastic moduli will be obtained. Using the results from triaxial compression tests, the static elastic moduli will be obtained. The laboratory elastic moduli will be then compared with those predicted by Hashin s theoretical method in order to assess its reliability. The results of the exploratory research will be used as a basis to further explore the validity of Hashin s method as it applies to soil-oversize particle mixtures having a soil matrix with varying degrees of saturation and heterogeneity doc15190 none This National Science Foundation and Environmental Protection Agency Technologies for a Sustainable Environment project proposes a new technology to enable continuous casting of molten metals, in a single step, to the specifications of the designer. Bessemer s vision ( ) of solidifying raw material directly into final product, without downstream processing steps (rolling, annealing), may now be realized for thin flat product, to marked environmental advantage. To cast aluminum foil, e.g., in a single step, would reduce CO2 emissions to the atmosphere by 250,000 tons per year, in the US alone. Every kilogram of aluminum saved in reducing manufacturing waste translates into electricity saved at the energy-hungry smelter. The technology is based on controlling length scales previously inaccessible to control. The idea is a marriage between laser and single-roll spin casting technologies. The laser offers a unique way to bring energy into the zone of contact between molten metal and substrate. The contact zone is a region of adverse conditions, generally inhospitable to mechanical intrusion. Successful casting by design, or tunable casting, will use laser energy to manipulate product quality. One approach is to condition the substrate by imposing thermal gradients before the contact zone. Grey-scales in ink-jet printing are produced by the spacing and arrangements of ink dots of the same size. In much the same way, the proposed gradients will be established with arrangements and spacing of hot spots. Laser heating will induce the hot spots at fine scales. This project will have significant societal benefits in reducing environmental impact and energy consumption, as well as providing improved scaled-down processing requirements for industry doc15194 none The Western Arctic is profoundly influenced by the northward flux of nutrient and organic-rich, low salinity Pacific Ocean water that enters the basin through the Bering Strait and across the Chukchi shelf and slope. This flow, a key component of the global ocean circulation, transports freshwater from the Pacific to the Atlantic via the Arctic Ocean while also sustaining some of the most productive ecosystems in the world, the Bering and Chukchi Seas. Net transport, sea ice cover and sea surface temperatures are well known to vary greatly over seasonal and interannual time scales, but the experimental, observational, and modeling bases to evaluate the response of Arctic ecosystems to these changes, and to global change in general, are largely lacking. This interdisciplinary project will provide the observational and theoretical framework to evaluate carbon fluxes in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas in response to variable environmental forcing. A main goal of this project is to determine the impact of decadal-scale environmental regime shifts in the northern high latitudes on carbon cycling in the western Arctic Ocean. Carbon import from the Bering Sea, local production and transformation, and export from the Chukchi and Beaufort shelves to the basin will be examined. This project will focus on understanding the influence of physical and biological processes on fluxes of carbon and other key elements (e.g. N, O, Si) in the water column and benthos of the shelves and slope, and subsequent exchange with the basin. This project has been integrated with other research programs and related resources in the SBI program. The ultimate goal of this study is to obtain a more complete understanding of shelf-basin exchange processes and biogeochemical cycles, and to establish benchmarks useful for assessing future global change of this sentinel ecosystem doc15195 none Hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) emissions from the refrigeration and air conditioning sector in the U.S. currently amount to approximately 13 million metric tons of carbon equivalent (MMTCE). This number is expected to grow to 27 and 38 MMTCE in and , respectively. Second only to automotive refrigeration systems, retail food refrigeration accounts for 25% of these emissions: a typical supermarket leaks about 1 ton of refrigerants every year. Secondary refrigeration loops have the potential to reduce primary refrigerant charges to as little as 10% of that required in a traditional refrigeration system. Nonetheless, secondary refrigeration has found acceptance in only about 200 out of over 30,000 supermarkets and 300,000 convenience stores in the U.S. With profit margins comparable to their electric bills, retail food enterprises are concerned that secondary refrigerants may not be as energy-efficient as the HFCs that are currently used in direct refrigeration. Improving the energy efficiency in this sector is of government concern as well since the retail food industry currently accounts for approximately 4% of electricity consumption in the nation. The primary goal of this project is to work towards addressing the following questions: (a) What are the families of compounds that can act as secondary refrigeration fluids? (b) What is the energy efficiency of these compounds and how does it compare to that of the HFCs that are currently used in direct refrigeration? (c) Are these compounds safe and environmentally benign? Towards answering these questions, this project integrates theoretical and experimental research that will: (1) develop a mathematical model which selects the atomic composition of a refrigerant in such a way that environmental and chemical constraints are satisfied while the energy efficiency, total warming impact of the refrigerant life-cycle, and other economic and environmental objectives are optimized; (2) devise an algorithmic procedure to solve the above model in a way that overcomes the combinatorial difficulty of the problem as well as difficulties associated with nonlinearities in property prediction estimation techniques; (3) establish an experimental procedure for calibrating the mathematical model through measurement of physical properties of potential refrigerants; (4) verify experimentally the theoretical findings through laboratory synthesis of compounds identified by the model and measurement of their thermal transfer properties in actual refrigeration equipment doc15196 none Kilpatrick, P North Carolina State U The management of emulsions during the production, transportation, and processing of crude petroleum fluids is one of the most persistent challenges which faces the petroleum industry. Annually, tens of millions of tons of emulsions are produced during production of petroleum and this figure is likely to rise annually with the increased production of heavy oils. A substantial percentage of these emulsions are stabilized by elastic films of adsorbed asphaltenes. It is common to treat these emulsions with chemical demulsifiers, typically nonionic polymers containing substantial proportions of ethylene oxide (EO) and propylene oxide (PO). Other methods employed to a lesser extent include thermal pressurization and rapid depressurization, electrostatic droplet shattering and coalescence, and ultrasonication of emulsions. Among the most effective chemical demulsifiers are oxyalkylated phenol resins, phenol-formaldehyde glycidyl ethers, and other polymers based on EO, PO, phenol, and formaldehyde. There is considerable concern in that many of these demulsifier chemicals persist in the environment, are nonbiodegradable, and may have adverse human health effects, including being suspected endocrine disruptors. Moreover, the costs associated with demulsifiers in particularly heavy and troublesome fields can be substantial. This project describes a novel method for demulsifying water-petroleum emulsions using compressed gases; the specific example which has been reduced to practice is the use of compressed carbon dioxide (CO2). The project describes the further development of this method and the possible use of mixed compressed gases, including methane (CH4), ethane (C2H6), propane (C3H8), and CO2. The method is based on the alteration of the solvent properties of petroleum for asphaltenes upon dissolution of dissolved gas. It is well known that dissolution of appreciable amounts of propane in petroleum fluids can precipitate asphaltenes, a process known as propane de-asphalting. CO2 is also highly effective and the precipitation is of sufficient magnitude to demulsify extremely stable petroleum emulsions. Should the method be plausible with compressed gases commonly found in contact and coproduced with petroleum - e.g. CH4, C2H6, C3H8, and CO2 - the possibility exists for demulsifying produced emulsions at the source and, perhaps, perform preliminary unit operations on the crude, such as downhole deasphalting. The impact of such a technology, if successfully reduced to economical practice, would be difficult to overestimate. Based on the somewhat reduced scope due to the revised budget reductions, the mixed gas demulsifications will be performed with methane (CH4) and CO2 only doc15197 none Stuart The goal of the proposed research is to develop a modeling framework and rapid materials identification methodologies to significantly improve resource utilization in the thermoplastics supply cycle. The specific goals are to: (1) design and develop an instrumental methodology for the off-line and in-process composition monitoring of pure and mixed polymer feed stocks (resin pellets regrind, and (2) design and develop a computational model that links composition information derived from material analysis in the supply chain with knowledge of molder demand to decide new criteria for selecting blending compositions and inventory quantities in the plastics supply cycle. The ultimate objective is to provide viable means to overcome significant barriers to the development of a sustainable supply cycle for plastics manufacturing doc15187 none A central goal of the Shelf-Basin Interactions (SBI) program is to understand the processes affecting carbon transformations and fluxes within and between Arctic shelf and basin ecosystems, and how climate change might impact these processes. The cycling of carbon in Arctic shelf and basin habitats depends on the structure and functioning of both micro- and meso- zooplankton acting as significant consumers of primary production. The partitioning of primary production between the fractions remaining in the water column or accumulating to the seafloor (where organic matter is less available for export from the shelf) can be greatly affected by the relative grazing rates of microzooplankton versus mesozooplankton herbivores. Microplankton grazing dampens export flux, while mesozooplankton grazing enhances it. The primary focus of this project is an analysis of the impact of microzooplankton and mesozooplankton grazers on the fluxes and exchanges of carbon within the oceanic waters of the Canada Basin and the shelf waters of the Chukchi Beaufort Seas. This study will explicitly address trophic linkages previously unexplored in this region of the Arctic. The hypothesize is that changing ecosystem structure resulting from climate change will alter the role of these trophic interactions in the utilization and cycling of carbon in arctic shelves and basin systems. This project will provide rate measurements for microzooplankton and mesozooplankton grazing and reproduction, parameters that are a high priority for the seasonal process cruises in the SBI project doc15199 none This project addresses the design, synthesis, characterization, processing and applications of novel multifunctional heterogeneous catalysts for environmentally benign and high efficiency organic transformations in aqueous media. It emphasizes metallic, organometallic-complex, and multifunctional catalysts capable of catalyzing multiple reactions simultaneously, examining the activity and selectivity of the catalysts for industrially important organic reactions, and engineering the structures and catalytic chemistry to achieve optimal performance through a fundamental understanding of catalytic reactions. This multidisciplinary project involving chemistry, chemical engineering, materials science, and environmental science provides a strong opportunity to integrate research with education to address important industrial issues such as how to reduce volatile and toxic organic pollutants in the environment. The development of new catalysts and methodologies for efficient and environmentally benign transformations of volatile organic pollutants will help achieve sustainable long-term economic growth while maintaining a cleaner industrial environment. Students trained in the synthesis, characterization, processing, optimization and recovery of catalysts will be highly competitive in both the academic and industrial job market. This Technology for a Sustainable Environment project is part of the National Science Foundation Environmental Protection Administration partnership program. It is being jointly supported by the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities and the Division of Materials Research doc15200 none Transfer of organic material and organisms from Arctic shelves to the deep Arctic basin may impact significantly the biogeochemical characteristics, and ecosystem function and structure, of both Arctic basin and the Arctic shelf ecosystems. However, the physical and biological processes influencing both the distribution of organisms and biological material on the Arctic shelves and the potential input of these materials into the Arctic Ocean and basin presently are poorly understood. It is critical to increase understanding of the biological-physical coupling in the shelf-slope region in order to better predict the potential impact of large-scale changes in climate on the Arctic ecosystem. The project will describe the role of mesoscale physical processes in the exchange or transport of biogenic material and plankton populations between the Chukchi Shelf and neighboring Beaufort Sea as part of the Shelf Basin Interactions Phase II field program (SBI). The proposed research has two distinct yet interrelated components: 1) description of the abundance, taxonomic and size composition of plankton and particles and aspects of behavior of plankton in physical features at two locations along the Beaufort Chukchi shelf break during two July-August process cruises ( and ) using a Video Plankton Recorder, 2) a description of the abundance of zooplankton on the outer shelf and upper slope and the mesoscale physical features that exchange water and biogenic materials between the two regions over two annual cycles using the absolute backscatter intensity data from an array of fourteen moored calibrated acoustic Doppler current profilers doc15201 none The limits to temporal resolution imposed by processes of time-averaging (i.e., age mixing of fossils that determines the temporal resolution of the fossil record) have broad implications for interpretation of the fossil record in a wide variety of types of studies. Almost no information on time-averaging is currently available for brachiopods, the predominant organism comprising Paleozoic and many later marine shell assemblages. We propose to use a combination of amino acid racemization and radiocarbon dating to document time-averaging in surficial accumulations of mixed brachiopod-mollusk shells on the southern Brazilian shelf. The resulting data will provide quantitative estimates of age structures of dated shells of brachiopods and mollusks from seven sites along a depth gradient. The study is expected to produce (1) the first quantitative estimates of time-averaging for brachiopod shell accumulations, (2) the first comparative data on time-averaging for two groups of biomineralized organisms (brachiopods vs. mollusks), and (3) the first estimates of time-averaging along an onshore-offshore bathymetric gradient. By adding taxonomic and environmental dimensions to the current knowledge of time-averaging, this study will provide a significant contribution to our understanding of the temporal resolution of the fossil record doc15202 none This symposium s primary objective is to identify research issues that transform the traditional industrial engineering environment to a new kind of industrial engineering work and services considered as e-Work. The scope of e-Work includes the collaborative computer-supported activities and communication-supported operations in highly distributed organizations of humans and or robots or autonomous software agents such as agent-based manufacturing, workflow and enterprise modeling, and middleware development. The premise is that without effective e-Work, the potential of emerging electronic work activities such as virtual manufacturing, e-supply chain, and e-commerce cannot be competitively materialized. This award provides partial support of the symposium and participants expenses during a two and one half day workshop at Purdue University on the past, present, and next frontier in the research direction of Production, Robotics, and Integration Software for Manufacturing Management (PRISM). This meeting will bring together previous and current PRISM researchers, industry practitioners who have experience in computer-oriented collaborative work, and sponsors who have implemented enhanced technologies to compare ideas, experiences, and challenges. The workshop will develop research guidance by survey review of previous and current research and through panel discussions on advanced production research for the next decade. The aim is towards solutions in seven areas: (1) engineering and design collaboration, (2) distributed models of networked enterprises, (3) assembly and inspection technology, (4) agent-based manufacturing and service systems, (5) electronic commerce and enabling technologies, (6) web-based human and computer interaction, and (7) information assurance for the above areas. The results and proceedings will benefit researchers at the Purdue PRISM Lab and at other universities by developing and sharing new advanced production research models and by providing a forum for researchers to discuss, exchange, and plan their discoveries doc15203 none The objective of this project is to functionalize water-soluble enzymes to provide hydrophobic and hydrophilic parts, which are expected to self-assemble and catalyze reactions at organic-aqueous interfaces. Current methodologies with enzymes placed in either aqueous or organic solutions suffer significant solubility and mass transfer limitations for reacting systems. The proposed interfacial configuration provides reagents in the biphasic systems the maximum access to the biocatalyst so that solubility and mass transfer limitations can be reduced. The polymeric modifying groups will alter the microenvironmental interactions around the enzyme moieties and reduce the interfacial tension, and thus affect the interfacial assembly and activation of enzymes. Fundamentals related to the interfacial assembly and reaction kinetics, particularly the effect of interfacial tension, will be explored both experimentally and theoretically. The feasibility of this interfacial biocatalysis will be examined and demonstrated for the enzymatic production of epoxides and glycosides. These enzymatic syntheses may lead to more environmentally-friendly routes for large-scale production of valuable chemicals doc15204 none Edward Goldberg, Tufts University It is proposed to build nanostructures by controlled self-assembly: they would be made of unit protein rods (approximately 50nm long rods) which would be organized in the shape of equilateral triangles, the sides of which would be made of complimentary binding pairs. Assembly of these triangles will be carried out by stages in a third dimension, with the desired order and growth. In this manner, the bottom up parallel manufacture of nanoarrays will become a practical possibility. A sequential assembly of three binding pairs is used. There are three major challenges: addressing the relevant binding pairs; positioning them in proper spacing and identifying the staging procedure for each new desired nanostructure. The complexity of these tasks, for any truly desirable assembly of nanostructures, demands a large number of steps (design and produce modular unit rods, associate one of the rods to a matrix and assemble the unit rods in a programmatic generation of triangles doc15205 none This NSF EPA Technology for a Sustainable Environment project seeks to address fundamental issues associated with replacing existing petroleum-based glass fiber - polypropylene composites with eco-friendly, sustainable, bio-composites from renewable resource-based natural bio-fibers and bio-plastics for automotive applications. The research will focus on: (1) innovative bio-fiber surface treatments and the design of engineered natural fibers; (2) synthesis of cellosic bio-plastics with acceptable mechanical properties; and (3) research into the processing methods to produce void free bio-composites sheets for stamping processes. The use of an electrical field during the processing enhances control of fiber alignment. It is expected that this will result in a break-through process for the new generation of bio-composites that is cost effective as well as environmentally friendly. University - industry collaboration is expected to add knowledge of the material and process engineering as well as to create a consciousness in designing value-added composite materials from bio-resources for the automotive and transporation industries. Knowledge gained from this research will enhance the education of students and practitioners in engineering design as well as manufacturing and production engineers concerned with environmentally benign manufacturing doc15206 none Ahmann The objective of this project is to perform combinatorial mutagenesis to improve the functioning of a Fe-hydrogenase for the production of hydrogen gas from algae in the presence of oxygen. The specific components of the research include: (1) the Fe-hydrogenase sequences of multiple organisms will be used as the basis for a PCR-mediated multi-parent shuffle to create recombinant hydrogenase sequences, (2) these sequences will be cloned into a Chlamydomonas vector, the vectors will be transformed into C. reinhardtii, and transformants for oxygen-resistant hydrogen production will be selected using a chemical selection procedure, and (3) a subset of the survivors will be selected using chemochromic and gas chromatographic hydrogen production assays. The goal of this research is an oxygen tolerant Fe-hydrogenase that may ultimately combined with other oxygen-inhibition-elimination mechanisms to facilitate commercial algal hydrogen production doc15207 none Award: Principal Investigator: David Eisenbud The Banff International Research Station (BIRS), supported by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley in collaboration with the Pacific Institute of the Mathematical Sciences in Vancouver, Canada, will provide an environment that optimizes creative interaction and the exchange of ideas, knowledge and methods within the mathematical sciences and with related sciences and industry. It is modeled on the extremely successful European mathematics centers in Oberwolfach and Luminy, and the US physics center in Aspen. It is a collaborative Canada-US venture. BIRS will pursue an extremely broad program, embracing all aspects of the mathematical sciences, from the most fundamental work on the great problems of algebra, geometry and analysis to modern pure and applied mathematics, theoretical and applied statistics, financial and industrial mathematics, the mathematics of information technology and computer science, and bio-mathematics. Conferences on math education, and Schools ranging in level from high-school to postgraduate will also be regular features. A conference center in Germany called Oberwolfach has played an enormously important role mathematics for more than half a century. Conferences there bring the greatest mathematicians from around the world to Germany, and this flow of people and ideas is often credited with aiding the quick recovery of German mathematics from the devastation it suffered during the war. It also helped by introducing generations of graduate students to the great men in their fields and to each other. The Oberwolfach model was so successful that the French eventually copied it at the center in Luminy. Senior US mathematicians are often visitors to these centers, but often graduate students and younger mathematicians from the United States and Canada are not invited, and there are many other ways in which those centers benefit Europe much more than the US. The physics center in Aspen has provided a resource for the US physics community that has provided related services, and the mathematicians who happen to have been involved have been impressed with what can be done in this mode. It has long been a dream of North American mathematicians to have a conference center of their own that would provide similar opportunities here, and the goal of the Banff International Research Station is to provide this important resource for mathematics and related fields doc15208 none Native Americans continue to be vastly under-represented in the SMET fields, especially in Information Technology disciplines, and as educators (NCES, ). This proposal seeks to address the chronic underrepresentation of American Indian graduates in SMET education in a variety of ways. The primary goals of the proposal are: a) to increase the enrollment of Native American students into SMET disciplines, b) increase the numbers of Native American graduates from SMET fields, especially in education, c) develop the SMET research infrastructure at Blackfeet Community College, and d) build up the Information Technology program at Blackfeet College as the funding force behind the first two goals. Several objectives will be implemented as these goals are realized. New SMET faculty positions will be created and funded in part through the proposal. The collaborative ties between Blackfeet Community College (BCC), and Montana State University-Northern will be strengthened. These two partners will develop a joint curriculum in Information Technology that is friendly to Native American students. The Information Technology degree program at BCC will be enhanced with new courses, new capabilities, and additional personnel. Professional development activities will be conducted for the entire BCC faculty for the purpose of integrating IT across the curriculum. Key SMET programs at BCC, such as the Ethnobotanical Greenhouse, the Weather and Water Lab, and the DNA Mapping Lab, will be targeted as IT supported research areas, and student interns will be funded to help with the research. Research internships will also be set up at MSU-Northern for American Indians who transfer into baccalaureate degree programs in SMET and IT education. A series of Summer Session BRIDGE activities for Blackfeet Reservation high school and college students will be jointly hosted by BCC and MSU-Northern at the MSU-Northern campus in Havre. This is an ambitious project that will serve as a model for others who desire to use some or all of the various activities that this proposal will encompass. The PIITA project will be a five year, $2 million dollar effort that will significantly impact the numbers of American Indian students graduating with SMET related degrees. Specifically, the project staff will assist at least 30 American Indian students to graduate with baccalaureate degrees in SMET fields of study, with an emphasis toward IT and education, during the next five years. These graduates will effectively raise the pool of American Indian IT educators in Montana by 500 percent or more. The proposal has provisions for retaining an external evaluator, and nominal support for an advisory committee. The eight member advisory committee will be recruited from educators and administrators from BCC, MSU-Northern, school disricts in the Blackfeet Reservation area, other Montana tribal colleges, and from the Blackfeet Community. The evaluator and the committee will meet quarterly with the project PI s doc15209 none Alexandridis, P SUNY Buffalo Formulating Waterborne Coatings for the Environment: Interactions in Water-Cosolvent Media between Associating Polymers, Surfactants, and Colloidal Particles Background: The coatings and paints industry commands a 50 billion-dollar market worldwide. Over 1 billion gallons of coatings and paints are sold in the U. S. every year. Because of increased environmental awareness and under regulatory pressure for the reduction of volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions (e.g., Pollution Prevention Act of ), over half of the coatings and paints are now waterborne, and the trend for increasing the fraction of waterborne formulations continues. But even waterborne coatings and paints are not VOC-free, as they contain cosolvents, which may comprise up to 30% of the total liquid present. Furthermore, a number of these cosolvents are classified as hazardous air pollutants (HAP). Motivation: There is a need for both an overall reduction of VOC cosolvents and a replacement of HAP cosolvent by non-HAP ones. This need challenges the waterborne coating and paint formulations, but the drive for reformulation is confounded by the dearth of reports in the open literature regarding the effects of cosolvents on the aqueous solution behavior of associating polymers and surfactants. These amphiphiles are essential in stabilizing the resin and pigment colloidal constituents of coatings and paints and in conferring unique rheological properties (e.g., very high viscosity at rest and very low viscosity during the spraying or brushing application). Research objectives: It is the goal of the principal investigator to develop fundamental knowledge to support and guide the optimal formulation of waterborne coatings and paints. The specific objectives are the following: Objective 1 is to establish benchmarks by examining the phase behavior, structure, and dynamics of aqueous solutions consisting of associating polymers and surfactants representative of those used in coatings and paints. Objective 2 is to explore and quantify the effects of various cosolvents (e.g., different types of glycol ethers and other polar solvents) on the phase behavior, structure and dynamics of aqueous solutions consisting of associating polymers and surfactants. No such information is currently available in the open literature. Cosolvents can have a profound effect on the solution behavior and interactions of amphiphiles, and also modify the overall and local viscosity of the system. Objective 3 is to study the colloidal stability, structure, and rheology of colloidal suspensions of resins or pigments in aqueous-cosolvent media that contain associating polymers and surfactants. Such suspensions are very similar to the ones used in coatings and paints. Of explicit consideration here is the fact that the cosolvents can interact specifically (e.g., partition or swell) with the resins. Another very important issue to consider is the change in the overall and the local composition (and corresponding interactions) of the particle-polymer-surfactant-cosolvent mixture as the water and cosolvents evaporate following the application of the coating paint. Potential Impact: The proposed research directly enables (i) the reduction of VOC cosolvents that are used in waterborne coatings and paints and the switch to cosolvents that are not HAPs, (ii) the optimal formulation of waterborne coatings and paints which would result in overall reduction of coating material (and associated energy costs) needed; (iii) at the same time the proposed work assists (by providing fundamental information) the ongoing efforts of replacing organic solvent-borne coatings and paints with environmentally friendlier waterborne formulations doc15210 none Dunn This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Robert Dunn of Hendrix College and Professor Geoffrey Stedman of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. The project will enable an international effort to use the extreme sensitivity and wide dynamic range of large ring lasers as geophysical research tools. Specifically, proposed work includes upgrades to the ring laser facility in New Zealand, and subsequent measurements of such phenomena as earth tides, the rotational components of seismic waves, and length of day variations. The collaboration brings together the efforts of international laboratories that have complementary expertise and research facilities. The project will enhance the international research competence of the several undergraduate students from Hendrix College who will participate in the research in New Zealand doc15211 none The proposal plans to connect Marist to NYSERNet and then to the vBNS+ Network for the purpose of enabling the following research: Remote Microscopic Visualization in Support of Polar Microbial Research; Advanced Brain Imaging; Functional Imaging Archive; MRI Vertebrate Development Analysis; Addictions Research; Computational Study of Chemical Bonding Across the Entire Periodic Table; Finite and Infinite Group Theory; Pedagogical Research in Mathematics and Writing doc15212 none Scalettar This two-year award supports U.S.-France collaboration in materials research between Richard T. Scalettar, University of California, Davis, and George Batrouni of the University of Nice. The project addresses the problem of interacting, disordered electron systems. The objective is to determine quantum phase transitions in disordered superfluids and superconductors using Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods. The investigators will conduct numerical simulations of the Boson-Hubbard model for superfluids and of supersolid formation in the Fermion-Hubbard model. The US investigator brings to the collaboration expertise in fermion determinant QMC methods. This is complemented by French expertise in dual algorithm bosonic QMC. Disordered electron systems exhibit remarkable properties including universal conductivity, two-dimensional metal-insulator and superconductor insulator phase transition, zero temperature liquid behavior and novel glassy phases. These systems represent fundamental problems in solid state physics and have important technological applications. This award represents the US side of parallel proposals to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses of the US investigator and student. The CNRS will support the visits of the French researchers. The collaboration will advance fundamental understanding of disordered electron systems in solid state physics and provides an international research training opportunity for a US student doc15194 none The Western Arctic is profoundly influenced by the northward flux of nutrient and organic-rich, low salinity Pacific Ocean water that enters the basin through the Bering Strait and across the Chukchi shelf and slope. This flow, a key component of the global ocean circulation, transports freshwater from the Pacific to the Atlantic via the Arctic Ocean while also sustaining some of the most productive ecosystems in the world, the Bering and Chukchi Seas. Net transport, sea ice cover and sea surface temperatures are well known to vary greatly over seasonal and interannual time scales, but the experimental, observational, and modeling bases to evaluate the response of Arctic ecosystems to these changes, and to global change in general, are largely lacking. This interdisciplinary project will provide the observational and theoretical framework to evaluate carbon fluxes in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas in response to variable environmental forcing. A main goal of this project is to determine the impact of decadal-scale environmental regime shifts in the northern high latitudes on carbon cycling in the western Arctic Ocean. Carbon import from the Bering Sea, local production and transformation, and export from the Chukchi and Beaufort shelves to the basin will be examined. This project will focus on understanding the influence of physical and biological processes on fluxes of carbon and other key elements (e.g. N, O, Si) in the water column and benthos of the shelves and slope, and subsequent exchange with the basin. This project has been integrated with other research programs and related resources in the SBI program. The ultimate goal of this study is to obtain a more complete understanding of shelf-basin exchange processes and biogeochemical cycles, and to establish benchmarks useful for assessing future global change of this sentinel ecosystem doc15214 none The proposal plans to connect SUNY-A to vBNS and Abilene via the NYSERNet Network for the following research and educational purposes: electronic government funded by the NSF PACI program; northeast regional climate modeling; interactive real-time regional air quality forecast and management system; real-time transmission of meteorological data; mesocale model and global analysis; network-based visualization of large-scale databases doc15215 none Biological Sciences (61) The recent sequencing of the human genome and continuing efforts to sequence and analyze genetic sequences of many species demonstrate the need for effective pedagogies in genomic studies. This project acquires the equipment and develops the materials necessary to engage undergraduate students in a novel genome project adapting and implementing materials from James Madison University. A DNA sequencer and sequence analysis software are being used to initiate the Lynx Genome Project as a unit in the Molecular Biology Laboratory course. Students are sequencing cDNA clones from lynx species (the Rhodes College mascot) and using the resulting data in evolutionary and functional prediction analyses. Results are expected to lead to insights in efforts to conserve these threatened species. High school students and teachers, a significant number of whom are members of groups under-represented in the sciences, are participating through a Summer Scholars Program doc15216 none This project contributes to Western Arctic Shelf-Basin Interactions (SBI) by focussing on a) biogeochemical modifications of Pacific water over the Beaufort and Chukchi shelf and slope regions, with emphasis on carbon and nitrogen; and b) comparative analysis of the findings over the broad Chukchi shelf and narrow Beaufort shelf and adjacent slopes to facilitate integration of the Western Arctic into a Pan-Arctic perspective. The project will evaluate the processes of carbon and nitrogen transport, exchanges and transformations in the regions of interest. Specific objectives are: a) determination of mass transport and fate of carbon and nitrogen associated with the volume transports calculated by SBI collaborators; b) interpretation of carbon and nitrogen spatial distributions and temporal variability relative to biological and physical conditions; c) evaluation of partitioning of organic matter between dissolved and particulate phases; d) determination of net community production and it s fate; e) determination of C:N stoichiometry as a complement to biological studies, particularly in relation to community structure and seasonal progression of intense phytoplankton blooms in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas; and f) evaluation of the contribution of dissolved and particulate organic material to apparent oxygen utilization development in the Arctic halocline and export from the shelf doc15217 none Approximately 20% of the relative motion between the North American and Pacific plates is accommodated along a system of active right-lateral strike-slip faults which runs from southern California through western Nevada and into southern Oregon. This zone is known as the Eastern California Shear Zone and Walker Lane. The remaining 80% of relative offset occurs along the San Andreas fault. The northern portion of the Walker Lane, near Reno, Nevada, is especially poorly studied but is believed to be the youngest portion of the zone and, thus, may well be the best region within which to study the beginning stages of an intra-continental transform. This study will attempt to determine primarily the timing and amount of right-lateral offset across the fault zone by applying a variety of geologic and geochronologic techniques. The results will have significance for understanding the evolution of plate boundaries but will also be of considerable significance in evaluating the seismic risk for the Reno area doc15218 none The largely landlocked Arctic Ocean receives input from the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean and from rivers draining the surrounding continents. These inflows are important sources of salt, heat, nutrients, sediment and organisms for the central basin. With the exception of a portion of the Atlantic Ocean contribution, these inputs must cross continental shelves where they are modified significantly by benthic, water column, and air-ice-ocean interactions. As a consequence of the cross-shelf transports, there are significant biogeochemical exchanges between the shelves and the central basin. However, we currently lack the information to quantify these exchanges. In order to address this lack, this project proposes as part of the western Arctic Shelf-Basin Interaction (SBI) Phase II program to apply an isotopic water mass tracer technique to assess the pathways and rates of exchange between the western Arctic shelves and the interior Arctic Ocean basin. The proposed technique uses the measured concentrations in the water column of the two naturally occurring radioisotopes 228Ra and 226Ra. Because 228Ra, which has a half life of 5.77 years, is derived solely from shelf sediments, it provides unambiguous evidence of the presence of shelf water. Its relative concentration in shelf and basin waters can therefore provide quantitative information on shelf-basin water transports. This technique is mature and has been used in shelf-basin exchange investigations in other regions. Results of a pilot research project carried out during the SBI Phase I program have demonstrated utility of this tracer technique in the western Arctic Ocean. For the proposed research, tracer data collected from vessels along transects through the study region will be analyzed within the context of nearshore and offshore field and modeling studies that focus on understanding cross-shelf transport. An emphasis will be placed on the role of mesoscale eddies in this transport. Where appropriate, the shorter-lived 224Ra with its 3.64-day half life will be measured at sea to supplement the dataset. Radium tracer data will also be collected whenever possible from other platforms such as moored arrays provided by other SBI investigators doc15219 none The information revolution has led organizations worldwide to rely heavily on numerous databases to conduct their daily business. Because databases usually exist in broad, highly dynamic network-based environments, formally accessing the resources in a secure manner poses a difficult challenge. Specially, the healthcare industry has recently tried to transit from their old and disparate business models based on ink and paper to a new and consolidated ones based on digitalized information since last a few years for their customers and stakeholders needs. In addition, the proposed rules of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), circulated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) through the Health Care Financial Administration (HCFA) strongly require the services of security and privacy. Along with this movement, a secure solution for the complex environment like healthcare industry has been highly demanded. Recently, the President s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) has issued a report about how security can be deployed to modernize the nation s healthcare systems. Nobody has taken a leadership role and demanded investment in information technology. Without active leadership it will be difficult, if not possible, to get the highly decentralized healthcare industry to come up with a standard secure information system. This motivates us to propose a scalable application that can serve as a security tool to the complex environment like healthcare industry. The problem we seek to address in this research is to provide authentication of individual identity in the context of accessing critical information including secure transmission of data across the Internet. These problems have technical solutions that are well known, but the solutions in general are strongly biased toward a single individual interacting with a single application. When an individual needs to access more than one application, or even the same application at a different location or institution, he or she needs another set of electronic keys. In a collaborative and research environment, individuals must collect and maintain a key set of electronic access mechanisms that quickly becomes cumbersome and difficult to manage. For this reason, we focus on token-based solution. In this research, we propose scalable token-based authentication architectures & mechanisms and demonstrate how we can implement them using commercial-off-the-self technologies. Our approach focuses on vendor-neutral specifications including the feasibility of the construction of password, certificate and signature-based authentication mechanisms doc15220 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a prototype of an integrated set of software tools for computer aided optimal design. This tool box will require interfacing with large scale proprietary codes for the simulation of physical phenomena. The industry problems to which will be addressed are such that conventional optimization techniques are not applicable. Intelligent search methods and parallel computing in distributed networks will be the basic tools to be considered. and the applicability of a recently developed system for asynchronous parallel pattern search. The system, that exist today, needs to be extended so that nonlinear constraints can be introduced and larger dimensional problems can be solved. Initial focus will be on optimal structural design, piezoelectric transducer design and the design of optoelectronic devices doc15221 none A century of research has focused on understanding the complete abandonment of the Mesa Verde region of the American Southwest by A.D. . Enormous efforts have been devoted to reconstructing the prevailing environmental conditions and to understanding where the Mesa Verde people went. However, a full understanding of this dramatic abandonment requires knowledge of the relationships among villages prior to and during the depopulation of this region. Existing data are inadequate to assess these interactions. For this critical period (A.D. - ), this project investigates social interaction among villages using evidence for economic cooperation, indicated by the exchange of pottery among villages and the locations of communal and defensive buildings signifying cooperation and conflict. The combination of ceramic exchange data and the distribution of communal and defensive architecture provides a powerful means for understanding the social processes at work during this otherwise well-documented abandonment. NSF funding will permit the chemical composition analysis of an additional 490 ceramic and clay samples from nine sites using Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis. With these samples, it will be possible to reconstruct patterns of ceramic production and exchange using a regional database comprising 1,041 ceramic and 60 clay samples from 18 sites. The grant would also fund the compilation of a regional database documenting the geographic distribution of communal and defensive architecture necessary for the assessment of the degree of cooperation and conflict among villages. Both of these databases will provide critical data that will be made accessible for and can be expanded by future research to further test anthropological arguments about social dynamics. This study, conducted by Ms. Donna Glowacki under the supervision of Dr. Keith Kintigh, will contribute to understanding the effects of stress, such as drought and violence, on social relationships prior to and during periods of large-scale emigration doc15222 none The goal of this project is to investigate the retrieval and reuse of information in organizations. Research has shown that many organizations waste valuable information because these processes are complicated and difficult. Detailed systematic insights are necessary to understand how organizations can more effectively reuse information and engage in productive knowledge management practices. Based on their previous work, the PIs will examine key theoretical issues through micro-level distributed cognition analyses in two technical support organizations to better understand these processes and organizational practices. Such a project is necessary to move beyond the hype often associated with the discourse about knowledge management in the scholarly and management literatures doc15223 none The proposal plans to connect CSU to OARNet and then to the Abilene Network to support research requiring a high performance connection in the following areas: Computational chemistry (supercomputer requirements) Enzyme research (supercomputer requirements) Health Sciences and Curriculum & Foundations Departments(distance education doc15187 none A central goal of the Shelf-Basin Interactions (SBI) program is to understand the processes affecting carbon transformations and fluxes within and between Arctic shelf and basin ecosystems, and how climate change might impact these processes. The cycling of carbon in Arctic shelf and basin habitats depends on the structure and functioning of both micro- and meso- zooplankton acting as significant consumers of primary production. The partitioning of primary production between the fractions remaining in the water column or accumulating to the seafloor (where organic matter is less available for export from the shelf) can be greatly affected by the relative grazing rates of microzooplankton versus mesozooplankton herbivores. Microplankton grazing dampens export flux, while mesozooplankton grazing enhances it. The primary focus of this project is an analysis of the impact of microzooplankton and mesozooplankton grazers on the fluxes and exchanges of carbon within the oceanic waters of the Canada Basin and the shelf waters of the Chukchi Beaufort Seas. This study will explicitly address trophic linkages previously unexplored in this region of the Arctic. The hypothesize is that changing ecosystem structure resulting from climate change will alter the role of these trophic interactions in the utilization and cycling of carbon in arctic shelves and basin systems. This project will provide rate measurements for microzooplankton and mesozooplankton grazing and reproduction, parameters that are a high priority for the seasonal process cruises in the SBI project doc15200 none Transfer of organic material and organisms from Arctic shelves to the deep Arctic basin may impact significantly the biogeochemical characteristics, and ecosystem function and structure, of both Arctic basin and the Arctic shelf ecosystems. However, the physical and biological processes influencing both the distribution of organisms and biological material on the Arctic shelves and the potential input of these materials into the Arctic Ocean and basin presently are poorly understood. It is critical to increase understanding of the biological-physical coupling in the shelf-slope region in order to better predict the potential impact of large-scale changes in climate on the Arctic ecosystem. The project will describe the role of mesoscale physical processes in the exchange or transport of biogenic material and plankton populations between the Chukchi Shelf and neighboring Beaufort Sea as part of the Shelf Basin Interactions Phase II field program (SBI). The proposed research has two distinct yet interrelated components: 1) description of the abundance, taxonomic and size composition of plankton and particles and aspects of behavior of plankton in physical features at two locations along the Beaufort Chukchi shelf break during two July-August process cruises ( and ) using a Video Plankton Recorder, 2) a description of the abundance of zooplankton on the outer shelf and upper slope and the mesoscale physical features that exchange water and biogenic materials between the two regions over two annual cycles using the absolute backscatter intensity data from an array of fourteen moored calibrated acoustic Doppler current profilers doc15226 none The goal of this project is to continue research aimed at improving and expanding the technology of immunomagnetic cell separation. This technique can be used to separate stem cells, cancer cells and fetal cells from other components of whole blood as well as pathogens from food. The specific goals of this research are to: (1) measure the degree to which cells are immunomagnetically labeled using Cell Tracking Velocimetry, (2) explore the fundamental relationships and parameters that govern magnetophoretic mobility, and (3) continue experimental studies on a variety of cell and immunomagnetic labeling systems doc15216 none This project contributes to Western Arctic Shelf-Basin Interactions (SBI) by focussing on a) biogeochemical modifications of Pacific water over the Beaufort and Chukchi shelf and slope regions, with emphasis on carbon and nitrogen; and b) comparative analysis of the findings over the broad Chukchi shelf and narrow Beaufort shelf and adjacent slopes to facilitate integration of the Western Arctic into a Pan-Arctic perspective. The project will evaluate the processes of carbon and nitrogen transport, exchanges and transformations in the regions of interest. Specific objectives are: a) determination of mass transport and fate of carbon and nitrogen associated with the volume transports calculated by SBI collaborators; b) interpretation of carbon and nitrogen spatial distributions and temporal variability relative to biological and physical conditions; c) evaluation of partitioning of organic matter between dissolved and particulate phases; d) determination of net community production and it s fate; e) determination of C:N stoichiometry as a complement to biological studies, particularly in relation to community structure and seasonal progression of intense phytoplankton blooms in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas; and f) evaluation of the contribution of dissolved and particulate organic material to apparent oxygen utilization development in the Arctic halocline and export from the shelf doc15228 none The adaptation of natural communities to changing environments is of growing practical concern. Rising sea levels and increased salinity are impacting coastal ecosystems, interactions between plants and animals, and community structure. We will investigate how Iris hexagona, a native freshwater species, responds to rising salinity, spatial isolation, and flower consumption by deer. Previous results indicate that salinity stress reduces biomass, but increases seed production. In contrast, large-scale flower consumption by deer eliminates seed production and stimulates vegetative growth. This interdisciplinary project combines field experiments, phytochemistry, molecular genetics, and predictive modeling. Field experiments will examine how interactions between salinity and deer influence growth, sexual and clonal reproduction, and belowground dynamics of I. hexagona populations. Phytochemical analyses will investigate physiological responses to salinity stress, including phytohormone, nutrients and minerals, proteins, and volatile floral compounds. Genetic analyses will reveal variation within and between freshwater and saltmarsh I. hexagona populations. Quantitative modeling will integrate our findings to predict plant population growth and the evolution of salinity-tolerance. This project can help advance our understanding of how coastal ecosystems and their natural communities respond to global climate change doc15229 none Under their previous grant, the PIs have shown that diabatic heat anomalies at the surface due to snow have large and extensive impacts on atmospheric dynamics, especially in mid- to high-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere (NH). Work under this award will examine the role of snow cover in forcing or triggering the dominant mode of variability of NH winter climate. Two parallel paths of research will be followed: (i) to focus on the relationship between Eurasian snow cover and winter climate through observational analysis; and (ii) to study cause and effect mechanisms using general circulation modeling. The work is important because it will enhance understanding of NH winter climate variability, and consequently, the potential of improved seasonal forecasting. This has great societal benefits doc15230 none The proposal plans to connect ESU to the Abilene Network via KANREN and the Great Plains Network for the purposes of low temperature astrophysics research, geospatial analysis, and archeology at a brand new site just donated to ESU doc15231 none Hipparions are an extinct group of three-toed horses that flourished widely in the Old world shortly after their first occurrence there in the late Miocene, at about 11 Ma. Once established, hipparions evolved into a multitude of lineages with chronologic ranges extending to the middle Pleistocene in China and the late Pleistocene of Africa. The paleobiology of these horses within this great temporal (ca 10 m.y.) and geographic span has not been addressed systematically heretofore. PIs believe that hipparions actually originated within the North American genus Cormohipparion, but the actual species involved has not been demonstrated. Their proposed research will break new ground in 1. describing a complex pattern of speciation within Cormohipparion; 2. better resolving the Old World hipparion immigration and subsequent evolutionary radiation; and 3. unraveling the origin, evolutionary radiation, multiple geographic extensions and adaptation of species belonging to a distinctive Old World late Miocene Pleistocene radiation known as the Sivalhippus Complex. Once having described and documented the pattern of dispersal and diversification of hipparions in the Old World PIs will be able to investigate the paleobiology of these horses to gain further insights on the dietary and locomotory adaptations by which they achieved their predominance in this evolutionary theater for so long an interval of time doc15232 none This grant provides support for the core activities of the Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences at the National Academy of Sciences. The Board responds to public policy needs that coincide with scientific developments in the behavioral, cognitive, and sensory sciences. This Board will focus on improving policy decisions by drawing together the collective expertise of diverse fields of developmental psychology, social processes, perceptual and sensory sciences, biopsychology and biotechnology, neuroscience and computational sciences. A Board strengthens communications, broadens the databases, and makes scientific information more accessible to wider audiences. Board activities simultaneously improve research by probing issues from diverse perspectives. Because distinguished scientists volunteer their services as members of NAS-NRC Boards, such Boards become a mechanism for cross-fertilizing disparate research domains to inform public policy. A Board directly benefits science in a number of ways. Scientific disciplines, typically driven by the issues and methods of their respective fields, have yielded increasing productivity when jointly considering problems from an interdisciplinary approach. However, the mission-orientation of most government agencies has mitigated against mutually shared scientific planning. Thus, the benefits of such a Board include: (1) providing linkages across federal agencies and the separate behavioral, social, cognitive, sensory, and technology research communities; (2) involving nationally-prominent academic scientists in improvements and developments in the behavioral, cognitive, and sensory sciences; (3) providing a forum for information exchange relating to science and public policy; and (4) advancing behavioral, cognitive, and sensory sciences within the NAS-NRC and through the Board s activities with Congress and the diverse program offices and research programs across the federal complex doc15194 none The Western Arctic is profoundly influenced by the northward flux of nutrient and organic-rich, low salinity Pacific Ocean water that enters the basin through the Bering Strait and across the Chukchi shelf and slope. This flow, a key component of the global ocean circulation, transports freshwater from the Pacific to the Atlantic via the Arctic Ocean while also sustaining some of the most productive ecosystems in the world, the Bering and Chukchi Seas. Net transport, sea ice cover and sea surface temperatures are well known to vary greatly over seasonal and interannual time scales, but the experimental, observational, and modeling bases to evaluate the response of Arctic ecosystems to these changes, and to global change in general, are largely lacking. This interdisciplinary project will provide the observational and theoretical framework to evaluate carbon fluxes in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas in response to variable environmental forcing. A main goal of this project is to determine the impact of decadal-scale environmental regime shifts in the northern high latitudes on carbon cycling in the western Arctic Ocean. Carbon import from the Bering Sea, local production and transformation, and export from the Chukchi and Beaufort shelves to the basin will be examined. This project will focus on understanding the influence of physical and biological processes on fluxes of carbon and other key elements (e.g. N, O, Si) in the water column and benthos of the shelves and slope, and subsequent exchange with the basin. This project has been integrated with other research programs and related resources in the SBI program. The ultimate goal of this study is to obtain a more complete understanding of shelf-basin exchange processes and biogeochemical cycles, and to establish benchmarks useful for assessing future global change of this sentinel ecosystem doc15234 none Breckenridge This three-year award for US-France collaboration in experimental physical chemistry involves researchers and students at the University of Utah and the Center for Atomic Energy (CEN) in Saclay, France. The principal investigators, William H. Breckenridge in the US, and Benoit Soep and Jean-Michel Mestdagh in France, lead this collaboration. They will study reactions of excited atoms and metal oxides produced at the surface in order to activate C-H (carbon-hydrogen) bonds. Activation of C-H bonds is important in a wide variety of technological processes such as hydrocarbon cracking, synthesis of chemicals from natural gas, hydrogenation, and organic synthesis. Many of these processes are either extremely complex chemically or occur under conditions which make it difficult to characterize and identify the processes responsible for bond breaking. The collaboration and comparison of experimental results will elucidate the bond-breaking process and understanding of how C-H activation occurs in these technological systems. Experiments will be performed at the University of Utah and in Saclay, France. The French group will conduct photosensitized C-H bond activation surface model experiments. These are complemented by metal oxide methane experiments at the University of Utah. The collaboration and comparison of experimental results will elucidate the bond-breaking process and advance understanding of how C-H activation occurs in these technological systems. Graduate students will benefit through advanced training and participation in the collaborative experiments performed by an international team. This award represents the US side of parallel proposals to the NSF and the CNRS. NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator and his students. The CNRS will support visits by French researchers and students to the United States doc15235 none Descour The aim of this project is the demonstration of an array of miniaturized microscope objectives. The area of immediate application is telepathology, a subspecialty of telemedicine that permits an expert pathologist at one location to provide diagnostic services to remote locations using digital video microscopy and modern telecommunications links. The goal of this SGER project is to explore the essential technical challenges associated with construction of an 80-microscope array In this project a sub-array of four, NA = 0.4 microscopes will be fabricated that will demonstrate a substantial imaging capability, i.e., imaging a 1-mm wide swath along the length of the slide. Image data will be recorded with 1-micron spatial resolution. The long-term goal of the research is to construct an NA = 0.7, 80-microscope array capable of 0.5-micron resolution over a 20-mm wide field of view. This SGER project will establish the technology foundations on which the NA = 0.7 microscope-array design will be based doc15236 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will apply agile manufacturing, and lean production concepts in studying the real time workflow patterns at plant level in a manufacturing-related company. The results will be used to develop a new generation ERP (enterprise resource planning) software system. This project will develop a web-based modularized software for upper middle levels and as well as shop-floor-level production planning, execution, monitoring, and evaluation using agile manufacturing and lean production principles. The commercial application will be directed toward the U.S. Manufacturing industry. This new ERP system will provide rapid and quality responses to plant-level production needs of manufacturers doc15237 none This is a seismological study of shear-wave splitting in the source volume of the large Mw 7.6 Chi-Chi, Taiwan, earthquake of . The study also investigates the guided fault zone waves, and non-linear wave propagation effects in damaged fault zone rock, using one of the best data sets in the world in a region of high natural seismicity. A comprehensive measurement is carried out on the stress-induced crustal anisotropy, augmented by other possible signatures of damaged fault zone material, and the project also evaluates the relationship of observations with (therefore predictive potential of) the occurrence of great earthquakes. The extensive data set is used that has been collected by the Taiwan Central Weather Bureau Seismic Network (CWBSN) from to . Rigorous tests are conducted on the correlation of shear-wave splitting and on other signals with regional crustal stress variations and lapse time before and after the Mw 7.6 event. This data set extends back to , providing a 30-year seismic database for monitoring the bulk crustal properties before, during, and after the Chi-Chi earthquake sequence. The CWBSN operates a network of more than 650-station (at 5-km station spacing) of 3-component, large dynamic range, and broadband accelerographs and a network of 75-station 3-component high-gain short-period seismometers. Thousands of M 3 events from the middle-lower crust have been beautifully recorded with excellent S N ratios. For most M 3 earthquake in the data set, found that there are a number of recording stations directly above the source with epicentral distance less than 20 km. The software for this project performs particle polarization analysis and at the same time extracts the shear-wave spiltting delay times through an automated maximization of the cross-correlation function of the two matched horizontal component signals. This allows accurate measurements to be made for testing the idea of shear-wave splitting as a potential indicator for a large earthquake in the future. This research project has the potential of being more comprehensive and definitive than any shear-wave splitting work that has so far been done to date doc15238 none This project will analyze ice nucleating particles in real-time for chemical composition using single-particle mass spectrometry. A continuous flow ice thermal gradient diffusion chamber (CFDC) will be coupled to the NOAA PALMS (Particle Analysis by Laser Mass Spectrometry) instrument and deployed in the field. This research will provide an assessment of the role of various aerosol types as ice nuclei for cirrus cloud formation, and the role of certain constituents as promoters or inhibitors of ice formation. The results of this project are likely to have broad societal impacts by providing new insights into the mechanisms for cloud formation, a topic critical for better understanding climate change doc15239 none The proposal plans to connect HWI to vBNS and Abilene via the University at Buffalo. Scientists at HWI are engaged in protein research and will use this connection for real-time access and control of diffraction experiments conducted at synchrotron sites around the country in order to conduct protein analyses, for data-mining and data-warehousing doc15240 none This project focuses on synchrotron generated x-ray scattering using the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Advanced Photon Light Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory to study the structural properties of thin liquid layers and related novel liquid surfaces. The structure and fluctuations of a thin liquid wetting layer that forms on various substrates will be characterized by x-ray specular reflectivity, off specular diffuse scattering and grazing incidence diffraction. A unique feature is that some of the wetting will involve the wetting of one liquid by a separate immiscible liquid. Solvation of selected nano-particles in these thin layers, accompanied by control of the thickness of the liquid, will make it possible to the study how 2-dimensional (2D) mesoscopic arrays form on deposition from solution. In addition, the interactions between thin wetting liquids and nano-scale structures on Si surfaces, and the manner in which alkane chains tethered to nano-particles order as the density of the nano-particles change will be investigated. A second benefit expected from this project, in addition to the expected scientific knowledge, is that new young researchers will be trained to carry out cutting edge research using these precious national synchrotron facilities. In addition, researchers participating in this grant will participate in the ongoing educational outreach activities at Harvard (see http: www.mrsec.harvard.edu education.html) for example, the Research Experiences for Teachers program (RET) that makes it possible for teachers from local-area K-12 schools to participate in research. Understanding the structure and related physical properties of liquid surfaces and thin liquid films are important for a variety of processes that include lubrication, adhesion, catalysis, painting, and coatings. In addition, the experimental and theoretical study of wetting phenomena is contributing significantly to the current understanding of fundamental problems in statistical physics. For example, studying the wetting of substrates with nano-scale inhomogeneities is important for developing a technologically promising microprinting method for the production of nano-scale structures doc15241 none Barros-Neto This U.S.-Brazil Program award will provide support for cooperative research between Dr. Jose Barros-Neto of Rutgers University and Dr. Fernando Cardoso at the Universidade Federal do Recife in Brazil. The researchers intend to study fundamental solutions to a class of partial differential equations that have been the subject of extensive studies and generalizations for their usefulness as a mathematical model in gas dynamics and flows. More specifically, this project involves the study of fundamental solutions of the Tricomi equation, which is the classical prototype of a partial differential operator of mixed type, and its generalizations at certain spatial points. Building on the important role that certain hypergeometric functions play in the finding of fundamental solutions to the Tricomi operator, the researchers aim to develop new analytic facts about differential operators of mixed type and push forward standard Euclidean analysis to higher dimensional manifolds with more complicated symmetry structure doc15194 none The Western Arctic is profoundly influenced by the northward flux of nutrient and organic-rich, low salinity Pacific Ocean water that enters the basin through the Bering Strait and across the Chukchi shelf and slope. This flow, a key component of the global ocean circulation, transports freshwater from the Pacific to the Atlantic via the Arctic Ocean while also sustaining some of the most productive ecosystems in the world, the Bering and Chukchi Seas. Net transport, sea ice cover and sea surface temperatures are well known to vary greatly over seasonal and interannual time scales, but the experimental, observational, and modeling bases to evaluate the response of Arctic ecosystems to these changes, and to global change in general, are largely lacking. This interdisciplinary project will provide the observational and theoretical framework to evaluate carbon fluxes in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas in response to variable environmental forcing. A main goal of this project is to determine the impact of decadal-scale environmental regime shifts in the northern high latitudes on carbon cycling in the western Arctic Ocean. Carbon import from the Bering Sea, local production and transformation, and export from the Chukchi and Beaufort shelves to the basin will be examined. This project will focus on understanding the influence of physical and biological processes on fluxes of carbon and other key elements (e.g. N, O, Si) in the water column and benthos of the shelves and slope, and subsequent exchange with the basin. This project has been integrated with other research programs and related resources in the SBI program. The ultimate goal of this study is to obtain a more complete understanding of shelf-basin exchange processes and biogeochemical cycles, and to establish benchmarks useful for assessing future global change of this sentinel ecosystem doc15243 none The proposal plans to connect SMAST (School for Marine Science and Technology) directly to the Northern Crossroads GigaPoP in Boston and then to the Abilene Network in support of the following research and education activities Become a major supplier and clearinghouse for distributed data and information related to its programs in ocean environmental observation modeling and fisheries oceanography and management research. C Collaborate more effectively with its Harvard University colleagues on the development of data assimilation modeling system. Become more actively engaged in the real-time exchange of large observational and model data that accompanies our joint development of an Advanced Fisheries Management Information System (AFMIS). Collaborate more effectively with colleagues in (1) large eddy simulation modeling of coastal winter-mixed layer evolution and (2) direct numerical simulation of ocean physical-biological systems on a remote supercomputer. Collaborate more effectively in its GLOBEC Georges Bank studies on the relation of satellite-derived temperature fields and biology. The establishment of an ACCESS GRID node would establish reliable support for distributed (remote) research and education collaborations. Provide IGS SMAST researchers and students with high-speed access to the virtual libraries that are being built to augment traditional libraries. Begin employing advanced visualization technology to analyze and synthesize results doc15244 none Salters This project will focus on Hf-isotope studies of ocean island basalts (OIB) and meteorites with the goal of characterizing the mantle and understanding how heterogeneities (metasomatic component, subducted components etc.) are mixed back into the ambient mantle. The terrestrial variation in Hf and Nd isotopes indicates that the Lu-Hf and Sm-Nd system are well correlated and regression of the array leads to eHf = 1.35 ?eNd + 3 eHf. I propose to test this excellent correlation between Nd and Hf isotopic compositions by analyzing materials from extreme isotopic or trace element environments. The Hf and Nd isotope systematics will provide interesting and powerful information in places where the Nd and Hf systems are differently correlated. Lu-Hf-Sm-Nd characteristics of pelagic sediments, oceanic crust as well as carbonatites imply evolution lines that have a different slope than the terrestrial or ocean basalt array. These distinctive trace element and Hf-Nd isotopic characteristics allows for relatively easy recognition of these components in oceanic basalts as well as good estimates on the duration of isolation of these components (mantle heterogeneity). The fact that the oceanic island basalt array is so well defined indicates that processes or components that would move mantle compositions off the array are either insignificant in volume or are mixed back in on relatively short timescales. A first step towards understanding these mixing processes is recognition of the different type of materials (pelagic sediment, oceanic crust etc) and processes (melting, metasomatism etc) in the sources of the basalts. I propose to obtain Hf-isotope data for basalts from the Samoan Island chain, from Koolau volcano, Hawaii, and from Walvis Ridge. A second component of the project is the determination whether Lu Hf-Sm Nd fractionation in chondrites is significantly different then the time integrated fractionations in earth as observed by the terrestrial array. Presently there are three different estimates for the isotopic composition of bulk Earth in Hf-Nd-isotope space. The available data indicate that Hf and Nd isotopic compositions of meteorites are correlated and that the meteorite array is at sharp angle with the OIB array. I propose to analyze a suite of meteorites for Hf and Nd isotopic composition and thereby better define the meteorite array doc15245 none Manga Heat and mass transfer across thermal and chemical boundary layers at the top and bottom of the mantles of the terrestrial planets govern the chemical and geodynamic evolution these planets. The dynamics of the top, lithospheric boundary layers of terrestrial planets are dominated by multi-mode (brittle ductile) rheological behavior, e.g., plate tectonics on Earth and immobile lithosphere on Mars, which are at least readily observed if not completely understood . Although deep mantle dynamics are less accessible to observation, there are still seismological, mineral physics and geochemical data that provide constraints on mantle dynamics. Near the core-mantle boundary, flow probably involves both a thermal and chemical boundary layer. Laboratory experiments can play an important role in treating problems involving vigorous multi-component convection in which dynamical interactions across continuous viscosity and density interfaces determine the flow. The investigators will carry out a series of laboratory experiments aimed at achieving a better understanding of the dynamics of mantle flow at the Earth s core-mantle boundary. Over the course of the proposed work they will forge a better fundamental understanding of thermochemical boundary layers in all aspects of mantle convection. The investigation will focus on two classes of experiments: (1) Basic studies of thermochemical convection to elucidate the coupling of heat transfer and flow across chemical boundary layers, quantify entrainment rates across viscosity interfaces, and better understand the dynamics controlling the formation of thermo-chemical plumes. (2) Focussed studies of plume plate interactions using controlled large-scale flow as a proxy for the effects of plate motions. The investigators also plan to complement their laboratory experiments with theoretical and 3-D numerical modeling studies. For the latter, the laboratory experiments will form valuable benchmarks doc15246 none The proposal uniquely plans to connect IIT to Argonne National Laboratory and then vBNS and Abilene, as part of an I-wire initiative. This network will enhance fluid dynamics research by making instrumentation in the IIT Fluid Dynamics Center available to other researchers via the national network; biological simulation research which are too large to run on the local IIT computer cluster; and research on improved methods of data-transfer among computational grids doc15247 none Research Mentoring for Junior Faculty in Human Sciences Richard Fabes The need to develop competitive grantsmanship skills is particularly evident among junior faculty. Senior faculty from Arizona State University and Auburn University propose to bring together outstanding junior faculty from departments of Human Sciences to interact with, and learn from, senior faculty who have been successful in obtaining research funding. The objective of the workshop is to establish a mechanism whereby senior faculty provide guidance and mentoring to these junior faculty in order to increase their abilities in obtaining research support. Underrepresented young scholars in Human Science programs will be specifically targeted for participation doc15248 none Sumners The investigator and his colleagues in the Program in Mathematics and Molecular Biology (PMMB) organize an international conference on the subject of multiscale phenomena at the interface of the biological and mathematical sciences. This meeting includes a broadly multidisciplinary set of participants, students and researchers active at the interface between mathematics (broadly defined) and biology. This project supports the participation of approximately 15 domestic students and young scientists, selected from a national pool of applicants generated by web and journal advertisements for the meeting. An unusual feature of the meeting is an opening day of tutorials, which prepare the attendees for the lectures, with mathematical scientists introducing basic principles to biologists and biologists giving tutorials for the quantitative scientists. Two sessions focus on issues of importance to students working at the interface between the computational sciences and biology. Students are especially welcome to attend the meeting and present posters on their work. The Program in Mathematics and Molecular Biology (PMMB) conducts research at the interface between molecular biology and the mathematical sciences and trains students and postdocs in this area. An essential part of this effort is a series of conferences on mathematics and molecular biology. The meetings provide a comfortable but challenging environment where students and scientists from each discipline can learn about the other discipline and about multidisciplinary approaches to the solution of important problems in modern biology. This fosters interdisciplinary training, catalyzes new interdisciplinary collaborations, and in an important scientific area helps develop more people with both mathematics and biology expertise. The project supports students and junior scientists doc15249 none This award will provide support for graduate students and junior investigators to attend the Gordon Conference entitled, QCD in Extreme Conditions: High Temperature, High Density and small x. The conference will focus on issues relevant to heavy ion physics, taking advantage of results from the first experimental run at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Approximately 20 speakers (divided roughly between experiment and theory) have been invited according to their expertise and leadership in the field doc15250 none Physical forcing in the North Pacific Western Arctic region exhibits abrupt regime shifts in which several decades (~25-35 years) of relatively cold, icy (2% above average) conditions are replaced in the span of a year or two by decades of warmer, less icy (3% below average) conditions; these cycles of climate in the region can be traced back at least to the late s. The response of the Chukchi Beaufort shelf ecosystem to warmer climate could follow two quite different pathways. In one scenario, warm periods would reduce ice cover and could create stronger thermal stratification, less mixing, limited nutrient supply, lower primary production, smaller-sized phytoplankton and smaller, coastal-like zooplankton. In a second scenario, also during warm periods with less ice, increased wind could result in shelf-break upwelling and mixing, enhanced nutrient supply, larger-sized phytoplankton and larger, deep-water zooplankton advected onto the shelf. Will global change, particularly warming, result in more large-sized zooplankton which support fish, birds, and mammals over the Chukchi and Beaufort shelves and slopes or smaller-sized zooplankton which will diminish the fish, birds, and mammals and favor sedentary benthic organisms? Large-bodied copepods on the Chukchi and Beaufort shelves must be advected there from the slope waters of the Arctic Ocean or Bering Sea; none of them can complete their life cycles on the shelf itself. Therefore, they are tracers of shelf-basin exchanges. The project will seek to understand which large-bodied copepods reach the Chukchi (wide) and Beaufort (narrow) shelves, and the physical forcing (upwelling, intrusions, eddies) that is responsible. Once on the shelves, how do size and reproductive responses of large copepods vary spatially, and what are the roles of physical processes and food supply? These responses define the robustness of the shelf habitat for supporting a pelagic ecosystem. The project will determine which copepods are transported off the shelves and the physical processes (eddies, plumes) associated with that transport. The investigation will integrate these ecosystem measurements with the physical forcing (both observations and models) to understand how advection shapes the food web in the region doc15231 none Hipparions are an extinct group of three-toed horses that flourished widely in the Old world shortly after their first occurrence there in the late Miocene, at about 11 Ma. Once established, hipparions evolved into a multitude of lineages with chronologic ranges extending to the middle Pleistocene in China and the late Pleistocene of Africa. The paleobiology of these horses within this great temporal (ca 10 m.y.) and geographic span has not been addressed systematically heretofore. PIs believe that hipparions actually originated within the North American genus Cormohipparion, but the actual species involved has not been demonstrated. Their proposed research will break new ground in 1. describing a complex pattern of speciation within Cormohipparion; 2. better resolving the Old World hipparion immigration and subsequent evolutionary radiation; and 3. unraveling the origin, evolutionary radiation, multiple geographic extensions and adaptation of species belonging to a distinctive Old World late Miocene Pleistocene radiation known as the Sivalhippus Complex. Once having described and documented the pattern of dispersal and diversification of hipparions in the Old World PIs will be able to investigate the paleobiology of these horses to gain further insights on the dietary and locomotory adaptations by which they achieved their predominance in this evolutionary theater for so long an interval of time doc15252 none We will develop techniques that can be used to understand the biology and ecology of rare and endangered species without direct observations or experiments on those species. Rare and endangered species are often difficult to study because their populations are very small and because direct observations and experiments can harm the species. We will apply geochemical and paleontological methods to the analysis of shells and bones in museum collections, archeological sites and natural accumulations. We will use growth lines in bones and teeth to determine age spans and growth rates. We will use the geochemistry of the bones and shells to determine diet, water sources, and salinity. We will examine three rare and endangered species in the northern Gulf of California: the Colorado delta clam (a mollusk), the totoaba (a fish) and the Gulf of California harbor porpoise (a marine mammal). These species are endangered by either direct human activity or through environmental changes caused by the near-complete diversion of Colorado River water for human uses. The techniques developed and tested in this project may be applied to the conservation biology and restoration of other rare and endangered species doc15253 none The proposal plans to connect CAU to the Abilene Network via SoX in support of the following research and education: high-throughput computing, video object coding and tracking, computational analysis of protein structure and folding IP multicast for Access grid technology Clark-Atlanta will also connect the Morehouse School of Medicine to Abilene and advanced network services via this award doc10548 none Nanostructured molecular sensors will report high-resolution spatial and temporal system data during industrial processes, health care diagnostics, and other applications without significantly affecting the systems they monitor. These nanosensors require specialized elements for sensor attachment to the target, assembly of a structural framework, sensing a particular physical or chemical state of the environment, and transducing this state into an output signal. Protein receptors offer a paradigm for nanosensor development as they have developed domains that perform each of these functions. It is proposed to develop a protein-based nanosensor based on the paradigm of cell adhesion complexes. Upon receiving the appropriate environmental stimulus the sensor will self-assemble subunits for supporting structural roles, sensing signals, and generating chemical messages. The initial aim of the project is to optimize adhesion of a sensor subunit to an inert solid matrix. Glutathione-S-Transferase (GST) will be employed to adhere GST-fusion proteins to glutathione, a GST ligand, covalently linked to a glass surface. The next project goal is to demonstrate detection of an enzymatic modification of the GST fusion protein on the surface. A GST fusion of a tyrosine kinase ligand will be attached to the surface and activation, or phosphorylations, of the ligand will be detected using radioactive phosphate or antibodies that specifically recognize phosphorylated proteins. The final stage of the project will investigate detection of sensor activation based on recruitment of structural and signaling components to an activated sensor subunit. Phosphorylated tyrosine residues bind to SH2 protein domains. An SH2 domain will be fused to a fluorescent protein, enabling detection of sensor activation by a simple fluorescence measurement doc15255 none Dirks This project will develop and implement a comprehensive data management strategy for the western Arctic Shelf-Basin Interactions (SBI) Phase II field program. This work will take place in collaboration with the SBI Project Office and the scientific investigators who are to provide datasets and information. The data management program will help ensure that data are accurate, accessible, well-documented, and disseminated in a timely fashion to scientific users. Initial preparation of the program will be assisted by results from a questionnaire that will be sent out to all involved parties including scientific investigators and project managers. These results will help in establishing database structure and to determine operational data needs. An on-line field catalog will support field activities and will contain field reports and data products for review and exchange during the progression of the field programs. Information included in the catalog is anticipated to include satellite images and early data products that may be useful to other ongoing work. Experience with past large research projects has shown that data management components such as this are essential to effective database generation and data dissemination, while the field catalog can be very helpful in project coordination and in optimizing field sampling doc15256 none This proposal seeks funding for an advanced network connection, in part, to facilitate research and education in the areas of immersive technology development, community-building with collaborative spaces using common wall technology, development of technologies for cluster-based computing in support of the Applications Service Provider (ASP) model of computing, development of middleware technology for advanced networking doc15257 none The proposal plans to connect UCHSC to Abilene via the Front Range GigaPoP to support NIH funded research requiring a high performance network connection. This research includes the next generation of the Visible Human Project as well as research in the Center for Computational Pharmacology doc15258 none The investigator and his colleagues develop an interdisciplinary training program that would give graduate students substantive training in both mathematics and biology. The goal is to produce students competent in both disciplines, with genuine expertise in applied mathematics and some specific area of biology: biofluids, ecology and evolutionary biology, neuroscience, or physiology. Training is built on the Special Interest Group, which includes faculty members from both mathematics and biology, students and postdocs, and industry-based researchers where appropriate. Modern biology is increasingly mathematical and computational. Education and training in components of both disciplines is needed to prepare people for the 21st century workforce, for leading-edge research, and for teaching. This pilot project includes innovative aspects in its thematic organization, flexible arrangement of both common and area-specific content, interdisciplinary teaming, combination of theoretical and experimental training, and involvement of industrial partners. The combination is promising for fostering long-term changes by growing a generation of scientists, mathematicians, and engineers who share language and skills well enough to take up and solve key problems doc15194 none The Western Arctic is profoundly influenced by the northward flux of nutrient and organic-rich, low salinity Pacific Ocean water that enters the basin through the Bering Strait and across the Chukchi shelf and slope. This flow, a key component of the global ocean circulation, transports freshwater from the Pacific to the Atlantic via the Arctic Ocean while also sustaining some of the most productive ecosystems in the world, the Bering and Chukchi Seas. Net transport, sea ice cover and sea surface temperatures are well known to vary greatly over seasonal and interannual time scales, but the experimental, observational, and modeling bases to evaluate the response of Arctic ecosystems to these changes, and to global change in general, are largely lacking. This interdisciplinary project will provide the observational and theoretical framework to evaluate carbon fluxes in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas in response to variable environmental forcing. A main goal of this project is to determine the impact of decadal-scale environmental regime shifts in the northern high latitudes on carbon cycling in the western Arctic Ocean. Carbon import from the Bering Sea, local production and transformation, and export from the Chukchi and Beaufort shelves to the basin will be examined. This project will focus on understanding the influence of physical and biological processes on fluxes of carbon and other key elements (e.g. N, O, Si) in the water column and benthos of the shelves and slope, and subsequent exchange with the basin. This project has been integrated with other research programs and related resources in the SBI program. The ultimate goal of this study is to obtain a more complete understanding of shelf-basin exchange processes and biogeochemical cycles, and to establish benchmarks useful for assessing future global change of this sentinel ecosystem doc15260 none Skilling University of Southern Mississippi This Collaborative Research proposal between the UC Santa Barbara and the University of Southern Mississippi will establish a regional stratigraphic structural and geochronological framework for Miocene volcanic rocks of the northern to central Sierra Nevada, and at the same time reconstruct structural settings and volcanological processes. The main motivation is to evaluate the tectonic significance and relationship of these mid-Miocene volcanic rocks to modern and ancient subduction, Basin and Range extension, and hotspot settings. Detailed volcanic and sedimentary lithofacies maps will be produced and used to determine the nature and timing of synvolcanic faulting. Petrography, image analysis and Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) imaging of the Sierran breccias will be employed to study and quantify clast and matrix types, morphologies, dimensions and fragmentation styles (brittle, ductile, transitional), and results will be compared with published examples of volcanic breccias of all plausible origins. Preliminary XRF geochemical analysis of representative suites (including all samples to be dated) will be completed and compared with compositions of clasts with matrices in the breccias. To test for geological consistency in our age data, sampling for 40Ar 39Ar geochronology will concentrate on stratigraphic successions containing at least three or four different datable units. Ar geochronology of single mineral grains (total fusions) as well as incremental step heating experiments will be completed doc15261 none Nepf Wetland systems often consist of a branching network of channels cutting through regions of dense vegetation. While the channels provide most of the flow conveyance, the vegetated regions provide most of the bioremediation and particle trapping. Thus, exchange between the channel and vegetated zone may control the overall wetland function, in particular with regard to water quality and sediment trapping. A similar relationship exists between the channel and vegetated bank of a river system. Laboratory experiments will be used to quantify the exchange of momentum and mass between a channel and a zone of emergent vegetation of equal or lesser depth (a bank), and to develop a model that predicts this exchange from representative vegetation and flow parameters. In the flume model, the exchange will be observed by tracking the evolution of dye plumes released from different locations within the channel and vegetated zone. The model vegetation will be designed using geometric and dynamic similarity to real vegetation. A preliminary flow visualization study will be used to assess major mechanisms, to define ranges of behavior across different geometry, and to refine the experimental system. Subsequent detailed studies will simultaneously measure concentration and velocity to directly quantify turbulent fluxes of momentum and mass. The study will draw from existing models for floodplains, including the effects of vegetation on hydraulic roughness and floodplain geomorphology. After the completion of this project, future phases of this research will integrate the new model for exchange between channels and vegetated zones with existing models for channel flow and vegetated flow to construct a comprehensive wetland model capable of predicting wetland circulation and transport. This model will provide an important tool for managing wetland systems by enabling stake holders to predict the changes in wetland function that will arise with proposed development and land-use changes doc15262 none Bickford Valley Large anorthosite bodies associated with high-grade regional metamorphism and anatectites are nearly restricted to orogens of Precambrian age. They may indicate different conditions for Precambrian tectonics or different circumstances of plate interactions, however to test various models for their formation an accurate temporal framework for the development of metamorphism, anatexis, melt accumulations and emplacement in orogens is required. This project will utilize the well studied Adirondack sector of the Grenville orogeny which contains classic anorthosite plutons to develop a detailed chronology of events. Results are expected to produce sufficient data to test models of anorthosite development, which will have applications in other Precambrian orogenic belts doc15263 none The International Conference on Solid-State Sensors and Actuators represents an important opportunity to capture a perspective on the current state of the art in microstructure fabrication and the development of MicroElectroMechanical Systems. The 11th International Conference on Solid-State Sensors and Actuators (Transducers 01) will be held in Munich, Germany, from June 10-14, . Transducers is a biennial conference focusing on theory, design, fabrication, and application of solid-state sensors, actuators, and microsystems. It is an interdisciplinary gathering with participants from university, government, and industrial laboratories representing diverse cross spectrum of fields: electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, materials science, biomedical engineering, physics, biology, chemistry, and microelectronics. We propose to partially sponsor travel for student authors of papers from North America to this conference. These student authors have been selected from a very competitive pool of abstract submissions, and represent the most talented young members of the MEMS community. These students will travel to the conference to present their own work, and then spend the remainder of the week attending presentations and discussions, gathering information on the most important breakthrough technologies revealed at the conference. Much of the fabrication and integration technology is of direct relevance to technologies and applications funded through NSF Electronics and Controls Systems office. Each of these students will write a brief report describing the important technologies they learned about at the conference, and these will be gathered into a summary report to NSF highlighting new trends in this community, important thrusts initiated by other countries, and areas where the US technological base holds advantages or disadvantages. The funding that we request will allow partial travel support for approximately 12 student authors from various institutions in North America doc15264 none The proposal plans to connect Bradley University to vBNS via the MREN GigaPoP in support of research needs such as data mining, remote supercomputing, archival storage and retrieval of biomedical images, data transfer, and others doc15265 none The proposal plans to connect DePaul to Abilene via the MREN GigaPoP. The connection would allow the School of Computer Science, Telecommunications and Information Systems to fully participate in Internet2 research projects. These projects have specialized needs including access to specialized network facilities, access to high bandwiths, access to collaborators on the high-speed national network doc15266 none Many animals experience parts of the environment to which we are not privy. Bats use echolocation, some insects sense substrate vibrations. We recently found that a fish, the pygmy swordtail, communicates in the ultraviolet (UV)-- light to which our skin but not ours eyes are sensitive. Male swordtails have a sword that extends beyond the tail fin. Our previous studies, which inadvertently excluded UV, were never able to show that females preferred males with swords to those without swords. Recently we discovered that the sword reflects UV, and that when tested under light containing UV (e.g. sunlight) females do indeed prefer males with swords. Thus UV plays a critical role in the communication system involved in mate choice. We also found that the swordtail s major predator, the Mexican tetra, does not see in the UV. Thus males can increase their conspicuousness to females but not predators by adding UV reflectance to the sword. In the proposed study we will determine how general the UV communication system is in these types of fishes, if variation in the presence of UV influence when the animal s court, how sensitive the visual system is to UV, if the presence of UV does not influence the predator s hunting success, and if the swordtails use UV for other tasks, such as locating their own prey. These studies promise to give us insights into a sensory world of these animals that was previously unknown doc15194 none The Western Arctic is profoundly influenced by the northward flux of nutrient and organic-rich, low salinity Pacific Ocean water that enters the basin through the Bering Strait and across the Chukchi shelf and slope. This flow, a key component of the global ocean circulation, transports freshwater from the Pacific to the Atlantic via the Arctic Ocean while also sustaining some of the most productive ecosystems in the world, the Bering and Chukchi Seas. Net transport, sea ice cover and sea surface temperatures are well known to vary greatly over seasonal and interannual time scales, but the experimental, observational, and modeling bases to evaluate the response of Arctic ecosystems to these changes, and to global change in general, are largely lacking. This interdisciplinary project will provide the observational and theoretical framework to evaluate carbon fluxes in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas in response to variable environmental forcing. A main goal of this project is to determine the impact of decadal-scale environmental regime shifts in the northern high latitudes on carbon cycling in the western Arctic Ocean. Carbon import from the Bering Sea, local production and transformation, and export from the Chukchi and Beaufort shelves to the basin will be examined. This project will focus on understanding the influence of physical and biological processes on fluxes of carbon and other key elements (e.g. N, O, Si) in the water column and benthos of the shelves and slope, and subsequent exchange with the basin. This project has been integrated with other research programs and related resources in the SBI program. The ultimate goal of this study is to obtain a more complete understanding of shelf-basin exchange processes and biogeochemical cycles, and to establish benchmarks useful for assessing future global change of this sentinel ecosystem doc15268 none Engineering - Chemical (53) Software simulations enable students to actively explore and understand scientific and engineering concepts through visualization and an iterative approach to problem solving. Our project will add major capabilities to our existing software simulation prototype, The Reactor Lab. Existing modules are simulations of chemical reactors, but the software framework is discipline-independent. Our first objective was to add a lab construction kit that has enabled students and faculty to build new simulations. The software will be integrated with the Internet to allow distribution of modules for use on- and off-line, to allow sharing of new modules, and to support communication and collaboration between students and faculty. The new modules that have been added will complete those needed for a first course in chemical reaction engineering. The final objective of our work was to establish and evaluate a prototype community of lab builders and users. This community will expose faculty and students to the collaborative working environments that are an increasingly important result of the Internet. The initial impact of this project was to enhance the education of chemical engineers and chemists about reactor analysis and design. Additionally our work should impact the design of efficient and safe chemical reactors, which is important in fields as diverse as pharmaceutical production and semiconductor fabrication. Dissemination is being done via annual meetings of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the American Society for Engineering Education. Our software has also been listed with the National Engineering Educational Software Database. Articles will be prepared for publication in Chemical Engineering Education. Web based data will be collected to evaluate the number of hits doc15194 none The Western Arctic is profoundly influenced by the northward flux of nutrient and organic-rich, low salinity Pacific Ocean water that enters the basin through the Bering Strait and across the Chukchi shelf and slope. This flow, a key component of the global ocean circulation, transports freshwater from the Pacific to the Atlantic via the Arctic Ocean while also sustaining some of the most productive ecosystems in the world, the Bering and Chukchi Seas. Net transport, sea ice cover and sea surface temperatures are well known to vary greatly over seasonal and interannual time scales, but the experimental, observational, and modeling bases to evaluate the response of Arctic ecosystems to these changes, and to global change in general, are largely lacking. This interdisciplinary project will provide the observational and theoretical framework to evaluate carbon fluxes in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas in response to variable environmental forcing. A main goal of this project is to determine the impact of decadal-scale environmental regime shifts in the northern high latitudes on carbon cycling in the western Arctic Ocean. Carbon import from the Bering Sea, local production and transformation, and export from the Chukchi and Beaufort shelves to the basin will be examined. This project will focus on understanding the influence of physical and biological processes on fluxes of carbon and other key elements (e.g. N, O, Si) in the water column and benthos of the shelves and slope, and subsequent exchange with the basin. This project has been integrated with other research programs and related resources in the SBI program. The ultimate goal of this study is to obtain a more complete understanding of shelf-basin exchange processes and biogeochemical cycles, and to establish benchmarks useful for assessing future global change of this sentinel ecosystem doc15270 none The research Institute at Oberwolfach organizes weekly workshops bringing together leading mathematicians from all over the world to exchange recent results and initiate new research. This project aims to add more promising junior scientists to these meetings. This will give young mathematicians from the US the chance to meet top people from their specific area, hear their results and present their own research. Also the more senior people will enormously profit from these contacts since very often breakthroughs in mathematics come from junior people. This project provides both supports living costs and for travel money. On average two people will be added to each workshops and so a total of 92 US Junior Oberwolfach Fellows will be supported. The costs for a stay for a week at Oberwolfach are 580 USD and this project supports 500 USD per person doc15271 none This study will investigate how the Antarctic Slope Front and continental slope morphology determine the exchanges of mass, heat, and fresh water between the shelf and the deep ocean, in particular those leading to outflows of dense water into intermediate and deep layers of the adjacent basins and into the world ocean circulation While the importance to the global ocean circulation and climate of cold water masses originating in the Antarctic is unquestioned, the processes by which these water masses enter the deep ocean circulation are not. The primary goal of this work therefore is to identify the principal physical processes that govern the transfer of shelf-modified dense water into intermediate and deep layers of the adjacent deep ocean. At the same time, it seeks to understand the compensatory poleward flow of waters from the oceanic regime. The upper continental slope has been identified as the critical gateway for the exchange of shelf and deep ocean waters. Here the topography, velocity and density fields associated with the nearly ubiquitous front must strongly influence the advective and turbulent transfer of water properties between the shelf and oceanic regimes. The study has four specific objectives: [1] Determine the mean frontal structure and the principal scales of variability, and estimate the role of the front on cross-slope exchanges and mixing of adjacent water masses; [2] Determine the influence of slope topography and bathymetry on frontal location and outflow of dense Shelf Water; [3] Establish the role of frontal instabilities, benthic boundary layer transports, tides and other oscillatory processes on cross-slope advection and fluxes; and [4] Assess the effect of diapycnal mixing, lateral mixing identified through intrusions, and nonlinearities in the equation of state on the rate of descent and the fate of outflowing, near-freezing Shelf Water doc15272 none EarthTalk Incorporated will be producing three seasons of I Wonder, 225 ninety-second radio programs that answer listeners questions about science. Questions will be collected from listeners via the projects web site, by mail, and during special field recording events in which questions are solicited from museum visitors at nine science centers across the nation. Each program will feature a listener s science question with its answer provided by interviews with scientists experts. I Wonder will be carried on the over 700 public and commercial radio stations that currently broadcast the producers Earth and Sky radio series. Ancillary support for the series will be provided by a special I Wonder section of Earth & Sky Online and direct mailing of the nine I Wonder CDs to 90,000 classroom teachers. Promotion for the series will include placement of print ads that are timed with the field recording events doc15273 none Rate of Bouts as a Measure of Response Strength Richard L. Shull University of North Carolina at Greensboro It seems almost self-evident that the tendency to engage in an activity should be directly related to the size of the reward for the activity (incentive value) and to the motivation level. Yet response rate in the laboratory has often turned out to be surprisingly insensitive to such factors. For example, response rate is an increasing, negatively accelerated function of the rate of its reinforcement (well described by a rectangular hyperbolic function). And sometimes response rate even decreases as the size of the reward is increased. The proposed research is based on the possibility that response rate is insensitive because, as typically calculated, it is a mixture of two different kinds of responding, a sensitive type and an insensitive type. There is reason to suspect that rate of initiating bouts of an activity might be highly sensitive to incentive and motivational variables whereas responding within bouts might not be. If so, bout-initiation rate should be a better candidate than total (composite) response rate for determining the fundamental relation between responding and reinforcement. Despite a considerable amount of suggestive evidence, however, this possibility has not been adequately developed or evaluated--mainly because researchers have been unsure how to determine unambiguously and nonarbitrarily when bouts begin and end and thus how to measure bout-initiation rate. Recently Shull and his colleagues described and validated a technique for determining bout-initiation rate and bout length--based on fits to limbs of log survivor plots of interresponse times. Using this technique, the proposed research will examine the possibility that the function relating bout-initiation rate to reinforcement variables (such as rate of reinforcement) is invariant over different response types and over variables that alter response rate by changing bout length. The proposed research will also determine if the relation between bout-initiation rate and reinforcement rate is approximately linear over a wide range. If these possibilities are confirmed, the results would favor a surprisingly simple and general principle of response strength due to incentive and motivational variables doc15274 none Parise and Chen This proposal plans a focused study on three systems of direct relevance to the Earth s lower crust and mantle and for which considerable data exist: dolomite, selected oxide spinels such as magnesioferrite (MgFe2O4) and qandilite (Mg2TiO4), and orthopyroxene (opx, En50Fs50). The goal is to determine the state of order in these materials as a function of both temperature and pressure using Rietveld refinement, confirm the breakdown curve proposed by Luth from his quench experiments on dolomite, and determine the relationship between order (X) and P- and S-wave velocities at high PT. It is recognized that quench experiments followed by single crystal structure determination can be useful, and that measurements at high pressure or high temperature alone are valuable. However, an opportunity exists now to couple crystallographic measurements with the estimation of ultrasonic travel times at simultaneously maintained high pressure and temperature for the first time, and thereby more closely approach measurements directly relevant to the Earth s lower crust and upper-mantle. These simultaneous measurements are ideally suited to the problem of order-disorder and its effects on stability and elasticity. X-Ray diffraction provides a record of X and of the thermal EoS while the new set up for ultrasonic work provides simultaneous determinations of P and S-wave velocities. The latter measurements are crucial since there is no longer a need to change samples to perform separate measurements for P- and S-waves; several groups report that while in some materials (orthopyroxene for example) P-waves appear unaffected by cation substitution, the S-wave velocities do vary. Some technical development will accompany the project and it is hoped this will find application in the research of other groups interested in simultaneous real-time determination of structure and elasticity, and in correlating atomic structure with physical properties doc15275 none Rumble Carnegie Institution of Washington, Geophysical Laboratory The primary goal of this proposal is to confirm the discovery of mass-independent sulfur isotope fractionation by replicate analyses to validate accuracy and to identify mineral hosts of anomalous sulfur and measure its heterogeneity. The motivation for additional study of sulfur isotope analyses is because of their utility as biomarkers in ancient rocks. In Precambrian rocks where fossils are non-existent and organic residues have been converted to carbon, sulfur isotope mass-dependent fractionations remain as an indelible record of the vital processes of sulfate-reducing microbes. With the discovery of mass-independent sulfur isotope fractionations in Archean rocks, sulfur isotope geochemistry has acquired even greater significance. Such fractionations are known in the upper atmosphere where gas phase reactions take place under the strong influence of ultraviolet light. Sulfur isotope analyses, therefore, may give evidence for the former existence of life but they may also record a previously unknown chapter in the evolution of Earth s atmosphere. This proposal will examine the distribution of anomalous sulfur geographically in Archean and Proterozoic metamorphic rocks. Stratigraphic sections will be measured to establish a sulfur isotope fractionation time distribution. The new sulfur isotope laser fluorination microprobe at the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution will be used to do detailed examination of Archean and Proterozoic metamorphic rocks doc15276 none Fei Conventional brittle failure is impossible at significant depth within Earth because the combination of pressure and temperature ensures that the flow strength of rocks is exceeded before the fracture strength. Nevertheless, earthquakes occur abundantly within descending slabs of oceanic lithosphere in subduction zones, in several cases to depths as great as 680 km, where they stop abruptly. Although the mechanism by which these earthquakes occur is unknown, their seismic signals ensure that they represent sudden failure of rock along a fault. There are two mechanisms presently known that can enable faulting to occur at high pressure. The first, dehydration embrittlement, involves generation of a free fluid phase by breakdown of hydrous minerals; the free fluid assists in opening of microcracks which is a crucial step leading to shear failure. So far as is known, this mechanism could potentially explain all earthquakes if appropriate hydrous phases are present in the mantle and if their stability fields are such that they dehydrate under appropriate conditions to yield the observed depth distribution. The second, phase-transformation-induced faulting can be triggered during the phase transformations of olivine to its denser polymorphs, which occur with increasing depth. This mechanism can potentially explain the bimodal depth distribution of earthquakes and their abrupt termination at the base of the upper mantle if metastable olivine is preserved in the cold cores of subduction zones at transition-zone depths. However, given current understanding of the phase distribution within subducting lithosphere, neither mechanism can comfortably explain the occurrence of very large earthquakes at depths exceeding 500 km. The investigators will apply their collective expertise in high-pressure technology, experimental deformation, and seismology to achieve the following: (1) test the hypothesis of reactivation of hydrated faults; (2) monitor experiments on dehydration embrittlement and transformation-induced faulting by detection and location of acoustic emissions; (3) develop improved high-pressure experimental assembly designs for in situ synchrotron experiments on shear failure; (4) use faulting experiments on both dehydration embrittlement and phase-transformation-induced faulting to place new constraints on these two faulting mechanisms doc15277 none Steve Emslie Occupation History and Diet of Adelie Penguins in the Ross Sea Region This project will build on previous studies to investigate the occupation history and diet of Adelie penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae) in the Ross Sea region, Antarctica, with excavations of abandoned and active penguin colonies. Numerous active and abandoned colonies exist on the Victoria Land coast, from Cape Adare to Marble Point will be sampled. Some of these sites have been radiocarbon-dated and indicate a long occupation history for Adelie penguins extending to 13,000 years before present (B. P.). The material recovered from excavations, as demonstrated from previous investigations, will include penguin bones, tissue, and eggshell fragments as well as abundant remains of prey (fish bones, otoliths, squid beaks) preserved in ornithogenic (formed from bird guano) soils. These organic remains will be quantified and subjected to radiocarbon analyses to obtain a colonization history of penguins in this region. Identification of prey remains in the sediments will allow assessment of penguin diet. Other data (ancient DNA) from these sites will be analyzed through collaboration with New Zealand scientists. Past climatic conditions will be interpreted from published ice-core and marine-sediment records. These data will be used to test the hypothesis that Adelie penguins respond to climate change, past and present, in a predictable manner. In addition, the hypothesis that Adelie penguins alter their diet in accordance with climate, sea-ice conditions, and other marine environmental variables along a latitudinal gradient will be tested. Graduate and undergraduate students will be involved in this project and a project Web site will be developed to report results and maintain educational interaction between the PI and students at local middle and high schools in Wilmington, NC doc15278 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This is a collaborative project involving Drury University, Central Missouri State University, and Lamar University Beaumont. Despite efforts of the Calculus Reform movement, in some institutions, the success rate of students in calculus remains low. Problem-based learning has proven to be an effective pedagogical technique which addresses a diversity of learning styles, but there are no published materials for teaching the calculus sequence using it. This project is completing the writing of texts for teaching Calculus I, II, and III using a problem-based learning approach, the modified Moore method, and incorporating an appropriate usage of technology. McGraw-Hill has published Calculus I, A Discovery Workbook, written by two of the investigators, and expresses interest in publishing Calculus II and III as well. Activities include assessment of the effectiveness of this method and dissemination of the results in faculty development workshops. The investigators and the advisory board members are innovativors in the use of problem-based teaching and learning and are active in discussing this method in the broader mathematical community and in disseminating materials for use in problem-based courses doc15279 none Frost and Swapp This project aims to determine the effect that melting had on the world-class lead-zinc ore deposit at Broken Hill, Australia, which was metamorphosed at granulite facies, well within the range of melting for the pure Pb-Zn-Fe-Ag-S system. We plan to study the textures, assemblages and mineral compositions within the ore body and its alteration halo to see if the relations observed can be explained by reactions between the country rock and a crystallizing and differentiating polymetallic melt. We plan to use trace element geochemistry to determine if the pyroxenoid horizon around the ore crystallized from the polymetallic melt. It will also determine if the high-variance assemblages around the ore body that involve garnet could have been produced by fluids that were released from the melt during crystallization of the pyroxenoids. It also intends to study assemblages within the ore body to see if they record a liquid line of descent, with the melt becoming enriched in incompatible elements, Ag, Au, As, Bi, Sb, and Tl, during differentiation doc15280 none The WWMeB meeting will bring together biologists and software developers who are working to develop a World Wide Meiosis Database. Meiosis is the process by which egg and sperm cells are generated, the gametes. Two previous meetings have been held. At this meeting, the organizerrs will incorporate two new gender-specific databases that have been developed for describing events in the development of eggs and sperm, respectively. The meeting will produce a plan for coordinating international efforts in an area of biology where the general processes have been highly conserved doc15281 none The largest mountains and highest plateaus on Earth are built when continents collide. Seismic converted phases (receiver functions) are used to investigate two key questions in continental collisions: does the lower crust flow beneath high plateaus, and does continental mantle subduct beneath mountain belts? If crustal flow occurs in a relatively thin channel, as some modeling predicts, it would develop a strong structural or mineral fabric that may be identified by seismic anisotropy. Unlike shear-wave splitting studies that provide only bulk anisotropy information between the source and receiver, azimuthal variations of converted phases can constrain anisotropy parameters for layers within the crust. Previous studies have generally found crustal anisotropies 5%, but highly anisotropic ( 10%) layers within the crust have recently been identified in New Zealand and the Central Andes using the receiver function method. This new technique is being applied to receiver functions recorded across the highest elevations on Earth, the Tibetan Plateau, in order to search for evidence of large-scale crustal flow. The upper mantle beneath the stable interiors of continents is layered on a large scale. Some layer boundaries are observed regionally and denoted by seismologists as H , X , and L . The origin of the stratification of the continental upper mantle is still poorly understood. In some locations the layering has significant dip. Receiver functions have been used to image modern subductions zones as well as identify dipping layers in the upper mantle beneath ancient cratons. Some of these layers beneath cratons appear to have anisotropic properties and may identify relict continental subduction zones. Even if the origin of the stratification is unknown, it can be used as a tracer to follow the subduction or destruction of an impinging strong plate beneath a continental collision zone, for example, to track the Indian plate beneath the Himalayas and Tibet. The primary goal of this project is to map out crustal anisotropy and upper mantle layering across the Tibetan Plateau, and use the results to improve our understanding of how high plateaus are built. This research will continue the development of the receiver function technique in the study of seismic anisotropy and mantle stratigraphy, and contribute to the technical education of two young scientists doc15282 none Kalonji This award is to the University of Washington to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners for the award include the University of Washington (Lead Institution), Washington State Office of Economic Development, Washington State China Relations Council, Northwest Environmental Business Council, Earth Tech, Inc., and Hart Crowser, Inc. Proposed Activities The proposed effort has the following goals: (1) create new team-based approaches for faculty, students, government and industry partners to collaborate on international research and education, (2) translate the work of these teams into products, systems, and services, (3) produce a scientific and engineering workforce to work in an international marketplace. Teams of faculty and students from the University of Washington and Sichuan University in Chengdu, China will be working collaboratively on water resource management, waste water treatment, forest ecology, environmentally-friendly materials processing, biodiversity, and the impact of humans on the ecology. Proposed Innovation The focus of the project is on building sustainable relationships for research-education-economic development. Innovation outcomes include creation of a workforce to participate in the emerging Chinese market, creation of the opportunities for small businesses to participate in academic research and to gain access to new international business opportunities, increase trade with China for Washington, and internationalization of some of the faculty at the University of Washington. Potential Economic Impact The major economic impact will be the expanded opportunities for Washington State business with markets in China. Potential Societal Impact The Pacific Rim could be a very large market for the United States over the foreseeable future. Preparation of a workforce to participate in this market is vital to the citizens of the US in general and especially the West Coast. Asians have already trained a workforce, and the US is behind. This effort will provide the workforce to open trade for small business in China doc15278 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This is a collaborative project involving Drury University, Central Missouri State University, and Lamar University Beaumont. Despite efforts of the Calculus Reform movement, in some institutions, the success rate of students in calculus remains low. Problem-based learning has proven to be an effective pedagogical technique which addresses a diversity of learning styles, but there are no published materials for teaching the calculus sequence using it. This project is completing the writing of texts for teaching Calculus I, II, and III using a problem-based learning approach, the modified Moore method, and incorporating an appropriate usage of technology. McGraw-Hill has published Calculus I, A Discovery Workbook, written by two of the investigators, and expresses interest in publishing Calculus II and III as well. Activities include assessment of the effectiveness of this method and dissemination of the results in faculty development workshops. The investigators and the advisory board members are innovativors in the use of problem-based teaching and learning and are active in discussing this method in the broader mathematical community and in disseminating materials for use in problem-based courses doc15284 none Mathematical Sciences (21) Materials are being developed for an activity-based college geometry course using Geometer s Sketchpad. The project addresses the DUE themes of teacher preparation and integration of technology into education. Subsequent work will develop a textbook for the geometry course required for teacher candidates at various institutions. This idea has been discussed with the acquisitions editor at Key College Publishing, the distributor of Geometer s Sketchpad. More than ten years experience each using an activity-based approach, cooperative learning, and mathematical software to teach calculus, discrete mathematics, and abstract algebra has demonstrated the effectiveness of these approaches. This project applies these pedagogical strategies to college geometry. The course materials are engaging students in exploratory activities designed to develop their intuitive understanding of geometric concepts. Students use interactive geometry software to construct geometric figures, make and test conjectures about these constructions, and create proofs based upon their constructions. Through productive group interactions, students are being guided toward constructing increasingly robust mathematical proofs. Most students served by this course are future teachers. Since teachers often teach as they were taught, it is important to model pedagogical strategies consistent with the recommendations of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). The project materials model such strategies, and are suitable for an introduction to formal mathematical reasoning in a first or second proof-course. This is a valuable course for any mathematics student, but particularly so for those intending to become teachers of mathematics doc15201 none The limits to temporal resolution imposed by processes of time-averaging (i.e., age mixing of fossils that determines the temporal resolution of the fossil record) have broad implications for interpretation of the fossil record in a wide variety of types of studies. Almost no information on time-averaging is currently available for brachiopods, the predominant organism comprising Paleozoic and many later marine shell assemblages. We propose to use a combination of amino acid racemization and radiocarbon dating to document time-averaging in surficial accumulations of mixed brachiopod-mollusk shells on the southern Brazilian shelf. The resulting data will provide quantitative estimates of age structures of dated shells of brachiopods and mollusks from seven sites along a depth gradient. The study is expected to produce (1) the first quantitative estimates of time-averaging for brachiopod shell accumulations, (2) the first comparative data on time-averaging for two groups of biomineralized organisms (brachiopods vs. mollusks), and (3) the first estimates of time-averaging along an onshore-offshore bathymetric gradient. By adding taxonomic and environmental dimensions to the current knowledge of time-averaging, this study will provide a significant contribution to our understanding of the temporal resolution of the fossil record doc15286 none Amsler Baker McClintock The benthic marine ecosystem near Palmer Station, Antarctica provides an excellent site for the study of the function and evolution of chemical defenses in marine organisms. Antarctica is unique in that sea stars and other invertebrates are the major predators on benthic animals. Sea stars are quite different from other, biting predators because they often feed by extruding their cardiac stomach over their prey for external digestion. This feeding pattern should be a particularly strong selective force for surface-sequestration of chemical defenses, especially in Antarctica where sea stars are the major sponge predator and biting spongivores are relatively uncommon. Antarctic sea stars are slow moving predators that feed on individual sponges for long periods of time and can have patchy distributions. However, they are much larger than the small grazers thought to be important in inducing chemical defenses at lower latitudes. Previous studies by the investigators have established the presence and ecological role of secondary metabolites in a wide variety of sessile and sluggish antarctic marine invertebrates and in marine macroalgae. The current project focus on two sets of questions concerning the function and evolution of chemical defenses. First, the predictions of the Optimal Defense Theory and the Induced Defense Model of plant and animal chemical defenses will be tested. The former theory predicts that chemical defenses will be differentially sequestered in tissues that are most susceptible to predation. The latter theory predicts that such predators should select for inducible defenses and these Antarctic predator-prey relationships provide the opportunity to separate the issue of predator size from the basic predictions of the model. Second, the investigators propose to utilize the ecologically dominant members of the Antarctic Peninsula s rich macroalgal flora and the distinctive nutrient environment of coastal Antarctica to test predictions of multiple, interactive roles for secondary metabolites in brown macroalgae including predictions of the Induced Defense Model. An additional test will examine whether increased ultraviolet radiation in shallow water benthic communities caused by atmospheric ozone depletion might be affecting secondary metabolite production. Because of the dominance of these macroalgae in their communities, understanding factors that influence their trophic relationships are important for understanding community dynamics as a whole. The investigators plan to continue to vigorously pursue and foster opportunities to integrate their scientific research with a variety of educational activities, including supporting undergraduate, as well as graduate and postgraduate research; and science teachers through the NSF Teachers Experiencing Antarctica program doc15287 none Carmichael Although the simple expression representing the solubility of water in magmas as a function of P,T and liquid composition, is adequate for many hydrous phase-equilibrium experiments, its extrapolation to iron-rich basalts and to higher pressures is problematic. Using our internally heated pressure vessel, it is proposed to measure the water solubility in two Columbia River basalts as a function of P & T to make secure the compositional extrapolation of the solubility algorithm to Fe-rich liquids of varying silica concentration. Published direct measurements of the volume of dissolved water in magmas will be included in the revised algorithm (a regressed variable in the early formulation) to ensure that the pressure dependence of the solubility relationship extrapolate to published high pressure experiments. Hornblende-bearing intermediate lavas associated with subduction are always more oxidized than their hornblende-free associates. The reasons for this are unknown and could indirectly result from the expulsion of dissolved water on eruption in combination with a sulfur species. This will be tested by using a newly developed X-Ray fluorescence technique to measure the sulfur concentration in a large collection of sub-aerial crystalline lavas for which the redox state is well known doc15288 none Integrated paleomagnetic geochronologic study necessitates radical tectonic re-thinking in the Boston portion of the Southeastern New England Avalon Zone because new isotopic data reveal fundamental flaws in the long accepted regional stratigraphy. For example: 1. Reportedly Neoproterozoic, but previously undated Brighton volcanic interbeds from four geographically separated sections in the Roxbury Conglomerate have maximum ages of approximately 587 Ma, 490 Ma, 438 Ma and 362 Ma based on 1-4 grain zircon fractions. 2. Reportedly Ordovician Quincy Granite (based on an upper intercept date of 437 + 23 Ma) has yielded Siluro-Devonian zircons (single grain analyses with 207 Pb 206 Pb dates of approximately 410 Ma). 3. Reportedly 630 + 15 Ma Dedham Granite west of the Boston Basin has yielded a weighted mean 207 Pb 206 Pb date of approximately 610 Ma based on three single zircon analyses. Preliminary paleopoles based on these geochronological data further suggest that: 1. The previously reported Neoproterozoic Avalonian pole form the Roxbury Conglomerate is from Silurian or younger rocks. 2. Reliably dated Neoproterozoic rocks formed at low-mid latitudes rather than the previously reported high-mid latitude for the 610 to ~ 570 Ma interval. This proposal seeks funding for continued work to clarify stratigraphic and structural relationships in the Boston area as a basis for completing 5 or 6 well dated paleomagnetic poles. These poles will constrain revised interpretations of the paleolatitude of the Southeastern New England Avalon Zone during Neoproterozoic arc magmatism, its position during during hypothesized snowball earth climatic events and the timing of mid-Paleozoic accretion to North America. Oriented paleomagnetic cores will be collected at 21 new locations in Avalonian arc rocks including Dedham Granite and Mattapan Volcanic Complex, in overlying Neoproterozoic strata including the Cambridge Argillite and glaciomarine deposits comprising the Squantum Member of the Roxbury Conglomerate, in Brighton Volcanics and in several other formations of uncertain or poorly constrained age (including reportedly Jurassic intrusive rocks of the Medford dike and Calf Island sill). Twelve of these sites are also targeted for supporting geochronology and ten for geochemistry doc15289 none The initial focus of this project is the development and refining of seismic analysis methods, such as precise waveform cross-correlation and waveform similarity clustering, to improve earthquake location and seismic source imaging for existing, well-characterized seismic datasets. Along with these tools, relative arrival-times and cross-correlation lag information are being incorporated into 1D and 3D tomographic algorithms to enhance the robustness of velocity models derived from passive seismic data. These developments are then used for analysis of large seismic catalogues from Japan and New Zealand. The software development is divided into three principal areas: (1) high-precision seismic waveform cross-correlation (WCC) for arrival time estimation, (2) robust event clustering and (3) relative arrival-time ( double-difference ) seismic tomography. Component 1 improves on an existing, highly successful WCC method to reduce phase pick inconsistency within catalogues by incorporating such innovations as wavelet-based spectral and cross-spectral estimation, auto- picking and improved uncertainty analysis. Component 2 expands upon event clustering methods by developing a hierarchy of clusters based upon waveform similarity measures at different scales. This multiple-frequency-band approach provides a framework for rapidly associating events into hierarchical clusters to expedite cross-correlation repicking for precise location estimates. In the third component of development, relative arrival time data including the adjustments obtained from WCC are incorporated into 1D and 3D velocity inversion techniques. Recent work using relative arrival times ( double difference location) has demonstrated great potential for improved earthquake location by adding these parameters into the location equations; capitalizing on relative traveltime information in combination with WCC pick refinements may also improve velocity models through reducing the existing scatter in hypocenter locations and associated arrival times used in the tomographic method. These software tools will be made available, with documentation, to the scientific community. The analysis tools are applied to obtain detailed understanding of the seismotectonics of subduction zones and their associated seismic hazards. Two regions are being investigated: Japan and New Zealand. In Japan, two separate populations of earthquakes within the subducting plate define a double seismic zone whose spatially distinct seismic source regions indicate variations of stress regimes within the downbending plate. Large, damaging, historic earthquakes have been shown to correlate with microseismic distributions and slab boundary morphology in the region, but the microseismicity is characterized by somewhat diffuse clusters. These clouds of hypocenters often lend themselves well to precise relocation methods, which can illuminate details of the seismogenic fabric previously obscured by random location errors. Refinement of these locations and improved delineation of shallow and deep seismic source structures will sharpen the image of the subducting slab and better define relationships among the distinct regimes. In New Zealand, a region of high shear strain accumulation rate has been identified around Wellington. Applying the new analysis tools to earthquakes in this region will improve delineation of seismogenic structures, which then allows them to be related to crustal faulting and hypothesized locked zones along the slab interface. Defining the details of these seismic sources facilitates a better understanding of the localized stress regimes and permits refinements of models for how the subduction regime influences faulting and deformation in the overriding crust. These investigations are being undertaken in collaboration with researchers in Japan and New Zealand doc15290 none Potential vorticity (PV) diagnosis has been used as a powerful tool in studying midlatitude cyclone developments. The PIs will use this tool to study the downstream evolution of African easterly waves (AEWs), their interactions with the large-scale flow, and their subsequent development into tropical cyclones (TCs). Specific studies include: 1) to reexamine whether AEWs are, in fact, wave-like disturbances, 2) to determine whether the deformation and concomitant superposition of AEW PV by the large-scale environmental flow is a viable mechanism alone to trigger tropical cyclogenesis, 3) to understand more completely the three-dimensional structure and evolution of TC PV, 4) to relate the steering layer of TCs to the depth of the PV column, and 5) to examine the sensitivity of TC steering to various microphysical parameterizations in NWP models. The hypotheses associated with the tasks are: 1) the intensification of the AEWs is related to their change in shape (from elongated to more circular) associated with appropriate deformation and 2) the intensity and track of a cyclone is related to its depth. Global analyses from European Center for Medium-range Weather Forecast (ECMWF), in conjunction with satellite data and satellite-derived winds and aircraft data, will be used to analyze the portrayal of AEWs. Investigation on TCs development and structure will be carried out with high-resolution non-hydrostatic research models. Tropical cyclone formation remains one of the largely unsolved problems in dynamic meteorology. This research using PV analysis has the potential to provide greater insight into the mechanisms of the transformation of African easterly waves into tropical depressions and provide guidance in tropical cyclogenesis prediction. The project provides good opportunities for training graduate students doc15291 none Paul M. N. Feehan The principal goal of our research is to prove the celebrated formula of Edward Witten ( ), relating the Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten series of smooth four-manifolds. Witten used quantum field theory methods to derive his celebrated formula, based on the concept of `duality , whereas the approach we have been pursuing jointly with Thomas Leness is a mathematical one, employing a moduli space of non-abelian monopoles as a cobordism between links of Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten moduli spaces. We have already partially verified Witten s formula using this approach, showing that in many cases the series agree up through terms of order depending only on the topology of the four-manifold. We aim to build on those results, by showing next that a relation between the two series of the overall expected shape exists and then applying auxiliary techniques to prove that his formula is the only one possible. A second goal of our research is to develop a proof of Witten s formula, in the special case of symplectic four-manifolds equipped with Lefschetz fibrations, and shed light on the relationship between Seiberg-Witten invariants, Donaldson invariants, and the structure of Lefschetz fibrations. Ultimately, we also hope to explain the relationship between the mathematical and quantum field theory methods of deriving Witten s formula. Witten s formula, as understood by mathematicians, is part of a physical theory developed by Witten and Nathan Seiberg relating non-abelian Yang-Mills theory (a generalization of Maxwell s theory of electromagnetics) and the simpler abelian Seiberg-Witten gauge field theories. In the physical world, quantum Yang-Mills theories provide a theoretical basis for describing elementary particle interactions. In the mathematical world, beginning with the work of Simon Donaldson in , classical Yang-Mills and Seiberg-Witten gauge theories have played a fundamental role in probing the geometry of four-dimensional spaces. String theory is often cited by physicists as the most promising candidate for a unification of quantum field theory (itself is a unification of the electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces) and Einstein s theory of gravity. Such a `grand unified theory would give a single theoretical framework for explaining both short-range, high-energy elementary particle interactions and the long-range gravitational force. However, discovery of such a unified framework has eluded physicists for nearly three-quarters of a century. Furthermore, while Einstein s theory of gravity is founded on rigorous mathematics, the goal of providing a mathematical foundation for quantum field theory has not yet been realized. Most physicists agree that particle accelerators of impossibly large size would be needed to experimentally verify that string theory is the `right theory of nature. However, while independent, mathematical verifications of quantum field theory predictions can never replace experimental tests, they may increase our confidence that quantum field theory predictions are correct when experimental checks are impossible with current technology. We hope that our project may serve as a small step in such directions doc15292 none The Bell Museum of Natural History is seeking a planning grant to begin the exhibit development process for a national traveling exhibit on nature in urban settings. Nature in the City will be designed to encourage the exploration of diversity of life in the city in the same way ecologist study ecosystems. The overall goal of the exhibit is to improve the public s understanding of ecology and biodiversity, and the relevance of these concepts to their lives in creating healthier and ecologically sustainable communities. The project will include front-end evaluation, identification of key themes and take-home messages, and a survey of potential host sites. The target audience assessment will examine interest, knowledge and attitudes about nature and the environment among urban audiences. Methodology will include interviews with community members, focus groups and surveys, all conducted in collaboration with museum staff and community groups. The results will be applied to the design of the sq. ft. Nature in the City traveling exhibit, mini-kiosks and supporting programs doc15271 none This study will investigate how the Antarctic Slope Front and continental slope morphology determine the exchanges of mass, heat, and fresh water between the shelf and the deep ocean, in particular those leading to outflows of dense water into intermediate and deep layers of the adjacent basins and into the world ocean circulation While the importance to the global ocean circulation and climate of cold water masses originating in the Antarctic is unquestioned, the processes by which these water masses enter the deep ocean circulation are not. The primary goal of this work therefore is to identify the principal physical processes that govern the transfer of shelf-modified dense water into intermediate and deep layers of the adjacent deep ocean. At the same time, it seeks to understand the compensatory poleward flow of waters from the oceanic regime. The upper continental slope has been identified as the critical gateway for the exchange of shelf and deep ocean waters. Here the topography, velocity and density fields associated with the nearly ubiquitous front must strongly influence the advective and turbulent transfer of water properties between the shelf and oceanic regimes. The study has four specific objectives: [1] Determine the mean frontal structure and the principal scales of variability, and estimate the role of the front on cross-slope exchanges and mixing of adjacent water masses; [2] Determine the influence of slope topography and bathymetry on frontal location and outflow of dense Shelf Water; [3] Establish the role of frontal instabilities, benthic boundary layer transports, tides and other oscillatory processes on cross-slope advection and fluxes; and [4] Assess the effect of diapycnal mixing, lateral mixing identified through intrusions, and nonlinearities in the equation of state on the rate of descent and the fate of outflowing, near-freezing Shelf Water doc15294 none Numerical models of ocean dynamics will be used to address two key aspects of dense water formation and modification process on the antarctic continental shelves. They pertain to: 1) the export of dense water from the shelf; and 2) its descent down the slope. These studies are justified by new hypotheses on bottom water formation and seek to facilitate the parameterization of such processes in global climate models. This modeling study is closely related to a ship-based study that will investigate how the Antarctic Slope Front and continental slope morphology determine the exchanges of mass, heat, and fresh water between the shelf and the deep ocean, in particular those leading to outflows of dense water into intermediate and deep layers of the adjacent basins and into the world ocean circulation While the importance to the global ocean circulation and climate of cold water masses originating in the Antarctic is unquestioned, the processes by which these water masses enter the deep ocean circulation are not. The primary goal of the experimental work is to identify the principal physical processes that govern the transfer of shelf-modified dense water into intermediate and deep layers of the adjacent deep ocean. At the same time, it seeks to understand the compensatory poleward flow of waters from the oceanic regime. This work will help to provide the dynamical framework for the observations and synthesize the observations into a coherent whole doc15295 none The goal for this symposium is to advance the recognition of hormone-binding proteins (HBPs) as centrally-positioned regulators in endocrine systems, that have significant influences both in the integration of cell and physiological function as well as in the evolution of endocrine systems. In this symposium, HBPs will be defined as proteins in the extracellular environment (mostly) that bind hormones or similar factors, usually with a high affinity, and that therefore maintain a central regulatory position between a hormone and its ability to transduce its signal through its cell receptor. The emphasis of the symposium will be to look beyond the role of HBPs as carrier proteins and instead to bring in the emerging concepts of HBPs as multifunctional regulatory proteins that can play dynamic --even predominant-- roles in integrating endocrine systems. Of particular interest will be where HBPs have developed regulatory properties beyond that of primary hormone-binding, including those that broadcast into other endocrine systems. With the diverse properties of HBPs being increasingly defined, it is also becoming clear that many HBPs have interesting evolutionary histories, not only in the development of their properties through different taxa, but also in their influences on the evolution of the hormone and receptor systems with which they interact. Such data are providing an enhanced understanding, and biological perspective, of the roles of HBPs in endocrine systems. In this symposium, there will be 13 plenary lectures by speakers who will serve as ambassadors for their respective HBP(s) of interest. The speakers are encouraged to present their own work in the context of general and underlying regulatory mechanisms ( integrative context ) and, where possible, in the context of the evolution of the respective endocrine systems ( evolutionary context ). It is expected that several of the speakers will also draw connections between different HBP endocrine systems, as well as to diverse physiological systems. Given the involvement of HBP endocrine systems in the integration and evolution of diverse physiological systems, including reproduction, development, neural systems, immune systems, and others, this type of symposium will afford an opportunity for a wide spectrum of biologists to learn about a forefront area in endocrinology with relevance to them. Twelve speakers will consider more specific aspects of certain HBPs, with a thirteenth lecture to be more general and given as the first annual Howard A. Bern Lecture in Comparative Endocrinology and presented by the namesake himself this year. On the following day, there will be an associated HBP Mini-Symposium at which students, postdocs, and others will have an opportunity to participate. The internationally recognized Journal of Endocrinology will publish the symposium proceedings. To date, general recognition of the importance of HBPs to endocrine regulation and to the evolution of endocrine systems has been limited, despite increasingly compelling evidence for their central, key roles in many systems. As far as we are aware, there has not yet been a broad-reaching symposium of this type, which orients itself on a cross-cutting theoretical basis. Particularly unique are the emphases on the multifunctional nature of HBPs and on their role in endocrine system evolution doc15296 none Amsler The benthic marine ecosystem near Palmer Station, Antarctica provides an excellent site for the study of the function and evolution of chemical defenses in marine organisms. Antarctica is unique in that sea stars and other invertebrates are the major predators on benthic animals. Sea stars are quite different from other, biting predators because they often feed by extruding their cardiac stomach over their prey for external digestion. This feeding pattern should be a particularly strong selective force for surface-sequestration of chemical defenses, especially in Antarctica where sea stars are the major sponge predator and biting spongivores are relatively uncommon. Antarctic sea stars are slow moving predators that feed on individual sponges for long periods of time and can have patchy distributions. However, they are much larger than the small grazers thought to be important in inducing chemical defenses at lower latitudes. Previous studies by the investigators have established the presence and ecological role of secondary metabolites in a wide variety of sessile and sluggish antarctic marine invertebrates and in marine macroalgae. The current project focus on two sets of questions concerning the function and evolution of chemical defenses. First, the predictions of the Optimal Defense Theory and the Induced Defense Model of plant and animal chemical defenses will be tested. The former theory predicts that chemical defenses will be differentially sequestered in tissues that are most susceptible to predation. The latter theory predicts that such predators should select for inducible defenses and these Antarctic predator-prey relationships provide the opportunity to separate the issue of predator size from the basic predictions of the model. Second, the investigators propose to utilize the ecologically dominant members of the Antarctic Peninsula s rich macroalgal flora and the distinctive nutrient environment of coastal Antarctica to test predictions of multiple, interactive roles for secondary metabolites in brown macroalgae including predictions of the Induced Defense Model. An additional test will examine whether increased ultraviolet radiation in shallow water benthic communities caused by atmospheric ozone depletion might be affecting secondary metabolite production. Because of the dominance of these macroalgae in their communities, understanding factors that influence their trophic relationships are important for understanding community dynamics as a whole. The investigators plan to continue to vigorously pursue and foster opportunities to integrate their scientific research with a variety of educational activities, including supporting undergraduate, as well as graduate and postgraduate research; and science teachers through the NSF Teachers Experiencing Antarctica program doc15297 none The world s largest and most destructive earthquakes occur on the interface between subducting and overriding plates, with interplate coupling playing an important role in their seismogenesis. Updip from this interface, the outer-rise comprises a broad and gentle upwarping of the oceanic lithosphere just before it descends into the trench. Almost 20 years ago, researchers, showed a correlation between the occurrence of outer-rise earthquakes and interplate thrust events. The improved seismological data and tools currently available enable us to develop an updated and enhanced catalog of outer-rise seismicity, including mechanisms, depths and spectral characteristics, which can be subsequently used to review models and hypotheses concerning these outer-rise events and the deformation of subducting plates. A large number of events have occurred since the earlier catalogs were compiled and, the seismic data quality, coverage and availability have improved significantly. This enables us to better constrain depth, location and focal mechanism through detailed waveform modeling. Using our new catalog, our understanding of the stress evolution within the trench and outer-rise and the relationship between seismic coupling and outer-rise earthquakes can be refined. This work is also a first step towards the development of a new generation of geodynamic models, improving the constraints on the mechanical properties of the lithosphere and the dynamics of the slab where it bends into the subduction zone. Additionally, it examines the relationship of these earthquakes to the structure of the subducting plates, as evidenced by bathymetric and reflection refraction profiles. Of particular interest is the spatio-temporal behavior of outer-rise seismicity. Although most outer-rise events are tensional, a small number of deeper events are compressional. These compressional earthquakes have been speculated to either precede an interplate thrust, occur in regions which have not experienced an interplate thrust event during the preceding few decades, or occur adjacent to an area which has had interplate slip. The bending stresses and the pull of the subducting slab are probably large relative to regional tectonic stresses or the cyclic stresses associated with seismic coupling. However, these stress perturbations may still trigger events in the outer-rise and may cause the neutral surface (the zero stress boundary between tensional upper plate and compressional lower plate) to shoal significantly. The stress changes following interplate events can thus be viewed as perturbations of the overall dynamics. From these temporal and spatial relationships, it is clear that the state of stress in the outer-rise may change in both time and space in response to interplate coupling. The record of seismicity should reflect these changes and can therefore shed light on the physical processes at work. Of greatest importance is the enhancement of our understanding of the physics of outer-rise deformation. The results will have further implications for several other disciplines. Improved knowledge of the temporal and spatial character of outer-rise seismicity is an important first step towards the development of a new generation of models of subduction zone dynamics. Since some large interplate earthquakes occur close to populated areas or generate tsunamis, compressional outer-rise events as stress build-up indicators may be important for intermediate term earthquake hazard assessment doc15298 none Fluids play an important role in the mechanics of earthquake generation. As the pressure of subterranean fluids increase, the stress required to trigger an earthquake decreases. Recent work along the San Andreas Fault indicates a fundamental paradox in that the apparent stress along the fault is insufficient, according to theory, to generate earthquakes. One possible solution is that the fluid pressures are sufficiently high that the low stress that is present is still sufficient to trigger earthquakes. The proposed work will model several sources and mechanisms for developing and maintaining elevated fluid pressures in the San Andreas Fault region. The quantitative constraints provided by this research will aid in a more thorough understanding of factors which may relate to earthquakes in California and elsewhere in the world doc15299 none Renne This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for research to establish the systematics of cosmogenic argon production necessary to establish its measurement as a routine surface exposure dating tool analogous to existing methods based on 3He, 10Be, 14C, 21Ne, and 26Al. Cosmogenic argon offers advantages over existing cosmogenic chronometers in that it is stable (hence applicable to long-term or ancient exposure dating) and less prone to diffusive loss than He or Ne. Production of 38Ar is principally by spallation of Ca and (probably) K, and is most easily measured using neutron-irradiated samples as has been performed routinely on extraterrestrial samples for several decades. Initial measurements on Antarctic samples by the principal investigators demonstrate the viability of this method for terrestrial samples, and suggest an average production rate 100 atoms gm-Ca year. Existing data suggest that 38Ar Ca exposure ages younger than 10^5 years may be determined by this method with useful accuracy. Further work on calcic minerals (apatite, sphene, clinopyroxene, plagioclase, calcite) whose exposure histories are constrained by 3He and 21Ne concentration data, will be used to determine the Ca-derived production rate. Analogous work on K-rich minerals (K-feldspars, micas) will be used to constrain the production of 38Ar from K, which should theoretically be comparable to that from Ca, using the same neutron-activation method. The analytical work will use existing samples plus new samples to be collected from the Dry Valleys of Antarctica in order to maximize cosmic radiation dosage for calibration purposes. Laboratory studies of 38Ar retentivity in appropriate minerals will be used to help evaluate our results and guide future applications. The results of this work will be important to a wide array of investigations that require knowledge of surface exposure ages doc15300 none O Beresnev Two pervasive practical problems are related to the reduced mobility of organic fluids in porous media: the difficulty in removing organic contaminants from groundwater and incomplete petroleum recovery from reservoirs. The existing solutions are expensive and often ecologically hazardous. On the other hand, the flow of pore fluids can be significantly enhanced by the application of elastic waves. The sonic stimulation is ecologically clean and economical. The proliferation of sonic-stimulation technologies has been hampered by inadequate understanding of the mechanisms by which the elastic waves mobilize pore fluids . A theory of sonic stimulation virtually does not exist. The proposing team at Iowa State University aims at gaining insight into quantitative physical mechanisms of stimulation and building a mathematical model of key phenomena in play. To study the microscopic mechanisms of fluid-sound interaction, the investigators will use the pore-scale flow visualization apparatus developed at the Department of Chemical Engineering. The unit matches the refractive index of all phases in a porous cell to make it transparent to light. A fluorescent dye is added to the organic fluid to make it the only one visible when illuminated by a laser source; the two-dimensional images are captured by a digital camera and then combined in a three-dimensional rendering of the system. The unit allows direct observation of the movement of organic ganglia subjected to sonic forcing. These investigations will be combined with the development of a theoretical and numerical model of sonic stimulation at the Department of Geological and Atmospheric Sciences. Among the mechanisms to include is the peristaltic motion, the effects of mechanical vibrations on capillary forces, coalescence of ganglia, and the boundary-film effects. The theoretical analyses will use the multi-phase continuum approach (Navier-Stokes equations) and the Monte-Carlo (pore-network) simulations. By integrating the theory development with the pore-scale investigations, a working model of the sonic stimulation will be built. This model will serve the basis for the applications of the new technology to environmental restoration and enhanced oil recovery doc15301 none The eastern margin of Tibet is one of the most enigmatic plateau margins in the world. Elevations rise from less than 500 m within the Sichuan Basin to more than 6.5 km over a distance of about 30 to 50 km. This is steeper than the Himalayan front, which owes its origin to the active thrusting of the Indian subcontinent under Tibet. In stark contrast to the Himalaya, however, the eastern margin of Tibet shows insignificant evidence of active thrusting. Moreover, the lack of a significant sedimentary basin adjacent to the margin and the absence of geodetic shortening further testify to the insignificance of active thrusting. New field investigations indicate that while active thrusting is indeed scarce, there is ample evidence for significant active strike-slip faulting. Initial reconnaissance field investigation reveals three and possibly four significant right-lateral strike-slip faults that trend NE, and two major left-lateral strike-slip faults that trend ~N-S. Research is now focused on determining the rates and detailed geometry of these faults, each of which are critical components in planned attempts at constraining relative crustal motions in the region. These observations are able to constrain the various proposed hypotheses and therefore enable us to understand the evolution of this part of the Tibetan margin. Early investigation has also revealed the likelihood of significant active faulting within the Sichuan Basin. This is of particular concern, because the suspect faults may represent significant strong ground motions and the Sichuan Basin is home to about 60 million people. Rates of fault slip are being determined by a careful sampling strategy whereby the ages of landforms that have been offset by faulting are being estimated by cosmogenic radionuclide analyses. The style and pattern of active faulting is being determined by a combination of imagery analysis, topographic analyses, and detailed field mapping in regions previously identified during reconnaissance field work. The combination of slip rates and fault geometry yields a set of kinematics that discriminate among the competing models doc15302 none This project will conduct service measurements for a three year Shelf Basin Interaction Phase II field program in -04. The service measurements include water temperature profiles, salinity, dissolved oxygen concentration, transmissivity, fluorescence and photosynthetically active radiation; inorganic nutrients (nitrate, nitrite, phosphate, silicate and ammonia), chlorophyll-a, salinity and dissolved oxygen concentrations; and underway measurements including temperature and salinity, standard meteorological observations, Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (velocity and backscatter), and various underway measurements made by SBI-designated science programs. A full set of service measurements will be made on two cruises each year in and and on one cruise in . A limited set of measurements will be made on mooring emplacement cruises in FY , , and . All service measurement data resulting from the work will be available at sea to all SBI investigators in scientifically useful form and will be placed on-line at a site linked to the UCAR Joint Office for Science Support (JOSS) and or delivered to JOSS (or other designated official data repository for the SBI Phase II Field Program) via express service shortly after the conclusion of each cruise. Data will be reported in preliminary, interim, and final form as appropriate for the SBI Project doc15303 none If earthquake nucleation were strictly a stress-threshold effect, then one would expect a correlation between times of peak tidal stress and regional seismicity. Failure of statistically rigorous tests to find such a relationship places important constraints on the nucleation process. Explanations of this failure to observe correlation generally involve an accelerating self-driven nucleation process that occurs on a time scale longer than the diurnal tide thereby destroying the expected synchronization. Although a general correlation between tides and earthquakes is not observed, it has recently been reported that a correlation of seismicity with tides is observed to develop during the few years before an earthquake in a finite sized region that scales with the magnitude. This emergent correlation has been interpreted as a consequence of the critical point model for regional seismicity. According to the critical point model, an earthquake, once nucleated, can jump barriers to grow large only when the crust is in a critical state that is characterized by long-range stress correlation. The rational is that the crust is more sensitive to tidal stress perturbations when it is near the critical state. If true, the emergent correlation of seismicity with tides offers another tool (in addition to accelerating seismic moment) for monitoring the approach of a fault network to the critical state, and the attendant possibility of a large earthquake. A preliminary attempt to reproduce the reported observations of emergent correlation between diurnal tides and seismicity before large earthquakes has not been successful. After reviewing published theoretical arguments in support of emergent diurnal correlation, there is no reason why, even in the critical state, it should not be destroyed by self-driven delayed nucleation. However, review of the theory leads to formulation of a new hypothesis for the tidal activation of seismicity: tidal activation occurs only when the sum of tectonic plus tidal stress exceeds the prior maximum value (analogous to the Kaiser effect in acoustic emissions). In this case the 15-day beat between solar and lunar tides predicts a strong 15-day correlation. The delayed nucleation that is hypothesized to destroy the diurnal correlation may not have as large an effect on the new longer cycle. This project is developing suitable observational techniques to optimize detection of this 15-day quasiperiodic signal and searching for it before a suit of large earthquakes in a variety of tectonic settings. also developing a suitable null hypothesis and tests for the statistical significance of any signals we find. Even if the 15-day signal is not observed, a statistically significant negative result places important constraints on the physics of earthquake nucleation. The effects of cyclic perturbations on a uniformly driven system as it approaches a critical state using a cellular automaton are being investigated. The Olami-Feder-Christensen non-conservative automaton develops long-range stress correlations leading to a critical state. Rate- and state-dependent friction is added to the automaton s failure criterion to produce self-driven delayed nucleation. Although this automaton is not realistic in its simulation of long-range elastic interactions between faults, it provides a suitable testbed for the two hypotheses being explored: 1) whether tidal activation becomes stronger near the critical state, and 2) whether delayed nucleation associated with rate and state-dependent friction is expected to attenuate the 15-day correlation to the same extent as the diurnal correlation doc15304 none Crinoids (Phylum Echinodermata) were among the most important marine organisms throughout the Paleozoic (ca 570 to 265 million years ago). They were dominant in maintaining the ecological structure Paleozoic communities, in diversity and abundance among echinoderms, and in importance as sediment contributors that ultimately led to the limestones of today. However, end-Ordovician global environmental change resulted in a mass extinction of crinoids and, ultimately, a macroevolutionary reorganization of crinoids as they diversified during the Early Silurian. End-Ordovician environmental change was caused by global cooling and sea level lowering resulting from a continental glaciation on the southern paleocontinents. A thorough understanding of the end-Ordovician biotic crisis will provide an important example of the consequences of global environmental change in deep time against which to compare global environmental changes that have occurred in the most recent past and for predicting future oceanic impacts of global environmental change. The objectives of this proposal are the following. 1) Field collection and study of crinoids in strata immediately surrounding the Ordovician-Silurian boundary, i.e. the Ellis Bay and Becscie formations. 2) Collection of samples for isotopic analysis will be coordinated with work by our Canadian colleagues in order to develop as thorough an understanding as possible of these stratigraphic sections. The plan is to sample the Ashgillian Vaureal Formation, for which isotopes are not known, and to take samples in formations that span the O-S boundary in unsampled sections in the eastern part of the island. 3) Within the time available, integrate the two data sets to further develop an understanding of whether the Anticosti Island Ordovician-Silurian succession is complete or whether there are paraconformities present that would affect the objectives of the study being proposed. and 4) provide a research learning experience for undergraduate and graduate students through field studies, laboratory research, and preparation of theses (undergraduate and graduate doc15302 none This project will conduct service measurements for a three year Shelf Basin Interaction Phase II field program in -04. The service measurements include water temperature profiles, salinity, dissolved oxygen concentration, transmissivity, fluorescence and photosynthetically active radiation; inorganic nutrients (nitrate, nitrite, phosphate, silicate and ammonia), chlorophyll-a, salinity and dissolved oxygen concentrations; and underway measurements including temperature and salinity, standard meteorological observations, Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (velocity and backscatter), and various underway measurements made by SBI-designated science programs. A full set of service measurements will be made on two cruises each year in and and on one cruise in . A limited set of measurements will be made on mooring emplacement cruises in FY , , and . All service measurement data resulting from the work will be available at sea to all SBI investigators in scientifically useful form and will be placed on-line at a site linked to the UCAR Joint Office for Science Support (JOSS) and or delivered to JOSS (or other designated official data repository for the SBI Phase II Field Program) via express service shortly after the conclusion of each cruise. Data will be reported in preliminary, interim, and final form as appropriate for the SBI Project doc15306 none Tarduno Geomagnetic paleointensity data from Proterozoic and Archean rocks can provide insight into the origin and early history of the Earth s magnetic field. This interval is of particular interest because it may mark the time of growth of the solid inner core. However, paleointensity measurements are difficult because of alteration induced during standard (Thellier) laboratory heating procedures. The investigators have developed an approach to measure paleointensity using single plagioclase crystals that has potential for studying the early geodynamo. Plagioclase crystals, which contain nanometer-sized magnetic inclusions, are less susceptible to experimental alteration than many bulk-rock samples. Preliminary rock magnetic and Thellier analyses of plagioclase crystals separated from 2.45 billion-year-old mafic dikes from Karelia (Russia), provide the basis for this work. They propose field and laboratory programs to obtain time-averaged paleointensity data based on single plagioclase crystals from Proterozoic and Archean dikes of Karelia and the Superior Province (Canada). These data will be used to test hypotheses concerning the early geomagnetic field, including whether a stepwise increase in paleointensity occurred related to inner core growth, and whether the early field had large octupole components. This work includes support for a postdoctoral researcher, a graduate student, and several undergraduate students doc15307 none Assessment of the quality of doctoral programs and their faculty can be a powerful tool to improve doctoral education. For institutions, these assessments have been used in decisions to expand, contract, or merge programs. Potential graduate students use assessment results as part of the decision about where to apply and improved measurement could spur increased attention to the graduate student experience. State boards of higher education have used quality assessments to reallocate state resources. For administrators, the objective of improving in the ratings can be used to partially justify hiring and other personnel decisions. Scholars use ratings to examine the correlates of quality and as a yardstick to help them in designing policies to improve graduate education. These uses are consequential for all involved in doctoral education and the Conference Board of Associated Research Councils judges that a periodic review of the methodology of such assessment is essential given the significance of its use. The Conference Board of Associated Research Councils is composed of the American Council on Education, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Research Council, and the Social Science Research Council. The National Research Council proposes to conduct a review of the methodology of assessment of research doctoral programs. The outcome of this review will be recommendations for the conduct of the next NRC assessment of doctoral programs. The methodology of assessing faculty reputation will be addressed, as will the construction of direct measures of effectiveness of the education of doctoral students. The study will examine the validity of measures of scholarly reputation and the extent to which they should be uniform across fields, the taxonomy of fields, and whether a broad reputational survey is the best way to assess research quality. It will also examine how to design and incorporate valid measures of the process of doctoral education and outcomes for recent graduates. A committee of experts consisting of statisticians, survey researchers, representatives of the major disciplines, and university administrators, will carry out the review. The committee will be assisted by information gathered from topical workshops, panels charged with focusing on taxonomy and measurement for each of the disciplines, and universities that have volunteered to collect data for prototype measures. The outcome of the study will be a report with recommendations designed to shape the next assessment of doctoral programs. Provided funding is obtained by summer of , report completion is expected by February . If the committee recommends a new assessment, it will take place in -5 with data collected for the -3 academic year. Total estimated cost for the project from July through February (20 months) is estimated to be $1.2 million. We are requesting $300,000 from NSF. Other prospective funders include the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Sloan and Mellon Foundations doc15308 none Schroeder This award is to the University of Alaska-Anchorage to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners for this activity include the University of Alaska-Anchorage (Lead Institution), University of Alaska-Fairbanks, University of Hawaii-Manoa, University of Washington, Ford Motor Company, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, The Boeing Company, Kimberly Clark, Alcoa, IBM Kirkland-Washington, Bureau of Reclamation, Microsoft, Flour Daniel, Alaska Technical Center, Northwest Arctic Borough School District, White Swan High School, Confederate Bands and Tribes of the Yakama Nation, NANA DOWL Engineers, and NANA Colt Engineers. Proposed Activities The effort will bring computer technology to remote communities, provide high school students with a vision of a career in science and engineering, connect students with professionals in industry and academia, provide industrial partners with a technologically trained workforce, and develop the enabling infrastructure necessary to sustain the effort long-term. Proposed Innovation The academic institutions will establish a modern computer laboratory with space, utilities, and Internet access in a remote rural community in each state in the partnership. High school juniors and seniors in a college-ready high school curriculum will be targeted. These students will be given state-of-the-art hardware and software training. Students will have summer internships with partner companies where they will be paid cash as well as scholarship money with any of the partner universities. The students will attend a summer bridging program the summer after graduation from high school to prepare them for college. The industry partners provide $500,000 annually for the bridging program. Potential Economic Impact The program will provide hundreds of high school students with access to technology-based education and jobs. These students are from sparsely populated rural states, and most are Indigenous Americans. The economic benefits result from a highly skilled workforce for the industry partners. Potential Societal Impact The targeted students are Indigenous Americans from rural Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington. The program can be replicated for any region with an indigenous population. More than 300 students have graduated from the internship program in the past. The current award will provide needed resources to attract more students, provide more computer facilities, and interact with more industrial partners doc15278 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This is a collaborative project involving Drury University, Central Missouri State University, and Lamar University Beaumont. Despite efforts of the Calculus Reform movement, in some institutions, the success rate of students in calculus remains low. Problem-based learning has proven to be an effective pedagogical technique which addresses a diversity of learning styles, but there are no published materials for teaching the calculus sequence using it. This project is completing the writing of texts for teaching Calculus I, II, and III using a problem-based learning approach, the modified Moore method, and incorporating an appropriate usage of technology. McGraw-Hill has published Calculus I, A Discovery Workbook, written by two of the investigators, and expresses interest in publishing Calculus II and III as well. Activities include assessment of the effectiveness of this method and dissemination of the results in faculty development workshops. The investigators and the advisory board members are innovativors in the use of problem-based teaching and learning and are active in discussing this method in the broader mathematical community and in disseminating materials for use in problem-based courses doc15310 none The PI proposes to determine the direction and approximate magnitude of change in long-wavelength elevation that is the consequence of the modern flat subduction system beneath central Chile and western Argentina. The specific study area is the Sierras Pampeanas province, a broad region that is analogous to the Laramide Rocky Mountain province of North America. In both regions basement blocks are uplifted along reverse faults in the foreland of the orogenic belt (Andes Mountains in South America and Cordilleran orogen in North America). But in the North American ancient example the foreland region suffered long-wavelength subsidence due to flat subduction, whereas the Sierras Pampeanas area today stands above sea level and above neighboring foreland regions with more normal subduction angles. The purpose of this study is to test the hypothesis that the Sierras Pampeanas region has risen (at long wavelength) during flat subduction. This project is a study of a continental interior whose objective is to constrain the subduction process. Its utility is tectonic, even if its methods are stratigraphic. Flat subduction merits focused study because it presents an excellent opportunity to view the properties of subducting plates and their interactions with overriding plates from a different perspective, which will shed light on normal subduction systems as well as flat-slab systems. The nature of contact between a subducting slab and an overriding plate is of enormous human importance, responsible for the vast majority of the world s seismic budget. But for seismological studies and mechanical models of plate interactions to lead to fruitful insight and accurate predictions, we must have geological constraints on the long-term responses of the overriding plates to the subduction zone processes. The PI proposes to compare modern long-wavelength topography of the Sierras Pampeanas to the topography when flat subduction began using three means of characterizing the middle Miocene paleo-topography. First, a graduate student and the PI will collaborate with Argentine colleagues to determine the extent of middle Miocene marine horizons across the Sierras Pampeanas. Such units are moderately well constrained near the northern and eastern extremes of the region and hypothesized to reach central sectors of the Sierras Pampeanas, but that hypothesis needs critical testing. Second, They will use seismic reflection data (provided by Repsol-YPF) to construct transects of the relief on the basal surface across which the middle Miocene strata onlapped, and then the relief on the surface across which the upper Miocene strata were draped. One transect will span most of the province from north to south, and a second will span the Sierras Pampeanas from west to east. Third, they will take advantage of the fact that a peneplain-like low-relief surface pre-dated the Miocene deposits and use this as a structural marker in both the ranges and basins. They will construct a Digital Elevation Model of current elevations of that pre-Miocene surface and remove from it the short-wavelength deformation across late Miocene to Recent faults. Comparison of the long wavelength elevation variations of this partially corrected surface to the modern long-wavelength topography, to the transects of relief underlying the middle and upper Miocene strata, and to the marine shoreline will reveal sectors that uplifted or that subsided during flat subduction doc15311 none OCE: The study will measure sedimentary denitrification rates at selected sites in the Chukchi-Beaufort continental shelf regions of the Artic Ocean as part of the Shelf Basin Initiative (SBI). Overall denitrification by facultative anaerobic bacteria in this region is a function of several factors including the oxygenation state of underlying sediments, spatial and temporal variation in organic matter inputs, bottom water nitrate concentrations, and the rates of sedimentary bioturbation and bioirrigation as well as water column processes. Denitrification along the wide Artic shelves is currently estimated to be a significant portion of the global oceanic denitrification rate and additionally responsible for consuming a significant fraction of the pan-Artic inorganic nitrogen budget. Denitrification in this region will likely be subject to the impact of global climate change brought about by either altered circulation patterns, such as changing inflow patterns of high nutrient Pacific waters through the Bering Straits, or climate driven changes in ecosystem structure and function resulting from altered sea-ice distributions. In order to better understand the present variability of nitrogen cycling in this Arctic shelf basin, the investigators will extend a limited number of denitrification rate measurements previously made in the region, and relate these to one or more of a number of contributing environmental drivers doc15312 none This award supports a program of field surveys of an area within the large, well-developed megadune field southeast of Vostok station. The objectives are to determine the physical characteristics of the firn across the dunes, including typical climate indicators such as stable isotopes and major chemical species, and to install instruments to measure the time variation of near-surface wind and temperature with depth, to test and refine hypotheses for megadune formation. Field study will consist of surface snowpit and shallow core sampling, ground penetrating radar (GPR) profiling, GPS topographic and ice motion surveys, AWS installation, accumulation ablation measurements, subsurface temperature, and firn permeability studies. Field work in two successive seasons is proposed. Continent-wide remote sensing studies of the dunes will be continued, using the new group of instruments that are now, or will shortly be available (e.g., MODIS, MISR, GLAS, AMSR). The earlier study of topographic, passive microwave, and SAR characteristics will be extended, with the intent of determining the relationships of dune amplitude and wavelength to climate parameters, and further development of models of dune formation. Diffusion, ventilation, and vapor transport processes within the dune firn will be modeled as well. A robust program of outreach is planned and reporting to inform both the public and scientists of the fundamental in-situ and remote sensing characteristics of these uniquely Antarctic features will be an important part of the work. Because of their extreme nature, their broad extent, and their potential impact on the climate record, it is important to improve our current understanding of these. Megadunes are a manifestation of an extreme terrestrial climate and may provide insight on past terrestrial climate, or to processes active on other planets. Megadunes are likely to represent an end-member in firn diagenesis, and as such, may have much to teach us about the processes involved doc15313 none Biological Sciences (61) The Department of Biology at Washington and Lee University is expanding and updating its course curriculum in the plant sciences. Currently, the department offers three courses related to the plant sciences and the material is limited primarily to taxonomy and systematics. A general review of photosynthesis is presented in General Biology as well as in an upper division botany course. The primary goal of this project is to modify the plant portion of the General Biology laboratory course, which uses functional but outdated equipment, and to introduce two new courses in plant biology. An additional goal is to integrate concepts within courses across biological levels of organization and to establish the importance to students of understanding that integration. Utilizing plants as the model system, gaps between molecular biology, biochemistry, cellular biology, physiology, and organismal biology will be bridged. These goals are being met by adapting previously implemented models from Grinnell College (ILI # ) and the University of Connecticut (ILI # ) into a series of courses: general biology, a new plant biology course and into and a new upper level experimental plant biology course. Standard methods from all levels of biological organization are being utilized, providing exposure to a variety of techniques (from molecular to organismal) that enrich the understanding of plant biology for a population of biology students with diverse career plans. The equipment being acquired (6 plant physiology workstations, two growth chambers, mini SDS-PAGE Western transfer equipment, a portable photosynthesis system, and a portable chlorophyll fluorescence system) enable students to obtain organismal, physiological and biochemical data in the lab, as well as in the field, and will successfully integrate biological levels of organization doc15314 none This project is a three-year laboratory study involving the reactions of ozone with alkenes and the reactions of peroxy radicals with nitrogen oxide in the lower troposphere. This study is focused on identifying and characterizing the role of short-lived intermediates (Criegee intermediates) in these reactions. The P.I. is in the process of building a system of flow reactors with infrared and ultraviolet visible spectroscopy to carry out the study. This project is expected to contribute to a better understanding of atmospheric oxidation mechanisms leading to the formation to tropospheric ozone doc15315 none The mid Cretaceous (Albian) is recognized as a greenhouse world under which atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, mean annual global temperature, and global precipitation rates were all much higher than present day. Geologic proxy data as well as general circulation models (GCM s) have been utilized in attempts to quantify climate variables (e.g. temperature and precipitation rates). We have utilized the oxygen isotopic composition (18-O) of siderite in spherical nodules (sphaerosiderites found in wetland paleosols) and an isotope mass balance model to quantify changes in precipitation rates along the coastal plains of the Cretaceous Western Interior Basin (KWIB) of North America (Kansas to Alaska). Our calculations suggest that at mid-high latitude precipitation rates greatly exceeded modern rates (290-390% greater in mid latitudes and 450% greater at high latitudes), that the subtropical dry-belt region had a greater precipitation deficit (i.e. was drier), and that the precipitation rates in the tropical-equatorial regions did not differ significantly from the modern. While our precipitation rates at mid latitudes and the sub-tropical dry belts precipitation deficit estimates are much greater than those estimated by GCM s, our tropical-equatorial region precipitation rates are much lower than GCM s estimates. However, empirical data from the tropics and sub-tropics that are needed to further constrain our model are lacking. This project will expand the northern hemisphere paleolatitudinal 18-O proxy coverage for the mid-Cretaceous (Albian-Cenomanian) to cover the mid-Cretaceous Americas of the northern hemisphere. The expanded latitudinal coverage will allow 1) refinements of isotope mass-balance models and constrain precipitation-evaporation fluxes for the sub-tropical to equatorial regions; 2) minimize uncertainties on modeling the hydrologic cycle in the northern hemisphere; and 3) better quantification of vapor sources and moisture recycling for the KWIB during the Albian. Paleoprecipitation 18-O compositions in the dry-belt region (15 to 30 N paleolatitude) will be determined by sampling and analyzing calcretes in siliciclastic and carbonate coastal plain deposits, and limestones from isolated carbonate platforms in Texas and Mexico, and freshwater lacustrine carbonates in central and southern Mexico. Equatorial (~10 S to 10 N paleolatitude) paleoprecipitation 18-O values will be determined by sampling and analyzing sphaerosiderites from nonmarine and coastal plain deposits in Colombia doc15316 none transfer. The scientific goal of the inquiry is to gain an understanding of how perceptual experience can lead to abstract conceptual understanding, and how conceptual understanding can change perceptual experience. The practical goal is to translate this understanding into general educational principles for integrating computer simulations into classroom activities doc15317 none For the past six years, the AMS has provided developing countries with the Journal of Climate and Monthly Weather Review. The program has been extremely successful in providing background materials for the scientists in those countries so that they can be part of the international policy dialogue on environmental issues. As a matter of national policy, the United States is committed to build the scientific infrastructure of the developing nations. As a result, NOAA s Office of Global Programs, NASA s Office of Earth Science and the National Science Foundation have continued to provide the support for this significant endeavor. The support has enabled the AMS to provide these two important journals to 175 organizations doc15318 none The contributions of ionosondes as standard observatory network instruments are already widely recognized in aeronomy and its current focus on space weather. Modern digital research ionosondes such as the dynasonde expand the variety, resolution and dynamic range of the products, but also of the noise. This noise is, in fact, evidence of the very essence of space weather in the upper atmosphere: It is a signature of the irregular and dynamic state of the region. In this project, some theoretical developments that have already demonstrated substantial successes of this kind are to be extended and applied to dynasonde digital ionosonde measurements. Three new products include: 1) Statistical parameters to quantify the prevailing small-scale ionospheric irregularities, such as the amplitude and the index of a power-law spatial spectrum usually applicable in the range of scales extending from about the radio wavelength to at least the radio Fresnel scale. 2) An outer scale of the small-scale irregularities, when this can be distinguished from still larger irregularities attributable to Atmospheric Gravity Waves (AGWs). 3) Local spatial diversity of these quantities, using the all-sky view characteristic of ionosondes. This can be very important especially in equatorial and auroral regions, during conditions of intense large-scale structuring. The PIs will use data from a dynasonde operating at EISCAT s auroral location; from another at the mid-latitude Bear Lake Observatory operated by Utah State University; and from an equatorial campaign, Project CONDOR of March for the above studies doc15319 none The project combines field and experimental approaches to investigate the sources, transformations, transport, and fates of dissolved, particulate and sedimentary organic matter in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. This project will take advantage of the specificity that molecular organic markers of organisms and their processes can provide to understand how the Western Arctic shelves produce, metabolize and sequester carbon, a question central for the SBI program. The proposed studies are closely linked with proposed research in other SBI phase II projects as well as international programs to give an integrated, pan-Arctic view of C and N cycling. The proposed research is directed by the following central hypotheses: 1) On time scales of physical transport across the shelf-basin boundary and interior ocean (years to decades), terrestrial organic matter contains specific, conservative biomarkers that trace riverine discharge; 2) Biological processing in shelf waters dictates the molecular signatures of organic matter deposited in sediments and exported to the Basin; 3) Episodic marine primary production fuels benthic production doc15320 none Holbrook This award is to the University of Georgia to support the activity described below for 24 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners for this award are the University of Georgia, Avigenics Inc., Georgia Cotton Commission, Georgia Research Alliance, OneGeorgia Authority. Proposed Activities The effort will focus on creating gene encyclopedias and bioinfomatic infrastructure needed to identify diversity of potential value to bio-based industries. Proposed Innovation Leveraging genomic technologies in this manner is expected to spawn an unprecedented era of innovation in bio-based industries, nurturing the development of new value-added products and intrinsic genetic solutions to agricultural challenges, in a manner that is publicly acceptable and compatible with responsible stewardship of the ecosystem. Potential Economic Impact Outcomes from this effort will include: (1) new ventures to expand and diversify regional bio-based industry opportunities, (2) empowering small businesses to compete with multinationals by partnering with public researchers as a virtual R&D resource, (3) strengthening the national science infrastructure by adding enabling tools for new plants and animals, (4) partnering with existing outreach networks to provide regional professionals with the training needed to exploit these tools, while preserving the links of the individuals to their home regions. Potential Societal Impact Young professionals will receive the education and jobs needed to provide regional economic wellbeing and remain in the region avoiding a regional brain drain doc15311 none OCE: The study will measure sedimentary denitrification rates at selected sites in the Chukchi-Beaufort continental shelf regions of the Artic Ocean as part of the Shelf Basin Initiative (SBI). Overall denitrification by facultative anaerobic bacteria in this region is a function of several factors including the oxygenation state of underlying sediments, spatial and temporal variation in organic matter inputs, bottom water nitrate concentrations, and the rates of sedimentary bioturbation and bioirrigation as well as water column processes. Denitrification along the wide Artic shelves is currently estimated to be a significant portion of the global oceanic denitrification rate and additionally responsible for consuming a significant fraction of the pan-Artic inorganic nitrogen budget. Denitrification in this region will likely be subject to the impact of global climate change brought about by either altered circulation patterns, such as changing inflow patterns of high nutrient Pacific waters through the Bering Straits, or climate driven changes in ecosystem structure and function resulting from altered sea-ice distributions. In order to better understand the present variability of nitrogen cycling in this Arctic shelf basin, the investigators will extend a limited number of denitrification rate measurements previously made in the region, and relate these to one or more of a number of contributing environmental drivers doc15322 none The process of rifting of continents to produce oceanic lithosphere is a first order phenomenon on Earth. Unfortunately, most rifted margins are buried by thick accumulations of sedimentary rock, hindering direct observation of the structures which formed during rifting. This project will address several significant questions about oblique rifting with a multi-disciplinary study of the Salton Trough in southern California. This region is undergoing active extension and right-lateral strike-slip faulting related to opening of the Gulf of California and the San Andreas fault. Exposures of bedrock are excellent and there is an opportunity to examine a plate margin caught in the process of forming. A combination of geological, sedimentological, geophysical, and geochronological methods will be brought to bear to study the partitioning of strain between strike-slip and normal faults and the accompanying sedimnetological response to each doc15323 none Under the direction of Dr. Prudence Rice, Mr. William Duncan will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. Mr. Duncan has participated in long term NSF supported archaeological to reconstruct late prehistoric population distribution and social organization in the Peten lakes region of northern Guatemala. After devolution of classic Mayan civilization in this region, local Mayan groups nucleated into smaller social entities until their ultimate conquest by the Spanish. Through combined archaeological, historical and ethnographic work the team has traced continuities through time and correlated late prehistoric and extant Mayan populations. This provides an excellent opportunity to trace change over time and evaluate, for example, the impact of such events as the classic Mayan collapse and the Spanish conquest. Dr. Duncan will focus on burial ritual. Because burials - both skeletal remains and associated grave offerings - are often well preserved in the archaeological record they are the focus of considerable scientific attention. Most societies have strict rules governing their form and through analysis of grave remains it is often possible to work backwards and reconstruct multiple aspects of social organization. In the course of the Northern Peten work, many burials from multiple Postclassic groups have been recovered. With NSF support, Mr. Duncan will expand and analyze this sample. He has noted that burials vary along multiple axes. Some are domestic and associated with individual dwellings. Others are multiple in nature and likely took place in a broader civic context. Within this latter distinct variants are evident. Based on both Middle American and world wide ethnographic comparison it is postulated that different burial variants served different purposes: in some cases the goal was to move the soul onwards to an afterlife. In others, the reverse was the case. Based on an ethnographically derived set of criteria Mr. Duncan will analyze methods of burial and compare them across different contexts and different social groups. He will also conduct an analyses of the skeletons themselves and use a set of discrete dental traits with a high degree of heritability to examine degree of relationship among and between individuals. This research is important for several reasons. It will provide insight into prehistoric Mayan social organization and the results will be of interest to many Middle Americanists. Through a unique combination of archaeological and biological approaches it will help to develop an analytic technique of potentially wide applicability. Finally it will assist in training a promising young scientist doc15262 none Bickford Valley Large anorthosite bodies associated with high-grade regional metamorphism and anatectites are nearly restricted to orogens of Precambrian age. They may indicate different conditions for Precambrian tectonics or different circumstances of plate interactions, however to test various models for their formation an accurate temporal framework for the development of metamorphism, anatexis, melt accumulations and emplacement in orogens is required. This project will utilize the well studied Adirondack sector of the Grenville orogeny which contains classic anorthosite plutons to develop a detailed chronology of events. Results are expected to produce sufficient data to test models of anorthosite development, which will have applications in other Precambrian orogenic belts doc15325 none The study will use a series of aircraft flights out onto Artic ice fields in the SBI work areas during March and April of years and to obtain hydrographic, nutrient and other chemical tracer distributions representative of end-winter - early spring conditions of the underlying water column. These late winter samples will be used to complement additional Shelf Basin Initiative (SBI) cruise hydrography in this region. Hydrography (temperature, salinity, density) will be profiled from the ice surface to 250m or the sea floor depending on water depth. Additional samples will be taken for nutrients, d 18O and possibly dissolved inorganic carbon parameters. The study areas will include transects out from Point Barrow (Alaska) to W, a transect across the shelf-slope break at W, and a transect across the shelf break at W, along the location of a current meter mooring line which is deployed as part of the larger SBI experiment doc15326 none We plan to investigate the internal features of cephalopod molluscs from Permian deposits in North America. In particular, we are studying the remains of soft tissues of siphuncular cords and membranes that have been preserved by early diagenetic phosphate mineralization in Permian cephalopods from Buck Mountain, Nevada. This research represents a follow-up study of our initial discovery of preserved membranes in three ammonoid specimens from this locality. We plan to expand this discovery with our primary objective the examination of the Buck Mountain cephalopod fauna for preserved membranes and soft tissues. This fauna includes prolecanitids, goniatitids, and nautiloids and is housed in Ohio University and Boise State University. We will prepare these cephalopods using acidification techniques and then examine the specimens with scanning electron microscopy. The study of the remains of soft tissues and membranes in Paleozoic cephalopods has previously been an unobtainable research goal. We pose two hypotheses: 1) the structures in these cephalopods are, indeed, soft tissue remains, now phosphatized, that preserve the details of their original microanatomy and 2) that these structures are homologous with those of modern cephalopods and reveal information about phylogeny and functional morphology. This study will lead to a better understanding of how these ancient and extinct animals lived and functioned in their environment. In this way, these discoveries will contribute to our fundamental knowledge of the paleobiology of fossil cephalopods doc15319 none The project combines field and experimental approaches to investigate the sources, transformations, transport, and fates of dissolved, particulate and sedimentary organic matter in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. This project will take advantage of the specificity that molecular organic markers of organisms and their processes can provide to understand how the Western Arctic shelves produce, metabolize and sequester carbon, a question central for the SBI program. The proposed studies are closely linked with proposed research in other SBI phase II projects as well as international programs to give an integrated, pan-Arctic view of C and N cycling. The proposed research is directed by the following central hypotheses: 1) On time scales of physical transport across the shelf-basin boundary and interior ocean (years to decades), terrestrial organic matter contains specific, conservative biomarkers that trace riverine discharge; 2) Biological processing in shelf waters dictates the molecular signatures of organic matter deposited in sediments and exported to the Basin; 3) Episodic marine primary production fuels benthic production doc15328 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for a study sulfate and nitrate in soils of the McMurdo Dry Valleys region of Antarctica. This goal is to quantify atmospheric deposition of sulfate and nitrate and to generate the first quantitative model for the origin, distribution, and post-depositional alteration of atmospheric sulfate and nitrate in Dry Valley soils. In addition to testing the hypothesis that landforms in the Dry Valleys have been stable for millions of years, results from this work will provide a valuable reference for quantitative soil development in hyper-arid deserts elsewhere on Earth and on Mars. The approach involves isotopic analyses of sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen in the water-soluble oxy-anions, sulfate and nitrate, in soils of differing ages and parent materials. The breakthrough that makes this proposal possible is the recent discovery of mass-independent oxygen-isotopic composition for sulfate and nitrate in Dry Valley soils that shows that atmospheric deposition has contributed a significant amount of sulfate and nitrate to the cold-desert soils over time. Recent work by the PI s identified spatial patterns in the oxygen-isotopic composition of sulfate in Dry Valleys soils and requires the existence of two sulfate end members, sea-salt sulfate and biogenic sulfate. Here, the biogenic sulfate refers to those sulfates formed by the oxidation of reduced biogenic sulfur gases (e.g., dimethylsulfide) in the atmosphere. Biogenic sulfate, due to its long residence time can travel greater distances relative to sea-salt sulfate. The isotopic analyses of oxygen and sulfur that will be done within this project will differentiate between biogenic sulfate and sea-salt sulfate in Dry Valley soils. In addition, preliminary data on the oxygen-isotopic composition of nitrate from these soils reveal exceptionally large nitrate oxygen-17 anomalies and a spatial pattern that reflects a single nitrate source rather than two sources as for sulfate. To quantify long-term atmospheric input of sulfate and nitrate and their subsequent mobility in soils of this unique environment, this project will (1) sample vertical soil profiles at centimeter-to-sub-centimeter-scale resolution, (2) systematically analyze oxygen and sulfur isotopes in sulfate and oxygen and nitrogen isotopes in nitrate, (3) examine soils of a wide range of radiometric ages and parent materials, including ancient volcanic ashes, colluvium, lodgment tills, and ice-sublimation tills, and (4) construct a simple one-dimensional transport model for sulfate and nitrate in vertical soil profiles. This project represents collaboration between a low temperature isotope geochemist and a geomorphologist who has extensive experience in the Dry Valleys region. When combined with existing radiometric isotope chronology of Dry Valley soils developed over the last 15 years, the proposed stable isotopic analyses will, for the first time, quantify the rate and style of soil development and patterned ground evolution in the Dry Valleys region. These quantitative data are of paramount importance for achieving a thorough understanding of the Dry Valleys ecosystem and for establishing baseline data for comparison with anticipated analyses on Martian regolith following a sample return mission to Mars doc15329 none Feng The travel time of water through a catchment -- that is, the time it takes for rainfall to reach the stream -- is a fundamental hydraulic parameter controlling the persistence of soluble contaminants, and thus the downstream consequences of pollution episodes. A catchment is characterized by a distribution of travel times, reflecting the diverse flow paths that rainfall can take to the stream. Thus, quantifying catchments travel time distributions should help to clarify the hydrologic mechanisms controlling flow routing in the subsurface. Understanding the timescales of transport and storage in catchments is also important for predicting how rainfall inputs will be chemically modified by reactions with catchment soils and bedrock. But despite the importance of catchment travel time distributions for watershed hydrology and geochemistry, they have rarely been quantified and the mechanisms controlling them are poorly understood. Catchment travel time distributions can be inferred from long-term time series of inert tracers, such as chloride, in rainfall and streamflow. It has recently been shown that catchment travel-time distributions can have unexpectedly long tails , implying that they can retain soluble contaminants for much longer than would otherwise be expected [Kirchner, Feng, and Neal, Fractal stream chemistry and its implications for contaminant transport in catchments, Nature, 403, 524-527, ]. The proposed research program builds on this recent work, and has four main components: a) analyses of long-term time series of rainfall and streamflow concentrations of chloride (a naturally occurring nonreactive tracer) from humid forested catchments in diverse geological settings, using spectral, autocorrelation, and cross-correlation methods to infer each catchment s characteristic travel time distribution, b) development and testing of alternative conceptual models for the observed travel-time distributions, c) construction of laboratory-scale physical models to simulate the hypothesized mechanisms underlying these conceptual models, and d) analyses of reactive tracer data, to complement the passive tracer (chloride) studies. This integrated program of data analysis, conceptual modeling, and laboratory-scale physical models is designed to clarify the mechanisms that control catchment-scale transport, storage, and mixing of waters and their associated solutes. This project is expected to lead to: a) improved understanding of catchment flowpaths and travel time distributions, and the factors controlling them, b) improved understanding of how catchment flowpaths, and reactions between aqueous and solid phases, affect the mobility of reactive solutes at catchment scale, c) improved tools for using hydrologic and geochemical time series to probe the internal workings of catchments, and d) improved methods for testing catchment flow and routing models through comparisons with field data doc15330 none Dagher This award is to the University of Maine to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners for the award include the University of Maine (Lead Institution), Maine Technology Institute, Eastern Maine Development Corporation, State Department of Economic and Community Development, The Manufacturing Extension Partnership, Maine Department of Transportation, Louisiana Pacific, Dow Chemical, State Farm Insurance, Henderson and Bodwell, The Kenway Corporation, Market Development Alliance of the FRP Composites Industry, APA the Engineered Wood Association, National Institutes of Standards and Technology, USDA Forest Products Laboratory. Proposed Activities The award will support the following activities: (1) strengthen partnerships among the University of Maine, private industry, state organizations, forest product industry organizations, and national laboratories to foster commercialization of composite reinforced wood, (2) develop innovative strategies for commercializing composite reinforced wood hybrids that can become models for other university research centers, establish commercialization projects (reinforced wood composite beams using low-grade hardwoods, disaster-resistant housing using reinforced sheathing panels, novel long-strand composite lumber beams and columns). Proposed Innovation Housing industry in the US accounts for 28% of the total construction industry, and most of the wood used is high-grade conventional wood lumber. The supply of high-grade lumber is declining in the US. Reinforced composite wood will allow the use of low-grade lumber from other species of trees in more abundant supply, and provide skilled jobs in Maine. These products will lower the cost of wood products for housing in the US. Increasing the resistance of housing to disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes will make a major impact on the economy of the nation. Potential Economic Impact Ninety percent of Maine is forested, and 25% of the state s economy is based on forest resources. The forest economy has traditionally been based on export of raw lumber with unskilled labor and few value added timber products. Other manufacturing jobs have moved from the state recently, leaving unskilled jobs and service industries (e.g., tourism) as the major source of income. Successful commercialization of composite reinforced wood will play a large role in developing a growing state economy. Lower costs for wood products for housing construction will have a major economic impact in the US. Increasing the resistance of housing to disasters will lower the cost of repair, maintenance, and insurance for disasters. Potential Societal Impact Maine ranks 29th in the nation in terms of advanced degree scientists engineers and 50th in science engineering graduate students. The job market for young scientists and engineers is bleak in Maine. The educational program will include entrepreneurial education as well as science and engineering to provide a skilled workforce for the economy surrounding the new wood-based technology economy. The housing industry amounts to $800 billion year in the US alone doc15331 none The researcher would conduct studies of the educational attainment of Asian Americans of different generations from existing longitudinal data bases of high school and college students. School performance includes the outcome of science, mathematics, English, and social studies learning. The intent of the study is to help understand whether and how Asian immigrants and their succeeding generations achieve educational mobility in particular to help identify factors that contribute to the differential outcomes of science and mathematics learning among different generations. The study should help inform policies regarding the role of public education institutions in providing education for new Americans. This project will produce papers that will be published in academic literature and distributed to government agencies. It will be of interest to the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders doc15332 none When professional mathematicians and scientists discuss the nature and origins of their own creativity, they often mention the central role played by visual and spatial thinking. But despite the apparent importance of visual spatial cognition in mathematics and science education, there is still relatively little research aimed at understanding, enhancing, and assessing spatial reasoning in math and science students. Even more, there are few efforts that seek to blend novel computational media with the sorts of spatially and mathematically rich hands-on crafting activities that influenced and motivated earlier generations of scientists. We believe that progress can be made on both these fronts--on both basic cognitive research and pedagogical development--by an effort at integration. That is: by designing playful, creative, and technologically sophisticated educational materials for exercising and enhancing spatial cognition, we can use those materials as the means to explore and understand fundamental issues in spatial cognition as well. In the course of this project, then, we plan to: Characterize the nature of spatial expertise in the understanding of three-dimensional forms, while creating flexible assessment techniques to measure development of that expertise; Devise a practical spatial curriculum of materials designed to enhance and exercise spatial cognition. This curriculum will be based on a combination of both hands-on work and creative computational papercrafting activities. Extend our current software research environments (HyperGami and JavaGami) to incorporate online spatial advisors that assist students in reflecting upon, understanding, playing with, and interpreting three-dimensional polyhedral forms; and Create new software to explore both traditional and novel realms of mathematical papercrafting, such as pop-ups, flexagons, anamorphic art, and surface models. In exploring these areas, we seek to expand the landscape of traditional mathematical papercrafts by exploiting the creative potential of computational media doc15333 none Weidner Conventional brittle failure is impossible at significant depth within Earth because the combination of pressure and temperature ensures that the flow strength of rocks is exceeded before the fracture strength. Nevertheless, earthquakes occur abundantly within descending slabs of oceanic lithosphere in subduction zones, in several cases to depths as great as 680 km, where they stop abruptly. Although the mechanism by which these earthquakes occur is unknown, their seismic signals ensure that they represent sudden failure of rock along a fault. There are two mechanisms presently known that can enable faulting to occur at high pressure. The first, dehydration embrittlement, involves generation of a free fluid phase by breakdown of hydrous minerals; the free fluid assists in opening of microcracks which is a crucial step leading to shear failure. So far as is known, this mechanism could potentially explain all earthquakes if appropriate hydrous phases are present in the mantle and if their stability fields are such that they dehydrate under appropriate conditions to yield the observed depth distribution. The second, phase-transformation-induced faulting can be triggered during the phase transformations of olivine to its denser polymorphs, which occur with increasing depth. This mechanism can potentially explain the bimodal depth distribution of earthquakes and their abrupt termination at the base of the upper mantle if metastable olivine is preserved in the cold cores of subduction zones at transition-zone depths. However, given current understanding of the phase distribution within subducting lithosphere, neither mechanism can comfortably explain the occurrence of very large earthquakes at depths exceeding 500 km. The investigators will apply their collective expertise in high-pressure technology, experimental deformation, and seismology to achieve the following: (1) test the hypothesis of reactivation of hydrated faults; (2) monitor experiments on dehydration embrittlement and transformation-induced faulting by detection and location of acoustic emissions; (3) develop improved high-pressure experimental assembly designs for in situ synchrotron experiments on shear failure; (4) use faulting experiments on both dehydration embrittlement and phase-transformation-induced faulting to place new constraints on these two faulting mechanisms doc15334 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This project is implementing online homework for lower division mathematics courses (Intermediate and College Algebra, College Mathematics, Finite Mathematics, Precalculus, Business Math I & II, and Brief Calculus) using WeBWork, a program developed at the University of Rochester. These courses service on average over students each semester. The primary objective of instituting online homework is to increase student learning in these courses. Additionally, student attitudes about their introductory mathematics courses are being improved by use of this system and by giving students an initial exposure to technology in their college education. To implement WeBWork, the project is developing libraries of problems for courses and training instructional personnel to use the system and to produce their own problems. A distinctive feature of the problem libraries is the inclusion of more extensive feedback for students when compared with most existing WeBWork problems. Dissemination is taking place through local workshops held for other educators and conference presentations. Assessment of student performance and attitudes is integrated into the entire project doc15335 none Reed This award is to Michigan Technological University (Lead Institution) to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners for this award include Michigan Technological University, North Carolina State University, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, NASA, Michigan Economic Development Corporation, Upstate Alliance for Innovation (NY), and North Carolina Technological Development Authority. Proposed Activities The award will support the following activities: (1) coupling technology transfer and sponsored research programs in the academic institutions, (2) create an inventory of knowledge assets at the academic institutions via an on-line data base, (3) managing and sharing knowledge assets among the partners via internal collaborative relationships among the partners, and any new partners. Proposed Innovation When completed the integrated knowledge management infrastructure will support university to university as well as university to industry knowledge sharing. The new system will facilitate the recognition and management of the full range of academia s knowledge assets with a sharp focus on identifying, implementing and managing partnership opportunities. The knowledge management infrastructure will be easily replicated by other academic institutions and their partners. The innovation is the research to identify which knowledge an academic institution has that has potential for commercialization plus development of the information technology needed to inventory and manage it. Included in this research is the development of methodology to identify the knowledge of interest to the various private sector partners, both current and future. Potential Economic Impact The methodologies should be invaluable to academia to recognize the value of its intellectual property and to target potential private sector and government partners needed for commercialization more effectively. Potential Societal Impact General economic wellbeing that results from new sustainable businesses will be of benefit to the citizens of the affected regions. The results will be easily replicated by other academic institutions and their regions doc15336 none Ustad This award is to the University of South Dakota to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners of the award are the University of South Dakota (Lead Institution), Black Hills State University, Dakota State University, Northern State University, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, South Dakota State University, South Dakota Board of Regents, Forward Sioux Falls, Rapid City Economic Development, Genesis of Innovation for South Dakota, Genesis Equity Fund, LLC, Small Business High Technology Institute, South Dakota Health Research Foundation, Dairean, Inc., Pacer Corporation, South Dakota Health Technology Innovations, TJ Technologies, Inc. Proposed Activities The activities include: (1) creation of a series of technology entrepreneurship education modules that will be integrated in science, math, engineering, and other subjects, (2) modify several existing business and entrepreneurship undergraduate and graduate courses to focus on technology and R&D businesses, and (3) integrate university and private sector partners into technology evaluation and development teams to move innovations and technologies to market. Current innovation courses at the academic institutions are business-oriented with little science, engineering, and technology emphasis. This award will support integration of science and engineering with the business and management courses and establishment of offices for technology transfer. Proposed Innovation The project will develop the knowledge and skills needed by students, faculty, entrepreneurs, and private sector partners to start and expand technology-based businesses in the technology business incubators being developed in South Dakota. The project involves a collaborative effort between public universities and the private sector to facilitate technology transfer into viable technology and business. The project will educate and encourage new technology entrepreneurs to start and grow new businesses. The technology sectors being emphasized are biomedical sciences and health, materials, information technology education, and biotechnology and agriculture. Potential Economic Impact The businesses formed will contribute to the economic wellbeing of South Dakota. Education of a workforce to fill positions in those businesses will be a priority. The six university campuses will lead as a source of new knowledge through research and a source of education for the businesses as well as in providing an entrepreneurial workforce. Potential Societal Impact Creation of wealth and high-paying jobs for the citizens of South Dakota will be a major outcome. Indigenous Americans will also benefit from doc15302 none This project will conduct service measurements for a three year Shelf Basin Interaction Phase II field program in -04. The service measurements include water temperature profiles, salinity, dissolved oxygen concentration, transmissivity, fluorescence and photosynthetically active radiation; inorganic nutrients (nitrate, nitrite, phosphate, silicate and ammonia), chlorophyll-a, salinity and dissolved oxygen concentrations; and underway measurements including temperature and salinity, standard meteorological observations, Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (velocity and backscatter), and various underway measurements made by SBI-designated science programs. A full set of service measurements will be made on two cruises each year in and and on one cruise in . A limited set of measurements will be made on mooring emplacement cruises in FY , , and . All service measurement data resulting from the work will be available at sea to all SBI investigators in scientifically useful form and will be placed on-line at a site linked to the UCAR Joint Office for Science Support (JOSS) and or delivered to JOSS (or other designated official data repository for the SBI Phase II Field Program) via express service shortly after the conclusion of each cruise. Data will be reported in preliminary, interim, and final form as appropriate for the SBI Project doc15338 none Geology (42) The Department of Geology at Kansas State University is obtaining several exploration geophysics instruments, including a differential global positioning system, gravimeter, and ground penetrating radar system, in order to build an undergraduate field geophysics teaching program adapted from the successful SAGE (Summer of Applied Geophysical Experience) program led by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The instruments are also enhancing our existing teacher education program. During the past two years, the department has made a commitment to improving its undergraduate geophysics curriculum by increasing the number of geophysics courses from one to five, and by increasing the number of geophysics faculty from zero to two. The geophysical equipment is being integrated into introduction to geophysics, field geophysics, hydrogeology, exploration geophysics, field methods, field camp, and introductory geology for education majors. The field geophysics course is taking advantage of a local field site, the Big Blue River valley, and students are mapping the subsurface geology using a variety of geophysical techniques doc15339 none This collaborative project is a modeling study of thermobaric instability in the ocean, and its effect on deep convection in the Southern Ocean. Thermobaric instability refers to the fact that the compressibility of sea water is a non-linear function of pressure, so that a colder and fresher layer overlying a warmer and a saltier layer may be statically stable, but become unstable if it is disturbed. That this is theoretically possible has been known for a long time, but only recently has it been considered as an effect that could actually occur in the Southern Ocean, specifically as the potential explanation of the episodic occurrence of polynyas (sizable areas of open water within the sea-ice pack) in the Weddell Sea. This evaluation of the impact of thermobaricity on deep ocean convection will be based on a numerical Large Eddy Simulation (LES) model capable of simulating directly the convection plumes and large scale oceanic flow features that would be expected with intense thermobaric overturn. Based on preliminary results of an LES model initialized and forced by conditions observed during previous oceanographic cruises to the Weddell Sea, this proposed work will combine a carefully structured series of model runs with observations to identify critical overturning processes doc15340 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for a study to investigate paleoenvironmental conditions during the Eocene on Seymour Island, Antarctica. The cooling trend that began with early Eocene peak warmth and culminated in the growth of permanent ice sheets on Antarctica in the early Oligocene marks the most significant interval of climate change in the Tertiary, both because of its magnitude and the effects it had on the composition, diversity and ecology shelf faunas. Seymour Island on the Antarctic Peninsula provides a unique setting within which the interplay between changes in climate and environment can be directly related to the concurrent evolution of invertebrate macrofaunas. Because of its high southern latitude location, the Paleogene sedimentary sequence at Seymour Island may record the timing of the onset of cooling, and the magnitude of that change through time, more precisely than less sensitive lower latitude sites. In addition, because the succession is highly fossiliferous, patterns of change in the diversity and ecology of invertebrate communities can be directly evaluated within this context of environmental change. The evolution of these high latitude shelf faunas during the Paleogene is especially important as they may represent the source of diversification for many southern hemisphere warm water faunas. Richard Aronson (Dauphin Island Sea Lab) and Daniel Blake (University of Illinois) have suggested that cooling during the Eocene had a profound affect on the ecology of shallow marine faunas at high latitudes. They hypothesize that cooling eliminated the shell-crushing predators that abound in warmer waters, thus lifting the predation pressure on the remaining molluscan fauna. In response, they predict that predation pressure by the shell drilling gastropods will show an increase through time, and that characteristic shell architectures that defend against shell crushers will show a decline. They are currently testing this hypothesis through a paleontological investigation of the Eocene La Meseta Formation on Seymour Island. However, to evaluate their hypothesis that cooling is the direct cause of ecological change, it is critical that a temperature history be assessed independently and tied directly to their documented patterns of predation. This project will work collaboratively with Aronson and Blake to generate a high-resolution temperature curve for the Eocene section on Seymour Island. This record will be derived from the d18O values of shell carbonate from several bivalve, gastropod, and brachiopod taxa sampled from the identical horizons used for their paleoecologic study. Possible offsets among co-occurring taxa (vital effects) will be quantified through intensive sampling of multiple taxa within shell beds to ensure that a meaningful composite, long-term record can be assembled. Replicate samples for each available taxon will be collected from each sampling horizon, so that variability within time horizons can be accommodated when assessing the magnitudes of change observed throughout the Eocene. Samples for isotope analysis will be collected under this project while working as a member of Aronson and Blake s field team. This will ensure that the records of temperature and faunal change are explicitly linked. Such an integrated approach will provide a more complete understanding of the evolutionary and ecological effects of cooling on the Antarctic ecosystem, and offer insight into the response of faunas to global climate change doc15341 none The objective of this research is to lay the foundation for a QoS metric that can be easily understood and can be used for the design of future packet networks. The premise of the proposed research is that Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms have not been widely employed because of both their complexity and their lack of relationship to user perceived performance. Therefore, it is currently difficult to justify the investment in complex QoS technologies while their value to the end customer is unknown. There have been cases where commercial networks have been over provisioned, resulting in all users, independent of QoS requirement or priority, receiving the same service. Based on these experiences network customers are reluctant to pay extra for QoS. Historically, the telephony QoS metric, call blocking probability, was not only easily understood but provided the foundation for network design. Clearly this metric is not suitable for packet networks like the Internet, since packet networks experience delay and packet loss in the presence of congestion. Recently, it has become increasingly apparent that temporal characteristics of the congestion episodes have the dominant effect on user perceived QoS. Reinforcing the increasing importance of the temporal characteristics of congestion is the recent work in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) on measurement-based temporal QoS metrics. Once congestion occurs at a bottleneck point in the network it tends to persist and cause a user observable impairment. Thus, there is a need to increase our understanding of the temporal characteristics of congestion. To address this issue a new QoS metric is defined, the rate of congestion events per unit time, and a research effort identified to develop analytic methodologies to study this QoS metric. Specifically, this research will focus on: 1) predicting the frequency of congestion events for long range dependent (LDR) like traffic, i.e., fractional Brownian motion, in a network context, 2) developing simple approximations for predicting the frequency of congestion events, 3) validating the resulting prediction methodologies for networks using real high resolution traffic measurements, 4) developing efficient techniques to measure the rate of congestion events, and 5) relating the congestion event metric proposed here to new measurement- based temporal QoS metrics. A rigorous definition is proposed for the time between congestion episodes, which leads to the application of first hitting time analysis for its prediction. The proposed research will exploit some recent theoretical results as well develop new methods for predicting first hitting times for a realistic traffic. Network users have been struggling to quantify their perceived performance. The new QoS metric proposed here summarizes the network component of performance in one easily understandable number. Equally important, the proposed metric is structured in such a way that it can be used for network engineering. We expect the proposed metric, combined with accurate prediction techniques, will play an important role in designing future packet networks doc15342 none McGruder This award supports a planning visit to South Africa in August for Professor Charles McGruder, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY. Professor McGruder, who is the President of the National Society of Black Physicists, will meet with leading South African scientists to formulate joint research projects between graduate students in the United States and South Africa. He will also meet with Patricia Whitelock, Deputy Director of the South African Astronomical Observatory, to discuss a planned graduate course in basic space science to attract students from all over Africa doc15343 none Siginer This award is to Wichita State University to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners are Wichita State University (Lead Institution), Boeing Aircraft Company, Cessna Aircraft Company, Raytheon Aircraft Company, Brittain Machine Inc., Delmia Corporation, Kansas Technology Enterprise Corporation, and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. Proposed Activities The broad objectives of the project include: foment the use of integrated virtual reality models of manufacturing systems by the partners to design, improve, and operate the manufacturing systems, and teach the workforce (new graduates as well as current industry personnel). The following activities support these objectives: integrate the curricula of the industrial engineering and manufacturing engineering programs at Wichita State University using the model that ties the courses together and integrates the applicability of and interrelation between the knowledge and skills gained, provide the students with real-world experience in manufacturing systems, and transfer the computer modeling tools to industry. Proposed Innovation The partnership will provide industry with computer modeling tools that are more realistic and system-based for aircraft manufacturing. The new curriculum will provide students with state-of-the-art real world engineering experience that is closer to the needs of the regional aircraft industry. Potential Economic Impact Wichita is home to major manufacturing facilities of Boeing Aircraft Company, Bombardier Learjet, Cessna Aircraft Company, and Raytheon Aircraft Company. Aviation is responsible for 10% of the earnings in the State of Kansas, and manufacturing is responsible for 60% of the income in Wichita. Since aircraft manufacturers face stiff global competition, innovation is necessary to maintain economic and technological superiority in the aviation manufacturing business. Having state-of-the-art tools and a workforce educated and trained with these tools is absolutely required for survival in this industry sector. Potential Societal Impact Economic well being and jobs for this region are critically dependent upon the aviation industry s maintaining its competitive advantage with tools and people trained to use them doc15344 none The Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention in cooperation with the Playful Invention and Exploration Network (a consortium of six museums) will develop Invention at Play. This will be a traveling exhibit in two sizes (3,500 sq. ft. b) experience their own playful and inventive abilities; and c) understand how children s play parallels processes used by innovators in science and technology. The exhibit will be divided into three sections: 1) the Invention Playhouse where visitors will be offered a variety of creative play activities to help them understand how playing builds creative and inventive skills; 2) Case Study Clusters where visitors will learn about the playful habits of five inventors, and 3) Issues in Invention and Play where visitors learn about ideas and debates among theorists who have linked inventive processes to children s play. This exhibit is based on documentation collected by the Lemelson Center since from and about inventors of the past and present, and symposia they have organized to examine the characteristics of innovative processes. This research has led to new insights into remarkable parallels between children s play and the way inventors approach their work. A series of complementary educational activities and programs will be developed and documented in an Educational Manual. These programs will be aimed at diverse audiences including families, parents, teachers and other groups in science and children s museums nationwide and will help extend the impact of the exhibit theme beyond the exhibit itself. Teacher workshops will be developed and arranged for each venue along with a special teacher s manual that will be distributed during exhibit-related school events offering a variety of activities on the themes of inventive play, creative model of problem solving, and exemplary tales of playful events and habits in the lives of interesting American inventors. RK & Associates have done the front-end audience surveys for this project and will do the summative and remedial evaluation work. The exhibit prototyping will be done by the Science Museum of Minnesota exhibit contractors doc15345 none Craig This award is to Montana State University (Lead Insititution) to support the activity described below for 24 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners include Montana State University (Lead Institution), AdvR, Inc., Tektronix, Inc., Scientific Materials Corporation, IBM Almaden Research Center, ILX Lightwave Corporation, MSU Techlink Center, Gallatin Development Corporation, and Montana Board of Research and Commercialization Technology. Proposed Activities The partners will collaborate to develop the requisite technology and to incorporate it into various operational optical communications and computing systems. The Lead Institution will do fundamental research and transfer the results to the partner companies. Two companies will assist in the development of the technologies based on the research results. Two of the partner companies will provide insertion platforms into systems level products. One company will provide fabrication facilities for the products. The not-for-profit partners will ensure a pro-business climate for establishment of new small and medium-sized companies. The state partner will provide funds when needed to promote the development and commercialization of promising technologies. This effort builds upon a new state-funded center for optoelectronics, named the Spectral Information Technologies Laboratory. The charter of the laboratory includes the directive to perform transfer of technology that results form basic research on optics. Proposed Innovation The consortium of companies, university, and public partners cover the entire chain from research to development, to insertion, to fabrication to development of business opportunities, to funding for formation of companies necessary to transform new research into commercial activities. The optical technologies covered will have a large role in the future of information technologies that underlie the current innovation economy of the last ten years. Potential Economic Impact Montana s economy is currently in the bottom 10% nationally. The population of the state is below 750,000. Creation of new high-tech jobs in the state will have a major impact. Potential Societal Impact The proposed activity will use the research and education of the state university system to promote new high-paying jobs for bright Montana citizens. Heretofore, most university graduates had very limited opportunity for jobs in the state, making the state a net exporter of highly educated talent. The resulting income will raise the economic wellbeing for the entire state doc15271 none This study will investigate how the Antarctic Slope Front and continental slope morphology determine the exchanges of mass, heat, and fresh water between the shelf and the deep ocean, in particular those leading to outflows of dense water into intermediate and deep layers of the adjacent basins and into the world ocean circulation While the importance to the global ocean circulation and climate of cold water masses originating in the Antarctic is unquestioned, the processes by which these water masses enter the deep ocean circulation are not. The primary goal of this work therefore is to identify the principal physical processes that govern the transfer of shelf-modified dense water into intermediate and deep layers of the adjacent deep ocean. At the same time, it seeks to understand the compensatory poleward flow of waters from the oceanic regime. The upper continental slope has been identified as the critical gateway for the exchange of shelf and deep ocean waters. Here the topography, velocity and density fields associated with the nearly ubiquitous front must strongly influence the advective and turbulent transfer of water properties between the shelf and oceanic regimes. The study has four specific objectives: [1] Determine the mean frontal structure and the principal scales of variability, and estimate the role of the front on cross-slope exchanges and mixing of adjacent water masses; [2] Determine the influence of slope topography and bathymetry on frontal location and outflow of dense Shelf Water; [3] Establish the role of frontal instabilities, benthic boundary layer transports, tides and other oscillatory processes on cross-slope advection and fluxes; and [4] Assess the effect of diapycnal mixing, lateral mixing identified through intrusions, and nonlinearities in the equation of state on the rate of descent and the fate of outflowing, near-freezing Shelf Water doc15347 none Caron Phototrophic and heterotrophic protists are ubiquitous in extreme cold-water environments where they are central to the production and utilization of energy and the cycling of elements. The dominance of protists in Antarctic food webs indicates major ecological and biogeochemical roles for these unicellular eukaryotes. Understanding the structure and diversity of these communities, and the adaptations that allow these assemblages to flourish near the lower limit of temperature in the ocean, is of fundamental importance to biological oceanography and to understanding the activities and evolution of life on our planet. The diversity of protistan assemblages has traditionally been studied using microscopy and morphological characterization. Due to the tedious nature of this approach and the inherent lack of taxonomic characters associated with most small protists, these approaches are inadequate for ecological studies of these communities. Molecular methods that utilize gene sequences for the identification and quantitation of naturally occurring protists offer a solution to this problem. This project will address issues of protistan community structure, population abundance, and adaptation to life in extreme cold through molecular and physiological studies on assemblages in the seawater and ice habitats of the Ross Sea, Antarctica. Research will focus primarily on species of phagotrophic protists (protozoa) which are ecologically important but for which no information currently exists. The work is designed to contribute new understanding concerning the biodiversity of protistan assemblages of coastal Antarctica, provide tools for ecological studies of these assemblages, and produce benchmark data on the basic physiological processes of protistan species in this extreme cold-water environment doc15348 none This proposal requests funding to support the ACM Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MobiHoc). The symposium will be held October 4-5, in Long Beach, California doc15349 none American children spend many hours with media each day. Although much of this time involves television viewing, an increasing amount involves participation with digital interactive entertainment technologies, including the Internet. Even television as we know it will soon change dramatically, with digital television adding improved clarity of images and the opportunity for interactivity. Knowing how to use these interactive technologies will be a necessary skill for an educated workforce in the 21st century and may be a gateway to studying science and technology. Therefore, knowing how children use and learn from these digital technologies is an important step in ensuring that children will develop these basic skills. Although children invest their free time heavily in electronic entertainment media, relatively little is known about how new interactive media impact children s learning in informal learning contexts. One problem is that the field is interdisciplinary. Researchers examine diverse issues rather than examine specific areas of interactive digital media systematically and then consolidate that knowledge into a central information base. Another problem is the rapid change in digital technologies, making researchers one step behind the latest developments. One outcome of these problems is a poor knowledge base for understanding of how new digital entertainment technologies influence children s learning. Over the next 5 years, this Center will advance theory and method in how children learn through digital interactive entertainment media. Using an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the fields of psychology, human development, communications, sociology, anthropology, and medicine, researchers will explore multiple levels of analysis in order to explicate the role that dialogue, in the form of interactivity and identity, play in children s learning from entertaining interactive digital technologies. At a macro level, two types of survey will be conducted to document patterns of change and similarity over time in children s access to, and use of, new and emerging digital platforms. These macro level studies will guide the direction of micro level experimental, observational, and ethnographic studies that will examine what interactivity is and how and what children learn from online digital experiences. Parallel research activities will examine children at different age groups, providing both cross-sectional and longitudinal findings on children s uses of media and the impact of media on their development. Overall, these research activities will expand the knowledge base about: 1) the kinds of digital media that are emerging; 2) the kinds of interactive digital media experiences children choose to have; 3) the impact of these interactive experiences on children s long-term social adjustment and academic achievement; 4) how specific kinds of interactions with digital technologies impact children s learning; 5) how interacting with each other online influences children s learning and identity construction; and 6) how observational and interactive experiences are represented in the developing brain. This knowledge base will be disseminated in published form in professional journals, through presentations at national and international conferences, and via interconnected websites to create synergistic activities among the researchers, policy makers, child advocacy groups, and creators in the children and digital media field. The Children s Digital Media Centers, based at Georgetown University, will also include the University of Texas at Austin, Northwestern University, and the University of California Los Angeles. Centers will include a Steering Committee and an Advisory Board of distinguished colleagues doc15350 none Silverman This award is to the University of Southern California to support the activity described below for 24 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners for the effort are the University of Southern California (Lead Institution), California State University Fresno, Caltech, Claremont Graduate University, University of Arkansas, University of Nevada-Reno, University of Pittsburgh, NASA Ames, California Technology Trade and Commerce, LA Economic Development Corporation, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, Niagara Broadband, and National Collegiate Innovators and Inventors Alliance. Proposed Activities The partners propose to create and implement a national Technology Transfer and Commercialization Network to coordinate and provide a variety of resources and knowledge so that network users can collaborate and innovate. The activity will provide private sector partners that supply needed technology, financial, and legal expertise, national labs and state and local governments that assist in firming and evaluating the program, academic partners that supply vital content and structure. The partnership will allow the partners and their clients to be successful innovators, sustaining the partnership in the future. Proposed Innovation The proposed network of academic institutions will provide a variety of resources and knowledge to partners, especially under-served schools, that they could not generate on their own. The infrastructure will allow academic institutions to move their intellectual property into commercialization through partnerships with venture capital, private companies, start-ups etc. The combined engineering expertise of the partners will provide resources to small companies that they could not afford otherwise. The business school expertise of the major academic institutions will be available for small universities and businesses alike. Potential Economic Impact The partnership will stimulate and support innovation growth by linking sources of knowledge and expertise with those needing such sources to make their enterprises prosper, particularly those in under-served areas. The resulting economic growth and development will generate additional resources to sustain the partnership. Potential Societal Impact Creation of economic wellbeing and jobs for people in under-served areas will have a beneficial effect on the people of those areas doc15322 none The process of rifting of continents to produce oceanic lithosphere is a first order phenomenon on Earth. Unfortunately, most rifted margins are buried by thick accumulations of sedimentary rock, hindering direct observation of the structures which formed during rifting. This project will address several significant questions about oblique rifting with a multi-disciplinary study of the Salton Trough in southern California. This region is undergoing active extension and right-lateral strike-slip faulting related to opening of the Gulf of California and the San Andreas fault. Exposures of bedrock are excellent and there is an opportunity to examine a plate margin caught in the process of forming. A combination of geological, sedimentological, geophysical, and geochronological methods will be brought to bear to study the partitioning of strain between strike-slip and normal faults and the accompanying sedimnetological response to each doc15352 none T. Guy Masters The PI proposes to convene a symposium at Scripps Institute of Oceanography in theoretical and computational seismology. As discussed in detail in the proposal, the conference is being held to bring together experts in theoretical seismology to address the explosion of observational data sets in seismology and what is necessary to keep parallel advances in theory computation. The issues being addressed are central to understanding Earth dynanics, and will be crucial for the optimization of the MRE-funded USAffay component of Earthscope. Funds will be used to offset travel and accommodation expenses for participants (especially students and post docs) and to pay for publication costs of a symposium volume. The Pls requested $18,000 in support, but I asked for a revised budget and have agreed to provide funds at the level of $15,000 doc15353 none Interdisciplinary (99) By integrating computer ethics across the curriculum, this project addresses the following concerns: 1) the increased use of instructional technology in the classroom; 2) the growth of enrollment in online distance education programs; 3) the need to improve the knowledge of ethical, social and legal issues in computing of women and under-represented minorities; and 4) the limited ties between technology and other disciplines. The workplan is to: 1) develop modules that are interdisciplinary in design and that capitalize on the life experiences of Mercy students for all the general education courses offered at the College; 2) develop modules addressing the specific issues of online distance learning courses; 3) lead workshops on designing ethics modules for all courses for the Mercy faculty on a faculty seminar day; 4) design and conducting an online workshop for faculty at other colleges and universities; and 5) develop a new course for computer information science majors. These curriculum enhancements are designed to: 1) increase the diversity of students who are knowledgeable about computer ethics and the related social and legal issues so the rewards of technology can be reaped by all in an equitable manner, and 2) emphasize oral, written and critical thinking competencies while focusing on the interdisciplinary connections of computer ethics. In order to accomplish this work, we are adapting a range of materials previously developed and made available to the community via NSF support. These materials include a range of case studies in computer ethics and the social aspects of computing. This course includes an online team-taught module with a faculty member of DePaul University and student-student collaborative projects from the two institutions doc15354 none Gradinger This interdisciplinary proposal aims to quantify sea ice primary production in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. The main working hypotheses are that both light and nutrient supply control biomass formation within the sea ice. While irradiance controls the rate of biomass change in spring and autumn, nutrient advection dominates during summer as meltwater accumulation below the ice impedes nutrient supply and hence limits the total biomass accumulation in the ice cover. To verify these hypotheses the project combines field studies, laboratory experimental work and remote sensing observations. This approach is designed to quantify the ice-related biogeochemical processes and to supply a regional, seasonally varying estimate of carbon accumulation in, and release from, the ice cover. The shipboard work will take place during two spring-summer (May-August) expeditions when physical, chemical and biological parameters will be measured at locations encompassing the prevalent ice types. Ice thickness and structure will be determined using an indirect measurement technique along transects varying in length from hundreds to thousands of meters. Ice cores will be analyzed to determine the vertical distributions of salinity, temperature, stable isotope concentrations, algal pigment concentrations and species composition. Primary production will be determined using optical and tracer techniques. Laboratory experimental work will assess the relationships among ice physics, chemistry and algal activity and to extrapolate results of the field measurements to early spring and late summer when shipboard sampling is more difficult. Integration of remote sensing data will contribute to regional estimates of ice algal production and its temporal and spatial variability within the study region. This proposal contributes to the goals of the western Arctic Shelf-Basin Interaction program by assessing the regional contribution of ice-associated primary production and consequent accumulation and release of carbon from the ice to the adjacent water column system. Results are expected to help in understanding and quantifying the ice algal community response to climate variations doc15302 none This project will conduct service measurements for a three year Shelf Basin Interaction Phase II field program in -04. The service measurements include water temperature profiles, salinity, dissolved oxygen concentration, transmissivity, fluorescence and photosynthetically active radiation; inorganic nutrients (nitrate, nitrite, phosphate, silicate and ammonia), chlorophyll-a, salinity and dissolved oxygen concentrations; and underway measurements including temperature and salinity, standard meteorological observations, Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (velocity and backscatter), and various underway measurements made by SBI-designated science programs. A full set of service measurements will be made on two cruises each year in and and on one cruise in . A limited set of measurements will be made on mooring emplacement cruises in FY , , and . All service measurement data resulting from the work will be available at sea to all SBI investigators in scientifically useful form and will be placed on-line at a site linked to the UCAR Joint Office for Science Support (JOSS) and or delivered to JOSS (or other designated official data repository for the SBI Phase II Field Program) via express service shortly after the conclusion of each cruise. Data will be reported in preliminary, interim, and final form as appropriate for the SBI Project doc15356 none Severinghaus This award supports the continued measurements of gas isotopes in the Vostok ice core, from Antarctica. One objective is to identify the phasing of carbon dioxide variations and temperature variations, which may place constraints on hypothesized cause and effect relationships. Identification of phasing has in the past been hampered by the large and uncertain age difference between the gases trapped in air bubbles and the surrounding ice. This work will circumvent this issue by employing an indicator of temperature in the gas phase. It is argued that 40Ar 39Ar behaves as a qualitative indicator of temperature, via an indirect relationship between temperature, accumulation rate, firn thickness, and gravitational fractionation of the gas isotopes. The proposed research will make nitrogen and argon isotope measurements on ~ 200 samples of ice covering Termination II (130,000 yr B.P.) and Termination IV (340,000 yr BP). The broader impacts may include a better understanding of the role of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations in climate change doc15357 none MacGillivray Freeman Films is producing and distributing Greek Odyssey, a large-format film presenting archaeology as a sophisticated, precise science that utilizes highly advanced technologies to reconstruct the past. The film will examine research in Athens, the Greek islands and beneath the Aegean Sea where archaeologists, geophysicists and conservationists collaborate to solve and record the mysteries of ancient civilizations. Audiences will discover the process and importance of scientific research to our understanding of Greece s past and its extraordinary influence on our world today. Outreach will include a Museum Resource Guide, Family Fun Sheet, Teacher s Guide, Website and a Scientist Speaker Series. Greg MacGillivray will serve as Co-Producer Director Director of Photography, Alec Lorimore will be Co-Producer, and Stephen Judson will be the film editor. The Lead Science Advisor is Mark Rose, a member of the Archaeological Institute of America and Managing Editor of Archaeology magazine. Science advisors include: George Bass, Institute of Nautical Archaeology, Texas A Sandy MacGillivray, Co-Director of Palaikastro excavations on Crete; and Floyd McCoy, Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Hawaii doc15358 none Kanatous This project will address the temporal development of aerobic capacity, lipid metabolism and oxygen stores in the skeletal muscles of young Weddell seals relative to aspects of the cellular environment that are important in the genetic regulation of myoglobin expression during maturation. The study will collaborate with ongoing investigations of the diving and hunting behavior of free-ranging adult and subadult Weddell Seals to investigate adaptations and the genetic control of the ontogeny of enzymatic, ultra-structural, and vascular adaptations for diving that occur in the skeletal muscles of adult Weddell seals. The first objective is to characterize the developmental changes in aerobic capacity, lipid metabolism, fiber type, and myoglobin concentration and distribution using enzymatic, immuno-histochemical and myoglobin assays in newborn, newly weaned, subadult and adult seals. The second objective is to determine the molecular controls for changes in the concentration and distribution of myoglobin in skeletal muscles during maturation. Molecular techniques will be used to determine the differences in mRNA populations in the swimming muscles of the different age classes of Weddell seals. These data will identify the proteins and transcription factors that influence the ontogenetic changes in myoglobin concentration. The results will increase our understanding of both the ontogeny and molecular mechanisms by which young seals acquire the physiological adaptations necessary to become competent divers and marine predators. In addition, this study will advance our knowledge of the molecular regulation of myoglobin in skeletal muscle, which has broader applications for human medicine doc15359 none Tectonic models have focused on explaining how orogenic belts initiate and develop in terms of plate interactions, but the related problem of how orogenies end has received relatively little attention. This project will address this issue by a detailed study of the circumstances of the ending of the Taconic orogeny in New England, and will involve extensive radiometric age dating. These and extensive existing geological data for this area will be utilized in testing several models of how orogeny terminates. Results are expected to applicable to the general problem doc15288 none Integrated paleomagnetic geochronologic study necessitates radical tectonic re-thinking in the Boston portion of the Southeastern New England Avalon Zone because new isotopic data reveal fundamental flaws in the long accepted regional stratigraphy. For example: 1. Reportedly Neoproterozoic, but previously undated Brighton volcanic interbeds from four geographically separated sections in the Roxbury Conglomerate have maximum ages of approximately 587 Ma, 490 Ma, 438 Ma and 362 Ma based on 1-4 grain zircon fractions. 2. Reportedly Ordovician Quincy Granite (based on an upper intercept date of 437 + 23 Ma) has yielded Siluro-Devonian zircons (single grain analyses with 207 Pb 206 Pb dates of approximately 410 Ma). 3. Reportedly 630 + 15 Ma Dedham Granite west of the Boston Basin has yielded a weighted mean 207 Pb 206 Pb date of approximately 610 Ma based on three single zircon analyses. Preliminary paleopoles based on these geochronological data further suggest that: 1. The previously reported Neoproterozoic Avalonian pole form the Roxbury Conglomerate is from Silurian or younger rocks. 2. Reliably dated Neoproterozoic rocks formed at low-mid latitudes rather than the previously reported high-mid latitude for the 610 to ~ 570 Ma interval. This proposal seeks funding for continued work to clarify stratigraphic and structural relationships in the Boston area as a basis for completing 5 or 6 well dated paleomagnetic poles. These poles will constrain revised interpretations of the paleolatitude of the Southeastern New England Avalon Zone during Neoproterozoic arc magmatism, its position during during hypothesized snowball earth climatic events and the timing of mid-Paleozoic accretion to North America. Oriented paleomagnetic cores will be collected at 21 new locations in Avalonian arc rocks including Dedham Granite and Mattapan Volcanic Complex, in overlying Neoproterozoic strata including the Cambridge Argillite and glaciomarine deposits comprising the Squantum Member of the Roxbury Conglomerate, in Brighton Volcanics and in several other formations of uncertain or poorly constrained age (including reportedly Jurassic intrusive rocks of the Medford dike and Calf Island sill). Twelve of these sites are also targeted for supporting geochronology and ten for geochemistry doc15326 none We plan to investigate the internal features of cephalopod molluscs from Permian deposits in North America. In particular, we are studying the remains of soft tissues of siphuncular cords and membranes that have been preserved by early diagenetic phosphate mineralization in Permian cephalopods from Buck Mountain, Nevada. This research represents a follow-up study of our initial discovery of preserved membranes in three ammonoid specimens from this locality. We plan to expand this discovery with our primary objective the examination of the Buck Mountain cephalopod fauna for preserved membranes and soft tissues. This fauna includes prolecanitids, goniatitids, and nautiloids and is housed in Ohio University and Boise State University. We will prepare these cephalopods using acidification techniques and then examine the specimens with scanning electron microscopy. The study of the remains of soft tissues and membranes in Paleozoic cephalopods has previously been an unobtainable research goal. We pose two hypotheses: 1) the structures in these cephalopods are, indeed, soft tissue remains, now phosphatized, that preserve the details of their original microanatomy and 2) that these structures are homologous with those of modern cephalopods and reveal information about phylogeny and functional morphology. This study will lead to a better understanding of how these ancient and extinct animals lived and functioned in their environment. In this way, these discoveries will contribute to our fundamental knowledge of the paleobiology of fossil cephalopods doc15362 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for a demonstration project to prove the viability of shallow ship-based geological drilling while simultaneously collecting useful cores for assessing the early history of the Antarctic ice sheets. For over three decades, U.S. scientists and their international colleagues exploring the shallow shelves and seas along the margins of Antarctic have been consistently frustrated by their inability to penetrate through the over-compacted glacial diamictons encountered at shallow sub bottom depths (within the upper 10 m) over these terrains. This is particularly frustrating because advanced high resolution seismic reflection techniques clearly show in many areas the presence of older successions of Neogene and even Paleogene sequences lying just beneath this thin veneer of diamictons. Until the means are developed to recover these sequences, a detailed history of the Antarctic ice sheets, which is an essential prerequisite to understanding Cenozoic paleoclimate and future climate change on a global scale, will remain an elusive and unobtainable goal. After four years of study and evaluation with the aid of a professional engineer (and over the course of two workshops), the SHALDRIL Committee, an interested group of U.S. scientists, has identified at least two diamond-coring systems deemed suitable for use on existing ice-breaking U.S. Antarctic Research Program vessels. The goal of this project is to employ diamond-coring technology on the RV IB Nathaniel B. Palmer in order to test out and demonstrate the feasibility of both ship-based diamond coring and down-hole logging. For this demonstration cruise coring will be attempted along a high-resolution seismic reflection profile on the continental shelf adjacent to Seymour Island, Antarctic Peninsula, an area of high scientific interest in its own right. Here the well-defined geologic section is estimated to range from Eocene to Quaternary in age, effectively spanning the Greenhouse-Icehouse transition in the evolution of Antarctic global climate. A complete record of this transition has yet to be obtained anywhere along the Antarctic margin. Following core recovery, this project will result in correlation of the paleoclimate records from the new cores with detailed fluctuations of the ice margin recorded at higher latitudes in the eastern Ross Sea by the recently concluded, fast-ice-based Cape Roberts Project. If successful, this mobile and flexible drilling system will then be available to the broader scientific community for further research in paleoenvironmental conditions and other areas of science that are currently hindered by the present gap that exists in the US Antarctic Program s technical capability to explore the Antarctic shelves between the shore-line fast-ice margin and the continental slope. SHALDRIL will be able to operate effectively in the no man s land that presently exists between the near shore (where the fast-ice-based Cape Roberts Project was successful) and the upper slope (where the Ocean Drilling Program s vessel JOIDES Resolution becomes most efficient). This technological breakthrough will not only allow major outstanding scientific problems of the last three decades to be addressed, but will also favorably impact many current U.S. and SCAR (ICSU Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research) Antarctic or drilling-related initiatives, such as WAIS, ANTIME, ANDRILL, ANTEC, IMAGES, PAGES, GLOCHANT (including PICE), MARGINS, ODP, and STRATAFORM doc15363 none The Greater Washington Educational Telecommunications Association (WETA) in partnership with BBC2 and the Open University, is producing ten half-hour television programs that explore the reality of scientific discovery. In each episode, five scientists who have been abandoned on a deserted island solve science-based challenges using only their collective expertise, wits, the island s resources and a few basic tools. In one episode, for instance, the scientists will need to: 1) calculate their location with the exact latitude and longitude, 2) create insect repellant, and 3) design and build a homemade radio. The programs capture both the disappointments of experiments that go wrong as well as the joy and excitement of success. The television series will be supported by Rough Science Adventures, field experiences where members of the public solve challenges similar to those facing the scientists in the television program, and by a Rough Science website. Outreach partners include the New York Hall of Science, the National Society of Black Engineers, and the International Educational Technology Association doc15364 none Collaborative Research: Perception-Action Foundations of Early Tool Use Dorothy M. Fragaszy How do humans learn to use an object as a tool? According to the theory of action perception coupling, to use a tool, an individual must detect potential relations between objects that allow actions with one to produce change in another (for example, object A can be used to strike object B), and establish these relations through action. To use one object to change another in a specific way (perhaps to use A to crack B open) requires positioning or aligning the objects appropriately and applying the appropriate force. The number of alignments that must be achieved and how precisely movements must be modulated influence the difficulty of mastering a particular tool. Before they begin to use objects as tools (at about their first birthday), human infants relate objects and surfaces through action, for example, by banging objects together or banging objects on a solid surface. We call these common modes of acting with objects perception-action routines . Do these routines form the foundation for the appearance over the second year of life of tool use? If so, how are perception-action routines harnessed for this new purpose? A collaborative project will investigate (1) how tool use emerges from infants perception-action routines (2) how tool use involves detecting and establishing relations between objects and surfaces (3) how skill with a familiar tool is acquired and (4) how the development of skill with hammer tools in young children differs from how capuchin monkeys (that spontaneously use objects as hammers) acquire skill in the same contexts. Taken together, the results of the proposed experiments will help us better understand how tool use develops in children and to what degree tool use represents an ability that is uniquely human. Children between 6 and 24 months of age will be videotaped acting singly with objects and surfaces that vary systematically in properties that affect banging (for example, hardness) and in features of handles. Cross-sectional studies of children s activity with unfamiliar objects, and studies of how children at different ages become skilled with practice at using hammers in varying conditions (for example, when the tool object has a handle vs. when it does not, and when they must be more vs. less accurate in where they strike) will also be conducted. These studies will be replicated with 8 adult capuchin monkeys. Capuchins readily use hammer-tools, but we do not know to what extent they master multiple relations in action as humans do. This work will contribute to knowledge of learning mechanisms that support development of tool-using skills in humans, of age-related changes in learning mechanisms, and of the special qualities of humans in this regard. It contributes to contemporary debates about the continuous or discontinuous origins of tool use in human development and human evolution, and the role of action in learning. Additional broader impacts include involvement of undergraduate and graduate students in research, exposure of the research process to the general public, and the development of a new collaborative relationship between investigators at two institutions and in complementary areas of behavioral study (developmental and comparative psychology doc15365 none Walton The project will focus on combined petrographic and geochemical analyses of altered rock core recovered from a deep drill hole near Hilo, on the Big Island of Hawaii. Some of this material comes from a 3 km-deep drill hole completed by the Hawaii Scientific Drilling Project (HSDP) in September, . The reminder will come from new samples that will be recovered when the existing hole is deepened, beginning in early . The primary objective of this project will be to develop and test models for rock alteration using an integrated analytical approach for studying the recovered core materials. Major questions to be addressed are: (1) What is the alteration history of the basaltic material which underlies Mauna Kea volcano, how has it been influenced by various types of alteration processes, and are these distinct from other forms of seafloor alteration? (2) How has this alteration affected the mineral composition and physical properties of these materials? (3) How significantly has alteration affected the chemical composition of the submarine portions of the Mauna Kea? and (4) What is the evidence regarding (proposed models invoking) deep circulation of ground waters within the interior of this volcano? Questions # 1 and 2 will be addressed through the systematic study of the alteration mineralogy. Question #3 and 4 will be addressed by detailed geochemical investigations of elemental and isotopic signatures associated with the conversion of basaltic minerals and glass to palagonitized glass, layer silicates, and zeolites. Trace element and isotopic analyses will provide the means of evaluating the exchange of basaltic, seawater, meteoric components during alteration. Stable isotopic analyses of alteration minerals should allow us to test a hydrologic model suggesting that meteoric fluids have circulated deep within the interior of Mauna Kea doc15322 none The process of rifting of continents to produce oceanic lithosphere is a first order phenomenon on Earth. Unfortunately, most rifted margins are buried by thick accumulations of sedimentary rock, hindering direct observation of the structures which formed during rifting. This project will address several significant questions about oblique rifting with a multi-disciplinary study of the Salton Trough in southern California. This region is undergoing active extension and right-lateral strike-slip faulting related to opening of the Gulf of California and the San Andreas fault. Exposures of bedrock are excellent and there is an opportunity to examine a plate margin caught in the process of forming. A combination of geological, sedimentological, geophysical, and geochronological methods will be brought to bear to study the partitioning of strain between strike-slip and normal faults and the accompanying sedimnetological response to each doc15367 none Frameworks for Integrating Nutritional, Environmental, and Neuroscience Contributions to Children s Development T. D. Wachs & B. Lozoff A workshop is planned to focus on the Functional Isolation Hypothesis. This hypothesis can serve as a theoretical framework for integrating the linked contributions of nutrition, environment, and neuroscience to children s cognitive and socio-emotional development. The core of the hypothesis is the assumption that nutritional deficits simultaneously act to adversely influence both central nervous system (CNS) development and function, as well as the level of the child s involvement with their environment and the nature of parent-child transactions. Parent-child transactions and the child s involvement with their environments, in turn, can impact the child s CNS development and functioning. Within this framework developmental outcomes are viewed as the result of the operation of linked nutritional, environmental, and CNS influences. Using the functional isolation hypothesis to link nutrition, environment, and neurosciences, a workshop is proposed to bring together 15 leading researchers from these 3 domains to discuss critical core questions that are central to the integrated study of functional isolation at the human level. The goal is to form research networks among nutritional, environmental, and neuroscience researchers that will focus on the interdisciplinary study of the nature of functional isolation and its consequences for children s development doc15368 none The Paleocene-Eocene epoch boundary at 55.5 million years before present coincides with the sudden onset of an 85,000-year greenhouse event of transient climate change, the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum or PETM, that involved release of massive amounts of light carbon into the atmosphere from shallow marine methane reservoirs. The resulting negative carbon isotope excursion [CIE] was first recognized in the deep sea, and then on land in the northern Bighorn Basin, Wyoming. In the Bighorn Basin the CIE coincides with a Wa-0 faunal immigration event including the first appearance of modern orders of mammals such as Artiodactyla, Perissodactyla, and Primates in North America, and with an abrupt but short-lived diminution in size of some mammalian lineages. Research here involves high resolution biostratigraphic investigation of continental mammals in the PETM interval. A 50-m-thick stratigraphic section containing the CIE and Wa-0 mammalian fauna is being studied around the margin of the Bighorn and Clarks Fork basins. Specific objectives include measurement of stratigraphic sections documenting marker beds and lateral facies changes in this interval; mapping of distinctive marker beds tying sections together using differential GPS with meter-scale precision; location of known fossils relative to measured and mapped bed units; location of productive new lithologies; quantification of body size change in all lineages crossing the Wa-0 interval; preparation and description of previously collected and new specimens of Wa-0 mammals focusing on the newly-discovered Meniscotherium priscum interval at the base of Wa-0; and collection of additional faunal specimens (gar scales, Coryphodon teeth, etc.) of known bed level for high resolution study of oxygen isotopes and paleotemperature through the continental CIE Wa-0 interval. The overall objective is better understanding of biotic response to short-term climate change doc15369 none Zhang Viscosity of hydrous silicate melts plays a critical role in bubble growth, magma fragmentation and volcanic eruptions. This proposal requests funding to develop a new and long-term project for viscosity measurement using a novel technique developed over the years in my lab. It is based on the equivalence between glass transition temperature and the apparent equilibrium temperature of the hydrous species reaction in silicate melt. In order to obtain viscosity using this method, the equilibrium of the hydrous species reaction must also be characterized. Such data are important in their own right in understanding melt structure, water solubility and diffusion in magma, and D H fractionation between water vapor and melt. In the three years of the grant period, we will concentrate on the following: a) speciation and viscosity at high pressures for hydrous rhyolitic melt up to 8 GPa; b) speciation equilibrium in hydrous dacitic melts and the viscosity of such melts to high dissolved H2O content (up to 8 wt% dissolved H2O); and c) development of more accurate viscosity models for hydrous rhyolitic and dacitic melts. The new viscosity model will be applied to re-evaluate previous results of bubble growth and magma fragmentation doc15370 none The goal of this Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) project is to investigate the potential performance of fixtures utilizing Light Assisted Adhesive Gripper (LAAG) pad technology; and, to characterize the design factors that are critical to its feasible implementation. In particular, this investigation will: (1) carry out machining tests to verify the dynamic load capacity of a LAAG pad; (2) carryout a dynamic response comparison between a dedicated fixture-workpiece system utilizing conventional technology versus one utilizing LAAG pad technology; (3) determine the necessary optical qualities of the light transmission system, and generate and test a practical design; and, (4) carry out laser release experiments in order to determine the impact of laser switching frequency, laser wavelength, laser power, and adhesive thickness on workpiece release time. In particular, the successful development of LAAG pad technology could lead to the following benefits: (1) The total exposed volume of fixturing necessary to restrain a workpiece will be significantly decreased, while simultaneously the dynamic stiffness of the fixture-workpiece system will be significantly increased. (2) Workpiece degradation due to pre-load deformation and contact surface brinelling and scratching will be eliminated doc15371 none Urban This award is to the University of Southern Mississippi to support the activity described below for 24 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners involved include the University of Southern Mississippi (Lead Institution), Petal High School, Jones Junior College, Pearl River Community College, Mississippi Department of Economic and Community Development, Mississippi Technology Alliance, Mississippi Technology Incorporated, Mississippi Center for Community and Economic Development, Area Development Partnership, Mississippi Polymer Institute, Office of Naval Research Laboratories, Cooperative State Research Education and Extension Service, National Institute of Science and Technology, John C. Stennis NASA Space Center, Bayer, Inc., Rohm and Haas, J.M. Huber, Eastman Chemical Company. Proposed Activities The proposed activities include: (1) develop, promote, and sustain an accessible infrastructure for innovation, (2) develop mechanisms for innovation for three model companies (an existing startup, a developing company, a new company), (3) design and implement educational program leading to the increase of the workforce. The vision is to develop a mechanism capable of translating polymer science and engineering discoveries to commercialization through development of new and retention and enhancement of existing companies. Proposed Innovation Proposed innovations include: creation of new jobs in the region, establishment of an infrastructure for beta testing and marketing to drive business plans and strategies for success, provide an educated workforce (engineers, scientists, management, sales), attraction of capital investors, provide continuing technical support for new and young companies, return of capital to the research base to ensure continued innovation. Potential Economic Impact The potential economic impacts include creation of three new companies with up to 300 new jobs in Mississippi over the next five years, establishment of an infrastructure for technical support for new companies to ensure success, establishment of an education partnership to provide a workforce from skilled laborers to Ph.D. scientists and engineers to support the polymers industry in Mississippi, attraction of investment capital to the region. Potential Societal Impact The major societal impact will be the increased standard of living for the state resulting from higher paying jobs and wealth taxes from new companies in the state doc15372 none Reconstructing and modeling climate variations over the last 30,000 years or so is one of the most important goals of global climate change research. Only by determining how the global climate varied during this period can we begin to understand the factors that controlled climate change in the past, an understanding that is crucial if we are to interpret the climate changes of today. For example, such an understanding is crucial if we are to separate natural climate variations from anthropogenically induced ones, and to predict future climate change. In this project, the investigators will use Global Positioning System (GPS) data from regions previously covered by glaciers to measure the present-day crustal motions associated with postglacial rebound. Using these data, a refined model for the history of the ice cover will be determined. This refined history can be used to estimate parameters that govern the evolution of the climate doc15373 none Davis The investigators will undertake research to obtain the most accurate and geophysically rigorous determination of global sea-level change to date. To correct tide-gauge data for the effect of postglacial rebound, the investigators will use state-of-the art theory, Earth models, and observations. A new element of the proposed research will be the use of Global Positioning System (GPS) data to correct for vertical crustal motion. This study requires careful assessment of various GPS data sets that could potentially contribute to this study, because it is difficult to achieve the required level of accuracy in the vertical rate with GPS. Nevertheless, such accuracy, at least on a regional basis, is possible. A recent analysis of GPS and tide-gauge data from Scandinavia, for example, yields a regional value for Baltic sea-level rise of 2.1 + - 0.3 mm yr. The Baltic tide-gauge data set, although potentially a powerful contributor to studies of sea-level change, has never before been used in a global analysis due to its contamination by postglacial rebound. This research will enable quantification of the relative contributions to present-day sea level change of thermal expansion of the oceans and the ongoing melting of glaciers and ice sheets, knowledge that is crucial to our ability to understand the causes and the present state of climate change doc15271 none This study will investigate how the Antarctic Slope Front and continental slope morphology determine the exchanges of mass, heat, and fresh water between the shelf and the deep ocean, in particular those leading to outflows of dense water into intermediate and deep layers of the adjacent basins and into the world ocean circulation While the importance to the global ocean circulation and climate of cold water masses originating in the Antarctic is unquestioned, the processes by which these water masses enter the deep ocean circulation are not. The primary goal of this work therefore is to identify the principal physical processes that govern the transfer of shelf-modified dense water into intermediate and deep layers of the adjacent deep ocean. At the same time, it seeks to understand the compensatory poleward flow of waters from the oceanic regime. The upper continental slope has been identified as the critical gateway for the exchange of shelf and deep ocean waters. Here the topography, velocity and density fields associated with the nearly ubiquitous front must strongly influence the advective and turbulent transfer of water properties between the shelf and oceanic regimes. The study has four specific objectives: [1] Determine the mean frontal structure and the principal scales of variability, and estimate the role of the front on cross-slope exchanges and mixing of adjacent water masses; [2] Determine the influence of slope topography and bathymetry on frontal location and outflow of dense Shelf Water; [3] Establish the role of frontal instabilities, benthic boundary layer transports, tides and other oscillatory processes on cross-slope advection and fluxes; and [4] Assess the effect of diapycnal mixing, lateral mixing identified through intrusions, and nonlinearities in the equation of state on the rate of descent and the fate of outflowing, near-freezing Shelf Water doc15375 none This study will investigate how the Antarctic Slope Front and continental slope morphology determine the exchanges of mass, heat, and fresh water between the shelf and the deep ocean, in particular those leading to outflows of dense water into intermediate and deep layers of the adjacent basins and into the world ocean circulation While the importance to the global ocean circulation and climate of cold water masses originating in the Antarctic is unquestioned, the processes by which these water masses enter the deep ocean circulation are not. The primary goal of this work therefore is to identify the principal physical processes that govern the transfer of shelf-modified dense water into intermediate and deep layers of the adjacent deep ocean. At the same time, it seeks to understand the compensatory poleward flow of waters from the oceanic regime. The upper continental slope has been identified as the critical gateway for the exchange of shelf and deep ocean waters. Here the topography, velocity and density fields associated with the nearly ubiquitous front must strongly influence the advective and turbulent transfer of water properties between the shelf and oceanic regimes. The study has four specific objectives: [1] Determine the mean frontal structure and the principal scales of variability, and estimate the role of the front on cross-slope exchanges and mixing of adjacent water masses; [2] Determine the influence of slope topography and bathymetry on frontal location and outflow of dense Shelf Water; [3] Establish the role of frontal instabilities, benthic boundary layer transports, tides and other oscillatory processes on cross-slope advection and fluxes; and [4] Assess the effect of diapycnal mixing, lateral mixing identified through intrusions, and nonlinearities in the equation of state on the rate of descent and the fate of outflowing, near-freezing Shelf Water doc15162 none Sufficiently fast fluid flows over erodible beds of sand and gravel entrain surface particles, which then roll and hop along as bedload. This project aims to develop quantitative predictive relations between fluid flow and bedload transport that more precisely incorporate the role of the fluctuating flow velocities due to turbulence, which always is present. Such relations will apply to the non-uniform or unsteady flows that are ubiquitous in streams and beneath waves and will provide new insight into the formation of erosional and depositional sedimentary features from ripples and dunes to bars and channels to sorting and grading. The project will investigate (1) turbulence structure and bedload transport over simple bedforms such as bedload sheets and low dunes, (2) turbulence structure over abrupt streamwise changes in bed roughness, (3) turbulence structure and the fluctuating forces on fixed natural bed particles, (4) turbulence structure and the fluid forces that act on bedload particles during entrainment, and (5) the modification of fluid velocity and turbulence structure by moving bedload particles. In addition, the project will further develop our discrete-particle computational model for sediment transport by (1) incorporating into it better treatment of the lift forces on bed and bedload particles and of the reaction forces on the fluid as the particles accelerate and (2) coupling it with an existing numerical simulation of turbulent flow over three-dimensional bedforms. The proposed research addresses three intertwined issues: how the forces exerted on particles on the bed and moving over it are related to the temporal and spatial distribution of the near-bed fluid velocities, how the entrainment and motion of those particles are related to the forces, and how the near-bed fluid velocities are modified by the presence of the moving bedload doc15377 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for a demonstration project to prove the viability of shallow ship-based geological drilling while simultaneously collecting useful cores for assessing the early history of the Antarctic ice sheets. For over three decades, U.S. scientists and their international colleagues exploring the shallow shelves and seas along the margins of Antarctic have been consistently frustrated by their inability to penetrate through the over-compacted glacial diamictons encountered at shallow sub bottom depths (within the upper 10 m) over these terrains. This is particularly frustrating because advanced high resolution seismic reflection techniques clearly show in many areas the presence of older successions of Neogene and even Paleogene sequences lying just beneath this thin veneer of diamictons. Until the means are developed to recover these sequences, a detailed history of the Antarctic ice sheets, which is an essential prerequisite to understanding Cenozoic paleoclimate and future climate change on a global scale, will remain an elusive and unobtainable goal. After four years of study and evaluation with the aid of a professional engineer (and over the course of two workshops), the SHALDRIL Committee, an interested group of U.S. scientists, has identified at least two diamond-coring systems deemed suitable for use on existing ice-breaking U.S. Antarctic Research Program vessels. The goal of this project is to employ diamond-coring technology on the RV IB Nathaniel B. Palmer in order to test out and demonstrate the feasibility of both ship-based diamond coring and down-hole logging. For this demonstration cruise coring will be attempted along a high-resolution seismic reflection profile on the continental shelf adjacent to Seymour Island, Antarctic Peninsula, an area of high scientific interest in its own right. Here the well-defined geologic section is estimated to range from Eocene to Quaternary in age, effectively spanning the Greenhouse-Icehouse transition in the evolution of Antarctic global climate. A complete record of this transition has yet to be obtained anywhere along the Antarctic margin. Following core recovery, this project will result in correlation of the paleoclimate records from the new cores with detailed fluctuations of the ice margin recorded at higher latitudes in the eastern Ross Sea by the recently concluded, fast-ice-based Cape Roberts Project. If successful, this mobile and flexible drilling system will then be available to the broader scientific community for further research in paleoenvironmental conditions and other areas of science that are currently hindered by the present gap that exists in the US Antarctic Program s technical capability to explore the Antarctic shelves between the shore-line fast-ice margin and the continental slope. SHALDRIL will be able to operate effectively in the no man s land that presently exists between the near shore (where the fast-ice-based Cape Roberts Project was successful) and the upper slope (where the Ocean Drilling Program s vessel JOIDES Resolution becomes most efficient). This technological breakthrough will not only allow major outstanding scientific problems of the last three decades to be addressed, but will also favorably impact many current U.S. and SCAR (ICSU Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research) Antarctic or drilling-related initiatives, such as WAIS, ANTIME, ANDRILL, ANTEC, IMAGES, PAGES, GLOCHANT (including PICE), MARGINS, ODP, and STRATAFORM.This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for a demonstration project to prove the viability of shallow ship-based geological drilling while simultaneously collecting useful cores for assessing the early history of the Antarctic ice sheets. For over three decades, U.S. scientists and their international colleagues exploring the shallow shelves and seas along the margins of Antarctic have been consistently frustrated by their inability to penetrate through the over-compacted glacial diamictons encountered at shallow sub bottom depths (within the upper 10 m) over these terrains. This is particularly frustrating because advanced high resolution seismic reflection techniques clearly show in many areas the presence of older successions of Neogene and even Paleogene sequences lying just beneath this thin veneer of diamictons. Until the means are developed to recover these sequences, a detailed history of the Antarctic ice sheets, which is an essential prerequisite to understanding Cenozoic paleoclimate and future climate change on a global scale, will remain an elusive and unobtainable goal. After four years of study and evaluation with the aid of a professional engineer (and over the course of two workshops), the SHALDRIL Committee, an interested group of U.S. scientists, has identified at least two diamond-coring systems deemed suitable for use on existing ice-breaking U.S. Antarctic Research Program vessels. The goal of this project is to employ diamond-coring technology on the RV IB Nathaniel B. Palmer in order to test out and demonstrate the feasibility of both ship-based diamond coring and down-hole logging. For this demonstration cruise coring will be attempted along a high-resolution seismic reflection profile on the continental shelf adjacent to Seymour Island, Antarctic Peninsula, an area of high scientific interest in its own right. Here the well-defined geologic section is estimated to range from Eocene to Quaternary in age, effectively spanning the Greenhouse-Icehouse transition in the evolution of Antarctic global climate. A complete record of this transition has yet to be obtained anywhere along the Antarctic margin. Following core recovery, this project will result in correlation of the paleoclimate records from the new cores with detailed fluctuations of the ice margin recorded at higher latitudes in the eastern Ross Sea by the recently concluded, fast-ice-based Cape Roberts Project. If successful, this mobile and flexible drilling system will then be available to the broader scientific community for further research in paleoenvironmental conditions and other areas of science that are currently hindered by the present gap that exists in the US Antarctic Program s technical capability to explore the Antarctic shelves between the shore-line fast-ice margin and the continental slope. SHALDRIL will be able to operate effectively in the no man s land that presently exists between the near shore (where the fast-ice-based Cape Roberts Project was successful) and the upper slope (where the Ocean Drilling Program s vessel JOIDES Resolution becomes most efficient). This technological breakthrough will not only allow major outstanding scientific problems of the last three decades to be addressed, but will also favorably impact many current U.S. and SCAR (ICSU Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research) Antarctic or drilling-related initiatives, such as WAIS, ANTIME, ANDRILL, ANTEC, IMAGES, PAGES, GLOCHANT (including PICE), MARGINS, ODP, and STRATAFORM doc15378 none Stanton This collaborative project is a modeling study of thermobaric instability in the ocean, and its effect on deep convection in the Southern Ocean. Thermobaric instability refers to the fact that the compressibility of sea water is a non-linear function of pressure, so that a colder and fresher layer overlying a warmer and a saltier layer may be statically stable, but become unstable if it is disturbed. That this is theoretically possible has been known for a long time, but only recently has it been considered as an effect that could actually occur in the Southern Ocean, specifically as the potential explanation of the episodic occurrence of polynyas (sizable areas of open water within the sea-ice pack) in the Weddell Sea. This evaluation of the impact of thermobaricity on deep ocean convection will be based on a numerical Large Eddy Simulation (LES) model capable of simulating directly the convection plumes and large scale oceanic flow features that would be expected with intense thermobaric overturn. Based on preliminary results of an LES model initialized and forced by conditions observed during previous oceanographic cruises to the Weddell Sea, this proposed work will combine a carefully structured series of model runs with observations to identify critical overturning processes doc15379 none Hodgins This award supports American participation in the first Asia-Pacific Advanced Studies Institute. The meeting will take place in Tokyo from July 20-29, on the subject of New Frontiers in Intelligent Robotics. The general purpose of this meeting, and of those that hopefully will follow, is to bring young, promising researchers from around the Pacific together with their senior mentors and colleagues to discuss a leading area of scientific research. It is hoped that by meeting for an extended period of time the participants will be able to engage in in-depth discussions and that they will form lasting professional ties. The objective for the younger American participants is to provide them with a significant international experience in their field that will encourage them to think globally about their research careers doc15380 none Carnegie-Mellon University is hosting the ROBOCUP- : The Fifth International Symposium, Competitions, and Demonstrations, in Seattle, Washington in the Summer . The event is sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The award will pay for the travel of 40 students, $500 person, to the ROBOCUP doc15381 none Biological Sciences (61) This project is developing, implementing, and assessing student-driven, hypothesis testing laboratory modules for introductory and upper level courses in our Environmental Science Program. Our project provides students with field opportunities to conduct hypothesis testing by revising current laboratory curriculum and improving field testing instrumentation. The targeted courses may lack student-driven, field investigation components, contain limited field investigations due to lack of equipment, or do not offer a laboratory course due to lack of equipment. Investigative modules are based on concepts developed by Switzer and Shriner ( ) and Eisen ( ) and successful models for field site investigations implemented at the Florida Institute of Technology, Northern Arizona University, and Middlebury College. Our primary goal is to provide students with active and cooperative learning techniques to improve their understanding of the hypothesis-testing nature of science. Each module requires students to generate hypotheses for environmental risk at one of four common study sites. Individual groups within classes are testing hypotheses on-site, analyziong their data, presenting their results to the class, and conducting peer assessments of individual student and group work. Our assessment plan aims to determine if the implemented modules improve student use of problem-solving skills and the scientific method to test hypotheses. The project results will be disseminated by presentation at scientific and education meetings, by web-site, instructor manual supplements, and peer-reviewed journals, and by two GLOBE summer workshops for high school teachers and UTC student science teachers doc15382 none Lazarian This research program is aimed at understanding the generation and evolution of astrophysical magnetic fields. Magnetic fields play decisive role in many astrophysical processes from mediating star formation and transporting angular momentum in ubiquitous accretion disks to influencing heating cooling within clusters of galaxies. In all these situations, the large magnetic Reynolds numbers of the flows require that any changes of magnetic field topology be implemented through fast reconnection, while magnetic field generation requires fast dynamo. The project makes use of recent advances in numerical capabilities to test recently advanced theories of fast reconnection and fast dynamos. It also proposes further development of reconnection theory, comparisons of theoretical and numerical results with liquid sodium measurements, and simulations of the galactic dynamo. Another very important outcome of this effort will be the development of a parallel AMR MI-ID code, RIEMANN, for simulating MHD phenomena in rotating astrophysical systems. This will be a general-purpose utility that will be made widely available to the community. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc15383 none The goal of this project is to make a fundamental contribution towards a nationally shared understanding of the role and impact of a science center in facilitating enhanced public understanding, attitudes and behaviors toward science by means of informal learning activities. To accomplish this, this research project will investigate the following questions: 1) What are the specific long-term changes in science understanding, attitudes and behaviors that result from visiting a science center exhibition? 2) What are the factors that contribute to these long-term changes? 3) What is the relationship between science center visits and subsequent reinforcing educational experiences? This study will build on previous work conducted by ILI at the California Science Center aimed at understanding how a science center impacts its community. These studies are known collectively as the Los Angeles Science Education Research Project (LASER). A sample of participants in one of the LASER studies has expressed their willingness to participate in subsequent interviews. These interviews will be designed to capture both small and large changes in science understanding, attitudes, behaviors and other informal learning experiences subsequent to the visit to the science center doc15384 none This project will take a research-informed approach to understanding how undergraduate engineering majors progress in their studies of engineering design. Its goal is to better understand and describe design expertise and a learner s growth towards acquiring that expertise. In this work, the investigators intend to undertake research in three areas: (1) The development of a continuum of design expertise as a way of describing learners growth toward acquiring expertise, (2) A study of design expertise that will provide information to help populate the continuum, and (3) The demonstration of a research-informed approach in design education through the use of the continuum to enhance and assess student learning of engineering design during their cooperative (coop) experiences. This research should help us to better understand how students learn design principles in engineering, and the continuum, itself, may be of great help to engineering faculty in their efforts to teach design doc15385 none Alluvial fans over the world are often shaken by large earthquakes that have led to some of the worst historical landslides even on very gentle slopes (e.g., the Turnagain Heights landslide, Anchorage, Alaska, in the Alaskan earthquake). However, systematic field evidence for coseismic change in pore-pressure in alluvial fans was not available until after the Chi-Chi, Taiwan, earthquake. The Chi-Chi (Mw=7.6) earthquake in central Taiwan was recorded by a dense network of modern seismological, geodetic and hydrologic instruments. Widespread coseismic pore-pressure changes, captured for the first time by 188 hydrologic wells in a network of 70 hydrologic stations, occurred across a large alluvial fan (the Choshui River fan) west of the epicenter of the earthquake. Ground-motion on this fan, both during the main-shock and during several large (M 6) aftershocks of the Chi-Chi earthquake was recorded by 80 broadband strong-motion accelerometers at high sampling rate, and the data was promptly published. A complex, yet systematic, pattern in the coseismic change in pore-pressure emerged from the digitized water-level records that led to a hypothesis that the coseismic pore-pressure change was due to the nonlinear mechanical response of sediments to seismic shaking. The hypothesis, however, was based on an empirical relationship from a small number of laboratory experiments performed on small samples under applied stresses with magnitude and frequency greatly different from that during earthquake shaking. The availability of both the ground-motion data and the hydrological data from the Chi-Chi earthquake has created a rare opportunity for a quantitative field test of the laboratory-based relationship between the pore-pressure change in sediments and seismic shaking. This project combines both the hydrological data and the seismological data from the Chi-Chi earthquake in a search of the empirical relationship between the two data sets that would be the first field-based relationship between pore-pressure change and seismic shaking, and would greatly facilitate our understanding and assessment of liquefaction and landslide potential in alluvial fans during earthquakes, and would thus be of great value to the seismic engineering community doc15386 none Dunbar This award supports a project to analyze samples from the Law Dome ice core for volcanic tephra. The Law Dome ice core is the best-dated ice core from East Antarctica and contains a detailed record of climate and atmospheric chemistry over at least the last 700 years. Several global volcanic eruptions appear to be recorded in the Law Dome core, including the well known Tambora and Unknown events, as well as the Huaynaputina and Ruiz events. To verify the source eruptions responsible for these signals, as well as to differentiate between local Antarctic and southern hemisphere eruptions, a continuous scan for volcanic glass at an annual resolution will be done on the last 700 years of the Law Dome ice core. Sub-annual tephra analyses will be done in the sections containing the largest acid signals in the core. To better evaluate the climatic impact of large equatorial eruptions from ice cores, it is necessary to isolate local eruptions and their associated glaciochemical signal from that of these more distant sources. The identification of local eruptions in the Law Dome core will improve upon the existing chronology of Antarctic volcanism over the last 700 years through the presence of volcanic glass in conjunction with the results from this same type of study on the Siple Dome ice core doc15387 none Kirchner The travel time of water through a catchment -- that is, the time it takes for rainfall to reach the stream -- is a fundamental hydraulic parameter controlling the persistence of soluble contaminants, and thus the downstream consequences of pollution episodes. A catchment is characterized by a distribution of travel times, reflecting the diverse flow paths that rainfall can take to the stream. Thus, quantifying catchments travel time distributions should help to clarify the hydrologic mechanisms controlling flow routing in the subsurface. Understanding the timescales of transport and storage in catchments is also important for predicting how rainfall inputs will be chemically modified by reactions with catchment soils and bedrock. But despite the importance of catchment travel time distributions for watershed hydrology and geochemistry, they have rarely been quantified and the mechanisms controlling them are poorly understood. Catchment travel time distributions can be inferred from long-term time series of inert tracers, such as chloride, in rainfall and streamflow. It has recently been shown that catchment travel-time distributions can have unexpectedly long tails , implying that they can retain soluble contaminants for much longer than would otherwise be expected [Kirchner, Feng, and Neal, Fractal stream chemistry and its implications for contaminant transport in catchments, Nature, 403, 524-527, ]. The proposed research program builds on this recent work, and has four main components: a) analyses of long-term time series of rainfall and streamflow concentrations of chloride (a naturally occurring nonreactive tracer) from humid forested catchments in diverse geological settings, using spectral, autocorrelation, and cross-correlation methods to infer each catchment s characteristic travel time distribution, b) development and testing of alternative conceptual models for the observed travel-time distributions, c) construction of laboratory-scale physical models to simulate the hypothesized mechanisms underlying these conceptual models, and d) analyses of reactive tracer data, to complement the passive tracer (chloride) studies. This integrated program of data analysis, conceptual modeling, and laboratory-scale physical models is designed to clarify the mechanisms that control catchment-scale transport, storage, and mixing of waters and their associated solutes. This project is expected to lead to: a) improved understanding of catchment flowpaths and travel time distributions, and the factors controlling them, b) improved understanding of how catchment flowpaths, and reactions between aqueous and solid phases, affect the mobility of reactive solutes at catchment scale, c) improved tools for using hydrologic and geochemical time series to probe the internal workings of catchments, and d) improved methods for testing catchment flow and routing models through comparisons with field data doc15388 none White Although it seems intuitively obvious that karst aquifers will carry more sediment than porous media aquifers, because of the large conduits and faster velocities, relatively few studies have tried to quantify sediment transport in karst. Understanding sediment transport is important for a number of reasons. First, sediment may enhance transport of contaminants that are mobilized by attaching to sediment. Second, the mobility of sediment also reflects the potential mobility of bacteria and viruses, which are of concern in evaluating groundwater quality. And third, the mobility of sediment is a measure of velocities and transport pathways in karst, a complex issue involving mixing from different reservoirs, which is difficult to quantify. This research will address how sediment transport varies with seasons and different storm events by measuring sediment transport in a set of karst aquifers over the course of a year and during several different types of storm events. Storm events will include small and large storms, plus storms with wet and dry antecedent conditions. Three distinct karst aquifers have been selected that include a high, medium, and low discharge system. At each site, continuous loggers will be installed to monitor conductance, discharge, and turbidity to record seasonal variation and antecedent conditions for storms. In additional, stormwater samplers will automatically trigger to sample during the selected storm events. Samples collected monthly and during storms will be analyzed for detailed water chemistry, sediment composition, and sediment size distribution. Efforts will be made to model the transport processes for sediment movement within karst aquifers. The combination of fieldwork and modeling to assess the controls on sediment transport will be used to classify the different karst systems using the mixing ratios implied by sediment transport. Unraveling mixing from different reservoirs is important in both karst and non-karst systems, and this study will help show how temporal heterogeneity (changes between storm events, not just within storm events) can provide clues to the internal structure of a system. This work will demonstrate the importance of temporal heterogeneity in hydrologic systems by studying an end-member system (karst) and quantifying the types of measurements needed to understand system response doc15389 none Much remains to be understood about how small faults grow into large faults and how the propagate through the crust. Such knowledge has considerable significance for evaluation of seismic hazards and the exploration for petroleum. This study will address this issue through the construction and refinement of computer programs which simulate faulting and the growth of folds related to the faults. Two different approaches will be utilized and the combination of these should reveal aspects of the phenomenon which have not yet been determined. A limited set of field examples will be studied to determine the extent to which computer models produce realistic results doc15390 none Engineering - Chemical (53) The major focus of our work is to explore and evaluate means of incorporating web-operable remote experiments as an educational tool in lecture courses. As a test vehicle for our ideas, we have created a remote experiment that provides an introduction to combustion, and the concepts of conservation of mass and energy. The experiment is used in an introductory chemical engineering course as a means of teaching adiabatic flame temperature. We have also introduced extensive report writing and more advanced engineering topics in conjunction with this experiment. Remote experiments have become more technologically straightforward and economically viable with the worldwide web. However, their educational value depends not only on a well-designed technology but more importantly on the content of the experiment. We are disseminating our results at the annual meetings of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the American Society for Engineering Education. A paper is being presented to Chemical Engineering Education journal doc15391 none Zielinski This award supports a project to analyze samples from the Law Dome ice core for volcanic tephra. The Law Dome ice core is the best-dated ice core from East Antarctica and contains a detailed record of climate and atmospheric chemistry over at least the last 700 years. Several global volcanic eruptions appear to be recorded in the Law Dome core, including the well known Tambora and Unknown events, as well as the Huaynaputina and Ruiz events. To verify the source eruptions responsible for these signals, as well as to differentiate between local Antarctic and southern hemisphere eruptions, a continuous scan for volcanic glass at an annual resolution will be done on the last 700 years of the Law Dome ice core. Sub-annual tephra analyses will be done in the sections containing the largest acid signals in the core. To better evaluate the climatic impact of large equatorial eruptions from ice cores, it is necessary to isolate local eruptions and their associated glaciochemical signal from that of these more distant sources. The identification of local eruptions in the Law Dome core will improve upon the existing chronology of Antarctic volcanism over the last 700 years through the presence of volcanic glass in conjunction with the results from this same type of study on the Siple Dome ice core doc15362 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for a demonstration project to prove the viability of shallow ship-based geological drilling while simultaneously collecting useful cores for assessing the early history of the Antarctic ice sheets. For over three decades, U.S. scientists and their international colleagues exploring the shallow shelves and seas along the margins of Antarctic have been consistently frustrated by their inability to penetrate through the over-compacted glacial diamictons encountered at shallow sub bottom depths (within the upper 10 m) over these terrains. This is particularly frustrating because advanced high resolution seismic reflection techniques clearly show in many areas the presence of older successions of Neogene and even Paleogene sequences lying just beneath this thin veneer of diamictons. Until the means are developed to recover these sequences, a detailed history of the Antarctic ice sheets, which is an essential prerequisite to understanding Cenozoic paleoclimate and future climate change on a global scale, will remain an elusive and unobtainable goal. After four years of study and evaluation with the aid of a professional engineer (and over the course of two workshops), the SHALDRIL Committee, an interested group of U.S. scientists, has identified at least two diamond-coring systems deemed suitable for use on existing ice-breaking U.S. Antarctic Research Program vessels. The goal of this project is to employ diamond-coring technology on the RV IB Nathaniel B. Palmer in order to test out and demonstrate the feasibility of both ship-based diamond coring and down-hole logging. For this demonstration cruise coring will be attempted along a high-resolution seismic reflection profile on the continental shelf adjacent to Seymour Island, Antarctic Peninsula, an area of high scientific interest in its own right. Here the well-defined geologic section is estimated to range from Eocene to Quaternary in age, effectively spanning the Greenhouse-Icehouse transition in the evolution of Antarctic global climate. A complete record of this transition has yet to be obtained anywhere along the Antarctic margin. Following core recovery, this project will result in correlation of the paleoclimate records from the new cores with detailed fluctuations of the ice margin recorded at higher latitudes in the eastern Ross Sea by the recently concluded, fast-ice-based Cape Roberts Project. If successful, this mobile and flexible drilling system will then be available to the broader scientific community for further research in paleoenvironmental conditions and other areas of science that are currently hindered by the present gap that exists in the US Antarctic Program s technical capability to explore the Antarctic shelves between the shore-line fast-ice margin and the continental slope. SHALDRIL will be able to operate effectively in the no man s land that presently exists between the near shore (where the fast-ice-based Cape Roberts Project was successful) and the upper slope (where the Ocean Drilling Program s vessel JOIDES Resolution becomes most efficient). This technological breakthrough will not only allow major outstanding scientific problems of the last three decades to be addressed, but will also favorably impact many current U.S. and SCAR (ICSU Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research) Antarctic or drilling-related initiatives, such as WAIS, ANTIME, ANDRILL, ANTEC, IMAGES, PAGES, GLOCHANT (including PICE), MARGINS, ODP, and STRATAFORM doc15301 none The eastern margin of Tibet is one of the most enigmatic plateau margins in the world. Elevations rise from less than 500 m within the Sichuan Basin to more than 6.5 km over a distance of about 30 to 50 km. This is steeper than the Himalayan front, which owes its origin to the active thrusting of the Indian subcontinent under Tibet. In stark contrast to the Himalaya, however, the eastern margin of Tibet shows insignificant evidence of active thrusting. Moreover, the lack of a significant sedimentary basin adjacent to the margin and the absence of geodetic shortening further testify to the insignificance of active thrusting. New field investigations indicate that while active thrusting is indeed scarce, there is ample evidence for significant active strike-slip faulting. Initial reconnaissance field investigation reveals three and possibly four significant right-lateral strike-slip faults that trend NE, and two major left-lateral strike-slip faults that trend ~N-S. Research is now focused on determining the rates and detailed geometry of these faults, each of which are critical components in planned attempts at constraining relative crustal motions in the region. These observations are able to constrain the various proposed hypotheses and therefore enable us to understand the evolution of this part of the Tibetan margin. Early investigation has also revealed the likelihood of significant active faulting within the Sichuan Basin. This is of particular concern, because the suspect faults may represent significant strong ground motions and the Sichuan Basin is home to about 60 million people. Rates of fault slip are being determined by a careful sampling strategy whereby the ages of landforms that have been offset by faulting are being estimated by cosmogenic radionuclide analyses. The style and pattern of active faulting is being determined by a combination of imagery analysis, topographic analyses, and detailed field mapping in regions previously identified during reconnaissance field work. The combination of slip rates and fault geometry yields a set of kinematics that discriminate among the competing models doc15312 none This award supports a program of field surveys of an area within the large, well-developed megadune field southeast of Vostok station. The objectives are to determine the physical characteristics of the firn across the dunes, including typical climate indicators such as stable isotopes and major chemical species, and to install instruments to measure the time variation of near-surface wind and temperature with depth, to test and refine hypotheses for megadune formation. Field study will consist of surface snowpit and shallow core sampling, ground penetrating radar (GPR) profiling, GPS topographic and ice motion surveys, AWS installation, accumulation ablation measurements, subsurface temperature, and firn permeability studies. Field work in two successive seasons is proposed. Continent-wide remote sensing studies of the dunes will be continued, using the new group of instruments that are now, or will shortly be available (e.g., MODIS, MISR, GLAS, AMSR). The earlier study of topographic, passive microwave, and SAR characteristics will be extended, with the intent of determining the relationships of dune amplitude and wavelength to climate parameters, and further development of models of dune formation. Diffusion, ventilation, and vapor transport processes within the dune firn will be modeled as well. A robust program of outreach is planned and reporting to inform both the public and scientists of the fundamental in-situ and remote sensing characteristics of these uniquely Antarctic features will be an important part of the work. Because of their extreme nature, their broad extent, and their potential impact on the climate record, it is important to improve our current understanding of these. Megadunes are a manifestation of an extreme terrestrial climate and may provide insight on past terrestrial climate, or to processes active on other planets. Megadunes are likely to represent an end-member in firn diagenesis, and as such, may have much to teach us about the processes involved doc15395 none Blewitt Global Position System (GPS) data can now be used to measure movements of Earth s surface with few-millimeter precision. Using GPS, research has recently revealed that the solid Earth changes shape due to seasonal change in the surface distribution of water, snow, and air pressure. This raises the possibility of using GPS with the Earth as a weighing machine to measure surface mass as it changes in time and place. By applying a new inversion method, this project plans to use worldwide GPS data from the International GPS Service (from to ) to produce a movie of surface mass redistribution around the globe over an 8-year period, with 1-week resolution. This will be useful to investigators modeling the global water cycle, as it will provide seasonal to decadal change in the intensity and geographic pattern of seasonal variation in near-surface water (of all forms). Determining whether the global water cycle is intensifying is a central science question concerning global climate change. One likely consequence of an accelerating water cycle is change in the amplitude of seasonal cycling of water storage between Earth s reservoirs, which this project should help to quantify. A secondary goal of this project is to test mechanical models of the Earth. Current models are largely based on seismology at much shorter time scales, and they ignore lateral variation in elasticity. To test these models requires independent information on surface loads, which this project will obtain from global atmospheric and hydrologic models, and sea level data, as well as data from remote sensing satellite missions doc15396 none This award supports a project to significantly improve our understanding of how Taylor Glacier flows and responds to climate changes. Taylor Glacier drains the Taylor Dome region of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and terminates in Taylor Valley, one of the Dry Valleys of Victoria Land. It provides a crucial and unique link between two intensively studied Antarctic environments: the Taylor Dome, from which a 130 kyr ice core paleoclimate record has recently been extracted, and the Dry Valleys, a pivotal Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site and a focus of research on geomorphology and glacial geology. The proposed work will thus make an important contribution to ongoing efforts to exploit the Taylor Dome - Dry Valleys system to build a uniquely comprehensive view of regional long-term environmental changes. The proposed work has two complementary components: field research and numerical modelling. Two field seasons will be used to measure velocity, surface strain rate, mass balance, ice thickness, glacier bed reflectance, and subglacial topography, along a nearly complete longitudinal transect of the Taylor Glacier, and along select cross-valley transects. This information will be used to constrain numerical models of ice and heat flow for the Taylor Dome - Taylor Glacier system. These calibrated models will be used to analyze the time-dependent response of the Taylor Glacier to climate changes. The synthesis of results will be aimed to improve understanding of the glacial geomorphology of Taylor Valley, and to illuminate impacts on the Taylor Valley lakes ecosystem. The project will have a major role in furthering the careers of a doctoral-level graduate student and a post-doctoral researcher doc15397 none The Garden Mosaics program will develop and test a model in which youth conduct research on community and home gardens in urban settings. Youth ages 11-18 will be recruited to participate in gardening activities in conjunction with elders from their communities. Students learn the science content associated with organismal biology, community ecology, ecosystems and the physical environment, as well as culturally-related food growing practices. Participants then take part in guided research; using methods such as transect walks, mapping, ecosystem models and soil tests, to document food-growing practices of immigrant minority and traditional gardeners. Expanded research investigations will be open to students who want to continue their explorations using the Internet and other resources. Students contribute to new and existing databases of ethnic and heritage gardening practices in the United States. Materials to be developed include an Educator s Manual, a Youth Handbook and a Garden Mosaics website. During the pilot phase a national leadership team will be established to test the program and materials at 10 sites in different cities across the U.S. including San Antonio, Baltimore, Boston, Sacramento, New York, Brooklyn and Philadelphia. It is anticipated that the dissemination of this model will reach more than 750 educators and 13,000 youth doc15398 none Engineering - Electrical (55) This project is designed to stimulate interest in engineering and increase retention in engineering programs by developing a web-based laboratory course that enhances the freshman engineering experience. In this course, students complete a comprehensive, hands-on project, in this case a robot, incorporating a broad spectrum of concepts that will be expanded in detail in subsequent advanced courses. The courseware laboratory system design consists of WebLAB, which is web-based courseware with built-in instrument controls, and the e-LAB instrumentation device, which is a computer-controlled laboratory instrument box connected between a test circuit wired on a protoboard and the student s computer. The web-based courseware contains all the engineering concepts and instructions to successfully build a robot and to understand all aspects of its operation. The modules contain background material, tutorials, structured questions, calculations and verifications of theory, graphing tools, laboratory report preparation through the use of templates, report questions that require independent and collaborative research, experiment evaluation and feedback, and integrated assessment tools for evaluating module effectiveness. Project assessment includes content and delivery evaluation by faculty and students at this institution and at two other diverse institutions. Results are disseminated by publications and conference presentations, and courseware is widely available on the internet and easily adaptable by other engineering and technical institutions doc15399 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This project is adapting and implementing the WeBWork homework delivery and grading system to help improve the success of students in College Algebra. The project builds on the successful use of WeBWorK to increase homework activity of students in calculus classes in several institutions. This project is now extending the use of the system to a large service class, College Algebra, with a total enrollment of 720 students each academic year at the PI s institution. The collection of problem sets created using the PG (problem generator) programming language developed for WeBWorK is being shared with other WeBWorK authors for distribution. In addition, training workshops are being conducted for an average of eight faculty per semester who are using WeBWorK directly in College Algebra classes. During the final year of the project, faculty from area high schools, community colleges and other institutions of higher education are to take part in training sessions with WeBWorK and to share information about its effectiveness doc15340 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for a study to investigate paleoenvironmental conditions during the Eocene on Seymour Island, Antarctica. The cooling trend that began with early Eocene peak warmth and culminated in the growth of permanent ice sheets on Antarctica in the early Oligocene marks the most significant interval of climate change in the Tertiary, both because of its magnitude and the effects it had on the composition, diversity and ecology shelf faunas. Seymour Island on the Antarctic Peninsula provides a unique setting within which the interplay between changes in climate and environment can be directly related to the concurrent evolution of invertebrate macrofaunas. Because of its high southern latitude location, the Paleogene sedimentary sequence at Seymour Island may record the timing of the onset of cooling, and the magnitude of that change through time, more precisely than less sensitive lower latitude sites. In addition, because the succession is highly fossiliferous, patterns of change in the diversity and ecology of invertebrate communities can be directly evaluated within this context of environmental change. The evolution of these high latitude shelf faunas during the Paleogene is especially important as they may represent the source of diversification for many southern hemisphere warm water faunas. Richard Aronson (Dauphin Island Sea Lab) and Daniel Blake (University of Illinois) have suggested that cooling during the Eocene had a profound affect on the ecology of shallow marine faunas at high latitudes. They hypothesize that cooling eliminated the shell-crushing predators that abound in warmer waters, thus lifting the predation pressure on the remaining molluscan fauna. In response, they predict that predation pressure by the shell drilling gastropods will show an increase through time, and that characteristic shell architectures that defend against shell crushers will show a decline. They are currently testing this hypothesis through a paleontological investigation of the Eocene La Meseta Formation on Seymour Island. However, to evaluate their hypothesis that cooling is the direct cause of ecological change, it is critical that a temperature history be assessed independently and tied directly to their documented patterns of predation. This project will work collaboratively with Aronson and Blake to generate a high-resolution temperature curve for the Eocene section on Seymour Island. This record will be derived from the d18O values of shell carbonate from several bivalve, gastropod, and brachiopod taxa sampled from the identical horizons used for their paleoecologic study. Possible offsets among co-occurring taxa (vital effects) will be quantified through intensive sampling of multiple taxa within shell beds to ensure that a meaningful composite, long-term record can be assembled. Replicate samples for each available taxon will be collected from each sampling horizon, so that variability within time horizons can be accommodated when assessing the magnitudes of change observed throughout the Eocene. Samples for isotope analysis will be collected under this project while working as a member of Aronson and Blake s field team. This will ensure that the records of temperature and faunal change are explicitly linked. Such an integrated approach will provide a more complete understanding of the evolutionary and ecological effects of cooling on the Antarctic ecosystem, and offer insight into the response of faunas to global climate change doc15349 none American children spend many hours with media each day. Although much of this time involves television viewing, an increasing amount involves participation with digital interactive entertainment technologies, including the Internet. Even television as we know it will soon change dramatically, with digital television adding improved clarity of images and the opportunity for interactivity. Knowing how to use these interactive technologies will be a necessary skill for an educated workforce in the 21st century and may be a gateway to studying science and technology. Therefore, knowing how children use and learn from these digital technologies is an important step in ensuring that children will develop these basic skills. Although children invest their free time heavily in electronic entertainment media, relatively little is known about how new interactive media impact children s learning in informal learning contexts. One problem is that the field is interdisciplinary. Researchers examine diverse issues rather than examine specific areas of interactive digital media systematically and then consolidate that knowledge into a central information base. Another problem is the rapid change in digital technologies, making researchers one step behind the latest developments. One outcome of these problems is a poor knowledge base for understanding of how new digital entertainment technologies influence children s learning. Over the next 5 years, this Center will advance theory and method in how children learn through digital interactive entertainment media. Using an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the fields of psychology, human development, communications, sociology, anthropology, and medicine, researchers will explore multiple levels of analysis in order to explicate the role that dialogue, in the form of interactivity and identity, play in children s learning from entertaining interactive digital technologies. At a macro level, two types of survey will be conducted to document patterns of change and similarity over time in children s access to, and use of, new and emerging digital platforms. These macro level studies will guide the direction of micro level experimental, observational, and ethnographic studies that will examine what interactivity is and how and what children learn from online digital experiences. Parallel research activities will examine children at different age groups, providing both cross-sectional and longitudinal findings on children s uses of media and the impact of media on their development. Overall, these research activities will expand the knowledge base about: 1) the kinds of digital media that are emerging; 2) the kinds of interactive digital media experiences children choose to have; 3) the impact of these interactive experiences on children s long-term social adjustment and academic achievement; 4) how specific kinds of interactions with digital technologies impact children s learning; 5) how interacting with each other online influences children s learning and identity construction; and 6) how observational and interactive experiences are represented in the developing brain. This knowledge base will be disseminated in published form in professional journals, through presentations at national and international conferences, and via interconnected websites to create synergistic activities among the researchers, policy makers, child advocacy groups, and creators in the children and digital media field. The Children s Digital Media Centers, based at Georgetown University, will also include the University of Texas at Austin, Northwestern University, and the University of California Los Angeles. Centers will include a Steering Committee and an Advisory Board of distinguished colleagues doc15402 none This is a four-year project to conduct seismological investigations of deep earth structure and earthquake sources.Using modern digital seismic waveform data, fundamental questions about dynamical structures in the mantle and rupture processes of large earthquakes will be addressed. The discovery of systematic variation of interplate earthquake rupture duration will be followed-up by detailed analysis of the source finiteness for very small thrust earthquakes on the megathrust fault in subduction zones. On average, these shallow events are found to take 2 to 3 times longer to rupture than comparable seismic moment events at larger depths. Establishing whether this is due to low stress drop or low rupture velocity requires determination of rupture dimensions, which will be pursued using directivity analysis with theoretical and empirical Green s functions. Studies of major boundary layer dynamics will also be conducted. Amplitude and arrival time anomalies for S waves from intermediate and deep focus earthquakes will be modeled by three-dimensional methods to help constrain the velocity structure and fate of deep slab downwellings. The effects of these downwellings on phase equilibria in the mantle will be examined using waveform-stacking methods that detect and characterize velocity and impedance contrasts in the mantle around subducting slabs. Complex velocity heterogeneity near the core-mantle boundary will be analyzed using new digital data sets and a hybrid 2D 3D wave propagation method that has recently been developed at UCSC doc15403 none Zhao, Li The focus of this proposal is to develop a high-resolution tomography method for seismic arrays. Resolution to sub-array structure is enhanced by inverting the phase and amplitude variations between adjacent stations, rather than at individual stations, in order to minimize biases caused by uncertainties in lateral heterogeneities far away from the array. Frechet kernels of the data are calculated by coupled normal-mode summation so that all finite-frequency effects are accounted for with no high-frequency or averaging approximations. A new traveling-wave method will also be developed to calculate exact kernels near stations. Asymptotic Legendre functions are used to express waves from the source to sub-array heterogeneity (scatterer), but exact Legendre functions are adopted for waves from the scatterer to the station. The tomography method is being developed for the Southern Africa Seismic Array, deployed to study the Kaapvaal craton, and 3-D inversions are conducted for upper-mantle anisotropic structure. Data are measured for surface and upper-mantle body waves at an average of 50 three-component stations from 51 teleseismic events. The result will shed new light on the conflicting features in some of the recent regional models, such as the presence of an oceanic-type low-velocity zone beneath the craton and shear-wave anisotropy. The multi-station, full-wave method developed here is also well suited to serve the need of the upcoming USArray. With its proposed average spacing of about 70 km between adjacent stations, this method will be able to provide a nearly uniform lateral resolution of about 50 km in the upper mantle over the entire continental United States doc15404 none Toran Although it seems intuitively obvious that karst aquifers will carry more sediment than porous media aquifers, because of the large conduits and faster velocities, relatively few studies have tried to quantify sediment transport in karst. Understanding sediment transport is important for a number of reasons. First, sediment may enhance transport of contaminants that are mobilized by attaching to sediment. Second, the mobility of sediment also reflects the potential mobility of bacteria and viruses, which are of concern in evaluating groundwater quality. And third, the mobility of sediment is a measure of velocities and transport pathways in karst, a complex issue involving mixing from different reservoirs, which is difficult to quantify. This research will address how sediment transport varies with seasons and different storm events by measuring sediment transport in a set of karst aquifers over the course of a year and during several different types of storm events. Storm events will include small and large storms, plus storms with wet and dry antecedent conditions. Three distinct karst aquifers have been selected that include a high, medium, and low discharge system. At each site, continuous loggers will be installed to monitor conductance, discharge, and turbidity to record seasonal variation and antecedent conditions for storms. In additional, stormwater samplers will automatically trigger to sample during the selected storm events. Samples collected monthly and during storms will be analyzed for detailed water chemistry, sediment composition, and sediment size distribution. Efforts will be made to model the transport processes for sediment movement within karst aquifers. The combination of fieldwork and modeling to assess the controls on sediment transport will be used to classify the different karst systems using the mixing ratios implied by sediment transport. Unraveling mixing from different reservoirs is important in both karst and non-karst systems, and this study will help show how temporal heterogeneity (changes between storm events, not just within storm events) can provide clues to the internal structure of a system. This work will demonstrate the importance of temporal heterogeneity in hydrologic systems by studying an end-member system (karst) and quantifying the types of measurements needed to understand system response doc15271 none This study will investigate how the Antarctic Slope Front and continental slope morphology determine the exchanges of mass, heat, and fresh water between the shelf and the deep ocean, in particular those leading to outflows of dense water into intermediate and deep layers of the adjacent basins and into the world ocean circulation While the importance to the global ocean circulation and climate of cold water masses originating in the Antarctic is unquestioned, the processes by which these water masses enter the deep ocean circulation are not. The primary goal of this work therefore is to identify the principal physical processes that govern the transfer of shelf-modified dense water into intermediate and deep layers of the adjacent deep ocean. At the same time, it seeks to understand the compensatory poleward flow of waters from the oceanic regime. The upper continental slope has been identified as the critical gateway for the exchange of shelf and deep ocean waters. Here the topography, velocity and density fields associated with the nearly ubiquitous front must strongly influence the advective and turbulent transfer of water properties between the shelf and oceanic regimes. The study has four specific objectives: [1] Determine the mean frontal structure and the principal scales of variability, and estimate the role of the front on cross-slope exchanges and mixing of adjacent water masses; [2] Determine the influence of slope topography and bathymetry on frontal location and outflow of dense Shelf Water; [3] Establish the role of frontal instabilities, benthic boundary layer transports, tides and other oscillatory processes on cross-slope advection and fluxes; and [4] Assess the effect of diapycnal mixing, lateral mixing identified through intrusions, and nonlinearities in the equation of state on the rate of descent and the fate of outflowing, near-freezing Shelf Water doc15406 none Adelie penguin (Pygoscelis adeliae) populations in the Ross Sea region, Antarctica have been undergoing change in recent times. Changes in environmental conditions have also been noted, particularly changes in the sea ice condition, an important variable related to foraging ecology of these seabirds. The focus of this renewal project is to investigate the mechanisms responsible for geographic structuring, the founding of new colonies, and recent population expansion of Adelie penguins. Past research has shown that none of the colonies is nesting-space limited, and that sea-ice extent and concentration affect diet, foraging effort (and ultimately chick growth and survival), and over-winter survival. In addition, large colonies affect the foraging patterns of smaller ones within foraging range and, perhaps ultimately, the size of those colonies. While quantification of emigration is still in progress, its rate and direction appear also to be constrained by sea ice conditions, with reasonable concentrations of ice favoring growth of smaller colonies, where foraging competition is minimal. The current research will address the demographic mechanism of colony growth (or decline), including changes in adult survival, juvenile survival, recruitment age, proportion of adults breeding, emigration immigration, or a combination of these factors. Research will include census work at three colonies on the Ross Sea coast: Cape Crozier, Cape Royds and Cape Bird as well as Beaufort Island. The four colonies differ in size and demography. The work will involve continuing a seven-year census record and includes known-age birds. The research team will use such technology as: computerized weighbridges that assess foraging effort and success, as well as quantify such difficult problems as band loss; time-depth-recorders and satellite transmitters to assess foraging behavior with respect to sea ice and overlap among colonies; and archival tags that, using celestial cues (time of sunset and sunrise, day length), determine migration timing and routes, and location of molting and wintering areas. Information will be related to sea-ice conditions as quantified by satellite images. Results will increase an understanding of population regulation and patterns of dispersion and the effects of climate change, mediated through changes in sea ice condition on populations doc15407 none Waddington This award provides three years of funding to study the transition from slow inland flow to fast ice stream flow by making use of a suite of geophysical measurements that have been made near the onset region of ice stream D in West Antarctica. These data provide a unique opportunity to develop and validate glaciological models of the controlling processes in ice stream onset zones. Important processes to quantify are motion at the bed and deformation in the ice. Previous analyses indicate that the controlling resistive forces shift from the bed to the sides during the transition from slow inland flow to fast, streaming flow. Model sensitivity analyses will be used to investigate the relative importance of feedbacks between basal processes and ice deformation in the transition from inland to ice stream flow. Model experiments will determine what factors control the location of the onset of streaming flow, and how that location might migrate when conditions at the bed, or along the flow direction, changes over time. The overall goal of this work is to improve understanding of the evolution of the WAIS drainage system. This study is a first step towards understanding the physics that govern the transition from slow inland flow to fast streaming flow doc15408 none Connell Yeasts in the Antarctic Dry Valleys: Biological role, distribution, and evolution The soil community of Antarctic polar desert is comprised of few endemic species of bacteria, fungi, and invertebrates. Both filamentous and single cellular fungi have been isolated from a diversity of Antarctic soil types, but only yeast appear to be endemic to the polar desert soils. Although the ecological roles of yeast in Antarctic soils is undefined, yeast may be the principal taxa in the heterotrophic communities that synthesize sterols required by soil invertebrates. In addition, yeast may be involved in accumulating and mobilizing growth limiting nutrients such as phosphorus into the polar desert food web. This multidisciplinary research will characterize the roles soil yeast play in the McMurdo Dry Valley ecosystem in order to better understand polar deserts and other extreme environments, as well as provide a foundation for incorporating yeast into biogeochemical models of temperate environments. Soil microbiota mediate most of the terrestrial ecosystem processes such as decomposition, soil respiration, the uptake and fixation of micro and macro-nutrients, detoxification of heavy metals, and serve as major global carbon sinks. The complexity of soil communities in temperate regions pose difficulties in studying the relationships between biotic and abiotic parameters of ecosystem function and the factors controlling populations of soil microbiota remain poorly understood. The extreme climate and relatively simple community structure of the continental Antarctica desert regions offer a unique opportunity to define interactions between soil organisms that are central to many ecosystems processes. The abundance and distribution of yeast in polar desert soils will be correlated with physical and chemical soil properties and these data will be stored and analyzed using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Several physiological parameters will be explored in vitro to develop a basis for understanding the functional role(s) these organisms may play. The evolution of Dry Valley yeast will be addressed by determining intra- and inter-valley population relatedness patterns, based on DNA sequence. These experiments will form a strong foundation for future investigations, provide additional opportunities for collaborative research and students from middle school through college will be given the opportunity to participat in this project doc15409 none Interdisciplinary (99) Mathematics (21) Physics (13) We are implementing an integrated physics and mathematics laboratory and classroom in which we extend cooperative learning models into a unified introductory physics and calculus course. We address several persistent problems in student learning: poor conceptualization and retention of material, underdeveloped problem-solving skills, and difficulty actively applying knowledge across disciplines. We are integrating and adapting materials and methods from several NSF funded projects (including Workshop Physics, integrated calculus and physics at University of New Hampshire, and peer-led team learning) and are building on successful projects at the University of Portland that use cooperative learning models. We are teaching a unified introductory math physics course that encourages students to make connections across disciplines in the same environment using the same set of tools. Instructors in this course have greater flexibility in the timing of topics, at times focusing on building strong foundations and at others, establishing connections between the subjects. New equipment allows students to work in small groups on investigative activities with a supervising peer-leader and a faculty member overseeing the entire class. The design of the classroom allows faculty to unify lecture with hands-on learning and to integrate computer usage with group activities such as experimentation and joint problem-solving. The laboratory also is used in our education of math and physics students interested in K-12 teaching doc15410 none Collaborative Research: Perception-Action Foundations of Early Tool Use Jeffrey Lockman How do humans learn to use an object as a tool? According to the theory of action perception coupling, to use a tool, an individual must detect potential relations between objects that allow actions with one to produce change in another (for example, object A can be used to strike object B), and establish these relations through action. To use one object to change another in a specific way (perhaps to use A to crack B open) requires positioning or aligning the objects appropriately and applying the appropriate force. The number of alignments that must be achieved and how precisely movements must be modulated influence the difficulty of mastering a particular tool. Before they begin to use objects as tools (at about their first birthday), human infants relate objects and surfaces through action, for example, by banging objects together or banging objects on a solid surface. We call these common modes of acting with objects perception-action routines . Do these routines form the foundation for the appearance over the second year of life of tool use? If so, how are perception-action routines harnessed for this new purpose? A collaborative project will investigate (1) how tool use emerges from infants perception-action routines (2) how tool use involves detecting and establishing relations between objects and surfaces (3) how skill with a familiar tool is acquired and (4) how the development of skill with hammer tools in young children differs from how capuchin monkeys (that spontaneously use objects as hammers) acquire skill in the same contexts. Taken together, the results of the proposed experiments will help us better understand how tool use develops in children and to what degree tool use represents an ability that is uniquely human. Children between 6 and 24 months of age will be videotaped acting singly with objects and surfaces that vary systematically in properties that affect banging (for example, hardness) and in features of handles. Cross-sectional studies of children s activity with unfamiliar objects, and studies of how children at different ages become skilled with practice at using hammers in varying conditions (for example, when the tool object has a handle vs. when it does not, and when they must be more vs. less accurate in where they strike) will also be conducted. These studies will be replicated with 8 adult capuchin monkeys. Capuchins readily use hammer-tools, but we do not know to what extent they master multiple relations in action as humans do. This work will contribute to knowledge of learning mechanisms that support development of tool-using skills in humans, of age-related changes in learning mechanisms, and of the special qualities of humans in this regard. It contributes to contemporary debates about the continuous or discontinuous origins of tool use in human development and human evolution, and the role of action in learning. Additional broader impacts include involvement of undergraduate and graduate students in research, exposure of the research process to the general public, and the development of a new collaborative relationship between investigators at two institutions and in complementary areas of behavioral study (developmental and comparative psychology doc15411 none Recent improvements in our understanding of the physics and rheology of fault slip suggest that predictive modeling of fault displacement may be possible in the near future. Such models require observational constraints from both geodesy and seismology, and ideally the observations should encompass time scales greater than that of the earthquake cycle. Working collaboratively with UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico), the University of Colorado is developing an integrated model of megathrust fault slip, using data from the state of Guerrero, Mexico. The study area encompasses a ~100 km segment of the Cocos-North America plate boundary with more than 5 m of seismic slip deficit. The geodetic data suggest that significant transient, aseismic slip recently occurred on the Guerrero subduction interface. This poses a fundamental question: does the seismic slip deficit (or seismic gap ) in Guerrero represent a very mature accumulation of plate boundary strain? Or, does the subduction megathrust in Guerrero relieve most of its strain accumulation aseismically? In other words, does transient motion in Guerrero translate to a higher seismic hazard, or a lower hazard, than on other megathrusts? This question is being addressed via a combination of data collection and modeling. The Guerrero gap is being monitored continuously with GPS receivers operated by CU and UNAM. These GPS data are combined to estimate positions on a daily basis and are used as input to the models. The GPS receivers are also being operated at higher rates, 5 Hz, so that higher rate positions can be estimated during earthquakes and combined with seismic data also being collected in Guerrero doc15412 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for a study to investigate the tectonic development of the southwestern Ross Sea region. Displacements between East and West Antarctica have long been proposed based on global plate circuits, apparent hot spot motions, interpretations of seafloor magnetic anomalies, paleomagnetism, and on geologic grounds. Such motions require plate boundaries crossing Antarctica, yet these boundaries have never been explicitly defined. This project will attempt to delineate the late Cenozoic - active boundary between East and West Antarctica along the Terror Rift in the western Ross Sea, where young structures have been identified, continuity between active extension and intracontinental structures can be established, and where accessibility via ship will allow new key data sets to be acquired. We will use multi-source marine and airborne geophysical data to map the fault patterns and volcanic structure along the eastern margin of the Terror Rift. The orientations of volcanic fissures and seamount alignments on the seafloor will be mapped using multibeam bathymetry. The volcanic alignments will show the regional extension or shear directions across the Terror Rift and the orientations of associated crustal stresses. Swath bathymetry and single channel seismic data will be used to document neotectonic fault patterns and the eastern limit of recent faulting. Delineation of neotectonic fault patterns will demonstrate whether the eastern margin of the Terror Rift forms a continuous boundary and whether the rift itself can be linked with postulated strike-slip faults in the northwestern Ross Sea. Seafloor findings from this project will be combined with fault kinematic and stress field determinations from the surrounding volcanic islands and the Transantarctic Mountains. The integrated results will test the propositions that the eastern boundary of the Terror Rift forms the limit of the major, late Cenozoic -active structures through the Ross Sea and that Terror Rift kinematics involve dextral transtension linked to the right-lateral strike-slip faulting to the north. These results will help constrain the kinematic and dynamic links between the West Antarctic rift system and Southern Ocean structures and any related motions between East and West Antarctica. In the first year, a collaborative structural analysis of existing multichannel and single channel seismic profiles and aeromagnetic data over the Terror Rift will be conducted. The location of volcanic vents or fissures and any fault scarps on the sea floor will be identified and a preliminary interpretation of the age and kinematics of deformation in the Terror Rift will be produced. Late in the second year, a one-month cruise on RVIB N.B. Palmer will carry out multibeam bathymetric and sidescan sonar mapping of selected portions of the seafloor of Terror Rift. Gravity, magnetics, seismic reflection and Bathy 3.5 kHz sub-bottom profile data will also be collected across the rift. In the third year, we will use these multisource data to map the orientations and forms of volcanic bodies and the extent and geometry of neotectonic faulting associated with the Terror Rift. The project will: 1) complete a map of neotectonic faults and volcanic structures in the Terror Rift; 2) interpret the structural pattern to derive the motions and stresses associated with development of the rift; 3) compare Terror Rift structures with faults and lineaments mapped in the Transantarctic Mountains to improve age constraints on the structures; and 4) integrate the late Cenozoic structural interpretations from the western Ross Sea with Southern Ocean plate boundary kinematics doc15413 none Chronology of the Late Pleistocene Yellowstone Ice Cap by Joseph M. Licciardi and Mark D. Kurz An understanding of climatic linkages between western North America and the North Atlantic region is essential for identifying causes of abrupt climate variability in the Northern Hemisphere during the last glacial period (over the past ~21,000 years). Advances and retreats of alpine glaciers are sensitive indicators of changes in Ice Age climate. The former Yellowstone Ice Cap was the largest alpine glacier system in the western U.S., and the deposits it left behind preserve a valuable record of past climates in western North America. In prior research, we successfully established a high-resolution chronology of fluctuations of the northern Yellowstone outlet glacier. The initial investigation at Yellowstone, however, was restricted to a single drainage, and therefore did not resolve many aspects of the complex Yellowstone glacial history. Here we propose a further investigation of this important climate signal and its origin. We will apply isotopic dating techniques to glacial deposits in additional drainages within the Yellowstone region. The new results will greatly enhance current knowledge of the Yellowstone glacial history, and will provide an alpine glacial chronology of unprecedented resolution in the western U.S. An improved chronology of Yellowstone glaciation will enable a compelling and detailed comparison with alpine glacier records elsewhere in the western U.S., and with the timing of abrupt climate events in the North Atlantic region. Consequently, the improved chronology will strengthen and refine climatic interpretations derived from the glacial record, and will provide an important base of evidence for further evaluating the origin of millennial-scale climate variability in the Northern Hemisphere doc15414 none Chu Antarctic krill is a key species of the Antarctic marine ecosystem and it is a species that is subject to international assessment and management. A variety of techniques have been used to estimate their abundance and or biomass including biological and acoustical estimations. However, the total abundance biomass estimated from the two approaches do not agree and both are subject to considerable errors. The purpose of this proposal is to provide a new approach that can be used to reduce the estimated errors resulting from the acoustic measurements. It is well known that the acoustic technique is far more efficient than the conventional survey techniques involving nets, pumps and trawls in studying the temporal and spatial distributions of zooplankton. However, the accurate interpretations of acoustic scattering data require reliable knowledge of the material acoustic properties (sound speed and density contrasts) of live animals. These material properties depend on the spatial and temporal distributions of the oceanographic parameters: temperature and pressure, as well as the animals body structure. For fluid-like weakly scattering marine animals, such as krill, small variations in the sound speed can result in substantial variations in the measured volume scattering strength. The lack of the ability in predicting and or measuring the variations of the acoustic properties in situ greatly affects and limits our ability to accurately interpret the acoustic data and to obtain reliable abundance and or biomass estimates. This proposal is intended to address this issue by in situ measurement of the material properties of Antarctic krill and their spatial and temporal variability. These measurements are crucial to the abundance and or biomass estimates in the Antarctic region. To provide in situ measurements of material acoustic properties, we propose to use the Acoustic Properties Of zooPlankton (APOP), developed at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in a cruise conducted in the Antarctic region. The APOP system is able to measure the sound speed and density contrasts of marine organisms in situ. From this proposed research, we expect to obtain a temporal and spatial variation of in situ material properties of Antarctic krill. By incorporating in situ material properties of Antarctic krill with acoustic and biological survey data, the confidence in estimates of the abundance and or biomass of Antarctic krill is expected to be strengthened greatly doc15415 none Vallance and Stix Michigan Technological University This proposal aims to advance the accuracy and application of scaled analogue models of caldera formation. Until recently, experimental models have struggled to accurately reproduce the caldera forming process. While new models illustrate that the collapse process is starting to be understood, they do not address the complexities that are inherent in real calderas. We have already developed a basic experimental setup which investigated the effects of varying the magma chamber depth, pre-existing topography, magma chamber pressure, and cross-sectional symmetry. The crust is scaled as sand in these and earlier experiments. Due to compaction effects, the sand appears to deform in a time-dependent fashion. Therefore, our improvements to this basic model will include: (1) scaling the rheological variability of the wallrocks and the magma chamber by using a sill-like, water-filled chamber contained within a silicone jacket; (2) measuring the pressure fluctuations within the chamber; (3) varying the timescales of eruption (chamber evacuation) relative to tectonic and intrusion processes; and (4) gradually adding material to the surface of the collapsing block so as to model emplacement of intracaldera ignimbrites. Experimental calderas that are produced purely from the collapse of a homogeneous subsiding block may have limited application to the complex structural relationships observed at actual calderas. This proposal will model four structural elements that are critical to the caldera-forming process but are poorly understood: 1) precursory tumescence; 2) pre-existing faults; 3) extension and transtension; 4) resurgence doc15416 none Birds in the Hood or Aves del Barrio builds on the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology s (CLO) successful Project Pigeon Watch, and will result in the creation of a web-based citizen science program for urban residents. The primary target audience is urban youth, with an emphasis on those participating in programs at science centers and educational organizations in Philadelphia, Tampa, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Participants will develop science process skills, improve their understanding of scientific processes and design research projects while collecting, submitting and retrieving data on birds found in urban habitats. The three project options include a.) mapping of pigeon and dove habitats and sightings, b.) identifying and counting gulls and c.) recording habitat and bird count data for birds in the local community. Birds in the Hood will support CLO s Urban Bird Studies initiative by contributing data on population, community and landscape level effects on birds. Support materials are web-based, bilingual and include downloadable instructions, tally sheets, exercises and results. The website will also include a web-based magazine with project results and participant contributions. A training video and full color identification posters will also be produced. The program will be piloted at five sites in year one, and then field-tested at 13 sites in year two. Regional dissemination and training will occur in year three. It is anticipated that 5,000 urban bird study groups will be in place by the end of the funding period, representing nearly 50,000 individuals doc15417 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for a study to investigate the Ferrar magmatic province toward understanding of the formation of this province and its role in the breakup of the Gondwana supercontinent. The dispersal of Gondwana represents one of the largest supercontinent breakup events in the Phanerozoic. Breakup was associated with the emplacement of a very large Jurassic mafic igneous province extending across the Karoo (southern Africa), Ferrar (Antarctica), and Tasman (Australia) regions, comprising continental flood basalts and extensive intrusive dolerites. Models linking development of the 3,000 km Ferrar province to a mantle plume, a major magma conduit, or multiple sources, make testable predictions about magma transport patterns within the Ferrar province. This project is a pilot study using several different techniques aimed at evaluating these models and providing a greater understanding of the emplacement mechanisms, flow directions, and magmatic architecture associated with the Ferrar mafic intrusive province in southern Victoria Land. Our research tools will include mapping intrusive geometry based on structural field studies and geochemical correlation techniques. Magma flow directions within the intrusive complex will be evaluated using anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility, and mesoscopic and petrofabric flow indicators. These results will help resolve outstanding questions concerning the geometry, propagation, and flow patterns of magma during emplacement of sills and dikes in mafic large igneous provinces. It will also provide a deeper understanding of the relationships between mantle plumes, basaltic magmatism and continental breakup doc15418 none Computer Science (31) The primary goals of this project are to advance the integration of wireless computer networking technologies into the undergraduate curriculum, to improve the educational experience, employment possibilities, and theoretical depth of undergraduate computer science and information systems majors. In order to achieve this goal, this project has the following objectives: - Provide undergraduate students with a solid appreciation of the fundamentals of wireless technologies through hands-on experience in installing, troubleshooting, and administering wireless components. - Provide experience developing applications that require a strict adherence to minimal protocols. - Leverage existing sound and proven laboratory experiences developed locally and elsewhere to demonstrate wireless technologies. - Demonstrate to the students applications of networking technologies, wired and wireless, in areas other than a traditional office environment. Using the webware developed at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the client-server systems developed by Sam Houston State University, the firewall setup from Trinity College, the wireless technologies developed at Illinois State University and North Carolina A&T, this project augments an existing exploratory, hands-on networking laboratory with wireless technology. These technologies are incorporated and explored in the laboratory in a three-pronged approach: 1. Closed laboratory sessions utilizing a heterogeneous local area network augmented with wireless technologies. 2. Undergraduate research into the application of wireless technology in manufacturing environments where wired access may not be feasible. 3. Undergraduate development projects emphasizing the scarcity of resources, the need for brevity and the implications of embedded type applications. This project utilizes exemplary material adapted from outside sources as well as adaptation and integration of materials developed from the existing laboratories doc15419 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This proof-of-concept project is developing a combination of multimedia-based and traditional educational materials for an Introductory Calculus course. It is also extending the current practice of student portfolios into electronic portfolios (or e-folios) in Calculus I, and for presentation of student mathematics research. Building on the successful programs of Multimedia Programming and Design and Calculus Reform, the Computer Information System and Mathematics Departments are collaborating to produce materials that utilize multimedia presentation methods to develop a set of educational materials that integrate multimedia technology for enhancing Calculus I. These materials use techniques such as three-dimensional visualization, animation, and dynamic problem solving to facilitate students comprehension of complex topics. Activities include product design sessions and training workshops to facilitate the creation of educational materials to be published on the web. These materials include electronic class notes, laboratory manuals, research problem sets instructors guide and various exercises, and assessment tools with links to appropriate sources of information and software tools and that enable students to learn through a hands-on problem solving approach. This project extends this innovative learning model by facilitating the integration of Multimedia technology into Student Research Projects. The students are being introduced to Multimedia Technology and can author their e-folios and publish their findings on the World Wide Web through exposure to the educational material and presentation techniques introduced in the classroom. This in turn provides students with knowledge and experience in Multimedia and World Wide Web, industries which are currently experiencing a tremendous demand for skilled workers doc15420 none The ZOOM children s television series, which reaches over 5.4 million children each week, teaches viewers the scientific processes as well as delivering science and mathematics content. The outreach materials and activities provide viewers with opportunities to explore, experiment and share their creativity. WGBH is requesting $1,303,776 of a total budget of $3,977,936 to produce 20 new shows for the ZOOM series. There also will be a new ZOOM campaign, the ZOOMsci Club, which will provide a unique way for kids to deepen their science and math knowledge while engaged in ZOOM s hands-on activities. The campaign includes: the new television programs, new print materials and outreach activities, and a new area of the ZOOM website that includes an on-line forum for kids to share results of their experimentation. ZOOM has been chosen by PBS as the first children s local national show. This PBS initiative capitalizes on the strength of local public television stations and provides the opportunity for stations to customize ZOOM to serve the needs of their local markets. The stations can produce and insert segments that honor local kids for their volunteer activities and feature local kids answering questions. Stations also can localize outreach activities, producing their own local ZOOM websites and launching ZOOM Into Action campaigns to motivate kids to volunteer doc15421 none Mathematical Sciences (21). This project is creating materials presenting the structure of the hydrogen atom and the periodic table as a first example of the power of representation theory in predicting physical phenomena from information about symmetries. Despite the centrality of representation theory to modern mathematics, mathematical physics and physical chemistry, undergraduate courses in representation theory often ignore the physical applications. During this proof-of-concept project materials are being tested at a number of different institutions, and a modular approach is being incorporated into the materials development so as to broaden the appeal of the materials to an audience that includes disciplines outside of mathematics . A book on representation theory is planned and an arrangement is already in place with a leading publisher doc15422 none Students in general education science courses typically do not appreciate that science advances through a series of complex paradigm shifts involving considerable debate and discussion. Their perception that scientific understanding of issues proceeds in a cut-and-dry process impedes their grasp of scientific concepts and their ability to apply science reasoning to issues in societal contexts. Unfortunately, there is no way to quantify these misconceptions and thereby address them with a concerted curricular response. This project is producing an assessment instrument, the Science Perceptions Survey, designed to measure these dispositions and changes in them as well. The Science Perceptions Survey is being devised in the context of general education chemistry courses and validated through correlation with results of written essays and interviews. An independent evaluator who is not associated with the development of the assessment tool is managing these validation protocols. Once validated, the instruments will be freely available to other institutions considering changes in curricula focused on enhancing the appreciation of science methods and their place in general education courses. The Principal Investigators anticipate that the Science Perceptions Survey will be a valuable tool in delineating deficiencies in students ability to understand the way in which scientific arguments are constructed and to guide curriculum development in correcting these deficiencies. In addition to the curriculum assessment format, the Science Perceptions Survey will be disseminated in a web-based format for student self-evaluation. This implementation will provide students real-time analysis of their tolerance for ambiguity in scientific findings and their ability to use the scientific method. This ongoing project can be used by instructors as an assignment in the general education courses to help students understand how science advances knowledge doc15423 none The Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh has designed a research project to examine the process of and outcomes of informal (out of school) web-based learning. Conceptualizing and Assessing Web-based Informal Science Education will be a three-year research study to document and analyze how the informal learner, both as an individual and in a social group, uses and learns from web-based activities. The PIs will also develop a framework and tools for evaluating informal web-based learning environments and guidelines for effective web-based learning activities. This research will use web sites developed by museums and that are complementary to exhibits in those museums. These sites are being selected because according to the PIs, museums and other nonprofit developers are already going beyond traditional content to create true virtual informal learning environments. The outcomes of this research will include a better understanding of the cognitive and social processes that occur as learners engage in web-based activities; a framework and tools for evaluating informal web-based learning activities; and a web-based annotated bibliography relevant to this research doc15424 none This project proposes to perform fundamental research on the development of classes of distributed control laws and algorithms for optimal traffic engineering in a multiple- service enabled Internet. Having its basis on recent results on the use of Sliding Mode theory in the context of control of computer networks, the proposed research aims at developing decentralized algorithms and tools for optimal traffic engineering in the presence of both multiple paths and multiple classes of service. The theoretical underpinnings of various traffic engineering algorithms will be developed. It will also provide solutions, implementation guidelines to practitioners in the field and also valuable input to standardization bodies on the effectiveness of various traffic engineering approaches doc15425 none Development of Quadrupole Magnetic Field-Flow Fractionation: Application to Characterization of Magnetic Colloids and Microparticles. The main objective of the proposed work is to develop magnetic field-flow fractionation (MgFFF) into a powerful tool for characterizing magnetic colloids in terms of their paramagnetic component content. The various FFF techniques are elution-based separation methods in which the degree of retardation of a colloidal material depends on the strength of interaction of the colloid particles with the applied field. The quadrupole magnetic field is radially symmetrical and lends itself to an annular FFF channel geometry. Such a geometry has already been exploited for biological cell sorting using immunospecific magnetic colloid labels. A novel, helical channel geometry is proposed that will have several advantages over a simple annular channel. It has simplified inlet and outlet geometry, it will nullify the effects of varying field strength around the annular circumference, and it will have increased separation length for a given quadrupole magnet. Effort is being devoted to optimizing the channel geometry and operating conditions. The importance of carrier solution chemistry cannot be underestimated because aggregation or chaining of magnetized particles must be avoided. Quadrupole magnetic FFF offers the unique possibility of characterizing colloidal material in terms of its distribution in magnetization. Other techniques yield only a bulk, or mean value for the magnetization. Distribution information would be invaluable to the manufacturers of these materials. The inclusion of a quadrupole electromagnet will broaden the applicability of the instrument. The field strength can be adjusted to suit the magnetic properties of the sample. Using programmed decay of field strength, the instrument will be capable of characterizing magnetically polydisperse particulate samples in which magnetization varies widely from particle to particle. The method will be useful for characterizing microparticles and colloids. It will also lend itself to separation of proteins by functionalizing the surface of the particles to promote selective adsorption doc15426 none National Video Resources, in collaboration with the American Library Association and the History of Science Society, is developing and implementing six-week discussion programs at 100 libraries across the country. The Research Revolution and the Shaping of Modern Life discussions will illuminate the organization and goals of scientific-technical work, the critical outcomes of research and development, the material and social byproducts of such work, and the ethical issues that sometimes result. During the program participants will screen and discuss documentary films on topics such as: an introduction to the rise of organized laboratory research and its results; new developments in quantum technologies and nanotechnology; recent developments in materials science and how artificially created materials have defined a modern way of life; the impact of genetic engineering and the Human Genome Project; medical imaging from x-rays to MRIs and CT-scans; and the science of meteorology and the problems of global climate change. Discussions will be lead by local scholars from Universities and research laboratories located near a participating library doc15427 none Ecological diversity of Miocene mammals of Pakistan Catherine Badgley, Thure Cerling, Anna K. Behrensmeyer, John C. Barry This collaborative project evaluates the ecological and evolutionary responses of mammals to changes in climate and vegetation during the late Miocene (5 to 11 million years ago), as known from the terrestrial record of Pakistan. Fossils and sedimentary rocks of northern Pakistan are well documented by the work of our international research team that has conducted over 25 years of field work on the geology, paleontology, and paleoecology of the Siwalik sequence. (Siwalik refers to fluvial sediments shed by the rising Himalayas over the last 20 million years.) Work to date on Siwalik sediments and vertebrate fossils, especially mammals, has provided a detailed record of changing fluvial systems, climate and vegetation, preservational attributes of fossil assemblages, and mammalian faunas. This record is one of the best documented continental ecosystems of the Cenozoic and now presents the opportunity to evaluate changes in taxonomic composition, speciation, immigration, local extinction, and ecological attributes of mammalian species and faunas in relation to sustained environmental change. Our project involves first the creation of an electronic database (the Siwalik species database) for fossil mammals. The database will contain ecologically informative, specimen-based measurements, including morphological and isotopic data for each species. Next, we will use this compilation of data to test three models of how mammalian faunas changed over time. One model focuses on the direct effects of changing climate and vegetation on the composition and ecological attributes of mammals. The second model evaluates whether or not species with large geographic ranges and high local abundance dominate the pattern of faunal change. The third model examines the hypothesis that the arrival of several species of extremely large mammals (the size of elephants) altered the local habitat through feeding and trampling and caused changes in the rest of the ecological community. Each model makes a unique set of predictions about the timing and nature of faunal change in relation to environmental change. These predictions will be tested with the data assembled in the database. The Siwalik species database will stabilize the taxonomic and ecological data for Siwalik mammals and make these data accessible for other studies of Old World history. Tests of the three models of faunal change will demonstrate how the fossil record contributes to patterns and theory in community ecology doc15428 none Schiffman The project will focus on combined petrographic and geochemical analyses of altered rock core recovered from a deep drill hole near Hilo, on the Big Island of Hawaii. Some of this material comes from a 3 km-deep drill hole completed by the Hawaii Scientific Drilling Project (HSDP) in September, . The reminder will come from new samples that will be recovered when the existing hole is deepened, beginning in early . The primary objective of this project will be to develop and test models for rock alteration using an integrated analytical approach for studying the recovered core materials. Major questions to be addressed are: (1) What is the alteration history of the basaltic material which underlies Mauna Kea volcano, how has it been influenced by various types of alteration processes, and are these distinct from other forms of seafloor alteration? (2) How has this alteration affected the mineral composition and physical properties of these materials? (3) How significantly has alteration affected the chemical composition of the submarine portions of the Mauna Kea? and (4) What is the evidence regarding (proposed models invoking) deep circulation of ground waters within the interior of this volcano? Questions # 1 and 2 will be addressed through the systematic study of the alteration mineralogy. Question #3 and 4 will be addressed by detailed geochemical investigations of elemental and isotopic signatures associated with the conversion of basaltic minerals and glass to palagonitized glass, layer silicates, and zeolites. Trace element and isotopic analyses will provide the means of evaluating the exchange of basaltic, seawater, meteoric components during alteration. Stable isotopic analyses of alteration minerals should allow us to test a hydrologic model suggesting that meteoric fluids have circulated deep within the interior of Mauna Kea doc15429 none Luttge Mineral dissolution data obtained by vertical scanning interferometry have formed the basis for a new surface model of the dissolution process. This model has been formalized in a fundamental rate law (Lasaga and Luttge, Science 291, - , ), with potential relevance to a wide range of minerals and mineral surface problems. In this project, we set forth a plan integrating experimental and theoretical techniques designed to explore the kinetics and dissolution mechanism of (alumino)silicates. We also anticipate that this work will have far reaching implications for other minerals as well. The techniques were chosen to enhance one another and provide complementary information, and include vertical scanning interferometry (VSI), hydrothermal atomic force microscopy (HAFM), Monte Carlo (MC) and solvated ab initio and density functional theory (DFT) quantum mechanical calculations. This approach will also allow us to incorporate results with data taken from previous experiments involving mineral powders and single crystals in batch and flow reactors. By operating over a wide range of length scales, this work has the potential to provide a much-needed, critical link between the atomic-scale observation of surface phenomena and their macroscopic result. The project will produce the following: (1) the dissolution rates of plagioclase as a function of solid composition, temperature and pH; (2) a direct comparison of VSI and HAFM data; (3) the relationship of these data to macroscopic (bulk) rates, as well as ab initio and DFT calculations; (4) the relationship between reaction rate and mineral surface area in terms of total (BET) versus reactive surface area; (5) a detailed understanding of the kinetics and mechanisms of feldspar dissolution from solvated ab initio and DFT calculations, and their relationship to earlier gas-phase calculations doc15430 none Luzzi This award is to the University of Pennsylvania to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners in this effort are the University of Pennsylvania (Lead Institution), Drexel University, the Collegiate Consortium, HUBS (Hospitals, Universities, Businesses, Schools), MAGPI (Metropolitan Area GifaPop in Philadelphia for Internet2), Bucks County Community College, Delaware County CC, Montgomery County CC, the CC of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, Camden County CC in New Jersey, Delaware Technical CC in Delaware, Hartford CC in Maryland, SAIC through HUBS, Centocor, Cephalon, Sunthes, Life Sensors, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and Ben Franklin Technology Partners. Proposed Activities This proposal presents a partnership or academic, non-profit and corporate partners in the Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland region to provide the infrastructure, curriculum development, teacher training and curriculum implementation for Associates Degree programs in nano- and nano-bio-technology. The proposal includes the building of an infrastructure that will leverage the power of high bandwidth communications for regional virtual classrooms and telexperimentation. The program also includes outreach to high schools in the region. Proposed Innovation The proposal centers on the need for a technically skilled workforce, if the region is to achieve its full economic potential in the technology-rich pharmaceutical, life science and advanced chemical sectors. The companies in these technology sectors will need workers from PhDs to technicians to enable growth and economic well-being. The partners propose a coordinated effort in tech-based outreach for education and training, especially at the associates degree level. Approaches included are internet portal and collaboration groupware to support dynamic formation of research teams and virtual classrooms, distance learning, tele-experimentation with remote participation in experiments via near-real-time digital images of scientific instruments, high-bandwidth communication through Internet 2 for video-conferencing. Potential Economic Impact Partnerships with universities, community colleges, the private sector, and regional government are needed to provide the workforce education training from associate degree through PhD degrees will provide the workforce needed to attract and retain high-tech industry in pharmaceuticals, advanced chemical, and life sciences to the four-state region. Potential Societal Impact Currently a significantly lower percentage of the high school graduates in the region receive education beyond high school than for Silicon Valley. The region needs a highly-trained workforce to attract and retain industry for high paying jobs. The young people in the region now have to accept low-paying jobs or relocate. This integrated effort will provide the training and the jobs needed to change that doc15431 none J. Brian Evans In this project the investigators focus on crystal plastic mechanisms involving dislocation creep and diffusion flow. Our understanding of the creep strength of calcite rocks, which are usually complex polyphase assemblages, is largely based on data from a few relatively pure limestones and marbles, from single-phase synthetic marbles, or even from single crystals, and, with a few exceptions, only over very small strain increments. Based on experience with deformation of other rocks and ceramics, one might expect rock strength to be highly dependent on dispersed second phases, solute impurities, preexisting porosity, grain size, and grain-size distribution, as well as temperature, pressure, and pore-fluid chemistry. The standard paradigm, steady-state power-law creep, as applied to calcite rocks, typically relates only temperature, stress, strain rate, and for diffusion creep or boundary sliding processes, grain size. Current data from tests on synthetic marbles with and without an added second phase, and on natural rocks suggest that the standard power-law equation fails to predict accurately the stress sensitivity of strain rate observed in conventional triaxial mechanical experiments in the dislocation flow regime. One particular problem may arise if the microstructure in the rock evolves with strain or time. Such structural variables might include average grain size, grain-size distribution, grain orientation, and dislocation structures that scale with grain-size. Previously it has been assumed that grain size had no influence on strength for high-temperature dislocation creep. In materials composed of more than one phase, the average grain size, shape, and distribution of second-phase particles, and the total amount of the second phase may also affect strength. In this work, carefully controlled samples of marble will be synthesized and tested at high temperature and pressure. The investigators intend to systematically investigate the effect on strength of matrix grain size, second-phase content, and solid solutions of magnesium, iron, manganese, and strontium. An important aspect of the work is the correlation of grain and dislocation microstructure with mechanical behavior. High strain experiments will be conducted using loading in simple shear, conventional triaxial extension, and confined torsion. The expanded data set will be used to construct a more robust constitutive law, applicable to a larger set of thermodynamic conditions doc15432 none This project will develop spatially extended and statistically reliable estimates of Antarctic surface temperature variations over the past several centuries, using a multi-proxy calibration verification approach that combines the climate signal in ice core, satellite remote sensing, and weather station data. Antarctica has been problematic from the point of view of large-scale paleoclimate reconstruction because of the paucity of long-term instrumental data, and the relatively low resolution of most ice cores. Several new developments, particularly the network of shallow (~100 meter) ice cores from the ongoing International Trans-Antarctic Scientific Expedition (ITASE) project will yield broad spatial coverage of annually resolved ice core physical properties, chemistry, and stable isotope data over more than a hundred years. Second, there are now over twenty years of microwave and infrared brightness temperatures available from satellites covering virtually all of Antarctica with seasonally resolved information that has been demonstrated to record the ice surface near surface temperature with very reasonable precision and accuracy. Finally, higher quality microwave emission data from Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometers (AMSR) with much finer spatial resolution and radiometric fidelity than those from previous sources will offer an improved view of longer term mean temperatures in Antarctica. The 40-year instrumental record and the shorter but spatially more comprehensive Automatic Weather Station network will be combined with seasonally-resolved 37-gigahertz satellite-based ice surface temperature estimates to reconstruct Antarctic-wide temperature patterns during the past forty years. The sparser Antarctic instrumental surface temperature data available back nearly to the beginning of the century will be added for longer-term, though quite spatially-restricted, cross-validation of these reconstructions. This cross-validation procedure has been used successfully with roughly century-long instrumental records at locations primarily in the Northern Hemisphere. The longer time scale will be approached through a cross-validation of the proxy-based pre-20th century surface temperature reconstructions using information on thermal emission from deeper in the firn that is contained in low-frequency passive microwave satellite measurements. The low-frequency estimates, supplemented by borehole thermometry, will provide important independent verification of the long-term averages of the annual surface temperature reconstructions doc15433 none Duffy In this project, the investigators will study rheological and elastic properties of mantle minerals by combining new radial x-ray diffraction techniques with Brillouin spectroscopy in a diamond anvil cell. Radial x-ray diffraction is a new high-pressure method that can constrain a wealth of information about single-crystal elastic constants, yield strength, strength anisotropy, stress continuity, texturing, and even the equation of state. Advantages of radial diffraction relative to other techniques for strength and elasticity determination are that the accessible pressure range reaches into the deep lower mantle and there is no requirement for high-quality single crystals. A major goal of this study is to explore the capabilities of radial x-ray diffraction by choosing a set of materials for which the investigators can simultaneously apply radial diffraction to 60 GPa and Brillouin scattering on single crystals to 20 GPa. This will provide a direct comparison of elasticity determined by the new lattice strain methods with well-established Brillouin techniques. Specific materials to be examined included perovskites, magnesiowustites, spinel, corundum, brucite, and calcium oxide. These results will have fundamental and wide applications to high-pressure studies and our understanding of the Earth s deep mantle doc15434 none This study is providing constraints on the distribution, geometry, and magnitude of structure and deformation within and near the Archean cratons of southern Africa. A combined seismic and numerical modeling approach is used to accomplish these goals. Results from this work are providing key information regarding the accretion and subsequent evolution of stable cratonic regions, the depth distribution of mantle deformation, and the degree of coupling between tectonic plates and sublithospheric mantle. Specifically, the following issues are being addressed: 1) the 3-D seismic structure of the crust and upper mantle in Archean craton regions of southern Africa, with a focus on the depth extent of the lithosphere and on the relationship of crust and upper mantle velocities to geologically-defined tectonic boundaries; and 2) the 3-D distribution of upper mantle anisotropy in this area, and its implications for deformation in the lithosphere and flow in the sublithospheric mantle. A new two plane wave technique that inverts variations in surface wave phase and amplitude across a broadband seismic array constrains three-dimensional (3-D) crust and upper mantle seismic structure. Data for this analysis come from the 82 station Southern Africa Seismic Experiment, part of the larger-scale multidisciplinary Kaapvaal Project. Unlike traditional regional surface wave tomography where planar wavefronts and great circle source-receiver raypaths are assumed, a significant advantage of the current method is that it accounts for wavefield perturbations due to lateral heterogeneity, scattering, or multipathing along ray paths. Both isotropic and anisotropic seismic structure are determined using Rayleigh and Love waves recorded at the SASE stations, and by inverting the surface wave data with existing shear wave splitting results in this area to determine best-fitting 3-D models of seismic velocity and anisotropy beneath southern Africa. The numerical modeling component involves calculating 3-D models of mantle flow and determining the relationship of these models to observations of seismic anisotropy and deformation of the mantle lithosphere. A lithospheric keel morphology appropriate for southern Africa is constructed through integration of the results of the surface wave analyses with previous body wave results. This geometry, is used to examine models of mantle flow around the keel in which flow is driven either by horizontal plate motion or vertical mantle upwelling. Predicted anisotropy for both body and surface waves using the elastic parameters of southern Africa mantle nodules and the results of other deformation studies are calculated to evaluate the potential extent of sublithospheric mantle deformation. The results of predicted seismic anisotropy due to mantle flow will be merged with the observed seismic anisotropy to help constrain the distribution of mantle deformation beneath southern Africa doc15435 none The current rate of strain concentrated along the Altyn Tagh and Kunlun fault systems in northern Tibet is being determined using the technique of radar interferometry. These fault systems play a key role in the dynamics of the continental deformation in Asia, yet their slip rate and associated deformation are still poorly known. Currently debated issues include the respective amounts of the convergence between India and Asia that are absorbed by crustal thickening and by lateral extrusion of continental blocks, or the characterization of the distribution of deformation throughout the continent. These issues are unresolved because of the poor knowledge of the present-day kinematics in the collision zone. In addition, northern Tibet has been the locus of two large earthquakes in and producing a disruption in the current inter-seismic strain pattern in the northern part of the collision zone. Spatially continuous maps of the line of sight displacement of the ground along active fault zones are being constructed by interferometric processing of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. This research exploits the extensive archive of ERS SAR data covering the northern Tibet area that have been acquired by the European Space Agency since . Errors in the data due to poor orbit determination and troposphere phase propagation delay are reduced using a baseline re-estimation procedure and data averaging, following the approach developed with radar data of California. Line of sight displacement maps are then combined to constrain deformation process models of long-term fault creep and of co-seismic slip and post-seismic relaxation for the and events. The data are used to determine distribution of inter-seismic strain in the vicinity of the Kunlun and Altyn Tagh faults, far-field slip-rate associated with the faults and variation of rates along the length of the faults, surface displacement associated with the and earthquakes, possible linkage between these two events, influence of post-seismic processes on the strain accumulation in other sections of the fault. Slip rates are being compared with long-term rates inferred from geological observations doc15436 none Richards This project will develop and apply two seismological methods for improving estimates of the inner core s rate of rotation with respect to the rest of the solid Earth. First, the investigators shall search for doublets in pertinent source regions, to enable very precise measurement of differential travel times that are indicative of inner core rotation. (A doublet, is a pair of earthquakes occurring at different times but in almost exactly the same location. A differential travel time is the time between two signals on the same seismogram.) Second, they shall search for indications of travel time change in seismic waves that have traveled almost vertically in the Earth, from a seismic source (an earthquake, or a nuclear explosion) to its antipode. By working with examples of seismic waves that have passed very deeply into the inner core, and are thus more sensitive to effects of anisotropy and inhomogeneity in the inner core, the investigators will be better able to understand the basic mechanism causing travel time changes doc15437 none The Lunar and Planetary Institute will expand a successful pilot program in which libraries in Texas and Louisiana are used as community learning centers. The program is two-fold and includes both Explore! resource materials and Fun with Science modules. Explore! materials are a collection of space science posters, brochures, fact sheets, videotapes and references. These resources are disseminated to librarians for use as part of their collections and to support the Fun with Science modules. Fun with Science consists of eight space science modules that librarians are trained to use in after-school and summer youth programs. Module topics include rocketry, comets, impact cratering, remote sensing and space capsule design. Each year, 3-4 new modules will be produced. Librarians receive training on content, activities and NASA resources in 2-3 day sessions. The dissemination plan would enable the program to expand to include public libraries in Texas, Illinois (Chicago) and South Carolina, as well as school libraries as a secondary audience. Rural sites will be targeted and distance learning will be used for training when possible. CD ROMs containing the modules, training videos and a website will be developed to support this project doc15438 none SoundPrint Media Center is producing a testing a pilot of a radio project that would examine mathematical models used to simulate phenomena, make predictions and generate scenarios. During the What If: Models, Predications and Scenarios pilot phase, SoundPrint will produce and test two half-hour documentaries, follow-up radio updates, and a plan for a web-based model simulation and educational resources. Educational Support Services will conduct evaluation of the pilot materials to determine: the programs ability to translate complicated mathematical and scientific ideas through a storytelling approach, the types of models that best lend themselves to illustrate those concepts, and the degree to which the documentaries as stand alone stories have an impact on listeners. The formative evaluation also will test a website doc15439 none Wagner This award is to Case Western Reserve University (Lead Institution) to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners in the proposed effort include: Case Western Reserve University (Lead Institution), Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Inc., KAL Equity Capital Fund, Metro Health Medical Center, Nortech-Northeast Ohio Technology Coalition, Ohio Innovation Fund, Seven Roien Funds, University Hospitals of Cleveland, Edison Biotechnology, Inc., CID Equity Partners, Enterprise Development Inc. Proposed Activities The award has the following activities: (1) internships for local high school students to work at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Bio Technology Park, (2) academic degree programs for undergraduate students to take one semester of bioengineering and management and internships for post graduates as part of the master s degree, (3) research activities in bioengineering or biomedical design where students design a product plus a business plan for its commercialization, (4) technology transfer with the use of a new incubator activity. Proposed Innovation The goal of the effort is to change the culture in Northeast Ohio to promote vibrant entrepreneurship by attracting young people to biotechnology, creating new biomedical undergraduate and graduate entrepreneur track degree programs that combine engineering and management studies, funding for biology-related entrepreneurs for early evaluation of product concepts and commercialization, and mentoring for entrepreneurs by successful business partners. Potential Economic Impact The award will allow the Northeast Ohio region to apply its considerable academic research and education strengths to entrepreneurial endeavors that will generate economic development. The goal is for the region to become one of the top ten regions for biomedical industry employment by the year . Potential Societal Impact Young people will be recruited for careers in biotechnology and be given education in both engineering and management to prepare them to become entrepreneurs to lead the new biotechnology economy that will be one of the top ten in the nation by . The emphasis on recruit and education of under-represented minorities is a major societal benefit doc15440 none This project focuses on new approaches to maximizing power consumption in handheld and other wireless devices by combining a network-centric view of the power-consumption issue (aximizing longevity for the network rather than device by devic) with the more traditional device-centric view (power management capabilities for the individual device). The project will model and evaluate new architectures and algorithms that allow the operating system to accept input from the applications and interact closely with the network for minimizing overall energy in the wireless system. The focus of the research is: 1) power-management of individual nodes 2) power-aware routing, in the sense that the power is minimized for the overall network and not only for individual messages or streams. 3) a combination of the variable voltage scheduling with the power-aware routing. It is anticipated that through algorithm development and analysis, simulation and testbed implementations, the results of this project will lead to a better understanding of how to provide more efficient power management to nodes with rechargeable batteries, and how to integrate CPU and network power management under one paradigm doc15441 none Ludwig This grant provides support for refinements to the widely-used Isoplot Ex, a MS Excel-based computer program used for reduction and evaluation of radiogenic isotope data. The program will be expanded to include several new capabilities including: 1) a Bayesian + Monte Carlo approach for improving the precision of radiometric dates from a sequence of stratigraphically-constrained beds; 2) a method for logical, statistical, and graphical integration of the two main Ar-Ar age-approaches (stepwise-release age-spectra and Ar-Ar isochrons); 3) a Gaussian unmixing module to enable quantitative evaluation of age-suites involving multiple age-components; 4) code revisions to maintain compatibility with new versions of Excel and eliminate bugs as they are detected; and 5) expansion and revision of the Isoplot User s Manual to increase clarity and teaching effectiveness doc15442 none Georgakakos The focus of the two-year research project is to quantify the relative importance of (a) the large-scale forcing fields of water vapor and thermal buoyancy versus (b) the storm microphysics for the development of the spatio-temporal characteristics of convective oceanic surface rainfall variability. Of particular interest is to understand the effects of cold microphysical properties on rainfall variability at various spatiotemporal domains and resolutions. The research studies oceanic rainfall as a first step toward the understanding of the causes of rainfall variability by separating the large scale forcing and microphysics from the complex terrain influences present in continental rainfall. The research results are of fundamental importance for hydrometeorology and hydrology, and they may be used in applications such as (a) downscaling or upscaling rainfall estimates obtained by remote sensing or by large-scale climate models, or (b) hydrologic design studies requiring rainfall estimates of high spatio-temporal resolution. Statistical-dynamical numerical models of rainfall genesis and evolution are combined with data from national large-scale experiments to achieve the goals of the project. State equations for the vertical momentum, mass and energy conservation are integrated efficiently using typical vertical profiles of the state variables, estimated from field experiments in convective regimes. A number of quantitative hypothesis are tested regarding the causes of rainfall variability in domains of a 256-km length, with spatial resolution of 1 km and temporal resolution of 1 min. The models are used in a Monte-Carlo framework that incorporates uncertainties in observed data, large-scale forcing fields, and model microphysical parameterizations, including possible feedbacks from the generated cloud to the near field large-scale forcing doc15443 none Physically based descriptions of fault constitutive response are being used to address key problems in the dynamics of earthquakes. There are two main topics: (1) In current attempts to devise models of crustal earthquake sequences, using experimentally motivated temperature variation (hence depth variation) of rate and state constitutive parameters, it has been noticed that important new features emerge as the state-evolution slip distance L is decreased towards values in the laboratory range. These are the emergence of a population of small events that is clustered towards the base of the seismogenic zone, and the effect of the resulting heterogeneous residual stress patterns from those events on the earliest phases of seismic radiation in large events. This process seems promising to explain the initially hesitant radiation in many large events, known as the seismic nucleation phase . To fit such calculations on present computers, L must be made much larger than laboratory values, which are of order of magnitude 10 microns, since the required numerical grid size scales with a large factor (of order 10^5) times L. Yet interesting behavior is emerging as L is reduced towards those values. This project addresses the small L range by a combination of new numerical studies, coordinated with asymptotic analysis of simplified models, as L is decreased in size, to provide a basis for interpretation and extrapolation. (2) Thermal weakening effects are thought to occur during rapid slip in major earthquakes, causing the effective friction coefficient to diminish from lab-like values, present when a propagating rupture front first reaches a point on a fault, to much lower values when rapid and large slip occurs. This problem is being addressed by building on initial studies that focus separately on the earliest phases of sliding, before melting occurs, and on the mature stage of active pseudotachylyte development. Flash heating at asperity contacts is expected to be the primary thermal weakening process when slip rates are high ( 1 m s) but total slip is still small, in a sense that can be quantified. A preliminary analysis captures some features of available experiments. Some ideas are being developed on how to address the much larger slip range when partial melting occurs. These include a view, supported by pseudotachylyte observations, that a granular fault gouge becomes liquefied through development of small amounts of partial melt, and that a self-regulated process of velocity-weakening character develops as this highly pressurized phase permeates into the adjoining fault walls. These concepts are being developed for purposes of integrating them with numerical simulations and theory on how the mode of rupture depends on constitutive response, to examine consequences for rupture dynamics. That will contribute to understanding how major fault systems can operate at realistically low overall driving stresses, even when the stress needed locally to initiate slip is much larger, and to quantifying the minimum average stress level for which a rupture, once initiated at a location of locally high shear stress or low effective normal stress, can propagate over large distances doc15444 none Chemistry (12) The power and versatility of modern NMR spectroscopy make it an essential tool for chemists. The Department of Chemistry is adapting a variety of experiments from the research and educational literature that uses nuclear spin to obtain structural information and implementing them as discovery-based experiments. These experiments are providing the context for introducing NMR techniques in a sequence that gradually increases the difficulty of relating molecular structure to spectral information. Organic chemistry students are being introduced to NMR early in the first semester through C-13, DEPT, and HETCOR experiments, followed by the characterization an organofluorine compound, using 2-D NMR to identify an unknown ester, probing the stereospecificity of a reduction reaction using NOE, and investigating the conformational dynamics of DEET. Students in Organic Spectroscopy are characterizing non-trivial unknowns using a variety of complementary spectroscopic techniques. Students in advanced courses are investigating phosphorus-phosphorus coupling and characterizing structures of enzyme inhibitors, among other laboratory projects. These discovery-based experiments require a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer with multinuclear capability and possessing the resolution and flexibility required by such experiments. Research in a variety of areas has become an integral part of the training of our undergraduate students and the high-field NMR is finding numerous applications doc15445 none Chemistry (12) This proposal focuses on improvements in the Instrumental Analysis and Physical Chemistry laboratories, in the undergraduate research program, and in the enhancement of collaborative efforts across disciplines fostered by the acquisition of an LC-MS. Experiments are being adapted from the research and educational literature and implemented into the undergraduate curriculum. In the Instrumental Analysis laboratory, students are performing project-based, comprehensive investigations typical of those they will be expected to carry out once employed in an industrial setting. Each project involves real world problems, utilizes several instruments, includes a literature review, method development, and laboratory preparation, and requires 2-4 weeks for completion. The LC-MS is playing a significant role in several of these projects. The instrument is also being used extensively in undergraduate research, both within the Department and in collaboration with faculty members outside the Department doc15446 none Houghton University of Hawaii Basaltic volcanism is most typically thought to produce effusion of lava, with the most explosive manifestations ranging from mild Strombolian activity to more energetic fire fountain eruptions. However, some basaltic eruptions are now recognized as extremely violent, i.e. generating widespread phreatomagmatic, subplinian and Plinian fall deposits. These eruptions are particularly dangerous because the ascent rate of basaltic magma prior to eruption can be very rapid (giving warning times as little as a few hours) and because their precursors may be ignored or misunderstood. The main question addressed in this proposal is: what are the conditions that cause basaltic magma to adopt an eruption style more typical of chemically evolved, highly viscous magma? Possible mechanisms (acting singly, or in concert) are: (1) interaction between magma and water, (ii) very rapid ascent producing a delayed onset of degassing then exceptionally rapid runaway vesiculation at shallow levels in the conduit, (iii) microlite crystallization and degassing of the magma during ascent leading to increased viscosity. Our goal is to establish the triggering mechanism for the Plinian phase of the Tarawera eruption. This proposal will test the hypothesis that this phase was a consequence of either rheologic changes during magma ascent that accompanied early (pre-fragmentation) interaction between the basaltic melt and water-bearing rhyolitic units forming the conduit walls or late-stage magma water interaction doc15447 none A multidisciplinary program of research and development that examines the impact of the sustained integration of representational tools and chemical investigations on chemistry learning and teaching in high schools and colleges will be undertaken. A team of chemists, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, and science educators will focus on three critical and interrelated issues: chemical understanding, scientific investigations, and discourse and representation. The project will generate new knowledge about the relationship between students understanding of chemical phenomena and their generation and use of various representations at the macroscopic (physical, aggregate) and microscopic (atomic and molecular) levels and in the context of collaborative laboratory investigations. Additionally it will evolve new knowledge about the relationship between teacher activities, scaffolding, and support and students use of representations in collaborative laboratory investigations. It is planned to extend the development of a learning environment, the ChemSense Knowledge Building Environment that both supports and benefits from research activities. This environment allows students and teachers professors to collaborate in the sustained investigation of chemical phenomena, collect data, build representations of these phenomena, and participate in scaffolded discourse to explain these phenomena in terms of underlying chemical entities and mechanisms. The project team will work with chemistry professors and high school chemistry teachers to implement this environment for an entire semester in a range of college and high school chemistry courses. These activities and assessments will be designed around key dimensions associated with the particulate nature of matter and chemical reactions: change in molecular geometry, connectivity, aggregation, state, and concentration. In high school classrooms, these dimensions will be employed within fairly standard first-year high school chemistry topics: electronegativity and bond formation, solubility, gas laws, and chemical reactions. Undergraduate studies will focus on integration of ChemSense into two types of classroom situations: a first-year lecture course designed to convey general chemical principles through organic chemistry, and a first-year, integrated studio course that combines lecture and wet-lab experiences. With appropriate laboratory activities and teacher guidance, the extended use of student generated, static and dynamic representations of chemical processes, along with instrument generated representations of their investigations, should result in deeper discourse and understanding that connect physical phenomena with underlying chemical entities and mechanisms doc15448 none Over the past several years two technologies, ad hoc networking and smart antenna systems, have developed independently of one another. Smart antenna systems have been developed primarily for cellular communication systems while ad hoc network technology has been developed for military and disaster relief network models. In this research, the researchers plan on utilizing smart antenna systems in the context of ad hoc networking. The researchers believe that smart antennas with their ability to dynamically form directed beams will allow the capacity of ad hoc networks to dramatically increase. The approach in this research is to exploit direction of arrival information obtained at the antenna level for MAC and routing protocol design and, conversely, use routing and MAC layer information to form appropriate beams. This integrated approach appears to be ideal in terms of improving the overall system performance. The planned approach will rely on simulations as well as modeling. For the simulation, the researchers propose adding smart antenna models into NS-2. In addition, since one of the performance metrics is energy, the researchers plan on incorporating accurate energy models for beamforming and direction of arrival algorithms into NS-2. One of the two approaches that will be explored for this is a mixed NS-2 DSP (Digital Signal Processor) environment in which NS-2 uses external DSPs to run the antenna algorithms and the exact measured energy cost is returned to the simulator. This research will have a significant impact on the existing state of the art in ad hoc network design. The researchers believe that as smart antenna systems mature, these systems are the right choice for infrastructureless networks. This research will develop protocols and answer questions related to performance improvements and the energy cost of using smart antennas. The researchers hope that the work will enable other researchers to explore this merging of technologies as well doc15349 none American children spend many hours with media each day. Although much of this time involves television viewing, an increasing amount involves participation with digital interactive entertainment technologies, including the Internet. Even television as we know it will soon change dramatically, with digital television adding improved clarity of images and the opportunity for interactivity. Knowing how to use these interactive technologies will be a necessary skill for an educated workforce in the 21st century and may be a gateway to studying science and technology. Therefore, knowing how children use and learn from these digital technologies is an important step in ensuring that children will develop these basic skills. Although children invest their free time heavily in electronic entertainment media, relatively little is known about how new interactive media impact children s learning in informal learning contexts. One problem is that the field is interdisciplinary. Researchers examine diverse issues rather than examine specific areas of interactive digital media systematically and then consolidate that knowledge into a central information base. Another problem is the rapid change in digital technologies, making researchers one step behind the latest developments. One outcome of these problems is a poor knowledge base for understanding of how new digital entertainment technologies influence children s learning. Over the next 5 years, this Center will advance theory and method in how children learn through digital interactive entertainment media. Using an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the fields of psychology, human development, communications, sociology, anthropology, and medicine, researchers will explore multiple levels of analysis in order to explicate the role that dialogue, in the form of interactivity and identity, play in children s learning from entertaining interactive digital technologies. At a macro level, two types of survey will be conducted to document patterns of change and similarity over time in children s access to, and use of, new and emerging digital platforms. These macro level studies will guide the direction of micro level experimental, observational, and ethnographic studies that will examine what interactivity is and how and what children learn from online digital experiences. Parallel research activities will examine children at different age groups, providing both cross-sectional and longitudinal findings on children s uses of media and the impact of media on their development. Overall, these research activities will expand the knowledge base about: 1) the kinds of digital media that are emerging; 2) the kinds of interactive digital media experiences children choose to have; 3) the impact of these interactive experiences on children s long-term social adjustment and academic achievement; 4) how specific kinds of interactions with digital technologies impact children s learning; 5) how interacting with each other online influences children s learning and identity construction; and 6) how observational and interactive experiences are represented in the developing brain. This knowledge base will be disseminated in published form in professional journals, through presentations at national and international conferences, and via interconnected websites to create synergistic activities among the researchers, policy makers, child advocacy groups, and creators in the children and digital media field. The Children s Digital Media Centers, based at Georgetown University, will also include the University of Texas at Austin, Northwestern University, and the University of California Los Angeles. Centers will include a Steering Committee and an Advisory Board of distinguished colleagues doc15450 none The lunar tide has been suspected of causing earthquakes for more than a century. It is important to understand the influence of tides on the occurrence of earthquakes to improve understanding of the stress and the strain patterns just as an earthquake begins. A better understanding of earthquake nucleation could aid attempts to predict earthquakes. Most previous studies of whether earthquakes are sensitive to tides have been inconclusive. A recently completed project by the investigators showed that earthquake rates are no more than a few percent higher when tides favor stresses than when tides act to discourage earthquakes. This work used tens of thousands of earthquakes on simple parts of the San Andreas fault in northern and central California and computes the tides with a sophisticated model including the moon, the observed tides in the world s oceans, and the detailed coast line in California. This project examines an expanded dataset with greater resolution and resolves the level of tidal influence on earthquakes. The work will also check to be sure that several possible confounding effects, including the temporal clustering of earthquakes into swarms and aftershock sequences and the presence of artifacts in earthquake catalogs do not affect the results. A refined estimate of the effect of lunar tides on the rate of earthquake occurrence will be produced. Results of this study will be useful in the search for new ways to further improve understanding of earthquake nucleation doc15417 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for a study to investigate the Ferrar magmatic province toward understanding of the formation of this province and its role in the breakup of the Gondwana supercontinent. The dispersal of Gondwana represents one of the largest supercontinent breakup events in the Phanerozoic. Breakup was associated with the emplacement of a very large Jurassic mafic igneous province extending across the Karoo (southern Africa), Ferrar (Antarctica), and Tasman (Australia) regions, comprising continental flood basalts and extensive intrusive dolerites. Models linking development of the 3,000 km Ferrar province to a mantle plume, a major magma conduit, or multiple sources, make testable predictions about magma transport patterns within the Ferrar province. This project is a pilot study using several different techniques aimed at evaluating these models and providing a greater understanding of the emplacement mechanisms, flow directions, and magmatic architecture associated with the Ferrar mafic intrusive province in southern Victoria Land. Our research tools will include mapping intrusive geometry based on structural field studies and geochemical correlation techniques. Magma flow directions within the intrusive complex will be evaluated using anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility, and mesoscopic and petrofabric flow indicators. These results will help resolve outstanding questions concerning the geometry, propagation, and flow patterns of magma during emplacement of sills and dikes in mafic large igneous provinces. It will also provide a deeper understanding of the relationships between mantle plumes, basaltic magmatism and continental breakup doc15452 none Twin Cities Public Television is producing the second and third seasons of Dragonfly TV, the science television series targeted at children ages 9 - 12. The series presents children showing their own scientific investigations and sharing the excitement that comes from making their own discoveries. Adult scientists are interspersed among the several groups of children who present research. They present their own research, their discoveries and their love of science. These adult reports are laced with home movies and snapshots of the adults when they were kids, linking childhood experiences to successful careers in science. Outreach for Dragonfly TV consists of a Dragonfly insert in the magazine Explorations, an interactive website where children can share their science investigations and programs at selected Boys and Girls Clubs of America and 4H Clubs. Teacher s Guides will be developed by Miami University of Ohio and distributed through the journals of the National Science Teachers Association doc15453 none The Bay Area Discovery Museum will expand their My Place by the Bay theme with new programmatic elements that reinforce the theme that people, plants and animals live together and depend upon each other to survive. Three new activity areas will be developed that focus on science learning: A) an outdoor Tot Lot for early science learners; B) an outdoor Discovery Cove focusing on place-specific elements of their bayshore site; and C) an indoor recreated Research Vessel outfitted with a simulated navigaion station and marine biology laboratory. The learning goals for these three areas are: 1) The Bay environment is home to many living things ; and 2) I can do science to explore and learn about my world . The Tot Lot, built into a hill, will be a one-half acre, multi-sensory, outdoor, prepared environment for children under five to learn about animals living in three distinct Bay habitats: woodland, stream and meadow. The Discovery Cove will be a two-acre area prepared environment for children up to age eight. Learners will be encouraged to see the bay as an integrated system that includes animal adaptations, ecological relationships and human activity. The Research Vessel is inspired by the R V Questuary and is the place where visitors will use authentic tools to do science. Other features of this project include an integrated system of Parenting Messages that includes special signage for parents and a Families Ask Guide for families with children ages seven and under that is a joint effort of DABM, Golden Gate National Recreation Area and the Golden Gate National Parks Association. They will also develop a series of teacher workshops that will link this informal learning space with the needs of formal education. One specific school group with whom they will work is the Junipero Serra, an NSF Urban Systemic Intiative site doc15454 none The PI proposes to determine the slip rate of the San Andreas Fault at several sites in southern California using 10Be and 26Al measurements of the exposure ages of offset geomorphic surfaces. Determination of a millennial slip rate north of Los Angeles, on the flank of the Mojave Desert, would provide a critical constraint to the interpretation of geodetic data there. Rates of slip across the fault on each side of the San Gorgonio Pass stepover would constrain the relative importance of the several strands of the fault in that region. Within the complex restraining stepover, rates and dates of fault slip and folding would test a new model of transpressional deformation. They would do this by constraining the evolution of deformation there throughout the late Quaternary period. A quantitative understanding of active deformation would also provide a basis for forward models of future large earthquakes involving this ominously historically dormant section of the San Andreas Fault doc15455 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for research on magmatic processes that are active in the Mount Erebus volcanic system. Magmatism is one of the most fundamental dynamic processes of planetary interiors, yet our knowledge of the time-dependent parameters of basalt petrogenesis (e.g. solid mantle upwelling rate, melting rate, melt transport rate, magma storage time, crystallization rate, magma recharge rate) is quite limited. Magmatic processes such as melting, fractional crystallization and magma chamber replenishment can fractionate parent daughter ratios of U-decay series isotopes and can thus create isotopic disequilibrium. Because the half-lives of the U-series isotopes are comparable to the time-scales of these processes, measurement of this isotopic disequilibrium in volcanic glasses and mineral separates provides constraints on the duration and rates of magmatic processes. The objectives of this project are to assemble a unique geochemical-isotopic-petrological data set, and use this to evaluate the rate dependent parameters of magma genesis, evolution, and degassing at Mt Erebus, Antarctica. Mt. Erebus, the most active volcano in Antarctica, contains a persistent convecting and degassing anorthoclase phonolite lava lake that has 2-6 small Strombolian eruptions daily. The lava lake provides a unique window into the magmatic system and offers a rare opportunity to examine processes occurring deep within the convecting magma body. The lava lake is continuously degassing and on-going work is focused on sampling and measuring the gas compositions and emission rates. The small Strombolian eruptions conveniently eject volcanic bombs thus providing pristine samples of the magma containing large, well-formed anorthoclase crystals. These bombs, plus older radiometrically-dated lava flows around the summit of Mt. Erebus provide a unique opportunity to investigate the timing of fundamental magmatic and volcanological processes. Through measurement of U-series isotopes (as well as isotopic and major- and trace-element constraints) from the known-age lavas, recently erupted bombs, and gases collected from Mt Erebus, this project will examine the timescales of: 1) magma genesis and melt transport from the mantle; 2) magma evolution and crystallization processes during magma storage in the crust; and 3) magma degassing and recharge rates into the current erupting magma chamber. This integrated study of gases and associated magma using U-series isotopes should lead to a major improvement in understanding of the Erebus system, and might yield a significant new insights about the whole magmatic system from magma formation by partial melting in the mantle through its evolution and finally to it degassing and open system behavior in the lava lake doc15456 none Donovan This award is to Montana Tech (Lead Institution) to support the activity described below for 24 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners for the award are Montana Tech, Montana Department of Commerce, Montana State University-Northern, Structural Dynamics Research Corporation, PFM Manufacturing, S&K Electronics, Lincoln Electric Company. Proposed Activities The activities for the project include: developing systems through which educational resources can be rapidly deployed to the widely distributed population of Montana, creating virtual organizations through which independent organizations efficiently combine core competencies to attain strategic market advantages, development of on-line courses in concurrent engineering and collaborative commerce, establishment of procedures and systems through which Montana s private industry can rapidly and efficiently for mutually beneficial collaborations with units of the Montana University System, and advancement of the state-of-the-art in collaborative methodologies. Proposed Innovation The proposed innovation is the development and establishment of state-of-the-art systems and methodologies for collaborative virtual organizations to promote combination of core competencies for a rural economy that is widely dispersed. Potential Economic Impact The proposed economic impact is the potential to increase the ability of small companies to respond to opportunities for business by combining their core competencies in virtual organizations. The average company size in Montana is 12 employees and the ability of any one company to meet the talents needed to compete is limited to its talent pool. Combinations of talents from several companies increases the opportunity to respond to business opportunities on an ad hoc basis. Potential Societal Impact The economy of Montana is dominated by farm income which has remained constant for more than 20 years. The average company size in the state is 12 employees. The population is sparsely dispersed. Increased business revenue that will result from these companies becoming more competitive will create much-needed wealth for stability and growth. The project involves under-represented minorities, especially native Americans in the business enterprise of Montana doc15457 none The Huntington Library will develop the Rose Hills Foundation Conservatory for Botanical Science to engage visitors of all ages in the study of plants. Conceived as a synthesis of a traditional conservatory and an interactive science center, the Conservatory will be a 16,000-square-foot permanent exhibition featuring spectacular plants in a family-oriented setting. Using a living collection of plants from around the world, visitors will explore the diversity of plants. Interactive exhibits will encourage visitors to make observations and comparisons of plant structures doc15458 none Ziliaskopoulos This award is to Northwestern University to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners for this award include Northwestern University (Lead Institution), University of Illinois-Chicago Circle Urban Transportation Center, Chicago Area Transportation Study, City of Chicago, Metropolitan Planning Council, Business Leaders for Transportation, Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway Company, Union Pacific Railway Company, Central States Trucking Company, and Roadway Express. Proposed Activities The objective of this effort is to forge an effective partnership among all major stakeholders of the intermodal freight industry in Chicago. Three interdependent research programs will be established to create a sustainable effort: (1) development of a framework with advanced quantitative decision support tools, to evaluate innovations in business process, infrastructure, and technology that streamline operations and eliminate unnecessary delays, (2) perform in-depth analyses of past, current and future trends of the intermodal freight industry by collecting and interpreting data, and (3) promotion of the use of decision support tools through educational programs for the partners. The framework with decision support tools includes a dynamic traffic simulation assignment simulation module, a terminal operations module, and a logic module to assist in coordinated planning of all operations in the Chicago area. The in-depth analysis of past, current and future trends will include data from Illinois DOT, City of Chicago, trucking companies, rail companies, maritime and custom data, shippers, and freight industry proprietary data. Proposed Innovation Modules exist that model each sector of the intermodal transportation system, but there has not been an integrated analysis simulation of the integrated transportation system for a city as large as Chicago. The proposed effort will incorporate data and models for each sector and integrate them in a mathematical tool for scheduling the movement of freight to minimize loss of time and efficiency for the system. Potential Economic Impact More than 60% of the US container movement go through the Chicago region. Conservative estimates predict a fourfold growth by the year . This means more than 100,000 daily truck movements between rail terminals, all over existing streets and roads. Empty trucks returning to a terminal plus traffic delays taken alone will cost millions of dollars in lost revenue. An integrated computer-based scheduling tools to minimize empty trips and efficient use of the street grid will save millions. Potential Societal Impact The impact on the efficiency of movement of freight plus the reduction of unnecessary traffic on the street system in the Chicago region will have a large impact on the quality of life in the region. Loss of freight traffic because the region has reached gridlock could have a huge negative societal and economic impact doc15459 none This award supports a project to develop computational models to simulate ice-shelf rift propagation using a combination of well-established ice-shelf creep-flow models and new crevasse models, based on linear elastic fracture mechanics (LEFM). The overall objective of the proposed work is to simulate rift propagation and eventual large iceberg calving,and place those processes within a larger ice sheet and climate context. The work will proceed in stages, first developing models of single-and multiple-crevasse propagation; then using those models to evaluate propagation sensitivity to various environmental conditions; and third developing models that incorporate both crevasse propagation and advection within an ice- shelf system. Model development will be guided by and evaluated according to satellite observations of rift propagation in several characteristic locations on Antarctic ice shelves. New numerical models of fracture in ice will have applications to many problems in glaciology. The research proposed here is directed toward large rift formation in ice shelves and subsequent iceberg calving. It is motivated by the need to understand observed changes in modern ice shelves,and their connection to climate. Where it has been sampled, the sedimentary record of the Weddell Sea sector implies Peninsular ice shelf variability on millennial time scales. The ability to simulate iceberg calving in a credible way will improve our ability to reproduce such events and place the complete cycle of ice shelf advance and retreat in an ice-dynamics context. That will, in turn, enable us to place ice-shelf cycles within the climate cycles that ultimately drive ice-sheet mass balance doc15460 none Testing the Utility of Detrital Zircon Provenance Analyses: Neogene Drainage Capture and the Snake River Plain-Yellowstone Hot Spot Paul Karl Link, Idaho State University This proposal will use the distribution of detrital zircon grains in stream systems surrounding the Snake River Plain-Yellowstone hotspot system to establish confidence limits on the use of detrital zircons as a fingerprint of provenance in fluvial systems. In the northern Rocky Mountains the Yellowstone-Snake River Plain hotspot and its associated topographic bulge have migrated northeastward from the late Miocene (17 Ma) to the present. During this time, the western continental divide of North America has followed the crest of the migrating topographic bulge. Thus, regional drainage, which in middle Miocene time was to the east from a continental divide in central Idaho, was disrupted to radial north- and south-flowing streams draining away from the topographic bulge. Following passage of the hot spot and subsidence of the Snake River Plain in its wake, the west-flowing Snake River has progressively captured segments of several streams, causing them to flow west, rather than north, south, or east. The migrating hotspot model makes testable predictions about Miocene to Recent drainage capture. This project will test the utility of the detrital zircon provenance method to accurately record drainage basin provenance. PI will use SHRIMP (Sensitive High-Resolution Ion Microprobe) U-Pb geochronologic analyses of 60 grains each, from about 50 samples from modern streams and Neogene terrestrial sediments from the northern Rocky Mountains. He will investigate the size threshold of fluvial systems where mixing begins to mask distinctive zircon signatures doc15461 none The Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California at Berkeley will develop the Real Astronomy Experience (RAE) in which science center visitors will explore the universe by controlling and viewing robotic telescopes via the Internet; by using image processing software to understand the images they capture; and by capturing images with a hands-on, functional telescope equipped with a Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) camera to learn how a modern telescope image-capture system works. Guided by project materials, visitors learn about the cosmos, tools and methods of scientific research, data analysis and the general progress of modern astrophysics doc15462 none Deino An extensive data-reduction program for analysis of 40Ar 39Ar data is already in the beta testing phase at the Berkeley Geochronology Center (BGC) and other laboratories. Support from this grant add important, high-level data interpretation features, as well as producing detailed documentation suitable for public dissemination. These features will include: 1) an Arrhenius plotting program to evaluate argon diffusion experiments, 2) linkage of step-heating spectra directly to isochron analysis, so that the identification of a plateau can be based on isochron MSWD s, and also that non-zero intercepts can be fed back directly into the plateau program to generate appropriate plateau and integrated ages, 3) optional text-file input of spectrometer data in a standard format, and 4) data reduction capability for non-Ar Noble gasses. Expanded user support for this program will include a detailed, redundantly-indexed, PDF-format manual and on-line support in the form of help screens as well as Balloon Help on Mac OS systems up to 9.1, and Tool Tips on Mac OS X. As envisioned, the manual will be suitable as a web-available teaching tool for graduate-level classes in isotope geology doc15463 none This award supports a detailed laboratory analysis of the mass-independent isotopic composition of processes associated with atmospheric nitrate trapped in the snow pack at the South Pole. The project will specifically test if the oxygen isotopes 16O, 17O, 18O of nitrate can be used to probe the denitrification of the Antarctic stratosphere. Despite decades of research, there are several important issues in Antarctic atmospheric science, which are presently inadequately resolved. This includes quantification over time of the sources of nitrate aerosols. Today, little is known about the past denitrification of the stratosphere in high latitude regions. This lack of knowledge significantly limits our ability to understand the chemical state of ancient atmospheres and therefore evaluate present and past-coupled climate atmosphere models. The role of nitrogen in environmental degradation is well known. This issue will also be addressed in this proposal. Atmospheric aerosols have now been shown to possess a mass-independent oxygen isotopic content. The proposed research will investigate the stable oxygen isotope ratios of nitrate in Antarctica both collected in real time and from the snow. Two periods of time will be covered. Full year nitrate aerosol collections, with week resolution time horizons, will be performed at the South Pole. Weekly aerosol collections will help us to identify any seasonal trend of the oxygen-17 excess anomaly, and eventually link this anomaly to the denitrification of the Antarctic stratosphere. This data set will also be used to test our assumption that the oxygen isotopic anomaly of nitrate is mainly formed in the stratosphere and is well preserved in the snow pack. If true, we will for the first time resolve an atmospheric signal extracted from a nitrate profile. The snow pit will allow us to see any trend in the data on a multiple decade timescale doc15464 none The Space Science Institute (SSI) seeks to develop the Stardust Project, designed to introduce the public to concepts related to the birth of stars, the search for planets beyond our solar system and the search for life beyond earth. The project s three components include a 2,500 square-foot travelling exhibition called Stardust: Our Search for Origins; a comprehensive education program for museum staff and grades 4-9 school teachers and a public Web site that incorporates and builds on the exhibit and education content. The project proposes to assemble standards-based educational materials for dissemination through workshops conducted at museums that host the exhibit. The educational programs -- particularly professional development workshops for teachers -- target, among other groups, underserved Native American and Hispanic teachers associated with a partnership between SSI and the NSF Rural Systematic Initiatives in the American West. The project is built around strong partnerships with two NASA Origins Program missions and with established informal education institutions including the New York Hall of Science, the Lawrence Hall of Science, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, TERC and the SETI Institute. Its goals are to make it possible for teachers, students and the public to learn about: The formation of stars, planets, and the solar system; The conditions necessary for life; The effect of life on Earth s environment; The methods used to detect planets orbiting distant stars and The scientific tools used in origin research -- from space-based telescopes to microscopes doc15465 none Thinking SMART is a comprehensive five-year program that will encourage young women to pursue careers in science, mathematics and technology. The project focuses on girls ages 12-18, and will especially target those who are underserved and under-represented in the sciences, including girls from diverse backgrounds and persons with disabilities. Key elements include four science engineering module options, a two-tiered mentoring component, training, resource materials, online activities and an awards program. The modules (Material Girls, Eco Girls, Galactic Girls, Net Girls), focus on engineering, ecology, physics and computer science respectively, and will be aligned with national standards. The modules are implemented during the school year and include weekly programming, a summer camp and a spring Women in Science and Engineering conference organized by girls. Weekly meetings are augmented by online activities, in which girls interact with other participants and mentors, publish reports and obtain career information. Additionally, participants who complete all four modules are eligible to become paid mentors for younger participants. Five publications will be produced to support the program, including manuals for mentors (both adults and youth), module activities, a parent guide and a guide for implementation sites on community partnerships. Thinking SMART materials will be developed and piloted tested at eight sites in conjunction with Girls, Inc. affiliates in Nashua, NH, Worcester, MA, Oakridge, TN and Shelbyville, IN, with input from the Society of Women Engineers. Extensive training will also be provided for pilot programs and future dissemination. Finally the E3 Awards Program will motivate implementation sites to create high quality local programs. It is anticipated that more than 1,500 Girls, Inc. affiliates will adopt Thinking SMART doc15466 none Rossman Many minerals that are usually formulated as anhydrous actually contain low concentrations of water or hydroxide bound in distinct sites in their structure. These components influence the properties of the host phase to an extent that is far disproportionate to their actual concentrations, and together, constitute a globally significant reservoir of hydrogen in planet Earth. Our research program is directed at 1) characterizing the chemical form and concentrations of these components in natural minerals and related synthetic materials, 2) relating the hydrous components to other physical and chemical properties of the host phases, and 3) exploring the significance of the hydrous components to the terrestrial geologic system. We select naturally occurring minerals from several geologic occurrences and characterize their hydrous components with a variety of spectroscopic probes. One major objective is to determine the quantitative amount of the hydrous components in the host phases. The general characterization of hydrous components in minerals provides basic information about the global water reservoir contained in minerals systems and provides information relevant to the entry and role of hydrogen into technological products (synthetic minerals and related structures) used in a variety of industries. The absolute calibration data is needed to constrain the quantitative amount of hydrogen in the various mineral reservoirs, an important parameter in evaluating the role and transport of volatiles in the Earth s systems. We ultimately expect to be able to prepare general calibrations for major groups of minerals found in the earth s crust. The content of these components in anhydrous minerals is potentially a useful indicator of fluid history or fluid variation within a geological system. We will work to establish the extent and conditions under which anhydrous minerals preserve a record of water activity in rock by investigating the variation of OH in anhydrous minerals in well-studied geological environments that have experienced inhomogeneous fluid conditions. Our results will be compared to oxygen isotope systematics that record fluid history in the same mineral or rock. Through detailed studies, we will gain insight into factors such as oxygen fugacity that could modify the retention of OH and H2O in anhydrous mineral structures doc15467 none Chesley Understanding magma genesis in continental arcs is difficult because contamination in the mantle source area and contamination of mantle-derived magmas by assimilation of lithospheric mantle or crustal rocks during ascent and emplacement produce similar geochemical characteristics. We have been studying the trans-Mexican volcanic belt (TMVB) in order to constrain these processes. We feel our previous work has shown that 187Os 188Os is an excellent proxy for assimilation, the geochemistry of samples with low 187Os 188Os (0.13-0.15) is primarily the result of source contamination, whereas geochemistry of samples with high 187Os 188Os (0.15-0.45) is the result of a more complex history that includes assimilation. The ability to decipher different inputs into arc magmas offers an opportunity to couple other elemental and isotopic systems into this framework to help unravel different inputs from source contamination and assimilation. We propose further study, of continental arc volcanism along the Trans-Mexican volcanic belt, whereby we utilize a combined approach of major and trace elements with Os, Pb, Sr and O isotopic analysis on whole rock or olivine and magnetite mineral separates of previously characterized samples, together with new samples from key localities. These data will be used to constrain the relative importance of source vs. crustal contamination for different components and isotopic systems in magma genesis across this arc. Specifically, we will examine: 1) The relative roles of mantle source contamination versus crustal contamination in basaltic magmas within individual fields and across the entire Mexican arc from west to east. 2) Determine whether volcanic fields (Palma Sola) in eastern Mexico are related to subduction of the Cocos plate or are part of the eastern alkalic province, which is unrelated to subduction doc15468 none Busby and Gans University of California, Santa Barbara This Collaborative Research proposal between the UC Santa Barbara and the University of Southern Mississippi will establish a regional stratigraphic structural and geochronological framework for Miocene volcanic rocks of the northern to central Sierra Nevada, and at the same time reconstruct structural settings and volcanological processes. The main motivation is to evaluate the tectonic significance and relationship of these mid-Miocene volcanic rocks to modern and ancient subduction, Basin and Range extension, and hotspot settings. Detailed volcanic and sedimentary lithofacies maps will be produced and used to determine the nature and timing of synvolcanic faulting. Petrography, image analysis and Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) imaging of the Sierran breccias will be employed to study and quantify clast and matrix types, morphologies, dimensions and fragmentation styles (brittle, ductile, transitional), and results will be compared with published examples of volcanic breccias of all plausible origins. Preliminary XRF geochemical analysis of representative suites (including all samples to be dated) will be completed and compared with compositions of clasts with matrices in the breccias. To test for geological consistency in our age data, sampling for 40Ar 39Ar geochronology will concentrate on stratigraphic successions containing at least three or four different datable units. Ar geochronology of single mineral grains (total fusions) as well as incremental step heating experiments will be completed doc15469 none This project will support the investigation of the dynamics of a system ofintraplate faults in the southern part of the central Walker Lane belt, known as the Mina deflection, using an integrated approach of field mapping, tectonic geomorphology, paleoseismology, thermochronology, and geochronology. Faults within the Mina deflection define a regional-scale releasing bend that transfers slip from the Eastern California Shear Zone to the Walker Lane Belt. The Eastern California Shear Zone and Walker Lane Belt straddle the boundary between dominantly east-west extension in the Basin and Range province to the east and dominantly NW-shear along the Pacific-North American plate boundary to the west. The interaction between extension and transcurrent shear has resulted in the development of a complex array of faults that accommodate intraplate strain. The research is motivated in large part by ongoing geodetic investigations on the magnitude of present-day strain accumulation and pattern of strain distribution across the Eastern California Shear Zone and Walker Lane Belt. In light of these geodetic constraints on strain accumulation, it is timely to improve our understanding of the spatial and temporal patterns of strain release during late Cenozoic to Recent times. The two data sets will provide important constraints on geodynamic hypotheses proposed for the evolution of the Eastern California Shear Zone and Walker Lane Belt. An accurate characterization of the temporal and spatial strain distribution within the Eastern California Shear Zone and Walker Lane Belt is crucial for understanding tectonic processes over a much broader area of intraplate deformation associated with the interaction between the Pacific and North American plates doc15470 none Farley and Asimow Despite the ubiquitous use of noble gases as tracers of Earth processes and as chronometers, many fundamental aspects of their geochemical behavior are, surprisingly, poorly understood. Among the uncertain characteristics are the siting of noble gases in rocks and minerals, mineral melt partitioning behavior, solubility and diffusivity in important and commonly analyzed minerals, and transport mechanism and rate through wet and dry rocks. This proposal seeks to address a particularly critical characteristic of noble gas geochemistry, about which neither data nor theoretical understanding exist: at equilibrium, how do noble gases partition between grain boundaries and crystals? Unlike all other elements, the noble gases are uncharged and rather large atoms that do not fit in any obvious way within most crystal lattices. Thus it is not unreasonable to propose that noble gases will partition into the defect-rich region between grains. This possibility is not commonly considered, yet if true, would have profound implications for several important fields of geochemistry, most notably including studies of mantle evolution and noble-gas-based geochronology. The proposed research project seeks to investigate in a quantitative and thermodynamically rigorous way the partitioning behavior of noble gases between mineral interiors and grain boundaries in rocks. The conceptually simple experimental technique relies on reactor-produced isotopes to eliminate the concerns regarding atmospheric adsorption and contamination that plague studies based on natural isotopes. In addition to producing otherwise rare isotopes, neutron irradiation provides an initial condition closely analogous to in-situ radiogenic noble gas production relevant in nature. Although isotopes of all noble gases can be produced in many different substrates in this way, this pilot study will focus on just one model system: the partitioning of 4He and 37Ar in polycrystalline aggregates of diopside, equilibrated after irradiation at elevated temperature and pressure in the piston-cylinder device. Along with partitioning measurements, samples will be characterized texturally and chemically with the electron microprobe, SEM, and transmission electron microscope to directly assess the physical nature, width, and chemistry of the grain boundary region. The proposed work will develop and explore the techniques necessary for establishing the role of grain boundaries in noble gas behavior through study of this one simple system. If the irradiation technique works for assessing He and Ar partitioning in diopside, it should be generally applicable for other noble gases and other materials, and as such has potential well beyond the initial pilot study doc15471 none The primary goal of this project is to determine the history of earthquakes, tsunamis, and coastal deformation in the northwestern-most Pacific and southwestern Bering Sea, since the retreat of glaciers about 10,000 years ago. In order to achieve this history, the project will also contribute to the millennial-scale history of large volcanic eruptions on Kamchatka. Primary means for accomplishing these goals are field work, coastal surveying, trench excavation, strata description and sampling--as well as radiocarbon dating for age control, and analysis of volcanic ash layers and of tsunami deposits. This project focuses on the region where the Emperor Seamount chain and the Aleutian-Komandorsky islands are colliding with Kamchatka, and where the subduction zone ends, with tectonic transition into the Bering Sea. The history of tsunamis and volcanic eruptions in this region has applications to the entire North Pacific and Bering Sea region--as a guide for understanding tectonic history, as a tool for correlation (for example, in the Aleutians), and as an indicator for natural-hazard analysis. Moreover, Kamchatka tsunamis affect localities and populations as distant as Hawaii and Chile. This project also will record the history of vegetation changes at selected sites via pollen analysis and macrovegetation studies. In cooperation with archaeologists, human-occupation levels will be recorded for potential future exploration, and for documenting the relationship between human habitation and geologic events. This project also will provide ages of basal peat horizons, which have implications for global carbon budgets and for climate-change models doc15472 none The International Conference on Hyperbolic Problems: Theory, Numerics and Applications will be held in CalTech on March 25-29, . The planned Hyp conference will be the ninth meeting in the bi-annual international series which became one of the highest quality and most successful conference series in Applied mathematics. There have been many new developments in hyperbolic and nonlinear evolution PDEs since the last international hyperbolic PDEs conference was held in the US at Stony Brook in . In the hyperbolic PDEs conference to be held at CalTech, we would like to bring young and active scientists together with leading researchers from different disciplines to address the theoretical, modeling, and computational issues in solving hyperbolic PDEs and more generally nonlinear evolution equations arising from various application areas. In fact, we would like to broaden further the scope of our next hyperbolic conference to include new and exciting research areas such as multiscale modeling and simulations (deriving and simulating meso-scale or nanoscale material properties in micro devices), geophysical applications (wave propagation in random media, coarsening of multi-phase flows through multiscale porous media), computational biology and computational chemistry, free boundary problems arising from materials science and multi-component fluid dynamics (thin films, crystal growth, multi-fluid interfaces, solid liquid interfaces). The conference will provide a forum to exchange and to stimulate new ideas from different disciplines, and to formulate new challenging problems that will have important physical and industrial impacts. Theoretical and numerical studies of hyperbolic problems have made tremendous impact in the developments of US economy and technology. Many high-resolution methods developed in the hyperbolic community have helped design faster airplanes, new materials, and improve our space exploration program. The hyperbolic conference series and its proceedings have become a focal point for active research in a growing field, where theory, numerics and applications complement each other. The earlier conferences were focused more on theoretical aspects of hyperbolic conservation laws. As computers became more and more powerful in the late eighties and the nineties, many effective numerical methods have been developed in simulating hyperbolic systems arising in aerodynamics and fluid dynamics applications. The hyperbolic meetings in this series have been very successful in steering the development of new high-resolution algorithms for solving complex physical systems. Many of these developments found new applications outside their traditional area of Computational Fluid Dynamics, including materials science, multiphase multicomponent flows, combustion detonation, flows with free boundary, geometrically based motions for image processing and more. We believe that hosting such a high level conference in the US will greatly benefit the US scientists working in this general area. It is especially helpful in educating our graduate students and postdocs, providing them with the opportunity to be in touch with the leading experts working on the frontier of this field. We will take several measures to attract young scientists. An effort will be made to increase the number of women doc15473 none Price This award supports research in climatology, geosciences, and life in extreme environments to be carried out with a newly developed optical borehole logger. The logger fits into a fluid-filled borehole in glacial ice. It emits light at 370 nm in a horizontal plane in order to probe optical properties of particles embedded in the ice out to several meters from the borehole. After leaving the borehole, the light is partially absorbed and scattered by dust, biomolecules, or microbes. A fraction of the light is scattered back into the borehole and is detected by a system of seven phototubes, each of which collects light with high efficiency in a separate wavelength band. One of them collects light that scatters off of dust and air bubbles without wavelength shift, and serves as a dust logger. The other six are covered with notch filters that measure six different wavelength bands and measure the shape of the fluorescence spectrum of microbes and biomolecules. Thus, the same instrument serves as both a dust logger and a microbe logger. Applications include: 1) Precise chronologies and long-period solar variability. With a resolution of 1 to 2 cm for both GISP2 and Siple Dome, the logger will record annual dust maxima and evaluate claims of modulations of dust concentration with periods ranging from 11 yrs (the solar cycle) to yrs; 2) Volcanism and age-depth markers. Dozens of volcanic ash bands will be detectable and will serve as primary age-depth markers for other boreholes; 3) Microorganisms and biomolecules. The vertical distribution of living, dormant, and dead microbes can be logged, and searches for archaea and aeolian polyaromatic hydrocarbons can be made. The logging experiments will be carried out at Siple Dome and Dome C in Antarctica and at GISP2 and GRIP in Greenland doc15474 none High Resolution Chronostratigraphic Constraints on Terminal Paleozoic Crises and Recovery in the Circum-Tethys Region Roland Mundil, Kenneth R. Ludwig, Paul R. Renne This research program is intended to improve the calibration of late Permian through Triassic biostratigraphic and magnetostratigraphic time scales towards an enhanced understanding of the terminal Paleozoic environmental and biotic crisis and subsequent Mesozoic recovery. Improved time scales are critical to realistic evaluation of the causes of, and interrelationships between, the various observed biotic and paleoenvironmental anomalies that characterize this transition. Our initial radio-isotopic age data (both U Pb and Ar Ar) are at variance with recent studies, many of which favor a rapid extinction caused by a bolide impact. Although an impact at or near the P-T boundary cannot be excluded a priori, a more gradual scenario and a causal relation between the massive continental basalt volcanism in South China at the end of the Permian and Siberia at the Permian-Triassic boundary - possibly in combination with other factors - and the biotic crisis must be considered. Despite the dramatic increase in available geochronologic data for the Late Permian through Early Triassic interval, crucial questions remain unanswered and will be addressed: 1) How synchronous are global biostratigraphic correlations across the Permo-Triassic boundary, and how precisely can biostratigraphic, geochemical, lithostratigraphic, and other records be correlated? 2) What are the temporal relations between terrestrial and marine records across the Permo-Triassic boundary? 3) What was the rate of the biotic recovery in the Early Triassic? 4) Do interlaboratory discrepancies (either physical or by interpretation) between high-precision U Pb zircon ages for the Permo-Triassic boundary undermine the inferred extremely rapid chronology of extinction events? Indeed, how reliable is U Pb zircon geochronology as a Phanerozoic time scale method doc15475 none Mobile ad hoc networks are multi-hop wireless networks, with dynamically changing network topology. Evaluating network capacity is a hard problem in such networks because of the shared nature of the radio medium and possibility of spatial reuse. The latter is again influenced by routes used and node mobility. On the other hand, understanding the network capacity in terms of available bandwidth is crucial to design effective routing protocols. The resarchers propose empirical techniques to evaluate the network capacity. The techniques work in conjunction with a simulator and use mobility and session-level traces to compute capacity that can be compared against the network utilization reported by the simulator. Preliminary experiments indicate interesting results that more capacity is available with higher mobility; however common routing protocols fail to utilize the additional capacity for better routing performance. Preliminary analysis indicates that spatial diversity is not exploited enough by conventional protocols, indicating that multipath routing protocols and distributing traffic over multiple paths would be quite effective. While investigating better techniques to evaluate capacity will be one component of the researchers work, they will also expend substantial effort in developing multipath protocols and techniques to achieve better load balance. For efficiency they will focus on protocols with an on-demand nature. The researchers indicate in this proposal how multiple, link- or node-disjoint, loop-free routes can be computed on demand without the use of source routing, with minimal additional overhead. The researchers will further development and analysis of such protocols. The emphasis will be on obtaining as many multipath routes as possible. Our preliminary results already indicate that such routing mechanisms reduce route discovery attempts, thus improving both delay and throughput. We will also focus on evaluating techniques to distribute load on multiple routes effectively for a fuller utilization of the available capacity. However, we point out that the dense nature of most ad hoc networks will form multiple routes in radio vicinity. In that case, topologically disjoint routes may still share radio medium. To achieve diversity further, we propose using multiple channels in the underlying medium access control (MAC) layer so that independent channels can be assigned to neighboring routes. While individual channels may now have less capacity, some preliminary results indicate that significant performance gains are possible if the transmitter is capable of transmitting on multiple channels concurrently. The researchers wish to explore, among other things, channel selection issues for individual links and paths when multipath routes are available. To summarize, the overall goal in this project is to better our understanding of the capacity of a mobile ad hoc network operating with real network protocols; and to exploit spatial and channel diversity significantly with a synergistic use of multipath routing and multichannelMAC protocols doc15476 none Candela and Piccoli University of Maryland Experiments will be performed to determine the speciation and partitioning of gold and copper in felsic melts + vapor or brine (starting composition of KCl+NaCl+HCl+H2O) assemblages, some with added sulfur, at 800 degrees C covering a range of pressures near 100 MPa. Experiments performed in sulfide-saturated systems (e.g., pyrrhotite-intermediate solid solution assemblage) will be performed to determine copper and gold partitioning in vapor melt, brine melt and vapor+brine melt assemblages. This effort complements experiments on crystal-melt partitioning of Au and Cu among magnetite and biotite, and rhyolite melt. Taken together with existing experimental data, the proposed research will yield a preliminary model for the behavior of Cu and Au in melt-crystal-vapor-brine systems that can be used to test hypotheses for the origin of porphyry and related Au-Cu deposits. The melt-volatile phase experiments proposed here are in high demand given that the relative roles of brine versus vapor and sulfur versus chloride-bearing ligands are not clear in light of the pioneering analytical work on natural fluid inclusions by both Bodnar ( ) and Audetat et al. ( ). These workers have suggested that both sulfur-bearing species and the vapor phase may be important in transporting these Cu and Au in ore-forming environments. Our study is designed to provide basic thermodynamic data to determine the controls on copper and gold partitioning in magmatic-hydrothermal systems and to clarify transport mechanisms for these economically important metals doc15477 none Geography (88) The core purpose of this project is to adapt key elements of the core curriculum developed by the National Council for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA, ), combining these with materials already used on some campuses in the University of Maine system. This is a collaborative project designed to benefit five universities that are part of this system: The University of Southern Maine, The University of Maine, Fort Kent, The University of Maine, Machias, The University of Maine, Augusta, and The University of Maine, Farmington. The broader purpose of this collaborative project is to enhance GIScience education throughout the state of Maine on the 5 collaborating campuses. On each campus a dedicated laboratory is being equipped to support the development of a modern geographical information science (GIScience) curriculum, comprised of GIS and GPS technology and related educational materials. We are developing and implementing a sequence of two GIScience courses for undergraduate students in each of the five universities. These are being designed to educate students to a common standard of achievement, although there are local variations designed to meet the varied needs of the 5 participating campuses. The new curriculum meets a growing need for high-quality GIScience education in a variety of fields. We are designing the two-course sequences to foster active learning by customizing exercises and data sets to the diverse geographic locations and programmatic strengths of each campus. Our project is also enhancing and developing the skills of the faculty, and integrating advanced technology into a variety of disciplines. Our plan is to disseminate our work through our teaching, on-site workshops for our faculty colleagues, internet publication, and presentation at professional meetings. Project evaluation is being assisted by on-site peer input during faculty workshops, and periodic review by a three member advisory panel of GIScience scholars and professionals doc15478 none Gargett Ultraviolet radiation influences the dynamics of plankton processes in the near-surface waters of most aquatic ecosystems. In particular, the Southern Ocean is affected in the austral spring period when biologically damaging ultraviolet radiation is enhanced by ozone depletion. While progress has been made in estimating the quantitative impact of ultraviolet radiation on bacteria and phytoplankton in the Southern Ocean, some important issues remain to be resolved. Little is known about responses in systems dominated by the colonial haptophyte Phaeocystis antarctica, which dominates spring blooms in a polyna that develops in the southern Ross Sea. The Ross Sea is also of interest because of the occurrence of open water at a far southerly location in the spring, well within the ozone hole, and continuous daylight, with implications for the regulation of DNA repair. A number of studies suggest that vertical mixing can significant modify the impact of ultraviolet radiation in the Southern Ocean and elsewhere. However, there are limited measurements of turbulence intensity in the surface layer and measurements have not been integrated with parallel studies of ultraviolet radiation effects on phytoplankton and bacterioplankton. To address these issues, this collaborative study will focus on vertical mixing and the impact of ultraviolet radiation in the Ross Sea. The spectral and temporal responses of phytoplankton and bacterioplankton to ultraviolet radiation will be characterized in both laboratory and solar incubations. These will lead to the definition of biological weighting functions and response models capable of predicting the depth and time distribution of ultraviolet radiation impacts on photosynthesis, bacterial incorporation and DNA damage in the surface layer. Diel sampling will measure depth-dependent profiles of DNA damage, bacterial incorporation, photosynthesis and fluorescence parameters over a 24 h cycle. Sampling will include stations with contrasting wind-driven mixing and stratification as the polyna develops. The program of vertical mixing measurements is optimized for the typical springtime Ross Sea situation in which turbulence of intermediate intensity is insufficient to mix the upper layer thoroughly in the presence of stabilizing influences like solar heating and or surface freshwater input from melting ice. Fine-scale vertical density profiles will be measured with a free-fall CTD unit and the profiles will be used to directly estimate large-eddy scales by determining Thorpe scales. Eddy scales and estimated turbulent diffusivities will be directly related to surface layer effects, and used to generate lagrangian depth-time trajectories in models of ultraviolet radiation responses in the surface mixed layer. The proposed research will be the first in-depth study of ultraviolet radiation effects in the Ross Sea and provide a valuable comparison with previous work in the Weddell-Scotia Confluence and Palmer Station regions. It will also enhance the understanding of vertical mixing processes, trophic interactions and biogeochemical cycling in the Ross Sea doc15479 none Andreas K. Kronenberg The PIs propose to hold a Gordon Research Conference on Rock Deformation from May 19-24, at the Gordon Conference site in Barga, Italy. As discussed in detail in the proposal, the conference is being held to bring together an interdisciplinary group of experts to discuss major unanswered questions about the deformation and plastic flow in the Earth s crust. The issues being addressed are central to understanding tectonic processes, the initiation of earthquakes, and the origin of natural resources. Funds will be used to cover travel and accommodations to enhance participation of student and early career scientists. It is expected that a broad and interdisciplinary cross-section of researchers from academia, government labs, and the broad international community will participate in the conference. The PIs requested $25,000 in support, but the group of reviewing program directors decided that $20,000 is more appropriate for the conference as proposed doc15477 none Geography (88) The core purpose of this project is to adapt key elements of the core curriculum developed by the National Council for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA, ), combining these with materials already used on some campuses in the University of Maine system. This is a collaborative project designed to benefit five universities that are part of this system: The University of Southern Maine, The University of Maine, Fort Kent, The University of Maine, Machias, The University of Maine, Augusta, and The University of Maine, Farmington. The broader purpose of this collaborative project is to enhance GIScience education throughout the state of Maine on the 5 collaborating campuses. On each campus a dedicated laboratory is being equipped to support the development of a modern geographical information science (GIScience) curriculum, comprised of GIS and GPS technology and related educational materials. We are developing and implementing a sequence of two GIScience courses for undergraduate students in each of the five universities. These are being designed to educate students to a common standard of achievement, although there are local variations designed to meet the varied needs of the 5 participating campuses. The new curriculum meets a growing need for high-quality GIScience education in a variety of fields. We are designing the two-course sequences to foster active learning by customizing exercises and data sets to the diverse geographic locations and programmatic strengths of each campus. Our project is also enhancing and developing the skills of the faculty, and integrating advanced technology into a variety of disciplines. Our plan is to disseminate our work through our teaching, on-site workshops for our faculty colleagues, internet publication, and presentation at professional meetings. Project evaluation is being assisted by on-site peer input during faculty workshops, and periodic review by a three member advisory panel of GIScience scholars and professionals doc15481 none Physics (13) The project is completely redesigning the optics course for non-science majors, A World of Light and Color, from a traditional lecture format into a collaborative, activity-based classroom environment. About 80% of the students attending Western Maryland College (WMC) are non- science majors and many lack a basic comprehension of the scientific endeavor. During the past decade, the physics education research community has demonstrated that well-designed, student- centered activities help students achieve a deeper understanding of physical concepts, while fostering an appreciation of science. To capitalize on these findings, the project is combining the Workshop Physics approach with optics activities that have been developed at WMC. Workshop Physics, a discovery-based approach pioneered at Dickinson College, has been successful in introductory physics courses, and the project is adapting and implementing many aspects of this delivery method to meet the needs of General Science students. Providing students the opportunity to explore optical phenomena in a collaborative, student- centered environment should result in a positive learning experience. Students also should appreciate the role computers and data analysis play in the scientific process, and computer-assisted activities appropriate are being designed specifically for non-science majors. A specific objective of the project is to develop and disseminate high-quality optics activities for non-science majors nationwide. Finally, this project will serve as a prototype for the renovation of the entire General Science curriculum at WMC doc15482 none Physics (13) The objective of this project is to produce a collection of easy-to-administer, ready-to-use, classroom- and student-tested materials in electrostatics (electrically-charged objects, static electric fields, and electric potential) that can be used as classroom materials, web assignments, or homework assignments. In addition, pre post- assessment tools in the same area are being developed. These focused materials will employ TIPERs (Tasks Inspired by Physics Education Research) that are easily incorporated partially or as a whole into existing courses and teaching styles. This second stage follows a similar project in magnetism and may be followed by incremental development in stages concentrating on areas such as thermodynamics, waves, and optics. This project is a collaboration between two-year college and university physics faculty from institutions that have diverse, representative student populations. This project team is experienced in educational research as well as developing and implementing new approaches to, and assessment of, learning. These materials are being classroom tested at several institutions and will be made available widely in both print and electronic versions. This project facilitates the incorporation and application of the results of physics education research into classrooms and thus improve the learning of physics by students at post-secondary education institutions doc15483 none Gast Phototrophic and heterotrophic protists are ubiquitous in extreme cold-water environments where they are central to the production and utilization of energy and the cycling of elements. The dominance of protists in Antarctic food webs indicates major ecological and biogeochemical roles for these unicellular eukaryotes. Understanding the structure and diversity of these communities, and the adaptations that allow these assemblages to flourish near the lower limit of temperature in the ocean, is of fundamental importance to biological oceanography and to understanding the activities and evolution of life on our planet. The diversity of protistan assemblages has traditionally been studied using microscopy and morphological characterization. Due to the tedious nature of this approach and the inherent lack of taxonomic characters associated with most small protists, these approaches are inadequate for ecological studies of these communities. Molecular methods that utilize gene sequences for the identification and quantitation of naturally occurring protists offer a solution to this problem. This project will address issues of protistan community structure, population abundance, and adaptation to life in extreme cold through molecular and physiological studies on assemblages in the seawater and ice habitats of the Ross Sea, Antarctica. Research will focus primarily on species of phagotrophic protists (protozoa) which are ecologically important but for which no information currently exists. The work is designed to contribute new understanding concerning the biodiversity of protistan assemblages of coastal Antarctica, provide tools for ecological studies of these assemblages, and produce benchmark data on the basic physiological processes of protistan species in this extreme cold-water environment doc15484 none Chemistry (12) We are using an automated atomic absorption spectrometer, an automated HPLC, and equipment for microwave digestions and extractions to enhance students learning in analytical chemistry and applying the knowledge gained to other chemistry courses in the physical and biological sciences and to research projects. We are adapting a number of problem-based laboratories from literature such as the environmental monitoring of urban air or trout streams and the analysis of a clinical control serum. These lab projects make use of real samples (serum, air, water) and require students to design, optimize, and validate a method(s) to do the work in their project. Two broad pedagogical objectives of this project are- to provide instruction in modern analytical chemistry through changes to the analytical curriculum and the acquisition of modern analytical instrumentation, and to create an educational environment in which students solve problems by learning to think as analytical chemists. These objectives are accomplished by: (1) creating a new curriculum that better represents the skills required in analytical chemistry; (2) providing students with a problem-based laboratory experience; (3) creating a student-centered lab emphasizing cooperative learning; (4) training students in the use of modern, automated instrumentation; and (5) linking the analytical lab experience to a student s interests. In the Method Development course, an upper-level laboratory course required of chemistry majors, the students work as part of a research team to design, optimize and validate an analytical method for an analyte in a complex, real matrix. Each student assumes responsibility for one or more aspects of the group s project. A key feature of this project is the use of the jigsaw concept in which students from different groups, but with similar responsibilities, periodically meet to share information and discuss solutions to common problems doc15477 none Geography (88) The core purpose of this project is to adapt key elements of the core curriculum developed by the National Council for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA, ), combining these with materials already used on some campuses in the University of Maine system. This is a collaborative project designed to benefit five universities that are part of this system: The University of Southern Maine, The University of Maine, Fort Kent, The University of Maine, Machias, The University of Maine, Augusta, and The University of Maine, Farmington. The broader purpose of this collaborative project is to enhance GIScience education throughout the state of Maine on the 5 collaborating campuses. On each campus a dedicated laboratory is being equipped to support the development of a modern geographical information science (GIScience) curriculum, comprised of GIS and GPS technology and related educational materials. We are developing and implementing a sequence of two GIScience courses for undergraduate students in each of the five universities. These are being designed to educate students to a common standard of achievement, although there are local variations designed to meet the varied needs of the 5 participating campuses. The new curriculum meets a growing need for high-quality GIScience education in a variety of fields. We are designing the two-course sequences to foster active learning by customizing exercises and data sets to the diverse geographic locations and programmatic strengths of each campus. Our project is also enhancing and developing the skills of the faculty, and integrating advanced technology into a variety of disciplines. Our plan is to disseminate our work through our teaching, on-site workshops for our faculty colleagues, internet publication, and presentation at professional meetings. Project evaluation is being assisted by on-site peer input during faculty workshops, and periodic review by a three member advisory panel of GIScience scholars and professionals doc15328 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for a study sulfate and nitrate in soils of the McMurdo Dry Valleys region of Antarctica. This goal is to quantify atmospheric deposition of sulfate and nitrate and to generate the first quantitative model for the origin, distribution, and post-depositional alteration of atmospheric sulfate and nitrate in Dry Valley soils. In addition to testing the hypothesis that landforms in the Dry Valleys have been stable for millions of years, results from this work will provide a valuable reference for quantitative soil development in hyper-arid deserts elsewhere on Earth and on Mars. The approach involves isotopic analyses of sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen in the water-soluble oxy-anions, sulfate and nitrate, in soils of differing ages and parent materials. The breakthrough that makes this proposal possible is the recent discovery of mass-independent oxygen-isotopic composition for sulfate and nitrate in Dry Valley soils that shows that atmospheric deposition has contributed a significant amount of sulfate and nitrate to the cold-desert soils over time. Recent work by the PI s identified spatial patterns in the oxygen-isotopic composition of sulfate in Dry Valleys soils and requires the existence of two sulfate end members, sea-salt sulfate and biogenic sulfate. Here, the biogenic sulfate refers to those sulfates formed by the oxidation of reduced biogenic sulfur gases (e.g., dimethylsulfide) in the atmosphere. Biogenic sulfate, due to its long residence time can travel greater distances relative to sea-salt sulfate. The isotopic analyses of oxygen and sulfur that will be done within this project will differentiate between biogenic sulfate and sea-salt sulfate in Dry Valley soils. In addition, preliminary data on the oxygen-isotopic composition of nitrate from these soils reveal exceptionally large nitrate oxygen-17 anomalies and a spatial pattern that reflects a single nitrate source rather than two sources as for sulfate. To quantify long-term atmospheric input of sulfate and nitrate and their subsequent mobility in soils of this unique environment, this project will (1) sample vertical soil profiles at centimeter-to-sub-centimeter-scale resolution, (2) systematically analyze oxygen and sulfur isotopes in sulfate and oxygen and nitrogen isotopes in nitrate, (3) examine soils of a wide range of radiometric ages and parent materials, including ancient volcanic ashes, colluvium, lodgment tills, and ice-sublimation tills, and (4) construct a simple one-dimensional transport model for sulfate and nitrate in vertical soil profiles. This project represents collaboration between a low temperature isotope geochemist and a geomorphologist who has extensive experience in the Dry Valleys region. When combined with existing radiometric isotope chronology of Dry Valley soils developed over the last 15 years, the proposed stable isotopic analyses will, for the first time, quantify the rate and style of soil development and patterned ground evolution in the Dry Valleys region. These quantitative data are of paramount importance for achieving a thorough understanding of the Dry Valleys ecosystem and for establishing baseline data for comparison with anticipated analyses on Martian regolith following a sample return mission to Mars doc15487 none PIs will pursue a comprehensive theory of diffusive soil transport and hillslope evolution associated with biological activity and surface rainsplash, building on recent, key developments in hillslope geomorphology. Their objectives are: (i) to clarify the fundamental ingredients and forms of constitutive (transport) laws describing these processes, demonstrating the conditions under which transport is proportional to the land-surface gradient or to the product of the soil thickness and surface gradient; (ii) to provide the analogue of a kinetic theory for the diffusion-like coefficient used in hillslope evolution models, demonstrating how it is an explicit nonlinear function of soil-particle activity, particle size, soil porosity and soil thickness, and indirectly related to climatic and biological conditions; (iii) to experimentally obtain the form of the constitutive law for transport by rainsplash using high-speed video and particle tracking techniques; (iv) to illustrate the fundamental significance of particle-activity gradients in producing transport, and demonstrate this using sandbox experiments for the case of rainsplash, and using field measurements of soil properties and tracer particles for the case of subsurface transport; (v) to clarify the ingredients of surface and subsurface particle dispersal, mixing and sorting, demonstrating how these processes contribute to hillslope catena structure; and (vi) to develop an advanced computational model of diffusive transport and hillslope evolution for exploring the full coupling between land-surface geometry, soil transport, soil thickness and soil production, including nonlinear responses to external and boundary forcing. This four-year program will mesh theoretical, experimental, field-based and computational components. The PIs theoretical work will focus on clarifying: (i) the ingredients of particle dispersal, mixing and sorting soil-depth and catena scale; and (ii) the forms of constitutive transport laws. PIs experimental field work will: (i) focus on the process of rainsplash, and on particle mixing and sorting within soils, and at the soil surface; and (ii) be designed to test validate the theoretical and computational aspects of their work. They will also apply high-performance algorithms based on discontinuous spectral element methods in developing advanced computational codes for simulating particle behavior at the soil-depth scale, and for simulating hillslope evolution at geomorphic scales. Under the auspices of the Center for Earth Surface Processes Center (CESPR), this project will involve collaboration of scientists expert in geomorphology, fluid mechanics, applied mathematics and advanced computations. The results of this work will constitute a major, and critical, contribution to the growing theoretical foundation of hillslope geomorphology doc15488 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for a seismological study of Antarctica. The crust and upper mantle beneath Antarctica remain among the most poorly understood regions directly underlying Earth s surface. Seismic surface wave dispersion is uniquely suited to providing information about the crust and upper mantle beneath Antarctica because surface wave tomography can perform well in regions with relatively few receiving stations and remote seismicity. There are three principal goals for this research: to continue to refine the seismic images of the crust and upper mantle beneath Antarctica and surrounding oceans, to improve methods to quantify the quality of these images, and to begin to elucidate the nature and cause of some of the more prominent seismic velocity anomalies in the uppermost mantle. Prior work was devoted to developing and applying the capabilities to estimate and assess seismic models at high southern latitudes. This research will continue to advance these capabilities, but a larger fraction of the efforts will be devoted to understanding the resulting images of the crust and upper mantle underlying the Antarctic Plate. The work will be divided into the following five subject areas: (1) continued surface wave dispersion measurements and data processing, (2) methodological improvements in surface wave tomography, resolution analysis, and inversion, (3) experiments to determine whether azimuthal anisotropy can be estimated robustly, (4) estimation of a refined model of the crust and upper mantle at high southern latitudes, and (5) development and application of methods to interpret the new model to gain geophysical insight into the temperature, composition, and evolution of the Antarctic asthenosphere, lithosphere, and crust. The rapidly growing seismic data sets from both global networks and temporary arrays in and around Antarctica promise to combine with improvements in surface wave tomography and inversion to significantly refine the images of the seismic structure of the crust and upper mantle beneath the Antarctic Plate. These refinements will help to provide the basis for an improved understanding of the geophysics of the Antarctic lithosphere. Structural and tectonic features that are of particular interest for further elucidation include: the West Antarctic Rift system with implications concerning the separation between East and West Antarctica during the Cenozoic, the East Antarctic craton in relation to other cratons in the world, the SE Indian Ridge with emphasis on the uppermost mantle near the Australian-Antarctic Discordance, the thermal and compositional structure of the upper mantle beneath the Antarctic Plate, and the distribution of anisotropy (radial and azimuthal) across Antarctica and the southern oceans. This research should help to advance broadly our understanding of the Antarctic crust and upper mantle doc15489 none Wireless communication technology has gained widespread acceptance in recent years. Wireless local area networks have come into greater use, with the advent of the IEEE 802.11 standard and availability of several commercial products based on this standard. An ad hoc network can be formed by wireless, potentially mobile hosts, without requiring the use of any fixed infrastructure, such as base stations. Such networks have many applications, including home networking, personal area networking, sensor networking, search-and-rescue missions in remote areas, and other civilian as well as military operations. Modern wireless devices are often designed with the capability to transmit at different bit rates using different modulation schemes and to operate in a power-save mode to conserve energy. While such wireless devices can be built, there is not adequate research on performance of ad hoc networks utilizing such devices. This project will, therefore, attempt to answer two broad questions: (1)How to design wireless medium access control (MAC) protocols that exploit multi-rate and power-save capabilities in ad hoc networks? While there has been some work on such protocols, this project is expected to develop new techniques to utilize multi-rate and power-save capabilities. (2) What is the impact of multi-rate and power-save capabilities on performance on network layer and transport layer? The project will study the interaction between wireless device capabilities and upper layer performance, and develop mechanisms to improve performance of the various layers doc15490 none Theoretical models of motion transfer from the ductile lower lithosphere and mantle upward through the brittle-ductile transition and the brittle upper crust are as yet inadequate to account for many phenomena, partly because of lack of access to intact crust sections that represent deformation results from the same overall tectonic environment. This project utilizes the Caribbean-South America plate boundary, which has been the locus of oblique convergence for the past 50 million years to address this problem. This system has brought a sequence of rocks to the surface that represent a continuous vertical section of the crust exposed from west to east along the contact between the two plates from Venezuela to Trinidad. Structural and thermochronologic data will be collected and used to develop, refine and test models for the origin, response partitioning, and exhumation of this sequence. Results have the potential to place significant constraints on rheological differences within the lithosphere, which is of fundamental importance in understanding tectonic systems and plate interactions doc15491 none Late Cenozoic deformation is broadly distributed across the North American plate margin of the conterminous western United States and stretches from the San Andreas fault system eastward across the Mojave Desert and into the Basin and Range. The eastern California shear zone and Walker Lane of the western Great Basin form an active belt of structures accommodating about 25% of the relative motion between North America and the Pacific plate. From the Mojave Desert, the displacement is carried north, east of the southern Sierra Nevada, in a narrow zone of deformation bound on the west and east by the Owens Valley and Furnace Creek fault systems. North from the latitude of the central Sierra Nevada, the zone of deformation broadens to include the Walker Lane and central Nevada seismic belt in the northwestern Great Basin. The Sierra Nevada behaves as a coherent tectonic block with a northwest-directed motion of 10-14 mm yr and forms the western boundary of the zone of distributed deformation in the Great Basin. A complex pattern of active structures underlies west-central Nevada where displacement is transferred from the eastern California shear zone to the Walker Lane and the central Nevada seismic belt. Integrated geologic, seismological, and GPS geodetic results indicate that the central Walker Lane serves as an displacement transfer system linking stepped northwest-trending transcurrent faults. Within the central Walker Lane displacement partitioning is active and may be accommodated by differential motion of tectonic blocks. A GPS velocity field exhibits a systematic increase in magnitude from east to west across the central Walker Lane and is consistent both with block translation and vertical-axis rotation. Zones of divergent, transcurrent, and convergent motion are observed across suspected block boundaries. The observed velocity field is not easily reconciled with the current understanding of fault displacements and points out the difficulty in comparing geodetic and geologic displacement fields. The PI s propose an integrated geodetic and geologic investigation of the central Walker Lane to address two questions: (1) Is displacement transfer between transcurrent structures wholly accommodated by kinematically coordinated slip on throughgoing faults, and (2) are the kinematics of active displacement transfer derived from GPS geodesy consistent with the displacement field estimated by earthquake seismology and fault-slip inversion? The central Walker Lane is ideally suited for this study for three reasons: (1) the region is seismically active and well defined earthquake focal mechanisms exist for the displacement transfer fault system, (2) the faults are well exposed and have produced preliminary fault-slip estimates of deformation kinematics, and (3) a complex present-day displacement field with ~10 mm yr of differential slip is recorded by a GPS geodetic network. These elements will allow characterization of the kinematics of displacement transfer and offer the opportunity to directly compare different means of measuring deformation kinematics. The PI s primary interest is to characterize the kinematics of deformation in the active displacement transfer stepover and to compare the geodetically determined displacement field with that derived from earthquake focal mechanisms and fault-slip inversion. To achieve their research objectives, several aspects of the extensional stepover system exposed in the central Walker Lane must be examined in greater detail. The primary tasks set out in this project are: (1) to establish the spatial distribution of active high-angle faults linking the bounding transcurrent faults, (2) to document the detailed geometry and slip history of fault systems that transfer displacement between transcurrent faults, and (3) to deploy a GPS network with sufficient density to differentiate between continuous versus discontinuous variations in the present-day velocity field. The PI s will address the tasks listed above with an integrated study utilizing detailed geologic mapping, structural analysis, and GPS geodesy. The investigators (Oldow and Satterfield) each have substantial experience working in the area and by building on previous studies, geological mapping and structural analysis will establish the areal limits of the transtensional fault system, document variable geometric relations between major and secondary fault systems, define the kinematic history of fault motion, and develop first-order estimates of recent slip magnitude by documenting offset landforms. Combined with other ongoing or proposed studies in the central Walker Lane, the results of this research should contribute to an unprecedented view of active transtensional displacement transfer and yield critical insight into the comparison of geologic and geodetic measures of deformation kinematics doc15492 none Parkinson University of South Carolina The primary objective of this proposal is to document the petrological characteristics and tectonic significance of high- to ultrahigh-pressure metamorphism (HP-UHPM) of Pan-African nappes in Minas Gerais State, southeast Brazil. The crystalline nappes are components of the Tocantins orogen, which extends along strike for around km, and records Neoproterozoic convergence, subduction and collision between the Sao Francisco craton and Rio de la Plata plate. Techniques to be applied will include: [1] X-ray compositional mapping of major and trace elements in garnets, [2] identification of inclusion species in garnet and zircon by micro-Raman spectroscopy, [3] textural and compositional characterization of exsolution lamellae and integration of precursor phase compositions, [4] SHRIMP U-Pb geochronology of zircon zonal domains. These studies will be complemented by conventional analyses of reaction textures and petrofabrics. The observation of coesite-grade metamorphism in the Americas not only impacts local studies of the Brasiliano-Pan African tectonic framework, but also provides a comparison between deep burial in the Proterozoic (at c. 630 Ma) and better studied Cainozoic orogenic analogues. This proposal, which addresses directly ancient convergent margin orogenesis, provides critical detail field, geochemical, and geochronological data of deeply buried rocks now exposed at the surface. The newly derived P-T-time data for this 630 Ma terrane will be incorporated into regional geodynamic models for the evolution of the South American orogen doc15493 none This study will provide a three-year, in depth, longitudinal analysis of students development as mathematical learners in reform-oriented mathematics classrooms during the middle school years. For the purposes of this study, reform is defined as a teacher s use of instructional practices and curricular materials that aligned with the NCTM s Curriculum and Teaching Standards and the Principles and Standards for School Mathematics. The overall purpose of this research is to examine the ways in which mathematics reform affects students development as mathematics knowers and learners. The study will document changes in students learning and self-conceptions, as well as the processes by which this change occurs. The primary research questions guiding the work are: 1. What are the direct and indirect effects of teacher practice, classroom and student level processes on students conceptual understanding, achievement and identify development in mathematics? 2. How are the effects of teacher practice, and classroom and student level processes on students conceptual understanding and identify development moderated by gender, ethnicity and socioeconomic status doc15494 none Recently discovered, Eocene ultrahigh-pressure (UHP) metamorphic assemblages in the northwestern Himalayas may indicate the limited subduction of Indian continental crust beneath Eurasia during Himalayan-Tibetan orogenesis. At present, the tectonic significance of this observation is controversial because the distribution of Himalayan UHP metamorphic assemblages has not been mapped in detail, because the age of metamorphism is imprecisely known, and because the structural relationships among UHP rock packages and their surroundings are largely unconstrained. We propose an integrated geochronologic (U-Pb, Sm-Nd, and 40 Ar 39 Ar), Nd isotopic, petrologic, and structural study of the most recently discovered UHP terrain in the Himalayas: the Tso Morari complex of Ladakh, India. Thus far, the UHP-diagnostic mineral coesite has been found at Tso Morari only in mafic eclogite that may or may not be of Indian plate affinity; an important part of our proposed work will be to determine if UHP assemblages occur in lithologies that can be traced unequivocally to a provenance in the Indian plate. If so, our aim of establishing high-precision dates for UHP metamorphism will determine whether or not continental subduction occurred subsequent to the initiation of India-Eurasia collision - well-constrained by independent means - or prior to collision in an intraoceanic environment, as has been proposed recently. We also intend to develop a more comprehensive knowledge of the pressure-temperature- time evolution of this UHP terrain over the Eocene-Miocene interval, one of the most poorly understood intervals in the history of the orogen. The integration of such data with detailed maps and kinematic analysis of major structures should result in much better constraints on the processes responsible for the exhumation of UHP rocks in the Himalayan-Tibetan system doc15495 none The main thrust of this work is to seek a deeper understanding of the radiated waves emitted by earthquakes. In previous work, the investigator has examined how total radiated energy can be sensitive to the source physics, showing dfferences for slip versus velocity weakening friction in elastodynamic faults. This work was expanded to look at the frequency content and spatial dependence of the radiation. A number of important results were obtained, including: (1) A new radiating boundary condition allowing a nonuniform prestress, useful for repeated ruptures, was developed; (2) Having to assume only a physics of the tractions on the fault, the full spectra of radiated waves for events with a wide range of sizes were generated; (3) Characterizing the spectral content of the radiation, a nonlinear magnitude dependence of a second corner frequency was found, and shown to be related to fundamental source parameters; (4) Strong directivity effects for large events were exhibited in spectral ratios. With renewed support, continued research on this subject is being carried out, with a focus on three specifc projects: The first project involves further exploration of magnitude and spatial dependence of directivity effects. Initial results have shown striking amplification of acceleration spectra away from the epicentral region in large events. Further exploration of these effects includes time domain complements of the frequency domain measurements already made. This work will further develop a new theoretical tool for exploring an issue with potentially large hazard and earthquake engineering implications. The second project involves the extension of measurements made in two-dimensional models of radiated energy spectra to three-dimensional models. A further generalization of a new radiating boundary condition is being developed in two dimensions, both extending it to higher dimensions and to continuous loading, allows direct measurements at long times. This allows quantitative physical predictions of the magnitude dependence of radiated energy spectra. The third project involves the application of a new measurement developed in the models to earthquake data. The measurement takes advantage of a natural averaging measure through summing of energy spectra to convert to average acceleration spectra. In the models, the period of the peak average acceleration spectra was shown to reflect fundamental source parameters. Measurements of the magnitude dependence of this quantity in earthquakes are being carried out doc15496 none Peucker-Ehrenbrink On geologic time scales, atmospheric pCO2 is controlled by the release of Ca and Mg from silicate weathering and subsequent formation of Ca Mg-carbonates in the ocean. Attempts to deduce the past intensity of silicate weathering have relied mainly on the measured marine 87Sr 86Sr, but lately also on the marine 187Os 188Os record. In order to correlate 87Sr 86Sr and 187Os 188Os in continental runoff with relevant major cations released through silicate weathering, comprehensive data for 87Sr 86Sr, 187Os 188Os, Re, Pt, and major cations (Na, K, Ca, Mg, Si) and anions (Cl, SO4, HCO3) in streams and rivers is needed. Mafic silicates are generally more reactive in the surficial environment than felsic minerals and runoff from ultramafic rocks is characterized by high Ca Na, Mg Na and total dissolved loads. Weathering of ultramafic rocks may thus be an important source of riverine Ca and Mg derived from silicate weathering. As a comprehensive data set on ultramafic rock weathering is missing, this project aims to correct that by investigating, in the field and experimentally, how weathering of ultramafic rocks affects riverine, and thus ocean chemistry doc15497 none Physics (13) This project is modernizing the introductory physics laboratory using computerized instructional technology. Microcomputer Based Laboratory (MBL) tools that use the RealTime Physics (RTP) program designed by David Sokoloff and Ronald Thornton are being adapted. Students in their first and second year of college and also high school physics instructors and students are participating in the project. The objective is that the student play an active rather than passive role in performing the experiments which include data acquisition, analysis (graphs and calculus) and intuitive inference. Immediate visual display of the experimental results saves time and enhances students laboratory skills and their ability to retain the physical concepts learned. The implementation of the RTP also allows development of more appropriate laboratory exercises for students with different science majors. The standardized Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation is being used to evaluate the effectiveness of the methods. An external peer reviewer familiar with education policies in Puerto Rico is also evaluating progress. To better prepare students who may come to the university while still in high school, a summer workshop is being organized for local high school science instructors to assist them in learning new and powerful ways of teaching basic science. Videos tapes showing high school students immersed in physics related experiments are being distributed to local high schools in order to make studying physics more attractive as a career option doc15498 none This project will support the investigation of the dynamics of a system of intraplate faults in the southern part of the central Walker Lane belt, known as the Mina deflection, using an integrated approach of field mapping, tectonic geomorphology, paleoseismology, thermochronology, and geochronology. Faults within the Mina deflection define a regional-scale releasing bend that transfers slip from the Eastern California Shear Zone to the Walker Lane Belt. The Eastern California Shear Zone and Walker Lane Belt straddle the boundary between dominantly east-west extension in the Basin and Range province to the east and dominantly NW-shear along the Pacific-North American plate boundary to the west. The interaction between extension and transcurrent shear has resulted in the development of a complex array of faults that accommodate intraplate strain. The research is motivated in large part by ongoing geodetic investigations on the magnitude of present-day strain accumulation and pattern of strain distribution across the Eastern California Shear Zone and Walker Lane Belt. In light of these geodetic constraints on strain accumulation, it is timely to improve our understanding of the spatial and temporal patterns of strain release during late Cenozoic to Recent times. The two data sets will provide important constraints on geodynamic hypotheses proposed for the evolution of the Eastern California Shear Zone and Walker Lane Belt. An accurate characterization of the temporal and spatial strain distribution within the Eastern California Shear Zone and Walker Lane Belt is crucial for understanding tectonic processes over a much broader area of intraplate deformation associated with the interaction between the Pacific and North American plates doc15499 none Hofmeister A one-year investigation of thermal conductivity (k) of crustal minerals using spectroscopic measurements and modeling is proposed. The data will be supplemented with new measurements of the thermal diffusivity of a plagioclase feldspar using a laser-flash apparatus. These measurements will provide a benchmark of the PI s model for the lattice contribution against available reliable data on thermal conductivity below room temperature for quartz and feldspar, and against the laser flash measurements at high T. The calibrated model will provide high T data appropriate for diffusion of heat in the Earth, and will constrain pressure dependencies through the equation of state. The purpose is to try and understand why the most recent heat flow data from the continents is lower than that from the oceans (Pollack et al. ), contrary to the expected correlation of high heat flow with high radioactive contents, and to the partitioning of almost all of Earth s radioactive elements into the crust The imbalance suggests that virtually no heat from the mantle escapes through the crust. From the determination of k(T,P) for quartz and feldspars, the continental crust can be approximated by a conductive cooling model that incorporates internal heating. Requiring that the surface heat flux and temperature be matched will give solutions relating the basal temperature to the radioactive contents. Comparison of results with previous independent estimates of radioactive contents (based on chemical inventory) and of temperatures (based on phase relations) will set limits on these interrelated quantities, and thus on the basal heat flow from the mantle. This result should provide a constraint for convection models of the mantle doc15500 none Sidell Notothenioid fishes that dominate the fish fauna surrounding Antarctica have been evolving for 10-14 million years at a nearly constant body temperature of ~0C throughout their life histories. As a result, this group of animals is uniquely suited to studies aimed at understanding and identifying features of physiology and biochemistry that result from the process of evolution at cold body temperature. This project has three major objectives aimed at examining adaptations for life in cold environments: 1. Identify the amino acid substitutions in the fatty acid-binding pocket of fatty acyl CoA synthetase (FACS) that explain its substrate specificity. Fatty acids are a major fuel of energy metabolism in Antarctic fishes. FACS catalyzes the condensation of CoASH and fatty acids to fatty acyl CoA esters, a step required for subsequent metabolism of these important compounds. This research may permit us to resolve the specific amino acid substitutions that explain both substrate specificity and preservation of catalytic rate of notothenioid FACS at cold physiological temperatures. 2. Produce a rigorous biochemical and biophysical characterization of the intracellular calcium-binding protein, parvalbumin, from white axial musculature of Antarctic fishes. Parvalbumin plays a pivotal role in facilitating the relaxation phase of fast-contracting muscles and is a likely site of strong selective pressure. Preliminary data strongly indicate that the protein from Antarctic fishes has been modified to ensure function at cold temperature. A suite of physical techniques will be used to determine dissociation constants of Antarctic fish parvalbumins for calcium and magnesium and unidirectional rate constants of ion-dissociation from the protein. Full-length cDNA clones for Antarctic fish parvalbumin(s) will permit deduction of primary amino acid sequence These data will yield insight into structural elements that permit the protein from notothenioid fishes to function at very cold body temperature. 3. Conduct a broad survey of the pattern of cardiac myoglobin expression in the Suborder Notothenoidei. Previous work has indicated a variable pattern of presence or absence of the intracellular oxygen-binding protein, myoglobin (Mb), in hearts of one family of Antarctic notothenioid fishes (Channichthyidae; icefishes). Because Mb is of physiological value in species that express the protein, the observed pattern of interspecific expression has been attributed to unusually low niche competition in the Southern Ocean. This leads to the prediction that similar loss of cardiac Mb should be observed in other notothenioid taxa. This part of the project will survey for the presence and absence of cardiac Mb in as many notothenioid species as possible and, if Mb-lacking species are detected, will extend analyses to determine the mechanism(s) responsible for loss of its expression using molecular biological techniques doc15501 none Dye The development of the Antarctica has expanded beyond the initial population of scientists and military personnel to include other support staff (e.g., construction, food service, housekeeping and sanitation personnel) without an explicit scientific or military mission. Experts speculate that as space populations develop, a similar mix of residents may emerge. Such organizational and cultural merging in restricted living environments undoubtedly creates new cultural landscapes (ethnoscapes) that can influence health and health behavior. In addition, because of the extreme environmental conditions in Antarctica, health risks and health care are particularly important in this new cultural context. The specific aims of this project are to 1) model the emergence of cultural stages in isolated confined environmental (ICE) ethnoscapes as experienced through work, recreation, and daily living in Antarctica, 2) identify those elements of ICE ethnoscapes that are specific to an individual season on the ice and those elements which are repeated across seasons, 3) relate how the temporal and content stages of ICE ethnoscapes interact with risk, behavior, and injury, and 4) demonstrate the utility of electronic and distance-based assisted ethnography in conducting social research in ICE environments of Antarctica. These aims will be accomplished with a pre-deployment qualitative phase of interviews and focus groups with individuals who have spent at least one season in Antarctica within the past three years. The second phase will be on-ice with the project team residing in Antarctica for an extended period to conduct on-site observation and interviews with Antarctic residents. This research could contribute to the development of context-sensitive explanatory models of culture and injury risk, screening procedures for long term residence in isolated confined environments, and the methods of their derivation remotely. The study of cultural emergence in Antarctica as an analog to space could prove useful in the development of models of health and health behavior in an isolated confined environmental (ICE) context doc15502 none Many mountain belts are characterized by late stage normal faults and bimodal igneous activity, both considered to be reflective of orogenic collapse. This proposal will address a classic example of such activity, the Donegal granitic suite of northern Ireland by collecting a suite of very high quality radiometric ages on igneous rocks and fabric-forming minerals in shear zones believed to related to plutonism. The ages of plutonic rocks coupled with ages of activity on major shear zones will provide critical data needed to evaluate various mechanisms which produced the late stage activity doc15503 none Sowers This award supports a project to improve the understanding of the biogeochemical processes that control CH4 emissions. Records of the concentration of methane in trapped gases in ice tell us about changes in atmospheric loading through time. Such records do not, however, provide information on the individual sources or sinks. One way to refine our understanding of the cycling of bioactive trace gases like methane is to use stable isotope records of trapped gases in ice cores. This project will measure the Deuterium Hydrogen (D H) ratio of methane trapped in shallow recent ice (covering the last ~ 200 years) at Siple Dome, Antarctica. The proposed work will complement current efforts to measure the carbon-13 isotope ratio of methane in ice cores and will provide fundamental information on the various sources and sinks of atmospheric methane over the last 200 years doc15504 none Heaney Anionic clays and manganese oxides occur abundantly as nanocrystalline coatings on soil and sediment particles in surficial environments. They exhibit a remarkable facility for exchanging ions dissolved in aqueous fluids and act as major traps for anions and cations. The investigators of this proposal will apply a novel crystallographic approach to resolve mechanisms of cation exchange in layered double hydroxide and Mn oxide materials. Powdered samples will be monitored by synchrotron X-ray diffraction during the process of cation exchange. These experiments will yield the first time-resolved analyses of the structural distortions that occur to accommodate substitutions by transition metals in low-temperature minerals. Additionally, in concert with high-temperature infrared spectroscopy, synchrotron XRD analyses will be performed as samples are heated, allowing the structural manifestations of thermal decomposition to be correlated with cation exchange capacity. These studies will allow the investigators to capture intermediate transition steps that are overlooked by a more conventional static analysis of final run products. As the structural perturbations that are associated with chemical substitutions tend to stabilize the exchanged phases, these studies will indicate which factors limit the degree of exchange for selected cations. Consequently, these experiments will suggest approaches to the design of new remediation materials with amplified exchange characteristics doc15505 none Chemistry (12) This award is permitting the introduction of GC MS in an incremental fashion into the curriculum as students are using this instrument in undergraduate organic chemistry, quantitative analysis, instrumental methods of analysis, advanced synthetic laboratories, and undergraduate research. Through a careful selection of instrument components, the incremental approach is allowing the use of the GC MS in both large enrollment lower-division and lower enrollment upper-division laboratories. Experiments are being adapted from the research and the educational literature and implemented into our curriculum using an inquiry-based pedagogy. The incremental approach begins with the concepts needed to interpret isotopic mass and abundance data, and then continues with fragmentation patterns of complex species, techniques required for the accurate analysis of complex mixtures, and identifications through the use of library software. Finally, a sound introduction to the operating principles of GC MS is providing the foundation for sophisticated uses in our upper-division instrumental methods of analysis and advanced synthesis courses and in undergraduate research projects. This approach is developing the student s comprehension of and appreciation for the power of this technique through a variety of experiences. The creative thinking skills and problem solving abilities of students are being improved. The installation of the GC MS is a continuation of our overall Laboratory Modernization Technology Integration Effort doc15506 none Hart This grant has as its overarching goals the understanding of the placement, genesis, evolution and lithologic nature of the several known heterogeneous mantle domains, and the dynamics of melting and melt extraction from these mantle domains. Several paradigm warps have been in progress during the period of our last renewal. One is the increasing evidence that mesoscale mantle heterogeneities (veins, pods, layers) may be important in creating some of the isotopic heterogeneity observed in mantle-derived melts. This in turn demands a better understanding of melting and melt transport processes. The second is the concept that the deepest mantle may be convectively isolated from the overlying mantle (with a boundary at circa km). This in turn demands a better understanding of the chemical and lithologic make-up of mantle plumes, as they may provide our most direct sampling of the deep mantle. Several of the isotopically-defined mantle domains are thought to be a result of lithospheric recycling, and yet we have little understanding of the parentage or lithologic expression of this material, or of its melting dynamics. We will explore two avenues as a means to confront this problem. The first is an in-depth study of the Samoa hotspot (the most extreme EM2 mantle plume). The high 87Sr 86Sr (~ 0. ) of the Samoan plume, and its distinctive chemistry, is conventionally ascribed to recycling of ancient lithosphere containing a terrigenous sediment component. However, no model has as yet satisfactorily accounted for many of the puzzling geochemical characteristics of EM2 hotspots (e.g. the coexistence of enriched 87Sr 86Sr, heavy d18O, and high 3He 4He). We propose to undertake analytical studies of volcanics from the older seamounts west of Samoa, of shield lavas from western Upolu and Savai i (putatively the oldest subaerial volcano in Samoa), and of basalts from two younger seamounts east of Samoa. Sample suites from all of these locations are in hand. This work will include 40Ar 39Ar dating of these volcanoes, to test the age-progression hypothesis, and trace element and isotopic work to elucidate the pedigree of the EM2 component in Samoa. The second avenue is a study of the isotopic composition and trace element signatures of melt inclusions in phenocrysts from EM1 and EM2 basalts (using in-situ ionprobe and laser-ablation ICP MS techniques). In general, the geochemical diversity captured in melt inclusions far exceeds that observed in the erupted host lavas. The nature of these melt inclusions, which likely represent pre-aggregated melts, will shed significant light on the melting lithologies and melt transport networks involved in EM hotspot volcanism. We should be able to discriminate between large-scale and small-scale mantle heterogeneities, and between mafic and ultramafic lithologies; this should allow a firm test of the recycled lithosphere model for EM2 plumes doc15507 none Bodnar A three-year experimental study will be conducted to determine the temperature-pressure-composition (PTX) limits of fluid immiscibility over the temperature and pressure range appropriate for magmatic-hydrothermal ore deposits associated with shallow granitic magmas. The study will focus on fluid compositions in aqueous solutions containing Na, K, Ca, and Fe chlorides, starting with the less-complex sub-systems containing Na-K, Na-Ca, and Na-Fe chlorides. Samples of immiscible fluids will be trapped in situ using the synthetic fluid inclusion technique, and compositions of the fluids will be determined using standard microthermometric analytical techniques. The compositional data will be used to develop an empirical numerical model to predict P-T conditions attending magmatic-hydrothermal processes. The model will require only information that is easily obtainable during conventional microthermometric and or microchemical analysis of fluid inclusions. The feasibility of the project has been documented by preliminary studies on the water-NaCl-KCl system. The data confirm that the synthetic fluid inclusions trap a representative sample of the fluid(s) present at experimental run conditions, and maintain these compositions during quenching to ambient laboratory conditions. Moreover, conventional microthermometric analysis of the coexisting liquid-rich and vapor-rich inclusions can be employed to determine the fluid compositions. Preliminary data for the water-NaCl-KCl system show that partitioning of sodium and potassium between coexisting liquid and vapor varies systematically with both temperature and pressure. Specifically, sodium partitioning into the liquid phase becomes less pronounced with increasing temperature and with decreasing pressure doc15508 none This project will provide new constraints on the temperature and viscosity structure of the wedge in subduction zones by combining petrologic and geophysical constraints on the thermal structure of the wedge with experimental and observational constraints on wedge viscosity structure in numerical models of convection. Petrologic and geophysical constraints indicate that current thermal models of subduction zones significantly underestimate the temperature in parts of the mantle wedge. Observations of low seismic velocity and high attenuation in localized regions of the wedge indicate the presence of high temperatures, aqueous fluids, or melt. Deformation experiments on olivine aggregates indicate that a high water content or high melt fraction can significantly reduce viscosity. Instantaneous dynamic models of subduction provide indirect evidence for low viscosity in the wedge. Agreement between model results and observations of topography and geoid improve significantly for subduction zone models including an isolated low viscosity region in the wedge. Including a localized region of low viscosity in time-dependent models of convection will: (1) lead to a higher mean wedge temperature, a hotter wedge-crust boundary and a hotter slab-wedge interface, and (2) modify the dynamic coupling between the wedge and the slab. Hybrid (mixed kinematic-dynamic) and dynamic, time-dependent numerical models of convection are being used to characterize the dependence of the wedge temperature and flow distribution on the magnitude and location of localized low viscosity regions. Combining both numerical methods allows isolation of the behavior of the wedge viscosity itself on the flow from the modification of the flow due to changing the viscous coupling of the wedge to the slab. Specifically, the project is investigating the model dependence on: asthenosphere viscosity, localized regions of low viscosity, age of the overriding plate, slab dip, slab velocity, slab age, slab viscosity, fault dip and depth, and nonlinear rheology. The goal is to find models of convection in the wedge that are consistent with both petrologic and geophysical data and include a viscosity structure that more fully reflects the complex rheologic behavior in this environment doc15322 none The process of rifting of continents to produce oceanic lithosphere is a first order phenomenon on Earth. Unfortunately, most rifted margins are buried by thick accumulations of sedimentary rock, hindering direct observation of the structures which formed during rifting. This project will address several significant questions about oblique rifting with a multi-disciplinary study of the Salton Trough in southern California. This region is undergoing active extension and right-lateral strike-slip faulting related to opening of the Gulf of California and the San Andreas fault. Exposures of bedrock are excellent and there is an opportunity to examine a plate margin caught in the process of forming. A combination of geological, sedimentological, geophysical, and geochronological methods will be brought to bear to study the partitioning of strain between strike-slip and normal faults and the accompanying sedimnetological response to each doc15362 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for a demonstration project to prove the viability of shallow ship-based geological drilling while simultaneously collecting useful cores for assessing the early history of the Antarctic ice sheets. For over three decades, U.S. scientists and their international colleagues exploring the shallow shelves and seas along the margins of Antarctic have been consistently frustrated by their inability to penetrate through the over-compacted glacial diamictons encountered at shallow sub bottom depths (within the upper 10 m) over these terrains. This is particularly frustrating because advanced high resolution seismic reflection techniques clearly show in many areas the presence of older successions of Neogene and even Paleogene sequences lying just beneath this thin veneer of diamictons. Until the means are developed to recover these sequences, a detailed history of the Antarctic ice sheets, which is an essential prerequisite to understanding Cenozoic paleoclimate and future climate change on a global scale, will remain an elusive and unobtainable goal. After four years of study and evaluation with the aid of a professional engineer (and over the course of two workshops), the SHALDRIL Committee, an interested group of U.S. scientists, has identified at least two diamond-coring systems deemed suitable for use on existing ice-breaking U.S. Antarctic Research Program vessels. The goal of this project is to employ diamond-coring technology on the RV IB Nathaniel B. Palmer in order to test out and demonstrate the feasibility of both ship-based diamond coring and down-hole logging. For this demonstration cruise coring will be attempted along a high-resolution seismic reflection profile on the continental shelf adjacent to Seymour Island, Antarctic Peninsula, an area of high scientific interest in its own right. Here the well-defined geologic section is estimated to range from Eocene to Quaternary in age, effectively spanning the Greenhouse-Icehouse transition in the evolution of Antarctic global climate. A complete record of this transition has yet to be obtained anywhere along the Antarctic margin. Following core recovery, this project will result in correlation of the paleoclimate records from the new cores with detailed fluctuations of the ice margin recorded at higher latitudes in the eastern Ross Sea by the recently concluded, fast-ice-based Cape Roberts Project. If successful, this mobile and flexible drilling system will then be available to the broader scientific community for further research in paleoenvironmental conditions and other areas of science that are currently hindered by the present gap that exists in the US Antarctic Program s technical capability to explore the Antarctic shelves between the shore-line fast-ice margin and the continental slope. SHALDRIL will be able to operate effectively in the no man s land that presently exists between the near shore (where the fast-ice-based Cape Roberts Project was successful) and the upper slope (where the Ocean Drilling Program s vessel JOIDES Resolution becomes most efficient). This technological breakthrough will not only allow major outstanding scientific problems of the last three decades to be addressed, but will also favorably impact many current U.S. and SCAR (ICSU Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research) Antarctic or drilling-related initiatives, such as WAIS, ANTIME, ANDRILL, ANTEC, IMAGES, PAGES, GLOCHANT (including PICE), MARGINS, ODP, and STRATAFORM doc15511 none This project will investigate the age, structural geometry, and regional extent of a proposed geological suture (the Betsimisaraka suture) in East Madagascar, approximately 50 km wide and over 700 km long, that welds the continental fragments of East and West Gondwana. The suture hypothesis poses a fundamental challenge to the current paradigm regarding the configuration of Rodinia and its transformation to Gondwana. The objectives of this research are to determine the structural vergence, kinematics, and timing of terrane-accretion and terminal-suturing events in the critical part of the EAO that have important global-scale implications for Neoproterozoic tectonics. Research will proceed through an integrated program of geologic mapping and structural analysis, together with remote sensing analysis (Landsat TM and SIR C X radar), U-Pb geochronology, geochemical, and radiogenic isotope (Re-Os, Sm-Nd) investigations. The structural investigations and sample collections will be made along five river transects that traverse the proposed suture. Within the proposed suture are meter-and km-scale blocks of peridotite, hartzburgite, gabbro, and basalt interpreted as relicts of the former Mozambique Ocean. Geochemical and geochronological analysis of these will place constraints on their age and origin, and provide an important test of the suture hypothesis. Structural investigations and U-Pb dating of rocks within and adjacent to the proposed suture will allow us to evaluate other critical elements of the hypothesis, and place important constraints on the configuration of continental terranes within Gondwana. TM imaging and SIR C X radar analysis will reveal macro-scale kinematic relations and provide a basis for extrapolation of the suture to a larger scale. This work will lead to a new understanding of kinematics, age and overall structural vergence in the critical, eastern part of the EAO where strongly divergent views of its evolution are emerging. The research will involve collaboration between professional colleagues in Madagascar and the U.S., and allow for the participation and training of American and Malagasy students in field- and laboratory-based research doc15512 none A Pilot Study of Plutonochronology: Rapid Dating of Recent Sediments and Soils using Pu Activities and 240 Pu 239 Pu Determined by ICPMS. Studies of the chronology and inventory of anthropogenic pollutants in the environment require a well-calibrated timeline in soils and sediments. These sediment and soil profiles are most frequently and reliably dated using time-consuming radiocounting measurements of excess 210Pb, 137Cs, and 239+240Pu. Dating of recent soils and sediments using plutonium isotopes has not been more extensively pursued because of analytical difficulties. The fact that the application of quadrupole ICPMS to Pu chronology has been overlooked represents one of the more striking missed opportunities of the s in isotope geochemistry, as ICPMS technology has been suited to this task for at least the last decade. The goal of this project is to demonstrate and further develop the use of inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICPMS) in Pu dating of soils and sediments. This approach will provide a much faster complement or alternative to established radiodecay counting of 137Cs and or excess 210Pb. It will examine Pu activity and isotope ratio profiles in Lake Coeur DAlene, Idaho, and Pine Valley Reservoir (Washington Co., UT doc15513 none The PI s propose to investigate the mechanics of fracturing during folding because field data indicate this is a significant strain-accommodating mechanism of the brittle crust. Fractures nucleate and propagate as a result of stress concentrations, and the stress fields within folds can be constrained by understanding the associated fracture evolution in space and time. Previous efforts have argued for simple, symmetric and homogeneous stress-fold relationships, and various models of fracture formation in such idealized stress fields have been proposed. These methods have in common that they ignore pre-folding structures such as joints, which can perturb the stress field within the fold, if they are reactivated. New fractures then would form in a stress field different from that predicted by the simple models. At the Emigrant Gap anticline, a Laramide fold located near Casper, Wyoming, the simplified relationships of previous models are not capable of explaining the majority of the observed fractures. The PI s preliminary field observations show that two tectonic joint sets existed prior to folding, and that most fractures observed on the fold are sub-parallel to these two sets. Some of the older joints show shear offsets, arguing for their reactivation during folding. Associated with the reactivation is the formation of new fractures with strikes that parallel those of sheared joints rather than the fold axis. Measured fracture intensities for both fracture sets on the fold are approximately four times the intensities of the respective joint sets in unfolded strata of the same formation. The PI s will determine the influence of pre-folding joints, bedding interfaces, and contrasting constitutive properties of the strata on fracture development and strain accommodation during folding. They plan to integrate detailed field observations with mechanical modeling of these structures. Their specific objectives are: l) Map and document fractures and fold geometry of various sandstone units at the Emigrant Gap anticline, including fracture geometries in 3-D, the 3-D shape of the folded strata, and evidence for bedding-parallel shearing within the shale units. 2) Design and execute large-strain numerical experiments using the FEM code ABAQUS to understand the underlying mechanical process of strain accommodation by fracturing during folding as motivated by the field observations. 3) Integrate the insights gained from the field observations and numerical analyses to construct a conceptual model to predict fractures in similar geologic and tectonic settings. This model will modify and, in cases such as the Emigrant Gap anticline, replace existing models based on symmetric fold-fracture relationships doc15514 none Green Conventional brittle failure is impossible at significant depth within Earth because the combination of pressure and temperature ensures that the flow strength of rocks is exceeded before the fracture strength. Nevertheless, earthquakes occur abundantly within descending slabs of oceanic lithosphere in subduction zones, in several cases to depths as great as 680 km, where they stop abruptly. Although the mechanism by which these earthquakes occur is unknown, their seismic signals ensure that they represent sudden failure of rock along a fault. There are two mechanisms presently known that can enable faulting to occur at high pressure. The first, dehydration embrittlement, involves generation of a free fluid phase by breakdown of hydrous minerals; the free fluid assists in opening of microcracks which is a crucial step leading to shear failure. So far as is known, this mechanism could potentially explain all earthquakes if appropriate hydrous phases are present in the mantle and if their stability fields are such that they dehydrate under appropriate conditions to yield the observed depth distribution. The second, phase-transformation-induced faulting can be triggered during the phase transformations of olivine to its denser polymorphs, which occur with increasing depth. This mechanism can potentially explain the bimodal depth distribution of earthquakes and their abrupt termination at the base of the upper mantle if metastable olivine is preserved in the cold cores of subduction zones at transition-zone depths. However, given current understanding of the phase distribution within subducting lithosphere, neither mechanism can comfortably explain the occurrence of very large earthquakes at depths exceeding 500 km. The investigators will apply their collective expertise in high-pressure technology, experimental deformation, and seismology to achieve the following: (1) test the hypothesis of reactivation of hydrated faults; (2) monitor experiments on dehydration embrittlement and transformation-induced faulting by detection and location of acoustic emissions; (3) develop improved high-pressure experimental assembly designs for in situ synchrotron experiments on shear failure; (4) use faulting experiments on both dehydration embrittlement and phase-transformation-induced faulting to place new constraints on these two faulting mechanisms doc15515 none Klypin This award supports Anatoly Klypin and students from New Mexico State University in a collaboration with Stefan Gottloeber of the Astrophysical Institute in Potsdam, Germany. The project will focus on expanded computer modeling of the formation of galaxies and other large objects in the expanding universe. Specifically, the research will investigate the nature of dark matter, which defines the process of formation of such objects as well as their structure. Both sides of the collaboration bring specific and complementary expertise, skills, and resources to bear on the problem. The US side will provide computer codes for running and analysis of simulations, while the German side will develop new methods of analysis in order to study the results of the modeling. The project will also compare model results with actual observed data. The work plan provides for extensive participation by graduate students in the international travel and research doc15511 none This project will investigate the age, structural geometry, and regional extent of a proposed geological suture (the Betsimisaraka suture) in East Madagascar, approximately 50 km wide and over 700 km long, that welds the continental fragments of East and West Gondwana. The suture hypothesis poses a fundamental challenge to the current paradigm regarding the configuration of Rodinia and its transformation to Gondwana. The objectives of this research are to determine the structural vergence, kinematics, and timing of terrane-accretion and terminal-suturing events in the critical part of the EAO that have important global-scale implications for Neoproterozoic tectonics. Research will proceed through an integrated program of geologic mapping and structural analysis, together with remote sensing analysis (Landsat TM and SIR C X radar), U-Pb geochronology, geochemical, and radiogenic isotope (Re-Os, Sm-Nd) investigations. The structural investigations and sample collections will be made along five river transects that traverse the proposed suture. Within the proposed suture are meter-and km-scale blocks of peridotite, hartzburgite, gabbro, and basalt interpreted as relicts of the former Mozambique Ocean. Geochemical and geochronological analysis of these will place constraints on their age and origin, and provide an important test of the suture hypothesis. Structural investigations and U-Pb dating of rocks within and adjacent to the proposed suture will allow us to evaluate other critical elements of the hypothesis, and place important constraints on the configuration of continental terranes within Gondwana. TM imaging and SIR C X radar analysis will reveal macro-scale kinematic relations and provide a basis for extrapolation of the suture to a larger scale. This work will lead to a new understanding of kinematics, age and overall structural vergence in the critical, eastern part of the EAO where strongly divergent views of its evolution are emerging. The research will involve collaboration between professional colleagues in Madagascar and the U.S., and allow for the participation and training of American and Malagasy students in field- and laboratory-based research doc15312 none This award supports a program of field surveys of an area within the large, well-developed megadune field southeast of Vostok station. The objectives are to determine the physical characteristics of the firn across the dunes, including typical climate indicators such as stable isotopes and major chemical species, and to install instruments to measure the time variation of near-surface wind and temperature with depth, to test and refine hypotheses for megadune formation. Field study will consist of surface snowpit and shallow core sampling, ground penetrating radar (GPR) profiling, GPS topographic and ice motion surveys, AWS installation, accumulation ablation measurements, subsurface temperature, and firn permeability studies. Field work in two successive seasons is proposed. Continent-wide remote sensing studies of the dunes will be continued, using the new group of instruments that are now, or will shortly be available (e.g., MODIS, MISR, GLAS, AMSR). The earlier study of topographic, passive microwave, and SAR characteristics will be extended, with the intent of determining the relationships of dune amplitude and wavelength to climate parameters, and further development of models of dune formation. Diffusion, ventilation, and vapor transport processes within the dune firn will be modeled as well. A robust program of outreach is planned and reporting to inform both the public and scientists of the fundamental in-situ and remote sensing characteristics of these uniquely Antarctic features will be an important part of the work. Because of their extreme nature, their broad extent, and their potential impact on the climate record, it is important to improve our current understanding of these. Megadunes are a manifestation of an extreme terrestrial climate and may provide insight on past terrestrial climate, or to processes active on other planets. Megadunes are likely to represent an end-member in firn diagenesis, and as such, may have much to teach us about the processes involved doc15518 none The Tibetan Plateau deforms over time much more than any other large piece of continental crust on earth. Unlike most tectonically active regions, the effects of plate motion there are not localized to a narrow boundary separating India and Asia, but are spread across thousands of kilometers, from the Himalayan foothills to Mongolia. Where this deformation occurs within the Plateau is still mostly unknown, as are the basic physical mechanisms driving it. The work supported by this funding intends to attack both of these mysteries by improving mathematical models of crustal deformation to include edge and surface effects hypothesized for the Himalayan boundary, and by making direct measurements of the velocities of remote parts of Tibet using GPS geodesy. Existing models of Tibetan dynamics have not yet addressed the development of the shape of the Himalayan arc. Existing maps of observed Tibetan surface velocities are still mostly blank. It is currently impossible to differentiate among competing hypotheses of how Tibet grows and moves based on predictions of surface motions or of geographic shapes doc15519 none In the past decade the world has seen an explosion in Internet activity and with it has come increased expectations for its performance. Internet users now demand faster and higher-quality service for applications ranging from audio video-on-demand to Internet telephony. At the heart of these information exchanges is the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and active queue management (AQM) schemes which work together with the goal of preventing network congestion and improving end-to-end performance. However, it is becoming increasingly evident that the present form of these schemes may not be able to cope with the growing demands on the Internet. It is well documented that congestion-avoidance schemes relying on Drop-Tail routers are prone to high-loss rates while AQM routers deploying random early detection (RED) are difficult to tune. Motivated by this situation, this proposal is concerned with the design of advanced AQM schemes. This projects approach departs from the prevailing techniques by explicitly relying on dynamic network models and feedback control principles. Central to the approach is the recognition that AQM schemes are feedback control systems and that feedback control principles provide essential tools for the analysis and design of AQM strategies. The absence of feedback control principles from the design scene so far is apparently due to a lack of an analytical model of TCP. Fortunately, this roadblock has been recently removed by one of the PIs through the introduction of a fluid-flow model that expresses TCP in a language that allows network control engineers to analyze and design AQM schemes. Indeed, in several recent papers the PIs have accomplished just that by: 1) relating key network parameters to the performance of AQM networks, 2) analyzing RED and suggesting parameter settings for stable queue management, and 3) introducing a new AQM scheme, the PI controller, that compares favorably with RED. The proposed research builds on these recent results and has two objectives. First, to study the interaction of heterogeneous fluid-flows with AQM routers and secondly, to investigate the scalability of PI controllers. The first objective is aimed at the recently developed TCP AQM movel which assumes only long-lived flows and ignores short-lived flows. This research will develop models of heterogeneous flows and explore their impact on the AQM analysis and design. In the second objective the PI controller is considered which was originally designed and analyzed for a TCP connection encountering only a single bottleneck router. The scalability for the PI controller will be explored where complex network topologies, consisting of many routers each under local PI control, will be considered. Unlike the development of the original PI controller, this research will necessarily use, multivariable feedback control techniques to establish network stability, performance and robustness to network parameter variations doc15520 none Sowers This award supports a project to construct an isotopic record of atmospheric methane and nitrous oxide over the last century from South Pole firn air. Over the last 150 years, atmospheric methane and nitrous oxide concentrations have risen in response to increased emissions from various anthropogenic activities. As this trend is liable to continue in the foreseeable future, it is important to understand the biogeochemical processes that contribute to the emissions of these two greenhouse gases. In this context, records of the variations in the atmospheric loading of trace gases found in ice cores and interstitial spaces in the snow near the surface of the ice sheet (firn air) provide fundamental boundary conditions for reconstructing historical emission records. One way to improve our understanding of the cycling of bioactive trace gases and their emission records is to use stable isotope tracers, which have been recorded in the ice cores and firn air. This project will develop records of carbon-13 and deuterium isotope ratios of methane, as well as the nitrogen-15, oxygen-18 and the isotopomer composition of nitrous oxide trapped in firn air samples collected in January at the South Pole. These measurements will allow isotopic records of these atmospheric gases to be reconstructed throughout the 20th century. Such records will help to establish the relative contribution of individual sources with a higher degree of confidence than is currently available doc15521 none Seabird research conducted at Admiralty Bay, King George Island in the Antarctic Peninsula region has documented annual variability in the life history parameters of the population biology of three related penguin species: the Adelie, the gentoo and the chinstrap (Pygoscelis adeliae, P. papua and P. antarctica, respectively). This long-term study has collected twenty-five years of data on the three related species, including survival and recruitment, population size and breeding success, and diets and foraging ecology. The current project will extend the research linking penguin demography and foraging ecology to variability in the Antarctic marine ecosystem. A major focus of this work will be on the Adelie and gentoo penguin population biology data and the distribution and trophic interactions among the three Pygoscelis species during the breeding season and the non-breeding, winter period. Recent results have provided the first detailed data on the wintering distributions of Adelie and chinstrap penguins in the Antarctic Peninsula region, through the use of satellite tags and time-depth recorders to examine the post-fledging foraging. Specific topics of research include an examination of the size and sex composition of krill captured by penguins feeding chicks and krill collected concurrently by net hauls in the adjacent marine environment and the length-frequency distribution of krill collected from penguin diet samples. The over winter survival of penguin breeding adults and the recruitment of young (two to four year old) pre-breeding penguins to their natal colony will be compared to the extent of sea ice in the winter prior to the breeding season. These variables are expected to be positively correlated for the Adelie but negatively correlated to the chinstrap penguin. Detailed studies of the adult gentoo penguins, which do not disperse widely from the natal colony, will be conducted using satellite tags. The data collected in this study will improve an understanding of the structure and function of the Antarctic through research on the impact of environmental variation on the structure of upper trophic level predators such as the Pygoscelis penguins doc15522 none Wolff Assessing the relative contributions of enriched mantle and continental crust to continental flood basalt lavas is a long-standing problem, because essentially the same whole-rock geochemical data can be used to argue for either case. We propose a test using the Columbia River Basalt Group, the best-studied flood basalt province in the world. We shall use laser ablation sampling in combination with multicollector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (MC-ICP-MS) to establish whether or not plagioclase phenocrysts in CRBG lavas exhibit zoning in 87 Sr 86 Sr. Because plagioclase crystallizes from basaltic liquids at crustal pressures, this will establish whether or not the magmas experienced changes in Sr isotope ratio during residence in (or transport through) the crust. While laser ablation MC-ICP-MS for in-situ isotope ratio analysis is not yet a fully developed technique, Sr in plagioclase has been demonstrated as feasible, and presents relatively few analytical challenges. This research has the potential to place unequivocal spatial constaints on the depth at which lithosperic contamination has affected the compositions of the Columbia River lavas. The results will affect our understanding of mantle plume-lithosphere interactions during genesis of this flood basalt province doc15523 none Information is currently accessed and manipulated using a variety of fragmented tools. The researchers use a desktop computer as our primary information tool, a server, network of servers, or an ISP to provide file system support, computationally intensive computing, and other system support functions. They use a notebook computer, which may or may not have network access, when they desire a portable information tool. When information needs are modest, and mobility needs most apparent, the researchers use a variety of other devices such as handheld computers, personal digital assistants, cellular telephones, and pagers. Software version management in this situation is inefficient, and licensing is complex. Ensuring that the same (and latest) version of each desired application program is installed on a large number of computers can consume a significant amount of system support staff resources, even if these computers are accessible from the same network. The protection of information from unauthorized access is similarly difficult. The result of this fragmentation of data, applications, and devices is an increasingly complex and unmanageable collection of information tools that communicate with each other ineffectively. The convergence in time of substantial need, substantial communication infrastructure, and high performance, low power computing resources challenges the researchers to explore a better alternative. The Bifrost location independent computing project seeks to provide a flexible and comprehensive information access environment. The function of Bifrost is to provide location and device independent access to data. Data in Bifrost encompasses both information and the applications used to manipulate that information. Bifrost uses affinity between data, and between users and data, to make appropriate decisions about when and where to move data. We refer to this approach as affinity directed mobility. The core research issues of the project are mobility management (how we move data and threads to support user and device mobility), data management (how we represent, access, update, and protect information), and application management (how we provide a common applications base across a variety of devices). In contrast to previous approaches to mobile data management, Bifrost anticipates that in 3-5 years network connectivity will be the norm, even for highly mobile computing devices. In this situation, the problem of how users can access remote personal data, regardless of location or computing device, becomes at least as important as planning for a possible disconnection. The researchers propose to design, implement, deploy and evaluate a two-campus prototype of the Bifrost location independent computing system. The Bifrost design represents a new paradigm for information access and manipulation. We propose to integrate the way in which information is managed with the way in which the applications that access this information are managed. One of the design principles of Bifrost is that the ability to access data should be consistent across all platforms, including portable computing devices. This approach is in stark contrast to the stripped down operating system plus stripped down applications plus limited data set computing model currently associated with most hand-held computing devices. In addition to the educational benefits to the students directly involved in the project, the researchers intend that this project contribute in broader ways to the academic community. They will incorporate this research into the operating systems and distributed systems classes taught at the University of Colorado and Cornell University. All software and other research products of this project will be made readily available via the world wide web doc15524 none Physics (13) This project continues work begun under Award No. . The project is developing, evaluating, and disseminating educational devices, software, and curriculum materials that center on the nature of light, optics, color, and perception. The major innovation of the project is the introduction of homelabs about light into college science courses. These inquiry-based, quantitative laboratory experiences are designed for students to perform in their own homes. Many of these activities take advantage of the unique properties of computers, allowing students to use inexpensive optical materials to manipulate, explore, and study the light coming from their monitors. In the Project LITE proof-of-concept phase (funded through NSF Award No. ), the investigators conducted the initial development and testing of a number of these homelabs. The basic educational goal of the homelabs is to encourage individualized hands-on (and eyes-on ) learning. The use of homelabs also seeks to alleviate a major resource problem faced by many large, introductory-level, non-majors university science courses, arising from the limited availability of laboratory space, equipment, and teaching assistants. Project LITE materials are being developed and tested at Boston University. The national impact of individual homelabs is being extended by integrating them into community college, university, and high school courses in astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth science, physics, and psychology, as well as into science courses for pre-service teachers. The homelabs are also useful for distance education, home learning, and adult continuing education doc15525 none Halgedahl The physical origins of pseudosingle-domain (PSD) behavior in small magnetic particles have been subjects of lively debate, because PSD grains are thought to carry much of the stable remanence in rocks. Two ingredients contribute most to PSD behavior: transitions in magnetic domain state and defects that pin domain walls. Despite the important role of defects having been recognized for decades, recent theories and experiments in rock magnetism underscore how little we understand about their impact on key problems such as domain wall nucleation, wall-pinning, the stabilities of remanences to alternating field (AF) demagnetization, acquisition of thermal remanent magnetization (TRM), and even the potential for extracting paleointensities from PSD grains of certain magnetic minerals. Single particles of judiciously-chosen magnetic minerals can provide magnified views of both nucleation events and wall-defect interactions. Owing mainly to its weak demagnetizing field and few domains, hematite is such a magnifier. This combination of properties opens up a window for studying the intrinsic impact of defects on magnetic behavior. We will use large, single platelets of hematite to better understand how defects control nucleation and domain wall pinning. Six sets of core experiments are proposed here. These would determine: (1) the thermal stability of SD-like (or near SD-like) states induced at room temperature; (2) domain states for weak-field TRM; (3) temperature dependences of nucleation fields; (4) temperature dependences of critical fields that unpin mature domain walls; (5) AF stabilities of truly multidomain hematite carrying strong-field remanence and weak-field anhysteretic magnetization, and (6) the frequency distribution of critical unpinning fields doc15526 none Jeffrey T. Freymueller The Tibetan Plateau deforms over time much more than any other large piece of continental crust on earth. Unlike most tectonically active regions, the effects of plate motion there are not localized to a narrow boundary separating India and Asia, but are spread across thousands of kilometers, from the Himalayan foothills to Mongolia. Where this deformation occurs within the Plateau is still mostly unknown, as are the basic physical mechanisms driving it. The work supported by this funding intends to attack both of these mysteries by improving mathematical models of crustal deformation to include edge and surface effects hypothesized for the Himalayan boundary, and by making direct measurements of the velocities of remote parts of Tibet using GPS geodesy. Existing models of Tibetan dynamics have not yet addressed the development of the shape of the Himalayan arc. Existing maps of observed Tibetan surface velocities are still mostly blank. It is currently impossible to differentiate among competing hypotheses of how Tibet grows and moves based on predictions of surface motions or of geographic shapes doc15527 none Kay The Central Andean margin, the classic example of an oceanic slab subducting beneath a continent, is a laboratory for studying processes that typify continental crustal formation, modification and destruction. This study focuses on such a process - the migration of an arc magmatic front towards the backarc - that has reconfigured the forearc, arc and backarc of continental margins since plate tectonics began. Lithospheric scale profiles indicate significant mass balance problems that imply recycling of continental crustal and mantle lithosphere into the mantle. We plan a trace element and isotopic study of magmas erupted before, during and after arc migration as probes to changing magmatic source regions and lithospheric configurations beneath the migrating arc. The focus area from 26.5?S to 28?S latitude overlaps the transition between the modern Central Volcanic Zone (CVZ) and the non-volcanic region above the shallowing dipping subduction zone to the south. In this region, the magmatic arc front migrated ~ 50 km eastward from the Maricunga belt to the southern CVZ and Bonete region between ~7 and 2 Ma. Existing geologic maps, K Ar ages (~300) and major element and Instrumental Neutron Activation trace element data (~ 400 samples at Cornell) from virtually every center provide a basis for an in-depth ICP-MS and Nd, Sr, Pb and O isotopic study of magmatism in this environment. Chemical data show that lavas erupted in the old dying arc and as the front migrated eastward have extremely steep REE patterns (La Yb 60) and high field strength (HFS) element depletions (La Ta to 85) that contrast with lower ratios in both pre-8 Ma and post-4 Ma arc lavas. The magmas with the steepest REE patterns appear better analogues to anomalous Archean (TTG) magmatic suites than do magmas thought to be melts of the subducting slab (adakites). Variable age mafic magmas ( 58% SiO2) in the region, which include the most mantle-like Central Andean lavas, are critical to deciphering mantle processes whereas silicic magmas are keys to crustal processes. A crucial question is why very steep REE patterns occur in lavas erupted as the arc terminates and migrates, but not before or after. Residual garnet must play a role, but is that garnet associated with melting in the mantle, in situ thickened crust, or in crust removed by subduction erosion from the base of the arc and forearc and cycled through the subduction zone? Tests are to correlate spatial and temporal isotopic patterns with variations expected across the arc region and to look at interrelations between the isotopes and trace elements. Other questions are the origin of La Ta ratio variations and the history of fluid interaction as the slab shallows and the arc migrates. Oxygen isotopes and expanded trace element data sets can be used with fluid melt distribution coefficients to constrain spatial and temporal variations. Expanded trace element data sets including Nb, Zr as well as Ta, Hf, and Ti will allow modeling of residual phases and source areas. Longer range questions are the importance of crustal thickening, arc migration and removal of young continental lithosphere in both the modern Central Andes and the Archean, and the extent to which continental lithospheric is recycled in this setting. As Andean analogies are used to understand processes in both ancient and young mountain belts, results of this project will set up Os-Re and Lu-Hf isotopic studies and define geophysical targets addressing fundamental questions in Earth s continental lithospheric evolution doc15528 none Much of Earth s continental crust comprises Precambrian through Cenozoic orogens, where preexisting rocks have been variably modified by metamorphism and deformation. Owing to the association between collisional tectonic events and mountain building, this long record of orogenesis provides the most accessible means of reconstructing paleotectonic settings and events that have shaped our planet. Although the Appalachian mountains are widely used to illustrate Earth s tectonic evolution and associated orogenesis, collisional processes and events that drove the Ordovician Taconian orogeny in the Quebec Maine segment of the northern Appalachians remain enigmatic. Deformational features in this region cannot be satisfactorily related to a specific convergent setting or collisional event(s) because the nature of the eastern (present coordinates) Laurentian margin during the early Paleozoic is poorly understood. Interpretations are divided as to whether the orogeny was caused by ophiolite emplacement, island-arc collision, or microcontinent collision. Because the Taconian orogeny initiated the Appalachian mountain-building cycle, understanding its architecture and evolution is essential for understanding the Appalachians as a whole. The PI proposes to investigate structural, metamorphic, and temporal relationships among the rock units that make up the Chain Lakes massif and Boil Mountain ophiolite in order to test competing models and hypotheses for the Taconian orogeny in the northern Appalachians. Their multidisciplinary approach incorporates mapping, structural, microstructural, metamorphic, and geochronological studies. Integrating field and laboratory studies, the PI will establish: (a) the relative and absolute timing of metamorphic and deformational events within the Chain Lakes massif, (b) the crystallization age of the mafic portion of the Boil Mountain ophiolite, (c) the age and kinematics of ophiolite emplacement, (d) whether mafic volcanic rocks near the ophiolite represent a genetic part of the ophiolite, and (e) the age of possibly rift-related mafic dikes in the Chain Lakes massif. The geochronology portion of the project will include in-situ U-Pb analyses of monazite to provide high temporal resolution for metamorphic events, small-number multigrain U-Pb analyses of zircon or baddeleyite from gabbro to determine the crystallization age of the ophiolite, U-Pb analyses of zircon to establish the age of the dikes, and laser step- heating 40 Ar- 39 Ar analysis of muscovite to determine the minimum ophiolite emplacement age. The PI will compare his results with existing interpretations of the Thetford Mines ophiolite and overlying units in southern Quebec, the Maquereau Dome in the Gaspe Peninsula, and the Dashwoods Subzone in Newfoundland in order to evaluate temporal and spatial relationships among these potentially correlative units. Because the extents and boundaries of terranes are fundamental components of the tectonic models, testing the terrane relationships will test the models. The work will clarify the nature of the Taconian orogeny in the northern Appalachians, and will bear on conceptual models describing Iapetan paleogeographic reconstruction and collisional accretionary processes doc15529 none This study will derive the thermal conductivity of first-year antarctic sea ice as a function of ice microstructure, temperature, temperature gradients, salinity, and other environmental parameters. Measurements will be carried out by freezing thermistor arrays into the fast ice of McMurdo Sound. The thermal conductivity of sea ice determines the magnitude of the heat flow through the ice, and hence the exchange of heat between the ocean and atmosphere, for a given ice temperature gradient. General circulation models (GCMs) and large-scale sea-ice models currently include overly simplistic parameterizations of the ice thermal conductivity, developed several decades ago, that are likely to contribute significantly to errors in estimating ice production rates. The results from this work will feed into improved parameterizations of sea ice parameters for collaboration with the Sea-Ice Model Intercomparison Project (SIMIP2) Team established under the auspices of the World Climate Research Program. The research will advance and improve: (1) our understanding of processes and parameters controlling heat transfer and thermal conductivity of first-year sea ice, (2) measurement techniques for the derivation of thermal conductivity and heat flow data from thermistor arrays, (3) our understanding of sea-ice processes and heat flow through the ice cover in the McMurdo Sound region, (4) parameterizations of thermal conductivity for use in large-scale and high-resolution one-dimensional simulations, and (5) the representation of first-year ice antarctic and arctic thermal properties in GCMs doc15530 none Hemley and Mao Carnegie Institution of Washington, Geophysical Laboratory The goal of this project is to determine the chemical properties of lower mantle and core materials at relevant deep Earth conditions in order to obtain direct experimental constraints on the chemical composition, formation, and evolution of the planet s interior. The research takes advantage of numerous new developments in situ high-pressure techniques, including synchrotron x-ray diffraction and spectroscopy, infrared and optical techniques, neutron diffraction, and new high diamond-cell methods. The project will start by improving both pressure and temperature calibration at deep mantle and core conditions. With this improved accuracy, in-situ x-ray diffraction studies will be performed to resolve current questions about the post-spinel phase boundary as a function of pressure-temperature and composition (P-T-X). The defect structure and concentration of iron and aluminum-bearing magnesium silicate perovskites will be characterized by detailed compositional studies and by direct site-occupancy measurements with neutron powder diffraction. A series of complementary synchrotron x-ray spectroscopic techniques used to characterize the spin and oxidation state of iron in these phases throughout the P-T range of the lower mantle. The question of additional, very high P-T phases of Fe and Fe-Ni alloys will be investigated using diamond gasket double-sided laser heating synchrotron x-ray diffraction techniques. High-resolution x-ray emission, nuclear resonant forward scattering, and optical Raman spectroscopies will be used to identify possible pressure-induced changes in electronic, magnetic, and vibrational properties of iron alloys to core pressures. High P-T x-ray diffraction measurements in the lower pressure range will also allow investigations of structural changes in the liquid state of Fe. The problem of the light element in the core will be examined in a few pseudo-binary systems with Fe-Ni, starting with oxygen and then moving to sulfur and hydrogen using the same battery of diffraction and spectroscopic techniques doc15349 none American children spend many hours with media each day. Although much of this time involves television viewing, an increasing amount involves participation with digital interactive entertainment technologies, including the Internet. Even television as we know it will soon change dramatically, with digital television adding improved clarity of images and the opportunity for interactivity. Knowing how to use these interactive technologies will be a necessary skill for an educated workforce in the 21st century and may be a gateway to studying science and technology. Therefore, knowing how children use and learn from these digital technologies is an important step in ensuring that children will develop these basic skills. Although children invest their free time heavily in electronic entertainment media, relatively little is known about how new interactive media impact children s learning in informal learning contexts. One problem is that the field is interdisciplinary. Researchers examine diverse issues rather than examine specific areas of interactive digital media systematically and then consolidate that knowledge into a central information base. Another problem is the rapid change in digital technologies, making researchers one step behind the latest developments. One outcome of these problems is a poor knowledge base for understanding of how new digital entertainment technologies influence children s learning. Over the next 5 years, this Center will advance theory and method in how children learn through digital interactive entertainment media. Using an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the fields of psychology, human development, communications, sociology, anthropology, and medicine, researchers will explore multiple levels of analysis in order to explicate the role that dialogue, in the form of interactivity and identity, play in children s learning from entertaining interactive digital technologies. At a macro level, two types of survey will be conducted to document patterns of change and similarity over time in children s access to, and use of, new and emerging digital platforms. These macro level studies will guide the direction of micro level experimental, observational, and ethnographic studies that will examine what interactivity is and how and what children learn from online digital experiences. Parallel research activities will examine children at different age groups, providing both cross-sectional and longitudinal findings on children s uses of media and the impact of media on their development. Overall, these research activities will expand the knowledge base about: 1) the kinds of digital media that are emerging; 2) the kinds of interactive digital media experiences children choose to have; 3) the impact of these interactive experiences on children s long-term social adjustment and academic achievement; 4) how specific kinds of interactions with digital technologies impact children s learning; 5) how interacting with each other online influences children s learning and identity construction; and 6) how observational and interactive experiences are represented in the developing brain. This knowledge base will be disseminated in published form in professional journals, through presentations at national and international conferences, and via interconnected websites to create synergistic activities among the researchers, policy makers, child advocacy groups, and creators in the children and digital media field. The Children s Digital Media Centers, based at Georgetown University, will also include the University of Texas at Austin, Northwestern University, and the University of California Los Angeles. Centers will include a Steering Committee and an Advisory Board of distinguished colleagues doc15532 none The snowball Earth hypothesis proposes that during times of especially widespread glaciation some 600 to 750 million years ago, the surface ocean became completely covered with ice, resulting in the mass extinction of marine life. The occurrence of such events has important implications for the Earth s climate system as well as for the evolution of complex multicellular organisms, which appear in the fossil record immediately after the last evidence of these severe ice ages. The disruption of marine ecosystems called for in the snowball Earth hypothesis should be recorded in the carbon isotopic values of carbonate rocks deposited during the glacial event. Appropriate successions are present in Namibia, Australia and the North American Cordillera, to test this prediction, and provide insight into life in a snowball ocean. Initial results suggest life was not terribly different than before the snowball event, thus challenging the notion that sea ice was extensive enough to disrupt marine ecosystems. The data collected in this study will also be used to test other hypotheses proposed for these ice ages including the recent suggestion that post glacial massive destabilization of methane clathrates was responsible for many of the peculiar features of this record doc15533 none Ryan In order to understand anthropogenic alterations to the trace metal budget of natural systems, it is first important to understand the mineralogical and chemical features of such systems. One type of system enriched in trace metals is the natural environment found in association with ultramafic rocks. Previous studies have documented elevated concentrations of trace metals such as Cr, Ni and Co in soils, plants and waters associated with ultramafic rocks-- in some cases, at levels considered to be detrimental to ecological and human health. What these studies have not done is quantitatively analyze speciation of trace metal-bearing phases, which is a crucial component of understanding mobility. We will apply a recently developed quantitative XRD method in conjunction with sequential chemical extractions (SCE) to assess trace metal partitioning. SCE is often used to sequentially dissolve minerals and organic matter in soil. However, it is only when combined with advanced powder XRD techniques that sequential extractions can be used to accurately determine mineral composition, structure, and abundance in the soil. This type of data is especially important because it provides information on (1) the solubility of solid phases in the soil, and (2) the influence of mineral composition and structure on elemental concentration, speciation and mobility. In addition to XRD and SCE (using ICP-AES), C-N analyses will be performed to aid in determinations of soil organic matter content, transmitted light and SEM analyses will be used to assess primary-secondary mineral spatial relationships, and laser diffraction will be used to assess particle size of various soils and mineral phases. Field analyses will include measurements of Eh, pH, Cr and Ni. The intent of this project is to characterize the speciation and concentration of naturally-occurring trace metals in surficial aspects of the hydrosphere, including ultramafic rock (fresh and chemically altered), soil (inorganic solids, organic matter, soil water), surface water, and stream sediment. In order to assess the main controls on weathering and release of trace metals from these rocks, we will sample and analyze rock, soil and water specimens from a wide range of weathering regimes, including (1) the cool temperate, recently glaciated northern Appalachians (Vermont), (2) cool, temperate, unglaciated Cornwall, England, (3) semiarid and subhumid northern California, and (4) humid tropical Costa Rica. Results of this comparative analysis will be applied to a predictive model of trace metal speciation in a wide range of environments doc15534 none Ayers and Miller The susceptibility of monazite to fluid-induced recrystallization has important implications for interpretation of ages measured in-situ by electron or ion microprobe. To refine interpretations, complementary laboratory and field experiments have been designed to identify and characterize monazite recrystallization and alteration in granitoids and associated rocks. The solubility of monazite will be measured as a function of pressure, temperature and fluid composition using the double-capsule method to identify the conditions and fluid compositions that lead to enhanced solubility and recrystallization. Experiments run in cold-seal pressure vessels at 400-600 degrees C and 0.1-0.2 GPa will characterize the effects of varying concentrations of potential complexing ligands F, Cl and OH. Large natural crystals will then be run in fluid at identified conditions of high solubility to characterize the rate of recrystallization and the effect of alteration on intracrystalline zoning and elemental and oxygen isotopic composition. Duplication of zoning styles and oxygen isotope systematics observed in natural monazites will create a firm link between monazite alteration and fluids, establish the conditions under which alteration occurs, and greatly increase confidence in interpretations of monazite ages. Field studies are designed to test the hypothesis that the ages of altered zones in monazites correspond to the timing of fluid influx, and to test important hypotheses specific to those field areas. The effects of changing temperature, fluid composition, and fluid rock ratio on preexisting monazite will be examined in contact metamorphic aureoles in which magmatic fluids infiltrate monazite-bearing country rocks: the Ireteba pluton in southern Nevada, the Birch Creek pluton in the White Mts. of east-central California, and the Red Hill W-Sn deposit in northern Guangdong Province, Southeast China. Fruitful geochronological studies of monazite and zircon in the Dabie Shan central UHP (ultra-high pressure) zone will be extended to the enigmatic northern Dabie complex to determine the areal extent of UHP metamorphism and the assignment of the northern Dabie to the Yangtze or Sino-Korean blocks doc15535 none The Seagrass History of Florida Bay Reconstructed from Integrating Micropaleontological and Geochemical Proxies Laurel S. Collins, Rudolf Jaffe, James W. Fourqurean, William T. Anderson Florida International University How much of the variation in coastal environmental conditions is naturally occurring and how much has been caused by humans? This question is addressed with the historical record of seagrass abundance, which today is highly correlated with environmental water quality. The study is set in Florida Bay, part of the environmentally challenged Everglades National Park. The main objective is to collect cores of Florida Bay sediment and use proxies of seagrass abundance contained therein as indicators of the environmental water quality for the past few hundred years. Proxies are used because seagrass itself is not preserved in sediments. The geochemical proxies are measures of organic matter (organic carbon, nitrogen, molecular biomarkers, stable isotopes - d13C, d15N, dD) and micropaleontological proxies are abundances of seagrass indicator species (foraminifera, diatoms). Hypersalinity has recently been linked to large seagrass die-offs in Florida Bay. Several proxies will also be used to determine the correlation between historical salinity and seagrass changes. This grant funds the pilot project to extract sediment cores from Florida Bay, conduct sedimentologic analyses, determine radiometric ages, and calibrate the proxies to modern seagrass abundances and salinities. The investigators will subsequently collect geochemical and micropaleontological data from the cores, integrate the data in statistical analyses, and interpret the results. Knowledge is advanced by incorporating the results in geology, biology and chemistry classes taught by the investigators, and providing the basis for three graduate student theses. FIU is a federally recognized minority university doc15536 none Biological Sciences (61) Muhlenberg College s Biology Department is committed to having students undertake long term, independent research projects, complete comprehensive data analysis and data presentation, and engage in intensive collaborative inquiry and investigative type exercises. Muhlenberg s ILI-NSF grant ensured that these objectives were accomplished in the upper-level research-based courses through the use of computer-based technology. The current project is addressing the introductory biology sequence, and is an adaptation of the learnings provided by Project Kaleidoscope s What Works, and similar efforts at Kutztown University ( ). Specifically, the project is implementing models for teaching plant and animal structure function and cell molecular biology laboratories while adapting computer technology to facilitate scientific inquiry. Our central goal is to expand the use of computer technology and the culture of science to students enrolled in the introductory biology laboratories. These courses are introducing the students to all elements of scientific inquiry through investigative exercises and doing independent research. The students are using computers, software, and peripherals to 1) record data from their short-term investigative and long-term independent experiments, 2) doing statistics and graphing, 3) placing data on the web and using web-based technology to access molecular databases, and 4) presenting their long-term projects in the format of a poster and or oral presentation. Thus, the computer-based infrastructure is allowing the students to make even more sophisticated connections within and outside the laboratory doc15537 none Holzworth This project is a balloon-borne experiment whose main goals include 1) a focused program of investigation of high latitude ionospheric electrodynamics (the study of the properties of electromagnetic radiation and the way in which it interacts with charged matter) using multiple long duration balloons launched in Antarctica, and 2) the investigation of the fast penetration of electric fields from the outer to the inner magnetosphere in response to external inputs. The project is cooperative with Japanese X-ray and magnetometer investigators. The bulk of the proposed effort will be focused on investigation of outstanding problems of the polar and auroral ionosphere such as the nature of polar cap convection under varying solar wind conditions, dynamics of the dayside cusp, the transient and steady state coupling of the solar wind to the magnetosphere, transient phenomena on wholly closed magnetic fields lines such as traveling convective vortices (TCVs) and those related to magnetic pulsations with periods greater than one second. Another important effort will be to investigate the rapid transmission of ionospheric and magnetospheric electric fields from higher to lower latitudes in response to variations in the interplanetary magnetic field. This project consists of the construction, integration and testing of the electric field instruments for the geophysics payloads that are planned as part of the - continuation of the Polar Patrol Balloon Program managed by the Japanese National Institute of Polar Research Three balloons will be flown from the Japanese Antarctic Station, while one payload will be launched from McMurdo Station doc15538 none Chapman and Harris Temperature-depth profiles measured in boreholes contain a temporal record of past changes in surface ground temperature (SGT) and provide valuable constraints on climatic variations over the last few centuries. Although much has been learned in the last two decades about the subject geothermics of climate change there are important questions remaining. What regions of the continents are experiencing transient ground warming, and by how much? What are baseline temperatures at the time of the industrial revolution prior to the instrumental record of global warming? What is the relationship between air and ground temperature over time scales appropriate to climate change studies? What is the sensitivity of surface ground temperature change to climatic parameters such as solar radiation, precipitation, and snow cover? What are the significant factors impacting comparisons between geothermal data and meteorological surface air temperature (SAT) records? How much heat is being stored in the outer layers of Earth as a result of 20th Century warming? This project will answer these questions by developing methods for and performing analyses in the geothermics of climate change. The study entails four interrelated tasks: (1) operation of a real-time surface observatory (weather station at a borehole site) to monitor meteorologic variables and near-surface temperature; (2) data analysis making quantitative estimates of the effects of solar variations, snow, and precipitation effects on ground temperatures; (3) repeat temperature logging in selected boreholes to isolate transient temperature fields associated with climate change; and (4) combined analysis of geothermal and meteorologic data to reconstruct climate change at local, regional, and global scales doc15539 none Atmospheric Sciences (41) The American Meteorological Society (AMS) in cooperation with the US National Weather Service and the Department of the Geosciences of North Carolina s Elizabeth City State University is providing professional development opportunities for 100 faculty at minority institutions with the goal of increasing minority student participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Over a 4.5-year period, this project will attain this diversity-enhancing goal by making available to minority-serving colleges and universities Online Weather Studies, an existing AMS-developed distance- learning course on the basics of atmospheric science partially delivered via the Internet. Greater minority student participation in STEM requires greater access to scientific learning experiences that engage student interest and develop their critical thinking skills. Critical thinking and associated reasoning skills are considered essential for student success in STEM. Online Weather Studies is designed to meet this goal through electronic delivery of highly motivational investigations written to current weather conditions. To facilitate adoption and implementation of Online Weather Studies, the project provides professional development experiences for faculty (25 per year for 4 years) via a 5-day summer workshop at the National Weather Service Training Center (NWSTC) at Kansas City, MO plus a series of two-day workshops treating science content, pedagogical, and diversity issues as a regular feature of the AMS Annual Meeting held each January doc15540 none This award represents continued partial support of the Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment (BICE). The National Research Council, through its Division of Engineering and Physical Sciences, established the BICE in to investigate questions of technology, science, and public policy applied to urban systems and services; above ground and underground construction; the relationship between the constructed and natural environments, and their interaction with human activities; the effects of natural hazards on constructed facilities; and related issues of planning, design, construction management, surety, and use of the built environment. The BICE brings together in an independent forum expertise from a wide range of scientific, engineering, and social science disciplines to address problems and issues of infrastructure and the build environment. The BICE provides a unique structure to respond to specific requests from government, or to act on its own initiative with public or private sector support. In pursuit of its goals, BICE plans to conduct on-going strategic planning for studies, workshops, symposia, and a variety of information dissemination activities. The BICE also develops integrated and coordinated activities with the Institute for Civil Infrastructure (ICIS), established by NSF at the Wagner Graduate School at New York University. During the coming year, BICE will also include themes focused on extreme events, complexity, and interdependencies in their activities doc15541 none Under the direction of Dr. Steven L. Kuhn, Mr. Kristopher W. Kerry will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. This research will quantitatively examine relationships between several different Early Upper Paleolithic stone-tool assemblages associated with the Early Ahmarian lithic tradition. Found throughout most of the eastern Mediterranean region known as the Levant, the Early Ahmarian ranges in age from 25-40,000 years ago, and represents one of the earliest Upper Paleolithic industries in the world and perhaps the earliest example of prismatic blade production in Eurasia. This specific method of stone-tool production, used to produce numerous elongated removals (blades) from a single piece of stone, differs significantly from earlier stone-working techniques, and is contemporaneous with broad-scale changes in human behavior and population dispersal argued to occur throughout Eurasia circa 30-40,000 years ago. Despite this distinction, the Early Ahmarian tradition was not recognized until the early s, when it was distinguished from another Upper Paleolithic technological tradition. This separation, centering on the high percentage of blade elements, was a significant contribution in characterizing Levantine Upper Paleolithic variability. However, over the past two decades the Ahmarian has become a designation for many, highly variable assemblages whose only common denominator is a bladey appearance. Understandably, such a classification scheme has made the taxonomic use of the Early Ahmarian somewhat cumbersome. While prismatic blade technology defines the Early Ahmarian, descriptions based on quantitative measures associated with the manufacture of blades are rare. This research will examine relationships between eight different Early Ahmarian assemblages by evaluating blade production strategies using quantitative measures. These assemblages form a transect through south-central Sinai, southwest Jordan, the Negev, central Lebanon, and south-central Turkey and represent various environmental and site settings. Additionally, three out-group assemblages will also be examined. These out-group assemblages are included in attempts to identify common themes in Early Ahmarian blade production strategies by comparing them with prismatic blade manufacture from southeast Europe and other stone-tool production techniques considered quite distinct from the Early Ahmarian within the Levant itself. In quantitatively describing blade production strategies associated with these eleven assemblages a consistent method of comparison may help distinguish regional distinctions associated with local environment and site location, as well as identify common themes within the Early Ahmarian. Only after Early Ahmarian technological variability is better defined can questions relating to the dispersal of prismatic blade production throughout Eurasia within the broader context of behavioral and demographic changes often associated with the Upper Paleolithic period be explored. Archaeologists know that the earliest anatomically modern humans first appeared in Africa and that they subsequently spread throughout both Old and New Worlds. Although one might assume that cultural attributes such as stone tools spread the same way, the archaeological evidence is far from clear. Mr. Kerry s research will provide relevant data. It will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc15542 none The International Working Conference on Active Networking (IWAN) will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from September 30, October 2nd, . This conference is the pre-mier international workshop in the emerging field of active and programmable networking. This proposal requests funding to assist fourteen United States-based graduate students in attending this meeting. Participation in workshops such as IWAN is an extremely important part of the gradu-ate school experience, providing the opportunity to interact with more senior researchers and be exposed to leading edge work in the field. In addition, IWAN offers the opportunity to interact with international researchers in this area, as both the presenters and the attendees have had strong European and Asian presences. The support requested in this proposal will enable the participation of students who would otherwise be unable to attend IWAN doc15543 none Chemistry (12) A major emphasis in science education over the past decade has been the development of programs to enrich undergraduate understanding and appreciation of knowledge, and to improve the skills necessary for continued learning. However the assessment techniques typically employed do not necessarily assess the kinds of learning emphasized in national standards. The Interactive Multi-media Exercises (IMMEX) project at UCLA has been exploiting modern technology to allow educators the opportunity to teach, observe and assess student performances in realistic settings. More than 10 years of experience with integrating IMMEX learning and assessment technology into primary, secondary and medical school classrooms suggests to us that there are ways to overcome the perils of authentic learning and assessment, and to use these methods to achieve the goals envisioned by the NRC and others. We are building upon this proven assessment technique by developing a full suite of IMMEX materials for a two semester general chemistry course. The major partners in this plan are Learning Chameleon (the licensing organization for IMMEX software), Clemson University and the University of Kansas. Pilot testing also is being carried out at Hutchinson Community College and Claflin College, and in conjunction with the new American Chemical Society General Chemistry text. The project has three phases: 1. The integration of existing materials (10 problems, 300 cases) into two different general chemistry programs. 2. The development of new problems (a) to address second semester chemistry content, and (b) an experimental type of problem that compresses the problem space and concentrates on one particular concept or skill. These problems are being used both as an assessment tool and as a diagnostic tool to identify different types of problem solvers. 3. The development of specific interventions to help students become more proficient, based on the analysis of the strategies our students actually employ when solving problems. The outcomes of this project will be a suite of IMMEX problems suitable for general chemistry courses, a workbook detailing the program and an instructors manual doc15544 none The Andes are the type example of ocean-continent collision. The Nazca plate subducts beneath the South American continent, giving rise to the high mountains along the coast and the great plateaus of the Central Andes. In Ecuador, the imposing Andean arc divides into two volcanic chains that define the eastern and western margins of the Inter Andean Valley, a long, north south oriented topographic low at high elevation. Quito, Ecuador s capital city, sits within the Interandean valley between the two chains. Its 1.5 million citizens live amidst some of the Earth s more active geologic processes and hazards, including active, complex faulting, explosive volcanism, and rapid and extreme erosion and sedimentation driven by the high elevations in the area. The Interandean Valley of Ecuador is an excellent place to study strain partitioning and fault dynamics during oblique convergence. The geology is well mapped and the region is extremely active tectonically making it easy to observe and quantify deformation. A major fault system, the Delores-Guayaquil Megashear, a transpressive dextral strike-slip system, trends onshore at Guayaquil and passes into the Inter Andean Valley. The Delores-Guayaquil Megashear is similar in scale and seismic activity to San Andreas Fault system in California. Like the San Andreas, the Delores-Guayaquil Megashear is a composite fault system, composed of a number of individual fault strands. While portions of the fault system have been identified using offset geomorphic features, sag ponds, and fault scarps, the fault system has not been systematically mapped at the surface. In many places the location of the fault is masked by active erosional and depositional processes. Nowhere has the fault or associated deformation been imaged in the subsurface. There is no coherent framework for integrating the numerous faults and the development of fault-controlled structures into a kinematic model. We are conducting a pilot project to acquire high-resolution seismic reflection profiles in three strategic locations in the Inter Andean Valley to determine subsurface fault fold geometry and deformation history within the Delores-Guayaquil Megashear. The results of this study will improve our understanding of strain partitioning in transpressional settings and are immediately relevant to assessing the seismic hazards for Quito, Ecuador. This project is a collaborative effort between Lehigh University and the Instituto Geofisico at the National Secular Polytechnic National, Quito, Ecuador doc15545 none 7 Brook This award supports work on trapped gases in Antarctic and other ice cores for paleoenvironmental and chronological purposes. The project will complete a ~ 100,000 year, high-resolution record of atmospheric methane from the Siple Dome ice core and use these data to construct a precise chronology for climate events recorded by the Siple Dome record. In addition, the resolution of the GISP2 (Greenland) ice core record will be increased in some critical intervals to help with the Siple Dome chronology and that of future ice cores. Finally, an upgrade to the analytical capabilities of the laboratory, including increasing precision and throughput and decreasing sample size needed for ice core methane measurements will be an important goal of this work. The proposed work will contribute to the understanding of the timing of rapid climate change in the Northern and Southern hemispheres during the last glacial period, the evolution of the global methane budget in the late Quaternary, and the late Quaternary climate history of Antarctica. It will also improve our ability to generate methane records for future ice coring projects, and inform and enrich the educational and outreach activities of our laboratory doc15546 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports research to apply numerical modeling to constrain the uplift and exhumation history of the Transantarctic Mountains. The Transantarctic Mountains (TAM) are an anomalously high ( m) and relatively broad (up to 200 km) rift-flank uplift demarcating the boundary between East and West Antarctica. Dynamics of the East Antarctic ice-sheet and the climate are affected by the mountain range, and an understanding of the uplift history of the mountain range is critical to understanding these processes. This project will constrain the uplift and denudation history of the Transantarctic Mountains based on thermo-mechanical modeling held faithful to thermochronological, geological, and geophysical data. The research will be the primary responsibility of post-doctoral researcher Audrey Huerta, working in collaboration with Dennis Harry, 1 undergraduate student, and 1 graduate student. Thermochronologic evidence of episodic Cretaceous through Cenozoic rapid cooling within the TAM indicates distinct periods of uplift and exhumation. However, a more detailed interpretation of the uplift history is difficult without an understanding of the evolving thermal structure and topography of the TAM prior to and during uplift. These aspects of the mountain range can best be constrained by an understanding of the evolving regional tectonic setting. Proximity of the TAM to the West Antarctic Rift System (WARS) suggests a link between uplift of the TAM and extension within the WARS. The project will integrate two techniques: lithospheric-scale geodynamic modeling and crustal-scale thermal modeling. The lithospheric-scale deformational and thermal evolution of TAM will be modeled by a finite element model designed to track the thermal and deformational response of the Antarctic lithosphere to a protracted extensional environment. Previous investigators have linked the high elevation and broad width of the TAM to a deep level of necking in which mantle thinning is offset from the location of crustal extension. In this study, a three-dimensional dynamic model will be used to track the uplift and thermal evolution of the TAM in a setting in which necking is at a deep level, and in which extension within the crust and extension within the mantle are offset. Velocity boundary conditions applied to the edges of the model will vary through time to simulate the extensional and transtensional evolution of the WARS. Because the model is dynamic, the thermal structure, strength, and strain field, evolve naturally in response to these initial and boundary conditions. Dynamic models are uniquely suited to understanding lithospheric deformational and thermal evolution, however kinematic models are best suited for addressing the detailed thermal and exhumation history of crustal uplifts. Thus, a 2-dimensional kinematic-thermal model will be designed to simulate the uplift history of the TAM and the resulting erosional, topographic, and thermal evolution. Uplift will be modeled as normal-fault movement on a set of discrete fault planes with uplift rate varying through time. Erosion will be modeled as a diffusive process in which erosion rates can be varied through time (simulating climate changes), and vary spatially as a linear function of gradient and distance from the drainage divide. Synthetic time-temperature (t-T) histories will be calculated to compare model results to thermochronologic data doc15547 none Physics (13) Over the period - , the number of physics baccalaureates granted annually declined to pre-Sputnik levels and there it remains. A contributing reason for the decline is prompted by a common student belief that there are no jobs for physicists. While this belief can be understood, it is untrue. This project is designed to inform students about the wide range of jobs and diverse careers pursued by physicists. Based on experiences during the - and - academic years, we shall create and implement a model course in 20 departments of physics. A central feature of the model course will be to bring physics alumni pursuing non-academic careers face-to-face with contemporary physics students so that they can learn directly from physicists in the workplace about what physicists do, how their careers evolved, and how their major in physics prepared them for their professional life. To support the model course, two books, Preparing Physicists For Work and Physicists At Work, are being written. From the feedback supplied by students and faculty at each participating institution, the American Institute of Physics (AIP) is (1) developing a Guide for initiating and implementing the model course and (2) revising the two books in accord with the student and faculty comments. The Guide and copies of the two books, Preparing Physicists For Work and Physicists At Work, will be disseminated by AIP to every physics department in the United States. The project will be evaluated by the Statistics Division of AIP doc15548 none The investigator would apply a method of expert-knowledge and statistical technique to the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) data set to identify and measure latent competencies that students must use to get correct solutions to test problems. The TIMSS was conducted in both mathematics and science, but the final negotiated project will be conducted in mathematics only. The purpose of this investigation is to provide a technique that can help classroom teachers and administrators make better use of test score data. The investigator has developed a technique (Rule Space method) to enable the creation of a scale score on underlying knowledge states. This process will test through statistical analysis the existence of attributes of the test items that identify cognitive processing skills and knowledge underlying student performance doc15549 none Integrative Studies of Cognition in Development: Planning for a Research Center Robert Kail, Thomas Berndt, & Lynn Okagaki The aim of this project is to plan a Center for Integrative Studies of Cognition in Development. The Center is intended to bring together experts in cognitive development, family relations, social development, and childhood socialization for the purpose of conducting research that integrates these diverse theoretical and research perspectives. The Center s research will focus on the development of children s understanding of mathematics and science in the context of their relationships with parents and peers. The Center is needed because scientists who study basic cognitive processes rarely consider the social context of children s lives. Conversely, scientists who study children s social contexts either ignore cognitive processes or examine forms of thinking specific to the social domain while giving little attention to basic cognitive processes. Consequently, a scientific knowledge base of children s development and learning is fragmented and incomplete. The goal of the Center will be to increase understanding of children s learning, particularly of math and science, by supporting multidisciplinary studies of children s cognition and social relationships. To specify the plan for the Center, a workshop will be conducted at which researchers from several institutions will discuss strategies for the integrative study of cognition in development. Some of the workshop participants will be invited to join the Center s core research group, while others will be asked to serve on an Advisory Board. With the guidance of the Advisory Board, the core scientific group will prepare a complete proposal for the Center for submission to the NSF in doc15550 none In real world learning situations, a wide variety of contextual cues become associated with gradually formed common sense knowledge. In contrast, school learning often emphasizes abstract symbolic manipulations, which can lead to students difficulties in applying their knowledge to real world examples. To help students make intuitive sense of physics, it is necessary to address sensory stimuli that are explicitly or implicitly associated with students common sense knowledge from experience. To do this, it is important to understand what contextual cues are involved in learning and how they affect the learning process. For selected topics in introductory physics, we will conduct systematic qualitative studies to identify and investigate specific context cues that affect students learning; we will develop methods to measure, evaluate and represent the involvement of context cues in different stages of learning; we will also develop physics activities in virtual environments to investigate experimentally how low-level sensory cues such as haptic feedback affect learning and how such cues may be addressed in instruction. The resulting insights into the interplay between context and learning, and integration of contextual and sensory information into virtual environments will broaden the horizon of active engagement teaching methods and inform the development of teaching technologies doc15551 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for a study to investigate paleoenvironmental conditions during the late Paleozoic and Mesozoic in central interior Antarctica. The 4 km thick sequence of sedimentary rocks, known as the Beacon Supergroup, in the Beardmore Glacier area records 90 million years of Permian through Jurassic history of this high-paleolatitude sector of Gondwana. It accumulated in a foreland basin with a rate of subsidence approximately equal to the rate of deposition. The deposits have yielded diverse vertebrate fossils, in situ fossil forests, and exceptionally well preserved plant fossils. They give a unique glimpse of glacial, lake, and stream river environments and ecosystems and preserve an unparalleled record of the depositional, paleoclimatic, and tectonic history of the area. The excellent work done to date provides a solid base of information on which to build understanding of conditions and processes. This project is a collaborative study of this stratigraphic section that will integrate sedimentologic, paleontologic, and ichnologic observations to answer focused questions, including: (1) What are the stratigraphic architecture and alluvial facies of Upper Permian to Jurassic rocks in the Beardmore area?; (2) In what tectonostratigraphic setting were these rocks deposited?; (3) Did vertebrates inhabit the cold, near-polar, Permian floodplains, as indicated by vertebrate burrows, and can these burrows be used to identify, for the first time, the presence of small early mammals in Mesozoic deposits?; and (4) How did bottom-dwelling animals in lakes and streams use substrate ecospace, how did ecospace use at these high paleolatitudes differ from ecospace use in equivalent environments at low paleolatitudes, and what does burrow distribution reveal about seasonality of river flow and thus about paleoclimate? Answers to these questions will (1) clarify the paleoclimatic, basinal, and tectonic history of this part of Gondwana, (2) elucidate the colonization of near-polar ecosystems by vertebrates, (3) provide new information on the environmental and paleolatitudinal distributions of early mammals, and (4) allow semi-quantitative assessment of the activity and abundance of bottom-dwelling animals in different freshwater environments at high and low latitudes. In summary, this project will contribute significantly to an understanding of paleobiology and paleoecology at a high latitude floodplain setting during a time in Earth history when the climate was much different than today doc15552 none This is a study of middle school science assessment test items. It intends to develop test items that have high levels of validity. The investigators would create a framework to guide writing valid science items that elicit intended knowledge, skills, and cognitive processes that are valid for women, men, and minority groups. The goal is to develop a strategy that can be used by other test developers to develop such tests rather than develop the test itself. They are seeking items that require the students to use the same knowledge and skills as intended by test developers and that work the same way regardless of ethnicity or gender. The framework also involves attention to student motivation, content exposure, and attitude toward response strategies and uses a taxonomy developed by Richard Snow as the basis for their study. The product will be a series of reports that will serve as a guide for middle school science assessment developers doc15553 none The Antarctic Submillimeter Telescope and Remote Observatory (AST RO) is designed to investigate one of the least explored bands of electromagnetic radiation emitted by astronomical sources. Submillimeter-wave radiation, at frequencies from about 300 Gigahertz (billions of cycles per second) up into the Terahertz (trillions of cycles per second) range, is emitted by dense gas and dust between the stars, and submillimeter-wave observations allow us to study in unprecedented detail the galactic forces acting upon that gas and the star formation processes within it. AST RO is a 1.7 meter diameter single-dish instrument, which has been operating for six years at South Pole station in several wave bands with arcminute resolution over regions of sky which are several square degrees in size. AST RO s relatively large field of view allows the observation of interstellar molecular clouds throughout the fourth quadrant of the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds, in order to locate star-forming cores and study in detail the dynamics of dense gas in our own galaxy. Studies of molecular clouds with varying heavy element content under a variety of galactic environments shows us how molecular clouds are structured, how the newly-formed stars react back on the cloud, and how galactic forces affect cloud structure. AST RO is recognized as the test bed and progenitor of planned instruments which will go on to study how stars form throughout the universe from the earliest times to the present. Essential to AST RO s capabilities is its location as Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, an exceptionally cold, dry site which has unique logistical opportunities and challenges. Most submillimeter radiation from astronomical sources is absorbed by irregular concentrations of atmospheric water vapor before it reaches the Earth s surface. The dry air over South Pole Station allows an accurate intercomparison of submillimeter-wave power levels on the scale of the Milky Way and its companion galaxies doc15554 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for the unification and upgrading of its Antarctic collection; its proper storage and curation; development of an electronic database; and network access. This award will support a collection manager for two years, installing modern, archival-quality steel cabinets, and rehousing, conserving, and barcoding the entire collection. These changes will vastly increase the availability and research potential of a significant and unique Antarctic collection, and they will help to preserve a rich cultural, historical, and scientific legacy. The Antarctic collection constitutes one of the best repositories of archival, geological and paleontological holdings in the nation. The archival collection was amassed over a fifty-year span and contains maps and rare books in addition to Antarctic research samples. The comprehensive igneous and metamorphic rock collection gathered from the orogenic belts of Queen Maud Range, Marie Byrd Land, and Ellsworth Land is important for understanding the paleotectonic evolution of the Transantarctic Mountains and West Antarctica. The paleontological collection includes exquisite plant fossils from the Allan Hills, which indicate a Gondwanian heritage for Antarctica. Several holotypes of Cretaceous vertebrates from Seymour Island, including Polarornis, the oldest known Antarctic bird, provide additional evidence for high latitude heterochroneity doc15555 none Kurz This project will involve a combined geochemical, isotopic, and chronological study of Galapagos lava flows in order to constrain the origin of the Galapagos hotspot and to compare it to other oceanic hotspots, such as Hawaii. An important obstacle to evaluating the temporal evolution of Galapagos volcanoes has been the lack of an eruption time scale. This project will rely heavily on the relatively new dating method of surface exposure dating (using cosmic-ray-produced nuclides such as 3He and 36Cl) to determine lava flow ages. Combining the new age information with the geochemical data (i.e. the isotopes of strontium, neodymium, lead and helium) will help determine if the large geochemical differences between Galapagos volcanoes are related to temporal or spatial variability, which is crucial to hotspot models. One key goal of the research will be to evaluate temporal evolution at Cerro Azul and Fernandina, the two most active volcanoes in the western end archipelago which are thought to be near the center of the present-day hotspot. The project will also generate a west-to-east geochemical transect from Fernandina to San Cristobal to evaluate the hotspot model in the paradigm of plate tectonics. New field work will provide a geochemical comparison of these results to the northern volcanoes on Pinta and Marchena which are presently difficult to explain in standard hotspot models doc15556 none Rigorous understanding of teaching and learning practices requires the development of a descriptive science that captures multiple cognitive and social aspects of complex learning situations. This project builds upon available micro-analytic methods, both cognitive and sociological, with a careful regard for the established standards of rigor applied within these traditions. We will explore the promise and limitations of these methods by analyzing a particular set of practices (referential practices) in a particular learning situation. Reference is a fundamental feature of all human communication. It is the means by which we initiate and achieve a common orientation to objects in our shared environment and as such is an integral part of learning. By providing an account of how interactants accomplish reference in a particular situation, we hope to contribute to our developing understanding of how people do learning. Our intent is to study learning practices in the operating room (OR) of a busy teaching hospital, focusing on medical students early experiences with endoscopic surgery. In such surgeries, surgeons use fiber-optic lenses to view and operate within the patient s body. This poses multiple perceptual challenges, particularly to newcomers. Pilot work shows that this is a rich site for examining referential practices as they relate to learning. Furthermore, these surgeries represent an analytically compact cycle of activity, helping to make manageable the highly ambitious task of describing the content and methods of learning. Preliminary investigations have revealed that establishing shared reference is not always easily accomplished. Participants may proceed as if a common reference has been established even though they are orienting to different aspects of the scene. Post-surgical interviews highlight some of the complexities of studying how participants display their understandings in natural settings. This project will consist of a series of six sequential studies, each involving phases of fieldwork, participant interviews, and analysis. Standard methods for ethnographic fieldwork will be employed when taping in the OR. Post-surgical interviews will be conducted with the participants, using the video from the surgery as an object for discussion. These interviews will serve both to augment our interpretations of the referential practices utilized in the OR and to document the forms of anatomical and professional expertise displayed. Biannual project teams meetings will be conducted to do collaborative analysis of the data. These data sessions will be structured to encourage a disciplined form of noticing. Community building activities are planned to foster the development of descriptive skills by other researchers working in other learning settings doc15557 none Physics (13) The Department of Physics & Astronomy has added a laboratory component to its Modern Physics course and moved some experiments from the Experimental Physics Laboratory course to the Modern Physics course. A capstone research project has also been added for senior physics majors. As part of these course modifications, the department is adding high-energy electron diffraction (RHEED) equipment to be used by undergraduate students in a wide variety of experiments. Experiments adapt and draw from undergraduate labs on diffraction and on research techniques using RHEED to make measurements on materials. Students who work with the electron diffraction equipment demonstrate for themselves the wave-like behavior of electrons and also gain valuable hands-on experience using particles as a probe of the structure of matter. Other more advanced topics that are covered include the concepts of diffraction and reciprocal space, surface symmetry and order, and structural differences between amorphous and crystalline solids. The diffraction equipment complement the real space imaging capabilities of two scanning probe microscopes already owned by the department. Together the electron diffraction and scanning probe microscopy experiments make a powerful combination that enable students to gain a deeper understanding of important fundamental physical ideas like diffraction, tunneling, and the wave-like nature of matter. Laboratory manuals and supporting materials developed under this project are shared at regional meetings of the AAPT in addition to being posted on web sites. Results stemming from undergraduate research is published separately in appropriate peer-reviewed journals and presented at scientific meetings doc15417 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for a study to investigate the Ferrar magmatic province toward understanding of the formation of this province and its role in the breakup of the Gondwana supercontinent. The dispersal of Gondwana represents one of the largest supercontinent breakup events in the Phanerozoic. Breakup was associated with the emplacement of a very large Jurassic mafic igneous province extending across the Karoo (southern Africa), Ferrar (Antarctica), and Tasman (Australia) regions, comprising continental flood basalts and extensive intrusive dolerites. Models linking development of the 3,000 km Ferrar province to a mantle plume, a major magma conduit, or multiple sources, make testable predictions about magma transport patterns within the Ferrar province. This project is a pilot study using several different techniques aimed at evaluating these models and providing a greater understanding of the emplacement mechanisms, flow directions, and magmatic architecture associated with the Ferrar mafic intrusive province in southern Victoria Land. Our research tools will include mapping intrusive geometry based on structural field studies and geochemical correlation techniques. Magma flow directions within the intrusive complex will be evaluated using anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility, and mesoscopic and petrofabric flow indicators. These results will help resolve outstanding questions concerning the geometry, propagation, and flow patterns of magma during emplacement of sills and dikes in mafic large igneous provinces. It will also provide a deeper understanding of the relationships between mantle plumes, basaltic magmatism and continental breakup doc15559 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for a pilot study designed to test the potential of using rock magnetic properties as sediment provenance tracers for Antarctic glacial marine sediment. A means of tracing sediment provenance would enable more meaningful interpretation of transport and depositional processes recorded in sediment cores. One could conceivably determine which parts of the continental ice sheet were advancing and supplying till, or disintegrating to create debris-laden icebergs. One could conceivably trace the paleocurrents that carried IRD-laden bergs, or identify wind patterns that carried the eolian material. Rock magnetic methods have the advantage of being inexpensive, rapid, non-destructive analyses using highly sensitive instrumentation capable of working with small amounts of material. The chosen test area is the Antarctic Peninsula (AP) region. The AP region is the subject of intense interest to the paleoclimate-global change community in light of the recent warming trend, disintegration of ice shelves, and rapid ecological and physical changes presently taking place. The tectonic setting and petrology of the AP region have been studied extensively, and this region is site of on-going marine geology and LTER research. Thousands of pre-existing samples from the major rock types (and supporting published petrologic and chemical data) are housed at the Byrd Polar Research Center and are available for study. Rock magnetic methods provide a rapid, sensitive, inexpensive means of identifying iron-bearing minerals in rocks and sediment. This project will systematically investigate the material properties and magnetic properties of the major bedrock formations exposed on the Antarctic Peninsula along with selected surface and historic sediment samples. The steps in developing reliable magnetic provenance tracers are: o Confidently linking sediments with their source materials via their materials properties such as precise chemical composition, oxidation parameter, lattice parameter, and grain morphology o Determining if a unique magnetic signature can be used to identify those material properties o Testing if the magnetic signature is recognizable in the sediment, thus providing a rock magnetic means of tracing sediments back to their source rocks o Verifying the success of the magnetic method by using existing petrologic and chemical data Igneous rocks and sediment from Graham Land contain magnetite, titanomagnetite, and hematite. Initial studies indicate that the magnetite and titanomagnetite grains in the AP rocks are affected by varying degrees of oxidation and impurity content, which generates a reproducible, measurable magnetic signature. All magnetite is not the same. Even small deviations from metal-oxygen stoichiometry and deviations in cation distributions can have large effects on the physical and magnetic properties of metal oxides. This is the basis for suggesting that magnetic methods may be effective tracers. No single magnetic parameter is sufficient to uniquely characterize a sample or to serve as a link between sediment and source rock. Therefore, by following the steps outlined above it is hoped that a link based on quantifiable material properties can be established, and then magnetic signature of those properties can be determined. This work will test the concept that combinations of magnetic parameters can be used to identify material properties. If it can be demonstrated that distinctive magnetic properties in sediments are indicative of material states, and these states can be matched with their parent material, then rock magnetism may provide a rapid, inexpensive means of tracing sediment provenance doc15560 none Murray This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for a paleoceanographic and paleoclimate study of recently acquired marine sediment cores from the continental shelf of East Antarctica. The goal of this work is to develop a better understanding of Holocene climate change on the East Antarctic Margin (EAM) via geochemical studies of ultra-high resolution sedimentary sequences recovered during the Coring Holocene Antarctic Ocean Sediments (CHAOS) program conducted in early . A diverse suite of geochemical analyses will be carried out that will provide indicators of nutrient utilization, surface and export production, terrigenous flux, and terrigenous provenance by developing an integrated database of d15N, d13C, opal, TOC, and a diverse suite of 17 major and trace elements. This project has two mutually reinforcing components: inorganic proxy work at Boston University, and complementary isotopic studies at Stanford University. The work will target important hypotheses and questions relating to East Antarctic Margin (EAM) climate variability over decadal-, centennial-, and millennial-scale time scales, as well as assess the impact of global climatic events such as the Little Ice Age, Holocene climatic optimum, Medieval Warm Period, and Younger Dryas. This work will compare and contrast records from the EAM (a terrestrial ice sheet) to the Palmer Deep record off the West Antarctic Peninsula (a predominantly marine-based ice sheet). It will examine relative timing of events between the EAM, Palmer, and Northern Hemisphere Holocene records, and compare the relative timings of climatic change in both the biologic (nutrients and export) and physical (terrigenous) systems acting along the Antarctic continental margin. Integrating biological and physical studies allows for a comprehensive assessment of the combined marine-terrestrial Antarctic system. Documenting changes in export production through inorganic chemical means will be an important independent approach from that taken by researchers focusing on the paleontological record (e.g. diatom assemblages), and will provide quantitative information regarding the frequency of change in the sequestering of atmospheric CO2. In addition, variations in nitrogen isotope ratios can either reflect differences in relative utilization of nitrate in the photic zone or can be used to track the exchange of nutrients between deep and surface waters. Carbon isotope records track bloom events, which reflect productivity in the surface waters. Each of the isotope proxies (d15N, d13C, TOC, biogenic opal, major trace elements, etc.) responds to different aspects of the biogeochemical cycle, and only by synthesizing them can a more complete picture of the region s systematics be achieved. Changes in the terrigenous flux and chemical provenance may indicate variations in the weathering patterns of bedrock and soil on the EAM, delivery of ice-rafted debris, the strength of ocean currents, or behavior of different glacial regimes on the margin. Interpreting these results within the context of other studies will allow an assessment of the response of local glaciers to changes in climate and precipitation on the margin. These issues have been targeted with similar methodologies and integration of data sets with great success in the Palmer Deep, West Antarctic Peninsula. The sediments from the East Antarctic Margin are of comparable resolution and integrity to allow for future comparisons of the response of both the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and West Antarctic Ice Sheet to climate change doc15561 none This project is a study of the mechanisms controlling the air-sea flux of soluble gases - in particular chlorofluorocarbons (CFC s), carbon dioxide, and oxygen - in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and the Southern Ocean. There are three objectives to the study: (1) a better understanding of the influence of mesoscale oceanic processes on tracer transport, and how to represent those processes in coarse resolution models; (2) the development of an innovative diagnostic approach to evaluating air-sea gas fluxes rooted in our understanding of the relationship between air-sea fluxes, ocean transports and biogeochemical transformations, and (3) testing this approach against explicit models of southern ocean biogeochemical cycles and apply it to observations to yield independent estimates air-sea carbon and oxygen flux. An existing global model will be used as a testbed. This model currently represents key biogeochemical processes with idealized parameterizations, however these are sufficient for an initial test of the basic assumptions of this diagnostic approach. The continued development of the global biogeochemical model will occur in parallel with this diagnostic work. This approach has great potential practical utility in supplementing current methods of estimating air-sea gas fluxes in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. It will provide an explicit description of the connections between physical and biogeochemical processes, and will significantly improve the prognostic capabilities of such models in general doc15562 none A first-order feature of the Tibetan Plateau is its triangular geometry on map view with its north-south width increasing from ~500 km in the west to km in the east. This asymmetry has been explained by either eastward extrusion of Tibet or partitioning of north-south shortening in the Tian Shan and northern Tibet across the strong Tarim block. To quantify the role of lateral extrusion in accommodating intracontinental deformation during the Indo-Asian collision, we must know the timing and magnitude of slip along major Cenozoic strike-slip faults in Asia. This goal may be achieved by examining the termination structures of the strike-slip faults where their motion is transferred to dip-slip structures. In this proposal, we plan to investigate the temporal and spatial evolution of one of such structures: the 220-km long, north-trending Kongur Shan extensional system in the eastern Pamirs. In the lateral-extrusion model, the Kongur Shan extensional system is the northern termination of the ~ -km long right-slip Karakorum fault, which is thought to have assisted Tibet to extrude hundreds of kilometers eastward. Because the southern end of the Kongur Shan system is assumed to link with the right-slip Karakorum fault, the extrusion model requires that the extensional system has progressively lengthened northward and its total magnitude of extension decreases from south to north. Alternatively, the oroclinal-bending model suggests that the development of the north-trending Kongur Shan system may have been related to pure bending of the Pamir-Nanga Parbat syntaxis system during Cenozoic northward indentation of the Pamir promontory. This hypothesis not only explains coeval east-west extension in the Pamirs and east-west contraction in the Nanga Parbat region in the western Himalayan orogen, but also predicts specifically that the Kongur Shan extensional system should have lengthened progressively southward and its total magnitude of extension decreases along strike to the south. The distinctive predictions regarding the extensional-magnitude distribution and propagation direction of the Kongur Shan extensional system by the two competing models form the basis of this proposal. We plan to conduct field mapping across the extensional system in four different transects, each is about 20-40 km wide, which will allow us to construct a series of cross sections for estimating the magnitude of extension along individual segment of the system. Field mapping will focus on the question of whether the Kongur Shan extensional system is actually linked with the Karakorum fault. We will integrate field mapping with thermobarometric, 40 Ar 39 Ar thermochronologic, and U-Th-Pb ion-microprobe geochronologic analyses to constrain the P-T-t paths for both the hangingwall and footwall of the extensional system. The results of this study will provide two important constraints on the tectonics of the western Himalayan orogen: (1) the timing and magnitude of eastward extrusion of Tibet, and (2) the dynamic cause for the initiation and development of coeval east-west extension and contraction in the western syntaxis system doc15349 none American children spend many hours with media each day. Although much of this time involves television viewing, an increasing amount involves participation with digital interactive entertainment technologies, including the Internet. Even television as we know it will soon change dramatically, with digital television adding improved clarity of images and the opportunity for interactivity. Knowing how to use these interactive technologies will be a necessary skill for an educated workforce in the 21st century and may be a gateway to studying science and technology. Therefore, knowing how children use and learn from these digital technologies is an important step in ensuring that children will develop these basic skills. Although children invest their free time heavily in electronic entertainment media, relatively little is known about how new interactive media impact children s learning in informal learning contexts. One problem is that the field is interdisciplinary. Researchers examine diverse issues rather than examine specific areas of interactive digital media systematically and then consolidate that knowledge into a central information base. Another problem is the rapid change in digital technologies, making researchers one step behind the latest developments. One outcome of these problems is a poor knowledge base for understanding of how new digital entertainment technologies influence children s learning. Over the next 5 years, this Center will advance theory and method in how children learn through digital interactive entertainment media. Using an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the fields of psychology, human development, communications, sociology, anthropology, and medicine, researchers will explore multiple levels of analysis in order to explicate the role that dialogue, in the form of interactivity and identity, play in children s learning from entertaining interactive digital technologies. At a macro level, two types of survey will be conducted to document patterns of change and similarity over time in children s access to, and use of, new and emerging digital platforms. These macro level studies will guide the direction of micro level experimental, observational, and ethnographic studies that will examine what interactivity is and how and what children learn from online digital experiences. Parallel research activities will examine children at different age groups, providing both cross-sectional and longitudinal findings on children s uses of media and the impact of media on their development. Overall, these research activities will expand the knowledge base about: 1) the kinds of digital media that are emerging; 2) the kinds of interactive digital media experiences children choose to have; 3) the impact of these interactive experiences on children s long-term social adjustment and academic achievement; 4) how specific kinds of interactions with digital technologies impact children s learning; 5) how interacting with each other online influences children s learning and identity construction; and 6) how observational and interactive experiences are represented in the developing brain. This knowledge base will be disseminated in published form in professional journals, through presentations at national and international conferences, and via interconnected websites to create synergistic activities among the researchers, policy makers, child advocacy groups, and creators in the children and digital media field. The Children s Digital Media Centers, based at Georgetown University, will also include the University of Texas at Austin, Northwestern University, and the University of California Los Angeles. Centers will include a Steering Committee and an Advisory Board of distinguished colleagues doc15564 none Slingerland The objective of this proposal is to design and calibrate a non-invasive, passive acoustic system for measuring spatially-integrated bedload transport rates in a natural bedrock channel. We pro-pose to measure the self-generated noise of bedload clasts in transport. Our experimental design consists of eight hydrophones and eight geophone deployed along a 100m reach, with data recorded to disk after passing through a sixteen-channel analog-to-digital conversion board on a laptop computer. The phones will be epoxied onto bedrock, near the banks, and onto large boulders in the center of the stream. The hydrophone array and the geophone array will be compared to determine which, if either, is preferable and to eliminate signals from fluid turbulence, cavitation, and bubble collapse. Both broadband and narrowband amplitudes will be analyzed for predictive power of bedload transport. The purpose of the streamwise array is to exploit the presence of downstream propagating waves of bedload transport and to determine an optimal sampling design. The system will be calibrated using bedload transport rates observed at low flows by conventional techniques such as chickenwire traps and Helley-Smith samplers, and at high flows by multiple surveys of a delta where the stream empties into a standing body of water The delta surveys will be accomplished using a shallow-water echosounder. Key hydraulic variables also will be measured in the study reach in order to relate these variables to measured bedload fluxes. The result will be a non-invasive method for measuring cross-sectionally-integrated bedload transport rates in bedrock reaches at very short time intervals doc15565 none Chemistry (12) The objectives of this project are to promote student understanding of tandem chromatography-spectrometry as a problem-solving technique that takes advantage of methodology common to all sciences, to discourage student compartmentalization of chemical ideas, to facilitate student understanding of structure-property relationships, to increase student access to modern instrumentation, to improve faculty collaboration, and to effect evolution in the chemistry curriculum to include more problem-based laboratory activities. These objectives are being accomplished by implementing the same instrumental technique in multiple courses throughout the strata of the chemistry curriculum. Thus, all chemistry majors and most biology majors are using the LC MS in courses over multiple years covering several of the sub-disciplines of chemistry. The Department is using the liquid chromatograph mass spectrometer to adapt and implement exemplary laboratory experiences originally developed at Duquesne University. Adaptation of other laboratory experiments and projects from the educational literature are also being implemented. These adapted experiments and projects are being implemented into at least seven project-based laboratory courses, including Organic Chemistry, Instrumental Analysis, General Chemistry, Biochemistry, and undergraduate research in both Chemistry and Biology. The enhanced project-based laboratories are aiding students make connections across the sub-disciplinary boundaries of chemistry. Once this project is fully implemented, nearly 200 Millikin University undergraduate students will feel its impact each year doc15566 none The PI s Bronislaw Czarnocha and Vrunda Prabhu, will conduct two year-long cycles of teaching experiments to introduce the intuition of indivisibles into calculus instruction and integrate it with standard ways of instructing via Riemann construction. They plan to study closely the conceptual and computational development of students who receive this instruction. It As part of this project, the PI s will investigate: (1) What is the process of transformation and development of the intuition of lines (the indivisibles) into a precise, mathematical concept? (2) Does the introduction of the W-C construction based on indivisibles, the interplay of that construction with the standard Riemann construction, and the instruction that integrates both, strengthen students understanding of the concept of the definite integral? In the proposed project, they will conduct and coordinate Calculus instruction at six institutions, assess students performance via tests, essays and clinical interviews, collect data resulting from the different assessment and analyze the data in preparation for a refinement of the teaching strategy. As a general framework they will adopt Vygotsky s theory with its emphasis on the cognitive processes in the zone of proximal development, which dictates important consequences on the instruction and assessment. Students will be guided by the activities of the class to enable them to experience the process of mathematical thinking and to reveal its content to the teacher. The role of the instructor will be to provide systematization of their spontaneous development grounded in the precise mathematical understanding of the concept in question. The directions their spontaneous thought processes take, will be under investigation during the course. The project is a balance between various aspects: (1) the natural intuition of the learner vs. the academic instruction, (2) computational mastery vs. conceptual understanding, (3) teaching and research doc15567 none Heizler and McIntosh New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology Cogenetic biotite and sanidine from volcanic rocks often yield discordant 40Ar 39Ar ages. The typical age discordance is between 0.2 and 1.0 Ma. The discordance has important implications for detailed, high precision volcanic history studies, for intercalibration of K Ar with U Pb and other geochronological methods, and the age of flux monitor standards. This proposal will investigate the causes of the biotite sanidine discordance through detailed geochronological analyses of two well-studied Mid-Tertiary volcanic sequences from the Mogollon-Datil volcanic field of New Mexico. The expected outcome of this study could be far reaching, if it is shown that biotite ages are plagued by inaccuracy that is not evident in individual analyses. Because biotite is the most commonly dated volcanic and plutonic mineral phase and it often yields highly precise apparent ages, determination of accuracy of biotite ages is essential to a wide variety of tectonic, volcanic, and geological studies doc15551 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for a study to investigate paleoenvironmental conditions during the late Paleozoic and Mesozoic in central interior Antarctica. The 4 km thick sequence of sedimentary rocks, known as the Beacon Supergroup, in the Beardmore Glacier area records 90 million years of Permian through Jurassic history of this high-paleolatitude sector of Gondwana. It accumulated in a foreland basin with a rate of subsidence approximately equal to the rate of deposition. The deposits have yielded diverse vertebrate fossils, in situ fossil forests, and exceptionally well preserved plant fossils. They give a unique glimpse of glacial, lake, and stream river environments and ecosystems and preserve an unparalleled record of the depositional, paleoclimatic, and tectonic history of the area. The excellent work done to date provides a solid base of information on which to build understanding of conditions and processes. This project is a collaborative study of this stratigraphic section that will integrate sedimentologic, paleontologic, and ichnologic observations to answer focused questions, including: (1) What are the stratigraphic architecture and alluvial facies of Upper Permian to Jurassic rocks in the Beardmore area?; (2) In what tectonostratigraphic setting were these rocks deposited?; (3) Did vertebrates inhabit the cold, near-polar, Permian floodplains, as indicated by vertebrate burrows, and can these burrows be used to identify, for the first time, the presence of small early mammals in Mesozoic deposits?; and (4) How did bottom-dwelling animals in lakes and streams use substrate ecospace, how did ecospace use at these high paleolatitudes differ from ecospace use in equivalent environments at low paleolatitudes, and what does burrow distribution reveal about seasonality of river flow and thus about paleoclimate? Answers to these questions will (1) clarify the paleoclimatic, basinal, and tectonic history of this part of Gondwana, (2) elucidate the colonization of near-polar ecosystems by vertebrates, (3) provide new information on the environmental and paleolatitudinal distributions of early mammals, and (4) allow semi-quantitative assessment of the activity and abundance of bottom-dwelling animals in different freshwater environments at high and low latitudes. In summary, this project will contribute significantly to an understanding of paleobiology and paleoecology at a high latitude floodplain setting during a time in Earth history when the climate was much different than today doc15569 none The Proterozoic tectonic history of the American southwest is the subject of considerable controversy. Controversy revolves around the nature of ~1.4 Ga plutonism and tectonism and its relationship to Paleoproterozoic (1.8-1.6 Ga) crustal accretion. To help resolve this question The P.I. will investigate the Cimarron Mountains of northern New Mexico and the Needle Mountains of southwestern Colorado. These two regions preserve deformation and plutonic histories that record both Paleoproterozoic accretion and subsequent Mesoproterozoic reactivation. 1.4 Ga metamorphism has erased the Paleoproterozoic thermal signature in most of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. Therefore, these two proposed study areas may provide the only opportunity to decipher the Paleoproterozoic metamorphic and cooling history in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. The Cimarron Mountains contain an upper amphibolite grade block and a greenschist grade block separated by the Fowler Pass Shear Zone (FPSZ). Metamorphic mineral assemblages across the shear zone suggest up to 10 km of vertical separation. Cooling ages from the high-grade block suggest high-grade metamorphism occurred at ~1.4 Ga. In contrast, rocks in the low-grade block record a Ar 40 Ar 39 cooling age: this is the oldest cooling age reported in northern New Mexico. Detailed structural analysis of the two blocks and the F.P.S.Z. will be undertaken to clarify the deformation history and tectonic significance of this structure and its relationship to the metamorphic evolution of the region. The Needle Mountains record a much different history. Paleoproterozoic supracrustal rocks in this region are divided into two packages. The Uncompahgre Formation, consisting of quartzites and schists, is regionally metamorphosed to the greenschist facies. These rocks rest on a sheared unconformity above the second package, which is composed of amphibolite facies gneiss, migmatite, and schist. The 1.46 Ga Eolus granite intrudes both packages and has a well-developed contact aureole with peak metamorphic assemblages including sillimanite and K-feldspar. However, many of the rocks far from the granite have assemblages that appear to be unaffected by 1.4 Ga metamorphism. This situation may provide the opportunity to determine the thermal structure of the crust during Paleoproterozic orogenesis as well as during the 1.4 Ga overprint. In order to better understand the role of 1.4 Ga tectonics in the evolution of southwest North America, the P.I. will undertake a structural, metamorphic, and geochronologic study of the two ranges. Both of these areas are similar in having 1.4 Ga metamorphic features and Paleoproterozoic thermal and metamorphic signatures. These regions are therefore well suited to determine which deformational and metamorphic features belong to each of the two events. The preservation of Paleoproterozic metamorphic features makes these areas ideal for testing of models for slow cooling and long-term residence in the middle crust in newly formed lithosphere doc15570 none This award supports a project to characterize the morphology, ice motion velocity and mass balance of Lambert Glacier, Antarctica using state-of-the-art remote sensing and GIS techniques. Lambert Glacier is the largest ice stream in the world. Because of its size, it plays a fundamental role in the study of glacial dynamics and mass budget in response to present and future climate changes. Along with the bedrock topography and ice thickness data derived from airborne radio echo soundings and snow accumulation data compiled from ground-based measurements, the dynamic behavior and mass balance of the Lambert glacial basin in a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) environment will be examined. Specific objectives are to: (1) Extract two-dimensional ice velocity field over the entire Lambert glacial basin using speckle matching and differential interferometric SAR (InSAR) techniques, and produce a full coverage of radar coherence map over the drainage basin. With the ice velocity data, calculate the strain rate field from the initiation areas of the ice stream onto the Amery Ice Shelf; (2) Derive high-resolution digital elevation model (DEM) over the Lambert glacial drainage basin using SAR stereo, differential interferometric SAR, and GLAS laser altimetry techniques. Based on the DEM, extract ice divides and ice flow directions, delineate the snow catchment basin, and calculate the balance deformation velocity and the basal shear stress; (3) Interpolate traverse ice thickness data collected by Australian and Russian airborne radio echo sounding surveys into a regular grid, and derive a regular grid of bedrock topography in combination with the DEM; (4) Integrate newly derived ice velocity and ice thickness data as well as snow accumulation rate data compiled from previous ground-based measurements into a geographic information system (GIS), and calculate the mass flux through the ice stream at the grounding lines and net mass balance throughout the drainage basin. With these new measurements and calculations derived from advanced remote sensing techniques, we will be able to improve our understanding of dynamic behavior and current mass balance status of the Lambert glacial basin, gain an insight on the relationship between ice mass change and the variation in regional and global climate at decadal scale, and provide an evaluation on the issue of whether the Lambert glacier basin is subject to surging in the context of future climate change doc15571 none Goes There is sufficient evidence to show that present levels of incident ultraviolet radiation (UVR, 280-400nm) are impairing phytoplankton productivity in the Southern Ocean. Yet, efforts at extrapolating these findings to allow accurate and unambiguous predictions of the consequences of UVR on the Antarctic marine food web and biogeochemical cycles in the sea have been confounded with uncertainty. Estimated impacts to the Antarctic marine ecosystem range from insignificant to catastrophic. This disparity has been attributed to lack of information in key areas of UVR photobiology and photochemistry. Generally, studies have been based on broadband UVR, and do not take into account competing responses of phytoplankton at different wavelengths across the UVR waveband. Such information is critical if we are to understand the consequences of UVR enhancement on carbon assimilation by marine phytoplankton and its consequences for the food web and biogeochemical cycles. This is especially true in regions like the Antarctic where stratospheric ozone concentrations can decrease by about 50% each spring altering the proportion of UVB (280-320nm) and UVA (320-400nm) radiation that phytoplankton receive during their growth season. This project will systematically investigate changes in the production rates and composition of biochemical compounds within Antarctic phytoplankton cells under spectrally defined conditions. Investigations of both laboratory cultures and natural populations of Antarctic phytoplankton will be undertaken to understand 1) how phytoplankton cellular biochemical processes are impacted by the interplay between the different UVR wavelengths and visible light, 2) how UVR sensitivity varies across taxonomic groups of phytoplankton and 3) whether this difference in sensitivity is responsible for the dominance of one species over the other. The effect of UVR exposure on nutrient uptake by phytoplankton cells will also be studied. This information will help ascertain the role of UVR in the phytoplankton dynamics of the Southern Ocean doc15572 none Williams Syndrome (WMS) is a genetic condition in which a relatively consistent neurobehavioral phenotype is produced by a genetic deletion. The syndrome has high potentials in bridging genes and behavior because of the genetic specificity and the consistent cognitive features in WMS. The crucial link between the genetic and behavioral levels is likely to be provided by cortical neuroanatomy. Recent neuroanatomical studies indicate that the most severe volumetric reductions in WMS are in the occipital lobe involving especially the primary visual cortex (V1). Furthermore, V1 is the only cortical area where anatomical observations have shown signs of abnormal neural connectivity. These anatomical findings call for studies addressing early levels of visual processing in WMS. The current study, in response to the NSF Children s Research Initiative, will be the first systematic behavioral investigation of low-level visual processing in WMS. The primary visual cortex not only carries out a local analysis of the retinal image along the main feature dimensions (such as color, texture, depth), it also participates in the integration of local information, primitive figure-ground segmentation, and visual contextual integration. V1 also remains plastic and dynamically changing even in adult life, and takes part in visual short-term memory. How are these functions affected by the anatomically indicated abnormal connectivity in V1? The first objective of the study is to assess the development of local and integrative visual functions, and their plasticity related to occipital cortical areas in WMS. The assessment involves psychophysical measurements to estimate (1) orientation discrimination abilities, (2) contour integration abilities, (3) contextual sensitivity, and (4) perceptual learning in WMS subjects. All these procedures are based on the PI s previous work in visual spatial integration, visual plasticity and development. The PI s previous work also provides normal developmental trends in the studied visual functions, enabling the research group to evaluate developmental dispositions in WMS from the perspective of normal development. How does occipital visual dysfunction affect the development of higher-level cognitive functions, such as language? The cortical areas mediating language are not as severely involved anatomically as the low-level visual areas, and language seems to be preserved in WMS. However, abnormal visual processing might interfere with the normal development of some linguistic functions, such as visuo-spatial language. It has recently been indicated that the link between low-level vision and language might be visual memory. The second objective of the study is to assess the consequences of occipital dysfunction on the development of higher-level cognitive functions. The assessment involves behavioral studies on (1) visuo-spatial working memory and (2) visuo-spatial long-term memory, and (3) visuo-spatial language. Correlations between memory and language related task performances are evaluated. The conjecture is that abnormal connectivity in the visual cortex leads to memory limitations, and language impairments. The research is novel in that it offers a systematic investigation of (a) the development of occipital functions, and (b) consequential memory limitations, and language impairments in WMS. It also offers to test the whole population of Hungarian WMS children and young adults, therefore the whole range of patients with a genetic disorder within an isolated population. Experiments are designed to ensure age-matched (normal), mental-age matched (normal), and IQ matched (Down Syndrome) controls. In addition to its potential to reveal neurobehavioral developmental rules in WMS, the research is significant in terms of a better understanding of both psychological functions (e.g., contextual integration, working memory, visuo-spatial language), and the neural circuits underlying these doc15573 none This proposal from Boston College seeks funding to continue the preparation of prototype inquiry task items for the TIMSS international assessment and to provide a website for teachers that documents students approaches to responding to the prototype problems. The second set of activities includes a Questionnaire Development Group that would consider the most useful types of contextual information for TIMSS to gather and identify the best vehicle(s) for gathering it. Support for this project ensures that the international study can continue the planning and staff work necessary for the TIMMS administration doc15574 none Auburn University Children s Research Center Planning Grant PI: Gregory Pettit Co-PI: Brian E. Vaughn This award will support a series of activities to enhance the intellectual, administrative, and social infrastructures at Auburn University . Specific activities relevant to four broad aims will be supported. The project will build institutional capacity at Department, College, and University levels by (a) initiating and supporting cross-disciplinary inquiries on the nature and development of children s relationships and belief systems; (b) identifying and fostering relationships with nationally and internationally recognized experts in the conduct of this research; (c) establishing relationships that insure the participation of ethnic minority scholars in all aspects of research and that insure the participation of members from ethnic minority communities in research samples; (d) using existing structures for outreach in place at Auburn University to allow for efficient translation of research products into meaningful programs; and (e) laying the groundwork for a Data Center to house data and products from the Research Center and from national and international datasets concerning children s relationships. This Data Center will serve as a resource for Center faculty in terms of consultation and assistance for sampling and analysis and will serve as a portal to the larger community of developmental and learning scientists using the Internet. The project will assess research needs pertinent to the construction, maintenance, and elaboration of Center identity and focus by (a) fostering cross institution collaborations at national and international levels; (b) developing mechanisms to incorporate training activities for the next generation of developmental and learning scientists; (c) designing an administrative structure to guide the scientific mission of the Center; and (d) developing mission statements for Community and Scientific Technical Advisory Panels who will serve as external evaluators of Center goals, activities, and products. The project will support ongoing research programs on interpersonal relationships and social transitions, plan new, large-scale studies of these phenomena, and identify mechanisms to support innovative pilot studies by (a) holding workshops with outside experts to provide training and technical assistance and to identify specific personnel needs for the Center; (b) identifying means mechanisms to streamline and speed up data coding and sharing of large datasets (e.g., using Internet- 2 protocols to transfer video files) and to use existing facilities more efficiently; and (c) setting priorities for identifying and supporting pilot investigations by Center faculty and affiliates. The project will establish mechanisms for evaluating Center activities and products by (a) identifying and recruiting a Scientific Technical Advisory Panel to evaluate the Center s goals, activities, and products in terms of their impact on the developmental and learning sciences and on their capacity to nurture a new generation of developmental and learning scientists from the Human Sciences; and (b) identifying and recruiting a Community Advisory Panel to provide guidance and feedback concerning the practical value of the Center s activities and products, especially with reference to our goal of including ethnic minority participants in every aspect of research doc15575 none A Workshop on Williams Syndrome and the Issue of Neurogenetic Developmental Disorders Ilona Kovacs impaired visual integration and less impaired analytic processing; better grammar than lexicon; and, high social competence. The workshop will be based on intense experimental and theoretical cooperation between several internationally recognized researchers in the field. The workshop will focus on: developmental models used in explaining Williams syndrome abilities; exact profiles of visual impairment of Williams syndrome subjects of all ages; working memory and language acquisition in Williams syndrome; language profiles of Williams syndrome subjects obtained from populations speaking different languages; comparisons with other populations, most notably with autistic subjects; and issues of self-help in families of Williams syndrome children doc15576 none This project will develop spatially extended and statistically reliable estimates of Antarctic surface temperature variations over the past several centuries, using a multi-proxy calibration verification approach that combines the climate signal in ice core, satellite remote sensing, and weather station data. Antarctica has been problematic from the point of view of large-scale paleoclimate reconstruction because of the paucity of long-term instrumental data, and the relatively low resolution of most ice cores. Several new developments, particularly the network of shallow (~100 meter) ice cores from the ongoing International Trans-Antarctic Scientific Expedition (ITASE) project will yield broad spatial coverage of annually resolved ice core physical properties, chemistry, and stable isotope data over more than a hundred years. Second, there are now over twenty years of microwave and infrared brightness temperatures available from satellites covering virtually all of Antarctica with seasonally resolved information that has been demonstrated to record the ice surface near surface temperature with very reasonable precision and accuracy. Finally, higher quality microwave emission data from Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometers (AMSR) with much finer spatial resolution and radiometric fidelity than those from previous sources will offer an improved view of longer term mean temperatures in Antarctica. The 40-year instrumental record and the shorter but spatially more comprehensive Automatic Weather Station network will be combined with seasonally-resolved 37-gigahertz satellite-based ice surface temperature estimates to reconstruct Antarctic-wide temperature patterns during the past forty years. The sparser Antarctic instrumental surface temperature data available back nearly to the beginning of the century will be added for longer-term, though quite spatially-restricted, cross-validation of these reconstructions. This cross-validation procedure has been used successfully with roughly century-long instrumental records at locations primarily in the Northern Hemisphere. The longer time scale will be approached through a cross-validation of the proxy-based pre-20th century surface temperature reconstructions using information on thermal emission from deeper in the firn that is contained in low-frequency passive microwave satellite measurements. The low-frequency estimates, supplemented by borehole thermometry, will provide important independent verification of the long-term averages of the annual surfac doc15577 none Socialization of Preschoolers Beliefs Across Parent and Peer Relationships Brian E. Vaughn & Bryan B. Korth Family relationships are the crucible within which children s social competencies are forged and honed, however, the payoff for the child s social competence is derived from interactions in the peer group. Children well equipped (by virtue of the quality of their family relationships) with interaction skills, beliefs about the desirability of social activities, and convictions that social initiations will lead to positive outcomes tend to become central, accepted members of their peer groups during childhood. Furthermore, these children frequently accumulate social power in the peer group that can be parlayed into preferential access to the physical and social resources available in the group. These facts form the crux of a paradox because parent-child relationships tend to emphasize affiliation, coherence, and nurturance protection at the expense of competition, conflict, and deception whereas this balance is often reversed in the peer group. The question arises: What is learned in the family that prepares children for the very different social demands imposed by the peer group during early childhood? In this project, we will collect data that can begin to answer this question. Investigators from Auburn University and the University of Illinois pool their expertise in parent-child and peer relationships for this 4-year longitudinal study. A total sample of 100 families (50 at each site) will be recruited. Insofar as possible, two-parent families will be recruited (a minimum of 50% for the total sample) so that assessments of both mother-child and father-child relationships can be obtained. Assessments of sibling interactions and relationships will be obtained when possible. Because attachment theory proposes the most well articulated characterization of parent-child relationships available in the developmental sciences, assessments of both child and parent will emphasize the secure base aspects of their relationship. Parents will be assessed in terms of their demonstrated ability to serve as a secure base for their child and in terms of the availability of a secure base script in assessments of the adults themselves. Starting in the second project year (as the children turn 3.0-3.5 years of age) assessments will take place also in their peer groups. A standard battery of social competence assessments will be collected and friendship and social dominance status also will be ascertained. Between 3.5- 4.0 years of age, the availability of secure-base scripts in child-parent narratives will be assessed, using tasks developed for this purpose. Both classroom and parent-child assessments will continue in the third project year (as the child turns 4.0 to 4.5 years of age). Data analyses will test hypotheses concerning the stability of attachments to both parents, the organization of attachment scored from behavioral and narrative protocols, and the specific value of parent-child attachments to forming and maintaining relationships with age peers. Age appropriate measures of cognitive and personality status will also be obtained and tested both as main effects (direct predictors) and as intervening variables in the analyses testing hypotheses posed above doc15578 none Chemistry (12) This project is an interdisciplinary effort between the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and the Biology Department. New Supercritical Fluid Extraction (SFE) and Capillary Electrophoresis (CE) Instrumentation is being integrated into the laboratory component of several analysis oriented chemistry, biology and biochemistry courses using modern teaching methodologies. The focus of the plan is to develop an analytical biochemistry cluster of experiments that runs through the current Sophomore and Junior Senior laboratory courses. Experiments within this cluster are based upon the Case Study method, with students working in small groups; involve the use of one or both of the proposed instruments; and focus on issues of biochemical relevance. Experiments and protocols from the Journal of Chemical Education and from primary research journals are being combined and adapted in order to create the Case Studies. This approach better prepares chemistry, biology, and biochemistry students by involving them in the consideration of real world problems, and by providing hands-on experience using modern analytical instrumentation and techniques. As a result of this experience, students are expected to become more efficient learners, retain what they learn longer, exercise their critical thinking skills, and involve themselves in more interesting and challenging experiments than were available in the past. Case Studies are being written in a manner that will allow other colleges and universities, similarly equipped, to readily adapt these methods. Results of the project will be reported at national and regional meetings and published in appropriate college science teaching journals doc15490 none Theoretical models of motion transfer from the ductile lower lithosphere and mantle upward through the brittle-ductile transition and the brittle upper crust are as yet inadequate to account for many phenomena, partly because of lack of access to intact crust sections that represent deformation results from the same overall tectonic environment. This project utilizes the Caribbean-South America plate boundary, which has been the locus of oblique convergence for the past 50 million years to address this problem. This system has brought a sequence of rocks to the surface that represent a continuous vertical section of the crust exposed from west to east along the contact between the two plates from Venezuela to Trinidad. Structural and thermochronologic data will be collected and used to develop, refine and test models for the origin, response partitioning, and exhumation of this sequence. Results have the potential to place significant constraints on rheological differences within the lithosphere, which is of fundamental importance in understanding tectonic systems and plate interactions doc15580 none A three-year research project is proposed with the following goals: 1. To fully describe the science and mathematics curricular exposure of high school students and differences resulting from curricular variations, social context and opportunities to learn, and students background. 2. To analyze how curricular exposure and social structure influence students persistence through the science and mathematics pipeline. 3. To analyze how curricular exposure and academic progress through the science pipeline affect students choice to major in science-related fields, including teaching. 4. To analyze how science curricular exposure shapes students health behavior and health-related science literacy. Three major areas that influence students progress through the science and mathematics pipeline and their health choices and literacy even if they leave the pipeline are identified and analyzed: (1) curriculum content, performance expectations and perspectives (2) formal, structured opportunities to learn and (3) the informal social contexts of students learning environments. Quantitative methods are employed. This study takes advantage of a unique and timely opportunity to analyze nationally representative, longitudinal data from the s, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) and its transcript supplement. A third wave of Add Health is currently being gathered, and students high school transcripts and supporting school documents (course catalogues, syllabi, textbook lists) are being collected and coded. For this study, course curriculum (content, performance expectations, and perspectives) will also be coded and analyzed along with the transcript data and longitudinal survey data from approximately 19,000 respondents who were in grades 7 through 12 in the - school year. This data set contains extensive measures of many sources of influence from the contexts of students lives that can be linked to adolescents health behavior, academic performance, and science and teaching aspirations. This study is set within Quadrant III of the ROLE program: irResearch on SMET learning in formal and informal educational settings,ll and has major implications and links to Quadrants II and IV. The study directly targets the question of how recent mathematics and science educational reforms in approaches and curriculum materials affect students academic progress and learning. It explicitly distinguishes between formal and informal processes to assess the effects and interactions of each. The study addresses the concentration of Quadrant II since the research questions are framed to recognize how the complex, multilevel aspects of students backgrounds and lives interact with the structure and social context of schools to affect learning. The concentrations of Quadrant IV are also addressed by the multilevel approach to analysis of longitudinal, nationally representative data. The data sets depth allows for analysis of how reforms in curricular content (including textbook adoptions) and structure are related to students progress within the context of schools and curriculum-based subsets of students (such as tracks). Consistent with common themes across ROLE concentration areas, this study will model these processes and analyze large-scale effects of curricular and social structuring inherent in mathematics and science reform efforts. Finally, it assesses how science education is related to the everyday lives of the U.S.s diverse population by examining how exposure to science in high school is related to health choices and behaviors doc15581 none Watkins This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for a study of calcareous nannofossils in cores from the Ross Sea. Much of the direct evidence of the early history of Cenozoic glaciation on Antarctica comes from cores that were drilled in the waters of the Ross Sea. One set of these cores was drilled by rigs mounted on the fast ice that rings the southern part of the Ross Sea, just to the north of the Ross Ice Shelf. These include the CIROS-1 hole and Cape Roberts Project (CRP) holes 2 and 3, which cored thick sections of Oligocene and lower Miocene sedimentary rocks deposited within about 15 km offshore of the glaciated coast of Victoria Land. These clastic rocks include sandstones, siltstones, mudstones, conglomerates and diamictite that indicate glaciers reached sea level by the Oligocene and were very close (or actually on top of) the site of deposition for all or part of the Oligocene and early Miocene. A second set of cores, drilled by the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) drilling vessel Glomar Challenger includes Site 270, located at the same latitude (77 degrees) as CIROS and CRP, but more than 300 km away from the nearest source of glacial sediment. The Oligocene - lower Miocene sedimentary sequence at this site is thinner and more fine-grained, but contains abundant evidence of nearby ice in the form of ice rafted debris (IRD). A second DSDP Site (274), located some 8 degrees latitude north, contains a Oligocene and lower Miocene dominated by diatomaceous sediment including mud and ooze, reflecting its largely open oceanic position. These four drill-holes form a latitudinal and paleoenvironmental transect to investigate the surface water history of the Ross Sea using calcareous nannofossils. Calcareous nannofossils, the fossil remains of coccolithophorid algae that secrete calcite skeletal plates, will be used in two ways to examine the Ross Sea: 1) Paleoceanographic reconstruction - The distribution of the coccolithophorid algae is strongly controlled by the thermal structure of the surface water mass, making their fossils sensitive indicators of past water mass temperature. This is especially useful in an area that is dominated by sediments with too little calcite to use isotopic methods of estimating water temperatures. Analysis of the calcareous nannofossils by statistical paleoecologic methods will provide a temperature history of the Ross Sea surface waters for a period of geological time characterized by fluctuating ocean temperatures and partial or ephemeral continental ice sheets. In addition, because of the sensitivity these phytoplankton are known to have to abnormal salinity, the analysis of the assemblages from deep ocean to the mouths of the Victoria Land glaciers may provide a new way to estimate the meltwater outflow of the evolving East Antarctic Ice Sheet. 2) Biostratigraphy - The rapid rate of evolution of the coccolithophorid algae through the mid-Cenozoic, coupled with their widespread distribution in the oceans, provides the means of age dating the sediments that contain their fossils. The numerical ages of extinction and speciation events have been well documented, providing a means to accurately and precisely date the sedimentary sequences in the Ross Sea and, thus, the events responsible for the deposition. Because of the excellent calibration of calcareous nannofossil biostratigraphy to the time scale, these fossils offer the possibility of constraining the paleomagnetic stratigraphy and other fossil biostratigraphies (such as the largely endemic Antarctic shelf diatoms) that occur in these Oligocene and lower Miocene sections. If successful, this work will have important, and wide reaching ramifications to paleoceanographic research that seeks to understand the role of the Antarctic ice sheet in global systems doc15582 none Phillips This award is to the University of Florida to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF ). Partners The partners for this award include the University of Florida (Lead Institution), Florida A&M University, the University of Miami, Alachua County Environmental Protection Department, Florida Department of Environmental Protection, NASA Kennedy Space Center, Bionetice, Camp Dressen & McKee, Inc., Dynamac Corporation, Jones Edmunds & Associates, Koppers Industries, and Post, Buckley, Shuh, and Jernigan (PBS&J). Proposed Activities The proposed partnership will establish the Florida Interdisciplinary Center for Environmentally Sound Solutions. The center will create a forum for effective communication and collaboration among all synergistic university researchers while serving as a focal point for establishing an interface with the private sector and government. The center will identify and respond to important environmental problems and develop innovative solutions. Proposed Innovation The partnership will provide science and engineering solutions for environmental problems, improve understanding of complex relationships involving public policy, economic issues, risk assessments, and public education. Potential Economic Impact The potential impact will depend upon the perceived economic value the public places on environmental issues and the cost the private sector places on abatement and cleanup. Potential Societal Impact The societal goal of economic growth compatible with preservation of the environment using renewable resources can be achieved by a judicious marriage of technology with public policy. The center will contribute to this. The potential societal impact of environmental protection is limitless doc15583 none Constraining Tertiary Temperatures, Salinities, and Ocean Chemistry: An Isotopic and Trace-metal Study of Serially-sampled Mollusks E. Grossman, Y. Rosenthal, and C. Lear The Tertiary Period (55 to ~2 million years ago) presents our best opportunity to study the transition from an ice-free greenhouse world to today s icehouse world and to understand the response of present and future climates to high atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. This proposal will take advantage of the superb fossil record of the US Gulf Coast and two independent measures of ancient ocean temperatures, oxygen isotope (18O 16O) and strontium calcium ratios in fossil shells, to characterize this dramatic change in global climate. These results will address a longstanding controversy of early Tertiary climate, the cool tropics paradox . Oxygen isotope measurements of planktonic foraminifera indicate cool tropical sea-surface temperatures for a time when high latitudes experienced unusual warmth. This contradicts model simulations of greenhouse world climates that predict that both polar and tropical temperatures must have been significantly warmer than today. A common explanation for the discrepancy is that paleotemperature data from planktonic foraminifera have been modified by post-depositional chemical alteration (diagenesis). By analyzing pristine mollusk shells, this study will obviate this limitation of previous studies. A second objective is to improve our understanding of the nature and causes of the climatic transition near the Eocene-Oligocene boundary associated with rapid Antarctic glaciation and faunal overturn. Recent work using oxygen isotope ratios in fish otoliths from US Gulf Coastal Plain sediments has linked faunal overturn to increased seasonality, in particular colder winters in this region. However, interpretation of such data is limited by poorly constrained estimates of global ice volume and local salinity variations. This study will use paired measurements of mollusk Sr Ca and 18O 16O to examine changes in low-latitude sea-surface temperatures and seasonality across this event. Lastly, modern mollusk samples will be collected with temperature, salinity, and seawater 18O 16O data from various sites in the Gulf of Mexico and Eilat, Israel. These samples will be analyzed for stable isotopes and trace metals (especially Sr Ca) to calibrate trace metal-temperature relations doc15584 none Microearthquakes (earthquakes smaller than magnitude ~3) that have similar hypocenters (locations) and focal mechanisms (fault planes and slip directions) produce ground motions at a given seismic station that appear very similar. By comparing the recorded seismic waveforms of these earthquakes, it is possible to obtain very accurate estimates of the relative arrival times of the seismic waves, and ultimately very accurate estimates of the relative locations of the earthquakes. Errors in relative location obtained using this method are tens of meters for events separated by hundreds of meter, and, after correcting for time-dependent station changes, meters for events separated by tens of meters or less. These errors are a factor of 10-100 smaller than those in the published US Geological Survey Northern California Seismic Network (NCSN) catalog. This increase in resolution has led to significant new insights in two different areas of fault studies. First, structures internal to the fault zone that previously could not be seen have been imaged. Second, because the relative location errors between the nearest microearthquakes are much smaller than the rupture dimensions (tens to hundreds of meters), this resolution allows studies of earthquake interaction using datasets of many thousands of events. In the area of fault structure, microearthquake relocation shows that the seismicity along many creeping faults is organized into slip-parallel streaks , tens to a few hundred meters tall and up to kilometers in length. In the area of rupture interaction, it has been observed that the distribution of aftershocks of microearthquakes along the central San Andreas fault is very asymmetric, with many more of the nearest aftershocks (in space and time) occurring to the northwest of a prior mainshock than to the southeast. This is attributed to the contrast in material properties across the fault and how this contrast affects the dynamics of the mainshock (preferential propagation to the southeast). If this explanation is correct, it is relevant to seismic hazards because directivity of large earthquakes concentrates ground shaking in the direction of propagation. Current research is devoted to developing catalogs of thousands of precisely-located microearthquakes in regions of geologic interest, interpreting these catalogs in terms of their implications for fault mechanics, and improving the relocation method. More time-dependent corrections are being determined for NCSN stations and made available to the seismological community. The more precise locations obtained with the station corrections are being used to search for (1) subtle changes in fault dip associated with the observed microseismic lineations and (2) short lineations on faults believed to have little slip, to distinguish between competing ideas for the origins of the lineations. In the area of asymmetric aftershock distributions, the dataset is being extended to smaller mainshock sizes using the Parkfield HRSN catalog, the relocation code (with time-dependent station corrections) is being modified to routinely determine the local across-fault P-wave and S-wave velocity contrasts, and numerical modeling of rupture on the interface between dissimilar materials is being undertaken to test the explanation proposed for the origin of the symmetry. Finally, the statistics of aftershock sequences of microearthquakes on different faults are being compared to the predictions of analytic models of rate-and-state friction, and to numerical models of rupture interaction on planar faults. The goals are to test models of rate-and-state fault friction and to determine differences in loading rates and or surface properties of the various faults. Because for some faults the earliest portion of the aftershock sequences might have been lost because of the network blind time following a triggering event (perhaps a few tens of seconds), the nearly 100 s archived waveforms of all cataloged events are being processed to identify and locate events that would ordinarily have triggered the network. These studies will lead to further insights into the mechanics of earthquakes doc15585 none Clayton Oxygen isotopic compositions of primitive Solar System materials have proved to be very powerful tracers of chemical process involved in formation of objects as small as chondrules to as large as planets. Isotopic compositions serve to determine genetic associations of divers meteoritic groups, such as the SNC (martian) meteorites and the HED (howardite, eucrite, diogenite) groups. Low-temperature aqueous processes in carbonaceous chondrites have been studied in terms of reservoir origins, alteration conditions and water rock ratios. All this has been possible even though we lacked consensus on the ultimate origin of the anomalous effects. A novel approach, combining photochemistry and the X-wind model of stellar accretions, has the possibility of providing a consistent picture of oxygen isotopic evolution, along with a novel interpretation of the chemical evolution of the inner Solar System. In addition, we plan to use oxygen isotopic compositions of organic molecules in carbonaceous meteorites to determine how much of the organic chemistry occurred within the parent asteroid, and how much occurred earlier, in the Solar Nebula or in interstellar space. These are fundamental questions for the origin of pre-biotic organic molecules doc15586 none Alley This award provides support for a 2 year modeling effort to study the dynamics of Pine Island Glacier (PIG). The discharge from the PIG constitutes the largest mass loss from any single West Antarctic ice stream. Satellite observations indicate that this outlet glacier is experiencing ongoing thinning and acceleration. The emphasis of this work will be on understanding the cause and the near-term projection of the observed thinning of PIG. Model experiments will address the hypothesis that the observed changes were caused by the loss of a buttressing ice shelf, and that the changes will continue in the form of an upglacier propagating wave of thinning and acceleration. To perform this work a numerical model of the coupled mass, energy, and momentum balance of Pine Island Glacier basin will be developed. The model will comprise four modular components, which will be coupled and then benchmarked against the European Ice Sheet Modeling Inititative (EISMINT) model intercomparison. The model will then be applied to the thinning of Pine Island Glacier using likely ice-shelf histories and possible basal boundary conditions to learn which may be accurate and to assess possible future behavior. The primary expected result will be an improved understanding of the importance of ice-shelf buttressing and the potential for inland thinning due to the reduction of ice-shelf drag doc15587 none The overall goal of this project is to develop plant cell bioreactor cultures into a more effective system for producing high-value recombinant proteins. The specific objectives of the present research are as follows: 1) Test inducible cell-cycle control to maximize the useful culture life and yield of the target protein; 2) Employ tested molecular strategies that complement the cell-cycle control to further enhance the level of target protein expression; 3) Optimize protein production using on-line GFP-fusion monitoring and dynamic process optimization in high-density cultures. To accomplish these objectives, the Principal Investigators (PIs) will embark on the following research tasks: (1) examine the effect of expressing a cell-cycle inhibitor on cell proliferation in plant suspension cultures; (2) study coordinated expression of the target gene and the cell-cycle gene to enhance the target protein production; (3) exploit suitable targeting and endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-retention signals to promote secretion and to stabilize the target protein; (4) engineer GFP as a dual function fusion tag for process monitoring and protein purification; (5) investigate signal processing of on-line detected fluorescence of GFP-fusion proteins; (6) devise an effective dynamic process optimization scheme that draws on the on-line fluorescence data; and (7) develop high-density perfusion and fed-batch cultures integrated with the controlled proliferation technology and the fusion protein monitoring optimization schemes. Tobacco will be used as the model host system. Human granulocyte macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GMCSF) with GFP fusion is chosen as a model protein in this research. The proposed research should lead to development of a more effective plant cell culture process for recombinant protein production. It should also shed light on regulation of the plant cell cycle and cell-cycle dependence of foreign gene expression in plant cells doc15588 none Brook This award supports a two-year project to continue work developing the techniques to make carbon monoxide (CO) measurements in ice core samples. Carbon monoxide is an important atmospheric chemical constituent as it is a primary sink for hydroxyl radical (OH) (and therefore influences the oxidizing capacity of the atmosphere) and because the concentrations of three major greenhouses gases , carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and ozone (O3) are directly tied to the concentration of CO. In light of recent anthropogenic increases in the emissions of CO, CO2, CH4 and NOx, it is desirable to understand this complex chemical system and the changes in the greenhouse forcing resulting from perturbation. Because it is difficult to test the accuracy of models for past and future conditions for which no direct atmospheric measurements of trace gas concentrations are available these measurements must be obtained in other ways. Polar ice cores provide a means to make these measurements. Further work is necessary to refine the analytical technique and additional measurements are necessary to investigate the accuracy of these results and to establish the nature of temporal trends in CO. It is anticipated that the CO record, combined with existing or new data for CO2, CH4 , N2O and other paleoclimate variables, will provide further constraints on model studies of the effect of changing atmospheric chemistry on greenhouse forcing doc15589 none In recent years, researchers have developed and studied a variety of instructional materials that can support students learning how to conduct investigations in project-based science classrooms, but few classroom assessment materials and tools have been developed to support these materials. Ideally, such assessments would give teachers a better understanding of what students know at any point in a project in order to adjust and improve instruction. This project will develop, test, and evaluate classroom assessments for extended science projects that are supported by handheld computers. To develop the assessments, the investigators will create on teams of teachers, assessment specialists, software developers, and researchers to develop these tools. The project will rely on a small group of teachers in the Beaufort County Public Schools to try out the assessments. SRI researchers will evaluate factors associated with adoption of the handheld tools in a variety of classrooms and measure its effectiveness in improving teaching and learning doc15590 none One of the major recent advances in reconstructing past plate configurations was the recognition that the Precordillera Terrane of Argentina was derived (rifted from) the Ouachita embayment of present day North America, thus providing a rare example of knowing exactly where an exotic terrane came from. However, the timing of the rifting and the timing of the subsequent collision with Gondwana, critical to Paleozoic reconstructions is problematic. Previously the timing of the collision was thought to Middle to Late Ordovician based on when the carbonate platform drowned, presumably by close approach and subduction of the continental margin. However, more recent work suggests that the drowning of the carbonate platform was due to rift-related subsidence, and if correct, dates the rifting from North America, not the subsequent collision with Gondwana. This project aims to date the collision by radiometric methods from rocks in the exposed suture zone, including magmatic bodies that intruded during and after the several phases or pulses of collision-related deformation. Results will clarify the arrival time of the Precordillera, data that will be critical in establishing a Paleozoic plate position history doc15434 none This study is providing constraints on the distribution, geometry, and magnitude of structure and deformation within and near the Archean cratons of southern Africa. A combined seismic and numerical modeling approach is used to accomplish these goals. Results from this work are providing key information regarding the accretion and subsequent evolution of stable cratonic regions, the depth distribution of mantle deformation, and the degree of coupling between tectonic plates and sublithospheric mantle. Specifically, the following issues are being addressed: 1) the 3-D seismic structure of the crust and upper mantle in Archean craton regions of southern Africa, with a focus on the depth extent of the lithosphere and on the relationship of crust and upper mantle velocities to geologically-defined tectonic boundaries; and 2) the 3-D distribution of upper mantle anisotropy in this area, and its implications for deformation in the lithosphere and flow in the sublithospheric mantle. A new two plane wave technique that inverts variations in surface wave phase and amplitude across a broadband seismic array constrains three-dimensional (3-D) crust and upper mantle seismic structure. Data for this analysis come from the 82 station Southern Africa Seismic Experiment, part of the larger-scale multidisciplinary Kaapvaal Project. Unlike traditional regional surface wave tomography where planar wavefronts and great circle source-receiver raypaths are assumed, a significant advantage of the current method is that it accounts for wavefield perturbations due to lateral heterogeneity, scattering, or multipathing along ray paths. Both isotropic and anisotropic seismic structure are determined using Rayleigh and Love waves recorded at the SASE stations, and by inverting the surface wave data with existing shear wave splitting results in this area to determine best-fitting 3-D models of seismic velocity and anisotropy beneath southern Africa. The numerical modeling component involves calculating 3-D models of mantle flow and determining the relationship of these models to observations of seismic anisotropy and deformation of the mantle lithosphere. A lithospheric keel morphology appropriate for southern Africa is constructed through integration of the results of the surface wave analyses with previous body wave results. This geometry, is used to examine models of mantle flow around the keel in which flow is driven either by horizontal plate motion or vertical mantle upwelling. Predicted anisotropy for both body and surface waves using the elastic parameters of southern Africa mantle nodules and the results of other deformation studies are calculated to evaluate the potential extent of sublithospheric mantle deformation. The results of predicted seismic anisotropy due to mantle flow will be merged with the observed seismic anisotropy to help constrain the distribution of mantle deformation beneath southern Africa doc15396 none This award supports a project to significantly improve our understanding of how Taylor Glacier flows and responds to climate changes. Taylor Glacier drains the Taylor Dome region of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and terminates in Taylor Valley, one of the Dry Valleys of Victoria Land. It provides a crucial and unique link between two intensively studied Antarctic environments: the Taylor Dome, from which a 130 kyr ice core paleoclimate record has recently been extracted, and the Dry Valleys, a pivotal Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site and a focus of research on geomorphology and glacial geology. The proposed work will thus make an important contribution to ongoing efforts to exploit the Taylor Dome - Dry Valleys system to build a uniquely comprehensive view of regional long-term environmental changes. The proposed work has two complementary components: field research and numerical modelling. Two field seasons will be used to measure velocity, surface strain rate, mass balance, ice thickness, glacier bed reflectance, and subglacial topography, along a nearly complete longitudinal transect of the Taylor Glacier, and along select cross-valley transects. This information will be used to constrain numerical models of ice and heat flow for the Taylor Dome - Taylor Glacier system. These calibrated models will be used to analyze the time-dependent response of the Taylor Glacier to climate changes. The synthesis of results will be aimed to improve understanding of the glacial geomorphology of Taylor Valley, and to illuminate impacts on the Taylor Valley lakes ecosystem. The project will have a major role in furthering the careers of a doctoral-level graduate student and a post-doctoral researcher doc15491 none Late Cenozoic deformation is broadly distributed across the North American plate margin of the conterminous western United States and stretches from the San Andreas fault system eastward across the Mojave Desert and into the Basin and Range. The eastern California shear zone and Walker Lane of the western Great Basin form an active belt of structures accommodating about 25% of the relative motion between North America and the Pacific plate. From the Mojave Desert, the displacement is carried north, east of the southern Sierra Nevada, in a narrow zone of deformation bound on the west and east by the Owens Valley and Furnace Creek fault systems. North from the latitude of the central Sierra Nevada, the zone of deformation broadens to include the Walker Lane and central Nevada seismic belt in the northwestern Great Basin. The Sierra Nevada behaves as a coherent tectonic block with a northwest-directed motion of 10-14 mm yr and forms the western boundary of the zone of distributed deformation in the Great Basin. A complex pattern of active structures underlies west-central Nevada where displacement is transferred from the eastern California shear zone to the Walker Lane and the central Nevada seismic belt. Integrated geologic, seismological, and GPS geodetic results indicate that the central Walker Lane serves as an displacement transfer system linking stepped northwest-trending transcurrent faults. Within the central Walker Lane displacement partitioning is active and may be accommodated by differential motion of tectonic blocks. A GPS velocity field exhibits a systematic increase in magnitude from east to west across the central Walker Lane and is consistent both with block translation and vertical-axis rotation. Zones of divergent, transcurrent, and convergent motion are observed across suspected block boundaries. The observed velocity field is not easily reconciled with the current understanding of fault displacements and points out the difficulty in comparing geodetic and geologic displacement fields. The PI s propose an integrated geodetic and geologic investigation of the central Walker Lane to address two questions: (1) Is displacement transfer between transcurrent structures wholly accommodated by kinematically coordinated slip on throughgoing faults, and (2) are the kinematics of active displacement transfer derived from GPS geodesy consistent with the displacement field estimated by earthquake seismology and fault-slip inversion? The central Walker Lane is ideally suited for this study for three reasons: (1) the region is seismically active and well defined earthquake focal mechanisms exist for the displacement transfer fault system, (2) the faults are well exposed and have produced preliminary fault-slip estimates of deformation kinematics, and (3) a complex present-day displacement field with ~10 mm yr of differential slip is recorded by a GPS geodetic network. These elements will allow characterization of the kinematics of displacement transfer and offer the opportunity to directly compare different means of measuring deformation kinematics. The PI s primary interest is to characterize the kinematics of deformation in the active displacement transfer stepover and to compare the geodetically determined displacement field with that derived from earthquake focal mechanisms and fault-slip inversion. To achieve their research objectives, several aspects of the extensional stepover system exposed in the central Walker Lane must be examined in greater detail. The primary tasks set out in this project are: (1) to establish the spatial distribution of active high-angle faults linking the bounding transcurrent faults, (2) to document the detailed geometry and slip history of fault systems that transfer displacement between transcurrent faults, and (3) to deploy a GPS network with sufficient density to differentiate between continuous versus discontinuous variations in the present-day velocity field. The PI s will address the tasks listed above with an integrated study utilizing detailed geologic mapping, structural analysis, and GPS geodesy. The investigators (Oldow and Satterfield) each have substantial experience working in the area and by building on previous studies, geological mapping and structural analysis will establish the areal limits of the transtensional fault system, document variable geometric relations between major and secondary fault systems, define the kinematic history of fault motion, and develop first-order estimates of recent slip magnitude by documenting offset landforms. Combined with other ongoing or proposed studies in the central Walker Lane, the results of this research should contribute to an unprecedented view of active transtensional displacement transfer and yield critical insight into the comparison of geologic and geodetic measures of deformation kinematics doc15594 none The proposed study will investigate the potentially significant role of the Southern Ocean and the Antarctic Circumpolar Current System in the global ocean circulation. The focus will be on those specific antarctic processes that can influence the World Ocean, including formation of major water masses in the vicinity of Antarctica, air-sea exchanges of heat, moisture and momentum, as well as eddy mixing in the Southern Ocean. Key questions to be addressed are: 1. What is the dynamical role of the Antarctic Bottom Water? 2. What is the role of the Antarctic Intermediate Water in the global circulation? 3. Why is the global thermohaline circulation sensitive to the magnitude of southern hemisphere winds? 4. What is the sensitivity of the global thermohaline circulation to the magnitudes of southern hemisphere heat and moisture fluxes? 5. What is the role of the eddy mixing in the Southern Ocean? 6. What is the role of the lateral fluxes of heat, moisture and momentum across the northern boundary of the Southern Ocean? These questions will be addressed with an ocean general circulation model coupled to a sophisticated sea-ice model in a series of numerical experiments combining a sufficient degree of realism with computational efficiency, in order to obtain meaningful results within a reasonable time frame. The work significantly improve our understanding of the dynamics of the Southern Ocean, and will emphasize the importance of the Antarctic region and the need for future observational and modeling studies of the area doc15595 none Zreda Although the general systematics of in-situ produced cosmogenic isotopes has been understood based on theoretical and experimental work, new quantitative information in several areas is needed to refine cosmogenic dating methods. Recent research on experimental production rates and effects of paleomagnetic intensity has shown that the production rates determined at one location and time cannot be transferred to other locations or times without introducing systematic errors that are estimated to be on the order of twenty percent. There are many specific reasons for these uncertainties, all revolving around a fundamental general problem of the distribution of the cosmic-ray intensity on earth. To improve our understanding of the distribution of neutrons, we started a neutron monitoring program, under which we are measuring the neutron intensity and cosmogenic isotope production rates as a function of latitude and elevation. The currently-funded one-year project will determine the attenuation lengths in the air for fast neutrons and for cosmogenic 36Cl (produced by fast and thermal neutrons) and 3He (produced by fast neutrons). These measurements are three out of eight that are necessary for a full characterization of altitude and depth dependence of cosmogenic production rates. The proposed project will provide the remaining five: the attenuation length in the air for thermal neutrons, and attenuation lengths in the rock for fast and thermal neutrons and for cosmogenic nuclides produced by fast and thermal neutrons. The goal of this proposal is to determine the relationships between the attenuation lengths obtained from measurements of cosmic-ray neutrons and of cosmogenic nuclides accumulated in rocks. This goal will be achieved by conducting the following measurements. (1) The thermal neutron intensity as a function of elevation, from sea level to m (top of Mauna Kea). To avoid the air-ground boundary, which affects thermal neutrons, the measurements will be conducted 300 m above the ground using bare neutron detector attached to a small pressure balloon. (2) The fast and thermal neutron intensity as a function of depth, from 0-100 cm in the rock. These measurements will be conducted in horizontal access holes drilled into the rock and by shielding the top of the instrument by slabs of basalt. (3) Cosmogenic 14C, 36Cl and 3He concentrations in shallow (100 cm) vertical cores. Two cores will be studied, with 15 samples per core; sampling will concentrate in the top 20 cm. Three specific objectives are: to determine the attenuation length for cosmogenic isotopes produced by fast neutrons; to define the depth function for thermal-neutron-produced isotopes; and to determine whether fast-neutron-produced isotopes are affected by the air-ground boundary. Isotopic and neutron data will be compared in order to define the relationship between the neutron intensity and cosmogenic production rates. This assessment is critical for developing the ability to calculate reliable cosmogenic production rates for locations where isotopic data are lacking. The results of this work will be used to construct an improved altitudinal scaling formulation for cosmogenic production rates, which will be an important contribution to the improvement of all cosmogenic dating methods doc15596 none This award supports a 2-year renewal program to continue research on the physical and structural properties of the Siple Dome ice core. This work will include continued monitoring of the core relaxation process, additional examination of the volcanic ash and dust record preserved in the Siple Dome core and its relationship to the timing and distribution pattern of widespread infall of tephra in the Byrd core, and possible climatic implications, additional thin sectioning of ice from below 800 m to obtain a more accurate picture of the response of the deeper ice to increased deformation and elevated temperatures, and measurements of total air content in the basal debris-bearing ice to evaluate mechanisms by which debris is incorporated at the bed. Especially intriguing are ongoing attempts to resolve the climate record at Siple Dome and to refine the time scale. Currently, we are working to obtain the best possible depth-age scale that utilizes annual layer counting based on visual stratigraphy and ECM in conjunction with the gas record. Many climate-related records from the Siple Dome core have recently been presented showing a possible hiatus at approximately 680 m and a potential major climatic event at around 720 m. However, the layer structure in the Siple Dome core shows reversed inclined layering as high as 559 m and evidence of disturbed and steeply inclined layering in deeper ice. It is critical that we determine whether this kind of structural disturbance has resulted in discontinuities in the climate record or is some other structural artifact that has not impacted the continuity of the record. In addition to conducting further visual examination of the core, we plan to prepare vertical thick sections in several regions of disturbed ice structure to determine if the crystal structure reveals evidence of deformation. Until this is complete, we will not know how deep into the core a continuous climate record exists doc15597 none Raymond Jeanloz The occurrence of deep-focus earthquakes remains one of the great mysteries of geophysics because laboratory experiments demonstrate that materials become ductile at the pressures of the Earth s deep interior. How then can rock undergo brittle rupture at the pressures of the deepest earthquakes, some 0.25 million atmospheres? The proposal requests support for a 3-year effort intended to develop and then begin applying a new experimental method for characterizing acoustic emissions generated from samples at high pressures. An array of GHz-frequency sensors is to be attached to a diamond-anvil cell in order to characterize the elastic-energy released by high-pressure phase transitions in mantle minerals and their analogs. The work combines proven technologies (acoustic-emission recording and GHz ultrasonics with the diamond cell), and shows considerable promise for future development of a large variety of complementary methods (optical, spectroscopic, diffraction) for characterizing brittle failure in detail and under a wide range of conditions doc15598 none Wise This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for a study of clays (specifically smectite) in cores from the Ross Sea, Antarctica, toward an understanding of the age and origin. One of the most surprising discoveries of the recently concluded geological drilling of the Cape Roberts Project (CRP) in the eastern Ross Sea, Antarctica, was the presence of authigenic smectite clays in lower Oligocene (or older) sandstones in the lower portion of Hole CRP-3, which was diamond-cored continuously to 941 meters below sea floor with 98% recovery. This is the first confirmed report of authigenic smectite in sandstones from the Antarctic continental margin. Situated along the eastern margin of the Victoria Land Basin, adjacent to the rising Transantarctic Mountains, CRP-3 was drilled to elucidate the paleoclimatic and tectonic history of the region; however, the base of the Cenozoic section is poorly dated, with limited constraints from biostratigraphy and paleomagnetics. This project is designed to shed additional light on the spatial extent, source, timing, and mode of emplacement of the authigenic smectite, which were probably emplaced shortly after deposition of the host sediments. This will help constrain the age of the basal Cenozoic sediments and the environment in which the smectite formed. This in turn will lead to a better understanding of the tectonic processes at work during the early history of the basin. Because this serendipitous discovery was not anticipated prior to drilling, only a pilot study could be undertaken within the time and funding constraints dictated by the science plan for the project. Work to date allows the definition of three multiple working hypotheses to account for the source and mode of emplacement of the authigenic smectite: 1) Burial diagenesis with necessary components sourced from volcanogenic materials and heavy minerals within the Cenozoic sequence or from a dolerite intrusion in the Paleozoic sandstones below; 2) Precipitation from hydrothermal waters associated with possible igneous intrusion(s) and nearby faults; 3) Mobilization and injection of fluids along a nearby fault that bounds a major graben parallel to the Transantarctic Front. The data gathered form the preliminary study was insufficient, however, to arbitrate among these three possibilities. This award supports work to test, to the extent possible, these three hypotheses and to allow completion of the study through: 1) a thorough examination of the core by scanning electron microscope energy-dispersive microprobe analysis to determine the extent of the smectite in CRP-3 and the nearby CRP-2 core (also predominantly of Oligocene age), and 2) radiometric dating of the authigenic clays and potential source rock(s) by the 40Ar 39Ar method. Completion of the study will help answer fundamental tectonic an paleoenvironmental questions posed by the CRP project, will help guide future exploration of the Antarctic margin (such as by the ANDRIL, SHALDRIL, and IODP projects), and will impact major Antarctic initiatives such as ANTEC, MARGINS, and STRATAFORM doc15599 none Johannesson Groundwater is the principal source of drinking water in the United States, and represents over 68% of the world s fresh water supply. Therefore, assuring the quality of groundwater for current populations and protecting it from future contamination is of great concern. Groundwater consumption can increase the loading of specific heavy metals to our bodies, and interaction of groundwaters with buried nuclear wastes is considered the most likely release mechanism of these materials to the environment. Understanding the geochemistry of heavy metals in aquifers is critical to developing accurate solute transport models, which can be employed to predict the fate and transport of heavy metals in aquifers over time and under different environmental conditions. We seek to quantify rare earth elements (REE) concentrations and behavior along groundwater flow paths in real aquifers, and develop a coupled groundwater flow and transport model for these heavy metals. The REEs are of interest because of their potential as geochemical tracers of water-rock reactions, and because their chemical similarities to transuranics makes them attractive natural analogs for studying radioactive contaminants in aquifer. Our research objectives are: (1) To elucidate the geochemical behavior of REEs along groundwater flow paths in well characterized aquifers emphasizing their concentrations, fractionation patterns, and speciation. (2) To develop a combined surface and solution complexation model for the REEs that is specific to each aquifer, but can also be broadly applied to other systems. (3) To assemble and implement a coupled groundwater flow and reactive transport simulation model for REEs in groundwater systems. To accomplish these objectives, we will implement an integrated field, laboratory, and numerical modeling study over a period of three years. We will utilize two well characterized aquifers (i.e., Carrizo Sand, Texas; Floridan aquifer, Florida) for the field component of the project. Both are typical drinking water aquifers that represent common, albeit, compositionally different systems. The data generated in the study will be crucial for calibrating reactive transport models for REEs in aquifer, and will improve our general understanding of reactive solute transpor doc15600 none The PI s propose to conduct an in-depth study of the learning of secondary students engaged in making sense of complex system through participating in classroom participatory simulations. In particular, the PI s will study the complimentarity of two forms of reasoning: object based and aggregate reasoning. These forms of reasoning will be used to as resources to in making sense of complexity. To do so, the PI s will extend the functionality of the HubNet Participatory Simulations architecture by building an integrated simulation and modeling environment (ISME). This environment will be built to couple the networked simulations with object based (NetLogo) and aggregate Model-It) modeling tools. Finally, the PI s will extend and refine the Participatory Simulation Activities (PSA) and through iterative curriculum design incorporate the PSA inot curricular units targeted for secondary classrooms doc15601 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for research to investigate fossil plants from the central Transantarctic Mountains toward an understanding of plant diversity and evolution as well as an improved understanding of the paleoenvironmental conditions. The terrestrial rocks of the central Transantarctic Mountains have been a source of outstanding plant fossil discoveries over the last 30 years, including Permian and Triassic permineralized peat, fossil forests silicified in growth position, and compression floras with cuticular preservation. The rare juxtaposition of sites that include many different types of plant preservation (permineralization, compression impression, in situ forests, mummified wood), the exceptional quality of the plant preservation, and the richness of the sites make this area unique in the world. This project centers on the collection of Permian and Triassic plant megafossils from the Beardmore Glacier area. Fieldwork is anticipated in the - field season as part of a mini-camp with other researchers. Collections would include compression floras, especially those from Graphite Peak, and permineralized peats from Skaar Ridge and Fremouw Peak, both in the vicinity of Walcott Neve. These permineralizations represent the rarest form of plant fossil preservation. Since they preserve a three-dimensional record of the flora, they are important in understanding the basic morphology and anatomy of fossil plants, as well as detailing relationships among groups. The additional data provided by the juxtaposition of plant fossils preserved both as permineralizations and compressions have already contributed a great deal to our understanding of late Paleozoic-early Mesozoic plant evolution. This project will address several important phylogenetic hypotheses through further collection of material, coupled with material already processed. The Permian and Triassic represent an important time in plant evolution, and one about which we still know relatively little, especially in the southern hemisphere. The glossopterid seed ferns in the Permian (leaf type, Glossopteris), and the corystosperms in the Triassic (leaf type, Dicroidium) were the dominant plant groups in Gondwana. Since both of these groups bore seeds which were enclosed in some manner, they have been proposed at one time or another as possible ancestors of the flowering plants, and have figured prominently in phylogenetic analyses of seed plants. Only through a combination of permineralizations and compressions is it possible to reveal a complete picture of the form and structure of fossil plants, but more importantly, to understand the position of these plant groups in seed plant evolution. Plants and silicified logs will be collected from the section at Graphite Peak, which is believed to contain the Permian Triassic boundary. These plant fossils will be used to test several hypotheses concerning the floral and paleoclimate changes that may have occurred across this boundary. These include: How early in the Triassic does the Dicroidium flora appear? Does Glossopteris occur with Dicroidium as it does in several other Gondwana floras? Is there any evidence of a megaflora dominated by lycopods, as some of the palynological evidence suggests? Silicified logs have been noted in the lower Buckley Formation (mid-Permian?) at this site and these will be collected and examined for paleoclimate data from tree rings. These can also be compared with tree rings in Late Permian wood (upper Buckley) from nearby Mt. Achernar. The Late Permian has been assumed to be much warmer than Early-Middle Permian and this should be reflected in differences in the width and structure of the tree rings. This project is expected to lead to significant improvements in understanding of both plant evolution and paleoenvironmental conditions during the critical Permian to Triassic interval doc15602 none Clustering technologies enable incremental scaling of Internet server sites at modest cost. It is increasingly common in cluster-based service architectures to distribute incoming request traffic among servers using redirecting intermediaries integrated into the network switching fabric or interposed between the client and servers. However, Internet services and their delivery architectures continue to evolve rapidly. This creates new challenges and opportunities for redirecting intermediaries, and motivates basic research in both the mechanisms for request redirection and the request routing policies for specific service environments. This work will undertake a coordinated research program to expand the potential of redirecting intermediaries as an enabling technology for scalable Internet services. The work focuses primarily on integrating service-aware redirection and request routing as network-level functions in a high-speed switching architecture. The methodology combines simulation, construction of software prototypes, and evaluation of prototypes using synthetic and real workloads. The expected outcomes of the work are: An improved understanding of the role of request routing as an enabler for large-scale Internet services, Simulation results evaluating these policies in large systems, Software prototypes that demonstrate the value of these solutions in practice for Web-based services and network storage services, and Opportunities to train students as participants in this research at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. In summary, the research work has the following basic objectives: 1. Define protocol features essential for redirection at the level of the transport protocol. The switch routes incoming requests on each transport connection to any active server at the discretion of a service-specific routing policy; referred to as Anypoint communication. 2. Implement an Anypoint-capable transport protocol that supports features commonly required by service protocols: reliable communication, ordering and duplicate suppression, and congestion control. 3. Define interfaces and capabilities for service-specific policy modules in Anypoint intermediaries. This defines an architecture for decomposing service protocol implementations into a client, a server, and service module to extend the intermediary. 4. Evaluate the intermediary architecture defined by Anypoint by constructing software prototypes of virtualized service implementations. The initial targets are HTTP 1.1 application services and NFS doc15603 none Geology (42) The Casco Bay project brings research into the classroom. Recent pedagogical studies and reports recommend that undergraduate courses create opportunities for students to do science by engaging in research that provides them with life-long learning skills in problem-solving, quantitative reasoning, and communication. In essence, science and the skills learned by doing science are integral to everyone s life, regardless of background or (future) occupation. The Casco Bay region of Maine is readily accessible to Bowdoin College and it lends itself to multi-disciplinary studies, because the region includes felsic and mafic volcanics, pelites, and limestones that have undergone deformation and been variably metamorphosed from chlorite to sillimanite grade. Research on the Casco Bay region is being integrated into undergraduate geology courses and student thesis research. This project adapts and implements the successful practices of other educators by using regional geologic studies and by integrating research into courses. The Casco Bay project incorporates petrological, geochemical, structural, and geochronologic research in four undergraduate courses: Introduction to Physical Geology, Structural Geology, Igneous and Metamorphic Petrology, and Mountain Belts. Data are shared between students using a Geographical Information System s (GIS) database. Through the project, students become familiar with the geology that surrounds them and engage cooperatively in multidisciplinary research. In so doing, students make connections between geologic disciplines, recognize the benefit of approaching problems from different angles, and improve their field, quantitative, and communication skills doc15604 none This project seeks to examine what it is about mathematics that elementary teachers need to know and appreciate, and where and how in teaching such understandings and appreciation are used. Two enduring questions are at the heart of contemporary efforts to improve mathematics instruction: o What mathematical knowledge is entailed by the work of teaching mathematics? o Where and how is mathematical knowledge entailed, and how would it be useful and used, within the work of teaching mathematics? How is mathematical knowledge intertwined with other knowledge and sensibilities in the course of that work? Within the term knowledge the project includes content (e.g., topics, theorems, definitions, algorithms) as well as practices and sensibilities. What it might mean, and what it would take, for elementary teachers to teach in ways that are respectful of both students and the mathematics. What could it mean to have mathematical integrity as an elementary teacher? The project will also seek to locate the mathematical aspects of elementary teaching -- the tasks, moments, and challenges -- where what a teacher can hear, see, do, and say depends on mathematical knowledge. Rather than asking these questions by examining curriculum frameworks or standards of what teachers are supposed to teach, the project works in and from practice. Our investigations take us first into investigations of the practices of teaching and learning mathematics, as well as into the practices of mathematics itself. Central to this work is a large longitudinal NSF-funded database, documenting an entire year of Ball s third grade public school teaching during -90. By analyzing these detailed records of practice, we seek to develop theory of mathematical knowledge as it is entailed by and used in teaching, to consider instruction over time, examining the work of teachers in developing mathematics and their students across the school year. Products of this project will include detailed analyses of the mathematics entailed in elementary school teaching, as well as grounded theory about the nature and uses of mathematical content, practice, and sensibilities in the day-to-day work of teaching. Written products will target different audiences with interests in this work doc15605 none Zreda This proof-of-concept project will provide data to test the feasibility of a new method for soil water determination. The method is based on thermalization of cosmic-ray neutrons by hydrogen atoms present within water molecules in soils. It has several appealing characteristics: it is noninvasive (measurements can be conducted above the ground); it measures moisture at an intermediate scale; it may be scalable by changing instrument position and or configuration; it can be easily automated for long-tern unsupervised monitoring; and it is safe (it does not use an artificial source of neutrons). The proposed work will involve measurements and modeling of the intensity of cosmic-ray neutrons under controlled water content conditions. The specific objectives of the proposed research are: (1) to identify and quantify any trends in neutron intensity with water content and with chemistry of soil; (2) to quantify the effect of water layer placed on top of soil on the neutron intensity; and (3) to determine what the measurement volume is and whether it can be controlled by instrument position above the ground or by instrument configuration doc15606 none In the past several years, combinatorial techniques have revolutionized certain aspects of chemistry. One of the limiting factors in the implementation of this state-of-the-art approach is the need for high-throughput screening techniques. This proposal is adapting several procedures from the educational and commercial literature and implementing them into the undergraduate chemistry curriculum using a 96-well plate reader. Students are monitoring protein folding, conducting enzyme kinetics, screening libraries for phosphatase inhibitors, and developing an ELISA technique with the microtiter plate reader. These activities are introducing students to high-throughput, microtiter plate techniques, providing information for a statistical analysis of a large pool of data, and increasing the capacity for research-based and discovery laboratory activities. In addition, the library screening activity is being adapted for use in an outreach program with minority elementary and middle-school students. The impact of this proposal is being evaluated by student performance in both the laboratory and classroom portion of the course via test and survey questions. Dissemination of the results of this proposal will be presented through a national CUR workshop, publications, and outreach activities doc15607 none Subduction of active oceanic spreading ridges has been an important process in Cenozoic tectonics of the Pacific Basin. The Chile Ridge, the divergent Nazca-Antarctic plate boundary, is currently subducting beneath continental South America along the Chile Trench at ~46.5S, forming a plate triple junction in the vicinity of the Taitao Peninsula. Chile Ridge spreading rate and morphology, and the history of ridge subduction, are well-known: at least three southern Chile Ridge segments have subducted beneath South America 14, 6 and 3 m.y. ago. The current seismicity of the southern portion of subducting Nazca lithosphere defines the dip of the Nazca slab north of the Nazca-Antarctica-South America triple junction, albeit poorly. However, south of the triple junction seismicity diminishes markedly and Antarctic plate slab dip is not known. Nonetheless, given spreading and convergence histories, and knowledge of the motion of South America with respect to the deep mantle, the morphology of the subducted Nazca and Antarctic labs and their associated spreading ridge can be predicted. Thus, the loci and expected shapes of gaps formed between actively spreading subducted portions of the Nazca and Antarctic slabs - slab windows can be determined. Implicit in the slab window idea is the assumption that spreading between the two sides of the subducted ridge continues after subduction, but that no new lithosphere is formed after subduction, leading to formation of a progressively widening gap and asthenospheric mantle flow between the two edges of the former ridge. Preliminary results from studies of shear wave splitting and seismic attenuation in the Chile Ridge subduction region indicate that the upper mantle flow field beneath South America may be highly variable. Deployment of some 50 passive-source seismic stations in the Chile Margin triple junction area offers the prospect of direct observation of a slab window and the possibility that the form and function of the mantle flow field in this geodynamically unique tectonic regime can be determined. Studies of crust and upper mantle structure, mantle anisotropy, seismic attenuation, and tectonics of the Nazca-Antarctica-South America triple junction region are designed to yield the structure of slab gaps and mantle flow through those gaps. Targeted tests of mantle responses to the ridge subduction include establishment of the presence and thickness of mantle asthenosphere beneath the study region, determination of potentially heterogeneous crustal and lithospheric structure due to slab window magmatic processes and enhanced tectonic erosion, observations of mantle flow directions in the vicinity of the gaps, and estimation of seismic attenuation and associated inferences concerning mantle temperature fields doc15608 none Physics (13) With its capability of visualization and manipulation at atomic and molecular levels, scanning probe microscopy (SPM) has become one of the most important advancements in science and technology in the past decade. This project is adapting and integrating SPM into a two-semester Electron Microscopy (EM) course that has been taught at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC). The addition of SPM instrumentation to the course gives students a broader view and experience on the cutting edge microscopy technologies. The integration also allows a more efficient approach in teaching the subject, because the course covers a wider range of techniques used in microscopy and emphasizes the application of these techniques in various fields. The improvement of the course is being achieved by introducing, in addition to the existing hands-on experiments on EM, two verification-type experiments using SPM to visualize atomic structures on well-defined crystalline surfaces in the first semester. This is followed, in the second semester, by three inquiry-based experiments that involve both SPM and EM. The improved course enhances the interdisciplinary education in science, mathematics, engineering and technology at UMKC doc15609 none Considerable interest and debate surround the problem of uplift and geomorphic evolution of areas undergoing arc magmatism and arc accretion to continental margins. The Sierra Nevada of California, a deeply eroded remnant of a late Mesozoic magmatic arc, has conventionally been thought to have been uplifted in late Cenozoic time, however this conclusion has been challenged by low temperature geochronologic studies suggesting high relief as early as late Mesozoic. This project will measure river incision rates in the Sierra Nevada by comparing elevations of dated cave deposits with present day river elevations. These data will be incorporated in a model of Sierra landscape evolution in order to provide a test of the competing mutually exclusive hypotheses. Results will be of considerable regional importance and have clear implications on broader issues doc15610 none Engineering - Electrical (55) The project develops an integrated laboratory for state-of-the-art circuit design and implementation using a CAD system and printed circuit board (PCB) prototyping. It is based on similar programs at several other universities. The laboratory is being integrated into the sequence of digital design courses so that the material is introduced gradually. The evaluation plan compares the complexity, performance, design time, and packaging of past senior design projects to those developed using the new laboratory. In addition they will use course evaluation, senior exit interviews, and alumni surveys to evaluate the usefulness of the CAD and PCB training. They plan to post laboratory manuals and examples of design projects on the web and to publish noteworthy outcomes with journal and conference publications doc15611 none This proposed work is the continued operation of the Antarctic Meteorological Research Center (AMRC) for three years. AMRC is a meteorological data acquisition and management system with nodes at McMurdo Station and at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The system is a resource and archive for meteorological research and a test bed for improving operational synoptic forecasting. Its basis is a computer-based system for organizing, manipulating, and integrating antarctic environmental data, developed by the University of Wisconsin. It captures the flow of meteorological information from polar orbiting satellites, automatic weather stations, operational station synoptic observations, and research project data, producing a mosaic of antarctic satellite images on an operational basis. It also receives environmental data products, such as weather forecasts, from outside Antarctica, and acts as a repository for existing archived databases. The AMRC provides customized weather and climate information for a variety of antarctic users, including aircraft and ship operations of the US Antarctic Program. Currently the AMRC produces the Antarctic Composite Infrared Image, a mosaic of images from four geostationary and three polar-orbiting satellites, which is used for both forecasting and research purposes doc15612 none The future high-speed networks are expected to support a variety of services such as data, voice, image, and video with diverse traffic flow characteristics and Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements. Developing a framework for the design, control and management of wide area packet networks which can effciently support such QoS requirements is a fundamental challenge. Conventional frameworks for the teletraffic analysis of networks and QoS guarantees are either deterministic or probabilistic. In the deterministic approach, the worst-case traffic envelopes are used. This most likely will lead to conservative resource allocation policies and inefficient usage of the network resources. In the standard probabilistic frameworks, the traffic is usually modeled as a variant of Poisson process, e.g., MMPP, MAP, etc. Such models are amenable to traditional teletraffic analysis but only capture simple and limited correlation structures in the data. The researchers propose to significantly expand the analytical methodology in solving complex teletraffic problems arising in modern computer and communications networks. Their approach which is rooted in classical ballot theorem handles a large class of arrival processes including the standard Markovian processes, general periodic processes, processes described by time-series (auto-regressive and moving average), or even general processes described by the joint distribution of number of arrivals in equally-spaced non-overlapping discrete intervals. Special attention will be paid in deriving algorithmic solutions which are numerically robust and efficient even when the system utilization is high. The researchers proposed approach is unifying, it avoids root-findings, and unlike the matrix analytical approach or recently introduced state-space spectral decomposition method, it does not involve potentially expensive iterations. Further, it is transform-free and may provide a simple form of solution amenable for further analytical studies such as tail behavior or asymptotic analysis. The researchers general arrivals processes could be used for the end-to-end performance analysis once the departure process from a network node is appropriately approximated or probabilistically bounded. Since they are not limited to traditional Markovian models, such an approach appears to be viable. The researchers propose to implement our general algorithms and make them available as a scientific package to the research community doc15613 none Habits of mind that support the analysis, evaluation, synthesis, and integration of information are increasingly important in the information age. This project focuses on how, when, and why such habits of mind might be acquired and developed. Prior research has shown that inquiry-based learning environments can support deeper understanding of science content, but there is little systematic work thus far on the process by which students achieve deep understanding in these contexts. Even less is known about how to support the development of a critical stance. A critical stance supports the active evaluation of information and the detection of inconsistencies that in turn help direct deeper processing of information through explanatory reasoning. This project explores the role of learning environment and task in supporting a critical stance toward scientific information. We go beyond current efforts by employing a variety of processing measures that tap on-line representation and understanding, including verbal reports (gathered by having students think out loud as they read and write) and eye movement patterns (monitoring the fixations of the eye on different parts of texts as students read). In combination, these measures along with a number of comprehension measures will provide a particularly rich set of data as we pursue two lines of research. Our goal in the first line of research is to examine when people develop a critical stance toward scientific subject matter, and the specific behaviors that promote better understanding. In the second set of studies, we are interested in whether the adoption of a critical stance toward scientific subject matter can be supported through a computerized collaborative tutor. These studies represent an important first step in identifying the cognitive processes that are enabling understanding as students read scientific web pages, and the contexts and tasks that will allow novice readers to become critical consumers of scientific communications in both formal and informal learning contexts doc15455 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for research on magmatic processes that are active in the Mount Erebus volcanic system. Magmatism is one of the most fundamental dynamic processes of planetary interiors, yet our knowledge of the time-dependent parameters of basalt petrogenesis (e.g. solid mantle upwelling rate, melting rate, melt transport rate, magma storage time, crystallization rate, magma recharge rate) is quite limited. Magmatic processes such as melting, fractional crystallization and magma chamber replenishment can fractionate parent daughter ratios of U-decay series isotopes and can thus create isotopic disequilibrium. Because the half-lives of the U-series isotopes are comparable to the time-scales of these processes, measurement of this isotopic disequilibrium in volcanic glasses and mineral separates provides constraints on the duration and rates of magmatic processes. The objectives of this project are to assemble a unique geochemical-isotopic-petrological data set, and use this to evaluate the rate dependent parameters of magma genesis, evolution, and degassing at Mt Erebus, Antarctica. Mt. Erebus, the most active volcano in Antarctica, contains a persistent convecting and degassing anorthoclase phonolite lava lake that has 2-6 small Strombolian eruptions daily. The lava lake provides a unique window into the magmatic system and offers a rare opportunity to examine processes occurring deep within the convecting magma body. The lava lake is continuously degassing and on-going work is focused on sampling and measuring the gas compositions and emission rates. The small Strombolian eruptions conveniently eject volcanic bombs thus providing pristine samples of the magma containing large, well-formed anorthoclase crystals. These bombs, plus older radiometrically-dated lava flows around the summit of Mt. Erebus provide a unique opportunity to investigate the timing of fundamental magmatic and volcanological processes. Through measurement of U-series isotopes (as well as isotopic and major- and trace-element constraints) from the known-age lavas, recently erupted bombs, and gases collected from Mt Erebus, this project will examine the timescales of: 1) magma genesis and melt transport from the mantle; 2) magma evolution and crystallization processes during magma storage in the crust; and 3) magma degassing and recharge rates into the current erupting magma chamber. This integrated study of gases and associated magma using U-series isotopes should lead to a major improvement in understanding of the Erebus system, and might yield a significant new insights about the whole magmatic system from magma formation by partial melting in the mantle through its evolution and finally to it degassing and open system behavior in the lava lake doc15615 none Polar Programs, provides funds for a study of sediment cores from the McMurdo Dry Valley lakes. The Dry Valley lakes have a long history of fluctuating levels reflecting regional climate change. The history of lake level fluctuations is generally known from the LGM to early Holocene through 14C dates of buried organic matter in paleolake deposits. However, the youngest paleolake deposits available are between to 14C yr BP, suggesting that lake levels were at or below current levels for much of the Holocene. Thus, any information about the lake history and climate controls for the Holocene is largely contained in bottom sediments. This project will attempt to extract paleoclimatic information from sediment cores for a series of closed-basin dry valley lakes under study by the McMurdo LTER site. This work involves multiple approaches to dating the sediments and use of several climate proxy approaches to extract century to millennial scale chronologies from Antarctic lacustrine deposits. This research uses knowledge on lake processes gained over the past eight years by the LTER to calibrate climate proxies from lake sediments. Proxies for lake depth and ice thickness, which are largely controlled by summer climate, are the focus of this work. This study focuses on four key questions: 1. How sensitively do dry valley lake sediments record Holocene environmental and climate variability? 2. What is the paleoclimatic variability in the dry valleys on a century and millennial scale throughout the Holocene? Especially, is the yr evaporative event unique, or are there other such events in the record? 3. Does a mid-Holocene ( to yr BP) climate shift occur in the dry valleys as documented elsewhere in the polar regions? 4. Is there evidence, in the dry valley lake record of the yr Holocene periodicities recently recognized in the Taylor Dome record? Core collection will be performed with LTER support using a state-of-the-art percussion piston corer system that has been used successfully to retrieve long cores (10 to 20 m) from other remote polar locations. Analyses to be done include algal pigments, biogenic silica, basic geochemistry, organic and inorganic carbon and nitrogen content, stable isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, carbonate phases, salt content and mineralogy, and grain size. In addition this project will pursue a multi-chronometer approach to assess the age of the core through optically-stimulated luminescence, 226Ra 230Th , 230Th 234U, and 14C techniques. New experimentation with U-series techniques will be performed to allow for greater precision in the dry valley lake sediments. Compound specific isotopes and lipid biomarkers , which are powerful tools for inferring past lake conditions, will also be assessed. Combined, these analyses will provide a new century to millennial scale continuous record of the Holocene climate change in the Ross Sea region doc15616 none Nochetto This US-Argentina award will fund a collaborative project between Dr. Ricardo H. Nochetto, University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP), in collaboration with Drs. Hugo A. Aimar and Eleonar O. Harboure, Instituto de Matematica Aplicada del Litoral (IMAL), Universidad Nacional del Litoral in Santa Fe, Argentina, and Dr. Carlos Cabrelli of FCEyN, Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina. Their research is a mix of classical and functional analysis as applied to the practical, numerical solution of partial differential equations (PDE). The problem is one of approximating solutions by means of mathematical objects that can be computed. This project will build upon the strengths and complementary interests of each group, to collaborate on the topics of harmonic and numerical analysis. UMCP has expertise on adaptivity for linear and nonlinear PDE as well as basic wavelet theory and applications. The IMAL has expertise on wavelet applications to PDE and Besov spaces. They will facilitate an ongoing collaboration by bringing both sides together for six visits over two years. In addition, they will include advanced graduate students and postdocs. This pairing will promote the cross-fertilization of ideas and techniques between the two research areas, institutions and countries doc15617 none Kohlstedt The investigators propose a laboratory investigation of the high-temperature, high-pressure rheological properties of clinopyroxene, an important mineral in both the lower crust and the upper mantle. Because even a small amount of water dramatically weakens nominally anhydrous minerals, emphasis will be given to the contribution of water to the viscosity of aggregates of clinopyroxene and clinopyroxene + olivine. In most studies, the water-weakening effect has been treated as an on-off process - if water is present, rocks are weak; if water is absent, rocks are strong. Recently, however, the investigators demonstrated that the viscosity of olivine-dominated aggregates is inversely proportional to OH concentration. The proposed research builds on this observation and on recently reported experiments on the deformation behavior of dry clinopyroxenite. Water concentration will be determined by micro-FTIR analysis, and deformation-produced microstructures will be analyzed using optical and electron microscopy. In order to extrapolate from laboratory to geologic conditions, a major goal will be to determine detailed flow laws describing viscosity as a function of water concentration as well as differential stress, grain size and temperature in both the diffusion creep and the dislocation creep regime. Recent analyses of the depth of earthquakes in continents and of the correlation between crustal thickness and elastic thickness have led to the conclusion that the lower crust, at least in some places, is stronger than the uppermost mantle. This point of view is contrary to most models of continental rheology such as the jelly-sandwich construction in which a weak lower crust lies between a strong upper crust and a strong upper mantle. Many models take the strength of the continental lithosphere to lie in the mantle beneath the Moho. Certainly, the relative strength of lower crust and upper mantle will depend on the presence or absence of water. Little is known about the strength of clinopyroxene relative to that of olivine, even when the two phases are present in the same rock as in the mantle. Our recent experiments suggest that these two minerals have similar strengths under anhydrous conditions but that clinopyroxene is weaker when water is present. A careful investigation of the dependence of viscosity on water concentration for aggregates of clinopyroxene and clinopyroxene + olivine is critical in order to address these issues and to model the dynamical behavior of the lower crust and upper mantle doc15412 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for a study to investigate the tectonic development of the southwestern Ross Sea region. Displacements between East and West Antarctica have long been proposed based on global plate circuits, apparent hot spot motions, interpretations of seafloor magnetic anomalies, paleomagnetism, and on geologic grounds. Such motions require plate boundaries crossing Antarctica, yet these boundaries have never been explicitly defined. This project will attempt to delineate the late Cenozoic - active boundary between East and West Antarctica along the Terror Rift in the western Ross Sea, where young structures have been identified, continuity between active extension and intracontinental structures can be established, and where accessibility via ship will allow new key data sets to be acquired. We will use multi-source marine and airborne geophysical data to map the fault patterns and volcanic structure along the eastern margin of the Terror Rift. The orientations of volcanic fissures and seamount alignments on the seafloor will be mapped using multibeam bathymetry. The volcanic alignments will show the regional extension or shear directions across the Terror Rift and the orientations of associated crustal stresses. Swath bathymetry and single channel seismic data will be used to document neotectonic fault patterns and the eastern limit of recent faulting. Delineation of neotectonic fault patterns will demonstrate whether the eastern margin of the Terror Rift forms a continuous boundary and whether the rift itself can be linked with postulated strike-slip faults in the northwestern Ross Sea. Seafloor findings from this project will be combined with fault kinematic and stress field determinations from the surrounding volcanic islands and the Transantarctic Mountains. The integrated results will test the propositions that the eastern boundary of the Terror Rift forms the limit of the major, late Cenozoic -active structures through the Ross Sea and that Terror Rift kinematics involve dextral transtension linked to the right-lateral strike-slip faulting to the north. These results will help constrain the kinematic and dynamic links between the West Antarctic rift system and Southern Ocean structures and any related motions between East and West Antarctica. In the first year, a collaborative structural analysis of existing multichannel and single channel seismic profiles and aeromagnetic data over the Terror Rift will be conducted. The location of volcanic vents or fissures and any fault scarps on the sea floor will be identified and a preliminary interpretation of the age and kinematics of deformation in the Terror Rift will be produced. Late in the second year, a one-month cruise on RVIB N.B. Palmer will carry out multibeam bathymetric and sidescan sonar mapping of selected portions of the seafloor of Terror Rift. Gravity, magnetics, seismic reflection and Bathy 3.5 kHz sub-bottom profile data will also be collected across the rift. In the third year, we will use these multisource data to map the orientations and forms of volcanic bodies and the extent and geometry of neotectonic faulting associated with the Terror Rift. The project will: 1) complete a map of neotectonic faults and volcanic structures in the Terror Rift; 2) interpret the structural pattern to derive the motions and stresses associated with development of the rift; 3) compare Terror Rift structures with faults and lineaments mapped in the Transantarctic Mountains to improve age constraints on the structures; and 4) integrate the late Cenozoic structural interpretations from the western Ross Sea with Southern Ocean plate boundary kinematics doc15619 none Basalt geochemistry records information about mantle dynamics, indicating that there are at least five reservoirs in the mantle. However, the dynamical meaning of such reservoirs is ill-constrained. Efforts to reconcile the full range of types of observational data have recently given rise to several new geodynamic models that include layers of different composition in the mantle. The investigators will evaluate these and related models, by using numerical models of thermo-chemical convection in the mantle to determine the geochemical signatures predicted by different dynamical models. Simulations will include tracers to represent various chemical species. Partial melting processes at ridges are taken into account, yielding fractionation between oceanic crust and lithosphere, and outgassing into the atmosphere. These processes have not been included in previous large-scale, fully dynamic, convective models. The simulations keep track of ancient oceanic crust, and include intrinsic density variations between eclogite and peridotite, as well as inhomogeneous heat production rates. The investigators will address the ability of their different models to reproduce some of the features of basalt, and to be in agreement with geodynamical observations such as the heat flow. They will also test the sensitivity of the results to petrologic and geodynamic parameters doc15620 none Ihinger University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire The primary objective of this proposal is to use H-species defects, incorporated into hydrothermal crystals during crystallization, to determine the relative growth rates of different crystallographic faces, which in turn may be used to derive the absolute time for in situ crystal growth, with appropriate experimental calibration. Quartz and kyanite will be investigated. The timescales involved in crystal growth processes are poorly constrained and the absolute time involved in the growth of crystals from either igneous or metamorphic environments is not known. This is a first order problem in petrology and few new approaches have been proposed to attack it. Although the theory describing reaction kinetics in the crustal environment is sound, few quantitative studies exist and the mechanisms responsible for the variation in size and shape of individual crystal faces are still not well understood. Published data on natural euhedral quartz crystals obatined in our laboratory allow quantitative determination of the relative growth rates of their growth faces throughout their growth histories. The concentration of water molecules and metal hydroxyl impurities incorporated into the crystal structure at the time of growth serve as speedometers that directly reflect the growth kinetics of active growth faces. These measurements provide a new means of imaging the shape and absolute dimensions of crystals throughout their growth history. A partnership with commercial quartz production company will provide synthetic samples for experimental calibration of fluid parameters, which are necessary to quantitatively interpret H-defect data from natural hydrothermal quartz crystals doc15621 none This award provides one year of support to use newly developed technology in which an ice-core melter is coupled with both an Inductively Coupled Plasma - Mass Spectrometer (ICP-MS) and a traditional Continuous Flow Analysis (CFA) system, to measure a continuous time series of chemical and trace element deposition on the Siple Dome ice core from West Antarctica. A coupled ice-core melter, ICP-MS, and CFA system will be used to measure concentrations of a number of elements, isotopes and chemical species at very high depth resolution (~2-cm) in the top 54 m of the Siple Dome A-core. Pilot data from analyses of ~6 m from the nearby but much lower accumulation J-core site at Siple Dome, together with more extensive results from Summit, Greenland, indicate that it will be possible to obtain exactly co-registered, high-quality records of at least 12 seasonally varying elements (sodium, magnesium, aluminum, potassium, calcium, iron, manganese, rubidium, strontium, zirconium, barium, lead) and three other chemical species and ions (ammonium, nitrate, calcium ion) with this system. Under this proposed research, we will also add continuous measurements of sulfate to our system. Because more than sufficient core from Siple Dome for these depths is archived at the National Ice Core Laboratory, the proposed research will require no fieldwork. The continuous, very high-resolution, ~350-y record of these elemental tracers will enhance the value of previous chemical and isotopic measurements that have been made on the Siple Dome core and will be particularly valuable for comparisons between ice-core proxies and modern instrumental data related to El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) as well as for validation of model simulations of atmospheric circulation. These data, and the expertise gained through this research, will be invaluable when this novel chemical analysis technology is eventually applied to deep ice-core records for the study of rapid climate-change events doc15622 none Travel funds are provided for Donna Nelson at the University of Oklahoma and five of her undergraduate students to travel and attend the August National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Chicago, IL. Donna Nelson is an invited speaker for two talks and the students will have two poster presentations. The subject of these talks and presentations is the diversity of the faculties of the Top 50 chemistry departments doc15623 none Sturchio Knowledge of the subsurface residence time of groundwater has a multitude of important applications, both scientific and utilitarian. The determination of groundwater residence time is fraught with complexity because of uncertainties in aquifer properties, initial conditions, and hydrodynamic history, as well as possible subsurface production or water-rock interactions involving the isotopic or chemical tracers used for residence time determination. Although there are a number of well-developed tools for dating relatively young groundwaters, there is a paucity of tools for dating relatively old groundwaters. The most commonly used tool for dating old groundwater is accelerator-based mass spectrometry of 36Cl, yet this approach is compromised by the temporal and geographic variability of the initial 36Cl Cl ratio as well as the locally variable magnitude of subsurface 36CI production. A more ideal tool than 36Cl,, yet one which has been neglected because of analytical difficulties, is 81Kr Resent developments in magnetooptical atom-trapping methods have made accurate, precise 81Kr analysis possible by using a benchtop-scale apparatus. We propose to use the prototype instrument for atom-trap trace analysis (developed at Argonne National Laboratory by Z. T. Lu and colleagues) to perform the first 81Kr measurements of very old groundwater from the Nubian Aquifer of the Westem Desert of Egypt. The Kr will be extracted and purified from samples of 8,000-10,000 liters each by B. Lehmann and colleagues of the University of Bem who have developed large-sample noble gas extraction methods for 239Ar analysis of ground waters. These 81Kr data will be obtained in conjunction with a suite of other chemical and isotopic data (including solute ion and dissolved gas analyses; stable isotopes of H, C, N, 0, S, and Cl; and tritium, radiocarbon, and radiochlorine) and used to address fundamental questions about groundwater dating and the history of the Nubian aquifer doc15590 none One of the major recent advances in reconstructing past plate configurations was the recognition that the Precordillera Terrane of Argentina was derived (rifted from) the Ouachita embayment of present day North America, thus providing a rare example of knowing exactly where an exotic terrane came from. However, the timing of the rifting and the timing of the subsequent collision with Gondwana, critical to Paleozoic reconstructions is problematic. Previously the timing of the collision was thought to Middle to Late Ordovician based on when the carbonate platform drowned, presumably by close approach and subduction of the continental margin. However, more recent work suggests that the drowning of the carbonate platform was due to rift-related subsidence, and if correct, dates the rifting from North America, not the subsequent collision with Gondwana. This project aims to date the collision by radiometric methods from rocks in the exposed suture zone, including magmatic bodies that intruded during and after the several phases or pulses of collision-related deformation. Results will clarify the arrival time of the Precordillera, data that will be critical in establishing a Paleozoic plate position history doc15625 none Engineering - Civil (54) The objective of this proposal is to introduce unsaturated flow phenomena in soils in undergraduate civil engineering education at the Colorado School of Mines by introducing unsaturated flow phenomena in soils. The project responds to a pressing need in civil engineering practice by filling the gap between current textbooks and engineering practice. Over the last two decades, geotechnical engineering, a sub-discipline of civil engineering, has experienced radical changes. Traditional foundation design methodology, which is based strictly on soils under saturated conditions, is now being supplemented with the considerations of unsaturated soil conditions in many structural foundation problems such as construction and operation of dams, natural slope stability and landslide analysis, underground waste containments, and expansive soil damages to houses and civil infrastructures. As a result, today s geotechnical engineers must deal with soils under unsaturated conditions in engineering practice; a subject typically excluded from many formal undergraduate education curricula. Furthermore, all soil mechanics and laboratory textbooks currently in use at the undergraduate level in the United States cover little, if any, material on unsaturated flow phenomena in soils. The fundamental concepts of unsaturated flow phenomena in soils are being incorporated into Soil Mechanics and Soil Mechanics Laboratory courses by adapting and implementing two experiments which illustrate unsaturated flow phenomena in soils. These experiments consist of Soil Water- Suction Characteristic Curve Test for quantifying dependency of soil suction head on water content, and Coefficient of Permeability Test for quantifying dependency of soil permeability on water content. Comprehension of the working principles for both experiments is critical for the full understanding of unsaturated flow in soils, and application of these principles to structural foundation design and other pressing geotechnical engineering problems doc15626 none Stucki Clays, which are ubiquitous in natural sediments, soils, and other geologic formations, affect the fate of such chemicals as pesticides, organic contaminants, heavy metals, and plant nutrients in the environment. This effect is strongly correlated with the surface chemistry of the clay minerals, which is influenced by the charge or oxidation state of iron (Fe) in their crystal structures. The long-range goal of our work is to understand the role of iron on these surface reactions, and the specific objective of this proposed study is to identify the underlying cause(s) for the effects of structural Fe oxidation state on clay surface properties, and to characterize the nature of the resulting interactions with surface species such as water, metals, and organic compounds. The central hypothesis for the proposed research is that reduction of structural Fe by either biotic (bacterial reduction) or abiotic (chemical reduction) means, not only yields a new redox potential and electrostatic charge at the clay surface, but invokes in situ changes in crystal site occupancy of structural Fe and introduces structural defects, which, in turn, further alter the clay surface chemistry. We plan to test our central hypothesis and accomplish the overall objective of this proposed study by pursuing the following four specific aims: (a) Determine the site occupancy of structural Fe in mixed Al-Fe-Mg dioctahedral smectite clay minerals before and after Fe reduction; (b) Identify the causal relationship between changes in Fe oxidation state and surface chemistry; (c) Determine the reversibility of redox processes; and (d) Characterize the relative effects of bacteria versus inorganic reducing agents on clay properties. The fundamental understanding to be gained during this study will provide a powerful tool for using redox behavior to predict and control chemical reactions at clay surfaces doc15627 none Detachment faults are large-scale extensional structures that are responsible for much of the extension observed in the crust, however the origin and evolution of detachments are poorly understood and controversial. This project will attempt to address the mechanisms and rates of detachment and associated basin development in an active modern example - the Cordillera Blanca detachment fault in the Peruvian Andes. The work centers on the temporal and spatial evolution of the supradetachment basin, the denudation history of the uplifted footwall, and the Quaternary kinematic history. Results will be incorporated into tectonic models for detachment faulting in oceanic-continental convergent settings, which are expected to be of general application in this tectonic setting doc15583 none Constraining Tertiary Temperatures, Salinities, and Ocean Chemistry: An Isotopic and Trace-metal Study of Serially-sampled Mollusks E. Grossman, Y. Rosenthal, and C. Lear The Tertiary Period (55 to ~2 million years ago) presents our best opportunity to study the transition from an ice-free greenhouse world to today s icehouse world and to understand the response of present and future climates to high atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. This proposal will take advantage of the superb fossil record of the US Gulf Coast and two independent measures of ancient ocean temperatures, oxygen isotope (18O 16O) and strontium calcium ratios in fossil shells, to characterize this dramatic change in global climate. These results will address a longstanding controversy of early Tertiary climate, the cool tropics paradox . Oxygen isotope measurements of planktonic foraminifera indicate cool tropical sea-surface temperatures for a time when high latitudes experienced unusual warmth. This contradicts model simulations of greenhouse world climates that predict that both polar and tropical temperatures must have been significantly warmer than today. A common explanation for the discrepancy is that paleotemperature data from planktonic foraminifera have been modified by post-depositional chemical alteration (diagenesis). By analyzing pristine mollusk shells, this study will obviate this limitation of previous studies. A second objective is to improve our understanding of the nature and causes of the climatic transition near the Eocene-Oligocene boundary associated with rapid Antarctic glaciation and faunal overturn. Recent work using oxygen isotope ratios in fish otoliths from US Gulf Coastal Plain sediments has linked faunal overturn to increased seasonality, in particular colder winters in this region. However, interpretation of such data is limited by poorly constrained estimates of global ice volume and local salinity variations. This study will use paired measurements of mollusk Sr Ca and 18O 16O to examine changes in low-latitude sea-surface temperatures and seasonality across this event. Lastly, modern mollusk samples will be collected with temperature, salinity, and seawater 18O 16O data from various sites in the Gulf of Mexico and Eilat, Israel. These samples will be analyzed for stable isotopes and trace metals (especially Sr Ca) to calibrate trace metal-temperature relations doc15629 none This project will operate a small optical telescope at the South Pole to search for and characterize extrasolar planets, by continuously following a southern Galactic star field with a Charge-Coupled Device photometer, searching for the periodic dimming that occurs as a planet transits its parent star. The recent discovery of many close-in giant exoplanets has expanded our knowledge of other planetary systems and has demonstrated how different such systems can be from the Solar System. However their discovery poses important questions about the effects of such planets on the presence of habitable planets. To date only one extrasolar planet - HD b - has been observed to transit a parent star. This project has the potential for a tenfold increase in the number of extrasolar planets for which transits are observed. The South Pole is an excellent location to detect such planets because of the long winter night, during which randomly-phased transits can most efficiently be detected. Also, the constant altitude of a stellar field at the pole avoids large daily atmospheric extinction variations allowing for higher photometric precision and a search for smaller planets. Specifically, the project will establish an automated planet-finding photometer at the South Pole for two austral winter seasons. Based on the statistics of planetary systems of nearby solar-type stars, about ten to fifteen extrasolar planets should be detected. There is also a possibility of finding lower mass planets that have not previously been detectable. Combining the transit results (which give the size of the planet) with Doppler velocity measurements (which give the planetary mass) will allow determination of the planetary density, thus indicating whether the planet is a gas giant like Jupiter, an ice giant like Uranus, or a rocky planet like the Earth. These data will provide basic observational information that is vital to theoretical models of planetary structure and formation doc15630 none The aim of this work is to obtain higher resolution, more precise source parameters of small earthquakes than are currently available. To accomplish this, the highest quality existing data are being analyzed using techniques that compare closely located earthquakes to improve the precision of both relative and absolute source parameters. Small earthquakes do not in themselves present a major natural hazard, but they provide much of our understanding of the source processes of larger damaging earthquakes. Many models of earthquake nucleation and rupture dynamics, and earthquake triggering require assumptions about small-scale behavior, for example, whether there is a minimum sized earthquake or nucleation patch. Observations to constrain these parameters are therefore critical. To date, studies using shallow and deep borehole recordings containing high frequency signals have shown that the static stress drop is constant down to the smallest earthquakes we can measure, but the scatter and uncertainty in the individual measurements are large. Measurements of seismic energy, which are fundamental to understanding the rupture dynamics have even larger uncertainties. These uncertainties severely limit the use of such observations to constrain models of the earthquake source process. In this study, new techniques are used that take advantage of closely-located earthquakes to obtain significantly more precise source parameters of small earthquakes than in earlier studies. The data analyzed first are from the deep borehole recording at Cajon Pass, California where local earthquakes were recorded with seismometers between 1 and 3 km depth over a total of four years. These seismograms remain the cleanest, least attenuated recordings of small earthquakes available. In previous work source parameters were estimated for some of the earthquakes recorded at 2.5 km depth, simply to address long standing scaling controversies. Since then, the importance of more precise measurements of energy and stress drops, as well as quantification of the onset of the seismograms has become clear for solving fundamental questions about earthquake rupture processes. Earthquakes recorded by the borehole network at Parkfield, California, (where there is considerable controversy about small earthquake stress drops), and a high frequency network at Acu Dam, northeastern Brazil, installed to monitor reservoir-induced seismicity, are also being analyzed for comparison. At each location, the catalogues are searched for similar earthquakes, including foreshocks and aftershocks. The waveforms and spectra of the clustered earthquakes, which can be assumed to have identical path effects, are compared to obtain high-resolution relative source parameters. Detailed study of the onsets of the waveforms is also performed to investigate the earthquake nucleation process and determine, for example, whether it differs with magnitude. These measurements are then used to improve the constraints on models of the nucleation and dynamics of earthquake rupture. This work will improve our understanding of the earthquake source process, which is fundamental to any improvements in hazard minimization. It funds a graduate student and also undergraduate assistants to enhance education doc15631 none Kim Antarctic marine ecosystems differ from other polar, temperate and tropical systems at the level of individuals, populations and communities. The environment is characterized by extreme seasonality in light and food availability, along with cold stenothermal conditions. Additionally, human impacts are more limited in Antarctica than in highly populated or exploited areas. A unique research opportunity will occur in with the installation of a sewage treatment plant at McMurdo Station. This will allow for the conduct of a large-scale experiment on community recovery from organic enrichment and physical disturbance. This research will test whether major hypotheses related to community structure and disturbance recovery, which were formulated and demonstrated in more accessible marine communities, applies to Antarctic ecosystems. This research will build on a ten-year time-series that follows benthic community degradation resulting from emplacement of a sewage outfall. A complicating factor in the local McMurdo ecosystem is the input of fecal matter from the abundant populations of marine mammals and large fishes. Sampling will span the implementation of sewage treatment and the data will be incorporated in a meta-analysis of community recovery from organic disturbance in a variety of habitats, to test the generality of recovery patterns. Experimental manipulations will compare the potentially complex roles of burial and patch size in recovery dynamics. The knowledge gained from this research can be applied to other examples of high organic loading in polar habitats. Significant anthropogenic inputs in high latitudes include pulp mills and increases in human occupation and visitation as well as natural sources including woody debris in river outputs and carcass-falls from the productive surface waters above also present significant carbon inputs to high latitude environments. This study will significantly further the understanding of anthropogenic impacts in polar environments using an integrated approach to evaluate the recovery of the infaunal and epifaunal assemblages after a substantial carbon-loading perturbation sustained over ten years doc15632 none Biological Sciences (61) The goal of this project is to strengthen the ability of students to use microscopic approaches to solve problems. The objectives are to integrate fluorescent and phase-contrast microscopy into all levels of the Wartburg College biology curriculum and to enhance student access to the instrumentation and their ability to use microscopic techniques in student research projects. Students are introduced to the use of fluorescent and phase-contrast microscopy in the introductory Biology course, and gain expertise in subsequent courses, Microbiology, Microbial Ecology, Cell Biology, and Student Research. These courses provide other opportunities for the use of these microscopes in inquiry-based labs and undergraduate research. Inquiry-based lab exercises are being developed as adaptations from the contemporary research literature. The students are also be trained in still-frame and video-capture techniques so they can document, present, and publish their results. The impact of the project on student learning is being assessed using cumulative digital image portfolios and lab practicals. The results of the assessment and student-generated projects will be disseminated through a Web site and presentations at national meetings doc15633 none Weare and Moller This research program will contribute the development of an equation of state (EOS), which can be used to accurately predict thermodynamic properties (e.g., liquid-vapor phase coexistence, enthalpy and free energy) in the NaCl-KCl-CaCl2-H2O-CO2-CH4 (SWG) system over the wide PTX ranges associated with Earth processes. Many important geochemical processes, such as mineral deposition, metamorphism and chemical fractionation via phase separation, are controlled by the thermodymanic behavior of aqueous formation fluids with compositions approximately in this system. Unfortunately, most experimental data available for development of an EOS for this system are confined to much smaller PTX ranges than those encountered in Nature. To overcome these important limitations in data availability, our research approach will use recent advances in the theory of dense fluids and molecular simulation methods to: (1) support the construction of an EOS that not only correctly summarizes data but also reliably extrapolates to desired regions of PTX space (e.g., deep crustal and magma conditions); and (2) supplement the experimental data by direct simulation at the molecular level. The proposed EOS will be based on thermodynamic perturbation theory. In this theoretical method the free energy is written as a sum of contributions from an ideal reference system and from a perturbation correction. In the proposed research program we will concentrate on developing reference systems that optimally represent the behavior of the subsystem under study. Our objective is to lower the complexity and magnitude of the perturbation corrections needed to represent the measured behavior in order to maximize the extrapolation properties of the EOS. Molecular dynamics simulations of model systems will provide useful tools for testing reference system improvements and mixing rules. Special functional behavior (scaling behavior) is required to correctly describe thermodynamic properties in the critical region. We will apply scaling methods to improve critical region predictions and examine how scaling can be generalized to calculate other thermodynamic properties, such as heat content and free energy. In addition, we will develop crossover EOS, which provide accurate predictions both in and away from the critical region. To reproduce thermodynamic properties via simulation at the molecular level, we will continue to develop simulation methods [e.g., first principles ab-initio (AIMD) and classical molecular dynamics (MD), Gibbs Ensemble Monte Carlo (GEMC)]. A main objective of the proposed research is to significantly improve the accuracy of ionic solution simulations by developing better intermolecular effective potential representations of ions in solution. We will test new methods to improve the performance of GEMC methods and prediction in the critical region. AIMD methods will be applied to guide intermolecular potential development and to study important effects on these interactions of system properties such as local polarization. These methods will be used to establish the forces for systems with little data, such as ion-neutral interactions doc15634 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for a project to make use of ship-repositioning transit cruises to gather geophysical information relating to plate tectonics of the Southern Ocean and to support student training activities. Well-constrained Cenozoic plate reconstructions of the circum-Antarctic region are critical for examining a number of problems of global geophysical importance. These problems include, e.g., relating the plate kinematics to its geological consequences in various plate circuits (Pacific-North America, Australia-Pacific); a dynamical understanding of what drives plate tectonics (which requires well-constrained kinematic information in order to distinguish between different geodynamic hypotheses); and an understanding of the rheology of the plates themselves, including the amount of internal deformation they can support, and the conditions leading to the formation of new plate boundaries through breakup of existing plates. By obtaining better constraints on the motion of the Antarctica plate with respect to these other plates, and by better quantifying the internal deformation within Antarctica (between East and West Antarctica), contributions will be made to solving these other fundamental problems. In this project, existing data will be analyzed to address several specific issues related to plate motions involving the Antarctic plate. First, work will be done on four-plate solutions of Australia-Pacific-West Antarctica-East Antarctica motion, in order to most tightly constrain the rotation parameters for separation between East and West Antarctica for the time period from about 45 to 28 Ma (Adare Basin spreading system). This will be done by imposing closure on the four-plate circuit and using relevant marine geophysical data from all four of the boundaries. The uncertainties in the resulting rotation parameters will be determined based on the uncertainties in the data points. These uncertainties can then be propagated in the plate circuit for use in addressing the various global geodynamic problems mentioned above. Second, rotation parameters for Pacific-West Antarctica during Tertiary time will be determined using recently acquired well-navigated Palmer transit data and any additional data that can be acquired during the course of this project. These parameters and their uncertainties will be used in assessments of plate rigidity and included in the plate circuit studies. In the framework of this project, new collection of marine geophysical data will be accomplished on a very flexible schedule. This will be done by collecting underway gravity, magnetics, and swath bathymetric data on Palmer transit cruises of geological importance. This has been successfully done on eight previous Palmer cruises since , the most recent four of which were funded under a collaborative OPP grant to CalTech and Scripps which is now expiring. On one of the suitable transits, a formal class in marine geophysics will be conducted that will afford an opportunity to 12 or more graduate and undergraduate students, from CalTech and Scripps as well as other institutions. In this way, educational activities will be integrated with the usual scientific data collection objectives of the research project doc15634 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds for a project to make use of ship-repositioning transit cruises to gather geophysical information relating to plate tectonics of the Southern Ocean and to support student training activities. Well-constrained Cenozoic plate reconstructions of the circum-Antarctic region are critical for examining a number of problems of global geophysical importance. These problems include, e.g., relating the plate kinematics to its geological consequences in various plate circuits (Pacific-North America, Australia-Pacific); a dynamical understanding of what drives plate tectonics (which requires well-constrained kinematic information in order to distinguish between different geodynamic hypotheses); and an understanding of the rheology of the plates themselves, including the amount of internal deformation they can support, and the conditions leading to the formation of new plate boundaries through breakup of existing plates. By obtaining better constraints on the motion of the Antarctica plate with respect to these other plates, and by better quantifying the internal deformation within Antarctica (between East and West Antarctica), contributions will be made to solving these other fundamental problems. In this project, existing data will be analyzed to address several specific issues related to plate motions involving the Antarctic plate. First, work will be done on four-plate solutions of Australia-Pacific-West Antarctica-East Antarctica motion, in order to most tightly constrain the rotation parameters for separation between East and West Antarctica for the time period from about 45 to 28 Ma (Adare Basin spreading system). This will be done by imposing closure on the four-plate circuit and using relevant marine geophysical data from all four of the boundaries. The uncertainties in the resulting rotation parameters will be determined based on the uncertainties in the data points. These uncertainties can then be propagated in the plate circuit for use in addressing the various global geodynamic problems mentioned above. Second, rotation parameters for Pacific-West Antarctica during Tertiary time will be determined using recently acquired well-navigated Palmer transit data and any additional data that can be acquired during the course of this project. These parameters and their uncertainties will be used in assessments of plate rigidity and included in the plate circuit studies. In the framework of this project, new collection of marine geophysical data will be accomplished on a very flexible schedule. This will be done by collecting underway gravity, magnetics, and swath bathymetric data on Palmer transit cruises of geological importance. This has been successfully done on eight previous Palmer cruises since , the most recent four of which were funded under a collaborative OPP grant to CalTech and Scripps which is now expiring. On one of the suitable transits, a formal class in marine geophysics will be conducted that will afford an opportunity to 12 or more graduate and undergraduate students, from CalTech and Scripps as well as other institutions. In this way, educational activities will be integrated with the usual scientific data collection objectives of the research project doc15523 none Information is currently accessed and manipulated using a variety of fragmented tools. The researchers use a desktop computer as our primary information tool, a server, network of servers, or an ISP to provide file system support, computationally intensive computing, and other system support functions. They use a notebook computer, which may or may not have network access, when they desire a portable information tool. When information needs are modest, and mobility needs most apparent, the researchers use a variety of other devices such as handheld computers, personal digital assistants, cellular telephones, and pagers. Software version management in this situation is inefficient, and licensing is complex. Ensuring that the same (and latest) version of each desired application program is installed on a large number of computers can consume a significant amount of system support staff resources, even if these computers are accessible from the same network. The protection of information from unauthorized access is similarly difficult. The result of this fragmentation of data, applications, and devices is an increasingly complex and unmanageable collection of information tools that communicate with each other ineffectively. The convergence in time of substantial need, substantial communication infrastructure, and high performance, low power computing resources challenges the researchers to explore a better alternative. The Bifrost location independent computing project seeks to provide a flexible and comprehensive information access environment. The function of Bifrost is to provide location and device independent access to data. Data in Bifrost encompasses both information and the applications used to manipulate that information. Bifrost uses affinity between data, and between users and data, to make appropriate decisions about when and where to move data. We refer to this approach as affinity directed mobility. The core research issues of the project are mobility management (how we move data and threads to support user and device mobility), data management (how we represent, access, update, and protect information), and application management (how we provide a common applications base across a variety of devices). In contrast to previous approaches to mobile data management, Bifrost anticipates that in 3-5 years network connectivity will be the norm, even for highly mobile computing devices. In this situation, the problem of how users can access remote personal data, regardless of location or computing device, becomes at least as important as planning for a possible disconnection. The researchers propose to design, implement, deploy and evaluate a two-campus prototype of the Bifrost location independent computing system. The Bifrost design represents a new paradigm for information access and manipulation. We propose to integrate the way in which information is managed with the way in which the applications that access this information are managed. One of the design principles of Bifrost is that the ability to access data should be consistent across all platforms, including portable computing devices. This approach is in stark contrast to the stripped down operating system plus stripped down applications plus limited data set computing model currently associated with most hand-held computing devices. In addition to the educational benefits to the students directly involved in the project, the researchers intend that this project contribute in broader ways to the academic community. They will incorporate this research into the operating systems and distributed systems classes taught at the University of Colorado and Cornell University. All software and other research products of this project will be made readily available via the world wide web doc15637 none This award supports a three-year renewal project to complete measurement of cosmogenic nuclides in the Siple Dome ice core as part of the West Antarctic ice core program. The investigators will continue to measure profiles of Beryllium-10 (half-life = 1.5x10 6 years) and Chlorine-36 (half-life = 3.0x10 5 years) in the entire ice core which spans the time period from the present to about 100 kyr. It will be particularly instructive to compare the Antarctic record with the detailed Arctic record that was measured by these investigators as part of the GISP2 project. This comparison will help separate global from local effects at the different drill sites. Cosmogenic radionuclides in polar ice cores have been used to study the long-term variations in several important geophysical variables, including solar activity, geomagnetic field strength, atmospheric circulation, snow accumulation rates, and others. The time series of nuclide concentrations resulting from this work will be applied to several problem areas: perfecting the ice core chronology, deducing the history of solar activity, deducing the history of variations in the geomagnetic field, and studying the possible role of solar variations on climate. Comparison of Beryllium-10 and Chlorine-36 profiles in different cores will allow us to improve the ice core chronology and directly compare ice cores from different regions of the globe. Additional comparison with the Carbon-14 record will allow correlation of the ice core paleoenvironment record to other, Carbon-14 dated, paleoclimate records doc15638 none This two-year proposed project will investigate the cognitive and sociolinguistic influencesthat shape the performance of English language learners [ELLs] on science and mathematicsassessments. It will address the fact that performance of ELL students in science andmathematics is inconsistent both across test items and across languages. The knowledge gainedfrom this project will inform practitioners, researchers, and policy makers about new approachesfor attaining equitable testing and obtaining valid measures of the achievement of ELLs in science and mathematics. It will provide valuable information relevant to both classroom-basedtesting and the inclusion of linguistic minorities in large-scale testing. We will compare the inferred cognitive activities of ELL students, the problem solutionstrategies they use, and the scores they obtain on the same set of science and mathematics itemsadministered both in English and their native languages. In addition, we will investigate whether and how performance differences across languages and items are reduced when students are tested with locally-adapted versions of tests that reflect their first languages dialects. We will examine the performance of ELLs across languages and items from three perspectives: cognitive, psychometric, and sociolinguistic. These perspectives will allow us to: (1) determine how the language in which ELL students are tested influences their cognitive activities and the problem solution strategies they use on science and mathematics items; (2)determine whether ELL students perform better on local dialect than standard dialect versions of tests; and (3) examine the inconsistency of ELL student performance across items and across languages as an interaction of three sources of score variability: student, item, and language (i.e., a given ELL student performs better in his her native language than in English for some items but better in English than in the native language for other items). We expect to improve our understanding of the cognitive and sociolinguistic processes that operate below the surface as ELL students interpret and solve problems. We also expect to gain knowledge on how these processes are reflected in the performance of these students and the variability of their scores across languages and items. This knowledge will contribute to improving both classroom-based and large-scale assessment practices. Goals Ultimately, our goal is to contribute to attaining more valid measures of ELL academic achievement and more equitable testing practices by offering a fresh approach to the testing of linguistic minorities. This approach recognizes the complex relationship between language and cognitive phenomena, and the social nature of language. From the knowledge we gain in this investigation we expect to be able to formalize a set of recommendations for improved testing policies for ELLs doc15639 none A Peer-to-peer networked system is a collaborating group of Internet nodes which overlay their own special-purpose network on top of the Internet. Such a system performs its own application-level routing on top of IP routing. These systems share some of the same characteristics as the Internet in that they can grow to be quite large, need to utilize distributed control and configuration, employ a naming scheme that allows them to address a node without knowing its exact whereabouts, and possess a routing mechanism that allows each node to meaningfully communicate with the rest of the system. Typically a peer-to-peer network performs a very specific purpose such as distributed data storage, cache replication, multicasting etc. and uses normal Internet functionality for all other purposes. These systems are diverse enough that it would not be desirable to make modifications to the IP routing naming protocols to support each instance of such a system. Peer-to-peer systems such as Napster and Gnutella have, of late, received a fair amount of attention in the non-technical literature. More importantly, several research groups have recently designed a variety of peer-to-peer systems as infrastructure for flexibly evolving the Internet, for large-scale network storage, for anonymous publishing, and for application-level multicasting. At the core of many of these systems lie innovative and novel distributed algorithms for disseminating content. The principal investigators classify these systems into structured systems where there is global consensus on where a document is stored, and unstructured systems where no such consensus exists. Peer-to-peer systems have a rich theoretical structure, and sophisticated algorithmic techniques have been employed in the systems currently under development. In preliminary work, the princi- pal investigators use the small-world model to improve the performance of a specific unstructured system called Freenet. Motivated by their preliminary work, this proposal plans to take a principled look at the properties of various algorithms proposed in the peer-to-peer literature. Some of the specific questions that the principal investigators intend to address are understanding the funda- mental bounds on the performance of peer-to-peer systems, designing algorithms that allow these systems to perform at peak availability and minimum latency, studying the impact of topology and caching on latency, and understanding the role that the small-world model might play in improving the performance of these systems. The overall attention that the peer-to-peer technology has garnered in the recent past, and the various proposed businesses based on this model, point to the potential broad impact that this work can have. The principal investigators hope that this work will provide the systems community with the theoretical tools necessary to rigorously understand the behavior of some of their designs as well as rules of thumb to choose between alternative architectures, protocols, and algorithms. The principal investigators intend to integrate some of this material into a graduate course on \Algorithmic Issues in Communication Networks . Their classroom treatment of these topics will be formal, but with clearly indicated motivations from and applications to real systems. The lecture notes and course projects developed by the principal investigators will be made publicly available doc15640 none This project would develop an assessment framework and performance assessment practices after an analysis of frameworks from many countries for the purpose of assessing Information Communication Technology (ICT) as it is used in elementary and secondary schools. The project would identify issues of large-scale implementation of performance assessments in information technology and develop performance assessment scenarios and specifications. Moreover, the project would develop performance assessment tasks and test them in 4 countries and develop administrative and training manuals. The results of this project would be used in an international studies called the Second International Technology in Education Study (SITES) sponsored doc15641 none To gather evidence about large-scale assessment practices, SRI International proposed a research study to NSF to examine the validities of standards-based science inquiry assessment. In response to negotiating questions from the REPP program, SRI restructured the scope of work of the originally proposed study into two phases: Design and Implementation. SRI was funded to conduct the Design Study in July, . Teams of nationally recognized experts studied the validities of science item formats used in three of the nation s most influential large-scale science assessments-NAEP, TIMSS, and New Standards. The research teams conducted three distinct, but coordinated, studies including an Alignment Study, a Cognitive Analysis Study, and an Empirical Study. When completed, the Design Study will integrate methodologies and preliminary findings from the three studies. Results of the Design Study have contributed to the design and methodologies of the proposed Implementation Study. The Implementation Study will permit an intensive analysis of science items and tasks that have been used in large-scale science assessments at the national, as well as the state level; an in-depth examination of the performances of a large and diverse sample of students; and the application of powerful methodologies that were refined during the Design Study. The specific goals of the Implementation Study are to: (1) develop a framework for characterizing the design features of item task formats that aim to elicit different types of science learning, (2) conduct a study of the alignment of selected assessment questions and exercise formats from existing reference and extended investigation assessments with the National Science Education Standards, (3) conduct analyses of the cognitive demands placed on learners when solving different types of items tasks, (4) conduct an empirical study of the validities of different types of assessment formats, in particular, the instructional sensitivity of the different assessment formats, and (5) develop prototype designs of multi-level assessment systems that would provide more comprehensive measures of students science knowledge and inquiry strategies. Benefits that are likely to flow from the Implementation Study will include robust methodologies and procedures to support the conduct of future studies of inquiry-based science assessment. Procedural pitfalls and item and test design considerations will be identified that can guide the research community and state and local education agencies in the design of better validity studies. In addition, we will draw implications of student learning opportunities for the design of science inquiry achievement studies. The Implementation Study will provide confirmatory evidence of what particular items and item task formats intend to test and student s actual reasoning and explanations of how assessment formats call on different kinds and levels of science knowledge and inquiry. Finally, we intend to integrate these findings to develop guidelines for how educators may combine reference exam results with data from other exam formats to communicate science achievement levels and make policy decisions about professional development, curriculum, and assessment reforms doc15642 none Truffer There are a number of surge-type glaciers in the central Alaska Range and most of them overlying the Denali Fault . The actual occurrence of a surge, however, is rare because of the long recurrence time which is about 50-100 years and only three glaciers have been recorded to surge repeatedly in this region. One of these is the Yanert which is known to have last surged in . This is very different from the glaciers in southeast Alaska where surges are often repeated in less than twenty years. The exact causes and the behavior of surges are not known, therefore, it is important to take advantage of opportunities for more data collection whenever it arises. Unfortunately, the exact year or time of a surge is very difficult to predict and it is impossible to plan for adequate field work in advance. The Yanert Glacier is located in the central Alaska Range, but little is known about it other than it is a surge-type glacier and a surge had been observed in . The recent surge started in the late winter of , but most of it went unnoticed. In April , it had restarted again and developed into a major surge . Because no surges have been observed to last more than two years, the Yanert surge is likely to stop this summer and not resume next winter. The Principal Investigators will fly to the terminus of Yanert Glacier and install two time lapse cameras. One will observe the surge front that is currently about five kilometers from the glacier terminus. It will be used to measure the rate of advance of the surge front and to establish the time when the advance stops. A second camera will be placed in front of the glacier. The end of the surge is expected to coincide with a big flood. This camera will record if and when the flood occurs. The Principal Investigators will also record the position of the surge front, using hand held GPS units. At the end of the season, they will fly a profile of the glacier with an airborne altimetry system and retrieve the time lapse cameras. The profile will be used to estimate the total mass transport of ice that occurred as a result of the surge doc15643 none Building Capacity for a Research Center on Mediated Learning Mary Martini Higher-order thinking skills are important in enabling young people to prepare for our rapidly changing society. The proposed project will establish the groundwork at the University of Hawaii for a collaborative research center on the role of socially mediated learning in the cognitive development of children. The proposed center will facilitate and sustain a research program focused on determining how children develop higher order thinking and problem-solving abilities and how adults mediate this learning in everyday social interactions and cultural and learning activities. The center aims to advance our knowledge in this area by encouraging collaborative projects that combine different but potentially complementary research approaches-specifically those of ethnographic observation, experimental cognitive development research, and developmental neuroscience. Two models of such integrative work are: 1) to initially study learning and teaching processes in their natural contexts in homes, classrooms, lessons, playing fields, etc., using observational and ethnographic methods, and then to evaluate hypotheses about the processes operating in those settings using experimental research designs; and 2) to initially study cognitive and learning processes in laboratory settings, and then seek to deepen our understanding of how those processes take shape through more naturalistic, observational research. A major goal of the planning year will be to examine the potential applicability of these two models, as well as of other possible models, to the study of children s socially mediated learning. Center research will focus on the effects of adult (and peer) guidance on cognitive and neuro-cognitive processing. Some research questions will be: How do children take on the problem solving strategies presented by others? How do children generalize the strategies learning in one domain and context to others? How do adults mediate learning in different settings-at home, in classrooms, in work settings, in lessons or sports activities? Can effective mediation styles used in one setting transfer to other settings to enhance learning? A workshop will be held to develop the activities that will be incorporated into a center proposal, including: 1) developing a shared knowledge base and set of research models among the participating researchers; 2) providing a working forum in which participating researchers can develop specific research proposals; 3) developing collaborations among University of Hawaii, mainland and community researchers; and 4) developing the infrastructure for the envisioned research center at the University of Hawaii doc15644 none The George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) is a project funded under the National Science Foundation (NSF) Major Research Equipment appropriation. The goal of NEES is to provide a national, networked simulation resource of 20 or more geographically-distributed, shared use, next-generation experimental research equipment sites, with teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities, which will transform the environment for earthquake engineering research and education through collaborative and integrated experimentation, computation, theory, databases, and model-based simulation to improve the seismic design and performance of U.S. civil and mechanical infrastructure systems. NEES will be constructed through September 30, , and then enter its operational period from October 1, through September 30, , during which time it will be operated by a NEES Consortium (to be established under this award). This 36-month cooperative agreement with the Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering (CUREE) is to conduct the project entitled George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) Consortium Development. This award is the outcome of the peer review of proposals submitted to program solicitation NSF 01-56, George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES): Consortium Development. The extensive project team is led by CUREE and includes individuals from the following organizations: Civil Engineering Research Foundation, Cornell University, Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, Oregon State University, San Jose State University, University of California at Berkeley, University of California at San Diego, University of Kansas at Lawrence, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, University of Minnesota at the Twin Cities, University of Southern California, and University of Texas at Austin. This project team will outreach extensively to the earthquake engineering community, NEES System Integration awardee, and NEES equipment site awardees to accomplish three major tasks. First, this project will organize and run activities to gain community-generated input and broad consensus for the organizational structure and governance of a single community-based and community-led NEES Consortium. These activities must culminate in the completion by October 1, , or earlier, of all documents required for NEES Consortium establishment and operation and in a proposal submitted to NSF for ten-year operation of NEES (FY -FY ). Activities are included during the period from October 1, to September 30, to enable start-up operation of NEES by the NEES Consortium. Second, this project will organize activities to facilitate community-generated input and consensus needed by the NEES system integration awardee for detailed network design. Third, this project will coordinate outreach and training activities for the NEES equipment sites as they become operational before September 30, . To accomplish this scope of work, project activities will include national workshops, regional workshops, white papers, and working groups with membership from the earthquake engineering community. This project will maintain an interactive web site to keep the earthquake engineering community informed of activities and progress. Project activities will be coordinated by an Executive Council. These tasks, critical self-assessment, and project management will be conducted in accordance with the awardee s Project Execution Plan. NEES and this award are part of the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program doc15645 none Biological Sciences (61) Exercise physiology is fundamental for researchers and majors in health fitness, athletic training, physical education, and health education. Not unlike other sciences, exercise physiology instruction that provides students with iihands-onl. laboratory experiences creates the most positive learning climate, leads to a more complete understanding of basic physiological processes, and increases comprehension of scientific principles, concepts and methods. Currently, due to lack of metabolic analyzing equipment, the instruction of many exercise physiology laboratory activities has been done via more traditional demonstration methods than full and active student participation in the exercises themselves. The acquisition of key instructional equipment (metabolic analyzer and treadmill) will expand and strengthen the undergraduate student s experience in exercise physiology and help foster a direct problem- solving approach to the learning process in scheduled laboratory sessions, independent research or other out-of-class projects. The objectives of this project are two-fold: a) to provide expired gas analyzing instrumentation to enable students to study several fundamental exercise physiology principles that cannot be investigated with the current equipment and b) to promote and encourage active learning and student research opportunities. The improved learning and research resulting from the integration of the requested equipment into the curriculum will advance the college s commitment to undergraduate research throughout the academic program doc15646 none Engineering - Civil (54) The projects adapts a series of large-scale experiments into the advanced undergraduate structural engineering courses, and exercises to enhance continuity between graduate and undergraduate courses. Although the literature describes several successful efforts to bring physical experiments into structural engineering courses, the Structural Engineering Workshop is going to advance this methodology in two important ways: First, most previous projects were limited to illustrating structural analysis concepts, but the Structural Engineering Workshop emphasizes failure modes of real structural components and systems. This is important because many design procedures are meant to steer us toward some failure modes and away from others, but it is difficult for students to appreciate why most students never get the chance to see (and hear and touch!) the difference between the brittle failure of an over-reinforced beam and the ductile failure of an under-reinforced beam. Second, while projects reported in the literature were limited in scope to one particular course, the Structural Engineering Workshop is going to use the experiments as a means to integrate activities across a range of courses in an engineering program. Students of different years and specialties are going to participate in planning and production of test specimens, testing, and analysis of results. Giving students the opportunity to revisit the experiments throughout their academic programs, each time from the shifted viewpoint of a different course, is going to help them understand the critical links between material component behavior, construction methods, and structural design doc15647 none The Biogeochemical Aftermath of Neoproterozoic Ice Ages The proposed research aims to critically test the celebrated Snowball Earth hypothesis, which predicts that several times in the Neoproterozoic (543- million years ago), the entire planet was blanketed from the poles to equator with continental glaciers and sea ice. To overcome such extreme conditions it has been suggested that over millions of years atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration must have risen to over 100 times its present inventory, eventually building up enough greenhouse gas to warm the frozen planet. On one hand, the materials required for the enigmatic carbonates (which cap these Neoproterozoic glacial sediments worldwide) may have come from the intense weathering of the continents under such a CO2-charged atmosphere. Alternatively, the source of these materials may have derived from the deep ocean where sulfate-reducing bacteria dominated the water column - similar to the present-day anoxic Black Sea - during widespread, yet less severe and shorter glacial epochs. Testing the validity of either of these end-member hypotheses will require detailed study of the elemental, mineralogical, textural, and stable isotopic compositions of the cap carbonates. Samples from the Otavi Group in Namibia (where the critical evidence for global glaciation was first amassed), and in demonstrably equivalent strata from the Bambui and Macaubas groups of Brazil will be analyzed. Regional mapping and high-resolution stratigraphic studies of the thick, carbonate-dominated Brazilian successions will aid in the evaluation of models that seek to explain these severe oscillations of Precambrian climate doc15648 none Shelton This project includes organization of a workshop to be conducted by NSF with support from WTEC, Inc. for a preliminary assessment of U.S. and international activities in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). This topic has been identified as a focus of a potential NSF ENG study. The purpose of the workshop, to be held in summer of , is to gather facts and opinions from experts in the U.S. research community on how this area of research should be defined for the purposes of such a study and to provide an overview of U. S. and international R&D activities within this scope. The information presented in the workshop will be distilled into a report to NSF doc15649 none Chemistry (12) With the acquisition of an Agilent UV VIS spectrophotometer equipped with LabVIEW software, we are introducing chemical kinetics and computer data analysis in our introductory chemistry course and in environmental management technology program. Most of our students in this associate degree program enter the workforce upon graduation and become involved in environmental testing and chemical analyses in a laboratory setting. Our goal is to better prepare students to meet these challenges by adapting and implementing computer-aided laboratory experiments into our curriculum. These experiments allow students to integrate and reinforce chemical concepts learned in the classroom with real-life experiences. Kinetics is a difficult concept for students to grasp and often requires exploring the topic through various modalities. We are using our UV VIS to do kinetics experiments in which the students visually track changes in chemical reactions in real time doc15650 none Biological Sciences (61) Carroll College, Wisconsin s oldest institution of higher education, is adapting an effective model of core curriculum reform for the liberal arts setting. We are modeling our curriculum reform efforts after a successful program developed at the California State University at Fullerton. Our initial efforts at curriculum revision resulted in substantive changes to the content presented in the four core courses, but did not impact how that content was delivered. As outlined in this proposal, our efforts at curriculum reform now center on three objectives for enhanced student learning: 1) strengthening the investigatory skills of students, 2) modeling the integration of biological fields, and 3) developing and implementing multi-level assessment strategies that validate practice and identify areas for growth. This project supports faculty development to help coordinate our teaching efforts, enhance our expertise with particularly effective pedagogical strategies, and measure the effectiveness of our curriculum. Students are using essential equipment including mobile workstations in a series of integrated investigations designed to develop research skills incrementally while also demonstrating the connections between multiple levels of biological inquiry. Our ultimate goal in this phase of curricular reform is to enhance student learning by creating an assessment-driven core curriculum. The outcome of our project is students who more successfully retain basic concepts in upper-division courses and who approach their senior research project with a solid foundation in how to ask and answer biological questions. Secondary biology education students are integrated into our teaching collaboratives, enhancing their professional preparation. We are also improving the teaching skills of faculty in the biology department, with reform spreading to other members of the Science Division, other Carroll faculty members, and local high school and college science teachers who participate in faculty development opportunities doc15651 none Mathematical Sciences (21) The objectives of this collaborative project are to improve post-calculus students learning of probability and statistics and to provide students with better preparation for their future careers in mathematics and statistics, mathematics education, and computer science. These objectives are being achieved by focusing on active and cooperative learning, visualization of concepts, and use of simulations in post-calculus introductory probability and statistics courses at Athens State University and Middle Tennessee State University via the adaptation and implementation of two recently developed National Science Foundation funded materials. The materials are (a) A Data-Oriented, Active Learning, Post-Calculus Introduction to Statistical Concepts, Methods, and Theory ( ) and the (b) Virtual Laboratories in Probability and Statistics ( ). Project activities include faculty enhancement at the institutions, the respective institutional adaptation and implementation (A&I) of the materials, the evaluation of the A&I of the materials, and the assessment of students learning while using the materials. The University of Alabama Huntsville is providing the evaluation doc15652 none Interdisciplinary (99) In this project, four science departments (Chemistry, Biology, Physics, and Geology) at SUNY Potsdam are using Atomic Force Microscopy and Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (AFM STM) to continue their ongoing efforts to incorporate advanced technologies into laboratory experiences for science majors. While examples of atomic imaging techniques in new textbooks have enhanced student s visualization of atoms and molecules, the lack of an AFM and appropriate related laboratory experiences has limited student learning in this area. Bridging the gap between coursework and the laboratory, a number of new experiments based on AFM STM use are being developed, some of which are integrated across the curriculum. The ability to engage students in experiments using AFM STM is creating possibilities for designing innovative courses and is advancing undergraduate research. This equipment enables students in chemistry and biology classes to (1) measure the forces between molecules, including antigen antibody interactions (V.W. Jones, J.R. Kenseth, M.D. Porter, C.L. Mosher, and E. Henderson, Microminiaturized Immunoassays Using Atomic Force Microscopy and Compositionally Patterned Antigen Arrays, Anal. Chem., , 70, - ), (2) explore phospholipid and drug interactions (T.H. Ha, C.H. Kim, J.S. Park, and K. Kim, Interaction of Indolicidin with Model Lipid Bilayer: Quartz Crystal Microbalance and Atomic Force Microscopy Study, Langmuir, , 16, 871-875), (3) examine structure of polymer films (D. Raghavan, M. VanLandingham, X. Gu, and T. Nguyen, Characterization of Heterogeneous Regions in Polymer Systems Using Tapping Mode and Force Mode Atomic Force Microscopy, Langmuir, , 16, - ), (4) observe pitting corrosion and to study the effect of inhibitors on metal corrosion, imaging the surface of nanoelectrocatalytic materials used for methanol oxidation, (5) examine microporosity and mesoporosity in different carbon materials, (6) observe adherence of bacteria to surfaces, (7) examine the structure of biological molecules at very high resolution, and (8) study the viral infection process. Biology and chemistry students are now able to study the actions of DNA binding proteins and ligands, including restriction enzyme mapping and gene localization (H.B. Sun, L. Qian, and H. Yokota, Detection of Abasic Sites on Individual DNA Molecules Using Atomic Force Microscopy, Anal. Chem., ,73, - ). The data generated through AFM analysis of these processes are then compared with those generated through traditional methods, and demonstrate the evolution of modern chemistry and molecular biology, while providing the students with a glimpse of the future direction of the science doc15653 none FACILITATING EDUCATION IN ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH In , the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a special competition, Biocomplexity in the Environment (BE): Integrated Research and Education in Environmental Systems. This five-year initiative epitomizes NSF s stated priorities of enhancing the integration of work done in research and education. It requires that all research proposals be accompanied by a related educational or outreach activity. However NSF is aware that many scientists have little experience with translating or applying their research methods and findings to educational settings. Proposing and designing education projects that are useful, meaningful, achievable, and whose outcomes can be assessed for their short- and long-term efficacy is a challenging task. The NRC aims to facilitate the integration of research and education by convening a 2-day workshop focused on the educational efforts of scientists working in environmental research and related disciplines. Participants will include researchers who have successfully integrated education with their research, researchers just beginning educational projects, and education professionals with expertise in areas such as the life, chemical, and earth sciences; assessment of teaching and learning; student research programs; interdisciplinary approaches to teaching and learning science; and state and national standards for science. At the workshop Scientist Educators whose work is exemplary will present their approaches, methods, and perspectives. The sharing of their stories will be used as the basis for a discussion on how to develop, implement, integrate and assess educational components of research projects. The workshop discussions will be summarized and published as a report together with papers submitted by participants. The workshop summary report will provide a resource to assist scientists who are struggling to integrate education components into their research doc15654 none Chemistry (12) The goal of this project is to develop a series of organic chemistry spectroscopy experiments for the general chemistry laboratory that use organic chemistry students as peer mentors. Working in groups, the general chemistry students work on inquiry experiments that introduce them to UV-visible, IR, and NMR spectrometry. Using electronic tools such as e-mail and Web-based discussion boards, organic chemistry peer mentor groups collaborate on-line with the general chemistry students after the experiments, which helps the general chemistry students apply their newly learned knowledge. This portion of the project is adapted from the Physical Chemistry On-line project (NSF ). Because of the relative simplicity of C-13 spectra, we introduce NMR with C-13 rather than proton spectra. An upgrade of our existing Varian EM360 with an Anasazi EFT-GENII FT-NMR conversion package provides an instrument that allows us to do both proton and C-13 spectra. We also are using this spectrometer in our organic chemistry and advanced organic chemistry courses, and are adapting experiments from the Journal of Chemical Education that allow students to work in groups. The upgraded NMR completes the suite of instruments to which we introduce our undergraduate students at an early point in their careers. It also allows us to institute a peer-mentoring program, which we expect will enhance our students communication skills and make organic chemistry more attractive to students who have finished general chemistry. The project serves as a model of how organic chemistry peer mentors can be used in general chemistry. We also are developing new experiments that introduce NMR to introductory students doc15655 none Understanding and forecasting the intensity and structural characteristics of deep convective storms as a function of the storm environment is an interesting scientific problem and of great interest to operational forecasters. This research seeks to explore several new dimensions of the large parameter space that regulates the morphology and intensity of convective storms. The study will be undertaken using a full-physics three dimensional cloud simulation model, initialized with environments designed to permit independent investigation of eight separate parameters that are believed to be responsible for much of the sensitivity of storm structure to storm environment. Exploratory studies have already demonstrated the existence of large sensitivities of storms to most of these parameters, in at least portions of the full parameter space. Sensitivities already found include bulk convective available potential energy (CAPE) and bulk shear, the shapes of parcel buoyancy and shear profiles, and the depths of both the mixed layer and moist layer. The shape of the relative humidity profile and the temperature at cloud base are other parameters of potential importance. Although the preliminary results already reported constitute a first step in exploring many of the relevant parameter space dimensions, the findings need to be extended to embrace a larger range of values of parameters. In order to address these needs, this project will expand the previous research by building and analyzing a more complete archive of idealized cloud simulations. Progress is expected to be rapid because the tools needed to build the simulation environments and to analyze the model output are already mostly in place. In the analysis of the model data, emphasis will be placed on quantifying the storm morphology variations and on documenting the effects of the various competing physical mechanisms. It is expected that study of these simulations will significantly enhance understanding of convective storm behavior within a broad range of environmental conditions and will allow progress towards the goal of improving storm forecasts doc15656 none Biological Sciences (61) This project is adapting a laboratory model presented by Dr. Adele Wolfson at a PKAL workshop. In an attempt to look at questions on how sequence data is obtained, and how can it yield new knowledge and understanding about the structure, function, organization, and evolution of genes and proteins while providing a genuine research experience for students, this project will: (1) enhance a mid-level Molecular Biology course for undergraduate biology and chemistry majors by developing an inquiry-based, project-driven series of five laboratory modules in Recombinant DNA technology and Bioinformatics; and (2) create a Molecular Genetics and Bioinformatics (MGB) laboratory facility for Biology and Chemistry students engaged in collaborative research projects. Each laboratory module consists of linked experiments, and the modules constitute a semester-long project in the isolation and analysis of rRNA genes and homeobox genes from 3 sources: the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, the closely related microscopic invertebrate Brachionus plicatilis (a rotifer), and an unknown organism for identification by rRNA gene sequence homology. The modules include specific experiments in DNA isolation, primer design and optimization, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), cloning and sequencing PCR products from rRNA and homeobox gene families, and comparative bioinformatic analysis of sequenced DNA for both molecular phylogeny (rRNA genes) and function (homeobox genes). A final module includes formal reports and presentations in multimedia formats (talks and posters). The simultaneous use of model and non-model experimental organisms gives students an experience in how new knowledge is systematically generated through controlled experimentation. The objective is to offer students the opportunity not only to explore documented concepts in a model organism, but also to apply these concepts and experimental practices to discover new knowledge about other organisms through testing of specific hypotheses. The proposed MGB facility will contribute not only to the biology departmen s curriculum, but also to a newly developed curriculum in the chemistry department and an anticipated major in Biochemistry. This plan also initiates a curricular and programmatic shift toward interdisciplinary interactions between the two departments doc15657 none Nelson The use of high-speed electronics has provided many beneficial effects to society. Unfortunately, one of the potentially adverse effects is that electromagnetic interference (EMJ) can cause malfunction in electronic devices. In particular, circuits made from high-speed devices can become a source of EMI in other devices, or they can be susceptible to malfunction from EMI. In order to design products that are less susceptible to EMI. equipment designers need to know the electromagnetic environment of their product. This is obtained via antenna measurements. However, if the devices are in complex environments (i.e., close to the radiating, source, or to other metal objects) measuring these fields can be a real challenge. For these cases the antenna factor (e.g., the parameter that allows one to convert a measured antenna voltage to the desired electric field) is ill-defined. Three questions are addressed in this work: oCan antenna factors be determined for frequency-selective (i.e.. narrow-band) measurements of the electric field when the measurement antenna is in the near field of the radiating source, and in close proximity to other metal objects? if so, how is it appropriately defined? oWhat parameters (e.g., distance from the radiating source, distance from the scatterers, etc.) significantly affect the antenna factor for such measurement situations? oWhat guidelines can be offered regarding the validity of using far-field antenna factors in terms of the measurement parameters identified above? A three-fold method including analytical expressions, numerical modeling, and experimental measurements will be used to determine answers to these questions. Analytical expressions will be evaluated to determine the AF for two specific near-field situations when source and receiving antennas are in free space, and when they are over a ground plane. Numerical models of near-field measurement environments will be constructed and a method-of-moments software code will be used to numerically determine the AF for several near-field scenarios. Matching funds from TUV Product Services, Inc. will provide access to world-class test facilities, making it possible to gather experimental data which will be used to verify computational and analytical results. Lastly, parameters that significantly affect the near-field antenna factors will be identified and characterized, and guidelines will be developed to determine the conditions for which far-field antenna factors can be used with reasonable accuracy. This work will answer the question of whether or not antenna factors can be determined for complex measurement environments for the specific case of a dipole antenna. If the study shows that the concept of a near-field antenna factor is indeed valid, and that the AF can be simulated via computational methods, the way will be paved for further work with many types of antennas. If the study shows that the concept is not valid for a dipole antenna, it is doubtful that it will be valid for any other type of antenna typically used in the EMC community. As a result, many investigators will be warned that it is not worth their precious time trying to simulate such an entity. In either case, positive results are expected. Additionally, if the results indicate that the near-field antenna factor is a reasonable concept, suggestions will also be presented regarding which measurement parameters most significantly affect the AF, along with guidelines regarding when the far-field AF can be used to provide reasonably accurate results doc15477 none Geography (88) The core purpose of this project is to adapt key elements of the core curriculum developed by the National Council for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA, ), combining these with materials already used on some campuses in the University of Maine system. This is a collaborative project designed to benefit five universities that are part of this system: The University of Southern Maine, The University of Maine, Fort Kent, The University of Maine, Machias, The University of Maine, Augusta, and The University of Maine, Farmington. The broader purpose of this collaborative project is to enhance GIScience education throughout the state of Maine on the 5 collaborating campuses. On each campus a dedicated laboratory is being equipped to support the development of a modern geographical information science (GIScience) curriculum, comprised of GIS and GPS technology and related educational materials. We are developing and implementing a sequence of two GIScience courses for undergraduate students in each of the five universities. These are being designed to educate students to a common standard of achievement, although there are local variations designed to meet the varied needs of the 5 participating campuses. The new curriculum meets a growing need for high-quality GIScience education in a variety of fields. We are designing the two-course sequences to foster active learning by customizing exercises and data sets to the diverse geographic locations and programmatic strengths of each campus. Our project is also enhancing and developing the skills of the faculty, and integrating advanced technology into a variety of disciplines. Our plan is to disseminate our work through our teaching, on-site workshops for our faculty colleagues, internet publication, and presentation at professional meetings. Project evaluation is being assisted by on-site peer input during faculty workshops, and periodic review by a three member advisory panel of GIScience scholars and professionals doc15659 none Chemistry (12) With the purchase of a Varian Mercury 300 MHz NMR spectrometer, we have created a regional NMR site by which six two- and four-year colleges and universities in the San Antonio region with no previous access to NMR instrumentation have easy and effective access to one which is housed at and maintained by Trinity University. To overcome the access limitation to use of NMR at a remote site, we have designed a process in which samples from the participating institutions are delivered to Trinity University, are prepared for analysis by a student worker, run automatically with a sample changer, and the data (free induction decays, FID s) downloaded to a Trinity University server. Students at the participating institutions transfer the FID s to a local computer to be processed using free software. Each of the six institutions have thoughtfully chosen a set of experiments from the chemical education literature to use in their curricula. The participating institutions pay only for the time of the student worker and a nominal fee for deuterated solvents. They are therefore able to control and incorporate as much NMR access as they can afford. The pedagogical advantages are several. First, students process their own spectra and learn to make decisions about integration or expansion of the various regions of the spectrum. Second, since the FID is retrievable from a server, they can return to the spectra for reprocessing if necessary. Third, by running spectra on real samples, they have opportunities to deal with impurities and develop greater sophistication in interpretation. Finally, being able to acquire spectra of real samples allow students to identify unknown products of chemical reactions doc15660 none Chemistry (12) The goals of this project are to narrow the gaps between textbook concepts and real world chemistry, and between student interests and student laboratory experiences. These goals are being accomplished by structuring laboratories for all chemistry courses around the common theme of the environment, by stressing the use of instrumental techniques, and by adding a service learning component. This project is adapting the Topic Oriented Approach Development concept from the University of Wisconsin and implementing specific laboratory experiments from the educational literature. Students are placed in real world situations so they will find chemistry laboratories interesting, relevant, and applicable to their world. The chemistry courses serve non-chemistry and non-science majors at an environmental liberal arts college, and thus the focus on environmentally related topics is especially relevant to student interests. The use of instrumental methods in the laboratories adds a dimension of interest, skill, and analytical thought, improving both teaching and student learning doc15661 none Psychology - Biological (71) This project is enhancing learning experiences in behavioral neuroscience at the undergraduate level by providing opportunities for students to conduct sophisticated empirical research projects from the introductory level through senior-level independent research. This project is adapting an approach successfully developed in an NSF-funded project and used by Dr. Michael Kerchner of Washington College. Dr. Kerchner teaches students how to use an acoustic startle system in their projects, and makes research experiences more accessible at several levels of instruction. The goal of the current project is to provide the means by which students collect behavioral data efficiently and objectively. Students are able to collect more data in less time and focus more on the process of doing hypothesis-driven systematic research. By actively engaging in the scientific enterprise, students better understand concepts being covered in class and are better prepared for conducting advanced research in behavioral neuroscience. Two behavioral assays that are more commonly used in dedicated research environments are being adapted for use in several undergraduate courses in behavioral neuroscience. One of these systems allows for the video-tracking of individual animal movements as well as social interactions among pairs of rats (BM Spruijt, T Hol, the role of brain monoamine systems in sensorimotor gating (see C Johansson, DM Jackson, J Zhang, and assessing animal models of schizophrenia (MA Geyer, K Krebs-Thomson, DL Braff, & NR Swerdlow, Pharmacological studies of prepulse inhibition models of sensorimotor gating deficits in schizophrenia: a decade in review, Psychopharmacology, Vol. 156: 117-154, ). Each of the pieces of equipment used to support this project are linked to the campus network and students take advantage of a web-based classroom support environment to load their data directly into a course web-site, where it is shared by the entire class. Creation of individual web-sites and on-line discussion about the data also occurs in this support environment. As students progress through the curriculum, they become increasingly familiar with the behavioral assays supported by this grant and the experiments that they work on become more open-ended and are more likely to yield novel findings. Consequently, students are more likely to experience the excitement associated with scientific discovery. The project is leading to changes in other courses in the curriculum and provides a model for other institutions that plan to integrate research experiences into undergraduate training in behavioral neuroscience doc15662 none Collaborative Research in the Socialization of Preschoolers Beliefs Across Parent and Peer Relationships Kelly K. Bost & Brent A. McBride Family relationships are the crucible within which children s social competencies are forged and honed, however, the payoff for the child s social competence is derived from interactions in the peer group. Children well equipped (by virtue of the quality of their family relationships) with interaction skills, beliefs about the desirability of social activities, and convictions that social initiations will lead to positive outcomes tend to become central, accepted members of their peer groups during childhood. Furthermore, these children frequently accumulate social power in the peer group that can be parlayed into preferential access to the physical and social resources available in the group. These facts form the crux of a paradox because parent-child relationships tend to emphasize affiliation, coherence, and nurturance protection at the expense of competition, conflict, and deception whereas this balance is often reversed in the peer group. The question arises: What is learned in the family that prepares children for the very different social demands imposed by the peer group during early childhood? In this project, we will collect data that can begin to answer this question. Investigators from Auburn University and the University of Illinois pool their expertise in parent-child and peer relationships for this 4-year longitudinal study. A total sample of 100 families (50 at each site) will be recruited. Insofar as possible, two-parent families will be recruited (a minimum of 50% for the total sample) so that assessments of both mother-child and father-child relationships can be obtained. Assessments of sibling interactions and relationships will be obtained when possible. Because attachment theory proposes the most well articulated characterization of parent-child relationships available in the developmental sciences, assessments of both child and parent will emphasize the secure base aspects of their relationship. Parents will be assessed in terms of their demonstrated ability to serve as a secure base for their child and in terms of the availability of a secure base script in assessments of the adults themselves. Starting in the second project year (as the children turn 3.0-3.5 years of age) assessments will take place also in their peer groups. A standard battery of social competence assessments will be collected and friendship and social dominance status also will be ascertained. Between 3.5- 4.0 years of age, the availability of secure-base scripts in child-parent narratives will be assessed, using tasks developed for this purpose. Both classroom and parent-child assessments will continue in the third project year (as the child turns 4.0 to 4.5 years of age). Investigators at the Illinois site will place an additional emphasis on collecting, decoding and analyzing data with respect to the nature and quality of father-child relationships and children s broader social networks and supports doc15663 none David Feary An ad hoc committee under the auspices of the National Research Council (NAS) - Board on Earth Sciences and Resources (BESR) will be charged with the review of the science objectives and implementation planning of the three components of NSF s EarthScope initiative. They are: United States Seismic Array (USArray), the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD), and the Plate Boundary Observatory (PBO). EarthScope is an NSF-led initiative designed to apply modern observational, analytical, and telecommunications technologies to investigate the structure, dynamics and evolution of the North American continent, and the physical processes controlling earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. It is anticipated that the results of the EarthScope initiative will provide a foundation for fundamental and applied geoscience research throughout the United States doc15664 none Planning Grant for a Center for Integrative Developmental Science Focused on Development During Key Transitions J. Lawrence Aber (2) organize and support 2-3 smaller research planning subgroups to design new multidisciplinary, integrative research on aspects of turning points in development; and (3) prepare a proposal for the National Science Foundation to create a Columbia University Center on Integrative Developmental Science that will conduct the studies designed by the subgroup(s doc15665 none Engineering - Aeronautical Astronautical (51) The project adapts effective pedogogies for an aerospace structures laboratory previously developed at several universities. The laboratory consists of a material and structure testing machine and provides experimental experiences in at least four courses. It also allows senior capstone design teams to verify the structural performance of their unmanned aerial vehicles. The Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement (MESA) program at the PI s institution, which focuses on increasing the number of under-represented populations in engineering and science through programs for grades 6-12, plans to use the laboratory in MESA classes and summer programs. The investigators plan to assess and evaluate the project results through a variety of measures in conjunction with the University s Center for Engineering Learning and Teaching. Results will be disseminated through out reach programs, over the Internet, and at conferences doc15666 none s containing methodological flaws that need to be discovered and repaired. The effect of training on the examples is being assessed in a pretest-posttest nonequivalent groups design that allows generalization across classes and instructors and the assessment of modes of delivery (web vs. face-to-face, and individual work vs. group activity doc15667 none Interdisciplinary (99) This project increases students involvement in undergraduate research by developing two team-taught interdisciplinary research methods statistics courses. The interdisciplinary team approach is adapted from the approaches developed by Donovan at Kean University and Peaslee at Hope College. The project also provides faculty development opportunities to foster greater inclusion of active learner methodologies in courses, and creates a centralized program to promote and support undergraduate research activities. The unique configuration of the nine basic and applied sciences and health sciences programs in the College provides team-teaching and student-faculty research opportunities across disciplinary boundaries. Project activities include: (1) Development of a team-taught interdisciplinary two-course sequence on research methods statistics courses that is offered for sophomore students majoring in Biology, Nursing, Mathematics, Computer Science, Environmental Science and Geography, and Exercise and Movement Sciences. During the first course, students working in interdisciplinary research groups complete the first two sections of a research report including the introduction and review of literature. Labs are conducted and instructions on statistical computer programs are also provided. The second course covers additional statistical procedures and computer applications in addition to writing the method, results, and discussions sections of a research report. Labs and research presentations provide student-active learning opportunities. The proposed courses are adapted from undergraduate research courses at several institutions (such as Hampshire College, Portland State University Samford University and Spellman College among others). (2) Faculty development activities include workshops and seminars on student-active learning and the effective use of students in research. (3) The promotion of student involvement in research includes the tracking and encouragement of students who complete the two-course sequence, expansion of paid summer research opportunities, and development of a part-time position to oversee and promote student involvement in research doc15668 none Engineering - Civil (54) The primary goal of this project is to strengthen the sophomore-year experience in civil and environmental engineering by using advanced surveying measurements to solve real-world engineering problems and to introduce concepts of engineering design. The project adapts and implements the experiential learning concepts of the Sooner City project. The project targets the sophomores and uses real-world problems to engage students in engineering design early in the curriculum. The content of CIE 272 Civil and Environmental Engineering Measurements is being altered to include more (and different) surveying laboratories, and to integrate the surveying labs with the use of AutoCAD. Also, a new sophomore-level course CIE 372 Project Layout and Site Planning is being developed and initiated. Finally, faculty members in other programs at Syracuse University are using the equipment purchased for this project for undergraduate teaching in basin analysis, geomorphology, field ecology, geographic information systems, and architecture. With support from NSF, Syracuse University is acquiring advanced optical and satellite- based surveying equipment for hands-on use by undergraduate students in civil and environmental engineering, earth sciences, geography, biology, and other programs. As a result of this project, undergraduate students are learning how to make state-of-the-art optical and satellite-based surveying measurements, and how to work with the resulting data on the Computer. Students completing CIE 272 and 372 are developing highly marketable skills in surveying and computer applications, which will enhance their opportunities for summer jobs, cooperative education placements, and permanent employment. Engaging students in the hands- on solution of real-world engineering problems fills a void in the traditional sophomore-year curriculum. Collaboration with faculty in other departments stimulates cross-disciplinary teaching and encourages students to take additional courses outside their majors doc15669 none Physics (13) The Open-Source Physics Education, OPEN, project is a synergy of curriculum development, computational physics, and physics education research based on the Principal Investigator s current WebPhysics project. Material from the OPEN project is being incorporated into three new texts: Gould, Tobochnik, and Christian s Computer Simulation Methods, the Principal Investigator s Open-Source Physics, and a topical Physlets workbook that can be used with a variety of standard texts. The OPEN project makes a large number of Java simulations available for physics education using the GNU Open-Source model for the source code. In addition, it entails the creation and maintenance of a website for the distribution of compiled applets and examples of interactive curricular material. The OPEN project plans two one-week summer workshops and full- and half-day workshops at national and regional professional meetings. A formal assessment of students cognitive gains is being undertaken. The OPEN project impacts science, mathematics, engineering, and technology education nationwide through the distribution of a wide variety of class-tested interactive computer-based materials using both commercial and non-commercial distribution. The OPEN project is studying the conditions under which these materials can increase student learning. This assessment is of interest to all researchers studying the effectiveness of animation and simulation in teaching and learning doc15670 none Language and Literacy: Developmental, Cultural, and Brain Mechanisms Henry Wellman, Frederick Morrison, and Twila Tardif Being able to talk, to read and to profit from instruction are core cognitive competencies of older children and adults. Much of our lives are spent talking with, reading about, learning from and teaching others; in short, in communicating and learning. Core abilities to communicate and to learn develop in the preschool years and then set the stage for the transition to school and more focused learning. For example, during the preschool years children acquire communicative competence, vocabulary, knowledge about people and about the world, initial abilities to reason logically, and very early literacy skills. How do they do so? How can we best help them do so? How do such early skills make possible later school-based learning? To answer these questions requires consideration of a variety of processes-development and learning, informal and formal instruction, language and literacy. It requires consideration of several levels of analysis-brain mechanisms, childhood experiences, formal and informal lessons provided by others, cultural and instructional practices. Changes in language and literacy in the preschool years thus provide a remarkable window of opportunity for researching the complex developmental, cultural-institutional, and neurocognitive mechanisms responsible for cognitive growth. This Children s Research Initiative planning grant will design research needed to exploit this window of opportunity. The eventual aim of this project is the establishment of an integrative research center to undertake the needed research. Initially, the investigators will focus on combining three different research approaches to address these complex questions. One concerns cross-cultural comparisons, in this case comparisons between Chinese and English cultures and practices (specifically, US, Hong Kong, and mainland Chinese). Chinese and English contrast as languages in intriguing ways--not the least of which is differences in writing and reading systems. Moreover, Hong Kong, China and the US offer different types of socialization experiences with regards to language, literacy, and schooling. A second approach disentangles the influences of age (maturation) and experience (especially school experiences) by using school cutoff methods. In school cutoff studies, children who just made versus just missed the cutoff for school entry (and thus who are of identical age but different experiences) will be compared on growth of cognitive, language, and literacy skills. A third approach is to apply cognitive neuroscience methods of brain imaging to developing preschool children. Such research can yield important insights about both the maturation of brain structures and the role of experience in developing language and literacy skills. Combinations of these research approaches and results promise to illuminate the development of essential human abilities, in particular those involved in being able to talk, to read, and to learn doc15671 none Biological Sciences (61) This project outlines the needs, equipment and implementation plans to integrate digital imaging technology into the Cell and Molecular Biology (CMB) curriculum at SMSU. This technology is currently used in biomedical and biotechnology fields. Adapting this technology to teaching laboratories is expected to enhance student learning and job opportunities available to SMSU students. This instrumentation is to be retrofitted on an existing shared microscope, an Olympus BX60, used for undergraduate courses and research. The technology enhancement of this microscope 1) provides for collection and analysis of data in laboratory courses and student research to allow use of learned computer skills to develop knowledge in the scientific process of data analysis; and 2) provides for faculty opportunities to become current with skills in digital imaging technology to allow for integration into the undergraduate laboratory curriculum and research projects. This experience benefits all CMB majors, those interested in basic science and in allied medical careers, by providing the opportunity to obtain the skills and knowledge base in digital imaging techniques required to be competitive for jobs and positions within the growing biomedical field. This request for instrumentation updates and enhances the capabilities of existing equipment in use within the program, and enhances the career opportunities for the mostly rural and female students in the CMB program at SMSU doc15672 none Biological Sciences (61) This project is developing an interdisciplinary curriculum bringing together two highly successful but currently separate areas of excellence at UNH. The Lakes Lay Monitoring Program (LLMP) is a 22-year veteran program wherein citizen stakeholders living on NH lakes collect water-quality data for analysis and archiving at UNH. The LLMP is being augmented with the use of remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS), drawing from strengths associated with a world-class facility housed in the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS). We are recruiting a cohort of UNH sophomores, including non-science majors, to participate in the project which is adapting the Blackboard Project to connect lay lake volunteers and UNH undergraduates. They are learning to use the geo-spatial technologies (GST) to develop regional algorithms to monitor lake watersheds from space, while learning theory and practice of limnology and microbial ecology. We are engaging the undergraduates as outreach teachers through adaptation of methods from the Gaia Crossroads Project to train the lay monitors in GST. This Lake Watch Project develops skills for communication, teamwork and critical thinking through hypothesis-driven, cooperative learning. The project increases faculty empowerment of undergraduates as a teaching resource and promotes faculty awareness of lecture-less teaching. It yields, through a writing- and speaking-intensive Lake Watch Seminar course, a student-prepared resource manual and a distance-learning model. The suitability of this model is being evaluated as a means of introducing lake watershed remote sensing into other arenas, including K-12 classrooms doc15673 none Chemistry (12) In spite of the many types of kinetic and thermodynamic information available through electrochemical techniques, few undergraduates have the opportunity to carry out such experiments. This project seeks to address this deficiency through the acquisition of a computer controlled potentiostat. Use of the instrument is being implemented throughout the chemistry curriculum beginning with Organic Chemistry and culminating in undergraduate research. The project draws from a model developed by Holder at Appalachian State University and adapts experiments from the research literature. Experiments are selected which complement the material being covered in a particular course, and which illustrate the usefulness of electrochemical techniques for understanding molecular properties. The project is particularly benefiting first generation college students, who comprise approximately 40% of Coe s entering classes. An advisory committee of electrochemistry professionals (from the University of Iowa, Cornell College, and Collins Printed Circuits) has been formed to assist in evaluation and in the development of new experiments suitable for use in undergraduate laboratories. The advisory committee includes expertise from industry, biochemistry, material science, and environmental engineering; the new experiments being developed include these interdisciplinary areas. Students are expected to gain a broad understanding of the use of electrochemistry to solve chemical problems. Dissemination will include presentations at regional and national meetings, publication in the chemical education literature and research literature, and creation of an electrochemical education Web page doc15674 none Salamanders are one of the major groups of living amphibians. Unfortunately, very little is known about their early evolution because early salamander fossils have not been recovered. Indeed until now, only two species from the relevant time was known. We are now presented with an unusual opportunity to investigate major questions of salamander evolution and diversity. Over the past three years, we have recovered more than 800 superbly preserved salamander specimens from the earliest parts of salamander history. These sites, from northern China, contain a highly diverse and well preserved fauna of salamanders. Access to these sites has been granted and they can readily be quarried in an effort to recover even more specimens. The importance of these sites and this material lies in its age (these are among the earliest known salamanders), its abundance (hundreds of articulated skeletons can be collected from each site), its taxonomic diversity (several different families are present), its life-history diversity (many different parts of the life cycle are are all preserved), and its exceptional preservation (soft-tissue impressions are often present). Major goals of this project include: 1. to collect new fossils from and assess the relative age of the exceptional fossil-bearing units northern China, 2. to describe new fossil salamanders and revise known taxa, 3. to access the evolutionary and geographic history of fossil and Recent salamanders, and 4. to use the exquisite preservation of the new salamander material to address how morphological variation has evolved doc15675 none A collaborative research program will study adaptive and survival strategies of microorganisms in biofilms. The collaborating team includes researchers at the University of Buffalo and at Malmo University (Sweden). The program has three objectives: as a clear test of the induction hypothesis with a well-studied system, to identify the general and acid-specific stress proteins induced in S. mutans H7 during the early stages of the acid tolerance response and to initiate studies on their function; to establish the relationships between the acid tolerance and starvation responses in S. mutans, as functions of the surface energies of the substrata to which they have attached as biofilms; and to expand the study of the induction of stress proteins to include the response of S. mutnas to dynamic shear stresses that characterize relevant microbial biofilm environments doc15676 none Chemistry (12) With the purchase of a Varian Saturn gas-chromatograph mass-spectrometer (GC MS) equipped with electron ionization (EI) and chemical ionization (CI) capabilities, we are adapting and implementing GC MS-based laboratory experiments into four courses, Organic Chemistry, Physical Chemistry, Instrumental Methods of Analysis, and Environmental Chemistry at Philadelphia University. In addition, we are developing disciplinary and interdisciplinary guided-inquiry projects for the four courses. The GC MS system is used as the catalyst in the development of these guided-inquiry projects. In these laboratory projects, students are given chemistry problems to solve as in an actual research setting. Solution to these problems requires the students to work as a team to formulate a response and use GC MS and other instrumentation to solve the problems. The projects increase in complexity as students gain experience with the instrumentation. For example, in organic chemistry a two-component mixture is analyzed by GC MS to gain insight into reaction mechanisms. Identification of the compounds in natural and manmade products with high vapor pressures and unique smells is explored in physical chemistry. And, in environmental chemistry, a GC MS required project examining sediment contamination in the local Philadelphia area will soon be undertaken. The overcharging goal of our project is to enable our students acquire highly valued technical skills, develop critical thinking, and improve their communication and teamwork skills. Furthermore, with the knowledge and expertise gained working with modern research-grade instrumentation, our students would be well equipped for entering into chemistry-related industrial positions and or highly competitive graduate programs doc15677 none Biological Sciences (61) This project develops a new discovery-based laboratory course, Laboratory in Genetics , adapted from a course at Santa Clara University. Targeted to upper-class undergraduates, the course permits students to experimentally explore concepts of classical and modern genetics, including genomics. Two inquiry-based research projects are initiated and carried out by the students; both projects generate novel data. This approach offers students the opportunity to explore a unique genetic problem, acquiring related concepts and information in the context of that exploration. The course makes use of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, taking advantage of the ease and practicability with which relatively sophisticated genetics experiments can be carried out with this organism. For example, the second project incorporates a new experimental technology that enables genomic sequence information to be transferred to a functional assay in this organism. A pilot offering of the course demonstrated the feasibility of the course plan and enabled the sharpening of course goals. The pilot helped identify specific equipment needs that are necessary to meet the course objectives. Project outcomes are: (1) to refine the syllabus and course materials to increase student capacity and make the course exportable, (2) to provide the means for students to explore a wider array of genotypes and phenotypes, and (3) to give each student the opportunity to become proficient at utilizing the available literature and post-genomics databases and tools. In this way, the larger goals of improving acquisition of scientific knowledge and skills, including analytical, technical and communication skills, can be achieved doc15678 none Chemistry (12) With the acquisition of a 300 MHz high-field Fourier Transform nuclear magnetic resonance (FT-NMR) spectrometer we are implementing modern NMR techniques, including variable temperature, multinuclear, and two-dimensional methods, in both teaching laboratories and undergraduate research projects. The main goal of the project is to update and improve the chemistry lab experiences afforded to both chemistry and non-chemistry majors. Other objectives are to improve undergraduate research experiences, to provide a regional NMR resource, and to provide opportunities for professional improvement to WSU chemistry faculty. To achieve our objectives, we are adapting and implementing a set of experiments from the chemical education literature into our Biochemistry, Organic, Inorganic, Polymer, and Physical chemistry courses, and into two advanced laboratories; the Advanced Organic Chemistry and the Instrumental Analysis laboratory courses. In conjunction with NMR, we are also using molecular modeling in organic chemistry to enhance the quality of the experiments. The chemistry students experience with the FT-NMR techniques begins with the second-year course in organic chemistry and culminates in capstone research guided by the chemistry faculty. Students use laptop computers for off-line data processing, thus allowing time-efficient use of the NMR. We are using standardized student, faculty, and alumni surveys and course evaluation forms to assess our project. Classroom assessment techniques from the Field-tested Learning Assessment Guide (FLAG) project are being used to assess student learning. Project results will be disseminated through presentations at national professional conferences, submissions to peer-reviewed journals, and publication on the project web site doc15679 none This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, provides funds and field support to continue a study of plate motions in the Antarctic Peninsula and Scotia Sea region. The principal aim of the original Scotia Arc GPS Project (SCARP) was to determine motions of the Scotia Plate relative to adjacent plates and to measure crustal deformation along its margins with special attention to the South Sandwich microplate and Bransfield Strait extension. The focus of the present proposal is confined to the part of the SCARP project that includes GPS sites at Elephant Island, the South Shetland Islands and on the Antarctic Peninsula. The British Antarctic Survey provides data from two sites on the Scotia arc for this project. The northern margin of the Scotia Plate is not included herein because that region is not covered under Polar Programs. A separate proposal will request support for re-measuring SCARP GPS stations in South America. With regard to the Antarctic Peninsula area, continuously operating GPS stations were established at Frei Base, King George Island (in ) and at the Argentine Base, South Orkney Islands (in ). A number of monumented sites were established in the Antarctic Peninsula region in to support campaign-style GPS work in December and December . Because of the expected slow crustal motion in the Bransfield Strait and expiration of the initial grant, no further data collection will be done until enough time has passed so that new measurements can be expected to yield precise results. The primary aim of this work is to complete the measurements required to quantify crustal deformation related to opening of the Bransfield Strait, the South Shetland microplate, and to identify any other independent tectonic blocks that the GPS data may reveal. The measurements to be completed under this award will be done using ship support during the - season. This would be five years after the first measurements and would provide quite precise horizontal velocities. This project will complete the acquisition, processing, and interpretation of a single data set to continue this initial phase of the NSF-funded project to measure crustal motions along the southern margin of the Scotia plate. A principal investigator and one graduate student from the University of Texas will perform fieldwork. A graduate student from the University of Hawaii will process the new data consistent with previous data, and all of the SCARP investigators (Bevis, Dalziel, Smalley, Taylor: from U. Texas, U. Hawaii, and U. Memphis) will participate in interpreting the data. The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) also recognized the importance of the Scotia plate and the Bransfield system in both global and local plate tectonic frameworks. They, too, have used GPS to measure crustal motions in this region and duplicate a number of our sites. They began earlier than we, have taken data more recently, presumably will continue taking data, and they have published some results. The collaboration between SCARP, BAS, and AWI begun earlier, will continue into this new work. Joint and separate publications are anticipated. The existing SCARP network has several advantages that justify collection and analysis of another set of data. One is that SCARP has established and measured GPS sites on Smith, Low, and Livingston Islands, where other groups have not. These sites significantly extend the dimensions of the South Shetland microplate so that we can determine a more precise pole of rotation and recognize any sub-blocks within the South Shetland arc. Smith and Low Islands are near the end of the Bransfield Basin where relative motion between the South Shetland Microplate must somehow terminate, perhaps by faulting along an extension of the Hero fracture zone. Another advantage is that measurements under SCARP were made using fixed-height masts that eliminate all but a fraction of a millimeter of vertical error in exactly re-occupying each site. Vertical motion associated with postglacial rebound should be on the order of several mm yr, which will eventually be measurable. Mid-Holocene shorelines that emerged to more than 20m on some South Shetland arc islands suggest that vertical motion is significant. Thus, this work will contribute to understanding both plate motions and post-glacial rebound from ice mass loss in the region doc15680 none Understanding Socialization and Adolescent Development in Multi-cultural Contexts Andrew Supple Communities in the southeastern United States have experienced rapid increases in proportions of foreign-born individuals over the last decade. Demographic changes have been especially dramatic in No. Carolina and Georgia, two states among the top ten in terms of percentage increases in foreign-born populations during the s. Changes in the demographic composition of local communities in these states have created an acute need for a sound knowledge base regarding the socialization influences and outcomes in these populations. Moreover, community leaders, outreach service providers, and educators will need reliable data and culturally relevant theoretical frameworks to disseminate knowledge about socialization processes among children and adolescents from immigrant families. The purpose of this project is to create a multidisciplinary and cross-institutional research team from three universities in the southeastern United States through a series of workshops. The workshops are designed to develop a strategic plan for research on the socialization of children and adolescents in immigrant families doc15681 none NORTH CAROLINA CHILD DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH COLLABORATIVE Martha J. Cox, Principal Investigator J. Steven Reznick, Co-Principal Investigator The North Carolina Child Development Research Collaborative (CDRC) proposed here builds upon ongoing multidisciplinary activities across departments at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and neighboring institutions of Duke, University of North Carolina at Greensboro and North Carolina State. Investigators from disparate areas of developmental inquiry-from behavioral genetics and developmental neuroscience to life-course sociology, anthropology, public health, nursing, social work, education and developmental psychology-will participate in the research and training at the CDRC. The CDRC s efforts are informed by an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the development of youth that includes investigation of cultural and societal factors studied by anthropologist and sociologists to the neural and genetic levels studied by biologists and neuroscientists. The work of the CDRC will transcend a main effect model of development that sees each influence as an independent contribution and will embrace a model in which influences from various levels (the community, the family, neural and genetic factors etc.) are seen as working together. The CDRC will increase the capacity of faculty and students to conduct interdisciplinary research. This will be accomplished by launching a new longitudinal, collaborative research study focusing on early childhood. From birth to school entry, children show remarkable linguistic, intellectual, emotional and social change while going through successive transitions between social contexts such as from family to day care or nursery school, annual changes from one peer group to another, and later changes from preschool to kindergarten. This study will tap levels of analysis relevant for understanding early development, extending beyond the individual and dyad to include assessments of biological functioning, cognitive competence, personality and emotion, social relationships, neighborhood, community, and culture in which persons and interactions are embedded. Beginning in the first year of life, we will track these multiple levels of analysis during periods of transition to elucidate both the constraints posed by the child s environment as well as illustrating the ability of the child to adapt to new environments and conditions. A representative sample of 200 children born during a 3-month period will be recruited into the study from birth records in Durham, North Carolina. Durham is a mid-size city with typical characteristics of cities around the United States: a diverse population in terms of family ethnicity, income, and education; a declining city center with large pockets of poverty and limited employment opportunities; and wide variation in the quality of child care and school settings. Durham has an almost equal representation of African-American and Euro-American families and a rapidly increasing Hispanic population. Moreover, Durham has a large African-American middle class population, thus making it possible to study ethnicity disentangled from socioeconomic status among both African-American and Euro-American groups. Children will be tested initially within a 2-week period on either side of their first birthday and followed longitudinally through their fourth birthday. Additional assessments will be conducted at the second and third birthday and midway between birthdays (i.e., at 18, 30, and 42 months). Integrated working groups of researchers will implement multiple levels of measurement. Six working groups focus on: biological processes; temperament and emotional regulation; memory, language, and literacy; peer relations as contexts; family and intergenerational relationships; child care, community, and culture. A seventh working group provides expertise on quantitative approaches to longitudinal analyses. The CDRC will also initiate and support other linked endeavors including: 1) conducting workshops, seminars and course development to increase cross-disciplinary knowledge, 2) developing new methods for interdisciplinary research, and 3) training a diverse cadre of young scholars who are equipped to pursue collaborative interdisciplinary research doc15682 none Chemistry (12) At the Chemistry Department of Birmingham-Southern College, we are enriching the learning experience of our students by developing a new chemistry curriculum which includes more experiential, investigative laboratory exercises across the chemistry program. FT-NMR and other instruments in the department are used to demonstrate scientific problem solving through the use of modern instrumentation. Our goal is to improve students critical thinking skills by adapting and developing laboratory experiments that require them to develop protocols, collaborate in groups, and defend results in oral presentations. To accomplish this, we are adapting a number of experiments form the chemical education literature and implementing them as collaborative laboratory projects into the Organic, Physical, Biochemistry, Inorganic, and Advanced Analytical courses. Our department has already made significant progress in incorporating investigative laboratories into our curriculum and developing an active undergraduate research program. A second goal is to further continue this trend. An NMR spectrometer is critical for fulfilling this goal since it has become an essential tool in chemistry. Our students are exposed to NMR spectroscopy at all levels beginning with organic chemistry and culminating with independent research. With the completion of the Elton B. Stephens Science Center in the spring of , and its significantly enhanced teaching and research facilities that better reflect our new way of teaching, we expect to see an increase in the number of students involved in the sciences and thus impacted by the new chemistry curriculum. We are also making the instrument available to Miles College, a small, historically black college in Fairfield, Alabama, for use in both teaching and research doc15683 none This project is a balloon-borne experiment whose main goals include 1) a focused program of investigation of high latitude ionospheric electrodynamics (the study of the properties of electromagnetic radiation and the way in which it interacts with charged matter) using multiple long duration balloons launched in Antarctica, and 2) the investigation of the fast penetration of electric fields from the outer to the inner magnetosphere in response to external inputs. The project is cooperative with Japanese X-ray and magnetometer investigators. The bulk of the proposed effort will be focused on investigation of outstanding problems of the polar and auroral ionosphere such as the nature of polar cap convection under varying solar wind conditions, dynamics of the dayside cusp, the transient and steady state coupling of the solar wind to the magnetosphere, transient phenomena on wholly closed magnetic fields lines such as traveling convective vortices (TCVs) and those related to magnetic pulsations with periods greater than one second. Another important effort will be to investigate the rapid transmission of ionospheric and magnetospheric electric fields from higher to lower latitudes in response to variations in the interplanetary magnetic field. This project consists of the construction, integration and testing of the electric field instruments for the geophysics payloads that are planned as part of the - continuation of the Polar Patrol Balloon Program managed by the Japanese National Institute of Polar Research Three balloons will be flown from the Japanese Antarctic Station, while one payload will be launched from McMurdo Station doc15684 none Earth Systems Science (40) A series of activities are being undertaken as a first step in the development of a GIS laboratory at Prairie View A&M University. Visits to the GIS facilities at the University of Texas-Austin, Texas A&M University, and Houston Community College are designed to acquaint us with high quality academic programs and identify exemplary materials for adaptation. Faculty development activities, including attendance at GIS workshops, are being undertaken doc15685 none Computer Science (31) The goal of this project is to increase the effectiveness of textbooks in the undergraduate science curriculum. Our experience at Hope College and the literature indicates there are several problems with current textbooks, including difficulty in matching texts to course needs in the areas of emphasis, breath, depth and level. These problems are addressed by developing a new textbook model. The effectiveness of the model will be determined by its application in our general education course, Introduction to Computer Science. This project develops a prototype of an electronic textbook where the instructor determines the content of the textbook. Traditional textbook content as well as supplemental materials provided by the instructor or determined by the student is used. Students augment the material supplied by the instructor with other resources, including resources created by the student. The textbook integrates previously disconnected resources in the learning experience, such as homework assignments and laboratory experiments, into a single environment. Both student and instructor have the ability to annotate any of the materials used or referenced in the textbook. Integrating all of these features creates a textbook that is customizable by both student and instructor and provides a single location that students can use to organize the learning resources available for a course. An important feature of our model is that it is designed to run on handheld computers, allowing the textbook to be portable and convenient for students to use doc15686 none Planning for an American Indian Child Development Center Joseph M. White & Beverly R. King Efforts to develop an American Indian Child Development Center on the campus of South Dakota State University in Brookings, SD, will begin with a two day workshop designed to address several issues. The workshop will help in the development of a specific mission and a set of narrowly defined research objectives. At present the purposes of a Center at SDSU would be to identify factors that influence positive development from different levels of analysis (e.g., individuals, families, and communities) and context (e.g., ethnicity, culture) among American Indian children. These influences may or may not be the same as the majority culture. Further insight into this issue is needed in order to use this information to assist American Indian children and their families in the process of understanding functional pathways to development across childhood. Activities planned for the workshop include training in the life course perspective, both in terms of a theory to guide future research and in terms of designing methodologies that will be sensitive to multiple influences on American Indian child development. This will include selected faculty involved in defining the research questions and potential projects. Although much of this work will have been done prior to this time via preliminary correspondence, this initial morning session will be designed to review and refine the research questions and ensuing framework. The afternoon session will be open to the academic community at large to receive training on the life course perspective and the methodology used to work within this framework. Smaller breakout groups are anticipated to explore issues related to this paradigm. Groups will then reconvene to conclude the day s activities and to allow the consultants to respond to any final questions. The second day of the workshop will include a more focused level of training from American Indian representatives from local tribes and communities. They will be asked to share presentations about their beliefs, understanding, and practice relative to children. Smaller breakout sessions will occur prior to lunch and resume after lunch. Groups will again reconvene to pull information together and provide concluding comments. Input from the tribal communities will be critical to finalizing the research questions and agenda. Research collaborators will have several follow-up meetings to review the information gleaned from the workshop and integrate it into the original set of specific research questions that were developed prior to the workshop. This information will then be used to develop a more coherent and focused proposal for the development of a center. Finally, visits to a few existing American Indian Centers sometime following the workshops will be invaluable. The visits may help identify ways in which a center focused on American Indian Child Development might function and how the specific research questions and ensuing projects may be facilitated doc15687 none Geology (42) We are developing a new Applied Geophysics course that represents an adaptation of a pedagogical model developed at the University of Massachusetts. We are also creating new opportunities for undergraduate research in geophysics. The lab component of our Applied Geophysics course includes six modules dedicated to seismic refraction and reflection, ground-penetrating radar, gravimetry, direct-current electrical methods, magnetic surveying, and cross-hole geophysics. Two four-hour field labs are devoted to each module. The instructor designs the first survey using each method, for the purposes of demonstrating proper survey design, data collection, safety measures, and data reduction. Alternating groups of students lead the second lab in each module, thus calling on student groups to take leadership roles in designing surveys, assessing the limitations of various methods through forward modeling, and organizing data collection efforts. The instructor-led experiments take advantage of diverse sites off campus. Student-led surveys are being conducted at various locations on campus, including our Geophysical Test Site and adjacent Experimental Well Field. Interpretations incorporate complementary data sets from multiple geophysical methods. New access to state-of-the-art geophysical equipment is having a major positive impact not only on the preparation of geology majors, but also on other physical science and engineering students doc15688 none Twickler This award supports the continuation of the Science Management Office (SMO) for the National Ice Core Laboratory (NICL). The NICL-SMO is located at the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space at the University of New Hampshire and serves as the primary point of contact for scientists interested in access to ice cores. It also facilitates the interactions of the Ice Core Working Group (ICWG), a group of scientists knowledgable about ice cores who provide guidance to funding agencies on topics related to sample access, distribution, inventory, policy issues, operation and maintenance of the NICL facility and future directions for ice core research. NICL-SMO assists the ICWG in polling the scientific community and in developing reports, planning workshops and coordinating educational outreach activities. Increasing public and scientific interest in ice cores and ice core records and the growing demand for information about current and past climate all point to the immense importance of this field and the need for this function. Under this renewal award the NICL-SMO will start to publish a bi-yearly newsletter to inform the science community and the general public about the latest findings from ice cores and other news of interest to people curious about ice cores and the paleoclimate records they provide doc15689 none Computer Science (31) Through a collaboration of Grand Valley State University, Alma College, and the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, this project explores the use of the algorithm visualization (AV) tool JHAVE on student understanding of computer algorithms. We are refining a suite of existing AV resources, each of which consists of a visualization, a text description of the algorithm, and questions that are presented to the students as they interactively explore the algorithm. We are conducting usability studies of the resources on all campuses in order to ensure portability of our results. We are focusing on evaluation of the results of these resources using student surveys, faculty surveys and examinations which will allow for cross-institution comparisons. We anticipate using a working group format to dissemination and enhance our results doc15690 none Mathematical Sciences (21) A major shortage of qualified mathematics teachers exists and is expected to worsen. By adapting and implementing Queens College s (QC CUNY) exemplary TIME program (NSF ), the pipeline of prospective mathematics teachers at the middle and high school levels is being increased. TIMEQCC is establishing a mathematics-education program at Queensborough Community College (QCC) and increasing the junior year cohort in TIME . The success of TIME has been demonstrated through increased retention rates, media recognition, and additional funding from the college and a private foundation. The goal of increasing the pipeline of qualified teachers is being accomplished by targeting the under-recruited population of QCC students who have completed college algebra or precalculus with a B or better and then retaining them using two major innovations. These innovations are: 1. Cross-campus counseling and teaching (QCC and QC), including an interdisciplinary mathematics education course. 2. Implementing the successful QCC upper level mathematics retention model -- tutoring in upper level mathematics courses, study groups based on the Uri Treisman model, and tutoring internships in the Mathematics Learning Center. Working closely with the TIME faculty at QC, the structure of the program is being adapted for the community college student. Formative and summative evaluations are being conducted using QC s established evaluation procedures. Dissemination is through the CUNY Council of Math Chairs and national on-line conferences doc15691 none Engineering-Chemical(53) We have developed interactive hybrid curriculum materials for teaching chemical reaction engineering. Our materials consists of textbooks, a CDROM, as well as a web site on the Internet. A prototype of this hybrid has been evaluated over the past two years at the University of Michigan. Through the use of interactive computer modules (ICM) we are supporting students with different student learning styles. These learning styles are outlined in the Felder Solomon Inventory and we have designed our materials to address these in a number of different ways. The simulations we have created are around various chemical reactions. These simulations model complex problems that allow students to alter key parameters and evaluate their results to complement homework assignments, classroom lectures, and student study groups. These problems have been designed to enhance student critical thinking and problem solving skills. Updated authoring software Quest 10 from Quest 2.0 will be utilized as well as FEMLAB to upgrade our existing modules. Our original materials have gained a wide audience in the Chemical Engineering community. We are disseminating our new material through two textbooks, our CDROM that is being distributed to every chemical engineering department through the CACHE Corporation, and the Internet doc15692 none Chemistry (12) This project focuses on adapting and implementing the Working With Chemistry (WWC) laboratory program for General Chemistry students. WWC is an NSF DUE-funded inquiry-based laboratory program, developed by Wink, Gislason, and Kuehn at the University of Illinois-Chicago, designed for non-chemistry science majors. Experiments are grouped in threes: Skill-building (detailed procedure given; new skill learned), Foundation (students design part of a procedure, using new skill), and Application (students design a procedure using a new skill to solve real-world problems). Adoption of the WWC program changes instructional styles from traditional to problem-based. Adaptation of the WWC program is needed to better meet the needs and backgrounds of Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) students, improve the instructional abilities of IUP faculty, and integrate technology into the laboratories. Trial runs of WWC indicated several changes were needed to successfully implement the program at IUP. The objectives and expected outcomes include: improve the pre-laboratory assignments to better prepare students for each experiment; implement a laboratory report tutorial; adapt the few WWC laboratories that have proved problematic at IUP; incorporate diode-array spectrophotometers and Vernier interfaces; develop and implement new experiment groups relevant to other majors in General Chemistry; adapt the existing instructor s guide; and implement a WebCT site. To achieve these outcomes, eight faculty, with appropriate expertise, are working individually and collectively to develop adapt prelabs and experiment groups, install software and write student guidelines. Faculty reports for each laboratory are being used to enhance the instructor s guide. Continuing evaluation of the program is underway, and dissemination of results is planned doc15693 none Geology (42) The purpose of this project is to design and test 12-15 laboratory-style exercise modules for publication in a geology laboratory manual or uploading to the Internet. The purpose of the exercises is to teach mathematical material to geology students in geologic context. Each exercise includes one or more spreadsheet models designed to address a geological-mathematical problem (i.e., a geology problem with mathematical content). The exercises are being designed with the expectation that the students can figure out the cell formulas from the mathematics provided in the written material; that is, the spreadsheets show the layout of the algorithms but not the formulas themselves. The written material of the exercises also guide the students to explore, through the repetitive calculations made possible with spreadsheets, both the mathematics applied in the problems and the geology of the problems themselves. The mathematics covered include algebra, trigonometry, analytical geometry, probability data analysis, calculus, and problem-solving heuristics. The exercises are hands-on, interactive, student-friendly version of much of the material covered in the PI s column, Computational Geology, in the Journal of Geoscience Education. The exercises are being piloted in the PI s geological-mathematical problem-solving course, and at several other institutions doc15694 none The Ecology of Early Language Development Marguerite Barratt Establishing proficient communication skills in early childhood provides a critical foundation for social and emotional development and for subsequent academic achievement. The vast individual differences in early language skills that emerge in the context of children s families, cultures, and communities are important because of their long-term implications for children s school readiness and subsequent adaptation. The goal of the planning grant is to bring multidisciplinary perspectives to bear on the causes and consequences of individual differences in early language development. Some aspects of language are particularly fragile, particularly vulnerable to deprived conditions. Decades of excellent research within individual disciplines, including psychology, education, linguistics, family ecology, medicine, genetics, nursing, and speech and language science have described early language development. However, the explanations of processes that are emerging necessarily cross disciplinary boundaries (Chapman, ). Each discipline uses different theoretical frameworks, different vocabularies, and asks different questions. The ecological and developmental framework that will guide this research will bring together the perspectives of the various disciplines of 16 faculty scholars from Michigan State University. The planning process will (a) build the multidisciplinary context for the work through sessions with nationally prominent visiting scholars and (b) through planning sessions focused on development of a Center for the Study of the Ecology of Early Language Development. (c) The effort will integrate the domains of biology, family, culture, and community through research clusters that work to refine and integrate their science, with a focus on assessments, research designs, sampling strategies, and pilot research. During the planning period, (d) linkages will be strengthened with other research institutes and departments at MSU and with other Michigan institutions of higher education, particularly community colleges that provide certificates and degrees in early childhood education. (e) A Community Forum will solicit information about early language development from a broad coalition of Michigan partners. (f) Dissemination linkages are already in place with MSU Extension, collaborations with the state networks for child care and Head Start, the human service planning groups in each county, and the 53 Intermediate School Districts. (g) Policy linkages are in place with the Michigan legislative Children s Caucus, the state departments addressing social services, community health, and education, and several state level advocacy organizations. (h) A National Advisory Committee and a Community Advisory Committee will be assembled. The Institute for Children, Youth, and Families (ICYF), within the College of Human Ecology at Michigan State University, has a 30-year history of multidisciplinary research and outreach that serves as the foundation for this proposal. The research on the ecology of early language development will explicitly link to MSU s 10-year-old multidisciplinary Interdepartmental Graduate Specialization in Infant Studies. It will also link to MSU multidisciplinary graduate training programs in applied developmental science, cognitive science and neuroscience doc15695 none Biological Sciences (61) Recent advances in microscopic techniques have provided scientists with new tools to understand cells and the tissues they comprise. A wide variety of fluorescent labels are now available to study cellular structure and function in both living and preserved cells. In addition, contrast enhancing optics and computerized image analysis provide advanced microscopy tools needed to prepare, observe and analyze the organization and function of tissues and cells. These techniques provide the opportunity to completely reinvent undergraduate courses that involve microscopy (e.g. Functional Histology) in such a way that will provide for cooperative, inquiry-based, learning and critical thinking among all students while giving them an experience in discovery-learning. The knowledge of tissue and cellular architecture thus gained will be particularly important to students planning to enter medical school, graduate school, or work as technicians in most biological laboratories. This project is incorporating these teaching techniques in a centralized advanced microscopy center that provides students with the facility and, through training in microtechniques and image analysis, the skills needed for more critical observation of biological phenomena by using the microscope as a tool of inquiry. In this way students are encouraged to develop research interests and are able to design and evaluate experiments in a scientifically meaningful way. This is being accomplished by incorporating experimentally advanced microscopic techniques across the undergraduate curriculum and in our undergraduate research programs for biology majors. The techniques are adapted from successful programs established at Kent State University (DUE grant # ) and Fort Lewis College (DUE grant # ), both of which have been established through NSF funding. These exemplary programs are being adapted so as to integrate these powerful teaching techniques with advanced microscopy technologies into our curriculum which is being modified for: 1) the establishment of a new functional histology course; 2) specific laboratory exercises across the biology curriculum; 3) two faculty workshops on advanced microscopy techniques and modern image analyses; 4) our pre-college teacher training programs and; 5) our academically talented minority high-school program doc15696 none The purpose of this project is to organize a workshop that will bring together an exciting, interdisciplinary group of researchers working on new issues in learning and development. In addition to presentations by researchers using new methods and techniques in child learning and development, the workshop will also include presentations by scholars in the fields of psychology and neuroscience where results from animal research may profoundly impact our understanding of learning and development in humans. The workshop will complement a series of in-house lectures by grant members who will be giving state-of-the-art presentations on individual research areas. The goal of the proposed Workshop is therefore to help forge a new interdisciplinary working framework for future collaborative research on child learning and development at Brown University doc15697 none Interdisciplinary (99) This project sets up a web-based resource center at Alabama State University using adaptations of WeBWork and WWWAssign, to strengthen the algebraic and computational skills of students, and to make WeBWork and WWWAssign available to regional colleges and high schools. WeBWork and WWWAssign are adapted and used in conjunction with other methods to provide and collect information through the Internet to offer college mathematics homework assignments and college and high school mathematics algebra review and practice modules across the web. The project has the following outcomes: (a) WeBWork is adapted in mathematics courses of all levels at our institution. (b) Homework assignments and tests are offered in the resource center in electronic form using WeBWork and or WWWAssign, with automatic grading and reporting of scores to instructors and immediate feedback to students. (c) Web-based review materials containing WeBWork practice problem sets are written to accompany the assignments and tests so that students who encounter difficulties can review and practice the material between attempts. (d) Web-based practice tests are created. (e) Workshops are conducted and assistance is provided for regional postsecondary and secondary teachers interested in learning about the WeBWork and WWWAssign systems. Ongoing evaluation and dissemination programs also are fully integrated into the project doc15698 none Collaborative Proposal: Infant Perception of Referencing Through Dynamic Gestures During Early Lexical Development Nancy Rader The main objective of the proposed research is to test a perceptually-based theory hypothesized to underlie early word comprehension. The theory has its basis in socialization practices used by caregivers in interacting with infants at a very early stage of word learning. In determining how infants initially come to perceive the relation between a word and its referent, complexities arise from the fact that the word is a segment of what perceptually is a continuous stream of speech sounds. Additionally, the referent is one element embedded within a complex, dynamic environment. How could an infant detect which span of the speech stream is a word and what that word means? In searching for an answer to this question, a set of four studies has been designed. These studies test the hypothesis that the types of perceptual information that caregivers present in gesture and speech attract attention and make the correspondence between a word and its referent available and easily detectable. The research will examine a range of semantic functions that includes nouns (objects), verbs (object motions), and adjectives (object attributes). The sample will be comprised of infants from English-speaking families and will include mothers whose highest education level is a high school diploma as well as those with a college education. The research will be carried out at Ithaca College, a primarily undergraduate institution; the undergraduate students assisting with the project should gain an appreciation of a scientific approach to psychology and a greater interest in pursuing graduate studies. While the results of this research will be of interest to theorists of language development, they also should have great practical significance. Understanding the processes underlying early word learning will help educators devise more effective techniques for impaired language learners, for children with developmental disabilities, and for anyone learning a second language doc15699 none A Longitudinal Study of Relational Aggression in Preschoolers Nicki R. Crick Longitudinal investigations have demonstrated that childhood aggression is one of the best known social predictors of future maladjustment. Although many important advances have been made in our understanding of aggression, much of this knowledge has been gained through an empirical and theoretical focus on aggressive boys only. The lack of attention to aggressive girls has likely occurred because the study of physical aggression has been emphasized, a form of aggression that is more characteristic of boys than of girls. In an attempt to rectify this inequity, a relational form of aggression has been recently identified that has been shown to be more typical of girls than physical forms. Although great strides have been made in our understanding of relational aggression, the significant gaps in our knowledge are too numerous to outline. One of the most critical gaps is the lack of attention to the early development of relational aggression and its consequences, information that is crucial for informing early prevention and intervention efforts. The proposed study was designed to address this issue through the longitudinal study of preschool-age children. Four objectives will be addressed: (1) to evaluate normative, developmental changes in relational and physical aggression in young children; (2) to assess gender differences in observed relational aggression among young children; (3) to assess the stability of individual differences in physical and relational forms of aggression for both boys and girls; and (4) to compare the concurrent and future social-psychological adjustment status associated with relational aggression for young children of both sexes. A total of 80 preschoolers (40 girls; 40 boys) between the ages of 2 and 4 years will serve as participants. During each of four assessment periods (Year One: Time 1 Year Two: Time 3 & 4) naturalistic observations plus teacher-, peer-, and self-assessments of children s social behavior (relational aggression, physical aggression, and prosocial behavior) and social-psychological adjustment (social adjustment, internalizing difficulties, and externalizing problems) will be conducted at the preschools. A variety of statistical techniques will be used to evaluate the proposed hypotheses including descriptive analyses, linear growth modeling, ANOVA, hierarchical multiple regression, and path analyses. Findings of the proposed research have great potential for enhancing our understanding of a vastly under-represented group, aggressive girls, and for drawing attention to theoretical shortcomings that have promoted the lack of attention to this group. Without the ability to assess and identify aggressive behavioral problems among young girls, we cannot understand the etiology and developmental trajectories of later adjustment problems for females. Early prevention and intervention efforts are also impossible without adequate information to identify at-risk girls during their childhood years doc15700 none Chemistry (12) This project is improving the laboratory experience for our students in The Chemistry of High Polymers. This is being accomplished by the introduction of a GPC, coupled with UV and light-scattering detectors, with attendant software. Experiments are being adapted from a program at the University of Northern Iowa and from the educational literature. These instruments allow students to accurately determine synthetic and or commercial polymer s accurate macromolecular characterizations, such as their molecular weights, molecular weight distributions and molecular size. The result is that we are upgrading and enhancing the laboratory program for an undergraduate polymers course that has been offered for the last 26 years. Since it is a well-known fact that about 75% of all chemistry majors will work in the chemical industry at some time in their careers, and that a vast majority of those chemical companies manufacture polymers, many exclusively so, this particular course and its laboratory experience are integral to the education of chemistry majors who pass through our department. It has proven to be a very popular course over the years we have offered it, and most all our chemistry majors take it doc15701 none The Center for the Study of Culture, Health and Children s Development: Proposal for a Planning Grant Sara Harkness and Charles Super The majority of issues affecting children s health, development and well-being today demand a more interdisciplinary approach than has been characteristic of developmental research in the past. Rapidly increasing awareness of cultural variability in the environments of children s development has led to a call for more contextually oriented research paradigms; but the continuing pressures of disciplinary constituencies make it difficult to build collaborative work across their boundaries. The present project is to support planning and development for a Center for the Study of Culture, Health and Children s Development at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. The proposed Center will build on existing interdisciplinary collaborative relationships among researchers, educators, practitioners and students, with the goal of increasing understanding of children s health and development in cultural context. We expect that the work of this Center will make significant contributions to scientific knowledge and to the improvement of the lives of children and their families in a variety of circumstances. Although the principal investigators have extensive research experience in the area of culture, health and human development, a planning grant is needed to support the development of a larger, coordinated program of research projects on the cultural mediation of children s healthy development. Specifically, we are requesting funding for three related activities: 1) A major planning conference, to be held in October at the University of Connecticut, which will bring together the 25 faculty members associated with this proposal, plus selected graduate students. The purpose of the conference will be to explore common areas of interest and expertise in the intersections of culture, health and children s development, and to define focal topics or issues for the development of new research. One outcome of this conference will, consequently, be the formation of several (we anticipate four) working groups who will continue to collaborate together in preparing specific research proposals that will involve coordination and funding through the proposed Center. 2) Four smaller working conferences, to be held during the winter of , focused on each of the focal research topics defined at the major fall conference. Based on previous work and current interests of participating faculty, we anticipate that these topics will include the cultural regulation of sleep and arousal in infancy, goodness of fit between young children s temperaments and their culturally constituted environments of care, attentional and stress-related disorders of middle childhood across several ethnic and cultural groups, and cultural social factors in school success (or lack thereof) for children as they approach the transition to adolescence. Although research in each of these areas will require special expertise (e.g. measurement of biological markers of stress and reactivity for research on infant sleep and arousal), the projects will be linked through the use of a common theoretical framework for integrating diverse developmental, biological and cultural data (e.g. the developmental niche of Super and Harkness or the developmental microniche of Worthman). Efforts will be made, thus, to ensure that the structure of inquiry and the methods of data collection and analysis for each project are as consistent as possible, creating a synergy among them. 3) Because the proposed Center will be a context for training as well as research, we will bring in speakers for a faculty student research seminar, to be held bi-weekly throughout the spring semester . This seminar, modeled on the Culture, Health and Human Development seminar that has been held for the past three years, will provide an ongoing context for communication and mutual education among the diverse faculty and students affiliated with the Center. We anticipate that at least some of the speakers in this seminar will also contribute to the development of thinking related to the selected focal research topics doc15702 none A Virtual Center for Child Language Acquisition Research: A Planning Grant Proposal Barbara C. Lust We aim to create a Virtual Center through the use of the internet to exchange materials and data across laboratories currently concerned with the study of language acquisition. The purpose of this Planning Grant is to initiate planning to develop the Infrastructure for this Virtual Center. In the planning stage, six US laboratories at six institutions that are concerned with children s first language acquisition, including childhood bilingualism, will form the core of this Virtual Center. The Cornell Language Acquisition Lab, as the lead institution, is in turn linked to the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychology at the Cornell University Weill Medical College. The proposed infrastructure is to be executed through the development and dissemination of new World Wide Web materials to support and develop collaborative cross-linguistic scientific primary research in all areas of language acquisition. These materials comprise a Virtual Linguistics Lab (VLL) which will include a set of internet-available materials to guide primary linguistic research in the area of language acquisition through a web-based graphical user interface. These materials provide the basis for exchange of knowledge and data across laboratories leading to collaborative research and educational initiatives which can allow each individual laboratory at each institution new power and scope through interaction with the Center. Ultimately, the proposed Virtual Center will be extended to networking with other labs which focus on second or multi-language acquisition in the adult, and to other labs which are practicing neuroscientific methods of study of language acquisition. In addition, it will be networked with several international labs in India, Peru and Taiwan, as well as other countries, which will allow a wide expansion of the exchange of knowledge (including both data and scientific methods) in the field. The Virtual Center is designed to allow infinite and open-ended dissemination of materials and data. The Planning Grant is intended to establish the prototypes for the required infrastructure and the necessary preliminary interaction among collaborators in order to design and construct this infrastructure doc15703 none Physics (13) This project aims to increase the number of undergraduate students exposed to physics at Vassar College and, through outreach, to increase the awareness of physics for both K-12 students and teachers. The project adapts a pedagogical technique--video analysis of everyday phenomena and events (e.g., sports, dance, people on swings)--that has been successfully used by a number of physics educators at the college and high school levels. The Principal Investigator is developing a course for college students who do not typically enroll in science courses. In this course, students discover physics concepts by filming and analyzing digital video. Each student is loaned a laptop computer and digital video camera for the semester so that the students can film physics whenever they see it. The video is then transferred into the computer and analyzed with software that yields position-vs.-time data for the object(s). Further analysis allows the calculation of other quantities such as velocity, acceleration, forces, and energy. The first half of the course is a guided exploration of motion concepts through video. The second half of the course is devoted to group projects, in which teams of students create a multimedia DVD or CD-ROM that is appropriate for some level of K-12 students. As a final exercise, the students to go out to K-12 schools and present their projects to a class doc15704 none Every day we hear media reports of far-reaching decisions affecting children s lives--made by legislators, politicians, school boards, government agencies, judges, and others--ostensibly based on sound research. But basic scientists often cringe when they learn of the misunderstanding and misapplication of the research that allegedly informs these decisions. There exists in our society a schism between the scientists who conduct sound empirical research and the decision-makers who translate it into practice. The goal of CIRC is to improve the quality of the conduct and dissemination of child-related research. We aim to place rigorous, scientifically defensible research findings into the hands of society s decision-makers to better inform their thinking about complex issues and the decisions they make. Research conducted through the institute will also inform basic science in the core disciplines. CIRC will achieve these goals by commissioning and servicing national teams of outstanding developmental scientists to study policy-relevant questions and create a consensus report for broad dissemination. Questions will be selected on the basis of their potential to contribute core knowledge to basic science. The planned dissemination process is designed to inform policy-makers and also to impact the lives of the next generation of scholars now in high school, college, and graduate school. CIRC will foster the integration of research, undergraduate education, graduate and postdoctoral training, and public dissemination of rigorous child-related scholarship with the potential to benefit children, science, and society. CIRC s research will tap the developmental sciences (including developmental psychology, economics, medicine, neuroscience, and life-course sociology). CIRC s goals will be accomplished through the interaction of seven components designed to (a) contribute to basic scientific knowledge, (b) inform policy and the media, and (c) integrate these first two goals with undergraduate education of underserved populations and graduate postgraduate training of the next generation of scholars. CIRC will enable multidisciplinary teams to undertake studies pertaining to children in any substantive area of developmental science (e.g., social, cognitive, biological). CIRC s seven components are: 1) A mechanism to commission high quality, developmental science studies on questions of relevance to children; 2) The assembling of an Advisory Board of eminent scholars from developmental psychology, neuroscience, economics, medicine, policy, and sociology, who will guide the selection of research topics to be commissioned and the nomination of scholars to conduct the research. The Advisory Board will also mentor postdocs and grad students, advise teams of visiting scholars on substantive issues, participate in miniconferences, and help spread the word about CIRC s existence and aims; 3) Graduate and postdoctoral training experiences to provide the next generation of scholars with unique training in conducting rigorous developmental research that benefits children; 4) A postsecondary training initiative to insert into current curricula the results of commissioned studies, targeting colleges and universities with substantial Latino and African American enrolments and low-SES community colleges serving students of all races; 5) Formal print dissemination (the publication of a monograph series translating promising developmental research into policy proposals, the preparation of press releases, etc.); 6) Formal non-print dissemination (the organization of miniconferences, a public web site, and press conferences); and 7) Coordination with existing Cornell centers and institutes to leverage resources of this proposal doc15705 none New York University: Center for Research on Culture, Development and Education Joshua Aronson, Diane Hughes, Catherine Tamis-LeMonda, Niobe Way (2) the broader research community; and (3) policy makers and practitioners in education. This will occur through an intensive and rigorous training program and a variety of dissemination strategies of both research findings and lessons for policy and educational practice. The proposed Center is situated within a School of Education, in the vibrant, incomparably diverse context of New York City, making it an unparalleled locale for studying culture and schools, and an ideal place to establish a think tank capable of attracting additional scholars and students of the highest quality. Through the work of the Center, we aim to bring about a deeper understanding of the interplay of culture, development and education, and thereby enhance the nation s response to the academic underachievement of ethnic minority children doc15706 none Maureen B. Steiner An exciting discovery of geomagnetic field behavior was made in Jurassic oceanic basalts of the Pacific Ocean. Continuous change of geomagnetic polarity was observed in a four hundred meter basalt sequence. Six polarity intervals were observed, corresponding to geomagnetic field reversals roughly once every 50,000 years. Such fast, continuously reversing behavior has never before been observed. The ~170 Ma oceanic crust is remarkably unaltered (similar to 0-20 Ma age oceanic basalt). Magnetic intensities of the basalt are normal to slightly high for unaltered oceanic crust, and microprobe work shows that this is not the result of an unusual chemistry of the titanomagnetite remanence carriers. An abundance of glass, which commonly preserves pristine titanomagnetite is present throughout the 400 m. The glass abundance provides the opportunity to examine geomagnetic field intensity during this unusual field behavior. In the record of constantly changing polarity, numerous intervals of intermediate directions also are present, including intervals of zero inclination at which geomagnetic field intensity would be expected to be lowest. The glass abundance in a record of continuously changing field behavior and the intermediate and zero-inclination directions allow interrogation of the intensity of the geomagnetic field during this unusual directional behavior. Paleointensities will be measured for each polarity state and for all intermediate-direction intervals for which glass is present. The result is expected to provide information about the geomagnetic field s ability to change on such a fast time scale. The results should provide data to help constrain geomagnetic dynamo theory doc15707 none Center for Child & Family Research: A Conference Laurie Dinnebeil & Chris Bergin The purpose of this conference is to bring together key personnel from the major universities and service agencies in Northwest Ohio to discuss the feasibility of collaborative research to address the needs of children and families. The conference is specifically targetted to achieving consensus for a research agenda and to solidify plans for creating a research center. Expected outcomes will be a set of research priorities and an implementation plan to move toward establishing research collaboratives and possibly a research center on children and families doc15708 none Interdisciplinary (99) LaSalle University is enhancing student learning by incorporating Problem-Based Learning (PBL) into two courses that are integral components of its new Integrated Science, Business and Technology (ISBT) Program. Modeled after a very successful program at James Madison University, ISBT is an interdisciplinary, undergraduate major that draws on LaSalle s solid traditions in science, technology, and business education to develop graduates that are uniquely qualified to take active leadership roles in arriving at scientifically and economically informed solutions to real-world problems. Funds are being used to purchase two UTMs, one Gas Chromatograph with auto sampler, and two, 5-liter B. Braun B Fermentation Systems, and to support faculty and curriculum development for Technology Foundations II-Materials (sophomore-level) and Bioprocessing (junior-level). Materials are designed around student use of a Universal Testing Machine (UTM) and students are learning to use the UTM to test ferrous and non-ferrous metals, polymers and elastomers, ceramics, composites, and adhesives and to perform tensile, compression, shear, and flexure testing. This laboratory-intensive approach affords the investigation of a broad range of material types within a one-semester course and permits each student to discover a valid taxonomy of material type and physical behavior. Bioprocessing is designed to integrate concepts introduced in previous courses and imparts an understanding of fermentation system fundamentals, knowledge of several different mammalian and microbial biochemical systems, and an appreciation of the unique requirements of each system. Students manipulate and use real-time data to keep fermentation systems under control. PBL is being delivered through facilitated small student groups and utilize the new equipment doc15709 none This project is developing and implementing a Biotechnology Program at the University of Nevada, Reno. We are adapting courses and objectives from successful Biotechnology Programs at Ferris State University and Northwestern University. The program is a collaborative effort by the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Agriculture, Biotechnology and Natural Resources, and extends from the University to two local community colleges, local middle and high schools, and the community at large. The specific goals of the biotechnology program are: 1) to meet the growing student interest in a biotechnology career-directed education via development of an intercollegiate biotechnology degree program, 2) to increase the scientific literacy of a wide diversity of undergraduate students through the addition of biotechnology into courses for science and non-science majors, 3) to enhance community interest and knowledge in the sciences by community outreach, and 4) to enhance economic development in the state by the creation of a well-trained work force of biotechnology scientists doc15710 none Chemistry (12) The College is involved in an effort to transform regular classrooms into Learning College classrooms across the institution. As part of this institutional effort, the Chemistry Department is transforming course material to contextual formats. In this project, the faculty in chemistry are working together with Forensic Scientists from a regional crime laboratory to incorporate GC MS experiments across the two-year college chemistry curriculum, including Organic Chemistry, Forensic Chemistry, College Chemistry, and General Chemistry courses. The objectives of the proposal are to: 1. adapt, adopt, and pilot test laboratory experiments in organic, forensic, general, and college chemistry courses; 2. provide faculty development on the use, calibration, and maintenance of the GC MS; and 3. expand outreach to high school chemistry teachers and students through a Sinclair program called the Friday Visitation Program. The project is meeting the needs of high school and two-year college students for GC MS experience as they matriculate to universities and enter the workforce as technicians. The results of the project will be disseminated through presentations at professional conferences and articles in journals doc15711 none Interdisciplinary (99) This project is developing a multidisciplinary B.S. Program in Biotechnology that places a heavy emphasis on both methodology and ethical, socio-political and economic outcomes to provide students with the necessary skills required for (1) entry-level laboratory positions in the pharmaceutical industries and academia, and (2) placement into research-based graduate programs. We are adapting materials from institutions offering a B.S. in Biotechnology including: Cedar Crest College, Clarion University of Pennsylvania, Eastern Washington University, Elizabethtown College, Ferris State University, Moorhead State University, University of Southern Maine, University of Wisconsin and Worcester State College. A newly-approved B.S. in Biotechnology is providing cutting-edge technology training for biotechnology students within a framework of a core curriculum, community service, internships in biotechnology laboratories, and small faculty student ratios. Cabrini College is constructing a state-of-the-art building to house a new Center for Science, Education and Technology. The Biotechnology Program is to be housed in the new Center. In its first stage, this program is being offered to traditional undergraduate students, and concentrates on outreach, recruitment and admissions . As it matures, additional students will be drawn from non-traditional students and transfer students. Area high school teachers participating in a Cabrini-taught summer course, DNA and the New Millennium , will be part of the feeder school process for locating new students for the program doc15712 none Chemistry (12) We are using temperature-programmable, computer-controlled gas chromatographs (GCs) equipped with TCD detectors to refine, adapt and incorporate a comprehensive set of experiments in the general and organic chemistry sequences. The enhanced throughput of the computer-controlled GCs provides access to the acquired data and powerful data analysis software anywhere on the campus intranet. The experiments extend our innovative inquiry-driven model for General Chemistry and Chemical Equilibrium to Organic Chemistry. Students are first introduced to GC instrumentation in General Chemistry through an analysis of fats and oils as part of our current topical module on fats and nutrition. In the Organic sequence, several key experiments are run in an investigative, what if fashion by individual students. For example, detailed examination of the conditions and mechanistic details of the hydroboration reaction by observing the effect of different solvents, alkenes, and hydroboration reagents are investigated by students. In another experiment, students compare E1 vs. E2 elimination of 2-bromobutane to give cis- and trans-2-butene. Since the isomers can be resolved by the GC system, the relative yields lead to insights about the mechanism. Finally, the GCs are also being used in an inter-disciplinary course on perfumes and in community outreach activities in a Howard Hughes-funded program for Girls and Women in Science, where sixth grade girls and their teachers perform hands-on GC analyses of gasoline and other common materials. We are carrying a comprehensive assessment of the project by an on-site specialist in chemical education. We will disseminate the results of the project nationally through the web sites and links to the NSF-funded ChemLinks Coalition, as well as through articles in The Journal of Chemical Education once they become available doc15713 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This project is addressing national and statewide needs to improve the mathematics skills of undergraduate students, particularly for at risk members of special populations . The project goal is to increase the retention and successful completion rates of community college algebra students by developing a collaborative, research-based approach to the improvement of teaching and learning mathematics. Project partners, Mesa, American River and West Valley Colleges are supported by both professional state mathematical organizations and the Center for Student Success. Project objectives include adapting, pilot testing and evaluating three recommended approaches to increasing student success: 1) adapting refining a specialized mathematics study skills course developed at Manatee and Valencia Community Colleges in Florida; 2) adapting refining a teacher specific peer tutoring approach, Beacon; and 3) supplementing the course with computer-aided instruction using ALEKS. This project is designed to adapt, implement, investigate and determine which of these strategies are effective with specific groups of at risk community college students. Project objectives also include the development of a virtual resource center, regular partner meetings and a summer institute that is facilitating contact, communication and exchange of information among mathematics faculty members. The Project Resource Center is also being used as a clearinghouse for information regarding current research, available curriculum, instructional resources, and best practices for teaching Elementary Algebra. Project-produced educational materials, evaluation instruments, pilot test results and lessons learned are being disseminated doc15714 none Mathematical Sciences (21) Over the past several years, the proliferation of accessible mathematics technology has led to alterations in mathematics pedagogy. The college has responded to these changes by incorporating the use of technology throughout the mathematics curriculum from the use of graphing calculators in calculus to computer labs in more advanced classes. The goal of such reform has been to provide opportunities for students to work on realistic and computationally complex problems, develop strong visualization skills, and engage in collaborative and investigative learning. The purpose of this project is to extend and fully integrate the use of technology in mathematics classes by creating a student-centered computer classroom and implementing appropriate curricular changes in the effected courses. Initially, three courses are being taught daily in the computer classroom: multivariable calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations. These courses already make use of scheduled visits to a computer laboratory, but the new classroom is providing daily use of essential technologies and eliminating the artificial separation between the high-tech and non-tech activities of the class. In order to ensure a successful transition to the new space, curricular changes are being implemented that reflect the recommendations of The Linear Algebra Curriculum Study Group and the Boston University Differential Equations Project doc15715 none Children s Motivational and (2) children s motivation and beliefs about achievement, account for the effects of teacher-child interactions on early school adjustment. Children s regulation and motivational beliefs and behaviors are thought to arise, in part, from teacher-child interactions. Three cohorts of children from diverse family backgrounds (n = 60 in each cohort; middle- to low-SES, approximately 38% minority; approximately 50% low income) are being followed from the beginning of their experiences in 4-year-old preschool classrooms through the end of their first year in public school (kindergarten). Participating children are enrolled in preschool classrooms that vary widely in quality; these include state-supported pre-kindergarten demonstration projects, for profit centers, and federally supported programs for low-income families. Teacher effects on effortful control and motivation are assessed through observations and questionnaires. Parent effects on effortful control and motivation are assessed through questionnaires. In preschool, the quality of teacher-child relationships are assessed via teacher report, observations of classroom interaction, and the child s reliance on the teacher as a support during a challenge task. Children s effortful control is assessed in a series of tasks that include the ability to delay gratification; response to disappointment; slowing motor activity; suppressing or initiating activity to signal; effortful attention; and ability to lower voice. Children s responses to failure on a series of puzzles are used to measure motivational beliefs and patterns. Children s stress hormone levels will be assessed during daily activities in the morning and afternoon (basal levels), and before and after a challenging task (reactive levels). Basal and reactive hormone levels are seen as indicators of the functioning of the child s hypothalmic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA), which may temper or exacerbate the effects of preschool program quality and parenting on effortful control and achievement. Achievement will be assessed in fall and spring of the pre-kindergarten year with normed school-readiness and language measures. Children s kindergarten adjustment will be assessed with teacher ratings and interviews with children. This study will answer enduring questions regarding how preschool programs affect children s development, and the qualities of programs that contribute to children s success in school. This information will be used in teacher-training and program-design to insure that all young children enter school ready to learn doc15716 none Child Temperament and Personality Across Contexts Mary Rothbart The major objective of this Workshop on Child Temperament and Personality Across Contexts and the planning project of which it is a part, is to bring together a collaborative network to plan multidisciplinary, cross-cultural research on the development of child temperament and personality. Collaborators organized by James Victor of Hampton University and Mary Rothbart, University of Oregon, will plan projects enabling the group to develop proposals for individual investigator, small collaboration and large-scale projects to meet the NSF objective of integrating child development research across traditional knowledge domains, cultural contexts, and levels of analysis. The workshop has three specific aims. First, scientists studying biological, emotional, social, and behavioral aspects of temperament and personality will plan the development of uniform temperament and personality measurement scales for children. These researchers include James Victor and Spencer Baker, Hampton University; Mary Rothbart and Gerard Saucier, University of Oregon; Michael Posner, Cornell University; and Charles Halverson and Valerie Havill, University of Georgia. Second, child development collaborators in the domain of risk identification and prevention who study issues across a broad array of contexts (family, child-care, school, community, culture and language) will participate in the project. These include Mark Roosa, Arizona State University; Guillermo Bernal, University of Puerto Rico; Wendy Kliewer, Lenn Murrelle and Evelyn Reed-Victor, Virginia Commonwealth University; Sandee McClowry, New York University; and Lynn Pelco, College of William and Mary. Third, collaborators from both of these domains will address ethnic and cultural contexts in temperament and personality research. Collaborators will plan studies that examine how adult informants in different contexts, describe, interpret, and accommodate individual differences in child temperament and personality. The work will be based on bringing together independently developed measures of temperament and personality. The initial Planning Workshop is to be held in Eugene, Oregon, no later than November 15, . This workshop will be an intensive meeting, identifying dimensions to be studied across contexts in multidisciplinary collaboration. During day 1 of the workshop, emphasis will be on the common instrument. Dr. Rothbart will present issues relating to the measurement of temperament, including computer-administered tasks of temperament dimensions. Dr. Victor will present results from the Hampton Version personality instrument for developing appropriate dimensions for a common instrument. Discussants for this session will be three distinguished researchers, Dr. Charles Halverson, for child personality from the lexical tradition; Dr. Paul Costa, adult personality; and Gerard Saucier, the adult lexical tradition. On Day 2, domain specific groups will prepare feedback on development of common measures from the perspective of risk and cross-cultural populations, and identify possible across-site collaborations. The afternoon session will focus on the development of guidelines for collaboration and the formation of domain work groups. The major outcomes for the second day are a) achieving further refinement of plans for development of the common temperament and personality instrument, taking risk and cultural context issues into account, and b) the formation of collaborative work groups for work to be completed in the second phase of the planning grant. After review and feedback, summaries submitted after this meeting will be posted on the planning project website for review and input from the collaborative network, and form the basis for future proposals doc15717 none Engineering - Mechanical (56) The objective of this project is the integration of simulation technology into undergraduate education through the development of teaching modules (TM) for complementary computational fluid dynamics (CFD), experimental fluid dynamics (EFD), and uncertainty analysis (UA) for use in teaching undergraduate fluid mechanics courses and laboratories. Faculty partners from colleges of engineering at small and large public, small private, and small historically minority private universities are collaborating on the development of the TM, the effective implementation, the evaluation, the dissemination, and the pedagogy of simulation technology using web-based techniques. The evaluation plan includes collaboration with faculty from the University of Iowa, College of Education, the Department of Psychology and Quantitative Foundation and Center for Evaluation Assessment. The TM include three parts: 1) lectures on CFD and EFD methodology and standard procedures and UA; 2) CFD templates for academic use of commercial industrial CFD software; 3) exercise notes for use of CFD templates and complementary EFD and UA. The commercial industrial CFD software is FLUENT, http: www.fluent.com , which is a widely used CFD software in many industries and universities and a partner in the present work. Faculty development activities are occurring in parts 1) and 3) of the production of the TM, and during part 2), faculty development activities are occurring during the generation of TM specifications and collaboration with FLUENT on design of CFD templates. FLUENT is providing software development and testing of CFD templates; training of faculty in the use of CFD templates; national international self-sustaining web-based distribution of the TM, including all parts 1) -3); and free faculty use of FLUENT Flowlab. Faculty partners will meet yearly for development of the TM and collaboration and training with FLUENT Flowlab. The initial capability of the TM are based on those capabilities developed in the proof-of-concept at The University of Iowa in spring semester , fall semester , and spring semester . The results from this prior effort may be reviewed at http: www.icaen.uiwa.edu ~fluids . This project is a collaborative between the University of Iowa ( ), Iowa State University ( ), Howard University ( ) and Cornell University ( ). Keywords: FLUENT, Flowlab, teaching modules, computational fluid dynamics, experimental fluid dynamics, uncertainty analysis doc15718 none A Workshop on An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Social Cooperation Joann Keyton The goal of the proposed workshop grant is to develop and execute a small workshop that promotes interdisciplinary research that identifies the factors that contribute to, or compromise, children s ability to work cooperatively in groups critical skill for children s academic and social development. To that end, the proposed workshop will: (a) bring together scholars in three disciplines--Communication, Education, and Psychology that can contribute to our understanding of social cooperation; (b) invite a senior scholar in each of these disciplines to keynote at the workshop; (c) invite regional scholars (generally, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee) to participate in working sessions of the workshop to help explore this research focus, develop research agendas, and discover potential interdisciplinary research partners; and (d) invite community leaders and experts who work with children and adolescents to provide a practical framework from which research is generated and for which basic research can provide meaningful answers. Thus, the workshop is designed to promote exchange of current knowledge about children s social cooperativeness in each of the contexts in which children find themselves as group members (families, peer groups, organized activities, and school settings), and to promote exchange of knowledge across disciplines. More specifically, the host scholars want to use the workshop and its activities as a vehicle for articulating a vision for developing an interdisciplinary research center that would promote collaborative work among researchers from universities, school districts, and community agencies throughout the Mid-South region doc15719 none Collaborative Proposal: Infant Perception of Referencing through Dynamic Gestures During Early Lexical Development Patricia Zukow-Goldring, University of Southern California The main objective of this proposal is to test hypotheses from a perceptually-based theory to determine how infants initially learn to understand what words mean. Underlying this approach is careful, longitudinal observation of both English- and Spanish-speaking caregiver practices in ecologically valid environments, an often unacknowledged but indispensable step in determining hypotheses worthy of testing. These caregivers pattern what they say and do to mark the correspondence between words and what they represent as they interact with their infants during very early stages of word learning. The goal of this investigation is to pinpoint the relation between this perceptual information and the infants emergent abilities crucial to early word learning through a set of experimental studies. These studies will test the hypothesis that the types of perceptual structure or information that caregivers present in gesture and speech attract attention by making the link between a word and its referent perceptually accessible and easy to notice. This research will examine a set of semantic functions typical of infants earliest word learning that includes nouns (objects), verbs (object motions), and adjectives (object attributes). The sample of Spanish-speaking families will be comprised of infants whose mothers have received a high school diploma or a college education. Such a sample will extend the generality of this theory beyond the usual English-speaking, middle-class population. Students assisting with the project should gain an appreciation of a scientific approach to psychology and a greater interest in pursuing graduate studies. For the Latino student-assistants, this proposal offers the additional opportunity to contribute their cultural knowledge and native language expertise to the realization of this research. Findings from this research would have important implications for theories of language development as well as great potential for practitioners. A better understanding of how children learn that words refer to aspects of ongoing events can serve as a basis for refining teaching methods and enhancing student comprehension in early educational settings. Not only first and second-language learners might benefit, but language-delayed and perceptually impaired children as well doc15720 none Planning a Center for the Study of Children s Development in Relationships Julia Torquati, Lisa Crockett, Carolyn Edwards, Marcela Raffaelli, and Ross Thompson Relationships are critical to intellectual, emotional, social, and physical growth in childhood. Relationships with parents, grandparents, siblings, peers, teachers, caregivers in day care and preschool, and others contribute to the development of skills, respond to the child s individuality, facilitate new learning and growth, and provide sources of security and support. Relationships have recently been described as the active ingredients of healthy development by the Committee on Integrating the Science of Early Childhood Development of the National Academy of Sciences in their report, From Neurons to Neighborhoods. But although much is known about the impact of specific relationships on children s development, there are many limitations to current understanding. This project proposal requests support to enable investigators to advance the science of relationships in development by planning the creation of a Center for the Study of Children s Development in Relationships. The overarching goal of the Center is to develop the capacity for multi-disciplinary research on children s development within relationships, from infancy through adolescence, encompassing the varieties of relationships and develop-mental processes characteristic of childhood. More specifically, researchers at the Center will develop: (a) a shared theoretical view of development and relationships to guide their work, (b) a framework for coordination among specific research activities conducted by research scientists, (c) processes for scholarly exchanges through workshops, conferences, and networking opportunities, (d) educational activities for graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and visiting scientists, (e) associations with institutional and community resources concerned with children, (f) a repository for data and reports that already exist concerning development and relationships from both local and national sources, and (g) procedures for disseminating research conclusions to other scholars, communities, human service professionals, and policymakers. The goals of the proposed planning period are to inaugurate the development of this Center by building collaborative partnerships within the University of Nebraska, and with scholars at other institutions, and to initiate specific research programs by critically examining current research on children s relationships to identify gaps in conceptualization, measurement, populations studied, or developmental stages and transitions that have been examined. During the proposed planning period, several activities will occur. These include (a) an assessment of future research needs through monthly meetings, exchanges of reviews of the literature, and consulting with an advisory board of experts, (b) building multidisciplinary collaborations within the University, and with scholars outside it, (c) developing a shared theoretical framework through collaborative interaction, and (d) preparation and submission of a Center grant proposal. The Center for the Study of Children s Development in Relationships will also accomplish several ancillary goals. First, it will provide an infrastructure for the integration of education and research on this important topic. Second, it will broaden the representation of under-represented groups through active recruitment of scholars, students, and research participants. Finally, the work of Center scholars will enhance knowledge of the field through independent research activities and review of the research literature doc15651 none Mathematical Sciences (21) The objectives of this collaborative project are to improve post-calculus students learning of probability and statistics and to provide students with better preparation for their future careers in mathematics and statistics, mathematics education, and computer science. These objectives are being achieved by focusing on active and cooperative learning, visualization of concepts, and use of simulations in post-calculus introductory probability and statistics courses at Athens State University and Middle Tennessee State University via the adaptation and implementation of two recently developed National Science Foundation funded materials. The materials are (a) A Data-Oriented, Active Learning, Post-Calculus Introduction to Statistical Concepts, Methods, and Theory ( ) and the (b) Virtual Laboratories in Probability and Statistics ( ). Project activities include faculty enhancement at the institutions, the respective institutional adaptation and implementation (A&I) of the materials, the evaluation of the A&I of the materials, and the assessment of students learning while using the materials. The University of Alabama Huntsville is providing the evaluation doc15722 none The Study of Brain-Behavior Relations in the Context of Development Charles Nelson Over the past decade, tremendous strides have been made in elucidating the neural underpinnings of human cognition and emotion. Regrettably, similar gains have not been made in understanding the development of these functions. This is unfortunate, as the study of development is not only important in its own right, but also has implications for understanding mature function. For example, knowledge gained from the study of development can provide useful information with regard to how the brain accomplishes the tasks that makes behavior possible. When one finds that a particular process appears in a particular sequence it suggests that experience provided by one system may be used to grow the next. When several different processes all appear at the same time in development, it suggests that a common mechanism may underlie all of these activities. Understanding the effects of experience and maturation on a behavioral system are central concerns of the developmental approach. Developmental studies make it possible to search for sensitive periods and raise the question of what brain changes bring a sensitive period to an end. The overall objective of this center grant planning proposal is to capitalize on the gains being made in adult cognitive and affective neuroscience and extend these gains to the study of development. The Center for Neurobehavioral Development (CNBD) at the University of Minnesota will be home to this application. The faculty that comprise the CNBD are made up of an eclectic group of faculty that collectively have in common an interest in the relation between brain and behavior in the context of development. The CNBD faculty has strengths in a variety of areas, and have specifically targeted for investigation studies that focus on the following four areas: (a) The organization of sensory and perceptual systems (b) The development of memory, (c) The development of attention and executive functions as cognitive constructs and in the service of emotion and behavior regulation, and (d) Emotion and stress regulation. Although many of the faculty that comprise the CNBD have worked together in the past, because this is a new center, its participants are not yet as well integrated as would be desirable. This planning grant will facilitate such integration. Project activities during the planning phase will consist of a) meeting of affinity groups, in which like-minded faculty will meet on a regular basis to discuss common interests, b) inviting guest speakers from other universities whose research interests overlap with those of CNBD faculty, c) inviting consultants to the CNBD that will help identify themes common to the full faculty, d) having the Director of the CNBD (and PI of this application) visit with other center directors around the US, and e) hosting a faculty retreat doc15723 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I Project will develop a cost-effective commercial method for production of fully dense structural ceramic parts of complex shape directly by self-propagating high-temperature synthesis (SHS) reaction under pressure using the Electroconsolidation process. Many already developed high-performance ceramic materials are not used because of the high cost to fabricate components. The use of SHS to make parts offers considerable opportunity to reduce costs if dense, shaped parts can be made directly from reactant powder mix. Electroconsolidation is a newly developed process for low-cost pressure-assisted densification that is uniquely capable to meet this requirement. The project will determine the technical and economic feasibility of employing Electroconsolidation for making dense silicon carbide. The commercial benefit if successful, would be products made from high-performance materials such as carbides, silicides, and carbo-nitrides could become more economical to produce doc15724 none The principle objective of this workshop is to bring together experts from both domestic advanced networks and HPIIS to develop metrics. These metrics will be used to quantify the use of HPIIS network links, to classify research use of these advanced networks and to collect success stories for each classification. A future objective will be the reporting of the numbers of published papers and people trained over time doc15725 none African American and Latina Latino Adolescents Perceptions of and Responses to Racial Discrimination William David Wakefield Student achievement typically has been defined as performing well on academic coursework and successfully advancing through each grade level until graduation. However, in today s multiethnic, multiracial, culturally diverse society, another factor that may influence academic achievement for ethnic minority young people is their perceptions of discrimination in U.S. society. Discrimination likely influences orientation toward school and subsequently academic achievement. This research is grounded in the disciplines of adolescent development and social psychology. Two facets of particular interest in this study include better understanding factors influencing adolescents perceptions of discrimination and subsequent thinking about how to respond to racial discrimination. This project has three goals: (1) to develop a clear understanding of how adolescents understand and think about perceived discrimination that they may likely encounter at school and outside of school using developed quantitative measures and through development of qualitative interviews; (2) to disseminate the results to a national audience through peer-reviewed documents and presentations and including undergraduate and graduate research assistants in national conference participation, presentations, and publications; and (3) to create a viable and sustainable research and mentorship program within the Interdisciplinary Program in Child Development at California State University, Northridge. This program will mentor and train under-represented undergraduate and graduate students in social science research skills and critical thinking through multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to understanding ethnic minority adolescents development using a multi-tiered approach. This program will ultimately assist in preparing future minority child & adolescent development scientists for application into M.A. and Ph.D. programs doc15726 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This project enhances the knowledge and skills of students in developmental mathematics courses by providing on demand access to mathematics instructions. The project also contributes to the research literature on the use of computer-assisted instruction in developmental mathematics. The web-based courseware Assessment and Learning in Knowledge Spaces (ALEKS) is adapted and implemented. The project includes a 36-station computer lab for the use of ALEKS and video clips to go along with the lab. Web cameras that are used for remote student-faculty interaction are also included. This integration of technology in mathematics education is accompanied by extensive faculty development doc15727 none Biological Sciences (61) This project adapts successful models from CSU Hayward and James Madison University to facilitate the incorporation of DNA sequencing technology into both the undergraduate curriculum and independent student research at CSU Chico. We are creating a modern automated DNA sequencing facility and integrating sequencing into a wide variety of undergraduate courses (microbiology, plant and animal molecular biology, systematics and ecology) helping to unify our diverse disciplines. Undergraduate students are introduced to modern gene-based biology by incorporating hands-on sequencing and database exploration. The project has two objectives: (1) to improve undergraduate laboratory course experiences, and (2) to stimulate independent student research. We are quantifying class outcomes as students individual and class projects, and independent research by student presentations and publications. We are also evaluating how well this project helps students prepare for further education or biology-related careers doc15728 none This workshop will focus on the best approaches to sequencing the gene fraction of the maize genome and will develop a comprehensive plan for achieving this goal. Maize is the best studied genetic system in the grasses, with exceptional strengths in facilitating our understanding of plant development, gene regulation (including epigenetics), stress tolerance, transposable element function, and genome evolution. Physical and genetic mapping, mutagenesis, reverse genetics, transformation, and other molecular tools are reliably employed in maize research. However, a major limitation to the continued productivity of maize as a model plant species is the lack of comprehensive understanding of gene content and arrangement of the maize genome. There are now technologies for accomplishing this task in a short time frame and at low cost. Thus, the goal of obtaining a completed sequence of the gene-rich regions of the maize genome is feasible, worthy and timely. The chief goal of the workshop will be to bring together experts in high throughput genomic sequencing and analyses with experts knowledgeable about the properties of the maize genome. This small group, comprising scientists from academia and industry, and observers from government agencies, will discuss strategies for sequencing the maize gene space. The output from this workshop will be a comprehensive plan for proceeding with sequencing the maize genome, an estimation of the resources required, and a timetable for action. This document will be circulated to the wider genetics and genomics communities for comment prior to finalizing the document. A timetable for follow up activities will also be developed doc15729 none Salim Hariri University of Arizona The overall research goal of this proposal is to design, develop, evaluate and deploy Pragma, the next generation adaptive runtime infrastructure capable of reactively and proactively managing and optimizing application execution using current system and application state, predictive models for system behavior and application performance, and an agent based control network. The overarching motivation for this research is to enable very large-scale, dynamically adaptive scientific and engineering simulations on widely distributed and highly heterogeneous and dynamic execution environments such as the computational grid . The design, development and evaluation of the proposed Pragma framework will be conducted in collaboration with the Astronomy Department at the University of Arizona in the context of a real-world astrophysical hydrodynamics simulation using adaptive mesh refinement and including multigroup flux-limited diffusion, self gravity, nuclear burning, and a complex equation of state doc15730 none Physics (13) This project is improving an upper-division advanced physics lab course through the adaptation and implementation of a cohesive set of experiments built upon digital imaging array detectors. These experiments were originally designed as part of a lab course in optical astronomy instrumentation at Caltech, which was funded by NSF s Instrumentation and Laboratory Improvement (ILI) program (Award No. ). The six experiments being adapted focus on geometric optics and aberrations, CCD electronics, CCD characteristics, fundamentals of spectroscopy, applications of spectroscopy, and imaging using an IR array camera. These experiments give students hands-on experience with IR and CCD array cameras and detectors, optics, and spectrographs as tools for making experimental measurements. By analyzing the collected digital data, students gain competence in the areas of analog-to-digital conversion, computer data acquisition, statistics, and modern computer image-processing techniques. The new equipment is also being used in a chemistry course on instrumental analysis; in physical chemistry lab experiments pertaining to spectroscopy; and in introductory physics and astronomy courses to demonstrate concepts such as visible light, infrared radiation, and temperature. Loyola Marymount University serves a diverse student population. Typically, about one third of the students enrolled in the advanced physics lab course are members of under-represented groups, and 65% of the students in introductory astronomy are female. As the investigators implement the new equipment in these courses, they are not only improving the quality of the educational experience for all students but also attempting to excite women and ethnic minorities about pursuing careers in science. As part of assessing the effectiveness of the improved advanced physics lab course, at the end of the course, students are giving demonstrations based on the experiments, and explaining the physics involved, to high school physics classes. The feedback from the high school teachers and students provides a gauge of how well the LMU students have grasped the advanced lab material doc15731 none Learning (2) Learning in childhood across cultures; (3) Adolescent learning across cultures; (4) Adulthood learning across cultures; and (5) Learning and aging across cultures. The objective will be to scrutinize learning similarities and differences as a way of understanding development. The multiphase approach will help learning scientists understand the developmental precursors and learning phenomena, as well as developmental consequences. The results of the workshop will include a reseach agenda to guide the development of future research projects about children s learning in varying cultural contexts. Another anticipated outcome will be a book that can serve as an international textbook on the role of cultural differences and universal stages in human development doc15732 none Tura This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project concerns using elastic P-wave and S-wave seismic data simultaneously to obtain time-lapse seismic monitoring images of fluid saturation and pore pressure changes in an oil reservoir. Time-lapse seismic using P-waves alone may not allow discrimination between fluid saturation changes and reservoir pressure changes since such information is contained in the large source-receiver offsets of P-wave seismic data, which can be contaminated by noise and subject to data acquisition aperture limitations. Using S-waves in addition to P-waves in time-lapse analysis can lead to more accurate inversion results, yielding reliable estimates of reservoir saturation and pressure changes. The proposed project will allow customers to avoid costly errors in development and production of economic oil reservoirs and yield higher recovery rates. For this feasibility phase a reservoir model will be constructed, and three-dimensional P- and S-wave synthetic seismic data at two production times will be generated. These time-lapse P- and S-wave data sets will be processed simultaneously and will be cross-equalized and inverted to yield changes in reservoir saturations and pressure. The inverted data will be analyzed to assess the feasibility of the proposed approach on field data. Commercial applications of the technology proffered by Fourth Wave Imaging will include accurate mapping of bypassed oil and monitoring of costly injected fluids. In addition, the firm will be able to better image flow compartmentalization and determine the hydraulic properties of faults and fractures. These applications will allow cheaper and more efficient production of oil reservoirs, guide reservoir management decisions, and help maximize the life of both new and existing fields while minimizing recovery costs. The proposed methods also have commercial applications in monitoring ground water reserves, contaminant plumes and environmental clean-up projects. In medical imaging, use of elastic waves has the potential to yield superior results over acoustic waves alone. Commercial products resulting from this work will consist of time-lapse P- and S-wave seismic data processing, interpretation and analysis tools and methods doc15733 none Fritsch and Almeda Drs. Peter Fritsch and Frank Almeda at the California Academy of Sciences and their colleagues are studying the phylogenetic relationships of the tropical flowering plant genus Symplocos with DNA sequence data to test competing hypotheses on the evolution of organisms with amphi-Pacific tropical distributions. These are groups of plants that occur today primarily or exclusively in the tropical areas of the Americas and the lands bordering the western Pacific Rim. The means by which these land organisms have come to occupy areas that are today separated by thousands of miles of Ocean are not well understood. One hypothesis explaining this pattern proposes intercontinental dispersion across one or both of the land bridges connecting North America and Eurasia in the Early Tertiary around the high-latitude regions of Beringia and the North Atlantic. A competing hypothesis maintains that the primary avenue for the dispersion of these plants occurred pan-tropically in the Late Cretaceous Early Tertiary, when the Atlantic Ocean was much narrower than today. The investigators will analyze DNA sequence data from Symplocos samples to estimate both the pattern of species relationships and intercontinental splitting times of major subgroups. These data will in turn be interpreted in the context of the extensive fossil record of Symplocos to arrive at a synthetic view of the biogeographical history of this group. The project will integrate laboratory work with field collection of samples from several countries, in Latin America and S.E. Asia. The broader scientific significance and societal ramifications of this project will benefit both environmental protection and science education. By facilitating inferences about the past movements of tropical vegetation, the knowledge derived from this project will contribute to the broader issues of the ecological effects of climate changes that are occurring at present. Further, it will help develop and refine conservation strategies of tropical countries, as many Symplocos species are rare and endangered. The project will contribute to the support and training of the next generation of organismal biologists by including undergraduate, Masters, and Ph.D. students involved in original research projects. Because the proposed research will be conducted at a major metropolitan natural history museum, ample opportunities exist to present the results of this research and its implications to the general public. This will take the form of articles in popular periodicals, displays in the museum s public venues, adult education courses, and lectures for visitors doc15734 none Biological Sciences (61) The Biology Department of West Chester University (WCU) has a rare opportunity to redesign both the physical space and the curriculum for our three introductory biology laboratories, General Biology (Bio 110), Botany (Bio 215) and Zoology (Bio 217). By adapting materials from Northern Arizona University and Hampshire College, the emphasis in the laboratory moves from activities that primarily serve to reinforce lecture material to student-driven research investigations that stimulate critical thinking and an appreciation of the scientific method. To enhance and coordinate our introductory biology curriculum, we are: 1) developing new laboratories that include open-ended components, 2) increasing the use of technologies that enhance the learning experience, 3) linking concepts and creating spiraling connections between the sub-disciplines, 4) encouraging collaboration among students and faculty through the use of pedagogy designed to foster cooperation, and 5) providing a research-rich learning environment as a training ground for our future secondary school teachers. Students in our Secondary Education Program (BS Biology, Education) are actively involved with the development and implementation of the inquiry-based laboratories. With the help of Dr. Lesley Welsh, an assessment expert from the School of Education at WCU, we are evaluating the effectiveness of these changes doc15735 none This award is establishing a digital imaging and data analysis center of networked computers and image acquisition equipment for use at all levels across the science curriculum. The facility is modeled after a successful digital imaging laboratory in the Department of Biology at Franklin and Marshall College ( ) and is adapted for our interconnected science departments. The award is (1) engaging students in an active manner in the process of scientific inquiry through digital imaging, (2) promoting collaborative research between students through instant data exchange and projection, and (3) demonstrating the inter-relatedness of scientific disciplines by linking courses that share imaging as an experimental approach. In order to achieve these aims, faculty who represent all science departments and in whose courses greater than 60% of all students in the College are enrolled are utilizing the facility each year. Several of the courses are incorporating cross-disciplinary laboratory exercises. This project is impacting in a positive fashion student performance in science, student perceptions of science, and recruitment of students into science majors. Results of this project will be widely disseminated through workshops, poster presentations, publications, and websites doc15477 none Geography (88) The core purpose of this project is to adapt key elements of the core curriculum developed by the National Council for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA, ), combining these with materials already used on some campuses in the University of Maine system. This is a collaborative project designed to benefit five universities that are part of this system: The University of Southern Maine, The University of Maine, Fort Kent, The University of Maine, Machias, The University of Maine, Augusta, and The University of Maine, Farmington. The broader purpose of this collaborative project is to enhance GIScience education throughout the state of Maine on the 5 collaborating campuses. On each campus a dedicated laboratory is being equipped to support the development of a modern geographical information science (GIScience) curriculum, comprised of GIS and GPS technology and related educational materials. We are developing and implementing a sequence of two GIScience courses for undergraduate students in each of the five universities. These are being designed to educate students to a common standard of achievement, although there are local variations designed to meet the varied needs of the 5 participating campuses. The new curriculum meets a growing need for high-quality GIScience education in a variety of fields. We are designing the two-course sequences to foster active learning by customizing exercises and data sets to the diverse geographic locations and programmatic strengths of each campus. Our project is also enhancing and developing the skills of the faculty, and integrating advanced technology into a variety of disciplines. Our plan is to disseminate our work through our teaching, on-site workshops for our faculty colleagues, internet publication, and presentation at professional meetings. Project evaluation is being assisted by on-site peer input during faculty workshops, and periodic review by a three member advisory panel of GIScience scholars and professionals doc15737 none Biological Sciences (61) The Biology and Chemistry departments at Eastern Michigan University (EMU) are dedicated to pedagogical innovation and the development of inquiry-based learning. Genomics is a rapidly advancing interdisciplinary science with highly projected applicability in the local and global job markets presenting a unique opportunity for the development of new pedagogical strategies in this area. This is particularly true at EMU, as many graduates are subsequently employed at local biotechnology firms. This project, therefore, adapts from a James Madison University funded NSF award Integration of genomics into the undergraduate curriculum (award # ), and implements new inquiry-based investigations at Eastern Michigan University. This project promotes new integrative pedagogical strategies in genomics through the development of a Genome Analysis course and the design of investigative projects in Biochemistry, Recombinant DNA Technology, Microbial Physiology, and newly-developed, inquiry-based core courses. Additionally, computational and technical skills are being developed with the acquisition of new equipment. The developed courses and modules resulting from this project provide model pedagogical advancements for universities and colleges nationwide, coinciding with a national emphasis in genomics and bioinformatics and a need for individuals knowledgeable in these areas doc15738 none Biological Sciences (61) Integrating technology and research rich laboratory experiences into biology curricula clearly fosters creativity and significantly improves learning. At Wittenberg University we strive to provide hands-on learning opportunities for our undergraduate students that are inquiry based and integrate modern scientific equipment. To accomplish this goal in an immunology course a research-based mixed-model approach is being adapted from the University of St. Thomas, Rider University, Haverford College and St. Mary s University. The mixed-model approach provides students with 10 weeks of instructor led exercises followed by a 4 week long directed research project. This project is providing students with a high quality investigative laboratory experience as a means of enhancing learning in immunology. The acquisition of scientific laboratory equipment and training faculty in both equipment use and integration of a research-based pedagogy into their courses is accomplishing the objectives of the project. Moreover, the Department of Biology strongly promotes undergraduate research and believes that student-centered investigative laboratory experiences fosters the creativity that leads to increased student involvement in independent research. This adaptation and implementation proposal targets the DUE themes of integration of technology in education and faculty development doc15739 none Chemistry (12) The Department of Chemistry at the State University of New York College at Geneseo is modernizing its Biochemistry, Inorganic, Physical, and Analytical Chemistry laboratory curriculum with the purchase of an Isothermal Titration Calorimeter (ITC) and a Real-Time PCR Thermalcycler Sequence Detector. The motivation stems from our strong desire to broaden our students experience with modern biochemistry instrumentation, increase inquiry- and discovery-based laboratory experiments for active learning, and to improve participation in undergraduate research projects that we believe are an integral part of a chemistry or biochemistry education. Our ultimate goal is to produce students who are excited about science and who possess the necessary skills and problem-solving abilities to solve timely and important problems. A number of discovery-based experiments utilizing the ITC and the Real-Time PCR Thermalcycler Sequence Detector are being adapted from the research and or education literature. Experiments utilizing the Real-Time PCR Thermalcycler are being carried out in the biochemistry laboratory. ITC experiments are being done in the Biochemistry, Inorganic and Physical Analytical Laboratories. For example, ITC experiments on the study of molecular interactions, developed by Professor Lawrence Kaplan at Williams College (NSF ) and Professor Timothy Elgren at Hamilton College, NY (NSF- ), are being implemented into our biochemistry laboratory. Both Professor Kaplan and Professor Elgren have kindly shared their programs with us and have agreed to serve as test sites for our inquiry-based laboratories. We believe that inclusion of experiments using these instruments are significantly enhancing the education of our students at Geneseo doc15740 none Computing - Other (35) These workshops provide models for teaching undergraduate genomics - the emerging field of computational analysis of DNA sequences. The key feature is the creation of collaborations between biologist and computer scientists who link their courses in order to include coordinated material. The use of workshops over a two-year time span allows for development, feedback and dissemination of models and educational materials doc15741 none Biological Sciences (61) In this project we are taking advantage of recent advances in video and computer technology to improve student experiences in our undergraduate Biology curriculum. We are introducing four digital microscopy workstations into our cell biology, microbiology, and plant physiology courses. These workstations permit us to offer laboratory exercises that expose students to techniques and phenomena normally confined to the research laboratory. We are adapting research techniques from the contemporary science literature and building upon the efforts of several other project supported by NSF that incorporate digital microscopy workstations into the undergraduate curriculum (e.g., , and ). For example, phase and fluorescence microscopy is being used in experiments to examine the various cell compartments and dynamic processes such as organelle transport and cell migration. Students have the capability to make digital records, including time-lapse movies, of their phase and fluorescence observations. It is our experience that experiments that include fluorescence and video microscopy generate the greatest excitement among our students doc15742 none Mathematical Sciences (21). This proof of concept project is developing educational materials to enhance the teaching and learning of mathematical ideas for quantifying real world problems, enhancing problem solving skills, and improving students ability to interpret results and further their understanding of the underlying problem. The investigators aim to counteract students perception that mathematical modeling consists of ad hoc lists of methods and techniques, and to promote instead a view that mathematical modeling is anchored in a suite of general mathematical principles. Two drafts of textbooks -- a basic theory text as well as an advanced applications text -- are under development and being tested. The approach and materials are also incorporating findings and new topical areas arising from on-going interdisciplinary research projects at the principal investigators institution doc15743 none Chemistry (12) With the upgrade of our Varian continuous wave 60 MHz NMR spectrometer to an efficient multinuclear FT-NMR spectrometer equipped with 2-D capabilities using technology developed by Anasazi Inc., we are incorporating modern NMR techniques across our chemistry laboratory curriculum at Florida Institute of Technology. We introduce routine Proton and Carbon-13 analyses into lower division labs, reinforcing identification techniques taught in the lecture. More sophisticated experiments such as 2D and multinuclear analyses, kinetics and equilibrium studies of reactions, Quantum Mechanics applied to NMR analysis, and Dynamic NMR Spectroscopy are being adapted into upper division labs. Most of the experiments are taken form the chemical education literature such as the J. Chem. Educ. We anticipate the progressive integration of the experiments into our curriculum to continue. We are also using this instrument in ongoing undergraduate research projects. Students independently run samples using the upgraded FT-NMR instrument without any operational difficulties and the hardware software operation is durable and reliable enough that requires only moderate supervision during student usage. We are involving the Science Education Department at Florida Tech in the evaluation of the project and plan to present the results of this project at regional and national professional meetings. In addition, we will submit articles describing any new NMR experiment and or resulting curriculum improvement to the Journal of Chem. Educ. or the web-based The Chemical Educator for publication doc15744 none Chemistry (12) This proposal is developing project-based laboratories (PBL) for the General Chemistry sequence as a means to foster a more learner-centered environment. Projects presented to students must be solved through experimentation, with individual student teams contributing experimental results to the larger, class pool of results. As the students progress through the two-semester sequence, they are becoming less dependent on instructor directions, more independent in their ability to modify suggested procedures, and are eventually required to have significant input into their own experimental design. Computer-interfaced laboratory equipment is providing continuity, reduced data-collection times, and networking capability necessary to implement this proposal. Specific experiments have been adapted from the education literature and are being implemented in a PBL format. Twenty-four student workstations, four computers, four printers and two networked diode array visible spectrometers are present in the teaching laboratories. Approximately 600 students in General Chemistry are using this equipment during Fall, Spring, and Summer terms, with nearly two-thirds of the General Chemistry laboratory curriculum affected. Given the extent of the proposed change, this process is being phased into the curriculum over a three-year period. It is anticipated that these changes will enhance scientific reasoning skills since the students are actively applying and modifying their laboratory skills to solve problems in which they have an interest doc15745 none Engineering - Materials Science (57) In this project we are developing four hands-on interdisciplinary experiments from a variety of engineering laboratories within Rowan University. Our project is providing a model for hands-on interdisciplinary experimentation for use in introductory materials science courses. The development of these hands-on laboratory experiments are addressing concerns expressed by ABET and the Engineering Education Coalitions. The experiments will be incorporated into the curriculum at Rowan University. Our testing machines has been interfaced with computer data acquisition and control systems. Rather than purchasing new equipment this project is adapted from the work done by McDonald, Adams, and Mahajan. Our equipment will be modernized in a similar fashion to help our students perform, observe, and analyze the measurements that characterize the behavior of engineering materials. As a compliment to this laboratory experience we have our undergraduate students working with industrial sponsors in material science related research. By combining the two experiences, laboratory studies and fieldwork, students are gaining an appreciation for the practical aspects of materials characterization. The results of our project are being disseminated through relevant journals and through the use of an Engineering Clinic that emphasizes hands-on learning doc15746 none Geology (42) A stable isotope laboratory is being developed at Mount Holyoke College, adapted from similar efforts underway at Colgate University and Colorado College. The facility is designed for undergraduate student use in geoscience courses and stable isotope geochemistry is being integrated into the curriculum. The facility includes a vacuum line for the extraction of CO2 from carbonates and from combusted graphite organic matter for analysis by mass spectrometry at nearby University of Massachusetts. A new stable isotope facility at the University of Massachusetts is also being used for analysis of water. Two- to four-week inquiry-based modules are being incorporated into several existing courses, and a new stable isotope course is being added to the departmental offerings. Impacted courses include environmental science, history of earth, petrology, groundwater, and the biosphere. Our goals are to enhance student comprehension of geochemical processes and critical thinking skills through active participation in real investigations. As an institution of higher learning for women, we hope to increase science literacy among those choosing non-science career paths, as well as improve the laboratory experiences for those who remain in science. Inquiry-based group projects are being used to promote teamwork, communication, excitement of discovery, and life-long learning skills. A variety of assessment tools are being used and significant results disseminated through publications in journals and presentations at professional meetings doc15747 none Engineering - Engineering Technology (58) This A & I project adapts material developed at the Northeast Center for Telecommunications Technology (NCTT) to improve the existing lightwave communication laboratory at Three Rivers Community College. The project is adding fiber optic wavelength division multiplexing capability to their existing laboratory and providing students with a hands-on experience with sophisticated equipment. They are adapting four experiments developed by NCTT and are considering four new ones based on suggestions by their industry partners. In the evaluation effort, they will analyze student report, written exams, and the students performance on practical exams to determine if the students achieve the learning objectives. The dissemination plan involves presentation to PHOTON project participants, at the NCTT workshop, and at national conferences along with publications in the PROTON and NCTT newsletters and in professional journals doc15748 none Earth Systems Science (40) We are integrating GIS technology into most field, laboratory, and classroom courses in a new Earth and Environmental Sciences (EES) program at Virginia Wesleyan College. Our project includes a request to equip an enhanced laboratory lecture classroom and a small GIS laboratory, and acquire two pieces of environmental monitoring equipment capable of collecting digital data for import and use in ArcView . Although GIS has established itself as an important tool for the manipulation, analysis, and display of spatial data, it is not always easy for students outside of geography to gain exposure to, and proficiency with, this technology. To help narrow the gap, we are integrating GIS into nearly all courses of the existing EES curriculum. We are adapting parts of exemplary programs at Sul Ross University, Lewis and Clark University, Washington and Lee University, Richard Stockton University, and Miami University. Students just beginning their college career become familiar with only a small number of spatial manipulations in their lower division courses, benefiting mostly from the visual aspects of GIS, whereas EES majors close to graduation become quite proficient in all aspects of spatial data analysis. Because the available data exist in almost limitless variety, equally diverse classroom situations are being employed to encourage hypothesis building and testing, discussion of cause and effect, and cooperative learning. Future K-12 teachers and students taking EES courses to fulfill general studies requirements are also discovering that GIS components in lecture and lab make the experiences more interactive, visually stimulating, and fun doc15749 none Engineering - Mechanical (56) The latest reports from the National Research Council, the Carnegie Foundation, and the National Science Foundation recommend that faculty use the problem-based learning (PBL) method of instruction in undergraduate education. The literature claims that the PBL method has inherent potential to foster problem-solving, teamwork, and communication skills and, therefore, it is superior to the traditional (subject-based) learning method. As a consequence, the goal of this project is to develop a prototype PBL set of course materials that is based on the PBL model, and use this model to formally test this claim. To accomplish this goal, the PI uses established characteristics of a good PBL problem along with proven processes for writing PBL problems to do the following: (a) develop PBL materials for a engineering measurements course in the mechanical engineering curriculum at North Dakota State University (NDSU); (b) evaluat, using both formative and summative assessment methods, the enhancement in student learning and skills development from this PBL course ; (c) evaluate the project outcomes using the results from five independent institutions; and (d) disseminate the tested PBL educational materials through a web site, CD-ROM, and several workshops to the academic community. In summary, we are developing PBL course materials using proven pedagogical concepts with the assistance of partners from leading instrumentation industry. An independent five-member committee is evaluating all aspects of the project. These committee members are experienced engineering educators from five different institutions. They are providing assessment data during the development phase of the project and testing the PBL modules at their own sites. The dissemination plan includes workshops scheduled for K-12 school teachers, regional colleges and university faculties, and tribal college faculties. Key words: Problem-based learning, inquiry-based, PBL problems doc15750 none Engineering - Other (59) An introductory course in Supply Chain Management and Lean Design is being developed. Lean design is a systematic approach to identifying and eliminating waste - through continuous improvement by flowing the product at the pull of the customer. Lean ideas have transformed process design. The challenge now is to make use of Internet-enabled information to link processes across global organizations. Lean design is guided by general principles, which are translated into practice using tactics such as creating manufacturing cells. The primary objective is to develop students ability to apply lean design principles in global, multi-stage processes. The design process is complicated because in reality not all waste can be eliminated. To be effective designers, students need to understand how variability affects process dynamics and to combine this knowledge with analysis of process data. To accomplish our objective, we are developing this introductory course, which uses hands-on activities to assist students in discovering theory. It is followed by experiments in later courses that expand on and reinforce this theory. A variety of existing manufacturing and supply chain simulations are being adapted, as well as physical experiments in quality and variability, to the lean design framework. One contribution of this implementation is the integration of these activities into a more holistic experience, starting early in an undergraduate career. The plans are being guided by significant industry interaction and support faculty development in active-learning pedagogical methods doc15751 none Computer Science (31) Advances in microtechnology have increased the possibility for providing robotics instruction emphasizing computing requirements rather than hardware requirements. Curricula for a first course in robotics have been published to take advantage of this technology. The purpose of this project is to take advantage of the existing work, adapting it as necessary to produce an effective, hands-on course in robotics within the computer science curriculum at the University of North Florida. To realize this objective, an appropriate robotics laboratory is needed and a set of robotics laboratory projects must be developed. No general standards have as yet been developed for robotics technology. A major inhibitor for introducing robotics courses within computer science has been the uniqueness of the fabrication requirements, which has largely confined the subject to engineering- related programs with resources for robotics construction needs. Corresponding software has been in short supply, and generally has relied on base-level programming in C or in machine language. Existing robotics curricula for computer science that have been developed have been constrained by the need to develop a lab and produce a viable lab maintenance plan, all complicated by the fabrication issues. On the other hand, significant progress has been made in reducing the complexity of electro-mechanical requirements, allowing software issues for producing effective autonomous robots to receive increased attention. Robotics kits developed by the KISS Institute for Practical Robotics (KIPR) and incorporated into this proposal at least partly redress the logistical issues and form the basis for a robotics lab suitable for supporting a first course in robotics. To conduct the course of instruction, an incremental series of hands-on exercises using the laboratory facility must be developed and tested. The KISS Institute will be called upon to both evaluate overall project outcomes and to promulgate materials developed for the project (the Institute is a non-profit national corporation that among its objectives seeks to advance the state of robotics education doc15752 none Engineering - Electrical (55) The project is developing a laboratory for an existing two-course sequence in electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) and in the senior design projects in this area. Industrial laboratories and the labs at other academic institutions serve as models for the University Michigan-Dearborn lab. Because the institution is in the heartland of the US automotive industry, the experiments emphasizes automotive applications. The laboratory is providing hands-on experience with experiments on radiated emission, radiated immunity, conducted emission, and conducted immunity EMC testing. The evaluation uses student and graduate surveys that are conducted with assistance from the University s Center for Engineering Education and Practice and an industrial advisory committee. Dissemination plans include posting information on the laboratory web site and publishing conference papers and journal articles doc15753 none Chemistry (12) Stonehill College is integrating high field FT-NMR across the entire chemistry curriculum in order to strengthen the ability of students to retain what they learn, draw connections between courses, interpret spectroscopic results, and design experiments. This project is impacting chemistry, biochemistry, biology, environmental studies, and computer engineering majors. The incorporation of high field FT-NMR across the entire curriculum is based on NSF-DUE funded projects (Nolen-DUE , Smart-DUE , Wallace-DUE , McDonald-DUE , Gaede-DUE ) and on a Journal of Chemical Education (JCE) article (Davis-JCE, 99). Most experiments have been adapted from JCE or NSF-DUE funded projects and implemented into our curriculum. For example, in General Chemistry, students are investigating electronegativity as well as the heavy atom effect by obtaining C-13 NMR spectra of halogenated methanes (Baer-JCE, 99). In Organic Chemistry, C-13 NMR is being introduced early in the semester (Reeves-JCE, 98), eventually leading to the introduction of H-NMR. Once the basics are established, NMR is then being used for structure determination, to determine optical purity (Viswanathan-JCE, 95), to study Markovnikov verses anti-Markovnikov hydration (Smart-DUE , Nolan-DUE , Blankespoor-JCE, 91), and to determine the stereochemistry of hydride reduction (McDonald-DUE ). In Instrumental Analysis, students are exploring how different parameters change the appearance of a spectrum (Gaede-DUE ) and investigating the nuclear Overhauser effect (Schmedake-JCE, 96). In Physical Chemistry students are performing variable temperature NMR kinetic and thermodynamic studies (McDonald-DUE , Gallaher-JCE, 96). Advance NMR techniques (two-dimensional, heteronuclear, isotopic labeling, etc.) are becoming an integral part of Biochemistry, Advanced Organic Chemistry, Advanced Inorganic Chemistry and student faculty research doc15754 none Mathematical Sciences (21) As a part of the CCLI A&I grant entitled Implementing Reform in an Internet-Based Classroom, the mathematics department at East Tennessee State University implemented a pilot program, which provided a technology-intensive laboratory experience for certain sections of elementary statistics courses. This experiment showed that the use of technology in elementary statistics increases retention, fosters participation, and improves conceptual understanding of statistical concepts. Indeed, students in the program were significantly more successful than those in the general population. In order for technology to truly make a difference in student learning, it must be delivered within an entirely different type of course. Hence, this project creates an elementary statistics course that incorporates software packages such as Minitab, online materials such as those in the Rice Virtual Lab in Statistics (NSF , 07 97-06 99), and the best of curriculum reform. The best means to do so is to transform statistical instruction into a multi-faceted program that develops students mathematical abilities in a step-by-step process doc15755 none Engineering - Other (59) The project is adapting course and curriculum modification from several engineering schools at Lake Superior State University. It involves the development of a new integrated Energy Conversion Laboratory that will support instruction in electro-mechanical conversion systems, fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and modern industrial control. The laboratory is supporting seven courses in the EE and ME programs. Undergraduate students and senior design teams are working to integrate and implement the new laboratory. Project evaluation involves an assessment model that includes measurable educational objectives and department level review of each course. The investigators plan to disseminate results of the evaluation process along with detailed descriptions of the new trainers interfaces and the data acquisition equipment by postings on the University s web site and presentations at engineering education conferences doc15756 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This proof-of-concept (POC) project is developing and evaluating a set of curriculum modules in knot theory for use in courses that typically comprise a pre-service teacher program. The PIs aim to graduate teachers who learn mathematics in a coherent fashion that emphasizes the interconnections among theory, procedures and applications, and who develop the habits of mind of a mathematical thinker (CBMS, ). Since knot theory draws on connections with diverse types of mathematics, it has the potential to integrate well into courses on geometry, topology, combinatorics, discrete mathematics, or graph theory. Java applications are being developed to illustrate the Jones polynomial in a dynamic and visual context. Additionally, the project team is conducting research that addresses the mathematical knowledge and the beliefs about mathematics of preservice and practicing secondary mathematics teachers doc15757 none Mathematical Sciences (21) The standard undergraduate geometry courses are principally designed for pre-service teachers and prospective research mathematicians. Such courses are normally not of interest to students in the technical oriented fields of engineering, computer science, and the applied mathematical sciences. This proof of concept proposal develops course materials for an applied geometry course for students pursuing degrees in engineering, computer science, and the applied mathematical sciences. Also, interactive course materials that can be used in such an introductory geometric modeling course and that can be used in the pre-requisite calculus courses are developed. Effective courses utilize the current skills and abilities of the students in developing new skills and in developing an understanding of new concepts. In geometry, the crucial abilities tend to be somewhat intuitive, as geometry is similar to a language. The current generations of students tend to have an underdeveloped geometric intuition, possibly because they have played more with virtual reality than physical reality. However, there is a geometric intuition in virtual reality, which is not equivalent to geometric intuition of physical reality. In order to use their virtual geometric intuition, this project develops materials aimed at unifying these two diverse varieties of geometric intuition, by using both modern technology (computers and the internet) together with the traditional tools of geometry (compass, straightedge and physical models). In addition, the materials are interactive, as it is important to engage the students with the material doc15758 none In this collaborative project faculty at a number of institutions are working together to develop and implement information technological solutions aimed at enhancing the interoperability of both collections and services for the NSDL. A particular emphasis is on exploring the requirements for supporting tightly federated collections, that feature close adherence to particular metadata frameworks so as to enable federated search services to be built. In this collaborative effort a team from the University of California - Berkeley is working primarily on collection interoperability while a team from the University of Missouri - Columbia is focusing its efforts on enhancing the interoperability of services (see doc15759 none Biological Sciences (61) One of the greatest challenges in the development of scientific curricula is to develop courses that teach students important scientific concepts while fostering critical thinking and hypothesis testing skills. The faculty and administration of the Natural Science Division at Hope College believe that science is best learned by doing . With the recent commitment by the college to establish a neuroscience program, our objective is to develop a research-oriented neuroscience laboratory that will facilitate student understanding of neuroscience concepts and support the divisional emphasis of nurturing critical thinking skills. This new laboratory will continue to build on students prior investigative laboratory experience, wherein students are first trained in a scientific technique (using structured lab exercises) and then use that technique to complete a long-term project based on their own hypothesis and experimental design. We are adapting the structured labs from two complimentary neuroscience lab programs currently being used at other undergraduate institutions: 1) The Crawdad Program, which is currently being used by institutions such as Cornell University and Williams College, introduces students to modern neurophysiology techniques including electrophysiology. 2) A Laboratory Manual of Leaning and Memory Experiments currently being used at Wesleyan College and Kent State University, presents students with experimental techniques used at the organismal level to study behavior and learning. The resources used in this neuroscience lab are also be utilized by students in the advanced physiology and introductory biology courses doc15760 none Chemistry (12) This award is providing a dedicated molecular modeling Linux Cluster for use across the chemistry curriculum, including the integration of molecular modeling modules in honors freshman chemistry, honors organic, and experimental physical chemistry. A new computer laboratory course, Computational Nanotechnology is providing undergraduate chemistry students and other science majors an exposure to modern research techniques and emerging scientific are as. Computational Nanotechnology is training a new generation of skilled workers in the multidisciplinary approaches necessary for continued progress in nanotechnology and is providing significant laboratory research experience. In this course, students are designing, building, and testing molecular devices, materials, and nanostructures adapted from the research and educational literature, including organic and protein-based molecular motors, surface interaction and self-assembly, and molecular dynamics simulations doc15761 none Engineering - Other (59) This project develops software to automate the management of a game simulating the economic decisions in running a company. In the game, students apply the principles learned in class to run their company , as investment opportunities become available. Each opportunity requires the use of the most recent topics covered in class. The current manual version of the game, although very popular with the students, requires inordinate instructor time to manage the game and calculate the results of the students decisions. Students will be surveyed to get their reaction and their suggestions; also test results from students who used the game in their course will be compared to those from a similar course where the game was not used. The investigators will present papers describing the game and the results of their evaluation at professional conferences, and they will make the software available free to anyone who is interested through a web site and a CD-ROM doc15762 none Interdisciplinary (99) This project is a multidisciplinary effort to integrate stable isotope analytical techniques into the science curriculum at Keene State College as a means to (1) motivate student learning; (2) involve them into the process of scientific investigation and develop their scientific and technical skills; and (3) increase their understanding of important concepts in the biological, geological, and environmental field. The project is designed to promote science education for students who at Keene State College are composed of a large proportion of first generation students, and in Biology, Geology, and Environmental Studies have 54 % women. Adapting exemplary models from several other institutions (Dartmouth College, Saint Louis University, and University of Utah) and the literature, student centered inquiry-based field and laboratory exercises are being designed that use stable isotopes to address scientifically interesting questions and highlight the interconnection between classes such as Ecology and Evolution, Environmental Geology, Glacial Geology, Stratigraphy, Hydrogeology, Paleontology, Geochemistry, Physiological Ecology, and Community and Ecosytems Ecology. In addition, stable isotope analysis is a critical component in student-faculty cooperative research projects through Independent Study and the Environmental Studies Junior Senior Seminar. The acquisition of an isotope ratio mass spectrometer along with vacuum sample preparation lines is necessary because it allows us to complete the stable isotope analysis within the timeframe of a course (commercial analysis can take 4-12 months) and enables students to participate in the entire process of the investigation. The project is being evaluated using a combination of pre- and post-course questionnaires as well as a team of experienced external evaluators doc15763 none Engineering - Other (59) This project is establishing a multidisciplinary, laboratory based undergraduate control curriculum across engineering departments at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The lab is being shared by students in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Manufacturing Program and Aerospace Program. Due to its flexibility stemming from the modular nature of the instrumentation comprising the four work stations requested here, the multidisciplinary controls mechatronics laboratory borrows and adapts pedagogical elements that have been successfully implemented at other institutions. Prevalent themes include controlling physical devices as was implemented at the University of Urbana-Champaign, and controlling of smart structures as tested at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. A major influence comes from a paper by D.S. Bernstein where the important aspects of enhancing undergraduate control education at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor were laid out. The curriculum is being redesigned to incorporate an extensive laboratory component using the requested equipment. This allows students to become proficient in state-of-the-art real-time data acquisition and processing instrumentation, digital control implementation, and vibration testing. The physical devices that are controlled change every two years and are designed by WPI students pursuing their Major Qualifying Project (MQP). The MQP is a WPI degree requirement that is equivalent to a three course workload that leads to a written report and oral presentation and which is equivalent to a Bachelor s thesis. Project results are being disseminated at the Project Presentation Day in which graduating seniors present their MQP projects to the WPI community; during the annual campus visits of local (inner city) K-12 students which WPI already has established a leadership in encouraging K-12 students to pursue careers in STEM disciplines; through presentations proceedings at control and engineering education conferences doc15764 none Chemistry (12) Reflecting the importance of lasers in scientific research, medical practice, and numerous current and emerging technologies, leading chemistry programs have incorporated laser experiments into their advanced laboratory courses. We are introducing laser experiments at several levels of the Chemistry Department curriculum in a project that is central to our goal of moving the curriculum toward a research model in which students work with research-grade instrumentation, design experiments through guided inquiry, and interpret their results within the context of primary research literature. The experiments we are implementing are adapted from the Journal of Chemical Education and from primary chemistry research literature and are modified from procedures tested at other institutions. We are enhancing a Spectroscopy Laboratory course with the innovative goals of: (1) having students work with a versatile set of laser equipment to recognize how the capabilities and limitations of sources and detectors affect experimental design, and (2) designing two research-based experimental modules which address bio-inorganic photoinduced electron transfer and nonlinear optics using the appropriate spectroscopy tools. A second adaptation incorporates fluorescence lifetime and laser photochemical kinetic measurements into an Introductory Chemistry Laboratory and supplements our outreach efforts with secondary school chemistry programs. This project supports a trend in our department of increasing interest in student-faculty collaborative research. With new chemistry facilities to support instrumentation and new faculty members with expertise in spectroscopy, this is an ideal time to introduce laser spectroscopy experiments into our program doc15765 none Mathematical Sciences (21). An investigative classroom is being established to give students writing space, personal access to Internet connected computers, space for collaborative work, and visual access to a SMART Board. The approach blends active learning, collaborative work among students, instructor led electronic demonstrations, and a minimal amount of lecturing. Instead learning activities are being implemented that exploit a variety of applications-oriented materials developed for calculus I and II over the last eight years under the aegis of NSF and other institutions. Collaborative, investigative exercises that start in class are used to generate longer-term group projects; and a computer algebra system, Maple, and the TI-89 calculator are used as aids to visualization and exploration doc15766 none Chemistry (12) The effective instruction of Fourier Transform Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (FT-NMR) theory and its applications is dependent upon the availability of modern and reliable instrumentation. The goal of this project is to enhance the understanding and mastery of current FT-NMR applications and theory at the undergraduate and community college level in Eastern Kentucky through multiple hands-on experiences. Following the acquisition of an Anasazi-upgraded NMR, students are operating the FT-NMR instrument as well as interpreting the data individually and in group experiments. The students are learning to apply their knowledge of FT-NMR to a variety of standard and advanced FT-NMR techniques. The level of FT-NMR education is being increased for students at Maysville and Prestonsburg Community Colleges in Eastern Kentucky by hosting visits experiments by those students who in the past did not have routine access to NMR instrumentation. These students are involved in group experiments with current Morehead State University students. Students education at all levels, freshman to senior, is being impacted by the new instrumentation, with use of the instrument in organic chemistry courses for both science majors and nonscience majors, inorganic chemistry, analytical chemistry, and advanced courses including independent research. Experiments are being adapted from both the educational literature and the research literature doc15767 none Chemistry (12) We are enhancing our undergraduate curriculum by adapting and implementing into our chemistry and biochemistry courses projects which make use of our newly acquired CD spectropolarimeter. Our primary emphasis is to develop an integrated biophysical chemistry laboratory course that involve a series of projects focused on the investigation of macromolecular structure and function using the CD instrumentation. We are also integrating CD instrumentation into our sophomore and higher level laboratories and in ongoing student-faculty research projects. The project-based biophysical laboratory represents a forum for investigation of macromolecular structure and function by instrumental means. Aspects of polypeptide and DNA structure are being examined using the CD spectrometer. In sophomore Organic chemistry, students use the CD instrumentation to determine the absolute configuration of chiral compounds. Additionally, we are adapting a project-oriented experiment from the J. Chem. Educ. in which our students in advanced organic chemistry use the CD instrumentation to determine the absolute configuration of alpha amino acids following completion of an organometallic synthesis. Coupled with our 200 MHz NMR and the UV vis spectrophotometer, students in the biophysical chemistry course investigate the thermodynamics of protein and DNA structures. The overarching goal of our project is to enhance our students problem solving skills in chemistry and biochemistry through incorporation of modern instrumentation and to enable them to seek varied approaches to the solution of scientific problems doc15651 none Mathematical Sciences (21) The objectives of this collaborative project are to improve post-calculus students learning of probability and statistics and to provide students with better preparation for their future careers in mathematics and statistics, mathematics education, and computer science. These objectives are being achieved by focusing on active and cooperative learning, visualization of concepts, and use of simulations in post-calculus introductory probability and statistics courses at Athens State University and Middle Tennessee State University via the adaptation and implementation of two recently developed National Science Foundation funded materials. The materials are (a) A Data-Oriented, Active Learning, Post-Calculus Introduction to Statistical Concepts, Methods, and Theory ( ) and the (b) Virtual Laboratories in Probability and Statistics ( ). Project activities include faculty enhancement at the institutions, the respective institutional adaptation and implementation (A&I) of the materials, the evaluation of the A&I of the materials, and the assessment of students learning while using the materials. The University of Alabama Huntsville is providing the evaluation doc15769 none Biological Sciences (61) Advances in imaging technology have made the light microscope one of the most powerful tools of this century to study cell function. We are no longer limited to descriptive studies of dead specimens; we can image live cells carrying out the fundamental processes required for life. The objective of this project is to incorporate modern light microscopic techniques, including fluorescence imaging, into laboratory exercises designed for an undergraduate cell biology course. The microscopes are equipped with video cameras and computers for students to record their results in a digital format. This cell biology course has a highly interactive computer-based component. For all laboratory exercises, pairs of students perform variations of a central experimental theme and post their results on a course web page. The web site not only provides an interactive forum for students to discuss and evaluate a variety of data, but also serves as a resource for faculty at other colleges and universities who would like to incorporate this advanced imaging technology into their courses. This course provides an excellent testing ground for these lab exercises, and those which prove amenable to larger enrollment courses are being adapted for more general cell biology courses. The project is an adaptation of similar programs at Kent State University, Texas A&M University, Davidson College and Haverford College doc15770 none Biological Sciences (61) This project is providing opportunities for students to design, conduct, analyze, and report on inquiry-based laboratory projects in developmental biology by adapting from the contemporary research literature techniques of microsurgery, microinjection, and digital imaging for use by undergraduates. These research techniques are being implemented within inquiry-based undergraduate laboratory projects that investigate cell fate, cell morphology, and organogenesis. Thus, students have valuable opportunities to incorporate some of the most important and broadly applicable techniques of modern developmental biology research within experimental questions of their own design. By actively engaging students in all phases of scientific inquiry from experimental design through execution, analysis, and communication, students learn valuable technical, intellectual, communicative, and collaborative skills. Further, students are merging both classical embryology and modern developmental biology to obtain unique first-hand perspectives on how animal form and function arise doc15771 none Engineering - Electrical (55) This project implements an integrated laboratory experience in the signal and systems area in the electrical engineering curriculum. The development is based on prior work at Georgia Tech and uses the telecommunication instructional modeling system (TIMS) developed there. The project is developing a set of experiments that use the same laboratory platform in a four-course sequence. Evaluation includes both quantitative measurements and interviews with two groups of students: one that completed the new experiments and one that did not. The PI plans to disseminate their experiments and their assessment results using their web pages and publications in the education journals. The PI also intends to use the equipment in two on-campus programs for high school students with diverse backgrounds doc15772 none Biological Sciences (61) Marymount College, a women s college, is incorporating a collaborative inquiry-based approach to teaching physiological principles in six laboratory courses by making data collection, analysis and presentation consistent with present technology. This incorporation involves two phases and aims to overcome present impediments of incomplete and inconsistent experimental data collection, low student participation and lack of time for students to thoroughly understand concepts. The project is adapted from a NSF-funded program for physiology-based courses at Goshen College (CCLI # ). Students are using more graphic data representation and apply critical thinking skills to data analysis and the development of creative hypotheses. Evaluation of critical thinking skills is being inventoried through questionnaires and surveys. Dissemination of assessment will occur through participation in undergraduate conferences, publications and development of Web sites doc15773 none This CCLI-EMD Proof-of-concept has as its primary goal the integration of haptics technology into required undergraduate engineering courses to improve learning and teaching in the engineering program at the Ohio University. Haptics indicates force and touch feedback to the human from a computer. Commercially available haptic interfaces can greatly augment education: feeling is believing . Teaching and learning can be more compelling, fun, and engaging with better student retention via the integration of haptics technology. Specifically, we are developing haptics-augmented software activities and Internet-based tutorials, and integrating these tools into undergraduate engineering physics and statics dynamics courses. The PI has delivered similar products in the K-12 arena, sponsored by NASA. Though this proof-of-concept haptics technology development and evaluation is taking place at Ohio University, we have a nationwide focus with a goal of systematic changing the nation s undergraduate engineering programs via integrated haptics technology and curriculum. The College of Engineering personnel are performing the haptics technology, software, and tutorial development. The College of Education personnel are leading the integration of the resulting technology into the undergraduate engineering curriculum, the transfer of project results to K-12 science and technology teacher preparation, and the project evaluation efforts at Ohio University. The deliverables for this project include prototype haptics-augmented PC software learning activities, HTML-based tutorials, and integrated curriculum for physics and statics dynamics courses. Pilot tests on each of these courses will be conducted to evaluate project results. The dissemination of the results of this project will consist of conference papers and a journal article. Also, we will study the potential of commercially disseminating the products of the project nationwide. We will submit a full development proposal to NSF CCLI-EMD at the project conclusion. Keywords: Haptics, haptics-augmented software, haptics technology doc15774 none Interdisciplinary (99) This cross-disciplinary project integrates mathematics and biology in the undergraduate curriculum at Sweet Briar College (SBC). The overall goal of this initiative is to improve the quantification skills of SBC students using applications in the life sciences. Quantification skills are defined as the ability to look at an unfamiliar problem, determine the type of data necessary to address the problem, select the appropriate mathematical tools, and draw conclusions on the adequacy of the results. The objectives for the initiative are to: 1. Strengthen the quantification skills of biology students. 2. Expose mathematics students to the usefulness and applicability of mathematical knowledge and highlight career opportunities in the life sciences. 3. Introduce students to interdisciplinary research, emphasizing collaboration with researchers from different fields. 4. Improve the overall oral and writing skills of mathematics and biology students with specific emphasis on interdisciplinary content. These objectives are achieved by: 1) Developing a new course, Quantification Skills for Biomathematics, focusing on applications of mathematics to biology, and 2) Enriching the mathematics and biology curricula by developing and implementing additional educational modules that are used as biomathematical projects in existing courses. The focus is on the biological applications of common mathematical tools, rather than underlying mathematical theories. Students experience the usefulness of complex mathematical techniques as applied to biological problems. Modules are adapted from: 1) existing texts and programs; 2) results from our research, and 3) data from our collaborators at the Center for Biomathematical Technology at the University of Virginia doc15775 none Ball The International Workshop on Operator Theory and Applications (IWOTA) has been held biannually since and more frequently in recent years (starting in ) in eight countries in North America, Europe and Asia. The IWOTA conferences offer a rich program on a wide range of the latest developments in operator theory and its applications. In a combination of plenary lectures by eminent mathematicians and parallel sessions of invited and contributed talks, the plan is for this year s conference (to be held August 6-9, on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Virginia) to cover a wide range of topics, including operator system theory, operator scattering theory, operator theory numerical analysis, operator theory wavelets and signal processing, operator theory harmonic analysis as well as topics in Krein space operator theory and core engineering. These topics form a core of the basic science behind a variety of applications, including control of industrial processes or high performance aircraft, tomography and image reconstruction, pulse propagation in optical fibers, seismology, data compression and reconstruction, and identification of only approximately known parameters. The original concept of IWOTA was as a satellite conference for operator theorists to the broader based international symposium on Mathematical Theory of Networks and Systems (MTNS), to be held August 12-16, at the University of Notre Dame. While this concept is still in place, the scope of IWOTA has broadened considerably in recent years and IWOTA has now attained an independent identity as a world-wide conference for recent developments in core operator theory and its applications. IWOTA s primary objective is to bring together major researchers in the area of operator theory and related fields. These meetings provide opportunities for all participants to present their own work in contributed talks, to interact with other researchers from around the globe, and to broaden their knowledge of the field by hearing the invited lectures of eminent mathematicians. In addition IWOTA emphasizes cross-disciplinary interaction among mathematicians, electrical engineers and mathematical physicists, and encourages participants to continue on to the MTNS conference for a further broader interdisciplinary interaction. In addition, IWOTA encourages and financially supports the participation of young researchers, i.e., advanced graduate students and recent Ph.D. recipients, for whom the opportunities offered by expert conferences are particularly important doc15776 none Engineering - Electrical (55) This project investigates a shift in the introductory digital systems course from the current focus on gate level design to a HDL (hardware description language), register-transfer level focus. The emphasis is placed on the fundamentals of current design methodologies and skills to utilize the latest high-density programmable devices and synthesis software tools. The PI is developing a textbook, a set of experiments, and a web site to provide a detailed coverage of the concepts, principles, and practices of register-transfer level design. Student surveys provide feedback on the content, organization, continuity of topics, and level of difficulty. Course instructors in the senior design course will assess the students digital circuit design abilities and compare them to those of earlier students who had a traditional digital systems course. The PI is planning to present papers at education-oriented conferences, to prepare manuscripts for education journals, and to post complete lecture slide, class projects, and laboratory experiments on his web site to supplement the material in the developed textbook doc15777 none Chemistry (12) The purpose of this project is to introduce modern multinuclear Fourier Transform Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Spectroscopy experiments throughout the undergraduate chemistry curriculum. Experiments are drawn from pedagogical and research literature and are adapted to specific courses. They are designed to present students with a breadth of hands-on NMR experiences to illustrate the power and variety of NMR techniques. Laboratory experiments begin with an introduction to 1H NMR spectroscopy in the freshman year. The sophomore year uses a more rigorous treatment of 1H and 13C NMR and, in the junior year, students receive an introduction to the power of NMR as a method to study kinetics, nuclear spin relaxation mechanisms, and multiple pulse experiments, and they explore instrumental factors. In their senior year, students use a variety of sophisticated one and two-dimensional NMR techniques (COSY, HETCOR, DEPT, INADEQUATE) to determine the structure and properties of spectrally complex molecules. This project is designed to positively impact the science education of all chemistry and biology majors. In addition, the NMR is being used extensively by students involved in undergraduate research. Students from nearby Southern Virginia University also are making use of the instrument in several of their courses and through their participation in undergraduate research doc15778 none Laser and computer technologies have revolutionized modern physical chemistry research over the past few decades as lasers now allow molecular processes and chemical reactions to be probed in unprecedented detail. Current research in computational chemistry provides a wealth of information related to molecular structure, energetics, and reactivity. Integrated laser experiments are being adapted and implemented into the physical chemistry laboratory sequence. Further, to bring relevance to the subject, the exercises are based on processes that are important in atmospheric chemistry. The specific exercises being adapted from the educational and research literature include studies of the reaction of oxygen atoms with propene and the reactions of hydroxyl radical with halocarbons. In the exercises, students are employing laser technology to make experimental measurements of the reactions followed by computational exercises and molecular modeling studies of the processes. These integrated laser, computational, and molecular modeling exercises merge research and teaching by utilization of the skills and research strengths of the principal investigators, specifically laser kinetics of environmentally important compounds and ab initio computational chemistry. Undergraduate students are employed to test the exercises and to provide feedback doc15779 none Chemistry (12) At Doane College, we use a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer (GC MS) to significantly increase the opportunities for students to acquire sophisticated data in its chemistry and microbiology courses, as well as in undergraduate research in those areas. The students are learning to critically evaluate the data from this instrument and to integrate that data with other data from currently available instruments and techniques to solve progressively more difficult problems in their coursework and research. The goal is to help our students develop deductive reasoning and problem solving skills and gain hands-on experience with common modern instruments. We are adapting a number of experiments from the J. Chem. Educ. and from the microbiology literature such as the J. Microbiol. Methods for inclusion into our chemistry and biology curriculum to achieve our goal. The instrument gets its greatest use in organic chemistry and in microbiology courses and research. In most organic chemistry experiments, each student gets a unique set of starting materials and has to determine the outcome of the reaction by analyzing the often-complex product mixtures. In Bacteriology and in Environmental Microbiology, the phospholipid fatty acid (PLFA) method of analysis is used to explore mixtures and consortia of bacteria form both laboratory and field samples. In both areas, the GC MS provides information that allows more complex and meaningful experiments to be performed. We are also developing new undergraduate experiments that will be used in both chemistry and biology courses doc15780 none Biological Sciences (61) There is a well-documented national need for development of curricula in bioinformatics, especially at the upper-division undergraduate level. This project is establishing a foundation course in bioinformatics for third-year undergraduates, articulated with the biological science major, and available as an elective course for chemistry, computer science, and physics majors interested in bioinformatics. Materials available through the California State University Program in Education and Research in Biotechnology (CSUPERB) Bioinformatics Consortium and the National Center for Biotechnology Information are being adapted for use in the course. The project also addresses the need to identify students having inadequate preparation for bioinformatics instruction and to provide just-in-time review materials. The objectives are: 1) to assemble, implement and field test a computer-based module for diagnostic pretesting and remediation for enrolling students, 2) to develop a set of problem-based instructional units to be used in a discussion laboratory format with laptop computers and web browsers 3) to implement and evaluate an introductory course in bioinformatics using these materials, and 4) to share the results with faculty at other undergraduate institutions. The objectives are being accomplished using a systems approach to design, create and test materials appropriate for undergraduate bioinformatics. These materials are used with problem-based learning, enabling students to apply the strategies and tools of bioinformatics to topical problems drawn from current academic and commercial research. Basic computation, chemistry, biology, analytical and problem-solving skills are emphasized. The project involves several campuses of the California State University (CSU) system with the support from the CSU Program in Education and Research in Biotechnolgy (CSUPERB)Bioinformatics Consortium, which is committed to integration of technology and faculty development in the area of bioinformatics education doc15781 none This project studies stochastic processes that model complex, interacting behavior, such as interacting particle systems and interface models. Basic examples of particle systems studied are exclusion-type processes and Hammersley s process. Special situations studied in this project include bottlenecks, traffic jams, boundaries between different phases, priorities between individuals, and other irregularities that disturb the individual particles. An interface model describes the growth or decay of one phase relative to another. Examples of mathematical models in this category are last-passage models, models of increasing sequences, and marching soldiers models. The questions addressed are the speed, the eventual shape, and the roughness of the interface. The results of this project will concern the macroscopic behavior of these models and the fluctuations and deviations around the expected behavior. A basic feature of the world around us is that natural processes occur at several different scales. Large scale features are formed through the combined effect of a vast number of operators on a smaller scale. This can be observed in physical processes, biological processes, and man-made processes. For example, the disorganized motions and collisions of individual fluid particles make up the flow of a river; competition and cooperation at the level of individuals determines the evolution of a population; and the behavior of vehicles on a freeway determines the flow of traffic. Many different complex systems share common basic principles of organization and behavior. Such shared features can be abstracted in mathematical models, and analysis of these models then has implications for many particular applications. This project is about the mathematical study of such models, and the outcome of this project is a better understanding of the behavior of certain classes of models of complex systems doc15782 none Engineering - Mechanical (56) The importance of developing learning communities, where students interact with those outside their class, has recently been emphasized by NSF-DUE initiatives, which encourage interaction between high schools, community colleges and universities. The proposed project is designed to develop a learning community in a freshman engineering design course. The design course is being adopted from an established design curriculum, which emphasizes hands-on learning. Enhanced teamwork communication components is being added by coordinating with a high school technology program, and a freshman engineering graphics course. Curriculums from all three courses are being coordinated, creating a learning community. Students from each course are participating in the design process at different levels. The primary design responsibility remains with the design class, however, design teams include students and facilities from the other courses. The primary objectives of the coordinated curriculum are to: 1. Develop communication skills necessary for meaningful technical interaction between colleagues with diverse educational backgrounds. 2. Develop students awareness that material taught in one course is related and applied in other courses. 3. Develop communication and research skills within the design process early in students careers. 4. Encourage high school students to pursue careers in science or engineering by engaging them in the design process. An implementation of a unique short-term assessment process enables quick curricular changes in response to student needs. The project had generated much interest with local community colleges. Dissemination involves presentations at the regional meeting of universities and colleges, and local workshops doc15783 none Biological Sciences (61) This project will introduce new technology into the introductory Principles of Biology laboratory at Columbus State University. The technology would support and maximize the impact of inquiry-based activities built around the learning cycle approach to science education. Specifically, computers and graphing calculators will be interfaced with an array of probes and sensors to facilitate measurement, quantitative analysis, and presentation of data. These skills are now critically lacking in our students. The use of these instruments will better engage students in laboratory activities, allow them to experience the use of technology in modern biology, and enhance their ability to visualize and understand the biological phenomena they are exploring in the laboratory. Outcomes will be assessed through comparison of learning and attitudes among students who use the new technology with students who carry out similar experiments without the technology. DUE themes addressed by the project include integration of technology in science education, professional development of science faculty, preparation of future science educators, and participation in science by women and under-represented minorities. Participation of the PIs in appropriate workshops and specific efforts to share their experiences with colleagues will ensure professional development. Student demographics at CSU guarantee significant involvement in the project of women, under-represented minorities, and future teachers. Project results will be disseminated through publications and presentations at regional and national meetings, and products will be disseminated through publication on a web site devoted to the project doc15784 none Geology (42) Digital technology has revolutionized all of science and engineering. Nowhere has the impact been greater than Geosciences where immense quantities of spatial data, common to the discipline, can now be collected, manipulated, and analyzed using a powerful GIS. Digital mapping has grown from a convenience to a necessity and it is imperative that students be exposed to this technology at an early stage in their education. We are integrating digital technology into a traditional Geology summer field camp curriculum by adapting an inexpensive Pocket PC computer, GPS receiver, and widely available software for use as a complete digital field mapping system. Our goal is to enhance the basic skills necessary for fieldwork with digital technologies to bring students to the forefront of the digital revolution. To accomplish this goal, we are adapting existing exercises (Onasch and Frizado, ; Brimhall, ) and developing new ones for our summer field course. This project builds on the successes of our pioneering effort in integrating technology in a field course funded by NSF six years ago. We believe the new curriculum is making fieldwork more efficient and accurate, extending what can be accomplished in the field, and reinforcing important concepts and methodologies. Our curriculum can be implemented by other schools through the use of digital products of the project including mapping exercises in GIS format, templates for various field exercises, references sources in eBook format, and a roadside geology GIS, all of which are available on CD-ROM or from our website doc15785 none Interdisciplinary (99) This institutional initiative for curriculum improvement is establishing freshman residential learning communities (LC) for non-science majors. Two sets of existing freshman courses, laboratory science for non-science majors (Science-104) and humanities seminar (Humanities-101), are being linked by a common theme to create multidisciplinary learning experiences. The project is an adaptation of several noteworthy educational innovations: (1) Learning communities, such as the type described by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), Use of Learning Communities in General Education. (2) The Wagner Plan (of Wagner College in NY), which stresses the general education program of a college as its learning keystone, and provides interdisciplinary, experiential learning in learning communities during the freshman year to help students integrate their knowledge and develop their academic priorities. (3) Multidisciplinary courses bridging science and the humanities. Some of these are derived from earlier NSF-NEH joint awards made under a program known as Science and Humanities: Integrating Undergraduate Education. An example is courses developed and taught at Holyoke Community College under a grant Interdisciplinary Learning Communities in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Science Courses. Others are derived from course materials being taught at SENCER workshops sponsored by the AAC&U. (SENCER = Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities.) A total of six learning communities (representing 12 new courses) are being developed and implemented during the two-year grant period. The teaching team for each LC consists of a scientist, a humanist, and two undergraduate teaching assistants. The three learning communities offered in the Fall of are The Nature and Culture of Water (taught by faculty in biology and English), Cosmology and Ultimate Questions (physics and philosophy), and The Impact of Breakthroughs in Science and Medicine (biology and philosophy). Three new learning communities are being offered in the Fall of . Two of these are Madness: Scientific and Literary Perspectives (taught by faculty in psychology and English), and Scientific Sleuthing and the Social Impact of Crime (chemistry and philosophy). A sixth learning community is being planned. Each LC will include open-ended scientific inquiry, experiential learning (emphasizing outreach to K-12 students), and extensive use of educational technology. The program objectives are to 1) dispel the discipline-specific compartmentalization of knowledge and help students integrate information across disciplines, 2) acknowledge and further develop the creativity and teaching skills of gifted upperclassmen by including them as teaching partners, 3) inspire the freshmen to be active learners and the instructors to provide a more interactive learning environment, 4) emphasize the importance of the General Education program, 5) help first-year students focus their academic priorities, and 6) integrate student and faculty use of technology throughout the program. Each teaching team is participating in a two-week summer workshop followed by six weeks of collaborative course development. The workshops guide the teams in building successful learning communities and using the program evaluation plan. Each LC is maintaining a continuously evolving web page documenting the development, implementation, and evaluation of the program doc15786 none Biological Sciences (61) This project is a collaborative effort of biology and chemistry faculty to develop curricula in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. Objectives are to: 1) enhance the complementary nature of these two programs via team teaching and the utilization of state-of-the-art equipment for DNA and protein analysis, thereby effecting reform and refinement of courses throughout the four years of the programs; 2) integrate problem solving investigative approaches to learning in a developmental fashion throughout the four years, and in so doing encourage student research; 3) bring curricula into the 21st century of genomics and proteomics. To accomplish these goals the project is adapting successful approaches of several NSF funded projects. The activities in this proposal include development of new courses including an integrated Molecular Biology and Biochemistry senior seminar, implementation of new inquiry based laboratory experiences in a variety of courses across the curricula, team teaching, enhanced coordination of the two programs, acquisition of state-of-the-art equipment for teaching and research. A major focus is to promote undergraduate research in these areas, encouraging students to participate in interdisciplinary projects that involve faculty from chemistry and life sciences. Workshops to disseminate the results of the project include one for a general audience of high school teachers and college faculty, and one for a specialized audience of science students and faculty. The expected outcomes include complementary state-of-the-art curricula that encourages and enables excellence in student research in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry and fosters the development of students who will go on to graduate work and employment in the burgeoning fields of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry doc15787 none Biological Sciences (61) Ithaca College and EcoVillage at Ithaca, in partnership, are developing a science-intensive curriculum in environmental sustainability. Drawing on models of college community affiliation successful on other campuses, such as Pennsylvania State University, the project adds four new laboratory courses (Ecologically Sustainable Communities, Sustainable Land Use, Energy Systems and Sustainable Energy, and Ecological Footprinting) and faculty sponsored summer research. The new courses are sequenced such that students are introduced to the approach of sustainability science in the first course, master the analytical tools involved in energy efficiency (combustion analyzers, watt and light meters, thermal submetering systems, as well as computerized building models) and land use (field surveys, and GPS GIS) in the second and third courses, and unify their knowledge and apply it using the ecological footprinting approach in a final capstone course. Furthermore, all the core courses in the Environmental Studies Program are being modified to incorporate the curricular theme of environmental sustainability such that students are trained in all aspects of sustainability and are fully equipped to pursue careers at the science-policy interface with a solutions-oriented approach doc15788 none Engineering - Other (59) This project is developing, evaluating, and disseminating web-based modules for courses on numerical methods and for upper-level engineering courses using numerical methods. The two prototype modules concern nonlinear equations and interpolation. The modules allow user-customization of content based on engineering major and mathematical package used. The effort provides the basis for a full development proposal focusing on eight mathematical procedures taught in typical undergraduate numerical analysis courses. The project includes an evaluation study to compare the performance of students who have and have not used the modules on specially designed tests. Dissemination efforts include posting material on the course web page and on web site hubs for mathematical packages and sharing the results at engineering education conferences and in engineering education journals doc15789 none Engineering - Materials Science (57) We have developed a textbook and accompanying CD-ROM for a course in materials specifically designed for non-science majors. This work builds on the success of a course developed at Washington State University for non-science majors that addresses the manner in which materials impact society on a regional, national, and global scale. The course Materials: The Foundations of Society and Technology is targeted at third and fourth year undergraduates and is a capstone course in our General Education Curriculum. This textbook is based on the extensive notes we have prepared in developing the course and on research we have undertake under the auspices of this proposal. The textbook has been written in such a way that it can readily be used by the general college population. To assist faculty that decide to teach similar courses at their own institution we have developed a CD-ROM. Our CDROM has links to important educational and informational resources. In addition it contains homework problems and suggested assignments as well as background information regarding basic engineering and scientific principles doc15790 none The goal of this EPSCoR Centers Development Initiative (CDI) project is to increase the participation and competitiveness of EPSCoR researchers in multi-investigator Centers grant programs funded by the National Science Foundation. This project will provide direct consultation and assistance to the EPSCoR community using the following two complementary strategies: Centers Initiation: enhance proposals being developed by EPSCoR institutions jurisdictions for submission to major NSF Center programs. Centers Infusion: match research groups in EPSCoR institutions jurisdictions with NSF funded Centers and link and support partnerships with funded NSF Centers. This project builds on the success of a previous pilot project that provided direct consultation and assistance to researchers with promising EPSCoR Initiation Centers projects. This project expands the successful Initiation approach and adds the second approach of Centers Infusion to increase collaboration between EPSCoR jurisdictions and Centers in EPSCoR and non-EPSCoR jurisdictions. The Centers Initiation and Infusion strategies stimulate competitive, collaborative large-scale research through the following activities: opportunities identification, consultation and assistance, outreach, partnerships, project development and dissemination. This project is a joint undertaking of the University of South Dakota, the EPSCoR Foundation and the EPSCoR doc15791 none Chemistry (12) We are integrating Raman spectroscopy, a specialized tool commonly seen only in advanced research laboratories, throughout all four years of the undergraduate chemistry curriculum and also into some Physics and Life and Earth Science courses at Otterbein College. Our immediate goal is to enhance our chemistry curriculum by including activities that will carefully build students understanding of vibrational spectroscopy throughout their four years of training. To achieve our goal, we are adapting and implementation inquiry- and project-based laboratory exercises that utilize the Raman microscopy into the General, Organic, Analytical, Inorganic and Physical chemistry courses. These activities draw on a variety of NSF-funded projects on forensic chemistry, modern instrumentation, and Raman spectroscopy. We are also using the Raman spectroscope in ongoing faculty-student research projects. In addition to chemistry students, this instrument is also being used by students in the Physics and Life and Earth Sciences departments. In total, approximately 110 students annually are being impacted by this curricular reform project. We anticipate the student outcomes of this project will include: (1) a greater understanding of the fundamental theories and applications of vibrational spectroscopy and (2) the further development of critical-thinking and research skills. Our long term goals are to develop multidisciplinary programs in the sciences and the development and dissemination of a national model for the implementation of Raman spectroscopy throughout the undergraduate science curriculum doc15792 none Interdisciplinary (99) Training undergraduate students to examine the complex interrelationships within our natural earth system requires improved collaboration across academic disciplines. In this project, Allegheny College faculty from the Departments of Biology, Chemistry, Environmental Science, and Geology are developing the French Creek Watershed (FCW) Research Program to provide an interdisciplinary approach to undergraduate natural science coursework and research. The instrumentation acquired is enabling solid and solution-phase analysis of critical biotic and abiotic watershed components. The FCW Research Program: 1) is using new analytical equipment to strengthen field investigations in undergraduate science classes at all instructional levels; 2) enhancing the caliber of student faculty research within the College by markedly improving analytical capability and accuracy; 3) creating a program website, linked to a geographic information system (GIS), to serve as a centralized, institutional database for watershed information collected in courses and from student faculty research efforts at Allegheny. The effort is an adaptation of a similar program at Shippensberg University. This program is enhancing the intellectual vigor of both undergraduate students and faculty by: 1) improving analytical capability for coursework and research; 2) developing critical thinking and scientific skills within a regional watershed setting; and 3) fostering an interdisciplinary perspective in coursework and research via collaboration among disciplines. Dissemination of program design and results via the website, conference presentations, and publications will facilitate similar cooperative, interdisciplinary approaches at other institutions doc15793 none Biological Sciences (61) This project integrates DNA microarray technology and the application of bioinformatic data analysis as a core technology in the undergraduate Biology, Biochemistry and Bioinformatics curricula at USP. Microarray technology is an important biotechnology tool for the study of gene expression and in molecular diagnostics and has launched a paradigm shift in the way pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries approach drug discovery and development. An entire industry of microarray instrument, reagent and bioinformatic companies have developed to meet the current and future needs of the biological science community. Recently, instrumentation has been developed for making microarrays ( gridders ) and microarray readers ( scanners ) that are marketed and priced for the small laboratory environment. Students who graduate with a Life Science degree in the 21st century need to know the scientific principles and practical technological skills of microarray technology. Our cross-disciplinary curriculum program adapts microarray technology and develops microarray specific exercises in three courses, Molecular Biology (BI-290), Genetics (BS-466), Bioinformatics (BI-450) and supports undergraduate research in our Directed Research program (BS-499 and CH-450). This program is part of the educational foundation for our new Bachelor of Science degree in Bioinformatics and gives students in the Biology and Biochemistry programs the opportunity to experience microarray technology in their 2nd , 3rd or 4th years of study. Students carry out gene expression and DNA diagnostic experiments, and work with the bioinformatic software that is used to organize and mine microarray data. Successful implementation of this proposal is leading to the expansion of DNA microarray exercises to other courses and programs (eg. Microbiology). This project is providing a curricular template that leads to protocols and data sets for other undergraduate institutions doc15794 none Engineering - Other (59) A common criticism of the teaching of undergraduate engineering statistics is that it is too academic in focus, excessively theoretical, and divorced from real problems that appear in industry. The purpose of this project is to teach statistics using activity-based learning. A one-semester lecture-based engineering statistics course is being re-engineered through the adaptation of an activity-based engineering statistics course currently offered at the Pennsylvania State University. The proposed course is being structured to include laboratories and workshops intermingled with activity-based lectures. The laboratory sessions are intended to provide the student with an opportunity to become proficient in designing experiments, collecting data, and analyzing problems using PC-based statistical software. Workshops are designed to involve short lecture segments mixed with team-based problem-solving activities and software tutorials. The development of the laboratory and workshop activities includes materials based upon the research and consulting activities of the investigators. Different engineering laboratories are being utilized for these activities. Working through a diverse set of engineering problems, the student are expected gain the confidence to apply statistical techniques to new and different situations and realize the role of statistics in engineering design. Quantitative and qualitative tools are being employed to assess and evaluate this project and its components at different times throughout the two-year project duration. Dissemination plan involves conference presentations, journal articles, course workbooks, and a project web site doc15795 none Biological Sciences (61) The interaction of organisms with their environment is manifested in biological responses at many scales, from the biochemical to the ecosystem level. The relationships of organisms and their environments has been of concern to ecologists in the context of natural environmental variation and is of growing importance in light of the effects on organisms of human-influenced environmental change. In this project eight laboratory classes offered in the Biology department at Kutztown University are being adapted to introduce students to study of the physiological responses of organisms to natural environmental variation or to human-influenced environments. The efforts are an adaptation of and based on the experiences of faculty at Bloomsburg University, Cornell University, the University of Delaware, and the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Laboratory exercises focus on measurement of effects of environments on organisms from the physiological to the whole organism scale of response. The organisms to be studied include bacteria, protists, plants, and selected marine invertebrates. The environmental factors are being studied in controlled environments in the laboratory or greenhouse as well as under conditions of natural environmental variation in field sites. In this project: 1) Students are working cooperatively to examine the relationship between organisms and environment in inquiry-based laboratory exercises, 2) Students, working in groups, use computer-interfaced physiological equipment to quantify response to selected environmental factors, 3) Students examine how selected environmental factors impact organisms at the level of individual performance, population numbers, or in competitive interactions among species, 4) Students analyze physiological and whole organism data using comparative quantitative methods from graphical representation to basic inferential statistics and 5) students present results in manuscript-style laboratory reports, in posters, or in oral presentations patterned after those typical of a professional meeting doc15796 none Computer Science (31) This project focuses on the history approach to teach an overview course in computer science for non-majors. History is an ongoing theme throughout the course through the adaptation of relevant historical materials. Where appropriate, the project leaders are developing digital conversion of materials to enhance the course delivery. The project team is working closely with the Charles Babbage Institute, the Computer Museum History Center, the IEEE History Center, and the Computing History Center at Virginia Tech. Each of these centers has already identified, preserved, and in many cases catalogued a vast quantity of the exemplary materials pertaining to computing history. The project team is also creating a dedicated website solely for this activity. Students will have direct access to digitized material emanating from this project, to the collection of course-related historical materials, and to links to other useful and related sites. The expectation is that there will be a dramatic change in the course from one of sterile factual content to one containing dynamic interludes involving people, places, and events. In this manner, the computing course for non-majors will be much more interesting. It will stimulate more students to consider computing as their major, will contribute to students life-long learning experiences, will encourage students from diverse and minority communities to appreciate computing, and will increase student retention. Students will also gain a better sense of the nature of inquiry, the processes of innovation, the constraining and driving factors involved, and the human dimension doc15797 none Conventional models for the coevolution of exaggerated male sexual ornaments and female mating preferences posit that females derive material benefits or indirect genetic benefits by preferentially mating with the most conspicuous males. The chase-away sexual selection model, however, suggests that elaborate male sexual displays can arise because they exploit pre-existing biases in females sensory systems, inducing females to mate in a sub-optimal manner. An essential element of this hypothesis is that such manipulation should quickly lead to female resistance or decreased attraction to male display traits. Although anecdotal evidence in certain taxa appears to provide support for the evolution of female resistance, the hypothesis has not been directly tested. Nuptial food gifts, an integral feature of the mating systems of a wide variety of insects, may be a frequent conduit by which males attempt to influence the mating behavior of females against females own reproductive interests. Recent work in my laboratory suggests that the food gifts offered by male decorated crickets contain substances that at one time inhibited the sexual receptivity of females, but that females have evolved resistance to these substances. The proposed research seeks to establish the receptivity-inhibiting properties of these food gifts by offering them to females of several non-gift-giving species, and measuring their effect on female fitness. These studies may lead to the identification of male-derived hormonal substances that inhibit female mating behavior, which ultimately could furnish a safe, but effective means of biological control of insect pest species doc15798 none Biological Sciences (61) This project is developing a new long-term experimental site that will serve as a focus for undergraduate ecology at East Carolina University (ECU). The ecology laboratory required for biology majors has been based on a series of outdated cookbook experiments and field trips, and lacked opportunities for investigative learning. We are developing a course that has relevance and value for all biology students at ECU, the majority of whom will pursue careers in health or biotechnology. We are modeling our project after a successful project at Southern Illinois University, and taking advantage of ECU s recent acquisition of 600 acres of land near campus. The project has three educational objectives: 1) to enhance learning of ecological concepts; 2) to teach skills in data management and analysis; and 3) to promote an understanding of ecological principles that will inform students as future citizens. The sites illustrate important processes in community ecology that can be observed only on a long time scale. The accumulation of a valuable long-term data set will provide a wealth of opportunities for students to explore tools for data management and interpretation. We are working with the students to present and publish the data, and develop a nationally accessible website for the project (linked to the ESA website). Once the sites are established, we will encourage other ECU faculty, other North Carolina universities, and local K-12 schools to participate in the project doc15799 none Physics (13) A new optics initiative at Calvin College is providing students with marketable technical training in the optical sciences and introduces an optics concentration and an optical- technology minor into the physics curriculum. The programs target students in physics and engineering, as well as pre-service teachers preparing to teach science in high school. Curricular changes include the reconfiguration of several physics courses and the introduction of an intermediate-level course entitled Phys 246: Waves, Optics, and Optical Technology. Based on a mentor apprentice pedagogical model, this course will make use of a fully integrated lab-plus-lecture format, an approach with which Calvin s science-education specialists have already had great success in courses for pre-service elementary school teachers. The new pedagogical method will also influence the way in which students are mentored in a new upper-level lab course, Phys 383-384: Advanced Optics Laboratory. The project involves adaptations of labs for both the intermediate and the advanced courses, so that the optics initiative can effectively address its two-fold goal of cultivating technological knowledge and skill and providing a fresh model of teaching by hands-on inquiry. The labs are adapted from labs used at other institutions and from the research projects of the PI and Co-PI. The curriculum for Phys 246 is taken largely from a course at the University of Maryland taught by Dr. Wendell T. Hill, who is providing advice on a continuing basis. Certain individual labs (at both intermediate and advanced levels) are based on existing experiments and input from faculty at Caltech, Harvard, Harvey Mudd College, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Still others are a natural outgrowth of the PI s research on laser-cooled and trapped atoms and plasma diagnostics and the Co-PI s research on diode-laser applications and spectroscopy doc15800 none Engineering - Civil (54) Our project builds on previous work (C ) to gather high quality digital videos and still photographs to enhance environmental and water resource engineering education resources for educators. The publication and dissemination of these materials provides educators with the instructions to utilize these high quality digital materials in a variety of educational settings such as overhead transparencies, PowerPoint presentations, and computer based instructions. Our materials have the potential for use in long distance education courses. We are providing these materials to help educators in K-12 to foster environmental education through our What Do Environmental and Water Resource Engineers Design? web site. To obtain the digital images, we have gone on location, photographing existing operations, renovations, and construction projects at a range small to large-scale projects. Topics include unit processes in water and wastewater, hydraulic structures and open channel flow. We are disseminating our text and video materials through a publisher and our Internet site doc15801 none Engineering - Mechanical (56) Engineering undergraduate and graduate students are rarely asked to design, set up, carry out, and interpret their own experiments. Although prearranged laboratory experiments are used very effectively to reinforce theoretical concepts, they follow a fixed format and do not give students an opportunity to develop their own experimental planning skills. The overall objective of this project is to give students more control of the learning process. Experiments in an on-campus laboratory or test-trips to an off-campus site, i.e. the roving laboratory, are going to create an interactive, student-driven learning environment where instructors serve as learning coaches. Analytical and experimental structural dynamic course materials are going to be adapted from a proven set of course notes to meet the needs of this environment. Industrial partners, who serve on an advisory committee as third-party evaluators, are going to donate structural specimens or data to be used in experimental student projects. The project is going to better educate students in experimental structural dynamics within the roving laboratory, encourage lifelong self-learning, establish an educational link between university classrooms and industry, promote and support curriculum innovation where this approach is warranted, and provide other educators and industrial sponsors with information needed to implement this approach elsewhere doc15802 none Project This proof of concept project develops a set of instructional materials for teaching fundamental programming concepts using an exciting simulation and visualization package. This package provides an environment that supports the creation of 3-dimensional, interactive, animated virtual worlds (which can be easily built by novices!). It is expected that this approach will strengthen and enhance student skills as well as provide sufficient programming experience to improve student performance and retention in introductory computer science (CS 1) and beyond. The results of this project will be the creation of a set of instructional materials: textbook, laboratory exercises, lecture and demonstration slides, and a reference for the animation software, and the collection and analysis of preliminary data on the use of these materials. All curricular materials will be freely available and disseminated online doc15803 none Chemistry (12) The goal of this project is to increase the percentage of students continuing from introductory chemistry to more advanced courses and to careers in science. We are accomplishing this by changing students perceptions of chemistry laboratory through adding project-oriented experiments using advanced GC and GCMS instrumentation to solve topical and relevant problems. A secondary goal is to enhance the preparation of our students by providing laboratory experiences more similar to those they will experience in the workplace. The integration into the curriculum of a series of experiments using four Shimadzu GC-14B series capillary gas chromatographs with data stations and a QP- GCMS system equipped with autosampler supports a broader departmental plan to introduce FTIR, UV Vis, GC, and HPLC techniques into lower level laboratories. Students are gradually building their skills by repeated exposure to the GC and GCMS instruments in each of five laboratory sections accompanying general, organic, and analytical chemistry. Experiments have been carefully selected from the Journal of Chemical Education and are being adapted to fit our existing program. Success in meeting our goals is being assessed both numerically, by tracking the fate of each student entering our general chemistry program, and more qualitatively through our existing departmental assessment plan. Results will be shared with the educational community at national meetings of the American Chemical Society, the Council on Undergraduate Research, and Sigma Xi, in addition to informal discussions with associates at other Colleges. Publication in the Journal of Chemical Education of novel or substantially revised experiments developed to support our mission will complete our dissemination effort doc15804 none Astronomy (11) This project is adapting and implementing a model of complementary telescopes--one local and one remote--pioneered at the University of Iowa. The investigators are installing a pair of 16-inch telescopes, one at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where observing is sometimes hampered by poor weather and light pollution, and one at the Rehoboth Christian School near Gallup, New Mexico, a remote location with clearer and darker skies. The choice of the remote site builds on a century-old relationship between the college and the high school, which serves primarily Navajo and Zuni students. A teacher at the school is assisting with the installation and maintenance of the telescope there and is integrating it into the school s physical science curriculum. Students and faculty at Calvin College use their local telescope in a hands-on and a training mode, and use the nearly identical, robotic telescope at Rehoboth Christian School to make observations remotely. Both telescopes provide individual data for many students, including research-quality data for upper-level undergraduates. This arrangement provides a flexible but reliable system, in which the local telescope at the college can be switched between eyepiece, camera, and spectroscopic modes, and in which skills gained by students using the local telescope immediately transfer to data acquisition on the remote telescope in New Mexico. Efficient queue operation of the remote telescope supplies large quantities of high-quality data, enough for individual students to pursue a wide range of physically interesting experiments with their own data sets. Outcomes of the project include sequential installation and reliable operation of the local, and then the remote, telescope; training in the new equipment and procedures for Calvin College faculty who teach astronomy courses, as well as their student assistants; training in the new equipment and assistance in curriculum development for the participating teacher at Rehoboth Christian School; integration of new observing capabilities into the college s lab curriculum and existing and newly developed courses; enhanced recruitment of Native American students (at Rehoboth Christian School) into careers in science; conference presentations that disseminate the college s model for astronomy labs; and the development of relationships with the college s feeder high schools (in addition to Rehoboth Christian School), so that they can incorporate use of the new telescope in their science curricula doc15805 none Engineering - Civil (54) The project implements a sophisticated research technique, Planar Laser-Induced Florescence (PLIF), into a safe, versatile, and robust instructional tool at the University of Colorado. It adapts research and instructional implementations at Stanford University. The PLIF system is being incorporated into a dedicated teaching flume that students are using to visualize fluid flow and the effect of various interactions on the flow pattern. Five faculty members are incorporating the facility into their courses. Assessment tools include student surveys, open-ended interviews, written test, and course evaluations. The group is preparing a web site, a workshop, and engineering education publications describing the construction and implementation details along with assessment results doc15806 none Physics (13) In this project, the investigator is building an advanced physics lab course into an equipment-intensive course where students learn and develop hands-on skills in the areas of computer interfacing, modular instrumentation, and vacuum techniques while they learn to work collaboratively, as they would in a technical job environment. Recent physics education research has shown the success of the collaborative approach in teaching introductory physics. This project supports the full-scale implementation of teaching and learning advanced experimental techniques in a collaborative environment by adapting the ideas developed by P. Heller and M. Hollabaugh ( Teaching Problem Solving Through Cooperative Grouping. Part 2: Designing Problems and Structuring Groups, Am. J. Phys. 60, 637-644 [ ]) and applying them to an upper-division laboratory course. Specifically, context-rich problems are being developed and student groups are being managed to foster problem solving skills in the laboratory. The new advanced physics lab course is structured around three experimental problems: detecting mechanical chaos, measuring the lifetime of an exotic atom, and designing and characterizing a simple, low-energy electron gun. The experiments are adapted from F. Moon s book on chaos, _Chaotic and Fractal Dynamics_ (Wiley, , pp. 451-456); M. Yuly s paper on positronium decay, Positronium in the Undergraduate Laboratory, Am. J. Phys. 67, 880-884 ( ); and the discussion of vacuum techniques and electron optics in _Building Scientific Apparatus_, 2d edn., by J. Moore, C. Davis, and M. Coplan (Perseus Books, , pp. 75-118 and 305-344). The problems were chosen because of the instrumentation they involve and the skills students can learn from them. By working on the same problem and discussing the experimental techniques presented in a closely coordinated lecture, students develop both individual skills and the ability to work in a group. The collaborative model has been tested with a mechanical chaos experiment, with excellent results, particularly in terms of increased student readiness for independent research projects. The project is being evaluated by students, both formatively over the course of the project and longitudinally as they progress in the major; by faculty, both internally and externally; and by presenting for review and comment a detailed instructor s manual, supporting Web site, and articles in journals such as the _American Journal of Physics_ and _The Physics Teacher doc15807 none Using findings from cognitive science, a prototype of an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) is being developed. This ITS utilizes case-based reasoning (CBR) to scaffold undergraduate engineering students in their learning of introductory probability and statistics. This scaffolding process is based on the principle that successful problem solvers and experts gain a better grasp of the underlying problem structure by moving back and forth as they reach dead-ends or see new ways to formulate the problem. Specifically, the students learn the following three steps: 1) situation conception--understand the problem in everyday language; 2) mathematized situation conception--create a mathematical representation; and 3) solution method conception--carry out the mathematical procedures. Existing commercial software and well-established research index-based CBR and rule-based expert systems are used to support the presentation of ITS by graduate students to the undergraduate students in the course. The assessment of ITS is to test two hypotheses: 1) Does the ITS increase the internalization of key concepts by the students? and, 2) Does the ITS increase the student independence in representing and solving problems? Also, assessments based on comparing the performances on questions related to the hypotheses for ITS-students and non-ITS-students. This initial evaluation of ITS from the standpoint of integrating it with an existing engineering statistics course, allows the participation of other universities who also offer the engineering statistics course to participate in a joint, longer term project to realize a fully functional ITS. Also, the partnership with other universities provides a vehicle for embedding ITS into other courses where the same cognitive and instructional principles are appilcable. The final product--a prototype and recommendations for a more fully functional ITS-- will: 1. Assist students in extracting the underlying common structure from engineering statistics problems that illustrate the full range of engineering disciplines; 2. Allow the student to generate, customize, and change a virtual infinite collection of exercises that can be solved with the assistance of the ITS. The students can explore the effect of changes to different parameters and how those changes influence the solution; and 3. Help students formulate and solve practical and open-ended problems. The final product will be kept on CD-ROM, and further dissemination will be via workshops. Keywords: Case-based reasoning, intelligent tudoring system doc15808 none Engineering - Engineering Technology (58) The Learning Factory concept was first developed as part of the TRP NSF funded Manufacturing Engineering Education Partnership (MEEP). The objective of the Learning Factory (LF) is to integrate a practice-based engineering curriculum that balances analytical and theoretical knowledge with physical facilities for product realization in an industrial-like setting. The LF model, which emphasizes practical experience, moves Engineering programs closer to the Engineering Technology (ET) model; which by design is oriented to practical applications. Consequently, ET programs are well suited to implementing the LF. This project s goal is the adaptation of the LF model for implementation in ET programs. Under this project, five carefully selected courses in the current programs are being modified. This will lead to the use of coordinated projects across those courses. The specific coordinated projects focus on the design and building of functional model engines. In the various courses, students generate CAD drawings of all the engine 1components, produce process plans for the engine components, fabricate the engine components and assembling and testing the engines. This education process provides the students with a good understanding of engines. That is, the students gain the exposure to the full range of issues involved in the product design phase, in the manufacturing planning phase, in the fabrication phase, in the assembly phase and in the testing phase. Since the implementation component of the project is modifying of existing courses rather than developing new ones, it is highly likely that the results of the project will be widely accepted by the ET community. The results will be disseminated through conferences and journal publications geared to the Engineering and Engineering Technology community. There will also be particular outreach to area community colleges to encourage coordinated implementation of the LF concept doc15809 none Chemistry (12) This project is providing access for two community colleges to the 300 MHz NMR spectrometer on the campus of the State University of New York New Paltz. Students in the community colleges are now being introduced to NMR techniques in their sophomore-level organic chemistry class. The techniques learned at this level are then expanded in advanced chemistry courses when they transfer to a four-year institution. Students at the collaborating institutions, Dutchess County Community College and Ulster County Community College, did not previously have access to an NMR spectrometer and the community colleges were not likely to have the resources to purchase and maintain a high-field instrument. Thus, students taking organic chemistry at these institutions were not exposed to experimental NMR spectroscopy in their curriculum and this presented an additional barrier for them to overcome when they transferred into a Bachelor program. This project is adapted from the collaborative programs at James Madison University, Rider University, and Indiana University. An autosampler is installed on the 300 MHz NMR spectrometer at SUNY New Paltz. Silicon Graphics Workstations equipped with the compatible NMR operating software is installed on the community college campuses. Samples are transported to New Paltz, loaded into the NMR autosampler, and students at the community colleges are then be able to control the NMR spectrometer in real time over the internet. The project also includes initial and ongoing training by the Project Coordinator of the students and faculty at the community colleges in NMR theory and the operation of the spectrometer doc15810 none Atomic absorption spectroscopy is an important method of elemental analysis that undergraduate chemistry students should encounter at all levels of the curriculum. We are adapting proven atomic absorption experiments that use both flame and graphite atomization procedures and implementing them into the laboratories for Introductory Chemistry, Environmental Chemistry, and Instrumental and Experimental Chemistry. These experiments are taken from the recent educational literature, have an environmental, real-world content and thus are relevant to the experiences of our students, both majors and non-majors alike. The instrument is also being used by undergraduates as part of a variety of research projects. New laboratory manuals are being written to reflect the increased emphasis on atomic absorption spectroscopy and the manuals can be disseminated to other institutions wishing to incorporate atomic absorption spectroscopy into their curriculum. The experiments and the success of our students in mastering atomic absorption will be disseminated to the chemical education community through presentations at local and national meetings, publication in chemical education journals, and personal contacts doc15811 none Biological Sciences (61) Experiments that utilize optical spectroscopic methods adapted from the literature are being introduced in a coordinated fashion into four teaching laboratories as a means of increasing student understanding of interactions of light and matter. Students measure the absorbance and fluorescence of metalloporphyrins in a freshman-level inorganic chemistry laboratory. They characterize protein-DNA interactions, DNA-ligand thermodynamics and kinetics, and protein unfolding equilibrium and kinetics in upper-level biochemistry and chemistry laboratories using absorbance and fluorescence spectroscopy. In one laboratory course, students develop and test their own hypothesis for a well-defined biophysical problem. Web-based teaching tools are being developed and implemented to enhance and monitor student learning. Instrumentation to facilitate these activities include a UV-visible spectrophotometer, two scanning fluorometers (with computers printers), and a rapid-mixing accessory for stopped-flow kinetics for dedicated use in the undergraduate teaching laboratories. This project is being assessed by an advisory board of chemistry and biology faculty and a teaching and learning specialist doc15812 none Engineering - Civil (54) Visualization and animation are areas of increasing importance in civil engineering practice. The goal of this project is to adapt concepts developed in the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center at Georgia Institute of Technology, and to implement a modification of these concepts into the civil engineering curriculum at Cal Poly Pomona. The first objective is to introduce static visualization into lower division courses. A second concurrent objective is to introduce real-time 3-D visualization and animation into upper division courses. Rhinoceros, a 3-D NURBS solid modeling and static visualization tool, is being utilized to accomplish the first objective. Static visualization concepts are being introduced into CE 127 CAD Engine Concepts, a freshman computer graphics class. More advanced concepts and basic animation are being addressed in CE 134 Elementary Surveying, CE 220 Advanced Surveying, and CE 222 Highway Design. Objective two is being accomplished by acquiring 20 graphics accelerated SCSI workstation with static and dynamic visualization software. This equipment is going to be used to modify the spatial positioning systems, photogrammetry and GIS classes. Data are being collected in these classes by global positioning systems and softcopy photogrammetry. These data are going to be used to build computer models with visualization and animation software currently applied in industry. Concurrently, this equipment is being used in senior projects and the comprehensive civil engineering design classes. Students are developing terrain fly-throughs, building walk throughs, earthquake simulations and civil engineering equipment simulations. The visualization and animation techniques are being integrated throughout the curriculum. Students are incorporating these techniques into most senior projects. These senior projects are presented to faculty, students, and industry on College Symposium Day. The impact of visualization and animation techniques on these audiences will assure their inclusion. The project is expected to reach 3,700 enrolled engineering students. This project addresses both upper and lower division student audiences and integrates new technology into the curriculum of the Department of Civil Engineering enabling student learning and understanding of three-dimensional space. In addition, based on current enrollment statistics approximately 33% or 175 students who are under-represented minorities are going to be impacted by this project. Finally, the College of Engineering works with a consortium of high schools, and Metropolitan Transit Authority Foundation transportation academies. Through these avenues, the project promises to reach several hundred high school students doc15813 none Engineering - Engineering Technology (58) This A (2) a device laboratory; and (3) writing assignments on the impact that a technological device has on the social, the economic, and the cultural of the United States society. The project is to adapt Krupczak s Hope College model to an earlier laboratory created by the PI. The laboratory is for first year engineering students who work in teams of two or three. They READ a technical description of a device or system and then play the role of: (1) the USER of the system; (2) the ASSEMBLER (dissect the system and study it); (3) the ANALYST ( analyze and solve particular problems dealing with the system operation); and (4) TEACHER ( tell others about their system, its purpose, its principles of operation, and present an illustrative problem representative of the system s functions) Specifically, the Hope College component consist of the format of fourteen lectures and a six week laboratory consisting of six hands-on roles (read, use, dissect, calculate, design, and present teach explain), and two papers on the impact of the particular system on society. Evaluations include pre post student attitude surveys, a standard NCSU student course evaluation, and a new course assessment developed by the College of Engineering staff. Student outcomes are measured using the Nan Byar s definition of technology literacy doc15814 none Engineering - Other (59) Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) is using this CCLI-A&I project to redesign its core engineering science courses by transforming the instructional methodology from one that is primarily lecture based to one that emphasizes active learning in a laboratory setting. The aim is to enhance students understanding of engineering theory and develop their analytical skills. The project is the result of recommendations made by an outside evaluator, and discussions between our faculty and engineering faculty from several four year institutions. Our faculty are working with representatives from The City College of New York (CCNY), the University of Virginia (UV) and the Louisiana Technological University (LTU) to adapt and implement exemplary educational materials and pedagogical strategies that have been successfully tested and implemented at each of these institutions. The specifically topics are: 1) Circuits--adapt and implement (a&i) a set of laboratory exercises developed at CCNY School of Engineering. Hands-on activities are complemented by the use of Electronic Workbench and LabView software. 2) Graphics--a&i computer based activities such as solid modeling using Pro Engineer software as are used at CCNY and other schools. 3) Mechanics-- a&i a series of hands-on exercises such as Working Model as was developed at LTU. 4) Thermodynamics--a&i a set of workshops developed at UV. Simulations and analysis at the workshops are supported by the CYCLEPAD software. In support of these curricular reforms, this project is setting up a computer laboratory and an experimental engineering science laboratory equipped with up-to-date software and instruments. A training program consisting of workshops conducted by faculty from the model institutions ensures that our faculty are knowledgeable in the pedagogical methods of the model institutions and are capable of using active learning and project based activities. The measurable outcome of the project will be a manual for the four courses, which will include hands-on laboratory experiments and computer activities. A separate manual consisting of student projects will also be an outcome product. These products will be disseminated at national and regional engineering meetings and will be made available on the college s web site doc15815 none Mathematical Sciences (21) The Connecting Mathematics for Elementary Teachers (CMET) project is connecting prospective elementary teachers learning of mathematics in mathematics content courses with how children understand and learn mathematics. The goals are to 1) enhance pre-service teachers understanding of mathematics, 2) improve their teaching of mathematics, 3) improve prospective elementary teachers understanding of how children learn and understand mathematics, 4) help them connect the mathematics they are learning with the mathematical concepts they will be teaching children, and 5) facilitate prospective elementary teachers understanding of the connection between the mathematics they will be teaching in elementary school to the mathematics and technological skills children learn in middle and high school. To achieve these goals, supplementary materials are being developed for one 3-credit hour mathematical content course for elementary teachers. An expanded supplement of teaching notes is being developed for the instructors. The materials explore how children learn and understand mathematics, the mathematics actually taught in the elementary school, and the important connections at the elementary level to mathematics and the technological skills children learn in middle and secondary school. The project is emphasizing mathematics from children s perspectives and how this is directly related to the mathematics they are learning and will be teaching children. The materials are being evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively for their effectiveness at a test site. This project provides future teachers in-depth knowledge of how the subject matter they are learning relates to their future teaching doc15816 none Biology (61) The Biology Department at the University of St. Thomas has built a curriculum for both majors and non-majors that introduces undergraduates to modern biological techniques modeled on actual scientific investigations. This project is introducing flow cytometry into this curriculum in order to address our goal of providing students with hands-on exposure to current technology via investigative laboratory experiences. The project is modeled after successful similar efforts at Occidental College, Haverford College, Ursinus College, and San Diego State University. The flow cytometer is a powerful tool for detailed analysis of complex populations of cells in a short period of time. In recent years, flow cytometers have become less expensive and more user-friendly, making them accessible and appropriate for undergraduate biology education. In this project we are integrating flow cytometry into our curriculum via three majors courses, two non-majors courses, and independent student research. We also making flow cytometry available to Biology faculty in a Twin Cities consortium of five private institutions. We are aiming to expand future use of the technology into other courses of our curriculum such as advanced cell biology, microbiology, molecular biology, evolution and ecology, as seen in other undergraduate programs doc15817 none Drug Delivery is a burgeoning field that represents one of the major research and development focus areas of the pharmaceutical industry today, with new drug delivery system sales exceeding 10 billion dollars per year. Chemical Engineers play an important and expanding role in this exciting field, yet undergraduate chemical engineering students are rarely exposed to drug delivery through their coursework. To provide students with the skills directly relevant to the evolving needs of the pharmaceutical industry, this project is developing and integrating applied drug delivery coursework and experiments throughout the Rowan Engineering curriculum. The design and production of new drug delivery systems requires that the engineer fully understand the drug and know material properties related to the processing variables that affect the release of the drug. This requires the engineer to have a solid grasp of the fundamentals of mass transfer, reaction kinetics, thermodynamics, and transport phenomena. He or she must also be skilled in characterization techniques and physical property testing of the delivery system, and practiced in the analysis of the drug release data. This project provides the Chemical Engineering students at Rowan University with the necessary foundation materials and fundamental principles. There are seven modules adapted, implemented and used to introduce students to the multidisciplinary engineering principles of common drug delivery systems designs. Each module describes experiments used to support the design, preparation, characterization, and analysis of that particular drug delivery system. The seven drug delivery systems explored are: tablets, ointments, membrane systems, microcapsules, osmotic pumps, Chemical kinetics, and supercritical fluid-processed particles. The engineering goals of this project are: --to explore different types of drug delivery systems --to study drug delivery designs in a quantitative manner using engineering principles --to use up-to-date industrial techniques for the production, testing, and analysis of drug delivery systems and to evaluate factors influencing the release of drug from a delivery system. To accomplish these goals, this collaborative project maximizes the curricular impact by vertically integrating the seven modules beginning with the Freshman Clinic, followed by the fundamental engineering courses, the Junior-Senior research projects course, and finally, advanced level elective courses on pharmaceutical topics. These modules employ proven methods in SMET education. To maintain the quality , recurring meetings of senior project personnel and other Chemical Engineering Department faculty are planned as necessary. The project is undertaking both formative evaluations and summative evaluations, and its dissemination is being accomplished through presentations at national conferences, CD-ROM and refereed journals. Keywords: Drug delivery systems, drug delivery methods, pharmaceutical drug delivery systems doc15818 none Physics (13) The project is adapting and developing new courses in material science and nanotechnology in a traditional physics curriculum to better meet the interests, needs, and employment opportunities of majors. The adapted courses are 200 level Material Engineering classes taught in a single semester at the NSF National Nanofabrication Users Network (NNUN), Penn State Nanofabrication Facility. These courses are taught by the Pennsylvania Nanofabrication Manufacturing Technology (NMT) Partnership under the joint auspices of the Nanofabrication Facility and the State of Pennsylvania. The NMT classes are a unique opportunity for students to study the techniques and processes involved in state of the art micro- and nanofabrication at a premier research facility. Two new courses in the physics curriculum offer the theoretical foundations for the techniques and process courses offered by the NMT center. This project addresses the lab component of the new courses. The new course offerings, with the addition of the NMT courses, form the basis of a Bachelors of Science Applied Physics Degree with a Nanofabrication Concentration. This program offers significantimprovement to all three physics degree programs: 1) B.S. Physics majors interested in continuing on to graduate school have an opportunity to work with state-of-the art equipment and to fabricate devices for their undergraduate research projects, 2) B.S. Physics Ed. majors have an opportunity to gain understanding and experience in modern materials and fabrication, which they can take to the classroom to inspire future generations of students, 3) Applied Physics Engineering majors have a viable four year alternative to the five year program currently offered doc15819 none Engineering - Chemical (53) We were previously funded under an NSF-sponsored project, in that program we integrated design through the use of AspenPlus simulation software which was developed for use in lecture courses throughout the four-year chemical engineering curriculum. In this project, the integration of design is expanded to include open-ended design-oriented experiences in the chemical engineering laboratory. Under this project we have our students working in an open-ended, design-build-test experiment in packed column design for gas absorption. The experiment is now part of our required senior-year chemical engineering laboratory course. It is modeled after a typical industrial project in which students are required to make design choices between competing alternatives where economics must be considered. Students are using AspenPlus to model the absorption process and make choices between alternative columns and column packing configurations. Our students are building and testing their design in the laboratory and report their findings in a written or oral presentation. We are assessing the effectiveness of this project by using student interviews, surveys of senior students and graduates, employers as well as the program s industrial advisory board doc15820 none Engineering - Chemical (53) We have developed web-based Unit Operations experiments in Chemical Engineering. To help in this effort we are adapting various elements from CCLI web based experiments from existing work started by other investigators. These include C which involved multidisciplinary instruction in environmental science done by Dr. Krehbiel and his team. We are also adapting the work of Dr. Asumadu s novel Remote Wiring and Measurement Laboratory (RwmLab) C . This project demonstrates how students can wire up physical electrical and electronics circuits and perform real measurements through internet access. Finally we are also using some of Dr. Kamangar s project, C , where students implement a suitable hardware software environment for multi-platform computer-based monitor and control of the environment. We have developed two Internet-based Chemical Engineering Unit Operations experiments. The first is a non-isothermal fixed-bed adsorption remote controlled experiment as well as a dialysis unit operations experiment. For Internet-based laboratories to be successful, they must be effective learning experiences. Our plan has been to study the effectiveness of these on-line experiments relative to a hands-on experience. Building on our work and that of other researchers we hope to encourage other faculty to use of the Internet to deliver laboratory experiences. Our model, if emulated, would allow faculty to develop high quality experiments in their area of expertise and share them with the engineering community. In addition to this significant pedagogical benefit, the use of Internet-based laboratories offers the potential to reduce laboratory costs while simultaneously increasing the number of laboratories available to students. The University of Toledo Chemical and Environmental Engineering Department and The University of Cincinnati Chemical Engineering Department are committed to maintaining the experiments along with existing Unit Operations experiments. Finally, upon successful completion of our project, we will pursue a larger effort to develop Internet-based laboratories with all of the Chemical Engineering Departments in the State of Ohio doc15821 none Biological Sciences (61) The joint project of the mathematics and biology departments is focused on the entire biology curriculum, including biology education. It is adapted from materials developed in the well-tested programs of the University of California at Davis, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Utah. The ideas implemented at Beloit College and Macalaster College provide additional guidance. Aspects of each of these programs are integrated with ideas developed at Appalachia State to take full advantage of existing local resources and support systems. The aims are to: a. increase students computational maturity through realistic biological applications in mathematics and statistics coursework; b. reinforce students computational skills through mathematical, statistical and technological integration in biology coursework; c. foster communication and collaboration between the departments for research, student projects, and course development; and d. increase the marketability of students by giving them a broader set of skills from which to draw. The courses affected include the introductory mathematics sequence (use of biology related examples and guest lectures from biology faculty to highlight biologically important mathematics concepts), introductory biology courses (introduction of mathematics modules many of which parallel research being done at Appalachia) and introduction of advanced cross-disciplinary courses developed and co-taught by faculty from both departments. Evaluation of the project includes oversight by a team of mathematicians and biologists who are actively involved in similar curricular reform and of a science educator and mathematics educator doc15822 none Physics (13) This project is adapting and implementing the Tutorials in Introductory Physics, by Lillian McDermott, Peter Shaffer and the Physics Education Group at the University of Washington, in the recitation sections of the large introductory calculus-based physics courses taught at the University of Cincinnati. The goal of this proposal is to improve the performance of the science, math and engineering students taking introductory calculus- based physics courses, which have been a barrier for many science and engineering students at the University of Cincinnati. The students in these courses come from a diverse background and include many at-risk students. The tutorials have been pilot tested at the University of Cincinnati, and students using tutorials have shown improvement over non-tutorial students. A Tutorial Coordinator is helping the department completely implement the tutorials, and peer instructors helping as facilitators in the tutorial recitation classes. The Coordinator will coordinate all tutorial recitations and manage the recitation instructors tutorial training sessions, under the supervision of the Principal Investigators. Innovative features of this implementation of the tutorials are the pairing of a graduate teaching assistant with an undergraduate peer student, the testing and selection of an effective set of tutorials for less well-prepared students, and the use of checkpoints and grading based on recitation performance to motivate students and guide the recitation instructors. The University of Washington Physics Education Group will be involved in observing and advising on the implementation of the tutorials doc15823 none The objectives of this project are (1) to integrate selected biochemical concepts and methods and (2) to introduce project-oriented, student-designed laboratories into the analytical course. An HPLC system and a UV-Visible spectrophotometer are making this possible. Specific experiments and the project laboratory approach are being adapted from the chemical education literature, the primary chemistry literature, and application notes provided by manufacturers. The proposed changes are correlated with a Departmental goal to integrate biochemical concepts across the chemistry curriculum and toward a college-wide effort for student-directed, individualized learning opportunities. By incorporating biochemical concepts and group project experiments into the analytical laboratory, student understanding of selected biochemical topics, student ability to apply an analytical approach to biochemical problems, and student capacity for working with other members of a group toward the solution of a problem are being increased doc15824 none Psychology - Cognitive (73) A shared Eye-Tracking Laboratory (ELT) has been established at the University of Richmond to advance undergraduate coursework and research. This laboratory is modeled after a similar one at the University of Chicago, but has been adapted for primary use by undergraduate students. Although eye tracking is being increasingly used for research in psychology, engineering, human factors, and education, students at primarily undergraduate institutions rarely gain experience with this advanced technology. The goal of the proposed ELT is to give students a greater understanding of advanced research methodologies in psychology, greater preparation for advanced study in a variety of related fields, and a deeper understanding of mind, brain, and eye. The ELT enhances the curriculum of advanced research methods courses in social psychology, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, adult development, and behavioral neuroscience. This lab is being used to demonstrate prior findings, and to conduct experiments that extend earlier work. In addition, students in these advanced methods courses are learning how to collect and analyze eye-tracking data in order to investigate their own research questions. Students who have been trained in eye tracking also have the opportunity to use the ELT for independent research projects under the direction of the principal investigator or co-principal investigators. Typically, 35 psychology majors conduct independent research at the University of Richmond Psychology Department each year doc15825 none Mathematical Sciences (21). This project is adapting and implementing materials and approaches from the ATLAST (Augmenting the Teaching and Learning of Linear Algebra through Software Tools) project ( and ) into two first-year courses for prospective mathematics majors, including preservice K-12 mathematics teachers. The primary focus is on the incorporation of these materials into an introductory course in linear algebra, with a secondary focus on the use of specific computer-based modules and materials from ATLAST into a course, Principles of Mathematics, which serves to introduce proofs to future mathematics majors doc15826 none Chemistry (12) With the acquisition of a matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization MALDI time-of-flight (TOF) mass spectrometer, we are incorporating MS techniques into our undergraduate chemistry curriculum. Over the last 20 years the ability to analyze large involatile molecules by mass spectrometry has grown to the extent that it is now a common technique. In order to introduce the use of this research tool to our students, we are adapting, implementing, and developing disciplinary and interdisciplinary projects into the General, Organic, Biochemistry and Problems in Chemistry laboratory courses at Mercer University. We are adapting these experiments into our discovery-based pedagogy to further enhance student learning. In addition to the laboratory courses, we are using the instrument in ongoing student-faculty research projects. The incorporation of MALDI-TOF-MS into the curriculum has permitted us to analyze involatile species, including proteins and clusters. Our students are first introduced to the MS technique during their first semester of General chemistry by studying the concepts of isotopes and average molecular mass. Students then continue their study of MALDI techniques by performing individual and group experiments in Organic chemistry and Biochemistry courses. Finally, they gain a significant laboratory experience in the application of MS in the capstone Problems in Chemistry laboratory sequence. In addition, students interested in organic synthesis and biochemical research continue to use the instrumentation in a number of ongoing student-faculty research projects. Our ultimate goal is to further utilize this instrument throughout our curriculum and generate laboratory exercises that demonstrate the utility of this modern technique at the undergraduate level doc15827 none Mathematical Sciences (21). This project is developing a significant set of enhancements and extensions to the functionality of WeBWorK, an Internet-based system for generating and delivering homework problems to students, already in use at a number of colleges and universities in the country. These enhancements and extensions are streamlining and modularizing the system code and improving its functionality, speed and reliability. In addition to acting as a hub to integrate contributions and ideas from users, the project team is forming a comprehensive library of WeBWorK problems covering topics such as single and multivariable calculus, differential equations, finite mathematics, college algebra, linear algebra, statistics, and other subjects, thus expanding the current collection of calculus and differential equation problems and facilitating the sharing and selection of WeBWorK problems. The WeBWorK system and problem library are expected to be freely distributed to educational institutions doc15828 none Biological Sciences (61) This project aims to improve student understanding of physiological concepts by providing opportunities for students to record, manipulate, analyze, and synthesize physiological data in Anatomy and Physiology, Human Biology, and Neurobiology courses. The computers, software, and physiology peripherals to be acquired are allowing the inclusion of experiments in which the students generate and analyze data. Performance is being assessed by laboratory reports, oral quizzes and lecture exams. Exam and quiz results from previous classes are available for comparing achievement. Written lab reports are being used to assess student comprehension, and analytical and collaborative skills. The effort builds upon and is adapted from experience gained at a workshop sponsored by the American Physiological Society on teaching investigative laboratories in physiology doc15829 none Chemistry (12) The technique, matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization time-of-flight (MALDI-TOF) mass spectrometry has become a foundational tool in chemical and biochemical research. Using MALDI-TOF one can quickly and accurately determine masses of proteins, nucleic acids, and other polymers well in excess of 100,000 and, just as importantly, resolve and analyze complex mixtures of smaller peptides and oligonucleotides. We are introducing this powerful new technique into the undergraduate curriculum by implementing MALDI-based experiments in five laboratory courses and by incorporating MALDI in ongoing student-faculty research projects. Our goal is to have students gain experience with MALDI-TOF technique and develop an appreciation for the applicability of the technique to a wide range of problems. In the instrumental analysis course students are using the MALDI-TOF technique to identify unknown proteins through peptide mapping, they synthesize polystyrene in organic chemistry and determine its molecular mass distribution, they restriction map a multiple cloning site in molecular biology, they create a profile of cysteine residues for a protein in biochemistry, and they identify unknown bacteria in microbiology. These new experiments, adapted from the educational and scientific literature, are enhancing the laboratory experience of our students by involving them in the cutting-edge mass spectroscopic tools needed to address many challenging problems encountered in the chemical and biochemical research laboratories doc15830 none Mathematical Sciences (21) The primary goal of this project is to increase student achievement and success in developmental algebra. The project is attaining this goal by implementing reforms in the areas of pedagogy and course administration. To support the implementation of these reforms, a technology-enhanced Mathematics Learning Laboratory (MLL) is dedicated to the mathematical development of over underprepared students each year. Reform in course administration includes a competency-based approach permitting students to have multiple tries to pass electronically generated and graded examinations. Pedagogy reforms are focusing on a blend of technology-based assessment, student tutorials, and classroom instruction, that is transforming the classroom into an active learning environment where the mathematical needs of each individual student can be met.A key part of our plan draws upon the NSF funded project, An Expert System For The Efficient Assessment of Mathematical Knowledge ( NSF ), which is being used by students to assess their existing levels of mathematical knowledge. This project is also adapting and implementing themes and techniques from two previous NSF supported projects: Connected Mathematics and Interactive Mathematics Program doc15831 none Biological Sciences (61) Through implementation of investigative and collaborative learning, using pedagogy established by BioQUEST, our goal is developing critical thinkers in three populations: biology majors, and non-science majors at the University of Richmond, and high school students from the Richmond area, particularly under-represented minorities. To realize these goals, we are using microbiology as the subject with the laboratory component focused on antibiotic resistant bacteria isolated from freshwater sources. We are teaching not only what we know from science (i.e., content), but more importantly how that knowledge is acquired (the process of science) and its relevance to real-world problems. We are adapting BioQUEST s inquiry-based model for our Biology major s Microbiology course, the development of two new courses, Unseen Life (non-science students) and Microbes: Life s Small Beginnings (high school students), and a research-based course, Exploring the Basics of Biotechnology: Teaching Investigative and Deductive Experimentation (EBBTIDE), which is an investigative experience designed for high school students. The goals of these microbiology courses, regardless of the student population, differ only in regard to science literacy (e.g., understanding primary literature versus review articles). Through investigative and collaborative learning experiences, using currently available technology, we are teaching students critical thinking, how to: (1) ask questions, (2) solve problems, and (3) articulate their findings. These courses culminate in opportunities for scholarly activities for undergraduates and some high school students. By engaging students in independent investigations with connection to current events, students should leave the academic setting as life-long learners, excited about science and their environment doc15832 none The primary objective of this project is to develop adequate communication tools within mathematics courses delivered by web-based distance learning technologies. Web-environments for distance learning college courses do not provide basic communication tools for math courses. Also in face-to-face math courses, commuter students especially, need to collaborate outside of class. Assessment of distance math instructors indicates they wish to create edit math notation, conceptual diagrams and graphs directly in online postings. The goals of this project are: 1) Provide math instructors and students with direct creation editing of math notation, conceptual drawings and graphs in online postings. 2) Adapt existing web-based and face-to-face college math courses to include basic communication tools for math. 3) Provide faculty development support for re-design of distance ed. math courses. 4) Research more natural diagrammatic math communication and math learning. 5) Spread basic math distance ed. communication tools doc15833 none Chemistry (12) The laboratory curriculum for chemistry majors is being restructured with a focus on inquiry-based experiments in the areas of modern chemical research. Three major educational goals are being addressed: (1) stimulating student interest in chemistry through projects in contemporary chemical issues; (2) providing students with the opportunity to apply modern instrumentation in experimental investigations; and (3) fostering collaborative interaction among students across different courses in the laboratory sequence. A sequence of three laboratory courses is being implemented to fill the niche in the undergraduate curriculum normally occupied by second semester organic, advanced inorganic, and physical chemistry laboratories. These courses are emphasizing modern themes from contemporary chemistry research and development and include topics in nanotechnology, combinatorial chemistry, chiral technology, and biophysical chemistry. Seven topic modules were developed that emphasize these themes and seventeen experiments from the research and educational literature are now being adapted and implemented across the three courses. Thus, the courses are integrated thematically if not experimentally, and this is enhancing the interest and motivation of students as they proceed from one course to another in the sequence. Modern, high-quality instrumentation and equipment is available for use by undergraduates in these courses. Students in a prerequisite course are collaborating with students enrolled in advanced courses of the sequence. For example, students in a module focussed primarily on synthetic chemistry are providing samples to students in advanced modules for product characterization or to perform experiments of a more physical nature requiring a more extensive theoretical background. Such cross-course collaborations emulate interactions between investigators working in different sub-disciplines of chemistry doc15834 none An Anasazi Instruments FT-NMR conversion package for the current EM-390 NMR has been purchased and is providing enhanced learning opportunities for students. In Organic Chemistry, students are able to quickly and effectively characterize reaction products by H-1, C-13, and two-dimensional methods. A change in the fundamental pedagogy of this course is also being instituted based upon the adaptation and implementation of a similar program developed at Albion College. Research problems selected by the faculty are segmented into smaller research questions that are being addressed by student teams during three-to-seven week projects. Students are learning to design and carry out their own experiments in response to a research problem, are learning to evaluate resultant data and to draw their own conclusions. Upon completion of the research projects, oral presentations by each research team are critiqued by other members of the class. The FT NMR is also being used in other courses in the curriculum with experiments from both the research and educational literature being adapted and implemented doc15835 none Engineering - Mechanical (56) The project is adapting educational materials, concepts, and methodologies from successful mechatronics microcontroller courses developed at Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT) and Ohio State University (OSU). The components of these courses regarding manufacturing applications of mechatronics systems, and controls and Actuators are being adapted to the specifics of South Carolina industry. The adapted course components will be incorporated into the engineering curriculum in the form of updated and enhanced laboratory equipment procedures, advanced programming and simulation software, and state-of-the-art instruction delivery training methods. Mechatronics Microcontroller teaching laboratory is being equipped with new 16-bit microcontroller hardware, state-of-the-art microcontroller programming and simulation software, Digital Signal Processor (DSP) development kit, mobile robots hardware, and PC-based data acquisition and process control functioning units. All these result in offer state-of-the-art educational and instructional environment to the USC students. Self-teaching instructional modules are being developed around the programming and simulation software. These modules, consistent with web-based delivery, are going to greatly enhance teaching and education productivity in the area of Mechatronics Microcontrollers. These activities complement the current USC effort to introduce information technology across the campus. The University of South Carolina has formed a campus-wide task force on informatics under the leadership of the College of Library and Information Science. The self-teaching modules to be developed through this project support the campus-wide initiative and have the potential for being extended to other campuses. The project targets a special audience consisting of a large proportion of women (22%) and minorities (30 doc15836 none Interdisciplinary (99) The science departments at Sweet Briar College are making a strong commitment to enhancing the preparation of new teachers by developing a set of new science courses for the undergraduate pre-service teacher. These courses, Chemistry by Inquiry, Life Promoting and Producing Inquiry-Based Relevant Experiences (NSF award no. ), Keene State University. (3) Alfonso M. Albano, Building Bridges: Science Education Reform at Bryn Mawr College (NSF award no. ), Bryn Mawr College. Through adaptations of these programs we are creating science courses for pre-service undergraduate teachers that inspire them to create and discover. Our objectives in implementing this new curriculum are to provide the newly trained teachers with content mastery and hands-on science experiences and activities which are directly transferable to the NK-6 classroom, and to do so in an environment which encourages open-ended investigation and active learning. Students who complete these courses develop competency in science methodology, acquire a good attitude toward science and the scientific process, and learn the requisite skills (written, oral, and quantitative) to be successful teachers of science doc15837 none Interdisciplinary (99) Faculty in the Colleges of Science and Education at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) have been working collaboratively for three years to address problems of student achievement and retention in first semester courses in Chemistry, Biology, and Physics. Through this work they have recognized the need to improve the design of course, curriculum, and alignment of course components. This project is now entering a phase where further development is likely to have benefits for a number of universities in the US. We are engaged in (1) conceptualizing a Curriculum Design Model (CDM) to serve as a framework for the development of instructional modules; (2) applying this CDM to the development and trial of 5 prototype instructional modules in chemistry, biology, and physics; (3) evaluating the CDM in terms of student achievement in these 5 modules, improved student motivation, and stronger student interest in science; (4) institutionalizing a process of faculty professional development; and (5) designing, running, and evaluating undergraduate peer leader training. There are three main design features of the CDM for introductory science courses, summarized as: 1. Less is more: Faculty should cover the most important topics in greater depth, emphasize relationships between core concepts, and design instructional activities to give learners practice in representing their understanding of core concepts. 2. Scaffolding learning: Novice learners cannot be expected to direct their attention to core concepts in a discipline, rather, they require extensive guidance from faculty to deepen their thinking and understanding. Curriculum should be designed to provide a scaffold on which to promote this kind of learning. 3. Peer learning: The learning environment should allow and encourage students to engage in mutual discussion in order to construct and deepen their own conceptual understanding. The modules and this instructional practice are being field tested with Florida Atlantic University and Palm Beach Community College students. Based on the evaluation of these field tests, the Curriculum Design Model is being refined, and further development of the prototype instructional modules undertaken. Mechanisms for extensive collaborations have been established with community colleges in the area through the Region V Area Center for Educational Enhancement, which is a local office of the Florida Department of Education doc15838 none Psychology - Cognitive (73) This project is creating an interactive computer-based classroom for the teaching of core content courses in psychology. We are building on our previous success in revamping the Statistics and Research Methods courses, which now use exploratory computer exercises to encourage active, collaborative learning of fundamental concepts. In the present project, we are applying similar methods to incorporate a hands-on, research-based approach to the teaching of Developmental Psychology and Sensation and Perception. We are doing this by adapting materials developed primarily at Pennsylvania State University - Erie for use in our Developmental Psychology course. We are also adapting materials developed at the University of California - Riverside and Skidmore College to our course on Sensation and Perception. Our goals in this project are to (1) create a more interactive classroom environment in courses that in the past were often taught by lecture, (2) continue the emphasis on developing students research skills that begins in Introductory Psychology and our Statistics Research Methods sequence, and (3) guide students to focus on methodology as they critically evaluate scientific research findings. We are equipping a new computer laboratory classroom with 31 seats and software. In addition, this project includes a plan for assessing the impact of students experiences in the interactive classroom on their mastery of course content, as well as their interest in and attitudes toward science. Upon completion of this grant, we will also encourage and assist other department faculty in the development of similar materials for other core courses within the department doc15839 none Interdisciplinary (99) Chemistry (12) This project is implementing the use of atomic absorption spectrometry (AAS) in the chemistry and environmental science curricula. Recent internal and external assessments of the chemistry program as well as the recent implementation of the environmental sciences program have demonstrated a gap in curricula as a result of students not using AAS in the laboratory. AAS has been established as a fundamental technique in the quantitative determination of trace metals. In order to implement AAS into six courses of the chemistry curriculum and one course of the environmental science curriculum, a number of experiments are being adapted and modified from the educational literature. Students are using AAS in general chemistry laboratory, environmental analytical chemistry laboratory, and then the intermediate laboratory I II and advanced laboratory I II sequence. In the ES program, AAS is used in the advanced environmental science laboratory. In addition, seniors are able to use AAS in their senior research projects that are required for graduation. Students learn the theoretical basis of AAS and also have extensive hands-on experience. This ensures proper training in AAS for chemistry and environmental science majors who go on to graduate school or are employed in the private or public sector doc15840 none Psychology - Biological (71) Students in psychology and physics need inquiry-based experiences to prepare them for the increasing use of technology in graduate research and clinical work. Students at Northwest Nazarene College in Idaho have used electrophysiological recording equipment in an undergraduate laboratory that has successfully fostered hands-on student learning and faculty-student research. This project is adapting this laboratory and creating a joint-use electrophysiological recording laboratory for students in the Psychology and Physics departments at Calvin College. This laboratory is based on The Neurodata Model 15 Amplifier made by Grass Instruments -- designed for recording electroencephalograph (EEG) data and event-related potentials (ERP). We are revising and expanding the laboratory courses beyond the initial adaptation in psychophysiology to include undergraduate research in cognitive and motivational psychology. The lab is also being used to study the physical properties of physiologically generated electrical potentials. Electrophysiological recording has become an essential element in many medical, human service, and research settings. Physics and biology students are being introduced to the laboratory through the study of physics for the health sciences. Students will continue to use the laboratory in advanced research courses, and through student-faculty research projects. Our goals are to foster greater technical competency and enhance the learning of theory and applications in the classroom. Specific outcomes include revised laboratory manuals, Web-based dissemination of laboratory exercises, student research presentations, and student-faculty publications doc15841 none Chemistry (12) With the upgrade of our continuous wave NMR spectrometer to a multinuclear FT-NMR instrument, we are integrating NMR spectroscopy throughout our undergraduate curriculum. In the chemistry department, we are developing an exciting new curriculum which makes use of major laboratory instrumentation, including FT-NMR, in all of our chemistry courses. We are adapting and implementing a number of NMR experiments from the peer-reviewed chemical education literature for this purpose. For example, our new freshman curriculum include an integrated chemistry and biology course focusing on the environment. We are adapting a H-NMR study of mono-, di-, and trihalomethanes to examine the concepts of electronegativity and polarity in this course. These compounds are familiar to students through the discussion of trihalomethanes in the module on Water Purification which we have adapted from the NSF-supported ChemConnections initiative. In our Inorganic course, we are adapting a C-13 NMR experiment on the structure of fullerenes. In our more advanced courses we emphasize the integration of the various disciplines of chemistry to prevent our students from seeing each class as a separate discipline. To show this integration of knowledge we are using FT-NMR experiments throughout the curriculum in activities highlighting the relationship between the structure and properties of molecules. We are also integrating molecular modeling analysis of structure with NMR spectroscopy doc15842 none Computer Science (31) This project pioneers an innovative methodology that increases the effectiveness of formal methods courses by providing students with sophisticated tools for understanding and proving program correctness. These tools are based upon Z, the common and powerful specification language and include type checking, specification animation and proof obligations. A separate tool is used for code generation. All of the tools provide research quality support to students learning to program in a formally correct manner. Student performance is evaluated via tracking experimental and control groups through the core curriculum; the control group enrolls in similar courses but does not use the tools. We will measure and report two important factors: task completion time and error count doc15843 none Geology (42) Using the recommendations from a workshop supported jointly by NSF, AGU, and the Keck Consortium (NSF, ), Western Oregon University recently implemented a broad-based, integrated Earth systems science approach to undergraduate geoscience education that is a unique program in the state of Oregon. One of the key objectives of this state-of-the-art curriculum shift is to engage undergraduate Earth Science majors in the process of doing science (NSF, ). The primary objective of this course improvement project is to adapt and implement an active, inquiry-based approach to teaching mineralogy and petrology within the context of this new Earth systems science curriculum. This pedagogical model integrates geologic problem solving with petrographic microscopy and digital image analysis in an introductory petrology course that serves as the foundation for the study of Earth materials in the Earth Science major. Using thin sections as a geologic database, Earth Science majors become proficient in making observations, identifying scientific problems, proposing working hypotheses that can be tested using computer-based technologies, and defending their results in class-wide discussions via multi-media presentation systems and written reports. To implement this innovative pedagogical model, a petrographic microscope and digital camera are interfaced with a computer, digital image analysis software, and a set of student petrographic microscopes. In addition to the petrology course, this instrumentation is being widely utilized throughout the broad-based, undergraduate Earth systems science curriculum and is being used for outreach activities that are designed to showcase the exciting world of microscopy and digital image analysis to K-12 students and science educators doc15844 none Mathematical Sciences (21). This project is adapting and implementing a web-based homework delivery system, WQS, created at the University of Kentucky (UK) under NSF funding ( ). First, WQS is being used to deliver extensive sets of homework problems in college algebra, first term calculus, first term calculus lab, and business calculus. The materials are providing assistance for students with weak skills in certain prerequisite topics, as well as help on new course topics. Second, the project is adapting a problem-solving course developed at UK for prospective high school mathematics teachers in which students use the Maple to design web-based problems, posting them on the web via WQS. Finally, the PIs are conducting academic year and summer workshops for college faculty and current high school teachers to design web-based problems and use WQS with their own students. Assessment includes multiple student and faculty surveys and comparative studies to determine the value of WQS for students in university courses by measuring communication between faculty and students, collaboration among students, and improvements in student performance doc15845 none Engineering - Engineering Technology (58) This project is developing an interdisciplinary, team-taught block of courses to train engineering technology students in industrial-level process control equipment and associated systems integration. These courses are also instilling advanced communication skills necessary for quality performance in a technical and professional environment. Target Audience Diversity consists of students coming from five counties designated by Congress as part of Appalachia, i.e. a population under-represented among the college-going population. This population is largely comprised of first generation college students of whom about 20% are returning adult students. The project is addressing the following problems: a. Curriculum provides inadequate training on realistic industrial-level equipment due to design limitations, dated technology, and the large learning curve. b. Inadequate communication skills limit students in understanding, recording, and referencing the hierarchical concepts needed to negotiate the equipment complexities. In addressing these problems, a three-member faculty team (two engineering professors one English professor) will adapt an interdisciplinary approach implemented by three institutions (Drexel University, Texas A&M University, and Arizona State University, all members of a NSF-funded coalition) to improve engineering education. The modified approach integrates four required and one optional course in engineering technology and English into a three-semester sequence, with courses collaboratively taught. The objectives\outcomes of the project consist of: a. Training engineering technology students in industrial-level equipment and systems integration. b. Using technical writing training to improve learning on technical equipment. c. Cross-training faculty on the pedagogical models. d. Disseminating resulting course plans and laboratory design materials via professional journals, workshops\website, and conferences. e. Providing an exemplary approach for writing-intensive courses in other disciplines doc15846 none Chemistry (12) Loyola University of Chicago is integrating three laboratory experiments that are utilizing GC MS as the principal component into the undergraduate analytical laboratory curriculum. Chemistry majors in the Quantitative Analysis course are using electron capture ionization (ECI) in conjunction with GC MS to quantify a model aromatic amine, aniline, at the femtogram picogram level. Undergraduates in the newly-established Environmental Chemistry course are analyzing low levels of chlorinated phenols in water samples. Students in the Instrumental Analysis laboratory are comparing a GC MS-based method for the determination of lead to inductively-coupled plasma (ICP) mass spectrometry and other analytical methods. The experiments have been adapted and implemented from the research and educational literature and are emphasizing the development of skills associated with handling and extracting small quantities of analyte. Analytical chemistry students are becoming acquainted with the power of GC MS to detect and quantify very small (femtogram level) amounts of analyte, particularly through the use of electron capture as the ionization technique for GC MS. Once the students are familiar with the GC MS, they are applying their knowledge to the analysis of real-world samples, including water from Lake Michigan and paint chips from housing projects in the Chicago area doc15847 none Interdisciplinary (99) This project supports the acquisition of an Inductively Coupled Plasma Emission Spectrophotometer (ICP), the centerpiece for establishing a five-course sequence that integrates problem-based learning, and faculty development for implementation of the integrated courses. The course sequence tracks majors through Environmental Communication and Problem-solving, Research and Analytical Methods, Environmental Statistics, Environmental Impact Assessment, and Senior Seminar. The interdisciplinary environmental themes and a hierarchical course model are adapted from successful programs at Montclair State University (NSF- ), Middlebury College (NSF- ) Evergreen State College (NSF- ), and Governor s State College (NSF- ). The Environmental Science and Policy Program at the University of Southern Maine is strengthening its curriculum by adding a new B.S. degree to the existing B.A. degree. The B.S. degree was approved in and is being implemented during the academic year. The addition of a B.S. degree option modifies the current interdisciplinary curriculum model and requires revising and transforming two courses (Environmental Communication and Environmental Impact Assessment) and creating three new courses (Research and Analytical Methods, Environmental Statistics, and Senior Seminar) to form an integrated, cohesive course sequence. Students are first introduced to dominant environmental themes, their causes, and potential solutions while also developing a research proposal to guide their future activities. Next they gain hands-on training in data collection and generation in both the field and laboratory and are introduced to data quality objectives focusing on their selected theme. Students then use the data they generated in an environmental statistics course. Student teams next synthesize their prior studies through comprehensive impact assessment approaches. Lastly, students culminate their research through a professional presentation at either a college-wide research symposium, regional, or, if appropriate, national meeting. The collective outcomes from each course will result in a comprehensive and evaluative student research portfolio. Introducing students and faculty to a range of environmental themes across a sequenced course structure strengthens the interdisciplinary learning goals for the curriculum as a whole. In addition, the weave of a focus environmental theme across a five-course sequence engages and interests students while allowing them to build problem-solving skills, communication abilities, and analytical competence. In particular, this approach attracts and improves the science skills of a large non-traditional USM student body (predominately female, older, and part-time). Student outcomes are expected to improve understanding of environmental scientific knowledge, increase practical skills relating to communication, laboratory analysis, data collection, and research writing. This project is being implemented over a 24-month period and the curriculum modifications are being evaluated at two levels: course-specific successes and overall sequence outcomes. The results are being disseminated to science peer groups within our institution, our region, and at national meetings and WWW provides access to our results through our Program homepage doc15848 none Jeffrey Ultraviolet radiation influences the dynamics of plankton processes in the near-surface waters of most aquatic ecosystems. In particular, the Southern Ocean is affected in the austral spring period when biologically damaging ultraviolet radiation is enhanced by ozone depletion. While progress has been made in estimating the quantitative impact of ultraviolet radiation on bacteria and phytoplankton in the Southern Ocean, some important issues remain to be resolved. Little is known about responses in systems dominated by the colonial haptophyte Phaeocystis antarctica, which dominates spring blooms in a polyna that develops in the southern Ross Sea. The Ross Sea is also of interest because of the occurrence of open water at a far southerly location in the spring, well within the ozone hole, and continuous daylight, with implications for the regulation of DNA repair. A number of studies suggest that vertical mixing can significant modify the impact of ultraviolet radiation in the Southern Ocean and elsewhere. However, there are limited measurements of turbulence intensity in the surface layer and measurements have not been integrated with parallel studies of ultraviolet radiation effects on phytoplankton and bacterioplankton. To address these issues, this collaborative study will focus on vertical mixing and the impact of ultraviolet radiation in the Ross Sea. The spectral and temporal responses of phytoplankton and bacterioplankton to ultraviolet radiation will be characterized in both laboratory and solar incubations. These will lead to the definition of biological weighting functions and response models capable of predicting the depth and time distribution of ultraviolet radiation impacts on photosynthesis, bacterial incorporation and DNA damage in the surface layer. Diel sampling will measure depth-dependent profiles of DNA damage, bacterial incorporation, photosynthesis and fluorescence parameters over a 24 h cycle. Sampling will include stations with contrasting wind-driven mixing and stratification as the polyna develops. The program of vertical mixing measurements is optimized for the typical springtime Ross Sea situation in which turbulence of intermediate intensity is insufficient to mix the upper layer thoroughly in the presence of stabilizing influences like solar heating and or surface freshwater input from melting ice. Fine-scale vertical density profiles will be measured with a free-fall CTD unit and the profiles will be used to directly estimate large-eddy scales by determining Thorpe scales. Eddy scales and estimated turbulent diffusivities will be directly related to surface layer effects, and used to generate lagrangian depth-time trajectories in models of ultraviolet radiation responses in the surface mixed layer. The proposed research will be the first in-depth study of ultraviolet radiation effects in the Ross Sea and provide a valuable comparison with previous work in the Weddell-Scotia Confluence and Palmer Station regions. It will also enhance the understanding of vertical mixing processes, trophic interactions and biogeochemical cycling in the Ross Sea doc15849 none Chemistry (12) The project is addressing known and significant deficiencies in the way undergraduate students are educated in the chemical sciences by implementing a teaching and learning environment in which the boundaries between lecture and laboratory are eliminated. Building on our preliminary work, we are modifying the Studio-Laboratory concept pioneered by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and California Polytechnic State University, and elements from NSF-CCLI awards ( ; ; ; ) for our analytical and honors-level chemistry courses. This provides a teaching and learning environment which addresses our students difficulty in making higher-level connections between theory and practice, and improves the laboratory technique they exhibit in quantitative experimentation. Central to this endeavor is the change from supervision and assessment of canned experiments to an inquiry-based study of real-world problems and laboratory techniques. A number of novel technological features are being incorporated into our version of the Studio-Laboratory which is divided into stations. Each station, serving up to four students, supports two computers and data interfaces (Vernier Lab Pro) and a diode-array UV-VIS spectrometer. Each group of four stations (a cluster) shares an FT-IR spectrophotometer. The instructor serves as an expert-mentor and guide to provide an inquiry-based learning environment rich in real world content and laboratory techniques. WebCT augments the instructor by serving as the gateway to the educational media under development. On-demand video, conceptual animations, and self-paced learning assignments are being designed specifically to help our students build higher-level connections between theory and practice, particularly those who are more visual learners and those requiring additional reinforcement or support. Workshops are being offered to faculty and staff from all universities and colleges in Michigan s Upper Peninsula in order to introduce the university community to the Studio-Laboratory concept. Additional workshops will be held for high school teachers doc15850 none Physics (13) The Physics Department at Towson University is restructuring the calculus based general physics courses in order to a) provide a more effective learning environment for the students, b) provide appropriate course content in the service courses, c) increase the retention of declared physics majors in the general physics courses, and d) teach the general physics courses in such a manner so as to recruit additional students. This is accomplished by offering two sequences of calculus based general physics; one acts as a service course to other science disciplines, and the other is an Honors Physics course. The Honors Physics sequence not only has students from the Honors College enrolled, but all declared physics majors take the course. Placing the physics majors in a class with highly motivated, interested students such as from the honors college helps to increase the retention rate of the majors. Additionally, this low enrollment course is taught using adaptation of Workshop Physics techniques. This highly interactive, active learning environment has been demonstrated to be a more effective method of teaching physics than traditional lectures, and students are expected to retain their enthusiasm and interest in physics. Additionally, by separating the physics majors from the present calculus based general physics courses, the department can modify the content of the courses to suit the needs of the other science disciplines. Equipment is being used in both the Workshop Physics honors course and the regular general physic course. In the regular general physics course, the equipment allows the faculty to explore implementation of a calculus-based version of Realtime physics doc15851 none Astronomy (11) This project updates computers in two laboratory courses in astronomy and meteorology in the Department of Physics and Astronomy for use by nonscience students. About a quarter of the college s enrollment are using the computing facilities in this project. The project is adapting material from the internet to access scientific and technological databases worldwide, for example, meteorological and astronomical images. In addition, the project is using the CLEA labs for astronomy and adapting labs for use with an existing remote-controlled telescope. The project has several objectives. First, students gain valuable experience with computers. Second, students use data from the latest science and technology. Third, computer projects properly integrated into a laboratory are a good mechanism to increase the interest of non-science students doc15852 none Biological Sciences (61) In an effort to improve students understanding of genetics, their long-term retention of genetic concepts, and their ability to think, work, and analyze scientific problems independently, the genetics laboratory course at Adelphi University is being substantially modified. The revised course emphasizes open-ended project-based learning, and consists of two projects, one focusing on genetics and one on molecular biology. In the first project, an adaptation of a plant physiology lab developed by Dr. Jonathan Monroe of James Madison University, mutants of Arabidopsis are isolated and characterized genetically and physiologically. In the second project, an adaptation of a lab developed by Dr. Daphne Preuss of the University of Chicago, an Arabidopsis mutation is mapped using molecular markers. In both projects, students work in small groups on challenging problems. Under the instructor s guidance, they master technical skills, understand and pursue approaches to genetic problems, and use the scientific literature to develop their own set of experiments. These inquiry-based projects increase student intellectual involvement in the course and thereby should improve student learning. Colleagues in the Adelphi Office of Research, Assessment, and Planning are assessing the outcomes of the course improvements. Results are being disseminated to the science departments and Adelphi community through workshops, discussions, and presentations, and at a national conference doc15853 none Engineering - Mechanical (56) The project is modeled on successful existing implementations of undergraduate robotics efforts at MIT and Swarthmore, but with a specific emphasis on the freshman and sophomore experience. The investigators are purchasing equipment to develop and implement the Laboratory for Undergraduate Robotics Education (LURE), permitting them to develop new, technologically advanced laboratory space for undergraduate education. The laboratory allows them to change to a mode of teaching that provides analysis, design, and manufacturing skills in a robotics setting. The equipment requested also permits them to inject engineering content with a hands-on laboratory component into the curriculum at an early stage (freshman year). This provides some perspective and motivation to beginning students, who currently receive the impression that engineering consists only of theoretical physics and mathematics. In the evaluation study, they are investigating how the differences in background preparation and training of incoming students affect development for high-tech courses related to robotics. They are developing and disseminating robotic-related curricular materials for use both in interdisciplinary college-level education, as well as K-12 outreach programs doc15854 none Neale Ultraviolet radiation influences the dynamics of plankton processes in the near-surface waters of most aquatic ecosystems. In particular, the Southern Ocean is affected in the austral spring period when biologically damaging ultraviolet radiation is enhanced by ozone depletion. While progress has been made in estimating the quantitative impact of ultraviolet radiation on bacteria and phytoplankton in the Southern Ocean, some important issues remain to be resolved. Little is known about responses in systems dominated by the colonial haptophyte Phaeocystis antarctica, which dominates spring blooms in a polyna that develops in the southern Ross Sea. The Ross Sea is also of interest because of the occurrence of open water at a far southerly location in the spring, well within the ozone hole, and continuous daylight, with implications for the regulation of DNA repair. A number of studies suggest that vertical mixing can significant modify the impact of ultraviolet radiation in the Southern Ocean and elsewhere. However, there are limited measurements of turbulence intensity in the surface layer and measurements have not been integrated with parallel studies of ultraviolet radiation effects on phytoplankton and bacterioplankton. To address these issues, this collaborative study will focus on vertical mixing and the impact of ultraviolet radiation in the Ross Sea. The spectral and temporal responses of phytoplankton and bacterioplankton to ultraviolet radiation will be characterized in both laboratory and solar incubations. These will lead to the definition of biological weighting functions and response models capable of predicting the depth and time distribution of ultraviolet radiation impacts on photosynthesis, bacterial incorporation and DNA damage in the surface layer. Diel sampling will measure depth-dependent profiles of DNA damage, bacterial incorporation, photosynthesis and fluorescence parameters over a 24 h cycle. Sampling will include stations with contrasting wind-driven mixing and stratification as the polyna develops. The program of vertical mixing measurements is optimized for the typical springtime Ross Sea situation in which turbulence of intermediate intensity is insufficient to mix the upper layer thoroughly in the presence of stabilizing influences like solar heating and or surface freshwater input from melting ice. Fine-scale vertical density profiles will be measured with a free-fall CTD unit and the profiles will be used to directly estimate large-eddy scales by determining Thorpe scales. Eddy scales and estimated turbulent diffusivities will be directly related to surface layer effects, and used to generate lagrangian depth-time trajectories in models of ultraviolet radiation responses in the surface mixed layer. The proposed research will be the first in-depth study of ultraviolet radiation effects in the Ross Sea and provide a valuable comparison with previous work in the Weddell-Scotia Confluence and Palmer Station regions. It will also enhance the understanding of vertical mixing processes, trophic interactions and biogeochemical cycling in the Ross Sea doc15855 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This project develops textual materials and related software for a diffraction course suitable for junior-senior level students from mathematics, physics, chemistry, materials science, and electrical engineering. The material was class tested at SIUC and a number of other colleges and universities. After introducing a bit of bivariate Fourier analysis (including Fourier transforms of the Fresnel kernel and of the comb, curry, and grid functions which generalize the univariate sampling function) the course presents the elements of Fourier optics (Fresnel diffraction, image formation, resolution, optical Fourier transforms, fractional Fourier transforms, etc.) and an analysis of the far field diffraction patterns associated with bivariate crystals , i.e., doubly periodic functions on RXR . Software allows students to create PostScript files for greytone images that are printed on 35mm slides using a high-resolution film recorder. Passing a laser beam through these slides produces the corresponding diffraction patterns. Images from a digital camera, scanner, and the above mentioned PostScript files are processed on a PC to illustrate various phenomena studied during the course. The resulting synthesis of mathematics (Fourier analysis, operator theory, wallpaper groups, etc.), experimentation (done in a darkened mathematics classroom with an inexpensive laser), and simulation (using a fast PC and the FFT) provides a stimulating introduction to modern applied mathematics as well as deep insights into optics, X-ray crystallography, and digital image processing doc15856 none Physics (13) The main project goal is to deliver more effective introductory science instruction to University of Central Florida s growing, diverse student population. It is well known that the majority of introductory physics students learn significantly more from carefully constructed activities than from traditional lectures. The Student-Centered Activities for Large Enrollment University Programs (SCALE-UP) project developed at North Carolina State University offers UCF a way to teach large studio classes where the emphasis is on learning by inquiry instead of learning by listening. The SCALE-UP approach is a complete revision of the standard lecture laboratory. The students work in groups of 3-4 with computers and lab equipment for 4-6 hours each week in a large technology-rich laboratory designed to promote collaborative learning. Evaluations of NC State classes show that this approach is well matched to UCF s objectives of improving students conceptual understanding, problem solving ability, and overall experience with introductory science classes. This project is developing curriculum materials and purchasing equipment for SCALE-UP physics and chemistry courses in an 80-student studio classroom. In addition to adopting activities developed at NC State, the UCF physics and chemistry education research groups are also developing new activities and instructor materials, particularly in chemistry where work is just starting. Curriculum development and evaluation are conducted in close collaboration with the SCALE-UP developers. This project should demonstrate that other schools can successfully adopt the SCALU-UP approach, which may lead to widespread changes in undergraduate math and science classes across the country doc15857 none Engineering - Other (59) We have developed a number of real-time experiments as an approach to improving student understanding of the graphical representation of a variety of concepts. The project builds on successes by Physics educators (primarily with motion sensors) in combining the use of technology and hands-on engineering experiments to achieve visual analysis of phenomena in real-time in the classroom. Our approach has expanded greatly by using a wide variety of inexpensive sensors that are easily interfaced with PCs. This enables our students to measure many different physical phenomena. We have developed a series of modules in one-page, and use a 20-minute activity format. We hope this format more readily enable faculty to incorporation our modules into their curriculum. Our best modules are being distributed and marketed with the assistance of the manufacturer of the sensors. Our modules have been designed to be appropriate for high school students. It has been our goal to implement our modules across multiple classes. The modules and the format we have created holds promise for students to make connections between courses and thus support curriculum integration. Students are encouraged to learn more effectively and both students and instructors are expected to enjoy the learning process. A multiple-intervention assessment protocol will be used to determine the comparative benefit to learning effectiveness of the following interventions: (1) presentation of concepts with time for reflection, (2) reflection guided by instructor demonstrations using the sensors, and (3) guided, active experimentation with the sensors. A pre-test post-test design will be used to account for the effect of differences in the initial preparation of the different study populations doc15858 none Chemistry (12) Despite increased emphasis on environmental chemistry across the curriculum at Georgia Southern University, non-major students and chemistry majors are not receiving meaningful, real world analysis experience in this vital area. This project seeks to remedy this situation by providing portable field instrumentation appropriate for use by lower level and senior students alike, as well as modern technology for the analysis of regionally relevant environmental pollutants. The project adapts initiatives undertaken at Western Carolina University ( ), Roanoke College ( ) and Emory and Henry College ( ). By allowing students access to these changes in the curriculum, we: 1. Expose them to modern methods of environmental analysis, 2. Allow for on-site testing, with all its inherent challenges, and 3. Stimulate student interest through examination of local issues problems and development of critical thinking skills as they analyze the ramifications on their own lives. Students gain a solid understanding of environmental testing techniques, awareness of the importance of environmental stewardship, and enhanced data analysis and report preparation skills as they undertake studies on total ecosystem quality. This is accomplished through intensive field studies, coupled with advanced laboratory experiences for upper level students. Georgia Southern educates significant numbers of minority and female students, and a new core requirement in environmental science ensures inclusion of students of virtually all major degree programs. The Chemistry Department has established collaborations with area water treatment plants, wildlife rehabilitation centers, sanitary landfill operators, and agricultural extension agents, thus providing a variety of appropriate field locations for student investigations. The newly-acquired equipment reflects modern technology and thus provides students with current practical experience doc15859 none Biological Sciences (61) A growing body of literature amply documents the low levels of scientific literacy among the American public. To address this issue we are providing a framework in which large numbers of undergraduates can achieve basic scientific literacy. We are accomplishing this goal through development of a general biology laboratory course for approximately students per year including non-science majors, under-represented minorities and future K-16 teachers. This course is adapting materials from Oklahoma State University, New York University, Sweetbriar College, Wellesley College, and Project Kaleidoscope The new biology course utilizes project-based learning and critical thinking skill development to introduce and allow discussion of relevant scientific concepts. Expected project outcomes include: graduates able to engage in scientifically aware behavior and informed citizenship, improved scientific knowledge, and an appreciation of the connections between science and real-world problems. The project is yielding innovative hands-on, minds-on laboratory activities suitable for large numbers of students that are available for adaptation by other institutions through a published laboratory manual. Dissemination is being accomplished through a project web site, presentations at national meetings, faculty development workshops, publication of laboratory materials and professional articles. This model is one that can be easily adapted by other institutions and, therefore has excellent potential for other universities who teach large numbers of students doc15860 none Biological Sciences (61) This project is supporting an advanced Laboratory Course in Developmental Genetics. The course provides a cooperative, research-based learning experience that complements upper level lecture courses in genetics, cell biology and developmental biology. The critical reasoning and problem-solving strategies that student are exposed to in this laboratory course are expected to have a broad impact on their overall intellectual development. This laboratory course uses Drosophila and Xenopus, two important model systems for current research, to explore a number of fundamental principles in developmental biology and genetics. Research grade microscopes are used to enhance the students ability to obtain hands-on experience with embryological experimentation in these two biological systems. Digital-imaging equipment is being used for both the purpose of demonstration and for student collection and analysis of experimental results. This laboratory course is adapting exercises in vertebrate experimental embryology from Harvard University (MCB116) and from an EMBO Practical Course in Drosophila Embryology. An important feature of the course is an inquiry-based approach that strongly encourages cooperative learning by the students. This laboratory course is an innovative addition to the curriculum and is helping to formalize a new paradigm for integrating research and education at Stony Brook doc15861 none Geography (88) This project supports NSF s goal of integrating technology into education. It enhances and revitalizes the undergraduate GIS curricula at University of Wisconsin Oshkosh (UW Oshkosh) by adapting and implementing high-quality educational materials and effective educational practices in geographic information science, including the GIS core curriculum developed by the NSF supported National Center of Geographic Information and Analysis, and the remote sensing core curriculum being developed by the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. This project is engaged in a major curriculum renovation that will integrate GIS, remote sensing and Global Positioning System technologies into undergraduate education and research. In particular, this proposal demonstrates two major changes in the development of the new GIS curricula. First, three current geographic technique courses are being enhanced and two new technique courses developed to provide students with laboratory-based learning and additional opportunities to enhance their critical thinking abilities. Students now have the opportunity to learn cutting-edge technologies in geography. Second, a new GIS Laboratory is being assembled using high-end personal computers in a network environment for use in the new technique courses. This lab is also enhancing opportunities for student-faculty collaborative research. The University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh is a comprehensive, suburban, commuter campus. These improvements in teaching geographic information science may serve as a model for many similar institutions doc15862 none Geography (88) Increasing use of global positioning system (GPS) technology within agriculture, transportation, natural resource management, and other fields highlights the importance of understanding GPS principles as well as basic geographic concepts tied to location, direction, scale, and distance. This project is developing instructional modules that address theory, operation, and applications of GPS technology and its integration with other spatial technologies. Four modules are being designed for adaptation within undergraduate geography (or related) courses that emphasize basic navigation positioning, spatial data capture, data management integration, or the analysis of geographic information. These modules contain three parts: 1) a web-based pre-lab exercise to be completed in advance of a class meeting, 2) presentation materials that can be used by instructors (topic outlines, photographs, diagrams, animations), and 3) hands-on exercises emphasizing field data capture and spatial data integration. These modules are undergoing a three tier evaluation. First, they are being critically examined by a curricula review team. Second, they are being tested within selected Oklahoma State University courses. Finally, they are being tested by faculty collaborators at six other campus sites. Nationwide dissemination of materials is being undertaken through the GPS Tools for Geographers web page. An important project goal is to update and revise project materials indefinitely and to attract a following that encourages contributions of new modules by faculty at other institutions doc15863 none Engineering - Mechanical (56) The project adapts work on thermal systems laboratories at University of Virginia, US Naval Academy, and Union College to establish an undergraduate laboratory in thermal engineering technology for three undergraduate thermal science courses. The project provides students with hands-on experiences of abstract concepts discussed in lecture and allows exceptional undergraduate students the opportunity to learn about the subject material in more depth by co-designing and constructing an experimental apparatus. Furthermore, it supports collaboration between faculty to enhance the learning experience of undergraduate students and provides potential future teachers experience in the design of educational materials. Finally, it develops a model that can be used in the development of other laboratory experiments in the institution s mechanical engineering curriculum. Experimental stations are being constructed and tested by undergraduate students who have recently completed the courses into which the experiments are being implemented. The project addresses the DUE themes of teacher preparation, faculty development, and integration of technology in education. The evaluation program, under the direction of a collaborator from the Center for Mathematics and Science Education Research, includes student interviews and surveys, classroom observation, and follow-up studies with faculty members teaching in subsequent courses. The investigators plan to disseminate the organization and evaluation of the project, along with two lab manuals, through conference presentations, journal articles, and web site postings doc15864 none Physics (13) This project is restructuring the modern physics laboratory course at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne to provide students with experience with in-depth investigations. Six tracks of four experiments each are being developed. These tracks are (1) Lasers and Spectroscopy I, (2) Interferometry and Fourier Analysis, (3) Lasers and Spectroscopy II, (4) Magnetic Resonance, (5) Nuclear Spectroscopy, and (6) Molecular Spectroscopy. The experiments within a track use the same, or similar, equipment and concepts throughout. This allows students to become sufficiently familiar with the concepts and equipment so that they can be given more responsibility and freedom as they proceed through the track to design the investigation, collect appropriate data, and analyze the data. The project is adapting and implementing four major elements. (1) It is adapting procedures for fostering independence in experimental design and analysis learned from a Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) project conducted by co-PIs Masters and Maloney (Award No. , Improving Conceptual Understanding and Complex Problem Solving in General Physics ). (2) From professional practice, the project is adapting the practice of having students present poster sessions to classmates and faculty. (3) Also from professional practice, the project is implementing LabView software to introduce students to a standard of the industrial workplace. (4) The project is adapting much of the software from the Visual Quantum Mechanics project (Award No. ) as an independent study resource for students doc15865 none Engineering - Other (59) One of the greatest challenges facing engineering education is to provide realistic and engaging learning experiences for undergraduates that properly reflect the concerns and needs of industry. Technology in the areas of product design and manufacturing is increasing at a rapid pace and education must keep up to produce engineers capable of contributing effectively to cost-driven projects with significantly reduced cycle times. This project adapts the integrated use of modern rapid prototyping and CNC machining equipment into the curricula of three engineering departments: mechanical, aerospace, and civil. Both technologies are being used in the design sequence of mechanical engineering, similar to their use at Purdue University and MIT. Students are able to quickly fabricate design concepts and working models, reinforcing the design sequence taught in class. Aerospace engineering students are using the equipment during a course sequence to design, build, and test student created aircraft. Where current methods of production are slow and out-dated, the proposed equipment provides individual learning experiences similar to those found in industry. Civil engineering students are using the equipment for stress analysis and enhanced visualization in the classroom. This project is providing a hands-on learning environment for students, and enabling the implementation of modern engineering practices in design and manufacturing to produce future leaders in industry. Assessment involves industrial advisory panels. Educational resources, quality assessment data and machine capabilities are being shared with local and national educators doc15866 none Engineering - Other (59) In Fall , the Department of Technology at SWTSU was authorized to begin the first engineering program on campus, a curriculum leading to a B. S. in Manufacturing Engineering. Present courses in digital electronics, controls, and semiconductor manufacturing are suitable for a technology curriculum but need substantial upgrading and enhancement to support the new engineering program. The objective of this proposal is to provide hardware and software to implement a number of new educational initiatives in several courses which are going to support this new program. These initiatives are adapting ideas from institutions such as Texas A&M and Virginia Polytechnic Institute (VPI) to develop a curriculum suited to SWTSU environment, which draws heavily from rural, minority and female population pools in Central Texas. The courses targeted for improvement are in Digital Electronics, Control Systems and Instrumentation, and Microelectronics Manufacturing (a two-semester sequence). The strengths of the hands-on teaching approach that is common in technology programs is being applied to develop laboratory-intensive course modules suitable for modern manufacturing engineers. Such a hands-on applications approach to engineering education is intended to cater to the learning styles of all students. The experience gained through faculty development and implementation of these changes helps to establish the manufacturing engineering program on a firm foundation, adding to the pool of skilled engineering personnel which are badly needed in this region doc15867 none Biological Sciences (61) The goal of this project is to make the physiology student laboratories at Truman State University more investigative. The main obstacle in transforming our laboratories from traditional formulative exercises into student-driven investigations lies in our data handling capabilities. The stand-alone instruments we had been using require manual adjustments for which no record is generated, which made it difficult to compare data from different instruments or work sessions. In addition, the data records consisted of extensive collections of strip charts. There was no efficient method for sharing these records within a work group. Worse yet, this form of record did not facilitate in-depth analysis, comparisons, and contrasts; quantitative evaluations could only be made after painstaking hands-on measurement of each bit of pertinent record. This project is upgrading the technology of our physiology labs with the aim of improving our data collection and interpretation capabilities by providing instruments which allow computerized data acquisition and analysis. It is an adaptation of models introduced by the University of Central Florida, Harvey Mudd College, California State University at Hayward, and Cornell University, with NSF support. The expected outcomes of this project are: 1) students able to design and carry out procedures which allow them to answer specific physiological questions; 2) the ability to highlight the relationships between procedures, data, and the interpretation of data so that students have a better understanding of how real science works; and 3) giving the students an opportunity to compare and contrast results from related procedures and draw conclusions therefrom doc15868 none Biological Sciences (61) Introductory Biology laboratories work best when students actively engage in genuine scientific inquiry. We are following the precedent set by Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL) and transforming the CLU s Introductory Biology lab course to one that emphasizes the major processes of science: the formation and testing of hypotheses, observation, interpretation, experimentation, analysis, and communication (both oral and written). We are purchasing four functional groups of equipment to develop a new course, Introduction to Biological Experimentation (IBE). IBE offers lab exercises that support an inquiry-based approach. Emphasis on investigative biology at the introductory level better prepares our science students for upper division courses and research experiences, and enhances their prospects for success in graduate programs, the health professions, and jobs in research, clinical, and business settings. Students enrolled in CLU s Science Educators program (conducted with CLU s School of Education) are receiving better training in the methods of science as a result of our new IBE course. This project is contributing to the important national goal of training more capable K-12 science educators. The equipment of this project is also expanding the types of experiments that young minority students enrolled in our science Upward Bound summer program (High School minority students) can conduct. We are evaluating the new labs and disseminating successful experiments through print and electronic media doc15869 none Computer Science (31) The main goal of this project is to improve the quality of the software design and development education for undergraduate students in Syracuse University, with contributions to the understanding of the educational process that will have similar benefits to other educational institutions in the country. This is accomplished by adapting and integrating the results of the NSF Educational Innovations project at the University of Alabama on integrating component-based software development into the computing curriculum (NSF ). The major adaptation efforts focuses on introducing component-based software development into the courses on software engineering, rather than requiring separate courses doc15870 none Physics (13) In order to better attract and retain students, the physics department is beginning a new research and teaching emphasis in optics. About half of a new 4-credit-hour research preparation course is devoted to optics. For the research preparation course, the project is adapting and implementing optics experiments that were developed at Boston University and New Jersey Institute of Technology with funding from NSF. Experiments are chosen to both to prepare students to carry out independent research projects in holographic interferometry and to give them exposure to the rapidly developing field of fiber optics. The project is supporting laser beam characterizing equipment, modal analysis, a fiber optics kit, optical table, and hardware. The project is adapting the experiments to the smaller institutional size and to focus on holography. In the first implementation of the course, students choose one of these experiments as a special project. Using the existing materials and the new equipment, they set it up and demonstrate it to their classmates. Their work is then the basis for use by future students doc15871 none Biological Sciences (61) Research is an essential part of the Knox College biology curriculum, with inquiry-based exercises the norm. Developmental biology represents the junction of many different disciplines: anatomy and physiology (plant and animal), molecular biology, evolution and ethics. It is a dynamic, active area of research. This project establishes a research based advanced laboratory course in developmental biology at Knox, by adopting the curriculum and laboratory modules developed for undergraduates at Duke University and Macalester College ( ). The end result is an active, student-driven learning experience. Students investigate major questions in developmental biology, including determination of cell fate, embryo patterning, gene regulation and the processes of forming specialized organs and tissues using classical embryology along with molecular techniques. The course is divided into two sections, classical embryology and developmental genetics, each with several different units. Students examine vertebrate (chick, Xenopus), invertebrate (sea urchin, Drosophila) and plant (Arabidopsis) model systems using techniques including micromanipulation, microinjection, in situ hybridization, immunofluorescence, analysis of transgenic organisms, and fate mapping. Students design and perform experiments. The research grade microscopes and video imaging systems give students the power to collect, store, and retrieve data with ease, allowing them to easily compare different stages of development, as well as the effects of perturbations. By allowing the students the opportunity to master sophisticated techniques, we advance the level of research in the course. These skills, as well as the research grade microscopes, provide students an excellent starting point for independent undergraduate research doc15872 none Engineering - Electrical (55) The project is adapting and implementing a pair of laboratory courses to teach the microfabrication techniques required to create microdevices. Materials and instrumentation for microfabrication techniques are being procured and constructed in a laboratory, and process sequences are being adapted from similar programs and implemented in the laboratory. Using these facilities and techniques, students are making transistors and simple MEMS devices. Assessment involves student course evaluations and peer review where faculty, industrial and government representatives interested in microfabrication examine the course content, student work, and student course evaluations. Dissemination plans include reporting results in journal and conference publications and on a web site and developing an Internet-based course on microfarication doc15873 none Chemistry (12) The chemistry department is enhancing student experiences in physical chemistry by shifting the laboratory experience towards a more research-rich project environment. Students are undertaking projects that make use of a laser light scatter instrument, a laser Raman spectrometer, additional and computers and software. Expanded projects in quantum chemistry and molecular modeling are creating a more comprehensive link between experimental data and theoretical constructions. Experiments are being adapted primarily from the research literature. Many of these experiments allow students to work with macromolecules. The new studies assist students in creating a deeper understanding of the correlation between structure and function, enhance their skills in experimental design and create a more research-like approach to their laboratory studies. This approach is expected to make physical chemistry students more aware of the process chemists utilize in exploring the chemical world, create greater interest in the course, and provide a stimulus for the students to pursue undergraduate research with a physical chemist doc15874 none Engineering - Civil (54) Retention of first year engineering students is approximately 75% in the US. One reason for the low retention rate may be the ineffectiveness of the introductory engineering course. A poorly designed introductory course does not engage the students and does not motivate them to persevere through their heavy load of mathematics and science courses. The project is creating an introductory civil and environmental engineering course that adapts the Sooner City program. Sooner City is a virtual city that allows students to design a variety of infrastructure needs such as roadways, building structures, foundations, earthen dams, etc. Sooner City program had been developed to be used in a design across the curriculum environment, and thus adaptation of the concept to a single introductory course appears to be promising for retention. The project consists of: 1. Creating a portable first year Introduction to Civil and Environmental Engineering, (ICEE) course based on the Sooner City program. 2. Assessing the success of the ICEE course at meeting the following global objectives: a. Stimulating interest in engineering among freshmen; b. Providing freshmen with an understanding of the breadth of the civil and environmental engineering profession; c. Positively impacting retention of freshman civil and environmental engineering students. d. Widespread adoption at other universities as a result of its portability, modularity, and cost-effectiveness. 3. Providing course materials on a web site to facilitate implementation of the course at other universities. 4. Beta testing the ICEE course at other universities doc15875 none Chemistry (12) Supercritical fluid (SCF) technology is being introduced into the undergraduate curriculum to complement many traditional topics already discussed and to enhance chemical education to prepare students for a variety of work environments. This environmentally-friendly medium is often mentioned only briefly in current undergraduate curricula, usually without any hands-on laboratory experience, even though the diversity of applications involving SCFs continue to mount in virtually every sector of the scientific workplace. A SCF system is being introduced into five different undergraduate chemistry laboratory courses - two analytical, one inorganic, one physical, and one materials courses. Experiments are being adapted primarily from the research literature and implemented into these courses. Analytical experiments are utilizing the system for extraction of analytes from difficult matrices using environmentally-friendly solvents. Inorganic experiments are exploiting the properties of SCFs to isolate novel complexes possessing labile ligands, and other compounds that are traditionally difficult to synthesize purify. Physical experiments are examining solubility and phase behavior of various co-solvents SCF mixtures. In addition, thermodynamic and kinetic parameters for a variety of reactions are monitored around the critical point to determine the effects of such media. Semi-empirical and DFT calculations are being carried out to predict speciation within a SCF medium and to compare experimental results. Materials experiments are invoking this technology for polymerization, crystallization, nanoparticle deposition, and thin-film growth applications doc15876 none Chemistry (12) The chemistry laboratory curriculum is being transformed and revitalized by the introduction of context-based experiments that emphasize critical thinking and that challenge students with real-world problems. Students are also being provided with service learning opportunities. From these activities, the students are understanding the role of chemistry in our society, particularly toward solving environmental issues, the capabilities and limitations of modern instrumentation and technology, and building connections with their community. These laboratory experiences are being adapted from the educational and research literature and are being implemented in part through the use of a Gas Chromatograph-Mass Spectrometer (GC-MS) and a Fourier Transform Infrared (FT-IR) spectrophotometer. Teams of students from lower and upper division laboratory courses including Environmental, Analytical, Instrumental, and Organic Chemistry and Physical Science for pre-service teachers are investigating environmental issues related to protecting and sustaining natural resources on a nearby Native American Reservation. As a consequence of the inquiry-based laboratories and their service-learning component, students are focussing on the scientific process and the significance of results, rather than following cookbook-type experiments doc15877 none Biological Sciences (61) The Transformation Program of the Department of Biology, Chemistry and Enviromnental Science is impacting the entire four-year biology curriculum at Christopher Newport University (CNU). Research-based experimental systems (RBES) developed by Research Link are forming the backbone of this transformation, providing fast-growing plants and biologically informative animals with which the concepts learned in lecture can be explored in an engaging, investigative, open-ended format. The sea anemone and Wisconsin Fast Plant RBES are the initial systems that will be introduced. Additional RBES are being investigated and incorporated as an ongoing aspect of the project. The transformation begins with the general biology lab course that is taken by over 700 majors and nonmajors each year, engaging students in the process of science from their first semester. It moves in steps through each level in the biology curriculum until courses in all four undergraduate years are changed and independent research opportunities are varied and readily pursued. Simultaneous with the transformation of the curriculum is the training of doctoral candidates who aspire to university careers. These candidates, six selected from regional doctoral programs each year and awarded Bartholomew Gosnold Instructorships, are being mentored in the use of RBES and guided in becoming exciting and productive college faculty. The lessons of Transformation are being extended to regional college biology faculty and to local middle and high school biology teachers in a series of intensive workshops doc15878 none Chemistry (12) The Department of Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Science is instituting curricular changes over a 3-year period that will enhance student learning of local environmental issues through the integration of Ion Chromatography (IC) into the undergraduate curriculum. The project is impacting more than 400 students per year and is being used in General Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, Ecology, Instrumental Analysis, Environmental Chemistry, and Undergraduate Research within the Department. The goals of this project are to: 1) enhance student learning about the local environment through field experiences and laboratory exercises using IC; 2) increase student understanding of instrumentation selection and sensitivity; and 3) allow students to gain experience using currently important instrumentation. The curricular modifications are modeled after successful experiences with IC at Calvin College and Western Carolina University. Particular experiments are being adapted from the educational and research literature and standard EPA protocols and are being implemented to fit our curricular requirements doc15879 none Geography (88) Field experience is vital for the development of qualified and effective practitioners in all aspects of geography. Unfortunately, the availability and easy access to secondary data over the past two decades has resulted in the de-emphasis of fieldwork, which now threatens to produce a generation of geographers inadequately prepared to apply and teach field methods. This project is working to correct this deficiency through the development of a field laboratory dedicated to student-led, inquiry-driven instruction. Our premise is that students learn best by doing. Our goal is to provide students the opportunity to acquire hands-on experience in an intellectually exciting environment wherein problems are investigated that they themselves have formulated. This approach is a modification of the guided-inquiry, learning-by -doing approaches created and described by Barbara Tewksbury (see B. Tewksbury, editor, Innovative and Effective Teaching in the Geosciences, National Association of Geoscience Teachers, ), developed and implemented with success at Hamilton College (Geology) and Dickinson College (Geology, Geophysics), and elsewhere in Europe (see M. Kent et al, Fieldwork in Geography Teaching: A Critical Review of the Literature and Approaches, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, Vol. 21, No. 3, , pages 313-332). To facilitate experiential learning, we are working in a 14,200 acre field site belonging to the University of Oklahoma. Field activities throughout the geography curriculum are being planned for this field station. Students first become acquainted with the field lab in lower division courses, when they are introduced to fundamental field techniques and instruments. Upper division courses are building on these experiences, and we are implementing a course of guided autonomous investigation. Small teams of students are working with faculty and representatives from state and federal agencies. The role of faculty is to stimulate, encourage, and guide students through the research process and advise them on the merits and the suitability of chosen field methods. Scientists from state and federal agencies are being used to provide unique insights from practical local perspectives. The students are collecting original data, performing appropriate analyses, and reporting their results in departmental colloquia. Outstanding students are provided with support to present their results at national meetings and they are encouraged to publish in appropriate journals. By experiencing the complete spectrum of problem formulation, experimental design, data analysis, report writing and dissemination of results, students are developing skills in problem-solving, critical thinking, and research collaboration. All project activities are being placed on a web site created for the purpose and are freely accessible to everyone doc15880 none Through integration of advanced gas chromatography with mass spectrometry (GC-MS) detection across the chemistry curriculum and into the biology and geoscience curriculum, student understanding of complex environmental issues is being expanded. A spiraled approach starting in General Chemistry and continuing with guided-inquiry, project-based laboratory experiences throughout the curriculum is developing student expertise using this powerful hyphenated technology toward solving important issues. The topics and the experiments are being adapted and implemented from the chemical and research literature and include multiple uses for the GC-MS. The GC-MS is also being used across discipline lines (ecology and geoscience) to strengthen existing collaborations and to encourage additional ones and to illustrate the interdisciplinary nature of scientific inquiry doc15881 none Engineering - Other (59) Two introductory courses-- Introduction to Environmental Resources Engineering and Science and Introduction to Design-are being revitalized to better prepare students to solve the difficult interdisciplinary problems of the 21st century. These courses are being redesigned to provide integrated, interdisciplinary approaches to solving environmental problems, including: (1) interdisciplinary presentation of environmental and human systems via hands-on team projects, field and lab experiences, (2) clear presentation of course requirements and careers available to environmental scientists and resource engineers, and 3) development of computational, technical communication and teamwork skills through projects, field and lab experiments. These courses are going to give students the knowledge, skills and attitudes they need to be successful in their majors. The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute s studio teaching and Just-In-Time Teaching (JiTT) approaches are being adapted. Project approach consists of modifying existing curricula to incorporate the Studio Teaching and Just-In-Time Teaching (JiTT) approaches, and PROMISE Project materials. WebCT software and the new ERE Design Studio are being used to integrate technology into the curriculum. The project addresses NSF themes of diversity and integration of technology in the curriculum. The two PIs are women in a field where women are under-represented; the PROMISE curriculum is more inclusive of under-represented groups in SMET areas. Both JiTT and Studio Teaching require the integration of technology in the classroom. Project dissemination plan consist of making WebCT course modules containing engineering curricula available through course web pages, making presentations at national meetings, conducting on- and off-campus faculty development workshops, and journal publications doc15882 none Computer Engineering (32) We are adapting testing quidelines and techniques from a variety of federal and industrial sources and implementing a course in testing embedded systems and software. We are working with partners from DoD, NASA, and industry to focus on those techniques commonly used in industrial environments. Students learn both the theoretical and practical aspects of testing embedded systems through case studies obtained from these partners and laboratory experiments doc15883 none Biological Sciences (61) Paul Smith s College (PSC), located in the Adirondack Park of New York State, offers students the opportunity to pursue a baccalaureate degree in Natural Resources. We are actively re-evaluating our course curricula to provide students with a set of science experiences and research challenges that build upon one another across a course sequence. This project will develop a series of hierarchical research and modeling activities that effectively scaffold the process of scientific inquiry across the sequence of courses leading to a degree. Data collected by classes throughout this process will be added to a data repository and will be accessible to future Paul Smith s College students. These data will also be available to other interested members of the Adirondack community. Several activities designed for introductory courses will improve question development, and hypothesis testing skills. Activities designed for second and third year courses will introduce simulation models that allow students to expand their research ideas across larger spatial and longer temporal scales. Finally, in the third phase, students will work with STELLA, and other computer models to build and parameterize simple ecological models, explore model assumptions, and conduct sensitivity analyses. In all phases, oral and written presentation skills and collaboration will be emphasized. At the onset of the project, PSC faculty will be involved in a two-day workshop to field-test activities, discuss project implementation with science education experts, and work with new computer programs doc15884 none Earth Systems Science (40) In this project we are adapting problem-based learning (PBL) and other inquiry-based approaches to a new integrated geoscience course for K-8 pre-service (preK-8) teachers. The motivation for this effort is to address the problem where our preK-8 pre-service teachers were taking a course that did not meet the content and pedagogy standards and that was not designed for them. With this new integrated geoscience course, we are trying to improve the students attitudes toward science, understanding of science, ability to do science, understanding of science concepts, and ability to use instructional technology to learn about science. We also aim to increase the number of preK-8 teachers who choose to emphasize science, increase the diversity of science K-8 teachers, and provide university faculty and graduate student development to ensure high quality instruction. To accomplish these goals, we are creating an earth system science course that meets state and national educational standards for earth space science content, science pedagogy, assessment and evaluation, and effective use of instructional technologies. The course is being designed around topical units that integrate multiple disciplines, that lend themselves to inquiry-based teaching and learning strategies, and that are socially relevant and interesting to students. The PBL approach is a student-centered approach that uses concrete, real-world problems to enhance student learning. In the course students investigate carefully framed geoscience problems via online explorations and visualizations of real-world data, small-group collaborations, and hands-on experiments. We are working with an elementary science educator to design effective assessment and evaluation methods doc15885 none Biological Sciences (61) Future teachers are expected to understand how past and current research fits together into a structure of knowledge, at the same time as they learn how to model scientific inquiry. This project bridges science research and teaching practice with Video and Image Data Access (VIDA), a collection of digital science images for prospective K-6 teachers. The VIDA database of annotated science research images builds upon knowledge from CIELO, a database for art history courses at California State University, to create a science image project that is partnering with BioSci Education Network (BEN). Project objectives are to (1) identify content areas where images can best support learning by prospective K-6 teachers, (2) build a database of digital images from research that can be shared and analyzed in an inquiry approach, (3) catalogue the images into a meaningful hierarchy with text annotations to make them searchable, (4) assist prospective K-6 teachers to achieve subject matter information competence in science, (5) provide a prototype database that can be adapted by other institutions to link prospective teachers with the science research community through the use of images from modern research. The VIDA images serve as a starting point to develop questioning strategies about systems, scale, constancy, and change. VIDA gives prospective teachers a role in contributing annotated images using a controlled science vocabulary by providing a clearly defined database structure and a cataloging manual written for K-6 teachers. VIDA helps K-6 teachers understand how a database can be used for inquiry, while making it possible to share the excitement of current research and complement hands-on inquiry through the use of images doc15886 none Biological Sciences (61) Inquiry-based laboratories are an important means of providing students with the opportunity to learn through a process of exploration and discovery. Inclusion of inquiry-based laboratories is a critical feature of the curricular reform currently underway in the Department of Biological Science, California State University, Fullerton. This project involves the development and support of multiple inquiry-based laboratory modules integrated throughout a new four-semester series of foundational courses in the biology major. Eight modules are being developed using model organism systems drawn from the Research Link Institute. The courses served by these modules include: Biodiversity & Evolution, Cellular Basis of Life, Genetics & Molecular Biology, and Principles of Physiology & Ecology. Modules, using Aiptasia palladia (sea anemone) and Wisconsin Fast Plants, follow themes of symbiosis and stress responses, respectively, from the distinct perspective of each core course. The key innovation of this project is the creation of an iterative inquiry-based laboratory experience. Student laboratory experiences more closely resemble authentic science. We propose that students gain 1) confidence in the care and manipulation of the organisms, 2) facility in experimental design, 3) appreciation of the integrative nature of biology, and 4) a greater depth of knowledge. Student learning goals and preparation for upper-division course work, including independent research, are being evaluated doc15887 none Information Science and Systems (33) This project addresses the need for access to educational opportunities enabling anyone to become fluent in information technology as defined by the National Research Council s report Being Fluent with Information Technology which defined what Skills, Concepts, and Capabilities everyone should possess for work, citizenship and personal benefit. This project is creating BeneFIT100, a free, online self-study version for independent learners, based upon the fluency course first developed at the University of Washington in . Developed with high production values, the course includes all the labs and projects of the successful classroom version. To reach students not sophisticated enough for a self-study approach, we also offer an instructor-mediated version of BeneFIT100. We address the need for a Fluency instructor corps by using BeneFIT100 and a specialized workshop to train a nationally selected cohort of future Fluency instructors. Thus, the project creates a new, unique resource of international importance, and demonstrates leveraging it for teacher training doc15888 none Chemistry (12) Chemistry students at the University of San Francisco (USF) complete many traditional wet chemistry techniques in their introductory lab courses. With this project, we are making use of an atomic absorption spectrophotometer (AAS) and web-based writing-to-learn technology (Calibrated Peer Review, CPR) to explore environmental chemistry problems in general and analytical chemistry courses. We are adapting a number of environmentally significant chemistry experiments from the chemical education literature to improve conceptual understanding of technical subjects, to develop skills in reading for content and in scientific writing, and to link the writing assignment to hands-on experiments using atomic absorption spectroscopy. On-line source material on environmental problems and published experiments using AAS are being adapted for pre-lab and post-lab writing assignments using the web-based Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) program developed by the NSF-funded Molecular Science Project. First and second year science students in general and analytical chemistry, plus a group of non-science majors in a general education course are impacted by the project. Assignments are designed to explore how quantitative analysis by AAS can help identify environmental problems. The immediate impact includes (i) a deeper understanding of an environmental problem via the CPR pedagogy of reading for content and peer-review of writing assignments, (ii) exposure of introductory students to high quality analytical instrumentation, and (iii) more confidence and interest in quantitative chemistry. We are assessing student confidence and learning by conducting surveys tracking their exam performance, their writing assignments and by arranging informal discussions with students doc15889 none Engineering - Chemical (53) Our work is the adaptation of teaching methods developed in Development of an Interdisciplinary Curriculum in Electronic Materials and Devices: Cooking Without Recipes (NSF award # DUE - ). Our curriculum has been developed to help undergraduate students who are interested in careers as processing engineers in microelectronics and related industries. This project helps students develop an in-depth understanding of the underlying physical and chemical principles in unit processes commonly used in microelectronics. These unit operations include plasma etching, chemical vapor deposition, spin coating, and chemical mechanical polishing. In addition we are introducing students to advance diagnostics tools which has helped us design more advanced microelectronics experiments. We have also developed a curriculum that enables our students to acquire much needed soft skills . These are necessary if our students are to succeed in their professional careers. These soft skills include technical writing, oral presentation, safety awareness, and teambuilding. We have extended our audience to include high school students who have participated in summer programs. Through these summer programs we are hoping to recruit under-represented students into science and engineering careers doc15890 none Biological Sciences (61) This project addresses the need to engage introductory biology students in critical thinking and problem solving and to make topics in biology more exciting and relevant for all students. The products from this project include 1) the Human Biology Case Library, an undergraduate interface to a powerful suite of medical school case studies and 2) a set of inquiry-based curricular materials based on the use of the cases. These products foster active learning experiences, promote collaborative learning and increase the inquiry-orientation of science education. We aim to make accessible a tremendous variety and quantity of cases that have been collected at Harvard Medical School and adapted for undergraduate education. The Human Biology Case Library brings the advanced computational infrastructure to any student with a web browser and provides a suite of interactive tools based on a number of human biology cases. This access to a multiplicity of human cases, source documents and analysis tools provides a rich environment for promoting student inquiry. Introductory biology classes serve a great number of college students, including non-majors and many future teachers. Medical school cases in non-electronic form have been adapted for undergraduate classes for six years at Hampshire College. The software being developed will support inquiry activities in the original classroom and is being tested in additional classrooms. Three cases are being implemented as a proof of concept, and their effectiveness is being tested in a variety of post-secondary institutions (e.g., a community college and large university) and within a variety of teaching styles (e.g., traditional large lecture-based and small case-based classes). We are examining the difficulties of comparing student performance across institutions. Close communication with faculty is facilitating the use of the modules and testing their effectiveness through student and faculty outcome studies, interviews and evaluation of changes in attitude and content learning. Rigorous methodologies are being used among well-defined populations to analyze outcomes. This material will be submitted to and reviewed by BioQUEST doc15891 none Geology (42) This project creates a Mineralogy textbook that is accessible and relevant to students by presenting the material in accord with modern learning theory. The chapters are integrated with a CD-ROM focused on active learning by students. Every text illustration is reproduced in color 3-D and includes animations, interactive exercises, and narration by the authors. A second accompanying CD-ROM provides an all-inclusive mineralogical database that can be used for mineral identification, movies of crystal structures, optical properties, etc. Sections of the text and its animations will be incorporated into DLESE, with metatags provided for direct searching and browsing of much of the material. The textbook reflects the experience of both authors in industry and their years of teaching geoscience, science education, planetary science, and materials science. The textbook addresses a diversity of student perspectives ranging from science teachers to geologists, across the broader earth sciences, to connections with cognate disciplines like chemistry, physics, mathematics, and biology. This project involves collaboration among authors at Mount Holyoke College and the University of Idaho. Educators at the University of Idaho are performing evaluations. Tasa Graphic Arts, Inc. is producing the illustrations and the CD-ROMs. Support is requested to facilitate production of a low-cost textbook that incorporates state-of-the-art pedagogy and computer animation that may be used by students in the geosciences as well as science education programs. The textbook incorporates innovative methods (such as the use of spiral and inductive learning, as well as concept maps) that have the potential for improving the quality of science teacher preparation, adding diversity to the textbooks in this field, and providing for integration of technology into earth science and related curricula. Significant co-funding of this project is being provided by the Division of Earth Sciences in the NSF Directorate for Geosciences in recognition of the importance that this innovative textbook and accompanying CD-ROM has for undergraduate students and faculty doc15892 none Chemistry (12) Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is a powerful method for structure determination in organic chemistry. In addition, it is critically important in chemical education, since interpretation of the experiments compels students to confront the details of the structural theory. Over the past decade the development of pulsed Fourier transform (FT) techniques combined with the increased capability of small computers has led to vast improvements in NMR instrumentation. It is essential that undergraduate students at small institutions have some access to this type of analytical equipment. Thus, this project has the following objectives: (1) Convert an operational continuous wave (CW) spectrometer to a pulsed FT-NMR instrument through an Anasazi upgrade (2) Use the upgraded spectrometer to enhance student learning in the organic chemistry laboratory and participation in research in organic chemistry (3) Expand student appreciation and knowledge of chemical concepts through the use of more advanced FT-NMR techniques in the physical chemistry and instrumentation laboratories (4) Make the data from the upgraded spectrometer available through online services (5) Make FT-NMR spectroscopy available to students at the College of New Rochelle. The conversion process retains the durable magnet from the older spectrometer, but transfers instrument control to a computer. The upgrade allows students to obtain hydrogen and carbon NMR spectra, perform spectral editing tasks and produce correlated two-dimensional spectra. Of considerable importance is that students are able to obtain routine spectra rapidly and in a form that is electronically portable. The FT-NMR spectrometer is being used to expand the current laboratory curriculum by adapting a number of experiments from the Journal of Chemical Education. Exposing students to the high level of understanding of molecular structure and dynamic chemical processes offered by FT-NMR is expected to have a profound effect upon their educational experience doc15893 none Faculty at Wright State University and Miami University are conducting complementary activities for the purpose of introducing and training students and educators to the precepts and techniques of combinatorial chemistry. The primary focus of the project is laboratory instruction in this area. Activities include testing, adapting and documenting experiments already developed at the collaborating institutions as well as developing additional exercises appropriate for students at all levels of undergraduate training. The materials take into consideration variations in equipment inventory and faculty expertise at institutions serving as adaptation sites. The utility of these experiments as an educational contribution to the training of chemical technicians is also being explored. Experiments range from solid phase variants of traditional experiments to discovery-based activities requiring group work and several weeks of project-style input. Anticipated dissemination activities include publication and presentation of papers at professional conferences, the development of sourcebooks and workshops for educators, dedicated conferences and collaboration on an introductory laboratory manual doc15894 none Software Engineering (34) We have devised a novel pedagogic methodology, Live-Thru Case Histories, for motivating and teaching Software Engineering. Computer Science students are often excited about learning technology (State of the Art), but uninterested in its critically-necessary adjunct, software development process (variously known as Software Engineering, State of the Practice, or Best Practice). Our methodology brings undergraduate Computer Science students to the realization that without an appropriate appreciation for and facility in using State of the Practice, they are likely to fail, not in their course work, but in the real-world software development projects to which they are planning to devote their careers. We have conducted a pilot study in a Senior Project Software Engineering course, and have obtained, and published, encouraging results. A publisher who read our results has approached us, unsolicited, with a request to develop additional Live-Through Case History materials. Colleagues at Rutgers, New Jersey Institute of Technology, University of Michigan Dearborn and University of Maryland University College have agreed to use Live-Thru Case Histories. Members of our team include: a former Vice President of AT a technology researcher with twenty-seven years experience teaching computer science and performing and supervising research sponsored by such organizations as NSF, DOE, and IBM Research; a psychologist whose specialty is the development and assessment of educational programs; and a political scientist whose specialties include web-based outcomes assessment and the design and analysis of surveys doc15895 none The investigators will determine the impact of adverse space weather conditions on the electricity market. The main effort is to by formulate an econometric model of electricity supply in which space weather conditions, because they impact the transmission of electricity, are a variable. The work addresses the economic consequences of space weather events. While some of the economic impacts are fabled within the space weather community (e.g. Quebec Hydro in ), to date no one has systematically documented and quantified the true economic costs. The research proposed here will begin to rectify that shortcoming. The fundamental reason why space weather may adversely impact the performance of the power grid is because adverse space weather conditions can interfere with the transmission of electric power. Specifically, the power transmission grid can act as an antenna of sorts, picking up geomagnetically-induced currents (GIC) at distances of hundreds of kilometers. The GIC are the result of electric currents high in the atmosphere of Earth (at ionospheric altitudes), produced by geomagnetic storms and sub-storms as the magnetosphere interacts with disturbances in the solar wind doc15896 none Engineering - Mechanical (56) This is a Full-Scale-Development Proposal based on a successful Proof-of-Concept Grant (NSF Award No. ) demonstrating an innovative approach to materials for upper- division undergraduate engineering education. The value of visual materials in conveying technical concepts is very well established, and is here applied in a multimedia form to the topic of thermofluid dynamics (i.e. convective heat transfer, thermodynamics, and gas dynamics), with strong emphasis on experimentation and optical flow visualization. The results are materials captured on one or more CD-ROMs that can be used by instructors and students as a visual supplement to any of the standard textbooks on these topics. The suitability of such materials for national dissemination has already been demonstrated. This approach makes use of the ubiquity and low-cost of CD-ROM technology, which makes it especially important for small and minority universities that sometimes lack the facilities to convey the laboratory experience directly to their students. The major SMET challenge being addressed is that of enhancing traditional engineering education with highly-visual material not currently available, and thus conveying to students a sense of the research-laboratory experience. One DUE theme also addressed here is faculty development, by providing faculty with an unusual supplementary teaching tool, thus broadening their preparation beyond what is traditionally available in textbooks. Integration of technology is also a component part of this project. That is, during the learning, the course materials require the students to use computers and to interface with multimedia systems environments. Keywords: Multimedia, multimedia fluid mechanics, optical flow visualization doc15897 none Biological Sciences (61) In science education, laboratory sessions are valuable for reinforcing concepts introduced in lectures. However, it has become increasingly difficult to acquire equipment, space, and personnel resources to manage laboratory classes in higher education. The objective of the project is to develop a set of interactive laboratory modules utilizing a previously developed Internet-based video digitizing system. The developed modules will allow students to quantify the motion of an object or the human body by acquiring coordinate data from video images. The kinematic parameters resulting from the processing of coordinate data can be used for the learning of basic mechanical concepts and the study of movement coordination and control. Specifically, laboratory modules will be developed for the learning of basic mechanical concepts (e.g., linear and angular kinematics, muscle mechanics) that are usually taught in undergraduate level biomechanics and physics courses. The modules for the learning of concepts in motor coordination and control (e.g., inter-limb coordination, postural control) utilize a multidisciplinary approach, integrating concepts from biology, psychology and engineering. The use of the Web provides students unlimited accessibility in terms of both time (when) and location (where) to complete the laboratories. The modules have applications for distance learning courses and for educational settings where resources for specialized undergraduate laboratories are limited or unavailable. The project provides a unique integration of information technology and education for laboratory environments and the laboratory modules developed will be made available to the public. Teachers Professors can selectively incorporate some or all of the modules in their courses. This is a collaboartive effort with the University of Florida doc15898 none Software Engineering (34) Defective, or bug-riddled, software is a serious problem in the software industry, costing U.S. companies as much as $100 billion last year. Software testing is a critical tool for addressing this issue, but unfortunately, it is viewed as boring and uncreative by practitioners and receives little formal treatment in undergraduate programs. The objective of this project is to develop a series of on-line education modules covering software testing that will be integrated at several levels across the undergraduate computer science curriculum. Module content will allow the instructor to adjust the coverage assigned to students, and assign module content in parallel with ongoing class programming assignments. The result will be an array of services with an easy-to-use web interface, allowing students to use the tool in many different classes, allowing instructors to incorporate tool-based testing in their own assignments, and supporting use by students and educators at multiple institutions. As an integral part of the project, summer research interns from Virginia Tech s Minority Academic Opportunities Program will participate in both research and educational aspects of the proposed work doc15899 none Computer Engineering (32) Traditional undergraduate instruction in process control focuses on abstract analysis and often does not prepare students for the industrially important task of synthesizing process control strategies and designs. The key goal of our project has been to bridge this chasm between academics and industry by developing and incorporating into the curriculum inexpensive and flexible process control lab kits that will allow students to design, implement and test their own control systems. The students will have the important tasks of determining the placement of sensors and control elements, and the nature of the control strategy. With our kits, students conduct several flow, level and temperature experiments, which illustrate concepts from simple draining tank dynamics through the implementation of advanced multi-loop control systems. In this project, the needed components, a software control system, and student instructions have been developed. Because our kits are inherently safe and require only electrical power and water to run, they can be used for laboratories, classroom demos and exercises, independent activities, distance learning and for educational outreach to high school students. In the future, kits could be adapted to provide experiments for a range of engineering courses including Introduction to Engineering, Material and Energy Balances, Unit Operations and Reactor Design. Evaluation of the kits and materials developed have been conducted at Lafayette College. Rowan University and Manhattan College have completed additional testing doc15893 none Faculty at Wright State University and Miami University are conducting complementary activities for the purpose of introducing and training students and educators to the precepts and techniques of combinatorial chemistry. The primary focus of the project is laboratory instruction in this area. Activities include testing, adapting and documenting experiments already developed at the collaborating institutions as well as developing additional exercises appropriate for students at all levels of undergraduate training. The materials take into consideration variations in equipment inventory and faculty expertise at institutions serving as adaptation sites. The utility of these experiments as an educational contribution to the training of chemical technicians is also being explored. Experiments range from solid phase variants of traditional experiments to discovery-based activities requiring group work and several weeks of project-style input. Anticipated dissemination activities include publication and presentation of papers at professional conferences, the development of sourcebooks and workshops for educators, dedicated conferences and collaboration on an introductory laboratory manual doc15901 none Physics (13) Providing interesting and rigorous undergraduate physics instruction for biology and health science majors is a significant and challenging problem. An increasing body of physics education research literature supports the claim of McDermott and colleagues that Teaching by telling is an ineffective mode of instruction for most students . This growing realization has placed renewed emphasis on active learning and laboratory components of physics instruction. Yet the laboratory experiences are often routine exercises in data taking on an apparatus designed to demonstrate a physical principle with little regard for life-experience relevance. There is limited motivation to acquire conceptual understanding and reasoning or opportunities to relate physics to life experiences. The objective of the project is to develop modules for the introductory level laboratory and lecture that address the need for physics experiments and lecture demonstrations performed in a physiological venue. Students rarely encounter frictionless inclines or force tables with pulleys. They routinely are aware, however, of their anatomy, blood pressure and respiration, hearing and vision. Initially four modules are being developed and integrated into a yearlong laboratory sequence. Specific experiments include: 1) the study of force, torque and rotational equilibrium via the measurement of the vertical location of the center of mass of the entire human body and its dependence on the attitude of body parts; 2) the study of fluid mechanics via the measurement of variations in blood pressure with vertical location and the maximum expiration and inspiration pressures of the lungs; 3) the study of waves and sound via the measurement of the ability of a human listener to discern the direction of a sound source; and 4) the study of geometric optics via the measurement and correction of common imaging defects of the human eye. Interdisciplinary participation of the physics and biology departments is included throughout this project. This project is directed by both physics and biology faculty advisors working with a team of two to four students to design, fabricate and test the experiments and develop the laboratory modules. A significant benefit of this program is the opportunity for the funded research students who represent the target community to become a part of the pedagogical process development. This opportunity should be especially valuable to aspiring educators. Assessment of the project includes pre- and post-laboratory testing and specific evaluation of laboratory report discussions of concepts and their application to related physiological applications. These experiments are of interest to a wider population and selected modules are being utilized in the University s Upward Bound program, a weekend summer program in science for promising high school students from local, urban school districts. Additionally, the lecture demonstration derivatives are used in a non-science major core course entitled Physics of the Body. Finally, the modules are being disseminated to other universities and made available nationally by publication and web presentation of laboratory materials. The successful program outcome is a challenging, interdisciplinary and relevant physics learning experience for a large undergraduate student population doc15902 none Interdisciplinary (99) This project takes the innovative and highly successful interdisciplinary science education Web portal Visionlearning (http: www.visionlearning.com) from prototype to full implementation. Visionlearning has been proven through classroom evaluation to provide effective learning strategies for students and it has received outstanding peer reviews that have praised its effective use of creative and timely teaching methods. The Visionlearning portal efficiently leverages the inherent strengths of the Internet to make interdisciplinary teaching materials freely available to all students and instructors. Visionlearning has successfully integrated strategies to specifically benefit low income and minority science students. This project is: a) adding 72 new lessons to Our Library, a group of novel teaching modules proven to enhance learning; b) fully developing MyClassroom, an imaginative system that allows faculty to fully customize the Visionlearning interface to their own curricular objectives; c) enhancing the Teaching d) expanding the robust evaluation of the project to three additional diverse institutions; e) further disseminating the project to add at least 20 instructors to the Visionlearning faculty list; and f) broadening the publishing partnership to ensure the project s long-term sustainability doc15903 none Astronomy (11) The project is developing a prototype and evaluating Interactive Astronomy, a multimedia instructional package for a widely taught undergraduate science course: Introductory Astronomy for Non-Science Majors. This course serves a great number of college students, including many future teachers, and has great potential for improving their science skills and influencing their understanding of and appreciation for science. The multimedia package includes software which incorporates two innovative elements: the revolutionary improvements in instruction offered by information technology, and the emerging paradigm of inquiry-based learning. Utilizing the high degree of interactivity which computers make possible, students are led to discover things for themselves, as opposed to learning them passively. Utilizing the dynamical simulations which computers make possible, students can live in the world of science, yielding a vivid experience of its normally abstract world. Two important elements of the package are Guided Discoveries, which are extensive, highly interactive instructional exercises, designed with careful attention to pedagogical issues; and Intelligent Tutors, which customize their instructional strategies, based on an assessment of the student s learning needs. Design of seven of the Discoveries has already been completed. In this project, three are being fully implemented, and then a proof of concept test is conducted of their effect on student learning. This formative evaluation (to be conducted in the Fall at Greenfield Community College and Amherst College, and in the Spring at the University of Massachusetts) runs parallel to, and be interactive with, further software development doc15904 none Geology (42) We are designing and constructing an artificial rock outcrop on our campus at the University of New Orleans. Louisiana has no natural rock outcrops, which impacts how local students learn geology. Students have tremendous difficulty with 3-D spatial-visualization thinking and often have minimal exposure to field geology and natural outcrops. Although Louisiana is ideal for studying recent sedimentary processes it offers few opportunities for inquiry about rocks and outcrops, both of which are essential for geology. This proof-of-concept project is the first step in addressing these challenges. The outcrop is being used by a large population of students and is designed to promote collaboration between the Colleges of Science and Education and the local school system. The artificial outcrop is one way we are trying to recruit under-represented students into the sciences, particularly geology doc15905 none Engineering - Materials Science (57) Our recently developed undergraduate laboratory course has been designed to provide a balanced and integrated treatment of synthetic and biomacromolecules, while providing students with essential hands-on experience in their synthesis and analysis. Our course has relevance for undergraduate programs in polymer and materials science. In addition, such laboratory exercises also have value in either organic or physical chemistry lab courses, in which the integration of fundamental chemical concepts can be demonstrated using intrinsically interesting materials: macromolecules. Our pedagogical approach for the course is to convey the macromolecular concept, that the science and engineering of macromolecules can be presented as a set of general principles and fundamentals, regardless of source. We have achieved these objectives by creating a suite of new multicomponent laboratory experiments, each with a dual purpose: (1) introduce a particular macromolecular concept, and (2) introduce one or more particular laboratory techniques. Each of these laboratories will be developed around macromolecules derived from both synthetic and biosynthetic pathways. A special feature of the new course has been molecular modeling of macromolecules as an undergraduate laboratory exercise, thus providing students with an avenue for conducting experiments even if they find themselves without access to traditional laboratory facilities. If faculty wish to adopt our course we have created a laboratory manual textbook, complete with introductory material, detailed experimental procedures, and supporting reference materials as a comprehensive set of appendices. Through our laboratory course, undergraduates have built firm foundations for industrial practice, graduate education, and graduate research in macromolecular science and engineering doc15906 none Tendon is a dense, fibrous tissue that connects muscle to bone. It plays a host of biomechanical roles, is architecturally complex, and virtually impossible to repair if damaged. This symposium will address a fundamental shortcoming of current research into the biology of tendon. Organismic biologists have little or no appreciation for clinical, developmental, or molecular aspects of tendon biology, while biomedical researchers are largely unaware of the comparative physiology, evolutionary patterns, and diverse roles of tendon in vertebrates. The goal of the symposium is to bring together researchers from a variety of applied and basic research areas to synthesize the current state of our knowledge of tendon. Participants will also point out new and innovative directions for future research. Speakers will cover a broad range of scale, from the molecular biology of tendon organization, through patterning at the cellular level, and tissue interactions with muscle and bone, to the many roles of tendon in the whole organism. In addition to serving as the basis for the first volume ever devoted to the biology of tendon, this symposium will foster a synergy between tendon researchers in such wide-ranging fields as molecular developmental biology, biochemistry, functional morphology, and biomedicine doc15907 none Engineering - Materials Science (57) The mummified remains of the copper-age man Otzi in the Alps in helps us understand how people lived around 3,500 BC. We also discovered the tools he used to hunt with and helped him to survive thus gaining important insights as to the peoples understanding of materials around that time. Using Otzi as a focal point for materials science issues has provided us with a wealth of opportunity to explore science, math, engineering, and technology (SMET) concepts. We have developed a single prototype web-based module that uses a constructivist approach and an interrupted lecture method that integrates the instructor s lecture with content from our module. This module is meant to be used as an in class experience which will be supplemented by online materials to better educate students with different learning styles. We have engaged non-science majors along with physics and materials engineering students in our freshman materials science class. The key problem that we have addressed is the need to help both non-science and engineering majors develop problem solving skills using this thematic approach for structuring SMET content in materials science. Using this thematic approach our module will include human evolution, art, exploration, politics, health, and transportation, to name a few doc15908 none Web-based three-tier diagnostic tests to assess misconceptions held by undergraduate biology students are being developed. Misconceptions hinder students understanding of complex, abstract scientific concepts, yet many faculty and students themselves are unaware of these misconceptions. This project is producing a web-based assessment tool for general biology courses to provide rapid diagnosis and individualize feedback, which can be easily adaptable for other institutions. As a result, science education is being improved in two ways. Identification of misconceptions is the first step in evoking conceptual change. Diagnosing misconceptions is critical in helping students develop more scientifically accurate conceptual understanding, which ultimately improves performance in undergraduate science courses and reduces attrition. Second, results from this diagnostic instrument help faculty to recognize the types of misconceptions that students hold, thereby helping faculty to tailor instruction and laboratory activities to confront the misconceptions. Assessment results are driving curricular change doc15909 none Engineering - Civil (54) We are meeting the growing need for genomics studies in undergraduate education by creating a course entitled Molecular Methods in Environmental Engineering . An integral part of our course has been to create teams of students collaborating through the use of inquiry based laboratory modules. These student are performing group projects following the full-cycle 16S rRNA approach . This course has been popular among our students in Civil and Environmental Engineering program. Our curriculum materials have been designed to be incorporated into other disciplines e.g. Biomedical Engineering and Chemical Engineering on other campuses. This material has undergone extensive testing and evaluation by our staff. We have created a laboratory manual with an accompanying CDROM for dissemination of these laboratory experiments through appropriate commercial channels. Additional support materials are also available on the World Wide Web to help faculty and their students. We are presenting present papers in peer reviewed journals like the Journal of Engineering Education. We also plan to make a presentation at the upcoming AEESP AAEE Conference on Education and Research Needs in Environmental Engineering and Science on August 11-13, at the University of Toronto doc15910 none Computer Science (31) This project is developing curricular materials for an interdisciplinary digital media program to meet four needs: (1) the high interest that college students are showing in digital media, (2) the growing demand for digital media professionals, (3) the need for course material that addresses both the technical and the aesthetic elements of multimedia creation, and (4) the need for a curriculum that balances hands-on experience with fundamental concepts that remain constant beyond fast-changing multimedia development tools. The primary goal of the project is to develop materials that are appropriate to students of either computer science or art, to find the core curriculum necessary for both groups of students, and to present this interdisciplinary material in a well-integrated, modular approach. The curricular materials are divided into three modules: (1) a primer that provides fundamental knowledge required of all students and that concentrates on hands-on exercises; (2) an advanced module that provides the scientific, technical, and mathematical foundation for the students understanding of digital media; and (3) an advanced module that addresses the aesthetics and graphic design issues. The materials cover image processing, digital audio, and digital video and are delivered in an electronic format (Web, CD-ROM, and e-books) with interactive multimedia enhancements doc15911 none This award provides funding for scholarships to support students to attend the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Symposium to be held in Houston, Texas on October 18-20, . The goals of the symposium are to make visible the accomplishments of people of diverse ethnicities in the field of Computing. The symposium will be a technical event focusing on undergraduate and graduate students, who will participate directly in the symposium activities as speakers and panelists and who will also participate in poster board sessions doc15912 none Mathematical Sciences (21). This proof-of-concept project is creating a Web-based set of instructional materials consisting of a database of interactive mathematical curves, a National Curve Bank, together with exercises related to the characteristics of these curves. Three mathematical areas are under development: Precalculus, Calculus, and the History of Mathematics; and within each of these areas, links to specific topics allow students to access and make use of a wide variety of curves. Accompanying exercises ask the student to manipulate the curves or investigate their attributes. A prototype for this project has been investigated, featuring animation and interactive components. Such a National Curve Bank expects to provide students with immediate feedback and permit faculty to add an active learning component to various courses doc15913 none Engineering -- Other (59) This project integrates medical-imaging research and new technologies into the undergraduate biomedical engineering curriculum. It develops a series of courses and a new software package that provides dynamic simulations of commonly used medical imaging systems. As a prototype, the PI is developing a CT simulator that includes web pages illustrating principles and devices along with a Java package allowing the users to view the results as an image is processed step-by-step. Using this material, the PI is establishing a web-based medical imaging laboratory library accessible through the Internet. The assessment process involves an evaluation of the plans by faculty colleagues, teaching evaluations and exit interviews with graduating students, and an evaluation by an external review committee and employers feedback. In addition to establishing the web-based laboratory library, the PI plans to present papers at the ASEE and the IEEE EMBS meetings to disseminate his work doc15914 none Chemistry (12) We are developing a complete Linked and Layered Resource for Collaborative, Technology-Based Learning in Physical Chemistry. The resource, Quantum States of Atoms and Molecules, is grounded in progressive pedagogical methods, uses appropriate computer technology, and makes firm connections between fundamental principles, physical reality, physical models, and mathematical descriptions of reality and the models. The resource would be unconventional in both form and structure. It is designed to engage students in the process of learning and help them develop skills in information processing, critical thinking and problem solving. It also takes advantage of existing knowledge on how adults and young adults learn. The product would consist of two parts: an inexpensive soft-cover text and a comprehensive multimedia CD. The text would present the core concepts linked to spectroscopy in an easy to understand prose style. The entire text would be on the CD with active hyperlinks to web and computer-based activities that engage students in active learning. Some hyperlinks would point to animations and simulations to provide dramatic visualization of concepts, chemical processes, and molecular-level phenomena. Other links would connect to concept and math supplements to provide greater depth, detailed derivations, and review relevant math concepts within a chemistry context. Such linking should make it easy for students to review material on a need to know basis as they advance through the text without having pages and sections that interrupt the narrative. A final set of links would point to Mathcad symbolic math templates that will be used in both a guided-discovery mode and as a resource for students in building their own Mathcad documents for assigned problems and activities. An instructor s manual and sets of numerical solutions to exercises and problems are also being created for the project doc15915 none Biological Sciences (61) The Living Textbook Initiative (LTI) of the Johns Hopkins University has designed a new form of textbook to address specific educational challenges: How can textbooks become more effective at delivering the best science to more students? How can different learning styles--listening, reading, seeing, and interacting--be integrated into a textbook? How can such a text support teachers efforts to expand their role as mentors and discussion leaders? The LTI is producing, evaluating, and publishing Human Physiology: The Cardiovascular System, in a CD Internet-based textbook. This publication will comprise 10 chapters, each composed of a virtual lecture, a full lecture-length animation of scientific concepts, note taking capabilities, and interactive laboratory simulations. A web site provides tutorials, posting capabilities, and discussion boards. A prototype textbook has been tested and proven effective. LTI content and technology experts represent the Johns Hopkins University s Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Beta-test site schools representing a diversity of students are testing and evaluating the Living Textbook. McGraw-Hill Publishing is part of the beta study and is focusing on issues related to marketing and distribution. A project report will be submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal to culminate the project doc15916 none A team of institutions is developing the technical capabilities and executing the organizational responsibilities of the core integration component of the National SMETE Digital Library program. Collaborators include: UCAR, Cornell University, Columbia University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at the University of Massachusetts, and the San Diego Supercomputing Center. The project is bringing together many efforts already underway, and engaging new efforts as well, in support of a comprehensive large-scale digital library that promises to enhance every aspect of education in science, mathematics, engineering and technology. The organizational and technical underpinnings of the proposed work fall into three categories of effort, each within the overall context of educational excellence: 1) engaging the community, 2) providing technology, and 3) operating core services. To promote the vision of a strong NSDL community that sees itself as owning the program and having major influence on the character of the library, the project team is working with all NSDL-funded projects, helping to integrate their work into the library. Additional partnering with efforts such as those funded by the NSF s Digital Library Initiative and by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and independently developed collections and services, is also taking place. Development and support of models for intellectual property and digital rights management are being undertaken, as well as promotion of a library evaluation framework, administration of an NSDL program advisory group, and development of an overall governance mechanism for the NSDL. A robust, flexible information technological infrastructure is being implemented based on two themes: a spectrum of interoperability and one library with many portals . Technical components include a flexible portal architecture, a central metadata repository, an open source tool kit for access to rich content, and a database for authentication and user profiles, all emphasizing openness and long-term evolution. Finally, support is provided for a very wide array of educational and library services, emphasizing in this initial phase: operation of the primary portal and specialized portals for the NSDL community and the NSDL partners, comprehensive information retrieval services to search for collections or individual items, and an optional service for user profiles and authentication. The other two awards in this collaborative project are and doc15917 none Computer Science (31) An undergraduate education is a critical link between high school and a society increasingly dependent upon computer technology. SMET majors increasingly need computer programming as a fundamental skill. Students effectively learn computer programming by using examples, yet the number of examples that can be presented in class and in a textbook is limited. The cognitive approaches of collaborative and discovery learning supported by the intellectual scaffolding of a robust set of examples can give students a deep understanding of concepts they discover on their own. Assignment of computer programming problems just beyond a student s current skill level functions as the leading question , where carefully constructed examples give the student the information necessary to construct a mental model leading to the solution to the problem. This can help overcome the cognitive bottleneck where too few students negotiate the transition from lower-level skills to higher-level skills, from basic rote memorization and re-telling skills to more abstract knowledge synthesizing and transforming skills. The difficulty lies in getting a complete set of the right examples. This project creates a web-based system which gives intuitive access to between 300 and 500 examples illustrating the main points in the C++ programming language. A prototype is being implemented in a pilot study over two years, being used with 300 undergraduate students taking an introductory programming course at UIC. Evaluation will use both web-based statistics and evaluation forms, comparing student skill levels and attitudes before and after the system s implementation doc15918 none Computer Science (31) This project is creating a set of laboratory exercises that support student understanding of robust software systems design for modern electronic commerce applications. Lecture and lab are closely synchronized so that technical topics, strategies, and case studies presented in lecture are immediately reinforced by an implementation experience in the laboratory. Lab exercises include protocol performance, cryptography, authentication, electronic transactions, and steaming multimedia using technologies such as Java, ASP, Perl, XML and MySQL. There is particular emphasis on the planning and evaluation process to ensure that the materials are those most necessary and sufficient for student understanding of electronic commerce doc15919 none Computer Science (31) We are exploring a new pedagogical approach to software engineering education which seeks to integrate analysis tools with instruction in programming methodologies. Instead of learning methodologies as abstract ideas, students directly benefit from applying analysis tools that embody methodologies to large, realistic programs. The approach focuses on using lightweight analysis tools that offer to the students clear and immediate benefits with minimal initial costs. The tools help students understand information hiding, invariants, memory management and security within the context of full industrial scale programs doc15920 none Ancient Andean empires were communications dinosaurs; information and decision-making traveled only as fast as a human could, and the Andean peoples did not know writing. Lacking the administrative technology of contemporaneous European or Asian states, the native empires of the Andes were forced to develop alternative modes of statecraft, and other principles to integrate their subject populations. Archaeologists have long suspected, based on Spanish eyewitness accounts of the Inka empire, that one of the crucial integrative mechanisms of prehispanic statecraft was the elaborate mortuary practices of the politically important. In the Inka empire, the carefully kept bodies of deceased rulers served as material symbols of dynastic succession and political continuity. Through periodic rituals and fine mausoleums mummies were the setting for public communication of messages of political legitimization and imperial authority. While the role of the dead in Inka statecraft has been well studied, much less is known about this topic in early Andean empires, such as the Wari; in some ways a fore-runner of the Inka that dominated the highlands between AD 400 and 800. Ms. Charlene Milliken s doctoral dissertation project, conducted under the direction of Dr. Marc Bermann, will investigate the site of Conchopata, Peru. At its height, Conchopata was a secondary center of the Wari empire (A.D. 600- ) and consisted of residential zones, public plazas, pottery workshops, temples, and specialized mortuary complexes. Excavation will center on residential contexts associated with two mortuary complexes, and research will test the hypothesis that these mortuary complexes were used by Conchopata elites in the veneration of important ancestors. Conchopata is a particularly good location for this research because several intact mortuary structures have been uncovered; normally these kinds of facilities were looted or destroyed long ago. This project will provide the first investigation of the potential role of mortuary activity in Wari political statecraft as one native means by which authority is constructed and expressed in non-literate, non-Western populations doc15921 none Engineering - Chemical (53) The Center for Chemical Process (CCPS) of American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) has established an industrial need to help Chemical Engineering Departments in the nation add an element of safety to the core courses in their curriculum. In addition our team has reviewed the accident history of the chemical process industry and has found that the number of major accidents continues to rise every year. The sad consequences for our society are deaths, injuries, and environmental damage. Unfortunately only a fraction of our practicing engineers have the appropriate safety culture and exposure to key safety concepts to impact this negative performance. To overcome these problems we have identified key ideas and effective pedagogical techniques to help professors teach a number of these. Our effort has been to overcome this lack of safety training in core course covering chemical processing. The courses we will address are Mass and Energy Balances, Kinetics, and Plant Design and Economics. We have created two one half hour lectures as well as exercises in a modular format for each course using different teaching methodologies. We have assessed the effectiveness of these materials and our approach and have made numerous changes. To help with dissemination of our course materials and modules we are working cooperatively with member of the Center for Chemical Process (CCPS) of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). We are also working with our publisher SACHE to present our materials in their newsletters, web site, and through their workshops doc15916 none A team of institutions is developing the technical capabilities and executing the organizational responsibilities of the core integration component of the National SMETE Digital Library program. Collaborators include: UCAR, Cornell University, Columbia University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at the University of Massachusetts, and the San Diego Supercomputing Center. The project is bringing together many efforts already underway, and engaging new efforts as well, in support of a comprehensive large-scale digital library that promises to enhance every aspect of education in science, mathematics, engineering and technology. The organizational and technical underpinnings of the proposed work fall into three categories of effort, each within the overall context of educational excellence: 1) engaging the community, 2) providing technology, and 3) operating core services. To promote the vision of a strong NSDL community that sees itself as owning the program and having major influence on the character of the library, the project team is working with all NSDL-funded projects, helping to integrate their work into the library. Additional partnering with efforts such as those funded by the NSF s Digital Library Initiative and by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and independently developed collections and services, is also taking place. Development and support of models for intellectual property and digital rights management are being undertaken, as well as promotion of a library evaluation framework, administration of an NSDL program advisory group, and development of an overall governance mechanism for the NSDL. A robust, flexible information technological infrastructure is being implemented based on two themes: a spectrum of interoperability and one library with many portals . Technical components include a flexible portal architecture, a central metadata repository, an open source tool kit for access to rich content, and a database for authentication and user profiles, all emphasizing openness and long-term evolution. Finally, support is provided for a very wide array of educational and library services, emphasizing in this initial phase: operation of the primary portal and specialized portals for the NSDL community and the NSDL partners, comprehensive information retrieval services to search for collections or individual items, and an optional service for user profiles and authentication. The other two awards in this collaborative project are and doc15923 none Earth Systems Science (40) The National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT) and the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) is offering a professional development program to improve the quality of undergraduate geoscience education. The program is designed to enhance the participants content knowledge in emerging fields and promote exemplary teaching practices; develop effective on-line resources to support existing workshops; provide electronic versions of workshops to extend the influence of the workshops; and develop an active cohort of educators involved in further dissemination. The professional development program includes both emerging topics in geoscience and faculty development workshops. Two emerging topics workshops are being offered each year, one in an interdisciplinary field related to Earth systems and one in geoscience pedagogy. Mature topical workshops, based on successful previous work, include: course design workshops, workshops for early career faculty, and workshops for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows preparing for careers in academia. Web resources developed by the project provide a collection of background resources and are designed to engage participants in on-going discussion. The project also explores tutorials, synchronous discussion, and on-line courses for delivering workshop content. Participants in the workshops are expected to develop course materials based on the principle of actively engaging students in their own learning, test materials following the workshop, and ultimately contribute to the DLESE Collection and Community Center. Integration of workshop planning and web-resource development are combined in a unique on-line resource aimed at extending the workshop experience far beyond those who attend the face-to-face workshops and beyond the lifetime of the grant doc15924 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This project develops a prototype course in scientific programming that is aimed at majors in the mathematical sciences (as distinct from engineering and computer science) and provides a comprehensive introduction to software development tools for large codes in scientific computing. The undergraduate computer science curriculum typically includes one or more courses in which students work on a large software project, often as part of a team, that requires them to develop, document, and respect functional interfaces and to compile and link the final product from multiple files and libraries. In contrast, majors in mathematics, physics, and similar disciplines usually do not learn such skills in the introductory programming and numerical analysis courses that typically are part of the curriculum. As a result, majors in the mathematical sciences often are at a disadvantage, relative to their peers in computer science, when they seek employment after completing their baccalaureate degrees or when they continue on to graduate study in fields that involve the development of large scientific codes. The course provides mathematical science majors with experience in developing and prototyping software for applications that involve large data sets or large amounts of CPU time doc15925 none Interdisciplinary (99) This project is developing modules within an immersive virtual environment (VE) in order to examine whether or not such environments provide an effective venue for education. The environment being developed is based upon four principles. First, a high level of interactivity is necessary to allow students opportunities for active learning. Second, VE technology is used as a supplement to other methods of learning. Third, the environment contains many types of information and presents links between them. Finally, the 3D visualization realistically portrays information that is abstract or normally not visible in the physical world. The modules being developed are in structural engineering, computer networks, and computer graphics and we are integrating them into the curriculum in order to evaluate their effectiveness. The results of this work include a set of well-tested educational VE applications, guidelines for designing educational VEs, and principles for deciding when a VE is an appropriate choice for an educational goal and it is intended to provide a real and substantial improvement to the learning environments of many students as well as innovative VE research doc15926 none Computer Science (31) This project develops curriculum support materials for use with undergraduate computer science majors to develop Java based handheld and smart-card applications for the Handheld and Ubiquitous Computing (HUC) market. Faculty and students are provided with HUC devices and developing prototype tools to demonstrate their effective use in our curriculum. Evaluation and assessment of the tools is done using student evaluations developed by a behavioral psychologist and interviews conducted by an independent review board of industry specialists. These tools are incorporated in two of our required and three of our elective courses. The tools and modules developed will be disseminated over the Internet via www.sourceforge.net, in a series of papers, and through a forthcoming Prentice Hall textbook Java Micro Edition Programming doc15927 none Geology (42) High quality color maps that plot the location of and display analytical datasets, descriptions, images, or movies are difficult to publish in a format that facilitates their easy access, distribution and use. The need for them is clear: most professional geologic meetings start and end with map-based field trips, students are taught using them, and they form the backbone of many geologic research projects. With previous NSF funding, the PI developed a proof-of-concept solution on the Macintosh, called the Dynamic Digital Map. DDMs display data using several methods, including point-and-click at icons pin-pointing locations on maps, from lists of samples or sites, and by linked text. The data displayed by a DDM come from spreadsheets, or files created in CAD or GIS programs by any author who inserts or links it into a DDM Template, following instructions in a DDM Cookbook . The finished DDM becomes a freely distributable stand alone program, running with no additional software. This project continues and accelerates the Macintosh-only DDM conversion to a cross-platform program (Win32, Macintosh, Linux) that is web enabled and allows information to be expressed at different user levels (e.g. from the professional to the junior high earth-science class) in one DDM, thus encompassing a wide audience. Dissemination is by WWW (including DLESE) and CD, with reviews and testing in several institutions. The first workshop on how to create and use DDMs is being held at the Geological Society of America Northeast Sectional meeting March 24, doc15928 none Dr. Elsa Reichmanis of the American Chemical Society (ACS) is supported by the Chemistry Division Office of Special Projects and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities to organize a program at the National ACS meeting, which will be held in Chicago in August, . This program will consist of a presentation by Willie Pearson of Wake Forest University, who will give an overview of diversity issues and present data on women and under-represented minorities. A panel discussion focussing on graduate school retention and under-representation of women and minorities on university faculties will follow. Panelists will include Hector Abruna (Cornell), Billy Joe Evans (U Michigan), Paula Hammond (MIT), Judith Klinman (UC Berkely), Harry Morrison (Purdue U) and Bradford Wayland (Penn doc15929 none Chemistry (12) Using Java XML software, suites of design tool player pairs of programs and educational materials for the chemistry and biochemistry curriculum are being developed. The design tool software permit instructors to build their own intellectual and instructional content into highly interactive electronic exercises for students. The design tool player pairs provide total independence both to instructors, for selection of content, and to the students, for self-paced instruction. The design tool player pair concept is sufficiently general that it is adaptable to most areas of undergraduate chemistry. This generality and flexibility permit students, with guidance from the instructor and via collaboration with peers, to problem-solve, not only via the application of the scientific method, but also via processes of self-reflection, trial and error, and the construction of a body of knowledge that emerges as students link practice and theory. The design tool program is menu-driven and requires no programming knowledge. It converts the logic and content of an instructor s interactive design into XML-tagged text. The XML file that results can be played by a Java player program, which presents the interactive exercise to the student and keeps track of the students responses (mouse clicks or keyboard input). We have demonstrated the efficacy of this approach by designing a tool player pair for enzyme mechanism tutorial exercises in a biochemistry course. The mechanism tool player pair can be used to create mechanism exercises for virtually any enzyme mechanism (or any chemical reaction mechanism, for that matter). This proof of Concept project is intended to show 1) the broad usefulness of this approach to software creation ; 2) the creation of tool player pairs for a variety of interactive exercises covering many aspects of an undergraduate education in chemistry; and 3) the potential to expand our development efforts to an entire science curriculum doc15930 none Biological Sciences (61) The objective of this project is to develop a set of interactive laboratory modules utilizing a previously developed Internet-based video digitizing system. The modules allow students to quantify the motion of an object or the human body by acquiring coordinate data from video images. The kinematic parameters resulting from the processing of coordinate data can be used for the learning of basic mechanical concepts and the study of movement coordination and control. Specifically, laboratory modules are being developed for the learning of basic mechanical concepts (e.g., linear and angular kinematics, muscle mechanics) that are usually taught in undergraduate level biomechanics and physics courses. The modules for the learning of concepts in motor coordination and control (e.g., inter-limb coordination, postural control) utilize a multidisciplinary approach, integrating concepts from biology, psychology and engineering. The use of the Web provides students unlimited accessibility in terms of both time (when) and location (where) to complete the laboratories. The modules have applications for distance learning courses and for educational settings where resources for specialized undergraduate laboratories are limited or unavailable. The project provides a unique integration of information technology and education for laboratory environments and the laboratory modules developed will be made available to the public. Teachers Professors can selectively incorporate some or all of the modules in their courses. This is a collaborative effort with the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign doc15931 none The reviewers found this project to be meritorious. I have read the summary and individual reviews and concur with their assessment. This is a full development proposal that will develop, evaluate, and disseminate material for an alternative first-course in electrical engineering. In addition to teaching some of the fundamental concepts, the course introduces the discipline and provides a set of experiments in various areas tied to real applications. The applicant has tested a pilot version of the course material with good results and asks for funds to continue their work. The assessment plan is excellent and will address learning outcomes. The dissemination plan involves textbook publishers, letters to other departments, on-line material, and a faculty workshop. He also arranged to have the material tested at North Carolina A & T, a minority institution. The reviewers rated this proposal very highly. They indicated that the existing parts of the new course and labs looked very good and were impressed by the institutional support in the initial development. They noted that the breadth of the material provided an excellent overview and that the labs would be fun for the students. The low cost of the lab modules, the objective nature of the assessment plan, and the quality of the assessment consultants impressed them. They listed the following minor weakness: (1) The applicants should consider adding a minority or open enrollment institution to the project to pilot the material as a way of broadening the user population and increasing diversity in engineering. (2) A seminar or workshop could easily be added to the dissemination plan to facilitate adoption at other universities. (3) A commercial educational equipment supplier should be approached concerning offering the experimental modules fabricated at a reasonable cost, but the publication of the documentation for do-it-your-selfers should not be sacrificed. I contacted the PI and suggested that he consider modifying his project to include work with a minority institution, a faculty workshop, and a possible commercial supplier (see my email dated 10 12 01). The PI did followed through on each of the three suggestions as indicated in his email dated 11 27 01 and his FAX dated 11 28 01. He arranged to have North Carolina A & T participate by offering a version of the course in their EE program with a small increase in the budget to support this effort. He added a faculty workshop, again with an increase in the budget to support the participants travel and so on. Finally, he made arrangements with TCI Works, a nonprofit agency that provides work oriented rehabilitation services for disabled and disadvantaged individuals by providing light, short run electronic assembly, to produce the modules. This is a well-written proposal that addresses the nature of the first course in electrical engineering. In place of a rigorous course on circuit theory, the applicants have developed and offered a course that provides an overview of the discipline and laboratory experiences related to several applications. Evaluation results of several pilot offerings were very positive and they want to refine and expand the course material and develop a web-based virtual lab for off-campus use. The evaluation study of the pilot offering was excellent and planned future assessment work is solid. The dissemination plan will be effective. I recommend funding at the revised level doc15932 none This grant supports the participation of Dr. Frank and his Co-PI, Johannes Verlinde, in the CRYSTAL-FACE project, which stands for Cirrus Regional Study of Tropical Anvils and Cirrus Layers - Florida Area Cirrus Experiment. This is an interagency field program to be conducted in and around southern Florida in the summer of with the goal of studying the formation, evolution, and radiative properties of the cirrus anvil clouds created by large convective clouds in the tropics. Dr. Frank will use an NRL P3 aircraft fitted with the NSF ELDORA radar to document the life cycles of deep convective cloud systems from the time of their inception until the development of widespread cirrus anvils. The main objective is to estimate the convective transport of total water substance (vapor plus condensate) into the cirrus cloud layer. This is accomplished by first computing the vertical air velocity from the profile of horizontal divergence derived from Doppler radar observations, and then inferring the water flux by combining the estimated mass flux of air with results of large-eddy simulations that include parameterized precipitation. The results will be synthesized to assess the influence of convective water transports on the global population of cirrus clouds, including estimates of their effect on the Earth s radiation budget doc15933 none Economics (82) This project is developing and testing software that allows students enrolled in principles of microeconomics classes to participate in a simulated economy over the Internet. In the simulation, prices and output are determined by the decisions of the students as they try to maximize their households utility and their firms profits. The simulation has two sequential components. It starts with a barter economy with household production and then transitions into a monetary economy in which output is produced by firms. In this project, the emphasis is on (1) the refinement of the user interface, (2) the creation of support materials for both faculty and students, and (3) rigorous testing of the impact of this simulation on student attitudes and learning achievement, using control groups. The evaluation of the simulation is being done through a large-scale testing. This is one of the few such evaluations of computer-assisted instruction in the economics. If the evaluation results confirm that the simulation is an effective teaching tool, the principal investigators are planning to promote the use of this simulation model at the national level through workshops, publishing, and presentations at professional meetings doc15934 none Physics (13) Curriculum materials and Java-based software are being developed to make it easier for faculty to incorporate computer applications into the undergraduate physics curriculum. In particular, the principal investigator, in colloboration with Jan Tobochnik of Kalamazoo College and Wolfgang Christian of Davidson College, is developing an extensive and powerful library of Java utilities and templates that make it relatively easy to develop computer simulations and animations in a variety of contexts. The software is platform independent and open source and available at no cost. In addition, the third (Java) edition of our popular undergraduate level computer simulation text is being developed during the time frame of the work doc15935 none Hochwender It is well know that some plant species tolerate damage by herbivores more than others, but information about how natural selection acts to change the expression of tolerance is scarce. In this project, the investigators use a hybrid willow system to examine the role of tolerance to damage as an adaptive response to browsing herbivores. The researchers will evaluate traits that confer tolerance to damage, measure the selection gradient for those traits in F2 hybrids, determine the sets of trait combinations that are generally favored by selection, use six genetic classes of willows to investigate the genetic architecture of tolerance and its traits, and determine how plant age alters tolerance and its mechanisms. To evaluate these aspects of tolerance to damage, plant cuttings propagated from controlled crosses will be grown in common gardens, given a treatment of either 50% shoot damage or 0% shoot damage, and evaluated for fitness responses and for traits that confer fitness. By measuring the selection gradient for candidate traits of tolerance, the researchers will elucidate the role that natural selection can play in the evolution of tolerance to damage. In addition, they will assess how past selection has shaped the expression of tolerance traits in each parental species. By determining how tolerance to damage is expressed, they can evaluate the influence of epistasis on the evolution of tolerance, as well as the presence or absence of additive genetic variance between the two plant species. These findings will provide insight into the potential for hybridization to enhance the adaptive responses of plants to herbivore damage doc15936 none Engineering - Civil (54) Our team at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University has previously developed and documented a prototype web-based instructional system for solid mechanics. Our basic goal has been to promote an inquiry-based style of modern engineering analysis, experimentation, and design into undergraduate solid and fluid mechanics courses. A central effort of our team s work has been the design and evaluation of a modular and portable framework so that faculty can create a diverse set of experiments based on our web- based model. To help guide faculty toward adoption of our model a workbook and accompanying CD-ROM is being published. Through our project Web-based Educational Framework for Analysis, Visualization, and Experimentation (WEAVE) faculty will have the option of complimenting traditional labs with module-based projects designed to encourage students to compare, contrast, and improve models of actual physical experiments. An interactive web-based tutorial for each module will be developed in conjunction with Shodor, a non-profit educational research foundation based in Durham, N.C. The deployment of WEAVE across the engineering curriculum enables students to follow interactive tutorials, execute numerical simulations, and conduct physical experiments. In these self-paced labs, students explore concepts of fluid and solid mechanics through trial and error iterations by directly controlling and modifying the physical experiments and their associated numerical simulation. The dissemination of our materials and findings has been promoted on our campus, and at the state and national levels through oral presentations, publications in educational journals, and via the Internet. We also plan to present at the Frontiers in Education in doc15937 none Biological Sciences (61) TIEE (Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology) is a web and CD-ROM resource designed to help faculty incorporate more student-active approaches in ecology courses. TIEE is composed of 3 interrelated parts: 1) inquiry-based experiments, 2) controversial issues for lecture and 3) linked and interwoven teaching resources. TIEE also addresses the reward system for educational innovation because Experiments or Issues submitted by faculty are peer reviewed by TIEE editors. During - , with CCLI-EMD Proof-of-Concept support, we built a model TIEE website and CD-ROM which we evaluated in a workshop at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) in Aug. . Faculty applied and worked in small groups with the CD-ROM; they evaluated the overall product plus assigned Experiments or Issues. The evaluation of the workshop and of TIEE was very positive and helpful to the current project. We also established a TIEE board of editors who we met with at this meeting. In this full submission we are building on our successes with the proof. The ESA is publishing an annual issue of TIEE on its website and distributing the CD-ROM. We are training faculty to write and use Issues and Experiments at Introductory and Author workshops at ESA plus AIBS and AAAS meetings. In this proposal we describe the guidelines and structure for submissions of Issues and Experiments to TIEE, the processes for peer and editorial review, and the sustainability of TIEE following this granting period doc15938 none Engineering - Other (59) This project, being conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and the Colorado School of Mines, investigates the feasibility of a web-based system for assessing an engineering student s ability to recognize and resolve ethical dilemmas similar to those encountered in practice. The investigators are testing a pencil-and-paper version with carefully constructed scenarios and well developed scoring rubrics on 100 students. Finally, they are evaluating the use of a neural network to predict student classification. In order to evaluate their tool, they will compare their results to those derived from follow-up interviews and a triangulation process that combines many measures to estimate the true outcome. They plan to describe their results at major engineering education meetings and, if warranted, they will publish in archived journals doc15939 none Engineering - Other (59) Our project involves the design, implementation, and assessment of a multidisciplinary freshman engineering course. Experience in distributed virtual collaborative engineering is becoming more and more important as the use of advanced communication and information technologies is transforming engineering companies. Our course incorporates e-engineering technologies that model a virtual collaborative engineering environment. Although such e-engineering technologies may be found at the corporate level, graduating students often lack skills and knowledge needed to take advantage of these technologies and this emerging environment. There exists a unique opportunity to create a virtual collaborative engineering course model which leverages on-going academic industry and government initiatives. The goal of our work has been to create a multidisciplinary, project-oriented freshman engineering course. Our course covers the fundamentals of project management, engineering team organization techniques, and problem solving, e-engineering technologies, and application of the above concepts and methodologies to a multidisciplinary project. This project will include design, rapid prototyping, and testing of a product, and is designed to challenge students to move beyond traditionally conceived engineering team toward a virtual collaborative engineering approach by employing the use of e-engineering technologies doc15940 none This project restructures two statistics courses, Introduction to Biostatistics and Experimental Methods. The learning environment is transformed through interactive labs, collaborative projects, and frequent formative assessments. Students spend the majority of class time in computer studio labs gaining hands-on experience with statistical analysis both individually and in teams. The project team develops discipline specific materials and activities that take full advantage of the current technologies to tailor courses to the students needs. The objectives of the project include; 1) increasing students mastery of statistical strategies; 2) improving their ability to transfer knowledge of statistical concepts to problems in different disciplines; and 3) fostering the collaborative skills that their professional lives will require doc15941 none Computer Science (31) Since this world is built around geometric objects, we should not be surprised that many areas in computer science and engineering focus on representing, processing, and modeling geometric objects. These familiar areas include computer graphics, computer-aided design, 3D vision, visualization, robotics, NC machining, molecular modeling, terrain modeling and GIS. However, a typical computer science curriculum has a little or even no discussion about computing with geometry. This project addresses this deficiency in the training of future computer professionals, especially at a time that more and more applications require highly trained programmers with geometric and modeling skills. This project is an extension of a previous very successful proof-of-concept project, Geometric Computing in the Undergraduate Computer Science Curricula. A web-based textbook and a software tool DesignMentor were developed and used worldwide and are highly regarded. The project builds on the lessons learned in this previous project and on the experiences of instructors and users from all over the world. The primary goal of this project is to design and develop a set of comprehensive, elementary, and flexible course materials for teaching topics in computing with geometry that can be used in a dedicated course or across several courses (e.g., computing with geometry, computer graphics, computer-aided design, geometric modeling, and visualization). A secondary goal is to develop tools with which students can experiment and visualize the concepts, geometric algorithms, and skills in an intuitive, non-mathematical, and learning-by-doing way. With a set of well-organized contemporary course materials and pedagogical tools, we expect that students will be familiar with the state-of-the-art of computing in the geometric world, acquire basic knowledge and skills, know how to handle geometric problems in different applications and environments, and be well-prepared to approach geometric applications and their software development with confidence. Moreover, this project may also improve the retention rate of students, especially those geometric-minded students who may not perform well in traditional courses, in computer science. On the other hand, this project may also help students who are weak in visualization and geometry to improve their skills. Most importantly, this project impacts the future by preparing computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers for professions that need a solid foundation in computing with geometry doc15942 none Engineering - Materials Science (57) Based on knowledge and skills developed in a previous CCLI grant we intend to develop CD-ROM based tutorials on functional materials. These CD-ROM based tutorials are designed, using a blackboard analogy, to support important classes of functional materials that are currently missing from introductory material science curricula. The tutorials will be contained on CD-ROMs that will receive international distribution. They, along with an included interactive Glossary and an Animation Video player will be available for instructors who wish to use them to support traditional lecture courses. The tutorials, along with the textbook being written to accompany them, could be used in a number of other learning situations, including distance learning, continuing education, and courses at institutions that do not have an engineering curriculum. The topics covered will include dielectric, piezoelectric, ferroelectric, magnetostrictive, and optical properties of materials. In this project we plan to create a new set of interactive, self-paced, multimedia tutorials for a new sophomore engineering course being developed at the University of Pennsylvania. The subject matter will be structured using a case study approach. Our new tutorials are designed to enhance student learning before a lecture is given. The material in these tutorials will be used to introduce students to specific materials concepts that they will be tested on before the lecture. We plan to use these materials in conjunction with a textbook. Our long range goal is to create a collection of online instructional materials that serve as the core for a one semester freshman level course doc15943 none Engineering - Civil (54) We have identified a need for failure awareness in the undergraduate engineering curriculum. Engineers can learn a lot from failures, and failures play an essential role in engineering design. This need has been documented in a number of papers and conferences over the past 15 years. Our work is in response to this situation and aimed at providing a heightened appreciation of the role failure analysis knowledge can play in higher education and public safety. We have produced educational materials on failure case studies for use in civil engineering and engineering mechanics courses, in print and CD-ROM format. In addition we have developed a one-day workshop to disseminate these materials to 24 engineering faculty members from across the U.S. During the course of our project we have developed our educational materials, including review and feedback by the committees discussed below, and the workshop, as well as a thorough evaluation of both efforts. Although the majority of the work has been carried out at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, faculty members and practicing engineers from across the country have participate in the development of these materials and the workshop. This work has been accomplished through the various committees of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Technical Council on Forensic Engineering (TCFE). Our work has specifically targets the NSF Division of Undergraduate Education crosscutting theme of Faculty Development doc15944 none Engineering - Other (59) The project adapts and implements the studio-learning approach to undergraduate education that has been developed by the Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). NJIT understands that a research university must offer an undergraduate experience that incorporates active learning and promotes critical thinking among students. Studio courses integrate the traditional lecture recitation laboratory into studio sessions in which faculty serve as mentors for students engaged in scaffolded exercises. The RPI approach has been successfully adapted at other universities in physics, chemistry, mathematics, and introductory engineering. Evaluations have shown that studio learning increases student retention of the subject material, improves student and faculty satisfaction, builds scholarly communities among students, and engages them in active discovery. NJIT s piloting of two introductory courses in - demonstrated the potential of studio courses in biomedical engineering. This proposal is matched with funding from the Whitaker Foundation and from the New Jersey Commission on Higher Education. These funds enable NJIT to design and equip a studio classroom. Activities specific to this grant include the adaptation of RPI s studio method and the conversion of three introductory biomedical engineering courses to studio courses. The project also integrates technology into these studio courses. Project outcomes are going to be validated through external evaluation. A comprehensive dissemination program is being used to support faculty, student, and K-12 teacher development doc15945 none Interdisciplinary (99) Adaptive Teaching and Learning Environments (ATLes) is a project that is providing undergraduate science, mathematics, engineering, and technical students with problem-based, authentic learning activities designed to help them develop problem-solving skills and master content. The ATLes project is founded on constructivist learning theory and peer-to-peer faculty development while using technology to bridge learning goals and promote problem solving. Adaptive Teaching and Learning Environments is a collection of collaborative communication tools and content tutorials in science and mathematics education embedded into generative adaptive tutorials based on progressive disclosure of key concepts, facts, and data. Regardless of the course or topic, ATLes requires students to write hypotheses, sketch problem analyses, and prepare summaries or reports using the same technology-based tools recent graduates are using in the workplace. Additionally, the learning path a student takes through an ATLes course is being tracked, allowing instructors to identify successful learning pathways, and of equal importance, those areas that are not successful, where students struggle with material. Finally, this project incorporates a unique research design that assesses the effect ATLes has on student critical thinking and command of discipline specific knowledge. ATLes development is broken into three major themes: 1) adaptive software engine design, 2) ATLes lesson module design, and 3) comprehensive assessment of the effects of ATLes on student critical thinking and mastery of discipline- specific knowledge doc15946 none Geology (42) Computer simulation is an ideal tool for understanding the complex effects of a variety of physical and geological processes that interact to influence landform evolution over extended periods of time (centuries, thousands of years, millions of years). Yet simulation models and the visualization of their results usually require specialized software that is not easily accessible to undergraduate education. This proof-of-concept project is developing a web-based interactive landform simulation model that can be accessed anytime and anywhere via a standard web browser to improve undergraduate students learning experience of landform evolution. This web-based interactive model is employing a cellular automata algorithm and is implemented using Java technology, which is designed to run on different computer hardware and operating systems. Students are able to interact with the model by selecting and manipulating different parameters (such as precipitation intensity, degree of surface runoff, rock erodibility, tectonic movement, etc.) through a Graphical User Interface and observe how different combinations of processes (parameters) influence the landform evolution. This project integrates the latest technology into undergraduate education to improve both teaching and learning. Because of its global potential in web based dissemination, it has the ability to reach a wide and diverse audience, including under-represented populations in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology, non-traditional students, and students with learning disabilities. In addition, it enables the investigators themselves to refine their own skills in the new and promising area of 3D visualization on the web, which is beneficial to their own teaching and research doc15947 none Faculty members attempting to create materials for collections of engineering education content in a digital library face several challenges. Lack of training in sound pedagogical practices, a shortage of training in the effective use of educational technology, short supply of required resources and time to produce completed and tested works, and a lack of emphasis on improved teaching in the university faculty rewards systems are the major obstacles to materials development. To remedy this situation, this project endeavors to create an active, engaged, and sustained virtual community of engineering educators who energetically contribute to and share materials from a common collection of courseware. The virtual community is taking form as an incubator in which faculty are trained in sound pedagogical practices e.g., developing learning goals and assessment techniques. Next, participants are schooled in the effective use of technology in many different teaching learning situations including: classroom presentation, self-study, distance and distributed learning, experiential learning, etc. Once trained, faculty then develop a portion of a collection of courseware modules in their area of expertise. Guidelines are provided so that modules can be integrated with each other from both the standpoint of technology mix as well as the pedagogical approach being used. Members of the virtual community of contributors subsequently become the testers of the courseware modules, with each of the contributors using a subset of modules to conduct courses at their home campuses. As soon as a baseline collection in a topic area is established the project personnel will present national workshops on how to adopt and adapt the materials in the collection. NEEDS will be used to catalog and make the collections available. Keywords: Virtual community, NEEDS, digital library doc15948 none Interdisciplinary (99) Core concepts, such as Newton s second law of motion or the ideal gas law, underpin a rigorous science education. These ideas and laws come from physics, math, and chemistry; their necessity to practical and advanced science literacy is evidenced by widespread institutional standards requiring study in these disciplines by students in the sciences. Over the course of their careers, students mature in their understanding of fundamental scientific concepts, moving from memorization to analysis and synthesis of core ideas. The goal of science education at Brown University is to provide learning environments where students can become self-driven inquirers and investigators capable of scientific discovery. To achieve this growth, students require grounding in core scientific concepts and practice in the in self-driven inquiry and investigative behaviors they will use as scientists and scientifically literate citizens. To improve understanding of key science concepts and promote inquiry-based learning, we are developing a prototype Context-Rich Interactive Science Teaching and Learning System (CRISTALS) for pilot testing in 13 Brown University courses and at Rhode Island College and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The web-based CRISTALS environment provides students with information and problems facilitating the exploration of a core concept in a context rich in interdisciplinary applications and examples. The CRISTALS environment is expected to support instructors in adapting science pedagogy to better meet the needs of a diverse student population. The CRISTALS tool provides students with opportunities to improve their ability to apply core scientific concepts in problems from multiple disciplines, and encourages self-driven inquiry into fundamental scientific principles doc15949 none Engineering - Other (59) Aerosol science and engineering (ASE) has applications in several fields ranging from environmental engineering, public health, medical sciences, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, and materials science . The National Science and Technology Council lists ASE as one of the Inherently Interdisciplinary areas. ASE is also linked to the National Nanotechnology Initiative. However, teaching of the subject matter has been primarily restricted to graduate level resulting in shortage of professionals in this field. To ensure further development in this area and to explore its true potential, it is essential that the subject be introduced in a broader manner at undergraduate level. The objective of the project is to develop integrated and interactive aerosol dynamics computer programs to enhance the understanding of aerosol science and engineering (ASE). To achieve this objective, three stand alone modules are going to be developed to be included in courses that cover aerosol topics, i.e. ENV Air Pollution Control Design, ChE 368 Transport Phenomena, and the dual level course ENV 518 Aerosol Science and Engineering. These modules are going to consist of (1) Cyclone for particulate control, (2) Optical Particle Counter for particle size characterization, and (3) Respiratory Deposition. CD-ROMs are going to be prepared and disseminated utilizing the network of American Association for Aerosol Research (AAAR). Formative and summative evaluations are going to be conducted in addition to the pilot evaluations in several aerosol related undergraduate classes. Full development is going to be designed based on the feedback obtained from the current project doc15950 none Engineering - Mechanical (56) A proof-of-concept is being undertaken for the development of web-based laboratory modules for statics and mechanics of materials, two foundational courses for Mechanical, Civil, and Biological Engineering students. Two modules are being developed. The first module is a very preliminary experiment using the pressure in a soda can as a demonstration of thin-walled pressure vessel theory. The second module and principal activity of the project focus on the torsion of both engineered and biological materials. This module features web-based instructions which combines audio, text and video of the sample preparation process and the process of conducting the actual experiments. Furthermore, this module also provides data from real tests, which includes data from biological materials that the students download and analyze as part of their laboratory reports. One goal of the project is to develop a web-based laboratory that serves a variety of educational needs. As a consequence, this second module is being developed in consultation with colleagues from several schools including two-year community college. Once developed, the module will be implemented and evaluated at Cornell and at the other schools. The approach to web-based laboratories, which combines web-based instructions with real data, serves as a model across many engineering disciplines. It is also a step towards making web-based instruction more active by requiring substantial analysis by the student in addition to providing visualization and explanation of the processes. The project will have immediate impact on the large number of students who are taking the statics and mechanics of materials classes at Cornell and at other institutions. If successful, the project will lead to a full deployment proposal and to exploration of the commercialization of the laboratory materials. If commercialized, the laboratory materials could impact a larger number of engineering and technology students, since statics and mechanics of materials are taught at many institutions other than the ones involved in the project. Key Words: Web-based laboratory modules, Web-based instructions for statics, Web-based instructions for mechanics of materials doc15951 none Physics (13) This project is developing and field testing a set of companion materials intended to provide visualization and numerical solutions illustrating problems and concepts in upper-level undergraduate courses in electricity and magnetism. The goal is determine how the use of a highly portable and cost-free implementation of computational and visual learning tool may be brought into wide acceptance. The subject of electrodynamics has been chosen for this proof-of-concept project because of the rich opportunity for visualization. This prototype project involves developing a selection of sample learning aides for undergraduate electrodynamics with a component of field testing in a classroom environment. The project materials consist of Java programs with numerical methods and a visualization interface and are accompanied by descriptive text. A key component of the prototype concept is the text and discussion materials that work with the Java visualization and computational tools. This accompanying material includes subject explanation and description of the use of the computational visual tools. Though a significant quantity of learning materials and software are being produced in this prototype project, one of the major research question addressed is the design of materials to that they are actually used in the classroom. The design concept being tested seeks to remove many of the typical barriers to adapting new material for an existing class. Among the barriers being addressed are cost, relevance, software compatibility, and the important issue of time invested by teacher and student in getting started with the learning tools. Relevance and other design features are the subject of field tests included in the project design doc15952 none Computer Science (31) The academic setting of an undergraduate software engineering course imposes fundamental obstacles to the goal of providing students practical experience and skills development. Some major differences between an academic and industrial setting include motivation, amount of available time, and the size and scope of projects. Furthermore, the academic environment requires ensuring a certain level of competency in all students. We accept these differences and are developing a software engineering methodology tailored to the academic setting. One objective of this methodology is to increase the size and scope of the software engineering course project in a way that affords students practical experience in project management and system design without increasing their workload. We also wish to insure an individual level of competency, particularly in the programming skills of lower division students. To achieve these objectives, we are devising a project methodology as the centerpiece of an upper division software engineering course. This methodology is unique in that it will use an intra-curriculum approach involving multiple courses at different levels in the curriculum. The software engineering course will simultaneously cooperating with introductory CS courses, data structures courses, as well as with advanced, specialized elective courses like database, Human Computer Interface, and networks. Software engineering students will focus on design and management activities while the implementation burden is shared with other courses. An automated testing and management system has been developed as part of this project. This system tracks individual skills competency, particularly of lower division students, and assists in coordination between the various courses doc15953 none Computer Science (31) This country urgently needs more people trained in computer science. At present the number of students entering the CS pipeline in American colleges and universities is not increasing and, in the case of female and minority students, is actually declining. Thus if we are to meet our national need for CS researchers, software developers, and information technology workers, it is vital to attract, engage, support, and retain computer science students more effectively. Our project addresses these issues by developing a prototype for innovative multimedia instructional software for introductory computer programming classes. These software tools will be built on top of the existing OWL on-line instruction system, a system that has been used with great success in chemistry, physics and mathematics. The array of proposed software tools is designed to make the techniques of introductory programming and problem-solving more accessible for students with a wide range of backgrounds in computing. This proof of concept project will include a fairly extensive suite of single-step OWL-based learning activities, a small collection of more complex, multistage problem solving exercises, an evaluation plan for a full study, including baseline data for that study, and a preliminary statistical assessment of the performance of CS-OWL machinery in our classes. - Construction of a suite of questions about code behavior by creating multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank questions for beginning CS1 activities, and using existing OWL machinery to automate grading, gather statistics, and keep class records for participating students - Construction of a collection of OWL-embedded interactive activities, which illustrate and develop elementary OO programming skills. - Develop the indexing scheme for a database of elementary Java code examples, for the purpose of developing student reading skills, and for the purpose of supplying raw material for other CS-OWL activities. - Development of guided problem solving exercises, which are designed to teach multi-step problem solving skills. develop three or four multi-stage problem-solving examples - Develop an evaluation plan in which lays the groundwork for a future full evaluation by establishing a baseline assessment of student performance in our CS1 classes over the next several semesters. We also expect to provide some preliminary statistics that show some early signs that our CS-OWL system is an effective learning tool doc15954 none Economics (82) Economics students enrolled in large lecture-based introductory courses rarely have the opportunity to interact with course content. Because of this they do not gain a deep understanding of the material or the ability to analyze and interpret complex economic events. Classroom experiments have been shown to be useful in aiding student understanding of the material. In the past these exercises have been impractical in large courses. This project is developing wireless classroom technology to allow students in large classes to participate in classroom experiments during the class meeting times. We have assembled a cross-disciplinary group that is creating a learning system that is making it possible to realize the benefits of classroom experiments in large classes. Our vision is of a portable system composed of standard electronic handheld devices (such as PDAs) that communicate with a laptop computer that will organize economics simulations such as markets, public goods environments and economic games. While other researchers are currently working on internet-based experiments, such systems do not translate to large classes unless students complete the exercise asynchronously. The instructor has only very limited ability to revise the game in response to student questions or suggestions. Evaluation is a critical component of this project. We have designed a controlled experiment to collect data on performance in a large lecture course. We are evaluating to what extent this wireless system can improve student outcomes and reduce costs doc15955 none Engineering - Electrical (55) Instructional materials that fit undergraduate classroom teaching and laboratory experiments for the subject of web-based Instrumentation and Control (WIC) are scarce. The literature has a few examples of previous efforts to build virtual web-based laboratories, but most of these are very specialized and the support software is very expensive. It is the goal of this proof-of-concept project to offer an undergraduate course with a companion laboratory that teaches students to design and develop web tools for WIC. The idea is a result ot the research the PI conducted for Siemens and Motorola. The objectives of the project are to demonstrate that (a) it is practical and feasible to offer engineering undergraduate students a course on WIC that involves recent technological innovations; (b) the proposed course can be effectively conducted with two integrated components--classrom lectures and hands-on practices through a remote setting; and (c) the course materials can also be offered after modification to gifted high school students and thus be used as a vehicle to attract students to the engineering disciplines. The plan is to reinforce the process by regularly evaluating the project progress based on gathered data and information, and disseminating the project findings through conference presentations, scholarly publications, preparation of a textbook based on the lecture notes and laboratory materials doc15956 none Computer Science (31) Closed laboratories have become common in the computer science educational community as a means of enhancing student achievement. However, circumstances for many departments have changed since the original push to closed laboratories: rapid advances in web-based technologies and increasing ownership of networked personal computers by students makes it even less sensible to use closed laboratories to deliver exercises or tutorial activities and many institutions are facing increasing enrollments, shortage of space, or reduced budgets for laboratory assistants that require departments to ensure that resource expensive closed laboratory components for courses are used as wisely as possible. In this project we are re-examining the strengths of the closed laboratory model and assessing methods and technology for learning outside a closed laboratory in order to deliver better practicum experiences for students and to reduce a department s costs for developing and delivering closed-laboratory components in a computing curriculum. We are: (1) analyzing the needs for a closed-laboratory component for a course and also for the set of student activities carried out during a course s weekly laboratory sessions; (2) determining what practicum-oriented student activities are best served in a closed laboratory environment and which can effectively be handled outside a closed laboratory session; (3) identifying and documenting a set of best-practices of techniques and tools that can support effective learning activities for closed laboratories, and also for activities that are better moved to an open laboratory situation; and (4) using this set of best-practices to define a development guide for how to plan and implement laboratory components doc15957 none Klieger This exploratory research studies an ancient trade route between northern Myanmar (Burma), Tibet and Yunnan Province of China. The principal investigator, an anthropologist, and a photojournalist will travel where few outsiders have ever received permission to travel, the Hkakabo Razi region of Myanmar. The project will examine trade relationships between highland people of Myanmar and Tibetan traders, exchanging salt for forest products. They will gather information on the history of trade relations and kinship ties in the region, with an eye towards documenting the traditional pattern of behavior before rapid change begins. The research is important as it will provide a baseline of information about the Taron people living in this little-known region. This sort of research also provides valuable data about the persistence of cultural groups in isolated regions doc15958 none Biological Sciences (61) This project continues an NSF-funded project to teach undergraduate neurobiology through interactive simulations that mimic the experience of doing actual experiments in a real wet lab. Our first effort produced a software framework that allows students to learn basic concepts by doing simulated experiments in an active exploratory way, and a small set of interactive laboratories that exercise this framework through explorations of, e.g. resting potentials, action potentials and simple neuromodulation. Here, we are undertaking major new efforts which exploit our existing software framework to: 1) teach students quantitative and analytical skills and methods in the context of data analysis and experimental design; 2) make our software and labs broadly available to students from a wide variety of backgrounds and educational environments (including non-traditional learners) through a series of interactive tutorials covering fundamental concepts and the use of our software; and 3) develop new computer-based tools for the objective assessment and graded testing of student learning. The result will be a second version of our software, incorporating major new tools for experimental design, data analysis, and testing assessment of student learning, together with a collection of 30 fully tested interactive laboratories covering most or all of the core concepts in cellular neurobiology doc15959 none While a large body of educational research advocates active learning, practical constraints hinder changes in large introductory courses. Online homework systems help bypass some of these constraints by integrating easily into common course structures, automatically grading of student assignments, and providing timely feedback. However, the online assignments continue to be largely quantitative problems. This proposal is creating a variety of interactive online homework activities that is enhancing students conceptual learning and increasing their interest in science. These problems pose goals more closely resembling the work of practicing chemists, focus on designing simple experiments, and put chemical concepts into meaningful, real-world contexts. This work is impacting students in introductory courses since homework serves as the primary means through which students practice applying new concepts. This project builds on previous NSF-funded work that has produced a Virtual Lab, now used by three universities and 500 students to date, and a set of authoring tools (CREATE) to facilitate interactive educational software development. We are developing 5-10 problems, varying in difficulty, for each of at least 10 chapters of introductory chemistry. The quality of these materials is being ensured through intensive assessment -- first by interviewing students to identify likely difficulties and later by including conceptual and attitude questions in the online homework system to compile ongoing data across universities. Dissemination through several course management systems, our own web site, a CD, and professional meetings are enabling instructors to browse the problems, their solutions, and their difficulty doc15717 none Engineering - Mechanical (56) The objective of this project is the integration of simulation technology into undergraduate education through the development of teaching modules (TM) for complementary computational fluid dynamics (CFD), experimental fluid dynamics (EFD), and uncertainty analysis (UA) for use in teaching undergraduate fluid mechanics courses and laboratories. Faculty partners from colleges of engineering at small and large public, small private, and small historically minority private universities are collaborating on the development of the TM, the effective implementation, the evaluation, the dissemination, and the pedagogy of simulation technology using web-based techniques. The evaluation plan includes collaboration with faculty from the University of Iowa, College of Education, the Department of Psychology and Quantitative Foundation and Center for Evaluation Assessment. The TM include three parts: 1) lectures on CFD and EFD methodology and standard procedures and UA; 2) CFD templates for academic use of commercial industrial CFD software; 3) exercise notes for use of CFD templates and complementary EFD and UA. The commercial industrial CFD software is FLUENT, http: www.fluent.com , which is a widely used CFD software in many industries and universities and a partner in the present work. Faculty development activities are occurring in parts 1) and 3) of the production of the TM, and during part 2), faculty development activities are occurring during the generation of TM specifications and collaboration with FLUENT on design of CFD templates. FLUENT is providing software development and testing of CFD templates; training of faculty in the use of CFD templates; national international self-sustaining web-based distribution of the TM, including all parts 1) -3); and free faculty use of FLUENT Flowlab. Faculty partners will meet yearly for development of the TM and collaboration and training with FLUENT Flowlab. The initial capability of the TM are based on those capabilities developed in the proof-of-concept at The University of Iowa in spring semester , fall semester , and spring semester . The results from this prior effort may be reviewed at http: www.icaen.uiwa.edu ~fluids . This project is a collaborative between the University of Iowa ( ), Iowa State University ( ), Howard University ( ) and Cornell University ( ). Keywords: FLUENT, Flowlab, teaching modules, computational fluid dynamics, experimental fluid dynamics, uncertainty analysis doc15717 none Engineering - Mechanical (56) The objective of this project is the integration of simulation technology into undergraduate education through the development of teaching modules (TM) for complementary computational fluid dynamics (CFD), experimental fluid dynamics (EFD), and uncertainty analysis (UA) for use in teaching undergraduate fluid mechanics courses and laboratories. Faculty partners from colleges of engineering at small and large public, small private, and small historically minority private universities are collaborating on the development of the TM, the effective implementation, the evaluation, the dissemination, and the pedagogy of simulation technology using web-based techniques. The evaluation plan includes collaboration with faculty from the University of Iowa, College of Education, the Department of Psychology and Quantitative Foundation and Center for Evaluation Assessment. The TM include three parts: 1) lectures on CFD and EFD methodology and standard procedures and UA; 2) CFD templates for academic use of commercial industrial CFD software; 3) exercise notes for use of CFD templates and complementary EFD and UA. The commercial industrial CFD software is FLUENT, http: www.fluent.com , which is a widely used CFD software in many industries and universities and a partner in the present work. Faculty development activities are occurring in parts 1) and 3) of the production of the TM, and during part 2), faculty development activities are occurring during the generation of TM specifications and collaboration with FLUENT on design of CFD templates. FLUENT is providing software development and testing of CFD templates; training of faculty in the use of CFD templates; national international self-sustaining web-based distribution of the TM, including all parts 1) -3); and free faculty use of FLUENT Flowlab. Faculty partners will meet yearly for development of the TM and collaboration and training with FLUENT Flowlab. The initial capability of the TM are based on those capabilities developed in the proof-of-concept at The University of Iowa in spring semester , fall semester , and spring semester . The results from this prior effort may be reviewed at http: www.icaen.uiwa.edu ~fluids . This project is a collaborative between the University of Iowa ( ), Iowa State University ( ), Howard University ( ) and Cornell University ( ). Keywords: FLUENT, Flowlab, teaching modules, computational fluid dynamics, experimental fluid dynamics, uncertainty analysis doc15962 none Atmospheric Sciences (41) A visually-realistic virtual tornadic supercell thunderstorm is being developed with data probe capabilities, providing students from K-12 through graduate with opportunities to learn as scientists learn in a constructivist manner. The virtual storm is a proof-of-concept for later creation of other virtual geoscience systems. The virtual storm addresses the NSF goal of providing all students access to excellent undergraduate science education, with learning based upon direct experience with methods and processes of inquiry. This research is being built upon a simple prototype of the virtual storm, already developed with internal funds at Iowa State University. Although the prototype storm, lacking data probe capabilities, was developed in a fully-immersive virtual CAVE, a version has been disseminated to linux-based PCs, improving student access. We are creating a Windows-based version for wider dissemination. The numerous small-scale details within a super cell thunderstorm that reflect the wide range of important atmospheric processes occurring make the storm an especially useful model to serve as a proof-of-concept. An assessment of the impact the virtual storm has on science education is being made by comparing student answers to questions on the topic in a large-lecture introductory course in year 1 (no exposure to the virtual storm) to those from year 2 when students are exploring the virtual storm. Successful completion of the project should demonstrate that exciting laboratory-type experiences of phenomena previously off limits to students within classroom laboratories can be brought to students everywhere by virtual reality simulations doc15963 none A major goal of science curriculum standards is to provide students with an opportunity to understand macroscopic features in terms of the microscopic interactions that give rise to those features. Our cross-disciplinary project team has developed a set of instructional materials that help to achieve this goal. A key feature of these materials is the use of molecular dynamics, a technique developed in recent years that programs the motion of atoms and molecules based on the laws that govern their motion. Thus, a student can observe, in real time, the microscopic behavior and, using split-screen software programs, can simultaneously see the corresponding macroscopic behavior. By changing the conditions of the system (e.g., volume, pressure, or temperature), the student can better understand how both microscopic and macroscopic properties depend on these conditions. These interactive materials are being used across a continuum of intellectual depth, from the demonstration of qualitative concepts to a full-edged tool of exploration and self-discovery, and they are being used to teach a topics such as mathematics, chemistry, biology, and physics as well as applied topics in engineering and medicine. This project is enhancing existing materials by development of new multidisciplinary curriculum modules that integrate current nanoscience molecular modeling research with science education. Topics such as nanotubes and buckyballs, molecular motors and molecular machines, protein folding, aggregate formation and dissociation such as atherosclerosis and Alzheimer s disease, crystal growth, and designer membranes are being developed. Through existing research collaborations, the team is (1) developing new undergraduate science curriculum modules (curriculum and software tools) that focus on the treatment of nanoscale concepts that unite various scientific and engineering disciplines, (2) classroom-testing materials through laboratory-based extensions to existing SMET courses at Boston University, (3) fostering Web-based community-building and support, and (4) implementing a prototype teacher development program for faculty at 2- and 4-year undergraduate institutions. The project is being evaluated in terms of student learning, classroom practice, and impact on under-represented populations doc15964 none Engineering - Other (59) Industrial and systems engineers go on to jobs that often involve the design and or management of complex large-scale projects. Such projects require exceptional skills in knowledge integration, teamwork and decision-making. Unfortunately, there are few cost-effective ways for developing the necessary skills for working on projects of this scale and complexity. As a result, students rarely see more than unrealistically simplified problems and finish their undergraduate engineering education with a collection of disjoint tools, techniques and skills without the necessary experience to unify and integrate them. Engineering schools often use capstone classes with projects in industry to culminate undergraduate education. While this can be a valuable experience, students rarely get the kind of projects that integrate their technical skills. This project develops a different kind of capstone class: one that takes advantage of Active Learning, where the students are immersed in realistic experiences of designing and running a virtual manufacturing floor. The manufacturing environment consists of compiled documents, role-playing, and a software virtual floor. Unlike many other manufacturing simulations that concentrate on the details of the machines and products, this product focuses on the experience of designing and running fairly generic large-scale process projects. In this capstone project, the students draw on all of their engineering skills, apply them to a wide range of problems, and face the consequences of their decisions doc15965 none Computer Science (31) Bioinformatics brings together the fields of biology, computer science, and information technology to analyze, among other things, the gigabytes of genome data that have been collected over the past fifteen years. The work that will be done by bioinformaticists in the 21st century will dramatically change the practice of medicine much like the discovery of the transistor altered the course of information technology in the 20th century. The national need for bioinformaticists, estimated by one study to be 20,000 by the year , with the education and training to speak the complex languages of biology and computer science will not be met by one institution alone. The goal of this project is to develop courseware for general use in diverse contexts at other institutions, even those without a degree program in Bioinformatics. This project provides a packet of lecture presentations and laboratory manuals that can be widely disseminated and used by teams of biologists and computer scientists outside of RIT to support instruction in Bioinformatics. These instructional materials are being developed by an interdisciplinary team of biologists and computer scientists with input from academic partners from outside institutions. This work includes supporting material, prepared by computer scientists, written for biologists so that a biologist can understand the computational processes being utilized to analyze the biological data. Likewise supporting material, prepared by biologists, written for computer scientists will be developed so that a computer scientist can understand the basic biological processes being analyzed doc15966 none Computer Science (31) We are addressing a major issue facing many computer science students, i.e., that they are deficient in mathematics in general and that they do not see the relevance of mathematics to computer science, by integrating discrete mathematics into the first-year computer science curriculum via CS-Complete examples. A CS-Complete example is a problem that covers the topics of representation, problem solving, algorithms, recursion, induction, and data structures. In order to further help with the integration of discrete mathematics into the first year computer science sequence, we are constructing software tools that provide students with an enhanced integrated development environment for Java that enables them to analyze their computer programs (in terms of their correctness and time complexity) while they are creating them. There are two primary goals of this project. First, we are producing a useful software development tool that enhances instruction in the introductory computer science curriculum and is useful for practicing software developers as well. Second, we are producing model first and second course syllabi that cover all of the core topics of the Programming Fundamentals plus over 25% of the core topics of the Discrete Structures, Algorithms and Complexity, and Software Engineering areas of the Computing Curricula proposal for Computer Science doc15967 none Interdisciplinary (99) This project builds upon the successful regional Shodor Computational Science Institute (SCSI) to create a National Computational Science Institute (NCSI). Reaching more than undergraduate faculty per year for three years, NCSI offers a proven, modular set of in-person, video-conferenced, and web-accessible workshops, seminars, and support activities to introduce the hands-on use of computational science, numerical models and data visualization tools across the undergraduate curriculum. This project represents a partnership with the Education, Outreach and Training Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure, the National Computational Science Education Consortium, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and more than two dozen undergraduate institutions, high performance computing centers and vendors. The target audience for NCSI is teams of faculty from predominantly undergraduate institutions, minority serving institutions, and community colleges whose students are either the next generation of scientists and engineers, the next generation of K-12 teachers, or both. NCSI participants then assist other faculty on their own campuses and at neighboring institutions to introduce computational science in their own classes. The main work of NCSI is accomplished through three synergistic but distinct efforts that can be modeled as PULL, PUSH, and PERMEATE. Regionally distributed workshops PULL faculty within a reasonable travel distance for a week of intense interdisciplinary training, collaboration, and curriculum development in computational science. Participants explore the use of modeling and visualization tools in existing courses, while stimulating creation of new courses and promoting new modes of undergraduate research. NCSI staff and participants proactively PUSH computational science education onto the agendas of numerous annual meetings of professional and discipline-specific societies, by offering workshops, conducting tutorials, presenting papers and posters, and serving on program committees. To sustain these efforts, NCSI PERMEATEs on-going and proposed undergraduate curriculum efforts providing interdisciplinary and discipline specific web-accessible courses for faculty enhancement, and resources for interactive exploration including curriculum, problem-based modeling modules, tools, and tutorials, leveraging Shodor s award-winning Computational Science Education Reference Desk doc15968 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This project addresses two national needs: the quality of Science, Technological, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education for all students needs improvement; and the participation of populations currently under-represented in the STEM pipeline needs to be increased, thus increasing the pool of professionals available for the careers in science and engineering. The general goal of the project is therefore to improve the success rate of undergraduate students in STEM disciplines, particularly targeting minority populations. The specific objectives pursued in order to achieve this goal are formulated in order to enhance student motivation, increase student time on task, strengthen student problem solving and analytical skills, and enhance the participation of faculty at minority serving institutions in effecting STEM education improvement. In order to accomplish these objectives, the Virginia Tech Emporium is adapted and implemented. Other innovative educational materials that incorporate information technology and STEM discipline specific applications to enhance content and motivate students are developed, and a model Lecture-Laboratory Calculus course is developed and tested which incorporates these materials doc15969 none Engineering - Chemical (53) Our work addresses the fundamental national needs of engineering student retention because it provides a project inquiry -based experience for first year engineering students who have not yet committed to engineering. To address this need we have created a comprehensive, web-integrated, learning and student assessment module. This module is based on a feedback-controlled acid neutralization laboratory experiment. It has been designed for our first year engineering students and includes topics such as feedback control, which is of interest to many of the engineering disciplines. Our experiment also incorporates the use of mass conservation equations (of interest to chemical and environmental engineers) and modeling of engineering systems with computer - based simulation which is of interest to all engineers. A key part of our module was the development of a web-based student (Primary Trait Analysis) assessment tool. This assessment tool will be wrapped around the simulator so that instructors can observe and then provide feedback about how students go through the process of using a simulations tool to explore, understand, and interpret data from a physical experiment. From this, instructors would gain crucial insight into student learning pathways and thus determine both how, and how well students are learning. Further it endeavors to show how to integrate web-based information and the use of an engineering simulator to explore and understand a physical experiment. The details necessary to reproduce the experiment, the simulator, the web-based information and the assessment procedure are available for testing and implementation at other institutions doc15951 none Physics (13) This project is developing and field testing a set of companion materials intended to provide visualization and numerical solutions illustrating problems and concepts in upper-level undergraduate courses in electricity and magnetism. The goal is determine how the use of a highly portable and cost-free implementation of computational and visual learning tool may be brought into wide acceptance. The subject of electrodynamics has been chosen for this proof-of-concept project because of the rich opportunity for visualization. This prototype project involves developing a selection of sample learning aides for undergraduate electrodynamics with a component of field testing in a classroom environment. The project materials consist of Java programs with numerical methods and a visualization interface and are accompanied by descriptive text. A key component of the prototype concept is the text and discussion materials that work with the Java visualization and computational tools. This accompanying material includes subject explanation and description of the use of the computational visual tools. Though a significant quantity of learning materials and software are being produced in this prototype project, one of the major research question addressed is the design of materials to that they are actually used in the classroom. The design concept being tested seeks to remove many of the typical barriers to adapting new material for an existing class. Among the barriers being addressed are cost, relevance, software compatibility, and the important issue of time invested by teacher and student in getting started with the learning tools. Relevance and other design features are the subject of field tests included in the project design doc15971 none Biological Sciences (61) Bioinformatics is central to biology in the 21st century. The use of computer based analytical tools on electronically stored and distributed data is fundamentally changing life science research and its application to problems in medicine, agriculture, conservation, and forensics. In light of this information revolution undergraduate biology curricula must be redesigned to prepare the next generation of informed citizens and prepare those who will pursue careers in the life sciences. The BEDROCK initiative (Bioinformatics Education Dissemination: Reaching Out, Connecting and Knitting- together) is enhancing, expanding, and empowering a national community of bioinformatics educators. The project goals include: 1) Identify and support faculty who can take a leadership role in bioinformatics education; 2) Highlight and distribute innovative approaches to incorporating bioinformatics data and techniques throughout undergraduate biology education; and, 3) Establish mechanisms for the broad dissemination of bioinformatics resource materials and innovative teaching models. To achieve these goals we are holding a series of faculty development workshops around the country; recruiting and supporting a group of innovative faculty to implement and disseminate bioinformatics education materials; publishing resources for bioinformatics education and building a networked collaboratory environment for developing and sharing bioinformatics educational approaches. This project builds on the established pedagogical philosophy and academic community of the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium. Specifically, BEDROCK extends our work in bioinformatics education over the last four years during which we have established a community of collaborators representing the diverse resources required to mount a national dissemination effort doc15972 none Engineering - Chemical (53) We have developed and deployed a number of virtual unit operations lab projects. Our lab-based units have been developed to pose open-ended what if design problems by having students work on real time chemical processes. These chemical processes will include distillation and polymer crystallization for example. This will enable student on our campus as well as students from other campuses, colleges and high schools, to gain experience on a wide range of design, scale-up, and start-up problems generated by these laboratory projects. We hope to have students gain access to experiments that would not otherwise be available to them. These experiments can be used either in a classroom or lecture setting. Development efforts have involved collaboration between faculty at John Hopkins University and MIT doc15973 none Mathematical Sciences (21). This project is developing an expanded set of features and functionality of a mathematical visualization program, 3D-Filmstrip. Project tasks include writing appropriate documentation, not only for the software itself but more importantly for the mathematical objects it is used to visualize; improving the scriptability of the program, both to enhance its ability to communicate with other running programs (e.g., web-servers, database programs, etc.) and also to facilitate the automation of its use as a curriculum supplement; producing additional format interchange software, so that objects created using 3D-Filmstrip can be further processed and viewed in other programs (e.g., Mathematica, Maple, VRML) and vice versa; and improving the cross-platform features of the program, in particular making more of its features available over the Web. Several pilot integrations of the program into the mathematical sciences curriculum are taking place at various educational levels. This work is also informing the writing of two sets of undergraduate level Lecture Notes tightly coupled to 3D-Filmstrip, one on the theory of curves and surfaces, and the second on lattice models doc15974 none Computer Science (31) This project develops a virtual testbed that allows for providing hands-on experience to large numbers of students together with the course material for an introductory course on embedded systems programming. The key feature is to couple a PC with an embedded processor board and to simulate a variety of external electromechanical devices thereby alleviating the need to provide expensive, maintenance prone physical devices in large numbers. Requests of devices by user programs running on the embedded processor are transparently forwarded to the simulators on the PC. Using software instruments such as voltmeters and scopes, students experience hands-on programming while the institution experiences a low-cost low-maintenance laboratory. The course material being developed applies to an introductory course in embedded systems programming and consists of a sequence of modules, each of which is centered on a small programming project. All materials are web-based to allow for broad dissemination and possible distance learning doc15975 none Interdisciplinary (99) Conservation of the earth s biological diversity is a pressing problem that excites and motivates students from a wide range of institutions and disciplinary backgrounds. Conservation biology is widely taught now, but it is seriously hampered by a lack of resources that capture its potential for inquiry-based learning. To foster changes in course content, curricula, and educational practices in conservation biology, The Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (CBC) at the American Museum of Natural History, the State University of New York s College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY- ESF), and the University of Maine (UMaine) have formed a partnership to link faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates with practicing professionals to generate an extensive set of classroom-tested, inquiry-based-learning materials. Each completed draft module will be evaluated in a classroom situation at UMaine and SUNY-ESF as well as at several pilot sites: Antioch New England Graduate School, Holyoke Community College, Lehman College, City University of New York, Long Island University, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, Prescott College, and Columbia University. A distinguishing project feature is its self-sustaining dissemination. Distribution of materials to undergraduate instructors will happen through three media: 1) an edited volume published by a commercial publisher; 2) CD-ROMs distributed by the CBC at cost; and 3) via an internet portal website hosted by the CBC. Over three years, approximately 50 instructors and 50 students will work directly on developing materials; about 20 instructors in 25 diverse courses will test modules with at least 600 undergraduate students at pilot sites and provide feedback doc15976 none Engineering - Other (59) This project develops a prototype package of educational materials to facilitate the adoption of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) into sophomore-level mechanics courses. The objective of this project is to create PBL-based materials sufficient to cover those topics in an undergraduate dynamics course typically covered in one semester. These new materials are going to include (i) the relevant sections of a dynamics textbook, and (ii) enough homework and example problems, with emphasis on motion over intervals of space and time, to get through a semester. A subset of these materials is going to be tested in the fall of on a limited basis, in concert with the textbook that is currently being used. In the spring of , at least one section of undergraduate dynamics is going to be taught using the newly created materials instead of a currently available textbook. Baseline and full assessments are going to be done during the spring semester and during the - academic year. In addition, through an agreement with McGraw-Hill, the materials are going to be reviewed by the mechanics faculty at 10-15 universities. At the end of the project period, the first draft of the textbook is going to be prepared. Upon the completion of this project, a proposal to complete the development of the full package, including substantial web- and team-based components is going to be submitted doc15977 none This grant provides funding to conduct a workshop to focus on tether-free technologies in manufacturing. The focus of the workshop is to address underlying issues in emerging tether-free technologies and their applications in manufacturing equipment, processes, and enterprise system, and ultimately provide better direction for researchers and practitioners. It is hoped the results of this workshop can impact both manufacturing research and education activities in academia. The potential areas that would benefit, if embedded within a tether-free environment include, but are not limited to: manufacturing (wire free sensor actuator systems for closed loop feedback systems, enhance quality control and preventative maintenance of equipment, the remotely controlled factory floor); wireless sensors and or actuators for environmental sensing and control; smart defense systems in mobile power, command smart materials and structures for closed-loop monitoring and control; new tether-free infrastructure (ultra-wideband techniques, data compression, security of sensitive data information, etc). The project is to organize a collaborative workshop among industry, academia, and government agencies to discuss the needs and emerging technologies, as well as to make recommendations to the National Science Foundation and the research community on the direction of interdisciplinary research and education in the areas of tether-free technologies and their impacts to e-manufacturing. The results of the workshop will be used to define industry university collaborative needs as well as to serve as an potential roadmap for researchers and practitioners to advance the state-of-the-art technologies and practices in applying tether-free technologies in next-generation manufacturing equipment, processes, and enterprise systems for U.S. manufacturing industry doc15978 none Mathematical Sciences (21). This project is developing an online mentoring guide (OMG) to enable professors to integrate mentoring experiences into their mathematics and mathematics education courses. Pre-service teachers in these courses participate in mentoring activities associated with the Math Forum s Problems of the Week feature, a web-based project in which students in grades 3-12 submit solutions to six different posted problems. These apprentice mentors respond to each student and engage them in mathematical discourse. The OMG also allows individuals to pursue mentoring for continuing education credit or simply for professional growth. Incorporating the OMG in a variety of math-oriented classes is expected to encourage more students to consider teaching as a profession. Assessment of the impact of the mentoring experience on the student participants understanding of mathematics teaching issues and children s learning of mathematics is being undertaken through focus groups, pre- and post-interviews, video conferencing, and Internet-based communications. Participating faculty at nine institutions are piloting versions of the OMG and providing feedback, from both themselves and their students, to improve the Guide, the Math Forum s existing mentoring environment, and the capacity to mentor more students doc15916 none A team of institutions is developing the technical capabilities and executing the organizational responsibilities of the core integration component of the National SMETE Digital Library program. Collaborators include: UCAR, Cornell University, Columbia University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at the University of Massachusetts, and the San Diego Supercomputing Center. The project is bringing together many efforts already underway, and engaging new efforts as well, in support of a comprehensive large-scale digital library that promises to enhance every aspect of education in science, mathematics, engineering and technology. The organizational and technical underpinnings of the proposed work fall into three categories of effort, each within the overall context of educational excellence: 1) engaging the community, 2) providing technology, and 3) operating core services. To promote the vision of a strong NSDL community that sees itself as owning the program and having major influence on the character of the library, the project team is working with all NSDL-funded projects, helping to integrate their work into the library. Additional partnering with efforts such as those funded by the NSF s Digital Library Initiative and by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and independently developed collections and services, is also taking place. Development and support of models for intellectual property and digital rights management are being undertaken, as well as promotion of a library evaluation framework, administration of an NSDL program advisory group, and development of an overall governance mechanism for the NSDL. A robust, flexible information technological infrastructure is being implemented based on two themes: a spectrum of interoperability and one library with many portals . Technical components include a flexible portal architecture, a central metadata repository, an open source tool kit for access to rich content, and a database for authentication and user profiles, all emphasizing openness and long-term evolution. Finally, support is provided for a very wide array of educational and library services, emphasizing in this initial phase: operation of the primary portal and specialized portals for the NSDL community and the NSDL partners, comprehensive information retrieval services to search for collections or individual items, and an optional service for user profiles and authentication. The other two awards in this collaborative project are and doc15980 none Anthropology (81) Archaeology is the discipline that provides humans with a conduit of sorts to the past: it is our way to travel through time. Although archaeologists can only dream of time travel as an ultimate check on their reasoning and interpretations, modern technology can make virtual time travel possible in virtual reality. In this project, by combining immersive role-based technology with the principles and data of archaeology, ethnography, and history, we are developing an environment for teaching generations of students about all of these disciplines. The project is creating a virtual archaeology site based on a real Indian village with a somewhat unusual history. Like-a-Fishhook was first established in the s following a smallpox epidemic in the Dakota Territory which so depleted native Americans that the survivors of three tribes banded together to establish this village. The project is creating a virtual village as it existed in and then 100 years later in , following an extensive archeological dig and documentation of this village. Immediately after this exploration, this the area was flooded following the construction of a dam. Evidence from research on earlier projects indicates that there are potential learning advantages to the approach developing and using synthetic environments in an active learning context. We believe that student learning of scientific knowledge and problem-solving skills in our virtual environment matches student learning from participation in a real archeological dig. The objective of this project is to produce an educational software product for national distribution. The prospects for the success of this effort are being strengthened by evaluation research that we expect will support our belief that this instructional approach both enhances student learning of traditional curriculum and expands the scope of student learning through other curricular connections. This project is being undertaken through collaboration between the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Dakota State University, in cooperation with teachers at Minnesota State University - Moorhead (MSUM) and Jamestown College, a private four-year liberal arts college doc15981 none The Longitudinal Effects of Racial Identity on Parenting Styles and Racial Socialization of African American Children Marva L. Lewis This is a project to evaluate the long-term impact of African American parents ethnicity and racial identity on their parenting styles with infants and toddlers. The project expands Ron Rohner s theory of parental acceptance and rejection to include the racial context of African American children s development. The Principal Investigator argues there are intense emotions associated with being accepted or rejected or teased about phenotypic racial features by various members of the child s family and social networks. Phenotypic racial features -- skin color, hair texture, nose and lip size -- may have been an ongoing source of ridicule, pride or shame to during the parent s early childhood. These early intense emotional experiences associated with race compose the parent s ethnobiography. Their ethnobiography includes their ethnic identity, early childhood experiences of racial acceptance and rejection and internalized stereotypes. We also propose that the best culturally valid context to study the interactions between parents and children is to use the racially charged task of hair combing. Several exploratory and pilot studies have been conducted by the P.I. over the past several years using a questionnaire based on this theory and using the hair-combing task. The findings from these pilot studies suggest that early experiences of racial acceptance and rejection are associated with depression and anxiety, feelings of security and insecurity, self-esteem, and racial identity and racial pride in adult African American mothers. Further, early experiences of racial rejection were associated with higher levels of internalized stereotypes about Blacks. A pilot study funded by a grant from the National Institute of Mental health was conducted with 41 mother-child dyads and examined the robustness of Hair Combing Task (in conjunction with a teaching task and free play task) as a viable context to evaluate parenting styles. The current project is to plan research and to develop the measures. The primary research questions to be addressed are: 1). Is there a relationship between African American parents ethnobiographies and their current childrearing beliefs and attitudes about children? 2). What is the relationship of African American parents early experiences of racial acceptance and rejection with their parenting styles with their children? The goal is to develop a scientifically rigorous project to replicate and expand the previous research findings doc15982 none Computer Science (31) This project is developing a more effective way of teaching the high dropout introductory programming course by using a set of group-based cooperative learning exercises in conjunction with the lecture approach. A major goal is to maximize use of faculty resources by incorporating teaching assistants into the process. Cooperative learning is a well known pedagogy for improving student retention and success. However, it is relatively unused in computer science and this project will provide an instructor s manual and group exercises to help computer science faculty move towards using cooperative learning doc15983 none Athanasios K. Ziliaskopoulos Northwestern University NSF USDOT : A Zero Infrastructure Vehicle Based Traffic Management System This research project introduces and studies an innovative, fully decentralized traffic information system that is based only on data exchanged by equipped vehicles. It does not require any infrastructure to be installed on the network by government agencies. Vehicles exchange traffic information as they move through the network, which allows drivers to adjust their routes and avoid or be prepared for congestion, incidents or other hazards. Since the system is solely based on in-vehicle devices, it will be market-driven and self-maintained and it will work on all types of roadways, if there is sufficient market penetration (freeways, arterials, rural and dirt roads). It will be upgraded as newer cars, with more advanced technological capabilities for obtaining, exchanging and processing information, are introduced into the market-similar to the to that of the computer hardware and software industry today. While the concept is outside of the current policy philosophy of government agencies, the investigated system is quite simple: participating vehicles equipped with on-board computing and communication devices will be able to determine the vehicle s current location and past spatio-temporal trajectory as they traverse the network and exchange traffic measurements with other equipped vehicles. Equipped vehicles moving in opposite directions on the same roadway or at intersections will exchange traffic information. This research will use analytical probabilistic and simulation based methods to answer questions, such as what is the necessary market penetration to have effective information generated and propagated throughout a street network, the relationship between shockwave and information-wave propagation, and the functional and algorithmic requirements of online routing algorithms to convert the data exchanged into meaningful routing information. The analysis will consider benefits for equipped and non-equipped drivers under various scenarios of recurrent and non-recurrent congestion. If the above analysis demonstrates potential for significant benefits, we intend to work with major communication and auto manufacturing companies that have strong ties with Northwestern University to develop a preliminary assessment of the technical feasibility of the system and potentially deploy a pilot doc15984 none Chemistry (12) With funding from an NSF CCLI-EMD grant, we have successfully developed a proof-of-concept prototype DVD (digital video disk) for physical chemistry. We are now creating a full version of the DVD, with developing 8 new modules and updating the 2 modules created for the prototype. The complete 10-module DVD would be a multimedia program that will allow students in undergraduate physical chemistry to see the practical, experimental applications of the concepts they are learning in the course. Each module of the DVD would explore a scientifically significant research project being carried out in a research laboratory in academia or industry, with current and relevant applications. The video medium would be used to provide high-quality programs about the research that include lecture information by the principal scientist and laboratory footage to demonstrate the research in action. The video program is supplemented with numerous high-end 3-D animations and graphics to assist in teaching the concepts. In addition, a unique Web interface to the DVD allow us to include HTML documents containing background theory and interactive problems for the students. These problems are based on the actual research being carried out, including authentic data from those experiments for the physical chemistry students to analyze. This Web-DVD interface is the first of its kind for an educational application, and would serve students with different learning styles by providing a combination of approaches for learning the material doc15985 none Mathematical Sciences (21) This project develops software material for teaching mathematical statistics to advanced undergraduate students in science, mathematics, and engineering. The project is a collaborative effort of educators and researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and Davis, the Naval Postgraduate School, and Lucent Technologies. The software integrates case studies based on real-life problems from diverse fields with multimedia demonstrations of statistical concepts that use visualization, animation, and simulation to create a unique interactive learning environment. The philosophy behind the project is well represented by Moore s statement, The case for substantive change in statistical instruction is built on strong synergies between content, pedagogy, and technology, (ISR, ). The case studies from Stat Labs: Mathematical Statistics through Applications (Nolan & Speed, ) provides a model and example content for integrating cases into the software. A distinguishing feature of this interactive environment is the use of professional statistical software, R, as a plug-in to the browser for running demonstrations. Some implications of this feature are that: extensive Java programming of plotting and numerical routines are avoided, the content (cases) and demos can be integrated into one cohesive document, more attention can be paid to the pedagogical aspects of the software. Further the project provides an electronic framework that is easily extensible and adaptable to different contents, therefore making it easier for instructors to incorporate the material into their teaching and to adapt the material to special audiences doc15986 none Psychology - Biological (71) The Mind Project is developing a rich array of interactive, web-based curriculum modules in the cognitive and learning sciences. Each module is designed for students who have no prior knowledge of the cognitive and learning sciences. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the cognitive sciences, many modules are suitable for use in a variety of different subjects, even at the freshman level. This strategy of cognitive science across the curriculum is providing a way of introducing students to this exciting field early in their academic careers. When linked together in sufficient numbers, the growing number of completed modules can be used to create an entire introductory course to cognitive science. One of the central design features of many of the modules is their capacity to introduce students to a particular research methodology and to provide interactive experiences that invite the student to employ that methodology first-hand. Rather than merely reading about what cognitive scientists do, students can actively engage in scientific inquiry, exploring the nature of mind and cognition with newly acquired methodological skills. Because the research expertise is built into the modules, a single instructor is able to teach an introduction to cognitive science with the kind of serious commitment to a variety of research methodologies that is typically found only in team-taught courses. The modules are being housed and maintained in The Mind Project Archive, the official repository for the Consortium on Cognitive Science Instruction CCSI). This archive uses a powerful server, allowing instructors to create customizable tables of contents (with the underlying materials) for use in specific courses. This project seeks to make it possible to integrate Mind Project modules and any other resources stored in the Archive doc15987 none Chemistry (12) This project addresses four perceived problems in instruction at the introductory level in Chemistry: a need for curriculum materials that will support an inquiry oriented instructional strategy; the difficulty students have linking macroscopic, microscopic and symbolic levels of understanding; a need for computer-based instructional materials that are simple, dynamic and interactive; a need to identify and address students misconceptions. We are developing instructional materials that can be implemented as an integrated macroscopic (sensory) microscopic symbolic inquiry-oriented laboratory based instructional model. Specifically, we are developing eight Molecular Level Experiment (MoLE) Simulations: Gas Laws, Gas Phase Equilibrium, Kinetics, Atomic Structure and Periodicity, Acid-Base Chemistry, Calorimetry, Electrochemistry and Molecular and Solid State Structure. Each MoLE Simulation is a powerful, interactive, dynamic computer simulation, and is accompanied by a guided and open-inquiry laboratory activity. The materials help students link the macroscopic, microscopic and symbolic worlds together and allow them to develop a deeper understanding of these chemical phenomena. The materials also allow faculty and students to identify and address misconceptions students might have concerning the target concepts in each MoLE Simulation. Several different colleges and universities are testing and evaluating the proposed materials with their students under a number of additional instructional settings, including lecture, lecture supplements, homework assignment, computer laboratory, as either group or individual activities, and to introduce or verify concepts doc15988 none Biological Sciences (61) The goal of the Visible Human Dissector (VHD) project is to provide a highly visual, interactive exploration tool to undergraduate instructors and their students that will enhance their ability to teach and learn human anatomy. The VHD, in its present prototype form, permits the user to 3-dimensionally display, highlight, dissect and identify structures and their properties and functions in the trunk of the National Library of Medicine s Visible Human Male. This project, through collaboration with nine undergraduate institutions in Colorado, is helping to develop and integrate this unique visual, interactive tool into anatomy and physiology courses offered by two-year and four-year undergraduate institutions. The students have the opportunity to perform a virtual cadaver dissection on photo-realistic anatomy in an interactive, self-directed manner, with testing and feedback options. This is made possible through the integration of technology, innovative software and this unique dataset. The existing prototype VHD was designed for medical student use as an adjunct to their human gross anatomy course. A goal of this project is to integrate this same technology into the undergraduate classroom. The nine schools were chosen to encompass a diverse population of undergraduate types. Formative and summative evaluation tools are designed to evaluate the VHD. Both an instructor and a student version of the Visible Human Dissector will be distributed nationally doc15989 none Astronomy (11) This project expands development of data-driven interactive exercises and simulations for use in a collaborative learning environment to cover virtually all topic areas in introductory Astronomy. The motivation is to a) use the naturally engaging character of Astronomy as a vehicle to promote science literacy by integrating research into the curriculum to transform the passive lecture mode into an active learning system that emphasizes scientific process and methodology, b) explicitly create a collaborative learning environment where student teams solve problems and analyze data and c) offer a more engaging interface to science learning so that it becomes an effective recruiting tool for future K-12 science teachers. These goals can be accomplished by the development of robust software, based on real astronomical data sets, that runs in the Web browser environment. Previous work by the team on this project has already produced some of these learning tools. Assessment and evaluation of that effort shows that the methodology is sound. New objectives will be accomplished via further software development and beta-testing in local classes. This will involve approximately 700 students annually on four different campuses. The overall goals of this effort are for the students to be exposed to science methodology by engaging them in the actual practice of science and for them to develop excellent collaboration skills. These outcomes will serve the students far better than the traditional mode of rote memorization of syllabus-driven material that currently constitutes the pedagogy doc15990 none Interdisciplinary (99) Many problems in science, engineering, and mathematics are inherently spatial in nature. Examples are understanding and reasoning about atoms in a molecule, the design of mechanical and electronic systems such as robots, the layout of an integrated circuit or microelectronic mechanical chip, and the transmission of tension and compression forces in a structural system. These problems all demand the ability to visualize and reason spatially. Surprisingly, students of science and engineering are seldom taught these skills. Visual thinking and the ability to reason spatially can be taught and learned: indeed, this is a central component of architectural design education. We teach architects to manage and manipulate complex configurations of physical elements in space, and architectural educators have developed techniques for teaching this ability. In the past, the principal means for teaching spatial and visual thinking has been drawing and three-dimensional model-making. Today interactive media and software tools augment these traditional methods. Based on experience with teaching visual skills to architectural designers we are developing a series of exercises that, as part of a course on visual and spatial reasoning, can enhance science, mathematics, and engineering education for undergraduate students. The exercises include drawing with pencil and paper as well as computational drawing media, physical as well as computer-graphics based three dimensional modeling, and techniques for shifting between computational and physical representations. We are testing these exercises in a course taught to first-year college students and assessing the learning experience using both formative and summative evaluations doc15758 none In this collaborative project faculty at a number of institutions are working together to develop and implement information technological solutions aimed at enhancing the interoperability of both collections and services for the NSDL. A particular emphasis is on exploring the requirements for supporting tightly federated collections, that feature close adherence to particular metadata frameworks so as to enable federated search services to be built. In this collaborative effort a team from the University of California - Berkeley is working primarily on collection interoperability while a team from the University of Missouri - Columbia is focusing its efforts on enhancing the interoperability of services (see doc15992 none Chemistry (12) This project is a joint effort between two Louisiana Universities, Southern University in Baton Rouge and McNeese State University in Lake Charles. We intend to integrate our resources and develop a Collaborative Chemistry Laboratory Model (CCLM) for undergraduate chemistry that can address some common problems. Specifically, poor student performance in the chemistry gatekeeper courses may be due to poor inquiry skills (methodology and reasoning) and poor conceptual understanding of chemistry topics. These problems, in turn, may adversely influence progress in future science courses. The model is based upon the integration of constructivist learning theory with three interactive modes of technology that are designed to enhance experiences with a phenomenon and its representations. Microcomputer Based Laboratory (MBL), i.e., the NSF-funded LabWorks, allows student design of experiments, simultaneous observation of a phenomenon and its representations, and graphical analysis of its data. Interactive Multimedia Computer Simulations (IMCS), the Chemistry Explorer computer modeling and simulation from Riverdeep, expands student decision-making opportunities and allows visualization at the particulate level. We are adapting and integrating the use of the MBL and IMCS systems so that students can emulate the mental world of chemists when they couple the enhanced methodology of MBL with the conceptually rich microworld of IMCS. Online cooperative collaborative learning methods are providing opportunities for students to share their experiences and ideas between the two universities. The CCLM is being tested in freshman chemistry laboratory courses and later will be implemented in advanced courses. The project involves 800 STEM students distributed within the two universities. Faculty development workshops are being used to share findings throughout the LS-LAMP network of 12 universities. Other methods of dissemination include web publications and professional conferences doc15993 none Biological Sciences (61) This project is fully integrating quantitative methods into a course in vertebrate microanatomy by adapting digital technology into the classroom. While digital imaging technology is now widely available, using it effectively in undergraduate courses is limited by a lack of readily available protocols, lab materials, and lab exercises for undergraduate microscopy. In addition, software instruction to groups is usually done in computer labs distant from the biology laboratory. To address these problems, we are 1) developing a laboratory manual with special emphasis on image processing and quantitative methods for microscopy, 2) creating biologically meaningful investigations that apply the protocols, and from which students are collecting digital light and electron micrographs, 3) using the images students generate as well as commercially available datasets to teach image processing and quantitative analysis using readily available software (Adobe Photoshop and IPTK plugins), and 4) teaching image processing and analysis using wireless networked iBook computers at the benches in biology laboratories. By the end of the course, students should be able to prepare vertebrate tissues for light and electron microscopy, capture digital images, identify and describe characteristic tissue structures and make quantitative comparisons between samples doc15994 none Engineering - Materials Science (57) In order to solve simple as well as involved materials science problems the use of spreadsheet solutions has been underutilized by educators. We have developed a suite of problems in materials science that lend themselves to spreadsheet solutions. Our materials enable students to work on the collection of data, graphing techniques, and analysis of may problem types. Toward this end a workbook containing a complete set of tutorials, applications, problem solutions, and a study guide has been created. In addition an instructor s manual is also available. These materials have been designed for use in high schools and colleges. We are disseminating our materials through symposia and publications. We are also distributing our materials through a publisher as well as the Internet doc15995 none Geology (42) We are developing interactive computer-based materials - unlike any that previously existed - to help students learn geology, improve their spatial visualization abilities, and engage in critical thinking. This proposal is to fully develop these innovative materials to create a lab-based curriculum, integrated with technology and focusing on the visual aspects of geology, such as visualizing geologic structures hidden beneath the Earth s surface. This project is placing these visual materials in a web-friendly framework and in the context of authentic, complex problems. We are using 3D programs to create arguably the next generation of interactive visual materials for introductory college geology courses. We are constructing QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) movies that enable students to interactively rotate topographic and geologic terrains, slice into geologic blocks or reveal the internal geometry of layers, and erode the uplifted side of a fault block to see how this would be expressed on the land surface. We have piloted these movies in our introductory geology labs and upper-division geology courses, all to rave reviews. This curriculum contains integrated modules that can be used in introductory college courses and upper-level SMET courses, and by the general public. To evaluate the curriculum, students are pre-tested, selectively interviewed while training on the materials, and post-tested. Experimental methods include both experimental and quasi-experimental, and data are qualitative and quantitative. Proposed duration of the project is 36 months. Materials are being distributed via the Internet (http: reynolds.asu.edu) and via commercial publishers who already are interested doc15996 none Biological Sciences (61) Biological research has moved from the laboratory bench to the desktop computer. However, bioinformatics, the use of information technology to manage, store, and analyze biological data, is seldomly used in the biology classroom. Not only is it important for students to develop research skills in this area, but engaging in these types of activities gives students a better understanding of molecular biology. This project enables college and high school instructors to use bioinformatics in life science courses by addressing the lack of classroom-ready materials. The project is developing instructional materials that focus primarily on teaching students how to use the databases and analysis tools available at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Students learn fundamental concepts in biology through the use of bioinformatics tools to perform novel experiments. Products of the project include: 1) a textbook laboratory manual written from the perspective of how biologists use bioinformatics and providing an overview of the field and fifteen to twenty different experiments designed to help students develop skills in this area; 2) an instructor s manual to help instructors interpret results and including guidelines for implementation and inquiry-based activities; 3) a CD-ROM supplement containing data sets and examples that demonstrate how the laboratories work; and 4) on-line, animated, tutorials designed for novice users and made available through the education page at the NCBI web site doc15997 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will integrate materials processing and will develop a new lightweight and resilient three-dimensional woven fiber reinforced cellular matrix composite (3DCMC) material. Lightweight materials will allow fuel efficient and more environmentally friendly vehicles. The 3DCMC have the potential to significantly surpass the strength, stiffness, damage tolerance, energy absorption, and characteristics of current composite materials. Predictive analysis for a detailed characterization and optimization will be performed. The commercial potential of this project will be a new class of lightweight 3-D woven composites with cellular matrix; this will benefit the automotive industry doc15998 none Given the technological advancements in sensors and wireless communications, future motor vehicles will be capable of reporting a wide variety of information about their own conditions and the local environment, including the condition of the infrastructure that they are on. Even though many uses exist for the vehicle and infrastructure related information transmitted from the motor vehicles, currently there is no necessity for this information to be available for anything other than the private use of the motor vehicle owner. The research project focuses on identifying possible social uses of motor vehicle information and of possible ways to address technical and organizational barriers for greater use of this information. The research objectives are: (1) to identify ways in which motor vehicle sensor information could best be collected, communicated and managed to provide access yet ensure privacy, (2) to identify potential uses and benefits of the information collected from motor vehicles, and (3) to develop an appropriate business plan for financing and managing of the information collected. The research approach includes a wide-ranging and inter-disciplinary investigation of system wide effects with the expectation of identifying economies of scale and synergies among different data uses. The expected contributions of this exploratory research include a list of discipline specific and interdisciplinary research issues, and a clear research agenda and a business plan for exploiting motor-vehicle information and communications technology doc15999 none Biological Sciences (61) This project is incorporating digital imaging and image analysis technology across the biology curriculum so as to more fully implement investigative pedagogical approaches. The project adapts several key features of curriculum-wide imaging projects successfully implemented at other universities, most notably Franklin and Marshall College, Kutztown University, and Kent State University. However, the scope of the project is larger than those at other institutions in that digital imaging is being used extensively in the largest General Education lab science class, Introductory Biology. This course serves non-science majors, science majors, and pre-service K-12 teachers. The project is organized to provide Biology majors proficiency with this technology by introducing them to it in their first year and incrementally increasing their use of digital imaging and analysis in their upper division core and elective courses and undergraduate research. To accomplish these goals, the project is using a two-tiered approach. In the first tier students use workstations consisting of basic digital cameras, student compound and stereo microscopes, and computers to answer guided-inquiry questions in both Introductory Biology and upper division labs. At the second tier, two low-light level CCD cameras attached to high-quality microscopes are being used by all Biology majors in a centralized microscope facility to perform more sophisticated digital imaging and quantitative image analysis in classes and research projects. Faculty development is being accomplished through instructor training on equipment acquired doc16000 none The goal of this project is to synthesize and characterize new solid-state materials in the metal thiophosphate and selenophosphate families. The metal thiophosphate and selenophosphates show a very rich chemistry that is based on anions that form in chalcophosphate fluxes by simple in-situ fusion, and these act as fundamental structural building blocks. Areas to be explored include alkali metal-free ternary metal-and rare-earth-metal- thiophosphates and selenophosphates, corresponding alkali metal quaternary derivatives and also glasses formed from the manipulation of these materials. Thioarsenate and selenoarsenate fluxes will also be explored to discover corresponding arsenic compounds. Characterization of the new materials will include structural determinations by single-crystal X-ray scattering methods and the measurement of physical properties such as optical absorption, thermal behavior and electrical conductivity. The structure of glasses will be probed with pair distribution function (PDF) analysis. The molten alkali poly-thiophosphate and poly-selenophosphate salts, which are the reactive solvents in this project, will be studied by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy in order to understand the identity, distribution, and chemistry of the anions that form in chalcophosphate fluxes. Eventually we wish to control the stabilization and incorporation of specified building blocks in synthetic target compounds. The ultimate goal of this research project is to enhance our knowledge of the chemistry of chalcogenides and render the chemistry more controllable and predictable so useful new materials can be designed. This project has a very strong education component that aims to educate students in the advanced subject of solid state synthesis including non-oxide materials discovery and novel state-of the-art laboratory techniques. The discovery of new classes of solid state materials with novel composition and structure, as well as an understanding of their chemical behavior and physical properties such as optical and electronic behavior are important to industry. For example, the glass versions of the metal-thiophosphate and -selenophosphates show controllable amorphous to crystal phase changes and may have potential for memory storage applications. Students trained in these areas are well poised to exploit current and future academic and industrial job opportunities doc16001 none A web-based assessment instrument that provides real-time, multi-dimensional, formative assessment of student learning is being developed. This instrument provides measures of learning by topic and by level of mastery. The levels of mastery are defined as the information level, the algorithmic level, the conceptual level, and the problem solving level. The information level is characterized by memorization and the ability to recall, repeat pieces of information, and identify information that is relevant. The algorithmic level is characterized by the ability to mimic, implement instructions; and use memorized information in familiar contexts. The conceptual level is characterized by the ability to visualize, rephrase, change representations, make connections, and provide explanations. The problem-solving level is characterized by the ability to use material in new contexts; to analyze problems; to identify the information, algorithms, and understanding needed to solve them; to synthesize these components into a solution; and to evaluate the quality of this solution. Four products are resulting from the project: 1) A web-based assessment system founded on a coded database of questions; 2) A coded database of questions for use in measuring student learning in introductory college chemistry, calibrated to reproduce measurements generated through student interviews; 3) Protocols for developing and calibrating databases for use in other SMET courses; and, 4) Quantitative and qualitative analyses of the use of this system by both students and teachers, including the impact of the instrument on the users learning and teaching strategies and the impact of the instrument on student performance. Students are using the instrument to self-assess their learning after each assignment, to clarify expectations for their performance particularly with regard to conceptual understanding and problem solving, and to identify strategies for improving their achievement. Faculty are using it to prepare formative and summative assessments, to target particular practices and topics for improved instruction, to identify groups of students who need immediate assistance, and to assess the effectiveness of new teaching strategies and materials. Important co-funding of this project is being provided by the Division of Research, Evaluation and Communication doc15229 none Under their previous grant, the PIs have shown that diabatic heat anomalies at the surface due to snow have large and extensive impacts on atmospheric dynamics, especially in mid- to high-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere (NH). Work under this award will examine the role of snow cover in forcing or triggering the dominant mode of variability of NH winter climate. Two parallel paths of research will be followed: (i) to focus on the relationship between Eurasian snow cover and winter climate through observational analysis; and (ii) to study cause and effect mechanisms using general circulation modeling. The work is important because it will enhance understanding of NH winter climate variability, and consequently, the potential of improved seasonal forecasting. This has great societal benefits doc16003 none The PIs will investigate the influence of the solar cycle on the general circulation of the stratosphere and troposphere. Decadal variations operating coherently with the variation of the ultra-violet (UV) radiation will be investigated in long records of dynamical and chemical structure characterizing the circulations of the stratosphere and troposphere. Building on recent evidence, this investigation will examine the four-dimensional record of National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) reanalyses to isolate those months and locations, inclusive of the Southern Hemisphere, tropics and troposphere, for which interannual changes operate dependently with changes of ultra-violet (UV) irradiance. Contemporaneous changes of ozone will be investigated in records from station data and in the satellite record from total ozone mapping spectrometer instrument (TOMS). The work is important because it will enhance our understanding of solar-climate interactions doc16004 none The Edward Bouchet Abdus Salam Institute (EBASI) will convene its Fourth International Conference on Physics and High Technology for Africa August 6-10, in Contonou, Benin West Africa. The focus of this conference is on implications and relevance in current advances in pure and applied physics for emerging telecommunications technologies. The meeting is planned in conjunction with the Telecommunication Authority of Benin. The Institute for Mathematics and Physical Sciences (IMSP) of the National University of Benin, and the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP). The conference will consist of invited and selected presentations from refereed submissions. The conference proceedings will be published. The expected participants will include physicists and applied mathematicians from the African Continent from the United States and Europe. In addition to the motivations for scientific exchanges, the conference is also designed to allow all participants the opportunity to explore the possibilities for mutually beneficial transcontinental collaborations doc16005 none Benfey A critical first step in characterizing gene function is defining the expression pattern of a gene. A novel methodology is being developed in plants to rapidly determine the cell-type specific expression of thousands of transcripts in concert. The technique involves separating plant cells by protoplasting transgenic lines that express GFP in specific cell types, obtaining an enriched population of GFP expressing cells using a Fluorescence Activated Cell Sorter (FACS), and applying mRNA isolated from sorted cells to microarrays. The result is an expression profile from a specific cell type. Extensive controls have been performed and a first round of the entire protocol with a single transgenic line has been completed. The results are extremely promising with microarray profiles of specific genes in agreement with their independently confirmed expression patterns in the Arabidopsis root. The aims of this proposal are to: 1) Further test and develop the methodology. 2) Expand the number of sorted cell lines. 3) Develop computational tools to analyze and disseminate the data. The risk associated with this project is balanced by the enormous potential benefit to the plant community doc16006 none Among Aboriginal people in Australia s deserts, as among all humans, food acquisition is not simply about eating: practices related to what types of foods are acquired, who obtains the food, how food is treated and distributed, are infused with value other than simple nutrition. Often these practices are attached to gender roles. Traditional explanations have assumed that gender differences in foraging and food sharing are bound by a common goal of provisioning--that like a mini-economy of scale, a household will be better provisioned through gender specialization. But recent work among other people that hunt and gather suggests that under some circumstances critical aspects of gender differences in labor may arise from the ways in which different strategies of food acquisition and distribution meet different foraging goals, some of which can conflict with household provisioning. This is especially the case when the activity of acquiring food can provide public goods that are distributed widely, or when food contains symbolic value beyond its simple caloric content. This research proposes to quantitatively test the predictions of hypotheses that examine factors influencing food acquisition, sharing, and their link to gender differentiation among the Mardu of Western Australia. To what extent are different (sometimes conflicting) foraging goals influencing a sexual division of labor? To what extent are Mardu foraging decisions designed to more effectively provision themselves and their households, and to what extent are they influenced by the ways that different activities can honestly signal underlying qualities of the acquirer? How do changes in household composition, environmental dynamics, and social dynamics affect male and female foraging strategies? Answering these questions will involve quantitative measures of the economics of resource patch utilization, prey selection, food transfers, and Mardu camp composition and ecology. Delineating these and how they structure subsistence decisions will have broad relevance for our understanding of basic features of human family organization in small scale economies doc16007 none This project is aimed at greater understanding of the mechanisms responsible for the breakdown of single crystal solidification and their dependence on alloy chemistry of nickel-base superalloy single crystals that find technological applications in improving performance and efficiency of aircraft engines. Carbon additions represent a promising new approach to improving the solidification characteristics of a broad range of alloys. However, the underlying mechanisms are not well understood. Careful control of carbon and other microalloying constituents could have a substantial impact on the production of large single crystal components. The main goals of the project are to determine the influence of microalloying additions, including boron, zirconium, nitrogen, hafnium and magnesium that affect the carbide precipitation process, the liquidus temperature and partitioning of major elements during solidification. The project examines the influence of these additions on freckling, segregation during solidification and precipitation processes near the liquidus. Directional solidification experiments are conducted in a Bridgman apparatus with conventional radiation cooling and with the use of liquid metal tin as a coolant. The role of alloying is examined with the use of segregation mapping techniques, differential thermal analysis and electrochemical extractions of precipitates. The work is performed in close collaboration between University of Michigan and General Electric Company (Corporate Research and Development, GE-CRD and General Electric Power Systems, GE-PS). GE-CRD will provide support for an extended sabbatical visit of the co-P.I. to the University of Michigan, to facilitate the interaction with student(s) supported on the program. Additionally, student(s) will jointly design experiments with GE-PS personnel as well as visit their engineering and manufacturing facilities. This research develops new understanding of the mechanisms involved with solidification of nickel-base superalloy single crystals for improved performance and efficiency of aircraft engines. The research will lend significant opportunity for academic personnel and students to interact with industrial counterparts doc16008 none The objective of this project is to support faculty members and departments in efforts to assess student learning in at least one of the following: (1) Coherent blocks of courses of undergraduate mathematical sciences, including entire degree programs; and (2) Individual courses, especially reform courses, using various assessment tools across varieties of institutions. The targeted blocks of courses are: (a) the major in mathematics, (b) courses for future teachers; (c) school mathematics as a preparation for college mathematics, usually called college placement programs; and (d) general education courses, including those aimed at quantitative literacy. This latter block includes study of assessments of the mathematical and quantitative literacy achieved in entire degree programs, recognizing that much mathematics is learned outside mathematics courses. Assessment cycles that use assessment for program improvements are of special interest, including those that use research on learning. Support from this work includes: (1) Nationwide distribution and discussion of a volume of case studies on assessment practices in undergraduate mathematics; (2) Compilation and nationwide distribution of a second volume of case studies and syntheses of coherent sets of case studies; (3) Construction and maintenance of a website to contain an annotated bibliography, literature synopses, interviews, and assessment designs; and (4) Development and operation of a series of workshops for faculty working on campus-based assessment programs, including both face-to-face and electronic venues. Assessment cycles for program improvement have not been integrated into core operations of departments. This project greatly facilitates assessment program development through wide dissemination of knowledge gained through experiences with assessment doc16009 none Child Temperament and Personality Across Contexts James B. Victor, Hampton University Mary K. Rothbart, University of Oregon This project will merge two previously independent strands of research in the study of child temperament and personality. During the project year, child personality and temperament research teams at Hampton University, a Historically Black University (HBCU) and the University of Oregon will develop a collaborative network to build capacity for multidisciplinary, cross-cultural research about the development of child temperament and personality across contexts (CTPC). Child development collaborators who study child development issues across a broad array of developmental contexts (family, child-care, school, community, culture and language) will participate in the project. The overall project goal will merge two previously independent strands of research in the study of temperament and personality. The project s three specific aims are related to three domains as follow. Aim 1: Domain 1: Biological, social and behavioral aspects of measuring temperament and personality in children. We have chosen collaborators who will help us consider issues related to child temperament, child personality development (both the lexical approach and the NEO-PI Facet approach), and adult personality research. This group of collaborators will consider conceptual and measurement issues in developing facets for common instruments across the biological, emotional, social, and behavioral aspects of temperament and personality. In addition, collaborators will plan a multi-site study to validate the facet measures that have been developed. Aim 2: Domain 2: Risk identification and prevention in temperament and personality development. We have chosen collaborators who represent a broad array of scientific interests in child development to assist in developing an integrative approach to studying temperament and personality development from a common perspective. These collaborators will review the collected materials and analyses from Domain 1 activities. They will provide input and recommendations from their research prospectives on the measurement issues presented to them. In addition, they will plan collaborative studies using the common facets, based upon their programs of research. Aim 3: Domain 3: Ethnic and cultural contexts in temperament and personality development. We have chosen collaborators to address important ethnic and cultural issues and provide research access to a broad spectrum of populations of American Children to include African American and Latino children. These collaborators will plan studies to confirm and validate the common temperament and personality facets across culture and language contexts. Work to complete the three aims will include a fall workshop at the University of Oregon on child temperament and implications for facilitating collaborators working groups. In the spring workshop at Hampton University collaborators will present plans to submit proposals, gain funding, and conduct individual investigator, small collaborations and large-scale projects to meet the objective of integrating child development research across traditional knowledge domains, cultural contexts, and levels of analysis doc16010 none This Small Business Technology Transfer Phase I project is to design and develop appropriate mathematical models and algorithms for optimizing the crosscut operation in a wood processing (lumber processing) rough mill. The goal is to incorporate these algorithms into an integrated software system for automatic control of the process. The software system consists of a main engine that contains the mathematical models and algorithms for finding an optimal cutting pattern for each piece of incoming uncut lumber, along with all necessary mechanisms to interface with (and to coordinate the operation of) various components of the manufacturing line. These components include automatic scanners, automatic crosscut saws, and all associated conveyor belts and positioning devices. At the present time in most rough mills the task of identifying a good cutting pattern for each piece of lumber is done by visual inspection. The commercial benefits of this software system wil be on the efficiency of the crosscut operation, by increasing both its speed and its yield. This could lead to substantial reductions in the manufacturing cost as well as significant savings in the overall consumption of wood, which is a scarce national resource doc16011 none This award continues NSF support for the American Statistical Association s Federal Statistics Fellowship Program. The program also is supported by the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the National Center for Education Statistics. The general objective of the program is to foster collaborative and interdisciplinary research efforts that will continue to stimulate the development and advancement of methodology and social science research relevant to issues on which Federal statistical agencies seek to provide information. The program accomplishes this by bringing academic researchers into the supporting federal statistical agencies to work with agency statisticians and social scientists for up to one year on problems of mutual interest. Several specific objectives of this research fellowship program include: to provide academic scholars with the unique opportunity to have hands on access to federal agency data through the establishment of research fellowships that bring scientists with diverse academic backgrounds to the agencies; to bring about an improvement of the quality of the data collected and disseminated by each agency; to develop a research group of personnel for the future recruitment of statisticians and other research scientists to help fill government needs; to stimulate methodological and substantive research in academia on the problems of collecting and analyzing data that provide the basic information for making decisions that can have significant effects on society; and to increase the interaction and collaborative research and education among federal agencies and between federal agencies and academic institutions doc16012 none An NSF-funded national dissemination project, Disseminating Successful Strategies for Fieldwork in Undergraduate Science Curricula ( ), also known as the Regional Workshops Project (RWP), began a 5-year effort in that will eventually conduct 15 regional workshops for 300 undergraduate faculty at the rate of 3 per year. The RWP is engaged in establishing professional learning communities of faculty who 1) create and deliver undergraduate SMET courses that demonstrate that environmental problem solving is an integrative, challenging, effective way to engage undergraduate majors and non-majors, 2) use concepts and field laboratory techniques suitable for teaching undergraduates how science is done in a real-world, problem solving context, and 3) use research-based knowledge of how to assess student learning and support their capacity for development as educators on an environmental problem solving-based curriculum for undergraduate SMET courses. This ASA project is simultaneously examining the effects of the NSF-funded Regional Workshops Project (RWP) on improved faculty capacity to foster increased student learning. The approach is to study both the faculty capacity development initiated by the RWP workshops and sustained by interactions and resources (both planned and unplanned) available to faculty following their workshop experience, and the effects of these faculty capacity building processes on student learning. More specifically, this project is studying: 1) the development of RWP participants capacity to use research on SMET learning and assessment practices in ways that result in changes in the participants approaches and attitudes toward teaching; 2) the extent to which faculty are supported while undertaking significant change in their curriculum and pedagogy (where pedagogy includes assessment activities) in ways that result in improvements in the participants abilities to develop, sustain, and institutionalize their new environmental problem solving-based courses; and 3) the extent to which students in SMET courses : a) learn SMET concepts in a meaningful way (as defined by Novak, ); b) construct a view of SMET disciplines that is consistent with views held by experts in those disciplines; c) construct integrative conceptual frameworks to facilitate their understanding of SMET disciplines; and d) develop positive attitudes and perceptions about SMET disciplines. The project is providing the RWP PIs and regional workshop leaders with formative evaluation of the effectiveness of the regional workshops, and tested instruments and an easy-to-use analysis and report process that workshop leaders can use to undertake formative evaluation of other faculty development workshops with similar goals. These formative evaluations will be designed to help workshop leaders improve the format, content, delivery, and climate of the workshop. A tangible outcome will be a tested longitudinal assessment evaluation process that SMET faculty can adapt to gather credible, dependable, transferable, and confirmable feedback that 1) guides course changes in support of improved student learning and 2) fosters their own professional growth and development doc16013 none This project is developing, implementing, and evaluating assessment tools and methods that support continuous improvement in student preparation in electrical and computer engineering design and related areas. Educational research has developed findings which suggest that engineering education would be improved by deliberately and carefully assessing important educational outcomes and building continuous improvement loops around courses and curricula. One of the most important goals of engineering education is preparing students to succeed in developing solutions to large-scale, ill-structured design problems that are typical of senior capstone design project courses and the professional world of engineering practice. The project is using the knowledge of expert functioning provided by cognitive science and instructional research to identify crucial aspects of the design process. It is developing multiple measures and gathering data to verify that these aspects are significant components of design skill. In broad terms, the components of expertise that are being addressed are declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, and metacognitive processing knowledge. These are being illuminated by the development of quantitative ways to measure quality of design. Declarative knowledge (including facts ) tends to build and become refined with experience, and its structure tends to become organized in more abstract schemas with experience, allowing it to be applied confidently to a greater range of problems. Procedural knowledge is understanding how to address problems efficiently. Metacognitive processing knowledge is particularly significant for developing lifelong learning skills. It is developed as students learn to think broadly about how they are solving particular problems and seek better or more efficient approaches for future use. This is knowledge that requires planning, self-monitoring, and reflection. Its growth responds to deliberate efforts to develop it by instructors. The approach is being class tested in sophomore design courses and senior project design courses in two engineering areas, electronic and computer software design. Participating instructors are evaluating the assessments, writing improvement plans, and implementing these over a period of three years. The project is producing three distinctive products. First, it is producing assessments of various components of design skill, with reliability and validity findings. Second, it is evaluating the effectiveness of these assessment measures for use in course-based continuous improvement of student learning. Finally, the assessments of sophomore knowledge in the first year of the project is being used to predict their performance in their senior design courses doc16014 none Engineering - Mechanical (56) This project is developing fourteen experiments and building seventeen apparatuses for an undergraduate laboratory designed for conducting experiments in Mechanics of Materials and Dynamics of Machinery. The experiments and the apparatus being developed through this project may be utilized as starting points for the new laboratories or used to strengthen the existing laboratories. Undergraduate students are participating in research, design and development stages of the project in materializing all components of a Model Laboratory . The project is helping them to improve their skills in working in teams, and their appreciation for cost-effective and superior designs. The outcomes of the project consist of: 1. Developing blueprints for fabrication of apparatuses necessary for precision experimentation in the areas of Mechanics of Materials and Dynamics of Machinery. 2. Creating detailed laboratory manuals for distribution to students. 3. Building a comprehensive plan for putting together an affordable model laboratory that successfully addresses the fundamental requirements of undergraduate laboratories in civil and mechanical engineering as well as engineering technology programs. 4. Enhancing the capabilities of future engineers educators by involving them in the process of research, design, and development of experiments and equipment doc16015 none This project falls into the New Development track of the program guidelines. An assessment tool is being developed that can be used as both a diagnostic tool and a measurement of instructional effects, with primary focus on student conceptual understanding in the geosciences. Conceptual understanding and change are being targetted for two reasons. First, conceptual understanding implies both a familiarity with content and the ability to apply it to complex questions. Second, a number of studies have suggested that prior knowledge can be as important to understanding as pedagogy. As such, students personal understanding of Earth systems may impact the way in which they understand and retain the formal geoscience they are exposed to. The primary goal of this study is the dissemination of a reliable and valid assessment tool to geoscience faculty around the nation, for use in general education and introductory geoscience courses, as a means of both diagnosing student preconceptions and assessing one aspect of course effectiveness. This test can thus be used as a cross-course, cross-university assessment instrument and as a means for comparing a variety of instructional styles and other variables, including disparate student outcomes related to characteristics such as age and gender. This goal will be achieved by: 1. Identification of alternative conceptions of geological processes through a comprehensive literature search and interviews with students. Geoscience covers a range of interdisciplinary studies, and we have narrowed our focus to three dimensions: Earth s crust (including topographic expression and geographic expression), Earth s interior, and Earth through time. Roughly 70 student interviews will be conducted at four different institutions with dissimilar student populations; 2. Development of a multiple-choice conceptual assessment tool using commonly held misconceptions as distractors. These misconceptions will be catalogued from the student interviews described above; and 3. Qualitative and statistical validation of the assessment tool, to ensure robustness as a comparative instrument. We will ensure both validity, the ability of a test to measure a specific characteristic, and reliability, the internal consistency of the test items and test reproducibility, of this test. Reliability and validity will be ensured through initial piloting with novice students, educators and expert geoscientists, and Item Response Theory statistics. The availability of an assessment tool involving fundamental conceptions in geology will be invaluable for university faculty interested in assessing introductory and non-major courses in the geosciences. Additionally, the use of misconceptions as distractors allows interested faculty to use the pre-test as a diagnostic tool, to determine the kinds of alternative ideas held by their students. Teachers can then modify course structures to specifically target these preconceptions. Finally, the availability of a standard test will allow geoscience faculty to compare courses at different universities, and in so doing allow a basis by which different instructors, teaching methodologies, curriculum, and technologies can be compared. This type of evaluation is critical if we are ever truly going to answer the question What works in the geoscience classroom doc16016 none This project is developing improved practices and tools for the use of Web-based assessment in SMET courses. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) is singularly well suited for such a project. For more than five years faculty and students have been making increasing use of a Web-based assessment system, Enterprise Diploma (EDU), based on software created at UNL. The level of activity with Web-based assessment at UNL, in pedagogical content development, software development, and institutional commitment, makes this campus a fertile site for groundbreaking advances in this area. During the - academic year, the EDU software was in use in more than 30 courses, and was used by more than 8,500 students. In addition, earlier versions of this web-based assessment system have been published nationally and adopted by a diverse range of postsecondary institutions. This project is engaged in assessing, expanding, and enhancing the use of this assessment system. Thus it is contributing to the improvement of student learning and satisfaction with basic math, statistics, physics, astronomy, and geology, and enabling instructors to improve instructional practices and course design as a result of increased knowledge of their students skills and abilities. The objectives of this project are to: 1) Assess the effects of systematically varied use of Web-based assessment on student learning and motivation; 2) Develop and test new question suites and types of questions that allow more complex assessments, and conduct detailed item analysis on the archives of questions and student assessments; 3) Develop an implementation program that includes individual coaching and training workshops to prepare instructors to use EDU. The ultimate products of this project will be Web-based pedagogical assessment materials for introductory SMET courses that will be disseminated nationally through the proposing team s established links with traditional text-book and software publishers, and or through open-source, authorshare - style Web-based means. The project also will produce educational research leading to recommendations for improved practice of Web-based assessment, with the potential to improve SMET teaching and learning in undergraduate institutions nationwide. Web-based assessment allows students to practice, fail, succeed and develop proficiency in a student-centered environment and enables instructors to assess and respond to student needs and tailor instruction accordingly. Yet, despite the attractiveness of the idea and the popularity of EDU at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln (and of similar products at other schools), most of the evidence of its effectiveness, or possible lack of effectiveness, is anecdotal. It is vital to experimentally measure and test its effectiveness as an assessment tool in SMET courses. This project will focus on assessing the validity and use of EDU in large foundational courses, first- and second-year classes with enrollments of 100 or more students. These classes are often the first encounter undergraduates have with SMET disciplines. The experience of undergraduates in them can shape their attitudes and expectations about science, math and engineering in profound ways doc16017 none The MASTEP (Mathematics And Science Teacher Education Program), funded under the NSF Collaboratives for Excellence in Teacher preparation program is continuing three crucial activities of the large and successful project. Under the leadership of San Jose State University, MASTEP includes San Francisco State University (the other teacher preparation program), four Community Colleges (City College of San Francisco, College of San Mateo, Evergreen Valley College, and San Jose City College), several local school districts, several local institutions for informal education, and several local supportive industries within the San Francisco Bay area. The project is evaluating the lasting impacts of MASTEP while also sharing experiences with colleagues nationwide through dissemination activities. In order to evaluate the teaching practices and leadership roles of MASTEP mathematics and science teacher graduates through their first 3-5 years in classroom teaching, the project is continuing the New Teacher Support Networks at both San Jose and San Francisco State Universities. Network activities include teaming the new teachers with local mentoring teachers, partial day workshops on relevant topics to teaching and leadership, and one residential workshop per semester to further network the new teachers together while promoting additional reform strategies. Dissemination activities consist of expanding the project s website to include rich descriptions of all of the major course revisions that have been funded by MASTEP. Accompanying many of these descriptions will be evaluation data on the impact of the course revisions or other activities. Faculty presentations on reform efforts are targeting Arts and Science faculty to inform such faculty of the project s successes and to encourage other faculty to embark on similar reforms. Evaluation efforts are leading to a summative assessment of the lasting impacts of MASTEP on students, instructors, and institutions. The evaluation is coordinated with the CETP Core Evaluation effort . The anticipated outcome of this project is a well documented assessment of the features of MASTEP that have had important and lasting impacts, especially on the new teachers produced and on the college university faculty related to teaching practices, leadership roles, advances in personnel careers, and institutional reform doc16018 none This project is creating an outcomes assessment instrument to identify engineering student misconceptions in thermal and transport science courses, such as thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and mass transfer. The instrument focuses on misconceptions concerning fundamental molecular-level and atomic-level phenomena, including heat, light, diffusion, chemical reactions, and electricity, which differ in significant ways from observable, macroscopic causal behavior. Important student misconceptions identified by surveying experienced engineering faculty are validated through student interviews for inclusion in a multiple-choice pencil-and-paper instrument patterned after successful misconception instruments such as the Force Concept Inventory. The instrument is being field tested to demonstrate its validity and reliability and its usefulness for both course-level and program-level assessment of student misconceptions in thermal and transport science topics. The instrument is designed to allow for pre-testing (at the beginning of a course or curriculum) and post-testing (at the end of a course or curriculum) to measure changes in student mental model development doc16019 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will development a smart seal using shape memory alloy technology (SMA) combined with elastic foundation bedding. The use of active control allows corrections to take place during the operation. Active control protects against seal failure and preserves the tribological characteristics. The objective is to develop a class of non-contacting mechanical annular seals (e.g. labyrinth, smooth bushing, and step) where their clearance can be actively controlled. The commercial benefits from this application will be in compressors and steam gas turbines. This project will have a significant advantage over existing types of labyrinth seals by reducing the leakage rates, extending operational life, decreasing required maintenance, decreasing fuel consumption or electric power of the machinery and will lessen contamination of the environment doc16020 none The objective of this Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) project is to establish a unifying taxonomy of features selection. Feature selection is used in used in various applications, including pattern recognition, machine learning, datamining or decision making, to choose the most appropriate subset of features among the available ones for the task. It can be viewed as an optimization problem of exponential time complexity along several dimensions. Many feature selection algorithms have been developed and deployed in real-world applications. However, there exists a distinct gap between what theory suggests and what practice reveals, and the proliferation of feature selection algorithms makes it very difficult to fully understand the various feature selection techniques and construct a general methodology for feature selection. It is time-critical that these issues are addressed and a unifying taxonomy is developed, to facilitate new research, development and tools in feature selection. This project explores the first step toward dealing with these issues. The task of establishing a unifying taxonomy for feature selection is accomplished in two steps: (1) defining a common platform to consider representative algorithms on the equal footing; and (2) building a unifying taxonomy to discover how the algorithms complement each other and what is missing. The approach includes collection of representative data and algorithms and conducting comparative experiments to determine the characteristics of the feature selection algorithms, their performance on different data and tasks. The expected results of this project include a contemporary survey, a unifying taxonomy of feature selection algorithms, and some potential solutions to the automatic selection problem -- being able to automatically choose the most suitable feature selection algorithm with given the problem conditions. The progress and updates of the project, and the resulting survey and unifying taxonomy will be available online doc16021 none The Department of Biological Science at California State University Fullerton (CSUF) is implementing a major curricular revision of the biology major s program in fall . Planning for this revision involved the majority of the 24 faculty in the department working as collaborative teams and was based on explicit identification of student learning outcomes for the entire curriculum and for each of the four new core courses that replace the eight core courses previously offered. Faculty worked in groups called Teaching Collaboratives, according to their expertise, to develop the four new core courses. The new core courses incorporate active learning and inquiry-based activities in both the lecture and laboratory sections. The Faculty Collaboratives are now developing and adapting assessment instruments and techniques (such as those developed at Kean University, Reid, B et al, , Outcome Assessment as a Context for Evaluating the Biology Curriculum , BioScience, 42:536-542) for critical thinking and problem-solving skills, linked to the major concepts and themes within the courses. Faculty teaching the same core courses (members of the Teaching Collaboratives) are sharing their assessment items and developing new ones with the guidance of assessment software and in collaboration with an assessment consultant and process facilitator. In addition, sample student work resulting from these assessment items are being examined by the Teaching Collaboratives to identify strengths and weaknesses of the assessment items and of the learning environment. The end result is development of: an informed faculty; an electronic system for gathering the data to monitor the impact of curricular changes on student achievement, attitudes, and retention; and an accessible but secure database that allows faculty to share assessment items and to monitor student profiles throughout the biology program doc16022 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will explore the processing of boron nitride (BN) composites for a wide variety of wear applications with a focus on aircraft brakes. Significant research has been performed worldwide to develop greatly improved braking materials at significantly lower cost. Of the approaches under consideration, a composite using BN as a matrix appears best in terms of desired cost-performance characteristics. Phase I will produce stable boron nitride composites from a unique pre-ceramic polymer (borazine) that allows for simple impregnation. The oxidative and hydrolytic stability of these composites is greatly improved over current carbon fiber carbon (C C). Based on preliminary testing, a carbon fiber carbon-BN matrix displayed a five-fold decrease in wear as compared to C C. C C matrix composites have been used extensively for both military and commercial aircraft brakes since they were first developed in the mid- s and later optimized in the early s. Problems with such systems include rapid wear at elevated temperatures leading to frequent replacement. In fact, commercial airlines consider the maintenance of brakes to be the second most serious cost problem doc16023 none The anthropologically rich Afar region of East Africa has been a prolific area of research for human origins. The northernmost reaches of the Afar in the newly founded State of Eritrea have been untapped to this point. This award is to undertake fieldwork in the northern Afar. It is important for, 1) understanding the earliest history of humankind in Africa 2) understanding the northernmost range of early human ancestors on the African continent, 3) understanding when and where our species, Homo sapiens left Africa, and 4) understanding the biogeography of humans and our ancestors in one of the worlds most geologically active areas. The researchers will survey, map and surface collect sites in the northern Afar (Danakil depression) four to five weeks. All specimens will be catalogued and deposited in the National Museum of Eritrea. Description and analysis of fossils and artifacts will take place in Asmara. Rock samples for petrographic and isotope analysis will be transported to the United States and South Africa for analysis. The research team will consist of scientists from the United States, Eritrea and South Africa doc16024 none Mary K. Vernon University of Wisconsin The goal of this project is to develop the tools needed for performance-directed integrated design and control of complex applications running on distributed computational systems. Its target computational systems are complex, incorporating the difficult heterogeneity, latency, and adaptive properties of computational grids. Its target applications are at the cutting edge of computational science: very large, complex applications with adaptive characteristics that do not allow their optimal system configurations or computational requirements to be estimated prior to run time. Each application will be viewed as a composition of components, with a formal, high fidelity model of performance to be designed for each component. The approach is to use model-based adaptive run-time control, based on these composed performance models, to control the execution of the application to meet specified performance goals. The control strategy will make real-time changes to parameters that modify the behavior of both application and computational platform doc16025 none Lay - Behavioral Ecology of Hydrodynamic Pressure Waves Aquatic pressure waves occur in the form of surface waves, such as ripples, underwater pressure waves, and underwater sound waves. Pressure waves can be produced abiotically by wind, currents, and moving objects, and biotically by animal and plant movements. Surface waves can often be relatively long-range, such as when ripples produced in a calm lake travel many meters, and as they travel, they induce traveling pressure waves beneath them. Underwater pressure waves are usually short range, i.e., within 2 meters. Sound waves are normally long-range. The great majority of all studies on surface and underwater pressure waves have been done in the laboratory and at close range, within about 40 cm. This project will examine a set of interactions between invertebrate and vertebrate predators which are mediated by pressure waves, at longer range, in the field. The project will be focused on interactions between 1) fresh-water bass and minnows, where bass sense the presence of unseen minnows by the swimming motions of the minnows; 2) feeding trout and their response to ripples induced by swimming beavers (nonpredators) versus otters (predators); and 3) ocean-living mantis shrimp, which defend burrows in part by sensing the approach of intruder shrimp by the pressure waves and or sound made by the approach of the intruders. In all cases, pressure waves will be recorded and analyzed, then played back, to determine the response of the receivers to various pressure waves. As long-range surface wave interactions have never been studied, these data especially will aid in determining the role the pressure waves play in the invertebrate and vertebrate species in the field doc16026 none Bales A number of recent studies by the National Academy of Sciences and other groups have articulated critical needs for vigorous new interdisciplinary programs of research and education in hydrologic science to provide the basis for sound, infonned decisions at local, regional, national, and international levels. It has become apparent that the science infrastructure in hydrology and related sciences is currently inadequate to meet many of the enumerated priority science questions and societal needs. Specifically, coordinated investments in instrumentation, field measurement strategies and analytical tools are critically needed to gain greater understanding of hydrologic processes and the linkages between hydrologic and related biogeochemical processes. In response to this need for infrastructure in hydrologic sciences, the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) has been created to facilitate such research. During its first two years, the Consortium will undertake science and implementation planning aimed at establishing research infrastructure in three main areas: i) Long Term Hydrologic Observatories to provide the consistent, integrated, long-term information from point to continental scales; ii) a Hydrologic Infon-nation System program to support the data, information, and analysis requirements of the community; and iii) a Hydrologic Measurement Technology program to develop and operate state-of-the-art systems and provide support services for hydrologic research. In year two, the formulation of plans and proposals for programs in education and technology transfer also will be developed. This infrastructure initiative will be driven by the hydrologic community s desire and society s need to develop new understanding about priority questions in hydrology and related sciences that will have significant implications for the health and sustainability of regional and national economies as well as for the ecosystems in which they may flourish doc16027 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will study the feasibility of an innovative new process for the production of hot rolled titanium alloy sheet. Hot rolled titanium alloy is currently manufactured using facilities designed to produce other materials, such as stainless steels. As a consequence, it is common for the production of hot rolled titanium alloy sheet to require several months of processing, with a material yield of less than one-half. In the proposed research, equipment specifically designed for the production of titanium sheet will be developed and implemented to streamline production. In conjunction with equipment improvements, cutting-edge processing technology and innovative ideas will be incorporated to yield the following benefits over traditional titanium alloy sheet production processes: 1) significant reduction in the number of manufacturing steps required; 2) improvement in the quality and mechanical properties; and 3) substantial reduction in the yield loss, production time, and final cost. The commercial benefits of this new process will make hot rolled titanium alloy sheet more competitive with other metals on a cost basis. Ultimately, it is believed that the proposed process will lead to an increase in the market share and number of products that can economically incorporate titanium alloy sheet doc16028 none Hondzo The objective of this research is to investigate the growth dynamics of the green alga Selenastrum capricornutum and the blue-green alga Synechococcus leopoliensis in a well-defined flow system. This research will test the hypothesis that the growth and aggregate formation of these algae depends not only on optimal water temperature, light regime, and nutrients, but also on hydrodynamic mixing conditions. To test this hypothesis, experimental studies of these algae will be conducted under laminar, turbulent, and turbulent-intermittent fluid flow conditions in order to characterize the growth, aggregate formation and morphometry as functions of intrinsic fluid flow parameters. Fluid flow conditions will be generated using both a rotating cylinder apparatus and an oscillating grid apparatus. This research could provide data for improved model development for the prediction of alga blooms in freshwater systems doc16029 none Papanikolopoulos Institution: University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. NSF USDOT: Real-time collision Warning at Traffic Intersections Collisions between vehicles at urban and rural intersections account for nearly a third of all reported crashes in the United States. This research entails developing some of the components of a real-time system which uses cameras to continuously gather traffic data at intersections (e.g., vehicle speeds, positions, trajectories, accelerations decelerations, vehicle sizes, signal status, etc.), applies efficient algorithmic techniques to detect potential collisions and near-misses, and then issues suitable countermeasures. At this stage, the goal is to establish the feasibility of this approach using both computer simulations and field tests at actual intersections (urban intersections in the Twin Cities---Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN). The proposed work has as main emphasis the design of efficient and robust computer vision and collision-detection algorithms that can address the intersection collision warning problem doc16030 none Proposal: PI: Christopher L. DeMarco Institution: University of Wisconsin-Madison Date: July 21, As our nation s needs in critical infrastructure have been examined in the wake of Presidential Decision Directive 63, a number of forums have identified enhancement of U.S. university programs to prepare suitably trained researchers and technical professionals as a key area for further effort. Graduate training and research experience relevant to critical infrastructures has a strong interdisciplinary component. Accomplishing interdisciplinary work in the traditionally specialized departmental structure of graduate programs at the U.S. universities has long presented a challenge. The goal of this workshop is to present perspectives from a disparate set of disciplines on critical infrastructures, share experiences of interdisciplinary research and graduate education, and identify and disseminate mechanisms to further cultivate and improve this work to include the programs of NSF and other agencies which provide support for these efforts doc16031 none Researchers have long sought to understand the environmental variables underlying behavioral and anatomical evolution in early primates. While disagreement persists over which factors were of greatest significance, diet is widely thought to have played an important role. Therefore, efforts to illuminate trends in early primate evolution will require the ability to reconstruct diet from fossils. To this end, investigators over the past two decades have attempted to identify features of the skull and dentition that can be used to achieve this. While these studies have identified many such features, significant gaps remain. First, to ensure that a structure and function are consistently linked in a specified manner, they must be evaluated in ecologically similar, yet distantly related groups. As few predictions have been tested in nonprimates, it is unclear whether patterns observed in these animals can confidently be extrapolated to their distant fossil relatives. Second, the study of jaw or dental form alone is not sufficient to discriminate among all diets. Since previous studies have considered these separately, the usefulness of evaluating both to fully characterize a species feeding habits remains largely unexplored. The goal of this research is to fill these gaps by using marsupials as a natural experiment to test the hypotheses that dental and mandibular form reflect a species diet. Specifically, ten predictions relating tooth surface features and the internal and external proportions of the lower jaw (determined from x-ray film) to the physical properties of a species diet will be evaluated. By testing these predictions in a group that extensively overlaps primates in most aspects of feeding ecology, this study will not only allow greater confidence in the utility of these variables for inferring diet in extinct primates, but it will also greatly expand our understanding of the ecological bases of evolution in mammals in general doc16032 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project explores the feasibility of a novel and inexpensive synthesis, fabrication and processing route for creating nanostructures at high rates. The approach specifically targets synthesizing synthetic gecko pads. Geckos have the unusual ability to adhere to surfaces with a dry nanostructure found on the pads of their feet. These nanostructures are so flexible and numerous that stresses on the order of one atmosphere result. This permits walking up walls and hanging upside down on ceilings. Phase I and Phase II, if successful, will provide adhesive manufacturers with synthetic gecko pads. The commercial applications of this project include toys, clothing, and shoes, and any application that requires a dry, self-cleaning adhesive doc16033 none This grant is supported by the Divisions of Materials Research, Physics, and Mathematical Sciences. The research covers a broad program in statistical mechanics with an aim to better understand macroscopic phenomena originating in the collective behavior of its microscopic constituents. The methods used range from rigorous mathematical analysis to computer simulations. Topics to be studied include: (i) Symmetry breaking transitions leading to the formation of spatial (temporal) patterns are fascinating and important examples of collective phenomena. They are paradigms of emergent behavior, with no counterpart in the properties of individual atoms or molecules. They occur in very diverse situations, ranging from crystallization in equilibrium systems, the development of rolls and cells in fluids heated from below to the formation of patterns in morphogenesis. For equilibrium systems the state observed with overwhelming probability is the one which maximizes the entropy: the logarithm of the number of microscopic states (with given constraints) corresponding to the macroscopic structure. This translates into minimization of the free energy at a fixed temperature, etc. For nonequilibrium systems there is no such general principle. We have however recently found a rigorous generalization of free energy to a model nonequilibrium system. Extending this work to more realistic systems will provide a framework fo rpattern formation in nonequilibrium with some of the generality now enjoyed by equilibrium. (ii) The behavior of alloys and fluid mixtures following a quench from a uniform high temperature phase into the coexistence region continues to offer challenging problems. Of particular theoretical interest and practical importance is the case of alloys with elastic interactions where the kinetics determine many of the important physical properties. Our approach to these problems includes analytic derivations of macroscopic equations describing phase segregation from microscopic models; investigations of the solution of these highly nonlinear equations; and, computer simulations. An important simplification occurs when the interactions giving rise to the phase segregation are long range Kac potentials. These systems permit the investigation of detailed properties of the interface (soliton) between different phases. (iii) Work on other aspects of nonequilibrium phenomena include dynamical systems approach to current carrying systems in which the time evolution is described by thermostated deterministic non-Hamiltonian dynamics; the study of very large, formally infinite, Hamiltonian systems which can be divided into a subsystem and reservoirs; microscopic derivation of macroscopic (hydrodynamics type) equations for realistic systems. (iv) A surprisingly large number of macroscopic phenomena, such as boiling and freezing, can be treated as if the atomic world was (effectively) classical. This is no longer so at low temperatures or ano sizes. There one is in the world of the quantum where the phenomena is much richer and calculations much harder. Work will continue on both equilibrium and nonequilibrium systems which are intrinsically quantum mechanical. The Schroedinger time evolution of even the simplest model system is exceedingly complex and fascinating once one goes beyond perturbation theory. (v) Biological systems are now at the frontier of science. There have already been many applications of statistical mechanical ideas to biology. These range from ecological and epidemiological systems to neural network models of the immune system and the brain. While only a few of these applications have really been on target, the methodology of statistical mechanics does seem to provide the right framework for describing how higher level patterns or behavior emerge from the activity of a multitude of interacting simpler entities. Research will be carried out on a number of these topics. %%% This grant is supported by the Divisions of Materials Research, Physics, and Mathematical Sciences. The research covers a broad program in statistical mechanics with an aim to better understand macroscopic phenomena originating in the collective behavior of its microscopic constituents. The methods used range from rigorous mathematical analysis to computer simulations doc15717 none Engineering - Mechanical (56) The objective of this project is the integration of simulation technology into undergraduate education through the development of teaching modules (TM) for complementary computational fluid dynamics (CFD), experimental fluid dynamics (EFD), and uncertainty analysis (UA) for use in teaching undergraduate fluid mechanics courses and laboratories. Faculty partners from colleges of engineering at small and large public, small private, and small historically minority private universities are collaborating on the development of the TM, the effective implementation, the evaluation, the dissemination, and the pedagogy of simulation technology using web-based techniques. The evaluation plan includes collaboration with faculty from the University of Iowa, College of Education, the Department of Psychology and Quantitative Foundation and Center for Evaluation Assessment. The TM include three parts: 1) lectures on CFD and EFD methodology and standard procedures and UA; 2) CFD templates for academic use of commercial industrial CFD software; 3) exercise notes for use of CFD templates and complementary EFD and UA. The commercial industrial CFD software is FLUENT, http: www.fluent.com , which is a widely used CFD software in many industries and universities and a partner in the present work. Faculty development activities are occurring in parts 1) and 3) of the production of the TM, and during part 2), faculty development activities are occurring during the generation of TM specifications and collaboration with FLUENT on design of CFD templates. FLUENT is providing software development and testing of CFD templates; training of faculty in the use of CFD templates; national international self-sustaining web-based distribution of the TM, including all parts 1) -3); and free faculty use of FLUENT Flowlab. Faculty partners will meet yearly for development of the TM and collaboration and training with FLUENT Flowlab. The initial capability of the TM are based on those capabilities developed in the proof-of-concept at The University of Iowa in spring semester , fall semester , and spring semester . The results from this prior effort may be reviewed at http: www.icaen.uiwa.edu ~fluids . This project is a collaborative between the University of Iowa ( ), Iowa State University ( ), Howard University ( ) and Cornell University ( ). Keywords: FLUENT, Flowlab, teaching modules, computational fluid dynamics, experimental fluid dynamics, uncertainty analysis doc16035 none This research effort will explore a multi-agent negotiation-based approach to traffic management and route guidance. In the proposed multi-agent system called Cooperative Transportation Management and Route Guidance System (CTMRGS), IRANS (In-vehicle Routing and Navigation Systems) and ISPs (Information Service Providers) are represented as agents. The idea is to allow all drivers and their IRANS to have the ability to choose, make, and pay for a safe, efficient, cost-effective trip. Each IRANS agent negotiates with the ISP agents about the trip for a minimal change in the preferred routes and thus ensures that the driver will comply with it. The ISP agents inform network managers with the anticipated road usages in exchange for the current traffic conditions to be used in the ISP s negotiation model. The proposed negotiation is based on a new principled negotiation based approach that is significantly different from other multi-agent negotiation and bargaining approaches (e.g., contract-net) discussed in the literature. Therefore negotiation is not entirely based on individual agent s utility maximization criteria. The agents exchange their objective criteria before they negotiate for routes so that each other s objectives are included in the route generation and alteration functions. The proposed multi-agent system is compliant with ATIS6 market package for Integrated Transportation Management Route Guidance with specific focus on overcoming drivers non-compliance hurdles present in the current ATIS6 package doc16036 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to develop and evaluate a software prototype to assess the technical and commercial feasibility of an Object-Oriented Design Learning Environment (OODLE) that will help software engineers acquire expert-level object-oriented design skills rapidly and economically. Unlike earlier tutoring systems that help novices learn to write short programs that generate merely correct results, OODLE will help software engineers learn to design more complex software systems by appropriately balancing factors such as the importance of each functional requirement, time and space efficiency, simplicity, flexibility, clarity, and code modularity. Because complex design problems have no single correct solution, the tutoring system will assess the strengths and weaknesses of each student s design and then converse with the student within a Socratic dialog to clarify understandings, intentions, and rationales, as well as point out additional facts, issues, and experiences that suggest design alternatives worth considering. Although OODLE will teach object-oriented software design skills, many of the findings of this research may also apply to other engineering disciplines. Thus, this research would significantly advance our ability to create curriculum development and learning assessment tools that help student and professional engineers enhance their design skills. Software engineers require better methods of acquiring the extensive experience and instructional feedback needed to become proficient designers. Ideally, the engineers would receive individualized instruction in one-on-one or small group mentoring situations. In practice, however, mentored instruction can be difficult to achieve because expert mentors are an expensive resource that is infrequently available. To satisfy this market need, the company will develop an object-oriented design skills tutor that can be marketed to software vendors and IT organizations. Initially, the OODLE technology will be packaged within semi-custom solutions sold directly by the firm to large end-user companies or indirectly via licensing or reseller arrangements with software training and consulting companies doc16037 none Darbha Swaroop Texas Engineering Experiment Station NSF USDOT: Development of an information technology based advanced monitoring and inspection system for air brakes in commercial vehicles systems for air brakes The principal research goal of this project is to design novel fault detection algorithms for air brake systems in commercial vehicles with a view towards applying them in the development of automatic maintenance and enforcement inspections and in the development of real-time, on-board monitoring systems. This proposal is motivated by considerations of preventive and active vehicle safety, since no such diagnostic and monitoring system currently exists for air brakes in trucks. The PIs intend to develop a mathematical model of an air brake system for diagnostic purposes and adopt the analytical redundancy approach for Fault Detection and Isolation (FDI). Using the air brake model, brake pressure will be predicted from the measurements of the pedal position and wheel speed; the difference between the measured and predicted values of brake pressure will be used to assess the degradation in braking performance. The air brake system model will be experimentally validated and the diagnostic algorithms will be implemented on the test bench developed by the PI with the support of Bendix CVS Inc., at Elyria, OH and the SWUTC program of the Texas Transportation Institute. The tools developed in this project will be applicable to a wide variety of industrial machinery. Graduate and undergraduate students will be engaged in the development and implementation of FDI algorithms. Finally, the test bench, models and the diagnostic algorithms will be integrated into relevant undergraduate and graduate courses doc16038 none PI:Coifman Institution: Ohio State University Research Foundation. Decentralized surveillance, control and data transmission for transportation applications This research will reexamine the control and data transmission systems used by highway operating agencies to reduce the combined surveillance and communications costs, without sacrificing traffic management effectiveness. These agencies rely on automated surveillance tools to monitor conditions throughout the road network. Under conventional operation, the fixed-point surveillance systems transmit data at constant intervals to allow for a rapid response when conditions change. Yet most of the time, the response to the data is simply that no action is necessary. The required communications network and transmission costs can become significant. Some states spend several million dollars each year to cover the associated communication expenses. This problem will intensify as new traffic management surveillance technologies are deployed in the future. The research will develop distributed control algorithms to make decisions in the field and the systems will only transmit data when it would be beneficial for wide scale control. The research will focus on the decision to transmit data, based on prevailing conditions at the detector station, to reduce the costs of surveillance. Key to this event driven approach is the recent emergence of new communication technologies, such as cellular digital packet data. With a slight increase of processing power in the field, the detector station could initiate communications as soon as conditions warrant reporting. The fundamental contributions of this research include quantifying the benefits of information, modeling various communication network topologies to optimize system performance, developing efficient communication and distributed control algorithms for these networks, and demonstrating the work in a detailed case study doc16039 none Elizabeth G. Jones Institution: University of Nebraska - Lincoln NSF USDOT: Towards a Systems Integration Urban Network Performance Measure - Scalability and Data Issues of the Two-Fluid Model To advance the integration of information technologies in surface transportation systems, this research will experiment with the utilization of real-time video-based traffic flow data collected from camera arrays along a street corridor for traffic control and city transportation system modeling. The research is expected to enable the transportation control system to interact with the traffic environment, to acquire and understand the traffic situations based on sensory inputs, and to make intelligent decisions about the circumstances where the traffic control tasks are to be performed. The proposed research will focus on the following objectives. (1) Video handoff and target vehicle tracking, (2) Traffic flow information extraction, and (3) Vehicle driving pattern modeling and identification (e.g., identifying individual vehicles that demonstrate dangerous behavior or potentially at risk). To achieve these objectives, the research activities of this project will be divided into three task phases: (1) the image acquisition and pre-processing phase, (2) vehicle tracking and hand-off processing phase, and (3) the traffic video understanding (vehicle driving pattern recognition) phase doc16040 none This project will investigate methods for improving the scheduling of intermodal trucks with the objective of reducing empty miles improving customer service. In the real world, truck operations in any traffic network contain a fairly high degree of uncertainties including arrival of new orders, cancellation of existing orders, variable waiting times and variable travel times due to traffic congestion. To fully capture the capabilities of these technologies in the trucking industry, quick and efficient algorithms, capable of providing good solutions in real time, are still needed. In this one-year exploratory grant, the focus will be on the problem of scheduling trucks serving a centralized port area with many feeder end customers. This dynamic hybrid solution methodology consists of a fast dynamic program in conjunction with a search technique (such as genetic algorithms). Theory and methodology developed in this research can be expanded in later years to solve more general dynamic routing problems. The researchers will validate the dynamic approach using actual data that contains several truck depots, container terminals, intermodal facilities and end customers. The elimination of international trade barriers, lower tariffs and shifting centers of global manufacturing and consumption, has lead to new dynamics in intermodal shipping. Worldwide container trade is growing at a 9.5% annual rate, and the U.S. growth rate is around 6%. Every major port is anticipated to at least double its cargo by . As a consequence, truck traffic in the vicinity of the nation s ports is likely to grow substantially, leading to increased roadway congestion, and delays for both ordinary drivers and for the import and export of goods doc16041 none NSF USDOT: Dynamic and Stochastic Vehicle Dispatching with Time Dependent Travel Times: The Next Generation of Algorithms Researchers have long understood that stochastic and time-dependent travel times, stochastic service or handling times and stochastic demand arrival patterns render schedules developed using static assignment models sub-optimal and often infeasible. Nonetheless, the development of alternative models and solution methods has proceeded at a relatively slow pace. The costs associated with these infeasibilities can be very high and are borne by commercial vehicle operators, their customers and society at large. This research represents a new generation of routing and scheduling models, ones that explicitly incorporate time-dependent and stochastic travel times, dynamic service requests and stochastic service times. The applications of interest are local truckload trucking operations, local less-than-truckload operations, local pickup and delivery operations and service fleets doc16042 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop magnetorheological (MR) fluids using nano-sized magnetic particles. MR fluids are a family of smart materials that have the unique ability to undergo rapid, reversible, and significant changes in their rheological properties on application of an external magnetic field. These unique properties make MR fluids very attractive for such applications as shock and vibration control, brakes, and precision finishing technology. However, problems persist with commercial MR fluids due to the relatively large magnetic particles used (typically 3-5 um). These problems include poor stability against sedimentation and redispersibility. In this Phase I project, nanosized magnetic powders will be developed to produce MR fluids with improved stability and redispersibility. This will be followed by optimization of synthesis, characterization, and testing of the MR fluids. The commercial applications of this project are expected to include electrically controllable dampers, brakes, clutches, engine mounts, throttle valves, cross steppers and precision finishing technology doc16043 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project is aimed at optimizing the mass-transport properties of the cathode electrode for high temperature (120C), and dry air operation. The overall objective is to fabricate complete catalyst coated membranes utilizing the newly engineered cathode electrode layer, and test the improvements in a high temperature(120C) fuel cell. A second objective is to understand the water and reactant transport mechanisms occurring in the cathode electrode that are limiting the operating temperature and requiring high levels of cathode humidification. Major benefits could be realized if proton exchange membrane fuel cells could be operated under hotter ( 90C) and drier conditions on the air electrode. Higher operating temperatures allow for an easier system heat rejection and a greater anode tolerance to CO contaminants typically found in reformed hydrocarbon fuel streams. Similar benefits can also be realized in building co-gen applications where a higher temperature doc16044 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop a novel method of UV curing composite structures that will extend UV curing techniques to any size, thickness, or shape composite and with any type of reinforcing fiber by uniformly distributing UV light throughout a composite structure. The anticipated result is a new UV curing process that can be used in many diverse applications, including aircraft, automotive, spacecraft, and marine. The process will significantly reduce the cost of manufacturing composite parts, improve the performance of these parts (by reducing residual stresses), and open new applications for composite materials using this fabrication technique. This novel UV curing technique is most attractive for large or complex composite parts. The proposed UV curing process has the potential to replace thermal curing for nearly all composite parts because it will achieve large cost and time savings while improving, or at least equaling, the thermally cured composite part performance. Additionally, the size limitations imposed by the use of an autoclave are removed because this UV curing process does not require an autoclave or any specialized tooling. Applications for this UV curing process exist in all fields, including next generation vehicle applications doc16045 none The project is concerned with applications of the recent developments in general equilibrium theory to problems arising in incomplete markets and finance. When markets are not complete, an investor, who seeks portfolio insurance, will be interested in the cheapest hedge that is marketed. Such insurance will not exactly replicate the desired insured-payoff, but it is the best that can be achieved using today s market. One of the proposed problems deals with several new methods of computing the minimum-cost portfolio by applying the newly developed portfolio dominance method. In another direction, a new incentive compatibility notion is proposed that will allow to develop a model where the standard accepted conditions in finance will guarantee that a security that can be obtained through incentive compatible trading must also allow all of its options (puts and calls) to be obtained through incentive compatible trading. Several applications in various disciplines of the techniques that are being developed in this project are planned. The most important of which seems to be on the problem of Optimal Crop Diversification under Uncertainty in agriculture. Crop diversification is still practiced widely by both small and large agricultural producers in industrialized countries. Smaller producers, especially vegetable producers, often find the fixed costs associated with crop specific technologies too high to be profitably employed. Large producers on the other hand usually find the use of specialized technology highly beneficial, yet they continue to plant different varieties or hybrids of the crop of specialization. Planting different varieties, often those that respond differently to uncontrollable elements of the local environment, provides farmers with a natural form of hedging against risk. The existing literature on risk in agriculture provides numerous insights into the proper role and use of crop insurance, price and revenue hedges, and weather related derivatives. Much of the discipline s existing literature and knowledge focuses on issues related to price uncertainty and methods to hedge against price risk. The proposed project will provide a complementary solution to these approaches by applying the method of minimum premium hedge to the crop diversification problem doc16046 none The proposed continued affiliation is considered crucial to the mission of the Center in at least three ways. First, the affiliation adds immeasurably to the credibility and salability of the Center to prospective members of the U.S. Glass industry and the continuation of the present members. Second it allows the NSF to carry out an annual evaluation of the Center (a total quality management function). Third, it permits the Center Directors to participate in the national I UCRC meetings and programs offered by NSF. Beyond this, of course, the additional funding from NSF releives some of the financial burden of Center administration from the members and university doc16047 none This award will extend our current highly limited understanding of the development of cardiovascular regulation, and its potential plasticity in vertebrate embryos. The four-year project will focus on three areas of study, using conventional developmental models (the fry of zebrafish Brachydanio rerio, embryos of chickens Gallus gallus), as well as embryos of other fishes and birds. The first area extends the PI s investigation of the development of the circulation and its regulation in early vertebrate embryos, making quantitative measurements of blood pressure, blood flow, and heart rate as a function of development, and during pharmacological and environmental manipulation. In particular, these studies will focus on two aims: 1) Determination of changes in cardiovascular regulation during embryonic development. Recent findings show that there are non-linear rates of both appearance and maturation in the development of reflexes controlling the circulation. Major species-specific differences are emerging between chicken, emu and zebrafish embryos. Thus experiments to determine whether the venerable chick embryo model is indeed representative of vertebrate physiological development are warranted. 2) Quantification of the specific properties of the blood vessels of the avian chorioallantoic membrane (CAM), which remains largely a physiological black box. Because the CAM and embryonic vessels are located in series, intrinsic responses of the vascular beds of the embryo could be muted or completely masked by qualitatively different vessel diameter responses occurring simultaneously in the CAM per se, especially when blood pressure and other measurements are made at only one point in the circulation. The second area focuses on the breathing transition in late incubation of the avian embryo as it internally pips (pushes its beak into the internal air cell) and relinquishes respiration using the CAM for respiration using the lungs. This award will fund experiments to characterize the physiological changes that occur from day 19-21 in chick embryos, and from Day 50-53 in emu embryos. The PI s experiments to date suggest that this 2-3 day period holds intense and complex change for cardiovascular regulation, and its relatively slow time course relative to mammalian birth should provide critical new insights in cardio-pulmonary transitions. The third area will be an investigation of how environment (e.g. hypoxia) influences normal developmental trajectories for the cardiovascular system. In particular, planned experiments will explore the extent to which embryonic cardiovascular systems exhibit self-repair as development progresses. Exciting new results suggest that embryos with modifications of metabolism in early development produced by low environmental oxygen can develop along unexpected trajectories and still arrive at a normal metabolic state. The proposed research program will make important and timely contributions to scientific advancement and human resource development. The proposed measurements will provide mechanistically-based information on how cardiovascular systems develop, how they respond acutely to common environmental stress, and to what extent their long-term function during subsequent development may be altered by environment. The experiments will yield a basic understanding of embryonic physiology in vertebrates which will be important in developing corrective procedures for human defects through a combination of gene therapy and embryonic corrective surgery (envisaged by some as the next surgical frontier). This project will train a new cohort of undergraduate and graduate students in the use of contemporary physiological techniques to address critical questions in developmental physiology. The project will increase international collaboration, and the broadening of professional vistas for trainees through the PI s informal Environmental Genetic and Growth Science (EGGS) network of collaborating scientists from six countries. And finally, a greater love of science in high school and middle school teachers and their students will be fostered. Selected secondary school teachers from Denton will participate in original scientific research at UNT, through the PI s collaborative program with the local school district doc16048 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will provide interactive software to improve the quality of data obtained in environmental monitoring projects that involve chemical analysis. It will facilitate understanding and successful implementation of the complex interactions between project data quality objectives, sampling and analytical method selection, and numbers and kinds of samples analyzed. Developing an expert system that can be used as a tool for cost-effective project planning will do this. Although the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency initiated systematic planning for environmental sampling and analysis over ten years ago, successful implementation of it has been difficult. This SBIR project will provide solutions to the frequently misunderstood areas of data quality, information quality, and method performance. It will enable scientists and engineers to generate environmental analytical data at a quality level (and resulting cost) based on the use of that data (i.e., performance based measurement systems - PBMS) instead of only using current prescriptive protocols. Interactive software will be developed that facilitates more rapid and cost-effective environmental sampling and analysis which is based on the interrelated factors of confidence levels, numbers of samples, and analytical method selection. The software will combine method performance information from a new National Environmental Methods Index (NEMI) with U.S. EPA s Data Quality Objective (DQO) Process and a user s desired Measurement Quality Objectives (MQOs). Although it will be primarily a commercially useful product for industry and government organizations, it will also function as an educational tool to support university and technical school curricula. Another potential application is for the software to be incorporated as a technical basis for a future front-end user interface to NEMI doc16049 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I Project will develop a novel optoelectronic sensing system for the high-speed identification and sorting of metals including aluminum alloys. The goal is to demonstrate the ability to unambiguously identify metal alloys by alloy type, including low atomic number elements, in less than 50-milliseconds per sample. The Scrap Recycling Industry reports that more than 30 billion pounds of nonferrous scrap metals are produced each year in the U.S. alone. About 70% of this scrap is aluminum or aluminum alloys. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) reports that more than 10 billion pounds of these nonferrous metals are discarded each year in landfills, because recycling is neither technically nor economically practical. Existing methods of sortation use visual examination and hand sortation. Smelting facilities for mixed metals are polluting and expensive to build and operate. Using advanced spectrographic radiation and detection techniques, including computer analysis, the proposed technology will improve alloy identification accuracy and sort metal alloys automatically by type of alloy at speeds never before attainable. The commercial impact of this project will be increased scrap utilization, increased scrap value and reduced environmental pollution is enormous. The potential worldwide market exceeds $2 Billion annually doc16050 none Lucca This award supports Don Lucca and students from the Oklahoma State University in an extensive collaboration with the universities of Aachen and Bremen in Germany. The project will focus on discovering what factors are generating the new wave of high-tech The resulting U.S.-Germany Transregional Collaborative Research Center involves sixteen technical projects centered on the development of processes for the manufacture of complex, high-quality optical components for next generation applications in information technology and telecommunications, health care, the life sciences, sensing, lighting, and energy conversion. There are technical projects in the areas of deign, had coatings, replication techniques, and measurement science and technology. Funding for this long-term research center, with the exception of the project here described, is being supplied mainly by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the German counterpart to NSF. The research focus of the U.S. project, High Resolution Surface Zone Analysis, is the investigation of the near-surface mechanical nature of sol-gel derived diamond-turnable, hard mold coatings which will be used in the volume production of ultraprecision optics of polymers and glasses. Nanoindentation will e used to study the near-surface mechanical properties including elastic modulus and hardness, and the surface residual stress state of the hard coatings. Depth profiling studies will e performed on cross-sectioned and taper-sectioned coatings with a newly developed method for near surface zone analysis. The adhesion and delamination behavior of the mold coatings will be explored with the use of nanoscratching. The project will also further contribute to the development of advanced surface characterization tools needed for assessing the near-surface mechanical state at the nanometer scale doc16051 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will exploit the unique fluorescence and signal amplification qualities of poly(phenylene ethynylene)s in a nanoparticle format. This combines the intense solid-state fluorescence and sensing capabilities of poly(phenylene ethynylene)s (PPEs) with the many unique attributes of nanoparticles, including their tremendous surface area and their surface adsorptivity. In this project, a series of charged PPEs whose emissions span the color spectrum will be synthesized and systematically evaluated for the formation of stable, aqueous nanoparticle dispersions. They will be functionalized and conjugated to biologic recognition molecules (i.e. antibodies and nucleic acids). The Phase I effort will yield a series of functional, highly fluorescent nanoparticles which may be used directly for the labeling of biological molecules. The commercial applications of this project will be in standoff explosives detection for wide area mapping. Standoff, wide area mapping is of intense interest for military and humanitarian uses as well as for environmental remediation of explosives contamination doc16052 none Willemann This grant provides four years of continued support for the operation of the International Seismological Centre (ISC) affiliated with Oxford University. The ISC is supported by 50 member organization around the world for the production of a global summary of earthquake hypocenters, magnitudes, arrival times and other phase measurements. ISC also compiles an annual Bulletin of these data after further analysis of the data. The Bulletin provides a comprehensive database of refined earthquake hypocenters with redundant and suspected erroneous data filtered. The Catalogue and Bulletin are available via CD-ROM to researchers worldwide interested in earthquake hazards, seismotectonics , global tomography and earthquake physics. All ISC data are also now available via the internet doc16053 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will determine the feasibility of a process for producing pure hydrogen and electricity at low cost from the oxidation of organic wastes. This program will measure oxidation and eduction properties of the chemistry, efficiencies of oxidation for model organic materials, and effects of other species. This should result in the identification of an effective chemistry and establishment of the technical and economic feasibility of the proposed process. Commercial application of the process will result in lower pure hydrogen costs, increased energy efficiency, lower fossil fuel use, pollution prevention, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and a safer environment doc16054 none The Web-based Integrated Science Environment (WISE)was founded in with a 3-year grant from the National Science Foundation.This invited proposal for an Accomplishment Based Renewal (ABR)describes planned WISE activities for 3 additional years at the current rate of funding.Our document conforms to the four-page ABR proposal limit;much more can be learned about WISE activities at http: wise.berkeley.edu. WISE capitalizes on the synergies between Internet connectivity and integrated science to advance our understanding of inquiry science instruction.In the first 3 years,WISE has created the following elements of inquiry: o The WISE learning environment that incorporates recent cognitive and social research and gives new authoring partnerships a headstart on effective inquiry designs. o Over 30 WISE projects that meet our design criteria and can be used by teachers everywhere. o The WISE mentored professional development model that guides teachers to implement inquiry practices. o WISE server technology that collects and stores both student work and teacher activities such as lesson plans, contributions to discussion, and reflection notes. o WISE Knowledge Integration Assessments that measure progress in inquiry and can be used to detect transfer from the topic where inquiry was taught to new topics. o WISE science, technology, and language literacy measures, and connections to standards-based measures of inquiry from NAEP,TIMSS,and state testing programs to establish broader impacts. The proposed ABR will research how these elements of inquiry instruction jointly contribute to sustained improvement of science learning.We prepare to address four research themes:(a)What is the longitudinal impact on students of one or more WISE projects?(b)What are typical trajectories of teachers from diverse schools (urban, rural,and suburban)who adopt inquiry practices such as WISE?(c)What value do new technologies for visualization and modeling, including our new grant of Palm technologies, bring to inquiry instruction with WISE? And (d)How do Curriculum Design Partnerships progress in response to the design review and classroom trials of their curriculum projects? Establishing and sustaining technology-enhanced inquiry science instruction requires a powerful learning environment that takes advantage of cognitive and social research as well as effective professional development,rigorous design of urriculum and assessments,and continuous monitoring of student progress. Our research will characterize trajectories of teachers as they adopt WISE inquiry projects and identify ways to make professional development more effective. We will refine our design principles and test their effectiveness in guiding partnerships that design new WISE curriculum.We will incorporate emerging technologies into the WISE learning environment,adjust professional development practices,and test the effectiveness of these improvements on student learning. We will research the impact of WISE projects on students,both immediately and longitudinally,as a function of the expertise of the teacher and the extent of exposure to WISE projects. We will look specifically at the needs of diverse learners and identify ways to ensure that all students succeed in WISE. Proposed studies will inform the design of curricula,professional development,and science assessment. Our work will inform the setting of policy for equity and assessment. To communicate our findings,we plan a book-length monograph,research publications,and conference presentations, as well as workshops for teachers, netcourses, and extensive on-line materials. We have already attracted over teachers to join our web-based community. As participating teachers provide information about their customizations and insights into inquiry teaching,we expect this community to grow. We will connect teachers to mentors according to our WISE mentoring model for professional development. We appreciate the contributions of our advisory board over the past 3 years and have identified some continuing and some new advisors for the ABR. The longitudinal impact theme will be advised by Paul Holland,ETS,and will continue to draw on the methodological expertise of Mark Wilson, University of California, Berkeley; David Rogosa, Stanford University; Robert Linn, University of Colorado, and Lorrie Shepard, University of Colorado. The teacher trajectory theme will be advised by Jane Bowyer, Mills College;and Louis Gomez, Northwestern University who both have experience with urban systemic reforms. The value of new technologies theme will benefit form collaborations with CILT Post Docs Eric Baumgartner,Michelle Spitulnik,and Yael Kali;in addition,we will be advised by computer scientists Michael Clancy,UC Berkeley,and Elliot Soloway,University of Michigan;and by Nancy Songer,University of Michigan. The Curriculum Design Partnership theme will be advised by Philip Bell,University of Washington; Louis Gomez, Northwestern University; Roy Pea, Stanford University; and Nancy Songer, University of Michigan,all of whom bring experience in forming and sustaining partnerships doc16055 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I Project will develop a method for incorporating Single Walled Carbon Nanotubes (SWNT) into nylon fibers to act as reinforcement. This incorporation will be achieved by wrapping the SWNTs with a functionalized polymer that both allows the tubes to be dissolved in the solution containing the nylon precursors and acts as a load transferring conduit between the fiber matrix and the nanotubes in the final composite. The primary focus of this project is to optimize the SWNT nylon matrix interaction in order to obtain the best load transfer properties and to direct the orientation of the SWNTs along the long axis of the nylon filaments in order to maximize the fiber s strength. The commercial application of this project will be in the aerospace industry. The high strength nylon fibers are expected to be used to construct flywheel rotors for airplanes and spacecraft that are capable of performing the dual functions of high density energy storage and control of gimbal and altitude doc16056 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a new approach to economical, ultra high performance coating composites. This approach is based on the use of alumoxane nanoparticles. These functional inorganic-organic nanoparticles improve physical properties such as toughness, impermeability, chemical resistance and flexibility. This novel approach to production will demonstrate a highly cost effective manufacturing methodology that can be easily carried out in the coating plant, wherein the nanoparticle production becomes an integral part of the coating manufacturing process. The project will seek an understanding of the mechanisms that influence the top down fragmenting phenomenon. Nanoparticles, in slurry form, will be functionalized and then incorporated into the high performance coating. The commercial applications of this project will have a broad and significant impact in the nation s 1.7 billion dollar industrial coatings market. This market includes interior linings, chemical resistant coatings and rail car linings doc16057 none The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses the synthesis of new polysiloxane-polyimide co-polymers for use as high-temperature resistant polymeric matrix materials. Phase I will develop new highly usable synthetic methodologies for the production of inorganic-organic hybrid materials composed of cross-linked polysiloxane-polyimide segments. The cross-linking or curing (hydrosilylation) reaction may be conducted at room temperature, thus providing the opportunity to develop a non-autoclave or low-temperature curing system, similar to the well-established room temperature vulcanization process widely used in the silicone industry. The expected high-performance polymeric materials would be employed in Phase II as matrix materials for low-temperature fabrication of polymeric matrix composites (PMC). In Phase II polymer formulation will be optimized, and distinctive PMC components will be fabricated by employing proprietary low-cost resin transfer molding technologies. Commercial applications are expected in low-temperature curable high-temperature resistant cure-in-place materials. Potential fields of application include automotive components, aeronautics, microelectronics, composites, construction materials, and other industries where outstanding thermal, chemical (solvents and oxidation resistance), physical, and mechanical properties are important doc16058 none As part of the CASES-99 program (Cooperative Atmosphere-Surface Exchange Study- ), the PI measured the temperature, pressure, humidity, and wind velocity with high resolution in time and altitude using instruments suspended from a tethered kite or, in calm conditions, a tethered blimp. Preliminary analysis of the data has revealed sharp temperature inversions, intermittent bursts of turbulence, and apparent wave phenomena, all with unprecedented resolution. This grant supports the continuing analysis of CASES-99 data. The analysis is focused on the following objectives: (1) statistical characterization of the turbulence in selected homogeneous layers; (2) investigation of turbulence in the vicinity of horizontal interfaces separating layers with different turbulence characteristics; (3) study of turbulence intermittence, including calculation of spectra of the energy dissipation rate e and the temperature structure parameter Ct2; (4) examination of the structure of Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities and other wave phenomena in collaboration with large-eddy simulation modelers; (5) entering other collaborations with CASES-99 researchers in the analysis of different data sets. This research advances the fundamental understanding of atmospheric turbulence and enables improved parameterization of the diffusion and vertical transport of heat, momentum, and material in the nocturnal atmospheric boundary layer doc16059 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop: connections between concrete-filled fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) tubes (splicing and joints) and with other traditional construction materials; a cost-effective structural framing system; and design aids and specifications for these structural framing systems. The advantages of concrete-filled FRP tubes (CFFT) over concrete-filled steel tubes (CFST) include high strength-to-weight ratio, durability, and the possibility of optimizing and engineering the fiber orientation for best result. Experiments have shown that CFFTs can significantly increase strength and ductility of normal strength concrete (3-5 thousand pounds per square inch (ksi) and 0.003-0.004 ultimate strain) to the level of high-performance concrete (15-20 ksi and 0.02-0.04 ultimate strain). Phase I will develop both analytical and experimental components, conduct modeling, calibration, and parametric studies, and perform limited proof-of-concept testing. Phase II would concentrate on manufacturing these new system components. The new framing system utilizing CFFTs and other structural forms are expected to be used in civil construction such as buildings and bridges. It will offer superior seismic performance and higher resistance to explosion damage, such as in terrorist attacks, in comparison with traditional systems. In addition, long durability and corrosion resistance are expected to extend the designed life span of many civil structures with low maintenance costs doc16060 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project will develop a high volume high pressure RDR-MOCVD nitride production tool. Two fundamental problems will be addressed. The first is the need for large area substrate quality and the second is the need for large area high volume MOCVD nitride epitaxy production tools. This project will demonstrate a scaleable tool to meet these needs. The commercial applications of this project will be in electronics and optoelectronic device markets doc16061 none The Herbivory Uncertainty Principle - How Experimenter Visitation and Measurement Affect Herbivory and Plant Growth PI: Richard A. Niesenbaum, Muhlenberg College CO-PI: James F Cahill, University of Alberta CO-PI: Christine M. Ingersoll, Muhlenberg College In ,Werner Heisenberg proposed that there are fundamental limitations to the study of subatomic particles, as the act of measuring them can affect their behavior. Our prior work confirms that such uncertainty also occurs in ecological studies, where visiting plants to measure rates of herbivory actually changes those rates and significantly impacts the plant-insect interactions being studied. The implications of such visitation effects are enormous, and the proposed work will permit us to more substantially test whether visitation and measurement of plants alters rates of herbivory and plant growth, and will increase our understanding of the mechanisms responsible for these effects. We will examine how the presence of neighboring plants and local light environment influence the occurrence of visitation effects , and how visitation and touch influence plant chemistry and insect foraging in the plant, Apocynum cannabinum. Results from the proposed research will challenge the long-standing assumption that field researchers are benign observers , as the essential act of visiting plants during an experiment could alter the performance of those plants. A significant visitation effect may motivate us to re-think the way that we measure and test hypotheses about herbivory, plant growth and productivity, and other plant-animal interactions. This work is essential to understanding possible strategies to mitigate any potential observer effect in future studies, and will provide information about the basic ecology of plant-animal interactions in natural plant communities. An additional major goal is to advance undergraduate education by giving students primary roles in a significant ecological research project doc16062 none The Small Business Innovation Phase I Research will develop a formal algorithm, and a corresponding software package, which constructs and evaluates regression models automatically and can handle large data sets efficiently. Regression analysis is widely used in all areas of physical and social sciences, medicine, management, and engineering. Despite its widespread use, there is a significant element of art in building regression models. In addition, the wide availability of data makes it important to be able to perform regressions with very large data sets and a large number of potential explanatory variables. The objective is to take the art out of the construction of regression models, and, in doing so, will achieve better regression models that are significantly faster, and extend their capabilities to build much larger models in the presence of very large data sets. The commercial benefits of an automated regression package would allow data mining in diverse areas such as marketing, health care, insurance, credit cards, and finance. An automated regression package that can handle very large data sets and many explanatory variables can become the critical engine for data mining in all these industries doc16063 none Harrington Studies of fungal species, their reproductive strategies, how they evolve, and how humans influence their evolution and distribution are needed. This need is particularly acute for plant pathogenic fungi because humans unwittingly move cryptic species of fungi around the world on their crops (mostly on plant propagative materials such as seeds and cuttings) and plant products (such as logs, wood chips, packing materials, etc.), often with devastating consequences. Introductions of invasive fungal species and changes in fungal populations frequently frustrate disease control strategies, reduce food and fiber productivity, and threaten forest ecosystems. Ceratocystis species, which are primarily found in the Americas, have been particularly damaging when introduced into new ecosystems or when introduced plant hosts come into contact with indigenous pathogen populations. The research of Dr. Thomas Harrington at Iowa State University focuses on how new species arise in the Ceratocystis fimbriata complex, which contains some of the most aggressive pathogens in the genus Ceratocystis. Although currently considered one species, it is actually a complex of many species that share morphological similarities but infect different hosts in different parts of the world. Dr. Harrington will use a variety of modern molecular and traditional tools to delimit species within the complex and infer their evolutionary history. Particular emphasis will be given to the host range (which hosts the pathogen can infect) of each of the delimited species. DNA fingerprinting markers will be used to study the diversity of populations and trace the suspected spread of host-specialized species by human activity. Recently derived populations should have low levels of genetic diversity and have limited geographic ranges, except where the geographic range has been extended by humans. Older lineages are hypothesized to have more genetic diversity and broader geographic ranges. Also, the hypothesis that older lineages are more restricted in their host ranges will be tested. These studies will build a foundation for a taxonomic treatment of this ecologically and economically important genus. Where and how populations of C. fimbriata were introduced by humans will also be determined, and this information will be particularly important because of the increasing movement of plant pathogens on logs, wood chips and crating material. The studies will allow for a better understanding of how ecological niche affects speciation and will lead to a more practical definition of species in the fungi. The definition of a species continues to be among the most controversial issues in basic biology, but the practical implications for plant pathology, particularly for quarantine concerns, are immediate. Concerns over invasive species, including plant pathogens, have been heightened by the globalization of our economies, and the simple concept of a species continues to be of pivotal importance to the prevention of introductions and management of introduced pests doc16064 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will study an innovative formulation for simulating unsteady cavitation phenomena in pumps. The formulation is based on a compressible gas-liquid framework that accurately models the acoustics in multi-phase mixtures, and may be extended to account for generalized thermodynamic effects. An innovative cavitation model based on tracking the surface area associated with dense, bubbly vapor clouds is presented: this permits the implementation of detailed bubble dynamics within a continuum framework. The multi-phase formulation will be available within a commercial CFD code CRUNCH, which has a multi-element unstructured framework and is ideally suited for complex turbomachine geometries. The Phase I effort will focus on validating the procedure for unsteady cavitation in unit problems that will be extended to three-dimensional pump geometries in the Phase II program. This technology will be applicable to a wide variety of pump systems that have to operate over a range of low, off-design flow rates and Net Positive Suction Head (NPSH)conditions, where the coupling of unsteady hydrodynamics and cavitation has the potential for causing excessive vibration and damage. The limited reliability of current design tools in this flow regime makes this innovation a useful tool for high-energy pump designers. Commercial Potential Manufacturers of high-energy pumps have to certify their systems for operation at off-design conditions. However, unsteady flow behavior coupled with fluctuating vapor volumes at low NPSH levels can result in significant damage in this flow regime. Hence, considerable resources are currently being expended by the pump industry to better understand the formation of cavitation instabilities. The development of innovative designs that eliminate or mitigate the formation of cloud cavitation will result in a significant competitive advantage for both marketing of new products as well as aftermarket upgrade opportunities. However, current design tools, such as empirical correlations and one-dimensional analyses, have limited reliability in this flow regime. Furthermore, experimental testing over the entire flow regime is impractical. The proposed effort here will address these needs by providing a tool for refining preliminary designs, as well as correcting problems with existing designs. In addition, The innovative technology proposed here would resolve the deficiencies of currently available commercial CFD codes: such codes typically do not resolve the acoustics within the gas liquid mixture, which can have very low sound speeds and directly impact hydrodynamic time scales. Indeed for accurately modeling this unsteady multi-phase problem, the generalized compressible framework proposed is essential for simulating the coupling between hydrodynamic pressure fluctuations and the cavitation rate process. Potential customers for this product are anticipated to be U.S. manufacturers of a broad range of high-energy industrial pump systems doc16065 none Gordon This award will provide funds for the support of a workshop on climate-scale variations in the Southern Ocean to be held at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in October . The task of the workshop will be to produce a document for the US CLIVAR Scientific Steering Committee, presenting priority research and sustained observational activities within the Southern Ocean that reach Clivar objectives. Four themes are presented to help guide the process: (1) Ocean circulation and overturning within the circumpolar belt, including the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, intermediate water, and subantarctic mode water production. (2) Ocean circulation and overturning within the Antarctic zone and regional sea-air fluxes, including processes leading to ventilation of the deep ocean. (3) Large scale variability of the Southern Ocean and its relationship to global climate phenomena, including the Antarctic Circumpolar Wave. (4) Ocean circulation and its regulation of air-sea partitioning of carbon dioxide. The workshop participants will also consider new observational techniques applicable to the Southern Ocean environment, particularly those that require special ship capable for handling of new observing platforms (e.g. autonomous vehicles). The Southern Ocean is the major site of interocean exchange and ocean overturning. It provides a heat source for the atmosphere, regulating to a significant degree the distribution of sea ice and perhaps even affecting glacial ice mass balance. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current and descent of antarctic waters shape much of the global ocean stratification. Interannual and lower frequency variability within the Southern Ocean has been linked to patterns of global climate variability. The CLIVAR SSC has endorsed the convening of this workshop, recognizing that the Southern Ocean clearly has relevance to CLIVAR goals doc16066 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will investigate methods for improving the process of requirement definition for software projects. It will investigate how the stakeholder in a project can be constrained to create only those requirements that have good characteristics. The approach is to codify the domain comprised of all tasks which can be implemented on a computer and present the stakeholder with decisions to make about what will be implemented in a specific system. Use cases will be used to facilitate the process. After capturing the requirements, an initial object-oriented analysis model will be generated automatically from the requirement descriptions. The model will be based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML). However, diagram notations will define the model in terms of UML metamodels rather than by diagram notations. UML modeling tools such as Rational Software s Rose can import the metamodels and create their associated graphical representation. This research will develop a prototype tool that will guide the stakeholder to describe requirements within a fixed format, and automatically create UML metamodels doc16067 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will conduct research to design a system for the unit testing of modules. This system will operate by automatically capturing events at the boundary of the module under test while a client of the module executes test cases. These events will be logged to a file so that they can later be replayed to the module in isolation. It is proposed to use Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) techniques to implement this tool and to use a third-party open-source licensed tool named AspectJ to implement this tool for Java. Unit testing solutions offer considerable cost-savings by automating the recording and playback of events for testing by organizations that either develop or use software doc16068 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will use a moisture sensor to monitor moisture ingress, corrosion, and delamination of fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) concrete structures. Phase I will build on the development of a moisture sensor for composite aircraft and adapt its use for infrastructure such as bridges. FRP is increasingly being used to reinforce such structures during rehabilitation, but uncertainties concerning the health of the composite and the bond between the composite and the concrete prevent widespread application. The moisture sensor, which is based on the established technique of electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), will allow moisture intrusion and the effects of moisture to be tracked from very early stages. Initial commercial applications will involve an inspector using a portable computer to interrogate the sensors to determine structural health. The advanced application would include a permanently mounted potentiostat module that would periodically send signals to a central location. Commercial opportunities include over100,000 structurally deficient bridges that are candidates for FRP rehabilitation doc16069 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop an innovative process for the fabrication of nanometer-scale alloy powders. The innovation will result from the combination of state-of-the-art composite wire manufacturing techniques with recently developed powder fabrication technology. The project will focus on the production of nanometer-scale Nb-Al (Niobium-Aluminum) powders for use in the fabrication of improved Nb3Al superconducting wire. A Nb-Al composite jelly-roll wire will be fabricated, this wire will be converted to nanometer-scale Nb-Al solid solution powder by an electro-explosion process, and this powder will be used to fabricate monofilament wire by a powder-in-tube process. Samples of the wire will be heat treated to form Nb3Al and the resulting superconducting properties will be measured. The commercial applications will be in magnets for high energy physics and fusion machines, high frequency NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) units, and, potentially, cryo-cooled MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) units. This process could be extended to the fabrication of nanometer-scale aluminide powders, these materials could be used as in the fabrication of structural parts for use in high temperature environments encountered in aerospace applications (e.g., turbines), and in the automotive industry (e.g., heat treatment furnaces). Nanometer-scale refractory alloy powders could be used to coat parts in the corrosive environments found in the chemical industry doc16070 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop the Combustion Chemical Vapor Deposition (CCVD) process to modify surface properties of particulate matter in a fluidized bed. The proposed Fluidized Bed CCVD (FBCCVD) technique will enable production of next generation surface engineered powders for applications such as decorative and specialty chemicals. In the CCVD process, low-cost, environmentally friendly, metal-bearing reagents are dissolved in solvents that serve as a combustible fuel. Using MicroCoating Technologies (MCT) innovative atomizer, the Nanomiser TM , this solution is atomized to form submicron droplets that are then combusted in a flame to produce the desired material. This flame-based method will be integrated with an externally recirculating fluidized bed and used to encapsulate particulate matter suspended in the fluidized bed with dense and well-adhered thin films. The effect of the FBCCVD process variables on the encapsulated powder properties, deposition efficiency, and production rate will be investigated. Inexpensive powders with functionalized surfaces are in high demand for decorative, optical, specialty chemicals, and electronics applications. The powder market is estimated to be over a billion dollar market annually and represents a growing segment. Success of the proposed research will result in a new FBCCVD process that could facilitate inexpensive production of encapsulated powders doc16071 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop technologies to automatically generate large meshes appropriate for finite element and similar analyses. This will be done using scalable, parallel algorithms that will enable the generation of meshes on distributed parallel computers including workstation clusters. The result of this project will be software that is capable of generating meshes with hundreds of millions, or billions of elements in an efficient manner. The generated meshes will already be partitioned to be compatible with the needs of parallel analysis codes. The commercial applications of this research are in those industries that need to perform large scale simulations of complex problems over general domains. The procedures to be developed will allow simulation based design technologies to be applied to applications that demand massive simulations doc16072 none Ettensohn The accumulation of the protein beta-catenin in the nuclei of specific cells is a critical, early step in the development of multicellular animals. In all deuterostomes that have been studied, nuclear accumulation ( nuclearization ) of beta-catenin is polarized along one axis of the early embryo. Nuclearization of beta-catenin is required for mesoderm and or endoderm formation and the establishment of early signaling centers. Despite its fundamental importance in patterning deuterostome embryos, the mechanisms that regulate the differential nuclearization of beta-catenin are unknown. The early sea urchin embryo is an ideal experimental system for the analysis of this problem. The embryo is highly transparent, which facilitates analysis of the dynamics of protein turnover and targeting in vivo using light optical methods. The sea urchin system is also unique in that specific cell types can be isolated from early embryos in large quantities. This critical characteristic means that it is possible to isolate large quantities of early blastomeres that have, or do not have, beta-catenin in their nuclei, and study biochemical differences in the two kinds of cells. Many of the central molecular components of the beta-catenin pathway have been cloned from sea urchin, including several key players that have been cloned recently in our laboratory. This powerful combination of characteristics makes the sea urchin embryo a unique experimental system for the analysis of beta-catenin nuclearization. This proposal tests several specific hypotheses concerning mechanisms that regulate the nuclear accumulation of beta-catenin during early development. To test these hypotheses, a combination of time-lapse, 3-D confocal microscopy, manipulation of embryos by microsurgical and molecular biological methods, and biochemical approaches will be employed. The major questions to be addressed are the following: a) Do interactions between blastomeres play any role in regulating the pattern of beta-catenin nuclearization during early development? b) What is the stability (half-life) of beta-catenin in different cell lineages at different developmental stages? Does the stability of beta-catenin increase or decrease at specific times and in specific cells? c) Is the loss of beta-catenin on the animal side of the embryo mediated through GSK3? If so, are there measurable differences in GSK3 activity, stability, or abundance along the A-V axis? d) What is the spatial distribution of axin, a regulator of beta-catenin stability, along the A-V axis? e) Is the state of the degradation complex different in animal and vegetal blastomeres? This research project will advance scientific knowledge by elucidating the mechanisms of a fundamental process in animal development. It will also contribute to the development of human resources through the training of undergraduate researchers, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows doc16073 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I Project will be used to investigate an optical system to be used with LCDs or plasma displays to produce 2D 3D switch-able autostereoscopic displays which produce images possessing the full resolution of display. Various companies have begun to market autostereoscopic displays. Such displays are encountering a market barrier in some applications because they achieve their 3D effect by sacrificing resolution. They divide the pixels on the display between a right and left eye image, thus leaving each image with half the resolution of the flat panel itself. The proposed technology will produce autostereoscopic images without sacrificing resolution. The objective of the project is to establish the feasibility of the autostereoscopic imaging concept, to identify the best configuration for the optics, and to determine the feasibility of using the concept on LCD and plasma displays. To accomplish this objective, small test optics will be created and evaluated, measurements of relevant properties of representative plasma and LCD panels will be made, and a development path for the next phase of the project will be identified. The project has the potential to produce a practical high resolution flat panel autostereoscopic displays suitable for high resolution 3D imaging applications. The direct commercial potential of the projects lies in autostereoscopic products that will be manufactured using this technology. Such display products will find widespread use in scientific and medical visualizations applications, industrial inspection, telerobotic and other remote vision applications. Consumer based applications may include electronic commerce and computer gaming. l doc16074 none This Phase I SBIR program will investigate and develop a new process for depositing catalysts on fuel cell membrane and electrode assemblies (MEAs). The proposed process for producing reliable MEAs is conducive to high volume manufacturing using fabrication tools familiar to industry. In addition to high rate production capability, the proposed process optimizes the electrode catalyst structure allowing us to reduce the catalyst loading that further reduces the MEA cost. This program will demonstrate the process in operating fuel cell stacks and evaluate the economics of employing the process on a larger scale. The proton exchange membrane fuel cell is a promising power source for vehicles with residential, stationary, and portable power applications doc16075 none This project focuses on the ecology and behavior of chimpanzees living in the Ugalla area of The Tongwe East Forest Reserve in Tanzania. Ugalla is one of the driest environments in which chimpanzees are known to exist and it shares similarities with many of the paleoenvironments reconstructed for early hominids. It has long been proposed that chimpanzees living in dry areas are an important source of data for modeling the behavior and ecology of early hominids, but very little research has been conducted on such populations. This study attempts to discern the factors that influence where the chimpanzees nest and how they use their habitat. Since the chimpanzees at Ugalla are not habituated to human observers and are not provided with food, the study methods require no direct observation of these apes. Maps of chimpanzee nests as well as other signs of their presence (feeding remains, feces) will be constructed, and the distribution of the resources they use (food, water, available trees for nesting) will be studied. Data on the amount and seasonal distribution of the fruit available to the chimpanzees will be obtained by monitoring individual trees of species known to be eaten or possibly eaten by the chimpanzees. In addition, data on the chimpanzees diet will be obtained by analyzing feces and the contents of carbon and nitrogen present in hair collected from nests. The data obtained from this study will be compared with that for other chimpanzee populations as well as for other great apes. It will also be important to compare these results against the archaeological evidence for early hominid habitat use doc16076 none The Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC) in the area of Lasers and Plasmas for Advanced Manufacturing will develop a science, engineering and technology base for laser and plasma processing of materials, devices and systems. Laser and Plasma processing of materials is used in various manufacturing sectors such as semiconductor electronic manufacturing, aerospace, automotive, general manufacturing, life science products, medical device manufacturing. The focus of the center includes: bulk processing, surface processing, coatings, surface etching and patterning. The I UCRC will also take full advantage of being cited next to Free Electron Laser Facility of Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The Facility is the world s most powerful, tunable laser, currently delivering kilowatt average power in the mid infrared. The strong interest in the center is evidenced from various letters of commitment received from industry and federal laboratories doc16077 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will result in manufacturing processes for low-cost, multi-functional composite materials that have marine, rail and other ground transportation safety applications. The key steps will involve (1) development of innovative manufacturing methods using out-of-autoclave processes, that are derivatives of liquid molding approaches, to co-infuse resin systems in multi-layered composites of simple shapes representative of structures and (2) production of a number of fiber ply metal foam combinations and measurement of mechanical and physical properties of these combinations to assess potential improvements in structural performance such as damage tolerance and high fatigue life. Existing materials designed to protect against flying debris or provide impact protection in vehicles tend to be heavy and to be appendages on structural systems. The new materials produced here, which consist of a metal foam surrounded by facing plies of resin-infused glass, carbon, or aramid fibers, will be designed to integrate affordability and functionality. Improved properties will lead to new markets with a focus on enhanced passenger protection in aviation, marine, and ground vehicles doc16078 none Laufenberg This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes a new software platform for designing and simulating electric power generation and delivery networks. The demand for reliable electric power, both in this country and in developing nations seeking to forge a sustainable industrialized economy, is growing dramatically. At the same time, fears over the environmental repercussions of burning carbon-rich matter, particularly in regards to the emission of greenhouse gases and acid rain, are intensifying. While using cleaner energy sources and technologies could help mitigate the environmental impact of increased power production, the larger initial investment required by such alternatives has made their adoption a tough sell. The software will enable system architects to design a system graphically and to assess and compare its merits using an integrated approach that considers reliability, financial cost, and environmental impact. Users will be able to distribute generation resources throughout a system, change generator fuel and technology types, and experiment with various transmission topologies with unprecedented ease. The package will assess system reliability using an integrated contingency analysis tool. It will evaluate the financial implications of a design by accounting for start-up and construction costs associated with various generating and transmission equipment and calculating projected operating costs using economic dispatch. Finally, it will assess the environmental impact of a design by calculating the amount of pollutants emitted by its power sources based on empirical formulas for emissions defined by the user. The market niche that PowerWorld Corporation is attempting to exploit is the development of high-quality, yet extremely user-friendly power system visualization software to help answer the question: how can increased demand for electric power be met reliably, cleanly, and economically? By integrating reliability, economic, and environmental analyses into a single package, the tool will enable developers, engineers, economists, and policy makers to develop efficient and clean power system designs doc16079 none Paytan This U.S.-Mexico award will support Dr. Adina Paytan of Stanford University in a research collaboration with Dr. Jorge A. Herrera-Silveira of Cinvestav-Merida in Yucatan, Mexico. The researchers intend to work on a multiple-year study to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying methane production and oxidation in mangrove ecosystems. They aim to obtain reliable estimates of methane flux from mangrove ecosystems to the atmosphere, and predict fluctuations in this flux that may result from climatic and anthropogenic change. The Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Environmental Biology of NSF will contribute funds for the research. The study will take place in several lagoons dominated by mangrove vegetation located on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. These lagoons have similar vegetation and climate patterns yet very different levels of freshwater and nutrient inputs and anthropogenic impact, allowing for comparison of various parameters in the study. Project results will allow better estimates to be made of the contribution of worldwide mangrove ecosystems to the global methane budget and predict potential changes in this flux. The collaborators will bring complementary skills to the project with Dr. Herrera-Silveira emphasizing biological aspects and Dr. Paytan focusing on biogeochemical interactions in the ecosystem doc16080 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop microelectronic systems that will increase speed and capability combined with smaller size. As the patterning feature size of microelectronics continues to decrease, the need for power systems of smaller physical size emerges as a critical need. This project will develop novel microbatteries that will deliver a minimum-area, volumetric electrochemical energy source in a MEMS device. In order to realize minimum volume devices, the project approach will be to exploit zinc-air (Zn-air) chemistry that promises the highest energy density available for battery chemistries (36 J mm3). The company has developed a novel microfabrication process for non-silicon materials, including polymers, ceramics, and glasses that will enable reliable microscale fabrication of Zn-air batteries using appropriate materials. In this way, miniaturization of the highest performance system will be realized. The commercial potential of this project will be batteries that have increased life and will be smaller. This will help the electronics industry in reducing the size of many electronic and microelectronic devices doc16081 none This Small Business Innovation and Research (SBIR) Phase I project will demonstrate the feasibility of using an agitation device based on a resonating elastic member for dispersing and coalescing immiscible liquids. This will have a significant impact in the liquid processing for solvent extraction of metals. The proposed technology offers a mixing regime that promotes high mass transfer, yet easy disengagement between immiscible liquids by forming uniform droplet dispersions and creating interfacial activity that increases mass transport. The post-contact phase disengagement can be further enhanced by applying higher frequency energy. The near term commercial application would be presented by the changing technological landscape of the international mining and metals industries. The shift to leaching technology has created a need for advanced solvent extraction equipment. Applications also exist in the pharmaceutical industry, where solvent extraction is an entrenched and accepted approach to recovering products from microbial fermentation broths doc16082 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop as well as establish technical and commercial feasibility of the advanced low weight thermal and electrical insulation materials using fullerenes. This approach combines high reflectivity of metal foil and high absorptivity of low thermal conductivity fullerenes in attempt to produce effective structurally integrated low cost insulation material, which is expected to be much thinner than any other option currently available on the market. During the course of investigation, the proposed insulation materials will be fabricated and fully characterized in terms of density, thermal conductivity as well mechanical integrity and compared with other candidate materials. The approach should provide viable solutions to various heat management problems in numerous fields. If proved viable, this insulation will find extensive applications in rockets and satellites, cryogenic industry, electronic devices, fire-retardant packing materials, thermal insulators for temperature-sensitive products, insulative clothing, insulation of buildings, cars, refrigerators, water heaters, etc doc16083 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project proposes development of a magnetically controlled and microwave powered fluidized bed reactor, incorporating three primary innovations: [1] highly energy efficient waveguide-based microwave transmission and irradiation of fluidized media, [2] unique self-regulation of fluidized bed temperature using a localized magnetic field gradient and the temperature dependence of magnetic susceptibility to confine only relatively cold particles within the heating zone, and [3] a novel microwave-compatible temperature measurement system. The temperature dependence of the benefits of microwave heating have been applied to a vast array of chemical syntheses and related unit operations. However, most work to date has been conducted using relatively inefficient multi-mode cavities with poor temperature control. The innovation couples the excellent mass transfer efficiency of Fluidized Bed Reactors (FBRs) with the vastly superior heat transfer efficiencies achievable using high performance waveguide-based microwave irradiation systems. Anticipated benefits include: 1) energy savings resulting from improved thermal efficiency, 2) much faster reactor start-up due to substantially improved heating rates, 3) improved temperature uniformity, 4) improved control of reactor operating temperature, 5) development of novel magnetically controlled particles, and 6) greater understanding of the heat transfer characteristics in fluidized bed reactors. The successful coupling of optimal heat transfer and mass transfer characteristics with novel temperature control materials can be utilized to improve reactor efficiency and reduce costs. It is most probable that small-scale laboratory units will be the first commercial product doc16084 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop Pd-based sensors that are durable and exhibit stable response to hydrogen gas. These sensors will be fabricated using microstructurally stabilized Pd films. The morphological stability mandated by the novel composite film should result in enhanced durability and drift stability by circumventing the issue of film delamination often observed in Pd-based systems. This should result in the commercial development of safe, reliable and inexpensive hydrogen sensors, and thus help promote commercial acceptance of hydrogen as a fuel. The commercial application of this project is in the hydrogen sensor market doc16085 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will catalyze the creation of interactive worlds accessible over the Internet where students, professionals, and consumers can experientially learn scientific concepts not readily accessible to human physical interaction. The specific focus is the construction of a cellular world where University students can explore complex cellular mechanisms, and through customized versions, corporations can educate physicians, researchers and patients on the cellular basis of their products. As a proof of concept, Voyager Interactive has created a demonstration of 3D content delivered over the Internet using narrowband connectivity. This demostration allows students to become a virus particle and if successful, infect a cell. The student moves within a 3D cellular world, activates viral functions, interacts with objects, and triggers events in the world. A Cellbot companion interacts by voice and by uploading text and figures to assist the student. The content and functionality requirements described in the proposal will be translated into a comprehensive software development plan, which will serve as the blueprint for success in the phase of the research. The BioMachine Cellular World proffers a significant contribution to science education and an excellent launch point for custom commercial collaborations. It has prospects for science publishers interested in immersive 3D cellular educational software for use by electronic texts as well as indirect benefits associated with the identification of functional requirements for promoting student active learning in these highly interactive environments doc16086 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project is to establish the technical and economic feasibility of a novel technology to completely oxidize formaldehyde at dilute concentrations in air at room temperature by use of a novel catalyst system. Formaldehyde-containing resins are widely used in the U.S., leading to widespread emissions of formaldehyde at the product formation molds, and in storage and use of these resins. A novel technology will be developed to completely destroy the formaldehyde using room temperature catalytic oxidation with a new class of noble metal reducible oxide (NMRO) catalysts designed specifically for such compounds. This new class of catalysts provides destruction efficiencies for the complete oxidation of formaldehyde dramatically higher than traditional platinum VOC oxidation catalysts. This research program will utilize catalyst composition studies to tailor a superior catalyst for this application, reactor studies of the destruction efficacy of the NMRO class of catalysts, and a competitive cost analysis of the technology relative to other alternatives for formaldehyde destruction. The commercial applications for the concept will be for efficient cleansing of indoor air, cleansing of workplace air, and control of emissions at ambient temperature and low cost, capable of rapid deployment. The commercial applications of the research should be of value to both the private sector and the government sector, providing cost effective commercial systems to enhance indoor air quality and emissions controls. The program should help protect the nation s environment and improve economic competitiveness doc16087 none This Small Business Technology Transfer Phase I project will develop novel trimetallic nitride template endohedral fullerene (TNTs) materials for use as contrast agents in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). TNTs, which offer significant diagnostic and therapeutic possibilities, are now available in sufficient research quantities. Chemical functionalization reactions to solubilize the TNTs are also now available. TNTs offer an exciting alternative to current MRI contrast agents. TNTs offer the flexibility of excapsulating a variety of paramagnetic metals into the C80 fullerene cage. As several of the metals are paramagnetic, a production optimization plan balancing cost of materials versus efficiency as an MRI contrast agent is a primary focus of this project. The development of TNT based contrast agents is expected to lead to smaller patient doses, increased T1 relaxation rates and increased product safety. The commercial application of this project is in the contrast agent segment of the MRI imaging market. If successful, this project could result in a significant expansion in MRI capability and usage, with the potential of developing new business on the order of $700 million per year doc16088 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 1 project will demonstrate the capability of a universal solvent set concept to reduce the environmental and health impact of solvents used in the construction of fuel cells and printed wiring boards, without significantly increasing cost or reducing performance. The key objectives involve (1) development of solubility maps for mixtures of solvents using only the solvents and solvent mixtures contained in the proposed universal solvent set (2) Formulation of trial precursor solutions derived from the solubility maps (3) Screening of the trial formulations for desirable characteristics (thermal stability, ease of atomization, shelf life, low nozzle buildup) (4) Performance of trial thin film depositions to produce sample fuel cell catalyst membranes and resistor materials for printed wiring boards and (5) customer evaluation of fuel cell and resistor material samples. The proposed work will facilitate creation of environmentally friendly precursor solutions that will have impact in the fuel cells and embedded passives industry and, in particular in the combustion chemical vapor deposition process which is enabling next generation products in electronics, advanced energy, and broadband doc16089 none Karen Ann Garett, Allison Power, Helen Alexander ( , , ) Little is known about the role of plant disease in natural ecosystems, but several current environmental concerns motivate a greater understanding. When considering the potential effects of climate change, invasions of new pathogen species, or movement of disease resistance genes from genetically modified crop species to wild plant populations, understanding the role of plant disease in natural ecosystems is key. We propose a study of plant disease in the tallgrass prairie to provide information relevant to these concerns as well as to a general theoretical understanding of pathogen ecology and the role pathogens may play in determining the success of particular plant species. Plants in the tallgrass prairie of North America are of particular interest because so little area remains of this ecosystem and attempts to restore tallgrass prairie are an important focus of conservation efforts in the Great Plains. In this study we will provide information about the abundance of pathogen species and the patterns of their co-occurrence on a set of representative tallgrass prairie plant species found at the Konza Prairie Biological Station (KPBS), an NSF LTER site in the Flint Hills tallgrass prairie region in northeastern Kansas. We will also estimate the effects of predicted climate change scenarios, landscape patterns of microclimate variation, and burning cycle patterns, and work to refine sampling methods for characterizing pathogen populations within natural plant populations. This study will supply an essential baseline data set for plant diseases at KPBS to complement the LTER database on plant species composition and productivity doc16090 none The investigator organizes an international conference at Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques to study folding and self-assembly of macromolecules. Self-organization of macromolecules is a fundamental question in molecular biology. How molecules fold plays a major role in their organization. The meeting fosters the creation of new tools by bringing together scientists from several domains to consider the problem from different perspectives. DNA is like a long zipper whose teeth are pairs of molecules, called base pairs, one molecule on each side of the zipper. Links between the base pairs close the zipper. The zipper is about six feet long in human DNA; to fit inside a cell, it coils up. It partially uncoils to expose sections --- genes --- that are read to produce an intermediate molecule, called messenger RNA. Ribosomes read the messenger RNA and produce a corresponding amino acid chain. The chain folds up spontaneously; this is a protein. Proteins in turn perform their functions by partially unfolding to interact with other folded macromolecules. Proteins, genes, and DNA all fold and unfold to do their work. So folding and self-assembly are central issues in molecular biology. A goal of the conference is to stimulate synergistic interchanges between different disciplines by bringing together biologists, chemists, physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists to discuss these issues from different perspectives doc16091 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop and assess electrochemical methods for recovery of the giant and insoluble fullerenes that comprise the bulk of the fullerenes made by the hydrocarbon combustion route. Of the fullerenes produced by the combustion system at TDA, ca. 10 0E 12 % of the raw soot weight is recovered as fullerenes (C60, C70, etc.) by washing the soot with o-xylene and filtering. Yet other analyses demonstrate that most of the fullerenes are not recovered by straightforward washing techniques. In a prior NSF SBIR Phase I, Diener and Alford (Nature 393, 688) demonstrated an electrochemical method for separation of C74, giant fullerenes, and other traditionally insoluble fullerenes from mixed fullerene sublimate. This Phase I project is for the expansion of those ideas to processing of the extracted soot and implementation on a kilogram or greater batch scale. The recovered fullerenes will be useful for applications demanding a more robust, but still fullerenic material or coating. One possibility is carbon coatings for artificial biomaterials, where roughness on a nanometer scale promotes cell growth and increases the already high biocompatibility of carbon. A thin, robust film of higher fullerenes on steel implants potentially offers the high performance of carbon implants, but with a fraction of the cost. It is also possible that the small bandgap fullerenes could have roles that make use of their postulated three- dimensional electrical conductivity, as optical limiters, or as scaffolds for nanotechnological devices doc16092 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project assesses the feasibility of new oil and gas reservoir management tools for optimization of hydrocarbon recovery. It proposes extension of state-of-the-art analytic solution methods for potential flow in porous media from 2-D to 3-D. It will incorporate 3-D analytic fluid flow simulation technology into large-scale optimization routines where reservoir recovery performance is required. Unlike previous analytic solution methods, complex heterogeneous reservoir architecture can be entertained. Well conditions are modeled directly, making possible design of complex wells. Phase I will also address the possible extension of the method to alternate subregion shapes to allow even faster and more flexible implementations. This project will provide a new class of reservoir management tools capable of rapidly and accurately screening what-if scenarios for field development. The objectives of the research as to 1) generalize analytic solution boundary element methodology to three dimensions; 2) build a prototype, 3-D, analytic simulation tool; 3) propose and test algorithms or well and field optimization using an analytic solution performance evaluation; and 4) extend algorithms to include additional geometric shapes for enhanced flexibility. The next phase of the research involves algorithm refinement, generalization, optimization shell implementation, and testing. Subsequently, concentration will be on commercial software development and a user interface. There is a recognized need for speed, accuracy, and simplicity in reservoir engineering management tools. There is also a demand for such tools without the high-end computational horsepower expected of most numerical reservoir simulators. Potential Research Solutions envisions a PC software product as a deliverable from this research and development, allowing improved management of existing hydrocarbon resources, especially in mature reservoirs. The proffered software product would benefit in-fill drilling programs, allocation of production rates to balance well load and drainage volumes, and screening of a large portfolio of reservoir management options--all with accurate reservoir performance predictions in complex reservoir architecture--and, it will be of particular interest to independent oil and gas producers with limited access to high-end computers doc16093 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop the technology to perform Spectroscopic Imaging Polarimetry using Antenna Arrays with Integrated Diodes (SIP-AAID) to measure both the amplitude and phase of the light in an image at each pixel. Typically, visible and IR detectors imagers measure only the intensity of light, ignoring potential information in the phase. Since antenna size and diode capacitance scales with electromagnetic radiation wavelength for optimum collection, this SIP will require the use of antenna s with features 100 nm, and diodes with layer thicknesses 5 nm and geometric areas 50 nm, for visible and IR light. The development of a high resolution SIP-AAID that determines the complete polarization state of light at each pixel over a broad range of wavelengths is expected to revolutionize the IR and visible imaging detector industry. The relatively low cost and the unique capabilities of the SIP-AAID, when compared to present IR detectors, will likely provide a market pull for applications ranging from in on-line process and product control to surveillance with unmatched recognition and tracking abilities. The commercial applications of this project will be in space and defence related industries doc16094 none This Phase I Small Business Innovation Research project will develop plasma processes to treat both internal and external surfaces of medical polymer tubing such as catheters. The treatments will facilitate attachment of bioactive coatings, will clean, sterilize, and reduce friction; similar processes can also deposit organic or inorganic coatings. Plasmas driven by electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) will treat the lumen and external surfaces more uniformly, and over a greater range of process parameters, than conventional glow discharge or corona plasmas. Phase I will demonstrate that all treated surfaces of polymer tubing samples have been significantly and uniformly activated by the ECR plasma treatment without causing damage or discoloration of the material. A final Phase I test will evaluate the uniformity of a heparin-containing bioactive coating applied to the lumen wall of actual hemodialysis catheters. Phase II will refine plasma processing parameters for attachment of antithrombotic and antibiotic coatings, sterilization, pore sealing, and removal of contaminants on the lumen wall and exterior surfaces of medical catheters. Phase II would also begin applying research results to an ECR plasma activation system for Phase III production and commercialization. The ECR plasma process should be expandable to large-scale, low-cost commercial production of polymer tubing for catheters. A surface treatment to facilitate attachment of bioactive coatings and for cleaning, sterilization, and friction reduction would add both therapeutic and economic value to dialysis and other catheter types. The same plasma treatments can be applied to tubing for other medical and non-medical applications, such as prevention of biofilm formation in dental water lines doc16095 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will determine the technical and commercial feasibility of using the rapid freeze prototyping (RFP) and jet model making (JMM) processes to produce ice and wax patterns used in investment casting to fabricate metal castings for dental restorations. The Phase I effort is to develop a solid freeform fabrication based dental reconstruction system that can be used by dental labs to produce high-quality crowns, bridges, and implant structures rapidly and cost-effectively from digital images and computer-aided design data. The commercial potential of this project will be more precise dental restorations costing less. In this market was estimated to be about $2.5 billion with an expected annual growth between 10-15 percent doc16096 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop a highly conductive p-type AlGaN by construction of AlGaN superlattices. The material p-type AlGaN is key to many optoelectronic and some electronic semiconductor devices. Many characteristics of semiconductor devices containing p-type AlGaN (that is, power efficiency, maximum power, noise properties, maximum operating temperature, heating of the device and reliability) depend on the resistivity of this layer. In this Phase I project, a novel approach for a low-resistivity p-type AlGaN is proposed, namely p-type AlxGa1-xN AlyGa1-yN superlattices. This approach is based on exploiting potential variations induced by the superlattice and on the polarization fields occurring in the AlGaN material system. The commercial applications of this project will be in the market for electronics and optoelectronic devices. Examples of such devices include bipolar transistors, lasers, LEDs, and photodetectors doc16097 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop database information technology for constructivist teachers who are dissatisfied with the limitations of classroom testing for guiding reform. The Learning Partnership will provide Web-based classroom assessment services that measure a wide range of complex learning outcomes. Unlike EduTest.com, a test preparation program, The Learning Partnership s system will be optimized to diagnose student learning and provide direction for improvements in the learning process. The technical objectives for this project are as follows: 1. Adapt the discrete assessment approaches developed at the NASA Classroom of the Future for use with the Looking at the Environment curriculum, a one-year comprehensive inquiry-based high school science curriculum that is fully technology integrated that is being developed at Northwestern University in partnership with the Chicago schools.. 2. Create an assessment framework that integrates these discrete assessment approaches. The framework will track student performance at three levels: activity level, module level, and course level. 3. Develop database information technology that will support mass customization of assessment tasks, tracking of student performance, and reporting of results. These services will address a growing demand for online assessment materials. If science education reform in the U.S. is to succeed, new approaches to assessment are critical. On the one hand, assessment is essential provide school administrators with empirical evidence of student learning for accountability purposes; on the other hand, it is also essential to provide teachers with the depth of information needed to guide their practices. The Learning Partnership proposes to address this problem by providing classroom assessment services that bring together multiple forms of assessment for tracking student progress from the activity level to the high-stakes testing level doc16098 none Peet Temperate river systems and their associated floodplains have been substantially altered by human activity. Although the effects of dams on river hydrology and downstream ecosystems have been studied extensively, data on how changes in historic sedimentation regimes and geomorphology affect floodplain ecosystems is practically nonexistent. This research will demonstrate for an entire model river system (the Roanoke River of North Carolina) the degree of post-colonial landscape-scale ecosystem alteration due to sediment deposition, and the future changes likely to affect vegetation dynamics as those sediments are redistributed and transported out of the system. We will test a series of specific hypotheses centered on the following: (1) Anthropogenic sediment deposition on the Roanoke River floodplain over the last 250 years has led to a dramatic alteration of the extent and distribution of landforms within the geomorphologic system; (2) The vegetation of the lower Roanoke floodplain has been substantially altered as a consequence of environmental changes due to geomorphic alterations from post-colonial sedimentation; (3) Models of sediment-impacted riparian areas developed from geomorphologic and paleoecological data can be used to predict future landforms and vegetation composition. To address these hypotheses we will integrate dendrogeomorphic, palynological and modeling techniques to (1) develop a spatially explicit model of post-colonial sediment accumulation for the lower Roanoke River floodplain, (2) model the pre-colonial geomorphic landscape and simulate future floodplain geomorphology, and (3) predict vegetation distributions for those surfaces using vegetation-environment relationships doc16099 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop and characterize a novel ceramic material and microcomponent fabrication technique for two different industrial sectors: the fiber-optic communications industry and the chemical industry. Current processes for microcomponent fabrication, primarily based on silicon processing technology are expensive, and often do not meet the production rates required for optical component (fiber-connectors, beam splitters) fabrication or possess the desired high-temperature performance for chemical industry applications (micro-channel devices for gas separation reforming). The objective of this project is to develop a cost-effective technique for microfabrication of components with properties and or production efficiency comparable to or superior than silicon technology. The process will use a low-temperature, net-shape fabrication technique that is expected to be efficient, cost-effective, scalable and environmentally friendly (no-byproducts). The commercial benefits will be an alternative to silicon processing technology. The high production capacity and tight dimensional tolerances for components fabricated using this material technique makes it an attractive option for optic fiber component manufacturers. The high achievable surface areas and the inherent thermochemical stability of ceramics make this material very attractive for fabrication of microchannel devices for gas separation reformation doc16100 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will address the high cost and size and shape capability of ceramic matrix composites. Silicon carbide (SiC) fiber reinforced silicon carbide composites require furnaces, reactors, or ovens to produce the SiC SiC composite matrix. These reactors, furnaces, and ovens are large capital expenditures limiting product size and shape and significantly increasing the cost of composites. Phase I will use an oven-less process to make SiC SiC composites with a reaction-bonded silicon carbide matrix to remove cost, size, and shape constraints on SiC SiC composites. Phase I will determine the thermal processing parameters required to produce SiC SiC composites comparable to furnace-produced composites. Density, microscopy, and strength will be used to evaluate the process. This is a technology for producing SiC SiC composites that are not dependent on furnace proportions that control the size, shape and cost of the composite parts. Large and complex shapes are expected to be produced rapidly in an oven-less process for advanced turbine engines, radiant tube heaters, heat exchangers and the numerous erosion, corrosion and thermal applications of the chemical, petroleum, and paper and pulp industries doc16101 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop the technology for fabrication of M50 bearing steel coatings that are superhard, adherent, nanocrystalline, homometallic (an integrated layer without interface), and resistant to scratch and corrosion. These homometallic coatings will be similar in composition to the metallic substrates onto which they will be deposited. However, their nanocrystalline structures will provide enhancement in important properties such as hardness, toughness, and wear and corrosion resistance, without the brittleness, poor adhesion and other problems associated with conventional ceramic coatings. Prior research has demonstrated that nanocrystalline (3-40 nm grains) Co-Cr deposited onto Co-Cr-Mo substrates possesses hardness close to that of some ceramics (18-26 GPa, 400% increase) without the associated problems with adhesion to metallic substrates, and that fabrication of nanocrystalline ( 40 nm crystals) Ti, with hardness of 12-14 GPa, can be accomplished. The commercial application of this project will be in the manufacture of aircraft, boats and ground vehicles doc16102 none Project Endophytes are fungi that live internally in plants but do not cause disease. Instead, endophytes are thought to benefit the plant by increasing resistance to drought, herbivores, and seed predators, pathogens and root feeders and increasing germination rates, nutrient uptake, and competitive abilities. Endophytes are found in all plants, including agronomic crops and turf grasses. They are used in turf grasses to increase performance of grasses, but may also cause harm livestock because of their toxic effects. However, little is known about the role of endophytes in native grasses. The benefits of endophytes are often not the same as in agronomic grasses. Our research seeks to determine the costs and benefits of asexual, seed borne endophytes in the genus Neotyphodium in two widespread SW native grasses, Arizona fescue and sleepy grass. Our goals are to experimentally test the cost and benefits of Neotyphodium infection depending on plant and endophyte genotype and environment. We will implement two major field experiments that control plant genotype and endophyte infection, soil moisture levels and herbivory by invertebrates and vertebrates. Our results will provide insights into basic interactions between endophytes and their host grasses, and may have important applied aspects related to forage grasses doc16103 none This workshop will address the new research and education challenges posed by the advent of embedded computing as a discipline. Workshop participants include embedded system experts from both academia and industry. The workshop report includes: 1) a statement of pressing research problems posed in embedded computing; 2) recommendations about important research areas relating to embedded computing; and 3) viewpoints on how the discipline of embedded computing fits in with existing computing disciplines and specialties doc16104 none Bottke This three-year award supports U.S.-France collaboration in astronomy between William F. Bottke of the Southwest Research Institute and Alessandro Morbidelli of the Observatory of Nice. The project addresses the origin and evolution of near earth objects or NEOs, a population of asteroids and comets crossing or nearly crossing the Earth s orbit. Present knowledge of orbital and size distributions of the NEO population is limited, because the NEOs known to the Earth are biased by complicated observational selection effects and because only a modest fraction of the entire NEO population has been discovered. US and French researchers addressed the first problem through development of quantitative models of debiased orbital and absolute magnitude distribution of NEOs. This collaboration is extended to new problems: design of NEO surveys to determine how and where to find the most hazardous or hard to find NEOs; computation of frequency of impacts on Earth and other terrestrial bodies as a function of the impact energy; computation of the relative collision rate on the moon and terrestrial planets; and computation of the upper limits on long-period and Halley-type comet population. The French investigators bring to this collaboration expertise in asteroid and cometary dynamics and the physics of collision fragmentation. This is complemented by US expertise in fast integration codes; large scale numerical simulations and statistics on orbital evolution doc16105 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will help launch the development of a Metainformation Engine. Every application could be supplemented by a rich set of links; most items on display screens should have multiple links tailored to current task and preferences. The Metainformation Engine will automatically generate links within the majority of computer applications, generate metadata about the application elements and the relationships underlying each link (which users can examine for better understanding), and provide several hypermedia-style services such as annotation. Instead of keyword search or lexical analysis on the display text, the Metainformation Engine generates links on application elements based on application structure and context. These links lead to related elements in the same application or in related applications or databases. Integration requires few or no modifications to existing applications. This product will be valuable to enterprises as they attempt to collect and integrate new and legacy information meaningfully across corporations and the entire supply chain doc16106 none The goal of our project is to develop a novel integrated engineering simulation tool for heat conduction in microelectronic and microphotonic components - microscale systems with nanoscale features. The global impact of this work will be to quantify, tabulate and disseminate phonon properties, which are as important for heat conduction in these devices as properties such as emissivity and extinction coefficient for thermal radiation in the classical regime. Novel molecular dynamics (MD) simulations will be used to quantify and parameterize phonon relaxation times and phonon-interface phenomena. Given the phonon data obtained through MD simulations, a new ballistic-diffusive formulation of the Boltzmann equation will enable the solution of realistically complex thermal problems from nano- to macroscales. A modular design of our implementation will facilitate an eventual integration into design software. The results from the projects will be applied for the development of Information technology systems. These are constructed from devices and components with characteristic length scales ranging from nanometers to micrometers, such as semiconductor lasers and heterojunction bipolar transistors used in telecommunication systems. Currently, the thermal design of such micro- and nanoscale components is major challenge because Fourier s law fails at these scales due to the long mean free path of phonons (the dominant heat carriers in most semiconductor devices) and there exists no practical alternative. Revised Title: ITR: Collaborative Research on the Development of an Integrated Algorithm for Heat Conduction form Nano- to Macroscale doc16107 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop software tools allowing educators, interpreters, and linguists skilled in American Sign Language (ASL), but not skilled in computer 3-D animation, to create fully grammatical synthesized ASL to provide access for Deaf and Hard of Hearing individuals to Internet web pages and CD-ROM based interactive media; and to create interactive courses for learning ASL. While this project will build upon Vcom3D s commercial SigningAvatar(TM) product, a signficant advance is proposed. The current SigningAvatar(TM)technology allows users to generate unique sentences in Signed English thus providing partial access to digital media. However, the absence of many elements of ASL grammar limits the use of SigningAvatar(TM) by the larger segment of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing population who require grammatical ASL for comprehension and for ASL courses. This project addresses the numerous requests to provide fully grammatical ASL that Vcom3D has had from the Deaf community. The resulting ASL products will significantly reduce federal costs of public school education for Deaf children and will move toward improving universal access and equity of service goals, as mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act; Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act; and Section 255 of the Telecommunications Act doc16108 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will establish a method to quantitatively predict the level of micromixing and mass transport in single-phase and multiphase fluid systems that are generated by a novel low-frequency acoustic technology. The primary Phase I objective is to demonstrate the feasibility for development of a theoretical understanding of the governing mechanisms for the transformation of high-intensity, low-frequency, acoustic energy radiation into useful work for mixing and mass transport applications in multi-phase fluids. A secondary, but essential, objective will be to develop the transfer functions coupling the acoustic transducer to the radiated acoustic energy in the fluid. The models will be accompanied by experiment methods that will correlate classical micromixing amd mass transport techniques with acoustic field experiment data. The proposed work will result in establishing a fundamental understanding of the governing mechanisms for acoustically-driven, single-phase and multiphase fluid processes, as well as fluid-particle interactions. The analytical models are essential for exploitation of the industrial market by innovative low-frequency acoustic mixing methods that are emerging. Mixing is the most common operation encountered in the Chemical Processing Industries. In North America alone, the conventional industrial mixer market is between $200 million and $250 million annually. Other industries reliant upon mixing and mass transport include food, petroleum, mining, pharmaceutical, pulp and paper, water treatment and municipal waste water treatment doc16109 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop an economical platform technology for producing well-dispersed polymer nanocomposite films. Emphasis has been placed on the mechanical property advantages of mixing nano-sized clay flakes into conventional polymers. Processing techniques include sol-gel, various vacuum-based deposition methods, physical mixing, gas phase synthesis, chemical synthesis, liquid dispersions, and mixed solvent casting. To overcome potential production problems, a low-cost alternative technology, the modified Combustion Chemical Vapor Deposition (CCVD) process can be utilized. The modified CCVD process allows for the incorporation of nanoparticles of various sizes, distributions, and types in the polymer matrix. As a test bed for this platform technology, nanocomposite films for light emitting diode (LED) with voltage dependent wavelength output will be synthesized for display applications. The commercial application of this project will be in the polymer based LED segment of the flat panel display market. A low-cost, voltage variable LED system that is less expensive to manufacture, more reliable and with a longer life-span could have a significant impact in capturing more of this market doc16110 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop compositions of nanocomposite metal oxide catalysts for use in automotive catalytic converters. Such nanocomposite catalysts will potentially lower emissions of polluting gases, such as carbon monoxide (CO), hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides (NOx) particularly in the initial warm-up phase of engine operation. With more stringent regulations on mobile source emissions, the need for improved catalytic conversion has become a major priority for research efforts worldwide. The key task will be to develop the ceria-based nanocomposites suitably doped with highly dispersed noble metal (Pt or Pd) to achieve highly active and thermally stable performance at costs comparable to conventional catalysts. The proposed project will have a major impact on commercial and consumer automotive applications. Catalytic converters are used in nearly all gasoline-powered automobiles. Improvement in catalytic converter efficiency will have significant environmental impacts on the mobile air pollution sources doc16111 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project concerns R&D aimed at assessing the feasibility of applying statistical Machine Translation (MT) techniques to the problem of improving the productivity of human translators. Currently, human translators use translation memory tools, i.e., software packages that provide access to databases of previously translated sentences. Unfortunately, these tools do not provide significant help in translating previously unseen sentences and do not improve over time (with the exception of providing access to increasingly larger databases of previously translated material). Because automatic translation systems produce low quality translations that are not tailored to their genre and domain of interest, human translators refuse to use automatic translation systems. In this program, a prototype hybrid translation system and computer interface that will permit humans to translate text by exploiting both a translation memory and an automatic, statistical-based MT system will be built and the increase in text translation productivity that is enabled by the use of the hybrid tool will be measured. A hybrid translation tool such as that proposed here has the potential to reduce significantly the costs associated with human translation, and increase translation productivity doc16112 none synthesis of these major approaches. Second, it is the intent to develop a research methodology that can be adapted for classroom use. Recent work by Li-Ping Ma has called attention to the ideas of depth and connectivity of mathematical knowledge. The PI hopes to develop a blend of qualitative and quantitative methods that can be used to analyze the depth and connectivity of a student s mathematical knowledge. With the current affordability of powerful computers, there has been a new push to use computer analysis to gain insight into qualitative data. Existing software like Sacks Conversation Map and Krackplot of social network theorists will be evaluated for use in the math education setting, and new software will be developed as necessary. Third, the research results will be disseminated not only using the traditional avenues of conferences and published papers, but also over the Internet in a web-searchable database. The PI has considerable experience in such projects and already runs two such servers: one is a database of educational resources for the national community of Treisman workshop leaders and another one holds for math and statistics education papers for the Special Interest Group on Undergraduate Math Education of the MAA. Among the indexed and posted contents will be classroom instruments along with examples of student work. As a final benefit, student research assistants will play important roles in the research, either graduate students or motivated advanced undergraduates. The experience will be designed to cultivate an interest in math education in the math majors chosen to work on the project, with an eye towards encouraging them to pursue careers in math teaching or math education research doc12725 none An application running in a distributed computing environment such as the Computational Grid must adapt to the available hardware and software resources. This requires information about the properties of Grid resources such as hosts, network switches, links and paths, software libraries and systems, user and organization rights, software services, event channels and dictionaries, and more. The information needed for an application to run, the values of the information (how fast the information changes) and the freshness of the information (how fast updates must be pushed to the application) can vary dramatically. These attributes place significant demands on the resource information service, demands that are arising with increasing prevalence in the general area of directory services as well. The Grid Forum, an international standards body for world-wide Grid computing, is developing standards for representing and querying this information. There is much that is excellent about these evolving standards, but there are many forms of highly desirable queries that will be difficult or expensive to perform in these systems. In particular, dynamic information will require very high update rates not supported by LDAP-based implementations. This project will address these concerns through a proposed (and tentatively named) Grid Resource Information Service (GRIS), a unified relational approach to grid information services. The research will start with the full ACID (Atomicity Consistency Isolation Durability) functionality of a relational database system and build down to a practical resource information system that still provides most of the benefits of the RDBMS. Such a system will provide a single highly flexible query model and language for all types of Grid resource information, no matter how dynamic. The research will culminate in an extensible implementation based on commodity database systems and the SQL language, including canned queries for non-SQL users. The project will evaluate the new system and techniques using logged updates and queries from an existing Grid information service, and comparing results with a hierarchical system such as Globus MDS2. To facilitate comparisons, the project will produce a set of benchmark queries from discussions with users, tool developers, and Grid Forum members, and will quantify the limits of these queries doc16114 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will investigate the usefulness of image processing technologies for characterizing discontinuities in rock masses. Discontinuities in rock masses include joints, faults, bedding planes, etc., and characterizing these features is one of the most important inputs to engineering design in rock masses. Split Engineering LLC has developed image processing and mathematical algorithms for I) delineating fracture traces in images of rock fractures, and 2) extracting three-dimensional properties (including strike and dip) from the delineated fracture traces. The first objective of the Phase I work is to test and further refine the image processing and mathematical algorithms that have been developed. The second objective is to investigate the synergies between this technology and the laser scanning technologies, which also have great commercial potential in the field of fracture characterization. The third objective is to conduct a number of field case studies to validate the trace analysis approach and to determine under what circumstances it is beneficial to incorporate laser-scanning technologies into the approach. Knowledge of geologic discontinuities is important for a number of industries. Current technologies have resulted in either millions of dollars in damage due to a missed fracture or costly reinforcement where it was not needed because of a misinterpreted discontinuity. Important end-users of the technology proffered by Split Engineering LLC, referred to as the trace analysis technology, are the mining and geotechnical industries. The capability fits in especially well with the need to automate certain rock characterization tasks and incorporate the resulting information into the mining process. If the project is successful in developing improvements in fracture system characterization, benefits for the petroleum and environmental industry are also plausible doc16115 none This Small Business Innovative Research Phase I project seeks to develop a meshless Petrov-Galerkin geo-environ technology for wide scale field uses. Groundwater supplies are increasingly threatened by organic, inorganic, and radioactive contaminants introduced to the environment by improper disposal or accidental releases. Estimates of remediation costs at U.S. government sites alone range into the billions of dollars. Geo-environ assessment tools play an important role in design and evaluations of remediation alternatives and long-term management of groundwater. Proposed mesh free geo-environ technology will open a new era for easy simulation of large complex systems without grid generation. Node density will adjust dynamically for accurate solution. A Petrov-Galerkin based model will provide stable robust technology for contaminant transport and remediation alternative evaluations. Interfaced 2D and 3D displays and animations will provide efficient means for easy communications within project team, decision-makers, and regulators. Consultants for Environmental System Technologies proposed technology has applicability to numerous waste site restoration programs and groundwater management projects that are implemented at an enormous cost by Federal agencies, states, counties, petroleum facilities and chemical industries doc16116 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is for the development of platinum catalysts for hydrogen air proton-exchange membrane fuel cells. The proposed catalysts will be more active than the current catalysts. The goal is to develop advanced fuel cell catalysts that are sufficiently active to meet DOE s goal for precious metal loading for fuel cells. More active Platinum catalysts will help commercialize hydrogen air proton-exchange membrane fuel cells for vehicle and low- to medium-power generator applications. Fuel cell manufacturers and users will benefit greatly if the proposed research becomes successful doc16117 none The automated interaction of computers with humans and the biosphere in which they reside represents an increasingly important attribute of computing in the information age. Identification is a critical component of this interaction whether the application be projection of human identity at a distance over the internet, criminal justice and forensics, or medical diagnostics and therapy delivery. Defined across this application spectrum, automated biometric identification systems measure a physiological, behavioral, or biological signature from the human body or environment, process and recognize classifiable signal components, and then renders an identification decision based upon the parameters of a given application. Effectively addressing the breadth of needed biometric identification system research from the life sciences to the computing sciences represents a significant challenge to industry and government. Cohesive university faculty groups are particularly well suited to address innovations at this intersection of disciplines. The Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR) organizes the activities of faculty groups at four universities spanning the physical, health, and computer sciences and engineering, to effectively address the cross-cutting research needed to address automated advance biometric identification technology and systems. CITeR will serve an enabling role in the technical and economic development of this area through research of new enabling technologies, the integrative training of scientists and engineers across its breadth, and the facilitation of the transfer of this technology to the private and government sectors doc16118 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)Phase Iproject will explore a system for improving the sensitivity of fluorescence-based metal-ion sensing. It will use a novel mesoporous material that responds to the presence of certain metal ions by undergoing a precipitous drop in fluorescence intensity. This will enable the detection of trace amounts of toxic or otherwise problematical metal ions in e.g. drinking water, hazardous waste sites, and industrial waste streams. This sensing system can then be incorporated into a test strip-like format in a polymer matrix to give a mass-producible and hence cost-effective, single-use trace metal sensor. These sensors can be made widely available and thereby can improve the amount of information on the presence of metals of concern in the home, workplace, and environment doc16119 none This three-day conference will bring together the international community of cerebellar researchers to discuss the current status of the field. Progress in cerebellar physiology has proceeded at a rapid pace and a meeting to exchange new results and concepts seems timely. This meeting will serve to cross-fertilize efforts between various factions in the field in the understanding of cerebellar function. Seven sequential panel sessions, each with an organized and moderated discussion period, two plenary lectures the history of landmark discoveries, and a poster session will be presented over a three-day period to consider the following topics that are important for understanding cerebellar function. 1) The cerebellum as a device for coordination of movement; 2) Relative roles of the cerebellar cortex and nuclei; 3) Parallel fiber beams. What do they do? 4) Climbing fiber inputs to the cerebellum. What is signaled? 5) Cognitive processing by the cerebellum; 6) LTD, LTP and molecular mechanisms of learning and memory; 7) Models of cerebellar function. It is expected that attendees of the meeting will be informed of the very latest progress and research in the cerebellar field. Because cerebellar research is presently extremely active, and because many of the speakers use state of the art technology such as optical recording and multiple electrode recording techniques, attendees will also be informed of the state of the art of methodology related to the neurosciences. The open format of the poster session will provide the opportunity for active, intimate discussion doc16120 none This Small Business Innovative Research Phase I project will develop and validate a three-dimensional finite element modeling capability to predict machining induced residual stresses. This project will significantly extend the current state-of-the-art that is limited to 2D residual stress analysis and recently, 3D oblique cutting models of single cutting edge geometries. Residual stress has become increasingly important because of its effects upon surface quality, fatigue, and workpiece distortion. Residual stress has high economic impact to industry since the cost of manufacture is incurred prior to any measurement or detection. Testing methods are very expensive, difficult, and not developed for production purposes. Industry and government testing has determined that machining induced residual stresses can be significant enough in magnitude to induce part distortion and out-of tolerance conditions on completed workpieces. This project will demonstrate an integrated approach to predicting residual stress effects upon completely manufactured parts. Workpiece residual stress due to machining parameters will be modeled, verified, and then integrated into a complete part analysis to determine the final state of stress and distortion for a complete workpiece part prior to any manufacture. The commercial applications include large, thin walled aerospace parts (such as wing spars), structural components, and parts susceptible to high rates of fatigue (rotor wing hubs and load carrying parts, spindles, structural, and powertrain components). The economic impact to predict and control part distortion induced by machining processes is very high. The cost of rejection of one part due to out-of-tolerance conditions can easily exceed $100,000 and routinely create weeks in production delay and scrap. The automotive sector, primarily within engine block manufacture, piston liners, bearings, spindles, and hard turning applications (generally) could also benefit from this technology doc16121 none Chen This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will test the feasibility of a new production technology for affordable near-net shape components of a class of advanced refractory metal intermetallic composites. Niobium (Nb)-based intermetallics will permit a revolutionary increase in operating temperatures for many very high temperature applications. Phase I will employ an innovative reactive metal investment casting method to create a cost-effective and robust process for manufacturing complex shapes. Phase II would explore strategies for producing actual components. Anticipated commercial applications are those at very high temperatures, such as turbine airfoils now made of single crystal nickel-based superalloys. Unprecedented levels of fuel efficiency and thrust-to-weight ratio are expected for future aircraft systems doc16122 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project proposes to develop a real time coating property sensor to measure intrinsic material properties of thermal spray coatings. The project proposes to develop this technology into a production capable tool for thermal spray process development and control with the following attributes: measures useful coating properties in situ; usable by real world spray shop operators at both small and large shops; relatively inexpensive ( $25K); able to operate in harsh environment; and uses minimal assumptions and complexities associated with property interpretation. The project will demonstrate feasibility of producing such a tool under Phase I. Under Phase II, a production tool will be developed and important relationships between the tool output and the functional properties of the coatings will be generated. Despite this need, there are no simple procedures currently available to rapidly determine the mechanical properties of coatings both in laboratory and industrial settings. As thermal spray coatings evolve from a role of life extension of components to performing a prime reliant function, there exists a critical need to develop procedures to obtain design relevant properties. The impact of this project will provide commercial thermal spray customers with engineering support directed at improving quality and repeatability of coatings application. This should result in significant capital expenditure savings for companies over many disciplines that are involved in manufacturing doc16123 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will establish the performance of the Plasma Flow Source for stripping and residue cleaning of photoresists on 200 mm semiconductor wafers without producing any environmentally-damaging waste streams. In particular, it will determine the effect of process conditions and gas chemistry on stripping rate and uniformity. Measurements will be performed on standard and heavily implanted photoresists as well as on patterned wafers following reactive ion etching. The novel Plasma Flow Source system produces a large flux of oxygen atoms at low-temperatures and pressures between 10 and Torr. It has been shown that this source strips photoresists from 100 mm wafers at rates of up to 0.9micron min at 120 C and 3.0 micron min at 250 C, with excellent uniformity. The high ash rate observed at 120 C shows promise for removing heavily implanted resists and hardened residues from reactive ion etched substrates. Moreover, operation at higher pressure reduces gas consumption and dramatically decreases pumping requirements. The knowledge gained from this study will establish the potential of this exciting new technology for environmentally-benign, photoresist stripping of wafers for next-generation semiconductor devices doc16124 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)Phase I project will create image processing based software that tracks objects using real-time video input for use in the teaching of mathematics and physical science. Image processing has not previously been used in educational motion detection. Compared to the currently used methods-real-time graphing and frame-by-frame analysis of stored video-the proposed innovation will have many advantages, such as the simultaneous display of video and graphs and the automatic generation of stroboscopic images. Phase I has two research objectives. To develop a system that can track one object and display a graph of its motion on a computer screen in real time, and to investigate with teachers and students the applications of this system to understanding motion, graphing, shapes, visualization, and projection. Used in conjunction with inquiry-based curriculum, the system proffered by Paul Antonucci & Associates could improve teaching and learning of physical science and mathematics nationwide, and it expands the possibilities for exploring motion in real-world situations. This innovation will create the opportunity to surpass in learning effectiveness and ease-of-use the technologies now used widely in high school and college physics. In addition it will potentially reach a much larger market-mathematics classrooms from middle school through college doc16125 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop innovative technologies for smart infrastructure, and in particular coordinated wireless sensors and control devices. The first smart wireless devices will focus on measurement and control of environmental parameters such as temperature and humidity, although these devices are archetypes for a wider range of smart components. The behavior of the smart devices will be coordinated by the MetaOS, a software system developed by Ambient Computing, Inc. to provide traditional operating system functions to fully distributed collections of smart computing and networking devices. The system will demonstrate the technical and commercial feasibility of connected and coordinated smart devices. The early commercial applications of the proposed work will focus on improvement of energy consumption and personalization of environmental parameters. Existing means of addressing these problems are highly proprietary, difficult and expensive to deploy, and have limited flexibility. The proposed more advanced systems will lead to significant reduction in overall energy consumption while providing personal comfort and financial benefits to consumers. This effort aims to build some of the missing and necessary pieces for smart environments, specifically, small and low-cost wireless devices with integrated computing capabilities doc16126 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)Phase I project focuses on the development and evaluation of a new class of algorithms for blind source separation (BSS) and independent component analysis (ICA) based on a recently proposed information theoretic learning (ITL) criterion. The algorithms yield several practical criteria to adapt universal mappers, either under unsupervised or supervised paradigms. The ITL criterion can dramatically improve upon systems trained with mean square error. NeuroDimension will develop new algorithms to choose the segments for separation, address BSS of noisy mixtures, and extend the ITL criterion to convolutive mixtures. The firm further proposes to validate these methods via the fetal heart rate monitoring problem, which requires the separation of the maternal and fetal ECGs, a blind source separation problem. The ITL criterion of minimum cross entropy can exploit the fact that the ECGs are statistically independent. The expectation is that the new information theoretic learning will extract a much cleaner ECG because it is exploiting all the information about the signal statistics, not only the second order statistics (as MSE does). Finally the ITL criterion will be compared with the conventional interference cancellation algorithms in real data obtained from the University of Florida College of Medicine. The project has the potential to develop a new piece of clinical instrumentation, a fetal heart monitor, for which there is a demonstrated market. The firm utilizes a new approach to information signal process that may be able to identify the elusive fetal heart signal in a practical, real-time manner doc16127 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses the lack of visualization technology for advanced engineering simulation tools. Such tools routinely depend on interpolation and approximation (basis) functions for a variety of purposes, including modeling geometry via CAD CAM tools, or for computational techniques such as the finite element method. What distinguishes advanced tools from earlier, less sophisticated tools is their dependence on higher-order basis functions, as compared to the linear functions typical of early tools. While modern simulation tools have moved to more sophisticated basis functions, visualization technology has lagged behind. Visualization technology, which plays a vital role in understanding, communicating and steering computational design, has not moved beyond supporting linear basis functions, with a few special exceptions (e.g., quadratic). This situation poses a significant problem for engineering computation, since advanced techniques of high accuracy are coupled with lower-accuracy display of results. Such an approach is error prone, and introduces significant penalties in terms of time and computer resources required. Kitware, Inc. proffers software technology that will enable analysts to use higher-order basis functions for visualization. This technology will be available for licensing in the combined CAD CAM and finite element market. In addition, Kitware, Inc. will build visualization applications for commercial sale doc16128 none Naturally occurring populations of guppies (Poecilia reticulata) exhibit striking genetically based variability in the color patterns of males. Each male has a unique color pattern or one that is shared with one or very few other fish in the population. How this polymorphism is maintained remains a mystery despite decades of study on this model organism. Laboratory studies have suggested that the mating success of males may depend on how rare or common their color pattern is, and theory suggests that such frequency dependent selection could maintain genetic variation. This study will examine the role of frequency dependent selection in maintaining color pattern variation in naturally occurring guppy populations. It will use new techniques for molecular paternity analysis and permanent marking of fish to examine patterns of survival and mating success of individual fish in streams. Understanding how genetic variation can persist in natural populations has long been a goal of research in evolutionary biology and more empirical study is needed. Dwindling populations of organisms often suffer from loss of genetic variation. Thus, this is an increasingly important topic for investigation and application to conservation strategies. This research involves an international collaboration between research and undergraduate institutions, and research participation by undergraduates and a high school teacher doc16129 none This Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) Phase I Project will further develop a nanostructure technology for use as the active material of a fiber optic laser. Prior research has demonstrated that self-organized III-V semiconductor nanostructures grown on GaAs (gallium arsenide) substrate can operate as the gain region of a 1.3 micron wavelength laser, and that these structures are effective in realizing vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs). 1.3 micron VCSELs are a key device for high speed fiber optic links for use in Ethernet and other metro access and metro applications. This project will have access to a high quality epitaxial growth facility with the capability to grow the III-V nanostructures and VCSEL mirrors and to develop a broad range of electronic and optoelectronic device materials. The commercial application of this project is in the fiber optics communications market. It is estimated that the market for a 1.3 micron VCSEL could reach close to $1 billion within the next 10 years doc16130 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will eliminate coking in ethylene furnaces and dusting in steam reformers. Ethylene and hydrogen, two very important feedstocks, are produced by processing hydrocarbon feed streams at high temperatures. Unfortunately, when hydrocarbons come into contact with iron and nickel (major components of steel) at high temperature, reactions can occur which cause coking in ethylene production and formation of metal oxide particulate (dusting) in hydrogen production by steam reforming. The lost time required to decoke ethylene crackers and the removal of metal oxide particulate from steam reformers are costly. Although pyrolysis and steam reforming are carried out under different conditions, the initial steps in coking and dusting are identical, the formation of iron and nickel carbides. In this project, additives will be developed that bind strongly to iron and nickel on the steel surface, eliminating the formation of these metal carbides. Additives that reduce coke in ethylene crackers and eliminate dusting in steam reforming would find immediate application in both ethylene and hydrogen production industries. These problems are significant sources of cost to each of the industries and their elimination would result in measurable reductions in price for both ethylene and hydrogen doc16131 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project focuses on the development of novel solid state facilitated transport membranes for the separation of carbon dioxide hydrogen and carbon dioxide methane mixtures. Current best technologies are amine absorption or pressure-swing-adsorption both expensive, energy intensive processes. The key objective of this project is to deliver a new type of facilitated transport membrane in the form of a solid polymer electrolyte. To provide high gas fluxes, the membranes will be formed as thin-film composites. Preliminary studies indicate that solid polymer electrolyte composite membranes can show significantly improved performance over conventional facilitated transport and polymeric membranes. Separation of carbon dioxide from natural gas and from hydrogen-containing refinery off-gases in refineries present a significant opportunity for membrane-based-gas separation. About 17% of U.S. natural gas requires processing to remove carbon dioxide. In refineries, hydrogen is typically produced by steam reforming of natural gas or light hydrocarbons and must be separated from carbon dioxide, which is produced as a by-product. Membrane separation offers many advantages over amine absorption or pressure-swing adsorption in these two applications. However more selective and robust membranes are needed to achieve these economics over conventional separation technology and this is reason for developing solid polymer electrolyte composite membranes doc16132 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will establish the feasibility of a materials system to encase customized ceramic signage (and other lightscaping products) which utilize solid-state ceramic lamps as a backlight source. These systems should achieve extraordinary power efficiency by illuminating the information rather than the entire sign area and are intended for external operation over a wide environmental range (e.g. extremes in temperature, humidity, acid rain, etc). The proposed encasement method uses special materials formulations applied through ultrasonic spray and CNC technologies to create custom ceramic surfaces. These surfaces display the information content in a backlit format while protecting the light emitting ceramic layer from the external operating environment. This system provides a semi-transparent, multi-colored outer ceramic layer exhibiting a combination of information display and artistic presentation features when backlit by a solid-state ceramic lamp. This technology can be applied to a wide variety of commercial signage and lightscaping applications doc16133 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project involves development of fully inorganic nanofiltration (NF) membrane modules that combine the attributes of low cost, excellent chemical resistance in aggressive organic and aqueous media, high thermal stability, and high mechanical strength. The key objectives will be to develop NF membrane modules based on low-cost multi-channel honeycomb supports with 220 square cetimeter membrane area and to demonstrate they have NF retention capability, high productivity (flux rates), and resistance to aggressive organic and aqueous media. Preliminary work to fabricate analogous modules with square centimeter membrane area will be performed. The modules, when ultimately commercialized to very large size, will be especially suitable for in-process recycling of solvents used in a wide variety of applications and could replace distillation as a cost-effective purification method for solvents such as hexane and acetone that are used in very large quantities in edible oil processing. In addition, the products would have wide application in the chemical manufacturing, petrochemical, petroleum production, pharmaceutical, food processing, and water treatment industries doc16134 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project examines the feasibility of using gestural interface technology and interactive robotics to facilitate receptive and expressive language development of children with severe and or multiple disabilities. Developed by AnthroTronix, Inc., the technology uses a child friendly robot controlled by various interfaces adapted to individual needs, regardless of physical limitations. The robot imitates movements and tells the child s written or spoken stories, providing reinforcements and motivation for learning. Speech and language impairments, affecting 10% of school children, including most children with severe disabilities, significantly impact abilities to read, write and communicate. Objectives are to examine the technology s (a) applicability across a range of disabilities, ages, and interventions in the promotion of speech, language, reading, and writing skills, and (b) ease of use by therapists and teachers. Methods will include qualitative data and pre-post tests with 3-5 children representing a range of disabilities, cultural backgrounds, and ages who attend a K-5 public school. Results will enable Beta Prototype design specifying a range of applications for children with disabilities and will determine specific interventions to be tested in the next phase of the research. Completion of the project will enable the refinement of the hardware and software to target specified interventions that promote language literacy across a range of children with disabilities. The technology will be marketed in a package that includes a CD-ROM and instructional manual to teachers and therapists working with children with disabilities doc16135 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will demonstrate the correlation between bound-water dielectric relaxation observed by broadband permittivity measurement and the degree of hydration in Portland cement, and apply the results to the refinement of a concrete cure monitoring system under development at the company. Complex permittivity over the frequency range 10 kHz to 10 GHz in curing cement shows signal components due to 1) free-water behavior near 10 GHz which decreases during cure and follows percent hydration, and 2) bound-water behavior between 1- MHz which increases during early hours of cure and decreases and broadens thereafter. The bound-water relaxation does not appear in the initial cement paste but does appear after several hours of cure, mirroring the formation of hydration products to which it is attaching. This behavior will be elucidated by varying initial chemistry and determining effects on signal, quantifying changes in relaxation frequency and amplitude with cure time and fitting to appropriate models. The commercial potential of this project is in the construction industry doc16136 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project investigates the feasibility and design of a novel authoring and server-client system that delivers interactive education-on-demand for technique training and telescience. Rich media including live and archived video, data, and 3-D models are (1) collected from instructor sources, (2) objectized and integrated into MPEG-4, MPEG-7, and MPEG-21 compliant streams, (3) securely conveyed via dynamically selected transport protocols to wide audiences with diverse computing platforms (from workstations to wireless PDAs), (4) tailored to individual demographics and physical handicap, and (5) rendered in a participant-driven interactive fashion that supports user-directed manipulation of views and articulation of models, real-time scientific visualization, technique learning, real-time analysis of experiment data, and experiment control (if authorized) without the need of special hardware. The client admits future media types, and user-supplied extensions (e.g., MatLab workspaces) for personalized data analysis, and content is adapted to the demographics, physical handicaps, and computing resources of the student. A graphical authoring tool facilitates the set-up of lectures and peer sessions, and assessment of student performance and courseware. The concept proffered by Sorceron provides technique training and telescience to the academic and commercial markets, which require interactivity not available in traditional streaming media architectures. Commercial success is enhanced by compliance with emerging multimedia standards and partnering with potential clients during technical and business requirements assessment doc16137 none Wetzel Collaborative Research: Elevated Atmospheric CO2 Alters Plant Detritus Nutritional Quality: Effects on Microbial and Detritivore Food Webs in Aquatic Ecosystems. Elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) resulting from the combustion of fossil fuels, directly affects the photosynthesis rate, growth, and chemical make-up of tree foliage. The investigators have demonstrated that when aspen trees are grown under elevated CO2 levels, their leaves contain less nitrogen and higher concentrations of plant defense compounds (phenolic compounds, lignins and tannins), which renders them less nutritious to their animal and microorganism consumers. Since small headwater streams in forested landscapes rely heavily on tree leaf litter to fuel their food webs, parallel field and laboratory studies will measure the effect that the CO2-induced change in food quality of aspen leaf litter will have on the growth and reproduction of stream bacteria, fungi, and invertebrate consumers. The difference in microbial and invertebrate growth rates in turn could affect food web structure and functions and carbon dynamics in aquatic ecosystems doc16138 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will investigate the feasibility of designing and building a software system: Xtractica. This software system will allow domain experts to specify programs that transform unstructured or partially structured data from a variety of document sources, such as World Wide Web sites, PDF files and text into structured, coherent and readily usable information. Xtractica will consist of a set of tightly integrated powerful syntactic and semantics-driven data extraction technologies that are managed from a graphical user interface to retrieve information that was created for human understandability, and extract and reason about it to create knowledge that can support automated decision making and transactions. An important feature of Xtractica is that users can rapidly create extractors by simply supplying examples of the data to be extracted. Thus it will empower users who are knowledgeable about their application domains but are not necessarily trained as computing technologists, to structure data into knowledge. The Phase I project will develop the operational specifications of Xtractica and determine its feasibility by prototyping its critical components. Phase 2 will then produce a fully functional Xtractica system based on results from Phase I. Finally Phase 3 will make Xtractica commercially available to clients with diverse business interests including content aggregation, e-procurement, ERP and supply chain management vendors doc16139 none Lively Explaining the widespread distribution and maintenance of genetic recombination is widely regarded as one of the most interesting challenges facing evolutionary biologists, and a large number of ecological and genetical hypotheses have been suggested to explain why clonal reproduction has not generally replaced genetically recombining individuals in populations. Contrasting these alternatives has proven difficult, but the effort is greatly aided by studies of populations in which clonal and recombinant individuals coexist. Such mixed populations are common in the freshwater New Zealand snail, Potamopyrgus antipodarum, which has been used as a model system for evaluating different hypotheses. In past studies, no support for the lottery hypothesis, the reproductive assurance hypothesis, or the tangled bank hypothesis has been found. In contrast, past work has shown that the frequency of recombinant individuals is spatially coupled with the prevalence of infection by larval trematodes. This result is consistent with the idea that time-lagged, frequency-dependent selection by parasites prevents the elimination of recombinant hosts by clonal hosts - the Red Queen hypothesis. But, direct tests of this hypothesis are still needed. This LTREB research will allow measurement in mixed populations of the frequency of recombinant and clonal individuals over time. Long-term data will provide a test of the hypothesis that time-lagged selection by parasites prevents the replacement of recombinant individuals by clonal individuals in natural populations doc16140 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project will focus on the development of an electrochemically operated organic peroxy acid generator. Peroxyacids are popular disinfectants that can eliminate even resistant microorganisms (i.e. spores, viruses). Peracids produce biodegradable end products, are effective at dilute concentrations (ppm levels), are safe for use even in food preparation applications, and are thus applicable to many point-of-use applications in homes, restaurants and hospitals. These include the use of peroxylactic or peroxyacetic acids for diverse uses, including: i) preventing the build up of heterotrophic bacteria in water treatment appliances, ii) destroying pathogens in water and on food surfaces, iii) sterilizing medical devices, and iv) sanitizing food processing equipment by incorporating a clean-in-place capability. The conventional method of manufacturing peroxy acids involves mixing concentrated hydrogen peroxide, organic acid, and inorganic acid catalyst (concentrated sulfuric acid) with numerous stabilizers and additives. In the proposed method, peracids can be generated and used on demand using oxygen or air, thus eliminating the need for hydrogen peroxide and sulfuric acid. In Phase I, optimization of the electrocatalyst (to improve current and energy efficiencies), preliminary cell design and catalyst configuration, and biocidal properties of the peracid product will be conducted. There is a considerable need for miniature and scalable clean-in-place devices in point-of-use applications in homes, hotels, food service establishments and hospitals. Many equipment manufacturers are trying to incorporate a self cleaning capability into their existing product lines due to concerns of microbial contamination, especially one that requires minimal user interaction, is cost effective, and environmentally friendly. In water treatment applications alone, the market for these decives is estimated to be over $1billion annually in the U.S. and $3 billion worldwide doc16141 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project concerns the surface modification of textiles in order to impart properties to the fabric necessary for their use as protective clothing. The increase in disease transmission, the widespread use of pesticides in agriculture, and the increased proliferation of chemical and biological weapons worldwide have increased the need for the development of effective fabric treatments for protective clothing. During the Phase I research, agents will be covalently attached to the surface of fabric in order to give them the desired properties. The modified fabric will then be tested for antimicrobial activity against a broad spectrum of pathogenic microorganisms, for detoxification of chemical pesticides and appropriate surrogates for chemical and biological weapons, as well as for skin cytotoxicity. The Phase I research will show that the modified textiles are able to effectively eradicate a broad range of pathogenic microbes, detoxify chemical pesticides and surrogates for chemical and biological weapons while retaining their original physical properties and possessing no skin cytotoxicity. Potential applications for this technology include protective clothing and materials for medical and dental institutions, agricultural workers, and military soldiers as well as for cloth products for household disinfection and various consumer products. Commercial applications for fabric that is active against pathogenic microorganisms as well as chemical agents are wide and diverse. Protective clothing for agricultural workers and military servicemen could be produced from these modified fabrics. A multitude of applications could be found in the medical and dental area. Clothing for medical and dental personnel and patients including lab coats, scrubs, caps, shoe covers, masks, privacy drapes, surgical drapes, bed sheets, etc. could be rendered antimicrobial utilizing this technology. Consumer products such as diapers, athletic socks, water filters, and disinfectant wipes could also be prepared from these materials doc16142 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project will address one of the major obstacles to commercial development of broadband fixed wireless access under 5 GHz, namely overcoming a convergence bottleneck arising from distance-sensitive propagation conditions. It is well known that as distance ranges from line of sight to well beyond line of sight, transmission parameters can degrade dramatically. However, current state-of-the-art treats this condition in a highly unsatisfactory way, through statistical models, through handshake schemes, modulation fallback, use of preambles and embedded pilot tones, to name just a few. An innovative concept will be demonstrated for rapid, two-way, unobtrusive and easily scaled RF measurements that permit characterizing thousands of hub-to-subscriber paths precisely without guesswork. Regional operations centers, hub base station and consumer terminals will operate more efficiently due to the network s ability to converge rapidly on near-optimum transmission characteristics. This innovation will make broadband more readily available to populations that live and work where DSL, fiber, and cable modem service is not offered. This includes: people who work in outdoor locations, in hard-to-get-to schools, libraries, college campuses, transportation systems, factories, waterways, and small businesses doc16143 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop an innovative system for reliably and inexpensively attaching medium- to heavy-weight equipment to thin-skin composite sandwich structures. This will be accomplished with proprietary metallic foam (patent applied) and polymeric partial inserts with functionally graded stiffness. This is different from the stiffness of the sandwich material and is set to the stiffness and strength required to carry the equipment. By varying the stiffness of the insert from low to high, it will be possible to carry the weight of the equipment without damaging the polyvinyl chloride (PVC) core material. Inserts of metal foam and polymer composite with varying density and stiffness will be fabricated by a patented extrusion, free-form fabrication technology. Due to the materials low density, less than one or two pounds of the attachment material will be of adequate volume for a composite attachment system. Thus, the material cost of the attachment system will be small relative to the cost of a traditional sandwich composite structure. Potential applications are anticipated in manufacture of vehicles for commercial transportation, e.g., buses, trains, small crafts, and aircrafts doc16144 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)Phase I project will develop technologies to synthesize nano tin metal oxide anode materials for lithium rechargeable batteries. Reducing tin particles to nano size is known to be critical for a good cycle life of tin-based anode materials. The materials are expected to show a capacity of mAh cm3 which represents a 50% increase over the practical capacity of carbonaceous materials presently used in lithium rechargeable batteries. In addition, the materials are expected to have a first cycle reversibility of 80%, comparable to that of carbon. The commercial application of this project will be in the materials market for the next generation of lithium rechargeable batteries. The market for portable batteries is about $6 billion, with an annual growth rate of 15% in the last 10 years. Of this, the worldwide portable lithium-ion battery market is $2.93 billion, with 530 million cells shipped in . New markets are also emerging for electric and hybrid vehicle propulsion doc16145 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a new methodology to manage the inventory of service parts used to provide after-sales support of mission-critical products. In particular this research will develop computationally efficient and optimal algorithms for replenishment and allocation of inventory in service parts logistics networks. Subsequently, the algorithms will be incorporated into a commercial software product platform for service supply chain optimization. Service part optimization requires specialized models, since demand (due to machine failures and unscheduled maintenance) is infrequent and difficult to predict. Movement of parts must be coordinated across many inter-connected stocking locations in order to facilitate on- time delivery, often within hours or even minutes. In addition, there are multiple sources of supply for these parts such as internal manufacturing, external suppliers, repair vendors, and de-manufacturing. Current commercial service supply chain optimization systems do not incorporate these complexities of the service supply chains. As a consequence, they perform poorly in after-sales service environments resulting in extensive in service parts inventory that turns only 1 to 2 times per year. This research can lead to commercial technology that can reduce this expense substantially doc16146 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes a new low cost electro- chemical fabrication method to produce flexible photovoltaic cells based on the commercially important copper indium diselenide (CIS) films. The project will develop an innovative n-CIS solar cell with fewer components and processing steps. The cell will be constructed on a flexible foil to reduce weight, fragility and balance-of-system costs. The project also develops a new roll-to-roll electrodeposition technology for large volume manufacturing. Phase I will synthesize CIS films and construct n p heterojunction devices on metal foils. It will evaluate the solar cell performance to validate the concepts. The proposed n-CIS solar cell configuration and its fabrication are specially designed to simplify manufacturing, reduce costs and increase production speed. It will circumvent the complexity, expense, safety and scale-up issues of the present p-CIS technology. Its commercialization will provide a timely solution to the nation s escalating energy and environmental problems. It will avert future power crises and help reduce global warming. Applications for the copper indium diselenide technology range from the electric utility to satellites. Flexible, lightweight, photovoltaic cells may be used in non-utility applications such as electric vehicles, building integration, mobile systems and new space systems. Lower costs, fewer components and easier manufacturing could translate into a wider spectrum of commercial markets doc16147 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses the challenge of seamless interoperability among computer systems and user interface components such as displays and keyboards. Today these components are tightly coupled with the computer, which restricts the utility of both-especially in mobile computing systems, where users invariably have to choose between usable displays and reasonable portability. A familiar manifestation of the opportunity is the conference display swap problem. The over-all goal of the project is to develop and specify robust, efficient and secure interfaces that enable computers to dynamically discover, connect to and use displays over moderate-bandwidth network connections. The Phase I investigation will focus on efficient encoding techniques for an interoperable virtual display interface that can be run over existing wireless network technologies. The interface will make it possible for multiple computers to share a projection display serially via software. In the longer term, it frees mobile computing systems to evolve independently of display technology, and leads to a model in which user interface devices are considered public infrastructure. This research has commercial application in a number of industries where seamless display sharing is routinely required but is not yet supported, such as conference management, higher education, and medicine doc16148 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a new surface modification technique for manufacturing copper indium diselenide (CIS) thin films, an important emerging photovoltaic technology. It will eliminate present toxic processing steps involving cadmium sulfide deposition, cyanide etch, all of which have many unfavorable repercussions to the manufacturer and the environment. The key step will be to devise a simple, inexpensive process, using air and a non-toxic aqueous solution, to alter the surface properties of CIS films. This step will eliminate the need for the cadmium component, the cyanide etch and the disposal of hazardous chemicals. It will also improve the efficiency of solar cells made with inexpensive coating methods. Performance evaluation of the modified CIS solar cells will validate the new concept. This innovation is anticipated to simplify manufacturing, lower costs and improve the efficiency of photovoltaic modules. Applications for the CIS photovoltaic technology range from powering small appliances to electric utility. Non-utility applications include solar cars, building integration, mobile systems and space systems. Lower costs, fewer components and easier manufacturing could translate into a wider spectrum of commercial markets for CIS solar cells. Eliminating the toxicity issues will enhance the public perception of CIS photovoltaic technology. Its implementation will promote the market success of CIS solar cells to provide a timely solution to the nation s escalating energy and environmental problems doc16149 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will address the problem of short-term hospital census prediction. Fluctuating occupancy can impact many operational metrics: direct staffing costs, emergency center ambulance diversions, medical errors triggered in understaffed patient areas, quality of care, and job satisfaction for the dwindling nursing pool. This project will result in a computer based decision support system for predicting short-term patient occupancy at a nursing unit level over 72-hour time horizons. The short-term forecasts will be tested in a 226-bed community hospital. The first objective is to quantify sources of error in an alpha-version of the model and to develop an improved model. The objective is to prove that the improved model generates accurate predictions of patient census. Next, the research will quantify the potential impact of short-term forecasts on nurse staffing and scheduling. Surveys with hospital personnel will gauge the interest in and utility of the forecast information. The national shortage of nurses demands better use of this limited resource. Improvement Path Systems objective is to build commercial forecasting software to be licensed to hospitals. The daily forecasts of hospital occupancy will allow hospitals to make better staffing decisions and operate more efficiently. The proposed decision support system can be generalized to other dynamic systems involving people flows doc16150 none This Small Business Innovation (SBIR) Phase I project will investigate the feasibility of a computerized projection system to be used in planetariums in the nation s schools. With such a digital projector, a simulated night sky can be imaged with the capacity for a multitude of motions and displays surpassing all but the most sophisticated of museum planetariums. When coupled with suitable simulation software, information-based technology can be used to encourage interactive and inquiry-based activities. In addition, the planetarium projector will have capabilities shared by no other; that is, being able to project dynamically changing information displays of the earth, including plate tectonics, weather patterns, and biological distributions. The system proffered will help promote interdisciplinary studies, use the latest astronomical and GIS data, and aid in teaching the content of the national standards, especially earth science at the elementary and middle school level doc16151 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project will demonstrate a design approach for a high energy density hydrogen air Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cell. The proposed research will demonstrate a means of creating sections of membrane, integral with the parent material, which are thermoplastic in nature and which are impermeable to hydrogen, oxygen and water for sealing edges. The same membrane modification will be used to create narrow, inerted sections of membrane to serve as borders of inactive membrane between segmented, series-connected, coplanar fuel cells. The material innovations will be demonstrated in actual 50 cm 2 PEM fuel cells, both single and segmented. Ionic conductivity and water and gas permeability will be determined to show the extent of inactivation in treated regions. Tensile strength tests will be conducted to demonstrate the integrity of the structures and the strength of thermally bonded edge seals. PEM segmented or coplanar have potential fuel cells applications where exceptionally long total service lives ( 30,000 Hrs) of operating times are required. Long service life is required for residential applications, battery replacement and standby power supplies for critical computer and control facilities doc16152 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is aimed at developing a general platform for conducting combinatorial auctions. It is proposed to develop a bidding language and user interface, along with a system architecture for an integrated combinatorial auction platform that can be used to facilitate combinatorial auctions. The system will provide a wide degree of flexibility in terms of the number of rounds, stopping rules, and bidder and or object-specific constraints that can be implemented. If successful, this project will lead to a development of a combinatorial auction system that will become a standard part of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and will greatly enhance electronic procurement in business-to-business environments. Some examples of industries that can benefit from combinatorial auctions include: airport time slots for flights; shipping and transportation companies, as well as the retailers and manufacturers who use these shippers; computer hardware manufacturers, as well as auto manufacturers who can use combinatorial auctions for material procurement; and television networks who can use combinatorial auctions to sell advertising space in TV shows doc16153 none This SBIR Phase I project from Learnimation (TM) will produce a browser-based assessment and feedback engine prototype that evaluates mathematical problem solving skills for students with learning disabilities. This assessment engine prototype will provide adaptive instruction in a learning environment designed to meet individual students needs. It will also provide adaptive guidance to a student s teacher and caregiver. The importance of high level mathematical problem solving and reasoning and the assessment of these skills is emphasized for all students by the national standards-governing bodies in the United States (NCTM, AAAS, NRC), yet as many as 6% of all school age children have severe math deficits with very few tools at their disposal to help them gain fluency and measure accountability in an increasingly information-based society. This investigation will provide an alternative assessment platform for mathematics skill development designed specifically for learning disabilities and will ensure that all students with disabilities are included in the present national educational assessment reforms doc16154 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses security of operating systems. This approach is based on developing specifications that capture security-relevant behaviors of programs, and constraining their execution to ensure adherence to these specifications. Since all security-relevant operations are administered through system calls, program behaviors are modeled in terms of sequences of system calls made by them, together with their arguments. The system will achieve enhanced security without compromising on functionality by (a) being able to protect against known as well as novel kinds of attacks, (b) maintaining a very low false-alarm rate, and (c) reduced maintenance needs doc16155 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will enable the development of the first knowledge management system dedicated specifically to protein localization (ProLoc). Data generated from high-throughput genomic and proteomic experimentation and information published across the entire spectrum of cellular and molecular biology is proliferating at exponential rates. Moreover, current database systems remain incapable of handling the intricate network of relationships between proteins. ProLoc, a database system that integrates expert-curated information from published literature with primary data from a range of experimental methodologies, will begin to attack this problem by focusing on one discrete area of cell biology (protein localization). Researchers will be able to mine pathways and mechanisms, leading to disease elucidation and new therapies. Phase I will be used to create the framework for a functioning relational database, with representative entries for initial beta testing. This will provide an essential foundation for Phase II, when comprehensive content and ancillary tools will be added, creating a highly structured, sophisticated, and interactive relational database system. Once the daunting challenge of reflecting biological pathways into standard database formats has been met through the ProLoc database, the ProLoc structure can be extended to many other cell regulation pathways and processes. ProLoc will stand out as an extremely high quality specialized resource in the field of protein localization that will be a necessary part of any set of molecular biology benchtop databases and tools doc16156 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project will develop a hybrid, co-flow laser material deposition system in order to enhance the ability to fabricate materials with nanocrystalline microstructures and to produce miniature, three dimensional structural components such as dental implants and stents directly from a CAD (Computer Aided Design) solid model. This work will leverage two technologies previously developed by the researchers : (a) Laser Engineered Net Shaping (LENS), and (b) Direct Write Electronics (DWE). The LENS process provides the ability to fabricate large structures directly from a CAD solid model, whereas the DWE process provides the ability to fabricate microelectronic components directly from a CAD representation. The principal commercial application of this project will be in the field of miniature biomedical components. Additional applications are expected in the field of electronics and defense doc16157 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project will determine the feasibility of designing the scanning electron microscope (SEM) component of an instrument simulator. Cost prohibits that incorporation of a variety of image composition-based instruments used in research and industry into relevant modern science math engineering technology curricula. Some of these instruments are becoming available over the Internet, but they provide limited access to students and, in general, they are not fully functional. The research objectives in Phase I to will primarily relate to the method(s) of manipulating a very large image (the equivalent of over SEM images) in a manner that faithfully simulates the operation of a real WEB-based SEM. The key research area will be to develop an image-management and input output engine. The anticipated deliverable of Phase I is the SEM image simulator, and the outline of several educational modules on CD DVD media. Instrument simulation proffered by the RJ Lee Group has the potential to distribute the benefits of the resource of a variety of image composition-based instruments (via CD or DVD) to all students in a class throughout a school year. A simplified viewer mode would be developed for the informal education and home markets, and an advanced mode incorporating specific science content interactive discovery-based modules would be developed for the K-college formal education market doc16158 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a low-temperature, atmospheric-pressure deposition process for metal chalcogenide nanomaterials in electronics. This process will use a hybrid ink containing CdSe nanoparticles mixed with a reactive dispersant in a non-aqueous solvent. The reactive dispersant, a metal-organic molecule, will strongly coordinate to CdSe nanoparticles to form a suspension at ambient temperatures. During spray deposition, this reactive dispersant will thermally transform into CdSe and byproducts at relatively low-temperature. As a consequence, this approach will allow printed CdSe thin film materials on temperature-sensitive substrates such as those of interest in flexible displays. The commercial applications of this project include large area flat panel displays, thin film transistor fabrication, jet deposition ink formulations and printed electronic materials doc16159 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will demonstrate the commercial feasibility of conducting polymer muscle-like actuators as active elements in prosthetics, pumps and automatic valves. Rigorous characterization has been performed, demonstrating the active stress, strain, power to mass and efficiency of actuators in which the active element is a thin film of the conducting polymer polypyrrole. Studies show that polypyrrole actuators generate up to 100 times the force per cross-sectional area of mammalian skeletal muscle, and up to 10 times the work per stroke. Conducting polymers convert electrical energy to mechanical work at low applied voltages (typically 1 V), and increase in speed as the film thickness is reduced, making them ideal for micro and nanoscale applications such as micro-pumping and fluid switching. The commercial potential will be for polymer driven artificial urinary sphincters and low cost automatic irrigation valves. Later applications include incorporation into micro and nano-devices doc16160 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will produce a unique computational tool for heat transport prediction. The novel approach to be used here will hybridize the Digital Physics technology based on Lattice Boltzmann Methods (LBM) for hydrodynamics with efficient partial differential equation (PDE) solution methods for heat transfer using grids of up to a hundred million computational cells thus allowing for quantitative prediction of heat transfer phenomena of interest in materials processing and manufacturing. With this platform, the highest standards of numerical accuracy, efficiency (including nearly perfect parallel scalability) and geometrical flexibility (including full integration with commercial CAD tools), as well as a user friendly interface, shall be naturally inherited. Upon algorithm optimization and benchmarking against test flow data, a complex heat transfer problem of industrial level complexity shall be simulated. The hybrid thermal transport prediction tool will open major new commercial markets for the PowerFLOW product, especially at the engineering design level. This new technology shall enable prediction of internal flow and heat transfer within the automotive industry. The ability of the proposed LBM-PDE methods to address microscale thermal transport problems in which Knudsen number effects are important should open important new markets for novel technologies in MEMS and related industries as well as broad new markets for computer aided engineering (CAE), especially in manufacturing industries doc16161 none This Small Busuness Innovation Research (SBIR) project will develop an initial prototype design for a cavitation probe that uses the property of a collapsing cavitation bubble to produce visible photons (sonoluminescence) has been designed and constructed. These light emissions can be easily detected within a small, finite volume and thus this probe provides a direct means of measuring the cavitation density (activity per unit volume) within a cavitating fluid and the delivery of ultrasonic energy at an engineered surface. As a result, ultrasonic methods treating a surface can be directly monitored and controlled in real-time, leading to the ability to improve and predict the performance of the resulting structure. For example, since cavitation is thought to be the principal mechanism that leads to particle removal from silicon wafers during an ultrasonic megasonic cleaning operation, it is likely that a strong correlation exists between cavitation probe output and cleaning effectiveness. Thus, this probe provides the potential for constructing a real-time monitor of ultrasonic megasonic cleaner efficiency and effectiveness. In addition, because the entire three-dimensional cavitation field can be measured with this probe, it can also serve as a useful tool in ultrasonic megasonic cleaner design. A real-time cavitation-density measuring device would have great utility in the semiconductor cleaning industry and thus this probe provides considerable promise for commercial development doc16162 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will study the feasibility of building a reliable, high-performance network-centric storage system technology (NetSTOR). NetSTOR s architecture is based on a new very fast group data coding (GC) scheme that will achieve efficient and dependable data delivery across the network. Recently, the need for network storage has burgeoned, without truly universal solutions being available. Phase I will evaluate the performance improvement achieved by NetSTOR s unique architecture and validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the GC technique. Efficient decoding algorithms will be employed to achieve reliability against server failure and faulty network connections. Multi-threaded parallel data transfer will ensure high performance data delivery. Automatic system reconfigurability will provide high data availability. The system will be application-aware addressing application specific issues such as cache management, data layout, and prefetching will be employed for performance optimization. Potential commercial applications of the proposed storage system include distributed web hosting, multi media network-based services, high performance computing, modeling and simulation, distributed information retrieval, and terrain visualization. Applications of group coding in areas other than data storage include mobile communication, reliable multicasting, audio video streaming, and digital fountain systems will be considered doc16163 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims at the development of a universal technology platform for remote sensing and controlling. This technology development will be carried out with a focus on affordability, ease of use, reliability, usage of and compatibility with existing communication standards, computer platform independence, modularity reconfigurability, scalability and expandability. One commercial application using this Internet-based technology will foster the enhancement of education through remotely accessible experimental devices, the availability of which will provide significant relief to the strain on the spatial, temporal and fiscal resources that traditional laboratories impose on educational institutions. The initial beneficiaries of the proposed technology will be students at the undergraduate and graduate college levels. Subsequently, the propagation of the technology into the K-12, corporate training, and scientific experimentation arenas as well as into industrial and consumer applications appears to be both feasible and plausible. The enabling of remote access to various experimental devices proffered by JDS Technologies will facilitate improved student learning of scientific and technical principles. The proposed technology will promote independent and asynchronous learning patterns. It will also permit experimental demonstrations in lectures and allow experimentation to be included in distance learning programs. It thus provides access to sophisticated and cost intensive experimentation for a much larger student audience than would be possible in the absence of the remote-access capabilities doc16164 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)Phase I project will evaluate the technical and economic feasibility of using nanofabricated clay membranes as proton exchange membranes (PEMs) in fuel cells. The project team will incorporate high cation exchange capacity materials (clays) with polyions as thin films and compare them to Nafion, the current material of choice for PEMs. Initially, fifty four different nanomembranes will be assembled and evaluated against Nafion. The project team will identify those formulations of nanomembranes that show the most promise in terms of technical performance and economic feasibility. The fuel cell market has tremendous potential and initial estimates forecast growth from $5 to 60 billion between and . Successful research developing nanofabricated clay polyion membranes for use in PEM fuel cell could lower the costs of fuel cell systems by 38% (1 kW system). These nanomembranes have the potential to increase the power output of fuel cells because they are orders of magnitudes thinner and use high cation exchange capacity materials. Furthermore, these nanomembranes are inexpensive to make, thus reducing the cost of the overall fuel cell substantially. Not only do nanomembranes have the potential to cost less than Nafion, but they can also lower the price of fuel cells due to higher operating efficiencies doc16165 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will determine the technical feasibility for applying a new innovative sensing technology to rapidly identify and sort aluminum metals from other non-magnetic metals such as copper, zinc, nickel, and non-magnetic stainless steels commonly found in scrap metals, particularly metals derived from automobile shredder facilities. The objective will be to develop an environmentally friendly computerized dry process which can be situated locally and which can rapidly and cleanly sort aluminum scrap from mixtures of nonmagnetic metals at low cost. This technology will replace the large, costly, and environmentally burdensome heavy media process that is current used. The commercial applications for this technology will be sorting of aluminum from automobile shredders. This technology will significantly reduce the environmental impact of sending these materials to landfills. The materials recovered can be recycled and sold back to industry doc16166 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is an investigation of the feasibility of using anonymous tracking of cellular phones to generate traffic information on a road network. Delays due to congestion are expensive both in terms of lost time and in aggravation. Management of congestion is difficult due to lack of information on current conditions. While most information is gathered via expensive detector systems installed in the roadways, it is possible to determine traffic conditions by following the movements of sample vehicles, called probes. Many vehicles contain a cellular phone, and, due to a recent FCC mandate, which requires that all telecommunication carriers be capable of locating a cellular phone to within 125 meters, an opportunity exists to build a system where the movements of a large number of cell phones can be used to determine conditions on every road in a road network. This project will determine whether the location systems installed by the carriers can be used to generate traffic information. The results will enable the development of an area-wide traffic information system which can be used for the dissemination of travel information and for the study of traffic patterns on road networks. Commercial application of the results of this project fall into 3 areas: traffic management, fleet operations, and information dissemination. Traffic information is valuable to the users of the road network. Traffic management includes the many public agencies around the country tasked to aid in the management of the roads. Fleet operators consist of large and small delivery vehicles. Information dissemination includes cellular phones, personal digital assistants, in-vehicle display systems, websites and radio. All three markets are significantly affected by traffic congestion, particularly unexpected congestion. Each market is large and commercially addressable by a traffic information system based on cell phone tracking doc16167 none Spong This three-year award supports US-France collaboration in control systems between Mark W. Spong of the University of Illinois and Romeo Ortega of the Signal and Systems Laboratory at SUPELEC, a French center for research in electrical engineering. The objectives are to investigate passive nonlinear control of networked control systems, in particular, systems involving bilateral remote operation (teleoperation) over unreliable communication networks. The problem is motivated by interest in wireless communication in embedded real time control systems and the use of the Internet as a communication medium in teleoperated and networked control systems. The research will advanced understanding of how to design and utilize mobile, intelligent robotic systems with local intelligence for communication over unreliable networks with other robots and human operators. The researchers plan to answer: How sensory, command and control information are shared over such networks and how much local intelligence is needed to guarantee performance and stability when network communications are degraded. The US investigator brings to this collaboration expertise in passivity-based networked control systems. This is complemented by French theoretical expertise in nonlinear control and robotics. Potential applications of their results include work in hazardous and remote environments, surveillance, search, and rescue robots, autonomous vehicles and autonomous locomotion systems, haptic devices, remote construction, and remote surgery. This award represents the US side of parallel proposals to the NSF and the CNRS. NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator. The CNRS will support visits by French researchers and graduate students to the United States doc16168 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will evaluate the use of innovative multiclass fluid models for analyzing factory capacity and finding optimal scheduling policies for semiconductor fabs. Historically, queuing theory models and other analytical tools have not modeled wafer fabs well because of their massive size and highly reentrant flows. Recently, researchers in modern queuing theory have made considerable progress in developing a new type of model known as a multiclass fluid network, which addresses many of the shortfalls of earlier analytic methods. The objective of this project is improved analytic and computational techniques and tools for design, optimization, and simulation of fab operation systems using queuing theory and stochastic processes (as models of complex, dynamic fab systems and processes) for production planning and control in scheduling wafer processing and integrated material logistics (including automated material handling and human delivery to and operation of equipment). The project will show the feasibility of several algorithms for solving fluid models when applied to realistic fab data in a robust, usable, portable, and scalable computing environment. Anticipated results include the development of new software tools to improve the performance of manufacturing production systems. The commercial benefits will be to semiconductor manufacturing companies and other firms that operate large factories with reentrant flows (such as flat panel and disk drive producers). The worldwide semiconductor revenue was over $203 billion in (with 914 fabs in current operation), and is projected to be nearly $283 billion by (with an additional 38 fabs on line doc16169 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project investigates the opportunities inherent in long-distance learning alternatives fashioned around the telnet internet protocol. To date, virtually all long-distance learning trials have been designed to operate using the procedures of the world-wide web (HTTP, CGI, Java, etc.), but these web-based solutions have a number of obvious intrinsic problems. Such solutions tend to be quite slow, and they are capable of only moderate interactivity, often quite fragile, and rapidly become surprisingly complex. In contrast, the telnet protocol, when used with a more or less standard terminal emulator, tends to be very responsive over the internet, especially when the protocol is very slightly modified, and very simple to program against. The creation of a freely distributed player and accompanying inexpensive authoring tool built around a standard terminal interface could be of importance to areas with underdeveloped communications infrastructures, thus making the internet accessible to those who can afford only low-bandwidth internet. The distributed player and authoring tool proffered by Aics Inc has the potential to have an important impact on the nature and methods of the distribution of information opportunities for secondary education through graduate and continuing professional education, and they could serve in technical commercial sales and training and in more generally in crossing the digital divide doc16170 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will focus on development of unique ceramic polyimide nanocomposite materials. It will demonstrate the ability to formulate a polyimide (or other polymer material) with a designed coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) through the covalent incorporation of ceramic nanophase materials. The key tasks involve (1) sol-gel synthesis of ceramic nanospheres possessing a negative CTE (2) covalently bonding them into the backbone of the polyimide through the use of bi-functional linker molecules and (3) evaluation of various doping levels of the ceramic nanospheres to determine optimum impact on the CTE of the composite material. In terms of commercial uses, polyimides have wide application as films in the electronics, aerospace, and manufacturing industries where they are used for flexible circuitry, insulation materials, speaker cones, automotive switches, disk drives, and in many other applications. A common problem in the design of these systems using polyimides is the inherently high CTE of these materials and to a certain extent poor thermal dimensional stability. The proposed effort seeks to provide an approach to resolve these issues doc16171 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will enable design professionals and their clients to produce concise and accurate statements of project requirements. The initial work will be done for the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry. The proposed requirements definition tool empowers businesses to develop on-line user needs and analysis statements according to customers preferences and to model, in real-time, the type of constructed project desired. With superior understanding of clients needs, designers can shorten the product delivery cycle and provide an end product with greater customer satisfaction. The potential market for this innovation is since it can be used in any segment of the AEC industry such as industrial, office, commercial, residential, hotel, and education. Firms producing large, complex products-such as aircraft, flight simulators, and telecommunication systems-have the same need for early, accurate identification and statement of requirements doc16172 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop a rapid, low-cost, low-temperature, scalable, environmentally benign method for the deposition of crystalline oxide thin films. The specific Phase I goals are to demonstrate the feasibility of developing procedures for growing these specific high-quality thin-film crystals and to evaluate their crystal structure, optical properties and texture. The commercial benefits of this type of processing method would revolutionize applications ranging from electronics to medicine to energy doc16173 none Stern This three-year award for US-France collaboration on studies of the Arctic Sea ice cover involves researchers and students at the University of Washington and at the Glaciology and Environmental Geophysics Laboratory in Grenoble, France. The principal investigators, Harry L. Stern in the US, and Jerome Weiss in France, lead a team of researchers with expertise in the fracture of geophysical materials and motion and deformation of Arctic Sea ice. The objectives of this collaboration are to characterize the variability of sea ice deformation, understand its connection to stresses and coastal conditions, test the fracture mechanisms independent of spatial scale, and improve sea ice models. Heterogeneity and scaling laws associated with the process of deformation will be modeled in order to study the dynamics of the Earth s lithosphere. A major source of data for the studies is from the RADARSAT Geophysical Processor System. The US team brings to this collaboration expertise in remote sensing of deformation and dynamics of sea ice cover and applications to oceanography and climate. This is complemented by French expertise in fracture of geophysical material of the Earth s interior and their development of multifractal and wavelets analyses. The collaboration advances understanding of the dynamics of the Arctic Sea ice cover and will improve existing models. Arctic sea ice dynamics are important to monitor because of potential consequences for global climate, marine life and commerce. The collaboration contributes as well to research and education infrastructure. Students will benefit through advanced training and participation in an international team effort. This award represents the US side of parallel proposals to the NSF and the CNRS. NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator and his students. The CNRS will support visits by French researchers and students to the United States doc16174 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)Phase I project will develop a highly-parallel, mass-selected purification system for large pharmaceutical drug libraries. The need for high-throughput purification is driven by the industry recognition that combinatorial chemistry samples must still be purified even after chemical screening. This is a daunting task considering the exponentially increasing number of drug candidates being synthesized by combinatorial and parallel methods. This proposal will examine monolithic parallel flash chromatography and preparative liquid chromatography configurations. The key enabling technology is photoionization mass spectrometry, which permits accurate molecular detection in mixtures of compounds without the problems of competition-for-charge and ion suppressions that plague conventional ionization methods. This will make it possible to monitor several chromatography columns at the same time. The goal of the project is to have a purification system in place that has a practical purification rate of 1 min per sample (16 parallel purifications in about 16 min) corresponding to a potential 16 hr daily rate of 960 sample purifications per day. The commercial application of this project will be in the important niche market of molecular analysis and screening for drug discovery doc16175 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will focus on the development of a commercially viable continuous process for bioethanol recovery. The proposed process will integrate a novel permeate condensation approach with the energy-efficient pervaporation technology. Due to increased interest in renewable fuels, domestic use of bioethanol is expected to grow steadily over the next decade. The primary processing steps, fermentation and ethanol recovery and purification are a significant component of the total cost of bioethanol production. Process improvements, such as incorporation of continuous fermentation and development of energy-efficient ethanol recovery technologies would reduce the production cost significantly. Successful completion of the project objective will lead to a reduction in the sizes of the fermentor and elimination of the distillation step, and consequently reduce the cost and enhance the energy efficiency of the entire bioethanol production process. The primary customers of the proposed technology will be the ethanol producers, but the technology has potential applications in the recovery of other fermentation-derived organic solvents as well doc16176 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop prototype equipment to achieve control of acoustic shearwaves in ferromagnetic materials, and introduce innovative technology to enable scientists and engineers to utilize variable shear wave polarization as a new tool for measuring and characterizing material properties. This will greatly enhance non-destructive testing of metals.To establish the feasibility of the proposed technique, a specially configured Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducer (EMAT) will be used to demonstrate electronic steering of shear wave polarization. Acoustoelastic relationships, relative to polarization angle, will then be analyzed for several steel samples of varying microstructure with the objective of establishing a measurement method capable of accurately determining longitudinal stress, independent of sample microstructure. Commercial applications exist for both rapid, in-situ, nondestructive assessment of microstructure, and for longitudinal stress measurement in steel members. Specific examples include monitoring and process control at critical stages of steel manufacture and thermomechanical processing; improving railroad safety through early detection and preemptive correction of extreme rail stress that can contribute to train derailments; and verification of correct load distribution in older or compromised steel structures such as bridges, stadiums, factories and multi-story steelframe buildings doc16177 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will demonstrate a unique method of producing hybrid metal ceramic composite friction materials.Friction materials are the replacement elements in braking,clutch and transmission systems.In this effort,Thor Technologies,Inc.will team with Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)and an aircraft braking systems company to integrate two novel technologies into an innovative method of producing hybrid ceramic composite brakes.Preliminary studies with the Polymer Infiltration Microwave Pyrolysis (PIMP)processing method indicate that it is capable of producing fiber-reinforced ceramic brakes with integral metal features.Such ceramic brakes will offer substantial competitive advantages over traditional friction materials,and should integrate seamlessly with existing systems.Thor Technologies will use the LANL Gyrotron Facility to produce hybrid ceramic composite frcition materials through the PIMP process.These will be evaluated through dynamometer tests conducted at the braking systems company.These tests will validate hybrid ceramic composites for friction applications,and will justify full-scale development of the PIMP manufacturing process.Thor Technologies,Inc.and the Principal Investigator are uniquely well positioned to meet the technical challenges of producing ceramic friction products and transitioning them to the market doc16178 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will demonstrate the feasibility of a distance coaching system for foreign language learners using the tandem method through electronic media (eTandem). The objectives of the proposed research are to establish a fundamental understanding of issues and parameters affecting eTandem distance coaching and to demonstrate feasibility of an eTandem distance coaching system. Language learners lacking access to foreign language learning opportunities will be targeted. Rural and disadvantaged learners are key target groups. Tandem is an autonomous form of language learning where two native speakers of different languages form a reciprocal learning partnership. Tandem coaching was conceived, researched and demonstrated to improve the effectiveness of the tandem learning process. Since , Tandem has been practiced using electronic media (eTandem) with great success. The concept of distance coaching for eTandem learners, not previously researched, offers high potential to advance language learning and intercultural exchange for an international audience. Parvis proffers a system, eTandem coaching, with potential for a dramatic impact on distance foreign language learning worldwide, serving a wide range of possible customers from K-12 to adult education doc16179 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will research technical and commercial feasibility of heterogenized homogeneous (supported) palladium N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC) catalysts. Homogeneous palladium-catalyzed reactions are powerful methods for carbon-carbon and carbon-hetero atom bond formations, such as Heck and Suzuki reactions. However, their commercial adoption in fine chemical manufacture has been burdened by the inefficiencies associated with homogeneous catalysts, primarily recovery and recycling, which could be eliminated by the development of supported catalysts. Successful research and development would result in commercial products that would simplify post-reaction processing, reduced waste streams and reduction in costs via recycling doc16180 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop a a dry, strong, compliant adhesive tape that is removable and reusable. This will be based on a novel dendritic architecture consisting of a compliant velvet of micron-diameter carbon fibers, each with a compliant carbon nanotube array on its tip. Pressed against a surface, each nanotube array will make contact at multiple points on an atomic scale, resulting in a strong intermolecular (van der Waals) adhesive force. The Phase I project is expected to accomplish fabrication of dendritic structures, examination of these structures with electron microscopy and measurement of adhesive properties to a variety of surfaces under varying environmental conditions (i.e. air, vacuum, elevated temperature). The commercial applications of this project will be in a broad range of markets, extending from aerospace to consumer electronics doc16181 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop an innovative new ultraviolet (UV) curable pre-ceramic polymer chemistry for the fabrication of high yield and low cost silicon oxycarbide (SOC) fibers for diesel particulate filters and other applications. Silicon carbide (SiC), silicon nitride (Si3N4), and silicon nitride silicon carbide (Si3N4 SiC) ceramics have been fabricated from UV photocurable pre-ceramic polymers to SiC and Si3N4 SiC with higher than 85 percent ceramic yield. Preliminary experiments have demonstrated that SOC fibers can also be fabricated from high-viscosity, photocurable thermoplastic pre-ceramic polymers. The poly(ethynyl)siloxane pre-ceramic polymers also have potential as a binder or matrix phase in SOC SOC composites. Phase I will optimize fiber production techniques. Potential commercial applications are expected in particulate diesel filters for manufacturers in the automotive and truck markets doc16182 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will research and develop the missing link in current virtual prototyping systems for computer-aided design (CAD). This missing element is the human hand. Current virtual prototyping strategies involve mice or other low-dimensional point-like interaction mechanisms. By adding life size, real-time interaction at the level of the human hand, virtual prototyping becomes significantly more valuable because of the higher order information available to the user. Interaction methods like grasping, pushing, sculpting as well as force feedback data can provide designers with critical product related information not usually available until a physical prototype has been built. Building on Immersion Corporation s existing SOLID infrastructure for real-time interaction with NURBS geometries and kinematic assemblies, the firm proposes to both research and develop numerical techniques necessary for true interaction with realistic models as well as the interaction paradigm itself. This innovation has great potential for all designers who build and prototype products that humans interact with. The introduction of interaction at the level of the human hand will leverage existing infrastructure at Immersion Corporation for intellectual property, product evaluation and marketing. The result will be an efficient transition to a product with a large existing market of designers and engineers from a significant cross-section of industry doc16183 none Knowledge of our evolutionary past, along with observations of changes in the ecological community in which our predecessors lived, is vital to helping us understand how we got here and what the human place in nature is today. The Makapansgat Valley has yielded a wealth of fossil fauna that reveal past environments through time, along with an important sample of an early human-like species known as Australopithecus africanus - our earliest known predecessors of southern Africa. The Australopithecus fossils from the Makapansgat Limeworks, considered to between about 2.8 and 3.2 million years old , may be the oldest from southern Africa. As these fossils are broadly contemporaneous with the early Australopithecus sample from East Africa, they hold key clues to understanding the emergence and diversity of human ancestors across the continent. Moreover, the rich assemblage of fossil fauna from the limeworks has provided valuable insights into the ecological context of human origins and evolution in southern Africa, although interpretations have varied. Our plan is to augment our current knowledge base with a well-controlled excavation from which the fossils can be studied in a detailed context. We will excavate the known Australopithecus-bearing layers of the Makapansgat limeworks, as well as lower levels of the sediments that promise to reveal earlier stages of the valley s prehistoric changes. In addition, other sites in the Makapansgat Valley preserve a record of environmental change from the well over 3 million years ago through to the present. For example, recent excavations at Buffalo Cave have yielded a rich mammalian sample from between 1 and 2 million years ago. Fossils and stone artifacts from the Cave of Hearths represent much of the past several hundred thousand years of human occupation in the area. The Makapansgat Valley thus provides a valuable opportunity to understand how global and continental environmental changes were reflected in a tightly constrained local context. Fossils from Makapansgat have conjured up many images of pre-human behavior, ranging from our ancestors having been killer apes to visions of a more docile creature at the mercy of a wide variety of predators. Given the significance of the Makapansgat Valley s sites for interpretations of our past, it is important to understand that the earliest sequence from the Limeworks has only recently undergone preliminary systematic excavation of in situ fossils - i.e. those in their original context. For the past half-century fossil collecting at the site focused almost exclusively on the waste dumps of breccia (fossil bearing sandstones) left behind by limestone miners decades ago. This simple fact - that most of Makapansgat s fossil fauna has been recovered from mine dumps - helps explain the difficulty in reaching consensus concerning paleoenvironmental and ecological reconstructions of this important fossil site. For this reason, the primary objective of the proposed research is to continue and enhance systematic in situ paleoanthropological excavations of Makapansgat limeworks in order to recover fossils of known context, and to better analyze how this reflects ancient environments and ways of life doc16184 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop an innovative and versatile low-pressure injection molding (LPIM) process for the fabrication of net-shape ceramic components. LPIM has been recently recognized as an attractive process for the fabrication of high-precision, complex-geometry ceramic parts. However, one major factor that limits the use of injection molding process for production is the lack of reliability and throughput. Thus, there is an immediate need for technologies that can substantially improve the LPIM process. This project will utilize a low-pressure injection molding approach for the net-shape forming of high performance ceramics reliably and at low cost. Specific innovations include: utilizing an environmentally-safe solvent extraction debinder technique, improving the thermal conductivity of the current binder system, and demonstrating an improved fabrication versatility that is relatively insensitive to material and size constraints. The commercial benefits will be to alumina ceramic based cross-flow particulate filtration systems for liquid waste streams; mullite based filters for hot gas streams; NZP based engine liners; and alumina based element holders for furnaces doc16185 none This research investigates a process by which natural selection can lead to gender-specific dysfunction. Males and females need to accomplish different biological functions, yet nearly 90% of the genome is expressed in both sexes. In a recent pilot experiment the entire genome of the common fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) was cloned and then identical copies of the same genomes were expressed in both males and females. Genomes that produced the highest Darwinian fitness in females produced low fitness in males, and visa versa. This intersexual reversal suggests that genes that are favored in one sex and disfavored in the other sex are common in the genome of the fruit fly. Because all animals express many of the same genes, the observed intersexual genetic conflict may be widespread. In the proposed research cytogenetic cloning will be used to measure: i) the functional significance of sexually antagonistic genetic variation, ii) its distribution among chromosomes, iii) its transmission dynamics between generations, and iv) the traits that mediate intersexual genetic conflict. The experiments are relevant to hereditary factors that mediate gender-specific impairment (e.g., sterility). In the past it has been assumed that harmful genetic variation was maintained solely by recurrent mutation or genetic drift. This research evaluates a new source for the genetic polymorphisms that are responsible for gender-specific dysfunction doc16186 none Harwood This award, provided by the Office of Polar Programs, allows a US investigator to join a geological field team sponsored by Antarctica New Zealand (the New Zealand national Antarctic program) and the Institute of Geophysical and Nuclear Sciences of New Zealand to gather seismic data over regions that have potentially important sedimentary records of paleoenvironmental conditions and tectonic uplift of the adjacent mountains. The paucity of exposures of Cenozoic strata in Antarctica, due to the present ice cover, requires the collection of geological data from drill cores. Seismic data are necessary for proper site selection toward future drilling and provide a means of understanding the depositional context of the drill sites. Much has been learned over the last 20 years of drilling by the DSDP, ODP and via the fast-ice and on-land drilling of the DVDP, MSSTS, CIROS and Cape Roberts Project drill holes. A new international drilling initiative, ANDRILL, is in an early stage of development, with an initial focus in the McMurdo Sound area using the proven Cape Roberts Project drilling technology. This award provides support for site survey work in three ANDRIL target areas that will result in new seismic information to address tectonic, basin history, and paleoenvironmental questions. The Principal Investigators have been invited to collaborate with a New Zealand seismic team during the - austral field season, and join an international collaborative effort with the United Kingdom and New Zealand to collect and interpret seismic data from the sea-ice and ice shelf in the McMurdo Sound region. US participation would allow the seismic program to include areas with considerable US interest. Financial support to enable the acquisition of seismic data in three target areas is the responsibility of the United States for New Harbour (NH), of New Zealand for Windless Bight (WB), and of the United Kingdom for Southern McMurdo Ice Shelf (SMIS). This project began initially as a 2-year NZ and UK collaborative project for WB and SMIS. At the ANDRILL Workshop (4 at Oxford University) it became apparent that drill holes proposed in the New Harbour area could be the initial targets of ANDRILL because the extant drilling system would require little modification and because scientific targets require relatively modest investments in new site survey data. An invitation for the US to join this collaborative effort was extended to enable the collection of data in New Harbour during the first year of this project. In addition to the requisite site survey work, the seismic data will help address current questions regarding: (1) the geometry of sedimentary sequences that will provide insight on competing theories regarding development of the Victoria Land Basin, as well as cause and uplift history of the adjacent Transantarctic Mountains; (2) the contrasting stratigraphic history recorded in the Ferrar and Taylor valleys; (3) the postulated stability of the Dry Valley landscape under a cold, polar climate for the last 20 million years. The new seismic information will also enable the extension of existing drill core data into a broader stratigraphic framework. The spirit of international collaboration developed through the Cape Roberts Project and continuing with ANDRILL will result in scientific exchange during the follow-up studies of all three target areas. The existence of 12 drill holes in the McMurdo Sound Dry Valleys region, combined with new seismic data to be acquired by this project and from marine vessels, and future drill holes, will make this region a focus of future chronostratigraphic correlation on the Antarctic continental shelf doc16187 none Case This three-year award for U.S.-France collaboration in computational biophysics involves researchers at the Scripps Research Institute and the Institute for Molecular and Cellular Biology and Genetics in Strasbourg, France. David A. Case, Charles L. Brooks III in the US and Thomas Simonson in France lead the collaborative program. The joint effort is aimed at the development and distribution of computer codes for molecular dynamics simulations of proteins and nucleic acids. The specific aims include performance of critical tests for parameterizations and implementation of the generalized Born solvent model and new applications for NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) structure refinement and for behavior of biomolecules. The investigators have complementary expertise in biomolecular simulation and in widely used computer programs: CNS XPLOR (Simonson), CHARMM (Brooks) and AMBER (Case). The new distributed computer codes will allow new types of biomolecular simulations. The enhanced generalized Born model will be used for structure prediction, prediction of protein-ligand interactions, protein folding, structure-function analyses. This award represents the US side of parallel proposals to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses of the US investigators and graduate students. The CNRS will support visits to the US by the French participants. The project adds an international dimension to research training of graduate students and enhances opportunities for future collaborative partnerships doc16188 none Comparative Anatomy, Phylogeny and Biogeography of Fossil and Living Gonorynchid Fishes The family Gonorynchidae is an extant family of primitive ostariophysan fishes with a long, and well-preserved fossil record dating over 65 million years. Ostariophysi (e.g. carps, minnows, catfishes) in turn, is one of the largest groups of fishes on earth (75% of all freshwater fishes). An understanding of this basal fish group, (i.e., Gonorynchidae) will provide vital information necessary to better understand the complicated history of the Ostariophysi as a whole. This study contains three clearly defined objectives. First, The comparative osteology and development of extant species will be examined. It is necessary to understand Recent forms first before including fossil taxa. Fossil taxa are often incompletely preserved and developmental stages are often not available. Second, based on the data generated from objective 1, a phylogenetic or evolutionary analysis of all gonorynchid species will be conducted. Third, data generated from the phylogenetic analysis will be used in a study of Historical Biogeography. If one assumes that the earth and its biota evolved together, than an understanding of the evolutionary patterns of the biota should lead to a better understanding of the history of the earth. This project thus has broader application to those interested in earth history and global change. The significance of this project is multifaceted. This study will cross disciplinary lines and combine paleontology and neontology into one project. It will provide the first phylogeny for Gonorynchidae that is based on a thorough comparative examination of all fossil and living species. Results from this study will ultimately result in a better understanding of one of the most important teleost fish groups known, the Ostariophysi. Because of the well-bounded nature of this study, it will be used as a training tool for undergraduate and Masters students at Loyola University and the Field Museum. Students will have hands-on experience to all aspects of this project from the preparation of both fossil and extant taxa to data collection and computer analyses. Funds from this grant, along with matching funds from Loyola University, will expose students to both the complexities and the intellectual rewards of doing comprehensive anatomical phylogenetic work, and contribute to the long-term health of comparative morphological studies in general. This project thus extends beyond the limits of ostariophysan systematics and will be of interested to developmental biologists, biogeographers and systematists in general. The goal of this project is not only to provide vital information to colleagues, but also to help assume the responsibility of educating and training students to a field of biology fundamental to other disciplines doc16189 none Hedges This award supports John Hedges and students from Washington University in a collaboration with Gerhard Kattner of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany. The project will have several foci, including the study of export of organic matter from rivers to the ocean, biogeochemistry of tropical systems, dynamics of dissolved organic matter in natural waters, and preservation of organic materials in marine sediments. Both groups are actively developing analytical methods for organic materials in environmental samples. In particular, the project will produce a method for analysis of the stable carbon and nitrogen isotope compositions of individual amino acids and their stereoisomers. In addition, the US group will learn the high-performance liquid chromatographic method now practiced by the AWI group fro ultra-sensitive analysis of amino acids as well as their methods for characterizing the molecular weight distribution of samples of dissolved organic matter. The work plan provides for extensive participation by graduate students in the international travel and research doc16190 none Bilham Description: This award supports a US-India workshop on Seismological, Geodynamic and Engineering Implications of the M=7.6, 26 January, Bhuj Earthquake that will be held October 3-5, in New Delhi. Professor Roger Bilham, University of Colorado Boulder will convene a three-day international meeting for scientists and engineers to discuss the scientific findings and implications of this earthquake. With fatalities exceeding 20,000, this was the most disastrous event in India s recorded history. The first day of the workshop will be devoted to seismological, geologic and geodetic investigations, the second to acceleration and engineering effects, and to the characterization of seismic risk in India, the third to general discussions on the seismotectonic implications of recent earthquakes in India and to their association with plate boundary processes and underlying plate dynamics. Scope: The Bhuj event had a number of features that resemble the mid-continent 19th century earthquakes of North America. The expectation is that discussions will provide insights into the causes of the Bhuj earthquake and of mid-cratonic events in general. This will be a forum for Indian and foreign scientists that have undertaken relevant post-seismic and theoretical investigations to compare their findings. The Indian Department of Science and Technology is cofunding this workshop; it is jointly funded by NSF s Division of International Programs and Division of Earth Sciences doc16089 none Karen Ann Garett, Allison Power, Helen Alexander ( , , ) Little is known about the role of plant disease in natural ecosystems, but several current environmental concerns motivate a greater understanding. When considering the potential effects of climate change, invasions of new pathogen species, or movement of disease resistance genes from genetically modified crop species to wild plant populations, understanding the role of plant disease in natural ecosystems is key. We propose a study of plant disease in the tallgrass prairie to provide information relevant to these concerns as well as to a general theoretical understanding of pathogen ecology and the role pathogens may play in determining the success of particular plant species. Plants in the tallgrass prairie of North America are of particular interest because so little area remains of this ecosystem and attempts to restore tallgrass prairie are an important focus of conservation efforts in the Great Plains. In this study we will provide information about the abundance of pathogen species and the patterns of their co-occurrence on a set of representative tallgrass prairie plant species found at the Konza Prairie Biological Station (KPBS), an NSF LTER site in the Flint Hills tallgrass prairie region in northeastern Kansas. We will also estimate the effects of predicted climate change scenarios, landscape patterns of microclimate variation, and burning cycle patterns, and work to refine sampling methods for characterizing pathogen populations within natural plant populations. This study will supply an essential baseline data set for plant diseases at KPBS to complement the LTER database on plant species composition and productivity doc16192 none Lee This three-year award for U.S.-France collaboration in condensed matter physics involves research groups at Cornell University and the Center for Low Temperature Physics Research in Grenoble, France. David M. Lee, Jeevak M. Parpia and John Reppy lead the US effort; Yuriy Bunkov and Henri Godrin lead the French group. The focus of the research is superfluid 3He (helium) - a unique coherent quantum system whose order parameter shows the complex breaking of gauge and rotation symmetries. The main areas to be studied are the relaxation domains in bulk superfluid 3HeB and the nature of the superfluidity of liquid 3He in aerogel. The project involves nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) studies of 3He at high magnetic fields and at ultra low temperatures. The Cornell group s experiments include exploration of magnetic field dependence of the temperature of catastrophic relation and sound propagation and heat transport in aerogel as a function of magnetic field. This is complemented by French NMR studies of superfluid 3He in aerogel at the limit of ultra low temperatures and theoretical investigations and numerical simulations of catastrophic relaxation. This award represents the US side of joint proposals to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses of the US investigators and postdoctoral researchers. The CNRS will support visits to US of the French participants. The collaboration will advance understanding of 3He systems and applications in cosmology and high-energy physics doc16193 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project addresses the widespread need to improve the productivity of the student learning process in a wide variety of public, private and commercial environments. Using the Internet. speaktomi, LLC. has conceived, developed, and, demonstrated an innovation: a natural language query system (NLQS). This system is an Internet-based intelligent query system that combines distributed speech recognition and natural language understanding technologies. Speaktomi demonstrated and tested a NLQS prototype system using English in and Japanese in May . The core technology of speaktomi s NLQS is a set of proprietary software components, integrated by speaktomi, LLC., using speaktomi s architectures and approaches (patents applied for) which support several languages and require no speaker training. The objectives of this research are to advance the performance of the NLQS system to the point of being able to define the specifications for a commercial product embodying NLQS. Specifically we will improve the system accuracy, latency, port the system to a PDA and identify client-server bottlenecks. The applications span learning grades K3-16 and above, in a broad array of commercial and military training programs, and when in combination with a translation engine, the NLQS technology can form a basis for systems that support interactive queries and real time collaboration across several languages doc16194 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses the problem of constructing high-assurance real-time, networked embedded systems. The project will develop a design environment, called HARBINGER, supporting the specification, composition, analysis, and refinement-to-code of embedded systems, in a way that preserves consistency between requirements and code. HARBINGER will also supported guided refinement, e.g., by generating resource tradeoffs throughout the process, enable capture and reuse of design knowledge, and yield formal proofs of correctness to the extent possible. It is anticipated that HARBINGER will lower the cost of producing new embedded systems and improve the assurance of their correctness. Once in use, HARBINGER will also make radical improvements in the evolution of systems originally constructed in its environment. Practical problems such as targeting applications to changing host platforms will be handled much more easily within HARBINGER In this project, the firm will assess the practicality and effectiveness of the HARBINGER approach for commercially important applications. This will require selecting an initial market with strong requirements for high assurance software and systems as the basis for a proposal for the next phase of the research. Initial application candidates include automotive and aviation vehicle control systems, areas in which the firm has extensive connections. In both of these areas, attention will be paid to the practical consideration of legacy code and to the impact of important new protocols doc16128 none Naturally occurring populations of guppies (Poecilia reticulata) exhibit striking genetically based variability in the color patterns of males. Each male has a unique color pattern or one that is shared with one or very few other fish in the population. How this polymorphism is maintained remains a mystery despite decades of study on this model organism. Laboratory studies have suggested that the mating success of males may depend on how rare or common their color pattern is, and theory suggests that such frequency dependent selection could maintain genetic variation. This study will examine the role of frequency dependent selection in maintaining color pattern variation in naturally occurring guppy populations. It will use new techniques for molecular paternity analysis and permanent marking of fish to examine patterns of survival and mating success of individual fish in streams. Understanding how genetic variation can persist in natural populations has long been a goal of research in evolutionary biology and more empirical study is needed. Dwindling populations of organisms often suffer from loss of genetic variation. Thus, this is an increasingly important topic for investigation and application to conservation strategies. This research involves an international collaboration between research and undergraduate institutions, and research participation by undergraduates and a high school teacher doc16196 none Musa Genomics Workshop, Arlington VA. July 17-19 A Musa Genomic Consortium has been formed within the framework of the Global Program for Musa Improvement. Deciphering the banana genome is an enormous task that will require participation and collaboration of scientists around the world. The Consortium will bring together and enhance the combined expertise of the different participating laboratories. This meeting has been organised to develop the strategy for the Consortium and to plan its implementation. The Musa genome offers exciting new perspectives in studying genomic biodiversity of monocots. It has a small genome (500 to 600 Mb - only 25% larger than rice) that is highly tractable to complete functional and sequence analysis. Cultivated varieties of Musa are sterile clones that have been propagated vegetatively for thousands of years, while fertile wild diploid equivalents have been actively evolving for the same period in the same environment, ranking Musa as a unique model to study plant evolution. Sterile and fertile forms have also co-evolved with most of the Musa pathogens, creating an excellent system in which to study plant pathogen evolution. Musa was the first species where a pararetrovirus was shown to be integrated into a plant genome, with the capacity to give rise to episomal banana streak badnavirus. Understanding the mechanism behind this phenomenon may lead to important applications, such as gene targeting. Musa is among few plant species with bi-parental cytoplasmic inheritance: paternal inheritance of mitochondria and maternal inheritance of chloroplasts. Variability in ploidy levels in Musa offers a new opportunity to gain insight to the greater-than-additive gains in crop productivity that often accompany polyploidy. Polyploids such as cotton and sugarcane contain only one type of polyploidy within the taxon, whereas Musa includes several types of autopolyploids (AAA, AAAA, AAAAAA), and allopolyploids (AAB, ABB, AABB, AAAB) in addition to diploid M. acuminata (AA) and M. balbisiana (BB) and AB hybrids doc16197 none Slavin This award supports Andei Slavin and students from Oakland University in a collaboration with Burkard Hillebrands of the Physics Department at the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. The project is supplementary to the ongoing award from the Division of Materials research on the Dynamics of Linear and Nonlinear Spin Waves in Magnetic Films. The aim of the international project is to develop a complementary research collaboration between the theoretical research group in the US and the German experimental group to work on solutions to problems involving confinement of linear and non-linear spin waves in magnetic films and particles. Such solutions will have important applications in magnetic recording, and will advance the state of our fundamental understanding of magnetic excitations. The work plan provides for extensive participation by graduate students in the international travel and research doc16198 none Leone This two-year award for US-France collaboration in experimental physical chemistry and quantum information science involves researchers and students at the University of Colorado and the Aime Cotton Laboratory in Orsay, France. Stephen R. Leone in the US and Christian Jurgen in France lead this collaboration of experimentalists and theorists. The objective of their combined efforts is to investigate Rydberg molecular packets of complex sodium or lithium compounds (dimers) or nobelium as potential sources for quantum information. The US group will assemble and prepare molecular wave packets with ultrafast pulsed lasers in order to construct coherent superpositions of states. Pairs of superposition states, called qubits, will then be used to investigate algorithms proposed for quantum information science. The French investigators will provide the theoretical expertise to identify the states involved and to interpret the complex wave packet dynamics. This collaboration advances understanding of research in laser control of chemical reactions and molecular spectroscopy. The new knowledge will be used in quantum information science, optical communications, and femtosecond laser optics. The collaboration advances research training of graduate students and provides them with opportunities to establish international partnerships early in their careers. This award represents the US side of parallel proposals to the NSF and the CNRS. NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator, postdoctoral researcher and students. The CNRS will support visits by French researchers and students to the United States doc16199 none Liquid crystal phases are intermediate between solid and liquid and present a wealth of rheological and electro-optical properties. Novel technological applications involve highly ordered phases such as the ferroelectric smectic~C . Ferroelectricity in liquid crystals is a consequence of the chirality of the phase (i.e., molecules are arranged in helical patterns). Chirality also turns out to be a central attribute of all living organisms. This fact brings a biological scope to liquid crystals research. This proposal deals with mathematical and modeling issues of advanced liquid crystal materials, in the context of applications to optics and rheology. Ferroelectricity and chirality are at the core of the proposed models. One of the issues of the project is the modeling of ferroelectric display. The switching time of such a display is much less than that of other liquid crystal technologies (e.g., shutters are capable of a 70 microseconds transition time); it also allows for sequential coloring. The project also addresses related current trends of thin film research for liquid crystals, with a view towards biological applications. One such trend relates to the need of miniaturization of devices, such as the manufacturing of very thin ferroelectric displays (from 10 to 100 nano-meters thickness). These are particularly needed in interactive video applications, where some of the display components are intended to be wearable. One related aspect of the proposed research is the study of interfaces and contact surfaces between liquid crystals and isotropic fluids, and the role of smectic liquid crystal phases as surfactants. Such questions are also relevant in studies of biological membranes and processes, such as the transport of drugs through cell walls, and the attachment of proteins to strains of DNA. The analysis of flow problems will encompass uniaxial and biaxial nematic, chiral and smectic liquid crystals and polymers. The PI will also carry out research related to applications of liquid crystals to optical switching and telecommunications, and will search for industrial partnership in such topics. The work will incorporate modern theories of partial differential equations and calculus of variations. Numerical simulations will also be carried out for some of the problems. The PI will continue the very active program of connecting research activities with undergraduate education through the following: the summer REU program, organization of industrial seminars, participation and organization of open houses for undergraduate students as well as for high school students, first year seminars, and bringing state of the art computer software and technology to undergraduate mathematics. Since their discovery at the end of the nineteen century, liquid crystals have been at the core of the most exciting scientific events, and have brought one of the truly remarkable technological advances of the twentieth century. They are found in the most basic household items, such as watches and calculators, to computer screens and instrument display panels (LCD). Following the commercialization of the first display device towards the mid 20th century, the physical and mathematical modeling of liquid crystals has played a major role in their technological development, during the last quarter of the 20th century. Moreover, the mathematical challenges posed by the liquid crystal models of continuum mechanics brought a wealth of activity in analysis and partial differential equations. These achievements, in turn, prompted further technological developments. The future of the liquid crystal research promises new levels of scientific and technological advances, but it is also filled with challenges. The goal of the proposed research is to actively participate in this endeavor and work on the forefront of the modern liquid crystal research. This proposal deals with mathematical and modeling issues of advanced liquid crystal materials, in the context of applications to optics and rheology. The work will incorporate modern theories of partial differential equations and calculus of variations. Numerical simulations will also be carried out for some of the problems. Date: June 25, doc16200 none Weiblen Work by Dr. George Weiblen at the University of Minnesota examines the evolutionary history of the mulberry family (Moraceae) using the DNA sequences from the living members of this ancient lineage of flowering plants. There are more than species of Moraceae worldwide, including such economically important fruits as figs, mulberries, jackfruit and breadfruit. Among the Moraceae, the figs (species of the genus Ficus) have been a major focus of research in ecology and evolution because of their complex interactions with fig wasps. Specialized wasps that feed on fig seeds are the exclusive pollinators of over 700 species of figs. The mutually beneficial relationship between figs and their wasps has stimulated much research on coevolution, the process by which two species undergo genetic change in response to each other. Ecological studies of fig pollination have advanced our understanding of coevolution, and yet the origins and evolutionary stages leading to fig pollination have remained virtually unknown. This project uses new tools of DNA sequencing and phylogenetic analysis to probe the early history of the mulberry family and to identify the closest relatives of the figs. Field work in the Old World tropics will focus on pollination biology of several Moraceae. Reconstructing patterns of diversification in this way makes it possible to test theories on the origin of the unique fig pollination syndrome, and to improve our understanding of general trends in floral evolution. The project will significantly expand our taxonomic and phylogenetic knowledge of an important branch of the tree of life. Economically significant members of the Moraceae include ornamental and edible figs (Ficus), breadfruit and jackfruit (Artocarpus), paperbark mulberry (Broussonetia), a source of fiber, and breadnut (Brosimum), a major tropical timber. Mulberry (Morus) also plays a key role in the production of silk as the main food source for silk moths. Understanding how these plants are related genetically is important for their sustainable use and conservation. In addition, the research provides an opportunity for advanced graduate training in state-of-the-art molecular techniques combined with museum collections-based approaches to the study of biodiversity doc16201 none Raines This award supports Ronald Raines and students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in a collaboration with Renate Ulbrich-Hofmann of the Department of Biochemistry and Biotechnology at the University of Leipzig, Germany. The aim of the international project is to use intein-mediated protein ligation to create semisynthetic variants of ribonuclease A. These variants will be produced by the US group and studied with respect to their thermodynamic and proteolytic stability by methods established in the German group. The results will provide new insight into protein-folding pathways and the fundamental basis for protein stability, and ultimately lead to the creation of new proteins with desirable properties. The work plan provides for extensive participation by graduate students in the international travel and research doc16202 none Natural ecosystems are dynamic, not static. For instance, plants themselves alter properties of soils and ecosystems. Thus, the characteristics of different plant species influence important ecosystem functions such as soil fertility, soil development and plant productivity, and thus in part control ecosystem functioning. The specifics of these controls, however, are very poorly understood due to difficulties in separating effects of climate or soils from those of vegetation. To explore the way in which plants can influence their own environment, we will utilize a unique common-garden experiment of 32-year old monoculture stands with 14 temperate tree species in Poland. This is the only such experiment in the world. The proposed research will compare and contrast leaf and fine root traits and their effects on ecosystem by examining: above- and belowground tissue physiology, structure and productivity, litter decomposition and soil chemistry and development doc16203 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 1 project develops a novel method to protect the authenticity of multimedia. The Internet allows cost-free distribution of multimedia products of all sorts, from simple documents to music, video, or virtual reality. Free product samples become the gravity for snowballing success. Yet the same medium is plagued with theft and piracy of copyrighted media. The resolution of this dilemma is critical for inventors and copyright holders, and indeed for the growth of e-commerce as a whole. Media duplication is critical for exposure as long as the author, artist or company is cited. This novel research embeds three markings in multimedia by an independent component analysis (ICA) blind mixing algorithm: a visible logo or advertisement, an invisible watermark, and an invisible electronic bacteria code. The logo serves as a vaccination against a dormant digital electronic bacteria code. Once the logo is removed the bacteria code awakens and degrades only the multimedia. The invisible watermark enables retrieval by hardware media players and tracking. The product of this research is twofold: intellectual property and software tools. Revenue originates from the sale of advertisement space, IP licensing, and sale of software to the content producers doc16204 none The Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), the nation s leading IT association representing more than 500 corporate members from the information technology industry, proposes a pilot initiative to establish a framework for substantial engagement of its member companies with a core group of minority-serving institutions representing the more than 105 Hispanic Serving Institutions, 203 Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and 32 Tribal Colleges and Universities across the U.S. This effort will be directly responsive to the recommendations of the bipartisan Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering and Technology (CAWMSET) with respect to improving access to and the quality of higher education for groups under-represented in science, engineering, and technology. The broad goal is to link the resources and expertise of ITAA and its members with those minority-serving institutions demonstrating the commitment and capacity to improve the technological and pedagogical infrastructure devoted to student learning, faculty and student research, and administrative processes. Through this initiative, ITAA will pursue two major activities: 1. Assist in developing and implementing customized campus technology plans for specific schools through: a) Identification, assessment, and refinement of user needs; b) Recommendation and technical assistance in procurement of baseline systems and technology 2. Provide knowledge enhancement activities through: a) Student and faculty internships in ITAA member firms b) Recommendation of specific curricular and research activity enhancements c) E-mentoring of students, faculty, and administrators d) ITAA practitioners-on-loan as potential academic and administrative consultants The ITAA project will complement other NSF grants, including EDUCAUSE (Award # ) and the Council on Competitiveness (Award# ). This project will also build upon the quality assurance provided by merit review of proposals submitted to the HBCU-UP and TCUP programs at NSF doc16205 none McKoy This Americas Program award will support Dr. Vincent McKoy of the in collaboration with Dr. Marco A. Lima of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil and Dr. Marcio H. Bettega of the Universidade Federal do Parana, Brazil. The aim of the project is to determine why the differential elastic cross sections obtained from high-level calculations using a number of methods exhibit, within certain ranges of collision energy and scattering angle, surprisingly large deviations from recent experiments. The calculations will produce very valuable data, adding significantly to the knowledge of electron scattering from a handful of technologically and fundamentally important molecules. The project also promotes education and training by providing an opportunity for Brazilian graduate students in the physical sciences to gain experience with the application of large-scale parallel computation to scientific problems doc16206 none The role of immigration in rescuing a population from the threat of extinction remains to be tested in a comprehensive experiment. By exploiting the amenability of the housefly for large-scale long-term experiments, the effects of immigration and selection on the survival of persistently small populations will be examined. Replicate metapopulations (i.e., interacting sets of small subpopulations) will be constructed. Over the course of 20 generations, each metapopulation will be managed under one of six specific treatments for immigration and selection effects. For the selection treatments, only the adults with the highest reproductive activity will be allowed to contribute offspring to the next generation. For the immigration treatments, members from one subpopulation will be allowed to breed in another subpopulation. Measures will be made on reproductive activity and on the genetic variation for molecular and complex traits to assess the threat of extinction. The central hypothesis is that a low level of immigration will bolster the selection response for higher mating activity and rescue subpopulations from inbreeding depression. In agricultural programs to select for economically important traits and in efforts to save endangered species, immigration is commonly used to relieve the detrimental effects of inbreeding. Recent studies in laboratories and in nature, however, have identified gaps in our understanding of the genetic complexities of near-extinction events. This large-scale long-term experiment is uniquely designed to explain how populations in nature, agriculture, laboratories, and conservation projects escape the threat of extinction doc16207 none Lacey The PI will examine relationships among social behavior, demography, and genetic variation in two species of tuco-tucos (Rodentia: Ctenomyidae) from southwestern Argentina. The presence of both the group-living colonial tuco-tuco (Ctenomys sociabilis) and the solitary Patagonian tuco-tuco (C. haigi) in Argentina s Limay Valley provides an unusual opportunity to explore the effects of sociality on genetic variation in closely related species that occur in similar habitats. Using DNA extracted from tissue samples collected from 10 populations per species, variation at both microsatellite and Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) loci will be quantified. These data will be used to determine how genetic variation is apportioned within and among populations of each species. Specifically, the PI will test the hypothesis that group living is associated with enhanced selection for diversity at MHC genes, which are the genes associated with the vertebrate immune response. To determine if selection on MHC genes is influenced by presumably greater pathogen exposure among members of group-living species, the prevalence of fleas and flea-borne bacteria of the genus Bartonella will be assessed for all populations of C. sociabilis and C. haigi sampled by the PI. The proposed research is important in that it is one of the first studies of natural populations of non-human vertebrates to (1) link behavioral and demographic variables to patterns of MHC variation and (2) explore the role of behaviorally-mediated differences in pathogen exposure in generating selection on MHC genes. Both aspects of the project will significantly improve our understanding of the processes underlying observed patterns of genetic variation in vertebrates. The project will also contribute significantly to our understanding of the biology of the endangered colonial tuco-tuco, which is endemic to the western Limay Valley and surrounding hills. Specifically, by engaging Argentine university students to assist with the project, the PI will facilitate involvement of local biologists in the study and management of this little-known species doc16208 none R. D. Shelton, WTEC, Inc. Partial support for the organization and travel of invited speakers participating at the Workshop on Nano- and Related Technologies for Improving Human Performance, December 3-4, , at NSF, will be provided. The objective of the meeting is to evaluate the current research results and discuss future research directions in the emerging interdisciplinary field dealing with synergistic implications of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognition on improving human performance. Nanotechnology is opening an array of technological developments that may significantly improve human perception, sensing, adaptation, learning, human-machine interface, communication, group creativity, and other aspects of human activities. The workshop will provide input from about thirty leading experts in various areas from science, engineering, cognitive sciences, medicine and other disciplines. Specialists from academe and industry will attempt to identify common principles and approaches and develop collaborations. The workshop will be organized with plenary presentations and 4-5 breakout sessions. There will be about sixty participants, including observers from various agencies, academic and private organizations. The main goals of the workshop are to evaluate the potential role of nano related technologies on improving human performance, identify research opportunities, and develop a strategic plan for the future. Ample time will be allowed for questions and discussions. The workshop is expected to facilitate the establishment of interdisciplinary cooperation among researchers in academe, industry and government in the in the area technology implication on human improvement. A website will be established for timely communication and dissemination of the results. A report will be prepared at the end of the meeting doc16209 none Grotjahn This three-year award for US-France collaboration in organometallic chemistry involves researchers and students at the San Diego State University and University Pierre and Marie Curie (Paris VI). Douglas B. Grotjahn in the US and Hani Amouri in France lead further investigations of stable metal complexes - simple ortho quinone methides (o-QMs) - discovered recently by the Amouri team. In the absence of metal, o-QMs are capable of forming complex organic molecules or damaging DNA. The Amouri-Grotjahn collaboration will use metals to stabilize the o-QM by binding tightly to it. Preliminary studies show reactivity of o-QM complexes with the metal iridium. Complexes of other metals are expected to show different reactivity. The investigators will use coordinated o-QM ligands to create new carbon-carbon bonds and rings. Optically pure samples of o-QM complexes will be used to make single enantiomers (mirror images) of the products. The US investigator brings to this collaboration expertise in optically active organic molecules and synthetic application of organic cycloadditions using advanced Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) techniques. This is complemented by French expertise in the chemistry of quinone methide complexes and their application. The collaboration advances understanding of o-QM complexes and their synthetic applications in products. Students from a predominantly undergraduate research institution will gain international experience and benefit from training in new synthetic techniques used in the French laboratory. This award represents the US side of parallel proposals to the NSF and the CNRS. NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator and students. The CNRS will support visits by French researchers and students to the United States doc16210 none Levin The genus Acalypha, commonly known as copperleaf, is the fourth largest genus in its family (Euphorbiaceae) with about 450 species. It is widespread geographically, with species native to the Americas (about two-thirds of the known species), Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific Islands. It is most abundant and diverse in subtropical and tropical regions. Some species are problematic weeds in native and agricultural systems, whereas others are rare; two are common ornamentals, and there is growing evidence that some species contain potential pharmaceuticals. Unfortunately, the taxonomy of Acalypha has not been revised in more than 75 years and is suspected to reflect true relationships poorly. Ecological, conservation, pest management, and medical research on the genus are being hindered by the poor classification. Drs. Levin and Steinmann at the University of Illinois and the Institute of Ecology in Mexico intend to address this issue and provide better understanding of the evolution of the genus by using DNA sequence data and morphology to reconstruct the phylogeny, or evolutionary history, of a large sample of the genus. Combining field work and existing collections, they will examine about two-thirds of the species. Morphological data and sequence data from two genes (nuclear ITS and plastid ndhF) will be analyzed separately and in combination to reconstruct relationships within the genus. The results will then be used to revise the classification and assess various aspects of copperleaf evolution, particularly changes in growth form and reproductive organization. The investigators will develop a web site to distribute the results of this project and of future studies of Acalypha. This project is significant because it develops human resources, strengthens research on a poorly known group, stimulates further research, and facilitates conservation and pest management. Very few systematists work on Euphorbiaceae, especially given that the family is the seventh largest family of flowering plants with over 7,000 species. This project helps address this issue by providing training to a graduate student and a young researcher (Dr. Victor Steinmann). Further scientific work will be stimulated by providing the framework for other studies on a diverse group. Because of its simple flowers but varied ways of organizing them on the plant, Acalypha could become a model group for applying newly developed genomic techniques to understanding the evolution of floral development, but only if a well-supported phylogeny is available to provide the evolutionary context. In addition, Levin s and Steinmann s work will have broader societal benefits. A modern, well-supported classification will facilitate conservation of rare species, management of agricultural weeds and invasive species, and the search for pharmaceuticals doc16211 none Hartmann This award supports Dieter Hartmann and students from Clemson University in a collaboration with Sylvio Klose of the Thuering Observatory in Tautenburg, Germany. The aim of the international project is to study the temporal evolution of gamma-ray burst afterglows. Both groups have access to small and midsize telescopes. The U.S. side uses data from the fully robotic Super-LOTIS telescope at the Kit Peak National Observatory. The German side has access to the Tautenburg two-meter telescope as well as time on various international large-aperture telescopes. By combining data collected by both groups, they will analyze gamma-ray burst afterglow light curves and possible color changes on time scales ranging from seconds to days. The work plan provides for extensive participation by graduate students in the international travel and research doc16212 none Ellison This three-year award supports US-France collaboration in astronomy between Donald C. Ellison of North Carolina State University and Anne Decourchelle of the Astrophysics Department of the Center for Nuclear Studies in Saclay, France. They propose to study the self-consistent theory of nonlinear particle acceleration and photon emission in supernova remants. The objective is to provide an accurate and efficient means of interpreting X-ray and GeV gamma ray emissions in supernova remnants and TeV gamma rays. The research utilizes data collected during various space missions, including the US Chandra and European mission XMM-Newton, and data obtained from current and future spacecraft missions and ground-based telescopes. The US investigator brings to this collaboration on expertise in shock acceleration and cosmic ray origins. This is complemented by French expertise in X-rays from shock heated plasma emissions in supernova remnants and experience with data gathered through spacecraft missions. The collaboration will lead to a new state-of the art code that will advance understanding of the shock acceleration of cosmic rays and impact other astrophysics topics, such as, the origin of cosmic rays and the evolution of supernova remnants and their influence on interstellar medium. This award represents the US side of parallel proposals to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator. The CNRS will support visits by French researcher to the United States doc16213 none Plant and pollinator interactions have profound economic and biological impact (e.g., pollination of crops, persistence of fragmented populations or endangered plant and pollinator species, diversification of floral form). This research develops mathematical and computer models of plant and pollinator interaction. Specific objectives are: (1) To investigate the dynamics of interacting plant and pollinator populations; and (2) To understand when `generalist (e.g., one plant relying on many different pollinator) versus `specialist (e.g., an intimate one-to-one relationship between plant and pollinator) interactions evolve. Theoretical methods are based on the premise that plants and pollinators are participants in an economy of production and consumption (e.g., nectar, produced by plants and consumed by pollinators). Mathematical and computer models of plant production and pollinator consumption are integrated using the economic notion of trade. These models provide insight into the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of interacting plants and pollinators. This endeavor is broadly significant in its contribution to study at the interface between evolutionary and ecological processes, and to understanding the evolution of plant reproductive systems and plant-pollinator mutualisms. In addition to these academic contributions, the proposal supports science and mathematics training with graduate research assistantships and undergraduate learning opportunities. The proposed training exposes beginning scientists to a research program integrating quantitative reasoning into questions of biological relevance doc16214 none In all the theories of the evolution of the genetic code, the number of amino acids is hypothesized to have gradually increased from a few to the twenty that now constitute the building-blocks of proteins in living cells. The objective of this research is to recreate a possible evolutionary intermediate in which a living organism contains 19 and not 20 amino acids. This objective would give insight into how protein structures adapt to mutation and open possibilities in terms of designing and selecting organisms adapted to a different chemical composition. Based on encouraging results from recent experiments, this objective will be accomplished by placing a population under selective pressure for the loss of a given amino acid. Two different strategies have been designed to replace isoleucine by valine and threonine by serine in Escherichia coli. These strategies combine selection strategies that exploit classical strain constructions with the use of a continuous culture apparatus that allows long-term experiments doc16215 none Quinn Despite the general appreciation for climatic effects on ecological dynamics, most biological studies are too brief to test for interactions between climatic and biological processes. Alternatively, many long-term studies do not span enough levels of biological organization to provide meaningful insights into the complexity of ecological responses to environmental change. In the last century, population dynamics of anadromous Pacific salmon have been influenced by interactions among large-scale shifts in regional climate, inherent density-dependent regulation, and fisheries activities. We propose to take advantage of unique, highly detailed biological and physical time series that extend for 40-50 years to test for interactions between climatic and biological processes in the freshwater ecosystems used as nursery habitats by sockeye salmon in southwestern Alaska. Sockeye are not only an important fishery resource to commercial and subsistence communities in this region, but are also keystone species, driving many components of freshwater and riparian ecosystems. We have established a series of working hypotheses to investigate interactions among climatic variables (e.g., hydrology, ice-out date) and biological variables (e.g., bear predation, juvenile competition) that interact to control life history evolution and the ecology of sockeye in freshwater ecosystems. Our main research themes are to explore: 1) interactions among habitat features, climate-driven variation in hydrology, bear predation and salmon density controlling the life history patterns and productivity of adult sockeye, 2) sockeye population dynamics and climate as controllers of limnological conditions in lakes used as nursery habitats, and 3) biological and climatic factors controlling growth rates and age at seaward migration in juvenile sockeye salmon. Sockeye are an ideal species for such studies because they occupy stream, lake and open ocean habitats at discrete life history stages, exert top-down control on zooplankton communities, provide important marine-derived nutrients to freshwater ecosystems when they die and decompose, and occur in large, well-studied populations. This LTREB research will: 1) maintain sampling programs to build on existing data sets established over four decades ago in two lake systems of Bristol Bay, Southwest Alaska, 2) continue to develop a state-of-the-art data archive system to ensure long-term data security, and 3) initiate new and retrospective studies to test several hypotheses central to understanding the interactions between climate and the ecology of sockeye and their ecosystems. A major objective is to develop a living database available to investigators from all avenues of freshwater ecology and fisheries biology. These data sets include the abundance, size- and age-structure of adult sockeye salmon, regional climate, limnological conditions in nursery lakes, and abundance and growth of juvenile sockeye salmon and other lacustrine fishes. More specifically, we will evaluate the consequences of climate change for life history evolution and population dynamics of a fish species that plays an exceptionally important role in the structure and function of its ecosystems, and the local economy and culture of people in the region doc16216 none Stern This three-year award supports U.S.-France collaboration between David B. Stern of the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell University and Silva Lerbs-Mache of the University Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France. They lead a collaborative program involving reciprocal visits of postdoctoral researchers, graduate and undergraduate students, and faculty researchers. The project utilizes a multi-faceted approach to the study of transcription in organelles, specifically, mitochondria and plastids. The objectives are: (1) to use reverse genetic approaches in maize cell cultures and in Arabidopsis plants to reveal the functions of proteins in organelle transcription and plant development; (2) to reconstitute the active polymerase through overexpression of putative components; and (3) to use proteomics approach to discover any unknown subunits. The US researchers bring to this collaboration expertise in reverse genetics in maize to discern organelle protein function. This is complemented by French laboratory strengths in Arabidopsis and RNA polymerases biochemistry. Reciprocal visits of junior faculty and students are emphasized to add an international dimension to their activities and to develop international connections early in their careers. This award represents the US side of joint proposals to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses of the US investigators, postdoctoral researchers, graduate and undergraduate students. The CNRS will support visits to US of the French participants. The collaboration will advance understanding of organelle biogenesis and plant development doc16217 none Considerable evidence has accumulated that female birds may exert control over the sex ratio of their offspring. Under optimal conditions, more female chicks are produced; and under poor environmental conditions, more of the young are males. There are several plausible explanations for this. In some cases, young males disperse and so under stressful conditions do not compete with parents or siblings. In other instances where habitat conditions are favorable, mothers with new chicks are assisted by older female offspring, increasing reproductive success. In species that lay clutches with multiple eggs, there can be chicks of both sexes and self-assessment of parent condition may not be as crucial. However, in other species such as penguins, only one or two eggs are laid during each breeding season. In this situation, the application of the strategy of sex ratio allocation requires that females must be very capable of assessing their condition and that of their mates. This Small Grant for Exploratory Research will investigate the sex ratio of king penguin chicks relative to the condition of the parents to determine if females are controlling the gender of chicks. Sex determination will be accomplished by DNA analyses of blood samples, a new method to be tested on king penguins in this project. Quantifying parental condition will be done by several standard methods, including measures of body size, parasite load, and immunocompetence. This study will also explore the possibility that plumage coloration is an indicator of condition in penguins as it is in other bird and fish species. Plumage color is from diet-derived carotenoids and may be a useful proxy for evaluating health and fitness. Penguins are dominant predators in their environment and shifts in a population parameter as fundamental as offspring sex ratio might reflect changes in climate or in distribution and abundance of food resources. The results of this work, which will be conducted in collaboration with scientists from the French Antarctic Program, will provide a better understanding of penguin population dynamics and the complex mechanisms of environmental biofeedback doc16218 none Orlando This award supports Terry Orlando and students from MIT in a collaboration with Frank Wilhelm of the Department of Physics at the University of Munich, Germany. The aim of the international project is to maximize the quantum coherence of superconducting quantum bits for possible use in a full-scale quantum computer. The US side will conduct experiments, analyze quantum computing and control issues, and explore new coupling methods between qubits along with intrinsic decoherence mechanisms in the superconducting system. The German side will provide indispensible theoretical models which will give quantitative predictions for application to the experiments. The combined effort could result in new concepts of quantm computation, the realization of quantum gates, numerical tools to allow the explicit construction of control pulses, and new coupling schemes and decoherence mechanisms. The work plan provides for extensive participation by graduate students in the international travel and research doc16219 none Chamon This three-year award for U.S.-France collaboration in condensed matter physics theory involves students and faculty researchers at Boston University, Ecole Normale Superieure, Ecole Superieure de Physique et Chimie, and Commission de l Energie Atomique in Paris, France. Claudio Chamon and Leticia Cugliandolo from Boston and Paris respectively will lead the collaborative program. The theoretical work involves studies of quantum non-equilibrium dynamics in both driven and non-driven systems. The research focuses on aging dynamics, infinite dimensional quantum spin glass systems, aging and memory effects in electronic glasses, and noise, quantum fluctuations, charge, spin in quantum wires, quantum dots, and carbon nanotubes . The collaboration takes advantage of complementary French expertise in quantum systems, spin glass models, and dynamics in electronic glasses. This award represents the US side of joint proposals to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses of the US investigators and graduate students. The CNRS will support visits to US of the French participants. The collaboration will advance understanding of quantum systems and computational and theoretical methods. The theoretical results will be applied to experimental data and lead to new interdisciplinary research directions in statistical mechanics and quantum condensed matter physics doc16220 none The project will develop understanding of the linkage of tropical deforestation with cumulus cloud formation and orographically generated cloud-banks in environmentally complex terrain. Advancing hydrologic predictions in regions undergoing land-use and land cover change from the use of remotely sensed cloud observations will be an important project objective. The research is motivated by the need to understand and model land-surface interactions and cloud connections in regional hydrologic cycling in terrain regions such as the tropical montane cloud forest ecosystems of northern Costa Rica. The research will involve regional atmospheric modeling, remote sensing of land-surface characteristics and cloud distribution, and on-site monitoring of soil moisture and cloud-base heights. Drs. Welch, Han, and Lawton (University of Alabama, Huntsville) expect project activities to shed insight into causes of lowland deforestation, watershed management, ecosystem functioning, and biodiversity conservation in mountainous parts of the tropics. The project is supported by NSF s Water and Energy: Atmospheric, Vegetative, and Earth (WEAVE) interactions program, which seeks to improve understanding of the Earth s hydrologic and energy cycles to support better assessments of the potential impact of human activities on those cycles and on the climate system, in particular doc16221 none Hibbett and Binder The proposed research by Drs. David Hibbett and Manfred Binder at Clark University concerns the evolutionary relationships of homobasidiomycetes, which include the mushroom-forming fungi. There are about 13,500 described species of these fungi. Homobasidiomycetes play important ecological roles as decayers, pathogens, and beneficial symbionts of plants and animals. Traditionally, classifications and evolutionary hypotheses in this diverse group have been based on the morphology of the fruiting bodies, which include forms with a cap and stalk, club and candelabra-shaped forms, puffballs, bracket fungi, etc. Recently, however, DNA sequences have been used to infer evolutionary relationships of homobasidiomycetes. The proposed research will use DNA sequences to study relationships of two groups of homobasidiomycetes: cyphelloid fungi (roughly 300 species), which are minute cup-shaped forms, and aquatic homobasidiomycetes (20 species, usually quite rare). Both cyphelloid and aquatic homobasidiomycetes have been taxonomically obscure. Recent molecular evidence suggests that these groups may be closely related, which had not been predicted previously. The proposed research will follow up on the leads generated in recent molecular studies, and will include fieldwork to expand knowledge of the diversity in both groups. The proposed work will increase understanding of the pathways of morphological evolution in homobasidiomycetes. In addition, it will elucidate the ecological transitions from terrestrial to aquatic habitats in fungi. The proposed research will benefit science and society in two major ways: 1) The proposed research will enhance understanding of biodiversity. In particular, it will highlight an unusual group of organisms that even most biologists are not aware of, but that play important ecological roles. 2) The proposed research will include a significant training and outreach component. A post-doctoral fellow and a Ph.D. student will receive training. In addition, a series of summer workshops in the Worcester, MA, area for local high school students and high school teachers is planned (one student and one teacher will be supported per year). The summer workshops will provide exposure to modern techniques of molecular biology and evolutionary biology. Teachers who participate in the workshops will receive professional development points, which are necessary for annual recertification in Massachusetts, and which Clark University is authorized to award. Teachers and students will be recruited from the Worcester public school system doc16222 none The world s plants consist of homosporous plants, best represented by ferns, and heterosporous plants, best represented by seed plants. Homosporous species have high chromosome numbers, suggesting that they are products of repeated cycles of doubling of chromosome numbers (polyploidy) followed by gene genome silencing. This project will address the question of ancient polyploidy by generating high resolution genetic maps of the 39 chromosomes of Ceratopteris richardii, the fern species used as a model organism for studies of homosporous plants. DNAs from 500 completely inbred hybrid plants (DHLs) will be analyzed with approximately molecular markers. Analyses of the chromosomal locations of duplicate markers will make it possible to determine whether the Ceratopteris species is an ancient polyploid. Homosporous plants are now known to share an immediate common ancestor with seed plants, a group that includes all agricultural food plants. This project s genetic maps will provide fundamental information about genomic structure of homosporous plants, which in turn will provide basic comparative data bearing on evolutionary processes that produced the genomic organization of all of today s plants. In addition to the genetic maps, the 500 fully genotyped DHL plants will be cloned and made freely available to biologists for future genetic studies doc16223 none Sturgeons, paddlefishes and their fossil relatives form a small group of fishes from the Northern hemisphere called Acipenseriformes that is believed to have split off from other ray-finned fishes (the actinopterygians) some 150 million years ago. The morphology of living sturgeons (25 species) has remained largely unchanged since they first evolved. Although there have been many studies of sturgeon morphology, there never has been a study that is detailed or comprehensive enough to allow modern studies of their evolution. The new study of the skeleton of fossil and living sturgeons by Hilton, Grande and Bemis has two main goals. The first objective is to describe in detail the skeleton of the shortnose sturgeon (Acipenser brevirostrum), a small species of sturgeon found in coastal rivers of eastern North America. This study will be based on several types of specimens, including dry skeletons, hand cleaned skeletons that are stored in alcohol, and cleared and stained skeletons (in which the soft tissue is made clear, cartilage is stained blue and bone is stained red). Specimens representing all life history stages will be studied, from the earliest embryos to the oldest specimens available. Such an approach allows observations of changes of morphology due to growth and development of the skeleton. The results of this study will be published in a large format monograph, illustrated with photographs for documentation and line drawings for interpretation, accompanied by clear text descriptions. The intention is that this monograph will serve as a lasting contribution to the knowledge of the anatomy of sturgeons and a standard reference for anatomical studies of primitive ray-finned fishes. The second part of this study concerns tracing evolutionary relationships among living and fossil sturgeons. Most fossils that are identified as sturgeons are very fragmentary, and only after a detailed study of the living members of a group can such specimens be properly interpreted. Additionally, new comparative data generated during the first part of the study will be used to formulate new hypotheses of relationships. All previous morphological studies of the relationships of sturgeons are inadequate for various reasons. For instance, many studies have looked only at relationships of sturgeons from a particular geographic region or country. Evolution has not occurred within political boundaries, and Hilton, Grande and Bemis study will be the first to incorporate morphological data for all sturgeons on a worldwide scale. All species of sturgeons are afforded some form of protection, with many listed as endangered. The precarious conservation status of many sturgeons make studies of their evolutionary history even more critical doc16224 none Wendel This three-year award for U.S.-France collaboration in plant genome research involves students and faculty researchers at Iowa State University and University of Rennes 1, Rennes, France. Jonathan F. Wendel and Malika Ainouche will lead the collaborative program in the US and France respectively. They will study polyploid formation and evolution of novel expression patterns in two complementary model systems, one from the cotton genus Gossypium and the other from the grass genus Spartina. Using a diversity of materials and natural populations from both genera, gene expression will be studied in newly synthesized and older, natural polyploids. Changes that occur immediately after polyploid formation as well as those that arise on an evolutionary time-scale will be evaluated. The researchers will also determine the extent and dynamics of gene silencing using a cDNA-AFLP screen to identify, sequence and verify. Tissue specific partitioning of expression and novel expression in polyploids, compared to their diploid parents, will be examined for duplicated genes where initial screens suggest silencing or novel expression. The Iowa State group brings to this collaboration expertise in natural and synthetic polyploid members of the cotton genus Gossypium. French studies and investigations of the polyploid system from the grass genus Spartina complement this. This award represents the US side of joint proposals to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses of the US investigators and graduate students. The CNRS will support visits to US of the French participants. The collaboration will advance understanding of the evolution novel gene expression in higher plants and improvements in cotton agriculture doc16202 none Natural ecosystems are dynamic, not static. For instance, plants themselves alter properties of soils and ecosystems. Thus, the characteristics of different plant species influence important ecosystem functions such as soil fertility, soil development and plant productivity, and thus in part control ecosystem functioning. The specifics of these controls, however, are very poorly understood due to difficulties in separating effects of climate or soils from those of vegetation. To explore the way in which plants can influence their own environment, we will utilize a unique common-garden experiment of 32-year old monoculture stands with 14 temperate tree species in Poland. This is the only such experiment in the world. The proposed research will compare and contrast leaf and fine root traits and their effects on ecosystem by examining: above- and belowground tissue physiology, structure and productivity, litter decomposition and soil chemistry and development doc16226 none In , the National Science Foundation support created the Center for Learning Technologies in Urban Schools (LeTUS); a unique partnership focused on improving opportunities for challenging learning for urban children. LeTUS brings together two urban school districts, Detroit and Chicago, and research groups from the University of Michigan and Northwestern University. This partnership has created an infrastructure for developing and sustaining broad-based collaboration among professionals from public schools and university contexts, committed to improving teaching and learning in urban schools. This ABR proposal summarizes LeTUS four years of accomplishments and charts plans for an additional eighteen months of work doc16227 none Fawley Three research teams (Buchheim at University of Tulsa, Fawley at North Dakota State University, and Zechman at California State University at Fresno) have begun a collaboration that will address questions about the hierarchical (i.e., phylogenetic) relationships among green algal groups that are collectively known as the Chlorophyta. The Chlorophyta, which has phylum status in the Linnean nomenclatural system, represents one of two branches of the green plant lineage-the other branch being the land plant alliance. The Chlorophyta comprise organisms that range from the microscopic to the macroscopic, exhibit a variety of reproductive strategies (e.g., sexual vs. asexual), and live in a broad spectrum of habitats (e.g., freshwater, saltwater and terrestrial). Some aspects of the current classification scheme for the Chlorophyta, based largely on comparative morphology, have been challenged by new evidence from comparative molecular data. A comprehensive interpretation of the new evidence, however, has not been forthcoming because (1) these new molecular data have not been applied to all groups within the Chlorophyta and (2) in most cases only a single gene has been used to evaluate diversity among select groups of Chlorophyta (unlike the land plants where diversity in some groups has been studied using three or more different genes). The goal of this project is to develop a comprehensive assessment of diversity in the Chlorophyta using a comparative study of DNA sequence data in three different genes, the nuclear 18S ribosomal RNA and 26S ribosomal RNA genes, and the chloroplast rbcL gene. The two rRNA genes code for portions of all ribosomes found in living cells. The rbcL gene is part of the chloroplast genome and codes for a portion of the enzyme responsible for carbon fixation in plants. The Zechman lab at CSU-Fresno will be responsible for gathering data from the chlorophyte group known as the Ulvophyceae. The Fawley lab group at North Dakota State University will be responsible for gathering data from the chlorophyte group known as the Prasinophyceae. The Buchheim lab group at the University of Tulsa will gather data from the two chlorophyte groups, Trebouxiophyceae and Chlorophyceae. The project will culminate in (1) a phylogenetic synthesis of all molecular data for the Chlorophyta, (2) a fundamental re-assessment of chlorophyte classification, integrating morphological and photosynthetic pigment data, and (3) an integration of the chlorophyte molecular phylogenetic data with (published) parallel data from the land plant lineage. Studies using chlorophyte green algae as model organisms (for example, the genus Chlamydomonas, easily cultured in the laboratory) have significantly advanced our understanding of fundamental processes such as photosynthesis and flagellar function. As biologists continue to dissect the molecular and biochemical basis for biological phenomena, new chlorophyte models will be explored in order to understand the spectrum of variation associated with these phenomena. A more comprehensive understanding of the relationships among all chlorophyte groups will be vital to interpreting the results (for example, assessing the broader applicability) from studies of chlorophytes used as model organisms. Moreover, the results from a comprehensive assessment of chlorophyte diversity will inform future studies of biological processes that rely on green algae to model the mechanisms. Lastly, studies of diversity within the Chlorophyta are critical to advancing our understanding of the origins and evolution of the green plant lineage doc16228 none Soil aggregation (the arrangement of pore spaces and solid matter in soil) is a critically important process in natural and managed ecosystems, affecting a wide range of soil and ecosystem functions and biota. Management practices and erosion threaten soil structure on a national and global scale. Fungi, and in particular arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), are of great significance in soil aggregation. However, there is little known about of the basic biological characteristics of AMF in relation to soil aggregation. This research tests several fundamental biological (physiological and architectural) characteristics of AMF for their relationship with soil aggregation. It is hypothesized that there fungal traits correlate with soil aggregation across a number of fungal species. The research also places soil aggregation in the context of other functions carried out by these symbiotic fungi, and investigates how different species of fungi can interact in maintaining stable soil aggregates. An aspect of the educational component of this research is participation of graduate students and PI in the Montana Teachers Investigate Ecology program, a partnership with Western Montana High School teachers doc16229 none Ramayya This award is a renewal of an earlier award that supports A.V. Ramayya, Joseph Hamilton, and a graduate student from Vanderbilt University in a collaboration with Walter Greiner of the Department of Theoretical Physics at the University of Frankfurt, Germany. The project will focus on understanding the mechanisms of cold (neutronless) fragmentation of nuclei. The collaboration brings together the experimental expertise and facilities on the U.S. side with the theoretical capabilities of the German side. Recently, new facilities (namely, large germanium arrays such as Gammasphere and Eurogram II) have made detailed spectroscopic studies of neutron-rich nuclei possible, resulting of observation of new structural features. This in turn has led to some entirely new approaches to the study of fission. The collaboration supported here will bring together experimentalists and theorists in a way that will significantly advance the field of nuclear fission doc16202 none Natural ecosystems are dynamic, not static. For instance, plants themselves alter properties of soils and ecosystems. Thus, the characteristics of different plant species influence important ecosystem functions such as soil fertility, soil development and plant productivity, and thus in part control ecosystem functioning. The specifics of these controls, however, are very poorly understood due to difficulties in separating effects of climate or soils from those of vegetation. To explore the way in which plants can influence their own environment, we will utilize a unique common-garden experiment of 32-year old monoculture stands with 14 temperate tree species in Poland. This is the only such experiment in the world. The proposed research will compare and contrast leaf and fine root traits and their effects on ecosystem by examining: above- and belowground tissue physiology, structure and productivity, litter decomposition and soil chemistry and development doc16231 none The Physidae (Gastropoda: Basommatophora) is a group of freshwater snails with a native distribution in North, Middle, and South America, and Eurasia, but reach their greatest diversity in North America. The family constitutes a major component of the freshwater molluscan fauna in many lake, pond, and stream habitats. Despite the prominence of physids in behavioral, physiological and ecological studies, little is know of the phylogenetic relationships among the taxa. Furthermore, many questions remain as to whether many of the currently recognized species, subspecies, and morphs constitute valid evolutionary entities. Despite nearly 200 years of taxonomic and systematics studies, no rigorous study has been done employing modern methods and analyses. The purpose of the NSF-sponsored research is to collect physid snail specimens representing recognized species, subspecies, and morphs to estimate an evolutionary tree using on mitochondrial and nuclear gene DNA sequences and shell and anatomical data. In addition, the principal investigators will examine whether the family Physidae constitutes a natural assemblage of snails, being more closely related to each other than to any other group of snails. Although estimating a phylogeny for the ecologically important Physidae is important for its own sake, the resultant evolutionary tree will be used in conjunction with a modern, analytically based view of species to test whether currently recognized groups constitute valid species. At a time when species inventories are being made to discover hotspots and prioritize areas for various protection measures, it is imperative that recognized species correspond with phylogenetic species. Furthermore, the researchers will examine the evolution of reproductive isolation among selected physid species by conducting a series of controlled experiments in the laboratory. This research will provide a robust evolutionary tree and modern classification of the snail family Physidae. In addition, an empirical examination of species issues in physids will provide important data for estimating how many species actually exist within the family. These data will be of considerable use to conservation and evolutionary biologists as well to federal and state wildlife agency personnel doc16232 none Boltje This award supports Robert Boltje and students from the University of California-Santa Cruz in a collaboration with Burkhard Kulshammer of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Jena, Germany. The aim of the international project is to study the structure of various representation rings of finite groups, viz., the ring of monomial representations, the trivial and linear source ring, the Green ring, and other viariants. The results are expected to have applications to generalizations of Brown s theorem on Euler characteristics and to invariants in algebraic number theory, and might also uncover connections to algebraic topology. The work plan provides for extensive participation by graduate students in the international travel and research, and the exchange is intendedto let them benefit from the complementary strengths of both collaborators and to introduce them at an early stage to international collaboration to stimulate further exchange of ideas doc16233 none The proposed study will target Focus area I by examining preschooler s acquisition of the emergent literacy skills that provide the foundation for skilled reading in elementary school. Children from low-income backgrounds and families in which Standard English is not their first language face particularly high hurdles as they transition into early reading instruction. Moreover, teachers understanding of the developmental processes involved in learning to read are critical for successful implementation of literacy curricula and successful use of formative assessment to tailor instructional strategies to children. Following on these needs this project will provide teachers with state of the art research based knowledge about how emergent literacy skills are directly linked to, and form the foundation for, skilled reading in the elementary school. Additionally, the project will provide important data on the validity of assessment procedures used to inform curricula doc16234 none Thiemens This three-year award for US-France collaboration on biogeochemical studies in Antarctica involves Mark H. Thiemens and students at the University of California at San Diego and Michel Legrand and Robert Delmas of the Glaciology and Physical Environment Laboratory (CNRS, Grenoble, France). They will study atmospheric sulfur and nitrogen cycles in Antarctica using gas concentration and a combination of sulfur, nitrogen and oxygen isotopic measurements. Multi-isotope ratio measurement and integration of mass independent isotopic chemistry will be employed. Specifically, sulfur and nitrogen species at the French Antarctic station will be studied using gas concentration, aerosols, size distribution, and composition in addition to isotopic ratio measurements. Concentrated and isotopic measurements of ionic species trapped in the Vostok ice cores, currently in stored in France, also will be investigated. The US researchers bring to this collaboration expertise in ice analysis. This is complemented by French expertise in ice core chemistry and access to French Antarctic research facilities and special ice cores. Studies of Antarctic ice cores will advance understanding of the Antarctic atmosphere, ozone depletion, and the causes of climate transition. This award represents the US side of parallel proposals to the NSF and the CNRS. NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigators and students. The CNRS will support visits by French researchers to the United States doc16235 none Russell This award supports David Russell, Alexander Neimann and a student from the University of Missouri-Saint Louis in a collaboration with Lutz Schimansky-Geier of the Department of Physics at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. The aim of the international project is to understand the mechanisms of noise-enhanced information encoding in the electrosensory system of paddle fish. The fish represents a naturally designed passive radar system with 65 million years of evolution. Tens of thousands of electrorecptors are populated on the elongated rostrum of paddlefish, which acts as a an antenna in plankton feeding. Electrophysiological experiments and the results of previous behavioral experiments will provide information for models and parameters of the electrosensory system. The collaboration will combine the theoretical modeling of stochastic resonance by the German group and experimental study and testing of the theoretical predictions in the US laboratory. The work plan provides for participation by postdoctoral students in the international travel and research doc16236 none Moloney This award supports Jerome Moloney and students from the University of Arizona in a collaboration with Wulfhard Lange of the Department of Applied Physics at the University of Muenster, Germany. The aim of the international project is to make a systematic study of the spatio-temporal dynamics of technologically vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VSCEL) devices. The effort will bring a leading experimental group in Germany together with the US group whose expertise is in modeling and simulation. The US group has established a unique capability to calculate from first principles the full many-body microscopic optical response of a great variety of semiconductor quantum well materials. These simulation tools will be extended to the study of VCSEL structures in order to investigate, among other phenomena, the role of oxidation layers and their geometry in controlling current spreading and diffractive spreading in very small and large aperture VCSELs. The international team makes a powerful joint theory and experimental program that will significantly impact a critical emerging technology sector. The work plan provides for extensive participation by graduate students in the international travel and research doc16237 none Zechman Three research teams (Buchheim at University of Tulsa, Fawley at North Dakota State University, and Zechman at California State University at Fresno) have begun a collaboration that will address questions about the hierarchical (i.e., phylogenetic) relationships among green algal groups that are collectively known as the Chlorophyta. The Chlorophyta, which has phylum status in the Linnean nomenclatural system, represents one of two branches of the green plant lineage-the other branch being the land plant alliance. The Chlorophyta comprise organisms that range from the microscopic to the macroscopic, exhibit a variety of reproductive strategies (e.g., sexual vs. asexual), and live in a broad spectrum of habitats (e.g., freshwater, saltwater and terrestrial). Some aspects of the current classification scheme for the Chlorophyta, based largely on comparative morphology, have been challenged by new evidence from comparative molecular data. A comprehensive interpretation of the new evidence, however, has not been forthcoming because (1) these new molecular data have not been applied to all groups within the Chlorophyta and (2) in most cases only a single gene has been used to evaluate diversity among select groups of Chlorophyta (unlike the land plants where diversity in some groups has been studied using three or more different genes). The goal of this project is to develop a comprehensive assessment of diversity in the Chlorophyta using a comparative study of DNA sequence data in three different genes, the nuclear 18S ribosomal RNA and 26S ribosomal RNA genes, and the chloroplast rbcL gene. The two rRNA genes code for portions of all ribosomes found in living cells. The rbcL gene is part of the chloroplast genome and codes for a portion of the enzyme responsible for carbon fixation in plants. The Zechman lab at CSU-Fresno will be responsible for gathering data from the chlorophyte group known as the Ulvophyceae. The Fawley lab group at North Dakota State University will be responsible for gathering data from the chlorophyte group known as the Prasinophyceae. The Buchheim lab group at the University of Tulsa will gather data from the two chlorophyte groups, Trebouxiophyceae and Chlorophyceae. The project will culminate in (1) a phylogenetic synthesis of all molecular data for the Chlorophyta, (2) a fundamental re-assessment of chlorophyte classification, integrating morphological and photosynthetic pigment data, and (3) an integration of the chlorophyte molecular phylogenetic data with (published) parallel data from the land plant lineage. Studies using chlorophyte green algae as model organisms (for example, the genus Chlamydomonas, easily cultured in the laboratory) have significantly advanced our understanding of fundamental processes such as photosynthesis and flagellar function. As biologists continue to dissect the molecular and biochemical basis for biological phenomena, new chlorophyte models will be explored in order to understand the spectrum of variation associated with these phenomena. A more comprehensive understanding of the relationships among all chlorophyte groups will be vital to interpreting the results (for example, assessing the broader applicability) from studies of chlorophytes used as model organisms. Moreover, the results from a comprehensive assessment of chlorophyte diversity will inform future studies of biological processes that rely on green algae to model the mechanisms. Lastly, studies of diversity within the Chlorophyta are critical to advancing our understanding of the origins and evolution of the green plant lineage doc16238 none The Exploratorium is testing new methods of using Internet-based programming to increase the public understanding of current scientific research. Exploratorium staff, working with a group of advisors, will assess the current status of projects that focus on conveying information about research. They then will develop and test a prototype website. The exploratory research will examine such questions as: What information about research is important and critical to convey to the public? How do you build a Web presence that can rapidly accommodate new findings? What is an appropriate oversight process to assure inclusion of appropriate research? What are sufficient update intervals? How does such a Web site build an audience? How can the Web effort be coordinated with other PUR projects? How can the Web site provide opportunities for public input and discussion? How do you develop buy-in and participation from researchers? Is the additional interpretation annotation sufficient to give the public a deeper level of understanding? These planning and prototyping efforts will be coordinated with other simultaneous Public Understanding of Research planning projects doc16239 none EarthTalk Incorporated is producing and distributing 282 Edge of Discovery radio programs. Each of the 90-second programs will explore an area of on-going research and will feature actualities or recorded voices of scientists explaining their work. The programs will be carried on 700+ public and commercial radio stations. The broadcast programs will be supplemented by an Edge of Discovery web presence that will contain the radio programs themselves plus a More Info section for each program that includes references to printed articles and links to other web sites on the day s topic as well as supplementary background material such as transcripts of interviews with scientists. The Edge of Discovery web page also will feature a Meet the Scientists section in which a new scientist will be profiled each month, and it will feature live online chats with scientists six times each year. The producers hosts for the series are Deborah Byrd and Joel Block who created, produced and hosted the highly successful radio series Earth and Sky. The Senior Producer is Marc Airhart who will be primary liaison with the team of researchers and writers. Review of all material developed for the projected will be done by the project s review committee of 95 scientists doc16240 none Kloosterziel Inertially Unstable Currents and Internal Waves In the ocean, inertial instability is thought to be the primary mechanism that maintains anticyclonic shears and vortices at stable and marginally stable values. This project will utilize a series of numerical simulations to study the evolution of inertial instability in detail. Theoretical predictions will be made for the occurrence and physical location of the instabilities initial growth from a variety of ocean models of vortices and currents. Both methods will be used to help determine the nature of the internal wave radiation that is generated by the inertial instability. Analytical and numerical work will then be undertaken to investigate the complex behavior of packets of dimensions and amplitudes consistent with the oceanic investigations doc16241 none Hicks This award supports the participation of American scientists in a U.S.-Japan seminar on new aspects of quark nuclear physics with polarized photons to be held in Honolulu, Hawaii from February 25-28, . The co-organizers are Professor Kenneth Hicks at Ohio University and Professor Hajime Shimizu of Yamagata University in Japan. The workshop will provide a forum for presentations and discussions of the structure of subatomic particles using new results from experiments with polarized photons incident on polarized hydrogen and deuterium. Both theoretical and experimental techniques will be discussed, with the objective to gain a better interpretation of the data. Plans for new cooperative activities resulting from the workshop will most likely be in the form of new proposals for experiments at the new facilities. These collaborations would be a natural result of sharing experimental techniques for polarized targets and beams. In addition, theoretical input from experts across the globe will be highly desirable to provide an overview of the role of non-perturbative QCD in the interpretation of precise polarization observables to be presented at the workshop. The project advances international human resources through the participation of many junior faculty, postdocs and graduate students. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish proceedings of the workshop through either the World Scientific Publishing Company or through the Jefferson Laboratory doc16242 none This project tests and explores the hypothesis that soil erosion in upland ecosystems constitutes a measurable and significant sink of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The hypothesis is being tested in watersheds where soil erosion rates have been previously determined using cosmogenic isotope measurements. At each field site, the researchers will excavate numerous soil profiles, measure their total carbon storage, calculate rates of carbon loss from convex portions of the landscape, and calculate storage in concave areas (hollows), using a diffusion modeling approach. Other ancillary soil organic matter properties (C:N ratio, N content, and N isotope composition) predicted to change systematically with erosion, will be measured to further test and confirm our hypothesis. The work will address one of the great uncertainties about the role of soils in the global carbon budget. This is a collaborative proposal with Amundson ( doc16243 none In theory, tradeoffs between host resistance against parasites and host fitness traits play a key role in the maintenance of genetic variation and hence in determining the evolutionary potential of resistance. The proposed research encompasses a comprehensive empirical study of tradeoffs focusing on host life history and ecological traits, and will utilize a Drosophila-mite system as a model to address several key hypotheses. These hypotheses are that strains selected in the laboratory to be more resistant to parasitic mites will suffer, in the absence of the parasites, significant reductions in egg hatch success, ability to compete for limiting resources, survivorship and fecundity, and in defensive capabilities against other natural enemies. These enemies include an invertebrate predator and an insect-pathogenic bacterium. Another major emphasis will be to test for the presence of costs of resistance under variable environmental conditions to which the host organism is known to be exposed in nature. Many of the elements that mediate the Drosophila-parasitic mite association are seen in vertebrate host-ectoparasite interactions, and in associations between insect prey and their predators. Thus the results of the proposed work should provide data of importance toward understanding the mechanisms and evolution of resistance across a broad array of animal species. The data generated are also expected to help define criteria for choosing appropriate natural enemies, and especially mixtures of natural enemies, for effective biological pest control. The research should therefore help to reduce dependency on chemical pesticide and herbicide usage, and hence promote environmental health. Our general knowledge of multispecies associations and their ecological complexities should also be advanced. The research effort will contribute to the training of both undergraduate and graduate students, and it should be of practical and societal value as it is expected to help develop novel methods of sustainable biological control doc16244 none Gonzalez This Americas Program will support a planning meeting in La Paz, Mexico, jointly organized by Dr. Laura I. Gonzalez-Guzman, of SUNY and Dr. Sergio Hernandez-Vazquez of the Centro de Investigaciones Biologicas del Noreste, in La Paz, Mexico. The organizers plan to develop a collaborative and interdisciplinary research project aimed at building a conceptual framework for linking the socioeconomic dynamics of community-based fisheries with the dynamics of natural ecosystems, and determining how these joint forces influence the marine environment and the sustainability of fisheries in the Northern Pacific West Coast of Mexico. The meeting will involve scientists with backgrounds in ecology, fisheries science, economics, resource management, and geography from the US and Mexico. The research program that will be the outcome of this planning meeting will have three main components: an ecosystem component, a socioeconomic component, and an education and outreach component. Ultimately, the project will serve to develop now approaches to fisheries management in Baja California and models and guidelines for management and conservation to be applied to the coastal fisheries of the Pacific region doc16245 none PI Name: John L. Gittleman Institution: University of Virginia Different animals and plants are found in different places. Kangaroos and eucalyptus trees are characteristic of Australia, whereas giant pandas live only in China. One must travel far to see a close human relative, the lemurs, found only on the island of Madagascar. Surprisingly, no single source of information summarizes the geographic ranges of all mammal species. It is now all the more important to have such a database because species ranges are rapidly changing due to global climate change, habitat fragmentation, and human population growth. If there is a single prescription for species conservation, it is the preservation of natural geographic range distributions of a species. The primary sources for discovering where species live are maps showing point localities and range boundaries of a species. Our research will use GIS technology to digitize current range maps for all mammal species. We will use this database to examine three broad questions: (1) How do species differences in geographic range relate to their ecology or reproduction? (2) How are geographic ranges in mammals influenced by humans (i.e., dense human populations and land usage)? (3) How will geographic areas with high mammalian diversity (e.g., tropical forests) be effected by climate and other global changes? These questions are fundamental to understanding why almost a quarter of the 4,763 mammal species currently are threatened with extinction and using that information to establish conservation priorities. Both graduate and undergraduate studetns will be involved in all facets of this researh, and the entire database will be available freely on the worldwide web doc16246 none P. Van Tassel, Wayne State University This proposed workshop is conceived as one of the answers to the NSF s Grand Challenge in Nanoscale Science and Engineering . It will assess the recent advances (and promise) in the creation and usage of devices and materials of nanometric dimensions. It will be hosted as part of the annual meeting of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers in Reno NV, with a goal to maximize the exposure of the traditional engineer attendees to the new field of nanotechnology. To achieve this objective, it is proposed to: 1. Invite six leading experts to discuss their views of the research directions most likely to dominate the next ten years. A forum will follow these presentations. 2. Encourage the participation of young promising researchers by having each of the six experts nominate two of them. In summary, this workshop, and its panel discussions, should be an effective device to stimulate collective brainstorms among a large number of interested participants. It will also provide an incentive for younger scientists and industrial scientists participation doc16247 none Many plant species exhibit characteristic morphological and physiological responses to crowding and vegetation shade. This shade avoidance response is cued by a reduction in the ratio of red to far-red wavelengths (R:FR) in light transmitted through or reflected from green vegetation. This R:FR signal is perceived by light-sensing molecules known as phytochromes. Prior research from this project has demonstrated that phytochrome-mediated stem elongation increases lifetime reproduction of the native annual Impatiens capensis (jewelweed or touch-me-not) in dense stands, but plants induced to display the shade avoidance response at low density suffer reduced fitness relative to non-elongated plants. The present study will examine genetic variation among inbred lines in expression of shade avoidance traits across a range of densities, and assess the contribution of phytochrome-mediated developmental pathways to this variation. In addition, natural selection on shade avoidance traits will be measured in the field across a range of densities, in order to predict how shade avoidance responses will evolve in variable density environments. The results of this project will provide important information about the genetics and evolution of phytochrome-mediated shade avoidance responses in natural plant populations, and will provide an ecological and evolutionary context for current research on the molecular, genetic, developmental, and physiological mechanisms underlying plant responses to light. It will also help to inform selection strategies for crop improvement and provide an ecological context for recent proposals to increase yield by genetically engineering crops in which shade avoidance responses are blocked doc16248 none Gallagher This three-year award for U.S.-France collaboration in atomic, molecular and optical physics involves Thomas Gallager, Pierre Pillet and graduate students at the University of Virginia and the Laboratoire Aime Cotton in Orsay, France respectively. The goal is to use cold Rydberg gases as a controllable test system for several different kinds of experiments. Cold Rydberg atoms mimic an amorphous solid, the properties of which can be manipulated using small tuning electric fields or by changing the Rydberg state. This cooperative research program will explore collectively this phenomena in cold Rydberg atom samples, the Rydberg to plasma evolution, and dipole-dipole interactions in frozen Rydberg gases. The main questions addressed are: How does ultracold plasma containing cold atoms in a well-defined Rydberg state come to equilibrium? What key role do dipole-dipole interactions play in quantum logic gates? The French group brings to this collaboration expertise in high-resolution laser spectroscopy and cold atom manipulation. This is complemented by US expertise in manipulation of Rydberg atoms. This award represents the US side of joint proposals to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator and graduate students. CNRS will support the visits of the French researchers and graduate students to the United States. The collaboration will advance fundamental understanding of the atomic-solid state connection in cold Rydberg gases and this phenomena s applications in plasma and condensed matter physics doc16249 none Hupp Temperate river systems and their associated floodplains have been substantially altered by human activity. Although the effects of dams on river hydrology and downstream ecosystems have been studied extensively, data on how changes in historic sedimentation regimes and geomorphology affect floodplain ecosystems is practically nonexistent. This research will demonstrate for an entire model river system (the Roanoke River of North Carolina) the degree of post-colonial landscape-scale ecosystem alteration due to sediment deposition, and the future changes likely to affect vegetation dynamics as those sediments are redistributed and transported out of the system. We will test a series of specific hypotheses centered on the following: (1) Anthropogenic sediment deposition on the Roanoke River floodplain over the last 250 years has led to a dramatic alteration of the extent and distribution of landforms within the geomorphologic system; (2) The vegetation of the lower Roanoke floodplain has been substantially altered as a consequence of environmental changes due to geomorphic alterations from post-colonial sedimentation; (3) Models of sediment-impacted riparian areas developed from geomorphologic and paleoecological data can be used to predict future landforms and vegetation composition. To address these hypotheses we will integrate dendrogeomorphic, palynological and modeling techniques to (1) develop a spatially explicit model of post-colonial sediment accumulation for the lower Roanoke River floodplain, (2) model the pre-colonial geomorphic landscape and simulate future floodplain geomorphology, and (3) predict vegetation distributions for those surfaces using vegetation-environment relationships doc16250 none PI Name: Paul Keddy Institution: Southeastern Louisiana University One of the most basic questions in ecology relates to the rules or mechanisms that determine the assembly of species into local communities. Although some hold that physiological limitations of species along environmental gradients determine community composition, others argue that interspecific competition plays a pivotal role in determining the identity of coexisting species. This research addresses such questions through a suite of manipulative experiments. Twelve species of wetland plant, many used in restoration projects, will be combined in controlled experiments along a gradient of water depth. By comparing aspects of growth in the presence or absence of competitors, this research will address two broad topics. First, how much does competition suppress the ecological range of species, and to what extent is it variable and species-specific? Second, is competitive displacement one-sided, and if so what are the quantitative characteristics of this asymmetry? Because this work will take place in a new outdoor classroom that is accessible by K-12 students, it will provide a concrete platform for illustrating the importance and role of research in understanding the ecology and conservation of wetlands doc16251 none Lynch This award supports Christopher Lynch and students from Georgia Tech in a collaboration with Juergen Roedel of the Department of Material at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. The aim of the international project is to design ferroelectric ceramics that are less brittle and more reliable than those used today. This will require detailed knowledge of both the quasi-static and fatigue crack properties under both electrical and mechanical loading. To improve the materials properties, the mechanisms of their failure have to be fully understood. The US group has developed a finite element computer code capable of determining stress and electric field concentrations in ferroelectric materials. The German group has developed experimental techniques and specialized fixtures for measuring the crack propagation behavior of brittle materials under combined electrical and mechanical loading. By bringing together the strengths of both groups, new analytical techniques and new experimental techniques will make possible a full understanding of the fracture process in lead zirconate titanate (PZT), which in turn will elucidate the role of microstructure in the fracture process. The work plan provides for extensive participation by graduate students in the international travel and research doc16252 none The research is for a continuation of a computational study of the effects of complex magnetic fields on bulk crystal growth processes. In the project the investigators are focusing on several stability problems that are important for the growth of compound and solid-solution semiconductor crystals. There are really two distinct, but highly synergistic, application areas are involved: (1) Study the effects of rotating magnetic fields on vertical Bridgman or vertical gradient freeze growth of solid-solution crystals such as alloys of germanium and silicon. The investigators will develop the first stability analysis for a RMF including the effects of the buoyant convection and the free surface that are present in the actual process. (2) Study thermoelectromagnetic convection (TEMC) for the magnetically stabilized growth of compound semiconductor crystals. The investigators will develop a linear stability analysis to predict the transition from steady to periodic melt motions with buoyant convection, forced convection and TEMC. Both problems to be studied have the potential to contribute to improved quality and sizes for advanced semiconductor crystals that are important for optical and wireless technologies doc16253 none Buchheim Three research teams (Buchheim at University of Tulsa, Fawley at North Dakota State University, and Zechman at California State University at Fresno) have begun a collaboration that will address questions about the hierarchical (i.e., phylogenetic) relationships among green algal groups that are collectively known as the Chlorophyta. The Chlorophyta, which has phylum status in the Linnean nomenclatural system, represents one of two branches of the green plant lineage-the other branch being the land plant alliance. The Chlorophyta comprise organisms that range from the microscopic to the macroscopic, exhibit a variety of reproductive strategies (e.g., sexual vs. asexual), and live in a broad spectrum of habitats (e.g., freshwater, saltwater and terrestrial). Some aspects of the current classification scheme for the Chlorophyta, based largely on comparative morphology, have been challenged by new evidence from comparative molecular data. A comprehensive interpretation of the new evidence, however, has not been forthcoming because (1) these new molecular data have not been applied to all groups within the Chlorophyta and (2) in most cases only a single gene has been used to evaluate diversity among select groups of Chlorophyta (unlike the land plants where diversity in some groups has been studied using three or more different genes). The goal of this project is to develop a comprehensive assessment of diversity in the Chlorophyta using a comparative study of DNA sequence data in three different genes, the nuclear 18S ribosomal RNA and 26S ribosomal RNA genes, and the chloroplast rbcL gene. The two rRNA genes code for portions of all ribosomes found in living cells. The rbcL gene is part of the chloroplast genome and codes for a portion of the enzyme responsible for carbon fixation in plants. The Zechman lab at CSU-Fresno will be responsible for gathering data from the chlorophyte group known as the Ulvophyceae. The Fawley lab group at North Dakota State University will be responsible for gathering data from the chlorophyte group known as the Prasinophyceae. The Buchheim lab group at the University of Tulsa will gather data from the two chlorophyte groups, Trebouxiophyceae and Chlorophyceae. The project will culminate in (1) a phylogenetic synthesis of all molecular data for the Chlorophyta, (2) a fundamental re-assessment of chlorophyte classification, integrating morphological and photosynthetic pigment data, and (3) an integration of the chlorophyte molecular phylogenetic data with (published) parallel data from the land plant lineage. Studies using chlorophyte green algae as model organisms (for example, the genus Chlamydomonas, easily cultured in the laboratory) have significantly advanced our understanding of fundamental processes such as photosynthesis and flagellar function. As biologists continue to dissect the molecular and biochemical basis for biological phenomena, new chlorophyte models will be explored in order to understand the spectrum of variation associated with these phenomena. A more comprehensive understanding of the relationships among all chlorophyte groups will be vital to interpreting the results (for example, assessing the broader applicability) from studies of chlorophytes used as model organisms. Moreover, the results from a comprehensive assessment of chlorophyte diversity will inform future studies of biological processes that rely on green algae to model the mechanisms. Lastly, studies of diversity within the Chlorophyta are critical to advancing our understanding of the origins and evolution of the green plant lineage doc16254 none Collaborative Research - Mesozoic therians from Central Asia: the basal radiation of tribosphenic mammals and their impact on the higher-level relationships of therian mammals A grant has been awarded to Dr. Novacek at the American Museum of Natural History, Dr. Rougier at the University of Louisville, and Dr. Wible at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History for a comprehensive study of the Cretaceous (145 to 65 million-years-ago) radiation of therian mammals. Therians include living marsupials and placentals plus their extinct relatives. Therians are represented today by more than species accounting for nearly all the diversity of living mammals, the exception being the three species of egg-laying monotremes. The study of the evolutionary relationships among therians has been addressed with data from molecular biology (the structure of DNA) and comparative anatomy (the structure of living and extinct forms). The family trees (phylogenies) that result from these two approaches are not entirely congruent nor do they suggest the same time of origin of the major lineages of living therians. However, both molecular and anatomical workers agree that insectivore-like forms are at the base of the therian radiation. Available to Drs. Novacek, Rougier, and Wible as the core study group for their project are exquisitely preserved, 80 million-year-old insectivore-like fossils, some related to placentals and others to marsupials, collected from the famed dinosaur and fossil mammal beds of Mongolia s Gobi Desert by recent joint expeditions from the American Museum and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. Unlike the vast majority of Cretaceous therian fossils, which are merely isolated jaws and teeth, these are nearly complete skeletons. They will provide the most comprehensive anatomical data base to date for studying the evolutionary relationships among Cretaceous therians and their living descendants, and evaluating the controversial difference between DNA and anatomical results. Most of the Cretaceous therians to be studied are shrew-sized and, therefore, cannot effectively be investigated with the naked eye alone. Two tools are needed for the anatomical study of these small forms: standard stereoscopic microscopy and high-resolution computer tomographic imaging (CT-scanning). Both are available, the latter at a National Science Foundation supported facility at Pennsylvania State University. Drs. Novacek, Rougier, and Wible will use their expertise in the anatomy of living and extinct mammals, and the collections at the American Museum, Carnegie Museum, and other institutions to build an anatomical data base of comparative information. Family trees will be generated from this data base by various available computer programs and compared with those previously published based on other information. These exquisite Mongolian fossils are a unique resource that ultimately will be returned to their country of origin. Careful study and extensive documentation of these fossils now is critical in order to make them widely accessible for scientific advancement. A by-product of this study will be a standardized anatomical terminology for the therian skeleton; currently, researchers studying particular therian lineages employ different terms that are often incongruent. This study also affords the opportunity for educating and training of new scientists at both the pre- and postdoctoral level. Finally, the valuable scientific knowledge contained in these fossils will be translated for the public through the exhibits and educational programs of the American Museum and Carnegie Museum doc16255 none Resource, Predation, and Disturbance Interactions in a Grassland Community PI: Matthew D. Moran DEB- This study is designed to investigate how carnivores, nutrients, and fire affect grassland communities. Previous studies have shown that these three factors are important for determining the population sizes of many different animals and the growth of plants in grasslands. However, how these processes interact with each other is not well understood. This study is also designed to compare small isolated grassland communities in Arkansas to those larger, more well studied tallgrass prairies in the Great Plains of North America. The grasslands of the Great Plains have many similarities with my field sites, including similar plant species and frequent disturbance by fire. However, my field sites lack (and historically lacked) large mammal herbivores such as bison. This study will therefore help determine if the results of studies on the tallgrass prairies apply to other grassland systems. Proper management of grasslands is important as these systems have been drastically altered by human activity and often contain rare and declining species. This study will address what factors affect the abundance and diversity of life in grasslands and will therefore provide information as to the proper human management of these systems. Some of the research will take place on state owned lands with public access and will help with both management and education of the public. This project will also provide support for numerous undergraduate research projects furthering the educational goals of the National Science Foundation doc16256 none Clark LTREB This proposal will continue the TREES Project, an 18-year study designed to examine the ecological bases of life history diversity and population ecology in tropical forest trees. The core activity is an annual census of individuals of ten canopy and emergent tree species in a 250 ha area of old-growth tropical wet forest. Growth, mortality, physical damage, and microsite conditions of all trees have been measured annually since . All trees are mapped and incorporated into the La Selva Geographic Information System, and their distribution and performance have been studies in relation to both soil nutrients and topography over a meso-scale landscape. Two compelling scientific issues will be addressed during the next five years. One question with major environmental, political and economic implications is whether tropical rain forests are experiencing a decline in forest productivity with global warming. The second issue is the original core driver of the project, to elucidate the diverse life history modes represented among tropical rain forest canopy trees. The core TREES data set is the largest and longest record available of concurrent annually-measured growth and microsite conditions for tropical rain forest trees. This project clearly links population ecology with global climate change, and has important implications for conservation and maintenance of biodiversity in tropical ecosystems doc16257 none Process models of ecological system directly represent how a system functions. They can be used to generate new ecological theory, and sometimes, can be used to predict the consequences of environmental management. A new method, the Pareto Optimal Model Assessment Cycle (POMAC) for developing and assessing process models is explored and contrasted with the more traditional technique of least squares fitting. POMAC uses evolutionary computation to seek parameters of the model that can simulate different outputs of process models. The model that can be developed using POMAC will be compared using the standard method of least squares fitting and also the Akaike Information Criterion, designed to produce parsimonious models. Developing POMAC should lead to a more effective method for model development and assessment. Saying that a model accounts for a particular amount of the total sums of squares of the data does not provide an adequate assessment-we need to know how it has achieved that. POMAC permits many different types of data to be used simultaneously, giving greater potential use of ecological and environmental data doc16258 none Herman This award supports Cila Herman and students from the Johns Hopkins University to collaborate with Dieter Mewes of the Institute for Chemical Engineering at the University of Hannover, Germany. The project will focus on the use of electric fields to influence bubble formation as well as boiling in terrestrial and microgravity conditions. While both the German and US investigators have experience in optical measurement techniques, they now intend to collaborate in the new area of electrohydrodynamic control of bubble formation and motion. The new technique may has potential for achieving better control over bubble formation and for increasing the amount of heat that can be transferred from a surface. An understanding of the mechanisms of bubble break-up under the influence of electric fields holds the promise of being able to control bubble size in two-phase flow systems and could have great benefits to the proper design of phase-change and two-phase flow systems. The work plan provides for extensive participation by graduate students in the international travel and research doc16259 none This project tests and explores the hypothesis that soil erosion in upland ecosystems constitutes a measurable and significant sink of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The hypothesis is being tested in watersheds where soil erosion rates have been previously determined using cosmogenic isotope measurements. At each field site, the researchers will excavate numerous soil profiles, measure their total carbon storage, calculate rates of carbon loss from convex portions of the landscape, and calculate storage in concave areas (hollows), using a diffusion modeling approach. Other ancillary soil organic matter properties (C:N ratio, N content, and N isotope composition) predicted to change systematically with erosion, will be measured to further test and confirm our hypothesis. The work will address one of the great uncertainties about the role of soils in the global carbon budget. This is a collaborative proposal with Heimsath ( doc16260 none Theodorakis This award supports Chrostopher Theodorakis and students from Texas Tech University in a collaboration with Rupert Simon of the National Research Center for Environment and Health in Neuherberg, Germany. The aim of the international project is to study the effect of thyroid-disrupting substance on molecular markers. The ecological relevance of these responses will be assessed in laboratory exposure experiments with zebrafish and African clawed frogs as fish and amphibian model species. The German group can provide samples of zebrafish exposed to selected pollutants, analyze them for thyroid hormones and iodinated compounds in tissue and serum samples, and determine exposure concentrations of organic contaminants in water and biological samples. The group at Texas Tech will expose zebrafish and African clawed frogs to perchlorate and analyze thyroid histology, analyze differential gene expression, and perform analysis of perchlorate in water and tissues. Results of the collaboration will develop new protocols for endocrine disrupting potential assessments of industrial and environmental chemicals. The work plan provides for extensive participation by graduate students in the international travel and research doc16254 none Collaborative Research - Mesozoic therians from Central Asia: the basal radiation of tribosphenic mammals and their impact on the higher-level relationships of therian mammals A grant has been awarded to Dr. Novacek at the American Museum of Natural History, Dr. Rougier at the University of Louisville, and Dr. Wible at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History for a comprehensive study of the Cretaceous (145 to 65 million-years-ago) radiation of therian mammals. Therians include living marsupials and placentals plus their extinct relatives. Therians are represented today by more than species accounting for nearly all the diversity of living mammals, the exception being the three species of egg-laying monotremes. The study of the evolutionary relationships among therians has been addressed with data from molecular biology (the structure of DNA) and comparative anatomy (the structure of living and extinct forms). The family trees (phylogenies) that result from these two approaches are not entirely congruent nor do they suggest the same time of origin of the major lineages of living therians. However, both molecular and anatomical workers agree that insectivore-like forms are at the base of the therian radiation. Available to Drs. Novacek, Rougier, and Wible as the core study group for their project are exquisitely preserved, 80 million-year-old insectivore-like fossils, some related to placentals and others to marsupials, collected from the famed dinosaur and fossil mammal beds of Mongolia s Gobi Desert by recent joint expeditions from the American Museum and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. Unlike the vast majority of Cretaceous therian fossils, which are merely isolated jaws and teeth, these are nearly complete skeletons. They will provide the most comprehensive anatomical data base to date for studying the evolutionary relationships among Cretaceous therians and their living descendants, and evaluating the controversial difference between DNA and anatomical results. Most of the Cretaceous therians to be studied are shrew-sized and, therefore, cannot effectively be investigated with the naked eye alone. Two tools are needed for the anatomical study of these small forms: standard stereoscopic microscopy and high-resolution computer tomographic imaging (CT-scanning). Both are available, the latter at a National Science Foundation supported facility at Pennsylvania State University. Drs. Novacek, Rougier, and Wible will use their expertise in the anatomy of living and extinct mammals, and the collections at the American Museum, Carnegie Museum, and other institutions to build an anatomical data base of comparative information. Family trees will be generated from this data base by various available computer programs and compared with those previously published based on other information. These exquisite Mongolian fossils are a unique resource that ultimately will be returned to their country of origin. Careful study and extensive documentation of these fossils now is critical in order to make them widely accessible for scientific advancement. A by-product of this study will be a standardized anatomical terminology for the therian skeleton; currently, researchers studying particular therian lineages employ different terms that are often incongruent. This study also affords the opportunity for educating and training of new scientists at both the pre- and postdoctoral level. Finally, the valuable scientific knowledge contained in these fossils will be translated for the public through the exhibits and educational programs of the American Museum and Carnegie Museum doc16262 none Gu This one-year award in computer aided design and applications involves researchers from nine US universities in the US and seven laboratories of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the French National Institute for Research in Informatics and Applied Mathematics (INRIA). Keqin Gu of Southern Illinois University and Silviu-Iulian Niculescu at the University of Science and Technology in Compiegne, France are the principal organizers of this joint effort. US and French engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists will meet in a workshop format to collaborate on time-delay topics including: stability and performance issues, input-output approaches, prediction and feedback control design, and applications in energy distribution networks, computer networks, and load balancing in parallel computation. The researchers will develop new software, including a comprehensive toolbox for computer aided control systems design applicable to time delay systems. The collaboration takes advantage of complementary US and French expertise in systems and control areas. Time-delay systems are present in nature, from biology models to population dynamics and from engineering to economics. The collaboration will advance understanding of these systems and their applications to a wide variety of scientific disciplines and problems. This award represents the US side of parallel proposals to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigators. The CNRS will support visits by French researchers to the United States doc16263 none Fox This three-year award for U.S.-France collaboration in chemical and thermal systems involves researchers and students at Iowa State University and the University of Rouen in France. Rodney O Fox and Pascale Domingo lead the US and French efforts respectively. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) macroscopic models for liquid-phase turbulent reacting flows will be studied. Such models have potential for improving process design in the chemical process industry. The research addresses the utility of CFD models for reducing pollution and toxic byproducts caused by poor product selectivity. The collaboration s focus is code development and validation, and detailed simulations for experiments conducted on the Iowa State planar-jet reactor. The US research group will obtain data for a well-defined reactor geometry using particle-image velocimetry and planar laser-induced fluorescence. This will be complemented by the French group s studies of direct numerical simulations and large-eddy simulations of flow statistics that cannot easily be measured with the techniques used by the Iowa State group. This award represents the US side of joint proposals to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses of the US investigators and students. The CNRS will support visits to the US of the French participants. The collaboration will produce a set of detailed data for CFD model validation of liquid-phase chemical reactors doc16264 none Xiang The discontinuous distribution of many closely related plant species in eastern Asia and eastern North America is one of the most fascinating biogeographic patterns in the Northern Hemisphere. This striking phenomenon has attracted the attention of botanists for centuries, providing a focal point for systematic and biogeographic investigation. Although evidence available so far has suggested a complex history, the floristic exchange between the two continents and relative importance of proposed migration routes have largely remained unclear. Additional studies of plant groups with a good fossil record is necessary for a better understanding of the biogeographic pattern. The dogwood genus Cornus L., which contains several ornamentally and medicinally important plants including the widely planted flowering dogwood , is an ideal model for the study. With an excellent fossil record and three subgroups showing intercontinentally discontinuous distributions, the genus permits a detailed quantitative, phylogeny-based biogeographic study of disjunct distribution patterns. The primary goals of the proposed study by Dr. Jenny Xiang at North Carolina State University are: 1) to build a robust genealogical foundation for the dogwood genus using morphological characters and DNA sequence data from multiple genes; 2) to test evolutionary and biogeographic hypotheses that were based upon assessments of the morphological diversity in the genus; and 3) to evaluate the timing (in a geological sense) of major speciation events in the genus using the genealogical framework. Extensive fieldwork will be conducted in the Americas and China to collect plant materials that are currently not available for some species. Historical information will be made available to the public via an on-line web page, which will serve as a starting point for the future development of a web-accessible, taxonomic monograph of this highly cultivated and biogeographically important plant genus. The study focuses on the genus Cornus to advance our current understanding of the historical nature of eastern Asian-eastern North American floristic exchange through integration of phylogenetic and biogeographic data, and DNA-based dating approaches using calibration points provided by the fossil record. Despite well known taxa in Europe and North America, tropical and Asiatic dogwoods are poorly known, and understudied. The multiple molecular data sets generated in the study will also facilitate comparisons of mode and tempo of evolution of different genes to enhance the understanding of molecular evolution in the two isolated continents. The on-line web page will maximize the utility of the phylogenetic and biogeographic information obtained from the study, which will be valuable for evaluating conservation priorities (help in guiding research on the dogwood anthracnose disease, and developing strategies for sustainable uses of natural sources of dogwoods), and future ecological, pharmacological, and horticultural research. One graduate student will be trained through this study. The opportunity for student participation is important for it has profound impact on the future of systematics, the science of biodiversity doc16265 none Morris This three-year award for US-France collaboration in chemical and transport systems involves researchers and students at Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Florida, University of Marseilles, and the Ecole Polytechnique. The US investigators, Jeffrey F. Morris and Jason E. Butler, and the French investigators, Elisabeth Guazzelli and Paul Manneville, will collaborate on theoretical and experimental studies of fluid transport and suspension of solid particles in pipes (tubes). The suspension mechanical perspective - in which particles impact the flow processes - and the role of inertia will be studied. Particle fraction and velocity distributions in pipes, flow structures and stability, bulk stresses in particle-laden liquids are emphasized. The collaboration merges experimental and theoretical expertise of the US and French research teams. Both types of expertise reside in the US and French groups. Jeffrey Morris is known for his quantitative theories. This is complemented by the French investigator s experimental expertise. The collaboration provides access to some unique French experimental facilities equipped with a functioning experimental loop for pipe flow suspensions. This collaboration advances understanding of engineering problems related to particulate transport. These problems are important in numerous industrial and geotechnical areas and processes, including fluvial and oceanic sediment transport and deposition. This award represents the US side of parallel proposals to the NSF and the CNRS. NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator and students. The CNRS will support visits by French researchers and students to the United States doc16266 none Howe Experimental restoration uses land reclamation techniques to test fundamental ecological theory and thereby inform management practices. This work will maintain an existing example of a grassland restoration to (1) monitor vole-driven changes in plant dominance over enough time to distinguish among several possible outcomes; (2) determine whether initial changes in standing crop are persistent or transient, and (3) determine whether vole-driven effects produce persistent increases or decreases in plant richness and diversity. Initial results to date raise the following issues: (1) Will the established vole-driven change in plant dominance result in the promotion of a new single dominant species? (2) Will initial reductions in apparent aboveground productivity persist? (3) Will vole-driven changes increase or decrease diversity? If voles effectively replace a palatable grass with a distasteful single large dicot species, such as Rudbeckia, community aspect will change but apparent productivity and diversity may not. If smaller clonal dicots become co-dominants aspect will change, standing crop will decline, and plant diversity may increase. The outcomes of these questions are compelling for understanding the origins and maintenance of tallgrass communities because they would not simply be incremental changes in relative abundance of species. Within the limits of the experimental set of species, they could amount to rodent-driven changes in fundamental properties of the communities. This is a known and understood possibility for ungulate effects on tallgrass communities, but the potential for rodents to have effects of similar magnitude is not widely recognized doc16267 none Sokolov This three-year award for U.S.-France collaboration in polymer sciences involves researchers and students at the University of Akron and University of Paris Sud. Alexei Sokolov and Christiane Alba-Simonesco lead the US and French efforts respectively. They will perform experimental studies of polymer dynamics using light and neutron scattering techniques, dielectric and calorimetric measurements. The investigations focus on dependence of dynamics in polymeric systems, on molecular architecture, pressure, and aging. The four experimental techniques cover extremely broad frequency ranges and provide a bridge between fast molecular motion and macroscopic properties, between dynamic and thermodynamic quantities in polymeric systems. The Akron team will perform the light scattering experiments. This is complemented by neutron scattering experiments at the Institute Laue Langevin and dielectric and calorimetric measurements performed at University of Paris Sud. This award represents the US side of joint proposals to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses of the US investigators and students. The CNRS will support visits to the US of the French participants. The program trains graduate students on different techniques at large international facilities. The collaboration will advance understanding of polymer dynamics in the high frequency range and development of new plastics for high frequency applications in information, computer and communication technologies doc16106 none The goal of our project is to develop a novel integrated engineering simulation tool for heat conduction in microelectronic and microphotonic components - microscale systems with nanoscale features. The global impact of this work will be to quantify, tabulate and disseminate phonon properties, which are as important for heat conduction in these devices as properties such as emissivity and extinction coefficient for thermal radiation in the classical regime. Novel molecular dynamics (MD) simulations will be used to quantify and parameterize phonon relaxation times and phonon-interface phenomena. Given the phonon data obtained through MD simulations, a new ballistic-diffusive formulation of the Boltzmann equation will enable the solution of realistically complex thermal problems from nano- to macroscales. A modular design of our implementation will facilitate an eventual integration into design software. The results from the projects will be applied for the development of Information technology systems. These are constructed from devices and components with characteristic length scales ranging from nanometers to micrometers, such as semiconductor lasers and heterojunction bipolar transistors used in telecommunication systems. Currently, the thermal design of such micro- and nanoscale components is major challenge because Fourier s law fails at these scales due to the long mean free path of phonons (the dominant heat carriers in most semiconductor devices) and there exists no practical alternative. Revised Title: ITR: Collaborative Research on the Development of an Integrated Algorithm for Heat Conduction form Nano- to Macroscale doc16269 none Most natural infections contain multiple viruses, and this has important consequences for virus evolution. On the one hand, viruses can swap genes during co-infection, creating variability that allows rapid virus evolution. On the other hand, increased competition between viruses can occur during co-infection, slowing the rate of virus evolution. This suggests a compromise where viruses evolve to restrict the numbers that enter a cell (to decrease competition) without reducing the number to one (to achieve gene exchange). Given the widespread occurrence of virus co-infection, it is surprising that the costs and benefits of this phenomenon are virtually unexplored. The focus of this project is to address the question using viruses that infect bacteria. Laboratory experiments will examine the evolution of virus traits that control co-infection numbers, and molecular analyses will determine the genetic changes responsible. The results of this project can be applied to several systems because viruses are important disease agents in animals, plants, and bacteria. Because the life cycle of the project virus is similar to that of many human viruses (such as influenza and HIV), the project data should contribute greatly to a better understanding of the generalized role of virus co-infection in human illnesses doc16270 none Proposal David J. Lovell University of Maryland College Park SGER - 3-D Sight Distance Computation August 1, The PI proposes exploratory research aimed at solving a perpetual transportation design problem - the automated and efficient measurement of available sight distance for three-dimensional highway alignments. This is an important problem in its own right because of the growing need to automate design feasibility test and evaluation for highways due to workforce reductions. Automation is thwarted by the computational complexity of the problems. If successful, research the results will be a more efficient algorithmic to the sight distance problem and improved highway design evaluation, selection and safety. This will have a significant impact on the transportation community, including universities, public and private agencies such as roadway construction and maintenance, traffic operations, safety. Additionally the mathematical framework required to solve the problem can support a number of other investigations, such as clear zone widths, passing lane demarcations, etc doc16271 none At a global scale, soil carbon storage generally increases with clay content, and carbon loss via soil respiration can be relatively well predicted from mean annual temperature and rainfall. At an ecosystem scale, the mechanisms responsible for C retention and loss are less well understood. This study will use a long-term and well-replicated pasture-to-forest chronosequence to study the factors that contribute to soil C storage and loss. The research will follow C from plant litter inputs through decomposition to storage in soils, and loss via CO2. Chemical properties of plant tissues change during secondary succession, and thus the impact of the litter chemistry on ecosystem processes is also likely to change over time. The research will use field and laboratory experiments and stable- and radioisotopes to compare and contrast the roles of litter chemistry, above- and belowground litter inputs, and soil chemical properties in belowground C cycling over 82 yr of reforestation. This research will contribute to understanding of how plants influence soil C dynamics, and improve the ability to predict the effects of reforestation and afforestation on C sequestration doc16272 none R. DeSalle & P. O Grady A grant has been awarded to Drs. Rob DeSalle and Patrick O Grady of the American Museum of Natural History to investigate evolutionary relationships of flies in the family Drosophilidae, a group of about 3,300 described species. In spite of recent research efforts, systematic relationships of genera and species groups within the Drosophilidae remain unresolved. This is likely due to the rapid diversification of this large group. The proposed work will generate about 60 gene sequences from over 100 species. This will comprise one of the largest collections of nucleotide data, in terms of number of loci and taxa, ever gathered for a phylogenetic study. In addition to being applied to understanding the phylogenetic relationships within the Drosophilidae, these data will also be used to examine the molecular evolutionary patterns and processes acting on the genomes of these species. The Drosophilidae has served as a model system in genetics, evolution, and development for over one hundred years. The recent completion of the Drosophila melanogaster genome sequence, provides us with an unprecidented amount of data which can be used to initiate comparative studies in other drosophild species. The proposed work will make the entire Drosophilidae a model system for molecular phylogenetic studies. Furthermore, the data generated in this proposed work will facilitate the next stage of comparative evolutionary studies - comparative genomics doc16273 none DNA sequence information from subfossil wood specimens, hundreds to thousands of years old, would promote our understanding of temporal as well as spatial genetic variation in long-lived forest tree species. Huon pine and Siberian pine have been used extensively in dendrochronological analyses to infer climate variability in the late and post-Pleistocene periods in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Subfossil wood samples range in age from present day to 15,000 years before present and encompass periods of increased amplitude of climate change and human mediated disturbance. Using state of the art DNA sequence based technology, we will evaluate the feasibility of obtaining genetic information from nuclear, chloroplast and mitochondrial genomes from exactly dated wood samples of these species. Rigorous criteria to authenticate DNA extraction and PCR - amplification from subfossil wood will be incorporated in all phases of this study. Genetic data from historical specimens could open broad new areas of investigation related to plant evolution, biodiversity, forensics and archaeology. Knowledge of the scale of genetic change in forest tree populations related to variability in climate and habitat alteration represent fundamental problems in plant biology, important for gene conservation strategies and global energy policies doc16274 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Daniel L. Distel of the University of Maine to investigate the evolution of wood-boring clams. Though not well known to the general public, wood-boring clams are destructive species that may be considered the marine equivalent of termites. They include many diverse species that cause more than a billion dollars in damage to wooden structures, boats, and fishing gear annually in marine environments worldwide. The most destructive of these are the shipworms ; worm-like clams that burrow into and eat wood. These voracious wood eaters can destroy a twelve-inch diameter pier piling in less than one year s time. Though they look like worms, molecular evidence suggests that they are closely related to the common steamer clam , a staple of New England cuisine. The purpose of this investigation is to use molecular data from several genes to reveal the evolutionary relationships of wood boring clams to other more common bivalves and to use these data to better understand how their destructive habits have evolved, including the role of associated bacteria. Although wood can be treated with broad-spectrum chemical biocides to control wood-borer damage, use of the most effective treatments has recently been restricted or banned in many states and nations due to environmental concerns. New environmentally sound control methods are critically needed, particularly in low-income coastal communities where wood is the only affordable marine construction material. Such control measures must be targeted specifically to wood-boring species to minimize ecological impact. Evolutionary studies will tell us how these nuisance species developed the ability to destroy wood and what makes them different from other more desirable and economically important marine species. This knowledge will be essential for developing control methods that are safe and highly specific to these destructive organisms doc16275 none Wilhelm Cyanobacteria in freshwater environments respond to a variety of well-studied physical factors as well as changes in the chemistry of their environment. Overlying this is the influence of cyanophages, which persist in thousands per mL and regulate cyanobacterial production, proliferation and diversity. As blooms of toxin-producing species are increasing on a global scale, and evidence is emerging that suggests chronic, low-level exposures to cyanotoxins may be tumorogenic or carcinogenic, it has become critical to develop a basic understanding of the ecological relationship between freshwater cyanobacteria and the viruses that infect them. This project is a coordinated, interdisciplinary lab and field study designed to examine the ecology and diversity of lytic freshwater cyanophages at research sites in the Tennessee River and in one of its tributaries. Augmented by a cruise of opportunity in the western basin of Lake Erie, this study will provide a fundamental insight on the cyanophage-host relationship in freshwaters as well as provide new insight on the role of viruses in the release of cyanotoxins in both lab and natural systems. The laboratory component will further this work by providing insight on the diversity of the lytic cyanophages from these systems. This program of research contains a significant educational component that will train both graduate and undergraduate students (including those from under-represented groups) in the interdisciplinary aspects of microbial ecology, limnology and molecular biology. The final scientific product of this study will be information that will enhance our understanding of cyanobacterial proliferation and cyanophage dynamics in freshwater systems. It will provide a critical insight on the role of viruses in the flux of toxins into the dissolved phase of potable water supplies. It will also serve to provide broader information for those interested in water management for both consumable and recreational activities doc16276 none Rick Lindroth and Caroline Awmack Proposal Increasing concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and ozone (O3) are anticipated to exert widespread impacts on ecosystems. Exceedingly little is known, however, about the effects of these factors on the dynamics and genetic structure of populations of interacting species. The purpose of this research is to assess the independent and interacting effects of elevated CO2 and O3 on the dynamics of a host plant - herbivore - natural enemy model system. This research will be conducted at the Aspen FACE (Free Air CO2 Enrichment) facility in northern Wisconsin. Studies will be conducted to evaluate the long-term impacts of CO2 and O3 on the population dynamics of natural assemblages of red clover, pea aphids, and two natural enemies (ladybeetles and a parasitic wasp), and the importance of genotype in influencing such interactions. Results will improve our understanding of the relative importance of competition as well as bottom-up and top-down trophic interactions for community dynamics, in the context of global environmental change doc16254 none Collaborative Research - Mesozoic therians from Central Asia: the basal radiation of tribosphenic mammals and their impact on the higher-level relationships of therian mammals A grant has been awarded to Dr. Novacek at the American Museum of Natural History, Dr. Rougier at the University of Louisville, and Dr. Wible at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History for a comprehensive study of the Cretaceous (145 to 65 million-years-ago) radiation of therian mammals. Therians include living marsupials and placentals plus their extinct relatives. Therians are represented today by more than species accounting for nearly all the diversity of living mammals, the exception being the three species of egg-laying monotremes. The study of the evolutionary relationships among therians has been addressed with data from molecular biology (the structure of DNA) and comparative anatomy (the structure of living and extinct forms). The family trees (phylogenies) that result from these two approaches are not entirely congruent nor do they suggest the same time of origin of the major lineages of living therians. However, both molecular and anatomical workers agree that insectivore-like forms are at the base of the therian radiation. Available to Drs. Novacek, Rougier, and Wible as the core study group for their project are exquisitely preserved, 80 million-year-old insectivore-like fossils, some related to placentals and others to marsupials, collected from the famed dinosaur and fossil mammal beds of Mongolia s Gobi Desert by recent joint expeditions from the American Museum and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. Unlike the vast majority of Cretaceous therian fossils, which are merely isolated jaws and teeth, these are nearly complete skeletons. They will provide the most comprehensive anatomical data base to date for studying the evolutionary relationships among Cretaceous therians and their living descendants, and evaluating the controversial difference between DNA and anatomical results. Most of the Cretaceous therians to be studied are shrew-sized and, therefore, cannot effectively be investigated with the naked eye alone. Two tools are needed for the anatomical study of these small forms: standard stereoscopic microscopy and high-resolution computer tomographic imaging (CT-scanning). Both are available, the latter at a National Science Foundation supported facility at Pennsylvania State University. Drs. Novacek, Rougier, and Wible will use their expertise in the anatomy of living and extinct mammals, and the collections at the American Museum, Carnegie Museum, and other institutions to build an anatomical data base of comparative information. Family trees will be generated from this data base by various available computer programs and compared with those previously published based on other information. These exquisite Mongolian fossils are a unique resource that ultimately will be returned to their country of origin. Careful study and extensive documentation of these fossils now is critical in order to make them widely accessible for scientific advancement. A by-product of this study will be a standardized anatomical terminology for the therian skeleton; currently, researchers studying particular therian lineages employ different terms that are often incongruent. This study also affords the opportunity for educating and training of new scientists at both the pre- and postdoctoral level. Finally, the valuable scientific knowledge contained in these fossils will be translated for the public through the exhibits and educational programs of the American Museum and Carnegie Museum doc16278 none Adaptive radiations have long been recognized as prime examples of natural selection and speciation. To understand the processes that bring about these radiations requires a phylogenetic reconstruction of the relationships among the species. However, adaptive radiations usually occur extremely rapidly and therefore traditional methods of phylogenetic reconstruction often fail. The proposed research will investigate whether DNA sequencing of the 3 -untranslated region of multiple genes will provide the data necessary for the phylogenetic reconstruction of a particularly rapid adaptive radiation, that in the columbine genus Aquilegia. After sequencing the 3 ends of expressed genes, specific PCR primers will be designed to amplify both coding and non-coding gene regions. These gene regions will then be sequenced for multiple species of Aquilegia and a phylogenetic reconstruction will be made. Understanding the processes that generate bio-diversity is essential to understanding how bio-diversity can be maintained. Adaptive radiations represent instances of remarkable diversification yet without information on the evolutionary relationships of their species, little progress can be made on understanding their origin. The proposed research will investigate a technique that would be applicable to reconstructing relationships for a wide range of taxa doc16279 none This research involves using vertical temperature measurements from available sonde stations and from the space-based Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) to determine the altitudes and geographic locations expected to be optimal for detecting long-term changes. Both radiosonde profiles of atmospheric temperature and MSU estimates of lower and upper tropospheric temperatures will be used to characterize the variability and autocorrelation of the profile data. This information will then be combined with general circulation model projections to discern the altitudes and locations at which significant climate changes might be detected earliest. The methods follow statistical techniques previously applied to ozone and other geophysical data. The ability to detect the atmospheric changes expected to accompany increasing levels of greenhouse gases can assist the climate community in accurately attributing the environmental effects and may help quantify the extent to which these changes are due to anthropogenic components. The results will help determine if the projected changes should be detectable either currently, or in the near future. The techniques can also quantify the advantage of improved data accuracy in reducing the time to detect trends. The work is important in terms of developing realistic expectations for the detection of climate change doc16280 none Lovett This LTREB project will support sustained research on the direct and indirect effects of two exotic pests that threaten the forests of the eastern US, the gypsy moth and the hemlock wooly adelgid. The gypsy moth is the most important defoliator of eastern forests. It preferentially attacks oak-dominated forests and causes widespread defoliation during periodic outbreaks. The hemlock woolly adelgid is a more recently introduced pest that is devastating hemlock trees in the mid-Atlantic states and New England. It is an aphid-like insect that feeds exclusively on hemlocks, and generally results in 100% mortality of trees within several years after infestation. The research questions here involve the effect of these pests on the nitrogen cycle of forests. Both of these pests are occurring against the backdrop of elevated levels of nitrogen deposition due to nitrogen oxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion and ammonia emission from agricultural activities. These is a strong probability of a complex interaction between nitrogen deposition and the effects of these pests on the nitrogen cycles of the forest ecosystems under study. This LTREB project will continue measurements of forest productivity and nutrient cycling in long-term study plots in Millbrook, NY. The plots include both oak plots in the zone likely to be affected by the gypsy moth, and hemlock plots in an area soon to be infested with hemlock woolly adelgid. In addition, a long-term N-addition experiment in an oak forest will be maintained, as well. This work has direct relevance to management of eastern forests, in that gypsy moth and hemlock woolly adelgid are two of the most devastating pests in the region. The phenomenon of nitrogen saturation and its effects on forest health and the quality of surface waters, is an emerging management and policy issue in the eastern US. Thus, the study of the interaction of these two stresses is of both scientific and practical importance doc16281 none The investigators will reconstruct the phylogeny of plethodontid salamanders using morphological and molecular data and then use the phylogeny to explore how species diversity changes with elevation, and the evolutionary reasons for patterns of species richness. Plethodontidae is the largest family of salamanders, containing about two-thirds of all 460+ species of salamanders. Plethodontids are possibly the most abundant vertebrates in eastern North America and are the focus of research by dozens of scientists in many diverse fields of biology (e.g., ecology, behavior, morphology, evolution, development). Many (if not most) of these studies depend critically on having a robust phylogenetic framework. However, higher-level relationships among plethodontids have never been the subject of a comprehensive study using modern methods. In a three-year collaborative study, the PIs will reconstruct the phylogeny of 112 species of plethodontid salamanders (plus outgroups representing five other families) using morphological characters and DNA sequences from two mitochondrial genes and one nuclear gene. The phylogeny will be used to explore how and why species diversity changes with elevation, using the unusually rich salamander fauna of the Appalachian Mountains as a model system. Many groups of organisms exhibit increased species diversity in montane areas relative to lowland areas, a widespread pattern that remains poorly explained. It is suggested herein that this pattern results from increased speciation in montane regions caused by the disjunctive nature of montane habitats and the elevational habitat specificity of highland species. Three key predictions of this model will be tested using phylogenetic methods. The study will provide the first phylogeny of plethodontid salamanders based on a rigorous analysis of morphological and molecular data. The phylogeny will be critical to dozens of researchers who use plethodontids as a model system in studies of ecology, behavior, evolution, development, and other areas of biology. The study will also be the first to address elevational patterns of species richness from a phylogenetic perspective. These analyses of montane species richness should have important implications for the fields of ecology, evolution, biogeography, and conservation biology. For example, the analyses of elevational specificity (how narrowly adapted a species is to a given elevational range and its associated climate) may be important for predicting the persistence or extinction of montane species in relation to global warming or other changes in climate. The study will provide training for undergraduate and graduate students and a postdoctoral fellow in molecular techniques and in integrated analyses of phylogeny, ecology, and evolution doc16282 none Brian Enquist This award will support field research to obtain data for assessing assumptions and predictions of a new theoretical model for scaling plant anatomical and physiological attributes from within individuals to populations, and even ecosystems. The ultimate goal of this research is to expand and elaborate a general theoretical and mechanistic framework for scaling in biology. This framework is based on evolutionary and physical first principles, integrating how specific attributes of organismal form and function change with organismal size (allometry) and how such changes influence ecological and evolutionary phenomena. Field and laboratory assessments are necessary to (i) advance future efforts to scale anatomical and physiological attributes of individuals and (ii) to link how attributes of organisms at the level of the individual ramifies (scales) across plant populations, communities, and ecosystems. This project focuses on understanding plant vascular form and function. It will provide the base-line allometric data for woody plant species necessary to assess numerous predictions of theoretical models. Specifically, the research will focus on intensive anatomical and physiological measurements of four tree species which span a range of environmental gradients and are functionally diverse (including the three major classes of vascular structure; ring-, diffuse-, and non-porous vascular plants). Standardized measurements of anatomical and hydrodynamic attributes of individuals will be used to evaluate the model. For example, specific measurements will be made to determine how total leaf area, the number of branches, length of branches, total water flux photosynthetic rate, stem conductivity, leaf specific conductivity, tracheid vessel radius, the proportion of conductive and non conductive tissue, and water content scale with changes in plant mass and with branch diameter. Such information will be critical for (1) future elaboration of new theoretical models; (2) understanding scaling of physiological attributes of plants; and (3) investigating the evolutionary and ecological implications of allometry in biology. These three research directions will form the core of Dr. Enquist s research program as a new faculty member at the University of Arizona, and this award will support the building of a graduate program in biological scaling doc16283 none Brachfeld This two-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research involves Stefanie Brachfeld of Ohio State University and Catherine Kissel and Carlo Laj of the Laboratory for Climate and Environmental Sciences at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Paris, France. The objective of the research is the construction of a proven, millennial-scale correlation and dating tool for Antarctic glacial-marine sediments beyond the range of radio-carbon dating. Researchers will utilize an established geomagnetic method of dating sediment cores in which paleointensity records from an undated core are correlated with high-resolution paleointensity target curves in order to import absolute ages to one s core site. The analyses will be conducted on nine late Pleistocene through Holocene kasten cores and jumbo piston cores from sites in the East Antarctic land margin. The construction of the paleointensity records requires investigation of the remanence vector recorded by the sediments (paleomagnetism) and investigation of the magnetic mineral assemblage in the sediments (rock magnetism). The US investigator is an expert in rock magnetic analyses. This is complemented by French expertise in paleomagnetism and access to the French lab s high-resolution pass-through magnetometer that will be used to measure u-channel samples. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigators and graduate students. The CNRS will support the visits of French researchers to the United States doc16284 none Viruses infecting bacteria and algae are generally the most abundant microorganisms in aquatic environments, and are known to influence microbial community structure, function, and biogeochemical cycling. Although the importance of viruses in typical marine and freshwater environments is recognized, almost nothing is known about their roles in alkaline hypersaline environments. Preliminary observations from Mono Lake, where pH is ~10 and salt content nearly three times that of seawater, indicate that viruses are near the highest concentrations ever observed in nature. Mono Lake supports a relatively simple food web with high phytoplankton production, brine shrimp acting as the sole macrozooplankton grazer, and permanent stratification shaping the structure of the microbial community. Three basic questions are addressed in this research. How does viral abundance, dynamics, and diversity differ in this unusual environment from those in marine and freshwater environments? What is the contribution of viruses to host mortality? How are the viruses in this seeting different from other viruses in terms of genetic and physiological properties? Viral density and diversity will be ascertained using viral isolates as well as direct molecular approaches. This research complements ongoing activities at the Lake Mono Microbial Observatory, and facilitates an integrated study of the viral community in a broad biotic and abiotic context. Results will provide new insights into the occurrence, diversity and function of microbiological life forms extreme environments. The project also provides opportunities to educate graduate and undergraduate students in environmental and microbiological sciences doc16285 none Workshop on Linking Ecological Biology and Geoscience Basic environmental science increasingly depends on collaborations among biologists and geoscientists. We propose to bring together 35 leading scientists to explore how to promote interdisciplinary research across the interface of ecological biology and geological science. During a two-day meeting at the annual Ecological Society of America (ESA) meetings, we will address questions about intellectual opportunities, needs for unified synthetic models, and how best to support and fund such research interactions. A central goal is to engage the broader community of scientists within the ESA, in a manner similar to what is taking place in the American Geophysical Union (AGU). The final product of this workshop will be a white paper report that addresses the prospects and challenges for disciplinary convergence between ecosystem biology and the geosciences. We will also submit summaries of the meeting to the ESA bulletin, EOS, the Geological Society of America (GSA), and appropriate journals such as Nature and Science doc16201 none Raines This award supports Ronald Raines and students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in a collaboration with Renate Ulbrich-Hofmann of the Department of Biochemistry and Biotechnology at the University of Leipzig, Germany. The aim of the international project is to use intein-mediated protein ligation to create semisynthetic variants of ribonuclease A. These variants will be produced by the US group and studied with respect to their thermodynamic and proteolytic stability by methods established in the German group. The results will provide new insight into protein-folding pathways and the fundamental basis for protein stability, and ultimately lead to the creation of new proteins with desirable properties. The work plan provides for extensive participation by graduate students in the international travel and research doc16287 none Lathrop This three-year award for U.S.-France collaboration in earth sciences involves researchers and graduate students at the University of Maryland and Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon and the French Atomic Energy Commission in Saclay. Daniel P. Lathrop and Jean-Francois Pinton will lead in the US and France respectively in experiments in magnetic field generation in liquid metals flow. This research is relevant to understanding nonlinear dynamics associated with turbulent flow conducting fluids. Such conditions are thought to occur in the Earth, planetary bodies, and stars. The experiments take advantage of access to a new experimental sodium facility constructed and funded by the French Ministry of Research. This facility has a larger capacity than similar experimental facilities at the University of Maryland. The US and French groups have complementary skills in fluid turbulence, nonlinear dynamics, and in fluid experiments. Reciprocal visits of students are emphasized to advance their research training and encourage future international partnerships. This award represents the US side of joint proposals to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator and graduate students. CNRS will support the visits of the French researchers and graduate students to the United States. The collaboration will advance fundamental understanding of the Earth s magnetic field and the magnetic fields of other planetary and astrophysical bodies doc16288 none Non-technical summary of Why are chiles hot? An integrative exploration of secondary metabolite function in ripe fruit Doug Levey and Joshua Tewksbury University of Florida It is well known that the pungent compound in chile fruits, capsaicin, has many physiological effects in humans. Although it is widely used in medicine and is one of the most important spices in the world, the evolutionary basis for capsaicin remains mysterious. Why and how did the compound evolve? Is its function secondary (non-adaptive) or can its presence in chiles be explained by selective pressures of frugivores? Because similar secondary compounds are common in other fruits, our work will simultaneously address a long-standing paradox: Why do many plants place compounds in ripe fruit that are apparently toxic to fruit-eating animals? Six hypotheses for the role of secondary metabolites in ripe fruit, using chiles and capsaicin as a model system will be tested. The work will entail laboratory trials with captive frugivores and field studies on two chile species that are widely separated geographically and phylogenetically. One occurs in Arizona, the other in Boliva. In Boliva, a variety is available that is non-pungent (i.e., it lacks capsaicin). By comparing consumption of pungent and non-pungent chiles by a wide diversity of frugivores, from microbes to vertebrates, we will be able to determine the effect of capsaicin on frugivore behavior. Parallel studies will use artificial fruits made with and without capsaicin. These experiments will lead to a better understanding of capsaicin s evolutionary function and will pave the way for potential applications of capsaicin in human health, pest management, food storage, and chile cultivation doc16284 none Viruses infecting bacteria and algae are generally the most abundant microorganisms in aquatic environments, and are known to influence microbial community structure, function, and biogeochemical cycling. Although the importance of viruses in typical marine and freshwater environments is recognized, almost nothing is known about their roles in alkaline hypersaline environments. Preliminary observations from Mono Lake, where pH is ~10 and salt content nearly three times that of seawater, indicate that viruses are near the highest concentrations ever observed in nature. Mono Lake supports a relatively simple food web with high phytoplankton production, brine shrimp acting as the sole macrozooplankton grazer, and permanent stratification shaping the structure of the microbial community. Three basic questions are addressed in this research. How does viral abundance, dynamics, and diversity differ in this unusual environment from those in marine and freshwater environments? What is the contribution of viruses to host mortality? How are the viruses in this seeting different from other viruses in terms of genetic and physiological properties? Viral density and diversity will be ascertained using viral isolates as well as direct molecular approaches. This research complements ongoing activities at the Lake Mono Microbial Observatory, and facilitates an integrated study of the viral community in a broad biotic and abiotic context. Results will provide new insights into the occurrence, diversity and function of microbiological life forms extreme environments. The project also provides opportunities to educate graduate and undergraduate students in environmental and microbiological sciences doc16290 none Groza This award supports Joanna Groza and students from the University of California-Davis in a collaboration with Eberhart Burkel of the Department of Physics at the University of Rostock, Germany. The aim of the international project is to study field-activated sintering of nanopowders, which occurs under exposure to microdischarges. Technologically, electric field application has distinct benefits, such as enhanced sintering rates, sontrol and production of novel microstructures, and fewer processing steps. The US group has an ongoing research program which has already achieved results on difficult-to-sinter materials. The German group is a leader in the development and improvement of new synchrotron radiation ingvestigation using inelastic scattering of synchrotron radiation with very high resolution. The research will advace our knowledge of field-assisted sintiering, particularly as applied to nanosized powders.. The work plan provides for extensive participation by graduate students in the international travel and research, the work is intended to offer insights into science and engineering education and prepare the students to work in an increasingly interdependent global economy doc16291 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Meerow of USDA Agricultural Research Service in Miami, Florida to complete studies on the evolutionary relationships of the large flowering plant family Amaryllidaceae using DNA sequences and morphological characters. The family, consisting almost entirely of showy-flowered plants that grow from bulbs, is highly valued in horticulture. Meerow is noted internationally as a leading specialist in the family. Previous work by him and co-workers using both chloroplast and nuclear DNA sequences has contributed to understanding the relationships of this family to other closely related groups such as the onion family (Alliaceae). That the family is a natural unit was confirmed, and geographically based groups of common ancestry were resolved. The earliest branch in the amaryllis family tree is found in Africa where the family likely originated. However, three chloroplast DNA sequence data sets failed to resolve the relationships between two remaining African groups (or tribes in botanical lexicon), a small tribe restricted to Australasia, and the Eurasian and American genera of the family, the latter two groups sharing common ancestry. Using a nuclear DNA sequence, Meerow and co-workers were able to present a highly resolved estimate of the relationships among the American genera which have resulted in a much more natural classification. The current work to be funded by NSF has two objectives: 1) complete a family-wide data matrix of nucleotide sequences of the ndhF chloroplast gene for all genera of the Amaryllidaceae, with the express purpose of resolving the relationships of the major lineages, and 2) use sequences of the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) of 18S-26S nuclear ribosomal DNA to resolve the Eurasian group of the family, as proved to be so successful for the American group. The Eurasian group includes the economically important genus Narcissus, one of the five most popular spring-flowering bulbs in the world. For the family-wide analysis, gene sequences will be combined with morphological data. Genomic DNA will be extracted from fresh or silica gel-dried leaf tissue of approximately 59 species of Amaryllidaceae representing all genera (chloroplast ndhF), and 20-25 species of the Eurasian group (nuclear ITS), using standard procedures. Target sequences will be amplified using the polymerase chain reaction PCR). Both strands of the target DNA sequences will be run on automated sequencers. DNA sequences will be aligned, and subjected to phylogenetic analysis and confidence testing using various computer programs. At the same time, analyses of the Amaryllidaceae using morphological and cytological characters will be completed. Comparative and combined analyses should elucidate a robust phylogeny upon which a final, accurate classification of the Amaryllidaceae can be based. Phylogenetic and taxonomic analyses of the Amaryllidaceae will improve documentation of biodiversity patterns in the tropics, facilitate study of biogeographic migrations and regions of endemism, guide selection of stocks for horticultural improvement, and identify clusters of related species and genera that may share biosynthetic capabilities, in a family well-known for producing novel alkaloids, some poisonous to humans, but others potentially of pharmaceutical interest. As the family is highly valued in horticulture, especially genera of the Eurasian group, there is more than passing interest among non-scientists in understanding the evolutionary relationships of the genera. In the course of conducting this research, undergraduate students recruited from local area universities will have the opportunity to become acquainted with techniques of molecular taxonomic analysis in Meerow s laboratory doc16292 none Arge This award supports Lars Arge and graduate students from Duke University in a collaboration with Jan Vahrenhold of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Muenster. The project will focus on bridging the gap between theory and practice of spatial database algorithms research, where there still exists a large gap between theory and practice in algorithms for massive spatial databases. Often, theoretically efficient algorithms are too complicated to be of practical use, while theoretically inefficient algorithms often perform well on most real-life data sets. Theoretical developments, however, have also led to tremendous runtime improvements. Because spatial databases, especially geographic information systems, have emerged as extremely powerful management and analysis tools in science and engineering, this work is likely to lead to new algorithms that will benefit scientists, engineers, and other spatial database users. The collaboration supported here will bring together experimentalists and theorists in a way that will significantly advance the field of nuclear fission doc16293 none A newly developed approach to excavation below the water table, tested successfully last year under a High Risk Anthropological Research award, will be applied to fossil lemur sites throughout Madagascar. The anticipated rich yield of data will permit the examination of the nature and timing of the extinctions of the larger native animals and the landscape changes that occurred on the island in the last two thousand years. In the past, sites containing a fossil record of the period during which the extinctions occurred have generally been excavated without suitable stratigraphic control. By creating a temporary depression in the water table in order to remove the sediments with full three-dimensional stratigraphic control, high-pressure ultralight water pumps now make it possible to re-excavate key sites, and open others previously uninvestigated because of their flooded nature. Improvements in radiocarbon dating techniques and a multidisciplinary approach to analysis now make it feasible to correlate evidence from the bones of extinct giant lemurs and other extinct animals with many other types of data, including small vertebrate and invertebrate remains, pollen and plant macrofossils, charcoal particles, stable isotopes, ancient DNA, and human artifacts. Integrating these results at the landscape level, through the choice of key sites from the various regions of the island for detailed analysis and the compilation and evaluation of existing data sets for comparison, will provide the most rigorous test yet devised for the Blitzkrieg Hypothesis (rapid overkill by humans) and five competing hypotheses for the extinctions in Madagascar. Determining the length of the period of overlap between humans and the extinct megafauna and the sequence of biotic changes will be particularly critical to the evaluation of competing explanations for the extinctions. In addition, new insights will be gathered concerning the diet and habits of extinct giant lemurs, range shifts of extant lemur species, and the timing of human arrival and landscape transformation. Applying these techniques will enrich our basic understanding of lemur evolution and ecology and of the role of humans in transforming Madagascar. The Office of International Science and Engineering and Environmental Social and Behavioral Sciences Activities are assisting in the funding in order to enhance international cooperation and educational opportunities for undergraduate students doc16294 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Gustavo Larsen Institution: University of Nebraska The objective of this proposal is to develop electrohydrodynamic and chemical methods for fabricating nanoscale spheroidal particles and filaments from transition metals and oxides. Sol-gel chemistry in conjunction with electrically driven liquid jets and droplets will be used to make uniform metal and hybrid organic-inorganic particles and fibrous deposits. Metal alkoxides of Ti, V, Si, and Al will be used in the presence of solvent mixtures to effect fiber and particle formation at electrically driven jets. The fabrication of nanoscale glassy fibers sheathed with an organic resin will be attempted. The design of more complex structures using a novel concentric-tube feed is planned. Basic characterization will be performed using electron microscopy, diffuse reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and temperature-programmed decomposition. An international collaboration with scientists from Spain will be established. The Spanish group has expertise in electrospray formation and will assist in the design and modeling of this process. An industrial partner will provide student support and equipment. The materials produced by these methods possess high surface-to-volume ratios and have potential for use as catalysis and sorbents doc16295 none Explaining the presence of the incredible diversity seen in nature has focused much attention on understanding why plants possess such a diverse collection of defensive traits, such as chemicals, hairs and thorns. This project combines field experiments that manipulate environmental factors (i.e., water, light, and herbivore load) with the statistical power of quantitative genetics to explore how selection acts on such traits both individually and as a suite of complex interacting traits. Studies of the plant used in this research, Arabidopsis thaliana, have proceeded with great speed at the genome level, yet an understanding of this organism in nature lags behind. This study will not only allow a fuller understanding of the biology of this model organism, but it will also provide insight into the interaction of environment and genes. Understanding such interactions will allow us to better appreciate the consequences of environmental change on agricultural ecosystems, and could be used, for example, to develop crops that are designed to protect themselves. Because there is also a growing appreciation of the role of plant chemicals in human health, a fuller understanding of how selection acts on these chemicals might have important applications to nutrition and medicine doc16296 none Perna This award provides support to 8 US participants, including graduate students and junior faculty, in a US-France joint workshop on genome analysis of the plant pathogen, Erwinia Chrysanthemi in Lyon, France, July . The workshop, organized by Nicole T. Perna of the University of Wisconsin and Nicole Cotte-Pattat of the Institut National des Sciences Appliquees de Lyon, France, brings together researchers in genomics and Erwinia biology. The goals are: to discuss strategies for completing the sequencing of E. chrystanthemi genome and methods of genome analysis; to develop standards for annotation (predict genes and their functions); to train on a web-based multi-user annotation system; and to forge collaborations for post-sequencing projects. This workshop affords an opportunity for the ultimate end-users of the Erwinia genome sequence data to create the annotation and a solid framework for future research partnerships. This award represents the US side of joint proposals to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel to France and living expenses of US researchers and graduate students. The CNRS will support the travel of the French researchers to the workshop doc16297 none PROJECT ENVIRONMENTAL AND TEMPORAL PATTERNS IN PLANT DIVERSITY THROUGH GEOLOGIC TIME PI s: Hallie J. Sims, Patricia G. Gensel, and Scott L. Wing Plants first appeared on land roughly 410 million years ago. Since then, there clearly has been a massive increase in the number of plant species, the spatial complexity of terrestrial vegetation, and the range of habitats that plants occupy. The taxonomic composition of terrestrial vegetation also has changed completely. Although major trends and events affecting terrestrial plants have long been identified in a descriptive way and quantitative data exist for many local sites and short time intervals, there has been only one attempt to quantify the major Phanerozoic trends in plant diversity and floral composition. Recent advances in the statistical analysis of diversity data, increasing recognition of the importance of spatial scale for interpreting diversity data, and growing acceptance of bioinformatic databases as important tools for maximizing the value of published data, make this the right time for a new quantification of long-term trends in the ecology of terrestrial plants. We have formed a working group of fifteen paleobotanists whose specialties span the temporal and biological spectrum to collect high-quality data on Silurian to Paleogene fossil plant localities, occurrences, and taxa as part of the Paleobiology Database (http: flatpebble.nceas.ucsb.edu public ). The result will be a public, web-based repository for fossil occurrence data- a GenBank for the plant fossil record. With these data, we will assess the effects of sampling biases on changes in estimated global plant diversity, examine environmental correlates of diversity change, and track changes in diversity at local, regional, and global scales doc16298 none Spatafora Cordyceps is a genus of ascomycete fungi that includes over 300 described species, most of which are pathogens of insects and other fungi. It is a member of the family Clavicipitaceae, which also includes numerous species of plant pathogens. The Clavicipitaceae are fascinating in that all species must associate with other organisms in nature in order to complete their life cycle. This association is usually antagonistic, resulting in disease and death of the host organism. Many of these fungal pathogens are only known from asexually reproducing states, which often inhibits accurate identification and inferences about their evolutionary origins. Results from prior NSF supported research by Dr. Spatafora are consistent with an interpretation of host jumping through evolutionary time and multiple losses of sexual reproduction. The data reject previous hypotheses pertaining to the evolution of this group of fungi, which is reflected in an outdated classification that does not reflect true relationships or possess predictive value. Research funded by this grant will build upon previous data by collecting and analyzing DNA sequences from five nuclear and mitochondrial genes. The overall goal of this research is to develop robust and testable hypotheses for the evolutionary relationships of Cordyceps and related fungi, which in turn will provide a basic understanding of the evolution of host association, pathogenicity, and mode of reproduction. To develop such hypotheses, the diversity of Cordyceps species will be sampled with a special emphasis on East Asia, the most species rich region of the world for the genus. In order to sample this diversity, Dr. Spatafora will collaborate with researchers from Japan, Korea, and Thailand. They will assist in collecting of species and he will provide training opportunities in molecular evolution of fungi for a limited number of graduate students from each of these countries. The students will visit the laboratory at Oregon State University for a period of approximately six months, after which they will return to their home institutions with the goal of transferring this technology. Many species of Cordyceps and related fungi of the Clavicipitaceae are important in both agriculture and medicine. Numerous species of Cordyceps are pathogens of insects and are promising candidates for biological control of insect pests. Biological control is an active area of research that may lessen the dependence on, and environmental impact of, pesticides. Central to development of efficient biological control systems is an accurate understanding of both the relationships of candidate species and the overall pattern of host association and niche specialization. In addition, many species of Cordyceps and the Clavicipitaceae produce biologically active compounds that function in pathogenicity. Some of these compounds have been exploited for use in medicine (e.g., Cyclosporin A from Cordyceps subsessilis), but others likely await discovery. An understanding of the evolutionary relationships of these fungi will provide a predictive framework in which more focused and directed research in other fields of biology (e.g., biological control, drug discovery, etc.) can proceed doc16299 none Anderson This three-year award supports US-France collaboration in economics between Simon Anderson of the University of Virginia and Regis Renault of the University of Caen. The objective of their research is to develop an economic theory of the content of advertising and explore incentives used by firms regarding the amount and nature of information they provide in advertisements. They will construct a model to demonstrate the relationship between the amount of information revealed by a firm about its products and corresponding market performance. The US and French researchers have complementary expertise in economics. They collaborated previously on research on firm pricing in the context of consumer search for prices and product matches. This collaboration extends this initial research into new areas. The research will advance understanding about economic and social impact of advertising on firms, purchasing, product pricing and on the public respectively. This award represents the US side of parallel proposals to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator. The CNRS will support visits by the French researcher to the United States doc16300 none Evolution in response to human activities is of great economic importance, for example in agriculture. It would be extremely useful to be able to predict when and how such changes will evolve. We know that mutation and genetic variation is necessary for evolution. This project will search for simple general features of mutation and genetic variation to use as the basis for predictions about evolution, and test these predictions against the differences observed among species. The wings of fruit flies (Drosophila) will be used as a model system. Surprisingly, integration of mutation, variation and evolution in one study has never been attempted with a multicellular organism. If the predictions of this project are borne out, the methods developed would be applicable to evolution in domesticated plants and animals. If one can predict combinations of features that are unlikely to evolve, costly breeding programs that are doomed to fail could be avoided. Alternatively, features that are unlikely to evolve with natural variation would be attractive targets for genetic manipulations. If the predictions are not borne out, this will point to the need for a more detailed understanding of the functional basis of biological traits before predictions are useful doc16301 none Zavaliangos This three-year award supports US-France collaboration in metal and ceramic powder manufacturing between Antonios Zavaliangos of Drexel University and Didier Bouvard of the National Polytechnic Institute, Grenoble, France. Their collaboration addresses modeling and experimental aspects of anisotoropic shrinkage in sintering and compaction powder processes. During these processes, powder mixtures are pressed into different and sometimes complex forms. Characterization of microstructure evolution during powder sintering and modeling of anisotropic aspects will be studied. The collaboration merges modeling and experimental approaches. The US investigator brings to this collaboration, expertise in thermomechanical modeling. This is complemented by participation in experiments in France and French expertise in physiochemical and microstructural characterization. Sintering of powder mixtures is a key step in a number of processing techniques for a variety of industrial processes, such as manufacturing of steel parts and hard magnets. This research will advance our understanding of behavior of powder mixtures and enhance predictive modeling capabilities. The collaboration includes an educational component. An instructional module is planned for classroom use and undergraduate students will participate in the experiments in France. This award represents the US side of parallel proposals to the NSF and the CNRS. NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator and students. The CNRS will support visits by French researchers to the United States doc16302 none Cameron M. Gordon The Department of Mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin will host the Spring Topology and Dynamics Conference. Now in its 36th year, this is the largest annual topology conference in the US. It has a broad scope that encompasses set-theoretic and general topology, continuum theory and dynamical systems, geometric group theory and geometric topology. It thus provides a unique forum for researchers in a wide range of disciplines within topology. There will be eight invited plenary one-hour lectures of a semi-expository nature, given by leading researchers in the areas covered. There will also be twenty invited half-hour lectures, together with 15-minute contributed talks, held in four parallel sessions. The invited speakers have been selected with the help of an advisory committee of experts in the various subfields. Topology is one of the major subdisciplines of mathematics, and, at just over a hundred years old, the youngest. It originated with Henri Poincare around , who introduced it as a means of describing the qualitative behavior of certain physical systems (for example, our solar system), whose complexity renders a precise quantitative analysis too difficult. The wide range covered by the subject today is well represented by the Conference. General topology deals with the abstract properties of topological spaces; set-theoretic topology impinges upon the logical foundations of mathematics. The study of dynamical systems is close to Poincare s original motivation, and deals with the behavior of various iterative processes. These often give rise to complex objects, continua, which are studied in their own right. Geometric topology deals with manifolds, objects which are locally like n-dimensional Euclidean space, but whose global structure might be quite complicated. For instance, there is a lot of current activity in 3-dimensional topology, whose goal is essentially to describe all theoretically possible 3-dimensional universes. Rich connections have recently been discovered between this subject and quantum physics, while on the other hand topological techniques from the theory of knots in 3-dimensional space have recently been applied to the study of DNA. Finally, geometric group theory, a relatively new subject, studies groups, which are algebraic objects, from a topological point of view; this is leading to deep connections between topology and algebra. The interaction at the Conference between workers in all these different branches of topology is expected to be very fruitful doc16303 none Luckow Although the mimosoid legumes are an important component of tropical forests, especially in arid and semiarid regions, they have been understudied relative to the two other major legume groups, the papilionoid (pea-flowered) and caesalpinioid legumes. The most recent evolutionary study of the legume family incorporated only 7 samples from an estimated species of mimosoids. Proposed work by Dr. Melissa Luckow at Cornell University and colleagues is aimed at correcting the imbalance by intensive study of genera in the subfamily Mimosoideae. Specifically, the goals of this study are: 1) to construct an evolutionary tree for 39 genera of mimosoid legumes using data from both morphology and DNA sequences (from nuclear and plastid genes), and 2) to write a revision of these genera, complete with keys for identification and detailed descriptions. Field work will be undertaken to collect rare and unusual species in Africa, Madagascar, and South America. Molecular and morphological data will be employed in a phylogenetic analysis that will clarify the relationships among the genera and shed light on the evolution of nitrogen-fixation and characters associated with adaptation to arid climates. Interactive keys and descriptions will be constructed and incorporated into the Diversity of Life web site. The legume family is the third largest flowering-plant family, and second only to grasses in economic importance to mankind. The mimosoids are particularly important in tropical ecosystems as agroforestry and timber trees, providing wood and forage in marginal and arid regions of the world. Much effort is currently being expended to improve and exploit species of Prosopis (mesquite), Acacia, and Leucaena for food and fodder in arid habitats. Yet, currently there is little information on what the closest relative to Prosopis might be, or whether or not all species of Acacia in the New World are related to those in Africa and Australia. A phylogenetic context will be indispensable to the agricultural evaluation and development of species in these genera; reliable identification keys to the genera, with comprehensive descriptions, will be widely used by taxonomists, foresters, plant breeders, and ecologists. For example, most areas in Latin America lack comprehensive floras; legumes also tend to be one of the last groups to be worked on since the family is so large and diverse. Creating web-based keys and descriptions that can be downloaded will insure wide availability and affordability to users in developing countries. This format will also make it easy for instructors to integrate the material into their classrooms doc16304 none Cerqua-Richardson This three-year award for U.S.-France collaboration in novel optical materials involves students and faculty researchers at the University of Central Florida s School of Optics CREOL and research groups at the University of Bordeaux I in France. Kathleen T. Cerqua-Richardson, Alfons Schulte, and Thierry Cardinal at CREOL and Bordeaux respectively will lead the collaborative program. The goal is to fabricate and characterize chalcogenide and oxysulfide glasses and their related waveguides for integrated optic applications. Chalcogenide glasses have shown potential for use in linear and nonlinear optics. They exhibit high optical nonlinearities, are photosensitive in the visible region and transparent in the telecommunication spectral region. They suffer from limited long-term stability. The research will address several current limitations associated with non-oxide chalcogenide glasses and extend knowledge in new oxysulfide glass systems. The US researchers bring to this collaboration expertise in processing and optical fabrication of bulk chalcogenide materials, Raman spectroscopy using near infrared techniques for fiber and films. This is complemented by French expertise in the synthesis and characterization of bulk oxysulfide materials and ab initio calculations. This award represents the US side of joint proposals to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigators and graduate student. CNRS will support the visits of the French researchers and graduate students to the United States doc16305 none Tandy This award supports Peter Tandy and students from Kent State University in a collaboration with Reinhard Alkofer of the Department of Theoretical Physics at the University of Tuebingen, Germany. The project focuses on hadronic processes in terms of confined quarks and gluons by bringing together two presently disparate lines of investigation. The US side has expertise in continuum nonperturbative QCD modeling of hadrons using the Dyson-Schwinger equations. To be useful, the results must be packaged in the form of model solutions of the gauge sector Dyson-Schwinger equations for at least the gluon and ghost-dressed propagators and the gluon-quark vertex. This is exactly the expertise of the German group. They have recently produced the most advanced solutions of truncat4ed forms of the gauge sector Dyson-Schwinger equations and have found unexpected behavior that relates to the origin of quark confinement and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking. The project has the potential to impact the search for quark-gluon plasma, nuclear astrophysics, early universe cosmology, and strongly interacting field theory. The work plan provides for extensive participation by graduate students in the international doc16281 none The investigators will reconstruct the phylogeny of plethodontid salamanders using morphological and molecular data and then use the phylogeny to explore how species diversity changes with elevation, and the evolutionary reasons for patterns of species richness. Plethodontidae is the largest family of salamanders, containing about two-thirds of all 460+ species of salamanders. Plethodontids are possibly the most abundant vertebrates in eastern North America and are the focus of research by dozens of scientists in many diverse fields of biology (e.g., ecology, behavior, morphology, evolution, development). Many (if not most) of these studies depend critically on having a robust phylogenetic framework. However, higher-level relationships among plethodontids have never been the subject of a comprehensive study using modern methods. In a three-year collaborative study, the PIs will reconstruct the phylogeny of 112 species of plethodontid salamanders (plus outgroups representing five other families) using morphological characters and DNA sequences from two mitochondrial genes and one nuclear gene. The phylogeny will be used to explore how and why species diversity changes with elevation, using the unusually rich salamander fauna of the Appalachian Mountains as a model system. Many groups of organisms exhibit increased species diversity in montane areas relative to lowland areas, a widespread pattern that remains poorly explained. It is suggested herein that this pattern results from increased speciation in montane regions caused by the disjunctive nature of montane habitats and the elevational habitat specificity of highland species. Three key predictions of this model will be tested using phylogenetic methods. The study will provide the first phylogeny of plethodontid salamanders based on a rigorous analysis of morphological and molecular data. The phylogeny will be critical to dozens of researchers who use plethodontids as a model system in studies of ecology, behavior, evolution, development, and other areas of biology. The study will also be the first to address elevational patterns of species richness from a phylogenetic perspective. These analyses of montane species richness should have important implications for the fields of ecology, evolution, biogeography, and conservation biology. For example, the analyses of elevational specificity (how narrowly adapted a species is to a given elevational range and its associated climate) may be important for predicting the persistence or extinction of montane species in relation to global warming or other changes in climate. The study will provide training for undergraduate and graduate students and a postdoctoral fellow in molecular techniques and in integrated analyses of phylogeny, ecology, and evolution doc16307 none Nochetto This award supports Ricardo H. Nochetto and students from the University of Maryland-College Park in a collaboration with Gerhard Dziuk of the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Freiburg, Germany. The award is a one-year renewal of a project begun in January . The project focuses on error control for nonlinear partial differential equations via a posteriori error estimation. The techniques will have applications for physical problems involving diffusion, advection, phase changes, and interface dynamics. Such problems arise frequently in industrial applications, and raise fundamental and challenging questions that need to be addressed in order for the field to advance. The collaboration combines complementary expertise and facilities on both sides. In particular the innovative software toolbox ALBERT, developed by the German group, is central to the proposed work, which will gain added value from the powerful theoretical capabilities of the U.S. group. The work plan provides for extensive participation by graduate students in the international travel and research doc16308 none The goal of this project is to assess the role of high levels of self-fertilization in enhancing the conditions for linkage disequilibrium within plant species. Linkage disequilibrium refers to a correlation in allelic state between two different genetic loci at the population or species level. The statistic used to measure this correlation provides an index of the non-random distribution of alleles at different loci or of different nucleotide sties within a locus. All other things being equal, sexually reproducing organisms are expected to reach a state of linkage equilibrium because recombination ultimately randomizes the genome at all scales of resolution (the correlation in allelic state approaches zero independent of genetic distance). However, the rate of approach to equilibrium may be slow because it depends on the breeding system and the extent of linkage between genes. A nonrandom distribution is important because selection on a gene will perturb the frequencies of all other genes in linkage disequilibrium with the selected gene. Such perturbations can reduce the efficiency of selection because selection at one locus may be contravened by selection at a second locus in linkage disequilibrium with the first. This situation is known as linkage drag. Self-fertilization and linkage interact to restrict recombination, because self-fertilization reduces heterozygosity and thereby reduces the effective rate of recombination between genes or between nucleotide sites within a gene. It is obviously important to characterize the extent of linkage disequilibrium in inbreeding species to better understand how restricted recombination may affect adaptive potential. This project will investigate the extent of linkage disequilibrium within wild barley (Hordeum vulgare ssp. spontaneum), a species with a rate of self-fertilization greater than 98%. The project will sample nucleotide sequences from a number of loci and the accessions sequenced will be chosen to span the geographic range of wild barley. The genetic scale of the samples will permit a measure of linkage disequilibrium at different physical and genetic distances ranging from (a) physical distances up to approximately 5,000 base pairs; (b) moderately linked genes (recombination fraction 0.01); and (c) loosely linked genes (recombination fraction 0.1). This investigation will permit a direct empirical assessment of how the interaction between selection, linkage and recombination restricts adaptive potential in inbreeding species doc16309 none This proposal is submitted with the acknowledgement that project and program evaluations are indispensable to those agencies and organizations that emphasize mathematics, science, technology and staff and funders with valuable information to make informed decisions about the implementation, progress and success of a project or program. Therefore, it is imperative that the evaluators responsible for planning, collecting and analyzing evaluation data are trained to be both technically competent in their work efforts and sensitive to the cultural context in which the project or program takes place. This planning grant would provide the structure for the development of a summer training institute for participants to broaden thier knowledge of evaluation models, methods, and standards, as well as raise both their awareness and understanding of a very important aspect of evaluation - its cultural context. That is, a fundamental aspect integrated throughout all the institute s training activities will attend to the reality that evaluations do not occur in a vacuum but instead are contextual because of the variety of racial, cultural, socio-economic, and other settings in which the project or program is operating. As such, there is a pressing need to develop a framework for identifying the many hidden variables (e.g., stereotypes, attitudes, ecpectations) that frame the cultural contex of evaluation. A major focus of this planning grant would be to develop a culturally relevant evaluation training model and plan for its utilization at a summer training institute so that mid-level evaluators will appreciate and understand the need for a cultural context of educational evaluation of math and science and other projects. Upon completion of the Institute, the participants will be able to effectively transfer theoretical knowledge learned to procedural knowledge, and then to actual evaluation practice within a responsive and relevant context doc16310 none El-Sayed This two-year award for US-France collaboration in nanoparticle research involves researchers and students at Georgia Institute of Technology and the University Pierre and Marie Curie (Paris VI). The principal investigators, Mostafa El-Sayed in the US and Marie-Paule Pileni in France, lead the collaboration. The combined teams will examine radiative and nonradiative properties of individual and assembled copper nanoparticles of different sizes and shapes. Copper particles represent a new and interesting nanoparticle system. Their properties such as surface plasmon absorption, acoustic breathing, oscillations, electron-phonon and phonon-phonon relaxation processes will be studied. Changes in spherical and rod-shaped nanoparticles as a result of self-assembly and intraparticle interactions will be investigated. Experiments involve femtosecond transient laser spectroscopic methods and monodispersed size and shape distributions of nanoparticles. The collaboration merges different experimental methods and expertise. The US group is expert in ultrafast laser methods and spectroscopic experiments. This is complemented by French expertise in the synthesis of monodispersed nanoparticles, including copper nanodots and nanorods, and nanoparticle self-assembly. This collaboration advances understanding of the optical and mechanical properties of nanomaterials. Nanoparticle materials are important for new electronic devices, optical devices, and biological materials. Graduate students also benefit. They will receive training in advanced synthetic and self-assembly techniques. This award represents the US side of parallel proposals to the NSF and the CNRS. NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigator, postdoctoral researcher and students. The CNRS will support visits by French researchers and students to the United States doc16311 none Gursky This three-year award for U.S.-France collaboration in geometry involves Matthew L. Gursky at Indiana University, Paul C. Yang and Sung-Yung Chang at Princeton University, Frank Merle and Emmanuel Hebey at the University of Cergy-Pontoise. The collaboration addresses higher order elliptic, in particular fourth order, and parabolic equations in geometry and mathematical physics. These geometry problems arise in conformal geometry, Einstein manifolds, and canonical metrics. The US mathematicians bring to this collaboration expertise in higher order equations. This is complemented by French expertise in analytical problems. This award represents the US side of joint proposals to the NSF and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for individual visits of US investigators and students and group travel to a workshop. The CNRS will support the visits of the French researchers. The collaboration will advance fundamental understanding of higher order equations as applied to problems in physics, geometry, and analysis. The project adds an international dimension to training of students and provides opportunities to develop international partnerships doc16312 none PI Name: Priyanga Amarasekare Institution: University of Chicago This research investigates how multiple predator and parasite species influence the dynamics (change in abundance) of their common prey or host species. The ecological system that is the focus of research is the harlequin bug and two parasitoid species (parasitic insects that grow on and kill other insects) that attack the bug s eggs in southern California. The system presents a puzzle: multiple parasitoid species can coexist on the same host stage as well as reduce fluctuations in host abundance. Solving the puzzle requires understanding the mechanism(s) by which both parasitoid species coexist on a single host species, and how these mechanism(s) in turn influence the parasitoids effect on the host. The first goal is to distinguish between two hypotheses that address mechanisms of parasitoid coexistence are intraguild predation (IGP) and temporal niche partitioning (TNP). Intraguild predation predicts that species will coexist because one species is superior at attacking unparasitized hosts while the other species is superior at attacking hosts already parasitized by the first (multiparasitism). Temporal niche partitioning predicts that species will coexist because each is superior at attacking hosts at different times of the year. Predictions for the two hypotheses will be tested via manipulative field experiments. Understanding how coexisting parasitoid species influence host population dynamics will be the domain of mathematical models that explore the impact of parasitoids on host abundance and variability under different mechanisms of coexistence (IGP vs. TNP). This research is novel because it investigates how multiple consumer species influence the dynamics of a shared resource, a poorly understood issue that is critical to the maintenance of species diversity. It also has applied significance. The decision to release single or multiple natural enemies to control a pest, an issue at the heart of biological pest control, depends crucially on the mechanisms by which natural enemies coexist on a given pest species. Linking mechanisms of resource use with population dynamics allows us to predict which combinations of natural enemies provide the most effective control of a pest doc16313 none Thiemens This two-year award for a dissertation enhancement program in atmospheric chemistry is part of a US-France collaboration between the University of California, San Diego, and research group at the University Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France. Greg Michalski, a graduate student of Mark H. Thiemens, will carry out spectroscopic studies under the supervision of Remy Jost at the Physical Spectrometry Laboratory in Grenoble. The objectives of the collaboration are investigations of mass independent fractionation (MIF) mechanisms using spectroscopic analysis of NO2 isotopomers. The collaboration requires the synthesis of symmetric and asymmetric isotopomers of NO2. Mr. Michalski will carry out the spectroscopy on the isotopomers substituting the central nitrogen atom with isotopes with integer and half-nuclear spins. Probing states below the dissociation threshold will be done using Cavity Ringdown Spectroscopy. Mr. Michalski will also be trained to operate the French laser systems and the expansion jet using standard NO2. The US team brings to this collaboration expertise in isotopomer synthesis. This is complemented by French expertise in spectroscopic measurements. The resulting data will provide a basis for a complete and quantitative theory to explain MIF in planetary atmospheres, the geologic record and in meteorites. The collaboration contributes as well to research and education infrastructure. The graduate student will benefit through advanced training on specialized equipment in France and participation in an international team effort. This award represents the US side of parallel proposals to the NSF and the CNRS. NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US graduate student. The CNRS will support visits by French researchers and students to the United States doc16314 none The PIs request LTREB support to continue experimental studies in the Chihuahuan Desert near Portal, Arizona. The 20-ha study site contains 24 fenced plots, each 0.25 ha in area. They have maintained the removal of some or all species of rodents and or ants from 10 plots continuously since and from an additional 4 plots since . Standardized censuses of rodents, ants, and plants provide invaluable data on responses of individuals, populations, and communities both to experimental perturbations and to background temporal and spatial variation in the environment. Results to date demonstrate: 1) complex interannual and seasonal dynamics of rodent, ant, and plant populations; 2) direct effects of seed predation by rodents, birds, and ants on winter annual plants; 3) direct effects of competition by kangaroo rats on population densities and species diversity of other seed-eating rodent species; 4) indirect effects of kangaroo rats on vegetation, other rodents, birds, and lizards; 5) reorganization of the entire ecosystem, including large increases in woody vegetation and extinctions, colonizations, or shifts in abundance of many animal species, apparently caused by a change in climate since the late s; 6) regulation of emergent properties, such as species diversity, biomass, and energy use of rodents and plants, within narrow bounds despite large shifts in species composition in response to environmental change. The proposed research for the next five years includes: 1) continuation of experimental manipulations and standardized censuses of rodents, ants, and plants; 2) focus on spatial patterns and processes over a wide range of scales; 3) investigation of the experimental manipulations and functional groups of organisms on ecosystem processes; 4) examination of the dynamics of the ant community; and 5) assessment of the interacting influences of climate, livestock grazing, and fire on the transition between desert shrubland and arid grassland doc16315 none M. Denise Dearing Workshop: Proposal for Conference on the History of Atmospheric CO2 and its Effect on the Evolution of Plants, Animals, and Ecosystems Several new proxies to estimate the concentration of atmospheric CO2 have been developed in the last few years so that our understanding of the history of CO2 in the atmosphere is much improved. Plant growth is strongly influenced by the concentration of atmospheric CO2, causing changes in nutrient status and the production of plant toxins, and affecting the competition between plants using different photosynthetic pathways or having different physiological strategies. Changes in availability, nutrient content, or toxicity of certain plants impacts animals at the ecosystem level. Therefore, atmospheric CO2 can be considered to be a driver of evolution at the ecosystem level. The time is now ripe for a synthesis of recent work that links the history of atmospheric CO2 to evolution at the ecosystem level. This grant will support an international symposium to address this topic doc16316 none Carnevale Inertially Unstable Currents and Internal Waves In the ocean, inertial instability is thought to be the primary mechanism that maintains anticyclonic shears and vortices at stable and marginally stable values. This project will utilize a series of numerical simulations to study the evolution of inertial instability in detail. Theoretical predictions will be made for the occurrence and physical location of the instabilities initial growth from a variety of ocean models of vortices and currents. Both methods will be used to help determine the nature of the internal wave radiation that is generated by the inertial instability. Analytical and numerical work will then be undertaken to investigate the complex behavior of packets of dimensions and amplitudes consistent with the oceanic investigations doc16317 none Frank This award supports Curtis Frank and students from Stanford University in a collaboration with Brigitte Voit of the Institute for Polymer Research in Dresden, Germany. The aim of the international project is to study a range of activites that are central to the overall goals of the NSF Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at Stanford IBM UC Davis and the international collabortion will receive support both from the German DAAD and from the Insititute for Polymer Research itself. The specific goals of the collaboration include increasing the characterization and processing tools beyond those currently available for nanoparticle synthesis, providing a framework for exchange of researches, especially junior researchers, allowing undergraduate students the opportunity o patcipate in an international research project. The work plan provides for extensive participation by graduate and undergraduate students in the international travel and research doc16318 none Middya This three-year award for US-Portugal collaboration on the physics of quasimorphous silicon thin-film for applications in large-area electronics involves Abdul Middya and students at Syracuse University and Rodrigo F. Martins at the New University of Lisbon, Portugal. The purpose of the project is to understand how drift mobilities and other electronic properties of thin-film silicon that are sensitive to disorder-induced localization vary. The researchers will also explore why defect metastability varies between quasimorphous and conventional amorphous silicon. The US researchers bring to this collaboration expertise in electronic transport, density of-state measurements and device modeling. This is complemented by Portuguese experience in plasma-processing of materials and fabrication of devices for photovoltaics and micro-electronics. Defect metastability is one of the greatest impediments for commercialization of non-crystalline Si-based thin-film technologies. An understanding of defect metastability in amorphous silicon has technological significance for use in laptop computers, solar cells, and laboratory arrays and detectors doc16319 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Regina Wetzer and Joel Martin of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County to study the relationships of a very diverse and important family of crustaceans. These crustaceans are commonly known as pillbugs, sow bugs, or rolly-pollies, and scientifically known as sphaeromatid isopods. Today more than 600 species are known, yet we still do not know how sphaeromatid species are related to one another and how they came into their present distribution on the planet. This project will define their evolutionary relationships using analysis of both morphological features and gene sequences. We will sample 100 species representing over 25 genera (1 6 of the world s sphaeromatid species diversity representing nearly 2 3 of the known generic diversity). Our plan of sampling across taxa will provide a solid phylogenetic framework for the group. We are living in one of the largest biodiversity crises in Earth history. In similar previous crises, large proportions of the biota went extinct. For humans to be able to survive the present crisis, we will need to understand which organisms are being affected and in what ways. Unfortunately, for most animal groups, we are unable to identify the species and their evolutionary origins. Therefore we cannot understand how their diversity and abundance is changing. This study focuses on a group of animals that is common and globally distributed, and thus likely to be strongly affected by change doc16320 none Fewell This award supports Jennifer Fewell and graduate and undergraduate students from Arizona State University in a collaboration with Juergen Gadau of Institute for Behavioral Physiology at the University of Wuerzburg, Germany. The aim of the international project is to examine the extent and consequences of hybridization between two native seed-harvester ants, Pogonomyrmex rugosus and Pogonomyrmex barbatus. The German and U.S. groups will test the hypothesis that hybridization in that system does not universally produce reduced hybrid fitness, as expected by current models. They will also test the hypothesis that colonies respond to hybridization by preferentially using sperm belonging to different species. They will use morphological, molecular, and behavioral techniques to determine the extent of introgression between species and to measure fitness components of hybridized and parental colonies. In addition, they will perform controlled mating experiments to determine the effect of hybridization on caste determaination. The work plan provides for extensive participation by graduate students in the international travel and research doc16321 none Non-native African fountaingrass has invaded the understory of Hawaii s dry forest; it is now causing death of native tree seedlings and productivity decline in mature trees. Total conversion of this ecosystem to alien grassland would result in high biodiversity loss, disruption of natural biogeochemical cycles, and extinction of many culturally important plants, yet mechanisms underlying these alien-plant impacts are poorly understood. We will determine how fountaingrass alters native-tree access to rainwater, and how this impact translates into productivity changes. Particular emphasis will be placed on tree access to water from small rainstorms - which may provide water necessary for sustained activity between larger events. Future research will investigate resource competition for light and nutrients. Our long-term objective is a comprehensive understanding of mechanisms that cause conversion and alteration of ecosystem functions. The Hawaiian dry forest is conducive to this goal and results may be applicable to other aridland ecosystems doc16322 none This project, building on a planning grant, provides a practical, theory-based approach to developing high quality assessments of science inquiry. The project will produce: (1) a system for developing reusable assessment-task templates organized around schemas of inquiry; (2) generally stated rubrics for recognizing and evaluating evidence of inquiry skills; (3) an organized set of assessment development resources; (4) an initial collection of schemas, exemplar templates and tasks produced in the contest of the BioKIDS and FOSS projects; and (5) a statistical model that supports rigorous analyses of student learning. Rigorous quantitative and qualitative methods will be used to document the process. A quality of evidence study will be conducted to determine if the information yielded by these assessments provides more useful and descriptive information of student learning than traditional assessments doc16323 none The primary objective of this international conference entitled Primate Origins is to assemble a series of experts who are currently performing novel research concerning the unique adaptive characteristics of the Order Primates (the taxonomic group to which humans, apes, monkeys, and prosimians belong). Primates are distinguished from other mammals by several traits of the skull and limbs, most notably the opposable big toe, nails instead of claws on the digits, larger brains, reduction of the organs responsible for the sense of smell, and larger more convergent eyes which are protected by additional bone around the sockets. This conference will provide a long-overdue comprehensive reassessment of the adaptations of the first primates utilizing the expertise of both paleontologists and those who study living primates. We will provide the first comprehensive analysis of the adaptive significance of pronounced morphological and behavioral transformations during this important and interesting stage of primate evolution which will also facilitate a fuller understanding of groundwork for the transformations that took place during the later evolution of higher primate doc16324 none In the terms of this cooperative agreement, the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) will establish a Technical Center that will enhance the IERI program at the level of individual projects and at the meta level of theory building around the scaling up of effective educational interventions. The Center will be organized around three functions: (1) technical assistance, training, and ongoing needs analysis in service of IERI grantees, (2) community building, and (3) research and theory building related to core IERI priorities. All Center activities will contribute to a larger purpose that is consistent with the mission of IERI: To bring demonstrably effective interventions to scale in order to enhance student learning, and to more fully understand the nature of the scaling-up process. The activities of the Technical Center will be carried out in close and ongoing consultation with the cognizant NSF program officer and with the larger IERI Working Group. All strategic decisions of the Center will be joint decisions between the Technical Center, NSF, and the larger program leadership of IERI doc16325 none Kuo This is a 24 month AWARE center-center linkage proposal submitted by Dr. Ying-Hwa (Bill) Kuo, UCAR, for establishing start-up phase of a broad-based program to create new and strengthen existing research, operational and education linkages between the U.S. atmospheric science community and that of the nations of East Asia. The scientists involved, both in the U.S. and East Asia, are among the world s best, with excellent records of prior research. The science to be incorporated is cutting edge, innovative, groundbreaking, and facilities and opportunities available for U.S. scientists at research sites in Taiwan related to COSMIC project and the Earth Simulator in Japan are unique in the world. The two-year start-up phase of this program will allow UCAR to develop a relationship with its international counterparts, to formulate detailed plans for its educational programs, and to establish its cooperative research and training projects. At the end of the start-up phase, UCAR will submit a follow-up proposal to continue the collaborative education, research and training program. This broad-based program can create new and strengthen existing research, operational and education linkages between the U.S. atmospheric science community and that of the nations of East Asia, and will greatly benefit to U.S. students and junior scientists in atmospheric science doc16326 none Lay Animals recognize and respond to many different volatile chemicals in their environment using specialized nerve cells called olfactory neurons. We are interested in understanding how the specific functional properties of individual olfactory neurons are defined during development. We are exploring this issue in the model genetic organism, the small soil nematode C. elegans. C. elegans responds to and discriminates among thousands of environmental chemicals using a small set of olfactory neurons including the AWA, AWB and AWC neurons. We propose to investigate how the functions of the AWB neurons are defined developmentally. In previous work, we identified three genes that play important roles during AWB development. In animals mutant for the kin-29 protein kinase gene, the AWB neurons fail to correctly express a subset of olfactory receptor proteins. In sns-11 mutants, the AWB neurons do not exhibit any AWB-specific functional or morphological properties, while in sns-9 mutant animals, additional AWB-like neurons are observed. We will utilize genetic, molecular and biochemical techniques to further investigate the roles of these three genes in AWB neuron development. We expect that our findings will not only yield insights into the mechanisms by which functional diversity is achieved among olfactory neurons, but also provide information regarding the basic principles underlying neuronal development doc16327 none The International Water Vapor (H2O) Project (IHOP) is a large multi-agency, multi-investigator project that focuses on the measurement of water vapor and water vapor variability. The goal of the project is to improve understanding of convective initiation and to increase short-term precipitation forecast skills. The researcher will employ the Wyoming Cloud Radar system (WCR), in situ data from the University of Wyoming King Air research aircraft (UWYKA), and ancillary IHOP data to describe in unprecedented detail, the vertical structure and evolution of radar fine-lines , such as outflow boundaries and drylines, and to interpret their ability to trigger deep convection. The UWYKA is equipped with an array of atmospheric sensors to measure temperature, humidity, winds, and their fluxes, as well as cloud and radiation probes. The combination of UWYKA and WCR data along stepped traverses will allow (a) a description of the kinematic and thermodynamic vertical structure of shallow convergence zones; and (b) an estimation of the variation of the boundary layer precipitable water, convection parameters, and moisture convergence across fine-lines. The key hypotheses to be tested are: 1. The WCR data are sufficiently sensitive and detailed to describe various details of boundary layer structures 2. The WCR data allow a detailed and accurate description of the airflow in vertical sections across radar-detected fine-lines 3. Analysis of combined WCR, UWYKA, and ancillary IHOP data, in particular DIAL water vapor profiles will show that the variability of precipitable water in a well-mixed convective boundary layer is significant doc16328 none A grant has been awarded to Geeta Bharathan at SUNY at Stony Brook to study the evolutionary relationships of Dioscorea (the true yams). Dioscorea is a large, economically important monocot genus that contains about 600 species of, mostly tropical, vines that grow in a range of habitats. Despite its traditional value as a tuber and medicinal crop (and, recently, in the pharmaceutical industry) the taxonomy of Dioscorea is in a mess. While a statement, over a 100 years ago, by the famous taxonomist, Hooker, that ...the species of Dioscorea are in a state of indescribable confusion is slowly being remedied through heroic efforts by a great many alpha-taxonomists, the question of higher level relationships is a thorny one that traditional morphological approaches alone may not be able to resolve. In this project species of Dioscorea across the world will be sampled to study variation in molecules (DNA sequences of three genes) and morphology (observations on field and herbarium collections). Molecular sequences will be analyzed to formulate hypotheses of evolutionary relationships and to construct a systematic framework for the group. This will help to achieve several goals: 1) Evaluation of previous classifications to facilitate taxonomic revisions; 2) Evaluation of the evolutionary basis for particular subgroups (e.g., the one that includes the three North American species) to help understand the historical origins and biogeographical spread of this large genus; 3) Evaluation of morphological traits to improve their use in classification of the genus; 4) Compilation of a morphological data set for phylogenetic analysis, to be done in collaboration with Dioscorea scientists across the world. The wider significance of the achievement of the above objective has both scientific and societal aspects. The project would generate a rigorous systematic framework that then can be used to study various aspects of this important tropical crop: evolution of vegetative form and development (including leaf form and tuber-formation), biogeographical patterns of diversification, and history of domestication. All these would contribute to future uses and improvement of the crop. The project would enable training of students (graduate and undergraduate) in field and laboratory methods including morphology, while at the same time exposing them to important international issues involved in the collection and utilization of germplasm from other nations. The project has the explicit involvement of a Mexican collaborator for plant collection and mapping using GIS, and a course on phylogenetics to be taught in Mexico by the PI. All these activities will contribute to building 1) a scientific base of knowledge on an important, but understudied, tropical crop, 2) scientific skills and infrastructure at the national and international levels, and 3) international collaboration and scientific exchange doc16329 none This is an exploratory research project to investigate the unique physiological characteristics of high altitude native populations in the Andes. An enduring question is the extent to which characteristics (such as large lung volume) are genetic, as the result of natural selection, or developmental, as the result of lifelong exposure to HA. Many previous studies have had the goal to partition genetic from developmental effects in this regard, but with varying success. In the present study we will apply a novel approach with this basic goal in mind. The approach might be termed an admixture migrant study design because it takes advantage of two fundamental realities in the Andes. First, the majority of current Andeans are the admixed descendents of both European and Amerindian populations. Second, current populations reside not only at high altitude, but also as recent migrants to large urban centers near sea-level. If matched groups of highland and lowland born subjects are compared, this may allow us to better understand how lifelong altitude exposure affects physiology. Further, if admixture rates are estimated for each individual within a group, then we may better understand how genetics and natural selection have affected physiology. By quantifying both effects, we can explicitly test the idea that gene and environment interact to produce a given characteristic. In collaboration with the Universidad Cayetano, Lima, Peru, we will measure pulmonary function and maximal oxygen consumption (VO2max) in at least 25 lowland born subjects in Lima (sea level) and also at Cerro de Pasco, Peru (4,300 m). In Cerro de Pasco, we will perform the same measurements on at least 25 highland born subjects. A blood sample will be used to determine admixture rate based on a panel of informative genetic markers developed for this purpose. This study should provide crucial information regarding the feasibility of this promising new approach doc16330 none Richter Research at the Calhoun Experimental Forest has investigated rates and processes of soil biogeochemical change over four decades of forest-ecosystem development. From this work it is clear that soils are dynamic components of ecosystems remarkably responsive to ecosystem change. Continuation of this study by LTREB will allow continued testing of hypotheses and objectives that together will result in critical continuity for research development at this site. The three hypotheses concern: (1) the depletability and resupply of soil micronutrients over four decades of forest development, (2) soil SO4 and whether SO4 is decreasing in the last two decades in a pattern indicative of reduced air-pollution inputs, and (3) recent changes in soil and whole-ecosystem sequestration of C 14C, and N. Making this particularly compelling is the recent disturbance by bark beetles, ice and wind damage which together have decreased leaf area by as much as 50%, increasing litterfall inputs to the forest floor, and greatly accelerating growth of understory hardwoods. Because the Calhoun archive has nearly all soil samples collected since , investigators have the ability to conduct retrospective analyses on soil and ecosystem biochemical change. The project also includes a program of educational outreach with undergraduate and high school science students, and data management improvements to expand the use of the Calhoun data for current and future researchers doc16331 none The research questions for this proposal are designed to explore the interactions of teaching practices, curriculum materials, and professional development to understand how they can be optimized to improve student learning. The University of Delaware and Texas A&M University, working in partnership with Project of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, will study how to provide, on a large scale, the professional development and continuing support teachers need to improve student learning of key ideas and skills in middle-grades mathematics. Over five years of a longitudinal study, the research team will examine how the use of specific research-based instructional strategies in the classroom-supported by professional development and highly-rated curriculum materials-relate to lasting improvements in student learning. An experimental study in years 4 and 5 will test the feasibility of delivering professional development and ongoing support cost-effectively on a large scale doc16332 none Chen Much scientific effort has been expended in measuring CO2 exchanges between vegetation and the atmosphere in an attempt to determine the role of terrestrial ecosystems in the global carbon budget. Most prior efforts have focused on mature forests. However, these may not be representative of the overall landscape mosaic, since most forested landscapes are disturbed by humans, dominated by stands of varying ages, and subject to multiple edge influences. This project uses a spatial modeling approach, supplemented and evaluated with direct field measurements of ecosystem carbon exchange, to understand landscape-level carbon flux, taking into consideration age structure and edge influences. Such a broad-scale endeavor must rely heavily on models and remote sensing techniques because of the practical impossibility of obtaining enough direct flux measurements. This project is among the first to provide strong quantitative information concerning carbon exchange at the landscape level, yet based on ecosystem-level process measurements doc16333 none This project will bring together knowledge and technology and refine them into an Assessment Design and Delivery System (ADDS) for science learning. ADDS provides both a set of tools and a testbed to investigate factors the impact implementation, effectiveness, and scale-up. Specifically, ADDS provides (1) utilities for individual teachers or teams of teachers to become designers and users of assessments that actionable information to guide their practice and student learning; (2) embeds content, assessment and pedagogical knowledge to assist teachers in both designing assessments and interpreting student progress; and (3) valid results for classroom-based inferences with the potential for aggregation of results for policy uses doc16334 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Brown at the University of Wyoming and Dr. Evans at Hope College to examine evolutionary relationships among members of the tropical plant family Bromeliaceae subfamily Bromelioideae. The Bromelioideae, with 30 genera and about 750 species, is the most poorly understood subfamily in Bromeliaceae. Almost a third of the species in subfamily Bromelioideae are represented by the genus Aechmea, an extremely variable, and almost certainly artificial genus. Several genera in Bromelioideae differ from Aechmea by only one or two characters, and the morphological boundaries among genera are very poorly defined. Aechmea forms the core of a complex of as many as 20 Bromelioideae genera for which evolutionary relationships and systematics are in complete disarray. The primary goal of this project is to utilize morphological and molecular (DNA sequence) data to examine relationships within Bromelioideae, with an emphasis on Aechmea and closely related genera. Morphological information from individual plants will be collected during intensive field studies. Because floral characteristics are poorly preserved in this family during the normal pressing and drying process, observation of live and or liquid preserved material is critical for successful phylogenetic analysis. Phylogenetic analyses using maximum-parsimony methods will be conducted on the taxon by character data matrices produced in this intensive reanalysis of morphology. DNA sequence data from three non-coding regions (two chloroplast intergenic spacers, psbA-trnH and trnL-trnF, and nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer regions) will be collected from the same individuals used for morphological studies. Phylogenetic analyses of the molecular data will provide an independent assessment of the morphological phylogenies as well as a tool to examine the evolution of specific morphological characters. Integration of multiple data sets is currently an area of much discussion and debate in systematics, and several methods for comparing and integrating the molecular and morphological data will be explored. The proposed research will contribute significanly to several broader sceintific and educational goals, as follows: 1) It represents the first attempt to develop hypotheses of phylogenetic relationships within Bromeliaceae subfamily Bromelioideae from within an explicit phylogenetic paradigm. 2) It will make a significant contribution to biodiversity documentation for an ecologically important taxon (Bromelioideae) in one of the most endangered, yet biotically diverse biomes on Earth, the Atlantic Forest Biome of Brazil. 3) Ecologically, tank-forming bromeliads, which include most members of Bromelioideae, are keystone species in biodiversity maintenance. They are an important resource for free-water in the canopy, and provide feeding sites, breeding sites, and habitat for many diverse organisms that represent all Kingdoms of life. The resulting phylogenetic hypotheses will be important to biologists studying diversification, biogeography, and possible co-evolutionary patterns of any of the organisms that utilize bromeliad tanks. 4) Both U.S. and Brazilian students will be trained in modern systematic practice and theory. 5) The project will improve professional botanical systematics research and teaching infrastructure at an important Brazilian university. 6) DNA samples and sequences collected will be made available to other researchers. 7) The project will help to stimulate future collaborative U.S. - Brazil systematic and biodiversity-related research and education doc16335 none This project will conduct a five-year study on the scale up of complex instructional innovations. The PIs construe scale up to mean both widespread adoption and high quality implementation. Using three large whole-school projects-Success for All, America s Choice, and Accelerated Schools, the project will examine two issues: 1. To what extent do design and environmental factors influence attempts to bring high-quality implementations of educational innovations to large numbers of schools? 2. How do the designs and educational environments affect the problems of scaling up, and how do interventions and implementers manage these problems doc16336 none This planning grant is a collaboration between the Education Development Center s for Children and Technology (CCT) and Wireless Generation, a technology development company. Together, the collaborators are building a suite of handheld diagnostic tools that make it possible for teachers to conduct observational assessments and collect the process data necessary to effect changes teaching and students learning. The planning period will be used to conduct a thorough review of the literature, strengthen the research design, and focus on designing an assessment system. During the planning process, CCT will draw on an interdisciplinary team and a nationally recognized board of advisors to guide the work. Staff Analysis PI: Honey doc16334 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Brown at the University of Wyoming and Dr. Evans at Hope College to examine evolutionary relationships among members of the tropical plant family Bromeliaceae subfamily Bromelioideae. The Bromelioideae, with 30 genera and about 750 species, is the most poorly understood subfamily in Bromeliaceae. Almost a third of the species in subfamily Bromelioideae are represented by the genus Aechmea, an extremely variable, and almost certainly artificial genus. Several genera in Bromelioideae differ from Aechmea by only one or two characters, and the morphological boundaries among genera are very poorly defined. Aechmea forms the core of a complex of as many as 20 Bromelioideae genera for which evolutionary relationships and systematics are in complete disarray. The primary goal of this project is to utilize morphological and molecular (DNA sequence) data to examine relationships within Bromelioideae, with an emphasis on Aechmea and closely related genera. Morphological information from individual plants will be collected during intensive field studies. Because floral characteristics are poorly preserved in this family during the normal pressing and drying process, observation of live and or liquid preserved material is critical for successful phylogenetic analysis. Phylogenetic analyses using maximum-parsimony methods will be conducted on the taxon by character data matrices produced in this intensive reanalysis of morphology. DNA sequence data from three non-coding regions (two chloroplast intergenic spacers, psbA-trnH and trnL-trnF, and nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer regions) will be collected from the same individuals used for morphological studies. Phylogenetic analyses of the molecular data will provide an independent assessment of the morphological phylogenies as well as a tool to examine the evolution of specific morphological characters. Integration of multiple data sets is currently an area of much discussion and debate in systematics, and several methods for comparing and integrating the molecular and morphological data will be explored. The proposed research will contribute significanly to several broader sceintific and educational goals, as follows: 1) It represents the first attempt to develop hypotheses of phylogenetic relationships within Bromeliaceae subfamily Bromelioideae from within an explicit phylogenetic paradigm. 2) It will make a significant contribution to biodiversity documentation for an ecologically important taxon (Bromelioideae) in one of the most endangered, yet biotically diverse biomes on Earth, the Atlantic Forest Biome of Brazil. 3) Ecologically, tank-forming bromeliads, which include most members of Bromelioideae, are keystone species in biodiversity maintenance. They are an important resource for free-water in the canopy, and provide feeding sites, breeding sites, and habitat for many diverse organisms that represent all Kingdoms of life. The resulting phylogenetic hypotheses will be important to biologists studying diversification, biogeography, and possible co-evolutionary patterns of any of the organisms that utilize bromeliad tanks. 4) Both U.S. and Brazilian students will be trained in modern systematic practice and theory. 5) The project will improve professional botanical systematics research and teaching infrastructure at an important Brazilian university. 6) DNA samples and sequences collected will be made available to other researchers. 7) The project will help to stimulate future collaborative U.S. - Brazil systematic and biodiversity-related research and education doc16338 none This Advanced Training Institute in Social Psychology will provide training on the new methods and techniques by which social psychological research can be conducted via the internet. The internet allows for rapid collection of large samples of data with minimal costs associated with printing, mailing, testing, lab space, lab assistants, and data coding entry. The Internet can also be used as a device for recruiting participants from different cultures or participants who have special characteristics that might be rare in the world s population. The training institutes will be held at California State University, Fullerton doc16339 none Doppler spectra measured by MST (mesosphere-stratosphere-troposphere) radars are broadened by turbulent velocity fluctuations of the scattering elements in the beam. Measuring the spectral spread is therefore one of the ways of using MST radar to estimate the intensity of turbulence. Because the beams of such radars are fairly broad (typically several degrees) there are additional contributions to the Doppler spread caused by the cross-beam wind (so-called beam broadening) and by shear of the radial wind component in the direction of the beam axis. Recent studies indicate that the methods currently used to correct for these effects are inaccurate. Such methods are usually based on the assumption that the contributing volume is uniformly filled with turbulence. In fact, the turbulence is often confined to one or more horizontal layers that are thinner than the vertical extent of the contributing volume. Corrections based on the assumption of a filled beam are then generally too large. The present award supports development of a new experimental technique that will enable improved radar estimates of turbulence. Called the dual-beamwidth technique, it has the advantage of obtaining the turbulence intensity directly, without the need for the usual corrections to the Doppler spectral width. The assumption underlying the method is that the (generally unknown) contribution of beam broadening to the Doppler spread is proportional to the beamwidth. Simultaneous measurements at the same range with two beamwidths, which is possible with advanced MST radars such as those in Japan and India, then make it possible to measure the contribution of beam-broadening to the total Doppler spread and to compensate for it in estimating the remaining spread due to turbulence. The turbulence intensities determined this way will be compared with those estimated from a single beam employing the concept of an effective beamwidth, which is less than the geometric beamwidth to allow for the limited vertical extent of the turbulent layers. If the method employing a single effective beamwidth is proven accurate, it will then be applied to recompute turbulence intensities for radar data from Japan and White Sands, New Mexico, that have already been reported in the literature doc16340 none PI: Alexander Kiselev Proposal: Institution: University of Chicago The research will focus mainly on two directions. The first objective is to further study and apply to concrete quantum systems of interest the criteria relating behavior of solutions of Schroedinger equation, spectrum and dynamics. In particular, the applications may shed new light on the dynamics and spectrum of certain classes of random and quasiperiodic operators, such as Fibonacci Hamiltonian, as well as provide a better general understanding of the quantum transport phenomena. The second objective is to continue the study of advanced WKB methods for one-dimensional Schroedinger operators, using the tools of harmonic analysis. WKB methods are a classical part of quantum mechanics, and their main goal is to find a good approximation for the wave function of the system under certain natural assumptions. This project will pursue the development of new WKB-type techniques, which can be applied to obtain information about dynamics of a class of Schroedinger operators. Extensions to higher dimensions will also be sought. The spectral and dynamical theory of Schroedinger operators is the cornerstone of Quantum Mechanics. This theory describes the laws which govern behavior of the quantum particles, such as electrons, atoms and molecules. Much of the fundamental scientific knowledge about many important physical processes (such as, for example, chemical reactions or conduction properties of various materials) comes from the theory of Schroedinger operators. This project focuses on the development of new methods in spectral and dynamical theory of Schroedinger operators which may allow a new approach to some long-standing problems in Quantum Mechanics. These problems concern, in particular, the conductance properties of materials with impurities and of quasicrystals, and have direct applications to modern engineering devices, wave guides and transistors to name two. The project will also involve development of a modern mathematical methods curriculum for undergraduate students majoring in biology and chemistry. Given rapidly evolving interface between mathematics and these sciences, a new set of ideas and material needs to be incorporated into such service courses. In addition, graduate courses will be developed with the main objective to help beginning graduate students make a transition to independent research doc16341 none The purpose of this workshop is to gather for the fourth time, a diverse group of leading researchers in solid state technology, devices, circuits, and system architectures to: Assess the change in the knowledge base since Interact in an open discussion and free exchange of ideas across the broad spectrum of communication information processing technology Identify areas on the research frontiers that extend communication information processing progress into the 21 st Century and beyond shrink limitation Establish a communication link between researchers from around the world from different disciplines and backgrounds for a fruitful exchange of experiences and ideas As the cost and performance factors of microelectronic devices improve through advances in technology, novel and or improved information communication systems are enabled. Conversely, new concepts for information communications applications often create a demand for more advanced microelectronics technologies that offer unique capabilities. As an example, the need for mobility has driven the creation of high performance, low power, microelectronic devices used in portable electronic assistants with communication capabilities The objective of the 4th IWFIPT is to examine the push and pull between microelectronics technology and emerging application areas to obtain a sense of future technology trends and capabilities. Leading contributors will describe their views on hardware performance and functionalities needed in the information society of the future. These projections will be juxtaposed with anticipated trends in microelectronics and with potential ioradical technologiesli arising from advances in carbon-based materials, quantum physics, molecular nanotechnology and other areas. A synthesis of views is planned to identify trend feeding, trend fighting and trend setting microelectronic technologies that are likely to emerge over the next few decades doc16342 none The potential usage of magnetorheological fluids (MRFs) for temporary in-situ solidification of coarse-grained soils is being investigated. Should magnetorheological materials be successfully introduced into the pore space of a soil and solidified by application of a magnetic field, they could significantly improve our ability to sample saturated or dry cohesionless soils with minimum disturbance. The cost savings over pore fluid freezing could be very significant. Other potential future applications of MRFs in geotechnical engineering may include: stabilization of soil for excavation and tunneling, control of seepage and contaminant migration, liquefaction hazard reduction, control of machine vibrations, soil surcharging to accelerate pre-construction settlement and others. The present exploratory laboratory program will include tests for hydraulic conductivity, stiffness, strength, volume change susceptibility due to vibration, and stability of open cuts in MRF-stabilized soils doc16343 none Dr. Scott Edwards, an African American evolutionary biologist, will use this Minority Career Advancement Award to supplement salary and provide laboratory supplies during a sabbatical year from September to June . September to March will be spent at the Australian National University in Canberra, where collaborative studies on the evolution of sex chromosomes in snakes and birds will be conducted. The principal investigator will use the technique of fluorescence in-situ hybridization (FISH) to determine whether genes that influence sex determination in mammals and reside on the mammal Y chromosome are located on the sex chromosomes of birds and snakes. This research will provide a useful comparison to the genetic patterns found on mammalian sex chromosomes and will help us understand how genes determine the sex of vertebrate species. From March to June Dr. Edwards will undertake immunological research at the Institute for Animal Health in Compton, United Kingdom, in order to develop tools to monitor the immune response of birds in the wild. The ability to monitor the avian immune response will ultimately be useful for measuring the importance for disease resistance for modulating the reproductive performance, or fitness, of individuals of a variety of species doc16344 none Russo This is a workshop proposal submitted by Dr. Raymond Russo, Northwestern University, and Dr. Martin Flower, the University of Illinois, to request travel expenses to enable 15 U.S. scientists to attend workshop on collision-related mantle flow fields beneath East and Southeast Asia. The meeting will be held in Halong Bay, Vietnam, from January 6-16, . The topic of the workshop is important for earth sciences and for understanding the India-Eurasia plate collision, which is the largest continental collision in the world. The proposed list of participants is impressive, including younger, women and minority scientists from U.S. institutes, and represents many earth science disciplines. Participation in this workshop by U.S. scientists will likely result in a number of new collaborative studies between the U.S. and Vietnamese scientists. The NSF and the Geological Survey of Vietnam jointly support this workshop doc16345 none Rajaniemi Competition can play a key role in structuring plant communities, and understanding the mechanisms of plant competitive interactions is therefore critical for successful management of natural and cultivated systems. Yet despite years of study, the nature of plant competitive interaction and their relationship to environmental conditions is incompletely understood and continues to be debated. Belowground competition and its relation to fine-scale heterogeneity in soil resources is a particularly little explored area, despite the ubiquity of soil heterogeneity in nature. This research will use experimental and modeling approaches to investigate root foraging traits and their relationship to plant competitive ability and plant community diversity in spatially heterogeneous soil. Greenhouse and field experiments will be used to measure the scale, precision, and rate of root foraging and their relationship to the competitive ability of herbaceous perennial species, including an important invasive weed. An especially novel focus of this research is the phenomenon of belowground size asymmetry and its role in plant competitive ability and community structure. Field experiments and simulation modeling will examine whether fine-scale heterogeneity affects competitive size symmetry and competitive hierarchies, and the consequences for plant species coexistence and the maintenance of plant community diversity. This research has the potential to redirect our understanding of root competition and its role in the structure of plant communities doc16346 none This project focuses on the use of a regional, climate chemical transport model (Reg-Chem-CM) to study the sources and fate of air pollution and hazes in East Asia. The project will combine diagnostic analyses of data from the region, including air quality data gathered from 5 non-urban sites in China and data from the Aerosol Characterization Experiment in Asia, with model simulations for resolving the relevant chemical and transport processes that control the fate and export of primary and secondary pollutants and hazes from the region. This research will contribute to improving our understanding of the linkages between air quality and climate change doc16347 none The RNA-Based Life Workshop will be held November 15-18, at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN. The objective of the RNALife Workshop is to provide a high caliber, interdisciplinary meeting for researchers with an interest in the many roles RNA can play in sustaining life, focusing on the single question, How viable is life based on RNA? The question is relevant to cutting edge efforts in metabolic engineering, molecular medicine, cell biology and studies of the origin of life. This will be the first meeting of its kind. It is intended to be international in scope and to provide extensive opportunities for interaction between established scientists from various fields of RNA research and the next generation of scientists. The meeting is open to principal investigators, postdoctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate students and other interested scientists doc16348 none Perdue This award supports Michael Perdue and students from Georgia Tech in a collaboration with Antonius Kettrup of the Department of Chemistry at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. The aim of the international project is to describe the distribution of molecular weight and the pH-dependent distribution of charge in natural organic matter, which is a highly complex acidic mixture that occurs everywhere in natural waters. This project will focus on a sample of natural organic matter from the Suwannee River, Georgia, USA, which is available from the International Humic Substance Society, and will integrate experimental results from capillary electrophoresis and potentiometric titration to elucidate the actual distribution of charge in the matter. The proposed research has a high potential to advance our ability to deal with important contemporary problems such as environmental toxicology of metals and organic chemicals an dthe influences of watershed properties on aquatic systems. The work plan provides for extensive participation by graduate students in the international travel and research doc16349 none This SGER (Small Grant for Exploratory Research) project involves airborne measurements of aerosol phase organic compounds during ACE-Asia (Aerosol Characterization Experiment-Asia). In this collaboration with Dr. Barry Huebert of the University of Hawaii, the PI is providing his aerosol sampling system for use in the NSF C-130 aircraft. In this particular configuration, the airflow will be passed through a particle concentrator, a diffusion denuder, and filters. This minimizes potential artifacts associated with the collection of semi-volatile organic compounds. Recent measurements have pointed to the potentially large and yet insufficiently well understood role of organic compounds in atmospheric aerosols and their climate forcing. The airborne measurement of organic carbon is a crucial component of the ACE-experiment which takes place in a region where the role of carbonaceous material is expected to be very significant doc16350 none QUANTA is a toolkit for supporting TeraNode applications over optical networks. Getting terascale collaborative applications to work optimally on a high speed optical network is not as simple as connecting ones computer to the Internet. Today s protocol stacks and scientific applications cannot and do not know how to utilize this extreme level of bandwidth even when it is available. We intend to address this problem with Quanta, a cross-platform adaptive networking toolkit for supporting the extraordinary networking requirements of terascale collaborative applications. Quanta will consist of a collection of novel networking protocols that are designed for handling a wide variety of extremely high bandwidth application traffic flows; and a Quality of Service (QoS) architecture to flexibly control these protocols and support electronic and optical QoS mechanisms such as Generalized Multi Protocol Label Lambda Switching (GMPLS). The goal is to provide an easy to use system that will allow programmers to specify the data transfer characteristics of their application at a high level, and let Quanta transparently translate these requirements into the appropriate transmission protocol and network QoS services doc16351 none Proposal No.# PI: Hastings, Mardi This project supports a workshop that is designed to encourage retention and advancement of qualified women and under-represented minority-engineering educators in pursuit of scientific and engineering challenges. The workshop will bring together a select group of 80 of the nation s outstanding engineering educators who predominately have been in tenure track positions for less than five years or are in jthelast year of their Ph.D. program and actively pursuing tenure track academic positions. The participants will be employed in teaching and or research positions and actively developing their own unique research programs. Specific workshop goals are to: I) foster technical and intellectual exchange among Ph.D. level, under-represented and minority engineers who are or desire to be engineering educators; II) instill in its participants the sense of a technical community in which they can thrive and to which they can contribute; and III) increase participant awareness of research and funding opportunities. The workshop will consist of ten formal sessions spread over a three-day period emphasize the integration of research and education presentations on funding opportunities from agencies such as NSF, ARO, AFOSR, ONR, DARPA, and NASA. A panel of university deans will discuss their perspectives on reasonable career expectations and demands, include the discussion of issues related to tenure, teaching, research, publications, funding, outreach and a rewarding personal life along the career path of an engineering educator. The workshop proceeding will summarize the recommendations from the working session discussions, provide a workshop outcomes ass4esment and recommendations statement, and include a two page abstract from each participant that describes their research interest. The envisioned significance and benefits of the workshop are the increased retention of women and under-represented minority engineers as active researchers and educators and development of infrastructures of colleagues is the same field that is a rich diversity doc16352 none Kolodzey The PI proposes to evaluate the performance of a novel bio-chemical sensor based on the electrochemical field effect in MOS-type transistor structures. He has fabricated prototypes of this MOS sensor, and have found that they produced non-linear current-voltage responses to DNA molecules in an aqueous solution. Calculations indicate that the device should be highly sensitive to the electrochemical potential of bio molecules such as DNA and proteins. It should be capable of nanosecond response times for time-resolved measurements. These preliminary results will be described briefly here and in more detail in the Motivation Section of this proposal. The operation of the sensor is based on the semiconductor surface field effect in MOS devices in which the electrochemical potentials (Fermi levels) of bio-compounds influence the electrical current flowing in a transistor-like device. The detected biomolecules are located within a Debye screening length of the gate insulator electrode. Calculations indicate that the proposed field effect device may be sensitive to less than 110 molecules per square micron of active sensor area. By reducing the active area to 100 nm square, which is within lithographic capabilities, the sensor may be able to detect the charge on one DNA molecule. The reason for the exploratory and high-risk status is that the PI has not yet performed a comparison of sensor responses with different types of DNA and other biomolecules. He has not yet measured the time resolved response. The sensitivity is unknown, and it is uncertain if the sensor can distinguish different concentrations and different types of DNA. For this SGER proposal, the PI wants to measure the sensor response with different types of DNA to determine its sensitivity and selectivity. The measurements will be calibrated with an optical fluorescence microscope. If it turns out that this bio-chemical sensor is a valuable instrument that can yield useful information on biomolecules, he plans to submit a full proposal for a comprehensive research program. A comprehensive proposal based on this sensor was submitted in November to the Nanoscience NIRT program, but was unsuccessful. The reviewers stated that a weakness was the lack of sufficient chemical and biological data on sensor operation. In this SGER proposal, the PI requests the funds to support a student and travel to obtain measurements of the sensor for different DNA molecules and reference solutions. These results would be used to justify further research and large funding programs doc16353 none Much good Internet research is being frustrated by an inability to deploy experimental router software at points in the network where it makes most sense. This problem affects a wide range of research, including routing protocols themselves, active queue management schemes, and so-called middlebox functionality such as intrusion detection systems. Research becomes unrealistic because of the difficulty of experimenting under real network conditions; often ideas never make it out of the network simulator. To address these problems, the XORP project will develop a complete open-source router software platform, from forwarding path to routing protocols, using an architecture that permits extensibility whilst at the same time providing stable well-performing basic router functionality. The vision is of an integrated router software platform running on off-the-shelf hardware, that is sufficiently well performing and reliable to see production service in a wide range of network conditions. The software architecture will be designed with extensibility in mind from the start. The goal is for Internet researchers needing access to router software to have a common platform for experimentation; this will provide all the basic router functionality that the researcher can then use to perform measurements or augment with new protocol functionality doc16354 none Proposat #: PI: Arun Phadke Institution: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Date: July 6, This workshop brings together 30 teams of awardees funded by NSF under the ETI initiative to discuss and disseminate the results of the exploratory research. The research targeted a broad class of complex engineering systems in the modern service industry: those that transport of people, goods, energy, and information, including highways, railways, air transport, shipping, gas-, fuel-, and water distribution pipelines, power distribution grids, communications networks and the Internet. The workshop, scheduled for August 13-14, in Washington, DC, is also intended to foster a sense of community among the participants which would lead to cross-fertilization of ideas belonging to the different fields of engineering doc16355 none The proposed workshop is a follow-up activity to a pilot effort funded by the EHR REC as a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) in FY that focused on evaluator capacity building and the importance of cultural context in conducting evaluations. This proposal builds on the strategies and activities implemented in the pilot workshop and will incorporate lessons learned and feedback from the pilot workshop participants. Major objectives for this workshop would be to provide participants with: 1. an introduction to the role and importance of program evaluation in urban school settings 2. a general overview of major evaluation theories approaches that have defined the field of educational evaluation 3. a closer look at a few emerging evaluation theories approaches that accept cultural context as an important factor in program evaluation. 4. preliminary considerations of culturally responsive approaches in the design and implementation of program evaluations. 5. A videotape and accompanying CD of the workshop will be developed by a professional media company for use in future professional development workshops and recruitment. The workshop participants and evaluation facilitators will receive copies of the videotape and CD doc16356 none A principal investigator from the University of Southern California will take advantage of two cutting-edge technologies for an investigation of benthic organic carbon cycling. Initially, the PI will create oxygen profiles utilizing genetically engineered bacteria (Shewanella sp.) which can be modified to perform carbon oxidation using either oxygen, or manganese oxide, or any combination of electron acceptors. Using these bacteria will allow the PI to construct oxygen profiles with control over organic substrate type distribution, oxidant availability distribution and bacterial community abundance distribution. The goal of this research is to provide a direct relationship between solute profiles observed in sediments and the type and abundance of bacteria needed to carry out the redox reactions to yield a given profile. In addition, the PI also will use a profiling X-ray fluorescence scanner in collaboration with a scientist from Germany, to determine Fe, Ca, Mn and Ti in laminated sediments from low-oxygen-sites off Southern California and Mexico at 2-3 mm intervals or 3-6 years of resolution. The objective of this study is to obtain high resolution images of changes in solid phase Fe, Mn and Ti and carbonate as a function of time to identify diagenetic fronts and interpret changes in ocean productivity doc16357 none This grant provides partial support for a Chapman Conference that is intended to bring together volcanologists, geophysicists, and marine geoscientists with interests in the formation of clastic volcanologic successions of the modern seafloor and in ancient successions, and in the processes and significance of explosive subaqueous eruptions in seafloor settings doc16358 none This workshop uses recognized experts in information technologies to improve our understanding of the appropriate use of information technology in sustainable development. We intend to look particularly closely at remote environments recently affected by conflict and natural disasters. Attention will be directed toward methods of collecting and relaying information between a remote local population and their environment, and we intend to evaluate both the methods and metrics of collection and the capability for remote, high-dimensional visualization of those complex local systems. The hypothesis is that collecting health information locally with the capability of remote visualization can offer a quantitative and predictive method for community analysis. With careful attention to design, and iterative feedback for the community, we expect to offer earlier recognition of a spectrum of possible threats. Information collected, analyzed, and iterated may improve health while guiding local development sustainability, thereby improving regional stability. Better understanding the ecology and epidemiology of locations distant in geography and in culture broadens our global insight and benefits national security doc16359 none The structure and stability of combustion processes in real mixtures is analyzed using mathematical methods for partial differential equations. Diffusion flames, premixed flames, and detonations are addressed. Through nondimensionalization of the conservation equations, appropriate parameters are identified, typically activation energies or ratios of reaction rates. Asymptotic analysis identifies limiting values and simplifies the conservation equations, enabling solution analytically without resort to numerical integration. Formulas are derived for quantities of interest such as burning velocities, ignition or extinction strain rates, autoignition delay times, and critical conditions for stability. Systems addressed include combustion of higher hydrocarbons and higher alcohols including production of nitrogen oxides, intrinsic detonation stability, and influences of strain on flames. Reduced kinetic schemes are derived and their influences on flame and detonation behaviors are analyzed doc16360 none Catalysis and design of catalysts is presently deemed to be of great practical importance. Natural enzymes are the most proficient catalysts that we are aware of. Some fifty years of research in the field of structural biochemistry has provided detailed structures of many enzymes by x-ray crystallography. Even X-ray structures of high resolution suffer in that they are only averages of many dynamic structures and structures present in less than 25% of the time are not included in the averaged structure. Molecular dynamic simulations (MDS) provide individual conformers and those present less than 25% of the time can be isolated. The general question of why enzymatic reactions are so efficient has been, in the mind of many, answered by the Pauling tenet that the transition state (TS) is bound to the enzyme in preference to the ground state substrates (S) thus stabilizing the TS. Using X-ray coordinates of enzyme species, secondary kinetic isotope effects and other means one can derive the structures of the enzyme bound S (E S) and transition state (E TS) and by MDS observe these structures and their dynamic motions. By this means one can determine if E TS is an appropriately tighter complex than is E S. Is the Pauling tenet a useful proposal? Does the emerging concept of the importance of correlative motions in E TS formation have value? This will be determined by examining the E S and E TS structures for a number of enzymes (diphtheria toxin NAD+ hydrolase, C. fasciculata nucleoside hydrolase, formate dehydogenase, liver alcohol dehydrogenase doc16361 none The objective of this research program is to develop a comprehensive framework for nonlinear model-based feedback control of multivariable hybrid nonlinear processes (i.e., processes with combined continuous dynamics and discrete events). Both lumped and spatially-distributed hybrid systems will be studies. Lyapunov theory will be employed to produce novel analytical nonlinear controller designs that deal explicitly with control actuator constraints and model uncertainty and enforce the desired stability, performance and robustness specifications in the closed-loop system. The motivation for the research is provided by: a) the common coupling of continuous process dynamics with discrete events, b) the abundance of nonlinearities and uncertainties in chemical process models coupled with the common occurrence of hard constraints on the capacity of control actuators, c) the lack of practical nonlinear control methods for hybrid chemical processes that can deal explicitly and simultaneously with nonlinearities, uncertainty and constraints and d) the increasing need to improve chemical process operation to reduce product variability and off-spec production, improve energy efficiency and reduce environmental impact. To realize the desired objective, the research will focus on the following projects: a) nonlinear and robust control of multivariable hybrid nonlinear processes with input constraints, b) output feedback implementation of the nonlinear and robust controllers using nonlinear state estimators, c) nonlinear and robust control of spatially-distributed hybrid processes, d) application of the nonlinear control algorithms to simulated lumped and spatially-distributed hybrid processes with uncertainty and actuator saturation, and e) development and experimental application of a real-time integrated measurement hybrid feedback control system to a plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) reactor. The research will provide fundamental insights into the limitations imposed by the presence of nonlinearities, uncertainty, constraints and discrete events on our ability to modify the dynamics of a chemical process, provide concrete control algorithms that can be readily implemented in practice, illustrate the application of the control methods and derive tuning guidelines for the implementation of the controllers, and produce a research monograph on nonlinear process control based on previous and current research of the PI in this area. The new control algorithms are expected to lead to significant improvement in the operation and performance of chemical process systems with combined continuous discrete dynamics, nonlinearities, uncertainty and constraints. The development of integrated measurement control systems for PECVD processes is expected to reduce spatial non-uniformity of the deposition, especially as wafer dimensions continue to increase and broaden the use of these processes in semiconductor manufacturing doc16362 none Numerous factors have driven the desire to promote more interdisciplinary research in the environmental sciences, including the desire to better understand the complex interactions among the many different natural and human systems that characterize the world and the need to better integrate the efforts of those researchers seeking to answer fundamental questions about various systems with those interesting advancing methods and techniques for the conduct of scientific research. Despite the acclaim accorded interdisciplinary research, relatively little scholarly attention has been given to dynamics that result in effective work that spans disciplinary boundaries. This project will use a multi-level, multi-method approach to study interdisciplinary collaboration as it relates to scientific production and innovation. The investigators will combine a socio-anthropological approach with an organizational perspective to examine how interdisciplinary collaboration transpires as well as when and how it leads to scientific production and innovation. This project will be a pilot study designed to test the effectiveness and tractability of a range of approaches on a sample of interdisciplinary centers that focus on environmental research and education and that have received NSF research support. The pilot will emphasize two strands if research. The first strand will focus on interdisciplinary research network structure. It will use techniques of social network analysis to explore structural relations among individuals in eight sample centers. Data used in this part of the pilot will be drawn from a variety of sources, including surveys of individual researchers, a census of ties among individuals within centers, and bibliometric analyses of citations in curriculum vitae. The second strand will focus on interdisciplinary research network dynamics. This strand will focus on interaction and organizational analyses of knowledge transfer, conversion, and integration. Special attention will be given to the connectedness, centrality, and roles and positions of different researchers and disciplines in the networks of two sample centers. Data will be gathered through the conduct of interviews, the review of artifacts and documents, and the observation of activities in the centers. The results of these activities will be used to generate white papers, to make presentations as major meetings of groups like the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Sociological Association, and to submit papers to scholarly journals like Social Studies of Science, Science Communication, Human Communication Research, Social Epistemology, and Organization Science. Through these analyses, the investigators expect to provide new insights into the personal, organizational, psychological, and intellectual components of the research environments and interactions within centers, and they expect to distinguish between factors that characterize successful interdisciplinary collaborations. This project will advance general knowledge of the factors that lead to successful interdisciplinary research, thereby facilitating such work among members of the myriad research communities who now are exploring collaborative work with each other. The project also should assist NSF and other funding agencies in assessing which proposed projects are most likely to generate new insights that span traditional disciplinary boundaries. This project is being supported with funds designated by NSF for the support of projects in Biocomplexity in the Environment doc16363 none This Collaborative Research Project will continue experiments that may be evidence for a metal-insulator (M-I) transition in two-dimensional systems of electrons in semiconductors. The M-I transtion has been thought by many to be forbidden on general theoretical grounds. The data, which are suggestive of a M-I transition, remains a mystery despite a growing number of theoretical and experimental papers on the subject. Important recent progress, made by two experimental groups involved in the present project, has shown that the M-I transition in silicon inversion layers may be connected with a ferromagnetic instability in two dimensions. To test this intriguing possibility, magnetoresistance measurements will be performed at ultra-low temperatures and high magnetic fields at the MicroKelvin facility of the NSF-supported National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Gainesville, Florida. The information sought will be crucial for the understanding of the nature of the enigmatic behavior observed in the two-dimensional electron gas systems. Graduate and undergraduate students participating in this project will receive training in a complex and important area of forefront physics involving cutting edge technology and semiconductor device structures. This will prepare them for a range of careers in industry, government or education. This Collaborative Research Project will investigate the properties of very high purity semiconductor materials in a MOSFET structure somewhat related to those found in many current electronic devices. Contrary to the widely-held expectation that no metallic phase is possible in such two dimensional semiconductors, experimental evidence has been obtained in the last few years that indicates there may be a transition from insulating to metallic behavior. The issue remains unresolved despite a growing number of theoretical and experimental papers on the subject, and poses a serious challenge to our understanding of the behavior of electrons in semiconductors. The principal investigators of the present project have been leading contributors to this field, and have independently obtained recent evidence that the metal-insulator transition may be associated with a tendency toward a ferromagnetic transition. To test this intriguing possibility, measurements will be performed at ultra-low temperatures and high magnetic fields at the MicroKelvin facility at NSF-supported National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Gainesville, Florida. Gainesville, Florida. The information obtained is expected to be crucial for the understanding of the nature of the enigmatic behavior observed in two dimensional semiconductors. Graduate and undergraduate students participating in this project, including some minority students, will receive training in a complex and important area of forefront physics involving cutting edge technology, including semiconductor device structures This will prepare them for a range of careers in industry, government or education doc16364 none The aim of this International symposium is to provide a forum for the discussion of developments in nonlinear and stochastic dynamics. Nonlinear systems are at the center of many engineering disciplines. Their analysis and design have made tremendous progress over the last decade with the development of new tools in nonlinear and stochastic dynamics. In turn, problems in nonlinear mechanics have stimulated important research in mathematical systems theory. Practical applications of fundamental results in these areas are beginning to appear across the entire spectrum of science. Research in this area is characterized by international and interdisciplinary cooperation. The symposium will review both fundamental theory and its applications in structural and mechanical systems, fluid-structure interactions, and other areas of mechanics, science and technology. The workshop is being organized and hosted for the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (IUTAM) by researchers at University Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, August 25-31, . Fifty speakers will be invited to present talks at this five-day symposium. These include speakers from the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Denmark, Italy, Russia, Austria, Poland, Czech Republic, Norway, India, China, Australia, South Africa, and Vietnam. The Proceedings of the Symposium will be published under the title IUTAM Symposium on NONLINEAR STOCHASTIC DYNAMICS by Kluwer Academic Publishers; the official designated publisher of International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics(IUTAM) Proceedings doc16365 none This proposal advocates the research and development of tools and techniques to detect, diagnose, and correct network faults in local broadcast domains, whether they are wired (Ethernet) or wireless (802.11b). These tools will provide the troubleshooter with a useful visual reference for these network domains and automate element-by-element investigation of performance along a network path. In addition, the wireless work will provide a standard authentication platform for both IPv4 and IPv6 wireless clients doc16366 none Mn-superoxide dismutase and Fe-superoxide dismutase (MnSOD and FeSOD) catalize alternating one-electron oxidation and reduction of the superoxide anion (O2 -), to molecular oxygen and hydrogen peroxide (O2 and H2O2). These enzymes extend our healthy life, and are closely related to enzymes that mediate degradation of toxic wastes, and synthesis of antibiotics. This research seeks to understand the determinants of SOD s catalytic activity. Previous work has shown that the SOD proteins can tune the reduction midpoint potential, Em , of the bound Fe2+ 3+ or Mn2+ 3+ ion over more than half a volt, thus providing potential access to a wide range of chemistry. The protein has been proposed to achieve this via hydrogen bonding between a conserved active site glutamine and a coordinated solvent molecule. The spectroscopic, structural and thermodynamic studies, on native enzymes and a few mutants, will elucidate the mechanism and magnitude of this hydrogen bonding s effect on the Em. In addition, the first characterizations of Mn-substituted FeSOD, whose Em is higher than 900 mV, will be carried out. This research will test a rational, chemical mechanism for redox tuning in metalloproteins. Many metalloenzymes besides SOD include a solvent molecule among the metal ion ligands, and as a rule this solvent also hydrogen bonds with protein residues. Thus, understanding gained as to the magnitude of redox tuning this can afford, and the extent to which it can be manipulated, will have general applicability doc16367 none Primates include all living prosimians, monkeys, apes, and humans. Much is known of the evolutionary history of this group but its origins remain obscure. The earliest recognized fossil primates appear suddenly on northern continents at the beginning of the Eocene, about 55 million years ago, but their place of origin and their relationships with other fossil mammal groups remains an unresolved question. Tree shrews, dermopterans (flying lemurs), and chiropterans (bats) all have been suggested as the closest living relatives of primates. Among fossil mammals, a Paleocene group called Plesiadapiformes has most often been cited as possible primate ancestors, based on shared tooth structures. Alternatively, plesiadapiforms have been linked by skull and limited skeletal evidence to flying lemurs. Recently, exceptionally well-preserved plesiadapiform skeletons have been found in Paleocene and Eocene freshwater limestones in the Clarks Fork Basin of Wyoming. These skeletons are remarkable for their completeness and their preservation of even the most delicate of anatomical structures. These skeletons represent four different families of plesiadapiforms including Carpolestidae, Micromomyidae, Paromomyidae, and Plesiadapidae. Analysis of these skeletons will allow for: (1) new functional interpretations of the positional behavior and locomotor pattern of Plesiadapiformes, (2), a test of the hypothesized plesiadapiform-dermopteran link and (3) a re-analysis of plesiadapiform-primate relationships. Initial results indicate that a diversity of unique positional behaviors is represented in the four plesiadapiform families represented. All groups appear to have been arboreal and their skeletons show a variety of adaptations for above-branch walking, vertical clinging, climbing, grasping, leaping, and suspension. These diverse skeletal attributes parallel the wide variety of dental specializations developed in plesiadapiforms. New data from these specimens will be used to reconstruct a model of the skeletal anatomy of primitive Primates doc16368 none While much progress has been made over the last decade in understanding the structural characteristics of severe weather systems, many questions remain unanswered on the critical factors that trigger deep convection. Recent work has shown that the dryline, a sharp horizontal gradient in moisture and often found over the south central United States in spring and early summer, creates a favorable environment for initiation of convection. This mesoscale phenomenon is significant because it is often linked to the occurrence of severe weather, which tends to develop along and to the east of the dryline. This is particularly true during a cold frontal approach, which furnishes a mechanism for the lifting of the moist air. To date however, there have been very few detailed studies of the moisture structure and evolution of the dryline. The Principal Investigators will perform a three year study to quantify the detailed vertical and horizontal moisture stratification of the pre-thunderstorm environment and drylines as well as the potential role of humidity in the development and initiation of convective storms using the capability of Raman lidar systems. They will use the Raman lidar to verify theoretical as well as numerical predictions of dryline characteristics dryline-front interactions and associated convection. This project relies on acquiring and utilizing Raman lidar observations of water vapor mixing ratio and aerosol profile data observed between and during several field missions at different parts of the U.S.A. Data from the International H20 Project (IHOP), planned for May-June in the southern Great Plains of the United states, and the Water Vapor Intensive Operations (WVIOP) conducted by the Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program, also will be utilized. A combination of analyses of existing data from Raman lidars, rawinsonde, radars, microwave radiometers, wind profilers and other conventional data sets and a numerical model will be used to achieve the objectives of this research. Dynamic, thermodynamic and moisture structure of convergence zones, frontal surfaces, and drylines as well as the temporal development of the boundary layer will be analyzed. Areas of focus include the effects of small-scale variations in the vertical structure of moisture during drylines and cold fronts on storm initiation and convection and the role of the structure of the mid-tropospheric layer in storm dynamics and initiation and or inhibition. The calculation of convective available potential energy and convective inhibition as well as simple model simulations of selected case studies to better understand the role of wind shear in the initiation of convection are included. The results of the research should provide a better understanding of the diurnal characteristics of the dryline, complement the theoretical predictions of convective initiation by proving or disproving the predicted quantities and eventually contribute towards improvements in the forecasting skills of severe weather conditions doc16369 none The researcher developed an international optically switched data mining testbed called the Tera Mining Testbed, linking the US, Canada and Amsterdam initially, and which supports the remote analysis and distributed mining of Gigabyte and Terabyte size data sets. The researcher developed specialized protocols for moving data efficiently over high performance networks without the necessity of network tuning by striping data across networks and using related methods. The researcher also developed high performance data servers for OC-XY networks and optical switched networks incorporating parallel network transport and parallel input output doc16370 none Kilbey, S. Michael Clemson University In this exploratory project the PI and Co-PI will focus on creating a series of branched amphiphilic block copolymers and investigating how their assembly, organization and structure are different than brushes formed form linear polymers. In order to maximize the productivity during this one-year exploratory project, the synthesis efforts will focus three types of architectures. The PI and Co-PI will synthesize comb-block, star-block copolymers and make proof-of-concept syntheses of A2A B and A3A B copolymers. The A2A B and A3A B copolymers are novel materials. In terms of characterization, the PI and Co-PI will focus on two key techniques: They will use the surface forces apparatus (SFA) to investigate the structure of brushes made from the aforementioned materials; they will also investigate the surface morphology and organization using atomic force microscopy (AFM). The former technique will focus on the layers as they are assembled from a selective solvent, and the latter technique will examine dried layers after the assembly process. The focus here is to explore how the connectivity and size of the new, branched polymers affects the organization and structure of the brush layer. This is an Exploratory GOALI grant in which the PI and Co-PI will collaborate with Dr. Victor P. Thalacker, Senior Laboratory Manager at 3M Corporate Process Technology Center in St. Paul, Minnesota doc16371 none Rob Jackson The recent genome projects and the growth of molecular biology in general have had an enormous impact on the biological sciences at cellular and subcellular scales. While systematic and evolutionary biologists have been quick to incorporate molecular advances in their research, plant ecologists have only recently begun using such approaches to discern how populations, communities and ecosystems function. This four-day workshop will bring together plant ecologists and molecular biologists to discuss ways to hasten the incorporation of molecular techniques into ecological studies and to foster interactions between the two groups. The workshop will address opportunities for collaborations and two-way interactions between molecular biologists and plant ecologists, and will explore particular needs of ecologists that may require development of new molecular tools. It will address training needs for ecology graduate students applying molecular approaches to ecological questions. The workshop will produce a joint publication that outlines specific ideas and methods for increasing the use of molecular approaches in ecological research doc16372 none The Internet has opened the door to new possibilities, but also brought with it new risks. Internet security is a widely recognized problem crossing the boundaries between mathematics, systems and sociology, and panaceas are unlikely. The goal of this proposal is to isolate and target a few components of the security problem that have real impact on Internet security in practice and are well-defined enough that clear, documented, and identifiable progress can be made within the time-frame and resources of the project. The chosen problems relate to cryptographic components of current and future Internet security protocols and standards, in technical areas such as authentication, access control, privacy, key distribution and key compromise, and to bridging the gap between cryptography and systems security. Providing high-quality, cost-efective cryptographic mechanisms, and tying them together se- curely,is a challenge. Cryptographic schemes are easy to specify but hard to validate, and notorious for containing bugs that take a long time to be discovered. This proposal will employ the practice- oriented provable-security approach toimprove security guarantees of cryptographic mechansisms. Developed by Bellare and Rogaway, this approach already has a track record in delivering prac- tical cryptography backed by theoretical guarantees. Past successes of this method include the HMAC andOAEP algorithms which have been adopted by numerous standards bodies and widely implemented. The first two problems that we propose to address are related to the security of protocols such as SSL. The researchers propose to investigate the security ofa mechanism that is common practice but not analyzed in theory, namely to use the same key for both asymmetric encryption and digital signatures. The researchers will seek to determine under what circumstances this is secure, with particular focus on existing standards. The researchers will then propose to investigate the security of the session key exchange protocols at the heart of security protocols like SSL, TLS or that of 3GPP, building on past work in provable security for session key exchange. The greatest threat to the security the researcher may hope to obtain from some cryptographic mechanism may simply be key exposure: an intruder breaks into the system and compromises the underlying key. This problem crosses the boundary between security and cryptography, and the next two problems proposed by the researcheris to consider two cryptographic approaches to it. The first is forward-security, whose goal is not to prevent key exposure, but to mitigate the damage it causes by making sure that past uses of a key are not compromised by its exposure. The researchers propose two specific pieces of research related to forward security, one in the domain of signatures and the other in the domain of pseudorandom number generation. The second problem relates to human-memorizable keys, or passwords. These have the advantage of not being subject to key exposure via breakin, but have other disadvantages, most notably being subject to dictionary attack. Several corporations have proposed some form of server-aided, password-based authentication. The researcher looks into the security of some of the potential mechanisms to this end doc16373 none The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchically distributed database that provides information fundamental to Internet operations, such as translating between human readable host names and Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Due to the importance of the information served by DNS, there is a strong demand for securing communication within the DNS system. The current (insecure) DNS does not prevent attackers from modifying or injecting DNS messages. Users accessing hosts on the Internet rely on the correct translation of host names to IP addresses by the DNS. A typical attack, referred to as DNS spoofing, allows an attacker to manipulate DNS answers on their way to the users. If an attacker makes changes in the DNS tables of a single server, those changes will propagate across the Internet as a viral infection. Increasingly, DNS is also being used to perform load distribution among replicated servers. For instance, companies such as Akamai have used DNS to provide Web content distribution. Moreover, there is consensus that since DNS is a global and available database, it can be employed as a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) which would enable e-commerce applications. Securing DNS means providing data origin authentication and integrity protection. Existing proposals for securing DNS are mainly based on public-key cryptography. In this proposal, the researcher describes a new approach based on standard symmetric (or secret-key) cryptographic techniques. The researcher introduces the concept of DNS symmetric certificate that are used to create a trusted path from the DNS root server to a server that is authoritative for a portion of the DNS tree. This strategy is very similar to the one introduced by Davis and Swick and symmetric certificates can be seen as a sort of tickets in the Kerberos system which create a trusted path from the authentication server to the destination server going through the ticket-granting server. DNS symmetric certificate are as manageable as public-key certificates with the exception that they cannot be shared, which is not generally required in the DNS system. The project solution enables a wide range of secure services previously believed impractical or too difficult to manage, such as mutual authentication and key revocation. Moreover, the gain in terms of computational complexity, network traffic, and storage requirements is impressive when compared with public-key cryptography based approaches. The research has clear ideas on how to define a secure DNS system based on symmetric-key cryptography. The researcher proposes to build such a system and make public the prototype implementation. The second part of the proposed research, would focus on a still unresolved problem: A DNS server represents a single point of attack which could easily be compromised. The researcher would like to investigate the possibility to distribute the role of a single DNS server among several servers. The research proposes a proactive DNS system that can survive component failures (whether malicious or not) by combining standard techniques of decentralized storage and dynamic self-maintenance. The researchers approach would allow DNS servers to automatically recover from possible, undetected break-ins and then maintain uninterrupted security. The researchers propose to use the proactive security model, which provides a method for maintaining the overall security of a system even when individual components are repeatedly broken into and controlled by an attacker, as long as not too many servers are compromised at the same time. The approach employed by the proactive security model is to first distribute the cryptographic capabilities among several servers, next have the server periodically engage in a refreshment protocol. Information gathered by an attacker before a refreshment period becomes useless to attack the system in the future. The researcher proposes to define, and build, an architecture that combines decentralized storage system technologies, data redundancy and encoding, and dynamic self-maintenance to create survivable DNS servers based on the proactive security model doc16374 none PI Name: William J. Boecklen Institution: New Mexico State University The importance of endophytic fungi (fungi that live within the leaves of plants) in mediating interactions between host plants, insect herbivores, and the natural enemies of herbivores (predators and parasitoids) is poorly understood in natural systems. The proposed research will examine both direct and indirect effects of endophytic fungi on plant herbivore interactions in a southwestern oak (Quercus gambelii) by using a combination of field sampling, chemical analyses, and controlled field experiments. In addition, the influence of environmental variation on the outcome of antagonistic interactions between endophytic fungi and interactions between endophytes and herbivores will be tested using field inoculations of fungal species onto oak hosts. The proposed research will contribute to our understanding of plant-herbivore interactions, and will help identify factors that influence plant susceptibility to herbivore attack. By understanding how herbivores respond to plants bearing endophytic fungi, results of this research will provide important insights into developing new strains of pest-resistant crop plants. In addition, the results of this research will provide background data on the potential use of endophytic fungi as biocontrol agents against insect herbivores doc16375 none This project, submitted under the Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) program, explores an emerging issue in the relationship between law and bureaucratic institutions, namely, the shift from public to private arrangements for the production of welfare law. The private domain has assumed new significance in the aftermath of welfare reform, which has produced a virtual explosion in private contracting of public welfare functions relating to welfare s work provisions. This exploratory project investigates the private construction of law within contract bureaucracies, agencies that perform essentially public welfare functions but do so outside the organizational boundaries of government. It extends research on the informal institutional practices through which law acquires specific meaning beyond the public sector. As a study of the construction of practical legal meaning, this inquiry is concerned, not with legal ideals or intent, but with the creation of legal realities. Case study research will be conducted in two private organizations contracted to provide welfare-to-work services. The cases will be purposefully selected to permit comparison with the researcher s public agency studies and to allow comparison with each other. This inquiry will utilize the methodology of street-level analysis, combining in-depth interview techniques often used by organization researchers with direct observation more commonly used in ethnography. The objective of this form of analysis is to reconstruct agency practice in terms of its own internal logic and to explain the particular form that law takes in specific settings doc16363 none This Collaborative Research Project will continue experiments that may be evidence for a metal-insulator (M-I) transition in two-dimensional systems of electrons in semiconductors. The M-I transtion has been thought by many to be forbidden on general theoretical grounds. The data, which are suggestive of a M-I transition, remains a mystery despite a growing number of theoretical and experimental papers on the subject. Important recent progress, made by two experimental groups involved in the present project, has shown that the M-I transition in silicon inversion layers may be connected with a ferromagnetic instability in two dimensions. To test this intriguing possibility, magnetoresistance measurements will be performed at ultra-low temperatures and high magnetic fields at the MicroKelvin facility of the NSF-supported National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Gainesville, Florida. The information sought will be crucial for the understanding of the nature of the enigmatic behavior observed in the two-dimensional electron gas systems. Graduate and undergraduate students participating in this project will receive training in a complex and important area of forefront physics involving cutting edge technology and semiconductor device structures. This will prepare them for a range of careers in industry, government or education. This Collaborative Research Project will investigate the properties of very high purity semiconductor materials in a MOSFET structure somewhat related to those found in many current electronic devices. Contrary to the widely-held expectation that no metallic phase is possible in such two dimensional semiconductors, experimental evidence has been obtained in the last few years that indicates there may be a transition from insulating to metallic behavior. The issue remains unresolved despite a growing number of theoretical and experimental papers on the subject, and poses a serious challenge to our understanding of the behavior of electrons in semiconductors. The principal investigators of the present project have been leading contributors to this field, and have independently obtained recent evidence that the metal-insulator transition may be associated with a tendency toward a ferromagnetic transition. To test this intriguing possibility, measurements will be performed at ultra-low temperatures and high magnetic fields at the MicroKelvin facility at NSF-supported National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Gainesville, Florida. Gainesville, Florida. The information obtained is expected to be crucial for the understanding of the nature of the enigmatic behavior observed in two dimensional semiconductors. Graduate and undergraduate students participating in this project, including some minority students, will receive training in a complex and important area of forefront physics involving cutting edge technology, including semiconductor device structures This will prepare them for a range of careers in industry, government or education doc16377 none The Educational Broadcasting Corporation (WNET) is researching and testing an experimental, short format television broadcast and Web project entitled, Science InSight. The goal of this experimental research is to determine if short-format television segments can successfully increase Americans understanding of and interest in new research in science and technology and, if they can, which of several possible formats is likely to be most successful. During this research and development phase, WNET will test the viability of the project model and develop and refine the model for use in a selected group of media venues such as the forthcoming PBS weekly public affairs program, Public Square. The specific activities to be undertaken in the research phase include: assembling an expert board of up to six advisors with expertise in science, science journalism and media; producing three experimental, short-format, program concept video segments of varying lengths for use as science information pieces in other media programs; conducting formal and informal testing and evaluation of these test formats for appeal, credibility, clarity, and comprehensibility of style and content; and identifying additional key potential distribution partners from television media, print, Web and science centers outlets doc16378 none To continue to address the goal of characterizing the behavior of HPC networks, the NLANR MNA group plans to extend and expand the Network Analysis Infrastructure (NAI) by deploying more sophisticated measurement architectures, meeting the needs of new measurement domains, and developing network analysis partnerships with established and developing researchers. Planned projects include the extension of the Active Measurement Project (AMP) into the campus domain, the repackaging of AMP for distribution, a wider range of measurements, and the development of new data analysis tools, including visualizations and automated event detection. The Passive Measurement and Analysis (PMA) project will be extended to allow detailed study of packet flows through a router and across an end-to-end path. Other developments will include PMA measurements focused on coordinated measurement, allowing the behavior of parts of the network to be understood as they relate to one another, as well as measurements of higher speed network paths. With these developments, the NAI will continue to be an excellent platform and source of research data and methods from which other researchers (including students) can build their own projects and with which systems engineers and administrators can improve their networks doc16379 none The NLANR Distributed Applications Support Team is focused on supporting researchers and research communities in the use of resources embedded within high-performance networks and the middleware-based Grid environments that depend on those networks. This proposal sets forth a plan for the next stage for this leading edge team, building on previous efforts and assisting in the maturing of user communities in the use of distributed resources connected by advanced networks. This includes the development and extension of end-user and network engineer oriented tools for both high-bandwidth optical networks and low-bandwidth wireless networks, which will be the critical network components for advanced applications in the next several decades. Support functions will evolve from a focus on specific projects to being a community support organization fostering the development, support, and growth of a global community of network engineers and network support staff working to advance networking in support of global science. Outreach efforts will be expanded in raising awareness in new and emerging communities, such as those associated with major NSF MRE funding, of the dependencies these projects have with respect to networking technologies doc16380 none Pervasive Information Communities Organization (PICO) is a framework to create mission-oriented dynamic communities of software agents that perform tasks on behalf of users and devices. PICO provides automated continual services to improve quality of life, and to utilize resources efficiently by enhancing existing Internet services. PICO enabled Internet will be used effectively in many dynamically changing time-critical applications that demand proactive real-time collaborations among physical devices, software agents, and personnel in heterogeneous environments. The main components of PICO are software entities, called delegents (intelligent delegates) and hardware entities, called camileuns (connected, adaptive, mobile, intelligent, learned, efficient, ubiquitous nodes). The novel features of PICO include: i) creation of mission-oriented dynamic communities of software agents, ii) QoS management for just-in-time communication and proactive collaboration among communities, and iii) adaptability to dynamic environments through context- and location-awareness. As a pervasive computing paradigm, PICO has applications in many domains such as telemedicine, the military, crisis management, and many day-to-day activities. In this project the researchers focus on the design and development of PICO, and investigate its applicability as a platform for distributed collaborations. Through telemedicine applications, the researchers demonstrate the full potential of PICO as an Internet enhancement framework that is not only unique, simple, and versatile, but can also work with current and future hardware software tools. Specifically, the proposed tasks include: formal specifications, design, and development of PICO architecture; requirements analysis for telemedicine scenario; QoS and resource management; PICO prototype development; and validation, performance evaluation and benchmarking. PICO-enabled pervasive environments will revolutionize the way the Internet is being used, enhance quality of life and promote user-centric applications. The PICO project will result in the training of students in pervasive computing, high quality masters and doctoral theses, and transfer of technology to health care providers, professionals and other researchers doc16381 none NetFS is a file system interface to the network configuration parameters of an operating system. All network configuration is performed by file operations, thus inheriting file system protection, including limited user and group access, as well as support for hierarchies, which more readily support virtual networks. This results in fine-grained resource protection for individual network settings, providing in a safe environment in which applications can have controlled access to limited subsets of network configuration and control, such as routing tables, interface configurations, IP security associations, and firewall rules. NetFS also provides an interface that unifies access to these networking parameters of the operating system under a portable file system paradigm. This unified controlled interface also more readily supports advanced virtual networking, where individual applications are attached to different subsets of network infrastructure to support concurrent participation in multiple coalitions doc16382 none A planning grant (SGER) is sought to develop a national curriculum in nuclear fission power engineering that would serve as a certificate-based, minor concentration for undergraduate students majoring in traditional engineering degree programs. With the renewed interest in nuclear power as a key component of the nations energy portfolio, there is growing concern about the availability of engineers trained in nuclear technology in view of the very significant erosion in university nuclear engineering programs and facilities over the past two decades. Even with a rapid infusion of new resources, the time required to rebuild the necessary faculties and facilities and stimulate student interest makes it highly unlikely that conventional nuclear engineering programs can provide a flow of graduates adequate to meet the near-term needs of industry and the federal government. We propose to form a team of faculty members drawn from the leading nuclear engineering programs in the nation to develop a minor concentration in nuclear fission power engineering that colleges and universities could offer to students enrolled in conventional undergraduate engineering degree programs (e.g., mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, industrial engineering, materials science and engineering, and computer engineering). This effort would augment nuclear engineering graduates in the near-term and supplement the growth of nuclear engineering majors in the long-term. This multiple-course nuclear power curriculum would include a summer practicum involving extensive laboratory experience (perhaps at a regional university reactor facility or national laboratory) taken between the junior and senior years of the undergraduate major. This proposed nuclear-power minor curriculum would be supported by extensive computer and network resources, including nuclear code simulation packages, web portals, and technology enhanced learning for on-campus and off-campus distance education. We believe that such a program has the potential for rapidly expanding the production of engineers and scientists capable of contributing to our nations nuclear energy programs since it would draw from the large cadre of engineering and science majors rather than the small enrollments of nuclear engineering degree programs. In fact, industry has long expressed interest in hiring nuclear engineers more broadly trained in general engineering majors such as mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer engineering. Furthermore, this approach is particularly attractive to universities since it would allow them to respond to growing national needs in nuclear energy without the necessity of major expansion of existing nuclear engineering faculty or facilities (unlikely in the current budget climate in any event). The program would be designed to be highly transportable, and since both the content and support of the proposed program would be provided by a team of faculty members drawn from leading nuclear engineering programs across the nation, individual institutions would not have to commit additional resources to build new capabilities. In particular, this effort would intends to produce teaching tools such as course resources, web-based lectures, and software simulations that could be used at institutions that do not have access to nuclear engineering faculty. Moreover, this effort could serve as a useful model in engineering education for addressing the need for engineers trained in other highly specialized areas such as integrated manufacturing, nanotechnology, quantum engineering, and biotechnology. An undergraduate minor concentration would allow students to prepare for careers in these fields without sacrificing the broader educational experience (and market opportunities) provided by a more conventional degree program. Furthermore, by developing a curriculum and supporting materials for a minor concentration using a team of national leaders in the given specialty, colleges and universities could offer such specialized curricula without significant additional investments in new faculty and facilities. In fact, the model we propose may well represent the future of engineering education as technical knowledge continues to fragment into subdisciplinary specialties and universities face growing constraints on resources for faculty and facilities doc16383 none uses only a few parameters to describe the important features of a system, and the evolution of the system can be well understood in terms of the evolution of only these few parameters. Various nonlinear optical systems of current technological interest, such as second harmonic generation, three-wave parametric interactions, stimulated Raman scattering, and two-photon propagation, will be studied. We seek to determine forms of collective modes that may be useful for these systems, and then to determine how parameter values for these collective modes may be gleaned from input data. New types of collective modes, called virtual solitons, have already been discovered in second harmonic generation. The purpose of this project is to develop new ways to express solutions of the complicated equations describing interactions of laser light with matter. Simple mathematical expressions that give exact solutions of these equations are known for some simple pulses and certain combinations of such pulses. Some of these pulses are the same type as the optical pulses that are used to transmit information in optical fibers. In this project, we will develop ways to express other solutions of the equations in a more explicit form than is currently available. In the process, we will find new classes of useful pulse forms and broaden the class of well-understood solutions doc16384 none This Advanced Training Institute in Social Psychology will provide intensive training in the use of immersive virtual environment technology as a methodological tool for social psychology. Institute Fellows will receive appropriate methodological, technology, software, and data collection training to enable them to use state-of-the-art immersive virtual technology to perform social psychology experiments. The advanced training institutes will take place during summers at the Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior at the University of California, Santa Barbara doc16385 none Molecular techniques are essential to some of today s most advanced and progressive research in physical anthropology. The broad applicability of molecular methodologies, combined with improved accessibility, means that invaluable training and research opportunities now exist for students and researchers. This award provides funds for an Automated DNA Analysis System in order to develop a molecular anthropology training and research program at the University of Florida (UF). The Department of Anthropology at UF is expanding its Bioanthropology program with an emphasis on developing a core series of graduate-level laboratory courses. Furthermore, the expansion of the Bioanthropology program has stimulated the development of several collaborative research and training projects within the Department of Anthropology and throughout the university. Dr. Mulligan has an active research program in which molecular techniques, specifically DNA sequence and fragment analysis, play a central role. A total of eight projects are currently funded (partially or fully). The requested instrumentation will provide improved accessibility of the technology to researchers and students with minimal experience in molecular methodology. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UF recognizes the merit of this opportunity and has agreed to match external funding obtained for the acquisition of an Automated DNA Analysis System doc16386 none There are over one thousand species of fish in the family Cichlidae (Cichlids) throughout the world, but surprisingly most of this diversity occurs in the great African lakes, Malawi (Nyasa), Tanganyika, and Victoria. These lakes are not of great age, in evolutionary terms, and biologists are puzzled over how the hundreds of unique Cichlid species, that exist in each of these lakes, could have arisen quickly. The traditional model of species formation assumes that separate species first begin as isolated populations that do not exchange genes. However, an important alternative model that could apply where there are not sharp barriers to migration, is that species arise without population separation. This model includes gene exchange between newly forming species, as well as natural selection acting to cause divergence. It is an interesting model, but difficult to test. In this project, researchers will test the model by applying a newly developed genetic procedure for detecting recent gene exchange between several Cichlid species from Lake Malawi. The Cichlids of Lake Malawi have become a model system for many researchers studying speciation. Yet the critical question here, as in other cases of recently formed species, is whether natural selection has caused the divergence directly, or whether species arise as completely separate populations that diverge separately. This question is fundamental to the understanding of how biological diversity arises doc16387 none The protein bacteriorhodopsin is being optimized for bioelectronic and photonic applications through site directed mutagenesis, random mutagenesis and directed evolution. The native protein has many characteristics that make it a nearly optimal photonic material, but further optimization is necessary to achieve competitive performance in computer applications. The goal is to generate protein variants that are optimized for holographic associative memories and large scale volumetric memories. The former memory system is based on Fourier-transform holography, and the protein will be optimized for thermal stability, quantum efficiency and holographic efficiency. The large scale volumetric memory is based on a branching reaction out of the main photocycle. The protein is being optimized for this application by increasing thermal stability, branching efficiency and long-term stability of the branched photoproduct. Genetic engineering is the best method for achieving all three goals simultaneously, and directed evolution is being studied as one possible method of rapidly achieving these goals simultaneously. This is a collaborative project involving researchers at the W. M. Keck Center for Molecular Electronics at Syracuse University and molecular biologists at the University of Connecticut doc16388 none This project uses functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to investigate biologically plausible brain mechanisms that produce economic behavior. Traditionally experiments in economics have taken place either in the field, where individual behavior can be observed before and after a treatment variable has been manipulated, or in behavioral laboratories where, in addition, there is greater control over incentives, information, and the rules of the game. The purpose of such experimentation is to better understand both the behavioral mechanisms that produce particular types of behavior, such as investor overconfidence in bull markets, and the resulting behavior of markets, such as price bubbles. While a great deal of progress has been made in understanding market behavior very little progress has been made in understanding individual behavior. Recent advances in functional brain imaging now makes it possible for economists and neuroscientists to collaborate to study how brain activity is linked to economic decision making. This project studies how the human brain is genetically designed, and environmentally influenced, to solve the problem of mutually advantageous cooperation. This research is likely to have a significant impact on economic thought, and institutional design, by linking observed economic behavior to the biological mechanisms that produce this behavior doc16389 none 7 David E. Salt The overall objective of this project is to identify genes involved in metal hyperaccumulation in metal-hyperaccumulating plants. These unique plant species are able to accumulate between 0.1 and 3% of their shoot dry biomass as Cd, Ni, Se or Zn depending on the species. Such characteristics could be invaluable in current efforts to use plants to clean metal-contaminated sites (phytoremediation). The known metal hyperaccumulators are not well suited for phytoremediation because of their small size and slow growth. However, they are a unique source of genes for metal hyperaccumulation. Over 25% of the known hyperaccumulator species are members of the Brassicaceae family, and as such they are related to Arabidopsis thaliana. By investigating the molecular genetics of metal hyperaccumulation in species related to A. thaliana, the investigators will utilize the technical and genetic resources developed during the Arabidopsis genome project, harnessing powerful functional genomics technologies to dissect metal hyperaccumulation at the genetic level. Metal hyperaccumulators in the Brassicaceae will be collected from around the world, and genes important in hyperaccumulation will be identified using three complementary approaches. Seed from approximately 40 accessions of over 20 different species of hyperaccumulators in the Brassicaceae family will be collected from North America, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Greece and Turkey. Accessions of metal hyperaccumulators found to be amenable to T-DNA insertional mutagenesis will be identified and over 100,000 genetic lines will be generated. In a forward genetic approach, these lines will be screened for mutants exhibiting metal-sensitivity and loss of metal-hyperaccumulation. T-DNA tagged genes from these mutants will be isolated, and their role in metal hyperaccumulation determined. In a reverse genetic approach, genomic DNA pools will be generated from these lines and screened by PCR to identify lines containing T-DNA insertions in genes already known or suspected to be involved in metal hyperaccumulation. The A. thaliana genome sequence will provide a rich source of candidate genes for this reverse genetic approach. In a third approach, cDNA expression libraries will be created in E. coli and yeast from hyperaccumulating species and screened for genes conferring heavy-metal resistance and sensitivity. Taken together these approaches will provide a comprehensive framework for the identification of genes involved in metal hyperaccumulation in plants. The set of genes identified in this project will provide a valuable resource for the future development of plants ideally suited for the phytoremediation of metal polluted sites. This project was funded through the Joint Program on Phytoremediation, co-sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program doc16390 none for Prof Aguirre s NSF Proposal # . Aguirre. This Small Grant for Exploratory Research is being awarded to the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware for project in Veracruz and Puebla, Mexico, in collaboration with Dr. Jesus Manuel Macias of CIESAS, Mexico City. The objectives of the project are to better understand: (1) the societal reactions to the extensive flooding that occurred in the two Mexican states in ; (2) the systems of warnings and evacuations that took place during these floods; (3) the extent to which established empirical generalizations in the social science of disasters regarding warnings and evacuations are applicable in a developing country. The project uses multiple methodologies to investigate these issues: (1) community survey of randomly selected residents in cities impacted by the floods; (2) content analysis of newspapers, agency reports, and other textual information on the societal reaction; (3) extended field work employing observational and intensive interviews of victims and officials; (4) the use of key informants to ascertain recent, post changes in the vulnerability of the communities doc16391 none Since the late s, people in agencies at multiple levels of government have sought to prepare for terrorist attacks. Attempts to form a functional response structure have been hampered by communication and coordination problems among practitioners unaccustomed to their new roles in national defense. This dissertation research project by a student of cultural anthropology is a multi-sited, ethnographic study of homeland defense in the United States. The research will be conducted in a policy-based community comprising those individuals working in local, state, and federal level organizations operating in the Boston, Massachusetts area. Based on network and domain analyses in conjunction with ethnographic interviews, the study will examine (1) how practitioners from varied backgrounds (police, medical personnel, FBI agents, firefighters) construct their models of homeland defense, (2) how those models affect interactions, and (3) how local experiences intersect with and potentially transform policies. It examines homeland defense as an area of daily practice and discourse through which traditional ideas of defense are challenged and either maintained or transformed. The project advances anthropological knowledge of defense as a culturally constructed institution, expands the application of practice theory, and addresses the methodological challenges of studying multi-sited organizations as parts of daily social life. Of particular relevance, the research has the potential to offer practical insights into communication barriers that hamper coordination of homeland defense efforts doc16392 none Organisms have developed numerous mechanisms for resisting predators and pathogens. These mechanisms are generally thought to incur a cost to the organism, such that predator resistant organisms are inferior competitors (relative to sensitive organisms) in the absence of predators. However, the causes and consequences of this tradeoff have proven difficult to examine in most experimental systems. Escherichia coli and its viral predators (bacteriophage) are ideal model organisms with which to study this tradeoff, because they are easy to propagate, they grow rapidly and because there is an abundance of background literature on their biology. Experiments will be performed that directly examine the genetic and physiological causes of the tradeoff between competitive ability and bacteriophage resistance in E.coli, and the effects of this tradeoff on populations and communities over short (ecological) and long (evolutionary) time scales under specific environmental conditions. The premise that there is a tradeoff between resistance and competitive ability forms the basis for numerous hypotheses on the origin of biodiversity and the interaction of predators or pathogens and their prey. Understanding this tradeoff will have widespread value in both pure and applied sciences, including increasing the accuracy of predictions of climate change effects on biodiversity, the impact of foreign species introduction, and the evolution of virulence in human pathogens doc16393 none The primary goal of the Evergreen International Phage meeting is to provide a place where students and researchers studying bacterial and archaeal viruses can build strong international working relationships, leading to new insights and collaborations. All aspects of phage biology, such as genetics, regulatory mechanisms, the functioning of enzyme complexes involved in DNA synthesis, repair and shutting off of host functions, phage-host interactions in lytic and lysogenic cycles, morphogenesis and cell lysis, phage ecology and evolution, structures of phage proteins, and functional and comparative genomics are discussed. Senior scientists start each session with an introductory talk, followed by younger scientists and students. The meeting is treated by Evergreen State College as an extension of their summer Undergraduate Research Program, and undergradute students at the College are involved in running the meeting. This provides them with the opportunity to interact with an international range of scientists doc16394 none The Science Museum of Minnesota is requesting $279,577, of a total budget of $339,074, to plan and conduct a four-day international conference exploring issues, current practices and future directions related to furthering public understanding of current research in science and technology. The conference will bring together leading museum professionals, scientific researchers, science journalists, television producers, web developers and others who are already engaged in preliminary work for such an effort and who stand to learn from each other s experiences. The conference will center on the role of museums in informing the public about research, but will include representatives from other media and institutions crucial to its success. The specific goals of the conference are to: Explore challenges and barriers that hinder the development of public understanding of research programs. Identify best practices and promising models, tools and technologies for presenting current research to the public. Develop partnership strategies for creating public understanding of research program collaborations across the museum, media and research communities. Identify strategies for selecting significant research stories that are relevant to the public. Develop funding strategies and operational approaches that help sustain a consistent public understanding of research effort. The project will be under the direction of David Chittenden, Vice President for Education at the Science Museum of Minnesota. Advisors to the project include: Carol Lynn Alpert, Museum of Science, Boston; John Beatty, Distinguished Teaching Professor, University of Minnesota; Graham Farmelo, Head of Science Communications, Science Museum of London; Richard Hudson, Twin Cities Public Television, St. Paul; Ken Keller, Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota; Rob Semper, The Exploratorium; David Ucko, Koshland Science Center and Science Outreach, National Academy of Sciences; and Bonnie VanDorn, Executive Director, Association of Science-Technology Centers doc16395 none This project explores the synthesis and physical and chemical characterization of a new class of materials, viz., ternary chalcogenides of the group 3 and group 4 transition and lanthanide metals. Many of these condensed cluster phases appear to be uniquely stabilized by strongly bound, late transition metals as interstitials in nominal clusters of the early metals, which is a new concept in solid state chemistry to be explored in this project. These cluster-interstitial combinations also allow insight into local interactions present around impurities in enigmatic intermetallic and pure metal systems, which is a new direction in chemistry. Physical properties of these will be defined by crystal structure studies, electronic conductivity, and magnetic susceptibility measurements, and with parallel extended-Hckel and density functional theory (band) calculations. Explorations for new examples of aperiodic quasicrystals and a new method for their direct structural definition are also planned. These studies afford advanced students training along new frontiers in techniques and chemistry. Participating undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students will get valuable training and experience in advanced methods in solid state chemistry. Half of the personnel have been women in recent years, and the proportion is presently two-thirds. The discovery and development of new materials, utilizing synthetic explorations to uncover new and unprecedented solid compounds, structures and properties is crucial to advancing materials science. Successful syntheses often involve specialized techniques, conditions, and exotic containers that are not widely employed and, since the availability of new materials is a high priority in both industry and academia, students trained in these areas typically compete very well in the job market doc16396 none This award renews support of the International Collection of Vesicular-Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi (INVAM) at West Virginia University Research Collection. The collected fungi are soil-borne organisms that form mutualistic symbiotic associations with the roots of at least 80% of all terrestrial plant species. INVAM is the largest public collection of such fungi, with accessions at present. This award provides support to INVAM s continued operation of the collection. This includes characterization and preservation of collected germplasm , distribution of germplasm sources to user groups worldwide, centralization of information in an extensive Internet website, and education and training related to use and operation of the collection. In addition, this award will support the implementation of lyophilization and other long-term storage means to circumvent the use of serial culture doc16397 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Michener at University of New Mexico to develop the informatics framework that can facilitate storage, discovery, and access to the strategic environmental information resources that are collectively held at North American biological field stations. Project objectives will be accomplished through two integrated networking activities: (1) a research focus that encompasses five inter-related resource discovery components and (2) an intensive training component that provides field station personnel with a solid foundation in the computational and informatics skills that are critical for developing, archiving, managing, and communicating data and information resources. In so doing, communication, discovery and exchange of data and information will be facilitated among scientists and students, integration and synthesis in field biology will be enabled, and the incipient value of the enormous data resources at biological field stations can begin to be realized. Research activities include the development of five databases that will support discovery of biological data and information resources at field stations. In particular, the research team will: (1) establish a North American Field Station Data Registry and Repository; (2) initiate a Thesaurus for Field Biology; (3) develop a Site Characteristics Database for North American Field Stations; (4) create a Bibliography of North American Field Station Publications; and (5) develop a WWW-accessible Database of Field Station QA QC and Standard Methods. The team of investigators will coordinate development of the databases in conjunction with representatives of the Organization of Biological Field Stations, who comprise the project steering committee. In addition, the investigative team will coordinate the development of educational activities for field station personnel. These field station personnel will also contribute to database development activities. Education will principally focus on annual intensive (2-week) training workshops in ecological informatics that are developed around a series of course modules. Where appropriate, training modules will be made available on a web site to broaden the potential audience throughout the community of potential users. Biological field stations represent the premier facilities in North America where the most pressing environmental challenges facing science and society can be directly confronted and understood through research and education. These challenges include maintenance of biodiversity, ecological sustainability, environmental forecasting, restoration and rehabilitation of damaged ecosystems, the outbreak and spread of diseases and control of invasive species. Research Coordination Network activities supported in this project will enable discovery of the critical information resources that are held at biological field stations. These resources will facilitate synthesis in ecology-leading to a better understanding of our natural environment, sound natural resources management, and a more sustainable quality of life. The project management plan and the composition of the core research team and steering committee are designed to benefit the largest possible number of biological field stations in North America and their associated field biologists and students, to amplify research results to the international community, to promote an interdisciplinary perspective in field biology, and to enhance workforce diversity doc16398 none Bao This award provides partial support (55%) for the acquisition of a CO2-laser fluorination system and an isotope-ratio mass spectrometer (IRMS) system for multiple stable isotope analyses (e.g., O, S & N) for geological and environmental samples. These facilities will be installed and operated in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the Louisiana State University (LSU). This acquisition will greatly improve LSU s existing research infrastructure and enhance current and planned research capabilities of the LSU geochemistry group. In addition, the facilities provide excellent science education and training platform for undergraduate students. The Principal Investigator (PI), Dr. Huiming Bao, recently joined the Department as an Assistant Professor. The instruments will be the primary tool for Bao s research programs in multiple isotope geochemistries of oxygen (all three isotopes: 16O, 17O, & 18O), sulfur (all 4 isotopes: 32S, 33S, 34S, & 36S), and nitrogen (14N & 15N). The capabilities of these new instruments will be used in research and educational activities aimed at a better understanding of elemental cycles in the atmosphere and in surface environments. Immediate research plans include studies of long-term atmospheric deposition of sulfate and nitrate and their post-depositional mobility in Antarctic Dry Valley soil systems (in collaborating with Dr. Marchant at Boston University), oxygen and sulfur isotopic compositions of Archean sulfide and sulfate deposits in South Africa, and sulfate leached from recent and ancient volcanic ashes, all of which will benefit from the availability of a CO2-laser fluorination system and an IRMS that can offer efficient off-line on-line gas extractions and high-precision multiple isotopic analyses with minimal sample size doc16399 none The development of sea-ice parameterizations for use in general circulation models (GCMs) has historically been characterized by a focus on increasing the complexity of the parameterization. Currently, ice model development has involved adding previously un-represented or under-represented physics, such as melt ponds, ice ridging, etc. Increased physical complexity, however, is not the core issue in the GCM parameterization. In the case of parameterizing moist convection, parameterization is the link between that which provides a control upon the physical process being parameterized and the feedback the physical process provides. With sea-ice parameterizations, there does not currently appear to be an adequate understanding of how the large and small-scales interact. What the large-scale ultimately cares about, both a control and as a recipient of feedback, is not the microscale physical behavior per se, but rather what the parameterized process dynamically accomplishes. Preliminary work in adding a stochastic parameterization for winter leads to the ARCSyM Arctic regional climate model suggests that climate sensitivity to ice processes lies fundamentally in how the ice couples with large-scale atmosphere dynamics, and not so much in the ice model itself. In this project, very small perturbations to ice concentration can result in melting of nearly half of the January ice pack, and also appear to affect the development and evolution of synoptic cyclones. Since the sea-ice model reasonably emulates mean ice extent, the coupled model s sensitivity appears due to ice-atmosphere interactions and feedbacks doc16400 none This award supports theoretical research and education in the area of soft-condensed matter physics. Research will focus on two problems: (1) The key element in the theory of the self-assembly of macromolecular-and nano-crystals is a connection between purely repulsive potentials and area-minimizing, space-filling structures or honeycombs. This interaction is juxtaposed with entropic arguments that show that close-packed lattices are favored. While in two dimensions both close packing and perimeter minimization result in the same triangular lattice, in three dimensions there is a fundamental frustration between packing entropy and the area-minimizing lattices. The PI plans to further develop these ideas, to extend them to non-cubic lattices, and to make a closer connection between molecular details and this analogy. Molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo simulations provide tests of these ideas. (2) The PI plans to explore the nonlinear elasticity of layered systems. The energetics of defects is dramatically altered when one adds those nonlinearities required by rotational invariance -changing from exponentially decaying interactions to power laws. The PI will further explore this effect and employ novel linear decompositions of minimal surfaces as a starting point for variational calculations. This activity also contributes to postgraduate education in the theory of soft-condensed matter. %%% This award supports theoretical research and education in the area of soft-condensed matter physics on two projects. The first involves the study of the wide variety of crystal structures exhibited by molecular assemblies, such as diblock copolymers, dendritic polymers, and hyperstar polymers. The PI seeks to extend his previous work to understand these structures as a consequence of an additional interfacial interaction contribution to the free energy that arises from the interactions between the brush-like coats of these molecular assemblies. A firmer connection will be developed between this interaction and microscopic properties of polymers. This work has potential impact on fundamental science as well as on developing concepts to aid in designing structures in technologically important self-assembling materials. The second project is concerned with studying the role of defects in elastic layered systems when the elasticity of the layer is nonlinear doc16401 none Snakes have one of the most specialized feeding mechanisms among vertebrate animals. One of the key aspects of snake feeding is the presence of a venom delivery system in roughly one-fifth of the living snakes. Molecular and anatomical studies suggest that a venom delivery system has evolved independently in at least four snake lineages. The Viperidae (including pit-vipers and true vipers), the Elapidae (cobras and sea snakes), the Atractaspidae (Stiletto snakes from Africa), and several taxa - such as the boomslang - within the Colubridae have all evolved venom delivery systems. In recent years a suite of techniques were developed to study the mechanics of venom injection in one representative viper, the western diamondback rattlesnake (Crotalus atrox). The purpose of this grant is to apply these same techniques to the mechanics of venom delivery in representative elapids. This will be the first experimental analysis of venom expulsion in an elapid, and a comparison with the earlier studies will highlight the degree of functional convergence among snake venom delivery systems. The venom delivery system will be examined through four integrated projects on the kinematics, neuro-muscular control, functional morphology, and behavioral ecology of venom injection. The kinematics of venom expulsion will be studied using high-speed digital videography and computer-based image analysis techniques to document the degree to which the monocled cobra (Naja kaouthia) modulates its strike depending on such factors as the size of the target and the behavioral context of the strike. The kinematics of venom spitting by the red spitting cobra (N. pallida) will also be documented. In snakes the venom is expulsed through skeletal muscle contraction; by regulating the contractile state of the muscle the snake could control the amount of venom injected. The extrinsic venom gland musculature will be studied in N. kaouthia using anatomical techniques to document the gross and microscopic structure of the muscle and its innervation. Subsequent experimental analyses will combine muscle stimulation with measurements of venom flow and pressure to document any spatial functional specialization within the muscle, and the motor units within the muscle will be mapped using glycogen depletion. In cobras venom forced from the venom gland by muscle contraction flows through the venom duct into a series of soft tissue chambers which are surrounded by the fang sheath, a drape of connective tissue and epithelium. The functional morphology of this region will be studied in both N. kaouthia and N. pallida using gross and microscopic anatomy, radiopaque tracers (used to document venom barriers), cannulation experiments, and recordings of venom pressure. The behavioral ecology of venom injection will be studied by chronically implanting transonic flow probes onto the venom duct of N. kaouthia. Venom flow (measured with flow probes) will be synchronized with high-speed digital videography while the cobra strikes a variety of defensive and predatory targets. This will document the kinematics of venom flow during the strike and reveal the extent to which cobras inject differential volumes of venom depending on target size or behavioral context doc16402 none This research project, supported in the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, addresses the formation mechanisms of self-assembled monolayer thin films. Professor Daniel Schwartz and his group at the University of Colorado use a combination of methods to examine the detailed microscopic mechanism of monolayer growth, including two and three dimensional transport of molecules, the structure of the growing film, and the aggregation of molecules in the layer. Scanning probe microscopy is used to monitor the morphology of the growing monolayer, and reflection absorption infrared and X-ray scattering methods are used to provide molecular structure information. Phosphonic, sulfonic and carboxylic acid monolayers growing on mica and sapphire substrates are examined under a systematic variation of growth conditions. The overall goal of the research is to develop a detailed and quantitative model of the formation of self-assembled monolayers from solution. Organic thin films have important applications in material surface modification and as models for biological membrane systems. The detailed understanding of the mechanisms of growth of these self-assembled monolayer materials is the goal of this research project. With the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, the goal of this research project is to obtain molecular level information about the growth of a range of molecular acid monolayers on oxide substrates, and to develop a detailed model of the growth process. The results of this research will be useful in the understanding of these technologically important model systems, and in their subsequent design and application for the modification of material surfaces doc16403 none One of the major goals of neuroscience is to delineate the neural and molecular mechanisms important for learning and memory. A prominent type of learning is fear conditioning where one learns to be afraid of an aversive event and the signals that become associated with the event. Learning and memory of fear has important biological and psychological implications for animal survival and human interactions in society. Over the years, one part of the brain, called the amygdala, has been shown to be critical for fear learning as measured by numerous fear-related responses in animals and humans. While the amygdala is an integral part of a fear circuit or system, little is known about the molecular mechanisms of fear conditioning within the amygdala. Cascades of molecular events from neurotransmitters activating receptors and then signal transduction systems to the expression of genes and proteins are thought to underlie learning and memory. The objectives of this proposed research are to investigate the cellular and molecular mechanisms of learning and memory of fear within the amygdala. The participation of the major transduction systems in the amygdala will be investigated by selectively inhibiting four prominent transduction pathways pharmacologically and determining whether fear conditioning and gene expression are blocked. Additional experiments will determine which types of neurons in the amygdala have these changes in gene expression. The results will contribute important advances in our understanding of sequential cellular and molecular processes that underlie the phenomenon of learning and memory of fear doc16404 none Under the direction of Dr. Robert Blumenschine, Mr. Jackson Njau will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. The goal of his research is to understand how early humans behaved and utilized the environment ca. 1.7 million years ago. For many years a multidisciplinary team jointly headed by Dr. Blumenschine has examined a single stratum representing a ca. 50,000 year interval at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. The deposit contains early hominid stone tools as well as hominid and other faunal remains. It also offers a wealth of paleo-environmental data in the form of preserved animal tracks, fossil plant remains and geological and geochemical information. On this basis the team is working to reconstruct a detailed and accurate picture of the landscape and then to superimpose hominid-related remains on it. In this way one can gain insight into early human behavioral adaptations. Based on multiple lines of evidence the group knows that a significant portion of the region consisted of river and lake margin as well as other types of wetlands. However it lacks the ability to distinguish accurately among these. Mr. Njau will conduct a multipronged investigation to provide the necessary refinement. He will study a number of modern analog environments which range from alkaline lakeshore to spring fed marshes and in particular note the kinds of faunal assemblages associated with each. Since hippopotomi and crocodiles both modify such landscapes and predate on a wide range of species, they can leave a major mark. Mr. Njau will focus on both species and will conduct feeding experiments in which farm raised crocodile are provided with prey remains;their imprint on discarded bones noted. Mr. Njau will also examine prior excavated faunal assemblages from Olduvai to search for matches between experimental and observed patterns. This research is important for several reasons. It will provide a framework for an improved understanding of hominid behavior at one of the most important prehistoric sites in Africa. It will also yield modern analog data which are directly relevant to a wide range of paleoecological and archaeological questions. The award also provides a promising young scientist doc16405 none 01- Edwards The proposed project is a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) which will take advantage of a cruise of the Australian icebreaker RSV Aurora Australis in October to investigate the concentration of biologically active iron in the sea ice and its snow cover. Sea ice acts as a natural depository for wind-borne dust, but there is currently no reliable information on the magnitude of this source of iron for the production of phytoplankton in the upper layers of the Southern Ocean. Simple flux calculations suggest that this may be the dominant source, and up to three times as large as all other sources combined. The objective of this research is to evaluate both the concentration and bioavailability of iron in the seasonal sea ice of the Southern Ocean south of Australia. Sample data, when combined with other sea ice observations and sea ice drift models will greatly enhance our knowledge of antarctic iron biogeochemistry doc16406 none SES Proposal Technology in the Making of 20th Century Europe Thomas Misa, Illinois Institute of Technology This proposal supports the participation of American historians of technology in a large-scale, European-based study seeking to understand the roles of technology in the making of European society across the 20th century. The work undertaken focuses on conceptual and empirical research that will extend the European project -- and which is done in close collaboration with a network of European and North American scholars. The PIs intend the work outlined here, in both substantive and organizational ways, to help the field of STS speak to vital public concerns about the role of technology in society. More specifically, the project is intended to generate new knowledge about technology s role in 20th-century Europe, greater visibility and coherence for European studies of technology in the U.S., and a better comparative understanding of U.S. developments. These collaborative efforts may serve as a model for STS research that is transnational in topic, organization, and method. Specific activities include the following: [a] coordination and integration of the European project as a whole, with a goal of refining concepts and methods for conducting detailed empirical research related to big questions about technology in complex historical processes; [b] work on the cities theme of the larger project -- involving research, coordination, workshops, and publications; and [c] similar work on the colonialism theme of the project. The PI and co-PI are already deeply involved in the European network; through workshops and other efforts, the project seeks to encourage broader participation by other U.S. scholars doc16407 none Guggenheim Funds from this grant will support an upgrade to the single-crystal X-ray diffraction (XRD) capabilities of the University of Illinois at Chicago. A CCD detector equipped XRD will replace an aging Picker instrument (vintage ) in Earth and Environmental Sciences (E&ES) and a Nonius diffractometer in Chemistry, and updates the capabilities of these laboratories. The system will allow for research that is not now possible including study of much smaller crystals, a reduction in search time for single crystals suitable for study, and rapid data collection during high-temperature experiments, especially for phyllosilicate studies. These studies often involve materials with high numbers of defects, where smaller crystallite sizes and a reduction in search time will increase productivity. In addition, the use of smaller crystals will allow new materials to be studied in-house. The E&ES X-ray laboratory has served as a major university and regional facility in the Chicago metropolitan area. Routine use of the facility is made by the Departments of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Dentistry, Civil Engineering, Physics, and the Research Resources Center, in addition to visitors from outside the University. The system will provide single crystal capabilities that will substantially increase usage of the facility by a new group of researchers doc16408 none Based on the theoretical framework of human behavioral ecology, this research will examine the importance of community-level variation in food sharing patterns, and the relationship between intra-community sharing and extra-community trading of meat resources. The importance of household-level factors in food sharing patterns has been investigated previously, but little attention has been given to differences among communities. Therefore, this research focuses on the contextual variation across two different Huaorani communities located within the same region of the Ecuadorian Amazon, and the role that this community-level variation has in predicting food sharing patterns. The PI, a graduate student in anthropology from the University of California at Davis, will investigate the hypotheses that 1) contextual differences between the two communities influence the extent of intra-community food sharing observed, and 2) the degree of intra-community sharing and the degree of extra-community trading are inversely related. Contextual factors to be considered include community layout, relatedness of households, and potential reproductive opportunities. Data will be collected through direct observation and structured interviews. In addition to providing doctoral training for a promising woman scientist, the research will contribute to understanding the potential impact of indigenous people s participation in market economies on local wildlife conservation doc16409 none The parameters defining the life history of an organism, for example, survival rates at different stages in life, birth rates, germination rates and dispersal rates, vary with the physical environment, such as weather, and also with the biological environment defined by the densities of organisms of different sorts. A general mathematical theory of life-history evolution will be developed that takes into account the interacting effects of a varying environment and organism densities. Mathematical models will be developed and investigated using probability theory, dynamical systems theory, and computer simulation. Particular emphasis will be placed on annual plant germination, growth, survival and reproductive relations in perennial organisms, and seasonal variation in growth of perennial plants. The life history of an organism is fundamental to the way it relates to its environment, and therefore the life history is fundamental to predicting what will happen to the organism as conditions change either through human intervention or natural causes. The complexity of the subject means that effective study requires a theoretical framework to generate hypotheses, which can then be tested empirically. Although separate theories for the effects of a varying physical environment and organism densities have been developed previously, there has been very limited attention to their interaction. The results of the study should have wide applicability to wild organisms (flora and fauna, pests, weeds and fisheries), with some applications also to crops and domestic animals doc16410 none Chabot Space and Science Center is developing and organizing a major traveling exhibit called Dragon Skies: Astronomical Instruments of Imperial China. The exhibit will consist of nine Chinese astronomical instruments, dating between and , as well as 25 smaller artifacts. In addition, a variety of interpretive materials and activities will be developed to enhance the exhibit. The PI, Michael Reynolds, has visited the Ancient Beijing Observatory and begun initial conversations with the staff there, resulting in tentative collaboration agreements. Subsequent to that visit, the Ancient Beijing Observatory has already determined which original instruments will be able to travel, has replicated several exhibits, and has compiled a collection of additional artifacts that will enhance the exhibit. The planning phase will be carried out by staff from Chabot, the Beijing Ancient Observatory, the Chinese Astronomical Society, and a team of advisors. Planning activities will include: Decide which aspects of exhibit development will be taken on by each partner. Determine what ancillary materials will need to be developed. Establish what interactive activities, such as hands-on activities or computer kiosks, will enhance the project. Determine what multimedia programs, such as an audio tour or planetarium shows, will increase the impact of the exhibit. Determine the translation needs for the exhibit and for the supplemental materials and programs. Arrange the logistics for the traveling exhibit. Establish criteria for venues that might display the exhibit and identify potential sites doc16411 none Well over 200 genomic sequencing efforts have been completed ranging from pathogens and exotic microbes, to yeast, rice and human, yielding a phenomenal array of sequence information, the comprehension of which is only just beginning. Understanding how a living cell works, however, obviously requires much more than simply determining the genome sequence and the number of genes. A fundamental problem is how to find genes and assign functions to these genes. Insights can be obtained by analyzing the sequences of the proteins that the genes encode using the available databases, but by such methods less than half of the genes in a given organism can be assigned a function with any degree of confidence. Hence, the roles of about half of the genes in any given genome is essentially unknown. This suggests that half of life s biochemistry is unknown. A major effort is therefore needed to assign biological roles to these unknown genes through functional genomic approaches. The goal of this research is to identify genes involved in carbon metabolism of Pyrococcus furiosus, an archaeon (archaebacterium) that grows optimally at 100C. The research will largely focus on finding genes involved in carbon metabolism in the unknown half of the microbial genome. The P. furiosus 1.908 Mb genome contains approximately 2,200 putative genes. The fundamental hypothesis to be tested is that many of the more than 1,000 genes of unknown function play key roles in primary carbon metabolism by as yet unknown mechanisms. This will be ascertained using DNA microarray analyses using all 2,200 genes in the P. furiosus genome. Preliminary data have shown that a surprisingly large number of the unknown genes are regulated by the carbon source used to grow the organism. The specific aims are a) to identify previously uncharacterized genes involved in the metabolism of carbohydrates, proteins and C-1 compounds by analyzing expression levels using cells grown under a wide variety of conditions, b) to confirm gene expression data by enzymatic assays and metabolite analyses, and c) to characterize the key enzymes by direct purification using P. furiosus biomass from 600 liter fermentations and by using recombinant proteins that are available through a complementary structural genomics effort with P. furiosus. It is anticipated that the results of this study will provide completely new insights into the metabolism of fixed carbon compounds and the role of what are currently hypothetical genes in both P. furiosus and in other organisms, including human doc16412 none Leon V. Kochian Contamination of soils with toxic heavy metals is a serious worldwide problem both for human health and agriculture. Cleanup of hazardous wastes by the currently used engineering-based technologies has been estimated to cost at least $400 billion in the U.S. alone. Recently, there has been considerable interest in the use of terrestrial plants as an alternative, green technology for the remediation of surface soils contaminated with toxic heavy metals. The principal behind phytoremediation is to grow plants on a contaminated site in much the same way crop plants are grown on agricultural soils. If the plants have an affinity for the heavy metals in the soil, they can extract the metals from the soils and accumulate them in the above-ground shoot biomass. These heavy metal-containing shoot tissues are then harvested and ashed to reduce their volume prior to storage in a waste repository. This plant growth and harvesting process is repeated until the level of contaminant in the soil is reduced to acceptable levels (usually a number of years). A major factor behind the recent interest in phytoremediation of metal polluted soils has been the growing awareness by the scientific community of the existence of a number of plant species that not only can tolerate high levels of toxic heavy metals in the soil, but actually can accumulate these metals to very high levels in the easily harvested above-ground shoot biomass. Over 200 terrestrial species have been reported that grow on high metal soils and can tolerate and accumulate high levels of heavy metals such as Zn, Cd, Cu, and Ni in their shoots. These plants have been coined hyperaccumulators; the very existence of these interesting metal hyperaccumulator species suggests that the genetic potential exists for phytoremediation to be successful. Most of these hyperaccumulator species, however, are small and slow growing, and because they produce limited shoot biomass their potential for large-scale decontamination of polluted soils is limited. Transferring the genes expressing the hyperaccumulating phenotype to higher shoot biomass-producing plants has been suggested as an avenue for enhancing the potential of phytoremediation as a viable commercial technology. Progress towards this goal, however, has been hindered by a lack of understanding of the basic molecular, biochemical and physiological mechanisms involved in heavy metal hyperaccumulation. One of the best known metal hyperaccumulators is Thlaspi caerulescens, a member of the cabbage family that can accumulate the heavy metals cadmium (Cd) and zinc (Zn) to extremely high levels in the shoot. Additionally, certain ecotypes of T. caerulescens have been reported to accumulate high levels of other heavy metals, including Ni and Co. The unique physiology of heavy metal transport and tolerance in Thlaspi caerulescens makes it a very interesting experimental system for basic research aimed at elucidating plant mechanisms and the associated genes controlling heavy metal hyperaccumulation. The goals of this research are to identify the basic mechanisms of heavy metal hyperaccumulation in plants, and to isolate and characterize the suite of genes that underly this hyperaccumulation trait in Thlaspi caerulescens. Dr. Kochian s group will use recent advances in plant molecular biology and genomics to identify both metal transporter genes involved in metal accumulation and tolerance, as well as genes involved in the production of low molecular weight organic compounds (e.g., peptides, organic genes, amino acids, metallothioneins, phytochelatins) that can bind and detoxify Zn and Cd in plant cells. Based on the recent sequencing and analysis of the Arabidopsis genome, it is now known that higher plants employ the same families of metal transporters recently identified and characterized in yeast, bacteria and mammals for metal accumulation and homeostasis. Dr. Kochian s group has cloned genes in T. caerulescens from these different metal transporter gene families and will characterize these transporters to determine their role in metal hyperaccumulation. This characterization will include determining in which plant tissue and cell type different genes are expressed, the membrane localization of transport proteins to help assign a potential role for each transporter, and the elucidation of the physiological function of individual metal transporters. They also are expressing T. caerulescens genes in yeast to look for genes conferring metal tolerance through the production of metal binding organic ligands. These approaches should allow the investigators to identify the suite of genes that confer heavy metal hyperaccumulation in T. caerulescens and to elucidate the molecular mechanism(s) for this trait. The ultimate goal of this research is to use these hyperaccumulation genes to develop transgenic plants that both are metal hyperaccumulators and produce high shoot biomass , and thus will be well suited for the phytoremediation of metal contaminated soils. This project was funded through the Joint Program on Phytoremediation, co-sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program doc16413 none This dissertation research is a comparative study of how those Maya communities associated with the archaeological zones, Chunchucmil and Chichen Itza, negotiate and experience their roles, meanings, and claims over archaeological patrimony in the context of the implementation of cultural heritage policy by national institutions, foreign archaeological projects, and international government organizations. Through ethnographic description of Maya conceptions of space, property, and ownership, the juridical establishment and regulation of archaeological zones, and the recent efforts to establish local cultural foundations with international ties, the research considers how current endeavors on the part of archaeologists and local communities to develop and preserve cultural heritage promote alternative privatizations of archaeological zones. This study engages the fields of Maya studies and cultural heritage studies, providing baseline criteria by which to comparatively study how Maya communities integrate with the modernizing influences of institutional, scientific, and commercial agencies of regional, national, and international scale. In addition to training a doctoral student in cultural anthropology, the findings of this research will contribute to understanding those factors that enhance or impede efforts to nationalize and or privatize cultural heritage doc16414 none This grant is co-funded by the Divisions of Materials Research, Molecular and Cellular Biology, and Physics. The grant supports theoretical research in biological physics. Many problems in biology have a component that involves statistical mechanics either directly because the question is on the molecular scale, or indirectly because a probablistic model is being used to decode a genomic sequence. The internal Watson-Crick base pairing of RNA defines its secondary structure which is better delineated energetically than the corresponding elements in proteins. A kinetic Monte Carlo code has recently been written to follow the formation of secondary structure for RNA s up to ~ 400 bases in length and includes non-nested configurations (pseudoknots). The code will be applied to the ends of the molecule as in recent experiments. Protein trafficing in cells involves numerous steps where proteins are sorted and targeted, e.g., in the Golgi substrate as processed in successive cisternae by different enzymes. In collaboration with a laboratory at NIH, models which allow for Golgi enzyme localization in a connected membrane system will be devised and tested. These are alternatives to the prevailing ideas that either the substrate lives in fixed compartments and the enzymes flux through the compartments via an active process of sorting and vesicle transport, or the enzymes are fixed and the substrates are actively transported. There are now multiple fluorescent proteins that can be expressed in live cells (sometimes as chimeras with native proteins), which allow for measurement of their number in one cell as a function of time. In conjunction with an experimental group at Rockefeller, we are modeling the stochastic noise (due to a small number of molecules) in transcription and translation. More generally we will collaborate on experiments and theory to assess whether stochastic effects impact the fitness of bacteria. The regulation of gene transcription by short, e.g., 10-30 bp, motifs to which proteins bind and integrate environmental signals is important to many areas of biology. An algorithm has been devised which finds improbable strings of bases, based on the frequency of shorter strings present in an iteratively constructed dictionary. It yielded many significant motifs when applied to yeast, and we intend to apply the algorithm to other organisms, as well as extend it to recognize fuzzy patterns. The comparison of related species is another way to recover regulatory motifs and we intend to apply a probablistic alignment code both to fit the evolution rate in noncoding sequence and assign probabilities to the regions which are more conserved than chance and thus functional. An algorithm to relate gene expression data directly to sequence and assign statistical significance has been tried on yeast and will be extended to other multicellualr organisms. %%% This grant is co-funded by the Divisions of Materials Research, Molecular and Cellular Biology, and Physics. The grant supports theoretical research in biological physics. Many problems in biology have a component that involves statistical mechanics either directly because the question is on the molecular scale, or indirectly because a probablistic model is being used to decode a genomic sequence. This research will investigate a variety of problems of current biological interest using techniques from theoretical condensed matter physics doc16415 none The project will be devoted to the growth of III-V diluted magnetic semi- conductors (III-V DMSs) ternary compounds in which the anions are re- placed with a member of the 3d-transition group. The motivation and goal of the program are to explore and establish the conditions for successful growth of single crystals which will be materials suitable for investigating the ex- traordinary physical phenomena originating in the large magnetic moments of 3d-transition-ion (3d-TMI) and their role as acceptors. The simultaneous presence of free holes and the large magnetic moments provide the ingredi- ents for novel phenomena associated with spin-polarized charge carriers. The growth will initially focus on the incorporation of Mn, Co and Fe into GaAs, InP, GaP and InSb by thermal diffusion and melt growth. Spectroscopic (Fourier Transform Infrared, Raman and photoluminescence, modulated re- flectivity transmission and magneto optic characterization at Purdue and those based on magnetic, electron-paramagnetic-resonance, and non-linear spectroscopy by international collaborators will provide invaluable feedback to the crystal grower. Another collaboration will address the production of ultrapure starting material and fabrication of substrates suitable for molec- ular beam epitaxy (MBE). Basic science and device related work will be ini- tiated during this phase. Besides the crystal growth program implemented by the Co-PI, students will participate in the characterization activities and will acquire a healthy appreciation of growth techniques. This exposure and involvement will prepare them for the scientific technical workforce of the 21st century. The aim of the program is to provide a steady state- supply of well characterized III-V diluted magnetic semiconductors to our ongoing research on collective and localized excitations of vibrational, electronic, and magnetic character. The access to bulk single crystals as well as material as MBE- grown epilayers and quantum well structures will give the participants the intense excitement of basic research significant in device applications doc16416 none Funds are requested to partially support U.S. researchers to attend the international workshop on underwater robotics for sea exploration and environmental monitoring. The workshop will be held in Rio de Janero, Brazil, September . The objective of the proposal is to provide an opportunity for U.S. researchers to participate in conference that will bring together experts as well as young researchers in the theory and applications of advanced robotics. The range of application areas include space, underwater, nuclear, tunneling, agriculture, medical and healthcare, civil engineering and construction, manufacturing and other applications. The conference program consists of plenary lectures, invited papers as well as contributed papers doc16417 none This project studies how labor market institutions affect labor market outcomes such as the level of unemployment, the duration of unemployment spells and wages. The divergence of European and American labor market experiences over the last twenty-five years in the presence of sharply different labor market institutions has motivated many earlier studies on this topic. This research finds that previous studies have overlooked a key channel through which labor market institutions affect labor market outcomes. In particular, this research finds that the uncertainty inherent in the hiring process is key to understanding how labor market institutions such as employment protection and wage compression affect outcomes. This finding also allows us to understand the differential evolution of European and American labor markets over the last twenty-five years. As the role of manufacturing began to diminish resources were shifted into new activities. Job creation in these new activities involved much more uncertainty than job creation using the established technologies that were embedded in activity in the manufacturing sector. As a result it is during this period that the European style labor market institutions started to have a large effect on the performance of European labor markets relative to the United States doc16418 none Dr. Davis will combine live imaging techniques with Drosophila genetics to visualize synapse remodeling in vivo and analyze the underlying molecular mechanisms that control synapse remodeling in real time. Synaptic connections are the sites of communication between neurons. The precise modification of synapses is essential to the correct wiring of neuronal circuitry during development and to the modification of neural circuits during adult plasticity. Despite the identification of myriad synaptic proteins, the mechanisms that control synaptic bouton formation, stabilization and retraction are still poorly understood. Dr. Davis will characterize, with fine temporal resolution, the sequence of events by which new synapses are assembled, stabilized and disassembled. Combined with a genetic analysis, these studies aim to identify important molecular mechanisms underlying the events of synapse remodeling. In previously published studies, Dr. Davis has demonstrated that mutations in the cell adhesion molecule Fasciclin II and the microtubule associated protein Futsch impair synaptic growth. Dr. Davis will now examine how these and other molecules affect synapse growth in real time. Preliminary data from Dr. Davis demonstrate that new presynaptic varicosities can be added to the nerve terminal as rapidly as 2 to 5 minutes and can be eliminated during normal development. These data challenge previous hypotheses regarding synaptic growth at this synapse, the Drosophila NMJ, that suggest that synaptic boutons are added slowly over the course of hours and, once added, are not eliminated. Dr. Davis now hypothesizes that presynaptic varicosities can form very rapidly, but only a subset of the newly formed varicosities become stabilized to form functional boutons. Dr. Davis further hypothesizes that, once stabilized, synaptic boutons are rarely eliminated. Thus, an essential growth regulatory event may be the determination of whether a new presynaptic varicosity is stabilized. The live imaging experiments proposed in this study will address this possibility in detail. Dr. Davis will also investigate the molecular mechanisms that determine whether newly formed synaptic boutons are stabilized or retracted. Preliminary data implicate the dynactin protein complex as an important regulator of synapse stabilization. Inhibition the dynactin complex causes the elimination of synaptic terminals at the NMJ. Live imaging combined with genetic analysis will precisely define how synapse elimination occurs in the dynactin mutations. Finally, Dr. Davis will use well characterized mutations that alter nerve and muscle activity to determine the roles of pre- and postsynaptic activity in the process of synaptic growth and elimination using live, in vivo imaging doc16419 none There is a considerable void of data on the frequency, patterns, and mechanisms of seed and pollen dispersal within and among natural plant populations. The goal of the research is to integrate empirical and theoretical approaches to the measurement dispersal over large distances. The project uses molecular genetic markers, a large mapped tropical forest plot in Panama, and several long-term environmental data sets to address fundamental questions about the patterns, processes, and mechanisms of seed and pollen dispersal in five tropical tree species. As humans continue to alter and fragment tropical forest landscapes, knowledge of those processes that regulate populations and maintain diverse communities is critical for predicting how these populations will respond in the future. Chief among the population processes that will determine the ecological and genetic response over time and space is dispersal. To our knowledge, this study is among the first and most comprehensive attempts to obtain direct measurements of both seed and pollen dispersal distances using genetic techniques. This study will directly inform conservationists and land managers as to the appropriate size of habitat required to maintain populations of tropical trees in light of the spatial extent of seed and pollen movement doc16420 none Internet Data Centers are built by clustered high performance servers, workstations, and PCs, where the size of the cluster ranges from LAN (local area networks) to WAN (wide area networks for metasystems and for grid computing). The data centers not only provide data searching storage services, but also provide large scale computing services. Effective resource management presents important and challenging research and development issues to be addressed in the areas of scalability and reliability. Cluster-based data centers provide us with tremendous opportunities for aggregating huge amounts of information and computing resources in a cost-effective way, but it is harder to build distributed data centers that are efficient. This exploratory award will investigate several areas of research in resource management in distributed systems based on the core technology of being able to monitor and predict the usage of resources in a distributed system: (1) development of a unified network and system information extraction tool for performance prediction, and data center resource utilization; (2) modeling of and profiling network behavior and activities; and (3) development of dynamic scheduling schemes and their implementations for optimal utilizations and management of global resources in Internet data centers including networks, memory, and I O systems. The result will be the identification of the most promising line of research for future investigations doc16421 none A symposium will be organized in conjunction with the opening of Michael Frayn s play Copenhagen in its four-week run in Washington, currently scheduled for February 26, through March 24, . The play reenacts possible events associated with an actual meeting between Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr in Nazi-occupied Denmark. The symposium will seek to ensure and expand the involvement of the general public and students in the science and drama of the play. There is a need to engage and inform the general public in the understanding and appreciation of science, scientists and the impact of science on our daily lives. The play Copenhagen, perhaps more than any science-based play, involves the audience in an understanding of the impact of the new physics. The symposium will be held about a week before the play opening and consists of three parts: 1- The Science and History Surrounding Copenhagen focused on the science in Copenhagen, and its modern day impact. 2- An Understanding of the Characters of the Play, with speakers who knew the three characters in the play, (Bohr, his wife Margrethe and Heisenberg) and. 3-Deconstructing Copenhagen, with the playwright, theater critics, writers and journalists examining the construction and dramatic elements of the play. The audience for the symposium is the general public with a strong emphasis on students. The impact of the symposium and the associate colloquia and seminars will extend well beyond the attendees through wide interest by the local press including, TV, radio and print. The extended colloquia and discussions will encourage debates and interdisciplinary learning opportunities by including the sciences (physics), the humanities (history), and the arts (theater doc16422 none In an effort to better characterize the four-dimensional distribution of water in the atmosphere with a view toward improving understanding of its impact on deep convection, the International H20 Project (IHOP- ) field experiment will take place over the Southern Great Plains during May and June of . The four focus areas of IHOP are: 1) quantitative precipitation forecasting (QPF); 2) convective initiation; 3) atmospheric boundary layer processes; and 4) instrumentation research. The Principal Investigators will conduct storm-scale research with particular emphasis on moisture sensitivity and data assimilation in the context of numerical quantitative precipitation forecasting. Specifically, they will: 1. Develop new and improved techniques, based particularly on variational approaches, for the analysis and assimilation of water and related diabatic fields (e.g., latent and sensible heating) at the scale of individual convective storms and their larger mesoscale clusters. 2. Study the impact of special and routinely available, high-resolution observations of water vapor and hydrometeor content on the forecasting of convective storm morphology and quantitative precipitation at resolutions of one to a few kilometers. Both forward and adjoint models will be used to assess sensitivity and data impact. 3. Develop and evaluate techniques for estimating error characteristics (i.e., error covariance matrices) of numerical forecasts at the convective scale to improve the quality of three-dimensional and four-dimensional variational data assimilation. 4. Apply newly developed single Doppler velocity and thermodynamic retrieval algorithms to mobile radar data collected during IHOP and assimilate the retrieved data into a forecast model. 5. Provide real-time, high resolution (2-3 km) analysis and forecasts for ranges between 6 and 12 hours, to assist the operational decision-making and targeting of mobile observations during the field phase of the IHOP. The project will provide much needed education and training for graduate students and a post-doc in the increasingly important areas of variational data assimilation, numerical weather prediction and ensemble forecasting. The research findings will have a direct path to operations through the PI s involvement as one of the lead scientists in the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model system development project. Although much of the work to be performed herein will use the Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms (CAPS) Advanced Regional Prediction System (ARPS) owing to its maturity and capability, the new WRF will be used whenever possible. Further, the results obtained here, and the software developed, will be applied to further the development of the WRF model as part of CAPS involvement in the WRF project doc16423 none John P. Miller-Montana State University-Algorithms for real-time decoding and modulation of neural spike trains-A grand challenge in neuroscience is to understand the biological basis of information processing in nervous systems. Three major goals facing sensory neuroscientists are a) to understand how sensory information is encoded in the activity patterns of neural ensembles, b) to understand how those activity patterns are decoded by cells at the subsequent processing stages, and c) to understand how computations (e.g. visual pattern recognition or oriented motor responses) are carried out on that decoded information. Two major goals of the research proposed here are a) to develop a formal, general approach toward achieving those goals, and b) to test and refine that approach by characterizing the functional organization and neural encoding scheme of a simple sensory system. These goals will be achieved through the development of a data-driven model of the system. The model will be formulated in terms of information processing units and information channels, rather than in terms of individual neurons. That is, the functional units in the model will be operators that carry out specific, independent computations (or information transformation operations) at a specific processing stage in the test nervous system, and the channels through which information is passed between these functional units will correspond to information channels in the Shannon sense doc16424 none Systemic Research, Inc. proposes to conduct a 24-month evaluative study (from October to September ). During the initial phase, comprehensive secondary data collection will be conducted from various sources, including past Core Data Elements (CDE) reports, Annual Reports submitted to NSF, other key indicators obtainable from the RSIs own web sites and relevant rural project reports. Systemic Research will develop a Rural Key Indicator Database (RKID) to organize both quantitative and qualitative longitudinal achievement databases over the project period of individual RSI sites. The study team will conduct two site visits each year to confirm reform implementation and to write relevant case stories based on observation. Based on completed RKID, both quantitative and qualitative data analysis will be performed to explore an inferential causal model. Study results will be disseminated in three publications: a two volume Rural Key Indicators of Science and Mathematics Education (Volume I for individual RSI progress report and Volume II for overall RSI progress reports); a rural education report in booklet format; and a RSI Evaluative Study Report including case stories of the four sites that were visited. All publications will be available in three different formats-- printed copy, CD-ROM, and web-based publication doc16425 none Today s Solutions in partnership with the Girl Scouts-Lone Star Council are using a planning grant to build a strong regional and national collaboration with Texas community colleges and five additional Girl Scout councils. The Council is building on a technology curriculum project pilot called The Edge. The original pilot program was developed for girls ages 6-17 and delivered primarily to elementary and middle school girls. The plan is to modify The Edge to address the needs of high school age girls, undergraduate women and women desiring an entry level technology job. The large project will focus on those in rural Texas counties, girls within the 200% of poverty level and girls that have English as a second language, to increase their technology skills and their interest in going to college. Austin Community College distance learning, St. Edward s University, University of Texas and the IC2 institute are eager to partner with Girl Scouts - Lone Star Council . The Council served 12,839 girls and 6,598 adults in fiscal year 99-00 doc16426 none The Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology (FASEB) conference entitled Post-Transcriptional Control of Gene Expression: Effectors of mRNA Decay will be held July 6-11, in Tucson, Arizona. The objective of this conference is to provide an opportunity for the cross-fertilization of ideas between workers studying mRNA decay in prokaryotes and eukaryotes. mRNA decay plays a major role in determining the level at which genes are expressed. Therefore, understanding the mechanisms of mRNA degradation becomes very important to understanding how genes are regulated. Among the topics planned for this conference are: (1) A keynote overview of mRNA decay at the start of the conference by Dr. Roy Parker (University of Arizona). (2) Multicomponent bacterial nucleases. (3) Multicomponent eukaroytic nucleases. (4) How mRNA transport and localization affect mRNA decay. (5) How translational accuracy affects mRNA decay, including how the premature termination of translation elicits mRNA decay. (6) Cis-acting mRNA sequences and their associated trans-acting factors that affect mRNA decay. (7) RNA as a tool and target for drug design doc16427 none Durrenberger This research tests the consequences of centralized vs. de-centralized organizations on union locals that represent health care workers in Chicago and in Pennsylvania. Using consensus analysis based on triads tests the researchers will test the hypothesis that union consciousness will be more developed among union members in more de-centralized organizations than in the more centralized ones. The results will advance our understanding of the relationship between the organization of power and the organization of cognitive structures, the relationship between organization structures and patterns of thought. The methodological contributions will be to further the development of consensus as a social science measurement technique, to relate it to ethnographic knowledge. The practical contributions will be to assess the differences between centralized and participatory organizations in general, and to inform unions about the implications for their members of these structures doc16428 none Anthropologists have long been interested in the life histories of women as they are embedded in culture and in understanding the social and biological processes underlying lifespan transitions such as puberty, birth, and menopause. The goal of this project is to better understand the natural history and daily experiences of the menopause transition in contemporary American women. Between and , 59 women, aged 45 to 50 at entry into the study, kept records of biological, psychological, and social events and experiences for one to five years. Unlike most previous studies of the perimenopause, which were cross-sectional or relied upon infrequent contact and relatively few measurements, the present study used daily checklists of events (e.g., stressors, exercise, sexual experiences, physical symptoms) and mood ratings, along with standardized psychosocial questionnaires and personal narratives, to obtain a full description of the experience and meaning of the menopause transition. This fine-grained information will allow the exploration of changes, processes, and interrelationships among factors that vary on a daily or weekly time scale, as well as the examination of processes that take place over time periods up to several years in length. In previous studies, the authors have demonstrated that a rich view into the lives of individual women can be obtained through the use of daily recording of selected variables. This is the next best thing to becoming participant observers in the classic anthropological sense by immersion in the experiences of each of the women whose lives are being followed. Information collected as part of this study includes over five million data points from the daily checklists in addition to extensive narrative descriptions of significant life events. Funding will allow analysis of these data using appropriate quantitative and qualitative techniques doc16429 none This Research Coordination Network, in the form of an International Institute without walls, is dedicated to the advancement of research and education in Neuromorphic engineering. Neuromorphic engineering is a young discipline in Bioengineering that is based on the design and fabrication on artificial neural systems, whose physical architecture and design principles are based on those of the biological nervous systems. The Aims of the Institute for Neuromorphic Engineering (INE) will be: 1) to foster the continuation and completion of specific collaborative interactions designated at the annual Workshop; 2) to organize smaller and highly focused meetings throughout the year to allow the exchange of ideas and discussion on designated topics, as well as to hold a mid-winter meeting to discuss and evaluate the progress of the INE; 3) to organize and expand the education activities beyond the confines of the Workshop to other participating institutions. The RCN members also will help organize the annual Telluride Workshop at which members and students will meet over three weeks for intensive research and teaching. The INE will have minimal permanent administrative staff and will have no permanent scientific staff, building, or equipment overheads. Instead, the INE will utilize the staff and facilities of its international member laboratories, which have a proven record of collaborative research doc16430 none This dissertation research project by an anthropologist at the University of Chicago examines how a dispersed Nigerian community maintains its Yoruba cultural identity through ritual performances of religious music in African as well as U.S. churches. The research focuses on the changes in cultural practices and transnational identities of Nigerian migrants through the performance of music, dance, and oratory in churches in Lagos and Chicago. The objectives of this ethnographic research are to describe and analyze the formal characteristics and aesthetic values of Yoruba church music, and to compare the effects of migration on local identities and practices. The methods to be used include participant observation, collection of demographic data, life histories, and migration profiles through surveys and interviews, and detailed ethno-musicological analysis of religious ceremonies. Through careful ethnographic study of the local as well as transnational networks produced through musical performance, this project will advance our understanding of the relationship between cultural and economic processes of transnationalism and globalization. Methodologically, the research will contribute to anthropological studies of music and ritual by focusing on the ways in which music structures and is structured by other ritual modes. Finally, the study will explicate the meanings of the term diaspora as a social scientific concept as well as a lived experience. In addition to contributing to the education of a young social scientist, the research will advance our knowledge of this region of Africa, and improve our understanding of how migrants preserve and modify their culture in both originating and receiving societies doc16431 none Under this project, test tube evolution is used to create molecular switches that serve as logic gates, and these chemically triggered switches are assembled into first-generation biomolecular computing devices. This project is creating new functional RNA and DNA molecules that perform as distinct types of logic gates. This advance in molecular hardware design is adding to the repertoire of molecular computing infrastructure and permitting the construction of more advanced molecular computing devices. As a demonstration of utility, these logic gates are assembled into molecular computing systems that can be used to add any two numbers. A combination of modular rational design and in vitro evolution is being used to create nucleic acid molecular switches that are analogous to electronic logic gates. This design strategy employs the process of Darwinian evolution, where molecular survival-of-the-fittest is used to identify unique RNA switches that have AND gate function. The kinetic characteristics of the selected RNAs are examined to identify robust constructs that can be altered to produce up to 1 trillion different AND gate species. To demonstrate the utility of these logic gates, they are assembled to create a functional architecture for a molecular computer that can add any two numbers. The result of the molecular computation is reported as pixels on a chip-like surface using radioisotope signaling. In addition, other RNA and DNA switches are created using similar strategies that perform as representatives of the remaining common logic gates doc16392 none Organisms have developed numerous mechanisms for resisting predators and pathogens. These mechanisms are generally thought to incur a cost to the organism, such that predator resistant organisms are inferior competitors (relative to sensitive organisms) in the absence of predators. However, the causes and consequences of this tradeoff have proven difficult to examine in most experimental systems. Escherichia coli and its viral predators (bacteriophage) are ideal model organisms with which to study this tradeoff, because they are easy to propagate, they grow rapidly and because there is an abundance of background literature on their biology. Experiments will be performed that directly examine the genetic and physiological causes of the tradeoff between competitive ability and bacteriophage resistance in E.coli, and the effects of this tradeoff on populations and communities over short (ecological) and long (evolutionary) time scales under specific environmental conditions. The premise that there is a tradeoff between resistance and competitive ability forms the basis for numerous hypotheses on the origin of biodiversity and the interaction of predators or pathogens and their prey. Understanding this tradeoff will have widespread value in both pure and applied sciences, including increasing the accuracy of predictions of climate change effects on biodiversity, the impact of foreign species introduction, and the evolution of virulence in human pathogens doc16433 none The objective of this project is to characterize a Nicotiana tabacum membrane transporter that may be responsible for the transport of alkaloids from their initial site of biosynthesis in roots to xylem tissue and for their final accumulation in leaves. This will be accomplished by using a gene fragment previously isolated during transcriptional profiling experiments as a hybridization probe to isolate the full-length cDNA. With this cDNA in hand, an extensive effort will be made to determine the tissue and intercellular localization patterns of the putative alkaloid transport protein, using both RNase protection assays and transgenic reporter gene fusions. Biochemical confirmation of alkaloid transport activity will be accomplished by heterologous expression of the putative alkaloid transporter in Xenopus oocytes and directly measuring alkaloid transport kinetics. Finally, in vivo modulation of the putative alkaloid transporter gene expression levels will be achieved using overexpression and antisense transgenic hairy root cultures to assess the effect on overall alkaloid accumulation levels. These experiments may lead to the first identification and molecular characterization of a postulated alkaloid transporter that is responsible for mobilizing alkaloids between their site of biosynthesis in specific root cell types towards their site of action in the leaves. This would be a significant contribution to understanding both how and why the site of biosynthesis of many plant secondary metabolites is often spatially separated from the site of action of these important defense compounds doc16434 none Folates are essential cofactors for one-carbon transfer reactions in all organisms. Unlike plants and microorganisms, humans cannot synthesize folates and so require them in the diet. A lack of folates is the world s most common nutrient deficiency and has grave consequences that include neural tube defects in infants and vascular disease in adults. Since plant foods are the single largest source of folates in human diets, enhancing plant folate content by metabolic engineering is an appealing way to improve human nutrition worldwide. At present too little is known about folate synthesis, catabolism, and regulation in plants to undertake the rational engineering of folate levels. This research addresses the missing basic biochemical knowledge and will take the first steps towards engineering itself. Of the nine enzymes specific to folate synthesis, only three have been cloned from plants. It is therefore planned to clone the other six enzymes by combining genomic approaches and functional complementation, and to biochemically characterize the recombinant proteins. Genomic sequence data indicate that some of these enzymes differ so strikingly in structure from their counterparts in other organisms that they are likely to have novel properties. The engineering work will explore the extent to which flux in the whole folate pathway is regulated via the committing enzymes of its pterin and p-aminobenzoate branches. These enzymes will be overexpressed singly and together, relying primarily upon non-plant enzymes that are expected to be insensitive to end-product inhibition. A second engineering approach will seek to divert folates towards overaccumulation in a stable form (5-formyltetrahydrofolate) by using antisense RNA to block recycling of this compound. Folates and pathway intermediates in engineered plants will be quantified by HPLC, and pathway flux will be measured using radiolabeled precursors. Folate catabolism will also be investigated using radiolabeled substrates to establish the degradative reactions that occur and the rate at which the folate pool turns over. Tomato will be used for both the cloning and the engineering work, because: (a) Fruits have lower folate contents than leaves, showing that enhancement is in principle possible. (b) Folates are subject to huge losses during cooking, making fruits and fruit juices an efficient vehicle to deliver folates because they are consumed fresh. (c) Tomato is readily transformable and is a major world crop. It is also possible that the tomato fruit will tolerate unphysiologically high folate levels because it is an organ programmed to die doc16435 none This proposal seeks preliminary support for development of a fully detailed workshop symposium proposal on the highly theoretically interesting (and contested) question of how the institutional context of contemporary China has fostered robust economic development over the past several decades despite what traditional theory would suggest is a recipe for failure. Contemporary China is certainly moving slowly toward a more market-centered economy, apparently despite the absence of well-established guarantees of private property and freedom, of reliable financial markets and ownership guarantees and an independent judiciary (among other factors). Meanwhile, a growing body of work on economic development, technology transfer and commercialization, international strategic alliances and other topics creates a relevant backdrop against which scholars conversant with the Chinese experience and with such data as can be accessed, cries out for integration. This Small Grant for Exploratory Research is recommended to facilitate the development of funding to support new approaches to the established topics of institutional contexts favoring economic development; to take advantage of the availability of the presence of Chinese scholars now resident in North America as well as in China and of well-established U.S. scholars familiar with the Chinese development context; and most particularly to catalyze discussion around this important issue at an especially opportune time, exploring the potential for integrating China into the emerging global economy. It is anticipated that the PI will submit a full proposal subsequently, building on the initial inquiries funded by the present SGER doc16436 none Catherine Plaisant Ben Shneiderman University of Maryland Baltimore County Digital Government: Collaborative Research: Integration of Data and Interfaces to Enhance Human Understanding of Government Statistics - Toward the National Statistical Knowledge Network This award will support collaborative research with several Federal statistical agencies to develop better statistical data models, to explore the use of SML, to develop better map-querying tools and to integrate other available tools for manipulating, browsing and visualizing tabular data. The goal is to develop better human computer interfaces for expert users to novices, to increase general statistical literacy, and to provide seamless access to data held by multiple Federal agencies and agencies at other levels of government, in particular state and local data doc16437 none An analogy is often drawn between sex (or mating-type) chromosomes in haploid-mating organisms, such as fungi, and the sex chromosomes in the majority of plants and animals. However, the mechanisms of divergence, and thus the content of sex chromosomes, are likely to be very different when mating compatibility is determined during the haploid stage. In particular, sheltered degeneration of the Y-chromosome in higher diploids is thought to be possible because only the Y is permanently heterozygous. However, no such asymmetrical sheltering occurs in haploid-mating organisms, yet they also have sex chromosomes dimorphic for size. In fungi, this was first observed in the basidiomycete Microbotryum violaceum. Variation in the size of sex chromosomes of Microbotryum may be caused by translocations or by incremental insertions of repetitive elements (for example, transposon accumulation). In this project, sex chromosome-specific libraries will be screened, using electrophoretically isolated autosomes, for hybridization patterns that identify translocations. Whether accumulation of repetitive DNA is a cause of the dimorphism will be determined by sequencing a large sample of DNA fragments from each sex chromosome. These sequences will be tested for homology to known genes and for similarity among them. Several retrotransposon-related sequences on the sex chromosomes of Microbotryum have already been identified using this approach. The directions and rates of sex chromosome change will be investigated by reconstructing intra-specific phylogenies using DNA sequence data from regions completely linked to the mating type locus. Sex specificity of the chromosome dimorphism will be investigated by characterizing sex chromosomes from widely divergent samples from Europe and North America. Although there have been enormous theoretical and empirical advances in our understanding of sex chromosomes in plants and animals, their occurrence has been a long-standing enigma in organisms that mate as haploids, such as most fungi and mosses. This research, using the fungus Microbotryum, will test specific genetic hypotheses regarding the composition, origin, and evolutionary directions of haploid sex chromosomes. This research will also contribute to understanding variation among members of the same species for how genetic information is organized within the nucleus. Great effort is currently being devoted to the construction of complete genome sequences, and an understanding of genetic variation within species is essential to interpreting such data, especially when it is associated with particular chromosomes. In addition, because structural changes in chromosomes are often implicated as barriers to compatible mating, the study of forces that promote such variation will increase our understanding of the origins of new species by reproductive isolation doc16438 none WGBH is conducting research and testing an innovative science magazine television series dedicated to the public understanding of research. The show will present both breaking research news and reports on underlying trends and issues in science. It will also feature stories that follow experiments or lab work over extended periods, profiles of scientists, stories of invention and discovery, and more purely entertaining items. The project places strong emphasis on a collaborative approach with other media developers, notably web and museum exhibit designers, to deepen the impact of the show beyond its immediate broadcast. During the research phase, WGBH will convene a group of scientists, informal educators and other potential collaborators to investigate the parameters involved in a collaborative approach. They also will produce and test sample program segments to determine what formats may be most effective. In addition, WGBH will begin looking for on-camera talent who has the knowledge and presentation ability to carry such a program. The questions that will be examined in the research phase include: how research and production efforts can be coordinated across different media, how facilities and infrastructure might be shared among different organizations providing public information about research, how the new television format might be customized to allow local television stations and science centers to link it with local events, and what formats may be most effective in engaging the public, holding their interest over multiple programs, and conveying substantive information about research doc16439 none This action is to support a field survey of the effects of the tsunami generated by the Southern Peru earthquake of 23 June . The survey involves a 9-person team for a total of nine days in the area impacted by the tsunami. The objective is to gather a coherent database of runup and inundation measurements, to be used later in computer modeling efforts aimed at unraveling the exact mechanism of generation of this tsunami. Preliminary reports indicate that a tsunami was generated and recorded as far away as Japan. Locally, reports indicate a series of five waves (with periods on the order of half-an-hour) destroying built-up structures and inundating as far as 1.5 to 2 km inland in the area of Camana. This survey represents a continuation of the work carried out for the past decade in the aftermath of significant tsunamis worldwide, in order to gather coherent, quantitative sets of modern data which can then become the basis for modeling the source of the tsunami through state-of-the-art computational techniques. For past tsunamis, the comparison between simulations for a variety of sources of the tsunami and the surveyed dataset has provided fundamental and occasionally unexpected insight into the dynamics of the ocean floor during, or immediately following, an earthquake in the marine environment. The information from this survey, as with previous surveys, will be distributed worldwide via the tsunami Internet bulletin board doc16440 none Chandler Critical steps in sperm-egg interaction during fertilization in animals include initiation of sperm motility, sperm chemotaxis toward the egg, sperm penetration of the extracellular matrix layers surrounding the egg, and binding and fusion of sperm with the egg plasma membrane. This proposal focuses on the important step of sperm chemotaxis, a process that has been widely studied in invertebrates such as the sea urchin but which has received little attention in vertebrates including mammals and humans. Dr. Chandler and Collaborators have now purified and sequenced allurin, a 21 kD protein obtained from the egg jelly layers of Xenopus laevis that represents the first vertebrate sperm chemoattractant to be isolated. Phylogenetic analysis of the allurin sequence suggests that this protein is related to the cysteine-rich secretory protein (CRISP) family of mammals, members of which are known to bind to sperm. They propose to molecularly clone the cDNA coding for allurin, to express recombinant allurin in bacteria, and to determine whether native and recombinant allurin both have chemoattractant activity for Xenopus sperm. Chemoattractant activity will be quantitated in vitro using a two chamber assay in which sperm cross a porous polycarbonate membrane barrier, and sperm will be observed microscopically by using a choice assay in which sperm swimming behaviors and trajectories are monitored by video microscopy as they approach agar wells filled with the chemoattractant protein. In addition, they plan to study the mechanism by which allurin acts on sperm with goals of 1) identifying and characterizing a sperm-surface receptor for allurin, and 2) determining what types of intracellular signals are elicited in sperm by allurin. Finally, they will determine the range of allurin expression in both reproductive and non-reproductive tissues. Protein expression will be assessed by immunocytochemistry and Western blotting while expression of mRNA coding for allurin will be detected by Northern blots and in situ hybridization. They anticipate that allurin-like proteins will be found in the reproductive tracts of both female and male amphibians doc16441 none This is a project to determine the specifications for a collaborative electronic environment that would support distal CLT researchers, educators and others interested in learning about the research and practices emerging from the CLTs. Each CLT includes a doctoral degree granting university and a school district, but typically many other types of institutions are included such as colleges, community colleges, developers, education resource centers, private institutions and others, all of whom have contributions to make and specific needs. Under this project, a needs analysis of the CLT stakeholders will be carried out and specifications for a full system detailed doc16442 none This project provides for development of a long-term research plan that will identify the needs and opportunities that exist to advance the state of the art and the state of the practice in earthquake engineering and earthquake loss reduction. The Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) will convene intensive panel activities to be comprehensive in nature and to advance knowledge in the following areas: improve understanding of physical models, improve the treatment of uncertainty in analysis and simulations, contribute to the development of a protocol for systematic performance data, improve understanding of societal impacts, and contribute to better integration of research and education. The plan will incorporate opportunities presented by high performance computing, information systems, simulation and visualization and will work closely with other organizations and programs including the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS), the NSF-funded earthquake engineering research centers (EERCs), and the agencies and organizations that make up the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program. EERI will establish a panel of researchers and professionals from the earth sciences, structural and geotechnical engineering, the social and policy sciences, architecture and urban planning, and information technology. Over a nine-month period, the panel members will commission a series of white papers that provide a summary of expert assessment of research needs in each field. The panel will engage in teleconferences to gain further input and will draw on the white papers to prepare the comprehensive plan doc16443 none The Alaska Native Science Commission will conduct a workshop on Ethical Practices for Documenting Alaska Native Cultures in Anchorage, October . The workshop will include Alaska Native tradition bearers and researchers who will discuss their experiences working on collaborative cultural documentation projects. Panelists will address the topics of intellectual property, the nature of local knowledge, and the ethics of collaborative research. The workshop will allow others to learn from Alaska Natives experiences with collaborative research projects doc16444 none Many organisms respond to the threat of predators by altering their physiology, behavior and morphology. These attempts to reduce their likelihood of being killed by a predator, often come at the cost of reducing growth. Although organisms from bacteria to plants and animals show such responses, the underlying reasons for this trade-off are poorly understood. Reduced growth in the presence of predators may result in part from behavioral responses to reduce feeding, but physiological changes also may play a major role. This research will explore the differences among species and genera of larval damselflies (Hexapoda: Odonata) in physiological response to predators, the consequences of these differences for metabolic resource allocation and behavior, and the evolution of these traits. Five studies will be performed to examine the physiological responses of species and the allocation of ingested resources to various molecules in the body. The first study will survey 12 species to measure natural growth rates and the amount of glucose, glycogen, triglycerides and protein in the organism s body. The second will experimentally determine alterations in growth and allocation to these molecules under treatments of predator presence and food availability in the lab. The third is a field experiment to test whether the results obtained in the controlled laboratory experiment are substantiated in real lakes. The fourth tests hypotheses about the proximate differences between the genera that induce the physiological response. Finally, the fifth examines the broader evolutionary history of this physiological response to predators. This work explores the physiological mechanisms underlying a fundamental difference in ecological performance between two groups of insects. This is critical to understanding how an individual s phenotype shapes its ability to engage in interactions with its environment and with other species. Also, examining how this physiology has evolved provides valuable insights into how species adapt to various environments and to natural and anthropogenically-induced environmental change (e.g., natural habitat shifts, climate change, habitat degradation doc16445 none The basic laws of thermodynamics apply to organisms as they do to the physical world. As a consequence, all living cells must metabolically breakdown large organic molecules such as carbohydrates and in the process trap some of the energy released in the form of a compound known as adenosine triphosphate, ATP for short. ATP functions as the cell s energy currency. Its chemical breakdown is used to drive a variety of energetically unfavorable processes such as biosynthesis, cellular movement like contraction, and pumping substances uphill across biological membranes. There are instances where demand for ATP exceeds supply as might take place at the onset of burst muscle contraction. In many cells a compound known as phosphocreatine is present which, through the action of an enzyme called creatine kinase, is capable of replenishing ATP as quickly as it is used (at least in the short term). This energy buffering role of phosphocreatine is critical in the functioning of a broad spectrum of cells. The precursor for phosphocreatine is creatine. In vertebrates, a fraction of the creatine required is obtained from the diet while the rest is synthesized in the liver and pancreas. Creatine is then carried in the blood to cells where it is transported by a special membrane transport protein (creatine transporter) into the cell and then converted to phosphocreatine. Genetic defects in creatine biosynthesis and transport produce severe pathological effects in humans including profound mental retardation. Many diverse invertebrate groups accumulate large quantities of creatine phosphocreatine in their cells. This is particularly true of certain marine species such as sea urchins which are broad-cast fertilizers. These animals literally shed their eggs and sperm into to the sea water; this strategy necessitates production of massive amounts of sperm which have very high levels of creatine phosphocreatine. Thus, there is a seasonally high demand for creatine yet it is not clear at all how these animals obtain and transport this vital substance to cells where it is needed. The proposed research effort seeks to trace the evolution of creatine biosynthetic and membrane transport capacities by investigating these processes in selected groups of invertebrates. Initial efforts will focus on 1) using sensitive isotopic labeling techniques to determine whether the two key enzymes of creatine biosynthesis are present in these animals; and 2) using modern molecular genetic approaches to localize the tissue expression of these enzymes, and to determine whether there is increased presence of these proteins at peak reproductive activity (when demand for creatine is high). A second facet of this research will center on determining the nature of creatine transport into cells where it accumulates as high concentrations of creatine phosphocreatine. Once again, molecular genetic methods will be used to express the transport proteins in a cell system where they can be studied and characterized most efficiently. The overall results will yield mechanistic information about creatine biosynthesis and transport as well as provide a picture of the evolution of these processes from the lower invertebrates to more advanced animals doc16446 none SGER: The evolutionary genetics of avian choice behavior David W. Stephens University of Minnesota Lay This project explores the feasibility of genetic studies of avian choice behavior. The project has two key goals. First, it will develop a system for testing the choice behavior of Coturnix quail that will allow the investigators to efficiently assay several aspects of choice behavior, such as how quickly food preferences develop, and how sensitive preferences are to differences in the timing and amount of food reward. The second goal of this project is to make preliminary estimates of the heritability of, and correlations between preference traits. These estimates will be made by comparing the measured preference traits of related individuals. In this study we will test half-sib families, that is, family groups in which a given pair of quail has the same father, but different mothers. This method allows us to exclude possible maternal effects. The resulting genetic estimates will allow us to make predictions about how choice behavior should respond to natural or artificial selection. Genetic correlations between traits provide information about the extent to which the different aspects of choice behavior are influenced by the same genes doc16447 none An agenda-setting workshop of 25-30 invited participants wil be held by the Center for Information Policy a the University of Maryland. This workshop will bring together diverse shcolars and practitioners to explore social and economic issues raised by open source software development. These issues include its relationship to other forms of hybrid enterprise (such as standards development and scientific research), and implications for institutions and policies ina digital society. Particpants will submit sohor statments in advance to structure the substantive discussion and these statements later will be edited and published on the Center s web site. The workshop will consider the feasibility and design of a future international conference that brings together U.S., European, and developing world perspectives and research. The qualities and values claimed for open-source software-security reliabilty, adaptability, extensibility, low cost, and openness-create marketing opportunities and pose policy questions. The latter include how the government develops or licenses software for its own use, how marketplace competition is regulated to promote economic growth and consumer welfare, and arguments for making the Internet and the benefits of the digital economy more broadly accessible, in lesser developed countries as well as in the United States. The success of the open source invites far-ranging speculation and debate about information architectures, contracts, institutional economics, and the configuration of intangible assets and innovation processes. Expected outcomes, include a prioritized set of questions for future research, a web site for academic research on open source, a bibliography and summary report of the workshop publicly available on th Center s website along with edited contributions of participants and links to related other workshops and research. The workshop wil seek to promote new channels of communication among researchers and between the practitioner community and academic researchers, and to elicit broader academic understanding and interest in the issues surrounding open source. The workshop will consider the feasibility and design of an international conference that brings together U.S., European, and developing world research on open source doc16448 none This basic research project is focused on this laboratory s long-standing interest in plant metabolic enzymes and their regulation by the ubiquitous process of reversible protein phosphorylation . The overall investigation deals specifically with phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase (PEPC) and sucrose synthase (SuSy), two target enzymes that undergo phosphorylation in photosynthesizing leaves and or nitrogen-fixing root nodules of soybeans, peas, and other legumes. While PEPC is best known for its cardinal role in the initial fixation of atmospheric carbon dioxide during photosynthesis by such crop plants as sorghum, corn, sugarcane and pineapple, it also functions in a diverse array of non-photosynthetic contexts, e.g., carbon nitrogen-metabolism in legume root nodules and unicellular green algae. This multifaceted nature of plant PEPC makes it an extremely attractive subject for continued study of its (a) intricate control by PEPC-kinase (PpcK), the novel, highly regulated protein-kinase enzyme that phosphorylates activates PEPC, and (b) emerging biochemical structure-function relationships. Along these lines, two of the three specific experimental objectives of this renewal project focus on the molecular biochemical analysis of plant PpcK, and sorghum-leaf and green-algal PEPC. The third and final focus of this investigation is SuSy, likely the major sucrose-metabolizing enzyme in a variety of non-photosynthetic sink tissues in plants, including legume root nodules, developing leaves, fruits and seeds, and tubers. Continued interest in this metabolic enzyme largely stems from the fact that, like PEPC, it is one of but a handful of phosphorylated plant enzymes with a specific target amino-acid residue(s) identified both in planta and in vitro. In addition, this target enzyme has the documented potential for phosphorylation at multiple sites by at least two distinct subfamilies of plant protein kinases. However, neither the exact role of this phosphorylation event(s) nor its dynamic reversibility in planta is established. These uncertainties will be addressed experimentally during this project by a combination of biochemical, immunological and mass-spectroscopic approaches. The significance of this multi-pronged, basic research and discovery project is that it will (a) enhance the fundamental understanding of two important enzymes involved in plant primary metabolism in terms of their intricate regulation and structure-function relationships, and (b) provide detailed molecular insight into the unique protein kinase that targets one of them exclusively. As such, the results from this research will contribute significantly to the requisite underpinning for the constructive manipulation of plant carbon nitrogen-metabolism and its control mechanisms in leaves and legume root nodules by biotechnological approaches doc16449 none Vulnerability of natural networks (such as the Internet, power supply grid, or molecular regulatory circuits of cells) to perturbations is an important area of study. Prior work has traditionally involved observations on static networks or on computer simulations, and has revealed certain general fundamental properties. Specifically, the study of one representative natural network by direct experimental manipulation should illuminate general properties of most networks. The molecular machinery regulating the synthesis of RNA molecules in the nucleus of budding yeast forms a natural network that can be experimentally perturbed, and their effects studied by transcriptional profiling on DNA microarrays. In this initial funding period, study of the responses of a sub-section (comprised of approximately 300 nodes) of this natural network as a function of precise perturbations in the form of gene knockout mutations. A queriable, static, database model of the network is being made, which is queried by simple attack plans, and responses are tested for consistency with experimental results. This interplay is allowing a proof-of-principle demonstration of this empirical approach to studying properties of complex networks. Insights obtained from these studies is forming the basis of more sophisticated investigation of complex network properties doc16450 none Very little is known on how plant metabolic pathways are physically organized in the cell, or how plant metabolites are transported within or between cells. These are problems of central importance for plants, because many metabolites are toxic or are synthesized distantly from where they accumulate. The biosynthesis of flavonoid pigments and related metabolites provides a useful system to investigate the significance of the formation of large multi-enzyme complexes in the biosynthesis of phytochemicals, and to dissect the basic mechanisms by which plant metabolites are transported within cells. The two main goals of this project are: 1) to investigate the subcellular localization and association of enzymes corresponding to two branches of maize flavonoid biosynthesis, and 2) to explore the distinct trafficking pathways of plant metabolites using inducible auto-fluorescent compounds. To accomplish the first task, the subcellular localization of GFP-tagged enzymes corresponding to the two main branches of maize flavonoid biosynthesis will be examined in the presence and absence of the other enzymes in the pathway. Each branch of the pathway can be independently induced using specific transcription factors. The possibility that flavonoid biosynthetic enzymes physically interact will also be investigated, using complementary genetic and biochemical approaches. Together, these studies will determine whether multi-enzyme complexes corresponding to different branches of a metabolic pathway form, and whether these complexes localize to different places in the cell. For the second goal, previously identified green and yellow auto-fluorescent compounds will be isolated and chemically characterized. The green auto-fluorescent compounds accumulate in structures, the green fluorescent bodies (GFBs), previously not recognized in plants, and which fuse with the plasma membrane. These GFBs will be isolated and the proteins associated with them will be characterized. These proteins will provide useful markers to investigate the biogenesis, cargo transport and fusion of these bodies to particular membrane domains doc16451 none This work will begin to map brain circuits that carry the reward signal believed to be generated when animals successfully meet motivational goals, such as finding food when hungry. Such a signal is thought to inform the animal that its current behavior is important to its survival, and to reinforce the continuation of that behavior. Electrical stimulation of the medial forebrain bundle has long been believed to create a potent and non-satiating version of the reward signal, yet the circuitry traversed by this signal outside of this major axon pathway is still unknown. Brain areas critical to carrying the signal will be revealed by psychophysically tracking changes in the reward magnitude of medial forebrain bundle stimulation when target areas distant from the bundle are temporarily anesthetized. Once reward-relevant targets are identified, the anatomical relationship of these targets to the stimulation sites will be explored electrophysiologically. The stimulation-induced neural activity wilkl be followed to those areas to see whether the neural signals have conduction properties known to characterize the putative reward signal, and whether the target areas are directly or indirectly (i.e., transynaptically) linked to the medial forebrain bundle. This project will increase our understanding of brain circuits involved in reward, with a long term goal of understanding their role in consumptive and other motivated behaviors doc16452 none Cell specification in eye development Eyes in vertebrates develop from cells in two regions of the forebrain, and these cells specialize (or differentiate) to generate many cell types. The cell types include photoreceptor cells (which detect light), many types of neural cells (which integrate signals from photoreceptor cells and send signals to the brain), and several types of supporting cells. The mechanisms by which regions of the brain become specified to form eyes, and cells in these region become specified to form different cell types, are not well understood. The proposed research will examine eye development in a model laboratory organism, the frog Xenopus laevis. Cells within the developing eyes communicate by releasing specific signaling proteins; these proteins bind to receptors on other cells, influencing cell determination. One group of signaling proteins, called FGFs, is used in several processes during eye development. FGFs can bind to, and activate, any of four different FGF receptors (FGFRs), but it is not clear whether activation of specific FGFRs affects cell differentiation in the eye. Experiments will be conducted to test the hypothesis that activation of different FGFRs causes eye cells to differentiate in different ways. Inhibitory FGFRs will be expressed in the developing eye; it will then be possible to compare the effects of blocking signaling through, say, FGFR-1 with the effects of blocking other FGFRs. This analysis will show whether different FGFRs play distinct roles in eye development. The experiments will utilize recently developed transgenic technology in frogs, which makes it possible to introduce specific genes into frog embryos. The introduced genes will consist of DNA that directs the gene to be expressed only in the eye, coupled to DNA encoding an inhibitory FGFR. . These studies will lead to a better understanding of the mechanisms by which vertebrate eyes develop, and which processes may be disrupted when eyes develop abnormally. Finally, comparison of eye development in different organisms will contribute to a better understanding of how eyes have evolved. Undergraduate students will be strongly involved in the proposed research. This research will thus serve, in part, to train the next generation of scientists doc16453 none Nanoscale magnetic devices are of critical technological importance. This project will advance our understanding of their properties through a coordinated program of modeling, analysis, simulation and experiment. Topics to be addressed include (a) development of improved numerical methods for the simulation of magnetic materials and devices; (b) exploration of the micromagnetic energy landscape and the role of noise in thermally activated switching; and (c) investigation of specific nanoscale effects such as configurational anisotropy and geometrically constrained walls. Mathematics has much to contribute and much to gain. The study of appropriate limits leads to challenging problems of analysis whose solution will shed light on the essential physics. The analysis of noise and switching leads to the study of the energy landscape and to physically relevant examples of stochastic partial differential equations. Modeling coordinated with laboratory experiments will refine our understanding of the relevant phenomena. This Focused Research Group activity will draw expertise from a multidisciplinary group of mathematicians, physicists and computational scientists. The project includes a collaboration with IBM and training of postdoctoral scientists and graduate students. Magnetic storage devices lie at the foundation of modern computing. Their modeling, simulation, analysis and design raise fundamental questions of physics and mathematics, many still unanswered. As device size decreases, the relevant science changes: defects, spatial disorder and thermal fluctuations become crucial in the nanoscale regime. Mathematics has much to contribute and much to gain. The study of appropriate limits leads to challenging problems of analysis whose solution will shed light on the essential physics. The analysis of noise and switching will be studied in a three-pronged approach: by mathematical analysis, numerical modeling and experimental investigation. Modeling coordinated with laboratory experiments will refine our understanding of the relevant phenomena. This Focused Research Group activity will draw expertise from a multidisciplinary group of mathematicians, physicists and computational scientists. The project includes a collaboration with IBM and training of postdoctoral scientists and graduate students doc16454 none Under this project tools are being developed to increase the computational generality of surface-based DNA computing. It is well known that for a computing model to be general, that is, capable of efficiently simulating algorithms used in conventional electronic computing, it must be able to efficiently simulate circuits. It has been shown theoretically that the surface-based approach, when using multiple words and the MARK, DESTROY-UNMARKED, UNMARK, and APPEND operations, is a generalizable approach to computing, but this has not been implemented experimentally. The necessary tools for such an implementation is being developed. Particular tasks, which are being addressed to this end, include: -improved designs of sets of DNA words that do not interfere with one another in hybridization experiments and do not contain strong secondary structure motifs. -methods for the efficient purification of colloidal gold nanoparticles and the implementation of surface-based DNA computing using such particles as supports. -development of a new DESTROY-UNMARKED operation, multiple-word AND operation, and multiple-word APPEND-MARKED operation doc16455 none Anand Sivasubramaniam Pennsylvania State University CISE Research Resources: From High performance to Low Power: Infrastructure for Ubiquitous Computing This CISE Research Resources proposal asks to establish a computing infrastructure laboratory in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Pennsyvlvania State University. The resources will include a 16 node dual Pentium Linux cluster connected by Gigabit Ethernet, laptops and PDAs with wireless LAN capabilities, and testing measurement equipment for evaluating energy-performance trade-offs on the mobile devices. This laboratory will support the research activities of the following NSF-funded projects: 1) Scheduling Support for High Performance Clusters; 2) Energy-Efficient Architctures and Their Interaction with Software: A Java Perspective; 3) EOC: An Energy-Aware Optimizing Compiler Framework; and 4) Optimization and integrated Control of Low Power Wireless Multimedia Networks. These projects address different components of this ubiquitous computing infrastructure. At the high performance end, the principal investigators will examine architectural and systems software issues in the design and deployment of clusters of workstations for the emerging and demanding applications (such as web services, databases, graphics and visualization applications, and multimedia) to provide high performance and guaranteed service. At the resource-constrained end, they will examine architectural, runtime and compilation optimizations, specifically targeted for conserving battery energy and to make energy-performance trade-offs. They also will examine the issue of wireless communication that is intended to seamlessly integrate the mobile handheld devices with the servers (clusters) on the wired network. The equipment will serve as a platform for the experimental activities and evaluation of prototypes in these projects. The laboratory will also be used in many of the courses that we teach at the graduate and undergraduate level to introduce students to this important emerging topic doc16456 none High-technology startup companies have been heralded as the future of work, but scholars have yet to examine the extent to which startups organizational structures and corporate cultures differ from those of previous generations and other industries. This doctoral dissertation research by a cultural anthropologist in the American Studies program at Yale University tests the hypothesis that high-tech startups represent a new corporate form with unique implications for employees and the technologies they develop. This comparative ethnography of U.S. high-tech startups investigates employees experiences and conceptions of work in a particular industry and organizational setting. Taking into account the unique demographics of the startup workforce, this study challenges received wisdom concerning the relationship between work and home life and elucidates the characteristics of a new generation of white-collar employees, salient topics considering recent economic and cultural shifts in the high-technology industry. In light of skyrocketing unemployment in the high-tech industry over the last half of , interviews with unemployed high-tech workers supplement data collected on corporate employees. Methods include long-term participant observation, directed and open-ended interviews, video ethnography, surveys, analysis of labor force statistics, and historical study of management theory and the corporate form. This research advances our understanding of the place of work in contemporary life and the evolution of the corporate form, knowledge that will help employees, managers, and labor advocates modify the organization of corporate work and the quality of workers experiences doc16457 none A common problem with ensemble weather forecasts is the insufficient spread of the ensemble members so that often the true state lies outside the span of the ensemble forecasts. Previous studies indicate that this lack of spread is worse near the surface than it is in mid-troposphere, suggesting that part of the problem may be due to the land surface conditions in the model. The PIs seek to improve this situation by perturbing the land surface condition and treating the insolation (incoming solar radiation at the surface) stochastically in the ensemble forecasts. The research has two components: first, an observational diagnostic study geared toward the understanding of the spatial and temporal characteristics of errors in surface fluxes and insolation. The second component is to design methodologies to link the errors of the surface fluxes to the surface moisture and perturb it. The isolation will be perturbed with stochastic noise. Once suitable candidate methods have been developed, they will be tested in the Rapid Update Cycle or Weather Research and Forecast model ensemble runs by the Forecast System Laboratory, NOAA. Results from this research have the potential of finding their way into operational ensemble weather forecasts. Probabilistic forecasts generated by ensemble predictions are increasing used for a wide variety of purposes, from flood forecasting to assessing the demand for electricity. This research is aimed at improving the quality of ensemble forecasts and enhancing their usefulness. The training that the graduate students receive will help to prepare them for careers in ensemble forecasting where there is a shortage of talented manpower doc16458 none This project by a doctoral student of anthropology investigates how industrial workers and managers in a post-socialist setting (the Czech Republic) pursue strategies which impact the economic transition to fully capitalist forms of enterprise. Through surveys, interviews, and as an employee in the factory setting, the student will collect the data needed to analyze the processes whereby groups of workers come to think about their work and organize themselves, and how these, in turn, affect processes and goals within specific enterprises. The research will also document the political processes among workers and identify how power and authority are exercised within the factory. This research will contribute to the body of theory regarding industrial work in different cultures and will provide practical approaches to enterprise management as well as valuable insight to business ventures in the region doc16459 none Because of their economic impact as plant pathogens, Phytophthora species are being intensively studied through molecular genetic and genomics approaches. These organisms have served as lead species for the entire Stramenopiles lineage, a major radiation of crown eukaryotes distinct from plants, animals and fungi. The Phytophthora molecular genetics community has developed a strong culture of collaboration, communication, and sharing techniques and resources. With the recent blossoming of genetic and genomic tools for Phytophthora, many new investigators from a variety of backgrounds have become interested in Phytophthora molecular genetics. This award will facilitate the integration of these investigators into the community and will further strengthen the cooperative culture of this community. The specific goals of the network follow: 1. To promote communication and collaboration, and to minimize duplication of effort, within the worldwide Phytophthora molecular genetics community by means of an annual workshop, exchange visits among laboratories, and a community web site. 2. To produce and distribute research resources including libraries, specific DNA clones, genetic strains and cDNA microarrays, that will benefit the whole community, 3. To promote the entry, participation and training of students, postdoctoral fellows, junior faculty, and more established faculty in the field of Phytophthora molecular genetics. The network is especially interested in facilitating the participation of minority individuals and those from predominantly undergraduate institutions, institutions with high percentages of students from groups under-represented in the U.S. research infrastructure, and institutions in states that have traditionally received lower amounts of federal funding for research and development. This will be done by means of travel awards to the annual workshop, training internships, and facilitated access to techniques and resources. Faculty from nations without established research infracstructures will also be eligible for some support. This Research Coordination Network is open to all researchers with an interest in Phytophthora molecular genetics. It promises to broaden the diversity of scientists working in this field and to advance our understanding of the biology of these important plant pathogens doc16460 none Recent research has documented dramatic population declines and extinctions of frogs, toads, and salamanders in many parts of the New World tropics, a pattern seen in North America and elsewhere in the world. We propose the formation of RANA, the Research and Analysis network for Neotropical Amphibians, to coordinate scientists from a variety of institutions examining this issue. The goal is to promote collaborative research that takes advantage of the tremendous habitat and taxonomic diversity of the New World tropics. Members of RANA will collect data to test leading hypotheses for population declines, including disease, climate change, and UV-B radiation. Reports of extinctions, deformities, and population declines of amphibians frequently appear in the popular media, and represent a modern day mystery to scientists. The global nature of this biodiversity crisis means that we have to look outside of our borders to provide insights on why large numbers of frogs are disappearing in many regions of the US, including Sierra Nevada and the Cascade Mountains. This project will produce a bilingual Spanish-English publicly-available website with information on amphibian declines and a database with information on the status of all species of the New World tropics doc16461 none Cunningham Although the North Atlantic is the best-studied ocean in the world, there is no coordinated effort to study its ecology and evolutionary history. This research coordination network will bring together ecologists, paleontologists, oceanographers, and evolutionary biologists. In particular, the group will focus on the many marine taxa that are hypothesized to have invaded from the North Pacific following the opening of the Bering Strait in the late Pliocene. This invasion placed closely related organisms on both coasts of the North Atlantic in a grand natural experiment. Although there is great potential to compare the ecology of taxa found on the very different coasts of the NW and NE North Atlantic, this is rarely done. The major goals of this network are to encourage trans-Atlantic ecological and evolutionary research when closely related taxa are found in the NW and the NE Atlantic. This research will be placed in a historical context by coordinating literally hundreds of molecular phylogeographic and systematic studies of the North Atlantic flora and fauna, with an emphasis on taxa found on both coasts. These historical molecular studies will then be placed in the context of knowledge about oceanography, paleoclimatology, and paleontology. Although a comprehensive study of the North Atlantic requires cross-disciplinary and international cooperation, currently there is no annual meeting devoted to basic research by significant subsets of these fields and attended by scientists from both sides of the Atlantic. Even within specific fields, scientists who study marine animals and plants rarely interact. This network brings together 76 scientists from 12 countries bordering the North Atlantic, and has already generated considerable excitement at the opportunity to carry out trans-Atlantic, multi-disciplinary collaborations. Because of its central location between Europe and North America, the North Atlantic is strongly affected by human activities. Overfishing and pollution have led to population crashes in important species such as cod and lobster. Since both cod and lobster have close relatives on both coasts of the North Atlantic, there is much to learn about their ecology by comparing populations on both coasts. This can help to explain why, for example, lobsters (genus Homarus) are so much more common in America than in Europe. By placing this research in an evolutionary context, the research coordination network will examine what organismal characteristics allowed taxa to survive the last glaciations in the northern hemisphere. This information will help explain why some species are more resistant to local extinction than others, which will help in conservation efforts doc16462 none The primate dentition has been studied for many reasons ranging from phylogenetic reconstruction to dental development to functional morphology. Because of their composition, teeth are the most frequently preserved parts of fossil primates and the only ones known for some extinct taxa. Teeth are adapted for many functions - e.g. mastication, food preparation, and social interactions - but also contain a record of their growth, which all means that a great deal can be learned from their fossilized forms. The dentition is also important from the developmental and evolutionary perspective. Only wear, breakage and caries alter the morphology of primate teeth once eruption has occurred, and the effects of these processes are fairly easy to identify. Teeth are thus relatively less affected by environment and behavior than are bones. Consequently, teeth have a reduced nongenetic component to their variation and are more tractable for determining underlying genetic mechanisms. Combining all these characteristics of teeth, the dentition is a prime candidate for investigating the genetic evolutionary history of a complex phenotype. This project proposes research into the genetic evolutionary history of the primate dentition using a baboon model. This project is a novel integration of the usually disparate fields of quantitative genetics and paleontology in order to investigate and identify the genetic mechanisms underlying evolutionarily significant morphological variation. This project identifies dental traits from the last five million years of baboon evolution in Africa that also vary in a genotyped pedigreed colony of modern savanna baboons at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio, Texas. This variation will then be studied using modern quantitative genetic analyses to identify the genetic mechanisms that underlie this variation in modern baboons, and thereby, probably represent the same mechanisms that determined this variation in past baboon species. This project represents a unique opportunity to integrate the power of modern genetics with the time depth of the fossil record to investigate the genome and anatomy simultaneously, rather than as separate entities. Results from this study have broad implications for evolutionary and developmental biology, as well as for anthropology and primatology. This study will provide insight into the genetic mechanisms that underlie tooth development and patterning in baboons, mechanisms likely to be involved in the evolution of teeth of other primates, including humans and their ancestors. Thus, the results of this study will be immediately applicable to the study of human dental evolution, as well as the evolution of many other primates doc16463 none The Philippines has one of the highest tuberculosis mortality and morbidity rates in the world. Recent research suggests that Filipino women are infected less often but experience more mortality than do men. This dissertation research project, conducted by a graduate student in cultural anthropology at Southern Methodist University, will address two main issues: How do patients and their families perceive and understand tuberculosis? and How does gender influence treatment decision making and outcome? The project is divided into three phases: descriptive, instrument development, and explanatory. Phase I involves interviews 80 individuals regarding their perceptions, knowledge and attitudes about illnesses, including tuberculosis. Methods will include semi-structured interviews, true false questions, and pile sorting exercises. In Phase II, a questionnaire will be developed for use in the final phase of the project. The sample size for Phase III is 280 male and female TB patients. This phase will determine how gender and the type of health care delivery site (public or private) are correlated with a number of factors associated with treatment. These factors include time of initial treatment, first type of health care delivery site approached, number of times treatment was stopped, presence of another family member with tuberculosis, etc. In addition to providing doctoral training for a promising woman scientist, this study will contribute to our understanding of gender complementarity and equality in Southeast Asia as it relates to health and health care decision making. It will also assist health care policy makers in developing programs that would specifically address the needs of women and men doc16464 none Biodiversity represents a complex and rapidly changing feature of ecosystems that is currently under intensive investigation by two distinct groups of scientists; those that study its distribution and those that study its function in ecological processes. Understanding the environmental consequences of widespread changes in biodiversity, however, requires bringing these groups together. BioMERGE (Biotic Mechanisms of Ecosystem Regulation in the Global Environment) will be a research-coordinating network that will foster the merger of these two groups. It will develop electronic networks to coordinate the sharing and dissemination of scientific findings among participating scientists. It will also sponsor a series of workshops that will periodically assemble core participants to resolve emerging theoretical and empirical issues, develop analytical tools, evaluate and recommend scientific protocol, and identify future priorities in biodiversity research. BioMERGE will also serve as an information gateway for both scientists and non-scientists alike by providing non-technical consensus papers, bibliographies, glossaries, and summaries of important findings doc16465 none Swisher This NSF Instrumentation and Facilities award provides funds for equipment required for the completion of a state of the art 40Ar 39Ar dating facility at Rutgers University designed to address a diverse array of geochronological issues in geology, paleontology and anthropology. The Rutgers facility centers around a Mass Analyzer Products 215-50 mass spectrometer recently acquired with the closure of the Princeton University Ar laboratory. The MAP 215-50 is well suited for 40Ar 39Ar research, however, ancillary sample extraction, gas purification, and computer systems were needed to make the Rutgers facility fully operational. NSF funds from this award will provide necessary CO2 laser and resistance furnace sample heating systems, and, an automated, low volume, ultra low background extraction system for gas purification. Sample extraction and gas purification systems necessary for the completion of the Rutgers 40Ar 39Ar dating system are not available, for the most part, as single off the shelf items; rather individual components and parts must be purchased, assembled, integrated calibrated and tested. Thus, in addition to equipment, funding of additional technical support during build-out, testing and calibration phases is also required. As part of cost sharing between NSF and Rutgers University, Rutgers has committed two years salary and benefit support for a permanent Ph.D. level, Research Associate faculty position for development and technical assistance during the tenure of this proposal. Thereafter, Rutgers will continue to support this position at the 50% level, the remaining time to be allotted to research initiatives, collaborative projects and university lectureships. Rutgers has also committed funds for the purchase of the MAP 215-50 mass spectrometer, over $145,000 on upgrades and modernization of research facilities and fixed equipment, and committed permanent academic year salary and benefits for the P.I. to oversee and develop these facilities. Ongoing and proposed research by the P.I., Research Associate and numerous Rutger s faculty and students will benefit immediately from implementation of the new instrumentation. The new Ar facility will serve as a catalyst, bringing together two unique working groups of Rutger s scientists; a timescale group consisting of faculty Swisher, Aubry, Berggren, Kent and Miller, and a geological paleoanthropology group of Swisher, Anton, Ashley, Blumenschine, Feibel, and Harris. Collaborative research with faculty and student investigators in geology and anthropology at Rutgers and Princeton universities is anticipated, as is continued collaborative research with other national and international colleagues doc16466 none Health and disease are experienced within social contexts. For people living in poverty, health care seeking decisions are made in conjunction with considerations of how to allocate scarce resources to meet the needs of multiple household members. Much of the international health literature has focused on sociocultural factors that impact health care seeking. Yet little research has been conducted on the ways that economic factors directly and indirectly constrain or facilitate health care seeking strategies in poor households. The proposed study will examine how sociocultural factors, economics, and social relations articulate in health care and resource decision-making among poor and lower middle income households in Nicaragua, a country with high rates of child morbidity and mortality as well as high rates of maternal mortality. Utilizing participant observation and semi-structured interviews, the researcher, an anthropology graduate student at the University of Arizona, will prospectively follow fifty rural households in a municipality of the department of Masaya over the course of a year. Ethnographic research is needed in local contexts to assess how multiple factors impacting on health seeking articulate during actual illness episodes. In addition to providing doctoral training for a promising woman scientist, the proposed study will help fill the gap in the paucity of ethnographic research into contemporary health issues for Nicaraguans living in poverty, and assess the cross-cultural applicability of theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of health care seeking doc16467 none This collaborative project between the University of Oklahoma and the Pennsylvania State University is part of the International H2O Project (IHOP). The IHOP is a large multi-agency, multi-investigator project that focuses on the measurement of water vapor and water vapor variability. The goal of this project is to improve understanding of convective initiation, increase short-term precipitation forecast skills and test the capabilities of various instruments to measure the four dimensional characteristics of water vapor. The field phase of the IHOP will be conducted during the Spring and Summer of and will provide a wide range of mesoscale meteorological observations for studies to gain a better understanding of the scales of, and processes influencing, water vapor variability. The goal of this hypothesis-driven research is to improve understanding of the processes leading to the initiation of deep, moist cumulus convection. Though several studies have examined certain aspects of boundary layer structure little is known about what causes convective initiation. IHOP will provide the comprehensive data sets needed to begin evaluating and revising hypotheses concerning convection initiation processes and the role of boundary layer water vapor. The Principal Investigators will acquire and analyze three dimensional radar-derived boundary layer airflow and in-situ measurements of winds and thermodynamic parameters from mobile facilities. The combination of boundary layer airflow with in-situ measurements of absolute humidity and virtual temperature provides the only means of documenting the dynamical and transport processes acting in the boundary layer to regulate precipitable water and force the development of secondary circulations. Thus these observations are essential for evaluating hypotheses concerning the impact of water vapor supply and airflow evolution on boundary formation and convection initiation. Detailed observations will be analyzed in several different ways. Subjective analyses and visualizations will be produced incorporating all available data on relevant scales for convection initiation. Observation density will be enhanced utilizing an advanced time-to-space conversion scheme by distributing nearly conservative variables along Lagrangian trajectories based on multi-Doppler wind syntheses. Finally, these enhanced observations will be assimilated into mesoscale models to determine the dynamical forcing processes controlling the development of localized boundary layer circulations that either promote or prevent convection initiation. This effort will result in the collection and analysis of an unprecedented data set at scales previously not observed. Through this work, a completely new understanding will emerge regarding the processes occurring near low-level boundaries and how these processes regulate the formation of thunderstorms. The knowledge will be useful for developing new advances, both numerical and subjective, in quantitative precipitation forecasting by improving the ability to forecast if, when, and where convection will develop doc16468 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University will upgrade a 500 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will facilitate research in the following areas: a) microscale determinations of structures, stereochemistry or ligand receptor interactions using nano- to micro-gram amounts of ligands; b) studies of helical conjugated molecules; c) development of a genetic screen for proteins in vivo based on catalytic activity; d) de novo protein design; and e) synthesis of molecules with interesting properties, such as a catalyst that selectively binds and hydrolyzes cocaine in vivo. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including biochemistry and synthetic chemistry doc16469 none In this project, we are proposing to develop the communication interface that will allow microsensors such Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) sensors to transfer sensor data to a Bluetooth communication module for wireless data telemetry to a remote computer. Wireless transmission of sensor data will be compared with direct acquisition of sensor data using traditional wired methods. Since line of sight communication is not required in such systems, studies will be conducted to assess data transmission capabilities from within a variety of enclosures made of different materials. Lithium Niobate SAW devices operating at three different frequencies will be acquired for this purpose. They can serve as very good temperature sensors. All three sensors will be operated simultaneously in close proximity to verify sensor identification capability of the communication system. This proof of concept system is expected to serve as foundational work for the wide use of this technology for a variety of sensor systems including SAW and MEMS sensors. One graduate student and one undergraduate student will be supported on the project doc16470 none The objectives of this work are two fold. Professor Stewart first proposes to use metabolically active but nongrowing E. coli cells to effect stereoselective organic functional group reduction reactions. E. coli cells will first be engineered to produce yeast reductases with desirable properties then quantities of the desired cells will be grown and used to effect syntheses of enantiomerically enriched, biologically relevant targets. The principal investigator will then investigate NADPH-dependent enzyme reactions again using nongrowing E. coli cells with the aim of developing whole cells capable of effecting either oxidation or reduction reactions depending on the amount of NAD NADPH present. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Jon D. Stewart of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Florida. Dr. Stewart will work on the development of E. coli cells capable of catalyzing a number of chemical reactions. This group will explore stereoselective reduction reactions using enzymes contained in these whole cells. These reduction reactions produce molecules which are chiral (have two nonsuperimposable mirror images) and make only one of the two possible forms (a single enantiomer). Development of this family of reactions is one of the most important problems facing the pharmaceutical industry today. When developed, Dr. Stewart s work could be applied to the environmentally friendly syntheses of a number of biologically active molecules. Students trained during the course of this work will gain skills needed by the pharmaceutical industry which now produces a number of single enantiomer compounds doc16467 none This collaborative project between the University of Oklahoma and the Pennsylvania State University is part of the International H2O Project (IHOP). The IHOP is a large multi-agency, multi-investigator project that focuses on the measurement of water vapor and water vapor variability. The goal of this project is to improve understanding of convective initiation, increase short-term precipitation forecast skills and test the capabilities of various instruments to measure the four dimensional characteristics of water vapor. The field phase of the IHOP will be conducted during the Spring and Summer of and will provide a wide range of mesoscale meteorological observations for studies to gain a better understanding of the scales of, and processes influencing, water vapor variability. The goal of this hypothesis-driven research is to improve understanding of the processes leading to the initiation of deep, moist cumulus convection. Though several studies have examined certain aspects of boundary layer structure little is known about what causes convective initiation. IHOP will provide the comprehensive data sets needed to begin evaluating and revising hypotheses concerning convection initiation processes and the role of boundary layer water vapor. The Principal Investigators will acquire and analyze three dimensional radar-derived boundary layer airflow and in-situ measurements of winds and thermodynamic parameters from mobile facilities. The combination of boundary layer airflow with in-situ measurements of absolute humidity and virtual temperature provides the only means of documenting the dynamical and transport processes acting in the boundary layer to regulate precipitable water and force the development of secondary circulations. Thus these observations are essential for evaluating hypotheses concerning the impact of water vapor supply and airflow evolution on boundary formation and convection initiation. Detailed observations will be analyzed in several different ways. Subjective analyses and visualizations will be produced incorporating all available data on relevant scales for convection initiation. Observation density will be enhanced utilizing an advanced time-to-space conversion scheme by distributing nearly conservative variables along Lagrangian trajectories based on multi-Doppler wind syntheses. Finally, these enhanced observations will be assimilated into mesoscale models to determine the dynamical forcing processes controlling the development of localized boundary layer circulations that either promote or prevent convection initiation. This effort will result in the collection and analysis of an unprecedented data set at scales previously not observed. Through this work, a completely new understanding will emerge regarding the processes occurring near low-level boundaries and how these processes regulate the formation of thunderstorms. The knowledge will be useful for developing new advances, both numerical and subjective, in quantitative precipitation forecasting by improving the ability to forecast if, when, and where convection will develop doc16472 none Indonesia currently faces a period of social instability marked by a struggling economy and widespread political uncertainty. This dissertation research project will ask how concepts of morality, masculinity, and selfhood shape the way Minangkabau men in the West Sumatran city of Bukittinggi adapt to these conditions. West Sumatra is a particularly compelling area in which to examine issues of gender and morality in modern Indonesia due to its unusual mix of a matrilineal social structure with a widespread commitment to Islam. The research plan consists primarily of participant-observation of men s lives in Bukittinggi, interviews concerning the cultural meanings of men s roles and their moral significance, and extended, person-centered interviews conducted with a small number of respondents. These methods are designed to elicit information on the relationship between cultural conceptions of morality and masculinity, the shape of social and economic life in Bukittinggi-and in Indonesia more generally-and Minangkabau men s experiences of themselves as masculine, moral actors. In addition to contributing to the training of a young anthropologist, this study will further the development of anthropological theories of self and subjectivity, and illuminate the dynamic engagement between individuals and cultural worlds experiencing uncertainty and transformation doc16473 none The Museum of Science in Boston is proposing to work with eight other science centers to investigate how science centers might collaborate to enhance the public understanding of research. The purpose of the planning effort is to identify and elaborate on promising approaches to increase the public understanding of the nature of scientific research, the process of technological innovation, and the interaction between science and technology and societal issues. Planning will be conducted in the context of three topics (tentative): global climate change, alternative energy sources, and genetically modified foods. Questions to be explored include: what it would take for each science center to offer exhibits and presentations on all three topics, how can the exhibits be kept current, what is the best mechanism for keeping science centers informed about current research, what would motivate visitors to return in order to follow a single line of research, how can visitors best continue their connection with the science centers after their visits, what will science centers change in the way they develop exhibits and programs in order to present current science and technology, what costs and logistical factors will need to be taken into consideration, will one size fit all or will different designs be needed for different science centers, and how might the exhibits and programs be designed to encourage the incorporation of local resources. The project will be coordinated with other media that are developing efforts to convey on-going science to the public. Evan Hadingham, Science Editor for NOVA at WGBH, will bring the perspective of television production; Rob Semper from the Exploratorium will represent the Internet; and Bruce Lowenstein, Editor of Public Understanding of Science, will represent print. The science centers participating in the planning effort include: Museum of Science, Boston New York Hall of Science Science Museum of Minnesota Arizona Science Center Tech Museum of Innovation California Science Center The Exploratorium Pacific Science Center American Museum of Natural History doc16474 none Many fundamental cellular processes are governed by genetic networks which employ protein-DNA interactions in regulating function. The biochemistry of the feedback loops associated with protein-DNA interactions leads to nonlinear effects, and the tools of nonlinear analysis become invaluable. This project involves the use of techniques from nonlinear dynamics and molecular biology to model, design and construct synthetic gene networks for biocomputing applications. Here biocomputing is defined as representing the ability of cells to make decisions based on external stimuli, and in this context, synthetic gene networks can be viewed as controllers for living cells. In this project, a rapidly switching genetic toggle switch is being modeled and constructed in bacterial cells. The genetic toggle switch, which is a fundamental unit of biocomputing memory storage, can be flipped between two stable expression states using transient chemical or thermal stimuli. In addition, as part of this project, synthetic gene networks based on more complicated logic gates (i.e., AND and OR gates) are being designed, modeled and constructed in bacterial cells. These circuits can function as sensors of multiple transient signals, and form the basis for general control schemes requiring an if then structure. Synthetic gene networks represent a first step towards logical cellular control, whereby biological processes can be manipulated or monitored at the DNA level. Ultimately, synthetic gene circuits encoded into DNA, might be downloaded into cells creating, in effect, a wet nano-robot. These cellular robots could be utilized for a variety of functions, including in vivo biosensing, autonomously synthesizing complex biomaterials, executing programmed cell death, and interfacing with microelectronic circuits by transducing biochemical events to and from the electronics doc16475 none Wu-chi Feng Oregon Graduate Institute CISE Research Resources: A Flexible Video Networking Infrastructure to Support Massively Scalable Information Flows This research project proposes the establishment of a flexible video networking testbed in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Oregon Graduate Institute. The main purpose of this architecture is to facilitate experimental research in systems that support massively scalable information flows. Focus will be on four main tasks: (1) Scalable Video Distillation Architectures - providing mechanisms to support the aggregation of large numbers of video streams in a video sensor network; (2) Scalable Video Multicast Distribution Protocols - providing scalable mechanisms that support quality and rate adaptive video for multicast over overlay networks; (3) An Integrated Approach to Resource Management for Internet Applications - combining application-level knowledge with low-level networking to provide scalable Internet application architectures, and (4) A Video Archive - creating an extensive testset of video data for use within our experiments as well as for distribution of statistical and frame size information to the rest of the research community doc16476 none This project is a series of Interdisciplinary Conferences in Applied Mathematics conducted by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) over three years. The conferences are designed to bring together mathematical scientists, computational scientists, engineers, and applications scientists who are developing and applying new mathematical concepts, methods, and algorithms. A successful feature of this series is the inclusion of focused, interdisciplinary, academic industry workshops. A new feature is a focus on workshops to encourage diversity in the mathematical and computational science workforce. The primary objective of the conferences is to initiate new interaction among the creators and users of the mathematical and computational science and thereby contribute to the understanding of mathematics and encourage its application to problems of society doc16477 none This project examines microenvironmental causes of developmental instability. This project hypothesizes that developmental instability results in part from the sensitivity of metabolism and development to (generally unmeasured) micro-environmental variation This project tests the hypothesis that trait sensitivities to small-scale changes in environmental conditions will explain a significant fraction of developmental instability. Thirty five ecotypes of Arabidopsis thaliana will be grown in controlled environmental conditions. Each plant will experience one of four macro-scale environments: High Light (HL) High Nitrogen (HN); HL LowNitrogen(LN); LowLight (LL) HN; LL LN. Within these macroenvironments, each plant will receive a slight increase or decrease in light or nitrogen relative to the macro-scale target levels. Using a quantitative genetics approach, the comparison of 1) the sensitivity of trait measurements to small changes in environmental conditions and 2) the extent of developmental instability, will test the hypothesis. Developmental instability is thought to play a number of important roles in the processes by which organisms adapt to changing environments. Perhaps most importantly, developmental instability obscures the roles of genes in the variation between individuals. For crop breeding, this means that the response to selection for economically important traits is reduced. In natural populations, developmental instability reduces the abilty of the organism to both maintain a stable phenotype, and to adapt to changing environments doc16478 none This award renews support of the Peromyscus Genetic Stock Center at the University of South Carolina at Columbia. The deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus) and congeneric species are among the most abundant, speciose, and widely distributed North American mammals. They range from Alaska to Central America and occur in many natural habitats. They are frequently used as models to study the fundamental processes underlying speciation, adaptative physiology, behavior, and community ecology. Laboratory stocks of both wild-type and genetically variant Peromyscus are used for investigations in which laboratory-based studies are interfaced with those of natural populations. The Peromyscus Genetic Stock Center was established in . Today it provides a reliable source of Peromyscus and related materials to the national scientific and education communities. The Center currently houses seven species of Peromyscus and more than 35 distinctive mutant and other genetically defined stocks, primarily of the deer mouse. The Stock Center supplies researchers and educators with live animals, and with selected biological materials including fresh or preserved tissues, molecular probes and libraries of cloned Peromyscus DNA. It also functions as a clearinghouse for information by sponsoring an Internet database, maintaining a reference collection of reprints, standardizing the genetic nomenclature for the genus and publishing a semi-annual Peromyscus Newsletter. The Peromyscus Genetic Stock Center continues to be widely used throughout the U.S. and elsewhere doc16479 none Predicting the timing and location of convective cloud development is a fundamental challenge in the study of meteorology. Heterogeneities in the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) particularly in ABL water vapor content and depth, lead to preferred locations for convective initiation. Land surface heterogeneity is an important cause of heterogeneity in the ABL. Hence, land-surface fluxes play an important role in ABL development and convective initiation. The minimum scale of land surface forcing that causes heterogeneity in ABL properties such as depth and water vapor content and consequently leads to preferred locations for cloud formation remains uncertain. Observations and models suggest scales ranging from a few to nearly 100 km. This project proposes an observational plan as part of the International H2O Project (IHOP). The IHOP is a large multi-agency, multi-investigator project that focuses on the measurement of water vapor and water vapor variability. The goal of this project is to improve understanding of convective initiation, increase short-term precipitation forecast skills and test the capabilities of various instruments to measure the four dimensional characteristics of water vapor. The critical observations for the research to be performed under this award are maps of surface fluxes of latent and sensible heat over a region of at least 300 x 300 km in Oklahoma and Kansas, and repeated airborne water vapor DIfferential Absorption Lidar (DIAL) observations of ABL depth and lower tropospheric water vapor. The flux maps will be created from a network of surface flux towers, airborne measurements of surface fluxes over repeated flight tracks about 50 km in length, satellite remote sensing of land surface temperature and vegetation cover, and a land surface model. One airborne DIAL will be coupled with an airborne Doppler Lidar, yielding the ability to observe ABL flux profiles via remote eddy covariance. Flights will be focused on the midday hours of 10-15 relatively fair weather days in order to capture the preconvective atmosphere with DIAL. Observations will be analyzed to determine the degree of spatial heterogeneity in ABL water vapor depth and water budgets and the causes of this heterogeneity, focusing especially on determining the spatial scales at which land surface heterogeneity is an important factor. Ten to fifteen days of data will be analyzed in an attempt to move beyond a case study approach. Data assimilation will be used to ingest dense, mesoscale observations into a high-resolution mesoscale atmospheric model that includes a sophisticated land-surface scheme. The model will be used as an analysis tool to study mesoscale surface-ABL-cloud interactions captured in the observations. Further the model will be used to assess the impacts of the DIAL observations, detailed land surface flux maps and a new shallow cumulus parameterization on forecasts of ABL heterogeneity and convective initiation. Products will include ABL depth maps, ABL water budget estimates and model post-analysis fields incorporating all available IHOP observations for the 10-15 days of DIAL observations. Expected results include: an improved understanding of the role of land surface heterogeneity in convective ABL development and convective initiation; the degree to which model prediction of ABL development and moist convection can be improved via dense observations of ABL water vapor content and surface fluxes; and the impact of a shallow convection parameterization on model performance doc16480 none Robert Kozma-University of Memphis-Percolation Model of Phase Transitions in the Central Nervous Systems during Perceptual Information Processing The proposed research will explore the close link between pattern-based information processing using dynamical memories and percolation phenomena. Percolation models have been used to analyze a wide range of processes in physics and electronics, and in biological and ecological systems. In the last decade and a half, many variants of the standard percolation models have been studied. In particular, there has been much work on the family or processes known as bootstrap percolation. Computer experiments performed by physicists have suggested interesting non-trivial models. The solid mathematical theory of percolation in lattices to lay down the foundations of dynamical memories and the related phase transitions will be applied doc16481 none The National Science Foundation supports the Boston University Conference on Language Development to be held at Boston University each November from through . The conference is an internationally recognized meeting for researchers in the areas of first and second language acquisition, bilingualism, language disorders, and literacy development. It is attended by 400-500 researchers from around the world. Its presentations are chosen by anonymous peer review, and its proceedings are published by Cascadilla Press. The keynote speaker is Susan Goldin-Meadow; the plenary speaker is Bonnie Schwartz. Since , the faculty and students of Boston University s Applied Linguistics Program have organized and run the conference. Dr. Shanley Allen leads this year s team of student and faculty organizers doc16482 none Renne This research by an anthropologist from the University of Michigan will examine the impact of Islamic education on the perspectives and practices of women in Northern Nigeria. This demographic anthropological study of married Hausa Muslim women s participation in Islamic adult education programs in the town of Zaria, Nigeria, will report on women s perceptions of moral conduct in social relations, and will examine women s views of what they have gained-intellectually, socially, morally and economically-from their attendance at Islamic education classes. The project will compare the moral views, social and economic preferences, and aspirations for daughters of schooled and non-schooled women through a survey of 540 women. The role of women s education in affecting changes in marital age and health is important to understand, as prior research shows that a mother s increased education is one of the best predictors of gains in maternal and child health. This project s focus on Islamic, as opposed to Western education, has wider implications as it will advance our understanding of this relationship in a different educational regime doc16483 none Between - ,with NSF funding, Dr. Vincent Pigott and colleagues excavated a cluster of three prehistoric copper producing sites in the small, ore-rich Khao Wong Prachan Valley in central Thailand. While occupation began ca. B.C., copper metallurgy did not appear until ca. B.C. at Non Pa Wai, Nil Kham Haeng and Non Mak La. With pending support from the NSF, Dr. Pigott and Co-PI Dr. Karen Mudar will oversee a program of analysis of the excavated organic remains from these three sites. The goal of the analytical program is to establish and assess the evidence for subsistence and subsistence change through analysis of the floral, faunal, and human skeletal remains. We seek to measure possible agricultural instability based on evidence for marginal soils, erratic rainfall, and drought potential. These analyses will be used to test our working model that links agricultural instability to the specialized production of copper in explaining the nature of economic and social relations within this prehistoric context. Massive copper production in the valley, but little indication of local use, suggests that copper was being produced for exchange, most probably for food. We argue that copper production was a strategy to buffer unpredictable shortfalls in local agriculture. Evidence suggests that environmental changes brought on by humans as well as agricultural instability occurred in concert with the intensification of copper production. The correlation of changes in both subsistence and production will contribute to an understanding of subsistence strategies that, we argue, motivated long-term, non-hierarchical, egalitarian, social and economic relations in this region. Dr. Mudar will conduct the analysis of all excavated faunal remains. Dr. Anagnostis Agelarakis (Adelphi University) will study the forty-eight human skeletons from the site of Non Mak La. Dr. Steven Weber (Washington State University, Vancouver) will study all excavated samples of botanical remains and Dr. Lisa Kealhofer (Santa Clara University) will study all samples taken for phytolith analysis including those from swamp corings. With the analytical results in hand, the PI s will examine potential links between craft specialization, unreliable agriculture, and egalitarian social organization; evidence which should provide an important alternative to current models. We anticipate that the results of this study will have a major impact on how archaeologists view craft production and social complexity doc16484 none The project, a collaboration between U.S. and French researchers, is an attempt to conduct systematic comparative research on second-generation incorporation of immigrants in the US and France. Examination of a wider range of contexts than can be found in one society alone can help to clarify the circumstances under which each of the competing theoretical models of incorporation--classical assimilation, segmented assimilation, and ethnic pluralism-best applies and the causal mechanisms involved. The intent is to study the socioeconomic incorporation of the second generation of the largest immigrant groups in France and the U.S.- Maghrebins, i.e., Muslim North Africans, in the former and Mexicans in the latter. A number of similarities in the situations of these two groups suggest that they may be on more or less parallel tracks of incorporation. The societies they have entered both have strong histories of assimilation as the principal mode of incorporating the descendants of immigrants, but the groups in question come from countries that have endured colonial or semi-colonial relationships to the host societies. Both impressionistic and systematic evidence indicate that they suffer from prejudice and discrimination and that their second generations (and, in the case of Mexicans, their third) evidence a variety of disadvantages, from higher rates of early departure from school to concentration in low-skill jobs. Thus, the evidence to date leaves it unclear which of the models of classic and segmented assimilation better applies and under what circumstances. If the socioeconomic trajectories of Mexicans and Maghrebins turn out to be similar in a systematic comparison, this could lead to a re-evaluation of the understanding of the position of the groups in both societies-in the U.S., this could entail some revision in the segmented-assimilation model, which is so far tied to features specific to the U.S. (e.g., racial segregation); and in France, to a revision in the understanding of the source of Maghrebin disadvantage, which is heavily colored by religious distinctiveness. The research will be based on analysis with multi-level models of a number of micro-level data sets in both countries-in the U.S., we will use the National Longitudinal Study of and the National Educational Longitudinal Study of ; in France, we will use four different studies, including the FQP ( Fonnation-Qualification-Professionelle ) of and the Generation of Cereq. All the studies offer a comparable range of variables measuring family origins, school achievement, and early labor-market experiences on major variables doc16485 none Hans Bode During the last 20 years a great deal has been learned about the genes and the molecular mechanisms that regulate the processes underlying the development of an embryo into a functioning animal. One of the most interesting aspects of the accumulating knowledge is that similar sets of genes and mechanisms underlie similar developmental processes in many of the diverse animals studied so far. These common features raise a number of important questions. When during animal evolution did these genes arise? Were they already present in the earliest metazoan? To what extent has the function of a particular gene, or pathway of genes been conserved throughout metazoan evolution? One approach to these issues is to study these genes and their functions in organisms that belong to groups of animals that arose very early during metazoan evolution. One of the earliest groups is the Cnidaria, whose members include jellyfish, sea anemones, and the freshwater hydra. Of these, hydra, is particularly useful since the developmental processes are well-understood. The overall aim of the proposed work is to determine the extent that the genes and mechanisms underlying axis formation in hydra are similar to those found vertebrates and arthropods. Though hydra, and all cnidarians, have a single axis compared to the two axes [anterior-posterior and dorsal-ventral] in bilaterians, a number of genes known to be involved in axis formation in vertebrates and arthropods play similar roles in hydra. A specific problem that needs to be addressed concerns the genes and mechanisms involved in the initiation of axis formation. In vertebrates, a region termed the organizer plays a central role. Recently, a region of the hydra head, the hypostome, has been shown to have clear similarities with this vertebrate structure. Thus, the focus of this proposal is to isolate genes from the hydra organizer, determine their roles, and determine to what extent the same or similar genes are involved in hydra and vertebrate organizers as well as arthropod organizing regions. The common approach is to look for homologues of genes that function in the organizer activity of a vertebtate or the fruit fly, Drosophila. This approach has been very successful but is slow and tedious. DNA array analysis provides a means for identifying a subset of genes among several thousand that are candidates for roles in organizer activity in hydra. Sequence analysis will reveal which are homologues of known genes, which belong to a specific class of gene and which are novel genes. Thereafter, the role of each of these genes will be analyzed by examining their expression patterns during the development and functioning of the organizer region as well as with the use of a functional assay. The information gained will provide (a) a more detailed understanding of the organizer in hydra, (b) a more detailed understanding of the molecular evolution of this structure, (c) and possibly the identification of novel genes that may generally be involved in organizer development and activity doc16486 none Interaction between northern temperate forests and the atmosphere is the focus of the Chequamegon Ecosystem-Atmosphere Study (ChEAS). The ChEAS scientists are studying forests of northern Wisconsin to understand the carbon and water cycles of the forest-atmosphere system and their role in the earth s climate system. The ultimate goal is to learn how the northern forest-atmosphere system will respond to increases in greenhouse gases, land-use change, and natural climate variations. The components that contribute to the carbon and water cycles range from the size of a soil bacteria or leaf pore to the global circulation of the jet stream. Some processes, like photosynthesis, vary from one minute to the next with the passing of cumulus clouds, while others, such as forest succession, respond to climate patterns that persist over decades or even centuries. No single scientific method can encompass these vast scales of time, space, and disciplinary expertise. The ChEAS research collaboration network provides funds for students, faculty and research scientists from a wide variety of disciplines, including atmospheric science, ecology and hydrology, and institutions to exchange data, personnel, and scientific understanding. This exchange of information will accelerate our understanding of the forest-atmosphere component of the earth s climate and will help to train a new generation of earth system scientists doc16487 none This project is exploring quantum computing based on superconducting Josephson quantum bits (or qubits) coupled through microwave fields. More specifically, the quantum dynamics of a Cooper-pair box with a superconducting loop, as well as the flux-based qubit, in the presence of either classical or non-classical microwave fields are being investigated. The control of quantum coherent Rabi oscillations in a superposition of two charge states, for both single-and multi-photon processes are being studied. Under this project very novel quantum computing schemes for Josephson qubits coupled through photons, including the implementation of quantum communications between qubits is being investigated. The local gate voltages and a microwave field can be used to control the device, which should be scalable to at least 10^8 qubits. Thus ways to implement scalable and well-controlled quantum computers, which are expected to be capable of performing certain tasks which no classical computers can do in practical time scales are being investigated. Indeed, the Cooper pair box is a viable candidate for the implementation of quantum gates since it is a macroscopic two-level system that can be coherently controlled. Finally, young researchers are being trained in the fast growing area of quantum computing doc16488 none Computing with DNA, with its advantages of massive parallelism and huge information density, promises a number of revolutionary applications, as well as the potential to solve problems beyond the capabilities of conventional computers. A critical barrier, however, is unplanned crosshybridization among oligonucleotides. In order for the computations to be reliable and efficient, and to scale to larger problems, the DNA sequences have to be designed to minimize these unplanned crosshybridizations. Though pairwise hybridization is well modeled and understood, design of such libraries is challenging because of the huge number of pairwise hybridization s, and the conflicting constraints of maximizing the library size while minimizing crosshybridization.Therefore, to overcome these limitations, huge libraries of non-crosshybridizing DNA oligonucleotides are manufactured by in vitro evolution with a PCR-based protocol that selects from a random pool those oligonucleotides that are maximally mismatched. In addition, because enumeration of all pairwise hybridization energetic in a huge library is computationally prohibitive, a statistical approach, which is based upon spin glass physics, is used to model the library. The model is the basis for a set of analysis and design tools for application to the libraries. Because of the fundamental importance of DNA hybridization in DNA computing, the modeling and manufacture of huge libraries of DNA oligonucleotides is producing foundational principles and results for the field. The size of the largest libraries of non-crosshybridizing oligonucleotides is also the limit on the size of feasible computation. The libraries are an enabling resource not only for large-scale DNA computations, but also biotechnology applications, such as reusable, universal DNA microarrays. In addition, the libraries, as well as the software tools, are available for reproduction and use by other researchers in DNA computing and biotechnology doc16489 none The theory of quantum computation is being constructed from abstract study of topological properties of collective electron systems. One example is the dancing pattern of quasi-particles in fractional Quantum Hall effects. The dancing patterns of quasi-particles are described mathematically by braids. In this context, the Berry phase of the quasi-particles gives rise representations of braids. In mathematical terms, these are modular functors. This project is using insights from modular functors to investigate the possibilities for physical realization of quantum computers. The chief advantage of topological quantum computation is physical error correction. The rich mathematical structure of modular functors is also employed to design new quantum algorithms. Topological Quantum Computation Numerical Laboratory is being established as an intermediate step towards the physical implementation of a real quantum computer based on the principles of modular functors. A lecture and seminar series at Indiana University is organized to training students. This cross-disciplinary project involves topology, condensed matter physics, and computer science doc16490 none This project will continue the operation of the Submillimeter Polarimeter for Antarctic Remote Observations (SPARO) at the South Pole for the next three winter seasons. The SPARO instrument is operated on the Viper 2-meter telescope, and has recently been upgraded following its first year of observations. In the exceptionally transmissive and stable winter-time skies over the Antarctic plateau, SPARO provides a powerful probe of magnetic fields in interstellar regions. Measurements at submillimeter wavelengths provide a method for mapping magnetic fields in the denser interstellar regions of the galaxy by measuring the linear polarization of thermal emission from magnetically aligned interstellar dust grains. Interstellar magnetic fields are generally difficult to observe, but they can contribute to our understanding of two general problems in which interstellar gas (and thus probably also magnetic fields) play important roles: the study of the galactic center, and star formation. The galactic center is a highly radiationally active region. In some centers, known as active galactic nuclei (AGN), the nucleus or central core produces more radiation than the entire rest of the galaxy. The size of an AGN can be smaller than the size of our solar system, and current theory suggests that there is a supermassive black hole at the center of an AGN. Observations proposed here are aimed at (a) confirming SPARO s recent discovery of a large-scale toroidal magnetic field at the galactic center, (b) testing a magnetic outflow model for the Galactic Center Lobe - a radio structure possibly tracing gas that has been ejected from the galactic nucleus, and (c) mapping large-scale magnetic fields in a sample of star forming clouds in order to study the relationship between the elongated shapes of these clouds and their magnetic fields doc16491 none This research focuses on morphogenesis and developmental biology as an inspiration for algorithms and general principles for organizing complex behavior from locally interacting agents. The goal is to design artificial systems that replicate biological robustness, and to use insights from these systems to understand the capabilities of biological systems. The general principles are formalized as programming languages --- with explicit primitives, means of combination, and means of abstraction --- thus providing a framework or the design and analysis of self-assembling systems. Previous work demonstrated this approach with a programming language that specifies a robust process for shape formation on a sheet of identically-programmed ``cells using local primitives from epithelial cell morphogenesis and Drosophila cell differentiation, and rules from geometry. The specific aims are: 1) developing new programming models for domains such as growth and apoptosis (cell death) and 2) investigating the connection of current programming models to biological processes. This research will have significant impact on both the engineering principles for robust design and on the understanding of biological morphogenesis doc16492 none Atmospheric precipitation, whether in convective storms or quasi-uniformly stratified cloud layers, generally is highly inhomogeneous and exhibits considerable natural variability at scales ranging from a few meters to several hundreds of kilometers. A variety of sensors (e.g. rain gauges, radars, and satellites) are used to monitor precipitation rate and total accumulation and provide both direct and indirect measurements at different scales based upon instrument resolution and sampling or analysis strategies. Physically-based computer models, both of the atmosphere and solid earth, rely upon these observed data for initialization assimilation as well as forecast validation. However, owing to the tremendous scale-dependent variability of precipitation and the discrepancies in scale and resolution among different types sources of data, merging or comparing observations at different scales, or comparing model outputs to observations, is difficult. Yet, quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE) and model forecast verification are foundational aspects of both atmospheric and hydrologic prediction. In an effort to address issues associated with both scale variability and scale discrepancy in merging or comparing information from multiple sources, the Principal Investigators seek to use a recently-developed scale-recursive estimation (SRE) framework. They will utilize the SRE framework for (1) Quantitative Precipitation Forecast (QPF) verification when observations are available at one or more scales different than the scale of the numerical model; (2) derivation of products or analyses in situations where observations and model outputs at different scales are to be merged to produce a single field; and (3) estimation of background error covariances from fields produced via the comparison of observations and model outputs at different scales. The problems to be addressed require combined expertise in statistical multi-scale analysis of precipitation, optimal estimation theory, radar data analysis and interpretation, data assimilation, and numerical weather prediction modeling. This collaborative team involves two statistical hydrologists and two meteorologists having demonstrated expertise in the above areas, and builds upon a previous successful collaboration in the analysis of the spatio-temporal structure of forecasted and observed precipitation at the scale of individual convective storms. In previous collaborative research, an extensive analysis was made of the spatio-temporal structure of forecasted and observed precipitation with an emphasis on one fundamental question: Do storm-resolving forecast models produce precipitation fields that exhibit the same scale invariant structures as observations, and if not, why? The shortcomings of typical distance-based deterministic interpolators (or averaging operators) for converting data from one scale to another, i.e., downscaling (up-scaling), were documented, and the need for a rigorous methodology capable of handling scale-dependent variability and uncertainty in observations was demonstrated. The present interdisciplinary proposal builds upon this body of previous work and proposes to explore a framework within which issues of variability and scale-dependency can be properly addressed for the purpose of QPF verification and multi-sensor rainfall estimation doc16493 none This grant is supported by the Divisions of Materials Research and Advanced Computational Infrastructure and Research. The research is in the area of computational materials research and involves a collaborative effort in both materials research and computational science. The overall goal of the research is to exploit high performance computers for solving large scale and complex problems that arise in modeling real materials. The research will center on electronic materials with extended and point defects, and non-ideal interfaces and in the form of amorphous solids, atomic clusters, liquids, and glasses. The continuing evolution of high performance computers is creating new opportunities for the application of sophisticated electronic structure techniques to the study of technologically important materials. A few orders of magnitude improvement in speed are feasible in the near future and will enable us to step beyond the current computational limits in materials science and achieve an unprecedented understanding of the physical and electronic properties of materials. Such achievements are not made by progress in computer hardware alone, but depend more so on innovations in algorithms. The development of new algorithms in multidisciplinary research requires an understanding and appreciation of the different disciplines involved by the collaborating members. Based on prior experience of this group, progress can be best made by a close collaboration between computer scientists and materials scientists. Thus, algorithms will be developed, implemented and applied to a number of materials problems. Applications will include: localized systems, atomic clusters and quantum dots; liquids and disordered semiconductors; dilute magnetic semiconductors. Algorithms to be developed include: out-of-core methods; special methods for computing eigenvectors and eigenvalues; avoiding eigenvectors and eigenvalues. %%% This grant is supported by the Divisions of Materials Research and Advanced Computational Infrastructure and Research. The research is in the area of computational materials research and involves a collaborative effort in both materials research and computational science. The overall goal of the research is to exploit high performance computers for solving large scale and complex problems that arise in modeling real materials. The research will center on electronic materials with extended and point defects, and non-ideal interfaces and in the form of amorphous solids, atomic clusters, liquids, and glasses. The continuing evolution of high performance computers is creating new opportunities for the application of sophisticated electronic structure techniques to the study of technologically important materials. A few orders of magnitude improvement in speed are feasible in the near future and will enable us to step beyond the current computational limits in materials science and achieve an unprecedented understanding of the physical and electronic properties of materials. Such achievements are not made by progress in computer hardware alone, but depend more so on innovations in algorithms. The development of new algorithms in multidisciplinary research requires an understanding and appreciation of the different disciplines involved by the collaborating members. Based on prior experience of this group, progress can be best made by a close collaboration between computer scientists and materials scientists. Thus, algorithms will be developed, implemented and applied to a number of materials problems doc16492 none Atmospheric precipitation, whether in convective storms or quasi-uniformly stratified cloud layers, generally is highly inhomogeneous and exhibits considerable natural variability at scales ranging from a few meters to several hundreds of kilometers. A variety of sensors (e.g. rain gauges, radars, and satellites) are used to monitor precipitation rate and total accumulation and provide both direct and indirect measurements at different scales based upon instrument resolution and sampling or analysis strategies. Physically-based computer models, both of the atmosphere and solid earth, rely upon these observed data for initialization assimilation as well as forecast validation. However, owing to the tremendous scale-dependent variability of precipitation and the discrepancies in scale and resolution among different types sources of data, merging or comparing observations at different scales, or comparing model outputs to observations, is difficult. Yet, quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE) and model forecast verification are foundational aspects of both atmospheric and hydrologic prediction. In an effort to address issues associated with both scale variability and scale discrepancy in merging or comparing information from multiple sources, the Principal Investigators seek to use a recently-developed scale-recursive estimation (SRE) framework. They will utilize the SRE framework for (1) Quantitative Precipitation Forecast (QPF) verification when observations are available at one or more scales different than the scale of the numerical model; (2) derivation of products or analyses in situations where observations and model outputs at different scales are to be merged to produce a single field; and (3) estimation of background error covariances from fields produced via the comparison of observations and model outputs at different scales. The problems to be addressed require combined expertise in statistical multi-scale analysis of precipitation, optimal estimation theory, radar data analysis and interpretation, data assimilation, and numerical weather prediction modeling. This collaborative team involves two statistical hydrologists and two meteorologists having demonstrated expertise in the above areas, and builds upon a previous successful collaboration in the analysis of the spatio-temporal structure of forecasted and observed precipitation at the scale of individual convective storms. In previous collaborative research, an extensive analysis was made of the spatio-temporal structure of forecasted and observed precipitation with an emphasis on one fundamental question: Do storm-resolving forecast models produce precipitation fields that exhibit the same scale invariant structures as observations, and if not, why? The shortcomings of typical distance-based deterministic interpolators (or averaging operators) for converting data from one scale to another, i.e., downscaling (up-scaling), were documented, and the need for a rigorous methodology capable of handling scale-dependent variability and uncertainty in observations was demonstrated. The present interdisciplinary proposal builds upon this body of previous work and proposes to explore a framework within which issues of variability and scale-dependency can be properly addressed for the purpose of QPF verification and multi-sensor rainfall estimation doc16495 none Manahan Larval forms are dominant in the life history strategies of invertebrates in marine environments. In Antarctica, energy budget calculations have shown that larval stages of echinoderms have the capacity to survive without food for periods of several months to years. This has led to the speculation that mechanisms of energy metabolism are more efficient in these larval forms, and that this enhanced efficiency might be unique to life in extreme cold. Recent studies on the biochemical bases of developmental physiology in Antarctic marine invertebrates have revealed some novel aspects of metabolism in the cold. Contrary to expectations of low metabolism and low rates of macromolecular synthesis in the cold, embryos and larvae of an Antarctic sea urchin have high rates of protein synthesis, while maintaining low rates of metabolism. This apparent paradox was resolved with the recent finding that the cost of protein synthesis in this Antarctic sea urchin is one twenty-fifth of that reported for other animals. This is the highest efficiency for protein synthesis reported for an animal and has important implications for the physiology of growth and development in cold environments. This unique biochemical efficiency of protein synthesis in the cold is the subject of detailed investigation in the current project. The research team will combine expertise in Antarctic larval physiology and biochemistry and molecular biology of sea urchin development to address an experimental plan that is based on three major objectives. (1) The generality of the recent finding of the low cost of protein synthesis in Antarctic sea urchin larvae will be tested by measuring metabolism and protein synthesis during development of other Antarctic echinoderm species. (2) The prediction of a high rate of protein synthesis with low metabolic cost is that growth efficiencies will be high in such organisms. This will be tested by measuring the physiology of protein growth efficiencies in larvae. (3) The unique high efficiency of protein synthesis in Antarctic sea urchin embryos will be studied using specific molecular biology approaches. The combination of these quantitative analyses will enable us to pinpoint those aspects of protein metabolism that result in such extremely high energy-efficiencies. Understanding metabolic efficiency in polar organisms is required to help resolve long-standing questions regarding temperature compensation and adaptations to food limitation in polar regions. The unique approach here is the emphasis on the cellular and sub-cellular levels of biological analysis to understand the relationship among development, growth, metabolic rate, and rates and costs of protein synthesis in the Antarctic organisms we propose to study doc16496 none A program of theoretical research on quantum computation in quantum dot structures is underway. In this type of quantum computer, the qubits are the spins of electrons trapped in a silicon-germanium semiconductor heterostructure. The error distributions and decoherence properties of these electrons are being calculated, and it appears that correlated errors and mutual decoherence are important in this dot implementation. The impact of these phenomena on quantum algorithms and quantum error correction schemes is being investigated. This is done by examining their effect in two paradigmatic quantum processes. The first is the quantum random walk, a simple example of an algorithm that can be implemented on a one- or two-dimensional array of quantum dot qubits. The second is the computation of the majority function. A particularly attractive feature of both problems is that it is interesting and feasible to do them in cases that require relatively few qubits. More general questions are also being addressed. Certain types of quantum algorithms will be more susceptible to certain types of errors. This leads to the possibility of quantum error-resistant algorithms, and the feasibility of this generalization of the similar classical concept is being determined doc16497 none Liu This workshop will bring together decision makers from government and the power industry and technology experts from US and Brazil to discuss the solutions to the current energy crises in both countries. The workshop organization will be guided by NSF and EPRI. The PI will also work closely with the Brazilian colleagues to identify the best team for a successful discussion. The workshop is intended to identify the basic research needs and fundamental solutions for the future both near-term and long term. This is the first of a series of three NSF EPRI workshops, whose ultimate goal is to promote research leading to a quantum leap in the level, intelligence and efficiency of global grid control, whether centralized or distributed. A critical issue that this first workshop will address is rapid development of the devices that allow an increased level of controllability in a wide area grid. There is substantial opportunity for the U.S. to learn from the successful experience of Brazil with such devices. The US is facing severe national challenges on the electricity infrastructure in the years to come. These issues were discussed in President Bush s National Energy Policy: Grand Challenge 1: Lack of Transmission Capability; Grand Challenge 2: Operation in a Competitive Market Environment; Grand Challenge 3: Power Infrastructure Vulnerability. These grand challenges require basic research to develop fundamental solutions to the national problems. Some questions that must be answered through basic research are: o What is the optimal strategy to expand the transmission capabilities from an engineering point of view? o What is the strategy to defend, protect and operate the stressed power grids in the market environment? o What is the strategy to ensure that wide area power grids are invulnerable facing the various sources of disruption? o What new technologies are needed to meet the grand challenges doc16498 none In the young field of quantum information science, theoretical investigations have quickly identified potentialities which are so astounding in scope (exponential speed-up of computation, the insecurity of current cryptographic schemes) that a focused experimental activity must be undertaken. This project is pursuing a fundamental experimental advance in one potential arena for the implementation of these theoretical ideas is proposed: the synthesis of optical and atomic quantum information resources through cavity quantum electrodynamics (CQED). While theoretical developments indicate that CQED devices offer a scalable and powerful architecture for quantum information processing, a key missing element which stands in the way of further progress is the deterministic loading of the atom-cavity system. To mend this gap, a powerful yet straightforward integration of the experimental techniques of laser cooling, magnetic trapping and Bose-Einstein condensation with cavity quantum electrodynamics is underway. This synthesis is clearly beneficial to quantum information processing, combining well controlled, stationary qubits comprised of trapped atoms wherein quantum information is stored in long-lived internal states, flying qubits in the form of photons emitted from the cavity, and a means of strongly coupling the two. This ambitious effort will enable a broad range of breakthroughs and innovations in the field of quantum information science. For this project, an evaporatively-cooled, and at times quantum degenerate, atomic gas is produced outside the confines of a high-finesse optical cavity, and then adiabatically placed inside the cavity to provide a reservoir of ultracold atoms. Single atoms, or a countable number of atoms, are activated from this passive reservoir by a transition between atomic hyperfine states, and are then used for a wide range of basic applications with direct relevance to quantum information and communication schemes. These applications include the generation of single photons on demand, the generation of non-classical number states of the optical field, the implementation of Raman CQED by which the atom-cavity system can be programmatically switched on and off, and an exploration of quantum and non-linear optical properties of quantum degenerate gases at the single photon level doc16499 none The primary goal of this program is to quantify the dynamics of lipid uptake and utilization in a naturally foraging mammalian carnivore by examining freely diving Weddell seals in Antarctica. This species offers a unique opportunity to follow the biochemistry and physiology of nutrient utilization in a large carnivore that may not be possible in any other system. This is due to the essentially impossible logistics of working with large predators such as free-ranging felids (e.g, lions, tigers) or ursids (bears) and obtaining multiple blood samples and measuring digestive chemistry while the animal is actively foraging. While such studies can be conducted in laboratory or zoo settings, they are necessarily limited to using captive animals where feeding times are typically constrained by husbandry requirements and to human-determined diets. However, a unique opportunity to perform digestive chemistry experiments in actively foraging large carnivores in the wild exists in the Antarctic. For several decades, the Weddell seal has been the focus of studies on natural diving physiology because of the ability to work with the species using isolated holes in the sea ice near McMurdo Station, Antarctica. In that system, the seal has access to a single ice hole where it routinely returns to breathe, sleep, digest, etc. With the use of blood-sampling catheters, serial samples of blood can be collected whenever the seal returns to the surface between diving bouts. Seals rely primarily on lipid metabolism for their daily energy demands and in this new program, nutrient metabolism in predatory carnivores will be studied by examining the kinetics of lipid uptake and utilization during active foraging bouts. Labeled blood samples from freely diving animals will be used to quantify lipid turnover rates and to characterize the various components of the lipid pool. Adult seal lipid uptake and utilization will be compared to similar processes in pups, which are biochemically adapted for massive and rapid lipid utilization while nursing. This project will provide rare and perhaps unparalleled data on the foraging biochemistry of freely living carnivores. Results will also provide insight not only to Antarctic ecosystem studies, but to the entire field of lipid metabolism in mammals and to the study of carnivore biology doc16500 none With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Paul Kay and Terry Regier will build a web-accessible database to test the hypothesis of universal constraints on color naming across languages. Anthropologists and linguists used to think that the meanings of color words (e.g., red , black , etc.) differ arbitrarily from language to language. It was also thought that these words, rather than being constrained by biological constants of human color perception, vary arbitrarily across cultures and that the words cause speakers of different languages to see color differently. A study by Kay and colleagues challenged this view, maintaining that patterns in color naming across languages reveal certain constants. That study was followed up by the NSF-supported World Color Survey, in which data on color naming in 110 unwritten languages were gathered in the field by linguists highly familiar with the languages. The World Color Survey resulted in a number of publications, generally supporting the view of universal constraints on color naming. Because these data were collected in the early days of computers, they were not entered into a uniform database that would make them amenable to comprehensive statistical testing or to web publication. The current project will (1) convert the World Color Survey data to a uniform database, (2) make this database available to everyone via the web, and (3) perform comprehensive statistical testing on the data to test hypotheses about color naming. The question of universal constraints on systems of color naming has broad implications. Color words provide a natural laboratory in cross-language comparison of meanings because their meanings - colors - can be specified in a scientific system of description that is independent of any particular natural language. Color has thus been the vocabulary domain most often cited both by proponents of linguistic cultural relativity and by their opponents, who tend to emphasize biologically and evolutionary based universals in human behavior. As a consequence, color words have come to occupy a special position in the very general nature versus nurture debate, a controversy within the biological and social sciences, as well as the general educated public and many issues of public policy, at least since Darwin. Increased scientific clarity with regard to universality versus arbitrariness in color naming is consequently of general interest doc16501 none Under the direction of Dr. Mark Aldenderfer, Claudia U. Rumold will collect data for her doctoral dissertation which will examine the adoption of agriculture in the high Andes of northwestern Argentina. She will participate in the archaeological investigation of two sites, Ramadas and Matansillas 2, located in the San Antonio de los Cobres River Valley. The sites, dating from circa to BP, span the period in which agriculture developed in this region and current evidence indicates that they will provide data regarding this process. Both sites contain evidence for the cultivation, processing, or consumption of plants (e.g., hoes, grinding stones, plant remains). Significantly, sites as early as Ramadas are rare in the south-central Andes and may provide key insights into the first stages of agricultural adoption. Within the last ten thousand years, agriculture appeared independently among many societies inhabiting distinct environmental settings around the world. The widespread adoption of an agrarian economy had and continues to have a far-reaching impact - contributing to increasing sociopolitical complexity, sedentarization, rapid population growth, urbanism, and large-scale human transformation of the environment. In view of its pivotal role, archaeologists wish to understand agriculture s origins and development - how and why it diffused so successfully throughout the globe. Clarification of the fundamental variables underlying the shift from hunting-gathering to farming hinges on careful comparison of case studies. Northwestern Argentina possesses many of the variables closely linked with the appearance of agriculture (e.g., the domestication of autochthonous plants and animals and the appearance of pottery and settled village life). Rumold s research here will therefore provide new data critical to the comparative process. Four analyses will be carried out with the aim of characterizing the emergence of farming at the sites in question. Grinding stone and ceramic use-wear analysis will elucidate the nature and intensity of plant processing techniques. Examination of charred plant remains will illuminate the use of seed plants. Roots and tubers (e.g., potato) - the most important economic plants domesticated prehistorically in the Andes - do not often preserve in charred form; therefore, starch grain analysis will be conducted in order to clarify their economic role. As this technique is relatively new to archaeology, Rumold s research will help to expand its empirical base in highland South America. On a theoretical level, data regarding the use of roots and tubers will be essential to correcting the present bias in theories of agricultural origins, which primarily concern seed plants doc16502 none Louiqa Raschid University of Maryland College Park CISE Research Resources: Infrastructure to Develop a Large Scale Experiment Testbed of Multi-model Resources The use of the widely distributed collections of structured and unstructured information expressed in multiple languages or modalities provided by the Internet, requires production of scalable, robust algorithms for the discovery of replicated content, determination of delay or access latency of sources, and the confrontation of the inherently dynamic nature of the Internet. This project s objective is to establish a laboratory testbed providing a controlled environment that captures structural, content, and latency characteristics of the (publicly accessible) Web. This will stimulate collaboration between researchers whose interests range over natural language applications, language independent processing of scanned documents, analysis of video information sources, information retrieval, and wide area applications and resource discovery across heterogeneous servers. The testbed will support the development and testing of: (1) tools for broad-scale, cross-linguistic analysis and discovery of relevant information across languages and modalities, (2) cost models and access cost catalogs for wide area environments, reflecting the temporal variability in access latency, (3) distributed content based indexing and association of media clips for resource discovery, (4) transcoding and scheduling of multimedia resources for delivery any time and anywhere to disparate clients; from mobile wireless to high speed optical links doc16503 none Solving problems that have large computational and storage requirements is becoming increasingly critical for advances in many domains of science and engineering. Runtime and compiler technology can significantly accelerate advances in such domains by enabling the programming of algorithms for these problems at very high levels of abstraction. Our research focuses on an important class of scientific and engineering problems: data intensive computations. Such computations arise in many domains of scientific and engineering research. We are targetting two high-level programming models for this class of computations: 1. Object-Oriented (Java-Based): Object-oriented features like encapsulation and polymorphism can ease software development and allow better long-term management of large computational projects. We are using a dialect of Java for expressing data intensive computations. An initial prototype compiler for this dialect of Java has been built. Our compiler uses static interprocedural slicing technique to extracting required functions for utilizing an existing runtime system, Active Data Repository (ADR). 2. Declarative (XQL-Based): The very high-level nature of declarative languages can allow rapid prototyping of new computational techniques. XML (Extensible Markup Language) is getting accepted as the format for the logical layout of data which may be made available over the web or exchanged between organizations. We will make extensions to XML Schemas for expressing multidimensional collections of elements. We also will also make extensions to XQL, which is a query language for XML documents, for expressing processing of large datasets. We propose innovative research in five important areas: 1. Execution Strategies for Disk Resident Datasets. 2. Advanced Symbolic Analysis. 3. Interprocedural Code Motion Techniques for Object-Oriented Programs. 4. Combined Compiler and Runtime Techniques for Locality Management. 5. Advanced Interprocedural Slicing Techniques for Object-Oriented Languages doc16504 none This U.S.-Hungarian research project involves two teams led by Piers Coleman of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and his partner Alfred Zawadowski of the Physics Institute at the Technical University, Budapest. Their collaboration features examination of strongly correlated systems with an emphasis on quantum criticality and superconductivity in heavy fermion systems and electronic correlation effects in mesoscopic devices. These researchers found motivation in recent experiments performed at the magnetic quantum critical point of a heavy fermion metal and in nano-science developments that enable measurements and observations of strongly correlated states in single electron devices. The project s research plan features study of: 1) magnetic quantum critical point in the Kondo lattice; 2) superconducting order in heavy fermion compounds and 3) dynamical and out-of equilibrium properties of quantum dots. Various numerical and analytical methods will be employed including slave particle methods and large N expansions; perturbative renormalization group techniques and e-expansions; and dynamical mean field theory calculations combined with numerical renormalization group methods. If successful, findings should contribute to our knowledge of new phenomena on a nanometer scale that may be applicable in specially fabricated materials. This international research project in materials theory fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the Untied States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc16505 none The Design and Development of a Network Process Migration System Intensive research has been done in process migration and mobility. However, most present successes are based on safe-languages such as Java. While this safe-language approach provides a satisfactory solution for many applications, it has inherent limitations, especially for technical computing applications. During the last few years, the Principle Investigator (PI) and his research group have developed a set of methodologies to support heterogeneous process migration for high performance computing. This has included a practical data-collection-restoration methodology applicable to codes written in legacy languages such as C or Fortran, an effective data representation and transfer scheme for heterogeneous network environments, and a feasible communication protocol for process coordination in a migration-supported dynamic environment. In this research, the PI proposes to further test these existing methodologies, develop a methodology for I O state transfer, and explore the design of an integrated network process migration system to support process migration of legacy codes written in stack-based languages such as C, Fortran, or C++ in a heterogeneous network environment doc16506 none COMPACT-AGEP PARTNERSHIP This proposal seeks to expand a pilot project begun two years ago between the Minority Graduate Education (MGE) program and the Compact for Faculty Diversity s Institute on Teaching and Mentoring. The proposed project would continue and expand Institute participation to all AGEP programs, as well as provide the full array of program activities and services that have contributed significantly to the Compact s success. The Compact is a nationwide program initiated in involving three regional organizations, the New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE), the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB), and the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE). The goal of the program is simple; to increase the number of minority graduate students who earn the doctoral degree and seek careers as college and university faculty. Extending the experiences of the pilot group to scholars in every AGEP program and expanding the services these scholars receive is what this initiative will accomplish. Specifically, the proposed Compact AGEP partnership will achieve two broad goals: 1) provide AGEP scholars with knowledge, skills, academic mentoring, and support that will increase the likelihood of success in graduate school; and 2) enhance preparation for a career as a college or university faculty member. The project has five key objectives: Objective 1: To provide an array of direct support services to AGEP scholars that will increase the likelihood of completion of the doctoral degree. These services include regular contact by staff; review of student progress and grades; a newsletter; academic counseling and advocacy; mentoring, and professional development opportunities. Objective 2: To provide training in skills and techniques of succeeding in a Ph.D. program in SEM. Objective 3: To prepare AGEP scholars for successful transition from graduate school to a faculty position. Objective 4: To provide expanded networking and academic community building support to AGEP scholars. Objective 5: To provide training to the faculty mentors of AGEP scholars in effective mentoring techniques and practices. The Compact s annual Institute on Teaching and Mentoring is clearly the centerpiecel of Compact activity. This three-day, fall meeting of more than 500 participants provide a forum for students and faculty mentors to discuss issues critical to success at the doctoral level. Attendees participate in workshops and seminars that range from how to survive graduate school to what is expected of a junior faculty member, with particular attention given to enhancing research, teaching, and mentoring skills, career preparation, proposal writing, negotiating the first job, and networking. With the majority of Compact scholars representing science, engineering, and mathematics (SEM) disciplines, particular attention is paid to the issues specific to scholars and faculty doc16507 none Professor Gina Hoatson of William and Mary College has a grant from the Solid-State Chemistry and Analytical and Surface Chemistry Programs to support student participation in the NMR Symposium of the Rocky Mountain Conference on Analytical Chemistry. This four day meeting is recognized internationally as top solid state NMR meeting in the US. This meeting will focus on the application of NMR to key problems in materials science including nanoparticles and interfaces. Currently 20% of the speakers are women and 13% are minority. Historically, the conference is well attended by students. This support is targeted at partially funding students and postdocs to enable them to attend the meeting. The meeting will occur from July 29-August 3, doc16508 none J. Bush, MIT It is proposed to perform research in three areas of fluid mechanics: free surface flows, geophysical mixing, and sedimentation in stratified fluids. The free surface flow consists of experimental and analytical study of Marangoni convection in thin films and fluid polygons. The geophysical mixing forced by plumes and gravity currents will be studied by detailed experiments. The physical processes involved in the sedimentation in stratified fluids will be studied by experimental and analytical means. The education plan is aimed to bring direct experimental experience in fluid dynamics research to Mathematics undergraduate and graduate students in MIT and to high school students and teachers. The PI has been supervising undergraduates in the design and construction of laboratory experiments for educational and research purposes. And such activities will continue. The PI will also participate in two of the MIT s high school outreach programs. One is the Science and Engineering Program for Teachers, the other is to involve promising high school students in summer research program doc16509 none 15 years ago, Fitchen ( ) posed the question, Why do we continue to tolerate hunger amidst the affluence of the United States? She hypothesized that Americans expect the poor to eat marginally-the rich shall eat steak and the poor shall have cheese. Although the prevalence of food insecurity and hunger in the general population has fallen, high rates continue among African-Americans and Hispanics. What is the social and cultural context in which minority households experience food insecurity in the US? In Durham County, NC, this doctoral student will investigate the relationship between structural, community, and household factors that contribute to food security. She proposes to develop a theoretical model of food security based on the perspectives of African-American and Hispanic families living in urban and rural neighborhoods. Using food access indicators developed through GIS to identify 8 case study neighborhoods, she will use qualitative and participatory research methods to conduct key informant interviews and focus group interviews. Participants will document their own sources of household food security, the role that food assistance plays in their household food security, and the relationship of food access to food assistance and household food security. The results from this study will provide important insights into the determinants of household food security beyond and within the household doc16510 none Inaccurate replication in the presence of DNA damage is often responsible for cellular rearrangements and mutagenesis. Nevertheless, the cellular mechanisms by which replication-blocking lesions are processed and repaired remain largely uncharacterized. UV-induced DNA damage severely inhibits chromosomal replication. In Escherichia coli, the recovery of replication following UV irradiation is dependent on nucleotide excision repair proteins and some proteins of the recF pathway. It is speculated that several additional genes may be involved in replication recovery but they have not been examined directly in vivo. This project will determine the cellular mechanism by which chromosomal replication recovers when it is blocked by UV-induced DNA damage. The investigator will identify the structural properties of lesion-arrested replication forks throughout replication recovery. This portion of the project will be done by isolating the post-irradiation DNA from uvr mutants in sucrose gradients to quantitate the number of UV-induced lesions that can be bypassed (or skipped) by DNA replication machinery before replication arrest occurs. Post-irradiation DNA synthesis will then be analyzed using strand-specific 32P-labeled probes to determine on which template strand replication blockage occurs. In addition, the investigator will use two-dimensional agarose gel electrophoresis to characterize the structural integrity of the replication fork throughout the recovery process and identify the structural intermediates that arise at blocked replication forks during recovery. He will further identify which candidate genes are directly involved in the resumption of replication at DNA damage-blocked replication forks and characterize at which step they act. This will be done by isolating DNA synthesized during the period of replication recovery in CsCl gradients and quantifying it. The role that these candidate genes play in replication recovery will further be characterized by examining the nascent DNA degradation at blocked replication forks following UV irradiation. Through an understanding of how faithful replication resumes when it is blocked by DNA damage, the investigator hopes to identify the conditions and events which can lead to illegitimate recovery, genomic rearrangements, and lethality in the presence of DNA damage. Because changes in DNA affect all aspects of biology, these insights could profoundly affect human interactions with the natural world doc16511 none Litterfall from riparian vegetation provides a critical energy source for many stream food webs. The quality of those litter inputs strongly influences their rate of decomposition in the stream and the diversity and productivity of aquatic organisms they support. The extent to which genetic variation within a single species or hybrid complex contributes to variation in litter quality is not well understood, but could be critical, particularly in high-elevation riparian ecosystems in the southwest, where two species of cottonwoods and their hybrids constitute 80-95% of the riparian vegetation. Furthermore, the effects of environmental stress such as insect herbivory and drought are known to depend on cottonwood genotypes, but how such genotype by environment interactions affect leaf litter quality and in- stream processing is not known for cottonwoods, nor, to our knowledge, for any other riparian species. This study will determine whether aquatic biodiversity and ecosystem processes are similarly linked to cottonwood hybrid zones. Common gardens with pure and hybrid cottonwoods of known genotypes will be used to determine how genetic variation within the cottonwood hybrid complex affects litter quality, in- stream decomposition (including mass loss and nutrient release), and colonization and diversity of microbial decomposers (bacteria and fungi) and invertebrates. This experimental work will be supplemented with natural surveys of litter entering streams to determine the importance and distribution of litter from each of four cottonwood cross-types (Fremont, narrowleaf, F1, and backcross) that are naturally ubiquitous in watersheds from Colorado to Mexico. Finally, controlled experiments crossing cottonwood cross-types and environmental stress (drought and herbivory) will be used to determine how genetic by environment interactions alter litter quality and litter processing and biodiversity in streams. This research will address these critical unknowns in our understanding of aquatic community and ecosystem processes and terrestrial-aquatic interactions doc16512 none Robert H. Klenke Virginia Commonwealth University NGS Performance Modeling of Complex Hardware Software Systems through Mixed Level Modeling This project will develop a revolutionary new capability by providing a unified design framework for complex, high performance computer systems. This framework includes a performance modeling environment that will be integrated into a mixed level hardware software design environment through the use of standard Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) and supporting design tools. This framework will allow the modeling of hardware and software systems at a high level to enable rapid design space exploration and system performance analysis. The framework will provide the capability to refine these high level designs in a step-wise manner into models with more design detail and, ultimately into an implementation. This step-wise refinement capability allows areas of the design that are determined to be high risk in terms of performance to be refined to a more detailed level where the effects on system performance of assumptions and design can be realized doc16513 none The proposed research will lead to the creation of next-generation Netlib (Netlib.ng). While preserving and strengthening Netlib s ability to provide its traditional services: reliable, fast access to latest and best computational software packages, we will explore technologies that adapt Netlib repositories to the new challenges presented by today s computing environment. We will first enhance Netlib s traditional services for both users and developers, principally by using the Repository in a Box (RIB) toolkit to upgrade Netlib s catalogue technology for improved usability and interoperability. Applying RIB tools to Netlib will make it compliant with IEEE metadata standards, substantially improve user interfaces, accelerate repository updates, simplify and decentralize administration, and enable for Netlib.ng to participate in larger virtual repositories without compromising its high standards for quality control. The second part of research aims to automate the full software deployment and management process, i.e. its compilation, installation, configuration, and management. When this work is completed, we believe Netlib.ng will leverage the power of this major community asset to create a rich and scalable solution to some of the complex problems of software deployment and management in the new era of high performance distributed computing we have entered doc16514 none Fabrikant This award supports the participation of American scientists in a U.S.-Japan seminar on resonances in small systems to be held in Saitama, Japan from July 22-24, . The co-organizers are Professor Ilya Fabrikant at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln and Professor Mineo Kimura of Yamaguchi University in Japan. Collision processes in different environments are often driven by intermediate resonance states. They play an important role in a broad variety of scientific fields: atomic physics, nuclear physics, surface and condensed matter physics, chemistry, and biological sciences. Even in complex processes involving many particles it is often possible to extract few-body resonance effects responsible for observed phenomena. On the other hand, each field of science has its own method in treating these effects. Therefore, it is important for specialists in each particular field to get together and discuss their own findings and problems, to exchange ideas and to learn about the methods used in other fields. It is expected that the seminar will provide a good opportunity for closer interactions between electron scattering and positron scattering groups, surface and atomic physics groups and interaction between other branches of science. The project advances international human resources through the participation of many junior faculty, postdocs, graduate students and undergraduate students. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish proceedings of the seminar in the Plenum Press doc16515 none The proposed project is to develop a method to directly measure the nanometer-scale fluid velocity in order to characterize the flow field in the vicinity of cell-surface mechanoreceptors. The method is based on use of the atomic force microscopy (AFM) to access the small scale regions on the cell surface. The AFM cantilever tip is modified by placing nanocarbon bundles with a single nanocarbon tube protruding into the flow field. The force on the nanocarbon tube will be correlated to the flow filed to extract the flow velocity information doc16516 none This DARPA NSF workshop will take place on September 29-30, , on the campus of the California Polytechnic State University, San Louis Obispo, CA. The workshop will provide a forum for roboticists, human- computer interaction experts, psychologists, sociologists, cognitive scientists, and communication experts, to examine the state of the art in the area of human-robot interaction. About 60 participants will be invited from the academic community, industry, and government doc16517 none This work involves the continued development and application of models for recognition memory. The first phase included formulation of the architecture and basic processing modules of a recognition model based on general theories of classification and memory; the model has been formulated with special attention to usefulness in increasing the informativeness of measures extracted from recognition data. A major published application reported a study of how performance on a test of recognition of an item or event depends on past frequencies of encounters with the same or similar stimuli and on presence or absence of positive or negative payoffs for correct responses on previous tests. The major result reported was that performance in recognition is not simply a matter of matching perceived with remembered stimulus patterns, but is influenced by many of the same conditions that control goal-directed behavior. At this juncture, a new set of benchmark experiments has been completed and is ready for model-based analysis. Several of the experiments were addressed to the problem of how prior familiarity with stimuli such as words or faces affects their recognition in a new situation; others deal with ways of enhancing the precision of measurement of the way factors such as stimulus frequency, stimulus exposure duration, and retention interval affect performance in situations that simulate eyewitness identification. Results from this series of experiments are ready for model-based analyses, which will be very computationally demanding, because all models and model versions examined will be fitted to the data of individual subjects, typically 30 to 80 in number per experiment. In all of this work, there will be major attention to advancing methodology for dealing with artifacts of averaging data and to communicating theoretical results in forms available to potential users in education, medicine, and technology doc16518 none As we approach 100nm technology, the impact of interconnect on signal integrity is becoming one of the main concerns in testing gigahertz system-on-chips (SoCs). Voltage distortion (noise) and delay violations (skew) contribute to signal integrity loss and ultimately functional error, performance degradation, shorter life and reliability problems. This research investigates a methodology to model and test signal integrity in deep-submicron high-speed interconnects that bind the internal cores in a SoC. The following issues are being explored: a) the development of a unified integrity fault model, independent of technology, that includes various problems occurring on the SoC s high-speed interconnects such as crosstalk, overshoot, skew, etc.; b) the establishment of a test generation technique that finds test patterns to stimulate maximal (worst case) integrity loss on the interconnect network; c) the implementation of noise detector (ND) and skew detector (SD) cells, to detect noise and skew violations (integrity loss) over a period of operation; and d) the design of a cost- and time-efficient readout architecture to transfer the integrity information that ND and SD cells accumulate. As part of educational plan, we are: 1) developing a two course sequence on ASIC SoC design and test with emphasis on high-frequency issues; 2) involving undergraduate students in general, and minorities in particular, in VLSI ASIC SOC test research. 3) advocating for greater CAD tool use in early stage of CE EE curriculum doc16519 none Fraser The potential consequence of human impact on wildlife in Antarctica has been debated for many decades. Scientists, support staff and visitors in Antarctica may have an effect on the behavior and population dynamics of marine mammals and seabirds. Since the early s, shipboard tourism has expanded to the point where it is timely to address the question, using a scientific research approach. The focus of this study is to examine the potential effect of tourist activities on the Adelie Penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae) in the Antarctic Peninsula. The topic has gathered the interest and opinions of those in private industry, the scientific community, government organizations and environmental groups. A key concern is that increases in these activities may eventually overcome the ability of research to address critical issues in a timely and biologically meaningful manner. The approach to understanding how tourism might affect Adelie Penguins must involve both a study of human activity and a study of natural variability in the physical environment. The ongoing Palmer Long Term Ecological Research program focuses on the ecosystem and its components and thus addresses the issues of natural variability. This project focuses on the human dimension and continues a tourist-monitoring program begun as a pilot project near Palmer Station. This site is in a geographic location that mirrors current patterns in tourism and tourist-wildlife interactions in the western Antarctic Peninsula. It also offers a setting that provides unique opportunities for human impacts research. This includes the presence of long-term databases that document environmental variability over multiple time and space scales in both marine and terrestrial habitats, and the ability to examine potential tourist impacts as part of controlled experiments. The results of the study will have important implications to understanding interactions between climate change and ecosystem response, and for detecting, mitigating and managing the consequences of human activities such as tourism doc16520 none PI: John Rice Institution: University of California - Berkeley The Berkeley Statistics Department will operate a vertically integrated research and education program involving undergraduate majors, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty. The goal of the program is to produce statistically trained professionals who will contribute to our society in the commercial, governmental, and academic sectors. The program contains several integrated components. Innovations at the undergraduate level include curriculum reform, research seminars, and research experiences for undergraduates. The graduate student component includes education, mentored teaching experiences, research, and broadening components aimed at training graduate students to interact in interdisciplinary environments. The postdoctoral component includes mentored research and teaching experiences. Recruitment of traditionally under-represented groups into these programs will be strengthened by the resources of the Berkeley Edge, a campus NSF-Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate, the goal of which is to triple minority Ph.D. production in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering doc16284 none Viruses infecting bacteria and algae are generally the most abundant microorganisms in aquatic environments, and are known to influence microbial community structure, function, and biogeochemical cycling. Although the importance of viruses in typical marine and freshwater environments is recognized, almost nothing is known about their roles in alkaline hypersaline environments. Preliminary observations from Mono Lake, where pH is ~10 and salt content nearly three times that of seawater, indicate that viruses are near the highest concentrations ever observed in nature. Mono Lake supports a relatively simple food web with high phytoplankton production, brine shrimp acting as the sole macrozooplankton grazer, and permanent stratification shaping the structure of the microbial community. Three basic questions are addressed in this research. How does viral abundance, dynamics, and diversity differ in this unusual environment from those in marine and freshwater environments? What is the contribution of viruses to host mortality? How are the viruses in this seeting different from other viruses in terms of genetic and physiological properties? Viral density and diversity will be ascertained using viral isolates as well as direct molecular approaches. This research complements ongoing activities at the Lake Mono Microbial Observatory, and facilitates an integrated study of the viral community in a broad biotic and abiotic context. Results will provide new insights into the occurrence, diversity and function of microbiological life forms extreme environments. The project also provides opportunities to educate graduate and undergraduate students in environmental and microbiological sciences doc16522 none Pokeweed antiviral protein (PAP), a 29-kDa antiviral protein isolated from pokeweed plants catalytically removes two adenines and a guanine from the large rRNA and inhibits translation. PAP depurinates the large rRNA by binding to ribosomal protein L3. The investigators recently demonstrated that expression of PAP in yeast led to specific inhibition of +1 programmed ribosomal frameshifting (PRF) and interfered with the ability of the yeast retrovirus Ty1 to retrotranspose. Using nontoxic PAP mutants, they showed that PAP inhibited +1 PRF and Ty1 retrotransposition without inhibiting general translation. PAP had no effect on -1 PRF or maintenance of the yeast killer virus. These results suggested that PAP could be used as a specific probe to dissect the mechanisms regulating +1 PRF and as a general tool to study the role of translational fidelity in virus maintenance. The primary objective of this project is to use recombinant PAP mutants and yeast chromosomal mutants to investigate the mechanism by which PAP inhibits +1 frameshifting and Ty1 retrotransposition in yeast. PAP sequences critical for inhibition of +1 PRF and Ty1 retrotransposition, and PAP binding sites on ribosomal protein L3 will be identified. It will be determined whether binding of PAP to the ribosomes, to the large rRNA, and or to L3 is critical for inhibition of +1 PRF. These studies provide a unique way to address questions relating to ribosome structure and function and may have important implications for understanding the unusual mechanism of translation inhibition by ribosome inactivating proteins. Alterations in PRF efficiencies can have profound effects on propagation of many important plant and animal viruses. Information gained from these studies could be used to design viral or cell specific translation inhibitors and may lead to development of more effective means of disease control in agriculture and medicine doc16523 none Ackley The proposed work will develop a systematic climatology of in situ antarctic sea ice thickness from observations made since . Sea ice thickness is by far the least well known property - horizontal properties such as areal extent and compactness can be observed from satellites - but thickness information is necessary to constrain large-scale climate models. The three-dimensional growth and decay of antarctic sea ice is an important feature of the global climate system as it directly modifies ocean-atmosphere interaction in the Southern Ocean. The four major large-scale sea ice properties that need to be monitored for variability and change are ice thickness, compactness (including extent), movement, and deformation. In large-scale climate models, the lack of sea ice thickness data for validation introduces a free parameter for arbitrary tuning and allows a wide range of results which cannot be checked. Hence it is difficult to ascertain which model physics are correct, leading to divergent viewpoints about the sensitivity of the various parameters. This project will (1) provide an antarctic climatology of in situ sea ice thickness (and secondarily compactness) using the recently recovered 11,000 sea ice property records from 42 voyages between and ; (2) through validation studies, expand the in situ sea ice climatology to include remote sensing information from U.S. National Ice Center ice charts from to , and (3) contribute to the greater knowledge of air-ice-ocean interaction by determining the relationship between an antarctic sea ice climatology, climate variability, and climate trends. The work will serve the community at large by linking the sea ice climatology results into the public NIC web-site for the validation of numerical model outputs, to obtain error-bounded input for data assimilation, to study sea ice processes, and for operational use doc16524 none Peter Doerschuk Purdue University CISE Research Resources: Computer Cluster to Support Computational Biology and Other Nonlinear Signal Reconstruction and System Design Problems The grant, an equipment grant, will purchase two computers, a compute server and a 3-D visualization workstation, in support of the investigators NSF CISE funded work in computational mathematics and its application to the structural biology of viruses and other nonlinear signal reconstruction and system design problems. The compute server (Microway, Inc.) is a cluster computer containing 64 Intel Pentium III microprocessors and 16 GB of memory organized into 32 nodes connected by 100 Mb Ethernet. The visualization workstation (Sun Microsystems) is a workstation with one 900 MHz UltraSPARC-III microprocessor, 1 GB of memory, and the intermediate level of Sun s three levels of 3-D graphics hardware accelerators. This equipment will support 3 projects which concern computational mathematics including multi-dimensional quadratures, transforms, and numerical optimization. The unifying theme is numerical optimization, especially global optimization. The projects are divided according to application and include 3-D reconstruction problems in structural biology and systems design problems for nonlinear communication channels. The main application is structural biology, in particular, the structural biology of viruses. The problems of particular interest are 3-D signal reconstruction problems for computing the dynamical behavior of viruses from a variety of biophysical measurements doc16525 none Lee This project focuses on geographic pathways and genetic mechanisms of invasions by the zebra mussel, Dreissena polymorpha. Objectives of this study are to (1) reconstruct pathways of invasions, from potential sources in the Caspian and Black Sea region to North America, (2) clarify genetic (evolutionary) relationships among sibling species and identify which subspecies are invasive, and (3) describe genetic traits of the invasive subspecies. Using genetic markers, a genealogy (phylogeny) will be constructed to determine pathways of invasions and genetic relationships among physiological races of zebra mussels. For this purpose, sensitive genetic markers (AFLPs) and powerful data analysis software (Dominant Marker Analysis Package) are currently under development. This project will also involve collaborative efforts with scientists at the Russian Academy of Sciences, including a joint research cruise on the Caspian Sea to collect from sites where the zebra mussel species complex has probably evolved. The zebra mussel ranks among the most hazardous exotic species that has entered North American waters, with an economic impact in the billions of dollars. Despite intense ecological interest and efforts toward mitigation, little effort has been devoted toward understanding genetic and physiological mechanisms of zebra mussel invasions. We do not know origins of North American populations, their genetic traits, and why they are so successful as invaders. Information from this project will enhance our predictive power on range expansion and adaptive potential during invasions. In addition, as pathways of invasions tend to be shared by multiple species, information from this project will yield insight into general principles on mechanisms of invasions doc16526 none This proposal will bring together three specific, recent advances to study the behavior of hybrid systems, most notably those systems for which the traditional algorithmic methods fail because the reachability and omega-language problems are undecidable. The tools that will be used include: 1. The recent development of a model for the probabilistic process algebra PCSP in which the expected laws for both nondeterministic choice and for probabilistic choice operators hold, 2. The recent development of a quantified m-calculus and associated quantified temporal logic for reasoning about finite state systems that support both nondeterministic choice and probabilistic choice, and 3. Recent results about the expressibility of simple measures on locally compact spaces - in particular, the fact that any probability measure on such a space is the directed supremum of simple measures. These results tie together to provide an interesting and novel approach to modeling hybrid systems doc16527 none This project provides for continued development and public access to the national Information Service for Earthquake Engineering (NISEE) at the University of California, Berkeley. The Earthquake Engineering s database, which will soon reach 100,000 citations of the technical literature, is the premier source of earthquake engineering research literature in the world. The NISEE Software Library of 114 programs in source code has successfully turned a long-term investment in NSF engineering research at universities into an affordable public good for engineering analysis and design. The grant also supports a workshop designed to review the needs and directions within NSF s evolving George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) program. In conjunction with management of NISEE, the PIs will conduct the workshop to identify needs and opportunities in the information environment created by the formation of the NEES collaboratory. The workshop will include representatives from the Science and Engineering Digital Library project at Cornell University, and also managers of curated databases in the physics community (e.g., Lawrence Livermore Laboratory) and industry representatives. The proceedings will include recommendations on needs and future directions in information services in the future doc16528 none The proposed effort is to organize and provide support for two symposia, one in and one in . The symposia would allow a select group of recent doctoral graduates in physical oceanography and related fields to present their doctoral research in a setting that allows a more detailed presentation than is available at traditional scientific meetings. The venue would be selected and the schedule designed to encourage informal interactions and development of relationships that will benefit the community for years in the future doc16529 none The central importance of the actin cytoskeleton to plant development has been widely accepted for some years now; however, little detailed biochemical analysis of the individual components that regulate actin-based function has been performed. This project addresses this deficiency by characterizing at the biochemical, cellular and genetic levels, the family of fimbrin-like actin filament crosslinking proteins from Arabidopsis thaliana. A major component of this project will exploit reverse-genetic approaches by identifying knockout mutants for each of the five fimbrin sequences. Phenotypic analysis of these knockout lines will include determining whole plant defects and examining the detailed structure of the actin cytoskeleton in different cell types by using immunofluorescence and GFP technology. Specific actin-based functions such as chloroplast orientation, cytoplasmic streaming, determination of division planes, response to fungal pathogens, and cell expansion will be analyzed in the knockout lines. Collectively, this study will test the hypothesis that Arabidopsis contains members of the fimbrin family with distinct biochemical and cellular properties and which, therefore, have the potential to contribute to the diversity of actin-based function within individual plant cells. Furthermore, this potential for diverse functions will be tested directly by exploiting the power of reverse genetics. The results obtained will provide important insight into fundamental mechanisms that underpin cellular morphogenesis and responses to extracellular stimuli doc16530 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Peter Stahl will identify and analyze a collection of animal bone specimens that were recovered during archaeological investigations at the site of Challuabamba in the southern Andean highlands of Ecuador. The site is of great importance for our understanding of early village agricultural life in this southern area of the northern Andes, as it appears to have been settled in B.C. and subsequently occupied for as much as years. Analysis of the animal bone collection from Challuabamba provides insight into local resource utilization. Identification of the material could also contribute to our understanding of the early introduction and subsequent spread of South American animal domesticates like llamas, alpacas and guinea pigs, into their northernmost pre-Columbian distribution. The identification of native domesticates in the Challuabamba collection would be of crucial importance for documenting their early appearance north of the present Peruvian border and for understanding the mechanism involved in their original introduction. In particular, their appearance at Challuabamba is critical for assessing the viability of a southern terrestrial trade route as a potential mechanism for introducing early animal domesticates into Ecuador. Coastal marine shells may have entered the southern Ecuadorian highlands via a terrestrial route through the nearby Cordillera de Mullupungu, where they were subsequently consumed and or processed for further overland trade to interior northern Peru, and eventually to the coast. In exchange, southern-derived animal domesticates may have entered Ecuador via this early trade mechanism. This would be significant for our understanding of early domesticates in Ecuador, because Challuabamba appears to predate important early cultural sequences on the coast. The absence of native animal domesticates in the assemblage would support their appearance at Pirincay around A.D. 100 as the earliest occurrence of domesticates in the southern highlands of Ecuador, and potentially provide an earliest date for possible terrestrial exchange of animals into the area. Plants and animals were independently domesticated in several regions of both the Old and New World and Peru constitutes one such hearth area. In all cases domesicates eventually spread and were adopted by hunting and gathering peoples thus significantly altering their way of life. Anthropologists wish to understand the principles which underly this process of diffusion and culture change and Challuabamba provides an excellent context in which to address this question doc16531 none The hypothesis of this project is that local deviations from ideal, bulk translational mobilities and concentrations of ligands near membrane surfaces exert critical influences on the kinetics of ligand-receptor interactions and, as a consequence, biological function. To test this hypothesis, three groups of specific aims will be pursued. In the first group of aims, physical factors (electrostatic, hydrodynamic and entrapment) governing the translational mobilities and concentrations of fluorescent ligands in regions of solution that are very close to model and natural cell membranes deposited on transparent planar substrates will be examined. These measurements will be carried out by using total internal reflection with fluorescence correlation spectroscopy as developed during the last funding period. In the second group of specific aims, three technological innovations will be implemented. These innovations will provide distance-dependent, rather than distance-averaged, information about local ligand dynamics. First, the distance-dependence of the local ligand translational mobility and concentration will be probed by changing the evanescent depth. Second, photon counting histograms obtained with evanescent illumination will provide a direct measure of the manner in which the ligand concentration and therefore potential depend on the distance from the membrane surface. Third, high order autocorrelation will be employed to further confirm and understand the effects of the nearby membrane surface on the local ligand concentration and mobility. The goal of the final specific aim is to correlate local changes in ligand concentrations and dynamics, as they are observed, with specific ligand-receptor kinetics. The interaction kinetics will be monitored with a well-established method, total internal reflection with fluorescence photobleaching recovery doc16532 none Dissection of biochemical functions and developmental pathways by mutating genes is central to functional genomics. Genes can be mutated by nucleotide sequence changes, insertions or deletions. Insertional mutagenesis with T-DNA and transposons has become the most widely used method for mutating plant genes. By contrast, homology-dependent gene targeting, a powerful technique that permits precise changes to be made in either coding or regulatory sequences, has not yet become a useful technique in plants. A number of factors have been identified that may contribute to the lack of gene targeting success or which can be optimized to enhance the frequency and increase the ease of detecting homology-based recombinational events in plants. This information has been used to design a new gene targeting strategy for plants. This project utilizes a high-risk strategy, however if successful, it will lead to the rapid development of a practicable system for homologous gene targeting in plants, which will have a very high pay-off in plant research. The strategy for plant gene targeting seeks to 1) enhance the probability of identifying homology-based interactions by detecting both gene conversion and recombination, 2) minimize illegitimate recombination associated with both naked DNA and T-DNA transformation, 3) make use of the observation that double-stranded DNA breaks stimulate recombination in plants and 4) enrich for plants in which the recombination donor molecule has been released from the chromosome. Because evidence has already been obtained indicating that all of the sub-components of the present strategy work in plants, putting the whole system together and testing it is the next step. The results of these experiments will provide the preliminary data for subsequent research to study molecular mechanisms in plant recombination and to identify favorable genetic backgrounds for gene targeting doc16533 none James Krogmeier Purdue University CISE Research Resources: Instrumentation for Communications Research in Wireless Ad-Hoc Networking The Schools of ECE and Civil Engineering at Purdue University will purchase radio frequency test equipment (a network analyzer, an air-interface measurement tool, and radio frequency channel emulators), workstations, Bluetooth Developer s Kits, laptops, and supporting electronic and interface supplies to enhance the capabilities of the Wireless Communications Research Laboratory and the Harold L. Michael Traffic Operations Laboratory in the area of experimental wireless communications research and intelligent transportation systems. Four research projects will be directly enhanced by the availability of the above resources: 1) Wireless ad-hoc networking for dedicated short range communications applications in intelligent transportation systems, 2) Reduced complexity receivers for continuous phase modulations, 3) Reduced-dimension decision feedback equalizers for high-speed wireless communications, and 4) Embedded signal processing for intelligent transportation systems. The communications research involved in the projects above is focused on synchronization, channel estimation and equalization, and low complexity receivers for both linear and non-linear modulations. End-to-end network performance is also considered, as is the design of simplified protocols for use in ad-hoc networking. The signal processing research is largely experimental involving the integration of different intelligent transportation subsystems including communications and embedded signal processing for traffic signal control and weigh-in-motion doc16534 none The evolution of cooperative breeding, reproductive suppression, and all-male groups in a southern African ground squirrel. Jane M. Waterman In highly social species, reproduction is often monopolized by a few individuals, yet species with more breeding individuals offer an alternative approach to understanding the costs and benefits of sociality. Although most cooperative groups are composed of close relatives, examining sociality among unrelated individuals enables other selective advantages for grouping to be evaluated. The Cape ground squirrel (Xerus inauris) lives in the arid regions of southern Africa in clusters of related females and associated bands of apparently unrelated males. Females and their young are considered to be cooperative breeders because of the delayed dispersal and reproductive suppression of young that help care for offspring. Males live independently of females in amicable all-male bands that persist throughout the year, and only interact with females during breeding. Thus, two different social systems (male and female) coexist in this species, resulting in a social organization unlike that described for any other mammal and providing a unique model for testing hypotheses on the costs and benefits of grouping. This project will test critical hypotheses about the evolution of social behavior in Cape ground squirrels using a combination of behavioral, molecular and hormonal techniques. To understand the evolution of cooperative breeding in females, reproduction, survival, and offspring care of breeders and non-breeders will be examined in groups that differ in size and habitat quality. The reproductive suppression of subadult females will be monitored using hormone assays and correlated with number and behavior of breeders. Genetic relationships of males and the paternity of offspring within the band s home range will be correlated with dominance status. Predator mobbing experiments will examine mobbing as a form of helping behavior in females and a form of paternal care in males (related to the number of offspring in the area). Delayed dispersal by young males will be examined to compare the reproductive payoff of this strategy to that of early dispersers. The research and educational objectives of this project will be highly integrated in a collaboration between the University of Central Florida and the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Much of the research will be conducted by graduate students from both schools who will develop thesis projects based on this proposal. A field course on the ecology and behavior of small mammals in South Africa will be developed for senior undergraduates and beginning graduate students from both schools. This course will use web-based distance learning and an intensive field component to expose students to the theory, methods and analytical tools used in mammalogy, behavioral ecology, and research in general. Thus, this project will lay the foundation for a long-term study of African ground squirrels and collaboration with the University of Pretoria in both research and education doc16535 none Connor This grant, supported through funds from the NSF Information Technology Research - Small Grants Program and the EAR Instrumentation and Facilities Program, will enable the development of a first-generation data and model assimilation system for volcanic hazard assessment. Essentially, this system will use Bayesian forecasting techniques to construct hazard estimates that incorporate both prior geologic information and near-real-time data types. The primary goal is to demonstrate, through the application of information technology methodologies, that such disparate geologic data types can be combined smoothly, even during volcanic crises, to yield improved estimates of hazard and risk. The focus will be on hazards associated with the dispersion and accumulation of volcanic tephra (volcanic ash), both because of the importance of this volcanic hazard and our previous experience in forecasting tephra hazards. Models will be used to relate observed tephra-stratigraphies at several volcanoes (Colima, Cerro Negro, Montserrat, Popocateptal) to sets of input parameters, including eruption duration, initial gas content, and meteorological conditions. We plan to explore several techniques (inversion, simplified models, database development) to relate observed patterns of volcano deformation directly to the parameter estimates used in tephra fallout models. The system will be constructed using parallel algorithms to exploit inexpensive and widely available PC clusters. Through the auspices of an ITR grant, we plan to clearly demonstrate the huge advantages realized by, for the first time, systematically linking the geologic record, process models, and near-real time monitoring results. For tephra accumulation hazards specifically, this approach will further lead to a clear understanding of the links between deformation, magma processes, and the fundamental parameters governing tephra dispersion and accumulation. In this sense, the results of the systematic approach advocated here will provide guidance about the volcanological research most likely to results in volcanic hazard reduction. This research will be conducted as a collaborative proposal between the University of Miami, the University of South Florida, and Southwest Research Institute (nonprofit). In addition, international collaboration with the University of Bristol will bring expertise on tephra dispersion modeling and data on the important Montserrat eruptions to the project. Students will contribute to all phases of the project, including geological research, model development, and software development. After appropriate testing, we plan to make the results of this project widely available by open-sourcing the codes and providing assistance in implementation of PC clusters to the volcanological community doc16536 none This project will support a conference on research on learning technologies and technology-supported education in Tampa St. Pete on May 4-6, and will support the participation of US researchers at a related Tuebingen conference to be held in Germany in October . The conference is organized to pair senior researchers with early career researchers on actual research projects that will be discussed and refined at the two conferences. The work of the Tampa conference in will be a direct extension of the work completed at the Tuebingen conference. The research will result in papers published in two special issues of the International Journal of Educational Policy, Research, and Practice doc16537 none The American Evaluation Association (AEA) is the only National professional association for evaluators in the U.S. and, as such, should speak for the profession on National policy issues. However, AEA has never before provided guidance to the broader community on public policy issues and therefore lacks the procedures to do so. Having such a voice is particularly critical now with the current debate of the Bush Administration s proposal to test all 4th and 8th grade public school students in mathematics and reading. Because the testing proposal deals specifically with actions that to be taken with regard to public schools based on the outcomes of the tests, this is primarily an evaluation issue and would benefit from an analysis by evaluators. AEA will create a process for developing a policy statement on the Bush Administration testing issue and on three other issues to be selected later that also address concerns of the mathematics and science community. The aim is to establish an ongoing capability within the AEA organization to mobilize the organization s resources to deal with policy questions doc16538 none This project involves participation in the International H20 Project (IHOP) field program. The IHOP is a large multi-agency, multi-investigator project that focuses on the measurement of water vapor and water vapor variability. The goal of this project is to improve understanding of convective initiation, increase short-term precipitation forecast skills and test the capabilities of various instruments to measure the four dimensional characteristics of water vapor. The Principal Investigator will utilize an advanced instrument known as the Mobile Integrated Profiling System (MIPS) as part of an extensive ensemble of mobile ground-based instrumentation. The MIPS capabilities include vertical profile measurements of wind, vertical motion, temperature, virtual temperature, cloud properties, boundary layer characteristics, and water vapor. The principal objectives of the Principal Investigator are to advance understanding of convective initiation and its dependence on characteristics of boundaries and the adjacent atmospheric boundary layer. In addition to participating in experiments on convective initiation, the Principal Investigator also will use the MIPS to collect data important to the success of other IHOP researchers. Finally, the Principal Investigator will conduct thorough comparisons of the MIPS 12-channel passive microwave profiling radiometer with other remote sensing devices and in situ soundings doc16539 none The University of Chicago will lead a consortium of six institutions to design and utilize an eight-meter off-axis telescope at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in order to carry out a unique and powerful survey of galaxy clusters to unprecedented red shifts. This survey will allow the study of integrated cluster abundance and its red shift evolution, and will give us precise cosmological constraints, which are completely independent of those from supernovae distance and Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropy measurements. The sample size and redshift depth will be ideally suited for using cluster abundance evolution to determine the equation of state of the dark energy component of the universe. One of the most important discoveries in cosmology is that it appears that much, if not most, of the mass in the Universe is made not of stars and glowing gas that is familiar to us from astronomical images of the sky, but of what has been termed dark matter. This dark matter emits little or no light or other electromagnetic radiation, and so far makes its presence known only through the gravitational force it exerts upon the luminous matter. There is some indication that the dark matter may in fact not even be baryonic. Just what fraction of the mass is in the form of non-interacting non-baryonic particles is of great interest to cosmologists and physicists. Measuring the mass in baryons along with the total mass in a region of the Universe that could be considered a fair sample would provide a crucial direct determination of the dark matter content. In recent years, just such a test-bed has been found in the guise of massive clusters of galaxies. These clusters contain large amounts of gas (baryons) in the form of a highly ionized atmosphere of gas at temperatures of millions of degrees, which emit X-rays. Nearly all of the baryons in the clusters are believed to be in the hot phase, and so it is likely that we are truly measuring the baryonic mass in the cluster. In addition to emitting X-rays, the hot cluster gas also scatters the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. This scattering, called the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect (SZE), is measurable using radio telescopes. The CMB has a blackbody temperature of 2.7 K which and a radiation spectrum that peaks at a wavelength of around lmm. Observations at centimeter wavelengths see the SZE as a distortion of the spectrum, i.e. as a reduction in the brightness toward the cluster as the photons are scattered toward a higher energy level. The observed decrement is proportional to the integrated electron density along the line-of-sight through the cluster. The Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect is important to the study of cosmology and the CMB for two main reasons. 1) The observed hotspots created by the kinetic effect will distort the power spectrum of CMB anisotropies. These need to be separated from the primary anisotropies in order to probe properties of inflation. 2) The thermal SZ effect can be measured and combined with x-ray observations in order to determine values of cosmological parameters, in particular the Hubble constant doc16540 none Arnold, Frances BITS: Biological Information Technology Systems - BITS: Self-Perfecting Genetic Circuits We propose to develop efficient, evolutionary design strategies for constructing functional de novo genetic circuits. We will apply methods of molecular evolution, which have proven highly successful for engineering proteins with improved or altered properties, to complex genetic systems involving multiple repressors, operators, and promoters. We believe that evolution will prove to be generally applicable for optimizing individual devices as well as complex genetic circuits, and our goal will be to demonstrate how evolutionary searches are best performed in order to build libraries of devices and assemble them into functional circuits. We anticipate that this research will establish a general strategy for de novo genetic circuit design and provide new insight into the natural algorithms of information processing in biological systems and biological complexity. This research exploits, in powerful combination, the strengths of classical approaches in electrical circuit design (characterizing the device physics of gates, then composing circuits from well understood components) with adaptation mechanisms (mutation and selection)that are the hallmark of biological systems doc16541 none This action is to support a post-earthquake field survey of the magnitude Mw 8.1 earthquake that occurred on June 23, near the coast of southern Peru, about 175 km west of Arequipa or 595 km southeast of Lima. This earthquake caused extensive damage in the areas around the cities of Arequipa, Camana, Moquegua, and Tacna; part of the damage has been attributed to a tsunami wave in the Camana area. The goal of this geotechnical reconnaissance team is to document the geotechnical and engineering geology seismology features of this earthquake. The team is being coordinated by Adrian Rodriguez-Marek of Washington State University and Pedro Repetto of URS Corporation, with collaboration of Joseph Wartman, Drexel University. Jorge Zegarra of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru is serving as the local contact and is assembling a team of local experts to participate in this reconnaissance effort. It is expected that this reconnaissance will yield information and data which will help the profession understand the effects of interplate subduction earthquakes on the built environment. These efforts will support the continuing efforts to reduce the earthquake risk posed by the Aleutian-Alaskan and Cascadia subduction zones in the United States. The results of the earthquake reconnaissance will be made available in two phases. In the first phase, the early reconnaissance reports will be posted on the Internet through the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) web page at http: peer.berkeley.edu . The release of the report will be announced using the GEOTECH Internet mailing list. In the second phase, a more comprehensive final report will be prepared; it will be available as a hardcopy report or as an Adobe Acrobat file downloadable from the Internet doc16542 none Myo1p is a novel, unconventional myosin discovered by Dr. Gavin and colleagues in the model protozoan Tetrahymena thermophila that has been implicated as playing a role in two fundamental cellular processes: endocytosis phagocytosis and nuclear motility. In a recently completed project, the Gavin laboratory used targeted gene disruption to create a Tetrahymena strain that lacked a functional MYO1 gene. In transformed MYO1 cells, food vacuoles (endosomes) formed at a slower rate than in wild-type cells, and the macronucleus frequently failed to elongate properly during amitotic cell division, resulting in grossly unequal segregation of DNA to progeny. In this renewal project, experiments will be performed to directly and specifically link Myo1p to the machinery for both endocytosis and macronuclear elongation. Two general hypotheses for Myo1p function in Tetrahymena will be tested. (1) Hypothesis: MYO1 is required for both endosome maturation and endosome recycling. The rate of endosome formation could be regulated, in part, by the rate of endosome maturation in the cytosol and subsequent endosome recycling at the membrane structure known as the cytoproct. If Myo1p is involved in endosome maturation, a MYO1-knockout strain might exhibit defects in expansion and or acidification of nascent endosomes. If Myo1p is involved in endosome recycling at the cytoproct, a MYO1-knockout strain might have a reduced rate of endosome degradation. (2) Hypothesis: Macronuclear elongation is mediated by cooperative action of microtubules, actin microfilaments, and Myo1p. One can envision at least two, non-mutually exclusive, arrangements for the putative molecular machinery that could power macronuclear elongation. The elongation machinery could be concentrated near the midzone of the macronuclear interior or membrane. Alternatively, the machinery for elongation could be concentrated throughout the periphery of the macronucleus either directly on the macronuclear membrane or in the surrounding cytosol. In order to test these hypotheses, a full-length MYO1 sequence will have to be acquired and new reagents developed. Therefore, Project I will involve completion of MYO1 sequencing, generation of polyclonal antibodies against Tetrahymena actin and Myo1p, and creation of GFP- expression constructs for three Tetrahymena proteins: actin, tubulin, and Myo1p. Project II focuses on Myo1p function in endocytosis. Three areas of investigation will be pursued: (1) localization of actin and Myo1p to components of the endocytic pathway, (2) maturation of endosomes, and (3) endosome recycling at the cytoproct. Cells expressing either GFP-actin or GFP-Myo1p and MYO1-knockout cells expressing GFP-actin will be investigated with time-lapse confocal microscopy. Fluorescent polystyrene beads and membrane marker dyes will be used in assays for endosome maturation and endosome recycling. In project III, confocal microscopy of cells expressing either GFP-actin, GFP-tubulin, or GFP-Myo1p and MYO1-knockout cells expressing either GFP-actin or GFP-tubulin will determine whether actin microfilaments, microtubules, and Myo1p are components of a molecular machinery that could power macronuclear elongation. An in vitro motility assay will obtain direct evidence for Myo1p-powered movement of macronuclei. Functional studies of Myo1p have the potential for expanding our understanding of endocytosis phagocytosis and nuclear motility and may reveal novel mechanisms for the role of unconventional myosins in these processes. Studies of endocytosis phagocytosis have implications far beyond the Tetrahymena model. Cell regulation of surface receptors is mediated by endocytosis, and the phagocytic process is important for the feeding of many protists, and in metazoa it is an essential part of the immune system. The underlying basis for macronuclear motility may be related to nuclear migration and positioning that take place during development in many cell types and are known to involve cytoskeletal elements doc16543 none Little is known about the regulation of gap junction assembly and even less is known about gap junction removal from the cell surface. Such information is critical to the understanding of gap junctions and the role of hormonal control of cell-cell communication. In this proposal, the hypothesis that gap junction function may be regulated by the assembly and removal of gap junction protein from the plasma membrane will be tested. It is proposed that gap junction protein assembly and degradation are regulated by peptide hormone stimulation. Specifically, the role of adrenocorticotropin (ACTH) and cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) in regulating connexin 43 (Cx43) gap junction protein intracellular movement, channel assembly, and degradation will be studied in adrenal cells. Adrenal cortical cells that have gap junctions (SBAC and SW13 cell cultures) and those that lack gap junctions (H295 cells) will be transfected to express cDNA encoding for green, red or yellow protein Cx43. Gap junction protein processing (synthesis, trafficking, degradation and function) will be characterized by immunocytochemistry, live-cell imaging, western blot analysis and Lucifer yellow dye transfer. The spacial and temporal distribution of the Cx43 gap junction protein in secretory pathway organelles and in the plasma membrane will be determined in treated and nontreated cultures. Analysis of gap junction protein processing is an essential step in understanding the dynamics of gap junction and peptide hormone interaction. More importantly, this work will have a broad impact on the field of cell biology since it will provide a clearer understanding of the mechanisms by which hormones regulate organ function. In addition to the scientific impact, this study will provide a training environment for high school students, undergraduates, graduates, and postdoctoral fellows doc16544 none Stigma is an example of a culturally and socially determined behavior that has enormous impact on the health of individuals and populations worldwide. It is time for a major behavioral and social science approach to complement the legal approach and moral reproach that have characterized the global response to stigma regarding persons with marginalizing illnesses, such as schizophrenia , epilepsy and HIV AIDS. This award is in support of an international conference that will take place over two and a half days in September, . The conference is hosted by the Fogarty International Center at the NIH. Sessions will focus on cross cutting, socio-cultural issues including policy. It will also include sessions on population genetics and stigma doc16545 none Sharma Partial funding is awarded towards the purchase of a new generation multi-collector Thermal Ionization Mass Spectrometer (TIMS), which permits ultra-high precision measurements of positively and negatively charged ion beams. The Dartmouth College will provide a match consisting of 50% of the expected cost of the instrument. The TIMS instrument will be the primary research tool in the new radiogenic isotope geochemistry laboratory in the Department of Earth Sciences. Ultra-high precision osmium and neodymium isotopic ratios will be determined using the new TIMS with the aim of addressing issues related to the origin and evolution of Earth and other planetary reservoirs. In addition, high sensitivity measurements of rhenium, osmium, iridium, samarium, neodymium, uranium, thorium, lead, rubidium, strontium, and iron isotopes will be performed. The new TIMS facility will provide an exciting new dimension to research at Dartmouth, complementing the extant strong research programs in the Department of Earth Sciences, which include K-Ar geochronology, organic geochemistry and paleoceanography, hydrogeochemistry of watersheds, climate change, landscape evolution, stratigraphy and basin analysis, hydrology and geomechanics, and tectonics. Many of these programs have a radiogenic isotope component and require access to a state-of-the-art TIMS facility. Additionally, other researchers and students at Dartmouth and in New England region will be able to use the new facility, resulting in further growth of research and education in geochemistry and in physical sciences doc16546 none Current scenarios of predicted environmental change raise fundamental questions about the expected responses of animal populations to changes in local climate and food availability. Animal responses to environment are mediated by physiological functions such as metabolism, digestion, growth and reproduction. Using parallel simulation modeling and experimental studies in the laboratory and in nature, the PI will investigate the effect of food availability on reproduction in the timber rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus) in northwest Arkansas. Rattlesnakes are excellent subjects for these studies because of their abundance and large size which allows the use of radio-transmitters (for location and body temperature information). The simulation model is based on information about energy flow through timber rattlesnakes discovered under a previous grant ( ). New studies will build upon and complement previous work. A laboratory population of snakes will be maintained under three feeding regimes designed to produce variation in reproduction. In nature, an experimental food manipulation will test model predictions by comparing reproduction between supplementally fed and control groups of radio-tagged female rattlesnakes. Information gathered from these experiments will be used to test previous predictions made by the simulation model, and then to refine and improve the simulation. The results of this study will enhance our ability to predict the responses of animal populations to environmental change. The described studies will also provide multiple opportunities to enhance science literacy and involve students (from grade school to graduate school) in the process of science doc16547 none All organisms ranging from the simplest bacterium to the most sophisticated multicellular animal need energy for metabolic maintenance, growth, and reproduction. It is thus not surprising that a wide variety of mechanisms have evolved for acquiring the energy needed to carry out these vital processes. One such system that has developed among aquatic organisms involves cellular transport and utilization of dissolved organic matter (DOM) directly from the surrounding medium. The work from this project will add much needed direct evidence on the ecological and energetic role of DOM for marine invertebrate animals. Most of the current studies examining use of DOM by marine invertebrates are limited to indirect evidence based on comparisons of metabolic expenditure and potential contribution of DOM calculated from uptake rates of dissolved compounds. Although this approach is useful in determining the theoretical contribution of DOM, it does not directly characterize the realized contribution to an animal s energy budget. A more direct approach based on comparisons of metabolic expenditure of animals in the presence versus absence of DOM is needed. The proposed work seeks to establish this for the bryozoan Bugula neritina through a series of laboratory and field experiments examining how the availability of DOM during larval swimming and metamorphosis effects ecological relevant parameters such as, larval swimming duration, metamorphic competence, size after metamorphosis, adult growth rate, and onset and amount of reproduction. In addition, direct evidence for incorporation of DOM into larval tissues and those of early post-metamorphic stages will be established through autoradiographic techniques. These data will provide insight into how and when the transported compounds are being used (e.g., for swimming, metamorphosis, early juvenile growth). Taken together, the proposed experiments will provide direct evidence on the realized contribution of DOM to the nutritional biology of invertebrates, adding significantly to our current understanding of the ecological and energetic importance of DOM doc16548 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Northern Illinois University will acquire a liquid chromatograph - ion trap mass spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) characterization of heme protein samples; b) photochemical studies of autofluorescent pigments; c) development of new analytical tools based on protein-ligand interactions; d) studies of carboranes and metallacarboranes; e) investigations of reaction rates and thermodynamics for ions in the gas phase; and f) the development of reusable ruthenium carbene catalysts for olefin metathesis. Liquid chromatography with mass spectrometric detection (LC-MS) is an extremely powerful technique used for the separation and analysis of complex mixtures. This instrument will substantially strengthen scientific research in a wide variety of projects, ranging from the measurement of physical properties of ions to biochemical structural analysis doc16549 none This award renews support to the UTEX Culture Collection of Algae (UTEX) at the University of Texas at Austin. The UTEX algal collection includes a variety of mostly unicellular, freshwater algae, including diatoms and blue-green algae. The collection provides several thousand sample cultures every year to academic scientists (for basic research), to governmental agencies (for research and water quality analysis), to companies (for aquatic animal food, applied research, and biotechnology development), and to educators and students (for teaching and learning). Over UTEX strains are currently cryopreserved. Cryopreservation minimizes the cost of maintaining strains, and reduces the risk of genetic drift which may occur when strains are maintained using serial culture. The collection maintains a web site that includes a database listing all cultures in the collection, strain histories, and recipes for culture media. UTEX acts as a resource for information about the culture of algae, and provides opportunities for short-term visits to learn methods and techniques needed for use of algae in research. Awarded funds cover approximately two-thirds of the cost of operation of the collection with the remainder covered by the University and by user fees. Planned improvements within the next five years include cryopreservation of nearly all UTEX strains, development of a reservoir of whole genomic DNA, and addition of images of many UTEX algae to information provided on the web site doc16550 none Pinder The objective of this research is to investigate the use of a new approach to the modeling of groundwater flow and transport systems. A Monte-Carlo simulation approach is the only viable method for the solution of such problems involving large uncertainties in parameter values, such as hydraulic conductivity; but current methods require enormous computational effort and they require the use of rectangular numerical meshes. The goal of this research is to explore a new approach to generating random fields for both parameters and state variables that results in significantly less computational effort when simulating groundwater flow and transport and that can also be used on a triangular (or other irregular) finite-element mesh. The approach uses a variant on Latin-hypercube sampling to perform the necessary Monte-Carlo simulations. The overall goal is to increase both computational speed and mathematical flexibility when solving such problems described using parameters characterized by random fields. The computational efficiency will be achieved by reducing the number of realizations required to represent a random field to a specified degree of accuracy. The mathematical modeling flexibility will be enhanced by extending current random field representation technology to accommodate irregular finite-element simulation meshes, a technology that does not currently exist. This project could lead to significant gains in efficiency and effectiveness in solving difficult problems of groundwater contamination and flow, as well as a wide range of other problems in engineering and physics doc16551 none Tobacco etch virus (TEV) is a potyvirus, a member of the picornavirus supergroup of positive-strand RNA viruses, which infects plants. Like encephalomyocarditis virus (EMCV) and poliovirus, the genomic RNA of TEV is a polyadenylated mRNA that naturally lacks a 5 cap structure but is nevertheless efficiently translated. The TEV 5 -leader is sufficient to confer cap-independent translation to an mRNA and it is functionally analogous to a cap in that it interacts with the poly(A) tail to promote efficient translation. The TEV 5 -leader also promotes translation of the 5 -distal (i.e., second) cistron of a dicistronic mRNA in vivo when it is present in the intercistronic region, an observation indicating that the TEV 5 -leader functions as an internal ribosome entry site (IRES). The translation initiation factor eIF4G is required for TEV IRES function. The mechanism underlying IRES-mediated cap-independent translation has not been investigated for TEV or any other plant virus. The observation that the TEV is a naturally uncapped mRNA that has evolved a 5 -leader sequence that confers cap-independent translation, functions even when positioned in the intercistronic region of a dicistronic mRNA to promote internal initiation, and requires eIF4G for IRES function suggests that this member of the picornaviral superfamily may share similarities to IRES function described for animal picornaviruses such as EMCV and FMDV. The goal of this project is to determine the mechanism by which TEV IRES function promotes cap-independent translation in plants. This project will be the first to establish whether a plant viral IRES functions like animal picornaviral IRES. Because of the mechanistic differences among animal picornaviral IRESs, the research will determine whether the evolution of the TEV IRES is more similar to the IRES of EMCV (which can recruit eIF4G directly) or poliovirus (which may require the assistance of other factors to recruit eIF4G). The research will determine the structure of the TEV IRES and investigate whether eIF4G binds directly or is recruited to the TEV IRES by an additional trans-acting factor. The IRES of TEV is substantially smaller than animal picornaviral IRESs, suggesting that an IRES does not require extensive sequence to recruit the translational machinery. Elucidation of how such a simplified IRES can efficiently recruit the translational machinery in a cap-independent manner will provide important insight into the minimum requirement for IRES function in a higher eukaryote doc16552 none Some insects, such as the cricket (Gryllus firmus), are wing polymorphic (i.e., they contain both flight capable and flightless morphs). Wing polymorphism has been extensively used to investigate the hormonal control of dispersal and the evolution of endocrine regulation in insects. However, all previous studies have focused exclusively on the hormonal control of flight capability (e.g., growth of wings and flight muscles) in the laboratory. No study has investigated the endocrine regulation of flight itself, and no study has investigated the hormonal regulation of wing polymorphism in the field. Recent studies indicate that the endocrine regulation of morph-specific traits is more complex than previously expected. The key regulator of wing polymorphism is juvenile hormone (JH). In the cricket, Gryllus firmus, the mean concentration of JH is similar in the flight capable and flightless morphs, but the morphs differ in how the level of this hormone varies over time. The JH titer changes 10-50 fold during the day in the flight capable morph, but it is relatively constant in the flightless morph. This study focuses on the underlying causes and adaptive significance of daily changes in the JH titer. Prolonged elevation of the JH titer is associated with ovarian growth and with the breakdown of flight muscles--changes that are detrimental with respect to flight. This study will test the hypothesis that brief elevation of the JH titer is of sufficient duration to cause the expression of flight behaviors but of insufficent duration to cause ovarian growth or the breakdown of flight muscles. Studies will involve direct comparisons of hormone titers between morphs throughout the day and evening. The JH titer will be experimentally manipulated, and its effect on flight propensity will be monitored. Finally, physiological processes (hormone biosynthesis and degradation) that regulate morph-specific daily changes in the JH titer will be investigated. Importantly, these studies will be undertaken in both the laboratory and the field. This study will substantially enhance our understanding of the endocrine regulation of dispersal and evolution of dispersal in insects doc16553 none This U.S.-Czech research project between David Galbraith of the University of Arizona and his counterpart, Jaroslav Dolezel from the Czech Academy of Sciences Institute of Experimental Botany in Olomouc, features use of flowsorting to selectively enrich populations of individual barley chromosomes. Their intent is to produce fluorescent genomic DNA targets for hybridization of barley DNA microarrays and for fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) analyses of metaphase chromosomes. The total effort benefits from the Arizona team s extensive expertise with microarray technologies and the Czech s expertise in both fluorescence-activated sorting of plant chromosomes and plant chromosome cytology. Research experiences for undergraduate students are an integral part of the research plan. If successful, this work my yield new techniques for mapping single copy genes (i.e. ESTs) on specific plant chromosomes using barley as a model. The researchers also anticipate using the sorted chromosomes for the production of chromosome-specific DNA libraries. This international project in plant genome research fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the Untied States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc16554 none Xian-He Sun Illinois Institute of Technology CISE Research Resources: Acquisition of a Computing Cluster and Access Grid Node for Information Technology Research The Department of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) will purchase an 82 node Linux cluster, an Access Grid node, and several workstations, all of which will be connected via a high-speed network. These computational resources will be dedicated to the support of several on-going research projects in the area of information technology. Such projects include the development of a process migration environment for heterogeneous distributed computing, design and implementation of scalable information systems, scalable distributed simulation in support of complex systems management, and scalable parallel numerical algorithms and simulations. These projects require significant computing power and high-performance networks. Such resources are not currently available within the university. The acquisition of these resources through the NSF CISE Instrumentation program is critical to the success of these research projects, and to the development of a strong computer science program at IIT. Additionally, the requested equipment will offer an excellent platform upon which students can learn about and experience state-of-the-art research via course work and term projects doc16555 none During development, the cells of the nervous system go through periods of growth and proliferation and are often produced in excess. As cells become connected into their adult circuits, excess cells and cells in temporary structures die and are removed by a naturally occurring process called apoptosis. This process is regulated, in part, by diffusible signaling molecules that also act as neurotransmitters in adults. Neurotransmitters are small compounds that nerve cells use to communicate with each other. One such molecule is the diffusible gas, nitric oxide. Once inside a cell, the interaction of nitric oxide with its target molecule sets off a cascade of biochemical events. While nitric oxide has been implicated in regulating both cellular proliferation and apoptosis, little information exists about its role in the regulation of nervous system development. Previous work in Dr. Leise s laboratory has indicated that nitric oxide acts as a natural inhibitor of metamorphosis in a species of marine snail. During this process, one cluster of neurons in the brain, the so-called apical ganglion, disappears. Drs. Leise and Hens hypothesize that the disappearance of this ganglion is a result of apoptosis. They will use a histochemical test to look in apical ganglion cells for the presence of DNA fragments which form during apoptosis. They will also conduct related pharmacological and anatomical investigations to determine if nitric oxide regulates this process. They will investigate the relationship of nerve cell proliferation to metamorphosis and will determine if nitric oxide also controls the birth of new neurons. Finally, they will use molecular and immunocytochemical methods to identify regions of the embryonic brain that produce the enzyme that generates nitric oxide and determine when the production of the enzyme, and thus nitric oxide, cease during development. Nitric oxide occurs naturally as a neurotransmitter in the brains of adult humans, and its importance in the function of the adult brain is widely accepted. However, little is known about the role of this important molecule in embryonic development. These studies will further our understanding of nitric oxide in the embryonic brain and its importance for the regulation of neural development doc16556 none Cellular Mechanisms of Encoding Space-Time in the Monkey Brain Perceptions and memories are organized in brain in such a way that the spatial and temporal patterns of the original sensory stimuli are faithfully represented. This ability to encode space and time, intertwined as space-time in the physical world, is a fundamental feature of the nervous system. The cellular mechanisms of this encoding process in the primate brain are unclear. The present project employs a novel method to reveal how the neurons of the monkey hippocampus contribute to the encoding of space. Specifically, the firing of single hippocampal neurons are recorded for as long as 24 hours in squirrel monkeys moving freely on the walls and floor of a test chamber. During this period, the animals are performing a spatial memory task and allowed to eat, drink, rest and sleep. The hypothesis is tested that in these conditions most hippocampal neurons express a complex firing pattern tuned to process information on large sectors in space. Importantly, the experiments set the stage for examining the involvement of these cells in encoding time, as well. Thus, in the long run, this project will significantly contribute to the development of a unified concept on encoding space and time in the monkey brain. Such a concept should have a broad impact on cognitive neuroscience and should help to understand the uniquely sophisticated operation of the primate brain doc16557 none Karen Ann Garett, Allison Power, Helen Alexander ( , , ) Little is known about the role of plant disease in natural ecosystems, but several current environmental concerns motivate a greater understanding. When considering the potential effects of climate change, invasions of new pathogen species, or movement of disease resistance genes from genetically modified crop species to wild plant populations, understanding the role of plant disease in natural ecosystems is key. We propose a study of plant disease in the tallgrass prairie to provide information relevant to these concerns as well as to a general theoretical understanding of pathogen ecology and the role pathogens may play in determining the success of particular plant species. Plants in the tallgrass prairie of North America are of particular interest because so little area remains of this ecosystem and attempts to restore tallgrass prairie are an important focus of conservation efforts in the Great Plains. In this study we will provide information about the abundance of pathogen species and the patterns of their co-occurrence on a set of representative tallgrass prairie plant species found at the Konza Prairie Biological Station (KPBS), an NSF LTER site in the Flint Hills tallgrass prairie region in northeastern Kansas. We will also estimate the effects of predicted climate change scenarios, landscape patterns of microclimate variation, and burning cycle patterns, and work to refine sampling methods for characterizing pathogen populations within natural plant populations. This study will supply an essential baseline data set for plant diseases at KPBS to complement the LTER database on plant species composition and productivity doc16558 none Coronatine (COR) is a phytotoxin produced by the plant pathogenic bacterium Pseudomonas syringae. COR contributes to the virulence of P. syringae; however, a precise mode of action for COR has not been defined. COR has a unique structure consisting of two distinct compounds: (1) coronafacic acid (CFA), and (2) coronamic acid (CMA). CFA is structurally similar to jasmonic acid (JA), a plant hormone involved in plant defense, and functions as a molecular mimic of this endogenous plant signaling molecule. CMA is a structural analog of aminocyclopropyl carboxylic acid (ACC), the immediate precursor to ethylene, another endogenous plant hormone involved in plant defense. The structural and functional similarities between COR and compounds involved in plant defense signaling (JA and ACC ethylene) suggest that COR may promote pathogen virulence by interfering with host defense responses and or with other physiological processes in the plant. Furthermore, we have previously shown that COR is important for early colonization events in host plants, a finding consistent with the suppression or modulation of host defense responses. In the proposed work, a genetic approach that encompasses both host and pathogen will be used to define the role of COR in the pathogenesis of Arabidopsis and tomato. For this purpose, the PI and Co-PI have developed the first well-defined CFA- and CMA- mutants of P. syringae pv. tomato DC , a pathogen of Arabidopsis and tomato. The unique expertise and tools in the PI and Co-PI s laboratories will be used to integrate studies of the host (how does COR modulate susceptibility?) with the pathogen (how does COR contribute to virulence?). Specifically, we will: 1) characterize the COR genes in P. syringae pv. tomato strain DC and study the structure and regulation of these genes; 2) investigate the role of COR, CFA and CMA in the pathogenesis of Arabidopsis and tomato by utilizing mutants deficient for production of CFA, CMA, or both molecules; 3) utilize functional genomics (microarray studies) and the DC COR- mutants to investigate the role of COR, CFA, and CMA on modulating host cell processes and defense responses; and 4) analyze the effect of COR, CFA, and CMA on plant cell biology. These studies will contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms involved in disease development in plants. By taking advantage of a system where we can simultaneously study both the pathogen and plant host we will be able to identify and study the mechanisms by which COR alters normal plant cell processes. These studies will provide insight into the molecular basis of COR function in other plant hosts, a contribution that could result in the development of improved strategies for preventing or controlling plant disease in agricultural and horticultural systems doc16559 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Singularity Formation in Nonlinear Evolution Equations Sacks This award supports participants in the conference on Singularity Formation in Nonlinear Evolution Equations held at Iowa State University on June 8-9, . The conference emphasizes recent progress in the theory of singularity formation in nonlinear partial differential equations. The focus is mainly on three topics: singular solutions of systems of partial differential equations, critical exponent phenomena in nonlinear parabolic and hyperbolic equations, and effects of damping and convection. An issue of fundamental importance in the mathematical theory of evolution equations is that of singularity formation. Analysis of this phenomenon can be essential for understanding the physical processes being modeled. One might very roughly divide the subject into three categories: regularity theory (proofs that singularities do not occur), propagation and interaction of singularities results (proofs that singularities persist in some respect) and theory of singularity formation (proofs that singularities must occur, and behavior of solutions near singular points). It is this last topic which is the main theme of the proposed conference, which will provide an excellent opportunity for communication and collaboration among faculty and between senior and junior investigators doc16560 none University of Washington-Guang R. Gao-Adaptive Neurally-Inspired Computing: Models, Algorithms, and Silicon-Based Architectures Rapid advances in silicon technology over the past few decades have allowed digital devices to achieve ultra-high speeds in numerical computation. However, a majority of these devices are prone to catastrophic failure when confronted with circumstances unforeseen at programming time. Endowing such devices with the ability to adapt and learn from experience is rapidly becoming a problem of fundamental importance in information technology. We propose a new approach to solving this problem: building information technology systems based on neurobiological computation and learning. We intend to achieve this goal by developing computational models of plasticity and information processing in neurons and networks of neurons in selected sensory and motor areas of the brain; testing these models and their corresponding algorithms in software-based simulations, and designing real-time implementations of these algorithms in silicon using synapse transistors and field-programmable learning arrays (FPLAs). We expect our research to provide a better understanding of computation within neuronal networks, and to lead to a new generation of adaptive neuromorphic devices that could be used for a variety of information technology applications, ranging from signal processing and pattern recognition to ubiquitous computing and robotic control doc16561 none Hybrid systems: biological neurons interacting with electronic model neurons via electronic or computer simulated synapses can be a powerful approach for understanding basic neural computational principles and for building small hybrid and artificial processors that will create new perspectives for modern information technologies. Based on our previous studies on neural dynamics in living cells, computer models and analog electronic implementations of model neurons and connections, we are planning to work in two directions: (i) we will explore the main principles of information processing that uses dynamical elements, i.e. neurons, synapses and small neural circuits; and (ii) we will reconfigure real biological networks by utilizing electronic neurons and synapses in order to transform such circuits into controllable information devices with new functions and new abilities doc16562 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Curtis Marean conducted exploratory archaeological investigations in July of of three caves near Mossel Bay in the Western Cape province of South Africa. That project was funded by the high risk exploratory grants provided by the Archaeology Program. The goal of those investigations was to evaluate the suitability of several caves for more intensive excavations. Two of those caves proved to have very well preserved archaeological sediments dating to the Middle Stone Age, with excellent fossil bone preservation. Two hominid fossils were found, suggesting that further investigations could yield more and contribute to a currently small sample. Furthermore, features such as hearths are well preserved, and ochre pencils were found, suggesting that the occupants had been involved in symbolic activities. Based on those results, Dr. Marean will conduct with National Science Foundation support more intensive excavations at one of those caves, named Cave 13B. This study is part of a wide ranging international and interdisciplinary research effort that seeks to understand the cultural transition from archaic to modern human behavior. This research effort, focusing on the interval of time between about 250,000 and 30,000 years ago, involves scholars working primarily in Eurasia and Africa. To date the evidence has been dominated by that from Europe, where scientists have been working intensively for the last 100 years. The results of that research have led many scientists to argue that those aspects of modern human culture that we associate with modern people appear first shortly after 40,000 years ago. These indicators of modernity include such things as symboling behavior as suggested by the presence of artistic expression and religion, and complex social structures such as trade networks as indicated by the presence of raw materials from distant sources. Recently, new results from the poorly sampled African continent, particularly in coastal South Africa, suggest that these indicators of modernity may have appeared earlier there than in Eurasia, and that this once-secure Rubicon at 40,000 years ago may be an artifact of an empirical record weak in African evidence. This project seeks to expand the African record for this crucial transition. The excavations at Mossel Bay should help provide a more secure understanding of the timing of these events in Africa. The analysis of the excavated materials will focus on geochemical analyses of raw materials to investigate trade networks, spatial analysis of the artifacts and faunal remains relative to hearth placement to investigate the organization of social activities, and faunal remains to understand the sophistication of hunting behavior doc16563 none A. Gast, Gordon Research Conferences Partial travel support for Young speakers in the early stages of their careers and for senior graduate students and postdocs are requested for this Gordon Conference. The major objective of this Gordon Conference is to provide a forum for new and established scientists and engineers in colloidal, macromolecular, and polyelectrolyte solutions to discuss and exchange information. The conference will facilitate discussion and exploration of ideas at the forefront of the many complexities of the charged, macromolecular, interfacial and solutions. This conference has always had interdisciplinary participation from the engineering, physics, chemistry, and biochemistry communities. An important component of the conference is the inclusion of young scientists and engineers. The various session in the conference include self assembly on surfaces, self assembly in solutions, ordering and nanostructures, proteins at surfaces, single molecule analysis, DNA sequencing, flow and microarrays, and polyelectrolytes in biophysics doc16564 none This award is in partial support of a conference on Intracellular RNA Sorting, Transport and Localization. The purpose of the meeting is to stimulate further progress in understanding what is now recognized as an essential form of post-transcriptional gene regulation in germ cells, embryos, and somatic cells. This conference is one of the series of summer FASEB-sponsored meetings, to be held in at the Big Mountain Resort in Whitefish, Montana. The meeting has been held in alternate years since . It provides a unique opportunity to bring together researchers who have common interests in RNA transport and localization but use a wide range of experimental systems to study what are often quite different aspects of development or cellular function. The meeting serves to inform researchers about the most recent advances from all experimental systems in a setting that is extremely conducive to interactions. The cross-fertilization of ideas from scientists who otherwise attend different meetings and thus do not interact extensively has been extremely beneficial. Approximately 120-150 participants are expected. Speakers will be scientists with recent significant research contributions, and will be assembled by both invitation and evaluation of submitted abstracts. The major session topics will be: 1) Defining roles for mRNA localization in somatic cells; 2) Comparing mechanistic strategies for mRNA transport and localization; 3) Tracing mRNA movements in vivo to define mechanisms of localization and transport; 4) mRNA localization signals: structural organization and function; 5) Proteins that recognize mRNA localization signals ; 6) Role of the cytoskeleton in mRNA localization; 7) Molecular motors and moving mRNAs; 8) Coordination of mRNA localization with other post-transcriptional control points; and 9) Local regulation of mRNA translation. There will also be two poster sessions doc16565 none Philip McKinley Michigan State University CISE Research Resources: A Proxy-Centric Testbed for Mobile Internet Research The Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University will construct a state-of-the-art testbed for research in protocols and services surrounding the mobile Internet. The testbed will comprise four major components: (1) a high-performance parallel proxy cluster interconnected by a gigabit Ethernet switch; (2) new generation 802.11a wireless network components with bit rates up to 54 Mbps; (3) a wireless network analyzer that enables detailed inspection and analysis of conditions and behavior of the wireless network; and (4) a set of mobile hosts for collecting experimental data. The primary mission of the testbed is to support three research projects related to mobile Internet environments: design of new network protocols to improve the observed performance of wireless channels in transporting multimedia data; study of adaptive middleware services to support collaboration among heterogeneous mobile hosts; and the use of formal analysis techniques to support automated development and testing of interactive distributed applications doc16566 none Giles J. Laurent- - Biological computation in olfactory systems: experiments, theory and analog circuit modeling Pattern recognition (e.g., face, voice recognition) remains one of the most difficult problems for computer science. Odors are complex physical objects (blends of molecules) and yet, are perceived as singular objects (e.g., coffee, jasmine); because olfactory circuit designs appear similar across animal species (from insects to mammals), olfaction constitutes a potentially ideal system to identify key solutions to pattern recognition. The investigators are an interdisciplinary team from Biology, Physics, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Caltech and from the University of California-San Diego. They are investigating the basic computational principles of olfactory processing and recognition in animals, with the long-term goal to build intelligent pattern storage and recognition devices, designed using rules inspired by neurobiology. We plan to study how to build simple and later, scale up, both in number of processors and in frequency, electronic antennal lobes and mushroom bodies so that one might, in the future, adapt and exploit the design of biological pattern recognizers and provide new computational paradigms for human uses doc16567 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville will acquire an Electrospray Matrix-assisted Laser Desorption Ionization Quadrupole - Time of Flight (MALDI Q-TOF) Hybrid Mass Spectrometer. This instrument will be used for a) studies on the characterization of polymers and amyloid fibrils; studies of multiply charged anions; and for the synthesis and characterization of telechelic materials. In addition, investigators at Knoxville will investigate aminoglycoside antibiotic modifying enzymes; light regulation of plant development; and protein components of amyloid plaques. Matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization (MALDI) time-of-flight (TOF) mass spectrometry is the technique of choice for obtaining accurate molecular weights on molecules up to and over 300,000 daltons, with extremely high sensitivity. These studies utilizing the MALDI-TOF mass spectrometer will have an impact in chemistry, biochemistry and materials research doc16568 none Large-scale phenomena in anti-predator behavior: on the consequences of putting predators back into predator-prey interactions PI - Steven L. Lima Most studies on the anti-predator behavior of animals focus on a small area in which prey respond to an ambient level of predation risk imposed by predators. The tendency has been to focus more the behavior of prey rather than predators, and the latter have usually been treated merely as a source of risk to prey rather than active participants in the behavioral interaction. This small-scale perspective has revealed much about behavioral predator-prey interactions, but it has missed an entire class of behavioral interactions that exist at larger spatial scales. To appreciate these large-scale interactions, one must think on the scale of an ecological landscape, or an area many km2 in extent-a scale much larger than usually considered by behavioral ecologists. One must also put predators back into the picture by allowing them to be an active participant in the behavioral interaction. More specifically, the proposed work is motivated by a simple question: what drives the movement of animals across a landscape? The present (small-scale) consensus holds that movement by prey attracts predators, hence movement by prey must reflect a need to find new sources of food, etc. However, the results of a simulation model show that predator and prey may be involved in a large-scale shell game, in which predators move frequently in search of elusive prey, and prey move among feeding sites to remain elusive. Furthermore, if prey in a given area are relatively difficult to locate, then predators will focus their attention elsewhere on more predictable prey, with the result that these predictable prey may initiate greater movement to avoid predators. This indirect interaction among prey (through their effect on the predator s behavior) represents a related large-scale phenomenon: the predator pass-along effect. Under other circumstances, predators might avoid constantly attacking prey at a particular location in an effort to render them more catchable in the long-run. Such predatory behavior represents another large-scale effect: prey management by predators. The further theoretical exploration of these large-scale phenomena is an important feature of the proposed work. Much of the proposed work covers an empirical exploration of these large-scale behavioral interactions. This work focuses on the conceptually important paradigm of the small bird in winter, in which small birds must survive both the rigors of winter and the predatory onslaught of bird-eating Accipiter hawks. This task requires much basic biological research, as very little is known about the large-scale movements of small wintering birds or Accipiter hawks. The daily movements of hawks and their avian prey will be followed (via radiotracking techniques) over study areas many km2 in extent. Basic information will be established on hawk and prey home range sizes and movements. Using food manipulation sites established throughout a study area, the distribution and spatial predictability of prey birds will be altered experimentally. These food sites will be manipulated (established and withdrawn) in order to test predictions concerning shell games, predator pass-along effects, and prey management by predators. Conducting behavioral research at a large spatial scale presents unique challenges, but such work represents an important step in the study of predator-prey interactions, one that may ultimately shed much light on ecological systems in general doc16569 none Enzymes catalyzing sequential reactions are increasingly found to be associated within cells. Sometimes the association involves multifunctional proteins, such as those in eukaryotic fatty acid synthetase complexes, sometimes tightly linked enzyme complexes, such as the glycine cleavage system, and sometimes membrane-associated complexes, such as mitochondrial respiratory complexes. Most enzymes, however, are soluble proteins, readily isolated free of other proteins. At the high protein concentrations found within cells, such enzymes can associate into loosely bound complexes, which the late Paul Srere termed metabolons. A complex that has favorable properties for structural and kinetic analysis of the metabolon concept is the bacteriophage T4 dNTP synthetase complex. Previous research from this laboratory has demonstrated a complex containing at least eight phage-coded proteins and two of host cell origin. Individual activities within the isolated complex are kinetically linked. Indirect evidence suggests that the complex is associated with the DNA replication apparatus and that it plays an important role in delivering deoxyribonucleoside triphosphates (dNTPs) to replisomes fast enough to sustain DNA chain at rates of 500-800 nucleotides per second. All of the enzymes known to be in the complex and all T4 DNA replication proteins are available as purified recombinant proteins, allowing numerous approaches to identifying specific protein-protein interactions and analysis of kinetic coupling through studies on partially reconstituted forms of the complex. This project includes the following specific aims: (1) To identify direct and indirect interactions among proteins in the T4 dNTP synthetase complex and interactions with T4 replication proteins shown to associate with the complex. This involves analysis in an optical biosensor, as well as protein affinity chromatography and nondenaturing gel electrophoresis; (2) To define effects of substrates and allosteric effectors upon protein-protein associations. Evidence suggests that small molecules have dramatic effects upon protein associations in the dNTP synthetase complex; (3) To define effects of protein-protein interactions upon kinetic behavior of individual enzymes and linked multi-step reaction pathways. Kinetic analysis of partially reconstituted complexes explores the nature of kinetic coupling. Steady-state analyses, and, in collaboration with a colleague, pre-steady-state analyses using quench-flow techniques are being used; (4) To ascertain whether the dNTP synthetase complex is associated with the replication machinery in vivo. These experiments involve immunolocalization of E. coli dNTP-synthesizing enzymes, specifically, ribonucleotide reductase and thymidylate synthase, and are also being done in a collaborative effort. Crystal structures of some of the enzymes in the complex have been determined and other structure determinations are under way. As structural information about proteins and docking sites emerges, these data will be merged with the enzymological data from this study, in an attempt to develop a unified picture of this particular metabolon doc16570 none The collapse of the Soviet Union was a watershed event that resulted in a catastrophic decline in longevity and health status for indigenous Siberians. The social and economic disintegration following the breakup of the Soviet Union resulted in epidemic mortality from cardiovascular diseases. This study will investigate the social, behavioral and physiological phenomena underlying this higher mortality. This research uses an urban-rural design to investigate major determinants of cardiovascular risk in the Yakut, an indigenous Siberian group. The hypothesis will be tested that rapid social change has lead to dietary changes, producing a gene-diet interaction leading to high cholesterol levels among urban subjects and increased incidence of cardiovascular disease. Approximately 500 adult subjects will be recruited from the city of Yakutsk, the village of Tiungiuliu and surrounding settlements. Serum lipids and C-reactive protein will be used as markers of cardiovascular risk and will be measured using dried blood spots. Dietary intake of saturated fats and cholesterol will be assessed using a food frequency questionnaire. Data on health behavior (alcohol consumption, smoking) and sociodemographic dimensions will be collected by questionnaire. This research will enhance international collaboration and the exchange of scientific knowledge between U.S. and international scientists and will provide essential training for future scientists in the United States. This research is significant in that it explains the health consequences of failed modernization, estimates the effect of gene-diet interactions, and increases our knowledge of how rapid epidemiological change can occur within the context of rural-urban social change doc16571 none The goal of the research is to learn more about the relationships between spellings and sounds in English and to use this information as a basis for studying the processes that are involved in spelling and reading. Most previous studies of English reading and spelling have concentrated on short, simple words, those that contain a single syllable. This research will go beyond past work by studying words that are longer and more complex. Such words are frequently encountered by children and adults, and it is important to understand how they are dealt with. Computer methods will examine the links between spellings and sounds in a comprehensive database of English words. The research is based on the hypothesis that, even when it is not possible to predict exactly how a given sound will be spelled or how a given letter will be pronounced, there are a number of factors that can help narrow the range of alternatives. For example, consideration of a unit s position in the word and the identity of the surrounding units can help decrease the degree of uncertainty. The research will study these factors in both the adult vocabulary and the words that are seen by children of various ages. The results of this phase of the research are expected to show that the English writing system, although complex, is more systematic than commonly believed. A series of behavioral studies will examine children s and adults use of the statistical patterns. In addition, analysis of data from an extensive study of adults reading of a very large number of words is expected to find that adults and even children are sensitive to the statistical patterns in the input. However, the research is further guided by the hypothesis that learners pick up some types of patterns in the system more easily than others. For example, patterns involving letters that are not adjacent to one another may be difficult for children to learn. The results should thus help to show which aspects of the English writing system are especially difficult to master and why. The findings should shed light on the nature of the English writing system and the way in which it is learned and used. They should have implications for theories of literacy and literacy development and for the understanding and prevention of reading difficulties doc16572 none Large-eddy simulation (LES) is increasingly used to analyze land-atmosphere interactions at scales relevant to microscale and mesoscale meteorology. The goal of this project is to improve the understanding of subgrid-scale (SGS) motions - the turbulent velocity fluctuations too small to be resolved in LES models, which must be accounted for by some kind of parameterization. The approach is to use experimental data collected in the SGS experiment, conducted in the summer of in the San Joaquin Valley. The analysis will employ novel ideas that have arisen from laboratory studies of turbulence. These include new statistical-geometrical tools to quantify alignments between SGS heat flux and temperature gradient vectors, the evaluation of spectral eddy viscosities and eddy diffusivities from the data, and the study of coherent structures such as sweeps and ejections. To extend the range of the scales that can be analyzed, a new field experiment will be planned that combines an array of hot-wire anemometers to measure the fine scales of turbulence with arrays of sonic anemometers to measure the larger scales. Details of the experiment design will depend on the outcome of the analysis of SGS data. The field program will be undertaken in collaboration with the Atmospheric Technology and the Microscale and Mesoscale Meteorology Divisions of the National Center for Atmospheric Research doc16573 none Sudeep Sarkar University of South Florida CISE Research Resources: A Compute-Intensive Sensor-Based Environment for Research in Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence Automated learning of grouping parameters for perceptual organization of complex images, modeling and reconstruction of elastic objects from image sequences, real-time matching of buyers and sellers for E-commerce, and learning models from extremely large databases, all require large data storage and a computing environment that supports exploring extremely large parameter spaces along with the ability to process huge quantities of data. A multiprocessor computing environment with substantial memory and disk storage is requested for high-performance computing associated with these four research projects in the general areas of computer vision and artificial intelligence. The compute server will increase the present capabilities by an order of magnitude. In addition, image acquisition devices, including high-resolution color cameras, digital video cameras, stereo cameras, and laser range scanners are requested for gathering color, motion, and range data. The ability to acquire fast range images and motion sequences will enable the consideration of the problem of integrating motion and range into the perceptual organization process. Also, the ability to acquire fast and high-resolution range, with registered color, will facilitate development of physics-based non-rigid algorithms and models that incorporate true material properties, which have, heretofore, not been possible doc16574 none Randall D. Beer-Case Western Reserve-Reconfigurable and Multifunctional Behavior Pattern Generators We propose to develop new theories and models that extend current computational frameworks by understanding and implementing the dynamically reconfigurable and multifunctional information processing architectures of biological systems. We will address this challenge through a collaborative interdisciplinary research program focusing on multifunctional neuromechanical components and their reconfiguration into multiple behavioral patterns in animals. The ultimate goal of our proposed research is to abstract general design principles that can eventually be applied in a variety of other contexts. Specifically, we propose the following four closely intertwined experimental and modeling theoretical projects: 1)We will undertake a detailed experimental analysis of the feeding system of the mollusk Aplysia California, which dynamically reconfigures its feeding behavior in response to changing environmental circumstances, and does so through the multifuntionality of its neuromechanics. First, we will characterize the conditions under which the animal switches between distant behavioral patterns. Second, we will examine the neural and mechanical basis of these switches. 2)We will create and analyze models of behavioral pattern switching as the basis for new design principles. First, we will construct interconnected semi-Markov models to capture behavioral pattern reconfiguration observed in biological systems. Second, we will pursue the development of a systematic design methodology for engineered systems, with potential applications to robotic assembly. 3)We will create and analyze models of multifunctional pattern generations in order to identify general design principles. First, we will use genetic algorithms to evolve multifunctional neural pattern generators that can switch between distinct behavioral patterns. Second, we will undertake a detailed study of the design space of these model pattern generators. 4)We will explore the implementation of multifunctional neural pattern generators in analog VLSI. First, we will develop compact, low-power pattern generators based on the experimental and theoretical work proposed above. Second, we will study the effects of noise and component mismatch on the performance of these networks doc16575 none Lay Murray This one-day symposium has the goals of bringing together investigators working on diverse taxa, and moving the field toward a unified framework of the neural mechanisms underlying navigational behaviors. Previous conferences on the subject of orientation and navigation have not emphasized neural mechanisms, and a greater understanding of such neural mechanisms is now possible using multichannel recording, and newly-developed techniques for recording from freely-moving animals. Eleven speakers will each present a 30-minute talk on their work followed by 10 minutes of questions. All speakers will address common problems, models, and mechanisms shared among all investigators, with the goal of developing a unifying framework to understand the neural circuits utilized as animals find their way over both short and long distances. The objectives of this symposium are as follows: To exchange ideas about state-of-the-art neuronal, computational, and behavioral approaches to the analysis of oriented locomotion; To seek common neural mechanisms of orientation and navigation used by multiple phyla and in diverse sensory contexts; And to set short-term and long-term goals common to those working on the mechanisms of oriented locomotion toward establishing a general theory of the neuronal mechanisms of oriented locomotion. These general mechanisms will inform technologies now developing in the form of mobile robots. This symposium will provide an opportunity for a rich cross-fertilization of ideas among researchers studying animal behavior and those studying neurobiology doc16576 none The aim of this research proposal is to develop microsensors to based on resonant properties of spherical dielectric particles to sense a variety of chemical and physical properties of gas and liquid phases. These microsensors make use of extremely sensitive dependence of resonant amplitudes, widths, and spectral positions on the index of refraction, the aborption coefficient and the size of a spherical microresonator. As a first step the temperature, humidity and mercury vapor sensors will be developed doc16577 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of California in Riverside will acquire an Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) Spectrometer. Among the research programs in which EPR spectroscopy will play a vital role are: a) bioinorganic chemistry or iron porphyrins, redox chemistry of fullerenes, metalloporphyrin fullerene supramolecular chemistry and reactive radical cations across the periodic table (Reed); b) characterization of porphyrin pi-cation radicals in multiporphyrin arrays (Bocian); c) studies on carbon nanotubes and neutral organic conductors (Haddon); d) investigations on the mechanism of manganese catalyzed water oxidation in photosystem II (Debus); e) trapping of fluorocarbonyl radicals (Morton); and f) development of new analytical tools for assessing chirality (Mueller). An electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectrometer is an instrument used to obtain information about the molecular and electronic structure of molecules. It may also be used to obtain information about the lifetimes of free radicals which are often essential for the initiation of tumor growth and or a variety of chemical reactions. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, in particular biological chemistry and materials sciences doc16578 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at CUNY City College will acquire a Circular Dichroism Spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) studies on DNA oligomers and duplexes; b) investigations on the characterization of isolated fragments of variants of Trx as a proxy for the unfolded state of the protein under non-denaturing conditions; and c) development of biomaterials for nanoscale photonic applications. Circular dichroism spectroscopy is an extremely useful tool in modern analytical chemistry. It provides a very reliable and sensitive method for assigning absolute molecular configurations. The results from these studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry and biochemistry doc16579 none This award will enable continued operations of the Kitt Peak 12m (KP12m) millimeter-wave telescope for 18 months while the University of Arizona (UA) puts in place a plan to operate the facility using private funds. The KP12m was formerly operated as a national user facility by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). The UA and the Research Corporation will also contribute funds toward operations during the privatization period. The privatization plan calls for integration of the operations of the KP12m and the Heinrich Hertz Telescope, a submillimeter telescope on Mount Graham in Arizona, under a single director to reduce total operating costs. The UA will seek other partners to form a consortium to operate both telescopes for the longer term. The KP12m, though over 30 years old, has continued to produce significant scientific results in recent years. The benefit to science of successful privatization will be that a still useful telescope will continue to enable research in millimeter astronomy, helping to maintain the community of millimeter astronomers in the US as a prelude to ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimeter Array). During the bridge period, telescope time will be allocated to the general astronomical community in proportion to NSF s share of the operations burden doc16580 none Ramdas Kumaresan University of Rhode Island Collaborative Research: Processing of Temporally-Coded Auditory Representations for Sound Separation and Localization The proposed work investigates the use of two temporally-coded representations and temporal processing strategies for the separation of auditory objects. Two temporal representations and temporal processing strategies for the separation of auditory objects will be used. Two temporal representations of input signals will be used. These are 1) phase-locked spike train responses in a simulated auditory nerve array (Auditory Temporal Images), and 2) an auditory-inspired signal representation based on adaptive demodulation (Adaptive Demodulation and Real-Zero Conversion) that converts bandpass signals into timings of certain zero crossings. Temporal coding through phase locking is a very general strategy for representing sensory information through the relative timings of spikes. Temporal coding is found in many sensory systems: audition (periodicity and frequency discrimination, localization, echolocation), mechanoception (flutter-vibration, localization, movement), electroception (localization), and vision (fly motion detection). The unsurpassed capabilities of biological auditory systems to separate, analyze, and recognize multiple sounds may be due to the early use of temporal codes and computations, but thus far there have been relatively few attempts to effectively exploit these time domain strategies in artificial signal processing contexts. This collaborative project will combine understanding of the neural substrates of auditory perception (Cariani) with mathematical insights and expertise in signal processing (Kumaresan) to develop new biologically inspired time-domain approaches to auditory scene analysis doc16581 none Harvey Rubin-University of Pennsylvania-Modeling and Analysis of Biological and Information Networks The overall goals of our research are to: 1) create enabling technologies and experimental systems that are necessary to understand and predict the integrated functions of two bacterial sensing and regulatory networks--porim osmo-regulation in E.coli and oxygen sensing regulation of DNA synthesis in Mycobacterium tuberculosis; 2) model and abstract principles of organization, design control and coordination of biological systems. We believe that a better understanding of networked, hybrid models in biology will provide deeper insights into networked, embedded systems. No systematic approach to designing and developing such hybrid systems exists today. Our research on the porin osmo-regulatory system in E. coli will investigate crosstalk between the porin osmo-regulatory system and other signaling systems. We suggest that the ability of the sensing element of the system, EnvZ, to act as both a kinase and phosphatase is crucial for the control of information flow and to minimize crosstalk. We will extend our models in a related series of experiments on the PhoQ PhoP two component systems, which responds to changes in the extracellular magnesium concentration. Since the levels of the histidine kinase PhoQ and response regulator PhoP are modulated by the concentration of phosphorylated PhoP, we will be able to establish the effect of this feedback and its influence on robustness of the overall system behavior doc16582 none Miroslav Martinovic The College of New Jersey CISE Research Resources: Purpose-Driven Natural Language Processing The unifying theme of the three projects (WHAT, QASTIIR, and Hopewell) is the integration of methodologies of computational linguistics with statistical techniques and their cooperative application to question answering and information retrieval systems. QASTIIR (Question Answering System Through Intelligent Information Retrieval) considers where and when techniques of computational linguistics could best improve performance of a hybrid statistical linguistic question answering system. WHAT (Web Host Access Tool) addresses client-side personalization of web search queries, exploiting semantics to disambiguate keyword meaning. The Hopewell project automates K-12 curriculum mapping (essentially a digital library of curriculum resources achieved through teacher consensus). NLP IR techniques should reduce the need for middle layer expertise to manipulate map databases. All three projects address how to disambiguate logical and set expression queries. QASTIIR takes the most theoretical approach, developing theory through established protocols for testing. The WHAT domain provides a highly ambiguous real-world domain using well established databases. Hopewell project provides a second real-world domain whose semantics are more constrained, but that requires a database design responsive to novice querying. Anticipated outcomes are (1) new theory development in natural language processing, (2) highly private user profile development, (3) application of NLP technology to digital library development and retrieval doc16583 none Teresa Dahlberg University of North Carolina Charlotte CISE Research Resources: Experimental Testbed for Mobile Network Protocols The overall objective of this project is to experimentally analyze mobile network protocols that support multimedia services. A wireless, mobile multimedia network will be built to add an experimental component to four ongoing research projects at UNC Charlotte. The experimental work will focus on the component of each project that involves development and analysis of mobile network protocols. Experimentation will enable critical analysis of protocol behavior in dynamic environments where real-world entities replace simulation models, especially, network traffic models, wireless channel models, fault and vulnerability models, and power usage models. The testbed will encompass both cellular and ad hoc network architectures with components that include PCs and laptops with IEEE 802.11 radios and FreeBSD operating system. Network nodes to be configured include multimedia nodes that generate variable bit rate streaming audio and video and a security authentication node. The testbed will support individual research activities as well as facilitate synergy among the researchers who possess expertise in the areas of multimedia, security, ad hoc networking, and cellular networking. The outcome of the experimental studies will contribute to the limited body of knowledge of mobile network protocol behavior within highly dynamic environments doc16584 none David Luebke University of Virginia This project will construct a state-of-art immersive display at the University of Virginia. Specifically, the investigators will build a wide field-of-view tiled display, using passive stereo projection, 6-DOF head tracking, and spatialized audio to create an extremely immersive 3-D audio-visual display environment. This display will benefit and enable three separate research projects in the Computer Science and Psychology departments: gaze-directed rendering, perceptually driven physical simulation and animation, and cognitive design of human-computer interfaces. Tiling multiple projectors will create a display spanning a very wide field of view; two projectors per tile will enable passive stereo display with lightweight polarizing glasses. An audio system, a head tracker, and realistic scanned 3-D environments will enable immersive and convincing virtual worlds. The wide field-of-view will provide an ideal testbed for gaze-directed rendering, which accelerates interactive rendering by exploiting reduced visual acuity (e.g., for peripheral or fast-moving objects), and for perceptually driven physical simulation, which selectively degrades simulation accuracy according to perceptual metrics. The human-computer interface project investigates immersive ambient context to improve human memory. The stereo head-tracked capabilities of the new display will literally add a new dimension to the investigation, enabling full 3-D environmental cues doc16585 none Wagner The Role of LEAFY in Reproductive Development in Arabidopsis The switch from juvenile to reproductive phase occurs in all higher organisms. Control of the proper timing of this switch is vital. In plants the transition from vegetative to reproductive development is also of agronomical importance as seeds, the storage reserves which human sustenance largely depends on, are the product of the reproductive phase. The transcription factor LEAFY (LFY) is a key regulator of the floral transition, a central step in the switch from vegetative to reproductive development. Later in the reproductive phase LFY controls flower patterning. Despite its central role in these processes, events downstream of LFY are poorly understood. Only two direct targets of LFY are known. Genetic evidence indicates that additional LFY-controlled target genes play critical roles in reproductive development. We will employ genomic molecular approaches to identify these unknown LFY-regulated target genes. The proposal is based on posttranscriptional activation of a LFY fusion protein that allows identification of genes whose expression change rapidly in response to LFY activation. Biological significance of the identified novel LFY-regulated target genes will be investigated doc16586 none Jie Wu Florida Atlantic University CISE Research Resources: A Low Cost Parallel and Distributed Systems Laboratory The proposed project includes three parallel applications on a Beowulf cluster. The chief advantage of a Beowulf cluster is its superb price performance ratio: the proposed cluster will obtain performance in the 3-5 Gigaflop range, for less than one tenth the cost of a comparably powered supercomputer. The low cost parallel and distributed systems laboratory consists of a 16-node Beowulf cluster. Each node is similar to an off-the-shelf PC without a monitor or keyboard. The nodes are networked by 100 Mbit Fast Ethernet lines. Each node will run both Linux and Windows NT. Three parallel applications are proposed: (1) A parallel system for ecological modeling, with its focus on minimizing the simulation time of parallelized ecological models. A central component will be porting NOAA s NNT-SMS rectilinear parallel modeling package to the Beowulf architecture, (2) A Java runtime framework on Beowulf clusters for parallel execution of multithreaded processes. A new lottery-based job stealing algorithm will be studied for efficient scheduling of large-scale multithreaded computation. (3) Optimal configuration selection for accuracy enhancement of programmable machines. A genetic algorithm solution will be studied to enhance the accuracy of programmable machines. The success of this project will demonstrate the usefulness of Beowulf clusters as a cost-effective alternative to the supercomputer doc16587 none Peter A. Cariani Mass Eye & Ear Infirmary Collaborative Research: Processing of Temporally-Coded Auditory Representations for Sound Separation and Localization The proposed work investigates the use of two temporally-coded representations and temporal processing strategies for the separation of auditory objects. Two temporal representations and temporal processing strategies for the separation of auditory objects will be used. Two temporal representations of input signals will be used. These are 1) phase-locked spike train responses in a simulated auditory nerve array (Auditory Temporal Images), and 2) an auditory-inspired signal representation based on adaptive demodulation (Adaptive Demodulation and Real-Zero Conversion) that converts bandpass signals into timings of certain zero crossings. Temporal coding through phase locking is a very general strategy for representing sensory information through the relative timings of spikes. Temporal coding is found in many sensory systems: audition (periodicity and frequency discrimination, localization, echolocation), mechanoception (flutter-vibration, localization, movement), electroception (localization), and vision (fly motion detection). The unsurpassed capabilities of biological auditory systems to separate, analyze, and recognize multiple sounds may be due to the early use of temporal codes and computations, but thus far there have been relatively few attempts to effectively exploit these time domain strategies in artificial signal processing contexts. This collaborative project will combine understanding of the neural substrates of auditory perception (Cariani) with mathematical insights and expertise in signal processing (Kumaresan) to develop new biologically inspired time-domain approaches to auditory scene analysis doc16588 none Andreas G. Andreou Johns Hopkins University A Comparative Study of Information Processing in Biological and Bio-inspired systems: Performance Criteria, Resources Tradeoffs and Fundamental Limits We propose a research program towards a fundamental and quantitative understanding of the tradeoffs between system performance and resources such as size, reliability and energy requirements for biological and bio-inspired microsystems. We employ the mathematical tools of communication theory and model natural or synthetic physical structures as micro-scale communication networks, studying them under physical constraints at two different levels of abstraction. At the functional level we examine the operational and task specification, while at the implementation level we examine the physical specification and realization. Both levels of abstraction are characterized by Shannon s channel capacity, as determined by the channel bandwidth, the signal power; and the noise power. The link between the functional level and the physical level of abstraction is established through first principles and phenomenological otherwise, models for transformations on the signal, physical constraints on the system, and noise that degrades the signal doc16589 none The investigator and his colleagues consider new directions for the development of default model uncertainty input specifications for Bayesian model selection and model averaging. For the problem of model space prior specification, distributions are developed that dilute probability within neighborhoods of redundant models, thereby providing a more appropriate representation of ignorance. For the problem of parameter space prior specification, the predictive properties of model averaging are investigated for various prior formulations. In particular, focusing on the frequentist consequences of prior misspecification, new formulations are developed that maintain near-minimax behavior with only a minor degradation of predictive potential. For Bayesian modeling of large data sets, new adaptive formulations are developed that accommodate local as well as global structure. This includes new adaptive hierarchical modeling formulations as well as a new framework for simultaneous model and data selection. The goals of theoretical optimality and practical feasibility are considered throughout. The ultimate objective of this research is to enhance the potential of Bayesian statistical methods for discovering and modeling systematic relationships between variables in large multi-variable data sets. The explosive growth of information technologies has led to the proliferation of such data sets across widely diverse fields in business and science. Such methods offer a general approach towards improving explanations and predictions of many varied phenomenon such as, for example, consumer behavior, disease incidence, financial turbulence, industrial pollution and school efficiency. Bayesian statistical methods, in particular, offer the promise of optimally distinguishing systematic structure from random noise, which is of critical importance for effective mining of large, detailed data sets. The main thrust of this research is on the development of automatic implementations and richer formulations of these methods that will more fully exploit their statistical potential doc16590 none Boahen, Kwabena Univ. of Pennsylvania BITS: Epigenetic Computers: An in vitro, in abstractio, and in silico study Ultimately, nanotechnology will enable us to design programmable information processors (computers) from the ground up, growing them from molecules. The brain is built in this fashion through the power of epigenesis multicellular differentiation triggered by environmental signals. Despite impressive progress in our understanding of this process (Sanes, Reh et al. ), no one has attempted to design a computer that learns by growing based on insights from neurobiology. Using information derived from in vitro and in abstractio studies of diffusible neurotrophic factor mediated neuronal pathfinding (growth-cone chemotaxis) and synaptogenesis, we will develop a self-configurable computer that reprograms itself at the level of individual connections by merging custom, very large scale integration, in silico microtechnology with growing virtual wires. With the insights gained in this project, we will be poised to take advantage of real anatomical plasticity made possible by rapid progress in nanotechnology doc16591 none In order for insects to grow and undergo metamorphosis, they must shed their restrictive outer skin (exoskeleton). They have used this process very efficiently over hundreds of millions of years in order to grow at times when predators and other endangering environmental factors are less threatening. Many of the structural, physiological, biochemical and molecular events that occur during the molting process are elicited by the principle molting hormone of insects, a polyhydroxylated steroid hormone 20-hydroxyecdysone, which is synthesized in many tissues of the insect from another steroid, ecdysone. Ecdysone is synthesized in special glands in the insect, the prothoracic glands. The stimulus to synthesize this very important molecule is a peptide, prothoracicotropic hormone, secreted by four specialized neurosecretory cells in the insect s brain. About 40 years ago, ecdysone was extracted and characterized from two tons of commercial silkworm, but during the past four decades there has been little progress in elucidating the individual biochemical steps in ecdysone synthesis. Understanding the synthetic steps is important not only to further our basic knowledge of this very important group of animals that intimately affects human welfare, but also because if one is able to characterize the individual steps in the ecdysone biosynthetic pathway, and clone the genes for the enzymes that mediate each of these steps, there is the possibility of introducing this sequence of genes (transfection) into agriculturally important plants. They would then synthesize this steroid hormone, which is a natural deterrent to insect pests. Thus, when the hormone is ingested by an insect consuming such transfected plants, it will molt out of synchrony and will not be viable. Ecdysone is nontoxic to higher organisms, so that this possibility of introducing the necessary genes into host plants is a reasonable goal. Little progress had been made using classical biochemical techniques to elucidate the pathway of ecdysone biosynthesis because the intermediate compounds are in very low quantity and are extremely unstable. Almost all laboratories that have attempted this feat have given up after years of negative results. In collaboration with the O Connor laboratory at the University of Minnesota, the principal investigator has made critical progress in elucidating the biosynthetic pathway between cholesterol and ecdysone. For these studies, the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster has been employed because its genetics are better known than any other animal, and its short life cycle makes both the molecular genetics and biochemistry more feasible. This combined use of molecular genetics and biochemical analysis has resulted in the identification, cloning, and functional genomic studies of two enzymes in the ecdysone biosynthetic pathway, and has provided insights into experimental approaches for elucidating the remaining enzymes in that pathway. By cloning and sequencing certain genes (Halloween genes) from Drosophila embryos that have less than the normal amount of ecdysone, the principal investigator and his colleagues learned that mutations in these genes cause lethality in the embryo. Transfection of these genes into a Drosophila cell line and use of biochemical technology has shown that two of these mutants, disembodied and shadow, code for mitochondrial ecdysterol 22- and 2-hydroxylases, respectively. The purpose of continued work over the next several years will be to fully identify these two enzymes through more sophisticated analyses (mass spectrometry) and identify as many of the remaining (5) enzymes (P450 enzymes) in this biosynthetic pathway. Expression of these genes will be examined during Drosophila development, and a search will be conducted for counterparts in other insect model systems, such as the tobacco hornworm. Not only will these experiments result in a complete knowledge of how ecdysone is biosynthesized, but they will also provide the genes for transfection into plants of agricultural importance. In addition, the data should provide a clear understanding of the rate-limiting control mechanisms that modulate ecdysone biosynthesis, and perhaps will permit identification of the specific biosynthetic reactions that are controlled by the brain neuropeptide, prothoracicotropic hormone. This new paradigm of combining molecular genetics with biochemical analysis can be used in the future for studying biosynthetic pathways in a variety of organisms, including pathogens doc16592 none Analyses of wrongful convictions, cases in which subsequent evidence (e.g., DNA analyses) has indicated that the convicted person was not guilty of the crime, have found that incorrect eyewitness identifications have led to more convictions of innocent people than have all other factors combined. Prior research has shown that a key factor on eyewitness mistakes is the tendency for people to recognize faces of a different race more poorly than faces of their own race; this phenomenon has been called the other-race effect. Research with adults has clearly demonstrated the pervasiveness of this effect, but little is known about when this effect originates or what its course of development may be through childhood. This gap in knowledge is addressed in the current project by examining the effect in young African Americans and Whites at four developmental levels (second graders, sixth graders, tenth graders, and college sophomores). The goals of the project are to understand how the effect develops across childhood, and whether and how it can be changed. In addition to yielding important basic information about human perception and memory, these studies should provide useful information to those who work with children as witnesses in the criminal and civil justice systems. The findings should be particularly relevant to those who formulate policies about how best to obtain, interpret, and utilize eyewitness memory reports from children of various ages doc16593 none Bruce C. Wheeler-University of Illinois-BITS: Information processing in Designed Neuronal Circuits BITS: Information processing in Designed Neuronal Circuits The aim of this project is to enhance our understanding of information processing by small numbers of neurons arranged in designed circuits. This is an ideal time for this initiative because: We can intentionally design neuronal microcircuits due to progress in serum free media to support relatively pure neuronal populations, in microlithgraphy as applied to the deposition of proteins and other biomolecules to surfaces, and in understanding of the conditions under which sparse pattern populations of neurons become functionally active in culture. We can study the information processing capabilities of these neuronal circuits due to advances microelectrode array technology, permitting both stimulation and recording of electrical activity, as well as the supporting real-time data acquisition technology. We can analyze the data utilizing theories of neural coding derived as applications of rich theoretical foundations in signal processing and communications theory. We have three specific goals, creation of reliable, repeatable, robust neuronal circuits of cultured hippocampal neurons. Stable circuit behavior is essential to further investigation of information processing. The first aim emphasizes geometric properties, including guiding axonal extension, the second aim emphasizes functional properties, and the third aim is neuronal information processing. Models to be evaluated include rate codes, precise timing codes and phase synchronization codes doc16594 none Baldwin This NSF award supports a technical position in Syracuse University s Noble Gas Isotope Research Laboratory (SUNGIRL). The position, currently filled by Dr. Laura Webb, is cost shared with contributions from Syracuse University. SUNGIRL consists of 1) a state-of-the-art Micromass noble gas mass spectrometer and extraction line used primarily for 40Ar 39Ar analyses, and 2) a quadrupole mass spectrometer and automated extraction line for He analysis in conjunction with (U-Th) He dating. The laboratory is shared by two faculty members in Earth Sciences, Suzanne Baldwin and Paul Fitzgerald, whose research focuses on the thermochronologic evolution of crustal terranes. The award will initially allow timely completion and commissioning of the lab, including automation of the noble gas extraction line. During the course of this award we also plan to build a laser system for in situ analysis of minerals in thick sections, as well as outgassing of mineral grains in conjunction with (U-Th) He and 40Ar 39Ar thermochronology. The laboratory will be utilized by Syracuse University faculty, researchers, post-doctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate students, and visiting U.S. and international researchers. Under the general direction of the PIs, Dr. Webb will be responsible for the day-to-day management and operation of the laboratory including maintenance of equipment, design modifications, and development of noble gas mass spectrometric techniques. Dr. Webb will also participate in ongoing NSF-sponsored research which presently includes thermochronologic analyses (40Ar 39Ar, (U-Th) He, and fission track) in areas of continental extension (Basin and Range Province, Transantarctic Mountains) and oblique convergence (Southern Alps of New Zealand). We are also dating late Quaternary volcanic ashes from the Peruvian-Bolivian Altiplano in collaboration with Geoff Seltzer and colleagues in order to provide a geochronological framework for paleoclimatic research of the tropical Andes utilizing drill cores obtained through NSF funded research. Pending NSF proposals that will utilize SUNGIRL include thermochronologic research in the Pyrenean collisional orogen and in the active metamorphic core complexes of the Western Woodlark Basin of Papua New Guinea doc16595 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oklahoma - Norman will acquire a X-ray diffractometer with CCD detector for small molecule diffractometry. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including the following: a) studies of nitrosyl and nitroso metalloporphyrins; b) the synthesis and characterization of group 13 organometallic compounds; c) the reactivity and synthetic utility of organotransition metal complexes; d) fast ion transport in solids; and e) synthetic bioinorganic chemistry. The X-ray diffractometer allows accurate and precise measurements of the full three dimensional structure of a molecule, including bond distances and angles, and it provides accurate information about the spatial arrangement of the molecule relative to the neighboring molecules. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, including the preparation of more efficient catalysts and biochemistry. In addition, this CCD-equipped single crystal diffractometer will be the first instrument of its kind to be available in the state of Oklahoma, and will be used as a state resource for serving the needs of nearby institutions including several small regional colleges doc16596 none Patrick Flynn University of Notre Dame CISE Research Resources: Instrumentation for Multidimensional Imaging and Applications The award contributes to the purchase of (a) specialized sensors and actuators (range scanners, digital video facilities, 3D fabrication equipment), (b) high-performance computing equipment (a Beowulf cluster and high-performance workstations), and (c) infrastructure (including a network-attached disk array and networking hardware). The proposed equipment will support current and planned research in image processing and understanding. Research in planning and currently underway that will employ the facility includes image and video processing (range image compression techniques, image compression artifact mitigation, and high-resolution video from sensor fusion), image analysis and solid modeling (image segmentation, skeletonization, object representation, and applications in orthopedics and gait analysis), and empirical evaluation of image understanding algorithms (performance of low-level and high-level image understanding tasks as well as 3D modeling techniques). The planned facility will foster the continued development of a nascent image processing and understanding research group at the University of Notre Dame, and the research topics to be supported were carefully examined to validate their ability to take advantage of the proposed equipment acquisition doc16597 none Chris D. Cox University of Tennessee Hybrid Testbed for Evaluation of Cell-Cell Communication Models in Prokaryotes Information processing strategies utilized by biological cells are fundamentally different than those used for silicon-based computing and thereby hold great promise for the development of improved algorithms, software, and hardware. However, our understanding of how genetic networks control information flow in biological systems needs to be further developed. To this end, various research programs are underway to develop models of genetic networks; however, the success of this effort could falter unless tools to directly observe cell processes and validate the models are developed and integrated into the model development process. The proposed research program seeks to develop a hybrid testbed to calibrate and validate models of genetic regulatory networks controlling quorum sensing behavior in prokaryotic organisms. The benefits or [sic] this project to biological information technology include: i) development of a system for calibration and validation of genetic regulatory models leading to a better understanding of intracellular information flow; ii) improved technologies for silicon-to-cell and cell-to-cell silicon information transfer; and iii) a better understanding of information transfer between cells through chemical signaling. Project objectives, methods, and impacts are described below doc16598 none Gopal Gupta University of Texas Dallas CISE Research Resources: Resources for Research in Scalable Parallel Computing and Networking Simulation The PIs seek to acquire a network of six 4-cpu multiprocessors and a data storage system connected with 100 Mbit s Ethernet. This equipment will be used for building scalable parallel and distributed systems for tabled logic programming (LP), for computational geometry projects, as well as for quantitatively studying mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). The logic programming project seeks to combine dynamic reordering of alternatives with stack-splitting for realizing or-parallel tabled LP systems on distributed networks of SMPs. The computational geometry projects are related to research on design and implementation of scalable parallel and distributed algorithms for the weighted regions optimal trajectory problem, with applications in surgery planning, geographic information systems, and radiation therapy. The parallel implementations will be carried out on the network of SMPs. The MANET project will conduct a quantitative evaluation of unidirectional wireless links in MANETs: the impact of interference and battery life on the occurrence of unidirectional links, and MAC sub-layer issues for such links. Routing protocols designed to use both bidirectional and unidirectional links will be evaluated via simulations. The network of multiprocessors and the data storage system will be used, respectively, for conducting large simulations and for storing large simulation data doc16599 none Rucci, Michele Boston Univ. BITS: Fixational eye movements in biological and artificial vision systems The proposed research project has two goals: (1) to determine the specific contributions of small eye movements to the representation of visual information in the brain, and (2) to export such mechanisms to machine vision systems. To accomplish these goals, this project will integrate computer modeling of neural populations, robotic experiments and psychophysical experiments with human subjects to analyze the statistical structure of neural activity under natural viewing conditions. The proposed research will first characterize the influences of eye movements on the spatial selectivity of thalamic and cortical cells during natural viewing conditions. Then, the activity dynamics of neuronal ensembles will be studied, both in terms of efficiency of visual representation and in relation to the results of psychophysical studies on the hierarchical structure of spatial visual processing. Finally, we will analyze the possible involvement of small eye movements in the recovery of distance information during binocular free-viewing of a 3D scene. Studies will be conducted with the dual purposes of providing new insights on the brain and considering possible applications to machine vision systems doc16600 none This project provides partial funding for a conference on Transcriptional Regulation During Cell Growth, Differentiation, and Development to be held under the auspices of FASEB at Saxtons River, Vermont, from June 29-July 4, . Gene regulation through transcription is a fundamental process common to all biological systems. Transcriptional regulation underlies critical aspects of cell behavior including proliferation, response to environmental signals, differentiation, and the development of multicellular organisms. The intent of this conference is to bring together researchers engaged in studying a broad range of transcriptional processes in different biological systems and using different methodologies. The sessions are designed to communicate recent advances in knowledge of fundamental mechanisms of transcriptional activation and repression, chromatin structure, and long-range and epigenetic effects on gene expression, and the relationship of these mechanisms to the biology of response to environmental signals, development, and cell-cycle control. The conference will underscore the important role that transcriptional regulation plays in normal differentiation and development and the manner in which aberrant gene expression is involved in cancer and other diseases. This conference differs from other transcription meetings in that it does not focus simply on molecular mechanisms but rather emphasizes how transcription is used by cells to solve particular problems of development and differentiation. As such, the meeting will include problems encountered and solved across a wide range of species, including yeast, worms, flies, and mammals, such that the similarities and differences can be appreciated. The meeting will include formal talks, discussion periods, two informal 2-day poster sessions, and excellent opportunities for interaction among the attending scientists. Attendees will include principal investigators, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students. 33% of the invited speakers and 8 9 session chairs are women, and 54% of the invited speakers are new to this meeting. The conference will provide an up-to-date overview of one of the most fundamental and rapidly moving fields in biology and is expected to generate new directions for future research doc16601 none Elise deDoncker Western Michigan University CISE Research Resources: Information Visualization and Incremental Knowledge Discovery in a Cluster Computing Environment This proposal seeks funding to enhance a 64-node PC cluster at Western Michigan University, obtained in part on a previous National Science Foundation grant and university funding. Improving the cluster will give hardware support for on-going research and education on parallel and distributed algorithm design and development. Although the cluster is currently used for various research efforts by different groups in the university, this proposal focuses on two of these projects: parallel integration and distributed incremental knowledge discovery. The requested infrastructure includes a networking upgrade to support the current communication intensive (high bandwidth low latency) projects. These include the tailoring of load balancing methods underlying the migration of regions in adaptive partitioning. The system will also provide a better environment for our study of the scalability of task partitioning methods in numerical integration and other areas. The proposed project on the development of methods for incremental knowledge discovery from large databases will further be supported by the visualization components of the infrastructure. This effort includes 3D interactive visual exploration of large relational data sets. The techniques will be incorporated in a systematic way into a software system for incremental knowledge discovery, and evaluated for effectiveness and suitability in different scenarios doc16602 none Camillo Taylor University of Pennsylvania The idea of deploying teams of small, inexpensive robotic agents to accomplish various sensing, manipulation and communication tasks is one that has gained increasing currency over the last few years. This project will involve three interrelated research thrusts that investigate various aspects of this paradigm. The first thrust deals with the problems associated with coordinating the motion of teams of robots. Some of the questions that are addressed by this effort include the problem of controlling the motion of robots moving in formation and coordinating the action of robots engaged in cooperative manipulation of an object. The second thrust focuses on the issues associated with combining the information obtained from distributed robots to form a coherent model of the environment. The third area of research concerns the problems associated with designing and analyzing networking strategies that are appropriate for use with distributed teams of robotic agents. Since the platforms are mobile, many of the traditional networking strategies, which were designed with fixed infrastructure in mind, are not applicable. As part of this proposal we intend to investigate questions concerning the appropriateness of various wireless networking technologies such as IEEE 802.11b and Bluetooth. This proposal requests funding to purchase the equipment required to develop a fleet of networked robots that would serve as a shared testbed for our research efforts doc16603 none Srinivas Aluru Iowa Stae University CISE Research Resources: Acquisition of a Cluster for Experimental Parallel Computing Research in Scientific Computing and Computational Biology This project provides funding to Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University for acquisition of a cluster of 64 Pentium workstations connected by a high-speed network. The cluster will be used as a distributed memory parallel computer and will be dedicated to support research in parallel computing, bioinformatics and computational biology, and scientific computing. More specifically, the equipment will be used for research in: parallel algorithms and software for gene identification, parallel algorithms and software for electromagnetic scattering analysis, scalable parallelization of tree-based data structures, and integrated software visualization environments for program correctness, validation and optimization. Experimental studies will be conducted to evaluate the performance of the parallel algorithms developed and the knowledge gained from such studies will be used to derive efficient, scalable, parallel implementations. Acquisition of the instrumentation will enable researchers to develop, demonstrate and disseminate comprehensive software systems that are capable of solving large-scale scientific applications of current relevance doc16604 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of California in Berkeley will upgrade two 400 MHz NMR Spectrometers with new consoles and variable temperature capabilities. This equipment will enable faculty to carry out research in the following areas: a) exploratory and mechanistic studies of stoichiometric and catalytic organometallic reactions; b) synthesis of glycopeptide mimics by chemoselective ligation; c) applications of sulfonamides and sulfinamides to asymmetric synthesis and parallel synthesis; d) preparation, characterization and use of dendrimers; e) structure and dynamics of metallo-supramolecular assemblies; and f) cobalt-mediated syntheses. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including catalysis and materials chemistry doc16605 none James Cremer University of Iowa CISE Research Resources: Instrumentation for a Virtual Environment Laboratory to Study Human Behavior The University of Iowa will purchase equipment supporting multidisciplinary research on the use of virtual environments as a medium for the study of human behavior. The primary components of the equipment include a PC-based, real-time image generation system for use in the existing immersive display environment, and hardware for instrumented bicycle and wheelchair interfaces to the virtual environment. The equipment will replace outdated and unstable equipment currently in use, and greatly improve the computational foundation of the virtual environments laboratory. The supported research has two primary thrusts: (1) a computational component directed at advancing scenario modeling techniques to meet the special needs of experiments for replicable experiences that adapt to subject behavior and (2) an experimental component investigating children s bicycle riding behavior in simulated traffic. Experiments conducted in virtual environments will be compared with experiments conducted in real environments to validate the use of simulators as laboratories for the study of human behavior. The work integrates research on high-fidelity simulation, control of complex behaviors of simulated agents, human factors, and developmental psychology. This research will advance virtual environment technology, experimental methods, and simulator validation, and increase the understanding of a leading cause of childhood injuries doc16606 none Jasmonic acid (JA) and related octadecanoid-derivatives are key plant signals that are involved in development, defense against pathogens and insects, and in protecting plants from harmful environmental agents such as ozone. Despite the importance of these signaling molecules, their mechanism of action at the molecular genetic and biochemical level is largely unknown. Mutations in the JAR1 gene in Arabidopsis thaliana impair many JA-signaled responses, suggesting this gene is associated with JA function. The JAR1 protein was recently found to be a member of the adenylate-forming firefly luciferase superfamily. These enzymes adenylate substrate carboxyl groups, thereby activating them for further biochemical modification. Importantly, JAR1 appears to adenylate JA. This finding is unique among known plant hormone response pathways, because it suggests that covalent modification of the signal (JA) by JAR1 positively affects JA response. Arabidopsis also has 18 other genes that are closely related to JAR1 and some of these act on other plant hormones. This project intends to: 1. Determine how the adenylating activity of JAR1 affects JA signaling in Arabidopsis. 2. Understand the role of JAR1 in controlling plant gene expression. 3. Compare and contrast the expression pattern of JAR1 and related genes. 4. Isolate and characterize suppressors of the jar1 phenotype. 5. Determine the biochemical and physiological function of other Arabidopsis genes that are related to JAR1. Methods to achieve these objectives will include the in vitro assay of enzyme activity of JAR1-like genes using GST-fusion proteins expressed in E. coli. Extracts from jar1 mutants and wild type plants will be analyzed by GC MS to determine if levels of JA, JA precursors or JA derivatives are altered. JAR1-related gene function will be explored in knockout mutants and by gene overexpression. The developmental and tissue-specific expression pattern of JAR1 and the 18 related Arabidopsis genes also will be analyzed to determine where and when each gene acts. Finally, suppressors of the jar1 phenotype will be isolated and characterized. Together these approaches will yield a comprehensive understanding of the role that covalent modification of hormones by adenylation plays in controlling hormone function. A gene family that influences plant development and helps to protect plants from disease and other environmental damage will be investigated. Some of these genes encode enzymes that biochemically modify the plant hormones jasmonic acid and indole acetic acid. This is important to study because the control of plant hormone activity by chemical modification is poorly understood. The project will increase our understanding of how hormones regulate growth and protect plants from damage. The results from this study of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana will have a fundamental and broad impact because similar genes are found in many if not all plant species doc16607 none Benjamin Watson Northwestern University CISE Research Resources: A Shared Data Cluster for Real Time Interaction With Massive Datasets The research at Northwestern is increasingly concerned with the issues involved in providing interactive and affordable access to massive (terabyte scale) datasets. In particular, they focus on visualization of these datasets using perceptually based computer graphics techniques and display the visualizations using a combination PC CAVE and Active Mural. They also study the issues involved with ubiquitous access to high-resolution spatial datasets from mobile devices, and leverage a powerful wireless network. They focus on prediction-based adaptation and scheduling for distributed interactive applications and are building a compute cluster to support this work. What is missing in the existing shared research infrastructure is a facility to store and serve massive datasets interactively, with low latency and high bandwidth. The researchers will build such a shared data cluster. The data cluster will be very high performance and capacity PC RAIDs interconnected with a multi-GB sec SAN. The SAN will connect to their compute cluster, CAVE Mural, mobile devices and wired client machines. The combined data and compute clusters will be sufficient to pump 200 MB s from disk to the CAVE Mural screens. The combination of the data cluster, compute cluster, CAVE Mural, local network infrastructure, and desktop and mobile clients will let them study interactivity in the large doc16608 none The climate of southern California is a Mediterranean-type, characterized by mild winters, protracted summer drought, and periodic wildfire. The dominant vegetation is chaparral, which is uniquely adapted to summer dehydration and fires. There are three strategies by which chaparral survive and persist through periodic fire: non-sprouters after fire, facultative sprouters after fire, and obligate sprouters after fire. We hypothesize that these three strategies are coupled to dehydration tolerance. We will estimate dehydration tolerance by determining the threshold in dehydration that causes the water transport system of plants to fail. This failure is caused by xylem embolism formation under severe water stress, that is, when the plumbing system (xylem conduits) of plants become blocked by air bubbles, cutting off water flow to leaves, leading to shoot death. The primary objective of our research is to elucidate the mechanisms linking xylem functional traits to life history type among diverse species of chaparral shrubs. We hypothesize that there are trade-offs among xylem embolism-resistance, xylem conductivity efficiency and xylem mechanical strength and these depend on the three life history strategies that chaparral species have in response to wildfire. Issues related to recurrent wildfire, water conservation, erosion control, urban expansion and recreation are more pronounced in regions of chaparral than in any other type of wild land in California. Results from the research will be disseminated widely to local agencies responsible for management and conservation of natural resources in the Santa Monica Mountains, and to educational groups including docents for the State Park Service and the National Park Service. The findings will allow generalizations to the broader chaparral community of California and to the other four Mediterranean-type climate regions of the world. Results from the proposed work will refine predictions of expected shifts in chaparral distribution and community structure over the next century in response to an anticipate climate change to a warmer, drier California with increased episodic Santa Ana winds and wildfire doc16609 none John Yin -University of Wisconsin -Genomic Information Processing by a Virus-Host System The proposed research aims to advance biologically inspired computing by providing insights into the mechanisms and dynamic of genomic information processing for an experimentally well-characterized system. The system of study will be a computer simulation for the growth of bacteriophage T7 in Escherichia coli, a model virus-host system that integrates genetic, physiological, biochemical, and biophysical laboratory data spanning more than 30 years. The overarching aim of the study will be to identify and characterize modular features of integrated information processing during the simulated intracellular growth of the virus. More specifically, the work will entail defining measures of system performance under different host resource environments, quantifying the sensitivity of this performance to perturbations of pair-wise and higher order interactions between genetically-encoded functions, and extracting from these studies patterns of interaction that reflect modular features of biological information processing doc16610 none To facilitate the development of theories for biological information processing, it would be useful to have a system that permits a priori specification of the connection in a neural network. By defining the connectivity in a neural network, the system will allow rapid prototyping of arbitrary neuronal architectures. Ideally, such a system would be able to not only recapitulate in vivo structure, but also be able to create novel neural structures in a user-defined manner. Such user-defined networks will then allow more rigorous testing of theories for biological information processing in the nervous system and will potential result in the identification of novel information processing paradigms in general. In this project, the following issues will be addressed: a) Identify the determinants of successful neurite elicitation under applied force. b) Compare engineered network behavior to model network behavior to assess whether neuronal information processing is linear or nonlinear. c) Develop approaches to scale-up that allow multiple connections to be formed doc16611 none The Genetics of Parental Care Behavior Edmund D. Brodie IIII The genetic control of behaviors involved in social interactions is difficult to understand because traits of one individual can be influenced by traits of individuals with which it interacts. Such influences have traditionally been considered sources of environmental variation in phenotypes, but this view ignores the possibility that the environmental influences can themselves be genetically determined. The result is a complex web of genetic effects that reach from traits in one individual to traits in another and allows environmental sources of variation to contribute to evolutionary change. Indirect genetic effect (IGE) theory provides a framework for understanding such complex inheritance in terms of the quantitative genetic parameters and equations traditionally used to understand evolutionary processes. The presence of IGEs can substantially alter evolutionary dynamics and outcomes, but virtually no empirical studies of IGEs are available with which to evaluate the general importance of IGEs in behavioral evolution. Parental care behavior is one of the most common examples of social interactions that can generate IGEs. The behavior of both parents and offspring determines how much care parents provide, and parental care in turn influences many traits in offspring. If parent and offspring components of parental care are genetically variable, IGEs exist and can affect the evolution of parental care. The proposed research will investigate the genetics of maternal provisioning in the burrower bug, Sehirus cinctus. Parental care in burrowers is limited to females, which provision their offspring with fruits from mint plants as the sole source of nutrition. Previous research has shown that burrowers are an ideal system for studying the genetics of parental care because they can be readily cross-fostered, reared, and bred in captivity. The proposed work is divided into two parts designed to determine how genes in mothers and offspring interact to determine the inheritance of parental care behavior. Project 1 is an experimental investigation of how maternal care influences offspring traits that will reveal how traits in one generation influence traits in the next. Project 2 combines a quantitative genetic breeding design with manipulative cross-fostering experiments to measure the relative importance of genes in parents and offspring in determining provisioning. This project will also determine patterns of genetic variation and covariation among parent and offspring components of provisioning behavior. Genetic variation is a requisite for the evolution of any trait. IGE theory recognizes that genetic (co)variation for interacting phenotypes (e.g., parental care) need not be direct, but rather may exist through indirect pathways from social partners. Specific results from each project will be used to test assumptions and predictions of phenotypic models of parental care evolution. Moreover, this work will represent the first quantitative genetic study of parental care behavior to consider the importance of social context doc16612 none Theodore W. Berger-University of Southern California-Title: Neurobiological Nonlinear Dynamics for Biomimetic Signal Processing-Title-The fundamental goal of the proposed research is to derived a new generation of temporal and spatio-temporal pattern recognition systems based on the nonlinear dynamics, network architecture, and synaptic plasticity properties of the hippocampus, a cortical brain system responsible for the formation of new pattern recognition memories. From a neurobiological perspective, the proposed experimental modeling work promises to generate (1) first-characterizations of high-order nonlinearities of cortical brain tissue, i.e., predictive models of the input output transformations in spatio-temporal activity performed by individual hippocampal neurons, and to (2) investigate the increasingly likely possibility of dynamic neural learning rules , i.e., requisite conditions for the induction of synaptic plasticity that depend on the past history of activity. In addition, the proposed research will investigate (3) the role of known hippocampal network topology in neurobiological signal processing and hierarchical feature extraction. From a theoretical computational perspective, the proposed work is designed to (4) develop novel methodologies essential for characterizing nonlinearities of neurobiological systems, as well as to (5) further expand a newly developed paradigm for biologically realistic neural system modeling (the dynamic synapse neural network architecture ) that has already demonstrated a heretofore unmatched capability for identifying optimal feature sets for temporally and spatio-temporally coded information doc16613 none Increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and other atmospheric and climate changes may substantially alter plant growth. Differences in growth responses within and between plant species may have substantial impacts on biodiversity, carbon sequestration and other ecosystem functions by altering community composition and changing the movement of carbon, nutrients and water through ecosystems. However, despite extensive research over the last several decades, fundamental problems remain with predicting effects of climate change on plants. For example, carbon dioxide uptake by plants, a standard measure of climate change effects on carbon sequestration potential, has been found to vary substantially from carbon accumulation in plants. To account for this variability, a source-sink feedback mechanism is frequently invoked that links changes in carbon uptake (photosynthesis) with developmental changes that affect carbon accumulation. This mechanism is driven by changes in the balance between source activity (carbon uptake) and sink capacity (carbon accumulation). However, few studies have actually manipulated plant development to analyze the effects of normal developmental changes on physiological processes that regulate photosynthetic responses to climate change. As a result, the role of plant development in regulating photosynthetic responses to climate change is poorly understood. The overall goal of the proposed research is to develop a mechanistic understanding of the effects of developmental changes as plants age on the physiological processes that regulate photosynthetic responses to climate change. To identify key developmental and physiological processes that regulate photosynthesis, two key developmental processes, plant ontogeny (the timing and duration of developmental events) and morphological changes as plants age, will be independently manipulated. Planting cohorts of plants on different dates and inducing all cohorts to flower simultaneously will independently manipulate ontogeny and plant size. To avoid the confounding effect of accelerated ontogeny induced by growth in elevated carbon dioxide concentrations, a developmentally determinate, short-day species (Xanthium strumarium L.) will be used. In addition, because temperature is a key component of climate change and nitrogen supply is a critical factor regulating interactions between developmental and physiological processes, these factors will be manipulated to examine how they mediate the effects of developmental changes on photosynthesis. The results of this study will increase our understanding of the effects of changes in plant ontogeny and morphology on photosynthetic responses to climate change. More broadly, this study will increase our understanding of the links between carbon uptake and growth responses of plants to environmental change doc16614 none Enrico Pontelli New Mexico State University The Laboratory for Logic, Databases, and Advanced Programming (LLDAP) plans to acquire modern computing equipment to create an infrastructure for parallel and distributed computing and for software development for autonomous agents. The equipment requested consists of four Pentium III shared memory machines (with four CPUs each) to provide shared memory programming support. The four machines will be connected using fast gigabit Ethernet, creating the testbed for experimenting with distributed memory programming. The Project will also involve the acquisition of a set of five autonomous robots. The equipment will be used to support research in three inter-related projects: (1) The goal of the first project is to pursue the development of technology to support exploitation of different forms of parallelism from traditional logic programming and from constraint programming languages, (2) The second project develops technology for the creation of planners capable of dealing with incomplete knowledge, dynamic domains, and sensing actions, (3) The goal of the third project is to develop technology to promote accessibility of Web documents in the context of Web-based course-ware engineering doc16615 none This action is to support a study to complete the post-earthquake reconnaissance effort begun the day after the February 28, Nisqually Earthquake, and to further document observations of important cases of ground failure and building damage from this event. Well-documented case histories of building performance at sites undergoing severe and minor ground failure will be developed through selected field and laboratory testing. These case histories will be documented at the website developed during the post-earthquake reconnaissance of the Nisqually earthquake, and in a paper to be published in the Journal Spectra of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI). Timely reporting of these results will enable researchers to incorporate these data into ongoing studies and identify additional work resulting from this important Pacific Northwest earthquake. Professor Bray and some of his colleagues and graduate student researchers traveled immediately to the affected area of the Nisqually earthquake, and as part of a larger reconnaissance team completed documentation of some of the more important geotechnical aspects of this event. This included conducting detailed surveys of ground deformation from a significant lateral spread involving the Deschutes Parkway, mapping of ground deformation at the Martin Way embankment failure, documentation and sampling of sediment ejecta in several building foundations in South Seattle, and surveying of the Highway 101 embankment failure. The goals of this follow-up study will be met in part by completing documentation of these important case records, with emphasis on the Deschutes Parkway in Olympia and the building foundations performance in South Seattle. Stephen P. Palmer, Washington State Department of Natural Resources, assisted during the post-earthquake reconnaissance effort and who will be involved in this current project doc16616 none Evolution of coloration and mate preferences along resource availability gradients Gregory Frank Grether (PI) Gita Raman Kolluru (co-P) The only barriers to reproduction between some closely related species are female mate preferences for male secondary sexual characters. Factors that cause female mate preferences to evolve (i.e., change over generations) can lead to the formation of new species. Scientists are just beginning to understand the role of the environment in this process. In guppies, a small stream-dwelling fish native to Trinidad, females prefer males with larger and brighter orange spots. The orange spots contain two types of pigments, one which males can synthesize (drosopterins) and another which they must ingest (carotenoids). Guppies acquire carotenoids from algae, which grow on rocks in the streambed. Algae availability for guppies is strongly influenced by forest canopy cover and therefore by stream width (wider streams create larger gaps in the forest). The proposed project will expand and strengthen efforts to understand how variation among streams in forest canopy cover affects the evolution of male coloration and female mate preferences. In addition, new experiments will be carried out to determine (1) whether carotenoid consumption influences parasite resistance, (2) whether transfer of carotenoids from mothers to offspring affects offspring viability, and (3) whether males also express carotenoid-based mate preferences. The methods will include field experiments, laboratory breeding experiments, color measurements and biochemical analyses. The broader goal is to develop a deeper understanding of how the environment affects the evolution of mate preferences and the traits they favor. This study will contribute to our knowledge of biological diversity doc16617 none EIA- -John Granacki-University of Southern California- Architectures for Neuromimetic Information System Biologically inspired computing modules performing spatio-temporal pattern recognition will be a key aspect of future computing systems. Current prototypes of biomimetic circuit models have demonstrated real-time performance at very low power levels and high physical density. Further, these simple structures are capable of recognizing signal patterns masked by significant noise levels. These properties are difficult to mimic in digital signal processing algorithms, which require substantial modification when adapting to new applications. We propose to implement second-order dynamic synapse neural models with digital equivalents that use features extracted from software simulations. Arrays of these digital equivalents can be readily implemented in dense re-useable commercial field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), enabling very high-speed operation. Additional features, such as writeable registers for user tuning of dynamics, will accelerate the evaluation of new kernels as well as enable investigation of high-speed super-time learning doc16618 none Michael Arbib-Biological Information Technology Systems-BITS: Neural Computing, Round 3 There have been two main rounds of neural computing to date, the first focusing on adaptation and self-organization, the second on compartmental modeling of the neuron. This project will catalyze a third round of neural computing: Analyzing the architecture of the primate brain to extract neural information processing principles and translate them into biologically-inspired operating systems and computer architectures. This project will focus on analyzing and further developing computational neuroscience models concerned with grasping, recognizing and executing actions, and describing those actions with language, in terms of basic information processing principles. The intention is to create a new research effort, applying the latest advances in computational neurobiology to the design of a new generation of machines. In particular, the proposed research will catalyze research and development of unusually robust, versatile, and adaptive computer architectures, that can easily adapt, correct themselves, and blend diverse styles of processing doc16619 none The symposium, New Perspectives on the Origin of Metazoan Complexity, will be held at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) meeting, January 3-6, , in Anaheim, California. Funding for the symposium will provide a stimulus for research on the early diversification of metazoans. The vast majority of living organisms, bacteria, algae, and protozoans , consist of single cells or even when multicellular of only a few different types of cells. What distinguishes metazoans from these organisms is that they have not just many cells, but many different types of cells. Their cells, moreover, are organized in complex patterns, forming tissues and organs. Exactly how metazoan complexity evolved is a daunting problem in evolutionary biology. The goal of this symposium is to examine how the morphological and theoretical aspects of metazoan complexity relate to the growing evidence that genomic complexity increased very early and rapidly and may predate even the origin of the clade. Such a view challenges the idea that metazoan ancestors were simple and that complexity has arisen incrementally. The symposium will bring together a select group of biologists and paleontologists to identify promising areas for research and promote greater cooperation between their respective disciplines. The program includes promising young investigators at the Masters, PhD, and postdoctoral levels as well as senior investigators with established research programs. The symposium is also designed to encourage gender diversity, with 7 women as presenting authors, and promote foreign collaborations, with 12 of the participants coming from countries other than the United States doc16620 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University will acquire a 400 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable faculty to carry out research in the following areas: a) magneto-electronics of transition-metal clusters; b) studies of supramolecular assemblies of cyanine dyes on nucleic acid templates; c) environmentally benign hydrogen peroxide activators; d) characterization of the catalyst used in atom transfer radical polymerization; e) characterization of conducting polymers used in self-assembled and nanoscale materials; and f) determination of the rate of gated charge transfer. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including catalysis materials chemistry doc16621 none In this project infrared difference spectroscopy will be used to study the active site structure and molecular mechanism of hydrogen binding and activation in the hydrogenases. Previous infrared spectroscopic studies have shown that both the [NiFe] hydrogenases and the Fe-only hydrogenases display intense infrared bands in the - cm-1 spectral region. The groups responsible for these infrared bands have been identified as arising from intrinsic carbon monoxide and cyanide molecules coordinated to Fe ions in the active site of these enzymes. The primary objectives of this research are: 1) Utilization of infrared spectroscopy for delineating the active site structure of the [NiFe] hydrogenase from Desulfovibrio vulgaris. The enzyme from Desulfovibrio vulgaris has been proposed to have a NiFe (CO)(CN)(SO) cluster at its active site rather than the NiFe (CO)(CN)2 cluster shown to exist in other [NiFe] Hydrogenases. 2) Utilization of infrared difference spectroscopy to explore the molecular changes accompanying reductive activation in the [NiFe] hydrogenases. 3) Utilization of the infrared spectral signatures, combined with isotopic labeling, for determining the active site structure of Fe-only Hydrogenases I and II from Clostridium pasteurianum. 4) Utilization of mid-infrared difference spectroscopy to examine the role amino acids play in the activation of hydrogen. The research will involve undergraduate students pursuing degrees in chemistry and chemistry-related fields. It is anticipated that this work will have important consequences for understanding the mechanism underlying the hydrogenases ability to split molecular hydrogen into protons and electrons, or conversely, to produce hydrogen from protons and electrons. Such knowledge has consequences for the design of cheap catalysts for the production of hydrogen, a clean burning fuel source. The proposed research will involve the participation of undergraduate students, both during the academic year and during the summer. Student participation in this project will afford undergraduate students a unique opportunity to apply skills and knowledge they have learned in their coursework, while contributing to an exciting project in modern physical biochemistry doc16622 none Bioluminescence the emission of light by living organisms is a fascinating phenomenon that has enchanted children and challenged those who have tried to fully understand it. Fireflies are examples of bioluminescent beetles capable of emitting light of various colors from green to red. The basic biochemistry of the firefly light emission process has many practical applications including drug development, clinical trials and food testing. This project will investigate the key firefly protein called luciferase that is responsible for the extraordinary biochemical light process. The research is designed to identify important components of firefly luciferase and to determine how specific amino acids work together to efficiently produce light of varying color. Molecular biology techniques will be used to create and evaluate new luciferase proteins. The results should contribute to a better understanding of firefly bioluminescence and the fundamental process by which living organisms convert chemical energy into light. The elucidation of the light-emitting process of firefly luciferase is important to the continued development of significant useful applications. Additionally, a better understanding of the firefly luciferase structure-function properties is important to fundamental biochemical processes with significant practical applications extending beyond the realm of bioluminescence. This project will be carried out at Connecticut College, a liberal arts college with a strong commitment to undergraduate research experiences. Previous bioluminescence work directed by the principal investigator for approximately 25 years has been highly appealing to undergraduate students. Professional and students participants in this project will be involved in modern mainstream biochemical and molecular biology research. It is expected that student participants will become scientists well prepared for entry into graduate programs and professional scientific careers doc16623 none Microtubule-dependent motor proteins of the kinesin and dynein superfamilies are essential components of mitotic and meiotic spindles, the complicated cellular machines that power chromosome segregation. For kinesins at least, there is now a fairly good understanding of how these motors move along microtubules, but to understand completely the role that a given motor plays in the cell and how the protein performs its role, additional questions need to be answered for each motor. These questions include: What is the motor s cargo and how is that cargo recognized? Are non-motor subunits associated with the motor subunits and if so, what is their role? How is the motor s location and function regulated? For most kinesins, the answers are likely to be interdependent, but a major stumbling block in answering these questions is that the identity of the cargo is unknown for many kinesins. However, certain kinesins, including members of the C-terminal, MKLP-1, and bimC subfamilies, recognize and transport a well-known and well-characterized cargo: another MT. Study of these motors, which are thought to drive MT sliding, should facilitate answering the above questions. The overall objective of this projectis to understand how the Drosophila C-terminal Ncd motor functions during the meiotic divisions of oogenesis and the early mitotic divisions of the embryo. Ncd is perhaps the best-characterized C-terminal kinesin, yet much remains to be learned about how this protein recognizes cargo, whether the motor slides or simply bundles adjacent MTs, the composition of native Ncd, and how it is regulated to produce appropriate forces at appropriate times during cell division. There are two specific objectives. The first will examine the ATP- independent binding of the Ncd tail to cargo microtubules. Experiments will determine if recombinant Ncd can slide MTs past each other, what specific residues are involved in binding cargo microtubules, and how dimeric Ncd tail domains interact with cargo microtubules. The second objective will examine the subunit composition of native Ncd and characterize the activity of native Ncd. Ncd, like majority of kinesins, has never been purified from native sources and working knowledge of the protein is based on recombinant motor subunits expressed in bacteria. To determine if native Ncd also contains non-motor subunits, a combination of ion exchange chromatography and microtubule affinity techniques will be used to purify the native motor. In addition, the motor properties of native Ncd will be determined to determine if previous work with recombinant Ncd motor subunits is an accurate reflection of native Ncd activity. To accomplish these objectives, Dr. Walker will use a combination of biochemical, biophysical and molecular biology approaches. Increased understanding of Ncd activity and function will shed light of the mechanisms of C-terminal kinesins, and ultimately on the fundamental properties of microtubule-dependent motors and the cellular processes dependent on these proteins doc16624 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Texas in Austin will acquire a 300 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) molecular sensors; b) synthesis of foldamer molecules that fold into a compact, predictable higher-order structure; c) synthesis of porphyrins and synthetic porphyrin analogues; and d) the fabrication of materials with desired interfacial properties. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry doc16625 none EIA- Villa, Ferdinando University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences BDEI: Towards an Operational Semantics Diversity: Integrating Structure Understanding the dynamics of biological diversity requires new approaches and integration between different disciplines. The development of a unitary body of knowledge about biodiversity is made difficult by the fragmentation and lack of interoperability between the diverse - and often informal and simplistic - semantics adopted for data and models. Different representational paradigms require conceptual, as well as technical, integration to enable reorganizing the body of knowledge and enable new ideas, theories, and higher-level paradigms to surface and be tested. Building on software and conceptual frameworks being developed at IEE UMD, we propose to develop and deploy a web-accessible database where temporally- and spatially- explicit biodiversity data will coexist with dynamic modular models, potentially integrating multiple modeling paradigms and automatically enforcing their compatibility. The XML-based infrastructure used by the underlying software engine will enable us to store data and models (modules) adopting an extensible array of representations, and to link them together transparently and automatically. The integration will happen through explicit cross-cutting abstractions called domains, which represent various aspects of the world (such as time or space) as seen by each module, and are processed by the simulation engine to resolve conflicts related to different scales or representational paradigms doc16626 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Florida will upgrade a 300 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) cyathane diterpenoids; b) chemoenzymatic synthesis; c) organometallic chemistry of group 6 imido diamide complexes; d) nucleic acid chemistry; e) linked phenoxide ligands as rigid platforms for the preparation of large constructs; and f) synthesis of carbosilane siloxane segmented polymers. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including biochemistry and materials chemistry doc16627 none The emphasis of this work is on the development of new single electron transfer initiated photochemical reactions. Photochemical group transfer reactions which result from the formation of reactive dipolar intermediates will be investigated in detail. Photochemical preparation and trapping of 1,3 dipoles such as azomethine and carbonyl ylides will be studied as will 1,4 dipole forming and trapping reactions of alpha ketoamides and alpha ketoesters. Single electron transfer initiated photomacrocyclization reactions will also be studied, first using phthalimides. Photomacrocyclization of phthalimides will be used to determine the factors which govern efficiencies and regioselectivities of photocyclizations then that information will be applied to macrocyclic polyether, polyamide and polypeptide syntheses. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Patrick S. Mariano of the Department of Chemistry at the University of New Mexico. Dr. Mariano will explore photochemical group transfer, cyclization and redox reactions. The photocyclization reactions studied will serve as the foundation for new polyether, polyamide, and polypeptide syntheses and thus have potential applications for the preparation of antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals. Discovery of selective, photochemical amine oxidation reactions has potential applications in the design of inactivators of flavoenzymes such as monoamine oxidase. Students trained during the course of this work will be broadly trained in preparative organic chemistry and preparative photochemistry and gain skills needed by the pharmaceutical industry doc16628 none Professor John Wright of the University of Wisconsin-Madison is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program to study coherent two-dimensional vibrational spectroscopy. Doubly vibrationally enhanced (DOVE) four wave mixing (FWM) methods pioneered by this group will be complemented by new doubly degenerate FWM methods, such as the use of two tunable infrared lasers to drive three infrared transitions and a fourth output beam. These methods will be used in a variety of ways to explore the utility of coherent two dimensional methods for analytical measurements. Certain advantages such as line-narrowing and selective component enhancement in complex mixtures can be achieved, relieving current problems in vibrational spectroscopy such as spectral congestion. Hydrogen bonded liquids will be studied. Infrared spectroscopy is commonly used to study and monitor industrial processes analytically. New laser-based spectroscopic methods can potentially make more tractable the IR spectroscopy of proteins, for example, which will be of use in basic and applied biochemical and biotechnological research doc16629 none Lay summary In a world that continually supplies us with a multitude of sensory information, the selection and enhancement of important signals is crucial. There is general agreement that the pulvinar nucleus is uniquely involved in this process. However the mechanisms by which the pulvinar carries out this function are, as yet, unknown. Several models of directed attention have proposed that the pulvinar nucleus acts as a hub in a network that integrates inputs from widespread cortical areas to direct attention to salient visual targets. Such models predict that neurons that project to and from different cortical areas, are synaptically connected within the pulvinar nucleus to link diverse signals related to visual spatial location, memory, and motivation. To test this theory, the investigators propose to examine, at the ultrastructural level, connections between the pulvinar nucleus the posterior cingulate gyrus, and the inferior parietal lobule. In addition, they propose to examine the synaptic targets of subcortical inputs from the pretectum, and the pedunculopontine tegmentum. These areas, in which activity is correlated respectively with eye movements and attentional state, are also predicted to contribute to networks underlying visual attention. The results of these studies will help to understand how cortical and subcortical inputs structurally interact within the synaptic circuitry of the primate pulvinar nucleus. By studying these neural circuits in experimental animals, we can begin to understand the mechanisms underlying normal attentional processes, and how they are affected by disease doc16630 none The focus of this research is the development of synthetic routes for the preparation of macrocycles. Methods to form [9] and [10]paracyclophanes and approaches to macrocyclization and macrolactamization will be pursued. For macrolactamization, the reaction of amino groups with thioesters in the presence of silver salts will be used and an approach utilizing an azide as latent funcionality will be investigated. The total syntheses of hymenocardine, pondaplin and roquefortine C will be carried out to highlight the strategic approach. With this renewal award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Madeleine M. Joullie of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Joullie will focus her work on developing strategies for the synthesis of unusual classes of natural products including macrocycles of plant origin and alkaloids exhibiting unusual structural features. The low yields of these compounds obtained from plants or other natural sources make the development of practical synthetic methods important. The biological properties of the target molecules are of interest to the pharmaceutical industry. The research also provides an excellent setting for the training of graduate and post-doctoral students doc16631 none The Sodium Calcium exchanger is an integral cell membrane protein in charge of regulation of intracellular Calcium concentration. It works as a counter-transport, exchanging one Calcium ion (two positive charges) for three Sodium ions (three positive charges) from different membrane sides; i.e. it is electrogenic because the unbalance of transported charges generates current. The energy for Calcium transport against a gradient is taken from the gradient of Sodium ions plus the electrical membrane potential difference across the membrane. In addition to Sodium-Calcium competition for the transporting sites, this mechanism displays regulation by intra- and extracellular ligands. There are two main types of regulation on the intracellular side: (1) Ionic: Sodium inactivation, Calcium stimulation and Proton inhibition, and (2) Metabolic: ATP and phosphoarginine (PA) stimulation. Regulation by ATP requires Magnesium and also a low molecular weight soluble cytosolic regulatory protein (SCRP); PA needs Magnesium but no SCRP The metabolic pathways for ATP and PA are different. In the proposed work the investigator aims to individualize and characterize the interrelationships between ionic and metabolic regulation of the squid Sodium Calcium exchanger by using two experimental preparations: (i) Squid axons under internal dialysis, an essentially in vivo preparation that permits ionic and biochemical control of intra- and extracellular environments, and (ii) Squid nerve membrane vesicles, that allow to perform parallel transport and biochemical assays. The plan includes: (i) To study the links between ATP, PA, Sodium and Protons and the relevance of the intracellular Magnesium in the modulation of the Sodium Calcium exchanger; (ii) To use 32P-labeled PA to investigate if there are membrane phosphorylations involved in the PA stimulation. (iii) To isolate and identify the low molecular weight soluble cytosolic regulatory protein (SCRP) essential for ATP regulation. It must be emphasized the broad impact of the expected results: First, provide insights on normal function of the cardiovascular system and brain. Second, help to understand diseases, like cardiac and brain hypoxia and ischemia, and hypertension, situations where the is a large imbalance of the ligands affecting one of the most important membrane system for cell Calcium regulation in brain and cardiovascular system, the Sodium Calcium exchanger doc16632 none Gliding motility (the active movement of cells over surfaces without the aid of flagella) is a trait shared by diverse bacteria. Gliding motility was first observed nearly 200 years ago, yet the mechanisms responsible for cell movement are still largely unknown. Flavobacterium johnsoniae is a convenient model organism for studies of bacterial gliding motility. Techniques to genetically manipulate F. johnsoniae have recently been developed and used to characterize a number of genes that are required for gliding (gld genes). The proteins encoded by these genes appear to localize to the cell envelope, where the motility apparatus is expected to reside. GldA, GldF, and GldG are thought to interact to form an ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporter. Most of the other Gld proteins do not exhibit significant similarity to proteins of known function. The role of the Gld ABC transporter in gliding is not known and will be investigated. Wild-type and mutant cells are being biochemically characterized to identify the cargo of the transporter and determine the role of the transporter in gliding. Additional genes required for gliding will also be identified by cosmid complementation and transposon mutagenesis. These genes will be cloned, sequenced, and analyzed to determine possible functions for the individual components of the gliding machinery. Mutations will be created in individual gld genes and the effects on cell motility will be assessed. The genes will also be cloned into expression vectors to allow overproduction of Gld proteins. These proteins will be used to raise antibodies, which will allow localization of the Gld proteins by cell fractionation and by immuno-electron microscopy. This may allow visualization of the motility machinery at high resolution for the first time, and will be an important step toward determining the mechanism of gliding. Bacteriophages that infect only motile cells will also be used as tools to aid in identification of the outermost components of the motility machinery. These studies will lead to a better understanding of the mechanism of Flavobacterium gliding motility. In addition to expanding our knowledge on this common but little understood means of bacterial locomotion, these studies could have more practical value since gliding bacteria related to F. johnsoniae are important as pathogens of plants, animals, and humans, as agents of biodegradation, and as producers of enzymes, antibiotics and other secondary metabolites doc16633 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Youngstown State University will acquire a Glove Box and Vacuum Line Systems for Materials Synthesis and Characterization. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on NS heterocyclic materials, organometallic crystal engineered materials, alkanethiol monolayers, monolayer organometallic films, metallocenophanes, organometallic nanoscale rigid-rod and star-shaped materials, and solid state nitride fluoride compounds. Research-grade glove boxes enable researchers to handle air-sensitive materials. This equipment will enrich the materials-related research program at Youngstown State University and also provide hands-on experience for undergraduate and masters students in the advanced inorganic chemistry and polymer science laboratory courses doc16634 none Tag1 is an autonomous transposable element in Arabidopsis thaliana. Tag1 excision and expression are restricted to the reproductive cell lineages in developing flowers. The long-term goal of this research is to elaborate the mechanisms and identify the host genes that control Tag1 excision and expression during plant development. The specific objectives of this project are as follows: (I) Elucidate the developmental control of Tag1 transposase expression by pinpointing the cells and stages of flower development in which Tag1 expression is active, localizing the cis-acting regulatory elements within Tag1 that are responsible for the developmental control of expression and identifying host regulatory genes. (II) Elucidate the developmental control of Tag1 excision by searching for host genes that regulate Tag1 excision, characterizing mutants variants that have altered excision patterns, determining the effect of known mutations on Tag1 excision and cloning the gene encoding the host factor that binds to the 3 end of Tag1. Transposable elements provide powerful tools for studying development and gene function. They have been exploited for mutagenesis, gene shuttling, gene isolation and cell lineage studies. The research on the Tag1 transposon of the plant Arabidopsis will advance the study of (I) developmental and genetic regulation of transposition in plants, (II) control of plant development and (III) genome evolution doc16635 none Animals have internal biological clocks that enable them to coordinate physiological and behavioral rhythms relative to the time of day, termed circadian rhythms. In mammals, a key part of clock in the brain is the supra-chiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the hypothalamus. In nocturnal rodents, which are widely used in the laboratory, the SCN is known to be important for the timing of female reproductive behavior and a surge in the luteinizing hormone (LH) that triggers ovulation. However very little is known about diurnal rodents, which have evolved from nocturnal species. This project asks how the neural mechanisms responsible for circadian control of the female reproductive cycle have changed in diurnal compared to nocturnal rodents. The model animal is the unstriped Nile grass rat, which is related to common laboratory rats, but has a virtually complete reversal in the timing of a variety of events associated with female reproduction, including morning instead of evening timing for both mating behavior and for the surge in LH. Cytochemical, anatomical and behavioral approaches will be used to distinguish whether the SCN itself changes signal timing, whether there is instead a change in the timing of receptiveness of target sites to SCN signals, or whether there is a change in the neuroanatomy connecting SCN to different targets in nocturnal and diurnal species. The results will have an impact beyond neuroendocrinology to chronobiology, hypothalamic physiology, and evolutionary physiology. In addition, training of students and researchers at several levels is an important part of the project doc16636 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of California in Irvine will acquire a High Performance Liquid Chromatograph-Electrospray Ionization Mass Spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) the separation and analysis of diastereomeric polysiliconates and the evaluation of affinity supports for the separation of oligonucleotides and small peptides (Shea); b) the synthesis of beta-sheet mimics for protein recognition and function research (Nowick); c) novel strategies and mechanistic studies for natural product synthesis (Overman); d) the synthesis of highly oxygenated macrolide natural products with potential cytotoxic and anti-fungal applications (Rychnovsky); and e) the synthesis of dityrosine and ditryptophan crosslinked peptides as protein structure probes (Van Vranken). Liquid chromatography with mass spectrometric detection (LC-MS) is an extremely powerful technique used for the separation and analysis of complex mixtures. The research that this instrument will enable will have a significant impact in the areas of biochemistry and pharmaceutical chemistry, among others doc16637 none Apoptosis, or programmed cell death, is utilized extensively in the functioning immune system. During development, cells which express potentially auto-immune or functionally irrelevant receptors are excised before they reach maturity. In addition, once a lymphocyte has participated in an antigen-specific response, it may be eliminated either passively, following growth factor withdrawal, or actively, after interaction with cells bearing death-inducing signals. In this project, the role of the IAP (Inhibitors of APoptosis) family of anti-apoptotic proteins will be explored in normal lymphocytes. IAPs share a unique, 70 amino acid BIR (Baculovirus Inhibitor of apoptosis Repeat) domain and most function by inhibiting some of the caspase enzymes which play a central role in apoptosis. Mouse- (m)-survivin, the central focus of this work, is the smallest and simplest of these interesting IAP proteins. The thesis to be investigated is that different anti-apoptotic molecules may function at particular stages in the lymphocyte life-cycle. In particular, it is posited that survivin acts to preserve lymphocyte viability in cells which are undergoing rapid proliferation and or are subject to active selective pressure. The signals and conditions which induce m-survivin expression in B and T lymphocytes, both in vivo and in vitro will be investigated and the relative kinetics of IAP expression will be compared with those of other anti-apoptotic proteins. The lymphocyte subpopulations in which m-survivin is expressed will be defined, and the experiments will also explore the effects of over-expression of survivin on the capacity of lymphocytes to withstand induction of cell death. Finally, a novel modification of mRNA differential display methodology, first developed by the PI s laboratory will be employed to characterize the expression of multiple members of the BIR-containing family in differentiating lymphocytes. This research will be conducted at an undergraduate institution. The primary participants will be senior year and summer research undergraduates in the PI s laboratory at Haverford College. Significant contributions to the work are expected from undergraduate students who are members of under-represented groups. Students are involved at every stage of the research, from selection of their individual projects to presentation of the work, either at local or national meetings or in final written form. The control of apoptosis is a burgeoning field of research with major implications for the regulation of cellular proliferation across the eukaryotic kingdom doc16638 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at SUNY Albany will acquire an X-ray diffractometer with CCD detector for small molecule diffractometry. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas: a) investigations of catalyst systems for efficient syndiotactic polymerization of styrene (Welch); b) studies on the calcium affinity of coordinated polyphosphonates (Dikarev); c) synthesis and study of acyclic and heterocyclic organic compounds of sulfur, selenium and silicon, including natural products from garlic, onions, and mushrooms, and the use of sulfur compounds in organic synthesis and as ligands (Block); d) design of novel supramolecular materials (Petrukhina); e) structural studies on the folding and unfolding of small globular proteins (Scholesz); and f) synthesis, structural characterization and physicochemical evaluation of metal complexes containing silylated and germylated beta-diketonates and related ancillary ligands (Toscano). The X-ray diffractometer allows accurate and precise measurements of the full three dimensional structure of a molecule, including bond distances and angles, and it provides accurate information about the spatial arrangement of the molecule relative to the neighboring molecules. The diverse research programs that will benefit from this diffractometer include those in inorganic, organometallic, organic, materials, biophysical and bioorganic chemistry doc16639 none PI: Elizabeth Adkins-Regan This project will explore the mechanisms of the lifetime pair bond that forms between male and female zebra finches. Biology seeks to explain not only general features of most organisms (fundamental processes of life) but also the diversity in organismal forms and lifestyles. There is great diversity in animal mating systems. This diversity includes interesting variation in whether males and females form long-term close social relationships in order to reproduce. Long-term monogamous relationships, including pairing for the life of the animals, are scattered throughout the animal world (including some human populations) but are most common in birds. This kind of mating system is poorly understood. The objective of this research is to explain the function (how such relationships lead to better reproduction) and the physiology responsible for the formation and maintenance of these relationships using a species, the zebra finch, that pairs for life. The research will answer questions such as: are the birds more reproductively successful if they continue with the same partner rather than choose a new partner? Are sex hormone actions required for birds to pair and to remain paired? Do pubertal sex hormones have any long-term effect on pairing? Are they responsible for the transition from attachment to the parents to attachment to the pairing partner? What is the role of the physiological stress response following separation of the pair in re-pairing following loss of the partner? Are physiological changes following separation part of the costs that normally prevent separation? The methods will include hormonal and social manipulations during juvenile development and adulthood, behavioral testing designed to measure pairing preference and status, and determination of reproductive success and hormone levels. By discovering what is responsible for pairing and remaining together, this research will answer important questions and will offer and test new hypotheses about the physiology of ecologically relevant behavior applicable to a broad array of socially monogamous animals. The research will also provide valuable training and an important start to a scientific career for a large number of undergraduate and graduate students of both genders and of diverse backgrounds and origins doc16640 none Haldane s rule is the observation that when in the F1 offspring of two different animals races one sex is absent, rare, or sterile, that sex is the heterozygous [heterogametic] sex (Haldane, ). In the nematode genus Caenorhabditis, Haldane s Rule is observed in C. briggsae::C. remanei hybrids. Implementation in this combination is through sexual transformation of haplo-X hybrids into females. Hybrid sexual transformation likely results from dysgenic interactions among sex determination genes. This hypothesis will be tested by mapping naturally occurring variants that suppress the hybrid sexual transformation phenotype relative to the sex determination genes of C. briggsae and C. remanei. One such variant has been identified in each of these species. Mapping of sexual transformation variants will utilize single-nucleotide polymorphisms(SNPs) as genetic markers. The goal of this project is to map hybrid sexual transformation variants to the nucleotide. This will be accomplished in two stages. A resolution of 0.1 mu (0.1% recombination) will be achieved by analysis of recombinant chromosomes through a single-worm PCR assay. Depending on the genomic region involved, this resolution will correspond to between 5,000 to 150,000 bp. Increased resolution (0. mu) will be achieved through a population-based assay designed to detect recombination between adjacent SNPs. This work will further the understanding of the evolutionary genetics of species formation doc16641 none The objective of this project is to understand the relationship between two activities of a protein encoded by a group I intron. The protein facilitates a splicing reaction that excises the intron from its precursor RNA and also acts as a DNA endonuclease, cleaving DNA at a specific sequence. It is commonly believed that the RNA splicing activity evolved from a protein that originally functioned solely as a DNA endonuclease. However it is unlikely that this new function arose simply by fusion of an additional gene sequence. Preliminary evidence indicates that the DNA and RNA substrates bind to distinct or partially overlapping sites on the protein. The question then arises as to how a protein acquires a new function and how easily this can be detected. This is particularly relevant to annotating genomes. Attributing a single function to a gene may constitute only partial characterization of the sequence since an unknown number of proteins may moonlight and perform a second, unrelated and unforeseen task. Group I introns can catalyze their own excision from RNA precursors. An intron-encoded protein, called a maturase, significantly facilitates removal of such an intron in Aspergillus nidulans. It also has DNA endonuclease activity. The three-dimensional structure of the protein has been obtained with the help of a collaborator and the region which binds the cleavable DNA sequence has been identified. Guided by this model, the relationship between the binding sites of the RNA and DNA substrates will be studied biochemically and genetically. Current diffraction data from crystals of group I introns are of insufficient quality to reveal structural details at the atomic level. Co-crystallizing RNA with a protein can often solve this problem. A collaboration will be performed to obtain a high-resolution structure of the intron-maturase complex. This will not only reveal the RNA binding site on the protein and help to determine how the RNA binding site arose, but also provide a wealth of structural information about the group I intron RNA itself doc16642 none William Jorgensen of Yale University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to continue his theoretical studies of organic chemistry in solution. Chemical systems are modeled at the atomic level using molecular quantum mechanics, molecular mechanics, molecular dynamics, and Monte Carlo statistical mechanics. The project includes the following efforts: (1) developing revised potential functions for organic molecules that are consistent with Jorgensen s improved computational model for liquid water, with testing that emphasizes Monte Carlo simulations for the proper use of pure organic liquids and free energies of hydration, (2) developing improved semiempirical quantum mechanics methods to enable routine computational study of organic and enzymatic reactions in solution, (3) incorporating semiempirical configuration interaction into the quantum mechanics framework, with initial applications to solvolysis reactions and Bergman cyclization, and (4) initiating basic studies of intramolecular interactions with organofluorine compounds to complement current interest in perfluoroalkanes as solvents and in fluorophobic effects. Outcomes are expected to enable an enhanced understanding of organic reactions, molecular properties, and intramolecular interactions that are central to chemistry and biochemistry. This research will reveal useful information on molecular processes in solution, and the ways in which molecules are affected by their solvent environment. The theoretical studies closely parallel and complement experimental research on optimization of organic reactions and on the development of catalysts, selective receptors for organic molecules including drugs and metabolites, materials with novel properties, and molecular devices doc16643 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois in Chicago will acquire an ultrafast Ti:Sapphire laser system and a high power Nd:YAG laser. This equipment will enhance research in coherent control of chemical reactions, analytical probing of organic thin films, and nanolithography. A femtosecond laser provides ultrafast pulses of coherent visible or infrared light, which enables researchers to obtain important information about fast occurring chemical reactions. Its use may enable breakthroughs in our understanding of the properties of reactive and nonreactive molecules doc16644 none In this award funded by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Rice will study the theory for the active control of the evolution of quantum many-body systems in order to establish conditions under which active control of a unimolecular reaction can be achieved in a dense liquid phase. The principal focus in these investigations will be on developing new variants of methods that use coherent excitation of states with or without adiabatic transfer of population. A main focus in on the development of new stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) laser excitation schemes for both gas phase and solution phase reactions. Other promising methods as well as refinements and extensions of previous implementations of active control of molecular dynamics will also be studied. Selective control of product formation in a chemical reaction has been sought persistently throughout the evolution of chemistry. Using such control of a reaction would allow one to generate a particular product mostly or completely. Control has been accomplished at the macroscopic level by manipulating external factors such as temperature, pressure, solvent character, etc. With the advent of the tunable laser, it was hoped that product selectivity could be controlled at the microscopic level, and that individual bonds within a molecule could be selectively broken. It was very quickly found that energy absorbed by a molecule was not easily localized in individual bonds, but preferred to redistribute throughout the molecule. More recently, however, the concept of laser selective chemistry has had a rebirth, and theories developed by Rice and others have shown that energy could be localized by carefully choosing a complex sequence of laser pulses of prescribed shapes. If this theory can be put to practice experimentally, it will be possible to realize the goal of microscopic selective control of chemical reactions doc16645 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Colorado in Boulder will acquire a 400 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) the mechanism, design, synthesis and evaluation of anti-cancer drugs involving DNA cross-linking (Koch); b) new naked and extremely reactive cations of a variety of elements, and studies of fluorinated bicyclo[1.1.1]pentanes (Michl); c) organic synthesis, including glycopeptides and glycoproteins, and derivatized structural analogs (Halcomb); d) organic synthesis involving a new class of catalysts for accomplishing hydroxyl-directed reactions (Sammakia); e) the design and characterization of nanostructured solid-state organic materials (Gin); and f) fundamental structural, spectroscopic and mechanistic investigations of metalloenzymes (Hagadorn). Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including biochemistry, pharmaceutical chemistry and catalysis doc16646 none Enzymes function within cells to catalyze biochemical reactions, thereby controlling the amounts and types of products that are produced by different types of cells under different conditions. Work in many laboratories has provided evidence that enzymes that cooperate in biosynthetic pathways and other coordinated systems, such as DNA replication and protein synthesis, are often physically associated as macromolecular complexes. This organization has the potential to dramatically enhance the biochemical efficiency of living cells as well as providing mechanisms for sequestering toxic or volatile intermediates, regulating competition among branch pathways, and coordinating interdependent processes. Some of these systems, such as the machinery of protein and nucleic acid biosynthesis, are extremely stable and can be extracted from cells as intact multienzyme structures. Others, such as the TCA cycle and the glycolytic pathway, are organized as dynamic complexes that may dissociate and reform in response to environmental or physiological stimuli. However, there are only a few cases in which a specific physiological function for this organization has been documented. At the same time, very little is known about the molecular basis of enzyme complex formation and localization. This project aims to address these questions using the flavonoid biosynthetic pathway in the plant, Arabidopsis, as an experimental system. Numerous genetic, molecular, and biochemical tools are available for this system, including cloned genes for seven major flavonoid enzymes, purified recombinant enzymes produced in bacterial cells, polyclonal antibodies against many of these proteins, and a collection of mutants that includes null alleles for several key enzymatic steps. The major goals of the current project are to 1) determine the three-dimensional structures of two of the flavonoid enzymes, 2) use new technologies to study the interactions between these enzymes, 3) track changes in the subcellular locations of the enzymes in response to environmental stimuli such as wounding and gravity, and 4) study the biochemical and physiological effects of targeting flavonoid enzymes to inappropriate locations within the plant cell. Expanding the knowledge of the structure and function of enzyme complexes is essential to developing a complete understanding of how cells organize and regulate metabolic activity. This information is crucial for efforts to alter cellular metabolism via gene therapy and in the development of transgenic organisms for industrial and agricultural applications. This project will also provide a training ground in contemporary molecular genetic and biochemical technologies for undergraduate and graduate students doc16647 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Emory University will acquire a Circular Dichroism Spectrometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) the design of polypeptide materials of precise and controllable molecular structure (Conticello); b) studies on flavoenzyme systems (Edmondson); c) peptide structure and self-assembly (Lynn); d) transition metal-DNA interactions (Marzilli); and e) bio-organic chemistry of protein-DNA complexes (Mohler). Circular dichroism spectroscopy is an extremely useful tool in modern analytical chemistry. It provides a very reliable and sensitive method for assigning absolute molecular configurations. The results from these studies will have an impact in a number of areas, in particular, biochemistry doc16648 none The Helicosporidia are a unique assemblage of pathogens isolated from a diverse group of invertebrates with only one named species-Helicosporidium parasiticum. Morphologically, this group is defined by the production of an unusual cyst stage that encloses three ovoid cells and a single elongate, filamentous cell. These organisms were at one time considered to be protozoa or fungi but have been unclassified since . Experiments outlined in this project utilize the expertise of three research teams to explore the structure and function of this novel pathogen. The approach taken in this project, dictated by the lack of biological information on this organism, will provide a combination of morphology, life history, and molecular data. The outlined objectives include a complete analysis of the in vitro developmental cycle of the Helicosporidium sp. with an emphasis on the ultrastructure and replication of vegetative cells and the morphogenesis of the infectious cyst. Preliminary examination has revealed that Helicosporidia possess many unique cytological features, such as a pellicle that is formed by both vegetative and cyst phenotypes, nuclei that enclose the cytosol, a number of undefined cell organelles, and a harpoon-like filamentous cell. The combination of high-resolution light and electron microscopy will provide detailed insight on the composition and structure of the surface, wall structure, and internal morphology of this organism. Under controlled in vitro conditions, time-lapse microscope studies will provide details on the developmental cycle of this pathogen. Secondly, the in vivo infection process, development, and host range of the Helicosporidium sp will be examined. Throughout the course of this study, cell-tracking technologies will be optimized to analyze the ingress of this pathogen through the midgut barrier and its subsequent development in the hemocoel. Unlike many insect diseases, Helicosporidium sp., although isolated from an aquatic environment, can infect a wide range of terrestrial insect hosts. For comparative purposes, both mosquito and lepidopteran larvae will be used to document the in vivo cell cycle. To date, sequence data generated on rDNA and two proteins, actin and tubulin, have demonstrated that Helicosporida belongs within the Chlorophyta and, as such, it represents the first record of an insect-pathogenic alga. It should be noted that Helicosporidia nests hierarchically within a group of organisms with radically different morphologies and life history traits, allowing for comparative studies that can shed light on genes and structures that were modified to achieve parasitism. Molecular studies will be directed at generating sequence information on select genes from the Helicosporidium sp. and on EST libraries. A primary goal is analyze the relationship between the genera Helicosporidium, Prototheca, and other members of the Trebouxiaphyceae in order to gain a better understanding of the morphological, molecular, and genetic changes that are correlated with the evolution of parasitism. Furthermore, analysis of this sequence data in conjunction with morphological (ultrastructural) features will define the taxonomic status and phylogeny of this organism. This project will provide support and training for two graduate students and two undergraduate research assistants. The goal is to leverage the combined talents of this group to provide students interdisciplinary training in molecular systematics, histology, and pathology. These skills are crucial for the discovery, characterization, and evaluation of microbials for applications to a broad range of scientific disciplines such as new pest control technologies, novel protein and small molecule discovery, etc doc16649 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Rockhurst University will upgrade a permanent magnet CW NMR instrument to a FT-NMR. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies in natural products synthesis and medicinal chemistry. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. A broad spectrum of students at this undergraduate institution will benefit from the upgrade since the investigators plan to integrate the spectrometer into coursework doc16650 none As the bacterium Bacillus subtilis differentiates from the vegetative form into a dormant endospore, complex morphological and physiological changes occur that require the sequential expression of many genes. During the process, new RNA polymerase sigma factors appear (sF,sE,sG,sK), displacing one another in a sequential cascade and conferring on the RNA polymerase a changing specificity for the recognition of different classes of promoters. This mechanism of altering transcriptional specificity is a fundamental element in the regulation of sporulation gene expression. However, during sporulation repressors and activators control the use of some promoters by RNA polymerase containing the sporulation-specific sigma factors. GerE is a DNA binding protein that is required for activation or repression of several specific sK-dependent promoters during the final stage of endospore development. GerE is the smallest member of the LuxR-FixJ family, a widespread, large family of transcriptional activators that includes two-component type response regulators (e.g., DegU, ComA, FixJ, and BvgA) and activators regulated by low molecular weight cofactors (e.g., LuxR and MalT). Most members of the LuxR-FixJ family contain an amino terminal receiver domain linked by a small region to a carboxy-terminal domain that contains an amino acid sequence similar to the helix-turn-helix (HTH) motif found in other DNA-binding proteins and RNA polymerase sigma factors. The 74 amino acid sequence of GerE is similar over its entire length to the DNA binding domain of this protein family, including the HTH motif. Moreover, recently the structure of GerE has been solved by X-ray crystallography. Therefore, GerE provides a simple model for studies of transcription activation by this family. It is not known how GerE stimulates promoter activity. However, the small size of GerE makes it somewhat surprising that it stimulates transcription from various positions at different promoters. The mechanism of GerE-dependent promoter activation will be examined in this project by testing a model in which two specific surfaces of GerE interact with RNA polymerase during activation of the cotC and cotX promoters, respectively. Genetic and biochemical approaches also will be used to test the hypothesis that GerE interacts with sK at some promoters, and with other subunits of sK RNA polymerase at other promoters to stimulate transcription. The results of this project are expected to yield insights into the mechanism of promoter activation by this important family of transcription factors found in a wide variety of bacteria. Because transcription factors play a key role in determining which genes are active in which cells and at what time, their importance cannot be overstated. This project will help us understand how they work doc16651 none The Gordon Research Conference on Macromolecular Organization and Cell Function has met biannually since . This award will provide partial funding for the ninth conference in this series (and the fourth consecutive one to be held at Queens College, Oxford University), which is scheduled for August 4-9, . The first conferences concentrated on the role of enzyme organization in metabolic regulation, but the subject matter has been greatly broadened over the years. The conference now deals with virtually all aspects of cell function, focusing on the intracellular organization of cellular components, the mechanisms underlying and controlling this organization, and the essential role of intracellular organization in cell function. Conference topics continue to evolve in relation to the questions that can be effectively addressed by new technologies and the integration of different disciplines. For example, many of the focus areas of the conference are now especially relevant for the application of emerging technologies in proteomics and structural biology. Sessions in the upcoming conference include Nucleic acid super-structures and gene expression, Organization of cellular metabolism, The cytoskeleton and cell function, Organization of translation, New technologies for the post-genomic era, The virtual cell, and Molecular imaging in intact living systems. This is a truly interdisciplinary conference that has, throughout its history, successfully promoted the exchange of ideas among scientists with diverse backgrounds, expertise, and interests. These range from the areas of biochemistry, cell biology, and molecular biology to biophysics, physics, and instrumentation, as well as theoretical biology and mathematical modeling. Discussion leaders help to integrate the various presentations into cohesive themes and speakers are asked to provide basic background information to enable those in other disciplines to understand the material. Ample time for general discussion at the end of each session typically leads to a lively exchange of ideas and provides topics of conversation for poster sessions and mealtimes. A priority is also placed on facilitating the participation of young scientists, not only junior faculty members, but also postdocs and graduate students. This has been accomplished both by providing supplemental funding (for 11 students and 14 postdocs in ) and, starting with the conference, by establishing a session of poster flashes in which junior attendees are invited to make a brief oral presentation to promote interest in their posters. The conference has consistently received high ratings in surveys completed by the participants and attendance has been steadily increasing doc16652 none Knowledge of brain structure is essential to understand brain function. The evolution of mammals has resulted in many differences in brain anatomy, but we know very little about how those differences correlate to the wide diversity of animal behavior. This collaborative project is to consolidate and make more accessible for research and education two major collections that form a unique, extensive, remarkably preserved assembly of mammalian brain specimens for comparative and evolutionary studies. Together they contain more than 275 sectioned and stained brains, including over a half million microscope slides, representing over 150 species, from 50 families in 17 different orders of Mammalia. Many specimens are irreplaceable, from rare or endangered species, and provide critically unique data for questions about biodiversity and evolution as well as neuroscience. The collections are being brought to a national museum facility in Washington DC to join complementary extensive human brain collections and establish a single site with long-term stability for storage, curation, and research on comparative mammalian brain neuroanatomy. An electronic website is being developed for worldwide access to images. Researchers can use the images directly, or decide whether to visit the museum itself to examine the original preserved biological material. The impact of this project is high. First, it safely preserves for future research an irreplaceable resource that represents a scientific investment of more than 50 years of exacting work by dozens of people. Second, it promotes multidisciplinary research on comparative neuroscience, behavior, evolution and systematics to understand the diversity in the most complex organ known. Third, using technology of digital imaging and multidimensional databases, it provides a working base as well as a model for how to handle and share complex morphological data with other collections, including those on non-mammalian vertebrate brains. Fourth, the project will continue to have educational impact by providing easy website access for schools and informal science education about the vertebrate brain in the context of biodiversity doc16653 none The objectives of this work are two fold. 1) Diene-iron tricarbonyl complexes with appended olefins will be coupled to make spirocyclic compounds. This coupling reaction allows stereospecific construction of densely functionalized molecules that contain proximal quaternary centers. This methodology will be applied to the synthesis of the core structures of the natural products, stemodinone and aphidicolin. 2) Diene-iron tricarbonyl complexes with proximal hydroxyl groups will be used in stereoselective intramolecular cyclization reactions. The diene-iron complex stabilizes cations formed by acid promoted ionization of the hydroxyl group allowing stereocontrolled intramolecular cyclizations to be effected. Use of optically pure complexes in these cyclizations should lead to asymmetric cascade reactions. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Anthony J. Pearson of the Department of Chemistry at Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Pearson will explore stereoselective cyclization reactions of organoiron reagents. The ability to form carbon-carbon bonds in molecules which are chiral (have two nonsuperimposable mirror images) and make only one of the two possible forms (a single enantiomer) is one of the most important problems facing the pharmaceutical industry today. When developed, Dr. Pearson s work could be applied to the synthesis of natural products such as stemodinone and aphidicolin. Students trained during the course of this work will gain skills needed by the pharmaceutical industry which now produces a number of single enantiomer compounds doc16654 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University will acquire a Pulsed Fourier Transform Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) Spectrometer. The new instrument will support research in the following areas: a) mapping electronic coupling within photogenerated radical ion pairs at fixed distances using time-resolved EPR spectroscopy (Wasielewski); b) direct observation of guanine cation radical in duplex DNA (Lewis); c) time-resolved applications in energy conversion chemistry: finding and identifying electron traps at photo-active interfaces (Hupp); d) time-resolved EPR of electron transfer within protein complexes (Hoffman); e) EPR studies on cobalt (II)-substituted zinc-binding domains (Godwin); and f) EPR studies of monoamine oxidase (Silverman). An electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectrometer is an instrument used to obtain information about the molecular and electronic structure of molecules. It may also be used to obtain information about the lifetimes of free radicals which are often essential for the initiation of tumor growth and or a variety of chemical reactions. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, in particular the chemistry of photofunctional materials and biophysical chemistry doc16655 none Natural history collections are a resource for research on the taxonomy and systematics of organisms. Specimens and the associated data are now used in studies of ecology, conservation and environmental biology. Much of the museum data lacks geo-referenced collection locations, such as map coordinates or latitude and longitude. It is estimated that the number of specimens in US collections alone exceeds 750 million. Usually, the collection location is recorded as a string of text that describes the location as position along a road and or distance from a town or other point of reference. Capture map coordinates from these text descriptions is tedious and time consuming. In this activity, a suite of software tools will be developed that will enable the biological collection community to geo-reference quickly all of the locality data associated with their collections. A prototype system, using a pattern-matching algorithm to break down the text string, has been developed. Available place names in a database are associated with latitude and longitude coordinates. When place-name data are missing, a database of other geographically-referenced information is compiled and used. The tools will also include visualization, correction and error estimation features for more precise location and updates to the database doc16656 none Neuropeptides are compounds in the nervous system that often modulate physiological functions, and so act as hormones. The insect neuropeptide allatotropin (AT) is synthesized by specific cells in the central and enteric nervous systems, and is known to promote the synthesis of juvenile hormone (JH), but also has been implicated in other functions. Recently three other allatotropin-like neuropeptides, ATL I, II and III have been discovered, encoded by alternative splicing from AT gene expression. The mRNA for these splice variants shows specificity in the tissue and the stage of development, and the gene expression also appears to be under physiological control. This project combines molecular, biochemical and physiological approaches to clarify when and where the different mRNAs encocde the unique peptides. Results will provide information on the mechanisms to precisely control the overall biological response that results from the expression of a single neuropeptide gene that is an important regulatory molecule in a model insect species. The scientific impact will extend beyond insect neuroendocrinology to more general regulatory physiology, and potentially to insect pest control. The infrastructure impact includes cross-disciplinary postdoctoral training, which will be enhanced by the collaborative team approach doc16657 none Understanding the relationship between plant traits and plant performance is a fundamental goal of both basic and applied plant sciences. This research will determine the relationship between plant traits and performance (survival and reproductive output) for a wild sunflower species of hybrid origin (Helianthus anomalous) and early generation hybrids of its ancestral parents (Helianthus annuus and Helianthus petiolaris). We are interested in plant traits related to water use, photosynthetic carbon gain, growth, survival, and reproductive output. The hybrid species complex provides a unique opportunity to look at how these traits are evolving to improve the fitness of the hybrids in a desert dune environment, and what trait combinations are associated with maximum performance in this water and nutrient limited environment. The analyses will include a) experimental gardens to show which plants do best in environments on and off the dunes, b) phenotypic selection experiments to determine which traits account for better performance, and c) selection experiments to determine whether or not there is heritable genetic variation for these traits in Helianthus. This research will further our understanding of how wild plants adapt to harsh environments and identify traits that may be useful for development of stress tolerant line of commercial Helianthus annuus doc16658 none Hany Ammar West Virginia University Digital Government: Automated Dental Identification This grant will support the development of tools for rapid identification of individuals based on dental records. The technology proposed has potential for high impact in investigations, such as the World Trade Center, where only dental records are available to aid in victim identification. Technically, the work will involve the creation of a pilot Digital Image Repository, include image manipulation (feature extraction, image enhancement), high-speed databases (archiving and matching), neural nets, and parallel computation using a network of workstations. The grantee will collaborate in this work with the FBI doc16659 none Previous research conducted under NSF support ( ) resulted in well-defined organic inorganic hybrid materials such as block and graft copolymers with poly(dimethylsiloxane), POSS containing homopolymers and block copolymers, and well-defined organic polymers tethered to curved and flat surfaces. These materials were prepared by controlled radical polymerization (CRP) processes, primarily using atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP). %%% While various methods to incorporate organic polymers to inorganic substrates have been reported, robust methods to universally incorporate well-defined (co)polymers are highly desirable. The versatility of ATRP is a significant advantage to prepare hybrids, as facile functionalization of inorganic substrates can be performed to enable introduction of well-defined (co)polymers to these materials. The potential of such an approach is far reaching to researchers involved in synthesis of polymers, colloids, nanocomposites and modification of flat surfaces. The primary strategy is to covalently bond well-defined organic homopolymer and block copolymers to inorganic substrates (i.e., polymers, particles, surfaces) enabling precise interfacial control between organic and inorganic components. In particular, block copolymers of varying composition and molar mass will be combined with inorganic substrates using CRP techniques. Hybrid nanocomposites of increasing structural complexity will be prepared by utilizing the self-assembly properties of incompatible block copolymers attached to inorganic materials doc16660 none During evolution of terrestrial plants, the atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) declined, resulting in a limitation on the capacity for photosynthesis, especially under higher temperatures, drought and or saline conditions. Consequently, some plants evolved a biochemical inorganic carbon pump through a C4 cycle, so they are called C4 plants. While C4 plants account for less than 10% of terrestrial species, they are estimated to account for about 30% of global terrestrial productivity because of their success under extreme climatic conditions. This is due to their effectiveness in carbon assimilation and efficiency of water use. Unfortunately, most crops lack this carbon pump, which limits their productivity and our ability to extend production into less favorable habitats. Plants not possessing C4 photosynthesis have one photosynthetic cell type in their leaves. The dogma for about 35 years has been that photosynthesis occurs in all terrestrial C4 plants by the cooperative function of two photosynthetic cell types: an outer layer of palisade cells, where atmospheric CO2 is captured by the C4 cycle, and an inner layer of bundle sheath cells, where the CO2 is concentrated through the C4 cycle and used in carbon assimilation (called Kranz anatomy ). However, we have shown recently that C4 photosynthesis can function in a single photosynthetic cell based on studies on a member of the family Chenopodiaceae. The results suggest that Kranz anatomy is not required for function of the CO2 concentrating mechanism, and that two types of chloroplasts, each with specialized functions, can occur within a single photosynthetic cell. In this project we will determine the mechanism and efficiency of single cell C4 photosynthesis considering biochemistry, compartmentation of required enzymes within the photosynthetic cell, characteristics of oxygen production and CO2 exchange. Information on biochemistry and spatial compartmentation will be used to develop a mechanistic model to test how C4 photosynthesis can function in a single photosynthetic cell. Since little is known about genetic control of development of Kranz type C4 plants, we will also study, by mutational analysis, whether single genes control development of their specialized anatomy and biochemical compartmentation. There is great interest in the potential for genetic engineering of crops, such as rice, to perform C4 photosynthesis. Our project will suggest rational strategies for genetic modifications to increase productivity via increased capacity for photosynthesis doc16661 none The focus of this research is to extend diffusion clock methods to determine the rate constant of propagation, ionization (activation) and deactivation in the living polymerization of isobutylene, styrene and styrene derivatives, as a function of solvent, temperature and catalyst. Knowledge of these rate constants is fundamental for overall control in cationic polymer synthesis and also important in new catalyst development. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Rudolf Faust in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Professor Faust will focus his work on determining the absolute rate constants in cationic polymerization. These studies will promote renewed research in catalyst design and thus lead to the production of more efficient polymerization catalysts doc16662 none Diseases caused by parasitic species of the genus, Perkinsus, in bivalve mollusks are a worldwide problem. The parasite, Perkinsus marinus (Dermo) has been one of the two most important protozoan parasites causing severe mortality in the American oyster, Crassostrea virginica, on the east and Gulf coasts since the s. Although this parasite s host is an ecologically and economically important aquatic species, previously no information existed on its lipid metabolism and biosynthesis. A previous NSF award, revealed important information concerning lipid metabolism in P. marinus in relation to its host. Some of the important findings are that this parasite has a capability for phospholipid synthesis similar to the Plasmodium spp. that cause malarial disease and as most other parasitic protozoans, can acquire and metabolize exogenous lipids. However, unlike other parasitic protozoans, which rely on their host for essential lipids, P. marinus is able to synthesize a range of saturated and unsaturated fatty acids, including the essential fatty acid, arachidonic acid. No other parasitic protozoans have been reported to have such a capability. Interestingly, this parasite appears to have different metabolic phases depending upon whether or not it is associated with its host or not. To further elucidate the lipid metabolism in this parasite and its relation to the parasite s development, life cycle completion, disease transmission, and virulence and pathogenesis of the host, the present project employs advanced analytical technology and molecular and genomic approaches to test the key hypotheses built on the previous findings. The study addresses not only basic lipid metabolism questions with potential application to disease control for oyster acquaculture production, but to diseases caused by other Perkinsus spp. in other bivalve species such as clams. An in-depth understanding of the significance of de novo lipid and fatty acid synthesis in P. marinus may lead to the development of parasiticidal drugs to control this parasite and other parasitic protozoans, including those species affecting humans. Lipid biosynthetic pathways are currently being investigated as potential drug targets in several protozoan parasites of humans including Plasmodium and Trypanosoma species. Importantly, this project will provide opportunities to post-graduate, graduate, undergraduate, and high school students to receive hands-on research experience and training in marine science in general and lipid biochemistry, molecular genetics, and parasitology in particular doc16663 none This condensed matter physics project investigates the properties of transient, laser-produced bubbles that are created in liquids such as water, ethanol, and liquid argon. As the bubble collapses, the gas inside is compressed and heated, giving rise to emission of a fast pulse of luminescence at the minimum-radius collapse point. The spectrum of the luminescence will be measured, and high-resolution studies of the bubble dynamics near the collapse point should lead to a detailed understanding of the nature of the light-emission mechanism and its relation to sonoluminescence. A second area of interest is superfluid fog generated by an ultrasonic transducer under the surface of liquid helium. These novel aerosols will be investigated to examine if there are significant differences from normal fogs. Sound attenuation measurements in the fog will be undertaken to examine the coupling to the superfluid second-sound mode in the droplets. The third area of interest is the superfluid phase transition of submonolayer helium-4 films adsorbed on a new mesoporous silica ceramic substrate known as MCM-41. This substrate has long uniform cylindrical pores, and materials can be fabricated with pore diameters between 18 and 100 Angstroms. This will allow theories of the superfluid transition involving quantized vortex pairs to be be tested, and should allow a measurement of the vortex core size in these submonolayer superfluids. This research will contribute to the Ph.D. training of several graduate students. They will learn a broad range of skills useful in many different fields of science and technology, including cryogenic techniques, acoustics methods, and applications of lasers and optical spectroscopy. This condensed matter physics project involves three different activities. In one, a pulsed laser focused to a point is used to create bubbles in liquids such as water, ethanol, and liquid argon. As the bubble collapses, the gas inside is compressed and heated, giving rise to a fast pulse of light. The spectrum of the light will be measured, and the bubble motion will be studied. This will allow an understanding of the nature of the light emission, and how it is related to a similar phenomenon known as sonoluminescence. In the second project, the properties of fogs generated in the vapor above liquid helium will be investigated. Since the droplets making up the fog are superfluid, this system is different from ordinary fogs. The attenuation of sound in the fog will be measured, to examine if there is any coupling to the superfluid waves in the droplets. In the final project superfluid properties of very thin helium films (less than an atomic layer in thickness) will be studied. These films are adsorbed on a new type of substrate, a silica ceramic, which has long cylindrical pores, with very fine pore diameters that are only tens of atoms in diameter. The work will test theories of the superfluid properties in the ceramic, and will allow fundamental parameters of the superfluid to be measured. This research will contribute to the Ph.D. training of several graduate students. They will learn a broad range of skills useful in many different fields of science and technology, including cryogenics, acoustics, and applications of lasers and optics doc16664 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Pennsylvania State University will acquire a X-ray diffractometer with CCD detector and stereo microscope for small molecule diffractometry. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including the following: single crystal and fiber diffraction of phosphazene-based compounds and molecular inclusion clathrates; design and characterization of multi-dimensional covalent networks; novel methods of molecular recognition and the preparation of fluorescent chemical sensors; structural relationships between bioinorganic analogues and metalloprotein active sites; molecular recognition and artificial photosynthesis in lamellar and zeolitic solids; relating structural details to the mechanistic aspects of organometallic chemistry and homogeneous catalysis; structural characterization of complex natural products and their synthetic precursors; and structure-function relationships in enantioselective catalysts. The X-ray diffractometer allows accurate and precise measurements of the full three dimensional structure of a molecule, including bond distances and angles, and it provides accurate information about the spatial arrangement of the molecule relative to the neighboring molecules. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, including the preparation of more efficient catalysts, chemical sensors, and biochemistry doc16665 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Departments of Chemistry at Brown University and at the University of Rhode Island will acquire a computer system to enhance the Rhode Island Network for Computational Chemistry and Physics. The system will consist of Internet-2 linked computing clusters at Brown and URI. Clusters at each institution will have a hybrid structure composed of two distinct layers. Layer-I, the natural compute server for CPU-intensive, communications-tolerant applications, will consist of a larger number of loosely coupled processors. Layer-II, designed for more communications-intensive applications, will be a smaller, more tightly coupled sub-cluster. This equipment will enhance research in the following areas: a) structure structure (Freeman); b) the dynamical behavior of liquids (Stratt); c) the generation of excited states of strongly quantum systems (Nightingale); and d) many-body quantum dynamics (Doll). A cluster of fast, modern computer workstations is vital to serving the computing needs of active research departments. Such a computer network also serves as a development environment for new theoretical codes and algorithms, provides state-of-the-art graphics and visualization facilities, and supports research in state-of-the-art applications of parallel processing doc16666 none In this project funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Bililign will address two important issues of physical chemistry. The first deals with the reaction dynamics of M-H2 (M = alkali metal). By measuring the nascent rotational state distribution of the LiH product we will try to understand the reaction mechanism. The second deals with the C-H activation by metal atoms. The physical and chemical quenching of excited Li atoms by alkane and alkene hydrocarbons will be investigated by means of cascade and time-resolved atomic fluorescence techniques. Far-wing scattering state spectroscopy will be employed in the studies of reaction dynamics. This research deals with two important areas of chemical reaction processes. The goal is to understand how reagent molecules approach, collide, exchange energy, and finally separate into products. The benefits of such knowledge include applications to the modeling of chemical reactions in the upper atmospheric, plasma processes, chemical synthesis, and chemical reaction process technology. This work will be conducted with students who will thereby gain research experience in preparation for advanced studies or entry into the scientific technological workforce doc16667 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University will upgrade a 400 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out the following research: a) preparation of organometallic complexes with unusual structure, reactivity or physical properties (Deck); b) studies on metal complexes of polysulfonated phosphine ligands as catalysts in biphasic reaction conditions (Hanson); c) isolation of natural products (Kingston); d) rotaxane chemistry (Gibson); e) organic synthesis and synthetic methodology (Carlier); and f) preparation of polypeptides with novel three-dimensional architecture as mimics for the helix-turn-helix motif in polypeptides (Etzkorn). Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including organic, polymer and organometallic chemistry doc16668 none The objective is the joint effort of the National Science Foundation Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Technology Office (ITO) to establish a National Experimental Platform for Hybrid and Embedded Systems Technology (NEPHEST). The Goal of NEPHEST is to provide a common experimental infrastructure for hybrid and embedded systems research. NEPHEST will include the following major components: 1. An open framework for integrating hardware and software components of both laboratory and large-scale experiments for hybrid and embedded systems research. 2. Reusable hardware and software components and tools for experimental systems. 3. An evolving suite of challenge problems, reference solutions, and baselines for validation and verification of technologies. 4. A National Repository of components, tools, verification results and documents doc16669 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University will acquire a X-ray diffractometer with CCD detector for small molecule diffractometry. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including the following: a) analysis of endohedral fullerenes (Dorn); b) structure-function relationships of natural products exhibiting anticancer activity (Kingston); c) studies on rotaxanes and pseudorotaxanes (Gibson); d) studies on the structure, physical properties and reactivity of perfluoroarylated transition metal cyclopentadienyl complexes (Deck); e) investigations of catalysis using metal complexes of polysulfonated triarylphosphines in aqueous and biphasic solvents (Hanson); and f) studies on charge-transfer molecular magnets (Yee). The X-ray diffractometer allows accurate and precise measurements of the full three dimensional structure of a molecule, including bond distances and angles, and it provides accurate information about the spatial arrangement of the molecule relative to the neighboring molecules. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, including the preparation of more efficient catalysts; materials chemistry; pharmaceutical chemistry; and biochemistry doc16670 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania will acquire a Departmental Beowulf Cluster for Computational Chemistry. This equipment will enhance research in the following areas: a) polyborane catalysis and coordination chemistry (Sneddon); b) computational methods for combinatorial protein design and protein folding (Saven); c) computational methods in the development of ligands for asymmetric synthesis (Kozlowski); d) dynamics of water molecules in anion solvation shells (Klein); e) the role of structure and conformational change in biological electron and ion transport (Blasie); and f) correlating alloy chemistry with metallic glass formation (Rappe). A cluster of fast, modern computer workstations is vital to serving the computing needs of active research departments. Such a computer network also serves as a development environment for new theoretical codes and algorithms, provides state-of-the-art graphics and visualization facilities, and supports research in state-of-the-art applications of parallel processing. These studies will have a significant impact in a number of areas, including development of more efficient catalysts, biochemistry and materials sciences doc16671 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oregon in Eugene will acquire an X-ray diffractometer. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including the following: a) development of novel multilayer synthesis of metastable solids; b) characterization of metal-organic multilayers with nonlinear optical properties; c) determination of the structure and size distribution of gold nanoparticles; d) preparation and characterization of inorganic semiconductor | conjugated polymer interfaces; e) low temperature synthesis of new oxide materials using salt metathesis reactions from non-aqueous solvents; and f) synthesis and characterization of novel metal dichalcogenide superlattices. The X-ray diffractometer allows accurate and precise measurements of the full three dimensional structure of a molecule, including bond distances and angles, and it provides accurate information about the spatial arrangement of the molecule relative to the neighboring molecules. These studies will lead to the development of novel materials important to the electronics and optics industries doc16672 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Georgia will acquire a 300 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) probing cellular function with small molecules and light (Dore); b) assessment of binding affinity and selectivity of anion receptors; characterization of new organic materials; structure-relaxivity studies of porphyrin dendrimers (Johnson); c) total synthesis of biologically active natural products (Majetich); d) enzyme reaction mechanisms and kinetics (Phillips); e) synthesis and structural organometallic chemistry (Robinson); and f) alkane activation and metal-free supramolecular catalysis. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including biochemistry and the development of new catalysts and novel materials doc16673 none With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the State University of New York in Stony Brook will acquire a 400 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) the development of synthetic processes based on organometallic catalysts and the development of synthetic methods for natural products and their congeners (Ojima); b) synthesis of biologically active natural products and designed molecular probes (Parker); c) synthesis of analogues of Coenzyme A and development of computer-designed receptors and sensors for biological molecules (Drueckhammer); d) investigations on the role of disintegrins in mammalian fertilization and on understanding enzyme motion (Sampson); e) the structure and reactivity of all-carbon molecules (Goroff); and f) the preparation of designed supramolecular structures (Fowler). Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including biochemistry, biological sensor development, and materials chemistry doc16674 none The small nuclear RNAs (snRNAs) known as U1, U2, U4, U5, and U6 comprise a highly abundant class of metabolically stable, non-polyadenylated RNA molecules that are required for pre-messenger RNA splicing in eukaryotic organisms. These snRNAs are all synthesized by RNA polymerase II, with the exception of U6, which is synthesized by RNA polymerase III. Despite this difference in RNA polymerase specificity, U6 genes and the RNA polymerase II-transcribed snRNA genes utilize similar cis-acting regulatory signals and overlapping sets of transcription factors for their expression. The main goal of this project is to gain an understanding of the molecular mechanisms that are responsible for the selection of the correct enzyme (either RNA polymerase II or RNA polymerase III) at individual snRNA gene promoters. In higher eukaryotes, transcription of both classes of snRNA genes requires an essential proximal sequence element (PSE) within the region 40-75 base pairs upstream of the transcription start site. In the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, the PSE is recognized by the PSE binding protein (termed DmPBP) that contains three distinct subunits that closely approach the DNA. Previous work in the principal investigator s lab has led to a working model in which the U1 and U6 PSEs act as differential allosteric effectors of DmPBP. Conformational differences in DmPBP, in turn, are believed to be responsible for the subsequent downstream recruitment of the correct RNA polymerase. Two distinct yet highly synergistic approaches will be undertaken to test the validity of this model. First, germline transformation and Drosophila genetics will be employed to select mutants that have an altered RNA polymerase specificity at snRNA gene promoters. The second approach involves targeted in vitro mutagenesis of the genes that code for the subunits of DmPBP. The biochemical mechanisms, including conformational differences in DmPBP, that lead to changes in RNA polymerase specificity will be examined. Particular interest will be focused upon identifying functional domains or amino acid residues required specifically for the recruitment of one RNA polymerase but not the other. For the genetic information that resides in DNA to be correctly read out, it is critical that the correct RNA polymerase must be recruited to any particular gene of interest. This project will shed light on how this is accomplished at the molecular level. The system under investigation in the principal investigator s laboratory also serves as a general model for macromolecular assembly and for understanding how subtle changes in macromolecular interactions can lead to significantly different biological outcomes. The project will help us to understand how decisions among alternative biological pathways are made within cells. Research training will be provided for students engaged in acquiring their B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in biochemistry and molecular biology. Students with disabilities and from under-represented groups will be active participants doc16675 none Nolet Funds from this award provide partial support for purchase of a multi-node computer cluster. With this new facility, geophysicists at Princeton University will study how earthquakes influence local crustal stress fields and change the probability of new seismic events. Further algorithm development should also make significant improvements in our ability to image the interior structure of the Earth. Such improvements will incorporate the effects of finite frequency wavefront healing. Mathematical theories incorporating the effects of wave diffraction for more realistic seismic tomograms were developed at Princeton but this group has so far lacked the computational facilities to exploit it fully at resolutions of geological interest ( 100 km doc16676 none H. Berny Schlegel is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to carry out computational program developments and applications of ab initio classical trajectory calculations. Methodological improvements include Car-Parrinello-based density matrix propagation, Born-Oppenheimer trajectories, and reaction-path following techniques. Specific research areas include organic light-emitting diode materials, molecules with nanotubes, and chemical vapor deposition. This research will expand the range of applicability of electronic structure methods to problems of current interest, such as stability issues in organic light-emitting diode materials being readied for marketing and control issues in chemical vapor deposition processes that produce industrial coatings doc16677 none The parvalbumins - containing two EF-hand Ca2+-binding motifs - offer an attractive system for examining protein-ligand interactions. Despite extensive homology, parvalbumin (PV) isoforms exhibit disparate metal ion-binding properties. There is compelling experimental evidence that PV divalent ion affinity is influenced by structural features outside the EF-hand motifs. The PV molecule consists of a 70-residue ion-binding domain (the CD-EF domain) and a 40-residue N-terminal AB domain. Others have previously shown that the AB CD-EF interaction in pike PV is Ca2+-dependent. This project will extend this observation, exploring the hypothesis that the AB domain is a primary modulator of divalent ion-binding behavior. Recombinant AB and CD-EF domains from several a and b parvalbumin isoforms - and select site-specific variants - will be purified and characterized. Following examination of the isolated domains, the energetics of the AB CD-EF interaction will be delineated in the presence and absence of divalent ions. These issues will be addressed by diverse methods: x-ray crystallography, optical spectroscopy, NMR spectroscopy, analytical ultracentrifugation, surface plasmon resonance, 45Ca2+-binding assays, and titration and scanning calorimetries. Broadly defined, protein-ligand interactions underlie all aspects of protein function - from structure to transport to regulation to catalysis. Importantly, the precise orientation of the coordinating groups in a ligand-binding site can be influenced by structural reorganization events distant from the ligand-binding site. These conformationally mediated action at a distance phenomena are among the most intriguing aspects of protein enzyme action. The parvalbumin molecule - with its juxtaposition of a single EF-hand domain and an autonomous structural element - offers an elegant model system for examining the influence of remote determinants on ligand-binding events and, conversely, the propagation of a ligand-binding signal to neighboring structural elements. Thus, the relevance of these studies extends well beyond structure-affinity correlations in EF-hand proteins doc16678 none Just as in real estate, in an organism the location of a protein is important. Knowing the location provides a basis for deciding how to test for functionality. The proteins a specific cell makes give it a special character. Similarly, different sub-cellular compartments do different functions in the cell. We have experimental clues about function for fewer than 40,000 or the currently known 1.2 million proteins. The tools developed in this project will enable the predication of the localization of proteins by considering its structure, especially its surface components which should aid in determining function. The first task will be to develop methods using neural networks to predict localization for proteins of know structure. The method will be generalized to proteins of unknown structure by predicating surface residues, derivative of a method already in hand. A database of know sequence-motifs related to location will be developed and integrated into the prediction method. An atlas of localization will help map knowledge about function over the lifetime of any protein. Localization is an excellent starting point for assigning function to proteins. The atlas is also a vehicle for teaching both molecular biology and informatics. The atlas and tools will be available from servers as developed doc16679 none Tetrahymena thermophila, a freshwater ciliated protist, is uniquely well suited for ana-lysis of nuclear and chromosomal events associated with both the cell division cycle and conjugation (sexual reproduction). Ciliates exhibit an unparalleled richness of developmental landmarks during mitosis by virtue of the precisely controlled proliferation and patterning of basal bodies that form the ciliated oral apparatus in the cell cortex. This cortical program is coupled to both nuclear division and cytokinesis and provides an easily visualized, richly detailed clock of developmental events during cell division. This developmental program offers unique opportunities for understanding the genetic control of nuclear-cortical interactions that regulate a cell s progress through this cell-cycle dominated landscape. Three features recommend this system for developmental analysis: a wealth of developmental landmarks, the ability to carry and express mutations with lethal phenotypes, and the ability to study mutations that target both mitotic and meiotic mechanisms without affecting cell viability. The goals of this project are three fold: 1) Build and screen an antisense library to search for genes involved in conjugal development, 2) Launch a biochemical investigation into fenestrin and other proteins associated with the pronuclear exchange junction, 3) Uncover the cytogenetic basis of the developmental checkpoint associated with conjugal arrest in star -cell lines that abort normal conjugal development. Work involving these 3 methods of analysis will shed light on the genetic basis of sexual development in the ciliate Tetrahymena thermophila and its integration with the cell division cycle. This project will also help to link events occurring at the cell surface with events occurring within the cell s nucleus during the cell division cycle while providing a superior research training experience for undergraduate students doc16680 none Ecologists investigate a number of critical and diverse environmental issues, ranging from global climate change to the loss of biodiversity. The data needed to support this range of research are highly complex and variable, and the data are often labor-intensive to collect. These characteristics present distinct challenges for the collection and management of ecological data that are not being met by the range of available software tools. Prospects for the preservation and re-use of ecological data are further compromised by their tendency to be poorly described and inadequately archived. As a result, potentially relevant data that have been collected in the past are often difficult to find or difficult to interpret because of ambiguities in how they were collected. The bottleneck is a lack of standard methods or formats for data documentation or easy-to-use frameworks that assist in these functions. These data management and access problems will be solved by reducing inefficiencies and errors during the process of capturing environmental data in the field. This will be achieved through the design and building of a set of flexible, easy-to-use software tools for handheld field devices, as well as desktop computers-that will streamline field data collection, data entry and data documentation. These software tools will assist in the creation of data entry forms that are well-structured, unambiguous, and visually pleasing-thus eliminating the need for customized database development for each new project, or the often haphazard and error-prone entry of data into free-form spreadsheets. Finally, researchers and students will be trained in the use of these new tools. There is a growing need for synthetic ecological studies that will provide for a more powerful understanding of living systems, over larger spatial scales and longer time periods. Such syntheses require integrating environmental data collected from a number of sources. To achieve this goal, it is imperative to pay more attention to how the raw data are collected and preserved. The research should have major impacts on the scientific community by doing this-facilitating the capture, documentation and accessibility of ecological and environmental data. This software is not only intended to simplify the process of collecting data, but also to promote sound data practice by enforcing logically consistent data structures doc16681 none The objective of this research by Professor John E. Bercaw at the , which is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Oganometallic Chemistry Program, is to develop new, highly reactive enantiopure precatalysts that show improved selectivity and substrate generality for chiral alpha-olefins. Due to their extreme activities in polymerizing alpha-olefins, optically active ansa-zirconocene polymerization catalysts are excellent prospects for effecting kinetic resolutions, preferentially polymerizing one enantiomer of a chiral olefin and leaving behind the less reactive enantiomer. This not only resolves the two enantiomers, but also leads to a new class of optically active polymers. New catalysts will be developed to resolve right- and left handed molecules, which is essential for synthesizing chiral molecules such as pharmaceuticals. By using a polymerization catalyst, one type of handed molecule is incorporated into a new type of handed polymer doc16682 none Beginning in the middle-school years there is a significant drop in young girls confidence to succeed in math and science, even though girls perform as well or better than boys. The perception females hold of their abilities in math and science is the gatekeeper to their persistence in these academic domains. Yet, it is not clear why young adolescent girls lose confidence in these abilities. There is compelling recent evidence that when adult women are either directly or subtly reminded of women s minority status in math, their subsequent math performance is compromised and their expectations for future success in math are lowered. This profound effect of a stereotype threat is found consistently across studies of adult women. Very little is known, however, about stereotype threat in children and when it becomes salient to young girls. Although there is a well-established body of evidence identifying the experimental conditions under which stereotype threat is heightened, it is not known how stereotype threat is triggered in a natural occurring context such as the classroom. Identifying the emergence of stereotype threat and the conditions in the classroom under which it occurs is critical to understanding why young adolescent girls lose confidence in their ability to succeed in math and science. This pilot investigation will identify the conditions in the classroom that increase girls vulnerability to this threat, and examine whether stereotype threat is responsible for the decline in adolescent girls math and science confidence doc16683 none Global declines of amphibian populations are a source of great concern. Several decades ago, Rachel Carson drew the attention of the world to the plight of wild birds suffering from the effects of DDT. Her book raised the grim prospect of a silent spring without the optimistic choruses of song birds. Today, we are faced with the prospect of a new silent spring as the world s populations of colorful and remarkable amphibians continue to decline and even disappear. The causes of global amphibian declines are unknown. Recent studies have implicated one or more skin-invasive pathogens in the declines. Among the immune defense mechanisms used by amphibians is the production of antimicrobial peptides in specialized granular glands (also called poison glands) in the skin. These packets of natural antibiotics can be emptied onto the skin when the amphibian is injured or when danger is sensed. Although the antimicrobial peptides made and secreted by amphibian skin are thought to play a role in protection from environmental pathogens, there is very little direct evidence to demonstrate this. The studies proposed here are designed to test the hypothesis that antimicrobial peptides produced in the skin are synthesized, processed, stored, and secreted in sufficient concentrations to play a role in defense of the skin from pathogens present in the immediate environment of the skin. The project will address a number of specific questions about these immune defenses and provide greater insight into this important innate immune defense mechanism. The first objective is to examine the relative abundance and pattern of secretion of antimicrobial peptides on the skin surface of model amphibians at rest in comparison with the levels present following maximal secretion induced by agents that stimulate the sympathetic nervous system and thus mimic a natural attack by a predator. This analysis will be accomplished by using mass spectrometry (MS) in which a highly sophisticated instrument separates individual peptides from a mixture of peptides based on their unique molecular weights. These studies will establish reproducible sampling and analysis protocols and provide baseline data for additional studies. Other experiments are designed to deplete antimicrobial skin peptides in some frogs and examine the susceptibility of these frogs to infection by skin pathogens in comparison with other frogs that contain the full set of skin peptides. The second objective is to study the synthesis of precursors of antimicrobial peptides in the skin of model amphibians at rest and following discharge of peptides. The immediate precursors of peptides are messenger RNAs that have been transcribed from DNA. These studies will examine the levels of steady state synthesis, and kinetics of induction of new synthesis following secretion of peptides. They will provide baseline data for studies of how environmental factors may affect the synthesis of antimicrobial peptides. The third objective is to examine the effects of cold temperature, glucocorticoid hormones (stress hormones), and local inflammatory responses on synthesis and secretion of antimicrobial peptides in the skin. These studies are designed to determine whether environmental stressors may inhibit the natural production of antimicrobial peptides and thus render the amphibian host more susceptible to disease doc16684 none This proposal describes studies of secreted and nonsecreted factors responsible for promoting avian ovarian granulosa cell viability, and facilitating differentiation at the time of ovarian follicle selection into the final stages of development (the preovulatory hierarchy). In most vertebrates, including avian species, the vast majority of growing ovarian follicles ( 90%) are lost via the death of follicles (follicle atresia) at some point during development prior to the preovulatory stage. It is now well established that ovarian follicle atresia in all vertebrate species studied to date is mediated via apoptosis, and that this process is initiated within the granulosa cell layer. The identification of mechanisms that promote the survival of granulosa cells and provide for sufficient numbers of ovarian follicles for optimal follicle development and thus, optimal fertility, remains an active area of investigation. Similarly, cellular processes that precisely control ovarian follicle selection and the establishment of an orderly preovulatory hierarchy in avian species are poorly understood. Throughout the reproductive life span of the avian female, ongoing attrition of developing follicles eventually results in the survival of a small cohort of follicles that are responsive to follicle stimulating hormone. Subsequently, a single follicle from this cohort is selected per day to rapidly grow and undergo final differentiation before ovulation, thus establishing an orderly hierarchy of preovulatory follicles. Significantly, follicle selection into the avian preovulatory hierarchy is reflected by the concomitant expression of anti-apoptotic factors and cell survival signaling pathways that render granulosa cells resistant to apoptosis, and accordingly, results in diminished susceptibility to follicle atresia. Thus, there is a clear relationship between the initiation of differentiation and acquisition of apoptosis resistance within the granulosa cell layer at the time of follicle selection. The present proposal describes experiments, using the ovary of the domestic hen (Gallus gallus) as a model system, which study several secreted and nonsecreted factors, plus a unique Inhibitor of Apoptosis Protein (IAP), which together are proposed to mediate a balance between granulosa cell apoptosis versus cell survival and differentiation. Utilizing a combination of cell culture and gene transfection, in vitro assays and molecular techniques, the principal investigator will approach the study of these processes by achieving the following objectives: 1) establish signaling pathways within the cell that are responsible for epidermal growth factor receptor- (EGF-R-) mediated effects on promoting granulosa cell proliferation and cell survival, while simultaneously inhibiting premature cell differentiation; 2) define the role of transforming growth factor b (TGFb) and the related family member, activin, in promoting granulosa cell differentiation at the time of follicle selection. Related studies will define mechanisms by which EGF-R signaling blocks TGFb activin-induced differentiation; and 3) investigate the role of the multifunctional IAP family member, survivin, as a regulator of cell proliferation and inhibitor of apoptosis in prehierarchal follicle granulosa cells. An important outcome of these studies will be a better understanding of causative factors and associated cellular events that promote granulosa cell resistance to apoptotic cell death and facilitate granulosa cell differentiation. More broadly, the data generated will contribute to our understanding of mechanisms responsible for the establishment of an ovarian preovulatory follicle hierarchy that is prerequisite for egg laying in a variety of egg-laying (oviparous) species, including reptiles. All studies described will incorporate the training of both undergraduate and graduate students. It is expected that during the course of investigations novel avian genes will be identified and functionally characterized, thus contributing to the further characterization of the avian genome. Accordingly, all results will be promptly submitted to appropriate, publicly accessible databases (e.g., GenBank) and subsequently published in first-tier journals doc16685 none The tomato gene, Mi, confers resistance against several species of root-knot nematodes (Meloidogyne spp.) as well as against specific isolates of potato aphid (Macrosiphum euphorbiae). It is the only major gene for resistance to an aphid to be cloned so far and the first discovered that can mediate gene-for-gene resistance to two unrelated pests. Mi is a member of a diverse class of plant resistance-genes (R-genes) involved in gene-specific resistance against pathogens including viruses, bacteria and fungi. Members of this class of plant proteins mediate specific pathogen recognition and signaling of host defense responses. More than 20 such genes have been identified, yet how the pathogen is recognized and resistance conferred is not known. The Mi clone constitutes a unique resource for gaining insights into R-gene functions associated with specific pest recognition and signaling in plants and for determining the mechanism(s) by which a single gene can mediate resistance to multiple organisms. Chimeric constructs of Mi that produce a lethal phenotype when transiently expressed in Nicotiana benthamiana leaves are already available. Specific in vitro mutations in Mi and in constitutively lethal constructs of Mi will be produced. The phenotypes of the mutations will be examined in two different assays to delineate the function in pathogen recognition and signal transmission of particular regions of the gene. These assays will determine the effects of mutated alleles on cell death in a leaf infiltration assay and on nematode resistance in transformed roots. The phenotypes of in vitro-generated alterations in Mi on the signalling of resistance will also be examined in transgenic plants to identify the functional domains associated with nematode and or aphid recognition and downstream defense signaling. In addition, proteins that interact with Mi will be identified using the yeast 2-hybrid system and the role of these proteins in resistance will be examined. Root- knot nematodes cause billions of dollars in damage to the world s crops. Current agricultural control measures include application of chemical pesticides or the use of resistant plants. A single gene present in some tomato varieties can confer effective resistance against nematodes as well as resistance against some aphids. This project explores the question of how a single gene, which was bred into tomato from a wild plant species, can mediate recognition of the nematode pest and trigger an effective defense. An increased understanding of how plants defend themselves from pathogens and pests should result from this work. Such understanding is essential for rational design of strategies to improve pest and pathogen resistance in plants doc16686 none The goals of this research are twofold. First, efforts will be made to isolate and characterize a number of photoproducts believed to be relevant to achieving a chemical understanding of UVB-induced DNA damage. Cyclobutane dimers, Dewar adducts and (6-4) adducts of 5-methylcytosine with thiamine and cytosine will be sought. Second, it will be determined if the various products isolated in experiments related to goal one are also formed within the context of DNA and in the environment of a cell nucleus. Calf thymus DNA and nuclei and wheat DNA and nuclei will be used for this portion of the work. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research efforts of Dr. Martin D. Shetlar of the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco. Professor Shetlar will focus his work on finding out what happens to mammalian and plant DNA after it absorbs ultraviolet light. In particular, the work focuses on the role of the minor base 5-methylcytosine in mediating damage induced by the absorption of ultraviolet light. The research could have a broader impact in helping to understand the role that UV-induced lesions in DNA might play in the induction of skin cancer and other unwanted biological effects doc16687 none James Collman of Stanford University is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program for research on redox reactions (involving both electron- and atom-transfer mechanisms) of transition-metal poryphrin complexes. Interest will be centered on redox reactions involving more than one electron. Investigations of reductions of dioxygen by dinuclear porphrin complexes involving two dissimilar metals will be continued. Four-electron oxidations of organic complexes by chlorite ion, catalyzed by porphrin complexes will be studied, as well as related electrochemical reactions. Hetrometallic dinuclear porphrin (and related) complexes of second and third row transition elements will be prepared and characterized by several methods in order to ellucidate novel types of metal-metal multiple bond. Oxidation-reduction reactions involving the transfer of several electrons from reductant to oxidant are not rare in nature or in technological applications, but such reactions have been studied relatively infrequently. Building on achievements of the prior period of NSF support, the PI has identified several diverse types of multi-equivalent redox reactions, all of which involve transition metal porphrin complexes as catalysts or reactants. There is a strong probability that increased understanding of such multi-electron redox reactions will have important technological and scientific applications. Four-electron oxidations by chlorite ion, to be studied in this program, are regarded as especially promising doc16688 none This work combines laboratory astrophysics with basic rate process models in order to provide a broadly applicable research methodology for the aeronomy and planetary atmospheres community. The research project will: 1) investigate the physical chemistry controlling the thermal properties of the atomic oxygen dominated upper thermosphere, 2) establish accurate models of rate processes for species of primary importance to aeronomy, utilizing wherever possible, a combination of experimental and theoretical quantities for each process, and 3) establish an experimental design for the measurement of atomic nitrogen electron impact cross sections, with an accompanying atomic model for both N and N doc16689 none A workshop on Embedded Software was held October 8-10, , in Tahoe City, California. The purpose of the workshop was to incubate a research community in embedded software. There were 35 invited presentations at the workshop, with national and international speakers from both academia and industry. The presentations covered all aspects of embedded software, including operating systems and middleware, programming languages and compilers, modeling and validation, software engineering and programming methodologies, scheduling and execution time analysis, communication protocols and fault tolerance doc16690 none The primary objective of the proposed research is to further our understanding of the mechanisms by which the highly conserved TOR (Target Of Rapamycin) signaling pathway regulates cell growth in eukaryotic organisms. This pathway was discovered by the action of the antibiotic rapamycin, a potent immune suppressor, which targets the large, evolutionarily conserved TOR kinase. Insight into the function of this pathway has come from recent studies of the simple eukaryote, S. cerevisiae, where it has been shown that TOR controls the expression of genes involved in several essential nutrient-responsive biosynthetic pathways. In particular, TOR regulates the expression of a concise cluster of genes (termed RTG-target genes) that encode mitochondrial and peroxisomal enzymes whose activities are required for the de novo biosynthesis of glutamate and glutamine. The RTG-target genes are also regulated by a mitochondria-to-nucleus signaling pathway, termed the retrograde response pathway, that is induced when mitochondrial respiratory function is impaired. The aims of this project are three-fold. First, the pathway by which TOR regulates RTG target gene expression will be elucidated. Research underlying this project has determined that TOR acts in part by regulating the nucleocytoplasmic localization of a transcription factor complex, composed of the Rtg1 and Rtg3 proteins. Thus, the research will examine a number of proteins that may provide a link between TOR and this important regulatory step. Second, functional genomic approaches will be used to determine the extent of cross talk and or overlap between TOR and retrograde signaling. Third, novel regulators of RTG target gene expression will be identified and partitioned into the TOR and or retrograde branches of this signaling pathway. Together, these studies will help elucidate the molecular mechanisms by which TOR regulates the activity of an essential metabolic pathway. Moreover, we will learn how TOR collaborates with another important intracellular signaling mechanism to maintain the normal metabolic behavior of cells doc16691 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Arizona State University will acquire a Matrix-assisted Laser Desorption Ionization - Time of Flight (MALDI-TOF) Mass Spectrometer. This instrument will facilitate research in a number of areas: a) the synthesis of organic compounds, including large porphyrin-based complexes; b) characterization of intermediates and products involved in the biosynthesis of the glycosylated carotenoid myxoxanthophyll; c) characterization of proteins that have undergone posttranslational modifications; d) characterization of synthetic DNA binding polypeptides; and e) proteomics study on extracellular enzymes that degrade phenolic comopounds. Matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization (MALDI) time-of-flight (TOF) mass spectrometry is the technique of choice for obtaining accurate molecular weights on molecules up to and over 300,000 daltons, with extremely high sensitivity. Use of a MALDI-TOF mass spectrometer has therefore become a standard technique in most DNA protein core facilities. The ability to obtain very accurate molecular weights of biomolecules is fundamental to all biological and biomedical research and essential in a modern research and training environment doc16692 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop a digital video surveillance system prototype. Over the past few years, video surveillance systems have been moving from analog to digital. The success of a digital video surveillance system depends on three key enabling technologies: compression, search and retrieval and network transmission. Existing commercial systems generally use standard video compression techniques, which often result in higher memory and bandwidth requirements and jerky object motion. In current video search and retrieval, the existing systems offer only search-by-time and no search-by-content. In network transmission, today s systems use relatively simple techniques that tend to make remote monitoring slow and sluggish. The company is using a highly efficient compression algorithm that exploits the special characteristics of surveillance video and is based on a segmentation technique. This technique, when applied to video search and retrieval, leads to search-by-content, which is more efficient and effective in practical applications. Finally the proposed system will employ fast network transport protocols and scalability techniques to make remote monitoring faster, uninterrupted by network traffic surges, and to allow display on a range of user devices. This digital video surveillance system can be used to maintain the security of banks, airports, government buildings, corporate sites, homes, and small businesses. It can also be used to monitor the performance and operating conditions of machines and equipment doc16693 none Understanding the role that infectious diseases play in natural communities is a key question in community ecology. Host-pathogen interactions, perhaps more so than other types of interactions (e.g. predator-prey & competition), are largely determined by the physiological condition of the host. To gain a predictive understanding of the impact that infection may have on host population dynamics requires a detailed understanding of host physiology and immunology. Freshwater wetlands are primary habitat for snails serving as intermediate hosts for a variety of helminthic parasites including digenetic trematodes. Trematodes are responsible for hundreds of thousands of cases of human disease each year (e.g., schistosomiasis) and have been linked with developmental abnormalities in amphibians. Amphibian deformities, in particular those related to limb development, have now been reported throughout North America. The widespread nature and apparent increase in the prevalence of deformities has lead to substantial interest from scientists and the general public. While preliminary laboratory experiments suggest that infection by trematodes can cause some deformities, researchers have pointed out that there is a need for more fieldwork to evaluate the association in nature. In addition, some research has suggested that land use changes in wetlands, such as increased eutrophication and altered hydrology, may precipitate outbreaks of deformities by increasing abundance of intermediate hosts (snails). We propose to examine the role of the host s hormonal response to land use changes (environmental stress) in terms of how it can regulate disease susceptibility. The proposed project will complement an ongoing study examining how land use changes affect snail (intermediate host) abundance and therefore influence amphibian infection rates. This proposal will add significantly to our knowledge of how free-living animals respond physiologically to anthropogenic land use changes, and the data generated on host susceptibility will add significantly to the development of a predictive model for disease outbreak in this host parasite system doc16694 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Miranda Warburton and the Society for American Archaeology will expand their Arthur C. Parker fellowship program which provides archaeological training for Native Americans and Native Hawaiians. Currently the fellowship provides $3,000 yearly to permit one student to participate in a summer archaeological field school or similar training activity. The NSF award allow an additional three awards to be made each year for a total of five years. Thus an additional 15 individuals will be supported. The program is administered by the Society for American Archaeology which has established rules for the competition, organizes evaluation of proposals and selects the awardees. The Society also widely announces the availability of these funds. The most immediate goals of the fellowship are to encourage Native Americans and Hawaiians to pursue archaeological careers and also to gain insight and understanding which will be useful to the communities in which they reside. Native Americans and Hawaiians are under-represented in the ranks of professional archaeologists and in part this is because of lack of familiarity with the field. Unfortunately Native American and Hawaiian communities are often at odds with archaeologists over who should control cultural remains and how these should be treated. In good measure this situation results from lack of mutual understanding in both communities. It is essential for the future of archaeology in America that links between the two groups be strengthened and that a corps of individuals who are familiar with both worlds be developed. The Society for American Archaeology program should help to accomplish these goals doc16695 none The long-range objective of this research is to develop a fundamental description of protein interactions and the mechanisms by which these interactions elicit long-range cooperative effects existing at the core of signaling processes. The goal of this project is to study the interactions of the HIV protein Nef with Lck and Fyn SH3 domains. The following issues will be addressed: 1) The coupling of binding affinity to long range cooperative effects. The proline-rich Nef peptide, the conserved core of Nef, and full length Nef, all bind to SH3 with similar binding affinity but different thermodynamics (different enthalpy entropy balance; 2) The structural stabilization of Nef by inter-domain interactions; 3) The coupling of binding and inter-domain interactions. These studies will involve a combination of approaches such as experimental thermodynamics (isothermal titration calorimetry and differential scanning calorimetry), hydrogen deuterium exchange studies, statistical thermodynamic analysis and structure-based thermodynamic computations. The identification and separation of interactions that contribute to binding affinity and cooperative effects from those contributing to binding affinity only, will permit the design of ligands that elicit variable cooperative effects and are able to better modulate protein function. Cells are not bags containing different biological macromolecules performing their function in a random and chaotic fashion. On the contrary, biological macromolecules are tightly regulated by an intricate net of interactions. Different macromolecules communicate with each other through interactions among themselves or with small molecules. These interactions provide the foundation to all the regulatory processes found within living organisms. The long-range objective of this project is to develop a fundamental description of protein interactions and the mechanisms by which these interactions elicit the responses existing at the core of signaling processes doc16608 none The climate of southern California is a Mediterranean-type, characterized by mild winters, protracted summer drought, and periodic wildfire. The dominant vegetation is chaparral, which is uniquely adapted to summer dehydration and fires. There are three strategies by which chaparral survive and persist through periodic fire: non-sprouters after fire, facultative sprouters after fire, and obligate sprouters after fire. We hypothesize that these three strategies are coupled to dehydration tolerance. We will estimate dehydration tolerance by determining the threshold in dehydration that causes the water transport system of plants to fail. This failure is caused by xylem embolism formation under severe water stress, that is, when the plumbing system (xylem conduits) of plants become blocked by air bubbles, cutting off water flow to leaves, leading to shoot death. The primary objective of our research is to elucidate the mechanisms linking xylem functional traits to life history type among diverse species of chaparral shrubs. We hypothesize that there are trade-offs among xylem embolism-resistance, xylem conductivity efficiency and xylem mechanical strength and these depend on the three life history strategies that chaparral species have in response to wildfire. Issues related to recurrent wildfire, water conservation, erosion control, urban expansion and recreation are more pronounced in regions of chaparral than in any other type of wild land in California. Results from the research will be disseminated widely to local agencies responsible for management and conservation of natural resources in the Santa Monica Mountains, and to educational groups including docents for the State Park Service and the National Park Service. The findings will allow generalizations to the broader chaparral community of California and to the other four Mediterranean-type climate regions of the world. Results from the proposed work will refine predictions of expected shifts in chaparral distribution and community structure over the next century in response to an anticipate climate change to a warmer, drier California with increased episodic Santa Ana winds and wildfire doc16697 none This research has two immediate objectives and both rely on a novel approach to the study of peptide helicities. This tool consists of a series reporting conformational templates(RTC s) that can be linked to a peptide at its N-terminus to initiate a helix and monitor its stability. The first objective of this project is the design, testing, and optimization of new capping structures that can be linked to both N and C-termini of peptides to substantially stabilize their helical conformations. The second objective is to define rigorously the functional dependence of fractional helicity on the experimental value of the circular dichroism ellipticity [theta]222 measured for the peptide at 222 nm. NMR methods applied to RCT-peptide conjugates will be used to calibrate [theta]222 definitively. With this renewal award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Daniel S. Kemp of the Department of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The work aims at a complete description at a chemical level of the folding process for the important case of folded peptide helices. Folding in water can convert a highly flexible linear polypeptide, defined by its ordered, linked sequence of particular amino acids, into a compact, relatively rigid structure that can bind tightly to other biomolecules. Understanding the structures and energetics of the folded forms of proteins and shorter polypeptides is a fundamental problem of modern structural biology and bioorganic chemistry. Helices provide key structural subunits formed by local peptide sequences within most globular proteins. Moreover the docking of folded, helical signal peptides to proteins found at cell surfaces have been shown recently to control growth of abnormal cells found in a significant number of human disease states. Success with the objectives of this proposal is expected not only to allow a better predictive understanding of these docking events but also to provide hitherto unavailable practical methods for tuning, controlling and inhibiting such signal processes. The potential relevance to improvements in cancer diagnosis and treatment is significant doc16698 none Plants synthesize two major groups of carotenoids: carotenes, which are cyclized or uncyclized hydrocarbons (e.g. lycopene and beta carotene), and xanthophylls, which are variously oxygenated derivatives of carotenes (e.g. lutein and zeaxanthin). Carotene hydroxylases (OHases) add hydroxyl groups to the rings of cyclic carotenes and are essential for the synthesis of all xanthophylls in plants. This proposal performs a detailed analysis of carotene hydroxylases in plant tissues by isolating genes defining specific carotene hydroxylases and modifying the expression of one or more activity by mutant analysis. The consequences of such modifications on carotenoid and xanthophyll synthesis and composition in photosynthetic tissues will provide important insights into the role of each enzyme in the pathway and the consequences of pathway engineering in food crops. Given the importance of carotenes as antioxidants in the human diet and the role(s) of carotenoids in decreasing the incidence and progression of macular degeneration, various cancers and vitamin A deficiency in certain subgroups of the global population, a further understanding of the enzymes involved in carotenoid and xanthophyll synthesis may have beneficial impacts on the overall health of the population doc16699 none Michael P. Matise One of the greatest challenges to modern biology is to understand how complex, multi-cellular organisms such as humans develop from a single cell, the fertilized egg. This single egg, the zygote, has virtually unlimited potential to generate all the millions of different cell types that are found in an adult mammal. However, during development, the potential of cells becomes increasingly restricted as cell division and growth differentiate cells from one another in the adult organism. One important mechanism that appears to distinguish cells from one another during embryonic development involves secreted signalling molecules that provide spatial information which is critical for establishing their position and hence their specific function or fate in the mature organism. One such signalling molecule is known as Sonic Hedgehog. Sonic Hedgehog activates a cascade of responses in cells that receive this signal. A family of genes that have a central role in interpreting Sonic Hedgehog-supplied positional information are known as Gli genes. Studies in the fruitfly have provided important insights into the mechanisms by which Gli family proteins transduce the Sonic Hedgehog signal. In addition, mutations in Sonic Hedgehog and downstream genes, including Gli, have recently been implicated in cancers. This proposal seeks to utilize mouse genetics in order to explore the function of Gli genes in the development of the central nervous system. Some of the experiments proposed are designed to test whether aspects of the model for the role of Gli proteins in Sonic Hedgehog signalling developed in fruitflies are applicable to mammals. By addressing basic issues relating to the regulation of this pathway, a greater understanding of the development of the central nervous system will be gained. These insights will also provide valuable insights to our understanding of the mechanisms of cancers that involve Sonic Hedgehog and Gli gene abnormalities doc16700 none Professor Kathy Rowlen of the University of Colorado-Boulder is funded by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program to use confocal microscopy and nonlinear spectroscopy to study thin organic films. The goal is to learn how thin films deposit on surfaces. Three experiments are being performed: the optical properties of films from sub-monolayer to multilayer will be measured, the spatial resolution of second harmonic generation and other optical methods will be increased, and dip-pen-nanolithography is used for producing well defined nanopatterns of optically interesting dyes. Optical microscopy is required rather than average measurements because inhomogeneities on the nanoscale can govern orientations and domain growth of thin films. Such studies are required to understand the deposition of oligonucleotides and proteins which are used for microarrays and lab-on-a-chip formats. Fundamental research on film deposition serves as an example of how basic research in chemistry can enable advances in human health. The students will learn both measurement considerations and surface science doc16652 none Knowledge of brain structure is essential to understand brain function. The evolution of mammals has resulted in many differences in brain anatomy, but we know very little about how those differences correlate to the wide diversity of animal behavior. This collaborative project is to consolidate and make more accessible for research and education two major collections that form a unique, extensive, remarkably preserved assembly of mammalian brain specimens for comparative and evolutionary studies. Together they contain more than 275 sectioned and stained brains, including over a half million microscope slides, representing over 150 species, from 50 families in 17 different orders of Mammalia. Many specimens are irreplaceable, from rare or endangered species, and provide critically unique data for questions about biodiversity and evolution as well as neuroscience. The collections are being brought to a national museum facility in Washington DC to join complementary extensive human brain collections and establish a single site with long-term stability for storage, curation, and research on comparative mammalian brain neuroanatomy. An electronic website is being developed for worldwide access to images. Researchers can use the images directly, or decide whether to visit the museum itself to examine the original preserved biological material. The impact of this project is high. First, it safely preserves for future research an irreplaceable resource that represents a scientific investment of more than 50 years of exacting work by dozens of people. Second, it promotes multidisciplinary research on comparative neuroscience, behavior, evolution and systematics to understand the diversity in the most complex organ known. Third, using technology of digital imaging and multidimensional databases, it provides a working base as well as a model for how to handle and share complex morphological data with other collections, including those on non-mammalian vertebrate brains. Fourth, the project will continue to have educational impact by providing easy website access for schools and informal science education about the vertebrate brain in the context of biodiversity doc16702 none The importance of chloroplast-encoded genes for plant growth and productivity is unquestionable, yet surprisingly, many aspects of molecular biology and biochemistry of the organelle, such as the control of chloroplast development and intracellular communication of signals related to this process are only poorly understood. The sequencing of several higher plant plastomes has provided valuable information of types and number of genes that are encoded by ctDNA and has greatly increased our knowledge of organellar gene regulation on the transcriptional and translational level. On the other hand, higher-level structural determinants that very likely have profound effects on the expression of plastome-encoded genes are essentially unknown. Since the plastome is associated with proteins that condense the multiple genome copies into compact complexes termed nucleoids, rearrangements of nucleoids must occur to allow transcription, replication, recombination and repair to take place. While nucleoid protein composition is known to change with plastid development, the molecular details of these remodeling events and the way(s) in which they affect the fundamental aspects of plastid nucleic acid metabolism are unknown. This project addresses the molecular basis of nucleoid structure and function by studying expression and regulation of interaction with DNA of a major structural protein of plastid nucleoids. Through a combined genetic, biochemical and cell biological approach, the biological significance of the association of DCP68 SiR with the plastid nucleoid will be assessed. DCP68 SiR appears to be a bifunctional plastid protein that fulfills dual roles in the organelle as a nucleoid constituent and an enzyme of the sulfate reduction pathway that leads to the biosynthesis of cysteine and other sulfur-containing metabolites. Because of the intriguing possibility that regulation of nucleoid structure and function is connected with that of the assimilatory sulfur metabolism, the results from this study will contribute to an understanding of the molecular processes and regulatory strategies in the plant cell that govern organellar development and function. The study will begin to elucidate the contribution of nucleoid structure in regulating plastid gene expression and plastome transmission and maintenance, and will thereby aid future efforts to develop efficient plastome genetic manipulation strategies. The photosynthetic organelles (chloroplasts) of plant cells contain their own genetic material (DNA) that encodes many products of great importance for plant growth and productivity. Chloroplast DNA is bound to proteins that condense it into so-called nucleoids whose structure and, presumably, function, change during plant growth and development. This project addresses the effects chloroplast DNA-compacting proteins have on the ability of the organelle s DNA to provide a template for duplication and for information retrieval. The study focuses on the chloroplast nucleoid protein DCP68, which condenses DNA and plays the additional role in the chloroplast of converting sulfur minerals to a form that is usable by the plant. The study will examine how environmental and internal signals affect the interaction between DCP68 and chloroplast DNA and might connect nucleoid structure and function with other metabolic aspects of the organelle doc16703 none Research into the structure of yeast chromosomes and the mechanisms and control of their replication and segregation continues at a rapid pace. To bring together scientists working in this area, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) will sponsor the seventh convening of the research conference Yeast Chromosome Structure, Replication and Segregation to be held June 28-July 3, , at Snowmass Village, Colorado. The goal is to provide a forum where members of all subdisciplines studying the metabolism, structure and behavior of yeast chromosomes can meet to exchange ideas. This conference has a strong tradition of presenting primarily unpublished results and is attended by most of the leaders in the field. Principal investigators are present for, and actively participate in, the entire meeting. This small conference provides a good balance of students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior and senior researchers, with an informal atmosphere that contributes greatly to interactions between younger and older scientists. This is the only conference that is specifically devoted to this topic and brings together its diverse subdisciplines. Integration across research fields has become ever more critical, and assembling experts from separate but related fields provides a unique opportunity for the intellectual cross-fertilization, insight and understanding that can lead to discoveries beneficial to all society doc16704 none Bergen, Kathleen University of Michigan - Ann Arbor BDEI: Radar Remote Sensing of Habitat Structure for Biodiversity Informatics Project Mapping for biodiversity informatics requires information on habitat so that known species occurrences may be extrapolated to maps of potential species occurrences. That is, given the conversion of known specimen locations into maps, how can we best predict where additional individuals or populations of that species may occur? In the context of landscape ecology, landscape structure - its multi-dimensional components - is a primary basis for habitat preferences of bird species. Vegetation spatial composition, heterogeneity, variability, and scale are among the variables contributing to the horizontal structure, while vegetation height, layering, and biomass are examples of variables in the volumetric dimension. Combined together these variables, and others, describe the real multi-dimensional structure of habitat doc16705 none The cichlid fishes of the Great Lakes of East Africa are a classic example of rapid adaptive radiation. Hundreds of species of these fishes have evolved from a common ancester in the past one million years. Their rapid speciation is thought to result in part from sexual selection, in which female mate preferences drive the evolution of male color patterns. As male color patterns change to better match the preferences of females, fish with these new color patterns become new species which no longer interbreed with fish having the old color patterns. In order to understand how this happens, we need to know how cichlids choose mates. This requires an understanding of t he visual sensitivities of these fish and whether visual sensitivities differ among species. This project will examine several aspects of visual communication in the cichlid fishes of Lake Malawi, Africa. First, we will quantify the diversity of visual sensitivities in a broad range of cichlid species by sequencing the five cone opsin genes and measuring their relative expression levels in the retina. We already know that some Malawi cichlids are sensitive to ultraviolet wavelengths while others are not. This survey will determine whether ultraviolet sensitivity is widespread in this group and how it evolved. Second, we will measure the hues of cichlid color patterns as compared to their natural environment. This will determine whether color patterns also contain significant contributions in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum. Third, we will relate the visual system and color patterns in order to determine the conspicuousness of the color patterns as seen through cichlid eyes. These studies will be related to ecological or behavioral factors to determine whether color usage is modified in different localities or under different social situations. We will also examine the importance of water quality and optical transmission for visual communication. Lake Malawi has historically been one of the clearest lakes in the world. Maintaining its clarity may be an important factor in preserving the spectacular diversity of these fishes. The proposed effort will provide important scientific contributions to our understanding of how species diversity arises and is maintained. In addition, this work will integrate biological and physical approaches to understanding visual communication. It will also support the scientific training of a minority graduate student who will be fully funded by this project doc16706 none One of the most fascinating and important properties of living systems is their ability to cope with physical damage. This property is manifest in both single cells and multicellular systems, and is broadly conserved not only in a number of different animal phyla, but in plants as well. Because of its obvious clinical importance, multicellular wound healing has long been the subject of intense scrutiny. In contrast, repair of plasma membrane wounds in single cells has been overlooked until relatively recently. At least two mechanisms have been described: an extremely rapid membrane fusion event that provides an immediate block to the inrush of ions that would otherwise kill the cell, and a slower contractile response in which a circumferential ring of actin filaments and myosin-2 assembles around the wound and then closes. The primary goal of this project is to characterize the mechanisms that regulate assembly and closure of this ectopic contractile ring. Using Xenopus oocytes as a model system, a combination of physical, microscopic, and recombinant DNA-based approaches will be employed to test relationships between cell tension, local increases in rho class GTPase activity, and intracellular free calcium, in the recruitment of actin filaments and myosin-2 to the wound border. In addition to providing information directly relevant to the basic biological process of repair of damage to the plasma membrane, the proposed studies have the potential to provide insights into processes which resemble ectopic contractile ring assembly and closure, such as animal cell cytokinesis doc16707 none Hanna-Rose The long-term goal of the Hanna-Rose laboratory is to elucidate the molecular mechanisms that direct organogenesis. The focus of the proposed research is a detailed investigation of the role of the cog-2 gene and of a specific cell-cell fusion in promoting proper attachment of the C. elegans uterus and vulva. cog?2 encodes a Sox (SRY-related HMG box) family transcription factor that is expressed in a specific cell of the uterus called the uterine seam cell (utse). The utse normally executes a developmentally programmed cell fusion to another gonadal cell called the anchor cell. This cell-cell fusion promotes formation of an open channel between the uterus and the vulva in a late stage of organogenesis. In the absence of cog-2 function, utse cell fate is induced but fusion to the anchor cell (AC) is not executed. The aims of the proposed research are to determine whether COG-2 acts to regulate fusion directly or affects fusion indirectly through an effect on utse cell fate, to identify and characterize additional genes involved in AC-utse fusion, and to identify COG-2 binding partners. Results are expected to elucidate mechanisms whereby COG-2 functions. This will also shed light on potential regulatory targets for vertebrate Sox proteins. Furthermore, the results are expected to increase our understanding of how the formation of a proper connection between two organs is genetically programmed and to promote the development of tools for probing the mechanism of cell fusion doc16708 none This project will investigate the fluid dynamics of crossflow filtration in suspension-feeding fishes such as menhaden, anchovy, and carp. These fishes filter massive volumes of water to extract suspended food particles that are as small as 5 micrometer to 1 mm in diameter. Although they comprise approximately 25% of the world fish catch and have filtration efficiencies approaching those of industrial filters, the mechanisms that they use to trap their tiny prey remain largely unknown. A miniature fiberoptic endoscope has been used recently to observe particle movement inside the oral cavities of live suspension-feeding fishes. These data, combined with computational fluid dynamics simulations in fish oral cavities, have led to the development of a new model involving crossflow filtration in suspension-feeding fishes. Although crossflow filtration is a multi-billion dollar industry for the manufacture of products that we use every day (e.g., dairy products, beer and wine, pharmaceuticals), this filtration mechanism had not been recognized previously in any vertebrate. During crossflow filtration in fishes, particles are concentrated inside the oral cavity as filtrate exits between the gill rakers, but particles are not retained on the rakers. Instead, the high-velocity crossflow along the rakers carries particles away from the raker surfaces and transports the particles towards the esophagus. Equations from the industrial filtration engineering literature could be used to calculate the hydrodynamic forces on particles and the resulting particle velocities and trajectories during crossflow filtration in fishes. However, values that are appropriate for suspension-feeding fishes must be used in place of the variables in the equations. The empirical data needed for the first quantitative analysis of biological crossflow filtration will be provided by laboratory experiments involving sonomicrometry, pressure transduction, fiberoptic endoscopy, high-speed video, and flow velocity measurement with micro-thermistor probes. This analysis will provide insight into the process of crossflow filtration as it determines the sizes and densities of particles that suspension-feeding fishes retain. The study will engage undergraduate and Masters students in interdisciplinary research that has important ecological, evolutionary, and engineering implications doc16709 none The structure of hybrid zones depends on the interaction of natural selection and dispersal. Simple models using different forms of natural selection have been generated to explain the structure and maintenance of hybrid zones. However, field studies have shown that natural selection can be very complex and that an understanding of hybrid zones cannot be obtained through simple models. It is necessary to determine the agent of natural selection and the ecological circumstances under which it operates to understand how hybrid zones are formed and maintained. This study proposes to determine the selective forces operating in a hybrid zone formed between two species of marine mussels. Results from a previous grant demonstrated that the two species differed in their physiological capacity to tolerate elevated silt. One possible adaptation to elevated silt is increased mobility so that the animal can move and avoid smothering. This adaptation may be detrimental in open coast environments where silt concentrations are low and mussels may be dislodged by exposure to increased wave action. Mussels that are more mobile may be exposed to greater wave action if they migrate to the top of mussel beds or into other locations where they are more likely to be dislodged. This study will test the hypothesis that these two species of mussels differ in their behavioral adaptations to silt and that these differences result in strong natural selection against the more mobile species in open coast environments doc16710 none Manley During embryonic development the pharyngeal endoderm forms a series of pharyngeal pouches in many, if not all chordates. The pharyngeal pouches develop into a diverse array of specialized structures in different organisms. For example, the pharyngeal pouches form gills in many invertebrate and vertebrate species, while in terrestrial animals, the pouches form pharyngeal organs, such as the thymus, but do not form gills. Recent work from the P.I. s laboratory suggests that in mice, Hoxa3 expression in the 3rd pharyngeal pouch endoderm is required for both initiation of thymus organogenesis and suppression of gill formation. Hoxa3 is also required to up regulate the Pax1 9 genes in the 3rd pouch endoderm. The proposed experiments will test the hypothesis that the expression of Hoxa3 in the pharyngeal pouch endoderm in higher vertebrates modifies Pax1 9 gene expression, resulting in the development of different pharyngeal pouch-derived structures in different vertebrate species. The proposed studies will use 3 different vertebrate species, the lamprey, zebrafish, and mouse, representing a range of vertebrate body plans. Specific aim 1 will determine whether Hox3 and Pax1 9 gene expression patterns in the pharyngeal region in these three species can be correlated with differences in pharyngeal morphogenesis and organogenesis. The second aim will test whether zfHoxa3a is required for thymus formation in the zebrafish, as it is in mouse. In aim 3, misexpression of the lamprey, zebrafish, and mouse Hox3 genes will test whether Hox3 proteins from all of these species can induce an ectopic thymus and or block gill formation. The fourth aim will use gene targeting to knock-in the lamprey Hox3 and zebrafish zfHoxa3a gene sequences to the mouse Hoxa3 locus, thereby determining to what extent these genes can substitute functionally for mouse Hoxa3. The experiments in Aims 3 and 4 will test whether there has been an acquisition of new functions by the Hoxa3 protein during vertebrate evolution. The results from the proposed studies will provide evidence for possible mechanisms by which vertebrates have evolved newer functions, such as adaptive immunity, from evolutionarily ancient embryonic structures. In addition, these studies may provide molecular insights into the loss of gills in air-breathing vertebrates doc16711 none Ma Mammalian implantation is an essential step during early embryonic development and involves the synchronization of endocrine, paracrine, and cellular events which confers uterine receptivity to the early embryo. However, very little is known about the molecular interactions between implanting blastocysts and the hormonally primed uterus. Two maternally expressed AbdominalB-like homeobox genes, Hoxa-10 and Hoxa-11, have been implicated in the preparation and functioning of the implanting uterus. Mice deficient for Hoxa-10 exhibit reduced female fertility due to defects in the uterine stroma to confer uterine receptivity. Molecularly, Hoxa-10 functions in a hormonally regulated pathway and likely converges with another implantation pathway involving prostaglandin E2 and its receptors. In addition, both Hoxa-10 and its neighboring gene Hoxa-11 have been shown to be required for hormone-mediated stromal cell proliferation during implantation. Collectively, these results place Hoxa-10 and Hoxa-11 at the top of a hormone-regulated implantation pathway and suggest that these two genes may be responsible for many hormone-induced physiological changes. This grant proposes to test the current model, first by demonstrating in site-specific knockout mice that progesterone directly regulate Hoxa-10 and Hoxa-11 gene expression in vivo during implantation through the two putative progesterone response elements. Second, Dr. Ma will search for candidate target genes controlled by these two transcription factors, with special focus on cell cycle regulatory factors which could mediate hormone-induced cellular proliferation in the implantation uterus. Results from these experiments should contribute substantially to the understanding of the implantation process and will start the process of building a genetic pathway controlling mammalian implantation doc16712 none The goal of this symposium is to assess the role of physiological performance in driving the ecology of populations and communities in a key ecosystem, the rocky intertidal zone. Physiological performance and its genetic determinants have long been considered important determinants of community structure and of species distribution within the intertidal. However, an understanding of how interactions between the physical environment and organismal physiology drive community dynamics has remained elusive. With the advent of new molecular and biochemical techniques, the potential for using physiological indicators of state to address ecological questions is of increasing interest to ecologists. Conversely, physiologists are actively investigating the role of complex environmental signals (as opposed to constant conditions) in influencing organismal physiology. This symposium will bring together researchers from a range of disciplines to educate workers about the potential strengths and limitations of each other s approaches. This symposium has three main goals: (1) to assess the state of knowledge in the field of intertidal physiological ecology, and to determine what questions have yet to be successfully addressed, (2) to introduce ecologists to the strengths, and potential pitfalls, of using physiological indicators of state (e.g., heat shock proteins, RNA:DNA ratios, etc) for examining ecological questions, and (3) to discuss how best to merge studies conducted under necessarily simplified, controlled conditions, with those conducted under more complex, time-varying conditions in the field. This symposium will be hosted by the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) from January 2-6 in Anaheim, California doc16713 none This collaborative proposal describes research that links stream hydrodynamics, turbulent transport of odor signals, and the sensory ecology and behavior of the crayfish Orconectes rusticus. Crayfish use water-borne chemical signals ( odor plumes ) as navigational cues for locating food, burrows, or mates, and for avoiding predators. The nature of the spatial and temporal variability ( structure ) of the odor plumes depends on the hydrodynamic conditions, which, in turn, depends on the physical characteristics of the stream. The goal of the proposed research is to understand how crayfish use odor plumes to locate underwater objects. In particular, we plan to investigate how the crayfish navigational behavior varies under different hydrodynamic conditions (associated with different types of stream substrate materials). By focusing our attention to the changes in odorant structure and associated orientation behavior over different substrate types, we hope to gain insight into the specific algorithms and information cues used by the animals. Ultimately, the knowledge gained from the proposed study could be used to design robotic vehicles to search for dangerous underwater objects, or to protect crayfish habitat in managed ecosystems. Environmentally, crayfish are keystone species for many stream habitats and understanding the physical, biological, and chemical factors that influence their behavior will lead to a broader understanding of stream ecology and the human impact on stream ecology. In particular, detailed knowledge of how stream habitats influence the distribution of chemicals will provide the information necessary to understand not only crayfish and stream ecology, but will help elucidate the physical mechanisms behind pollution transportation in streams and their possible impact on stream ecosystems. The work outlined in this proposal is a collaborative effort between a biologist and engineer that will lead to cross-disciplinary training of both graduate and undergraduate students. In addition, new technical advances will be achieved through the development of high-speed and fine-scale three-dimensional measurements of chemical concentrations in different natural flow regimes. The development and quantification of these techniques will benefit a wide array of fields from oceanography to environmental engineering doc16714 none Early in meiosis, homologous chromosomes pair, exchange, and synapse. Both the number and the location of exchange events are highly regulated in a poorly understood process called crossover control. Crossover control is postulated to be closely related to chromosome compaction, although direct proof of this postulate has been lacking. Mutations that alter the number or the distribution of crossovers have been identified in many organisms, including C. elegans. Recessive mutations in the autosomal gene him-5 reduce the number of crossovers on the X chromosome and alter the distribution of the residual crossovers. Preliminary molecular evidence indicates that the predicted HIM-5 protein has a region of homology to RCC1, a well-known protein involved in chromosome compaction in vertebrates. Direct proof that this gene corresponds to him-5 will be obtained by determining the structure of transcripts from the locus and sequencing these in him-5 mutants. The expression pattern of the gene will be determined in both sexes, and in various mutant strains affecting meiosis and germ-line development. Using immunofluorescence, the location of the HIM-5 protein in the gonad will be determined in order to infer the meiotic processes affected. A closer homologue of RCC1 has also been shown to affect meiosis in C. elegans, but the gene involved has not been studied. Mutations of this gene will be identified and characterized genetically and cytologically. The expression of this gene will be studied as well. Epistatic relationships between this gene and him-5, as well as other meiotic mutants, will be used to clarify the functional relationships among the genes. As RCC1 is well-known in other organisms, the characterization of its role in meiosis in C. elegans could make a direct connection between chromosome structure and crossover control. One familiar genetic manifestation of crossover control is the phenomenon of interference, whereby one crossover prevents the occurrence of a second crossover nearby. Previous work has shown there is extremely high interference in C. elegans, and that most chromosomes have exactly one exchange. Interestingly, all of the known double crossover exceptions had one of the crossovers in a region of the X chromosome known to have other unusual meiotic properties. Genetic mapping experiments, combined with analysis from the genomic sequence, will be used to examine the unusual meiotic properties in this region and to ask if these have a common basis. Undergraduate students under the direction of the principal investigator will conduct all of these experiments. Because meiosis is a fundamental process whose main characteristics have been known for decades, most students are familiar with the basic properties. However, the molecular basis for crossover control is quite obscure. Therefore, the students will be carrying out significant research on a fundamental and familiar process doc16715 none The emphasis of this work is two fold: 1) development of new photochemical reactions and 2) the theoretical as well as experimental understanding of mechanisms of organic photoreactions. On the synthetic organic photochemistry side, several new photochemical rearrangement reactions will be explored as well as some new heterocyclic photochemistry that should lead to a photochemical beta-lactam synthesis. Host-guest or solid state photoreactions which occur within a crystal lattice will continue to be explored. Three different theoretical methods for predicting and modelling organic photochemical processes will also be studied. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Howard E. Zimmerman of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Zimmerman will explore new organic photochemical reactions and work to theoretically predict and model the outcomes of existing photochemical reactions. The photochemical reactions studied will serve as the foundation for new synthetic organic procedures and thus have potential applications for the preparation of antibiotics (particularly the heterocyclic photochemistry to be studied) and other pharmaceuticals. Students educated during the course of this work will be broadly trained in theoretical and experimental organic chemistry and preparative photochemistry and gain skills needed by the pharmaceutical industry doc16716 none The International H20 Project (IHOP) is a multi-investigator, multi-agency program whose chief aim is improved characterization of the four-dimensional distribution of water vapor and its application to improving the understanding and prediction of convection. Program emphasis is on four important research areas: quantitative precipitation forecasting; convective initiation, atmospheric boundary layer processes; and instrumentation testing. Critical to the success of the IHOP is the measurement of wind and thermodynamic values spanning several scales of motion. This will be accomplished with unique and varied instrumentation. To contribute to achieving the goals of IHOP, the Principal Investigators have submitted collaborative proposals. As part of the required IHOP instrumentation suite, the Principal Investigators will deploy the University of Oklahoma Doppler on Wheels (DOW) radars. These radars provide the IHOP researchers with a high resolution instrument for obtaining detailed wind measurements. These measurements have applications to all four IHOP research components. The DOWs will coordinate with both fixed-site and mobile observing platforms to sample with unprecedented data density and resolution the pre-convective environment, including wind and thermodynamic properties within and along boundaries and convergence lines. For their research contribution to the IHOP, the Principal Investigators will analyze these data to elucidate the magnitude of gradients in the water vapor field and the role of the wind field in focusing these inhomogeneities. For example, the Principal Investigators will determine if locally convergent mesoscale circulations along boundaries or intersections between convergence zones, possibly associated with horizontal convective rolls (HCRs), create pockets of high water vapor content. They will further assess the orientation of water vapor gradients with respect to the HCRs. In addition to boundary studies, the Principal Investigators will perform analyses of data collected on days without obvious convergence zones to determine the degree of variability in the water vapor field in the absence of substantial focusing mechanisms. After understanding the nature and degree of water vapor variability in the pre-convective environment further analysis will focus on the relationship of these inhomogeneities to the convective initiation process based on current hypotheses. For example, if pockets of high water vapor content are found to exist, the Principal Investigators will then examine whether deep convection indeed is favored at these locations. They will examine in detail the depth of lifting associated with observed very small scale circulations and convergence zones to determine the transport of water vapor in the boundary layer. The goal is a better understanding of the mechanisms governing water vapor variability in the preconvective environment and the dynamical processes by which this variability is manifested in the convective initiation process doc16717 none The prevalence of water-insoluble compounds in biological systems has driven the evolutionary development of families of hydrophobic ligand carrier proteins. Just as there are carrier proteins that function to solubilize and deliver hydrophobic molecules in the circulatory system (e.g., lipoprotein particles, albumin, etc.), there exists a homologous family of proteins that are found intracellularly. These proteins, which have been termed the fatty acid binding proteins (FABPs), are responsible for the solubilization and delivery of hydrophobic ligands within a cell. The FABPs bind most avidly to fatty acids and retinoids. The signature feature of all FABPs is a Beta-barrel fold forming an internal, water-filled cavity that serves as the ligand-binding domain. A 1:1 non-covalent complex is typically formed between the protein and the ligand and once inside, the ligand is sequestered from the external milieu. The adipocyte FABP (FABP4) has been studied in detail as a model for structure-function relationships of the fatty acid binding proteins. The investigators hypothesize that FABP4 functions to donate insoluble long chain fatty acids to acyl CoA synthetase producing a soluble lipid (acyl CoA). To test this hypothesis, they will: (I) evaluate the effect of FABP4 on the catalytic activity and ligand binding properties of very long chain acyl CoA synthetase and (ii) examine the physical interaction of FABP4 with the acyl CoA synthetase using microcalorimetry and map the interaction site(s doc16718 none When plants are attacked by herbivorous insects, they often respond by producing proteins that protect them from being eaten. We have shown that a unique enzyme, a protease, coded for by the gebe mir1, accumulates in certain insect-resistant corn lines when they are attacked by the fall armyworm caterpillar. We have transferred the gene, mir1, into other plant cells using genetic engineering technology. When caterpillars eat these transgenic plant cells, their growth is retarded by 60 to 80%. It appears that caterpillars feeding on resistant plants or transgenic plant cells cannot use the nutrients in the plant for growth. Our hypothesis is that the protease damages the insect gut and prevents normal nutrient utilization. The purpose of this research project is to determine if the unique corn protease damages specific structures in the insect gut. To test this we will make mutations in mir1 that will change the characteristics of the enzyme. One mutation will eliminate protease activity, the other will remove a unique region of the enzyme. The mutated forms of mir1 will be transferred to plant cells. Transgenic plant cells that express mutated proteases will be fed to caterpillars. Then growth and gut structure of caterpillars fed transgenic plant cells expressing normal and mutated proteases will be assessed. If the protease activity is required to retard caterpillar growth and damage gut structure, then we expect that the normal protease will harm the caterpillars and the mutated forms will not. In addition, we will make pure preparations of the normal and mutated proteases by expressing mir1 and its mutated forms in insect cells. The purified proteases will be directly fed to the caterpillars to determine if they attack the insect gut. If the unique protease does specifically attack the insect gut, it may be possible, in the future, to use mir1 to genetically engineer plants to resist insect feeding doc16719 none It has been possible to construct a human artificial chromosome (HAC) containing the entire unrearranged human heavy and light chain Ig loci and introduce it into a bovine fibroblast. Using advances in the technology of cloning, it has been possible to use these HAC-transgenic fibroblasts to generate bovine fetuses and calves. These cloned transgenic bovines will provide the experimental material for a project that will determine the ability of HAC-borne human Ig loci to undergo rearrangement, Ig expression and the generation of a primary antibody repertoire within the environment of bovine cells. While we hypothesize that a diverse repertoire of human antibodies will be formed in these animals, whether the bovine B lineage environment will support the generation of a diverse repertoire of human antibodies is an open question. There are major differences in the mechanisms and sites used by humans and Bovidae to diversify antibody genes. There is no body of experiment that predicts whether the rearrangement of HAC-borne human Ig loci will be limited, as is true of bovine Ig loci, or extensive, as seen in humans and transgenic mice. This experiment will allow us to investigate the interplay of species-specific cell physiology with the sequences of entire unrearranged immunoglobulin loci in determining the mechanism, extent and sites of immunoglobulin gene diversification. The availability of bovines transgenic for the complete human heavy chain locus and the complete human light chain locus make it possible to examine the compatibility of unrearranged Ig loci from one species with the diversification system of another. Although this question has been explored in genetic chimeras (i.e. human to mouse ) between species that use the same mechanisms and sites of repertoire diversification, it has not been studied in those that do not. The creation of human to bovine Ig locus chimeras provides an opportunity to determine the extent to which human Ig loci can be diversified by a xenogeneic diversification system that employs sites and mechanisms that differ significantly from those of humans. Some of the opportunities presented by the advent of rearrangement of a guest human Ig locus in the bovine B lineage are addressed by the following specific aims: AIM 1: Determine the extent and mechanism of human antibody diversification in HAC-transgenic, cloned cattle. AIM 2: Examine the synthesis, cell surface display and secretion of human immunoglobulin by HAC-transgenic bovine B-lineage cells. AIM 3: Study the humoral immune responses of cloned, HAC-transgenic calves. This study of cloned cattle containing a human artificial chromosome offers an opportunity to determine the effects of transplanting the gene assemblies responsible for human antibody production into cattle. The successful generation of significant amounts of human antibodies has the important implications for basic biology outlined above. Because cattle are large animals that have the potential to produce very large amounts of antibody, these studies could have an impact on the technology of human antibody production for use in the clinic doc16720 none Elegant studies of human and yeast RNA polymerase III (Pol III) transcription machineries have contributed extensively to our current understanding of the mechanism and regulation of gene expression. In contrast, the plant Pol III machinery is virtually undescribed. An in vitro transcription system from whole cell extracts of Arabidopsis thaliana suspension cell cultures has been developed that will permit purification and biochemical analysis of the plant Pol III machinery. This project has the following objectives:1) To assemble a biochemically defined in vitro plant Pol III transcription system capable of transcribing tRNA and other genes; of particular interest are the plant TFIIIC subunits, which are highly divergent between yeast and human, and that differ dramatically in structure and the capacity to acetylate chromatin; and 2) To define whether the plant TFIIIC has histone acetyltransferase (HAT) activity and if so, to determine whether such activity is important for Pol III dependent gene transcription in vitro and in vivo. Approaches that will be used include: 1) capturing the Pol III machinery on tRNALys1 gene fragments immobilized on magnetic beads; and 2) expressing and purifying Pol III machinery from transformed suspension cells. Components will be reconstituted into a robust in vitro system capable of transcribing tRNA genes. A variety of functional assays, in combination with reconstitution experiments, will be used to define the minimal plant Pol III machinery, and the properties conferred on the complex by accessory factors. Components of the plant Pol III and transcription factor complexes will be assayed for HAT activity, known to be important for modifying chromatin. If HAT activity is found, the responsible proteins and domains will be identified, mutated to eliminate the HAT activity, and the mutated proteins expressed in transgenic A. thaliana to assess the consequences of HAT inactivation on in vivo activity of Pol III and on plant growth and development. The results of this project are expected to significantly advance current understanding of gene expression in plants and other eukaryotes, supplying important information and tools for both further basic and applied research in the plant sciences. The project will support educational experiences for undergraduates and for a postdoctoral fellow, and will contribute to the environment responsible for training students for professional careers. These opportunities will be enhanced by institutional and other federal programs also intended to increase the diversity of under-represented scientists in the workforce doc16721 none Andrew Lumsdaine University of Notre Dame Next Generation Software: Open Compilation for Self-Optimizing Generic Components This proposal is to advance the state-of-the-art in high-performance software specifically related tot he design and compilation of high-performance scientific libraries. This work will address two of the most important issues-code complexity and performance optimization-by applying and extending two emerging programming paradigm: generic programming and concept-based optimization. The vehicle for this work will be development of an integrated framework consisting of open compilation and generic library technologies. By simultaneously developing the compilation technologies and the library technologies-and by providing mechanism to couple the two together-the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts doc16722 none Filamentous fungi grow by tip extension, branching and hyphal fusion to form a hyphal network that makes up a fungal individual. Although tip growth and branching have been extensively studied in filamentous fungi, essentially nothing is known about the mechanism of hyphal fusion or the function of the formation of a hyphal network. Studies by this laboratory on the hyphal fusion process using live cell imaging and confocal microscopy in the filamentous fungus, Neurospora crassa, have revealed a complex and carefully regulated biological process with obvious consequences to the fungal individual. Hyphal fusion is a way to increase cytoplasmic flow and interconnectedness of hyphae, which may be important in intra-hyphal communication that influences hyphal pattern formation and developmental processes. Hyphal fusion in filamentous fungi is comparable to cell fusion events in other organisms, such as fertilization events between egg and sperm and somatic cell fusion events that result in syncytia, such as myoblast fusion during muscle differentiation. The hyphal fusion process must be carefully regulated because inappropriate cell wall breakdown would result in lysis of the hyphae. N. crassa is the best filamentous fungus to assess the process and function of hyphal fusion in filamentous fungi because of its tractability for live cell imaging techniques (http: www.neurospora.com ), full genome sequence information (http: www-genome.wi.mit.edu annotation fungi neurospora ), the availability of hyphal fusion mutants, and the ease of genetic and molecular techniques. Preliminary results indicate that a series of signaling events are required for hyphal fusion, one of which is mediated by a map kinase pathway. Hyphal fusion mutants show physiological and developmental defects, suggesting that the failure to form a hyphal network has physiological consequences. The objectives of this project are to characterize hyphal fusion mutants using a combination of live cell imaging via confocal microscopy, and genetic and biochemical analysis to elucidate the mechanism of self-signaling, polarization and membrane fusion. The ultimate goal is to understand how the formation of the hyphal network allows a fungal individual to perform the physiological and developmental processes required to complete its life cycle. Understanding the hyphal fusion process in filamentous fungi will not only reveal the function of the formation of the hyphal network, but will provide a model for cell fusion events in other eukaryotic organisms doc16723 none This project addresses the molecular mechanisms responsible for epigenetic transcriptional silencing in plants. In the unicellular green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, silencing of single-copy transgenes occurs without detectable methylation of the introduced DNA. A WD40-repeat containing protein (Mut11p), with homology to the C-terminal domain of the fungal transcriptional co-repressor Tup1p, is required for this process. Similar proteins are widely distributed among eukaryotes but their function is unknown. Methylation-independent transgene silencing in Chlamydomonas also requires a serine threonine protein kinase (Mut9p) that appears to be specific to the plant kingdom. Both genes are also necessary for the repression of transposable elements, normal cellular growth, and tolerance to radiomimetic agents inducing DNA double strand breaks. Close homologs of Mut9p and Mut11p are encoded in the Arabidopsis thaliana genome, albeit as members of small multigene families. Intriguingly, an analysis of the Arabidopsis EST databases suggests that some genes, in a given family, are expressed preferentially in reproductive tissues. It is tempting to speculate that in multicellular plants some family members are expressed in every cell and play a role in basal cellular functions, such as transposon repression. In contrast, other members may have specialized to regulate specific sets of genes at a certain developmental stage. The immediate goals of the study will include: (1) Characterization of the molecular role(s) of Mut9p and Mut11p in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. This objective will be achieved through the isolation of proteins interacting with the cloned gene products, by a variety of proteomic approaches. The research will also identify potential target loci regulated by the silencing machinery, by an analysis of differential gene expression in mutant and wild-type strains. (2) Characterization of the role(s) of homologs of Mut9p or Mut11p in Arabidopsis development. The expression pattern of all homologs in a given multigene family will be examined at different stages of development. Mutants in genes predominantly expressed in reproductive tissues will be identified by screening T-DNA tagged lines. The phenotype(s) of these mutants is expected to provide information on the possible functional divergence of the various family members. (3) Characterization of one Chlamydomonas mutant (Mut-39), and cloning of the disrupted gene, defective in the transcriptional silencing of multiple copy, methylated transgenes. Since the structure of these transgenes resembles a heterochromatic knob, the findings may contribute to our understanding of heterochromatin components in plants. In eukaryotes, epigenetic processes, which result in heritable changes in gene expression without modifications in DNA sequence, play important roles in the control of development as well as in the cellular responses to viruses, viroids, transposable elements, and transgenes. Thus, understanding the mechanisms of epigenetic gene silencing may provide insights into relatively unexplored but essential features of gene regulation and of defense responses against genomic parasites. These findings may also have practical applications in agriculture and medicine, such as improving transgenic technology or enhancing our understanding of the role that epigenetic phenomena play in malignant diseases such as cancer doc16724 none Sexual reproduction in plants is a dynamic process, and its mechanism and control are complicated. Research into the molecular basis of flowering and fruiting is intellectually intriguing as well as practical in agriculture. Promoting sexual reproduction could enhance the yield of fruits and seeds. Suppressing the process could increase the yield of vegetable produce. Other possible manipulations include utilizing male sterile genes to produce hybrid seeds, generating seedless fruits, and promoting self fertilization. A major step in sexual reproduction is the interaction between the male sperm-containing pollen and the female egg-containing part in the flowers. This interaction is initiated largely by the molecules on the pollen surface. The pollen coat contains water-insoluble lipids and semi-water-soluble proteins as the major constituents. These lipids and proteins originate from subcellular particles in the parental cells enclosing the maturing pollen. The laboratory of Professor Anthony Huang at the University of California at Riverside will study these subcellular particles in Arabidopsis, a model plant of the cabbage family. The studies will emphasize the lipid and protein constituents in terms of their selective degradation and retention, their transport to and deposition on the pollen surface, and their function in the pollination and fertilization process. Arabidopsis mutants deficient in the lipids and proteins will be employed to dissect this parent-to-pollen pathway. The results will delineate the mechanism of the control that the parental cells have over pollen maturation, especially on the pollen coat formation. They will also define the functions of the abundant lipids and proteins in the pollen coat in pollination, pollen germination, and tube penetration into the stigma doc16725 none Eukaryotic cells have developed elaborate signal transduction pathways to respond to changes in their environment. The phosducin-family of proteins is believed to play a role in cellular signaling. This family consists of phosducin (Pd), which is expressed principally in the retina and pineal gland, and phosducin-like protein (PhLP), which is found in almost all tissues and cell types. Both Pd and PhLP bind to G proteins and other effectors. Pd and PhLP are regulators of G protein signaling pathways. Recent evidence suggests that Pd and PhLP also have other functions in the cell. Both have been found to interact with the SUG1 subunit of the 26S proteasome. Immunoprecipitation experiments and mass spectrometry identify proteins that co-immunoprecipitate with PhLP. These include subunits of the cytosolic chaperonin complex containing TCP1 1 (CCT). This chaperone is required for the folding of actin and tubulin and several other proteins. Thus, CCT is required for eukaryotic cell to produce essential protein products in their native state. PhLP binding inhibits the ability of CCT to fold these proteins. This research will elucidate the interaction of PhLP with CCT and investigate its physiological role in regulating CCT activity. The specific objectives are: 1) To test the hypothesis that PhLP is a physiological negative regulator of CCT activity; 2) To determine the mechanism of PhLP protein degradation and its role in regulating CCT activity; 3) To biochemically characterize the interaction between PhLP and CCT. The methodology includes a variety of biochemical and molecular biological techniques including gene silencing, analysis of site-directed mutants and chimeric proteins, cross-linking studies, immunological methods and mass-spectrometric approaches to elucidate PhLP functions and interactions. This study explores a totally novel function of PhLP and a unique mechanism that regulates CCT activity. Thus, it has the potential to forward our understanding of the regulation of protein folding in a major way as well as to elucidate the regulation and processing of proteins necessary for cell survival. This project also provides a research experience for undergraduates since a unique opportunity exists for undergraduate researchers to participate in this significant research project doc16726 none We know very little how evolution produces new species adapted to particular ecological niches. This project is to study two closely related species, one diurnal and the other nocturnal. The nocturnal animal has more rods for night vision, fewer cones, a bigger eye and a different eye conformation than the diurnal one. How many and what kind of genetic changes produce this constellation of differences? We hypothesize that a relatively simple change, an alteration of when maximal cell proliferation occurs to favor rods over cones in the nocturnal species, is the essential genetic change, and the rest of the alterations in eye conformation are epigenetic as eye growth patterns fall under the control of rods. To test this, we bring the together the expertise of three laboratories. The Finlay lab at Cornell University has developed the quantitative techniques for comparing the developmental schedules and morphologies of different animals; the Cepko lab at Harvard Medical School has pioneered studies of cell proliferation and differentiation of the eye; the Silveira lab of the Federal University of Para, Amazonia, Brazil has produced the fundamental descriptions of the visual systems of these species. We will investigate the development of the retina and the eye in both species, looking at the expression of developmental control genes, regulators of the cell cycle, and markers of cell type to see exactly what has changed between the two. At the heart of the project lies the question whether genes, over evolutionary time, have produced coordinated patterns in response to repeatedly encountered challenges like the shift from diurnal to nocturnal living. As a multi-institutional international collaboration, this project has special features. The universities of the north of Brazil struggle economically, so this project provides a link for the researchers and students of Amazonia to new technologies, research resources and ideas. All of the students, North American and Brazilian, benefit from the exposure to different educational systems and expectations; we plan to provide more formal means for student exchange in the near future. Financial support for the animal center is also very important: in addition to its role as a research facility and breeding colony, the center serves as a cachement center for animals confiscated by poachers and those endangered by natural or man-made ecological challenges doc16727 none Legume plants like alfalfa, soybean and peanut, can obtain the nitrogen compounds needed for growth through a symbiotic association with nitrogen-fixing bacteria. These bacteria are able to take relatively inert dinitrogen gas from the atmosphere and biochemically convert it into a more useful form. This conversion has a cost-the bacteria require plant-derived carbon compounds that can be metabolized to obtain energy for the nitrogen fixation reactions and a microaerobic environment in which the biochemistry can occur. It is thought that the bacteria receive a major fraction of their nutrition in the form of dicarboxylic acids and their ability to import dicarboxylic acids using the bacterial DctA protein has been shown to be essential to bacterial nitrogen-fixation. After traversing a plant membrane, dicarboxylic acids are imported by symbiotic bacteria using the DctA dicarboxylate transporter, a member of a glutamate transporter family of proteins better known for their role in neurotransmitter metabolism. In free-living growth, DctA can transport a number of physiologically important compounds, including malate, fumarate, succinate, aspartate and oxaloacetate. It is unclear how important each of these is in symbiosis. Mutations of the Sinorhizobium meliloti DctA protein will be isolated that have altered specificity or affinity for the different substrates in order to discover more about the transport properties of DctA. Various mutant isolation strategies will be used, including isolation of functional mutants resistant to a toxic DctA substrate, mutants with higher transport rates with dicarboxylic acids for which DctA has low affinity, and mutants able to compete well for limiting amounts of dicarboxylic acids. Transport properties of the mutants will be determined and, in addition, the mutants will be tested on their alfalfa host plants for the ability to support symbiotic nitrogen fixation. In this way, the mutants function as in vivo probes of nodule function. Analysis of the mutants should contribute to the understanding of the relationship of DctA sequence to substrate recognition and thus provide a novel view into one class of this important family of transport proteins doc16728 none Eukaryotic genomes are more than just the sum of their genes. The chromosomal context of genes is important and certain chromosomal parts, including the centromeres, telomeres and rDNA regions, serve structural as well as coding roles in the cell. Several lines of evidence indicate that the chromatin structure of centromeric, telomeric and rDNA regions is more condensed than most chromosomal regions and that this heterochromatic chromatin causes gene silencing. The inactivated X chromosome in women represents an example of gene silencing by heterochromatin. Centromeric, telomeric, and rDNA provide excellent models to identify critical differences between alternative forms of chromatin. Parallels are emerging among organisms whose heterochromatic regions have been studied to date (principally yeasts and Drosophila) but significant differences have also been detected. The current project will broaden our understanding of the silencing that characterizes heterochromatic sequences by taking advantage of a model eukaryote, the filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa. The study builds on the well developed genetics of this organism and the recent availability of the nearly complete sequence of its genome. Efficient genetic approaches will be used to identify the important players in the cell that result in the formation, and normal function of, heterochromatin. Reporter genes will be placed in telomeric, centromeric and rDNA regions of Neurospora chromosomes by homologous recombination in a strain bearing a mutation in a silencer gene, nst-1. The resulting strains will be used as transformation hosts to test candidate genes for involvement in heterochromatin silencing. This part of the project takes advantage of a dominant post-transcriptional silencing process, quelling, to efficiently screen a large number of genes. Approximately 30 candidate genes identified by homology to genes of other organisms will be screened initially. In addition, novel silencer genes will be sought in a non-redundant set of sequenced cDNA clones. Genes showing evidence of involvement in silencing will be selectively disrupted using RIP (repeat-induced point mutation). Silenced reporter genes will also be used to select new silencing mutants generated by insertional mutagenesis. The mutated DNA will be isolated and sequenced to identify silencer genes. Finally, centromeric, telomeric and rDNA chromatin will be characterized in wildtype Neurospora and in silencing mutants. Both genetic and physical methods will be used to identify the nature of the defect(s) of the silencing mutants. Knowledge gained from this project should both improve our understanding of specific mechanisms of gene silencing and shed light on mechanisms responsible for normal and abnormal chromosome behavior in a variety of eukaryotes. In addition to its scientific merit, this project will serve to train students and to advance the use of Neurospora as a practical model system for functional genomics doc16729 none Ma We are seeking support for the travel costs of speakers invited to participate in the 17th Penn State Symposium in Plant Physiology to be held May 16-18, in State College, Pennsylvania. This symposium is entitled Plant reproduction: from evolutionary and physiological analyses to molecular and cellular studies. Plant reproductive biology has been a subject of great interest and intrigue for many generations. In recent years, there have been very rapid advances in our understanding of plant development not only from molecular genetic studies, but also from evolutionary and physiological analyses. The goal of this meeting is to provide an interdisciplinary forum for leading researchers working in diverse areas of plant reproductive biology to present their recent findings, to share their ideas, and to stimulate each other in discussions. The symposium will bring together about 20 outstanding scientists from around the world, many of whom do not regularly attend the same meetings because of their wide-ranging specialties. In addition to the invited talks, we anticipate having approximately 50 contributed posters summarizing current research by scientists, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students. The results presented at the symposium will be summarized in a meeting report to be published by one of the leading plant journals. This symposium will provide a valuable service to the research community. We are not aware of any other symposia that have considered this topic in such an integrated and comprehensive manner. By bringing together scientists using different approaches to study the problems in plant reproduction, the symposium will facilitate novel collaborations and experimental approaches, and will further stimulate progress in this fast advancing and growing field doc16730 none Xylem is the wood-forming and water-conducting tissue in vascular plants. Xylem is a complex tissue consisting of both living and nonliving cells. The most characteristic xylem cells are the water-conducting tracheary elements. Tracheary elements undergo a remarkable differentiation process that involves extensive secondary cell wall modification, cell suicide and complete autolysis. The complete autolysis that occurs in tracheary elements contrasts with the selective autolysis that occurs during the differentiation of two other vascular tissue cell types, laticifers and sieve elements. Protoplast degradation in tracheary elements is preceded by cell death and the release of vacuolar contents and is dependent on the activity of papain-like cysteine peptidases. XCP1 and XCP2 are Arabidopsis papain-like cysteine peptidases that localize to tracheary elements and are therefore likely to be required for autolysis. XCP1 and XCP2 are also the first recognized orthologs of the best-known laticifer peptidase, papain. As such, they represent the first known genetic link between a complete autolysis program and a selective autolysis program. The selective autolysis program in papaya (Carica papaya) laticifers preserves the plasmalemma and cell turgor but degrades the nucleus and all organelles, replacing them with latex-containing vesicles. For this project, transgenic plants expressing a reporter gene under the control of the XCP1 promoter have been mutatgenized and they are being screened for altered reporter gene expression. Positional cloning from resulting mutants will identify genes required for regulation of autolysis in tracheary elements and that may be relevant to other autolytic programs. XSP1 is an Arabidopsis subtilisin-like serine peptidase that is secreted from tracheary elements. XSP1 is also under investigation for this project. Post-transcriptional gene silencing and gene knockout experiments will be conducted for XCP1, XCP2 and XSP1 to provide direct evidence for their functions in tracheary elements. Electron microscopic immunolocalization of XCP1, XCP2 and XSP1 will also be conducted. Wood formation and latex accumulation are two economically important processes that depend on developmentally programmed autolysis. Revealing the roles of XCP1, XCP2 and XSP1 in the differentiation of tracheary elements may lead to the development of tools for engineering qualitative and quantitative changes in wood. A comprehensive description of subcellular localization for XCP1 and XCP2 compared with published immunolocalization data for orthologous papain from papaya laticifers will yield valuable clues regarding the roles of subcellular trafficking and compartmentation in regulating selective and complete autolysis. The improved understanding of autolysis gained from this project may lead to strategies for induction of selective autolysis as part of an engineered subversion of plant metabolism toward production and packaging of selected polypeptides or other desired metabolites in storage vacuoles that replace all other organelles, such as occurs naturally during differentiation of laticifers in some species doc16731 none Dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR) is an important enzyme in folate metabolism as its reaction product, tetrahydrofolate, is required for the synthesis of numerous metabolic intermediates. Inhibition of DHFR results in blockage of DNA synthesis, leading to cell death. Type II DHFR, typified by R67 DHFR, is unrelated genetically and structurally to chromosomal DHFRs. The active R67 DHFR is a homotetramer, with a toroidal (doughnut) shape and a single pore that contains a single active site. The presence of only one active site per oligomer is because only two molecules can bind concurrently to the active enzyme, most likely due to steric constraints. Among several possible complexes, the productive complex is the one containing the substrate (dihydrofolate) and cofactor (NADPH) bound to the active enzyme. The constraints imposed by the symmetry of the oligomer as well as the absence of catalytic bases suggest R67 DHFR may be a primitive enzyme. R67 DHFR s ability to form multiple ligand complexes as well as the dual roles for several active site residues supports the hypothesis that R67 DHFR uses a variation of hot spot binding which is focused in an enzyme active site rather than at protein-protein interfaces. The hot spot strategy is an excellent design for a primitive enzyme to adopt. A drawback of the symmetry is that binding to NADPH and dihydrofolate cannot be independently optimized. To further evolve R67 DHFR function would require a gene duplication event, followed by divergence of the gene copies. In this project, recombinant DNA technology has been used to produce quadruplicated R67 DHFR gene, resulting in a single polypeptide possessing the essential structure of tetrameric R67 DHFR. The goal of this research is to introduce asymmetric mutations that will allow independent manipulation of each half of the active site pore, leading to favorable interactions with NADPH on one side and complementary interactions with dihydrofalate on the other. This strategy may result in a more efficient enzyme doc16732 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop and commercialize a new technology for mass producing nanometer-sized ceramic powders at dramatically reduced costs. The technology, Combined Atomization and Reaction Technique (CART), involves providing an atomizing gas medium containing a reactant element such as hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, chlorine, fluorine, boron, or sulfur; preparing a metal alloy melt super-heated to a spontaneous reaction temperature at which the alloy can undergo a self-sustaining reaction with the selected reactant element; and introducing reactant gas to concurrently mix, atomize, and react with the critically super-heated alloy melt to form ultra-fine ceramic particles in an atomizer chamber. This Phase II project will design and build a prototype pilot-scale CART apparatus to demonstrate the commercial viability of the technology as applied to the synthesis of nano-sized oxides of selected metals that are deemed to have the greatest commercial potential. The commercial potential of ultrafine powders are in the production of catalysts, coatings and films, conductive pastes, cosmetics, electromagnetic components, electronic devices, fire retardant materials, magnetic fluids, sintered and injection-molded parts, ceramic composites, magnetic storage media, phosphors, pigments, polishing media, and toners. Indium-tin oxide (ITO) powders are used to prepare sputtering targets for deposition of transparent films for use in flat-panel display technology. Nano-grained materials can be employed to replace various load-bearing and non-structural parts in automobiles, infrastructures, off-shore structures, piping, containers, electronic equipment housings, etc. Nano-grained cermets and ceramics are outstanding cutting tool materials. Transparent nano-grained ceramics can be utilized in a broad array of applications, including transparent ceramic appliance components, clear glassware and artistic artifacts. Transparent ceramics may also be used in ballistic protection armor by law enforcement, security police and armored car personnel doc16733 none Control of RNA polymerase II (Pol II) activity is the major mechanism underlying cellular differentiation during development. For some genes, this includes regulation at the level of transcription elongation. The mammalian Pol II elongation factor ELL is distinguished as being able to increase the catalytic rate of Pol II in vitro. ELL homologs are absent from yeast, suggesting that the ELL family of elongation factors represents an adaptation of metazoans. The long-term goal of this project is to understand the role of the ELL family of transcription elongation factors in the regulation of gene expression. The Drosophila homolog of ELL (dELL) broadly co-localizes with phosphorylated Pol II on polytene chromosomes, is concentrated at sites of active transcription and is associated with Pol II in whole fly extracts. Mutations in the dELL coding sequence are found in independently isolated mutant alleles of Suppressor of triplo-lethal [Su(Tpl)]. Su(Tpl) is an essential gene, and the phenotypes of Su(Tpl) mutations are consistent with a defect in a general transcription factor. dELL is the only ELL-family protein in flies. This project will test whether dELL functions in transcription in living cells, and what role it plays in regulating gene expression. Specific Aim 1 will test whether dELL is recruited to the body of transcribing genes in vivo. Specific Aim 2 will test whether dELL is limiting for gene transcription in vivo. The expression of various patterning genes will be tested in early embryos in which dELL has been inactivated by RNAi, to see whether loss of dELL results in their down-regulation. Specific Aim 3 will test the ability of a dELL transgene to complement the recessive lethality of Su(Tpl) mutations, and whether a truncated dELL transgene behaves as a dominant negative on a wild-type background. These studies will provide the first detailed understanding of the role for the ELL-family of proteins and their gene expression in vivo. They will also provide the foundation for a genetic dissection of dELL and for understanding the regulation of Pol II in development doc16734 none Catecholamines, such as dopamine and norepinephrine, are regulatory molecules produced by neurons and the adrenal gland. Recently, investigators discovered that selected cells of the immune system not only take up catecholamines, but also synthesize these molecules. There is no information, however, on the regulation of catecholamine synthesis and release in these cells. Furthermore, the functions of catecholamines released by immune cells are not clear. The goal of this project is to investigate the molecular regulation of catecholamine synthesis, storage, and release in the RAW264.7 macrophage cell line and in peritoneal macrophages isolated from mice. The autocrine and paracrine actions of macrophage-derived catecholamines also will be investigated. Macrophages are important cells in the immune system, and catecholamines are important molecules produced by neural and endocrine cells. Based on new evidence that immune cells produce catecholamines, this project will explore the synthesis and function of these molecules in macrophages. Results of this study will contribute to our understanding of macrophage functions and provide clues to links between the nervous, endocrine and immune systems doc16735 none The ciliated protozoan Tetrahymena thermophila excises an estimated specific DNA segments from its somatic nucleus during development. This project aims to understand the regulation of this massive genome reorganization and ultimately learn fundamental principles governing chromosome structure and genetic stability. Understanding how particular DNA segments, called deletion elements, are selectively excised is challenged by the fact that they are quite diverse in size and sequence. The PI s approach toward understanding how the cell recognizes these diverse sequences has been to understand in detail the mechanism of deletion of two DNA segments, called the M and R deletion elements, and thus identify common regulatory properties. In this work, these elements will be mutagenized in order to identify the specific sequences that target these DNA segments for elimination. Mutant deletion elements will be integrated into the genome such that their excision can be monitored during the process. This will allow the determination of mutations in the identified cis-acting sequences that abolish the association between the element and proteins involved in excision. A major goal of these mutational analyses is to delimit the sequences that activate the non-genic transcription of deletion elements and determine whether transcription is required for DNA deletion. To further explore the molecular basis of epigenetic regulation of these DNA rearrangements, the minimal requirements for this regulation will be defined. Several prior genetic studies support a model that RNA copies of the element produced from parental nuclei act as inhibitory signals that block DNA deletion of the homologous element. This and other possible explanations will be tested. Combining studies that address both genetic and epigenetic regulatory components will expedite a comprehensive understanding of this process. This project investigates a process of regulated DNA rearrangement that occurs during development of the ciliated protozoan Tetrahymena thermophila. The cellular machinery that accurately rearranges the Tetrahymena genome likely involves many of the components that ensure the proper genetic stability of this organism. This research aims to understand how particular DNA segments are targeted for elimination. Its long-term goal is to learn how removal of these DNA segments affects the normal genetic stability of the somatic genome. Investigation of this process in Tetrahymena should provide fundamental insight into genetic mechanisms that operate in all organisms doc16736 none ScienCentral, with major support from NSF, has been developing and distributing short science stories for inclusion in local ABC news broadcasts. They are now developing a plan, in cooperation with NBC News Channel, to produce stories about cutting edge research to be carried on local NBC stations during their local news broadcasts. During this planning phase, ScienCentral will produce, distribute and evaluate three stories about current research in the area of global climate change. Specific planning tasks include: determining the technical and editorial processes for working with NBC News; conducting formative evaluations for topics, format and desired frequency of stories; and developing an auditable cost sharing process. The Editorial Board for the project includes Eliene Augenbraun, PI Executive Producer and former research scientist; Besty Rosenfield, Vice President of ScienCentral; Jack Penland, News Director; and Curt Epstein, Senior Producer. They will work closely with an advisory panel consisting of Greg Kohler, Senior Producer, NBC News Channel; Leon Lederman, Office of Strategic Initiative, Illinois Institute of Technology; Jane Lubchenco, Environmental Scientist, Oregon State University; and Danielle Gray, Deputy Director for Emory University Integration of Education and Research, Center for Behavioral Neuroscience. Members of the advisory board will review scripts and roughcuts of all segments doc16737 none The gated connexin channels found in gap junctions regulate communication between tissue cells. These membrane channels are critical for integrating and regulating basic cell processes such as metabolic cooperation, ionic transmission, differentiation and hormonal regulation. Breakdown in gap junctional communication can lead to developmental defects, abnormal cell proliferation and failure of tissue regulation as well as physical or developmental diseases. The channels consist of a dimer of two hexamers each called a connexon, of the constituent protein, connexin. These channels are unique in that when the two hexamers pair up, they self-assemble into distinct cellular junctional areas that are morphologically distinct. The connexins are a family of related proteins sharing a common folding motif. Different connexins are found in the same tissue and different connexins can be localized to the same gap junctional plaques. In the current structural model of the protein, the C and N termini are located on the cytoplasmic side of the membrane and cross the membrane four times in a helical segments. Mutagenesis studies have indicated that the extracellular domains may contain b sheet structures. The overall goal of this research is to image at the electron microscopic level the molecular structure of gap junction proteins as well as their arrangements within and between cells. This project is divided into two parts. Both address organizational principles that determine not only the molecular structure of connexins but also how these connexins are organized and interact with other cellular components. This is, in essence, the cellular structure of connexins. The goals of this project are: (1) To significantly improve the resolution of the present 3d molecular structure of the Cx26 channel: Connexin26 (Cx26) is the smallest of the gap junction family. This connexin isoform has the potential for molecular structure determination since it has been hypothesized that the smaller the carboxy terminus, the tighter the packing and less disorder within the connexon unit. Using the large gap junction two-dimensional crystals obtainable from these HeLa Cx26 transfectants, computational methods will be developed and applied to increase the resolution of the reconstructions. An approach using single particle correlation averaging in combination with a crystallographic analysis will be used in order to circumvent the lattice disorder inherent in these crystals. Development and application of this methodology will be useful not only for Cx26 crystals but also for application to other connexin crystals. (2) To continue to specifically label gap junction proteins in situ using photooxidation of either genetically tagged connexins or specific antibodies and then determine their 3D spatial arrangements and interactions with other cellular components using fluorescence photooxidation and electron tomography. The potential impact of this project is to advance the present knowledge of connexin channel structure, cellular organization, assembly and disassembly. Results from these experiments would impact the interpretation of other channel structures and understanding of how membrane proteins traffic. These results should also help to understand the molecular basis of connexin-related diseases doc16738 none Hake Knotted1 is the founding member of the knox (knotted1-like homeobox) gene family that has been identified in all plants surveyed so far. Homeobox genes encode transcription factors that regulate the activities of other genes. Class I knox genes are expressed in the meristem and stem. The initial down-regulation of knox genes in the meristem marks the site of leaf initiation. Ectopic expression of knox genes in leaves due to spontaneous mutations or overexpression results in dramatic alterations in leaf morphology, occasional ectopic meristems and changes in hormone levels. Loss-of-function knox mutants have begun to reveal specific roles for different members. The maize knotted1 (kn1) and Arabidopsis STM genes are required for meristem initiation and or maintenance, whereas rice osh15 and Arabidopsis KNAT1, also known as brevipedicellus (bp), are required in stem tissues. There are two other class I knox genes in Arabidopsis, KNAT2 and KNAT6. Insertion alleles will be obtained for these two genes. A mosaic analysis of bp will be carried out to determine the role of KNAT1 in different tissues. Genetic analysis will help sort out the roles for different knox genes in Arabidopsis. A number of approaches will be taken to identify targets of the KNOX family that include expression profiling, sequence comparisons and biochemistry. Identification of a large number of potential targets will provide the opportunity to determine which target genes are in common or distinct to different KNOX proteins. A select number of the target genes will be analyzed to determine their function. The long range goal is to understand the role of KNOX proteins in meristem maintenance and plant architecture doc16739 none Lay abstract Memory is generally believed to involve alterations in the ease with which neurons communicate with one another across synapses. These alterations in turn are made possible by the production of proteins under the guidance of genes. A major impediment to the identification of the relevant genes is the lack of information about which neurons and synapses are involved. In the case of memory formed by fear conditioning, the crucial synapses are believed to be in the lateral nucleus of the amygdala. Armed with this information, it should be possible to use the recently developed microarray technique to screen genes that are activated during memory formation. This approach, when combined with another recently developed tool, laser captured microdissection, should provide a powerful means for probing gene expression in specific cells in the amygdala that change during memory formation. The findings may also be relevant to other forms of memory subserved by other brain regions since existing data indicate that common molecular pathways are involved in different forms of learning and memory doc16740 none This project is to extend and upgrade a long-term study of the ecology and reproductive biology of tree swallows (Tachycineta bicolor) nesting near Ithaca, New York. This population numbers approximately 300 breeding pairs. The population has been studied for the past fifteen years, and a large number of techniques have been developed to efficiently explore tree swallow biology and ecology. Many of these techniques take advantage of the fact that tree swallows readily nest in artificial nest-boxes. Like many other songbirds, tree swallows have about a 50% annual survival rate, so a five year study can sample many birds during their entire reproductive lifetimes. Tree swallows are obligate aerial insectivores. Thus, they are unusually sensitive to short-term changes in weather, because their prey, flying insects, are unable to fly during cool temperatures or rain. Previous research has developed the methods for sampling and analyzing insect availability on a daily basis. One of the principal foci of the research in Ithaca in the past ten years has been investigating the seasonal decline of clutch size. Earlier laying females lay larger clutches, and they pay no measurable cost for laying earlier. Tree swallows across North America have advanced their date of laying, apparently in response to global climate change, and understanding the determinants and consequences of lay-date variation is thus of both basic and applied interest. The current project would attempt to answer three related questions: 1) How does variation in insect abundance and weather affect the lay-dates of individual swallows? 2) Does variation in flight performance correlate with variations in lay-date and chick-provisioning performance? 3) What are the consequences of short-term variation in weather and food supply both in terms of organismal biology and breeder fitness? Flight performance is clearly a critical trait for an aerial insectivore, and it will be evaluated in a Flight Performance Test Tunnel that is already constructed and in need of only slight modifications. Chick-provisioning performance will be assessed through a series of detailed behavioral observations coupled with samples of the food being delivered to the chicks collected in a specially developed trap. Physiological health and stress will be evaluated with repeated measurements of blood characteristics. This project would bring a new level of detailed measurements to a long-term study that has proved its worth both in basic research output and in education of students at all levels. By studying swallow reactions to the dynamic weather conditions of a temperate ecosystem, we can better understand the relationships between an animal s biology and its environment, both today and in the past, and make better predictions about how environmental changes will affect animal populations doc16741 none The accepted model for chemical transmission at the neuromuscular junction is that when an action potential reaches the nerve terminal, voltage-sensitive calcium channels open which leads to a cascade of events resulting in vesicles fusing with the presynaptic membrane to release their contents into the synaptic cleft. The number of active zones within synapses, and not necessarily the size or numbers of synapses per se, is correlated to the degree of synaptic efficacy. Additional factors besides structural elements have a role in synaptic efficacy, but the purpose of this study is to focus on structural correlations. Investigating the function of individual synapses is essential to understanding the mechanisms that influence the efficacy of chemical synaptic transmission. The known simplicity of the synaptic structure at the crayfish opener neuromuscular junction and its quantal nature of release allow an assessment of discrete synapses within the motor nerve terminals. By analyzing areas of a quantal current trace using modern statistical techniques, it is noted that the gold standard= of directly counting quantal events is unstable in determining the number of release sites (n) and the probability of release at these sites (p) when the probability of release is low. This classical approach estimates one site even when there are clearly multiple sites operating. Modern methods used in this investigation estimate the probability of release at each site (p) to determine whether new sites are recruited as the firing frequency is increased. The proposed investigations directly correlate quantal parameters by various statistical methods to synaptic structure. An established method of identifying and recording from a synaptic site allows for its subsequent serial reconstruction using electron microscopic techniques. Thus, the same region can be serial sectioned and reconstructed from electron micrographs to directly correlate function to synaptic ultra structure. This effort will provide a clearer understanding of the mechanisms employed by structural elements that influence synaptic efficacy and mechanisms underlying frequency facilitation of transmitter release in crustaceans doc16742 none Glycogen and starch serve as major energy storage compounds for nearly all- living organisms and are an important energy component obtained from plants. ADP-glucose pyrophosphorylase (ADPGlc Ppase) catalyzes the conversion of glucose-1-phosphate and ATP to ADP-glucose and pyrophosphate and is a key regulated step in both bacterial glycogen and plant starch biosynthesis. ADPGlc Ppase regulation is mediated by the binding of a number of activators and inhibitors, many of which are key metabolic intermediates. This research utilizes the ADPGlc Ppase enzyme from the bacteria Agrobacterium tumefaciens (Ag.t.) that is regulated by fructose- 6-phosphate and pyruvate. This project outlines x-ray crystal structural studies on Ag.t. ADPGlc Ppase to examine substrate binding, allosteric effector binding, and the mechanism of activation. Several roadblocks associated with x-ray crystallography have already been overcome including crystallization and heavy atom derivitization for phase determination. Once the three-dimensional structure of one member of the ADPGlc Ppase protein family is determined homology modeling can be used to construct reasonable structures of the other proteins in the family. As a major control point for the production of renewable and biodegradable carbon sources, ADPGlc Ppase is an attractive enzyme target for protein engineering. Understanding the regulation of the ADPGlc Ppase enzyme family is necessary for the bioengineering of the enzyme and could lead to rational protein engineering of the enzyme to increase starch production doc16743 none Our nervous system contains over a billion nerve cells. Nerve cells are specialized to transit electrical signals from cell to cell and from nerve cell to an effector cell such as a muscle cell. Nerve cells are able to store information in the form of learning and memory. To accomplish these tasks, the terminals of nerve cells, the sites of communication between cells, change in response to electrical activity. Actin filaments mediate the structural changes of the nerve terminal. Actin filaments also serve as tracks for the movement of cargo to the nerve terminal. An understanding of the mechanism by which actin filaments remodel nerve terminals and support the movement of membranous cargo to terminals are required to understand the processes of learning and memory. This project is designed to study how cargo is transported to the nerve terminal by the motor protein myosin-V. The nervous system of the squid, a marine invertebrate, will be used for these studies. The giant nerve fiber of squid is chosen for these studies because it is large enough to be dissected for observation without damaging its activity. The principal goal is to determine the mechanism by which transport of cargo is regulated. The proposal is divided into 3 projects. The first project is designed to understand how myosin-V binds to its cargo. The second project is to determine if binding of the motor to its cargo changes it from an inactive to an active state. The third project is to purify myosin-V in association with its binding partners and to identify the proteins that link the motor to its cargo. A combination of biochemical and cell biological experiments will be performed. FRET, a form of fluorescence microscopy that detects the direct binding of one protein to another will be used to determine whether regulatory proteins that bind to it affect the activity of myosin-V. Chemical cross-linking and antibody precipitation experiments will be used to identify protein partners of myosin-V that link it to its cargo. These studies will advance our understanding of the mechanisms of learning and memory doc16744 none Movement of conjugative transposons from one bacterial host to another requires transposon excision from the donor chromosome, conjugal transfer of the excised transposon from donor to recipient and integration of the transposon into the recipient chromosome. The best-studied conjugative transposon is Tn916. Movement of Tn916 is catalyzed by the transposon-encoded bivalent Int protein, whose domains recognize and bind to two distinct DNA sequences. Tn916 does not mobilize adjacent chromosomal genetic markers and expression of the genes involved in conjugal transfer is dependent upon excision and circularization of the transposon. Thus, the first step in conjugative transposition of Tn916 is excision of the element, and conjugal transfer does not occur prior to excision. A second transposon encoded protein that is required for excision, Xis, plays a regulatory role in transposon excision and a model for Xis function has recently been suggested. This model will be tested. Transposon excision and transfer can be dissociated by expression of Int and Xis from a heterologous promoter. Transposon excision occurs at a greatly elevated frequency in the donor cell population but the frequency of conjugative transfer and integration remain unchanged under these conditions. This implies that the step of conjugal transfer may also be regulated. The Int recombinase, in addition to its binding and cleavage of the transposon ends, has been shown to bind specifically to the origin of conjugal DNA transfer, oriT. Whether Int is required for conjugal transfer of Tn916, or if Int plays a regulatory role in this process will be determined. Examinion of Int binding to oriT has suggested that the N-terminal DNA binding domain of Int may exert an effect on the activities of the C-terminal catalytic domain. The possible role of such interactions between the two DNA binding domains of Int will be examined. Conjugative transposons such as Tn916 have the remarkable property of being not only able to move from place to place in the genome of a single bacterial species, but to transfer themselves between an amazingly large number of diverse bacterial species. They also have the ability to mobilize other genetic elements that normally are not self-transmissible. These properties mean that conjugative transposons are likely to be of major importance in promoting genetic exchange in the complex microbial communities that exist in natural environments. These complex communities have a great impact on human activities. The study of agents of genetic exchange in these communities will increase our understanding of how microbial populations adapt to changing conditions and prosper doc16745 none The objective of this work is to use ordered molecular environments to control growth at a crystal surface. In biomineralization, nature uses a number of protein sequences to recognize specific crystal faces. To try to understand and model this process, functionalized gel matrices which present an array of carboxylates will first be used to control crystal growth. Functionalized bis urea gelators will first be used to study the effect of spatial group orientation on calcium carbonate crystal growth. Small constrained peptide sequences will then be synthesized (20 residues with 4 Asp or Glu residues and with and without internal lactam bridges) and their ability to interact with target minerals such as calcium carbonate and calcium sulfide will be investigated. Second and third generation peptidomimetic molecules will then be designed to interact with specific crystal faces. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Andrew D. Hamilton of the Department of Chemistry at Yale University. Dr. Hamilton will explore the basic chemical processes involved in the natural process of biomineralization. Designed organic molecules and specific protein sequences will be investigated for their ability to control the growth of minerals such as calcium carbonate and calcium sulfide. The ability to control calcium carbonate crystal growth has applications in biomedical science for controlled bone growth. The ability to control calcium sulfide growth has applications in the semiconductor industry. Students trained as a result of working on this project will gain experience in inorganic materials research as well as supramolecular organic chemistry, hence they will have skills needed by both the computer and pharmaceutical industries doc16746 none The faithful transmission of chromosomes during cell division is essential for the well-being of an organism and the maintenance of the species. During cell division a complex set of structures work in concert to ensure the accurate transmission of chromosomes to daughter cells. A key structural component in this process is the centromere, the specialized DNA region within each chromosome where a complex of proteins, the kinetochore, assembles to attach the chromosome to the mitotic spindle. Many studies have provided evidence that chromatin structure is critical in maintaining the fidelity of chromosome transmission, but its roles are not understood. The long-term goal of this project is to understand how chromatin structure affects chromosome segregation, in particular the role that histones, the protein components of the nucleosome, have in this process. This study uses the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a eukaryotic model organism. The simple gene organization in S. cerevisiae, the ease of genetic manipulations, and the strong evolutionary conservation of the histone proteins and nucleosome structure make this yeast an excellent model system to study histone function. Current evidence indicates that histone H2A, one of the four histones that form the core of chromatin, is essential for normal centromere function. This project aims to identify factors that interact with histone H2A in the formation of a functional centromere-kinetohore complex, using genetic and biochemical approaches. The first major goal is to isolate and identify factors that suppress the increase-in-ploidy defect caused by a mutant histone H2A. Previous work showed that the ploidy increase caused by the H2A mutant is associated with defects in chromosome segregation and an altered centromeric chromatin structure. Thus, suppressors of the ploidy increase will provide important information about the components required for the formation of centromeric chromatin and their interactions with kinetochore proteins. The second major goal is to characterize two previously isolated suppressors of the increase-in-ploidy defect of the H2A mutant. These suppressors, PLO1 and PLO2, encode two new and uncharacterized proteins with significant homology to each other, and both proteins share limited sequence similarity to the mammalian centromere-binding proteins CENP-E and CENP-F, respectively. The characterization of PLO1 and PLO2 will determine the relevance of this homology with respect to their function. Preliminary work indicates that PLO1 is involved in some aspect of chromosome segregation. These studies will advance our knowledge of the factors that interact with histones and kinetochore proteins at the centromere, and will help to elucidate the mechanisms by which centromeric chromatin controls chromosome segregation. Ultimately, this work will provide insight into a basic cellular process essential to maintain the integrity of an organism s genetic information doc16747 none Joel Bowman of Emory University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to investigate improved computational methodologies with the aim of performing molecular dynamics calculations more efficiently than is currently possible. This research will avoid a major computational bottleneck by using a novel method based on Hermite interpolation that will provide information on molecular motion using much sparser data. The new codes, to be developed in collaboration with a numerical analyst, will be made available to the scientific community. The new methodologies will be applied to studies of ketene photodissociation and the vibrational energies of the hydronium ion. Research outcomes are expected to advance computational methods and the ability to understand molecular processes of importance in chemistry and biochemistry. Powerful computer programs currently exist to predict realistically the rates of chemical processes of importance in the diverse areas such as atmospheric chemistry, environmental chemistry, combustion chemistry, protein folding, and enzyme catalysis. The methods and software that will be developed in this project will enable faster and more efficient use of these programs to predict, interpret, and guide experiments that explore useful chemical and biochemical phenomena doc16748 none Function of Wnt Signaling during C. elegans Vulval Induction. David M. Eisenmann, University of Maryland Baltimore County All metazoan organisms rely on the use of extracellular signals to regulate cell division, migration and differentiation during development. Several evolutionarily-conserved signal transduction pathways are used to receive these signals and alter the regulation of genes and proteins that bring about changes in the behavior of responding cells. One of these conserved signaling pathways is the Wnt signaling pathway. Wnt pathways function in vertebrates during the development of the nervous system, the heart, the reproductive organs, and the skeletal system, and other processes. Much of our knowledge of the function of the Wnt pathway has come from genetic, molecular and biochemical analyses in model systems such as Drosophila, Xenopus and C. elegans. This lab has previously shown that Wnt signaling is involved in the development of the vulva of the C. elegans hermaphrodite. During vulval induction, six equivalent vulval precursor cells are instructed to adopt distinct cell fates by the action of extracellular signals that activate receptor tyrosine kinase Ras and Notch signaling pathways in these cells. Previous work showed that the Wnt pathway acts with the Ras pathway to coordinately regulate the levels of LIN-39, a member of the important class of evolutionarily-conserved transcription factors encoded by Hox genes, and current results indicate that the levels of LIN-39 in the vulval precursor cells play an important role in which cell fate they adopt. The experiments in this proposal aim to further characterize the role of Wnt signaling in vulval induction in C. elegans Specifically, to identify novel factors acting in C. elegans Wnt signaling, the mig-14 gene will be cloned and characterized and suppressors of the mig-14 mutant phenotype will be isolated and characterized. mig-14 is very interesting because mig-14 mutations lead to defects in most processes regulated by Wnt signaling in C. elegans, yet the mig-14 genomic region contains no known Wnt components or regulators. Also, mig-14 is likely to act in the Wnt sending cell, suggesting it could shed light on some of the unknown issues involved ligand production and secretion. Additional Wnt pathway factors may also be identified by proteins which physically interact with the C. elegans b-catenin BAR-1, which will be characterized in this proposed work. To investigate how cells become responsive to Wnt signals, cis- and trans-acting factors that control the BAR-1 expression pattern will be identified. This work will hopefully identify novel Wnt pathway components and regulators, and extend our knowledge of this important evolutionarily-conserved signaling pathway doc16749 none We have identified an ON OFF signaling mechanism that is required for tolerance of oxygen deprivation (anoxia) in Arabidopsis thaliana. Activation of Rop, a monomeric RHO-like G-protein, is required for alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) induction and ethanolic fermentation but is insufficient for anoxia tolerance. Tolerance of anoxia requires initiation of Rop signaling as well as the subsequent termination of Rop signaling by the GTPase activating protein RopGAP4. Our data support a model in which Rop-signaling promotes NADPH oxidase activity and H2O2 production required for ADH induction; in addition the negative regulation of Rop signaling by RopGAP4 reduces H2O2-induced damage, prolongs cell viability and increases anoxia tolerance. We propose that an increase in cytosolic free calcium, a second messenger in response to oxygen deprivation, is necessary to complete the activation of Rop signaling. We predict that interplay between Rop signaling and cytosolic free calcium levels governs changes in gene expression necessary for stress tolerance. Our goals are to: (1) Determine if a mitochondrial signal initiates Rop signaling in response to oxygen deprivation; (2) Elucidate the role of cytosolic free calcium fluxes in the regulation of Rop activity and RopGAP4 gene expression; (3) Determine whether Rop-mediated activation of NADPH oxidase involves the relocation of Rop and requires an increase in cytosolic calcium; (4) Test whether an H2O2 signal is sufficient to induce ADH and RopGAP4 expression; and (5) Explore the signaling mechanisms downstream of Rop that are involved in anoxia tolerance. We will use genomic and genetic analyses to effectively study this signaling network. These studies will include: (1) Analysis of changes in gene expression regulated by anoxia-induced Rop signaling using total and large polysomal mRNA; (2) A screen for dominant suppressor mutations that restore anoxia tolerance to ropgap4-KO seedlings; and (3) Continued screening of gene-trap lines for mutations altering ADH expression. The elucidation of the role of positive and negative regulation of Rop in the low-oxygen stress response should enable the engineering of flooding tolerance in crop plants. This project will elucidate the mechanisms that allow plant cells to sense a depletion of cellular oxygen and respond by stimulating fermentation. The project will study how the strict control of the stress response is tantamount for survival. The understanding of the signaling process that controls this response will enable scientists to manipulate flooding tolerance. The results may have additional relevance to plant and animal biology, due to similarities between stress responses in plants and the low-oxygen stress response in plants and animals doc16750 none Clark All above ground post-embryonic development in Arabidopsis occurs through the initiation of organs at shoot and flower meristems. Thus, the initiation of shoot and flower meristems is a fundamental prerequisite for subsequent pattern formation and cell differentiation. The role of the REVOLUTA (REV) gene in the initiation of lateral shoot and flower meristems has recently been described. Genetic and molecular analysis suggested that REV acts early in the process of lateral meristem initiation, and is required, at least indirectly, for the reactivation of known meristem regulators, such as the CLV loci, WUS and STM, at lateral positions. REV encodes a type III HD-zip protein, containing a putative DNA-binding homeodomain, a leucine zipper domain likely involved in dimerization, and a START sterol lipid binding domain. Other analysis has revealed that REV is also required for normal vascular organ development. Consistent with these developmental roles, REV is expressed early in vascular tissue, organs and lateral meristems. REV is a member of a closely related gene family consisting of five genes in Arabidopsis. The variable expressivity of rev mutant phenotypes and the lack of phenotypes for loss-of-function alleles of other gene family members suggest that these genes may exhibit functional redundancy. Indeed, other gene family members have been implicated in organ development polarity and vascular development through the analysis of gain-of-function alleles. Functional redundancy is likely to be very common among plant genomes, where the level of gene duplication is significantly higher than among animal genomes. However, little is known about the nature of functional specification among an entire gene family that has evolved multiple developmental roles. The REV gene family thus makes an excellent system in which to determine the relationships between the various gene family members and the potentially overlapping roles that each plays in plant development. This proposal seeks to use the REV gene family to characterize a functionally interrelated gene family, as well as advance understanding of lateral meristem development. Loss-of-function alleles have been identified for each family members and genetic analysis will determine to which development processes each gene contributes. The mRNA expression patterns of each gene will be assessed, as well as the functional equivalence of the proteins encoded by each gene. Potential downstream targets will be characterized. This work will provide a critical comprehensive understanding of the relationships, and perhaps origins, of a functionally interrelated gene family. This will be of significance to other plant developmental systems in which the action of redundant genes are important. Furthermore, the roles of key regulators of lateral meristem initiation will be characterized doc16751 none Children often attempt to persuade their parents and friends. At what age do they begin to tailor their arguments to the beliefs and attitudes of those individuals? Even preschoolers may possess such persuasive sophistication, according to theoretical accounts of children s developing social cognition and recent findings concerning young children s understanding of mental states. This research will use experimental interviews and analysis of everyday conversations to clarify whether, when, and how young children engage in psychologically sensitive persuasion. Because recent findings have indicated that children acquire an understanding of belief and its role in action during the preschool years, this research will focus on whether and when young children utilize belief information in their persuasion attempts, how typical are such efforts, and how development of this ability occurs. Experimental studies will involve individual interviews requiring young children to engage in persuasion with puppets or other people. Information about the beliefs of each persuadee will be systematically manipulated in order to measure effects on children s persuasion. These experimental manipulations will address the basic question of whether young children can engage in psychologically sensitive persuasion. They will also compare children s reasoning about belief as measured by traditional tasks to their belief reasoning on persuasion tasks, a first step towards understanding developmental progression. Experimental studies will also address questions concerning how real are the skills revealed in young children and which task factors appear to facilitate children s use of belief information in persuasion. Specifically, the research will examine how children s sensitivity to belief information in persuasion depends on how belief information is presented, how persuasive arguments are elicited, and whether interactions are with puppets or real people. Whether young children consider beliefs as representations or merely get ideas for arguments from belief information will also be examined. Finally, an analysis of children s everyday talk with parents (from transcripts of family conversations sampled throughout the preschool period) will provide a complementary real-life and longitudinal perspective on children s developing use of psychological information in persuasion. Together, these studies will provide extensive and novel descriptive data concerning children s use of their developing understanding of mental states in an important and common type of social interaction, persuasion. Results will bear on how development occurs, specifically with regard to belief understanding and application to persuasion, and generally with regard to whether conceptual development precedes social application or the reverse. The resulting descriptive and explanatory data should inform educational and developmental practices doc16752 none Over the past several decades, particle accelerators have contributed greatly to our understanding of the nature of the universe. Further, their use in research programs world-wide has had a major impact on many sciences. The societal benefits of particle accelerators are especially evident in material science, nuclear medicine, molecular biology and in many other fields. Charged particles or the radiation they produce enable doctors to treat many forms of cancer; an application that is experiencing significant growth. Accelerators are now a major presence in the semiconductor and pharmaceutical industries. As can be seen from the number of advertisements that appear monthly in such Journals as Physics Today and the CERN Courier, there is a dearth of personnel trained in accelerator physics and related technology. The nation s need for advances in the areas mentioned above requires the training of next-generation accelerator physicists, to carry out accelerator R acceleration of these beams to suitable energies without unacceptable emittance degradation; stable and efficient operation of superconducting linear accelerators at very high gradients etc. Cornell University has proposed to resolve these issues by the construction of a prototype ERL. The intention is to then utilize the information that is learned from the prototype to propose the construction of a full-scale ERL light source. The purpose of this interdisciplinary proposal is to construct the first phase of that prototype doc16753 none The dramatic and predictable changes in external and internal structures during molting and metamorphosis make insects ideal systems for studying the mechanisms underlying animal development. During the developmental process, tissues are restructured and obsolete cells are destroyed by a process called programmed cell death (PCD), which destroys specific cells in a manner that does not damage neighboring cells. It is now clear from studies on mammalian cells that mitochondria, organelles that provide most of the energy (ATP) for the cell, play a key role in the early steps of PCD. It is not known, however, if these organelles play a role in this process in insect cells. The proposed research will reveal changes in insect mitochondrial function during PCD by studying the mitochondria isolated from the midgut epithelium of the tobacco hornworm (Manduca sexta). This epithelium is an ideal system for studying mitochondrial function during PCD because the larval midgut dies at a predictable time in development and the epithelium s large size allows for biochemical studies not possible on small tissues or single cells. If insect mitochondria are involved in PCD in a manner similar to that in mammalian cells, then early in the PCD process the mitochondrial membrane potential (DY) will depolarize (dissipate) and the organelle will release a small protein, cytochrome c, into the cytoplasm. To test this hypothesis, mitochondria will be isolated from the midguts of larvae at different stages of metamorphosis, before and after the process of PCD begins. The DY of isolated mitochondria will be determined by monitoring the transmembrane distribution of a lipophilic cation. In addition, the cytochrome c content of the mitochondria as well as the cytoplasm will be measured to determine if release of this protein into the cytosol is an early event in insect PCD. The fact that changes in mitochondrial function occur early in PCD presents an interesting dilemma for cells. The process of PCD requires ATP, yet the organelle that generates ATP is being altered during the cell death process. In order to understand how cells deal with this problem, the proposed research will employ metabolic control analysis to quantify how oxidative phosphorylation, the process by which mitochondria make ATP, is altered during PCD. In addition to studying mitochondrial function, the proposed studies will use electron microscopy to reveal how the structure of midgut mitochondria changes during metamorphosis and PCD. Finally it is hypothesized that the molting hormones, the ecdysteroids, are ultimately responsible for initiating PCD in the midgut epithelium. This hypothesis will be tested by studying whether an ecdysteroid agonist effects structural and functional changes in midgut mitochondria similar to those seen during metamorphosis doc16754 none Dr. Graham R. Fleming of the University of California at Berkeley is funded for his research on optical studies of condensed phase dynamics by a grant in the Physical Chemistry program of the Chemistry Division. He will develop and apply new ultrafast laser spectroscopic methods to the dynamics of complex condensed phase systems. Specifically, he will develop heterodyne-detected, two-dimensional Raman spectroscopy, and two-color resonant photon echo spectroscopy for the study of liquid and glass dynamics, and the study of multichromophoric molecular complexes, respectively. Undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students will receive training and education in experimental design, measurement, and theoretical analysis. Students will be prepared to lead independent research programs at major research universities, National Laboratories, and private industry. Exceedingly short pulses of laser light with duration of a few thousandths of a trillionth of a second will be used to follow the motions of molecules during chemical reactions, and to study the processes involved in the collection and transfer of solar energy in nanoscale devices designed to mimic and extend the light harvesting function of the natural photosynthetic system of plants. The long range goals of this research are to reveal the design principles necessary for renewable energy sources based on solar energy, to provide new analytical methods for the study and optimization of chemical processes, and to train the next generation of U.S. scientists doc16755 none This award provides partial support for a workshop organized by the University of Florida focusing on research on negotiating strategies and mechanisms in extended enterprises which are spatially and organizationally distributed. The workshop will include a mini-symposium of research papers on the topic, coupled with breakout sessions to identify a future research agenda. The primary goals of the mini-symposium are to bring academic researchers and industry practitioners together to: (1) Characterize the problems and challenges facing leading-edge manufacturing and service firms in the areas of electronic commerce (eCommerce) and supply chain management; (2) Define the state-of-the art technological and decision support capabilities currently available to industry; (3) Identify the new technological and decision support solution capabilities needed for both meeting newly arising challenges faced by industry and for driving new sources of strategic and competitive advantage; and (4) Identify and define academic research opportunities and challenges for developing new technological and decision support solution capabilities sought by industry doc16756 none L Hernault During development, cells that are destined to interact with one another are frequently born in different locations. Such cells must locate and move towards the site where the interactions with their partner(s)occur. Fertilization in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is an attractive model in which to study the genetic control of these phenomena. The superior genetic and cell biological tools that either we developed or were previously available make C. elegans an experimental system where it is feasible to approach these phenomena comprehensively. Several mutants (spe-9, spe-13 and fer-14) produce cytologically normal spermatozoa that are motile, but they cannot fertilize when they collide with an oocyte. The spe-9 gene encodes an epidermal growth factor (EGF) domain containing integral membrane protein, and such EGF cell surface proteins are known from much prior work to play critical roles in cell-cell interactions. Therefore, spe-9 mutants are likely defective in either sperm-oocyte recognition, adhesion or fusion. EGF repeat containing proteins, like spe-9, are known to work with numerous other components. spe-13 and fer-14 phenocopy all examined aspects of the spe-9 phenotype and their study should help clarify the genetic hierarchy that operates during fertilization. The phenotypic, genetic and molecular analysis of the fer-14 gene will be completed. fer-14 will be positionally cloned by SNP mapping, deficiency end point mapping, a candidate gene approach and or transgenic rescue. Gamete interactions and motility in wild type spe-9, fer-14 and other mutants will continue to be followed in vivo by nontoxic methods we have developed to fluorescently label sperm and allow real time observations with new high resolution methods. New Spe mutants that produce spermatozoa with no obvious cytological defects will be identified and further investigated. Those that fulfill a set of six criteria based on the known phenotypic features of spe-9, spe-13 and fer-14 will be subjected to detailed cell biological, genetic, and molecular analyses. These studies should reveal novel information about gamete recognition and cell surface phenomena that are important prior to and during fertilization. Equivalent mutants affecting gamete interactions have not been described in any other metazoan doc16757 none Viruses are suitable tools to study trafficking of macromolecules through plants because they encode specialized movement proteins (MPs) that enable these pathogens to move cell to cell via the plasmodesmata. Moreover, the MP encoded by the single-stranded positive-sense RNA genome of Tomato bushy stunt virus (TBSV) is functional in many different families. Recent data have shown that the TBSV MP interacts with a novel host factor (HF3.5) with similarities to a class of transcription factors that are known to traffic through plasmodesmata. Results of in vivo and in vitro binding tests with defined MP mutants provided support for the hypothesis that the interaction between HF3.5 and the TBSV MP is functionally relevant. The objectives of this project aim to further test this hypothesis by: I) a detailed molecular analysis of the P22-HF3.5 interaction, II) localization of the HF3.5 protein in planta, III) biochemical verification of P22-host protein interactions in plant extracts, and IV) studying the functional role by monitoring the effect of HF3.5 gene silencing on TBSV movement and infection. It is anticipated that the studies of this newly described movement-associated host protein will provide novel insights into the interactions that control movement of viruses and other macromolecules through plants doc16713 none This collaborative proposal describes research that links stream hydrodynamics, turbulent transport of odor signals, and the sensory ecology and behavior of the crayfish Orconectes rusticus. Crayfish use water-borne chemical signals ( odor plumes ) as navigational cues for locating food, burrows, or mates, and for avoiding predators. The nature of the spatial and temporal variability ( structure ) of the odor plumes depends on the hydrodynamic conditions, which, in turn, depends on the physical characteristics of the stream. The goal of the proposed research is to understand how crayfish use odor plumes to locate underwater objects. In particular, we plan to investigate how the crayfish navigational behavior varies under different hydrodynamic conditions (associated with different types of stream substrate materials). By focusing our attention to the changes in odorant structure and associated orientation behavior over different substrate types, we hope to gain insight into the specific algorithms and information cues used by the animals. Ultimately, the knowledge gained from the proposed study could be used to design robotic vehicles to search for dangerous underwater objects, or to protect crayfish habitat in managed ecosystems. Environmentally, crayfish are keystone species for many stream habitats and understanding the physical, biological, and chemical factors that influence their behavior will lead to a broader understanding of stream ecology and the human impact on stream ecology. In particular, detailed knowledge of how stream habitats influence the distribution of chemicals will provide the information necessary to understand not only crayfish and stream ecology, but will help elucidate the physical mechanisms behind pollution transportation in streams and their possible impact on stream ecosystems. The work outlined in this proposal is a collaborative effort between a biologist and engineer that will lead to cross-disciplinary training of both graduate and undergraduate students. In addition, new technical advances will be achieved through the development of high-speed and fine-scale three-dimensional measurements of chemical concentrations in different natural flow regimes. The development and quantification of these techniques will benefit a wide array of fields from oceanography to environmental engineering doc16759 none Donald F. Norris University of Maryland Baltimore County Digital Government: Analysis of Barriers to Local Government Adoption of Digital Government and Strategies to Overcome the Barriers This is a proposal to explore the uptake of IT by local government, in particular the provision of transactions and services over the Web, and identify solutions to hurdles which are found. Focus groups will be established consisting of local government Chief of Information Officers, Mayors and other elected and appointed individuals. This project is in collaboration with the Office of Telecommunications and Information Applications of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, part of the US Department of Commerce doc16760 none In recent years, we have discovered an unusual marine bacterium that oxidizes hydrogen sulfide into a novel filamentous form of elemental sulfur, while fixing CO2 into cell material. Phylogenetic studies have placed this organism into the genus Arcobacter of the epsilon subdivision of the Proteobacteria. Microbial filamentous sulfur production occurs in high fluid flow marine sulfidic environments, including coastal salt marsh creeks, sulfidic sediments, and marine hydrothermal vents worldwide. During the previous research period, we were able to cultivate this filament-producing organism from coastal sediments (coastal strain putatively named Candidatus Arcobacter sulfidicus ) and deep-sea hydrothermal environments, and have investigated the physiology, morphology and phylogeny of this interesting group. The overall goal of the present project will be to expand studies on the microbial ecology of filamentous sulfur formation. So far, little is known of the abundance, distribution, diversity, and function of Candidatus Arcobacter sulfidicus -like organisms in situ. Abundance and distribution will be assessed in environmental samples by employing fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) with existing and newly developed fluorescently labeled oligonucleotides of different specificity targeting the 16S rRNA. Genomic DNA and RNA will be extracted from sulfidic marine and hydrothermal environments for diversity analyses using denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE), small-subunit rRNA gene cloning and sequencing. These data will form the basis for the design of more refined group-, species-, and strain-specific 16S rRNA probes. Microelectrode measurements will be used in concert with FISH to measure relevant physicochemical parameters in laboratory and environmental samples. Candidatus Arcobacter sulfidicus is likely to fix CO2 by an alternative pathway other than the Calvin-Bassham-Benson cycle based on 1) the absence of Rubisco, a key enzyme of a metabolic pathway used by many bacteria and green plants for incorporating CO2 into cell material, and 2) the small d13C fractionation by the cells. Thus, this organism seems to be the first colorless sulfur-oxidizing chemolithoautotrophic bacterium that does not use the widespread Calvin-Bassham-Benson pathway for carbon fixation. This is a finding of evolutionary significance and we propose to elucidate the pathway in our model coastal strain. Evidence also suggests that this organism is capable of fixing nitrogen and this will be confirmed in additional studies. The overall significance of this research lies in the characterization of the parameters and mechanisms by which this unique process of autotrophic sulfide oxidation occurs, as well as the abundance, distribution and genotypic diversity of the responsible microbes in a number of different environments. Finally, the results will enhance our knowledge of the physiology and ecology of a novel, and heretofore-unconsidered component of the sulfur cycle. Filamentous sulfur formation may be an important process at hydrothermal vents, extending into the shallow subsurface biosphere and driven by inorganic nutrients alone (i.e. H2S and CO2, N2 doc16761 none The hormone ethylene regulates a number of processes in higher plants including fruit ripening, tissue aging, shedding of fruits and leaves, wound responses, and growth. This research is a continuation of previous efforts by this lab to investigate the mechanisms by which the Arabidopsis ETR family of ethylene receptors sense ethylene and trigger responses in the plant cells. Toward this end several important new tools have been or are being developed, including: 1) mutant plants that are deficient in each of the 5 receptor proteins; 2) a system for producing receptor proteins in yeast cells for biochemical analysis; and 3) a high resolution method for assessing rapid changes in seedling growth in response to ethylene. Using these basic systems, the mechanisms by which ethylene is perceived by the ETR receptors and how this binding is transmitted through the receptor protein to downstream effector proteins is being investigated. Effort is also being devoted to sorting out the specific roles that the different isoforms of the receptor play in the transduction of the ethylene signal. This research will lead to a better understanding of the mechanisms by which ethylene works and allow us to develop new, less toxic ways to prevent crop spoilage and control ripening processes doc16762 none Kirk Our goal is to determine how an essential morphogenetic process requiring extensive intercellular coordination arose as multicellular Volvox evolved from a unicellular ancestor resembling its closest unicellular relative, Chlamydomonas. In order to be able to swim, at the end of embryogenesis Volvox must turn right-side-out in a gastrulation-like process called inversion, which involves coordinated cytoskeletal rearrangements and changes in cell shape and motility. Transposon tagged mutants with a variety of inversion (inv) defects have been generated. The first of these to be analyzed was Inv61, in which inversion is arrested at the halfway point as a result of a transposon insertion in invA, a gene encoding a novel kinesin that is localized in the embryo near the cytoplasmic bridges that play a key role in inversion. We have cloned the C. reinhardtii orthologue of invA (iarA) and found that it encodes a kinesin (IarA) that is 90 % identical in aa sequence to InvA in both its motor and tail domains. Because invA encodes a microtubule motor, whereas invA mutants resemble wild-type embryos exposed to actomyosin inhibitors, we will explore the possibility that InvA acts as a link between the actin- and tubulin-based cytoskeletons in Volvox. Meanwhile, we will study expression and localization of its orthologue, IarA, throughout the Chlamydomonas cell cycle, and will study the effects of blocking IarA function, using a dominant negative construct, antibody inhibition, or RNA interference. We will use nuclear transformation to determine whether iarA can rescue the invA mutant. If it does not, we will test chimeric iarA-invA constructs to define regions of InvA that are required to confer an inversion function on IarA. The functional significance of such structural differences will then be tested with appropriate kinesin binding and or motility assays. If iarA does rescue invA, we will compare the proteins with which IarA interacts in Chlamydomonas versus those with which it interacts in Volvox doc16763 none This award supports theoretical and computational research and education on topological defects in liquid crystals. The PI seeks to elucidate the structure and dynamics of topological defects in liquid crystals with the use of large-scale numerical simulations of phenomenological liquid models of liquid crystals. Topological defects will be created by molecular dynamics simulations of rapid quenches to ordered phases of systems consisting of 500,000 or more liquid crystalline molecules. A variety of methods will be used to locate defects, including finite element analysis and visualization techniques. Particular attention will be paid to the core structure of defects and the effects of hydrodynamic flow on the dynamics of the defects. Students will be trained in the arts of parallel programming, scientific simulation, and visualization. This award supports theoretical research and education on liquid crystals which are materials with properties intermediate between those of solids and liquids. They are important for technological applications such as display devices, and layered liquid crystalline structures are relevant to biological research on lipid bilayers. The phase diagrams of liquid crystalline materials are particularly rich, as is their topological defect structure. Topological defects play an important role in a range of condensed matter physics phenomena including equilibration processes, certain phase transitions, and confined systems. The PI seeks to elucidate the structure and dynamics of topological defects in liquid crystals with the use of large-scale numerical simulations of phenomenological liquid models of liquid crystals. Topological defects will be created by molecular dynamics simulations of rapid quenches to ordered phases of systems consisting of 500,000 or more liquid crystalline molecules. A variety of methods will be used to locate defects, including finite element analysis and visualization techniques. Particular attention will be paid to the core structure of defects and the effects of hydrodynamic flow on the dynamics of the defects. Students will be trained in the arts of parallel programming, scientific simulation, and visualization doc16764 none The genomes of multicellular eukaryotes exist in two distinct chromatin states, the loosely compacted euchromatin and the generally condensed heterochromatin. Scientific studies using the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, first revealed that this structural subdivision correlated with differences in gene activity over 60 years ago. There is growing appreciation for the importance of chromatin structure in gene expression, but our understanding of chromosome structural differences at the protein level and how this impacts gene expression is still in its infancy. One focus of this research project is the analysis of two Drosophila genes genetically identified as important for antagonizing heterochromatin formation and promoting a euchromatic chromatin state, E(var)3-5 and E(var)3-9. The specific objectives are to extend phenotypic characterization of E(var)3-5 and E(var)3-9 mutants and to map, clone and molecularly analyze each gene. Previous experiments showing that E(var)3-5 and E(var)3-9 mutations affect gene expression will be extended and include multiple alleles. The embryonic lethality associated with mutations in both genes will be investigated to determine the timing and characteristics of developmental arrest, potentially yielding insight into the normal activity of each gene product. Evidence for a role in mitotic or meiotic chromosome function will be investigated through assays for chromosome loss, and altered behavior and morphology. The E(var)3-5 and E(var)3-9 genes will be mapped and then cloned, followed by DNA sequence analysis to predict features of the protein products. The expression pattern of each gene will be examined. The second research focus is the functional analysis of the D1 gene, which encodes an abundant protein that binds to satellite DNA within heterochromatin. Mutant alleles of the D1 gene will be generated and characterized, as a means to elucidate the function of the D1 protein. D1 mutants will be studied to determine if the D1 gene is essential for viability, and if so, to characterize the timing and phenotypes associated with developmental arrest. Through experiments analogous to those performed to analyze the E(var) mutants, flies bearing mutant D1 alleles will be examined to reveal a potential role for D1 in mitotic and interphase chromosome structure, chromosome dynamics and gene expression. It is anticipated that the molecular and genetic characterization of these three genes will increase our understanding of protein determinants of chromosome structure and their role in normal chromosome function. The aim of this research is to increase the understanding of chromosome structure by the genetic analysis of several structural components and regulators, using the fruit fly as a model system. Two genes genetically identified as being important for chromosome structure will be cloned and analyzed to better define their roles. The function of an abundant chromosomal protein will be elucidated through the isolation and characterization of mutant alleles of its gene. The findings of these studies should be applicable to other organisms and contribute to our general understanding of the importance of chromosome structure for cell function doc16765 none The generation of rhythmic movement is essential to locomotion and many other activities in most animals. The pattern-generating networks in the brain that control these movements are efficient and reliable, and so provide a platform to study a critical set of biological control paradigms, and offer the potential to inspire engineered systems that exploit these underlying principles. Neuromorphic engineering is the development of hardware-based systems that are inspired by circuit architectures found in biological nervous systems. The goals of this collaborative project are to develop neuromorphic systems that emulate the control and production of such rhythmic movements, and to use nonlinear dynamical analysis to gain a better understanding of the production of these movements. Building on prior development of very large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuits that mimic motor patterns, and channel-based model neurons using such circuits, this project will create neuromorphic oscillators based on the dynamics of ionic channels in biological neurons, combine these oscillators with mechanical actuation and sensory feedback, and expand these systems to include heterogeneous populations of neurons. The models will test the engineering validity of some principles inferred from biological designs, and will in turn allow quantitative testing of how varied parameters, sensory feedback, and heterogeneous model populations may have effects in actual complex biological systems. Results from this work will extend beyond neuroengineering, to a better understanding of motor control and feedback in neurobiology, and to potential applications in robotic design. This collaborative project also continues training of students from various backgrounds and at various levels in laboratories with a solid history of interdisciplinary training doc16766 none Beattie Lay Movement is controlled by connections established during development between motor neurons and muscle cells. Motor neurons extend processes called axons out from their cell bodies, which leave the spinal cord and extend through the developing embryo to contact the appropriate muscle fibers. This process, referred to as axon guidance, is a fundamental component of development and is essential for survival. Axon guidance is highly precise with growth cones, the growing tip of axons, making few navigational errors as they extend along stereotyped routes or pathways. While numerous examples of axon guidance events in vertebrates have been described at the cellular level, less is known about the molecules that control these events. The goal of this research is to elucidate the molecules and mechanisms that control motor axon guidance in vertebrates. To this end, the experiments outlined in this proposal focus on mutations that disrupt motor axon guidance in the embryonic zebrafish. Zebrafish is an excellent model system for studying vertebrate motor axon guidance due to its relatively simple nervous system, the ability to study embryos at early stages of development, and the capability to induce, recover, and clone mutations. The mutation stumpy dramatically and specifically affects the ability of motor axons to reach their target muscles. Instead of progressing along their pathways, motor axons in stumpy mutants stop at intermediate targets; places along the pathway where growth cones normally pause, branch, or turn. Stumpy functions to enable growth cones to proceed past intermediate targets and to reach their target muscle fibers. A series of genetic, cellular, and molecular approaches will elucidate what kind of molecule stumpy is and how it is functioning. Moreover, another mutation has been identified that interacts with stumpy at the genetic level indicating that these genes work together to promote normal motor axon guidance. Studying these mutations will provide novel insights into the genetic control of vertebrate motor axon guidance and will identify molecules that function in this essential developmental process doc16767 none The vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) is a behavior that stabilizes visual images on the retina during head movements. It has been demonstrated that Cartilaginous fishes have an eye muscle innervation pattern and VOR circuitry that is different from most vertebrates. The lungfish are more closely related to tetrapods than to other vertebrates, but they are believed to have an eye muscle innervation pattern similar to that of Cartilaginous fishes. It is therefore hypothesized that lungfish have a VOR circuitry like that of Cartilaginous fishes. Testing this hypothesis requires that the organization of the oculomotor nuclei and VOR circuitry be determined in a representative of the lungfish. The African lungfish is chosen based on its commercial availability. Two sets of experiments are proposed. In the first set of experiments, retrograde transport of biotinylated dextrans amines (BDA) will be used to reveal the organization of the oculomotor nucleus. In the second set, injections of BDA into the oculomotor nucleus will be used to reveal the organization of the VOR connections. This research will contribute to our understanding of the evolution of eye movement control systems in the vertebrate brain. Additionally, the research project will provide experiences for undergraduates in basic neuroscience research doc16768 none Within the brain there are cells called glial cells that are intimately involved with the functions of neurons (nerve cells), and astrocytes form a whole class of glial cells. In mammals, astrocytes and neurons in an area called the arcuate nucleus show sexual dimorphism; during development, the cells in males become structurally different from the cells in females. This differentiation is hormonally mediated by the steroid hormone estradiol, even though the astrocytes lack molecular receptors for estrogens, and there is evidence that the neurotransmitter compound GABA (gamma-amino butyric acid) is involved. This project uses biochemical and molecular approaches to test the hypothesis that estradiol modulates the release of GABA, which in turn modulates calcium influx, promoting the formation of gap junctions throughout the population, so the whole population can differentiate together despite the lack of estrogen receptors. Results from this work will have an impact beyond neuroendocrinology, including developmental neuroscience and cell biology, and the relatively new area of glial neurobiology. In addition, the project continues the PI s excellent record of training graduate students and community outreach doc16769 none for Proposal # Caroline Goutte The Notch signaling pathway represents a conserved mechanism of cell communication. During the development of C. elegans there are multiple events in which the Notch signaling pathway plays a critical role in cell fate induction. Our work focuses on two newly identified components of Notch signaling events, the C. elegans aph-1 and aph-2 gene products. Previous work has shown that the aph-1 and aph-2 genes encode novel proteins that are well conserved in other systems, including humans; however, their function in Notch signaling events remains unknown. The primary objective of this proposal is to examine the roles of the APH-1 and APH-2 proteins in facilitating cell-cell interactions. To this end three general areas of investigation will be pursued. First, a series of experiments will be carried out to delineate where in the Notch signaling pathway the APH-1 and APH-2 proteins function. Which cells require APH-1 and APH-2 activity, and is their function required before or after receptor interaction with its ligand? The methods will include analysis of APH-1 cellular and subcellular expression patterns, manipulation of individual embryonic cells, and genetic epistasis analysis. Second, we will use standard mapping and cloning procedures to pursue the molecular identity of four new genes that were previously isolated as genetic suppressors of an aph-1 mutation. Because mutations in these genes can compensate for defective APH-1 activity, elucidation of their molecular identity will shed light on the normal function of APH-1, as well as identify potential new players of Notch-mediated events. Third, an exploration into post-embryonic roles for APH-1 and APH-2 will be initiated by examining post-embryonic mutant phenotypes, genetic interactions with other Notch pathway components, and an analysis of post-embryonic APH-1 expression patterns. Because APH-1 and APH-2 are found in other systems, it is expected that results from this study will contribute to the general understanding of Notch signaling in all species doc16770 none A collaborative grant has been awarded to Drs. William Henley and Robert Miller (Oklahoma State University), Mark Buchheim (University of Tulsa) and Mark Schneegurt (Wichita State University) to establish a Microbial Observatory at the Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge in northern Oklahoma. The briny remains of an ancient sea that once covered middle America rise to the surface and evaporate under dry conditions to leave a crust of white salt on the barren, flat, 65-km2 Salt Plains. Rainfall events dissolve the salt crust and create temporary streams and ponds, altering the landscape. Salt conditions change rapidly in time with rainfall events and in space as the plains give way to vegetated areas. The rapidly changing conditions and high surface temperatures, salt concentrations and UV exposure make this an extreme environment. The Salt Plains Microbial Observatory will use a combination of classic microbiology techniques and leading-edge genetic techniques to characterize microbial communities (bacteria and algae) and study how they survive in such a harsh environment. It is expected that many novel microbes will be discovered, and a repository of microbial biodiversity will be established, along with Internet databases of genetic information. Educational opportunities will be available for undergraduate and graduate students, including a summer course for students from groups under-represented in the sciences. Capturing the biodiversity of this remarkable environment will preserve unique microbes that have beneficial properties for man, as potential sources for new antibiotics, drugs, and enzymes for industrial processes and green chemistry. Fundamental ecological questions will be addressed that have widespread application to the management and conservation of our natural resources. Surviving under such harsh conditions, the microbes on the Salt Plains will serve as models for organisms that may be found on other planets. Representing the first extensive study of a non-marine, terrestrial, hypersaline environment, the Salt Plains Microbial Observatory is poised to make significant new discoveries doc16771 none The goal of this research is to examine parental management of adolescents peers in three ethnic contexts (African-American, Latino [primarily Mexican], and White). In recent years, there has been growing interest in examining parental management of adolescents peer relationships. Given the increase in importance of peers during adolescence and given that peer influence is also a predictor of school adjustment, drug use, and delinquent behavior, it is important to examine the ways in which parents manage the peer relationships of adolescents. Much current research on parental management of peers focuses on White adolescents. More research examining issues of normative development among minority populations, such as parental management of peers, is needed. This research will provide new information on the role of parental management of peers for adolescents in non-White and White groups and its relation to adolescent academic achievement and adjustment (e.g., drug use, delinquent behavior, friendship quality, loneliness). The project will consist of two studies. The first will identify the precursors of parental management of adolescents peer relationships (e.g., parental goals, parental beliefs, parental perceptions of adolescents behaviors) and it will identify the range of strategies used by parents in the management of adolescents peer relationships. Ninety adolescents and their parents (30 African-American, 30 Latino, and 30 White) will participate in interviews regarding several facets of parental management of peers, including precursors to parental management of peer relationships. Information derived from the first study will be used to refine and develop questionnaires to be used in the second study. That study will assess the suitability of the measures for use across the three ethnic groups, examine the relations between precursors of parental management of peers, such as parental beliefs about authority over peer relationships or adolescent adjustment, and examine adolescent outcomes (e.g., academic achievement, friendship quality, drug use, and delinquent behavior) associated with parental management practices. For the second, a total of 100 African-American, 100 Latino, and 100 White seventh-graders, their parents, and their best school friends will be followed for one year. All participants will complete questionnaires at the beginning of the academic year and at the end of the academic year. Analysis of the data will allow assessment of whether the questionnaires function similarly across the three ethnic groups, as well as whether particular precursors are related to management of peers and whether management is, in turn, related to academic achievement, friendship quality, drug use, and delinquent behavior. The data should ultimately be useful in constructing training for parents in peer management techniques that would be effective in achieving desired and socially acceptable outcomes doc16772 none Plants are completely dependent on the resources that are available in their immediate vicinity. Unfortunately, nutrient availability and distribution are in constant flux in the environment. Plants must be able to sense these changes and respond appropriately. This developmental plasticity can be clearly observed in the plant root system. The root system is a highly branched structure that extracts water and nutrients from the soil. Both the number and placement of lateral roots are dramatically affected by environmental cues. This allows the plant to optimize its root system to its unique habitat, compete effectively for soil resources and survive adverse conditions. Lateral roots are formed from mature pericycle cells in the parent root. We have almost no understanding of how pericycle cells are triggered to re-enter the cell-cycle and re-differentiate to create the lateral root primordium. Similarly, very little is known about how certain pericycle cells are selected to proliferate while their neighbors remain quiescent. Finally, it is unclear how external conditions are sensed and the information integrated into decisions about where and when a new lateral root will be formed. The objective of this proposal is to dissect the mechanisms that regulate the initiation of lateral roots. Our main strategy involves the analysis of a lateral root initiation mutant, lin1, that we have recently isolated in Arabidopsis thaliana. While wild-type Arabidopsis plants drastically repress lateral root initiation under certain environmental conditions, the lin1 mutant maintains a highly branched root system. Furthermore, lin1 shows altered patterns of accumulation of auxin, a hormone known to be critical for lateral root initiation. We will clone the LIN1 gene and characterize the LIN1 pathway using genetic, physiological and genomic approaches. These studies will begin to shed light on one of the fundamental mysteries in plant biology: How are the decisions made that coordinate plant development with environmental cues? They will also impact our understanding of how plants are able to selectively activate cell proliferation and organogenesis during vegetative growth. By focusing on the root system, our work will also provide important insights into plant adaptation to water and nutrient stress and may lead to the development of crops able to survive under adverse conditions doc16773 none Flikkema, Paul Northern Arizona University BDEI: Reconfigurable Wireless Sensor Networks for Dense Spatio-Temporal Environmental Monitoring Improving understanding of ecosystem processes requires the acquisition of multi-component environmental time series at high spatial resolution. Current environmental sensing systems typically rely on stand alone data loggers or wired sensor arrays. Research and resource management that depend on such systems are currently limited by initial cost and or the effort required to acquire the data. The nexus of this project is to integrate cutting-edge, low-cost circuit and system technology into a wireless environmental sensing network based on an evolvable architecture that will meet an immediate and critical need: to dramatically improve coverage and spatial density while greatly reducing the total cost. This first-generation network will also serve as an experimental testbed for fundamental research in wireless sensor networking that targets the unique characteristics of environmental monitoring applications. This research includes distributed, adaptive source coding of spatio-temporally correlated vector processes, multi-hop protocols with inter-layer interaction, and coded macrodiversity for energy-constrained multi-hop networks. Since this project brings together wireless networking and ecosystems and microclimate researchers, it also provides an opportunity to initiate the development of a new interdisciplinary program of study: Ecosystem Sciences and Informatics. This program will educate a new generation of students who can develop and use technology for ecosystem monitoring and modeling doc16774 none The mammalian anterior pituitary gland is a major organ for neuroendocrine function because it secretes multiple, important hormones. During development, proteins known as transcription factors regulate activation of the genes that encode these hormones. Two transcription factors of the LIM homeodomain group, Lhx3 and Lhx4, are involved in the specification of the hormone-secreting cells in the anterior pituitary. Very little is known about the biochemical mechanisms by which these factors exert their specific gene regulatory functions. Lhx3 exists in different isoforms, which have distinct DNA-binding and gene regulatory properties. This project uses molecular and biochemical approaches to test the hypothesis that Lhx3 is a phosphoprotein that is modified at multiple locations, and that phosphorylation of Lhx3 modulates its gene regulatory properties. Lhx3 will be expressed, purified and analyzed by mass spectrometry techniques, and modified isoforms will be changed by site-directed mutatgenesis. The DNA binding, gene regulatory properties, involvement of intracellular signaling pathways, and localization of these modified Lhx3 molecules will be tested using reporter genes, constitutively active signaling enzymes and confocal microscopy. Experiments also will test to what extent Lhx4 has similar, but distinct, transcriptional properties to Lhx3. An important issue from genomics is to understand how a limited number of genes can mediate the development of complex organisms, and this study shows an example of how multiple proteins can be generated from individual genes, and how their functions depend on post-transcriptional regulation. Results will have an impact beyond neuroendocrinology, because LIM proteins are required for development and function of many other systems in both animals and plants. Training and mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students also are an integral part of this project doc16775 none Duffy The Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor (EGFR or ErbB) family of receptor tyrosine kinases has been implicated in a myriad of developmental decisions including mitogenesis, apoptosis, cellular migration, determination, differentiation, and dedifferentiation. Despite our knowledge of the role of this family in cellular decisions, our understanding of receptor activation and signal propagation is still in its infancy. The studies proposed by Dr. Duffy will use the model system, Drosophila melanogaster, to shed further light on the activation of EGFR signaling. This will be accomplished by dissecting the role of the inhibitory molecule, Kek1, in EGFR signaling. Kek1 encodes a transmembrane protein of the Leucine Rich Repeat (LRR) and Immunoglobulin (Ig) family that acts in a negative feedback loop to inhibit EGFR signaling. The availability of an abundance of genetic and molecular tools in Drosophila provide the means to decipher the mechanism of EGFR inhibition by Kek1 in vivo. This analysis will determine if Kek1 represents a new mode of inhibition and contribute to an improved understanding of EGFR signaling. The specific objectives proposed by Dr. Duffy are: (1) to define the mechanism through which Kek1 inhibits D-EGFR signaling by generating modified forms of Kek1. These constructs will by assayed biochemically, genetically, and molecularly for their effects on D-EGFR activity, both in vivo and in cell culture; (2) to define the residues of Kek1 and D-EGFR that mediate their interaction; and (3) to determine if Kek1 s inhibitory function is conserved to the vertebrate receptors. To elucidate the role of the EGFR ErbB family in development, a continuing effort must be made to characterize inhibitory molecules, such as Kek1 doc16776 none Processes of sexual selection include competition, generally between males, and mate choice, typically by females. In the latter, discriminating females may obtain from males 1) direct, material benefits that influence their survival and fecundity and or 2) indirect, genetic benefits that are only expressed in the subsequent generation. Female choice based on genetic benefits requires that genetic variance for the chosen male character(s), and the female preference, exist, but the directional selection imposed by female choice should eliminate such variance. To determine how this paradox may be resolved in natural populations, the investigator will study mating behavior of the lesser waxmoth, a species in which males attract females with an ultrasonic advertisement signal. Previous studies demonstrated substantial genetic variance for the male signal and suggested that a genetic tradeoff exists between signal attractiveness and development rate. The current project will use inbred lines and quantitative genetic techniques to evaluate the extent of this tradeoff and how it may maintain genetic variance in male attractiveness. This study will contribute to our basic knowledge of acoustic signaling and perception and how these behaviors are related to life history and development. Moreover, analyses of the inbred lines will reveal the genetic relationships between sexual and developmental traits and how genetic correlation may influence the expression of behavior and its variation doc16777 none Rawls In vertebrates, the metameric pattern of the axial skeleton and peripheral nerves is dependent on the establishment of the anterior posterior (A P) polarity of somites during early embryogenesis. Individual vertebrae are derived from the anterior and posterior halves of the sclerotome compartment of adjacent somites. The proper segmentation of these axial structures is critical to the viability of the animal. Therefore, determining the molecular basis of A P polarity is of fundamental importance. Preliminary studies in Dr. Rawl s laboratory, tracing cell migration in the presomitic mesoderm of mouse embryos indicates the presence of active sorting of cells into anterior- and posterior-specific domains. Similar cell sorting mechanisms have been shown to regulate compartmental boundaries between segments of the vertebrate hindbrain. The first aim of this proposal is to perform a detailed analysis of cell sorting in the presomitic mesoderm and epithelial somite. Cell migration will be examined using a novel in vivo assay developed in the laboratory for tracing the movement of cells in the somites of mouse embryos. This technique also will allow for the comparison of cell migration in wild type embryos to that of existing genetic mutations that are deficient in A P polarity. Preliminary studies indicate that the cell sorting activity is compromised in embryos deficient for paraxis, a bHLH transcription factor required for proper epithelialization of the somite. Migration and sorting are dependent on the cell adhesion properties of the cells. Therefore, the loss of somite epithelialization and increased cell migration associated with the paraxis mutant are both consistent with a reduction in the cell adhesiveness of the presomitic cells. The cell adhesion properties of the mutant cells will be examined using in vitro aggregation assays and gene expression studies. The specificity of the cell migration activity will also be assessed by examining cell movement in Dll1 and Lunatic Fringe embryos. In these mutants A P polarity is disrupted but epithelialization occurs normally, Collectively these experiments will provide valuable insight into a mechanism for regulating spatial identity during somitogenesis. Examination of targeted null mutations will be used to identify the genes that regulate this process. Because segmentation and compartmental boundaries are a common strategy for patterning during development, the information gained from these experiments can potentially be used to understand other systems doc16778 none Susan Bertram This research addresses how heritable variation may be maintained within a population. Research on heritable variation is important because it has implications for biodiversity: extinction removes species, speciation adds them; and heritable variation is the fodder for speciation. While data suggests that genetic variation in traits that enhance fitness is quite common, current theory predicts almost no heritable variation in fitness conferring traits. This inconsistency between theory and data reveals the importance of determining the underlying mechanisms responsible for maintaining heritable variation. The goal of this research is to investigate how heritable variation may be maintained in sexually selected traits by directly testing the hypothesis that heritable variation in mating signals can be maintained by temporally fluctuating and opposing forces of sexual and natural selection. The Texas field cricket, Gryllus texensis, is an ideal system to test this hypothesis as male crickets display extensive mating signal variation, all signaling components measured to date exhibit high heritabilities, and signals are easily measured. Further, female crickets discriminate between potential mates based on mating signals, and signaling males are often attacked and killed by acoustically orienting parasitoids. Crickets have two breeding seasons, spring and fall. In the spring cricket and parasitoid densities are low, in the fall they are high. Density influences the intensity of selection, because in the low-density spring populations female crickets discriminate between mates with different songs. In the high-density fall populations selection appears reversed, with female crickets selecting mates randomly and signaling males being targeted by parasitoids. To test whether temporally fluctuating natural versus sexual selection can maintain variation, my research will first confirm that the mating signals are heritable. Selection experiments will then determine how natural and sexual selection influence variation in calling behavior over several generations. The proposed research will be the first experimental test of the hypothesis that conflicting selection forces shape mating signal variation within a population doc16779 none Glycogen and starch serve as major energy storage compounds for nearly all- living organisms and are an important energy component obtained from plants. ADP-glucose pyrophosphorylase (ADPGlc Ppase) catalyzes the conversion of glucose-1-phosphate and ATP to ADP-glucose and pyrophosphate and is a key regulated step in both bacterial glycogen and plant starch biosynthesis. ADPGlc Ppase regulation is mediated by the binding of a number of activators and inhibitors, many of which are key metabolic intermediates. This research utilizes the ADPGlc Ppase enzyme from the bacteria Agrobacterium tumefaciens (Ag.t.) that is regulated by fructose- 6-phosphate and pyruvate. This project outlines x-ray crystal structural studies on Ag.t. ADPGlc Ppase to examine substrate binding, allosteric effector binding, and the mechanism of activation. Several roadblocks associated with x-ray crystallography have already been overcome including crystallization and heavy atom derivitization for phase determination. Once the three-dimensional structure of one member of the ADPGlc Ppase protein family is determined homology modeling can be used to construct reasonable structures of the other proteins in the family. As a major control point for the production of renewable and biodegradable carbon sources, ADPGlc Ppase is an attractive enzyme target for protein engineering. Understanding the regulation of the ADPGlc Ppase enzyme family is necessary for the bioengineering of the enzyme and could lead to rational protein engineering of the enzyme to increase starch production doc16780 none Arora A fundamental feature of growth and differentiation in multicellular organisms is the ability of one group of cells to influence the fate of another through intercellular communication. Thus understanding how signaling activity is regulated and modulated contributes to an important aspect of developmental biology. A long-term goal of our research is to understand the in vivo roles and mechanism of Transforming Growth Factor-B (TGF-B) signaling during development in Drosophila. Ligands of the TGF-B superfamily control a wide range of biological functions such as cell proliferation, axial patterning, tissue specification and morphogenesis in systems as diverse as worms, flies, frogs, and mice. Despite the evolutionary distance, many components of the TGF-B signaling pathway show remarkable functional conservation. Thus studies in a genetically tractable organism like Drosophila can provide crucial insights into aspects of TGF-B signaling that are relevant to both basic and clinical science. One key issue is understanding how multiple ligands expressed in the same tissue can act through a relatively limited number of receptors and downstream signal transducers to elicit a variety of biological effects. This proposal focuses on characterizing the mutant phenotype, and determining the signaling pathway utilized by a novel ligand Alp. Since Alp is equally related to the Activin TGF-B and BMP subfamilies, it cannot be definitively assigned to a functional pathway based on structural similarity alone. Molecular and genetic approaches will be used to determine the functional requirement for alp, study how it generates spatial pattern, and identify the proteins required for its signal-transduction doc16781 none This research would investigate Mexican American ethnicity in two mid-size communities (Santa Maria, California and Garden City, Kansas). These locations extend sociological research on ethnicity beyond the usual major metropolitan areas. 120 interviews in the two communities will address questions of the strength of ethnic identification and the relationships between established residents and new immigrants. An organizational comparison of Mexican American civil rights groups in the two communities will also help us understand how ethnicity develops and is expressed. A principal research question focuses on how the different patterns of immigration in the two communities (continuous immigration in Santa Maria versus distinct phases in Garden City) have affected ethnic identification and solidarity doc16782 none Lay abstract Wright What happens in our brains when we learn? How do evolutionary changes in mechanisms underlying one form of learning impact upon the evolution of other forms of learning? In previous research this investigator used neurophysiological and behavioral studies of several present-day species (related to the popular models species, Aplysia californica) with known relationships to each other to establish that fundamental mechanisms of sensitization, a simple form of learning, have changed across evolution. In this research the consequences of evolution will be examined with respect to a more complex form of learning, classical conditioning. The hypothesis to be examined is whether loss or reduction in the simple mechanisms of sensitization reduces the persistence of the more complex neural changes underlying classical conditioning. This study will lead to a deeper understanding of the neural mechanisms of learning and memory doc16783 none Green A central question in developmental biology is how the body axes are established in the vertebrate embryo. Previous studies in Xenopus have shown that the protein kinase GSK3b plays a pivotal role in establishing dorsoventral asymmetry. However, it was believed that asymmetry in GSK3b specific activity, rather than an asymmetry of GSK3b protein abundance per se, provided spatial orientation for the embryo. In preliminary studies, Dr. Green and colleagues have shown that dorsoventral regulation of GSK3b involves an actual depletion of GSK3b, perhaps through differential stability of the protein. The research proposed here builds upon this preliminary observation. The broad goal is to define the GSK3b regulatory mechanisms that establish the dorsoventral axis. The first aim is to characterize the mechanism of GSK3b protein depletion. The stability of purified recombinant GSK3b will be measured in early embryos. Ubiquitination proteasome inhibitors will be tested for their ability to prevent GSK3b depletion. The second aim is to clarify the role of Wnt signaling in endogenous dorsoventral regulation of GSK3b. GSK3b abundance in embryos depleted for Wnt receptors will be measured and maternal Wnts will be compared with zygotic Wnts (that are known to reduce GSK3b specific activity only) for their ability to deplete GSK3b. To identify a possible temporal shift in GSK3b regulation from depletion to specific activity reduction, earlier and later stage unperturbed embryos will be compared. The third aim is to examine the role of GSK3b localization in its regulation. GSK3b protein depletion is tightly localized to the cell cortex, and has been shown to be involved in Wnt-dependent recruitment of the Wnt transduction protein Axin to the Wnt transmembrane receptor LRP5. The hypothesis that membrane-associated GSK3b forms a highly Wnt- and GBP-sensitive pool will be tested by examining GSK3b abundance and activity in cortical membrane fractions of normal and manipulated embryos. These projects will together provide a more precise molecular picture of GSK3b regulation in early Xenopus development doc16784 none Levine The focus of the proposed study is to characterize the gene regulation networks underlying notochord differentiation in a simple chordate, the ascidian Ciona intestinalis. The research plan includes three specific aims. First, the Snail repressor appears to inhibit notochord differentiation in the presumptive tail muscles. This will be tested by misexpressing both wild-type and mutant forms of the Snail protein in electroporated embryos using defined tissue-specific enhancers. Second, two different target genes of the Brachyury activator, Ezrin and Meg1, have been implicated in mediating cell shape changes during notochord differentiation. The activities of the encoded proteins will be investigated by expressing different dominant-negative forms of the proteins in the notochord. The third line of research will explore the basis of T box specificity, whereby related T-containing transcription factors control the differentiation of distinct tissues. Particular efforts will focus on Brachyury and Tbx6, which regulate distinct sets of target genes in the notochord and tail muscles, respectively doc16785 none A classic means of grouping languages typologically is in terms of the order of their basic constituents: subject, object, and verb. In traditional typological literature, these groups are thought to correlate with other syntactic phenomenon. Most research on these correlates has focused on western European languages, which primarily exhibit subject-verb-object (SVO) or subject-object-verb (SOV) orders. Although these studies has been fruitful, more attention needs to be given to languages that display other orders, particularly verb-subject-object (VSO) ordering. VSO ordering characterizes less than nine percent of the world s languages. Examples of VSO languages are Irish, Welsh, Arabic, Chamorro, Berber, Breton, Samoan, and Tongan. VSO ordering relatively rare, and it is highly problematic in terms of theoretical syntax. This has led to considerable controversy among scholars with respect to the degree to which most or all of the VSO languages share specific syntactical properties. This award will support a workshop that will bring together about 18 leading scholars representing diverse language families and different theoretical orientations to share their findings regarding verb-initial word-order correlates and to discuss the implications of structural approaches to word order and to the predictive power of analyses to word-order correlations. The workshop is scheduled to be held in Tucson, Arizona, in February . In addition to invited speakers, participation also will be open to other individuals who submit abstracts of presentations for anonymous review beforehand. Outcomes are the workshop are expected to be in the form of a compilation of papers presented in a special issue of a journal or in a book. This workshop will help advance linguistics by increasing communication among linguists who have employed different theoretical perspective and by increasing knowledge of how expanded understanding of VSO languages can advance understanding of syntax and linguistic theory as a whole. The workshop also will advance understanding about VSO languages, many of which, like Irish, are in danger of extinction doc16786 none We propose a study of symbioses between cyanobacteria and planktonic diatoms, dinoflagellates, radiolarians, silicoflagellates and other planktonic protozoans in the equatorial oligotrophic Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. We have recently observed that these symbioses are diverse and abundant, and some have not yet been reported in the scientific literature. The biology and the phylogeny of these symbioses are virtually unstudied. The 16S rDNA sequences of cyanobacterial symbionts within a diatom (Climacodium) showed that they are closely related to the N2 fixing genus Cyanothece (which fixes during the night), which suggests that some of these symbioses may involve N2 fixation. We hypothesize that cyanelle symbionts may benefit host species either via incorporation of fixed N or C (via DON or DOC release or by being phagocyticized). The research approach will use combined microscopy and molecular biology approaches to link observed relationships between cyanobacteria and the eukaryotic microalgae with phylogenetic information and detection of the genes involved in nitrogen fixation. Using samples collected directly by microscopy, and bulk filtered water samples, the identity, nitrogen fixation potential (presence of nitrogenase genes) and expression of nitrogen fixation genes will be related to specific organisms and quantified in the water column. These approaches will be based on amplification and sequencing of 16S rDNA from the symbionts to understand the phylogeny of the cyanobacteria, and detection of the presence of nifH as an indicator of capacity to fix N2, examination of the ultrastructure of host and cyanelle, use of 14 C autoradiography to examine C transfer, measurements of abundance and distribution to quantify ecological importance, along with culture attempts to allow laboratory studies directed at determining the nature of the symbiotic interactions using GC MS. The proposed research will take advantage of four already- funded (NSF) research cruises scheduled over the next three years in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans doc16787 none In this project, modifications of the photosynthetic reaction center from the purple bacterium, Rhodobacter sphaeroides, will be designed to incorporate original oxidation reactions involving the primary electron donor, a bacteriochlorophyll dimer. This strategy has already been shown to be successful in elevating the oxidizing capacity of the reaction center, enabling the oxidation of nearby tyrosine amino acid residues. A variety of techniques such as vibrational, magnetic resonance, and transient optical spectroscopy will be employed in the characterization of the modified reaction centers. Specific goals include: (1) To understand the role of proton transfer in the generation of amino acid radicals. Recently developed hydrogen abstraction models have proposed a critical role for protons in the function of tyrosyl radicals. The involvement of specific protons will be identified by performing measurements on mutants with alterations of possible proton-accepting amino acid residues. (2) To incorporate binding sites for manganese compounds that can be oxidized by the reaction center. Water oxidation in photosystem II takes place at a manganese cluster that remains a challenging aspect of photosynthesis to understand at the molecular level. The ability of the highly oxidizing reaction centers to oxidize manganese at increasingly more complex levels will be characterized. (3) To increase the yield of electron transfer in the highly oxidizing reaction centers by replacement of bacteriochlorophyll with chlorophyll in the dimer. The yield of the modified reaction centers is presently restricted because the bacteriochlorophyll dimer uses relatively low energy near infrared radiation for excitation. This limitation will be overcome by incorporation of chlorophyll, which absorbs higher energy visible radiation, into this site. In all photosynthetic systems, the primary conversion of light into chemical energy occurs in pigment-protein complexes. By coupling the primary process in these complexes to secondary events, the photosynthetic apparatus is capable of creating energy-rich compounds. Although the specific pathways vary among organisms, the general pattern of energy conversion is remarkably conserved, and an understanding of this process serves as the basis for current designs of artificial systems that mimic the photosynthesis. The expansion of the capabilities of the reaction center by the design of reactions involving amino acid radicals, metal complexes, and alternate pigments will not only provide a novel strategy for studying reactions that are crucial in photosynthesis and other biological processes, but also will lead to the development of a well-controlled system for oxidation of specific substrates doc16788 none With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Sandra Chung and James McCloskey will conduct three years of linguistic research on the form, meaning, and use of expressions of existence in five languages whose linguistic profiles differ radically from English. Previous research has established that these expressions fall into a small range of types, closely connected in form to expressions of location, possession, and impersonality. Relatively little is known about variation in the meaning and use of such expressions. Consistent with the intuition that existence is a fundamental concept, many linguists and philosophers hold that sentences expressing existence have a constant function, whatever their form. But most previous research involved a small number of well-known and closely related languages. Broader investigation is needed to reveal whether differences in form are correlated with specific differences in meaning and in patterns of use in these expressions. Chung and McCloskey s research team will investigate these questions in three languages of the Pacific (Chamorro, Maori, and Samoan) and two languages of Europe (Breton and Irish). Data collected through fieldwork with native speakers, from written language materials, and in naturally occurring discourse will address these questions: (1) In each language, what linguistic forms express existence? (2) How are these forms used in discourse? In narrative, for instance, can sentences expressing existence introduce new characters or reintroduce familiar characters? (3) What meaning restrictions, if any, are imposed on expressions of existence? Can they be used to assert the existence of a particular object, of a kind of object, of every object of a certain kind? (4) Does the linguistic form of these expressions correlate with their meaning or function? This research is important for several reasons. First, it will broaden the range of languages whose expressions of existence are studied in depth. Second, it will contribute insights into the cross-linguistic interaction of linguistic form, sentence meaning, and discourse function. Third, the five languages to be investigated are endangered. This research will contribute significantly to their documentation, which is especially important in the under-studied areas of meaning and language use doc16789 none An understanding of the principles that determine protein folding and stability is critical for guiding the rational design of proteins with novel functional properties, and for accurate predictions of tertiary structure from amino acid sequence. This project will increase our understanding of the relationship between altered topology and the folding pathway for a protein, and provide experimental data that can be used to refine structure prediction algorithms. The specific aims are: (1) to compare the folding and unfolding rates of wild-type and three to four circularly permuted sperm whale myoglobins using stopped-flow circular dichroism spectroscopy; (2) to map differences in the transition state structures for wild-type and circularly permuted myoglobins using perturbation methods. These studies entail generation and bacterial expression of genes encoding permuted myoglobin proteins (permuteins) as well as site-directed mutants of the permuteins and the wild-type myoglobin. Purified apoproteins will be analyzed for stability to chemical denaturation and in kinetic assays for folding and unfolding. CD spectroscopy will be used to derive the stability parameters and kinetic studies will be carried out with stopped-flow CD to measure rates of permutein folding and unfolding at various denaturant concentrations. Kinetic and equilibrium stability data will be used to map the relative energies of the denatured, native and transition states for folding reactions. The long-term goals of this research include a thorough determination of those regions of the myoglobin sequence that will tolerate topological mutation, and characterization of the folding pathway for these mutants. This project will provide an opportunity for several undergraduate students to integrate classroom teaching in biochemistry and biophysics with an intensive research experience. The students will carry out all aspects of the proposed work from cloning genes to CD studies, as well as presentation of results at local and national meetings. Hands-on experience with equilibrium and kinetic data collection and interpretation will greatly enhance student comprehension of biophysical principles, and prepare these students well for further study in biochemistry doc16790 none Light-initiated electron transfer within the photosynthetic reaction center is the primary event in solar energy conversion by photosynthetic organisms. The core of the photosynthetic reaction center from purple nonsulfur bacteria is a quasi-symmetric heterodimer, providing two potential pathways for transmembrane electron transfer. Past measurements have demonstrated that only one of the two pathways (the A-side) is used to any significant extent upon excitation with red or near infrared light. Recently, Dr. Woodbury has found that excitation with blue light into the Soret band of the reaction center gives rise to photochemistry along the alternate or B-side pathway apparently within a 200 fs laser pulse. The spectral signature of the states formed, and their long (nanosecond) lifetime at low temperature, are characteristic of charge separated states involving the anion of the B-side bacteriopheophytin. This opens the door to a whole new array of measurements attempting to understand both the mechanism and the function of B-side electron transfer in the reaction center. This research project centers around the interplay between the free energy of the charge separated states, which can be varied over a large range using mutants that alter the P P+ potential, and the energy of the photon used in excitation. Preliminary data suggests that the more favorable the energetics of B-side electron transfer, the lower the energy of the photon that is required to initiate B-side transfer. The physiological function of B-side electron transfer is not yet known. One possibility is that it could rapidly quench the excited states formed from blue or UV light absorption by reaction center cofactors and surrounding tryptophan residues. Several experiments involving mutants that disrupt B-side transfer are planned to see if reaction centers are more susceptible to UV and blue light damage without functional B-side photochemistry. Finally, in order to generate a series of new mutants with spectrally defined functional properties (loss or A-side electron transfer, increased B-side transfer, etc.), Dr. Woodbury will develop a directed evolution methodology that utilizes entirely optical means of both screening and selecting cells from a large library of reaction center mutants doc16791 none The long-term goal of this research, funded by the Molecular Biophysics Program in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences and the Theoretical and Computational Program in the Division of Chemistry, is to understand the influence of water on the structure and function of proteins. To accomplish this, Dr. Ichiye is developing fast and accurate treatments of solvent for computer simulations of biological macromolecules. This project focuses on the development of the soft, sticky dipole (SSD) potential energy model of water. The single-site SSD model is a considerable advance over three-site models commonly used for biological simulations because it has better structural, dielectrical and dynamical properties and yet is four times faster in molecular dynamics simulations. The SSD model represents a water molecule as a Lennard-Jones sphere, a point dipole, and a tetrahedral sticky hydrogen bond potential. Therefore, the interaction energy between two water molecules depends only on the position and orientation of each molecule in the SSD model, whereas it depend on the positions of the oxygen and the two hydrogens of each molecule in the three-site models. The aims in developing the model are (1) to investigate its pure water properties further, (2) to improve the water-solute interaction, (3) to implement it into a molecular mechanics computer program for biological macromolecules, and (4) to add electronic polarizability. The scientific aims are (1) to characterize water in and around rubredoxin and other iron-sulfur proteins, particularly near the metal site, and (2) to determine the physical origins of the anomalies in the temperature-dependence of water density and in the dynamics of supercooled water. Since these issues require very long simulation times and may depend crucially on the hydrogen bond potential, SSD is ideal for these studies. The development of the SSD model will impact many areas of research. For the scientific community as a whole, the development of fast but accurate models of water for computer simulations is important for understanding the complex behavior of water as well as for greatly improving the speed and accuracy of simulations involving solutes (including biological macromolecules) in aqueous solution. In this research, the accurate characterization of the structure and dynamics of water near the metal sites of iron-sulfur proteins is crucial because it strongly affects their electron transfer properties. Specifically, computer simulations will be used to investigate whether water entering the protein via water gates serves as a mechanism for controlling electron transfer specificity in these proteins doc16792 none RNA-binding proteins are critically important to many regulatory processes in the cell. The largest family of RNA-binding proteins carries one of more RNA recognition motif domains (RRMs). RRM-containing proteins occur in all living organisms, and play a role in most processes involving RNA, including splicing, RNA export, translation, and mRNA decay. U1A is a spliceosomal protein that carries two RRMs. Its N-terminal RRM mediates tight and specific binding to its RNA hairpin target (U1hpII)in U1 small nuclear RNA. U1A is one of the most extensively studied RNA-binding proteins and has been used as a paradigm for specific and tight RNA recognition by RRM-type proteins. However, to date the knowledge of the mechanism of RNA-binding by U1A and other RNA-binding proteins has been largely limited to a static image, in which the dynamics underlying the interactions are poorly understood. This project is aimed at obtaining detailed kinetic insight into the U1A U1hpII interaction using powerful state- of-the-art BIACORE technology to observe, in real time, the assembly and dissociation of the RNA protein complex. Analysis of the kinetics of the U1A U1hpII interaction will help elucidate the sequence of events that occurs during binding. More importantly, it will also provide general insights into the dynamics of RNA protein interactions, an area that has thus far remained largely unexplored. Knowledge of the kinetics of RNA protein interactions is highly relevant, since biological systems are dynamic; the rates of binding and release can affect the sequential assembly of RNA protein complexes and the function and intracellular localization of RNA- binding proteins, as well as their ability to compete for binding sites on RNA doc16793 none This project is investigating the seasonal fluxes of biogenic volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from grass and agricultural lands. Biogenic VOCs are important because they can have a significant influence on tropospheric chemistry and the formation of photochemical oxidants in the atmosphere. The educational component of the program includes an outreach component in association with five local high schools for the collection and analysis of leaf-level samples for use in making detailed seasonal and regional biogenic VOC emissions estimates for the area surrounding the Black Hills in South Dakota doc16794 none Marine cone snails of the genus Conus are predators that paralyze their prey by injecting potent neurotoxins. These toxins are peptides (11-45 amino acids long) that target ion channels crucial for normal electrochemical activity in nerve and muscle cells. A novel toxin has been discovered in one species, Conus californicus, which is a non-selective predator on worms, snails and fish. This toxins blocks nerve transmission by targeting voltage-gated sodium channels. This project uses biochemical, biophysical, and molecular approaches to elucidate the chemical structure of this peptide toxin, its mechanism of action, and its specificity profile, and to localize and clarify the basic biology of the venom production in this animal. Results will be important in developing a new experimental reagent for basic research on channels, and in understanding how different toxic peptides are made and used by these snails in a biologically relevant context. This lab also will continue important multi-disciplinary training of undergraduates in neuroscience doc16795 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II Project will establish market demand for a novel electrically mediated leveling technology and position the technology for market launch via a joint venture. The specific Phase II objectives are: 1. Scale-up and demonstration of the electrically mediated process on eight inch wafers, 2. Development of a process library for feature sizes 1-5 down to 0.17 microns, and lower, and 3. Design of a proof of concept plating tool. Preliminary concept design of a plating tool incorporating the electrically mediated process will be performed by an outside firm. The sustainable competitive advantage associated with the project for leveling is cost. Minimal overplate will eliminate or minimize the need for chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) by reducing the copper waste slurry compared to the state-of-the-art copper metallization processes. This in turn would eliminate the associated control, environmental, and cost issues doc16796 none Doruska, Paul University of Arkansas BDEI: Quantifying Forest Ground Flora Biomass and Diversity Using Close-Range Remote Sensing. Researchers propose the use of close-range remote sensing to estimate biomass per unit area and species diversity of forest ground flora. Ground flora biomass and diversity information is useful when describing forested ecosystems, gauging results in scientific experiments and determining the need for herbicide application to reduce unwanted competition in forest crops. Scientists will use both color and color infrared digital imagery to study forest ground flora biomass and species diversity of pine stands in southeastern Arkansas and mixed pine-hardwood stands in the Ouachita Mountains in central Arkansas. Airborne and or space-borne imagery have been used to estimate forest overstory biomass. However, such platforms cannot be used to estimate biomass of forest ground flora species because (a.) spatial resolution is too coarse for the required level of detail, and (b.) the presence of the overstory canopy can hinder use of such imagery. The objectives of this project are to (1) determine if these metrics can be collected through close-range remote sensing, and (2) identify spectral signatures for a number of species of forest ground flora doc16797 none PI: Nikolaos Kazantzis Institution: Worcester Polytechnic Institute Proposal Number: The main area of the planned research project is the development of a systematic, comprehensive and practical framework for digital monitoring, and fault detection and isolation (FDI), of chemical, biochemical, microelectronics, etc. manufacturing facilities. In particular, the primary objectives include: (i) The study of the fundamental problem of the design of reliable robust digital model-based monitoring and FDI systems for nonlinear processes in the presence of model uncertainty and unknown disturbances. (ii) The development of the appropriate software tools for the effective digital implementation of the planned process monitoring and FDI scheme. (iii) The real-time experimental implementation of the results of the aforementioned theoretical and computational studies on a pilot-scale polymerization reactor, as well as a bioreactor. An integral part of this project is the realization of educational goals that could complement and enrich these research activities. Aligned with the principles and vision of an innovative educational framework being developed at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), the primary educational objectives are: (i) The formulation of open-ended projects with a concrete flavor and orientation towards process dynamic modeling, monitoring and diagnostics, that will be jointly defined by professional practitioners in industry and the PI. These projects will be conducted on the industrial site, and occasionally, in an international setting. (ii) The utilization of recent advancements in computing and communications technology in order to provide a virtual learning environment that can (a) enhance the learning experience of current WPI students by elucidating key concepts in process modeling, dynamics, monitoring and diagnostics through animation and advanced graphics, and (b) be remotely accessed by educational institutions in socioeconomically distressed zones in the state of Massachusetts with a large minority student population. The objective is to provide direct remote access to real, as well as a virtual process control, monitoring and diagnostics laboratory, in order to enhance scientific literacy and awareness, and to broaden current educational opportunities for those who need them most doc16798 none Gary J. Marchionini Stephanie Haas University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Digital Government: Collaborative Research: Integration of Data and Interfaces to Enhance Human Understanding of Government Statistics - Toward the National Statistical Knowledge Network This award will support collaborative research with several Federal statistical agencies to develop better statistical data models, to explore the use of SML, to develop better map-querying tools and to integrate other available tools for manipulating, browsing and visualizing tabular data. The goal is to develop better human computer interfaces for expert users to novices, to increase general statistical literacy, and to provide seamless access to data held by multiple Federal agencies and agencies at other levels of government, in particular state and local data doc16652 none Knowledge of brain structure is essential to understand brain function. The evolution of mammals has resulted in many differences in brain anatomy, but we know very little about how those differences correlate to the wide diversity of animal behavior. This collaborative project is to consolidate and make more accessible for research and education two major collections that form a unique, extensive, remarkably preserved assembly of mammalian brain specimens for comparative and evolutionary studies. Together they contain more than 275 sectioned and stained brains, including over a half million microscope slides, representing over 150 species, from 50 families in 17 different orders of Mammalia. Many specimens are irreplaceable, from rare or endangered species, and provide critically unique data for questions about biodiversity and evolution as well as neuroscience. The collections are being brought to a national museum facility in Washington DC to join complementary extensive human brain collections and establish a single site with long-term stability for storage, curation, and research on comparative mammalian brain neuroanatomy. An electronic website is being developed for worldwide access to images. Researchers can use the images directly, or decide whether to visit the museum itself to examine the original preserved biological material. The impact of this project is high. First, it safely preserves for future research an irreplaceable resource that represents a scientific investment of more than 50 years of exacting work by dozens of people. Second, it promotes multidisciplinary research on comparative neuroscience, behavior, evolution and systematics to understand the diversity in the most complex organ known. Third, using technology of digital imaging and multidimensional databases, it provides a working base as well as a model for how to handle and share complex morphological data with other collections, including those on non-mammalian vertebrate brains. Fourth, the project will continue to have educational impact by providing easy website access for schools and informal science education about the vertebrate brain in the context of biodiversity doc16800 none An ordinary adult speaker has active control of tens of thousands of words in any given language. Unlike a dictionary that lists words alphabetically, the mental dictionary organizes words in the mind in complex ways according to their uses in language, for example, their grammatical and semantic functions. This research will address how such organization arises in childhood, settles in adulthood, and sometimes breaks down in disordered minds. The research will provide an alternative approach to current neural network models of language, because it aims at developing a cognitively and neuropsychologically plausible model that relies on self-organizing principles. Self-organization, a dynamic process of human learning, allows the learner to gather information about the input space (i.e., the limits, constraints, and possibilities of things) and to continuously organize the information in ways optimal for the task at hand. Building on Li s developmental lexicon model (DevLex), the new model will incorporate properties of self-organization, Hebbian learning, lexical co-occurrence learning, and dynamic growth. These computational properties should make the model well suited for the study of the human mental lexicon, its structure, representation, and processing in children, normal adults, second language learners, and brain-injured patients. The model will attempt to account for a wide variety of phenomena in language use. In particular, its design characteristics will permit the evaluation of important problems from a number of domains: (1) the development of structurally organized representation as a function of learning the linguistic input, and the impact of the organizational structure on linguistic generalization (child language acquisition); (2) the distinct versus integrated nature of bilingual lexicon, and crosslinguistic differences in bilingual lexical representation and acquisition (bilingual language processing); (3) the development of lexical ambiguity and grammatical ambiguity, and the processing of ambiguity in patients (lexical ambiguity processing); (4) the interaction between orthography, phonology, and semantics in reading acquisition, and the crosslinguistic differences in normal reading and developmental dyslexia (normal and impaired reading); and (5) the acquisition of category-specific representation, and the structure of lesioned semantic representations in patients (category-specific language impairment). Results from the modeling of these aspects will provide significant insights into theoretical and empirical issues in psycholinguistics and cognitive science. Understanding of normal and disordered processes in different languages will also have significant implications for language education doc16801 none This award by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research by Professor Malcolm H. Chisholm at the Ohio State University to investigate two aspects of the dinuclear chemistry of molybdenum and tungsten: 1) The activation of multiple bonds in nitriles, alkynes and dinitrogen in their reactions with compounds having M-M multiple bonds, and 2) The preparation and characterization of linked dimers of dimers, cyclotetramers and mesogens containing M-M multiple bonds. Particular emphasis is given to establishing the kinetic and thermodynamic factors that control the metathesis reactions in which multiple bonds are exchanged between dinuclear complexes and those in nitriles, alkynes and dinitrogen. In the second project specific attention is given to dinuclear compounds with bridging carboxylate linkers. Single electron oxidized and reduced species will be prepared and examined by epr spectroscopy to evaluate the electron delocalization. The thermotropic mesophases of the dinuclear complexes doped with paramagnetic complexes will be studied by magnetic resonance in order to establish the alignment of the columnar phase and he localization or delocalization of the paramagnetic site. Complexes with two metal atoms will be investigated for their reactivity with small molecules with multiple bonds and for their ability to form novel supramolecules and materials doc16802 none This SBIR Phase II project proposes to research ways to increase accessibility and utilization of microdata from censuses of the U.S. and other countries in secondary school and college courses in mathematics. A seamless, XML-driven interface to a web server at the Minnesota Population Center will make it possible for teachers and students to specify, request, and import this microdata into Fathom Dynamic Statistics software. Enhancements to Fathom software will increase its already considerable ease and power for working with census microdata; curriculum materials in mathematics will provide teachers with effective ways to begin working with this highly motivating data--both to teach existing content and to teach data literacy. Phase I research suggested strong similarities between census microdata and school census microdata data that is gathered by K-12 schools about student demographics and performance, course offerings, and classroom practice. Accordingly, Phase II leverages this overlap to produce greatly needed interfaces for easily accessing school census microdata, survey tools for producing it, and extensions to Fathom for analyzing it. KCP Technologies census microdata project exploits the merging web connectivity in American schools, thus symbiotically fitting a larger pattern of evolution of school technologies. The project offers a product that supports analysis of complex data through an easy-to-use interface which will contribute to data anlysis and learning from data analysis. U.S. education is very much in need of the kinds of software and curriculum resources to be produced under this project doc16803 none Guach, Susan University of Kansas Center for Research Inc. BDEI: Biodiversity Information Organization using Taxonomy (BIOT) Biological resources are the basis of much of this Nations prosperity. The wise stewardship of these riches affects current and future generations and, therefore, must be rooted in decisions based on the best information available. Because of the rapid growth of all content on the Internet, there is a corresponding increase in online biological information of all types. However, the sheer volume of data, and its widely varying quality and physical distribution make it impossible for decision makers to make critical decisions without the benefit of the existing body of information. This project aims to investigate and develop intelligent knowledge management tools and deploy them in this important domain. In particular, we will investigate the use of a taxonomy as a reference ontology to provide a conceptual framework to allow intelligent agents to browse biodiversity information in a variety of formats widely distributed on the World Wide Web. Our goals are four fold: 1) to investigate the use of a taxonomy as a reference ontology for browsing biodiverity information; 2) to evaluate techniques to automatically classify biodiversity information (web sites and individual web pages; 3) to personalize the information presented to the users expertise and needs; and 4) lay the groundwork for larger, multidisciplinary, efforts in intelligent search, visualization, and personalization of biodiversity information. This project proposes to build on existing work currently being done at the University of Kansas related to information discovery, retrieval, and delivery, particularly the OBIWAN project for ontology based search, browsing and visualization of Web resources and the PEET project for preserving and extending biodiversity information. A partnership has already been established between the University of Kansas and the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) to capitalize on the knowledge, expertise, and tools that have grown out of the existing University of Kansas NSF research agreement. As a result of this partnership, the first intelligent search agent for biodiversity information, BioBot, has been developed doc16804 none The objective of this work is to prepare new chiral carboxamidate ligands and their dirhodium (II) complexes, then use these complexes as asymmetric catalysts for a variety of organic transformations. Chiral catalysts will first be used for enantioselective C-H insertion reactions. Dirhodium (II) carboxamidates will then be attached to solid supports and used for cyclopropanation as well as C-H insertion catalysts. Metal catalyzed reactions of diazo compounds will then be used for heterocycle synthesis and metal catalyzed macrocyclizations of diazo compounds will also be studied. Lastly, these dirhodium (II) carboxamidates will be used as mild Lewis acid catalysts for enantioselective hetero Diels-Alder reactions and other Lewis acid catalyzed organic transformations. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Michael P. Doyle of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Arizona. Dr. Doyle will explore stereoselective, metal catalyzed reactions of compounds which contain a functional group (reactive site) known as a diazo group. Diazo compounds can be induced to lose nitrogen by metal catalysts thereby providing substrates for new carbon-carbon bond forming reactions. The catalysts form chiral pockets where the bond forming reactions occur and only one of two possible stereoisomers of the product is formed. The ability to form carbon-carbon bonds in molecules which are chiral (have two nonsuperimposable mirror images) and make only one of the two possible forms (a single enantiomer) is one of the most important problems facing the pharmaceutical industry today. Students trained during the course of this work will gain skills needed by the pharmaceutical industry which now produces a number of single enantiomer compounds doc16805 none Collectively, rodents and bats comprise roughly 75% of all known mammalian species. Within the Chiroptera, temperate bats such as the little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus) play critical ecological and economic roles in the United States and elsewhere. For example, these species are important in controlling insect populations, which would otherwise flourish in the absence of insectivorous bats. Understanding the regulation of basic reproductive processes in these species is therefore of vital concern, but surprisingly many fundamental aspects of reproductive control are still unclear in bats. The use of a comparative approach will provide information on the ubiquity in nature of these regulatory processes. Recently, the so-called obesity hormone, leptin, has been suggested to serve a role in mammalian reproduction. This hypothesis originally arose from the observation that levels of leptin in blood of pregnant animals increase considerably. Leptin s established functions are to suppress appetite and stimulate metabolic rate when body weight increases. As fat mass in the body increases, adipose cells secrete leptin into the blood, which signals the brain that sufficient fat reserves are available. Whether leptin exerts regulatory effects during reproduction is still uncertain. Also uncertain is the mechanism(s) by which plasma leptin levels are elevated during pregnancy. Recent evidence suggests that both the placenta and adipose tissue are important in secreting leptin during pregnancy, and that leptin may not only be secreted by the placenta, but may act on it as well (e.g., to promote its growth and development). In this project the regulatory factors that influence leptin secretion from both tissue sources during this energetically-demanding period of a mammal s life history will be identified. Further proposed experiments will permit determination of whether leptin is actively synthesized from placentas of rodents and bats. Finally, experiments will provide tests of the hypothesis that changes in expression of brain leptin receptors account in part for observed leptin-insensitivity during pregnancy (i.e., the ability of pregnant females to continue eating above a normal amount despite elevated levels of this appetite-suppressing hormone). Such experiments may help explain why some people are apparently insensitive to the appetite-suppressing effects of leptin. These studies will extend our knowledge of reproductive processes in Chiroptera, specifically, of the placenta as a mammalian endocrine organ, and will also be applicable to other mammalian orders, since the control of leptin secretion during pregnancy appears similar in bats and humans, for example. Elucidation of the sequence of leptin and its receptor in bats will provide useful probes for detecting the presence of receptor in brain and placenta, and aid in future phylogenetic and structure function analyses of the protein. This project will also contribute to science education by including numerous undergraduate students who will participate in various phases of the project, plus several graduate students or post-doctoral fellows. These students will gain valuable dual experience in field and laboratory biology, while engaged in an extremely topical project with wide-ranging ramifications and benefits to society at large. The PI and the co-PI have a long and successful history of promoting science through research and teaching at all levels, from K-12 through college, and continuing education of high school science teachers. It is anticipated that this trend will continue with this new project doc16806 none Mesodinium rubrum is a one-celled member of the marine plankton that can form extensive red-tides. It is unusual in that although it is a Protozoa (animal-like cell) it contains numerous chloroplasts (the organelles in which photosynthesis occurs) and can make its own food from carbon dioxide and water using the energy in sunlight, and thus is plant-like. Although Mesodinium rubrum appears to derive its plastids from ingestion of algae, it only occasionally requires algal prey and the plastids appear to be capable of synthesizing chlorophyll, the primary pigment used to capture light in photosynthesis. It also temporarily harbors nuclei of algae. Because of its unusual attributes, it may be a model for how ancestors of some algal groups acquired their photosynthetic organelles. The objectives are to describe the relationship of Mesodinium rubrum to its algal prey and to determine if photosynthesis and growth depend on acquisition of new chloroplasts or nuclei from algae and or on digestion of prey as food. Another goal is to determine if Mesodinium rubrum permanently harbors algal organelles or genes. These questions will be approached using a combination of experimental studies of cultured Mesodinium rubrum and of natural populations in the plankton. A combination of microscopic, chemical, and isotopic techniques will be used to study the physiological ecology of Mesodinium rubrum. Molecular techniques will be used to measure algal gene content and expression in Mesodinium rubrum and to determine relationships among different populations of Mesodinium rubrum and their plastids. These parallel physiological and molecular investigations will elucidate the possible role of organelle uptake from algae by protozoa in cellular evolution doc16807 none Proposal # Altunbasak, Yucel GA Tech Res. Corp - GIT An effective way of providing error resilience for multimedia transmission in a communication system with a relatively small reduction in efficiency is multiple description coding (MDC), which assumes the existence of multiple independent channels between the transmitter and receiver, each of which can be temporarily down or can experience burst errors. With MDC several coded streams, called descriptions, are generated and transmitted over different channels. At the destination, if all of the streams are received error free, then the signal can be reconstructed at its highest level of fidelity. However, if only one or a few descriptions are received in a usable form, the receiver can still reconstruct an acceptable signal. All multiple description coding methods to date assume an on-off channel mode between the transmitter and the receiver; each link is either broken, in which case the transmitted symbols, or packets, are lost completely, or it functions properly, in which case the packets are received free of errors. This model is appropriate for Internet transmission, but it is not appropriate for wireless channels. This study replaces the parallel in independent on-off channel model with a wireless channel model, such a Rayleigh fading model. Communication is performed using multiple transmit and received antennas over the channel. With these models the signal at any of the receive antennas is the superposition of the transmitted signals from each transmit antenna independently faded. Therefore, even if the descriptions at the receiver side are completely independent, the received signal at each antenna will include some information from each description. This research involves finding the best multiple description coding strategy for these channels, the theoretical limits of such a scheme, and the efficiency doc16808 none Lunjin Lu Semantic-based program analysis provides useful information to compilers, debuggers and other program manipulation tools. Existing frameworks for logic program analysis do not provide support for backward or parametric analyses that are emerging as useful tools in logic program development. Nor do they provide sufficient support for context-sensitive analyses. The project seeks to create a new framework that will support these new classes of analyses as well as those supported by existing frameworks. The research focuses on (i) developing systematic methods for designing parametric, backward and context-sensitive analyses and methods for efficient computation of these analyses; (ii) integrating research findings in logic program analysis; (iii) implementing a software environment that facilitates design, implementation and evaluation of program analyses; and (iv) identifying, implementing and evaluating new program analyses. A better understanding of parametric analysis, backward analysis and context-sensitive analysis may be obtained out of the research and that would provide a breakthrough in the field of logic program analysis. This project plans to incorporate research results into the classroom by developing and enhancing several courses in computer science and software engineering. It also offers educational opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students to work on leading edge research projects doc16809 none This award from the Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure Program provides support for 25 American scientists to participate in a US-UK Workshop on Grid Computing. The purpose of the workshop is to: 1) identify Grid research, development, and deployment activities that could be carried out jointly by researchers from the United States and the United Kingdom; 2) explore common interests in both applications and infrastructure (middleware, networking) that would warrant, and benefit from, the creation of a high-speed transatlantic testbed, and 3) if such a testbed is desirable, begin to develop the technical agenda for a high-speed transatlantic testbed. The workshop will be held on August 4-5, in San Francisco just prior to the tenth High-Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC-10) Conference. This workshop award will pay travel expenses for US participants. The US co-organizers are Carl Kesselman (USC-ISI) and Paul Messina (Caltech doc16810 none Smyth This grant provides partial support to upgrade the laboratory for high-pressure X-ray diffraction and mineral physics studies in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Colorado. The laboratory currently comprises a Siemens Bruker 18KW rotating-anode X-ray generator, automated single-crystal and powder diffractometers, laser ruby fluorescence pressure measurement facility, X-ray precession cameras for crystal orientation, and three Merrill-Bassett type diamond anvil cells. The laboratory works in close collaboration with Hartmut Spetzler s group on Gigahertz Ultrasonic interferometry on combined X-ray and ultrasonic equation of state measurements of natural and synthetic high pressure minerals. The upgrade for the rotating-anode generator includes a new Mo anode, backup turbo pump, roughing pump, and vacuum valves and gauges. The upgrade for the single-crystal diffractometer system includes a control computer, LINUX workstation, and some salary support for adaptation and installation of new diffractometer control software. The upgrade of the powder diffraction system includes new computer and control software. The upgrade of the laser pressure measurement facility includes a safety door interlock system, computer upgrade, binocular microscope, and optical bench for a new basement lab facility required for laser safety. The upgrade of high-pressure diamond anvil cells includes two new cells, one four-pin Be seat cell and one wide-aperture carbide-seat high-temperature cell. The upgrade of the sample preparation facilities includes tools for preparation of oriented, faceted single crystals for ultrasonic studies, and facilities for preparation of high-pressure synthesis runs in collaboration with the group at Bayerisches Geoinstitut in Bayreuth, Germany doc16811 none Scott J. South State University of New York at Albany Residential Mobility and Adolescent Risk Behavior This research seeks to explain why a family s residential mobility tends to have a negative impact on their adolescent children. Changing schools is correlated with a variety of risky adolescent behaviors and negative outcomes such as delinquency, sexual activity, suicide, and poor academic achievement. This study attempts to identify the mechanisms that explain these outcomes. Peer social networks may be especially important since low status, often deviant, peer groups may be more receptive to new, entering students. The analysis will use new longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) that include measures of both outcomes and peer networks. The project holds promise for developing theories of social control and social networks, and for informing parents and school officials as they deal with the stresses experienced by adolescents when they move to new communities and schools doc16812 none Conversation is the most basic site for language use; it is the primary site for language acquisition and most likely the context within which language emerged. Despite its fundamental importance, research on the cognitive processes involved in the comprehension of conversational utterances has remained relatively rare. Instead, past empirical research has focused primarily on how readers comprehend and remember narrative or expository text. However, conversations differ from texts in fundamental ways, and understanding how people process conversational contributions will require attention to these differences. This research program is an attempt to contribute to our understanding of the social-cognitive processes involved in conversation comprehension. This will be accomplished by focusing on conversational utterances as intention-based, interpersonal, collaborative acts and examining how these acts are produced and understood. A series of experiments employing a variety of measures (reading times, interpretation speed, memory) will be conducted to examine how, and in what way, people comprehend and remember the actions that speakers perform with their conversation turns. An important aspect of this research will be the development of a method for examining participants (rather than observers ) on-line processing of their conversations. This will be accomplished with the development of an artificial conversation agent that can simulate human language use doc16813 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Joan Houston Hall and the staff of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) will continue their documentation of regional and social variation in American English. Specifically, they will concentrate on entries to appear in Volume V of DARE (Sl-Z), which is projected for publication in . Three volumes of DARE have been published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (A-C, ; D-H, ; I-O ), and the fourth (P-Sk) is expected late in . DARE is based both on an extensive program of fieldwork conducted in 1,002 communities across the United States between and , and on a massive collection of written sources (including materials such as diaries, letters, newspapers, novels, folklore collections, government documents, and electronic collections) that document our language from the seventeenth century to the present. The Dictionary of American Regional English provides full historical treatment of the words, phrases, and pronunciations that vary from one part of our country to another or that characterize the usage of one social group or another. Unique to DARE is the inclusion of maps (adjusted to reflect population density rather than geographic area) showing distributions of words. Although language change is inevitable over time, and though some have predicted the homogenization of American English, DARE makes it clear that regional words and phrases are still very much alive in our language. The published volumes of DARE and the tape recordings and other materials collected for the project have been used by linguists, sociolinguists, and other lexicographers. They have also proved useful to forensic linguists, who have used them to help identify crime suspects; to physicians, who may not be familiar with the folk terms for ailments and diseases; and to psychiatrists and gerontologists who often use diagnostic tools that ask patients to give the names of everyday objects - in such cases, not knowing that there are regional terms for the objects can skew test scores, resulting in misdiagnoses. The DARE volumes are also widely used by teachers, researchers, librarians, journalists, historians, and playwrights, as well as by readers who simply delight in our American English language doc16814 none This project is co-funded by the Division of Materials Research and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities, both within the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, and the International Division as a cooperative activity in materials sciences between the National Science foundation and the European Commission (NSF solicitation 01-105). The project involves the EC Research Training Network (RTN) on Computational Magnetoelectronics whose lead institutions include Daresbury Laboratory (United Kingdom), FZ Juelich (Germany), MSP-MPI Halle (Germany), CNRS Orsay (France), TU Vienna (Austria), University of Twente (Netherlands), Uppsala University (Sweden), Academy of Sciences - Budapest (Hungary) and Institute of Physics of Materials Brno (Czechia). This grant will enable the US research group at NYU to collaborate with members of the EC RTN. The NYU group is focused on analytic and model calculations in magnetoelectronics, whereas the EC expertise is in ab initio calculations of electronic structure and magnetic and transport properties of solids. The RTN is using ab initio methods to assess the importance on the transport properties of magnetic multilayers and tunnel junctions of features identified from calculations based on model Hamiltonians. Specifically, for metallic multilayers the role of spin flip scattering by impurities on magnetoresistance (MR) will be studied, as well as resistivity and MR for currents perpendicular to the layers and the role of anisotropy compared to giant MR in magnetic multilayers. For magnetic tunnel junctions the in-plane lattice constant and the interlayer distance at interfaces will be relaxed to determine the effects on tunneling. In addition, the surface band structures at electrode barrier interfaces, determined by full potential methods, will be incorporated into the calculations of junction MR. %%% This project is co-funded by the Division of Materials Research and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities, both within the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, and the International Division as a cooperative activity in materials sciences between the National Science foundation and the European Commission (NSF solicitation 01-105). The project involves the EC Research Training Network (RTN) on Computational Magnetoelectronics whose lead institutions include Daresbury Laboratory (United Kingdom), FZ Juelich (Germany), MSP-MPI Halle (Germany), CNRS Orsay (France), TU Vienna (Austria), University of Twente (Netherlands), Uppsala University (Sweden), Academy of Sciences - Budapest (Hungary) and Institute of Physics of Materials Brno (Czechia). This grant will enable the US research group at NYU to collaborate with members of the EC RTN. The NYU group is focused on analytic and model calculations in magnetoelectronics, whereas the EC expertise is in ab initio calculations of electronic structure and magnetic and transport properties of solids doc16815 none Alan Karr National Institute of Statistical Sciences Digital Government: Data Confidentiality, Data Quality, and Data Integration for Federal Databases: Foundations to Software Prototypes This award will support research in data confidentiality, data quality, and data integration. Prototypes will be built which can scale to operate on large sets of Federally held data. Researchers will partner with several large Federal Government statistical agencies. This topic is of particular importance given the balance of these agencies must strive for, in terms of their dual missions to collect and keep private confidential data, while at the same time making that data accessible for research and policy issues. This grant will support a multi-disciplinary multi-institution team, with participants from five universities, one non-profit, and one national laboratory. The disciplines represented include computer science, statistical science, and systems engineering doc16816 none Jose Fortes University of Florida Digital Government: Transnational Digital Government With entre provided by Organization of American States (OAS), the US research team will collaborate with researchers from universities in Belize, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. The domain is drug interdiction, under an arm or the OAS - the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission. Under the COmmission, member states of OAS collect, share and analyze information in standard ways. Within this context, research will be undertaken in the areas of spoken dialogue systems, data management and security for rule-based data sharing and filtering, information retrieval and machine translation, middleware to support these transnational information grids, and network behavior modeling for acceptable quality of service doc16817 none Musavi, Muhamad University of Maine BDEI: Planning Workshop on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Informatics for the Indian River Lagoon, Florida This proposal solicits funding to organize and conduct a planning workshop that will establish and facilitate research on the informatics needed to address complex issues of biodiversity and ecosystem processes within the Indian River Lagoon. This workshop will provide the opportunity and resources for collaboration and discussion among scientists from diverse fields of biodiversity, ecological sciences, remote sensing, geographic information systems, computer science and intelligent systems. The topics to be discussed will include investigation of novel computational intelligence techniques for modeling, prediction, analysis and database management of the disparate and complex data for the Indian River Lagoon. The explicit products of the proposed workshop will be a white paper and technical report, a formal research agenda that incorporates informatics into existing and planned research, and preparation of a competitive proposal based on the recommendations and preliminary work defined by the workshop doc16818 none Guoqing Zhou Old Dominion University Digital Government: National Large-Scale City True Orthophoto Mapping and Its Standard This grant will support planning for a larger proposal to investigate the development of new 3D algorighms for use of digital orthophoto maps in urban areas. Current usage of such maps at high resolution in urban areas has identified problems with perspective displacements, occlusions by tall buildings, geometric inaccuracies, and an inability to create a seamless mosaic of large images. The grant will also allow more complete planning of a partnership with the US Geological Survey, which runs the NationalDigital Orthophoto Program doc16819 none For nearly 30 years, the National Science Foundation has provided support for EERI s Learning from Earthquakes (LFE) Program. These funds have enabled dozens of multidisciplinary teams of researchers to carry out field investigations of significant earthquakes throughout the world, to observe and document effects on the natural and built environment and resulting social, economic and policy impacts. Over the years the program has generated much new knowledge, leading to changes in practice and stimulating new research in each of the related fields. As the US leader in post-earthquake investigations, EERI proposes significant revisions to the LFE program to improve the overall coordination of NSF funded post-earthquake research efforts and to incorporate new technologies to improve the collection and management of perishable data. During the duration of this award, EERI will coordinate post-earthquake investigations and improve the collection of perishable data in the first weeks after the earthquake. Equipment will be acquired to enhance data collection and dissemination, training will be provided to team members, and a new program of small grants for follow up research in each of the disciplines that contribute to fundamental understanding of earthquake impacts will be initiated. The LFE program will be integrated into the new Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES). The LFE program will work with other agencies, organizations and NSF funded centers to reach diverse population of young people and students to stimulate their interest and involvement in science and engineering. These and other activities during the five year duration of this award will contribute to a fundamental understanding of the science and practice of earthquake engineering and the reduction of future earthquake losses doc16820 none Dickerson, Allan Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University SUMMARY Cells routinely perform complex computational tasks that enable them to control the orchestration of thousands of genes and communicate with other cells to manifest emergent properties such as growth and differentiation.Understanding and engineering the algorithms underlying the complex computational machinery of cells should have significant impact in science and technology,particularly biotechnology, biocomputation and medicine. Several notable recent reports demonstrate that it is possible to design and construct simple de novo genetic circuits such as a switch and an oscillator in Escherichia coli .This work also revealed that implementation of even the most simple circuits in vivo requires tedious optimization of often poorly- understood protein-DNA interactions and mRNA and protein stabilities,among other parameters.We propose to develop efficient,evolutionary design strategies for constructing functional de novo genetic circuits.We will apply methods of molecular evolution,which have proven highly successful for engineering proteins with improved or altered properties,to complex genetic systems involving multiple repressors,operators,and promoters.We believe that evolution will prove to be generally applicable for optimizing individual devices as well as complex genetic circuits,and our goal will be to demonstrate how evolutionary searches are best performed in order to build libraries of devices and assemble them into functional circuits doc16821 none James Clark-Duke University-BDEI: Computation and Uncertainty in Ecological Forecasting. Planning for global change and decision making will be improved by access to reliable forecasts of ecosystem change. A recent initiative by the Ecological Society of America identifies three challenges that must be met for forecasts to be successful: 1) computational approaches (algorithm development and data structures) that would permit simulation of complex systems, 2) feasible methods to track statistical uncertainty, and 3) data inadequacy. The project BDEI: Computation and uncertainty in ecological forecasting is an incubation that addresses these three challenges with an integrated approach. We propose to develop new computational and statistical techniques that will provide the capacity to forecast at broader spatial and temporal extents than possible with current approaches. The success of the proposed techniques will be evaluated using the data gathered from field experiments. A team of three researchers-an ecologist (Clark), a computer scientist (Agarwal), and a statistician (Lavine)- propose a working group for Fall and Spring that will focus on forecasting forest compositional change. The working group will integrate new computational techniques into stand simulators and use models to estimate uncertainty. The working group will develop an agenda for a broad initiative in ecological forecasting as basis for future proposals doc16822 none Steroid hormones are small lipophilic regulatory molecules that profoundly influence basic processes of growth, homeostasis, and disease progression in developing organisms. Unlike peptide hormone signals, most of the physiological responses mediated by steroids occur though a nuclear action of the ligand receptor complex on responding genes (a genomic mechanism). Although much has been learned over the past decade concerning the molecular details of receptor activation and transcriptional regulation of steroid-responsive DNA targets, little is known about how the qualitative differences in gene expression lead to long-term physiological changes in the responding tissue. This remains a fundamental question of cell biology. The fruitfly, Drosophila melanogaster, has contributed much to our understanding of the conserved processes of developmental signaling. It is also an attractive system in which to study steroid responses because only one steroid, 20-hydroxyecdysone (ecdysone), is known to regulate the important postembryonic developmental transitions of molting and metamorphosis. Furthermore, the salivary gland of the third larval stage offers a unique opportunity to correlate changes in gene expression with a tissue-specific physiological response. This is possible because the chromosomes within this tissue are polytenized. Thus, hormone targets are easy to identify because they often form puffs on the chromosomes (areas of local chromatin decondensation) in response to ecdysone. In addition, it is known that the salivary gland will respond to hormone by secreting massive amounts of glue proteins, which are later used by the animal to cement itself to a solid surface during metamorphosis. Because glue secretion and chromosome puffing occur over the same time interval, it has been suggested that one or more products of the puffing cascade control the secretion response. Work conducted in Dr. Andres laboratory has confirmed the above hypothesis. By investigating the function of the puff genes in a secretion assay in which a GFP-tagged glue protein is used, they have identified a role for E63-1. This protein is directly induced by ecdysone, regulated by calcium ions, and associated with an unconventional myosin that is required for glue secretion. The project supported by this award will test the hypothesis that, as part of the genomic response of the salivary gland to ecdysone, E63-1 is induced and cytoplasmic calcium levels are elevated, and that once E63-1 is complexed with calcium, it acts as a bona fide light chain for myosin VI to influence the movement of secretory granules. The aim of the work is to define the biochemical interaction between the E63-1 and myosin VI proteins, and to identify key molecules important in the ecdysone regulation of calcium levels using genetic screens. The project has the potential to make important contributions to a basic, but not well understood, mechanism of cell biology involving the integration of steroid and calcium signaling pathways. In addition, since most of the personnel conducting this work will be students, the project offers them a unique learning and training experience using a multi- disciplinary approach employing genetic, molecular, biochemical, and pharmacological methodologies doc16823 none Beard-Tisdale, Mary-Kate University of Maine BDEI: Event and process tagging for information integration for the International Gulf of Maine Watershed Project This incubation proposal addresses the issue of integrating large, diverse, and autonomous collections of scientific data within a complex institutional setting. The goal is to convert these autonomous collections into a shareable repository that supports synthesis of data through new metadata structures based on events and processes. The institutional setting is the data and data- gathering activities of over 80 agencies, NGOS, and academic and research institutions operating within the Gulf of Maine watershed. The metadata development will be coordinated by library and spatial information scientists working jointly with domain scientists. An essential task of this incubation effort will be the development of a shared understanding of environmental processes and events that becomes a shareable ontology. Libraries play a vital role in organizing intellectual access to creative works. Scientific data has tended to be outside this traditional purview and has thus lacked the benefits of cataloging and indexing that promote shared access. We are proposing a new metadata structure that exploits common units of analysis in environmental studies: events and processes. Associating scientific data sets with event and process tags, in addition to other metadata elements, can substantially improve the ability to integrate and synthesize diverse scientific collections. The metadata initiative of this proposal will lay the foundation for specifying events and processes through the collaboration of data collections content specialists and information management specialists doc16824 none Jane Fountain L. Jean Camp Cary Coglianese David Lazer Harvard University A National Center for Digital Government: Integrating Information and Institutions This award will support the initial development of a social, political, and policy research center on the topic of government enabled by information technologies. Initial research will begin in two areas: i) institutional analysis (how information technologies are brought into government and affect the organization and its modes of operation, in particular across multiple agencies), and ii) policy networks as informational and deliberative structures. Other elements of the award will support the center aspects of the proposal to draw in and support the formation of a research community. These elements include a Doctoral Fellows program, support for graduate students, seminars, workshops, and other forms of outreach doc16825 none Stevenson, Robert University of Massachusetts - Boston. BDEI: The Eco Flight Simulator: Visualizing landscape patterns, ecosystem processes and biodiveresity information using flight simulator technology This proposal develops the Eco Flight Simulator a system for visualizing landscape patterns, ecosystem processes and biodiversity data. Many state and federal agencies are currently gathering large amounts of spatial data via aerial photographs and satellite imagery that can be used for seeing the landscape (distribution and location of habitats, size of habitat fragments, the relationships among political and ecosystem boundaries), the analysis of ecosystem processes (water cycling, nutrient cycling, pollution movement) and biodiversity issues (habitat types, population of invasive species, species interactions, etc.). For the most part these data are currently presented in the form of maps using GIS software. The view is static and the data displayed are static (but see the USGS s National Map Initiative). However, flight simulator technologies, developed first for the military and now common in the entertainment industry, offer a much better visualization technology - a user defined birds eye view of the landscape that can include the spatio-temporal complexity of the environment. Using standard off the shelf hardware, open source software and public domain data, marine (Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary in the Gulf of Maine) and terrestrial flight simulations (Ipswich and Parker River Watersheds of Essex County Massachusetts) (one simulator) are developed that present environmental information in new ways doc16826 none Stevenson, Robert University of Massachusetts - Boston BDEI: Planning a Community Science Approach to Biodiversity Monitoring: Extending the Spatial and Temporal Scales. Increasing the spatial scales and temporal frequencies at which species occurrences and locations are recorded is central to biodiversity informatics. There are not nearly enough trained scientists to do the job and remote sensing methods have severe limitations for most taxa. This project examines the idea that it is now possible to rapidly build communities of people (academic taxonomists, amateur natural historians, environmental educators, concerned citizens and students) and institutions (universities, environmental NGOs, governmental agencies and schools) to produce important scientific data about biodiversity. Building monitoring communities is made possible by digital technologies that permit three key advances: 1) Rapid Color Guides, the production on demand of high quality yet relatively inexpensive mini color field guides (here called Rapid Color Guides, Foster ) that will allow amateurs to correctly identify many more species in the field. 2) Spatial Coordinates, the ability to accurately record (within a 3 m radius under the best conditions) the spatial coordinates of individuals or populations using new GPS (Global Positioning System) units. 3) E-Vouchers, the availability of very high quality digital cameras that are field portable and relatively easy to use that can capture an electronic record of observations in the field. Along with the wide acceptance of the WWW, these advances permit people to gather and share biodiversity information in unprecedented ways. Three studies are planned and prototyped to examine this general claim. First, the variety of taxa recorded during Massachusetts Biodiversity Days, a three- day statewide citizen-based effort to monitor biodiversity already established in Massachusetts (http: data.massgis.state.ma.us Biodiversity BiodiversityDays.htm) will be expanded. Taxonomic specialists using digital cameras and printers will design Rapid Color Guides for taxa, which are common (e.g. ants, bumblebees, spiders, weeds) but rarely recorded by observers because of the lack of a suitable method to identify them doc16827 none Lane, Meredith Academy of Natural Sciences - Philadelphia BDEI: Overcoming nomenclatural complications while searching in a distributed database environment: One step toward true interoperability. With biological information content growing exponentially on the Web, the average member of the public (and for that matter, many scientists) may not be able to access all of the high-quality information actually available and or that they need because organisms are often known by more than one scientific name (many of which will perhaps be unknown to the user), and different information providers may use different names for the same organism. Important international projects such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (see www.gbif.org) have identified organism names as the core means for interconnecting databases from different domains (e.g., specimen databases with GenBank or ecological databases, etc.) because the organism name is highly likely to be the only database field common to both databases. True interoperability among databases is required to answer complex biological questions. This goal cannot be reached without a mechanism to allow access to all available information on a particular organism. Therefore, a foundation component in the development of the GBIF and associated national efforts must be a means to provide a list of all the names that should be searched for a given organism. The need for this component of interoperability was clearly recognized by the proposers of GBIF, but to date there have been no efforts specifically directed at providing software tools to make it possible. In this project, we will implement such a mechanism. It will allow even the most naive Web user to obtain biological information without needing to understand the complexities of nomenclature and associated arcana. To do this, we will develop a query interface portal understandable to any user; a set of standards and protocols for representing search requests (which will be sent as a URL) and result sets (which will be returned as XML using HTTP) that is platform-independent; and a set of platform-specific translators and search routines for retrieving data from participating nomenclatural data providers doc16828 none COMPARATIVE SOCIOBIOLOGY OF SPONGE-DWELLING SNAPPING SHRIMPS J. Emmett Duffy School of Marine Science The College of William and Mary Eusociality, characterized by cooperative colonies in which most members sacrifice individual reproduction, has long presented a fundamental paradox for behavioral and evolutionary ecology. According to Hamilton s rule, social behaviors can be understood as solutions to challenges imposed by the environment mediated through the genetic relatedness of interactants. A full understanding of social evolution thus entails an accounting of the genetic relationships among group members, the basic ecological constraints on populations, and some means of assessing the evolutionary consequences of their interplay. This proposal employs complementary genetic, behavioral, and comparative approaches to assess the interplay between kin structure and social biology, and some of its macroevolutionary consequences, in fostering social evolution in the species-rich and socially diverse sponge-dwelling shrimps (Synalpheus), one of the rare animal groups in which eusociality has arisen repeatedly among closely related species. The project has two principal objectives: (1) Assess the influence of breeding system, and consequent genetic structure of colonies, on behavioral dynamics and the maintenance of extreme reproductive skew in two independently evolved, and demographically divergent, eusocial shrimp species Synalpheus regalis and S. chacei. This will be accomplished by genotyping individuals from field-collected colonies of each species at eight microsatellite loci, and experimentally assessing levels of conflict and cooperation among individuals in captive colonies in the laboratory. This research will characterize the distributions of relatedness, aggressive dominance, mating success, and parentage among individuals within colonies, and of relatedness within vs. among colonies. (2) The longer-term evolutionary consequences of these social dynamics will be approached in a comparative framework by exploiting the social diversity among species of Synalpheus, building on the recently completed phylogenetic reconstruction of the sponge-dwelling clade. Phylogenetically independent contrasts will test the association, predicted by theory and empirical studies of social insects, among colony size, reproductive skew, and caste differentiation. This research will provide a new window on the origin, adaptive significance, and macroevolutionary consequences of eusociality in a unique, socially diverse clade of non-insect invertebrates, and will contribute to evaluating the generality at a broad taxonomic level of theories for the evolution of advanced animal societies based primarily on data from social insects doc16829 none Proposal : PI : Laane, J. There has been great interest in potential energy surfaces (PESs) in recent years, particularly in those for electronic excited states, since they can provide a wealth of data on molecular structure, bonding, and photochemical and photophysical processes. However, very few experimental PESs, rigorously determined from vibronic data, have been reported. Several different spectroscopic methods will be used to map the vibronic energy levels for structurally and conformationally important vibrations. The computational methodology for kinetic and potential energy calculations will be applied to determine the PESs of several types of electronic excited states in several different kinds of molecules. For singlet states (generally S1) laser induced fluorescence (LIF) spectroscopy of jet-cooled molecules and ultraviolet absorption spectroscopy will be utilized to establish the vibronic levels while far-infrared and Raman spectra will provide the complementary ground state data. A time of flight mass spectrometer, which allows mass resolution, will be used for ionization detection and resonance enhanced multiphoton ionization (REMPI) studies. This will allow access to non-fluorescing states and to transitions forbidden in one-photon LIF studies. Two-color experiments will be carried out to study higher singlet states. Considerable use will be made of sensitized phosphorescence excitation spectroscopy (SPES) for studying triplet states. Aryl ketones will be thoroughly investigated as these molecules show strong phosphorescence and are thus ideal for SPES studies of triplet states. The triplet and higher singlet states for molecules in the indan family will also be investigated. Several molecules with unusual bonding properties, such as the anomeric effect, will also be studied in ground and excited states in order to ascertain the effect of the electronic transitions on the bonding and structure. Spectroscopic methods using lasers for the absorption of light will be used to study the structures and energies of molecules in both their normal and excited forms. The excited forms are produced when electrons are excited by light to attain higher energies. Photochemistry, such as photosynthesis, typically occurs only after molecules have been excited in this manner. The goal of this research is to characterize the excited molecules and to compare them to their normal forms. The results of this work can prove beneficial to a variety of areas based on the interaction of light with molecules, such as the development of solar energy devices or the design of photochemical reactions. Students and postdoctoral research associates will participate in this research and will receive training to prepare them for entry into the scientific technical workforce doc16830 none Henebry, Geoffrey University of Nebraska - Lincoln BDEI: Spatio-temporal models of Biogeophysical Fields for Ecological Forecasting: A Cross-Disciplinary Incubation Activity We are now in an era of intensive earth observation: orbital platforms generate myriad remote sensing datastreams across a range of spatial, temporal, spectral, and radiometric resolutions. The number and variety of eyes in the skies are scheduled to increase significantly over the next few years. This veritable data deluge necessitates new ways of thinking about transforming remote sensing data into information about ecological patterns and processes. These datastreams hold the promise for environmental decision support. Yet, there is a critical need for theories and tools that will enable efficient and reliable characterization of spatio-temporal patterns contained in image time series. We think that such tools must be based on ecological expectations of land surface dynamics, analogous to climatological expectations. Ecological expectations would summarize across specific regions the typical temporal development of spatial pattern in biogeophysical fields. We have a robust principal method for extracting ecological expectations from remote sensing datastreams: projecting image time series into pattern metric spaces. To make ecological forecasting an operational possibility, we need the capability to establish and to update complex spatio-temporal baselines that will enable prediction of the usual and identification, quantification, and assessment of the unusual. A recent NASA workshop on Earth Science data mining identified anomaly detection as a key characteristic of scientific data mining; yet, there are relatively few examples of spatio-temporal data mining of biogeophysical data. Our approach is spatio-temporal datamining that is informed by relevant domain expertise. Representation of the spatio-temporal entities and fields in databases must support sophisticated spatio-temporal queries: a capability that does not currently exist doc16831 none The focus of this research will include the exploration of [5+2] cycloaddition of simple, unactivated vinylcyclopropanes, of substituent effects in the rearrangement and [5+1] cycloaddition of vinylcyclopropanes and of asymmetric [5+2] cycloadditions. Metal-catalyzed cycloadditions in water, studies on [6+2] cycloadditions, and studies on [8+1], [8+2] and [8+4] cycloadditions will also be carried out. Exploration of [3+2] and [4+2] cycloadditions involving cyclobutanones and of multicomponent cycloadditions such as [4+2+1], [5+2+1] and [5+2+1+1] cases will be carried out and serial cycloadditions will be studied as well. The overall goal is to develop new reactions and strategies for the synthesis of complex molecules. With this renewal award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Paul A. Wender of the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University. Professor Wender will focus his work on developing fundamentally new reactions, reagents and strategies for organic synthesis. A special emphasis is placed on catalyzed reactions that, in the absence of catalyst, are forbidden or hard to achieve. Further significance derives from the enormous potential of transition metal catalysis in the development of environmentally acceptable syntheses that provide little reagent-derived waste. The project provides an excellent training program for pre-professionals and the results of the research could have a strong impact in areas outside chemistry, such as the pharmaceutical industry doc16832 none True excellence in a career as university professor requires commitment, creativity and excellence in both research and education. In this proposal, a plan for implementing a research and education program in Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz is presented. In the research part of the proposal, the investigation of intersubband transitions in low-dimensional semiconductor quantum structures in the near-infrared wavelength range is put forward as an area of research activity with long-term potential for advancing materials science, engineering and physics. As optical networks become a reality and solutions for higher data bit rates are sought, intersubband transitions are an attractive alternative to currently existing technologies for pushing the limits of optical communications to higher bandwidths. Increasing the bandwidth is essential for building faster and less costly communication products and systems. The material properties of antimony-based heterostructures for near-infrared intersubband transitions will be studied. This includes determining band offsets and optical nonlinearities as well as the growth of self-assembled quantum dots. Secondly, new devices such as ultrafast wavelength converters and photodetectors will be designed and realized. Finally, new physics can be explored. Examples are nonclassical light emission from quantum dots at room temperature and quantum interference effects such as electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in intersubband transitions. The educational aspects of this proposal are tailored to improve the educational programs in Electrical Engineering at the Universitt of California, Santa Cruz, on several levels: within the University -lf, the local community, as well as the global scientific community at large. To this end, a number of measures are proposed for each community. Within UC Santa Cruz, the emphasis lies on building up the educational program of a very new department by developing new classes for the curriculum and introducing new ideas for classroom instruction. Activities involving the local community have a special emphasis on interaction with students who are at critical points in their school careers. Examples are open houses for high school seniors and lectures and demonstrations at middle schools to expose students at a younger age to science. Finally, the paramount importance of global interaction between students and scholars is recognized by proposing a number of programs, which institutionalize and foster relations, that will be beneficial to all participants. This includes establishing partner schools for exchange programs and joint educational projects, for example with the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD doc16833 none With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Maria Polinsky and Eric Potsdam will conduct two years of linguistic research on the omission of redundant information in sentences with a particular syntactic structure. In sentences with predicates such as try and intend , the subject of trying intention is identical to the subject of the sentence describing the intended event. Such identity is called a Control relation. This research project will systematically document the ways that natural languages realize the Control relation, something that has not been done before. The project also includes the development of a database of representative Control patterns in the world s languages. The research team will conduct fieldwork on three little-described languages: Malagasy (spoken in Madagascar) and Rutul and Tsaxur (spoken in Dagestan, NE Caucasus). The empirical findings will inform syntactic theory, which should be constrained so as to permit and model all and only the observed range of Control structures. This research will enhance scholarly understanding of several under-documented languages and advance linguistic theory by motivating modifications to account for Control structures. The project will also provide training for future researchers by involving graduate and undergraduate students in a unique collaboration between the University of California in San Diego and the University of Florida. Finally, the project will serve to establish contacts between linguists in the United States and linguists in Madagascar and Dagestan, where fieldwork for the project will be conducted doc16834 none Cushing, Judith Evergreen State College BDEI: Spatial Data Infrastructure for Ecological Research (Planning Grant) The Biodiversity and Ecosystem Informatics Research Agenda (http: bio.gsfc.nasa.gov) notes the current inability to compare data across spatial scales as a critical problem: Biological data from different sources are frequently collected and presented in different scales and resolutions resulting in a loss of detail when multiple data sets are required for data synthesis and analysis . This grant brings together a team of ecologists and computer scientists to plan a proposal for a Spatial Data Infrastructure for Ecological Sciences. The proposed infrastructure would allow a scientist to define a data set by putting together the proper spatial. building blocks -- building blocks represented in conceptually familiar, domain-specific terms. Data sets thus constructed (or recast) would be amenable to the automatic integration of spatial locations and measurements with automatic spatial data transformations. This would allow spatial analysis of individual field data sets and the linking together at same and different spatial scales data sets defined within the spatial infrastructure. We aim to include productivity enhancing research tools such as field data gathering devices and data validation and analysis, and to automatically tag field data with metadata early in the research cycle. We thus also contribute to the synthesis of metadata and data doc16835 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Mary Lidstrom and Ludmila Chistoserdova at the University of Washington to investigate the breadth of diversity in an environmentally important group of bacteria, those that grow on simple compounds containing one carbon. These bacteria, called methylotrophs, have developed unique biochemical pathways that allow them to grow on compounds such as methane (natural gas), methanol (wood alcohol), and a variety of atmospheric pollutants such as bromomethane and chloromethane. Evidence to date suggests that these biochemical pathways evolved through a combination of borrowing genes from other bacteria and creating new traits specific to methylotrophy. The approach that will be taken in this project is to use the few known genome sequences for methylotrophic bacteria and other bacteria in a comparative way to develop an understanding of the shared and unique aspects of these bacteria. Both laboratory cultures and natural populations of methylotrophs from the environment will be studied, to maximize the diversity that is sampled, and partial genomes from uncultured environmental methylotrophs will be identified and sequenced. This work will provide insights into the complex communities in natural habitats that are responsible for the cycling of one-carbon compounds. These bacteria play an important role in keeping natural habitats healthy and thriving, and in addition they are the main consumers on earth of a number of compounds that contribute to global warming. Understanding which methylotrophs are present in specific environments and relating such information to their natural roles is an important step in developing accurate predictions regarding the relationship between natural resource utilization and global conditions such as global warming. In addition, the comparative genomics studies that will be carried out will provide insights into the evolution of specialized metabolic pathways. These evolutionary approaches are important for making the leap from genome sequences to understanding how cells work doc16836 none Bowker, Geoffrey University of California - San Diego BDEI: Designing an Infrastructure for Heterogeneity in Ecosystem Data, Collaborators and Organizations Project Biodiversity and ecosystems data are currently being gathered in a large range of formats by a constellation of loosely connected private, government and not-for-profit agencies. The normal response to this double heterogeneity has been the development and enforcement of metadata (data about data) standards; in this response one tries to abstract data away from its organizational context in order to render it universally accessible. This project takes the opposite track, and seeks new ways of grounding environmental data in its organizational context in such a way that it can both be used more flexibly today and so it can retain its value longer. The hypothesis, based on the last 25 years of work in the field of Science Studies, is that formal data descriptions must be wrapped in informal descriptions in order to be useful. The informal description for short-lived data is provided by face-to-face contact, by exchanging graduate students, through conference papers and so forth. It is precisely this layer which is lost in highly distributed data collection efforts characteristic of biodiversity and ecosystem informatics; it is also this layer which is lost when data is wrapped in formal metadata and saved to disk. The goal of this project is to open up a major new field of database inquiry tied precisely to the specific problems of the biodiversity and ecosystems communities generated by their need for very long lasting and highly distributed data. The project will develop into a larger study of the articulation between metadata and narrative modes of wrapping data doc16837 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will produce advances in document clustering technology. The company s proprietary software transforms a long list of raw search results into organized hierarchical folders that are browsed in Windows Explorer style. This software brings into easy view relevant information that otherwise would remain buried in the search results. It also enables effortless knowledge discovery: at a glance, a user learns themain subtopics corresponding to the query. The company has the first document clusteringtechnology good enough for mass use, in terms of speed, quality of the clustering, and ease of interaction. The resultant software product will augment the capabilities of web, enterprise, and database search engines. The market will include search engine vendors, system integrators and large organizations in business, academe, and government doc16838 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II project will further explore the use of long-gage fiber Bragg grating strain sensors in conjunction with vibration-based system identification techniques for health monitoring and damage identification of civil structures. In phase I, the proof of concept was shown based on static and dynamic laboratory experiments on small-scale structural models. In this Phase II effort, field tests on bridges identified in Oregon and California will be performed to further validate this very promising tool for structural health monitoring and damage identification. These bridges provide unique opportunities as two of them are scheduled for demolition and both State Departments of Transportation have agreed to support testing as these bridges are systematically damaged to provide a true real-world test of the damage identification system. These field tests will be an important step in providing feasibility data for future commercialization of the structural health monitoring and damage identification system. Once the proposed methods are debugged and validated for field applications, the California and Oregon DOT s will strongly consider adopting them for widespread use in their structural health-monitoring and bridge rehabilitation programs. The proposed structural health monitoring and damage identification system offers very promising advanced solutions to the triple problem of: (1) monitoring the state-of-health of the civil infrastructure system for optimum allocation of rehabilitation resources, (2) optimally designing the rehabilitation scheme for a specific deficient civil structure, and (3) evaluating the efficacy of the rehabilitation measure doc16839 none Lager A high-pressure, single-crystal X-ray diffraction laboratory will be established at the University of Louisville. An existing, fully operational CAD4 diffractometer will be adapted for high-pressure use with a diamond-anvil cell. The laboratory will also house an electrostatic drilling machine and stereomicroscope for loading the cell and a laser spectrometer for pressure calibration. A second X-ray unit will also be upgraded with a solid-state generator. A precession camera mounted on this unit will be used as a check on crystal quality and to determine the orientation of single crystals in the pressure cell. The new laboratory will be dedicated to studies of hydrous minerals at high pressure. This group of earth materials plays an important role in mantle processes related to earthquake activity. For example, volume changes associated with phase transitions in hydrous minerals have been linked to the localization of stress and the occurrence of earthquakes along subduction zones. Experiments in this project will focus on hydrous magnesium silicate (OH-clinohumite) and hydrogarnet. Phase-equilbria studies indicate that clinohumite is a stable water-bearing phase in subduction zones to depths of ~400 km (transition zone). Its high-pressure infrared spectrum shows several anomalies at ~13 GPa. The possibility that these anomalies are related to a phase transition will be investigated using the converted CAD4 diffractometer system. Synthetic Si-free hydrogarnet (katoite) has been used as a model to understand how OH is incorporated in silicate garnets that occur in the crust and mantle. The katoite structure undergoes a phase transition at 5 GPa. X-ray data will be collected with the CAD4 at high pressures to determine if a similar transition is observed in naturally occurring hydrogarnets doc16840 none The U.S. National Committee for Rock Mechanics (USNC RM) is the focal point for rock mechanics and other geotechnical activities within the National Research Council (NRC), and operates under the auspices of the NRC s Board on Earth Sciences and Resources (BESR). The Board on Earth Sciences and Resources is considering whether there is a need for modification to the name and task statement for the USNC RM. Consultations with sponsoring agencies and the community are continuing, with the expectation that a committee with a broader scope and task statement will be in existence by the end of . There is an expectation that a more broadly-based committee will encompass the full range of geological and geotechnical engineering disciplines, and that the new committee will concentrate to a greater extent on producing advisory studies and reports at the request of federal agencies. This proposal is seeking support for this wide-ranging consultation process doc16833 none With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Maria Polinsky and Eric Potsdam will conduct two years of linguistic research on the omission of redundant information in sentences with a particular syntactic structure. In sentences with predicates such as try and intend , the subject of trying intention is identical to the subject of the sentence describing the intended event. Such identity is called a Control relation. This research project will systematically document the ways that natural languages realize the Control relation, something that has not been done before. The project also includes the development of a database of representative Control patterns in the world s languages. The research team will conduct fieldwork on three little-described languages: Malagasy (spoken in Madagascar) and Rutul and Tsaxur (spoken in Dagestan, NE Caucasus). The empirical findings will inform syntactic theory, which should be constrained so as to permit and model all and only the observed range of Control structures. This research will enhance scholarly understanding of several under-documented languages and advance linguistic theory by motivating modifications to account for Control structures. The project will also provide training for future researchers by involving graduate and undergraduate students in a unique collaboration between the University of California in San Diego and the University of Florida. Finally, the project will serve to establish contacts between linguists in the United States and linguists in Madagascar and Dagestan, where fieldwork for the project will be conducted doc16842 none An experimental and theoretical research program will be conducted to investigate fluid storage and ink delivery processes in thermal ink jet technology. Specifically, the PI s will study the micro boiling process in a closed chamber as well as fluid flow in a foam matrix. Several non-invasive visualization and diagnostic techniques will be employed. The results could lead to the development of more compact and reliable ink-jet cartridges with lower costs in addition to opening new applications for thermal ink jet technology. The research will build on an existing collaboration between Hewlett Packard of Puerto Rico (HPPR) and the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez (UPRM), with HPPR being an active participant in the research effort doc16843 none George Schatz of Northwestern University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to develop new theoretical methods for describing the dynamics of chemical reactions that take place in the gas phase. The overall project goal is to advance computational methods that provide a quantitative description of measurable properties of reactions involving atoms and small molecules (up to 6 atoms). Three interconnected research topics will be explored. First, reactions where spin-forbidden processes due to intersystem crossing are important will be described. Second, the effect of reagent vibrational excitation on the rate constants for reaction will be characterized, with particular emphasis on determining what kinds of reagent excitation are needed in order to achieve the most efficient reaction rates enhancements. Third, approaches for generating global analytical potential surfaces for simulating reactive processes will be explored. Research outcomes are expected to be useful for characterizing chemical reactions that are important in atmospheric and combustion chemistry, and in addition will find applications in describing laser chemistry and molecular beam experiments. The dynamics of chemical reactions in the gas phase continues to be a vibrant area of basic research. This project has relevant applications to atmospheric and combustion chemistry, as well as providing a fruitful meeting ground between theory and experiment. Ultimately, the outcomes of this research will spill over into other fields, including dynamics in liquids, biomolecular simulation, gas-surface dynamics, and materials chemistry doc16844 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will produce a set of completed and commercially viable intelligent tutoring systems for chemistry education, building upon a rule-based, model-tracing, cognitive modeling tutor prototype for chemical equation balancing. Teachers, students, parents and administrators state that existing chemistry education software does not satisfy their need for truly interactive and on-demand computer instruction. Current approaches are rigid and linear, offering only a limited number of fixed and statically scripted problems. They do not deal with the individual student s own work in any meaningful or intelligent way. By simulating reasoning using chemical principles rather than compiling a database of problems and answers, artificial intelligence methods can provide a route to overcoming these serious fundamental limitations. Although the technology proffered by Quantum Simulations, Inc. is technology that will assist all students, those students of average or marginal performance will benefit the most. Creating tutoring systems that can function as guides and not just as graders of student work is an important step in realizing the full value of computers in education. The proposed work takes a significant step in this direction. Moreover, the technology has been designed in a general way such that it can be applied to other educational topics beyond chemistry and can work together in a synergistic, value-added fashion with other tools and curricula in a multi-resource learning environment. Quantum Simulations, Inc., customers are driven by strong end user needs and include textbook publishers, software provides, and distance learning companies doc16845 none Tornadoes and hurricanes are two of the most destructive natural phenomena that threaten the U.S. population. A universal characteristic of these storms is a vertically aligned, intense vortex in the core region. The classical approach of analyzing the linearized dynamics of small perturbations to vortices has yielded substantial insight into the behavior of intense atmospheric vortices, helping to explain such phenomena as multiple vortex formation in tornadoes and rapid inner-core structure change in hurricanes. The vast majority of these studies, however, have been applied to essentially two-dimensional perturbations to two-dimensional vortices. In some studies, three-dimensional perturbations have been considered, but the basic-state vortices were homogenous in the vertical direction. This research will advance the study of intense atmospheric vortices in two ways. First, the classical methods of vortex stability analysis will be extended to allow for the study of truly three-dimensional vortices. The equations of motion will be the three-dimensional anelastic equations such that neither hydrostatic, quasi-geostrophic, or other balance approximations are required. Intense atmospheric vortices of all types are not homogenous along their vertical axis, but often have considerable variation of their wind and density fields with height. The stability analysis will allow for eigenfunctions that vary arbitrarily with height, so that the Principal Investigators can find truly three-dimensional eigenmodes, unstable or otherwise, in the cores of three-dimensional vortices. This approach will be applied to axisymmetric basic-state vortices, based on the results of numerical simulations and existing or future observational data sets of tornadoes and hurricanes. Secondly, the secondary circulation, which is known to play a critical role in the development and maintenance of tornadoes and hurricanes, will be incorporated into the basic state flow. Previous investigations on the influence of radial inflow and vertical outflow on the stability of these vortices have been limited to highly idealized vortices. Whether the secondary circulation, and in particular the shear of the vertical wind up through the core of the vortex, stabilizes or destabilizes the vortex remains an open and intriguing question and may be critical in understanding inner-core dynamics in tornadoes and hurricanes. For stable vortices, such as developing tropical cyclones or one-celled tornadic vortices, a natural extension of the research will be to determine the linearized evolution and impact on the basic-state vortex of three-dimensional, asymmetric, nonhydrostatic perturbations. Successful completion of this research will lead to better understanding and, potentially, better forecasts of destructive atmospheric vortices doc14319 none The aim is to develop a meaningful mathematical description of translation, which can provide insights into the mRNA-protein expression relationship in Escherichia coli. The two overarching objectives of the proposed efforts are: (i) the identification of the parameters that affect the correlation of mRNA and protein expression based on the formulation and computational analysis of mathematical models of the translation processes, and (ii) the quantification of these parameters using the information derived within the experimental component of the proposed work doc16847 none This award from the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division supports Dr. Klaus Theopold, Chemistry Department, University of Delaware, for research into the reaction chemistry of paramagnetic organometallic chromium and vanadium compounds. First, the synthesis of paramagnetic alkyls of chromium and vanadium coordinated by various nacnac-ligands will be developed. Important goals of this effort are the synthesis and structural characterization of single molecule catalysts for olefin polymerization. Secondly, high oxidation state chromium chemistry will be developed. This will include an exploration of oxo alkyls both with and without Cp-ligands, and the preparation of catalysts for O2-driven oxidation. Finally, new ligands, including bidentate carbenes, will be utilized to support paramagnetic organometallics. This project is fundamental in nature but will have practical impact on commercial catalyst development. The work will examine how oxygen atom transfers to and hydrogen is abstracted from hydrocarbons takes place with presently employed hexavalent chromium catalysts. Additionally, alternative catalysts that are more environmentally benign than those now used will be developed. Undergraduate and graduate students will experience a varied research culture and will gain a strong background in synthetic chemistry which is in high demand in chemical and pharmaceutical companies doc16848 none Feng This grant provides partial support for the purchase of additional online peripheral devices as well as necessary ancillary equipment for the stable isotope laboratory at Dartmouth College. The stable isotope lab currently houses two stable isotope mass spectrometers, a Finnigan Delta E and a ThermoFinnigan Delta Plus XL, and three online ThermoFinnigan peripheral devices, an Elemental Analyzer and a Gas Chromatograph Combustion system (GCC) and a TC EA. The lab also maintains a wide array of offline equipment for the extraction of oxygen and hydrogen from minerals, rocks and waters, and oxygen, hydrogen and carbon from organic matter, soils and soil gas. Isotope extraction procedures currently done offline, including water analyses and carbonate analyses, will be done more efficiently and with no compromise to data quality by online and automated peripheral devices. Specifically equipment to be purchased includes a ThermoFinnigan H Device for automated online hydrogen isotope analysis of water samples, a ThermoFinnigan GasBench II system for automated online hydrogen and oxygen isotope analysis of water samples, carbon and oxygen isotope analysis of carbonate minerals, carbon isotopic analysis of dissolved inorganic carbon and online analysis of soil CO2, and an analytical balance. The upgraded lab will support research by faculty and students in three departments (Earth Sciences, Environmental Studies and Biological Sciences) and numerous collaborative efforts with researchers from other institutions in New Hampshire doc16849 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Timothy R. McDermott, William P. Inskeep, and Gill G. Geesey of Montana State University to establish a Microbial Observatory to study and discover novel chemolithotrophic microorganisms in Yellowstone National Park (YNP). As a general physiological group, chemolithotrophs are tremendously under-represented, particularly given the predominance of inorganic energy sources in our biosphere. These microbes acquire energy for growth from the oxidation of inorganic chemicals such as ferrous iron, hydrogen sulfide, elemental sulfur, arsenite, or hydrogen gas. Because geothermal springs typically contain abundant levels of all or most of these chemical species, YNP represents an ideal location to conduct this search. The research will utilize novel cultivation and molecular techniques to describe, characterize, and isolate the microbial populations present along geochemical and temperature gradients. This detailed description of the microbial populations will be accompanied by a complete analysis of the aqueous and solid phase geochemistry, providing a comprehensive approach that will link molecular description with an understanding of the ecological relevance of identified populations. This observatory occupies a key link in the study of the thermophilic microorganisms in Yellowstone, and it will work closely with other observatories in YNP to maximize research synergy and discovery. In addition to contributing to the general development of microbial ecology principles, this research will foster the cross-disciplinary training of graduate students. Further, the information derived from this work will contribute to the continued development of databases that document and describe microbial diversity occurring in YNP s geothermal features, which in turn will facilitate extensive education-outreach opportunities of direct value to the education mission of YNP. All cultures and DNA obtained from this project will be stored in the Montana State University Thermal Biology Institute thermophile culture collection, providing biological materials for future screening doc16850 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop an entirely new form of machine vision technology for process control of metallic components. The technology is based on an array of giant magnetoresistance (GMR) sensors that produce high-resolution images of hidden defects, missing parts, and other features. Minute GMR sensors detect magnetic fields associated with eddy currents induced in the component being imaged. High spatial resolution images are achieved through the high density and small size of the sensors in the array, coupled with the high sensitivity, low noise, and fast response of the sensors. A GMR sensor array, combined with a magnetic field generator, can produce high resolution, three-dimensional images of parts as they are produced, using a rugged, non-contacting sensor system. The images provide on-line feedback for process control, quality assurance, and safety protocols. The Phase I project developed functional GMR sensor arrays, and successfully imaged defects in metallic parts clearly demonstrating that the technology is feasible. The commercial potential of the proposed technology will be in manufacturing, quality assurance (QA), and process control. It will be used for rapid imaging and inspection of parts used in electronics, aerospace, automotive, transportation, construction, biomedical and other industries doc16851 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase II project will demonstrate the ability to generate photostimulated luminescence (PSL) in nanoparticles. The potential applications in digital imaging and storage offered by PSL phosphors, including X-ray imaging could be significant. PSL phosphors currently in use present several drawbacks including greater expense and poorer resolution as compared to conventional screen-film methods. The quantum confinement of nanoparticles offers solutions to many of the shortcomings of existing PSL phosphors. The project will characterize nanoparticles with a goal of optimizing these materials for use as phosphors in thin films. The project will also fabricate the required thin films and compare them to commercially available PSL phosphors for performance, longevity, and other factors of interest. The commercial applications will be widely applicable to digital imaging, offering high resolution, low cost, easy storage, low complexity, easy portability, and other desirable features. Materials with efficient PSL have great potential for technical applications such as optical storage, X-ray imaging, radiation measurements and quality control, optical dosimeters and dating, infrared sensors, image intensifiers, near-infrared-to-visible light converters, and bio-molecular structure recording and probing doc16852 none Notothenioid fish are a major group of fish in the Southern Ocean. The ancestral notothenioid fish stock of Antarctica probably arose as a sluggish, bottom-dwelling perciform species that evolved some 40-60 million years ago in the then temperate shelf waters of the Antarctic continent. The grounding of the ice sheet on the continental shelf and changing trophic conditions may have eliminated the taxonomically diverse late Eocene fauna and initiated the original diversification of notothenioids. On the High Antarctic shelf, notothenioids today dominate the ichthyofauna in terms of species diversity, abundance and biomass, the latter two at levels of 90-95%. Since the International Geophysical Year of -58, fish biologists from the Antarctic Treaty nations have made impressive progress in understanding the notothenioid ichthyofauna of the cold Antarctic marine ecosystem. However, integration of this work into the broader marine context has been limited, largely due to lack of access to, and analysis of, specimens of Sub-Antarctic notothenioid fishes. Sub-Antarctic fishes of the notothenioid suborder are critical for a complete understanding of the evolution, population dynamics, eco-physiology, and eco-biochemistry of their Antarctic relatives. This project will support an international, collaborative research cruise to collect and study fish indigenous to sub-antarctic habitats. The topics included in the research plans of the international team of researchers includes Systematics and Evolutionary Studies; Life History Strategies and Population Dynamics; Physiological, Biochemical, and Molecular Biological Investigations of Major Organ and Tissue Systems; Genomic Resources for the Sub-Antarctic Notothenioids; and Ecological Studies of Transitional Benthic Invertebrates. In a world that is experiencing changes in global climate, the loss of biological diversity, and the depletion of marine fisheries, the Antarctic, Sub-Antarctic, and their biota offer compelling natural laboratories for understanding the evolutionary impacts of these processes. The proposed work will contribute to development of a baseline understanding of these sensitive ecosystems, one against which future changes in species distribution and survival may be evaluated judiciously doc16853 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will combine the Internet, electronic libraries, and a new machine learning technique that simulates human understanding of text to produce an independent learning and problem-solving environment for individuals and groups. Using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), Auto-autodidact (autodidact: a self-taught person) first learns the vocabulary and concepts of a topic by automatic training on textbooks. Then, as students study and write, and groups discuss and plan, it will continuously evaluate what they know and do not know, find relevant information anywhere in an electronic library, and connect participants with complementary needs and knowledge. Auto-autodidact capitalizes on the motivational power of peer interaction, the instant availability of enormous textual resources, and the possibility of sharing individual knowledge over time and space. Auto-autodidact will integrate LSA with a state-of-art environment for distributed knowledge-building discussion and newly available electronic libraries to provide continuous embedded assessment, tutorial dialogue, and meaning-based information insertion. It will be unique in its ability to construct a learning environment for a new domain, customizing it for the needs of either an individual learner or a collaborating team, in a matter of days or even minutes. As we move into a networked world, Knowledge Analysis Technologies proffered technology has the potential to weave together people and ideas, generating knowledge and fostering collaboration. If the project realizes its potential and consistently delivers useful results to users, it could transform how we interact with data and with one another doc16854 none Bromwich This award will provide funds for the support of a planning workshop for the Ross Island Meteorology Experiment, a project to integrate the results of advanced research techniques into antarctic weather forecasting. The workshop will be held at the Byrd Polar Research Center of Ohio State University, in September . The objective of the workshop is to bring together the atmospheric community with research interests in antarctic synoptic meteorology. This group, which will include operational forecasters, numerical modelers, atmospheric scientists, and others, will be expected to define and recommend realizable goals for the synoptic meteorology program of the U.S. Antarctic Program, and to define the core requirements of research project in the McMurdo Sound Ross Ice Shelf area which will achieve these goals. Recent advances in polar numerical weather prediction, resulting from ongoing efforts at improving the capabilities of numerical weather prediction models for use in polar regions, and real-time simulations of the antarctic atmosphere using the Penn State University National Center for Atmospheric Research fifth generation mesoscale model have placed the field of antarctic weather prediction at the brink of a period of rapid improvement. This potential can only be realized through a directed research program with the goal of providing an observational database to validate the modeling effort. The need for this workshop was recognized and articulated at the Antarctic Weather Forecasting Workshop held at Ohio State University in May doc16855 none Due to the advent of highly complex manufacturing, communication, and computer systems, there has been an increased need for more complex and realistic mathematical models to analyze and control such systems. A particularly striking example is seen in semiconductor wafer fabrication, where one facility may manufacture multiple products which traverse a labyrinthine route consisting of hundreds of steps. Factors such as reentrant routing, varied processing speeds, setup times, and machine downtimes make such systems particularly difficult to evaluate and control. Fluid models in queueing can be thought of as a relaxation of an original multiclass queuing network which can provide crucial insight into the operation of complex reentrant systems. The proposed research plan involves exploring fluid model techniques for efficient scheduling of multiclass queuing models. First we propose developing robust and efficient algorithms for solving a fluid model control problem. Then we will develop techniques for translating the solution to the fluid control problem into a feasible near-optimal schedule for the original. Finally, we will test the applicability of our methods using realistic wafer fab data of practical size and scope, drawing on a partnership with International SEMATECH for fab data and benchmark simulation models. The proposed education plan is tied in with the research plan and involves new course development and software development for undergraduate courses and graduate courses in operations research modeling and queueing theory doc16856 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project describes the development of a Capillary Breakup Rheometer (CaBER) from a proven breadboard design to a commercially viable instrument for both analytical and process control functions. In this document the results of the successful completion of a Phase I SBIR are outlined. The fundamental operation of the CaBER s component parts is supported by data that validates the chosen components and verifies the suitability of the design. In addition, sample data from model fluids will be used to both illustrate the functionality of the CaBER and to highlight the broad applicability of the instrument. Ongoing developments of the CaBER include more robust software analysis, cheaper manufacturing costs and a more intuitive user interface. These improvements will result in an instrument that is invaluable to industry in both a research laboratory and a process control environment. Currently there is only one commercially available extensional rheometer and a handful of academic rheometer designs. By providing a virtually unique tool for the determination of extensional viscosity in a freely draining fluid thread, this instrument will fill a segment of the instrumentation field that as here to fore been neglected doc16857 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Joseph B. Yavitt and Stephen H. Zinder at Cornell University to establish a microbial observatory to study the microorganisms that produce methane and decompose organic matter in northern, peat-forming wetland ecosystems. Although northern peatland ecosystems are significant sources of methane, an important greenhouse gas in the Earth s atmosphere, almost nothing is known about the microbes that produce methane (methanogens) in peatlands or about other anaerobes (organisms living without oxygen) that decompose organic matter to compounds used by methanogens. Because northern peatlands are characterized by low nutrient availability and acidic conditions, Drs. Yavitt and Zinder will concentrate on acid-tolerant bacteria. They will study three contrasting sites in central New York State in which their preliminary work suggests a rich diversity of as yet uncultivated methanogens. Molecular biological techniques will be used to further characterize the microbial populations at these sites, and methods will be systematically developed for culturing methanogens and culturing other anaerobes using organic compounds of particular importance in peatlands. Of particular interest will be the highly acidic McLean Bog site with a pH near 3.6. These studies will increase our understanding of microbial diversity and physiology; moreover, some of the acid-tolerant organisms obtained may have biotechnological uses. The microbiological studies will be integrated with biogeochemical studies on carbon flow to methane at the sites, and on methane flux to the atmosphere. As a result, we will be better able to predict how microbial populations in peatlands function and, in particular, how methane production will respond to changing environmental conditions, which will greatly improve our ability to forecast trends in atmospheric methane concentrations. Results of the project will be conveyed to the public through written documents, an internet web site developed and maintained by students, and visits by students to comparable sites in Canada and Europe doc16858 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II Project will develop a neutral, high flux fluence nitrogen atom beam source for application to the high rate growth of III-V nitride semi-conducting materials over large areas. The proposed source is based on proprietary MID-JET technology. This technology employs an electrode-less discharge contained by vortex flow, rather than a dielectric tube commonly used in traditional sources. MIDJET technology utilizing a temperature of C to produce nitrogen atoms has been demonstrated. This is 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than that generated by currently available sources. It is particularly applicable to Metal Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition (MOCVD) systems, where it will allow both high growth rate and the elimination of the use of ammonia. The MIDJET will be adapted for use in a MOCVD reactor and a demonstration made of the system s ability to grow gallium nitride at a rate of at least 10 microns per hour. This project will develop a charge-free, high flux fluence nitrogen atom beam for the growth of III-V nitride materials which can replace existing plasma-based tools. With higher growth rates of high quality material over larger areas, systems based on the MIDJET will have with application to the fabrication of high power high temperature semiconductor devices and blue illumination sources (including those for flat panel displays doc16859 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will develop software and hardware products that assist people with low vision to efficiently read and process information from many sources. These products will combine optical character recognition (OCR), speech synthesis and recognition technologies, together with customizable displays based on the latest vision research to accommodate a variety of visual impairments. These products will incorporate a Pick and Click user interface, developed in Phase I, which does not require viewing the screen, yet presents visual displays useful to a low vision person, and is intuitive to fully sighted teachers experienced with graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Included in the products will be functions particular to the low vision market, such as reading text optimally, enlarging pictures, and using a video camera for magnification while handwriting and viewing 3D objects. In addition, Pick and Click interfaces to the most common computer applications programs, such as word processing, e-mail, Internet browser, spreadsheet, and financial accounting will be included. Low vision users will benefit from a low cost interface that provides a clean and less cluttered presentation of information on the screen. JBliss Imaging s proffered new technology has potential to improve access to and capability of manipulating information for the low vision population.. The technology also has potential to serve individuals with other disabilities, such as dyslexia and other forms of challenges to learning and reading abilities. Commercial applications are in schools, libraries, businesses, and homes doc16860 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. K. Eric Wommack (University of Delaware), Feng Chen (University of Maryland), and D. Wayne Coats (Smithsonian Environmental Research Laboratory) to characterize novel viruses and investigate their role and importance in the annual plankton cycle of the Chesapeake Bay. For over a decade scientists have known that viruses are the most abundant biological entities in marine and aquatic environments. In the rich, productive estuarine waters of the Chesapeake, viral abundance is around 10 million viruses per milliliter; exceeding bacterial abundance by a factor of 10. Collectively these populations, comprised principally of bacterial and algal viruses, are known as the virioplankton. The specific identity of the vast majority of these strains is still unknown to science. This study will be the first to apply comprehensive characterization and monitoring of virioplankton populations within an estuary over several annual cycles. Methodological approaches will include the use of molecular genetic and genomics tools to identify changes in the composition and diversity of Chesapeake Bay virioplankton. These observations will be interpreted in light of the physio-chemical and biological changes which occur seasonally in the Chesapeake. In addition, viruses infecting important microorganisms occurring in the Chesapeake will be isolated in an effort to characterize specific virus-host interactions. The broad question poised to marine scientists since the discovery of high viral abundance is: what is the diversity of these viruses, and what role do they play in the maintenance and function of marine microbial ecosystems? Ultimately, these microbial communities comprised of bacteria, unicellular protists, and viruses determine the fate of nutrients and pollutants in coastal waters; and are at the center of the marine food web. A more complete understanding of the inner workings of marine microbial communities will assist in efforts to assess, maintain and even restore the health of marine and estuarine ecosystems doc16861 none In previous research, the PI found that people of European culture tend to perceive and reason in a relatively analytic way; they focus their attention on an object, categorize it on the basis of its attributes, and apply rules to predict and explain its behavior. East Asians perceive and reason in a relatively holistic way; they attend to the object and the context simultaneously, they are attentive to relationships among events, and they predict and explain behavior on the basis of presumed relationships between object and context. Compared to East Asian participants, Western participants a) notice less about the context, b) are less skilled at detecting covariation among events, c) find it easier to separate objects from the contexts in which they are embedded, d) are more likely to mistakenly attribute behavior exclusively to the object while ignoring the role of contextual factors, e) are less susceptible to the hindsight bias (the I-knew-it-all-along error), f) more likely to organize objects and events in terms of rules and categories as opposed to relationships and similarities, and g) are more likely to apply logical rules to problems describing everyday situations. The origins of these differences probably lie in the different social systems characteristic of East and West. We find that Asian Americans resemble European Americans more than they do Asians. The proposed research will explore the breadth of the perceptual differences, including whether they extend to audition and whether they influence learning processes; the depth of the perceptual differences, including how controllable vs. automatic they are, whether they result in different perceptual illusions for Easterners and Westerners, and whether they include differences in peripheral vision capacity; how unified the perceptual differences are; whether individual differences in perception are related to individual differences in cognition; and how social factors affect perceptual and cognitive functioning. The research is expected to indicate that educational practices that benefit holistic thinkers may not be the same ones that benefit analytic thinkers; that culture fair ability testing may be an illusory goal; and that perceptual and thinking styles are sufficiently different that ethnic diversity in work groups is likely to improve problem-solving doc16862 none This SBIR Phase II research project proposes to develop user-friendly component software for classical econometric estimation and inference based on simulation methods, such as maximum simulated likelihood, method of simulated moments, and efficient method of moments. In the last decade different simulation-based methods have been developed to tackle complex economic statistical models which cannot be estimated by conventional methods such as Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) and Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). Although these simulation-based estimators have desirable theoretical properties, they have remained as research topics in academia and have not become useful tools for practitioners because of the lack of user friendly software. Building upon the Phase I research and development, Insightful (formerly MathSoft) plans to study two classes of models: mixed logit models for discrete choice analysis which represent cross sectional and panel data problems, and models for term structure of interest rates which represent discrete time and continuous time structural models. Extensive Monte Carlo experiments will be used to explore finite sample properties of various aspects of simulation, estimation and forecasting, with an aim of improving and stabilizing the current algorithms. The user-friendly component software will be developed using both object oriented S-Plus language and the state-of-art JavaBean technology, and it will provide intuitive graphical user interface. The S-Plus functions of the technology proffered by Insightful for econometric estimation and inference will serve the purpose of quickly gaining a broad user base, while the JavaBeans can be used to develop custom applications. The software will help economists and practitioners in other fields such as the financial industry, social sciences, and biotechnology to conduct flexible and extensible model estimation and inference doc16863 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop advanced carbon electrode materials for ultracapacitors. Presently, ultracapacitor voltages are limited to 2.3 - 2.7 V cell. New carbonaceous electrode materials are expected to increase cell potential limits to 3.6 V. Given the quadratic dependence of energy density on cell potential, these materials will increase ultracapacitor energy storage by 100%. The increased cell potential will reduce device size and cost by reducing the number of cells required to attain a given voltage rating. Phase II will demonstrate that these materials can withstand extended charge discharge cycling to high voltage. A scalable process will be developed to produce the new carbon electrode materials. Prototype ultracapacitors will be produced to support customer demonstrations. The commercial potential of this project is for ultracapacitors that are used in portable electronic devices, power conditioning (UPS), and electromechanical actuators. Additional applications include hybrid electric and conventional vehicles to service intermittent high power loads (e.g. regenerative braking, engine start, electromechanical valves, and electric power steering doc16770 none A collaborative grant has been awarded to Drs. William Henley and Robert Miller (Oklahoma State University), Mark Buchheim (University of Tulsa) and Mark Schneegurt (Wichita State University) to establish a Microbial Observatory at the Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge in northern Oklahoma. The briny remains of an ancient sea that once covered middle America rise to the surface and evaporate under dry conditions to leave a crust of white salt on the barren, flat, 65-km2 Salt Plains. Rainfall events dissolve the salt crust and create temporary streams and ponds, altering the landscape. Salt conditions change rapidly in time with rainfall events and in space as the plains give way to vegetated areas. The rapidly changing conditions and high surface temperatures, salt concentrations and UV exposure make this an extreme environment. The Salt Plains Microbial Observatory will use a combination of classic microbiology techniques and leading-edge genetic techniques to characterize microbial communities (bacteria and algae) and study how they survive in such a harsh environment. It is expected that many novel microbes will be discovered, and a repository of microbial biodiversity will be established, along with Internet databases of genetic information. Educational opportunities will be available for undergraduate and graduate students, including a summer course for students from groups under-represented in the sciences. Capturing the biodiversity of this remarkable environment will preserve unique microbes that have beneficial properties for man, as potential sources for new antibiotics, drugs, and enzymes for industrial processes and green chemistry. Fundamental ecological questions will be addressed that have widespread application to the management and conservation of our natural resources. Surviving under such harsh conditions, the microbes on the Salt Plains will serve as models for organisms that may be found on other planets. Representing the first extensive study of a non-marine, terrestrial, hypersaline environment, the Salt Plains Microbial Observatory is poised to make significant new discoveries doc16865 none This STTR Phase II project will result in the creation of an advanced network capability to enable ad-hoc networks to operate in a low bandwidth undersea environment. The specific application of the resultant capability will be to support Autonomous Undersea Systems Networks (AUSNET), which are fleets of unmanned robotic vehicles that can provide survey, search, and monitoring functions for customer bases including the oil industry, environmental monitoring, undersea communications infrastructure, search and rescue, and military applications. The capability will build upon the emerging standard Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocols to create a network that is entirely self-configuring, bandwidth conserving, and tailored to the unique requirements of cooperative undersea robotic operations. The two technical thrusts of the effort include AUSNET low-level protocol development, and higher level Application Programmer Interface specification and development. The cooperative Autonomous Undersea Vehicle (AUV) market is emerging and substantial. There are currently 17 companies selling undersea communications devices, each of which is a candidate licensee for AUSNET technology. Near term application of Phase II results is anticipated in Naval applications. Even greater application is to be found in support of offshore undersea operations addressing requirements of the oil industry, communications (undersea cable) installation and maintenance, environmental survey and monitoring, search and rescue operations, and exploration scientific research doc16866 none A collaborative grant has been awarded to Drs. Jo Handelsman at the University of Wisconsin, Roger Ruess at the University of Alaska, Jill Banfield at the University of California-Berkeley, and William Metcalf at the University of Illinois to describe the diversity and function of the microbial life in Alaskan soil in a Long Term Ecological Research site. Microbial diversity and mechanisms of phosphorous acquisition will be studied by culturing and culture-independent molecular methods to access a wide spectrum of organisms. The culture independent methods will include metagenomics, an approach involving cloning the genes from organisms directly from the environment, without requiring them to grow in culture. Diversity will be assessed by methods that rely on the sequences of genes that act as molecular signatures for microbial species. Cultured organisms and metagenomic clones will be screened for the ability (1) to grow on reduced forms of phosphorous as the sole P source and (2) to solubilize the dominant mineral forms of P in the forest soil that are identified by our mineralogical characterization. Soil contains a rich variety of uncultured microorganisms that outnumber the cultured organisms by a factor of 100 or . The soils of interior Alaska represent a large and diverse habitat of the boreal forest whose micoorganisms, both cultured and uncultured, have been largely ignored. Recent studies of other cold environments have revealed novel and diverse microbial life, suggesting that the soils of Alaska will be a productive hunting ground for new microorganisms and new microbial functions. Little is known about phosphorous acquisition, which is essential to ecosystem function. The Microbial Observatory will contribute to our knowledge of the microbiology of cold soils, increase the diversity of cultured microorganisms, and potentially identify new microbial functions for coping with phosphorous limitation. The microorganisms cultured in this study and the metagenomic clones may also provide a new resource for biotechnology research for enzyme, drug, and agrichemical discovery doc16867 none Ma The objective of this research is to understand the mechanisms of arsenic uptake, translocation, distribution and detoxification by Brake fern. The efficiency of arsenic uptake by Brake fern suggests the cost-effective use of this plant for the remediation of arsenic contaminated soils. This research focuses on elemental interactions of arsenic with calcium and phosphorus, plant biochemical responses under arsenic stresses, speciation and characterization of arsenic in the plant using analytical, microscopic and spectroscopic techniques, and microbe-root-plant-arsenic interactions. Arsenic hyperaccumulation characteristics in Brake fern growing in soils of different arsenic concentrations will be investigated using arsenic spiked soils. The impacts of P (increases arsenic availability yet competes with arsenic uptake) and Ca (increases plant arsenic uptake and translocation) on arsenic accumulation, and biochemical responses of Brake fern to elevated arsenic (detoxification) will be examined. Also, the beneficial effects of mycorrhizal fungi for enhancing arsenic accumulation by Brake fern will be explored. This is a collaborative research project between the University of Florida ( ) and Northwestern University ( ). These two awards were made pursuant to the Joint Program on Phytoremediation, -STAR-C1 (EPA, NSF, ONR, SERDP doc16868 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop and commercialize the Magnetic Pulse Welding (MPW) system, a novel materials joining process. The goal is to establish MPW as a reliable and economic method to weld tubular structures. The project will conduct research and engineering that will address the critical technical hurdles for the commercial implementation and dissemination of the new welding technology. The commercial applications would revolutionize the assembly process of the hydroformed tubular structures in automotive chassis and space frame applications. This process will promote the hybrid automotive body structure design that uses tubes of both aluminums and steels and will enable joining of different materials such as titanium to superalloys for aerospace and electronic applications doc16770 none A collaborative grant has been awarded to Drs. William Henley and Robert Miller (Oklahoma State University), Mark Buchheim (University of Tulsa) and Mark Schneegurt (Wichita State University) to establish a Microbial Observatory at the Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge in northern Oklahoma. The briny remains of an ancient sea that once covered middle America rise to the surface and evaporate under dry conditions to leave a crust of white salt on the barren, flat, 65-km2 Salt Plains. Rainfall events dissolve the salt crust and create temporary streams and ponds, altering the landscape. Salt conditions change rapidly in time with rainfall events and in space as the plains give way to vegetated areas. The rapidly changing conditions and high surface temperatures, salt concentrations and UV exposure make this an extreme environment. The Salt Plains Microbial Observatory will use a combination of classic microbiology techniques and leading-edge genetic techniques to characterize microbial communities (bacteria and algae) and study how they survive in such a harsh environment. It is expected that many novel microbes will be discovered, and a repository of microbial biodiversity will be established, along with Internet databases of genetic information. Educational opportunities will be available for undergraduate and graduate students, including a summer course for students from groups under-represented in the sciences. Capturing the biodiversity of this remarkable environment will preserve unique microbes that have beneficial properties for man, as potential sources for new antibiotics, drugs, and enzymes for industrial processes and green chemistry. Fundamental ecological questions will be addressed that have widespread application to the management and conservation of our natural resources. Surviving under such harsh conditions, the microbes on the Salt Plains will serve as models for organisms that may be found on other planets. Representing the first extensive study of a non-marine, terrestrial, hypersaline environment, the Salt Plains Microbial Observatory is poised to make significant new discoveries doc16870 none Professor T. Don Tilley, Department of Chemistry, University of California at Berkeley is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division to investigate complexes that contain a transition metal-main group element multiple bond and to develop new methods for transition metal mediated bond activations. A primary reaction type by which transition metal centers cleave chemical bonds involves the migration of a group from a donor atom to the metal (alpha - migration). This process produces a metal-element multiple bond, which is a functionality with a rich reaction chemistry and which is important in many metal-mediated transformations. Although alpha-migrations are well established for metal-carbon bonded systems, they are much less developed in M-N, M-O, M-Si, M-P, and other metal heteroatom systems. This proposal aims to assess the generality and synthetic utility of alpha-migration as a route to isolable species containing multiple bonds between various main group and transition metal fragments. In doing so, several fundamental questions will be addressed: (a) Can alpha-migration be used to generate new types of metal-element multiple bonds? (b) How does the electron count at the transition metal center influence alpha-migration chemistry? (c) Does a formally charged metal center promote the alpha-migration process? (d) What substituents in addition to hydrogen participate in alpha-migration chemistry? (e) Can the design and implementation of new ligand sets provide access to new bond activations? (f) Can alpha-migrations be incorporated into new catalytic cycles? To address these questions, specially designed complexes containing metals from throughout the transition series will be prepared. Many of these will feature coordinative unsaturation, and ligands designed to facilitate bond activations. The goal of this work is to provide a basis for the development of new and useful metal-mediated chemical processes. The discovery of new bonding patterns and reactivity modes will be followed by attempts to use this information in the design of new catalytic cycles. Many of these investigations will focus on silylene complexes that have recently been discovered, but as other metal-element multiple bonded compounds are obtained, their reactivities will be explored in the search for useful transformations doc16871 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. James Murray and James Staley at the University of Washington to study microorganisms that mediate nitrogen transformations in low oxygen, or suboxic, environments. Such reactions are important because nitrogen is a critical element for life processes. The geochemical distributions in the Black Sea suggest that this is an ideal location to study these novel reactions. The research goals of this project are to discover, isolate and characterize the bacteria that are responsible for these nitrogen transformations. Closely coordinated microbial and geochemical approaches will be used. Samples will be collected on a research cruise to the Black Sea in from depths where the chemical transformations are inferred to occur. These samples will be used to enrich and isolate bacterial metabolic groups that can carry out these transformations. Laboratory studies will be used on a second research cruise in to develop molecular markers for identification of organisms in fresh environmental samples. In addition, probes will be developed to identify genes of enzymes that are involved in various redox reactions. Geochemical studies will be conducted to determine the stoichiometries, rates and nitrogen isotope fractionation in water samples from the reaction layers. Results of this investigation are expected to lead to discovery of novel, previously uncharacterized bacteria that carry out these important processes. The microorganism to be studied may be present in many ecosystems (such as sediments, anoxic aquatic environments, biofilms and microbial mats) where waters have low oxygen concentrations. This knowledge will increase our understanding of microbial diversity and anaerobic respiration in such marine environments. Human society is impacting aquatic environments more than ever, leading to an increase in suboxic aquatic habitats, and resulting in threats to fisheries and wildlife. Understanding the biological processes occurring in suboxic environments will lead to new approaches that could be undertaken for habitat restoration doc16866 none A collaborative grant has been awarded to Drs. Jo Handelsman at the University of Wisconsin, Roger Ruess at the University of Alaska, Jill Banfield at the University of California-Berkeley, and William Metcalf at the University of Illinois to describe the diversity and function of the microbial life in Alaskan soil in a Long Term Ecological Research site. Microbial diversity and mechanisms of phosphorous acquisition will be studied by culturing and culture-independent molecular methods to access a wide spectrum of organisms. The culture independent methods will include metagenomics, an approach involving cloning the genes from organisms directly from the environment, without requiring them to grow in culture. Diversity will be assessed by methods that rely on the sequences of genes that act as molecular signatures for microbial species. Cultured organisms and metagenomic clones will be screened for the ability (1) to grow on reduced forms of phosphorous as the sole P source and (2) to solubilize the dominant mineral forms of P in the forest soil that are identified by our mineralogical characterization. Soil contains a rich variety of uncultured microorganisms that outnumber the cultured organisms by a factor of 100 or . The soils of interior Alaska represent a large and diverse habitat of the boreal forest whose micoorganisms, both cultured and uncultured, have been largely ignored. Recent studies of other cold environments have revealed novel and diverse microbial life, suggesting that the soils of Alaska will be a productive hunting ground for new microorganisms and new microbial functions. Little is known about phosphorous acquisition, which is essential to ecosystem function. The Microbial Observatory will contribute to our knowledge of the microbiology of cold soils, increase the diversity of cultured microorganisms, and potentially identify new microbial functions for coping with phosphorous limitation. The microorganisms cultured in this study and the metagenomic clones may also provide a new resource for biotechnology research for enzyme, drug, and agrichemical discovery doc16873 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II Project substantially furthers the development of a powerful means to simultaneously measure trace amounts of multiple species vital to environmental control, industrial process control, and human health and safety. A fast, flexible, accurate, and low power-consuming technique, prism Cavity Ring-Down Spectroscopy (CRDS) will measure trace species to levels as low as parts-per-trillion. The research completed in Phase I demonstrated that the technology requires prisms fabricated from high-purity, super polished materials of high optical homogeneity. Phase I served both to identify appropriate materials to construct a fully functional prism and to prove that the prism cavity operates from the near UV down to the near IR range, greatly enhancing the breadth of CRDS performance. The commercial market for the prism cavity lends itself to a wide range of applications: manufacture of compound semiconductors for telecommunications; continuous emissions monitoring for environmental compliance and workplace safety; laser weapon development and performance verification; detection of explosives or chemical warfare agents; and chemical analysis of breath for medical diagnostics doc16874 none Gaillard The objective of this research is to understand the mechanisms of arsenic uptake, translocation, distribution and detoxification by Brake fern. The efficiency of arsenic uptake by Brake fern suggests the cost-effective use of this plant for the remediation of arsenic contaminated soils. This research focuses on elemental interactions of arsenic with calcium and phosphorus, plant biochemical responses under arsenic stresses, speciation and characterization of arsenic in the plant using analytical, microscopic and spectroscopic techniques, and microbe-root-plant-arsenic interactions. Arsenic hyperaccumulation characteristics in Brake fern growing in soils of different arsenic concentrations will be investigated using arsenic spiked soils. The impacts of P (increases arsenic availability yet competes with arsenic uptake) and Ca (increases plant arsenic uptake and translocation) on arsenic accumulation, and biochemical responses of Brake fern to elevated arsenic (detoxification) will be examined. Also, the beneficial effects of mycorrhizal fungi for enhancing arsenic accumulation by Brake fern will be explored. This is a collaborative research project between the University of Florida ( ) and Northwestern University ( ). These two awards were made pursuant to the Joint Program on Phytoremediation, -STAR-C1 (EPA, NSF, ONR, SERDP doc16866 none A collaborative grant has been awarded to Drs. Jo Handelsman at the University of Wisconsin, Roger Ruess at the University of Alaska, Jill Banfield at the University of California-Berkeley, and William Metcalf at the University of Illinois to describe the diversity and function of the microbial life in Alaskan soil in a Long Term Ecological Research site. Microbial diversity and mechanisms of phosphorous acquisition will be studied by culturing and culture-independent molecular methods to access a wide spectrum of organisms. The culture independent methods will include metagenomics, an approach involving cloning the genes from organisms directly from the environment, without requiring them to grow in culture. Diversity will be assessed by methods that rely on the sequences of genes that act as molecular signatures for microbial species. Cultured organisms and metagenomic clones will be screened for the ability (1) to grow on reduced forms of phosphorous as the sole P source and (2) to solubilize the dominant mineral forms of P in the forest soil that are identified by our mineralogical characterization. Soil contains a rich variety of uncultured microorganisms that outnumber the cultured organisms by a factor of 100 or . The soils of interior Alaska represent a large and diverse habitat of the boreal forest whose micoorganisms, both cultured and uncultured, have been largely ignored. Recent studies of other cold environments have revealed novel and diverse microbial life, suggesting that the soils of Alaska will be a productive hunting ground for new microorganisms and new microbial functions. Little is known about phosphorous acquisition, which is essential to ecosystem function. The Microbial Observatory will contribute to our knowledge of the microbiology of cold soils, increase the diversity of cultured microorganisms, and potentially identify new microbial functions for coping with phosphorous limitation. The microorganisms cultured in this study and the metagenomic clones may also provide a new resource for biotechnology research for enzyme, drug, and agrichemical discovery doc16876 none Deletional mutagenesis has not been used as extensively as insertional mutagenesis in Arabidopsis because large deletions are often not transmitted through gametes or are lethal early in development. The investigator will carry out a systematic study of small deletions by controlling their chromosomal location, developmental timing, and parent of origin. She will make deletions of known sizes using the site-specific bacteriophage P1-encoded Cre recombinase to delete chromosomal segments between a loxP-containing T-DNA donor site and a nearby loxP-containing transposon. Using an already tested transposon launching pad containing loxP recognition sites for the Cre recombinase, she will identify 3-4 transposons reinserted at different distances ranging from a few kilobases to a few megabases from each of several transposon donor sites to carry out these studies. She will use Cre recombinase genes expressed from a constitutive plant promoter, as well as from a chemically inducible promoter. She will detect deletions (and inversions) by both PCR-based and genetic methods. She will determine the genetic transmissibility of deletions and analyze the development of plants in which deletions are induced at different times after germination. This work will both increase the understanding of the detrimental effects of deletions and deletional heterozygosity and provide methods to control the size, chromosomal location, and timing of deletions. The second objective is to lay the groundwork for development of a transposon-based method to target genes to their original chromosomal locations. This technique, which the investigator calls gene homing to distinguish it from homology-based gene targeting, will use site-specific recombination to target a promoter-reporter cassette to a transposon-disrupted gene. If successful, this work will make it possible for the first time to study precise alterations in a plant gene s regulatory sequences in the gene s original chromatin context. The gene homing method will use transposons to target genes to their original chromatin environment by replacing a loxP-bracketed marker gene on the transposon with a promoter-reporter gene cassette. She will use existing plants with loxP transposons and transposon launching pads to determine whether an efficient cassette replacement technique developed in animal cells can also be used to integrate DNA segments efficiently between pairs of loxP sites in Arabidopsis. This work will establish the feasibility of replacing a transposon-borne marker gene cassette with a cassette carrying a reporter gene driven by the promoter of the disrupted gene. This work will provide basic information and techniques that will be widely applicable in contemporary plant genomic research. Both the constructs that will be made and the techniques that will be developed will be useful in other plants doc16877 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will demonstrate using a prototype design the commercial feasibility of electrospinning to produce nanofibers. Nanofibers will be combined with conventional filter media to form a novel NanoFilter media for liquid and air filtration applications. These applications have been shown to remove particles smaller than 3 microns from effluent streams with superior filtering efficiency and attractive cost potential. The acrylic nanofibers will be electrospun as a nanoweb directly on to a conventional support (filter media) substrate. The web will be combined with a protective cover layer to form a sandwich structure, which will be collected as a roll. The filter will be easily tailored to achieve the desired composite filter performance by varying architecture: substrates, nanofiber diameter, nanoweb density, and the nanoweb thickness. This project will be carried out collaboratively with academic centers and major corporations as its strategic partners. Nanotechnologies developed in the coming years will form the foundation for a significant commercial platform. Commercial applications in a variety of filtration processes such as: high-end industrial raw material purification, biological separations, ultra pure air and water systems, hospital clean rooms, agriculture and food industries filters, and microelectronic industries next generation clean environment needs are anticipated doc16878 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project seeks to develop a compact, lightweight, and low cost Microlith Water Gas Shift (WGS) reactor capable of rapid start-up, excellent transient response and high CO conversion efficiency with very low levels of methane formation. This technology offers a key low cost contribution to meeting objectives for efficiency and clean emissions. The Microlith based WGS reactor will be optimized by developing prototype reactor designs for fuel processor applications, and demonstrating predicted durability of up to hours. Target customers and markets are fuel processor fuel cell manufacturers developing and seeking to sell Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cell products for stationary residential and distributed power, and for heavy duty vehicles in the short term, fuel processor fuel cell manufacturers developing products for automotive markets in the long term and opportunistically, specialty chemical reactor applications (e.g. for hydrogen and syngas production and in ammonia synthesis) where the technology s size and performance doc16879 none The Integrated Coastal Management Sustainability Education Project is designed to help insure that future practitioners of coastal management are well prepared to address the lack of sustainability of environmental management processes in South-East Asia. In order to meet this goal, the results from an ongoing research project which focuses on process sustainability will be translated into educational materials, imbedded into an ongoing distance learning program and disseminated to the public over the Internet doc16880 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II Project will validate the polymer infiltration microwave pyrolysis (PIMP) process and ceramic product whose feasibility was demonstrated in Phase I. The Phase I project demonstrated a reduction in pyrolysis time of greater than 90%; the Phase II project will confirm a corresponding cost reduction. During the Phase I, a strategic partnership with a major original equipment manufacturer (OEM) was established. The Phase II project will refine the process to produce ceramic parts for a specific commercial application, and will validate the weight and performance enhancements projected in Phase I. The PIMP process will be expanded to the pilot plant scale, and with the collaboration of the OEM and a business development specialist. Commercial applications exist for fiber-reinforced ceramics, if they can be produced at low cost. The potential applications range from gas-fired turbine engines for power plants and aircraft to brakes, waste incineration and chemical production doc16881 none Talwani Airborne gravity gradiometry is a technology that has only recently been developed, but which has enormous potential. It is capable of making absolute gravity gradient measurements of great precision very rapidly over almost any kind of terrain, and at a relatively modest cost. It could well revolutionize measurements involving gravity for various types of studies focused on the shallow crust, and because the instrument determines absolute values, for time lapse studies as well. The former could include, for example, studies involving the detection of blind faults, determination of the thickness of sedimentary fill or of basalt flows and lithologic contacts in densely vegetated areas as well as environmental and mineral exploration related problems. The latter could help trace fluid flow in the shallow crust or magma movement in volcanoes, as well as other movements of material within the shallow crust on the human time scale. Only two airborne gradiometers are actually operational today. Both are based on Lockheed Martin s GGI gradiometer and have been adapted for airborne work jointly by Lockheed Martin and BHP. It is clear that this technology is in its infancy and some preliminary experimentation is necessary in order to test its suitability for crustal work. This project involves an aerial gradiometer survey of the proposed drill site for the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD), a component of EAR s Earthscope Initiative. SAFOD will involve drilling a 4 km deep hole which will intersect the San Andreas Fault near Parkfield, CA. In addition to helping determine the deep structure at the proposed drill site, the fact that the gradiometer makes absolute measurements can be put to another use. It is quite possible that in a time lapse experiment, that is by making two measuremenbts over the identical space separated in time, changes in the subsurface can be monitored. These changes could be the motion of fluids or changes associated with an earthquake. For the latter experiment, it is obviously important to establish a base line measurement before the earthquake. If a number of measurements are made it may be also possible to see if fluid motions in the shallow subsurface are reliable precursors to earthquakes doc16882 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Valerie Fridland will conduct two years of linguistic research on vowel shifts in Southern dialects of American English. She will compare recent changes in Southern vowels to both older Southern speech and contemporary Northern speech. Recent research suggests that vocalic positions in Northern and Southern speech are realigning. The systems resulting from this realignment suggest increasing divergence between the two dialects. Using Memphis as a field site, Fridland s research team will collect both naturally occurring conversational data and elicited interview data and analyze the acoustic position of vowels in those data. Perceptual tests will measure the acoustic positioning of the vowels and the attitudinal load associated with changes in individual vowels. By examining the social embedding and the perceptual salience of each shifted vowel class, this project will assess the internal (regional) and external (national) pressures affecting dialect variation and determine how incoming norms are judged and how they function as displays of local, ethnic, or national identity for speakers. Shared speech norms generally suggest that speakers participate in the same communication networks. Thus, an important part of this research is its documentation of whether both European-Americans and African-Americans participate in the changes, an indication of racial integration in the Memphis area. African-Americans do not appear to participate in the vocalic changes identified in Northern cities, but their role in the changes affecting Southern speech might explain the origin of some changes in the Northern African-American vowel system. This sociolinguistic research will contribute to the emerging picture of contemporary Southern speech and speech perceptions. This is significant for both education and theory. First, Southern speech is stereotyped as non-standard nationally. Understanding local norms and the perceptions behind them is crucial to national testing in education. On an applied level then, the research has implications for language specialists and educators concerned with how dialect variation relates to educational and social disadvantages. Second, this survey of changes in contemporary Southern English will document convergence and divergence in dialects and reveal the social motivation of some sound changes. On a theoretical level, the research will provide insight into the mechanisms behind linguistic change, one of the fundamental questions driving sociolinguistic research doc16883 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project will investigate the use of a new high temperature amorphous oxide material, CerablakTM, as a protective coating on components used in the molten aluminum industry. CerablakTM is a newly discovered sol-gel derived material that is thermally stable up to degrees Celsius over many hours. A patented precursor is used to form a continuous, dense, and smooth thin film using a simple dip coating process. The key property of CerablakTM is its relatively low oxygen diffusivity which enables its use for oxidation protection of metal and alloy surfaces exposed to elevated temperatures. The Phase I project showed that the material is non-wetting and compatible with molten aluminum. CerablakTM coatings developed on full-size thermocouple protection tubes showed excellent durability and non-wetting behavior. The Phase II project will optimize the coating quality for use in protection of thermocouple protection tubes, riser stalk tubes, molds, and dies. The commercial applications include protective coatings for metals and alloys used in turbine components and petrochemical refining, molten metal processing, thermal protection systems for space propulsion, cookware, and glass doc16884 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project will develop a program that will optimize poly (ethynyl) silazanes (PESZ) synthesis with an emphasis on improved efficiency and low production costs; will scale-up the production of PESZ polymers to pilot scale batch sizes; will optimize PESZ processing for component fabrication; will fabricate real world components, such as thrust deflectors and diesel engine particulate filters; and will obtain real world mechanical and performance testing data. Through the course of achieving these objectives, commercial opportunities will be pursued. This approach potentially permits the fabrication of extremely large ceramic matrix composites (CMCs) structures never before possible in much the same manner as large polymer matrix aircraft structures and boat hulls are currently manufactured. The commercial application will be the fabrication of extremely large CMC structures that can be used in the aircraft industry doc16885 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Mark Young and David Mogk (Montana State University-Bozeman) in collaboration with Drs. Kenneth Stedman (Portland State University) and Frank Roberto (DOE-INEEL Idaho Falls) to identify and characterize novel viruses from high temperature acidic environments present in Yellowstone National Park. The goals of this grant are to discover and analyze previously unknown viruses from very hot ( 178F) and acidic (pH 4) environments, conditions approaching boiling battery acid, and to monitor the virus populations in these environments over time. Preliminary data indicates that the viruses in these environments are unique and quite unlike viruses found in more normal environments. A combination of biochemical and molecular tools will be used to cultivate these viruses in the laboratory and to monitor their presence in Yellowstone s hot springs. In addition, detailed chemical analysis of these environments in which these viruses live will be performed. All cultures and DNA obtained from this project will be stored in the Montana State University Thermal Biology Institute thermophile culture collection, providing biological materials for future screening This research has broad implications. The detailed analysis of viruses has often led the way to fundamental breakthroughs in our understanding of the biochemistry of life (such as the discovery of DNA as the genetic material). The research supported by this grant to characterize viruses from extreme environments is likely to lead to new and fundamental understanding of biological adaptations required for life at high temperatures. Presently, we only have a rudimentary understanding of how organisms survive in extreme environments and how they have adapted to their unique chemical environments. The discovery and analysis of viruses from high temperature environments is an important step in the understanding how these unusual microbial communities operate. In addition, these studies will provide additional insights into how life adapts to changes in all environments. This research will also determine if viruses can act as sensitive biosensors of chemical and biological change. Finally, these studies will not only impact our understanding of life on earth but may also provide new insights in how to look for extraterrestrial life doc16886 none An NSF Microbial Observatories grant has been awarded to Drs. Holly Pinkart (Central Washington University), Melanie Mormile (University of Missouri-Rolla), and Brent Peyton (Washington State University) to study the anaerobic microbial ecology of a saline, alkaline lake. Soap Lake is a permanently stratified lake consisting two separate water layers which have not mixed for over two thousand years. Although both layers are quite alkaline and lack significant amounts of oxygen, the lower layer is an order of magnitude more saline. Additionally, this lake has concentrations of sulfide generally considered toxic for most life forms. In spite of the extreme chemistry of this environment, the lake supports thriving communities of algae, zooplankton, and bacteria. The Microbial Observatory will allow the study and quantification of the ecology and metabolic capabilities of the relatively unknown microorganisms that thrive in this extreme environment. The goals of the project are to characterize the microbial communities that inhabit this system, and determine how they affect, and are affected by, the geochemistry of Soap Lake. The methods that will be used include the culturing of microorganisms, cloning and sequencing of microbial DNA, and the use of satellite imaging for detection of microbial activities. The Soap Lake Microbial Observatory will serve as a model for studying interactions of the anaerobic communities in haloalkaline environments and their contribution to biomass production. Results generated by this project will supplement data available for the search for biological activity on Mars and extra-solar terrestrial environments, and will augment the Virtual Planet Laboratory Program being developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Microbial Observatory at Soap Lake will likely lead to discovery of novel microorganisms useful in industry and biotechnology. Additionally, this project will allow for the significant involvement of undergraduate students, and could serve as a model for the integration of research into undergraduate education doc16887 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will proceed with the development of a fully automated and integrated pest management (IPM) system. The goal of IPM is to minimize reliance on pesticides by emphasizing the moment-to-moment knowledge of the field situation to dynamically make decisions and deliver timely, targeted actions. Current IPM programs use data collection technologies from early s, thus lacking speed and integration necessary to generate reports required by decision-makers who need to act quickly. With the Phase II development of a robust centralized Internet hub housing expert systems for automated data analysis, reporting (with GIS) and quick distribution of information, the benefits to agriculture will be unsurpassed. The company targets its suite of field data management and decision-making tools the pest management market doc16888 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) project will develop advanced, nano-engineered thermal spray powders for producing composite coatings with revolutionary enhancements in performance. The Phase I project demonstrated the production of high volume reinforced (25-65 wt % SiC) aluminum and nickel matrix composite materials using CVD fluid bed coated powders and low cost consolidation techniques. Dramatic increases in flexure strength and modulus were achieved, with results showing greater than 5% (80% increase) ductility and a 600% increase in flexural strength compared to current metal matrix composite state of the art. A greater understanding of the nano-engineered particles being produced, and the relationship between nano-structural features and the resulting mechanical property improvements will be developed leading to repeatable, predictable performance and application to additional composite and coatings systems. The commercial potential will be for producing low cost; high volume fraction consolidated spray-deposited composite systems with significant improvements in mechanical properties and desired physical properties for structural and corrosion applications for the electronic industry doc16889 none Bierman This grant provides partial support for acquisition of an inductively coupled plasma, optical emission spectrometer (ICP-OES) and sundry sample preparation equipment. The newly established ICP facility in the Department of Geology, University of Vermont, will be dedicated to research relying on high precision trace element analyses of natural samples and the teaching of students with ICP analytical techniques and their applications. The new ICP lab will serve faculty members Bierman, Klepeis, Lini and Rusher for studies including determination of post-glacial surficial weathering rates, investigations of the petrogenesis of igneous plutons, research on experimental phase equilibria, and environmental impact studies doc16890 none This award to Professor Eric Conte of the Western Kentucky University is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program in the Chemistry Division. The overall research goal is to development new methods of solid-phase extraction, a method commonly used to sample water and other solutions for trace quantities of organic components. Solid-phase extraction is key sample preparation step prior to HPLC or mass spectrometry. In the proposed project, ionic surfactants bound to an ion exchange resin will be developed as an new solid-phase extraction material. If successful, the system has the potential of reducing or eliminating the use of organic solvents now required for solid-phase extraction, thus making the procedure more environmentally friendly. Both undergraduate and graduate students will participate in this research. A critical aspect of modern chemical analysis is sample preparation prior to instrumental analysis. New methods of solid-phase extraction, especially environmentally friendly methods, will likely find quick application in analytical chemistry. Undergraduate researchers can potentially make significant contributions in this research area doc16891 none This proposal will support two workshops between Chinese and US researchers in the digital library area, to work towards a major international collaboration in the creation of a very large digital book collection. The workshops will provide coordination in scanning technology, the choice of materials to be scanned, the organization of the delivery of the material to be scanned, and the disposition of the resulting digital content doc16892 none This is a proposal to fund two workshops to bring together computer science and digital library researchers from the US and India, to forward the work of the million book project . It is important to maintain coordination between the countries so that the international collaboration is maintained and the work can proceed in a unified and most productive way. The topics discussed will include scanning technology, selection of materials, and related issues doc16893 none This NSF CAREER award supports the integration of scientific research and education within the context of developing a deeper understanding of climate processes. The research objective is to improve our understanding of large-scale climate variability in the Southern Hemisphere in the context of the Southern Hemisphere annular oscillation (AO), a robust feature of the atmosphere s general circulation that accounts for a substantial amount of climate variance. The education activities are the following: the development of new curriculum and mentoring of graduate students. This research is important because the AO, a natural mode of the atmosphere, has been shown to have a large influence on weather and climate; however, the basic processes that control its development and characteristics are poorly understood and controversial doc16894 none Daniel Funds from this grant will support the acquisition of a state-of-the-art scanning electron microscope (SEM) with an environmental cell which allows for imaging of hydrated samples at variable pressures. The so-called environmental SEM (ESEM) will also be configured with an energy dispersive x-ray spectrometer (EDS) to allow for quantitative compositional analysis of samples. The ESEM facility at Bucknell will support the research programs of faculty members Chris Daniel (metamorphic petrology structural geology), Beth Capaldi (entomology), Carl Kirby (environmental geochemistry) and Margot Vigeant (Chemical Engineering) and their students at this liberal arts institution. Specific research thrusts include investigations of the Proterozoic tectonic history of the southwestern U.S. based on SEM and EMP analyses of metamorphic phases to elucidate their P-T history and patterns of chemical zoning, investigations of bacterial interactions with solid iron phases found in rocks exposed to acid mine drainage, studies of biofilms on medical devices and industrial piping and structural studies of live pollen-insect interactions to elucidate insect sensory structures and mechanisms doc16895 none Cheadle This grant provides partial support for the acquisition of a detector and software to add electron backscattering diffraction (EBSD) capabilities to an existing modern scanning electron microscope (SEM) in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Wyoming. EBSD systems are a relatively new technology that allow for the rapid characterization of crystallographic preferred orientations (CPO) of thin sections materials at sub-micron resolutions. The technology makes it possible to statistically characterize paleodeformation mechanisms in rocks with very small grain sizes that are impossible or very difficult to analyze using alternative techniques combining traditional optical microscopy and x-ray diffraction. Detailed crystallographic information can also be very useful for studies of mineral surface processes and for characterizing the structure of organic molecules. Research at Wyoming that will immediately benefit from this system includes studies of the deformation processes responsible for creating ultramafic mylonites collected from oceanic fracture zones, studies of mantle peridotites to elucidate the factors responsible for igneous cumulates and to aid in the interpretation of magma chamber dynamics, and studies of the interaction of pharmaceuticals with malaria pigment to aid in the design of more effective antimaliaral drugs doc16896 none A striking feature of chemical communication systems in the brains of jawed vertebrates (gnathostomes) is the apparent duplication of genes that produce useful neuropeptide compounds. For example, in mammals there are four neuropeptide precursors (proenkephalin, prodynorphin, proopiomelanocortin, and proorphanin) that produce opiate-like peptides (opioids) or nociceptic-like peptides (orphanins). These four precursors are members of a gene family, the opioid orphanin family, and the apparent redundancy of genes in this family in fact reflects the evolutionary history of the vertebrates. Gene duplication events at discrete points in vertebrate evolution have allowed for the layering of neuropeptide networks over time, and have led to a diversification in function of these peptide products, including roles in analgesia, nociception, motor control, and feeding. This project combines molecular biology procedures with a comparative approach to define trends in the evolutionary radiation of the orphanin opioid gene family in gnathostomes. The cloning and sequencing of cDNAs, coupled with the measurement of gene expression by real-time PCR, will generate a database of sequences for each gene in the family that will be used to perform cladistic analyses and to identify novel opioid sequences. By examining selected vertebrate lineages where the evolution of this gene family has been slower than in mammals or teleost fish, it is possible to make inferences about the origin and transitions in the sequential evolution of this gene family. These data will test the proenkephalin hypothesis that the ancestral gene in the opioid orphanin gene family was a gene that coded for the enkephalin-like product. Results will provide a new level of understanding of the evolutionary mechanisms underlying the functional diversity in this important family of neuropeptides. The impact of this project will extend beyond neuroendocrinology to molecular neurobiology in general, and to evolutionary biology with respect to the trends that promote species diversity. Multi-disciplinary undergraduate and graduate training also is an important component of this project doc16897 none Dr. Jonas Peters, Department of Chemistry, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program of the Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, for his work under a CAREER Award to investigate whether neutral, zwitterionic complexes can mediate reactions typically catalyzed by cationic, coordinatively unsaturated complexes. Such processes are industrially important and include: the tailored synthesis of polymeric materials; catalytic bond forming reactions critical to organic synthesis and pharmaceutical drug development; and activation and functionalization chemistry, relevant to the utilization of simple hydrocarbon feedstocks. The zwitterionic strategy uses (phosphino)borate ligands to effectively tether a borate counter-anion to a cationic metal center. The potential advantages of the zwitterionic approach are: 1) Zwitterionic catalysts remove the need for a counter-anion cocatalyst and minimize counter-anion binding thereby simplifying the fundamental mechanistic studies. 2) The zwitterions should be both soluble and catalytically active in relatively non-polar solvent media; whereas, more coordinating solvents are typically required to solubilize cationic catalysts, rendering them less active. 3) Because neutral, zwitterionic complexes are expected to be less electrophilic than their cationic counterparts, they should increase reaction rates in catalytic systems that require loss of a donor ligand as a rate-determining step. Preliminary studies with zwitterionic model systems lend support to these hypotheses. Education will be integrated with research by using a case study approach for understanding and solving problems in frontier topics in inorganic chemistry. Interactive software, used in the research effort to perform theoretical calculations on experimental systems, will also be used in a course supplement to teach molecular orbital theory and its practical application in inorganic chemistry. An advanced laboratory synthesis course to complement the lecture course in inorganic chemistry will be developed. The research group will continue its outreach efforts to local elementary and high school students in the Pasadena and Los Angeles school districts by using laboratory tours, laboratory demonstrations, and informal discussions to communicate enthusiasm for science in a way that suggests many opportunities for younger students. Simplified analogs of industrially important catalysts will be developed. Their reaction pathways will be determined with a view toward optimizing catalytic systems. The educational program is integrated with this research and extends to undergraduate courses and area elementary and high school students doc16898 none theory of Semigroups of Operators as well as Applications which include relevant areas of Science and Engineering. The key topics of the Conference include: Evolution Equations; Nonlinear Semigroups; Control Engineering (Structures, Aeroelasticity), Wavelets and Signal Processing; Probability and Stochastic Processes; Mathematical Physics; Electrical Propagation; Acoustics; and Optics. The Conference Program will consist of plenary lectures, invited papers as well as contributed papers. The Conference will be announced in the AMS Bulletin and on the Web: http: www.ctc.puc-rio. SOTA2, as well as by mailing of Call-For Papers. A Conference Proceedings will be published. The Conference Chairman and Chairman of The International Program Committee is Professor A.V. Balakrishnan (USA). The International Program Committee consists of Mathematicians and Engineers from 4 continents. This proposal requests travel support for 10 US participants. Minority, women, and young researchers are the first, and hopefully, the only choices of the 10 participants doc16899 none The objective of this work is to expand the scope and utility of olefin metathesis reactions. In an expansion of the PI s prior work, the types of olefins that can be used in cross metathesis reactions will first be investigated. Intermolecular cross metatheses of functionalized and cyclic olefins will be studied and the incorporation of allenes and alkynes into ring opening metatheses will be investigated. Secondly, metathesis based isomerization reactions will be developed and novel skeletal rearrangements of polyolefinic ring systems using this approach will be effected. Ruthenium catalyzed enantioselective metathesis isomerizations will be explored in addition to the sequential coupling of metathesis reactions with Kharasch reactions to build more complicated structures in a single reaction flask. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Marc L. Snapper of the Department of Chemistry at Boston College. Dr. Snapper will explore the scope and utility of olefin metathesis reactions. Olefin metathesis is an industrially important process used to make a number of specialty chemicals and starting materials for pharmaceutical syntheses from petroleum feedstocks. Developing shorter, more environmentally friendly routes to specialty chemicals (which are catalytic in metals used to effect the bond forming metathesis reactions) is one likely outcome of the proposed work. Students trained during the course of this work will gain skills needed by the pharmaceutical as well as specialty chemical industries doc16900 none The objective of this work is to investigate the formation of drinking water contaminants. Compounds which are formed by the reaction of chlorinating (and in some cases brominating) agents with humic acids and other organic materials will be studied. A number of phenol and resorcinol related humic acid models, which have received little attention previously, will be chlorinated and brominated in a variety of solvents and the reaction products will be identified. Reactions of dichloramine, the active chlorinating agent at near neutral pH in water, with phenols will be studied. Reactions involving humic acid models and oxidants containing chlorine-oxygen bonds will also receive attention. Similar studies with brominating agents will also be performed. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Victor L. Heasley of the Department of Chemistry at Point Loma Nazarene College. Dr. Heasley will explore contaminant formation which occurs during the treatment of drinking water with chlorinating agents. Models of naturally occurring humic acids (plant material found in all waters) will be treated with chlorine and bromine and the reaction products determined. Understanding these reactions should provide information about how water purification can be accomplished in conjunction with minimizing the amount of these byproducts formed. Students trained as a result of working on this RUI (Research in Undergraduate Institutions) project will gain experience in environmental chemistry as well as organic chemistry. These undergraduate students typically go on to work in the pharmaceutical or specialty chemical industries or go on to advanced study in graduate or medical schools doc16901 none The objective of this research is to advance fundamental understanding of microporosity formation during solidification of alloys. The single most important feature of the research is that it focuses solely on the microscopic scale (on the order of microns) where nucleation, interfaces, growth morphologies, and micro-flows can be directly observed. Previous studies of microporosity formation have been concerned with larger length scales and have not resolved the actual solid and pore microstructures. The study will provide valuable knowledge of pore nucleation and growth rates, microscopic flow and solute fields in the solid-liquid-gas system present during pore formation, and the interactions between the pores and the evolving microstructure. The research will be accomplished through the combined use of novel modeling, numerical simulation, and experimental techniques. A phase-field method will be developed to model the complex phase transformation and transport phenomena present, including multi-component thermodynamics, curvature effects, and convection. Modern numerical techniques, such as deforming finite element meshes and highly efficient parallel solvers, will be employed to solve the model equations. The experiments will use transparent model alloys inside a Hele-Shaw cell under a high-resolution microscope. In the experiments, the initial gas content and the solidification conditions will be carefully controlled. The model predictions will be validated by the experimental measurements. The work finds application in nearly every metal casting process. The problem of microporosity is of renewed interest because of the dramatically increased use of castings in the automotive and aerospace industries. Only the detailed prediction of microporosity can aid in its prevention and in assessing its influence on the strength and fatigue life of cast components. The transfer of the knowledge obtained through the proposed project will take place through continued collaboration with the casting industry, the development of improved microporosity models for use in casting simulation software, and the education of students. From a more fundamental point of view, the project will advance a largely uncharted area of research that is concerned with micro-scale, multi-component, multi-phase systems with phase change. Such systems are important not only in metal casting, but also in other materials processing operations, in nature, and in living organisms doc16902 none Relationships among the night lizards (Xantusiidae) have been problematic for over a century. Because of the group s antiquity, knowledge of its most primitive members is critical for understanding the deep evolutionary history of the larger group of lizards called scleroglossans. Scleroglossa, which includes snakes and their ancestors, is unique among amniotes (reptiles, birds, and mammals) in the repeated evolution of body elongation and limb reduction, Xantusiidae is a tree-changing group in that its alternative placements can alter hypothesized relationships among most other scleroglossan groups, but too few data are available to infer the exact placement of Xantusiidae. Thus, this project will: (1) reconstruct the phylogeny of the Xantusiidae based on the most extensive taxonomic sampling attempted to date; (2) use this phylogeny as a framework for a detailed study of the mutational dynamics and evolution of the mitochondrial cytochrome-b (cyt-b) gene; and (3) use the phylogeny to infer the exact position of Xantusiidae within Scleroglossa. This study will use both molecular and morphological data sets. The molecular sampling of relevant xantusiid species populations is virtually complete; approximately base pairs (bp) of DNA sequence data will be collected for about 80 individuals, representing regions of several nuclear and mitochondrial genes (including the entire cyt-b gene). Extensive morphological data will be collected, including internal cranial characters revealed via high-resolution X-ray CT (HRCT) scans of all named fossil and extant xantusiids. HRCT will permit nondestructive collection of novel characters from fossils still embedded in matrix and critically important type specimens too precious to dissect. All characters will be combined and subjected to extensive computer analyses run on parallel clusters to ensure exhaustive searches of tree space. Mitochondrial cyt-b sequences will be mapped onto the resulting phylogenetic hypothesis for statistical studies of mutational dynamics across all levels of divergence in the Xantusiidae. This project will also support a large sequencing effort to address placement of Xantusiidae within Scleroglossa, including at least bp from 6 - 8 nuclear genes and some of the same mtDNA gene regions used for Xantusiidae. Preliminary data (HRCT scans) will be collected for selected scleroglossan taxa for preparation of a proposal to support a complimentary morphological study of the placement of Xantusiidae within Scleroglossa. This study will provide extensive morphological and molecular data sets, and a complete survey of cyt-b mutational dynamics, for an entire group of lizards (Xantusiidae). The group s small size will permit thorough explorations of tree search strategies for both data sets, sensitivity analyses to different character coding schemes and assumptions about character evolution, and determination of the group s basal members. This will in turn provide an understanding of character state distributions within Xantusiidae, which is key to its placement within Scleroglossa and therefore to understanding the evolution of this larger group. Extensive data sets will be generated including novel nuclear genes (optimized and made available for studies of other lizard groups) and novel cranial characters revealed via HRCT (and made available as an online resource). The study will provide extensive opportunities for undergraduate student training doc16903 none A Center for Learning and Teaching in Technology Education would provide a focus for educating teachers and teacher educators who could implement the ideas of technology education as described in the recently produced Standards for Technological Literacy, as well as in the AAAS Benchmarks and the National Science Education Standards. This planning grant is for the collaboration of the technology teacher education community and research communities in science and technology education. The planning determines a structure for graduate education in science and technology education, creates an agenda for research into how students learn technological concepts and how to use the information to implement the ideas of technological education in classrooms, and develops a technology teacher education curriculum doc16904 none The goal of this work is to define the regulatory mechanisms that ensure accurate segregation of the sister chromatids in mitosis and meiosis. Drosophila is a powerful model organism in which to decipher the control of chromosome segregation for three reasons: 1) chromosome dynamics can be visualized directly; 2) genetic tools allow ready detection of mutants defective in segregation; and 3) it is possible to ablate gene function using RNAi in order to evaluate the role of genes identified in other species. This research focuses on proteins that control two crucial aspects of chromosome dynamics: sister-chromatid cohesion and condensation. In order for sister chromatids to move away from each other during anaphase they must first be physically attached to each other. This ensures that each sister chromatid of a pair attaches to microtubules emanating from opposite spindle poles. Cohesion must be precisely regulated to release only as the sisters separate at anaphase. The Drosophila MEI-S332 protein binds to centromeres to maintain cohesion and is essential during meiosis. The cohesin complex of proteins is essential both for the establishment of cohesion during DNA replication and its maintenance until chromatid separation at anaphase. The cohesin complex acts along the length of the chromosomes in mitosis and meiosis I and maintains cohesion at the centromere in meiosis II. This research addresses the mechanism by which MEI-S332 localization to centromeres is regulated and analyzes the relationship between MEI-S332 and the cohesin protein complex. The condensin complex is necessary for chromosome condensation, and mutations have been recovered in the gene encoding one of the subunits. This project will define the interdependency of the cohesin and condensin complexes. The role of the condensin complex in meiosis and gene expression also will be investigated. Three collections of mutants with defects in segregation have been recovered and will be analyzed to determine the activities of the gene products. The phenotypes indicate that these genes play critical roles in chromosome segregation, thus their investigation will provide new insights into chromosome dynamics. This research investigates the control of chromosome segregation, with the goal of deciphering two fundamental aspects essential for the proper partitioning of chromosomes during cell division. Accurate segregation of chromosomes is essential during the divisions that produce sperm and eggs in order to avoid birth defects such as Down Syndrome. Inaccurate segregation during cell proliferation produces aneuploid cells; these cells with an incorrect number of chromosomes are prone to become transformed cancer cells. The mechanisms that ensure proper segregation remain to be elucidated. This basic research builds on the identification of proteins known to participate in chromosome segregation to unravel the dynamics of chromosome behavior doc16905 none This NSF Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project continues research and development of a commercial process for the manufacture of mono-size-dispersed, spherical powder (size 1-10 micron) from metals melting up to 200C. A unique magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) jet exciter will be designed, fabricated and developed as a component of the system essential to producing monosphere powder to high tolerances (e.g., as demanded by the electronics industry of ball grid arrays for surface-mount components). The electrostatic means, for preventing coalescence in the drop cloud, will be developed further. Development of cooling means for solidification will be completed. Specific industry quality control standards and testing will be applied to qualify the monosphere product. Finally, a refined analysis of cost of manufacture, and a complete business plan will be produced. The outcome expected from this project is the technology base for the commercial, large-scale production of monospheres. This unique process innovation for large-scale production of monospheres, will provide a major new source of precise and economical powder for electronic solder balls and paste, powder metallurgy, composites, magnetorheological fluids, catalyst carriers, solid fluid reactions and a multitude of other uses doc16906 none Tulaczyk This grant provides partial support for acquisition of a Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) for the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The GPR setup will include five antennas spanning frequencies from 12.5 MHz through 400 MHz. The GPR equipment will be utilized by: (1) the UCSC Surface Processes Group (glaciology, geomorphology, hydrology and Quaternary geology; ~60% of time), (2) other UCSC Earth Science faculty (geophysics, hydrogeology, and neotectonics; ~30% of time), and (3) other UCSC and non-UCSC users (~10% of time). GPR technology fits ideally into the Earth Science research programs listed above because it permits better integration of surface and near-surface observations of geologic structures and stratigraphy. This GPR capability combines with its portability and ease of use to provide an excellent tool for constraining models of key surface and near-surface geologic processes even in logistically difficult environments. In addition to its application in research projects, the UCSC GPR facility will be used to intensify hands-on training of UCSC undergraduate and graduate students in field geophysical techniques. Use of this new equipment will be incorporated into relevant upper division courses: Geologic Hazards, Environmental Geophysics, Geomorphology, Soil Properties and Mechanics, and Groundwater. The host department will provide support for the new GPR facility in the form of: (1) 30% equipment cost match, (2) computer and software resources for GPR data field processing and post-processing, (3) technical support by a team of three specialists, and (4) storage space doc16907 none Balsara This research program is aimed at understanding the generation and evolution of astrophysical magnetic fields. Magnetic fields play decisive role in many astrophysical processes from mediating star formation and transporting angular momentum in ubiquitous accretion disks to influencing heating cooling within clusters of galaxies. In all these situations, the large magnetic Reynolds numbers of the flows require that any changes of magnetic field topology be implemented through fast reconnection, while magnetic field generation requires fast dynamo. The project makes use of recent advances in numerical capabilities to test recently advanced theories of fast reconnection and fast dynamos. It also proposes further development of reconnection theory, comparisons of theoretical and numerical results with liquid sodium measurements, and simulations of the galactic dynamo. Another very important outcome of this effort will be the development of a parallel AMR MI-ID code, RIEMANN, for simulating MHD phenomena in rotating astrophysical systems. This will be a general-purpose utility that will be made widely available to the community. Funding for this project was provided by the NSF program for Extragalactic Astronomy & Cosmology (AST EXC doc16908 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program in the Chemistry Division, Professor Robert S. H. Liu, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Hawaii- Manoa, will study a volume-conserving photochemical cis-trans isomerization reaction mechanism postulated in to account for the rapid photoisomerization reaction of the retinyl chromophore in the visual pigment rhodopsin. This mechanism is referred to as the Hula-Twist (HT). Its salient stereochemical feature is the simultaneous configurational and conformational transformation of two adjacent double and single bonds. Model compounds designed to provide distinguishable chemistry between Hula-Twist (HT) and the conventional one-bond-flip (OBF) mechanism will be prepared and their photochemical and photophysical properties will be examined. The medium is expected to play an important role to inhibit the OBF process allowing detection of the normally more difficult HT process. However, other conditions that might result in re-directing molecules from reacting in an OBF manner to the HT manner are also present and discussed. Meaningful model compounds used for test experiments are proposed. Among photosensitive bio-molecules containing a Pollyanna chromophore, the isomerization of PYP (photoactive yellow protein that makes bacteria response repulsively toward blue light) and bilirubin (the yellow bile pigment involved in jaundice and its phototherapy) can be rationalized by the involvement of HT in their photochemical reactions. Experiments are now proposed to prove unambiguously of its involvement. For the visual pigment rhodopsin and the energy storage system bacteriorhodopsin, HT is no longer considered likely to be the sole process responsible for the observed photochemistry. Recent X-ray crystal structural work on the primary photoproduct of bR (K) showed that the structure is not that from the once proposed HT -I 4 process. A modified pathway for both bR and rhodopsin is now proposed. HT has been retained in the initial photochemical process. However, before its completion, the process is likely to be re-directed by the rigid protein cavity to a series of volume-conserving bicycle pedal (BP) processes (in the ground state) leading to the more stable 13-cis or all-trans products. New experiments designed to test these ideas are proposed. The proposed experiments will be carried out by Professor Liu s group, concentrating on chemical synthesis and low temperature photochemical-spectroscopic studies in collaboration with a network of international specialists (time-resolved UV-Vis and FT-IR and other spectroscopic and biophysical studies). The common goal is to understand the nature of the very fundamental photochemical cis-trans isomerization that happens in native systems as well as in laboratories and to determine the scope of the novel two-bond twist mechanism. Perhaps this research can finally provide a definitive answer to the question of how the seemingly volume-demanding photoisomerization process of a polyene chromophore in a highly specific protein binding site can take place in less than a picosecond, a time scale much too fast for protein reorganization doc16909 none This project investigates the role of affect in information processing. Affect plays an important role in everyday life, and it has a significant influence on human cognitive functioning and social interactions. Although a large and growing body of research demonstrates that affect influences the extent to which individuals rely upon general, categorical information (e.g., stereotypes) as a basis for forming impressions of others, researchers disagree about what accounts for these findings. This project is concerned with how affect influences global local processing during impression formation and evaluates a new conceptualization of the role of affect in processing. According to this conceptualization, affective feelings serve as conscious feedback about largely nonconscious emotional processes. This feedback is used by individuals to direct their information processing. In evaluating this conceptualization, the research acknowledges that many real-world impression formation contexts require individuals to actively seek out information about others. Despite this, many researchers have treated the perceiver as a relatively passive recipient of target information. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of how affective feelings function in more naturalistic contexts, it is essential to study active information seeking behavior. This will be done by initiating a new direction for research that examines how feelings guide information search and impression formation. Given that impression formation is one of the most common goals that individuals have in human interaction, a greater understanding of the role that feelings play in this process will serve to illuminate further our understanding of human behavior doc16910 none Social psychologists have recognized the importance of a group s emotional life for its performance, development, and health. Until recently, however, relatively little research attention has been paid to the role of affect in group performance. Over the past few decades, research on individual people has shown that moods and emotions have profound influences on many areas of cognitive functioning. For example, mood has been found to affect persuasion and person perception, and it appears to do so through influencing the processes of memory, attention, and type of information processing. In terms of information processing, positive moods lead to less systematic and greater heuristic processing of information, whereas negative moods lead to less heuristic and greater systematic processing of information. Recent group level models suggest that group mood will also have similarly important influences on group performance through its impact on the information processing abilities of groups. That is, group moods will also affect the heuristic and systematic processing qualities of the group interaction. The main objective of this project is to examine the effect of group mood on group decision making. Specific aims are to demonstrate that (1) group moods can be successfully manipulated in the laboratory, (2) group moods influence group decision making outcomes, (3) these differences occur through altering the way that groups process information, similar to how moods affect how individuals process information, and (4) these information processing differences can be assessed through the observation of group interactions, as well as through some self-report measures. This research program provides training in small group experimental methods for several graduate students and up to fifty undergraduates. The results of these studies will form the empirical core of an understanding of how group mood affects group decision making. In the long term, this research program is intended to advance our understanding of affective influences on group performance in a wide variety of contexts, including work, friendship, and school groups, as well as experimental research groups doc16911 none Kurz This award will provide partial support for Dempsey Lott in the Isotope Geochemistry Facility at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), under the guidelines for Phase II technician support in the EAR Instrumentation and Facilities Program. Lott will have responsibility for maintenance, training, and technical support associated with the WHOI noble gas and thermal ionization mass spectrometers, under the supervision of Dr. M. D. Kurz. The laboratory has specialized in helium and neon isotopic measurements in seawater, groundwater, and a variety of rocks and minerals, for a diverse set of scientific programs. Active projects include mantle noble gas measurements from the Hawaiian Scientific Drilling Project (Mauna Kea volcano) and submarine lava flows from various locations (ocean islands and ocean ridges), helium-3 surface exposure dating from surficial Galapagos lava flows, and surface exposure dating from various glacial deposits (Western USA, Patagonia, Antarctica). An important goal of the proposed research is to expand measurement capabilities to the heavy noble gases, which will involve some technique developement. Specifically we will utilize a newly designed stainless steel cryogenic trap that performs significantly better than conventional (charcoal) traps, and will have applications to many aspects of noble gas geochemistry. The technical expertise of Lott will help make the noble gas measurement capability accessible to many researchers at WHOI and also the broader U.S. earth science community doc16912 none This is a SGER project to explore the possibility of remote sensing of large strain gauge arrays, which may be embedded in building walls and bridges, for continuous or on-demand monitoring of the structure s health condition. The power handling capabilities of a chip consisting of active analog vlsi transistorized bridge circuits, which determines the state of the strain gauge will be investigated, Initially the commercially available gauge products will be used as an arm in the active bridge that will be sent to mosis for fabrication into a vlsi chip. The attenuation characteristics of structural materials such as reinforced concrete are also to be determaned as well ass a means of transmitting data into and out of the embedded bridge. As a preliminary proof of concept the remote system will be mounted on the exterior of a wall whereas longer range studies will incorporate it embedded inside of walls doc16913 none Saxena To obtain high quality data at physical conditions of Earth s core and mantle, we need to modify our present equipment and develop new techniques of heating our samples at ultra-high pressures and for measuring the temperature and pressure. Funds from this grant will fully exploit the diamond-anvil techniques to study materials of geophysical importance at high to ultra-high pressures and temperatures. We will study the nature of the problems in laser heating as related to large temperature gradients (cool diamond to the hot sample), chromatic aberration (use of refractive optical elements, even chromatically corrected, results in the severe temperature errors that vary significantly with the chosen position of a spectral region) and poor knowledge of emissivity (wavelength dependent emissivity, needed for use of the Planck function). A combination of laser-heating systems, optical systems and methods for the determination of emissivity of several metals and oxides will be explored. A new method of temperature determination using a digital imaging camera will also be tested. Additional developments will include: i) the use of moissanite (SiC) anvils at high pressures (~ 50 GPa) to reach temperatures close to K, ii) design of a cell that provides easy access to the sample for the electrical leads and still maintains all the benefits of the Mao- Bell design and is easily cooled with a good inert atmosphere around the diamonds, and iii) building of cells which can be both electrically and laser heated with in-situ x-ray diffraction of the heated sample at one bar or few bars of pressure to measure thermal expansion and melting temperatures of solids. We will attempt to provide a solution to the key problem of simultaneous measurement of pressure and temperature doc16914 none Hofmeister Heat transport pertains to problems on all scales in Earth science, e.g., laboratory experiments, crystallization and texture of igneous rocks, ductile faulting, mantle plumes, Earth s convection patterns, and planetary formation and evolution. Understanding such processes requires knowledge of either the thermal diffusivity (D) or the thermal conductivity (k = DrCV ). The physical property k describes the rate at which heat flows from the hot to the cold end of a rigid material, and thus pertains to conductive processes. When the material flows as well (convective processes), D applies. Because density (r) and heat capacity (CV) at temperature are well-constrained or readily predicted, measurements of D provide the data needed to understand heat transport. However, the temperature dependence of D is generally unknown for geological and planetary materials and the available data are inconsistent. Disparities exist in the previous methods because heat is transported as light over the short scales of the experiments in a manner that is specific to a given experiment. The results are thus not a material property. This complex situation exists because planetary materials are transparent at some wavelengths of light (and light is heat). Technological advances in materials science have led to a device which overcomes this problem. Funds from this grant will support acquisition of such a laser-flash apparatus to measure thermal diffusivity (D) from room temperature to oC. No comparable instrument exists in Earth Science research facilities in the U.S. The apparatus not only doubles the oC range typical for the scant existing data, most of which are 30 years old, but is easy and rapid to use, and provides D(T) on melts. The data generated by the laser flash apparatus provide the needed tests for the T dependence for phenomenological models for k. Combining theory and experiment not only allows extrapolation of measured D and k to all conditions of interest to Earth science, but will further our understanding of the microscopic basis of transport properties doc16915 none In this CAREER project funded by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Carri will conduct fundamental research in the field of theoretical physical chemistry of single macromolecules. Specifically, he will construct first-principles models on the mesoscopic level to explain recent experimental results in the field of oligomers, copolymers and biopolymers. Models will be constructed from first-principles using an appropriately designed Edwards Hamiltonian that will take into account not only the stiffness of the polymer backbone, but also the tendency to form secondary structures (alpha-helices and beta-sheets). In the case of heteropolymers the effects of sequence distribution, stiffnesses of the different blocks, and the tendency to form secondary structures on the thermodynamic and mechanical properties of semiflexible copolymers will be explored. The second goal of this project is to improve the education of young scientists and stimulate high school students to pursue a career in science. The first objective will be achieved by developing a class suitable for graduate and senior undergraduate students in which the most important advances in theoretical physical chemistry of macromolecules will be explained and discussed. The second goal will be accomplished by giving simple though challenging problems to senior high school students and freshmen and sophomore undergraduates, allowing them to explore the world of computer simulations of macromolecules. Although initially studies of polymer elasticity were mostly useful in an industrial setting, they have proven more recently to be essential for understanding the function of biological macromolecules. Unlike industrial polymers, biological macromolecules have complex arrangements called secondary and tertiary structures. The full extent to which these structural arrangements determine the function of biological molecules has become clear only recently. In this work Dr. Carri will extend the theory of polymer elasticity to include the effect of structure on the computations of elastic behavior of complex macromolecules. This project is of critical value to allow for a quantitative study that will provide a deeper understanding of the physical properties of complex macromolecules like biopolymers as well as of carefully designed synthetic polymers that can form secondary structures. Ultimately these studies will transform our understanding of biology and bring about a less descriptive and more quantitative description of the cell. With respect to the education component, there is a strong need to have more polymer physics courses available for the non-polymer students as well as for those in polymer science. Introducing more computer projects enables the students to visualize the physics, something that excites them doc16916 none This project aims to study the novel physical properties encountered in transition-metal oxides at the transition from localized to itinerant electronic behavior and at orbital order-disorder transitions. The localized-itinerant electronic transition occurs where the dominant electronic energies change from intra-atomic to inter-atomic. This transition is first-order, and where phase separation would occur at too low a temperature for atomic diffusion, a dynamic spinodal segregation on a small length scale is accomplished by locally cooperative bond-length fluctuations. On lowering the temperature, ordering of the fluctuations may result in a charge-density wave that can be mobile or pinned. Orbital order-disorder transitions occur at localized configurations having an orbital degeneracy that is removed by lowering the local site symmetry. These Jahn-Teller distortions may be long-range cooperative and static or short-range dynamic to give another mechanism for bond-length fluctuations. Experiments have shown that the high-temperature superconductivity in the copper oxides occurs at a crossover from localized to itinerant electronic behavior. Colossal magnetoresistance in the manganese-oxide perovskites is associated with both a localized to itinerant electronic transition and the stabilization in a magnetic field of orbital fluctuations over long-range cooperative orbital ordering because orbital fluctuations give isotropic ferromagnetic interactions whereas static, long-range-cooperative distortions give antiferromagnetic order. Also, the importance of measuring on single crystals the transport and magnetic properties as a function of pressure as well as temperature allows fine tuning of the intraatomic versus interatomic interactions without changing the chemistry. The suppression of the phonon contribution to the thermal conductivity by bond-length fluctuations with an eye on how this phenomenon might be useful for peltier cooling will be studied. This project has a very strong educational component that provides graduate and post-doctoral students an opportunity to learn how to synthesize and characterize both chemically and structurally polycrystalline and single-crystal samples. This class of transition-metal oxides exhibits magnetic, transport, thermoelectric power, specific heat, and thermal conductivity behavior that suggests significant potential for high impact applications such as high performance magnetic and electronic devices and solid state refrigeration. Students trained in these areas will compete very well for available industrial and academic positions doc16917 none The North Dakota Advancing Science Excellence in North Dakota (ASEND) initiative is aimed at expanding the research capacity of North Dakota and to strengthen its ability to participate in the nation s mainstream science, engineering, and mathematics (SEM) enterprise. This initiative capitalizes on North Dakota s existing research strengths and takes advantage of opportunities to integrate research into education and into the economy of the state. The ASEND initiative will develop SEM infrastructure at North Dakota State University (NDSU) and the University of North Dakota (UND) North Dakota (ND) will focus on three research areas: catalysis, biocomplexity and multisensory integration. Each of these areas has been identified as niche to the state and contributing to national interests. In the area of catalysis, an interdisciplinary network of researchers will build on ND s current expertise in polymers and combinatorial chemistry to develop novel processes and materials, particularly those with technology transfer commercialization potential. The biocomplexity focus area will concentrate initially on the influence of parasitism on biocomplexity. An interdisciplinary team of researchers will investigate the role of parasites on host population genetics, landscape ecology, sexual selection, host bioenergetics, biodiversity and evolution. The multisensory integration research area will bring together cognitive and sensory psychologists with neurophysiologists to study sensation, perception, cognition and action. Researchers will investigate the sites, structures and processes of neural activity associated with multisensory integration. Potential applications include the development and evaluation of virtual environments. In addition to the research efforts, the ND project includes a multifaceted human resource development program designed to increase the opportunities available for students of the ND University System to participate in research and to increase the number of members of under-represented groups (e.g., low income, first-generation college, women, Native Americans) involved in SEM research activity. Moreover, a technology transfer program designed to facilitate academic-private sector partnerships and integration of research into the economy of the state will be implemented. The technology transfer effort includes programs linking undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty with local industries and a commercial feasibility support program doc16918 none People make rapid eye movements called saccades in order to examine the world around them. The still periods between saccades are called fixations. It is well known that vision is suppressed during saccades; therefore, visual information about the world is acquired only during fixations. Recent findings have shown that saccades also interfere with particular cognitive processes. This research will determine why this occurs while also exploring the fundamental characteristics and generality of the phenomenon of cognitive saccadic suppression. Four hypotheses about the possible mechanisms underlying suppression will be investigated in a series of experiments drawn from the areas of working memory, mathematical cognition, stimulus novelty, and retrieval from semantic memory. In general, the experiments will examine whether cognitive processes that are set in motion during an eye fixation continue to operate while the eyes are moving to a new position in space or whether these processes pause during the eye movement. People will be presented with a simple mental task that they will begin to perform while they are fixating one position in space and will then make either a short or a long saccade to a different position in space while attempting to continue performing the task. If cognitive processing is suppressed during eye movements, then long saccades (which take longer to execute) should disrupt performance more than short saccades (which take less time to execute). Performance will also be measured in another condition, in which the eyes do not move. Performance in the eye-movement conditions should be equivalent to performance in the no-eye-movement condition if eye movements do not interfere with cognition. The effects of cognitive processing on saccadic behavior (e.g., saccade latency, duration, accuracy, and peak velocity) will be examined as well to determine the reciprocity of the interference. The average person makes about three saccades per second (hence, about 172,800 saccades per 16-hour working day) and the average saccade lasts about 30 ms; thus, if suppression occurs during saccades, it would mean that cognition is disrupted for approximately 90 minutes each day. Determining why this occurs is of fundamental importance to the understanding of human cognition, particularly for activities such as scene perception and scene navigation that require many eye movements. The research also has practical implications for the design of visual displays and control panels that may require users to make saccades doc16919 none With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Carolyn J. MacKay and Frank R. Trechsel will conduct three years of linguistic research on Pisaflores Tepehua, an undocumented and endangered Totonacan language spoken in and around Pisaflores, Veracruz, in Mexico. Fieldwork will emphasize recording and analyzing grammatical, lexical, and text material. The PIs will work with native speakers to produce a grammatical description of Pisaflores Tepehua, a trilingual Tepehua Spanish English lexicon, and a collection of personal histories, narratives, conversations, and other discourse genres recorded in digital audio and video formats. The project will thus produce a comprehensive description of the language and document its use as an expression of social and cultural identity. This documentation will: a) provide the first and perhaps only grammatical description of this typologically interesting and undocumented language; b) yield data essential to the reconstruction of Proto-Totonacan, the ancestor language from which all the Totonacan languages are descended; c) help determine the historical relationship of Pisaflores Tepehua to other Totonacan languages and to other indigenous languages in Mesoamerica; and d) provide speakers of the language with a practical orthography and other materials for use in literacy and language maintenance projects. Tepehua is currently the principal means of communication in Pisaflores, and it is still being acquired by children. But it is rapidly being replaced by Spanish. Without documentation and revitalization, Tepehua may be abandoned within a generation. Tepehua materials resulting from this project will be valuable to the native speakers in Pisaflores, who are struggling to maintain their language for future generations, and to linguists and other scientists interested in native American languages and cultures doc16920 none The Kentucky EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement Award will enhance research and education in two broad priority areas -- biological and environmental research - at the University of Kentucky, the University of Louisville, and Murray State University. In biology, Kentucky EPSCoR will provide facilities and faculty in functional genomics, cellular and molecular proteomics, biomedical nano- and micro-electro-mechanical systems, and structural biology. In environmental research, Kentucky EPSCoR will set up facilities for the new Kentucky Environmental Research and Education Consortium (KEREC) at the University of Kentucky and Murray State University. The overarching goal of KEREC is to improve the quality, scope, and national competitiveness of Kentucky s environmental research programs by provision of faculty, staff, and laboratories. The facilities will include the Environmental Research and Training Laboratories housed within the College of Engineering and the University of Kentucky and the Center for Watershed Environments at Murray State University. Research in biological and environmental research is vital to the economy of both Kentucky and the nation. Each priority area has critical implications for human health, agriculture, and knowledge-based industry. Education and human resource programs will be augmented through undergraduate training. A statewide fellowship program for minorities and under-represented groups will be continued and augmented. A minority pipeline program for including faculty and undergraduate students from HBCUs and other regional universities in Kentucky s research programs will be extended to HBCUs beyond Kentucky. Predominately undergraduate institutions of the state will benefit from the Infrastructure Enhancement Program, which supports research and education outside of the major research universities doc16921 none Sharing, comforting, volunteerism, and charitable donations are all considered different forms of prosocial behaviors (i.e., actions intended to benefit others) which are beneficial to society and therefore highly valued and desired. Developmental researchers have provided evidence that there are growth spurts in these behaviors across childhood and adolescence. However, existing models of prosocial development have been guided mostly by theories that emphasize the role of social cognitions and or emotions on prosocial and moral behaviors. For the most part, the role of culture and ethnicity on prosocial development has been less clear in these theories, even though there is clear evidence of cultural and ethnic differences in prosocial development. Although both social cognitions and emotions are significant correlates of prosocial behaviors, new theories of prosocial development are needed that integrate the role of culture and ethnicity in prosocial development. Unfortunately, the bulk of the research investigating the developmental mechanisms that lead to prosocial development has been conducted with white, mostly middle class, children. Thus, our understanding of the development and predictors of prosocial behaviors in ethnic minority children is quite limited. To begin to address these issues, research is needed on the development of prosocial behaviors in ethnic minority children and adolescents. This project is designed to examine parenting, sociocognitive, and culture-related correlates of prosocial behaviors across childhood and early adolescence in one ethnic minority group (i.e., Mexican Americans). The two-phased systematic research agenda will combine qualitative and quantitative approaches. The overarching goal of the project is to gain an understanding of positive, social behaviors in Mexican American and European American children in the United States. The project is designed primarily (a) to examine ethnic group similarities and differences with respect to prosocial traits and behaviors in Mexican American and European American children and (b) to investigate the parenting, familial, and sociocognitive correlates of prosocial behaviors in Mexican American and European American children. When completed, the research will answer a number of questions that social and developmental psychologists have advanced in recent years. These questions include, but are not limited to, the following: (1) Is normal development of the abilities to understand another s point of view, to feel sorrow or concern for needy others, and to make moral decisions when faced with a context in which there are societially defined right and wrong behaviors associated with high levels of prosocial behaviors in both Mexican- and European-American children? (2) Do both Mexican- and European-American children who exhibit high levels of prosocial behaviors have parents who are warm and supportive and use explanatory and empathy-inducing disciplining practices? (3) Do Mexican American parents, compared to European American parents, emphasize collectivism (i.e., orientation towards greater social group) and familial interdependence, which in turn accounts for ethnic group differences in prosocial behaviors? (4) Do family and parenting processes impact or explain the relations of the abilities to understand another s point of view, to feel sorrow or concern for needy others, and to make moral decisions to prosocial behaviors in Mexican- and European-American children? (5) Do the adaptations that Mexican American children make to the mainstream and ethnic cultures as a result of the processes of acculturation and enculturation impact prosocial development. By addressing these questions, this study is expected to yield important information about variables that might promote prosocial behaviors and produce useful and valuable new measures of prosocial behaviors to use with Mexican American children and adolescents. These products will inform existing theories of prosocial development and will enhance intervention programs aimed at increasing behaviors that benefit others and society doc16922 none The HerpNET community project will enable knowledge networking of biodiversity information about the world s amphibians and reptiles for science and society. The information store is enormous, acquired during 300 years of biological exploration of the earth. Access to and use of these data are fundamental if we are to understand our biological diversity and its functional role in environmental system. Amphibians are especially sensitive indicators of environmental quality and change. The project is designed to create a network of distributed herpetological databases that builds on proven technologies and scales well. It is also designed to be economical to implement and easily accessible. HerpNET will help to form the basis on which a largely descriptive science can become a predictive one. It will provide global access and sharing of data, data standards, installation and management software and documentation doc16923 none This action is to provide partial support for the First International Conference on Scour of Foundations (ICSF-1), to be held 17-20 November at Texas A&M University. The scouring of bridge foundations during flood conditions is an area of major concern to transportation officials. Poor correlation exists between calculated and observed scour depths, primarily because scour prediction equations developed under laboratory conditions do not adequately account for all the variables found in the field. Scour is a major problem in the United States. From to , bridges collapsed and 600 of these collapses were due to scour, and lives were lost. The scour phenomenon is a water-soil interaction phenomenon which needs to be addressed through the cooperation of a number of disciplines, including hydraulic engineering, geotechnical engineering, hydrology, structural engineering, and construction. This conference will bring these disciplines together and enhance the participation of geotechnical engineers in solving this problem. The objectives of this conference are: 1. To present and collect the latest international information on scour of foundations. 2. To promote international discussion on research and practice of scour of foundations. 3. To organize a prediction event to evaluate the precision of scour prediction methods. 4. To promote the involvement of geotechnical engineers in the study of scour. The topics to be addressed include: scour of foundations, erosion of soils, scour at bridges, dams, offshore platforms, underwater pipelines, prediction of scour depth including pier scour, abutment scour, contraction scour, general degradation and aggradation, meander migration, countermeasures selection and design, monitoring, scour in gravel, sand, silt, clay and rock, laboratory measurements of erosion properties, field studies, case histories, failures and successes, international guidelines and practices, numerical modeling, model tests, field inspection, databases doc16924 none Martens, Petrus Yohko 10th Anniversary Meeting: Travel Support for Young Scientists This award will be used to support the attendence of 4 young astronomers at the Yohko meeting in September . The meeting will focus on coordinated multi-mission and ground-based observations of the Sun and will be a stimulating and intellectually profitable experience for these students doc16925 none The aim of this project is to investigate the thinking processes of young children and to find out how these processes affect children s ability to learn science in elementary school. The main focus of the research will be on how children learn to design simple experiments and how they understand experimental outcomes so that they can reach conclusions based on hard evidence. Throughout the project, there will be two intertwined strands of effort, lab-based studies and classroom-based studies. The expectation is that results from the lab studies will form the basis for the design of improved curriculum units that are grounded in cognitive theory and that can be implemented within the constraints of real classroom situations. Conversely, the expectation is that the classroom observations and assessments will raise questions that will be studied in the lab. The research will involve several interrelated studies. One will determine whether or not teaching children the basics of experimental design will enable them to understand better the results of others scientific investigations, for example, other children s science fair posters, or claims they hear about what scientists have discovered. Another study will investigate children s understanding of various types of error that can occur during the design, setup, execution, and analysis of experiments. The goal is to find out how children react when they see that things don t always turn out exactly the same way when they run the same experiment repeatedly. In addition, part of the research will explore the effect of presenting science instruction via a computer interface rather than with a live teacher. One of the studies will examine pre-school children s ability to generate notations for simple procedures that involve sequences of actions. Such an ability is an important precursor to using notation in the science lab doc16926 none A three-day symposium, to be held June 7-9, , will bring together leading researchers in the fields of cognitive development, visual perception, language acquisition, developmental neuroscience, and computational modeling to address key questions about the nature of category representations and the mechanisms that produce them. Speakers will focus on how children build object categories, beginning with the basic architecture of the brain and with the constraints or biases that provide the foundation of early perceptual experience. These developments will be considered in the light of subsequent growth of categorical and semantic abilities. Research will be presented that examines three interrelated themes: (1) fundamental processes by which children are able to individuate and categorize objects and their physical properties; (2) ways in which language transforms children s emerging categories and the selection of features relevant for object categorization; and (3) higher-level cognitive processes that guide the formation of coherent systems of category knowledge. The aim is to encourage the exchange of ideas, to synthesize the field s progress, and to build links to broader theoretical concerns. An additional aim is to contribute to the development of junior scientists and students. To this end, an invited cohort of promising young scholars will attend the meeting and interact with the speakers in an accessible and facilitating setting. A final aim of the symposium is to provide early childhood educators and clinicians with practical information about the way that infants perceive and learn about objects in the world. This knowledge may serve as a valuable tool for assessing aberrant development in at-risk infants in the earliest stages of life. The results of the symposium will be published as the 32nd in the series of Carnegie Cognition Symposium volumes doc16927 none Lay : NSF# - CAREER Using psychophysical and neurophysiological techniques, this research investigates several aspects of the important neural computations that are required for execution of visual orienting movements: 1) the mechanisms that mediate the transformation of sensory information into motor commands; 2) the neural computations required to decompose global motor commands observed at the level of the superior colliculus into signals required for coordinated contraction of muscles; and 3) the management of conflicting neural signals produced by the competition between motor commands and the sensory signals that are a direct result of the executed movements. Specifically, this proposal will test the predictions of a hypothesis that states that a gaze-related command signal issued by the superior colliculus is decomposed by cells in the paramedian pontine reticular formation (PPRF) into separate eye and head control signals, and that eye-head coordination (observed during visual orienting movements) is mediated by the interactions of these signals. The mechanisms for controlling head movements are largely unknown, and this proposal seeks to correlate cell activity with head movements during coordinated eye-head movements, during pursuit of moving targets, and during more natural movements that combine gaze shifts and pursuit movements. This proposal will contribute to understanding how the brain accomplishes the required computations to coordinate more than 40 muscles and muscle groups to produce a smoothly coordinated re-direction of the line of sight. In addition, this proposal will contribute to the development of courses based on the idea that students desire to understand general principles will lead to their own investigation of the details, using in-class lectures and small group discussions. Increased numbers of undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students will participate in the laboratory research proposed, both during the academic year and in a summer undergraduate internship program doc16928 none Lay The International Union for the Study of Social Insects is devoted to integrated analyses of the biology of this important group of organisms. It holds an international meeting once every four years that has emerged as the premier forum for the dissemination of knowledge in this field. Funds are requested to send a group of carefully selected graduate students to the meeting that will be held in Sapporo, Japan in July-Aug, . The opportunity to attend this important meeting will have a significant impact on the development of the careers of these students by allowing them to begin to meet leaders of the field, develop contacts that can lead to productive collaborations, and get feedback on their own work. Japan has a well established tradition of excellence in social insect biology and offers an outstanding venue for this meeting doc16929 none Lay Cocroft, Hunt and Wood Mating signals can diverge early in the process of speciation, but it is unclear whether signal divergence plays a direct role in speciation or is a byproduct of other processes such as ecological specialization. Our goal is to determine the role of mating signals in the diversification of a group of plant-feeding insects. The Enchenopa binotata species complex of treehoppers consists of nine species that are specialists on various trees and shrubs in North America. Considerable evidence suggests that speciation in this group occurred as a result of a series of shifts to novel host plants. A host shift alters life history timing, which, in combination with high host fidelity, allows divergence in traits that enhance performance on a novel host. Our research will test the hypothesis that divergence in mating signals is important in speciation by reducing gene flow between populations on ancestral and novel host plants. Our project will integrate (1) a comparative study of vibrational mating signals in the nine extant Enchenopa binotata species; (2) comparison of patterns of signal variation within and among species with patterns of DNA sequence divergence; and (3) determination of whether divergence in signals and life history traits has occurred in experimentally host-shifted populations. This research will provide a complementary picture of the relationship between mating signals and divergence not only in fully differentiated species, but also in lineages in the early stages of host plant race formation. Results of this research will enhance our basic understanding of speciation, and may provide practical benefits such as an improved understanding of how agricultural pests become established on novel host species doc16930 none The e-Print Archive has been a major advance in the dissemination of scientific research. It has effectively transformed the research communication infrastructure of multiple fields of physics and other scientific communities. It has been in operation since and has recently moved its base from Los Alamos National Labs to Cornell University. It has experienced continuous growth and has become in such general use that the APS and the University of California Digital Library have become mirror sites. Other scientific research areas are utilizing the archiving system as well. The number of submissions are over 20,000 per year and the site processes about 3 million transactions per month. The project has positively influenced the process and progress of scientific research and can be credited with many of the innovations in the electronic transfer and sharing of scientific information. It provides rapid access to current research at both larger and smaller research institutions and allows fuller participation in research by developing countries. It represents research at the leading edge of electronic dissemination of scientific information and continues to provide a service of great value to a number of scientific disciplines. Its continued development will have a strong influence on scientific advances in many disciplines doc16931 none Oxygenic photosynthesis is ultimately the source of the vast majority of biological energy that supports life on earth and is responsible for the generation of oxygen strictly required for respiration in all animals, including humans. Oxygenic photosynthesis depends upon a cluster of four manganese atoms, (Mn)4, associated with the catalytic site of H 2 O-oxidation of the membrane-bound photosystem II (PSII) complex. Recent advances in the determination of the molecular structure confirms that the (Mn)4) is sequestered within a region of the PSII complex formed by intrinsic and extrinsic proteins near the lumenal surface of the thylakoid membrane. Many outstanding questions remain and their mystery, in some cases, is only deepened by the newly available structure. The overall objective of this project is to connect the structure features of the cyanobacterial PSII H2O-oxidation complex (WOC) to the dynamical aspects of the assembly and function of the Mn cluster. Cyanobacteria are being used as the experimental model since the photosynthetic mechanism in these ubiquitous organisms is fundamentally similar to that found in higher plants and algae, but at the same time, more efficient methods for probing the photosynthetic process at the molecular level are available thereby shortening the time necessary to test the basic ideas of the research. The work combines molecular genetic, biochemical and biophysical approaches to clarify the process of photoactivation, which is the sequential light- dependent assembly of the catalytic tetramer of Mn atoms that forms the core of the WOC. The research is facilitated by the development of His-tag purification methods and strains for the gentle isolation of highly active and pure detergent-solublized PSII complexes. The ability to produce large amounts of mutant and wild-type PSII particles and extrinsic proteins now permits systematic manipulations of the ions and proteins of the WOC to better understand its assembly and function. While most mutants are already produced, a few additional mutations are being made to perform site-specific labeling to probe structural rearrangements using a cysteine-scanning mutagenesis chemical modification approach. The experiments are of benefit to parallel biophysical analyses (e.g. FTIR, EPR) by defining the compositional and kinetic properties of specific mutant His-tagged PSII particles and highlighting the best preparative procedures for isolating and analyzing them. Together, these efforts complement on-going developments in the crystal structure determination by considering the dynamical aspects concerning the mechanism of light-driven assembly and activation of the Mn cluster doc16932 none Somasundaran, P Columbia U SURFACE TREATMENT OF FIBERS USING NEW SILICONE BASED SURFACTANTS Fibers and fabrics used for the manufacture of various protective barriers are normally subjected to finishing operations for desired modification of their surface properties. Although many of these processes have been practiced, for example for over 30 years in the fabric industries, there are significant process variations. The process development and formulation optimization are established mostly through empirical approaches without the understanding of the fundamentals of these processes. This creates a lack of general guidelines for modifying different new fibers fabrics membranes as they are introduced into the industries. The objective of this exploratory project is to develop a basic understanding of the finishing processes used and to elucidate the role of the parameters responsible for its surface characteristics and performance properties. This will involve measurement of the reagent adsorption adhesion, molecular conformation and orientation of the adsorbents, interactions among reagents such as polymers and surfactants, nano-structures of the surface aggregates formed by these reagents and correlation of the results to the fabric surface properties such as surface charge, hydrophobicity and fluid penetration. As the proposed research has the objective of controlling the surface properties using a new class of surface modifiers based on silicones, the outcome should make a significant contribution to the advancement of fabric membrane products. Testing of these compounds is admittedly a high risk attempt but if perfected should lead to safer and eco-friendly products with enhanced performance. Towards this purpose, the next step will involve study of interactions of designed nanoparticles with fabrics and their crosslinking for superior finish, fire resistance, durability and chemical and biological agent resistance doc16933 none The consortium between Michigan State University and Florida State University proposes the construction of a highly efficient, large-area neutron detector for the detection of high-energy neutrons to be used in experiments with fast rare isotopes at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL). This consortium is joined by Ball State University, Central Michigan University, Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., Hope College, Indiana University at South Bend, Millikin University, Western Michigan University, and Westmont College, each of which will assemble and test one complete layer of the detector. The proposed detector consists of 144 horizontal blocks of plastic scintillator arranged in 9 layers of 16 detectors each, covering an area of 2.0 m wide by 1.6 m high. The detector is position sensitive and features multi-hit capability. The addition of passive iron converters enhances the detection efficiency for neutrons with energies above 100 MeV for an average efficiency of up to 70%. The high detection efficiency will allow the investigation of very neutron-rich nuclei that can only be produced with small intensities. The detector will be used in connection with the new sweeper magnet with its focal plane detectors in stand-alone mode as well as with the combination of sweeper magnet and the S800 magnetic spectrograph. It will therefore be essential for the experimental program at the coupled cyclotron facility. The detector can be optimized for even higher beam energies with only minor modifications due to its modular design. It could be the first detector to be used for fast fragmentation beams at the Rare Isotope doc16934 none Farquhar This grant provides partial funding for a UV laser system that will be used in conjunction with two gas-source isotope ratio mass spectrometers for measurement of O2 and SF6 analyte gases. This instrument will be one of the primary tools for geochemistry research in the Stable Isotope laboratory at the University of Maryland (www.geol.umd.edu ~jfarquha stable_isotope_lab.htm). The PI, James Farquhar has used and developed laser fluorination techniques in a previous position as a post doctoral fellowat the Geophysical Laboratory and UCSD. The PI and his colleagues (students and post docs) will apply the UV laser to research involving in-situ analyses of isotope ratios involving the four stable isotopes of sulfur and the three stable isotopes of oxygen. The focus of this research will be on understanding the application of these isotope systems to topics that include atmospheric deposition, isotopic exchange during mineral-mineral and mineral-fluid interactions, and the characterization of biological signatures in the rock record. The UV laser system will be coupled to a high vacuum extraction line and used in a system that is coupled to mass spectrometers capable of both dual inlet and continuous-flow isotope analyses. Its addition to the facilities in the Stable Isotope Laboratory provides the capabilities for analysis of samples several orders of magnitude smaller than by conventional techniques. These capabilities are important in situations where samples are limited and in cases where high spatial resolution is required for scientific interpretations doc16935 none Doctoral dissertation research: Telicity and event structure in language comprehension With NSF support, Ms. Erin O Bryan will conduct research under the supervision of Professor Tom Bever for a doctoral dissertation in linguistics. Recent research in the area of lexical semantics has shown that the semantic feature telicity (whether or not an event has a specified endpoint in time) is related to argument structure (the arguments that a verb requires or allows) (van Hout , Jackendoff , Sanz ). Recent research in the area of sentence processing has investigated differences in the degree of difficulty in understanding garden path sentences (sentences that are structurally misinterpreted and require reanalysis), such as The horse raced past the barn fell. Bever and Sanz have predicted that reduced relative clause garden path sentences with atelic verbs (verbs without a specified endpoint in time, such as race) should be more difficult than those with telic verbs (verb with a specified endpoint, such as arrive or melt). This prediction follows from the fact that intrinsically telic verbs require a verb phrase-internal object, and hence will facilitate the correct analysis of reduced relative sentences. Gibson ( ) and Pritchett ( ) have predicted that reduced relative clause sentences with transitive verbs that can optionally occur intransitively (without a direct object) should be more difficult than those with obligatorily transitive verbs. This prediction follows from the fact that transitive verbs require an overt direct object, and hence will also facilitate the correct analysis of reduced relative sentences. The thrust of the proposed research is to determine which of these explanations is correct, or if they both are. The predictions made by Bever and Sanz (in preparation), Gibson ( ), and Pritchett ( ) are based on linguistic and psycholinguistic theory, linguistic judgements of acceptability, and computational models. The proposed research will test these predictions with an online sentence comprehension experiment using the speaker change onitoring task (Townsend & Bever ). This task has been shown to reflect local processing complexity and has the important virtue of being usable with experimental groups, so that large numbers of participants can be included. In the proposed experiment, participants will listen to reduced relative clause sentences like those in (a) through (d). The experiment will test whether telicity and subcategorization affect the extent of garden pathing and whether either of these factors has a more immediate effect than the other. The first hypothesis is that reduced relatives with atelic verbs, such as (a) and (b), will result in more processing difficulty than reduced relatives with telic verbs, such as (c) and (d). The second hypothesis is that reduced relatives with potentially intransitive verbs, such as (a) and (c), will result in more processing difficulty than those with obligatorily transitive verbs, such as (b) and (d). a. The firefighter led by the marshal waved to the crowd. b. The firefighter escorted by the marshal waved to the crowd. c. The firefighter saluted by the marshal waved to the crowd. d. The firefighter sent by the marshal waved to the crowd. Processing difficulty will be measured as missed detections of speaker-change syllables in the by-phrase, e.g. on marshal, and on the main clause verb, e.g. waved. The speaker-change is a syllable spoken by a different speaker than the rest of the sentence that participants are asked to monitor for. The two speaker-change locations allow the investigation of the question of whether one of the factors has a more immediate effect on comprehension. The expectation is that either telicity or subcategorization will have a relatively larger effect on the early probe position. If telicity has a more immediate effect, it suggests that a verb s lexical semantics, which syntacticians consider to be structural though it also carries meaning, has an earlier and perhaps privileged role in comprehension. If subcategorization has a more immediate effect, it suggests that distributional properties of the verb have an earlier and perhaps more privileged role. The research will clarify the role of semantic variables in comprehension that have not been controlled for in prior research. It will also increase our understanding of the online use of semantic and distributional verb properties. Additionally, the research will reveal information about the true nature of thematic roles, their relationship with subcategorization frames, and their relationship with event structure doc16936 none The broad goal of this proposal is to gain a deeper understanding of the adult human mathematical mind by studying its development in infancy. A major goal is to test the hypothesis that infants rely on analog magnitude representations of number similar to those used by adults, young children, and non-human animals. Previous studies suggest that infants may rely on two distinct systems for representing number; an object-file system for representing small values and an analog magnitude mechanism for representing large numerical values. This hypothesis will be tested by studying the psychophysics of number discrimination over a wide range of numerical values, testing whether infants are sensitive to ordinal relations between numerosities, and taking the first step to determine whether the enumeration process(es) that infants use involves serial or parallel processing. The proposed experiments will use the time that infants look at various displays and the location of infants. eye movements as dependent measures. The results of the proposed studies should provide a strong foundation for the development of a coherent model of the development of non-verbal numerical representations and will contribute to the principal investigator.s long-term goal of studying both the evolution and the development of numerical cognition doc16937 none The Maine EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement award is designed to enhance Maine s competitiveness in molecular biophysical sciences through a partnership between the University of Maine and Maine s non-profit research organizations. The proposed Biophysical Sciences Institute brings together University of Maine faculty in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, and spatial engineering, with biomedical researchers at the Jackson Laboratory and Maine Medical Center Research Institute. Maine EPSCoR proposes to hire additional tenure-track faculty in the fields of biophysics and advanced optics, biochemistry, structural biology, applied mathematics, computer science, image analysis and visualization, and material science. The new and existing investigators will form research teams to develop new measurement techniques, new sensors, and innovative approaches to data processing and interpretation in intracellular structures and dynamics, functional materials as a means to manipulate cellular reactions, and biocomputing. In addition to establishing the institute, Maine EPSCoR will integrate research and education through improvements to graduate training doc16938 none Basu Funds from this grant provide continued partial salary support for a technician to oversee operation and maintenance of the isotope geochemistry facility at the University of Rochester. This is a Phase II technician support grant and follows three years of initial NSF support ( ). The isotope geochemistry facility at Rochester houses four mass spectrometers including a thermal ionization mass spectrometer (TIMS), a multicollector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (MC-ICP-MS), a quadrapole based ICP-MS and a noble gas mass spectrometer. These instruments are use by faculty members Basu, Anbar and Poreda for research projects ranging from studies of the petrogenesis of flood basalts to investigations of biological fractionation of heavy metal isotopes during mineral weathering to studies of cosmic dust fluxes to the surface of the earth over geologic time. The instruments supported by this technician will continue to provide a valuable research and educational tool to the University and to a number of collaborating geoscientists. As the University has committed to picking up full time support for this position following this Phase II award, NSF support has aided in the creation of an university funded job in the geosciences field that is an alternative to traditional academic career paths doc16939 none With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Jeffrey T. Runner and Michael K. Tanenhaus will conduct three years of linguistic research examining how participants interpret two important classes of referring words: pronouns and reflexives. The project will use a lightweight head-mounted eye tracker to monitor eye movements as participants identify a picture in a scene while listening to descriptions of the depicted activities (e.g., John told Bill about the picture of himself. ). Which objects participants look at, and when they look at them, provides evidence about which referents they are considering as they interpret the referring words. The goals of this research are to (a) investigate the interpretation of these referring words with on-line tasks rather than explicit judgments; (b) evaluate the extent to which grammatical factors define the initial set of referents for pronouns and reflexives; (c) examine the interaction of grammatical factors with pragmatic and discourse factors; and (d) explore the extent to which the potential set of referents for pronouns and reflexives is mutually exclusive. The results of this research will be important for understanding how people assign reference, which is a central goal of current research in theoretical and applied linguistics. Reference resolution is one of the most central and challenging problems in developing efficient language understanding systems, including systems that are being developed for bio-medical applications. Difficulties in reference resolution are also associated with some types of language difficulties that arise due to brain damage. Information about the timing of eye movements and speech will also inform scientists who are developing computer-based language understanding systems that use eye movements to help resolve ambiguous words and referring expressions doc16940 none People pursue a variety of life goals, seeking to move closer to their ideal selves by succeeding professionally, acquiring material possessions, developing desirable dispositions and abilities, and improving their physical and spiritual selves. Such goal pursuits do not transpire in a vacuum. Human dispositions, motives, and behavioral tendencies are fashioned at least in part by interpersonal experience. Among the many forces that shape the self, few if any sculptors exert effects as powerful as those of our close partners. Such effects can vary from exceedingly positive to exceedingly negative: Some close partners help bring out the best in each other, supporting and promoting one another s goal pursuits, whereas others either fail to do so or bring out the worst in each other. This project identifies a process termed the Michelangelo phenomenon, a congenial pattern of interdependence whereby close partners sculpt one another in such a manner as to bring each person closer to his or her ideal self. A key variable in this process is partner affirmation, or the degree to which a partner s perceptions of and behavior toward the self are congruent with the self s ideal. Partner affirmation has been shown to be associated not only with greater personal growth (movement toward the ideal self) and enhanced personal well-being, but also with adjustment and vitality in ongoing relationships. This project explores several previously unexamined components of this phenomenon by continuing a longitudinal study of ongoing marital relationships doc16933 none The consortium between Michigan State University and Florida State University proposes the construction of a highly efficient, large-area neutron detector for the detection of high-energy neutrons to be used in experiments with fast rare isotopes at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL). This consortium is joined by Ball State University, Central Michigan University, Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., Hope College, Indiana University at South Bend, Millikin University, Western Michigan University, and Westmont College, each of which will assemble and test one complete layer of the detector. The proposed detector consists of 144 horizontal blocks of plastic scintillator arranged in 9 layers of 16 detectors each, covering an area of 2.0 m wide by 1.6 m high. The detector is position sensitive and features multi-hit capability. The addition of passive iron converters enhances the detection efficiency for neutrons with energies above 100 MeV for an average efficiency of up to 70%. The high detection efficiency will allow the investigation of very neutron-rich nuclei that can only be produced with small intensities. The detector will be used in connection with the new sweeper magnet with its focal plane detectors in stand-alone mode as well as with the combination of sweeper magnet and the S800 magnetic spectrograph. It will therefore be essential for the experimental program at the coupled cyclotron facility. The detector can be optimized for even higher beam energies with only minor modifications due to its modular design. It could be the first detector to be used for fast fragmentation beams at the Rare Isotope doc16921 none Sharing, comforting, volunteerism, and charitable donations are all considered different forms of prosocial behaviors (i.e., actions intended to benefit others) which are beneficial to society and therefore highly valued and desired. Developmental researchers have provided evidence that there are growth spurts in these behaviors across childhood and adolescence. However, existing models of prosocial development have been guided mostly by theories that emphasize the role of social cognitions and or emotions on prosocial and moral behaviors. For the most part, the role of culture and ethnicity on prosocial development has been less clear in these theories, even though there is clear evidence of cultural and ethnic differences in prosocial development. Although both social cognitions and emotions are significant correlates of prosocial behaviors, new theories of prosocial development are needed that integrate the role of culture and ethnicity in prosocial development. Unfortunately, the bulk of the research investigating the developmental mechanisms that lead to prosocial development has been conducted with white, mostly middle class, children. Thus, our understanding of the development and predictors of prosocial behaviors in ethnic minority children is quite limited. To begin to address these issues, research is needed on the development of prosocial behaviors in ethnic minority children and adolescents. This project is designed to examine parenting, sociocognitive, and culture-related correlates of prosocial behaviors across childhood and early adolescence in one ethnic minority group (i.e., Mexican Americans). The two-phased systematic research agenda will combine qualitative and quantitative approaches. The overarching goal of the project is to gain an understanding of positive, social behaviors in Mexican American and European American children in the United States. The project is designed primarily (a) to examine ethnic group similarities and differences with respect to prosocial traits and behaviors in Mexican American and European American children and (b) to investigate the parenting, familial, and sociocognitive correlates of prosocial behaviors in Mexican American and European American children. When completed, the research will answer a number of questions that social and developmental psychologists have advanced in recent years. These questions include, but are not limited to, the following: (1) Is normal development of the abilities to understand another s point of view, to feel sorrow or concern for needy others, and to make moral decisions when faced with a context in which there are societially defined right and wrong behaviors associated with high levels of prosocial behaviors in both Mexican- and European-American children? (2) Do both Mexican- and European-American children who exhibit high levels of prosocial behaviors have parents who are warm and supportive and use explanatory and empathy-inducing disciplining practices? (3) Do Mexican American parents, compared to European American parents, emphasize collectivism (i.e., orientation towards greater social group) and familial interdependence, which in turn accounts for ethnic group differences in prosocial behaviors? (4) Do family and parenting processes impact or explain the relations of the abilities to understand another s point of view, to feel sorrow or concern for needy others, and to make moral decisions to prosocial behaviors in Mexican- and European-American children? (5) Do the adaptations that Mexican American children make to the mainstream and ethnic cultures as a result of the processes of acculturation and enculturation impact prosocial development. By addressing these questions, this study is expected to yield important information about variables that might promote prosocial behaviors and produce useful and valuable new measures of prosocial behaviors to use with Mexican American children and adolescents. These products will inform existing theories of prosocial development and will enhance intervention programs aimed at increasing behaviors that benefit others and society doc16943 none The purpose of this planning grant is to initiate a program of research examining the influence of situational status-defining roles on cognitive, affective, and behavioral dynamics of intergroup dyadic interactions. Specifically, this research explores how situational status impacts dyadic interactions between members of traditionally stigmatized groups (African Americans and women in workplace contexts), and members of traditionally nonstigmatized groups (White Americans and men). Three distinct dyadic types emerge from combinations of situational and socio-cultural status: status-congruent, status-reversed, and equal-status. The studies provide an initial foray into the impact of these three dyadic types on an important dynamic of intergroup relations: intergroup attitudes. Previous research and theory make conflicting predictions about how these dyadic types affect the attitudes of members of dominant groups regarding the stigmatized outgroup. The research examines whether explicitly endorsed attitudes moderate the effects of dyadic type, and possibly, therefore, resolve current discrepancies in the literature. Nonverbal behavioral correlates of the effects of status-congruent, equal-status, and status-reversed interactions on automatic attitudes are also investigated. These planning activities are expected to launch a program of research, investigating the influences of structural factors (such as interaction roles) and motivational factors (such as interaction goals) on multiple dynamics of intergroup dyadic interactions. The findings will help our understanding of intergroup conflict, as well as elucidate pitfalls in current approaches to prejudice reduction doc16944 none Benoit This grant provides support for the acquisition of a Brinkmann automated voltammetry system (VA Trace Analyzer, Model 746) and a MARS 5 microwave digestion system (CEM Corp.) to facilitate measurement of rapid changes in chemical speciation that occur in freshwater systems as a result of both natural biogeochemical processes and point and nonpoint source pollution. The Brinkmann voltammetry system automates basic voltammetric functions and combines this ability with an automatic titration system and 80 position autosampler. The MARS 5 Microwave Digestion system is able to digest colloids and particles in multiple samples rapidly and completely, and has the unique ability to increase analyte concentration through evaporation of the digestion matrix. The information on total metal concentrations provided by analysis of digested samples is a necessary component in the process of evaluating chemical speciation. The increased sample processing efficiency and reproducibility of the MARS 5 microwave digestion system will complement the increased sample throughput of the Brinkmann automated voltammetry system in improving the ability of researchers in our laboratory to measure rapid changes in metal speciation within freshwater systems. Current research on metal complexation by NOM (natural organic matter) aims to identify easily measurable characteristics of NOM (e.g., spectroscopic) that can be used to estimate their complexation characteristics (abundance and strength of binding sites). Future work on NOM will evaluate rapid variations in quantity and quality that occur during storm events and with changing water flowpaths through soils. Other projects study metal binding by reduced sulfur compounds in fully-oxygenated surface waters. This newly discovered class of ligands is poorly understood, but may be as important as NOM in many instances doc16945 none In the post-sequencing era of Arabidopsis research, the effort to understand the function of each and every one of the 26,000 genes is expanding rapidly on a global scale, involving many more countries and laboratories that were not originally part of the more focused sequencing efforts. In order to foster coordination of all of these worldwide functional genomics efforts, scientists have called for strengthening the Multinational Science Steering Committee (MSSC) that was established in for the purpose of coordinating the Multinational Coordinated Arabidopsis thaliana Genome Research Project. As a means to accomplish this goal, the North American Science Steering Committee for the Arabidopsis genome research project will employ and supervise a fulltime coordinator who would act as a reliable conduit for communications between the MSSC and the research community. Some of the specific duties of this person include: (1) functioning as the executive secretary for the MSSC, (2) together with TAIR (the Arabidopsis Information Resource), develop, maintain and update a website to inform the research community about various large-scale Arabidopsis functional genomics research activities, and (3) being the production editor of an annual progress report and other documents that the MSSC produces. This coordinator is expected to visit major project sites worldwide and communicate the findings to the MSSC. This award will provide two years of funding to test the effectiveness of such a person in coordinating the global Arabidopsis functional genomics activities. Two members of the North American committee serves on the MSSC and will be responsible for monitoring the activities of the coordinator doc16946 none Lower This grant provides partial support for a state-of-the-art instrument that integrates optical micros-copy, confocal laser scanning microscopy, scanning probe microscopy, and optical tweezers. It will be housed in the P.I. s laboratory at the University of Maryland, where it will be a primary tool for the P.I. s research programs in geomicrobiology, biogeochemistry, and nanoscale sci-ence. This instrument will be capable of collecting force measurements concurrent with optical observations as well as fluorescence resonance energy transfer. Further, it will allow the simul-taneous collection of atomic force microscopy (or scanning near-field optical microscopy) and laser scanning microscopy images. The applications of this instrument include for example: the study of fundamental intra- and inter-molecular forces between biomolecules on living cells and material surfaces (or other cells); identification of cell wall biomolecules which interact specifi-cally with particular minerals or cells; the study of the properties and localization of biomolecu-les on microbial surfaces; the study of mineral dissolution and growth including biomineraliza-tion; investigations of metal (or organic acid) sorption to mineral surfaces; the development of nanolithography techniques; and educational outreach doc16947 none The consortium between Michigan State University and Florida State University proposes the construction of a highly efficient, large-area neutron detector for the detection of high-energy neutrons to be used in experiments with fast rare isotopes at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL). This consortium is joined by Ball State University, Central Michigan University, Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., Hope College, Indiana University at South Bend, Millikin University, Western Michigan University, and Westmont College, each of which will assemble and test one complete layer of the detector. The proposed detector consists of 144 horizontal blocks of plastic scintillator arranged in 9 layers of 16 detectors each, covering an area of 2.0 m wide by 1.6 m high. The detector is position sensitive and features multi-hit capability. The addition of passive iron converters enhances the detection efficiency for neutrons with energies above 100 MeV for an average efficiency of up to 70%. The high detection efficiency will allow the investigation of very neutron-rich nuclei that can only be produced with small intensities. The detector will be used in connection with the new sweeper magnet with its focal plane detectors in stand-alone mode as well as with the combination of sweeper magnet and the S800 magnetic spectrograph. It will therefore be essential for the experimental program at the coupled cyclotron facility. The detector can be optimized for even higher beam energies with only minor modifications due to its modular design. It could be the first detector to be used for fast fragmentation beams at the Rare Isotope doc16948 none Brent, Michael Washington University, St. Louis A steadily increasing proportion of biological research is conducted on organisms whose genomes have been sequenced. For many research questions, however, an organism s genome is important primarily because of the proteins it encodes. So a critical question in genome analysis is: What are the structures of all the protein-coding genes and the exact sequences of the proteins they encode? The proposed research aims to improve gene-structure prediction in model invertebrates by integrating probabilistic models of gene structure with information from genome comparisons. Project 1: Probability models for gene-structure prediction using genomic homology This project focuses on developing probability models for exploiting genome comparison to improve gene-structure prediction. A novel aspect of the proposed models is their use of conservation sequence to represent the degree and pattern of evolutionary conservation at each point in the genome to be annotated. A conservation sequence is a synthesis of genome alignments. The probability models build on the Hidden Markov Model approach used in state-of-the-art gene-structure prediction systems.Project 2: Enhanced probability models for single-sequence gene-structure predictionTWINSCAN is the gene-structure prediction system developed with prior NSF support. TWINSCAN integrates genome comparison with probabilistic gene-structure models. This project focuses on developing improvements to the single-sequence portion of the gene-structure model and to specialize it for model invertebrates. Project 3: Parameter estimation module and comparative annotation of invertebrates. This project focuses on (a) development of a complete parameter estimation module that will allow TWINSCAN to be adapted to new genomes easily, and (b) genome-wide gene-structure prediction in invertebrate model organisms. The focus will be on a pair of roundworm genomes and a pair of fly genomes. In each case, genome-wide prediction will be done using patterns of similarity to the related genome as one information source. Our gene-structure predictions will be provided to the research community through a web site (genes.cs.wustl.edu) and a collaboration with the Ensembl group at the European Bioinformatics Institute. The ability to systemically, reliably, and affordably predict gene structure would constitute significant progress in high-throughput biology and biotechnology. Further, an algorithm for computing the complete protein sequence of the products of a genome would have important applications. Among these are: 1. Identifying targets for functional and biochemical study, such as novel protein families. 2. Providing accurate protein sequence to secondary- and tertiary-structure prediction programs. 3. Finding genes that give rise to specific phenotypes. This research would involve undergraduate and graduate students at Washington University in St. Louis, thus contributing to research-based education and national biotechnology infrastructure doc16949 none The intent of the project is to examine the impact of global or geographical distributedness on the coordination, control and reward systems in global software development project teams. Thus the primary resarch question addressed in the proposed research is: how does the distribution of project work across geographically, often globally, distributed work-sites impact the use and effectiveness of the coordination, control and reward systems in these project teams. The exploratory nature of the proposed work drives a combination of intensive qualitative research methods, including onsite observation, examination of project documentation, and in-depth interviews with project managers, project leaders, project members and other stakeholders at the various distributed sites. The PIs will also work with local informants and academics to help elicit and interpret the findings at each location. A theory of the management of globally distributed projects and its associated empirical case data will be immediately useful, and is likely to contain generalizable knowledge for research and practice in the management of global software projects, a major undertaking both in the US and in organizations around the world. With the shift to global software projects, increasing interest in this area is anticipated, along with increasing need for well-founded theory. It is expected that the interviews will help to clarify project-specific team dynamics and dimensions of project management, which will be utilized to help refine and structure a subsequent theoretical framework and a design for a broader study. The subsequent work will depend upon the grounded theory developed in the present exploratory, empirical exploration doc16933 none The consortium between Michigan State University and Florida State University proposes the construction of a highly efficient, large-area neutron detector for the detection of high-energy neutrons to be used in experiments with fast rare isotopes at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL). This consortium is joined by Ball State University, Central Michigan University, Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., Hope College, Indiana University at South Bend, Millikin University, Western Michigan University, and Westmont College, each of which will assemble and test one complete layer of the detector. The proposed detector consists of 144 horizontal blocks of plastic scintillator arranged in 9 layers of 16 detectors each, covering an area of 2.0 m wide by 1.6 m high. The detector is position sensitive and features multi-hit capability. The addition of passive iron converters enhances the detection efficiency for neutrons with energies above 100 MeV for an average efficiency of up to 70%. The high detection efficiency will allow the investigation of very neutron-rich nuclei that can only be produced with small intensities. The detector will be used in connection with the new sweeper magnet with its focal plane detectors in stand-alone mode as well as with the combination of sweeper magnet and the S800 magnetic spectrograph. It will therefore be essential for the experimental program at the coupled cyclotron facility. The detector can be optimized for even higher beam energies with only minor modifications due to its modular design. It could be the first detector to be used for fast fragmentation beams at the Rare Isotope doc16951 none This award to University of California Santa Barbara is to isolate and characterize adhesive glycoproteins from different algae species, and to determine molecular weight, shape and primary sequence of these proteins and their subunits. With this award Professor John Waite will evaluate the chemical functionality of the adhesive proteins, especially the determination of post-translational modifications and comparison of these modifications to those observed in adhesive proteins from mussels. Modeling of the adhesive proteins and studying methods to control cross-linking reactions during the adhesive curing process will be carried out. European scientists, who will be collaborating with this project, will provide algal adhesive proteins, haloperoxidase and cDNA-deduced protein sequences for these studies. This multi investigator project with six university research teams, two biotech companies and European scientists will isolate, characterize, mimic, and bulk-produce algal adhesive proteins with the ultimate aim of developing pharmaceutical adhesives and to mitigate fouling. Many analytical methods including tandem mass spectrometry with collision-induced decomposition will be used to determine the primary sequence of these proteins and their subunits. This NSF project is co-funded by the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities, and Divisions of Chemistry (Advanced Materials), Materials Research (Solid State Chemistry), International Office (Western Europe) and Civil and Mechanical Systems (Surface and Material Design) as a Cooperative Activity in Materials Sciences between the National Science Foundation and the European Commission (NSF 01-105). This project is being carried out in collaboration with the Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research Institute; Technion University, Israel; University of Birmingham, England; Gothenburg University, Sweden; Roscoff Marine Station, France; and industrial collaborators from Iceland (Bio-Gels Pharmaceuticals Ltd) and Israel (Biota Ltd doc16952 none One of the central lessons we have learned from the emerging discipline of cognitive science is that most seemingly effortless mental tasks, for instance recognizing faces and understanding speech, are in fact the result of incredibly complex feats of cognitive processing. Our minds not only make such accomplishments possible, but they do so in a seemingly effortless way that hides their complexity and difficulty from us. This research project will focus on the cognitive processing responsible for one such seemingly obvious aspect of our mental lives, our intuitive ability to perceive the world in terms of discrete objects (such as people, cars, and chairs). This ability seems somehow obvious and necessary to us; after all, the world is populated by such discrete objects. In fact, however, interpreting the world in terms of discrete objects is a Herculean task for the brain, since the incoming visual information consists of an undivided wash of colors, shapes, and motions. Our brains must grapple with such information, and through great efforts turn it into the orderly scenes of discrete objects that we perceive during almost every moment of our lives. This cognitive processing is critical to our lives, as it makes our visual experience coherent. This research project will explore how these object cognition processes work, answering a number of important and specific questions: What information does the brain use to infer the existence of a discrete object in a visual scene? What information is used to determine whether a briefly glimpsed object is in fact the same object that was viewed earlier? What are the limits on such abilities? The answers to such questions will help us understand how the brain accomplishes some of its most important but least appreciated tasks. This research will also address other critical questions: Where do these abilities come from? Are they hardwired into our visual systems from birth, or are they learned gradually? Are the cognitive processes which young infants use to make sense of the world in terms of discrete objects the same processes that guide our mature perception of objects in the world? Previous research on object cognition has studied both infants and adults, but these investigations have typically proceeded completely independently, in different sub-fields of cognitive science. This research will bridge this gap, by comparing object cognition in infants and adults, and by directly testing the hypothesis that researchers in these two areas have been exploring the same underlying brain mechanisms. This research thus has the potential to unite two previously independent areas of cognitive science, while pursuing the main goal of understanding the cognitive processing which provides us with the coherent perception of a world filled with discrete persisting objects, which we rely on but take for granted during almost every waking moment. In addition, this research on object cognition in normal adults and infants has implications for better understanding of, and perhaps improved treatment for, certain object-based visual disorders in impaired patient populations (such as Balint Syndrome ). In addition, it may be useful in the development of artificial systems that implement similar processes for dividing visual scenes into discrete objects and tracking them over time and motion doc16953 none Under the direction of Dr. Molly Diesing, Dr. Rachel Hastings will collect data for her (second) doctoral dissertation. She will conduct linguistic research on the Quechua language through fieldwork in the regions of Cusco, Peru, and Quito, Ecuador. Quechua speakers will be consulted regarding the meaning and contexts of use of expressions involving quantification and nominals containing relative clauses. Evidence from both spontaneous speech and texts (such as folktales published in Quechua) will also be consulted. The semantics of quantification in Quechua has received little attention in the past, and thus an initial goal of this study will be to investigate the semantic scope of quantifiers, and the syntactic position of the quantifier within a nominal. Some unusual, apparently clause-escaping properties of certain Quechua quantifiers will then be used to probe the structure of relative clauses. Quechua permits constructions in which the head of the relative clause (the nominal being modified by the clause) appears internally to the clause, as well as constructions in which the head is external. The semantic interactions between quantification and these two types of relativization will be used to investigate the detailed structure of these clauses. The importance of this research lies both within Quechua linguistics and within cross-linguistic theories of syntax and semantics. First, this research will contribute to the body of Quechua data that is available to on-going efforts to document Quechua grammar, promote Quechua literacy, and analyze variation between dialects. Second, within theoretical linguistics, the results of the study will contribute to the emerging field of cross-linguistic semantic studies, and quantification studies in particular. The results of this research will also inform on-going debates on the structure of relative clauses, in particular questions regarding relations between internally and externally-headed relatives doc16954 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Gillian Sankoff will conduct two years of linguistic research on how language change at the community level relates to stability at the individual level. This project investigates linguistic change in a community of French speakers, taking advantage of a unique series of tape recordings made between and by Dr. Sankoff and her colleagues. The original corpus consists of tapes and transcripts of 120 native French-speaking Montrealers, stratified by age, sex, and social class. Half of the speakers were re-recorded in , and a subset of those were followed through . The project will establish trends at the community level and assess the degree of stability across individual speaker lifespans. Since the speech has already been collected and transcribed, research activities will emphasize quantitative analyses of phonetics, grammar, and lexicon across speakers. Eight different features will be used to track differential malleability of these linguistic subsystems. For example, people might modify their grammars more readily than they do their childhood accents. This sociolinguistic research will refine the concept of a critical period for language learning. This is the maturational period before puberty when children acquire their native languages. For most people, basic linguistic knowledge forms a relatively stable system throughout life. Although people learn new vocabulary across their lifespan, most 50- or 60-year olds prove faithful to the sound system and grammar of the language they first learned as young children. And yet, languages are constantly changing. To account for how both situations can hold, earlier models of language change focused on the transmission of linguistic information from adults to children. Since recent research has shown that children model the adult system very closely, it must be possible for people to remodel their language - to some extent - later in life. This research on that possibility also addresses how language change affects communication, even across generations within the same speech community. Understanding language change as experienced by speakers across their lifespans will help to solve the puzzle of how and why people alter their speech, when the ensuing changes affect communication. The project will also address the limits of the possible, in examining the barriers to linguistic remodeling in later life for people who encounter new languages or dialects as adults doc16955 none This project will study children s acquisition knowledge in the domain of biology. The goal is to understand better what biological knowledge children bring to the classroom and how this knowledge is organized to support reasoning and explanation. Although children s understanding of biology has been examined in quite a few studies, little attention has been directed at the question of how biological knowledge might vary in children being raised in different cultural settings and among adults with different levels of experience. Since the existing work in the area suggests that adult conceptions of biological kinds and ecological relationships varies with culture and experience, children s understandings of nature likely also varies with culture and experience. Identifying cross-cultural differences and commonalities in biological knowledge is important if we are to meet the educational goals of the 21st century. It is also important to build theories that reflect accurately the diversity in knowledge and experience of people around the world. The project will include a number of under-studied populations, including urban and rural majority culture children, urban Mexican immigrant children, rural Native American children, rural Yukatek Maya and Ladino children. Children and adults will be given a variety of tasks to probe their underlying biological concepts (e.g. alive ), processes, and relationships. In addition, the research will examine parent-child dyads and other sources of information that help to shape children s conceptions of biology. The research will test specific theories about which aspects of biological knowledge are likely to be universal, which aspects vary with culture and experience, and how these variations interact with formal instruction. This research is directly relevant to science education. It is important to engage the understandings that children bring to the classroom in order to build on their real world experience and to address misconceptions when they arise. To ignore real world experience would risk failure to understand the educational possibilities for learning about science in general, and biology in particular doc16956 none The Third Workshop on Magnetism and Superconductivity of Advanced Materials (Ladek Zdroj, Poland, July 15-20, ) will direct its focus on the interplay between magnetism and superconductivity. A wide spectrum of new materials with novel properties, which have been discovered during the last three years, will be discussed at the workshop. Some of the materials presented will include new oxide magnetic superconductors from the class of ruthenocuprates, selected tripled state superconductors (UGe2, Sr2RuO4), heavy fermion compounds, modified C60 fullerenes, MgB2 (a classic superconductor that is challenging our current theoretical and experimental understanding of the electron-phonon interaction and gap anisotropy), and new compounds in the related class of manganites and ruthenates. Progress in the field of artificial heterostructures that consist of spatially distinct superconducting and magnetic layers, including systems that enable novel probes of the interaction of magnets and superconductors across an intervening layer, will be also reviewed and discussed at the meeting. An important goal of the Workshop will be providing an opportunity to strengthen collaborations between U.S. and European scientists, as well as enabling new collaborations to form. The workshop proceedings will be published in a special issue of Physica C, and will include articles based on both oral and poster presentations. %%% The Third Workshop on Magnetism and Superconductivity of Advanced Materials (Ladek Zdroj, Poland, July 15-20, ) addresses issues of novel superconducting and magnetic materials. Emphasis will be placed on properties, characterization, and processing of compounds exhibiting a range of novel phenomena arising from mutual interactions of magnetism and superconductivity. The need for this conference arises from the rapid development of this field, which is also of high interest in the community of contemporary mainstream condensed matter physics. This Workshop will also feature properties and processing of artificially grown magneto-superconducting, layered heterostructures, as well as magnesium diboride - an exciting new superconductor. Theoretical understanding of the properties of these materials and development of applications of their unique magnetic and electronic properties will be reviewed in depth at the meeting. An important goal of the workshop will be to provide U.S. and European scientists the opportunity to strengthen, as well as form new, collaborations. Young Polish and American scientists attending the workshop will be exposed to world-class research in the fields of superconductivity and magnetism. They will have the opportunity to interact in the workshop as well. All talks will be thorough, with generous time allowed for substantive discussions between the participants and speakers. The workshop materials will be published in a special issue of Physica C, and will include articles based on both oral and poster presentations. This NSF project is co-funded between DMR and INT as a Cooperative. Activity in Materials Sciences between the National Science Foundation and the European Commission (NSF 01-105). The project is being carried out in collaboration with the Center of Excellence for Physics and Fabrication of Low Dimensional Structures for Technologies of Future Generations (CELDIS) operated by the Polish Academy of Science within the 5th EC Framework Programme doc16957 none In the first few years of life, children learn a great deal about the causal structure of the world around them; they learn how some events make other events happen. This knowledge is reflected in children s everyday theories of the world. How does this learning take place? This research program will investigate the underlying mechanisms for causal learning in children. In particular, the research will explore how children use information about contingencies between events, such as the fact that one event always follows another event, to draw conclusions about causal relationships. It will investigate how children learn about inhibitory causes, interactive causes and hidden, unobserved causes. This work is informed by recent work in computer science and statistics that shows how computers can make accurate causal inferences. This work should have significant broader impact for educational practice. Causal relationships play a crucial role in scientific knowledge. If we understand children s basic natural causal learning mechanisms, we can use this understanding to help teach science more effectively. Similarly, this research has impact for studies of developmental disabilities such as autism and mental retardation. There is reason to think that children with these syndromes may have particular difficulty with causal learning, and understanding natural causal learning may help us understand and remedy these difficulties doc16929 none Lay Cocroft, Hunt and Wood Mating signals can diverge early in the process of speciation, but it is unclear whether signal divergence plays a direct role in speciation or is a byproduct of other processes such as ecological specialization. Our goal is to determine the role of mating signals in the diversification of a group of plant-feeding insects. The Enchenopa binotata species complex of treehoppers consists of nine species that are specialists on various trees and shrubs in North America. Considerable evidence suggests that speciation in this group occurred as a result of a series of shifts to novel host plants. A host shift alters life history timing, which, in combination with high host fidelity, allows divergence in traits that enhance performance on a novel host. Our research will test the hypothesis that divergence in mating signals is important in speciation by reducing gene flow between populations on ancestral and novel host plants. Our project will integrate (1) a comparative study of vibrational mating signals in the nine extant Enchenopa binotata species; (2) comparison of patterns of signal variation within and among species with patterns of DNA sequence divergence; and (3) determination of whether divergence in signals and life history traits has occurred in experimentally host-shifted populations. This research will provide a complementary picture of the relationship between mating signals and divergence not only in fully differentiated species, but also in lineages in the early stages of host plant race formation. Results of this research will enhance our basic understanding of speciation, and may provide practical benefits such as an improved understanding of how agricultural pests become established on novel host species doc16933 none The consortium between Michigan State University and Florida State University proposes the construction of a highly efficient, large-area neutron detector for the detection of high-energy neutrons to be used in experiments with fast rare isotopes at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL). This consortium is joined by Ball State University, Central Michigan University, Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., Hope College, Indiana University at South Bend, Millikin University, Western Michigan University, and Westmont College, each of which will assemble and test one complete layer of the detector. The proposed detector consists of 144 horizontal blocks of plastic scintillator arranged in 9 layers of 16 detectors each, covering an area of 2.0 m wide by 1.6 m high. The detector is position sensitive and features multi-hit capability. The addition of passive iron converters enhances the detection efficiency for neutrons with energies above 100 MeV for an average efficiency of up to 70%. The high detection efficiency will allow the investigation of very neutron-rich nuclei that can only be produced with small intensities. The detector will be used in connection with the new sweeper magnet with its focal plane detectors in stand-alone mode as well as with the combination of sweeper magnet and the S800 magnetic spectrograph. It will therefore be essential for the experimental program at the coupled cyclotron facility. The detector can be optimized for even higher beam energies with only minor modifications due to its modular design. It could be the first detector to be used for fast fragmentation beams at the Rare Isotope doc16960 none Research has demonstrated structural differences in the brains of musicians compared to non-musicians. However, it is not yet known whether these differences are inborn or develop through long-term stimulation during critical periods of brain development. On the one hand, the brain may be capable of changes not only in functional brain networks, but also in structural components as a response to increased use. On the other hand, the brains of musicians may be atypical prior to training, both anatomically and functionally. If so, becoming a professional musician may be partly genetically predetermined. Research has also demonstrated that music training in children results in long-term enhanced visual-spatial and mathematical performance. The underlying neural basis of such enhancements is unknown. Possible explanations include changes in arousal, mood, and priming of particular brain regions. However, long-term changes in brain function or structure, such as strengthening of existing brain connections or the formation of new connections or even new cells and a more elaborate system of connections, might be induced by learning and practicing on a musical instrument. This pilot longitudinal study will follow young children at the beginning of their music training over a period of three years and compare them to a control group of children matched in gender, SES, handedness, age, and overall IQ. Using high-resolution MR images within subjects over time, the research will begin to answer questions such as the following: Does the amount of instrumental practice correlate with structural brain differences and or do levels of musical talent skill predict structural brain differences either prior to or as a consequence of training? Is visual-spatial and mathematical reasoning enhanced by music training? If so, are these non-musical cognitive outcomes related to amount of time spent practicing, degree of improvement in reading music notation, and or level of musical talent skill? Do gains in visual-spatial and mathematical reasoning, if found, correlate with structural brain enhancements over the course of musical training? This research has potential far-reaching implications. First, children often begin music study at an age when the brain is at a critical phase of development and maturation. If structural brain changes or use-dependent brain growth occur, it would have important implications for early childhood education. Second, the results might help to explain why certain children succeed and others fail in mastering musical instruments. Third, demonstrating improvements in domains other than music as a function of music training would have strong implications for both general and music educational practice. Fourth, this research will provide testable hypotheses about the neural basis of transfer effects. Transfer is a key issue in educational theory, and has not only applied value but also theoretical value, since a demonstration of transfer helps us to understand how mental capacities are organized and related to one another doc16961 none s of relative hyperbolicity will be studied. As another application, the conformal and other geometric structures on hyperbolic groups will be constructed. It is the investigator s hope that this will lead, in particular, to a better understanding of open conjectures in 3-dimensional topology. It is an important and interesting task to investigate shapes of spaces, in particular of the one in which we live. Geometry studies spaces of various shapes. Group theory studies groups, that is, sets of symmetries of spaces. Geometric group theory provides links between spaces and groups. Every group has an orbit (!) in some space (!). The orbit is only a part of the space, but once something is known about the the group, geometric group theory provides information not only about the orbit, but about the whole space as well. Tools from several areas of mathematics are used for that. The research part of this proposal is to develop and use those tools. Another part of the proposal is organizing and supporting the G^3 = Geometric group theory on the gulf coast conference that would allow exchange of ideas among mathematicians of various research interests doc9602 none This Collaborative Research project is to develop an understanding of the processing of thermotropic liquid crystalline polymers (TLCPs) so that the current barriers to widespread applications are lowered. This will be accomplished through a coordinated study of melt stability, flow behavior, and structure properties of TLCPs. An array of sophisticated characterization methods will be applied to monitor the thermal stability of the melt at high temperature, and x-ray scattering methods to study the development and fate of molecular orientation (directly related to mechanical properties of TLCPs) in both simple flows and complex flows of relevance to processing. These methods have been productively applied to model TLCPs of purely scientific interest in recent years, but this project affords the first opportunity for a comprehensive study of a technologically relevant material using these techniques. To relate such fundamental information to product properties, channel flow plaques will be molded under protocols guided by the x-ray results, and their morphologies and physical properties studied. These materials are used commercially in applications requiring excellent processibility, mold-filling precision, physical properties, dimensional stability, and thermal stability. Despite considerable promise, TLCPs have yet to be broadly applied in numerous applications where their potential as high strength low weight materials might be realized. Contributing factors include thermal stability limitations at high temperatures in the melt during processing, systematically weak directions in moldings, and the high cost of commercially available TLCPs. This work will feature a TLCP material that offers potential for dramatic price reductions (approximately $3 lb), thereby directly addressing the central issue of cost. The collaboration between Northwestern University and MMI provides a venue for graduate and undergraduate students to gain experience in state-of-the art characterization tools and thermal analysis doc13829 none The objectives of this multi-campus research Center are 1) to explore, conduct research and to bring about innovation and practical solutions by focusing on the industrially relevant research needs; 2) to foster collaborative research projects between industrial and academic engineers and scientists; and 3) to promote interdisciplinary and intra-university research activities and to nurture students through testbed and collaborative projects. The Center proposed four key program areas, namely 1) production equipment e-monitoring and e-maintenance systems; 2) web-enabled industrial systems management and optimization program; 3) smart business to devices technologies program; and 4) web-enabled development tools for e-maintenance application systems doc16964 none Drs. Hans Paerl and Timothy Steppe (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Alan Decho (University of South Carolina at Columbia), James Pinckney (Texas A & M University) are examining the community structure and function of highly-diverse microbial mats located in lakes on San Salvador Island, Bahamas. Because water evaporation exceeds rain precipitation on San Salvador, lakewater salinity can reach up to five times that of normal seawater. Interannual and seasonal variability in rainfall causes lake-levels and salinities to fluctuate greatly. Consequently, the microbial mats, which cover extensive portions of the lake bottoms and control the lakes ecology, are subjected to prolonged periods of harsh, potentially lethal constraints such as desiccation, intense solar radiation, and high temperatures. Yet, they manage to grow and survive under some of the most extreme conditions on the planet. The objective of this study is to assess the influence water availability has on the structural diversification, community composition, production, and carbon sequestration in microbial mats over a five-year period. A particular emphasis will be placed on culturing and characterizing novel organisms that are adapted to water-stressed environments. State of the art molecular biological, polymer chemistry, physiological, and microbiological techniques will be employed to accomplish the research goals. Water is indispensable for life. The proposed work addresses a fundamental mechanism that is essential to all life, the ability to conserve water and balance ions. Understanding and characterizing water-stressed microbial communities may provide information crucial for understanding key controls of life processes on other planets and moons where water may exist. Anhydrophilic communities exist under feast or famine conditions with regard to water availability. Rainfall on San Salvador is episodic and largely confined to major storms, including hurricanes to which the island is often subjected. Monitoring the physiological responses of pristine anhydrophilic communities over time and under different hydrologic conditions will provide information necessary to understanding how long and short term climatic oscillations (including a predicted 10 to 40 year period of elevated hurricane activity) impact critical life-sustaining processes. Culturing individual populations will provide specific information for understanding the biology of anhydrophilic life forms that may be exploited for industrial or medical purposes doc16929 none Lay Cocroft, Hunt and Wood Mating signals can diverge early in the process of speciation, but it is unclear whether signal divergence plays a direct role in speciation or is a byproduct of other processes such as ecological specialization. Our goal is to determine the role of mating signals in the diversification of a group of plant-feeding insects. The Enchenopa binotata species complex of treehoppers consists of nine species that are specialists on various trees and shrubs in North America. Considerable evidence suggests that speciation in this group occurred as a result of a series of shifts to novel host plants. A host shift alters life history timing, which, in combination with high host fidelity, allows divergence in traits that enhance performance on a novel host. Our research will test the hypothesis that divergence in mating signals is important in speciation by reducing gene flow between populations on ancestral and novel host plants. Our project will integrate (1) a comparative study of vibrational mating signals in the nine extant Enchenopa binotata species; (2) comparison of patterns of signal variation within and among species with patterns of DNA sequence divergence; and (3) determination of whether divergence in signals and life history traits has occurred in experimentally host-shifted populations. This research will provide a complementary picture of the relationship between mating signals and divergence not only in fully differentiated species, but also in lineages in the early stages of host plant race formation. Results of this research will enhance our basic understanding of speciation, and may provide practical benefits such as an improved understanding of how agricultural pests become established on novel host species doc16933 none The consortium between Michigan State University and Florida State University proposes the construction of a highly efficient, large-area neutron detector for the detection of high-energy neutrons to be used in experiments with fast rare isotopes at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL). This consortium is joined by Ball State University, Central Michigan University, Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., Hope College, Indiana University at South Bend, Millikin University, Western Michigan University, and Westmont College, each of which will assemble and test one complete layer of the detector. The proposed detector consists of 144 horizontal blocks of plastic scintillator arranged in 9 layers of 16 detectors each, covering an area of 2.0 m wide by 1.6 m high. The detector is position sensitive and features multi-hit capability. The addition of passive iron converters enhances the detection efficiency for neutrons with energies above 100 MeV for an average efficiency of up to 70%. The high detection efficiency will allow the investigation of very neutron-rich nuclei that can only be produced with small intensities. The detector will be used in connection with the new sweeper magnet with its focal plane detectors in stand-alone mode as well as with the combination of sweeper magnet and the S800 magnetic spectrograph. It will therefore be essential for the experimental program at the coupled cyclotron facility. The detector can be optimized for even higher beam energies with only minor modifications due to its modular design. It could be the first detector to be used for fast fragmentation beams at the Rare Isotope doc16967 none The Oklahoma EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement Award will build two new statewide research programs, the Oklahoma Functional Genomics Consortium and the Oklahoma Network for Nanostructured Materials (NanoNet). Both programs are based on existing strengths at State research universities and each addresses a field of current national priority. Functional genomics follows the completion of large-scale genome projects and enables biologists to explore how genes interact with each other and the environment in complex biological systems. Research in this field is vital not only for enhancing fundamental understanding of genetics, but also for improving both human health and the agricultural industry, which is critically important to the economy of both Oklahoma and the nation. Nanotechnology is based on the observation that nanostructured materials have electrical, optical, and chemical properties that are different from those of molecules and different from those of bulk materials. Future technology that exploits these new properties will have major impact on the economy of the State, the nation and the world. Development of nanotechnology research infrastructure will enable Oklahoma both to compete for major research funding and to grow industries that depend upon highly skilled workers. Oklahoma has developed a strong spirit of interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaboration among its research-intensive campuses. The Oklahoma Network for Nanostructured Materials (NanoNet) and the Oklahoma Functional Genomics Consortium will be formed by investigators at Oklahoma State University, the University of Oklahoma at Norman, the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, the University of Tulsa, and the nonprofit Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, in partnership with the private sector to implement the goal of attaining sustainable research infrastructure through nanotechnolgy and genomics doc16968 none The long term goal of this project is to develop methods for efficient and sensitive metabolic surveys of genomes. This project will attempt to use the availability of genomic sequences, massively parallelmolecular biology techniques, and efficient cell-free protein synthesis to obtain functional expression of all the soluble enzymes in a genome, one protein per reaction chamber. With this approach, nearly every enzyme could be tested rapidly for its effect on a targeted metabolic process. This capability would be demonstrated by improving the performance of cell-free protein synthesis. This project will attempt to show that cell-free conditions can be developed to mimic the E. coli cytoplasm and to provide a variety of prosthetic groups so that complex, multimeric proteins will fold properly to become bioactive. This project would also attempt to show that single bioactive proteins can have a profound effect on cell-free protein synthesis and that these effects would be predicted based on the known, intracellular function of the protein. Ten proteins have been chosen to represent various challenges in protein expression and activation. If this project is successful, directed genetic changes could be made with a much higher probability of the desired outcome doc16969 none James Skinner of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to develop a general framework within which to calculate time- and frequency-domain vibrational spectra of solutes in liquid solvents. This approach builds on the work of others, where the solute and vibrational degrees of freedom are treated quantum mechanically, and the solute s rotations and translations and all solvent degrees of freedom are treated classically. The framework involves renormalization of the solute vibrations by the average interactions with the solvent, and so is expected to be able to describe systems with strong solute-solvent interactions. The theoretical approach will be applied to the following systems for which experiments have been performed: 1) HOD in liquid D2O (vibrational spectroscopy of the OH stretch), 2) the azide anion in liquid D2O (phonon vibrational spectroscopy of the azide anion asymmetric stretch), and 3) supercritical fluid oxygen and nitrogen (Raman spectroscopy). Finally, some general issues involving vibrational energy relaxation of solutes in polyatomic liquid solvents will be investigated. Many industrially and biologically important chemical reactions take place in liquid solution. The presence of solvent molecules are around a solute molecule can greatly affect rates and mechanisms of chemical reactions by changing the relative energy levels and providing pathways for efficient energy flow into and out of the solvent. This research project aims to provide a molecular level interpretation of the influence a solvent has on chemical and biological processes in condensed phases doc16970 none The objective of this work is to understand and develop the reaction chemistry of stereogenic organocopper reagents. The scope of reactivity of these chiral carbanions will be explored; specifically a variety of alpha alkoxyalkyl cuprates and alpha amino alkyl cuprates will be prepared and the stereoselectivity of their vinylation, acylation, conjugate addition, and substitution reactions will be investigated. Asymmetric deprotonation and transmetallation will be used as routes to prepare these reagents and for any substrate where these routes might fail then stereogenic cuprates will be prepared by dynamic thermodynamic resolution. Efforts to determine the structures of the organocopper reagents and kinetics of reactions that provide the highest enantio- and diastereoselectivites will be undertaken. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. R. Karl Dieter of the Department of Chemistry at Clemson University. Dr. Dieter will explore the reaction chemistry of stereochemically enriched organocopper reagents. The ability to form carbon-carbon bonds in molecules which are chiral (have two nonsuperimposable mirror images) and make only one of the two possible forms (a single enantiomer) is one of the most important problems facing the pharmaceutical industry today. When developed, Dr. Dieter s work could be applied to the synthesis of nitrogen and oxygen containing heterocycles with activities as antibacterial agents, CNS agents, and antiretroviral compounds. Students trained during the course of this work will gain skills needed by the pharmaceutical industry which now produces a number of single enantiomer compounds doc16971 none This grant explores high-resolution topographic imaging with concurrent optical, electrochemical, photoelectrochemical, and fluorescence mapping. These techniques are based on novel modifications of a commercial Near Field Optical Scanning Microscopic (NSOM Topometrix) to obtain shear force feedback control with a piezoelectric tuning fork. Optical resolutions of 60 nm and electrochemical resolutions of 50 nm have been achieved for these functional microscopies. This research is aimed at extending these resolutions to 10 nm or below. In addition a study of pitting precursor sites will be made for high purity titanium, titanium alloys, and aluminum alloys. This should facilitate in-situ and ex-situ evaluation of surface treatments used to mitigate pitting corrosion. A primary goal of this work is to develop these high-resolution capabilities to identify precursor sites for corrosion of microelectronic and magnetic storage assemblies. As the dimensions of these and similar devices decrease, corrosion becomes increasingly important and techniques to explore heterogeneous surfaces are needed. Magnetic storage surfaces can be covered with diamond-like carbon coatings to provide tribological protection, and it is important to determine how well these surfaces protect against corrosion as well. Scanning electrochemical microscopy with concurrent topographic mapping is the primary technique used for the studies. A secondary goal is to employ these successful characterization techniques for fabrication of novel surface structures doc16972 none This award supports a two-year project designed to investigate the earliest appearance of modern humans in Eastern Europe. It focuses on the excavation and analysis of archaeological sites located in the Russian village of Kostenki on the west bank of the Don River (roughly 450 km south of Moscow). The Kostenki sites have yielded the oldest known remains of modern humans in Eastern Europe, and even earlier traces of habitation that were probably left by modern humans more than 40,000 years ago. The new project will excavate the lowest human occupation layers of two of these sites (Kostenki 12 and 14) in order to expand our knowledge of the technology and economy of their occupants, and to establish with greater precision both their age and environmental setting. The research will bring together a team of American and Russian scientists from several fields, including archaeology, paleobotany, paleozoology, geology and geochronology. One project goal is improved understanding of how the sites were formed, which apparently involved a complex interplay of wind and slope action, periodic flooding, soil formation, and possibly other processes. This goal is closely tied to better dating of the earliest occupation levels at Kostenki 12 and 14 and reconstruction of environmental conditions. A series of new absolute dates (radiocarbon and luminescence) and paleomagnetic samples will be obtained from these levels, and an effort will be made to relate the sequence of layers to global climate-change and paleomagnetic events between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago. Fossil pollen and spores will be collected for reconstructions of vegetation, which will be used in conjunction with the study of fossil soils to provide further support for correlations with the global sequence. Excavations will be conducted at Kostenki 12 and 14 during July-August of and . The expanded sample of artifacts, features (e.g., former hearths), and associated mammal remains recovered from the lowest occupation levels will yield information about the technology and economy of the modern humans who appeared in Eastern Europe at this time. In the context of how the sites were formed, study of the mammal remains-such as the body parts represented and the damage on them-will help determine whether they were hunted or gathered by humans or deposited by natural processes. Stone artifacts will be analyzed in terms of from where the stone was obtained and how the implements were manufactured and used (based on microscopic study of the wear on their edges). Artifacts of softer materials (chiefly bone and ivory) are of special interest, because their complexity suggests that modern humans may have achieved a quantum jump in technological ability over their Neanderthal predecessors in Europe. The project will explore the thesis that complex and innovative technology was critical to the survival of modern humans-recently derived from southern latitudes and morphologically adapted to warm climates-in the relatively cold and dry environments of Eastern Europe doc16973 none Brassinosteroids are plant hormones that perform a fundamental role in coordinating growth and development. The Arabidopsis gene, Brassinosteroid Insensitive 1 (BRI1), encodes a receptor-like protein kinase (RLK), which is a critical component in brassinosteroid-mediated signaling. Using activation tagging, we identified a gene can suppress the growth defects of a mutant bri1 allele. This bri1 suppressor, BRS1, is predicted to encode a secreted serine carboxypeptidase. Elevated expression of BRS1 suppresses two bri1 alleles that have mutations in their extracellular domain, but not a kinase domain mutation. Genetic and physiological data strongly suggest BRS1 regulates an early step in brassinosteroid signaling. In many signal transduction pathways proteolytic processing plays an important role in regulating signal perception and transduction. We hypothesize that BRS1 is involved in a proteolytic processing step in the BRI1 signaling pathway. To test this hypothesis, we propose to undertake a detailed characterization of BRS1, including its cellular and subcellular localization, and analysis of its enzymatic activity. In addition, BRS1 is a member of a gene family. To examine a possible involvement of BRS1 and the BRS1-like genes in BRI1 and other RLK signaling pathways, we will use genetic approaches to investigate their function. These studies will contribute to our understanding of brassinosteroid signaling and other RLK mediated processes that control growth and development in plants doc16974 none This is a collaborative award that supports theoretical research and education in the area of condensed matter theory. The collaborator is professor Kirkpatrick at the University of Maryland ( ). The main objective of the project is to enhance the current understanding of many-electron systems at very low temperatures, and especially of phase transitions and other collective phenomena in such systems. The PIs will apply an effective field theory, developed during previous grant periods, to various collective phenomena of electrons in solids. The methods employed are general field theoretic techniques and the renormalization group. Specific systems for which this project is relevant include, magnets, superconductors, and doped semiconductors. The successful completion of this project will contribute to the understanding of an important area of condensed matter physics, and will train technical personnel with theoretical expertise in this field. %%% This is a collaborative award that supports theoretical research and education in the area of condensed matter theory. The collaborator is professor Kirkpatrick at the University of Maryland ( ). The research focuses on fundamental problems of condensed matter physics involving strong electronic correlations in clean and disordered systems. Specific topics of study include quantum phase transitions in ferromagnets and superconductors, the coexistence of superconductivity and ferromagnetism in UGe2, and how electronic correlations affect the metal-insulator transition. Quantum phase transitions occur at zero temperature and are driven by quantum fluctuations in contrast to the more familiar and well-understood phase transitions that are driven by thermal fluctuations and have non-zero transition temperatures. Critical fluctuations associated with quantum phase transitions may influence electronic behavior over a wide temperature range and may explain unusual electronic properties exhibited by materials with strong electronic correlations and other condensed matter systems. The award also supports education in advanced theoretical methods for condensed matter phenomena doc16975 none The Nevada plan for research infrastructure improvements will target three research focal areas: Integrated Approaches to Abiotic Stress (IAAS), Nanostructured Materials and Devices (NMD), and Advanced Computing in Environmental Science (ACES). Nevada s three research institutions, the University of Nevada at Reno (UNR), the University of Nevada at Las Vega (UNLV), and the Desert Research Institute (DRI) will collaborate in these research areas. The goal of the IAAS program is to build an internationally recognized research and training program in abiotic stress biology. The IAAS will apply genomics-based approaches to investigating 1) genetic requirements or variation for occupancy of extreme environments, 2) the functional significance of such genetic variation across many scales of biological complexity, 3) the evolutionary processes that create and or maintain such variation. The IAAS research area will include partnerships with the private sector which is becoming increasingly interested in cellular and molecular mechanisms that allow organisms to deal with extreme abiotic stress. In the Nanostructured Materials and Devices area, interdisciplinary, collaborative research on complex systems will incorporate both organic and inorganic species. Research emphases include organic light emitting devices, field controllable materials, novel polymeric metal composites for chemically specific sensing, imaging nanomaterials and smart devices. NMD will develop new facilities for materials fabrication, characterization and device development and involve collaborations with several private sector companies. The ACES project will create the Nevada Environmental Computing Grid - a statewide, distributed computational infrastructure. Multidisciplinary research will be centered on providing an application-driven environment to stimulate new information technology research of interest to computer scientists and private sector partners. In addition to the research effort, the Nevada project includes focused activities designed to increase the participation of members of under-represented groups in science via a partnership with the state s K-16 education system. The goal is to improve the successful academic careers of these students and increase the numbers of students graduating with degress in science-related fields doc16947 none The consortium between Michigan State University and Florida State University proposes the construction of a highly efficient, large-area neutron detector for the detection of high-energy neutrons to be used in experiments with fast rare isotopes at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL). This consortium is joined by Ball State University, Central Michigan University, Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., Hope College, Indiana University at South Bend, Millikin University, Western Michigan University, and Westmont College, each of which will assemble and test one complete layer of the detector. The proposed detector consists of 144 horizontal blocks of plastic scintillator arranged in 9 layers of 16 detectors each, covering an area of 2.0 m wide by 1.6 m high. The detector is position sensitive and features multi-hit capability. The addition of passive iron converters enhances the detection efficiency for neutrons with energies above 100 MeV for an average efficiency of up to 70%. The high detection efficiency will allow the investigation of very neutron-rich nuclei that can only be produced with small intensities. The detector will be used in connection with the new sweeper magnet with its focal plane detectors in stand-alone mode as well as with the combination of sweeper magnet and the S800 magnetic spectrograph. It will therefore be essential for the experimental program at the coupled cyclotron facility. The detector can be optimized for even higher beam energies with only minor modifications due to its modular design. It could be the first detector to be used for fast fragmentation beams at the Rare Isotope doc16977 none Shaul Mukamel is supported by a grant from the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to continue his research in molecular relaxation and radiative processes. He will continue his development of theoretical methods for the design and systematic interpretation of multidimensional femtosecond correlation spectroscopies in systems of coupled localized vibrational or electronic chromophores. Visible and infrared analogues of multiple-pulse NMR techniques provide novel snapshot probes into the structure as well as dynamics, interactions and relaxation processes of complex molecular assemblies. The fundamental theoretical concepts underlying techniques involving molecular responses to sequences of shaped and timed radiation pulses will be developed. Semiclassical methods for simulating nonlinear response functions will be tested. A classical-oscillator description of the spectroscopies will be developed, setting the stage for designing new pulse sequences that accomplish the same goals as their NMR analogues and providing a framework for computing and interpreting multidimensional signals. The advent of pulsed laser technology combined with the use of non-linear optical techniques has led to a large number of new methods to probe gas-phase and condensed-phase molecular systems. Mukamel is developing theoretical techniques that are central to the interpretation of the data obtained from these experiments. These interpretations lead to many important insights regarding chemical reactions and the effects of solvation in condensed phase systems that can have application to understanding biological systems doc16978 none The South Carolina EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement Award will enhance the research infrastructure in nanoscience, structural and chemical biology, and bioengineering by adding a critical mass of researchers to these targeted areas. The goal is to improve South Carolina s R&D competitiveness through the continued development and use of science and technology resources in the three major research universities (Clemson University, University of South Carolina, and the Medical University of South Carolina) and through productive, long-term partnerships between academia, government, and the private sector. This project will enhance nanomaterials research at Clemson University in collaboration with the University of South Carolina, expand bioengineering biomaterials research at Clemson University, develop and upgrade biomolecular structure research at the Medical University of South Carolina, and establish and expand statewide initiatives in education outreach. Outreach initiatives to support interfaces with the state s four-year colleges, HBCUs and the private sector will also result from this funding. Collaborative opportunities between faculty from HBCUs and those residing within the major research universities will further develop the state s research enterprise. Faculty hires in the nanomaterials nanotechnology program at Clemson University will complement existing expertise in the state, benefit graduate and undergraduate education, and serve to stimulate the further development of the emerging knowledge-based, high-tech economy in South Carolina. The Medical University of South Carolina will expand its biomolecular structure capacity and develop chemical biology through the addition of five new faculty. Partnerships with the College of Charleston and interactions with state and federal agencies will add synergism and competitiveness in additional areas of research. The bioengineering biomaterials program will be used to establish a branch of the Clemson University Bioengineering Department at the Medical University of South Carolina staffed with new Clemson University bioengineering hires, and add new faculty at Clemson with expertise in molecular biology doc16979 none This project will detect and record magnetic field fluctuations in the Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) range at South Pole Station. The range of frequencies being measured (1 to 350 Hz) encompasses interesting and important phenomena related to magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling. The primary objective is to characterize auroral ion cyclotron waves, which, according to theory, modulate precipitating electron fluxes, causing the flickering in auroral luminosity emissions. Substantial evidence now exists in support of this theory, although the excitation mechanism responsible for the ion cyclotron waves is somewhat uncertain. Perhaps the most well-developed theory suggests that the waves result from an electron beam instability. In any case, the frequency of the flickering or, equivalently, the frequency of the ground-based observations of ion cyclotron waves can be used to infer the altitude of the excitation mechanism, since the wave frequency depends on the strength of the known background magnetic field. As such, the information that will be acquired as part of this project can be used to test models of auroral acceleration mechanisms. The second objective of this project is to study dispersive ELF waves, a type of wave that has been reported in the literature only a few times, but one that may provide important information regarding substorm onset or, perhaps, boundaries of open and closed magnetic fields. A first step in the project is to identify the wave mode and to determine the location and geomagnetic conditions under which these waves are observed. Ultimately the most important parameter to be quantified is energy transfer, which occurs via Poynting fluxes and particle energy. A significant fraction of the particle energy flux is associated with auroral phenomena, so to a great extent our knowledge of magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling depends on how well we understand auroral processes doc16980 none Proposal: PI: Leopold, Kenneth R. The effect of solvation on molecular structure and reactivity is an important problem in chemistry. The investigation of microsolvated species offers a valuable means of bridging gas phase measurements with studies of condensed matter. Such work offers the possibility of developing an increasingly accurate molecular-level description of solvation. In this project, rotational spectroscopy will be used to examine the effects of microsolvation on reactive acid-base complexes. Molecular structures and dipole moments will be determined from rotational constants and Stark effect data, respectively. Aspects of charge distribution will, in certain cases, also be revealed by nuclear hyperfine structure. Two classes of systems are targeted: (i) partially bound Lewis acid-base complexes, whose structure and bonding change dramatically upon crystallization and (ii) hydrogen bonded systems which undergo proton transfer in solution or in the crystalline phase. These systems are chosen because in both cases, aggregation promotes chemical change and the effects of microsolvation are, therefore, expected to be pronounced. The central question to be addressed in this work is , In systems for which aggregation drives chemical change, how big is the effect of the first near neighbor? . Several systems with higher degrees of solvation are also considered. This work will systematically exploit the hypersensitivity of these reactive acid-base complexes to their near-neighbor interactions for the purpose of investigating solvation effects at the small cluster level. Much of the chemistry important to human activity involves substances in solution. For example, the chemistry of living things, reactions in contaminated ground waters, and even a host of important industrial processes occur only when molecules are dissolved in a solvent. When such reactions occur, the solvent itself is not a direct participant in the chemistry, though it has become increasingly clear that its presence can play a significant role in mediating the reactions that take place. Thus, in this project, we are interested in studying the role of solvent in mediating chemical processes. Our approach is to gain a basic understanding of the problem by examining the effect of a single solvent molecule close to a pair of reactive molecules. To accomplish this, we isolate two reacting molecules, plus one solvent molecule, and use microwaves to investigate how the solvent affects them. Understanding the influence of a single solvent molecule is an important step, as it is the fundamental building block for understanding the influence of the many solvent molecules present in a real solution. Moreover, the basic knowledge gained from this work may have direct consequences for modeling difficult problems of societal importance, e.g., the formation of particles in the earth s atmosphere, whose presence has wide ranging effects on climate, ozone levels, and human health. In this way, we envision potential practical applications for the fundamental science addressed in this project. Graduate students at the University of Minnesota will participate in this research as part of their training toward the doctoral degree and will learn numerous technical skills applicable to a wide variety of problems doc16981 none In this project funds are requested to continue studies of the equatorial thermospheric dynamics using the upgraded automated Arequipa Fabry-Perot interferometer (FPI) observatory operating at Arequipa which is ~400km south of the magnetic equator. The instrumental upgrade increase of the FPI sensitivity by a factor of 15 is achieved by replacing the GaAs photomultipler with a back-thinned CCD detector. The improved sensitivity of the Arequipa FPI will be used to extend current studies of the midnight temperature maximum and the equatorial wind and temperature anomaly (EWTA) with increased accuracy. A new line of research is proposed that would be based upon the observations of O+ and OH airglow emissions for the study of thermospheric [O]. The Doppler widths of the O+ spectral feature would provide information regarding the possible production of the hot oxygen corona that was previously observed with this technique in . If such hot [O] atoms exist near the equatorial upper thermosphere and exobase, aside from an increase in the effective Doppler width to equivalent temperatures of ~ , an excess of a few Rayleighs of 732nm emission rate relative to the FLIP predictions normalized by the observations at earlier solar depression angles should be seen. The proposed 732 nm measurements may resolve the question as to whether there exists and influx of fast oxygen ions into the equatorial ionosphere from the magnetosphere, which has been suggested to be caused by the polar O+ outflow that is diverted to the low latitude ionosphere by magnetospheric-ionospheric coupling processes. During the night the Doppler shifts of the OH nightglow at 731.6 nm would be observed to determine mesospheric winds averaged over the OH volume emission profile with a centroid altitude of ~87km. These results would be particularly useful in the support of the TIMED (thermosphere ionosphere mesosphere energetics and dynamics) satellite tidal studies as ground-based observations of mesospheric tidal winds in the Southern hemisphere are sparse. A filter changer would select between the two filters, 630 nm and 732 nm, as necessary to get the observations these science objectives require doc16982 none Butterflyfishes of the genus Chaetodon (Teleostei, Family Chaetodontidae) are conspicuous inhabitants of coral reefs worldwide and are ecological indicators of reef health due to their dependence on coral as a food source. These fishes exhibit a wide range of social and feeding behaviors and their species-specific color patterns provide visual cues used in social communication, but until recently these fishes were not known to produce sound during natural social behaviors. We have shown that territorial butterflyfishes produce sounds during agonistic interactions in the field. Normally the ear is the organ responsive to sound (as in all vertebrates). In fishes of the genus Chaetodon, however, it appears that the mechanosensory lateral line system, which is normally responsive only to water flow, may be sensitive to sound. This is thought to be due to the presence of a unique linkage of the swim bladder with the lateral line system (the laterophysic connection), found only in fishes in the genus Chaetodon. The goal of the proposed research program is to understand the functional significance of this unique structural specialization and the ways in which the ear and lateral line system process and integrate sounds produced during natural social behaviors. In order to do this, we will study 8 species of Chaetodon and test the more specific hypotheses: 1) that fishes in the genus Chaetodon naturally produce sound in the context of specific behavioral interactions, 2) that the presence of swim bladder horns enhances sensitivity of the inner ear to sound pressure stimuli, 3) that the laterophysic connection uniquely makes the lateral line system sound-sensitive, where it is normally only sensitive to water flow (which is physically distinct from sound), and 4) that variation in the structure of the laterophysic connection (already defined in 21 species with prior NSF funding) has important functional implications for the degree of sound sensitivity. These hypotheses will be tested using comparative behavioral, anatomical, biomechanical and neurophysiological approaches. We are using an exceptional model system for an integrated, field and lab study of the sensory biology of an diverse and ecologically important group of coral reef fishes. Students at both Villanova University and the University of Hawaii will benefit from this collaboration by interacting with both PI s who bring complementary approaches and methodologies to the project. Undergraduates and graduate students will be important contributors to this project. Several undergraduate, and graduate theses and dissertations will arise from this research program, thus enhancing the education of all student participants. In addition, Villanova students will have the opportunity to carry out field research in Both PI s will continue to involve women and minorities in their laboratories, as their records show they have done in the past. Dissemination of research results will occur through paper presentations at a variety of national conferences (e.g. SICB, ASIH, Neurosciences, ARO), and international conferences by both PI s, and the publication of several independent and collaborative peer-reviewed papers and potential invited or review chapters doc16983 none Liquid crystalline elastomers are a new class of soft materials, distinguished by the coupling between orientational order and strain, whose mechanical deformations give rise to changes in the dielectric tensor. Cholesteric liquid crystal elastomers, due to their periodic structure, are photonic band-gap materials whose band structure can be altered by mechanical strain. Optically pumped cholesteric liquid crystal elastomers exhibit distributed cavity effects, stimulated emission, and, above a threshold, mirrorless lasing at the band edges. The proposed work is to study, in conjunction with EC collaborators, the response of optically pumped helical cholesteric and other periodic liquid crystalline elastomers under mechanical strain. Participating graduate and undergraduate students will gain hands-on experience using the latest research techniques in laser physics and spectroscopy studying photonic band gap elastomers. In addition to gaining fundamental insights into the processes underlying the optical response of these materials, the proposed research will lead to mechanically tunable laser sources, switchable mirrors and tunable band-gap materials. Liquid crystal elastomers are novel rubber-like materials that dramatically change their optical properties when mechanically deformed. This unique property can be used to produce exceptional properties not possible with other materials; for example, they can be used to produce mechanically tunable wavelength selective mirrors, and large area, thin film lasers. The planned research will focus on exploring and utilizing these unique properties and effects. The high-risk materials research that led to the recent discovery of tunable rubber band lasers would not have been possible without public funding of basic research. The proposed work, to be performed in collaboration with European Community scientists already engaged in the study of elastomeric materials, is needed to ensure U.S. presence at the forefront of this materials science and technology area. The project will educate participating graduate and undergraduate students in the cutting-edge interdisciplinary areas of soft materials characterization, laser physics and photonics, and is expected to impact on a variety of technologies ranging from telecommunications to artificial muscles doc16984 none The Mississippi Research Infrastructure Improvement Program builds on successful previous investments and targets five areas: 1)Nanostructured Silicate Systems with Designed Molecular and Supermolecular Architecture in Hybrid Organic Inorganic Materials; 2) Computational Chemistry; 3) Integrating Molecular, Cellular and Organismal Responses of Bioregulatory Systems to Environmental Stressors; 4) Protein Structure and Localization; and 5) Computational Simulation and Information Technology. The Nanostructured Silicate Systems group involves chemists, physicists and polymer scientists engineers. It will develop nanostructured silicate systems and molecular silicas to exploit the potential for the design of novel materials with macroscopic properties that are a direct consequence of the unique nanoscopic properties of the finely dispersed heterogeneous components. The Computational Chemistry research group will concentrate on fundamental problems of potential energy surfaces, geometry and structure of inclusion complexes, hydrogen bonding in ground and excited states, and ring strain while improving computational efficiencies of the methods employed. The research group involved with Integrating Molecular, Cellular and Organismal Responses to Stress will investigate the biochemical, physiological and behavioral responses of the bioregulatory systems of animals and plants brought about by chemical and other stressors, including delineation of changes in the proteome during stress responses. The Protein Structure and Localization group will investigate structures known to have important physiological roles and involves identifying the compartment(s), in which protein acts, including movement from one compartment to another that often regulates protein function. They will use relatively low-resolution tools in conjunction with computational methods to recognize domains and other elements of tertiary structure. The Computational Simulation and Information Technology group will provide high performance computing and information technology support to the other research areas. The research infrastructure improvement project includes researchers at the University of Mississippi (UM), the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC), the University of Southern Mississippi (USM), Jackson State University (JSU), Mississippi State University MSU), and Mississippi College (MC). Cross-cutting computational support will be provided by the Mississippi State University Engineering Research Center. In addition to the research effort, the Mississippi infrastructure improvement plan includes support for activities to strengthen the campus environment for research. This support includes faculty start-up funds, equipment, travel and stipends for undergraduate and graduate students. Staff development activities such as seminars and workshops, commercialization assistance, subscription services etc. will also be available to further strengthen the research environment. The Mississippi project also includes focused activities designed to increase the participation of women and members of other under-represented groups in the activities of the award doc16985 none The Idaho EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement project invests in three research focus areas and implements a number of initiatives to strengthen statewide human resource development and train its 21st century workforce. Idaho s three research universities, the University of Idaho, Idaho State University and Boise State University will collaborate in these endeavors. The Idaho research universities will build nationally competitive teams in the following areas: 1) nanoscale materrials for electronics and sensor applications; 2) life at interfaces and the biocomplexity of extreme environments; and 3) neuro-fuzzy soft computing via silicon structures. In the nanoscale materials area, research will focus on the ultimate suitability of various materials for device and sensor applications in electronics, optoelectronics and magnetics. The research in life at interfaces and the biocomplexity of extreme environments will address biochemical and geochemical aspects of life at rock-water interfaces in extreme environments through an interdisciplinary combination of field, laboratory and modeling components. Neuro-fuzzy soft computing via silicon structures will address theoretical and practical issues for developing enabling technology necessary for cost effective neuro-fuzzy computing systems. The human resource development programs will add value to the project s research focus areas through the integration of research training and student education and through professional development of faculty. A number of activities are also proposed for new and continuing collaborations with national laboratories and Idaho s private sector. In addition, specific programs will address several of the issues challenging Idaho s workforce, including the recruitment and retention of members of under-represented groups in research and education-related activities doc16986 none Young In this study, researchers at UCLA will develop further the new method of laser ablation sampling of rock materials for analysis by multiple collector inductively coupled plasma-source mass spectrometry (MC-ICPMS). The new technology will permit researchers to use the isotopes of important and abundant rock-forming elements like magnesium, silicon, and iron as a means to discover the physical and chemical processes that affected rocks from a spectrum of environments. These environments include the ocean floor, the insides of asteroids, and the deep sources of volcanoes. Results will be used to elucidate details about a variety of phenomena related to the formation and subsequent evolution of the Earth. Questions that will be addressed using the new technique include: how flowing water heated from undersea volcanoes affects the chemistry of Earth s crust; how rocks formed from gas and dust in the early solar system and how this process gave rise to rocky planets and satellites with large amounts of water, including Earth; the timescales of events leading to active volcanism on Earth; and the ways in which isotopes can be used to distinguish biological from non-biological chemical processes in rocks and in the atmosphere doc16987 none This award funds the Learning in the Woods project which aims to use a multi-faceted approach to integrate research and education on environmental change at interannual to interdecadal scales in the Great Basin, where rapid population growth is testing the vulnerability of natural and human-dominated ecosystems to climatic fluctuations. The primary goal of the research is to obtain a baseline representation, over the last millennium, of interannual to interdecadal changes in water supply and fire regime. The spatial and temporal patterns of wildfire will be analyzed in the context of climatic fluctuations. Tree-ring chronologies from moisture-sensitive species will be developed for selected watersheds, including the Truckee, Carson, Walker, Owens, and Humboldt River Basins. The annual to seasonal resolution of such natural archives allows for accurate calibration with instrumental records, so that multi-century long proxy series of annual to seasonal precipitation and stream flow can be obtained. In addition, a four-day science experience for K-12 teachers and students will be held every year, and aimed at Hispanic middle- and high-school students in Nevada. The specific scientific and educational objectives include testing the spatial coherence of decadal-scale variability in Great Basin hydroclimatology, determining the amplitude of interannual to interdecadal fluctuations of freshwater input to selected watersheds of the Intermountain West over the past millennium, examining spatial and temporal changes of fire regime in connection to local and regional climate at annual resolution for several centuries, educating new generations on the dynamic relationships that exist both in space and in time between climate and surface processes such as precipitation, runoff, and wildfire, developing a web-based information system showing the spatial variability of precipitation, stream flow, and fire regime over Great Basin watersheds for the period of instrumental observations and for the period of proxy climatic records, and providing under-represented groups an incentive, early in their educational careers, for pursuing science careers doc16988 none The New Mexico EPSCoR project focuses on natural resource analysis and management and nanoscience. The goal is to strengthen the infrastructure in these two focal areas and remove the barriers to competitive research and to related educational and economic development. Improved computer connectivity and communication among New Mexico s institutions undergirds both focal areas. Six institutions will be participating: University of New Mexico, New Mexico State University, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Eastern New Mexico University, Western New Mexico University, New Mexico Highlands University, San Juan College, and Dine College. In the Natural Resource Analysis and Management area, new faculty in remote sensing hydrology and forestry in addition to new labs in environmental chemistry and spatial analysis will be featured in the new Institute for Natural Resource Analysis and Management. In Nanoscience, the purchase of high-resolution microscopes and increased connectivity will contribute to the collaborations among the New Mexico campuses and between the campuses and the national laboratories. The Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, designed as a collaboration between Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories and the University of New Mexico, will participate in fostering research collaborations and providing nanoscience education. The Master of Science for Teachers program at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology will introduce nanoscience and nanotechnology into the curriculum doc16989 none Disentangling the effects of female choice, contest competition and scramble competition for mates. M. Spritzer, D. Meikle, and N. Solomon lay abstract Sexual selection is differential mating success caused by variation among members of one sex in a trait that influences acquisition of mates. Although sexual selection is one of the most intensively studied areas in the field of behavioral ecology, surprisingly little is known about the relative importance of the different mechanisms of sexual selection. The main goal of the proposed research is to determine the relative importance of female choice, contest competition, and scramble competition for mates in determining the mating success of males. Female choice involves females choosing to mate with a male based on conspicuous ornaments or behaviors. Contest competition involves direct aggressive interactions between males and scramble competition, in contrast, involves a male s ability to rapidly and accurately locate mates. Meadow voles were used as the study species because past studies suggest that all three of these mechanisms of sexual selection occur among these rodents. Male navigation ability was chosen as a trait believed to be favored by scramble competition, and male dominance rank was chosen as a trait believed to be favored by contest competition. In addition, the influence of female choice upon both of these traits will be tested. The specific objectives are to determine: (1) the relationship between male navigation ability and male mating success, (2) the relationship between dominance and navigation ability among male voles, (3) the relative influence of dominance and navigation ability upon male mating success, and (4) female mating preferences for males with varying levels of navigation ability and dominance. A series of lab and field experiments will be used to achieve these objectives. Navigation ability will be measured by scoring each male s ability to complete a maze test, and male dominance will be tested by scoring aggression between pairs of males in arena trials. Male reproductive success will be determined using genetic paternity analyses. The results of this project will be an important next step in understanding how sexual selection shapes the evolution of a species doc16990 none This is a study of symbioses between cyanobacteria and planktonic diatoms, dinoflagellates, radiolarians, silicoflagellates and other planktonic protozoans in the equatorial oligotrophic Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The investigators have recently observed that these symbioses are diverse and abundant, and some have not yet been reported in the scientific literature. The biology and the phylogeny of these symbioses are virtually unstudied. The 16S rDNA sequences of cyanobacterial symbionts within a diatom (Climacodium) showed that they are closely related to the N2 fixing genus Cyanothece (which fixes during the night), which suggests that some of these symbioses may involve N2 fixation. Drs. Carpenter and Zehr hypothesize that cyanelle symbionts may benefit host species either via incorporation of fixed N or C (via DON or DOC release or by being phagocyticized). The research approach will use combined microscopy and molecular biology approaches to link observed relationships between cyanobacteria and the eukaryotic microalgae with phylogenetic information and detection of the genes involved in nitrogen fixation. Using samples collected directly by microscopy, and bulk filtered water samples, the identity, nitrogen fixation potential (presence of nitrogenase genes) and expression of nitrogen fixation genes will be related to specific organisms and quantified in the water column. These approaches will be based on amplification and sequencing of 16S rDNA from the symbionts to understand the phylogeny of the cyanobacteria, and detection of the presence of nifH as an indicator of capacity to fix N2, examination of the ultrastructure of host and cyanelle, use of 14 C autoradiography to examine C transfer, measurements of abundance and distribution to quantify ecological importance, along with culture attempts to allow laboratory studies directed at determining the nature of the symbiotic interactions using GC MS. The research will take advantage of four already- funded (NSF) research cruises scheduled over the next three years in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans doc16933 none The consortium between Michigan State University and Florida State University proposes the construction of a highly efficient, large-area neutron detector for the detection of high-energy neutrons to be used in experiments with fast rare isotopes at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL). This consortium is joined by Ball State University, Central Michigan University, Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., Hope College, Indiana University at South Bend, Millikin University, Western Michigan University, and Westmont College, each of which will assemble and test one complete layer of the detector. The proposed detector consists of 144 horizontal blocks of plastic scintillator arranged in 9 layers of 16 detectors each, covering an area of 2.0 m wide by 1.6 m high. The detector is position sensitive and features multi-hit capability. The addition of passive iron converters enhances the detection efficiency for neutrons with energies above 100 MeV for an average efficiency of up to 70%. The high detection efficiency will allow the investigation of very neutron-rich nuclei that can only be produced with small intensities. The detector will be used in connection with the new sweeper magnet with its focal plane detectors in stand-alone mode as well as with the combination of sweeper magnet and the S800 magnetic spectrograph. It will therefore be essential for the experimental program at the coupled cyclotron facility. The detector can be optimized for even higher beam energies with only minor modifications due to its modular design. It could be the first detector to be used for fast fragmentation beams at the Rare Isotope doc16992 none The foci of this research are three-fold. First , a novel [4+2]-cycloaddition -rearrangement sequence will be used to set the ABCE cyclic core of the aspidosperma alkaloid skeleton. Second, a tandem thionium N-acyliminium ion cyclization strategy will be used to afford the pyrrolo[2,3-d]carbazole ring framework found in deethylibophyllidene. Third, the transition metal mediated cyclization of acetylenic diazoketoamides will be studied as a route to the synthesis of a number of alkaloids including strychnine. With this Renewal award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research efforts of Dr. Albert Padwa of the Department of Chemistry at Emory University. Professor Padwa will focus his work on the development of tandem, or cascade, methods for the formation of several carbon-carbon bonds and or rings systems in a single operation. Using combinations of cationic, anionic, radical, carbenoid or pericyclic processes will lead to the preparation of structurally diverse synthetic targets possessing interesting biological properties. The research has broader impact for the training of graduate students and for the development of methodology pertinent to the pharmaceutical industry doc16993 none The mechanisms by which cells repair DNA interstrand crosslinks remain largely unknown. In mammals, the nucleotide excision repair endonuclease XPF-Ercc1 plays a key role in interstrand crosslink repair. This function is conserved in the Drosophila XPF homolog MEI-9. This project concerns the interaction between MEI-9 and a newly identified crosslink repair protein, MUS312. Genetic analyses of mus312 mutants will be done to better understand which repair and recombination pathways require mus312, and to what extent mus312 and mei-9 act in the same pathways. Additional alleles of mus312 will be generated to better understand the MUS312 protein. Both mei-9 and mus312 are also essential for generating meiotic crossovers, and this function will also be studied genetically and molecularly. DNA is under constant attack by both internal and external agents; several chemotherapy agents exert their effects by creating interstrand crosslinks in DNA. The mechanisms by which normal cells repair this type of damage are unknown. The present research seeks to understand the contribution to this repair of two key proteins, MEI-9 and MUS312. These proteins interact physically to carry out this repair process in Drosophila melanogaster doc16994 none This research proposes to exploit timing diagrams to improve formal verification for system designs. Formal verification is a valuable debugging technique, but scalability and usability problems hinder its broader use. Timing diagrams promise to alleviate both problems because they arise from the design community and engender more restrictive computational models than existing verification notations. The proposed research (1) enhances timing diagrams with constructs needed to capture realistic verification problems and (2) develops scalable and compositional verification techniques that exploit timing diagrams unique computational characteristics for improved scalability and efficiency. The educational aspect of this project focuses on increasing students skills in modeling and reasoning about system designs through a combination of curricular enhancements and hands-on projects. The combination of these research and educational objectives enables wider adoption and increased feasibility of formal verification in real-world design practice doc16995 none A sampling protocol for fungi (Discomycetes) found in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic will be developed. Many of these fungi are inconspicuous and poorly studied, and it is not clear what survey methods should be used to discover the most species. The research is exploratory in that it will investigate methods for surveying fungi and lead to more effective and innovative research on a very poorly known group of organisms. Ultimately, the methods will be incorporated into the Greater Antilles Project, an ongoing inventory of the fungi of the Greater Antilles. A webpage and database for the Discomycetes component of the Greater Antilles Project will be developed and include photographs, locality data, and ecological data. Two students, one from Puerto Rico and one from the Dominican Republic, will be trained in sampling methods and taxonomy of Discomycetes doc16996 none The past decade has witnessed the development of wavelet analysis, a brand-new mathematical tool, which has been quickly adopted by diverse fields in science and engineering. In a brief period it has reached a certain level of maturity as a well-defined mathematical subject with a strong interdisciplinary character. Wavelets have certainly begun to make an impact in many areas, including signal processing, data and image compression. However, wavelet application to the solution of diffcult partial differential equations (PDE) arising in different areas of physics and engineering has been very limited. The objectives of this CAREER proposal are manifold. The first objective concerns the advancement of the state of the art of wavelet-based numerical algorithms. The second involves the application of the method to challenging engineering problems, which currently are difficult to solve using conventional numerical algorithms. The final aim of this project is in education and dissemination of the use of wavelets in large scale scientific computing. More specifically, our educational goals are (a) to develop a comprehensive graduate upper undergraduate level course on the use of wavelet-based numerical algorithms for solving partial differential equations, (b) to develop and disseminate ``easy-to-follow wavelet-based codes, and (c) to write a textbook ``Wavelets and Numerical Solution of PDEs. The project will consist of three parts: (1) algorithmic development, (2) high- performance computing applications, and (3) course and textbook development. In the first part of the project we plan to improve and further develop the dynamically adaptive second generation wavelet collocation (DASGWC) algorithm in these two areas: (a) extension of the method to complex geometries and (b) adaptation of the algorithm for efficient use on massively parallel computers. At the same time, we plan to apply the further improved second-generation wavelet collocation algorithm to the following two classes of problems: (a) fluid-structure interaction and (b) micro-scale heat transfer. These problems are chosen with an eye to testing the strength of the wavelet method and to evaluating the degree in which it can really shine over conventional numerical methods. Finally, we will develop a course and a textbook on high- performance algorithms with particular emphasis on wavelet-based adaptive methods and their implementation in modern computational environments. We will also maintain a web site where we will post some of the rudimentary wavelet codes for solving PDEs, homework assignments, and other relevant material. We feel that such a service would be of immense educational value to the graduate students in engineering and science, since very few universities offer courses in scientific computing using wavelets doc16997 none CAREER: Assessment of Open-Source Software for High-Performance Computing Edward B. Allen, P.I. : This project will implement an integrated program of empirical software-engineering research and an exemplar of education in empirical methods for undergraduate and graduate students in software engineering. This will be achieved through research focused on assessing the quality of open-source software for high-performance computing, and through development of relevant courses and teaching modules. High-performance computing is the platform of choice in many fields of science and engineering that are critical to modern society. Off-the-shelf software packages in this category include tools to implement mathematical models, and middleware to manage parallel and distributed computation. The open-source approach of software development is becoming increasingly attractive in this field. Research activities of this program will employ empirical analysis methods to find ways to assess the quality of open-source software for high-performance computing, enabling scientific and engineering users to make better informed choices. Case studies of selected software products will validate the practicality and usefulness of obtaining such quality assessments. Software-engineering education in America is largely lacking instruction in empirical analysis methods. A spectrum of teaching materials targeted toward this need will be developed. Research results and instructional materials will be disseminated through publications and the NSF-sponsored Center for Empirically Based Software Engineering (CeBASE doc16998 none The regulation of replication initiation is poorly understood in eukaryotes, largely due to the difficulty in identifying cis-acting regulatory determinants. A thorough genetic dissection of replicons (replication initiation sites and their cis-acting regulatory determinants) has been achieved in a limited number of experimental organisms. Prior research on Tetrahymena thermophila focused on the 21 kb rDNA minichromosome, which is amplified -fold during a single S phase in the developing macronucleus, yet is replicated just once during each subsequent vegetative cell division. The goal of this new research project is to identify and dissect additional chromosomal replicons in Tetrahymena. By comparing the genetic organization of replicons that are not amplified to the rDNA, insights into cell cycle control should be obtained. These investigations will also serve as an entry point to explore how genic balance is maintained in the ciliate macronucleus, which lacks traditional mitotic segregation machinery. The initial stage of the project involves the mapping of replication origins in small (~100 kb), non-rDNA macronuclear chromosomes by 2D gel electrophoresis, and cloning of DNA that spans these sites. These regions will be subjected to comparative sequence and functional genomic analysis, to identify conserved elements and determine the physical and possibly functional relationship of replication origins to neighboring genes. The genetic organization of these replicons will then be dissected using two complementary strategies. The first approach will employ a novel method in which chromosome breakage sequence (Cbs) elements will be targeted to specific positions in the germline (micronuclear) genome. Programmed DNA fragmentation at these Cbs sites in the developing macronucleus will be used to map the physical limits of the replicons under examination. As a variation to this approach, marker rescue will be used to restore function to defective replicons. In a complementary approach, restriction fragments from size-selected (100 kb) chromosomes will be inserted into an engineered selectable vector to generate plasmid libraries. These libraries will be transformed into Tetrahymena to identify artificial minichromosomes capable of supporting autonomous replication. DNA replication is a highly regulated process, assuring that chromosomes are duplicated once and only once per cell division. Deviations from strict cell cycle control can result in selective amplification (over-replication) of small DNA segments. The high degree of complexity of chromosomal replicons in higher eukaryotes, and the absence of natural or artificial minichromosomes in these systems has hampered research in this area. The amenability of Tetrahymena to reverse genetic analysis will be exploited here to determine how complex eukaryotic replicons are organized and to explore how global cell cycle regulatory mechanisms can be differentially imposed upon replication origins. A bonus of this project is the diversity of experimental approaches, which will provide students with unique learning opportunities at the interface of new (genomics) and more traditional (molecular genetic) technologies doc16999 none The proposed research is a component of CREICO (Cooperative Research on Ecological Interactions in the Coastal Oceans) program in the Adriatic Sea. This international initiative is intended to develop cooperation between Croatia, Slovenia, Italy and the US in environmental science in the Adriatic, in concert with Adriatic Observing System (CAOS) being developed with NOAA. CREICO is intended to increase understanding of the structure and function of ecological systems in the Adriatic, and the system response to perturbations. The focus of CREICO is on bloom phenomena and their causes and consequences. This proposal focuses on the mucilage phenomenon (mare sporco). Over the last 3 centuries, enormous accumulations of mucilage have occurred along the coasts of the northern Adriatic Sea, affecting the coasts of Italy, Slovenia and Croatia. The cause remains a mystery. Mucilage events damage local fisheries and tourism. Scientifically, the huge organic matter accumulation represents an opportunity to study the ecosystem level mechanisms of variability in the carbon biogeochemistry, and North Adriatic offers a natural laboratory. Predicting the mucilage events would be an excellent test of models of oceanic carbon biogeochemistry. While phytoplankton blooms produce the organic matter that ultimately forms mucilage Dr. Azam hypothesizes that bacterial processing of phytoplankton biomass, to produce slow?to-degrade polysaccharide plays a significant role. They will test hypotheses on bacterial production of slow?to-degrade dissolved and colloidal organic matter (including bacterial capsular material and exudates) and its aggregation to form mucilage under relevant ecosystem conditions. This work will be done in collaboration with Serena Fonda?Umani (Italy), Vera Zutic (Croatia) and Valentina Turk (Slovenia). They will use mesocosms (in Fonda?Umani lab in Trieste, Italy) to test hypotheses through perturbation experiments. Further, they will take advantage of the planned two 15?d cruises. Bacterial studies will use molecular approaches, to explore species?specific roles in mucilage production and decomposition. Polysaccharide structure analysis will seek relationships between bacterial biochemical profiles and polysaccharide utilizability. Dr. Azam and his lab have been informally collaborating with Italian, Slovenia and Croatian marine scientists and students on mucilage studies, in research and training. This research will increase this collaboration; it will address a long?standing oceanographic problem, with potential of discovering fundamental principles of carbon cycling of relevance to research on global change doc17000 none With the support of the Organic Dynamics Program in the Chemistry Division, Professor Kenneth B. Wiberg, of the Department of Chemistry at Yale University, will study the nature of the intramolecular interactions that control the structures, energies, spectra and other properties of organic molecules. Through a combination of experimental and theoretical approaches, Professor Wiberg will examine the intramolecular interactions that control the preferred conformations of molecules. Electrostatic interactions in organic molecules will also be studied making use of calculated group dipoles and examining the question of the effective dielectric constant both experimentally and computationally. Studies will also be done examining the nature of electronically excited states for cyclic and open chain alkenes, factors that control optical rotation and, hence, optical activity, and comparing the permanganate oxidation of alkenes with the reaction of alkenes with Cr(IV). Professor Kenneth B. Wiberg, of the Department of Chemistry at Yale University, with the support of the Organic Dynamics Program, studies the properties of organic molecules using the synergistic interaction between experiment and theory to garner a richer detail of information than would be possible using either approach by itself doc17001 none Daniel Nocera of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program to conduct research on the development of photoinduced multi-electron oxidation-reduction transformations. Dinuclear inorganic complexes in which the constituent metal centers differ by two units of oxidation state will be prepared and characterized. Photoinduced reactivity of these complexes will be studied. Specific systems selected for study include the photochemical production of dihydrogen from hydrohalic acids catalyzed by a newly discovered dirhenium photocatalyst, and related materials to be synthesized. Stereoelectronic factors that account for stabilization of two-equivalent mixed-valence complexes by diphosphazanes will be investigated and insights thus gained will be applied to design and synthesis of new two-unit mixed valence complexes. The main thrust of the present proposal is on extending scientific understanding of two-electron photochemical processes and two-equivalent mixed-valence complexes, rather than on development of specific catalyic systems. However, the work has high potential of leading to future useful technological applications, such as design of energy-conversion photocycles, and activation of C-H bonds by multielectron photoredox transformations doc17002 none This project is aimed at studying fundamental issues related to the development of a new, efficient high-temperature oxygen sorption process based on perovskite-type ceramic sorbents for oxygen removal and air separation. The new sorption process takes advantage of the unique properties of certain perovskite-type ceramics which can adsorb a large quantity of oxygen, but not other gases, at high temperatures (300-800oC). Three perovskite-type ceramic materials with different compositions are selected as the sorbents for this study. The sorbent pellets and particles of various sizes are prepared by citrate and press-sintering methods. The thermodynamic defect equilibrium for oxygen sites in these ceramics is being studied experimentally by the gravimetric method and theoretically using point-defect and cluster-defect models. This defect equilibrium study provides oxygen-sorption isotherm data for these sorbents. Heat of sorption and order-disorder phase transformation of these ceramic sorbents is studied also by TGA DSC. Oxygen sorption kinetics on these ceramic sorbents are investigated experimentally by the transient gravimetric method and modeled using a simple linear-driving-force model and a more complex model based on the ambipolar diffusion theory. The chemical and mechanical stability of the ceramic sorbent particles is being studied systematically by dilatometry and attrition tests. Finally, fixed-bed experiments for oxygen removal or air separation are conducted to obtain data for design of a practical separation process based on this new concept. This project represents the first effort in developing sorption processes based on this new group of non-traditional sorbents. On the fundamental side, this project may lead to development of a large number of new sorption processes with unique separation characteristics that are not offered by the traditional sorption processes. If a hydrocarbon is used to regenerate the sorbent, this process can be extended to provide new chemical reactors for partial oxidation of hydrocarbons with improved selectivity. On the practical side, the proposed sorption process is based on perovskite-type ceramics with preferential equilibrium sorption for oxygen. Successful development of this sorption process will have a significant impact on industrial processes for air separation and oxygen removal doc17003 none Bhatia Under this CAREER Award, the investigator will develop a comprehensive research program in Microscale Hepatic Tissue Engineering oriented towards elucidating the structure function relationship of the liver. The liver architecture in vivo will be used as a guide to quantitatively investigate and optimize hepatocyte-to-hepatocycte cell interactions, hepatocycte-to-non-parenchymal cell interactions, cell-to-extracellular matrix interactions, and the role of soluble cues. Micropatterned surfaces conjugated with the adhesive peptide RGD as a model extracellular matrix will be used to ligate integrins and control cell-to-cell interactions in 2D. Photopolymerized PEG hydrogels conjugated with RGD will be used to present an adhesive peptide to aggregated hepatocytes in a 3D context. Photopatterning of cell-containing hydrogels will be used to explore 3D features of tissue structure. Collectively, the studies will provide fundamental insight into the cross-talk between integrins, cadherins, and gap junctions as well as the relative role of 2D and 3D environments in this cross-talk. Insights gained will benefit design of bioartificial liver reactors and implantable constructs and should have a major technological impact on the practice of 3D tissue engineering. The educational plan focused on building and maintaining the involvement of women in science and engineering and the need for further integration across the fields of engineering, biology, and medicine. A pilot outreach program for 11-13 year old girls would be expanded and a study of reasons for attrition of women in engineering would be broadened. An interdisciplinary undergraduate textbook on Tissue Engineering would be completed doc17004 none M. Yoda, Georgia Institute of Technology The objective of this SGER proposal is to study steady streaming flows due to oscillating bluff bodies of complex shape in highly confined fluid geometries. It is hypothesized that fish determine the direction of incident sound by exploiting such flows in their inner ears. If proved to be correct, this auditory retina hypothesis could lead to a new paradigm in sensory biology with possible application in human hearing. In engineering practice, this hypothesis could lead to compact and sensitive underwater acoustic transducers doc17005 none Harvard University-Marc D. Hauser-Primate-Inspired Specialized Learning in an Agent Architecture: Safe and Robust Adaptive Action Selection The intended multi-year research project would build a library of computational modules or idioms for representing learning and action-selection in non-human primates. We will particularly focus on modeling why well-learned new behavior does not always over-ride more established behavior patterns, and under what circumstances it can come to be exploited. This modeling could be key to designing fail-safe mechanisms in highly adaptive intelligent systems. In this exploratory project, we would adapt an existing agent architecture to model the specialized learning in Cotton-Top Tamarins, focussing on several completed experiments already documented in our laboratory. Conducting this research under an SGER will give us an estimate of the scale of the software project, the level of interaction we can expect between the modeling and our ongoing research, and the educational potential for this system. This will help us determine the level of staffing and funding requested in the full proposal doc17006 none ions that preserve the properties of interest. Achieving this goal will consist of first developing robust notions of bi-simulation for purely continuous systems, and then unifying the continuous and discrete notions in a manner that is consistent with the dynamics of hybrid systems. Merging discrete and continuous systems creates serious educational issues in order to combine the traditionally separate threads of discrete and continuous mathematics. These issues must be addressed at all educational levels. At the graduate level, creating new courses on hybrid systems are needed, but with focus on complexity reduction methods in both control theory and computer science. However, given the one-sided backgrounds of most undergraduate students, what is needed at the undergraduate level, is a cross-departmental, embedded systems course that will highlight both the discrete and continuous nature of embedded systems in various application domains. This will allow the earlier uniformization of educational backgrounds, expose students to related application domains in other departments, as well as demonstrate the cross-disciplinary power of the models, methods, and tools. This project was originally funded as a CAREER award, and was converted to a Presidential Early Career Award for Engineers and Scientists (PECASE) award in May doc16947 none The consortium between Michigan State University and Florida State University proposes the construction of a highly efficient, large-area neutron detector for the detection of high-energy neutrons to be used in experiments with fast rare isotopes at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL). This consortium is joined by Ball State University, Central Michigan University, Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., Hope College, Indiana University at South Bend, Millikin University, Western Michigan University, and Westmont College, each of which will assemble and test one complete layer of the detector. The proposed detector consists of 144 horizontal blocks of plastic scintillator arranged in 9 layers of 16 detectors each, covering an area of 2.0 m wide by 1.6 m high. The detector is position sensitive and features multi-hit capability. The addition of passive iron converters enhances the detection efficiency for neutrons with energies above 100 MeV for an average efficiency of up to 70%. The high detection efficiency will allow the investigation of very neutron-rich nuclei that can only be produced with small intensities. The detector will be used in connection with the new sweeper magnet with its focal plane detectors in stand-alone mode as well as with the combination of sweeper magnet and the S800 magnetic spectrograph. It will therefore be essential for the experimental program at the coupled cyclotron facility. The detector can be optimized for even higher beam energies with only minor modifications due to its modular design. It could be the first detector to be used for fast fragmentation beams at the Rare Isotope doc17008 none This is a collaborative award that supports theoretical research and education in the area of condensed matter theory. The collaborator is professor Belitz at the University of Oregon ( ). The main objective of the project is to enhance the current understanding of many-electron systems at very low temperatures, and especially of phase transitions and other collective phenomena in such systems. The PIs will apply an effective field theory, developed during previous grant periods, to various collective phenomena of electrons in solids. The methods employed are general field theoretic techniques and the renormalization group. Specific systems for which this project is relevant include, magnets, superconductors, and doped semiconductors. The successful completion of this project will contribute to the understanding of an important area of condensed matter physics, and will train technical personnel with theoretical expertise in this field. %%% This is a collaborative award that supports theoretical research and education in the area of condensed matter theory. The collaborator is professor Belitz at the University of Oregon ( ). The research focuses on fundamental problems of condensed matter physics involving strong electronic correlations in clean and disordered systems. Specific topics of study include quantum phase transitions in ferromagnets and superconductors, the coexistence of superconductivity and ferromagnetism in UGe2, and how electronic correlations affect the metal-insulator transition. Quantum phase transitions occur at zero temperature and are driven by quantum fluctuations in contrast to the more familiar and well-understood phase transitions that are driven by thermal fluctuations and have non-zero transition temperatures. Critical fluctuations associated with quantum phase transitions may influence electronic behavior over a wide temperature range and may explain unusual electronic properties exhibited by materials with strong electronic correlations and other condensed matter systems. The award also supports education in advanced theoretical methods for condensed matter phenomena doc17009 none The project will investigate the extent to which variability of the large-scale atmosphere is controlled by variations at the smaller synoptic scales. The upscale energy flux from the synoptic waves is reckoned to be an important contributor in generating variations at the larger scales. It is, of course, by no means the only contributor since instability of the zonal flow, variations in tropical diabatic heating, and planetary wave-zonal flow interactions can also generate significant planetary-scale variability in the troposphere on the intraseasonal-to seasonal time scales. Modeling and prediction of this variability component remains challenging. Drs. Orlando and, co-PI, Dr. Tung (Univ. of Washington, Seattle) will conduct a dynamically oriented analysis of the interaction of upscale synoptic fluxes and the larger-scale tropospheric circulation. The focus of the project will be on characterizing the upscale synoptic fluxes from modeling experiments of varying complexity. The project will advance understanding and modeling of the tropospheric circulation variability on intraseasonal-to-seasonal time scales, particularly, during the Northern winter season doc17010 none R. Sureshkumar, Washington University The objectives of this proposed research are: (1) to develop efficient and robust three-dimensional simulation tools for the design, optimization, and control of manufacturing processes of polymeric materials, and (2) to use the simulation tools to investigate thermostatic effects on the stability of polymeric flows in complex geometric shapes likely to be encounter in industrial processes. The problem to be considered are flow in concentric cylinders, flow through arrays of cylinders in a channel, multilayer shear flows, uniaxial and or biaxial extension, and fiber spinning. The broader impact of the proposed research is the development of simulation tools for industrial processes, to train graduate students in materials research and development, and to enhance the undergraduate students design experience doc17011 none Glutamate is the most abundant neurotransmitter that brain cells use to trigger electrical impulses in other brain cells they contact. At these sites of contact, called synapses, many vital processes take place. There are many different types of receptors for glutamate encoded by different gene families, which have different specific actions at synapses. The NMDA family of glutamate receptors is of particular importance because they can trigger changes in the level of sensitivity of synaptic connections between brain cells. Modulation by enzymes called kinases adds phosphate chemical groups to NMDA receptors causing marked enhancement of current passing through these receptors and enhancing signaling between brain cells. This modulatory effect has an important role in processes related to learning, development, and degeneration of brain cells. The identification of the sites on NMDA receptor subunits targeted by specific kinases will provide research tools for studying the physiological importance of NMDA receptor phosphorylation in brain cells. In the case of modulation by protein kinases of the C-type (PKC), the presence of these sites may also depend on the particular NMDA receptor family member present. In a particularly exciting example of the importance of NMDA receptor subtype, the NMDA receptor subunit that is more prevalent in young brains, NR2B, has been shown to give rise to more easily modifiable synaptic connections. Receptors that contain NR2B subunits pass larger calcium ion currents than other NMDA receptors. The present proposal hypothesizes that this difference is due to an increased sensitivity to PKC. Controlled expression of selectively mutated NMDA receptors in my laboratory has recently demonstrated that direct phosphorylation of 2 specific serine amino acid sites (S and S ) by protein kinase C controls current amplification in NR2B receptors. This result motivates the aims of the proposal and: 1) challenges a previous viewpoint that kinase modulation of current must be entirely indirect via other proteins associated with NMDA receptors at the synapse, and 2) provides a starting point for elucidating a mechanism of direct kinase action. These studies uniquely focus on modulation of the NMDA current that itself triggers long-term synaptic changes in brain cells doc17012 none Carbon has two stable forms, 12C and 13C. Both forms are used in photosynthesis, but plants have a slight preference for 12C, so plants are ENRICHED in 12C compared with atmospheric CO2. Furthermore, the degree of enrichment indicates variations in plant physiology. This knowledge has long been used to study physiology of individual plants; our study applies these concepts to studies of WHOLE ECOSYSTEMS. By sampling air at night at the mouth of small, well-defined watersheds, and analyzing carbon isotopes in respired CO2, we believe we can monitor the physiological responses of the ecosystems within the watersheds to environmental change. We will test this concept in two small watersheds, and will also design and test equipment to automatically sample air for the isotope analyses. At least two undergraduates will be involved in this study each field season doc17013 none West Virginia has developed a strong academic base on which to support larger scale competitive programs and technology transfer in the areas of Identification Science and Technology (Id S 2) find new ways to assist users interacting with computers and assist researchers in various disciples; and 3) provide a resource for student research and education at various levels including high school. The HPC effort includes use of an established Virtual Environment Laboratory for a variety of innovative research and educational activities. In addition to work in the research areas, the project will integrate the NSF EPSCoR activities with on-going educational and outreach initiatives in the state, create new initiatives, and increase the participation of under-represented groups in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology doc17014 none This interagency transfer to the Office of Naval Research (ONR) supports ACE-Asia (Aerosol Characterization Experiment) which took place in Spring, . ACE-Asia was aimed at improving our understanding of the physical, chemical, and radiative properties and distribution of natural and anthropogenic aerosols emitted in Northeast Asia and transported over the Pacific Ocean. ACE was supported by NSF, ONR, NOAA, and other national and international agencies. Specifically, this transfer covers part of the deployment and operational costs for the ONR supported Twin Otter aircraft. It also funds satellite support for the Twin Otter and the NSF C-130 aircraft in the field doc17015 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop technologies to generate meshes over general three-dimensional domains that are appropriate for high-order finite element analysis. A current stumbling block to the wide adoption of high-order finite element techniques is the lack of automatic means to generate appropriate curved meshes. This project will develop a new and innovative procedure for the effective generation of these types of meshes. The commercial application of this research is the integration of CAD technologies with advanced automated simulation techniques to be used within engineering design processes. These tools will reduce the time and costs associated with performing engineering analysis during design and increase the accuracy of the predictions obtained doc17016 none This project proposes workshop, to be conducted in June on Managing as Designing to undertake a high-risk effort to create a new approach to management education. Design thinking as a powerful way of approaching problems is the underlying philosophy, in contrast to the prevailing emphasis on purely analytical skills in decision-making characterizing management education since the s. Design represents a distinct mode of cognition different from analytical decision making, and suggests a more creative approach especially to the problem of envisioning new futures. The objective of the workshop is to define a new vocabulary of management education based on design thinking. The workshop will engage a broad range of scholars, designers and managers representing disciplines including architecture, music, art, sociology, history, communication and management doc17017 none Holmen Very little is known about the organic chemical composition of the ultrafine particles emitted by vehicles and about the atmospheric processing of these particles as they age during transport in the atmosphere. This is especially true for the more polar organic compounds that have been linked to stronger mutagenic effects. The composition of these ultrafine particles, and the organic species adsorbed to the particles, has very important implications for particle reactivity and the resulting endpoint effects on environmental and human health. The Research Component focus is the processes that control the physical and chemical attributes of vehicle-derived ultrafine particles. The Research Component will: (1) design and build a new sampler for size- and time-resolved collection of ultrafine particles from vehicles; (2) conduct aging experiments on vehicle-derived ultrafine particles to determine reaction products during exposure to UV light, ozone, and NOx under controlled laboratory conditions; and (3) develop new analytical techniques to analyze the composition of both fresh and aged ultrafine particles. This research will help close the gap in understanding the mechanism of diesel soot toxicity and identify the conditions under which aging mechanisms produce significant polar organic species. The results of this research will allow the most complete model yet of the processes governing the formation of vehicle-derived PM polar organic species in the atmosphere doc17018 none Research and educational activities tied to biomaterials and bio-inspired materials are the theme of the career plan of the PI. A fundamental approach is followed towards design of composites of hydroxyapatite and polymers for development of new biomaterials for bone replacement. The new approach takes inspiration from biology. A molecular control of polymer-HAP interactions is attempted with synthetic macromolecules, mimicking the formation of biocomposites in nature. Experiments will involve vibrational microspectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy to elucidate the molecular interactions between polymeric additives and mineral components under simulated body fluid environments. These interactions and understanding their role on bulk macroscopic mechanical response of the composite to loading is the focus of these studies. This research will attempt to understand the molecular mechanisms involved in formation of insitu composites and develop fundamental science based on this understanding to design composites with properties tailored for bone replacement. The educational activities proposed are very closely linked to the research. PI plans to 1.) Improve awareness of the biomaterials field at NDSU through a new course on biomaterials, summer research projects for undergraduate students and establishing a NDSU chapter of Materials Research Society. 2.) Stimulate interest in engineering and materials related research in middle school girls and 3.) Bring excitement of the materials and biomaterials field into middle school classrooms doc17019 none The focus of this research is to develop methodology for the preparation of biologically relevant C-saccharides and C-glycoside analogs of carbohydrate contining natural products. One approach uses a ring closing metathesis (RCM)) strategy for the preparation of C-1 glycals, which are, in turn, readily functionalized and transformed into 2-deoxy C-glycosides of 2-gluco-C-glycosides. A second approach uses an iterative tethering-olefin metathesis strategy for the preparation of C-oligosaccharides. With this new award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research activities of Dr. Maarten H. Postema of the Department of Chemistry at Wayne State University. Professor Postema will focus his work on developing methodology for the preparation of stable and unique saccharide mimics. Carbohydrates are an important class of organic structures. When joined at the cell surface to form oligosaccharides, they play an important role in cellular recognition, metastasis and adhesion. The stable C-saccharides and C-glycosides generated by the methodology of this project have implications for the pharmaceutical industry. The project also presents an attractive venue for the training of graduates students doc17020 none This award to the Polar Research Board is to establish a Committee on Frontiers in Polar Biology. The Committee will examine the opportunities and challenges of using modern technologies and methods of biology for conducting research on Arctic and Antarctic organisms. The committee will seek to identify the most important research questions that can be addressed using the new approaches and to recommend ways to facilitate and accelerate the transfer and use of genomic technologies to answer fundamental questions about Arctic and Antarctic organisms. The Committee s work will result in a consensus report with conclusions and recommendations that will highlight the potential of these new areas and provide guidance about research opportunities doc17021 none Embedded software is ubiquitous: it is present in a vast array of everyday products and appliances, and it accounts for an increasing share of the functionality and development cost of systems such as cars and aircrafts. Innovation in many fields, from transportation to military, from consumer products to manufacturing, is increasingly dependent on our ability to design ever more sophisticated embedded systems. Yet, the sophistication and complexity of embedded software is fast approaching the limit of current design abilities. This project aims at developing a formal approach to embedded software design that copes with complexity through the exploitation of design structure, and in particular, of modularity (the ability to assemble a system from components) and hierarchy (the ability to implement a complex component as a collection of simpler components). The project is articulated in three directions. The first project direction focuses on methods and tools for ensuring that the components used in a design are compatible one with the other. This helps to avoid bugs stemming from the interaction of multiple components, which are often among the hardest to prevent and detect. The project develops theories of component interfaces that captures the protocol, timing, and performance aspects of the interaction among embedded software components. The resulting interface theories constitute an extended type system that encompasses not only the values passed as inputs and outputs, but also the dynamic behavior of the components, enabling to check at design time whether the components interact in a compatible way. The second project direction investigates methods for deriving the performance and reliability of a system from that of its components. In parallel to this modular approach to analysis, this project direction will pursue a modular approach to debugging, in which the components are analyzed in isolation, and the results are used to guide the simulation of the entire system. Finally, as embedded systems are often used as controllers of a device or physical system, the third project direction proposes the use of multi-modal stochastic systems, a model that supports in an integrated fashion system identification, controller design, and code generation. In addition to direct student involvement in the proposed research, the educational component of this proposal consists in the development of two courses: Introduction to systems engineering, and real-time embedded software. The first course will introduce students to a structured, model-based approach to system design; the second will present the techniques and challenges of real-time embedded software development. These courses will be informed by the philosophy that structure, in terms of composition and hierarchy, is the key to the design of complex systems, and that models are the basis of reasoning about systems. This model-based, structure-oriented approach is an innovative element in the curriculum generally available in Computer Engineering and Computer Science departments. The courses will play a pivotal role in the planned growth of the Software Engineering discipline at UC Santa Cruz doc17022 none This project, supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities, supports a three-day workshop for about twenty graduate students and postdoctoral students that aims to prepare them to initiate careers at the college and university level. Professor Jespersen from Saint John s University and faculty from diverse institutions will host this workshop at the Fall Eastern Analytical Symposium meeting in New Jersey. Similar workshops will be offered in and with the goal of establishing the workshop as a traditional, self-sustaining component of the Eastern Analytical Symposium. The objective of this project is to make future college and university teachers more fully aware of the opportunities and responsibilities that will accompany this career choice so that they will be more successful. Of particular interest will be attracting women and minorities to academic careers and increasing their retention rates in the teaching profession doc17023 none The Massachusetts General Hospital is developing a large format film that will take an interdisciplinary look at brain science and raise questions about the nature and biological basis of consciousness. For the past two decades, the field of cognitive neuroscience has begun to explore and understand some of the most complex brain functions and, for the first time, research is pointing to answers to such questions as, What makes intelligence possible? and What makes consciousness possible? This film will examine the basic functions of the brain and explore some of the cutting-edge research that is reaching into the realms of intelligence and consciousness. The large format film will be supported by outreach components that will include an educator s guide, a family pamphlet, a poster and a website. Science content for the series will be developed by Anne Buckingham Young, Chief of the Department of Neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital; Dennis Selkow, Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women s Hospital and Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School; and Gary L. Gottlieb, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. They will work closely with advisors with expertise in cognitive neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, philosophy and biology. The project will be under the direction of JoAnna Baldwin-Mallory, Director of the Office of New Ventures at Partners HealthCare System. The film will be directed and produced by Peter Georgi who is currently producing and directing the NSF supported large format film, The Human Body, with the BBC. Front-end and formative evaluation will be conducted by Ralph Adler of RMC Research. As they have developed the conceptualization and preliminary plans for the film, the staff has identified several issues that would benefit from further, more in-depth planning. These activities that would be conducted during the planning stage include: Convening the scientific advisors and production staff to develop the science content further and to design an approach for presenting substantive content that is appropriate for the large format film medium. Conducting front-end evaluation of popular understandings of and interest in brain science. Carrying out formative testing of preliminary script ideas. Investigating the potential for supplementing the already planned outreach materials with additional components such as a guide specifically designed for classroom teachers, an activity guide for students, a CD-ROM and short radio spots that present stories from the front lines of brain research. Developing a film script, print and web components. Establishing partnerships in research and academic communities and with science centers and natural history museums doc17024 none Smith, William This award will support a five year Cooperative Agreement with the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for management and operations of the National Optical Astronomy Observatories (NOAO) and the National Solar Observatory (NSO). NOAO and NSO will administer observing time to the astronomical community via peer reviewed observing proposals, providing access to research facilities for over scientists per year in astronomy and solar physics. NOAO and NSO will also administer public outreach through education programs, visitor centers, and Web-based information and imagery. NOAO and NSO will also be responsible for coordinating planning by the US community for major new federally funded initiatives in ground based optical and infrared astronomy; this planning is in close partnership with US universities and non-federal observatories. NOAO s facilities are located at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) near Tucson, Arizona, and Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) near La Serena, Chile, which together include 4 telescopes of 4-meter class. NOAO is also responsible for the US Gemini Program Office (USGP), which is the gateway for US astronomers to their share of observing resources on the twin 8-meter Gemini Telescopes. Scientific studies will include Wide field imaging studies in optical and infrared wavelengths to locate and characterize the most distant visible objects in the universe and the dark matter pervading the universe, Spectroscopic studies to understand composition, distances, and ages of stars and galaxies, Imaging studies to locate and characterize Kuiper Belt Objects, the most distant bodies in the solar system, Imaging and spectroscopic observations of supernovae and other stellar explosions, to understand their intrinsic nature and their use a measures of the acceleration of the universe by dark energy , Spectroscopic studies of the centers of galaxies and quasars to determine the nature of massive black holes located in these active galactic nuclei. NSO s facilities are located on Sacramento Peak, NM, and on Kitt Peak. The principal telescope at Sacramento Peak is a vacuum tower telescope with world s best image quality for solar studies, through use of solar adaptive optics. The principal telescope at Kitt Peak is a 1.5-meter all-reflecting solar telescope, world s largest solar telescope and optimized for infrared observations. NSO will also operate the Synoptic Optical Long-term Investigations of the Sun (SOLIS) telescopes and the worldwide telescopes for the Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG). Scientific studies with the NSO telescopes will include High precision imaging of magnetic fields on the surface of the sun to understand the energy release mechanisms in solar flares, Synoptic monitoring of changes on the solar surface, including sunspots and explosive activity, to determine how these changes affect the Earth, including global climate change, Characterization of the internal structure of the sun using helioseismology, to determine why the sun changes with the 11 year sunspot cycle, Infrared spectroscopy of the solar chromosphere and corona to determine the location and composition of cooler clouds of molecular material, Infrared spectroscopy of the solar corona to understand the role of magnetic fields in shaping and controlling the corona, where solar material is ejected into interplanetary space doc17025 none The multiple time-scale and long-range dependent behavior of network traffic have been established by numerous experimental studies. In particular, power-law and Zipf-like distributions appear to be inherent to the Internet (file size, popularity of web documents, degrees of routers). These findings are raising the questions of (i) whether effective and valid mathematical tools for modeling and predicting network traffic can be developed and (ii) whether classical QoS engineering methods, based on the exponential distribution and its variants, can still be useful, if appropriately adapted. This project aims at providing positive, constructive answers to these questions, through the development of tractable, end-to-end QoS engineering solutions, applicable to current and future networks. Specifcally, this project will focus on the development of a new QoS methodology, tailored for multiple time-scale traffic, termed Stochastically Bounded Burstiness (SBB) calculus. This methodology provides robust statistical bounds on various performance measures, such as delay, at each node of a network. The SBB calculus applies to very general network settings and leads to high utilization of network resources. This project proposes to address a number of fundamental research issues towards a possible implementation of the SBB calculus into practical QoS architectures, such as, but not limited to, DiffServ. These issues are related to (i) traffic characterization and measurements (ii) policing (iii) admission control and QoS routing and (iv) network topology (the SBB calculus currently applies only to acyclic networks). In addition, the applicability of this methodology to new types of networks, such as small ad-hoc networks, will be investigated, in a collaborative effort with Nokia. Next, this project proposes to elaborate an innovative framework for the modeling and the analysis of power-law distributions, such as the Pareto distribution. The proposed framework is based on a fitting procedure that can approximate a power-law distribution arbitrarily closely by a mixture of exponential distributions. This modeling approach provides novel perspectives on the design and analysis of important systems where power-law distributions arise. In particular, this project proposes to make use of this approach in order to analyze and improve the performance of multi-server systems, such as clusters of web servers. The educational goals of this project are to develop a rich and challenging curriculum in computer networking, and to establish QoS engineering as one of its major disciplines. For this purpose, a new Internet instruction laboratory is planned, where students will get the opportunity to experiment with various networking equipment and communication technologies. The PI intends to develop two new networking courses, one undergraduate and one graduate, that will take advantage of this facility. In addition, the PI plans to introduce innovative teaching methods in order to enhance the communication skills of the students doc17026 none This project is designed to determine the functions of AtMDR1 and other proteins encoded by a group of ABC transporter genes in Arabidopsis that are homologous to multi-drug resistance (MDR) proteins of animals. The animal MDR proteins are most often studied for their roles in the resistance of cancer tumors to chemotherapeutic drugs. This research will investigate the roles these proteins play in plants. Genetic, biochemical, and physiological evidence indicates that at least two of the Arabidopsis MDR proteins participate in the transport of the plant hormone auxin, and thus are important to plant growth and development. The auxin-transport inhibitor NPA binds tightly to AtMDR1 and AtPGP1 proteins. Knockout mutants lacking these proteins have severe defects in polar auxin transport. The phenotypes of the knockout mutants are consistent with abnormal auxin distribution being the cause. The research activities that produced the substantial background information on these two genes will be reiterated to reach some never-before studied genes within the MDR-like subcluster. In addition, biochemical studies will test hypotheses about the mechanism of AtMDR1 function. For example, is it an auxin transporter or a regulator of an auxin transporter? The experimental plan includes characterizing knockout phenotypes, determining the effects of the knockout mutations on auxin distribution, and biochemical studies of the AtMDR1 gene after expression in a heterologous system. The two PIs responsible for the project have complementary areas of expertise and will provide interdisciplinary training for postdoctoral research associates and graduate students. The dissection of these interesting genes genetically, biochemically, and physiologically is expected to provide new insight into the hormonal control of plant growth and development doc17027 none Institution: University of Michigan Ann Arbor This PECASE award will explore the application of Markov decision processes to three related problems in parallel queueing systems. In each scenario, as the number of parallel queues increases, the complexity of the decision-making process increases. Thus, finding the structure of the optimal policy in order to decrease the size of the search becomes crucial. The first problem considered is a question of routing in a multi-server queueing system that appears in several areas of industry. For example, in demand chain logistics a company receives a request for a particular part. This part may be manufactured at several different plants in the same general area. If the company has an integrated information source, a decision-maker can query the system about how much work is in process at each of the several plants, estimate the time (and cost) it will take each plant to complete the job at hand and place the order accordingly. We next take the same routing problem described above and consider scheduling in a particular manufacturing plant. If there are several stations capable of performing the same task, the applicability of the previous model remains. We complicate matters a bit, by noting that some of the machines may deteriorate. We then seek a joint, maintenance and routing policy. Finally, we consider an example of load balancing that is useful in parallel computing. Sup-pose that work orders can be broken up, partially served on any computer and, upon completion, reassembled. Since the computers are networked, and a decision-maker would like to utilize these resources wisely, it may be advantageous to re-route work that has been sitting in queue at a particular machine to a different machine. That is to say, that the decision-maker would like to keep the load balanced between machines. The decision where a job will actually be processed is thus reevaluated so that idleness is reduced. The main thrust of the education plan in this proposal is to try to increase the number of successful Minority graduate students in industrial engineering and operations research. This will be facilitated by several activities, not the least of which is to attempt to increase the number of minority graduate students at the University of Michigan. Close ties to the undergraduates in the Industrial and Operations Engineering Department (IOE) at the university will be developed through mentoring and increased financial support for under-represented minority graduate students will reduce teaching requirements. This project was originally funded as a CAREER award, and was converted to a Presidential Early Career Award for Engineers and Scientists (PECASE) award in May doc17028 none Advances in network and computing technologies have accelerated the proliferation of infrastructure such as content distribution, caching, middleware services, and network measurement testbeds. Recently, however, a number of new application domains are beginning to emerge that are not well-supported by existing technologies, such as the ability to distribute dynamically generated or active content, to rapidly deploy new and untrusted Internet services into existing infrastructure, and the ability to dynamically inject network measurement code into an existing network experimentation infrastructure. These new application domains all share several security and resource management requirements: safely executing untrusted code, scaling to a large number (100s or s) of protection domains per physical host, and supporting a large degree of multiplexing of physical host resources across many concurrently active protection domains. Although there have been many sandboxing technologies proposed in the past, none of them have the combination of water-tight isolation and the ability to scale to a large number of protection domains required by these new applications. The goal of this CAREER proposal is to enable this wide array of new networking and distributed middleware applications by designing and implementing lightweight protection domains, technically focusing on the notion of using virtual machine monitors (VMMs). A virtual machine monitor is a software layer that runs immediately on top of the hardware software boundary, virtualizing all names exposed by that boundary to give higher-level virtual machines the illusion of their own dedicated physical machine. Virtual machines are known to have strong isolation, and they are known to support code migration. However, existing virtual machines and guest operating systems are typically heavyweight, permitting only a small number (3-10) to concurrently execute on a single physical machine. The first research challenge posed in this proposal is designing and implementing mechanisms for building lightweight VMMs, virtual machines, and guest operating systems, so that 100s or s can concurrently execute. An ancillary challenge implied by this is resource management across virtual machines: to fully isolate one VM from another, each VM s resource usage (e.g., CPU consumption, I O rates, memory footprint) must be bounded by the VMM. Once the researchers have successfully implemented lightweight virtual machines, they intend to heavily leverage this new mechanism to explore several new research topics, as well as revisiting a few existing ones. For example,they will use virtual machines as a sandboxing mechanism enabling web servers to dynamically inject new content-generation code into content delivery networks or web caching systems. As another example, they will use VMs to enable untrusted code authors to upload new Internet services into a virtual hosting platform. As a third example, the researchers plan on exploring the role of virtual machines as a resource container in cluster-of-workstations, in particular exploring the ability to dynamically alter relative resource consumption rates of virtual machines to create the effect of isolated \virtual clusters within a single physical cluster. For the educational component of the CAREER proposal, the researchs plan on exploring the use of their virtual machine monitor as a substrate for supporting novel projects in undergraduate and graduate advanced operating systems courses, such as CSE451 and CSE551 at the University of Washington. A virtual machine monitor is a natural place for supporting intricate debugging mechanisms, and hardware device emulation. Having students augment the virtual machine monitor and use it to develop simple components of an operating system will radically improve the students understanding of OS issues, as they will be forced to understand the interface between the OS and the hardware, as well as the structure of the OS itself. Finally, this will also provide us with an opportunity to revise the OS course curriculum to include modern topics as security, isolation, mobility, and OS support for embedded devices (which share characteristics of the virtual machines that we will emulate with our VMM doc17029 none Cell surface proteins of the L1 family of cell adhesion molecules are centrally involved in numerous developmental processes, especially during the formation of the nervous system. They interact with a large number of different proteins on the outside, as well the inside of cells that express such molecules. Whereas some functional properties of L1 proteins are well conserved in a wide range of species, from nematodes to humans, other functions and binding partners have been developed more recently during evolution. The proposed research tries to dissect this functional complexity of L1 proteins by analyzing the structural and functional requirements for L1-type proteins in specific developmental processes. The research plan will focus on the formation of the nervous system in the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster. Mutant Drosophila embryos that do not express any L1-type proteins die and exhibit many subtle abnormalities in their developing nervous system and a number of other tissues. In Drosophila embryos with mutations in their L1-type gene, several nerves are not appropriately formed and specific neuronal cells are unable to make the correct cellular connections with their targets. Natural, as well as artificially altered and mutant L1-type proteins will be reintroduced into such embryos to test whether they are able to rescue specific neurological malformations that are caused by the absence of the endogenous Drosophila L1 protein. This analysis will shed light on what molecular functions and interactions of L1-type proteins are required in which types of cells to support certain developmental processes doc17030 none This is a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. The research will develop techniques for computer systems to communicate technical arguments to people without technical training, using integrated text and data graphics. It will integrate empirical methods from computational linguistics and human-computer interaction. Empirical methods will be used to determine appropriate techniques for conveying technical arguments to people with non-technical backgrounds. Initially, the project will develop analytical methods based on a corpus of human-authored multimedia presentations. For example, corpus studies can determine which features of arguments suggest where supporting graphics should be placed. Next, human-computer interaction experiments will be used to determine the effectiveness of techniques based on the analytical models, and to investigate alternatives to the techniques that are shown not to be sufficient. The resulting empirically-based techniques will be incorporated into computational models that will extend current approaches in natural language generation, automated graphic design, and intelligent multimedia presentation systems. The computational models will be demonstrated with a prototype system for genetic counseling. The educational component of this project will include new course curriculum, provide undergraduate and graduate computer science students with the opportunity to participate in research, and develop a laboratory for human-computer interaction studies that will be a resource for students and other faculty members. This CAREER award recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of a teacher-scholar who is likely to become an academic leader of the twenty-first century. Her research seeks solutions for the problem that people who lack appropriate technical training are faced with increasing responsibility for making vital decisions based on technical arguments, often involving quantitative and statistical data. If successful in the area of genetic counseling, the approach could be applied to many other areas where decision makers need help in using technical information and analyses doc17031 none The goal of this project is to determine the molecular structure of proteinaceous domains that exhibit bioadhesive functionality. Model peptides in the solvated adsorbed-state will be examined using a combination of biophysical techniques to monitor the conformational changes that occur upon substrate binding. This project seeks to develop a protocol for structural elucidation of adsorbed molecules in solution. Mussel adhesive protein, MAP, extracted from Mytilus edulis has provided information to create the initial model compounds. Solid-state techniques, such as multiple attenuated internal reflectance infrared (MAIR-IR) spectroscopy, ellipsometry, contact angle analysis, combined with solution-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and molecular modeling have already given some structural information, but have not been used to their fullest potential. When warranted, these techniques, in addition to newly proposed adsorbed-state NMR spectroscopy, crystallization attempts for x-ray diffraction and cell attachment assays, will be employed. The information would be compiled to create molecular models of the peptides in close approximation to a surface to view and better understand changes that occur upon substrate binding. The investigator has worked to combine research with teaching. The variety of courses the PI has taught at D Youville College reflects her multi-disciplinary background (e.g., chemistry, biochemistry, mathematics and computer science). Most of the PI s students are female non-science majors. Although these students did not choose science as their major field of study, the scientific information, process and tools that they are exposed to have a significant impact on their overall education. Many of these students will be required to complete a Master s thesis or project. Additionally, the school has increased the number of education students drastically. These (K-12) pre-teacher s exposure to this project enhances not only their education, but of each of their students to follow. Exposure to this project may be the only opportunity D Youville students have to witness basic research before they graduate doc17032 none This pilot project proposes to interview principals in young knowledge-based firms in the Madison, Wisconsin area. Half will be firms that depend on university-generated science, typically involving faculty members. Data will be gathered to generate new inductive insights into how and when these firms use improvisation (in contrast to more traditional action modes of planning followed by execution, or following organizational routines) as an action mode in key behavior. Data will also be used to assess feasibility and develop measures to assess (1) setback incidents; (2) whether and when a firm switches to or from an improvisational action mode; (3) changes in the firm s network of key advisors; (4) other theory and control variables. The feasibility and measurement work will lay the groundwork for the design of a systematic study of related formal hypotheses. The pilot project is part of a long-term project to increase understanding of how improvisation can either help or hurt the prosperity of knowledge-based start-ups, and how key advisors moderate these processes. Contemporary entrepreneurship correctly emphasizes planning skills, which are essential. However, there is also some evidence that improvisation can represent a valuable organizational competency, especially for firms in high risk, high tech settings. Understanding and codifying knowledge about improvisation will encourage the development of theory as well as more sophisticated curriculum development in the area of entrepreneurship doc17033 none Drs. Sibrina Collins and Isiah Warner of Louisiana State University are supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry and Office of Multidisciplinary Activities Programs for support of minority students to attend a special poster session at Pittconn , a major international meeting for analytical chemists in New Orleans LA March 17-22, . The poster session is to be held in conjunction with a special symposium celebrating diversity in the field of analytical chemists, featuring reknown speakers from a variety of backgrounds. The requested funds are to support the travel costs of undergraduate minority students, making possible an increased attendance of minority students at this meeting doc17034 none The tropical Andes are an epicenter of global diversity, containing more plant and vertebrate species and higher levels of endemism than any other biodiversity hotspot. Information on the distribution of species within the Bolivian Andes is critical for conservation priority setting and management, and is of general interest to the fields of taxonomy, systematics, and biogeography. Yet for most taxa, the Bolivian portion of this globally important region remains one of the most poorly surveyed segments of the entire Andean chain. The Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (CBC) at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), the Coleccion Boliviana de Fauna (CBF), and the Museo de Historia Natural Noel Kempff Mercado (MHNNKM) have formed a consortium to study this poorly surveyed region. The consortium has developed plans for a series of multi-taxa surveys across elevational gradients in two Andean protected areas that the Bolivian government has identified as critical management challenges: Parque Nacional and Area de Manejo Integrado Cotapata and Parque Nacional and Area de Manejo Integrado Amboro. Birds, fish, herpetofauna, and invertebrates will be sampled simultaneously using standardized collection methods along an elevational gradient of over meters. Large biotic survey projects are increasingly recognized as cost-effective means to making significant progress in understanding the biogeography and systematics of a variety of taxa. But surveys of this magnitude require extensive logistical and methodological considerations. In preparation for this major initiative, a pilot survey at a single site in Parque Nacional and Area de Manejo Integrado Amboro, Bolivia, will be conducted to initiate the consortium s field activities and finalize protocols for future surveys. Goals for the proposed pilot survey are to: 1) Quantify the amount of time and sampling effort necessary either to reach an asymptote in species encounter rates or to statistically estimate the true species richness at a site. 2) Evaluate the feasibility of barcoding and tracking specimens from the time of their collection at remote field sites, through the preparation and identification phases, to their accession into museum collections. 3) Fully standardize invertebrate sampling methods. 4) Send a small team to visit each of the additional proposed study sites in Amoboro and Cotapata in order to efficiently coordinate future visits. The development of a suite of standardized biodiversity survey techniques and quantifying the sampling effort needed to adequately assess species richness or endemism has the potential to make biodiversity surveys more efficient and extend their application to wider areas. The use of microbarcode and databasing technologies is already leading to enormous efficiencies in biodiversity surveys and collection management, particularly for invertebrates. By developing and implementing field-based protocols for using these technologies, this study will help expand the application of these digital advances to field surveys. The results of this pilot expedition will help streamline the design and execution of multi-taxa surveys in Andean regions, and will in particular inform the design of the proposed series of surveys in Bolivia doc17035 none Gandolfi This award supports the participation of American scientists in a U.S.-Japan seminar on arsenic in biology and medicine to be held in Honolulu, Hawaii from December 15-20, . The co-organizers are Professor A. Jay Gandolfi at the University of Arizona and Professor Kazuo Suzuki of Chiba University in Japan. Arsenic is a toxicant of worldwide concern. Arsenic causes a range of toxic effect and is classed as a human carcinogen. Arsenic can be present naturally in soil and water or can be released into our environment by man s activities (e.g.mining). It appears in various oxidation states as both inorganic and organic forms. Each of these has distinct toxicological properties. Arsenic exposure can also be by ingestion (water, food) and inhalation (dust). Being an element, arsenic cannot be destroyed and must be contained to control its toxic exposures. The goals of the meeting are to: A) discuss the dose-response relationship for cancer and non-cancer endpoints for target organs of arsenic toxicity; B) determine the low-level dose-response effects for arsenic at concentrations relevant to those expected from arsenic contaminated drinking water; C) evaluate in vitro models of arsenic-induced molecular toxicity and comparison of these results with those seen in arsenic-exposed populations; and D) clarify whether there is a linear dose-response relationship for arsenic or if there is a threshold dose-response (a non-linear response). Specific topics for discussion are: 1) chronic arsenism caused by underground water; 2) chemical forms of arsenic and its metabolism; 3) mechanisms underlying the toxicity of arsenic; 4) mechanisms underlying the carcinogenicity of arsenic; 5) organ-specific toxicity of arsenic; 6) animal species-specific metabolism and toxicity of arsenic; 7) interaction of arsenic with other biological elements; 8) excretion and removal of arsenic (antidote to arsenism); 9) safety dose for chronic ingestion of arsenic; and 10) genetic polymorphism and arsenic toxicity. Concerns about the acceptable levels of arsenic in our environment are sweeping the world. Arsenic toxicity and carcinogenicity represent one of the big challenges for researchers in the new millennium. The recent efforts to change the drinking water standards for arsenic has stimulated numerous research investigations. Since a majority of the investigations have been performed in the United States and Japan it is very timely to convene this joint meeting to share these studies. The project advances international human resources through the participation of a postdoc and graduate students. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish proceedings of the seminar in a journal such as Environmental Health Perspectives doc17036 none Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) failure is a devastating reliability problem to VDSM (very-deep-sub-micron) and nano-scale Si ULSI IC technologies. It is imperative to investigate ESD failure fundamentals and on-chip ESD protection theories focusing on the following challenges: 3D mixed-mode ESD simulation methodology; accurate high-current ESD modeling; whole-chip ESD design synthesis, advanced ESD protection solutions for ULSI ICs, ESD protection for super-GHz RF ICs, ESD protection for nano-scale as well as wide-bandgap semiconductor IC technologies. The PI proposes a career development plan that addresses these challenges. Proposed research activities consist of six tasks: to investigate advanced on-chip ESD protection phenomena in ULSI ICs by developing a novel 3D mixed-mode ESD simulation methodology; to investigate ESD protection fundamentals by developing accurate high-current ESD device models; to develop a full-chip ESD design verification CAD tool called ESDcat; to explore novel ultra-fast ESD protection solutions for sub-100nm ULSI ICs, to explore ESD protection for future nano-technologies, and to extend ESD research to super-GHz RF ICs and wide-bandgap semiconductor, GaN. Since ESD phenomena are geometry-dependent involving complex electro-thermal-process-device-circuit coupling, the proposed research procedures take full-scale mixed-mode approaches that investigate ESD fundamentals in a fully-coupled process-device-circuit-electronic-thermal closed-loop in 3D format. A 3D parallel ESD model network is proposed for accurate high-current ESD modeling. ESDcat enables chip level ESD synthesis and verification at both schematic and layout levels. Nano-scale ESD research will take into account the ballistic phonon scattering effect. ESD for wide-bandgaps will focus on Si-compatible GaN ICs. End results include insights into ESD mechanisms, CAD tools for further investigation and design of ESD protections for various IC technologies, e.g., CMOS, BiCMOS, SOI, SiGe, GaN, RFIC, and Cu interconnects. Both new ESD theory and immediate industrial applications are expected. The education plan centers on: new curriculum development; integration of microelectronics research and education; student mentoring and community services; and university-industry collaboration. Specifically, activities include: develop five courses labs in a five-year period; pursue an improved microelectronics teaching approach; establish an Integrated Electronics Laboratory, a Virtual IC Fab facility, and TCAD ECAD Design Studios; advising students in conducting inter-professional projects; develop a undergraduate industrial co-op program; and involving minority women students in microelectronics research. This five-year education proposal is integrated into the departmental redevelopment plan in microelectronics doc17037 none This is a CAREER award that combines research and educational activities. The research topic is strongly correlated electron systems. The research component adopts a strategy of considering particular systems with a goal of developing general tools for studying the role of interactions in fermionic and bosonic systems, and bringing out a common framework for understanding the physics of strongly correlated states of matter. Intrplay of superconductivity and antiferromagnetism in the high Tc cuprates will be investigated to understand electron systems with competing instabilities. Stripes in the quantum Hall systems at integer filling factors will be studied as an example of electron systems with phase separation on mesoscopic scale. The relation between bosonic and fermionic mechanisms of suppression of superconductivity and the role of dissipation on the superconductor to insulator transition will be considered in the case of one-dimensional systems (wires and chains of Josephson junctions) as a typical example of quantum phase transitions. Spinor bosonic atoms in optical lattices will be studied to learn about the role of interactions in bosonic systems. Investigation of fundamental and universal properties will be complemented by concrete calculations of observable quantities that can be verified in experiments. The educational component involves developing an undergraduate course that presents condensed matter physics from the point of view of relevance to practical applications. By discussing recent developments in technology the course will motivate students to learn about progress in condensed matter physics and show the science in its dynamics: from basic research to industrial innovations. The course will use examples of modern microelectronics, semiconductor optics, magnetoelectronics and others to show how discoveries in condensed matter physics initiated major transformations in industry in the past. It will also address areas of current academic research that may play a crucial role in technologies of the future, for example, nanotechnology, and quantum computations and communications. Presentations will be accessible to an audience with only a superficial knowledge of quantum physics. This is a CAREER award that combines research and educational activities. The research topic is strongly correlated electron systems. The research component adopts a strategy of considering particular systems with a goal of developing general tools for studying the role of interactions in fermionic and bosonic systems, and bringing out a common framework for understanding the physics of strongly correlated states of matter. Intrplay of superconductivity and antiferromagnetism in the high Tc cuprates will be investigated to understand electron systems with competing instabilities. Stripes in the quantum Hall systems at integer filling factors will be studied as an example of electron systems with phase separation on mesoscopic scale. The relation between bosonic and fermionic mechanisms of suppression of superconductivity and the role of dissipation on the superconductor to insulator transition will be considered in the case of one-dimensional systems (wires and chains of Josephson junctions) as a typical example of quantum phase transitions. Spinor bosonic atoms in optical lattices will be studied to learn about the role of interactions in bosonic systems. Investigation of fundamental and universal properties will be complemented by concrete calculations of observable quantities that can be verified in experiments. The educational component involves developing an undergraduate course that presents condensed matter physics from the point of view of relevance to practical applications. By discussing recent developments in technology the course will motivate students to learn about progress in condensed matter physics and show the science in its dynamics: from basic research to industrial innovations. The course will use examples of modern microelectronics, semiconductor optics, magnetoelectronics and others to show how discoveries in condensed matter physics initiated major transformations in industry in the past. It will also address areas of current academic research that may play a crucial role in technologies of the future, for example, nanotechnology, and quantum computations and communications. Presentations will be accessible to an audience with only a superficial knowledge of quantum physics doc17038 none This project builds on the PI s archival fieldwork and initial analysis of turn-of-the-century Argentine criminology, to document its rise and application in state practices. It incorporates newly available sources that connect it to the broader political and legal history of the nation and region. It examines the impact of criminological theory on law and legislation and state policies intended to regulate and discipline deviant behavior in the context of modernizing Argentina. It examines the practical application of criminological theories in four key areas: New techniques of identification in policing The scientific reform of prison discipline The impact of positivist criminology on national legislation in the social defense laws of and The campaign to modernize the national Criminal Code. Encoding the Criminal unites two approaches, the history of science, and Latin American history. It focuses systematically on the contributions of Argentine scientists, and the impact of their ideas on local developments as well as on a larger body of international scientific thought. The project is part of an emerging field of historical inquiry that examines the interaction between science, politics, and culture. It provides new data and an important perspective not often taken into account in studies of science, technology and society. The project contributes to broader discussions of the role of science on state policy and law. It illuminates public debates about the role of science in determining the causes and treatments of crime doc17039 none The Advanced Materials Program in the Division of Chemistry makes this award to North Dakota State University Fargo to synthesize and characterize metal-polymer hybrids prepared from transition metals and polythieno[3,4-b]pyrazine and its alkylated derivatives. These composite materials are expected to have the electro- and photochemical properties of transition metal complexes with the electronic and optical properties of the organic polymer. Since metal centers will be bound directly to the polymer backbone, undesirable steric interactions will be eliminated in addition to stronger metal-polymer electronic coupling. This methodology to prepare composites without the use of copolymeric systems will have synthetic control for the production of well-ordered metallated polymers, which in turn will retain the desirable aspects of the conjugated polymer while allowing the metal centers to serve as electro- or photosensitive switches to modulate the polymer properties. Ordered heterometallic conjugated polymers will also be synthesized to determine structure-property relationships of these hybrid systems, and they will be evaluated for their potential applications in conducting, photo-conducting, and nonlinear optical materials. The Career Development Plan will incorporate History of Chemistry into the chemistry curriculum both at the undergraduate and graduate level courses with credit including seminars and web-based chemical history displays. These programs will also be offered to North Dakota high school science teachers as a way to allow them to include this material in their curriculum. Polymer-metal composites will be prepared from conducting polymers and transition metals. Since the metal centers will be bound directly to the polymer backbone in these materials, these well-ordered and oriented hybrids are expected to provide enhanced electronic and optical properties. Long-term goals of the project will be to prepare heterometallic, multidimensional and conjugated polymer materials for multi-dimensional arrays for potential applications in supramolecular chips for information storage. A new curriculum to teach History of Chemistry will be introduced at both graduate and undergraduate levels. High school science teachers will also be provided opportunities to take the course in History of Chemistry doc17040 none When a bacterial cell dies, the cause of death is often autolysis, rather than direct damage produced by a harmful factor. Hydrolysis of peptidoglycan is a necessary stage in cell wall synthesis, and autolysis has been viewed as a result of disbalance between peptidoglycan synthesis and hydrolysis , essentially a maladaptive mistake. This project explores the hypothesis that autolysis is not a mistake, but adaptive programmed death. Autolysis is part of the developmental process of fruiting body formation and sporulation in Myxococcus. Autolysis which is required for natural transformation in S. pneumoniae is another example of specialized adaptive programmed death. Bacteria show many features of complex organization, similar to multicellular organisms. Like in multicellular species, a bacterial population would benefit from eliminating defective cells. The aim of this project is to test the feasibility of the idea that autolysis is the mechanism of adaptive apoptosis in bacteria. Specifically, a search for regulatory components of a possible apoptotic pathway linking particular types of cell damage to activation of autolysins is being undertaken. A genetic approach is being used to identify putative apoptotic genes. E. coli will be mutagenized with mini-Tn10 transposon and selected for survival to lethal levels of a mutagen; and high temperature. Mutants that show resistance to killing (but not resistance to growth in the presence of) both factors will become candidates for being affected in genes coding for apoptotic compounds. Random PCR will be used to identify the flanking DNA regions, amplified DNA will be sequenced by single passage, and the genes carrying the Tn insertions will be identified using the database of the E. coli genome. The mutants will also be characterized phenotypically using a panel of different lethal factors. Strains with known mutations, such as those lacking autolysins, will also be tested for possible survival with the panel of lethal factors. This exploratory project will show whether E. coli has regulatory genes affecting autolysis and will lay the basis for future detailed studies of apoptosis in bacteria doc17041 none Drought stress is a major limitation for agricultural production. More than 95% of water loss from plants occurs via stomatal pores, which are formed by pairs of guard cells in the leaf epidermis. Stomata open and close in response to various environmental signals, such as light, CO2 and water status. A signaling network in guard cells integrates these signals to regulate stomatal movements, which control water loss and CO2 uptake. The long-term goal of the project is to dissect this signaling network by studying Ca2+ channels, which have been proposed to play a key role. Elevation of cytosolic free Ca2+ concentrations in guard cells is an early event during abscisic acid-triggered stomatal closing. Ion channel-mediated Ca2+ influx gives rise to the cytosolic Ca2+ increase. It has been shown previously that hydrogen peroxide activates Ca2+ channels in the plasma membrane of guard cells. Inhibition of NADPH oxidase prevents H2O2 production and reduces abscisic acid-induced stomatal closing. Additionally, preliminary studies have revealed that nitric oxide also triggers stomatal closure. This project will further study H2O2 and nitric oxide regulation of the Ca2+ channels via a combined cell biological, biophysical, and molecular genetic approach. The effects of biologically active oxidants and antioxidants on the Ca2+ channels will be analyzed. Furthermore, the role of NADPH oxidase in guard cell abscisic acid signaling will be determined. The effects of nitric oxide on stomatal movements will also be examined. The information gained in the project will provide insight into the guard cell signaling network and contribute to the identification of potential molecular and genetic targets for engineering drought-resistant plants. Furthermore, the project may also impact on the understanding of how nitric oxide, a major air pollutant, affects the global ecosystem via plants doc17042 none This award will enable junior investigators to attend the school, Electromagnetic Probes of Fundamental Physics, to be held at the Ettore Majorana Center in Erice, Sicily, on October 16-21, . The school will cover a wide variety of topics spanning, and crossing, the fields of nuclear and particle physics, including both quantum chromodynamics and quantum electrodynamics, the physics of strong fields, and the experimental promise of collider laboratories doc17043 none This is a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. The research will develop speech recognition and auditory scene analysis models that are probability distributions whose parameters can be trained from data and whose internal structures are capable of abstracting the perceptual response patterns of human listeners. Two broad research questions will be explored: (1) Can probability models representing the pitch, envelope, and timing of an acoustic source be computed and integrated in a tractable manner? (2) What are the theoretical and empirical requirements for the partitioning, training, and recognition scoring of probability models for landmark-based acoustic features? Landmarks in speech are identifiable points in the flow of sound over time, such as consonant releases and closures, vowel centers, and glide extrema. The educational component of this project includes significant curriculum development at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and a strong investment in the mentoring of undergraduate and graduate research trainees. This CAREER award recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of a teacher-scholar who is likely to become an academic leader of the twenty-first century. This is fundamental scientific research in acoustics and computer science, but it addresses the very practical problem that computers are still far worse at recognizing speech than human beings are. Speech recognition technology has already become an important industry, but it will become far more important in the future as mobile computing and computer-mediated communications make it necessary for millions of people to control machines verbally rather than by means of keyboards. The educational component of this work will train graduate students to be teachers and communicators, as well as researchers, thus preparing them to help build the base of personnel needed in this exciting, growing area doc17044 none Har-Peled, Sariel U of Ill, Urbana-Champaign Computational geometry is the branch of theoretical computer science devoted to the design, analysis, and implementation of geometric algorithms and data structures. Computational geometry has deep roots in reality: Geometric problems arise naturally in any computa- tional field that simulates or interacts with the physical world|computer graphics, robotics, geographic information systems, computer aided-design, and molecular modeling, to name a few|as well as in more abstract domains such as combinatorial geometry and algebraic topology. Aside from their obvious practical significance, geometric algorithms and data structures enjoy a rich and satisfying mathematical structure, and their development often requires tools from mathematical disciplines such as combinatorics, topology, and algebraic geometry, as well as traditional computational tools. The proposal outlines a challenging career development plan focusing on research in a broad cross-section of computational geometry, building on and significantly broadening the PI s successful work in the field over the last several years. Specific problem areas in which the PI plans to work include approximation algorithms, kinetic data structures, spatial and temporal databases, external memory computation, geometric optimization, and clustering. This classification is at best a rough guide, as many interesting geometric problems fall into more than one category. Furthermore, the PI plans to continue combining theory and empirical experimentation in his work, putting an emphasize on algorithms that perform well in practice doc17045 none Pratt Two-layer dynamics of sill flows will be studied with analytic and numerical techniques. Particular issues to be addressed include the nature of hydraulic transitions and upstream influence, effects of separation of the interface from side-walls, transport relationships, special features such as hydraulic jumps and recirculations, and procedures for assessing flow criticality. Interest will be focused more on the inflow and throughflow regions, rather than on the effluent plume that sinks at the outflow doc17046 none The focus of this research is to develop a general synthesis of chiral oxazolines, which can be applied to the discovery of enantioselective olefin epoxidation catalysts using molecular oxygen as a terminal oxidant. Further, a general synthesis of chiral pyridine ligands for application to an asymmetric allylic displacement will be sought. The educational focus of the project is to incorporate, into the curriculum, the relationship of current applications in synthetic organic chemistry to the fundamentals physical organic chemistry. With this CAREER proposal, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research and teaching efforts of Dr. Matthew Sigman of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Utah. Professor Sigman will focus his work on developing new chiral ligands for applications in asymmetric synthesis. The ligands will be assembled in a systematic manner in order to allow for optimization and direct insight into reaction mechanisms. This type of methodology development presents opportunities for the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries. Dr. Sigman s educational activities will be focused on improving the organic chemistry curriculum doc17047 none This proposal is for a Digital Society and Technologies Program workshop on Global Issues in the Social and Economic Impacts of IT to be conducted jointly with the European Commission s Information Society Technology program in conjunction with their research conference e : e-Business and e-Work to be held in Venice, Italy, October 17-19. The proposed workshop will be held on October 16, in advance of the conference. The workshop will explore a research agenda regarding the global social and economic impacts of IT and the possibilities for international cooperation in gathering multi-country data and conducting research. The workshop will discuss research issues related to 1) the global diffusion of IT production and use, the globalization of e-commerce (including mobile e-commerce), the new ways of working and collaboration, and the influence of national environments and government policies on IT diffusion and impact. A report will be produced indicating the results from the workshop doc17048 none This CAREER project focuses on the study of artificially layered ferroelectric superlattices and compositionally graded ferroelectric films for applications in microelectronics. In the paraelectric state ferroelectric materials possess some of the largest dielectric constants attainable, a property particularly relevant for applications where transient charge storage is required, such as capacitors in dyanmic random access memories(DRAM). Enhanced properties are sought through spatial variations in internal stresses, film composition, and microstructure. It is anticipated that through intrinsic characteristics of ferroelectric materials and the introduction of compositional and internal stress gradients, exceptional and unusual electrical and electromechanical properties can be obtained which are not possible for bulk ferroelectrics and ferroelectric thin films. The proposed work is a combined experimental and theoretical effort. The theoretical part will be based on an extended mean field Landau-Ginzburg-Devonshire phenomenology. Elastic and electrical interactions between individual layers will be modeled and physical properties of ferroelectric multilayers and compositionally graded films will be determined. The model developed will serve as a basis to design ferroelectric stacks with enhanced physical properties via artificially created non-uniformities such as compositional variations, different stress levels, and interfacial defect structures. Ferroelectric and or paraelectric layers with systematic variations in composition, thickness, and misfit with respect to the underlying substrate will be deposited by rf-sputtering or pulsed lased deposition techniques. Initially, the focus will be on the deposition of the prototypical BaTiO3 SrTiO3 system. Based on the information gathered, multilayers of other perovskite systems such as PbTiO3 CaTiO3, PbTiO3 SrTiO3, and KNbO3 KTaO3, will be grown. Ferroelectric stacks and compositionally graded films will be characterized crystallographically and microstructurally via x-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopy. Local compositional distribution of elements will be determined by energy-dispersive x-ray spectroscopy (EDXS) using an electron energy filter. Physical properties such as polarization hysteresis, dielectric, piezoelectric, and pyroelectric properties will be measured. The unconventional ferroelectric properties of these multilayers due to chemical and structural non-uniformity will be the basis for designing novel devices and circuits. This part of the research will involve an established industrial collaboration. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in a topical area of materials science having high technological relevance. The research is accompanied by an intensive educational plan. To promote comprehensive and active learning, advanced interactive course web sites will be developed for undergraduate and graduate level courses. Also, a popular science interactive web site on thin film science and technology aimed at a general, non-technical audience will be designed. The target audience for this web site is high school teachers, juniors, and seniors. Two new interdisciplinary graduate level classes will be designed and implemented. Another educational benefit of the proposed project sought is summer internships for graduate and undergraduate students involved in this research through industrial collaboration. Overall, the project provides students with new challenges and research approaches in materials synthesis, processing, and characterization, and provides new tools and approaches to education and training. Thus, an important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education doc17049 none Under the direction of Drs. Monica Macaulay and Thomas Purnell, Ms. Marianne Milligan will conduct fieldwork for her doctoral dissertation. She will work with the remaining speakers of Menominee, an endangered language spoken on the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin. Her dissertation emphasizes the metrical structure of Menominee, in particular the placement of accent and the pattern of long and short vowels. The topic is theoretically interesting because Menominee s metrical rules are very unusual. These rules have received several different theoretical analyses, one of which is used as evidence against certain current trends in linguistic theory. However, all analyses of Menominee metrical structure are based on the published works of American linguist Leonard Bloomfield, and so inherit various problems his work contains. First, while his grammar is considered one of the most comprehensive descriptions of an Amerindian language, it was completed after his death by another linguist. It is thus contradictory in places. Second, because Bloomfield used a standardized spelling system rather than phonetic transcription, his work does not show variation in pronunciation. Theoretical claims about Menominee require more accurate description of the data. This project s data will also be used in pedagogical materials for the tribe s language preservation programs. All materials recorded on audiotape will be transferred to CD for archiving purposes, distribution to tribal organizations, and acoustic analysis. This research is significant in two ways. First, it will extend research on Menominee metrical structure by providing both an accurate description and a theoretical analysis of the Menominee data. Understanding the unusual metrical structure of Menominee will not only add to our general understanding of human language, but the issues raised by these data may also affect current debates within linguistic theory. Second, the language teaching materials that this project will contribute to producing, such as tapes of stories with accompanying text, tapes of vocabulary items, and grammatical lessons, will be used in the tribe s efforts to retain the language and culture in the schools on their reservation doc17050 none Borgerhoff Mulder This research will advance the comparative method in anthropology through development and application of new methods involving synchronic (variation across societies) and diachronic (variation across time) change. Using network autocorrelation matrix analyses to control for Galton s Problem (the independence of adjacent societies), the project will develop methods that examine how suites of characteristics covary using historical and present-day ethnographic information; evaluate these methods in relation both to other synchronic methods and to newly developed approaches in comparative historical sociology; and apply these methods to test hypotheses using comparative data. The project will test a set of hypotheses (mainly focusing on marriage and bridewealth) about cross-cultural variability using the ethnographic literature (codings of 120 variables for 35 societies) from East Africa over the past 100 years, and then work towards making user-friendly computer programs available on the web to others interested in similar research endeavors. This research will advance our knowledge of East African societies, will help re-establish comparative cross-cultural research as a central part of anthropology, and will help link qualitative and quantitative research traditions doc17051 none Anagnostou Our understanding and ability to predict and respond to changes in the hydrologic environment cannot be properly addressed in the absence of reliable precipitation information. Proposed research aims at investigating the following questions: What are the quantitative limitations and uncertainty of current operational single polarization radar (e.g., WSR-88D) in rainfall estimation, and what are the advantages disadvantages of X-band polarimetric measurements over current S-band systems for various space and time scales? Those questions will be investigated based on multi-instrument specialized field campaigns associated with warm season convective storms and winter precipitation systems. This research includes participation in two field projects (i.e., Wallops Area Cold season Project, WACP, and the International H2O Project, IHOP) by deploying mobile X-band polarimetric radar and a two-dimensional (2D) video disdrometer in coordination with the other research instruments brought into the field. The synergy of rainfall observations from multiple sensors available from the experiments will be the fundamental building block to support the proposed investigations on precipitation microphysics and rainfall estimation (and validation) associated with different radar systems (i.e., X-band vs. S-band and single vs. dual polarization measurements). Successful completion of the research may provide compelling evidence of the advantages of X-band polarimetric measurements against operational remote sensing systems for support of local flood forecasting. This new remote sensing tool, if proven reliable, would be an attractive and economically affordable solution to the problem of monitoring remote basins and urban areas that are poorly covered by the National radar network, and are prone to flash flooding doc17052 none AST- Uros Seljak Dr. Seljak of Princeton University will develop a comprehensive theoretical framework to analyze, understand, and connect the many facets of weak gravitational lensing and its significance to cosmology. The phenomenon of weak gravitational lensing occurs when matter along the line of sight, which might otherwise be unobservable, magnifies and distorts the images of background galaxies. Dr. Seljak will make progress in this area of research by comparing his theoretical predictions to actual observations. He will make use of several observational surveys, including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Deep Lens Survey. He will use these data to put constraints on the masses of neutrinos, the nature of the newly discovered dark energy, the presence of dark matter in clusters of galaxies, the effect of dark matter on the formation of galaxies, and the relationship between the clustering of dark matter and that of galaxies. As part of his educational mission, Dr. Seljak will work on developing an undergraduate course in computational physics at Princeton, using his research as examples. He will also integrate undergraduate students from all levels into his research group. Dr. Seljak will also participate in a local outreach program through which he will partner with a local teacher and participate in regular class visits doc17053 none Power electronics technology is widely used in various industrial sectors and has recently been identified by the Office of Science and Technology Policy as critical for the future growth of the U.S. economy. Today innovations in electronic products are progressing at an unprecedented rapid pace. However, power electronics technology has not kept pace with the growth in low and medium power electronic industries. With this proposal, the PIs seek to improve the power supply performance by exploring new design techniques to develop a family of efficient, high-frequency, low and medium power AC-DC converters with reduced cost and improved reliability, and still achieve near unity power factor. This effort targets future stringent power requirements for high-speed microprocessor used in next generation computer and communication systems. The objective of the proposed research is to develop novel hybrid energy transfer AC-DC converters improved efficiency and increased reliability and provides Power Factor Correction (PFC). In a traditional single-stage AC DC-PFC scheme, the converter normally operates in Discontinuous Conduction Mode (DCM) and has the advantages of simplicity, low cost and high reliability, while less efficiency due to its inherent high voltage and current stresses. Moreover, it cannot achieve simultaneously, the desired input performance in terms of low power factor and harmonics, and output performance in terms of voltage ripple and regulation capabilities. The two-stage scheme can achieve unity power factor and higher output performance, but at the expense of high component count and increased system complexity. This in turn increases cost and degrades the reliability of the whole power electronic system. In both single-stage and two-stage AC DC converters, the power is processed twice as all the transferred energy would once store in an intermediate bulk capacitor. Here, we propose a novel method that allows parallel path of energy transfer to minimize power-processing times and to improve converter efficiency and reliability. A lion share of the input power directly transferred to the output without going through the input current shaping stage while the converter remains a near-unity power factor. Furthermore, considering the operation irrelevance of PFC stage and DC-DC stage in two cascade stage converters, the PIs also propose a novel concept to improve the efficiency by linking PFC stage with DC-DC stage to provide soft-switching conditions for the PFC stage or DC DC stage without adding any auxiliary switch. During the projects two-year period, the following major tasks will be carried out: 1) Investigate the limitations of improving efficiency in existing PFC- AC DC converters. 2) Aiming at reducing the power losses and processing time, analyze the power flow features, and build the potential path to forward partial input power to the output side directly to minimize the power processing times. 3) Compare existing practical soft-switching DC DC topologies; develop the suitable magnetic coupling paths between the PFC stage and DC DC stage to benefit each other, such as providing soft-switching condition for PFC stage or and DC DC stage. 4) Investigate integrated system issues and possible solutions, focusing on interaction between different stages and control schemes. 5) Set-up simulation platform and physical test bed, conduct comparative study for overall performance between the proposed topology and existing AC DC converters doc17054 none The purpose of the CAREER effort is to take some important steps towards the development and application of new, adaptive, high-order accurate methods for solving conservation laws. While the technical emphasis will be on efficient implicit time-stepping methods and techniques for local error and regularity estimation, the effort will maintain a focus on large scale, realistic applications from the applied sciences and engineering, and the use of national high performance computing facilities. The complexity of this multidisciplinary task, the development of a computational platform focusing on educational elements, and the fundamental nature of the problems being considered will provide a stimulating environment in which to train future computational scientists in emerging computational techniques for solving conservation laws. Application of basic physical principles of conservation of mass, momentum, and energy has proven itself to lead to accurate and reliable mathematical models of the physical world surrounding us. Such models, known as conservation laws, display a richness, much like the physical world, that continues to challenge developers of computational techniques for solving such problems. The mere universality of such models, however, warrants that new and improved methods be developed to enable the efficient and robust modeling of problems in areas as diverse as the dynamics of fluids and gases, optical communication and high-speed electronics, applications in electromagnetic radiation, or even climate modeling. Hesthaven proposes to develop new adaptive high-order methods for such problems and to train computational scientists in this area doc17055 none This will support a special focus workshop at the Human Language Technology Conference in the area of Language Processing of Biological Data. The purpose of this special focus within HLT context is to bring to the attention of a wide audience of researchers across all aspects of human language technology the research opportunites and recent research breakthroughs in this newly emerging area. This support is also intended to further promote cross-disciplinary approaches to the new field of bioinformatics doc17056 none Yu, Yizhou U of Ill - Champaign This project addresses the problem of recovering and synthetically generating realistic appearance details. Appearance details include color reflectance variations, small geometric features on 3D surfaces, and the change of these high-resolution geometric and physical properties at different times. We call these details 3D and temporal textures in contrast to 2D textures which only have color variations in a 2D space. This project describes fundamental research in four classes of problems surrounding 3D and temporal textures: (1) the development of a unified framework for texture modeling considering 3D spatially and temporally varying details; (2) the development of novel algorithms that either recover high-quality appearance details from photographs and videos or generate them synthetically; (3) the development of efficient synthesis algorithms that can generate novel instances of 3D and temporal textures from given examples; (4) the investigation of efficient representation and compression schemes for 3D and temporal textures. This project will result in significant advances in 3D and temporal appearance modeling and synthesis, and therefore lead to overall qualitative improvement of the synthetic imagery created by graphics approaches. 3D and temporal textures complement geometric modeling and physical simulation. Addressing the proposed problem will greatly benefit these and other related research directions. Recent advances in physics-based simulation made it possible to generate synthetic imagery from solving light transport and motion equations. While these simulation-based techniques are quite expensive, the results generated from these techniques are often found to be too clean and smooth to look realistic enough. Incorporating appearance details into these methods would be highly desirable. Meanwhile, recent geometric reconstruction techniques from images and laser range scans have made it possible to acquire high-quality geometric models. Appearance modeling is becoming increasingly important in computer graphics applications where the efficient and realistic representation of details is essential. This work will be able to produce statistically correct, physically plausible appearance details in an efficient manner. In the film industry, high-quality hair models and skin surface details will dramatically shrink the gap between synthetic and real characters. In the game industry, real-time 3D and temporal textures will bring virtual environments a large step closer to reality. This holds true for a large number of applications including electronic commerce, TV and Web content production, human computer interaction, architectural and archeological walkthroughs. Altogether, the expected outcome of the project will be the development of important new techniques and results that provide real-world applications with useful solutions, cross-fertilization between computer graphics and other related areas (such as image processing and computer vision), and curricular innovations doc17057 none Previously thought to inhabit only extreme environments, Archaea are now known to exist throughout the oceans. These prokaryotes can contribute over 34% of marine bacterioplankton biomass, thereby representing an important functional component of biogeochemical cycling in marine ecosystems. This Small Grant for Exploratory Research will investigate the relative importance of Archaea and Eubacteria in the Southern Ocean. Water column, sediment trap and sediment core samples will be analyzed to quantify archaeal and bacterial diversity and distribution. The presence of unique biomarkers for the lipid membranes of these two groups will be compared to results from molecular analyses with rRNA probes. The data obtained will also be used to evaluate the origin of archaeal signals in the benthos. Since archaeal lipids are relatively resistant to degradation, preservation in ancient sediments might be expected; but has not been observed. Instead, the concentrations of these compounds in sediments suggest in situ production rather than deposition from the water column. This project will provide important data for evaluating the relationship between water column and sedimentary archaeal biomarkers and for determining the origin of archaeal in benthic habitats. The combination of lipid biomarker analysis with molecular ecological probing to test these questions will establish an essential information base for future archaeal biomarker work in Antarctica doc17058 none Prior studies have show that when the neurotransmitter acetylcholine is reduced significantly in the cortex of the brain, a cascade of effects is observed in physiological and molecular systems that underlie learning and memory. These effects include changes in neural firing rates and in the expression of non-cholinergic neurotransmitters and synaptic proteins. Thus, two possibilities are suggested for the neural basis of memory: that acetylcholine alone may be responsible, or that it acts in concert with non-cholinergic neurotransmitters and synaptic proteins. The purpose of these studies is to determine whether the mechanisms of learning and memory can be preserved when the cascade of effects of non-cholinergic neural systems is prevented after the loss of acetylcholine. Therefore, acetylcholine in the cortex will be selectively removed and non-cholinergic neurotransmitters and synaptic proteins will be preserved by the application of neurotrophins, a class of brain proteins well known for aiding in the maintenance and survival of cortical neurons challenged by unfavorable conditions. Then the capacity of cortical neurons to undergo changes like those that take place in learning and memory will be determined. These studies are important for understanding the physiological and molecular bases of learning and memory doc17059 none The relentless down-scaling of the conventional metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) based integrated circuits is expected to slow down due to fundamental physical limitations and increasingly prohibitive cost associated with fabrication facilities. Molecular electronics, where the idea is that only a few or even just one molecule could be used to perform basic electronic functions, holds great promises for superior performance and substantially reduced cost. As a bottom-up approach to fabricate nanostructures, molecular electronics employs chemical synthesis and assembly to produce devices with critical dimensions defined by the molecular wires and hence can eliminate the cost associated with advanced lithography techniques. Such devices utilize various quantum effects such as tunneling and conformational transitions to their advantages and thus can deliver better performances than conventional MOS devices. The eventual success of this program will firmly establish molecular electronics as an intriguing and practical technology with great potential to replace silicon-based electronics. We expect to produce the molecular electronics version of two core elements in integrated circuits: transistors and memories. Our molecular transistors will possess a channel length around two nanometers, two orders of magnitude smaller than that of today s most advanced silicon-based transistors. We also expect to demonstrate nonvolatile spin-dependent memories with molecular wires as the active component. This technique will likely produce ultra-small memory devices and add a new direction to the by far classical molecular electronics. Finally we expect to demonstrate a new scheme for integrated molecular systems with carbon nanotubes as interconnects. This program will also serve to advance the fundamental forefronts of molecular electronics. Several unique features distinguish this program from other existing programs in this field. 1. We will utilize the nanopore technique to produce molecular transistors and spin-electronic devices. Our group is one of two existing groups that have mastered this technique (the other being the Mark A. reed group at Yale, who is currently focusing on two-terminal nanopore devices). This technique can render devices with channel length defined by the molecular wire length (~ 2 nm) and device areas ~ 10 nm in diameter. Such nanoscale devices hold great promises for high-density integrations. 2. We will investigate both n-type and p-type molecular wires in our transistor structures, making complementary circuitry possible. This important issue has by far being unexplored by other research groups due to the apparent difficulty. 3. An intimate integration of the proposed research and education is guaranteed. Substantial effort will be devoted to educate both graduate and undergraduate students, especially the under-represented, throughout this program. The research activities will also be integrated into the Nanoelectronics and Nanotechnology class I developed. 4. We enjoy full support from our collaborators at the Nanotechnology Center of NASA Ames Research Center. Dr. Wendy Fan and her colleagues are currently devoting 100% of her time to the organic synthesis component of this program, at no cost to NSF. Dr. Jie Han is focusing on the theoretical modeling and simulations of the proposed molecular devices, again, at no cost to NSF. In conclusion, the proposed program holds great promises for future nanoscale electronics and has a great chance to succeed. The financial support from NSF can be invaluable in helping me to achieve my goal to develop a life-long career in scientific research, academic advising and teaching doc17060 none The research will address three hypotheses arising from the spatial pattern of connectivity between streams and lakes: (1) lakes are nutrient sponges, absorbing spring nutrient pulses and then slowly releasing them over the summer, thus stabilizing biological production downstream; (2) lakes reduce biological productivity downstream because nutrients are lost via sedimentation and denitrification; (3) lakes are solar collectors, thus increasing watershed temperatures and the metabolic rates of organisms. These hypotheses will be addressed in sub-alpine watersheds in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho using: (a) hydrological and food-web modeling; (b) releases of a tracer nutrient (15NO3) followed through the food webs of a stream-lake-stream linkage, and; (c) analyzing patterns of chemical, thermal and biological activity in three watersheds with and three without lakes. The work will be useful for eutrophication and lake fertilization studies, for the protection of endangered fishes, and for the prediction of production in streams, rivers, and lakes doc17061 none The generation of cellular asymmetry is a key event in many developmental processes. One important mechanism that cells use to achieve asymmetry is subcellular localization of RNA. In the case of an mRNA, localization to a specific site within a cell efficiently targets its protein product to that site. In the Drosophila oocyte, localization of distinct mRNAs to the poles is an essential step in generating the anterior-posterior pattern of the future embryo. This research examines components of a ribonucleoprotein (RNP) complex identified previously because of its role in RNA localization: these components are the Exuperantia (Exu) and Ypsilon Schachtel (Yps) proteins, and oskar (osk) mRNA. An important hypothesis of the project is that this RNP complex functions to both transport mRNAs (including osk mRNA) in the cytoplasm to their sites of localization in the oocyte, and to regulate the translation of these transported mRNAs. This research also addresses the role played by the microtubule cytoskeleton in transporting localized mRNAs. Yps is a member of the Y-Box family of proteins; other Y-Box proteins are known to bind RNA and regulate translation. Preliminary results indicate that the yps gene expresses more than one transcript. These transcripts and any alternatively encoded protein isoforms will be characterized, and their expression patterns determined. Genetic and biochemical experiments will determine if Yps acts as a translational repressor of osk mRNA. The Exu protein is a novel protein that plays an essential role in RNA localization, and interacts directly with Yps. A domain analysis of the Exu protein will address the roles played by this protein in mediating mRNA localization, and the association of the complex with microtubules doc17062 none This award supports research and education on electrons in low-dimensional condensed matter systems with a large number of strongly coupled degrees of freedom. The properties of these systems are dominated by large quantum mechanical fluctuations. The ideas, concepts, and methods of quantum field theory will be used to carry out theoretical research in a wide range of areas including: electronic liquid crystal phases in strongly correlated fermionic systems, high temperature superconductors, and quantum Hall systems; quantum Hall topological entanglement and its applications to quantum computation; fractional quantum Hall effects and non-commutative geometry; and condensed matter analogs of general relativity, including analogs of the Hawking radiation in super liquids. This award supports theoretical research and education on electrons in low-dimensional systems. Research will focus on new physical phenomena that have been uncovered in the past few years, such as particles with fractional charge and fractional statistics, topological quantum computing, liquid crystal phases in electron liquids, and the possible existence of phases of matter with electron fractionalization. The physical systems where such phenomena take place are two-dimensional electron gases in large magnetic fields, strongly correlated systems such as high temperature superconductors, and the recently discovered ultracold dilute gases. Advanced methods of condensed matter theory, such as quantum field theory, will be used to address the intellectually challenging fundamental problems that arise in the condensed matter physics of these low-dimensional systems. This work may contribute to the intellectual foundation of future electronic device technologies doc17063 none Enormous demand to analyze and construct stochastic models describing various situations in the modern world has created new fast growing research fields that include financial mathematics, telecommunications, transportation, manufacturing, energy and biomedicine. Powerful techniques from stochastic theory and stochastic control have allowed to formulate and to solve a number of problems arising in these cutting-edge disciplines. The workshop will focus on building closer collaborations among stochastic control researchers .It will focus on promoting collaborative initiatives in stochastic theory and control as well as in stochastic theory and control education doc17064 none This research project, in the laboratory of Professor Ludwig Bartels at the University of California-Riverside, uses scanning tunneling microscope methods as a tool in organic synthesis. This early Career award supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, addresses the site directed synthesis of organic molecules bound to surfaces. Building on recent work that demonstrated the synthesis of biphenyl from iodobenzene using the STM tip, Bartels and his coworkers will extend this approach to the synthesis of individual molecules having multiple elementary units. This approach will allow the synthesis of molecules of exactly the desired conformation. Application of this approach to the synthesis of chiral molecules of specific conformation is planned as well. This basic research program will provide the background and understanding necessary for the development of molecular electronic devices and other nanomaterial synthesis strategies. Professor Bartels is also developing a course focussing on semiconductor processing that will be taught in the Chemistry Department as a part of this Career award. A detailed understanding of the construction of complex organic molecules will result from the work carried out in this Career award. Professor Bartels and his coworkers will use STM to manipulate individual molecules, coupling various functionalities to make molecules of the desired conformation adsorbed on a substrate. Coupling reactions will be used for the initial work, followed by more complex addition reactions. A semiconductor processing course will be developed as part of this Career award doc17065 none Grove Laser heating of metal-encapsulated accessory minerals has emerged as the most viable technique for accomplishing high-throughput, low-blank, and readily-tracked helium analysis for (U-Th) He dating. This award will provide funds for a CW TEMoo mode, Nd-YAG laser and optomechanical equipment for automated beam attenuation to develop a temperature controlled, laser-heated furnace system for helium analysis in the UCLA noble gas laboratory. The laser system will become an essential component of the newly refurbished VG extraction line that is now set up to perform 3He isotope dilution measurements. The newly developed (U-Th) He dating capabilities will support a number of NSF-sponsored projects that require efficient (U-Th) He analysis of apatite and sphene. The majority of these investigations are structural studies that rely upon low-temperature thermochronology to detect and characterize the magnitude and timing of Late Cenozoic crustal deformation. The itinerary of planned activities is broad and ranges from studies of the timing of the transition from water to steam-dominated conditions at The Geysers hydrothermal systems to detrital thermochronology in basins that border tectonically active areas. An overarching consideration in all this activity is our desire to develop self-consistent interpretive models that incorporate both 40Ar 39Ar K-feldspar and (U-Th) He apatite and sphene thermochronometers to derive nearly continuous thermal histories from middle crustal to surface conditions doc17066 none This research requests funding for an exploratory field effort to confirm the existence of and date the extent of laminated sediments in Norwegian fjords. Multicorer samples will be taken in seven selected fjords. Radiometric dating and assessment of benthic foraminifer faunas in recovered sediments will be done to determine suitability of the material for detailed paleoclimate studies doc17067 none This project involves studies of chlorine atom (Cl) initiated oxidation of volatile organic compounds (VOC) and subsequent formation of secondary organic aerosol (SOA). Laboratory studies will be carried out in a smog chamber where reaction will be initiated by photolysis of molecular chlorine, and products will be studied using Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometry and other types of detectors. Field studies will be carried out with the goal of finding unique markers of Cl-initiated chemistry. Computer models will be modified to include detailed chlorine chemistry, and will be used to interpret the laboratory and field data. This research project will develop new tools to study the chemistry of chlorine in the atmosphere and provide new information on the role of this potentially important oxidant. For the education component of this project, the PI will develop innovative coursework, integrate the results of his research into his teaching, and provide research opportunities for undergraduate students. The PI will also participate in a Summer Environmental Enrichment Program (SEEP) designed to encourage the participation of women and members of under-represented minorities in the environmental sciences and engineering. Efforts will also be directed towards improving retention of engineering students at Duke University doc17068 none This research program will develop and apply new measurement methodology in the domain of item response theory (IRT) models for unfolding. An unfolding IRT model is a probabilistic model that simultaneously estimates each respondent s latent trait along with the characteristics of each item using the responses to a test or questionnaire. In contrast to traditional IRT models that implement cumulative item response functions to measure traits like ability and proficiency, unfolding IRT models incorporate single-peaked, nonmonotonic item response functions to measure constructs like attitudes, preferences and individual locations within certain developmental processes that occur in stages. This research program will expand the applicability, utility and popularity of a particular unfolding IRT model for polytomous responses known as the generalized graded unfolding model (GGUM). These goals will be achieved through an integrated sequence of educational and research projects. Research projects will include: 1) An investigation of alternative indices of model, item and person fit that can be utilized with the GGUM - the results will enable practitioners to better identify when the GGUM is and is not appropriate for a given set of item responses. 2) An exploration of Bayesian estimates of GGUM parameters derived from a Markov chain Monte Carlo method - this technique will potentially improve the accuracy of GGUM parameter estimates in situations with sparse data and will better represent the uncertainty inherent in those parameter estimates. 3) The development of a new multidimensional extension of the GGUM - this model will allow for the measurement of multidimensional latent traits that are of interest to social scientists in many substantive areas like psychology, marketing, political science, etc. 4) The development of a new mixture model that is based on the GGUM response function - this mixture model will estimate latent traits of conscientious respondents while probabilistically culling unconscientious respondents from the measurement portion of the algorithm. The educational component of this program includes a series of both introductory and intensive workshops on the application and benefits of the GGUM family of models. Workshops will be developed and presented to applied measurement practitioners across the U.S. and Europe. The refinement and subsequent distribution of free, user-friendly computer software that estimates GGUM parameters will complement these educational activities. Recent psychometric research suggests that responses to typical attitude and preference questionnaires are more appropriately described by unfolding models rather than cumulative models. Indeed, the use of cumulative models in these situations can lead to invalid measures. Unfolding IRT models will promote more valid measurement in these situations while also providing other benefits commonly associated with cumulative IRT models. These include the ability to build item banks that maintain a common scale of measurement, the ability to estimate the precision of each respondent s latent trait estimate, and the ability to measure attitudes, preferences and other constructs in the social sciences using computerized adaptive testing methods. Consequently, the results from this research can improve the quality of measurements that are developed in many social science disciplines while simultaneously expanding applied measurement practices in ways that are both technically sound and practical. The educational component of this program will provide measurement practitioners with the requisite knowledge and tools to effectively use this growing methodology doc17069 none Modeling, Analysis, and Control of Hybrid Systems with Applications to Nanoprocesses In the light of the increasingly complex nature of dynamical systems requiring controls, the predominant considerations in control law design for modern engineering systems have focused on general hierarchical nonlinear switching control architectures that minimize control law complexity subject to the achievement of overall system stability and performance. These systems, classified as hybrid dynamical systems, include dynamical switching systems, nonsmooth impact mechanical systems, biological systems, sampled-data systems, discrete-event systems, intelligent vehicle highway systems, constrained mechanical systems, and flight control systems, to cite but a few examples. The proposed research program focuses on stability and control of general hybrid dynamical systems. In this research, first, we will focus on the development of a unified dynamical systems approach for solving the problems of stability analysis, disspativity theory, optimal control, robust stability and performance of hybrid impulsive dynamical systems. Next, a general modeling framework for mechanical impact systems described by impulsive differential equations will be developed. Furthermore, based on an ongoing research effort, we will develop a passivity-based control framework for stabilization of mechanical impact systems, more generally, Euler-Lagrange systems involving impacts. Finally, to transition the proposed theoretical developments to cutting-edge engineering technology, we propose to validate our results on a very important engineering problem; namely, active control of nanoprocesses. As part of his educational activities, we propose to introduce a novel web-based numerical experimental component in the undergraduate control education. Specifically, using the new enabling multimedia technology, we propose to develop several numerical experiments to train students in applying the analytical skills on computer generated models. Finally, inspired by an optimal control approach for biological processes, we propose a teaching philosophy model to study and hopefully maximize freshmen retention doc17070 none Metcalfe s law states that the value of a network increases with the square of the number of users. However, for most applications, as the number of participants increases, performance degrades, and so too does the value of application to the user. Centralized service and application architectures are most at risk for not maintaining performance with an increasing user base. Centralized sites can represent a processing bottleneck, a single point of failure, or single point ofattack. Furthermore, a single server cannot mitigate for client s poor network conditions in third-party domains. Repli- cating and distributing servers is one solution for solving the problems of centralized architectures. Peer-to-peer services take distribution even further by using collaborative clients who are pre- pared and expected to perform some or all the functions of servers. As new clients bring new load to the systems, they also bring new resources. Thus, peer-to-peer, collaborative services can be a powerful paradigm: if on average clients bring enough or more than enough resources to balance the load and cost they incur, then peer-to-peer services can increase in value and performance with the number of participants. The primary purpose of this proposal is to make fundamental advances in the understanding and design of applications and services that make use of replication and collaboration in a peer-to-peer environment. Opportunities for the application of peer-to-peer techniques in new disciplines seem limitless. I propose to examine several applications that are only possible, or achieve their best performance, using peer-to-peer architectures and not centralized architectures. These include the novel peer-to-peer applications of anonymity, secure ad-hoc routing, mobility-based transport for wearable computers, cheat-proof serverless gaming, and distributed information retrieval. There are commonalities to all the numerous peer-to-peer applications we will study: the ex- istence of heterogeneous peer resources, redundancy of offered services at peers, and replication of application data and content. By addressing these issues, the researcher will make important advances in discovery and understanding of peer-to-peer networking and by applying those results to a diverse set of problem areas, the researcher s work will make a broader impact in in fields as diverse as security (privacy, availability, and secure routing), mobile computing, wearable computing, multimedia and gaming, and distributed information retrieval. The major theme of the researcher s proposed educational activities is the involvement of undergraduates in original research. The goal of the educational proposal is to prepare undergraduate students for graduate school by providing them with an early opportunity toperform research. It consists of an integrated plan of publishable undergraduate research projects, new course curriculum, the development of practical lab exercises in networking and network security, distance learning, and minority outreach. By focusing the research of undergraduates on the themes of this proposal, the researcher is ensuring a number of benefits. First, that the impact of this educational component is tightly integrated with my research objectives. Second, by coordinating efforts with the director of the Northeast Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (NEAGEP), the researcher will improve minority outreach in the department by preparing and encouraging under-represented minority students to continue on for doctoral programs at UMass and other universities. Third, the researcher will advance the department s teaching mission by providing a new three-course curriculum of networking and security. Fourth, the researcher will produce a standard set of practical laboratory exercises in networking and network security to be used at any university. Finally, the availability ofmy curriculum and practical exercises, as well as UMass s existing Video Instruction Program and MANIC distance learning programs, will increase the external impact of the curriculum doc17071 none The objective of this research, funded by the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences and the Division of Chemistry, is to use an integrated approach of theory and computation to understand variations in quantum yield of tryptophan fluorescence in proteins. A custom hybrid quantum mechanical-molecular dynamics method will be applied to the higher charge transfer excited states instead of the electrostatic effects on fluorescence wavelength from the 1La state to predict tryptophan fluorescence wavelength shifts due to protein electric fields and solvation. The study will consider the possibility of both short and long-range electron transfer to (or from) at least the following implicated sources: the peptide backbone, protonated carboxylates (Glu and Asp), amide side chains (Asn and Gln), histidine, cysteine, disulfide bonds, and aromatic groups. The goal is to determine if there exists a correlation between fluorescence quantum yield and the incidence of charge transfer states that are particularly low in energy due to extreme electrostatic potential differences and or propitious solvation, using semiempirical and ab initio quantum mechanics applied to super molecular pairs consisting of tryptophan and a putative electron acceptor donor. At least 20 proteins with a full range of quantum yields, along with well-studied model compounds will be included in the study. Insight into the details of quenching is of practical importance because the protein fluorescence is used routinely by scientists to follow a myriad of transformations involving structural changes in the protein, for example, folding, unfolding, ligand binding, redox reactions, binding to other proteins, etc., all dynamic events for which structural information is often lacking. This work should add new and useful knowledge to the field of long-range electron transfer in proteins, which is central to photosynthesis and bioenergetics doc17072 none Raven Invasive plants are a major economic problem and are a serious threat to the protection of biodiversity in natural areas. Efforts to reduce the number of invaders must focus not only on controlling existing species but also on identifying pathways of introduction to reduce establishment. Many of these non-native species were introduced accidentally, but the majority were introduced for horticultural use. Introductions for horticulture use continue at a high rate, and species already here that demonstrate invasive ability are rarely removed from use. The workshop will bring together government, private, and academic interests in ecology and horticulture to address several relevant issues. The invited participants will: 1) develop specific codes of conduct for interest areas within horticulture, including nurseries, botanical gardens, landscape architects, and the gardening public; 2) assess and refine explicit easy-to-use methods and guidelines for evaluating plant species for potential to become invasive pests; and 3) develop and assess methods to determine acceptable alternatives to many invasive species currently used in the United States for horticulture. It is intended that the discussions will search for concrete solutions acceptable to all parties and that, from the discussions, research and action agendas will be identified. The results of the workshop will be presented to the commercial horticulture and botanical garden communities, as well as to the Weed Science Society of America, for discussion, refinement and adoption doc17073 none The Advanced Materials Program in the Division of Chemistry makes this Career award to Washington University. With this award, Professor Thomas Vaid will systematically study controlled doping of organic hydrocarbons using isostructural n- and p-dopants. Dopants will be synthesized and characterized for electrical charge transport behavior in solid state and electrochemical properties in solution. Doped crystals will be grown by a number of methods including vapor sublimation, melt crystallization and solution-phase crystallization. Junctions will be formed between doped semiconductors by vapor deposition or alloy junction growth to study current rectification behavior and photovoltaic responses. Organic light emitting diodes and organic field effect transistors are potential devices to be expected from these doped organic semiconducting crystals. The proposed educational program includes introduction of materials chemistry courses and laboratory experiments with special emphasis on acquisition and analysis of physical data on molecules and materials synthesized by students. Research training provided by the program will prepare graduate and undergraduate students for advanced studies and research New organic semiconducting crystal will be synthesized from hydrocarbons using isostructural doping using newly synthesized n- and p-dopants. Educational programs in materials chemistry will prepare students for advanced studies and research in electrooptic and conjugated materials doc17074 none This is a CAREER award which combines research and educational activities. The goal of the research component is to use newly developed atomic-scale first-principles approaches to address some of the most fundamental issues in transport in molecular wires that can have impact on the development of molecular electronics. Issues that will be studied include: (1) current-induced forces; (2) local heating and heating dissipation; (3) shot noise; and, (4) interference effects at the molecule-leads contact. The work will proceed in concert with experimental studies of leading groups in the field. The goal of the educational component is to integrate the research activities into undergraduate and graduate education with the development of a new course: Career Development for Physicists. This course will give undergraduates and graduate students an appreciation of the new career possibilities other than the academic one. Also, it will create the tools and specific problem-solving stategies to make the transition from student life to professional employment. Career options in nanotechnology will be the leading theme, but the scope of the course will be wider in range. This is a CAREER award which combines research and educational activities. The goal of the research component is to use newly developed atomic-scale first-principles approaches to address some of the most fundamental issues in transport in molecular wires that can have impact on the development of molecular electronics. Issues that will be studied include: (1) current-induced forces; (2) local heating and heating dissipation; (3) shot noise; and, (4) interference effects at the molecule-leads contact. The work will proceed in concert with experimental studies of leading groups in the field. The goal of the educational component is to integrate the research activities into undergraduate and graduate education with the development of a new course: Career Development for Physicists. This course will give undergraduates and graduate students an appreciation of the new career possibilities other than the academic one. Also, it will create the tools and specific problem-solving stategies to make the transition from student life to professional employment. Career options in nanotechnology will be the leading theme, but the scope of the course will be wider in range doc17075 none This proposal tackles fundamental problems in system design using a two-pronged approach including both queueing theory and kernel-level implementation. Particular emphasis is placed on understanding the impact of heavy-tailed properties in compute workloads. The proposal focuses on two specific research questions: (1) Is it possible to reduce the expected response time of every request at a server, simply by changing the order in which requests are scheduled? Todays web servers employ FAIR scheduling, wherein requests are time-shared fairly. This proposal considers instead scheduling which biases towards SHORT requests, and argues analytically and via implementation that biasing towards SHORT requests improves response times for all requests. (2) How should servers be designed to cope with transient overload conditions? Most of client dissatisfaction can be attributed to moments of temporary overload at the server. This proposal aims to understand exactly what happens to systems during overload, both via a formal queueing analysis and via a rigorous systematic study of server OS internals doc17076 none An emerging question in plant biology is whether plants display analogous elements of mammalian-programmed cell death (apoptosis) during development and pathogen attack. With respect to plant-pathogen interactions, cell death occurs in both susceptible disease and resistant host responses. For example, in resistant reactions, specific recognition responses in plants trigger formation of the hypersensitive response (HR) and activation of host defense mechanisms. HR triggers a cell death pathway resulting in restriction of pathogen growth and disease development. Historically HR has been considered a product of necrosis, but several studies have suggested that cell death during HR involves activation of a plant-encoded program for cell suicide that may resemble apoptosis. Susceptible interactions also result in host cell death although it is unclear to what degree (if any) the host participates in this response. Recent data obtained in my laboratory strongly suggest that during disease development in pathogen infected susceptible tobacco plants, apoptosis is occurring. Hallmark characteristics of apoptosis, including discrete DNA fragmentation (e.g., DNA ladders) and nuclear condensation have been observed. These apoptotic responses do not occur in the transgenic, disease resistant tobacco. Based on these data, as well as reports from other laboratories, it appears that elements of animal cell suicide are functionally conserved in plants. The central hypothesis of this research is that plants share certain features of apoptosis with animals. The goal of this project are: (I) to identify and characterize plant genes which functionally resemble those found in animal apoptosis pathways and evaluate these genes in resolution, the cell death process in plants. An understanding of how plants regulate cellular suicide will provide information regarding plant response to environmental stress and have the potential to generate effective disease resistant plants doc17077 none This is a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. The research component will employ eye tracking and other means to infer the cognitive processes of people engaged in particular tasks, and will develop a computational framework, called mind-tracking architecture, for mapping observed actions to the unobserved thoughts that produce them. This work will draw upon existing psychology and engineering research and synthesize these efforts into a unified methodology. The project will employ two frameworks at different levels to achieve mind tracking: the production-system architecture ACT-R and cognitive grammars that represent behavior as rules from intentions to actions. Three specific application areas will motivate, demonstrate, and test the methodology: intelligent tutoring, automobile driver assistance, and assistive technology for the disabled. The educational component will develop a new human-computer interaction curriculum and an outreach program to foster communication among students, researchers and industry professionals. This CAREER award recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of a teacher-scholar who is likely to become an academic leader of the twenty-first century. Each of the three application areas has the potential for significant benefit to members of the general public: students, drivers, and the disabled doc17078 none A fundamental fact in computer and network security is that there never can be a one hundred percent assurance that a computer system is trusted. The term trusted is used heavily in Computer Security. Unfortunately, the term has several definitions depending on who uses it and how the term is used. Throughout this proposal, a definition which is a slight modifications of Peter Neumann s, is used. Based on this definition, an object is defined as trusted when the object always operates as expected according to design and policy. A stronger trust statement is when an object is trustworthy. A trustworthy object is one that has been shown in some convincing manner, e.g. a formal code-review or formal mathematical analysis, to operate as expected. Ken Thompson described very clearly one of the many issues involved in determining if a system is trusted in his Turing Award speech in . For over twenty-five years, the security community has focused on technology, and yet information systems remain as vulnerable as ever (perhaps more so). However, a significant improvements in security lie in another area-the secure management of technologies and the systems that implement them. In this proposal, the PI demonstrates the need for intensive research on the secure management of distributed heterogeneous networks and systems, and describes a novel research plan using active system management to address this area. The tremendous growth of the use of information technology has exacerbated the problem of effectively managing and securing the resultant information infrastructure. This coupled with the fact that the current state of the art in security is essentially penetrate and patch has created a situation where information technology is more vulnerable than ever. The vulnerability of information technology is demonstrated by the large number of news stories relating to wide-spread computer intrusions and network scanning that are published each week. The big question is how do we improve the situation? While studies, anecdotal evidence, and press reports have demonstrated the increasing vulnerability of information technology, information security research is currently primarily focused on the underlying security technology rather than the secure management of the information technology. Yet, the tremendous growth in the use of information technology and its rate of change creates a configuration and system management nightmare that amplifies existing security problems. Unfortunately, current approaches for solving this complex problem are ad hoc, do not scale, and have not focused on security. In this research, the PI proposes a broad examination of distributed heterogeneous configuration and security management of network elements and hosts from both a theoretical and a systems approach. The proposed research provides the formalism, mechanisms, and protocols so that enterprises can implement and utilize a very small, or quick, management loop, i.e. the tools to allow the defenders to react faster than the attackers. Doing so eliminates one of the principle advantages of attackers, and dramatically increases the work factor of successful attacks- providing one of the first real improvements in computer and network security doc17079 none CAREER: A Unified Theory of Pseudorandomness Salil P. Vadhan During the past few decades, randomization has become one of the most pervasive paradigms in computer science. The best known solutions to many problems in algorithms, cryptography, reliable communication, network design, combinatorics, and distributed computing surprisingly involve making random choices. Thus randomness appears to be very useful, but it is still not known to what extent it is truly necessary. Thus, this research asks: is it possible to reduce or even eliminate the need for randomness in the above settings? The investigators address this question via the paradigm of Pseudorandomness, which is the theory of efficiently generating objects that look random despite being constructed using little or no randomness. Specifically, this research builds upon deep connections recently discovered between four pseudorandom objects, namely pseudorandom generators, expander graphs, error-correcting codes, and extractors. The investigators seek to strengthen these connections and use them to attack some of the open problems in the area, such as the construction of expander graphs with optimal expansion, the derandomization of space-bounded computation, and a complete understanding of the relationship between derandomization and circuit lower bounds. Students at all levels are involved in the research, including undergraduates who explore conjectures about expander graphs through computer experiments. The research is tightly integrated into new courses being developed by the investigators, including a graduate course on Pseudorandomness, which focuses on the unified theory that is emerging; and an undergraduate course on Cryptography, which emphasizes the role of pseudorandomness in modern cryptography doc17080 none Interconnect has always been the dominant component consuming area, delay, and energy in Field-Programmable Gate Arrays and related spatial computing devices. With interconnect requirements scaling faster than linearly in device gate capacity and fundamental interconnect delays in VLSI scaling slower than gate speeds, this problem is only exacerbated as we go forward. Further, with the size of silicon systems we can build today, all kinds of single-chip architectures (e.g. multiprocessor, system-on-a-chip, VLIW, Vector, PIM) will be moving toward greater on-chip parallelism and hence greater use of on-chip, programmable interconnect. Nonetheless, interconnect is probably the least understood component in programmable devices. The fundamental goal of this research is to close gaps in our understanding of interconnect structures and in our quantification of interconnect requirements and synthesize this understanding into an engineering-grade approach to programmable interconnect design. This effort will build upon results in VLSI and Parallel theory, but goes beyond them to close asymptotic gaps, understand how to optimize the constant factors, and characterize the properties and behavior of typical designs. The pedagogical goal is to make the design space, issues, tradeoffs, and impact of spatial interconnect design accessible to students and practitioners with an undergraduate computer science background doc17081 none The analysis of incomplete information has had a profound impact on economic theory, especially in the context of non-cooperative models. However, cooperative theory in the presence of asymmetric information is much less settled. This project will study important open problems of cooperation and incentives under asymmetric information, with an eye on applications such as auctions and bargaining. Due to the importance of individual incentives, the research will rely heavily on insights from non-cooperative game theory and mechanism design. When economic agents can cooperate with each other, it is important to consider economic allocations that are immune to changes induced by self-interested groups or coalitions. The idea of coalitional stability is typically formalized through the set of allocations known as the `core, also connected with the theory of competitive markets. This project is concerned with the theory of the core in an environment with asymmetric information. When a coalition of asymmetrically informed agents forms, it is not clear how much information will be shared among them because it may be in their individual interest to hide some of it. The research will analyze how to formalize coalitional stability in this context. It will provide a way of making endogenous the amount of information pooling among agents, and investigate conditions under which the set of core allocations is non-empty. The research will also explore how non-cooperative decentralized mechanisms may be designed to implement socially desirable outcomes. The results of the project will lead to a better understanding of important social, political and economic phenomena, including collusion in auctions and coalition formation in problems of bargaining doc17082 none Charles D. Creusere New Mexico State University Efficient Audio Compression with Perceptually Embedded Scalability The focus of this project is to develop compression formats for audio data that are better suited to the integrated wireless landline communications networks currently being developed and fielded. The heterogeneous nature of such networks demands a compressed storage format from which fine layers of audio fidelity can be extracted; thus, each listener on the communications network receives as many layers of audio fidelity (i.e., the best quality audio reproduction) that his or her communications channel can support, all extracted from this single compressed representation. An obvious application of such technology is music-on-demand over forthcoming wireless services like 3G cellular and Bluetooth. A finely layered or scalable bit stream can also be used to improve the streaming of real-time audio over the Internet or a broadcast wireless channel by simplifying rate buffer control and error protection. The research here concentrates on developing a high-performance compression algorithm whose scalability is optimized for perceptual performance over the entire range of output fidelities. Most of the audio compression algorithms in wide use today-- MP3 (MPEG audio layer 3), MPEG AAC, Dolby Digital, etc.-- do not support bitstream scalability. Within the frameworks of MPEG 2 and MPEG 4, fine-grained scalability is supported using a technique called bit slice arithmetic coding (BSAC). Unfortunately, subjective testing has shown that BSAC s scalability is not optimized for perceived sound quality at lower bitrates. To more closely tie the bit allocation process to the perceived quality, a non-uniform multirate filter bank is used here whose frequency resolution approximates that of the critical bands of human hearing. Quantization within each critical band is then performed in an optimal, multistage manner using both vector and scalar techniques doc17083 none Dr. Amnon Kohen of the University of Iowa is funded for his research on protein dynamics and hydrogen tunneling in enzymatic catalysis by a CAREER grant in the Physical Chemistry program of the Chemistry Division. He will develop mechanistic models for how biologically significant C-H bond activation occurs and for the role of protein dynamics, coupled motion, and quantum mechanical hydrogen tunneling in enzyme catalysis. Kinetic isotope effects and temperature effects will be used to probe tunneling and associated reaction mechanism questions. Dr. Kohen will incorporate aspects of bioorganic chemistry, physical organic chemistry, and computational chemistry into the organic laboratory for majors. A new graduate course, Chemical Catalysis in Biology, will be developed and based on recent literature. Enzyme catalysis is one of the most important biochemical phenomena, since it is at the heart of nearly all of our physiological biochemistry (how our food is digested, how our cells reproduce, how hormones induce changes in our body functions, etc.). The role of coupled motion and quantum mechanical hydrogen tunneling in enzyme catalysis will be discerned. Tunneling is the phenomenon by which a molecule or group of reacting molecules transfers through a reaction energy barrier due to its wave-like property. Synchronous motion or coupled motion of atoms in a reacting molecule is a phenomenon that has been found to be important in some enzyme catalyzed reactions. The small but important enzyme, dihydrofolate reductase, that catalyzes hydrogen transfer will be a focal point of this research. Dr. Kohen plans on developing new course work in the area of bioinorganic chemistry for both undergraduate and graduate students doc17084 none This is a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. The project is designed to develop fundamental principles for natural language interfaces for the next generation of intelligent tutoring systems. Natural language interfaces to instructional and educational applications need both knowledge about how to act in a domain and communication knowledge about how to talk about acting in the domain. This project seeks to overcome the domain dependence of natural language interfaces that prevents them from being portable to other domains. It will accomplish this in two ways. First, the research will elucidate the difference between domain dependent and domain independent communication strategies. Second, it will develop a methodology, algorithms and tools to semi-automatically derive domain and communication knowledge from text and dialogues. An innovative aspect of this work is the role played by the lexical semantics of action verbs to acquire domain knowledge represented as action schemas. Among the instructional domains addressed by this research is computer science. The fact that the work concerns tutoring systems integrates the research and education components of the work, through class evaluation and undergraduate participation in research. This CAREER award recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of a teacher-scholar who is likely to become an academic leader of the twenty-first century. Success in this research will enable the construction of improved computerized tutors, as well as advancing the general field of natural language processing. A specific educational focus is mentoring women at the undergraduate and graduate level, and supporting girls in choosing science and engineering as a career doc17085 none This research project will develop adaptive, personalized, topic-driven crawlers to help search engines. The current search engines do not scale in a dynamic environment. The proposed research will overcome this limitation. The research will utilize an autonomous agent-based approach to building new scalable algorithms. The career development plan will include integrating the results into the undergraduate and graduate curriculum. The students will also carry out projects using the results of this research doc17086 none Multimodal Neuroimaging of Cognitive and Mnemonic Control With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Wagner will conduct a three study of the role of the pre-frontal cortex in selection of task-relevant knowledge mediating goal-directed behavior. Human cognition is marked by complex mental behavior. Such behavior frequently depends on cognitive control processes that permit an individual to access and work with internal representations in a goal-directed manner, especially within the context of competing goal irrelevant representations. Given the centrality of control mechanisms in cognition, a fundamental challenge is to specify the cognitive and neural architectures of control processes. Initial efforts point to prefrontal cortex (PFC) as a locus of control, with theories positing that PFC is a component of the neural circuitry that guides access to and selection of task- relevant knowledge through interactions with posterior association cortices that may represent target knowledge. Moreover, in the process of mediating goal-directed behavior, PFC-control processes may contribute to the encoding of information in episodic memory. Understanding of PFC contributions to cognitive and mnemonic control has markedly advanced over the past few decades, with significant insights often deriving from the integration of multiple experimental techniques, such as the recent combination of cognitive behavioral paradigms with functional brain imaging methods. While these efforts have yielded important advances, fundamental questions remain regarding the nature of PFC control mechanisms, their necessity for goal-directed behavior and memory formation, and the temporal dynamics of these operations. Leverage on these outstanding questions can be gained through the integration of multiple neuroimaging methods when each provides a different perspective on brain function. In the proposed research, a unique multi-modal neuroimaging approach will be adopted. Spatio-temporal imaging will combine the spatial resolution of event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with the temporal resolution of electromagnetic imaging techniques - magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG). FMRI will characterize the functional properties of specific PFC sub-regions, and will guide the solutions for MEG EEG analysis of their temporal characteristics. In addition, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) -a technique permitting the momentary disruption of local neural activity in healthy individuals -will be implemented to address questions regarding the necessity of PFC regions for cognitive control, interference resolution, and memory formation. Single-pulse TMS will be applied to fMRI-identified PFC structures at MEG EEG-determined temporal periods. The proposed research, which will build on our preliminary studies as well as the broader literature, will address three specific aims: Aim 1. Capitalizing on the spatial resolution of fMRI, we aim to test specific hypothesis regarding the nature of PFC contributions to stimulus processing, controlled retrieval and selection, interference resolution, and episodic encoding. FMRI will adjudicate between models of PFC cognitive control by (a) exploring whether PFC subserves content-specific or contentgeneral bias mechanisms, (b) testing whether PFC mediates controlled retrieval or selection of task relevant knowledge, and (c) assessing the relation between these control mechanisms and behavioral susceptibility to interference. Aim 2. Capitalizing on the temporal resolution of MEG EEG, we aim to test the hypothesis that PFC provides a top-down bias on neural computations in posterior cortices, thus subserving access to, selection of, and episodic memory for target knowledge. MEG will provide complimentary evidence to fMRI, thus further addressing the central questions in Aim 1. Aim 3. Using TMS, we aim to test the hypothesis that PFC subregions - identified with fMRI and MEG to be correlated with specific control processes - are indeed necessary for cognitive control, interference resolution, and memory formation. We will test whether specific subregions are differentially necessary depending on (a) the nature of the required control processes, (b) the content of the to-be-encoded experience, and (c) the strength of relevant and irrelevant associations. It is anticipated that the combination of spatiotemporal imaging and disruptive stimulation will provide important new evidence regarding the nature, necessity, and temporal dynamics of PFC mechanisms that subserve cognitive and mnemonic control doc17087 none This faculty early career development award supports integrated research and educational activities in the interdisciplinary area of computational cell biology at the College of William and Mary. Professor Smith is developing a computational model of the dynamics of Ca2+ regulation at IP3-sensitive Ca2+ release sites that includes both 1) stochastic activation and inactivation of IP3Rs consistent with current knowledge of IP3 diversity and 2) a realistic account of the buffered diffusion of intracellular Ca2+ leading to cooperative IP3R activity. This model will be used to test four specific hypotheses. First, an optimal density of type 1 IP3Rs leads to maximum release site activation (but not so for type 2 IP3Rs). Second, Ca2+ buffers influence release site activation in a manner dependent on density and subtype of IP3Rs. Third, release sites exhibit distinct kinetics of activation and inactivation depending on IP3R subtype. Fourth, the dynamics of Ca2+ regulation at release sites with tightly clustered IP3Rs are well-approximated by reduced models utilizing steady-state Ca2+ microdomain theory. In addition, Prof. Smith is directing several interdisciplinary graduate undergraduate research projects related to the statistical properties of IP3-sensitive Ca2+ release sites and the effect of IP3R clustering on global Ca2+ responses. Educational activities include curriculum development intended to increase the exposure of graduate and undergraduate students at William and Mary to quantitative approaches in cell and molecular biology. A new course entitled Cellular Biophysics and Modeling emphasizes diffusion, membrane transport, mass action kinetics, single channel recording of voltage- and ligand-gated ion channels, whole cell currents, compartmental modeling, plasma membrane electrical excitability, and dynamics in cell signal transduction. A second new course, Introductory Bioinformatics, exposes biology majors (with minimal background in computer programming) to the basic algorithms of computational molecular biology including sequence comparison, fragment assembly, phylogenetic tree construction, and secondary structure prediction. Both courses include an integrated computer laboratory. This faculty early career development award supports computational cell biology research and education at the College of William and Mary. In most cell types an organelle called the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) has integrative and regenerative properties analogous to the excitable membranes of neurons. While insight into ER Ca2+ excitability has been obtained through the development of whole cell models of Ca2+ handling that are based on molecular mechanisms, a limitation of whole cell models to date is the assumption that IP3 receptors (IP3Rs) are globally coupled by the bulk (or average) cytosolic Ca2+ concentration. In order to overcome these limitations, Prof. Smith is developing computational models of the dynamics of Ca2+ regulation at IP3-sensitive Ca2+ release sites that focus on local coupling of IP3Rs mediated by the diffusion of intracellular Ca2+, a fundamental and significant aspect of cell signaling. Prof. Smith is also directing several interdisciplinary graduate undergraduate research projects related to the statistical properties of IP3-sensitive Ca2+ release sites and the effect of IP3R clustering on global Ca2+ responses. Educational activities include curriculum development intended to increase the exposure of graduate and undergraduate students at William and Mary to quantitative approaches in cell and molecular biology. Two new courses are being developed: Cellular Biophysics and Modeling and Introductory Bioinformatics, both of which involve an integrated computer laboratory doc17088 none Photopolymerization has experienced tremendous growth within the film, coating and ink industries and is leading to new applications in the biomedical, communications, automotive, and aerospace fields as well. The advantages of using light to initiate polymerization rather than heat include significant savings in energy costs and processing space and time, solvent-free systems, and increased control over the production of initiating species. Of the possible propagation mechanisms, those that are driven by free radical active centers are the most prevalent; however, these polymerizations are plagued by oxygen inhibition. This has increased interest in using cationic photpolymerization schemes, although these suffer from inhibition by moisture and slower cure rates. In order to address the limitations of these polymerization mechanisms, hybrid resin systems have been designed within the past few years to cure using a combination of cationic and free-radical mechanisms under ultraviolet light. These systems exhibit lower sensitivity to oxygen and moisture and offer advantages such as increased cure speed and improved film-forming properties. To date, most studies have focused on the development of these systems; thus, there is a definite need for in-depth studies in order to create a fundamental base of knowledge that allows the impact and utility of these systems to be optimized. This research will investigate hybrid resin systems based on formulations that contain both an epoxide moiety, which undergoes cationic ring-opening photopolymerization, and an acrylate moiety, which undergoes free radical photopolymerization. The goal of this research is to characterize the fundamental kinetics of these hybrid resin systems and to correlate the chemical distribution of the species with the resulting physical properties. This goal will be accomplished by: 1. Investigating the photopolymerization kinetics of the hybrid resin systems. 2. Determining the microscopic composition of the hybrid polymers. 3. Evaluating the mechanical properties of the hybrid polymers. The conversion and rate data for these hybrid systems will be obtained using in-situ Raman experiments and corroborated with photo-differential scanning calorimetry experiments. Raman spectroscopy provides a highly sensitive means of following both cationic and free- radical reactions in real time by monitoring the depletion of the epoxide rings and the acrylate double bonds as they are consumed during the polymerization. The physical nature and properties of the resulting polymers will be investigated with Raman microscopy and dynamic mechanical analysis. Results from this research will address important issues on the interactions between the two polymerization systems and will provide guidance that will aid in the design of these reaction systems for established radiation cure industries, as well as provide opportunities for growth in new areas. This research program will also have a direct impact on the educational experience of students at various levels, including those in junior and senior high school. The Engineering Awareness for Students and Teachers program will be developed to introduce secondary students and teachers from an urban school district to engineering concepts and college preparation strategies through a summer program and classroom activities. Economically disadvantaged students and female and minority students will be recruited in order to increase the opportunities of these under-represented groups in engineering. This two-pronged approach seeks to increase the impact of the program beyond the students who attend the summer program by supporting their teachers, who will return to their classrooms with materials to introduce all their students to the excitement and challenges of engineering doc17089 none The aim of this project is to develop an approach for conducting solid state chemical synthesis that provides the degrees of synthetic freedom of the liquid phase. The method utilizes molecules, as linear templates, to direct alignment of reactive sites using the strength and directionality of hydrogen bonds. The goals include: (1) expanding the methods to reaction homology by developing families of templates and reactants and (2) applying products of the approach for the design of a class of porous crystalline materials known as inverted metal-organic frameworks. These materials will be engineered to possess tunable pores of nanoscale dimensions lined with organic functionality. The ability to synthesize the organic building blocks of these materials in the solid state means that access to porous solids not achievable by other synthetic methods may be realized. The program seeks to integrate research ideas with education at the local, regional, and national level through events such as campus workshops that introduce students to green chemistry and materials science. Solid-state chemical techniques provide an environmentally-friendly, or green alternative to synthetic processes that rely on toxic organic solvents or routes to new molecules and materials with unique properties. For example, strategies for the design of porous crystalline solids are of much interest owing to their promise to deliver materials with properties that improve upon traditional and industrially important inorganic solids such as zeolites, a class of materials i doc17090 none This project focuses on studying general purpose visual tracking systems. A model-based approach will be used, emphasizing the particular class of objects to be tracked. The tracking procedure is to be based on solving partial differential equations describing curve flow. Schemes for performing tracking will be developed based on intensity information, which is contained within the region of the curve in question. Faster, more effective, and more robust trackers will be generated by extending the general framework via generalization of the assumptions used, and through formal analysis of the related PDEs. Also addressed will be the more general problem of combining shape and intensity-based information; as above, the algorithm will also look for intensity patterns that match what it knows about the class of objects to be tracked. The education part of the project includes curriculum development, undergraduate independent studies, and exposure of a large number students to an experimental system designed by the PI doc17091 none In research supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry and the Instrument Development in Biological Research Programs, Professor Robert M. Corn and his coworkers at the University of Wisconsin are developing new fabrication methods and spectroscopic detection techniques for biopolymer arrays on gold thin films. A combination of novel attachment chemistries and microfluidic delivery strategies are being employed to create high fidelity biosensor arrays of DNA, polypeptide and proteins on gold surfaces. Surface plasmon resonance imaging is a surface-sensitive detection technique that is being developed for the label-free detection of bioaffinity interactions in an array format. The DNA and protein arrays fabricated in this research effort will be used in conjunction with the surface plasmon resonance imaging methods for the high throughput study of protein-DNA and protein-protein interactions. Professor Robert M. Corn and his coworkers at the University of Wisconsin are creating high quality biochips that consist of DNA, polypeptides, and proteins attached onto gold thin film surfaces in a multi-element array format. By detecting the binding of other biomolecules onto these biochips with the spectroscopic technique of surface plasmon resonance imaging, these biopolymer arrays can be used as multi-element biosensors in the areas of environmental sensing and medical diagnostics. In addition to the detection of biological compounds, the high throughput study of bioaffinity interactions with these arrays will have immediate applications in the areas of gene expression and proteomics doc17092 none A PI from Georgia Institute of Technology will use MRPG funds to study the distribution, transport and behavior of 37Cs in the Savannah Estuary. The goal of this project is to ascertain whether sediments in estuaries are a permanent sink for naturally-occurring and anthropogenic radionuclides. About 20 sediment cores will be collected in this estuary along with some samples from nearby riverine and marine environments to obtain endpoints . Samples will be analyzed for 37Cs, major cations, trace metals, mineralogy and grain size. The PI also will analyze her samples for 210Pb, 226Ra, 234Th and 7Be to identify the dominant physical transport processes affecting sediments in the Savannah Estuary doc17093 none This effort explores the feasibility of extending the dilution limit of an engine during cold-start conditions by using reformer gas and characterizes experimentally the chemical interactions of reformer gas with large-carbon-number hydrocarbon fuels representative of gasoline over a range of pressures, temperatures, and equivalence ratios. The investigation includes determination of flame speed with digital particle-imaging velocitmetry (DPIV) using a counterflow burner, and characterization of oxidation scattering, and planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) using a piston reactor. Engine experiments are conducted to determine the effect from the use of reformer gas on cold-start hydrocarbon emissions. Under the education plan, research findings are integrated into course development. The program also includes outreach efforts at the precollege level including science project advising, classroom visits, hands on laboratory sessions, and laboratory demonstrations doc17094 none The objective of the research component of this work is the preparation of a number of C2-symmetric aromatic heterocycles and porphyrins and the assembly of these components into oligocatenanes (molecular chains) and other types of interwoven oligomers. The monomers used for chain assembly are predominantly bis-(pyridyl)pyridines, bis-(benzimidazolyl)pyridines and bis-(benzimidazolyl)propane units. These ligands contain benzyl halide or benzaldehyde functional groups which allow for future chain growth. After the ligands are synthesized, two are complexed to Zn(II) or Cu(I) to provide a kink in the molecular chain and then chain growth is initiated off the functional groups in the ligands. A variety of catenates and hetero-metallic oligocatenates will be prepared using this approach. Column oligomers and two dimensional grids and networks will also be prepared using a similar strategy but starting with formyl functionalized porphyrin monomers. There are two major educational components to this project. In educational outreach, this group is working with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and the Great Lakes Science Center to establish Polymer Science Days and Polymer Funhouse exhibits. An additional educational component of this work is the development of two polymer chemistry lecture courses at CWRU, one aimed primarily at undergraduate chemistry, engineering and materials science majors and a second aimed primarily at graduate students. With this CAREER award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research and educational goals of Dr. Stuart J. Rowan of the Department of Chemistry at Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Rowan will explore the synthesis of heterocyclic monomers which can be assembled into molecular chains and interwoven grids and networks. Such materials may have practical applications in the development of high temperature polymers, sensors, and separation membranes as well as exhibiting conducting and light harvesting properties which may prove useful in display devices. Students trained as a result of working on this project will gain experience in materials research as well as supramolecular organic and inorganic chemistry, hence they will have skills needed by both the specialty chemicals and the computer materials industries. In educational outreach, this group is working with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and the Great Lakes Science Center to establish Polymer Science Days and Polymer Funhouse exhibits. An additional educational component of this work is the development of two polymer chemistry lecture courses at CWRU, one aimed primarily at undergraduate chemistry, engineering and materials science majors and a second aimed primarily at graduate students doc17095 none T. Daniel Crawford is supported by a CAREER grant from the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to develop and apply accurate quantum chemical methods to the chiroptical properties of large molecules. He will design practical computational tools for the determination of the absolute configurations for newly synthesized chrial molecules and for insight into optical activity. He will also develop new algorithms to overcome the polynomial scaling of coupled cluster theory. In his educational activities, he will develop an integrated computational chemistry program across the undergraduate chemistry curriculum, involving computational experiments for the lab courses. Optical properties of large chiral molecules are of interest to natural product research in order to manipulate and synthesize stereochemically pure chiral drugs. The ultimate goal of this research program is to develop a computationally efficient and accuate method for calculating these properties from first princilpes. The goals of this educational program are not only to teach students the fundamentals of computational chemistry and for what chemical problems computational techniques may be the preferred analytical tool, but also to help them understand why and when such tools might fail. The lab projects will be collected into a computational chemistry handbook to be published in print and on the web for use by other chemistry departments doc17096 none A question of great interest to ecologists and evolutionary biologists is, Why do species occur in certain habitats and not in others? One basis for governing the distributions of species is their tolerance of physical factors in the environment, notably ambient temperature. This fact is illustrated especially clearly in rocky intertidal habitats: In the gradient from the subtidal region to the intertidal zone, thermal conditions vary sharply, as does the set of species found along this transect. It is common for one species of a genus to be replaced by a closely related species of the same genus (a congener). The studies supported by this proposal examine the physiological, biochemical and molecular differences among congeners from different vertical sites in an effort to identify adaptive differences that help to explain variation in distribution patterns. The systems to be studied include: (i) the heat-shock response, a rescue system for repairing heat-damaged proteins; (ii) heart function, which is markedly sensitive to temperature; (iii) membrane integrity, which is essential for many physiological processes, and (iv) nerve function, which may be of importance in setting thermal tolerance limits. Techniques to be used include a wide variety of molecular methods (sequencing of genes and analysis of gene expression patterns), biochemical approaches (measurement of levels of heat-damaged proteins) and physiological analyses (rates of heart function and generation of nerve signals). Study species include snails of the genus Tegula and porcelain crabs (genus Petrolisthes). Both sets of congeners occur over wide vertical and latitudinal ranges and thus are excellent study systems for elucidating mechanisms of adaptation to temperature. The study of congeners adapted to different temperatures allows a particularly clear picture to be developed of the role of adaptive change in establishing environmental optima and tolerance limits. By identifying the underlying mechanisms that establish thermal optima and limits, the effects of predicted global warming could be understood in a more definitive manner doc17097 none The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Directorate for Education and Human resources proposes to develop program evaluation models and tools that will be used to collectively and individually assess the National Science Foundation s (NSF) Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) Program. Under the AGEP Program, NSF supports a portfolio of projects that serve as effective models for addressing issues related to increasing the number of minority students pursuing advanced degrees; obtaining doctoral degrees; and entering the professoriate in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) disciplines. Products will include the AGEP Evaluation Framework; evaluation models; and evaluation tools and protocols. Dissemination of evaluation information and materials will be done in print and web site format. In addition, AAAS will host 3 AGEP evaluation workshops to help Alliance members understand how to use the AGEP Evaluation Framework, models, and tools doc17098 none With each successive generation of microprocessors designers push the envelopes of technology and complexity. But these factors are conspiring to make the accepted practice of custom ASICs, and generational processors obsolete. Overhead costs such as design, validation, mask-generation, and test are growing and will make it prohibitive to continue with the current strategies. Concurrent with this trend is the growing realization that we are well past the point of diminishing returns for enhancing single-threaded computational performance. The future will migrate us towards ubiquitous parallel models of execution. Finally, users are starting to demand not just performance but reliability and security from their computing infrastructure. While the obvious substrates are sea-of-gates FPGAs, they are highly inefficient and do not take advantage of the wealth of processor research conducted over the last 50 years. Instead, we propose SISC, or Soft-Instruction-Set-Computing. A SISC processor is a universal processor, with no fixed legacy instruction set architecture, and no fixed interface to the surrounding system envi-ronment. However, it does exploit the best features of both fixed-logic superscalar processors and fine-grained FPGAs to provide an efficient, generic, computing substrate on which to experiment and build the secure, robust and distributed systems of the future. We will demonstrate the capabilities of configurable substrates by showing that SISC processors provide efficient emulation of existing legacy instruction set architectures, a platform to provide peek performance on streaming data-flow applications, a unification of single, multi-threaded and multi-processor architectures, a computing device on which to provide application-specific architecture security, integrated hardware support for high-level languages and a flexible substrate for enhanced undergraduate and graduate level computer architecture research. These application goals will drive our research in the design of a truly universal computing substrate. We expect the following products from this career plan: 1. A configurable processor design capable of emulating most modern instruction sets and a platform on which to construct new secure application architectures. 2. An infrastructure of simulation tools, emulation techniques, and hardware prototypes to demonstrate the benefits of reconfigurable processing substrates. 3. Automated compilation algorithms and tools for runtime customization of the SISC architecture. 4. A set of secure application compilation targets and operating system techniques to dynamically apply them as a response to network attacks. 5. Students trained in efficient system design and rigorous evaluation methodologies through research, student workshops and new courses doc17099 none This research will develop techniques to provide seamless and transparent access to databases on the deep web. In particular, the project will build a metaquery system that helps users to find and query the databases. The specific tasks will include source discovery and modeling, semi-structured unified schema construction, dynamic source selection, metaquery language definition, and metaquerier system development. The career development plan will include modernizing the database curriculum as well as promoting interdisciplinary research doc17100 none Executive control is a fundamental issue in basic research in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience and in several areas of applied research, including human factors and ergonomics. Executive control is the process by which the mind controls itself, programming itself to perform specific tasks, monitoring performance for speed and accuracy, adjusting strategies, and switching between tasks. This research will extend Logan s theory of executive control to address a broad range of phenomena in the burgeoning literature on switching between tasks. Like many theories of executive control, Logan s theory posits an executive process that programs a subordinate task to do specific tasks. It interprets task switching as re-programming: The executive process develops a new program for the upcoming task and transmits it to the subordinate, much like a programmer installs new software in a computer. Logan s theory goes beyond previous theories of executive control in specifying the subordinate process explicitly and specifically. It adopts a powerful theory of attention and categorization as the theory of the subordinate process, and it describes executive control in terms of programming the subordinate theory to perform tasks. This allows precise, quantitative predictions of performance in a broad range of situations, including those in which people switch from one task to another. The research will consist of three projects. The first will develop quantitative measures of the time required to switch between tasks. In Logan s theory, this switching time represents the time required for the executive to formulate a new program and install it in the subordinate process. The second project will investigate the role of short-term working memory in executive control. It will focus on a new experimental procedure in which subjects are given names of tasks to be performed and then a list of stimuli to perform them on, much like a person remembers a list of errands to be run on the way home from work or a list of chores to be done on a Saturday afternoon. The third project will examine the role of long-term memory in task switching. It will focus on competition and interference produced by recent experience with other tasks performed on the same stimuli, much like switching from workplace roles to social roles in having lunch with the boss. This research will have direct implications for basic research on executive control. It will also have implications for human factors research and job design. With increased advances in technology, people in the workplace are often required to switch between tasks in the same environment; many of us have several windows open at once on our computer screens. Understanding the costs of switching between tasks and learning what can be done to reduce them will allow better design of software, tasks, and jobs doc17101 none This award will be used to compile and analyze a series of annually dated ice core records and to produce a unique data set capable of yielding sub-annual snow accumulation records from Greenland. The data set will include multi-century and multi-decadal records from a variety of sites in Greenland as well as records from Danish archives and other historical coring efforts. Following database development, the researchers will employ multiple statistical and time series analyses techniques to investigate spatial and temporal relationships in the long-term variability of annual (and subannual) accumulation from individual sites across the Greenland Ice Sheet doc17102 none The objective of this project is to design porous silica catalysts with isolated organometallic surface species and to assess their efficacy as olefin polymerization catalysts. These metallocene catalysts have been successfully used as homogeneous catalysts. The aim of this project is to prepare corresponding heterogeneous catalysts that will overcome the difficulties (e.g., reactor fouling) associated with the homogeneous form. The distribution of sites in heterogeneous industrial catalysts causes the selectivity of these materials to be lower than for their homogeneous counterparts, but the proposed synthesis of a heterogeneous form is expected to overhome this problem. The approach involves functionalization porous silica followed by a novel technique for binding the catalyst to the surface to produce only one type of site. The resulting catalytic material will be characterized with a number of surface techniques followed by characterization of the polymer formed in model reactions. The educational plan includes the development of a course to intorduce the rational synthesis of materials and the introduction of this topic into an existing catalysis course. Participation in a program to help middle school and high school teachers become involved in research during the summer will be part of an outreach effort. This work could lead to a novel technique for heterogeneous polymerication and may have broader applications in creating well defined, spatially isolated, organometallic species on support surfaces for a variety of novel catalytic process doc17103 none This proposal describes a symbiosis of research and education which blends mechanics and control in a way that advances the state and applicability of nonlinear control theory while offering unique opportunities to educate engineers by appealing to their earliest fascinations. The research integrates recently developed energy methods for controlling mechanical systems with empirical models of viscous fluid forces in order to control ocean and atmospheric vehicles using internal actuators. Educational activities complement this research and cultivate excitement for learning and discovery among students, and prospective students, through real-world engineering challenges involving vehicle dynamics and control and creative design. The research adapts energy-shaping control strategies to stabilize and maneuver vehicles using internal rotors or moving masses, focusing on the case study of an underwater vehicle. By incorporating viscous effects into the control design process, one may use them to advantage through clever modulation of a vehicle s internal shape. Research objectives include characterizing the effect of non-conservative forces on systems controlled using energy-shaping feedback, developing control strategies for internally actuated vehicles which exploit viscous effects, extending these strategies to vehicles with conventional actuators, and evaluating controller performance with an experimental underwater vehicle. Internal actuators promise to significantly enhance the efficiency, reliability, and performance envelope of underwater vehicles, moving them closer toward their inevitable role as workhorses for ocean science, offshore industry, and the military. Other areas where the resulting theory could be applied include internally or conventionally actuated ocean surface vessels, lighter-than-air vehicles, aircraft, low-orbit or re-entering spacecraft, and more general mechanical systems doc17104 none An approach in which students become teachers by using algorithm visualization technology not only to construct their own visualizations, but also to present those visualizations to their instructor and peers for feedback and discussion will be studied within the context of a third-year, undergraduate computer science course on computer algorithms. This approach will be used to develop a studio-based algorithms course in which the construction and discussion of visualizations are the central activities of the course. Specifically, students will use algorithm visualization technology to construct their own visual solutions to algorithm design and analysis problems. In a variety of regularly scheduled review sessions, they will present their solutions to instructors and peers for feedback, discussion, and evaluation. This research will yield several products and outcomes from which science educators, educational researchers, visualization technologists, and cognitive anthropologists stand to benefit doc17105 none This CAREER program is designed to integrate research into teaching and to promote the incorporation of biochemical proteomic methods into molecular genetic research among students and post-docs. Increasing evidence from biochemical and molecular studies implicated SIPK and WIPK, two tobacco mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs) in plant disease resistance signaling. However, genetic evidence is lacking. Activation of endogenous SIPK and WIPK by expressing the active mutant of their upstream kinase, NtMEK2DD leads to the induction of defense genes and hypersensitive response (HR)-like cell death. The identification of the homologous pathway in Arabidopsis, AtMEK4 AtMEK5-AtMPK6 AtMPK3 permitted genetic screens for modifiers and downstream components of this MAPK pathway, which is one of the major goals of this project. Activation tagging, T-DNA, and EMS mutant populations have been generated in steroid-inducible transgenic Arabidopsis. Mutants that lose cell death phenotype after steroid treatment, MAPK-activation-no-death (mand) will be isolated from T1, T2, or M2 population. Genes responsible for the phenotypic alterations will be cloned, which could be: 1) AtMPK6 and AtMPK3 themselves; 2) the substrate(s) of AtMPK6 and or AtMPK3; 3) extragenic suppressors and negative regulators of AtMPK6 AtMPK3 pathway such as MAPK phosphatases and scaffold proteins; and 4) other components involved in the regulation and execution of HR cell death. In addition, proteomic approaches will be employed to identify the in vivo substrates of these two MAPKs. The other major goal of this project is to integrate research into classroom teaching and to promote the use of multi-dimensional approach to study a physiological morphological phenotype, which is critical for the advance of post-genome biology. Undergraduate students, especially those from under represented groups will be actively recruited by participating in institutional programs that reach out to minorities. The concept and techniques of proteomics will be incorporated into the Advanced Biochemistry Laboratory course during the tenure of this program. In an era of significant technological advances, it is important for classroom teaching to absorb these advances and to prepare students with the most updated information. The identification of MAPK substrates and the regulators executioners of HR would be a significant contribution to the study of plant programmed cell death. One practical extension of this work is that the identification of important regulatory components in plant defense signaling pathway may allow the generation of crops with enhanced disease resistance, which is important for sustaining agricultural production and improving our environment doc17106 none coder that adapts to variations in data rate and packet loss statistics, (3) a new multi-frame boundary matching algorithm that utilizes the boundary smoothness property not only in the decoded frame but also in the successive frames, thereby minimizing the error propagation, (4) a new multi-frame blocking artifact reduction algorithm that uses the spatial correlations that exist between the successive frames to define constraint sets at multiple frames and provides a projections onto convex sets based solution, (5) a transport protocol that is specifically designed for real-time multimedia communications, and (6) a testbed to integrate all the aforementioned methods into a system-level wireless video streaming solution. On the educational front, the investigator plans to develop a comprehensive program in multimedia signal processing and communications. The investigator will make every attempt to meet the original scope and level of effort of the project doc17107 none Bargaining disagreements are often quite costly, and so a thorough understanding of the determinants of bargaining failure and the effectiveness of different procedures to resolve disputes is needed. This research will study arbitration procedures, and one key objective of this research is to examine dispute resolution under different forms of arbitration. That is, how do different arbitration rules affect bargaining outcomes? This research will examine an innovative arbitration procedure as well as currently used procedures. It is important to investigate dispute resolution with this innovative procedure because it theoretically promises to resolve disputes more effectively than procedures currently used in practice. This research will also investigate the role that bargainer expectations play in disputes. If bargainers view information about likely arbitration settlements in an optimistic way (i.e., each bargainer s perceptions of likely settlements are biased in his her favor), then these optimistic expectations may significantly contribute to the likelihood that the bargainers will arbitration rather than negotiate their own settlement. Specifically, one can show theoretically that optimistic expectations will likely reverse the ordering of least to most effective arbitration procedure from among those studied in this project. This research will examine the aforementioned issues using a controlled laboratory bargaining environment that allows for manipulation of bargainer expectations and arbitration rules used at bargaining impasse. Paid laboratory subjects will negotiate over the value of a generic variable (i.e., the item of value created for the lab environment), which generates higher payoffs to one bargainer for lower negotiated values but higher payoffs to the other bargainer for higher negotiated values of the variable. As such, the lab creates a conflict of interest (i.e., a dispute) in terms of payoff potential in the negotiations. Bargaining rounds of fixed length will utilize different sets of arbitrations rules in different rounds to resolve disputes that remain at the end of the round. The experimental environment will also manipulate subject expectations by providing a more distilled (and objective) form of information about likely arbitrated settlements for bargaining pairs in half of the experiments. Statistical analysis of the results from this research will reveal which arbitration procedure is most effective at limiting disputes and will also identify the separate contribution of bargainer expectations doc17108 none This project will create a research, education, and training program in the Museum of Southwestern Biology (MSB) at the University of New Mexico. Participating graduate and undergraduate students will gain a fundamental understanding of how natural history collections acquire, document, and database specimens, to provide an historical record of our rich natural heritage. Students will then use this knowledge and a collection of museum specimens held in the Division of Fishes that spans a 65-year history in two research objectives aimed at identifying the underlying causes of ecological change in the fish fauna of the imperiled Rio Grande aquatic ecosystem. First, stable isotope methodology will be used to compare present-day and museum-preserved fish specimens, to determine whether the fish community functioned differently in the past (prior to human population growth and large-scale water diversion) than at present. This research is designed to identify ecosystem-wide events that may have altered fish community dynamics in the Rio Grande. Second, abundance patterns of certain fish species will be evaluated using the collection and compared to current estimates of genetic diversity to ascertain whether reduced abundance has changed genetic diversity in ways that hamper species recovery. Both research efforts are focused on important issues for conservation and restoration of the Rio Grande. Natural history collections are becoming increasingly important for documenting and understanding the changes in biodiversity on the planet because they preserve an historical record of organismal diversity. Moreover, natural history collections have been used to address important issues in human health such as the origins and emergence of Hantavirus in the desert southwest. There exists, however, a fundamental gap between undergraduate and graduate training and the enormous resources that natural history collections can offer for solving important problems. The goal of this project is to close that gap by familiarizing graduate and undergraduate students with the kinds of information available in natural history museums, and to show them how this information can be brought to bear on critical environmental problems using a multidisciplinary research approach. The intended result is to produce scientists that can capitalize on the vast resources offered by natural history museums in novel ways to solve environmental problems facing us in the 21st century doc17109 none Professors Raina Maier, an environmental microbiologist, Jeanne Pemberton, a surface chemist (both of the University of Arizona) and Cynthia Larive, an analytical nuclear magnetic resonance expert (of the University of Kansas) are funded by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities for the investigation of microbial surfactants and their role in the surface chemistry of soils. This problem is to be addressed in an extensive interdisciplinary research program involving batch and flow-through column and micro-organism culturing, and analyses including FTIR, NMR, XPS, AFM and PCR. The goal is to sort out the interaction of biosurfactants in natural and model soil systems that are both contaminated and uncontaminated. Biosurfactants released by microbes play an unknown role in the transport of metals in the soil environment. In addition to aiding in questions of transport of metals (both natural and pollutants), the work may help provide new methods for bioremediation and or elimination of contamination in soils. A unique cross-training of graduate and undergraduate students is in place in conjunction with the research doc17110 none This research and education program is directed at devising theoretical frameworks and methodological strategies for designing and employing learning objects in scalable online learning environments that are rich with human-to-human interaction. To develop these new frameworks and strategies, empirical program based on qualitative analyses of existing online learning communities will be done. Rather than viewing learning objects as decontextualized artifacts existing independent of learners interactions with them, Wertsch s ( ) analytic method will allow the research to focus on the ways in which resources mediate the achievement of online learners goals in the context of existing online learning communities. The research will be integrated into several educational activities. Three full graduate assistantships are provided for the five years of the grant, which will engage students in Utah State University s Instructional Technology graduate program in real-world application of skills they are learning, as well as prepare them for future research projects of their own. Additionally, the grant will serve as a real-world context for assignments in a variety of courses such as qualitative methods courses and a Learning Objects Seminar. Thirdly, as portions of the framework become available courses will be designed around the framework, giving both myself and the students the opportunity to engage reflectively in their own integrated learning and research activities. This project is co-funded by Division of Undergraduate Education doc17111 none Computer security is an especially pressing and national need because of the increasing dependence on information systems in most aspects of our lives including business, finance, transportation, medicine, education and national security to name a few. These information technology systems are vulnerable to a variety of events which can compromise the functioning and integrity of the system such as design problems, physical failures, malicious attacks, and scaling problems that can occur within individual components and systems and in the complex interaction among these systems. While there is ongoing research in security such as in computer systems, networks, storage, cryptography, and distributed systems, more needs to be done, especially to ensure availability, fault-tolerance, confidentiality, and the integrity of the information system from applications to underlying infrastructure. A workshop on security, privacy, and trust was held in the fall of in Berkeley, CA. The purpose of the workshop was to bring together academic, industrial, and government experts in these areas to develop a research agenda and identify research areas that can make a major impact in the future. The workshop provided a report outlining a research agenda for trustworthiness and information security on the national scale doc17112 none Two key developments in networking are that the Internet is (1) increasingly used for the streaming of continuous media, a large portion of which is prerecorded, and (2) increasingly accessed by wireless (and possibly mobile) clients. The stringent Quality of Service requirements of continuous media, such as video, combined with the unreliability of wireless links make the real-time streaming over wireless links a very challenging problem. To address the trend towards wireless streaming, the researcher proposes to develop a comprehensive theory and a framework of practical protocols and mechanisms for the real-time streaming of prerecorded continuous media to wireless clients. To overcome the challenges of real-time streaming of continuous media over wireless links the proposed protocols and mechanisms will rely on the following key insights: 1. For prerecorded continuous media (i) the exact traffic characteristics are known before the streaming commences, and (ii) while the stream is being played out, segments of the stream can be prefetched into a prefetch buffer in the client. 2. Channel probing techniques can identify the wireless links with good transmission conditions in the face of location-dependent, time-varying, and bursty wireless link errors. 3. Rate adaptation techniques of modern wireless systems (e.g., third and fourth generation wireless systems) allow to dynamically allocate transmission capacities to the individual ongoing flows. The novel idea of the streaming protocols is to overcome the variability of the wireless links by prefetching segments of the continuous media stream into the client buffer. The prefetching is done by dynamically allocating transmission capacities to the ongoing streams according to (1) the prefetch buffer contents in the clients, and (2) the wireless link conditions (determined through channel probing). Through prefetching (i.e.,work-ahead) prefetched reserves are built up in the clients that allow the clients to continue playback during adverse transmission conditions on the wireless links. The preliminary simulation results for prefetching using a Join-the-Shortest-Queue (JSQ) policy in conjunction with a simple channel probing scheme indicate that prefetching brings dramatic performance improvements. The researcher proposes to develop a comprehensive framework for the real-time streaming of continuous media to wireless clients. The specific objectives of the proposed project are to develop: 1. optimal prefetching mechanisms for a single wireless cell, e.g., mechanisms that for given client buffers minimize the client starvation probability while maximizing the number of supported streams. The researcher will analyze the fundamental trade-offs in prefetching over wireless links and develop call admission rules. 2. prefetching mechanisms for scalable encoded media that enable heterogeneous multimedia streaming services. 3. seamless end-to-end streaming mechanism, for the real-time delivery of continuous media over networks consisting of wired and wireless links to mobile clients. In the preliminary work for the proposed project, the researcher has developed a prefetching protocol for the real-time streaming of continuous media between the base station and multiple wireless clients in a wireless cell. The proposed research is closely integrated with two educational initiatives. These are (1) outreach and extended education, and (2) the development of a wireless multimedia streaming testbed based on a 802.11 wireless LAN. The goals of the outreach and extended education initiative are to attract traditionally under-represented minorities to engineering, and to provide high-quality networking instruction to under-represented students, e.g., working adults. This will be achieved by (i) developing on-line networking labs for K-12 students and teachers in the Arizona MESA and the NSF funded WISE programs, (ii) enhancing the networking courses in ASU s Extended Education program with web-based teaching aids, and (iii) integrating networking courses into the exclusively web-based tri-university Master of Engineering program in Arizona. The streaming testbed will serve as a platform for integrating research, industrial collaborations, and students education. Protocols for wireless QoS, such as the proposed prefetch protocol will be implemented in undergraduate (senior) design projects to complement and deepen the classroom knowledge doc17113 none Nitrogen-fixing symbioses are ecologically and agronomically important and provide the major nitrogen input for many systems of sustainable agriculture. For scientific and historical reasons, the interaction between Sinorhizobium meliloti and a diploid alfalfa, Medicago truncatula, has become a model for this kind of nitrogen-fixing symbiosis. The DNA sequence of the S. meliloti genome has been determined and was predicted to encode about proteins. To investigate the genome further, an integrated genetic strategy is being developed that will provide a platform for many different types of genetic, biochemical, physiological and taxonomic analysis. The strategy uses high-throughput, genomic scale PCR and integrase technology to clone sequences that encode every predicted gene in the S. meliloti genome. These clones can be used immediately in creating DNA arrays for expression analysis and cross species comparisons and, using the clones, it should be possible to move smoothly to the construction of S. meliloti strains with reporter genes fused to each predicted promoter, to the isolation of mutant strains lacking precisely defined regions of the S. meliloti genome, and to the production of proteins for biochemical characterization. The strategy also provides built-in flexibility for incorporating technical advances in the future. Characterization of gene expression and symbiotic phenotypes of the resulting bacterial strains will allow investigators to investigate various bacterial traits important to a productive symbiosis, such as resistance to acid soils and heavy metals, cold tolerance, desiccation tolerance, competitiveness for nodulation and efficiency of nitrogen fixation. The information obtained by studying S. meliloti and its symbiosis with alfalfa will be relevant to understanding other symbioses and plant-microbe interactions in general. Resources will be developed for sharing this genetic material and information. Through both their immediate utility and their features designed to accommodate changes necessitated by future research needs, these constructs should provide a basis for many years of fruitful work. The strategy should be applicable to many other organisms important to society in areas ranging from agriculture and the environment to bioengineering doc17114 none This project integrates ecological research with university graduate and undergraduate instruction to assess how inputs of atmospheric nitrogen (N) from fossil fuel emission alter the carbon (C) cycling of southern Californian semi-arid shrublands. Atmospheric N fertilization has been implicated in the decline of northern forests. However, the effects of atmospheric N fertilization on western shrublands have not been adequately quantified even though these ecosystems are exposed to some of the highest atmospheric N pollution levels in the world. This project will employ field observational and manipulative studies to assess changes in ecosystem structure and function to atmospheric N fertilization and provide a mechanistic understanding of the ecosystem response. In turn, the field studies will significantly enhance lecture and laboratory curricula in terrestrial ecology and provide students an opportunity to actively investigate the impact of human activities on the C cycling of ecosystems that are regionally important doc17115 none Microorganisms are crucial components of ecosystems and human civilization. They play prominent roles in processes such as the formation and maintenance of soil, and the detoxification of environmental pollutants. Microorganisms also possess an immeasurable store of useful items ranging from enzymes for food processing to pharmaceuticals. Until recently, our understanding of this group of organisms has been limited by the small percentage of microorganisms that can be identified through traditional methods. Such methods involve growing the organisms in the laboratory. In the s, new approaches were developed that allow organisms to be identified without the need to grow them in the lab. Such approaches identify microorganisms through the analysis of specific genes (ribosomal RNA genes). This development was a major breakthrough, which has led to the identification of thousands of novel organisms. Yet, despite this advance, current strategies to analyze these genes are either cost prohibitive or unable to generate more than superficial depictions of the microorganisms inhabiting most environments. This proposal presents three objectives that address this technological deficit. First, the development of an experimental approach that allows thorough analysis of the microorganisms inhabiting any environment is planned. This will be accomplished through the use of new array-based technologies. Second, a public database that allows investigators to utilize the tools that will be created from this project will be developed. And finally, the project provides training for undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate students in microbial community analysis and bioinformatics. Overall, this proposal addresses the goals of the NSF Biological Databases and Informatics program by developing a public database that will facilitate thorough analysis of microbial communities and by disseminating the gained knowledge through interactive tutorials and a workshop. This work will fundamentally transform investigations into microbial community composition by making thorough examinations possible for the first time. This will lead to a greater understanding of how microorganisms function, which, in turn, will lead to more effective strategies to manage agriculture, maintain a clean environment, and advance biotechnology. The training component of this project will foster collaborations between computer scientists, statisticians, and biologists, which will produce the multidisciplinary researchers needed for this new era doc17116 none Freeway traffic congestion impacts the movement of most people and goods in the United States. This congestion is due to a small number of points on the network where demand peaks or capacity drops. Although these bottlenecks typically occupy a short distance of roadway, the resulting queues can extend for several miles. Most freeway queues are characterized by slow and stop waves propagating upstream from a bottleneck. The changing speeds give rise to an increased probability of accidents and the frequent accelerations increase vehicle emissions. Although the propagation of these waves can be predicted once they form, it is not known how they originate and debate continues as to whether they impact capacity. To date, these issues have been studied with point detectors, which are capable of monitoring traffic at fixed locations. The proposed work will equip two probe vehicles with GPS receivers and distance sensors to monitor adjacent vehicles. The probe vehicles will collect data throughout bottleneck regions and observe important signals that may not propagate all the way to point detectors. These probes will be used to identify which factors influence bottleneck capacity, and identify how the signals and waves form in freeway queues. These efforts should lead to additional benefits including improved car following and traffic flow models. The work is interdisciplinary, drawing on electrical engineering for sensor technologies, and civil engineering for traffic flow theory. This proposal forms the cornerstone for a new course, cross-listed between the two academic departments and taught with a teamwork environment that is found rarely in coursework. In this integrated environment, the students will push the boundaries of knowledge by the end of each quarter doc17117 none The strongly conserved C-terminal domain (CTD) of the largest subunit of DNA-dependent RNA polymerase II (RPB1) is essential for mRNA synthesis and is present in all animals, plants and fungi that have been examined. In many groups of organisms, however, the RPB1 C-terminus displays no evidence of sequence elements known to be necessary for CTD function. The implication of these differences for RNA pol II transcription is unclear. This research is aimed at examining the significance of evolutionary changes in RPB1 C-terminal sequences from a functional perspective. Specifically, questions to be investigated are, 1) when in the course of eukaryotic evolution did the CTD become fully integrated into the RNA pol II transcription machine, and 2) which components of that integrated machine enhanced control over mRNA synthesis sufficiently to allow for the emergence of developmentally complex organisms? Special focus will be placed on investigating the molecular biology of red algae, both because they are intermediate in developmental complexity between unicellular protistan groups and more complex multicellular model organisms, and because of their inferred evolutionary history based on RNA polymerase gene sequences. In conjunction with this investigation, a new research-based course for upper division undergraduate and graduate students will be developed, permitting direct participation in the exploration of the molecular biology of diverse eukaryotic organisms. This course also will serve as a springboard for attracting students toward more intensive undergraduate projects relating to the research goals outlined. In addition, it will provide the infrastructure for a summer outreach program that will afford area high school students and teachers a hands-on introduction to basic molecular and evolutionary research doc17118 none The research described here addresses information security issues for distributed networks and embedded environments. Embedded applications are found in a vast array of existing and emerging technologies, including mobile phones, personal digital assistants, smart cards, and remote-controlled utility network devices and are distinguished from typical (but far less prevalent) PC-level microprocessors in their relatively low power consumption and inherent limitations on memory and speed. It is predicted that the number of applications with embedded microprocessors which will be connected to our telephone and computer networks will increase dramatically over the next few years. For instance, it is anticipated that within the next few years, 50% of all Internet end-devices will have to operate in constrained environments. At the same time, these networks are enabling remote access to, and manipulation of, sensitive resources of all sorts, including bank records, medical information, alarm system, and industrial machinery. The need is clear for long-term planning and directed research in the area of cryptographic security for these devices. However, cryptography has only recently evolved from a discipline confined to the special interest of a small, closed community to become a practical and vital tool to enable a secure communications and information infrastructure. As a consequence, the acceptance of cryptography as an engineering discipline is still in its early stages. The US industry is already experiencing a shortage of crypto engineers . This negative trend is expected to continue, unless serious actions are taken for the education of crypto engineers. The researchers propose an integrated solution for the research and education problems in perspective. To contribute solutions to the security problems in distributed networks, the research will focus on the hardware implementations of public and secret key algorithms with challenging new requirements. The long-term ambition of this research is to bring cryptographic security solutions to the market which are flexible, low-cost, highly scalable, and power efficient. The researchers believe that this research will provide graduate and undergraduate students the perfect educational setting to explore solid engineering practices of cryptography. A rigorous cryptography curriculum introduced at the undergraduate level, enriched with international collaborations, and cutting edge research will create skilled crypto engineers, that will be essential in the future development of secured infrastructures doc17119 none Increasingly, confidential information is placed on network-accessible computers by organizations and individuals, yet neither the current practice nor theories of computer security are adequate to ensure that this information remains confidential. The lack of sound mechanisms for protecting confidential information, especially in the presence of malicious code or hosts, creates serious privacy, liability, and even national security concerns. This research explores new security mechanisms that provide stronger, end-to-end assurance that data remains confidential. The focus is on three important areas where existing models are inadequate and existing enforcement methods are impractical. First, confidentiality must be protected even in systems that include both mutually distrusting principals and untrusted, possibly malicious hosts. Second, concurrent and distributed systems create new challenges for information flow control. Third, new techniques are needed for verifying that binary code, including legacy code, protects confidential information. The goal of this work is fast, practical, end-to-end assurance of confidentiality for decentralized systems with mutual distrust. This kind of assurance promises to significantly strengthen the security of the emerging computing infrastructure doc17120 none Golan Yona Cornell University CAREER: Global Self-Organization of all Known Proteins - Toward a Complete Map of the Protein Space This effort addresses the growing need to characterize and organize all known proteins (the protein space) into functional classes. This effort will develop sensitive algorithms to detect subtle relationships between proteins and protein families, and will study and develop new techniques for representing the protein space as a mathematical object that can be further explored. Additionally, it will develop new unsupervised learning techniques for studying the properties and geometry of the protein space, and eventually to create a complete road map of the protein space. The outcome proposed will be a complete, accurate map of the protein universe. A direct benefit of the map is the ability to automatically classify every protein; known proteins as well as new proteins that will be sequenced in the future. This map can indicate the possible function of newly determined sequences that cannot be deciphered by traditional methods, based on the relative position of the sequence in the space. It can expose new relationships between distantly related protein families, limit the possible structural conformations of sequences and explain the mapping of sequences to structures, and may add insights about fundamental evolutionary processes doc17121 none This research focuses on devising novel techniques based on data-flow analysis in the memory management of real-time multidimensional signal processing. Data-flow analysis is the steering exploration mechanism along this project, allowing more exploration freedom than the traditional scheduling -based investigation, since the memory management tasks usually need only relative (rather than exact) lifetime information. Moreover, data-flow analysis enables the study of memory management tasks at the desired level of granularity -- between whole array and the scalar level -- trading-off computational effort and solution optimality. Part of this project investigates non-scalar methods for computing the memory size in real-time multimedia algorithms. This research addresses novel memory computation topics: dealing with a large class of parametric specifications, and dealing with parallelism in high-throughput applications. This project addresses also the problem of deriving a multilevel memory architecture optimized for area and or power, subject to performance constraints. Another research direction is the optimized mapping of data from an embedded application code into the on-chip SRAM or the off-chip DRAM for maximizing the overall memory access performance of the application. The educational component of this research includes (1) the development of a graduate course covering algorithmic aspects of high-level synthesis and system design methodologies; (2) the development of a web tool for memory size computation doc17122 none Mitochondria are the organelles in which the energy from food is harnessed into ATP. In many cell types, mitochondria undergo dynamic shape changes and regulated movement, events which are thought to coordinate delivery of ATP to subcellular regions with highest energy demand. Mechanisms by which mitochondria are moved and shaped have been partially characterized in single-celled eukaryotes, but not all of these mechanisms are conserved in more complex organisms. The scientific goal of this project is to elucidate molecular mechanisms of mitochondrial dynamics during spermatogenesis in Drosophila melanogaster. An undergraduate research program will be established, and students will identify and characterize genes associated with mitochondrial morphogenesis. The educational goal is to incorporate experimental questions from the research into a genetics laboratory course taught annually at Davidson College. Spermatogenesis in Drosophila is an ideal metazoan model system for genetic analysis of mitochondrial morphogenesis, since 1) mitochondria normally aggregate, fuse, and elongate beside the flagellar axoneme in spermatids, and 2) genetic defects in mitochondrial morphogenesis can lead to sterility, a phenotype for which many genetic screens have been performed. Students will take both forward and reverse genetic approaches to characterize gene products that are required for mitochondrial movement and shaping in Drosophila spermatids. These approaches interweave many classical and molecular genetic techniques, such as recombination mapping, transposon mobilization, complementation, polymerase chain reaction, DNA subcloning, blotting and hybridization, and immunolocalization. Sequence analysis using online tools and computer databases will be an essential component of the research. Students will benefit from the connections they observe between classroom learning and laboratory discoveries, especially as they see the integration of classical and molecular genetics. Undergraduates in independent projects and in the genetics laboratory course will be particularly motivated by the prospect of contributing original findings to the scientific literature. Sperm cells require a great deal of energy; the structures within each cell that generate and provide usable fuel are mitochondria. During sperm cell formation, mitochondria undergo shape changes essential for sperm cell motility. In this project, undergraduates will perform studies of sterile mutant fruit fly strains that show mitochondrial defects. Students will identify and characterize genes which control the movement and shaping of mitochondria. This project will expand knowledge of mechanisms of mitochondrial dynamics doc17123 none This project focuses on the role of self-regulated learning (SRL) in students understanding of science with hypermedia. SRL is emerging as a significant issue in educational and psychological research. SRL is an active, constructive process whereby learners set goals for their learning and then attempt to monitor, regulate, and control their cognition, motivation, and behavior in the service of those goals. SRL is guided and constrained by both personal characteristics and the contextual features of the environment (Pintrich, ). The focus of SRL research over the last three decades has been on learners academic learning and achievement and has progressively included emphases on cognitive strategies, metacognition, motivation, and task engagement (for a recent review see Paris (2) To examine the role of self- and co-regulation during individual and collaborative learning with hypermedia environments; (3) To examine the effectiveness of co-construction of goals (between teacher and students) during learning of science with hypermedia environments; (4) To examine the effectiveness of strategy instruction training in fostering students self- and co-regulated learning with hypermedia; and, (5) To examine the effectiveness of adaptive web-based hypermedia environments in detecting, modeling, and fostering students self- and co-regulated learning of science doc17124 none Designing Embedded Systems with Domain-Specific Languages Stephen A. Edwards This goal of this project is to provide tools to designers of embedded systems that will allow them to more quickly create correct systems. It proposes to do this by providing domain-specific languages and compilers. Such succinct, abstract languages reduce development and testing time by providing more formal, correct-by-construction methodologies and by enabling automatic implementation techniques. The result will enable the development of these systems to proceed beyond the current ad hoc C-and-assembly approach. The project addresses three issues in the design of many embedded systems: real-time software, software for communication, and software for communicating across the hardware software boundary. These issues are addressed through the following specific investigations: New Compilation Techniques for Synchronous Languages Synchronous languages such as Esterel provide very predictable real-time behavior but are challenging to compile. This project includes developing new, more efficient compilation techniques for large systems described in the Esterel language and its variants. New Languages and Compilers for Communication Protocols Network communication is becoming a crucial part of every embedded system, but the growing complexity of the protocols and the need for bandwidth (e.g., for video) makes this software difficult to develop. This project includes the development of a new language for describing such protocol software and a compiler for producing efficient implementations. New Languages and Compilers for Device Drivers Writing software that communicates directly with hardware is currently tedious and error-prone, and unfortunately even more important in embedded systems since they tend to have application-specific peripherals. This project aims to simplify this task by creating a language and compiler for writing device drivers. The results of this research will enable more diverse languages for communicating across the hardware software boundary. This project is also addressing the recurring complaint that academia does not produce students who understand both hardware and software well enough to be effective embedded systems designers by developing new courses along these lines. At the undergraduate level, a new embedded systems project course is being developed that will give students the opportunity to learn about and use some of these new techniques. At the graduate level, a more sophisticated course is being developed that focuses on languages for describing embedded systems and isses with their semantics and implementation. This will give future designers more tools for developing embedded systems and will prepare students for research in automating embedded system design. The results of this project are being disseminated in three ways: through conference and journal papers, through the release of all developed software to the public domain, and through the education of students in the use of the languages and compilers developed. Just as computer-aided design tools have enabled the rapid, correct design of fantastically complex integrated circuits, this work is enabling the quick, correct design of tomorrow s complex embedded systems doc17125 none Heterosis, or hybrid vigor, is a condition where more heterozygous individuals physiologically outperform more homozygous individuals. Although heterosis has often been reported for marine bivalves, as well as other taxa, the physiological and genetic bases of heterosis are still poorly understood. The proposed research will use a combination of quantitative and molecular genetic approaches to examine the physiological and genetic underpinnings of heterosis in the dwarf surf clam, Mulinia lateralis. The specific goals of this work are 1) to determine the genetic and physiological basis of growth rate variation, 2) to estimate the degree to which the physiological components of growth are genetically correlated, 3) to determine whether levels of heterozygosity are significantly associated with physiological performance under both stressful and non-stressful conditions, and 4) to determine the importance of inbreeding to any association between heterozygosity and physiological performance in M. lateralis. Three separate educational activities will be integrated with these research goals. First, M. lateralis will be used as a teaching model for a laboratory section to accompany the graduate level course in quantitative genetics currently taught at the University of Maine. Second, an internship will be established that will enable high school teachers and students to directly participate in the proposed research and gain hands-on training in molecular biology, bivalve husbandry, and quantitative genetics. Third, a summer content institute in genetics for secondary science teachers will be developed. This institute is intended to help teachers keep pace with the rapid advances in genetic research and effectively communicate these advances to their students. Along with the summer genetics institute, a series of pilot projects will be established in local schools exploring the most effective way to use M. lateralis as a model for demonstrating bivalve physiology, ecology, and genetics in a manner consistent with state and national standards doc17126 none This proposal aims to investigate the impact of the new I O technologies on the operating system architecture of the network servers. The key ingredient of the proposed approach is the memory-to-memory intra-server interconnect which allows non-intrusive communication between hosts and intelligent devices. Memory-to-memory communication eliminates or significantly reduces the overhead typically associated with conventional communication protocols. This benefit has been extensively studied to improve the performance of distributed applications but has not been yet explored in support of the operating system performance. The research will focus on how to split the operating system functionality across a cluster of computing nodes and intelligent devices. Two novel operating mechanisms based on memory-to-memory communication will be explored: (i) direct application-to-device communication to offload the TCP IP protocol processing to TCP servers executed on intelligent network interfaces or dedicated nodes, and (ii) direct communication between memory-mapped file servers and TCP servers. The research will also investigate how to use memory-to-memory communication to support cooperative file and network servers for availability and load-balancing. This research has been considerably motivated by the increasing interest in VIA, InfiniBand, and programmable device controllers. Its ultimate goal is to contribute to the understanding of how systems software should be designed to exploit and combine these new technologies doc17127 none Computational Intelligence (CI) is an emerging field of fundamental and applied research that utilizes a number of powerful computational paradigms, either separately or synergistically, to solve problems that defy solutions using traditional techniques. The main paradigms of CI encompass Fuzzy Set Theory and Fuzzy Logic (FL), Neural Networks (NN), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Genetic Algorithms (GAs). In this research, the PI will probe how CI paradigms can be utilized to address a number of critical research problems that are at the very heart of the infrastructure engineering profession at the present time. This will include the use of CI for: (1) the on-line management and control of transportation networks in the context of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS); (2) determining optimal budget allocation in the context of integrated infrastructure management systems; and (3) deriving land use limits from infrastructure capacity. The different research activities of the study will complement a corresponding education plan that has the following objectives: (1) strengthen the Information Technology (IT) content of Civil Engineering (CE) curricula; (2) experiment with learning strategies that promote active learning; and (3) undertake high school outreach. To achieve these goals, the study will develop a new course on CI applications in CE, as well as develop educational modules on ITS to be incorporated in undergraduate transportation classes. The study will also experiment with the Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) strategy, a pedagogical strategy that works through a fusion of high-tech and low-tech teaching elements. In addition, the study will establish an outreach program to local high schools that will provide the opportunity to select junior and senior students to work with faculty mentors on independent research projects doc17128 none The objective of this project is to advance theory and practice in the design, modeling and control of high performance communication networks. The scope of the project encompasses system-level issues in high-speed wireline networks, and interconnecting of wireline wireless networks. The research component of the project will be directed in three focus areas: (1) switch architectures and control algorithms for high speed networks; (2) mobility, connectivity and control of wireless networks; and (3) network modeling and simulation methodologies. Our proposed program of research in these areas is expected to make significant contributions to the design, modeling and control of large-scale, high-speed, heterogeneous communication networks. Research and education will be integrated through the following activities: (1) supervision of graduate and undergraduate research projects; (2) co-authoring of a graduate level two-volume textbook on modeling and analysis of high performance networks; (3) teaching of undergraduate and graduate level courses in the area of communication networks; and (4) development and maintenance of an up-to-date data networking laboratory that will provide students with hands-on experience in the operation and configuration of modern networks doc17129 none This is a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. Computer access by means of augmentative and alternative communication can be an extremely valuable assistive technology for the disabled. This project seeks to improve its efficiency and to develop accurate models of the performance of individuals with disabilities when using computer access. As an educational tool, an accurate modeling method would provide clinicians with insight into how specific disabilities affect an individual s ability to operate different kinds of devices. As an assessment tool, an accurate model would allow a clinician to identify potential devices and device configurations that are most likely to be successful for a particular client. The modeling technique will be used in a theoretical and empirical study to determine the most efficient method for representing language within an augmentative and alternative communication device. A software tool will also be developed that allows clinicians to incorporate the user modeling technique into their existing clinical processes. This CAREER award recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of a teacher-scholar who is likely to become an academic leader of the twenty-first century. The research project will develop science and technology needed to maximize the benefit of computers for disabled people, thereby allowing them to lead more productive and fulfilling lives. The educational component will give graduate and undergraduate students the opportunity to become involved in both fundamental research and clinical application in the areas of human-machine interfaces and assistive technology for the disabled doc17130 none The long term goals of this project are to understand the extent to which the histone amino termini, especially that of histone H3, contribute to transcriptional repression in vivo, and to determine the mechanisms by which they do so. Eukaryotic DNA is packaged into chromatin, and the fundamental unit of chromatin, the nucleosome, consists of about 146 base pairs of DNA wrapped around a core of histone proteins. Somewhat surprisingly, modification of the unstructured amino termini of the histones, which are not an essential structural component of the nucleosome, has turned out to be a widely used means of gene regulation. Numerous studies have implicated transcriptional regulation via modifications of the histone amino termini in diverse cellular processes, including cell cycle control, hormone response, and development. In spite of this progress, little is known of the mechanisms by which the histone amino termini influence transcriptional regulation. The principal investigator has discovered two examples in which the histone H3 amino terminus is critical for transcriptional repression in yeast. In the first example, the H3 amino terminus prevents activation by the CHA4 activator at the CHA1 promoter in the absence of inducer. In the second example, the INO1 gene is strongly derepressed in the absence of the H3 amino terminus, although little is known about the mechanism at present. The principal investigator has also found, using micorarray technology, that the H3 amino terminus exerts a broad, genome-wide repressive effect on gene expression. These findings serve as a basis to determine specific mechanisms for repression by the H3 amino terminus. In addition, experiments will be done to examine the contribution of the amino termini of histones H3 and H4 as targets in repression mediated by the histone deacetylase RPD3. DNA is the master controller and information reservoir for all of life. In non-bacterial cells, DNA is bound to histone proteins in chromatin. These proteins help the DNA fit inside the cell and participate in regulation of many processes that use DNA, including the transcription of DNA into RNA-the readout of the information in DNA. Studies by the principal investigator, using baker s yeast, are aimed at understanding how specific parts of the histone proteins prevent particular genes from being transcribed when they are not supposed to be. Because the basic mechanisms of transcription and components of chromatin are very similar in yeast and higher organisms, these findings will shed new light on transcriptional regulation in all non-bacterial organisms doc17131 none The goal of this research program is to explore tools, models, and design practices that shed light on the relationship between silicon technology and the direction of future EDA tools. The current education, research, and commercial semiconductor and EDA communities are set up in a way that virtually guarantees a knowledge gap between the cutting edge of CMOS technology and state-of-the-art design automation. The best current example of this knowledge gap is on-chip inductance. A large part of this project focuses on developing models, metrics, and design approaches to assess and ameliorate the impact of inductance on circuit performance. This includes a range of RLC-based models varying in accuracy and complexity that target different stages of the design flow ranging from standard cell characterization to late-mode full-chip timing. Other impending knowledge gaps being studied in this research program include: 1) standard cell interconnect libraries to leverage predictability and maintain performance, and 2) scalable global signaling alternatives to CMOS repeaters for nanometer design (feature sizes 100 nm). The education component of this CAREER program has two broad aims: 1) introduce students to the role of on-chip interconnect on circuit performance early and often, and 2) transfer a diverse population of students to industry with relevant design experience via group design projects doc17132 none This award is for the support of the third joint workshop of Task Committee D (Wind Engineering) of the U.S.-Japan Cooperative Program on Natural Resources (UJNR). This workshop is an ongoing effort of the UJNR Panel on Wind and Seismic Effects to bring together U.S. and Japanese researchers from academic institutions, government laboratories and industry to discuss the state-of-the-art of wind effects on civil engineering structures and develop strategies and collaborative efforts that will benefit both countries. The theme of this workshop is Reducing Losses from Wind: Collaborative Opportunities for the 21st Century and it will be held in Seattle, U.S. on October 2-5, . The purpose of this workshop is to (a) discuss previous collaborative research efforts, (b) continue mutual exchange of technical information on ongoing research, (c) identify collaborative opportunities for the 21st century and develop strategic planning that will benefit both the countries, (d) identify specific projects for collaborative research, and (e) visit selected sites in the Seattle area related to wind effects on structures doc17133 none The proposal outlines an integrated plan of teaching and research that will provide a solid foundation for the awardee s future contributions to education and science. The first undergraduate educational aims are to develop the awardee s teaching skills and to improve the current undergraduate cell biology course using the resources of Northwestern University s Searle Center for Teaching Excellence. The second undergraduate educational aim is to provide undergraduate research opportunities by having some of the proposed research aims performed by summer undergraduate researchers. The graduate education aims include organizing a new developmental genetics course and a new presentation series. The proposed research focuses on understanding the mechanisms underlying morphogenesis of epithelial and endothelial tubes. Despite the importance of correct tube diameter and length to the function of organs such as the vascular system, lung and kidney, there is little understanding of the complex cytoskeletal and extracellular matrix changes, dynamic rearrangement of cell-cell junctions, or coordinated cell shape changes that create tubes of particular sizes. To identify and study the functions of genes required for tube-size control, the proposed research will use molecular genetic approaches to investigate morphogenesis of the Drosophila tracheal system, a ramifying network of epithelial tubes that functions as a combined pulmonary vascular system. Previously, mutations in a group of eight genes that specifically control tracheal tube size have been identified. It has now been determined that one of these genes encodes a b-subunit of a Na+ K+ ATPase transporter and that mutations in the Na+ K+ ATPase a-subunit a-ATPase(93A) cause similar tracheal tube-size defects. Preliminary data suggests that the Na+ K+ ATPase is required to organize tracheal cell junctions, a novel role for a Na+ K+ ATPase. To better understand the mechanisms of epithelial tube-size control and the roles of the Na+ K+ ATPase, the genetic and cell biological functions of a-ATPase(93A) during tracheal tube morphogenesis will be investigated. In addition, the tracheal tube-size control gene varicose that genetic epistasis experiments suggest acts in parallel to the Na+ K+ ATPase will be cloned and characterized. Together, the analyses of a-ATPase(93A)and varicose will improve the understanding of the basic cell biological and molecular mechanisms of epithelial and endothelial tube-size control doc17134 none This research project will first develop a new scalable algorithm for clustering that can detect an unknown number of arbitrarily shaped clusters. This approach will be based on a synchronization model of plus-coupled oscillators. Next the project will build a CBIR (Content-Based Image Retrieval) prototype using the clustering algorithm developed in this research. The career development plan will include training students in CBIR as well as initiating a research seminar series. The proposed research will also support undergraduate design projects doc17135 none This career development plan includes significant research and educational components. The goal of the research program is to conduct an extensive analysis of U.S. manufacturers in order to assess the effects of inter-group cooperation, competition, and conflict on firm agility. Improving the social dimensions of organizations is increasingly important where competitors have access to comparable technology. The research design includes both qualitative and quantitative methods. The educational program will provide research opportunities for undergraduate students, with an emphasis on attracting and retaining women and under-represented minorities to industrial engineering. The program includes training students in data collection and analysis methods and involving the students in all aspects of research doc2158 none Theoretical calculations of coalescing compact binaries (mergers of two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole) will be performed using 3-D hydrodynamic techniques on parallel supercomputers. These calculations will include, for the first time ever, a complete treatment of all lowest-order post-Newtonian effects (i.e., the most important corrections to Newtonian gravity imposed by Einstein s general theory of relativity). In particular, the dissipative effects due to the emission of gravitational waves will be included in the hydrodynamics. These calculations will provide us with a much more accurate description of the binary coalescence process, including more accurate theoretical predictions for the gravitational radiation signals that may soon become detectable by laser interferometer detectors such as LIGO. They will also help us understand the mechanisms that may be important for producing the most powerful gamma-ray bursts observed by astronomers throughout the visible Universe doc17137 none Dr. Gary A. Lorigan of Miami University (Oxford, OH) is funded for his research in magnetic resonance studies of membrane proteins by a CAREER grant in the Physical Chemistry program of the Chemistry Division and in the Molecular Biophysics program of the Molecular and Cellular Biosciences Division. He will develop model membrane systems that magnetically align at low magnetic fields for magnetic resonance studies. A Q-band EPR spectrometer will be used to explore the structural and dynamic properties of model membrane systems and integral membrane proteins. Dr. Lorigan will develop a modern biophysical chemistry curriculum for undergraduate and graduate students in both the classroom and the laboratory. Magnetic resonance spectroscopy is an important technique that is rapidly becoming a standard tool in chemistry and biochemistry for the structural determination of proteins. This research will allow biophysical chemists to investigate the structural and motional properties of biologically significant molecules. Dr. Lorigan plans on developing new course work in the area of biophysical chemistry for both undergraduate and graduate students doc17138 none The research focuses on new approaches for exposing concurrency and improving performance in modern superscalar microprocessors. These approaches include semantic decomposition of instruction sets and bitslice decomposition of data paths to expose elements of the processor s control and data path to allow flexible, programmable control over at least a subset of the microarchitectural features that are available. Preliminary analysis shows that there are significant opportunities for reducing ALU cycle time, power consumption, and the deleterious effects of wire delay with little or no harmful effects on throughput measured in instructions per cycle. Further, the research proposes pre-execution using partial operand knowledge to resolve conditional branches, identify references that miss the cache, and mitigate the effects of other problematic instructions. The primary objectives of the proposed educational plan are to integrate advanced topics into the University of Wisconsin s computer architecture curriculum at the graduate and undergraduate level; to continue to involve undergraduate students in research to enhance their educational experience via exposure to leading-edge research topics; to incorporate advanced pedagogic techniques into the classroom environment in order to accommodate all learning styles; and to exploit emerging web-based technologies to streamline interactive and off-line communication between instructor and students doc17139 none Photosynthetic organisms must balance their metabolism with the growth conditions. Cyanobacteria synthesize and degrade their light harvesting proteins, called phycobiliproteins, in response to environmental parameters such as light intensity, light quality, and nutrient availability. The phycobiliproteins absorb light in the visible region due to their bilin chromophores. The long-term goal of this research project is to understand how cyanobacteria synthesize and degrade phycobiliproteins and their bilin chromophores. The first objective is to characterize enzymes that are involved in attaching the bilins to phycobiliproteins. The role of five proteins within Synechocystis sp. PCC that are believed to be involved in bilin attachment will be characterized by mutagenesis, by in vitro enzyme assays, and by heterologous in vivo assays in Escherichia coli. A second objective is to verify the activity of a novel methyl transferase that is responsible for adding a methyl group to a conserved asparagine residue within phycobiliprotein beta-subunits has been identified. A mutant lacking this enzyme will be characterized to assess the physiological significance of this modification. A third goal involves the creation and characterization of mutant strain in which the bilin biosynthetic gene pcyA has been interrupted. Characterization of the synthesis and regulation of other tetrapyrroles within this mutant strain will be performed. This career development plan also includes training of the undergraduate and graduate students in performing the research and contains innovative efforts for encouraging junior high, high school, and undergraduate students to contemplate scientific careers. Additionally, new coursework will be created to train biology students in modern molecular and biochemical techniques. This project is funded jointly by the Molecular Biochemistry and Metabolic Biochemistry Programs doc17140 none The investigator would investigate the role of context in critical thinking (making sure an author s points are clearly backed by evidence) across popular media. What are the needs of everyday critical thinkers and how can their needs be fulfilled? It will develop tools and training based on this research and train parents and teachers on the use of these tools. Then it will evaluate whether participation affects user practice. The researcher will examine the personal and social impact of scientific information from three studies of evolutionary science as perceived by college students and adults. It will concentrate on public understanding of the human genome project and human learning strategies. The project will use web-based forums as a vehicle for investigating these understandings. The interactions of teachers and students with the Web will be evaluated to determine whether informative tools that support student strategies and reflective exercises are needed doc17141 none CAREER: Perception of asymmetry and its role in evolutionary behavioral ecology John P. Swaddle This career development plan integrates research and education activities to address a question of broad relevance to evolutionary biology while also giving undergraduate students opportunities to develop their own independent research skills. The plan adopts a multidisciplinary, novel approach to address whether birds can use asymmetries (i.e. small differences between the left and right sides of the body) as visual cues of fitness (e.g. when assessing each other as potential mates). These small asymmetries arise due to accidents in development and are believed to reflect how well an individual is adapted to the environment in which it grows. As larger asymmetries indicate more accidents, researchers have studied whether females preferentially choose to mate with symmetric males and avoid asymmetric males. If birds use asymmetry as a cue in nature, their key perceptual task is to discriminate asymmetry from symmetry. If they cannot do this, asymmetry cannot be a direct cue. Hence, this research addresses whether birds are capable of detecting symmetry across a range of different perceptual tasks that are relevant to the birds natural ecology. Symmetry detection will be studied in two common bird species - European starlings Sturnus vulgaris and zebra finches Taeniopygia guttata. The experiments are designed to assess what forms of asymmetry are relevant to the birds, what magnitudes of asymmetry can be discriminated from perfect symmetry, and also explore whether a symmetry preference can arise as a by-product of other perceptual mechanisms for object recognition (i.e. independent of any association between asymmetry and fitness). Hence, this research will contribute greatly to assessing the importance of asymmetry to evolutionary processes. Undergraduate students will be involved with all aspects of the work. My educational objectives are to grow a strong, productive community of undergraduate scientists through close mentorship and opportunities for independent research projects. My educational plans include several new initiatives to integrate research activities into my undergraduate classes - including problem-solving activities, debates, workshops, high-profile guest instructors, and several research visits to national museums and academic institutions. Students will also present their research with me at national and international conferences, and join me on several international research trips. These activities are designed not only to arm students with a greater array of research and cognitive skills, but also to increase retention in the sciences and help students to pursue future scientific careers. The efficacy of my educational plans will be assessed through rigorous qualitative and quantitative techniques doc17142 none Modern operating systems are large and complex code bases in which hundreds of programmer-years have been invested. As a result, modifying an operating system is a difficult, costly, and often impractical endeavor. However, viewing the OS as an immutable object is at odds with most OS research. This research proposes techniques that enable the deployment of OS ideas without changing OS source code. The thesis is that an OS-like service can acquire information about the internal state of the OS and control its behavior, even when no explicit interfaces to do so are provided. With this approach, the OS is treated as a gray box, in which the general characteristics of its algorithms are known; this knowledge is then combined with run-time observations of how the OS reacts to probes in order to infer its state and exert control. Initial experience with gray-box systems points to additional areas of research: automated discovery of algorithms, on-line benchmarking to configure parameters, dynamic insertion of probes, and aggressive inference of OS internal state. Thus, the goal of this proposal is two-fold: to understand the theoretical foundations of gray-box systems and to implement a toolbox of software for the rapid development of gray-box systems doc17143 none To achieve the best performance on modern computers, one must understand and exploit the interactions between program behavior, run-time systems, and hardware. This research explores compiler and run-time system support for improving load-value prediction and for reducing the energy consumption of programs. Load-value prediction exposes instruction-level parallelism in programs by allowing loads to execute in parallel with the instructions that depend on it. Energy reduction techniques reduce the energy requirements of programs without significantly degrading performance. Broadly speaking this research considers two kinds of techniques: (i) Compiler techniques that use easily-available information in programs (such as type information) to transform or annotate code to make better use of hardware; (ii) Run-time system techniques that reorganize and annotate data to make better use of hardware. This research will also consider new hardware mechanisms for load-value prediction and energy consumption that can be exploited in software doc17144 none Data mining is the process of automatically extracting useful information hidden in large data sets. This emerging discipline is becoming increasingly important as advances in data collection have lead to the explosive growth in the amount of available data. This project aims to develop a wide-range of novel data mining algorithms suitable for the characteristics of scientific data sets arising in genomics and fluid dynamics. Our research will focus on developing algorithms both for sequential datasets and for datasets that can be represented by directed labeled graphs. The graph-based modeling enables us to capture in a single and unified framework many of the spatial, topological, geometric, and other types of relational characteristics present in scientific datasets. The specific research tasks that we plan to address are: (i) Development of scalable algorithms for finding frequently occurring patterns in graph data sets and algorithms for finding patterns whose frequency decreases as a function of the pattern-length. (ii) Development of scalable and high quality clustering algorithms for sequence and graph data sets which operate directly in the native feature space. (iii) Development of scalable and accurate classification algorithms based on automated sequential or relational feature extraction approaches. These algorithms will be validated by analyzing data sets arising in genomic and turbulent fluid flow. The project integrates the data mining research with an educational plan that focuses on initiating undergraduate and graduate students to the various computational and data analysis aspects of genomic research and developing a comprehensive bioinformatics curriculum whose goal is to foster multi-disciplinary research and collaboration. In addition, a comprehensive set of software tools will be developed and made available that can be used both to train students in using data mining techniques and to conduct novel research expanding the levels of understanding in various scientific disciplines doc17145 none The objective of this project is to determine the structural basis of amino acid specificity for the non-ribosomal peptide synthesis (NRPS) enzyme, gramicidin A synthetase (GrsA). Different NRPS enzymes incorporate amino acid substrates to produce a variety of peptides; the long-term goal of this research is to alter the specificity of a particular NRPS enzyme to incorporate new functional groups into novel peptides. In order to accomplish this goal, the following issues will be addressed: 1) The physical arrangement and interactions between the three domains (with three concomitant enzymatic functions) of GrsA synthetase. In preliminary studies, crystals of the entire GrsA synthetase, bound to its substrates, have been grown and they show diffraction amplitudes to beyond 3 A resolution; 2) Whether the substrate is transferred between domains via a covalently bound cofactor at the second domain. Crystal structures of the cofactor-bound and substrate-bound GrsA synthetase will be determined; 3) The rules of recognition for acceptance of the substrate amino acid, since the initial aminoacyl adenylation domain is the primary determinant for specificity. The crystal structures of three adenylation domains that bind distinctly different amino acids, D-alanine, L-proline, and a-aminoadipine will be solved and compared with the structure of the previously determined L-phenylalanine adenylation domain. Novel computational algorithms will be used to search mutation space and conformation space to propose possible mutants that will reprogram the L-Phe adenylation domain to accept a new substrate amino acid. Biochemical assays, along with crystal structure determination of the modified A domain, will be part of an iterative cycle to incorporate a non-native amino acid in an NRPS peptide product. Reflecting a strong movement toward multi-disciplinary research, today s chemistry education should also be multi-disciplinary, incorporating fields such as biology, physics and computer science. An integral interdisciplinary approach will be applied to newly developed courses in biophysical chemistry bringing structural biology to the forefront of the biophysical chemistry curriculum at Dartmouth College. It is also important to attract younger children to science. Through a partnership with a K-12 outreach program at a neighboring science museum, young children are learning the relationship of basic science principles to current research. Using interactive demonstrations of the properties of light with matter, children learn that the three-dimensional structures of proteins can be determined doc17146 none The theoretical and experimental research efforts in this project focus on haptics interaction and visual servoing of deformable objects through shared control. In particular, novel haptics modeling of interaction with deformable objects will be explored, using overlaying local nonlinear modeling of elasto-dynamic properties of objects; new visual servoing algorithms will be formulated for tracking deformable objects using position and image based control techniques; new robot control algorithms will be developed for safe interaction with a pacient s organs using haptics and vision. The project s education component focuses on developing new courses, involving students in course development, and involving undergraduate students in research. The PI will also participate in education of the under-represented high school students doc17147 none The research project will develop a distributed data management system for managing sensor data. Specifically it will develop an infrastructure for a sensor data management system as well as techniques for processing queries over data streams. It will also develop data models for handling new data types inherent in sensor data. The techniques will be demonstrated in a working prototype. This prototype will be used for research and education purposes in sensor data management. The career development plan will include the use of active learning for teaching. In this method, teachers involve students in presenting material through in-class exercises, open questions, as well as working in three-minute in-class two or three member group projects doc17148 none Several decades have elapsed since the landmark Civil Rights Act of outlawed discrimination in employment and public education, and the Fair Housing Act extended these protections to the sale and rent of housing. Over this period racial disparities in educational attainment and household income have narrowed, racial attitudes have changed considerably, and a significant population of middle class African Americans has emerged. Despite this, a high degree of racial segregation in residential patterns remains a striking feature of the urban landscape. This research deals with the causes, consequences and measurement of residential segregation in the United States. The research has three distinct components. The first is a theoretical exploration of the manner in which racial disparities in the distribution of income interact with preferences over neighborhood racial composition to determine patterns of segregation and stratification in metropolitan areas. This complex relationship is being investigated through the development and analysis of models of decentralized neighborhood sorting. The second component is an investigation of the implications of segregation for the intergenerational transmission of racial inequality. Earlier findings suggest that black households experience poorer neighborhood quality in comparison with white households belonging to the same income class. The project explores the manner in which current racial disparities in neighborhood quality influence future disparities in educational attainment and labor market success. These effects are being examined in the context of models of neighborhood sorting which take into account the acquisition of knowledge and skills within families, schools, and communities. The third and final component of the research deals with the measurement of segregation. This involves the use of a method for the decomposition of segregation measures into two components. One of these can be interpreted as the component of segregation that can be attributed to the effect of racial income disparities alone, while the other captures the combined effect of neighborhood preferences and discrimination. Using this method, disaggregated data on income distributions by race at the neighborhood level is being used to examine variations across cities and over time in the two components of measured segregation. The research findings will allow us to account for the persistence of segregation in certain cities, assess the prospects for integration in the future, and evaluate the implications and potential effectiveness of integrationist policies. The persistence of segregation in the face of narrowing racial income disparities has led some researchers to argue that racial attitudes are still quite intolerant, or that discrimination in real estate and mortgage lending markets is still widespread. This research will demonstrate, in contrast, that persistently high levels of segregation are consistent with narrowing income disparities even when preferences are pro-integrationist and discrimination is not widespread. This is possible because the relationship between neighborhood racial preferences and segregation depends in subtle ways on both intraracial and interracial disparities in income. As racial income disparities narrow, segregated cities become less stratified by income and hence the economic incentives for integration are diminished. The research also sheds light on the reasons why black households experience lower neighborhood quality than white households of comparable incomes, and why the incomes of black households underpredict the future economic success of their children relative to white households. This has implications for the extent to which racial disparities in income and education can be diminished by the adoption of race-blind social policies. Finally, the empirical component of the research will shed light on the extent to which the modest and uneven declines in segregation over the period to can be attributed primarily to changes in racial inequality or to changes in other factors, such as an increased desire on the part of Americans of all groups to live in more integrated communities doc17149 none This CAREER award supports research in the characterization of raft domains in lipid monolayers and bilayers. Rafts are regions in cell membranes in which particular lipids and proteins are concentrated, and can play an important role in biological functions such as signaling. This research will test a central hypothesis that the phase behavior of raft domains in lipid vesicles can be predicted from the phase behavior of the same lipids in monolayers. Specific goals of this research include using fluorescence microscopy and 2-photon microscopy to identify raft domains in giant unilamellar vesicles using lipids known to form liquid ordered domains in monolayers. In addition, the research will test whether changing symmetry from a monolayer to a bilayer alters domain formation. This will be evaluated by searching for raft domains in monolayers deposited on a surface patterned with silanes or alkane-thiols. Long-term goals include assessing whether the presence of rafts alters the activity of membrane proteins. Education efforts are focussed primarily on improving mathematical literacy of chemistry and biochemistry students. The importance of mathematics will be advertised to these students early in their college careers. A mathematics self-tutorial will be developed to clarify areas in which students need help. Resultant data will be used to guide curriculum changes. Study groups and e-mail threads will be instituted to help students learn from each other. Effort will also be directed to increasing departmental involvement of graduate students through a student-run colloquium series, and training students in the laboratory doc17150 none Internet data traffic is doubling each year. If this rate continues, data traffic will surpass voice traffic around the year . However, not included in the Internet traffic growth rate estimates are the potential data generated by web phones and mobile web-enabled PDAs, nor are the effects of future, unforeseen ``killer apps that may great increase the current demand for bandwidth. Thus, the data growth rate could be significantly higher in the aggregate and at the very least, some ``hot sites may experience a quadrupling of traffic each year. Unfortunately, due to technological barriers, bandwidth growth rates per fiber will be limited to only doubling per year. Consequently, short falls in available bandwidth may result, thus placing the burden to effectively manage bandwidth on overworked, network management teams. Network managers will require techniques and tools that enable them to nowcast not only their local network, but surrounding networks as well in order to ensure, stable, effective bandwidth allocation in the face of dynamic, high-bandwidth, next generation ``killer web apps . To address this nowcasting problem, we propose the use of a new parallel simulation modeling technique called reverse computation . Here, network models designed for parallel execution are able to execute both forwards and backwards in simulated time. For simplistic network models, reverse computation has been shown to reduce the state memory requirements of parallel optimistic simulations by a factor of 100 and increase the overall speedup by a factor of 6 when compared to classic state-saving techniques used to support rollback processing in optimistic simulations. We also believe reverse computation will allow large-scale network models to scale to much larger processor configurations as well as enable a more efficient design of simulation experiments. The overall goal of this project is to understand the fundamental functional and performance limits of reverse computation when applied to the modeling of large-scale systems. Because of its importance and impact, we have selected network models as our driving application. To achieve this goal, we propose to investigate reverse computation in the following five major research thrust areas: 1. the design and implementation of perfectly reversible computation algorithms for event-list management, and time management to enable scalable, efficient optimistic event processing, 2. the development of processes and techniques to effectively model a large-scale, multi-protocol network scenario in a parallel simulation, reverse computation framework, 3. the comparison and contrast of reverse computation performance to state-of-the-art conservative synchronization techniques, 4. the creation of new methods and techniques for the design of simulation experiments that take advantage of reverse computation, and 5. the exploration of the linkages between reverse computation, quantum computing and classic parallel distributed computing that could lead to a more unified view of these disparate classes of computation doc17151 none The project involves a blending of molecular biology, nanotechnology, and materials physics, in an attempt to create a new class of electronics. A new architecture for nanostructures using biologically modified metal semiconductor coated protein ananotube and quantum dots are being created that will inherently be high speed, light weight, high stability, and low power consumption. The architecture being used is a form of molecular self-assembly based on biological models. The protein nanotubes are formed from tubular peptide templates, which can be coated with various semiconductors, metals, and quantum dots. By functionalizing the end of the tubes with specific protein molecules, the nanotubes can use biological recognition, modeled after the biological antibody-antigen interactions, to attach the wire end to the appropriate substrate location. This strategy is at the center of the fabrication method being investigated. Designs of electronics devices are built into nanostructures by themselves, rather than having to be imposed afterwards using a patterning process. The functionality of this biological recognition is one of the major advantages as compared with other nanotubes. The project is having a significant educational benefit for the graduate, undergraduate and high school students in this interdisciplinary research ranging from spectroscopy to materials characterization. A summer Nanotechnology laboratory course is being offered to talented high school students doc17152 none The researcher s agenda over the next decade is to improve the robustness of network communication services to the point that they are suitable for applications that depend on assured connectivity. In this proposal, the researcher focuses on the key goal of containing the effects of router misconfigurations, implementation bugs in routing protocols, and other insider faults that, if left unchecked, can cause widespread loss of connectivity. Dependable communications are of clear importance as critical applications in the areas of aviation, medical services, emergency services, utilities and defense become integrated with the Internet. Yet the Internet today cannot be depended on because the routing protocols that provide connectivity are themselves fragile. They take a bimodal approach to security: well-developed cryptographic techniques are used to authenticate trusted entities and protect the protocol from untrusted attackers, but no further checks are placed on the information provided by an entity once it has been authenticated. The result is that once an inadvertent error or attacker slips in, the scope of error is potentially unbounded. As one example of a well-known, spectacular failure, misconfiguration at a Virginia-based ISP caused most Internet backbone traffic to be misdirected for up to two hours in April . Data from one study of Internet failures suggests that insider faults account for roughly five times more trouble tickets than malicious attacks, such as denial-of-service. The researcher proposes to work towards the design of routing protocols that are able to efficiently tolerate the above kind of insider faults. Detecting and containing these faults is a challenging problem because traditional security techniques are often ineffective. For example, authentication can validate what entity sent which message, but not that the entity is behaving correctly. The key to his approach is to extend routing protocols with information that can be used by the participants to consistency-check the behavior of each other. This is a novel strategy that differs from most of the prior work, which is focused on adding security in the context of existing routing protocols. The researcher illustrates the approach in this proposal by describing his research on a robust congestion signaling protocol, where it was applied to substantial advantage in a related domain. To begin this work, the researcher will conduct a measurement study of configuration errors in BGP, the routing protocol used across the backbone of the Internet. I have already started this task, and include some preliminary results in the proposal. Such a study is important because there is little data to quantify the kind, prevalence or impact of insider faults. Armed with these results, the researcher will design routing protocols that limit the loss of connectivity caused by common faults. the researchers philosophy is to first put aside deployment considerations to focus on what can be achieved as a more fundamental result with a clean-slate design, and then map the designs into the context of existing routing protocols. Specifically, he will reason about the minimal mechanism required to handle different kinds of faults, and evaluate the costs of that mechanism by using a combination of implementation, simulation, and comparison to alternatives in the literature. The researcher s approach is also to tackle the simplest, non-malicious insider faults first and work towards progressively more complex classes of faults, rather than beginning with the design of a .Byzantine robust. protocol. This has the advantages of both breaking a known, hard problem into pieces, and exposing the increased computational costs of tolerating more complex faults. At all of the above stages, the researcher will cross-fertilize my research and education activities as described in the proposal. The researcher will bring his research into the classroom to enliven lectures, and bring students, their projects, and overlapping infrastructure such as the proposed animations back into his research. If successful, this work will deepen the understanding of dependable network communication and how routing protocols can efficiently contain faults. This in turn will lay a foundation for research and education on dependable distributed systems that rely on the composition of routing protocols with other components such as transport protocols and name resolution doc17153 none CAREER: Delphin: Functional Programming in Logical Frameworks Carsten Schuermann Data structures such as lists, trees, graphs, arrays along with operations on them are one of the most studied concepts in computer science and supported by most modern programming languages. Theorems, proofs, and derivations on the other hand have elegant representations in expressive logical frameworks but lead in general to complicated, convoluted, and ultimately unreliable encodings even in modern programming languages. The proposed Delphin project engages in fundamental research on how to bring together the computational features of programming languages with the representational features of logical frameworks. In Delphin programmers can write automated theorem provers, interpreters, and compilers with elegant and compact data objects representing typing derivations (for compilers), proofs (for proof carrying code), and computation traces (for abstract machines). The proposed project employs techniques from higher-order theories, dependent types, meta-logical frameworks, and functional programming languages. Delphin will shed some light on the epistemological tension between abstract concepts and their representations; and it will provide answers concerning their manipulation. Moreover, it will open up new research areas of how to incorporate logical framework technology into other mainstream programming languages such as Java and C doc17154 none The current understanding of the mechanism by which a protein folds and adopts its biologically active three dimensional structure stems from experimental and theoretical investigations in idealized dilute environments. Under biologically relevant conditions, however, proteins fold in the much more complex cellular environment, where folding is plagued by a number of obstacles. For example, the crowded cytoplasmic environment, sequence mutations and changes in pH or temperature, can all lead to the formation of misfolded or intermediate structures. While recent experimental advances are permitting an exploration of folding in the cell, a theoretical framework and understanding of protein folding in the cellular environment is lacking. This project seeks to bridge the gap in our theoretical knowledge between in vitro and in vivo protein folding. Methods of statistical physics will be used to develop new methods and models to further our understanding of protein folding and to develop a microscopic picture of the kinetics and thermodynamics of protein aggregation. New algorithms based on parallel tempering Molecular Dynamics, Stationary Phase Monte Carlo and Field Theoretic methods will be developed to efficiently sample relevant aggregate conformations. The effect of crowding on folding and the competition between folding, misfolding and aggregation will be addressed. The educational goals of this project relate to the interdisciplinary nature of this research. A reform of the chemistry curriculum, to reflect the growing interdisciplinary nature of biochemical research and the impact of computers in modern research, will be achieved through the development of a new computational biophysics and chemistry course as well as through the creation of an interdisciplinary undergraduate research program. Outreach activities will be pursued through introductory computer classes aimed at middle school girls doc17155 none The Principal Investigator will investigate the internal structure and dynamics of the convective region of mesoscale convective systems. The main goal is to determine why moist convection appears as discrete thunderstorms in some situations and as solid mesoscale swaths (slabs) of overturning in others. Specific objectives include 1) constructing characteristic inflow environments for discrete-thunderstorm events and for slab events, 2) determining the local (within the convective region) differences in the dynamic and thermodynamic conditions that accompany cellular vs. slab convection, and 3) determining how differences in the convection (slab vs. cellular) affect the mesoscale dynamics and structural properties of the convective system. The research methodology is composed of three parts: 1) construction of a composite environment for observed cases of predominantly cellular convective systems and for systems exhibiting solid-slab overturning, 2) numerical experiments on the composite environments to determine whether or not the model is able to generate the two types of organizational modes, and 3) numerical sensitivity experiments on idealized (analytically specified) initial conditions using the results of items (1) and (2) as a guide. It is expected that the knowledge gained from these investigations will a) help to identify the factors that establish the organizational mode of the convection and the depth and strength of moist absolutely unstable layers, and b) elucidate how those factors affect the overall structure and evolution of mesoscale convective systems. The results may also provide practical benefits, such as improvements in the ability to discriminate among the types of severe weather that will occur for various types of large-scale environments. Differentiating among the possible modes of convective organization is extremely important from a forecasting perspective since it is these differences that often determine whether or not severe weather will occur and, if so, whether it will be characterized by individual, possibly rotating, storms or by strong straight line winds associated with slab convection doc17156 none In the past decade, new nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) have been developed for various image processing applications, such as noise reduction, edge detection, image segmentation and restoration. While the attention of the scientific community in this area predominantly focused on creating the new PDEs, very little attention was paid to developing numerical algorithms that approximate their solutions. The few numerical algorithms that are currently used suffer from a variety of problems: they are not accurate enough, too slow, and not fault-free. In this project, the investigator develops accurate, efficient, and robust numerical algorithms for nonlinear PDEs in image processing. The research activities are based on the investigator s extensive work in the field of hyperbolic conservation laws, and include numerical methods for the Hamilton-Jacobi equations, fast algorithms for high-order nonlinear PDEs, algorithms for computing steady-state solutions, numerical homogenization of Hamilton-Jacobi equations and multi-resolution analysis, analysis of nonlinear diffusion equations, constrained morphing active contours and geodesic flows, and non-blind algorithms for image processing. A portion of the research activities focuses on improving existing algorithms in order to solve a specific imaging problem in radiation oncology treatment planning. The investigator develops novel mathematical techniques for image processing and uses these techniques for solving problems in the field of radiation oncology imaging. Radiation oncology treats cancer by delivering relatively small doses of radiation to tumors in order to eliminate cancer without destroying or chronically damaging healthy tissues in and around the growth. CT and MRI scans are used as three-dimensional anatomical models to ensure that the treatments conform geometrically to the tumor target. This process depends critically upon identifying the location of the tumor as well as the healthy organs (in order to minimize the dose of radiation in these areas). Despite extended research, the existing mathematical tools for image processing are unsuitable for clinical medical applications. The segmentation of the CT and MRI scans is still carried out by manual tools, and consumes about one-half of the time required to plan the treatments. The investigator designs accurate and reliable automated algorithms that would significantly shorten this time and have a big impact on radiation oncology. He integrates into his work educational activities that demonstrate the importance of applied mathematics in a broad spectrum of sciences. Special emphasis is given to applications of computational mathematics in biology and cutting-edge technologies. The planned educational activities include programs for junior-high, high-school, undergraduate, and graduate students. The investigator works to increase the gender and ethnic diversity in the mathematical sciences by encouraging under-represented groups to study applied mathematics and choose it as a future career doc17157 none Papapolymerou The electromagnetic spectrum between 0.5 THz to 10 THz is scientifically rich and possesses a number of advantages: strong molecular absorption, wide bandwidth, very small sized circuitry, improved spatial resolution, faster switching speed and compactness. Applications in this frequency range include radio astronomy and atmospheric observations, detection of DNA mutations, detection of viral chemical agents, high-resolution imaging, ultra-wideband and covert satellite communications, electronic countermeasures, signature acquisition radars and electronic optical links in high-density integrated circuits. However, this region of the spectrum is relatively technologically poor due mainly to the unavailability of low loss and low cost transmission lines and other circuits such as antennas, filters and local oscillator sources. Traditionally, the vast majority of THz components utilize waveguide structures. Unfortunately, at frequencies above 1 THz waveguides become so small that fabrication utilizing conventional machining and electroforming techniques becomes extremely difficult, expensive and or impossible. As a result, the PI is currently technologically limited from the production of low cost, low loss and reliable THz components above 1 THz that can be integrated within semiconductor-based circuits. In this project, the PI proposes to further advance the state-of-the-art by designing and studying (both theoretically and experimentally) novel low loss, low cost and reliable Silicon micromachined THz circuits for communication, radio astronomy and biological chemical applications above 1 THz. This will be achieved by utilizing a unique laser micromachining technique capable of producing three-dimensional structures of any shape with an accuracy of 1-3 um, as well as state-of-the art active devices (e.g. monolithic membrane diodes). The investigation will include the development and characterization of the following structures: (1) micromachined conical and corrugated horns, as well as arrays of those radiating elements at 600 GHz, 1.2 THz, 2.4 THz and 4.8 THz; (2) micromachined cavity based band-pass and band-stop filters with coupling irises or slots at 600 GHz, 1.2 THz, 2.4 THz and 4.8 THz; (3) micromachined balanced doublers at 1.2 THz and 2.4 THz with membrane diodes and corrugated horns at the input output; (4) the first ever doubler at 4.8 THz and (5) micromachined doublers at 1.2 THz coherently combined with a magic-Tee for increased output power. All of the above structures will be implemented in a split-block configuration where the circuit is split along a center symmetry line into two components that are fabricated and then bonded together to form the entire structure. Bonding and self-alignment issues and their implications on circuit performance will be explored extensively in order to produce guidelines for micromachined THz circuits. Along with the proposed research program, the PI is firmly committed to pursuing several related educational goals. These will include: (1) the revitalization of the existing microwave engineering curriculum at Georgia Tech; (2) the active involvement of senior undergraduate students in the proposed research, as well as in the creation of a website database for published papers on micromachined microwave and THz circuits; (3) community outreach and mentoring activities to involve students traditionally under-represented in engineering and to attract high-school students into engineering; (4) summer internship with the major microwave THz companies in the country and with national labs and (5) the organization of seminars with related topics, presented by invited speakers from academia and industry. The PI believes that the above educational activities will benefit his research efforts in microwave THz circuits; expose students to a new world of circuits, interdisciplinary problems and opportunities; provide a strong linkage between them and the industrial research community; and attract more under-represented groups into engineering doc17158 none SUMMARY: Synthesis-assistance and Compilation Software for Embedded Systems --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Embedded systems promise to revolutionize our day-to-day lives with ever-increasing intelligence and connectivity at decreasing cost. Yet, many of the software technologies for embedded systems remain antiquated, from compilers that produce code whose performance and power consumption is substantially inferior to assembly language programs, to synthesis software that provides little guidance to the designer on what decisions to make. These shortcomings decrease system performance and increase time-to-market and software and hardware development cost. This project is developing fundamental technologies to propel the software for embedded systems to the next level of automation. Opportunities along two directions are being explored: increased automation of the synthesis of embedded soft cores, and new compiler strategies for the management of heterogeneous memories in embedded systems. When deployed, these innovations can be expected to lead to vast improvements in the time-to-market, cost and performance of embedded designs. Both directions rely on improved compiler analysis of application domains. In the first and major research direction, tools that assist the synthesis of embedded soft cores are being developed. Soft cores are general-purpose processors having parameterizable components instead of a fixed design. The project is designing software that recommends to the user the best choice of an expanded space of hardware parameters for the given soft core, in an automated manner, taking into account the target application domain. The design goal is reduced runtime and power consumption within a given silicon-area budget. For the first time ever, the software uses compiler analysis of the applications to guide its decisions, rather than an exhaustive design space explorations proposed before, resulting in a rapid and scalable methodology. The second direction explored is the efficient compiler allocation of software-exposed heterogeneous memory. In many lower-end embedded chips, often used in micro-controllers and DSP processors, no caches are provided. Instead heterogeneous memory units such as scratch-pad SRAM, internal DRAM, external DRAM and ROM are memory-mapped to different parts of the address space. Prior to this work, it was left to the user to partition the data among the different memory units. This project is developing a compiler strategy that automatically partitions the data among the memory units. This CAREER research also includes a strong educational component that serves college students, industry and local high schools. To this end, several initiatives are pursued. First, a new graduate course on compilers for embedded systems has been designed. It continues to evolve with the integration of new research results. Second, undergraduates are recruited for summer internships to participate in the research. Third, a new laboratory course focuses on the design of embedded soft cores and uses software developed in the research, when complete, as an educational tool. Fourth, a research seminar series is conducted for high school juniors and seniors, using short examples of futuristic applications to excite students about research in computer engineering doc17159 none Streptomyces, Gram-positive soil bacteria, are notable for their ability to form dormant cells called spores (sporulation) and production of most of the antibiotics used worldwide in clinical and veterinary medicine. Members of the genus Streptomyces produce common antibiotics such as streptomycin, ampicillin and tetracycline as natural products. A considerable amount of information has been obtained in recent years regarding the mechanisms that regulate the production of antibiotics by Streptomyces. One possible level of regulation that has not been studied in detail concerns the stability of the genetic message. In other organisms, it is known that modulating the stability of the genetic message can control the function of genes. It is proposed to examine the role of genetic message stability in the regulation of antibiotic production by Streptomyces coelicolor. S. coelicolor produces four antibiotics, two of which, actinorhodin (act) and undecylprodigiosin (red) will be examined in this study. Specific aims of the research are as follows. (1) The genes for two enzymes known to be involved in determining the stability of the genetic message in bacterial systems will be cloned. (2) The effects of the expression of those cloned genes (i.e., the production of the gene products) on the stability of the genetic message for two proteins known to be required for act and red production will be studied. (3) The effects of the expression of the genes that determine message stability on the production of the act and red antibiotics will be determined. If such effects are detected, the relationship of those effects to the stability of genetic messages required for antibiotic production will be assessed. (4) Using genetic engineering techniques, attempts will be made to artificially increase the stability of the genetic messages for the regulators of act and red production. It is possible that increasing the stability of the genetic messages in question will lead to increased production of the antibiotics whose synthesis is regulated by the proteins encoded by those messages. It may thus be possible to increase antibiotic yields by stabilizing the genetic messages for key genes required for antibiotic production. Thus, the proposed studies may well have significant implications for the production of antibiotics. (5) In previous studies, a gene designated absB has been identified that controls production of all four of the antibiotics normally produced by S. coelicolor. That gene encodes a protein that affects the stability of the genetic message in bacteria. Attempts will be made to identify the genes that are in turn affected by absB and to assess further the molecular mechanism by which message stability affects antibiotic production doc17160 none The problem of data synchronization is inherent to systems that require consistency among distributed information. In light ofthe vision of pervasive computing, in which any two mo- bile or fixed computing devices would be able tointeract, data synchronization is increasingly becoming an essential technology. To date, most research on data synchronization has focused on database issues related to con ict resolution. However, we feelthat current trends towards pervasive computing point to communication becoming the primary bottleneck for synchronization. For example, the Palm Pilot IIIxe, a popular and representative Personal Digital Assistant, can take even 20 minutes to synchronize with a desktop PC in certain practical scenarios. There are many other diverse examples of the need for communication-aware data synchronization, including synchronization of mobile data, resource discovery, and even reconciliation of nucleotide sequences in DNA. We intend to investigate practical data synchronization techniques that minimize com- munication complexity, building upon a foundation of recent research connecting such tech- niques to graph coloring problems and the design of error-control codes. These connections allow for application of the latest results in these fields, such as the capacity-approaching Low Density Parity-Check codes, to important synchronization issues. The synchronized schemes we propose to research promise to be much faster and more general than those currently in use, offering applications to fault-tolerance, file synchronization, and image comparison. At the same time, we outline an ambitious, but attainable, educational plan based on years of experience with a diverse body of students. Our goals include: 1) strengthening ties with high schools through mentoring involvement in prize-based research programs; 2) expanding involvement of undergraduates in the proposed research through targeted projects and collaboration with graduate students; 3) enhancing graduate education through the use of real-life projects and raw, unfinished research. We have already begun to work towards these goals and describe some of our successes doc17161 none Males from several laboratory inbred strains produce a sperm factor that is able to interact with the female meiotic spindle apparatus at the second meiotic division, disrupting the random segregation of chromatids between the zygote and the second polar body. On the other hand, the male sperm from other inbred strains do not interfere with the expected random segregation of chromatids. In hybrid males generated by crossing animals from these two types of inbred strains, the phenotype appears to segregate as a single locus that is expressed at the haploid stage of spermatogenesis. The objective of the project is to characterize this unusual effect of the sperm in nonrandom segregation of maternal alleles during female meiosis. This research project has two aims: i) characterize the mode of inheritance of the sperm factor and ii) identify the molecular nature of the gene, or genes, responsible for this phenotype using a combination of positional cloning, comparative genomics methods and functional assays. The characterization of true exceptions to Mendel s laws of inheritance has been a highly successful approach in uncovering general principles in genetics. The phenotype to be studied in this project, nonrandom segregation of chromatids during female meiosis that is driven by the genotype of the fertilizing sperm, represents a true violation to Mendel s law of segregation. In addition, it also violates the basic assumption of Mendelian genetics that the segregation of alleles during meiosis in one sex is independent from the segregation of alleles in the other sex, i. e., the inheritance of genetic information from one parent is independent of the inheritance of genetic information from the other parent. The information gathered in this research has great potential to provide new insights in the mechanisms of control of chromosome segregation during meiosis and to refine the standard models commonly used in the fields of genetics and evolutionary biology. In the past decade a trend has become apparent in the curricula of genetics at graduate and undergraduate levels. An increasing emphasis has been placed in the molecular aspects of gene action and gene regulation, while basic aspects of transmission genetics are briefly summarized and often presented as a complete body of knowledge. Although one may argue that this approach has been exceedingly successful in the characterization of the molecular basis of disease, it is also clear that some observations violate the most basic assumptions of Mendelian Genetics. These observations reject the commonly held opinion that transmission genetics was essentially solved in the past century and exemplifies the open-ended nature of the quest to fully understand the principles and mechanisms governing the transmission of genetics information. The underlying rationale of this research project (i. e., testing the validity of basic assumptions of genetic models) and the results generated have a great educational significance that will be integrated within course design, teaching and supervision at the high school, undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral levels doc17162 none DSP-Enhanced Low-Voltage Signal Processing in Submicron CMOS Today s electronic systems are strongly influenced by the dramatic advancement of submicron complementary metal-oxide-silicon (CMOS) integrated circuits (IC) technology as the size of transistors shrink to extreme dimensions. Because of the shrinking size of transistors, the digital signal processing (DSP) power and efficiency of digital computation grow exponentially; however, the equally decreasing operating voltage of the transistors leads to design problems for mixed analog-digital circuits which are part of all digital processors. By taking advantage of the CMOS down-scaling trend that increases DSP capability, this research combines the developmental efforts in both low-voltage analog circuit techniques and optimum architectures for DSP enhancements. This research systematically explores various architectures, develops and compares adaptive algorithms and digital correction techniques, studies the effects of analog imperfections in deep submicron CMOS, and obtains the fundamental limits of digital compensation and calibration. In this research, two IC design methods are created and expanded to overcome the analog mixed-signal design challenges of very deep submicron CMOS technologies. The first explores new architectures and techniques capable of maximizing the power of DSP for enhancing analog and mixed-signal circuit performance, including DSP-enabling architectures, use of multi-signal paths and taking advantage of inherent structures for error estimation, and merged system calibration of multi-stage architectures. The second explores new analog circuit design techniques for ultra low-voltage operation that is fully compatible with submicron CMOS, focusing on fast low-voltage switching schemes, analog-error insensitive and DSP-corrected low-voltage structures, and linear low-voltage input sampling circuits doc17163 none Life science is often about understanding complex systems- from human body systems to ecosystems to evolution. These are hard to understand because it requires understanding how structures relate to functions and what the behaviors of the system are. Some interactions between parts are invisible and have a time sequence that makes them difficult to perceive. Even adults struggle to learn about complex systems. Yet such understanding is often critical to scientific analysis. These difficulties may be aggravated by the static depictions found in typical textbooks that focus on structures without considering the dynamic behaviors and function. One possible approach to teaching about complex systems involves the use of a conceptual representation drawn from Structure-Behavior-Function (SBF) theory but we need to first investigate how people come to understand complex biological systems. Much of life science instruction tends to focus on structural aspects of complex systems. I will use this framework to develop both static (hypermedia) and dynamic approaches (a simulation construction kit, the virtual construction kit - the VCK) to help middle-school students learn an SBF schema, and in particular, support their understanding of system behaviors and functions. This research addresses three main questions: 1) What does it mean to understand a complex system?; 2) How can providing an explicit conceptual representation (i.e., SBF) support learning about complex systems?; and 3) How can dynamic representational tools (i.e., hypermedia and the VCK) support learning about this conceptual representation? The teaching plan has three main components. First, there will be an opportunity for a research mentorship for graduate and undergraduate students as they become involved in research and instructional design. Second, I will contribute to masters and doctoral course development through developing and enhancing existing graduate course offerings in Cognition and Technology and Model Development and Reasoning in Science. Third, there will be an impact on preservice teacher training. Because the VCK models can be used as windows into children s thinking, this work will provide contexts that will be integrated into preservice teacher education doc17164 none Home Area Networks (HANs) are an emerging technology that is very likely to play a major role in future homes. Broad deployment of this technology, however, depends strongly on the achieved security and the policies used to allow unsophistcated users to express and communicate their security requirements. The key objective of this research is to investigate technologies and methodologies which can be deployed and used to protect home networks. The research contributions include (a) user-accessible security policies, (b) a framework for the safe and secure communication between devices in a Home Automation Network (HAN), and (c) the collection and analysis of empirical findings by deploying such devices in a home environment. Without the security components that this research will produce, wide deployment of HANs may have devastating consequences. The results of low security awareness coupled with always-on connectivity have been demonstrated by the problems caused by computer viruses. In addition, the proxy-based communication framework that will be implemented as part of this research, will also be applicable to self-reconfigurable networks that may be found in health monitoring systems, battlefield sensor networks, etc doc17165 none Neuropeptides are compounds that are essential for regulating a wide array of cellular physiological functions. Many have been isolated from insect species, and the fruitfly, Drosophila, offers an exceptional model system in which to study the functions of neuropeptides at the level of molecular genetics. Corazonin (CRZ) is a neuropeptide that regulates cardiac function in some insects but not others, and its gene (Crz) also has a potential but not yet clear role in the biological clock of Drosophila. During development, a portion of corazonin-producing neurons appears to undergo programmed cell death (apoptosis). This project uses molecular biological and physiological approaches to examine the gene expression patterns of the corazonin gene, to manipulate its activities, to identify regulatory elements in the genetic promoter of Crz, and to determine the molecular mechanisms underlying the cell death of neurons expressing the corazonin gene. The experiments address the important question of how these peptidergic neurons are regulated by genetic and external factors such as hormones and photoperiod during development. Results will be extremely important to understanding the little-studied genetic mechanisms of neuropeptide function. The impact will extend to the fields of biological rhythms, developmental neuroscience, and neuroendocrinology. As a CAREER grant, the project will promote the career of an excellent young investigator, and will have a substantial impact on undergraduate biology by training undergraduates in modern techniques of molecular genetics and by developing new curricular offerings in the rapidly growing field of molecular neuroscience doc17166 none The goal of this project is to develop a methodology for analyzing the wealth of information captured by imaging sensors that densely sample visible light. Methods will be developed for automated selection of an ideal set of filters for multi-spectral imaging. Algorithms will be explored for accurate interpretation and recreation of scenes with complex light interaction, in particular in the high-dimensional spectral domain. Techniques for extraction of geometric and photometric invariants from video images will be studied, and novel algorithms will be generated for visualization of invisible spectral information. The project s education component includes development of new cross-disciplinary undergraduate and graduate courses, appropriate modification of existing courses, and hands-on approach to coursework and research projects doc17167 none Guskov, Igor U of MIchigan-Ann Arbor Medical imaging systems and computational modeling of physical processes produce vast amounts of surface data for analysis and visualization purposes. Often such data are time-dependent and describe surfaces that evolve in time, for example, a developing interface between two fluids or moving walls of the heart ventricles. This project will develop processing tools for such dynamic surface data. In particular, massively redundant and noisy raw data coming from applications will be converted into compact form useful for extensive interactive manipulation, especially within remote collaboration environments. The developed technology will also be useful for applications in tele-presence and animation. This research effort will be integrated with educational initiatives via student involvement in research projects, development of new curriculum in Digital Geometry Processing, and collaboration with external researchers. The focus of this project will be on converting raw application data into hierarchical surface representations that are temporally coherent and spatially (semi-)regular, and further processing and compression of the constructed data representations. Specifically, a sequence of irregular meshes produced by a frame-by-frame marching cubes extraction of isosurfaces from a time-dependent volumetric field is an example of geometric data that cannot be efficiently processed without first establishing temporal coherence and spatial regularity of the surface sampling. The development of a fully automated compression system for dynamic geometry in this scenario will include the following components: constrained parameterization method for establishing temporal coherence of surface sampling, patch layout generation and maintenance routine to deal with possible topology changes, efficient topological event detection procedure, predictive coding of dynamic geometry streams, geometric and topological denoising of raw application data, and possible integration of the regular mesh extraction into the simulation (or shape acquisition) environment. The developed technology will also be useful in the areas of scientific visualization and computer aided geometric design doc17168 none This project aims at greater understanding of deformation and fracture mechanisms of thin films. It has been known that these mechanisms interact with microstructural features such as grain size, grain orientation, interfaces and surfaces, and dislocation substructure albeit the nature of these interactions is not well established. The project investigates the stress-strain behavior of freestanding films using bulge test technique while films on substrates will be studied using the substrate curvature method. Another goal of the project is to investigate the precipitation hardening and the shape memory effects in Ni-Ti thin films. Third objective of the project is to develop micromechanical techniques for measuring thin film fracture toughness. These techniques are used to investigate sub-critical crack growth under cyclical loading conditions and to determine how factors like film thickness, chemical environment, and process conditions affect the fracture toughness of thin metal and alloy films. A new undergraduate Introductory Materials Science course along with a special topics course will serve as the main vehicles for some of the educational activities. %%% This research develops new and improved understanding of the deformation mechanisms that operate in thin films, resulting in better models for thin film mechanical behavior that will have an impact on many engineering applications where thin films are used, such as integrated circuits, MEMS devices, and wear resistant coatings. The fracture toughness and fatigue resistance of thin films are applicable from reliability concerns for MEMS devices in non-hermetic packaging that is more cost-effective than traditional hermetic packaging doc17169 none Ultimately, the essence of life is the controlled movement of charge. The vast number of conformational and chemical states available to the polypeptide chain allows nature to tune the reactivity of metal centers and direct electron flow within and between proteins. The goal of Dr. Crane s research is to develop and apply new photochemical methods for studying the structural basis of redox chemistry and long-range electron transfer (ET) in biology. Photosensitizers will be used to initiate long-range ET in single protein crystals, where structure can be precisely defined by X-ray crystallography. Designed crystal systems that fix donor and acceptor orientations allow effects of intervening protein and water structure on electron tunneling to be probed by mutagenesis and isotopic substitution. ET rates will be determined directly in crystals of metal-modified azurins and crystals of complexes between cytochrome c and cytochrome c peroxidase. Redox reactions at protein metal centers will be driven in crystals by photoinduced ET so that structures of activated states important for catalysis can be determined by cryo-crystallography or time-resolved diffraction techniques. Structures will be determined for peroxidase peroxo-iron and oxo-iron species, important intermediates in biological oxygen activation, and for tryptophan and tyrosine radicals, emerging players in a wide variety of high-potential, biological redox chemistries. Atomic structure will be correlated with electronic structure probed with magnetic and optical spectroscopies to understand the reciprocal tuning of reactivity between metallocofactors and the polypeptide chain. The results of this research will provide sets of long-range ET rates for structural states defined in detail, new structures of hitherto unobserved metalloprotein catalytic species, and new techniques for studying protein dynamics by X-ray diffraction. Educational activities connected with this research aim to relate fundamental concepts in structure, kinetics, thermodynamics and chemical reactivity to complex biological processes such as energy transduction, signal transduction, environmental sensitivity and response. Effort falls into two general categories: 1) mentoring high-school, undergraduate, and graduate students in research; and 2) the development and teaching of new undergraduate and graduate courses at Cornell University. Discovery-based learning at the K-12 level will also be promoted. The research described above is designed to provide projects appropriate for students of all levels. A new graduate course, the physical chemistry of proteins is now being taught and a second Bio-inorganic chemistry will be presented in . Other course activities include development of an introductory course for freshman chemistry majors in chemical structure and bonding, and an interdepartmental short course in enzyme kinetics. A playful approach to addressing problems will be emphasized in all activities doc17170 none ions of CSPs. The goal of these investigations is not only to enhance the performance of solving CSPs, but also to support interactions with human users by allowing them to build and navigate over landscapes of solution spaces. Such techniques will institute a new paradigm in problem solving by making a computer perform as an active, informed assistant rather than as a passive black box. The project s education plan combines curriculum development, course teaching, and individual mentoring of students. This CAREER award recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of a teacher-scholar who is likely to become an academic leader of the twenty-first century. Constraint satisfaction is most commonly used in scheduling and resource allocation applications, as well as in artificial intelligence planning and collaborative problem-solving. Therefore, this research will improve the techniques available to solve very difficult practical problems in a variety of fields doc17171 none CAREER: Automatically Generating Specifications to Improve Program Correctness and Maintainability Michael D. Ernst Ensuring software correctness, modifying software, and many other software engineering tasks are greatly eased by the presence of specifications that document program behavior. Unfortunately, specifications are usually absent, leading to problems with program understanding and maintenance. This research extends work in automatically generating (inferring) partial program specifications from program executions. The research goals are to detect conditional invariants (implications) that are true only sometimes, to scale the technology, to enable online processing, to investigate new inference strategies, to improve usability, to evaluate via experiments and case studies, to integrate the techniques and tools into education, and to transfer technology to industry. The research has three broad impacts: (1) it explains, advances, and evaluates the theory and practice of automatic generation of program specifications; (2) it enables easier, more effective, and broader use of specifications, by automating generation of partial specifications and by extending their scope to likely (as opposed to guaranteed) properties; and (3) it applies specifications to specific program tasks via new techniques and tools for program modification, testing, reuse, and documentation. Evaluation includes theoretical evaluations of the accuracy of the underlying techniques, case studies of substantial software projects, and controlled experiments to determine the efficacy of the resulting tools doc17172 none ion. - Concurrent class machines (CCM), an action-based modeling language that directly incorporates object-oriented features like classes and inheritance, objects and object creation, methods, method invocation and exceptions, threads and thread creation. - Shared variables interaction diagrams, a scenario-based language that adequately captures requirements of embedded systems communicating via shared variables. - Hermes}, a modeling, simulation and model checking tool for HRM that efficiently exploits the hierarchical structure to prune the state space. We also consider a variety of other CAV techniques and support for CCM. 2. Support the design methodology for embedded systems with tightly coupled discrete and analog behavior with: - Hierarchic hybrid machines (HHM)}, a hierarchic, state-based modeling language that allows to capture both discrete and analog behavior. - Charon, a modeling and simulation tool for HHM that exploits hierarchic structure for efficient multi-rate integration. - Different approaches to simulation, reachability analysis and modular reasoning. Application of hybrid systems to modeling cell behavior. 3. Publish a textbook providing a comprehensive, formal treatment of the unified modeling language UML for Real Time to reduce the gap between ESDA and CAV. 4. Integrate formal concepts in the undergraduate education at Stony-Brook by proposing changes for the courses in software engineering, theory of computation and operating systems doc17173 none Erez Zadok SUNY -Stony Brook CAREER: An In-Kernel Runtime Execution Environment for User-Level Programs We propose to develop a system that will simplify operating system code development while improving performance. Developing operating system kernel code is difficult for three reasons. First, the kernel is an unforgiving environment to work in, where any small bug can result in large-scale data corruption; debugging tools for kernels are not as flexible as their user-level counterparts and are not used often. Second, kernel developers must write codes that takes into account many unusual conditions such as resource contention, locks, reference counts, being interrupted or re-entrant, and more. Third, before programmers can become proficient kernel developers, they must read and understand large amounts of complex kernel code. However, one major advantage to developing kernel code is that it runs very fast; the kernel has direct access to all the system resources. The benefits of this research will include the creation of a novel system that allows anyone who can write user-level code to develop and test their code in the user level where it is easier to do so, and then to execute that code inside the kernel to gain significant performance benefits. This research will enable us to learn about the security and scalability of running many kernel applications and develop methods to optimize the performance of in-kernel applications further doc17174 none The goal of the project is to bridge the gap between human and machine vision by designing active vision systems modeled after neurobiology. Such systems can benefit from the ability to make eye, head, and body movements for active sensing, and can learn robust models of the visual world directly from interaction with the environment. Computational models of active vision will be formulated within the context of neurobiological data, addressing the problems of object identification, detection, attention, tracking, modeling self-motion, and oculomotor learning. An anthropomorphic real-time binocular active vision system will be designed based on commercially available camera platforms and real-time image processing hardware. The performance of the approach will be evaluated on both wheeled and legged robots in tasks involving visual navigation and multi-robot collaboration. The education part of the project includes development of an interdisciplinary curriculum in computational neuroscience doc17175 none Institution: North Carolina State University The objective of the proposed research is to study T lymphocyte (T cell) regulation at the intracellular level, with a focus on molecular signaling processes initiated by the cell surface receptors for the cytocines, interleukins (IL)-2 and (IL)-4. The specific objectives of this research include: (1) the quantitative analysis of pathway crosstalk interactions in IL-2 receptor signaling, using interventions that target specific intracellular molecules, (2) the characterization of the cooperation of IL-2 receptor-mediated signaling pathways in mediating T cell life (proliferation) and death (apoptosis) decision making, and (3) the elucidation of the synergistic effect of IL-2 and IL-4 on T cell expansion at the level of signaling network interactions. This research could provide new information to help modulate cell function, with potential application being the elucidation of therapeutic strategies. This project was originally funded as a CAREER award, and was converted to a Presidential Early Career Award for Engineers and Scientists (PECASE) award in May doc17176 none Saugata Basu Georgia Tech CAREER: Algorithmic Semi-algebraic Geometry and its Applications Algorithmic semi-algebraic geometry lies at the heart of of many problems in several different areas of computer science and mathematics including discrete and computational geometry, robot motion planning, geometric modeling, computer-aided design, geometric theorem proving, mathematical investigations of real algebraic varieties, molecular chemistry, constraint databases etc. A closely related subject area is quantitative real algebraic geometry. Results from quantitative real algebraic geometry are the basic ingredients of better algorithms in semi-algebraic geometry and play an increasingly important role in several other areas of computer science: for instance, in bounding the geometric complexity of arrangements in computational geometry, computational learning theory, proving lower bounds in computational complexity theory, convex optimization problems etc. The first goal of this project is to design optimal algorithms for several important problems of semi-algebraic geometry including the problems of computing the homology groups and stratifications of semi-algebraic sets. Secondly, the methods and techniques of algorithmic real algebraic geometry will be applied to investigate several open problems in discrete and computational geometry and to explore new connections, especially in the area of computational topology. At the same time, several emerging applications of algorithmic semi-algebraic geometry will be investigated, especially in the area of constraint databases. Additionally, practical implementations will be undertaken, in order to build a system able to compute topological invariants (such as the number of connected components, the Euler characteristic, the Betti numbers, the full homology groups) of given semi-algebraic sets. This will aim at bridging the current gap between the theoretically best algorithms, and the best practical implementations available. The educational component of the project consists of developing an integrated cross-disciplinary curriculum suitable for advanced under-graduate and beginning graduate students in mathematics and computer science. This would require no pre-requisite beyond college-level calculus and linear algebra, so that that the students can quickly absorb the mathematical background necessary for this line of research, and at the same time be in a position to make efficient implementations, which would make them attractive to both industry and academia doc17177 none Bronnimann, Herve Polytechnic Univ of NY Geometric computing, as applied in computer graphics, robotics, architecture, geographic information system, spatial databases, solid modeling, has penetrated every domain of science and engineering, from astrophysics to molecular biology to physical simulations and fluid dynamics. Recent years have witnessed a growing demand for two- and mostly three-dimensional computations. For the past two decades, computational geometers have investigated the mathematical foundations of this nascent field and have solved the asympotic complexity of basic geomteric problems. But theoretical solutions, while bringing valubable insight into the problem, hardly answerthe whole prob lem, and some research is needed on how to engineer these solutions to bring the benefits of these insights into practical solutions. Specifically, we propose to study the geometric primitives and underlying the field of computional geometry and its many applications, and to develop geometric concepts for basic geometric objects and predicates as well as for 3D general subdivisions in various geometric concepts. The methodology of separating the development of concepts from ther implementation is inspried by the generic programming paradigm. This is an approach that has met with success in other fields of algorithm engineering (most notably the C++ Standard Template Library -STL). We also propose to continue our investigaion of non-robustness problems in geometric algorithms. One approach to solving the problem, which is more efficient than exact computation, is the exact predicate paradigm in which only the primitives leading to critical decisions are guaranteed to make the correct decisions, even if quantities are not computed exactly. We propose to study the efficient implementation and implications of the exact predicate paradigm. The educational part of this proposal strengthens the research program by proposing to write a textbook devoted to implementation issues in geometric computing, designed to provide a foundation to and complement the existing classical computaitonal geometry textbooks doc17178 none This work seeks to build a foundation for an academic career that is distinctive, has an impact on the lives of students, and makes a lasting and valuable contribution to society. It seeks to accomplish these objectives using the following approach. -This project proposes the development and performance evaluation of mechanisms for the support of high priority users over public broadband TCP IP networks (i.e., the Internet ). Support for these types of users will enhance Internet service provider (ISP) revenue opportunities as well as support activities of importance to society, such as military, national security, and emergency response operations. -Impacts will be made on the lives of students through the development of innovative internship and entrepreneurial training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. New courses and curricula will also be developed to teach principles and new knowledge gained from this project s research work. Students will actively participate in this research, including undergraduates and those from under-represented groups. - This academic career will only be successful if it passionately pursues research which goes beyond technology development to make a difference in the lives of people. This work provides the PI a vehicle and opportunity to build an academic career that pursues such a passion. It is important to note that the research focus of this project will be on priority users, more than on the traffic they generate or the services they are seeking to use. Priority users may or may not expect high quality of service (e.g.,low delay, high data rates) or applications that place high demands on the network (e.g., interactive video). Without fail, however, all priority users will expect network services to be available to them and to perform reliably, regardless of the state of the network or the context in which it is operating (e.g., after a natural disaster). National security emergency preparedness users are of particular interest because they frequently need to perform their activities when it is most difficult for networks to support them due to failures and overloaded traffic. The primary requirements for priority users are as follows. - Availability - Immediate access to network resources whenever needed. -Dependability - Ability to carry out and complete a communication session, no matter what is happening in the network or social context. -Stability - Priority users must be able to trust the technologies they use, even as those technologies evolve. In addition, packet-level quality of service and preferential treatment may be important to some priority users, but all priority users expect the above three primary requirements to be met. This work proposes four project tasks that are staged over five years. The first three tasks will develop mechanisms for supporting high priority users in best effort, connection-oriented, and connectionless (i.e., Differentiated Services) environments. Task 4 will assess performance expectations across multiple types of networks on a full end-to-end path. These four tasks are as follows. -Task 1 - Endpoint Traffic Control for Best Effort Environments - Mechanisms will be developed for end users to control the performance they receive in best effort networks. This is accomplished using forwarding hosts which serve as intermediate destinations for traffic. The presence of multiple forwarding hosts gives end users choices of paths over which to test and send traffic. -Task 2 - Integrated Routing and Connection Admission Control - Connection admission control (CAC) is very useful in connection-oriented environments to limit the amount of traffic from low priority users. New CAC functions will be developed through simulation experiments that integrate efficiently with dynamic routing. -Task 3 - Priority Treatment in Diff-Serv Domains - In Differentiated Services domains, traffic is handled in an aggregated, connectionless manner. New traffic identification techniques, per domain behaviors, traffic engineering guidelines, and service level agreement templates will be developed to specifically address the requirements of high priority users in such environments. -Task 4 - End-to-end Priority Treatment - The ultimate research mission of this project is finally accomplished in Task 4, where priority users will be able to have their network activities supported end-to-end through new mechanisms to understand and influence performance in the different types of networks along a data path doc17179 none Craniofacial muscles collectively serve an extremely diverse set of functions. This set of muscles includes extraocular muscles which are responsible for highly precise eye movements during visual tracking of a moving object, laryngeal muscles that serve vocalizations and airway protection, and mandibular muscles that drive mastication. These muscles are highly complex with respect to structure, biochemical properties and physiological properties and, as such, are markedly different from limb muscles that serve locomotion. The overall goal of this project is to acquire a more comprehensive understanding of the molecular and cellular properties of craniofacial muscles that allow these muscles to serve such a vast array of functions and to do so with an extraordinary level of precision. Myosin is a large protein, being composed of two heavy chain and four light chain subunits, and is a key regulator of contractile properties of muscles. Whole craniofacial muscles which express superfast and extraocular laryngeal myosin isoforms are well recognized as having distinct contractile properties. However, the specific functional significance of superfast myosin and of extraocular laryngeal myosin remains unknown, in contrast to a large body of literature describing the roles of limb muscle myosins in the regulation of physiologic properties. The project aims are designed to test whether mammalian skeletal muscle fibers that are identified as expressing either superfast myosin, found in carnivore jaw-closing muscles, or extraocular laryngeal myosin, expressed in extraocular and intrinsic laryngeal muscles, have distinct contractile properties. The contractile properties to be measured in single muscle fibers include the maximal velocity of shortening, the rate of tension redevelopment following a rapid slackening and re-stretch, tension-generating ability, stiffness and myofibrillar ATPase activity. The myosin heavy chain and light chain isoform composition of each fiber will subsequently be determined using an ultrasensitive gel electrophoresis protocol. The results will be utilized to calculate the rate constants for crossbridge attachment and detachment in fibers that are identified on the basis of their myosin isoform composition. The primary objective is to test whether crossbridge kinetics differ significantly between superfast, extraocular laryngeal and limb muscle myosins. The results are expected to provide a mechanistic understanding of differences in crossbridge properties in fibers that express different myosin isoforms through the determination of fundamental crossbridge rate constants. This project will be based, in part, on a comparative approach. Single muscle fibers from jaw-closing muscles of carninvores (dogs, cats) will be compared to those from an omnivore (pig) that is known to not express superfast myosin. Differences in contractile properties between these two sources of muscle fibers will illustrate the unique properties imparted by superfast myosin to accommodate the feeding behavior of carnivores. This project will result in a more comprehensive understanding of a highly specialized group of muscles that has thus far received relatively little attention. In particular, the results are expected to provide valuable cellular and molecular insights into the function of muscles that serve the aggressive feeding style characteristic of carnivores and underlie the extremely precise motor functions associated with eye movements, vocalization and airway protection. Understanding the cellular and molecular bases of contraction in these highly specialized muscles will greatly expand our understanding of the complexity of muscle fibers among vertebrates and broaden the known repertoire of their contractile properties doc17180 none AST- Wesleyan University Kathryn Johnston Dr. Johnston is awarded funds to establish a research program in the structure, formation, and evolution of galaxies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Her approach focuses on using low-surface-brightness features of galaxies as tracers of the gravitational potential. The work will use gravitational N-body simulations to test and understand analytical and semi-analytical models of the formation of these low-surface-brightness features, and develop new methods of interpreting observations. Dr. Johnston s theoretical research group will collaborate with observational groups to carry out the interpretations. The group will also collaborate with cosmologists to place the results on individual galaxies in the broader context of galaxy formation in general. Aspects of the research program will be integrated into the educational mission of Wesleyan University by developing web-based tutorials for beginning research students. These tutorials will subsequently be used as a basis for a course in computational astrophysics that fits naturally into a cross-disciplinary certificate program in computational science currently under development at the university doc17181 none This project seeks to understand how students build mathematical reasoning skills through working with teachers on geometric proofs. Although the NCTM Standards put an emphasis on students development of these skills, teachers often do not know how to effectively use proofs to assist students. This project will focus on understanding the dynamics of working with proofs that occur between teachers, students, and the subject matter. The proposer will conduct classroom observations, interviews, and focus groups with teachers. Replacement units will be used by the teachers during some observations that will allow for both descriptive observation as well as flexibility in the treatment conditions. The researcher will use this research in his teaching in several ways. Preservice teachers will be invited to spend part of their practicum in the observation classes. Several courses will be created including a master s-level course on teaching and learning of geometry. The research will also infuse an existing course on conceptualization in mathematics doc17182 none Institution: Kansas State University The development of student s mental models has not been studied extensively in Physics education research. Initial evidence indicating that mental models and their application are strongly context dependent is particularly relevant to application-based curriculum. In this PECASE project, I investigate students mental models of real-world devices, how these models evolve through instruction, and whether they transfer across contexts. Next, I utilize my research results to develop application-based curriculum, organized into versatile weeklong instructional modules that are pilot-tested in introductory classes that I teach. I assess the impact of the model development on the students, as well as issues of transfer of learning from one context to another. As a spin-off from this investigation, I develop instruments that are transferable to other research on student mental model development. This research is also integrated into a graduate level course that I team-teach. The course focuses on current Trends and issues in physics education research. Students in this course are involved in my research through a capstone project in this course. Two experienced faculty members facilitate my professional development through the project. A pioneer in physics education and head of the department mentors my growth as a researcher and teacher in the graduate course. An award-winning teacher at the introductory undergraduate level mentors my pilot testing of the application-based curricula in the introductory courses that I teach. Overall this project builds a strong foundation for a lifetime of contributions to research and education in physics pedagogy. This project was originally funded as a CAREER award, and was converted to a Presidential Early Career Award for Engineers and Scientists (PECASE) award in May doc17183 none Intrusion detection is a critical component of the defense-in-depth network security mechanisms. Current intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are ineffective against new and sophisticated attacks. The key objective of this research project is to develop the algorithms, tools, and system architecture for adaptive IDSs. An adaptive IDS needs to detect new attacks and adjust to changes in normal operations. Towards this end, an information-theoretic based anomaly detection framework is investigated. The approach is to first compute the regularity of normal data using information-theoretic measures, then select features and construct a detection model according to the regularity measures. An adaptive IDS needs to also self-monitor its run-time workload and performance, and dynamically reconfigure its components to provide the best detection capability given the limited resources. Towards this end, performance monitoring, load-shedding, attack scenario analysis, and cost-benefit analysis techniques are investigated. Through the publications and algorithms and tools from this research, researchers and practitioners can learn the benefits and techniques of adaptive IDSs. This research also makes important contributions to related fields, e.g., survivable network systems and smart auditing. Ultimately, the society will benefit from the more effective and robust security mechanisms doc17184 none The goal of this research is to use control-theoretic techniques to develop new processor-architecture mechanisms for dynamically adaptable control of power and temperature. To accurately evaluate the effectiveness of these new mechanisms, this project will also develop more detailed models for localized temperatures within a processor and for leakage current within on-chip, memory-like structures. These models will be constructed for computationally efficient use in cycle-accurate power performance processor simulation doc17185 none This award, provided by the Office of Polar Programs (OPP) of the National Science Foundation (NSF), provides support for a workshop designed to initiate discussion about future scientific objectives and technical needs of the Antarctic marine geology and geophysics community. It has been about a decade since the community last took a focused look at the long-range science goals and needs for Antarctic marine geology and so a new perspective is needed. The present need for such a dialogue is also based on the timing of the lease schedule for the current ship support to the US Antarctic Research Program. Although ship support for Antarctic science is contracted for several more years, the process of developing scientific requirements as planning input for ship support beyond this period takes a considerable amount of time and so must begin soon. Consequently, within the next year, a document outlining the anticipated future scientific goals and objectives, in a broad fashion, and describing the specific technical needs for marine geologic and geophysical work in the Southern Ocean must be available for proper planning. The report produced from this workshop will serve as this planning document and will be available as a hard copy and on the Internet. The workshop will be held during Spring of , in Washington, D.C. The meeting will be advertised via e-mail and through EOS, so that all interested individuals will have the opportunity to attend doc17186 none The scientific goal of this project is to understand, model, and manipulate the biomechanics of chromosomal separation during cell division. Eukaryotic mitosis depends on molecular machines that move chromosomes along a network of long cylindrical microtubules. This process must be precisely performed and tightly regulated; lack of precision, leading to unequal distribution of genetic material between daughter cells, can result in cell death or other abnormalities. This project approaches this problem from two fronts: 1) computational modeling to predict the character, speed, and dynamics of interactions between chromosomes and microtubules; and 2) biophysical experimentation to test and refine the models. The former approach starts with a simple stochastic, thermodynamic model that describes the origin and coordination of the forces that move chromosomes. Guided by the model, the latter activities focus on the origin and physical properties of chromosome movements. Using an advanced optical gradient trap (optical tweezers) to manipulate microtubules interacting with chromosomes in vitro, forces and mechanical properties will be measured. Complementary experiments will examine chromosome movement in vivo by applying technology in which an ultra-short laser pulse creates targeted, localized disruptions within the mitotic apparatus. The changes that result from severing chromosome-bound microtubules and fragments of chromosome will be compared with modeling predictions to elucidate mechanical properties. These experiments will quantify mechanical and force generating properties that allow chromosomes to: 1) bear and respond to tensile loads to maintain connections with microtubules; 2) move along microtubules; 3) move to appropriate location during the different phases of mitosis; and 4) form and maintain connections with the mitotic spindle. Educational goals include integrating research and teaching to encourage students with strong quantitative skills to pursue cell biology problems, and to provide them with a rigorous interdisciplinary background so they excel at this pursuit. Principal aims are the continued development of classes in Quantitative Cell Biology and Cellular and Molecular Biomechanics, developing a laboratory segment to accompany Quantitative Cell Biology, and developing new teaching resources. This includes continued development of an extensive set of Internet resources, which will evolve into the framework for a new undergraduate text in Quantitative Cell Biology, which will be constructed with input from other investigators. This educational plan will have a significant impact on universities efforts to expand undergraduate training in Biomedical Engineering. A major long-term benefit will be improved transfer and application of engineering and physics approaches to cell biology and biotechnology research doc17187 none This CAREER grant interweaves research and teaching focused on understanding how social groups construct meaning during scientific conversations across different learning contexts, such as classrooms, museums and the home. This work will be translated into formal educational settings and used to inform teaching practices within pre-service University and in-service school district settings. The research and educational emphasis will be on creating conceptual links between social learning in diverse settings and the creation of corridors of opportunity between formal and informal learning institutions. To date there has been little research with families from cultural and linguistic minority populations, such as Latino families, at informal learning settings and virtually none that integrates formal and informal learning, or impacts teaching. The five-year project will: 1. Conduct Study 1, aimed at making fundamental cross-cultural comparisons of family conversational meaning making at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and linking this work with family interviews, reflective conversations and visits to family homes; 2. Review the theoretical framework and conduct Study 2, which will incorporate lessons learned from Study 1, and linking this research to formal classrooms; and 3. Use the findings (at each stage) to inform teaching practice with UCSC undergraduate (Science majors) and graduate (Science credential, MA and Ph.D.) students, and, in collaboration with teacher research groups for new and experienced teacher in schools that serve predominantly Latino students. This research plan provides an opportunity for viewing several inter-connected mechanisms, including family interactions and conversations, compelling science content, naturalistic learning in museum settings, and, finally, analyzing these factors in order to inform teaching practices that promote bilingual minority students to the rank of scientists doc17188 none Amasino The transition of shoot apical meristems from vegetative growth to flowering is the major developmental switch in the plant life cycle. The timing of flower initiation is obviously critical for reproductive success, and many plant species have evolved multiple flowering pathways that are integrated to precisely regulate flowering time. These pathways include those that monitor the developmental state of the plant and others that sense environmental cues of season such as photoperiod and temperature. Our recent work has demonstrated that both developmental and environmental (temperature) sensing pathways converge on the regulation of a repressor of flowering, FLC (FLOWERING LOCUS C). The major goal for this proposal period is to further our understanding of the circuitry of FLC regulation. Advances in the understanding of how flowering pathways operate in Arabidopsis will provide a foundation for understanding flowering-time regulation in other species. Premature flowering is a problem in many crops in which the leaves or roots of the plant are harvested. In other crops it is desirable to accelerate flowering. This work will define strategies to manipulate flowering time in Arabidopsis. Our long-term goal is to determine whether these strategies can be used to modify flowering time and increase productivity in crop species. Funding from this award will be used to train graduate and undergraduate students in plant genetics and molecular biology doc17189 none There is a growing scientific community working to provide solid theoretical and algorithmic foundations for the study of communication networks. This project furthers this goal through a combination of research and education. In particular, it addresses theoretical and algorithmic issues that arise in a central area of networking: the efficient utilization of communication bandwidth. The research component of this project addresses several different approaches for the succinct representation of information in communication networks. This includes the investigation of (a) the efficient use of communication bits to provide accountability in the Internet (which is a means of combating cyber-terrorism), (b) new approaches to compression that arise in new communication technologies, and (c) minimizing the amount of control information required to make communication robust with respect to network faults. The integrated educational objectives of this project include both graduate student collaboration and curriculum development. The former consists of student involvement with the research component of the project, as well as organization of summer schools and workshops. The later includes the incorporation of networking topics into a graduate level algorithms course, as well as the development of a new advanced graduate course addressing the algorithmic and theoretical challenges and achievements in the area of networking. For the research question of providing accountability in the Internet, this project studies the IP Traceback problem: given a stream of packets arriving at a node of the Internet, determine the source of those packets. This is an important tool for dealing with denial of service attacks, since accountability discourages such attacks and provides an automated mechanism for halting attacks in progress. This project studies probabilistic packet marking schemes for this problem, with the goal of determining the optimal tradeoffs between the number of marking bits used per packet, the number of packets required to reconstruct the source information, and the number of simultaneous sources of attack that can be dealt with. A number of new technologies also present us with entirely new approaches to compression. The resulting compression problems are fundamental, but since the motivating technologies have a short history, these problems have not been considered previously. In this project, we consider compression problems that arise from three such technologies: asymmetric communication channels, networks that are able to multicast information efficiently, and the compression of the World Wide Web. Finally, we also consider reducing bandwidth utilization by minimizing the amount of control information required to make communication robust against faults doc17190 none Weissmann Accurate modeling and prediction of contaminant transport and fate in groundwater systems requires that we produce detailed aquifer characterizations. Recently, the PI and colleagues developed a novel sequence stratigraphic approach to characterizing hydrofacies distributions for use in groundwater models on a stream-dominated alluvial fan system, thus integrating geological and hydrological assessment. Several questions resulted from this work that guides this proposed research project, including: 1) do sequences and systems tracts exist in other alluvial fan systems; 2) do sequences, bounded by clay-rich mature paleosols, compartmentalize groundwater flow into hydrostratigraphic units; and 3) can sequence stratigraphy provide a framework for improved groundwater modeling on other alluvial fan systems. Through sedimentologic, paleopedologic, and hydrogeologic analysis at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), a site with extensive core, geophysical well log, and 3D hydrologic test data, we intend to test hypotheses formed from these questions. Preliminary work at the LLNL site indicates that mature paleosols may bound hydrostratigraphic units, thus indicating that paleosol bounded sequences exist and that sequence geometry may strongly influence aquifer hydrodynamics. Through this work, we will (1) describe about meters of previously collected core, (2) assess paleosol morphology and chemistry, (3) model the stratigraphy, multi-scale facies distributions, groundwater flow, and contaminant transport within this complex aquifer system, and (4) assess data value to evaluate minimum data requirements for future work in similar geologic settings. These models will be tested against aquifer test and contaminant concentration data. A major objective of this work is to involve many student researchers in this project, thus several students will be directly involved in daily research activities. Additionally, aspects of this research will be incorporated into classroom activities, where students in an aquifer and petroleum reservoir assessment course will analyze core, construct the 3-D stratigraphic framework at a small site, and model the heterogeneity at the site. This will not only expose students to the research project, but will provide multiple realizations of the stratigraphic character for uncertainty assessment of the modeling results doc17191 none Khaneja Over the past fifty years, there has been a steady increase in man s ability to manipulate and control quantum mechanical phenomena. Today we are surrounded with technology that owes its existence directly or indirectly to quantum mechanical effects. From transistors, lasers, compact disc players, optical fibre communications, magnetic resonance imaging to scanning tunneling microscopes, the quantum technology has effected every aspect of our life. These days the quantum technologists can trap and experiment with individual atoms, bounce atoms up and down on carefully sculpted electromagnetic fields, and image the structure of a crystal, atom by atom. Emergence of the science of quantum information in the last decade has added a new dimension to the applications of control of quantum mechanical phenomena. There is now an increasing emphasis on harnessing quantum dynamics for the purposes of computing, communication, and information storage. All these technologies involve exercising control over quantum mechanical phenomena. A central challenge in the control of quantum dynamics is the loss of coherence (decoherence) in system dynamics, due to unwanted couplings to the environment. This issue of decoherence arises in almost all potential implementations of quantum information devices and control of quantum systems in general. In this project the PI will develop methods inspired by geometric control theory for optimal control of quantum systems. He will compute fundamental bounds on the minimum time it takes to produce a desired evolution in a quantum system and design time optimal control laws which achieve these bounds. These geometric control ideas will be applied to design of time optimal pulse sequences for coherence transfer experiments in high resolution liquid state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, with applications to structural biology and NMR quantum computing. Minimization of time is important as it reduces the effects of decoherence and increases the sensitivity of experiments in NMR spectroscopy. There is a great need for such work in the growing field of structural biology, because time optimal pulse sequences will significantly reduce the spectrometer time (by days in some experiments) leading the way to high-throughput determination of protein structures. Time optimal pulses will also help to scale NMR methods for processing of larger proteins by minimizing decoherence effects. This effort is broad in its scope and applicable to a wide variety of applications involving control of quantum systems doc17192 none SES Proposal Culture in the Balance: The Emergence of a New Model of Equilibrium within Medieval Thought, - Joel Kaye, Barnard College Despite the central place ideals of equality and equilibrium occupied in virtually every discipline within medieval thought, the model of equilibrium employed was never brought to the fore as a subject of discussion in itself. For this reason, modern historians, too, have so far failed to recognize and treat equilibrium as a primary subject of investigation. This project brings the history of equilibrium from the periphery to the center of inquiry. While the same words (equitas, equalitas, aequatio, adaequatio, equilibrare, etc.) continued to be used across disciplines throughout the medieval period, the definitions and processes denoted by these words changed dramatically over the period of high scholasticism, ca. - . The emergence of a new model of equilibrium in this period had profound implications, underlying and making possible a thoroughgoing reconceptualization of the form and functioning principles of the cosmos. The historical importance of this creation, little recognized up to this point, extends far beyond the medieval centuries. The new model remained influential and active for centuries to come, providing the foundation for much of what we now consider to be modern speculation in a wide variety of humanistic and scientific disciplines, from ethical and political thought, to astronomy, geology, physics, and medicine. The research and writing undertaken during the Fellowship year forms part of a larger book project, already well underway. The book will trace the emergence of a new conceptual model of equilibrium and examine its implications within four intellectual areas: scholastic economic thought, political thought, natural philosophy, and medicine. Research during the Fellowship year is focused upon primary sources in the area of medieval medicine. Here the language of equality and balance is ever present, as definitions of health and sickness, models of the activity and circulation of the elements and humours, speculation on the action of plants and medicines, and the rich theoretical models of the temperaments and complexions, all center on notions of equilibrium. The sources can be divided into six groups. 1. The early theoretical writings (through the mid-thirteenth century) on equilibrium and health found in various works from the School of Salerno provide a base line against which to view later developments. 2. Avicenna s great medical textbook, the Canon (particularly the opening chapters of book 1) provides a sophisticated discussion of the philosophical principles underlying medical thought and practice. Here the concept of equilibrium is thoroughly intertwined with the theory of elements, humours, temperaments, and complexions, in a manner that remains influential for centuries. 3. Thirteenth and Fourteenth-century commentaries on Book I of the Canon, particularly those of Gentile da Foligno (c. ) and Jacopo da Forli (c. ), provide an excellent means of tracing the development of the model over time. 4. The writings of Arnald of Villanova. 5. Commentaries on the Tegni of Galen. 6. Numerous shorter treatises focusing on the question of equilibrium within bodily systems (De complexionibus) and the question of medical dosage as a problem in equalization (De gradibus medicinarum doc17193 none The proposed research concerns computational principles of touch sensing in the context of part localization, model-based recognition, and shape reconstruction; it encompasses a number of areas of robotics - touch sensing, part orientation and localization, shape recognition, grasping, dextrous manipulation. The proposed localization scheme aims at determining the pose of an object with known geometry relative to the (robot) hand through contact. Algorithms will be developed for processing tactile data, computing geometric invariants, and registering them onto the object s surface. The education part of the project includes development of interdisciplinary courses with an emphasis on robotics and geometric computation doc17194 none This research project will develop techniques to make database systems cache-resident. The approach will develop three classes of techniques and they are (i) static data placement for deep memory hierarchies, (ii) cache buffer management and (iii) addressing coherence overload on multiprocessor systems. The research will also develop optimization techniques and investigate data layout alternatives. The career development plan will bridge database systems and computer architecture education programs and also promote interactions between computer architecture and database systems students and researchers doc17195 none Institution: Brown University This proposal aims to advance the state of the art of automated strategic reasoning through research and teaching at the intersection of computer science and economics. In research, the development of a computational theory of social choice is proposed, emphasizing the interplay of artificially intelligent agent strategies and computational mechanisms that implement collective decisions. Such a theory will facilitate the translation of collective decision-making by human societies into digital form. In education, the design of courses and degree programs across computer science and economics is proposed, as is encouraging women to participate in such programs and to explore careers that build on the resulting cross-disciplinary skill sets. This project was originally funded as a CAREER award, and was converted to a Presidential Early Career Award for Engineers and Scientists (PECASE) award in May doc17196 none This CAREER project investigates embedded systems architectures through the application of compiler and architectural techniques which use an existing processor more efficiently. Rather than automatically adopt existing personal computer paradigms for embedded systems, the main theme of this research is to rethink architectures and compilers in the context of embedded systems and how they are designed. Software thread integration (STI) is a novel compiler technique for automatically interleaving multiple procedures (which implement multiple threads of control) into one non-speculative implicitly multithreaded procedure. The threads are integrated at the assembly language level; the compiler applies transformations to resolve conflicts in control-flow and resource sharing. This research project uses STI in two ways. The first builds on the extraction of more fine-grain concurrency from a generic processor. STI enables switching from one thread to another with negligible (if any) performance penalty or delay. This means that some of the hardware resources added to compensate for the processor s poor fine-grain concurrency are eliminated and the functions move to software. The research is developing efficient methods to perform this hardware to software migration efficiently and precisely enough to implement network protocol interfaces completely in software, reducing size, weight, cost and development time for low-end embedded systems. The second uses integration s augmentation of a thread s instruction-level parallelism, leading to faster execution on processors which are able to execute multiple instructions simultaneously. Modern digital signal processors used in high-end embedded systems are able to do so, yet they are poorly utilized because single threads do not contain enough independent instructions. STI helps by increasing the number of independent instructions in a thread to keep more functional units busy and finish the computation faster. This enables the more efficient use of lower-performance processors, reducing system costs and development time. When coupled with power management techniques, it also reduces power consumption and increases battery life. The PI is creating a new embedded systems track within the computer engineering curriculum at NC State University. Two new hands-on courses on processor-based embedded systems are being added to supplement the PI s existing embedded system design course. The first is a junior-level course that introduces students to microcontrollers, interfacing them to the physical environment, and using a real-time operating system with modern development tools. The second is a graduate course that covers high-performance embedded systems for media processing. Students learn to program and optimize media applications (e.g audio or video compression and decompression) on various architectures (superscalar, VLIW, chip multi-processor). The PI is also involved in outreach activities at the NC School of Science and Mathematics to promote interest in embedded systems design and programming doc17197 none Computational complexity is the study of the inherent difficulty of computational problems. The theory considers various models of computation, such as classical computers, probabilistic computers, and quantum computers. For each of these, it aims to describe how many resources are needed to compute the solution to a problem as a function of the problem size. The most prominent open question in complexity theory is whether the ability to efficiently verify the validity of a candidate solution implies the ability to efficiently compute a valid solution (assuming one exists). The question is usually stated in terms of the corresponding classes of computational problems: Is NP contained in P? Lots of computational problems from virtually any discipline fall in the class NP but are not known to be in P. Therefore, a positive answer to the P versus NP question would have tremendous algorithmic implications. It would also imply a way to break any public-key cryptographic system, as the security of such systems rests on the assumption that a particular problem in NP does not belong to P. This research project aims to develop techniques for determining the relationships between complexity classes like P and NP: separations and inclusions. On the separation side, the investigators focus on techniques that do not suffer from the known pitfalls of relativization and natural proofs. In particular, they concentrate on indirect diagonalization and exhibiting distinguishing properties of complete problems. On the inclusion side, the emphasis lies on efficient classical simulations of time and space bounded probabilistic and quantum computations. The educational goal consists of the development of graduate courses on pseudo-randomness and derandomization and on quantum computing. At the undergraduate level, the investigators plan to further the integration of discrete structures in the core curriculum doc17198 none The experience of providing or receiving medical care has a very personal dimension. Quoted from the Hippocratic oath: Whatsoever I shall see or hear in the course of my dealings with men, if it be what should not be published abroad, I will never divulge, holding such things to be holy secrets . The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) required the Administration to issue regulations protecting the privacy of health information. Such a regulation gives consumers the right to see, copy, and correct their own health information and the right of being notified as to how their health information is going to be used and shared. It also imposes new restrictions on those who hold health information. However, legal protection alone is not enough as it can only be applied after the problem has occurred, when the damage has already been done. Moreover, law enforcement is usually expensive, slow, and complex. The goal of this project is to design a comprehensive technical infrastructure that guarantees the enforcement of health information privacy protection. The problem of data protection and privacy is addressed on a technical level, thus preventing any violation of a privacy policy in advance rather than correcting it after it has occurred. The intend of the project is to demonstrate that health information privacy solutions can be designed to achieve meaningful benefits without penalizing society with undue financial burdens or worse, with the compromise of public safety doc17199 none Min Wu U of MD College Park Having recognized that the advantages offered by the information technology era cannot be fully deployed without the guarantee on the security and protection of multimedia data, this project focuses on the investigation of multimedia security and information protection through two types of complementary signal processing techniques, namely, multimedia encryption and data embedding. The main function of multimedia encryption is to protect the confidentiality and thus performs access control, while data embedding or digital watermarking concerns how to associate a set of imperceptible data with the host media in a seamless way. The embedded data can be used to accomplish ownership verification or authentication even after decryption. The research component of this project involves three parts. The investigator first explores the protection of content confidentiality under three different levels of threats by designing and analyzing signal processing based encryption algorithms that are computationally efficient and easily compatible with lossy communications. In addition, new challenging problems of multimedia data hiding are studied based on a layered algorithmatic architecture, and a software testbed is developed. Finally, the project investigates the joint use of encryption and data hiding as well as their interplay for providing comprehensive protection. The educational component of this project focuses on two themes, namely, using multimedia as a powerful tool to enhance the productivity of multimedia education, and using carefully designed projects to provide students with hands-on experience that will well prepare them for joining the future technical force of information technology. In addition to the curriculum development, the investigator makes special effort to nurture the under-represented students especially young women and to attract them to step into the EE CS disciplines doc17200 none The Principal Investigator is requesting funds requested to continue Office of Polar Programs (OPP) support for graduate student participation in the annual Arctic Workshops. Over the last eight years, OPP has supported attendance at this workshop through payments of registration, per diem meals, and lodging for four nights. The last grant supported the Arctic Workshop at the Universities of Ottawa, Colorado, Washington, and Massachusetts. The budget is based on an attendance of 25 students, but the actual number per workshop was closer to 50. The next three workshops will be held at the University of Colorado, the University of Tromso (Norway), and the University of Colorado. The composition of the Arctic Workshops typically consists of about 55% professional Arctic scientists (academic and government), and 45% graduate students. A major effort is placed toward providing all the graduates with a forum for their research and to establish the appropriate network with their peers. The Arctic Workshops have participants from several countries with significant attendance from the United States, Canada, Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Germany Austria, and the United Kingdom doc17201 none This project involves the research, development, and dissemination of techniques and tools necessary to perform rigorous, systematic processor design-space exploration. The key element is a framework in which architectural simulators and targeted compilers are automatically derived from a common architectural description, providing architects, microarchitects, and compiler developers with a dynamic, yet coherent, environment within which to design processor systems. Such a system would enhance productivity and design quality by tightening the loop between architectural decision-making and realistic performance feedback and by allowing for more productive collaboration among the members of a prototyping team. The resulting reduction in design cycle times will counter increasingly restrictive market pressures, safeguarding the practicality of designing both new general-purpose microprocessors and application-specific processors (ASIPs), such as those found in networking hardware, cellular telephones, and next-generation digital devices. Additionally, this research will provide invaluable experiences for both undergraduate and graduate students in computer architecture and compilers. This same system is an ideal mechanism by which students can interact with tangible examples of computer architecture and compiler concepts -- it will allow them to rapidly prototype systems, experiment with new ideas, and thereby build intuition about computer systems doc17202 none Prolactin (PRL) is a highly versatile hormone of the pituitary gland of all vertebrates. It has essential actions in the regulation of salt and water balance (osmoregulation) in fish, including the tilapia, Oreochromis mossambicus, a species which can move freely between fresh water and seawater (it is euryhaline). In the diluting freshwater environment, blood ion levels tend to fall and PRL acts to counter this by increasing blood osmolality and reducing the water and ion permeability of skin and other osmoregulatory surfaces. Consistent with these actions, PRL cells show greater activity in tilapia held in fresh water than in those held in seawater. Blood PRL also rises and remains elevated as blood osmolality declines when tilapia move from seawater to freshwater. The tilapia PRL cell appears to be directly responsive to changes in extracellular osmolality inasmuch as PRL release increases as medium osmolality is reduced when tilapia pituitary glands are incubated in vitro. The term osmoreceptor refers to cells that respond to osmotic signals with an appropriate physiological response that is evoked through mechanisms called signal transduction pathways. Calcium (Ca+2) is widely used in these pathways as a second messenger that mediates the induction of cellular responses to specific external signals. The osmoreceptive properties of the tilapia PRL cells offer an excellent and possibly unique model system for investigating the pathways through which an osmotic signal is transduced into an osmoregulatory response (i.e., PRL secretion). In teleosts, unlike in other vertebrates, PRL cells are segregated into the anterior portion of the pituitary as a nearly homogeneous mass, which is easily separated for organ and dispersed-cell culture. This anatomical arrangement greatly facilitates the characterization of secretory mechanisms, and provides a highly useful model that can augment our general understanding of the regulation of other less-accessible osmosensitive (and osmoregulatory) endocrine and neuroendocrine systems (e.g. the hypothalamo-neurohypophysial magnocellular systems involved in vasopressin and oxytocin release in mammals). The long-term objective of this research is to identify the mechanisms involved in the regulation of the production and release of PRL by changes in the osmotic environment of the tilapia PRL cell. The present studies build on previous work in this laboratory, and are designed to construct a more detailed picture of signal transduction in osmoreceptive cells. The specific aim is to determine whether the rise in PRL release in response to reduced extracellular osmolality is triggered by an increase in cell size that leads to an increase in intracellular free Ca+2 ([Ca2+]i). The hypothesis is that a fall in extracellular osmolality leads to the passive influx of water into the PRL cell that increases cell volume; this initiates an influx of extracellular Ca2+ and a rise in [Ca2+]i, which triggers the increase in PRL release. In order to address this question, experiments will be conducted to determine: 1) whether an increase in cell size leads to an increase in [Ca2+]i; 2) whether an increase in cell size initiates a rise in [Ca2+]i and or an increase in PRL release; and 3) whether an increase in cell size and PRL release following exposure to hyposmotic medium is dependent on the entry of extracellular Ca2+. To achieve these aims, in vitro perifusion-incubation techniques will be used which allow measurements of individual cell size, PRL release, and intracellular calcium concentration ([Ca2+]i) through video-captured images, homologous radioimmunoassays, and microspectrofluorometry, respectively. The general approach for testing the proposed hypotheses consists of utilizing endogenous regulators of PRL release and pharmacological agents to manipulate the various steps putatively involved in the transduction of the osmotic signal. The proposed research will provide a better understanding of the signal transduction processes involved in osmoreception, a sensory modality whose full understanding has been hampered by the lack of a suitable model system. The use of the tilapia PRL cell as a model offers distinct investigative advantages unavailable to researchers addressing similar questions in other vertebrate osmoregulatory systems doc17203 none LAY Proposal # : PI Name: Paul Colombo This career development plan integrates teaching, mentoring, and research goals within the context of Tulane University s mission to promote neuroscience research and education. The educational goals include development of lecture and laboratory curricula for the new undergraduate neuroscience major, and recruitment of undergraduate students from groups traditionally under-represented in the neurosciences to participate in research training internships during the summer months. The broad research goal of this project is to systematically define relationships between two brain regions known to support different types of memory among mammalian species: the neostriatum and the hippocampal formation. Although the roles of these two systems have been dissociated experimentally, the extent to which they function independently, cooperatively, competitively, or in temporal sequence is not known currently. Moreover, the time courses and cellular mechanisms of memory formation supported by these two systems are not well understood. Memory formation is accompanied by brain region-specific changes among neurons involved in information processing. Hypotheses that these changes are memory- and brain region-specific will be tested: neostriatal activation supports response, nonspatial, and procedural memory, whereas hippocampal activation supports place, spatial, and declarative memory. The current proposal employs two primary research strategies. The first strategy is to use behavioral manipulations to induce learning-related changes in cellular mechanisms of memory formation and to quantify those changes within the neostriatum and hippocampal formation. The second research strategy is to test the effects of highly selective protein inhibition on acquisition and retention of neostriatal- and hippocampal-dependent memory. By combining these research strategies, relationships between the hippocampal formation and neostriatum will be elucidated during multiple types of memory formation at the behavioral, brain systems, and neuronal levels of analyses. In addition to the research goals of this proposal, two additional goals both involve integration of research, teaching, and mentoring. The first of these goals is to increase opportunities for neuroscience education and research experiences for students from groups traditionally under-represented in the neurosciences by mentoring students in the laboratory during the summer, and by outreach visits to colleges in the area. The second goal is to continue to develop the undergraduate major in Neuroscience at Tulane University doc17204 none Yezzi, Anthony GA Tech Res Corp This research is centered around problems of segmentation in image processing. Segmentation, which may be described as the problem of locating meaningful regions within an image, is a crucial problem in medical imaging, military imaging, and a variety of other image based applications. The two goals of this research are to (1) advance the state of the art in image segmentation and (2) develop frameworks to solve segmentation jointly with other image processing problems. A key an example of (2) will focus around the problem of image registration (aligning common objects seen within two or more images). Tradiditionally, the problems of segmentation (locating the objects in each image) and registration (lining them up) are solved separately. This research explores methods for solving such problems simultaneously, with the important benefit that one of the problems need not be fully solved before starting the solution of the other problem. The Principal Investigator s approach to problems (1) and (2) will draw strongly from the mathematical theories of differential geometry, curve and surface evolution, the calculus of variations, and partial differential equations (PDE s). PDE s comprise very natural and powerful mathematical tools due to their flexibility, ease of implementation, and mathematical rigor. Their current and previous applications to problems in image processing (including segmentation) have demonstrated their strong potential in this field. Under the recommended level of support, the PI will make every attempt to meet the original scope and level of effort of this project doc17205 none Lay abstract CAREER: Long-term changes in synaptic function induced by selective suppression of activity in single neurons The adaptation of the brain to environmental changes is achieved in part through modifications in the strength of synapses, which are specialized connections between neurons. The precise rules governing synapse formation, maturation and subsequent modification in the central nervous system are not fully understood. Using electrophysiology, fluorescence microscopy and molecular biological tools, Dr. Murthy will investigate long-term modification of identified synapses in a simple neural network in vitro. The overall research objectives of the proposal are (i) to determine the consequences of selective, long-term reduction of activity in a single neuron within an active network, and (ii) to understand the locus and mechanisms in synaptic modification resulting from this manipulation. Two general classes of results might be anticipated - homeostatic modifications that allow neuron-wide increase in synaptic strength that will restore the overall activity of the quiet cell to normal levels, and competitive modifications that reduce or eliminate synaptic input and output of the quiet cell. This experimental system will offer unparalleled access to detailed cell biological investigations of synaptic modification - from the level of gene expression to physiological analysis at single synapse resolution. The investigator will also integrate education with his research program by developing up-to-date instructional material for an advanced course in neuronal cell biology. Since optical microscopy has become an indispensable tool in cellular-level research, Dr. Murthy will organize short departmental workshops on advanced imaging techniques. In addition to these instructional elements, the investigator will also mentor undergraduate and graduate students, including those from under-represented groups doc17206 none Collaborating groups are dynamic affairs in which patterns of activity, working styles, levels of interaction, information structures and other elements emerge dynamically in response to the circumstances and settings in which work is carried out. In contrast, the technologies that we offer to support collaboration are static and rigid. Conventional software architectures support only limited degrees of adaptation and dynamic response. Combining analysis, design, and evaluation, this research investigates metalevel architectures, an alternative approach supporting radically dynamic application response. If successful, this will yield both applications and application platforms which provide much more seamless support for collaboration than is currently possible. It also forges new connections between the two major areas of CSCW research, social analysis and technical design. The complex relationship between these two areas of interest is a major challenge to research and teaching. This research further supports the training of a new generation of CSCW researchers who are not just familiar with both halves of the puzzle, but have the skills to put them together doc17207 none Our present understanding of intracellular regulatory networks is derived from comprehensive analysis of only a small number of well-studied genetic circuits. This deficit is more than just quantitative in nature, as we know very little about the large-scale organization of these sub-networks into the overall architecture of regulatory systems. This is akin to studying the workings of a television set by thoroughly characterizing a handful of operational amplifiers. In fact, new principles of sensory integration and processing are likely to emerge from studies that focus on the entire regulatory network of a cell. At this point, technological challenges are paramount. The biological community desperately needs methods to rapidly elucidate network connectivity (wiring) and dynamics on a global scale. This CAREER project seeks to develop experimental and computational infrastructure for mapping, monitoring, and modeling transcriptional regulatory networks in bacterial organisms. The project will: (1) develop a global, in vivo method for monitoring the occupancy of sites of DNA-protein interactions within a bacterial genome; (2) develop a high throughput, in vitro technology to identify transcription factors that bind computationally predicted and or experimentally determined DNA regulatory sequences; (3) develop a mathematical framework for abstraction, representation, and modeling of transcriptional network dynamics. The project s long-term goal is to better understand the relationship between the structural connectivity (wiring) of transcriptional networks and their dynamics. As part of the education component of this CAREER project, a new multidisciplinary curriculum has been developed to educate graduate and advanced undergraduate students (from molecular biology, computer science, engineering, physics and chemistry) in the genomic and computational analysis of biological systems. The students will be introduced to challenging new biological questions that computational analysis, whole-genome sequencing, and other related technologies have recently made accessible. The students are expected to form inter-disciplinary teams and to carry out projects at the interface of genomics and computational biology. Much of our knowledge about the organization of cells is derived from studies of individual genes and their protein products. However, as we are getting closer to having complete parts lists for these components, we are faced with the enormous challenge of how these parts fit together to orchestrate cellular behavior at a systems level. Characterization of interactions (wiring) between molecular components is a necessary foundation for such an understanding. The class of interactions between proteins and their cognate DNA sequences (protein-DNA interactions) determine when and where genes are expressed. This CAREER project seeks to develop technologies for monitoring DNA-protein interactions on a whole-genome scale, and to relate these interactions to gene expression dynamics-laying the technological foundations for a predictive dynamical understanding of transcriptional networks doc17208 none Professor Ronald Fawcett of the University of California Davis is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program to characterize the electrical double layer at single crystal gold microelectrode surfaces. Both novel experiments and theoretical studies will be performed. Aqueous and nonaqueous solvents will be investigated. Kinetic experiments will also be conducted at single crystal electrodes modified by a self-assembled monolayer. Monte Carlo calculations will be carried out to determine ion electrode correlation functions in the diffuse boundary layer. This fundamental work underlies the understanding of electrochemical capacitors, synthesis, sensors, corrosion and the preparation of new materials doc17209 none Institution: Harvard University This work will enhance our ability to use DNA or other genetic data to make inferences about population structure and population history. It will allow us, for instance, to answer questions like How much migration has occurred between these populations? or When did these populations diverge from each other? In order to do this, a body of mathematical models that are used to describe patterns of genetic variation within and between populations will be extended. Thus, a secondary impact of the project will be an advance in the fields applied mathematics and probability theory. Further, two books and an interactive web site will be produced. The aim of these is to promote the teaching of the branch of population genetics used by most workers but rarely taught, called coalescent theory. The theoretical aspects of the work will focus on the analysis of population models in which different events happen at vastly different rates. For example, if migration rates are high, then migration events will happen much more often than mutation events, which tend to be very rare. When such differences in time scale occur, the analyses are simpler and the mathematical models have properties that make them interesting in their own right. These simplifications will be used to produce a battery of methods and tests, which empirical population geneticists can employ to study the history of natural populations. The books will bring the teaching of population genetics up to date with current research methods and ideas. Specifically, they will use and advocate the modern genealogical, or coalescent, approach to the subject. The coalescent approach considers the genealogical history of a sample of genetic data, and thus can be better suited to empirical work than classical population genetic approaches which model entire populations. This project was originally funded as a CAREER award, and was converted to a Presidential Early Career Award for Engineers and Scientists (PECASE) award in May doc17210 none Mobile wireless networking is experiencing a tremendous rate of growth. Many traditional wireline based applications are going wireless. Among other issues, one core issue that needs to be addressed for the success of future mobile wireless communications is energy-efficient wireless networking. Currently, the re-chargeable battery energy capacity of most mobile devices is limited due to a variety of reasons. It is also known that the rate at which battery technology is progressing is rather slow compared to the advances in wireless technology and applications. Therefore, it is important to optimize the networking algorithms, protocols and parameters for energy efficiency. Especially, this may be essential to support next generation high speed wireless networking. Energy minimization is of two types: communication and computation energy minimization. There has been significant progress in designing energy-efficient physical layer algorithms and hardware architectures. But, the goal of this project is to investigate energy optimization and control policies at higher layers of the network protocol stack. Towards this objective a new layer called Control Layer is proposed. A rich set of mathematical tools and stochastic control algorithms are incorporated in this layer to predict, estimate, and control the time-varying parameters such as battery capacity, rate of transmission, error control, routing, transport protocols, and application requirements. This layer enables the other protocol layers to be energy-aware. In summary, the proposed plan for this inter-disciplinary research project and the educational initiatives to integrate research with teaching at both undergraduate and graduate levels are as follows: 1) Energy-efficient link and MAC layer protocols for time-varying wireless links. Stochastic control of the tradeoff between communication versus computation energy. New probability based MAC protocols that attempt to schedule users such that energy is minimized. 2) Theoretical analysis of stochastic control algorithms that react to the bursty nature of traffic and link errors. Experiments to validate and test these control algorithms for real-life channels. 3) Stochastic minimum energy routing algorithms that account for the current battery state of a mobile node and also the network state. 4) Energy-aware transport control protocols that distinguish between the good and bad states of a wireless link and act accordingly. 5) Stochastic dynamic programming based rate control techniques at the application layer to save energy. 6) Implementation of project based learning and active learning techniques in the class room. Motivate undergraduate and graduate student research through this NSF CAREER project. A matching grant of $100,000 from Stevens Institute and $100,000 from New Jersey state have been committed to this project. Supporting documents have been attached as supplements doc17211 none This CAREER project consists of observing x-rays, gamma rays, and energetic electrons from thunderstorms and in laboratory experiments to study the runaway breakdown of air in thunderstorm conditions. Runaway breakdown is a process in which an avalanche of high-energy electrons develops in a strong electric field, producing x-rays, gamma rays, and secondary ionization, and transporting large quantities of charge great distances. This process can occur when the energy gained by an electron accelerating in a strong electric field exceeds the energy lost by collisions. It may play a part in lightning initiation and large-scale charge transport in thunderstorms, as well as in explaining x-ray emissions from storms and transient luminous events (sprites and jets) in the high atmosphere above thunderstorms. The goals of the project are to demonstrate whether runaway breakdown occurs in the atmosphere, to test current models of the mechanism, to understand the importance of runaway breakdown in thunderstorm phenomena, and to make experimental scientific research part of every student s normal curriculum. To achieve the goals, the project includes the following work: 1. Design and construction of sensitive detectors for x-ray and gamma ray emissions, as part of a senior physics laboratory course. 2. Observing x-rays, gamma rays, and energetic electrons associated with triggered lightning in collaboration with the Lightning Research Laboratory of the University of Florida, Gainesville. 3. Conducting laboratory experiments with accelerating electrons in strong electric fields to investigate runaway avalanche; integrating the work into undergraduate physics labs. The project will provide the first direct evidence of the importance of the runaway electron process in air, contribute to the understanding of thunderstorms, and provide students with opportunities for instrument development and research in atmospheric physics doc17212 none Transitions between different phases of the cell division cycle are controlled by cell cycle checkpoints. Checkpoints are regulatory systems that monitor cellular processes and ensure that a given process has been satisfactorily completed before transition into the next phase of the cell cycle is allowed. When chromosomal DNA suffers damage, through exposure to mutagens, the DNA damage checkpoint arrests the cell cycle so that damage repair systems have an opportunity to repair the damage prior to transition into the next phase of the cell cycle. This activity is especially important when damage is incurred during S phase of the cell cycle, as lesions on chromosomes must be repaired before the damaged DNA is used as a template during DNA replication. The long-term goal of this research program is to use Xenopus egg extracts to biochemically address the problem of how damaged DNA is detected by the damage checkpoint. Our knowledge of how damage is sensed is currently quite limited. To correct this, a series of experiments will be performed that aim to answer basic mechanistic questions about how DNA damage is sensed. The Xenopus extract system is ideally suited for this type of analysis, and recent advances in the preparation of these extracts will be incorporated into these studies. The problems to be addressed will include the role that DNA replication forks play in sensing damage, the role that DNA repair pathways play in activating the checkpoint, and the effect that the checkpoint has on DNA replication. Once these questions have been answered, then the identity of the individual proteins that function to sense damage can be addressed. Because this problem has obvious connections to cancer, interest in the subject is high amongst undergraduates who are preparing for careers in medicine or laboratory research. To accommodate and encourage this interest, a lecture course has been developed, to be taught chiefly to undergraduates, that focuses on cell cycle control. This lecture course and the Research Plan described in this proposal are tightly connected in that, over the five-year funding period for the proposal, students taking the course will annually receive a copy of the Research Plan, they will be updated on the progress that has been made, and they will participate directly in the work by performing some of the experiments as part of a laboratory section that is attached to the class. This exercise not only teaches students about the cell cycle, but will also enable students to observe how science is practiced, from the conception of an idea (as outlined in the proposal), to the performance of an experiment to the interpretation of data doc17213 none Fu Under this CAREER Award, efforts will be made to systematically understand the structural mechanisms of microvessel wall controlling the transport of water, molecules and cells in order to design new drug and drug delivery methods. In particular, the proposal focuses on developing approaches to investigate the mechanisms by which VEGF induces permeability of individually perfused microvessels in frog mesentery and how that permeability is influenced by cAMP. The educational component of the plan focuses on creating research education seminars and conferences, supervising graduate students, creating new graduate level courses, relevant introductory undergraduate courses and providing research training for undergraduate and high school students, including outreach efforts to women and minorities and developing international research education collaborations with West China Medical University and the National University of Singapore doc17214 none The gap between microprocessor and memory system cycle times has been increasing over the past 15 years. In practice, because of the many levels in the memory hierarchy and interconnection busses between the processor and DRAM, a primary memory access may take 200 processor clock cycles from request to response; more than 50% of this latency is due to the memory hierarchy and interconnect. This research will focus upon the reduction of this fraction by novel interconnect techniques and increased focus on the DRAM controller management policies. As the amount of state present in DRAM devices increases, the available set of memory controller policy decisions also increases; this increased flexibility allows an intelligent memory controller to optimize controller policies to achieve increased performance. This research will examine the potential for improved performance when the memory controller changes from a static control policy to a dynamic control scheme. This impact will be simulated over a variety of interconnection topologies from the current NorthBridge to a CMP architecture with multiple DRAM busses doc17215 none The project addresses the issues of tracking and modeling of human motion. Robust tracking algorithms will be developed that do not require manual initialization and are capable of tracking over many frames without failure. These trackers will then be applied to archival video footage, to produce a rich corpus of historically-significant motion data. A combination of manual labeling, state invariant detection, and temporal co-occurrence analysis will be utilized to parse motions into sequences of movements. The generated library of learned motions can then be applied to a diverse set of applications, including robot control and computer animation. The education part of the project calls for development of a curriculum for figure tracking and motion modeling that is self-contained and accessible to students and researchers in the areas of computer vision, robotics, computer graphics, and biomechanics. An outreach program will be initiated that will target the machine learning and computer animation communities doc17216 none D. Corti, Purdue University This proposal lies at the frontier in an area, self-assembly in dense suspensions, in which theory lags behind rapidly evolving experimental techniques. The focus on geometrically-based statistical mechanics and novel simulations to address entropy-driven processes promises research at a high intellectual level. The theory has a clear physical basis and is relatively simple, but not easy, and is complemented by an experimental effort in collaboration with a group equipped to measure interparticle potentials directly. This approach might be powerful and simple enough to provide guidance for experimentalists seeking to self-assemble novel structures and to appeal to others applying statistical mechanics. The educational effort wisely concentrates on the undergraduate curriculum for chemical engineering, particularly the thermodynamic content. There is much to gain from linking course content to physically accessible topics in graduate research doc17217 none With the virtual completion of the human DNA sequence research attention has shifted to issues including the resolution of the genetic composition, evolutionary history, and health impact of portions of the human genome which have proven difficult to sequence due to their duplicative and dynamic nature. The proposed research aims to address these problems through the development of algorithms and software tools for discovery, resolution and evolutionary analysis of genomic duplications and other genome-wide segmental rearrangements. The ultimate goal is to help understand mechanisms for and the sources of genetic disposition to genome-wide structural rearrangements. Some of these structural rearrangements are known to cause dosage imbalance of developmentally important genes during recombination events; as a result, genomic diseases, including several birth defects as well as a number of adult diseases occur at a rate of $\~1$ in every $ $ births. The premise of this research is that understanding the mechanisms under such segmental rearrangements may help improve methods for diagnosis, treatment and prevention of these genetic disorders. The basic research components of the proposal are (1) identification of all chromosomal segments that are duplicated along the genome, (2) understanding the complex evolutionary relationships between these interesting segments through novel phylogenetic analysis algorithms for a single genome sequence, and (3) identification of the duplication order via known or derived properties of duplication mechanisms, and (4) development of similarity measures between genome sequences that involve not only point mutations but structural rearrangements, particularly duplications. The short-term education goal of the proposal is to establish the algorithmic and the fundamental software development component of an interdisciplinary bioinformatics program at CWRU, that will provide means of awarding M.S. and Ph.D. degrees within existing departmental degree-granting programs. The long-term goal is to establish a free-standing graduate program in computational genomics, offering a wide-range of introductory and advanced level courses in bioinformatics. To this end the investigator has developed and taught a new introductory graduate course on algorithmic issues in bioinformatics, with the involvement of students from both the Computer Science program and the School of Medicine at CWRU. Funds from this proposal will be used to enhance this activity through the development of a new advanced level graduate course in computational genomics for in-depth training on individualized research topics, as well as an intensive summer research and training program for graduate and undergraduate students doc17218 none TOWARD A UNIFYING THEORY OF SOCIAL EVOLUTION: TESTING COMPETING MODELS OF REPRODUCTIVE SKEW IN AN AVIAN COOPERATIVE BREEDER. STEPHEN T. EMLEN PROJECT SUMMARY (IN LAY TERMS) The family (defined as a multi-generation assemblage of genetic relatives) is among the least understood of all forms of social organization. Yet, because it is the basic social organization of our own species, it is arguably the most important for us to understand. Only about 3% of birds and mammals live in family-based societies, and only a few of these have been studied in detail. Families come in various sizes and forms. The most common form in both birds and mammals is the nuclear family, formed when grown young remain with their parents, but only the parents reproduce. Most so-called cooperative breeders fit this category, with grown sons and daughters remaining as helpers at the nest or den of their parents. Less common, but of greater interest, is the extended family, formed when reproduction is shared among many family members. When multiple pairs within a single family breed, the result is a mixture not only of parents and offspring, but also of grandparents, uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews, and cousins as well as unrelated in-laws. Until very recently, we humans lived predominantly in groups comprised of such extended family units. The difference between extended and nuclear families is one of shared versus monopolized breeding. A rapidly growing number of evolutionary models, known collectively as reproductive skew theory, attempt to explain the variability of reproductive suppression found in nature. Skew models incorporate a small number of factors (two ecological, one genetic, and one social) to predict 1) when stable family groups will form, 2) what their stable size will be, and 3) how reproduction will be shared among family members. Reproductive skew they is generating considerable interest among behavioral ecologists and evolutionary biologists because it links many major features of animal societies to their ecological, genetic, and social underpinnings. Because of this breadth, some workers believe that skew theory may provide a unifying framework for viewing much of social evolution. However, the development of the theory has far outpaced the testing of its assumptions and predictions with real animals in the field. There is an urgent need for detailed observational and experimental studies of skew theory on birds and mammals that live in family-based societies. The proposed research will provide such a test. The study species is the Grey capped social weaver (Pseudonigrita arnaudi), a common inhabitant of the whistling thorn savanna of East Africa. This species was chosen because it lives in both extended and nuclear family units, background knowledge of its behavior and ecology is already well-known, and it possesses many features that make it logistically easy to collect data and perform experiments. A study population of over 50 family units has been captured and the birds individually marked. Molecular markers (microsatellite loci) have been developed that will allow genetic determination of family structures (e.g. who is the father, or aunt, of whom). The research program will help to train numerous Kenyan professionals in modern methods of behavioral research. It will also combine the talents of several senior investigators whose expertise ranges from field studies of behavior, to molecular studies of social organization, to theoretical modeling of social evolution. As such, it constitutes one of the first integrated tests of the applicability of recent skew models to a complex vertebrate society. The results should enhance our understanding of 1) the factors that favor the evolution of family groups, 2) the reasons why extended families develop when they do, and 3) the behaviors that family members use in their cooperative and competitive interactions with one another (so-called family dynamics ). This, in turn, should provide insights into the conditions that favored the evolution and maintenance of extended family groupings in our own species as well doc17219 none This research project will advance intelligent search engines by developing query-concept learners. Techniques for detecting concept drifts as well as multi-resolution image characterization will be developed. In particular the research will be based on two online algorithms, MEGA and SVMActive. It will also integrated text attributes in image searching and apply the technology to video data. The career development plan will include sponsoring undergraduate and graduate projects as well as incorporating the research into the Computer Science curriculum doc17220 none Sajda Under this CAREER Award, a new set of computer-assisted analysis techniques will be developed to improve the noninvasive diagnosis of brain cancer by integrating biochemical and morphological markers from MRSI (magnetic resonance spectroscopy imaging) and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). MRSI, which allows for characterization and quantification of biochemical metabolites and the construction of metabolite intensity images, combined with MRI provides a biochemical and morphological view of the disease. Using short MRSI echo time techniques, 10-20 dimensional multi-variant feature space will be studied to uncover specific signatures for characterizing cancer. Specific aims include: develop semi-blind source separation using a maximum a posteriori framework for recovery of metabolite intensity images in MRSI; characterize the correlations and dependencies between metabolite intensity images and morphological information derived from MRI; develop a hierarchical probabilistic model for integrating metabolite intensity images with MRI for the joint biochemical morphological characterization of brain tumors; and assess the performance of the models within the context of computer-assisted diagnosis, making comparisons to traditional methods that have relied on fairly elementary relationships, such as the ratio of two metabolite concentrations. The educational component of the proposal focuses on a program in machine learning for biomedical engineering, including a new course and computer laboratories and efforts that would serve as a basis of an industrial internship program. The course will introduce students to the mathematical theory behind machine learning and probabilistic models, their application to the biomedical sciences, and techniques for evaluating and validating their performance doc17221 none Exposure-Resilient Cryptography concerns the important problem of key exposure and general information leakage. Exposure of such information poses one of the most serious and common threats to employing cryptography in real life. For example, cryptographic computations (decryption, signature generation, etc.) are often performed on a relatively insecure device (e.g., a mobile device or an Internet-connected host) which cannot be trusted to maintain secrecy of the private key. Thus, the goal of Exposure-Resilient Cryptography is to design solutions that will limit (or even completely eliminate) the negative consequences of such an exposure in various cryptographic scenarios. In particular, this research concentrates on the design of various key evolving schemes and the problem of partial key exposure. The paradigm of secret key evolution over time invloves updating one s secret key such that key leakage at given period(s) compromises the security of other periods to the minimal extent possible. The investigators examine two such models. Forward-secure schemes update secret key locally, and seek to protect the security of all the past periods when the current key is exposed. In contrast, bidirectionally-secure schemes use secure key updates, but protect all non-exposed periods: both in the past and in the future. In either model, the public information (e.g., public keys) are not affected by the secret key evolution. The problem of partial key exposure concerns the scenario where most but not all secret information has been leaked. The main question studied in this setting is how can valuable secret information be stored or represented in such a way that almost complete exposure of its representation still guarantees the secrecy of the actual, embedded secret doc17222 none ion did in distributed systems. We plan to deploy AON locally on the Millenium testbed and on the Internet-2 testbed, making it possible for other research groups to experiment with AON and implement applications on top of it. This project was originally funded as a CAREER award, and was converted to a Presidential Early Career Award for Engineers and Scientists (PECASE) award in May doc17223 none Institution: It is now widely recognized that multiple antennas will figure prominently in future wireless communications systems, since they can significantly boost the channel capacity, as well as lower the probability of error, of a wireless communications link. However, before the above promise can be realized in a practical communications system, there are several key research challenges that must be addressed. This research studies several of the information-theoretic, coding-theoretic, and signal processing challenges encountered, as well as the impact of integrating their solutions into a multi-user wireless network. A common thread encountered throughout is that the tools developed, as well as the results obtained, have implications well beyond multi-antenna communications--both in terms of the introduction of new mathematical methods, as well as in terms of their applicability to more general communication problems. The first research challenge addressed is information-theoretic: the actual channel capacity of a multi-antenna wireless link is known only under certain idealized conditions. For most realistic conditions, the channel capacity is unknown and it is not clear how it depends on the speed of the fading, the number of antennas, and the SNR. Nor is it clear what the optimal transmission strategies should be and what the performance of training-based schemes are. This research will focus on these problems for continuously- and block-fading channels, where the analysis appears to be tractable and where the theory of random matrices plays a major role. The second challenge is that of designing space-time codes that deliver on the high data rates promised by theory, have good error performance, and that lend themselves to efficient encoding and decoding. Compared to conventional codes, the added spatial dimension adds a whole new twist to the code design problem, and a variety of information-theoretic, linear-algebraic, and group-theoretic ideas play a prominent role. The signal processing research challenge is to devise algorithms that are efficient, so that all the processing can be done in real time. Recent work by the researcher has analytically demonstrated that, for a wide range of rates and SNRs, polynomial-time maximum-likelihood decoding of several classes of space-time codes is possible. This research will fully pursue the implications of this result, both in terms of the design of new algorithms and codes, as well as in terms of understanding the tradeoffs between maximum-likelihood performance and computational complexity. This project was originally funded as a CAREER award, and was converted to a Presidential Early Career Award for Engineers and Scientists (PECASE) award in May doc17224 none This research project will first develop efficient indexing strategies for spatio-temporal data sets. This will include access methods for future spatio-temporal queries as well as access methods for historical spatio-temporal queries. The next step will develop mining techniques for spatio-temporal databases. Finally the project will generate spatio-temporal data sets for experimentation. The career development plan will include two new courses on advanced database applications doc17225 none Institution: Pennsylvania State Univ University Park S-adenosyl-L-methionine (AdoMet) is one of the most versatile cellular metabolites used in enzymatic catalysis. Until relatively recently, it has been appreciated primarily as a cellular methylating agent, since it is the primary source of methyl groups for a broad spectrum of biological compounds, including DNA, RNA, proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, and a diverse array of small molecules. AdoMet is also involved in a variety of other interesting transformations. In one class of enzymes, it functions in concert with iron-sulfur clusters to generate enzyme-bound radicals that are intermediates in certain enzymatic reactions. In the project described herein, it functions as a donor of a methylene group rather than a methyl group, in a fascinating reaction catalyzed by the enzyme cyclopropane fatty acid synthase from Escherichia coli. The second substrate is an isolated and unactivated cis olefin present in the unsaturated fatty acid acyl chains of phospholipids. In contrast to methyl transfer, there is very little precedent in the biochemical literature for methylene transfer from AdoMet. All polar mechanisms for the reaction would be expected to involve intermediates that are very high in energy. In addition, since most cellular phospholipids are constituents of phospholipid bilayers, wherein their fatty acid chains are sequestered from the aqueous milieu, it is unclear how this enzyme catalyzes a reaction between two substrates of opposing solubilities. The goal of this project is to address these intriguing questions using a variety of kinetic, mechanistic, and physical techniques, which if successful, will contribute significantly to the general understanding of enzyme reaction mechanisms. This project was originally funded as a CAREER award, and was converted to a Presidential Early Career Award for Engineers and Scientists (PECASE) award in May doc17226 none For the majority of its users, the Internet remains a best-effort network and provides no direct means for meeting specific network Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of applications, such as fixed bandwidth rates or bounds on propagation delay and loss rates. Most previous work that addressed improving QoS capabilities of networks focused on mechanisms and techniques that require a combination of resource reservation, admission control, and wide-scale modifications to the network and transport layers of the protocol stack. These mechanisms and techniques are difficult to deploy in practice because a) they require changes and new standards within already operational lower layers of the protocol stack and b) they restrict competing sessions access to basic network resources. Recently, as an alternative, researchers and network practitioners have utilized distributed mechanisms implemented within the network s application layer to compensate for the QoS limitations of the underly-ing best-effort network infrastructure. These mechanisms provide services such as alternate path routing, network-internal transcoding of data, content replication and caching that improve session quality. Communication of both data and state information between the network points that implement these distributed mechanisms is performed upon network overlays: virtual networks that directly connect these points to one another by tunneling transmissions across the underlying network. The research described in this proposal develops and analyzes a Best-Effort QoS service for the wide-area Internet. This service automates the procedure used by applications to draw upon these distributed application layer mechanisms to improve the perceived quality and capabilities of the network. An application initiates the service by placing a specific QoS request at a network endpoint. A best effort is then made by the service to locate and instantiate the necessary distributed mechanisms to meet the QoS requirement. The service is best effort in that there is no reservation or admission control phase that restricts or denies other sessions access to network resources. Hence, there is no guarantee that the QoS requirement will be met, nor is there a guarantee that once met, the requirement will be satisfied for the remainder of the session. The only guarantee is that as long as application layer resources can be located and effectively applied to meet the requirement, then the service will do so. The work in this proposal will evaluate this service in three broad areas: (i) techniques for locating available application layer resources, (ii) coordinated selection of these resources, and (iii) controlling how competing applications share these resources. Our evaluation is performed mainly via mathematical analysis and simulation upon a generic service. However, we also demonstrate the practicality of the service by extending the analysis to two specific applications as well as developing and using a testbed for experimental purposes. The researcher s teaching efforts focus on the intertwining of analytical and experimental aspects of networking research. To this end, he proposes to develop courses in networking that (i) teach fundamental approaches to modeling and performance evaluation of networking systems, (ii) develop a wide-area classroom laboratory atop the Internet2 that can be used by students across the world to implement wide-area experiments, and (iii) teach students how to integrate experimental and theoretical approaches to networking issues doc17227 none The goal of the research plan is to further our understanding of the relationship between two aspects of community behavior in Pseudomonas aeruginosa-the formation of complex, surface-attached communities called biofilms and a cell-to-cell signaling regulatory mechanism called quorum sensing. It is known that quorum sensing is required for normal P. aeruginosa biofilm communities to form, but what quorum sensing regulates during the development of a biofilm is unknown. How quorum sensing functions in biofilm community is also unknown. Here is a summary of the project: 1) Identify the gene or set of genes regulated by quorum sensing that play a role in the development of biofilm communities; 2) Study signaling patterns in biofilms- what constitutes a quorum in a biofilm?; and 3) Examine signal diffusion in a biofilm- concentrating both on the roles of mass transport and the chemistry of the extracellular matrix of the biofilm. Here is a list of the goals of the project: Develop a detailed understanding of quorum sensing in a model microbial biofilm system Develop interdisciplinary collaborations to address interdisciplinary questions Cultivate an appreciation for the multidisciplinary approach to science needed to ask questions about environmental microbiology The educational plan mirrors the research plan in the need to incorporate a multidisciplinary approach to the complex environmental systems where microbes are found. There are three specific goals for the educational plan: Design and implement a basic microbiology course for undergraduate engineers. Design and implement a microbial ecology course for graduate level engineering students. Provide research experiences for high school, undergraduate, and graduate students in environmental microbiology, emphasizing the need to approach scientific questions in a multidisciplinary fashion The first goal is designed to give undergraduate engineers a foundation in biology. The need for engineers and scientists to interact with people outside their own discipline is clear- this course is intended to give the biological background needed to facilitate these interactions. The second goal is to develop a microbial ecology graduate course with the theme of biofilms, where the focus will be on systems and the need to bring different tools from different fields to bear on the system in order to understand it. The last goal is to provide a positive research environment where students can be trained in and exposed to cutting-edge research doc17228 none Genomic and proteomic projects have produced a vast amount of biological data: fully sequenced genomes, gene and protein sequences, protein structures, protein-protein interactions, and gene expression patterns. The next grand challenge in Bioinformatics is to determine the biological functions and cellular roles of all genes and proteins, and their interactions with one another to form a functional cell. The research problem aims to computationally predict the 3-dimensional structure of a protein complex from its components. This project will provide insights into the functions of the interacting proteins and can guide the design of novel reagents to regulate protein interaction networks. The research efforts will be integrated with Bioinformatics education. Boston University is among the first to establish a graduate degree program in Bioinformatics, funded by an NSF IGERT grant and growing rapidly. The curriculum development of the Program is a key element of this proposal. This project seeks to build a general system for predictive protein docking: to start with the coordinates of the unbound component proteins and to obtain computationally a model for the complex structure, including the conformational changes upon association. The research team has developed an initial-stage docking algorithm, which compares competitively with the best algorithms with a similar goal. The proposed work includes the following components: (1) To improve the existing docking algorithm, with the goal of initial screening. (2) To develop a new algorithm to refine the structures produced by the initial-stage algorithm. (3) To develop novel target functions for docking algorithms. (4) To test algorithms extensively using a benchmark set and community wide blind tests. (5) To establish a web accessible, fully automated, and user-friendly docking server. Results and the protein complex database produced in this project will also be available at the server. The results of this project will be integrated into two graduate courses (Computational Genomics and Protein Engineering for Biomedical Applications) and one Bioinformatics Teacher s workshop. The courses and workshop will also include other state-of-the-art results in the fields of structural and functional Proteomics and Bioinformatics doc17229 none K. Mahesh, University of Minnesota It is proposed to perform large eddy simulation (LES) of turbulent jets in cross-flow using unstructured grids. The problem is chosen because its applicability to a number of important technical problems such as fuel injectors, V STOL aircraft, film cooling of turbine blades and etc. Furthermore such a flow cannot be correctly predicted by the current computational scheme of Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations (RANS). Unstructured grids are chosen to allow mesh points to be localized near the jet boundary and near the wall. The method of computation will be based on a kinetic energy conserving scheme, which was developed by the PI. The results will be compared to existing experimental data. The LES scheme, once fully developed, will be applied to a range of other flows. The education plan involves development of new graduate courses, incorporate research component into both graduate and undergraduate courses, and including undergraduate students in research projects doc17230 none Programming for distributed object computing systems is complicated by the fact that objects persist and interact with a number of other objects in the system. When programmers change and evolve their objects, the ramifications are felt by clients in other parts of the system, not just within the application that is being programmed. Therefore, distributed object programmers require mechanisms to manage this evolution and make it known to other objects in the system. The dynamically configurable distributed object (DCDO) model is a first step toward managing evolution in distributed object systems. The DCDO model, implemented within the Legion grid computing system, helps enable object evolution and facilitate the development of distributed objects from multiple independent implementation components. Using DCDOs, programmers can evolve existing active objects to accept new member functions, to change the interface and behavior of their member functions, and to remove member functions from their external (public) or internal (private) interface. Programmers can make these changes on the fly, without deactivating any part of the system, without replacing binary exe-cutables, without interrupting the clients of evolving objects, and without having to know what the changes will be at the time the objects are initially compiled and run. The model supports evolution management strategies that define when and how object types evolve from one version to the next, and determine when a type change is propagated to existing instances. The evolution management strategies built into the DCDO model are a good start toward managing change, but they are not sufficient. Programmers require a more general purpose mechanism for defining how objects can change, and for restricting how evolutions can take place. The research described in this proposal will address this problem. In particular, we will make the evolution characteristics of an object a first class entity in the distributed system, so that it can be read by other objects, which can then behave appropriately based on how their peers have evolved and may evolve in the future. Clients will be able to read the evolution histories of servers, and will be able to determine the restrictions, if any, that are placed on future server evolution. Further, clients will be able to register call-back functions with servers in order to be informed when changes take place. When they do, the clients can be given some control over when and how the changes can be carried out. In some cases, a client may be able to veto an evolution operation, or delay it until the client has finished its current application. This functionality is implemented in terms of a protocol that is initiated by the call back functions among the clients who have registered interest in the evolution operation. This begins to address the problem of implementations changing out from under clients that are built to support a different interface. In another important part of the research, we will study how real applications change over time, in order to effectively design evolution management strategies and constraints. We will include a wide range of different applications in the study, including the core Legion objects themselves, high performance scientific applications, and distributed collaborative environments. In the educational component of the proposed program, we will implement the Student Centered Applied Learning through Industry Projects (SCALIP) program. In this program, students work with local industries to define class projects for other students in future instantiations of core graduate courses doc17231 none Srinidhi Varadarajan Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University CAREER: Weaving a Code Tapestry: A Compiler Directed Framework for Scalable Network Emulation In this research, we propose a new scalable network emulation test-bed that supports both the simulation as well as direct code execution paradigms within a single framework. In order to represent the scale and heterogeneity of the Internet, the test-bed scales to tens to hundreds of thousands of network nodes. The first major challenge lies in developing programming models that can represent the digraph relationship of network protocol stacks within a single process, without manually modifying either the protocol stack or network applications. Secondly, the enormous scope of the test bed requires us to address problems in inter application context switch time, memory usage and parallel discrete event simulation, all of which present bottlenecks to scalability doc17232 none Tepedelenlioglu, Cihan Arizona State University In wireless broadband communications, the distortion that the communication medium (`the channel ) causes on the transmitted signal, warrants accurate channel models in order to characterize and mitigate the distortion. These models need to take into account the mobility of the transmitter and receiver, the possible presence of a line-of-sight between the communicators, and the presence of noise and interference, all of which are parameters that quantify the channel quality, and affect the performance of the communication system. It is, therefore, of interest to construct such models, and use these models to estimate these statistical channel quality measures. It is the goal of this research to construct and utilize a signal processing framework to estimate these channel quality measures, which is expected to aid in the design of broadband systems with improved performance. More specifically, in the course of this research, the PI will construct optimal (maximum likelihood and minimum variance) as well as moment-based estimators for channel quality indicators such as the maximum Doppler spread, signal to interference plus noise ratio, and the Ricean factor for broadband systems such as OFDM. After characterizing the deleterious effects of the time-selective and frequency-selective channel on general block transmission systems, for which OFDM is a special case, the PI will devise generalized OFDM transceivers that reduce the adverse effects of the inter-carrier interference. Hence, the research will focus on the adverse effects of the randomly time-varying channel on broadband systems and propose novel, low-complexity remedies doc17233 none This project investigates two important elements in intelligent multiagent systems: decision making and learning. Based on a theoretical model of dynamic games, the PI will investigate a new optimality criterion for decision making. Second, the PI will define a non-stationary strategy within a dynamic game framework, providing a language to describe the policy choices. Third, the PI will provide a framework to describe the interaction between learning and action choice, and redefine the concept of online learning. Fourth, the PI will search for efficient online learning algorithms to reach an optimal non-stationary strategy. Fifth, this research on non-stationary strategy learning will be linked to research on models for dynamic single-agent systems. Finally, the proposed methodology and algorithms will be implemented in agent applications for E-commerce domains and computer games. Potential applications include bidding agents for online auctions, pricebots for online retailers and computer characters for strategic games. The proposed research is integrated with the PI s education plan, which focuses on promoting the concept of intelligence for multiagent systems. The PI will teach decision making and learning in dynamic games in her Ph.D. seminar class, and construct a graduate course on agent design for multiagent systems and their applications in electronic commerce doc17234 none This project will investigate how information technology is transforming financial markets and stock exchanges, which have historically introduced technological innovations that are later deployed in other markets, with the goal of understanding how other markets will be impacted by electronic trading systems. This research will identify ways to improve current systems, enhance the design of future systems, understand when electronic trading systems are valuable, and anticipate the adoption of future technologies. Using both public and proprietary data from the world s largest electronic market, Nasdaq, this program will use a variety of econometric techniques to explore how electronic trading systems impact stock markets both during and outside of the traditional trading day. The insights into the development of electronic markets and technological innovations in trade will be incorporated in MBA and undergraduate classes to improve understanding of the real-world tradeoffs between different market structures and the organization of an integrated firm versus coordination though markets and in a Ph.D. seminar to study features critical to electronic markets success and technology adoption and diffusion across electronic markets. This program is the beginning of a research agenda focused on related questions in other electronic markets and ways that information technology transforms commerce doc17235 none This Career Development Plan involves an integrated collection of research and educational activities focused on algorithms for high-dimensional geometric problems. Geometric computing with high-dimensional data is of crucial importance to many areas of computer science, including machine learning, data mining, databases and information retrieval, computer vision and computational biology. Example problems in this area are: nearest neighbor search, many variants of data clustering, and discovering linear structure of the data (e.g. via Principal Component Analysis (PCA)). Unfortunately, the classical geometric algorithms for many of these problems do not scale well with the dimension. For example, the running times of the classical algorithms for the nearest neighbor search depend exponentially on the dimension, which makes them inefficient for dimension higher than, say, 20. This is unfortunate, since many applications involve number of dimensions anywhere from a few hundred to a few million. In recent years, new, powerful techniques for solving these problems have been discovered, most notably dimensionality reduction and random sampling in geometric spaces. The algorithms obtained using those techniques enjoy very low (at most linear) dependence on the dimension, at the cost of providing approximate answers. The problems amenable to these techniques include nearest neighbor search, clustering and PCA. However, the algorithmic solutions to these problems still possess (sometimes quite severe) limitations. Our goal is to identify methods for circumventing these limitations and making the algorithms efficient, both in theory and in practice. The techniques which led to the development of the aforementioned algorithms are new and still not widely known. They include many tools which have been developed during 70s and 80s in the field of mathematics called functional analysis. However, computer scientists became aware of those methods only very recently, and many of the fundamental results are still not widely known or used. Therefore, it is important to make these results accessible to large computer science audience so that they can be successfully used, investigated and developed. In the Education Plan section we outline a plan on how to make them more accessible to students as well as computer scientists doc17236 none A keystone species is a species whose effects on a community are much larger than would be predicted from their abundance. Identification of keystone species within a system is critical to understanding how communities presently function and how they might respond to future environmental changes. Fire is a natural process in western Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forests, but human activities (i.e. logging and fire suppression) have altered fire frequencies and intensities. This project will address the influence of fire on the relative importance and possible keystone function of different woodpecker species on the secondary cavity user (SCU) community in pine forests in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Secondary cavity users do not excavate the cavities that they occupy for nesting and roosting. I will examine woodpecker and SCU communities in three types of treatments: unburned (i.e. control), prescribed fire, and old burn treatments. The prescribed fire treatments will undergo two years of pre-burn analysis before application of a prescribed burn. The focus of forests in different stages of post-fire succession will allow for an examination of the dynamic influence of fire on the woodpeckers and the SCU communities. The relative importance of individual woodpecker species to the SCU community will be determined by monitoring the use of woodpecker cavities during both the breeding season and non-breeding season. Wind Cave National Park will be the primary site for field research and for a field ecology curriculum to be taught to American Indian students. This study provides a unique opportunity to integrate research and ecological educational activities with American Indian students by combining a culturally relevant field site (Wind Cave) with culturally relevant animals (woodpeckers). The field ecology experiences will be the result of collaboration between the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (SDSM&T), Oglala Lakota College (OLC), and the SDSM&T Scientific Knowledge for Indian Learning and Leadership (SKILL) program. The combination of research activities and educational activities at Wind Cave will provide excellent opportunities to integrate research and education to a group that has traditionally been under-represented in the sciences doc17237 none Many genes in bacteria, plants, fungi, worm, fruit fly, and human have no sequence matches, their three-dimensional structures are unsolved, and their functional roles are unknown. Three-dimensional spatial surface motifs of key residues can provide critical links connecting gene sequence, protein structure, and protein functions. Surface motifs with complicated geometry are difficult to compute, and the key residues are often from distant parts of the primary sequences. The proposed project aims to develop tools using computational geometry for discovery of similar protein surface patterns, as well as server databases of libraries of similar protein surfaces for biological querying and understanding. The search tools will be developed using a comprehensive informatics approach for discovery of statistically significant similarity relationship of protein surfaces, combining sequence, physicochemical, and shape information. The database of libraries of spatial surface motifs will provide organized information enriched with functional annotation. By providing quantitative, organized, and understandable information of protein surface motifs, the tools and database proposed will help to uncover new patterns of key residues in surface motifs important for understanding protein functions. It will facilitate the understanding of the cellular roles of newly sequenced genes from genomic sequencing and newly solved structures from structural genomics. It will also help to establish previously unrecognized functional and evolutionary relationship of protein spatial surfaces, and uncover deep evolutionary origins of functionally constrained structural elements before the emergence of protein domains and folds. Knowledge and insight gained from protein surface motifs will also help to design and engineer novel proteins for new biological functions and for novel industrial applications. The educational component of this proposal will be centered on (1) course and curriculum development, (2) student mentoring, and (3) outreach. In addition to curriculum development for the newly approved MS PHD programs in bioinformatics, a new course named Geometric Computing for Bioinformatics will be developed, which will be tightly linked to the research through classroom teaching and class projects designed based on the research activities. The involvement of graduate and undergraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers provide mentoring opportunities, with the goal to pass the knowledge, the computational skill, and the ability of critical and creative thinking to the students. It will also allow the students to present their research in national and international conferences. The outreach activities to Chicago high school and junior colleges will be focused on high school summer camp activities of bioinformatics research, local visits, hosting interns in the PI s lab, school teacher preparation, and developing career as well as educational material on bioinformatics (CD-ROM and website) to attract students not traditionally represented in this field doc17238 none Dr. Tracy A. Hanna, Department of Chemistry, Texas Christian University is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program of the Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, for her work under a CAREER Award to study solution models for SOHIO oxidation ammoxidation catalysis. The SOHIO process is used industrially to oxidize propylene to acrolein and to effect the ammoxidation of the same feedstock to produce acrylonitrile. The active SOHIO catalyst involves both bismuth and molybdenum. The objectives of this research are to investigate the formation and reactivity of bismuth(II) radicals and prepare bimetallic calixarene-supported models of the SOHIO catalytic components. This research is integrated with undergraduate education, outreach programs, international collaboration and the inclusion of under-represented groups. In conjunction with this, both advanced and introductory chemistry courses at TCU are being reshaped and modernized. Primary components include the development and implementation of a write-your-own laboratory program in general chemistry, curricular reform, web-based course material development, and the incorporation of peer instruction doc17239 none ion, and at the same time providing invariants which ensure that the physical state remains within some known bounds. The educational part of the project is implemented through new course and curriculum development, and student mentoring. The main educational objective is to provide both undergraduate and graduate students with the knowledge and the skills to understand the key issues and to ensure technical leadership in the current and future aerospace information technology arenas. Finally, a special effort is devoted to the development of an interactive web site, where it is possible to access all the relevant information and software developed for the courses, and as a result of the research project doc17240 none In this project, an alternative approach to developing collaborative applications will be investigated. In this approach (called incremental specification and experimentation ), the collaboration infrastructure provides only the most essential functionality by executing meta protocols. During the course of collaboration, new protocols are discovered and specified as they emerge. Both meta and emergent protocol snippets are plugged, unplugged, and replaced on the fly. The project includes: (1) domain modeling to find natural representations of meta and emergent protocols; (2) multi-user authoring tools to support end-user incremental specification of emergent protocols; (3) plug-n-play of protocols to support incremental experimentation; and (4) execution, monitoring and awareness mechanisms to provide the necessary context for coordination. This proposed research investigates incremental specification and experimentation of synchronous and asynchronous protocols in the same framework and attempts to develop more end-user oriented support. The results, when applied, are expected to improve the flexibility, and thus the usability and development deployment costs, of a variety of groupware applications. The development of a new graduate course on collaborative systems and models will give students concrete experience in experimentation with collaboration protocols. In undergraduate courses, students will work in teams using collaboration technologies to identify and analyze their collaborative activities and the underlying meta protocols implemented in those systems that they would like to change. Through a protocol modeling process, students will develop analytic skills and begin to understand the dynamic nature of cooperative work and the importance of flexibility in the design of collaboration infrastructures doc17241 none Sensory exploitation of prey escape circuits One of the mechanisms of natural selection that evolutionary biologists study is the arms race between predators and prey. Predators evolve various adaptations to capture the prey, and the prey species evolve more and more sophisticated ways to avoid being killed. Who wins this arms race? This proposal focuses on predator-prey relationship in which the predator, the Painted Redstart (Myioborus pictus), exploits properties of a simple pathway in the nervous system of its insect prey to win the race. Flies possess a specific cluster of neurons, the Giant Descending Neuron Cluster, which triggers an escape reflex when a conspicuous image of an approaching predator is expanding on the fly s retina. Such neural pathways and their properties have evolved millions of years ago, and undoubtedly before the evolution of fly-eating birds. This escape reaction is believed to be a general antipredatory adaptation against all sorts of predators. This research project will test the idea that the Painted Redstart is now exploiting the properties of this simple neural pathway in flies. Birdwatchers are well acquainted with the very conspicuous tail fanning and wing spreading employed by foraging redstarts to show off their white and black plumage pattern. The idea is that redstarts use these displays to activate the escape reflexes of flies and other insects making them easier for the birds to detect. Redstarts have specialized in capturing such escaping insects in mid-air. This research will consist of three components. First, a comparison of Painted Redstart s diet with the diets of several other insectivorous birds will show whether flies with well-developed Giant Descending Neuron Clusters are more common in the diet of redstarts than in the diet of other insect-eating birds that do not use this exploitative hunting technique. Second, electrophysiological studies of the neurons in the Giant Descending Neuron Cluster will be used to test whether these neurons are especially sensitive to the redstart s displays. Third, a field study of the foraging performance of redstarts with experimentally enlarged and reduced white patches will show whether the arrangement naturally present in redstarts is optimal for flushing their insect prey doc17242 none Lutzoni Symbiotic associations among distantly related organisms with complementary functions provided key innovations for two major biological radiations - the mitochondrial eukaryotes and plants (chloroplasts). Despite the indisputable significance of symbiosis as a major evolutionary force, very little is known about mutualism and its evolutionary consequences. One of the main reasons for this is the lack of studies that include both mutualists and non-mutualists, and that are designed specifically to address evolutionary issues associated with coevolutionary processes. The need of analytical tools for such comparative phylogenetic studies and a general lack of knowledge about the limitations of newly developed statistical methods compound this deficiency. This project by Dr. Francois Lutzoni at Duke University aims to address these issues by greatly extending previous taxon and gene sampling of earlier phylogenetic studies of lichenized and non-lichenized ascomycete fungi, developing new analytical tools and assessing their statistical properties through computer simulation studies, and training the next generation of biologists to take full advantage of new bioinformatic and genomic tools while grounded in a solid training in organismal biology and systematics. In recent work by the investigator and his colleagues, it was reported that the diversity of lichenized and non-lichenized fungi can be best explained by few evolutionary gains followed by many losses of the lichen symbiosis, and that major lineages of strictly non-lichenized species (including the form genera Penicillium and Aspergillus) unexpectedly turn out to be derived from lichen-forming ancestors. The ultimate goal of this study is to better understand the mechanisms leading up to the origin and losses of major symbiotic associations (ranging from mutualism to parasitism) using the lichen-forming and allied derived ascomycetes as a model system. This research will be integrated with teaching activities by establishing two new courses ( Symbiosis and Phylogenetics ) and by reshaping one current course ( Systematic Biology ) at Duke University. This project will advance our understanding of early Euascomycete relationships and will contribute toward reestablishing a supraordinal classification of this phylum - an effort that was neglected by mycologists for the last 20 years due to the difficulty in resolving broad relationships based on morphological characters alone. This phylogenetic framework is essential to reconstruct the evolution of the lichen-symbiosis and to assess its impact on the diversification and evolution of the Euascomycetes, including the switch to new substrates (including vascular plants, animals and humans), changes in biosynthetic pathways leading to the production of novel secondary compounds, and transitions to new types of interactions to obtain carbohydrates (including parasitism). The Ascomycetes contain the most species that affect the everyday lives of humans by infesting crops, degrading textiles, causing human and animal diseases; but the group also includes model organisms such as Aspergillus, Neurospora, Saccharomyces, and Schizosaccharomyces, and other species indispensable in the production of foods and medicines. Computer simulations, part of this project, will provide new insights in choosing and developing statistical tests for phylogenetic studies. Interdisciplinary training across traditional organismal evolutionary biology and systematics, with new fields of phylogenetics, bioinformatics, and genomics is essential to the development of the next generation of systematists and evolutionary biologists and will facilitate innovative research on symbiotic systems doc17243 none The growth of the Internet in recent years is resulting in a rapid increase in the demand for network bandwidth. As this growth continues, the Internet will be expected to support an increasing number of high-speed real-time applications, such as Internet telephony, video conferencing, and video distribution, which not only require significant bandwidth, but also have quality of service requirements with respect to delay and reliability of transmitted data. Recent advances in optical transmission technology and wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) systems have enabled the development of advanced communication systems which are capable of providing large amounts of bandwidth in the core of emerging telecommunications networks. Similar advances in optical switching technologies will enable the deployment of highly flexible all-optical networks in the near future. Existing optical switching technology allows for the creation of networks in which all-optical circuit-switched connections can be established end-to-end. As optical switch technology evolves, networks in which packets are switched optically at each node will become possible, offering an even greater degree of flexibility. Through the intelligent design of switch architectures and dynamic protocols, these photonic packet-switched networks have the potential to fulfill the diverse requirements of emerging broadband applications. This proposal outlines a career development plan for research and education in the area of photonic packet switching. The research plan will investigate the feasibility and suitability of photonic packet-switched networks for supporting the traffic requirements of emerging Internet applications. Emphasis will be placed on the design and evaluation of protocols and architectures for improving photonic packet network performance, while also addressing the unique physical-layer properties of optical networks. The specific objectives of the research project will be to 1) investigate protocols for resolving contention and providing differentiated levels of service in photonic packet-switched networks, 2) investigate new techniques for contention resolution in optical burst-switched networks, 3) investigate static and dynamic approaches for avoiding contention and for reducing congestion in photonic packet-switched networks, and 4) develop an integrated framework for evaluating the performance of these networks on both the physical layer and network layer in terms of metrics such as delay, packet loss, and signal quality. This research will provide a foundation for the deployment of high-speed photonic packet-switched networks, and will identify key design parameters and trade-offs associated with the implementation of such networks. The education plan will focus on 1) developing new networking and telecommunications curriculum at both the undergraduate and graduate level, 2) organizing activities such as seminars and workshops to facilitate the transfer of knowledge from the university to surrounding industry, 3) developing new methods for providing education over the Internet, and 4) developing an outreach program to encourage under-represented minorities to seek careers in science and engineering doc17244 none This project will study the role that video can play in how teachers learn and how they develop a professional vision of their craft. The use of video based lessons of various sorts has become popular in the professional development of teachers. Meanwhile, research has sought to focus on the notion of a professional vision for teaching as researchers work to refine our understanding of how good teachers optimize their blend of pedagogical and content knowledge in the context of specific instructional tasks. This project will examine the use of video in the context of teacher professional vision. It will develop, apply, and refine a new organizing and analytic framework for studying this phenomenon, and will include the analysis of video content, professional development program design, interviews with teachers, and observations of video clubs. The research will be the source of several new and revised courses on learning sciences, teaching and pedagogy, mathematics teaching methods, and alternative certification doc17245 none Purchasing Power Parity Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) is one of the most enduring topics in international economics, and the question of whether PPP holds both over long horizons and during the post-Bretton-Woods system of flexible nominal exchange rates has been extensively analyzed. All variants of PPP postulate that the real 1 exchange rate reverts to a constant mean. Evidence ofPPP can be provided by tests of a unit root in the ! real exchange rate. If the unit root null hypothesis can be rejected in favor of a level stationary alternative, then there is mean reversion and, therefore, PPP. Most of the existent work on purchasing power parity focuses on the narrow question of whether or not unit roots in real exchange rates can be rejected. The purpose of this proposal is to go beyond the narrow statistical focus to consider what can be learned about the behavior of real exchange rates from the results of unit root tests. Recent work has begun to appear which reports strong rejections of unit roots in real exchange rates for panels with quarterly data. The first part of the proposal investigates whether these results really provide evidence of purchasing power parity. Using panel methods, unit roots in post- real exchange rates with the U.S. dollar as the numeraire currency can only be consistently rejected if the sample extends to or beyond. This leads to the question of what, if any, data generating processes for real exchange rates are consistent with both the recent rejections of unit roots with data extending through and the earlier failures to reject unit roots with shorter spans of data. Preliminary work indicates that the evidence is not consistent with real exchange rates being a stationary autoregressive process with high persistence, a combination of a stationary and a unit root process, or a nonlinear mean reverting process. The evidence is more consistent with a process of reversion to PPP restricted structural change. The second part of the proposal focuses on the speed of mean reversion. The half-lives ofPPP deviations, the expected number of years for a disturbance to the real exchange rate to decay by 50 percent, are generally calculated to be between three and five years with univariate methods. The use of median unbiased estimation methods with long-horizon and post- data, however, shows that these estimates are biased downwards. More strikingly, the confidence intervals of the half-lives, especially with the post-l 973 data, are so wide as to make the point estimates virtually uninformative. This work will be extended in two directions. First, applying median unbiased estimation techniques to panel methods, the half-lives ofPPP deviations from panel unit root tests can be investigated. Preliminary results indicate that, while (as with the univariate tests) the point estimates are biased downwards, the confidence intervals from the median unbiased estimates (in contrast with the univariate case) are tight enough to be informative. Second, median unbiased estimation techniques can be applied to a recently developed univariate unit root test that has more power than the conventional tests. This creates the potential for tighter confidence intervals of the estimated half-lives. The third part of the proposal focuses on the behavior of long-horizon and post- World War II real exchange rates. Using long spans of data and sufficiently powerful techniques, unit roots can be rejected in favor of level stationarity (PPP) for most real exchange rates. An obvious econometric point, however, is that rejection of a null hypothesis in favor of a particular alternative hypothesis does not necessarily mean that the alternative is correct. In this case, there are other alternative hypotheses, including regime- wise level stationarity and regime-wise trend stationarity (both with and without PPP restrictions), that may provide better characterizations of real exchange rates. For long-horizon data, multiple level changes appear to be the most promising hypothesis. For post-World War II data, a combination of level changes (to account for the devaluations and revaluations at the end of the Bretton Woods period) plus slope changes (to account for the appreciation and depreciation of the dollar in the s) appears to be most promising. The proposed research first involves conducting unit root tests with different alternative hypotheses. Depending on the results of these tests, simulation evidence can help uncover which data generating processes are most congruent with the results doc17246 none The research objectives of this CAREER Award are to establish a foundation for a decision-based approach to product family design and develop metamodeling strategies for web-based product platform customization. The first objective will investigate methods for generating product platform alternatives and modeling the associated costs, demand, and uncertainties of the products within the corresponding product family derived from each platform alternative. The second research objective will enable rapid customization of platform variants via the Internet. The educational objectives in this CAREER Award will engage students in problem-based learning through industry-focused projects in product family design and customization and assess the effectiveness of the proposed educational activities at enhancing student learning and student s attitudes toward lifelong learning. These educational objectives will be integrated within three undergraduate courses and one graduate course. Product dissection activities to expose freshmen and women and minority students in grades K-12 to design and product families will also be developed. Three industrial partners -- Durametal, Flowserve, and Ivalo Lighting -- will collaborate in the proposed research and educational activities. If successful, the results of this research will help companies reduce development costs and time-to-market while increasing product variety and customization. Strategies for web-based platform customization will also enhance customer interaction and improve customer satisfaction. The proposed research will foster the development of design methods and tools that can be used to design families of products that meet a wide range of rapidly changing customer requirements. The educational activities will help prepare students to succeed in today s highly competitive digital and global marketplace in which companies are constantly striving to shorten time-to-market and increase product variety while reducing costs. The research and educational activities will also establish a foundation for a long-term career in engineering design research and education doc17247 none Although the principles and fundamental equations that describe turbulent combustion are known, their direct numerical solution (DNS) remains impossible for practical problems. The usual approximations are to either time average or to spatially filter the fundamental equations. The first approach involves full time averaging (Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes equations, or RANS), while the second filters only for the smaller scales, allowing the larger scales to be resolved in space and time (Large Eddy Simulation, or LES). In either case, the semi-empirical modeling assumptions associated with the averaging process are critical, and have been the focus of much debate. These approaches have had substantial successes in the modeling of many flames, principally those dominated by boundary-layer-like flows such as free jets and shear layers, and combustion that is uninterrupted by local extinction. Most practical flames are, however, stabilized by recirculation or swirl, and exhibit extinction events, e.g., standoff from the burner. These phenomena are not well captured by the present models. To improve the modeling one must consider issues such as strongly curved streamlines, buoyancy, strongly varying density, dilatation due to heat release and its influence on the overall dynamics of the flow, and local extinction and reignition of the flame chemistry in regions of high shear rates. In this study, the bluff-body laboratory flames of the University of Sydney are used as a prototype for the study of the modeling of these phenomena. A bluff body at the base establishes a recirculation zone that stabilizes the flame. This experimental work has covered a wide range of conditions between fast chemistry and close-to-blowout behavior. These experiments therefore exhibit many of the challenging phenomena occurring in more complex, practical flames. They are, however, of a simple axisymmetric configuration and have been experimentally well characterized. Thus, these flames are excellent targets for fundamental investigations into the modeling of complex flame behavior. The following research activities are proposed: (a) DNS and theoretical work towards better understanding of (1) the mechanisms of extinction reignition in recirculation-stabilized jet flames, and (2) the physics and stability of flames dominated by large density differences, dilatation, curved streamlines, and buoyancy; (b) investigation evaluation of LES subgrid-scale models that incorporate the new information gained on extinction reignition and on fluid-mechanics issues specific to recirculating flames; and (c) comparison of LES computations with laboratory data on bluff-body stabilized jet flames to test the performance of the subgrid-scale models developed in this project doc17248 none This Career Award, provided by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, supports the research and educational program of Professor Donna Chen of the University of South Carolina at Columbia. Her research addresses the chemistry of metal on oxide surfaces at the atomic level. Using thermal desorption spectroscopy in combination with X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and scanning tunneling microscopy, the growth and surface chemistry of Ag and Pt nanoparticles deposited on titanium dioxide single crystal surfaces are being examined. The oxidation of ethylene to ethylene oxide, and the reduction of NO with CO will be used as probe reactions to examine the detailed surface chemistry of these metal on oxide systems. This approach will be extended to bimetallic nanoparticles as well. The integration of undergraduate and graduate research participants in this research program forms the focus of the educational plan in this Career Award. Interactive learning using web based tutorials and peer study groups are being implemented in the undergraduate curriculum, and the integration of research problem solving approaches in the courses of the P.I. is being implemented. The application of modern ultra-high vacuum surface science tools to the microscopic understanding of the surface chemistry of metallic nanoparticles on oxide surfaces forms the focus of this Career Award. The Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program supports the research and educational activities of Professor Donna Chen at the University of South Carolina. Scanning tunneling microscopy and electron spectroscopy are the major tools applied to the interactions of Ag and Pt particles with oxide surfaces. Integrating undergraduate and graduate student research with the curriculum, and the use of interactive learning methods form the focus of the educational aspects of this Career Award doc17249 none Institution: University of Arizona This PECASE grant sponsors research and teaching efforts in developing a unified methodology for variation management and reduction in Multistage Manufacturing Processes (MMPs). A MMP generally involves multiple operations to produce a product, which can be found in many industrial processes such as automotive body assembly, machining lines, progressive stamping, and semiconductor manufacturing. In a MMP, each operation adds inherent design variation when no fault occurs, and special assignable variation when a fault occurs, to the workpiece variation. The output workpiece of one operation is the input of the next operation. The final product variation is an accumulation of variation from all operations. Therefore, the characteristics of variation propagation is very complex in MMPs, depending on both product and process design. The research efforts in the project will develop methodologies to achieve on-target production with minimum variance by addressing both design and manufacturing concurrently. The research focus is to develop: (a) a math-based model to describe the variation propagation in a MMP; (b) an integrated methodology for variation management through design synthesis and optimization; and (c) statistical methods driven by engineering models for quick root cause identification and product defect prevention. In addition to research, new curriculums and courses will be developed. Various collaborative efforts with industry, international universities, and K-12 schools will be conducted in research and education in the project. If successful, the project results will enrich the science base and technologies in variation reduction and process control methodologies for MMPs, which include: (a) analytical (rather than empirical) modeling of MMP variation and its propagation; (b) synthesis (rather than analysis) of product process tolerance for optimal management of inherent design variation to minimize their impact on final products; (c) real-time root-cause identification (rather than change detection) for manufacturing process control and continuous improvement; and (d) prognostics (rather than defect inspection) for defect prevention throughout the manufacturing lifetime. The developed unified methodology will generate significant economic impacts in industrial sectors where MMPs are used. This project was originally funded as a CAREER award, and was converted to a Presidential Early Career Award for Engineers and Scientists (PECASE) award in May doc17250 none This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award is to study new models, algorithms, and applications of stochastic programs with alternative risk-averse objectives, subjective probabilities, and decision-dependent uncertainties. Although stochastic programming has now evolved as a viable paradigm for planning and decision-making under uncertainty, much of the progress in this area has been made at the expense of some simplifying assumptions. For example, traditional stochastic programming is concerned with optimizing an expected objective function. Other common assumptions include precise knowledge of a static underlying probability distribution. However, these risk ignoring assumptions can be quite undesirable in many practical applications. Unfortunately, these generalizations typically lead to non-convex optimization models. Consequently, traditional decomposition algorithms for (convex) stochastic programs are inapplicable. The research will investigate the integration of decomposition principles within non-convex optimization algorithms in order to attack large-scale instances of these general stochastic programs. The developed concepts will be applied to planning problems in important economic sectors such as process industries, engineering design, and utility industries. The educational component of this career development plan is aimed at popularizing stochastic programming based planning and decision making in engineering education and practice. Towards this goal, user-friendly stochastic programming modeling and solver tools, electronic tutorials, and real world case studies will be developed. The operations research community recognizes Stochastic Programming as a valuable quantitative technique for decision support in the face of uncertainty. However, this tool has not achieved widespread use in practical planning and decision-making. Two reasons for this are: traditional stochastic programming models can often be overly simplistic for real-life applications and the lack of exposure to practical stochastic programming concepts in engineering education. The proposed research program will extend stochastic programming paradigm beyond some of the traditional impractical assumptions. These generalizations will require the development of entirely new stochastic programming models and algorithms, and their application to relevant practical problems. On the education side, user friendly stochastic programming solver, electronic tutorials, and industrial case-studies will be developed to facilitate the introduction of applied stochastic programming concepts in undergraduate and graduate engineering education doc17251 none One central information technology problem of the next decade will be the creation of a means through which to query a heterogeneous set of life science databases, generally via the Internet. Life science web databases hold information that is critical to researchers. Even though, in the above databases, data have been collected and automated procedures for data manipulation have been provided, user accessibility to such databases is very often still inadequate due to the lack of a comparable data representation, a unified interface for data exchange among the databases, and a customizable infrastructure (i.e. support for views) that addresses the individual needs of scientists. The research objective of this career plan is to address these issues by developing an information integration system for life science databases that supports views (BACIIS+ Biological and Chemical Information Integration System Plus -- views). BACIIS+ will allow for better communication between life science databases, will provide for continuous and rapid expansion and adaptation to the evolving biological field, and will provide better and more customizable approaches for data access and data analysis through dynamic views. The open research issues involved in the development of BACIIS+ include : 1) the management of large data sets, 2) the interoperability of geographically distributed autonomous databases, 3) the seamless semantic-based integration of these databases with total transparency to the user, and 4) the support for distributed multi-database views. Semantic integration aims at integrating data in a meaningful way while syntactic integration consists of just collecting and pasting together data from different databases. Static views consist of a limited set of views predefined in scope. Whereas dynamic views are created on-demand and their scope is completely defined by the user. Two new graduate courses are planned: Life science information systems, and Computational biology algorithms. The first course will cover the complexity of information extraction and management in the context of life science data. The second course will cover the foundation of sequential and parallel algorithms for sequence similarity analysis. Collaborators from Eli Lilly & Company and Dow AgroSciences are involved in the courses, providing industry perspectives. The proposed courses build on a current course by the PI that covers advanced molecular biology and includes three major sections: bioinformatics, computational modeling, and molecular machinery. The plan actively seeks the participation of undergraduate and minority students through senior design projects. A campus-wide bioinformatics initiative includes a newly established School of Informatics and the Indiana Genomics Center. An international workshop on the interoperability of life science databases is in development doc17252 none The project focuses on robotic tasks that cannot be done by a single robot, with the goal of developing multi-robot systems with increased fault tolerance and task speedup. This domain will be studied formally, in pursuit of a fundamental theory. The resulting formalism is to guide researchers in the design of experiments with large-scale multi-robot systems. Macroscopic models using expected (rather than exact) values of the system states will be explored in the search of a theory of multi-robot teams. Models of large-scale robot teams will be designed, and testable hypotheses about system performance will be formulated. Scalable algorithms for certain canonical tasks in a planar environment will be designed and tested, using a large group of mobile robots and a multi-robot simulator. The education part of the project is closely tied to the PI s research, and includes a new teaching lab, lab courseware development, and hosting high-school minority summer interns at the lab doc17253 none This research project will develop a robust unsupervised clustering technique based on Genetic Niching. It includes the development of a statistical estimator and to use this estimator in a Baldwin learning scheme. It will also develop an evolutionary web personalization system as well as techniques for preprocessing web usage data. The career development plan will include training graduate students in web mining as well as integrating the results into the undergraduate curriculum doc17254 none Proposal Number: CAREER: A Two-Tier Approach for the Analysis and Evolution of High-Integrity Software Product Lines PI: Gerald C. Gannod The objective of the research component of this project is to develop software architecture analysis and software reverse engineering techniques that support the evolution of existing software into software product lines with an emphasis on high-integrity systems. To this end, this research will first involve the development of an approach for analyzing software from both the architecture and component views in order to support assessment along different quality attribute dimensions. The approach will consist of models for static and dynamic analysis as well as simulation to determine level of compliance with quality attribute constraints. Second, this research will involve the development of a methodology for modifying and evolving software at both the architecture and component levels in order to ensure compliance with different quality attribute constraints and goals. For the software architecture community, this research will address a need for analysis approaches that allow software architects to assess the extent to which a software architecture meets various quality concerns. In addition, the results of this research will facilitate the long-term evolution of a software architecture based on long-term product-line goals. For the software reverse engineering and maintenance community, this research addresses the need for approaches that allow a software maintainer to determine the extent of the support for various quality attributes by individual components and provides a technique that facilitates component modification in order to ensure compliance to quality constraints doc17255 none The dependability of critical systems is an increasing source of concern. Modern software systems are routinely composed of millions of lines of source, including legacy code from previous generations and other vendors, yet critical Internet services and financial systems are expected to exhibit four nines or five nines (99.99% or 99.999%) availability. Vast prior evidence suggests that despite our best efforts at achieving a correct design, complex systems can and will fail in unpredictable ways, often resulting from unforeseen interactions between well-tested components not designed to be used together. The measured effects of such failures in the Internet arena are staggering, and in mission-critical systems the costs could be measured in human lives, as was nearly the case with bugs in the Patriot missile guidance software used in the Gulf War. Since unexpected failures do in fact occur even in the most careful designs, this work proposes a new approach in which system design focuses not only on fault avoidance, but on rapid recovery from unexpected faults. In many cases, fault detection and recovery can exploit relatively simple, well known techniques that have been proven to work in keeping Internet systems highly available---despite their very large scale, stressful workloads, and requirements of continuous uptime in spite of high levels of software churn and integration of legacy code. Software watchdogs and timeouts can catch unexpected exceptional conditions; reactive or prophylactic process- or node-level restarts can recover from or prevent transient errors resulting from aging-related state corruption or unreclaimed resources; virtual machine technology can effectively contain faults in complex software systems. Although these mechanisms are simple, the challenge lies in determining how software must be structured so that the mechanisms can be applied. Similar techniques are well-known in the Internet protocol design community and embedded-systems community, prior work from which has inspired this approach. Brown and Patterson have proposed the term Recovery-Oriented Computing (ROC) to broadly describe the above philosophy. The primary goals of the proposed work include the systematic investigation of ROC engineering techniques to reduce MTTR (mean time to recovery) in complex software systems, characterization of the properties of software systems that make them amenable to ROC, and a set of design rules and (re)structuring techniques for applying ROC to software systems. Evaluation will include quantification of the trade-offs between improvement in service availability and quality of service delivered to users. Testbeds for the work include a ubiquitous computing environment co-developed with the Stanford Interactivity Lab, and a prototype COTS-based satellite ground station network co-developed jointly with the Stanford Space Systems Development Lab. The research is complemented by new course offerings and revision of existing course offerings, at the graduate and undergraduate levels, to refocus the software engineering curriculum on models closer to industrial practice for building complex critical-infrastructure systems. A new joint graduate course being co-taught with Prof. David Patterson at UC Berkeley focuses on applying ROC to a variety of student research projects across many domains. Proposed revisions to advanced-undergraduate courses present Internet software systems engineering as it is practiced in the field. In both cases, recognized industrial researchers and practitioners are contributing both their experience and concrete data that currently is nowhere published about how complex systems really fail in the field doc17256 none The focus in modern computer networks has started to shift towardsservices and functionality rather than efficiency andoptimization. This calls for algorithms that combine user-centricperformance metrics such as fairness, availability, and latency withmore traditional objectives such as the total bandwidth cost or totalthroughput; it is desirable for these algorithms to provide formalguarantees in abstract models, as well as general rules of thumb forsystem developers. This research involves the study of severalproblems within the above framework.The first problem is to design efficient distributed algorithms forachieving approximate fairness in computer networks, and to studysimple mechanisms that induce convergence of selfish users toapproximately fair solutions. The second problem is to study routingissues in peer-to-peer systems; peer-to-peer systems are groups ofend-nodes that collaborate to implement new network services at theapplication level. Another problem is to study the packet-injectionrate at which common packet scheduling protocols such as FIFO becomeunstable.In an attempt to overcome the gap between theoreticians andpractitioners in this field, a new course titled Algorithms forcomputer networks will be developed, and the course material will bemade publicly available. Another course titled Modern algorithmictechniques will also be developed doc17257 none This research project will address the problem of information overload by creating new document organization and presentation techniques. The approach will generate intelligent interfaces to the scientific literature. Existing knowledge bases will be used for the automatic generation of these interfaces. Categorizations and analyses of the search results will be used as the basis of an interactive interface to manage and share documents. The career development plan will include the use of real-world problems in biomedicine to motivate learning about information technology. It will also develop courses that promote interdisciplinary learning doc17258 none One of the central problems facing biology is to identify the general principles that govern the evolution of form, function and diversity. Adding to this problem is the complexity of connecting pattern and process across several scales of biological organization. The career development plan will allow for the development of a rigorous integrative training program in biological scaling at the University of Arizona. The proposed research program consists of two parts: 1) Expand a general allometric framework to account for patterns of ontogenetic growth across vascular plants. This focus will provide theoretical extensions and empirical assessments of allometric theory to account for patterns of ontogenetic growth and allocation across vascular plants; 2) Extend theoretical framework to quantitatively predict how physiological aspects of plants and variation in allocation and growth rate ramify to influence numerous attributes of large-scale dynamics in ecological communities and ecosystems. This line of investigation is geared toward: (i) documenting prominent scaling laws associated with the production and allocation of biomass across ecological communities; (ii) elucidating how the constraints of plant allometry influences the size structuring and dynamics of ecological communities; and (iii) highlighting a novel theory for the movement of resources and energy through ecosystems. The multifaceted research proposed will combine elaboration of allometric theory, the compilation of large global datasets, and experimental greenhouse manipulations to assess the quantitative predictions of new theoretical insights. The proposed research will contribute to a significant advancement in our ability to mechanistically predict the scaling of pattern and process in biology doc17259 none The end-to-end argument is a fundamental principle of the Internet architecture. The commercialization of the Internet, however, has brought new requirements like trust, QoS, ISP differentiation, third party involvement and less sophisticated users. These requirements have prompted the rethinking of the end-to-end principle in a quest for a new Internet architecture. Past experience indicates that the development of a new architecture will likely be a long process, rich with debate and will draw from a vast and often uncharted solution space. This research will investigate part of the solution space, namely the viability and suitability of Network Assisted Services as a possible component of the future Internet architecture. A network-assistance archi-tecture called Network Samaritans (NetSam) is defined to map the framework for such services. NetSam is motivated by the observation that many new requirements seemingly require new mechanisms in the net-work. Unlike Active Networks, NetSam is a moderate, yet careful step towards an enhanced network that provides a set of services beyond basic forwarding, but spiritually very distant from the malleable network of AN. NetSam preserves the architectural spirit of the Internet by seeking to determine the minimum func-tionality that is both necessary and appropriate in the network. NetSam is not an Internet architecture, but merely a framework for new services pivoting on network assistance, which may become part of the future architecture. Approach The study will be carried out in the context of three important applications: Reliable Multicast, Distributed Denial of Service, and Network Management. The investigation will follow a disciplined, minimalist approach, assuming that a service is not needed unless proven otherwise. Selected services will be decom-posed and their components distributed between the network and the application. Network components willbe simple and general so they can be easily implemented in the routers with minimal security risks. The NetSam architecture defines a new architectural division of services, namely filter and surrogate services. Filter services are very simple and typically implemented in the routers, while surrogate services are more complex and typically implemented at the edges (but use some help from forwarding filters). Together, filters and surrogates provide flexibility and support a large spectrum of services. The study will follow a top-down approach by isolating the applications of network assistance. Simple and general services will be defined, with candidates including packet marking, steering and sampling and then appropriate filters will be designed. The resulting system will be evaluated through implementation and simulation. Impact on Advancing Knowledge This research proposes a new paradigm for application network interaction. Unlike current paradigms that follow either complete separation or union of the two, this research proposes informed interaction between the network and application. The major contribution of this research to science will be the architecturethat governs this interaction. Impact on Education This research will expose students to both theoretical and practical issues on application network interaction. Students will be challenged to think deeper about the distinction between the application and the network, with emphasis on understanding concepts like the end-to-end argument and active networking. Students will learn to analyze application requirements and consider the merits and demerits of router-assisted services. Students will learn how to define a new architecture. Project work will task students with the definition of new services and the decomposition and implementation of their constituent primitives doc17260 none S. Llewellyn Smith, University of California, San Diego The PI proposes to study three problems related to the generic phenomenon of a body falling in a fluid, a problem first considered by Maxwell in . More specifically the first one is to develop a mathematical model for the vorticity being shed from a falling plate. Two-dimensional flow will be considered in this analytical study. The second one involves the extension of the first problem to a falling flexible plate. In this case, the shape of the flexible body is given as a function of time and it is incorporated in the solution of the problem. The third problem considers the falling body through a stratified fluid, experimental investigation will be made as well as analysis with linear modeling. Numerical simulations of the problem will be made in collaboration with a colleague at San Diego State University. Broader impacts of this research, when extended to three dimensions will include aerospace applications and propagation of seedpods. The education plan is quite novel, the PI plans to use sports to teach science and engineering to undergraduates and high school students. The high school students will be those enrolled in the Preuss School at UCSD, which is chartered under the San Diego Unified School District offering intensive college preparatory education program for low-income students doc17261 none Desbrun, Mathieu U of Southern California The primary research objective in this project is to develop new mathematical and computational tools for irregular sampling in Computer Graphics. Digital geometry is rapidly emerging as a new ubiquitous medium, complementing the previous electronic datatypes for sound, images and movies. However, geometry requires to deal with irregular, non-uniform sampling living on curved manifolds, a radically different problematic that calls for novel, fundamental tools. Thus, this work is targeted towards a better understanding and handling of irregular sampling. Building on our theoretical results, we will develop new practical algorithms for fast and predictive modeling and or simulation. We will establish a unified foundation for discrete differential geometry, defining mimetic discretizations of the continuous case. This project will provide both theoretical foundations in the nascent field of Computational Differential Geometry, and robust, reliable tools that will advance the field of Computer Graphics. These foundations and computational tools will facilitate and accelerate the expansion of 3D models in our everyday life, be it in software products (ranging from games to computer-aided segmentation of MRI data), on the web for downloads, or even on small PDAs with 3D scanning abilities. The large number of immediate applications demonstrates the significance of this research: - Compression of 3D objects for optimal storage and transmission; - Modeling of 3D objects, including texturing, editing, smoothing; - Haptic rendering and sculpting of virtual objects; - Realtime virtual surgery training and planning. The educational aspect of the project includes initiatives designed to incorporate the project advancements in the graduate and undergraduate curriculum. The long-term impact of this work will likely be seen in fields that have significant geometric and computational components, such as biology, medicine, and geology doc17262 none While some researchers have aimed at efficiency, they have often developed algorithms without proving them secure. Conversely, researchers focussed on provable security have often produced impractical algorithms. Providing both performance and provable security entails great effort in each domain, often entailing a strange marriage of mathematics with implementation considerations. It is not unusual for researchers to be seeking a generator of a random cyclic group while at the same time worrying about whether finding one will cost too many machine cycles. This research effort aims to address these problems by developing cryptographic algorithms that are vigorously optimized, yet retain proven security. Moreover, for each algorithm a carefully-tested implementation will be provided, along with a specification for porting to other platforms. Finally, the most promising algorithms will be forwarded to standards activities in order to make them widely available. The planned results are to provide the user community with fast, secure algorithms with freely-available reference code; to encourage other researchers to expend efforts in these directions when publishing new protocols, and to introduce students to the cross-disciplinary nature of this research, which blends pure mathematics with architectural considerations doc17263 none The broad aim of this project is to conduct research over a five-year period that investigates the link between visual representations and conceptual understanding of atoms and molecules in simple inorganic and organic molecules. Specific goals of the project are to investigate learners understanding of simple inorganic and organic structures at the atomic and molecular levels, explore how visual spatial-ability relates to the formation of representations of atomic and molecular structure, and develop an Internet-deliverable, multimedia package that has instructional and assessment functions in promoting conceptual understanding of atomic molecular structure through visualization. Specific objectives of the study are to survey student understanding of the difference between atoms and molecules at the microscopic level in relation to their understanding of elements and compounds at the macroscopic level, determine the conditions under which learners invoke the particle nature of matter when explaining chemical phenomena such as phase changes or chemical reactions, describe the nature of students two-dimensional and three-dimensional understanding of atomic and molecular structure in simple molecules, determine the nature of the relationship between visual-spatial ability and the formation of representations of atomic and molecular structure, investigate the efficacy of visual-spatial training in the development of the particle nature of matter using handheld models and molecular modeling applications, and examine the effect of visual-spatial training using handheld models or molecular modeling software on the ability of students to alternate between two- and three-dimensional representations of molecules. Research methods include semi-structured interviews, paper-pencil and on-line tasks, and video recording of student performance. Subjects will be enrolled in chemistry courses for majors, non-majors, and for future elementary teachers. Results from the research will lead to a better understanding of the relationship between cognitive skills and conceptual development leading to improved curricular design and pedagogy in the chemistry classroom doc17264 none CAREER: Automatic Generation of Software Configuration Management Repositories Emmet James Whitehead Twenty-five years of research and development on Configuration Management (CM) systems has bequeathed a rich legacy of data models, system architectures, and implementation approaches. This existing knowledge about CM systems is analyzed to distill out the key lessons, and then leveraged for advanced research on CM. The research advances the maturity of CM knowledge by performing a comprehensive domain analysis of CM systems, and by developing specification languages and technology to permit automatic generation of CM repositories. A domain model permits the characterization of an existing CM system as a point in a multidimensional design tradeoff space. This research describes key design spaces in sufficient detail to permit the specification of a single point in design tradeoff space. This specification can be fed to a generator that automatically generates a matching CM system. Research challenges include the creation of a repository specification language; a language for creating detailed CM system specifications that identify specific design choices, and resolve design tradeoffs; and the development of generator technology that automatically creates source code to implement a given repository specification. This auto-generation technology provides a valuable tool for exploring advanced data models for CM systems doc17265 none Understanding the early events in disease resistance has both fundamental and practical importance. Molecular dissection of disease resistance is currently one of the most intensively studied areas of plant biology and interesting parallels are being established with the animal-pathogen interactions. Although considerable progress has been made over the past ten years, early recognition events that lead to resistance are only just beginning to be understood. In the long term, understanding the molecular basis of specificity in plant-pathogen interactions and the molecular events resulting in resistance will provide new options for developing disease resistant plants. Our long-term goals are to determine the molecular basis of recognition and signaling in plant disease resistance and to engineer new disease resistance specificities. The specific goal of this proposal is to dissect the functional regions of the Pto protein that confer the ability to bind different pathogen products and to initiate physiological pathways (downstream signaling) necessary for defense against the pathogens in diverse plant species. DNA shuffling is a powerful and novel approach for dissecting protein function that makes few a priori assumptions about function yet provides great resolution to dissect individual regions of the protein. DNA shuffling involves the generation of chimeric genes (recombinations from two gene sources) in the test-tube from fragments of naturally occurring versions of a gene. Our proposed studies will further develop DNA shuffling as an experimental tool and provide statistical approaches for interpreting the resulting data. The interaction between the pathogenic bacterium Pseudomonas syringae and Solanaceous plants has become one of the best-characterized plant-pathogen interactions at the molecular level and the Pto gene is ideally suited to DNA shuffling experiments. We have been studying this interaction for several years and have all the necessary biological materials and methodologies in hand to make rapid progress. The first round of DNA shuffling the Pto gene has demonstrated the power and feasibility of the DNA shuffling approach and revealed several previously unrecognized, potentially important domains for binding to the pathogen derived avirulence protein, AvrPto. In this research program we will conduct three parallel lines of investigation that will provide detailed and complementary data on the domains and amino acid sequences of Pto which are required for binding pathogen derived proteins and for downstream signaling: 1) We will conduct a second generation of DNA shuffling as well as specific amino acid substitutions to test the structure - function inferences derived from our first DNA shuffling experiment. 2) We will screen a shuffled library of chimeric genes to identify variants of Pto with new binding specificities. 3) We will shuffle Pto with genes encoding similar proteins from Arabidopsis to identify chimeras that confer the ability to recognize additional avirulence proteins. The proposed experiments are highly multidisciplinary. They are a combination of molecular biology and statistics that draws on plant breeding strategies as well as making and testing structure-function inferences. The postdoc, graduate student, and undergraduates will receive training in both molecular biology and statistics. In addition, they will gain experience in plant-pathogen interactions doc17266 none This research project will develop techniques and systems that answer the following question, independent of content type: What items have the highest probability of being both interesting and relevant to my information need? Whether or not an item (document, resource, etc) is interesting for a given information need will depend on the user s background and taste. Book and web page recommenders will be built and evaluated that predict relevance and interest based on content and interest ratings entered by each member of a large Internet community. A content rating indicates how much a user believes that a relationship exists between an item and a content attribute while an interest rating specifies the user s level of interest in an item. Affinities between users interests and users perception of content relationships will be leveraged to transfer recommendations implicitly between users. The career development plan involves a) the development of a graduate focus in Intelligent Information Systems, which allies approaches from artificial intelligence, information retrieval, and human computer interaction against problems of information overload, and b) development of a summer REU program with the goal of increasing the number of broadly educated US Citizens (particularly women) in Ph.D. computing graduate programs doc17267 none This is a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. The research will explore how an organism extracts information from its environment for learning and perception, both to understand human learning and to create better machine learning algorithms. The first objective is to develop and apply new algorithms to better understand the mapping in the sensory pathways. An important goal is to understand how the visual pathway computes the invariant responses observed in inferotemporal cortex. The second objective is to study the extraction of information from cross-sensory interaction and its role in the development of perceptual invariance. This work will involve integrated computer simulations, mathematical modeling, and psychological experiments. As part of this goal, the researcher will study input feature selection, output feature selection, and the general problem of how dimensions should best interact in machine learning algorithms. The final research goal is to bring together the new knowledge in constructing a better autonomous learning machine that can learn to recognize objects. The algorithm will be more modular than current algorithms and will collect its own training data autonomously through a camera, microphone, and other sensors. The educational goal is to train students in the lab as well as in the classes to think about problems from a variety of approaches. They will be educated in the advantages and limitations of computational modeling, computational analysis, psychophysics and electrophysiology. This CAREER award recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of a teacher-scholar who is likely to become an academic leader of the twenty-first century. The research will improve our understanding of optimal integration between sensory modalities. This will lead to improvement in computer sensing algorithms, including computer vision, speech recognition, and any other application where other sources of information may be available. The work is also expected to give insight to the general problem of how to optimally combine different sources of information for machine learning. The educational aspects of this project are designed to give students a multidisciplinary perspective along with specific skills allowing them to use and appreciate a variety of approaches and techniques doc17268 none Speculative execution has been widely used in computer architecture research in the pursuit of higher levels of instruction level parallelism. However, recent studies have shown that this technique can significantly impact the scalability of the processor pipeline. This research will investigate a number of speculative techniques with respect to performance, scalability, energy efficiency, area costs, and complexity; eventually leading to a novel, scalable architecture to provide high performance at future technology sizes. Such an architecture will minimize the amount of logic on the critical timing path of the processor, relying on small speculative structures to reduce the cycle time of the processor. Off the critical path, a variety of larger speculative structures provide a backing store to the critical path. Some of the techniques to be examined in this research include branch prediction, value and address prediction, data prefetching, early register release and late register allocation, and multiple clustered functional units. Many of these techniques require large and often complex predictors that can impact the cycle time and power density of a processor. This research investigates some techniques to reduce the access time and size of these structures, while still providing the accuracy to avoid costly speculative recovery procedures doc17269 none Institution: University of California-Berkeley This PECASE project encompasses a broad research program to examine the condensed-matter aspects of a novel quantum fluid: spinor Bose-Einstein condensates of Rb-87. The initial experimental background and the consequent theoretical investigation of this intriguing fluid suggest a range of intriguing phenomena waiting to be explored. A dedicated experimental apparatus is being constructed which incorporates magnetic shielding and small scale magnetic traps, large-volume optical traps, a new type of polarization-contrast imaging, and stable laser beams for Raman coupling. Four experimental goals are identified: (1) the first observation of ferromagnetic F=1 spinor condensates, (2) the exploration of dynamic behavior using a novel in-situ imaging technique, (3) accessing the thermodynamic behavior of spinor condensates, and (4) the first observation of F=2 spinor condensates. In addition, it is expected that other deliberately engineered macroscopic quantum systems will be explored to complement this research program. One such system, which was recently identified by this research group, is a novel superfluid with an anisotropic and variable critical velocity. These research goals are being pursued alongside a program of educational activities. In particular, the establishment of a resource for teaching innovations in upper-division physics courses is being undertaken. While teaching innovations have been successfully implemented and tested in introductory physics courses, the development of resources to support such innovations in upper-division courses is sorely lacking, in spite of their great need. Particularly needed is a bank of tested qualitative questions appropriate for in-class and web-based inquiry. Such collections will be created and tested in three areas of upper-division modern physics, disseminated for use at other institutions, and supported further by contributions from other educators. Further educational activities include the exploration of web-based course delivery systems, and the training of future scientists through undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral research positions. This project was originally funded as a CAREER award, and was converted to a Presidential Early Career Award for Engineers and Scientists (PECASE) award in May doc17270 none Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia Arixozona State University CAREER: Time-Varying Signal Processing For Wideband Wireless Communications New and novel signal processing and communication algorithms are required to improve the performance of wireless communications systems, and to meet major challenges that arise from the escalating demand for new higher data rate wireless technologies. These challenges include methodologies to reduce channel impairments, higher data rate and higher bandwidth requirements to provide ubiquitous access, and schemes to improve multiple access transmission. As the nature of the wireless channel is time-varying, these challenges lead to many problems such as multiple access interference and fading due to time and frequency selectivity. Thus, the channel requires two-dimensional time-frequency processing methodologies especially designed to characterize spectral changes with time. Recently, the importance of time-frequency techniques in wireless communications has successfully been demonstrated for interference suppression and channel diversity. This research involves the development of novel time-frequency methods to address problems that surface due to the time-varying nature of the wireless channel. Specifically, these methodologies develop time-varying modulation schemes for code division and orthogonal frequency division multiple access systems, and investigate the effect of the schemes on fading distortions and multiple access interference. In addition, they design time-frequency transforms to enhance detection performance for multiple access systems and detection techniques for the new modulation schemes. They also utilize time-lag and frequency-lag techniques to jointly estimate multipath and Doppler fading parameters needed to improve detection performance at the receiver. Furthermore, they characterize wideband channels and employ the model to reduce fading and multiple access interference for broadband systems such as underwater or satellite wireless communications and third generation wideband systems. These research contributions impact the role and significance of time-varying signal processing in advancing knowledge to meet the high demands for wireless technological advances doc17271 none This CAREER proposal requests support for research and education in astroparticle physics, combining a program to develop low-power electronics for cosmic ray and neutrino detectors with an educational activity for high school teachers and students as well as university graduate and undergraduate students. The proposal outlines a program designed to develop portable, low-power consuming electronics for air fluorescence detectors which could function in self-contained units in environments such as the Utah desert or in space-based detectors. An intelligent trigger would be used to select potential ultra-high energy cosmic ray events using a low-power air fluorescence camera and only then would power-consuming electronics be activated. Plans include tests using the HiRes 2 detector in a remote part of the Utah desert. In the outreach effort of the proposal, the plan would involve high school teachers and university undergraduates building scintillation counters to detect high energy cosmic rays. These counters would then be moved to high schools in Utah and New Mexico to introduce high school students to the concepts and detector techniques of astroparticle physics. The high school program would focus on schools in Native American reservations in these states doc17272 none The translational initiation factor eIF4E is a central component in the initiation and regulation of translation in eukaryotic cells. Through its interaction with the 5 cap structure of mRNA and its translation partner, eIF4G, eIF4E functions to recruit mRNAs to the ribosome. The rapid accumulation of vertebrate EST and genome sequences has allowed the identification of multiple eIF4E family members. Based on sequence homologies and or function, three classes of eIF4E have been recognized; Class I (archetypal eIF4E and sub-types), Class II (eIF4ELP HP) and Class III (eIF4E-3, vertebrates only). The uncovering of multiple eIF4E related proteins suggests an unexpected complexity of the mRNA recruitment step and its regulation in vertebrates and has exemplified the difficulties in annotating DNA sequences on the basis of sequence homologies only. One hypothesis is that each form fills a specialized niche in the recruitment of capped mRNAs by the ribosome. Alternatively, it is possible that not all eIF4E family members function as initiation factors or in translational regulation directly, but in an unrelated function such as RNA RNP export or RNA splicing. The overall goal of this project is to use the knowledge of eIF4E family members and unique reagents accumulated by the Jagus laboratory to elucidate their respective roles in the regulation of gene expression in higher eukaryotes. The objectives are to characterize the functions of eIF4E family members and determine their role in the regulation of gene expression through the following specific aims: 1) analysis of expression pattern of each family member in different tissues and at various developmental stages; 2) determination of the function of each eIF4E family member (from zebrafish and mammals) in translation using a variety of established assays; and 3) kinetic analyses of the interaction of each class with cap-structures, eIF4G and the 4EBPs. The production of cellular proteins begins with the template genetic code that is copied in the form of mRNA. The information encoded by mRNA is translated on the ribosomes into proteins. Control of the recruitment of mRNA by ribosomes is an important form of regulation of gene expression in animal cells. Several protein factors are required for the recruitment of mRNA by the ribosome, the most important of which is the translation factor eIF4E. eIF4E recognizes and binds to the cap structure at the 5 end of mRNA. The accumulation of DNA sequence data has allowed the Jagus laboratory to recognize three classes of eIF4E; Class I (prototypical eIF4E and sub-types), Class II (eIF4ELP HP) and Class III (eIF4E-3, vertebrates only). The overall goal of this project is to characterize the functions of eIF4E family members and determine their role in the regulation of gene expression in the zebrafish developmental system doc17273 none The proposed project aims at establishing power quality as catalyst for the development and renovation of power engineering research and education at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez (UPRM). The proposed power quality research and education activities will prepare a new kind of power engineer, able to meet the energy challenges of the 21st century. Power quality at UPRM will link power systems, power electronics and contemporary energy issues in order to create an integrated perspective of today s electric energy systems. The multidisciplinary nature of power quality problems presents a unique opportunity to renovate power-engineering curriculum and inspire students to engage in energy systems research. Research tasks are centered on the power quality impact of power electronics in the electric system, with application to alternate energy sources. Photovoltaic (PV) systems will be chosen as a representative alternate source. Research activities include nonlinear device modeling for power quality studies; improvement and development of tools to quantify power quality events; implementation and testing of scaled PV systems including various grid-interface options; validation of models indices using the scaled systems; consideration of interconnection issues such as the power quality impact of different grid-interface options and the interaction with other loads in the system. The establishment of a PV testing facility will support research in distributed generation and policy issues such as deregulation doc17274 none Garde, Shekhar Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute The goal of the CAREER proposal is to develop a successful research program for quantitative molecular modeling of biomolecular self-assembly processes in solution using fundamental understanding of the underlying water-mediated interactions. It presents a vision for combing statistical mechanical theories with novel efficient molecular simulation techniques to develop a generalized approach to study thermodynamic, structural, and kinetic aspects of biomolecular interactions. Quantitative modeling of biomolecules in solution, in general, and proteins in particular is of interest to chemical engineers because of its direct relevance to biotech and pharmaceutical applications, designing novel self-assembling materials, and applications in molecular medicine. This project focuses specifically on the T, P, and salt and cosolvent effects on protein stability and interactions in solution. To this end, the specific steps in the proposed research are: 1. (a) To quantify, using atomically detailed simulations and theory, interactions between various archetype (building blocks or protein constituents) solutes mediated by water. (b) To develop, for the first time, an extensive library of the distance dependent free energies of solute-solute interactions in water- the potentials of mean force (PMFs) - for archetype solutes as a function of temperature, pressure, and salt and cosolvent concentration. 2. To develop a general and highly efficient statistical mechanical approach that integrates water-mediated interactions contained in the PMF-library for applications to a variety of self-assembly processes in water. 3. To apply this predictive approach to study of protein thermodynamics as a function of various environmental stresses. Perform complementary large-scale explicit water simulations for selected test systems for investigation of further mechanistic details, assessment of predictions, and fine-tuning doc17275 none Traffic congestion continues to be one of the most pressing problems facing urban America. Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) provide the systems perspective needed for sustainable solutions to urban mobility problems. During the final decade of the 20th century, hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in ITS surveillance, detection, and traveler information technologies. In this first generation ITS there remains a largely untapped potential to exploit the wealth of remotely sensed data for automated, time critical management and control. Multi-scale system-wide forecasting and state estimation is required for next generation ITS to support proactive rather than reactive transportation system management. This career development plan will provide an integrated research and education framework for system-wide traffic condition monitoring and state estimation for intelligent transportation systems. Research activities will include: (1) development of a system-wide ITS traffic condition monitoring and forecasting framework, (2) seasonal ARIMA based Kalman filtering for univariate forecasts, (3) application of continuum traffic flow theory to one-step system forecasts, and (4) continuum theory-based incident detection, missing data estimation, and shock wave propagation prediction. The first research activity is broad in scope and will provide a typological focus for ITS forecasting research and guidance for new course development and course enhancements to support the education and training of 21st century ITS practitioners and researchers. Specific educational activities will include (1) undergraduate course development and enhancement to increase student exposure to information technologies and infrastructure sustainability, (2) development of a new traffic flow theory course directly linked with ITS research activities, (3) involvement of undergraduates in ongoing ITS research activities through interdisciplinary research teams under graduate student leadership, and (4) active recruitment of students from traditionally under-represented groups through various programs aimed at incoming students and graduate school candidates. These research and educational activities will be built and integrated around a new campus traffic operation center and ITS lab. The lab will provide direct access to system-wide traffic condition data and full motion surveillance video. This ready access to system-wide data will greatly enhance the research and graduate education efforts. Special emphasis will be placed on exposing undergraduates to ITS research and development through course projects and undergraduate participation in ITS research teams. The ITS lab will also serve as a showcase for student recruitment, including efforts to attract women and under-represented minorities to civil engineering doc17276 none Using a modular building block strategy, conjugated molecules and polymers containing polyoxometalate (POM) clusters covalently linked in a variety of architectures will be synthesized for the first time. The proposed research stems from a recent discovery of a novel reaction protocol which allows the efficient and facile functionalization of POM clusters with a variety of aromatic amines and the recent demonstration that functionalized POM clusters can undergo Pd-catalyzed organic coupling reactions. The proposed hybrid systems not only represent truly new and novel classes of functional materials where strong electronic interactions exist between delocalized d-electrons, they are also expected to possess extremely interesting electrical and optical properties. Preliminary studies clearly demonstrate the suitability of the proposed modular building block approach. %%% The educational goal of this Career Development plan is threefold: to be an excellent mentor producing creative and productive scientists, an efficient instructor promoting chemical science education, and a passionate community member assisting the local school district with its science education. A new teaching style has been brought to the Organic Chemistry class and students response has been extremely positive. Strong efforts have been and will continue to be made towards training science teachers for the local community and exposing young high school students to research laboratories. The proposed research is geared toward discovery of new chemistry and innovative materials. The planned educational activities represent combined efforts in effective education and community involvement. They form a unified career plan, a journey toward becoming a creative researcher and an effective educator doc17277 none This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) research and education project uses high-resolution, three-dimensional tomographic imaging to better understand and communicate the process of failure in rock. Accomplishing the ultimate goal of predicting rock mass failure will result in significantly reduced fatalities, lowered construction costs, and increased environmental protection. Failure prediction extends to all aspects of rock mechanics including tunnels, mines, rock slopes, earthquakes, waste repositories, and bridge and dam abutments. To predict rock failure, it is quite helpful to monitor the redistribution of stresses within the rock. Recent advances in computational power have allowed this to be done using acoustic waves and tomographic imaging. The basic principal behind monitoring the redistribution of stresses is that microfractures within the rock are closed under increased loading, allowing the acoustic wave to travel at a greater velocity and with less attenuation. This method has been used successfully in the laboratory and has had growing, but poorly founded, application in the field. This project will put the technique of imaging stress redistribution in rock on a sound theoretical and practical foundation by 1) standardizing methods and 2) extending results of prior studies into the gap between laboratory- and field-scale studies. Educational efforts related to rock failure prediction will also be enhanced. Specific tasks associated with both education and research include 1) generating three-dimensional tomographic images to observe relevant alterations to the fabric of rock samples loaded to failure, and 2) using those images to calibrate numerical modeling results. By collecting data as rock samples are loaded, time-lapse animations will be developed which will assist in the communication of stress-analysis to undergraduates. Additional educational efforts focus on transitioning from a presentational teaching method to a constructivist model for two of the proposer s undergraduate courses and developing a graduate-level course for understanding failure through coupled analysis of imaging and numerical modeling results doc17278 none Ubiquitous computing offers the vision of a fundamentally more responsive physical environment in which users benefit from seamless interaction with a pervasively internetworked world of myriad wireless and wired devices, e.g. wireless personal digital assistants, video-enabled mobile phones, wearable computers, appliances, kiosks, toys, and sensors. A key component of the developing infrastructure for ubiquitous computing is based on the discovery and advertisement of services. In a typical ubiquitous computing scenario, a user who walks into a room is able to interact with a variety of services offered by the devices in the room. The goal of the service discovery framework is to assist the user s application in determining what services are available for interaction in this room. While the current service discovery framework represents an essential initial component of the ubiquitous computing infrastructure, additional capabilities are needed to address the challenges introduced by multidevice multi-user contexts. The objectives of this CAREER proposal are to explore the means for fostering scoped multi-device interaction in ubiquitous computing environments. Several key research areas are identified in this proposal as challenging problems that must be solved in order to enable multidevice multi-user ubiquitous computing: Active device resolution among multiple devices, with special emphasis on social context Active user resolution among multiple users, with special emphasis on social context Composing joint wide-area and local-area multi-device meta-services Beyond remote control: enabling new classes of ubiquitous computing applications The intent of this proposal is to first understand the implications and requirements of multi-device multiuser contexts, and to then design and develop the mobile computing applications, distributed middleware systems, meta-services, and wireless and application-level networking protocols that will assist in making the vision of multi-device ubiquitous computing a reality. The initial goal is to build the infrastructure necessary for ubiquitous computing in a departmental Smart Spaces Lab. A course taught on ubiquitous computing will allow students to make hands-on contributions to building portions of the infrastructure in the Smart Spaces Lab, even as the curricula is upgraded to reflect recent research innovations. The infrastructure will eventually be able to support remote control applications, wireless peer-to-peer applications, and event-notification applications, just to name a few. Once the research lab technology matures, the goal is to deploy this infrastructure throughout the university campus. The impact on the university at large will be highly beneficial, as the most mature technology should be immediately available throughout campus. As soon as the event notification, wireless message passing and remote-control infrastructures are in place, students, professors, and citizens should be able to immediately benefit from the fruits of our ubiquitous computing research. Campus-wide deployment is expected to begin about halfway through this five year research plan doc17279 none MacRae Arsenic is the only contaminant for which exposure through drinking water has been proven to cause cancer in humans. The US Environmental Protection Agency has concluded that the present drinking water limit of 50 ug L arsenic is not sufficiently protective and proposes a new limit of 10 ug L. In most cases, the arsenic originates in the geologic materials of the aquifer. While correlations with bedrock types have been made, the factors that affect arsenic concentrations and speciation in drinking water are poorly understood. As(III), the reduced inorganic form, is more mobile and more toxic than As(V), thus speciation affects both the concentration and the health implications of arsenic exposure. Microorganisms probably affect As concentrations in groundwater, but the magnitude and nature of their participation in the arsenic cycle have not yet been clarified. Microorganisms can affect the chemistry of arsenic compounds in a number of ways. Laboratory and field studies as proposed in this program will build on the PI s preliminary data that indicate the presence of arsenate reducing microorganisms in well water to determine how microbial activities affect soluble arsenic concentrations. This information will be used to create a conceptual model of the processes that affect As in groundwater. Molecular probes will be developed to determine the importance of the isolated arsenate-degrading microorganisms in situ. Existing geological data and field data gathered by high school and undergraduate students will be used to assess whether or not the model derived from laboratory experiments is supported by field observations. Since the project requires an interdisciplinary approach, links with microbial ecologists and environmental microbiologists will be strengthened to support the investigator s research goals. The research results will form the basis of new modules in two undergraduate environmental engineering courses. An outreach program for high school students will also contribute to the collection of field data doc17280 none TNumerous civilian and military ventures are showing keen interest in the thermo photovoltaic (TPV) generation of electricity as an attractive, clean, efficient, and inexpensive alternative energy. The low power (about C) of TPV heat sources makes gallium antimonide (GaSb), rather than silicon, the most common material for TPV cells. Research on GaSb TPV cells is currently focused on: (1) increasing the TPV efficiency, and (2) reducing the cost of production. This document proposes the first study of gallium arsenide (GaAs) as a viable material for TPV cells. There are two compelling reasons. First, the manufacture of TPV cells on a GaAs substrate could take advantage of existing GaAs facilities for low-cost, high-yield, large-volume production compatible with GaAs integrated circuits (ICs) on large six-inch substrates. Second, our innovative TPV cells can be designed for exceptionally high efficiency because of their simultaneous response, on the same GaAs substrate, to both the near infrared (less than 1.5micron) and the mid-infrared (2-5micron). This proposal develops three enabling technologies for making high efficiency TPV cells on GaAs: (1) innovative design of intersubband TPV devices for high power conversion efficiency of broadband heat sources; (2) novel Low-Temperature Grown (LTG) GaAs designed for strong absorption at the 1.5micron wavelength (an important TPV wavelength); (3) growth and annealing of very highly doped (10^{20}cm^{-3}) contacts, and highly doped tunnel junctions connecting series-TPV cells. This proposed work is ideally suited for an academic environment because of its interdisciplinary nature, emphasizing: both theory and experiment; fundamental studies of absorption, transport, and materials; and innovative TPV cells. One innovation is the proposed design of Intersubband Tandem TPV (ITTPV) cells, which have projected conversion efficiencies (35%) much higher than those (6%) of existing devices. The proposed study of LTG-GaAs goes beyond previous work in that it emphasizes the physics and engineering of a much stronger absorption at 1.5micron. The proposed work on very highly doped TPV tunnel junctions and contacts emphasizes: developing physical models of doping limitations; and a novel thermal anneal much more rapid (milliseconds instead of seconds) than the state-of-the-art capability. PI s educational program has three components: (1) new curriculum development, (2) mentoring activities, and (3) participation in research seminars doc17281 none This CAREER development project explores optical phenomena in semiconductor nanostructures. Various ultrafast and nonlinear optical techniques will be employed to probe the dynamics of charge and spin carriers in nanostructures and address issues of contemporary interest. More specifically, issues and questions addressed include: Autler-Towns splitting or dressed excitons in quantum wells, spin dephasing in semiconductor quantum wires, spin-charge separation in Tomonaga-Luttinger liquids, and carrier-induced ferromagnetism in magnetic semiconductors. The research work will train student researchers in frontier projects to produce next generation experts in semiconductor optics with broad knowledge in quantum optics, quantum information science, and nanotechnology. The impact of this project includes: increased understanding of the quantum states and dynamics of interacting and or strongly driven electrons in nanostructures; new spectroscopy techniques; novel device concepts and implementations; establishment of the quantum nature of semiconductor-light interaction; progress towards the solid-state realization of quantum information processing, computation and communications; and provision of a controlled environment in which to address unanswered questions in many-body physics. This CAREER award will develop a five-year program that coherently integrates research and education in the area of optical studies of semiconductor nanostructures. The proposed research work will train undergraduate and graduate students in frontier projects to produce next generation experts in semiconductor optics with broad knowledge in quantum optics, quantum information science, and nanotechnology. Various cutting-edge optical techniques will be employed to study electron dynamics in nanostructures. Such research will increase our understanding of quantum effects in nanostructures, increase students readiness for the fast-paced world of modern quantum technology, lead to novel device concepts and implementations, and bring significant progress towards the solid-state realization of quantum information processing, computation and communications doc17282 none This CAREER proposal combines a research program on the fundamental mechanics of web handing systems with two curriculum development projects. The research development plan in web handling is motivated by the needs of companies in many industries, including 3M, Kodak, Procter & Gamble, and SRS Technologies, to better understand and more rapidly process thin, flexible material. These handling processes produce a wide variety of products such as carpet, fabric, shrink-wrap, diapers, and paper towel. Universal issues that prevent more efficient operation-such as slip in wound rolls, wrinkling, creasing, and vibration-will be studied. The fundamental questions answered by this research will allow companies to more rapidly and efficiently produce their products. The curriculum development plan has two major thrusts. The first thrust will be the development of two unique courses concerning the mathematical modelling of solids and structures. These courses will expose students to modelling issues that occur in the study of web handling systems and throughout engineering. The second thrust will be an extensive overhaul of Penn States required undergraduate vibrations course. One section will be combined with the optional vibrations laboratory class. Additionally, the studio concept, combining lecture, laboratory and recitation into one educational experience, will be introduced. Along with traditional lectures, small teams of students will use classroom computers to complete activities, allowing them to more thoroughly learn the subject doc17283 none PI: Msayuresh V. Kothare Institution: Lehigh University Proposal Number: Micromechanical systems are a new genergation of minature chemical systems that carry out chemical reactions and separations in precisely fabricated three dimensional microreactor configurations in the size range of a few microns to a few hundred microns. Typical microchemical systems combine fluid handling and reaction capabilities with electronic sensing and actuation, are fabricated using integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing techniques and use silicon and related IC industry materials, polymers, ceramics, glass or quartz as their material of construction. The goal of this integrated research and education program is to study the unique dynamic properties of such integrated microchemical systems and develop a framework for designing implementable feedback control techniques for this class of microsystems. The research program will evolve around the following four central themes (1) dynamic modeling, simulation and dynamical analysis of microchemical systems; (2) model-based feedback controller design using fundamental, reduced order and empirical input-output models; (3) impact of dynamical considerations on microsystem design; and (4) experimental verification of controller design on a prototype microchemical system. The fundamental distributed parameter modles will be used to analyze the nonlinear steady-state and dynamic properties of the microsystem. The reduced order models as well as the empirical models will be used to synthesize low-order model-based controllers suitble for implementation on the experimental microchemical test system. Concepts from distributed and boundary control theory will be employed to study the model-based feedback control formulation of microchemical systems and to develop a technical framework for microsystem controller design. Efficient implementation of these controller algorithms will be investigated by using the experimental prototype microchemical system. Complementary to this research program will be a signicant educational eort to translate the research results to the chemical engineering core curriculum. At the graduate level, (a) lecture modules on microchemical systems uid- ow modeling and microreactor phase-plane analysis will be developed for incorporation in the core graduate level courses in uid mechanics and reactor design; and (b) lecture modules on distributed and boundary control will be developed for incorporation in a graduate level cross-listed elective course on multivariable and nonlinear control. At the undergraduate level, team-based independent research projects will be dened through three avenues: (a) the Opportunities for Student Innovation (OSI) undergraduate research program at Lehigh; (b) summer research and semester research credit at Lehigh; and (c) summer internships at Sandia National Laboratories. In addition, to incorporate microreactor concepts as \core concepts in the undergraduate curriculum, lecture modules will be developed for the following courses: (a) reactor design, to introduce a microreactor as yet another standard reactor; (b) process control, to demonstrate the dynamics and conventional control of microreactors; and (c) process design, to demonstrate the issues of micro owsheet design, integration, synthesis and control for integrated microplants. Collaboration with industry will be facilitated through the Pittsburgh Digital Greenhouse, a consortiumof microelectronics companies located in Pennsylvania, and a national laboratory through a collaborative agreement with the Sandia National Laboratories doc17284 none Morgenroth The overall objective of this proposal is to determine the influence of dynamic variations of shear stress on biofilm detachment. Mechanisms of biofilm detachment are poorly understood and procedures for the design and operation of biofilm reactors are mainly empirical. In biofilm reactors, the process of detachment is necessary to balance bacterial growth and to prevent clogging. In addition, the overall rate and time dependent variation of detachment significantly influence bacterial selection within the biofilm community. Specific objectives of this proposal are to determine the relationship between detachment rate, detached particle characteristics, and overall reactor performance under constant or dynamically fluctuating shear conditions. Based on experimental results, a dynamic mathematical biofilm model will be developed. The model will be used for experimental design, interpretation of research results and to teach students and practitioners the underlying principles governing the application of biofilms in biological treatment processes. Innovative tools for on-line monitoring of detachment will be developed. Laser backscattering and in-line video microscopy will be adapted to provide continuous information on the size and shape characteristics of detached particles. On-line techniques for measuring bacterial respiration rates within the biofilm reactor will be developed and used to correlate overall biofilm reactor performance with detachment dynamics. Detached particles will also be characterized for strength, surface hydrophobicity, surface charge, and abundance of nitrifying bacteria. Laboratory scale biofilm systems will be developed that allow biofilms to grow under defined hydrodynamic conditions (annular reactor) or under conditions used in full-scale reactors (packed bed reactor, airlift reactor). A mathematical biofilm model will be developed that will be applied both in research and in teaching. Inputs to the model will consist of wastewater composition, biofilm thickness distribution, and detached particle size distribution. The mathematical model will be tested in the laboratory and in full-scale biofilm reactors doc17285 none This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award focuses on research and education on the subject of evolution of multi-scale structures of polymeric material during processing. The influence of these evolving structures on mechanical, electrical, and thermal properties in chaotic mixing of miscible and immiscible polymers and nanofiller systems under controlled conditions of strain rates and temperatures is experimentally investigated. Chaotic mixing offers the following highly desirable attributes: (a) mixing occurs by both shear and extensional flow components, (b) polymer-polymer or polymer-filler interfacial areas are created at exponential rates, with much less energy consumption for the same degree of mixing than in conventional extrusion processes, (c) self-similar mixing microstructures are formed by repeated stretching and folding of the interfaces, showing nested striations, droplets, or layers of one polymer in the other leading to potential morphologies so far not achieved in conventional single and twin-screw extrusion schemes and (d) mixing uniformity is achieved with retention of self-similar microstructures, as opposed to randomization in conventional single- and twin-screw extruders. Rapid interfacial area generation will expedite reactions between functional polymers in reactive processing and in compatibilization in addition to rapid reduction in dispersed domain sizes. The self-similar microstructures produced will offer preferred orientation of the crystallites dispersed phases for augmentation of anisotropic electrical, mechanical, and chemical properties and will act as tools for creating unusual morphologies for design of polymer products with tailored properties. The study to be undertaken using twin-rotor chaotic batch mixer and continuous chaotic mixer will yield low cost, rapid, and energy-efficient mixing technology for scale-up studies, optimization of existing products, and process development in association with industrial partners. The education program will provide hands-on polymer education to high school and undergraduate students, including minority, through summer research and senior research projects and through participation in seminars and presentations. A new course will be developed on the applications of chaotic mixing in materials processing for graduate students and industry, which will draw heavily from the proposed research activities. In addition, web based course modules will be designed on rheology and polymerization reactor engineering to reach a much larger body of students outside conventional classrooms doc17286 none This project explores the development constraints faced by Russian agriculture. The project will quantify three critically important constraints with strong spatial dimensions (physical environment, burden of space, and rural demographics), help to understand their implications, and evaluate prospects for Russia s agricultural development through the prism of these constraints. Previously, explanations of Russian farming s failures have been mostly based on aspatial socio-economic factors such as incentives, ownership, and communal forms of life. However, low efficiency and poor production outcomes have survived at least three changes in the dominant socio-economic order and this provides motivation for an alternative explanation. The research methodology will combine multivariate statistical analysis, field observations, and GIS. The latter will be used to juxtapose place-specific estimates of agricultural development constraints and to produce relevant and informative maps. The study will involve two spatial scales: European Russia as a whole and three diverse provinces of European Russia in particular. Following the delimitation of marginal lands, factors of agricultural variance within non-marginal spaces will be explored. These factors are fertility of the soil, accessibility to major urban cores, and market conversion. It will be shown how their combined effect produces differential productivity in the Russian agricultural system. The research will challenge aspatial and Human Geography insensitive explanations of Russian agricultural travails and contribute to knowledge about transitioning to market economy. The breaking news mentality of the s whereby the Russian scene was viewed through the prism of upheavals and political personalities, rather than long-term processes and their historical and geographical antecedents and roots, will also be challenged. The study will establish an example of a replicable framework for presenting both the data and results of our spatial statistical and cartographic analysis. The databases assembled in the process of this research will be fully documented and published in a software-independent format, queryable across the Internet and useable by other researchers in the field. This design will contribute to the ongoing development of research infrastructure to enable integration of results from diverse area and case studies doc17287 none Deformation Mechanisms at the Materials Microstructural Length Scale The objective of this CAREER project is to integrate the study of the microscale materials behavior with a modern educational program in the area of the mechanical properties of materials. The proposed strategy is to develop an integrated experimental-numerical framework, which will attempt to stimulate student curiosity to explore the deformation mechanisms at these length scales. The proposed research is to study the evolution of the heterogeneous deformation fields and the history of hardening using a unique combination of efforts at the proper microstructure length scale. The fundamental principles are quite general and may be applied to many advanced materials systems that comprise deformation or material removal at the micro nano scale. The research objective will be realized through: 1) development of unique and stable testing configurations for advanced materials structures; 2) development of proper experimental techniques for full-field, finite-deformation measurements to monitor the evolution of the heterogeneous deformation and hardening at the proper length scale; and 3) applications of this approach to the deformation induced crack tip toughening and the interfacial toughening of layered structures. The measurements will be the benchmark tests against which both phenomenological models and discrete dislocation dynamics will be calibrated. The provided quantitative understanding will be carried over to: 1) the mechanism-based modeling or better informed continuum models employing finite element analysis, and 2) the possible hierarchies of multi-scale modeling through collaborations with Ames National Lab. This will allow a significant expansion in our ability to simulate the material behavior and address its reliability at such scales. This is a fundamental requirement for achieving further technological advancement for these advanced materials systems. The proposed educational vision integrates a modern view of mechanical properties of materials into the Iowa State University mechanics of materials curriculum, providing individuals in academia and industry with specialized knowledge in mechanical properties in small dimensions and the advanced experimental and computational techniques. Utilizing the myriad of web-based instructional research and resources, a specialized web-based experimental mechanics curriculum will be developed. In addition, a small research oriented group that facilitates interaction among honor and special-program students will be developed to give them the opportunity to express their curiosity in understanding the mechanics of materials and structure behaviors doc17288 none D Angelo There are hundreds of Superfund sites in the US contaminated with PCBs and 38 states with fish consumption advisories due to PCB bioaccumulation. Several biogeochemical processes, acting individually or in combination, attenuate pollutants in soils. However processes are dependent on environmental factors that regulate the growth and activities of specific microbial groups or assemblages, as well as bioavailability of chemicals to degradation. This study investigates the roles of these factors in regulating microbial community composition and detoxification processes in PCB-contaminated wetland soils collected from different parts of the country. Detoxification mechanisms, including a variety of technologies will be investigated in order to ameliorate a highly chlorinated PCB using indigenous soil organisms. This research is unique in that it links changes in environmental conditions with changes in microbial community structure and critical microbial detoxification activities in soils. The overall objective of the proposed research seeks to evaluate whether environmental selection pressures are significantly and reproducibly manifested as changes in microbial populations and PCB transforming activities in different soil environments. For the educational component of the plan - a new Environmental Biogeochemistry Laboratory Methods Manual will be published and used as text materials for a new Environmental Biogeochemistry Summer Field Camp to be held at UK s research forest. The teaching objective is aimed at integrating research, teaching and mentoring through the publication of a Biogeochemistry Laboratory Methods Manual and development of a Biogeochemistry Camp that will be open to graduate and undergraduate students, post docs, and teachers interested in environmental chemistry and microbial ecology. The manual will be a user-friendly guide of step-by-step instructions on some of the latest techniques in environmental research doc17289 none The theory of automatic control has reached considerable maturity in the last few decades. Solutions to a large number of diverse and challenging problems have been obtained, and many important mathematical aspects of the theory are well understood. However, there remain several categories of problems for which the success of standard control tools has been limited. These include: 1. Control of systems that cannot be stabilized by continuous feedback. 2. Control of systems with sensor or actuator constraints. 3. Control of systems with large-scale modeling uncertainty. The research and educational development plan proposed here is aimed at designing hybrid control algorithms. In this framework, a continuous-time process is controlled by means of logic-based switching among a family of regulators. The closed-loop system is then called hybrid because it combines continuous and discrete dynamics. We study several situations in which such a control paradigm is natural and helps overcome various shortcomings of more traditional control methodologies. The primary focus of this research is on systematic development of tools for hybrid control design, applicable to general and useful classes of nonlinear dynamical systems. We propose to achieve this goal by recognizing common trends that unify different aspects of the problems under consideration, and by exploiting recent advances made by the proposer and collaborators in nonlinear disturbance attenuation and in stability analysis of switched systems. Hybrid control techniques are suitable for implementation in the context of many important applications that drive the modern technology, such as software-enabled control, control over networks, and vision-based control. These methods help bridge the gap between the mathematical control theory and engineering practice. For this reason, they also generate high student interest. Our research program will be integrated into the academic curriculum of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign through course development, student mentoring, laboratory creation, and tutorial publications doc17290 none This CAREER project develops a multiscale approach to modeling and simulation of microstructural development in epitaxial thin films. The energetics and kinetics of surface steps and their interactions with lattice dislocations will be investigated. To capture features over a wide range of length scales, three modeling methodologies, atomistic, micromechanical, and continuum, will be utilized. Models suited for larger length scale simulations will be built from their smaller length scale counterparts, while retaining relevant physics. This approach is critical to engineering structures of interest for current and emerging micro- and nano-technologies, which are too large to model directly using atomistic approaches, but small enough that atomic-level phenomena have a large role in determining behavior. The education component builds on the PI s current activities to address the needs of high school, undergraduate, and graduate students and local industries. Specific initiatives include instruction and assistance to high school teachers on the principles of engineering and developing events and programs designed to promote participation and inclusiveness in the ASME student section at Stony Brook. A high school outreach program to under-represented minority students will be developed together with the students of ASME and the minority engineering student organizations at Stony Brook. In addition to attracting minorities to engineering, the program is intended to teach leadership and organization skills to participating students and to convey a sense of duty for community service doc17291 none A major limitation to the wide use of MEMS and other micro-scale devices is the availability of suitable power sources. Combustion is an attractive power source because of its high energy density, but there are major technical challenges including ignition from cold start and control of sustained combustion. Given the high surface-to-volume ratio inherent in a microcombustor, there is attraction in using heterogeneous catalytic reactions to promote ignition and to extend flammability limits. This is a computational and experimental study of the physical and chemical processes relevant to this strategy. Advanced computational methods are developed and validated with experimental measurements and parametric studies are done specifically targeted at small-scale combustion systems. Two canonical configurations are studied. First, stagnation-point flow over a catalytic surface is analyzed by modifying existing transient one-dimensional stagnation-point flow code with detailed surface and gas-phase chemical kinetics. Parametric studies address various combustion regimes, modified ignition and extinction limits due to catalytic reaction, and overall combustion performance. Also, the effects of transient modulation of the surface temperature and inlet flow are investigated as a potential control methodology. Second, a microchannel combustor is modeled by developing a high-fidelity multidimensional direct simulation code providing detailed temporal and spatial information on the combustor process. The feasibility of a nonpremixed combustion mode (using a coaxial supply of fuel and oxidizer) as a means of enhancement of ignition and heat generation is assessed. For both configurations, experimental measurements of temperature distribution and product species compositions are compared with computational results to validate embedded submodels. As an education program, interactive computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools are designed for undergraduate and graduate students in thermo-fluid sciences. These include application packages that are compatible with widely used kinetic simulation packages and web-based tools for solving differential equations and simulating data on reacting flows doc17292 none PI: Robert S. Parker Institution: University of Pittsburgh Proposal Number: Industry is demanding higher and higher levels of performance from their processes and little capital investment is available for retrofitting or additional sensors. Thus processes must operate in highly nonlinear regimes, likely under linear control algorithms. This CAREER award addresses the integration of research and education with the goal of developing tools and students capable of solving problems in nonlinear model identification and control. Specifically, the research will focus on the use of control-relevant process models in nonlinear model-based optimal controller design. The modeling studies use third-order Volterra and Volterra-Laguerre representations, a subclass of nonlinear polynomial moving-average models. The selection of these model structures is motivated by (i) the ability to tailor input sequences to excite (or cancel) particular model dynamics; (ii) the opportunity to reduce the coefficient space and noise corruption with little to no decrease in model accuracy; (iii) the wide class of systems these model structures can approximate (e.g. polymerizers, distillation columns, bioreactors); and (iv) the utility of these structures in controller synthesis. Based on a polymerization reactor case study, third-order Volterra models will be identified using tailored input sequences, design to excite the linear, nonliear diagonal, or nonlinear off-diagonal terms. The resulting model will then be projected onto the orthonormal Laguerre basis to reduce coefficient dimension and noise effects on the output estimate. These models will then be used to synthesize a nonlinear model predictive control algorithm. The culmination of the project will be the integration of the identification and control results into a single algorithm for simultaneous identification and control. The educational component has two primary aims. The first is to help the student retain material from class to class, and to be able to employ material from a given class on an application example. Consistent with ABET criteria, these cross-curriculum problems will probe the students mathematical skills. The type of problems examined serve to vertically integrate the curriculum with a recurring case study which draws on earlier courses, and therefore reinforces retention of material across classes. The integration of research and education is accomplished through the use of research results in the development of two new units for the Process Control Modules, case studies that examine data-driven model identification and nonlinear model predictive control at a level accessible to the undergraduate doc17293 none An advanced renewable based distributed power generation system is required for the next age of the alternative energy market. Improved and dependable systems for energy conversion, energy storage requires power quality demands and compatibility with distributed energy systems, also called by microgrid or micropower energy systems. An intelligent-based control methodology must be developed to optimize the microgrid system requirements, aiming convergence of adaptive, parameter insensitive and on-line learning capabilities. This research project is concerned with three main issues (1) small distributed generation prototype development of a high frequency ac link (HFAC) microgrid system, (2) analysis and modeling of behavior interactions and architecture management and (3) intelligent control applications. Power electronic systems will be designed to connect distributed sources to the HFAC. Intelligent control techniques will be developed to implement capabilities of learning by sensing the environment in order to reach its objective of optimum power operation, automatic functioning, self-monitoring and self-checking of failures and detection recovery for efficient user interface. A behavior based hierarchic control capable to generate set-points for optimal neural network controllers based on Adaptive Critic Design will be developed. An educational plan is focused to leverage the interdisciplinary mission of the Engineering Division at Colorado School of Mines. It is proposed the development of educational material will be developed to allow students to have experience in studying theoretical foundations of intelligent control systems, understanding their functional operation through the use of computer for simulation in promising research directions. The five-year, integrated development plan encompasses research, education and outreach activities in order to incorporate intelligent control techniques for performance improvement of distributed energy systems used in residential and small business applications doc17294 none Professor Heather Allen of Ohio State University has received a CAREER award from the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program for sum frequency generation studies on gas-liquid surfaces, especially ones of environmental interest. Ammonia uptake by aqueous sulfuric acid solution surfaces will be investigated using broad-band SFG, allowing the acquisition of vibrational spectra specific to the surface region. The spectra will be interpreted to give molecular level pictures of the surface uptake mechanisms of the reactive gas by the liquid. The ammonia-sulfuric acid system has relevance to the formation and growth of ammonium sulfate aerosols throughout the troposphere and is particularly important in polluted urban atmospheres. The PI will incorporate problem-based-learning in undergraduate courses, and will sponsor a program that will award summer research internships with the goal of increasing the participation of women and under-represented minorities in scientific research. Work on the chemical and physical properties of aerosols will lead to a better understanding of their role in atmospheric chemical cycles and in climate. Previous droplet-train experiments showed evidence for surface-mediated reactions, and new laser-based spectroscopies allow the examination of those reactions in a direct manner. Students involved in this research and education plan will be exposed to work that will lead to a better understanding of pollution, as well as the role of basic research in solving complex chemical problems relevant to society doc17295 none This proposal will deal with concerns of the development and application of methods for fault detection of nonlinear dynamical systems. Fault detection of linear systems is by now well established, but application of these techniques to nonlinear systems can lead to a loss of performance. The market for fault detection is growing, as more and more manufacturing and industrial centers are interested in improving their productivity by reducing unplanned maintenance and limiting losses to product due to equipment failure. In addition, many manufactures have installed sophisticated sensor and data collection networks in order to closely monitor their processes, which would enable the application of very sophisticated fault detection schemes. Fault detection can be as simple as placing limits on the allowable range of sensor measurements, but when the systems that are monitored are dynamic systems, more sophisticated methods can and should be applied. This is because dynamic systems, by the their very nature, have temporal relationships between the system variables that characterize both normal and faulted operating conditions. The challenge is to codify these temporal relationships. One method is to develop analytical models from first principles. In most model based fault detection schemes, output observers are designed which generate residual signals that measure the disagreement between the model and the measured data. However, these models are sometimes difficult to come by. The systems described above are nonlinear thermo-fluid systems that are difficult to model accurately and the resulting models would have many unknown parameters. In this case, system identification methods can be employed. This proposal is aimed at developing a theory of the interactions between the system identification and fault detection processes. The focus is on a general, practical method of nonlinear fault detection which is easily implemented on input output models that are generated by modern nonlinear system identification methods. The basic question that is addressed is to determine how the choices made during the system identification process, such as the model structure. The objective function, the choice of regularization, and the validation procedure influence or interact with the fault detection process doc17296 none There is a great demand for next-generation optical communication devices that are capable of wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) switching while avoiding optical-electronic-optical interconnects which compromise transmission speed. Compound semiconductors such as Indium Phosphide (InP) have direct bandgaps that allow active optical devices like lasers and optical amplifiers to be realized - an advantage over silicon, an indirect bandgap material limited primarily to electronic devices. The monolithic integration of InP-based active optoelectronics with micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) actuators will enable the realization of versatile WDM lossless switches, tunable lasers and tunable optical filters at 1.55 mm. At this wavelength optical fibers have minimal losses. This CAREER award supports an interdisciplinary research and education program by combining the three technical areas of MEMS, optoelectronics, and microfabrication of III-V materials for integrated optical microsystems. The research component aims to demonstrate the advantages of using InP-based materials in monolithic integration of MEMS and optical structures by reducing the optical losses on the chip, thus making complex devices achievable. The initial focus of this program is to investigate the electro-mechanical behavior of InP for development of electrostatically driven linear microactuators. The results of this study will enable the use of InP-based materials for (1) development of an innovative 4x4 optical cross-connect switch by combining the MEMS linear microactuators and optical waveguides and (2) integration of the optical cross-connect switch with semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) to minimize optical losses in the microsystem. The educational component focuses on a research oriented curriculum by integrating well-formulated research problems in teaching undergraduate and graduate level courses in MEMS and Microsystems and by exposing students to hands-on experience, industrial practice, and teamwork in both classrooms and laboratories. An early exposure of students to interactive research environments is accomplished by providing avenues for direct interaction between undergraduate and graduate students on collaborative research projects doc17297 none The focus of this research is to use the polymerization of ylides by trialkyl boranes for the controlled synthesis of linear and cyclic hydrocarbon polymers. The attributes of this methodology are the ability to control molecular weight, to prepare functionalized polymethylene derivatives and novel architectures and polymethylene copolymers. Because of the importance of the closely related polyethylene, these functional materials have potential value as compatibilizers, blending agents and surface modifiers. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Kenneth J. Shea of the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. Professor Shea will focus his work on the development of new polymerization reactions for the preparation of substituted carbon backbone polymers. The development of new catalysts for these reactions will contribute to the mechanistic understanding of carbon-carbon forming reactions and can benefit both polymer and small molecule synthesis. The research is also an excellent arena for the training of graduate students doc17298 none The union of TIMED (Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics) satellite measurements with CEDAR (Coupling Energetics and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions) ground-base measurements offers an unparalleled opportunity to explore the energetics and dynamics of the mesosphere and lower thermosphere (MLT) region (80-100 km). In particular, measurements will be made using the CEDAR Mesospheric Temperature Mapper (MTM) that is capable of quantitative investigations of intensity and temperature perturbations induced by a range of long and short-period gravity waves and tides. As part of this CEDAR Post Doctoral application it is proposed that Dr. Alok Taori (a recent Ph.D. from the Physical Research Laboratories, India), will join the PI s group and will develop a leading role in the operation, analysis and interpretation of the MTM data obtained during the CEDAR-TIMED coordination program. Alok Taori has an excellent research record that is highly complementary to the PI s current research program and his experience in building, testing and operating airglow instrumentation will be most beneficial to the sustained success of this research program. He is already familiar with the methods of analysis of OH temperature data and has good computer skills necessary for further development of the existing software including new tools for near-simultaneous OH O2 data reduction, analysis and presentation. Furthermore, his Ph.D. research experience with day-time OH instrumentation and measurements will be applied to the possible development of a new day-time OH capability at USU to complement the existing MTM measurements to provide novel and frequent 24-hr measurements of the MLT region doc17299 none This project focuses on the synthesis of new perovskite related oxides by solid state reactions for powder synthesis and the use of high temperature solution reactions for crystal growth to yield new classes of oxide materials with important chemical and physical properties. These chemical compounds can be selectively modified to exhibit desirable physical and chemical properties. Improved methods for designing and synthesizing these materials in desired physical forms such as powders or as single crystals allow one to investigate their electronic and magnetic properties, and to explore their utilization in a variety of applications. To accomplish these tasks, undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers are being trained in cutting edge techniques for synthesizing and characterizing these materials using state of the art instrumentation such as high-temperature and high-pressure reaction vessels, magnetometers and charge coupled device based single crystal diffractometers. The strong educational aspect of this research assures that highly trained men, women and under-represented minorities can enter the workforce to meet industrial needs for scientists. Perovskite oxides are known for important and interesting magnetic and electronic properties that include superconductivity, ferroelectricity, and ionic conductivity, and also for compositional flexibility enabling the development of new electronic devices, data storage materials, battery components and superconductors. Undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers trained in these cutting edge synthetic and characterization techniques will be very competitive for industrial and academic jobs doc17300 none Experience with earthquakes has provided compelling evidence of transportation infrastructure s critical role in restoring normalcy as well as the need for reliable transportation systems under natural or man-made disasters. Nonetheless, reliability analysis has received very little attention in transportation research. Moreover, increased economic activity and improved quality of life have placed a higher value on reducing congestion. Road travelers in the 21st century would prefer a more reliable transportation system with a higher level of confidence of arriving at their destination on schedule. Transportation network reliability analysis will play an important role in the planning, design and management of transportation facilities and networks particularly in developed countries and or mega-cities. The research plan entails developing an integrated transportation network reliability analysis framework. This integrated analysis framework involves modeling, evaluation, design, algorithm development, and implementation. The modeling includes estimating the maximum capacity of a transportation network and developing stochastic route choice models that account for both the traveler perception error as well as the uncertainty of network travel times. The evaluation component involves the assessment of transportation reliability measures: travel time reliability is concerned with the probability that a trip between a given origin-destination pair can be made within a given time interval and a specified level-of-service, and capacity reliability is concerned with the probability that the network capacity can accommodate a certain volume of traffic demand at a required service level. The design component addresses roadway network designed reliability and cost-effectiveness and includes investigating the role of information and learning in travel decisions. Finally, algorithms will be developed and implemented that will render the framework operational and successful. The education plan focuses on two important tasks: (1) enhancing the undergraduate program to better prepare our students for engineering technology careers in the 21st century, and (2) developing a graduation transportation curriculum and teaching program with emphasis in systems modeling. These objectives will be achieved by (a) providing hands-on, team experience through computer lab exercises to our students to promote active and collaborative learning, (b) exposing promising students at the undergraduate level to research opportunities in transportation, (c) building a graduate curriculum and teaching program that emphasizes systems modeling, and (d) developing a transportation research seminar to provide an informal forum for students to discuss a wide range of topics related to transportation issues that do not necessarily fit into the course curriculum. In addition to the above educational activities, the PI will integrate research into teaching by bringing in new insights and results generated by this CAREER project into both undergraduate and graduate courses, to broaden the students educational experience based on the research plan, and to recruit and retain traditionally under-represented students to the transportation program doc17301 none Pack The objective of the proposed research is to develop the knowledge and techniques to generate polymeric materials specifically designed to deliver genetic material to human cells. These materials can be termed artificial viruses and could bring benefits such as: (a) the capacity to carry large genes, (b) improved safety, (c) systematic administration, and (d) relatively easy production and purification. This research will focus on understanding how DNA polymer complexes (polyplexes) navigate through the cell. To deliver DNA from outside the cell to the nucleus, a vector must be endocytosed, escape from endocytic vesicles, undergo transport to and across the nuclear envelope, and release the DNA from the complex. The proposed research will focus on escape from the endocyric vesicles and transport to the nuclear envelope, since these are often thought to be the limiting steps. The research will also address the role of the cytoplasmic motility of polyplexes in moving through the cytosol to the nuclear membrane. The speck aims of this research are to: (1) to quantify the effects of polymer buffering on escape from the endocytic vesicles, (2) elucidate the mechanism of polyplex transport across the nuclear membrane, and (3) determine the kinetics and mechanisms of transport of polyplex vectors through the cytoplasm doc17302 none Funds are provided for a parallel analog and numerical modeling study to understand the structure of turbidity currents and nature of sediment deposits as they travel in meandering channels, 3-D seismic data on subsurface meanders will be used to link the model data with field observations. The research will be integrated with graduate and undergraduate education at University of South Carolina doc17303 none This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award provides funding for the development of optimization-based decision support systems that model the interaction between various levels of the logistics network and utilize improved network communications to increase logistics efficiencies. The major focus is to design and analyze algorithms which integrate production plans, inventory control and transportation strategies across the supply chain to reduce system-wide costs and enhance service. Analysis of the theoretical properties of different problem formulations and optimal policies will be used to develop efficient and robust solution techniques. Building upon our previous research in distribution planning problems, a series of increasingly complex models will be considered to account for large-scale production-distribution networks, nonlinear production and transportation costs, multi-modal transportation, capacity constraints, and uncertainty in demand. This research will be fully integrated with the educational program through the incorporation of case studies, industry projects and software tools in Logistics and Supply Chain Management courses. The most salient aspect of the educational component is the preparation of case studies that provide sufficient technical information to allow rigorous engineering analysis, while presenting students with real, unstructured situations that require sound business assessment. Finally, the educational program also includes curriculum design, mentoring and outreach activities with particular focus on women and minorities. If successful, this career program will lead to improved coordination in large-scale logistics networks and significant contributions to the theory of combinatorial optimization, networks and algorithms, as well as to education. The impact of our research is clear: lower system-wide costs, more reliable delivery times and enhaced service in supply chains. On the educational front, we expect that the introduction of appropriate case studies to engineering education will be widely accepted to stimulate critical thinking and bring hands-on experience to the classroom doc17304 none Over the years, atmospheric scientists and wind engineers have enjoyed fruitful collaborations that have addressed fundamental problems in the two disciplines. The majority of the research projects active within the Atmospheric Science Group and Wind Science and Engineering (WISE) center at Texas Tech University involve field experimentation. It has been recognized, however, that the link between the active research portfolio and the classroom could be stronger. The work under this award will provide new tools to further interactions between atmospheric scientists and wind engineers and incorporate these tools into a classroom setting. Under this award, the Principal Investigator will develop two new graduate classes, establish a Measurement and Analysis Laboratory (MAL) and conduct a research agenda focused on the atmospheric boundary layer in non-idealized (extreme) events. The initial research focus will be on the wind structure found within the hurricane planetary boundary layer (HPBL) -- specifically, documenting the HPBL wind flow characteristics and relating them to storm-scale processes. Special attention will be given to the coastal transition region. The two new graduate classes will focus on providing a fundamental foundation in making and analyzing measurements. The courses will provide students a unique and comprehensive experience at building instrumentation and acquisition systems, acquiring relevant data sets and analyzing them. The MAL will provide a central resource for students and researchers to efficiently learn about and develop instrumentation and data acquisition (DAQ) systems both in and out of the classroom. The MAL will be used to teach both of the newly developed courses and will be available to students and researchers to assist them in the development and testing of instrumentation and DAQ systems. The focus of the integrated approach is on providing a bridge to the students between the classroom and the field. The strength of existing programs within WISE will be enhanced because the current facilities can be brought into the classroom and used as real world examples and sources for class projects. This will link the educational aspects with the main research thrusts of WISE and provide the graduate students an educational foundation to accomplish the goals of their research projects. Successful completion of this research will lend new insights into important meteorological phenomena such as the wind structure in the hurricane boundary layer. The educational activities will provide an excellent environment for developing the next generation of wind engineers and atmospheric scientists and give them an exceptional background in observational issues doc17305 none This award is to fund an investigation of the systematics and biogeography of the poison frogs (family Dendrobatidae) in Peru and other parts of Amazonia. The award will fund the collection of specimens in the field, and the analysis of DNA from tissue samples in the laboratory. Tissue samples (toe clips) will be collected from poison frogs from remote parts of the Peruvian rainforest. These and previously obtained samples from other regions of Amazonia will be used to obtain DNA sequences from six gene regions via molecular genetic analysis. The DNA sequence variation among populations and species will be used in a phylogenetic analysis of the systematic relationships of the poison frog family. Information on DNA sequence variation among populations will also be used to investigate associations between genetic divergence and geographic barriers to gene flow in Amazonia. Finally, the information obtained on the systematic relationships of the poison frogs will be used to investigate evolutionary associations between life history and ecological characteristics of the poison frogs, including parental care, egg and clutch size, tadpole deposition pool size, tadpole cannibalism, mating systems, and sexual dimorphism. This research will provide the first thorough analysis of systematic relationships in the poison frog family. It will also provide an important contribution to recent debates about why the Amazon River basin supports such a huge number of species. Most of these debates have centered on the contribution of specific geographic barriers to genetic divergence, and this research will directly address the relevant hypotheses. The systematic results from this research will be used to investigate important questions concerning the evolutionary ecology of the poison frogs in a comparative framework doc17306 none Sheehan Under this CAREER Award, the musculoskeletal system at the component level (joint anatomy and tissue dynamics) during functional movements will be characterized. Characterization will be accomplished by developing a set of interdisciplinary tools (virtual functional anatomy - VFA) that will allow the accurate and precise measurement of 3D static and dynamic musculoskeletal anatomy. Fast-PC MRI (phase contrast magnetic resonance imaging) will be be combined with high-resolution 3D musculoskeletal models to create subject-specific 3D total joint anatomy models, animated based on actual joint movements during volitional movement. The initial focus will be on the musculoskeletal kinematics and kinetics of the knee joint while subjects extend and flex their knees. Stress-strain properties of the patellar and quadriceps tendons along with their moment arms, strain within the anterior and posterior cruciate ligaments and the contribution of each quadriceps muscle to the resultant extensor force will be determined. Once developed, the modular VFA tool can be adapted to other musculoskeletal systems utilizing other sources of dynamic and or imaging data. The educational component focuses on developing a mechanical engineering Master s level curriculum specializing in biomechanics, which would be based on two research-oriented courses-Imaging Technologies and Functional Movement Analysis--that would integrate the VFA produced through the research and be enhanced with web-based experimental programs. Outreach programs designed to allow young women the opportunity to explore potential careers in science or engineering will continue to be supported doc17307 none Our dependence on fossil fuel is causing social, political, technological, economical, and environmental problems. The search for alternative energy has given us many choices for replacing fossil-based energy. However, the choices come with their own set of advantages, disadvantages, and risks. This integrated research and education project will prepare students for solving energy problems involving alternative energy sources. The goal of this project is to make the best use of available energy sources by combining them. Energy sources, including photovoltaic, hydrogen, and wind, each can be converted to electrical energy such that it can be combined efficiently. The most effective means to combine and manipulate electricity is power electronics. In this project, new power electronic converters will be developed that combine multiple energy sources in an optimal way. This not only requires advances in control and topology - as multiple-input power converter technology is undeveloped - but will also require a thorough assessment of trade-offs in combining different energy sources. This will be supported by improved energy awareness among all engineering students through new courses and through more integration of energy-related topics in existing coursework. The research portion of the project will culminate in both theoretical algorithms and a hardware demonstration. The prototype will combine energy from at least three different sources and will power at least two varieties of loads. It is intended that this will be the first converter of its kind, and inspire a new approach to electric power doc17308 none The focus of the proposed research is to develop parsimonious electricity market models and to integrate asset valuation models with probabilistic simulation models of an overall power system. Tremendous market volatility in electricity prices has been witnessed in recently established power markets. Volatile electricity price not only puts pressure on efficient operations of power generation assets, but also increases the importance of having realistic power market models for the purpose of evaluating real assets and performing risk management tasks in quantifying and controlling operational and financial risks. Two competing approaches are now being used for modeling electric power market behaviors for the above mentioned purposes: The fundamental approach , which emphasizes on the engineering aspects of power markets, relies on system simulation and market operation to determine market prices; and the other so-called technical approach , which is economically oriented, involves the direct modeling of the stochastic behavior of market prices from historical data and fundamental analysis. While the fundamental approach provides finer details about electricity markets in specific scenarios, it is computationally prohibitive due to the large number of scenarios it entails. The proposed project will combine the strengths of the two approaches by developing specific stochastic models for electricity prices that are calibrated using a probabilistic simulation of an overall electric power system. The methodology and analytical models developed during this project can make a significant impact on the divestiture process and the evaluation of new projects by power system planners and marketers in the deregulated power industry. Costs due to discrepancies in capacity valuation resulting from differing valuation methodologies and assumptions of power price dynamics are estimated to be in the millions. To lower such costs, this approach is expected to yield realistic power asset valuation methodologies that properly reflect the reliability of the power systems doc17309 none Piazza Under this CAREER Award, methods in computational mechanics will be developed to study the function of healthy and diseased human feet and ankles. Though injuries and musculoskeletal disorders outnumber those seen at any other joint, especially among the elderly, the foot and ankle are two of the least well-understood areas of the human musculoskeletal system. Mechanical analysis has lagged behind that of other joints due to difficulty in defining axes of joint rotation and significant inter-subject variability. The research plan focuses on refining computational tools that will be used to locate the two major joint axes of the ankle noninvasively in individual subjects through mathematical optimization techniques. Subject specific models, which can be used by orthopaedic surgeons to study the effects of an untested variation in a surgical procedure while minimizing the risks to patients, will be based on MR scans of the lower legs of fifteen subjects. The educational component of the plan focuses on fostering interest in biomechanics in general and the foot and ankle problem in particular among undergraduate kinesiology and engineering students, with an emphasis on reaching under-represented groups Two new laboratories will be developed and a seminar series to bring together basic scientists and clinicians and to expose students to career possibilities in biomechanics and related fields will be introduced doc17310 none The purpose of the proposed effort is to investigate the control of distributed systems (i.e. systems with distributed mass, stiffness or other dynamic properties) in the presence of decentralized, networked, embedded information systems that deeply penetrate the system to be controlled. The networked imbedded system consists of numerous nodes, each consisting of a small microprocessor, sensor, and actuator. Furthermore, all of the nodes will be capable of communicating over a wired or wireless network. This configuration means that each node is subject to the following constraints: 1) limited computational power and memory; 2) limited information as to overall system response; and 3) limited authority over the physical system. The primary challenge of this program will be the development of decentralized control algorithms capable of performing successfully under such conditions. The research objectives will be accomplished through a parallel theoretical experimental effort. Theoretical work will focus on the development of simulation tools and decentralized control algorithms that meet the outlined objectives. The experimental efforts will seek to demonstrate this technology on a series of increasingly complex systems. The research program promises to develop new analysis tools and yield new insight into the behavior of decentralized control systems and, in particular, their application to distributed parameter systems. Among the many new contributions to the field will be: the investigation and development of decentralized control of distributed systems; improved knowledge on the global behavior of decentralized systems defined by localized actions; methods for constructing global performance metrics based on decentralized sensor processing; and the development of adaptive control algorithms for the creation of desirable global performance based on localized information. The primary goal of the educational program is to lead the development of a Mechanical Engineering curriculum that synergistically integrates a variety of learning teaching approaches in order to reach a more diverse student population. While traditional lecture formats address the majority of individual learning modes, the introduction of non-traditional approaches will not only enhance current student s learning but also attract and enhance the retention of a more diverse student population who s learning needs are not currently met. The goal will be met by introducing several new elements to those aspects of the curriculum under the PIs purview. These include alternative lecture teaching techniques, research oriented laboratory exercises, integration of graduate research methods and equipment into undergraduate teaching labs, and improved research opportunities for under-represented individuals doc17311 none Institution: Northwestern University Acculturation and urbanization have been linked to a wide range of human health issues, but the associations are mixed: A number of studies highlight the health benefits of improved access to infrastructure, health services, and education, while others draw attention to rising rates of stress-related, chronic degenerative, and atopic diseases. Further research in this area is needed, especially since indigenous groups around the world are becoming increasingly incorporated into a single global economy. Previous research has focused largely on adults, and additional research is needed on the specific health issues confronting children and adolescents, and their unique experiences in the context of rapid culture change. In addition, improvements in the methods used to assess health and human biology are required to overcome the constraints of research conducted in field settings. This project addresses these issues in pursuit of the following objectives: 1) investigate immune function and child adolescent health in the context of social and economic transitions in lowland Bolivia, 2) develop and evaluate minimally-invasive methods for assessing immunocompetence in remote field settings, and 3) create a series of educational opportunities in which high school, undergraduate, graduate, and international students can participate in mentored original research. Initial research efforts (Project 1) will be focused on a prospective study of culture change and health in lowland Bolivia. 600 participants between the ages of 5 and 20 years will be recruited from 9 villages, and sociocultural, demographic, socioeconomic, anthropometric, and morbidity data will be collected at multiple time points. Saliva and finger prick blood samples will be collected to assess physiological markers of immune function and health. By applying a uniform set of biological and socio-cultural methods across a range of cultural-ecological settings, this project will investigate the multidimensional nature of acculturation, and its positive and negative implications for child and adolescent well-being. In addition, assessment of immunocompetence-using methods that do not require venipuncture-in conjunction with growth and morbidity will reveal underlying physiological processes that may mediate the associations between shifting cultural-ecological environments and adverse growth and health outcomes. Subsequent research efforts (Projects 2 and 3) will be dedicated to a comparative analysis of immune development: Multiple dimensions of immunity will be compared in samples collected from 5-20 year-olds in Bolivia, Samoa, and the U.S. to gain insight into the range of variation in immune development, and to explore the contribution of a comparative, ecological perspective to current understandings of human immune function. Broader merits of the project include a number of educational initiatives: 1) development of a two-course sequence in Human Biology Research; 2) mentored research experience for undergraduate students; 3) summer workshop in laboratory methods for graduate students; 4) training of international students in Bolivia, and 5) establishment of a partnership with a local high school to provide internship and research opportunities for high school students. Participating students will engage in the scientific process, apply new methodological skills to issues in human biology and health, and become members of a collaborative research community. This project was originally funded as a CAREER award, and was converted to a Presidential Early Career Award for Engineers and Scientists (PECASE) award in May doc17312 none The research and educational program consists of developing a multi-scale experimental program to study the mechanics of fracture in elastic-plastic materials. The research is intended to complement and guide multi-scale simulations of fracture in elastic-plastic materials. The experiments will focus on understanding the behavior of cracks that exist along the grain boundary of symmetric tilt bicrystals of either pure aluminum or pure copper. In such a specimen there is a well known, but poorly understood, phenomenon known as directional dependence of fracture. If a crack is introduced along the grain boundary, the amount it grows macroscopically depends upon the direction within the grain boundary that it propagates. A judicious choice of crystallographic orientation and loading techniques will ensure that the mechanical properties at the macroscopic length scale are identical for both cracks, yet the amount of macroscopic growth will be different. Thus the explanation for the directional dependence must depend upon deformation mechanisms at the smaller length scales as well as the interaction of the deformation mechanisms across length scales. In the experiments, cracks will be introduced and propagated in opposite directions within the grain boundary of symmetric tilt bicrystals. The structure of the asymptotic deformation fields will be measured under plane strain conditions to investigate a certain type of strain discontinuity, known as kink shear discontinuity, that is predicted by theory and observed in some materials under certain conditions. The existence of kink shear discontinuities depends critically upon plastic constitutive relations at very small length scales. The next set of experiments will be to measure the directional dependence of fracture under both a monotonic and cyclic loading to document the degree of crack growth in different directions along a grain boundary. The final set of experiments will measure the lattice curvature of the crystal close to the crack tip to ascertain the density of geometrically necessary dislocations which play an important role in strain gradient plasticity. All the experiments will be simulated with the discrete dislocation plasticity technique in collaboration with other researchers. The educational component is to reach out to secondary schools in the neighborhoods around Columbia University, particularly in Harlem, to develop a science module that is suitable for students in their final two years of high school with the goal of inspiring them to continue their educations. The module will demonstrate that materials are made of discrete atoms by discussing the phenomenon of diffraction. To do so, the students will first gain intuition into the diffraction phenomenon by identifying and matching symmetries in diffraction gratings and the related diffraction patterns that are created with a standard laser pointer. Then the crystallographic aspects of face-centered cubic metals and the symmetries of a cube will be introduced. Finally the students will be asked to identify the two-fold, three-fold, and four-fold rotation symmetries in separate Laue back reflection x-ray diffraction patterns and correlate the patterns with the crystallographic orientations that exhibit the same sets of symmetries. Thus the students will identify the symmetries inherent in crystals without having to understand any of the details of the diffraction process doc17313 none The proposed integrated research and education program focusses on investigation of the notorious polarization instability and sensitivity to optical feedback of single transverse mode vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs). These intertwined difficulties plague ongoing efforts to develop the use of single mode VCSELs for applications such as wavelength division multiplexed communications networks and optical disk readout. Furthermore, we expect that our work will be relevant to future investigations of other low-dimensional semiconductor nano-lasers with a large degree of symmetry. The experimental investigations of polarization stability will be analyzed using a novel model that we have developed to describe VCSELs with two polarization eigenstates in the presence of optical feedback. This CW work will then be extended to an investigation of the small-signal modulation response of VCSELs with optical feedback. Finally, the results of these investigations will be used to explore practical strategies for improving the stability and polarization control of single mode VCSELs exposed to optical feedback. The proposed research will be integrated into the education of our undergraduate physics and engineering majors, both in the classroom and via direct participation of undergraduates in my research program. In order to enable our students to acquire the necessary research skills, we are developing a new investigative, inquiry-driven, sophomore-level instructional optoelectronics lab. In addition, we are introducing into our introductory sequence pedagogical reforms aimed at encouraging students to engage in the processes of critical analysis that are essential to successful, creative research. Ultimately, this integration of research and teaching will contribute to the resolution of a critical problem in VCSEL development while preparing our undergraduates to join the ranks of the next generation of women scientists and engineers doc17314 none The focus of this integrated research, education, and outreach program is the development of simulation tools capable of modeling the complex electromagnetic environment of high-speed circuits. Key innovations include the use of multi-scale abstraction and introduction of meta-elements to minimize the computational burden. The finite element method is used as a back-bone approach to allow for complex geometrical and material features. This simulation tool will be used, along with other educational materials developed by the Principal Investigator, to develop a Mixed Signal Circuits course at Michigan State University that focuses on electromagnetic interference (EMI) mitigation and design for electromagnetic compatibility (EMC). The educational materials developed for consumption on the MSU campus will be adapted for distance learning via the Asynchronous Learning Network. Flexible short courses will be offered over the Internet to industrial and life-long learning students. The target audience for this outreach effort are degreed-professionals desiring EMI EMC education for mixed signal circuit design. Student learning tracks will be customized based on the needs of the student and their company. Several major companies have indicated interest in collaborating in this effort and their input will assist the Principal Investigator in the production of a high-quality, high-impact outreach program doc17315 none Hillhouse, Hugh W. Purdue Univesity Semiconductor nanowires that exhibit quantum-size effects are predicted to have revolutionary thermoelectric transport properties, potentially resulting in solid-state cooling devices with efficiencies greater than vapor-compression refrigeration technology. However, in order to realize such devices, continuous wires must be synthesized with diameters much smaller than their thermal de Broglie wavelength to reach the quantum confinement regime. One technique being investigated to synthesize such nanowires is a template assisted approach in which ordered nanoporous materials such as microporous zeolites, mesoporous silica (i.e. SBA-15, MCM-41), and anodic alumina are used as passive hosts to template the diameter and form of the wire. However, nanowires with a sufficiently small diameter have not yet been realized, and in the smallest pore materials attempts have failed due to mass transport limitations. It is proposed that this limitation can be overcome by using electrochemical growth techniques with a new class of titanosilicate whose nanostructured framework facilitates cation transport. This new class of titanosilicate, designated as ETS, was first reported in . Several framework topologies have been identified that have micropores ranging from just under 0.4 nm up to 0.8 nm. One structure in particular (Sr-ETS-4) has recently been shown to be possess extraordinary gas separation properties for N2 CH4, N2 O2, and Ar O2 separations. A key feature that is unique to all of the ETS structures is the presence of continuous titania chains (-O-Ti-O-Ti-) that run parallel to the micropores. Each titanium unit in the chain carries two units of negative charge and must be balanced by cations in the micropore. This unique nanostructure is fundamentally different from classical zeolites, and is hypothesized to facilitate cation transport though the structure by acting as a rope to pull cations through the framework. This rope may be pulled electrochemically by reducing a framework cation at one end of the pore. This creates a state of charge imbalance in the structure and induces a series of correlated cation hops that pull an additional cation into the framework at the opposite end of the pore. In the process, the cathode grows through the framework forming an array of nanowires that mimic the pores. This phenomenon will be investigated in a body of proposed research that focuses on: Synthesizing high quality single crystals of ETS-10, ETS-4, and related structures. Understanding the fundamentals ion transport in these unique nanostructured materials by using complex impedance spectroscopy to examine ion conductivities, activation energies, and relaxation frequencies for Group IA, Group IIA, gold, lead, bismuth, and tellurium cations. Electrochemical growth of sub-nanometer wires in the pores of ETS frameworks for the development of thermoelectric devices. This multidisciplinary research is at the cross roads of engineering, chemistry, physics, and materials science, and is one part of an integrated education and research plan that seeks to: (1) train and mentor graduate students in a multidisciplinary environment to become creative independent researchers who have the background and skills to discover and develop new ideas in the area of nanotechnology, (2) actively encourage and support undergraduate research participation, and (3) develop and implement a new teaching approach that utilizes student authorship of web based content to facilitate lifelong learning and engage student participation in the context of a new course on nanostructured materials chemistry doc17316 none The investigator and his colleagues will address a number of fundamental problems about the geometry and arithmetic of moduli spaces: What is the canonical model of the moduli space of curves of genus g? Can one construct natural spaces that interpolate between the canonical model and the moduli space of stable curves? Can these be interpretted as moduli spaces in their own right? Can one count the number of rational points of moduli spaces of curves, bounded with respect to various heights? What are the natural functions (effective divisors) one might use to specify these heights? What are the naturally defined strata in the deformation space of a plane curve singularity? How can one interpret blow-ups along such strata? Algebraic geometry is the study of the solutions to systems of polynomial equations. Geometric aspects of the solution sets translate into algebraic properties of the equations, and vice versa. This approach has the advantage that computers can manipulate equations very efficiently. Promising hypotheses can thus be checked on explicit examples. Increasingly, computational approaches to geometry are transforming the education of undergraduate and graduate students, both in pure mathematics and in related fields where mathematics is applied. This emphasis on concrete examples and explicit computation creates new research opportunities for young people, especially those who have only just started to learn the technical intricacies of the subject doc17317 none Following Mandelbrot s seminal work, fractal based analyses of time series, profiles, and natural or man-made surfaces have found extensive applications in almost all scientific disciplines. The fractal dimension, D, of an object or data set is a roughness measure and routinely estimated in scientific studies. Long-memory dependence in time series or spatial data plays key roles in the discussion of issues such as global warming. It is associated with power-law correlations and quantified by the Hurst coefficient, H. In principle, fractal dimension, D, and Hurst coefficient, H, are independent of each other: fractal dimension is a local property, and long-memory dependence is a global characteristic. Nevertheless, the two notions have been linked through the celebrated relationship that indicates that the fractal dimension added to the Hurst coefficient equals n+1, for a self-similar surface in n-dimensional space. This relationship is based on the assumption of self-similarity, which has hardly ever been put to test. Recently developed stochastic models allow for any combination of fractal dimension, D, and Hurst coefficient, H, and therefore challenge the relationship and the role of self-similarity. Has the prevalence of self-similar model been a roadblock, keeping scientists from exploring and understanding a wide range of local and global behavior in complex systems? Or is it indeed a breakthrough, which lets scientists focus on models for which the above relationship holds, while other combinations of D and H are physically meaningless? This research develops tests for self-similarity and thereby addresses these problems. Along the way, new insight into the behavior of statistical estimators of fractal dimension and Hurst coefficient, software for the fast and exact simulation of self-similar and related classes of random processes, an analysis of topographic data for Oregon and Washington state, and new theoretical results for stationary random functions will emerge. Visualization tools and Freshman Seminars at the University of Washington will introduce undergraduate students to mathematical and statistical modeling, to fractals, long-memory dependence, and self-similarity, and to the natural beauty and diversity of the Pacific Northwest. Many natural phenomena such as mountains, clouds, ferns and rocks have features that look alike across scales. A little piece might indeed resemble the whole if the scale is not disclosed. Over the past decades, this notion of self-similarity has emerged as a popular and fruitful theme in a vast number of scientific studies. This research develops statistical tests, which allow scientists to assess whether their observations and data are compatible with classical assumptions of self-similarity. Alternative models allow for distinct behaviors at different scales and might inspire and encourage new theories across disciplines. The research is paired with the development of visualization and simulation tools as well as Freshman Seminars, through which students are introduced to mathematical and statistical modeling, to fractals, long-memory dependence, and self-similarity, and to the natural beauty and diversity of the Pacific Northwest doc17318 none This project will unite sensing and modeling in a virtual environment to enable simulation of as-built concrete structures and pavements. Embeddable sensors will be developed to utilize acoustic, electric, ultrasonic, and thermal measurements as complementary technologies, thereby enabling the in-place concrete quality and integrity to be measured. The predicted development of concrete properties will be compared with real-time field measurements to allow the stiffness, porosity, load, and damage to be adjusted to accurately represent the field concrete. Energy based damage criteria will be developed to compare information obtained from the sensor with the model predictions. This information will be used to characterize existing damage and to quantify the risk for future irreversible damage and deterioration. This modeling approach can permit contractors and inspectors to implement corrective actions during construction that can improve long-term performance. In addition to providing information during construction, these models will utilize early-age measurements to compute long-term performance. These models can be used to provide the owners of a structure with the feedback needed to assess alternate construction strategies, to determine pay adjustments, or to plan repair strategies. At the conclusion of this project the life-cycle performance models may be utilized by a wide range of users which could include governmental agencies (departments of transportation), material suppliers, contractors, insurance and surety companies, repair material producers, researchers, and students to predict the long-term performance of structures and to assess the success of innovative material and design improvements. In addition to the research, this project is focused on preparing both the construction engineer and the construction workforce for tomorrow. This project utilizes a problem-based-education approach to encourage high school, undergraduate, and graduate students to consider careers in civil engineering materials through hands-on projects in which they will learn to diagnose problems, conduct independent research, and develop solution procedures. In addition, this project will use continuing education courses and demonstrations to inform practicing engineers, concrete laborers and testing technicians of the project developments doc17319 none To successfully meet the challenges of the 21st century, engineers must be creative and be able to adapt themselves to new ideas. Technology is changing at a rapid pace. The increasing number of new materials and new systems available for structural engineering applications offers a large number of possibilities for the engineer with the knowledge and creative skills to understand them. The goal of this CAREER proposal is to promote innovative teaching and research in civil engineering. The integrated teaching and research plans will provide a fundamental contribution to the use of non-traditional materials for new structures as well as for state-of-the-art repair and retrofit systems. The outlined teaching plan will improve the curriculum in the areas of infrastructure and structural engineering both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. This long-term educational plan coordinates directly with the PI s research interest in the area of laminates for repair and retrofit of civil structures. Two innovative courses, one in materials for structural design, the second on repair and retrofit systems for civil infrastructure; a set of redesigned laboratory experiences for design oriented courses; and a new professional concentration in structural engineering will invigorate the profession of civil engineering. Diversity in engineering will be achieved through undergraduate summer research linked to Clarkson s Ronald E. McNair Program. Low-income and first-generation college students, as well as under-represented minority students will benefit from this activity. The proposed fundamental research will advance the knowledge of interfacial bond behavior between epoxy bonded FRP laminates and concrete. By characterizing the interfacial bond failure, a reliable design procedure can be developed for structural elements strengthened by externally bonded FRP laminates. Valuable information in the area of fracture mechanics will be gained by evaluating the energy dissipated during the interfacial crack growth. In particular, a new test set-up will be designed to obtain a fracture parameter. Results from this research will directly impact the use of laminates for repair and retrofit of civil structures. This research will help to move laminates and other new materials into the mainstream of engineering practice by contributing to the development of standard design equations and procedures. As a central outcome of this project the PI expects to become an academic leader committed to enhance the engineering community through her contributions in education and research. By providing teaching and research of the highest quality, the PI will fulfill the mission of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Clarkson University to educate talented and motivated men and women to become successful professionals through quality undergraduate and graduated programs that place high priority on student access and interaction with faculty doc17320 none J. Oberhauser, University of Virginia The objective the proposed research is to study the rheology and microstructure of polymer-clay nanocomposites, a novel class of material whose properties combine elements of suspension rheology and non-Newtonian fluid mechanics. The research plan has three parts: (1) to understand the basic rheology of a well-characterized nanocomposite fluid as a function of a number of material properties, (2) to assess the ability of the clay platelets to function as nucleating sites for oriented crystal growth by using a mini-extrusion device, and (3) to develop constitutive theory based on the experimental results. The education plan consists of improving existing courses by including various media and implementing some newer pedagogical techniques, to introduce new courses, and to include undergraduates in research doc17321 none Dr. Li Jia, Department of Chemistry, Lehigh University, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program of the Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, for his work under a CAREER Award to advance the design and development of a new class of homogeneous catalytic reactions as an economically attractive route for the synthesis of poly-beta-peptides. This new chemistry involves the alternating copolymerizations of aziridines and carbon monoxide with cobalt complexes as catalysts. This research is coupled with an educational objective to foster creative chemistry problem-solving in students to prepare them to deal with arising problems in the chemical industry. An inquiry-based laboratory course will be used to teach students the intellectual process of creative problem solving. Industrial speakers will be invited to give seminars at a mini-symposium on Problem-Solving in the Chemical Industry . Close industrial partnership to enrich students educational experiences and to facilitate technological innovation is a hallmark of the program doc17322 none Thermal barrier coatings of plasma-sprayed 7 wt.% Y2O3-ZrO2 (YSZ) are to be extensively studied at representative use temperatures (800 degrees C- degrees C) using a modified compression test for stand-alone coatings. For the test, the YSZ coating is removed from the substrate to isolate its behavior, and creep testing, stress relaxation, and fast fracture experiments will be performed. In addition to mechanical testing, we will use the following characterization methods for the proposed work: dilatometry, transmission electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, Raman Spectroscopy, and laser flash (to measure thermal conductivity). Each method listed will provide the necessary information to interpret the mechanical testing results. Thus, the principal output of this research will be structure-property relationships of plasma-sprayed YSZ in simulated operating environments. This will involve establishing deformation mechanisms as a function of temperature, stress, time, and sample microstructure (i.e. porosity and lamella size). This program will also establish a foundation for a lifetime of educational excellence through curriculum development, outreach, and mentoring. To increase non-majors participation in materials classes at Purdue, web-based modules will be designed that directly relate materials science applications to each of the engineering majors, and then incorporated into the introductory materials course. Beyond the activities at Purdue, an outreach program for science students at Jefferson High School (JHS) in Lafayette, Indiana will be established. In this program, high school juniors will spend 8 weeks of the summer with our research group, then continue their research in the fall and spring of their senior year through an established research based science class at JHS. There will also be a significant undergraduate mentoring component in the proposed work through support of a Purdue MSE undergraduate student every fall and spring semester of the program, as well as a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) student every summer. Virtually every commercial and military aircraft flying today uses thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) to protect the metallic structure of its gas turbine engine(s) from temperature extremes and or to allow the engine to be operated at higher, more efficient temperatures. In addition to the transportation sector, the energy sector also relies on the efficiency boosts TBCs provide industrial gas turbines (IGTs) as they produce electricity. While the benefits of TBCs result in significant cost savings in these and other sectors, there are still many aspects of TBCs we don t understand. For example, they often shrink, crack and even detach from the underlying metallic structure during elevated temperature service. Thus, basic research into their high temperature mechanical properties will allow us to fully utilize the benefits of using these coatings. At its most fundamental level, then, this proposal focuses on determining the material properties that govern how well TBCs work while they are in service and will serve as a basis for designing next-generation TBCs doc17323 none The objective of the research component of this work is to prepare novel electroactive C2-symmetric or pseudo C2-symmetric molecules and assemble them into helical electroactive macromolecules. The building blocks are bridged triarylamine derivatives. These molecules exist as atropisomers which can be resolved and studied prior to polymerization. The resolved atropisomers are then functionalized with vinyl groups or boronic esters and polymerized using ADMET chemistry or Suzuki couplings. The helical electroactive polymers produced will be characterized by a variety of physical and spectroscopic methods. Minority students in the SPUR program of the Northeast Alliance for Graduate Education will participate in these investigations. An additional educational component of this work is the development of a web based library for the exploration of structures of minerals as well as inorganic and molecular based materials. The site will contain information which should prove useful to students, teachers, and researchers. With this CAREER award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research and educational goals of Dr. Dhandapani Venkataraman of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Dr. Venkataraman will explore the synthesis of electroactive materials. These materials are expected to exhibit circularly polarized luminesence. This means they are expected to emit light when they are excited by other wavelengths of radiation. Such materials may be useful for backlighting in liquid crystal displays (LCDs, i.e. computer screens). Students trained as a result of working on this project will gain experience in materials research as well as supramolecular organic chemistry, hence they will have skills needed by both the specialty chemicals and the computer materials industries. An additional educational component of this work is the development of a web based library for the exploration of structures of minerals as well as inorganic and molecular based materials. The site will contain information which should prove useful to students, teachers, and researchers doc17324 none The Advanced Materials Program in the Division of Chemistry makes this award to Louisianan State University. With this Career award, Professor David Spivak will design, synthesize, process and characterize polymer monolayers with imprinted recognition and transduction sites. Surfactant diacetylene monomers with different head groups will be ordered and oriented at the air-water interface with proteins in the water sub-phase to provide recognition sites for the monomers before they are polymerized by ultraviolet radiation. Reversible signal transduction in response to binding unbinding of analytes will be detected directly by the polymer monolayer by colorimetric, electrochemical, uv-visible or fluorescence methods, and these monolayers may be developed to devices and sensors for specific biological and chemical detection. The PI with the support from the department will develop a multidisciplinary program in nanoscale sciences with special emphases on Chemistry, Biology and Engineering. In addition, a new Macromolecular Studies program with teaching and hand-on laboratory courses will be reactivated and offered to both graduate and undergraduate students. Monolayers based on polydiacetylene with different head groups will be designed, synthesized, processed and characterized for potential application in bio- and chemical-sensors and devices. In addition, these monolayers with specific recognition sites for analytes will have reversible signal transduction properties and signal may be processed by colorimetric, electrochemical, uv-visible or fluorescence methods. As part of the education program, a multidisciplinary program with training and research opportunities will be offered to both graduate and undergraduate students doc17325 none This is a proposal aimed at exploring the spin properties, both from the fundamental physics point of view as well as from their relevance to the recent technologically important area of spintronics. The PI proposes to combine the recent experimental developments of single-electron transistors and magnetic tunnel junctions to fabricate new spinelectronics devices, which we call single spin transistors based on the controllability and manipulability of single-electron spins. This proposal aims to fabricate and characterize single spin transistors which use the carbon nanotube as the nano-sized island. It will reveal new physical aspects of the quantum states and dynamic behavior of single electron spins in the one dimensional system. This device is based on the proven single electron transistor architecture and processing, with the island weakly coupled to ferromagnetic electrodes to inject and detect polarized spins. These nanoscale hybrid structures will be used to test various theoretically predicted phenomena such as enhanced magnetoresistance, single electron charging effects, conductance oscillations, and spin diffusion. One of the novel features of this effort is to inject fully polarized spins into the one dimensional carbon nanotubes, by spin filtering through the use of a magnetic semiconductor. Ultimately, the localization of a single electron of controlled spin in a highly sensitive nanostructure will enable novel and more versatile spin electronic devices, which so far is being pursued based on the behavior of large numbers of spin-polarized electrons. The proposed research will be critical to extremely high-density magnetic information storage, electron-spin-based quantum computing, magneto-electronic sensors, and perhaps future spin electronic devices and systems yet to be imagined. To continue the education and training of students, graduate students, undergraduates and high school students, especially from the under-represented groups, will be recruited to participate in the proposed research. This program represents an excellent opportunity for the students (of all levels) involved being educated in the nanoscience. They will work in multidisciplinary areas - physics, materials science, and nanoelectronics, the future trend in science and technology. These highly educated and trained people will become either future educators or the technical backbone of spin based information storage technology, which is already in short supply in the U.S doc17326 none Chellam The ultimate goal of this research is to develop tools to predict the removal of pathogenic viruses and precursors to potentially carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic disinfection by products by membranes as a step towards reducing microbial and chemical risks in drinking water. The proposed work is based on the following hypotheses: 1. Hindered diffusion of natural organic matter (NOM) contributes significantly to its transport across nanofiltration membranes leading to formation of toxic disinfection by-products (DBPs) upon chlorination. 2. Diffusion of pathogenic viruses contributes substantially to their transport across microfilters and ultrafilters and its dependence on water chemistry, temperature, and pore size can be quantified. 3. Direct measurements of membrane pore size distributions and transport parameters of NOM and viruses in membranes can be incorporated into theoretical models to predict their removal. Even though early research had been conducted on diffusive transport of salts across reverse osmosis, this investigation will be the first to perform direct measurements of NOM diffusion across nanofiltration membranes. Transport of NOM, DBP precursors, and viruses across membranes will be investigated experimentally and theoretically. Direct measurements of convection and diffusion of these contaminants across membranes under varying water chemistry conditions will be interpreted by undertaking numerical calculations of hindered transport. Universally applicable models (independent of membrane used and source water location) to predict trihalomethane and haloacetic acid speciation in precursor-limited waters (low NOM content) will also be derived doc17327 none Instrumental records of climate in California extend back approximately 100 years and are too short in length to capture the full range of natural variability of temperature and precipitation in the state. The project will provide records of climatic variability that extend back over 12,000 years. The project will analyze fossil midge fly larva (Chironomids), crustaceans (Cladocera), unicellular aquatic algae (diatoms), terrestrial plant microfossils, and geochemical evidence from lake sediments from the eastern Sierra Nevada to reconstruct records of temperature and effective moisture that extend back over 12,000 years. Chronologies will be linked to the records by the radiocarbon dating of organic matter in the lake sediments. Previous work has developed mathematical models that provide numerical estimates of past temperature and effective moisture from fossil chironomid and diatom assemblages. Previous preliminary work has also led to the recovery of several lake sediment records that extend back past 11,000 years in age and show clear evidence of both high and low frequency changes in temperature and effective moisture during the transition from glacial to modern climatic conditions between 12,000 and years ago. This project will complete analysis of these core sections. The project will then use the existing lake sediment cores and new cores collected from climatically sensitive settings to reconstruct changes in temperature and effective moisture over the past years. The project will construct records with better than 50 year temporal resolution for both high and mid-elevation sites. In addition to the significant multi-centennial to millennial variations seen in the glacial to non-glacial transition, the project will use previously published data for the past years to uncover evidence of multi-decadal to multi-centennial droughts during the past years. The temporal patterns of variations in California temperature and effective moisture will be compared to temporal patterns of variability evident in cores from the North Pacific Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean and Greenland Ice Cap, in order to help deduce the larger scale causes of long-term variability in California climate. Long-term climate records are essential to anticipating the full range of variability in the severity and duration of long-term drought periods, wet periods and warm and cold periods that can occur in California. The records will help determine if there is long-term periodicity in phenomena such as multi-decadal droughts that will make such events more predictable. These records of past climate will also help in assessing the role of changes in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in driving climatic variations in California. Finally, the long-term climatic records provided by this project will furnish baseline data on natural variability of climate in California that will allow for the detection of truly unusual variations that might be attributable to greenhouse warming. The records will be of importance for water resource management, forestry and conservation management, and climatic change detection and management doc17328 none The research component of this proposal deals with the study of solutions to certain non-linear systems of Partial Differential Equations which arise in connections with the geometry of Carnot-Caratheodory spaces. More precisely, we will study the sharp regularity of solutions to quasilinear subelliptic systems, and apply the results to the theory of quasi-regular maps in Carnot groups and in more general spaces. We will study critical points of the energy for maps with target in the Heisenberg group and with domain in a Riemannian manifold or in the Minkowski space. The analysis of boundary value problems for sub-elliptic operators, and the study of qualitative and quantitative properties of solutions of some non-divergence form non-linear equations, are also part of this proposal. The educational component of this proposal is centered around the creation of Integrated Research Groups, in which undergraduate and graduate students work on basic research projects supervised by the PI. One of thegoals of this activity is the dissemination of information, through a web-based data-base, seminars, and publications. Partial differential equations are used to provide a mathematical model for real-life phenomena, such as chemical reactions, force-fields or conductivity. Such models allow both to better understand the phenomena and to try to forecast the future behavior of the system under study. Roughly speaking, smooth solutions to PDE s correspond to systems which can be well understood and modeled. The study of regularity of solutions consists in finding smooth solutions. The equations described in this proposal appear in the study of motion under constraints (as in Robot arms motion), and in the study of diffusion in a non isotropic media doc17329 none The PI is proposing to develop a new CFD code that will predict the coupled ventilation behavior of indoor and outdoor airspaces, including species (pollutants, chemical agents) transport. She will then couple this with large scale building energy simulation programs (already in existence) that do not contain sophisticated ventilation capabilities except on an energy balance basis. Validation, testing, and optimization of this computation system as a design tool is a major part of the proposed effort. Potential impacts include reliable design tools and guidelines for healthy and energy efficient buildings. In addition, the theory can be used to design mitigation strategies for chemical or biological agent attacks, such as determining the best sensing positions for quick responses to agent releases, activation of suitable ventilation systems to create a safe zone for occupants, and provision of suitable means to clean the buildings after an attack. It will also serve to bring architects and engineers more constructively together at the design phase. The education contribution of the research will include two new courses directed at architecture and engineering students in the areas of integrated building systems design and in the use of computational fluid dynamics in building systems design doc17330 none Much of our civil infrastructure is in a severe state of degradation. This project will develop methods to assess the health of critical structural systems based on limited information about their vibration response signature, providing engineers with a set of reliable tools to evaluate their continued viability and prioritize repair and maintenance within limited budgets. Unlike conventional structural health monitoring methods (where data is analyzed in an off-line batch mode) the project, through an emphasis on algorithm efficiency criteria, will develop new approaches in adaptive system identification involving real-time damage detection into a set of application-oriented tools. These tools will be evaluated through a phased experimental program, involving numerical simulation, laboratory experimentation, and full-scale evaluation. Building on the PI s prior work, the research will show the potential of nonlinear identification techniques for application in the structural health monitoring context, and in broader fields of structural engineering engineering mechanics. The research objectives are: 1) to develop hybrid methodologies, circumventing difficulties associated with nonparametric vs. parametric modeling of nonlinear structural systems for damage detection purposes; 2) to develop nonlinear real-time identification techniques for structural health monitoring and active control, and seek to benefit from alternative sensor technologies; 3) to evaluate limitations in identification of structural dynamics from low-level excitation or from response measurements only (i.e., unknown excitation); 4) to evaluate limitations of inferring damage from vibration sensor arrays that are sparse, and develop cost-effective methodologies that enable engineers to readily detect structural damage; and 5) to apply these tools to other engineering challenges, e.g., MEMS, soil-dynamics and aerospace. Complementing the research project, an integrated educational project is undertaken. This educational project has three main aspects: 1) the development of a lab facility for repeatable nonlinear dynamic testing for research and student participation - repeatability achieved through use of active control to synthesize nonlinear behavior; 2) the development of a graduate-level course on health monitoring; and 3) a summer outreach program to engage underprivileged, inner-city, New York high-school students in the engineering research environment through teaching, field-trips, laboratory demonstration, and hands-on testing - all in collaboration with Columbia University s Double Discovery Center doc17331 none Expanding commercial and military applications crowd the wireless communications frequency band, creating a critical need to expand the band to higher frequencies. The application of newly discovered high velocity pseudo surface acoustic waves (HVPSAWs), has the potential of satisfying the high frequency requirements of the next generation of wireless communications. This CAREER proposal involves an integrated research and education plan for high radio frequency (RF) microwave acoustic devices. The research objective is to identify piezoelectric materials and specific orientations in which HVPSAWs exist, and to design, fabricate, and test prototype HVPSAW filters. Specific research tasks are: (i) search for piezoelectric materials and orientations in which HVPSAWs exist; (ii) characterize theoretical mode propagation; (iii) determine HVPSAW phase velocity, propagation loss, temperature behavior, electromechanical coupling, and power flow angle; (iv) experimentally verify the theoretically predicted HVPSAW properties; develop a theoretical model for the HVPSAW interdigital transducer (IDT) structure, and its experimental verification; (v) model and characterize integral HVPSAW filters structures, such as reflectors, multistrip couplers, guiding structures; (vi) integrate HVPSAW structure components into HVPSAW filter design; and (vii) fabricate and test prototype HVPSAW filters. The educational objective is to provide a learning experience in a fast moving state-of-the-art area to students ranging from high school to graduate level. The learning experience will range from team projects at the high school level to theses at the graduate level. In summary this project will not only provide the necessary research to realize the next generation of wireless communications but also educate students in a very relevant high need technology area which has applications ranging from cellular phones to high speed communication and signal processing systems doc17332 none There is a great demand for technologies that enable neuroscientists and clinicians to observe the simultaneous activity of large numbers of neurons in the brain. The monitoring of these groups or neural ensembles allows researchers to begin to understand the cooperative mechanisms used by neurons to encode and process information. Recent advances in MEMS technology have produced small arrays of microelectrodes containing as many as 100 recording sites. Next generation neural recording systems must be capable of observing 100- neurons simultaneously, in a fully-implanted unit. While integrated electronics have been developed for small-scale amplification of the weak extracellular neural signals ( 100 electrodes), existing circuits have high levels of noise and consume too much power to be fully implanted in larger quantities. We propose to develop low-power, low-noise analog and mixed-signal VLSI systems allowing fully implantable recording of 100- neurons. A fully implanted multichannel neural recording system must use an RF or inductive-link transmitter for transcutaneous telemetry. We will investigate techniques for on-chip data reduction (e.g., spike thresholding, feature detection) to assist in spike sorting and reduce the required bandwidth (and hence power) of such a transmitter. The educational component of the proposed work involves the improvement of the VLSI curriculum in the PI s department. This improvement will consist of three main thrusts: (1) Development of a laboratory component of a course in analog integrated circuit design taught by the PI. The construction of class chips will allow students to measure VLSI circuits in modern submicron fabrication technologies. (2) Development of a new advanced analog VLSI course. (3) Enlisting industrial partners to evaluate our VLSI curriculum. In addition to this curriculum development, the PI will also mentor a graduate student who will perform research related to the proposal doc17333 none Brown It has long been recognized that the adhesion of bacteria to surfaces can result in enhanced metabolic activity. This can be beneficial, such as with attached-growth bioreactors for water and wastewater treatment, biodegradation of subsurface contaminants and with nutrient cycling in soils. However, it can also be harmful, such as with bacterial survival and growth in water distribution systems, pathogen growth on medical implants and equipment, plaque formation on dental surfaces, and bacterial attachment in pipelines with concurrent degradation of the pipelines and the fluids they carry. Most research in this area has focused on the availability of nutrients and growth substrate adsorbed to the solid surface. The research approach proposed addresses this issue from a different viewpoint by considering specific interactions between the surface and the bacterial cell wall. The approach examines the link between two disparate theories, one involving colloid deposition processes and the other involving cell membrane bioenergetics. Specifically, this approach focuses on the interactions between the physiochemical charge-regulation process, which occurs as a surface containing ionizable groups (e.g. bacterial cells) approaches another surface, and cellular membrane bioenergetics the chemiosmotic theory of Peter Mitchell - which directly impacts metabolic activity and survival. The proposed research project examines the link between the charge-regulation and chemiosmotic processes through numerical and experimental investigations. Numerical simulations of the proton motive force and the charge-regulation process will be used to design and interpret experiments that will systematically examine the effects of bacterial, solid surface, and solution properties on bacterial metabolic activity and survival. The ultimate goal is to elucidate the nature of the link between the charge-regulation and chemiosmotic processes, allowing these models to be used as a tool to assess biochemical processes in natural systems and to assist in the selection or design of surfaces in engineered systems based on bacteriological constraints. The main educational thrust of this proposal takes a step back and focuses on Environmental Engineering curricula taught in middle- and high-schools. To reach the widest possible number of teachers, the PI proposes to develop a comprehensive web site. A main benefit of the web format is that the site will be a living document, which will evolve based on feedback as the curricula is used in the classroom. This site will be developed in conjunction with the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA). The NSTA has agreed to assist in setting-up reviewers in order to ensure that the site content and format are tailored to the needs of middle- and high-school teachers doc17334 none Joseph Wartman, Drexel University CAREER: Physical Modeling for Geotechnical Engineering Research and Education : Earthquake-induced landslides damage many structures, roadways, and utilities. Researchers have identified three mechanisms of earthquake-induced deformation in slopes: (1) sliding displacement along a localized shear surface, (2) deformation resulting from densification of unsaturated materials, termed seismic compression, and (3) distributed deformations resulting from accumulation of plastic strains in highly stressed regions of a slope, termed cyclic straining. While researchers have studied a number of issues related to sliding displacement, little effort has been devoted to understanding and developing analysis procedures for computing the magnitude and location of distributed deformations in slopes. The research component of this career development plan employs physical models to study seismically induced distributed (versus localized) deformations in slopes. It uses both 1-g (shaking table) and centrifuge physical modeling methods, complemented by numerical analyses. The project also consider issues related to the reliability and repeatability of physical model experiments, and explores ways of increasing use of physical modeling in engineering practice. It also involves collaboration with physical modeling researchers at the Port and Airport Research Institute of Yokosuka, Japan. Specific objectives include: (1) Investigate the mechanisms of cyclic straining and seismic compression in slopes. (2) Understand how various earthquake, slope (topographic), and soil parameters influence the relative contributions of the three deformation modes to total slope deformation. (3) Develop systematic analysis procedures for computing the magnitude and locations of distributed slope deformations. (4) Assess the reliability of model test results, and to develop a reliability-based framework for interpreting model experiments. (5) Investigate ways of increasing engineering practitioners use of physical modeling. The educational component addresses the integration of physical modeling into the geotechnical engineering curriculum at Drexel University. Models are used for demonstration and experimental (laboratory) purposes. A wealth of educational psychology research suggests that physical models will improve students understanding and comprehension of geotechnical engineering. The educational component also includes initiatives to encourage student intellectual growth through classroom instruction; involve undergraduate students in research; and expose school students to the concepts of experimental discovery. This career development plan reflects the PI s long-term goals of using physical models to study, and ultimately, to reduce worldwide exposure to seismic hazards doc17335 none AST- Nickolay Gnedin Proposal ID: Institution: University of Colorado at Boulder PI: Nickolay Gnedin Dr. Gnedin is awarded funds at the University of Colorado at Boulder to further develop new methods of modeling the first reionization of the early universe. Current data on the cosmic background radiation indicate that the gas content of the universe remained mostly neutral from the time of recombination at a redshift of about to a time corresponding to a redshift of about twenty. Observations of quasars at redshifts of about six indicated that, at that time, the intergalactic medium was highly ionized. Thus this reionization , the shift of intergalactic gas from mostly neutral to mostly ionized, must have happened sometime between the times corresponding to redshifts of six and twenty. Dr. Gnedin will make significant improvements on numerical methods of modeling radiative transfer with the hope of achieving numerical convergence. These models will be able to make quantitatively accurate predictions for the evolution of the intergalactic medium for the first time. Dr. Gnedin will further compare the model results to Lyman Break Galaxies, some of the most primordial observed galaxies, in an attempt to understand their formation. Dr. Gnedin will integrate his teaching and research by developing a new undergraduate course in cosmology for non-science majors, and developing the cosmology portion of a web-based course in general introductory astronomy. The web-based work will include original simulations drawn from his research. He will also work with undergraduate majors to develop a new planetarium show on cosmology doc17336 none This CAREER development project considers an common and intriguing aspect of condensed matter systems: Many naturally occurring, or artificially structured, materials fail to achieve thermodynamic equilibrium. In some cases this is desirable, as in molecular beam epitaxy. But in bulk materials, understanding out-of-equilibrium behavior is crucial to achieve a complete description of the system. This project involves the development of an integrated education and research program designed to play a leading role in advancing the frontier field of disordered and out-of-equilibrium systems. Susceptibility studies, which characterize macroscopic response, and x-ray and neutron scattering, which directly probe microscopic behavior, will be applied in concert to model disordered systems such as liquid crystals, sheared fluids, and quenched glass formers. The objective is to illuminate essential features of the out-of-equilibrium state and to test new theoretical paradigms. In parallel with this, an interdisciplinary course on the science of complex fluids will be initiated at Johns Hopkins and an undergraduate thesis program for Physics and Astronomy majors will be developed. Collectively, these efforts, along with the coordination of community outreach between Hopkins and local public schools, will seek to create a prominent and productive program on the physics of out-of-equilibrium systems that strives to be inclusive of young scientists and potential scientists. This is a CAREER development project in the field of condensed matter physics. In many common materials, the microscopic constituents are subjected to forces that prevent the materials from organizing in their most energy efficient and simplest state. These forces can be intrinsic as in the forces between molecules that lead to a liquid cooling into glass, instead of a crystal, or external , as for a fluid confined within tiny randomly connected pores. Again the fluid is prevented from reaching solid state with long-range order. In either case the resulting disorganization creates unique material properties that pose unusual challenges for physics. This project will develop an integrated education and research program designed to play a leading role in advancing physical insight into such disordered materials. The research strategy will involve experimental comparisons of different realizations of disorder in order to elucidate potentially universal features that might form the basis for a broad theoretical understanding. In parallel with this work, an interdisciplinary course on the science of these materials targeted at upper-level undergraduates and beginning graduate students will be initiated at Johns Hopkins and an undergraduate thesis program for Physics and Astronomy majors will be developed. Collectively, these efforts, along with the coordination of community outreach between Hopkins and local public schools, will seek to advance the science of disorder in a manner that strives to be inclusive of young scientists and potential scientists doc17337 none CAREER: The Mechanics of Fracture in Superelastic Materials Wendy C. Crone, Assistant Professor Engineering Mechanics Program, Department of Engineering Physics University of Wisconsin - Madison Shape memory alloys (SMA) constitute a unique class of materials that have already proven to have wide-ranging applications in the biomedical, aerospace, microelectronics, and automotive industries. These materials have a crystallographic structure that can change reversibly and reproducibly, allowing the material to display dramatic stress-induced and temperature-induced recoverable deformations. One key hurdle to their use is the development of reliable SMA materials and structures, in which the material s microstructure is well understood and its resistance to fatigue and fracture can be reliably predicted. Critical topics to be investigated in this research involve: determining the effect of process-induced microstructure on fracture and fatigue behavior; exploring the effect of grain refinement on the fracture behavior for grain sizes ranging between the micron and nanometer scale; and developing experimentally-based models that delineate the mechanisms influencing fracture and fatigue in NiTi and Cu-based SMAs. In conjunction with this research, education initiatives will be undertaken to develop widespread training at the undergraduate and graduate levels in superelastic behavior and shape memory materials, via new course material in the areas of nanomaterials, micromechanics and fracture mechanics. Not only will the expanded course material provide students with an introduction to topics where mechanics has been developing influence and making critical contributions to new technologies, it will also have international impact via Smart Materials Exemplar of the Worldwide Universities Network, an international network of researchers educators doc17338 none M. Pasquali, Rice University It is proposed to study experimentally and by simulation the behavior of polymers in complex flow. The experiment consists of fluorescently labeled DNA molecules flowing in a 4 to 1 contraction with its motion observed by video-microscopy. Simulations of the flow will be carried out using both Brownian dynamics model and by the course-grained continuum model. The latter method will lend itself to for design studies of processing equipment. The education plan involves introducing new courses in rheology and advanced computational methods and to include undergraduate students in the research. In terms of outreach, The PI plans to work with one high school teacher per year to help transfer the research experience to the high school students doc17339 none space of configurations lurking behind the physical phenomena. Unearthing and examining those properties of physically-motivated configuration spaces which capture the global features, the topology, geometry, and dynamics, holds the promise of providing global tools which transcend the physical instantiation of the system at hand: ostensibly different systems possess similar topological underpinnings. The research component of this project is the development of contemporary topological and global-geometric techniques for analyzing the dynamics and coordination of systems of interest in engineering and computer science. The overall goal is an effective technology transfer from cutting-edge perspectives in topology to bear upon systems in application domains which include robotics, mechanics, and fluid dynamics. This is combined with a blend of pedagogical service across graduate, undergraduate, and high school levels, featuring a focused research group on topological robotics and a high-school outreach program of expository lectures on the relevance and joy of mathematical research doc17340 none Le Doux The objective of the proposed research is to develop greater understanding of lentivirus-cell interactions, with the long-range goal of developing improved lentivirues that will be useful for cystic fibrosis gene therapy. Specifically, the goal of this research is to develop a targeted lentiviral vector and to examine the intracellular pathway that leads to maximal transfection. The specific tasks of this research include: (1) the test of the hypothesis that lentivirus gene transfer can be improved by incorporating escort proteins into the lipid bilayer of the viruses, (2) the quantitative analysis of the effect of the escort proteins on infection, and (3) the engineering of lentiviruses to target receptors on the apical surfaces of polarized epithelial cells. The knowledge gained from this research could help the design of the next generation of lentivirus vectors that would be useful for human gene therapy protocols doc17341 none The PI proposes to develop a synergistic modeling framework, from continuum level through atomistic simulation, to improve the understanding of diffusion reaction, and species aggregation during electronic materials processing. The creation of novel structures at length scales smaller than those available from traditional top-down fabrication methods requires a detailed atomistic understanding of the physics and chemistry governing multicomponent processes. This understanding must be linked also to macroscopic scale process operating conditions. Potential application areas that can benefit from such a paradigm include atomistic scale control of bulk dopant and defect distribution in silicon microelectronics, defect control in other electronic materials such as SiC, SiGe, and GaAs, and controlled deposition of multilayered structures for advanced optoelectronic materials. A close coupling of the analytical framework against available experimental results will be included in the research program. A primary goal of the educational component of the project will be to introduce electronic materials processing into the curriculum choices for chemical engineering majors, particularly at the University of Pennsylvania, to increase the number of those graduates who move into this important industry doc17342 none Montas The overall objective of the proposed project is to develop an excellent, unified and integrated program of research and teaching in engineering computation applied to biological resources systems. The proposed study consists of two educational components and three research components aimed at achieving this goal. The educational objectives are to: 1) Develop an undergraduate electronic textbook on engineering computation in biological resources, and; 2) Integrate stochastic theory, wavelet analysis and decision support into graduate level course contents and electronic documents. Research objectives are to: 1) Develop the stochastic-continuum theory of biotransport processes and validate it across biological resources systems; 2) Assess the ability of wavelet-stochastic techniques to classify biological resource image data; 3) Develop and evaluate decision support applications in biological resources areas. Successful completion of this project is expected to contribute significantly to engineering knowledge and to excellent teaching of engineering computation applied to biological resources at undergraduate and graduate levels doc17343 none CAREER: ELECTROPHORESIS OF PROTEINS IN TEMPLATED NANOPOROUS MATERIALS This CAREER project brings together biophysical and bioanalytical chemistry, with materials science and nanotechnology, to address challenges in the field of proteomics. The description of complex mixtures of proteins that make up a cell is done through a combination of separation and identification. Separations are almost always done under conditions that denature proteins and thereby obliterate their function. We seek new materials that will support the rapid and efficient separation of complex mixtures of proteins under conditions that maintain native protein structure and function. Proteins separated in these materials will be available immediately for the screening of function, such as ligand binding or enzymatic activity. We propose to develop nanoporous silica, produced using surfactant liquid-crystal templates, as a new matrix material for the electrophoretic separation of proteins under non-denaturing conditions. These materials will be fabricated into thin-films and microchannel arrays. Models of the electrophoretic motion of proteins in nanochannels should guide identification of optimal separation conditions. Our fundamental understanding of this process, however, is incomplete. Protein charge ladders - collections of protein derivatives that differ incrementally in net charge - have been useful in testing models of protein electrophoresis in free solutions. We will use charge ladders to study the role of protein charge and hydrodynamic size on the efficiency of separation and resolution of different proteins in nanochannels. Knowledge gained from these fundamental studies will test current models of electrophoresis in nanochannels and direct the formulation of new models that will, in turn, aid in the development of optimal conditions for protein separations. Proteomics - the study of the complete protein complement to the genome - seeks to answer the following two questions. Which proteins are expressed (i.e., are present and functional) in a cell? What are the functional interactions between the expressed proteins and other molecules in the cell? Answers to the first question require the separation and identification of complex mixtures of proteins isolated from cells. Separations are usually done under conditions that denature proteins and thereby obliterate their function. Answers to the second question require the biochemical analysis of individual proteins; analysis is usually done with isolated samples of pure proteins in their native functional state. Current attempts to answer these two questions therefore involve independent and mutually exclusive techniques. Our approach would combine separation with analysis of protein function. The goal is to integrate protein separation, identification and analysis of function on a single chip . This integrated approach to protein analysis requires new matrix materials that allow separations of proteins under conditions that maintain their native structure and function. We believe our approach will allow this integration. The development of these templated silica materials and the understanding of the transport of proteins through them via electrophoresis should also have significant impact on the use of such materials in bioprocess engineering. This CAREER award integrates research with an educational program that includes new course development at the university level, research opportunities for high school students, and focused educational outreach to elementary schools. The central theme of this educational program is that engineering applications and technology are effective hooks that introduce and draw students into the basic sciences and mathematics doc17344 none Semiparametric regression methods for censored data currently used by empirical researchers rarely extend beyond the well-known Cox proportional hazards regression model. The Cox model assumes that covariate-specific hazard functions are proportional, an assumption often not satisfied in practice. The proposed research investigates the accelerated failure time regression and the family of semiparametric linear transformation models, of which the Cox model is a member. Existing methods for these models are complicated by their numerical difficulties and stringent assumptions. To circumvent these complications, the investigator proposes a number of new approaches, including modified least squares method, the M-estimation and a minimization-based rank-type estimation for the accelerated failure time model and a general counting process-based score equations for the transformation models. An important feature of the new approaches is that their inference procedures can be readily implemented with numerically stable algorithms. Results from the proposed project will be relevant and directly applicable to many scientific disciplines. They will provide methodologic tools for analysis of data across many important fields, including economics, business administration, industrial engineering, medicine, biology and public health. Examples of the scientific research problems that the methods can deal with are as diverse as identification of factors associated with the duration of unemployment, determination of major risk factors for cancer, testing of new drugs to combat AIDS, examination of factors associated with the lifespan of system components, evaluation of potential confounding factors in crime prevention and drug abuse. The research touches many important areas in statistical science: linear regression, survival analysis, semiparametrics, robust statistics, nonparametric statistics and statistical computing. In this connection, it will generate excellent opportunities for graduate students to have exposures to a broad spectrum of modern statistics as well as to learn vital skills in conducting independent researches. A research topic reading course and a journal club will be developed to facilitate these exposures and enhance the educational experience doc17345 none Institution: University of Maryland College Park The chlorinated solvents tetrachloroethene (PCE) and trichloroethene (TCE) are among the most common contaminants of groundwater. The toxicity and physical properties of these compounds, along with the frequency with which they are detected, mean that cleanup of groundwater systems contaminated with PCE and TCE is both critical to protecting human health and technically challenging. Biological transformation of PCE is limited to anaerobic reductive dehalogenation. From a remediation standpoint, only complete dechlorination of PCE to ethene is an acceptable outcome, because lightly chlorinated ethenes also pose a health hazard. Unfortunately, the potential for complete detoxification of highly chlorinated ethenes is frequently not realized in situ, resulting in the accumulation of lightly chlorinated ethenes. An improved understanding of the factors that influence the extent of PCE transformation that occurs in impacted environments is needed to better predict contaminant fate and transport, protect human health, and improve the effectiveness of bioremediation strategies. The proposed research addresses a specific type of microbial interaction, competition between dehalogenating populations for chlorinated ethenes and electron donors. Competition between dehalogenating populations may have a major impact on the fate of chlorinated ethenes in situ because these organisms differ with respect to transformation rates, and even more importantly, the extent of dechlorination. The goals of the proposed research are:(1) to determine how competition among dehalogenating populations is influenced by the intrinsic biokinetics of the dehalogenating populations, the nature and concentrations of the available electron donors, and chlorinated ethene concentrations; and (2) to develop tools for predicting the outcome of competition between dehalogenating populations, the impact on chlorinated ethene fate, and the success of bioaugmentation strategies. These goals will be accomplished using an integrated approach involving modeling predictions and verification in a series of increasingly complex experimental systems, including defined co-culture competition experiments and field surveys involving microbiological and chemical characterization of groundwater at PCE-impacted sites. Quantification of key PCE-dehalogenating populations in groundwater systems will be achieved through 16S rRNA-based methods. This project was originally funded as a CAREER award, and was converted to a Presidential Early Career Award for Engineers and Scientists (PECASE) award in May doc17346 none The proposed research is to develop mechanism-based multiscale modeling and simulation to understand dislocation behavior in strained heteroepitaxial layer structures, which has been of central interest in developing high-speed microelectronics in the semiconductor industry. Discrete dislocation nucleation, motion, and interaction will be studied by incorporating atomistic information into a variational boundary integral method in the Peierls-Nabarro framework. Critical conditions for dislocation nucleation from the perfect surface and surface heterogeneities such as ledges, defects, microcracks, and quantum dots will be determined by solving the embryonic saddle-point dislocation configurations and their associated thermal activation energies. Short-range dislocation interactions and the effect of lattice resistance to dislocation motion will be evaluated as well. Collective behavior of dislocations will be investigated by incorporating the obtained mechanisms of dislocation nucleation, interaction, and motion into a finite element enhanced dislocation dynamics simulation, which has been developed in collaboration with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The emphasis will be placed on fundamental mechanisms of threading dislocation density reduction and dislocation pattern formation in strained heteroexpitaxial layer structures. The proposed education plan consists of the development of the new laboratory and curriculum that emphasize mechanics and materials at the small scale and interdisciplinary education at UC Riverside. Extra efforts will be made to enhance undergraduate students interest in science and engineering. The objective is to develop a first-rate new mechanics and materials education program that meets the future demands of nanoscale science and engineering. The proposed education and research plans are integrated to reinforce each other doc17347 none The nonlinear vibrations and aeroelastic stability of two-dimensional gyroscopic systems such as high-speed rotating disks and translating webs are investigated using computational, analytical, and experimental techniques together with state-of-the-art models of nonlinear flexible rotating disks and thin translating webs interacting with three-dimensional shear flows. The research aims to identify regions in parameter space where aeroelastic flutter occurs, and investigate the complex post-flutter nonlinear modal interactions of this category of two-dimensional gyroscopic systems. The results will lead directly to a fundamental understanding of the factors (i) limiting rotation or transport speeds and (ii) causing flutter instabilities and will be critical for the future design of information storage and synthetic material processing technologies such as magnetic hard disk drives, optical drives, data storage tapes, printing, and paper, textile, plastics, and metal foil processing systems. The education plan focuses on the PI s current activities in five key areas for integrating research, education, and industrial outreach, including, amongst others (i) leveraging the PI s research in collaboration with Purdue s Minority in Engineering and Women in Engineering Programs for the recruitment and retention of under-represented groups and women in engineering, and (ii) enhancing the undergraduate curriculum through the creation of a novel, hands-on Mechanics Laboratory doc17348 none For manipulations at the nanoscale, highly precise positioning capability is a very basic, yet indispensable requirement. Possible applications in this area range from the assembly of molecular structures to cell manipulations and highly precise machining tasks. Currently employed devices for nanomanipulation commonly rely on the use of actuators from active materials, mostly piezoelectrics and magnetostrictives. It is only through these materials and their inherent properties that the possibility of efficient actuation in an extremely small volume is offered at all. On the other hand, these materials exhibit a highly non-linear behavior characterized by the occurrence of hysteresis loops. This greatly afflicts their control performance and limits their applicability to low bandwidth and low stroke applications under conventional (PID) feedback loops. It is of great relevance for almost every nanomanufacturing task to improve speed and efficiency while at the same time maintaining high precision. A way to treat the problem is to incorporate a model of the material behavior into the control algorithm. A novel approach in the field of shape memory alloys developed by the PI has recently established the foundation for an extremely efficient type of algorithm. This approach not only extends the range of currently employed methods to account for optimality criteria like speed of adjustment or energy consumption; it is clearly real-time capable due to its high computational speed. Based on the observation that, on the icroscale, the physical mechanisms in shape memory alloys are closely related to the ones observed in piezoelectric and magnetostrictive materials, a unified model will be developed for all three materials. Based on such a unified model, the real-time optimal control approach will be extended to account for closed-loop feedback and parameter updating, and it will be validated in a real-time hardware environment. The educational plan involves four initiatives and will promote the development of new multi-disciplinary courses from undergraduate to Ph.D. level, as well as active undergraduate student research integration. The third effort will increase the exposure of students to international issues and increase their foreign language proficiency by offering possibilities to work with one of Germany s leading institutions in nanotechnology. The final initiative is the development of web based course materials, including virtual lab experiments through a simulation based on JAVA versions for active materials models doc17349 none The PI investigate the effects of controlling the surface microstructure on the single phase flow and heat transfer in microchannels, using whole field temperature measurement techniques. If successful, the research could lead to improved performance of MEMS devices and a variety of small scale, high heat flux devices, such as heat sinks for microprocessors, wearable air conditioners for harsh environments, and portable cooling units. The work could also clarify the sometimes contradictory and inconsistent body of experimental data that exist for heat transfer and fluid flow in microchannels. The educational plan includes the development of Cross Educational Research Teams involving graduate students, undergraduates and high school studens working with the faculty member as a coordinated team doc17350 none The focus of this research is to develop methodology for the preparation of porphyrins with fused pyrene rings and to test the potential for using pyrene as a platform for connecting fused porphyrin rings. In parallel studies, the synthesis, characterization and chemistry of carbaporphyrins will be investigated. Other macrocyclic systems, including tropiporphyrin, will be synthesized using 3+1 methodology and 4+1 methodology will be used to prepare carba-analogues of expanded porphyrins. Undergraduate students will be involved at all stages of the research. With this renewal Research in Undergraduate Institutions (RUI) award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research efforts of Dr. Timothy D. Lash of the Department of Chemistry at Illinois State University. Dr. Lash will focus his work on the preparation of porphyrin-like chromophores and related dimeric or oligomeric systems. Porphyrins are a class of brightly colored heterocycles that serve a variety of functions in nature and the synthesis of analogues opens new avenues for the preparation of compounds with potentially interesting properties. The work will be carried out with the collaboration of undergraduate and masters level graduate students doc17351 none Institution: Washington State University The PI proposes to investigate the synthesis of calcium phosphate based ceramic nano-podwers and its use in the development of bioactive bone implants of improved mechanical properties. The proposal includes a very well planned structured research plan addressing key aspects from the synthesis of the material (nanopowders) to processing of various composites for implants, to the detailed physical mechanical and biological characterization. The proposal brings a variety of skills to the project, all very well integrated. An entire interdisciplinary program plan seems to be associated with this proposal. The PI is a very active outstanding young faculty who has a multidisciplinary background, interacts with researchers with various backgrounds and expertise, and is an expert herself on the main experimental techniques to be used within the proposed research activities. The research questions address in the research plan are highly relevant and the approaches are novel. The proposed level of characterization of mechanical properties of the implant materials scaffolding materials is consistent with the current needs of the tissue-engineering field. The results of this investigation may significantly contribute to the advancement in the development of scaffolds for bone tissue engineering. This project was originally funded as a CAREER award, and was converted to a Presidential Early Career Award for Engineers and Scientists (PECASE) award in May doc17352 none This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project addresses an integrated research and education plan for a new generation of mechanical engineers in interdisciplinary design in biotechnology and biomedical applications (i.e., BioMEMS) using Microelectromechanical systems technology. The research objectives of this CAREER project are to experimentally: (1) evaluate the ability of electrowetting actuation to precisely transport and manipulate nano-liter to femto-liter discrete droplets in a discrete moving manner in BioMEMS devices; (2) determine how the design parameters and fabrication variables affect the performance of electrowetting-actuated discrete droplets in BioMEMS devices; and (3) determine an interdisciplinary design methodology for BioMEMS applications. Integrating the proposed research with education, the PI will incorporate MEMS education with existing curriculum in mechanical engineering, develop a new MEMS design course in mechanical engineering, organize a MEMS seminar at Iowa State University, advise graduate and undergraduate students through the proposed research, and work with a high school student and teacher on the proposed research during summers. The research studies of the fundamental issues associated with the electrowetting actuation will enable us to precisely, quantitatively and flexibly control the movement of nano-liter to femto-liter discrete droplets, transport it to any designed destination, and manipulate it to any designed size. The most significance of this project will enable us to further reduce sample consumption to the range of nano-liter to femto-liter volume, improve the overall performance, and achieve the current unachievable functionality of BioMEMS devices. This project will impact the current MEMS design methodology and promote the commercialization of MEMS applications. The educational activities of this project will take place at several levels (K-12 students and teachers, and undergraduate and graduate students majoring and non-majoring in mechanical engineering). Through this CAREER project, the PI will facilitate these audiences to succeed in the technology-based world of tomorrow doc17353 none Proposal SES 01- Biology on Display: Museums and the New Life Sciences in America Karen A. Rader, Sarah Lawrence College This CAREER Award integrates research and teaching toward a detailed exploration of the historical relations between academic and public understandings of biology in the twentieth century United States. The five-year research project examines with historical research methods the changing display patterns of life science exhibitions in American museums between to -- a subject uncharted by historians of science. This study clarifies central issues about the academic and social reconfiguration of biology as a science, including the relationship of the people and practices involved in life science laboratory research to those involved in its public presentation; the interplay of disciplinary and material forces that led biological exhibits to play a central role in newer science and technology museums, as well as in American culture more broadly; and, ultimately, the changing institutional role of the museum in sustaining social support for the twentieth-century life sciences. Research activities include a program of museum fieldwork in New York and at archives and museum sites in Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and Columbus (Ohio). Alongside the research project, the PI is developing two new courses that involve undergraduate students in independent historical and or sociological research. Students in an open seminar, Public Science Popular Science: Knowledge-Making and Scientific Literacy in the Modern World, explores how science is constructed as a public enterprise. This course investigates the general relationship between laboratory practice and processes of social and political change, as well as the particular meaning and significance of scientific literacy issues in differing historical and cultural contexts. Also, an advanced undergraduate seminar, Nature on Display: Museums in Science, focuses on how science and culture co-construct one another in the museum setting, with special attention to the historical evolution of different types of science museums, and the process of exhibition construction. This latter course requires students to undertake field placements at local science museums, in order to experience first hand (either by researching primary source historical documents, or by becoming a participant-observer in the design of a contemporary display) the process of museum science in-the-making. Located in the New York Metropolitan area, Sarah Lawrence College is an innovative liberal arts school with a unique undergraduate course structure that features small seminars, writing-across-the-curriculum, and individual tutorials; thus the pedagogical aims of this plan are uniquely suited to the institution s niche. To further encourage public outreach during the seminars, the PI is developing a workshop series on The Meaning of Public Science, in which exceptional local and national scholars, artists, and scientists will be invited to address their work to class themes in small panel discussions and lectures. All educational efforts make considered use of a WWW infrastructure for information and interaction. The primary goal is production of a book, as well as conference presentations (for students and the PI) and articles in scholarly journals and general education venues. By providing an overview of the history of biology displays, this research project re-situates museums as important institutions in relation to the existing histories of research practices and popularization in the life sciences. By placing liberal arts students in museums, the PI s pedagogical activities can expose them to social science methodologies, as well advance community and disciplinary outreach between the public and academic worlds of science doc1420 none The Principal Investigators (PIs) overall objective is to develop plant cell and tissue culture technology, which will permit rapid evaluation of heterologous gene expression in plants. This work includes the development of rigorous principles for the monitoring, control and operation of bioreactors for plant cell and tissue culture. These bioreactor operational principles will be utilized to correlate performance of transient expression systems using Agrobacterium co-cultivation for DNA transformation and the TMV vector or a single-stranded DNA geminivirus vector capable of DNA amplification for protein production (based on tobacco and corn seed endosperm) while testing expression and accumulation of three therapeutic proteins: a monoclonal antibody (NR-LU-10 MAb), a cytokine (human growth hormone, hGH), and a blood transport protein (human transferrin, hTR). The specific objectives are to: (1) Develop operational and control strategies for bioreactor growth of plant cell and root culture, (2) Develop and optimize techniques conditions for DNA delivery for transient expression, and (3) Utilize bioreactor control strategies and optimized transient therapeutic protein expression systems to evaluate heterologous transgene expression in plant cell and tissue culture, followed by correlation with performance in transgenic plants with the same proteins. This is a collaborative GOALI project involving three PIs with different complementary scientific and technological expertise. Wayne Curtis the primary PI at the Pennsylvania State University is an expert in the area of bioreactor technology, Hugh Mason the second PI at the Boyce Thompson Institute and Cornell University in the area of transgenic plants, and Doug Russell at the Integrated Protein Technologies of Monsanto in the area of production of proteins from transgenic plants doc17355 none Weiss Under this CAREER Award, methods from theoretical and computational mechanics will be combined with pattern theory to directly incorporate medical image data into the analysis of deforming biological tissues. Results will provide new finite-element based tools that use image data to track three-dimensional kinematics and nonlinear strain in deforming tissues and to register anatomical structures appearing in image data sets. Two applications would be targeted: in vivo measurement of strains in the beating human heart and in situ measurement of strains in ligaments. The techniques and resulting software, which will be made available to the public, are expected to be applicable in numerous other areas including geophysics, manufacturing engineering design, biology and computational medicine. The educational component focuses on three areas: bioengineering outreach to Utah high school students through a summer institute; developing an integrated biomechanics curriculum built around three core courses, and training undergraduate and graduate students in conjunction with research objectives doc17356 none The PI proposes study, using a number of state-of-the-art experimental techniques, a long-standing-but still inadequately understood-problem of fluid mechanics and heat transfer. Annular flow, in which vapor flows through the center of a tube surrounded by a thin film of liquid on the wall, is the dominant flow condition in many heat exchanger applications involving evaporation or condensation. The results could lead to improved models for flows in power, refrigeration and air-conditioning systems, with less reliance on empirical data gathered over a narrow range of operating conditions. An educational development plan includes non-traditional approaches to the therm-fluids cycle of the undergraduate curriculum, as well as incorporation of research results into upper level courses in multiphase flow and convective heat transfer doc17357 none Lee The objective of the proposed research is to develop techniques to significantly increase terpenoid indole alkaloid (TIA) production from cell cultures of C. roseus. The proposed hypothesis is that to maximize the production of secondary metabolites such as TIAs, the relative flows of precursors and energy resources at various levels must be balanced. The proposed specific aims for achieving this balance for increasing TIA production are to: (1) increase flux to both primary and secondary metabolism, (2) maximize the metabolic flux to TIA production while maintaining an appropriate metabolic flux to cellular machinery for supporting essential cellular activities, (3) tune the flux between the glycolysis, citric acid, and pentose phosphate pathways for maximum secondary metabolite production, and (4) characterize the optimum balance the various pathways and activities. This research could produce results to increase the yield of important antitumor and antihypertensive compounds doc17358 none Microstructure characterization and modeling are essential for the understanding of the macroscopic behavior of engineering materials. It is often used to design new materials with tailored microstructures, obtain parameters for multiscale continuum models, and simulate engineering processes at the material microstructure level. Microstructure characterization techniques have significantly advanced the understanding of many engineering materials such as metals, ceramics, and composites. This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) research and education project offers a novel approach for linking the geomaterials microstructure to their macroscopic properties. It focuses on developing an approach to quantify the three-dimensional geomaterial microstructure and its influence on fluid flow characteristics and directional permeability. These properties have significant impact on several phenomena in geomaterials such as the stability of saturated soils, contaminant transport in soils, oil transport in rocks, and the performance of pavements. The proposed research is well balanced between experimental methods for characterizing the 3-D microstructure of geomaterials, numerical modeling, and computer simulation. X-ray computed tomography (CT) will be used to capture the three-dimensional microstructure of geomaterials. Computational fluid dynamics will be used to develop a numerical solution to the fluid flow equations within the boundary conditions of the material microstructure as defined by the X-ray CT images. Experimental measurements will be used to verify the developed models and computer simulations. The outcome of this research will provide unique insight into the influence of the microstructure on the macroscopic properties of geomaterials. It will offer a fundamental approach for predicting material permeability and fluid flow characteristics that will ultimately lead to effective design of geosystems. These research activities will be integrated in an educational program that incorporates recent advances in experimental non-destructive techniques, image analysis, numerical modeling, and computer simulation into the academic curriculum through team-oriented projects conducted by undergraduate students, and graduate course development. A summer educational program will also be established that focuses on the participation of high school students, and those recruited from other universities with emphasis on under-represented groups in engineering. Students will be able to link the microstructure properties to the macroscopic response, and visualize the influence of the microstructure on the material behavior through computer simulations. The project includes a management plan to ensure achieving the research, educational and outreach objectives. It involves an advisory committee consisting of multidisciplinary individuals from academia, research institutions, and government agencies. The role of this committee will be to offer technical advice, facilitate dissemination of the results and ensure exposure of the findings to educational and professional organizations. An additional role of this committee will be to facilitate the involvement of under-represented student groups doc17359 none Seth Description: This award supports the US-India Cooperative Research: A New Approach to Boolean Division that can Trade Performance for Computation. US PI Shared Seth, University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), Somenath Biswas, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IITK) and two of their graduate students will collaborate on solving an important logic synthesis problem in microelectronic design automation. The investigators will decompose a large circuit into three smaller ones by using Boolean division to compute the two smaller circuits. The objective is to develop a best path technique using approximate algorithms that trade-off performance with time. The researchers will design and implement a single system that enables users to control the trade-off between computational efficiency and quality of output. The results of the proposed research may find extensive use in multilevel Very Large-Scale Integrated (VLSI) circuit synthesis. Scope: This project will enhance US infrastructure through the exchange of senior scientists and graduate students between UNL and IITK, one of India s foremost institutes for computer science. The students will present findings at a well-established VLSI design conference in India; the PIs will publish final documentation in an archival journal. The Office of International Science & Engineering and the Indian Department of Science and Technology (DST) support this activity under the NSF DST joint program doc17360 none The secreted proteins called neurotrophic factors exert diverse biological effects on neurons in different developmental contexts, such as differentiation, target innervation, and synaptic specification. Recent studies by our group and others suggest that glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) and neurturin (NRTN), the two closely related neurotrophic factors, are required for the normal development of several parasympathetic neuron populations and that these proteins are released from target tissues at early embryonic ages. The goal of this project is to elucidate the functional role of GDNF in the generation and differentiation of parasympathetic ciliary ganglion neurons that innervate striate muscle and smooth muscle in the eye. The following three questions will be addressed: (1) Does GDNF promote neurogenesis or neuronal differentiation in the ciliary ganglion? (2) Does GDNF provide a guidance cue for growing ciliary axons? (3) Does GDNF regulate the expression of a proper number of neurotransmitter receptors in ciliary ganglion neurons? Normal functions of GDNF will be manipulated both in vitro and in vivo, and resultant changes in gene expression, protein synthesis, axon outgrowth and receptor localization will be analyzed. These experiments would represent the first systematic attempt to isolate molecular and cellular mechanisms associated with parasympathetic neuron development, and substantially advance our understanding of neuronal identity and specification doc17361 none The proposed activities are organized according to the impacted student group from graduate down to preschool students. Maintaining an active research program on the cutting edge of technology will enable truly applicable lessons to be brought to each age group. Towards graduate education, the P1 will continue to teach a course entitled Principles of Thin Film Technology, and will focus on two specific goals over the next 5 years. One is the development of a new textbook and the other is the continued development of hands-on team-competition laboratories. These two goals are complimentary in that a laboratory manual will be published as an ancillary to the textbook. Towards graduate research, the proposed work aims to equip integrated optical circuits with important devices that are currently available only as discrete components. A great example would be magneto-optical isolators, currently composed of doped yttrium iron garnet (YIG), which have been cited as the most important components in fiber optic systems due to their extension of laser lifetimes. The size, weight and cost of adding an isolator to an optical system would be greatly reduced if the isolator could be integrated directly into the optical source. Here, rapid progress will be made toward integrated isolators using the foundation laid by prior NSF support (work invited to Photonics West ). Various magneto-optical waveguides and permanent magnet films will be investigated so that several generations of integrated isolators will be developed over the next five years. In addition to integrated isolators, the proposed work will extend P1 s expertise into the revolutionary field of photonic crystals. She has started growing nanostructures in anodized alumina and plans to apply these structures to develop 2D magnetophotonic bandgap materials. For this application, the nanostructures must have excellent periodicity. Using a novel vapor deposition technique, the structures will be observed directly in an electron microscope as they grow. This will enable investigations of the growth mechanisms so that nucleation can be suppressed while growth is encouraged, resulting in extended long range order. These nanostructures will then be used to pattern the best magneto-optical waveguides from the isolator work in order to make magnetophotonic crystals. This work is revolutionary in that it adds a new dimension to the current field of magnetophotonic crystals, which are presently only studied as one-dimensional multilayers. Towards undergraduate education and research, a Local College Facilities Usage Program will be inaugurated, support of the MRS Undergraduate Materials Research Initiative (a program founded by the P1) will continue, and the NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates Program in the P1 s department will be renewed. Both the NSF REU and the University of Minnesota s UROP programs will be used to support undergraduate research projects. Undergraduate teaching will take the form of recitations initially so that the P1 can learn about the departmental courses that she will subsequently teach. Finally, preschool-12th grade science outreach will include hiring a high school student to work with P1 s group every summer, and developing and delivering science demonstrations to preschool-12th grade groups. As part of an under-represented group, the P1 is often asked to deliver these demonstrations to youth of the same group. This grassroots outreach has promise for recruiting additional good students to science doc17362 none Devlin This work proposes to use granular iron, a low alloyed steel reclaimed from the scrap metal, as a model reactive porous medium to evaluate the following hypothesis: the hypothesis applies to media found in natural settings, such as sulfides and iron oxides, and has important implications for engineered in situ passive treatment systems as well as natural attenuation. The granular iron medium functions abiotically, simplifying the experimental designs and analysis. The emphasis of this work is with reactions involving organic pollutants in groundwater, and the processes selected for investigation as part of this program are: (1) reactivity discrimination between different classes of organic compounds and kinetics of reaction in systems with finite reactive surface availability, (2) sensitivity of hydraulic conductivity to precipitate accumulation, (3) relative importance of precipitate accumulation rates compared with corrosion rates to assess overall porosity loss gain rates, (4) modeling of reactive transport with the appropriate kinetic models and (5) assessing and quantifying the effects of surface carbon on reactivity. The investigations are supported in the modeling and spectroscopic aspects by collaborators in Canada, and in the effects of surface carbon by Peerless, Michigan, a manufacturer of the material. Novel experimental techniques and approaches are incorporated into the investigations as listed above: (1) Reactivity experiments will be conducted in a batch reactor especially designed to minimize mass transfer effects and abrasion of particles at the same time. This will be accomplished by adhering the particles to a glass encased magnetic rod suspended in the reactor vessel. Competition experiments will provide evidence of reactive sites shared by different compound classes; (2) corrosion rates will be estimated by 2 independent methods (measurement of hydrogen production rates and electrochemically) and compared; (3) precipitation rates of anaerobic processes will be estimated from surface area changes and mass accumulations and the results compared; (4) changes to hydraulic conductivity will be investigated by examining columns connected to a common manifold so that more than one flow path is available should hydraulic conductivity changes occur to the reactive medium and (5) surface carbon investigations will be conducted in flow through batch reactors modified from earlier experiments (1 above). This technique will permit a distinction to be made between mass losses due to sorption from those due to reaction doc17363 none N. Patankar, Northwestern University The PI is proposing to develop a broad range of simulation techniques to address several difficult and important problems in the area of modeling nanoscale systems such as MEMS devices, including Brownian motion of complex shape microstructures, motion of charged particles and motion of flexible molecules. The PI is also proposing to develop a hybrid continuum atomistic simulation for systems that span a broad range of length scales. All of the techniques are either novel or are building off of state of the art work in the literature. In the education plan, the PI proposes to develop two undergraduate courses and one graduate course in the area of computational methods for MEMS devices. The two undergraduate courses will deal with fluid simulations associated with these devices and the graduate course will incorporate the more novel numerical techniques described in the research plan doc17364 none Research world-wide on biosensing is motivated by numerous applications in environmental and food testing and clinical diagnostics, for example. However, the important problem of detecting in parallel a large number of molecular species from the very small samples typical of most collection procedures remains an elusive goal. This CAREER research plan focuses on solving this problem by merging the science of nanophotonics with waveguide biosensors and microfluidics for the development of a new class of molecular detection array. The immobilization of metallic nanoparticles onto discrete zones of an optical waveguide surface makes the parallel detection of a large number of molecular species feasible. In each zone, capture molecules tethered to the nanoparticles preferentially bind to a particular molecular species through an affinity interaction. Strong localization of light about each nanoparticle allows for dramatic improvement in optical signal transduction, thereby facilitating the detection of small numbers of molecules bound within each zone. Microfluidics will be used to deliver small sample volumes to each sensing zone and passive mixing structures will be studied in order to increase the molecular binding probability within each zone. The education plan focuses on the creation of a summer optics workshop for secondary school physics and science teachers. As more demands are placed on teachers, and as technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, teachers need a way in which to further their knowledge of science and hands-on teaching methods. Detailed lesson plans and laboratory exercises will be developed for deployment in the classroom, with the goal of improving student understanding of and instruction in optics and the sciences, and encouraging students to pursue careers in engineering and science. Participation of teachers from Hispanic and Native American schools will be strongly encouraged doc12700 none This research project will explore the utility of adjoint-based methods of ensemble prediction for El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), with the view to support the development of a new operational ensemble prediction scheme for ENSO. The PIs will use a hierarchy of coupled ENSO models that represent different levels of approximation of coupled ocean-atmosphere General Circulation Models (GCM). In addition to exploring singular vector and stochastic optimal based ensemble prediction techniques, they will compare these techniques with the method of bred modes that is currently used for ensemble weather prediction at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction. The ensemble prediction experiments will be analyzed using conventional statistical techniques and using a new theoretical framework based on information theory. The research builds on existing methods and ideas that have been applied successfully to Numerical Weather Prediction on timescales of 5-10 days using complex state-of-the-art atmospheric GCMs. The techniques have been applied successfully to ENSO prediction using simple coupled models, however, the application of existing ideas to complex ENSO prediction presents some significant new challenges that need to be addressed. The work is important because it has the potential to improve ENSO forecasts, which has important societal benefits doc17366 none Swartz Under this CAREER Award, macroscale tissue mechanics will be bridged to cellular- and molecular-level control elements to examine how cells act in concert to manage mechanical stresses in their shared environment. The focus is on issues of tissue fluid balance, in particular on the effects of interstitial flow on matrix remodeling in a dynamic living environment. To characterize the system, an in vivo model of lymphangiogenesis into an implanted collagen gel (in situ model in the rat tail) will be observed over time. Based on the qualitative data obtained, a 3D in vitro model in which the physical environment can be tightly controlled and cell response readily ascertained will be developed. The two models will then be used symbiotically to examine the relationship between extracellular matrix architecture and interstitial flow, with particular focus on the organization and development of interstitial water channels. The notion of interstitial-flow induced matrix remodeling and vessel formation can be used to address a number of related research questions. The educational component focuses on integrating traditional biomedical engineering topics with contemporary problems in the biological sciences and biotechnology. Specific areas to be addressed are: reconstructing the biomechanics and biotransport curriculum within the department (new courses in Advanced Tissue Mechanics and Transport in Living Systems and increased involvement in the NSF Engineering Research Center on Engineering Education), enhancing the bioengineering community within the engineering school (establish a focus in biomechanics) and introducing non-traditional, interdisciplinary components to the engineering curriculum (new course in societal implications of technology doc17367 none CAREER: Twinning Induced Grain Boundary Engineering In Ultrafine Grain Materials: A Multidisciplinary Approach Ibrahim Karaman Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University The manipulation of the interface content and structure of solids can be considered as one of the most important processes in the evolution of materials. This is particularly important for controlling the physical and mechanical properties of ultrafine grain materials (UFG) (grain size 1 mm) because of the large volume fraction of interfaces. This CAREER program aims at developing new strategies for twinning induced grain boundary engineering (GBE), furthering the understanding of GBE in UFG materials, and developing predictive and control capabilities for the materials properties that are governed by grain boundaries and their interiors, utilizing an integrated research and education methodology. The RESEARCH PLAN focuses on three thrust areas: 1) processing: fabrication of UFG materials by severe plastic deformation processing followed by thermal treatments starting either from powder precursors or bulk precursors to vary the structure and fraction of the boundaries and the texture, 2) characterization: microstructural characterization of boundary character distribution, texture, and internal stress distribution utilizing unique experimental techniques such as orientation imaging microscopy and in-situ neutron diffraction, 3) modeling: developing a hierarchically structured materials modeling approach across length scales to predict the mechanical properties and microstructural evolution of UFG materials. Specific emphasis will be given to deformation and annealing twinning induced interfaces in low stacking fault energy, high strength steels. The research plan is SIGNIFICANT because, despite the importance of controlling the grain boundary character, there has never been a study combining GBE and bulk UFG materials and investigating the effect of twinning. The EDUCATION PLAN is to strengthen the faculty of materials engineering at Texas A&M University (TAMU) by developing a rigorous curriculum on metallic materials, and by motivating and preparing students who can contribute to UFG materials engineering on a long-term basis both as engineers and researchers. Since the micro materials world is a stranger to public, particularly the younger ones, in spite of all its fascinating developments, a significant effort will be put to bridge this gap. A pilot instructional unit will be developed, in collaboration with an area high school, to offer students a physical feel and hands-on experience with materials doc17368 none This project focuses on finding more suitable catalysts for fuel-cell electrodes. The theoretical portion of the work will be aimed at both oxygen reduction at the cathode and methanol oxidation at the anode. Both electric field effects and solvent effects will be taken into account. The theory can offer insights into the competition between C-H and O-H bond breaking in the methanol molecule on clean platinum single-crystal surfaces. The CO poisoning of the anode will also be addressed. Studies of CO adsorption on various alloys will be studies to determine which alloys give the lowest binding energy, and thus have the greatest potential for CO tolerance. At the cathode catalytic bond breaking of the O=O bond will be studies; subsequently, the total cathode reaction, which typically involves water formation will be investigated. A complementary combinatorial approach will be undertaken in conjunction with guidance from other faculty. The educational component involves the development of a course in computational chemistry. A program in cooperative learning will also be included through the introduction of ConceptTests developed elsewhere. This work has the potential to guide research that may result in an improved methanol fuel cell doc17369 none CAREER: The Dependence of Friction on Vibrations at the Atomic Scale: A Fundamental Study Using Isotopic Engineering Robert W. Carpick University of Wisconsin - Madison Research Much progress has been made in the long-standing engineering discipline of tribology - the study of friction, adhesion, lubrication, and wear - yet many key questions remain. Recently, tribology has emerged as critically important to the field of nanotechnology, since the increased surface-to-volume ratio at small scales ensures that surface or interface effects dominate the interactions between micro- or nano-scale components. Therefore, progress toward the implementation of nano-scale materials technologies will not occur without a fundamental atomic-scale understanding of the tribological properties of interfaces. The proposed research will address this knowledge gap by studying a fundamental aspect of tribology: the relationship between frictional energy dissipation and the vibrational properties of materials. Specifically, the PI will perform atomic force microscope (AFM) measurements of friction at the atomic scale as a function of isotopic composition of the sliding materials. The substitution of heavier stable isotopes is a method to tailor specific vibrational properties by changing the mass, but not the chemical identity, of atoms in a material. The impact of this research will be: (1) to provide a quantitative experimental basis that will critically enhance the theoretical understanding of frictional energy dissipation in terms of vibrational energy; and (2) to enable the design of nanostructured materials and devices with optimized tribological (and other) properties via isotopic engineering. Education and Outreach To be prepared for new opportunities in nanotechnology, engineering programs must incorporate previously non-traditional physical and experimental concepts into the curriculum. The PI will make a major contribution to this by: (1) expanding an engineering mechanics undergraduate laboratory course to include a battery of nano-scale experiments including AFM experiments; and (2) co-developing an advanced seminar course in nanotechnology directed at engineers. The intention is not simply to provide new course materials locally, but to have these materials serve as models for enhancing engineering curricula everywhere through evaluation and wide dissemination on the web, education publications, and in public meetings. In addition, outreach efforts aimed at the general public and K-12 students will be pursued. The PI will contribute to the design of an upcoming international science museum exhibit on materials science by developing modules (visualization, models, hands-on materials) on the topics of microscopy, friction, and isotopes. The PI will also develop a classroom-compatible macro-scale AFM made of simple and affordable components which can demonstrate concepts behind high resolution imaging and friction force measurements. Local impact of this work will be felt through the PI s active involvement in a successful minority university recruiting program at UW-Madison. Finally, building on the established practice in the PI s lab, the laboratory efforts will also include substantial involvement of undergraduates including members of under-represented groups doc17370 none This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award provides funding for the development of models and algorithms for coordination problems in Service Parts Logistics (SPL) systems. The challenge in SPL systems is to coordinate decisions across business units, time horizons, and geographical locations at the same time towards high-quality system-wide solutions. The research first will develop a unified framework for integrated logistics network design and inventory management and explore decomposition-based solution methodologies for the associated problems formulated as mathematical models. The logistics network design submodel involves multiple echelons, multiple products and time-based service coverage restrictions. The inventory submodel involves inventory sharing across multiple facilities and response-time based service levels. Motivated by the scale of the problems existing in real SPL systems, the research will also investigate different levels of granularity of the models, and identify the trade-off between computation and solution accuracy. The research will finally address the mechanism design and incentive issues that inherently exist in coordination problems: How does one make sure that the decision entities have the necessary incentives to coordinate their decisions? The closely related educational plan of the award involves the development of a teaching case on modern SPL systems, and the development of a course on mathematical modeling of supply chain coordination problems. If successful, the results of this research will lead to the solution of problems in SPL, both in size and scope, commonly faced by industry, the government and the military. The models and their results will be validated and verified with partners in SPL. The investigations should contribute in finding scalable solution methodologies for large-scale mathematical models with special structure and their application to real problems. The results will also provide insights in aligning the individual decision entities goals with the system-wide goals. Analyzing these issues simultaneously in a unified framework will improve the understanding of how these factors (different levels of coordination and incentive issues) affect each other in distributed logistics systems. Another contribution will be to undercover the relationship between coordination mechanisms and decomposition-based optimization techniques. The educational component should enhance teaching in applied operations research, supply chain management, and logistics courses doc17371 none This award funds a wide range of scholarly and educational projects related to the principal investigator s research interests in Number Theory. With regards to his own research, the investigator plans to study, among other topics, partitions and modular forms, Gaussian hypergeometric series, character sums, varieties over finite fields, polynomial-exponential equations, and thedivisors of modular forms. In addition to his own research, the investigator will develop a number of new outreach and educational programs at the high school and undergraduate levels, and will become involved in training programs at more advanced levels. Specifically, the investigator will direct workshops for high school students and high school teachers, will support programs for talented undergraduate students, and will provide enhanced opportunities for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Number Theory is a very old branch of mathematics which has its roots in the study of the whole numbers. In modern times it has become an important tool in many applied endeavors. For example, systems which enable secure transmission of data over the internet are based on Number Theory, as are error correcting codes for reliable data transmission. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program supports the early development of academic faculty both as educators and as researchers. The program emphasizes the development of full, balanced academic careers. This award will allow the investigator to further develop his ongoing program of research in Number Theory. It will also support the investigator s broadly based educational and outreach efforts at the high school, undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels doc17372 none The overall goal of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award is to design and establish a research-integrated education program for machining difficult-to-machine materials. Machining difficult-to-machine ceramics, superalloys, and composites presents numerous challenges. Structural ceramics such as silicon nitride are finding applications in aerospace, automobile, and related industries. However, machining these materials is expensive and can induce subsurface cracks that compromise the strength of the material. The research objective is to develop novel laser integrated cutting tools that will be used for cost-effective machining of structural ceramics that is insensitive to part quantity and geometric shapes. Temperature monitoring capability will be built into the cutting tool to provide feedback for process control during machining. Micromechanical simulation of the machining process will be developed for producing ceramic components with minimal subsurface cracks. The educational components will address the specific educational needs of various sectors of the community through innovative means such as a new multifunctional laboratory for undergraduate and graduate students and area K-12 students and teachers. Integration of research and cooperative learning and effective assessment techniques will form a dynamic learning environment for undergraduate and graduate students. Short courses in machining difficult-to-machine materials will be developed for non-traditional students from industry who want to keep current with the new technologies being developed in this field. The potential impact of this project includes new cutting tools for machining difficult-to-machine materials, new scientific knowledge on thermally assisted machining processes, and the creation of a world-class workforce in the area of machining structural ceramics doc17373 none The goal of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award is to integrate research activities with educational efforts in two interdisciplinary fields: layered manufacturing and smart materials and structures. Currently, little has been reported on integrating these two fields, especially at the mesoscale (100 mm to 10 mm). In addition, fundamental issues for mesoscale layered manufacturing processes have not been well defined or investigated. This program involves research on mesoscale layered manufacturing of smart structures with a special focus on thermomechanical issues at the mesoscale. The approach is to integrate laser-assisted Shape Deposition Manufacturing (SDM) and Laser Direct Write to build, at the mesoscale, geometrically, compositionally, and functionally complex smart structures containing embedded micro sensors and actuators. Analytical models, numerical simulation, and embedded micro sensors will be used to investigate the thermomechanical phenomena. The educational plan is to improve the existing curriculum in the arena of manufacturing by developing new interdisciplinary elements that integrate the fields of layered manufacturing, micro-manufacturing, and smart materials and structures. Additionally, there will be substantial effort to mentor undergraduate and graduate students, and to expose K-12 students, teachers, and industries to novel manufacturing processes and smart devices. Strategies will be explored to attract, retain, and engage students from under-represented groups (women and especially students with disabilities) to manufacturing fields. The research program will have significant implications for industry in that mesoscale smart devices could become technologically and economically feasible for numerous applications. Emphasis on interdisciplinary materials, hands-on experience, teamwork, and high quality teaching and learning will better engineering education for next generation engineers doc17374 none This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award provides funding for the development of a flexible and economical robotic system for micro-assembly. This research will explore the possibility of applying electrostatic forces to visually servoed micro-assembly, by developing an optically transparent electrostatic micro-gripper, integrated into an automated assembly cell. Characterization of the residual interfacial charge and dielectric breakdown of several high-dielectric-constant materials will be performed in order to optimize the operation of the gripper. A theoretical model for the trapped charge will also be developed and experimentally verified using an electric field scanning probe microscope (SPM). Using the SPM as a charge-writing tool, the results of this research will be extended to nano-assembly and fixturing of carbon nano-tubes and large molecules. If successful, the outcome of this research will lead to development of economical techniques for the automated manufacturing of complex micro-systems with heterogeneously manufactured components. It will also generate experimental and theoretical data on possible future assembly techniques for the nano-world, based on electric charge writing. The interdisciplinary nature of the outlined research will provide educational opportunities for senior-year undergraduate students through participation in component design and system integration. A graduate-level laboratory course on the application of electrostatic techniques in manufacturing and sensing at micro and nano-meter length scales will be also developed doc17375 none This project will escalate and integrate architectural acoustics research and education in the United States. The research focus is on fundamental advances in understanding and modeling of auralization, or the process in which the listening experience in a space is audibly simulated from a physical or computational model. The computational procedure is already being used in the prediction and design of the acoustics in built spaces, but its accuracy and realism are limited by geometrical considerations, knowledge of material properties, and the use of time-invariant sound source directivity. This project plans to implement changing source directivity in real time to improve the accuracy of auralizations. Psychoacoustic subjective tests will also be run, so that perceptual differences may be quantified between (a) traditional auralizations using omnidirectional time-invariant sources, (b) auralizations with time-variant source directivity, and (c) measured results from actual sources in real spaces. With improvements, auralization will advance the study of acoustics in the built environment and potentially impact many other fields. Realistic sound fields can be recreated and tested on humans in controlled laboratory environments for psychoacoustic studies; auralized sound fields may be used to train people who are vision-impaired; and assessments may be made of noise quality in work environments and how that impacts productivity. The United States currently lacks a technical center for architectural acoustics research and education, as is found overseas. The PI plans to promote such a hub within the University of Nebraska - Lincoln Architectural Engineering program. The significance and excitement about building acoustics will be conveyed by making the auralization research accessible to all levels: in required undergraduate and graduate acoustics classes; in opportunities for undergraduates to complete segments of the research, mentored by graduate students; and through outreach to local high schools so younger students may participate as test subjects or aid with measurements of real spaces, such as their own classrooms doc17376 none Vaughn The PI s research proposes to study the effect of flow on the molecular organization of lipid and lipid protein membranes by employing experiments and computational methods. He will make model lipid membranes and use fluorescent microscopy to investigate the effect of flow on protein and lipid mobility. Many cell types such as erythrocytes and neutrophils are regularly exposed to stress and deformation in a flow field that affect the behavior of proteins in membrane. This kind of stress stimulus has profound biochemical effects on endothelial cells grown under flow conditions. Other evidence, such as the alteration of membrane fluidity in disease states, suggests that membrane external flow interactions are important. The PI hypothesized that the molecular organization of the membrane can be altered by flow-induced stress, and that this alteration can have physiological consequences. To understand molecular interactions, they will develop a multi-scale continuum molecular dynamic model of the membrane. This multi-scale approach will allow us to model fluid flow as a continuum, but impose its effect on the discrete atoms of the membrane lipids and proteins. As a result, the length of the simulation will be extended to allow investigation of long-range motion and order. It is expect this research to make a significant contribution in molecular dynamics modeling and membrane biology. The computational portion of this project contains several problems that are well suited to the abilities of undergraduates. The educational component of this proposal will be to involve undergraduates in long-term multidisciplinary research. Undergraduate research and extracurricular work have both been shown to have a positive impact on undergraduate development doc17377 none The proposed plan will rebuild the electric power and energy systems program at the North Dakota Slate University through closely linked research and education efforts. The research and educational plans will integrate contemporary issues with traditional power systems concepts to prepare both undergraduate and graduate students for the new requirements of the industry. The research plan will advance the state of the art in reliability and cost assessment techniques with particular focus on distributed energy resources and microgrid architectures. The education plan consists of modernizing some existing courses and developing new courses to build a power and energy systems curriculum that is both comprehensive and contemporary. Undergraduate students will also be involved in research projects; graduate students will be involved with contemporary original research. The proposed research and education activities will significantly strengthen the power program at NDSU, and provide it with the momentum it needs to grow into a larger and stronger program. The unique and significant contribution of the proposed research is that it will develop reliability and cost assessment techniques that are suited to the evolving structure of the electric industry, anticipate the future course of the industry and provide effective, cutting edge tools for planning and designing future systems doc17378 none Recent experimental and theoretical efforts on periodic metallic structures have led to the discoveries of a number of extraordinary optical and electromagnetic phenomena. Many of these phenomena are pointing towards new possibilities of confining, transmitting and manipulating light at a length scale that is far smaller than the wavelength of incident photons. Two recent examples include the experimental discoveries of plasmon-assisted high transmission through sub-wavelength apertures, and the theoretical proposal for constructing a lens with a negative refractive index that allows for focusing at infinite resolution. These discoveries are leading to new device possibilities in nano-fabrication and imaging. These developments, in turn, raised many interesting theoretical questions. A key ingredient in all these phenomena is the use of micro and nano-structured metallic objects. Therefore, we need to understand in general how micro and nano-structures interact with sub-wavelength features in the electromagnetic fields. Since the novel effects here directly result from the subtle interplay between the structural and geometrical parameters. It is important to undertake theoretical studies that take into account the full complexity of the structures in a first-principles way. We propose to undertake a series of large-scale simulations to elucidate the basic mechanisms associated with these phenomena, and to explore new structures that might exhibit further interesting properties. In particular, we will study the effects of microstructure on the resolution of focusing, and the detailed mechanisms of using aperiodic structures to assist tunneling through a single aperture. We will also explore the use of hybrid metal and dielectric periodic structures as a novel negative refractive index material that might be scaled down into the optical domain. These studies will enhance our understanding in this new regime of optics, and will lead to new opportunities for device applications. This program, in combination with my other research programs on photonic crystals and micro-photonic devices, will provide excellent research and educational opportunities for students. The students will gain a deep theoretical understanding by pursuing research in a new regime of optics. At the same time they will have ample opportunities to collaborate with experimental groups in optics and in nano-fabrication. The students will also learn state-of-the-art computational techniques. In addition, the research program is designed so that undergraduate and M. S. students can take on short-term projects to carry out sets of well-defined simulation studies. Finally, in order to share our excitement in this research field with the general public, we will explore the possibility of constructing a sculpture of an acoustic crystal, so that a visitor may directly experience the remarkable band gap effect doc17379 none The proposers plan to implement the Improved Student Performance model of school reform, developed by the Ventures Education System Corporation (VESC), in the reservation schools. This model was chosen by the teachers and administrators of the participating districts. Supporting the Ventures implementation, as well as the other objectives, the project leaders plan to conduct professional development for in-service teachers, and include pre-service student teachers in the activities as well. The project will also provide modest funding for extracurricular content-focused activities for students, and to better involve parents, as well as contracting for services to increase the cultural content in the curriculum doc17380 none In this Career project, the investigator creates a software platform (called NLApack) for Numerical Algebraic Geometry, trains students in the development and application of mathematical software, and broadens the graduate education of students in the areas of mathematics, computational science, and engineering. In a first stage, the algorithms for the numerical irreducible decomposition of the solution set of a polynomial system are refined and combined into a blackbox program. Besides software, another outcome of this stage is the development of a textbook for a course introducing students to symbolic and scientific computing. The second stage of the project focuses on three specific topics: pole placement, overconstrained linkages, and multi-body dynamics. A result of this stage is a collection of software tools specialized for those application fields, case studies, and benchmarks. Throughout, students are trained in mathematics and computing and in important applications areas. The principal investigator, his collaborators, and his graduate students are working in the areas of numerical analysis and computer algebra. While computer algebra solves mathematical problems in an exact symbolic fashion, as one would by hand, numerical analysis calculates with limited precision on input data often only approximately known. The software developed in this project combines the symbolic and numeric approach. Most scientists seek insight (not just numbers) in the form of equations to reveal new relations between the important parameters in their models. But these models contain approximate data that cannot be handled directly by current symbolic methods. The investigator develops symbolic-numeric methods that will make computer algebra more relevant to scientific computing, and trains students who will adept at both numeric and symbolic computation, with significant payoffs for disciplines that depend on large-scale scientific computing doc17381 none The search for, and synthesis of, new materials plays a crucial role in Condensed Matter Physics. Quasicrystals are a specific case of interest because they possess long-range atomic order but without the translational symmetry of conventional crystals. It is therefore possible to explore the consequences of an ordered but non-periodic structure on physical, magnetic and electronic properties of a material. This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award will fund a project that will address outstanding questions in the field of quasicrystals via the synthesis and measurement of high-quality, single-grain samples. In particular, this work will explore and clarify the complex roles of order, periodicity and structural perfection on electronic transport, and magnetic ground states and phase transitions in quasicrystals. The materials are for the most part incongruently melting, and the self-flux technique is a well-suited synthesis route. Experimental techniques used to probe the thermodynamic and transport properties include susceptibility, heat capacity, resistivity and Hall effect measurements. The students involved with this research will learn synthesis, characterization, and analysis skills that will enable them to find future employment in academe, industry, or government laboratories. In addition the PI s research efforts will be integrated into a new lecture course that introduces contemporary challenges in the field of condensed matter physics via the detailed discussion of canonical materials. Specific examples and experimental techniques from the PI s own laboratory will be used to motivate and illustrate various aspects of this course. The PI will also continue his interest in scientific publication for children. Advances in the field of Condensed Matter Physics often go hand-in-hand with the development of new materials. These advances may herald new theoretical challenges, a clearer understanding of well-known phenomena or advanced applications. In all cases, the search for, and synthesis of, new materials plays a crucial role, and this is the focus of the PI s laboratory at Stanford University. Quasicrystals are a specific case in point. These exotic materials possess long-range atomic order but without the translational symmetry of conventional crystals. It is therefore possible to explore the consequences of an ordered but non-periodic structure on physical, magnetic and electronic properties of a material. This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award will fund a project that will address outstanding questions in the field of quasicrystals via the synthesis and measurement of high-quality, single-grain samples. In particular, this work will explore and clarify the complex roles of order, periodicity and structural perfection on electronic transport, and magnetic ground states and phase transitions in quasicrystals. The students involved with this research will learn synthesis, characterization, and analysis skills that will enable them to find future employment in academe, industry, or government laboratories. In addition the PI s research efforts will be integrated into a new lecture course that introduces contemporary challenges in the field of condensed matter physics via the detailed discussion of canonical materials. Specific examples and experimental techniques from the PI s own laboratory will be used to motivate and illustrate various aspects of this course. The PI will also continue his interest in scientific publication for children doc17382 none A symposium gathers together outstanding scholars, analysts, and practitioners in science and technology policy who are within seven years of their PhDs. It provides an opportunity to meet and exchange ideas and to present their work to a high-level (senior) audience. This research symposium is oriented toward eight theme tracks in science and technology policy: New history of science and technology policy. R&D program analysis and evaluation Expertise, advice, assessment, and evaluation Science, technology, and human needs and values Science, technology, and international issues Science education, human resources, and workforce Science and technology policy institutions and processes Science, technology, and the public. Proposals for these tracks were broadly solicited and peer reviewed for acceptance. Accepted authors were funded to attend the workshop held in Washington, DC. Senior scholars and practitioners served as discussants. The new scholarship presented and the interaction among academics and practitioners have the potential to improve policy and programs and to benefit education in science and technology policy in a variety of ways. An edited book containing the presented papers will be published doc17383 none This CAREER project proposes to analyze the role that intergenerational and behavioral issues play on the design and analysis of public policy. The project has three components. The first component studies what types of institutions, existing or not, are able to generate optimal investment in future generations, and to protect them from expropriation. It includes the development of theoretical models to understand how to design fiscal constitutions that generate optimal investment in intergenerational public goods, such as the environment, and protect future generations from expropriation through fiscal policy. The key question is: How can we design institutions that give a voice to the interests of people who have not been born yet. We plan to test empirically this theory by using the last 200 years of American history to study the extent to which American institutions have generated good intergenerational outcomes. This includes the development of a new database on the finances of the Federal Government from to the present. The second component develops a new model of decision-making and welfare that uses as primitives brain structures and their operations, instead of preferences and preference maximization. The model incorporates important insights from psychology and neuro-science, and has the potential to explain why agents engage in self-defeating behaviors such as under-saving and addiction. Also, and most importantly for Public Economics, the model generates well-defined welfare evaluations that can be used to evaluate public policy. This theory will be used to improve our understanding of advertisement, savings policy, drug policy, health policy, and risky behaviors. Finally, the third component of the project is the career educational plan on Public and Behavioral Economics that includes, among others, the development of a behavioral economics research group at Stanford University, and the development of a new graduate textbook in Public Economics. Intergenerational and behavioral issues lie at the center of some of the most important current debates in public policy. Examples of intergenerational policy problems include Global Warming, R&D, and the AIDS epidemic. These problems are difficult to handle because the generations that would benefit most from these policies are not the ones paying for them. Examples of behavioral policy problems include the design of social insurance programs, crime, and addiction. Behaviors such as systematic financial mismanagement and the consumption of addictive substances challenge the predictions and the policy prescriptions of standard economic analysis, which presupposes that agents are quite rational. The basic motivation for this research is that an improved understanding of these issues will allow us to design better public policies and ultimately better institutions doc17384 none Statistical depth functions have become increasingly pursued as a promising tool in robust and nonparametric multivariate data analysis and inference. This project is to conduct a systematic and thorough study of these functions and their applications. The objectives of this project include: 1)to establish bases and provide specific guidance for selection of depth functions and their induced estimators for practitioners, 2) to introduce depth associated practical inference procedures, 3) to deepen and extend existing depth applications while pushing depth methodology to new frontiers, 4) to develop fast and accurate algorithms and toolkits for the practical computing of depth functions and associated procedures, and 5) to incorporate research activities into the educational process and to engage the participation of under-represented minorities in the proposed activities. Simple one-dimensional statistics based on ordering have played such an important role in one-dimensional data analysis and their multi-dimensional analogues have been sought for years, without completely satisfactory results. The extension to higher dimensions of these one-dimensional statistics, such as the median, is difficult because there is no natural and unambiguous method of fully ordering or ranking multi-dimensional observations. Statistical depth functions are proving to be a very promising tool for ordering multi-dimensional observations. The main idea of depth functions is to provide from the deepest point a center-outward ordering of multi-dimensional observations. Multi-dimensional data ordering is not the only application of depth functions though. Depth functions have brought us new perspectives towards multidimensional exploratory data analysis and inference, and have been proven to have significant applications in disciplines ranging from industrial engineering to biomedical sciences. Research in depth theory and methodology, however, is still in its preliminary stage and a number of fundamental issues are yet to be addressed including: 1) depth functions have been introduced ad hoc in many areas, and in great variety, without regards as to whether they meet any particular set of criteria and without regard to a general mechanism to construct them, 2) a large number of depth induced estimators exist with little guidance for choosing among them, an obstacle both, to potential users and to those designing software packages, 3) computing depth functions and associated procedures is challenging-- without fast and accurate algorithms further developments of depth methodology can be hampered, 4) depth-associated inference procedures have not been developed in general, and applications of depth functions are yet to be further deepened, broadened, and pushed to new frontiers: and finally, 5) depth methodology has not been integrated into the educational process. The proposal will address all these issues. The project will 1) extend the areas of application and methodological advantages of one-dimensional statistical procedures and methods based on ordering to the higher-dimensional context, 2) stimulate discovery and understanding within the field of depth theory and methodology, 3) advance nonparametric and robust multivariate exploratory data analysis built on the depth methodology, 4) promote inspired teaching and enthusiastic learning while broadening the participation of under-represented groups, 5) establish a strong research and education program in statistics involving researchers in the depth community and train undergraduate and graduate students from various disciplines, and 6) build for the PI a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education doc17385 none Namgoong Ultra-wideband (UWB) radio systems are emerging as one of the key technologies for high bandwidth digital wireless communications. The rationale for deploying UWB radio systems lies in the benefits of exceptionally wide bandwidths: covertness (very low power density signal), very accurate ranging (down to a few centimeters), good material penetration (at low frequencies) and high performance in dense multipath (because of fine time resolution). A common concern among UWB proponents is that an integrated, high-performance radio may not be achievable, because of the extremely high bandwidth, dynamic range, and clock speeds required. Such concern appears to lead to two alternative development paths. In the first, the UWB radio system is scaled down to operate at a much reduced bandwidth, compromising much of the benefits of an UWB system. In the other, advanced process technology with numerous discrete components is employed, albeit at the expense of significantly higher cost and power consumption. In this proposal, the PI presents a promising approach to realizing an integrated high-performance UWB radio using today s low-cost standard CMOS technology without compromising the signal bandwidth. To meet the design requirements of a high-performance UWB radio, which are currently far from being practical, he proposes an architecture that channelizes the incoming signal into frequency subbands, then processes them in parallel. By channelizing the incoming signal, the circuit requirements in both the analog front-end and digital back-end are dramatically relaxed, especially when large narrowband interfering signals are present. This research will demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed architecture for reception and transmission of UWB signals. He will provide a complete design framework based on a clear understanding of various design options and the corresponding trade-offs in performance and implementation complexity. Furthermore, he will demonstrate the feasibility and the advantages of the proposed architecture by realizing it on silicon. The goal is to design a high-performance single-chip UWB radio. Many of the concepts and techniques developed in the proposed research are not limited to UWB systems. They can be generalized to other high-bandwidth communication systems, such as high-speed satellite and wireline communication systems. A specific application that he plans to pursue in this project based on the techniques developed for the UWB radio is multimodal radios, which are radios that support multiple communication standards. The above research plan is coupled with an education plan that describes the PI s educational motivation and strategy at all levels of teaching. It includes specific plans to teach students how to learn, introduce a new class on communication transceiver design, instill high-quality oral and written skills, train research students with broad technical backgrounds, assist with university-sponsored outreach programs aimed at helping the neighboring area, and pursue applied research that is guided by the needs of our society doc17386 none In this project funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Sanov will combine femtosecond spectroscopy with photoelectron imaging to monitor the evolution of molecular orbitals in the course of chemical reactions. The initial systems to be studied include isolated and hydrated sulfur-containing molecular anions, and cluster anions. These are chosen for their practical importance and for serving as prototypes for the development of the new methodology. Photodissociation and unimolecular decomposition, dynamics at conical intersections, microscopic solvation, wave packet evolution, and bimolecular reactions in ionic clusters will be investigated. The results of this research will find immediate application in modeling the structure and dynamics of negative ions and solutions. Many important chemical processes involve ionic reactions, and the reactivity is affected strongly by interactions with the environment. In this research cluster ions are used as model micro-solutions for the studies of elementary processes relevant to biological and environmental chemistry. The results will provide insight into how the intermolecular interactions affect the behavior of electrons and chemical bonding. Photoelectron imaging experiments will be incorporated in the undergraduate Physical Chemistry program as a way of providing the students with hands-on research experience. A fast-track Internet-based mechanism for publishing the results of student research will be developed. Students will be trained in research techniques in preparation for advanced studies and for entry into the scientific technical workforce doc17387 none Institution: Stanford University Recent advances such as automotive steer-by-wire systems, radar ranging sensors and differential corrections that increase the accuracy of the Global Positioning System to 20 centimeters, pave the way for active collision avoidance systems. Unlike passive restraints that seek to minimize the severity of an accident, active systems seek to move the vehicle out of harm s way, preventing an accident from occurring in the first place. Yet while the necessary components for active collision avoidance will be available in a few years, it is not clear how to integrate these into a system that smoothly assists the driver while offering guaranteed performance. This project develops a framework for collision avoidance systems that assist the driver with lanekeeping and evading obstacles in two dimensions. The approach assigns a level of hazard to objects in the environment and applies a virtual force on the vehicle proportional to the gradient of this hazard through coordinated braking and steering. Using an energy analogy and Lagrangian dynamics, the assisted vehicle can be guaranteed to move away from obstacles while leaving the driver in control. Development of these theoretical guarantees is coupled with experimental validation of the concept on a full-scale test vehicle. The experimental equipment is also integrated into a laboratory experience in vehicle dynamics and control so that undergraduate and graduate students can literally feel the theoretical concepts of dynamics in practice. The ultimate objective of the project is to demonstrate a theoretically rigorous, yet commercially viable, system that can help reduce the approximately 37,000 traffic fatalities that occur each year, particularly the 40% due to collisions with fixed obstacles. This project was originally funded as a CAREER award, and was converted to a Presidential Early Career Award for Engineers and Scientists (PECASE) award in May doc17388 none The University of Hawaii system is an educational institution unlike any other, due to its remote location, culturally rich history, and locally populated student body. It is unique among our nation s universities and requires an equally unique approach to research and education. Cultural and geographic issues that do not exist at other institutions filter into nearly every facet of our function as a university. These can create a sense of unity among the administration, faculty, and students, or a sense of division; therefore, it is essential to consider the local cultural dynamics in any research and educational plan. This 5-year career development plan addresses the uniqueness of the University of Hawai i and seeks to increase undergraduate and graduate enrollment, student research participation, and diversity within the College of Engineering. A key aspect of this plan is working with the local cultural dynamics to foster a positive image for the College of Engineering within the state of Hawai i, as well as the Mainland. The proposed plan is an integrated research education outreach program. intended to encourage students to pursue graduate degrees, while providing them the experience of open-ended collaborative research projects in the areas of lasers and optics. The research proposed here involves fundamental investigation and development of optical sensors; particularly low-cost, high-efficiency, laser diode and LED-based sensors. Various innovative optical sensors will be developed with applications ranging from biomedical monitoring to target tracking. I will build upon previous work in gas sensing to optimize sensitivity, while miniaturizing the sensor. Innovative modulation techniques will be explored for increased accuracy to measured parameters. Central to this is the wavelength modulation technique employing higher harmonic detection. The focus of this research will not only be on the development of novel sensors, but also on the integration of such sensors in a sensor network. The motivation for concentrating on integration of optical sensors is to address the escalating need for situational awareness over multidimensional environments with a cost-effective robust system in environmental, military, and commercial analysis. Theoretical, experimental, and practical issues of all levels will arise in this research project, making it ideally suited for teams of students, composed of individuals at various academic levels ranging from sophomore to Ph.D., to participate. The rationale for including undergraduate students in what is traditionally graduate work, is threefold: (1) hands-on research projects give them the opportunity to apply the knowledge learned in their course work; (2) exposing them to open-ended research problems gives them a feel for what is involved in graduate school and can encourage them to pursue graduate degrees; and (3) undergraduate students are typically an untapped resource in academia: given the right opportunity, students are often highly motivated and extremely creative. I intend to use this team-oriented approach to propose and implement an accelerated Masters of Science Option to the College of Engineering at the University of Hawai i Manoa campus. This program would allow top performing students to get a Masters of Science with a thesis within one year of their Bachelors degree. This plan would be the first of its kind in the College of Engineering and would contribute significantly to the College s current initiative to boost enrollment. Furthermore, this interactive program would have a positive impact on the local community for two reasons. First, high-tech research draws attention from the mainland, as well as Japan, which can play an essential part in helping to balance the tourism-based economy. Second, engineers with graduate degrees and having a solid education and good practical experience are in high demand in the current job market, an asset highly revered in this tight-knit community. Creating a positive image within the local community is the most effective form of outreach here in Hawaii doc17389 none Organisms evolve by changing their genomes, including small changes (point mutations) and gross changes (genomic rearrangements). Genomic rearrangements are more likely than point mutations to quickly produce novel traits by rearranging functional domains and expression control sequences. Although genomic rearrangements have profoundly impacted genome evolution, they have yet to be shown to be directly advantageous in an experimentally evolving population of a eukaryotic organism. The investigators have recently shown that the exposure of budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae to suboptimal conditions such as starvation or heavy water induces recombination genes in a small subset of cells. It is important to understand whether this induction of recombination genes plays a role in adaptation by producing adaptive genomic rearrangements and, if so, what are the mechanisms that control such processes. Three ideas will be tested in this work: 1) The rate of recombination is increased in populations adapting to adverse environments, 2) Cells recombine at different rates in adapting populations and 3) Adaptation-associated genomic rearrangements are under genetic control. The investigators will analyze genomic rearrangements arising in populations during adaptation to growth in heavy water, a mild and broad selective agent that models previously unencountered habitats, and compare it to starvation, a common selective condition that parallels selection in nature. The rates of genomic rearrangements in adapting yeast populations will be assayed using novel chromosome recombination reporter constructs, genomic arrays and genomic polymorphism analysis. Distributions of recombinants in adapting populations will be assayed by fluorescent protein reporters coupled with flow cytometry. Finally, the investigators will analyze genetic pathways that control the adaptation-associated rearrangements, using available expression array data to find candidate genes, and analyze the candidate pool using recombination reporter assays. Learning about molecular mechanisms that control genomic rearrangements in suboptimal conditions will help us understand the process and control of adaptive evolution in eukaryotes. With the aid of genomic information available, we will better understand how genomes are shaped by evolutionary forces. Finally, the project may help to predict the evolutionary response of organisms exposed to novel environments doc17390 none This proposal outlines a comprehensive career plan for advancement of research and education in the field of wireless mobile ad hoc networks. The research plan consists of two complementary pails. The first is to design and develop a novel architecture for scalable multicast routing in wide-area ad hoc networks, while the second part proposes new methodologies for evaluation of wireless ad hoc routing protocols. The educational plan includes developing wireless networking courses coupled with a laboratory, in addition to proposing novel methods to improve student participation in the learning process. Also, proposed to design a new scalable architecture for multicast services support in large-scale ad hoc networks, the first of its kind. The proposed research program intends to fully utilize high v adaptive mechanisms in the various components of the architecture. Specifically, to design an adaptive zone-based hierarchy augmented by the notion of contact nodes to increase network coverage. In addition, to provide novel schemes for multicast service support, based on adaptive anycast for resource discovery. Also, introduce geographic multicast address allocation to map groups into rendezvous regions. All the proposed mechanisms are self-configurable, and promise desirable scaling and robustness properties doc17391 none Dr. Patrick Holland, Department of Chemistry, University of Rochester is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program of the Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, for his work under a Career Award to utilize coordination chemistry to uncover novel modes of reactivity and address issues in enzymatic, surface and solution catalysis. Three-coordinate transition metal complexes will be used to develop knowledge applicable to metalloproteins and catalysts. A particular focus is on modelling the reduction of unsaturated organic compounds by the enzyme nitrogenase. Research and education will be integrated by training undergraduates to be involved in the research effort and incorporating team learning into undergraduate and graduate inorganic chemistry courses at the University of Rochester. This research cuts across such fields as biology and chemical catalysis and focuses on metal sites with less than a full complement of ligands. Dr. Holland s research aims at a fundamental understanding of the reactivity of such sites that will aid in understanding how enzymes function and in developing new types of catalysts. Team learning in undergraduate and graduate courses will involve students in chemistry as a social activity to better integrate science into their lives doc17392 none F.S. Roberts, Rutgers University EIA Special Projects Program NSF CISE and EU IST have in place a Memorandum of Understanding to conduct a series of joint program planning workshops in order to develop plans for a series of joint programs in CISE-related areas between the US and the European Union. The EU IST has designated ERCIM as the coordinator of nine planning workshops to be held in Europe over the three year period starting in . NSF will support a travel grant program through DIMACS as requested in this proposal to cover costs of the US delegation to these international program planning workshops, beginning with the Bionics workshop in Brussels on June 18, doc17393 none This career development project focuses on an experimental study of a novel type of designer solid consisting of a sample of ultracold Rydberg atoms that are strongly coupled by long range dipole-dipole interactions. The experiments investigate a new form of this designer solid -a Rydberg atom crystal. The research works toward developing the ability to control interactions between individual atoms in this strongly coupled spin system at the level required to produce the entanglement necessary for quantum computations. The table top scale of the proposed research provides excellent opportunities for student involvement at a variety of levels. In addition, the work seeks to broaden the exposure of a group of successful women scientists to the larger community. Undergraduate students are involved in the development of a conceptual physics course as student teachers whose duties go well beyond those of a typical teaching assistant. They explore teaching pedagogies, help implement innovative teaching methods, and help build lecture demonstration resources. Student outreach is being extended beyond the confines of the college through a physics demonstration show, which travels to local K-12 schools doc17394 none A fundamental component of judgment and decision making is hypothesis evaluation, a process that is embedded in many real-world tasks. For example, physicians presumably consider the likelihood of various diseases prior to issuing a diagnosis, mechanics presumably assess the likelihood of various causes of automobile failure before investing time and money in repairs, and auditors presumably evaluate the likelihood of various sources of accounting errors prior to pursuing the sources of errors. Tied to the process of hypothesis evaluation is the process of hypothesis generation. Hypothesis generation involves the generation, or recall, of the to-be-evaluated hypotheses. Hypothesis generation is an equally important component of judgment, as the outcome of the generation process determines which alternative hypotheses ultimately are evaluated by the decision maker. The purpose of the present research is to examine both the hypothesis evaluation and hypothesis generation aspects of judgment within the context of mainstream memory theory. In particular, this research will focus on testing and extending a memory model (Minerva-DM) to account for how people make judgments of probability and how they generate hypotheses. The overall goal of this research is to provide an integrative theory of likelihood judgment and hypothesis generation while accounting for most of the likelihood judgment phenomena in the judgment-under-uncertainty literature doc17395 none The American Museum of the Moving Image is refurbishing the traveling exhibit, Behind the Screen: Making Motion Pictures and Television. The exhibit, which focuses on the science and technology underlying movies and television, opened at the World Financial Center in New York City and subsequently traveled to the Kulturhuset in Stockholm, Sweden and the Technisches Museum in Vienna, Austria. It currently is at the Exploratorium in San Francisco and is scheduled to travel to COSI Toledo, Ohio in October . The American Museum of the Moving Image has requests for the exhibit from the Science City, Kansas City; the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia; and the Museum of Science, Boston. However, in order for the exhibit to travel to venues beyond the Exploratorium, it needs to be refurbished and upgraded. This grant provides the funds for the exhibit to remain viable and to travel to additional venues doc17396 none Specific: A variety of technologies (e.g. fuel cells, catalysis, sensors) rely on electro chemical phenomena that occur at ceramic surfaces and interfaces. Our overall understanding of these interfaces is however immature, in that we generally lack mechanistic and predictive structure-property relations. The ultimate goal of this research is to advance such relations for the surface properties that are the basis of sensor and catalyst applications. It will be approached within the framework of developing a new class of metal oxide gas sensors, based on chiral (handed) surfaces, capable of detecting and differentiating chiral molecules. Hence, the underlying experimental objective is to develop a mechanistic understanding of the interactions between organic molecules and chiral oxide surfaces. This will include surfaces that are chiral on the atomic scale, e.g. Mo8O23(010), and those that are tailored to have chiral nano microstructures. Surface properties will be investigated through the fabrication and testing of model sensors and temperature programmed desorption spectroscopy, while surface and bulk structure will be interrogated using appropriate probes. This study will advance our general understanding of the roles surface and molecular structure play in oxide reactivity (i.e. surface structure-property relations) as well as new and powerful sensor functionalities. Complementary education and outreach activities include, (1.) the development, in collaboration with secondary science instructors, of multimedia course modules centered on electrochemical technologies that will enhance middle high school science curricula and raise students awareness of materials science, (2.) the establishment of an outreach program with a local community college to provide research and mentoring opportunities to students from under-represented groups, and (3.) an outreach program designed to align the PI s research goals with the needs of industry and augment his development as a researcher and educator. This will include extended visits to industrial and government laboratories (U.S. and abroad) focused on electrochemical and interfacial technologies. General: Metal oxides have unique surface properties that make them useful for detecting, synthesizing, and purifying chemicals and our environment. Sensory applications include detecting poisons (such as carbon monoxide) and monitoring the fuel mix in automobiles to minimize greenhouse gas emissions. Metal oxide catalysts are vital to the large-scale production of plastics and pharmaceuticals and can be used to purify our air and water. While the surface properties of metal oxides are already exploited on large and diverse scales, our overall understanding of these properties is limited, particularly our ability to engineer and predict them. As a result, we often rely on time consuming and costly trial-and-error methods of development. Hence, the ultimate goal of this research is to advance our fundamental understanding of the structure and chemical properties of metal oxide surfaces. The knowledge gained will lead to powerful new types of sensors and, more importantly, enhance our ability to efficiently engineer metal oxide surfaces for a variety of applications. Concurrent with this research, the PI will conduct a number of education and outreach activities intended to (1.) enhance science education at the secondary and undergraduate levels, (2.) recruit new students to the vital fields of materials and electrochemical sciences, and (3.) augment the PI s own development as an educator and researcher doc17397 none This CAREER award involves ultra fast spectroscopic investigations of dendrimers. Initially, femtosecond time-resolved measurements will be carried out with an upconversion setup on both homogeneous and inhomogeneous dendrimer systems in order to investigate the coherent nature of the excitations. The long radiative lifetimes of several of the novel dendrimer systems will also be measured by time-correlated single-photon counting measurements. These initial studies will also determine superior candidates for other light emitting applications as well. In the second stage of the anisotropy measurements in order to probe the fast kinetics of the energy migration process in organic dendrimers. In order to measure the homogeneous line-width more quantitatively as well as the dephasing dynamics in the dendrimer systems that possess strong interactions, he will carry out three pulse photon echo experiments. With this information quantitative comparisons to various excitonic theoretical predictions can be carried out. This research will help answer an important question that not only concerns organic dendrimers, but also concerns excitations in any branched (fractal) molecular geometry. The question, how do we describe the coherent nature of strongly interacting branched chromophores, will have a significant impact on the materials science, photo-physics, and technological communities. %%% The CAREER educational plan is focused on the physics and characterization of macromolecules. The first component is to expose undergraduate students to the real world of research and developments in industry that is concerned with the physical properties of macromolecules. Secondly, the PI will integrate these programs into larger group interactions. This will include both undergraduate and younger high school students in the Detroit Metro public school district, an area that has been under-represented in science in the past. This will be done in conjunction with ongoing programs that the PI is involved with including the ACS-project SEED program. The third component to the CAREER educational plan is to enhance the instructional aspects of the physical chemistry lecture and laboratory courses by including more instruction and experimental understanding of macromolecules doc17398 none In this CAREER award funded by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program in the Chemistry Division and the Division of Chemical and Transport Systems, Lev Gelb will develop novel methods for simulating the preparation of sol-gel materials and other real-world substances. A multi-scale approach integrating molecular and meso-scale descriptions will be used. The initial focus will be on atomically realistic models of silica based porous materials generated by sol-gel synthesis. Examples of such materials are controlled-pore glasses, silica xerogels and silica aerogels. Later work will be extended to the group of mixed oxides, non-siliceous materials, nanoscale thin films, and templated gels. Sophisticated characterization methods will be used to compare model and experimental materials, and these methods will be applied to new areas such as thin films and templating. In the teaching component of this work Gelb will bring molecular modeling ideas into the chemistry curriculum, both through a course in molecular modeling and through efforts to incorporate these methods and ideas into existing freshman chemistry and physical chemistry courses. Specifically, he will develop a new hands-on course in computational chemistry as well as sophisticated visualization tools for in-class demonstrations, and he will invite undergraduate students to participate in his research activities. The development of computer models and algorithms for simulating nanoscale material structure is an important research area. Such models have considerable value in understanding nanoscale phenomena occurring in adsorption and catalysis, as well as in the context of materials characterization. The characterization of the computer-generated materials allows comparison of calculations with data from real materials and results in a refinement of the simulation techniques. The application of these advanced simulation methods to the rational design of sol-gel materials has implications in chromatography, sensing, catalysis and separations. The educational component of the project can be expected to impact chemistry students by improving their knowledge of computational methods and exposing them to visualization techniques doc17399 none The research focus of this work is to develop asymmetric catalytic fragment coupling reactions for the synthesis of complex molecules. The central theme of the approach is triple diastereoselection , in which a chiral catalyst is used to overcome the poor diastereoselectivity obtained in stereochemically mismatched coupling reactions. Nickel-catalyzed intermolecular reductive coupling of alkynes and aldehydes (or imines) forms the basis of the coupling strategy. The focus of the educational effort will be the development of lecture and laboratory courses in organic chemistry. Dr. Jamison along with graduate and undergraduate collaborators will participate in the project. Further, high school outreach will be carried out by the graduate student participants. With this CAREER award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research and educational efforts of Dr. Timothy F. Jamison of the Department of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Jamison will focus his research on the development of new asymmetric catalytic reactions for the synthesis of diverse and complex organic molecules. Further, the methodology allows the preparation of complex molecules from common, simple starting materials. This approach could have important ramifications for the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries. The educational activities of the award will center around the MIT Chemistry Outreach Program and course development doc17400 none The leaf and fruit cuticles of higher plants function principally as barriers, controlling bacterial and fungal attack as well as the diffusion of water and chemicals from the outside environment. Their major chemical constituents are waxes that provide waterproofing and either of two insoluble structural support polymers, cutin (for aerial organs) and suberin (at internal locations and in wound tissue). This project aims to understand how the monomer units of the biopolymers are covalently linked together and to cell-wall polysaccharides, how the mechanical properties of the cuticular surface change in response to stress conditions, and how suberin or related materials are involved in textural hardening of potato tissues. Several biophysical approaches will be taken to these problems. (1) Oligomeric fragments of lime fruit cutin and suberized potato wound periderm will be produced by chemical and enzymatic means, separated chromatographically, and identified by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and mass spectrometry (MS). (2) NMR experiments on solvent-swelled samples will be used to develop and apply methodologies to identify polymer chain structures, cross-links, and cell-wall linkages in lime fruit cutin, potato wound periderm, suberized green cotton, and hardened potato tissues. (3) The impact of abrasion, chilling injury, and foliar delivery of pesticides on cuticular mechanical properties and molecular flexibility will be assessed using rheometry, atomic force microscopy (AFM), and solid-state NMR. (4) The biosynthesis of hard polymeric substances deposited in potato tubers that have hard-to-cook syndrome will be studied using texture analysis and NMR spectroscopy. The overall objectives of this project include understanding how the monomer units of the protective cutin and suberin biopolymers are linked together and to supporting cell-wall matrices, how environmental stresses such as wind abrasion and temperature shock alter the mechanical properties of the cuticular membrane, how fruit cuticles interact with aqueous detergents used in application of agrochemicals, and how suberin or related polyphenols are synthesized during the hardening process that degrades potato texture. Ultimately, this research should have both agricultural and economic impact, aiding in the design of essential crop protection strategies. More broadly, the microstructural and molecular insights developed from this work may assist the development of synthetic waterproofing materials for industrial or cosmetic use. Finally, this project will serve to introduce methods such as solid-state NMR and AFM to the community of plant scientists doc17401 none This CAREER project addresses complementary scanned probe microscopy (SPM) techniques for covalently nanopatterning polymer and biological molecules on silicon surfaces with an integrated research and education plan. One approach explores feedback controlled lithography as a means for templating hydrogen passivated silicon surfaces for subsequent wet chemistry in ambient conditions, and a second approach, termed liquid phase nanolithography (LPN), attempts to pattern organic molecules onto silicon surfaces directly from solution using conductive AFM. In addition to nanolithography, this project explores innovative frequency dependent nanoelectronic and nanophotonic characterization schemes. Nanoscale impedance spectroscopy (NIS) will be developed to delineate the phase and amplitude response of current through a conductive AFM tip in response to a variable frequency applied bias. NIS would provide, in effect, a nanoscale spatial map of the frequency dependent electronic behavior of hybrid hard and soft materials. In the case of photoactive materials, photocurrent will be detected through the conductive AFM tip under sample illumination; whereas, photons emitted from electroluminescent materials will be measured with a photodiode and current preamplifier. The basic elements of these research ideas will be incorporated into a comprehensive interdisciplinary nanoscale education and outreach program. In an effort to induce interdisciplinary interactions among graduate and undergraduate students, the research includes domestic and international collaborations with faculty and industrial representatives from other academic departments. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in a topical area of materials science having technological relevance. Outreach to undergraduates and under-represented minorities will be addressed through a Research Experience for Undergraduates and Minority Internships in Nanotechnology program that the PI is co-organizing through the Northwestern University Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center. Additionally, the PI is involved in developing new web- based nanomaterials coursework. This undergraduate coursework will then be adapted for the development of a nanomaterials world module for K-12 students, non-science majors, and the general public both domestically and abroad. The scope of the project will expose students to new challenges and research approaches in materials synthesis, processing, and characterization. An important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education doc17402 none Izatt Optical coherence tomography has matured into a successful mesoscopic biomedical imaging technique, and is currently under investigation for many applications in fundamental biology and clinical medicine. Real-time imaging is particularly pertinent in medical diagnostic situations, where it is desirable to screen large tissue regions rapidly. This submission proposes development of a radically new concept for a mass-produced, inherently robust, digitally addressed integrated-optic optical delay line for optical coherence tomography. Successful demonstration of the integrated addressable delay will lead to development of a fast, arbitrarily addressable delay module which would serve as an enabling technology to allow for wider application of this imaging technique doc17403 none This project aims in applying in-situ transmission electron microscopy under ultra high vacuum conditions to develop a fundamental understanding of the oxidation processes at the nanoscale. Major objectives of the proposed study is to develop better understanding of the nanoscale stages of oxidation from the nucleation of the metal oxide to the formation of thermodynamically stable oxide. Systematic experimental studies will be made on thin films of copper and aluminum. The project involves collaborations with the Materials Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the Institute for Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE), Singapore where a specialized in situ chamber for Al thin film deposition inside the UHV-TEM exist. This research has technological relevance where surface oxidation processes play critical roles in environmental stability, high temperature corrosion, electrochemistry, catalytic reactions, gate oxides and thin film growth as well as fuel reactions. The educational component incorporates the research tools developed in the project in the development of new courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels in materials science and engineering (MS&E) curriculum as well as a new web site accessible for public. The research develops a new understanding of the fundamental processes involved in nanoscale oxidation on thin metals that would have direct relevance in technologies where corrosion is the limiting factor doc17404 none This CAREER project addresses materials science issues and properties of nonvolatile superconducting switches. The nature of the superconductor-insulator quantum phase transition will be studied from a basic science perspective, including the correlation of the longitudinal and transverse transport properties, the nature of the temperature dependence of the insulating state, and the interplay between disorder effects driving the localization of holes and interaction effects responsible for pairing holes and producing the quantum transition to a superconductor. Long-term goals include the application of scanning probe microscopy to write in a nonvolatile, reversible fashion nanoscale superconducting structures and devices, including small superconducting islands, wires, and electronic Josephson junctions. Ultrathin, epitaxial ferroelectric-superconductor heterostructures will be studied using advanced thin film deposition techniques such as off-axis radio frequency magnetron sputtering. Structural and electronic characterization of thin film heterostructures will be carried out using atomic force microscopy (AFM), scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), reflection high energy electron diffraction (RHEED), x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy (UPS), nanoscale piezoelectric microscopy, and x-ray diffraction. Nanosecond pulse measurements to test the switching speed will be carried out, along with standard electronic transport measurements including resistivity, Hall effect, and mobility. A primary focus of this integrated research and education program involves teaching and training of undergraduate and graduate students in thin film deposition, a broadly used technology in materials research and engineering. Thin film fabrication research will be carried out by undergraduate and graduate students, and an undergraduate class devoted to physical vapor deposition techniques such as molecular beam epitaxy and sputtering will be developed and taught by the PI. This program involves collaborations with faculty members in the Departments of Applied Physics, Electrical Engineering, and Physics, and is designed to form a broad foundation in the study of thin film materials. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in a topical area of materials science having high technological relevance. Outcomes of these studies are expected to broaden our fundamental understanding of correlated oxide materials and lead to new applications based upon the novel types of behavior observed in these materials. The scope of the project will expose students to challenges in materials synthesis, processing, device fabrication, and characterization. An important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education doc17405 none At the heart of the genomics revolution has been the democratization of genome projects of all varieties - EST sequencing, large-scale mapping, and both limited and complete genome sequencing projects. This has resulted in the production of large, associated datasets of diverse types that are often scattered in space, time, and format. This has made comparative analyses difficult and makes the creation of integrated databases a significant, if not often insurmountable challenge. The goal will be to discuss and to attempt to define what is meant by accessible, timely, and usable data and how NSF and USDA can help to facilitate such data coordination for plant genome data. The objective is to define the design elements that will ensure modular, extensible, interoperable, machine and human queryable data structures and interfaces doc17406 none of brittle fracture in brittle interfacial materials through the study of diamond interfaces and nanocrystalline diamond model systems. The educational component of the proposal involves introducing materials modeling and simulation into the materials science and engineering curriculum through course development and restructuring, and involves developing new simulation and visualization software tools for teaching which will be shared with the materials science community. The educational component also includes an outreach program to expose K-12 students to materials science and materials science career options doc17407 none A grand challenge in neuroscience is to understand the biological basis of information processing at the cellular and network levels. One major technology barrier to continuing progress is the lack of adequate informatics and analysis tools to enable exploration of the structural organization of complex neural circuits, the discovery and understanding of emergent properties of neural ensembles, the formulation of quantitative hypotheses about neural computation, and the testing of those hypotheses experimentally. These scientists have developed a prototype database system that provides many of the needed capabilities, and have used this software system to study mechanisms underlying neural encoding. The general goals of the work proposed here are to extend the capabilities and general utility of this prototype system, to interface the database with several additional tools for the analysis of structural and time-series data, and to enable more effective data sharing between remote collaborators. The core informatics and neuroscience research will be carried out by a group of researchers at Montana State University. Collaborations have also been established with researchers at several other research institutions, to insure interoperability of this system with other data collections and analysis tools and to facilitate the testing and refinement of this system. The PI and co-investigators all study dynamic aspects of sensory processing at the cellular and network levels in a variety of preparations, including the cricket, cat, and monkey visual systems. The researchers all share the following general neuroscience research aims: a) to understand the relationships between spatio-temporal activity patterns in neural ensembles and the information they convey, b) to understand how the spatio-temporal patterns at one processing stage are decoded at the next processing stage, c) to understand how computations are carried out on that decoded morphology, synaptic connectivity, and intrinsic biophysical characteristics of the neurons in the ensembles. The software tools developed here will be applied to these ongoing studies, enabling a substantial increase in the breadth, depth, rigor, and rate of progress of those research projects. That neuroscience research will, in turn, provide a rigorous basis for the refinement, generalization and extension of the informatics tools doc17408 none This is a CAREER award which supports both research and education. In particular, the PI will study the behavior of light in chaotic dielectrics. Due to the extremely high degree of coherence and the ability to manipulate ray dynamics by changing the shape and the size of the system, deformed dielectric resonators represent an ideal system to study the fundamental phenomena which determine the evolution of generic conservative dynamical systems. In the last few years, such structures were also used to develop a number of novel photonics devices, e.g., our bow-tie microlaser with power output increased by three orders of magnitude. The primary research goal of this grant is the study of resonances and light scattering in these dielectric systems. Research topics will include: a semiclassical theory of resonance lifetimes and emission patterns in deformed dielectric resonators; Arnold diffusion and chaos-assisted tunneling in open systems; dynamic Anderson localization and scars in dielectric resonators, both in two- and three-dimensional geometries; light scattering by nonspherical dielectric particles. The nonlinear dynamics and modern classical methods which play the major role in research are also the focus of the education program. Here the primary goal is to bring these ideas to the optics curriculum at both the undergraduate and graduate level. This is a CAREER award which supports both research and education. In particular, the PI will study the behavior of light in chaotic dielectrics. Due to the extremely high degree of coherence and the ability to manipulate ray dynamics by changing the shape and the size of the system, deformed dielectric resonators represent an ideal system to study the fundamental phenomena which determine the evolution of generic conservative dynamical systems. The primary research goal of this grant is the study of resonances and light scattering in these dielectric systems. The nonlinear dynamics and modern classical methods which play the major role in research are also the focus of the education program. Here the primary goal is to bring these ideas to the optics curriculum at both the undergraduate and graduate level doc17409 none University of Florida Jonathan Williams Dr. Williams is awarded funds to initiate a research program in star formation at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He will investigate the formation of stars in clusters by observing them at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths, taking advantage of newly available telescope instrumentation. Although it is known that most stars form in clusters, the physics of star formation in groups is poorly understood relative to that of the formation of single stars. Dr. Williams will use observations at continuum wavelengths to locate protostars inside their dusty nascent clouds, and then use observations of molecular lines to investigate the dynamics and chemistry of the surrounding gas. The concentration and motions of the protostars will be used to estimate the relative age of a cluster, allowing Dr. Williams to trace the evolution of the chemistry and motion of the stars and surrounding gas as a function of time. Dr. Williams will involve graduate and undergraduate students in his research, and serve as liaison for a new international student exchange between the University of Florida and the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias in Spain. He will also participate in his university s Student Science Training Program by mentoring a high school student each summer in a seven week program doc17410 none This award will support the creative integration of paleoclimate research and educational outreach to better understand the interplay of low- and high-latitude climate processes in Earth s natural climate evolution and to describe this interplay in a manner useful to social scientists engaged in the economic and policy aspects of global climate change. In general, the researcher will use a series of numerical experiments to examine how orbital forcing of low latitude tropical climates might impact high latitude ice sheet growth during the Quaternary Ice Ages and the occurrence of climatic events such as the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Specifically, the researcher will pursue a scientific strategy to investigate the physical processes involved in the response of the tropical climate to orbital forcing, compare purely orbital signatures with glacial stage signatures in tropical climate, investigate the relative effects of orbital and glacial forcing on variability within tropical climates, and investigate how the telconnection between low and high latitudes might be altered as the mean climate state changes (i.e., when ice cover and atmospheric levels of CO2 change). The researcher s long-term scientific goals are complemented by a near-term educational goal of contributing a quantitative paleoclimatic perspective to the development of a university-wide undergraduate course covering the scientific, economic, and social aspects of climate change doc17411 none Readily usable forms of nitrogen are being deposited from the atmosphere in much greater quantities than plants can use. This is mainly nitrate nitrogen produced by the combustion of fossil fuels in urban areas, but some agricultural areas are subject to high deposition of ammonium nitrogen. Effects of atmospheric nitrogen deposition were first noticed in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and, in the U.S., in the industrial Northeast where it is associated with the death of trees, particularly conifers. These trees showed characteristic responses which included high nitrogen in their needles and loss of fine roots. Currently high levels of atmospheric nitrogen deposition are spreading to other parts of the U.S. including the Los Angeles Basin and the Colorado Front Range. After many years of nitrogen additions many forests show evidence of reaching a point where no further nitrogen can be taken up, tree mortality increases, and nitrate nitrogen leaches into the water table. Initially, plants were thought to take up and store most depositional nitrogen in forests. But studies using nitrogen isotopes as tracers suggested that the nitrogen was stored in the forest floor. This focused attention on two groups of beneficial fungi that occupy forest floors: ecto- and endomycorrhizal fungi. Both groups function as supplementary root systems for plants, and ectomycorrhizal fungi may store depositional nitrogen in sheaths of fungal tissue covering root tips of conifers and oaks. This project asks three kinds of questions in order to learn the role of ectomycorrhizal fungi in nitrogen storage and tree mortality. First, are species numbers and relative abundance of ecto- and endomycorrhizal fungi affected by chronic atmospheric nitrogen deposition? Second, is the metabolic activity of ecto- and endomycorrhizal fungi affected by atmospheric N deposition? Is the ability of ectomycorrhizal fungi to store N decreased when numbers of fine roots decline? Third, does atmospheric nitrogen deposition have the same effect on growth and mortality of ectomycorrhizal as endomycorrhizal trees? To answer these questions the investigators will quantify mycorrhizal and plant responses across the nitrogen deposition gradient in the Chicago metropolitan area in a five-year study. The Chicago metropolitan area is suitable for asking these questions because chronic nitrogen deposition increases 24% along a west to east gradient on similar soils and vegetation. At each site the investigators will use red oak (Quercus rubra, ectomycorrhizal) and sugar maple (Acer saccharum, endomycorrhizal) to test whether nitrogen alters (a) the species and abundance of ecto- and endomycorrhizal fungi, (b) the metabolic activity and nitrogen storage ability of ecto- and endomycorrhizal fungi, (c) the specific rates of ammonium and nitrate uptake by ecto- and endomycorrhizal roots, (d) survivorship, growth, and N leaching from soil under red oak and sugar maple seedlings at ambient and twice-ambient nitrogen deposition rates ranging from 17 to 42 kg ha-1 year-1 doc17412 none Rita Sambruna Dr. Sambruna, of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, is awarded a grant to continue her observational, multi-wavelength studies of relativistic jets. These jets somehow form near the centers of active galaxies, and are thought to originate from black holes. These enormous jets extend to many times the size of the galaxy itself. Dr. Sambruna s research will take advantage of new and upcoming instrumentation in order to probe the underlying physics of these poorly understood phenomena. The proposed observations include facilities such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray telescope in space, the ground-based radio Very Large Array and Very Long Baseline Array, and the upcoming VERITAS (Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System) ground-based gamma-ray observatory. She will address questions such as the origin of the multi-wavelength emission, the mechanism for particle acceleration, and the calculation of kinetic energy in the jets. Dr. Sambruna will also use her grant to enhance her educational activities. She will implement peer instruction techniques into her introductory astronomy courses, establish an astronomy club for the departmental majors, and organize a series of workshops for local science teachers doc17413 none Institution: Brown University Dr. Dell Antonio of Brown University is awarded funds to conduct the Deep Lens Survey (DLS), for which observations have already begun at the four-meter telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory and Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory. Through this survey, Dr. Dell Antonio will attempt to determine the amount of dark matter (DM) in the universe by studying its gravitational lensing signal in a wide-field, deep optical imaging survey. The phenomenon of weak gravitational lensing occurs when matter along the line of sight, which might otherwise be unobservable, magnifies and distorts the images of background galaxies. Because gravitational lensing is sensitive to all forms of mass, not just luminous (ordinary) matter, it is an ideal tool for studying DM. In addition, because the different models for the DM predict different degrees of clustering, the actual distribution of mass can offer clues to the nature of the DM. This project will determine the 2-dimensional distribution of projected mass in the universe with great accuracy, and the 3-dimensional distribution with somewhat less accuracy. The 3-dimensional distribution makes it possible to study the evolution of clustering with distance from earth (and thus look-back time). The evolution of clustering at redshifts between 0 and 1 depends critically on the amount and nature of the dark energy (DE) thought to be responsible for the present acceleration of the expansion of the universe, so this proposal will differentiate between possible models for the DE. Dr. Dell Antonio will also use the data - which will include multi-color imaging of about 25 million stars and galaxies - to design ancillary science projects at several different levels. In addition to the traditional mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students in research projects, he will also mentor local high-school students. He plans to recruit students who traditionally have not had opportunities for furthering their science background by partnering with teachers at Providence inner-city schools. The students will present their finished projects at public nights at Brown University s Ladd Observatory public nights, so the community as a whole (and in particular the families of the students) can see the effects of the mentoring program. The PI will also design workshops and laboratories for introductory astronomy students that will allow them to work with original data collected in the survey. This project was originally funded as a CAREER award, and was converted to a Presidential Early Career Award for Engineers and Scientists (PECASE) award in May doc17414 none Professor Urs Jans, of the Department of Chemistry at CUNY City College, is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his studies to generate data to help in evaluating the persistence and fate of two major classes of contaminants in sensitive ecosystems. Phosphorothionate esters and carbamates are among the most widely used insecticides in the U.S. Such contaminants are of toxicological concern in sensitive coastal ecosystems such as estuaries and salt marshes. It is likely that reactions with reduced sulfur species (particularly polysulfides) present in anoxic subregions of coastal water bodies could have a significant impact on rates of removal of such contaminants. Providing the necessary data is the principal objective of this research. Some of the products of these reactions may be of environmental significance; hence, an additional goal of these studies is to provide data related to the ultimate fate of such compounds by examining their ability to bind covalently to natural organic matter. Rates of reaction of reduced sulfur species with a group of phosphorothionate esters and carbamate insecticides will be determined in well-defined systems, additional experiments will be conducted using more complex matrices of natural sulfuric waters. Therefore, with this CAREER award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Programs supports Professor Urs Jans, of the Department of Chemistry CUNY City College who will generate data in his research that will help in evaluating the persistence and fate of two major classes of contaminants in sensitive ecosystems. The results will be useful to EPA for establishing scientifically based limits on insecticide usage in coastal areas. Dissemination of the results from the proposed curriculum development will benefit other universities to modify the ways in which students learn. Being located at a minority serving institution this proposed project will promote the training of students from under-represented groups doc17415 none Under the direction of Dr. Ron Scollon, Ms. Alexandra Johnston will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. She will conduct linguistic research on the face-to-face interviews between U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officers and prospective immigrants who are applying for permanent residency visas (green cards). INS officers use information from these interviews to approve or deny green cards - decisions with great consequence for individual applicants as well as for the U.S. labor force and society. Ms. Johnston will investigate how various communicative behaviors during these interviews influences these decisions. For example, she will study how people ask and answer questions and how they construct explanatory narratives. She will also study nonverbal cues such as eye gaze and hand gestures. Because such behaviors differ across cultures, they may not be interpreted as they are intended. Data for the project include video- and audio-tapes of permanent residency interviews conducted in an INS District Office, ethnographic research on site, exit interviews with applicants, and playback interviews in which officers and applicants view and comment on their videotapes in separate, interviews off site. This research is significant for both the INS and its immigrant clients. For the INS, the results may affect officer training materials or become a seminar series on strategies for inter-cultural communication. For immigrant clients of the INS, the results may make the interview process more transparent - perhaps through informational pamphlets or workshops for prospective immigrants about how to navigate these interviews. Finally, the research will illuminate the nature of interaction between individuals and institutional representatives as well as aspects of face-to-face communication across cultural borders doc17416 none This CAREER development award will support a young physics faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The project is focused on fundamental problems of phase coherence in quasi-one-dimensional superconducting systems. A novel nanofabrication method developed by the PI will be applied in order to investigate fundamental properties of ultrasmall superconductors. The fabrication technique involves metallic decoration of single-wall carbon nanotubes and provides nanowires as thin as 5 nm in diameter. The following basic problems will be addressed:: (i) the interplay between the fermionic and bosonic mechanisms of superconductivity suppression in one dimension, (ii) the effects of a dissipative environment on quantum superconductor-insulator transitions, and (iii) macroscopic quantum effects in homogeneous superconducting nanostructures. In addition to training students and postdoctoral researchers, the project PI will develop a course on mesoscopic physics and modern nanotechnology for undergraduate and graduate students. The multidisciplinary character of modern nanotechnology will be emphasized in the course in order to attract students from different disciplines. The students will receive training and education in cutting edge research techniques that will prepare them for careers in academe, industry and government. This five-year CAREER development project will integrate research at the forefront of condensed matter physics and nanotechnology with an interdisciplinary educational program. In the research portion of the project, new techniques will be used to investigate the properties of superconducting systems with dimensions approaching 5 nanometers-a virtually unexplored size scale of great importance to the development of future generations of ultrafast computers and electronic devices. Novel experimental approaches will be used to study the behavior of superconducting materials in ultra-small structures. Understanding these phenomena may provide information useful for the technical development of highly integrated superconducting quantum computers. Nanoscale science and technology is becoming increasingly important in ensuring the nation s scientific leadership, and the project will also support the development of new coursework on mesoscopic physics and nanotechnology for undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Illinois. The students will receive training and education in cutting edge research techniques that will prepare them for careers in academe, industry and government doc17417 none s of experimental data, and enhance the predictive capacity of theory and modeling applied to increasingly complex systems. Most chemical processes occur in a condensed liquid or solid, including those reactions that are responsible for biological function and synthetic materials performance. This research project aims to elucidate theoretical principles underlying chemical phenomena that involve changes in electronic state. Continued advances in related experimental methods will make theory and experiment increasingly able to interact directly, and promise to enhance the understanding and predicted capability of models for electroluminescent materials, biological processes such as photosynthesis, and chemical processes that occur in solution phase photochemistry doc17418 none This CAREER combines research and educational activities in several areas of quantum information theory. The principle goals are to develop methods for accurate, coherent quantum state manipulation of strongly interacting systems in quantum optics and atomic, molecular condensed matter physics. The main thrusts are; quantum state control in mesoscopic systems and atom interactions mediated by optical photons. A graduate course on open quantum systems and the physics of quantum information will be developed and outreach activities fo high school and the general public will be developed and presented doc17419 none With the support of the Organic Dynamics Program in the Chemistry Division, Professor Paul Hergenrother, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois- Urbana-Champaign, will investigate using small molecules to investigate and modulate biological systems. The overall goal of the research being the synthesis, identification, and use of small molecules that bind tightly and selectively to proteins involved in apoptosis. An approach to apoptosis is proposed in which small molecules that bind tightly to their protein target are synthesized and then used in vivo to knock-out the proteins in the pathway. Such molecules will be invaluable tools in the study of this exquisitely important system, and they also have potential as therapeutic agents. Initial protein targets will be the caspase family of cysteine proteases, as well as regulators of apoptosis such as Smac DLABLO and IAP. The small molecules used for this study will be synthesized on the solid phase in a combinatorial fashion, and then screened for binding as small molecule microarrays. Use of small molecule microarrays are essential, as it will allow for both rapid evaluation of the library against multiple protein targets, and assessment of the selectivity of the synthesized compounds for one caspase versus another. The library aimed at the caspases will be a focused library and will be structurally biased towards compounds that will inhibit cysteine proteases. The library that will be screened against Smac DIABLO, IAP, and other apoptotic proteins is a primary library in which an attempt has been made to maximize the diversity within the library. Such primary libraries that incorporate multiple chemical scaffolds have not been created on the solid phase, and the successful production of the library described herein will represent a significant advance in combinatorial synthesis. Professor Paul Hergenrother, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois- Urbana-Champaign, with the support of the Organic Dynamics Program for his CAREER award, will also develop an integrated program for teaching combinatorial chemistry in the classroom and applying combinatorial chemistry and high-throughput screening in the laboratory. The ultimate goal in the training of students is to create a group whose research is on the cutting edge of the chemistry-biology interface while developing in the student a wide variety of skills, from cell and molecular biology to organic synthesis doc17420 none The Advanced Materials Program in the Division of Chemistry makes this Career award to Bowling Green University. With this award, Professor Felix Castellano will design, synthesize and characterize photochromic luminescent quenchers based on transition metal complexes dispersed in polymer matrices. Metal-to-ligand charge transfer (MLCT) excited states using a series of Ru (II) and Re (I) compounds in polymer matrices will be used for a variety of data storage applications such as write-once-read-many systems and read-write-erase systems. One- and two-photon photochemical and photophysical processes of these polymer composites will be determined to evaluate potential photonic device applications. Development of new inorganic chemistry laboratory course in partnership with a private science center will provide new education and training opportunities to students. Planned science exhibits will reach a large segment of population including students at different educational levels. Photochromic luminescent quenchers based on Ruthenium and Rhenium complexes dispersed in polymer matrices will be designed, synthesized and characterized. Metal-to-ligand charge transfer (MLCT) excited states of these compounds in polymer matrices will be used for a variety of data storage applications. One- and two-photon photochemical and photophysical processes of these polymer composites will be determined to evaluate potential applications in photonic devices. Development of new inorganic chemistry laboratory course in partnership with a private science center will provide new education and training opportunities to students. Planned science exhibits will reach a large segment of population including students at different educational levels doc17421 none The Advanced Materials Program in the Division of Chemistry makes this Career award to Harvard University to study one-dimensional chemical nanostructures. With this award, Professor Hongkun Park will study the synthesis of large-diameter Single Walled carbon Nanotubes (SWNTs) with controlled diameter and helicity by chemical vapor deposition using well-isolated catalyst nanoparticles with uniform size distributions. Scanned-probe microscopy (SPM) will be used to determine electromechanical properties and the coupling between global radial deformation and electron transport properties of these SWNTs. Synthesis of individual single-crystalline nanowires prepared from barium titanate and related compounds and their subsequent characterization by variable-temperature SPM will also be carried out with this award. The SPM to study ferroelectric and piezoelectric properties of nanowires should provide fundamental knowledge that governs the thermodynamics as well as the kinetics of phase transition and polarization switching. Electrostatic force microscopy will be used to read and write by measuring the local electric polarization on the nanowires. The PI, with the help of other faculty members, will give lectures in materials science and nanotechnology to middle school students as part of the Early College Awareness Program to attract students to science related studies and careers. Large-diameter Single Walled carbon Nanotubes (SWNTs) with controlled diameter and helicity will be synthesized by chemical vapor deposition using well-isolated catalyst nanoparticles with uniform size distributions, and these nanotubes may have potential electromechanical applications in devices. In addition, single-crystalline ferroelectric nanowires will be prepared from barium titanate and related compounds and their ferroelectric and piezoelectric properties determined by variable-temperature scanned-probe microscopy. These experiments will determine phase transitions of individual nanowires as a function of temperature and nanowire diameter. Early College Awareness Program will expose school students in different aspects of science, and will attract them for advanced studies in science doc17422 none This project aims at applying grain-boundary engineering to develop high-temperature structural alloys such as Ni-based superalloy and Ti2AlNb intermetallics. Major objective of the proposed project is to develop better understanding of the inter-relationship of processing steps, grain boundary character distribution (GBCD), and creep behavior of high-temperature structural alloys. The main goals of this study are ; (1) to process microstructures with a distribution of random and special grain boundaries; (2) to measure grain boundary character distribution (GBCD); (3) to perform creep testing of varied microstructures; (4) to model the effects of grain size, grain boundary sliding, and grain boundary character on mechanical behavior. The project leads to the development of a processing methodology useful to enhance the mechanical behavior of high-temperature structural materials. The educational outreach component incorporates the research tools used in the research portion of the project and contributes to an increase in the number of undergraduate students majoring in materials science and engineering (MS&E). %%% The research develops new understanding of the deformation mechanisms of structural materials beyond the present state of the art through grain-boundary engineering. The results are applicable for development of better materials for high-temperature applications doc17423 none The Advanced Materials Program in the Division of Chemistry makes this Career award to University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to study light-gated synthetic ion channels to control transmembrane currents. With this award, Professor Mary Gin will synthesize cyclodextrin-based channel scaffolds after regiospecific modifications. Modified cyclodextrins with a trapped pH sensitive dye will be embedded in homogenous lipid vesicles of approximately 25nm diameter. Ion transport activities of these lipid vesicles will be determined by measuring the fluorescence intensity changes in the dye. The planned studies are expected to result in the development of sensors; time released drugs and improved water purification systems. The educational component of the award is to assist students in Elementary Organic Chemistry courses, and to provide graduate and undergraduate students with hand-on experience in organic synthesis and modification of bioderived materials. Light-activated synthetic ion channels will be prepared from regiospecific-modified cyclodextrins and embedded in homogenous lipid vesicles with uniform diameter. Changes in fluorescence intensity of a pH sensitive dye trapped in these modified cyclodextrins will be utilized to measure ion transport activities of these synthetic ion channels. Sensors, time released drugs and improved water purification systems would be some of the potential applications coming out of these studies. In addition, this Career award will increase assistance to students in Elementary Organic Chemistry courses, and will provide them with research opportunities in organic synthesis and chemical modifications of bioderived materials doc17424 none As a result of the extreme exposure to radiation at the site of the former Chernobyl Atomic Electric Station, changes in the community composition of soil fungi have been identified. Some of these fungi have been shown to be able to decompose some of the carbon based radioactive materials from the fuel rods and from contaminated roof material. One of the properties that has been found in these fungi is that isolates from the Chernobyl area appear to show positive radiotropism . These fungi appear to have evolved an ability to recognize radioactivity, the direction of the source and then grow towards the source. This ability does not seem to have evolved in isolates of the same fungal species isolated at a distance from Chernobyl. Our proposal is to further investigate the mechanics of this radiotropism . We wish to identify the nature of the radioactive cues that elicit a response in the fungi and will use a range of radioactive sources (a, b, g, mixed bg, neutron and X-ray) at a range of doses to determine which type and dose of radioactivity these fungi respond to. We will also initiate investigations of the underlying biochemical changes that may be triggered to cause the growth changes in these adapted fungi. The work has ecological and environmental significance in that, if we can show that fungi can respond to radioactive cues, grow towards sources of radioactivity, which they can then decompose, this may be a potential bioremediation tool that could be used in contaminant remediation doc17425 none Dr. Linda H. Doerrer, Department of Chemistry, Barnard College, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program of the Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, for her work under a CAREER Award to investigate transition metal fluoraryloxide anions, which are relevant to industrial polymerization processes requiring weakly coordinating anions and the general field of fluorous chemistry. A second area of study involves bulky phosphine ligands that faciliate electron deficient coordination environments and the binding of small molecules. Integration of Professor Doerrer s research and education endeavors benefits from the predominantly female environment at Barnard College and an ongoing international collaboration at Oxford University that gives undergraduates at both institutions an opportunity to engage in research in an international setting. Professor Doerrer will organize and administer an outreach program for students in grades 9-12 and their teachers to learn about the emerging area of nanoscience at the Columbia University National Science and Engineering Center. The PI will also revise advanced undergraduate laboratory courses at Barnard to incorporate inorganic synthesis, and develop a new general chemistry course designed for students with generally strong high school backgrounds, but relatively weak chemistry preparation doc17426 none Professor Michael Carrasco, of the Department of Chemistry at Santa Clara University, is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his studies to determine how peptides and proteins can be made resistant to proteolysis by the attachment of sugars or other small organic molecules. By studying arrays of neoglycopeptides synthesized by a recently developed combinatorial method, Professor Carrasco hopes to discover general structural motifs that confer proteolytic resistance. These motifs will then be tested on peptide and protein models of practical and theoretical interest. The stages of research will be: (1) synthesizing a combinatorial array of neoglycopeptides, (2) determining the proteolysis of the members of the neoglycopeptide array by a variety of proteases, (3) analyzing the results to determine general, protective structural motifs, and (4) introducing these motifs to bioactive peptides and proteins to increase their proteolytic resistance without disturbing their function. The results generated will provide new strategies for the design of novel peptide and protein pharmaceuticals. The teaching portion of this proposal focuses on extending the culture of research and community of scholars present in the sciences to include under-represented students with a special emphasis on Latino students. Four concrete objectives will be implemented to foster a network of students and faculty across the scientific disciplines that will address both general scientific issues and ancillary issues specific to those from multicultural backgrounds. The four objectives are: (1) identifying and recruiting research students from under-represented groups, (2) creating a faculty and peer mentoring network, (3) establishing a specific program of research presentations and attendance at regional and national meetings, and (4) initiating a regular, special seminar series given by prominent scientists from under-represented groups. The main emphasis of the program is providing both scientific and personal mentoring for the students. Therefore, with the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for this CAREER award, Professor Michael Carrasco, of the Department of Chemistry at the Santa Clara University seeks to determine if glycosylation can be an effective tool in developing more proteolytic-resistant peptide and protein pharmaceutical as part of his research effort and will use teaching and mentoring under-represented students as part of his educational goals doc17427 none China s protracted boom is a major episode in world economic history. Beginning in the late s, China experienced two decades of extraordinary growth that raised every indicator of material welfare, lifted several hundred million from absolute poverty, and rocketed China from near autarchy into unprecedented global prominence. Current research, however, leaves fundamental questions about the economic, political and social dimensions of this growth process and its future prospects unanswered. To address these issues, this project initiates a major interdisciplinary effort focused on China s long boom of the past two decades. It seeks a comprehensive and integrated analysis of the underpinnings and dynamics of China s protracted growth spurt that will be both path breaking and policy relevant. This project builds on two earlier efforts: one directed by Hugh Patrick and Henry Rosovsky that produced the path-breaking volume Asia s New Giant: How the Japanese Economy Works. A second, organized by Thomas Rawski, inspired a series of volumes that have contributed to deepening the economic content of Chinese historical studies and integrating Chinese experience into the study of global economic history. The project s plan includes two conferences scheduled for summer and summer . The conferences consider three groups of papers: five overviews that lay out themes, issues, and methods from several interdisciplinary perspectives; fifteen thematic papers that focus on specific dimensions of China s recent economic experience, e.g. openness, international trade and foreign direct investment, agriculture, fiscal policy, and industrial organization and enterprise governance; and three interpretative studies that consider the implications of China s twenty-year boom for China s future evolution, for China-oriented economics research, and for broader studies in economics and social science. The first conference will apply key results from the overviews to enrich and integrate the prospectuses for the thematic studies. The second conference will review the completed thematic studies and apply their results to expand and deepen the initial drafts of the interpretive essays. These papers will result in substantial publications, including a book, tentatively entitled The Transition That Worked, and at least one special journal issue, that will appear in Chinese as well as English. The results of this project will provide a springboard for future China-focused economic inquiry, expand the information base underpinning China-related policy discussions, and stimulate the integration of recent Chinese experience into research on development, transition, and social change doc17428 none This CAREER project at CUNY City College will experimentally explore the region of applicability of kinetic theory applied to idealized and industrially relevant granular materials. Granular systems are collections of particles that typically dissipate energy in collisions. A fundamental understanding of these materials, comparable to our current understanding of fluids and solids, does not exist today but would have far reaching impacts across many industries, such as energy production, food processing, and pharmaceuticals. The assumptions used to derive granular continuum equations for mass, momentum, and energy balance, by analogy to normal fluids but including energy dissipation, are clearly violated for some of these granular systems. The goal of the experiments is to determine the conditions under which these equations produce quantitatively accurate results and to modify the assumptions to encompass a broader range of situations. The simple visual nature of these experiments creates an ideal opportunity to incorporate research into the undergraduate and graduate science curriculum through a combination of individual focused research opportunities, an advanced research methods course, and a granular materials course. The students and post-docs involved in the project will receive training in cutting edge research methods and will be well prepared for careers in academe, industry and government This CAREER development at CUNY City College project will experimentally determine the region of applicability of competing theories of granular materials for both idealized and industrially relevant systems and will incorporate this research experience into the science curriculum. Granular materials are collections of small particles, such sand in an hourglass or grains in a silo. A fundamental understanding of granular systems, comparable to our current understanding of fluids and solids, does not exist today but would have far reaching impacts across many industries, such as energy production, food processing, and pharmaceuticals. The basic assumptions used to derive current theories of granular flow are similar to those of normal fluids but are clearly violated for some granular systems. The goal of these experiments is to determine the conditions under which these theories can be used to calculate accurate results and to extend the theories to encompass a broader range of situations. The simple visual nature of these experiments creates an ideal opportunity to incorporate research into the undergraduate and graduate science curriculum through a combination of individual focused research opportunities, an advanced research methods course, and a granular materials course. The students and post-docs involved in the project will receive training in cutting edge research methods and will be well prepared for careers in academe, industry and government doc17429 none Support is requested for a CAREER development plan at Penn State University which synergistically integrates research and education activities in the area of atmospheric aeronomy and electrodynamics, and space plasma physics. The PI and his undergraduate and graduate students will develop a dynamic research program at Penn State directed on understanding of the recently discovered large scale luminous phenomena in the Earth s atmosphere above active thunderstorm systems. The proposed research project will provide answers to critical questions concerning large scale energetic effects of lighting discharges on the upper regions of the Earth s atmosphere and implications of the associated energy depositions for the thermal and chemical balance of these regions. Specific educational activities of the proposed CAREER plan include development of a multi-disciplinary computer experiment laboratory for undergraduate and graduate students at Penn State majoring in Electrical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering and Nuclear Engineering, incorporation of the elements of proposed research in undergraduate education, including active involvement of undergraduate students in proposed research activities during summer time periods, and providing active mentoring and training for undergraduate and graduate students doc17430 none Theoretically, molecular nanotechnology will mean the ability to build things from the atom up, to rearrange matter with precision, and to control its very structure. Nanotechnology promises enhanced living, and the transcendence of myriad human physical and mental limitations. As self-replicating, super-intelligent machines working within and beyond the human body, molecular nanotechnology is likely to radically alter not just the physical, but the social, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of human life. Therefore, now is the time, in the theoretical stages of development, to begin to explore the ethical implications of molecular nanotechnology. This investigator seeks to understand the developing ethics of nanotechnology through a narrative analysis of discourse inside of its development. The focus is on engineers and scientists who are working in the field to answer the questions: What do scientists and engineers define as the ethical issues connected to the development of nanotechnology? How, if at all, do scientists and engineers imagine confronting or addressing those ethical issues as they are defined? In what ways might religious perspectives and personal beliefs be a factor in the ethical framework of developing nanotechnology? The data are drawn from an array of discourses, oral and written, in order to richly understand the ethics and beliefs of the developers of nanotechnology, thus revealing its largely tacit, newly forming moral ethical frameworks. A textbook on nanotechnology ethics, and eventually, educational film on the hopes and dreams of nanotechnology investigators, are hoped to be offered as tangible outcomes of this project doc17431 none Institution: Georgia Tech Research Corporation - GA Institute of Technology Most organisms use chemical signals to assess their environment and to communicate with other organisms. Chemical cues for the purposes of defense, mate attraction, habitat selection, and food tracking are known to be crucial, widespread, and diverse. As our understanding of receptor-ligand interactions, biosynthetic pathways, sensory biology, hydrodynamics, and ecosystem function has improved dramatically in the last decade, the opportunity to address the chemistry of marine biological processes has become more promising than ever before. This project will focus on the ecological effects of chemical communication in marine systems, demanding significant integration of biology and chemistry, involving active participation of young scientists in hypothesis building and testing, and training students in research methods and communication. In this study, the Florida red tide dinoflagellate Karenia brevis (= Gymnodinium breve) will be used as a model system for understanding how phytoplankton natural products directly mediate critical interactions such as predation, which affects population and community structure. Phytoplankton chemistry may also induce food-web cascades affecting multiple ecosystems, amplified by the movement of blooms over vast distances. Indirect evidence suggests that some harmful algae use natural toxins to deter grazing by zooplankters, shellfish, and planktivorous fish, or as allelopathic agents against competing microalgae, perhaps contributing to bloom proliferation. This study will test the hypothesis that chemical compounds produced by Karenia brevis defend it against grazing by the co-occurring copepod Acartia tonsa. Chemical fractionation guided by copepod behavioral and physiological feeding assays will be used to isolate antifeedant compounds from K. brevis extracts. Ecologically active compounds will be identified by spectroscopic techniques such NMR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry (including LC-MS). This research will provide adaptable methods for studying food-web and competitive relationships between unicellular organisms and their enemies, effectively decoupling chemical from morphological and nutritional factors. Students involved in interdisciplinary science need to develop strong communication skills for bridging fields and to acquire a breadth of experience without sacrificing scientific rigor and depth in their specialty. Towards these ends, two new educational opportunities have been designed. First, a new seminar series is planned for graduate and upper-undergraduate students, researchers, and faculty on the intersection of research, policy, and communication with non-scientists, using harmful algal blooms as an example of science that holds public interest. Second, a new interdisciplinary course will be developed for graduate and upper-undergraduate students on methodologies for the discovery of novel bioactive molecules that function as cues among aquatic organisms. This project was originally funded as a CAREER award, and was converted to a Presidential Early Career Award for Engineers and Scientists (PECASE) award in May doc17432 none Advances in science and technology give scholars and institutions new means of undertaking research on historical figures and historical artifacts. Techniques of bio-analysis commonly used in medicine and forensics, such as DNA testing or biochemical assays, are now being applied to answer historical questions. Recent proposals for bio-historical investigations of scientist Albert Einstein, explorer Meriwether Lewis, and presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln have generated scientific, historical, ethical, and legal controversies. The Institute for Science, Law, and Technology (ISLAT) at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the Chicago Historical Society (CHS) coordinate a collaborative investigation to develop ethical guidelines for the emerging field of bio-historical research. The project fosters interdisciplinary academic partnerships between specialists in bioethics, science, law, social science, history, and museology. The researchers investigate the reasons bio-analysis has been used, and might be used in the historical context, and the scientific, legal, ethical and social concerns raised by bio-analysis. The project examines pplicable existing guidelines for professional organizations of historians, anthropologists, museum curators, survey researchers, epidemiologists, pathologists, geneticists, forensic scientists, archeologists, and sociologists. They also analyze ethical and legal precedents such as those governing informed consent, privacy, respect for the dead, duties of museum curators, access to information about historical figures, contracts between donors and museums, and access to body tissue. Building on this research, ethical guidelines for bio-historical analysis will be developed for use on tissue samples (such as hair, blood, or bones) from figures of historical interest. Such guidelines are useful to geneticists, chemists, forensic scientists, and others who are requested to test such artifacts; and to foundations, government agencies, and others asked to fund such analyses. The draft guidelines will be posted on the Chicago Historical Society s Internet site, submitted to professional organizations for written comments, and presented at selected conferences for discussion. The principal investigators will incorporate this comprehensive feedback in the final draft of the guidelines that will be published in various academic and professional journals doc17433 none questions about solutions to equations, its value to other disciplines is largely through concrete objects and computational tools. A major activity of this project is to help disseminate the modern computational tools from algebraic geometry to other fields, including the applied sciences, through research collaboration, organizing conferences, and co-authoring a textbook on algebraic geometry for applied scientists. Sottile will also organize an outreach program for talented high school students in Western Massachusetts with the particular goal of serving the needs of students in nearby urban areas, many of whom come from groups traditionally under-represented in science. The intention of this work: the research, the technology transfer, the service and the outreach, is to provide a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated research and educational activities for Sottile doc17434 none Controlling and manipulating molecular building blocks on a nanometer scale is the central challenge of the emerging field of nanotechnology. Nature accomplishes this task by synthesizing numerous exact copies of high molecular weight protein molecules, with folding and function on nanometer scale encoded in the primary sequence of their amino acid monomers. Thus, the cellular apparatus of protein synthesis is uniquely suited for making giant molecules with properties controlled on a nanometer scales. However, natural materials also have many shortcomings, both in terms of the available chemical building blocks, as well as the limited flexibility of the linear, step-wise protein biosynthesis. Thus, combination of the precise natural biosynthetic process with favorable attributes of diverse unnatural synthetic blocks could be used to create materials with properties impossible to obtain with purely synthetic or natural synthons. The PI propses a research program aimed at exploring the synthesis and applications of novel materials consisting of genetically engineered polypeptides (protein polymers) conjugated with synthetic macromolecular building blocks: dendrons and or conventional polymers. Two specific aims will be addressed in the proposed research: (1) development of a synthetic route towards monodisperse cylindrical molecules with nanometer-scale length and diameter, and controlled distribution of polar and apolar surface chemistries, that can be used as building blocks for thin films and monolayers with nanoscale molecular ordering; (2) synthesis and processing of composites consisting of ordered, nanometer-sized polypeptide blocks dispersed in a synthetic polymer matrix, that will have high mechanical strength and toughness comparable to or better than those of the natural dragline spider silk fibers. %%% The PI will complement his interdisciplinary research effort with a teaching program designed to integrate the biology and materials science education. The PI s ultimate aim is to educate the next generation of sscientists and engeineers capable of working at the interface between the two disciplines. This will be realized by designing research projects at the interface between biology and polymers science and suitable for both undergraduate and graduate research. Furthermore, the PI will develop three new undergraduate materials science classes that will introduce concepts and techniques of life sciences to engineering students in the context of biomaterials. Ultimately, the proposed research and training program will facilitate the flow of ideas and techniques between the two disciplines. This will then lead to the discovery of new methods for synthesis of materials with diversity of functional properties approaching those of natural biopolymers, and having stability and processing characteristics suitable for application in many areas of nanoscale science and engineering doc17435 none In this CAREER project funded by the Division of Chemistry and the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, J. Daniel Gezelter will use theoretical and computational methods to investigate phase transitions, structural features, and dynamics in complex condensed phases. Of particular interest are biological membranes, glass-forming materials, and bimetallic alloys. The goals of this research are to elucidate the fundamental molecular interactions that give rise to these phases, to gain an insight into the dynamics of diffusion in these systems, and to develop both analytical theory and computational methodology to study these phase transitions in a computationally tractable manner. Three complementary areas of research will be examined: (1) simple models for biological (phospholipid) membranes, (2) efficient computational methods for observing rare events in membranes and glass-forming materials, and (3) analytical models for the vibrational spectra of amorphous materials. In the educational portion of this project a course will be developed that brings the most important intellectual material from theoretical and physical chemistry to students who are not majoring in the physical sciences. Computer simulations can answer a number of interesting questions and can explain, for example, the mechanism of diffusion and transport or the differences between alloys and mixtures. The theoretical methods developed in this project represent a promising strategy for investigating mesoscopic-scale phenomena and should be applicable to membranes and liquid crystals as well as more complex systems. The chemical systems studied should be of interest to biological and materials scientists and may even have potential biomedical application, for example, to drug delivery. Chemistry courses for nonscience majors, particularly those students taking science classes out of intellectual curiosity, are often taught at a low level of rigor. Dr. Gezelter proposes to elevate the intellectual level without making the course content more quantitative. Communicating the importance of science to non-scientists is one of the chief problems with the current state of the scientific enterprise. Such a course should help improve this communication and make the course a more valuable and rewarding experience doc17436 none Professor Keith Stevenson of the University of Texas at Austin has received a CAREER Award from the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program to study the electrochemistry of unique nanostructures leading to efficient energy storage and conversion. Optical and scanning probe microscopy will be applied to redox-active materials, starting with the oxides used in lithium batteries, to observe mixed conduction of electrons and ions at nanoscales. Together with electrochemical methods, the approach will permit the correlation of structural characteristics (e.g. atomic-level defects, porosity and morphology) with the energetics and kinetics of ion insertion. The research will enable the development of new nanostructured materials to improve ion transport and storage capability. The PI plans to incorporate new modern electrochemistry, light microscopy and scanning probe microscopy in innovative undergraduate laboratory courses. In addition, he will develop an interactive public outreach module that interfaces with existing UT-Austin outreach programs. Local high school students will also be involved in the PI s research. Information obtained from the research may lead to next-generation energy storage materials and configurations, and lead to creation of potentially superior high-performance electrochemical power sources. The students and public involved in the work will gain perspectives about research in nanomaterials and cutting edge ideas in energy storage doc17437 none This project will develop prescriptive planning models to addresses two important problems: provision of subsidized housing for low-income families and social services for the elderly. These application areas are important because the recipients of these two types of services are usually considered society s most deserving , yet in practice these services are delivered with little or no use of quantitative planning methodologies that have become common in other domains, such as transportation, medicine, emergency and police services and the environment. Moreover, proactive planning for these two types of service delivery is difficult due to the lack of knowledge regarding: forecasting of demand for services; measuring dollar-valued and non-dollar-valued impacts of alternative policies, and choosing policies that balance competing concerns of efficiency, equity and effectiveness. Key analytical tools to be used in this project are: optimization-based planning models from operations research management science (OR MS) to generate policy alternatives given limited resources and specific objectives; urban economic models to characterize housing and labor markets and to identify impacts of various potential configurations of subsidized housing; forecasting models based on statistics and geographic information systems (GIS) to estimate demands for senior services, and group negotiations and decisionmaking to identify most-preferred policies to implement. This project will result in a number of important contributions to quantitative public policy research and teaching. First, it will enable the comprehensive evaluation of benefits and costs of subsidized housing location and elderly service provision. Second, it will enable the design of efficient strategies for solving difficult optimization problems associated with these two domains. Third, through use of actual agency data, researchers and policymakers may be persuaded that these planning models could improve the quality of service provision as compared to current practice. Fourth, it will provide a framework for the design and implementation of multiple-stakeholder decision support systems (DSS) for subsidized housing location and elderly service provision. Last, it will enable schools and departments of public policy and public administration to better motivate course offerings in MS OR and information systems information technology (IS IT), and to integrate these course more smoothly into traditional curricula. This project is important more generally because the models it generates will help those who manage or advocate for subsidized housing and elderly service delivery to better justify policy initiatives that may seem controversial, at least in the short run. Many of the political controversies arising in subsidized housing and elderly service delivery are characterized by: incomplete data on current conditions, an inability to identify realistic outcomes associated with alternative potential policy initiatives, and great difficulty in negotiating towards a single policy alternative acceptable to all parties. This academic research is not intended to transform policy analysts or political activists into experts in OR MS or IS IT, nor will it eliminate ambiguity and uncertainty surrounding these facets of public-sector facility location and service delivery. However, the research may persuade some actors in policy and political debates that the use of planning models in general, along with more accurate data estimates and well-defined ways to discuss policy alternatives, could result in outcomes in which society is better off as compared to traditional policy-analytic and political advocacy methods. Finally, this research will enable students of public policy and public administration to more readily avail themselves of OR MS- and IS IT- based quantitative planning and implementation tools that business school graduates have used for years to improve the efficiency of private-sector organizations doc17438 none This research examines the sources of relative advantages and disadvantages of different systems of economic governance, and interactions among them. The focus is on questions such as: Which system will be better under what circumstances? When can different systems coexist, and when will one supplant the others? Will each society select the mode that is optimal for its circumstances? Will new systems be adopted when appropriate, or can groups remain locked into old modes even though these may be outdated or dysfunctional? The methodology of the research combines theoretical analysis, and testing this analysis against case studies that are available or emerging. In advanced western economies, economic contracts are enforced by an impartial and effective legal system. This enables strangers to deal with each other. In most other countries, and historically in all countries, such a legal system may be missing, or corrupt, or too slow. Other systems of governance then evolve. One alternative comprises social norms and sanctions. Small close-knit groups can use these effectively since they are well-informed about each other and in an ongoing relationship. This system is common among businesses in many East-Asian countries and among communities of traders linked by ethnic or similar ties. Other methods of unofficial governance include private profit-motivated third parties who collect and convey information about previous violations of contractual obligations; credit-rating agencies perform such functions even in advanced economies. Finally, they include private third parties who will enforce contracts by punishing any breaches; organized crime groups have played this role when the official state has broken down, for example in late 19th century Sicily, just after World War II in Japan, and just after the collapse of the communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. These third-party alternatives have performed acceptably in some circumstances and have proved dysfunctional in others. Improving our conceptual understanding of the mechanisms of enforcement of economic contracts is of obvious basic importance in the theories of law and economics. The research also has practical uses. For example, U.S. firms trading with, or investing in, countries with different governance practices can better foresee any problems they are likely to face in getting their local partners and governments to keep promises, and can devise methods to protect themselves against breaches of contract. Multilateral organizations like the World Bank and IMF that advise less-developed countries on structural reforms can design their recommendations better if they understand the governance structures under which the reformed enterprises must operate; where necessary, they can recommend simultaneous reforms of the methods of governance in these countries doc17439 none The CAREER award will address the key scientific uncertainties in assessment and modeling of climate variability by focusing on moist convective processes and their linkage to the larger scale circulation. The award will enable Dr. Sherwood to strengthen undergraduate and graduate education and research training in climate sciences at Yale. A teaching program aimed at providing a physically based understanding of global-scale atmospheric behavior and climate will be developed as part of this project. The research and educational goals of the project will advance understanding and modeling of moist convective processes, particularly their role in regulating interannual climate variability through impacts on atmospheric lapse rate, moisture distribution and transport, and the hydrological cycle doc17440 none Professor Amit Basu, of the Department of Chemistry at Brown University, is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for his studies of glycolipid interactions in myelin. In the research portion of the career plan, carbohydrate-carbohydrate interactions between glycolipids are identified as the object of exploration. Interactions between the carbohydrate portions of membrane glycolipids mediate the compaction of the myelin sheath, adhesion of a variety of cancer cells, and also initiate signal transduction pathways in certain instances. This proposal outlines a new approach for detailed characterization of carbohydrate-carbohydrate recognition using the interaction present in myelin as a model system. Professor Basu will prepare carbohydrate containing liposomes as well as self-assembled monolayers as cell surface mimics of glycolipids. The monolayers will be used to obtain information about how carbohydrate structure affects monolayer morphology and its recognition properties. The second stage of the project will use chemical mutagenesis to identify individual binding interactions in the associated carbohydrates. Each type of mutation provides a unique probe of the nature of the native binding interaction. These mutants will be incorporated into monolayers and their effect on monolayer architecture and recognition will be examined. Finally, detailed experiments are designed to correlate glycolipid structure with membrane morphology and recognition. The teaching portion of this proposal focuses on methods for introducing research into the undergraduate curriculum. The class will be introduced to research through the exclusive use of the primary literature for course readings. Students will develop the skills necessary to interpret and critically evaluate information that is presented in research articles. In the course of doing so, they will begin to identify key features and limitations in experimental methods and design. This will lead them to consider new experiments that might be performed. Therefore, with the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Amit Basu, of the Department of Chemistry at the Brown University will use an integrated approach to teaching and research, that is, the methodology of research will be incorporated into the undergraduate curriculum doc17441 none The objectives of this research project are to (1) correlate relative motion in relaxation processes of glass-forming polymers with the character of inter- and intra-molecular packing, and (2) assess the way in which intermolecular packing changes as a function of environment and the relation of these changes to know relaxation behavior in blends. The importance of the spatial region corresponding to the preferred intermolecular packing distance has previously been demonstrated. However, not all polymers have similar degrees of intermolecular ordering, and the effect of this on dynamics is unknown. Further, intermolecular ordering shifts depending on environment, and the effect of this is unknown as well. To achieve the objectives stated above, a series of polymers, wherein the degree of intermolecular ordering ranges from very little to extensive will be considered. A given polymer [A] will then be considered in a series of second components [B]. Changes in the degree of intermolecular ordering will be observed, including the original polymer [A-A], and the new ordering [A-B} induced by the changing environment. Observations will be made by coherent neutron scattering, which reveals relative motion on selected spatial scales, and molecular simulation, will assess the location and extent of spatial separations relevant to interchain packing. This combination of techniques has been chosen because they can follow relative motion with spatial selectivity. The ability of neutron measurements to select for spatial scales will be exploited to separate the contributions of the a and b-relaxations, and assess the influence of environment of each individually. The novelty of the proposal lies in following relative, rather than self motion, investigating carefully selected series of materials, and integrating molecular simulation. This work, when completed, will allow us to connect features intermolecular packing with relative motion, and to unambiguously delineate the role of environment in miscible blend dynamics. %%% Educational activities are centered on bringing research-oriented activities to students who would not otherwise have these experiences. Specifically, open-ended experimental simulation problems will be introduced in core chemical engineering courses, research opportunities will be provided to students in non-research universities, and a senior elective course on molecular simulation and its role alongside experiment will be added to the Chemical Engineering curriculum. Selected undergraduate students entering their senior year at Cal Poly Pomona, and industrially oriented university with no formal research program, will be invited to spend a summer pursuing research in the PI s group. The students research will continue as their senior thesis project during their final year. These students will develop a course project based on the research they conduct at Penn State. At the same time, open-ended projects will be developed and used in the reaction engineering and thermodynamics courses, and an experiment with a simulation comp0nent will be added to the senior laboratory course. These projects will be compiled, and in the last year of the Plan, used as modules in a senior elective course. This course, aimed at non-simulators, will teach students how to use and interpret simulation data, much as a traditional laboratory course does the same for experimental data. The research to be carried out in this proposal falls in the general area of short-time dynamic behavior in polymer melts and blends, an area important for its relevance to the glass transition and processing behavior of these common materials doc17442 none The scientific component of this project focuses on the development and utilization of advanced single-molecule techniques to study the fundamentals of DNA-protein interactions. Methods such as x-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance have provided a vast array of structural detail for biological molecules, yet are largely limited to a static view that is based on ensemble measurements. In this work single molecule fluorescence detection and spectroscopy will be combined with nano-mechanical manipulations, bio-friendly surface engineering, and site-directed mutagenesis to construct suitable DNA structures and engineered proteins and to study their dynamic interactions at the single molecule level. The educational component of the project focuses on the expansion of the physics undergraduate program at the university through a course that will introduce students in physics, chemistry, bioengineering, and biology to both traditional and modern techniques in biophysics. The course will have a strong laboratory component that will be integrated with the university s REU program and a new departmental senior thesis program. Students will be introduced to some of the latest biophysical techniques, including patch clap, atomic force microscopy, optical tweezers, magnetic tweezers, and single molecule fluorescence detection and spectroscopy. This project is jointly funded by the Division of Physics and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences and by the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences in the Directorate for Biological Sciences doc17443 none The transport of sediment in suspension by turbulent flows is important to a large number of geologic and environmental problems. In most instances, the suspended sediment concentration decreases very rapidly moving away from the sediment bed. Therefore, the most important factor in predicting the suspended sediment flux is an accurate estimate of suspended sediment very near the sediment bed. Numerous formulas have been introduced to predict this near-bed concentration, but estimates from these formulas vary considerably. There exists no qualitative or quantitative model for the actual process by which suspended sediment grains are entrained and disentrained from the bed of a hydraulically rough flow. One of the primary goals of this award is to develop an understanding of the process of suspended sediment entrainment and disentrainment from a hydraulically rough bed with simultaneous bedload transport. It is hypothesized that the entrainment and disentrainment process is governed not only by near-bed turbulence structures with positive, vertically upward velocities, but also by the availability of suspended-size particles at the bed surface. The availability is presumably controlled by the exhumation and burial of suspended-size particles at the bed surface. To understand this process, a number of quantitative visualization experiments will be conducted in a laboratory flume using a high-speed video system, laser light sheet, and a suite of novel hybrid PIV-PTV algorithms. A numerical simulation of the overall entrainment and disentrainment will be performed by calculating the simultaneous motions of a very large number of bedload and suspended-size particles. The motions will be driven by temporally and spatially realistic turbulent structures. Finally, the suspended sediment transport field will be coupled to large-scale lateral turbulent structures occurring in river channels. The lateral structures will be investigated in a laboratory stream table and in a river using PIV-PTV velocimetry techniques. Then the modification of the sediment transport field by the structures will be calculated. A Student Earth Surface Fluid Laboratory will be built with the help of graduate and undergraduate students. The laboratory will consist of a hele-shaw cell for ground-water flow investigations, a stream table for flow and channel change investigations, and a sediment recirculating flume for sediment transport experiments. Also, the lab will be equipped with tools and materials to build other small experimental devices for student directed projects. A set of flow-structure-resolving numerical routines will be written for each of the laboratory devices. A course in earth surface fluid experiments will be developed. The course will provide hands-on experience of how to build, setup, and take measurements of flow structures. The focus of the class will be on developing student directed research projects. A newly introduced sediment transport mechanics course for graduate students will continue to be developed with material incorporated from results of this proposed research. Also, a new shadow course for geology undergraduates will continue to be developed that tutors students with their homework while introducing geologic applications of calculus and physics doc17444 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program (OMC) in the Chemistry Division and the Molecular Biochemistry Program in the Molecular and Cellular Biosciences Division (MCB), Professor Dev Arya, of the Department of Chemistry at Clemson University, will pursue an interdisciplinary approach to the discovery of new ligands for nucleic acid stabilization and will perform natural product based synthesis of novel ligands. He will also pursue studies on a variety of natural product-nucleic acid interactions and their subsequent development as useful tools in stabilizing higher order nucleic acid structures. A major portion of the research builds on the recent discovery in his laboratory of the stabilization of DNA and RNA triple helices by aminoglycoside antibiotics. Professor Arya proposes to develop an integrated research and education plan in nucleic acid chemistry with the long term goal of creating a recognized nucleic acid chemistry research and education curriculum in the Department of Chemistry, and to establish Clemson University as a globally competitive center of excellence in biopolymer education and research. Professor Dev Arya, of the Department of Chemistry at Clemson University, with the support of the Organic Dynamics Program and the Molecular Biochemistry Program, will develop an interdisciplinary approach to research and education. He will develop a new course in biopolymers as well as transfer modeling and experimentation to the classroom to show students the synergism between education and research and its applicability to real life problems. Outreach activities planned by Professor Arya include working with K-12 students, inviting under-represented and under-privileged students to spend a summer in his laboratory, and working with high school teachers in 23 high schools in 9 counties in western South Carolina doc17445 none This CAREER award will fund a project whose goal is the development of a better understanding of the fundamental mechanism of self-organizing behavior at surfaces and the significance of interfacial stress, through direct dynamic measurements of the driving forces of self-assembly using scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). Two-dimensional nano-arrays in thermal equilibrium of large-scale order and size uniformity will be grown on strained interfaces between a bimetallic atomic layer and a dissimilar substrate in ultrahigh vacuum. Combining the structural information (from unique real-time variable-temperature STM measurements) with quantum-size effects in the electronic structure (from high-resolution UV photoemission) will guide the development of new dynamic models to describe the evolution and properties of nanoscale structures on surfaces. This research will form an integral part of the proposed educational outreach program. The newly designed course entitled Modern Aspects of Materials Physics for High School Teachers and the proposed Summer Materials Science Institute for High School Students will address the need to improve the science achievement for students by enriching science teaching in the high school classroom. In addition the graduate and undergraduate students involved in this research will receive training in state of the art techniques, providing them with a sound basis for their future scientific careers. Spontaneous formation of organized nanoscale structures on surfaces has been observed in many systems. They are thought to arise because of a delicate balance between long-range strain field interactions and short-range chemical forces that stabilizes these structures. A detailed understanding of the driving forces, however, does not exist. The goal of this CAREER project is to identify and control these interactions that have the potential to surpass standard patterning technologies and thus, to lead the way to higher density magnetic storage, more selective catalytic materials, higher sensitivity chemical sensors, and perhaps, quantum computers. Unique real-time measurements of the dynamics of individual atoms self-ordering into nano-arrays will be performed on a home-built (scanning tunneling) microscope. The results will guide the development of new dynamic models to describe the evolution of nanoscale structures on surfaces. This research will form an integral part of the proposed educational outreach program. The newly designed course entitled Modern Aspects of Materials Physics for High School Teachers and the proposed Summer Materials Science Institute for High School Students will address the need to improve the science achievement for students by enriching science teaching in the high school classroom. In addition the graduate and undergraduate students involved in this research will receive training in state of the art techniques, providing them with a sound basis for their future scientific careers doc17446 none Direct radiative forcing by absorbing tropospheric aerosols such as carbonaceous and soil dust aerosols is one of the most uncertain factors in climate change. The main objective of this project is to improve understanding of the climate response to forcing by these absorbing tropospheric aerosols for present day conditions. The PI will conduct sensitivity experiments using the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies General Circulation Model (GCM), plus other GCMs as available and as time and resources allow, e.g., the Community Climate System Model. He will analyze the response of main climate variables such as surface temperature, precipitation, cloud cover, sea level pressure and geopotential height on the global scale. Global and zonal averages, the horizontal patterns and the variability in time of these variables between different experiments as well as between experiments and observations, will be compared. From these analyses, the PI will draw conclusions about the uncertainty, both in the spatial structure and in the magnitude of the climate response in simulations of the present day climate due to the uncertainty in the radiative parameters and the vertical distribution of the absorbing tropospheric aerosols. The PI will also estimate what accuracy of these parameters is necessary to obtain reliable results from climate simulations with carbonaceous and soil dust aerosols. This research is important because atmospheric aerosols strongly impact the atmosphere s radiation budget and new knowledge about aerosol-radiation interactions will improve the ability of climate modelers to project future climates doc17447 none The PI proposes to investigate the dynamics of multi-scale thermal convection in the mantle. Important surface tectonic features can be attributed to mantle convection at two distinct scales: The plate-scale associated with the motion of surface plates and the small-scale associated with hot spot volcanism, mantle thermal plumes, and lithospheric instabilities. By studying the dynamic interaction between convection at different scales, the proposed research will improve our understanding of the following fundamental geodynamic questions: 1) formation and heat transfer of thermal plumes in the presence of plate-scale convection, 2) the cause of relatively small hot spot motion, 3) topographic anomalies produced by thermal plumes and their implications for layered mantle convection, 4) vertical motion of Hawaiian islands in the last 400 thousand years and its relation to plume-plate interaction. Another important component of this project is on education, specifically on more efficient integration of Geophysical Fluid Dynamics (GFD) into geoscience education. The PI proposes to develop a set of simulators that use the GFD approaches and computer modeling to help students understand a variety of geophysical and geological processes ranging from thermal convection, viscoelastic stress relaxation, surface loading and crustal compensation, fluid flow in porous media, and convection for icy materials. These simulators use simple computer modeling and animations to offer students direct experience about how to simplify complex processes into physical models and to understand the processes with GFD doc17448 none The general objective of this research is to study the evolution of income inequality in four OECD countries: the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New-Zealand using income tax returns statistics available since the beginning of the century. To carry out this study, homogeneous series of income shares received from the top fractiles of the income distribution and the composition of income within each of these fractiles will be build. All these countries have produced detailed income tax statistics that are particularly well-suited for analyzing the top of the income distribution. These statistics have not yet been used extensively to study the evolution of inequality over the long-period. The goal of the analysis is to assess whether changes in inequality are due primarily to shocks such as world wars or macro-economic depressions and tax policy or due to deeper technological transformations. The data will also allow to do a comprehensive study of the short term, and long term effects of taxation on incomes. Exploiting the numerous tax reforms, we plan to investigate how each source of income responds to taxation, and in particular, whether the high top tax rates on capital income over long time periods have had adverse effects on the concentration of wealth. Understanding the mechanisms behind the evolution of inequality of capitalist countries over the course of their development is critical to assess whether capitalist economies have a natural tendency to create increasing inequality and whether government interventions are required or effective to curb the level of inequality. The analysis of the behavioral response of of high incomes to taxation is of central importance to assess the efficiency of the tax system and the costs of taxing the rich to finance redistributive programs. Understanding better the mechanisms of these behavioral responses to taxation can help improve current tax systems and transfer programs for lower incomes doc17449 none The Advanced Materials Program in the Division of Chemistry makes this Career award to University of Central Florida. With this award, Professor Deron Walters will study interaction of peptides with carbon nanotubes (CNT) and will build nanomaterials from bottom up. These studies will involve selecting nanotube-binding peptides, studying electronic effects of peptide binding to individual tubes, and linking tubes together with bifunctional binding structural peptide units. Modification of electronic properties and nanopatterning of CNT surfaces by Atomic Force Microscopy will also be carried out with this award. Two- and three-dimensional assembly and chiral separation of CNT-peptide complexes planned with this award will be helpful for successful development of electronic devices, circuits and sensors. The PI, with the departmental support, will provide innovative approaches to teach quantum mechanics courses to undergraduate students at University of Central Florida. In addition, principles and behavior of the nanoscale world will be made available to the public, and precollege teachers and students through the Orlando Science Center. Interaction of peptides with carbon nanotubes (CNT) and nanopatterning of CNT surfaces by Atomic Force Microscopy will be carried to build nanomaterials from bottom up. These studies will involve selecting nanotube-binding peptides, studying electronic effects of peptide binding to individual tubes, and linking tubes together with bifunctional binding structural peptide units. Modification of electronic properties and nanopatterning of CNT surfaces, two- and three-dimensional assembly and chiral separation of CNT-peptide complexes will be helpful for successful development of electronic devices, circuits and sensors. Innovative approaches will be used to teach quantum mechanics courses to undergraduate students at University of Central Florida. In addition, nanoscale science will be made available to the public, and precollege teachers and students through the Orlando Science Center doc17450 none This CAREER award to Professor Neil Kelleher of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program in the Chemistry Division. The overall research goal is to analyze entire proteins by mass spectrometry as efficiently as small peptides are processed today. The main research goal involves development of a unique measurement platform centering around Fourier-Transform Mass Spectrometry (FTMS) and automating the fractionation and fragmentation of wild-type proteins above 10 kDa. Realization of this goal will detect biological events in the extremophilic organism, Methanoccoccus janaschii, that unexpectedly generate a protein of different molecular weight than that predicted from the sequenced and annotated genome. This career plan also reflects a determination to positively influence large numbers of young students. Specific plans include direct visitation to six high schools in Illinois with follow up field trips to the University for students to peek at research, and a teaching conference for regional educators of 14-18 year old students. Our society s expectations for postgenomic biomedicine and bioengineering demands a better understanding of proteins and their structural modifications. The unique analytical platform described above will contribute to the national research infrastructure and analyze genome-predicted proteins with unprecendented detail in the least-studied domain of life. The thermophilic enzymes encountered could be engineered into industrial catalysts with less negative impact on the environment. Execution of this plan will also recruit, train and educate people at many levels for an improved understanding of modern biotechnology doc17451 none Weak turbulence theory provides a broad framework for the study of steady-state statistical properties exibited by large classes of weakly nonlinear or weakly coupled physical systems. Within this framework, the research component of this work will focus on three fundamental problems in physics: the Garrett-Munk spetrum of internal waves in the ocean, finite-flux spectra in semiconductors with applications to semiconductor lasers, and Bose Einstein condensates. In each case, novel weak-turbulence-inspired techniques will be developed to compute the stationary energy spectra of the phenomena under investigation, which will provide an analytic statistical description of their long-term dynamics. Applications of this work include environmental aspects of ocean dynamics, semiconductor manufacturing and increases in laser efficiency, and condensed-matter physics and materials science at low temperatures. The educational component includes course development on undergraduate and graduate level that will incorporate an experimental component in an undergraduate mathematical modelling course, and a graduate course on waves and weak turbulence theory. What do internal waves deep below the ocean surface, semiconductor lasers, and extremely cold metallic vapors have in common? They are all very complicated physical systems composed of simple components that interact weakly. Weak turbulence theory addresses these type of systems, and precdicts how the energy they contain will behave on average over long times. The question of how the energy of an internal ocean wave depends on this wave s length has an elegant experimental answer pointing to a universal law, but has eluded theoretical explanation for more than thirty years. This work aims to provide such an explanation, which will furnish new insights into the oceanic environment. Semiconductors and semiconductor lasers manufacturing and operation requires ever increasing efficiency. This work will explore an improvement that is based on a more efficient way of delivering energy to the working semiconductors and semiconductor lasers. Three quarters of a century ago Bose and Einstein predicted a new phase of materials, the Bose-Einstein condensate, that can only occur at extremely low temperatures. Finally, six years ago, this phase was realized experimentally, and the the creators of the experiment received this year s Nobel Prize. This work will provide a theoretical explanation of how extremely cold metal vapors settle into the Bose-Einstein condensate phase. Date: December 17, doc17452 none This project aims to develop new leading-edge instrumentation as tools for advancing the understanding of chemical and physical mechanisms of doping and charge conduction in organic conductors and semiconductors. The goal is to enhance the ability to quantify and image surface charge since the detecting charge with better than single electron sensitivity over a wide range of temperatures and pressures will significantly advance the science and engineering of organic device fabrication. Another goal is to explore the possibilities for measuring sub-femto Newton forces and ultimately single-molecule nuclear magnetic resonance imaging by force microscopy. The educational goals include exploring the integration of this research with chemistry-based materials science directed to training undergraduates, particularly engineers, and for outreach to Kindergarten through grade 12 students. %%% The development of all silicon technology hinges upon the inherently low charge trap density at the silicon silicon dioxide interface. The presence of interface charge traps in organic devices has seriously retarded the development of high-efficiency organic transistor type devices. Designing and using tools that can be used to characterize and remove these charge traps will be crucial to the commercialization of organic based devices. Students trained in these areas will compete very effectively for job opportunities doc17453 none Hud Continental weathering is an important component of global geochemical cycles and is one of the most significant determinants of the atmospheric CO2 levels, and hence climate, on geologic time scales. Weathering of organic carbon is an important source of CO2; weathering of silicates a sink. The long-term goal of the PI s research is to understand the mechanisms and magnitudes of continental weathering in various pristine environments at present and to then project the results into the geologic past using suitable proxies. In this endeavor, characterizing the behavior of different chemical elements as a function of weathering environment is important. The PI proposes to study weathering of organic carbon rich reducing sediments as manifested in large pristine rivers. This proposal describes an integrative approach using redox-sensitive, oxyanion-forming elements (Re, Mo, V, U) and the Os isotopic system (187Os 188Os) intimately related to them. These elements are enriched in reducing sediments and are released as soluble oxyanions when they undergo fast oxidative weathering. The proposed research activities consist of three parts: field work, instrumental analyses and data interpretation. Field work will be carried out in western China, eastern Tibet, and northern Vietnam, areas affected by the Himalayan collision but whose fluvial geochemistry is poorly understood. This will be a continuation of the successful collaboration with scientists in China and Vietnam. A graduate student at Northwestern University and visiting scholars from China Vietnam will be involved in all three activities. At undergraduate students level, this research will be integrated into the Analytical Methods in Geochemistry course that the PI is developing to strengthen the interdisciplinary Environmental Science Program at Northwestern University. This work will provide fundamental understanding of the behavior of redox-sensitive elements and Os isotopes, which is in turn important in deciphering the paleo-environments of the Earth. Additional benefit is documenting the present weathering regime of the Upper Yangtze, which is important for the Chinese scientists in their attempt to monitor the effect of the Three Gorges Dam and erosion of top soil that is becoming a serious problem. Also, a clear comparison can be made between the undeveloped headwaters and the agriculturally impacted lower reaches of the Chinese and Vietnamese rivers doc17454 none Oxygenic photosynthesis occurs in plants, cyanobacteria, and algae and is essential in the maintenance of life on earth. This type of photosynthesis requires the concerted action of two light-absorbing reaction centers, which convert light energy into a transmembrane charge separation. One of these reaction centers, photosystem II catalyzes the oxidation of water and produces molecular oxygen and reduced plastoquinone. Photosystem II accumulates the four oxidizing equivalents necessary for oxygen production at a manganese-containing catalytic site. The sequentially oxidized forms of the catalytic site are called the S states. Photosystem II consists both of integral, membrane-spanning subunits and of extrinsic subunits, that do not span the membrane. A subset of these extrinsic subunits is known to influence light-driven electron and proton transfer events. The extrinsic subunit known as the manganese stabilizing protein, MSP, prevents loss of manganese from the PSII active site and is required for optimal rates of oxygen evolution. In this multidisciplinary project, vibrational spectroscopy will be used to obtain detailed information about structural changes occurring during the S state cycle. The ultimate goal is to determine how oxygen-oxygen bond formation occurs in photosynthetic oxygen evolution. In addition, vibrational spectroscopy will be employed to test a possible mechanism by which MSP may influence water oxidation. Finally, the idea that MSP changes conformation or folds when it binds to the PSII reaction center will be tested using X-ray scattering. These experiments will provide new information about the function and assembly of complex membrane proteins doc17455 none In this project funded by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Reichman will conduct a five-stage program to develop computational and theoretical tools to gain a better microscopic understanding of collective motion in molecular, supercooled, and polymeric liquids. The first stage involves a microscopic understanding of collective and heterogeneous behavior in supercooled liquids near the glass transition temperature using computer simulation. The second stage develops new molecular hydrodynamic approaches in order to understand collective motion in supercooled liquids and polyelectrolyte solutions. In the third stage the PI applies novel field-theoretic techniques to study dynamics in random heteropolymers. The fourth stage centers on the application of a molecular hydrodynamic approach to understand nonlinear Raman in liquids. The final stage includes three educational initiatives. The first is a continuation and improvement of a multi-institutional theoretical chemistry tutorial series for undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students in the Boston area. The second centers on a new computational chemistry course for undergraduate students that includes seminars by outside speakers and student presentations on their computer projects. The third involves mentoring undergraduate student collaborators on projects in the PI s laboratory. Much of the difficulty with theories used to understand the behavior of supercooled liquids lies in the arbitrary approximations that are commonly made to achieve tractable results. While such theories have been surprisingly successful in applications to supercooled liquids, for example, there have also been many underlying doubts arising from a perceived lack of rigor in the theory. In this project Reichman is developing a new formulation of Mode Coupling Theory (MCT) that restores a considerable amount of rigor while making transparent the nature and consequences of any approximations that are made. He will also apply this reformulated theory to a number of important condensed-phase problems involving materials that have significant technological importance, such as glasses and amorphous materials. In the educational component of this project, Reichman is expanding the undergraduate curriculum to include modern chemical physics methods that will demonstrate to students the integral role played by the computer in theoretical chemistry today. In the collaborative pedagogical seminar series that he has co-organized, he is taking advantage of the rich physical chemistry environment that the Boston Cambridge area presents, and is an excellent educational tool. This lecture series is especially appropriate for the area because of the ease of public transportation and the large number of research groups that might participate doc17456 none The Advanced Materials Program in the Division of Chemistry makes this award to Tulane University. With this Career award, Professor Sankaran Thayumanavan will study molecular interactions in macromolecules, and will design parameters for functional and dynamic dendrimers. Dendrimers with both hydrophobic and hydrophilic groups will be designed, synthesized and functionalized to provide hydrophilic outer surfaces in polar solvents and hydrophilic outer surfaces in apolar solvents. The studies will provide key concepts for the development of designed second order structure in macromolecules with functional utility. With these dendrimers, it would be possible to sequester apolar organic substrates into these dendrimeric interiors in polar media for applications in catalysis, phase transfer reactions, drug delivery systems and sensors. The proposed educational outreach program Tulane Science Scholars Program is a strong educational program, and this program will expose local high school students to science and engineering programs. The PI, the Co-director of the program with the help of other faculty members, will be provide courses to high school juniors and seniors in Chemistry, Physics, Cell Biology, Molecular Biology, Environmental Sciences, Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering during Fall and Spring semesters. New dendrimeric polymers with functional groups may be used in polar and apolar solvents with applications in catalysis, phase transfer reactions, drug delivery systems and sensors. The proposed Tulane Science Scholars Program will expose high school students in different aspects of science and engineering subjects, and will prepare them for advanced studies in science and engineering programs at college level doc17457 none Dr. William B. Connick, Department of Chemistry, University of Cincinnat, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program of the Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, for his work under a CAREER Award to elucidate the factors governing multielectron transfer reactions. Metal complexes will be prepared that undergo two-electron transfer reactions. Using time-resolved methods, kinetic data will be obtained to provide firm mechanistic information for verification of existing models of multielectron transfer. The educational component of this endeavor involves the development of a chemistry course for grade 7-12 high school teachers and an undergraduate laboratory experiment using a research laser facility; thereby, exposing a large number of senior undergraduates to a research setting doc17458 none This career development program combines innovative applications of hyperpolarized (HP) noble gases with the development of a new track for undergraduate physics majors, Physics of Modern Technology. Enormous non-equilibrium nuclear-spin polarizations (of order 10%) can be achieved in He-3 and Xe-129 via spin-exchange optical pumping (SEOP), greatly enhancing the NMR sensitivity of these nuclei. These hyperpolarized (HP) noble gases are being applied to a broad range of problems in physics, chemistry, and biomedicine. The recent strong push in applications of HP gases has created tremendous cross-disciplinary excitement, but has left in its wake a number of important and persistent problems in the physics that must be addressed to realize the full potential of the various applications. This research program integrates the study of the basic physics of SEOP and several applications. Studies include the use of highly polarized Xe-129 both for polarization transfer to other nuclei of interest, and for the study of a highly ordered lattice of spins, and a detailed analysis to determine the relaxation mechanism of hyper-polarized gases at wall surfaces. Physics of Modern Technology: The educational component of the program consists of co-development of a new track for physics majors at the University of Utah, Physics of Modern Technology (PMT). The PMT program is aimed at highly motivated students who will not be professional physicists but do need preparation for careers and leadership positions in which it will be valuable to have technical, quantitative and analytic strengths. The PMT program contains a number of innovative pedagogical features, including a modular structure in which important physical principles are explained and demonstrated in the context of real-world technical problems, and the integration of theory, experiment, and computation in each module. PMT will be excellent preparation for careers such as journalism, patent law, and medicine, and it will stimulate creative teaching and interaction with the rapidly changing and technically oriented industrial world doc17459 none In recent years, many novel techniques for regression, classification, and density estimation have been developed, both in statistics and in other related areas such as machine learning and neural networks. Some of these methods have been very successful in practice, but their statistical properties are not fully understood. This hinders the further development of these techniques. The goal of the proposed research is to gain statistical insights into these techniques, and to develop new methodologies and improved algorithms. The specific techniques investigated are the support vector machine, the randomized trees, and the log density functional ANOVA model for continuous and mixed data. Several new techniques are introduced. The support vector machine for multi-category classification with arbitrary cost structures will be further developed. A new framework is proposed that connects the adaptive nearest neighbor estimation and the randomized trees. Through the use of the sparse grid method, a backfitting type algorithm is proposed for fitting the log density functional ANOVA model, with applications to graphical models for continuous and mixed data. These new techniques will be examined through theoretical investigation and empirical evaluation. The investigator will develop a graduate level course on flexible methods for regression, classification, and density estimation, and their applications. Part of the proposed research will be incorporated into the course material. Regression, classification, and density estimation are the standard problems in statistics. Traditional methods typically employ strong distributional assumptions. With the vast computing power of today, it becomes possible to develop and implement more flexible methods, and a host of new techniques emerged, both in statistics and other related areas. Many of these are computationally intensive, and their statistical properties have not been wellunderstood. A clear understanding of these methods is crucial for their further development and statistical education. The proposed research develops valuable insights into flexible statistical methods of current research interest. The techniques developed in the research provides new and useful tools to efficient data analysis, and can be applied to many problems in medical, social, economical, environmental and biological sciences. An important aspect of the current statistical education is the teaching of flexible statistical methods that take advantage of the computing power we have today, and their application in different scientific and industrial areas. The insights and new techniques developed in the proposed research will be incorporated into graduate level courses, and benefit the training of graduate students doc17460 none This CAREER proposal requests support for an expansion of the Education Outreach pilot program based on QuarkNet with three-week summer workshops for high school science teachers. In addition, there is a request for funds to build and test a prototype high-level trigger and data acquisition system to upgrade the CDF Run IIb data collection capability. A workshop for fourteen Rochester-area high school teachers used funding from the QuarkNet initiative in Summer . Based on this pilot program, this proposal seeks to expand the project by providing three-week workshops for local middle and high school physics and physical science teachers with the goal of educating both teachers as well as their students about modern particle physics research. There would be lectures on particle physics as well as a plan to build cosmic-ray muon telescopes. These telescopes would then be used in the high school classrooms with student involvement. The PI has been heavily involved in the high-level trigger and data acquisition system and the offline data reconstruction effort for the CDF experiment at Fermilab. With the expectation of Run IIb to increase the instantaneous luminosity by a factor of 2.5 and the total data collected by a factor of 10, major upgrades in the data acquisition and reconstruction systems are needed. This proposal requests funds to purchase equipment to prototype and test a low-cost PC-based central analysis farm for CDF doc17461 none The need for spatially?explicit models of marine populations has become obvious as fisheries scientists search for alternatives to traditional management strategies for marine resources. Efforts to develop spatial models for marine fish populations have been handicapped, however, by the absence of quantitative estimates of exchange rates among geographically?separated groups ( connectivity ). This lack of knowledge is primarily due to the difficulty of conducting mark?recapture studies in species that are characterized by the production of large numbers of small pelagic offspring that suffer high initial mortality rates. In this study, Dr. Thorrold will continue development and application of a marking approach that relies upon natural variations in the geochemistry of fish otoliths (ear bones) as a marker of source location. Recent work suggests that it is possible to track individual fish from juvenile nursery areas to adult spawning locations using these geochemical signatures as a natural tag of natal location. The otolith is an ideal natural tag because: Deposition time of any material in the otolith can be determined by reference to periodic increments in the otolith. Otoliths are metabolically inert, and material is not re?worked or re?sorbed after deposition. The chemical composition of the otolith reflects, to some degree, the environment in which the fish has lived. They will begin with a series of laboratory studies to investigate factors influencing the elemental composition of otoliths in larval Atlantic silversides (Menidia menidia). Then characterize geochernical signatures in otoliths of young?of?the?year (YOY) Menidia from 10 estuaries along the coast of New England. Otoliths will be assayed for VC, 8 0, Sr 16 Sr ratios, and a number of trace elements (Mg Ca, Mn Ca, Sr Ca and Ba Ca). This process will include the development of a technique for quantifying 87 Sr 86 Sr isotope ratios in otoliths using multi?collector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. The resulting multivariate chemical signatures in these otoliths will be used to develop maximum likelihood estimators to classify adult Menidia returning to estuarine waters to spawn the following year. Otoliths ftom spawning adults will be sectioned to reveal the section of the otolith laid down during juvenile residency in their natal estuary. A combination of micro?drilling and laser ablation ICP?MS will be used to assay geochemical signatures in this portion of the otolith. Adult fish collected from each of the 10 estuaries will be assigned to natal estuary based on the MLE algorithm developed from ground?truthed signatures of juveniles captured in the estuaries the previous year. These data will provide quantitative estimates of connectivity through natal homing and straying in a coastal fish species on an unprecedented spatial scale. More generally, the study will provide a framework for research aimed at quantifying connectivity in marine ecosystems through the use of natural signatures in calcified structures of marine organisms. The educational component of the proposed research will include the development of topics courses in fisheries ecology and oceanography for the MIT[WHOl joint program in biological oceanography, the mentoring of undergraduates on summer student fellowships at WHOI, and the development and implementation of teacher training workshops for high school teachers in Massachusetts. They will focus on a common fish species that is a critical component of coastal habitats with which students are most familiar. The ability to track the movements of fish from the backdoors of local students to other estuarine and coastal habitats will stress the interconnectedness of salt marshes, estuaries and the coastal ocean doc17462 none AST- Max Tegmark Dr. Tegmark is awarded funds at the University of Pennsylvania to refine current cosmological models. These models will make use of existing and new data that include observations of the cosmic microwave background, galaxy surveys, supernova surveys, and others. With global analysis of these data, he expects to be able to address the natures of dark matter and dark energy beyond just their current density, the behavior of gravity on large scales, the nature of the early universe, and the history of structure formation in the universe. The PI will also initiate a high-school outreach program in the Philadelphia school district. The PI and graduate students will present lectures and demonstrations on cosmology to high-school science classes, hoping to recruit students into existing programs that typically reach only the affluent suburbs. In addition to his regular course development, the PI will also enhance his existing website on cosmology to contain a comprehensible introduction to state-of-the-art cosmology research in lay terms, intended for the general public doc17463 none This is a CAREER grant that combines research and education activities. The focus is on the theory and simulation of properties associated with non-crystalline solids. Non-crystalline solids exist as metals, ceramics, semiconductors and polymers, and find wide application in industry. Yet the atomic-level mechanisms that control the mechanical properties of non-crystals are poorly understood compared to the understanding of these mechanisms in crystals. The research on this grant will address fundamental questions regarding the atomic level microstructure of non-crystals as they relate to measurable mechanical properties. This will be accomplished by implementing large-scale parallel computer simulation methods to simulate the atomic level response of non-network forming glasses to applied stresses. The data from these simulations will be analyzed using a variety of correlation functions - some inspired by recent investigations in supercooled liquids and experimental fluctuation microscopy studies. Once analyzed, the data from the simulations will provide the foundation for a theory of non-crystalline plastic deformation based on well characterized atomic level processes. This theory will then be implemented numerically and continuum simulations will be directly compared to atomistic results to test the predictions of the theory. A greatly increased understanding of deformation and failure in non-crystalline materials will result from this investigation. In addition, this research will validate diagnostics for the microscopic characterization of these materials. This research project is timely because significant recent advances in four areas of research each have bearing on such an investigation. (1) Focusing on non-network forming glasses will allow this research to directly address issues critical to the development of an emerging new material, bulk metallic glass. (2) These investigations will build on recent advances using molecular dynamics simulation techniques to develop an understanding of plastic deformation in glasses below the glass transition temperature. (3) By focusing on non-network forming glasses this research will be able to directly link current research regarding the nature of the glass transition to the consequences of the details of this transition for the structure and properties of the glassy solid state. (4) The information gained about the relationship between medium-range order and non-crystalline deformation in non-network forming glasses will also help extend the applicability of fluctuation microscopy techniques to the characterization of these galsses in ways relevant to predicting their mechanical properties. This computational and theoretical research program will be integrated with an educational prgram at the University of Michigan that addresses the need to fully integrate computational and mathematical methods into the Materials Science and Engineering core curriculum. Introduction of these techniques on the undergraduate level will be accomplished in stages starting with a thorough redesign of the undergraduate Kinetics and Transport class and continuing with other core classes. The PI has taught, and is continuing to develop, a course on the graduate level covering computational materials science methods for molecular simulation. This course will also serve as an educational forum fo rteaching simulation methods developed and utilized in the research program. In addition to addressing educational issues through the university curriculum, this CAREER program also includes a targeted outreach effort to local community college students. This effort will address the motovational issues of under-represented minority students in introductory science classes at Washtenaw Community College. The goal of this effort is both to increase the rate at which these students transfer to the University of Michigan to pursue engineering as a career and to lay the groundwork for increased success amongst these students post-transfer. %%% This is a CAREER grant that combines research and education activities. The focus is on the theory and simulation of properties associated with non-crystalline solids. Non-crystalline solids exist as metals, ceramics, semiconductors and polymers, and find wide application in industry. Yet the atomic-level mechanisms that control the mechanical properties of non-crystals are poorly understood compared to the understanding of these mechanisms in crystals. The research on this grant will address fundamental questions regarding the atomic level microstructure of non-crystals as they relate to measurable mechanical properties. This will be accomplished by implementing large-scale parallel computer simulation methods to simulate the atomic level response of non-network forming glasses to applied stresses. The data from these simulations will be analyzed using a variety of correlation functions - some inspired by recent investigations in supercooled liquids and experimental fluctuation microscopy studies. Once analyzed, the data from the simulations will provide the foundation for a theory of non-crystalline plastic deformation based on well characterized atomic level processes. This theory will then be implemented numerically and continuum simulations will be directly compared to atomistic results to test the predictions of the theory. A greatly increased understanding of deformation and failure in non-crystalline materials will result from this investigation. In addition, this research will validate diagnostics for the microscopic characterization of these materials. This computational and theoretical research program will be integrated with an educational prgram at the University of Michigan that addresses the need to fully integrate computational and mathematical methods into the Materials Science and Engineering core curriculum. Introduction of these techniques on the undergraduate level will be accomplished in stages starting with a thorough redesign of the undergraduate Kinetics and Transport class and continuing with other core classes. The PI has taught, and is continuing to develop, a course on the graduate level covering computational materials science methods for molecular simulation. This course will also serve as an educational forum fo rteaching simulation methods developed and utilized in the research program. In addition to addressing educational issues through the university curriculum, this CAREER program also includes a targeted outreach effort to local community college students. This effort will address the motovational issues of under-represented minority students in introductory science classes at Washtenaw Community College. The goal of this effort is both to increase the rate at which these students transfer to the University of Michigan to pursue engineering as a career and to lay the groundwork for increased success amongst these students post-transfer doc17464 none The objective of the proposed work is to investigate the use of ortho-quinone methides (o-QMs) as building blocks for organic synthesis. This study will begin with work on ways to use o-QMs to provide access to phenols which have been functionalized ortho to the hydroxy group. Ortho quinone methides are generated in situ and then trapped by 1,4 conjugate addition to directly provide functionalized phenols or trapped by 4 + 2 cycloaddition reactions. Asymmetric protocols for the 1,4 conjugate addition to o-QMs will then be developed and the adaptation of this o-QM chemistry to solid supports will be studied. The synthetic methodology developed in this project will be used in the syntheses of natural products, robustadial A, heliquinomycin and diinsininol. In this CAREER proposal, Dr. Pettus also presents ideas for modifications to the undergraduate organic chemistry lecture and laboratory classes at UCSB. With this CAREER award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research and educational plans of Dr. Thomas R. Pettus of the Department of Chemistry at the University of California-Santa Barbara. Dr. Pettus will explore chemical reactions of compounds which contain a functional group (reactive site) known as an ortho-quinone methide (o-QM). Ortho-quinone methides can be generated in situ and then used to produce a variety of aromatic compounds which have heretofore been difficult to make. The synthetic methodology developed in this project will be used in the syntheses of natural products, robustadial A, heliquinomycin and diinsininol. These natural products posess a wide range of biological activities. Students trained during the course of this research work will gain skills needed by the pharmaceutical and speciality chemicals industries. In this CAREER proposal, Dr. Pettus also presents ideas for modifications to the undergraduate organic chemistry lecture and laboratory classes at UCSB doc17465 none Institution: The focus of this research is to develop new synthetic methodology in the context of complex molecule synthesis. Projects involving palladium-catalyzed oxidative [4+2] cycloaddition reactions and tandem Bamford-Stevens Claisen rearrangements will be carried out and a concise, stereoselective route to the hypoglycemogenic diterpenoid, saudin will be developed. In the educational realm, courses on synthesis and pharmaceutical chemistry are being developed and outreach activities enabling students to interact with the broader local community are in place. With this PECASE award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research and educational efforts of Dr. Brian Stoltz of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the . Professor Stoltz will focus his research on the development of new synthetic methodology within the framework of natural product total synthesis. The illustrative target molecule, saudin, has interesting biological properties of interest to the pharmaceutical industry. The education activities will stress outreach to local middle schools and high schools and will also focus on course development at the undergraduate and graduate level. This project was originally funded as a CAREER award, and was converted to a Presidential Early Career Award for Engineers and Scientists (PECASE) award in May doc17466 none Dr. Timothy Warren, Department of Chemistry, Georgetown University is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program of the Division of Chemistry, National Science Foundation, for his work under a CAREER Award to establish a fundamental understanding of multiply-bound functional groups in later, first row complexes that participate in catalytic reactions involving cyclopropanation, aziridination and hydrocarbon oxidation. Dr. Warren will prepare carbene, nitrene and oxo complexes of Mn-Cu with a promising class of beta-diketiminate ligands in order to lend insight into these catalytic processes so as to enable the design of more efficient and selective catalysts. Dr. Warren has integrated research and education by developing a course, Introduction to the Research Experience , that introduces motivated freshmen students to the research laboratory through a synthetic research project and plans to promote a better understanding of the scientific effort through a pilot outreach program to minority-serving DC high schools doc17467 none The purpose of the proposed work is to coordinate the activities of testing and refining a trajectory for supporting teacher change with that of testing and refining an interpretive framework as a lens for analyzing that change in both pre- and in-service teachers perceptions of what it means to teach mathematics effectively and how they develop an understanding of the complexities involved. Following Simon ( ), a hypothetical learning trajectory for teachers is proposed that builds from the current literature on teacher change by incorporating the following: 1. the importance of a deep understanding of the mathematics to be taught, 2. a focus on pedagogical strategies to support students learning of significant mathematics, 3. a focus on students diverse ways of reasoning on tasks, 4. lesson planning and design that takes account of students current understandings, and 5. teacher-developed cases from the classroom as tools for reflection and critique. The trajectory therefore involves conjectures about both a learning route and the means of supporting that learning. The research will test an interpretive framework referred to as the Critical Aspects of Teachers Knowledge: knowledge of content, knowledge of pedagogy, and knowledge of institutional context. This framework builds from Shulman s ( ) notion of pedagogical content knowledge to take account of the importance of both content and pedagogy in teaching for understanding. It extends this work by also acknowledging the importance of the institutional context of the teachers and its implications for their decision-making. Numerous scholars have noted the lack of carefully constructed and empirically grounded frameworks for characterizing the process of teacher change. Thus, research is needed that more fully explicates the criteria for conducting rigorous analyses of teacher change. This study addresses the need by combining the efforts of testing and revising the conjectured learning trajectory with analysis framed in terms of the Critical Aspects of Teachers Knowledge. This process is therefore positioned to make a significant contribution and provide the opportunity for development of new theories in the field. The proposed work takes place in two phases. The first entails collaborating with a cohort of in-service teachers (grades six through eight) with the goal of supporting and analyzing their practice in order to document change. The activities of the cohort will build from the conjectured learning trajectory to include a focus on 1) an in-depth exploration of mathematics, 2) development of lesson sequences to address the mathematics, and 3) development of cases from the teachers classrooms where the teaching of these lessons is the focus. The second phase of work involves taking the teacher-developed cases as resources for modifying a mathematics methods course for pre-service teachers so that it focuses on the Critical Aspects of Teachers Knowledge. In this way, the cases first serve as a vehicle for the in-service teachers change and then later as the tools for supporting an emerging practice in the pre-service teachers. As a result, this process provides a rich setting in which to investigate the utility of the interpretive framework as a lens for analysis of both pre- and in-service teachers growth and change, tightly integrating the research and education activities doc17468 none SES Proposal Indian Knowledge-Systems on the Eve of Colonialism Sheldon Pollock, University of Chicago Indian Knowledge-Systems (IKS) on the Eve of Colonialism is an internationa collaborative research project, which draws on the talents of ten scholars from five countries to examine the nature of scientific and scholarly knowledge and the social existence of scholars and scientists in South Asia during the period from (the approximate date of two innovative thinkers, one in north India, one in the south) to (the approximate date of the consolidation of British power in the region). This large problematic has been narrowed by three limits, each with its own particular logic: (1) Eight disciplines, chosen for their centrality to traditional scientific culture or for their uncommon popularity during the period in question, are targeted for study: language philosophy, logic-epistemology, hermeneutics, literary theory, law, astronomy, medicine, and ritual science; (2) In order to gain a better understanding of the variety of social and political contexts for precolonial science, knowledge production in the eight disciplines are to be examined in four distinct regional centers: Delhi Varanasi; Navadvip (Bengal) Mithila; Thanjavur Madurai; Maharashtra; (3) The science that found expression in Sanskrit, the premier language of learning outside the Persianate order, is considered. After conducting a systematic census of manuscripts and published works in the disciplines, team members select manuscripts preserved in South Asia (and to a lesser degree Europe and the U.S.) for collection and archival preservation. Prosopographical data from unpublished sources as well as from published editions and all relevant secondary scholarship is sifted and entered into a database. This is a version of FileMaker Pro modified for networked data entry and for specific project needs. A small number of major texts are chosen for study according to a uniform analytic matrix. These address, among other things: key problematics; principal disciplinary positions; tenets of the author or school in question; dominant modes of argument, evidence, and method. On the basis of the census of texts, the bio-biographical database, and text-analyses, team members plan a book of essays on the character of Indian scientific and scholarly knowledge and its social setting. Both the database and the manuscript archives (with links to the database) are to be available to the public on the IKS Website, in hopes that the database can be enriched even beyond the limits of the IKS project, to become a key tool of Indian studies. Comparative histories of Indo-Persian and eventually European science are initiatives built into the logic and structure of the IKS project doc17469 none This project presents a career development plan for integrating research and education in the area of ionospheric and space remote sensing and imaging. The research component is funded on developing, implementing, and integrating space-based ground-based optical and radio techniques for multidimensional, multisensor remote sensing and imaging of ionospheric electron density structures, and airglow emission layers that will provide insights into many current ionospheric science issues: equatorial anomaly, spread-F, TIDs, gravity waves, and ionosphere neutral coupling at the equator. Education through curriculum development, advising, mentoring, and involvement of students at both undergraduate and graduate levels in all aspects of research is key element of the proposed career development plan. In particular, the PI is committed to introducing space remote sensing and imaging concepts and methodologies to engineering students, by developing their enthusiasm and inspiration for studying natural phenomena doc17470 none There exist a variety of tools for studying multiple scale behaviors in nonlinear systems, and the method of choice for a particular problem often depends on whether the investigator is an analyst, an applied mathematician or a physicist. An important goal is to effectively merge the various approaches, and develop new ways of thinking about multi-scale problems. To this end, this project focuses on investigating five interdisciplinary problems, using ideas from functional analysis, geometry, topology, matched asymptotics and scaling arguments, in conjunction with numerical simulations. These problems are (1) Generalized crumpling: Combining functional analytic methods with geometric topological ideas to study singularities and microstructure; (2) Blowup in Parabolic PDEs: Applying Morse theory to the dynamics of blowup solutions; (3) Dynamics of microstructure: Studying global bifurcations involving the change of microstructure in a model system; (4) Pattern formation and non-equilibrium phase transitions: Investigating multiple scale behaviors in nonlinear systems in the presence of noise; and (5) Topological transitions in fluid interfaces: Using tools from PDE to investigate topological transitions in 2 fluid systems. Many real world systems are interesting precisely because they exhibit different behaviors on different scales. This is certainly true for living organisms, geological and geophysical systems, technologically important composite materials and even social structures and hierarchies. Thus researchers across many disciplines grapple with the following two questions, which are the essence of multiple scale analysis: (1) How does the large scale (macroscopic) behavior emerge out of the collective behavior of the small scale (microscopic) units?, and (2) What are the rules governing the large scale behavior, and how does this influence the behavior of the small scale units? The research component of this project studies these questions in a mathematical setting through problems that arise in material science and in physics. The overall goal is to meld together a variety of techniques to develop tools that can successfully handle complex real-world multiple scale problems. This is combined with an integrated approach to pedagogy, that features a strong involvement in undergraduate and graduate research, development of research opportunities for groups that are under-represented in mathematics and the physical sciences, curriculum development both at the graduate and the undergraduate level, and development of materials for scientific outreach to the general public. Date: December 17, doc17471 none In this project funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Meersmann will combine continuous-flow laser-spin-polarized 129Xe nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy with pulsed-field-gradient diffusion techniques to develop a non-invasive analytical technique that allows the study of porosity, pore-size distribution and pore connectivity in porous host materials. A combination of magnetic stray fields with continuous flow laser polarized xenon Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) will be used to study long range structural order in materials with small diffusion constants. An important system that will be probed with this new technique is the gas dynamics in one-dimensional nanochannels that is driven by very slow single-file diffusion processes. A variety of novel phenomena such as the correlation of xenon lineshape with diffusion or concerted cluster diffusion can be probed for the first time with these experiments. A non-invasive analytical technique will be developed to provide information about the porosity, pore-size distribution and pore connectivity of porous materials. Nano-channels play an important role in a wide range of industrial catalytic, geologic and biological processes. The results of this research are expected to make a significant contribution to material science concerned with heterogeneous catalysis, separation processes and in the understanding of fundamental physical chemistry. Graduate and undergraduate students will participate in this research. They will gain excellent training in forefront research techniques in preparation for advanced studies or entry into the scientific technological workforce doc17472 none Professor Jennifer Shepherd, of the Department of Chemistry at Gonzaga University, is supported by the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program for her research that involves the elucidation of rhodoquinone (RQ) biosynthesis in the purple non-sulfur bacteria, Rhodospirillum rubrum and later in the nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans. RQ is an essential electron carrier in the anaerobic energy metabolism of both of these species as well as in the helminth parasites. Parasitic infections pose a serious health threat to both humans and domestic animals. There are few effective anthelminthic agents available due to the emergence resistant parasite strains. The Pl plans to develop new anthelminthic agents that selectively target RQ biosynthesis in parasites. The teaching portion of this proposal focuses utilizing undergraduates and postdoctoral students in teaching and research. Therefore, with the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Jennifer Shepherd, of the Department of Chemistry at Gonzaga will use small projects within the specific aims of the research project to train undergraduates and larger scope projects for post doctoral associates doc17473 none Professor Daniel Chiu of the University of Washington has received a CAREER award from the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program to investigate the effects of constrained space on enzyme kinetics. Single molecule spectroscopy will be utilized to examine enzymes such as beta-galactosidase acting on fluorophores contained in 100 nm synthetic vesicles and designed planar supported bilayers in nanochannels. Electroporation and microfluidics will be used for manipulation of vesicles and single enzymes. The studies will ascertain whether the surface charge and hydrophobicity associated with cellular nanoenvironments can exert significant influence on the activity of proteins. These studies will lead to a better understanding of cellular functioning and compartmentalization. The PI will offer a new graduate course covering topics in microfabrication, fluid mechanics, Fourier optics and bioanalytical methods, and also will use web-based technologies extensively to assist in the General Chemistry courses. Most protein reaction studies are carried out in solutions in beakers, and any effects of the cell surfaces are lost. The advent of single molecule spectroscopy makes possible the study of single enzyme molecules inside tiny channels or vesicles, mimicking the enclosed ultrasmall spaces found in cells. Differences from molecule to molecule have shown up in previous studies, and these can be significant. The effects of the walls and limited spaces on the biochemical reactions can then be studied. Students engaged in the technologies used in this research and in the graduate course can transfer the knowledge to many efforts such as lab-on-a-chip and sensors doc17474 none Visual search is a process that humans engage in on a daily basis. Looking for a friend in a crowd, a car in a parking lot, or a tumor in an x-ray mammogram are all examples of visual search. Visual search involves two processes, (1) scrutinizing the visual scene by making eye movements to orient the high-resolution fovea to the regions of interest and (2) attending to different points in the visual scene independent of the eye position to select relevant visual information. For over three decades, investigators have studied visual attention and offered different theories about its function and its processing limitations during search. This research will test a number of existing and newly proposed theories using novel mathematical computer implementations of models of visual attention. The results will allow for a better understanding of the function of visual attention during visual search. The research will also provide a new theoretical and quantitative framework to study the types of attentional disorders present in patients with schizophrenia, Alzheimer s disease, attentional deficit hyperactive disorders, and hemi-neglect. The education plan will incorporate the use of computer and mathematical models in the study of visual attention in undergraduate and graduate education. In addition, the education plan will include implementation of a website that will allow students and researchers worldwide Internet access to use and test computer models of visual attention doc17475 none CAREER Garnero This proposal describes a long-term research directive for studying Earth s deep interior and related activities in science education in seismology and geophysics. An undergraduate and graduate course in seismology will be developed in Arizona State University s Department of Geological Sciences, a department that has experienced recent expansion in geophysics seismology. Many topics in seismology are beyond the scope of an undergraduate course that uses traditional lecturing approaches. The new courses will utilize more three dimensional visualizations using computer imaging and animation, along with more interactive learning methods and analogies. Both the undergraduate and graduate course will utilize already in-house research tools to study aspects of seismic data from recent and past relevant earthquakes. Emphasis on individual student and group discovery will be emphasized in both classes. Research activities for the proposed period focus on seismic studies of Earth s interior, with emphasis on the deep mantle. Three main areas of focus are: (1) determination of seismic heterogeneity, which is used to infer thermal and or chemical heterogeneity; (2) detection and characterization of seismic wave speed anisotropy, which is related to rheology, dynamics, and flow in the mantle; and (3) detection and mapping of boundary layers and or discontinuities in seismic properties, which may relate to chemical or phase boundaries in the Earth. The proposed work utilizes travel time and waveform analyses of relevant seismic waves and tomographic analyses, and will utilize two state of the art computer labs in the department, which are both outfitted with modern PC and UNIX computers. Research efforts characterizing heterogeneity, anisotropy, and boundary layering will include 2- and 3-D travel time and waveform analysis and propagation tools, an important next step in deep Earth seismology doc17476 none This integrated research and educational CAREER project will apply the bottom-up approach of atomic and molecular manipulation to produce new nanoscale structures. Three areas of emphasis are involved: (1) probing and manipulating the intrinsic degrees of freedom of the atom, such as energy levels, charge, and spin; (2) probing and manipulating the interface between the atom and the external environment, involving imaging chemical bonds, electronic and vibrational structure, and electron correlation effects; and ultimately (3) the nuclear properties of single atoms, for example isotopic mass and nuclear spin. Synergistically with the laboratory component, the PI and Stanford University will implement a substantial educational and outreach program. This cross-cutting effort includes: (1) the introduction of a new co-terminal physics teaching program, (2) the development of two sets of new courses into which current research in nanoscale science and technology will be interwoven, (3) an outreach program to build nanoscience research and education within the Americas, and (4) the construction of a remote-control station for atom manipulation in order to promote nanoscience education via visual tools to visiting students and to the public. This integrated research and educational CAREER project seeks to apply the bottom-up approach of atomic and molecular manipulation to several focused areas in science and technology. Controlled atom and molecule manipulation and atom-by-atom assembly of complex structures on the nanometer length scale are capabilities existing now only at the frontiers of science and technology. The students involved in this proposed research and education plan will receive a unique and cross-discipline training in emerging fields now universally identified as critical to society and our understanding of nature. Synergistically with the laboratory component of this plan, the PI and Stanford University will implement a substantial educational and outreach program. This cross-cutting effort includes the introduction of a new co-terminal physics teaching program, the development of two sets of new courses into which current research in nanoscale science and technology will be interwoven, an outreach program to build nanoscience research and education within the Americas, and finally the construction of a remote-control station for atom manipulation in order to promote nanoscience education via visual tools to visiting students and to the public doc17477 none We plan to elucidate the mechanisms of atomic motion and its relationship with electron transfer in photon-induced ultrafast reactions of metal complexes using a new type of ultrafast x-ray absorption spectroscopy, ultrafast selected energy x-ray absorption spectroscopy (USEXAS) that is currently being developed in the PI s laboratory. This method enables us to more directly investigate the atomic motion in non-crystalline materials on the ultrafast timescale. The atomic and electronic motion in several exemplary chemical systems will be investigated. The outcome of these investigations can shed light on the structures of the critical transition states in those systems. We will build an experimental educational program for local high school students and help them understand chemical reactions at the molecular level. Our aim is to enhance students ability to understand and appreciate physical and analytical chemistry at the most fundamental levels and at a young age. In this program, Internet-connected, remotely accessible, real-time chemical experiments (RARE) will be developed by undergraduate and graduate students at UC Davis. PI s lab will be used to train and prepare graduate students and undergraduate students. Understanding atomic motion during chemical reactions is critical to improving our ability to make new devices and materials such as solar cells, molecular electronic components, and drugs. We plan to elucidate the details of the interplay between atomic and electron motion in several important chemical systems using a new type of ultrafast x-ray absorption spectroscopy that is currently being developed in the PI s laboratory. This method allows us to visualize the motion of atoms during fast chemical reactions in a more directly manner. The educational component of this proposal involves the building of an experimental educational program for local high school students that will help them understand chemical reactions at the most fundamental levels and at a young age. The experiments are Internet-connected, remotely accessible, real-time chemical experiments (RARE) that will be developed by undergraduate and graduate students at UC Davis doc17478 none Research under this CAREER award will elucidate the role of surface albedo feedback in climate variability and sensitivity. The following outstanding issues will be addressed (i) What does our current knowledge of snow and ice albedo imply about climate sensitivity? (ii) Do snow and sea ice albedo feedback behave differently? (iii) How does albedo feedback impact the geographical and seasonal distribution of the climate change signal? (iv) Do models need albedo feedback to simulate the observed distribution of the climate change signal? (v) What is the impact of albedo feedback on internal variability? (vi) Is it possible to extract information about albedo feedback contribution to the real climate s sensitivity to a future external forcing based on the observed record of climate variability? The PI will perform a series of sensitivity experiments with the UCLA General Circulation Mode and Community Climate System Model (CCSM) to answer the above questions. For the integration of education, the PI will introduce undergraduate students at Harvey Mudd and Biklent Univ. Ankara Turkey, to projects related to the climate change experiments. Graduate students will be involved in evaluating the climate change simulations in a graduate course the PI will be teaching. This research is important because it will improve knowledge about processes important to issues of climate change and will help educate future scientists doc17479 none The goal of this research project is to develop a performance target (PT) sensitive optimizer. Performance targets are relevant in the noisy wide area environment where access costs to Internet accessible WebSources exhibit transient behavior, and are best characterized by a distribution of access costs. A PT sensitive optimizer will have the ability to differentiate among multiple alternate WebSources, and to choose a combination of WebSources so as to best meet a performance target for some query (and its query evaluation plan). The ability to meet a target is quantified by a utility function. Existing optimizers and their cost model consider either specific values or expected values for access costs, and are not sensitive to performance targets. This approach characterizes each plan with the expected value of the cost of the plan, as well as the delay; delay is the deviation above the expected value. A Cost-Delay measure (CDM) combines these two values using a cost factor and a delay factor. A simulation based study of the optimizer s aggregate behavior, for a set of queries and a set of remote relations on WebSources will be used to correlate the PT optimizer s selection of plans and WebSources with its success in maximizing utility or meeting a performance target. The results of this project will provide a tunable optimizer for noisy environments that allow applications to be sensitive to performance targets and to better utilize Internet resources doc17480 none This project conducted by the Southwest Center for Educational Excellence will work with ten districts to implement systemic reform strategies through content-based professional development, action research, standards-based curricula, reallocation of resources, formulation of supportive policies, and development of local partnerships. Four catalyst schools will partner with smaller districts, and key staff work will be organized by the schools five-year improvement plans doc17481 none Lay : D.H. Edwards (PI), Neural mechanisms of dominance behavior The neural bases of dominance hierarchy formation are not well understood. In crayfish and lobster, formation of a dominance hierarchy begins with fighting between pairs of animals in which both animals perform similar behavior patterns: approaches, attacks, and offensive tailflips. At some point, one animal becomes subordinate by switching to defensive behavior and retreating or performing any of three types of escape tailflips. The changes in behavior result from changes in the excitabilities of the neural circuits that mediate the behavior patterns. Changes in circuit excitability may result from changes in neuromodulation of the circuit. Serotonin is one neuromodulator that has been shown to affect escape behavior in a manner that depends on the animal s social status. The present research will determine whether serotonin modulates neural circuits for other behaviors that are important for dominance decisions, including another form of tailflip, backward walking (i.e., retreat), and body posture. The research will also determine whether the serotonergic neurons that normally modulate these circuits are themselves affected by changes in social status. The project will help provide a comprehensive view of the role of serotonergic neuromodulation in the formation of dominance hierarchies by crayfish doc17482 none Wolbachia pipientis is one of the most widespread endosymbiotic microorganisms known. First characterized in mosquitoes of the Culex pipiens complex, it has since been found in greater than 20% of insect species and about 25% of Drosophila melanogaster used in genetic research. Wolbachia has specialized in the manipulation of host reproduction. In Drosophila, Wolbachia primarily causes cytoplasmic incompatability (CI), a form of reproductive isolation. The expression of CI renders infected males unable to father offspring when mated to uninfected females. While infected males mate normally, transfer sperm and the sperm fertilize the egg, the egg fails to complete karyogamy and dies. Reciprocal crosses between uninfected males and infected females are viable, but since Wolbachia are transmitted vertically through the female, all resulting progeny are infected. The research project will attempt to understand the genetic basis of Wolbachia distribution in Drosophila melanogaster testes and the resulting effects on CI. Deficiency mapping will identify loci with large effects on Wolbachia distribution and density within D. melanogaster testes. Deficiency stocks will be screened for the presence of Wolbachia. Those strains with dissimilar patterns of Wolbachia distribution will be studied further for their ability (or inability) to cause CI as well as the for the host genetic basis of differential bacterial distribution. Following identification of important candidate loci through deficiency mapping, alleles with different levels of penetrance will be studied for their impact on bacterial distribution and CI. The identification of genes and biochemical pathways involved in determining Wolbachia distribution patterns will advance the understanding of how Wolbachia manipulate host reproduction in Drosophila and spermatogenesis in general. It may also provide clues as to what pathways are manipulated when Wolbachia infect more distantly related insects, particularly insect pests that cause human diseases (for example, malarial diseases transmitted by mosquitoes. Such knowledge will also aid in the design of effective pest management programs utilizing Wolbachia doc17483 none Sexual size dimorphism (SSD) is a widespread biological phenomenon in which adults of one sex attain characteristically larger body sizes than the other sex. Depending on the species, males might be larger than females, or vice versa. It is often assumed that SSD evolves due to differential selection on body size, and several adaptive hypotheses invoking advantages for male- or female-biased SSD have been widely discussed. However, the genetic basis and thus the potential for evolution of SSD is almost completely undescribed, and relatively little is known about physiological and other proximate mechanisms that lead to sex differences in body size in the vast majority of species. It is therefore premature to focus on ultimate as opposed to proximate causation of SSD, as has been the general tilt of previous studies in this area. The present project will focus on physiological and ecological mechanisms of proximate causation of SSD in a lizard (Sceloporus undulatus) in which females grow faster as juveniles to become about 10% larger than males as adults. This project will address the following questions: 1) Is testosterone fundamentally responsible for sexually dimorphic growth rates and the development of female-biased SSD? 2) To what extent is SSD subject to environmental variation? 3) How do constraints imposed by growth activity trade-offs affect the occurrence of SSD? To answer the questions posed in this project, two sets of studies will be done. 1) Descriptive studies will characterize growth rates, behavior, and sex steroid levels in juvenile lizards active in their native habitat. 2) Experimental studies involving hormone manipulations will resolve unambiguously the potential role of testosterone in leading to female-biased SSD. The work completed in this project will contribute important new information regarding the general question of how sex differences in growth lead to SSD. This work may open the door for future comparative studies on growth regulation in phrynosomatid lizards, a large family with a well-described phylogenetic history. Future comparative molecular studies in this group could provide a detailed understanding of the evolution of the regulation of growth-promoting gene expression and could help to resolve the contribution of genetic vs. environmental determinants of growth and SSD. As such, phrynosomatid lizards may prove to become a significant new model system for studies on growth regulation doc17484 none Filson The NSF, the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the China Seismological Bureau (CSB) of the People s Republic of China are partners in a Protocol for scientific and technical cooperation in earthquake studies. This Protocol was initially signed in Beijing in , and extended in , , , and . The latest extension (through ) was signed on March 28, at a signing ceremony hosted by the USGS in Reston, VA. This ceremony was the culmination of an official visit to the US by a Chinese delegation from the Ministry of Construction, CSB, and the Chinese Natural National Science Foundation which visited several locations within the US. The terms of the Protocol are that the receiving side pays whenever an official delegation visits. Thus, when a Chinese delegation visits the US, NSF and the USGS have agreed to split the costs of the delegation. This transfer of funds to the USGS will cover NSF s share of the expenses for the Chinese delegation s visit to the U.S doc17382 none A symposium gathers together outstanding scholars, analysts, and practitioners in science and technology policy who are within seven years of their PhDs. It provides an opportunity to meet and exchange ideas and to present their work to a high-level (senior) audience. This research symposium is oriented toward eight theme tracks in science and technology policy: New history of science and technology policy. R&D program analysis and evaluation Expertise, advice, assessment, and evaluation Science, technology, and human needs and values Science, technology, and international issues Science education, human resources, and workforce Science and technology policy institutions and processes Science, technology, and the public. Proposals for these tracks were broadly solicited and peer reviewed for acceptance. Accepted authors were funded to attend the workshop held in Washington, DC. Senior scholars and practitioners served as discussants. The new scholarship presented and the interaction among academics and practitioners have the potential to improve policy and programs and to benefit education in science and technology policy in a variety of ways. An edited book containing the presented papers will be published doc17486 none The metabolic activity of eukaryotic DNA is restricted by its packaging into chromatin. Accordingly, transcription, replication and repair require chromatin remodeling activities to allow factor access to template DNA. Two classes of chromatin remodeling activities have been described. One promotes ATP-dependent remodeling, as exemplified by the highly conserved and well-characterized SWI SNF complex. The other class catalyzes covalent modification of the histones, primarily at their N-terminal tails. Histone acetylation, methylation, phosphorylation and ubiquitination have been described. Presumably these modifications weaken histone-DNA or nucleosome-nucleosome interactions, thereby allowing factor access to DNA. This project addresses the role of covalent chromatin modifiers in gene silencing. The premise of the project is that the novel Set2 and Hsl7 proteins directly catalyze histone modifications as components of chromatin modifying complexes. Three specific Aims are being pursued, exploiting a powerful combination of yeast genetics, biochemistry and genomics. Aim #1 is to identify factors that genetically interact with Set2 and Hsl7; Aim #2 is to isolate and define Set2 and Hsl7 complexes; Aim #3 is to define the interplay among histone methyltransferases, acetyltransferases, kinases and deacetylases. This project is based on the recent characterization of the effects of histone acetylation and deacetylation on silencing. The successful outcome of this project is likely to identify novel chromatin modifiers and to define how these factors interact to regulate gene expression. The genetic information in higher organisms is packaged into chromatin, a complex structure consisting of DNA and histone proteins. In the past several years several proteins have been identified that regulate gene expression by affecting chromatin structure. The goal of this project is to isolate and define new proteins that control gene expression by biochemically modifying histones. A powerful combination of genetics, biochemistry and genomics will be used in this project. Novel information gained from this study is likely to be generally applicable given that chromatin structure and known histone modifiers are highly conserved among different organisms doc17487 none The proposed activities aim to create mathematical and computational methods for modeling large biological molecules. Computational simulation of dynamics and sampling of proteins, DNA, and nucleic acids promise to be a tool for understanding the relationship between structure and function, and for computer assisted drug design. Processes of interest include protein dynamics and folding and the study of other cellular components. Despite significant progress in the field, there is still a gap between the simulations that can be routinely performed with current technology and the complexity of processes and systems of biological interest. The proposed mathematical and computational methods will overcome the size and time scale limitations inherent in atomistic dynamics and sampling, while preserving the atomistic resolution of the biological systems. The new methods will be disseminated for research and educational purposes through an open source and scalable software framework called ProtoMol, and tested in a range of systems, from small proteins to potassium channels that reside in lipid bilayers. These new algorithms will translate into speedups of one or more orders of magnitude over current methodologies. This technology will enable simulations that are sorely needed in the expanding field of proteomics and the processing of data from the human genome project. To study dynamical processes, trajectories of large biomolecules are generated using molecular dynamics (MD). In an attempt to overcome the time scale limitations, multiple time stepping (MTS) integrators have been introduced. Nevertheless, even these methods have been limited by stability, and thus the time steps used in MD have not been dramatically increased. The PI proposes to devise multiscale algorithms for MD that are not limited by stability. To accomplish this goal, research will proceed in two phases: the _rst will extend the PI s work on stabler MTS numerical integrators by overcoming instabilities present in these methods. This will allow an estimated two- to eight-fold speedup over current methods for MD. The second phase involves the use of a symplectic semi-implicit method for MD using a splitting that separates cleanly many time scales, and incorporates the faster and less interesting ones in a more approximate manner. Speedups of two orders of magnitude or more are possible, depending on the degree of accuracy desired. This proposal will also tackle the related problem of statistical sampling. The large conformational space of biomolecular systems causes many difficulties to traditional sampling methodologies such as MD and Monte Carlo methods, or hybrids of both, all of which super performance degradation as the system size increases. We will use a biased hybrid Monte Carlo method that scales nearly linearly with system size. This will produce speedups of one or two orders of magnitude over MD, MC, or conventional hybrid MC methods. Synergy between this research project and teaching will occur at several levels. There will be an enhancement of materials of undergraduate and graduate courses taught by the PI, on data structures and applied algorithms, numerical methods, and computational methods for biomolecular modeling. Learning modules for engineering and science students will be developed in ProtoMol to facilitate an understanding of the behavior of large biological molecules doc17488 none Tremendous growth in information and biomedical technologies coupled with the increased complexity of modern transportation systems has fostered an increased demand for sensors and actuators with higher performance, enhanced reliability, and lower cost. Magnetostrictive sensors actuators have become increasingly popular and can be found in a diverse set of applications ranging from on-line torque sensors in automobiles to acoustic transducers in hearing aids. Yet, monolithic versions of the most popular magnetostrictives are prone to several technical problems including low tensile strength, brittle fracture, high eddy current losses, and complex and costly manufacturing. One solution to these problems is to develop a magnetostrictive composite sensor actuator in which the desirable properties of the magnetostrictive phase are combined with those of the matrix phase to create a composite of high strength, excellent processability, and low eddy current losses. Although some initial attempts have been undertaken to develop magnetostrictive composites, very little work has been accomplished in several key areas. A comprehensive experimental database spanning the full range of volume fraction is currently lacking. No comprehensive micromechanical model has emerged to design magnetostrictive composites for specific performance targets. This research project will focus on generating a complete set of magnetomechanical experimental data spanning the full range of volume fraction for magnetostrictive (Terfenol-D) composites. The experimental data will then be utilized in developing a micromechanical model for performance prediction and design of sensors actuators. The ultimate aim of the research is to provide the scientific and engineering basis for industrial application of magnetostrictive composites technology. From a broader perspective this research project addresses the NSF and national initiative for IT research and development by addressing the need for further scientific efforts in developing new and better sensors and actuators doc17489 none The workshop will consider both short-term and longer-term issues in processor evaluation. The rationale for considering at least some short-term issues is clear: the simulation crisis is already here. Even the SPEC95 benchmarks cannot be run to completion using cycle-accurate simulation. The SPEC benchmarks are substantially longer. A variety of techniques for reducing simulation time are currently in use, yet there is no agreement on which techniques are most appropriate. Some clearly-invalid evaluation techniques are in use simply because there are no alternatives that offer scientifically-valid results with the necessary turnaround times. We propose to use the following questions as a starting point for discussion. Metrics: What are the proper metrics to use for various architectural studies? Benchmarks: What are the appropriate benchmarks to use for various architectural studies in the next 5 years? ions: How can researchers determine when abstractions that accelerate simulation (but may reduce accuracy) are appropriate and when they are not? How can their accuracy and precision be characterized? Sampling: How when whether can researchers use mixed-mode simulations that vary between high and low amounts of detail in a single simulation? How can the accuracy of such simulations be verified? Sensitivity: How can researchers structure sensitivity studies to determine when a low-level error will translate into large errors, as opposed to when the low-level error s effect will be masked when aggregated into the full simulation? Validation methods: How can a processor simulation be validated before a similar processor is built? Hardware assists: How can simulations make use of hardware performance counters and other hardware assists for evaluating next-generation processors (which may have different organizations than the systems from which we are obtaining hardware counts)? Portability: Processor models are complex and often closely tied to the simulation infrastructure (e.g., SimpleScalar, ATOM) on which they are developed, and once a model has been validated, it becomes expensive to develop new models. Yet different simulator platforms are best suited for different experiments. How can the portability of processor models best be accomplished? Power: What new simulation questions are raised by the growing interest among architects in power modeling doc17490 none The emission of dimethylsulfide (DMS) from the ocean represents the major natural input of sulfur to the Earth s atmosphere. Once in the atmosphere, DMS is rapidly oxidized, forming sulfur aerosols that have an important impact on atmospheric chemistry and the global climate system. Recent evidence points to a key role for members of the marine roseobacter lineage in carrying out these globally-important functions. Representatives of the roseobacter group, including Silicibacter sp. DSS-3, are known to carry out many, if not most, of the major biogeochemical transformations of DMS and its precursor compound, dimethylsulfonioproionate (DMSP). Of particular importance is the fact that organisms like DSS-3 have the ability to produce DMS from DMSP but also the ability to metabolize DMSP by an alternative pathway that bypasses DMS altogether. Little is currently known about how these different pathways are regulated in marine bacteria, or how pathway regulation affects the complex DMS biogeochemistry in the sea. Thus the genome sequence of Silicibacter sp. DSS-3 will provide key information for deciphering how marine bacterioplankton control sulfur emission from the ocean. In this project, a fully closed and annotated sequence of Silicibacter sp. DSS-3 will be obtained, with the goal of developing molecular tools that can be used to investigate the microbiology and ecology of bacterially mediated organic sulfur transformations in the ocean. The roseobacter group is currently the only major lineage of marine heterotrophs whose members can be readily cultured and manipulated in the laboratory. As such, a genome sequence of Silicibacter sp. DSS-3 will also be of broad interest to marine biogeochemists and microbial ecologists. Sequence data will be provided to the scientific community through the TIGR Microbial Database site (www.tigr.org tdb tdb.html). Initial release of the sequence data will be in the form of contigs assembled at 3-fold sequence coverage, with monthly data releases thereafter. This is a Microbial Genome Sequencing Award funded through a collaborative activity between the National Science Foundation and the Department of Agriculture Initiative for Future Agriculture and Food Systems doc17491 none This project will investigate genome structure and its evolution in rotifers of the Class Bdelloidea, an extraordinary group of invertebrate animals that appears to have evolved for tens of millions of years without sexual reproduction. In particular, the project will: (i) initiate the basic characterization of bdelloid genomes; (ii) examine specific genes for the occurrence of genetic recombination within a bdelloid genome; (iii) determine the genomic consequences of long-term ameiotic evolution; and (iv) possibly discover novel features of bdelloid genomes that might provide insight into what has allowed bdelloid rotifers to evolve successfully without genetic exchange, and, correspondingly, what causes most other populations of animals and plants that become asexual to suffer early extinction - a long-standing fundamental problem in biology doc17492 none PI: Krzysztof M. Jarosz Proposal: Institution: Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville This proposal requests funding for a Fourth Conference on Function Spaces featuring several internationally known leaders in the field as principal speakers. This conference has a long an successful history and it is expected that it will attract a fair number of graduate students and young researchers form all of the US. Most of the award funds will be used to enable them to attend the Symposium. We are confident that the event will once again be of significant benefit to a broad mathematical community and enthusiastically recommend the award doc17493 none Nehrir, M. Hashem It is proposed to explore modeling and control of multi-source wind photovoltaic (PV) fuel cell distributed generation systems to evaluate and improve their performance. Proper dynamic models of different generation devices (i.e., wind generator, PV arrays, storage batteries and fuel cells) involved will be developed. Special attention will be put on studying the electrical characteristics of proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells for applications such as electric motor starting, load switching and or rejection to explore their dynamic behavior and design controllers to enhance their response and efficiency. Dynamic model of different generation devices will be integrated to form a multi-sourced distributed generation model whose dynamic performance will also be explored. Based on this dynamic response, a transient classifier will be designed to manage power flows from different generation sources with the objective of increasing the overall system efficiency and reliability. Economic benefits of both single-source and multi-source systems will also be evaluated doc17494 none The proposed research explores new polymeric material design at two interfaces: (1) materials and biology, and (2) materials and catalysts. At the first interface, high value advanced polymeric materials is targeted by mimicking the structures and strategies used in natural materials. The remarkable combined strength and toughness of muscle protein, titin, appears to derive from their modular structures comprising a linear array of domains, in which each domain is held together by secondary forces. Synthetic polymers will be constructed using molecular nanostructures that simulate the modular, multi-domain design of titin. These materials will be tested a both single molecule and bulk material level. The proposed research at the material-catalysis interface is targeted at developing new polymeric materials from simple commercial monomers. Built upon previous successes, new directions are proposed to expand the scope of using catalysts to control polymers with tunable topologies via catalysis, and design of polymers with unconventional topologies via catalysis. In parallel to the synthetic effort, the physical properties and potential applications for the new polymers will be investigated through collaborations with chemists, materials scientists and engineers on campus and at universities nearby. %%% The PI s educational goal for the next 4-5years is to build a strong polymer materials program at the University of California at Irvine. The current rapid growth of this campus and the cross campus Materials Initiative provide an excellent opportunity to implement this plan. An effort was initiated to integrate the course offerings in polymer science across a few disciplines to foster interdisciplinary interactions and collaborations. The goal in the undergraduate education is to spark their interests in polymer during introducing the basic concepts and essential knowledge of polymer science. Attention will be paid to interactive teaching methods, the relevance of polymers to our society, and the undergraduate laboratory research. The goal in graduate polymer education is to provide students a solid foundation in polymer chemistry by vigorous treatments of the fundamental mechanism, thermodynamics, and kinetics of each type of polymerization while in the meantime cover major research areas and recent progresses in polymer science. These broad topics will be approached in an interdisciplinary manner and the course format will be developed to encourage greater student involvement. In addition to curriculum development, mentoring also figures prominently in laboratory, classroom, and seminar contexts. The proposed research will increase understanding of the molecular mechanisms for achieving excellent material properties based on structural organization at nanoscale and produce materials with potential biomedical applications. Insight into the relation between the molecular properties of these materials and their performance should allow rational materials designs. The proposed research on catalytic route to new polymer synthesis has the potential to make new polymeric materials with complex topologies from simple and readily available monomers doc17495 none PROJECT SUMMARY The Biology and Excellence for Science Teachers (BEST) program is an expansion of a NSF -PSFMETE funded program, Engaging Students in Ecological Research, a pilot program that was launched in Summer by Dr. Lidia Yoshida. The BEST program is a teacher development program designed to improve the biological science curriculum in urban under-represented schools. The goals are to improve science teachers knowledge-base and update them in content, techniques and issues in science, to train teachers in the use of computers to prepare lessons for their classes and to further facilitate communication between science teachers within Los Angeles and Orange County through the Internet and ongoing science educational program activities. Workshops will be offered during the academic year with lectures and inquiry-based laboratories topics such as genetics, molecular biology, ecology, evolution and techniques in investigation and experimentation to high school and intermediate school teachers. Teachers will develop interactive lessons with laptop computers in the laboratory and will the have the opportunity to borrow the computers and LCD projectors for use in their classrooms. These lessons will be made available on-line where a website will be maintained for participants to share program information, resources and laboratory activities doc17496 none Shim This award supports the participation of American scientists in a U.S.-Japan seminar on a cross-cultural study of Electronic Commerce (E-Commerce) and Mobile Commerce M-Commerce. to be held in Niigata and Tokyo, Japan from April 1-5, . The co-organizers are Professor Jung P. Shim of Mississippi State University and Professor Takuro Munizawa at Niigata University in Japan. Participants will also be attending from Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan. The Internet Web has become one of the most important mediums for the sharing of business information between firms and their customers (B2C). While E-commerce and M-commerce have received considerable attention, virtually all the studies dealing with E-Commerce and M-Commerce have given cursory attention to the cross-cultural study. In Japan, the recent increase of handy-phones (mobile phones) and Internet users are remarkable. Over seventy percentage of Japanese are using mobile phones and half of them use the internet web. In addition, new I-Commerce handy-phone systems enable the end users to connect to e-mail, view homepages, and do e-trading and e-commerce. Several surveys estimate that Internet Web users are growing exponentially. Forrester Research estimates the worldwide E-Commerce market will grow to $3.2 trillion by the year . Emerging technologies (e.g., voice over Internet Protocol, video streaming and synchronized multimedia integration language) are opening the way E-Commerce is transacted. These technologies could have significant implications for the E-Commerce and M-Commerce market. The seminar may also have important implications for individuals in both the academic and professional communities. The project advances international human resources through the participation of many junior faculty, postdocs, graduate students and an undergraduate student. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of the seminar proceedings on the World Wide Web doc17497 none The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) is organizing a meeting for Principal Investigators (PIs) and co-Principal Investigators of currently funded DUE projects in the mathematical sciences in Washington, DC in March, . The meeting brings together PIs of projects funded by the Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement Program (CCLI), the Advanced Technological Education Program (ATE), and selected PIs of past Course and Curriculum Development Program (CCD) projects in the mathematical sciences. Meeting themes center on the role of the mathematical sciences in undergraduate general education with emphases on the ATE program, teacher preparation, and electronic publication, notably through the MAA Mathematical Sciences Digital Library (MathDL). An important activity of the meeting is consideration of the dissemination of (digital) learning materials in new forms and through new vehicles doc17498 none In this project funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Dunning will use atoms in high Rydberg states as a tool with which to conduct a comprehensive study of the formation and properties of a wide variety of negative ion species. Electron transfer reactions in which the excited Rydberg electron is captured by a target molecule will be investigated to obtain information on the energetics of dissociative electron attachment. This will be accomplished through detailed measurements of the angular and velocity distributions of the product ions. Kinematic studies will be used to explore the mechanisms by which such species are created. The dependence of their lifetime on the rotational (and vibrational) states of the parent neutral will be investigated to gain new insights into the coupling of rotational and electronic motions. Collisions of dipole-bound ions with attaching and polar targets will be examined to explore their chemical properties. Atoms in which one electron is excited to a high-lying state will be used to conduct a comprehensive study of electron capture by molecules. Aside from their fundamental interest, the results of this research will have important practical application in areas such as breakdown in high-voltage electrical equipment, industrial plasma processing, and in screening the toxicological properties of new compounds. The work will provide practical training for both graduate and undergraduate students and equip them with a valuable array of experimental skills in preparation for advanced studies or entry into the scientific technological workforce doc17499 none Blewitt Aquifer tests typically involve collecting time-drawdown data in the vicinity of a pumping well for the purpose of producing plots for estimating the storage coefficient and transmissivity of the aquifer or aquifer system. Recent advances in GPS technology and INSAR (interferometric synthetic aperture radar) satellite imagery, allow for detailed and precise calculation of land surface displacements. Stationary GPS monitoring during an active pumping test in conjunction with INSAR interferograms for the same region will allow for time-compaction (and time-horizontal strain) data to be collected in conjunction with the hydrograph data providing a far more diagnostic test for estimating storage coefiricient of confined aquifers. Furthermore, in leaky aquifer systems in which the confining unit is the primary compressible unit, the time-compaction data can provide the necessary information to accurately calculate the speciric storage and vertical hydraulic conductivity of the confining unit, parameters that are typically difficult to evaluate. A new analytical solution has been developed to derive the storage coefficient from time-subsidence data and numerical simulation results applied to this semi-log (conrined) and semi-log (leaky) methodology indicates that extremely accurate estimates for storage of the aquifer and storage and vertical hydraulic conductivity of the confining unit can be made. GPS and INSAR surveys will also provide detailed information on horizontal deformation occurring at the land surface and can corroborate results from hypothetical modeling of three-dimensional deformation and flow, which indicate that more than 50 percent of pumped water is released from storage associated with horizontal strain in confined aquifers. These results may have tremendous implications with regard to measuring subsidence, the quantity of leakage that can actually be expected through confining units, and the interpretation of long-term aquifer tests. Furthermore, the strain configuration through the confining unit will be much different in the presence of three-dimensional strain, which will affect the potential compaction and leakage through the confining unit over time. The potential contribution of water from horizontal strain may require us to rethink the current definition of storage coefficient where such strains have been neglected doc17500 none EIA - Grosch, Herbert TITLE: Completion of Computing History Memoir The investigator has published two editions of an autobiography history intended to cover the early years of the computer revolution. The first edition, in hardcover, called COMPUTER [see B. in Biographical Sketch], ran through mid- and ended with his first departure from IBM. The second edition, on CD ROM, was produced under NSF auspices (Grant No. ) and also covered the subsequent years through mid- , when the investigator was drafted to re-launch the Center for Computer Sciences and Technology at the National Bureau of Standards now NIST. The material added to the second edition was primarily concerned with the international computer scene, and included a visit to Japan in and two long tours of European user installations and European manufacturers on behalf of the young Control Data Corporation, in . On the domestic side, the second edition ended with the investigator s direction of an Air Force-funded research project in computational linguistics for GE Santa Barbara. It is proposed to carry the memoir through six years at NBS, three as director of CCST and three as Senior Research Fellow after IBM requested his removal from the earlier post for halting all Federal procurement of the new System 3 (which was withdrawn some years later). The investigator emerged to become the first editorial director of the burgeoning newspaper COMPUTERWORLD, which was to be the foundation of the McGovern IDG empire doc17501 none Three lipid-associated supramolecular preparations of the membrane-active antibiotic Amphotericin B (AmB) are currently on the market: AmBisome, Amphocil, and Abelcet. They are fundamentally different physically: AmBisome is a true closed liposomal bilayer preparation, Amphocil is micellar dispersion with cholesteryl sulfate and Abelcet is interdigitated lipid dispersion. Despite these differences, all three preparations damage fungal membranes compared to mammalian cell and all are more active than the original micellar commercial preparation consisting of AmB: deoxycholate in a mole ratio of ~1:2 (Fungizone, FZ). Simple AmB or FZ solutions may be treated with moderate heat (70 o C for 20 minutes) to produce a new self-associated state of AmB, a imsuperaggregatel., termed heat-treated Fungizone (HFZ). The goal of this project is to tease apart which specificbiochemical and biophysical properties of these five Amphotericin B supramolecular preparations make them selectively reactive toward fungal versus mammalian cell membranes. Three factors which influence the toxicity and selectivity of AmB preparations will be investigated by spectroscopic and molecular biology methods: 1) direct membrane activity via ion channel formation, 2) differences in distribution and delivery to tissues due to differences in stability of AmB complexes in the presence of serum lipoproteins proteins, and 3) initiation of an inflammatory cytokine response doc17502 none Finn This award, provided by the Office of Polar Programs (OPP) of the National Science Foundation (NSF), provides support for a workshop designed to explore the future aerogeophysical needs of the Antarctic community. A new airborne geophysical facility needs to be developed for the Antarctic Program so that key scientific questions, ranging from crustal structure and tectonics to ice sheet structure and glacial dynamics, can be addressed in all regions of Antarctica. Interest from the scientific community to study remote areas of East and West Antarctica as well as look in detail at areas around exposed rocks require consideration of airborne platforms such as long-range aircraft (C-130 s, P-3) or helicopters in addition to the Twin Otter. New instrumentation, such as swath-mapping systems for high-resolution (1 m) airborne mapping of topography and imaging spectometers (AVIRIS), has recently been developed. The loss of the SOAR facility leaves the U.S. Antarctic program without a means to remotely map sub-ice geology as well as ice sheet characteristics, thus limiting the ability to address fundamental questions in Antarctic geology and glaciology. A workshop tying the NSF Antarctic program goals and science targets identified in previous workshops to the development of new airborne geophysics capabilities could result in a focused program to combine broad science goals with the appropriate airborne geophysical tools and platforms. This award will support a workshop that will help define the type of airborne geophysical facility (instruments and platforms) most useful for the Antarctic Earth Science and Glaciology communities to use to address important science issues in key target areas doc17503 none Except for a small number of human pathogens, microbial genome efforts have steered clear of the diverse world of protozoans, many of which are important agricultural parasites. Of particular interest are the Microsporidia, which by eukaryotic standards have remarkably small genomes. Since they infect most invertebrate taxa and all classes of vertebrates, their impact on agriculture and fisheries is significant. They either cause disease or can serve as bio-control agents. These same organisms have attracted the interests of biologists and molecular evolutionists. They offer excellent models for studying interactions between the genomes of a host and an obligate, intracellular parasite. But molecular phylogenetic analyses point towards a confused evolutionary history. To advance knowledge of these unusual microbes and to address the ever-increasing demand for researchers broadly trained in genome sciences, the genome of the microsporidian Nosema locustae will be sequenced to closure and a comprehensive course in genome science will be established to provide broad-based training in high throughput sequencing techniques and bioinformatics. By integrating this course with the N. locustae project, nearly 100 students will be trained in all aspects of genomics. Although this model for research and training could be applied to other microbial groups, Microsporidia were selected because of their impact upon agriculture, their enigmatic character in molecular evolution studies and what they may reveal about interactions between the genomes of hosts and obligate intracellular parasites. Sequence data (3X and higher coverage, monthly updates and annotation) will be available to the research community on the Marine Biological Laboratory s web server (www.mbl.edu). This is a Microbial Genome Sequencing Award funded through a collaborative program between the National Science Foundation and the Department of Agriculture Initiative for Future Agriculture and Food Systems doc17504 none Kesner lay abstract In recent years there has been an increasing interest in developing computational models of the hippocampus aimed at providing mechanisms for understanding the processing of mnemonic information. These processes include encoding, consolidation, and retrieval as well as pattern separation, short-term and intermediate memory, pattern association, and pattern completion. The hippocampus is a very complex brain region that can be subdivided into a number of different subregions, including dentate gyrus, CA3 and CA1. The computational models emphasize subregional specificity of function based primarily on anatomical and physiological recording data, but rarely take into account behavioral data. The purpose of this grant proposal is to determine whether there is subregional specificity of function within the hippocampus using neurotoxic lesion techniques to ensure specificity of lesion effects in conjunction with behavioral paradigms designed to measure encoding, consolidation, and retrieval as well as pattern separation, short-term and intermediate memory, pattern association, and pattern completion processes. The outcome of this research should provide for some critical tests of the assumptions made by computational models and should aid in the understanding of the multiple mnemonic functions of the hippocampus doc17505 none Current models for the catalytic mechanisms of protein enzymes are far more advanced than those for RNA enzymes (ribozymes). This project will contribute to understanding how the catalytic mechanisms of ribozymes compare with those of protein enzymes. The specific objectives of this project are to: (1) synthesize atranyl-nucleosides 1-3; (2) characterize and determine the aqueous stability of atranyl-nucleosides; (3) use atranyl-nucleosides as transition state analogues (TSAs) to study the hammerhead and lead-dependent (leadzyme) ribozymes via collaborations; and (4) train undergraduate students in synthetic organic techniques in preparation for graduate study and or careers in science. TSAs are useful for enzyme studies; however, suitable TSAs for phosphoryl transfer reactions are lacking. Compounds 1-3 have an atrane moiety incorporated into a ribonucleoside. The atrane contains a trigonal bipyramidal silicon, germanium, tin, or titanium atom; and thus, 1-3 mimic the oxyphosphorane transition state of the ribozyme-catalyzed reaction. Compound 2 is a protected phosphoramidite that contains uridine and deoxyadenosine connected through the atrane moiety. Several syntheses of 2 starting from 5 -O-DMT-2 -amino-2 -deoxyuridine will be evaluated. Prof. William G. Scott of UC-Santa Cruz will incorporate 2 into the hammerhead substrate by solid-phase synthesis to obtain a hammerhead ribozyme-TSA crystal structure. Prof. Arthur Pardi of the University of Colorado-Boulder will similarly determine the structure in solution using NMR spectroscopy. Analogous approaches will be taken for leadzyme structural studies following the synthesis of phosphoramidite 3. These experiments will elucidate the magnitude of conformational rearrangement required to reach the transition state in each of these small RNA catalysts. This research will also help identify the role of specific RNA functional groups and metal cations in catalysis. This knowledge is paramount for understanding the pre-biotic RNA world and how our current life forms evolved from it doc17506 none In the co-evolution between plants and microbial pathogens, most plants have developed sophisticated defense mechanisms to ward off the majority of (but not all) potential pathogens. When a plant fails to mount a defense response and the pathogen carries appropriate positive virulence factors, disease occurs. In the past decade, significant efforts have been invested in studying how plants defend against pathogens. The use of the Arabidopsis-Pseudomonas syringae pathosystem played a critical role in advancing the understanding of pathogen recognition and plant resistance responses. In contrast, very little is known about how a plant fails to defend itself and ultimately succumbs to infection by virulent pathogens. The goal of this research is to understand the molecular mechanism by which Pseudomonas syringae causes infection in Arabidopsis thaliana. This research is based on the recent finding that the majority of bacterial pathogens of humans, animals, and plants use a specialized protein secretion system (the type III secretion system) to actively inject virulence proteins into the host cell. Mutations affecting this pathogen secretion system often eliminate the ability of pathogens to infect the respective hosts, suggesting an important role of type III virulence proteins in modulating host susceptibility. However, the molecular mechanisms by which these type III virulence proteins affect host signaling and metabolic processes, which ultimately lead to the establishment of the susceptible interaction, is not understood in any system. In this research, two specific objectives are proposed. The first objective is to link the effects of Pst DC infection to expression of specific Arabidopsis response genes. Successful accomplishment of this objective will remove a major roadblock to progress in the study of susceptible host-bacteria interactions, namely the lack of host cellular and molecular markers. The second objective of this proposal is aimed at achieving a deep understanding of how a specific type III virulence protein, VirPtoB, modulates host susceptibility. Emphasis will be on how VirPtoB, when transgenically expressed inside Arabidopsis leaf cells, alters Arabidopsis gene expression and response to pathogen infection. This research involves the use of genomic, transgenic, and pathogenic methods. Successful completion of this study will contribute to our understanding of those plant cellular mechanisms that must be altered for a plant to become susceptible to pathogens. A postdoctoral student and an undergraduate student will be trained during the course of this research project doc17507 none This conference award to the University of Arizona is made by the Advanced Materials Program in the Chemistry Division, the Electronic Materials Program in the Division of Materials Research, and the Electronic and Communications System in the Engineering Directorate in support of the International Conference on Organic Nonlinear Optics VI (ICONO VI). The symposium in non-linear optics of organic and polymeric materials will provide a forum for discussion of recent developments and fundamental studies, and their applications in photonic technologies, devices and architectures. Previous ICONO meetings in different countries were widely attended, and brought together internationally distinguished researchers for discussion and interactions. These conferences have been very well received by participants, both national and international scientists, and are always oversubscribed. The planned conference is expected to provide a forum for discussion of ongoing and emerging areas of research and education among scientists with common interests in organic and polymeric materials with non-linear optical properties, and to promote dialog between industry, government and academic scientists from around the globe. Funds from NSF will be used to cover registration fees and some local expenses for attendees from historically black and minority institutions. Attempts also will be made by the organizers of the conference to encourage participation from other under-represented groups. The International Conference on organic Nonlinear Optics VI will provide a forum conducive to the development of ideas, help bridge gaps among the materials chemistry constituencies in academia, industry and government laboratories from around the globe, lead to new collaborations and define the frontiers of photonic materials based on polymers doc17508 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Vertical Integration of Research & Education at Georgia Tech Lacey This VIGRE project will build on the strengths of the School of Mathematics at The Georgia Institute of Technology, and on the many innovations introduced by the curriculum review which accompanied the Institute s conversion to the semester system two years ago. The project creates innovative educational programs that link teaching and research and promote interactions among undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty members. At the undergraduate level, the project will increase the number of mathematics majors, improve retention, and provide students with a deeper and more relevant educational experience. This will be accomplished by the introduction of new courses and seminars for beginning students, more focused advising, and much expanded efforts to foster undergraduate research. The postdoctoral fellows supported by the VIGRE project will receive increased guidance as they continue to develop their teaching and research skills. They will interact more extensively with undergraduate and graduate students, both through one-on-one mentoring and through seminars that they themselves will organize. The VIGRE program will have a major impact on Georgia Tech s doctoral program in mathematics. Graduate trainees will be provided with full non-teaching support during their first year and during summers and portions of their later years. This will enable them to complete their degrees in a more timely fashion, and will also provide them with the added freedom needed to broaden their education by taking advantage of the many other strong programs at Georgia Tech. New seminars will smooth the transition from coursework to dissertation research. Increased contact with undergraduate mathematics majors and the school s postdoctoral fellows will further diversify their training. The VIGRE program will draw together the talents and energy of faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, undergraduates, and graduate students to create an integrated community of scholars dedicated to discovery and learning doc17509 none This award will integrate marine and terrestrial data from the Pacific Northwest with the National Center For Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Regional Climate Model 2 (RegCM2) to investigate regional-scale climate variability over the last 150,000 years. The investigators will use the RegCM2 model because it offers an advantage in spatial resolution (i.e., tens of kilometers compared to hundreds of kilometers in global circulation models) that will provide rigorous data-model comparisons and the resolution of potentially important climate feedbacks in the Pacific Northwest region; a region where climate is strongly influenced by topographic complexity, coastlines, and proximity to the Pacific Ocean. The investigators will test the following three scientific hypotheses: Hypothesis 1. On millennial time scales, local and regional changes in sea-surface temperatures in the Northeast Pacific, and perhaps changes in continental heating, are large enough to have influenced atmospheric pressure gradients that in turn substantially affected the intensity of coastal upwelling. Hypothesis 2. The marine pollen record faithfully reflects climate-induced changes in the distribution of terrestrial vegetation while changes in oceanic transport play a secondary role in the observed marine pollen records of the Northeast Pacific. Hypothesis 3. Changes in sediment provenance and terrigenous sediment accumulation in the Northeast Pacific reflect regional climate change and its effect on continental runoff and surface-ocean circulation. Furthermore, this award will address several hypotheses of importance to the field of paleoclimatology in an integrative and holistic manner using marine and terrestrial data from the Pacific Northwest as inputs to climate models. In addition to integrative scientific goals, the award will also provide unique training in integrative climate research for graduate and undergraduate students at Oregon State University doc17510 none In the last thirty years medical practice has undergone a profound technological change. Imaging technologies like MRI that emerged in this period are shifting medicine s vision to a domain in which the body seems to have lost its materiality and become a visual medium (Balsamo ). Apart from offering vast diagnostic possibilities, medical imaging technologies like MRI are also radically reconfiguring the human body and contributing to new enunciations of individual and social selves. This dissertation research grant attempts to contextualize this new visuality by analyzing the socio-economic and technical contexts of the development of MRI. The study has two purposes. First, through a comparative cross-cultural study to highlight the social cultural factors contributing to the making of this new digitalized visibility, the project will attempt to uncover the socio-technical network within which visualization by technologies like MRI is located and continues to develop. Further, the project will attempt to show in what ways this computer-based visualization is re-mapping spaces and bodies in different societies in the present era of globalization. Second, MRI research since its birth in the s has been located at the interface of different disciplines, institutions, and nations. The transnational cooperation has been further accelerated with the recent development of information communication technologies. Yet these cooperations are not unhindered flows of information and technology. They are embedded in the social, political, and economic interests of nations, education research institutions, multinational companies, and individuals. This study seeks to use MRI as a case study to explore the nature of interaction and exchange of a non-western country with the west in the development of sophisticated technologies. Funding for this project supports research at two laboratories, one in the US and the other in India. The research at these laboratories will entail combining the thick description of the laboratory work through participant observation, and interviews of scientists with textual analysis of scientific papers, policy documents, lay articles, biographical, and autobiographical notes doc17511 none The THEMATIC (Theoretical Microscopic Titration Curves) method, a new tool for functional genomics and bioinformatics, will be further developed and applied. With the sequencing of the human genome and the genomes of other species, a wealth of new information is becoming available about protein sequences and structures. This information holds tremendous potential and promise for many benefits to humankind. However, first this genomic information must be interpreted and understood. From the structures of these newly discovered proteins their function must be determined. The THEMATIC method has been used successfully to locate the active sites of a number of different kinds of proteins. The project will develop statistical analyses to improve the method, enhance its accuracy, expand its capabilities, and render it amenable to automation for high-volume screening of protein structures. This method will also be further developed using a dynamical averaging technique to attempt to expand the range of applicability of the method, analyze the sensitivity to structural changes and to reduce the number of false positive results. The THEMATIC method will be developed into a powerful, versatile tool for determining the function of a protein from its structure and for characterizing the residues in protein active sites. Furthermore, the results of the THEMATIC method can be used to characterize the residues of the active site of an enzyme and thus provide insight into how the enzyme works. The project will develop metrics to describe residues that are different from others of their type because they are perturbed by the protein environment. These metrics will be used to create a new bioinformatics database that characterizes residues and provides information about their functional role in the protein. This is an important step in the understanding, interpretation and application of the newly sequenced genome. This project will train doctoral students in research in the field of bioinformatics and functional genomes. The THEMATIC method will also be incorporated into an educational module for courses in molecular modeling and bioinformatics for graduate students and advanced undergraduates. Aspects of the project will also be incorporated into the PI s outreach activities promoting diversity in the sciences doc17512 none This research project, to be conducted by a doctoral student in Anthropology at the University of Georgia, contributes to an understanding of some of the processes of knowledge acquisition and transfer in formal and informal social contexts. Plant knowledge diversity and consensus are hypothesized to be correlated with variation in the structure of communication networks and community interaction patterns. Qualitative and quantitative techniques are used to test these hypotheses and document variation in ethnobotanical knowledge and change in several Raramuri (Tarahumara) communities in Chihuahua, Mexico. The project identifies environmental factors contributing to differential botanical expertise among children and adults at three levels of interaction: 1) the social interaction patterns between households; 2) a child s immediate environment interactions, both biophysical and sociocultural; and 3) a child s personal characteristics and social roles. Results will contribute to the development of an interactionist model of indigenous education, and to understanding the relationships between individual learning and community processes of change. It will also contribute to ongoing Raramuri biocultural conservation efforts and to the design of effective environmental education projects doc17513 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Vertical Integration in the Mathematical Sciences at The Ohio State University March The VIGRE program of the Department of Mathematics at the Ohio State University is designed to benefit the mathematical sciences by bringing together working groups consisting of undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty. The program will implement strategies for introducing both graduate students and undergraduate students to the research environment at a much earlier stage than usual and acquainting them with a greater number of faculty. It will increase the interactions between graduate and undergraduate students, postdoctoral fellows, junior faculty, and senior faculty. First-year graduate students will take a course, Invitation to Research, consisting of a number of short lecture series, taught by many different faculty, providing a glimpse into the various areas of mathematics in an informal setting. Beginning in their second year, students will be involved in Working Group Rotations that acquaint them with different areas of mathematics, different research styles, and different faculty throughout the year. The graduate students professional development is rounded out with courses that train them in effective communication of mathematics. These initiatives will enhance the effectiveness of the graduate program, lessen the time students require to obtain a Ph.D., and improve their employment opportunities in academia and in industry. Postdoctoral fellows will participate in the full spectrum of VIGRE activities. Undergraduate students will be involved in working group activities, in the Ross Summer Mathematics Program for high school students and teachers, and in a National Undergraduate Mathematics Research Conference that will be sponsored by Ohio State University doc17514 none Franses, Elias I Purdue University Direct Probing and Modeling of Adsorbed Layers of Surfactant Lipid Protein Mixtures at Air Water Interfaces The main objectives are to understand quantitatively and qualitatively how surfactants, lipids, and proteins adsorb at air water interfaces. By adsorbing, alone or in competition, surface active molecules modify the equilibrium and dynamic surface tension, the surface charges, the foaming behavior, and the protein denaturation behavior. These phenomena have important applications in bioprocessing of biological and biochemical dispersions, spray drying of pharmaceutical solutions, spreading of agricultural chemical in leaves; also in foaming stability, and foam-based separations of dilute solutions of surfactants and proteins, mineral ore flotation, and detergency. A major focus is the area of replacement therapy of lung surfactant, which is a mixture of lipids and proteins responsible for stabilizing the lung alveoli and controlling breathing. The equilibrium and dynamic adsorption is probed not only with indirect surface tension methods but with direct optical (ellipsometry, EL) and infrared reflection absorption spectroscopy (IRRAS). IRRAS is used primarily to determine the extent, rates, and mechanisms of individual components. IRRAS, in combination with EL and surface tensiometry, has proven to be a valuable tool for quantitative probing of complex industrial or biological mixtures. The results are used to develop formulations which are technically effective, cost-effective, and biologically or environmentally friendly; and to develop new, potentially effective lung surfactant formulations. The systems examined are bovine serum albumin, fibrinogen, various lipids and soaps, and model ionic surfactants. The data are used to guide quantitative modeling of diffusion adsorption processes of surfactants, lipids, and proteins from the bulk solution or dispersion to the interface. The models are used to help design new improved formulations, and to predict how formulations may function in different solutions and different geometries doc17515 none Lyons A state-of-the-art X-ray Fluorescence Spectrometer will provide new elemental chemical analysis capabilities for a variety of Earth and environmental sciences research projects at the Ohio State University. The instrument will also be used by both undergraduate and graduate students as part of courses and their research projects with faculty. Some selected research projects that will use the new instrument are described below. Profs. W. Berry Lyons and Anne Carey and their students will investigate major sources of geochemical input into the world s oceans from suspended materials in rivers that may contribute a large portion of the sediment that enters the oceans. In order to understand ocean chemistry, the main sources of chemical species from natural and anthropogenic origins must be determined. Prof. David Elliot s research group will collect and analyze a igneous rocks in order to understand better the tectonic processes and transport of magma associated with initial Gondwana break-up. This research will contribute to understanding changes in earth history, specifically the break up and movement of continents. Prof. Samuel Traina s group will investigate the nature of adsorption of inorganic chemical contaminants onto soils and sediments. Understanding these processes is important because adsorption of pollutants, including radioactive waste, to soils and sediments could control their transport and effect on living organisms. Prof. Frank Schwartz, an Ohio Eminent Scholar, and his students, will study how inhomogeneities in surface soils affect the propagation of reaction fronts. This information will be used to understand better potential processes for remediation of polluted sites. Prof. Prabir Dutta s group will make measurements to support their development of senor arrays for toxic gases in high temperature environments, such as automobile engines. Prof. Lonnie Thompson and his research group, will analyze dust from ice cores that they have collected from throughout the world. In order to assess current or future global climate change, past history and the factors that caused climate change must be understood. The ice cores from polar ice sheets and high altitude tropical ice caps, collected by Thompson and co-workers, contain high-resolution records of climatic and environmental variation that can extend over thousands of years. The information gained from this research will be useful in assessing historical changes in global climate doc17516 none Ms. Betty Jo Stokes, under the direction of Dr. Tom D. Dillehay, will conduct an archaeological investigation to gather data for completion of her doctoral dissertation at the University of Kentucky. She will complete an archaeological survey in the White and Rio Nuevo River valleys on the island of Jamaica to determine the historical relationship between the prehistoric Native American groups (Taino) of the island compared to those found on other islands in the Greater Antilles. Differences in the social organization of the Taino people at the end of the 15th century A.D. on these islands has been oversimplified identifying some islands, such as Jamaica, as less culturally developed than others prior to European contact. Currently, Taino groups are labeled as either part of the cultural core of the Taino world as on Puerto Rico island where many of the characteristics of that culture are well understood and easily recognized or as a part of the cultural periphery where groups are often considered less developed. Jamaica is currently considered part of the Taino periphery, but that designation has been based on very little concrete evidence, and in fact, the historical accounts written by the first Spanish explorers into this region refutes this. Using the Jamaican Taino as a test case, this project seeks to provide a systematic study in one area of the Taino world where the identification of what constitutes a core region and what constitutes a periphery is unclear in order to elucidate the key factors involved in identifying core versus periphery culture areas. This study compliments other archaeological studies that have expanded the uses of core-periphery analysis beyond modern global interactions as used for social geographical analysis to draw out relationships in the prehistoric world. By collecting data through an archaeological survey, various aspects of Jamaican Taino political, religious, and economic life can be identified and combined with existing historical information to directly address the nature of the social organization of Jamaican Taino. This project will clarify the culture history and cultural identity of the indigenous peoples once inhabiting this area. Additionally, it will give an indication how tribal chiefdom societies are maintained and developed, highlight how island landscapes can be used as productive cultural features, and provide a case example for comparison to other tribal chiefdoms around the world. This research is also important because it will help shed new light on the historical social context in which Europeans, and consequently African peoples, encountered the New World. The culture of the Taino was abruptly abbreviated by the introduction of European people into the Caribbean. However, remnants of this culture can still be found in modern Jamaican traditions and identity. This project seeks to recognize and embrace these components by providing an understanding of how Jamaican Taino fits into the broader social context of the pre-contact Caribbean and, thereby, a more accurate and complete picture of Jamaican history. It will also contribute to training a promising young scientist doc17517 none This research will investigate protein dynamics in detail in order to understand how these macromolecules, especially enzymes, precisely work. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy has proven over the years to be a viable method to determine protein dynamics. But, it has mostly been limited to the determination of the motions of the NH vector in proteins. In this project, the dynamical processes of many different vectors in proteins using residual dipolar couplings experiments, conformational exchange broadening experiments and cross-correlated relaxation measurements will be investigated. To interpret these data, theoretical computations of the chemical shift tensors will also be carried out. All these data will be combined to formulate comprehensive dynamical models of anisotropic local motion that are important for the complete description of the protein s molecular and energetic properties. Proteins are not nearly as static as is often assumed. The molecules have intrinsically mobile areas which are necessary to perform diverse functions in a living cell. Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy is a technique that can retrieve the dynamical properties of virtually each atom, individually, in a biological macromolecule, such as protein. The detailed insights will likely help in the fundamental understanding of the molecules of life doc17518 none SES Proposal Dreamers with Shovels: Science and Technology in the New Deal Political Imagination Jessica Wang, University of California, Los Angeles The project investigates, through a series of biographically-based historical case studies, the role of science and technology in political thought and action during the New Deal period in the United States. Within science and technology studies, many observers of technocratic political thought have emphasized its hegemonic, instrumentalist, and undemocratic character. In recent years, however, scholars have recognized that while this approach has contributed much toward understanding the nature of technological society, it needs to be revised and augmented. A study of the New Deal provides an important opportunity to reconsider prevailing assumptions and scrutinize the complex nature of technocratic politics as a set of beliefs and practices. The study centers on three main subjects -- planning, electrification, and state-building -- and discusses how science and technology affected policymaking in each of these areas during the New Deal years. The section on planning illuminates how Rexford Guy Tugwell, Frederic A. Delano, Wesley C. Mitchell, and Charles E. Merriam sought to translate technocratic ideology into action. With electrification, the study turns to technology itself and investigates the conflicts within the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural Electrification Administration over the proper relationship between technology and human values, and the appropriate political structures for technological development. The discussion of state-building examines how Jerome N. Frank and William M. Leiserson used ideas about science to legitimize the New Deal state and justify its expansion of state power via the new administrative agencies of the s. The final part of the project probes the postwar experiences of Henry A. Wallace and David E. Lilienthal, examines the transformation of technocratic politics wrought by the cold war, and explores how cold war instrumentalism replaced the technocratic liberalism of the New Deal. By examining how the New Dealers understood science and technology as a resource for politics, the project contributes to a renewed debate within STS over the nature of technocratic ideology and its political ramifications. The New Deal reveals the full complexity behind technocratic politics. Some of the New Dealers adopted subjectivist beliefs about the nature of knowledge, some brought a nostalgic, agrarian dimension to their version of technological progress, and most took seriously the problematic relationship between experts and democratic society and struggled over the question of whether technocratic politics could be made consistent with democratic values. The diverse range of thought and experience among the New Dealers suggests that an image of technocratic politics as naively positivist, dedicated to an unwavering faith in technological progress, and overly willing to subordinate democratic values to a cult of expertise requires refinement and reevaluation. The project will reinforce STS s current efforts to readdress the relationship between expertise and democracy and explore the full meaning of science and technology as forms of political thought and practice doc17519 none Assimilate distribution (partitioning) in plants is hypothesized to be regulated by transport processes located in importing organs (sinks) such as developing seeds. The transport of amino nitrogen, in particular, is a major factor influencing plant productivity, crop yield and reproductive success. However, key nitrogen transport processes remain to be identified and characterized. This project utilizes a multidisciplinary approach to characterize amino acid transport processes in sink tissues and specifically to determine the function of amino acid transporters expressed in reproductive structures. The overall goal is to understand, at a cellular and molecular level, the role of amino acid transporters in controlling nitrogen transport to and within seeds. Using Arabidopsis fruits (siliques) and seeds as a sink model, we intend (1) to identify the cellular and subcellular localization of members of the amino acid transporter family that are expressed during silique seed development, (2) to understand mechanisms controlling amino acid transport in sinks by characterizing the physiological and molecular regulation of amino acid transporters, and (3) to assess the functional significance of amino acid transporters in controlling import of organic nitrogen into developing seeds using molecular genetic manipulation of transporter expression and activity. The information obtained from the proposed work will form the basis for understanding the function of various amino acid transporters in nitrogen transfer and partitioning to and among seed tissues. In addition, it will provide a platform for more detailed future studies to evaluate transporter contribution to nutrient accumulation by seeds in other plant species. The program will also offer a framework for the development of biotechnological innovations to increase crop yield and for modifying nutritional qualities of seeds with respect to their amino acid complement doc17520 none The UCDavis VIGRE project offers a range of activities designed to integrate the excitement of research mathematics into every facet of its undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral programs. To accomplish this, the investigators and their colleagues are running up to four Research Focus Groups as a means to coordinate the activities in four research areas. Each Research Focus Group includes regular faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduates. The areas of research of the Groups vary from year to year, depending on the interests and expertise of the faculty and graduate students. Initial proposals include: 1) Geometry and Topology, including Computational Aspects; 2) Dynamics of Classical and Quantum Many-Body Systems; 3) Mathematical Biology, including Protein Structure and Function, Biofluid Mechanics, and Spatial Models in Ecology; 4) Discrete Mathematics, including Algebraic and Geometric Combinatorics and Stochastic Discrete Optimization. The Research Focus Group activities include a research seminar, a reading seminar, research projects, and outreach programs. An internship program has also been set up as part of the project. Among the goals of the Research Focus Groups are to introduce undergraduates to mathematical research, to provide a mechanism for graduate students to interact closely with faculty and postdoctoral fellows early in their graduate careers, and to give postdoctoral fellows an opportunity to learn leadership skills necessary to a successful mathematical career. The Research Focus Groups offer participants direct involvement in active areas of research of great current interest. This allows beginning students to focus on a promising career path in mathematics early on, and creates an environment where they can be more effectively prepared for such careers. The VIGRE project and the Research Focus Groups also serve as a focus of new initiatives in graduate recruitment. Feedback from Research Focus Groups and internship participants is used to revise the mathematics undergraduate and graduate programs at UC Davis doc17521 none Boulanger This award supports the participation of American scientists in a U.S.-Japan seminar on seismic disaster mitigation in urban areas by geotechnical engineering to be held in Anchorage, Alaska from May 21-22, . The co-organizers are Professor Ross Boulanger of the University of California, Davis and Professor Ikuo Towhata at the University of Tokyo in Japan. Earthquakes can devastate major urban areas in a number of ways, including through the hazards posed to the population, the disruption of lifeline systems and services, and the economic impacts on the region, state, or nation. Advances in our understanding of seismic hazards and their mitigation continue to be learned from recent large earthquakes. Recently the Chi-Chi (Taiwan), Kocaeli (Turkey), and Bhuj earthquakes caused tremendous damage to the civil infrastructure in and around urban areas in those countries. Reconnaissance teams sent independently from the U.S. and Japan investigated these disasters. Geotechnical aspects of these disasters will be discussed, including the effects of liquefaction, ground deformations, foundation failures, landslides, and surface ruptures on civil infrastructure (e.g., lifelines, ports and harbors, buildings, transportation systems). The objective of the seminar is to facilitate advancement of our understanding and ability to mitigate geotechnical aspects of seismic disasters. Discussions on these subjects will include: 1) development of new engineering techniques for mitigation of these hazards; 2) identification of those problems that should be solved with the highest priority; and 3) sharing the most recent results of research to advance our understanding of, and ability to predict, these types of hazards and effectively plan mitigation efforts. A number of researchers in both countries will continue to more thoroughly investigate important sites for lessons that can advance our understanding of these hazards. The project advances international human resources through the participation of postdocs and a graduate student. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of the seminar proceedings on their web site at the Center for Geotechnical Modeling (http: cgm.engr.ucdavis.edu doc17522 none The investigators will generate magnetic plasmoids that can excite non-linear processes relevant to solar and inter planetary plasmas. The main effort is to develop the laboratory diagnostics capable of measuring the non-linear processes and to develop theoretical and computer models of the physical processes and their relevancy to solar and interplanetary plasmas. The Spheromak-like compact toroid (SCT) is a magnetized blob of ionized material (plasmoid) with self-generated equilibrium magnetic field structures that can confine the plasma over its lifetime of several tens of microseconds. This type of plasmoid is of great interest in laboratory magnetic fusion experiments and its development has been supported through DOE projects. One of the unique properties of the SCT is that it can withstand a tremendous accelerating force, so high speed (over 100 km sec) can be reached in relatively short distance. Therefore, SCT accelerators are fairly compact and easily usable in laboratory experiments. In the past, one of the drawbacks of the SCT accelerator is the limit on its repetition rate by lack of high power repeatable switches. The low rate limits the use of this apparatus in physics experiment where statically meaningful database is required in a reasonable time frame. The investigators have now developed and operated a repeatable SCT accelerator using passive switching. At present, the pulse rate has increased from one per minute to one every 5 seconds. Improvement in the gas valve system will increase the rate to over 100 Hz. Moreover, the reliability of the accelerator has achieved over shots at the .2 Hz rate. Laboratory plasmas have the distinct advantage that its physical parameters can be carefully controlled and dynamic processes can be precisely diagnosed. Neither of these is possible with astrophysical plasmas doc17523 none Ecologists have long asked how hundreds of species of trees can coexist in tropical rain forests without a few superior species outcompeting all the rest and driving them extinct. Two recent theories to explain this situation are recruitment limitation - lack of seed production or germination prevents dominant species from outcompeting others, and spatial variation - seeds only travel limited distances, so each species only competes with a limited number of neighbors. Dr. Boucher, his Nicaraguan colleague Javier Ruiz Perez and their students will test these theories in forests in southeastern Nicaragua. To do this, they will tag, map, trap seeds, and measure soil and light variables for two important forest trees: Vochysia ferruginea and Dipteryx oleifera. The two theories they will test are important for knowing how to preserve tropical biodiversity and for predicting whether global warming will lead to forests being taken over by a few weedy species. The two tree species under study are both economically valuable, so their work will also be useful for developing sustainable forestry systems for rain forests. Undergraduates from a US and a Nicaraguan small college will work together to gather and analyze the data, strengthening international cooperation and developing capacities for conservation and sustainable use of tropical rain forests doc17524 none Support for Carbon Cycle Interagency Working Group I am writing on behalf of the Carbon Cycle Interagency Working Group to request funding for scientific coordination activities for the carbon cycle interagency initiative in FY . These activities will include two meetings (calendar year ) of the Carbon Cycle Scientific Working Group, chaired by Chris Field, one workshop to develop a comprehensive approach to quantifying and understanding the North American component of the Northern Hemisphere terrestrial sink, and support for a half time person to serve a project office function at the USGCRP office. The total budget request for the FY activities is $196,000. We are requesting $34,000 from NSF for their share of this integrated activity doc17525 none This dissertation project is a historical sociological analysis of the emergence of genetic genomic practices in epidemiology and toxicology, the environmental health sciences. Drawing on historical and qualitative research methodologies, this project addresses three broad and interrelated areas of inquiry. First, it analyzes the scientific,clinical, social, political, and economic concerns that have shaped the introduction, application, and development of genetic genomic technologies in the environmental health sciences. This analysis focuses especially on the emergence of molecular epidemiology and toxicogenomics, examining the processes through which molecular biomarkers and DNA microarrays have been constructed as the right tools for the job (Clarke and Fujimura ) of environmental health research. Second, this research examines the consequences of molecular epidemiology and toxicogenomics for the practice and organization of environmental health risk assessment. It investigates the co-construction of technologies and practice, examining both the effects of molecular biomarkers and DNA microarrays on environmental health risk assessment and the ways in which the demands of regulatory science (Jasanoff ) have shaped the development and meanings of these technologies. Finally, this project explores the social, cultural, and political implications of the use(s) of genetic genomic technologies in the environmental health sciences. It follows such technologies, and the knowledge they produce, outside of the laboratories and clinics where they have been developed, in order to describe how they are reinterpreted, reconfigured, renegotiated, reified, and or resisted by actors in multiple social locations and with what varied consequences. NSF funds will support the collection of historical and ethnographic data on genetic genomic technologies and research methods in the environmental health sciences and in environmental health risk assessment. One of the important research sites is National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle, NC. Funds will in part support interview transcriptions doc17526 none This three-year continuation of assessing the ATE Program will address four major questions: 1) To what degree is the program achieving its goals? 2) Is it making an impact, reaching the individuals and groups intended? 3) How effective is it when it reaches it constituents? 4) Are there ways the program can be significantly improved? The project will be comprised of three components. The first is the continuing collection and reporting of monitoring information for the ATE program through a database this project developed. Second is the design and implementation of four studies examining critical issues for ATE: the value added by ATE as determined by business and industry, the quality of materials development and their impact, the quality of professional development, and the nature and extent of sustainability of ATE project. The third component is dissemination of the evaluation project s findings through traditional and innovative approaches doc17527 none This proposal seeks funding for a workshop to bring together some 20 leading scholars and industry leaders to discuss needed research and theory development ininnovation and organization change. Organized by the editors of Organization Science, a leading journal of organization studies, workshop participants will collaborate to write white papers to set a research agenda for organization studies and management for the coming years. Currently managers face enormously changed circumstances from those of most of the last century, during which much organization theory was generated. The accumulated changes in the nature of work, organixations, and the external environment, including science and technology, cry out urgently for new theory based on sound empirical work. The workshop will be convened at NSF in Arlington in June , with knowledge dissemination via the web, a sepcial issue of the journal Organization Science, and a research monograph to be published (tentatively) by Stanford University Press doc17528 none This proposal requests support for a young investigator and her students who are working on a series of projects related to the experimental effort to detect gravitational waves with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). The proposed activities include; experimental studies of vibration isolation systems needed to enable LIGO to reach its ultimate sensitivity goal for terrestrial based detectors; development of new optical sensors needed in feedback systems to control the large LIGO optics and thereby lock the interferometer arms in the presence of background motion; development of new diagnostic techniques to measure and evaluate earth-motion that produces gravitational gradients that may limit the sensitivity of advanced detectors; development of analysis techniques to extract gravitational wave signals from the LIGO data stream in the presence of background noise. The PI is a leader in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration group that is charged with analyzing LIGO data for evidence of burst sources of gravitational waves and setting upper limits on amplitude and rates of such signals doc17529 none This proposal requests support for a single investigator to continue work on outstanding problems in numerical general relativity. The proposed projects are (1) formulation of boundary conditions for a numerical evolution of the Einstein equations, (2) computation of gravitational waveforms in the final stages of the coalescence of two black holes, and (3) gravitational radiation from the capture of a neutron star by a black hole. These are all of great interest to the community of scientists studying gravitational waves and the foundations of general relativity. Perturbation techniques have been successfully employed to deduce properties of some exotic cosmological events such as neutron star-neutron star coalescence (NS-NS inspiral) in the very early or very late stages, but are not sufficient in the intermediate stage of the merger. Large-scale computer simulations are necessary to bridge the gap between these extremes. The research proposed here will seek to develop the tools needed for such simulations. Numerical techniques developed by the P.I. and his colleagues have enabled important advances in the past and will be used to advantage in the proposed research program doc17530 none Jones, Edward G. This Human Brain Project will extend our previous efforts in developing an information system that can store, manipulate and retrieve large datasets compiled by the collaborating investigators. The project is built around and designed to manage data obtained from high resolution human and monkey brain atlases, molecular and cellular mapping studies, morphometry and physiology of retinal and thalamic cells, and studies of brain connections. There is an Administrative Core responsible for oversight, evaluation and dissemination and 4 Research Projects that will collect data and interact in visualization and databasing. Project 1 will design and integrate informational methods that integrate graphical and non-graphical datasets derived from Projects 2-4 and, using the lateral geniculate nucleus as a model, will develop software tools for building and maintaining neuroscience specific databases, for linking the diverse information sets derived from Projects 2--4 to one another, and for network retrieval and interchange of information from these and other neuroscience datasets. Project 2 will use computer assisted microscopy to build high resolution digital atlases of human and monkey brains, extending cytoarchitecture to quantify neuronal populations in the major nuclei of the thalamus (including in normal, schizophrenic and manic depressive human brains), and their profile of receptors and chemically defined cells and afferent fiber systems. This project incorporates a strong Visualization Component made up of computer scientists who have expertise in storage, manipulation and display of large datasets. It will populate a central NeuroImage Repository and, working in close conjunction with the other projects, will develop software tools for manipulating, graphically displaying and browsing the high resolution histological and neurochemical brain atlases, starting with the lateral geniculate database, and for distributing simplified images using Internet methodologies. Project 3 will expand a database of retinal cells characterized by morphology, chemistry, physiology and connectivity that provides the model for, and input to the lateral geniculate database. Project 4 will develop a database of monkey visual thalamo- and cortico-cortical connections for integration with the lateral geniculate database, using a newly developed pulvinar database as a model doc17531 none attributes of structural regions (e.g., volume); 3) to design a content-based retrieval system that will allow users to retrieve images with features similar to those in a submitted example; 4) to develop techniques that enable users to dynamically aggregate warehouse information into a probabilistic brain atlas for specified populations of interest; and 5) to develop a prototype system that will ground architecture and query language development in a real world setting so that tradeoffs in design choices may be accurately evaluated doc17532 none Green Quantitative rheological measurements on Earth materials have been conducted only under relatively low-pressure conditions corresponding to the depth of ~60 km or less. The main thrust of this project is to extend this limit, through technical developments, at least to ~800 km covering not only the upper mantle but also the transition zone and the lower mantle. We propose to establish a new inter-institutional program coordinated with COMPRES (Consortium for Materials Property Research in the Earth Sciences) by utilizing the infrastructure for operation of national facilities and educational program, and we will expand the capabilities of these facilities for the broader scientific community. Through inter-institutional collaboration, we will develop two new types of apparatus (a modified cubic apparatus (D-DIA) and a rotational Drickamer apparatus (RDA)) in addition to further improvements to the well-established deformation techniques using a multianvil apparatus (MA). Both D-DIA and RDA (as well as MA) can readily be fitted to synchrotron radiation facilities to allow quantitative measurements of stress and strain at high-pressure and temperature conditions. D-DIA is suited for quantitative rheology measurements including shear localization and resultant instabilities while RDA has a unique capability of large strain deformation experiments at high-pressures, an important feature for study of lattice preferred orientation. These apparatus will be used to obtain the first quantitative data set on rheological properties and deformation-induced microstructures of Earth and planetary materials under high-pressure, high-temperature conditions (to ~15-25 GPa, ~ K). The results of such measurements will contribute to better understand (i) the radial and lateral variation of rheological properties for whole mantle, (ii) the interaction of rheological behavior with chemical reactions including phase transformations, and (iii) the nature of deformation-induced microstructures such as lattice preferred orientation (which causes seismic anisotropy). The unique facility thus developed will be accessible to a large mineral and rock physics community and will significantly enhance the contribution of mineral and rock physics research to a wide range of solid Earth sciences doc17533 none MCAA: MOLECULAR MARKERS TO ASSESS THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF SEXUAL AND NATURAL SELECTION IN THE EVOLUTION OF PATERNAL CARE COLETTE M. ST. MARY Lay Life-history traits are potentially under both natural and sexual selection. In systems with male parental care (exemplified by fishes and birds), benefits to males and females can accrue via both natural and sexual selection. That is, care can increase offspring survivorship or quality (i.e., via natural selection), and also increase mate attraction resulting from female preferences for paternal investment (i.e., via sexual selection). Indeed, it is conceivable that care may first evolve in response to sexual and not natural selection under some circumstances. If this is the case, then parental behavior and mating preferences should coevolve in a sexually selected process. Life history theory is focused on the role of natural selection and therefore, the integration of sexual selection should provide significant new understanding of life-history evolution. My long-term research plan is to develop and formalize this hypothesis and to initiate a program to evaluate it experimentally. This work is part of an international collaboration with Dr. Kai Lindstrom, University of Helsinki, and a local collaboration with Dr. Joel Trexler, Florida International University. Dr. Lindstrom and I have recently recognized the Florida flagfish, Jordanella floridae, as an ideal species in which to explore the evolution of paternal care and the relative importance of natural and sexual selection and have been working together to pursue these ideas. Dr. Trexler is involved in complementary work focused on life history variation and population genetic structure in Everglades populations of flagfish. We recognize that the use of molecular markers, microsatellites (short repeat sequences of DNA) in particular, will greatly enhance our research program. Indeed, the development of these markers will enable us to estimate the heritability of male traits (care behavior and secondary sexual characteristics), and therefore understand their potential to evolve. Furthermore, we can use these markers to evaluate the population genetic structure of flagfish. The essence of this career advancement proposal is to train members of my lab (myself, a technician, and an undergraduate) in the isolation and development of variable microsatellite markers for flagfish and then to use those markers to estimate the heritability of male traits and to ascertain that the markers will also be useful in future studies of population genetic structure. This training will not only improve the probability of funding in the near term but will also enhance the quality of my future studies of natural and sexual selection in the evolution of life history by enabling me to use new approaches. Enriched with this new tool, my long-term, collaborative research program will provide new understanding of the distribution of parental care and the factors influencing its evolution doc17534 none During extreme events such as earthquakes and explosions, it is quite possible that a critical element of a building structure, such as a column, collapses. When a column in a building collapses the columns above this column, not being supported anymore, can collapse resulting in a catastrophic and progressive collapse of all floors above. Such a progressive collapse can result in tragic loss of many lives such as the Murrah Building tragedy in Oklahoma City. In order to avoid such tragedies, the structure should have mechanisms that loss of one column does not result in a domino effect and progressive collapse of columns above or a large portion of the structure. Dr. Astaneh has just completed successful testing of a steel cable-based mechanism to prevent such progressive collapses. In the system, steel cables are placed inside the floor slabs and when a column is removed, the cables act in a catenary action similar to a suspension bridge cable and prevent collapse of the floor and progressive collapse of the structure. The tests just completed have been for new construction where it is possible to place the steel cables inside the floor slabs. Realizing the success of this system in preventing collapse of new buildings, we are proposing to test the system as a measure of retrofit for existing vulnerable buildings. Fortunately, we have the specimen from the just completed tests in a state of minor damage and plan to use the specimen one more time for this proposed exploratory investigation. The main objective of this Small Grant for Exploratory Research is to take the existing specimen which is a one story 60ft by 20 feet building and add the cable-based system to it (under the existing slab) as a measure of retrofit and explore potential of this system in preventing progressive collapse of the existing building structures doc17535 none States create and join multilateral trade organizations at a faster pace then ever before in history. As these institutions grow in number and scope, mass protests against globalization around the world challenge the legitimacy of global governance through managed trade. The charge is clear: trade organizations impact more than market access among states. They also contribute to the demise of state capacity or willingness to protect individuals from global market forces. Despite a wealth of research into the general impact of international organizations on state-state relations, there is a virtual absence of systematic research into their impact on state- individual relations. In this Doctoral Dissertation Research Support project the student engages this debate whether and how states commitments to trade impact the lives of individuals in a global economy. The argument is offered that human rights are a particularly important case study to explore this tension. Using an institutional approach to the study of international political economy, the student challenges extant belief among many economists, political scientists, activists, and policy- makers that state commitment to trade organizations is inherently good or bad for human rights. Rather, it is hypothesized that state choice between different organizations, in terms of design and membership, will structure the impact of economic globalization on individual human rights. Human rights and free trade are therefore potentially compatible goals, which depend on the configuration of international and domestic institutions; yet they are by no means inevitable. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, this research explores this proposition across a sample of more than 150 states from the mid s to the present doc17536 none This dissertation research project investigates experiences regarding pregnancy and reproduction in two of the most populous, and markedly different, groups of migrant workers currently working in Tel Aviv, Israel: Nigerian and Filipina women. Given Israel s nationalist ideal of an ethno-religious Jewish majority, non-Jewish migrants reproduction is perceived as an unbearable economic burden and a threat to Israeli national integrity. In this ethnographic context, this study--conducted in affiliation with the Physicians for Human Rights Open Clinic and the municipal Mesila Aid and Information Center--investigates individual women s experiences of pregnancy and parenthood through semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and life history interviews. Findings will be anchored in a broader exploration of the microsocial, sociocultural, and political economic contexts of migrant women s lives in a foreign, and often unwelcoming, host society. This study broadens the global discussions regarding transnational labor migration through ethnographic and theoretical elaboration of migrant women s experiences of biological reproduction, and the dynamic interrelationship among nationalist sentiment, demographic speculation, administrative policies and constraints, and transnational labor migration flows doc17537 none Dr. Tianquan Lian of Emory University is funded for his research on femtosecond IR probe of ultrafast dynamics of molecular adsorbates on nanoparticles - solvation by a grant in the Physical Chemistry program of the Chemistry Division. He will further develop and test the theory of solvation-induced vibrational peak shift and use this novel approach to study solvation dynamics of molecules at nanoparticle liquid interfaces. For molecules with large dipole moment changes between ground and excited states, femtosecond excitation prepares the excited molecule in a non-equilibrium solvent configuration. The effect of the subsequent solvation on solute vibrational spectra is not yet understood, unlike the well-studied effect on solute electronic spectra. He is developing a theory of solvation-induced solute dynamic vibrational peak shift based on the Onsager dielectric continuum model of solvent-solute interaction. Dynamic peak shifts will be measured in Re(dcbpy)(CO)3Cl and related molecules in different solvents. The magnitude and dynamics of the CO stretching peak shifts will be used to compare with and critically test the theoretical model. He also will use vibrational peak shift as a new method to study solvation dynamics at solid-liquid interfaces. The combination of IR probe and nanocrystalline films will allow the study of solvation dynamics in a wide range of solvents. This approach is complementary to existing techniques such as fluorescence Stokes shift and the optical Kerr effect, and may have unique applications in slightly scattering media such as nanocrystalline thin films, that are difficult to study using these extant techniques. The proposed research is a continuation of Dr. Lian s research effort in understanding ultrafast dynamics of molecular adsorbates on nanoparticles. Semiconductor and metal nanoparticles have many potential applications ranging from nanoelectronics, solar energy conversion, to biomedical-imaging. Most nanoparticles are synthesized or modified with attached molecules as passivating, structural linkage, sensitizing, or molecular sensing groups. These molecules play essential roles in transfer, transport and dissipation of charge and energy in these systems. The proposed work will lead to a fundamental understanding of the dynamics of molecules on the nanoparticle surface, such as solvation and energy relaxation. This knowledge is essential to developing more efficient devices based on nanoparticles. The proposed research will also allow the training of postdoctoral fellows, graduate students and undergraduate students in the area of nanoscience and nanotechnology, educating the workforce of the future doc17538 none Regulated neurotransmitter exocytosis is a fundamental process for the intercellular communication among neurons. It is widely accepted that neurotransmitter secretion is a tightly regulated form of constitutive vesicular exocytosis shared by all eukaryotic cells. At the nerve terminal, a depolarization-induced Ca2+ influx through ion specific channels triggers the fusion of synaptic vesicles, which expel their neurotransmitter cargo onto the postsynaptic cell. A combination of biochemical and genetic approaches by many laboratories has lead to molecular models describing exocytotic and endocytotic mechanisms. In particular, recent advances uncovered the SNARE- or core complex driving constitutive membrane fusion. However, little is known about mechanism that mediate vesicle docking, arrest fusion-competent vesicles in the readily releasable pool, accomplish Ca2+ signaling from the sensor to the fusion machinery, adjust the probability of vesicle fusion, or regulate the size of readily releasable pool. We have initiated a genetic screen to identify further components mediating Ca2+-triggered exocytosis at nerve terminals and identified several novel mutations, which potentially affect neurotransmission. Of these, the mutation B682 is especially interesting because it inhibits a unique activity-dependent loss of evoked release, which coincides with a simultaneous increase in spontaneous neurotransmitter release, suggestive of an impaired releasable vesicle pool. A unifying hypothesis suggests that B682 protein mediates a late step in synaptic vesicle maturation that accumulates fusion-competent vesicles in the readily releasable vesicle pool . Specifically, B682 may clamp these fusogenic vesicles such that they await the fusion-triggering Ca2+ signal. To test this hypothesis (and explore others if warranted), loss- and gain-of-function B682 mutations will be examined for their effects on synaptic function at NMJs. These effects will be examined by a multi-disciplinary approach including electrophysiology, Ca2+ imaging, FM1-43 imaging, confocal and electron microscopy, and biochemistry. The first two Objectives will lay basic and essential groundwork for evaluating B682 s synaptic role. Specifically, we will verify that B682 is indeed a presynaptic protein that affects a physiological step of synaptic transmission but not neuromuscular synaptogenesis. Once these points are fully established the third Objective will test the essence of the B682 protein hypothesis. Specifically, it will test the prediction that B682 mutations do not impair Ca2+ entry and or extrusion. In addition, this objective will test whether the abnormal vesicle distribution in B682 mutants is caused by a defect in vesicle recycling, steps of vesicle trafficking to active zones and or refilling the readily releasable vesicle pool. Together, these studies will help to better understand the molecular mechanisms that mediate the regulation of fast, synchronous neurotransmitter exocytosis at nerve terminals doc17539 none Gwanmesia Elasticity measurements on minerals are the bridge between the observed seismic velocity structure of the Earth and properties of the Earth at depth, such as chemical composition and temperature. The mineral physics community is poised to undertake a new generation of experiments, which will allow us to accurately determine the properties of deep-Earth materials under a new regime of pressure and temperature (P-T) conditions. We will undertake a coordinated, multi-institutional effort to develop advanced experimental and theoretical techniques for determining sound velocities and elastic moduli on Earth materials. We will build on the current technology that utilizes light scattering and ultrasonic methods and exploit the full use of synchrotron radiation facilities for simultaneous characterization. We will pursue new methodologies utilizing inelastic x-ray scattering or gigahertz ultrasonics to expand the current capabilities. We will closely integrate theoretical approaches with the experimental to ground-truth both. Using multiple techniques, including theoretical calculations, we will focus our efforts on determining the elastic properties of olivine and its high-pressure polymorphs under high P-T conditions, and standard materials for high P-T calibrations (e.g., Pt, Au, MgO, NACI). Samples will be synthesized at a central community facility. The accuracy of each technique will be improved through inter-laboratory cross-checks and comparison with theory. This collaborative approach will greatly advance the technology of high pressure geophysics, and focus a community effort on accurate determination of the elastic properties of the most important mantle phases. These results will, in turn, be used to clarify our view of mantle composition and thermal structure doc17540 none Myxococcus xanthus exhibits the most spectacular morphogenesis among bacteria during its developmental life cycle. In response to starvation, tens of thousands of cells move by gliding motility to aggregate and to form multicellular fruiting bodies visible to the naked eye. Vegetative cells within mature fruiting bodies differentiate into dormant and stress-resistant myxospores. Distinct from any other known gliding bacteria, M. xanthus possesses two gliding systems, the adventurous (A) and the social (S) motility systems. While A motility enables M. xanthus cells to move as isolated individuals, S motility is manifested as movement of large cell groups. It remains an enigma how M. xanthus cells interact and coordinate with one another to bring about S motility. A new set of genes, the dif genes, is implicated in S motility. The predicted dif gene products show high similarity to chemotaxis proteins from many bacteria. It is known that bacterial chemotaxis proteins constitute sensory signal transduction pathways that are responsible for bacterial tactic responses to environmental stimuli. The similarity between Dif and chemotaxis proteins and the S-motility defects of dif mutants strongly suggest the involvement of a sensory component in the regulation of S-motility. This project takes a multidisciplinary approach of genetics, molecular biology and biochemistry to examine and to consolidate working hypotheses. dif mutations will be constructed for functional and structural studies. Genetic suppressors of difA mutants will be characterized to identify genes with functional, biochemical and or physical interactions with the dif chemotaxis-like signal transduction pathway. In a broader context, the outcome of this project is expected to advance our understanding of cell-cell interactions and intercellular communications, which are widespread and play essential roles in various biological systems and processes doc17541 none Across the country, the last two decades have witnessed an increasing emphasis on biotechnology as an engine for state and national economic development. Within the last two years, the amount of federal, state, and industry funding, media attention, and public expectation focused on this issue at Missouri s public Research I university has exploded. The combination of the culture of academic science, the economic development goals of the state, and the proprietary needs of industry may create a lively stew of potentially conflicting value orientations around this initiative. Within this confluence of changing expectations and values, the next generation of academic life scientists is being socialized into their research roles. This dissertation research project will address the ethical implications these changes may have for these doctoral students. Qualitative research methods will be used to ascertain student s perceptions regarding the existence of the biotechnology initiative, the norms of research, the training they have received in research ethics, and the possible impact of changing expectations on their career plans. The results of this study will be shared with a variety of audiences who are struggling with new ethical issues and conflicts associated with changing expectations and modes of support in academic research doc17542 none SES Proposal Space and Geometry in Kant s Critical Epistemology Lisa Shabel, Ohio State University This project has two interdependent aims: 1) to examine Kant s philosophy of mathematics in its eighteenth-century historical context; and 2) to determine the role that Kant s philosophy of mathematics plays in the epistemological view he defends in the Critique of Pure Reason. The project is motivated, at least in part, by the weakness of traditional interpretations of Kant s philosophy of mathematics. Most recent commentary on Kant s philosophy of mathematics falls victim to one or another sort of isolationism: commentators interpret Kant s philosophy of mathematics in isolation either from the eighteenth-century mathematical milieu that was familiar to him and his contemporaries, or from the epistemological arguments and results that his own philosophy of mathematics was deployed to serve, or both. This project aims to provide an account of Kant s philosophy of mathematics that situates it with respect to both the mathematical results that inspired it and the epistemological results that it inspired. The project uses textual research to show that in the eighteenth-century both symbolic and non-symbolic mathematical methods were dependent on constructive geometric procedures; in particular, early modern editions of Euclid s Elements show that modern geometric methods depend on diagrammatic reasoning. This textual research will support a defense of Kant s philosophy of geometry as a rich and compelling account of eighteenth-century mathematical practice. The project also shows that Kant s epistemological arguments regarding the nature of space serve to provide a foundation for constructive geometric procedures by establishing the pure cognitive faculty of spatial intuition as the source of geometric reasoning. It follows that, for Kant, the a priori representation of space is both the object of geometry and the medium in which we perceive spatial objects. In defending this interpretation of Kant, the project also provides a new explanation of Kant s defense of the applicability of pure geometry doc17543 none This proposal will explore a number of technologies for representing, storing, and processing microarray data, applied to development of the Yale Microarray Database (YMD). Microarray data sets, while providing information about gene expression or protein interactions, present one of the significant challenges in data management. Three specific technologies are involved. Collectively these approaches will allow us to address a number of the important issues in microarray database design: (i) dealing with large-scale and diverse information; (ii) allowing data dissemination; (iii) facilitating interoperation and exchange of data among heterogeneous information resources; and (iv) supporting integrative data analysis. 1. The use of the flexible EAV data modeling approach. The entity-attribute-value (EAV) approach in modeling a wide variety of sparsely populated attributes in a flexible fashion will be utilized in YMD to represent heterogeneous data including experimental conditions and multi-level analysis results. 2. XML-based interoperability. XML can facilitate the conversion and merging of heterogeneous (but related) data sets from different information sources into a common format so that integrated data access can be facilitated. MAGEML (an XML-based markup language for describing gene expression data) as a common data exchange mechanism between YMD and other MIAME-compliant microarray data repositories will be developed. 3. Parallel computing. A distributed, parallel computing approach to help speed up complex queries and analyses of large amounts of gene expression data will be used, providing users with integrated access to a variety of tools doc17544 none This prooposal has the specific objective to collect perishable data on injuries and related building damage for the recent Nisqually earthquake. The data collected under the proposed effort would enhance existing injury and damage databases compiled for recent U.S. earthquakes (the Whittier Narrows, Loma Prieta and Northridge earthquakes), and will build on current NSF-funded research (CMS 99- geographic analysis of injuries and building damage; integration into modeling for casualty estimation doc17545 none SES Proposal Philosophical Significance of Symmetries in Mechanics Gordon Belot, New York University This philosophy of physics project studies from a unified perspective three prominent problems in philosophy of physics-the question of relationalism about space and motion, the question of the nature and significance of gauge freedom, and the question of the content and implications of the principle of general covariance. The author intends, by setting these questions in the context of the mathematical theory of symmetry and reduction within geometric mechanics, to make possible sharp construals and investigations of conceptual and interpretative questions. He also hopes that treating these questions together within single framework allows for a fruitful delineation of the analogies and disanalogies in play at the technical level, as an aid towards making progress at the interpretative level. The intended result of the project is a book treating these topics doc17546 none There are now close to 20 documented examples of a role for quantum effects in enzyme catalyzed C-H activation processes. Insights from the ongoing work on H-tunneling in enzymes include the recognition that enzymes modify the entire reaction barrier shape (i.e., reaction barrier width as well as height) and that protein dynamics may play a role in the bond cleavage events catalyzed by enzymes. Further investigations are to be focused on establishing a firmer and more detailed relationship between protein dynamics and H-tunneling. Several hydride transfer reactions will be studied, catalyzed by a high temperature alcohol dehydrogenase (ht-ADH) with homology to the mesophilic horse liver alcohol dehydrogenase and a thermophilic dihydrofolate reductase (ht-DHFR) with significant homology to mesophilic DHFR. In the case of ht-ADH, studies are in progress to solve the three dimensional structure for this enzyme. This structural information will guide site specific mutagenesis experiments to analyze the effect of protein side chains on catalysis. In particular, the effects at elevated temperatures where tunneling is dominant and at reduced temperatures where H-transfer becomes more classical will be analyzed. Since the ht-ADH is too large for a study of dynamics by NMR, H D exchange, followed by limited proteolysis and mass spectrometric analysis will be pursued to map out protein flexibility. This laboratory has recently succeeded in cloning and over-expressing a ht-DHFR from B. stearothermophilis. This protein will be analyzed for the contribution of tunneling to H-transfer as a function of temperature. In parallel studies, this small protein (19 KDa) will be studied by NMR (as a probe of local dynamics) and by FT-IR H D exchange (as a probe of global flexibility doc17547 none Steffan The research is a collaborative effort between the University of Colorado, Boulder, the British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Office of Polar Programs (OPP) at National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) will support the project. The Greenland Ice Sheet is thinning rapidly along its outlet glaciers and is contributing an estimated 0.13 mm yr global sea level rise. Signs of its warming have been documented, including rising air temperature in its central part and retreating sea ice in its surrounding ocean. Extensive floating ice tongues in the northwest sector are ice undergoing massive rates of ablation from the surrounding warm ocean waters and are presently in a state of fragile equilibrium, but this ablation rate has never been measured. The Petermann Gletscher is the largest and most influential outlet glacier in northern Greenland, draining an area of 71,580 km2, with a discharge of 12 cubic km of ice per year. Remote sensing results suggest that its ice discharge exceeds that required to maintain the ice sheet interior in a state of mass equilibrium by 63%, and its grounding line is retreating at an anticipated rate at nearly one meter per year. Its floating ice tongue is only a few meters above sea level at the ice front, so it is highly vulnerable to ice thinning. If confirmed by in-situ observations and if this trend continues for several decades, the rate of thinning would be sufficient to threaten the stability and survival of the ice tongue. The Principal Investigators propose to do a detailed analysis of the glacier floating ice tongue in front of Petermann Gletscher that integrates key field observations with remote sensing data. The field program is designed to obtain the in-situ observations to confirm, validate, and calibrate the remote sensing estimates of basal melting, derive reliable estimates of surface melt from an energy balance model, observe changes in ice volume with precision, and understand the contribution of ice dynamics, surface melt and bottom melt to volume changes of floating ice. The experiment is will take place at the most crucial part of the glacier, the grounding line. Bottom melt rates are estimated to reach 25 m yr near the grounding zone from remote sensing data, and 75% of the ice that crosses melts in contact with warm ocean waters in the first 20% area of floating ice. Basal melting will be measured in-situ over several time intervals using a novel phase-sensitive radar sounding system developed and tested by the British Antarctic Survey. At the surface, the energy budget of the ice will be characterized using a network of automated micrometeorological stations, and the results will be employed to determine how well surface melt can be predicted from an energy balance model and how much it changes with time. Remote sensing data that include strain rates from interferometric synthetic-aperture radar (InSAR), elevation changes from airborne laser altimetry, and ice thickness from airborne ice-radar sounding, will be employed to yield spatial estimates of basal melting to be compared with in-situ data. InSAR and Global Positioning Systems will be used to detect changes in flow rate with time. The results will provide invaluable insights into dynamics and climatic processes of northern Greenland glaciers doc17548 none SES Proposal History and Philosophy of the Relations between Evolutionary and Developmental Biology Ronald Amundson, University of Hawaii Evolutionary developmental biology is a fast growing new field, stimulated by the rapid advances in molecular developmental genetics during the s. Professional excitement is evident in the appearance of new professional organizations, journals, textbooks, granting programs, and even a new nickname, Evo Devo. But the relations between evolutionary and developmental biology are anything but new. They began in the s with Darwin s earliest followers in evolutionary morphology. Their scientific program ran into difficulties, and was abandoned during the s. Evolutionary biology itself was in a period of flux and controversy until the Evolutionary Synthesis of the s and s. The Evolutionary Synthesis unified many areas of biology, but did not include development as a relevant factor for evolutionary understanding. A lively debate about the importance of development arose again around with equally fierce arguments from both defenders of the Synthesis and iconoclastic advocates of development. The current scientific excitement about Evo Devo comes not from the resolution of the methodological issues but from the promise of increasingly rich progress in developmental genetics. In this project, Dr. Amundson examines the history of the debates about the relevance of development to evolution. He compares points of contention and the ways in which scientific disputes are settled. Among the key questions are these: In what ways are today s issues about development in biology similar to those of past debates in the 19th or mid-20th centuries? To what extent do the debates depend on empirical discoveries, and to what extent on differences in scientific method? Will the methodological differences that still persist between Evo Devo and the mainstream evolutionary theory be a barrier to an integrated theory of evolution? The project suggests the importance of philosophy and methodology in scientific debate and the significance of history in understanding contemporary science doc17549 none Davis This award provides two years of continued support for the NSF-funded component of the Basin and Range Geodetic Network (BARGEN). This component, known as the Northern Basin and Range network or NBAR, includes 18 remote, continuously monitored GPS sites with ~100 km spacing, deployed in an east-west array near lat. 40 deg. N, spanning the diffusely deforming western boundary of the North American plate. Installed in and , these sites benefit from drilled, braced monuments anchored in bedrock to a depth of 10m and a very dry climate. Daily position estimates in the horizontal exhibit root-mean-square scatter at the 1-2 mm level, and time series analysis and other statistical analyses of some 4.5 years of data indicate errors in horizontal velocity of less than 0.2 mm yr at one standard deviation. Continued operation of this network is urgent, because it represents an important prototype experiment for NSF s Plate Boundary Observatory (PBO) initiative, which proposes the deployment of some 900 new sites of similar design across the deforming western margin of the North American plate. The NBAR sites are scheduled to be upgraded with new instruments as early as provided PBO is funded (now under consideration as part of NSF s FY budget). The NBAR sites will form the nucleus of PBO s 100-site backbone network and of proposed site clusters in the northern Basin and Range. Continuity of geodetic time series up to and through PBO implementation will provide the strongest possible basis for predicting its ultimate capability, and for assessing the merits of proposed strategies for site locations. An additional two years of data from the NBAR sites will bear significantly on three fundamental - and still controversial - questions: 1) the degree to which GPS time series are contaminated by low-frequency noise; 2) whether errors in vertical velocities will be low enough to provide geophysically meaningful signal; and 3) whether to expect agreement between geodetically determined velocities and geologically determined deformation rates. Additional data will also provide the clearest possible understanding of the capabilities and limitations of continuous GPS prior to PBO deployment doc17550 none Reversible protein phosphorylation is a ubiquitous regulatory mechanism governing biological processes such as the cell cycle, metabolism, transmembrane signalling and gene regulation. Phosphorylating (kinase) and dephosphorylating (phosphatase) enzyme activities are carefully balanced in normal cells, and these activities often are regulated by covalent modifications, association of specific regulatory subunits, and by formation of large multi-component signaling complexes. The protein phosphatase 2A (PP2A) holoenzyme is a heterotrimeric complex containing a catalytic subunit (PP2A-C) bound to one A and one B regulatory subunit. The mechanisms allowing the A and B regulatory subunits to control PP2A activity remain poorly defined. In Arabidopsis, small gene families encode each of the PP2A subunits, and only a few mutations in PP2A genes have been isolated. The ROOTS CURL IN NPA (RCN1) gene encodes one of three regulatory A subunits, and phenotypic analysis of the rcn1 mutant has shown that the RCN1 protein acts as a positive regulator of PP2A activity. Loss of RCN1 function in seedling roots perturbs polar transport of the plant hormone auxin, altering gravity response and growth of lateral roots. Thus, although the A subunits of Arabidopsis PP2A exhibit very strong sequence similarity, their functions are not fully redundant. The basis for functional specialization of A subunit isoforms is unknown. This project will extend our analysis of RCN1 function, and will provide key insights into the roles of PP2A and the regulation of its activity in Arabidopsis. The subcellular localization of the RCN1 protein will be determined using reporter gene fusions. Complementation assays will test the ability of other A subunit genes to supply RCN1 function. Isoform-specific antibody reagents will be developed to allow detailed analysis of isoform-specific functions and interactions. PP2A subunits and other proteins that bind to the RCN1 protein will be identified to gain insight into the mechanisms of RCN1 action. Genetic experiments will test for interactions between RCN1 functions and the functions of other genes with roles in auxin transport or signaling. Auxin-responsive reporter genes will be used to determine whether the altered auxin transport activities observed in the rcn1 mutant result in abnormal auxin distribution. These experiments will yield information on the regulation of auxin transport by reversible protein phosphorylation. Our goals in this project are to clarify the role of RCN1 protein in governing PP2A activity, and to elucidate the normal functions of RCN1-containing PP2A enzymes. These studies will lead to a better understanding of the circuitry that regulates PP2A activity in plants doc17551 none Eukaryotic chromosomes are linear molecules that terminate in repeats of simple DNA sequences. These structures, called telomeres, guard against loss of DNA during replication and prevent fusion of different chromosomes. Telomeres also have important roles in chromosome behavior, gene expression and genome evolution. In fungi and other eukaryotic microbes, telomeric regions tend to be rich in genes for ecological adaptation and are often highly variable, providing evidence that they are subject to niche-dependent diversifying selection. Despite their importance, telomeric sequences usually are not captured using strategies employed for high-throughput genome sequencing and are, therefore, highly under-represented in genome databases. In this project, targeted approaches will be used to isolate and sequence telomeric regions of two fungi: Magnaporthe grisea, a very important plant pathogen; and Neurospora crassa, a saprophyte whose study has made profound contributions to biology. Two strains of each fungal species will be examined to provide a thorough view of their telomere content and organization; and comparison of sequences between strains will reveal mechanisms of telomere variability. This information will improve understanding of how fungi adapt to their environment and, in particular, how pathogenic fungi avoid host defenses. The 2.4 megabases of high-quality sequence generated in this project will be essential for eventual completion of the genome sequences of these fungi. The project will provide education through undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral training in molecular genetics, high-throughput sequencing, and bioinformatics. DNA libraries and clones generated in the project will be available to other researchers. Assembled and annotated sequences will be released to public databases and unfinished sequences will be accessible through the websites: http: fungus.ceeb.uky.edu cgibin web-blast.cgi and http: www.riceblast.org. This is a Microbial Genome Sequencing Award funded through a collaborative activity between the National Science Foundation and the Department of Agriculture Initiative for Future Agriculture and Food Systems doc17552 none Household Impacts of the Nisqually Earthquake The February 28, Nisqually earthquake was moderate in magnitude (Mw = 6.8) and thus provides a unique opportunity to measure the economic impacts of an event of this type. This project will amass systematic evidence regarding the economic impacts on households through a telephone survey of randomly selected households according to zones defined by ground motion levels. This is in sharp contrast to typical spatial criteria: political units, zip codes, or census tracts. Three or four categories of ground motion will be defined. Survey data will be correlated with major categories of impact; damage at the home; financing for repairs; changes in economic behavior made as a result of this event; changes in mitigation and preparedness (e.g., insurance); and baseline economic and demographic information about the households themselves. The results of this study will include a large, unique database on household losses. The database will serve to test the hypothesis that actual losses exceeded official estimates. The explanation for the difference is that many categories of loss are never reported. Insights into the nature and extent of unreported losses may help public agencies respond to future disasters as well as better evaluate the benefits of pre-disaster mitigation investments. The database will also allos reliable estimation of the total amount of loss incurred by households in the region. This can provide a baseline against which other loss estimations can be compared, e.g., FEMA s HAZUS doc17553 none The project is to measure the force and deformation of individual floc of particles using a specially designed piston-cylinder apparatus. The relations between the applied compressive force and the floc porosity and structure will be determined. The effects of process variables on the structural characteristics will be assessed. The results will be used to develop a theory for the uniaxial compression based on the percolation theory with the moving boundary of the cylinder doc17554 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. E. Charles Adams and his colleagues will conduct three field seasons of archaeological research at Chevelon Ruin. Chevelon is the third largest member, at 500 rooms, of a cluster of ancestral Hopi settlements in northeastern Arizona collectively called the Homol ovi cluster. This cluster was occupied from A.D. - , a period of enormous political and social change in ancient Pueblo communities throughout the northern Southwest. This change is most clearly evident in increased average village size, which tripled to more than 500 rooms during the cluster s occupation. Excavation has been conducted in five other members of the Homol ovi cluster enabling Adams and his colleagues to establish the local chronology and study details of village reorganization associated with village growth. Because the cluster is situated along the Little Colorado River and villages were dependent on stream flow for growing crops and drinking water, they were dependent on one another economically and probably interacted politically. Chevelon is located upstream from all but one of the other villages along Chevelon Creek, one of two permanent streams flowing into the Little Colorado River that provide water to the cluster. Chevelon differs from the other villages at Homol ovi in having five to ten times more ceramics traded from villages 100 km east of the cluster. Either Chevelon had a unique trade relationship with these eastern villages or immigrants from these pueblos lived at Chevelon. The focus of the research will be to locate plaza spaces, abutment and bonding of walls, the presence and location of spinal room blocks, and the location of ritual structures at Chevelon using a total station and wall tracing followed by excavations. An important concept identified in previous excavations in Homol ovi villages is what we term enriched deposits. Enriched deposits have high quantities of whole and unusual objects and highly formalized deposits that are associated with ritual activity. The testing program will also look for deposits that have concentrations of exchanged pottery or riparian resources unique to the Chevelon area. The relationship of these deposits to architectural units within Chevelon should inform on the distribution of wealth within the community and the nature of groups or households controlling this wealth. Heterarchal, hierarchical, corporate, and communal models of village organization will be tested. In addition, the connection of the villages through sharing Little Colorado River water suggests cluster-level organization. The location of Chevelon along a permanent stream with potentially unique fauna and flora and its distinctive ceramic assemblage identify objects that could be exchanged with other cluster members. Tracing these objects to previously excavated villages will allow the team to assess the flow of these items from Chevelon to other cluster members and whether these follow patterns associated with confederacy or hierarchical models of cluster organization. The results of this research will inform archaeologists working in the Southwest and elsewhere on the material correlates and associated behaviors to power and sociopolitical organization within non-state societies and how these are expressed beyond the level of the village doc17555 none This project investigates the use of technical information in water management in Brazil: To illuminate the opportunities and constraints for the use of technical information in policymaking, especially water management, and To investigate how the use of such knowledge affects decision making in the context of the recently implemented water management reform in Brazil. This example of science society interaction illustrates how institutional settings where technical knowledge is applied play a role in the effectiveness of this information as a policy tool, and how institutions respond and adapt to new policy tools. In Brazil enacted new national water law that introduced an integrated, decentralized, participatory, and environmentally sustainable water management system. This resulted in several instances of public participation in water resources management at the watershed level, such as users commissions, watershed committees, and water policy councils that are open to the public. Within such organizations, technical information can play many policy-related roles, including providing support information for different kinds of decision-making, planning, and enforcement. However, such information can critically affect decision-making in different, sometimes unwarranted, ways. A key argument this study seeks to advance is that the use of technical information is context-dependent. The distribution of costs and benefits of information use in policymaking depends on the social, political, and cultural context in which information producers and users work. Better information may lead to better decisions, and better-informed decision-making might encourage stakeholders perception of effectiveness, which in turn, might encourage stakeholder participation. Or, the use of technical information can alienate participation by insulating decision-making from the public. Because technical information requires technical expertise for its use, it can shield policymakers from political meddling and efforts from outsiders to influence policy implementation and outcome. In this case, technocrats use technical information can make decisionmaking unaccountable and less democratic. This study involves detailed case studies in three watersheds using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. In-depth, semi-structured interviews and focus groups will be carried out with policymakers, information producers, and stakeholders. Participatory observation of public meetings and policymaking at the state level are used. The findings can inform policymakers and stakeholders of the possibilities and constraints for application of science-based information in policymaking, as well as to provide data producers with information on data needs from users. By examining political and cultural aspects of the application technical knowledge in distinct policy environments, this study contributes to analytical frameworks within the policy sciences, such as social constructivism, policy analysis, and the sociology of science. Results will include scholarly and policy-oriented presentations and publications in English and Portuguese. doc17556 none It is often claimed that the idea of significant biological differences existing between racial groups has all but disappeared from science, if not from the minds of the American public. Yet some observers challenge this depiction, arguing instead that many scientists continue to understand race to be a human biological marker. This dissertation research project, The Nature of Race, addresses this debate by posing two broad research questions: How do scientists today define and conceptualize race? What kinds of concepts of race are transmitted by scientists to the public? Drawing on the sociology of knowledge and on relevant existing research findings, a series of hypotheses concerning the relationship between social location (e.g. gender, age, academic discipline) and racial conceptualization are also assessed. Funds support the collection of data, which will occur through interviews conducted with approximately 100 U.S.-born faculty and undergraduate students at two universities. Faculty respondents are randomly sampled from departments of anthropology and of biology; undergraduates from among those who have declared majors in anthropology, biology, or other fields. Qualitative content analysis is used to characterize respondents definitions of race and the types of arguments, claims, evidence, images and metaphors they use to support and elaborate these understandings. Quantitative analyses including descriptive statistics and chi-square testing are used to explore patterns of variation in racial conceptualization according to social status. The project findings are particularly relevant for educators at all levels. Both academic scientists and other educators have demonstrated ethical concern that scientific research relating to human diversity be conveyed to the public in a manner that does not exacerbate but rather attenuates racism. But blanket statements assuring that biological race is an unscientific concept may need to be re-evaluated if the scientists whose legitimacy is being evoked in anti-racist public education in fact hold a markedly diverse range of beliefs on the matter. This project provides a careful assessment of how scientists in different disciplines understand race and racial difference doc17557 none The objective of this work is to prepare a number of metalloporphyrin material building blocks and then assemble them into photonic materials. A number of metalloporphyrins will be or have been prepared and the thermodynamics, kinetics, and cooperative interactions involved in the self assembly of these materials will be studied. These self assembled materials will then be assembled into supramolecualr photonics with multiple functions and these photonic systems will be processed onto surfaces and into polymers. The assemblies thus formed will be characterized by a number of physical methods, some in the laboratory of the PI and some in collaboration with other investigators. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Charles M. Drain of the Department of Chemistry at CUNY Hunter College. Dr. Drain will explore the synthesis of photonic materials. Photonic materials are assemblies of molecules which can absorb and emit photons in small defined spaces. These light absorbing materials (chromophores) are typically assembled onto surfaces (photogated transistors for example or materials on surfaces with controllable luminesence properties) or into polymers or wires. Students trained as a result of working on this project will gain experience in materials research as well as supramolecular organic chemistry, hence they will have skills needed by both the specialty chemicals and the computer materials industries doc17558 none The boundary layer vortex, which includes the relatively well-known dust devil, generally takes the form of a benign columnar atmospheric vortex. It is less well understood than its more dramatic cousin, the tornado, but recent evidence suggests that it may be more common than originally thought and may be important as a controlling factor of boundary layer structure and interactions. An investigation is proposed of the dynamics of the initiation and maintenance of boundary layer vortices, in particular, the dust devil vortex. The research objectives include the elucidation of the necessary meteorological conditions required for the existence of vertical vortices and the dynamical mechanisms responsible for their formation. Flow regimes are classified into three categories: a) convection in the presence of mean horizontal wind shear; b) convection in mean vertical wind shear; and c) convection in the absence of ambient wind or wind shears. Vertical vortex formation for category a) is straightforward and will not be considered under this research. The methodological approach to regimes b) and c) will be primarily through the use of a Large Eddy Simulation numerical model (LES) with some complementary theoretical work. Prior research results show that for category c), vertical vortices form readily at the vertices of cellular convective patterns. The current research will expand to also consider category b) in order to explore the parameter space of conditions that permit vertical vortex formation in the convective boundary layer. Prior investigators have suggested that strong mean winds can be inhibiting to the formation of dust devils and this contention will be investigated in the current research. The primary emphasis, however, will remain on category c), which is the most dynamically intriguing. In this case vertical vorticity centers that may be generated by convective circulations themselves and, subsequently tilted into the vertical, must exist initially above the surface. Therefore, the questions of how vertical vorticity extrema become co-located with updrafts and how a vortex becomes connected with the ground surface will be examined. Higher resolution numerical simulations and analyses will be performed to uncover the possible dynamical mechanisms. The results may be applicable to other small-scale vortices, including steam devils, fire-whirls and possibly tornadoes. This project may promote the understanding of the interactions and or relationship between a vertical vortex and larger scale convective circulations. In turn the parameterization of the planetary boundary layer and the effects of these vortical flows may be improved in large-eddy simulation models. The results regarding vertical transports by such boundary layer vortices may have impact on pollution studies, hazardous waste management and possibly the deep convective initiation problem doc17559 none Proposal: PI: Armentrout, Peter B. This project consists of continuing research in the fields of chemical dynamics and gas-phase organometallic ion chemistry using a combined techniques of flow tube ion production and guided ion beam tandem mass spectrometry (GIBMS). With this apparatus, thermalized atomic and polyatomic ions will be produced. Detailed kinetic and thermodynamic data on single mass-selected species will be obtained by accurately measuring the absolute reaction probabilities at thermal and hyperthermal energies. Two new experimental facilities will be developed: 1) An electrospray ion (ESI) source that should enable more routine generation of nonvolatile and thermally fragile ions in the gas phase and provide easier access to multiply charged species. 2) A source to study state-specific chemistry of heavier transition elements that utilizes electronic state chromatography . A range of chemical systems will be studied and will emphasize three related areas: 1) the dynamics of collision-induced dissociation; 2) the chemistry of the heavier third-row transition metals; and 3) metal ion binding to biologically relevant molecules. Implicit in all three areas will be theoretical calculations needed to augment the experiments. One motivation for this program is the obvious interest in making better correlations between the detailed information available from gas-phase ion studies with the real world of condensed-phase organometallic chemistry, homogeneous catalysis, and biological systems. We make the conscious choice to study simple systems that progress in complexity in order to quantitatively assess trends in metal chemistry. By comprehensively studying the thermochemistry of many metals and many ligands, the trends (periodic, changes with number of ligands, variations in electronic states) in the thermodynamic data allow us to transcend the gas-phase venue where the data are obtained. Students and post doctoral research associates will participate in this research. As chemical reagents, metals are important components of biological systems, acting as active sites in enzymes and helping to regulate cell function and to control structure. Technologically, metals are used extensively as catalysts to produce a wide range of important fine chemicals and fuels. In addition, molecules specifically designed to interact selectively with certain metals are needed for nuclear waste cleanup and decontamination. The research done in this project is designed to provide fundamental information about the strength of the interactions of metals with chemical components relevant to biological systems and the chemical industry. This is most readily accomplished by examining model systems that progress in complexity. This permits the trends in this information to be quantitatively assessed, which allows the development of predictive capabilities for more complex chemical environments. In this work, specialized devices known as guided ion beam tandem mass spectrometers are utilized to examine metal ion interactions with a variety of chemical species. This can be accomplished on single molecules such that interfering interactions from the environment can be eliminated. This allows the study to focus on elucidating the specific factors that control the interaction. A close collaboration with theory provides additional insight and provides essential predictive capabilities. The research will be done with students and post doctoral research associates who thereby receive training in preparation for advanced studies or entering the scientific technical workforce doc17560 none The focus of research is the development of synthetic methodology based on the use of axially chiral anilides. New routes for the preparation of anilides will be studied and new reactions that transfer axial chirality from precursor to product will be developed. Radical cyclizations, additions and hydrogen transfer reactions will make up the initial foci of the work. Further, non-radical reactions such as asymmetric organolithium and organopalladium cyclizations will be studied. The research is designed to advance the understanding of the synthesis, structure (including rotational behavior) and reactions of axially chiral amides in order to expand the synthetic utility of this class of compounds. With this renewal award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Dennis P. Curran of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh. Professor Curran will focus his work on developing methodology for the transfer of chirality of synthetic precursors to new stereocenters in products. The work represents a broad-based study of the structural features and synthetic potential of a novel class of chiral anilides. The methodology has fundamental importance and could lead to the production of novel catalysts, reagents and synthetic intermediates of use to synthetic chemists and, beyond that, to the pharmaceutical industry. The research also provides an appropriate venue for the training of students at the graduate level doc17561 none Stixrude Elasticity measurements on minerals are the bridge between the observed seismic velocity structure of the Earth and properties of the Earth at depth, such as chemical composition and temperature. The mineral physics community is poised to undertake a new generation of experiments, which will allow us to accurately determine the properties of deep-Earth materials under a new regime of pressure and temperature (P-T) conditions. We will undertake a coordinated, multi-institutional effort to develop advanced experimental and theoretical techniques for determining sound velocities and elastic moduli on Earth materials. We will build on the current technology that utilizes light scattering and ultrasonic methods and exploit the full use of synchrotron radiation facilities for simultaneous characterization. We will pursue new methodologies utilizing inelastic x-ray scattering or gigahertz ultrasonics to expand the current capabilities. We will closely integrate theoretical approaches with the experimental to ground-truth both. Using multiple techniques, including theoretical calculations, we will focus our efforts on determining the elastic properties of olivine and its high-pressure polymorphs under high P-T conditions, and standard materials for high P-T calibrations (e.g., Pt, Au, MgO, NACI). Samples will be synthesized at a central community facility. The accuracy of each technique will be improved through inter-laboratory cross-checks and comparison with theory. This collaborative approach will greatly advance the technology of high pressure geophysics, and focus a community effort on accurate determination of the elastic properties of the most important mantle phases. These results will, in turn, be used to clarify our view of mantle composition and thermal structure doc17562 none The Arizona-Rural Systemic Initiative (AZ-RSI) proposes to create a learning environment to improve science, mathematics and technology education in 22 rural, economically disadvantaged K-12 schools communities with high American Indian and Hispanic enrollments. The 22 schools are located within the boundaries of 7 public school districts and 2 Bureau of Indian Affairs agencies with a total student enrollment of 9,698. The AZ-RSI is a partnership among the 22 rural schools, 2 County School Offices, Arizona State University East, and WestEd Education Laboratory. Memoranda of Agreement with school boards support the proposed implementation plan to improve mathematics and science education for nearly 10,000 students by focusing on comprehensive and cohesive capacity-building at the local site. The AZ-RSI has designed an implementation plan that emphasizes reform at the school level. The plan is flexible and full of technical assistance and leadership training for all stakeholders to help build requisite capacity for implementing and sustaining lasting reform. The AZ-RSI has formed a highly qualified management team to oversee the implementation plan. Field specialists with expertise in classroom implementation of effective instructional strategies and experience in education reform will provide on-site support to Local Leadership Teams. Said teams will implement school-wide plans to improve mathematics and science for all students with the help from field specialists. The AZ-RSI anticipates that the overall impacts will be improved student achievement in mathematics and science in participating schools, increased capacity of schools to sustain improvements, and a significant contribution to rural education research doc17563 none PROJECT Edition of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin Duncan Porter American Council of Learned Societies The Correspondence of Charles Darwin makes available, for the first time, full, authoritative texts, edited according to modern textual principles and practices, of all the extant, known letters written and received by Charles Darwin. Following a comprehensive worldwide search, about 14,500 letters have been located. This figure includes the letters written to Darwin. Both sides of the correspondence are being published in order to provide as much information as possible. The Correspondence has a wide audience, including historians of science, philosophy, and sociology, biological and geological scientists, scholars of the 19th century, and general readers, for whom are brought together materials now dispersed among widely scattered repositories. Readers are instructed by the expository letters and entertained by the social life of the English country gentry, besides becoming better acquainted than was ever before possible with the life and mind of Charles Darwin. Prior support of the Darwin Correspondence Project from NSF has contributed substantially to the preparation and publication of two editions of A Calendar of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin, - ( , ), twelve volumes of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin ( , , , l988, , , , , , , , ), and Charles Darwin s Letters: A Selection, - ( ). The letters written during the period covered by this grant proposal are a part of Darwin s work and career that has been comparatively unexplored and overshadowed by the publication of his On the Origin of Species ( ). However, the continuing botanical studies, the gathering of information for Variation under Domestication ( ), The Descent of Man ( ), and The Expression of the Emotions ( ), and the preparation of the fifth edition of the Origin ( ) are of great importance for the understanding of Darwin s evolutionary thinking during this important period of his life. The planned research involves completion of volumes 14 to 17, from to , of the Correspondence during the grant period. The year fills two volumes because of its large number of letters. In addition, considerable research and editing should be accomplished on volumes 18 to 20, from to . These volumes cover Darwin s most significant investigations of heredity in humans, animals, and plants, yield an understanding of Darwin as an experimenter and innovator in plant physiology, psychology, and other fields, and provide extensive materials for studying the transformation of biological science in the nineteenth century doc17564 none We propose to hold a two-day workshop in Tucson, Arizona during fall on emerging ultra-large networks, such as the Internet. Hosted by Arizona Center for Integrative Modeling and Simulation, the meeting will bring together some of the world s leading researchers in the networking area to meet with counterparts with expertise in modeling and simulation of networks and of systems more generally. The workshop will provide these researchers with the task of coming up with the unknowns of ultra-large networks and with new directions of research in modeling and simulation that can address these unknowns. The Internet is increasing in connectivity, toward 1 billion nodes in and node capability providing a highly interconnected and computationally powerful medium. Such a globally and ubiquitously dispersed network will provide a new frontier for new kinds of educational, commerce and entertainment activities. However, there are many issues that arise in the emergence of such a large, highly decentralized, collection of interaction parts. The increased connectivity and capability creates new complexity and dynamics that we are only on the verge of appreciating. Difficulties in dealing with large-scale software systems are well documented in a recent report by the National Research Council. Techniques that work for small software systems fail markedly when the scale is increased by one million fold. Computer-based modeling and simulation (M&S) methodology is required to address these issues since the scale is well beyond what analytical tools alone can handle and there is limited ability to do controlled experiments on the always on Internet. Traditional M&S approaches have focussed on the micro-level components rather than the macro level integration of these components. However, with the advent of ultra-large scale systems such as the Internet of the future, it is necessary to develop M&S approaches for understanding the behaviors of very large inter-connected networks with very few loci of control and many interacting and varied sources of input and services demand. The results of this workshop are expected to be a set of specific finding of gaps in our knowledge of the behavior of ultra-large networks and how to deal with their design, management, and control. Participants may assess whether current approaches can be evolved to deal with the large increases in scale or whether different, revolutionary paradigms are required. Participants will address the need for new techniques and approaches for building models of ultra-large networks and developing simulation environments for studying their behaviors. Suggestions for borrowing points of view form other areas such as complex adaptive systems and from basic theory of modeling and simulation will be encouraged. The proceedings will be compiled in a form that will provide a useable and significant guide for new NSF funding initiatives for future network infrastructure research doc17565 none A series of small workshops will bring together researchers in the separately developing fields of virtual communities and geo-local community informatics. Objectives include the integration of the conceptual approaches that have been developed in those two areas, systemization of the theoretical and technical advances in these areas, development of a common research agenda, collaborations in research and field projects, and emergence of a new field of Virtual Community Informatics. There is the potential for broad benefit as many community projects have been developed without knowledge of advanced theory or resources for new technology, while many academic projects remain testbeds or are short-lived experiments. To insure that a community can grow and thrive, researchers from many disciplines will be included, as well as graduate students and practitioners from many parts of the world doc17566 none This dissertation enhancement grant will support Jose G. Tello under the direction of Dr. John M. Bates of the Field Museum of Natural History for a detailed study of the phylogeography of two bird lineages distributed throughout the Neotropical lowlands in Brazil. Phylogeography is a field of study concerned with the principles and processes that underlie the geographical distribution of genealogical lineages. Phylogenetic patterns of avian (bird) differentiation within the Neotropics, or the existence of spatial and temporal congruence of those patterns, are just beginning to be studied. This research involves the study of the diversification of two independent avian lineages -- Cercomacra antbirds and Platyrinchus flycatchers -- using mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequences. The generation of phylogenies will not only shed light on the region s evolutionary history, but also will help to elucidate the roles that different ecological and behavioral traits may have played in the diversification process. This fundamental research will constitute one of the first to extensively examine phylogeographic patterns in the Neotropical lowlands using multiple data sets and multiple lineages, and hence provide important insights into the history of diversification in the region doc17567 none Wentzcovitch Elasticity measurements on minerals are the bridge between the observed seismic velocity structure of the Earth and properties of the Earth at depth, such as chemical composition and temperature. The mineral physics community is poised to undertake a new generation of experiments, which will allow us to accurately determine the properties of deep-Earth materials under a new regime of pressure and temperature (P-T) conditions. We will undertake a coordinated, multi-institutional effort to develop advanced experimental and theoretical techniques for determining sound velocities and elastic moduli on Earth materials. We will build on the current technology that utilizes light scattering and ultrasonic methods and exploit the full use of synchrotron radiation facilities for simultaneous characterization. We will pursue new methodologies utilizing inelastic x-ray scattering or gigahertz ultrasonics to expand the current capabilities. We will closely integrate theoretical approaches with the experimental to ground-truth both. Using multiple techniques, including theoretical calculations, we will focus our efforts on determining the elastic properties of olivine and its high-pressure polymorphs under high P-T conditions, and standard materials for high P-T calibrations (e.g., Pt, Au, MgO, NACI). Samples will be synthesized at a central community facility. The accuracy of each technique will be improved through inter-laboratory cross-checks and comparison with theory. This collaborative approach will greatly advance the technology of high pressure geophysics, and focus a community effort on accurate determination of the elastic properties of the most important mantle phases. These results will, in turn, be used to clarify our view of mantle composition and thermal structure doc17568 none This STS Dissertation Improvement Grant is a study of a medical imaging technology in the colonial context. It historically traces notions of visual culture as they were developed not only by colonial administrators but also by users of radiographic technology. The idea of visual culture itself was developed and used to legitimize and stabilize relationships in colonialism s socio-technical work. The study shows what the political stakes of this epistemological debate were by outlining the role of visual culture in establishing a radiographic network in l Afrique Occidentale Francaise (AOF). It argues that radiographic technology, including its constituent discourse of representational tendencies, was used to negotiate the professional legitimacy of medical image interpreters and solidify their role as political actors in colonial and postcolonial West Africa. This study challenges the use of visual culture in Science and Technology Studies (S&TS) to explain consensus and reexamines the role of technology in colonialism. NSF funds support archival and enthnographic work in Senegal, the Ivory Coast and Mali doc17569 none Hemley Elasticity measurements on minerals are the bridge between the observed seismic velocity structure of the Earth and properties of the Earth at depth, such as chemical composition and temperature. The mineral physics community is poised to undertake a new generation of experiments, which will allow us to accurately determine the properties of deep-Earth materials under a new regime of pressure and temperature (P-T) conditions. We will undertake a coordinated, multi-institutional effort to develop advanced experimental and theoretical techniques for determining sound velocities and elastic moduli on Earth materials. We will build on the current technology that utilizes light scattering and ultrasonic methods and exploit the full use of synchrotron radiation facilities for simultaneous characterization. We will pursue new methodologies utilizing inelastic x-ray scattering or gigahertz ultrasonics to expand the current capabilities. We will closely integrate theoretical approaches with the experimental to ground-truth both. Using multiple techniques, including theoretical calculations, we will focus our efforts on determining the elastic properties of olivine and its high-pressure polymorphs under high P-T conditions, and standard materials for high P-T calibrations (e.g., Pt, Au, MgO, NACI). Samples will be synthesized at a central community facility. The accuracy of each technique will be improved through inter-laboratory cross-checks and comparison with theory. This collaborative approach will greatly advance the technology of high pressure geophysics, and focus a community effort on accurate determination of the elastic properties of the most important mantle phases. These results will, in turn, be used to clarify our view of mantle composition and thermal structure doc17570 none This award investigates the use of stalagmites and other speleothems from caves in northern Oman and Yemen as natural archives for information on the nature and cause of variations in the Indian Ocean monsoon system during interglacial and glacial periods of the last 75,000 years. The Indian Ocean Monsoon is an important weather system that affects both natural and managed resources (e.g., through agriculture and fisheries) and hence the economy of one of the most densely populated areas of the world. Two questions guide the research strategy, namely: 1) How did monsoon precipitation vary between interglacial periods? and 2) How does the timing of the monsoon vary with latitude? The research strategy applied combines studies of modern caves and cave waters, Hydrogen isotope analyses of water from fluid inclusions in modern and ancient speleothems, high resolution Oxygen and Carbon stable isotopic analyses of recent and well-dated ancient speleothems, and spectral analyses of the isotopic time series. Stalagmites, deposits of calcium carbonate that are precipitated from groundwaters in caves, will be used to produce high-resolution records of variation in monsoon rainfall. Changes in the intensity of precipitation are recorded in stalagmites as variations in growth rate, thickness of annual growth layers (if present) and in carbon and oxygen stable isotope ratios. Previous work using stalagmites and other speleothems from caves in Oman has shown that they are a rich source of climate information. The results demonstrate repeated pluvial (i.e., wet) periods in southern Arabia during each of the past four interglacial stages in Earth s climate. More detailed study of the early Holocene, at a resolution of approximately 4 years, shows a close correspondence between monsoon rainfall and solar forcing. Study of the past 800 years of the monsoon at annual resolution indicate a connection to the tropical Pacific El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) system on decadal and interannual timescales. This project is multi-national in scope and involves collaborators in Switzerland, Germany, Oman, and Yemen doc17571 none SES Proposal The Level Expert: Cornelius Vermuyden and the Drainage of the English Fens Eric Ash, Independent Scholar The goal of this research project is to investigate one of the largest and most important engineering works undertaken in seventeenth-century England: the drainage of the English fens. The research focuses primarily upon the career of one of the principal engineers responsible for the drainage, Cornelius Vermuyden, and his relationships with the English investors who employed him. The construction of such large-scale drainage works (spanning parts of five counties in eastern England) required a great deal of hydraulic expertise, a rare and valuable commodity in early modern England. Vermuyden s expertise made him an indispensable asset to his employers, and a key agent of London s increasingly centralized economic and social control of the realm. Over the course of nearly five decades, Vermuyden assisted various land speculators in London (including the king and his advisors) in acquiring thousands of acres of what had up until then been commonly-held fenland. He then oversaw the drastic alteration of the lands ecology, in return for a share of the profits resulting from the speculation over the drained lands increased agricultural value. In overseeing the drainage works, Vermuyden played an important role in bringing the fens under the more direct (and profitable) control of London administrators and investors. This award supports full-time archival research in the Harvard University Libraries, with its microfilm copies of English manuscript collections, including the State Papers Domestic and the Lansdowne Manuscripts, as well as printed primary sources, during the summers of and . The award also supports travel to the United Kingdom to enable the PI to examine manuscript collections at the British Library not available on microfilm. Other research includes visits to Cambridge, East Anglia, and the Wash, the location of a number of important seventeenth-century drainage works, in order to examine relevant archival manuscript collections and to make a personal survey of the former fenlands that are to be the focus of project. The evolution of the idea of technical expertise during the early modern period and the rise of powerful, centralized administrations in early modern European states are both issues that have received considerable attention in recent historiography. This project will seek to shed greater light on both stories by uniting them through the activities of a single individual, Cornelius Vermuyden, in whose life and career they were inextricably linked doc17572 none LI Elasticity measurements on minerals are the bridge between the observed seismic velocity structure of the Earth and properties of the Earth at depth, such as chemical composition and temperature. The mineral physics community is poised to undertake a new generation of experiments, which will allow us to accurately determine the properties of deep-Earth materials under a new regime of pressure and temperature (P-T) conditions. We will undertake a coordinated, multi-institutional effort to develop advanced experimental and theoretical techniques for determining sound velocities and elastic moduli on Earth materials. We will build on the current technology that utilizes light scattering and ultrasonic methods and exploit the full use of synchrotron radiation facilities for simultaneous characterization. We will pursue new methodologies utilizing inelastic x-ray scattering or gigahertz ultrasonics to expand the current capabilities. We will closely integrate theoretical approaches with the experimental to ground-truth both. Using multiple techniques, including theoretical calculations, we will focus our efforts on determining the elastic properties of olivine and its high-pressure polymorphs under high P-T conditions, and standard materials for high P-T calibrations (e.g., Pt, Au, MgO, NACI). Samples will be synthesized at a central community facility. The accuracy of each technique will be improved through inter-laboratory cross-checks and comparison with theory. This collaborative approach will greatly advance the technology of high pressure geophysics, and focus a community effort on accurate determination of the elastic properties of the most important mantle phases. These results will, in turn, be used to clarify our view of mantle composition and thermal structure doc17573 none Weidner Quantitative rheological measurements on Earth materials have been conducted only under relatively low-pressure conditions corresponding to the depth of ~60 km or less. The main thrust of this project is to extend this limit, through technical developments, at least to ~800 km covering not only the upper mantle but also the transition zone and the lower mantle. We propose to establish a new inter-institutional program coordinated with COMPRES (Consortium for Materials Property Research in the Earth Sciences) by utilizing the infrastructure for operation of national facilities and educational program, and we will expand the capabilities of these facilities for the broader scientific community. Through inter-institutional collaboration, we will develop two new types of apparatus (a modified cubic apparatus (D-DIA) and a rotational Drickamer apparatus (RDA)) in addition to further improvements to the well-established deformation techniques using a multianvil apparatus (MA). Both D-DIA and RDA (as well as MA) can readily be fitted to synchrotron radiation facilities to allow quantitative measurements of stress and strain at high-pressure and temperature conditions. D-DIA is suited for quantitative rheology measurements including shear localization and resultant instabilities while RDA has a unique capability of large strain deformation experiments at high-pressures, an important feature for study of lattice preferred orientation. These apparatus will be used to obtain the first quantitative data set on rheological properties and deformation-induced microstructures of Earth and planetary materials under high-pressure, high-temperature conditions (to ~15-25 GPa, ~ K). The results of such measurements will contribute to better understand (i) the radial and lateral variation of rheological properties for whole mantle, (ii) the interaction of rheological behavior with chemical reactions including phase transformations, and (iii) the nature of deformation-induced microstructures such as lattice preferred orientation (which causes seismic anisotropy). The unique facility thus developed will be accessible to a large mineral and rock physics community and will significantly enhance the contribution of mineral and rock physics research to a wide range of solid Earth sciences doc17574 none Weidner COMPRES, the Consortium for Materials Property Research in the Earth Sciences, promotes research and education in the area of Earth Science materials properties. The goal of this research community is to improve our understanding of the Earth and other planetary bodies by better understanding the materials that make up these bodies at the conditions that are found within the bodies. Through a community-based consortium approach, COMPRES aims to provide the broadest possible access to advanced facilities for research on Earth materials. Broad access will be achieved in part through educational initiatives and improved user support at advanced, centralized research facilities. This program supports the infrastructure for education and research including operational costs for national facilities, development projects for the community research programs, educational efforts for the community, and a central office. The mission of COMPRES is focused within three themes: COMPRES Central, Community Facilities, and Infrastructure Development Projects. COMPRES is governed by the community through elected committees and officials. The consortium will enable a community-wide approach to setting research and development priorities, and identifying the most promising new areas of future technology and research doc17575 none Using Your Brain for a Change: Neuroscience and Identity in Self-Help Literature Anne Harrington Ginger Hoffman Harvard University What can a definition of a synapse offer individuals seeking hope, solace, and self-improvement? This postdoctoral project generates a detailed study of the role neuroscientific information plays within a widely used resource for self-betterment: the self-help literature. Specifically, a combination of historical, anthropological, and cultural science studies methods are used to realize three principal objectives: 1)to document the types of neuroscientific information relayed to the public via the self-help literature, 2)to explore how this information influences individuals identities and sense of agency, and 3) to chart how (1) and (2) have changed over time. The fellowship holder s hypothesis is that neuroscientific information within the self-help literature delivers complicated messages about the relationship between us and our bodies, and that these messages have profound implications for both who we are and who we can end up being. To explore this claim, critical textual analysis of the self-help literature is combined with interviews of self-help readers and self-help authors, and will result in the production of several scholarly articles and the foundations of a book.. These research activities are enhanced by three in-depth training activities: 1)graduate level coursework in the history of science, anthropology of science, and public understanding of science; 2) the development and teaching of an undergraduate course on the history and philosophy of neurobiological models of mental illness, and 3) participation in a interdisciplinary working group (named Psychopharmaceuticals and Identity) conducting ethnographic research. This training serves as a critical adjunct to Hoffman s graduate training in neuroscience, and enables her research to be conducted from a solid interdisciplinary base. Investigating the presence of neuroscientific data within the self-help literature helps both scientists and the public understand how scientific facts travel from the lab bench to popular culture, and indeed, how these facts shape concepts of personhood, self-control, and the ways in which hope and help are attained doc17576 none This research project, supported in the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, focuses on the use of reflection absorption infrared spectroscopy to characterize adsorbed intermediates on solid surfaces. Professor Trenary and his coworkers at the University of Illinois-Chicago will examine adsorbed species containing CN multiple bonds, which result from the reactions of methane and ammonia and related compounds on well characterized platinum surfaces. High quality experimental data, combined with density functional theory calculations, will be used to make structural assignments for these adsorbed intermediates. Instrumentation and method development also forms a significant portion of the work being carried out in this project. Reflection-absorption infrared spectroscopy is a very powerful tool for the identification of adsorbed intermediates in surface reaction chemistry. Professor Trenary and his group at the University of Illinois-Chicago, with the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, have developed an active laboratory for the development and use of this method to investigate surface reactions. Work in this project will concentrate on surface intermediates formed from the reactions of methane and ammonia adsorbed on platinum surfaces, with clear application to the understanding of HCN synthesis reactions doc17577 none The central theme of this dissertation project is to examine how democratic decision-making about science and technology occurs in a developing society where civil society is relatively well developed. Moreover, this study explores how ethics and values are brought into decisions concerning science and technology in a society which is trying to find ways to meet basic human needs of its population through development. The introduction of Bt cotton in India has been the source of ongoing controversy since the late s. This controversy and the discourse surrounding issues of Bt cotton in India makes it possible to ask what are the processes of arriving at social understandings and collective decisions about newly available science-based agricultural technologies. How do ethics and values enter into the controversy surrounding agribiotechnology? How are the efforts of actors facilitated by using science or inhibited from participation in decision-making processes by not using science? In a democratic developing society, how do science and non-scientific considerations (ethics, beliefs, needs and preferences) play out in decision-making processes? Funds for this project support the collection of data through three methods: semi-structured and structured interviews, participant observation, and content analysis to analyze how science, ethics and values are used in discourse concerning agribiotechnology doc17578 none PROJECT Patricia Ross, Analyzing the Concept of Mental Disorder This project is a philosophical examination of a very important concept in abnormal psychology and psychiatry -- that of a mental disorder. There is little agreement, in theory or practice, as to exactly what a mental disorder is. This is due, in large part, to fundamental disagreements about the basic concept of a disorder. These disagreements about the nature of disorder are, in turn, based on differing positions on key issues in our general understanding of science: reductive explanation, objectivity and values, and functional accounts of behavior. This project has three objectives. The first is to provide a general taxonomy of the various recent accounts of disorder. This taxonomy is not limited to mental disorders, but includes accounts of physical disease, which are needed for a thorough understanding of mental disorder. Special attention is paid to the fundamental assumptions, sometimes unstated, that motivate the accounts. These involve such issues as the common, but mistaken, assumption that any fully acceptable account of disorder will involve a reduction to a purely physiological basis, and the question of whether scientific objectivity is possible in a domain that appears to contain an unavoidable inclusion of value-laden concepts. This leads to the second objective, an analysis of the special problems surrounding the concept of a mental disorder. Some of these problems are inherited from accounts of physical disease. Perhaps the most important of these is the status of functional accounts of disorder, for such functional accounts are among the most promising current candidates. But even within the context of functional accounts there are challenges peculiar to an adequate account of mental disorder, for it has not so far been clear how the function of the mental can be characterized without importing some values that undermine the objectivity of the account. The third objective is to point the way to an adequate functional account of mental disorder that can avoid the general criticisms leveled against such accounts. This is done by establishing a central role for empirical psychology in characterizing the goals and functions of the mental. This is coupled to reevaluations of the role of reduction in science and the way in which scientific objectivity need not be undermined by the appearance of values in the account. The project puts some standard philosophical issues (reduction, objectivity, functionalism) in a new context, thereby acting as a testing ground for recent treatments of them. It also points the way out of a current stalemate in psychology and psychiatry, a stalemate that is due, in large part, to unnecessary allegiances to outmoded ideas about what an adequate account of disorder must look like doc17579 none The University of Kentucky is hosting a conference to bring together the recipients of Presidential Awards for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM). As part of the conference format, they will also include as participants those mentored by the PAESMEM awardees. The conference has two main themes: (1) To continue the efforts to organize PAESMEM recipients as a national resource for mentoring; and (2) To highlight success in mentoring, especially that involving postdoctoral, graduate, undergraduate, or high school student research doc17580 none In this project funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Dantus will use three-pulse, four-wave mixing (FWM) non-linear spectroscopy to study the dynamics of wave packet motion in the ground and excited states of NO2, CF3NO, and N2O4. The purpose of the work is to investigate intramolecular vibrational energy redistribution (IVR) and curve crossing dynamics in polyatomic systems and thereby open up the way for more general, and wider ranging investigations than done heretofore on diatomics. Specific questions to be answered in this research are about the initial steps of energy dissipation and IVR in polyatomics, what is the nature of wave packet localization in phase space for multidimensional systems, and what is the ground state dynamics in systems with chemically significant amounts of energy, up to 12,000 cm-1. This project deals with fundamental questions of how energy absorbed into specific molecular energy states redistributes itself throughout a molecule in the course of time. A good understanding of these intramolecular processes may lead to the laser control of chemical reactions. This research is undertaken with students and postdoctoral research associates. They will acquire training and knowledge in one the forefront areas of contemporary physical chemistry in preparation for advanced studies or employment in industry, government or academia doc17581 none In this project, the Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science at Case Western -. Reserve University (OEC) further realizes the potential of World Wide Web to be a major . resource for learning and practice of responsible practice in science and engineering. The OEC, which is staffed primarily by students, has become the foremost Web site for science and engineering ethics. It serves a wide audience ranging from pre-college students to distinguished senior practitioners and research investigators This project builds on and advances the ease of navigation, accessibility, responsiveness to users, and organization of content for which it is already known. Through a multi-site collaboration, the OEC advances learning and understanding of science and engineering ethics in the following areas: .Social and Ethical Implications of Information and Communication Technology, led by Joseph Herkert, North Carolina State University. Computer Ethics for Software Engineers and other Computing Professionals: led by Keith Miller, University of Illinois at Springfield. Academic Integrity: Cases and Commentaries for Scientists and Engineers, led by Elizabeth Kiss, the Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke University and Daisy Waryold, The Center for Academic Integrity, Duke University. .Ethical Issues in Genomics and Biotechnology: Cases and Commentaries,1ed by Elizabeth Kiss, the Kenan Institute for Ethics and Center for Genome Ethics, Law, and Policy, Duke University. .Ethics Education in Conjunction with Senior Design Projects or Thesis, led by Elysa Koppelman, Oakland University Through further indexing, organizing, and adding key words to materials on the site, the OEC will greatly aid those seeking to find information on the topics addressed on the OEC s pages. The organization of information extends to indexing of our introduction to materials maintained by others. This project sets the stage for still wider collaboration through the development of pilot collaborations between junior scholars in the U.S. and their colleagues in other countries doc17582 none From to , vertebrate paleontology enjoyed a central position among the sciences working out the details of Darwin s Theory of Evolution By Natural Selection. During the next twenty years, and the so-called modern synthesis of evolutionary biology, vertebrate paleontology moved to the periphery of disciplines now orbiting chromosome genetics and theoretical population genetics. Existing histories of vertebrate paleontology seem to accept this life span for the discipline: the very few that venture into the 20th century end before . The emergent new fields, conversely, gained origin myths told, debated, refined and studied scientists and historians alike. The dissertation research supported by this grant is a last phase of work that will support a dissertation in the history of biology. That project has three aims. First, it is an empirical project that will recover the history of American vertebrate paleontology between and . Second, the study will consider the role of history-writing by scientists as they forge a place for their discipline among others. Third, the project will consider the historiographic problems inherent to producing a new account of the evolutionary synthesis told from the perspective of an outsider discipline. How does the marginalization of a science and its history in the present relate to the project of describing the past moment in which that move was accomplished? The research carried out under this grant consists of interviews with scientists and historians who have contributed to our understanding of vertebrate paleontology s place in the evolutionary synthesis. Many of those men are at retirement age or older; the few who can give eye-witness accounts of events during the synthesis are invaluable to this study. Information and opinions from these conversations will be combined with completed research using primary- and secondary material. The perceptions of these scientists are crucial for a project intended to measure the impact of history-writing in science. A second, equally important product of this grant s research is the set of interview transcripts. In order to enlarge the set of primary materials representing vertebrate paleontology during the s and s, the set of interviews will be tape recorded, transcribed and deposited as a collection with the American Philosophical Society. The intention is to provide some sort of solution to this project s basic methodological concern with the connection between disciplines that are poorly represented in modern biology, in historical studies and in archives doc17583 none This award helps to support the participation of researchers in a workshop on internet research ethics. Four US-based scholars will meet with three U.K. European scholars and researchers to outline a research agenda directed towards establishing an ethics of Internet research. Similarities and ethically pertinent differences between traditional human subjects research and on-line research with human subjects will be considered. Such differences emerge because the Internet allows for varieties of research never before possible, raising new ethical questions. Needed are guidelines for Internet research that are genuinely global in their validity (as required for a global medium) while acknowledging important cultural and national differences that might require specific ethical codes. Workshop participants were chosen on the basis of their expertise both as internet researchers and ethicists who have worked extensively on the problems of Internet research ethics. The workshop will be held in conjunction and interaction with CEPE participants--moral philosophers who have long focussed on computer ethics hence providing an audience uniquely suited to engaging productively with the issues raised by the workshop. The workshop builds on recent efforts to develop such principles of research ethics, including several national statements developed in the United States and abroad. It also builds on the forthcoming report of the Ethics Working Committee (EWC) of the Association of Internet Researchers, which attempts a first synthesis of available analysis and guidelines and tentative proposals for local and global Internet research ethics. Expected outcomes of this workshop include a series of articles in a special issue of Ethics and Information Technology, workshop results posted on www.cddc.vt.edu aoir ethics , and stimulation of much many practical outcomes such as national and international guidelines or principles governing human research on-line doc17584 none It is generally held that proteins and nucleic acids are the two principle classes of naturally occurring biomolecules capable of acting as enzymes in living systems. However, it has also been demonstrated that some cyclic oligosaccharides can act as catalysts in very simple non-biological in vitro systems. The goal of this project is to expand upon these observations. Specifically, this project seeks to demonstrate that cyclic oligosaccharides (in some organisms under certain circumstances) may not only act as catalysts in biological systems, but also, as a direct consequence of their enzyme-like activities, play important and unexpected physiological roles for the organisms that synthesize them. The observation that naturally occurring oligosaccharides possess catalytic activities in biological circumstances may have broad and profound implications for our current understanding of biological chemistry, cellular enzymology, and evolutionary biology. Moreover, they may enable the design and exploitation of directed evolutionary or other schemes to generate families of oligo- and polysaccharide catalysts with novel and useful properties doc17585 none Extremely halophilic archaea inhabit brine pools containing 3-5 M NaCl, which are extraordinarily diverse and dynamic with respect to salinity, pH, temperature, pressure, nutrients, etc. In addition to their obligately halophilic character,some are also acidophilic, alkaliphilic, psychrophilic, barophilic, or slightly thermophilic. Extreme halophiles are easily cultured in the laboratory and are excellent experimental systems with well-developed genetic tools. However, thus far, only a single genome from an extremely halophilic archaeon, Halobacterium species NRC-1, has been sequenced. In order to study the genomic diversity of extreme halophiles, we plan to sequence the genome of Haloarcula marismortui, a metabolically versatile halophile with a high-resolution ribosome structure. If time and resources permit, additional genomic analysis will be conducted on diverse strains, including Natrialba asiatica, a non-pigmented alkaliphile. Halorubrum lacusprofundi, a psychrophile capable of growing at temperatures down to 4oC, Halosimplex carlsbadense, a likely ancient halophile recently isolated from a Permian brine inclusion, which appears to be a genetic chimera, and Halobacterium species GRB, a closely related strain to NRC-1. Sequencing will be conducted at the Institute for Systems Biology and annotation will be done at the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute, Center of Marine Biotechnology. This project will provide better understanding of biodiversity among extreme halophiles, including genome structure and evolution, adaptation to extreme environments, and lateral gene transfer. In the long term, the proposed work should provide novel applications in biotechnology, e.g. engineering salt tolerance in crop plants and development of new antibiotics. This is a Microbial Genome Sequencing Award funded through a collaborative program between the National Science Foundation and the Department of Agriculture Initiative for Future Agriculture and Food Systems doc17586 none What organization design factors account for the growth or decline of online learning communities? What does one need to know in order to build sustainable, professional interest groups online? On-line learning communities in this project refers to discussion forums devoted to topics of professional management interest, such as knowledge management, supply chain management, or customer relationship management. The forums are publicly accessible through the Internet and attract professionals who have similar interests and confront practical problems related to the topic at hand. Meta-communities are the full collection of online communities devoted to anyone topic area. Online learning communities offer the potential to operate as inter-organizational professional groups, that is, as relatively distinctive entities with their own participants, knowledge resources and ongoing routines. In a sense, each community is akin to a new firm in an industry or market that competes with other firms to attract resources and grow. Of scientific interest is the question of why some of these communities grow and thrive whereas others fail to flourish, or become active for a time and then die. The research begins by examining one full population (i.e., meta-community) of all online communities devoted to a single topic area and then expands to include a second meta-community in order to test the generalizability of findings. Three types of analyses will be conducted within each meta-community: Estimation of the effects of community size, posting volume, linked resources, and discussion routines on community growth and mortality rates Mapping of social network structures, including the strength of information exchange ties within the communities and inter-community participation patterns Content coding of communication to gauge amounts and types of organizational learning that occur in each community, specifically, question asking, feedback seeking, experimentation, and reflection. Communities that grow and thrive will be compared with those that have died or failed to thrive. The research complements the work of other scholars who are investigating samples of online communities but not populations, who study special niche or general purpose communities other than communities of practicing managers, and who examine the social life of online communities rather than their organization structures. The findings should be directly useful to online community building activities. The data will be made available to researchers at other universities interested in the study of online communities and new organizational forms doc17587 none The objective of the workshop is to facilitate use of Internet-enabled technologies in conducting fundamental and applied research, disseminating results and data between collaborating universities, and transferring research and applications to the interested public. Specifically, the workshop will foster interaction among ESS researchers at GPN alliance-member Universities who are interested in 1) enhancing their individual research efforts, 2) developing new collaborative research efforts, and 3) exploring the potential for GPN resources in enhancing research infrastructure at member Universities. GPN Alliance Universities include: North Dakota University, North Dakota State University, University of North Dakota, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, South Dakota State University, University of South Dakota, University of Kansas, University of Kansas Medical Center Kansas State University, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, University of Oklahoma, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, University of Tulsa, Oklahoma State University, University of Arkansas, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, University of Arkansas Medical Sciences, University of Missouri-Columbia, University of Missouri To facilitate the objective and goals of the workshop, researchers will be provided an overview of the network and its resources, exposed to examples of technologies that are currently available, and will hear from fellow GPN ESS researchers about research projects and tools being developed in the other universities. To support and facilitate follow-up meetings, discussions, future proposals and collaborative efforts, and to facilitate use of the high performance network in the ESS research community, each workshop attendee will be provided with a PolyCom ViaVideo (H.323) videoconference unit. The PolyCom ViaVideo is USB-based desktop videoconference unit that utilizes Internet2 networking and provides business-quality video. The equipment will provide attendees with an important tool to assist in follow-up discussions and in continuing collaborative research and proposal development efforts doc17588 none The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics David Kaiser MIT Unlike traditional approaches to the history and philosophy of theoretical physics, which have been framed as intellectual or conceptual histories, this project examines the history of recent physics with a focus on calculational skills, local practices, and theoretical tools and techniques. In particular, this project traces the history of a theoretical tool which came to dominate nearly every branch of modern physics: Richard Feynman s simple line-drawings, introduced in the late s. Of central interest is how generations of young theorists learned to frame their research in terms of the diagrams, in and out of a series of competing theoretical frameworks for describing sub-atomic matter. Such a skills-based view allows historians to unpack the history of postwar theoretical physics from the ground up, as a story ultimately about designing, deploying, and disputing the tools which undergird everyday calculations. Complementing earlier studies of conceptual worldviews or paradigms, Kaiser s historical project concentrates on the simultaneous crafting of research practices and of the scientific practitioners who put them to work. Focusing on Feynman diagrams and their dispersion from the late s through the mid- s illuminates larger transitions within postwar physics, including changing notions of how to collaborate with roomfuls of graduate students; how to make sense of unprecedented reams of experimental data; how to train young physicists at the postdoctoral stage; and how to communicate new research techniques in mimeographed summer school lecture notes and preprints. The competing uses and interpretations of Feynman diagrams during the early postwar decades can only be understood within the context of these institutional and pedagogical transitions. At stake was nothing less than what should count as theoretical physics, and how someone should be trained to become a theorist. This project should therefore be of interest both to historians and sociologists of modern physics, as well as to philosophers of science who work on theory construction and selection. The expected outcome is book on the early history of Feynman diagrams, as well as conference presentations and published articles doc17589 none The Blackfeet Community College-Rural Systemic Initiative (BCC-RSI) proposal is an outgrowth of an earlier effort; namely, the Tribal College-RSI that targeted a larger geographical area. Having been a part of the earlier challenge to coordinate systemic reform efforts for several Indian reservations in five states, BCC-RSI proposes to concentrate its reform efforts on the Blackfeet Reservation, which consists of approximately 1.5 million acres of land located in Glacier County in north central Montana. The current population on the reservation is approximately 9,000 people. Two separate school districts (Browning and Heart Butte) located within the boundaries of the reservation serve approximately 1,900 students. BCC-RSI proposes to service all of the three schools from the Heart Butte School District and five of eight schools from the Browning School District. Of these eight schools, the efforts of BCC-RSI would impact 98% of the K-8 Indian student population and 100% of the Indian high school students on the Blackfeet Reservation. The BCC-RSI proposes to continue to impact student achievement in schools on the reservation by promoting the NSF drivers in addition to addressing the social cultural needs of the students and teachers that were identified during their development efforts doc17590 none The focus of this workshop is to define the fundamental technical issues critical for the development of low-temperature fuel cells. The workshop is scheduled to take place during November, at the National Science Foundation. The collective expertise of the group will identify feasible approaches to improved understanding and to establish an agenda for basic engineering research that will address these needs. The fuel-cell industry may have a significant impact on the consumer market in the future, playing a role wherever electrical power is needed. Although theoretically capable of high efficiency, the catalyst and transport processes limit actual performance. Engineering challenges of integrating and controlling the fuel-cell system (fuel processor, fuel cell, and power conditioning) must be overcome, especially for transient operation. Areas to be addressed include electrodes, membranes, fuel storage and conversion, and modeling. The basic sciences that support fuel-cell development are varied and require an interdisciplinary approach. Fuel cells have the potential to provide a clean source of electrical power for household, industrial, and transportation applications. A report defining the fundamental scientific and engineering issues along with research approaches will be prepared doc17591 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator:Richard Alkire Institution:University of Illinois The objective of this collaborative effort is to improve understanding of how surface roughness and shape evolution are influenced by trace quantities of solution additives during electrodeposition of metals and alloys. Multiscale simulations of the electrodeposition process including both continuum and non-continuum behavior will be performed. Hypotheses for how additives influence surface roughness evolution will be inferred from large datasets obtained through atomic force microscopy (AFM) measurements carried out in conjunction with high throughput electrochemical cells and well-characterized model additive systems. Hypotheses will be refined through quantitative comparison of these data with multiscale simulations of roughness evolution. Non-continuum phenomena will be modeled by a three-dimensional kinetic Monte Carlo method that simulates how roughness evolution is controlled by additives. Verification experiments that measure shape evolution on surfaces of convoluted geometry will be carried out to test predictions over multiple length scales. This work will lead to a better understanding of processes used in the manufacture of novel structures formed by electrodeposition of metals, alloys and semiconductors doc17592 none Public Science: Discourse on the Strategic Defense Initiative, - Gusterson Slayton MIT Scientists hold a paradoxical place in American society today, for while their knowledge is woven into the fabric of everyday human life, scientists themselves are often imagined to dwell above the plane of everyday human concerns. This postdoctoral project explores this paradox -- both its roots and its implications for science policy and communications -- by examining dialogue on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in the mid- s. Three immediate objectives lie in examinations of three interacting communities: scientists in the political sphere, journalists and others presenting the debate, and a pluralistic public. Findings from this research are to be communicated in academic journals, in conference papers, and in ongoing dialogue with local scholars. Longer-range goals tie this research to the retraining of Rebecca Slayton in historical and sociological studies of science and technology. Slayton builds on doctoral training in physical chemistry at Harvard, working under the sponsorship of PI Hugh Gusterson and co-PI David Kaiser, both at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This project brings together historical studies of scientists in the political sphere and studies of public communication of science. In debate over SDI, the same scientists acted as advisors and political activists, straining a long-standing tension between fears of technical tyranny and the need for technical expertise. Slayton examines the political roles that scientists assumed in debate surrounding SDI from a historical perspective, contributing to an understanding of the shifting role of the scientist in society. Because this role has been reflected in popular depictions of scientists, this project also examines public images of scientists and technology, as portrayed in magazines, newspapers, and on television. By comparing portrayals within and among these media, this work emphasizes how the constraints of particular media shape presentations of science and technology. Finally, this project examines discourse about scientists and SDI among several communities, analyzing the role particular communal values played in understanding science communication as an interactive process. Slayton s retraining involves coursework in sociological and historical approaches to science will build relevant methodological skills; courses in media studies; and teaching an undergraduate seminar course with the hope of stimulating dialogue about popular voices of science and their implications for the social roles of scientists. Her research plan includes interviewing scientists and analyzing their technical assessments and political statements; gathering and analyzing public presentations of scientific aspects of SDI in newspapers, magazines, and on television; examining public discourse in letters to editors in a variety of newspapers and among several smaller communities with common concerns. Ultimately, this project result in a better understanding of dialogue between scientists and publics, a dialogue that is central to today s science policy and culture doc17593 none Hemley We propose to develop the next generation static ultrahigh-pressure apparatus that will allow an increase in sample volumes in excess of 100 times those currently available in conventional diamond cells at megabar pressures. This will enable myriad mainstream analytical techniques currently unavailable for ultrahigh-pressure research, including those required for the successful utilization of major neutron and synchrotron radiation facilities that are coming on line. The new class of high-pressure cells will also improve measurement accuracy for existing in situ probe techniques, provide well-calibrated hydrostatic pressures and uniform temperatures, allow higher and more uniform temperatures to be achieved with laser heating, and provide robust and user-friendly operation. These capabilities are required to address numerous current problems in high-pressure geochemistry, geophysics, and planetary science; as such, the proposed advances are expected to have major impact in each of these areas. The increases in sample volume for the new cells will result from a combination of improvements that include enlarged anvils, modified culet shapes, designed gaskets, and added binding support for the anvils. Single-crystal diamonds synthesized at high pressures and temperatures will be enlarged by homoepitaxial chemical vapor deposition overgrowth of single-crystal diamond films to create anvils reaching 25 carats and above. Synthetic moissanite (SiC) anvils will be used for testing and for 100-fold volume increases at pressures up to 50 GPa. The larger sample chamber, in turn, will remove restrictions currently imposed by microscopic volumes and greatly improve the pressure-temperature conditions and probing capabilities at ultrahigh pressures. New presses will be built to provide the loads necessary for the larger volumes. The project will be carried out in coordination with the newly formed COnsortium for Materials Properties Research in the Earth Sciences (COMPRES), through which the new high-pressure capabilities will be made available to the high-pressure geoscience community doc17594 none Majumdar This award supports the participation of American scientists in a U.S.-Japan seminar on nanoscale thermal science and engineering to be held in San Francisco, California from June 25-28, . The co-organizers are Professor Arunava Majumdar of the University of California, Berkeley and Professor Ken Okazaki at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan. Both Japan and the U.S. are deeply committed to the emerging field of nanotechnology. This seminar will present an opportunity to share their knowledge in the area of nanoscale thermophysics and energy conversion, which is key to nanotechnology. Examples of this include: transport and interactions between electrons, phonons, and photons in low-dimensional nanostructures (semiconductor superlattices, nanowires, quantum dots); novel thermoelectric and optoelectronic phenomena and devices on nanostructured; thin film growth and cluster formation; experimental techniques involving scanning probe microscopes; femtosecond laser diagnostics and probing of materials; and molecular dynamic and Monte Carlo simulations of energy conversion and transport of nanostructures. Although a lot of effort in the past has been directed towards understanding the electronic and materials behavior of nanostructures, the thermophysics of nanostructures and nanodevices as well as biomolecular transport phenomena in micro nanodevices have not been adequately addressed. It must be recognized that although the nature of physical phenomena at nanometer scales can be quite diverse, they must all satisfy the basic laws of thermodynamics. Hence thermophysics at nanometer scales provides a unique window to study a wide variety of phenomena. For biomolecular analysis, there is tremendous opportunity to use the thermodynamics and fluidics of biomolecules such as DNA and proteins to understand their transport and transformations, which are both fundamental in biotechnology. The project advances international human resources through the participation of many junior faculty, postdocs and graduate students. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of the research in the Journal Microscale Thermophysical Engineering doc17595 none This Science and Technology Studies Dissertation Improvement Grant examines the history of roads in West-Central Africa from to , analyzing this technology along its material, political and cultural dimensions. The grant primarily supports travel to access published archival materials, published sources and to perform oral histories, primarily in France and West-Central Africa, in order to shed light on roads as material artifacts, political instruments, and the locus of cultural meanings, all built through the sometimes-clashing agency of Africans and Westerners. Over the course of the 20th century, roads of various sorts became increasingly important as a primary site or contact zone for encounters between westerners and Africans. But westerners and Africans each brought their own, sometimes widely differing, assumptions and expectations about roads to these encounters. Uncovering the ways both westerners and Africans perceived and used roads is thus crucial to understanding the nature and impact of encounters between Africa and the west, and to understanding the complex roles of technology in those encounters. The construction and maintenance of roads in west-central Africa during the 20th century posed significant challenges and entailed difficult (and revealing) decisions. The researcher will draw out the technological, political, social, and symbolic aspects of roads both over the course of the colonial occupation and as post-independence African nations maintained, expanded, and found new uses for road systems inherited from colonial governments. The project also argues for the pervasive and transforming role of a particular technology, roads, not only on a policy level but also in the day-to-day lives of and encounters between westerners and Africans in twentieth-century Africa. This dissertation, then, includes the voices of Africans, as well as westerners, who variously helped to build or repair roads, lived along (or away from) roads, and traveled along roads doc17596 none The objective of this work is to prepare very large molecular and ionic capsules and investigate their molecular recognition properties. A number of calixarenes and alkyl substituted resorcinarenes and pyrogallolarenes will be or have been prepared and the self assembly of these materials into pentamers and hexamers will be studied. The spherical assemblies thus formed will be characterized by a number of methods. These spherical assemblies will then be systematically presented with potential guest molecules and mixtures of potential guests to gain information about their molecular recognition properties. Lastly, hexameric assemblies with very long alkyl tails will be tested for their ability to form even larger assemblies via hexamer-hexamer interactions through these tails. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Jerry L. Atwood of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Dr. Atwood will explore the synthesis of spherical molecular and ionic capsules. Tetramers of phenols related to naturally occuring compounds can self assemble into a variety of Platonic and Archimedean polyhedral shapes. The resulting spherical assemblies have defined internal volumes, hence the term molecular capsules, capable of recognizing and distinguishing other molecular guests. Such assemblies may have practical applications for drug delivery or the removal of contaminants from mixtures. Students trained as a result of working on this project will gain experience in inorganic materials research as well as supramolecular organic chemistry, hence they will have skills needed by both the specialty chemicals and pharmaceutical industries doc17597 none The proposers will catalog and analyze classroom barriers-attitudes, concepts, skills, instructional strategies-that prevent students egress to higher level mathematics classes, and to study and compare parental attitudes and interventions between majority and minority parents toward their children s course-taking habits and decisions. The mathematics specialists involved in the exploratory phase of the work will compile school-specific and network composite lists of barrier concepts, and will then develop a set of instructional strategies and resources to redress the barriers. Minority and majority parents of students in grades 5-7 will be interviewed as to their understanding of the role of higher level coursework, and access to such courses; the effectiveness of district communications; their understanding of district policies; and their relationship with schools doc17598 none Bass Elasticity measurements on minerals are the bridge between the observed seismic velocity structure of the Earth and properties of the Earth at depth, such as chemical composition and temperature. The mineral physics community is poised to undertake a new generation of experiments, which will allow us to accurately determine the properties of deep-Earth materials under a new regime of pressure and temperature (P-T) conditions. We will undertake a coordinated, multi-institutional effort to develop advanced experimental and theoretical techniques for determining sound velocities and elastic moduli on Earth materials. We will build on the current technology that utilizes light scattering and ultrasonic methods and exploit the full use of synchrotron radiation facilities for simultaneous characterization. We will pursue new methodologies utilizing inelastic x-ray scattering or gigahertz ultrasonics to expand the current capabilities. We will closely integrate theoretical approaches with the experimental to ground-truth both. Using multiple techniques, including theoretical calculations, we will focus our efforts on determining the elastic properties of olivine and its high-pressure polymorphs under high P-T conditions, and standard materials for high P-T calibrations (e.g., Pt, Au, MgO, NACI). Samples will be synthesized at a central community facility. The accuracy of each technique will be improved through inter-laboratory cross-checks and comparison with theory. This collaborative approach will greatly advance the technology of high pressure geophysics, and focus a community effort on accurate determination of the elastic properties of the most important mantle phases. These results will, in turn, be used to clarify our view of mantle composition and thermal structure doc17599 none A student-based program to establish a genomic database of bacteriophages that infect agronomically important bacteria, especially agricultural pathogens will be established. The initial bacterial host will be Pseudomonas syringae, which causes a number of important plant diseases. After a development period, the program will constitute the laboratory core of an advanced undergraduate beginning graduate course in Phage Genomics, in which the teams of students will adopt a bacteriophage, determine and annotate its complete genome sequence, and conduct standard physical and physiological analyses during a full year of supervised research and lecture course activity. In addition to the educational goals served by this effort, the phage genomics database will be a resource to address questions about bacteriophage evolution in the context of plant bacterial hosts and the influence of phage on plant-bacteria interactions, and to probe the possible utility of phage cocktails in biocontrol applications against acute or chronic diseases of plants. This is a Microbial Genome Sequencing Award funded through a collaborative activity between the National Science Foundation and the Department of Agriculture Initiative for Future Agriculture and Food Systems doc17600 none Weare This grant provides partial support for the acquisition of a cluster of networked PCs (Beowulf cluster) dedicated to the prediction of the properties of ore forming fluids and aluminosilicate melts. Additional support will cover the salary of a postdoctoral scholar who will develop an interactive web site and necessary software to allow collaborators in the geosciences to initiate, view and control ab-initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) simulations of the chemical properties of hydrothermal fluids and the structure and dynamics of molten aluminosilicates over a wide range of temperatures and pressures. AIMD simulations facilitated on this multi-CPU Beowulf cluster will support and enhance experimental spectroscopic investigations of the chemical structure and dynamics of hydrothermal fluids and silicate melts and should offer new insights into the behavior of these fluids in a P-T range largely inaccessible to experimentation doc17601 none Casper This award supports the participation of American scientists in a U.S.-Japan seminar on neutrino-nucleus interactions in the few GeV region to be held in Irvine, California from December 2-4, . The co-organizers are Professor David Casper of the University of California at Irvine and Dr. Makoto Sakuda of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba, Japan. The recent discovery of neutrino oscillation represents the first compelling evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model, and has triggered enormous interest in future experiments using intense neutrino sources. Unfortunately, the increased statistical precision afforded by more powerful beams will be of little value without corresponding progress in reducing systematic uncertainties. The very large target masses necessary to detect neutrinos are typically comprised of nuclei (Carbon, Oxygen or Iron), but data on neutrino-nucleus reactions are sparse and the effects of the nuclear target are poorly understood. Moreover, the few-GeV energy regime corresponds to the boundary between quasi-elastic and resonant pion-production processes on one hand, and deep-inelastic scattering on the other, where two qualitatively different pictures of the reaction dynamics must be reconciled. Searches for rare oscillation signals in the K2K, Mini-BOONE and MINOS experiments, as well as possible future studies aimed at probing leptonic CP violation, will rely on an accurate description of exclusive neutrino-nucleus cross-sections at these energies. As partners in these experiments the U.S. and Japan are at the forefront of the exciting and rapidly evolving field of neutrino physics. This workshop will bring together theorists and experimentalists from the particle and nuclear physics communities to lay the groundwork for future progress in understanding neutrino interactions. They will attempt to confront existing models of neutrino scattering and nuclear physics with available data and synthesize them into a coherent description, which can be applied to planned or proposed experiments. Strategies for gleaning new information from near-term experiments will be explored, as well as the prospects for collaboration on future precision measurements. The project advances international human resources through the participation of a number of graduate students. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish proceedings of the workshop on their web sites doc17602 none The investigators will continue scientific studies of the magnetosphere with detailed data analysis of multi-point observations. The effort will take advantage of the unprecedented coverage provided by ground-based observatories and satellites launched as part of NASA s International Solar Terrestrial Physics Program. Specific goals are to study the pressure distribution in the magnetosphere, to assess the accuracy of global models, and to demonstrate techniques for assimilation of data. The work includes examining plasma pressure distributions during storms and substorms and comparing the pressure values with those inferred from low-altitude Defense Meteorological Satellite Program satellites. The results will help develop a reliable model for pressure in the magnetosphere and pave the way for data assimilation in future space weather models doc17603 none As a component of the State Department s contribution to the World Summit in Johannesburg (September ), this study will examine the geographic foundation for natural resource management and development issues in Africa. Specific examples will be drawn from case-study regions where USAID and other agencies have broad experience. Centered on a place-based, integrative framework, the study will draw on experiences of U.S. government agencies, international groups, decision-makers, and experts to examine 1) existing remote-sensing and GIS efforts in case-study regions, and lessons learned from those efforts, 2) existing levels of local expertise and technology, and ongoing efforts in geospatial capacity building, 3) a range of questions relating to the practical application of new and existing spatial data (e.g. required resolution, challenges of integrating layers of environmental and social data, and baseline data against which future change can be measured); 4) the role of decision support systems in the application of these data; and 5) options for making efforts sustainable beyond doc17604 none This Doctoral dissertation research moves beyond the existing literature on the politics of economic development by focusing on the political economy of industrial promotion programs at the subnational level. Market-oriented reforms in combination with administrative decentralization have increased the importance of subnational governments for promoting industrial development, yet we do not have adequate explanations for either the level or the type of subnational government action in industrial promotion. This Doctoral Dissertation Research combines in-depth qualitative comparison of industrial policy in three states in both India and Mexico with a large-n cross-sectional time-series analysis of sub national policy choice. Focusing upon variations both in the level and type of subnational development policy, the research enhances our understanding of the ways in which institutional context shapes policy choices among policy alternatives. The Ph.D. student draws on a variety of types of evidence, including interviews with elected officials, political party leaders, ministry bureaucrats, domestic industrialists, labor union officials, leaders of industrial associations, and foreign investors; surveys of industrial development offices and private sector development organizations; examination of legislative records; and measures of institutional factors, including executive power, legislative professionalism, the competitive balance of the party system, and labor and business strength. Using these types of information, the study explores the factors guiding developmental policy choice on the basis of a comparative analysis of state-level politics in India and Mexico. By bridging the gap separating the study of development efforts that rely upon the statist promotional policies from those emphasizing market-oriented policies of deregulation, the current study contributes to theoretical work on the political economy of development, enhances our understanding of subnational politics in emerging market nations, and establishes a stronger theoretical basis for understanding the ways in which variations in institutional context shape choices among development strategies. doc17605 none This award supports theoretical research and education motivated in part by the desire to improve the accuracy of density functional theory as practiced in condensed matter physics and quantum chemistry. The PI describes a ladder of approximations for the exchange-correlation functional in which the first rung is the local spin density approximation and the second rung is the generalized gradient approximation (GGA). These standard approximations do not enable electronic structure calculations with chemical accuracy. In particular, they do not accurately describe strongly correlated or strongly spatially inhomogeneous densities, polarizabilities of long-chain molecules, or highly excited states. The PI proposes to address these problems through work on several projects: (1) Develop and test approximations for the exchange-correlation functional that correspond to the third and fourth rungs of the ladder of approximations. The meta-GGA would be developed as a controlled interpolation between the slowly varying and iso-orbital density limits. The hyper-GGA uses the exact exchange energy density to achieve freedom from self-interaction error and a correct non-uniform scaling behavior. (2) The uniform electron gas will be explored using a modified pair density functional method with a self-consistent electron-electron interaction. An energy interpolation between exact high- and low-density limits will be used to explore the spin-polarized electron gas. The results will be compared with much more computationally expensive diffusion Monte Carlo calculations. (3) Diffusion Monte Carlo, density-functional theory, and RPA studies of the jellium surface energy will be carried out in parallel to resolve the apparent discrepancy between surface energies calculated using diffusion Monte Carlo and other methods. (4) Calculations for real solids will test a new analytic equation of state and will construct a Kohn-Sham potential for the orbital-dependent meta-GGA and hyper-GGA energy functionals. (5) A Laplacian-level meta-GGA will be constructed non-empirically for the orbital kinetic energy. This project also contributes directly to the education of undergraduate and graduate students, and to the professional development of postdoctoral researchers. This award supports fundamental theoretical research with an aim to improve the accuracy of density-functional based theories of materials. Analytical and numerical methods will be used. Density functional theory is widely used to predict a variety of materials properties, such as crystal structures, electron spin densities, and phonon modes. Another component of the PI s research would study fundamental problems associated with the electron gas and improved approximations for the kinetic energy. The homogeneous electron gas plays a fundamental role in the practical application of density functional theory. This award also supports education at the undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels doc17606 none SES Proposal Scientific Pluralism, A Workshop to be held at the University of Minnesota Oct. 10-13, C. K. Waters, University of Minnesota This project supports a small interdisciplinary workshop entitled Scientific Pluralism at the University of Minnesota, October 10 - 13, . The Principal Investigators are bringing together leading philosophers of science and scientists who have independently advanced views consistent with the idea that some natural phenomena cannot be fully explained by a single theory or fully investigated using a single approach. The aim of the workshop is to develop an understanding of the various forms of pluralism being advanced and to explore their philosophical implications. The goal is to determine whether a consistent philosophical account of scientific pluralism can be developed that goes beyond the mere rejection of the unity of science doctrine. This workshop brings together philosophers who have advanced pluralist solutions to puzzles encountered in their analysis of science with practicing scientists. The philosophers and scientists participating in the meeting represent a broad range of sciences including physics and mathematics, biology, and social and behavioral science. Philosophical participants are focusing their research and workshop presentations on detailed case studies that warrant pluralist interpretations. Workshop discussion includes scientists commentaries on the detailed case studies and general discussions on the broad philosophical implications of the presented works. The Principal Investigators plan to publish results of the workshop in a volume of Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science doc17607 none The Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Howard University is requesting a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) to plan and execute a two-day conference, Enabling a Basic Research Culture at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) in the Social Sciences October 18-20, . The guiding principle behind the conference is that it seeks to provide an opportunity for young social science faculty at HBCUs to articulate their research goals, the potential impact of this research on their teaching and what is needed to facilitate and sustain a research culture at their institutions. More generally, this conference is important because of its potential impact. The anticipated outcome is a set of strategies that can aid the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other funding agencies who seek to achieve greater diversity (i.e., institution, gender, race and ethnicity) in their support of research activities in the social sciences. The project proposes to identify and engage young and new social science faculty in the construction of strategies that will enable them to increase their participation in basic research. For example, as a first step, using doctoral degree production data from NSF s Survey of Doctorate Recipients as a measure of actual or potential basic research and expertise, the investigators have identified a group of HBCUs who are likely to expand their social science research capacity with additional funding. Within these institutions the investigators propose to identify young and new faculty who are currently engaged in research. The focus is on new faculty because they are seen as having the greatest likelihood of establishing and building a research culture for the social sciences at these institutions through increased exposure to funding opportunities and networking with researchers at other HBCUs and majority institutions. The conference will consist of three plenary sessions with researchers who have successfully secured research funding and have studied or participated in projects to increase minority participation in the nation s basic research enterprise. Working sessions will be held to brainstorm and articulate what is needed to enable interested faculty at HBCU s to conduct basic research and to then integrate a research culture in their teaching activities. A funding opportunities session will also be held with program directors from NSF. Specific issues that will be addressed include: (1) cultivating research capabilities in junior faculty, (2) exploiting mechanisms for basic research funding, (3) the role of research in the primarily undergraduate institution, and (4) establishing a research culture for the social sciences. The recommendations that emerge from the conference will be disseminated to HBCU s, NSF and other funding agencies. The ultimate goal is to outline strategies for a primary concern-- how both HBCU faculty and funding agencies can increase the number of scholars competing for research funds, the quality of proposals, and ultimately the success rate of investigators from social science scholars from HBCUs for large support grants doc17608 none This award is in partial support of the Gordon Conference on Sensory Transduction in Microorganisms to be held Jan 13 - Jan 18, at the Ventura Beach Hotel in Ventura, CA. This meeting provides a unique opportunity for cross fertilization of cutting edge research in prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms. The isolated, informal atmosphere characteristic of the Gordon Conference format is important for providing the opportunities for generating novel concepts. It is anticipated that there will be around 150 attendees from the United States and abroad to discuss the latest developments and ideas regarding the molecular mechanisms of signal transduction in unicellular microorganisms. The species covered will include bacteria, yeast, slime molds and ciliates, as well as selected examples of speicalized cell types from higher organisms (e.g., pollen tubes, neutrophils) where sensory transduction mechanisms are key to functionality. There will be 9 formal sessions, each consisting of an introduction by a leading researcher, 4 - 5 major presentations, and 2 - 3 minitalks that provide special opportunities for students and postdoctoral fellows to present poster data. The selection criteria for invited speakers (and participants) include expertise relevant to the meeting topics, gender balance, minority representation, and promise as a future scientific leader. The sessions will be integrated across species and explore fundamental topics such as receptor structure and function, transmembrane signaling, intracellular signaling pathways, and coupling to output responses. In addition, sessions on important emerging topics such as microbial biofilms quorum sensing and genomic proteomic approaches will aid in directing future research. A combination of poster and oral presentations will enable scientists ranging from graduate students to senior professors to present and discuss their work doc17327 none Instrumental records of climate in California extend back approximately 100 years and are too short in length to capture the full range of natural variability of temperature and precipitation in the state. The project will provide records of climatic variability that extend back over 12,000 years. The project will analyze fossil midge fly larva (Chironomids), crustaceans (Cladocera), unicellular aquatic algae (diatoms), terrestrial plant microfossils, and geochemical evidence from lake sediments from the eastern Sierra Nevada to reconstruct records of temperature and effective moisture that extend back over 12,000 years. Chronologies will be linked to the records by the radiocarbon dating of organic matter in the lake sediments. Previous work has developed mathematical models that provide numerical estimates of past temperature and effective moisture from fossil chironomid and diatom assemblages. Previous preliminary work has also led to the recovery of several lake sediment records that extend back past 11,000 years in age and show clear evidence of both high and low frequency changes in temperature and effective moisture during the transition from glacial to modern climatic conditions between 12,000 and years ago. This project will complete analysis of these core sections. The project will then use the existing lake sediment cores and new cores collected from climatically sensitive settings to reconstruct changes in temperature and effective moisture over the past years. The project will construct records with better than 50 year temporal resolution for both high and mid-elevation sites. In addition to the significant multi-centennial to millennial variations seen in the glacial to non-glacial transition, the project will use previously published data for the past years to uncover evidence of multi-decadal to multi-centennial droughts during the past years. The temporal patterns of variations in California temperature and effective moisture will be compared to temporal patterns of variability evident in cores from the North Pacific Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean and Greenland Ice Cap, in order to help deduce the larger scale causes of long-term variability in California climate. Long-term climate records are essential to anticipating the full range of variability in the severity and duration of long-term drought periods, wet periods and warm and cold periods that can occur in California. The records will help determine if there is long-term periodicity in phenomena such as multi-decadal droughts that will make such events more predictable. These records of past climate will also help in assessing the role of changes in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in driving climatic variations in California. Finally, the long-term climatic records provided by this project will furnish baseline data on natural variability of climate in California that will allow for the detection of truly unusual variations that might be attributable to greenhouse warming. The records will be of importance for water resource management, forestry and conservation management, and climatic change detection and management doc17610 none Bowman In this application, it is proposed to apply the Thermal Diffusion Probe (TDP) technique which quantifies perfusion to monitor gut ischemia by a proxy measurement of rectal wall blood flow. Feasibility will be demonstrated by the correlation of rectal wall blood flow with small bowel blood flow in a porcine model. Successful demonstration of this correlation will be followed by the bioengineering of a non-invasive probe system for the measurement of rectal wall perfusion. Shock occurs when arterial pressure and subsequently tissue blood flow (perfusion) drop so low that the delivered oxygen is not able to meet the metabolic needs of the tissue. During shock, the body directs blood to the heart and the brain, often at the expense of sacrificial organs such as the liver, skin, muscle, and gut. Prolonged shock may diminish blood flow to the gut such that the normal intestinal barrier function is disrupted and gut-derived bacteria and endotoxins are translocated to other organs via the blood. This, in turn, may lead to bacteremia, sepsis, inflammatory response and ultimately multi-organ failure - one of the major causes of patient mortality in the ICU. Conventional resuscitation therapy is directed toward first assuring that oxygen is being supplied to the patient and that it is being transported through the circulation to the organs to support life. Circulatory distress is addressed with the infusion of fluids and pharmacological agents (inotropes) to increase cardiac output. Therapy is typically titrated to attain a target heart rate (HR), systolic blood pressure, mean arterial blood pressure (MAP), urine output, and normal arterial pH. Cardiac output (CO) may also be monitored. While these conventional parameters are thought to give an indirect indication of tissue oxygenation, they correlate poorly with survival in critically ill patients (Astiz and Rackow, ; Shoemaker et al., ). Techniques have been proposed to monitor parameters (pO2, pH, pCO2, lactate, etc.) in sacrificial tissues that are susceptible to hypoperfusion, hypoxia and ischemia to provide an optimal ipend pointll to guide resuscitation therapy. While these parameters are an attempt to assess the local tissue blood flow, and hence the oxygen delivery, they also depend on metabolism and their respective arterial blood concentrations. It is evident that a reliable monitor for gut ischemia could significantly impact the management of shock patients doc17611 none Professor Luis Echegoyen of Clemson University is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program to study the electrochemistry of fullerene compounds. Within this theme, there are four areas proposed: reactivity of electrochemically induced reactions, including photovoltaic applications, preparation of new crystalline materials and metal ion endohedral complexes. The reaction mechanism to be studied is the removal of certain cyclopropane adducts from methanofullerenes. The field of fullerene chemistry including electrochemical study has grown since the discovery of this new carbon form just over a decade ago. New materials with potential for energy storage and sensors are beginning to emerge from this research endeavor doc17612 none The objective of the proposed research is to explore the use of the nonlinear optical technique of second-harmonic generation (SHG) for developing a sub-surface imaging approach that is capable of non-destructive detection and evaluation of corrosion and cracking of painted metals and composite layered materials. The experimental arrangement will make use of femtosecond light pulses in the 800- nm spectral range from a Ti:sapphire laser and amplifier system and an optical parametric amplifier pumped by it for second harmonic generation. The laser beam will be focused onto a spot in the sample; SHG signal will be collected in back-propagation geometry, sensed by a phase-sensitive detector, and recorded by a computer. A two-dimensional (2-D) x-y image for a particular depth (z) will be generated point-by-point by raster scanning the incident laser beam, collecting the SHG signal, and plotting the normalized signal as a function of position in the x-y plane. Different depths (z) within the sample will be accessed by adjusting the z-position of the focal spot. A series of 2-D x-y scans for different z-values will provide the 3-D sub-surface tomographic images of the sample. The samples to be investigated include rivets, semiconductor and dielectric wafers, painted quartz plates, corroded or and scratched metal plates, as well as aged metal specimens from airplane wing, bridge, and other structures. Significance of the proposed approach are: ability to obtain 3-D images up to a depth of ~500 mm, higher spatial resolution of ~20 mm, and potential for estimation of metallic corrosion rate from corrosion thickness measurements. The project will have an impact on sensing of cracks, corrosion, and defects in civil, mechanical, electrical, and optical material systems, and integration of research and education activities in an academic institution serving the disadvantaged minorities and newcomers to the mainstream of American society doc12694 none An effective way of using increasing powerful computer systems in improving numerical weather prediction is through ensemble forecasting. Experience shows that the ensemble forecasts do not diverge enough so that often the true state of the atmosphere lies outside the spread of the ensemble. In this project, the PIs seek to broaden the spread by exploring the variability of model s climate through the perturbation of the convective processes. The approach is to introduce stochastic noise in cumulus parameterization schemes to account for the sub-grid scale effects. The design of the fluctuations will be based on high-resolution data from cloud-resolving models, radars, aircraft, and radiosondes. These ideas will be implemented in models with different types of complexity. The results have the potential of providing new methods for improving ensemble forecast systems at major meteorological centers and also leading to improved understanding of existing cumulus parameterization. This project is being done collaboratively between Drs. Brian Mapes and Thomas Hamill, CIRES, University of Colorado and Dr. Steven Mullen, University of Arizona doc17614 none Queueing theory is a body of mathematical theory that attempts to find solutions to a large class of problems where the arrival pattern of customers is assumed to be exogenously determined. This is the case, for example, when motorists pull into gas stations along the highway to refuel their cars. In a radical departure from this approach, the focus of the present research is on queueing problems when the arrival pattern of customers is assumed to be endogenously determined, with each customer determining if and exactly when to join a queue. This is the case, for example when drivers decide at what time to bring their cars for emission inspection. If communication is not possible, endogenously determined arrivals give rise to problems of tacit coordination. We are interested in studying these problems from three perspectives-theoretical, experimental, and empirical. From a theoretical perspective we formulate the problem as one of interactive decision making, solve it using solution concepts of game theory, and study its equilibrium behavior. Experimentally, we investigate the emergence of tacit coordination, or any other patterns of behavior, in progressively more realistic queueing problems. One proposed experiment controls the level of congestion by manipulating the fixed service time. Another relaxes the assumption that service time is fixed and models it as random variable drawn from a commonly known distribution. A third experiment allows customers to form queues before service commences. In yet another experiment, the investigation is extended to multi-server queueing systems with parallel waiting lines. Empirically, we propose to collect data on arrival time, waiting time, and service time in actual emission control stations. Congestion and waiting in lines have become pernicious problems of modern society. Yet we know almost nothing about the strategic thinking that governs the behavior of customers who wish to minimize their waiting time in line by choosing the right arrival time. Nor do we know much about the dynamics that result in improvement in coordination over time. Decisions regarding the amount of service capacity to provide must frequently be made in governmental offices, supermarkets, banks, medical clinics, gas stations, etc. From the perspective of the agency, providing too much service involves excessive cost, whereas providing too little service may cause the waiting line to become excessively long. Excessive waiting time carries with it heavy social costs, and at times costs of lost customers. Therefore, the ultimate goal of the server is to achieve an economic balance between the cost of service and the costs associated with waiting for that service. Our proposed research is aimed at determining the factors that affect congestion, and the conditions that may help or hinder tacit coordination when customers make strategic decisions about joining queues doc17615 none This project is organized around six Interventions, each with implementation strategies targeted at the various administrative and teaching levels. Superintendents, school board members, and principals will participate in Leadership Institutes that will enhance the leaders abilities to support the resource, policy, and instructional alignments and revisions necessary to accomplish the reform. Math and science specialists will provide guidance and technical assistance in the development and implementation of standards-based programs in math and science, and will assist district personnel to review and analyze data and other information necessary to gauge progress. They will work with and through the district and school improvement plans, and will help develop collaborations with higher education institutions and other reform projects doc17616 none In this project funded by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division and the Americas Program in the Division of International Programs, Ortiz will interpret experimental results on several types of unusual anions using new quantum mechanical methodology. This research effort combines the development of a new generation of electronic structure methods for theoretical modeling of electron attachment and detachment processes with calculations that aim at testing these approaches and at investigating chemical species of practical interest. The computer codes developed will be used to address a wide range of chemical species, including double Rydberg anions, zwitterions, dianions, polyanions, and metal oxide clusters. Study of these chemical systems requires the implementation and use of new electron propagator methods that can treat electron correlation in anionic states as well as large orbital relaxation effects that accompany electron detachment. Quasiparticle self-consistent-field methods extend current techniques and satisfy the demands of the systems under study. They also offer an alternative one-electron picture of electronic structure that is complementary to that provided by previously implemented theories. This project involves a collaboration with Ana Martinez and her coworkers at UNAM in Mexico City. The proposed research involves the development of new and improved algorithms for calculating ionization potentials and electron affinities. The challenge to theory is not simply to reproduce a few measured experimental data, but rather to develop a theoretical model that is consistent with known data and capable of predicting consequences subject to subsequent measurement. The propagator method used here, especially in the novel context of a quantitative independent-particle model, is admirably suited to the development of insight and understanding. The resulting new formalisms developed in this project hold promise for enhanced accuracy, improved computational performance, and more straightforward interpretation of the computed data. These methods will be applied to several systems of current experimental interest and will be available to the public for general use. The students who will travel and work with the foreign collaborators in Mexico will gain experience with international collaboration that will enhance their scientific and educational training doc17617 none The interactions of insectivorous bats and their prey can be thought of as an evolutionary arms race. Bats began the race with the evolution of sophisticated, high frequency sonar with which they echolocate flying insects, track them through space, and ultimately eat them. Many nocturnal insects including moths countered with the evolution of sonar detection devices - ears - that alert insects to the echolocation cries of approaching bats. Moths take evasive action in the form of loops, spirals, and power dives and an impressive aerobatic dog fight between predator and prey ensues. Tiger moths (Lepidoptera: Arctiidae) have added a new twist to the fray. Tiger moths answer bats with a series of intense ultrasonic clicks produced by paired thoracic structures called tymbals. For over thirty years researchers have attempted to determine why tiger moths answer bats. There are currently three theories about the proximate mechanisms by which the sounds work. First, it is possible that moths produce sounds that startle bats, giving them a momentary advantage in aerial combat. Second, bats may jam the sophisticated ultrasonic echolocation system of bats by sending out sounds that mimic moth echoes but with inappropriate timing. The third possibility is that tiger moths send out an acoustic warning that they are not palatable food items, much as insects use bright colors to warn visual predators that they are noxious. These hypotheses are not considered mutually exclusive and they may all work simultaneously. The proposed experiments will take the three theories to the next level - from the level of proximate questions about mechanism to the level of ultimate questions about the evolution of behavior. Using two novel approaches - a learning approach and a phylogenetic approach - the selective advantages of tymbals will be determined. Laboratory experiments in which bats are pitted against insects with and without chemical defenses or sound will reveal how learning has shaped bat-moth acoustic interactions. Cladistic methods will then be used to explore when, where, and how tymbals originated and why they have been maintained for millions of years since their origin. The answers to these question will not only explain the fascinating details of bat-tiger moth evolution, they will also illustrate how a keystone behavioral innovation has allowed a temporary escape from predation and the radiation of a clade of ~11,000 species in relatively predatory free space. The results of these experiments will be shared with grade school children through a new website dedicated to the interactions of Bats and Bugs . The information will also be added to an exciting new ecological and environmental curriculum being developed in cooperation with the Archbold Biological Station near Lake Placid, Florida doc17618 none Better known as laughing gas, nitrous oxide (N2O) is also an extremely important greenhouse gas, contributing to global warming. Soil nitrogen transformations that lead to production of N2O are extremely dynamic after wildfire in forest ecosystems. This project will examine these dynamics using a recent wildfire near Flagstaff, Arizona. Two distinct groups of bacteria produce N2O in soils. Because these bacteria are sensitive to different environmental conditions, understanding their relative contributions to N2O production is important in predicting future N2O fluxes. Stable isotopes of nitrogen and oxygen in N2O have been proposed as signatures of the particular microbial processes responsible for N2O production, but this idea has never been explicitly tested in the field. This work will involve undergraduate students in research using the natural dynamics of N2O production after fire to test to what extent these isotopic fingerprints reliably indicate the bacterial groups producing N2O evolved from soil doc17619 none What factors best explain the legal decisions of U.S. Supreme Court justices? To what extent do the policy preferences of justices outweigh purely formal, legal concerns when deciding cases? How many policy dimensions structure the preferences of justices in the post-war era? Is the current Court more conservative than the Vinson and early Warren courts? Have the decisions of lower courts become more liberal over time? In what manner have the policy outputs of the Court changed over time? These are but a handful of the substantive questions the researchers will answer using statistical models customized to the peculiarities of the U.S. Supreme Court. More specifically, using a Bayesian inferential approach, the principal investigators develop variants of item response models that: 1) are suitable for multidimensional choice situations with small numbers of subjects; 2) explicitly model dynamics in ideal points and case-parameters; and 3) can be used to explain voting behavior with covariates (case facts, the court of origin, the arguments raised, the issues considered, etc.) while simultaneously controlling for and measuring policy preferences. To model the dynamics of ideal points and case parameters, the principal investigators use the dynamic linear model (DLM) machinery within the context of item response modeling. One of the goals of this proposal is to integrate these modeling strategies so that multidimensional models can be fit to longitudinal data in a computationally efficient manner. The second methodological goal of this proposal is to build and fit models that jointly measure policy preferences and account for the effects of measured covariates on voting decisions. This project lies at the intersection of several recent growth areas in social statistics: binary time-series and time-series cross-sectional data analysis, mixture modeling, hierarchical Bayesian modeling, and latent variable modeling. While the proposed class of models will be customized for work involving decision making on the U.S. Supreme Court, many of the proposed methods will be relevant to other applications in political science (such as behavior on lower courts, committee decision making, and legislative behavior) and other areas of social statistics (such as educational statistics, psychometrics, and econometrics doc17620 none Pfeiffer Over the last decade central Mozambique has experienced a dramatic proliferation of independent Christian faith-healing churches whose membership has jumped from an estimated 10% of poor peri-urban populations to well over 50%. Rooted in the Zimbabwean and South African Zionist and Apostolic movements, the majority of the churches are syncretistic , combining local Shona religious notions of illness causation with Pentecostal beliefs in the healing power of the Holy Spirit to recruit new members, mostly women, through treatment of reproductive and child health problems. Often referred to as the African Independent Churches (AICs), these denominations are a distinctively African expression of a world-wide Pentecostal boom that has gained remarkable momentum over the last 20 years. Throughout southern Africa, the AIC movements represent an extensive transformation of public discourse on health and treatment-seeking among the poor. During this period of AIC proliferation, central Mozambique also experienced rapid growth in economic disparity and social inequality as a result of economic reforms, privatization, and an influx of foreign aid projects. The research will examine the hypothesis that growing social inequality has fueled the popularity of the AICs, since poor women s social and economic vulnerability in urban settings is perceived to have intensified in the increasingly competitive environment. The project will test the hypothesis that reduced social cohesion and greater social competition find cultural expression in increased fears of witchcraft, sorcery, and new categories of avenging spirits believed to cause reproductive health problems. AICs appear to offer unique protection from these perceived threats to women and children s health. Using surveys and in-depth interviewing the research will a) identify demographic characteristics of AIC participants, b) measure community perceptions of change in social inequality, social cohesion, and sorcery witchcraft practices that affect health, and 3) examine how new church recruits made decisions concerning how to treat their reproductive health problems and why they eventually chose to consult church healers. Research findings will help provide a better understanding of why religious movements influenced by Pentecostalism have become so popular in the developing world and why healing plays such a key role in recruitment. The results will contribute to a growing body of research among public health and economic development planners on the relationship between economic disparity, social environment, and health. The findings will also provide insight into health care utilization patterns, useful to policy makers for improvement of primary health care delivery in Mozambique and Southern Africa doc17621 none Plant productivity is limited by water and phosphorus availability in natural and agricultural ecosystems throughout the world. Root system architecture plays an important role in the acquisition of scarce soil resources. Using common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) as a model system, we have identified specific root architectural traits that are regulated by genetic and environmental factors, particularly phosphorus availability. We have also demonstrated that these root traits are related to plant adaptation to different environments. In addition, we have developed Recombinant Inbred Lines of beans that segregate for these traits, which we will employ in our studies. Experiments outlined in this proposal aim to gain a better understanding of the relationship between root architecture and resource acquisition, particularly when multiple soil resources are limiting. Our overall objectives are to examine the tradeoffs of a shallow vs. deep root architecture for water and phosphorus acquisition, as well as to determine the adaptive importance of root architectural plasticity and the potential implications for interplant competition. The results from this work will have important ecological and agricultural significance, as well as aid in the development of resource acquisition efficient crops doc17622 none The activities of many viral proteins required for viral DNA replication and morphogenesis are regulated by phosphorylation. That this is the case in vaccinia virus (VV), which is the best-understood member of the Poxviridae, is increasingly clear. Poxviruses encode the vast majority of their own enzymatic components required for the transcription and replication of their viral genome. This remarkable autonomy from the host makes VV one of the most premier eukaryotic biochemical and genetic model systems available. The study of VV continues to shed light on parallel systems such as DNA replication, chromatin condensation, post-translational modification of proteins, and dynamic aspects of kinases and phosphatases. In particular, VV encodes two protein kinases (F10 and B1) and a dual-specificity phosphatase (H1). These enzymes are all essential in the viral life cycle. However, the precise molecular role dynamic phosphorylation plays during the viral life cycle remains largely undefined. The vaccinia viral protein that is at the heart of this research, Vp11, is an 11-kDa-phosphoserine protein. Although Vp11 (encoded by the gene F17) is the most abundant protein (in terms of number of molecules) in the virion, its precise in vivo function(s) remains elusive. As such, the primary goal of this research is to determine the in vivo function(s) of Vp11. Vp11 binds to DNA in vitro, and has long been postulated to be involved in condensation of the viral genomic DNA. By modulating nucleic acid-binding activity, protein phosphorylation can be a positive or negative regulator of gene expression. Phosphorylation may also be necessary for the oligomerization of a protein. Furthermore, protein phosphorylation can also be required for the proper subcellular localization of a protein, or may be critical for the protein s stability in vivo. This project is designed to explore these scenarios. Recent results from this project point to an important role of the MAP ERK kinase-signaling pathway during the VV life cycle. The proven tractability of vaccinia as a model system allows a dissection of this possible contribution of the host cell. Aspects of these processes are addressed within this project by a focused molecular characterization of Vp11 as well as the role of the MAP ERK signaling pathway in the life cycle of poxviruses. The research described in this project involves an animal virus called vaccinia. Vaccinia was the live vaccine used to eradicate smallpox. The study of vaccinia virus by biochemists has long provided insights into the more complicated workings of human cells. For the correct growth of a human cell, many forms of control (also called regulation ) are required. Without this regulation, cell growth becomes abnormal. The most common type of regulation is a simple chemical process by which a phosphate ion is placed on certain types of protein. Regulation of this sort is termed phosphorylation . This NSF-funded research will provide a window into this crucial event by using a much simpler, and therefore more tractable, viral model system doc17623 none Soils constitute a huge reservoir of microbes whose activities have a profound impact on global warming potential, on crop productivity, and on soil fertility and biogeochemistry. However, the vast majority of soil microbes remain uncultured, so knowledge about them is meager. Among the major and consistently present, but not-yet-cultured, microbial groups identified by cultivation-independent molecular methods are members of the Acidobacteria, Verrucomicrobia, Planctomycetes and alpha-Proteobacteria. In an effort to move beyond phylogenetic recognition and enumeration of these groups to their functionality, a genomics approach is being conducted. A novel way was devised to create large (100-150 kb) insert libraries of genomic DNA from soil such that one end of each insert is phylogenetically informative and is flanked by a large portion of genomic sequence. From such libraries, clones are being selected that capture the phylogenetic diversity and breadth of each target microbial group (above) and the inserts are being sequenced to identify genes associated with distinctive modes of nutrition and metabolism, e.g. autotrophy, diazotrophy, denitrification. Between 250-750 kb of genomic information (at 3X coverage) can be obtained from each of 22 different not-yet-cultured soil microbes with the same effort required to sequence a complete 5 MB genome of a bacterium already in culture. From such information, the metabolic potential of the target organisms and their probable role(s) in soil ecosystems can be realized. The emerging database of sequences will help guide future work on these organisms, as well as ongoing efforts to obtain them in pure culture. Sequence data is being made available through the Ribosomal Database Project (RDP) and through GenBank. In addition to providing the sequences for additional analyses, the RDP server will present the data in a evolutionary context by linkage of sequence data to an organismal phylogeny. This is a Microbial Genome Sequencing Award funded through a collaborative program between the National Science Foundation and the Department of Agriculture Initiative for Future Agriculture and Food Systems doc17624 none Dr. Charles Schmuttenmaer of Yale University is funded for his research in terahertz studies of transient photoconductivity in quantum dots and electron transfer in bacterial reaction centers by a grant in the Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division. The PI will measure time-dependent photoconductivity in isolated quantum dots (QDs) as well as in arrays of QDs. This information is of importance in the design of optoelectronics devices based on QD technology, where it is essential to understand the timescales that carriers remain mobile after absorption of a photon, and the actual value of the mobility. The PI also will develop a new and direct method for monitoring charge transfer events. The motion of the electron itself, rather than a change in absorption or fluorescence spectrum, provides the measured signal. This occurs because accelerating charges generate electromagnetic pulses, and if the charge transfer and or solvent reorientation timescale is on the order of 100 fs to 10 ps, then a THz pulse is generated. This methodology has been benchmarked on dye molecules oriented in strong electric fields, and will be used to study the primary step of charge transfer in bacterial reaction centers that are spatially oriented by using a poly-histidine tag that anchors a specific residue of the protein to a functionalized quartz slide. Over the last several years, the PI s group at Yale University has learned how to carry out and properly interpret a new class of experiments using short pulses of far-infrared light. For technical reasons involving the intensity of light sources and sensitivity of detectors, the far-infrared region of the spectrum has been historically neglected for spectroscopic experiments compared to other regions of the spectrum. With regard to time-resolved spectroscopic experiments, wherein one excites or changes a sample with one pulse of light, and then monitors the change in the sample with a second pulse of light (which is essentially the type of work for which the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Ahmed Zewail in ), there has been essentially no representation in the far-infrared region of the spectrum. The PI and his group will use these new pulse techniques to elucidate two important scientific issues. First, they will investigate transient photoconductivity in quantum dots. Quantum dots are a new type of material that is radically changing materials science because their properties depend not only on their composition, but also on their size (once they are small enough that quantum effects become important). The PI will assess how well and for how long these particles conduct electricity after absorbing photons of light. At a very basic and fundamental level, there are many important applications with respect to new types of optoelectronic devices and high speed communications. Second, they will focus on the primary charge separation step in photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is arguably the most important process that transpires on this planet. It provides the oxygen we breath, and equally important, it is the source of all fossil fuels - the energy which is so important to our society. The PI will monitor this primary charge transfer event in a much more direct and unambiguous manner than heretofore possible, and provide further characterization of the mechanisms of charge transfer. There is an urgent need for scientific personnel trained in nanotechnology, and the students and post-docs working on QDs will be trained in a wide variety of techniques in this emerging and rapidly changing field. Students and post-docs working on the photosynthesis project will receive training in ultrafast spectroscopy and will learn about electron transfer in photosynthetic systems doc17625 none In research supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, Professor Emile Schweikert and his coworkers at Texas A&M University are developing new methods for mass spectrometry of surfaces.The research focuses on extracting more information from the ejecta generated when bombarding surfaces with keV mono and polyatomic projectiles. One objective is to achieve nanophase characterization via the detection of coincidentally emitted secondary ions. The approach relies on the novel concept of mass separated time-of-flight mass spectrometry . A second objective is to advance detection sensitivity, which translates into the requirement of detecting neutrals. The approach is to collisionally cool the desorbed neutrals at ambient pressure, collect them into a supersonic molecular beam and subject them to efficient hyperthermal ionization for subsequent identification by time-of-flight mass spectrometry. In addition to enhanced detection sensitivity, the procedure should be useful for surfaces not readily amenable to examination in vacuum. This project deals with advancing chemical analysis expertise for examining surfaces. Progress in surface science and technology with emphasis on nanostructures requires the detection of vanishingly small amounts of molecules. The research aims to enhance our capabilities for identifying the chemical makeup of nanostructures and for detecting small numbers of molecules dispersed on a surface. The work will focus on two novel methods of mass spectrometry. One based on mass-separated time-of-flight mass spectrometry is expected to enable chemical analysis of nanodomains as small as ~ 30 nm. The other involves ambient pressure secondary neutral mass spectrometry with the goal of detecting molecules when they are randomly distributed on a surface (rather than assembled in a nanostructure) and when they are present in amounts which cannot be detected with current techniques doc17626 none Modeling of the fast solar wind and streamers will be carried out based on a pair of interlaced computer codes. One will be a 3D three-fluid code encompassing electrons, protons and one species of heavy ion. The other is a kinetic hybrid code where the protons and heavy ions are treated as particles and the electrons as a fluid. The hybrid code will be used to study the effect of high-frequency kinetic Alfven waves on the distribution functions, and in particular to determine the damping of these waves and their heating of the plasma. The results will be incorporated in the fluid simulation, and the results compared with observations, like ion flow speeds and effective temperature, derived from instruments on board SOHO and TRACE doc17627 none The objective of this research is to elucidate the mechanism by which the Bacillus subtilis competence transcription factor, ComK, activates transcription. Competence in B. subtilis is characterized by the cell s ability to bind and take up exogenous DNA. In addition to controlling its own expression, ComK is essential for the expression of the proteins that comprise the DNA binding and uptake system and for the competence-related expression of the recombination genes recA and addAB. ComK binds in the minor groove to sequences upstream of the -35 region and causes bending of the DNA. Three classes of ComK-regulated promoters are distinguished based on the spacing between ComK dimer binding sites: In the first class (recA, addAB, dinA, and nucA) the interval between dimer binding sites is 2 helical turns; the second class, comprising the late competence genes (comC, -G, -E, and -F), contain binding sites separated by 3 helical turns; and the third class contains a single representative, the comK promoter, in which the binding sites are separated by 4 helical turns. The downstream binding sites for all ComK-dependent promoters are located in regions proposed for the binding of the alpha subunits of E. coli RNA polymerase, which also binds in the minor groove. The PI will characterize the DNA binding domain of ComK and test the hypothesis that ComK affects the binding of the a subunits of RNA polymerase. The ComK DNA binding domain will be characterized using a combination of mutational analysis, NMR structural determination, and molecular modeling. The PI will determine whether or not ComK interacts with RNA polymerase alpha when it binds to representatives of the three classes of ComK-dependent promoters, recA, comG, and comK, by a combination of hydroxyl radical footprinting, targeted footprinting, protein-protein crosslinking, and mutational analyses. DNA binding and transcriptional activation will be assessed for wild-type and mutant ComK proteins using mobility shift assays, in vitro transcription assays, and analyses of transcriptional activation of recA-lacZ, comG-lacZ, and comK-lacZ fusions. This research involves investigating the way in which the ComK protein turns on the expression of an assortment of genes that enable the bacterium Bacillus subtilis to take up external DNA and incorporate this DNA into its chromosome. The results should elucidate how ComK controls the expression of dozens of genes that are required when Bacillus subtilis cells enter a specialized state for genetic exchange. Since the action of ComK likely involves interactions with RNA polymerase, the enzyme that governs gene expression in all bacteria, this research should further the understanding of bacterial gene regulation in general doc17628 none Fernando Torres-Gil, UCLA Partial travel support and conference preparation costs are requested for the participants at the workshop Nanotechnology: Opportunities and Challenges for Industry to be held at UCLA on September 10, . The California NanoSystems Institute and the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research organize the workshop. The sponsors are the Department of Commerce, the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Nanotechnology Coordinating Office (NNCO), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The workshop will bring together 70-80 leaders from industry, government, academia and financial community to explore the future of nanotechnology, the industry opportunities, and the ways to increase the pace of taking advantage of the new technology. This workshop is part of a series of workshops over the next 18 months in various regions of the country. The UCLA workshop will draw attendees from the Western U.S. predominantly with focus on importance of nanotechnology in three areas of application: aerospace, information technology electronics, and biotechnology medicine. The main objectives are: identifying the major technical challenges for application of nanotechnology in industry, scientific developments that could be exploited by industry, major obstacles in this developments, and networking among experts and organizations from various areas doc17629 none Under the direction of Dr. Joyce Marcus, Mr. R. Alan Covey will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. Using samples of grass, carbonized corn, and charred wood, he will obtain radiocarbon dates that will help to answer several important questions about the Inka empire. The samples were collected during Covey s regional survey research and excavations in the Vilcanota Valley (known popularly as the Sacred Valley), located immediately to the north of Cusco, the Inka capital. The new dates will help to refine our understanding of the development of regional pottery and architectural styles between AD - , the time during which the Inka empire formed in the Cusco Valley and began its first imperial conquests. A well-defined archaeological chronology for this period will elucidate some of the processes enabling rapid Inka imperial expansion, providing an additional line of evidence that can be compared to Colonial Spanish accounts of Inka history. The goal of Mr. Covey s research is to describe how the Inka created a well-integrated imperial heartland that included the Sacred Valley, an area occupied by several different ethnic groups in the pre-Inka period. This work integrates four independent datasets: (1) regional settlement patterns, collected in a systematic survey; (2) excavation data from pre-Inka households; (3) Colonial period Spanish accounts of Inka history; and (4) Colonial archival documents on land tenure in the study region. While the Spanish chronicles provide valuable information about Inka origins, they do not offer a reliable chronology for this period. The full potential of archaeological data has remained unrealized because a clear radiocarbon chronology is still not available to subdivide the period from AD - . A more accurate chronology will in turn yield more powerful regional data for analyzing the processes of early Inka territorial expansion. This research is important because it will help to demonstrate that processes of Inka imperial expansion and administration were developed through a long period of regional political interactions and integration strategies. Mr. Covey s research will advance our understanding of the conditions that promote the formation and expansion of empires. It will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc17630 none The National Research Council (NRC) through its Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences, will conduct a study to assist the National Science Foundation in the formulation of a comprehensive, long-term agenda for the earthquake engineering research that fully utilizes the capabilities of the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES). This effort will result in a report that articulates a dynamic, stakeholder-inclusive process for determining research needs, identifies the principal issues in earthquake engineering amenable to an integrated research approach that incorporates analysis, computational modeling, simulation, and physical testing; and assesses and comments on the possible roles of information and communication technologies for collaborative on-site and remote research. It will produce a long-term research plan based on short-, intermediate-, and long-term needs, general program to address them, and the estimated costs and benefits of the research program doc17631 none This dissertation research project proposes to examine how framings of risk and safety, and understandings about which entities pose risks, change over time, and how these changes influence political, technical, social, and medical decisions. It will focus on the contamination of the blood supply with the AIDS virus in France and the United States. Through examination of the dynamic process of risk perception and the construction of conceptual objects of risk from a network of elements, this study will trace an episode of contention of science and or politics, and grapple with the question of why attempts to contain crisis can often have the opposite effect. The contamination of blood during the early s provides a particularly good site for tracing the succession and interaction of conceptual objects of risk. The proposed project covers the mid- s when the etiology of AIDS was not well understood, and when knowledge about the disease was evolving rapidly. In addition, the populations at risk for the disease were not yet well defined. Hemophiliacs framed the threat in terms of their previous experience with hepatitis, blood bankers struggled against a threat to an adequate supply of blood, and doctors in both countries identified antibodies to the virus as indicators of protection and as indicators of infection. The study of AIDS in the blood supply by tracing risk objects can provide a better understanding of the dynamics of risk more generally. It is socially significant for assessing the role of risk perception, identification, and change in policy making processes, and can point to new ways of producing knowledge about potential risk for scholars and professionals in policy-related areas, public health, risk management, and health-related fields, particularly when dealing with situations of great uncertainty and grave potential consequences, such as AIDS in the s or variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease today. NSF funds will pay primarily for archival work in the Washington Baltimore area, which has the largest number of interview and research sites relevant to the project doc17632 none This is a grant to support the continuation of the core activities of the Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (BASC) of the National Academy of Sciences. The objectives of the effort include: (i) providing a national and international forum for the atmospheric sciences, focusing on research needs, policy issues, educational implications and issues and the resources required to improve understanding of the atmosphere and its interaction with human societies and other components of the Earth System; (ii) coordinating and overseeing the BASC study units involved in developing and publishing disciplinary assessments that probe the frontiers articulated in the Atmospheric Sciences Entering the Twenty-First Century report, and other studies requested by agencies on specific issues; (iii) serving as a continuing resource to inform and provide advice from the atmospheric sciences community to federal agencies and other relevant decision-makers, and to serve as a linkage to the entire cross-section of the atmospheric sciences community. To this end, BASC proposes to initiate annual forums to discuss the Federal plans and budgets for the atmospheric sciences and climate related research. The resulting forums will serve as major mechanisms for improving the coordination of the entire Federal program in these vital areas. (iv) coordinating atmospheric science expertise for other National Research Council (NRC) units (most frequently with Ocean Studies Board, Polar Research Board, Board on Earth Sciences and Resources, Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology, Space Studies Board, and the Committee on Global Change Research, but others as needed), international project offices, and bodies whose activities involve atmospheric sciences and whose actions may impact atmospheric science policy, societal impacts and educational issues. The relationship with the Committee on Global Change Research is particularly close with both the BASC chair and the chair of the Climate Research Committee serving as members. (v) creating a national forum for responsive dialogue on a number of atmospheric science phenomena of immediate and growing concern to society, including the conduct of specific studies and workshops in response to emerging science issues and Federal agency needs. These activities are important because they provide advice to and review of the Federal atmospheric and climate sciences funding agencies doc17633 none Investigations of fundamental issues in strongly-correlated electron (SCE) systems form a major area of condensed matter research today. This program contains two main thrusts: (1) the observation and elucidation of new phenomena in SCE, and (2) the development of nanoscale devices using novel fabrication techniques both for the exploration of fundamental physics and for creating opportunities to capitalize on nano-physics to help meet the challenges of next-generation technological needs. The combination of fundamental research and the implementation of novel devices are designed to maximize the impact of this program, through scientific advances and the education training of future researchers. Two genres of correlated systems--non-Fermi liquids in semiconductors, and metallic nanowires exhibiting correlated effects--will be studied. Non-Fermi liquid behavior constitutes a central theme of SCR systems. Unusual metallic behaviors observed in the normal state of high-Tc superconductors and in one-dimensional conductors are pushing beyond the standard Fermi liquid picture for conventional metals, toward a possible new paradigm of non-Fermi liquids in low-dimensional correlated systems. Two such systems are studied by transport measurements, the chiral Luttinger liquid at the 1-dimensional edge of the fractional quantum Hall fluid, and the two impurity Kondo system in double-quantum-dots. The edge of the fractional quantum Hall fluid supports exotic fractionally-charged quasi-particles obeying fractional statistics which will be investigated. Work in double-quantum-dots serves a dual purpose. In addition to exploring non-Fermi liquid behavior, the implementation of this system as a prototypical 2-qubit system will be pursued to create a building block of a semiconductor-based quantum computer. From a long term perspective, this may have a profound impact on bringing the challenging task of implementing quantum computation closer to reality. In metallic wires, investigation will concentrate on the phenomena of superconductivity, magnetism, etc., in nanowires fabricated by a novel cleaved-edge technique, as well as interaction between adjacent wires running parallel to each other. Understanding the properties of nanowires in proximity may impact next generation interconnects as device density in ULSI increases further. This program will train students in nanoscience and technology with an emphasis in nano-fabrication techniques and ultra low-noise electrical measurements. Such skills are particularly valuable for preparing the students to help drive forward the all important nano-science technology revolution which forms the basis of the technology and economic engine of the 21st century. %%% Investigations of strongly-correlated electron (SCE) systems form a major area of condensed matter research today. This program contains two main thrusts: (1) the observation and elucidation of new phenomena in strongly- correlated systems, and (2) the development of nanoscale devices using novel fabrication techniques both for the exploration of fundamental physics and for creating opportunities to capitalize on nano-physics to help meet the challenges of next-generation technological needs. The combination of fundamental research and the implementation of novel devices is designed to maximize the impact of this program, through scientific advances and the education training of future researchers. Strong correlations between electrons lead to unusual and novel metallic behaviors. Examples include high temperature superconductors and other low-dimensional conductors such as 0- and 1-dimensional conductors. Non-Fermi liquid behavior constitutes a central theme of SCE systems. For these systems, a new paradigm beyond the standard picture for conventional metals may become necessary. Two such systems will be studied by electrical measurements, the chiral Luttinger liquid at the 1-dimensional edge of the fractional quantum Hall fluid, and the two impurity Kondo system in double-quantum-dots. The edge of the fractional quantum Hall fluid supports exotic particles which carry charges in fractional units of the fundamental electron charge. Work in double-quantum-dots serves a dual purpose. In addition to exploring non-Fermi liquid behavior, the implementation of this system as a 2-quantum qubit system will be pursued to create a building block of a semiconductor- based quantum computer. If successful this may have a profound impact in the long term on bringing quantum computation to reality. In metallic wires, investigation will concentrate on the phenomena of superconductivity, magnetism, etc., in nanowires as well as interaction between wires in close proximity. Understanding the properties of nanowires in proximity may impact next generation interconnects as device density in ULSI increases further. This program will train students in nanoscience and technology with an emphasis in nano-fabrication techniques and ultra low-noise electrical measurements. Such skills are particularly valuable for preparing the students to help drive forward the all important nano-science technology revolution which forms the basis of the technology and economic engine of the 21st century doc17634 none Rational decision making by industries, agencies, and the public in anticipation of heavy precipitation, snow storm, flood or other disruptive weather phenomenon, requires information about the degree of confidence that the user can place in a weather forecast. It is vital, therefore, to advance the meteorologist s capability of quantifying forecast uncertainty to meet the society s rising expectations for reliable information. The long-term goal of this research is to lay down a methodological foundation for the next generation of probabilistic forecasting systems. The specific objective is to develop and test (i) a set of statistical techniques for probabilistic forecasting of weather variates and (ii) a set of performance measures for verification of probabilistic forecasts. The basic technique, called Bayesian Processor of Output (BPO), will process output from a numerical weather prediction (NWP) model and optimally fuse it with climatic data in order to quantify uncertainty about a predictand. The extended technique, called Bayesian Processor of Ensemble (BPE), will process an ensemble of the NWP model output. The techniques will harness recent advances in Bayesian statistical theory, multivariate distributions, estimation methods, and ensemble forecasting. Each technique will be developed and tested in three versions, for (i) binary predictands (e.g., indicator of precipitation occurrence), (ii) multi-category predictands (e.g., indicator of precipitation type), and (iii) continuous predictands (e.g., precipitation amount conditional on precipitation occurrence, temperature, visibility, ceiling height, wind speed). The primary test will involve the production and verification of probabilistic quantitative precipitation forecasts (PQPFs) for up to 3 days ahead. The primary benchmark for evaluation of the new techniques will be the 30-year old Model Output Statistics (MOS) technique used currently in operational forecasting. The expected impacts of these new, state-of-the-art techniques for probabilistic forecasting will be improved forecasts of all major weather variates, and hence increased societal benefits. In particular, reliable and informative PQPFs, produced by the BPO or the BPE and suited to requirements of hydrologic models, will enable the production of probabilistic river stage forecasts, probabilistic flood forecasts, and flood warnings with explicitly stated detection probabilities doc17635 none David Luebke University of Virginia The computer g aphics community increasingly recognizes the importance of understanding and leveraging the human pe ceptual system.Indeed,several researchers have proposed techniques to accelerate rendering by exploiting the limitations of human vision. However,this research has focused on realistic rendering algorithms such as ray and path tracing, which take seconds or minutes to render.Ve y little work has been done on perceptually d iven interactive rendering,whe e each image must be completed in milliseconds.Yet a dire need exists for techniques to accelerate interactive rendering of ever-la ger datasets,fo despite tremendous strides in graphics hardware,the growth in complexity of 3-D models appears to be outstripping our ability to render them. One barrier to research on perceptually motivated interactive rendering acceleration methods has been the inflexibility of standard graphics hardware.The rendering pipeline, specialized and perfected over many yea s,is now extremely fast at a narrow set of rendering tasks,but researchers cannot tamper with the traditional polygon-rendering underpinnings. We propose to circumvent this barrier by using software rendering,distributed across a cluster to achieve interactive ates on complex scenes.This SGER focuses on building the equipment necessa y to analyze several perceptual rendering techniques impossible under the traditional polygon-oriented interactive rendering paradigm doc17636 none Advances in engineering and scientific knowledge have generated a shift to performance codes, in which the building design is expected to satisfy broad social safety goals, rather than comply with prescriptive requirements. This project addresses conflict of interest that arises when performance codes address intrinsic hazards such as fire instead of extrinsic hazards such as earthquakes. In designing for intrinsic hazards, the same professional is both defining the hazard and designing the solution. Because these hazards are factually and technically very complex, there is no easy way to make sure that the social safety goals will be maintained. The regulatory systems adopted in fire engineering aggravate the problem by providing for piecemeal regulation of design objectives instead of an overall evaluation by regulators of the safety of the project. The multi disciplinary project proposes a careful examination of methods used in structural engineering to mitigate conflicts of interest and the evaluation of such methods for use in fire engineering. The methodology to be used is Regulatory Effectiveness analysis, a qualitative technique for comparing the Public policy, legal structure and technical tools in a technical regulatory program. Candidates for dealing with the conflict include regulatory responses; technological responses; sensitivity analysis and model verification; limiting analysis to technological factors; required Publication and disclosure or the utilization of other disciplines doc17637 none Fortes, Jose A University of Florida ITR SY: Design and Simulation of Biologically inspired Nanolattice This joint project between the University of Florida and Purdue University is pursuing scientific principles for designing and engineering biologically inspired neuromorphic computing architectures using radically new molecular electronic devices and biologically inspired, ultra-dense, self-assembled systems. Examples of applications of these architectures include unprecedently small and inexpensive nanoscale intelligent sensors. The architectures can be used to implement neurocomputing models and are well suited for nanotechnologies, thus accelerating the development of useful nanotechnology by providing clear functional targets for nanodevices. The team of investigators includes computer architects, neurocomputing experts and device physicists working in close collaboration along three highly synergistic thrusts. One of the two thrusts is focused on advancing the understanding of biologically-inspired dynamic information processing systems in order to understand the impact of constraints imposed by architectures and technologies on the properties of these systems. Another thrust investigates neurocomputing system architectures that can be engineered within the constraints of nanotechnologies. The third thrust develops a toolbox of novel mechanisms for integration, self-assembly and interconnection of nanoscale devices. The architectures are investigated via formal methods and simulation. Internet resources are used to conduct simulation, and to disseminate models, software and other research results. A new course, summer internships and educational materials are being developed to educate students on the key interdisciplinary aspects and results of the project doc17638 none Research on the biodiversity of deep-sea soft sediment habitats has centered largely on a?diversity, that is estimating local species diversity and its geographic variation in the ontext of traditional explanations involving disturbance, biological interactions and environmental heterogeneity. Little is known about the natural history and distributional patterns of the species themselves - information that is vital to understanding the roles species play in community organization, and the relationship between local diversity and the regional-scale processes that ultimately regulate it. Here we propose two avenues of research to relate biogeographic and life-history characteristics of species to deep-sea species diversity. The first is to introduce morphological variation in shell architecture of gastropods as a new dimension of biodiversity. The second is to explore the relationship of body size to depth within and among species of prosobranch snails. Both add a new level of understanding about how deep-sea communities are structured that could not be attained by analyses of simple a-diversity. The proposed research directly addresses the NSF Biological Oceanography theme of Biological Diversity in Marine Systems, particularly the areas of distribution, abundance, and life history of marine organisms from deep-sea ecosystems; adaptations of marine organisms; and their population ecology. 1. Morphological Variation. We present a preliminary analysis of bathymetric ranges and variation in shell architecture in lower bathyal and abyssal assemblages of gastropods from the western North Atlantic. The abyssal fauna is revealed to be merely a subset of the bathyal fauna consisting of species that extend their ranges deeper and out onto the abyss. In gastropods, shell architecture reflects feeding type, mode of development, predator defense mechanisms, locomotion and calcium carbonate conservation. We construct both empirical and theoretical morphospaces of shell form by using an eigenshape analysis and Raups model of shell geometry. Both approaches yield the same result. In terms of the range of basic shell types, the abyssal fauna appears to be a random subset of the richer bathyal fauna. However, the abyssal fauna is dominated numerically by a few core deposit-feeding species of bathyal origin with shells that are preadapted for carbonate conservation below the CaCO3 compensation depth. The combination of morphological variation, bathymetric range, feeding type and dispersal ability suggests a new hypothesis for abyssal biodiversity that is radically different from the ecological determinism of current theories. We propose that bathyal and abyssal environments comprise a source-sink system in which the abyssal fauna largely represents a mass effect. The abyssal fauna appears to be an attenuation of the bathyal fauna with a small minority of abundant species, and a majority of extremely rare species that may represent nonreproducing populations maintained by dispersal. We will test this hypothesis by extending the analysis to four other deep-sea basins, and by determining the reproductive state of bathyal and abyssal populations of the same species. Since the great abyssal plains represent such a huge ecosystem, this research has very significant implications for the genesis and maintenance of diversity, and for estimating the level of global deep-sea biodiversity. 2. Body Size. Body size is an issue of fundamental significance in biology, and one that has an important bearing on abundance, distribution, macroecology and biodiversity. Results from prior NSF support ( ) showed that, in contrast to the prevailing view, individual gastropod species increase in size with depth. Size-depth clines decrease in slope with depth and bathymetric ranges expand. We present a conceptual model that integrates this very consistent trend within species with the observation that average size among species appears to decrease with depth. We propose measuring the average size component of the model. This research has the potential to reconcile a very basic paradox in deep-sea ecology, and will provide, by far, the largest and most well-controlled database on size in the deep-sea benthos doc17639 none The localization of membrane proteins to specific regions of the cell is a conserved and essential feature of both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. In bacteria, protein localization is essential for cell division, DNA replication, as well as for chemotaxis, pathogenesis and the development of specialized cell types. However, in contrast to eukaryotic cells, little is known about the mechanism by which proteins reach their correct subcellular location in bacterial cells. Many cases of protein localization in bacteria involve the localization of membrane proteins to specific regions of the cytoplasmic membrane, often at the cell pole or septum. During B. subtilis sporulation, protein localization involves the specific localization of proteins to one of two separate membranes within the cell, similar to eukaryotic protein localization. The long term goals of the research described here are to understand the mechanism by which bacterial membrane proteins assemble at their correct locations within the cell. This project uses genetic and cell biological methods to investigate the mechanism by which proteins localize to specific membrane regions during sporulation, and to investigate the possibility that B. subtilis contains two integral membrane protein insertion complexes that serve to direct membrane proteins to different locations within the cell. It will also develop new methods to investigate if proteins made before division are restricted to one or the other cell after division, or if they are differently localized in the two cells, as these processes may provide a simple mechanism to generate daughter cells of differing fate. They also may control the activity of proteins that act in a vectoral manner across a newly-synthesized septum. These studies will provide further insight into the mechanism by which integral membrane proteins reach their correct subcellular address in bacterial cells. Thus far, the mechanisms of integral membrane protein insertion and assembly have been almost exclusively studied in Gram negative bacteria, primarily in E. coli. These studies will be extended to the Gram positive bacterium B. subtilis, which represents a separate bacterial kingdom that includes many human pathogens such as the Mycobacteria, Streptococcus sp. and Staphylococcus sp., and many bacteria of industrial importance, such as the Actinomycetes. The project will contribute to training graduate and undergraduate students in microbial cell biology and genetics doc17640 none This award by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research by Professor F. Albert Cotton at Texas A&M University to continue studies on using dinuclear complexes to design and synthesize molecular architectures including pairs, loops, and polygons as well as 1-, 2- and 3-dimensional extended structures. The communication between the pairs of metal atoms will be investigated as the oxidation of the neutral units occurs. Refined synthetic methods should allow for the design of large cavities with better shape control and factors for anion and guest recognition. Diruthenium molecules will be used in addition to those involving molybdenum and rhodium. Designs will focus on new structural motifs with a special emphasis on the introduction of chirality into the structures. Molecules with two metal atoms will be used as building blocks to design extended lattices with interesting structural, magnetic and conductive properties. Graduate students and postdocs will be trained in the synthesis and structural characterization of novel supramolecular materials and their applications doc17641 none Nerve cells (neurons) in the mammalian brain often have elaborate treelike branching of fine cellular extensions called dendritic arbors, which receive the chemical signals of activity from other neurons. Like an antenna, the location and number of branches on a dendritic arbor organize the pattern of the afferent input, so the decision about where and when to form a branch is critical. The intracellular structures of these dendrites include cytoskeletal components called actin and microtubules, and these components are dynamic, changing the dendritic structure over time by elongation or retraction or stabilization of the branches at particular points. It remains unclear what the mechanisms are that determine the patterning of these often highly specific arbors during development and growth. To approach this question, this project combines several recent technical advances that give the ability to 1) accelerate dendritic development significantly in cultured neurons from the hippocampal region of the brain; 2) follow the expression and trafficking of proteins and organelles within the living neuron by high-resolution microscopic time-lapse imaging; and 3) to create patterned substrates, using novel creative nanofabrication techniques to provide external cues for cellular development. The experiments will determine the roles of actin and microtubule dynamics, and the influence of external cues such as cell adhesion molecules and location of afferent contacts from other neurons, on dendritic branching. Results will provide a major advance on an important topic of neural development where fundamental information is still unknown, and the interdisciplinary approach will enhance interactions between biology and engineering. The excellent integration of educational activities with the research will have a major impact on research experience in this liberal arts college, and even on the local public schools doc17642 none Wilen This is a collaborative proposal by Principal Investigators at the University of Washington and Ohio University. Detailed knowledge about the interactions between micro-structure of ice and its deformation is needed to assess the integrity of stratigraphic layering and the depth-age relationship in ice cores, which is essential for interpreting the paleoclimate record. The Principal Investigators will use micro-structure to study fabric, the orientation distribution of crystal c-axes, and texture, the size and shape of crystals. Numerical modeling of ice deformation is a useful tool in understanding these interactions. Accurate modeling of ice deformation is complicated by factors, such as the fabric, grain size, dynamic recrystallization, stress level, and precise knowledge of initial conditions. For example, ice fabric evolves as the ice is strained and the deformation depends on the fabric. This complicated feedback mechanism must be understood to correctly model ice deformation. In another example, the usual assumption is that the initial fabric is isotropic or random, but there are excellent examples of near-surface ice in the ice cores that are apparently not isotropic. One must know the initial fabric to calculate the deformation rate in ice sheets. Dr. Wilen will combine results of his new automatic fabric analyzer (AFA) with predictions of detailed ice deformation models (Dr. Thorsteinsson) to refine and better constrain such models. The AFA gives new information in thin sections because the precision and number of measured c-axis orientations are greatly improved. The Principal Investigators will analyze existing data and collect new data on fabric and texture from ice cores to address questions regarding near-surface fabric, deformation mechanisms, dynamic recrystallization, and potential sources of layer disturbances. The data will be used to constrain models of fabric evolution and recrystallization processes. With the more refined models, scientists can address different questions and important problems related to ice deformation and ice cores. For example, the recent agreement between the climate records from the Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP) and Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) ice cores of the upper-90%, and the disagreement in the lower-10% emphasizes the need to understand and predict the mechanisms and probable depths of disruption in these and future deep ice cores. Evidence suggests that the stratigraphic disturbances arise from the anisotropic nature of ice crystals at a variety of scales. To properly model the deformation of anisotropic ice, the influence of fabric on deformation must be well known doc17643 none Engineering - Other (59) This project is hosting a team of undergraduate students from WPI to research the state-of-the-art in how laboratory teaching experiences are delivered using web-based information technologies. The team of students are completing 7 weeks of foundational research at WPI, then will work on-site at NSF in the Division of Undergraduate Education for another 7 weeks to complete their project. The project is ascertaining how the critical laboratory components of science and engineering courses and how advanced web-mediated learning technologies are being used to complement, supplement, or otherwise convey laboratory experiences in the undergraduate science and engineering curriculum. The WPI students are receiving academic credit in fulfillment of a requisite for the Bachelor of Science degree. Regular WPI faculty, who are resident in Washington with the students, are guiding their work with consultation with NSF program directors. The students will deliver a final report to the NSF that will contain, in addition to their revised literature review and methodology, presentation of their data and analysis, along with conclusions and recommendations doc17644 none Basic discoveries and innovations in manufacturing methods and processes will be needed to achieve the full impact of nano-technology. The multidisciplinary experts from the United States and the European Community gathered for this workshop will advise NSF on research needs for the future and develop a joint agenda for US EC cooperation in nano-manufacturing. This NSF-EC Nanomufacturing and Processing Workshop will be held January 5-7, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The workshop will be held immediately before the NSF Design, Service, and Manufacturing Grantees and Research Conference, so in addition to reporting the workshop results by publications, the findings will be immediately reported to the research community at the conference doc17645 none Kreutz This is a collaborative proposal between the Universities of New Hampshire and Maine and the Geological Survey of Canada. This Office of International Science and Engineering is contributing to this award. The Principal Investigators will recover two ice cores the Eclipse Icefield ( meters) in the St. Elias Mountains, Yukon Territory, Canada in cooperation with the Geological Survey of Canada in . The core will be analyzed for stable isotopes, major ions, trace elements, rare earth elements and persistent organic pollutants. The Eclipse record will provide, for the first time, detailed depositional histories of a wide variety of pollutants during the last 200 years in the remote northwest North American Arctic. Through the use of unique chemical tracers, the Principal Investigators will be able to identify source regions for these pollutants, changes in source regions with time, and the role of atmospheric circulation in controlling contaminant distributions in the northwest North American Arctic. The detailed multi-parameter record of natural and anthropogenic change will result in a greatly improved record of climate and environmental change for a region in which very few records currently exist doc17646 none Iverson This is a collaborative proposal by Principal Investigators at Iowa State University and the Wisconsin Geological Survey. Past glaciers, including the Pleistocene ice sheets of the Northern Hemisphere, sometimes flowed unusually fast, causing ice-mass fluctuations that resulted in severe climate change and landscape modification. A leading hypothesis attributes this rapid flow to deformation of the thawed glacier substrate. Structures preserved in the sediment beds of past ice sheets can provide a time-integrated and spatially extensive record of such deformation and can be used to test this hypothesis. Microstructures are potentially the most useful indicators of deformation, because they evolve systematically and are ubiquitous, even in massive till units. Although microstructural characteristics of deformed glacier sediments have been described extensively, there have been no methodical efforts to correlate these characteristics to shear-strain magnitude. The result is that the degree of bed deformation, and hence its role in ice-sheet motion, usually cannot be inferred reliably from the geologic record. Support is being requested to study the evolution of till microstructural characteristics as a function of shear strain with a ring-shear device that deforms a large sediment specimen to high strains. The experiments will be guided by related studies in structural geology, geophysics, and soil mechanics, which indicate that shear-plane orientations, clay-particle fabric, and anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility (AMS) change systematically with sediment deformation. These microstructural characteristics will be correlated with shear strain by conducting experiments to various strains and measuring these characteristics after each test. Two basal tills with different clay-mineral fractions will be tested and the sensitivity of the results to initial consolidation and total normal stress will be studied. Shear planes will be identified optically and the extent of Y-shear development relative to shears at other orientations, an indicator of shear-strain magnitude, will be quantified. Clay-particle fabrics will be measured with an X-ray, pole-figure goniometer at the University of Michigan and quantified by computing both eigenvalues and March strains. AMS will be measured at the Institute for Rock Magnetism at the University of Minnesota and used to compute AMS magnitudes, as well as strengths and directions of fabrics defined by orientations of maximum susceptibility. These experiments will help improve models of past ice sheets and interpretations of glacigenic sediments and landforms. This research may also help solve related problems in structural geology, geophysics, petroleum geology and geotechnical engineering, in which deformation of granular media and consequent anisotropy are often central issues doc17647 none Kirk A steering committee formed under the auspices of the Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources and the Board on Life Sciences will help to plan and host a workshop focusing on domestic animal genomics and its integration with other genomics and functional genomics projects. The diverse group of experts who participated in the sequencing of the human, mouse, C. elegans, Drosophila, Arabidopsis, rice, E. coli, and other genomes will be brought together with others involved in genomics mapping and sequencing for important livestock and companion animals and their pathogens. These experts, along with appropriate policy makers and stakeholders, will participate in a one-day meeting designed to 1) provide a forum for exchange among the diverse communities of genomics and functional genomics experts, 2) elicit discussions of research directions in animal genomics that would benefit agriculture and society while leading to greater biological understanding, and 3) identify opportunities and obstacles that might be encountered in developing a coordinated, multi-organism functional and comparative genomics effort that would include domestic animals doc17648 none Workshop on Mitigating the Vulnerability of Critical Infrastructures to Catastrophic Failures Critical infrastructures form the backbone of the economies of both the developed and the developing countries throughout the world. They include electric power networks, fuel networks, water networks, transportation networks, telecommunications networks, and computer networks to cite a few. Assessing and mitigating their vulnerability to catastrophic failures call for the development of a new body of knowledge that integrates in a unified manner and builds on concepts and methodologies pertaining to many engineering and scientific fields. Interdependencies between critical infrastructures were addressed by the OSTP NSF workshop held in June , which was entitled Critical Infrastructures: Needs in Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Training. While this workshop highlighted the need of multi-disciplinary research work in critical infrastructure protection, major failures in electric power systems, telecommunications networks, and computer networks were not discussed and analyzed. This is the focus of the workshop that will be held at the Lyceum, in Alexandria, Virginia, on September 10-11, , under the joint patronage of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the International Institute for Critical National Infrastructures (CRIS), the World Institute for Disaster Risk Management (DRM), and the International Institute for Information Technology (IIIT). This workshop will bring together about forty experts in critical infrastructures and disaster risk management from North America, Europe, and Asia. It will give them the opportunity to discuss various emerging concepts such as hidden failure, vulnerability, cascading failure, interdependency, risk assessment, and self-healing, among others, and identify research topics aimed at laying out the foundation of a new field of expertise dealing with the vulnerability of interdependent critical infrastructures. Key speakers will be invited to give presentations and to submit position papers. Proceedings will be issued in an electronic form and posted on several web sites that are popular among researchers and engineers of the critical infrastructure and disaster risk management communities doc17649 none The PI plans to study finite dimensional normed spaces and convex bodies using methods of Fourier analysis. The idea is to express different properties of convex bodies in terms of the Fourier transform and then solve geometric problems using Fourier analytic methods. This approach has already led to several results including a complete analytic solution to the Busemann-Petty problem on sections of convex bodies. The PI plans to develop new connections between the Fourier transform, spherical harmonics and parallel section functions (X-rays) of convex bodies that will lead to new results on critical sections of convex bodies, intersection and projection bodies and to new results of Busemann-Petty type. A significant part of the work will be related to several open problems of the local theory of Banach spaces. This includes several possible Fourier analytic approaches to the slicing problem and the study of the central limit properties of convex bodies. An important direction of the geometry of normed spaces is the study of geometric properties of convex bodies based on the properties of sections and projections of these bodies. This direction has already found numerous applications to engineering and medicine, starting with the classical theory of X-rays and geometric tomography. The goal of this project is to develop a new approach to the study of sections and projections of convex bodies based on methods of Fourier analysis. New connections between sections of convex bodies and the Fourier transform have been recently found by the PI and have already led to an analytic solution to the Busemann-Petty problem of whether smaller bodies can have uniformly larger central sections. The connections with Fourier analysis and geometric tomography will further relate methods and results of the Banach space theory to different areas of mathematics, engineering and medicine. New techniques for computing the Fourier transform will have independent value and can also be applied to signal processing and statistics doc17650 none Recent research indicates that women s mating preferences change across the menstrual cycle. Women s preference for the scent of men who exhibit developmental instability, as revealed by low fluctuating asymmetry, is enhanced in the days leading to ovulation, as is women s preference for masculine male faces. A working interpretation of the findings is that women experience heightened attraction to indicators of benefits that could be heritably passed on to their offspring when they are fertile. Traits that indicate such benefits could be ones that may be generally associated with health (e.g., low fluctuating asymmetry), complement a female s set of genes (e.g., complementary major histocompatibility complex [MHC] alleles), or diversify offspring (e.g., diverse MHC alleles). The research is designed to test four hypotheses: 1) If women s preferences shift during the fertile period toward indicators of heritable benefits, which in-pair partners may not possess, women should experience greater attraction to men other than their primary partners during these days. Overall, women should not experience the same increase in attraction to their primary partners during this period. 2) Men may have evolved to be more attentive of their partners during these times. 3 it may depend on whether a primary partner possesses heritable benefits (e.g., low fluctuating asymmetry, complementary MHC alleles, diverse MHC alleles). Six studies will assess these predictions in two cultures. One set of studies will assess changes in a sample of 200 romantically involved U.S. college students. The other set will examine the changes in a remote village on the Caribbean island of Dominica. The latter study will also examine whether female or male partner cortisol or the male partner s testosterone change across women s cycle. The aim of this program of research is to increase our understanding of the factors that affect partner choice, the dynamics and stability of relationships, and fertility doc17651 none Using a five-month planning grant, the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE) will develop a comprehensive 10-year, educational initiative to address the needs of the optical science and engineering communities. A series of workshops will be held at professional meetings of SPIE and the Optical Society of America (OSA) to assess regional needs and resources. Workshop recommendations will be used to create a plan to enhance the scientific and technological literacy of the public and raise the level of awareness about career options in this exciting and expanding field. The meetings will incorporate a diverse array of stakeholders including optical engineering and science professionals, formal and informal educators, as well as representatives from industry and under-represented groups in science and engineering. Strategic emphasis will be placed on informal science education and efforts to recruit and retain minorities and women in optical engineering and related sciences. The resulting education blueprint will be disseminated to the field in electronic and print media, and subsequently implemented by SPIE and OSA doc17652 none The alternating adsorption of polyelectrolytes and other multivalent organic and inorganic species has evolved in the past decade into a quickly developing new field of materials science. The multilayer assembly technique, which involves the alternating adsorption of oppositely charged species from dilute aqueous or mixed solvent solutions, has been used to create a number of systems with electrical, optical, dielectric and electrochemical functionality. Ultrathin films with high uniformity are can be created using layer-by-layer assembly techniques. The ease of fabrication, ability to control film structure on a nanometer length scale, and the tunability of the final properties of the film make polyelectrolyte multilayer approaches interesting as components in micron scale battery applications. Recent work from the Hammond research group has resulted in a number of microfabrication techniques that allow the incorporation of functional polymer multilayers into micron scale devices. New work in this group has also led to orders of magnitude increases in the solid state ionic conductivity of polyelectrolyte multilayer films through the use of highly acidic polyions such as perfluorosulfonated ionomers, and the incorporation of polyethylene oxide. The goals of this work are to develop new polyelectrolyte multilayer systems with ionic conductivities suitable for thin film battery applications, to take advantage of the nanometer scale control that multilayer assembly processes provide to develop electrolyte films with gradient electronic conductivities for battery electrode components, and to apply nonlithographic microfabrication techniques developed in this group to create cheap, easily manufactured multilayer battery devices on plastic, glass or paper substrates for plastic and paper thin film electronics applications doc17653 none Plant sterols represent a complex array of chemical compounds that are essential for many facets of plant growth and development, and are of considerable importance for their nutritional contributions to animals and man. Hence, it is not surprising that the biochemistry and molecular biology of the sterol biosynthetic pathway has been intensively studied. Nonetheless, very little is actually known about the regulation of this biochemical pathway in plants. One goal of our long-term research in sterol metabolism has been focussed on the regulation of squalene synthase, a key enzyme in sterol biosynthetic enzyme. Our recent results suggest that squalene synthase gene expression and enzyme activity are localized to shoot meristems. In attempting to reconcile these results with those already reported in the literature, the most logical interpretation is that sterol biosynthesis itself is localized to this tissue. This interpretation implies that regulation of sterol biosynthesis occurs in the shoot meristem, a tissue that has not been evaluated as such before, and that a sterol transport system for the movement of sterol from the apical meristem throughout the plant must exist. Experiments to test these predictions are proposed and include: 1, an evaluation if sterol biosynthesis localized to the shoot meristem is regulated; 2, the development of a test for long distance transport of sterol within plants; and 3, a determination if NPC1, a highly conserved protein involved in cholesterol uptake and intracellular trafficking, plays a similar role in plants as in animals. The proposed work, which will involve undergraduate and graduate students and a postdoctoral associate, should provide important insights into how this pathway might be engineered for enhanced value using emerging technologies doc17654 none In southern Mexico, indigenous organizations struggle for autonomy by working with transnational non-governmental organizations (NGOs) concerned with environmental problems, resource use, human rights, and socioeconomic inequalities. New information and communication technologies (NICTs) are essential to these networks of advocacy. Greater access to NICTs provides indigenous organizations with the means for self-representation, and thus changes the production of indigenous knowledge and identity. This dissertation project studies one such network in Oaxaca, Mexico with an examination of a grassroots support organization, Ojo de Agua Comunicacion, that endeavors to put new information and communication technology, especially video equipment, at the disposal of indigenous communities. This research asks what are the organizational practices of video-mediated indigenous knowledge production? Who is accessing video technology and how is this access mediated by networks of advocacy? How is this video technology used to produce indigenous self-representations and challenge dominant constructions of cultural identity? There are two specific research tasks supported by this grant: 1. an organizational ethnography of Ojo de Agua Comunicacion aimed at understanding its acquisition and use of NICTs in the process of assisting indigenous self-representation; and 2. an interpretive analysis of video-mediated self-representations of indigenous knowledge that this organization enables. For the first task, the everyday strategies of action of Ojo de Agua are studied through participant-observation and in-depth interviews. The second task draws upon geographic methods of analyzing the spaces of representation in terms of cultural politics and the production of knowledge to provide an interpretive analysis of indigenous videos made possible with the assistance of Ojo de Agua. This dissertation research is important for three reasons. First, there is an explosion of transnational NGO activity and this study provides ethnographic insight into the practices of advocacy. Second, the use of NICTs drastically alters the ways that indigenous knowledge is produced and this investigation reveals the impact of these changes in Oaxaca, Mexico. Although this is a case study by virtue of method and research questions, these relocations in authorial agency are happening all over Latin America and throughout the global south, and it is crucial to understand how technoscience contributes to them. Focusing on video-mediated indigenous knowledge, this project will demonstrate how technoscience empowers authoritative self-representations of indigenous identity doc17655 none Recently, it has been suggested that oxygen transport into sediments via the roots and rhizomes of seagrasses might resolve the observed discrepancy between the amount of carbonate dissolved and the amount of acid produced from remineralization of sediment organic matter. Combining field observations, laboratory experiments and modeling analysis, a PI from Old Dominion University will team up with a PI from San Jose State University to quantify the influence of seagrass productivity on carbon flux and carbonate dissolution in shallow waters of Lee Stocking Island, Bahamas, a tropical system. The PIs will compare the sediment and porewater composition recovered from a variety of sample types (bare ooid sands to densely vegetates regions with 70% seagrass cover) to establish the relationship between carbonate dissolution in sediments and seagrass density. Other studies to be carried out include incubation experiments of individual seagrass shoots to determine the amount of O2 generated by the roots and rhizomes under variable light and porewater O2 conditions. Additionally, whole sediment core incubation experiments will determine the rate of sediment organic matter degradation and carbonate dissolution. Lastly, Drs. Burdige and Zimmerman plan to compare their data with those obtained via a model of diagenetic processes in carbonate sediments. Results from this study will not only provide basic information on ecological and biogeochemical processes in tropical systems, but will help constrain budgets for carbonate cycling in shallow water carbonate bank environments doc17656 none The primary objective of this workshop was to bring together some of the leading experts in complex silicon-level microsystems with key leaders from the molecular devices community to provide some initial thoughts on how to develop future answers to the following questions: - How can molecular level interactions driving such systems be expressed in more abstract ways, how can these abstractions be translated into primitive building blocks, and how should modeling and design tools be built to emphasize such interactions? - How does one develop new design strategies for combining such primitive building blocks into larger functional subsystems and then scale into even larger molecular systems, what might some of these design strategies entail, and what might be lifted from our experiences with silicon? - What needs to surround a new technology to allow it to scale into complete, designable, complex sys-tems that can communicate with the outside, including legacy technologies such as silicon? - What are long term potentials for such technologies, as seen by complex system architects? - Where can they help solve bottlenecks that exist in current silicon technology microsystems? - Are there new models of computation or system design for which these new technologies are particu-larly well suited? Given that the bulk of the attendees were primarily architects of computational silicon microsystems, a second objective of the workshop was to re-energize the computer architecture community to develop alter-native or mixed models of computation, new microarchitectural techniques, design tools and approaches for both the new technologies, mixes of old and new, and even port back into silicon. A final objective was to help both the system architecture and the new technology communities begin to develop the dialogs necessary to advance such technologies in a timely manner, and maximize the Government s investments in new programs such as NSF s Molecular Architecture Initiative doc17657 none Waddington This is a collaborative proposal by Principal Investigators at the University of Washington and Ohio University. Detailed knowledge about the interactions between micro-structure of ice and its deformation is needed to assess the integrity of stratigraphic layering and the depth-age relationship in ice cores, which is essential for interpreting the paleoclimate record. The Principal Investigators will use micro-structure to study fabric, the orientation distribution of crystal c-axes, and texture, the size and shape of crystals. Numerical modeling of ice deformation is a useful tool in understanding these interactions. Accurate modeling of ice deformation is complicated by factors, such as the fabric, grain size, dynamic recrystallization, stress level, and precise knowledge of initial conditions. For example, ice fabric evolves as the ice is strained and the deformation depends on the fabric. This complicated feedback mechanism must be understood to correctly model ice deformation. In another example, the usual assumption is that the initial fabric is isotropic or random, but there are excellent examples of near-surface ice in the ice cores that are apparently not isotropic. One must know the initial fabric to calculate the deformation rate in ice sheets. Dr. Wilen will combine results of his new automatic fabric analyzer (AFA) with predictions of detailed ice deformation models (Dr. Thorsteinsson) to refine and better constrain such models. The AFA gives new information in thin sections because the precision and number of measured c-axis orientations are greatly improved. The Principal Investigators will analyze existing data and collect new data on fabric and texture from ice cores to address questions regarding near-surface fabric, deformation mechanisms, dynamic recrystallization, and potential sources of layer disturbances. The data will be used to constrain models of fabric evolution and recrystallization processes. With the more refined models, scientists can address different questions and important problems related to ice deformation and ice cores. For example, the recent agreement between the climate records from the Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP) and Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) ice cores of the upper-90%, and the disagreement in the lower-10% emphasizes the need to understand and predict the mechanisms and probable depths of disruption in these and future deep ice cores. Evidence suggests that the stratigraphic disturbances arise from the anisotropic nature of ice crystals at a variety of scales. To properly model the deformation of anisotropic ice, the influence of fabric on deformation must be well known doc17658 none Hooyer This is a collaborative proposal by Principal Investigators at Iowa State University and the Wisconsin Geological Survey. Past glaciers, including the Pleistocene ice sheets of the Northern Hemisphere, sometimes flowed unusually fast, causing ice-mass fluctuations that resulted in severe climate change and landscape modification. A leading hypothesis attributes this rapid flow to deformation of the thawed glacier substrate. Structures preserved in the sediment beds of past ice sheets can provide a time-integrated and spatially extensive record of such deformation and can be used to test this hypothesis. Microstructures are potentially the most useful indicators of deformation, because they evolve systematically and are ubiquitous, even in massive till units. Although microstructural characteristics of deformed glacier sediments have been described extensively, there have been no methodical efforts to correlate these characteristics to shear-strain magnitude. The result is that the degree of bed deformation, and hence its role in ice-sheet motion, usually cannot be inferred reliably from the geologic record. Support is being requested to study the evolution of till microstructural characteristics as a function of shear strain with a ring-shear device that deforms a large sediment specimen to high strains. The experiments will be guided by related studies in structural geology, geophysics, and soil mechanics, which indicate that shear-plane orientations, clay-particle fabric, and anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility (AMS) change systematically with sediment deformation. These microstructural characteristics will be correlated with shear strain by conducting experiments to various strains and measuring these characteristics after each test. Two basal tills with different clay-mineral fractions will be tested and the sensitivity of the results to initial consolidation and total normal stress will be studied. Shear planes will be identified optically and the extent of Y-shear development relative to shears at other orientations, an indicator of shear-strain magnitude, will be quantified. Clay-particle fabrics will be measured with an X-ray, pole-figure goniometer at the University of Michigan and quantified by computing both eigenvalues and March strains. AMS will be measured at the Institute for Rock Magnetism at the University of Minnesota and used to compute AMS magnitudes, as well as strengths and directions of fabrics defined by orientations of maximum susceptibility. These experiments will help improve models of past ice sheets and interpretations of glacigenic sediments and landforms. This research may also help solve related problems in structural geology, geophysics, petroleum geology and geotechnical engineering, in which deformation of granular media and consequent anisotropy are often central issues doc17659 none The Second Industrial Revolution is a major cusp on the chart of economic progress. It saw the rise of electricity, the internal combustion engine, steel, and the petrochemical industry. A massive transformation occurred in industry as steam, water, and horse-drawn power were supplanted by electricity and gas. A revolution just as great was taking place in the household sector of the economy. This research focuses on the household revolution. The idea is that technological progress can have profound implications in the microeconomy of the household that in turn can have enormous consequences for the macroeconomy of the nation. The Second Industrial Revolution is a major event in American economic history. There is little work in modern macroeconomics that addresses it. Understanding this period better is a worthy goal in its own right. But, it may have lessons for today. In many poor countries female labor-force participation is still low. Fertility is high and children still work. Most people live on farms. Maybe these countries resemble the US at the turn of the last century? As society moves into the information age, technological progress may lead to another shift in work patterns. Some speculate that it may favor working at home and outside of cities. Understanding how technological progress affected life in the past may aid in predicting how it will affect life in the future. A revolution in consumer durables was associated with the Second Industrial Revolution. Life at the turn of the last century was primitive. Most households didn t have electricity, central heating, or running water. This changed with the Second Industrial Revolution. It ushered in clothes dryers, electric irons, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and washing machines. A fruit of this technological advance was a dramatic decline in the time required for housework. Along with the spread of new appliances, there was a tremendous rise in female labor-force participation over the last century. Was the durable goods revolution responsible for the rise in female labor-force participation? How did this affect economic welfare? The Second Industrial Revolution transformed everyday life in other ways. It witnessed a spectacular decline in fertility. It also unshackled children from serfdom. The percentage of children that were gainfully employed dropped precipitously with the dawning of the Second Industrial Revolution. Almost no children worked by the Revolution s end. Could it be that before the Second Industrial Revolution children were needed for farm and housework? Labor- saving technological progress lifted this requirement. Children could now attend more school. The consequence was a fall in fertility, the end of child labor, and a rise in educational attainment. Before the Second Industrial Revolution most Americans lived on a farm. Technological advance meant that less labor was required on the farm. Technological progress meant that new types of consumer goods could be produced for two reasons. First, it reduced the cost of producing these goods. Second, the rising incomes associated with technological progress in other areas of the economy increased the demand for new consumer goods. Thus, while less labor was needed on the farm, more labor was being demanded in manufacturing to produce these new goods. This project analyzes the wave of migration that occurred during the Second Industrial Revolution as people moved from rural to urban areas. It studies urbanization doc17660 none Rice blast disease, caused by the fungal pathogen Magnaporthe grisea, is a major threat to food security worldwide. Decades of intense investigation have proven the fungus to be eminently suitable for genetic and molecular genetic manipulation, making it the primary model for elucidating the basis of phytopathogenesis, including infection related morphogenesis and cultivar host range specificity. The Magnaporthe research community has established an international consortium with the goal of obtaining a complete genome sequence of the fungus. The community has also developed numerous biological resources and tools to take immediate advantage of the sequence. This project represents a partnership between North Carolina State University and the Whitehead Institute-Center for Genome Research to generate and assemble the entire genome using a whole genome shotgun approach and to perform automated annotation. The rapid availability of this sequence in an annotated form will immediately provide new opportunities for integrating research and education of students. The data will promote the discovery of genes and potential anti-fungal targets, permit reconstruction of pathways, provide sequence-anchored clone paths for use in genetic and functional studies, and enable comparative genomic approaches to commence. Moreover, the data will provide the foundation for the discovery and design of novel environmentally sound strategies to more effectively manage this and other fungal diseases. This is a Microbial Genome Sequencing Award funded through a collaborative activity between the National Science Foundation and the Department of Agriculture Initiative for Future Agriculture and Food Systems. This award represents one portion of the Magnaporthe grisea genome sequencing project. The other portion is being funded by the USDA doc17661 none The principal investigator will investigate problems involving the representation theory of reductive algebraic groups. The structures related to reductive groups include Lie algebras, Chevalley groups, Weyl groups and centralizer algebras. The methods and constructions involved in the study will be algebraic as well as geometric. The underlying theme will be to establish connections between the cohomology and representations of the objects in order to prove new and interesting results about these structures. Establishing such relationships also lends itself to providing concrete calculations. The algebraic objects known as groups, rings and Lie algebras arise in many different physical applications in biology, chemistry and physics. These algebraic objects in general have complex internal structures and symmetries. Extracting information about these structures can provide vital information which can be used in a range of applications such as those mentioned above. This project is in the area of representation theory, which is now a central area of mathematics because it provides a systematic method for studying complicated algebraic structures. Roughly speaking, representations can be thought of as ``snapshots of some algebraic object from different viewing angles. These snapshots are provided via explicitly described matrices. By putting together the information from the representations, many questions surrounding these complicated algebraic systems can be answered doc17662 none A field investigation will be carried out to study the role that bubbles and their associated buoyancy play in the energy balance of the surf zone. Existing measurements do not agree with present models of turbulent dissipation in this region. It is hypothesized that the a significant buoyancy flux associated with bubbles may have an important effect on mean density and, consequently, dissipation. The vertical structure of dissipation, void fraction, and buoyancy flux due to air entrainment will be estimated. New theory for energy budgets and surf zone turbulence will be defined and tested doc17663 none The molecular mechanisms by which small-molecule allosteric effectors activate gene-regulatory proteins for specific DNA binding are largely unknown. Understanding these mechanisms should provide general insights into molecular recognition, and inform our understanding of the biology of the molecules involved in these processes. The overall goal of the present work is to achieve an understanding of allosteric activation that accounts for both structural and energetic features of ligand binding and explains DNA specificity in the arginine repressor system of E. coli, ArgR. A combined biochemical and biophysical approach will be used to establish the quantitative foundations for a comprehensive understanding of the molecular and biological significance of ArgR-ligand interactions. The cornerstone of this approach is careful measurement of ligand-binding equilibria including determination of affinity, stoichiometry, and cooperativity. The goal in making these measurements is to define the ligand-occupancy states of the protein as a function of ligand concentration. This information is then used to set the conditions for studies of protein function and structure over the range of relevant ligand-occupancy states. This project has four aims. 1. Quantitative analysis of L-arg binding to ArgR using isothermal titration, analytical ultracentrifugation, and NMR. 2. Analysis of the effects of ligand-occupancy state on ArgR function in transcription and recombination. 3. Evaluation of changes in structure and dynamics as a function of ligand-occupancy state, using proteolytic cleavage and NMR. 4. Examination of ATP binding to evaluate whether this ligand confers functional or structural consequences for ArgR. These biochemical and biophysical experiments should provide the quantitative foundations for understanding the molecular and biological mechanisms of ArgR function, and should help to bring the functional and structural pictures of ArgR allosteric activation into a common focus. Biomolecules have difficult jobs to do. Many of them must recognize one ligand from an intracellular sea of similar ligands, and respond in a physiologically appropriate way. The range of molecular strategies used to execute complex cellular functions is probably very broad, but few examples have been fully characterized. An in-depth understanding of molecular strategies is fundamental to many areas of chemistry and biology. This research is aimed at expanding our general understanding of the mechanisms used by proteins to recognize and respond to small ligands that can potentiate their function doc17664 none Proposal Number Bower Lozier This project will collect RAFOS float data, hydrographic data and altimetry to pursue a greater understanding of the pathways of waters exiting the subpolar regions. Sequentially released, acoustically-tracked, RAFOS floats will be deployed at the Labrador Sea Water level in the Deep Western Boundary Current (DWBC) along the western boundary of the Labrador Sea. The floats will be released on a seasonal basis for three years and they will be tracked as they transit through the junction in pathways near Flemish Cap. These observations will also be used to address an apparent contradiction between existing theory of the export of newly ventilated waters from the sub-polar regions via the DWBC and recent drifter tracks that show the profiling floats turning eastward along the subpolar-subtropical gyre boundary. The new data will also be used to address hypothesis related to the structure of the narrow DWBC path, the temporal variability and intermittency in Labrador Sea Water pathways, the extent to which the deep ocean is ventilated, and the time scale of that ventilation doc17665 none Wernicke This award provides two years of continued support for the NSF-funded component of the Basin and Range Geodetic Network (BARGEN). This component, known as the Northern Basin and Range network or NBAR, includes 18 remote, continuously monitored GPS sites with ~100 km spacing, deployed in an east-west array near lat. 40 deg. N, spanning the diffusely deforming western boundary of the North American plate. Installed in and , these sites benefit from drilled, braced monuments anchored in bedrock to a depth of 10m and a very dry climate. Daily position estimates in the horizontal exhibit root-mean-square scatter at the 1-2 mm level, and time series analysis and other statistical analyses of some 4.5 years of data indicate errors in horizontal velocity of less than 0.2 mm yr at one standard deviation. Continued operation of this network is urgent, because it represents an important prototype experiment for NSF s Plate Boundary Observatory (PBO) initiative, which proposes the deployment of some 900 new sites of similar design across the deforming western margin of the North American plate. The NBAR sites are scheduled to be upgraded with new instruments as early as provided PBO is funded (now under consideration as part of NSF s FY budget). The NBAR sites will form the nucleus of PBO s 100-site backbone network and of proposed site clusters in the northern Basin and Range. Continuity of geodetic time series up to and through PBO implementation will provide the strongest possible basis for predicting its ultimate capability, and for assessing the merits of proposed strategies for site locations. An additional two years of data from the NBAR sites will bear significantly on three fundamental - and still controversial - questions: 1) the degree to which GPS time series are contaminated by low-frequency noise; 2) whether errors in vertical velocities will be low enough to provide geophysically meaningful signal; and 3) whether to expect agreement between geodetically determined velocities and geologically determined deformation rates. Additional data will also provide the clearest possible understanding of the capabilities and limitations of continuous GPS prior to PBO deployment doc17666 none 01- Ritzwoller This is a collaborative proposal between Principal Investigators at the University of Colorado and Yale University. Arctic tectonics is dominated by the interaction of the North American, Eurasian,and Pacific plates. In oceanic areas, the boundaries between these plates are relatively well known, but much of the North American-Eurasian plate boundary is defined by a broad zone of intra-continental deformation. The driving mechanisms for this deformation are poorly understood. Newly acquired seismic data makes it possible to decipher plate motion at the Aleutian-Kamchatka junction. This junction connects the strike-slip Bering fault along the western Aleutians with an active subduction zone beneath southern Kamchatka, where plate convergence is accompanied by vigorous arc-volcanics. The Okhotsk Sea lies in the back-arc region of the Kamchatka subduction zone, and its unresolved deformation is critical to understanding present-day North America-Eurasia plate interaction. The evolution of the Kamchatka-Aleutian junction is a critical component of the Cenozoic evolution of the Pacific-Eurasian plate boundary, and thus of Arctic tectonics as a whole. The principal goal of this project to characterize the temperature and the texture of the lithosphere and the asthenosphere near the Aleutian-Kamchatka junction region. Temperature is related to seismic velocity anomalies, and deformation texture to seismic anisotropy. Temperature and texture will reveal the role of the upper mantle in the interplay between the plates, particularly 1) how mantle processes facilitate the vigorous subduction-related volcanism near the Aleutian-Kamchatka junction, and 2) whether and how past extensional tectonics in the Okhotsk Sea have influenced the Cenozoic development of the North America-Eurasia boundary. The Yale Principal Investigators acquired seismic data in Kamchatka by operating a portable network of broadband seismometers in - . Recordings from this network combined with data from permanent seismological stations will for the primary data set for this study. They bring expertise in regional tectonics, receiver function analysis, and characterizing lithospheric dynamics using seismic anisotropy. The Colorado Principal Investigators are experts in surface wave tomography inversion for models of the crust and the upper mantle and the inference of mantle temperature from seismic models. This collaboration is designed to generate accurate and more sharply focused images of isotropic and anisotropic seismic features near the Kamchatka-Aleutian corner. From these images the temperature and texture of the upper mantle that constrains lithospheric dynamics will be inferred doc17667 none Natural ecosystems perform fundamental services that are essential for sustaining human populations. Ecosystem services arise from complex interactions between natural cycles and ecological processes, and could cost human societies trillions of dollars annually to replace. Because human population growth and consumption cause the continued alteration of natural ecosystems, identifying and monitoring ecosystem services is a critical natural resource need for sound environmental decision-making. This research project focuses on the ecosystem services provided by floodplain forests ---specifically, how floodplain forests remove phosphate (a common pollutant) from floodwaters, converting it to a less harmful form prior to export downstream. One consequence of the development of natural ecosystems for agriculture or human habitation is an increase in phosphate exports to aquatic ecosystems. Because phosphate can cause the eutrophication of these aquatic ecosystems, understanding how floodplain forests convert phosphate to less harmful forms is an important component of understanding the ecosystem services that improve water quality doc17668 none Burnley Quantitative rheological measurements on Earth materials have been conducted only under relatively low-pressure conditions corresponding to the depth of ~60 km or less. The main thrust of this project is to extend this limit, through technical developments, at least to ~800 km covering not only the upper mantle but also the transition zone and the lower mantle. We propose to establish a new inter-institutional program coordinated with COMPRES (Consortium for Materials Property Research in the Earth Sciences) by utilizing the infrastructure for operation of national facilities and educational program, and we will expand the capabilities of these facilities for the broader scientific community. Through inter-institutional collaboration, we will develop two new types of apparatus (a modified cubic apparatus (D-DIA) and a rotational Drickamer apparatus (RDA)) in addition to further improvements to the well-established deformation techniques using a multianvil apparatus (MA). Both D-DIA and RDA (as well as MA) can readily be fitted to synchrotron radiation facilities to allow quantitative measurements of stress and strain at high-pressure and temperature conditions. D-DIA is suited for quantitative rheology measurements including shear localization and resultant instabilities while RDA has a unique capability of large strain deformation experiments at high-pressures, an important feature for study of lattice preferred orientation. These apparatus will be used to obtain the first quantitative data set on rheological properties and deformation-induced microstructures of Earth and planetary materials under high-pressure, high-temperature conditions (to ~15-25 GPa, ~ K). The results of such measurements will contribute to better understand (i) the radial and lateral variation of rheological properties for whole mantle, (ii) the interaction of rheological behavior with chemical reactions including phase transformations, and (iii) the nature of deformation-induced microstructures such as lattice preferred orientation (which causes seismic anisotropy). The unique facility thus developed will be accessible to a large mineral and rock physics community and will significantly enhance the contribution of mineral and rock physics research to a wide range of solid Earth sciences doc17669 none The proposal is for an experimental and theoretical research program to investigate turbulent flow and convective heat transfer in pin fin arrays, which are an important component of modern gas turbine blade cooling systems. From the database generated from comprehensive experiments, the development of more physically based turbulence closure models will be undertaken, and these will be applied to commercial software packages. The results, if successful, will allow improved cooling system design with more rapid design cycles, leading to reduced cost and higher engine efficiencies due increased allowable turbine inlet temperatures doc17670 none Waddington This is a collaborative proposal between Principal Investigators at the Universities of Washington and California-Santa Cruz. Scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will be involved. Other participants are scientists from the University of Iceland and Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (ETH). The Principal Investigators will address the glacier-scale physics of soft-bedded ice motion by testing the hypothesis that the force balance and the rate of motion of Breidamerkurjokull on the Vatnajokull ice cap, Iceland is controlled by the underlying till bed and not by other factors such as sticky spots, longitudinal stretching compression, marginal shear) Understanding the physics that govern ice motion is needed to make predictions on the future behavior of mountain glaciers and ice sheets in the context of the ongoing climate change and sea-level rise. Breidamerkurjokull, an outlet glacier draining, has played a significant role in developing a new paradigm of glacier motion, in which the ice itself rides passively on top of a deforming till bed. This innovative mechanism has been used to explain a wide array of glaciological phenomena such as fast ice motion and high rates of glacial sediment transport. Much of what is known about subglacial till deformation is derived from borehole and laboratory experiments where the process is studied at short length scales of ~0.1 to ~ 1 meters (m). However, to improve models of soft-bedded glaciers, an understanding of the physical factors controlling the ice-flow rate over much longer spatial scales of ~100 to ~ m is required This one-year project will involve collection of new data on ice surface velocity and topography (spatial resolution of 100 m) and bed topography (spatial resolution of several hundred meters). The fieldwork will include surveys with ice-penetrating and ground penetrating radar and Global Positioning System. Additional data will be generated from satellite imagery using Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry. The data will be used to calculate the spatial distribution of basal shear stress and basal resistance beneath Breidamerkurjokull employing the force-balance and transfer-function inversions, respectively. This research should improve the current understanding of ice-till interactions and of their control over flow of ice masses and may help predict whether modern ice masses will harm local or global societal interests through, for instance, changes in the global sea level or surges of mountain glaciers doc17671 none Holton This project will produce a lexical database and associated dictionary of Tanacross, an Athabascan language spoken in eastern interior Alaska. Tanacross is among the least documented of the Alaska Athabascan languages, and no previous lexical documentation project has been undertaken. Data will be collected both via elicitation and from recorded texts and compiled into a lexical database. This database will be used to generate a printed dictionary and will serve as the basis for an electronic version of the dictionary. The resulting dictionary and database will contribute both to our understanding of the Athabascan family of languages and to ongoing Tanacross language revitalization efforts doc17672 none Holton Alaska and Northwestern Canada are home to more than half of the Athabascan languages, and in these areas Athabascan communities have shown increasing interest in language revitalization. At the same time, the Athabascan languages present unique challenges to linguists seeking to develop lexical databases. The Athabascan Languages Conference, with an accompanying workshop on lexicography, will be held in Fairbanks, Alaska, in an effort to unite linguists, Native speakers, educators, and language learners in a rich information exchange. The sessions will be focused on linguistic research, language revitalization, and language policy. Stipends will be available for students and Native speakers from the Alaskan interior and Northwestern Canada doc17673 none Social measurement entails discovering the nature of knowledge shared by a group of individuals who possess common backgrounds, cultural knowledge, or social norms, i.e., knowledge defined by social conventions. Unlike most physical and psychophysical measurements, social measurements need not have objective external criteria. Therefore cultural knowledge and social norms must be inferred from the pattern of responses among respondents to test items posed by researchers. Previous research has developed a collection of formal models and methods for social measurement known as cultural consensus theory. The models bear a close relationship to models in psychometric test theory; however, unlike most applications of test theory, the researcher does not assume prior knowledge of the answer key for the test items. The theory consists of a family of knowledge aggregation models for questionnaire data that permits the simultaneous estimation of the competence or knowledge of each respondent and the consensus correct answer to each question. Models exist for particular testing formats such as true-false, multiple-choice, matching, and rank order for the case of a single homogeneous culture. This research project will take cultural consensus theory to the next level by developing new models to deal with more complex response formats, and to extend the models to the multiculture case where the respondents can be partitioned into subgroups. The new models will then be applied to a set of empirical studies concerning reliable differences in the perceptual structure of color, in particular across different language groups and between different individuals within a group. State-of-the-art Markov Chain Monte Carlo estimation methods will be developed for these new models. The advances in theory and method that will emerge from this research will improve the quality of social measurement, both for research questions related to the perceptual structure of color and for other measurement questions that depend upon aggregating the judgements of respondents doc17674 none Moum A comprehensive set of measurements of scalar gradient spectra from the towed microstructure instrument MARLIN, will be collected in regions of the abyssal ocean where a large range of both turbulence and stratification regimes is expected. The purpose of the study is to investigate the dependence of the ratio of salt diffusivity to heat diffusivity on buoyancy Reynolds number. To accomplish these objectives, two new sensors using well understood principles will be built and deployed on MARLIN. The first is a combined thermocouple microscale conductivity probe. The second is an anisotropy probe using multiple thermocouple pairs. A complementary purpose for analyzing horizontal scalar fluctuations is to improve the interpretation of microstructure measurements. Many assumptions are commonly made to infer mixing and fluxes from one-dimensional, partially resolved scalar spectra, or to relate scalar spectra to turbulent kinetic energy dissipation rates (such as the assumption of isotropy, a universal spectral form for scalar gradients, and associated .constants). Used in conjunction with the present catalog of existing vertical spectra and spectra from turbulence simulations, these measurements will permit improvements in the ability of the microstructure community to reliably quantify the effects of small scale ocean processes doc17675 none Systemic Research, Inc. proposes to develop and implement a progress indicator monitoring system for the National Science Foundation s (NSF) Historically Black Colleges and Universities Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP). Since the inception of the program in , HBCU-UP has provided a foundationfor sustainable improvements of science, mathematics, engineering and technology (SMET) instructional and outreach programs. Along with other ethnic diversity continuum programs within NSF, the overarching goal of HBSU-UP is to increases the number of under-represented ethnic minorities well prepared for participation and leadership in the SMET workforce. The program emphasized the implementation of comprehensive institutional approaches to strengthen SMET teaching and learning primarily focusing on improvement of access, retention, and graduation from undergraduate programs, including the transition between high school and college, 2- and 4- year colleges, undergraduate and graduate studies, and from college to the workplace. The Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA, ) mandates that Federal agencies account for program results; the HBSU program has been classified as part of undergraduate support for broadening participation with the primary goal of increasing the number of baccalaureate recipients. The HBCU-UP program also directly aims at the goals defined by the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (November 1, ) , sustainable improvements of science, mathematics, engineering and technology (SMET) instructional and outreach programs at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Within the context of HBCU-UP goals and relevant GPRA requirements, Systemic Research proposes to develop and implement a HBCU-UP indicator monitoring system (IMS) based on HBCU-UP goals and objectives, project activities and components, and self-evaluation and assessment questions designed to assist in self-assessment of the individual sites progress, as well as overall program effectiveness. The first year will be devoted to the design of the framework, development of prototype IMS instruments, and field-testing with selected HBCU sites. Beginning in the second year, the IMS instruments will be delivered to HBCUs during a workshop. The workshop will also be designed for institutional data managers to share ideas in indicator management and to enhance the integrity of collected data. The data collected during the second year will be compiled into a two volume Fact Book. Since , Systemic Research has had extensive experience working with minority serving institutions, including a few HBCU s, through it s involvement in NSF s Model Institution for Excellence Program (MIE) funded by NSF and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Systemic Research developed a progress indicator database, MSET (MIE Self-Evaluation Template), based on a conceptual and operational framework for MIE program effectiveness. The MIE program goal is very similar to that of HBCU-UP: to strengthen the infrastructure of minority serving institutions (HBCUs, Hispanic Serving Institutions, and Tribal Colleges and Universities) in SMET education and undergraduate research, and to increase the number of students who pursue advanced SMET degrees. Systemic Research will disseminate a two volume HBCU Fact Book: one for overall progress, and the other for individual sites progress. The published reports will be available in three formats: hard copy, CD-ROM, and web version. Systemic Research will also host a web site to promote communications and networking among the participating HBCUs doc17676 none SES Proposal Bruce Lewenstein David Kirby, Science Consultants, Fictional Films, and the Scientific Process Cornell University This project is a postdoctoral fellowship. David Kirby, the fellowship holder, is pursuing a combined educational and research program focused on the role of science consultants in the production of mainstream entertainment films. The primary goals are to: 1) learn the theory of science studies; 2) learn methods for researching issues of science communication through the media, including interview methods and historical analysis; 3) begin the transition from a career in basic science to a research and teaching career in science studies; and 4) broaden the domain of Public Understanding of Science to include science presented in entertainment media. Kirby is trained as an evolutionary and molecular geneticist and seeks preparation for a career as an academic researcher unsing a multi-disciplinary approach to address the ways science and technology are communicated through media. The postdoctoral training component of the project consists of taking core theory and methods courses, participating in the vibrant intellectual life of Cornell s Department of Science & Technology Studies, and working closely with specific faculty members. In addition, the fellowship holder will serve as an assistant editor for the journal Public Understanding of Science. The research activities include literature searches, archival research, document collection, film viewing, and analysis related to mainstream films with science themes. The primary case study is the Jurassic Park series, and will include oral interviews. A related research element concerns the commidification of scientific information. Here attention is given to one individual entrepreneur, Donna Cline, and a science consulting company, Takeoff Technologies doc17677 none Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are produced inside the cell during normal oxidative metabolism. Tight control of this process is crucial for numerous biological events to occur, including enzyme activation, cell cycle regulation and programmed cell death. Abnormal production of ROS can lead to an imbalance in redox homeostasis known as oxidative stress. Often times exposure to environmental agents, including, UV irradiation, ozone, herbicides, pesticides and metals can produce additional ROS that lead to this imbalance. Upon exposure to these agents, this elevated level of ROS can cause damage to proteins, nucleic acids and lipids, as well as, alter physiological responses such as signal transduction and gene expression. Long term consequences of oxidative stress have also been associated with the pathogenesis of a variety of toxicities and diseases. Under some circumstances, cells can utilize an antioxidant defense system in order to cope with the excess ROS produced during oxidative stress. However, the mechanism by which some key components in the antioxidant defense system work is not completely known. For example, NADPH is a critical biological cofactor that helps to maintain a balance between the prooxidant and antioxidant status of the cell. The pentose phosphate pathway through the activities of glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PDH) and 6-phosphogluconate dehydrogenase generates most of the NADPH needed by the cell. G6PDH is the key rate-limiting enzyme in this pathway and thus not only regulates the flow of carbon through this pathway, but also the production of NADPH. Since NADPH is necessary for maintaining the cell s redox balance and G6PDH is important for its production then it seems reasonable to conclude that the redox state of the cell would influence the expression of this important enzyme. Indeed, studies from this laboratory and others have suggested that expression of the gene for G6PDH is regulated by the oxidative status of the cell. However, the mechanism by which this regulation occurs is unknown. Therefore, this research is aimed at testing the hypothesis that the environmental contaminant cadmium, which influences the oxidative state of a cell by decreasing levels of glutathione, regulates the expression of G6PDH through a redox sensitive transcriptional event. Cadmium is generating a great deal of environmental concern due to its accumulation from such industrial practices as production of plastics, materials, batteries, tobacco, electroplating, welding and smelting. Organisms are easily exposed to cadmium due to its relatively high vapor pressure, which accounts for its high solubility in water. The studies will be done in primary rat hepatocytes in culture. The liver is the major target organ for acute inorganic Cd exposure. Additionally, hepatocytes are attractive to use as a model since the metabolic responses to hormones, nutrients or environmental agents consistently mimic those observed in vivo. These studies would represent the first of this kind and add significantly to our understanding of the role of the oxidative state of the cell on the expression of enzymes involved in major biochemical pathways such as the pentose phosphate pathway. These studies would also add valuable information about how a cell protects itself from damage induced from environmental agents such as metals. A team learning environment will facilitate the completion of the work by the PI and students doc17678 none Billfishes are a complex of large pelagic fishes that occur in the tropical and subtropical waters of the world s oceans. They are top predators in the pelagic food web and, simultaneously, the most sought-after fishes for saltwater anglers. These oceanic giants support a multi-million dollar sportfishing industry and comprise a significant bycatch of tuna longline efforts. Unfortunately, human activities have led to significant declines in billfish stocks; blue marlin are thought to be at less than 40% of that necessary to sustain fishing at maximum sustainable yields. Despite their critical ecological status, the biological information available on these organisms is extremely limited. Focusing on the early life history stages of billfishes is a tractable means of obtaining valuable biological data. For example, collection of early larval stages can be used, in conjunction with data on circulation, as a means of determining when and where spawning occurs. Investigation of the pelagic habitat variables associated with the occurrence of billfish larvae may provide insight into environmental conditions required for spawning and early survival. Even in their early life history, billfishes are likely important constituents of the pelagic food chain, especially as predators on zooplankton and larval fishes. The overall objective of this study is a seasonally resolved understanding of the annual cycle of billfish spawning, larval growth, feeding, and transport within the complex environment of the Straits of Florida. As top predators, billfishes play a critical yet undefined role in the pelagic food web. Here we examine the early life history of billfishes within the oceanographic context of the Straits of Florida (SSF). The SSF is a complex system of discrete, interacting water masses and pelagic environments. Preliminary data suggest that billfish larvae occur predictably in three distinct patches across the SSF. The project is designed to 1) identify the sources of the three distinct larval billfish patches within the SSF; 2) determine how the these patches differ in terms of the trophic and growth environment of the billfish larvae; and 3) investigate the transport fates of larval billfishes from these different patches. The fieldwork is divided into three separate study components: The first study will address the temporal qualities of cross-Strait features (i.e., water mass distribution, larval billfish patches, and zooplankton community structure). Monthly sampling (consisting of ichthyoplankton and zooplankton tows, CTD, fluorometry, and ADCP measurements) over two years will be linked via otolith aging studies and circulation patterns to estimates of spawning locations. Further otolith work on larval growth rates will be coupled to zooplankton work on community composition and dynamics to identify trophodynamic differences among patches. The second study will expand the spatial scale of our efforts to examine the along-Strait dynamics relating to the formation, maintenance, and fate of larval billfish patches. A single cruise will be made during the second year and will include the same suite of measurements as above as well as ARGOS-tracked drifter measurements. The third study during year 3 will incorporate Lagrangian techniques to track larval billfishes from hypothesized spawning sites through the Straits of Florida system to link these trajectories to the observed cross-Strait spatial patchiness and ultimate fate of the discrete patches. Sampling will consist of a similar set of measurements conducted at stations normal to the track of a group of drifters. Results of the proposed study will provide critical new information regarding the early life history and ecology of these important pelagic predators as well as the interaction between different water masses and the trophodynamics of pelagic food webs. A further understanding of the formation, maintenance and fate of particular chl. a zooplankton larval fish patches also will provide insights into understanding the role of upwelling and water mass exchange across frontal boundaries and shallow banks doc17679 none Physical and biological interactions play a complex role in the partitioning of carbon between the atmosphere, upper ocean, deep ocean and sediments. At present, interdisciplinary models offer the best means to test hypotheses about how carbon partitioning is regulated in various oceanic regions on time scales of years to centuries. A new interdisciplinary model will integrate advances in several areas to test two related hypotheses: 1) that switches in community and productivity dominance between diatoms and other phytoplankton groups (e.g. non?siliceous picoplankton and calcifying phytoplankton) significantly affect carbon partitioning, vary spatially and temporally and are regulated by a combination of Si and Fe in combination; 2) that changes in Si trapping in the Southern Ocean affect Si(OH)4 concentrations in the mode waters that feed equatorial upwelling, and that Si and C uptake by equatorial phytoplankton alters air?sea exchange of carbon dioxide at the equator. An interdisciplinary science team of biological and chemical oceanographers and modelers will address these issues via four approaches. First, a calcifying phytoplankton component will be added to an existing model and used to incorporate water column production and dissolution of CaC03. Second, model experiments will be designed and executed to explore the regulation of switching between siliceous (diatoms) and non?siliceous (pico and calcifying) plankton. Third, an improved blogeochemical model developed for the equatorial Pacific will be spatially expanded to include the Southern Ocean, and used to conduct a series of simulation experiments on the processes that link high latitude mode water regions with the source waters for equatorial upwelling. Finally, iron?sensitive growth parameters of the phytoplankton components of the model will be manipulated to test the ecosystem response to iron enrichment in both the equatorial Pacific Ocean and the Southern Ocean. These objectives represent a significant step in the development of coupled physical biogeochemical models for exploring the response of marine biogeochemical processes to climate change doc17680 none Lyons Research over the past few years has demonstrated for the first time that there are several fundamentally different types of geomagnetic disturbances having time scales ranging from a few minutes to a few hours and ground magnetic field perturbations ranging from a few tens of nT to ~ nT. Each has unique characteristics, reflects distinctly different physical processes occurring within the magnetosphere, and contributes significantly to overall space weather activity that affects manmade systems in space and on the ground. The general objective of the research proposed here is to determine important aspects of the two- dimensional structure and temporal dynamics of these different disturbances by using the recently enhanced capabilities for Arctic ground-based observations (CANOPUS, NORSTAR, SuperDARN) of currents, electric fields, and optical emissions within the auroral ionosphere, in combination with appropriate spacecraft observations (DMSP, POLAR, IMAGE, LANL, GOES, Geotail). Specific objectives related to the following disturbances include: Poleward boundary intensifications (PBIs: have an auroral signature that can extent equatorward from the poleward boundary of the auroral oval and are associated with short- time scale flow bursts in the magnetotail): Determine the two-dimensional structure of PBIs, and when and where their different types of two-dimensional structure occur. Relate the local two-dimensional structure to global auroral structure. Investigate the possibility that PBIs are a manifestation of a global magnetospheric oscillation by determining whether PBIs generally show large power at auroral-zone ULF frequencies, if the same ULF frequencies seen in the auroral oval are simultaneously seen in the nightside plasma sheet, and if consistent phase speeds can be seen for PBI-related variations. Determine if PBIs extending to low latitudes are of such large scale that they simultaneously affect the nightside plasmasheet from x ~ -30 RE (or near the separatrix) to synchronous orbit. Determine the two-dimensional relation between PBIs and plasma flows in the auroral ionosphere. Dynamic pressure disturbances (large and rapid brightening, broadening, and poleward expansion of the auroral oval caused by enhancements in solar wind dynamic pressure): Determine (a) whether reconnection and the amount of open magnetic flux over the polar caps is in general strongly controlled by the dynamic pressure of the solar wind as recent observations suggest, (b) whether the strength of ionospheric and region 1 currents are strongly controlled by solar wind dynamic pressure, and (c) how convection electric fields and the cross-polar cap potential drop depend upon dynamic pressure. Convection-driven morningside auroral disturbances (auroral enhancements at midnight to dawn MLTs that occur during prolonged periods of enhance convection): Identify the current (ionospheric and field aligned), electric field, and precipitation particle characteristics directly associated with these dawnside auroral enhancements. Substorms: Obtain an answer to the critical question of whether closer to 50% or closer to 100% of substorms are triggered by IMF changes that lead to a reduction in large- scale convection. This will be accomplished using the recently enhanced SuperDARN radar network to determine whether reductions in the strength of polar-cap convection (which must be related to appropriate IMF changes) are directly associated with substorm onset, and whether, for a given amount of energy stored in the tail, the strength of a substorm expansion phase is proportional to the amount of reduction in the strength of convection doc17681 none Tulaczyk This is a collaborative proposal between Principal Investigators at the Universities of Washington and California-Santa Cruz. Scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will be involved. Other participants are scientists from the University of Iceland and Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (ETH). The Principal Investigators will address the glacier-scale physics of soft-bedded ice motion by testing the hypothesis that the force balance and the rate of motion of Breidamerkurjokull on the Vatnajokull ice cap, Iceland is controlled by the underlying till bed and not by other factors such as sticky spots, longitudinal stretching compression, marginal shear) Understanding the physics that govern ice motion is needed to make predictions on the future behavior of mountain glaciers and ice sheets in the context of the ongoing climate change and sea-level rise. Breidamerkurjokull, an outlet glacier draining, has played a significant role in developing a new paradigm of glacier motion, in which the ice itself rides passively on top of a deforming till bed. This innovative mechanism has been used to explain a wide array of glaciological phenomena such as fast ice motion and high rates of glacial sediment transport. Much of what is known about subglacial till deformation is derived from borehole and laboratory experiments where the process is studied at short length scales of ~0.1 to ~ 1 meters (m). However, to improve models of soft-bedded glaciers, an understanding of the physical factors controlling the ice-flow rate over much longer spatial scales of ~100 to ~ m is required This one-year project will involve collection of new data on ice surface velocity and topography (spatial resolution of 100 m) and bed topography (spatial resolution of several hundred meters). The fieldwork will include surveys with ice-penetrating and ground penetrating radar and Global Positioning System. Additional data will be generated from satellite imagery using Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry. The data will be used to calculate the spatial distribution of basal shear stress and basal resistance beneath Breidamerkurjokull employing the force-balance and transfer-function inversions, respectively. This research should improve the current understanding of ice-till interactions and of their control over flow of ice masses and may help predict whether modern ice masses will harm local or global societal interests through, for instance, changes in the global sea level or surges of mountain glaciers doc17682 none Enrique Peacock-Lopez of Williams College is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to carry out research in the area of chemical and biochemical reactions in solutions and on surfaces using analytical methods and simulations. The effort will expand proposed minimal models and consider several systems that are relevant to nonlinear chemical kinetics and biochemical mechanisms in cell and human physiology. Specifically, cell surface ligand-receptor interactions and lateral diffusion on phospholipid bilayers will be studied. As well, cascade mechanisms responding to ligand-receptor binding and specific biochemical mechanisms related to biochemical response will be explored. Applications will enable insights to be gained into biochemical systems including self-replicating structures and their implication on triple-stranded DNA, prion kinetics, pulsitile secretion, regulation of pituitary hormones, and glucose metabolism in liver cells. Temporal and spatial pattern formation in biological systems is an interesting and challenging problem in theoretical biophysical chemistry. In this project, the molecular basis of different physiological mechanisms will be explored, with the aim of understanding the response to initial macromolecule-surface protein signals at the molecular level. Undergraduate participation is an integral part of this effort, with students expected to gain valuable research experience and benefit from complementary interactions with experimentalists doc17683 none Wake This is a collaborative proposal between the Universities of New Hampshire and Maine and the Geological Survey of Canada. This Office of International Science and Engineering is contributing to this award. The Principal Investigators will recover two ice cores the Eclipse Icefield ( meters) in the St. Elias Mountains, Yukon Territory, Canada in cooperation with the Geological Survey of Canada in . The core will be analyzed for stable isotopes, major ions, trace elements, rare earth elements and persistent organic pollutants. The Eclipse record will provide, for the first time, detailed depositional histories of a wide variety of pollutants during the last 200 years in the remote northwest North American Arctic. Through the use of unique chemical tracers, the Principal Investigators will be able to identify source regions for these pollutants, changes in source regions with time, and the role of atmospheric circulation in controlling contaminant distributions in the northwest North American Arctic. The detailed multi-parameter record of natural and anthropogenic change will result in a greatly improved record of climate and environmental change for a region in which very few records currently exist doc17684 none Colicin E3 is a toxic protein secreted by certain strains of E. coli in order to eliminate related strains of bacteria living in the same ecological niche. Colicin E3 carries out three functions: it binds to the BtuB receptor on the target cell envelope, it is internalized into sensitive cells across their cytoplasmic membrane, and once inside the cell, it inactivates the protein biosynthetic machinery of the infected cell by nicking 16S ribosomal RNA between A and G at the ribosomal A site. The producing organism is immune to the toxicity of colicin E3 by virtue of an immunity protein (IP), which tightly binds to colicin E3 in a 1:1 complex, and thus renders it inactive. The goal of this project is to understand the interaction of colicin E3 with proteins that facilitate its translocation across the outer and inner membranes of E. coli. The research will focus on the crystal structure determination of three ternary complexes: (i) colicin E3, IP and a C-terminal fragment of TolA; (ii) colicin E3, IP and TolB; (iii) colicin E3, IP and the BtuB cell surface receptor. Another part of this work deals with the dynamic aspects of the colicin E3 structure by itself and in the presence of either IP or the Tol proteins or the BtuB receptor. The degree of flexibility, either segmental or global, will be measured by Fluorescence Energy Transfer (FRET). The crystal structure of the colicin E3-IP binary complex suggests the formation of flexible hinges at the domain junctions in the absence of IP. This will be tested by FRET experiments. These studies will shed light on the mechanism of action of this multifunctional protein doc16479 none Predicting the timing and location of convective cloud development is a fundamental challenge in the study of meteorology. Heterogeneities in the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) particularly in ABL water vapor content and depth, lead to preferred locations for convective initiation. Land surface heterogeneity is an important cause of heterogeneity in the ABL. Hence, land-surface fluxes play an important role in ABL development and convective initiation. The minimum scale of land surface forcing that causes heterogeneity in ABL properties such as depth and water vapor content and consequently leads to preferred locations for cloud formation remains uncertain. Observations and models suggest scales ranging from a few to nearly 100 km. This project proposes an observational plan as part of the International H2O Project (IHOP). The IHOP is a large multi-agency, multi-investigator project that focuses on the measurement of water vapor and water vapor variability. The goal of this project is to improve understanding of convective initiation, increase short-term precipitation forecast skills and test the capabilities of various instruments to measure the four dimensional characteristics of water vapor. The critical observations for the research to be performed under this award are maps of surface fluxes of latent and sensible heat over a region of at least 300 x 300 km in Oklahoma and Kansas, and repeated airborne water vapor DIfferential Absorption Lidar (DIAL) observations of ABL depth and lower tropospheric water vapor. The flux maps will be created from a network of surface flux towers, airborne measurements of surface fluxes over repeated flight tracks about 50 km in length, satellite remote sensing of land surface temperature and vegetation cover, and a land surface model. One airborne DIAL will be coupled with an airborne Doppler Lidar, yielding the ability to observe ABL flux profiles via remote eddy covariance. Flights will be focused on the midday hours of 10-15 relatively fair weather days in order to capture the preconvective atmosphere with DIAL. Observations will be analyzed to determine the degree of spatial heterogeneity in ABL water vapor depth and water budgets and the causes of this heterogeneity, focusing especially on determining the spatial scales at which land surface heterogeneity is an important factor. Ten to fifteen days of data will be analyzed in an attempt to move beyond a case study approach. Data assimilation will be used to ingest dense, mesoscale observations into a high-resolution mesoscale atmospheric model that includes a sophisticated land-surface scheme. The model will be used as an analysis tool to study mesoscale surface-ABL-cloud interactions captured in the observations. Further the model will be used to assess the impacts of the DIAL observations, detailed land surface flux maps and a new shallow cumulus parameterization on forecasts of ABL heterogeneity and convective initiation. Products will include ABL depth maps, ABL water budget estimates and model post-analysis fields incorporating all available IHOP observations for the 10-15 days of DIAL observations. Expected results include: an improved understanding of the role of land surface heterogeneity in convective ABL development and convective initiation; the degree to which model prediction of ABL development and moist convection can be improved via dense observations of ABL water vapor content and surface fluxes; and the impact of a shallow convection parameterization on model performance doc17686 none Annual and monthly mean air temperatures are the standard parameters used to estimate recent climatic change. The traditional focus on mean air temperature has ignored the additional probabilistic information that can be derived from historical data on daily temperatures. Recent climatic change can be manifest in frequency distributions through a variety of changes to central tendency, variance, and other shape measures. This project will develop a comprehensive procedure for the simultaneous detection of trends in all portions of air-temperature frequency distributions. The project will use spatially extensive daily air-temperature data for 1,062 stations over the 48 contiguous states to develop the use of time-varying percentiles and other parameters that can estimate recent climatic change in innovative ways. Flexible procedures that estimate percentiles and parameters within moving windows will be developed, and the robustness of these procedures will be evaluated. Changes detected in the temperature data will be related to simultaneous changes in humidity and cloud cover as well as change in the shape of the diurnal cycle of air temperature. Monitoring these synergistic interactions will provide a climate-change perspective that is a substantial extension of the traditional focus on central tendency. This project will develop methods to detect trends that are not apparent when one examines only mean temperatures. For example, trends in air temperature may show an increase in the mean while the lower portion of the frequency distribution shows substantial warming and the upper portion shows no change. These changes would indicate not only a warming climate but also one where there is reduced variability with little change in extremely warm air temperatures. As a general approach, this research will develop new methods for detecting changes in frequency distributions that can be applied to any environmental variable that is observed at relatively high temporal resolution. Considering that ecological, economic, and social systems tend to be more sensitive to changes in variability and extreme environmental events, this research has wide applicability. The changes identified will be of value for evaluating the economic, social, ecological dimensions of climate change. The examination of time-varying percentiles, in particular, provides a flexible and robust approach for environmental change research doc17687 none Over the last few years, most aspects of the mathematics curriculum have been undergoing major changes. The calculus reform movement has generated changes both in terms of what is taught and how materials are taught; these changes are well documented. In the eighties a conference on reform calculus was held at Tulane University in New Orleans. The Tulane conference helped shape some of the ideas of reform calculus. This project does the same for precalculus. The purpose of the workshop is to rethink the preparation for calculus, given that students are having such different mathematical experiences in high school, calculus in college has changed, technology is providing mathematical tools for both teaching and learning, and college algebra is in the process of changing. Several mathematics educators were invited to a working workshop that was designed to address each of these issues doc17688 none Chuenpagdee This is a workshop proposal submitted by Dr. Ratana Chuenpagdee, College of William and Mary, and Dr. Kungwan Juntarashote, Kasetsart University, Thailand, to organize a workshop on the roles of education in sustaining integrated coastal management efforts for May 12-16, in Bangkok, Thailand. This is an important workshop to address the challenges of coastal zone management. This workshop will bring together educators, students, researchers, and coastal managers from the USA and the Asia-Pacific region to exchange examples of successful education programs on integrated coastal zone management and to develop an education toolbox that will be used to share information, resources and experience in sustaining integrated coastal management processes. The meeting will include 15 U.S. participants (5 students and 10 experts and educators) and 15 Asian participants (4 students and 11 experts and educators). This proposal meets an important NSF goal of human resource development, and addresses an important issue for sustaining the global coastal ocean environment doc17689 none Darby This is a collaborative proposal by Principal Investigators at the Ohio State University and Old Dominion University. The Principal Investigators will investigate sediment cores from the Chukchi Borderland that were collected and curated by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in . The core sites are located in an area that contains several generations of glacigenic bedforms, which were mapped by the Science Ice Exercise (SCICEX) survey in . A preliminary lithostratigraphy for these cores has been developed from their physical properties logs and core descriptions. The Principal Investigators will verify and further develop this stratigraphy based on lithological and paleontological (foraminiferal) compositions and paleomagnetic measurements, reinforced by 14C dating and coccolith studies. These approaches will allow them to put the Chukchi Borderland cores into a stratigraphic context for the Amerasian Basin and to correlate them with the Lomonosov Ridge sediment records. The results should help to establish an improved Quaternary age model for the Arctic Ocean. Investigation of glacigenic diamictons recovered by cores on the Chukchi Borderland will aid our understanding of the processes involved in the grounding of ice shelves on submarine rises. By using the composition of glacigenic clasts in sediments as provenance tracers they identify glaciation centers that sustained the ice shelves. This stratigraphically constrained information will yield insights into the Pleistocene glaciation history of both the interior and the periphery of the Arctic Ocean and will improve our understanding of interactions between continental-based ice sheets and ice shelves doc17690 none This proposal will provide support for one year for Dr. T. Kageya, a postdoctoral fellow working at the Laser Electron Gamma Source (LEGS) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The LEGS collaboration will carry out measurements of photon elastic scattering and pi meson production from protons and neutrons, which will in turn provide tests of some key low-energy predictions, such as the Drell-Hearn-Gerasimov sum rule, as well as chiral perturbation theory doc17691 none Karato Quantitative rheological measurements on Earth materials have been conducted only under relatively low-pressure conditions corresponding to the depth of ~60 km or less. The main thrust of this project is to extend this limit, through technical developments, at least to ~800 km covering not only the upper mantle but also the transition zone and the lower mantle. We propose to establish a new inter-institutional program coordinated with COMPRES (Consortium for Materials Property Research in the Earth Sciences) by utilizing the infrastructure for operation of national facilities and educational program, and we will expand the capabilities of these facilities for the broader scientific community. Through inter-institutional collaboration, we will develop two new types of apparatus (a modified cubic apparatus (D-DIA) and a rotational Drickamer apparatus (RDA)) in addition to further improvements to the well-established deformation techniques using a multianvil apparatus (MA). Both D-DIA and RDA (as well as MA) can readily be fitted to synchrotron radiation facilities to allow quantitative measurements of stress and strain at high-pressure and temperature conditions. D-DIA is suited for quantitative rheology measurements including shear localization and resultant instabilities while RDA has a unique capability of large strain deformation experiments at high-pressures, an important feature for study of lattice preferred orientation. These apparatus will be used to obtain the first quantitative data set on rheological properties and deformation-induced microstructures of Earth and planetary materials under high-pressure, high-temperature conditions (to ~15-25 GPa, ~ K). The results of such measurements will contribute to better understand (i) the radial and lateral variation of rheological properties for whole mantle, (ii) the interaction of rheological behavior with chemical reactions including phase transformations, and (iii) the nature of deformation-induced microstructures such as lattice preferred orientation (which causes seismic anisotropy). The unique facility thus developed will be accessible to a large mineral and rock physics community and will significantly enhance the contribution of mineral and rock physics research to a wide range of solid Earth sciences doc17692 none Information personalization refers to the automatic adjustment of information content, structure, and presentation tailored to an individual user. The goal of this research project is to develop a modeling methodology for information personalization. The methodology developed in this project termed PIPE ( Personalization is Partial Evaluation ) makes no commitments to a particular personalization algorithm or format for information resources. Instead it emphasizes the representation of information systems in a way that allows their subsequent personalization. With this methodology, web sites and other information resources can be modeled and personalized for users information-seeking goals. The specific activities conducted in this project include (1) characterizing the types of information systems for which this methodology is applicable and (2) constructing personable information system designs. The first activity is approached by defining how information systems are constructed and the representations they afford. The second activity involves the definition of a personability metric for evaluating information system designs. Human-computer interaction methodologies and systematic procedures for evaluation need to be enhanced to provide the needed input for the model formulation and validation. The results of this project will help define personable information spaces rigorously. With a formal model for personalization, we can design better information systems that can help users achieve their information-seeking goals doc17693 none Park This is a collaborative proposal between Principal Investigators at the University of Colorado and Yale University. Arctic tectonics is dominated by the interaction of the North American, Eurasian,and Pacific plates. In oceanic areas, the boundaries between these plates are relatively well known, but much of the North American-Eurasian plate boundary is defined by a broad zone of intra-continental deformation. The driving mechanisms for this deformation are poorly understood. Newly acquired seismic data makes it possible to decipher plate motion at the Aleutian-Kamchatka junction. This junction connects the strike-slip Bering fault along the western Aleutians with an active subduction zone beneath southern Kamchatka, where plate convergence is accompanied by vigorous arc-volcanics. The Okhotsk Sea lies in the back-arc region of the Kamchatka subduction zone, and its unresolved deformation is critical to understanding present-day North America-Eurasia plate interaction. The evolution of the Kamchatka-Aleutian junction is a critical component of the Cenozoic evolution of the Pacific-Eurasian plate boundary, and thus of Arctic tectonics as a whole. The principal goal of this project to characterize the temperature and the texture of the lithosphere and the asthenosphere near the Aleutian-Kamchatka junction region. Temperature is related to seismic velocity anomalies, and deformation texture to seismic anisotropy. Temperature and texture will reveal the role of the upper mantle in the interplay between the plates, particularly 1) how mantle processes facilitate the vigorous subduction-related volcanism near the Aleutian-Kamchatka junction, and 2) whether and how past extensional tectonics in the Okhotsk Sea have influenced the Cenozoic development of the North America-Eurasia boundary. The Yale Principal Investigators acquired seismic data in Kamchatka by operating a portable network of broadband seismometers in - . Recordings from this network combined with data from permanent seismological stations will for the primary data set for this study. They bring expertise in regional tectonics, receiver function analysis, and characterizing lithospheric dynamics using seismic anisotropy. The Colorado Principal Investigators are experts in surface wave tomography inversion for models of the crust and the upper mantle and the inference of mantle temperature from seismic models. This collaboration is designed to generate accurate and more sharply focused images of isotropic and anisotropic seismic features near the Kamchatka-Aleutian corner. From these images the temperature and texture of the upper mantle that constrains lithospheric dynamics will be inferred doc17694 none The continued growth in the availability and use of spatial data on a broad range of phenomena have fueled a drive to develop more effective and statistically sound approaches for the analysis of those data. Because spatial data have distinctive characteristics that do not enable the immediate application of many statistical approaches because fundamental assumptions that underlie the use of those approaches, focused inquiries are required into the development of new spatial statistical approaches and careful adaptation in the use of extant statistical methods for spatial analysis. These awards support collaborative research by two spatial econometricians on two different kinds of spatial analytic modeling approaches. The first of these approaches deals with spatially additive models. Traditionally, the two main methods for analyzing spatial data have been (1) to model the conditional mean of the dependent variable and (2) to focus on specification of spatial dependence among observation. The spatially additive model is designed to combine the specification of the conditional mean with the specification of spatial dependence among observations. The proposed development of spatially additive models in this project will be based on recent innovations that allow generalized additive models to be extended to spatial analysis. First, sparse specification of spatial dependence, quadratic log-determinant approximations and bounds, and computational advances have increased both the speed with which spatial estimation can be accomplished and the size of practical problems that can be solved. Second, quadratic bounds and approximations to the log-determinant can lead to a standard sequential quadratic programming solution that permit quick computation and robust optimization. These advances also allow simultaneous parameter estimation and model selection. The second major line of inquiry for this collaborative project consists of the development of multinomial probit estimation methods for regional science modeling problems where the sample data exhibit spatial dependence. Multinomial probit models can be applied to problems where the variable of interest represents a choice between two or more alternatives. Estimation methods and algorithms that are generally applicable are not currently available for the case when the polychotomous dependent variable disturbance process in the relationship exhibits spatial dependence. The methods to be developed through this project will address this issue and have application to location decisions involving spatial data. Theoretical issues relating to use of multinomial probit models and three alternative estimation strategies will be evaluated. The strategies are maximum likelihood estimation, Bayesian estimators based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimation, and a hybrid strategy based on MCMC methods and Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithms. Outcomes from the project are expected to include theoretical development of spatial multinomial probit model specification and estimation as well as algorithms and code that will be of value in the toolkit of methods available to spatial econometricians, regional scientists, and geographers. The new statistical approaches to be developed through this project will complement the approaches developed by these investigators and other leading spatial statisticians, thereby further enhancing the range of tools that researchers can use to effectively analyze a broad range of spatial databases. Because the investigators will make their results available through user-friendly software and documentation, this work should foster continued methodological development as well as enhanced capabilities for geographic and spatial econometric inquiry doc17695 none Goodman This award supports a two-year collaborative research project between Professor David Goodman at Texas A&M University and Professor Yasuhiro Iwasawa of the University of Tokyo in Japan. The researchers will undertake a study of the physical and chemical properties of nanosized metal clusters on oxide surfaces. The collaborators will correlate those physical and chemical properties measured for Au and Rh clusters of varying size with their catalytic properties. They will stress the strengths of each group, namely, the synthesis capabilities of the Texas group and the unique characterization facilities of the Tokyo group, specifically for atomic force microscopy. These studies are essential to understanding the unique properties of nanosized metal clusters for catalytic applications, and a key to establishing a methodology for predicting new systems and new reactions to be addressed by this exciting class of materials. This research will facilitate the collaboration between two strong surface chemical groups with complementary expertise and capabilities, allowing an important technical problem to be addressed with a broad array of modern surface methods. The project will offer a good opportunity to join efforts between the two countries. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The project advances international human resources through the participation of graduate students. The researchers plan to publish results of the research in scientific journals and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc17696 none In this project funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Continetti will use a tunable laser to study the dissociative photodetachment (DPD) and photodetachment dynamics of radicals and clusters. In these experiments, photoelectron-photofragment coincidence (PPC) spectroscopy combined with tunable laser photodetachment threshold photoelectron spectroscopy will be used to carry out high-resolution studies on organic radicals as well as the wavelength-dependent DPD dynamics of cluster anions. These studies will focus on the spectroscopy and dissociation dynamics of alkoxy radicals important in atmospheric chemistry. Electronic structure and unimolecular dissociation calculations will be carried out to aid in the interpretation of the observed energetics and dissociation dynamics. Studying the wavelength dependence of the photodetachment dynamics of cluster anions and other transient species provides important information on the electronic structure of these systems and problems in electron-molecule interactions that are at the forefront of modern electronic structure theory. This grant supports the application of spectroscopic techniques to the study of short-lived, reactive molecules important in atmospheric and combustion chemistry. An important focus of the research will be on a class of molecules known as alkoxy radicals. They play an important role in aspects of urban air pollution chemistry, but in spite of their importance, basic information about their stability and reactions are not known. This research project will help to fill in these gaps in our understanding of these important species, providing a solid empirical foundation for efforts to improve the modeling of atmospheric pollution phenomena. Graduate and undergraduate students will participate in experiments involving state-of-the-art lasers and detection techniques, computer modeling and prediction of chemical properties. They will thereby receive training in forefront methods of chemical research in preparation for advanced studies or entry into the scientific technical workforce doc17697 none Sean Seymore, Department of Chemistry, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program. Seymore s research includes the synthesis and characterization of new metal-oxo and -nitrido complexes supported by sulfur-rich tripodal ligands. Ligands such as phenyltris((methylthio)methyl)borate (PhTt) and hydridotris(methimazolyl)borate (Tm) provide a softer ligand environment than the more common nitrogen or oxygen donor ligands. The change in ligand may result in enhanced reactivity or unusual electronic properties in the metal-oxo and -nitrido complexes. Metal-oxo and -nitrido complexes are of interest as possible models of important reactive intermediates in catalysis, nitrogen fixation, and many other biological processes. Minority Research Planning Grants are intended to strengthen the proposal writing and planning capabilities of new investigators and to facilitate preliminary studies and other planning activities related to the research doc17698 none Barboza Caribou and reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) are the only ungulates to have successfully colonized both arctic and boreal ecosystems in a circumpolar distribution. These large animals are central to the cultural identity and sustenance of many indigenous peoples throughout the north. Across arctic and sub-arctic landscapes, terrestrial lichens comprise a large proportion of the plant biomass. These assemblages of fungi, algae and cyanobacteria not only contribute to hydrology, nutrient cycling and atmospheric exchanges in the ecosystem, but are also consumed by caribou and reindeer. Pollutants deposited on lichens are dispersed via Rangifer into predators and humans and into soil and water systems along their migration routes. Lichens support many Rangifer herds in the depth of winter and in early spring before the majority of vascular plants resume growth. Consequently, the distribution and abundance of lichens are related to population dynamics and movements of Rangifer. Although lichens contain several potentially toxic compounds, Rangifer and its gastrointestinal microbes can adjust to utilizing the unusual structural carbohydrates in this forage. Exclusive consumption of lichen by captive reindeer, however, can result in mass loss and the net loss of nitrogen (N). Low concentrations of N in lichens may prevent animals from attaining a positive N balance especially at low food intakes. Inadequate dietary N compromises the maintenance of maternal tissues and limits the production of new tissues for fetal growth in pregnancy and milk for calves in spring. We propose a model of changes in body protein for northern deer to relate energy and N balance to dietary supplies. The model predicts changes in the concentration and isotopic enrichment of the catabolite urea in relation to tissue proteins and their products (creatinine, hydroxy proline, methyl histidine). The proposed research will define mechanisms for conserving body N in Rangifer during pregnancy, and quantify a predictive model of body protein loss. Two PhD students will participate in the project. We propose two experiments with repeated measures of captive reindeer fed formulated diets or lichens. The first experiment will determine the dynamics of N through gestation; we will combine measures of food intake and excretion to assess N balance using tracer techniques and isotopic enrichments, with a validation of these methods in non- reproductive animals during spring. The second experiment will focus on the digestive and metabolic responses to lichens; we will determine intake, digestion, digesta flow and absorption, and recycling of waste N. Indirect measures of body composition will be used throughout to determine changes in body protein and fat in relation to diet and season. Describing the interrelationships between lichen ranges and Rangifer populations requires long-term monitoring and management because lichens grow so slowly, but accumulate biomass over many years. This project will provide new data on metabolic responses of Rangifer to the nutritional constraints of northern ecosystems and a tool for understanding the importance of lichens to Rangifer populations. These data will provide a basis for assessing the contribution of migrating herds to N and mineral cycling in tundra systems. Such an increased understanding of herbivore dynamics in the arctic also will have direct implications to other arctic ruminants (i.e. moose and muskoxen) with similar adaptive physiological mechanisms for protein and energy conservation doc17699 none This proposal will field a multi-method study of gender disparities in response to household economic crises (e.g., illness, floods, unemployment) among poor households in Lucknow, India. Survey data will be collected in four waves over a two and a half year panel design in order to obtain before and after measures of responses to crises. Household assets and decision making power will be evaluated at each wave. Qualitative data will be collected at the beginning and end of the field work. Household and individual-level data will be supplemented by community level focus groups exploring the key risk factors and community resources available to respond to those risks. Individual assets within the household are expected to be a determinant of who suffers most from crises, but gender differences are also expected to play an independent role doc17664 none Proposal Number Bower Lozier This project will collect RAFOS float data, hydrographic data and altimetry to pursue a greater understanding of the pathways of waters exiting the subpolar regions. Sequentially released, acoustically-tracked, RAFOS floats will be deployed at the Labrador Sea Water level in the Deep Western Boundary Current (DWBC) along the western boundary of the Labrador Sea. The floats will be released on a seasonal basis for three years and they will be tracked as they transit through the junction in pathways near Flemish Cap. These observations will also be used to address an apparent contradiction between existing theory of the export of newly ventilated waters from the sub-polar regions via the DWBC and recent drifter tracks that show the profiling floats turning eastward along the subpolar-subtropical gyre boundary. The new data will also be used to address hypothesis related to the structure of the narrow DWBC path, the temporal variability and intermittency in Labrador Sea Water pathways, the extent to which the deep ocean is ventilated, and the time scale of that ventilation doc17701 none The project will investigate the formation and maintenance of a key component of the tropical circulation that affects summer rainfall over continental United States: tropical storms, or hurricanes, in the Atlantic. The genesis of Atlantic hurricanes, which often make landfall over continental US, is in the African easterly waves, and the project will advance understanding of the dynamical factors controlling African easterly wave activity. The waves themselves are posited to arise from hydrodynamic instability of the African easterly jet, and Dr. Chen s research will examine the formation, maintenance, and variability of this lower tropospheric jet using the modern reanalysis data sets, which provide a wealth of information on circulation and diabatic heating. The diagnostic research will provide a new assessment of the dynamic and thermodynamic interactions involved in the formation and development of African easterly waves, building on the pioneering analyses of Carlson, Burpee, and Reed that date back a quarter century doc17702 none This symposium, to be held at the Materials Research Society Meeting November 26-30, focuses on polymer interfaces and thin films. %%% Polymer interfaces are critical for many technological and industrial applications in thin films such as found in electronic packaging, lithographic applications, sensor technology, or in bulk systems such as adhesives or polymer blends. The structure and architecture of interfaces in thin films and bulk polymeric systems involving applications can be exceedingly complex. In thin films, the technological drive to diminish film thickness while simultaneously enhancing homogeneity, stability and adhesion is a challenging task driving research in newer areas of nanofilled and controlled nanostructured and nanopatterned films. Tailoring of surface and interfacial properties are equally important for new developments in traditional fields of bulk polymer blends, reactive and compatibilized systems, etc. Since empirical approaches to R&D can be time-consuming and costly, the need also exists for concurrent development of theory and modeling, and simulations of polymer interfaces with predictive capability of ultimate structure-property relationship. Novel methodologies and measurement techniques also play an important role in the future development of the field, especially with the advent of combinatorial methods to thin film coatings for material science. A joint symposium with Combinatorial Approach to Polymers is planned doc17694 none The continued growth in the availability and use of spatial data on a broad range of phenomena have fueled a drive to develop more effective and statistically sound approaches for the analysis of those data. Because spatial data have distinctive characteristics that do not enable the immediate application of many statistical approaches because fundamental assumptions that underlie the use of those approaches, focused inquiries are required into the development of new spatial statistical approaches and careful adaptation in the use of extant statistical methods for spatial analysis. These awards support collaborative research by two spatial econometricians on two different kinds of spatial analytic modeling approaches. The first of these approaches deals with spatially additive models. Traditionally, the two main methods for analyzing spatial data have been (1) to model the conditional mean of the dependent variable and (2) to focus on specification of spatial dependence among observation. The spatially additive model is designed to combine the specification of the conditional mean with the specification of spatial dependence among observations. The proposed development of spatially additive models in this project will be based on recent innovations that allow generalized additive models to be extended to spatial analysis. First, sparse specification of spatial dependence, quadratic log-determinant approximations and bounds, and computational advances have increased both the speed with which spatial estimation can be accomplished and the size of practical problems that can be solved. Second, quadratic bounds and approximations to the log-determinant can lead to a standard sequential quadratic programming solution that permit quick computation and robust optimization. These advances also allow simultaneous parameter estimation and model selection. The second major line of inquiry for this collaborative project consists of the development of multinomial probit estimation methods for regional science modeling problems where the sample data exhibit spatial dependence. Multinomial probit models can be applied to problems where the variable of interest represents a choice between two or more alternatives. Estimation methods and algorithms that are generally applicable are not currently available for the case when the polychotomous dependent variable disturbance process in the relationship exhibits spatial dependence. The methods to be developed through this project will address this issue and have application to location decisions involving spatial data. Theoretical issues relating to use of multinomial probit models and three alternative estimation strategies will be evaluated. The strategies are maximum likelihood estimation, Bayesian estimators based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimation, and a hybrid strategy based on MCMC methods and Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithms. Outcomes from the project are expected to include theoretical development of spatial multinomial probit model specification and estimation as well as algorithms and code that will be of value in the toolkit of methods available to spatial econometricians, regional scientists, and geographers. The new statistical approaches to be developed through this project will complement the approaches developed by these investigators and other leading spatial statisticians, thereby further enhancing the range of tools that researchers can use to effectively analyze a broad range of spatial databases. Because the investigators will make their results available through user-friendly software and documentation, this work should foster continued methodological development as well as enhanced capabilities for geographic and spatial econometric inquiry doc17704 none The enactment of the Sentencing Reform Act of and the subsequent promulgation of sentencing guidelines by the United States Sentencing Commission (USSC) transformed sentencing in the federal criminal justice system. The highly discretionary and largely unregulated sentencing process of the pre-guidelines era was replaced by a tightly structured system in which judicial discretion is constrained by sentencing rules based largely on the seriousness of the offense and the offender s prior criminal record. Moreover, prosecuting attorneys, who played a fairly circumscribed role in the pre-guidelines era, have substantial influence on sentencing under the guidelines; in many cases, their charging and plea bargaining decisions determine the sentence that will be imposed by the judge. Research designed to evaluate the impact of these revolutionary changes in the federal sentencing process focus on sentencing decisions at the national level. These studies assume, either explicitly or implicitly, that there is little inter-district variation in case processing policies and procedures and that findings regarding sentence outcomes at the national level therefore reflect the reality of decision making in each of the U.S. District Courts. A second issue is that prior researchers have focused almost exclusively on the sentencing decision itself, rather than examining the prosecutor s charging and plea bargaining decisions. This research will address these methodological limitations by studying federal sentencing practices and outcomes at the district level and by using quantitative and qualitative research techniques to describe and analyze charging, plea bargaining, and sentencing policies, practices, and outcomes. The research will study three U.S. District Courts: the District of Nebraska, the District of Minnesota, and the Southern District of Iowa. The primary objectives of this project are: (1) to test for inter-district disparity in sentencing; (2) to describe charging and plea bargaining practices and to identify the predictors of charging and plea bargaining decisions; and (3) to examine the effect of offender and case characteristics on sentence outcomes at the district level. The researchers will collect data on all cases prosecuted in the three districts during fiscal years , , and . They will obtain detailed data on the offender, the case, and the sentence from the USSC s Offender Datafile for each district for each year. They will supplement these data with information contained in the Presentence Investigation Report, the Sentencing Recommendation, the Order of Judgement, and other documents provided by each U.S. District Court. The researchers also will interview judges, attorneys, and probation officers in each district. The proposed study will fill important gaps in our knowledge of the dynamics of the federal sentencing process. It represents a first step toward understanding inter-district variation in case processing procedures and outcomes, removing the cloak of secrecy that surrounds charging and plea bargaining in the federal criminal justice system, and untangling the complex inter-relationships among charging decisions, plea agreements, and sentence outcomes doc17705 none Polyak This is a collaborative proposal by Principal Investigators at the Ohio State University and Old Dominion University. The Principal Investigators will investigate sediment cores from the Chukchi Borderland that were collected and curated by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in . The core sites are located in an area that contains several generations of glacigenic bedforms, which were mapped by the Science Ice Exercise (SCICEX) survey in . A preliminary lithostratigraphy for these cores has been developed from their physical properties logs and core descriptions. The Principal Investigators will verify and further develop this stratigraphy based on lithological and paleontological (foraminiferal) compositions and paleomagnetic measurements, reinforced by 14C dating and coccolith studies. These approaches will allow them to put the Chukchi Borderland cores into a stratigraphic context for the Amerasian Basin and to correlate them with the Lomonosov Ridge sediment records. The results should help to establish an improved Quaternary age model for the Arctic Ocean. Investigation of glacigenic diamictons recovered by cores on the Chukchi Borderland will aid our understanding of the processes involved in the grounding of ice shelves on submarine rises. By using the composition of glacigenic clasts in sediments as provenance tracers they identify glaciation centers that sustained the ice shelves. This stratigraphically constrained information will yield insights into the Pleistocene glaciation history of both the interior and the periphery of the Arctic Ocean and will improve our understanding of interactions between continental-based ice sheets and ice shelves doc17706 none The purpose of this project is to analyze the impact of the stock market on the innovative capabilities of high- technology companies that have been central to the new economy . The empirical focus will be on equipment suppliers in the optical networking industry --an industry that integrates the bandwidth potential of fiber optics with the data communications potential of the Internet. Through in-depth comparative analysis of the development and utilization of technology at Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks, Lucent Technologies, Alcatel, and Sycamore Networks, this project seeks to determine the impacts of both the changing role of the stock market and the volatility in stock prices on the accumulation of innovative capabilities in an industry that is central to the prosperity of the US and global economies doc17707 none Jeffrey Lucas University of Akron The investigator will complete a pilot study that examines why men are more likely than females to self-handicap. Individuals self-handicap when they select actions that they are aware will inhibit future performances, usually with the goal of deflecting attention away from one s personal abilities. Research on self-handicapping consistently finds that men are more likely to self-handicap than women across a variety of age groups and settings. Efforts at determining the causes of this difference have met with limited success. There are two potential explanations of the gender difference in self-handicapping. One explanation comes from socialization theories. These theories indicate that males are socialized to be more competitive than females. It may be that males are more concerned with the evaluative outcomes of performances and that this leads to more self- handicapping behaviors. Status processes also may partially account for gender differences in self-handicapping. In US culture in many situations, men tend to have higher status than women do. Theories of status indicate that higher performances are expected from high status group members. The investigator will conduct a controlled laboratory study to test predictions derived from both socialization theories and status characteristics theory. The PI will randomly assign male and female participants to high and low status group positions and measure self- handicapping behavior across gender and status. Pilot data from the study will be used to develop a larger, regular proposal to the National Science Foundation doc17708 none P.I. Fratantoni Satellite-tracked surface drifters, acoustically tracked subsurface floats, and a growing family of actively ballasted profiling floats provide an effective and relatively inexpensive means of describing the ocean environment over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Many coastal and blue-water process studies require (or would benefit from) the repetitive deployment of drifting instrumentation over periods of days to years. At best, reliance on ships and or aircraft for serial instrument deployment can be expensive and logistically difficult. At worst, ship-based deployments may be impossible in remote locations, areas of unfavorable weather or seasonal ice cover, or in response to episodic events such as severe storms. To address this problem this proposal outlines an effort to develop and field-test a compact, low-cost moored platform capable of launching an arbitrary mixture of drifting instruments (e.g. surface drifters, RAFOS floats, profiling PALACE floats) over an extended time period. The Submerged Autonomous Launch Platform (SALP), deployed at depths as great as m on a standard oceanographic mooring, will enable floats and drifters to be launched (a) by time according to a user- defined schedule, (b) by real-time acoustic remote-control, or (c) adaptively on the basis of local environmental conditions. It is believed that the development of SALP will provide broad benefit to the oceanographic community by facilitating intensive and cost-effective studies of ocean circulation in rapidly changing, geographically remote, or environmentally hostile regions, and will enable investigators to address difficult research problems that are presently financially or logistically untenable. As a component of an autonomous ocean observing system, SALP will allow investigators to project and maintain an interactive presence at sea while promoting the eff doc17709 none Parole boards must ask themselves a crucial question: should the prisoner before them be released, or is he or she likely to commit another crime? While statistical prediction rules (SPRs) have been shown to be the best way of combining information about such prisoners to predict recidivism, parole officers tend to rely on their own intuition for combining the information to make their decisions. College admissions officers make similar sorts of errors each year, by basing admissions on criteria such as one-on-one interviews, instead of statistical models that can predict success in college based on past performance, often incremented by tests that have been specifically designed to predict performance. Nothing predicts without any inaccuracy, but the conclusion that SPRs are more accurate than intuition is well established, by over 150 studies comparing the two prediction modes. The proposed project asks a related question, one with important public policy implications: Why do people believe that they can make better decisions than can statistical models? One hypothesis to be investigated is that while SPRs automatically specify how poorly they predict when they specify how well, people overestimate their own ability to predict outcomes and hence reject the statistical models. Moreover, such overestimation may be based in part at least on the cognitive factor that our belief in our ability to predict is partially based on our ability to explain ( fit ) situations in retrospect ( I could have told you he d kill again, given his behavior as a child ). By understanding these biases of overestimation and retrospection, we can begin to devise effective methods for convincing people to rely more on statistical prediction rules and less on their own judgment, thereby befitting clients to whom accuracy of prediction is important, often vital doc17710 none The proposed project will focus on the study of political party systems, with an emphasis on the number of parties in a system, and on the sustainability of regional parties. The Investigator plans to build on previous theoretical and empirical results to understand party systems in a variety of countries. Currently he has data on Canada and Great Britain, and will get access to data on Russia, Germany, South Korea, Botswana, Ghana, and Zimbabwe, and possibly more countries. The fundamental question motivating the study is how and why some parties become national in scope and sustain a nationwide presence, and how and why some parties have only regional appeal. Results from this research should be widely applicable to party systems in many other democracies. At the core of the project is the theoretical argument, first proposed in Chhibber and Kollman ( A, B), that the degree of government centralization is an important factor in explaining both the number of parties in a system and the survival of regional or local parties. The literature on party systems is vast and diverse. Yet most theories of party systems are static. Explanations of the number of parties based on electoral institutions, national culture, the heterogeneity of national populations, or presidentialism have been quite successful at capturing cross-national differences. However, these explanations cannot help us to understand the dynamics of party systems. As the number of parties in many systems fluctuates, explaining the patterns requires attention on variables that change over time. One such variable that has been strongly correlated with party politics in the United States and India is the centralization of national government authority. The project will entail both empirical and theoretical components. On the empirical side, the data sets gathered will contain constituency-level election results for a variety of countries. Currently, the Investigator has data from Canada and Great Britain, two countries with single member, simple plurality electoral systems to their lower houses, similar to those in India and the United States. Other single member simple plurality countries, South Korea, Botswana, Ghana, and Zimbabwe have available data, and the Investigator will gather these data as well. The Investigator will also gather data from countries that have mixed electoral systems (elements of proportional representation and plurality), beginning with Germany and Russia. The formal component contains a rigorous theoretical models that can offer insights into the process of party formation and party aggregation across electoral districts. As a base, the Investigator will extend rational choice models of Duverger s Law to incorporate national politics. Then using these insights, the Investigator will explore multidimensional political competition in a similar environment, but including multiple levels of government as in a federation, and legislative parties doc17711 none This proposal seeks support for carrying out two conferences to scope out and define the scientific and out reach programs that will be done in the anticipated National underground Science Laboratory at Lead, South Dakota. Educators, geologists, biologists, and physicists will attend both of these conferences. The workshop will produce a white paper defining the nature and the timing of the science and outreach activities for the underground laboratory. The white paper will also serve as a guide to aid the baseline design of the laboratory doc17679 none Physical and biological interactions play a complex role in the partitioning of carbon between the atmosphere, upper ocean, deep ocean and sediments. At present, interdisciplinary models offer the best means to test hypotheses about how carbon partitioning is regulated in various oceanic regions on time scales of years to centuries. A new interdisciplinary model will integrate advances in several areas to test two related hypotheses: 1) that switches in community and productivity dominance between diatoms and other phytoplankton groups (e.g. non?siliceous picoplankton and calcifying phytoplankton) significantly affect carbon partitioning, vary spatially and temporally and are regulated by a combination of Si and Fe in combination; 2) that changes in Si trapping in the Southern Ocean affect Si(OH)4 concentrations in the mode waters that feed equatorial upwelling, and that Si and C uptake by equatorial phytoplankton alters air?sea exchange of carbon dioxide at the equator. An interdisciplinary science team of biological and chemical oceanographers and modelers will address these issues via four approaches. First, a calcifying phytoplankton component will be added to an existing model and used to incorporate water column production and dissolution of CaC03. Second, model experiments will be designed and executed to explore the regulation of switching between siliceous (diatoms) and non?siliceous (pico and calcifying) plankton. Third, an improved blogeochemical model developed for the equatorial Pacific will be spatially expanded to include the Southern Ocean, and used to conduct a series of simulation experiments on the processes that link high latitude mode water regions with the source waters for equatorial upwelling. Finally, iron?sensitive growth parameters of the phytoplankton components of the model will be manipulated to test the ecosystem response to iron enrichment in both the equatorial Pacific Ocean and the Southern Ocean. These objectives represent a significant step in the development of coupled physical biogeochemical models for exploring the response of marine biogeochemical processes to climate change doc17713 none Kaplan This three-year research project studies how people develop from youth to aged in the traditional foraging and simple horticultural society of the Tsimane, in Bolivia. The investigators will test predictions about age-specific patterns of mortality, morbidity, functional status, skill, strength and endurance focusing on the aging process and the elderly; will test hypotheses about the attainments of social skills and social capital as well as physical growth and strength as constraints on maturation and reproduction; and will study the relation between life history characteristics of individuals and the pattern of resource flows within and among families. The researchers include two senior cultural anthropologists and five graduate and undergraduate students from the University of New Mexico and UC-Santa Barbara. The study sample will include ten Tsimane villages with a population of about 1,000 individuals. From the larger sample three villages with a total population of about 250 persons will be selected as a core sample for focused behavioral studies and monitoring. Various measures of mortality, morbidity, anthropometry, strength, and skills will be recorded as well as measures of time allocation, resource production and food distribution, childrearing skills, social status, and human and social capital. The data from this project will be important to a wide range of scholars interested in understanding the universal and variable features of human life histories under relatively traditional conditions, comparable to those prevailing during the long history of selection during which the human life course evolved doc17714 none SUMMARY Reciprocal recombination (crossing over) between homologous chromosomes (homologues) appears to be required for proper meiosis I segregation. The mechanisms that control recombination so that each pair of homologues undergoes crossing over are not known. In Saccharomyces cerevisiae and humans, small chromosomes have higher meiotic reciprocal recombination rates (cM kb) than large chromosomes and in S. cerevisiae rates of reciprocal recombination have been shown to respond directly to chromosome size. The increased rates of recombination on small chromosomes appear to ensure crossing over and have been proposed to be due to crossover interference. Interference is defined by the apparent inhibition of additional meiotic reciprocal recombination events observed near the site of a crossover. The molecular mechanism of interference and how it might respond to chromosome size are not known. It was recently suggested that the density of meiotic recombination-inducing double-strand break (DSB) sites is greater on small chromosomes compared to large chromosomes suggesting chromosome size dependent control of recombination and perhaps interference might act by controlling DSB formation. To test this idea, we propose to analyze DSB formation on different size chromosome I constructs that were constructed in our laboratory. It has also been suggested that the meiotic synaptonemal complex (SC) is involved in mediating interference. Accordingly, a better understanding of the mechanism of interference might be gained by investigating the S. cerevisiae SC. Using a functional, fluorescent ZIP1-GFP fusion protein constructed in our laboratory, we have shown that SCs undergo dynamic changes in their distribution in early and late pachytene. We now propose to examine the dynamics of SC movements using ZIP1-GFP in mutant yeast in order to determine the genes required to produce this reorganization. We also propose to address the relationship of this reorganization to crossover interference. The structure and dynamics of the fluorescent SC will be examined using optical sections and fluorescent cinema-microscopy and will be enhanced by the construction of additional ZIP1-fluorocent protein fusions. These studies should provide new insight into the molecular mechanisms controlling recombination and chromosome synapsis, processes that lead to proper meiotic chromosome segregation doc17715 none Cyanide occurs as a natural biological poison in the environment. Over plants produce cyanide as a means of protecting against invading predators. Cyanide is also produced by certain fungi and bacteria, and its production by certain root-colonizing bacteria is believed to stimulate plant growth. Despite its occurrence in diverse biological settings, biochemical processes for cyanide metabolism are poorly understood. This project seeks to shed light on these processes leading to a better understanding of pathogenesis, plant-microbe interactions, and cyanide recycling in nature. The discovery that the initial steps in cyanide oxidation are mediated by a previously undescribed enzyme, cyanide oxygenase, and that this enzyme shares properties with another important enzyme having diverse roles in biology, namely, nitric oxide synthase, raises the prospect that new information on the properties and physiological roles of nitrogen-metabolizing enzymes in biology will be uncovered. A two-tiered research plan involving a collaborative effort with a senior faculty associate will be undertaken, with the objective being to characterize the proteins and genes constituting the ability of the bacterium, P. fluorescens (strain NCIMB ), to assimilate cyanide as a nitrogen source for growth. The biochemical pathway of cyanide breakdown in this organism will be determined, the enzymes and genes isolated and characterized at the amino acid DNA sequence level, and the occurrence of related genes in other cyanide-metabolizing bacteria determined. The long-range goal of this work is to understand the molecular basis of cyanide breakdown making it possible to better predict the ecological role of cyanide producing and metabolizing bacteria, and the agricultural significance of cyanide in plant-microbe interactions. The proposed research will stress the multi-disciplinary training of students and post-doctorals impacting significantly the research and teaching atmosphere of the sponsoring institution doc17716 none Physics (13) This project is supporting a Conference on the Introductory Calculus-based Physics Course. The conference is an initiative of the National Task Force on Undergraduate Physics (a cooperative effort of the American Association of Physics Teachers, AAPT, and The American Physical Society, APS, and the American Institute of Physics, AIP). In recent years it has become clear that there is a need to update and revitalize physics education. At the same time, a significant base of research in physics education has emerged with a particular emphasis on introductory physics. Therefore the time is ripe to provide departments that are interested in using the results of research to improve their courses a forum where they can get the information they need, including examples of successful implementations. Significant interest exists in the community for such a conference, and the attendance is estimated at approximately 200. The result will be a large number of physics departments that will begin to revise their introductory sequence in line with the best thinking on teaching and learning doc17717 none Latz This two-year award for US-Italy collaboration on comparative research on agricultural land-use history and forest management involves Gil Latz of Portland State University and Mauro Agnoletti of the University of Florence, Italy. The research will include comparative study of policies and legal instruments for conserving sites, and evaluation of opportunities and master planning for sustainable forestry and agriculture. In particular, the research will focus on Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques for construction of a multipurpose land-use map of the Spanocchia estate and its comparison to the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller (MBR) National Historical Park, and on proposals for possible conservation options. The US researcher brings to this collaboration expertise in sustainable management of forest parks, focusing on historic land-use patterns and forest management practices that have been restored. This is complemented by Italian expertise in the creation of a topographic database and a digital model of the territory, digitization of the Tuscan Cadastre of and aerial and remote sensing information, and field work to check aerial interpretations. The results of this research are expected to contribute to contemporary forest certification policy, by gauging the impact of historical information. These results are expected to be particularly useful to subsequent analysis, comparison, and dissemination of strategies for sustainable forest management to a broad public of policy managers and landowners throughout the world doc17718 none The Householder Symposium gathers the world s most active researchers in numerical linear algebra once every three years to review advances in the field, present recent theoretical and practical results, assess where the field is headed in the near future, and to provide an intimate atmosphere to foster close personal interaction and exchange of ideas. This project supports the travel of junior U.S. researchers to the 15th Householder Symposium on Numerical Linear Algebra to be held June 17 - 21, in Peebles, Scotland. The funds are for travel expenses for U.S. graduate students and recent Ph.D.s who would otherwise be unable to attend. The NSF funds will permit full participation by the most promising junior members of the U.S. numerical linear algebra community. As the Householder Symposium is traditionally a gateway conference into the field, participation of junior scientists is essential. U.S. participation in the Symposium will have a positive impact on the continued strong competitiveness of the U.S. in the crucial discipline of numerical linear algebra, a field of central importance in scientific computing doc17719 none In the late s the field of computational science and engineering emerged as a new discipline, one with a research core that generalized from its many applications and led to the creation os several academic programs at leading unversities. Computational science has since proven itself with many successes, but it has also evolved both in its tools, methodologies, and research challenges and goals. This workshop seeks to re-examine the area, and develop a new consensus on the directions it should be taking. A major goal of the workshop will be a document summarizing the accomplishments of the past decade, and prognosticating the future for scientific computing research doc17720 none This research investigates the relationship between the international taxation of corporate income and the international trade of multinational firms. About 40 percent of all U.S. international trade is intrafirm trade, or international trade that occurs between two affiliates of a multinational firm. Preliminary evidence suggests that multinational firms alter the prices on their intrafirm trade transactions in order to minimize their worldwide tax burden. For example, by underpricing goods sold to affiliates in low tax countries and overpricing goods purchased from affiliates in low-tax countries, a multinational firm can shift income to more lightly taxed locations. The opposite strategy applies to transactions with high tax countries. The first goal of the research is to examine the magnitude of such income shifting, analyzing the pattern of such behavior in different industries. The empirical analysis will consider the relationship between intrafirm trade prices and the tax rate of the partner country, employing detailed data on intrafirm trade prices from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The second goal of the proposed research will be to consider the consequences of this behavior for (a) the volumes of U.S. international trade with different countries and (b) U.S. federal government revenue collections. This analysis will rely in part on data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis on the operations of U.S. multinational firms. Third, this research will consider an alternative international taxation system, formula apportionment. Under this system, U.S. multinational firms would be taxed based on the share of their worldwide activity (measured by sales, payroll, or assets) located in the United States, rather than based on the income they incur in the United States. The revenue consequences of this system will be explored. This research will be informative for those scholars and policy makers who are interested in tax policy as well as those interested in trade patterns. For example, the extent to which multinational firms avoid taxation by shifting their income to low-tax countries affects our assessment of the fairness and efficiency of the current international tax system. By directly comparing the current system with an alternative, formula apportionment, more can be learned about the costs and benefits of these two options. Further, the tax minimizing behavior of multinational firms also affects the pattern of U.S. international trade in ways that trade economists have neglected. A final goal of the research will be to positively impact the research and educational environment of Reed College. This will be done by strengthening the principal investigator s abilities as a researcher, by working closely with undergraduate students on the proposed research, and by sharing data and research findings with students and researchers both at Reed and elsewhere doc17721 none Recent investigations of the biogeochemistry of iron in the ocean has spurred interest in the interaction of atmospherically sourced bioactive elements including iron, zinc, cobalt and copper on the speciation, organic complexation and bioavailability of these trace metals in surface seawater. In conjunction with a planned field expedition to the central western Pacific (NSF - Measures, Landing and Cutter) this collaborative research effort will employ a range of electrochemical and mass spectrometric based analytical techniques uniquely sensitive to the sub-nanomolar concentrations of the elements Fe, Co, Zn and Cu found in surface seawater. The use of competitive ligand equilibration experiments along with the sensitive voltammetric stripping analyses used in the electrochemical studies will provide relative indication of the binding strength of organic ligands either produced during surface phytoplankton blooms or found in atmospheric precipitation or dry deposition doc17722 none Markets bring together traders with widely divergent beliefs and motivations for the purpose of exchange. Economic tradition asserts the market selection hypothesis, that the market sorts traders. Those traders most directly concerned with profits and with the most accurate forecasts of the future will come to dominate the market. This hypothesis is used to justify a variety of modeling assumptions about markets, including rational expectations in macroeconomic models and informationally efficient markets in finance. However, it has never been carefully examined. This project has two goals: To study the validity of the market selection hypothesis and, more generally, the implications of trader heterogeneity for market behavior. The validity of the market selection hypothesis depends upon market structure. If market structure allows all potential gains from trade to be realized, the market selection hypothesis will be valid. If not, markets will sort traders in other ways which we hope to uncover. Market selection becomes a more delicate issue when traders have incorrect beliefs but are learning. In this case the question is how the market sorts across learning rules. Although general equilibrium analysis does not require similar traders, modeling practice in macroeconomics and finance eschews trader heterogeneity. We will show how market models with diverse traders exhibit very different (and more realistic) market behavior from the market models now in vogue. Our work opens a door for behavioral analysis in markets because the market selection hypothesis is not always correct, and even when it holds it has implications only for long-run market behavior. While it is possible to postulate the existence of traders with arbitrary behavior patterns, the market sorts among these traders and only a few behaviors will in fact determine market prices in the long run doc17723 none s, etc. The documentation author need only make changes in one place. Third, the project promotes data interoperability by creating a Web-based nonproprietary documentation standard that permits seamless exchange of files among data users and data providers. Finally, the shared specification provides the necessary infrastructure for porting data into online analysis systems, thus putting more social science data on the desktops of a wider community of users doc17724 none The U.S. mathematical and phycial sciences communities are represented by the Naitonal Academy of Sciences (NAS) in seven international scientific unions: the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the International Radio Science Union (URSI), the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), the International Commission for Optics (ICO), the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr), and the International Mathematical Union (IMU). U.S. National Committees (USNC s), staffed by the NAS, coordinate U.S. preparations for meetings of the corresponding international unions and for scientific conferences, symposia, and workshops organized by these unions to identify research topics, issues, and programs of interest to their specific disciplines; identify and support U.S. scientists to participate in union activities; and arrange for payment of U.S. dues to the seven unions. This award provides resources to underwrite the costs of these activities through CY doc17725 none Sinking particulate matter is the major vehicle for exporting carbon from the sea surface to the ocean interior. During its transit towards the sea floor, most particulate organic carbon (POC) is returned to inorganic form and redistributed in the water column. This redistribution determines the surface concentration of dissolved CO2 , and hence the rate at which the ocean can absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. The ability to predict quantitatively the depth profile of remineralization is therefore critical to predicting the response of the global carbon cycle to environmental change. In this study, researchers at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the University of Washington, and the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography will collaborate with colleagues in Monaco and France to test the hypothesis that minerals produced by organisms, or introduced into the surface ocean by winds, critically influence carbon export to the deep ocean and sediments. They will carry out a multi-tracer approach to explicitly consider different mineral ballast types, along with the associated organic matter and radioisotopes. Their first hypothesis is that ballast minerals physically protect a fraction of their associated total organic matter, which persists to predominate over the unprotected fraction in the lower ( m) part of the water column. Understanding the mechanistic basis of such processes will require an understanding of organic-mineral interaction at the compound-specific level. They hypothesize secondly that the ratio of organic carbon to ballast is key to predicting variability in the export fluxes and sinking velocities of organic carbon as estimated using radiotracers. The overall goal is to develop a seamless description of carbon fluxes and associated mineral ballast fluxes throughout the water column. To achieve this goal, the research team will measure simultaneously a suite of properties that are thought to be indicative of fluxes. They will synthesize these measurements from the top of the water column to the sediments using a variety of modeling and statistical techniques. The strategy is to unite the power of several disciplines: (i) organic geochemistry for characterizing organic matter in protected and unprotected forms and determining its degradation state; (ii) radiochemistry for assessing processes and time-scales involved in particle dynamics and transport; (iii) zooplankton ecology for assessing radioisotope partitioning and organic biomarker alteration; and (iv) microbiology for its role in organic matter decomposition, and (v) modeling and statistical analyses to provide a process-based model of flux out of the euphotic zone to the sea floor doc17726 none Haine In an effort to understand some of the oceanic processes that may be involved in decadal climate variability, this project will apply adjoint sensitivity analysis to 1-degree models of the N. Atlantic Ocean circulation to look at mechanisms that control sea-surface temperature (SST). The behavior of the 1-degree model will also be compared to forward integrations with 1 3-degree and 1 6-degree models in order to investigate the importance of unpredictable internal processes such as transport by mesoscale eddies. The adjoint study will be used to determine the sensitivity of SST to prior surface forcing. One of the hypotheses underlying this work is that changes to surface forcing can lead to changes in the depth of the thermocline which subsequently propagate through the ocean on baroclinic time scales and which may affect the SST above them in subsequent years. The work will be based on a z-coordinate ocean circulation model developed at MIT. The approach involves first conducting a 50-year hind-cast experiment for - with a 1-degree resolution version of the model. The fidelity of this will be assessed by comparing model SST with COADS SST. Three sets of 20-year long adjoint sensitivity calculations will then be made using the a linearization of the model system around the fiducial trajectory given by the hind-cast run. The three adjoint calculations will correspond to during different phases of the NAO -- low - early 60s, high - early 90s, near zero - mid-70s. The variable whose sensitivity will be examined will be the end-of-winter SST spatially averaged over O(10,000 Km^2) regions of the ocean surface. Model calculations will be performed on a Beowulf cluster at JHU and at one of the national supercomputing centers doc17727 none Small decision-making groups resolve many of the most important issues questions in organizations and society. Such groups bring more resources than any single individual to the task at hand. There is also a fair amount of research support for the superior decision-making capabilities of groups as compared to individuals. However, recent work has shown that the same processes that make groups superior decision-makers and problem-solvers can under certain circumstances, lead them astray. Groups perform better than individuals in many situations because when a correct or optimal alternative is proposed, groups have the ability to recognize the correctness of the alternative. Our recent work has shown that a group s ability to do this depends on an appropriate task representation shared by the group members. In most situations, the group members share an appropriate representation. However, we have shown that in situations where group members share a faulty task representation, group often perform worse than individuals. The research contained in the current proposal will attempt to further our understanding of how such shared task representations affect group decision-making. In addition, the research will address how competing shared representations - specifically representations at different levels of generality - affect group decision outcomes and processes. The overarching goals of the research are show how to enable groups to use appropriate task representations when they exist, but to learn how to prevent them from using faulty representations that are initially shared among the group members doc17728 none Adsorption and solution complexation exert important controls on the fluxes and distributions of trace metals in the oceans. However, to understand metal ion adsorptive behavior requires that the solution chemistry be well characterized. Considering that yttrium and the rare earth elements (YREEs) have solution chemistries that are known and are influenced by the same processes that influence other metals in seawater makes them ideally suited to studies of metal ion adsorptive behavior. For this reason, two PIs from the University of South Florida propose to carry out a series of laboratory experiments to determine the adsorption characteristics of YREEs as a function of particle type and solution chemistry. For particle type, the PIs plan to utilize -MnO2, a-FeOOH, a-Al2O3, amorphous SiO2, calcite, aragonite, Ulva lactuca (living non-living algae) and natural suspended matter collected in the Gulf of Mexico. The study will use both synthetic solutions and natural seawater. Results from this research will provide an improved understanding of processes that exert dominant control on the distribution of reactive metals in seawater doc17729 none This project explores algorithmic techniques for archival, indexing and reuse of complex knowledge. Hierarchical graphs have emerged as a powerful knowledge representation structures, however existing database and data mining techniques are not able to manage the extreme combinatorial complexities required to compare, classify, index and cluster these structures as primitive data elements. Research challenges include (1) capturing the inner structure of graph based models, and their topological sub-structures, to use for pattern matching purposes; (2) classify the stability of these approximation techniques in the presence of noise; (3) identifying how to translate these techniques into suitable database mechanisms. The basis of the approach is a mapping of the topological structure of a graph into a low-dimensional vector space through an eigenvalue characterization. This SGER studies these problems in the context of collaborative and distributed engineering design, where teams of agents (human and computational) interact over the network to realize a product (e.g., software, electro-mechanical device, building, etc.). This process is modeled as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) that encodes the design modeling operations and decisions, as well as the flow of the information along the modeling time-steps. Knowledge acquisition agents will be fielded to capture these knowledge structures and a validation of the theoretical methodology for indexing and reuse of process knowledge will performed. Some of this work will be done in collaboration with Bentley Systems. If successful, these techniques will lead to dramatic new possibilities for database and information management systems: allowing them to efficiently store complex graphs as single large objects and identify useful patterns in and across large sets of these combinatorial structures doc17730 none Steven L. Nock Paul W. Kingston Researchers have made little progress in systematically specifying how obligations-- duties or responsibilities that people have to others--are established. This project examines how Americans understand their obligations to others. That is, who is considered morally responsible for whom, under what circumstances, and to what extent? Also, why are some concerns treated as private troubles, whole others are viewed as public issues? The research is based on quantitative survey research and qualitative interviewers. Specifically, a sample of adults will be asked to respond to hypothetical problems that imply a need for help from some source. In these hypothetical dilemmas, basic features of the situation will be systematically varied, including the relationship between the person in need and the helper, the type of problem, the culpability of the person in need, and the detailed history of giving and receiving assistance from others. Finally, a series of qualitative interviews will focus on motives for offering assistance and making particular distinctions between private and public obligations. The PIs will use a theoretical model that integrates social capital and life-course perspectives to guide the research. This model proposes to explain how and why people assume responsibility for others in some cases, but not in others. It will show how obligations are influenced by the specific nature of the situation calling for assistance, the relationship (kinship or otherwise) between an individual and the person in need, and numerous characteristics of the potential helper. The project has practical significance in light of the growth of dependent populations who require care. It could potentially advance scientific understanding of the factors that influence beliefs about responsibility and deservingness doc17731 none The objective of this project is to design efficient indexing strategies that support flexible retrieval metric through relevance feedback learning. However, trying to satisfy both goals (efficiency and flexibility) at the same time leads to a conflict. A novel approach is explored to capture the inherent interplay between flexible metrics and indexing that has the potential to resolve the conflict. It is hypothesized that the interplay can be exploited to create effective content-based retrieval systems that meet performance and computational challenges encountered in practical image database applications. This exploratory project seeks to establish the proof of concept of an approach that trades off accuracy for efficiency, and that can avoid exhaustive search in large-scale image databases. The methods to be explored are based on bump-hunting in high-dimensional data for inducing a set of (possibly overlapping) boxes that capture the local data distributions. The induced boxes effectively cover the feature space, thereby providing an index to the image database. The flexibility and efficiency of the novel indexing technique will be tested in heterogeneous image databases that support a variety of query types, ranging from query-by-image to query-by-region. If successful, the results of this project will enable the use of flexible metric learning in large scale image databases, which will have a significant impact in content-based image retrieval in broad areas such as health-care, scientific images, education, or art doc17732 none The Climate Research Committee (CRC) of the Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (BASC) of the National Academy of Sciences is conducting a special study on the major uncertainties associated with climate change feedbacks. This award will enable an enlargement of the study panel to include experts in climate research beyond the specific members of the CRC. It will support a major workshop plus follow-on correspondence, meetings and report writing. This subject is important to NSF and other federal science agencies because it will enable better informed planning of climate change research agendas doc17733 none The United States economy is one of the richest in the world, both in terms of per capita wealth and in terms of per capita output, but it is also an economy with very sharp contrasts between rich and poor. What is the source of this inequality, and should it concern economists and policy makers? Is it perhaps a natural, or even necessary, aspect of being the richest in the world, or does it reflect a failure that can be addressed with economic policy? And even if inequality per se is not a cause for concern, does it influence aggregate economic activity? Although much progress has been made, academic economists are not yet able to address the above issues in a quantitatively satisfactory way. First, few natural experiments are available to speak directly to the issues using purely empirical methods. Second, adequate economic theory is largely missing. This research addresses the second point: it aims to continue the development of the theory and numerical tools needed for a quantitative study of the sources of inequality and its interrelation with macroeconomics. The present project, in particular, is a continuation of an earlier project (NSF grant # ) by this investigator with collaborators. The work proceeds along several fronts, but the common theme is to both develop and apply methods that are of general use in quantitative-theoretical studies of macroeconomics and inequality. The central questions are rather basic ones: What determines how different people save, both in human and physical capital? How does technological change influence wage inequality? How does economic policy influence, and how is it influenced by, inequality? The project has specific applications, but most of the work is on questions of quite broad applicability. The subprojects are as follows: I. Origins of inequality: a. Savings: Why do households differ so much in their propensities to save? This project continues earlier work on the role of initial wealth differences and labor market luck, but also goes further: what determines discount factors? The approach here is one of psychology and economics; the psychology literature reports that many consumers seem to face urges to consume, and whether they do or not, and how they deal with the urges, seems to vary widely. b. Earnings: How are wage and human capital inequality influenced by technological change that is embodied in capital? Arguably, the bulk of the present and recent improve- ments in productivity take this form, and the existing work on the topic is quite limited. Here, the focus is on how frictions in the labor markets impact both accumulation of physical and human capital, and on how economic policy interacts with these frictions. II. Interactions between inequality and aggregates: a. Does the wealth distribution matter for macro? A further investigation of channels through which inequality-via the differences in propensities to save and work in the population-influences aggregates is undertaken here. b. The policy channel: How does economic policy affect inequality, and vice versa? This work includes (i) a political-economy study of redistribution and social insurance and (ii) a study of dynamic policy determination when policy makers are restricted by a lack of commitment doc17734 none Meinen Monthly mean data from thru will be used to determine whether the spatio-temporal variability of fields of warm water volume and sea surface height estimated from satellite altimetry in the tropical subtropical Pacific are correlated. The pathways of warm water variability will be determined, since it is not clear that the mean Subtropical Cells and the variations about the mean follow the same pathways doc17735 none Contractile vacuoles (CVs), as cellular organelles of protozoa, have been known for 200 years but how they function is only now being discovered. Recent work on Paramecium from this laboratory shows that the CVs contain a hypertonic solution of osmolytes of which K+ and Cl- ions are the most abundant. Being hypertonic to the cytosol, excess water can enter the CV by osmosis from the cytoplasm. It has also been shown that the CV is a unique organelle that undergoes periodic rounding and relaxing cycles, apparently without the aid of a contractile cytoskeletal system. The membrane of the CV contains an innate timing mechanism that triggers CV rounding that is accompanied by a 35- to 50-fold increase in membrane tension. During this rounding excess CV membrane is topographically transformed into 40-nm diameter tubes that remain continuous with the CV. This research will attempt to (1) develop a microcapillary osmometer to measure the total intracellular and intraorganellar osmolarities, (2) determine how K+ and Cl- ions cross the CV membrane into the CV lumen to set up this hypertonic gradient, (3) see how the proton-translocating V-ATPases are used to energize this organelle and (4) determine how the CV can increase its membrane tension so dramatically. To carry on these studies the biochemistry of the CV membrane will be compared with other membranes in Paramecium to determine how this membrane differs from those membranes that are incapable of rounding and tension development. Patch-clamp electrophysiology will than be used to characterize the types of ion channels, water channels and electrogenic pumps present in the CV membranes that can be detected with this technique. A study of the function of contractile vacuoles, osmoregulatory organelles of protozoa and algae, will be continued. Osmoregulation is the process of balancing water and salts between cells and their environments. Patch clamp electrophysiology and biochemical studies will help us understand how fresh water protozoa have solved the problem of life in an environment where water continuously enters the cell s cytoplasm. Understanding water regulation in primitive cells is likely to provide clues on water regulation in much more advanced organisms doc17736 none The marine chemistry of trace metals, their complexation with ligands, and their interactions with phytoplankton are intimately linked with the cycling of sulfur. In particular trace metal speciation may be profoundly influenced by various forms of reduced sulfur (sulfides), even in the oxygen-rich surface ocean. While sulfides may be produced by the microbial reduction of dissolved sulfate, there is also abundant evidence that some species of phytoplankton may also produce both dissolved and particulate sulfide. In this study, researchers at Old Dominion University will conduct a thorough examination of the rates and mechanisms of hydrogen sulfide production by marine phytoplankton using an iterative laboratory- and field-based approach. They will measure the rates of production of dissolved and particulate sulfide by a number of coastal and oceanic species in continuous culture and examine the influence of variable light, nutrient, and trace metal levels. Additionally they will assess the utility of sulfur isotope measurements in the quantification of biotic and abiotic production of hydrogen sulfide. The laboratory studies will be compared to field measurements. The research team expects to elucidate and quantify the principal mechanisms of production of both dissolved and particulate sulfide and to assess the implications for the cycling of trace metals in surface waters doc17725 none Sinking particulate matter is the major vehicle for exporting carbon from the sea surface to the ocean interior. During its transit towards the sea floor, most particulate organic carbon (POC) is returned to inorganic form and redistributed in the water column. This redistribution determines the surface concentration of dissolved CO2 , and hence the rate at which the ocean can absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. The ability to predict quantitatively the depth profile of remineralization is therefore critical to predicting the response of the global carbon cycle to environmental change. In this study, researchers at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the University of Washington, and the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography will collaborate with colleagues in Monaco and France to test the hypothesis that minerals produced by organisms, or introduced into the surface ocean by winds, critically influence carbon export to the deep ocean and sediments. They will carry out a multi-tracer approach to explicitly consider different mineral ballast types, along with the associated organic matter and radioisotopes. Their first hypothesis is that ballast minerals physically protect a fraction of their associated total organic matter, which persists to predominate over the unprotected fraction in the lower ( m) part of the water column. Understanding the mechanistic basis of such processes will require an understanding of organic-mineral interaction at the compound-specific level. They hypothesize secondly that the ratio of organic carbon to ballast is key to predicting variability in the export fluxes and sinking velocities of organic carbon as estimated using radiotracers. The overall goal is to develop a seamless description of carbon fluxes and associated mineral ballast fluxes throughout the water column. To achieve this goal, the research team will measure simultaneously a suite of properties that are thought to be indicative of fluxes. They will synthesize these measurements from the top of the water column to the sediments using a variety of modeling and statistical techniques. The strategy is to unite the power of several disciplines: (i) organic geochemistry for characterizing organic matter in protected and unprotected forms and determining its degradation state; (ii) radiochemistry for assessing processes and time-scales involved in particle dynamics and transport; (iii) zooplankton ecology for assessing radioisotope partitioning and organic biomarker alteration; and (iv) microbiology for its role in organic matter decomposition, and (v) modeling and statistical analyses to provide a process-based model of flux out of the euphotic zone to the sea floor doc17738 none Low-level jets (LLJs) are currents of relatively strong winds found in the lower atmosphere between approximately 300 and meters above the earth s surface. LLJs are particularly frequent in the central United States and strongly influence the precipitation and severe storm climatology of this region. Southerly LLJs transport moisture and sensible heat northward from the Gulf of Mexico and help destabilize the lower atmosphere which leads to the formation of clouds and precipitation. Recent research by the principal investigators suggested that the frequency of LLJs is more variable, and that the character (i.e., the spatial pattern, orientation, height, and depth) of LLJs is more complex, than previously portrayed. These variations have important consequences for the frequency, timing and location of precipitation in the Great Plains and Midwest. This research project will specify the degree of variability in the frequency and character of LLJs, improve conceptual models of the structure and evolution of LLJs, and evaluate current theories regarding the linkages between LLJs and synoptic-scale weather disturbances, specifically mid-latitude cyclones and upper-level wind maxima. Climatological and case study methodologies will be used to 1) classify jet events that occurred during - according to their airflow configuration, 2) relate variations in the frequency of the different jet types to large-scale circulation anomalies, 3) explore the persistence, evolution, and vertical structure of LLJs with different spatial configurations, 4) better define the linkage between LLJs and upper-level jets and 5) investigate the relationship between LLJs and airstreams within mid-latitude cyclones. Three data sets will be used. These are the National Weather Service rawinsonde observations, observations from the NOAA Profiler Network, and the NCAR NCEP reanalysis data. This research project is one of very few large-scale, multi-event climatological analyses of LLJs and is the only study to explicitly investigate the variability of LLJs at multiple time scales. The study will contribute to both applied and basic science, and will lead to a better understanding of precipitation variability in the Great Plains and Midwest of the United States. A better understanding of the linkages between LLJs and anomalous large-scale circulation patterns has significance for assessing possible changes in the frequency and character of LLJs and associated precipitation in a perturbed climate. The improved conceptual models of the structure of LLJs will aid in the interpretation of the output from numerical weather prediction models and will assist with short-range weather forecasting. The findings of this climatological study will also establish a much-needed baseline for future mechanistic studies and modeling efforts. Additionally, the results of the study will help validate, or disprove, our current understanding of the linkages between LLJs and upper-level jets, and the relationship between LLJs and airstreams within mid-latitude cyclones. Educational benefits of the project include the training of graduate students, involvement of under-represented undergraduate students in the research process, and development of improved teaching modules on LLJs and mid-latitude cyclones doc17739 none Although rivers and the flood plains they occupy have long been the focus of scholarly attention, many aspects of their dynamic evolution are not fully understood. Vertical accretion and channel narrowing due to suspended sediment deposition have been documented by geomorphologists over long time scales in qualitative or semi-quantitative terms, but complementary data on the contemporary rates at which these interrelated processes operate are lacking. This research project will assemble a comprehensive, quantitative geomorphic history for a channel-floodplain system along the Waipaoa River on the eastern side of the North Island of New Zealand. Previous research has shown that the floodplain is characterized by rapid growth through vertical accretion, which has a measurable lateral component at the decadal time scale. This will be achieved by analyzing cross-section survey data, obtained since at 0.8-km (0.5-mile) intervals within a 40-km long reach. These analyses will ascertain the controls on in-channel sedimentation and will determine the extent to which the observed changes in cross-section geometry compliment the previously documented process of vertical accretion on the Waipaoa River floodplain. By considering complementary data for both the channel and floodplain, this research will shed light on the manner in which a river adjusts it hydraulics and morphology following a well-documented disturbance to the catchment environment (clearance of the native forest in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). By correlating patterns of overbank deposition and the complimentary process of in-channel deposition that promotes channel narrowing, the project will show how the coupled channel-floodplain system has responded to human-induced change in the historic period. The project therefore will afford a unique perspective on a suite of processes that has long been surmised from stratigraphic studies and is recognized to represent a fundamental adjustment of the fluvial system to human-related disturbance. This research also will provide the direct observational experience necessary to test relevant width adjustment and floodplain growth models which provide a mechanistic explanation for the tendency of a gravel-bed channel, like the Waipaoa River, that is subject to an increase in the supply of fine sediment load, to evolve into a narrower, deeper river with fine banks and a coarse bed doc17740 none There is a need to improve predictions of the timing of avalanche release, impact pressures, and run-out distances to reduce the impact of avalanches on human society. This project will investigate the timing, size and impact of snow avalanches using a combined experimental and theoretical approach. Specific objectives are to: (i) track the evolution of snow slope stability in order to improve predictions of the timing and size of avalanche release; (ii) couple output from a model of avalanche release to a dynamic flow model in order estimate impact pressures and run-out distances along paths of specified geometry; (iii) couple the input of the slope stability model to output from a predictive meso-scale climate model and develop tools for forecasting avalanches on a regional scale. Model development and verification will be done using results from field observations and existing archived databases of past weather and avalanche activity. Physical models of avalanche initiation and subsequent flow require detailed knowledge of transients as well as a three-dimensional description of the evolving mechanical properties of snow, which requires extraordinary input data that are not generally available. Simplifying assumptions are necessary to develop models that are not only realistic but also sufficiently tractable so that they can be used for operational forecasting. Guiding constraints for model development are that only valid approximations and minimal data inputs are acceptable. Results from models of decreasing complexity will be compared with observations to identify the simplest workable models that adequately simulate avalanche behavior. Snow avalanches directly affect people by causing injury or death, restricting transportation, destroying structures and villages, limiting access to areas of activity and altering the natural environment. Although the frequency of avalanches has not changed significantly over the past century, the hazard has increased as more people live, work and travel in mountain regions. Indirect costs to society such as those associated with mitigation, litigation, insurance, and loss of both travel and business opportunities are also high. The overall goal of this research is to increase public safety and reduce costs associated with snow avalanches doc17741 none The nervous system is mainly composed of two types of cells, neurons and glia. Unlike glia, most neuronal cells lose their ability to divide (proliferate) at an early developmental stage. Therefore neuronal loss is an irreversible process and a major contributor to the impairment of function in the central nervous system (CNS), underscoring the importance of identifying molecules that can decrease neuronal loss. Receptor protein tyrosine kinases (RPTks) are a class of molecules that plays a pivotal role in the survival and proliferation of a large variety of cells. The molecule Gas6 (growth arrest specific gene6), the focus of this study, can bind and activate three related RPTKs, Tyro-3, Axl and Mer. Because Gas6 and Tyro-3 are abundantly expressed in the CNS it is possible that Gas6 acting through Tyro-3 can promote neuronal survival and induce cell proliferation; this is the hypothesis that will be tested. For these studies a combination of morphological and biochemical assays will be used to monitor the survival and proliferative effects of Gas6 on neuroblastoma cells and of neurons obtained from mice in which the Tyro-3 receptor has been genetically inactivated. These studies should help to identify new molecules involved in the promotion of cell survival and proliferation in the CNS, knowledge that may ultimately be used to reduce neuronal loss doc17725 none Sinking particulate matter is the major vehicle for exporting carbon from the sea surface to the ocean interior. During its transit towards the sea floor, most particulate organic carbon (POC) is returned to inorganic form and redistributed in the water column. This redistribution determines the surface concentration of dissolved CO2 , and hence the rate at which the ocean can absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. The ability to predict quantitatively the depth profile of remineralization is therefore critical to predicting the response of the global carbon cycle to environmental change. In this study, researchers at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the University of Washington, and the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography will collaborate with colleagues in Monaco and France to test the hypothesis that minerals produced by organisms, or introduced into the surface ocean by winds, critically influence carbon export to the deep ocean and sediments. They will carry out a multi-tracer approach to explicitly consider different mineral ballast types, along with the associated organic matter and radioisotopes. Their first hypothesis is that ballast minerals physically protect a fraction of their associated total organic matter, which persists to predominate over the unprotected fraction in the lower ( m) part of the water column. Understanding the mechanistic basis of such processes will require an understanding of organic-mineral interaction at the compound-specific level. They hypothesize secondly that the ratio of organic carbon to ballast is key to predicting variability in the export fluxes and sinking velocities of organic carbon as estimated using radiotracers. The overall goal is to develop a seamless description of carbon fluxes and associated mineral ballast fluxes throughout the water column. To achieve this goal, the research team will measure simultaneously a suite of properties that are thought to be indicative of fluxes. They will synthesize these measurements from the top of the water column to the sediments using a variety of modeling and statistical techniques. The strategy is to unite the power of several disciplines: (i) organic geochemistry for characterizing organic matter in protected and unprotected forms and determining its degradation state; (ii) radiochemistry for assessing processes and time-scales involved in particle dynamics and transport; (iii) zooplankton ecology for assessing radioisotope partitioning and organic biomarker alteration; and (iv) microbiology for its role in organic matter decomposition, and (v) modeling and statistical analyses to provide a process-based model of flux out of the euphotic zone to the sea floor doc17743 none Banerjee This award provides support to a symposium on Sustainable Industrial Development: Energy and Material Exchange and Optimization through Eco-Industrial Networks to be hosted by the Center for Economic Development of the University of Southern California. The purpose of the symposium is three fold: (1) to bring together experts from the public and private sectors to discuss by-product optimization through application of state-of-the-art benign manufacturing, advanced environmental technologies and eco-industrial processes; (2) to identify cutting-edge environmental technologies and benign manufacturing processes that convert wastes into value-added products that will facilitate new job creation and business development and (3) to facilitate inter-disciplinary dialogue and information sharing leading to the development of a research agenda that focuses on increasing industry s competitiveness in the global market. The Center for Economic Development will post papers and presentations from the Symposium on its website. In addition, the National Association of Management and Technical Assistance Center (NAMTAC) will assist by disseminating findings from the Symposium to a diverse group of member organizations, including business, economic development and technical assistance providers. Co-Chairs of this symposium are Dr. Tridib Banerjee, Professor at the School of Policy, Planning and Development and Dr, Mansour Rahimi, Associate Professor at the School of Engineering, both at USC doc17744 none This grant provides funding for a workshop focusing on emerging technologies related to a Wireless Mobile Internet. The workshop is a collaborative effort between the Anderson School of Management, Computer Science, and the Electrical and Mechanical Engineering Departments of UCLA. The workshop provides a forum for academics, industry, and research establishments to target major aspects and problems related to IP-based mobile Internet and wireless access to the Internet. Technologies such as, WiFi, Bluetooth, 3G and Java are discussed and the possibilities of their integration explored, with applications to mobile commerce, wireless transactions, etc. The workshop takes the form of lectures, and panel discussions by leaders in industry and academia. Lectures and discussion transcripts will be made available to the public via the WEB. The workshop is held on November 8-9, on the Campus of UCLA. The PI anticipates that this will become an annual event doc17745 none This research project, in the laboratory of Professor Janice Reutt-Robey at the University of Maryland-College Park, investigates the structure and reactivity of molecular scale architectures formed on well characterized metal surfaces. With the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, the detailed structure and motion of alane oligomers formed on the Al(111) surface are being examined using scanning tunneling microscopy. A similar approach is used to examine the structure and reactivity of ordered architectures formed by the adsorption of N-heteroaromatic carboxylic acids on the silver surface. Information obtained from these studies is fundamental to our understanding of the growth and operation of nano-scale electronic devices. Using scanning tunneling microscopy and other surface sensitive tools, Professor Reutt-Robey and her coworkers at the University of Maryland are probing the adsorption and reaction of a range of interesting chemical systems with connections to the formation of nano-scale devices. The interaction of atomic hydrogen with aluminum surfaces to form ordered oligomers on the surface is being examined. Also, the adsorption and interaction of strongly hydrogen bonding nitrogen containing aromatic acids is being examined. The information gained from these studies will provide important underpinning for the synthesis and manipulation of nano-scale architectures on surfaces doc17746 none Gargett This project aims at developing new and promising techniques based on acoustic Doppler technology for continuous estimation of important turbulence variables at ocean observatories. Addition of a 5th vertical beam (VADCP) allows estimates of all three components of turbulent kinetic energy as well as its dissipation rate. This project will assess their potential to provide time series measurements of turbulent as well as mean flow properties at remotely operated ocean observatories. The major technical challenges are provision of a stable platform, and sufficient power and data transmission for the fast sample rates needed to resolve the large-eddy structure of turbulent velocity fields. The major scientific challenges are the design of sampling protocols appropriate to the particular mix of processes generating turbulence at a given time, and the separation of surface wave and turbulent velocities. A final question is how to verify that the results are correct , i.e., consistent with what is known of various forms of turbulence in the ocean. To address these sets of problems simultaneously, exploratory coastal deployments of a VADCP, in both wave-protected and wave-exposed locations, will be combined with development and use of a large-eddy simulation (LES) model suitable for the coastal ocean. LES velocity fields will be sampled with different VADCP protocols (choices of time space resolution), and the results used to estimate the reliability with which turbulent quantities can be estimated from the 5-beam Doppler data under various combinations of turbulence forcing and surface wave contamination. In addition, the numerical results will be used to define requirements for statistical significance of future comparisons between time-continuous, spatially localized VADCP measurements, and time- and space-intermittent results from more traditional turbulence sensors carried on standard vertical profilers and or autonomous vehicles. The observational results may in turn be used to examine the oceanic validity of assumptions underlying commonly used LES sub-grid parameterizations doc17747 none The objective of the proposed research is to develop generic methods for active feedback control of complex, non-equilibrium fluid flow. While active control of fluid flow has been studied, the use of feedback in non-equilibrium flows is largely a new territory. A main hindrance to applying off-the-shelf control methods is the absence of appropriate models. Existing models tend to either be simplistic steady models or, on the other extreme, complex computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation models, whose mere size and the lack of an invariant concept of state space are prohibitive in feedback design. The modeling challenge goes hand in hand with the development of practical design tools, tailored to the needs of fluid flow applications, and utilizing their ``redeeming factors . Such factors include the formation of few, large coherent structures, periodicity of some reference orbits, and useful concepts of Hamiltonian energy. A focus on periodic characteristics of coherent structures, such as the period itself, extrema of relevant indices over a period, and, indeed, leading Fourier coefficients (phasors), reduces the model to manageable size and incorporates intrinsic filtering. That filtering (both spatially and temporally) is expected to reduce effects of chaotic and stochastic dynamics, that feasible control methods are likely to be unable to address. Under typical, periodic and low gain actuation, periodic characteristics of both the controlled structure and sensor signals are expected to be slowly varying. In its simplest form, an observer model would be that of fixed period and phasors. Identified algebraic and or (slow) dynamic relationships between periodic characteristics of the sensor signal, the actuation signal and those of the controlled structure, together will comprise the control-oriented system model and will be used for control design. That is, feedback control will translate observed slow variations in the periodic characteristics of the system into slow variations in the periodic characteristics of the actuation signal. Energy storage expressions for the lumped model can be used for feasible control design, such as in regulating the total stored energy, or the periodic energy exchange between relevant Hamiltonians doc17748 none Each year billions of dollars of goods and services are acquired through auctions. By analyzing data that are generated in these transactions, key insights can be obtained on critical issues such as auction design. The data also may be used to understand the competitive character of these markets and bring information to bear on possible collusive behavior and market performance as reflected in economic efficiency. Structural analysis of auctions traditionally is based on game theoretic models that assume perfect rationality. Yet, the findings from auction experiments are pervasive and consistent: The behavior of auction participant deviates significantly from theory prescriptions. The extent of deviation sharply contradicts the assumption of perfect rationality that is so fundamental to structural analysis. The objective of this proposal is to bridge the gap between experimental economics and empirical auction modeling. We will explicitly allow bidders to deviate from the theoretical solutions of an inherently oversimplified benchmark theory model. Such deviations could be non-strategic (mistakes), or they may be strategic in the sense that they reflect real-life factors that are not appropriately captured by the benchmark model. Traditional bid functions, which assign a single bid to a player s valuation, are replaced by a full probability distribution for bids, conditional on valuations. The proposal develops operational numerical procedures for the analysis of bids under this new class of semi-structural models and explains their statistical properties. The analytical tools developed in this framework will be applied to several real-life situations: (1) Auction data from timber sales in the Northwest Pacific will be analyzed, with a specific focus on the identification of possible collusive behavior. (2) Data related to school milk procurement in Georgia will be analyzed, where issues of market efficiency may be highlighted. (3) Internet auctions, where observed behavior sharply deviates from standard theory prescriptions, will be used to demonstrate the explanatory power of the techniques developed. These empirical studies are expected to provide critical new insights in the operations of real-life auctions and result in suggestions for corresponding adjustments in their design doc17749 none This project investigates whether the rise in income inequality over the last three decades can be explained in part by the growth of corporate restructuring. Internal job ladders within firms may have been weakened by changes such as the growth of out-sourcing of employment, privatization of public sector work, the de-regulation of service industries, mergers, and a shift in the balance of power towards shareholders and away from managers. The research will test the importance of these restructuring changes by comparing changes in earnings inequality across 115 cities between and using decennial Census data. Changes in corporate restructuring (e.g., increases in subcontracting industries) are expected to be correlated with increases in wage inequality across the four panels doc17750 none Professor Richard L. Keiter, Department of Chemistry, Eastern Illinois University, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division for mechanistic studies of intramolecular exchange of bound and unbound phosphorus donor groups in transition metal complexes containing multidentate phosphine ligands. In some Group 6 transition metal carbonyl complexes that also containing both coordinated and dangling phosphino groups the rate of phosphine exchange is much faster than expected. The fact that a large through space carbon-phosphorus spin-spin coupling constant occurs between dangling phosphino and cis-carbonyl groups indicates that an electronic interaction may be an important factor in the acceleration. By using a series of phosphine ligands containing substituents with differing steric and electronic properties, a mechanistic model in which a short dangling phosphine arm accelerates the exchange reaction by interacting with the cis carbonyl groups of the complex will be tested. The study will then be extended to known and new chiral ditertiary phosphines. The usefulness of these in asymmetric hydrogenation will be evaluated. Substitution reactions have been studied extensively for many years but very few of these investigations have addressed phosphine substitution. The absence of such exploration is surprising given the current interest in phosphine chemistry that centers on ligand design for asymmetric synthesis, site-specific drug delivery, and water-soluble phosphine. In addition, the kinetic stability of the metal-phosphorus bond is highly important in catalysis and catalyst degradation. This study will provide thermodynamic and kinetic insight into the factors that control phosphine substitution in transition metal complexes. An additional, very important aspect of the project is the education of undergraduate chemistry majors and the opportunity it will provide both B.S. and M.S. students to engage in cutting edge research doc17751 none Prop #: PI: Richard D. Ricketts This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessel Blue Heron operated by the University of Minnesota and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Richard Ricketts is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire remote controls for trawl and cable winches and a satellite compass doc17752 none This research continues and extends earlier theoretical work of the investigator and of collaborator A. A. J. Marley on the measurement of psychological attributes such as the utility of goods and the subjective intensity of physical signals such as lights or sounds. The research will describe the underlying structure of independent variables that affect the attribute in such algebraic terms as (1) the ordering by subjectively greater than, (2) operations like being presented with two goods or stimuli at once or in quick succession, (3) treatments of stimuli as deviations from the status quo in utility or from threshold in psychophysics, and (4) use of judgements of ratios of intervals similar to those found in magnitude production methods. This project will account for violations of dominance, such as the utility of gambling per se, peculiarities of mixed gambles of gains and losses, and various principles to extend the theory from binary gambles to general ones. The project also will attempt to generalize some of the algebraic theories to probabilistic versions. Utility models are extensively used in providing advice to decision makers and subjective expected utility also is a key part of Bayesian statistical methods. Sensory measurement is used widely in a variety of industrial settings. Yet these applications are based primarily on empirical generalizations whose theoretical basis has recently been brought into doubt. This project will advance theory and methods in many application areas. It also will further the development of a probabilistic version of fundamental measurement theory, thereby expanding the value of this approach for many social and behavioral science inquiries doc17753 none Proshutinsky The sea level rise in the Arctic anticipated to result from global warming is important because of the influence that sea level changes will exert on shoreline erosion, sediment transport, navigation conditions, and oil and gas operations. This research will attempt to describe and model the current rate of sea level rise in the Arctic Ocean. Sea level is a natural integrating indicator of climate change, reflecting changes in practically all dynamic and thermodynamic terrestrial, oceanic, atmospheric, and cryospheric processes. However, using estimates of eustatic sea level rise as an indicator of climate change incurs the difficulty that sea level change is the net result of many components, some of which can offset one another. This effort will identify the role of each of the factors that contribute to Arctic Ocean sea level change. Based on analysis of existing, but previously unavailable, time series of sea level heights from Russian archives, along with atmospheric, cryospheric, terrestrial, and oceanic data sets and results of numerical modeling and data reconstruction, we will (1) identify links among sea level variability and atmospheric, hydrologic, cryospheric and oceanic processes, (2) quantify the regional and temporal variability of relevant processes in terms of sea level response, and (3) determine the relative importance of each factor influencing sea level change under global warming conditions. The observed sea level variability, which acts to integrate the complex contributions of these factors, will serve as the primary indicator of the ocean s response to climate change. Based on this analysis, the impact of linkages between hydrography, atmospheric circulation, hydrologic conditions, and the sea ice regime over the Arctic Ocean will be assessed in a conceptual model of sea level change. This project is an international effort with a research team of scientists from the USA, United Kingdom, and Norway. The proposed research and results of this project will have direct influence on several US National Science Foundation and European programs and regional climatic impact assessments doc17754 none Infrared imaging is an emerging technology and has the potential of leading to multi-modality sensor systems for enhancing the screening, diagnostic, and therapeutic capabilities of future medical practice. It can also be used alone for applications such as those of a pathophysiological nature (functional and soft tissue imaging); a unique advantage since it is provided by a totally non-invasive, non-ionizing, and low-cost procedure. The concept of thermal imaging in medicine toady is being evolved with the use of the advanced infrared imaging technology. It is now being merged with smart algorithms and image processing for the effective interpretation of medical images and the building of new bridges between computer science, engineering, and medicine. To this end, an IEEE EMBS Infrared Imaging Workshop is being held. Experts in infrared sensors technology, infrared image analysis and image interpretation are giving presentation and discussing various uses of infrared imaging in medicine in a hope to further the state-of-the-art doc17755 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Holly M. Simon at the University of Wisconsin to isolate and culture members of an unusual and little-understood group of soil microorganisms that colonize plant roots. These microbes, known as mesophilic crenarchaeota, are members of the archaea, a third domain of life separate from bacteria and eukaryotes. Growth of archaea on plant roots will be exploited by using the root as a starting point for their growth in vitro. Metabolic differences between archaea and bacteria will be used to selectively enrich for growth of the archaea while discouraging growth of bacteria also present on roots. DNA will be recovered for analysis of the diversity and potential metabolic activities of the assemblages present, which will in turn inform enrichment strategies. While isolation of the root-colonizing archaea in pure culture is the goal, their growth in vitro may require the presence of (an)other organism(s). Discovery of such commensal relationships would represent significant advancement of our knowledge about this unusual group of archaea. Members of the archaea are important contributors to biosphere processes. Examples include the production of methane, (a greenhouse gas), and globally significant transformations of sulfur. Archaea have also have often been discovered in extreme environments, such as Yellowstone hot springs, or submarine hydrothermal vents. The group of archaea being investigated in this proposal was completely unknown a decade ago. They represent evolutionarily divergent members within the archaeal division Crenarchaeota that are able to grow under moderate (mesophilic) temperature conditions. The isolation and growth in vitro of members from this enigmatic group of archaea will help us understand their place in the scope of archaeal evolution, and will provide insight into their metabolisms and ecological functions doc17679 none Physical and biological interactions play a complex role in the partitioning of carbon between the atmosphere, upper ocean, deep ocean and sediments. At present, interdisciplinary models offer the best means to test hypotheses about how carbon partitioning is regulated in various oceanic regions on time scales of years to centuries. A new interdisciplinary model will integrate advances in several areas to test two related hypotheses: 1) that switches in community and productivity dominance between diatoms and other phytoplankton groups (e.g. non?siliceous picoplankton and calcifying phytoplankton) significantly affect carbon partitioning, vary spatially and temporally and are regulated by a combination of Si and Fe in combination; 2) that changes in Si trapping in the Southern Ocean affect Si(OH)4 concentrations in the mode waters that feed equatorial upwelling, and that Si and C uptake by equatorial phytoplankton alters air?sea exchange of carbon dioxide at the equator. An interdisciplinary science team of biological and chemical oceanographers and modelers will address these issues via four approaches. First, a calcifying phytoplankton component will be added to an existing model and used to incorporate water column production and dissolution of CaC03. Second, model experiments will be designed and executed to explore the regulation of switching between siliceous (diatoms) and non?siliceous (pico and calcifying) plankton. Third, an improved blogeochemical model developed for the equatorial Pacific will be spatially expanded to include the Southern Ocean, and used to conduct a series of simulation experiments on the processes that link high latitude mode water regions with the source waters for equatorial upwelling. Finally, iron?sensitive growth parameters of the phytoplankton components of the model will be manipulated to test the ecosystem response to iron enrichment in both the equatorial Pacific Ocean and the Southern Ocean. These objectives represent a significant step in the development of coupled physical biogeochemical models for exploring the response of marine biogeochemical processes to climate change doc17710 none The proposed project will focus on the study of political party systems, with an emphasis on the number of parties in a system, and on the sustainability of regional parties. The Investigator plans to build on previous theoretical and empirical results to understand party systems in a variety of countries. Currently he has data on Canada and Great Britain, and will get access to data on Russia, Germany, South Korea, Botswana, Ghana, and Zimbabwe, and possibly more countries. The fundamental question motivating the study is how and why some parties become national in scope and sustain a nationwide presence, and how and why some parties have only regional appeal. Results from this research should be widely applicable to party systems in many other democracies. At the core of the project is the theoretical argument, first proposed in Chhibber and Kollman ( A, B), that the degree of government centralization is an important factor in explaining both the number of parties in a system and the survival of regional or local parties. The literature on party systems is vast and diverse. Yet most theories of party systems are static. Explanations of the number of parties based on electoral institutions, national culture, the heterogeneity of national populations, or presidentialism have been quite successful at capturing cross-national differences. However, these explanations cannot help us to understand the dynamics of party systems. As the number of parties in many systems fluctuates, explaining the patterns requires attention on variables that change over time. One such variable that has been strongly correlated with party politics in the United States and India is the centralization of national government authority. The project will entail both empirical and theoretical components. On the empirical side, the data sets gathered will contain constituency-level election results for a variety of countries. Currently, the Investigator has data from Canada and Great Britain, two countries with single member, simple plurality electoral systems to their lower houses, similar to those in India and the United States. Other single member simple plurality countries, South Korea, Botswana, Ghana, and Zimbabwe have available data, and the Investigator will gather these data as well. The Investigator will also gather data from countries that have mixed electoral systems (elements of proportional representation and plurality), beginning with Germany and Russia. The formal component contains a rigorous theoretical models that can offer insights into the process of party formation and party aggregation across electoral districts. As a base, the Investigator will extend rational choice models of Duverger s Law to incorporate national politics. Then using these insights, the Investigator will explore multidimensional political competition in a similar environment, but including multiple levels of government as in a federation, and legislative parties doc17723 none s, etc. The documentation author need only make changes in one place. Third, the project promotes data interoperability by creating a Web-based nonproprietary documentation standard that permits seamless exchange of files among data users and data providers. Finally, the shared specification provides the necessary infrastructure for porting data into online analysis systems, thus putting more social science data on the desktops of a wider community of users doc17759 none This project will consider the mechanisms of denitrification - the chemical reduction of dissolved nutrient NO3- largely to inert N2 gas- in the polar oceans and specifically the Bering Sea. Denitrification in the ocean, the loss of nutrient N essential for biological processes, is conventionally thought to take place only in conditions of relative dissolved oxygen deficiency ( [O2] 5-10mM). The northern Polar ocean shows significant nitrate depletion relative to phosphate despite the concentration of oxygen rarely falling below 15uM throughout much of the region. It has been known for many years that the Bering Sea in particular exhibits a sizeable nitrate deficit, but whether this arises in the water column or in the sediments, or perhaps is even advected in from low-latitude oxygen minimum zones in the Pacific remains unclear. Isotopic measurements of nitrate will be used to assess the relative role of sedimentary vs. water column denitrification based on observed distinct isotopic signatures accompanying these two processes. Using a recently developed isotopic analytical method, the d 18O of oceanic nitrate will also be developed as a tracer to complement the interpretation of d 15N differences to study these aspects of the oceanic nitrogen cycle. A further line of enquiry of the study is to consider the proposition that the modern polar Pacific ocean operates as an analogue of the glacial Southern Ocean, a key unknown in interpreting Holocene variations in atmospheric CO2 and thus broadening our understanding of geologically recent climate change doc17760 none Sabre Kais of Purdue University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to develop and apply the finite scaling method in several related projects. First, the finite size scaling method will be adapted for studying the critical behavior of a quantum Hamiltonian as a function of a set of parameters. This method will be generalized using Gaussian basis sets to search for new stable multiply-charged anions in the gas phase. As well, methods will be developed to predict and calculate the formation of resonances for atomic and molecular anions. Next, the Feynmann path integral approach will be used to advance the finite size scaling method for mapping quantum problems to effective classical lattice systems. The method will be combined with other simulation techniques to obtain critical parameters for molecular systems. Finally, finite size scaling will be explored to enable correlation of structural and thermodynamic properties of small clusters with their corresponding bulk matter. A long-term goal of this research is the creation of a single approach that will enable accurate computational chemistry calculations for atomic, molecular, and cluster properties at the lowest effective cost. Success in this area could obviate the need to carry out mundane or even hazardous experiments to determine necessary chemical information. This work could also permit the exploration of transient chemical species that could otherwise be difficult or impossible to study experimentally doc17761 none Cochran Of all the world oceans, the Arctic is unique in its persistent cover of sea ice, broad continental shelves that are loci for carbon cycling and strong annual variations in light intensity. Moreover the Arctic is perhaps the ocean most susceptible to showing the early effects of global warming. Although changes such as thinning ice cover may have natural causes, for example related to variations in the gradient of atmospheric pressure in the Arctic, they may also be related to changes in climate brought about by human activities. Climate warming may alter the cycling of carbon on arctic shelves through permanent reductions in ice cover and increases in riverine discharge. In turn these changes may lead to enhanced export of carbon to the slope and deep arctic basins. One of the most distinguishing features of the Arctic is its extensive shelf area, comprising about 30% of the basin area and receiving about 10% of the world river discharge. River discharge in the Arctic is dominated by the great Siberian rivers - the Yenisei, Lena and Ob. The Mackenzie River is fourth in importance after these, but is first in rank in terms of annual discharge of sediment. Moreover, it is the only North American analog of the large Siberian rivers, and in practical terms is the most readily studied. The potential importance of the river-dominated shelves to biogeochemical cycling in the Arctic has lead to an international effort --the Canadian Arctic Shelf Exchange Study (CASES)--organized by Canada to understand the consequences of sea- ice variability on the Mackenzie shelf. Based on prior involvement in Canadian-organized arctic programs in the Northeast and North Water Polynyas, the PI has been invited to participate in the CASES program. The research proposed here for the Mackenzie Shelf will build on the PI s prior efforts in the Arctic and elsewhere to use natural radionuclides as tracers for fluxes of particulate organic carbon and particles. CASES includes three month-long process cruises (in August , and ) on the Mackenzie Shelf and a year-long period between the August and cruises during which the research icebreaker will over-winter. This research will be structured to take advantage of the possibility to sample the full annual cycle of productivity on the Mackenzie Shelf. Focus will be on the three distinct zones (an early season inner shelf pool of freshwater dubbed Lake Mackenzie separated by an ice dam from a flaw-lead polynya and the arctic pack ice) that develop in the system, and employ natural radionuclides as tracers for the transport of particles and particulate organic carbon within and between the zones. We hypothesize that significant exchanges between the zones will occur in the spring through summer as the Mackenzie River freshet begins, the ice retreats offshore and productivity increases. We will test this hypothesis through the use of natural radionuclides to determine the presence of freshly input riverine sediments to the inner shelf, the rate of export of POC from the euphotic zone, and through mass balances, as indicators of the transport of particulate material through the zones. The radionuclides we will use include cosmogenic radionuclides (Be-7 and C-14) produced in the atmosphere from the interactions of cosmic rays with atmospheric gases, and radionuclides of the naturally occurring U-238 decay series (Th-234, Pb-210 doc17762 none New Immigrants: Science collection of quantitative data; examination of relevant literature. Attention is focused on two sets of subjects: foreign-born Indians holding master and doctorate degrees in S&E disciplines and their American colleagues, department chairs, and managers. Subjects are drawn from two industrial labs, two national labs, and three academic institutions. The findings of this project help illuminate the potential contributions of Indian scientists engineers in the future, as well as efforts to manage diversity, fairness and equality issues. The project aims to develop a theory about the behavior of scientists and engineers from India, as well as to help shape future policies. Research findings are likely to raise questions and foster discussion about the purported objectivity in evaluation and promotion doc17763 none In mammals, puberty is a time of increasing hormonal secretions as well as developing reproductive abilities. Associated changes occur in brain structures involved in these activities, and recent evidence shows that other parts of the brain involved in cognitive, non-reproductive functions also change structural features during puberty. This project uses anatomical and pharmacological approaches to examine how cellular numbers and membrane receptor molecules may change during puberty in non-reproductive areas of the brain. Ovarian hormone effects are measured in the visual cortex and in the hippocampus, which is a region known to be essential for many types of learning and memory. Potential cellular mechanisms such as programmed cell death and types of hormone receptors are studied to see how critically they depend on timing of the hormone action, compared to the traditional perinatal critical periods. Results will have substantial impact on understanding this little-studied but dynamic period related to reproductive and cognitive development, by exploring changes uniquely at the cellular level. The impact will extend beyond neuroendocrinology to the fields of biology of aging, comparative neuroanatomy, and developmental neuroscience. In addition, students will receive excellent research training in a lab that continues an excellent record of training and productivity doc17764 none Green fluorescent protein is a member of a unique family of proteins currently identified only in marine invertebrates (corals, sea anemones, and jellyfish). Upon translation, the peptide backbone of these proteins spontaneously form a compact, soluble structure that forces the autocatalysis of 3 inner amino acids forming a visible light fluorescent chromophore. These are the only known proteins that spontaneously produce a visible light fluorophore without the aid of exogenous cellular factors. Scientists have attached the cDNA sequences encoding these proteins to a number of proteins of interest in organisms ranging from viruses to plants to mammals. Virtually all organisms studied are capable of synthesizing these fluorescent proteins. Fluorescent proteins are now widely used by biomedical scientists as tools to understand the localization and function of an impressive array of proteins in a vast range of experimental organisms. As the range of research utilizing these proteins grows, the currently available collection of fluorescent proteins presents sever limitations on the types of experiments possible. This research will seek to identify novel fluorescent proteins from marine animals living in the Indo-Pacific Ocean. Using a combination of underwater fluorescence imaging spectral analysis of reef animals and molecular cloning, this research will survey, catalog and characterize fluorescence in the coral reef environment. In addition to providing a large number of new fluorescent proteins with differing biochemical and spectral properties for use in biomedical research, these studies will help reveal the role of these proteins in the ecology of the animals that produce them doc17765 none This proposal request support to examine the relationship between climate, ocean circulation, and foraminiferal assemblages in Maastrichtian sediments recovered from the Blake Nose by documenting changes in foraminiferal faunas, geochemistry of foraminifers, magnetic susceptibility and sediment color across cyclic intervals. The data will be used to test the hypothesis that the local ecosystem is responding to orbital forcing doc17766 none Fratantoni This project involves the analysis and synthesis of several types of data from the recently completed North Brazil Current (NBC) Ring Experiment. Preliminary results from this experiment suggest that these large ocean eddies may carry a significant amount of upper ocean meridional mass transport in the tropical Atlantic Ocean. Data available for this synthesis include RAFOS float and surface drifter trajectories, hydrography from multiple cruises, data from current meter moorings and inverted echo sounders. It is expected that most attention will be given to the float and drifter data, together with the hydrography. The analysis has several aims including: describing the physical structure of NBC rings after separation; determining rates of translation, mixing and decay as rings move north-west; determining the processes responsible for deformation and destruction of NBC rings as they encounter the Antilles; and to identify the fate of the S. Atlantic water in ring cores doc17738 none Low-level jets (LLJs) are currents of relatively strong winds found in the lower atmosphere between approximately 300 and meters above the earth s surface. LLJs are particularly frequent in the central United States and strongly influence the precipitation and severe storm climatology of this region. Southerly LLJs transport moisture and sensible heat northward from the Gulf of Mexico and help destabilize the lower atmosphere which leads to the formation of clouds and precipitation. Recent research by the principal investigators suggested that the frequency of LLJs is more variable, and that the character (i.e., the spatial pattern, orientation, height, and depth) of LLJs is more complex, than previously portrayed. These variations have important consequences for the frequency, timing and location of precipitation in the Great Plains and Midwest. This research project will specify the degree of variability in the frequency and character of LLJs, improve conceptual models of the structure and evolution of LLJs, and evaluate current theories regarding the linkages between LLJs and synoptic-scale weather disturbances, specifically mid-latitude cyclones and upper-level wind maxima. Climatological and case study methodologies will be used to 1) classify jet events that occurred during - according to their airflow configuration, 2) relate variations in the frequency of the different jet types to large-scale circulation anomalies, 3) explore the persistence, evolution, and vertical structure of LLJs with different spatial configurations, 4) better define the linkage between LLJs and upper-level jets and 5) investigate the relationship between LLJs and airstreams within mid-latitude cyclones. Three data sets will be used. These are the National Weather Service rawinsonde observations, observations from the NOAA Profiler Network, and the NCAR NCEP reanalysis data. This research project is one of very few large-scale, multi-event climatological analyses of LLJs and is the only study to explicitly investigate the variability of LLJs at multiple time scales. The study will contribute to both applied and basic science, and will lead to a better understanding of precipitation variability in the Great Plains and Midwest of the United States. A better understanding of the linkages between LLJs and anomalous large-scale circulation patterns has significance for assessing possible changes in the frequency and character of LLJs and associated precipitation in a perturbed climate. The improved conceptual models of the structure of LLJs will aid in the interpretation of the output from numerical weather prediction models and will assist with short-range weather forecasting. The findings of this climatological study will also establish a much-needed baseline for future mechanistic studies and modeling efforts. Additionally, the results of the study will help validate, or disprove, our current understanding of the linkages between LLJs and upper-level jets, and the relationship between LLJs and airstreams within mid-latitude cyclones. Educational benefits of the project include the training of graduate students, involvement of under-represented undergraduate students in the research process, and development of improved teaching modules on LLJs and mid-latitude cyclones doc17768 none This grant provides funding for equipment upgrades for the Econometrics Laboratory (EML) at the University of California, Berkeley, including a 660GB fiber channel disk tray for its fileserver, and a five-unit tape library for backups. The disk tray will increase the storage capacity of the EML, and provides larger, faster disks for improved I O as well as RAID performance and fail-safe capability. The new removable media technology will remain synchronized with the new disk technology. The EML provides a state-of-the-art computational environment for economic research, particularly in compute-intensive methods and the analysis of very large datasets. Extending its disk storage and backup capabilities provides key resources that are urgently needed by applied econometrics faculty investigators and graduate dissertation students doc17769 none One key to empanelling an impartial jury for a courtroom trial is the process of voir dire in which the judge, the attorneys, or both, question potential jurors about their background, history, and beliefs in order to determine whether they are qualified to serve. To identify biased prospective jurors, attorneys and judges must elicit adequate and accurate responses to questions. Social science research has shown that jurors do not provide such responses and resist admitting to bias. An apparent reason for voir dire s shortcomings is the kind and quality of questions asked by attorneys and judges. This research will assess the adequacy of typical questioning during voir dire in terms of social science standards of questioning and interviewing, and then examine the relationship between the adequacy of the questioning and the identification of juror bias. The theoretical and methodological significance of this research is that it will provide systematic knowledge about voir dire questioning and demonstrate a method for the evaluation of that procedure. The broader significance is that the research should identify potential improvements in the effectiveness of voir dire for empanelling an impartial jury as guaranteed by the 6th Amendment doc17770 none Verosub In environmental magnetic studies, the magnetic properties of sediments and soils are used as tracers of paleoclimatic and other environmental processes. The automated long-core cryogenic magnetometer in the Paleomagnetism Laboratory at UC-Davis has been designated by NSF as a national facility for environmental magnetic research. This grant will provide support for a laboratory manager whose primary responsibilities will be to oversee the operations of this facility, to develop new applications for the long-core magnetometer and new methods of analyzing the data generated by it, and to facilitate the use of the instrument by outside users doc17771 none This proposal request support to complete a multiproxy paleoclimate record from Cariaco Basin ODP Site to the base of the sediment section at about 550,000 years. The study will include stable isotope and foraminiferal census data at sample resolution of about 300 years for the entire record. Critical intervals will be sampled at finer resolution to evaluate subcentury-scale features. The study will be coordinated with measurements of a number of other proxies by informal collaborators as well as a modeling effort. The overall objective is to provide an integrated data set suitable for testing the hypothesis that changes in tropical hydrology are a potential driver of global climate change on millennial to Milankovich time-scales doc17772 none The biogeochemical cycle of nitrogen is very susceptible to changes in environmental conditions. Understanding the present and past response of the marine nitrogen cycle to natural and anthropogenic changes is important for our ability to predict the potential impact of future environmental changes on primary production in the oceans, and consequently their effect on global and regional marine ecosystems. One of the most powerful tools for deciphering past fluctuations in the marine nitrogen cycle is the 15N isotopic composition (d15N) of organic matter preserved in marine sediments. In various settings, this tracer may provide information about variability in ocean productivity and the degree of nutrient utilization, or about the relative importance of nitrogen fixation or denitrification. However, to accurately interpret the paleoceanographic record, a critical question that must be answered is to estimate the extent of nitrogen isotope fractionation during diagenesis. In this study, researchers at the University of Southern California will measure the d15 N of ammonia in pore waters of sediments from several near-anoxic basins in the California Borderland and the Gulf of California. Analyses of the solid phase abundance and d15N of bulk organic nitrogen and THAA (total hydrolyzable amino acids)will also be made. Because irrigation effects are absent from the study sites, it will be possible to construct mass balances for 15N and 14N lost during diagenesis of solid phases by fitting diffusion-advection-reaction models to pore water data. The combination of these model calculations with information on sediment accumulation rate and solid phase nitrogen data will establish the degree of isotope fractionation, and will also be useful for evaluating whether bacterial uptake of isotopically light nitrogen plays a significant role in the sedimentary nitrogen budget. To evaluate the potential for fractionation at more oxic sites, incubation experiments will be run using mixtures of sediment and fresh plankton decomposing under both oxic and anoxic conditions doc17773 none The Conquest hybrid disk memory file system takes a new approach to filesystem design by storing most information in RAM, devoting disk only to large files. Preliminary results have shown great benefits from the Conquest approach, despite the fact that the on-disk portion of the file system has yet not been optimized. In this research, we will investigate the optimal method of storing those large disk-based files. After reviewing prior research in disk layout, we will design and implement a layout that is optimized for storing large files in an environment that is free of metadata and small files. We will also develop a cleaner that will dynamically adjust the arrangement of on-disk data to optimize the performance of disk access. Finally, we will take measurements to quantify the improvements brought by the new approach doc17774 none Combining their expertise in calcification, satellite algorithms, sediment trap interpretation, water column chemistry, sediment geochemistry and global modeling, five principal investigators propose a multidisciplinary approach aimed at improving the uncertainties in the rates of CaCO3 cycling in the ocean. To achieve this goal, the PIs plan to address the following four objectives on both a regional and a global scale: (1) improve estimates of the standing stock and calcification rates of surface ocean particulate inorganic carbon; (2) improve estimates of surface CaCO3 export; (3) improve estimates of shallow (100- m) dissolution rates; and (4) improve estimates of deep ( m) dissolution rates. Results from this study will be basin-scale and global carbonate budgets to improve our understanding of carbonate production, export and shallow deep water dissolution in the marine environment doc17775 none Research on American legislative elections focuses predominantly on Congress, with far less attention given to state legislatures. This is unfortunate because the large number of state legislative elections, the variation across states in the character of legislative bodies and election rules, and the increased importance of states and state legislatures in policy making in the U.S. make state legislative elections especially well suited for testing theories about the nature of elections. Probably the greatest impediment to such research is the lack of readily accessible data about elections in the fifty states. The ICPSR data set, State Legislative Election Returns in the United States, - (Study # ) would seem to overcome this obstacle, as it contains information about all state legislative general elections in the United States over a two decade period, as well as primary elections in sixteen southern and border states, and runoff elections in eight states. Part I of this data set includes an observation (N = 173,811) for each candidate running in any election during the period, and shows among other variables, the candidate s party affiliation, the number of votes (s)he -and other candidates -receive, whether (s)he is an incumbent, and the type of district in which the election is held. However, scholars have been unable to fully exploit these enormously valuable data because of significant problems in the way candidate names are recorded. For candidates for whom there are multiple observations, the name recorded frequently varies across observations (e.g., with and without a middle initial, with and without nicknames), a problem compounded by typographical errors. These errors make it impossible to reliably trace a particular legislator from one election to the next, thereby greatly limiting the utility of the information in the data set. Berry, Berkman and Schneiderman ( ) estimated that among incumbents running in general elections for whom there were more than one observation included in this data set, only 65% were identified by an identical name across all observations; 35% had at least one case in which their name was recorded differently. The authors developed various computer algorithms for identifying when two similar but different names likely indicate the same person. Relying on these algorithms and visual inspection of a listing of legislators names, names were adjusted to achieve greater consistency, reducing the error rate from 35% to 6%. This project to extends the cleaning of names in Part I of the State Legislative Election Returns data set in several ways. The initial cleaning by Berry, Berkman and Schneiderman was restricted to incumbents running in general elections, which constitute only 25 percent of the observations in the data set; the new project includes all observations in the data set, i.e., candidates (winners and losers) competing in general, primary and runoff elections. Also, more sophisticated error detection algorithms -expected to lower the error rate from 6% to less than 2% -are employed. The ICPSR has agreed to release a new version of Part I of the Election Returns data set adding both an adjusted name variable and a dummy variable that identifies those observations for which the revised name differs from the original. To enhance the value of this data set to scholars, a companion data set reporting the values of numerous state-level variables for - is also created; it includes institutional characteristics of legislatures, election returns, and other political, socio-economic and demographic characteristics of states. Several election and state politics scholars have already expressed interest in doing research using the enhanced State Legislative Election Returns data set. Indeed, when this data set is successfully cleaned, it will permit students of state legislative elections to conduct research on a diverse range of topics, such the consequences of redistricting, partisan realignment in the South, the behavior and impact of minor party candidates, the determinants of electoral success of incumbents over the course of their careers, and the linkage between elections and the public policy choices of politicians. This project promises to enhance substantially our understanding of the topic and produce a dataset of value to numerous other scholars doc17776 none Austin Field and simulation studies will be used to determine where upwelled water originates, i.e. solely from the bottom boundary layer (BBL) or from a thicker region of the lower layer fluid, and where the displaced surface water goes, e.g. offshore in the the surface layer or, through subduction, to intermediate layers. Five dye studies, using fluorescene and rhodamine-WT, are proposed for the upwelling region over the Oregon shelf. Releases will occur in three different locations - beneath and inshore of the upwelling jet, in the BBL beneath the jet where onshore movement is expected, and inshore of the jet, just beneath the mixed layer but still in the Ekman layer, where offshore movement and possible subduction is expected. Dye will be tracked for 72 hours. The background environment will be defined by GLOBEC cruises, at least during the first field year. Three releases from the R V Elakha will be traced during the first year. The second year will involve two larger releases from the R V Wecoma. A version of the Princeton Ocean Model, configured for the region, will be run for comparison. Particle tracing techniques will be used to model the initial, small-scale dispersion. Both idealized situations and realistic modeling will be attempted. A 2-D ocean-going model will be used, in conjunction with buoyed GPS drifters, to track the subsurface dye patch after release. The results of the study will be a set of Lagrangian observations of cross-shelf transport pathways during upwelling. These will lead to improved understanding of circulation and mixing doc17777 none CD8 cytotoxic T-lymphocytes (CTL) recognize and kill targets that express antigenic peptides in the context of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I molecules. As such, CTL are crucially involved in the generation of adaptive immunity against viruses and tumors. Natural killer (NK) cells play an active role in innate immunity by detecting and killing virally-infected or tumor cells that have down-regulated their surface MHC class I molecules thereby escaping surveillance by the adaptive immune system. Growing evidence suggests that some immune responses are mediated by CTL expressing NK-associated molecules (CD8 NK T-cells). The biology and physiological significance of the complexity and heterogeneity of NK-associated molecules and their expression by different effectors (e.g. CTL) is unclear. Since it is now well established in several species, including frogs, that certain heat shock proteins (e.g. gp96 or hsp70) elicit both adaptive CD8 T-cell mediated responses against the antigenic peptides they chaperone, and innate immune responses, it will be of significance to explore, for the first time, the extent to which this putative ancestral system of hsp-generated immunity may involve CTL that express NK-associated molecules. In addition, an unequivocal characterization of NK T-cells in an amphibian that occupies a pivotal position in the evolution of vertebrates would support the hypothesis that CD8 NK T-cells represent an important evolutionary step that bridges the innate and adaptive immune systems. This finding would also attest of the importance of this cell type in immunity of mammals. Finally, a better knowledge of cell-mediated cytotoxicity in Xenopus may have crucial implication with respect to understanding putative defects in the immune defense systems used against those viral pathogens that are causing world-wide declines of amphibian populations. The overall goal of this project is to take advantage of our Xenopus model to assess, from an evolutionary perspective, the role of CD8 NK T cells, both in vitro and in vivo, in innate and adaptive immune responses to tumor, viral, and minor histocompatibility antigens as well as to explore the idea that T-cells co-expressing CD8 and NK markers (CD8 NK T-cells) are phylogenetically early mediators of cellular immunity. Natural killer and cytotoxic T-lymphocytes are two important types of immune cells involved in defense against virus infections and tumor. Recent studies suggest the existence of a novel cell type with intermediate characteristics. The goal of the research program is to use the frog Xenopus rather than mice as a model system to better understand the role of this new type of immune cell in immune defense against cancer and virus infections from an evolutionary perspective doc17774 none Combining their expertise in calcification, satellite algorithms, sediment trap interpretation, water column chemistry, sediment geochemistry and global modeling, five principal investigators propose a multidisciplinary approach aimed at improving the uncertainties in the rates of CaCO3 cycling in the ocean. To achieve this goal, the PIs plan to address the following four objectives on both a regional and a global scale: (1) improve estimates of the standing stock and calcification rates of surface ocean particulate inorganic carbon; (2) improve estimates of surface CaCO3 export; (3) improve estimates of shallow (100- m) dissolution rates; and (4) improve estimates of deep ( m) dissolution rates. Results from this study will be basin-scale and global carbonate budgets to improve our understanding of carbonate production, export and shallow deep water dissolution in the marine environment doc17779 none Tandon This project will compute the diapycnal fluxes due to surface mixed-layer processes in the Southern Ocean. The resulting fluxes are important inputs needed for such applications as the estimation of the three-dimensional circulation of the Southern ocean using inverse box models and hydrographic data. The approach that will be used is to force a mixed-layer model with surface flux fields with high temporal resolution, obtained from meteorological analysis products. This model will be used to determine mixed-layer buoyancy, depth and entrainment rates. These properties, when combined with buoyancy gradients determined from hydrographic data, can be used to determine the diapycnal flux across the base of the mixed layer associated with deepening and small-scale mixing. The diapycnal flux associated with stirring by mesoscale eddies will also be estimated and a net diapycnal flux determined. At present, there is significant uncertainty about the size of upper-ocean diapycnal fluxes in the Southern Ocean. It is anticipated that more robust estimates of these fluxes and their variability will enable investigators to gain a much clearer picture of the lateral and overturning circulation in the Southern Ocean from data collected during the World Ocean Circulation Experiment doc17780 none The Carnegie-Rochester Conference on Public Policy is designed to foster research and discussion of major policy issues by economists from academia and various policy making organizations. Economists in universities are often unfamiliar with the constraining effect of institutional arrangements in the shaping of policy issues whereas economists in government are often less aware of current research developments and their implications. The principal objectives of the conference series are (i) to stimulate policy relevance in theoretical and empirical research in economic science, (ii) to encourage interchange of scientific ideas among analysts with different approaches, and (iii) to generate greater understanding by academic economists of practitioners environments. The conferences are held semi-annually at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Rochester. About 50 participants plus faculty and graduate students from the host institution are invited to each conference. Participants from U.S. and foreign central banks and U.S. and international agencies attend regularly, and special care is taken to involve promising young scholars. The papers and formal discussions are edited and published so as to broaden the impact of the conference doc17781 none William B. Smith American Statistical Association Digital Government: Improving Statistical Literacy Through FedStats This grant will support a planning process to develop concepts for research in user interfaces and forms of on-line learning and analysis to improve statistical literacy for the citizen. The proposer will work with an existing group of collaborating Federal statistical agencies, know as FedStats. FedStats has an award-winning web site, and collaborates with several Digital Government grantees; they are the appropriate agencies to engage in this work doc17782 none This proposal plans to extend the theory of how people make economic decisions in two ways. The first project focuses on the preference for variety, which is usually ignored. We plan to study this preference by investigating the way in which preferences depend on the underlying characteristic of the goods. We will devise a choice structure from which characteristics are derived as subjective elements in the representation of individual choices. This will allow empirical testing and estimation of the theory. We also plan to identify the class of preferences over goods that can be generated by preferences over characteristics that satisfy conditions like concavity. Such class is larger than the set of neoclassical utilities, but still a restricted set. The second project further develops the theory of preference for flexibility and commitment, and will model unforeseen actions. In this way, we will try to explain things such as multiple temptations, compromise and guilt. The fact that some actions are unforeseen is a natural extension of the dual idea that events are unforeseen. This second project will provide a complete analysis of a crucial and so far relatively unexplored source of uncertainty doc17783 none Recent scholarship has identified a set of social and economic conditions that led to the creation of segregation and of a legally-defined racial order in the United States and South Africa. Yet similar circumstances and needs did not result in comparable institutional and social arrangements in Latin American countries with a substantial population of African descent. Why? That is the central question that this research project seeks to answer. Building upon recent historiography on Atlantic slavery and using Cuba as a test case, this study seeks to identify some of the conditions that prevented the creation of segregation in Spanish America. The researcher suggests that the legal, institutional, and ultimately cultural settings in which slave regimes developed are indeed crucial to understand post-emancipation race relations. These settings established the ideological and cultural boundaries of what would later be politically possible. This research attempts to identify the opportunities for claims making that colonial legislation and institutions created for slaves during the long colonial period. Traditional Iberian law, represented mainly by the 13th-century code Las Siete Partidas, conferred a limited legal personality to slaves, as illustrated by several slave rights : to marry even against the will of the master, to seek judicial protection in case of abuse and mistreatment, and to access manumission. These opportunities for claims making could have contributed to the creation of a political culture of inclusion and indeed to what has been described as the integration of the Africans and their descendants into colonial society. In turn, a political culture of inclusion and integration would facilitate the emergence of cross-racial forms of mobilization such as the nationalist coalitions that fought for independence in Cuba and elsewhere in Spanish America. To test these hypotheses, the principal investigator will use archival resources that contain local regulations, court decisions, cannon laws, pastoral letters and church documents doc17784 none OpenGeneX will provide a toolkit of capabilities for gene expression data management and analysis in an extensible system. The work will focus on core capabilities, such as addition of links to the database schema and an object-layer application programming interface and a data upload tool for automated loading into the database. In order to support uniform, efficient data analysis, a framework for incorporating new methods and defining protocols will be developed. The analysis protocol manager will be designed to permit storing and tracking of analysis procedures and validated and tested in a community-wide effort. A variety of analysis tools, including data preprocessing and normalization as well as statistical validation clustering methods will be developed. A prototype of peer-to-peer database connectivity will be created to test for supporting diverse gene expression resources in a cost-effective manner. The project is open source, so that other freely available software can be incorporated, rather than redesigned doc17738 none Low-level jets (LLJs) are currents of relatively strong winds found in the lower atmosphere between approximately 300 and meters above the earth s surface. LLJs are particularly frequent in the central United States and strongly influence the precipitation and severe storm climatology of this region. Southerly LLJs transport moisture and sensible heat northward from the Gulf of Mexico and help destabilize the lower atmosphere which leads to the formation of clouds and precipitation. Recent research by the principal investigators suggested that the frequency of LLJs is more variable, and that the character (i.e., the spatial pattern, orientation, height, and depth) of LLJs is more complex, than previously portrayed. These variations have important consequences for the frequency, timing and location of precipitation in the Great Plains and Midwest. This research project will specify the degree of variability in the frequency and character of LLJs, improve conceptual models of the structure and evolution of LLJs, and evaluate current theories regarding the linkages between LLJs and synoptic-scale weather disturbances, specifically mid-latitude cyclones and upper-level wind maxima. Climatological and case study methodologies will be used to 1) classify jet events that occurred during - according to their airflow configuration, 2) relate variations in the frequency of the different jet types to large-scale circulation anomalies, 3) explore the persistence, evolution, and vertical structure of LLJs with different spatial configurations, 4) better define the linkage between LLJs and upper-level jets and 5) investigate the relationship between LLJs and airstreams within mid-latitude cyclones. Three data sets will be used. These are the National Weather Service rawinsonde observations, observations from the NOAA Profiler Network, and the NCAR NCEP reanalysis data. This research project is one of very few large-scale, multi-event climatological analyses of LLJs and is the only study to explicitly investigate the variability of LLJs at multiple time scales. The study will contribute to both applied and basic science, and will lead to a better understanding of precipitation variability in the Great Plains and Midwest of the United States. A better understanding of the linkages between LLJs and anomalous large-scale circulation patterns has significance for assessing possible changes in the frequency and character of LLJs and associated precipitation in a perturbed climate. The improved conceptual models of the structure of LLJs will aid in the interpretation of the output from numerical weather prediction models and will assist with short-range weather forecasting. The findings of this climatological study will also establish a much-needed baseline for future mechanistic studies and modeling efforts. Additionally, the results of the study will help validate, or disprove, our current understanding of the linkages between LLJs and upper-level jets, and the relationship between LLJs and airstreams within mid-latitude cyclones. Educational benefits of the project include the training of graduate students, involvement of under-represented undergraduate students in the research process, and development of improved teaching modules on LLJs and mid-latitude cyclones doc17759 none This project will consider the mechanisms of denitrification - the chemical reduction of dissolved nutrient NO3- largely to inert N2 gas- in the polar oceans and specifically the Bering Sea. Denitrification in the ocean, the loss of nutrient N essential for biological processes, is conventionally thought to take place only in conditions of relative dissolved oxygen deficiency ( [O2] 5-10mM). The northern Polar ocean shows significant nitrate depletion relative to phosphate despite the concentration of oxygen rarely falling below 15uM throughout much of the region. It has been known for many years that the Bering Sea in particular exhibits a sizeable nitrate deficit, but whether this arises in the water column or in the sediments, or perhaps is even advected in from low-latitude oxygen minimum zones in the Pacific remains unclear. Isotopic measurements of nitrate will be used to assess the relative role of sedimentary vs. water column denitrification based on observed distinct isotopic signatures accompanying these two processes. Using a recently developed isotopic analytical method, the d 18O of oceanic nitrate will also be developed as a tracer to complement the interpretation of d 15N differences to study these aspects of the oceanic nitrogen cycle. A further line of enquiry of the study is to consider the proposition that the modern polar Pacific ocean operates as an analogue of the glacial Southern Ocean, a key unknown in interpreting Holocene variations in atmospheric CO2 and thus broadening our understanding of geologically recent climate change doc17655 none Recently, it has been suggested that oxygen transport into sediments via the roots and rhizomes of seagrasses might resolve the observed discrepancy between the amount of carbonate dissolved and the amount of acid produced from remineralization of sediment organic matter. Combining field observations, laboratory experiments and modeling analysis, a PI from Old Dominion University will team up with a PI from San Jose State University to quantify the influence of seagrass productivity on carbon flux and carbonate dissolution in shallow waters of Lee Stocking Island, Bahamas, a tropical system. The PIs will compare the sediment and porewater composition recovered from a variety of sample types (bare ooid sands to densely vegetates regions with 70% seagrass cover) to establish the relationship between carbonate dissolution in sediments and seagrass density. Other studies to be carried out include incubation experiments of individual seagrass shoots to determine the amount of O2 generated by the roots and rhizomes under variable light and porewater O2 conditions. Additionally, whole sediment core incubation experiments will determine the rate of sediment organic matter degradation and carbonate dissolution. Lastly, Drs. Burdige and Zimmerman plan to compare their data with those obtained via a model of diagenetic processes in carbonate sediments. Results from this study will not only provide basic information on ecological and biogeochemical processes in tropical systems, but will help constrain budgets for carbonate cycling in shallow water carbonate bank environments doc17788 none The investigator and his colleagues organize the third Conference on Foundations of Computational Mathematics at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), University of Minnesota on 5-14 August . Deepening the understanding of the mathematical processes that underlie fast computation and computer simulation is the principal goal of the meeting. The mathematical content covers fields of research at the interface of engineering, computer science, and pure mathematics, but focused on computation. The program includes 18 3-day workshops and 18 plenary speakers. The plenary talks and workshops span subjects of vital interest to the nation s infrastructure, economy, and defense. The project supports participation by postdocs, graduate students, junior participants, women and minorities as well as plenary and semi-plenary speakers and workshop organizers. Large-scale computation and the implementation of mathematical models for complex physical and societal phenomena are of fundamental importance to the nation s economy. Computation is also the backbone of the sciences supporting the nation s defense. Large-scale computation is the engine of numerical models for complex physical phenomena occurring at many scales. Fast computation and processing of the ever-increasing data sets obtained from various sensors is critical to the new military. The purpose of this major meeting, held only every three years, is to further the understanding of the deep relationships between mathematical theory: analysis, topology, geometry and algebra, and computational processes as they are evolving in tandem with the modern computer. The topics to be addressed include large scale computation and high performance computing as occurs in atmospheric and groundwater modeling, computer aided design and animation, data, image and signal processing, modeling network traffic, quantum computing, learning theory, optimization and control. Sustaining the nation s advantage in these vital areas relies on understanding the foundations of computational science. The meeting involves 350-500 researchers in 18 workshops over a 10-day period, with special plenary sessions attended by everyone. A large contingent of graduate students and other young scientists are participating, and the program is designed to promote intensive interaction among the participants. Several panels are devoted to identifying the most promising directions for future research. Published proceedings, web-based materials, and the conference sessions themselves serve as launching pads for focus and special interest groups for future interactions in a range of subjects at the interface of mathematics and computation doc17789 none Box models of the ocean-atmosphere carbon system have suggested that atmospheric CO2 is sensitive to perturbation of the high latitude surface ocean properties and quite insensitive to low latitude perturbations. In contrast, ocean general circulation and carbon cycle models show a greater role for the ocean s warm surface waters and a weaker response to changes in high latitude biological export efficiency. For this reason, a PI from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposes to test the hypothesis that these discrepancies can be attributed to the role of the ventilated thermocline and mode waters using a hierarchy of numerical ocean circulation and biogeochemistry models. In addition, the PI plans to carry out detailed simulations of the interannual variability of the thermocline, mode waters and the Southern Ocean intermediate waters and their ventilation to examine the interannual and decadal variability of air-sea gas fluxes and atmospheric CO2 doc17790 none The principal objective of this research is to advance understanding of the significance of early childhood nutrition for education and health and for economic productivity of adults in developing countries. Previous empirical studies on these important topics are limited because they do not have data that follows individuals from infancy and early childhood to adulthood and because they do not deal persuasively with estimation problems that arise because nutrition reflects past behaviors and because some characteristics, such as innate healthiness and ability, are not observed. This study is examining rich data collected by the Nutrition Institute for Central America and Panama (INCAP) in rural Guatemala to investigate the impact of childhood nutrition for individuals who are 25-40 years old when data are collected in 3, but who were 0-7 years old during the initial longitudinal data collection in - . These special data and appropriate estimation techniques are used to test three groups of hypotheses: (1) Controlling for relevant community, household, parental, and individual characteristics, better nutritional status in young children is causally and positively associated with: (i) school achievement and intellectual functioning; (ii) adult migration, health, and labor productivity; and (iii) spouse characteristics and assets acquired through marriage. (2) Through its effects on accumulated physical and intellectual capital, better nutrition during early childhood is causally and positively related to: (i) higher occupational mobility; (ii) higher productivity in agricultural and non-agricultural employment; (iii) greater consumption; and (iv) higher levels of material well being. (3) The economic rate of return to resources used to improve childhood nutrition, incorporating costs in addition to impacts and their respective time patterns, is high in such a context. The overall significance of the project is very substantial. Malnutrition is pervasive in developing countries, currently affecting about a billion people and is thought of have major negative effects on education, health and economic productivities. But there have been no previous economic analysis of effects of early childhood nutrition on adult education, health and economic productivities using data that follow individuals from early childhood into adulthood. Therefore the project estimates are very informative about the magnitudes of effects of early childhood nutrition and of a range of health and educational policies on adult health, education and productivity. They, thus, strengthen the knowledge basis for policy formulation that might improve significantly the welfare and the productivity of many of the poorest people in developing countries doc17791 none The ocean is second only to the atmosphere as a sink for anthropogenic CO2. Over the last decade, our ability to quantify the oceanic sink using observations has dramatically increased. The improvement derives from two major factors. The first is the JGOFS WOCE OACES global ocean carbon survey, which produced the first high-quality, global-scale inorganic carbon data set. The second is the continuing development of improved techniques to estimate anthropogenic carbon from new measurements. Still, significant uncertainties remain regarding estimation of the spatial distribution of anthropogenic CO2 uptake and storage in the sea. This uncertainty derives from the fact that the task of unambiguously discerning the natural and anthropogenic CO2 signals is far from trivial. The estimates require assumptions that are difficult to verify and whose uncertainties are hard to estimate. Better quantification of the spatial storage pattern and the associated uncertainties is required to assess the value of oceanic data constraints on the global carbon budget and ocean model evaluations, such as those undertaken by the Ocean Carbon-cycle Model Intercomparison Project (OCMIP). On this project, a team of researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Washington, and Princeton University will perform global analysis of observation-based estimates of the oceanic storage of anthropogenic carbon dioxide. Their goal is to assess a range of ocean data to provide a well-constrained estimate of the oceanic anthropogenic CO2 distribution. Particular emphasis will be placed on the estimation of uncertainties and differences between the several approaches. This work would depend upon and extend results from recently completed and ongoing research that these investigators have been involved in as part of the Synthesis and Modeling Project of the U.S. Joint Global Ocean Flux Study doc17774 none Combining their expertise in calcification, satellite algorithms, sediment trap interpretation, water column chemistry, sediment geochemistry and global modeling, five principal investigators propose a multidisciplinary approach aimed at improving the uncertainties in the rates of CaCO3 cycling in the ocean. To achieve this goal, the PIs plan to address the following four objectives on both a regional and a global scale: (1) improve estimates of the standing stock and calcification rates of surface ocean particulate inorganic carbon; (2) improve estimates of surface CaCO3 export; (3) improve estimates of shallow (100- m) dissolution rates; and (4) improve estimates of deep ( m) dissolution rates. Results from this study will be basin-scale and global carbonate budgets to improve our understanding of carbonate production, export and shallow deep water dissolution in the marine environment doc17793 none The research on arrest discretion has rarely recognized the marked influence of officers concerns outside their police identity, such as overtime need, personal commitments, and the aversiveness of arrest-processing itself. Moreover, the literature on police work s impact on the officer s private life has seldom explored the converse effect of off-duty roles interfering with official duties. To address this gap, an anonymous survey of 300 New York Police Department patrol officers will examine such issues as: What personal concerns give rise to arrest-related needs for overtime money, schedule-control, or avoidance of arrest-processing difficult? How are these needs related to various arrest-seeking and arrest-avoiding behaviors? To what extent are on-site arrest decisions predicted by prior arrest preference, patrol style, and method of intervention? When do adaptive responses develop? What arrest-related attitudes accompany adaptive behaviors? How are the responses related to officer tour, gender and other traits? Finally, how are adaptive arrest behaviors influenced by management? The study s objectives are to describe and quantify adaptive arrest behavior, and to explore ways both to minimize the potential harms of self-serving arrest motives and reduce the conflict between officers personal and professional commitments doc17794 none The focus of this research is a better understanding the mechanisms of the preservation of high molecular weight (~ 106 D) nitrogen rich macromolecular proteinaceous material in marine sediments and in the water column. Some of these molecules persist in sediments that are thousands of years old. Proteins, as energy rich biochemical substrates, are normally rapidly degraded in the environment by a range of high affinity bacterial proteases and enzyme systems, so the persistence of protein-like macromolecules for long periods of time in substrate (N) poor sediments remains inadequately explained. Preservation through selective sorptive protection in inaccessible sediment mesopores, structural modification such as glucosylation, condensation or complexation, aggregation and encapsulation in biochemically resistant materials such as membrane or cell wall components are some of the suggested mechanisms. Possibly all of these may operate to some extent. This study sets out to investigate range of non-covalent interactions entered into by polypeptides on mineral surfaces and or encapsulation of representative proteins into refractive biopolymers as potential important controlling factors resulting in preservation of such molecules. A series of laboratory manipulation experiments and protein characterization techniques, using a wide range of analytical tools, and applied to sedimentary and particulate associated organic matter will be used to examine support for these preservation mechanisms. The rates of turnover of carbon compounds in the shallow and deep seas is of importance to our understanding of the ocean s carbon cycle doc17795 none Proposal - The goal of this proposal is to develop and fabricate an acoustic remote sensing and mapping tool dedicated to studying hydrothermal flow at the seafloor. The new system will be deployable on a variety of ROVs, deep towed platforms, and stationary seafloor observatory networks for the study and detection of high and low temperature hydrothermal flow regimes. The sensor will implement two new acoustic methods that will enable detection and quantitative mapping of diffuse hydrothermal flow at the seafloor using acoustic scintillation thermography (AST) and volumetric studies of plume particle distributions and flow above the seafloor. These methods have been demonstrated using a commercial sonar system mounted on the ROV Jason during three previous experiments. The proposed sensor will improve upon the operational and technical limitations of the commercial system and enable long time scale experiments and larger-scale surveys using a variety of platforms. In addition, the sensor proposed will enable high quality scientific data collection and analysis thus providing a flexible test bed for new acoustic methods and applications of remote sensing to hydrothermal flow. The system will be compatible with available and proposed seafloor observatories, enabling interactive operation via the Internet. This proposal is the product of an ongoing collaboration between groups at Rutgers (Rona et al.) and the Applied Physics Laboratory of the University of Washington (APL-UW, Jones et al.) and arises from our experience in using commercial sonars for hydrothermal observations. The proposed instrumentation development is central to the goal of the PIs to observe focused and diffuse hydrothermal flow over long time periods. Design, fabrication, and local testing will be the responsibility of APL-UW whereas, the Rutgers group will contribute to the process of developing system specifications from scientific measurement requirements and will conduct the field tests, including analysis of test data. The new remote sensing tool will enable measurements of plume flow variability at long time scales (of order 1 year). Such scales are important in studies on the response of hydrothermal flow regimes to tidal forcing as well as to volcanic and tectonic events. The sensor will enable the implementation of new acoustic detection and mapping techniques for characterizing diffuse flow over large regions (10s of km2) of interest. It is proposed that this instrument will also enable studies of net heat flux from hydrothermal systems and its relation to geophysical, oceanographic, and biological processes doc17796 none This project will determine subsurface reservoir ages of waters around New Zealand by dating planktonic and benthic foraminifers associated with tephras in marine cores. The study will focus on dating samples associated with the Kawakawa tephra (ca 22,590 14C yr). The Kawakawa ash is easily identified and is widely distributed which will allow dating of intermediate and deep waters along the tephra isochron. Trace element measurements on foraminifer shells and stable carbon isotope measurements will also be done as a cross check on circulation changes derived from the 14C age distribution doc17797 none This research will examine whether voir dire results in a more conviction prone jury in cases where juveniles are tried in adult courts. Juveniles who are transferred to adult court have the same rights as adult criminal defendants, but are the rights of juvenile offenders to a representative and impartial jury abrogated when they are transferred to adult court? This research will use four studies to address the following questions: Do judges ask veniremembers questions about the possible penalty during voir dire in youthful offender cases and what effect do these questions have on juror decisions? Are juvenile waiver attitudes correlated with demographic variables such that minority group members are likely to be excluded from jury service because of their anti-waiver attitudes? Does the inclusion of jurors with anti-waiver attitudes increase the ability of a jury to evaluate the quality of the evidence presented? Finally, does exposure to voir dire questions in juvenile offender cases result in a more conviction-prone jury? To answer these questions, the principal investigator will collect and content analyze transcripts from a sample of cases in which juveniles were tried in adult courts. This initial exploration will allow the researchers to characterize the typical voir dire that occurs in these cases. In Study 2, the researchers will examine whether particular attitudes and demographic characteristics are correlated with anti-juvenile waiver attitudes. In Study 3, a jury simulation will be conducted in which half of the juries include jurors with anti-waiver attitudes and half do not, varying the strength of the evidence. To investigate whether exposure to juvenile qualification produces a more conviction prone jury, the researchers will expose some jurors to a simulated voir dire in a juvenile offender case and other jurors to a voir dire that lacks questions about juvenile waiver attitudes in Study 4. The results of these four studies will provide information about the voir dire process in juvenile waiver cases doc17798 none P.I. Luther This project proposes to purchase an in situ electrochemical analyzer (ISEA) that can be deployed at any ocean depth on landers, moorings and CTD type profilers for remote aquatic experiments in waters and porewaters. With this instrument, many redox species can be determined simultaneously by voltammetry at a gold-amalgam solid-state electrode during one potential scan. These species include dissolved oxygen, sulfide, thiosulfate, polysulfides, iodide, Fe(II), Mn(II), and FeS. Oxygen can be measured with high precision and sensitivity as can total dissolved sulfide. No chemical manipulations are necessary for measurement and up to four working electrodes can be mounted at different depths and locations to obtain chemical information in the water column. This analyzer is ideal for monitoring important redox regimes such as the development of seasonal anoxia in nearshore and shelf environments, the changes in sulfur chemistry at hydrothermal vents and the profiles of redox species in sediments, stagnant bays, estuaries and basins. In a previous submission, these areas of study were targeted for making measurements but the reviewers indicated that this was too ambitious and only one should be selected for further work. In this proposal, the focus is on hydrothermal vent research. A major concern at vents is; what are the changes in vent and diffuse flow chemistry that affect the way organisms colonize different sites? Recent work has shown that different biological organisms reside in different chemical niches. Thus, in situ sensors that can measure a variety of redox species would be ideal for improving our understanding of biogeochemical studies of water chemistry on temporal and spatial scales in these environments. A prototype in situ electrochemical analyzer has been successfully used on the DSV Alvin and is now commercially available from Analytical Instrument Systems, Inc. This system was designed to use DC power from DSV Alvin with electrodes deployed at given vent locations by the submarine s manipulators controlled by an operator in the submersible. The next step in development of this technology is to add remote or automatic capability to the system to monitor temporal changes in a variety of systems. Although the ISEA is a single system, it will have four Au Hg working electrodes with four temperature and pH sensors integrated with each of the working electrodes. In essence, the ISEA is four separate instrument packages for voltammetry, temperature and pH in one analyzer, which permits analysis of four separate locations depths. As part of this proposal the gold-amalgam (Au Hg) electrodes will be tested for long-term deployment. The testing will include long-term deployment in estuarine waters at the University of Delaware s harbor and at hydrothermal vent waters doc17799 none This dissertation research will examine the local understanding of human rights within the context of the recently concluded Disappearances Commission in Sri Lanka. The Co-principal investigator will provide an ethnographic analysis of the concept of human rights as understood, interpreted, used, and practiced at the grass roots level. Moreover, this research examines the local and national level discourses on human rights in Sri Lanka to provide an understanding of the Commission as a site of convergence of these different perspectives. Through in-depth interviews, observations, and recording of narratives of those who were involved in the Disappearances Commission in southern Sri Lanka, this research will study the conceptualization of human rights within the local context. The national discourse on human rights vis-a-vis the Commission will be analyzed through a careful investigation of archival sources. This will be juxtaposed against the local discourse to provide a scientific understanding of the Commission. This research contributes towards an understanding of contemporary Sri Lanka and provides an ethnographic understanding of human rights and commissions which have become an integral part of transnational legal processes doc17619 none What factors best explain the legal decisions of U.S. Supreme Court justices? To what extent do the policy preferences of justices outweigh purely formal, legal concerns when deciding cases? How many policy dimensions structure the preferences of justices in the post-war era? Is the current Court more conservative than the Vinson and early Warren courts? Have the decisions of lower courts become more liberal over time? In what manner have the policy outputs of the Court changed over time? These are but a handful of the substantive questions the researchers will answer using statistical models customized to the peculiarities of the U.S. Supreme Court. More specifically, using a Bayesian inferential approach, the principal investigators develop variants of item response models that: 1) are suitable for multidimensional choice situations with small numbers of subjects; 2) explicitly model dynamics in ideal points and case-parameters; and 3) can be used to explain voting behavior with covariates (case facts, the court of origin, the arguments raised, the issues considered, etc.) while simultaneously controlling for and measuring policy preferences. To model the dynamics of ideal points and case parameters, the principal investigators use the dynamic linear model (DLM) machinery within the context of item response modeling. One of the goals of this proposal is to integrate these modeling strategies so that multidimensional models can be fit to longitudinal data in a computationally efficient manner. The second methodological goal of this proposal is to build and fit models that jointly measure policy preferences and account for the effects of measured covariates on voting decisions. This project lies at the intersection of several recent growth areas in social statistics: binary time-series and time-series cross-sectional data analysis, mixture modeling, hierarchical Bayesian modeling, and latent variable modeling. While the proposed class of models will be customized for work involving decision making on the U.S. Supreme Court, many of the proposed methods will be relevant to other applications in political science (such as behavior on lower courts, committee decision making, and legislative behavior) and other areas of social statistics (such as educational statistics, psychometrics, and econometrics doc17801 none Economic theory suggests that an individual s charitable giving would be the same under appropriately paired rebate and match subsidy rates. For example, a 20 percent rebate subsidy and a 25 percent match subsidy both result in an effective price of $0.80 to give $1 to a charity. With equal prices of giving, and assuming other determinants of giving are the same, the level of giving should not differ with the subsidy type. Contrary to theory, results from research conducted in a laboratory setting indicate that giving differs significantly across the two types of subsidies. This project is a field experiment examining subsidized giving to four diverse nonprofit institutions designed to test the validity of the laboratory results. The lab experiment has a number of weaknesses that can best be overcome with a field study. In a laboratory setting, a subject plays with money provided by the experimenter; i.e. house money. When playing with house money subjects may make choices that are different from those they would make when allocating their own money. In the field study, subjects will be making decisions affecting their own money and choices made should be a more accurate measure of their true preference. The subject pool available for lab experiments is highly constrained -- with respect to age, income, marital status, and experience -- relative to the general population. A field study permits a more representative sample of potential donors and more statistically reliable results. The importance of this research is evidenced both by the frequent proposals to reform the United States federal personal income tax, and by the number of matching gift programs operated by corporations in both the United States and Canada. Two tax reform proposals that have received attention are a flat-rate income tax and a consumption tax; both proposals include the elimination of many, if not all, currently allowed deductions. The current Bush reform involves a reduction in marginal tax rates at higher income levels, reducing the effective subsidy to charitable giving. Any of these reforms is likely to leave such organizations with lower levels of funding. Assuming public sentiment favors the continued support of nonprofit and charitable organizations, alternative methods of subsidizing charitable giving should be explored. In addition, if these results are confirmed, they suggest that replacing the current system of tax rebate with an equivalently-costly matching subsidy system could increase contributions to charitable organizations. The impact of corporate matching gifts programs on giving to nonprofits and charitable organizations also has not been carefully examined. This is especially true in light of the fact that matching gift programs are becoming increasingly common features of corporate philanthropy doc17802 none Chin This project introduces a novel approach to representing boundary conditions in ocean models. The idea is, absent the ability to follow small-scale physical processes in detail, to represent the influence of these small-scale processes on the larger-scale dynamics resolved by the model by a stochastic process. The project will try several different auto-regressive representations of the boundary conditions and examine how the large-scale structure of the flow reacts to these. The model results will be compared with data from observations near the Florida Current made with HF radar. Using inverse techniques, based on a Markov random field approach, the values of parameters in the stochastic models of boundary conditions will be estimated. The sensitivity of these inversions will also be determined. In larger domains, dynamically similar to the North Atlantic, the question of whether stochastic boundary conditions along the eastern boundary can lead to internal jets (beta plumes) will be studied. Initially, the numerical circulation model will be a reduced-gravity, quasigeostrophic model in idealized geometries. The most effective approaches to stochastic boundary conditions will then be transferred to a primitive-equation OGCM doc17803 none This research project will examine the recursive relationships between the socio-economic forces producing rural poverty and the cultural processes through which the poor and rural poverty are identified by diverse residents of rapidly gentrifying areas in the rural American Northwest. The research will also explore how people understand class and gender differences in the context of high in-migration and rapid development and change in areas of persistent rural poverty. The research project will be conducted over a three-year period and will use both quantitative and qualitative methods. It will investigate the patterns of white poverty and economic restructuring across non-metropolitan counties and rural census tracts in Washington, Idaho and Montana. Economically booming and more stagnant places characterized by either high levels of white poverty or inequality will be compared in order to probe the ways in which social and cultural tensions over rural restructuring and poverty are being worked out in the Northwest. Initially, a quantitative typology of non-metro counties will be constructed to characterize restructuring patterns. The specific mechanisms by which class difference is represented and reproduced will then be investigated using in-depth interviews and focus group techniques. The research will combine several elements of studies of rural poverty. First, it will engage the literatures on regional economic and demographic change processes. Second, it will describe the political economy of rural restructuring and link these analytic descriptions to the cultural dimensions of rural change. The theoretical goal is to extend political-economy research through the incorporation of cultural and ideological processes in order to build a richer understanding of how poverty and socio-cultural differences are co-produced. The research project makes empirical, theoretical and applied contributions. The research focuses on places where a large portion of those in poverty are white and so poverty cannot be racialized as a non-white issue. In these contexts, the project will examine how poverty is understood in the context of economic restructuring and migration in the Northwest. As the urban rural divide becomes increasingly more porous and contested as urbanites move to rural spaces, it becomes ever more important to understand the ways in which marginalized populations are defined. The project also extends a research agenda on the recursive relationships between political-economic restructuring and the socio-cultural construction of class difference. The geographically specific analyses of restructuring and poverty will contribute to the goal of bringing cultural and ideological analysis into creative tension with political-economy approaches, thereby incorporating cultural considerations and meanings into the politics and economics, which define rural poverty. Finally, this research will be informative to community members and policy makers as they work to address the problems of poverty and to create inclusive communities in the face of rapid change doc17804 none This award provides funding to the University of Central Florida, under the direction of Dr. Sudipta Seal, for the support of an international research collaboration entitled, U.S.-Australia Cooperative Research Development of Solgel Derived Monsized Oxide Nanoparticles. This three year collaboration between student and faculty researchers at the Advanced Materials Processing Analysis Center Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering at UCF and Materials Science and Engineering research groups at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia will help establish a joint international research program in nanotechnolgy research which is proving to be one of the most promising frontiers in scientific research and development doc17805 none The investigators will determine the energy distribution of test particles accelerated in various magnetic field reconnection geometries. This will be achieved by integrating the particle equations of motion in specified analytic and numerical solutions of the magnetohydrodynamic equations. From these detailed computations, scaling laws for solar energetic particle (SEP) events will be derived, and subsequently compared with observations from the High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (HESSI) satellite. The major goal of this effort is to develop a testable model capable of explaining how and why different reconnection configurations produce different acceleration regimes, ranging from prompt electron acceleration to gamma-ray energies to proton acceleration to GeV energies in large gradual flares. This work promises to provide critical new insight on to SEP events, which are a prominent component of Space Weather doc17806 none This research examines how established firms adapt to technological innovations, such as the Internet, as well as the performance implications of such innovations. The specific research questions are: How strongly do current innovative efforts, relative to past experience, influence a firm s speed of technology adoption, the comprehensiveness of its technological adoption, and the returns to innovation? How can later adopters, disadvantaged by past innovation experience, catch up by increasing their innovative efforts? Although there has been strong theoretical emphasis on dynamic capabilities as critical to the adaptability of organizations, most empirical research has viewed organizations as evolving along paths and within boundaries determined by past experience. This study adds the new dimension of emerging capabilities to that of past-accumulated experience as widely studied in the literature. Emerging capabilities capture how firms organize for innovation once the decision for adoption has been made. This research views innovation as a dynamic process evolving over time and assesses the degree to which firms can directly influence their innovation process versus the degree to which past experience (initial capabilities) determines the path and direction of innovation. The dynamic capabilities perspective is used to reveal how firm capabilities emerge, develop, and change over time, as well as how firms integrate and reconfigure internal and external competencies to respond to technological and environmental change. Interviews with e-business managers and reviews of archival data sources, such as press releases and trade journals, will shed light on firms adoption processes. Additionally, the project includes a large-scale survey of senior executives in charge of Internet activities e-business operations at more than 600 U.S. financial institutions. Although promising at the outset, many innovations never pay off but rather consume enormous resources. This study thus offers important new insights into the way in which firms create value through collaboration and or integration of existing with newly-developed capabilities, and through internal versus external innovation-related capability development. Moreover, ways in which later adopters manage to catch up during the innovation implementation process will be examined. This research analyzes firms various adaptation strategies and innovation outcomes in the context of the Internet. The study will assess the importance of Internet implementation decisions relative to prior experience and timing of adoption, proposing that how an innovation is implemented matters more than when it is adopted. The findings from this research will ultimately provide organizations with a better understanding of how to develop innovation-related capabilities that improve innovation performance, and how to avoid implementation strategies that reduce the likelihood of yielding benefits from innovation doc17807 none This award to Professor Frank Gomez of the California State University, Los Angeles, is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program in the Chemistry Division. A primary objective is to couple on-column reactions with affinity-based separations for the dual purposes of high-throughput synthesis and rapid analysis. In addition, capillary electrophoresis will be further developed to assess binding constants for substrate-protein and substrate-DNA interactions. New analytical techniques are needed for the study of disease and improve public health. The proposed studies will focus on developing these new techniques by examining model biological systems with the long-term goal of developing useful techniques to study diseases including cancer, Alzheimer s, and Parkinsons. In addition, the proposed research effort will provide undergraduate and minority students a solid background in chemistry by examining problems at the interface of chemistry and chemistry-related disciplines. The research projects planned for the participants are aimed at demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of CE and its importance as a new and exciting instrument in solving broad scientific problems doc17808 none Karen Hegtvedt Cathryn Johnson Emory University The investigators will conduct two experiments that provide a novel combination of the justice and legitimacy areas in group processes research. Generally, missing from the justice literature is the notion of justice as a collective process, albeit one dependent on individual perceptions. This research will augment current understanding of reactions to injustice in task groups by incorporating collective sources of legitimacy. It also will have implications for understanding issues of injustice in concrete instances such as wage disputes, environmental conflict, and organizational budget decisions. Specifically, the objective of this research is to address two general questions: 1) how does the legitimacy of an outcome distribution affect an individual s emotional and behavioral reactions to perceived injustice? and 2) how does the legitimacy of an allocator and his or her use of fair or unfair procedures affect an individual s emotional and behavioral responses to perceived injustice? Legitimacy takes two collective forms: authorization refers to support by individuals who occupy higher positions within a group than the focal person and endorsement refers to similar support from people of equal or lower status than the focal person. Hypotheses pertaining to the two questions above are derived from tenets of justice and legitimacy theories. To test the effects of legitimacy and other factors on perceptions of and reactions to injustice, two computerized experiments are created. Experiment One addresses the effects of legitimacy of the outcome distribution and group identification on perceptions of and reactions to an unjust (from the subject s point of view) outcome distribution. The design of Experiment One is a 2 x 2 x 2 factorial experiment that includes: authorization of outcome distribution (low high), endorsement of outcome distribution (low high), and group identity (salience of identity with peers salience of identity with authorities). The dependent variables are perceptions of the justness of the outcome distribution, emotional expressions, and cognitive and behavioral responses to perceptions of injustice. Experiment Two examines the effects of legitimacy of the allocator and procedural justice on reactions to an unjust outcome distribution. Experiment Two is also a 2 x 2 x 2 factorial experiment involving authorization of the allocator, endorsement of the allocator, and procedural justice (fair unfair procedures). Computer programs will be developed for each experiment to create independent variable manipulations. Approximately 160 subjects are required for each experiment (n=20 subjects in each cell doc17809 none This dissertation research examines the implications of infrastructure privatization from a historical perspective. It investigates an institutional change that took place in eighteenth century England, in which responsibility for providing road investment was transferred from local units of government to private organizations known as turnpike trusts. The trustees of these organizations funded road improvements by levying a regulated schedule of tolls on the users of the road, while their counterparts in local government funded improvements with local taxes. The first part of the dissertation will determine whether this form of privatization increased the level of road expenditure in eighteenth century England. It will use the funds provided by this grant to collect data on the investment behavior of turnpike trusts and local governments. Then it will use this data to compare the expenditure levels of local government with the corresponding turnpike trust after a privatization occurs. The dissertation research also develops and tests a theory that explains why privatization increased the level of infrastructure investment in the context of eighteenth century England. It emphasizes the externalities created by inter-jurisdictional traffic and suggests that these externalities limited investment under the decentralized system. It then argues that the levying of tolls resulted in the internalization of the costs and benefits of road improvement and ultimately encouraged more investment. Besides focusing on externalities, the theory also emphasizes the transfer of control-rights to private actors with a concentrated interest in infrastructure improvement. It argues that landowners and industrialists lobbied for the right to establish turnpike trusts so that they could ensure that complimentary transportation investments were undertaken. The second part of the dissertation will estimate the contribution of transportation infrastructure investment to economic growth in England during the eighteenth century. Data on transportation costs will be collected for several different highways, which will contribute to an estimate of productivity growth in the road transportation sector. The project will then econometrically estimate the relationship between road investment and productivity growth in this sector. Next, it will broaden the analysis and show that there is a correlation between the formation of turnpike trusts and other local investments, including land improvements and the adoption of factories and steam engines. This will lend support to the hypothesis that there is a complimentary relationship between infrastructure investment and capital investment. Finally, the project will investigate the econometric relationship between transportation investment and growth in land rents and wages during the eighteenth century, providing yet another assessment of the economic value of these investments in the context of the British economy in this period doc17765 none This proposal request support to examine the relationship between climate, ocean circulation, and foraminiferal assemblages in Maastrichtian sediments recovered from the Blake Nose by documenting changes in foraminiferal faunas, geochemistry of foraminifers, magnetic susceptibility and sediment color across cyclic intervals. The data will be used to test the hypothesis that the local ecosystem is responding to orbital forcing doc17811 none MacCready Funds are provided for the development of two simplified models to be used in an investigation of the adjustment of an estuary to changes in river flow, wind forcing, and tidal forcing. The simplest model depends on two bulk parameters representing vertical and longitudinal stratification while the other is laterally and layer averaged. Further three-dimensional modeling will be performed with ECOM-si, a modified version of the Princeton Ocean Model, in simple topographic scenarios. The three-dimensional model will be verified using data from Willipa Bay and Budd Inlet. The output from the three-dimensional model will be compared to solutions from the more simplified models and used to verify the latter. Laboratory modeling will also be undertaken. The results of this research will be quickly transferred to students in the PI s courses. The PI has close collaborations with state environmental managers intends rapid technology transfer to practical applications, as well doc17812 none Ensminger & Henrich In all human societies, a wide range of social phenomena are governed by self-regulating institutions, or sets of norms that prescribe appropriate behaviors and proper sanctions for inappropriate behavior. Such norms influence an enormous range of human activity, from marriage patterns and sexual inequality to political processes and market exchange. Despite a fair amount of agreement that such institutions exist, extant theories struggle to explain the genesis and maintenance of pro-social norms (e.g., standards of fairness, or rules for punishing norm violators) that form the bedrock of social interaction. Both experimental and field data from across the social sciences indicate that neither assumptions of narrow economic self-interest nor evolutionary models based on kinship or reciprocity are sufficient to account for the observed patterns of human pro-sociality. To probe the diversity of social norms and preferences across the human spectrum, in the MacArthur Foundation invited twelve experienced field anthropologists to pioneer the use of experimental economic methods in small-scale societies. In this second phase of research, the researchers will explore the foundations of social norms by experimentally measuring individuals preferences tastes for altruism (or fairness), direct punishment (willingness to punish norm violators), and third party punishment (willingness of third-party observers to pay a price to punish unfairness) across 16 small-scale societies. These field sites include foragers, slash and burn horticulturalists, pastoral-nomads, small-scale agriculturalists, and urban wage laborers on most continents of the world. One of the advantages of running experiments in these contexts is that the social spectrum of subjects is broadened from those typically found in U.S. university laboratories. The overall objectives of this new research are to replicate the earlier work (including the finding that altruistic behavior increases with the level of market integration), to broaden the research by including nine new sites and new experiments, to tighten the data collection methods across sites, and to extend the research with new testable predictions. A core package of three games (the Dictator, Ultimatum with Strategy Method, and Third-Party Punishment Games) will be used at all 16 field sites. In addition, subsets of the group will pursue four supplemental studies to examine: 1) the relationship between social networks and trust, 2) framing effects created by manipulating the presentation of the games in the local culture, 3) the effect of the experimenter s knowledge of subjects decisions in double-blind games, and 4) the temporal, intra-individual replicability of game behavior, i.e. if the same game is repeated with the same subjects, do preferences change? One of the advantages of a large and diverse group of researchers is the variety of theoretical traditions and interests brought to the table. The group contains scholars who have done their major theoretical and empirical work in the fields of evolutionary theory, psychological anthropology, rational choice, new institutional economics, development, and network analysis. Previous experience has shown that this theoretical diversity inspires novel ideas, innovative empirical work, and theoretical development through the challenges that arise from the clash of paradigms. This project should contribute to theoretical work that explores the importance of social learning, institutions, cultural evolution, and culture-gene co-evolution on human behavior doc17813 none Encoded video is expected to account for a large portion of the traffic in the Internet of the future and next generation wireless networks. The video carried over future networks is expected to be (1) coded using heterogeneous encoding schemes, (2) coded at a range of quality levels, and (3) to a large extent scalable encoded (e.g., into several layers) to enable scalable multimedia services over highly heterogeneous networks. To date the traffic characteristics of these heterogeneous and scalable encoded videos are largely unexplored (only a few initial observations based on a small number of short video sequences have been made). Even less is known about the implications of these traffic characteristics for the network transport of heterogeneous and scalable encoded video. Therefore, the researcher proposes a comprehensive large scale study of the traffic characteristics and the network transport of heterogeneous and scalable encoded video. The researcher will investigate 1. the traffic characteristics (i.e., statistical properties) in conjunction with the video quality and the content features, and 2. the network capacity, i.e., the number of video streams that a given network can support (multiplexing performance) subject to given quality of service (QoS) constraints both for (a) non scalable video encoded at a range of quality levels using diffierent encoding schemes, and (b) scalable encoded video. These traffic and networking studies are traditionally based on traces of real video traffic. The existing video trace libraries, however, provide only frame size traces of a limited number of single layer MPEG 1 encoded videos. Hence, the existing trace libraries are inadequate for this study (and also for other researchers studying scalable multimedia services over networks). Therefore, the researcher proposes to create an extensive publicly available trace library of heterogeneous and scalable encoded video as the basis for the proposed study. The researchers will (1) encode over 100 di.erent videos, spanning a wide range of video genres and lengths and including diverse texture and motion characteristics. (2) encode each video into a single layer (non scalable) at a range of quality levels using di.erent encoding schemes. (3) encode each video into several quality layers, using the temporal, spatial, SNR, and data partitioning scalability modes, as well as the object based scalability mode of MPEG 4. (4) broaden the notion of video traces by capturing the video traffic, the video content features, and the video quality in traces. (5) disseminate the created video trace library through publicly available web sites. The trace library will stimulate research on protocols and mechanisms for scalable multimedia services in heterogeneous wireline and wireless networks. To date, the research in this area has been hampered by the lack of representative traces of scalable encoded video. In fact, the lack of realistic traffic data for scalable video may have prevented the development of e.cient and reliable protocols for heterogeneous multimedia services. As part of the seed work for the proposed project, the researchers have created a preliminary publicly available library of traces of non scalable MPEG 4 and H.263en coded video (http: www.eas.asu.edu trace) and studied the statistical properties of the traces in the library. This library is a first attempt at providing MPEG 4 and H.263 video traces. These traces are already widely used by networking researchers. The PIs complement each other in their competencies. Martin Reisslein brings to the project his expertise in developing and evaluating traffic management schemes for video traffic in high speed wireline networks and wireless networks. Sethuraman Panchanathan brings to the project his expertise in video compression, scalable video coding, video content analysis, and MPEG 4 doc17814 none Proposal - P.I. Jones The goal of this proposal is to develop and fabricate an acoustic remote sensing and mapping tool dedicated to studying hydrothermal flow at the seafloor. The new system will be deployable on a variety of ROVs, deep towed platforms, and stationary seafloor observatory networks for the study and detection of high and low temperature hydrothermal flow regimes. The sensor will implement two new acoustic methods that will enable detection and quantitative mapping of diffuse hydrothermal flow at the seafloor using acoustic scintillation thermography (AST) and volumetric studies of plume particle distributions and flow above the seafloor. These methods have been demonstrated using a commercial sonar system mounted on the ROV Jason during three previous experiments. The proposed sensor will improve upon the operational and technical limitations of the commercial system and enable long time scale experiments and larger-scale surveys using a variety of platforms. In addition, the sensor proposed will enable high quality scientific data collection and analysis thus providing a flexible test bed for new acoustic methods and applications of remote sensing to hydrothermal flow. The system will be compatible with available and proposed seafloor observatories, enabling interactive operation via the Internet. This proposal is the product of an ongoing collaboration between groups at Rutgers (Rona et al.) and the Applied Physics Laboratory of the University of Washington (APL-UW, Jones et al.) and arises from our experience in using commercial sonars for hydrothermal observations. The proposed instrumentation development is central to the goal of the PIs to observe focused and diffuse hydrothermal flow over long time periods. Design, fabrication, and local testing will be the responsibility of APL-UW whereas, the Rutgers group will contribute to the process of developing system specifications from scientific measurement requirements and will conduct the field tests, including analysis of test data. The new remote sensing tool will enable measurements of plume flow variability at long time scales (of order 1 year). Such scales are important in studies on the response of hydrothermal flow regimes to tidal forcing as well as to volcanic and tectonic events. The sensor will enable the implementation of new acoustic detection and mapping techniques for characterizing diffuse flow over large regions (10s of km2) of interest. It is proposed that this instrument will also enable studies of net heat flux from hydrothermal systems and its relation to geophysical, oceanographic, and biological processes doc17815 none The goal of Systems Biology is the construction and experimental validation of mathematical models that explain and predict the behavior of biological systems. Systems Biology is a synergistic integration of theory, computation and experiment. Intuition is not reliable when confronted with the highly interconnected reaction networks that underlie biological processes. The Second International Conference will be held in November . It seeks to promote the growth and development of the field of Systems Biology. The goals include: establishing the foundations of the field; presenting new results; identifying promising directions; fostering communications; and helping to organize the community. A top priority is to adopt a sound foundation for theory, software and experiment. The meeting seeks to be a specific forum for Systems Biology doc17816 none Estimation of causal effects of policy interventions such as job training programs is an important goal of much applied economic research. Often a reasonable starting point is the assume that assignment to the treatment is random given on sufficiently detailed observed pretreatment variables. Under that assumption one can identify the population average effect. This research will contribute to the literature on inference for average treatments effects under these assumptions in three parts. First, the research will develop large sample theory for matching estimators. By matching estimators we mean estimators where each treated unit is matched to one or a fixed number of controls, and each control is matched to one or a fixed number of treated units. Such pure matching estimators have considerable intuitive appeal and have been used widely in practice, without their large sample theory having been established other than for special cases. The result should be an asymptotic theory for such matching estimators that allows researchers to use these estimators in practice. In a second part, the research will investigate higher order properties of some of the estimators for average treatment effects that have been proposed. Many of these estimators have a nonparametric component. However, most of the literature is silent regarding the actual choice of smoothing parameters, beyond rate conditions. This makes it di .cult for practitioners to actually implement thse estimators. Here the plan is to develop a mean-squared-error based criterion to derive an explicit data-driven criterion for the smoothing parameter. In the third part, the research will compare a number of the estimators for average treatment effects. So far a number of estimators have been proposed, often with a small simulation study to investigate their properties. What this research accomplishes is a systematic comparison of various estimators. In many studies of social programs such as job training programs observational data are used to evaluate these programs. Statistical methods for such evaluations often rely on matching type methods that match trainees to similar controls, that is individuals who received the training to individuals who did not receive the training with similar background characteristics and labor market histories. A variety of such methods are currently used, with often the properties and reliability of such methods unknown. This research investigates the formal properties of such methods. In addition the research will develop automated procedures for implementing some of these methods. Currently these methods often require the researcher to make a number of choices in the implementation that potentially affect the final results substantially, without much guidance available to guide these choices. This should make these methods more transparent and easier to implement. Finally, the research will compare a number of these methods in settings where the correct answers are known so as to evaluate their performance and reach recommendations to inform the future use of such methods doc17817 none Financial markets play positive and negative roles in economic fluctuations. This project focuses on the latter roles and their impact on actual and optimal macroeconomic policy. Since emerging economies are particularly affected by financial underdevelopment and its consequences, they are both an object of study in themselves, and a good device to isolate the financial mechanisms that affect developed economies as well. Consequently, this project focuses on emerging economies but extracts more general lessons as well. The starting point of the project is a perspective where emerging economies are affected by two main forms of financial frictions. They have weak links with international financial markets and domestic financial markets are underdeveloped. The combination of these ingredients lead to occasional external crises, which are made more likely and severe by the equilibrium undervaluation of precautionary actions by domestic agents. Within this context the investigator asks and attempts to provide theoretical and empirical answers to questions such as: What is the appropriate monetary policy during crises and their prelude? How is the answer affected by the potential separation between domestic and international liquidity? To what extent and under which circumstances can monetary policy substitute for missing domestic insurance markets? How is this role affected by liability dollarization? Why does the latter persist long after inflation has subsided? What is behind the underinsurance problem of emerging economies? How is the standard political-economy analysis of central bank behavior affected by the presence of recurrent crises? What is the optimal exchange rate system for economies with underdeveloped financial markets doc17818 none The separation of ownership from control in the modern corporation introduces an agency problem between owners and managers. How do owners of modern corporations exercise effective control over managers (agents) when managers usually know much more about the day-to-day operation of the firms than the owners. The implications and mitigation of this agency problem have long been central issues in the economics literature. Nevertheless, there is little research on the exact quantification of these costs, and many holes remain in our understanding of the empirical details of this agency conflict. Many of the difficulties with this important area of empirical research stem from the use of measures of corporate governance that suffer from endogeneity problems or that capture only limited aspects of a firm s complex governance structure. The project uses a measure that accounts for the complexity of firm-specific corporate governance in a novel way. Taking advantage of the variation in state- and firm-level governance structures that arose in response to the takeover wave of the s, the investigators have constructed a Governance Index to proxy for the balance of power between shareholders and managers. The project uses this index as the basis for analysis of the effects of corporate governance. The investigators have begun research on the implications of governance for firm value and have found effects that are statistically significant and economically large. They find that the addition of governance provisions that add to managerial power (i.e., reduce shareholder rights) is consistently associated with lower levels of firm value. While the causality of this relationship is not yet established, there are several reasons to believe that the direction of causality runs from governance to value. Furthermore, the magnitude of this empirical relationship defines the large economic value at stake and motivates a detailed further investigation. The primary benefit of this research lies in its potential to further scientific understanding about the source and magnitude of agency problems in organizations. Furthermore, the results are expected to yield concrete policy implications regarding the effects of governance rules on corporate value and performance. These results will not only be relevant on the level of investor-management relations, but they should also contribute to the economic foundation of the debate on takeover regulation in local and national legislatures, both in the U.S. and abroad. Finally, this work develops a novel measure of governance that should be a useful input in many other studies. A preliminary version of the index has already been released to other researchers, and all of the data will be made available as soon as possible. More specifically, the planned work includes a series of four integrated projects. First, the investigators continue their research into the relationship between governance and firm value and refine their previous results. Second, they study the origins of variation in governance structures and search for an instrument to allow for truly causal inference. Third, they investigate the microfoundations of the costs of poor governance by studying its effects on investment, managerial turnover, wages, employment, and productivity. Fourth, the investigators study the relationship between the governance structures summarized in the index and other corporate governance mechanisms including executive compensation contracts, board independence, and ownership structure doc17819 none This project will study how tax incentives affect the structure of household portfolios. One strand of research will explore the determinants of asset allocation patterns in tax-deferred and taxable accounts. The recent growth of employee participation in 401(k) plans, and the coincident expansion in the number of households with Individual Retirement Accounts, has raised new portfolio choices for many households. This research will investigate the extent to which households consider tax factors in structuring their portfolios by comparing asset allocation decisions in taxable and tax-deferred settings. It will also develop new information on the potential distribution of balances in tax-deferred accounts when current savers reach retirement. The research will bear on the ongoing discussion concerning the adequacy of household retirement saving and thus will have broader impacts on both the financial and the public policy sectors. A second strand of research will explore the recent growth of variable annuity products. It will evaluate how tax incentives affect the demand for these financial products, and test the hypothesis that the households with the largest incentives to hold variable annuities purchase these products. This research will also consider the potential role of these products in helping retirees to draw down the balances that they accumulate in 401(k) plans and other retirement saving vehicles doc17820 none This award will provide for the acquisition of a multi-processor Linex cluster wtih seismic processing software and allow the upgrade of existing workstations. The group using the system has an increase in computational needs due to several large data sets recently collected, in addition to new faculty members doc17821 none Traditionally, Comparative Advantage had been the foundational logic that best frames the understanding of trade. A second alternative, that focuses on the Advantages of Specialization, offers an argument for the opening of markets that commands relatively more public support. Neoclassical economics was derived on the basis of comparative advantage because it allowed for constant returns postulate, without which a competitive economy seemed impossible. Only in the s and s, attention was directed to Adam Smith s emphasis on specialization and the size of the market. Modern analyses, not only demonstrates compatibility with competitive organization, but also identify sources of endogenous growth. These modern developments have been systematically presented in Xiaokai Yang s treatise, Economics: New Classical versus Neoclassical Framework (Blackwell, ). The purpose of the workshop is to stimulate examination of this emerging research program, which young scientists will not have encountered in their textbooks or in orthodox training. The workshop will expose them to Professor Yang, and to a critical evaluation of his treatise, in the expectation that they will, themselves, shift some of their interests to generalized increasing returns and its implications doc17822 none Gehlhar Description: This award is to provide funds to the United States Department of Agriculture, Washington, DC to support three joint research projects in the area of agricultural biotechnology. The program director is Clemen Gehlhar, of the USDA Foreign Agriculture Service. These projects include: 1) holding a workshop on developing an insecticidal nematode industry in Egypt, managed by Dr. Randy Gaugler of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey and Dr. Sally Allam of Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt; 2) development of improved low-fat soft cheese, managed by Dr. Joseph Frank, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia and Dr. Morsi El-Soda, University of Alexandria, Alexandria, Egypt; and 3) examination of poliovirus isolates from Egypt by nucleic acid probe hybridization signals to determine the pattern of virus spread, managed by Dr. Olen Kew, Center for Diseas Control & Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia and Dr. Naglaa A. Hamed, Egyptian Organization for Biological Products & Vaccines, Agouza, Cairo, Egypt. Scope: The award allows USDA to support three collaborative projects involving US and Egyptian scientists, in areas of interest to the two countries. This award is made under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc17823 none In February long-term monitoring of Mid-Atlantic Ridge Seismicity was begun between 15 and 35 degrees north using autonomous hydrophones moored within the SOFAR channel. The goal is to obtain a first-order understanding of the spatial and temporal patterns in overall seismicity, and the partitioning between magmatic and tectonic events at this slow-spreading ridge. The current grant extends the deployment of the current hydropone array for an additional four years, and makes the information more widely available to the ocean science community doc17824 none In this project researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the University of Washington will attempt to develop a method to evaluate anthropogenic changes in the carbon isotopic composition (d 13C) of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC)in the oceans, the so-called 13C Suess effect. Development of this method should permit reconstruction of the d 13C-DIC and DIC Suess effect globally using both the new WOCE JGOFS OACES d 13C-DIC and DIC datasets. These reconstructions will provide, for the first time, global coverage of (1) the relationship between the anthropogenic 13CO2 and 12 CO2 changes, ( 2) the total d 13C of DIC change in the oceans, and (3) the pre-industrial d 13C of DIC distribution. The reconstructions should also be of immediate benefit to modelers of the modern-day global carbon cycle and to the paleoceanographic community doc17825 none This is an investigation of the recently discovered Lost City Vent Field, atop the dome-like Atlantis Massif at 30 degrees north on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. This field is different from all other known seafloor hydrothermal fields in that it is located on 1.5 Ma crust, is dominated by steep-sided carbonate chimneys, and is underlain by significiant exposures of serpentinized peridotite. A detailed mapping and sampling program will be conducted to address the following: the tectonic and geologic controls that focus venting, the chemical and isotopic compositions of the vent structures and fluids, the indicence and phylogentic diversity of microorganisms, and whether macrofauna exist doc17826 none In a recent survey, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found that 99% of on-line companies collect personal information from the individuals visiting their web sights. In September , Amazon.com conducted dynamic pricing experiments in which DVD movies were sold to different customers at different prices (up to a 40% difference) based on their purchasing histories. Besides dynamic pricing, firms use consumer profile data to target ads and make product recommendations. Indeed, customized ads that use consumer profile data sell for up to ten times the price of untargeted advertisements. There are many Internet marketing firms such as Double Click and I-Behavior that collect and sell customer information to electronic retailers. In addition to purchasing histories, these databases typically contain such items as an individual s income, size of family, lifestyle interests, and motor vehicle ownership. Consumers are becoming increasingly aware that their electronic purchases and other activities are being monitored and cataloged. The purpose of this project is to investigate these privacy issues in the context of a series of game-theoretic models. Specifically, some of the key questions to be addressed include the following: What is the economic impact of a closed privacy regime (in which consumers own the information) versus an open privacy regime (in which firms own it)? Which -- if any -- consumers are likely to benefit from an open privacy regime and which are likely to be hurt by it? When -- if ever -- would firms prefer to insure the privacy of their customers and how might they accomplish this? What is the impact on efficiency and industrial organization of access to consumer profile data? Specifically, will such data become an integral input to the profitability of firms, and if so, is differential access to information likely to generate market power and anti-competitive behavior doc17827 none The Urban Transportation Modeling System (UTMS) remains the dominant approach to urban travel demand modeling within the transportation planning profession despite concerns that have been raised regarding its ability to meet the challenges of contemporary and future transportation planning. These concerns have not addressed through the development of new forms of activity-based travel demand models, which have the potential to remedy the deficiencies of UTMS by providing transportation planners with policy-sensitive forecasts. The reliability of these forecasts depends on sound model development, however, and many issues have yet to be addressed on this front. This project seeks answers to two questions relating to the development of activity-based travel demand models. First, what spatial resolution is appropriate for such modeling? Second, what activities are to be modeled? To address these questions, a systematic research program will be undertaken with three objectives: (1) to evaluate the effects of the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) on spatial choice sets, consisting of urban opportunities (i.e. potential destinations), and on the parameters of and outcomes from spatial choice models; (2) to develop an optimal zoning system that minimizes MAUP effects in activity-based travel demand models; and (3) to evaluate the effects of aggregating non-work, out-of -home activities on the attributes of those activities and on model parameters estimated for specific attributes. Data will be drawn from two sources. First, information on non-work, out-of -home activities will be obtained from a household travel survey that was conducted in the Louisville, Kentucky, MSA in the fall of . Second, details concerning all urban opportunities in the region will be taken from a database obtained from ReferenceUSA. The geo-processing capabilities of GIS will be used to obtain specific data for many of the empirical analyses. Descriptive statistics and statistical models (i.e. hazard models, multinomial logit models, and ordered probit models) will be used to analyze the data. The priorities of urban transportation planning have changed considerably in recent years, largely due to government legislation such as the Clean Air Act Amendments of . Instead of building roads to meet a growing demand for travel, transportation planning today seeks to better manage existing infrastructure. For this task, policy-sensitive tools like activity-based travel demand models are required. The results of this research will shed considerable light on two issues that have yet to be addressed concerning the development of such models, spatial aggregation and activity aggregation. Potential errors associated with these issues will be reduced, thereby increasing the reliability of forecasts and their usefulness for decision making doc17828 none The central question of this research program involves the changing relationship between masses and elites in the information age. The investigation explores the impact of exposure to political cues via traditional mass media, on the extent and nature of on-line political participation, information seeking and learning. Specifically, the investigators assess the impact of cognitive heuristics in campaign advertising and news coverage on the information seeking and participatory strategies citizens employ. Particular attention is paid to the effects of threat cues in political communication, as an emerging body of research suggests that these cues are especially effective at boosting engagement. The researchers also revisit the selective exposure hypothesis that was largely abandoned nearly four decades ago, to determine if exposure to standard political communication boosts or diminishes the selection of attitudinally consistent information via the web. A pilot study provides support for these hypotheses. The central communication factors that are investigatee as potential influences on Internet searching and behavior are advertising tone, the motivation to use the web, the credibility of information on the web, and various forms of threat cues. As the Internet evolves into an almost limitless information medium, and with barriers to accessing disappearing, the mechanism linking existing attitudes to information search strategies deserves renewed attention. The research design builds upon the innovative methodology employed in a pilot study. In this experiment, conducted in the fall of , adult subjects were shown political ads sponsored by candidates Bush and Gore that were constructed in the Media Lab. In these ads, the researchers manipulated the dimension used to organize the candidate s policy stands: one version emphasized partisan conflicts while others highlighted ideological, character, or group representation distinctions. After viewing the ads, subjects were told they could visit either or both of the web pages of the presidential candidates to learn any additional information that interested them. The web pages were patterned after the candidates actual web sites and were standardized so that the information was organized similarly on each site. Subjects movements on the websites and the time spent on each link were tracked electronically. This realistic yet unobtrusive measure of search behavior represents a significant improvement over survey measures of self-reported information seeking. In recent years, scholarly evidence for, and popular concern about, downward trends in civic engagement, participation, and trust in government have been growing. At the same time, there are those who predict that the landscape of political communication is approaching a major transformation as the Internet rapidly extends its reach. Some have argued these technological advances will reverse the downward spiral in engagement, while others predict even more isolation and passivity. Mostly absent from the debate thus far is the possibility that the political effects of the Internet will be, at least in part, contingent on the behavior of elites. Since communication strategies will certainly evolve to maximize the impact of campaigns in the age of the Internet, researchers must begin to explore how citizens react to those messages in terms of the vast interactive medium at their fmgertips. Most observers would agree that as barriers to acquiring information and participating on the Internet continue to drop, elite-mass interactions will change significantly. The question that remains is how. A rigorous and detailed study of these phenomena is not only warranted, but vital for understanding public awareness and political behavior in the near future doc17829 none This proposal request support to study evolution of wind strength and development and migration of the Intertropical Convergence Zone in the North Pacific Ocean during the late Paleogene and Neogene. The study will use grain size, isotope data and composition of dust in a series of marine cores in the tropical and subtropical Pacific to trace wind strength and dust source (Asian or American) during the Oligocene to Recent. The goals of the project are to determine the evolution of strength of zonal winds, and to trace the development and migration of the Intertropical Convergence Zone through time. In addition the study will better constrain the provenance of the American dust component and determine the changes in the latitude of the facies change between Asian-source and American source dust in the Pacific Basin doc17830 none The newly industrializing economies of East Asia have demonstrated that rapid economic growth and integration into the global economy can occur with substantial declines in the incidence of poverty and low inequality in incomes. Unfortunately, the shared growth miracles experienced by these economies have occurred with substantial deterioration in urban environments. Because these development and environment outcomes occurred in the context of increased openness to trade and investment, they have given rise to concerns that openness to trade and investment contributes to pollution havens or the movement of dirty industries from countries with stringent environmental regulations to those with weak regulations. The predictable result is more trade and investment (more globalization) and dirtier environments. To date, there is limited empirical support for the pollution haven hypothesis. Moreover, there is some evidence that openness to trade and investment can increase access to newer leading-edge plants and equipment that are less polluting because they newer and are imported from developed countries. This provides an important opportunity for significantly less-polluting development. While previous research has theoretically modeled both of these outcomes, there has been little empirical research on pollution havens. Moreover, most of this empirical research is based on highly aggregated data where the unit of analysis is the country rather than the firm or plants where the most important environmental decisions are made. This research project will empirically analyzing the impacts of globalization and environmental regulations on the environmental performance of manufacturing plants in one particularly dirty, rapidly growing, export-oriented industry, the cement industries of China, Malaysia, and Thailand. Research methods will include a statistical analysis of survey data collected from about 125 large and medium sized cement plants in these countries. Multiple regression analysis will be used to address three key questions: To what extent is increasing openness to trade and foreign investment associated with the adoption of technologies and production practices that are less energy, materials and pollution intensive? Are the impacts of openness on environmental performance contingent on the strength of regulatory enforcement and community pressure faced by these plants? Are the impacts of openness limited to changes in technology and production processes that improve both economic and environmental performance? Answers to these questions are important to both the international community and developing countries. If openness to trade and investment contributes to improved plant level environmental performance, the international community can be less concerned about pollution haven affects in trade and investment agreements. If, on the other hand, openness contributes to pollution haven effects, environmental considerations may have to become part of international trade and investment agreements. Moreover, if openness to trade and investment contributes to improved environmental performance, governments in developing countries would have additional policy options for insuring that rapid urban-industrial growth is less energy, materials, and pollution intensive. It would also provide opportunities to sustain high growth rates while improving ambient environmental quality. But if pollution haven effects are significant, this would suggest that governments in developing countries must redouble their efforts to increase the stringency of environmental regulations. It also suggests that there may be significant tradeoffs between growth, globalization, and the environment doc17831 none Pamela Oliver University of Wisconsin, Madison This pilot project will examine the feasibility of creating a database that will allow the PI to study both the overall trend of rising imprisonment and rising racial disparities in imprisonment, and geographical and temporal differences in these trends. The PI will use official data sets on arrests, imprisonment merged with social, economic, and demographic factors to create the new longitudinal data set that allow one to control for current and previous reported crimes and race-specific arrest rates as well as social factors in predicting imprisonment rates. Cross-sectionally, the most serious crime is found to account for very little of the racial disparity in prison admissions; differential arrest rates and differential prison arrest ratios in drug offenses and property crimes account for the majority of imprisonment disparity. The research seeks to determine the factors that lead to high enforcement levels against African Americans for drug offenses and lower-level offenses. A range of hypotheses will be tested, i.e., this enforcement arises as a reaction to prior elevated levels of serious violent crimes, to increasing in-migration or integration of minorities and whites, to exogenous macroeconomic or political factors that affect crime or policing, or to shocks such as drug panics. Secondly, it seeks to identify the consequences of high rates of imprisonment of African Americans, testing the hypothesis that, net of controls, black imprisonment rates adversely affects black economic well-being and family stability in a manner that indirectly contribute to increasing crime rates Existing official data sets will be processed to create this new longitudinal data set containing county-level data on race-and offense-specific arrest and incarceration rates, along with a wide variety of social, economic and legal indicators. The data set will be constructed for the time period of - and completed by merging data from the National Corrections Reporting Program and the Uniform Crime Reports, along with other data on law enforcement, corrections, social, economic and demographic factors from the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Justice Statistics and other sources doc17832 none A trace metal chemist and a molecular biologist from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will join forces to determine the speciation and distribution of zinc and cobalt in the marine environment to assess the role these metals play as an essential micronutrient for phytoplankton. The PIs also will determine what the relationship of zinc is to the geochemistry of cobalt and phosphorus and its influence on the composition of phytoplankton assemblages. During cruises to the North Pacific and the Bering Sea, the PIs will measure the speciation of Zn and Co, as well as alkaline phosphatase activity. Deckboard incubation experiments using freshly collected samples and added Zn, Co phosphate and organic P will be used to determine changes in alkaline phosphatase activity via ELF assay. Observed differences in these experiments will be compared with changes in specific growth rates for alkenone producers and the drawdown of nutrients obtained by scientists from the University of Hawaii. Similar measurements will be made during a cruise to the North Atlantic. In the laboratory, culture experiments will be used to ascertain the following: (1) effect of phosphate limitation on the requirements and growth limiting concentrations of Zn and Co and vice versa for cultures of E. huxleyi and Thallassiosira weissflogii by measuring growth rates and alkaline phosphatase activity; (2) whether E. huxleyi can use organically complexed Co; and (3) whether Trichodesmium has an absolute requirement for Co or Zn and the effect of these metals on alkaline phosphatase. From a methodology standpoint, the PIs plan to improve upon current methods available for making Zn speciation measurements, resolve existing discrepancies and lower the limit on free Zn concentrations. They also will develop a new solvent extractions speciation isotope tracer technique to extend detection limits for Zn and evaluate lability of ambient Zn complexes doc17833 none Han The goals of this project are: to determine the variability of the tropical Indian Ocean forced by intraseasonal atmospheric forcing; to understand the dynamics and thermodynamics of such variability; and to examine the impact of atmospheric intraseasonal forcing on oceanic seasonal variability and the Indian Ocean Zonal Mode. The primary motivation is the presence of large intraseasonal fluctuations in currents, mixed layer depth and upper ocean temperature in the Indian Ocean. It is hoped that a better understanding of the processes involved will be useful for unraveling some of the questions about how regional climate is determined. Numerical simulations will be made with the ocean component of the National Center for Atmospheric Rresearch s climate system model. From a diagnostic study of the comparison of the response of the Indian Ocean to quasi-realistic forcing with and without intraseasonal variability, the nature of the response, and the processes responsible for it, will be determined. Numerical solutions will also be compared to data from the JASMINE and WOCE field experiments doc17834 none Collaborative Proposals Vincent Roscigno William Danaher Ohio State University University of Charleston Traditional social movement theory has emphasized the importance of political opportunity and collective identity for social movement formation, and for movement stability, longevity, and success. Recent work incorporates aspects of both into a single framework, highlighting the central role of social movement culture in simultaneously fostering 1) group identity, 2) an alternative interpretational frame of cause and effect, and 3) a sense of political efficacy among potential movement participants. Little empirical attention, however, has been devoted to examining the role media may play in forging movement culture across geographic space. The PIs will examine the largest labor mobilization in U.S. history --the southern textile strike campaigns of - , where upwards of 400,000 workers walked off their jobs --and the extent to which media (and radio specifically) played a vital role in fostering a cohesive social movement culture across rural, mill communities. Indeed, the worker mobilization that occurred remains an anomaly to social movement theorists and labor researchers, given the lack of union involvement and the geographically disbursed nature of mill towns during the time period in question. Specifically, the project will investigate following: 1). Was there an empirical correspondence between radio station foundings during the era in question and strike events, even controlling for other influential factors? 2). What were transmission ranges at the time and to what extent were they heard in and across mill towns? Who owned these stations, and was there autonomy in terms of what could be broadcast? And, did mill workers have radios? 3). What national, regional, and state-level political information was transmitted that may have had the consequence of altering worker perceptions of political opportunity? 4). What was the role of radio in forging, or at least opening opportunity to, oppositional cultural messages. Were solidarity and a sense of similarity across mill towns manifested as a consequence? The project will make important contributions to theoretical debates regarding movement formation, communication technology, cultural transmission, labor dynamics, and spatial diffusion processes most generally. The analyses will be embedded in a historical context, while simultaneously highlighting broader themes and debates pertaining to the study and understanding of media, social movements, labor, and culture doc17835 none This project will complete an effort to calibrate isotope and trace element chemistry in the skeletons of sclerosponges as proxies for temperature and salinity. The study will measure Sr Ca and Mg Ca as well as O and C isotopes in sclerosponge skeletons from Discovery Bay, Jamaica previously stained in the field and for which continuous water temperature and composition data are available. In addition sclerosponge skeletons from different water depths at Lee Stocking Island will be analyzed to reconstruct the thermocline structure doc17836 none The share of workers covered by union contracts has plummeted dramatically in recent years. This research project studies this union decline in three new ways. First, it takes a new viewing angle to observe the process. Previous work looks at the process at the industry level or at the regional level. In contrast, this project studies union dynamics at the establishment level. Second, the project collects and creates new data sets. In particular it will recover discarded data on union local organizations (the Labor Organization and Reporting System) spanning to the present and it will publicly archive this new data. Third, the project focuses on a new issue, the role of neighborhood or spillover effects. A neighborhood effect exists when it is easier for a union to organize an establishment when neighboring establishments are organized. The issue of neighborhood effects is important, because when these effects are present, small changes in the underlying economic environment can lead to large changes in the extent of unionism. The project will quantify the extent to which neighborhood effects can account for why unions collapsed in the early s, and why unions are weak in the South, but are still strong the upper Midwest and Northeast. Understanding the process of union decline is of direct interest in itself. But in addition, this process has been intertwined with numerous other major trends in the economy. These trends include: the rise in the wage differentiable between skilled and unskilled workers, the movement towards the use of temporary workers and the rise of outsourcing, and the major shift in manufacturing from the union North to the nonunion South. The research in this project increases our understanding of all of these issues. The research also contributes to the general economics literature by making progress in identifying neighborhood effects. Neighborhood effects are thought to arise in many economic contexts including technology adoption, education, and even crime. The procedures developed in this research project have the potential to be applied to these other issues doc17837 none With the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, Professor Gutow at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, is studying the modification of hydroxylated oxide surfaces. Using a novel wet-chemical zinc alkyl treatment, he and his undergraduate students are exploring the quality and kinetics of formation of thin films formed using this approach. In collaboration with Professor Tysoe at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, these films are characterized using infrared spectroscopy, quartz crystal microbalance measurements, and ultra-high vacuum surface analytical methods. Strategies for the growth of well-characterized monolayer, multilayer, and composite films are being developed. In addition, this research program serves as an important training ground for undergraduate scientists at this primarily undergraduate institution. Effective routes to the formation of robust coatings on oxide surfaces are needed for technological applications in electronic materials chemistry and heterogeneous catalysis. With support from the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, Professor Gutow and his collaborators are examining novel zinc alkyl methods for forming these coatings. Synthetic methods, film characterization, and undergraduate training in state of the art research methods will result from this work doc17838 none This research project investigates the refugee returnee process developed by the international community to implement Annex 7 of the Dayton Peace Accords, the peace treaty that brought the Bosnian war to an end in . The central research question is: how has the international community sought to reconstitute multi-ethnic Bosnian places and how have local authorities mediated this process? Field-research is grounded in three ethnically-cleansed Bosnian localities - Bosnian Croat-controlled Jajce, Bosniak-controlled Travnik, and Bosnian Serb-controlled Derventa - which were multi-ethnic places before the war. The international community has been active in all three localities promoting returns but with modest results so far. In answering the research question, data are collected from three sources: policy decisions, reports, and operational procedures generated by institutional actors involved in implementing Annex 7 of the Dayton Peace Accords; semi-structured interviews with key international, national, and local decision-makers in the returnee policy process; and focus group sessions with returnees in the selected research sites. Multiple methodological strategies will be used to study the data gathered including mapping the geographies of displacement and return, charting the reconstruction and return policy process, discourse analysis of policy-maker and implementation storylines at various scales, and discourse analysis of the perspectives of returnees themselves. This research project investigates a nascent contradiction in the Dayton Peace Accords, which, on the one hand, pledged to reverse ethnic cleansing, but, on the other hand, sanctioned a segregated Bosnia created by ethnic cleansing and ruled by local authorities committed to ethnonationalism. This contradiction has given rise to a struggle between the international community and local authorities to define the ethnic and political geography of Bosnia. The study focuses on local municipalities to analyze how the extensive efforts of the international community to reverse ethnic cleansing in Bosnia impacted particular places. More broadly, it develops a conceptual understanding of the problems associated with the rebuilding of post-conflict states, especially the political geographic aspects of ethnic identity. It offers insight into how post-conflict plans conceived in international peace agreements are mediated and thereby transformed by the local contexts of their implementation doc17839 none A central feature of modem economic theory is the forward-looking decisions made by firms and households. Expectations of economic agents are therefore a key component of macroeconomic theories of consumption, investment, inflation and the business cycle. The RE (rational expectations) methodology has provided an elegant benchmark theory of expectation formation: expectations are assumed to be rational in the sense that agents do not make any systematic errors, given the available information. Two fundamental issues for this (now standard) approach concern the attainability of RE, i.e. whether boundedly rational agents can arrive at RE through a learning process, and the possibility of indeterminacy or multiplicity of RE equilibria. A related question is how the central messages of rational expectations are modified by the recognition that realistic decision-makers are likely to use misspecified models, and to be aware of this limitation. These interconnected issues, which have implications for economic policy and business cycle modeling, are pursued by this project on several fronts. A common theme throughout the project is the role that learning plays in the evolution of expectations. The first part focuses on monetary and fiscal policy. Recent work based on new Phillips curve models has obtained (under the RE assumption) interest rate feedback rules designed to implement optimal policy. The proposed research shows that if policy rules are formulated entirely in terms of responses to fundamental shocks, as might appear natural, the equilibrium will be unstable if private agents follow adaptive learning rules. The project then shows that stability can be achieved, and optimal discretionary policy implemented, if the interest rate rule depends in the right way on both the fundamental shocks and observed private expectations. This project extends the analysis to cases in which the monetary authorities can commit themselves to a fixed rule. Other extensions take up the interaction of monetary and fiscal policy and study the implications of adaptive learning for interest rate rules that may be subject to liquidity traps. The focus of the second part is business cycle fluctuations. Extensions of the Real Business Cycle framework to incorporate monopolistic competition have shown that multiplicities can arise, taking the form of expectation driven fluctuations around an indeterminate steady state. This possibility is known also to arise in some standard monetary models. Recent work on expectational stability and adaptive learning has provided convenient tools to determine whether these endogenous fluctuations can arise as outcomes of adaptive learning rules. Preliminary results show that a subclass of resonant frequency solutions is stable under learning for a range of parameters. This project computes the parameter regions for which stable endogenous fluctuations occur and investigates whether macroeconomic policy can be used to prevent endogenous fluctuations from arising. A third line of research looks at the implications of underparameterization for the Lucas Critique of economic policy, one of the dramatic implications of RE. Private agents that recognize their misspecification will respond by using constant gain learning rules that trade off tracking and filtering. A simple example is adaptive expectations with an optimally tuned coefficient. This project shows that for much of the parameter space monetary policy remains subject to the Lucas Critique. However, there are also regions in which the expectation rule is invariant and the Lucas Critique does not apply. Related work examines (i) the stability under learning of the high inflation equilibrium, in the seignorage model, to the assumption that some agents do not possess current information, (ii) the role of structural heterogeneity in facilitating or impeding coordination on a RE equilibrium, and (iii) the possibility that underparameterized learning may generate heterogeneity of expectations doc17840 none The news media play a vital role in many of the political processes of most interest to scholars. Accordingly, any political science subfield that uses news content as an independent or intervening variable will benefit from a systematic, theoretically driven accounting of the process by which the political world is filtered and condensed into a news product. This Doctoral Dissertation Research project embeds theories of the news production process in the empirical-test-friendly research designs of aggregate policy system analysis, in order to answer the question: what drives systematic variation in the political news product over a variety of substantive issue areas? National newspapers and evening newscasts from the past 20 years are examined. In all three studies, the dependent variable -news content -is measured by content analyses utilizing independent coders. The stories are gathered from Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe and the Vanderbilt Archives. Independent variables come from a variety of sources, the two most important being the Pennsylvania State University Correlates of War Project, and the University of Washington Policy Agendas data set. The three separate studies apply the primary research question to three facets of the political process: I) What explains variation in economic news over time? 2) What explains variation in the quantity of coverage allotted by the American press to foreign conflicts? 3) What explains variation in the quality and quantity of coverage given to congressional hearings? F or each model of variation in political news, four competing classes of independent variables are tested for their relative explanatory power. First, it is argued that the normative implications of mass mediation are most fruitfully understood by calibrating coverage to a reality baseline: the tangible, measurable aspect of the given political domain that an objective press is expected to report as faithfully as possible, and that the veracious reporting of which renders the press mere information carriers in the political process. Next, the extent to which elites deliberate attempts to shape the news product are successful in a given context is the extent to which the media are falling short in their watchdog role. Thus much can be learned from assessing the impact on news formation of independent variables that indicate a conscious attempt by elites to shape the news. Also, the use of dynamic models enables a statistically sound assessment of whether prior public opinion moves subsequent news, controlling for the more conventional effect of news on opinion. Such an effect suggests a previously overlooked element of democratic responsiveness in the policy process. Finally, variation in seemingly arbitrary qualities of the political world wield a powerful influence over news content on account of their conformance with the norms and constraints of professional news organizations. Such variables -known as media power variables -indicate a significant non-spurious effect of the news media on the political process doc17841 none The proposal will enable a collaboration between Oregon State and geochemists of the Consolidated Research Group in Marine Geosciences at the University of Barcelona, Spain. The purpose of this collaboration is to extend some analyses of sediment trap materials collected from sites in the Alboran Sea, during June - May as part of an EC funded Mass Transfer and Ecosystem Response (MATER-II) project. Particulate matter barium fluxes and other lithogenic tracer analyses, to be part of a dissertation of a student from the University of Barcelona, are to be completed with facilities at Oregon State. The scientific goals of the project are a better understanding of the causes of variability in the Ba Corg ratios found in different ocean regions doc17842 none This proposal request support for a comprehensive chemical and isotopic survey (major, trace, and rare earth elements along with Sr, Nd and Pb isotopes) to test the hypothesis that the source of particulate Fe to central equatorial Pacific surface waters is the Papua New Guinea region via the eastward flowing Equatorial Undercurrent (EUC). In addition the study will assess whether wind blown material is more important as a source of particulate Fe at 4oN and 5-2oS than is PNG-derived Fe. The study will examine downcore variations in the EUC-sourced Fe through glacial-interglacial cycles, and examine whether changes can be correlated with changes of export production recorded in the sediments doc17843 none Sequential voting among collegial courts during deliberations is a phenomenon that is fairly consistent among different types of court systems. However, the method of sequential voting varies widely from court to court. The U.S. Supreme Court uses a seniority sequential voting system during the certiorari vote and the original votes of merits, in which the most senior justice votes first, and so on to the least senior member. U. S. state courts use a multitude of sequential voting mechanisms which range from the seniority system described above, to a reverse seniority system (in which the least tenured justice votes first and so on to the most tenured justice voting last), to a rotation or random seniority system (in which the order of voting is determined randomly). Sequential voting processes affect the level of uncertainty judges confront when they cast their vote on a case. The amount of uncertainty that judges confront when they cast their vote is relevant because this influences a judge s ability to vote strategically. Specifically, it may influence a judge s decision to join the majority coalition. Being in the majority has two benefits for judges: an individual-level benefit and a collective benefit. Individually, in certain judicial systems, a judge who is in the majority has he opportunity to draft the initial opinion where bargaining occurs. Collectively, the formation of supermajorities is attractive since the legitimacy of the court s judgment is heightened when there is consensus about a legal issue. To test the effect of voting sequence, the researchers propose a series of laboratory experiments. Laboratory experiments also allow control for relevant parameters, such as the type of voting system, risk aversion of the judges, size of the court, the level of uncertainty, and the saliency of the issue under consideration. This research will provide evidence about which judge is more likely to vote strategically given his or her position in the voting queue, and the rate of strategic voting that should occur in each of the court systems. The experiments should also provide some useful results about the social welfare properties of each system doc17844 none The four collaborating principal investigators in this project (Stacia L. Haynie, Reginald S. Sheehan, Donald R. Songer, and C. Neal Tate) will continue and expand their efforts to develop for public use a systematic, replicable database to support comparative analyses of courts, judges, and their behavior. To further this objective, the principal investigators will extend and expand the multi-country database they are creating with support from National Science Foundation awards ( , , , ). That database supports descriptive and theoretical research by the whole scholarly community concerned with courts and judges and their functions and behaviors across a number of national cultural boundaries. It also allows the principal investigators to pursue an initial research agenda highlighting substantive areas that can be fruitfully studied across many nations and many times. The development of this database rests on a central proposition: Theory and data are intimately related. As new data become available, new theories and hypotheses are created and tested. For the overwhelming majority of the world s courts, social scientists lack even the most basic descriptive data summarizing their institutional characteristics, historical development, functional processes, or institutional and individual behaviors. With little more than such simple, descriptive data, scholars might be able to answer any number of theoretically interesting questions. The database that has been compiled under the previous awards show how even a simple analysis of those data provides impressive answers to questions, such as What Do Supreme Courts Do? and how general is Party Capability Theory? The initial project contains a sample of 100 reported supreme court decisions (or the universe, whichever is smaller) per year for 15 years for a sample eight nations with Anglo-American legal systems. The principal investigators will extend the temporal coverage of the database to include the 34 most recent years of available data and to expand the national and cultural coverage of the database by adding an important civil law, non-English-using court, the Suprema Corte de la Justicia de la Nacion of Mexico doc17845 none Blooms of toxic dinoflagellates from several different genera result in outbreaks of paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP), one of the more serious of the global marine phenomena collectively termed harmful algal blooms (HABs). The economic, public health, and ecosystem impacts of PSP outbreaks take a variety of forms, and include human intoxications and death from contaminated shellfish or fish, alterations of marine trophic structure, and death of marine mammals, fish, and seabirds. These impacts are caused by saxitoxins (STXs), a family of neurotoxins produced by some dinoflagellates (and cyanobacteria) that are accumulated in zooplankton, shellfish, or fish during feeding. The chemical structure and activity of the saxitoxins have been well characterized, but their metabolic role within the dinoflagellate remains unknown. Likewise, the factors that cause variability in toxicity between isolates or in a single isolate under different growth conditions are poorly understood. These issues are best addressed through the study of saxitoxin production at a molecular or genetic level, but that approach faces several major hurdles, in particular a lack of mutant strains that are identical to toxic forms except for their ability to produce toxins. This project will identify and characterize genes associated with STX production in dinoflagellates, continuing directly from significant results obtained in previous studies. In the initial project a powerful technique called Representational Difference Analysis (RDA), a method for finding differences between complex genomes that was developed in the search for genetic abnormalities in human cancer cells, was used to generate two gene fragments (called RDA1 and RDA2) that are expressed in a toxic Alexandrium isolate but not in a non-toxic strain. One of these fragments was screened against mRNA from 15 cultures and correctly hybridized to the only six organisms that produce STXs, even though these represent five different species from two dinoflagellate genera, as well as a freshwater cyanobacterium. This strongly suggests that RDA1 is associated with saxitoxin production or regulation. In the present project this exciting and productive line of research, the ultimate objectives of which are to identify and characterize the gene(s)involved in saxitoxin biosynthesis in dinoflagellates and to study their regulation under changing environmental conditions, will be continued. Specific project objectives are to: 1) utilize rapid amplification of cDNA ends (RACE) and genomic cloning to obtain full sequences of the putative toxin-specific gene fragments, RDA1 and RDA2; 2) identify and characterize the genes encoded by RDA1 and RDA2; 3) conduct inter-and intraspecific screening of toxic and non-toxic dinoflagellates with the RDA1 and RDA2 genes from Alexandrium; 4) conduct physiological experiments to study the genetic regulation of RDA1 and RDA2; 5) perform additional Representational Difference Analysis on toxic and non-toxic Gymnodinium catenatum and Alexandrium isolates, if necessary; and 6)develop and test molecular probes which can distinguish toxic from non-toxic dinoflagellates. The methodological groundwork has been established to allow this project to proceed with a high probability of success. It is expected that the project will isolate and identify genes required for STX production, but any marker that can differentiate toxic from non-toxic strains is of great scientific and practical value. With either result, probes can be designed that unequivocally identify only toxic cells in a complex natural assemblage of plankton, and these are of use in academic field research as well as in commercial and governmental shellfish toxicity monitoring programs doc17846 none While many factors contributed to the rash of international currency crises over the past decade, many economists point to the use of pegged exchange rates as one of the most important. Such compromises between genuinely fixed and flexible exchange rates were one of the hallmarks of the post war international monetary system established at Bretton Woods, but as international capital mobility has grown pegged rates have become increasingly difficult for governments to defend. This has given rise to the hollowing out or unstable middle hypothesis -that exchange rate regimes will continually be driven towards corner solutions -arrangements comprised of either relatively free floats or hard fixed rates such as currency boards, currency unions, and dollarization. There are two versions of this hypothesis, however. One, accepted by most economists, is simply that countries will be driven away from dead center -the Bretton Woods type narrow band adjustable peg. The other, more controversial, version is that to avoid crises, countries must go all the way to one extreme or the other. Dissenters argue that smaller movements such as to crawling bands would be viable. Advocates can point to examples where such regimes have worked well while critics can point to others where they haven t. What is missing from the extant literature is a large-scale study of the relationships between different types of intermediate exchange rate regimes and currency crises. This is particularly important because there are good reasons to believe that many countries will try to avoid corner solutions. An important and under appreciated implication of the theory of optimum currency areas is that only a minority of countries are likely to be good candidates for firmly fixed or highly flexible exchange rates. For very large countries flexible rates tend to be preferable and for very small ones fixed rates are usually superior. There is a broad middle range of countries, however, where neither is likely to be optimal. This project will pay special attention to the role of politics and political institutions when it comes to managing middle exchange rate regimes. From this point of view macroeconomic policy more often than not reflects the desires of policymakers and not the equilibrium solution of economic models. In a world of increasing capital mobility, policymakers have to choose a mixture of exchange rate rigidity and monetary policy autonomy. Intermediate exchange rate regimes thus constitute a middle ground where policymakers can have some exchange rate flexibility and some monetary policy autonomy. However, if the two policies are not related to each other in a consistent manner then currency crises are likely to result. The economic literature correctly stresses how high capital mobility makes such management more difficult. We will develop a political economy analysis that shows how political considerations also add importantly to the difficulty of managing such intermediate exchange rate regimes. In this project we will examine the extent to which different types of exchange rate regimes are crisis prone and investigate how a number of economic, political, and institutional considerations interact with regime choice to increase or reduce the likelihood of crisis. We will undertake a large-N Statistical study of (i) the exchange rate regime types and their connection with currency crises, (ii) the degree to which regimes have to move away from to middle to decrease the likelihood of crisis, and (iii) the policies required to effectively manage the middle. We will pay considerable attention to the classification of various types of intermediate exchange rate regimes and will develop a new behavioral measure to compare with institutionally based classifications doc17847 none Structural estimation is vital in empirical economics. The need for structural estimation arises from confounding factors due to individual choice making and market forces. A classical application is estimation of the effect of tax changes in a particular market, where structural estimation can be used to separate supply and demand factors. This research will study how to do structural estimation without functional form assumptions, which will help avoid misleading inferences that do occur in applications. A menu of models and methods will be developed. The research will also develop statistical tools to help in selecting among the methods. These tools will evaluate the performance of the different methods using higher-order approximations, and help determine which method is best. Previous work shows that avoiding functional form assumptions in structural modeling can lead to more accurate inferences in important applications such as evaluating the effect of tax changes on labor supply or consumer well being. This research will add significantly to our ability to do structural estimation by developing methods for some of the most important models. Also, the study will show that certain of the methods have particularly good statistical properties. This research will show that among methods that are currently widely used for estimating models in both microeconomics and macroeconomics the one called empirical likelihood has particularly attractive properties. These results suggest that using this particular method may lead to more accurate inference in empirical research doc17825 none This is an investigation of the recently discovered Lost City Vent Field, atop the dome-like Atlantis Massif at 30 degrees north on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. This field is different from all other known seafloor hydrothermal fields in that it is located on 1.5 Ma crust, is dominated by steep-sided carbonate chimneys, and is underlain by significiant exposures of serpentinized peridotite. A detailed mapping and sampling program will be conducted to address the following: the tectonic and geologic controls that focus venting, the chemical and isotopic compositions of the vent structures and fluids, the indicence and phylogentic diversity of microorganisms, and whether macrofauna exist doc17849 none Seismologists have predicted that a severe earthquake in the Istanbul region is highly likely in the next 30 years. This forecast has drawn much attention in the media and raises challenges as to how potential losses may be reduced by protective measures. Decisions made by private individuals, by officials, and by engineers and builders are all relevant to this question. The principles underlying protective decision making need to be better understood, for the sake of this and many other applications. We investigate how people determine whether to purchase insurance and or invest in loss-reduction measures against risks from fire, theft, accidents or natural disasters. We examine the effects of different ways in which risks can be communicated and different frames in which information and choices can be presented; we also examine how protective decisions are affected by instructional modules that aid understanding of probability and that suggest useful general strategies for framing decisions. To estimate these effects, controlled laboratory experiments, field surveys and interviews will be conducted both in the United States and in Turkey doc17850 none The goal of this project is to identify component members of the microbial community responsible for the oxidation of CO in coastal marine environments through a combination of recent microbiological and molecular approaches, and to estimate their contributions to total in situ CO bio-oxidation. The researchers will utilize a simple method that does not rely on liquid batch?cultures, for screening and isolating microorganisms with a particular phenotype. Replicate filters will allow for the isolation and purification of active CO-metabolizing colonies. Since this method spatially separates otherwise competing populations, simultaneous recovery of organisms with different growth rates and nutritional requirements is possible, and large numbers of bacteria can be screened rapidly at one time. Cell-specific CO-oxidation activity will be determined for selected strains with time-series 14 CO-oxidation methods. Molecular phylogeny based on 16S-rRNA sequence information within the context of the large and growing 16S database will determine the phylogenetic relatedness and identity of marine CO?oxidizing bacteria that result from our cultivation program. A collective CO-oxidation rate calculated from physiological measurements and abundance estimates of CO-oxidizing organisms will be balanced with biogeochemical CO-oxidation measurements to verify that activity and abundance of CO-oxidizing bacteria can account for the total CO-oxidation that is observed in natural waters doc17851 none The goal of this PFSMETE Start-Up Grant proposal is to establish a Partnership Laboratory within the framework of the UCSF SEP that will make discoveries and build knowledge about how collaborations between the scientific and education communities can improve and articulate K-20+ science education. This Partnership Laboratory will not be a separate, independent entity, but rather a scholarly research and evaluation effort integrated with SEP s existing professional development and partnership programs in science education, thereby institutionalizing partnership research efforts. The two major goals of establishing a Partnership Laboratory are: To build knowledge of scientist-teacher partnership by expanding and transforming PFSMETE-initiated partnership research by I) analyzing the correlation between scientist- teacher partnership outcomes and different programmatic models of partnership, 2) beginning an investigation of K-12 student outcomes that result from scientist-teacher partnerships, and 3) examining the influence of partnership experiences on the career trajectories of scientists and teachers. To cultivate a partnership research community by 1) founding a Partnership Collaborative Inquiry Group of veteran SEP scientists and teachers who engage in on-going partnership action research, 2) involving scholars and practitioners from the fields of science and education research as Partnership Research Advisors, and 3) convening Partnership Collaborative Inquiry Group members, Partnership Research Advisors, and the SEP Staff semi- annually at Research Retreats to analyze research questions, methodological strategies, data analysis, and interpretation of fmdings. The effort will not only result in the establishment of a Partnership Laboratory, but also begin to build an academic discipline ofK-20+ Education Partnership, the study of collaboration between teachers and practitioners to increase the quality and authenticity of subject area education for all students. In addition, although the proposed efforts are focused on science education partnerships specifically, they have the potential for informing and promoting the development of partnerships in many disciplines. As such, these studies of scientist-teacher partnership will be of national interest, and documentation of these efforts and synthesis of fmdings will be disseminated through presentation at scientific and educational conferences, with the eventual goal of publication in journal articles and compilation into a partnership handbook doc17834 none Collaborative Proposals Vincent Roscigno William Danaher Ohio State University University of Charleston Traditional social movement theory has emphasized the importance of political opportunity and collective identity for social movement formation, and for movement stability, longevity, and success. Recent work incorporates aspects of both into a single framework, highlighting the central role of social movement culture in simultaneously fostering 1) group identity, 2) an alternative interpretational frame of cause and effect, and 3) a sense of political efficacy among potential movement participants. Little empirical attention, however, has been devoted to examining the role media may play in forging movement culture across geographic space. The PIs will examine the largest labor mobilization in U.S. history --the southern textile strike campaigns of - , where upwards of 400,000 workers walked off their jobs --and the extent to which media (and radio specifically) played a vital role in fostering a cohesive social movement culture across rural, mill communities. Indeed, the worker mobilization that occurred remains an anomaly to social movement theorists and labor researchers, given the lack of union involvement and the geographically disbursed nature of mill towns during the time period in question. Specifically, the project will investigate following: 1). Was there an empirical correspondence between radio station foundings during the era in question and strike events, even controlling for other influential factors? 2). What were transmission ranges at the time and to what extent were they heard in and across mill towns? Who owned these stations, and was there autonomy in terms of what could be broadcast? And, did mill workers have radios? 3). What national, regional, and state-level political information was transmitted that may have had the consequence of altering worker perceptions of political opportunity? 4). What was the role of radio in forging, or at least opening opportunity to, oppositional cultural messages. Were solidarity and a sense of similarity across mill towns manifested as a consequence? The project will make important contributions to theoretical debates regarding movement formation, communication technology, cultural transmission, labor dynamics, and spatial diffusion processes most generally. The analyses will be embedded in a historical context, while simultaneously highlighting broader themes and debates pertaining to the study and understanding of media, social movements, labor, and culture doc17853 none Thornton Data from the RIPEX program will be extensively analyzed and archived. Various hypotheses concerning rip current strength and unsteadiness, as well as the instability of the nearshore shear current, will be tested using these data and a calibrated version of the Delft3D model. ARGUS systems will be used to monitor two sites within Monterey Bay while offshore waves are monitored with wave rider buoys. Knowing the changes in morphology and incoming wave spectra over a two year period, the PIs will test the hypothesis that rip spacing is dependent upon the bandwidth of the forcing spectrum. Delft3D will also be used to model the beach evolution doc17854 none The central puzzle in international business cycles is that real exchange rates are volatile, persistent, and not closely related to macroeconomic aggregates. These exchange rate fluctuations are explained by the interaction of monetary shocks and sticky prices. However, researchers have not yet developed quantitative general equilibrium models that support this explanation. The first generation of quantitative equilibrium models of international fluctuations from over a decade ago document that complete market models with technology shocks have a hard time generating the observed patterns of exchange rates. This project consists of three parts which model specific frictions discussed in the literature and assesses their ability to better account for the observations. The first part considers simple frictions such as incomplete markets. The second part considers the friction due to the difficulty of enforcing contracts between sovereign nations. These contracts involve large transfers of resources, which are only backed by promises to pay later. In the third part frictions are due to fixed cost to access the asset markets. More specifically, this project introduces sticky prices, monetary shocks and monopolists who price to market internationally into a quantitative equilibrium model of international fluctuations. This model can generate volatile and persistent real exchange rates, as in the data. The main discrepancy between the model and the data is the high correlation between real exchange rates and relative consumptions while the data shows no clear pattern between these variables. This anomaly will occur in any model with frictionless asset markets because in such a model the real exchange rate is tightly linked to the marginal utilities of consumption of domestic and foreign agents. The theoretical research shows that friction due to incomplete markets, international loans that can be enforced only by the threat of exclusion from future borrowing, and fixed costs to exchange bonds and money in international markets break the tight link between real exchange rates and relative consumptions present in frictionless models by introducing a stochastic wedge between the real exchange rate and the ratio of marginal utilities. The project investigates the quantitative significance of the different types of frictions. Preliminary results suggest that these frictions can go a long way in resolving the consumption-real exchange rate anomaly and at the same time generate other observed characteristics of the data doc17855 none This research consists of three distinct projects. The first investigates decisionmaking in the presence of temptations, options that the person knows he should not choose but finds difficult to resist. While familiar to anyone who has dieted or quit smoking, for example, it is difficult to reconcile the phenomena with the rational actor presumed by standard economics. There are important economic issues linked to such temptations. For example, why do people seem to save too little for retirement? Presumably, this is because they are tempted to consume too much when younger. What is the appropriate role for public policy in such circumstances? This project will develop new mathematical models of how agents make decisions in such settings and, as such, will cast new light on these questions. The second project also considers more realistic models of decisionmaking, this time by introducing the possibility that there are some courses of action available to the decision-maker that he does not currently recognize. Many times, the solution to a difficult problem is to think of a new option, not to insist on standard ideas. In writing long term contracts, for example, the agents must recognize that they cannot foresee all possible courses of action that might be followed in the future. Yet they need to specify what should be done in specific enough terms to ensure proper performance under the contract. As with the first project, this research will develop new mathematical models for studying such issues. The third project investigates a very different issue, namely the Electoral College. While it has not happened often in US history, the Electoral College need not yield the same winner as a popular election would. Many commentators have suggested that this must make the Electoral College inferior to popular election and have advocated its abolition. Surprisingly, there has been very little careful investigation of the effects the Electoral College has and its costs and benefits. This research will characterize situations in which the electoral college is more efficient than popular election and when the reverse is true. In fact, certain kinds of regional differences can make the Electoral College a very valuable institution. For example, if the main role of the election is to aggregate the information voters have, then it is important to control for correlation among voters. That is, the information held by the 10 million voters in California would not constitute 10 million data points since the information is correlated within the state. Hence it would be important to rescale this information before aggregating it across states doc17856 none Although the ecological consequences of viruses in marine systems are potentially enormous, studies of their role as pathogens of metazoans and their effects on host population ecology are in their infancy. A poorly explored area of pathogen-host interactions is the effect of pathogens on the behavior of uninfected members of the host population, and the consequences of such behavior on host population dynamics. A lethal, pathogenic herpes-like virus that infects Caribbean spiny lobster (Panulirus argus) has recently been discovered in the Florida Keys. Preliminary studies indicate that this disease not only alters the behavior of infected individuals, but also causes remarkable changes in the social behavior of healthy individuals in response to diseased conspecifics. Behavioral responses to disease have potentially far reaching repercussions for the spatial structure, recruitment, and transmission of pathogens in lobster populations. Traditional fishing practices may also contribute to the spread of this pathogen. The goal of this project is to determine the current incidence, mode of transmission, behavioral and ecological consequences, and potential population-level impacts of this newly discovered disease. Specifically, the investigators will: (1) Expand preliminary field surveys to document the current distribution and prevalence of this disease in adult and juvenile lobsters, as well as in other potential viral reservoirs in the Florida Keys. (2) Determine through laboratory experiments whether the pathogen is transmitted among lobsters by contact, water-borne particles, or ingestion of infected tissue, and whether transmission rates are affected by size (age), gender, condition, or injury. (3) Use laboratory experiments and field mark-recapture studies to test the effect of the disease on pivotal aspects of lobster behavior, population dynamics, and spatial structure that may influence the spread of the disease in this gregarious animal. (4) Develop and implement a diagnostic immunological assay to identify infected lobsters during the early stages of the disease. (5) Incorporate the information obtained in Objectives 1 - 3 into a spatially-explicit, individual-based lobster recruitment model to determine if the aversion of uninfected lobsters to infected conspecifics, or practices employed in the lobster fishery, alter the spread of the disease doc17857 none The impact of uncertainty on behavior has long captivated the political science discipline. Political theories addressing uncertainty s influence on bargaining and cooperation underpin the understanding of regime development and inform efforts to devise institutions that deal with societies most pressing problems. In surveying the theoretical literature, however, contradictory claims appear with respect to the causal mechanisms through which uncertainty supposedly exerts its influence. A number of prominent scholars have identified the salutary effects uncertainty should have on integrative bargaining and agreement on permanent rules while other scholars have offered equally plausible arguments suggesting that uncertainty inhibits such bargaining and impedes such agreements. As a means of testing countervailing claims regarding the relationship between uncertainty and institutional bargaining, this Doctoral Dissertation Research Support focuses on the North Atlantic in the wake of oceans enclosure. The formation of 200-mile exclusive economic zones (EEZs) provides a unique opportunity for evaluating countervailing expectations about bargaining behavior and associated outcomes as a set of new regimes are established. This project examines institutional bargaining through a research design that identifies variation in uncertainty across a rich set of comparable fisheries cases. The project examines the affect of this variation on the relative degree of integrative vs. distributive bargaining and the content of duration of regulatory agreements -agreements that usually take the form of property rights arrangements. Three theoretically plausible causal mechanisms are identified generating a number of contradictory propositions with respect to the influence of uncertainty on institutional bargaining. The project specifies the observable implications of these competing mechanisms and investigate the conditions under which they operate. The results of this project will illuminate our theoretical understanding of how competing bargaining incentives are reconciled under uncertain conditions, particularly in times of crisis. With respect to institutional design, this research offers insights into the sequence of issues negotiators might be best advised to address under specific conditions of uncertainty. A better understanding of the relationship between uncertainty and actual behavior can improve the probability of forging agreement on contemporary problems of environment and development that seek to balance equity, efficiency and sustainability concerns doc17791 none The ocean is second only to the atmosphere as a sink for anthropogenic CO2. Over the last decade, our ability to quantify the oceanic sink using observations has dramatically increased. The improvement derives from two major factors. The first is the JGOFS WOCE OACES global ocean carbon survey, which produced the first high-quality, global-scale inorganic carbon data set. The second is the continuing development of improved techniques to estimate anthropogenic carbon from new measurements. Still, significant uncertainties remain regarding estimation of the spatial distribution of anthropogenic CO2 uptake and storage in the sea. This uncertainty derives from the fact that the task of unambiguously discerning the natural and anthropogenic CO2 signals is far from trivial. The estimates require assumptions that are difficult to verify and whose uncertainties are hard to estimate. Better quantification of the spatial storage pattern and the associated uncertainties is required to assess the value of oceanic data constraints on the global carbon budget and ocean model evaluations, such as those undertaken by the Ocean Carbon-cycle Model Intercomparison Project (OCMIP). On this project, a team of researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Washington, and Princeton University will perform global analysis of observation-based estimates of the oceanic storage of anthropogenic carbon dioxide. Their goal is to assess a range of ocean data to provide a well-constrained estimate of the oceanic anthropogenic CO2 distribution. Particular emphasis will be placed on the estimation of uncertainties and differences between the several approaches. This work would depend upon and extend results from recently completed and ongoing research that these investigators have been involved in as part of the Synthesis and Modeling Project of the U.S. Joint Global Ocean Flux Study doc17859 none Dale Field and simulation studies will be used to determine where upwelled water originates, i.e. solely from the bottom boundary layer (BBL) or from a thicker region of the lower layer fluid, and where the displaced surface water goes, e.g. offshore in the the surface layer or, through subduction, to intermediate layers. Five dye studies, using fluorescene and rhodamine-WT, are proposed for the upwelling region over the Oregon shelf. Releases will occur in three different locations - beneath and inshore of the upwelling jet, in the BBL beneath the jet where onshore movement is expected, and inshore of the jet, just beneath the mixed layer but still in the Ekman layer, where offshore movement and possible subduction is expected. Dye will be tracked for 72 hours. The background environment will be defined by GLOBEC cruises, at least during the first field year. Three releases from the R V Elakha will be traced during the first year. The second year will involve two larger releases from the R V Wecoma. A version of the Princeton Ocean Model, configured for the region, will be run for comparison. Particle tracing techniques will be used to model the initial, small-scale dispersion. Both idealized situations and realistic modeling will be attempted. A 2-D ocean-going model will be used, in conjunction with buoyed GPS drifters, to track the subsurface dye patch after release. The results of the study will be a set of Lagrangian observations of cross-shelf transport pathways during upwelling. These will lead to improved understanding of circulation and mixing doc17860 none The proponents will further test and develop a flow through analytical technique for the determination of Mg Ca in planktonic forams, a proxy for sea surface temperature (SST). A problem with measured Mg Ca in bulk dissolved samples of forams, is that dissolution can fractionate Mg Ca. In addition, later calcification and contaminant phases can complicate the Mg Ca signal. The flow through cleaning technique, using the ICPMS and time-resolved analysis (TRA), will allow monitoring of the Mg Ca signal as the forams are slowly dissolved and analyzed. This technique is similar in principle to stepwise heating used for 40Ar 39Ar dating and is expected to distinguish between the early calcite formed nearest the surface and other unwanted signals. A pilot study of samples from two cores taken at ~900m and ~ at the Cocos Ridge show promising early results. TRA analysis of prepared samples of G. ruber, and G. sacculifer show high initial values of Mg Ca thought to be the initially formed calcite. More calibration of the technique will be done for other samples, with comparisons to Mn contents and d18O. Finally, the new technique will be used to analyze SST in map and time-series back to the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) in cores from the tropical and subtropical Pacific to resolve controversy about the role of the tropics in climate change doc17824 none In this project researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the University of Washington will attempt to develop a method to evaluate anthropogenic changes in the carbon isotopic composition (d 13C) of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC)in the oceans, the so-called 13C Suess effect. Development of this method should permit reconstruction of the d 13C-DIC and DIC Suess effect globally using both the new WOCE JGOFS OACES d 13C-DIC and DIC datasets. These reconstructions will provide, for the first time, global coverage of (1) the relationship between the anthropogenic 13CO2 and 12 CO2 changes, ( 2) the total d 13C of DIC change in the oceans, and (3) the pre-industrial d 13C of DIC distribution. The reconstructions should also be of immediate benefit to modelers of the modern-day global carbon cycle and to the paleoceanographic community doc17862 none CAMDA (Critical Assessment of Microarray Data Analysis Techniques) was founded to initiate a community-wide critical assessment of different techniques used in analysis of microarrays. It provides a forum for a cross-section of research looking at a common data set and applying innovative analytical techniques. The conference aims to establish the state-of-the-art in microarray data mining, as well as identify progress and highlight the direction for future effort. CAMDA is a functional genomics successor of other experiments such as GASP in genome annotation and CASP in protein structure prediction. Over 250 scientists attended the first meeting. Two data sets will be made available for analysis. The conference also includes oral and poster presentations. s will be published electronically and links will be made for the analytical tools. Attendance of students is particularly supported doc17863 none Despite a growing recognition of the role of recruitment in structuring benthic communities, post-larval dispersal remains a critical gap in our understanding of the processes determining patterns of distribution and abundance in soft bottom communities. There have been many observations of post-larval dispersal, but far fewer measurements of rates or distances of dispersal and their relationship to physical and biological factors. In particular, we know very little about the scales over which post-larval dispersal occurs. Knowledge of the distances post-larvae disperse is crucial in understanding the ecological consequences of this dispersal, including its interaction with other processes. The overall objective of this study is to examine the scale and magnitude of post-larval transport of a bivalve, the soft shell clam Mya arenaria, in a small flood-dominated estuary. In a laboratory flume experiment and field experiments, the investigators will make measurements of near bottom current speeds and examine the relationship between physical factors (flow speed, tidal state and range, sediment type) and rates and distances of post-larval transport. At the end of the study, they will examine the consequences of post-larval transport for patterns of distribution and abundance by combining the physical and biological data to drive a numerical model of post-larval transport. The research will substantially advance our understanding of the role of post-larval dispersal in bivalve recruitment. The study will be one of the first to make direct field measurements of the scale of post-larval dispersal using mark-recapture techniques. Quantifying the scale and magnitude of post-larval transport under observed physical conditions will be applicable to future studies of other species and other systems. The proposed research will have an educational impact by providing undergraduate students with the opportunity to conduct independent research as part of an interdisciplinary study doc17864 none This project improves our understanding of how economic factors affect income differences across countries. The focus of the research will be on the adoption of new technology in a vintage capital context. Vintage capital is a scenario whereby new technology can be implemented only if new machines that embody it are brought on line. This is different from the scenario of homogeneous capital, where technological progress can be exploited without the purchase of new machines. Vintage capital is quite a bit harder to deal with, which is the reason that many analyses have focused on homogenous capital. The thesis of this research is that models of vintage capital can be made manageable and empirically operational, and that they perform much better than models of homogenous capital. In particular they can explain income gaps and the particular mechanisms that lead to such gaps much better. Of late there have been suggestions in the economic literature that cultural and other non-economic factors explain a great deal of income differences across countries. The thesis of this project is that a carefully crafted economic model will do quite well without having to resort to such non-economic explanations. More specifically, this project analyzes models of embodied technological progress and vintage capital. The objective is to determine the extent to which distortions to the adoption of new technology can block economic growth. Distortions are broadly understood: They could be taxes and tariffs on the purchase of machines, bureaucratic impediments to the construction of structures and production facilities, delays, corruption, red tape, etc. The project constructs a quantitative model, capable of delivering numerical results concerning the effects of such distortions: To what extent distortions stifle investments, the capital stock of a country, the adoption decisions of manufacturers, wages of workers, and the GDP of a country. The project pursues a three-pronged approach. First, a theoretical model of the adoption of new technology by individual firms is constructed. Considering many such firms the model will then be aggregated to yield the theoretical counterparts of National Income statistics. Second, the model s parameters are calabrated using U.S. National Income data. The investigator also estimates econometrically the model s production function, using international data. These two steps provide a quantitative model, which is designed to predict the extent to which distortions can stifle the growth of an economy. Third, the project considers different countries as having different distortions and then determine what the model predicts will happen to their GDP. The investigator performs development decomposition exercises, determining how distortions, educational levels and efficiencies account for GDP differences across countries doc17865 none An inevitable outcome as we move forward in calendar time and as information technology advances is an increase in the volume of data available. Methods previously developed for handling a few variables are not adequate for analyzing hundreds of variables. This research is motivated by the need for empirical tools that can synthesize the data concisely and in ways that facilitate economic analysis. The focus of this research is on factor models. In a factor framework, components that have explanatory power in a large number of series are distinguished from the idiosyncratic ones that do not have pervasive effects on the data. This common-idiosyncratic decomposition provides an effective way of compressing a large volume of data to a manageable number of factors. Statistical results currently available for factor analysis assume either the time or the cross-section dimension of the panel is small. This research develops tools for factor analysis when both dimensions of the data panel are large. We show how the common and idiosyncratic components, although unobserved, can be consistently estimated from the data by the method of principal components whether or not the data are stationary. We will develop statistical criteria for determining the unknown number of factors from the data. We will also develop tests to determine whether non-stationarity in the observed data is of the common or idiosyncratic type. We will establish statistical properties of the principal components estimator. Different methods of estimating the common factors will also be considered. Many issues in macro and financial economics can be studied within a factor framework. For example, business cycles are characterized by the co-movement of a large number of economic time series. Asset returns have been shown to have a factor structure, with idiosyncratic variations being diversifiable, while systematic ones are not. Notions such as global trends and worldwide economic downturns are used frequently. The factor framework provides a formal treatment of these concepts. By providing the statistical foundation for factor analysis of large dimensions, our results enable researchers to use hundreds of series over decades, thousands of asset returns over years, and hundreds of country level series over centuries, to estimate the factors and conduct inference. The results of this research will make it possible to make maximum use of information available without having to choose subjectively which series are to be analyzed doc17866 none This proposal addresses a number of issues involved in the statistical analysis of data from laboratory experiments in economics. Experimental work in economics is of growing importance to the field, but the statistical analysis of data from these experiments is still relatively primitive compared to the opportunities available and the research issues posed. The purpose of our investigations is both methodological and substantive: Methodological in the sense of demonstrating applications of modern statistical (econometric) techniques to data analysis issues of central concern to experimenters, and refining applications of these techniques to the special questions (and opportunities) that laboratory experimental data pose. Substantive in that a number of the particular issues addressed have been of concern in the literature, so that the new experiments proposed here, and the corresponding data analysis, should provide new insights into the issues at hand. Work is proposed on a number of issues. (1) In common value (or mineral rights) auction experiments there is a significant self-selection effect as bidders who fall prey to the winner s curse lose money, often go bankrupt, and end the experiment with very little money. As a consequence they tend to self-select out of returning for subsequent experimental sessions which can lead to important biases in the conclusions reached regarding the behavior of more experienced bidders. The plan is to both measure the bias and to explore different ways of dealing with it, both statistically and in terms of experimental design. (2) One common method in economic experiments is to provide repeated trials with payoffs within a given experimental session to provide subjects with experience with the economic contingencies involved. This leads to subjects accumulating earnings from the experiment over time whose effect is typically ignored, or when studied fails to account for the endogeneity of changes in these earnings. This in turn can lead to important biases in the analysis of auction outcomes. We plan to determine why agents are subject to such effects when economic theory suggests that they will not be, and to extend the experimental methodology developed to study the impact of earnings on cash balance effects in mineral rights auction experiments. (3) Economists have long suspected that performance in economic experiments reflects, at least in part, the experiences of subjects outside the lab as well as their demographic characteristics. We will study this systematically by collecting relevant demographic and experiential data on subjects borrowing methods developed in the statistical analysis of field data. (4) In many economic experiments there are potential interdependencies between individual subject observations associated with repeated observations of a group of subjects within a given experimental session. We plan to explore this issue in a number of different settings and to devise ways for dealing with it. (5) Often when statistically evaluating behavior in economic experiments investigators assume that all, or most, response coefficients are constant across subjects. This is likely to be incorrect in a number of cases. We plan to study ways of accounting for this response heterogeneity across individuals in such cases doc17867 none Firms move operations to locations that are more favorable for their business. Competition among state and local governments to lure businesses has attracted considerable interest from economists, as well as legislators and policy makers, regarding issues influencing relocation of firms manufacturing activities. Only a few studies have looked at how manufacturing firms geographically locate their production, and most of them have looked at small samples from manufacturing or small geographic regions. For an initial study, this dissertation research summarizes the patterns of plant relocation and the post-move performance of relocated plants in the U.S. manufacturing industries over the period - using non-publicly available plant and firm level data from the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD) or the Census of Manufactures (CM). Focusing on an individual firm s decision to relocate, this research tabulates and analyzes information on the relocation of firm s manufacturing activities in the following three subprojects. First, the research assesses the relative importance of the relocation across industries and regions by constructing industry level measures of entry, relocation, and exit. The study examines if relocation shows different patterns in plant openings and closings compared to de novo entry and permanent exit. Second, the research studies the characteristics of relocated plants and the decision to relocate. To analyze characteristics of individual firms geographic shifts of production process, the research focuses on new production facilities for existing firms to produce a product in a new location. Estimation based on econometric models will demonstrate how taxes, unionization, factor prices, ownership, and other geographic and plant specific characteristics affect the relocation decision. Third, the research investigates the impact of geographic shifts on the firms by comparing the growth rates of output and productivity for newly relocated plants to those for existing plants in the original location. The inverse growth-age relation suggested by Jovanovic s ( ) firm-learning model is tested for relocating plants to examine whether the inverse growth-age relation observed among young firms holds also for the relocating plants that start over in a new space doc17868 none Auctions are of growing practical and theoretical importance in economics. Recent applications of auctions to sales of government assets have had spectacular success: Led by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the U. S. government has conducted a number of sales of air wave rights raising a total of $23.9 billion in selling over 10,000 licenses between July and July . Even more spectacular, in an auction ending in April , the British government raised 22.5 billion pounds ($35.53 billion) from the sale of third generation mobile phone licenses. Thus, auctions promise to both increase seller revenue and lead to more efficient allocation of assets (delivering assets to the buyers who value them the most). Further, auctions play a prominent role in the theory of exchange as they remain one of the simplest and most familiar means of price determination in the absence of intermediate market makers. And they serve as valuable illustrations, and one of the most prominent applications, of the theory of games (strategic interactions) in cases where agents possess private information (i.e., information which rival agents are not privy to). In spite of these successes there remain a number of open questions regarding optimal auction design. The research will involve both theoretical and experimental studies of a number of open questions in auction design. These include: 1. Comparing the efficiency of alternative forms of the multi-object Vickrey auction, an auction structure which, in theory at least, can deliver 100% efficiency when alternative auction structures fail to do so. What past research has shown is that the details of the auction design canmake it easier for bidders to approach the 100% efficiency goal. We will continue our study of these issues. 2. Investigating alternative auction forms for cases where one or more bidders place a somewhat higher value on the objects for sale than do rival bidders. In cases such as these there is a tendency for the advantaged bidder (even when this advantage is very small) to scare off rivals, which can lead to unnecessarily low selling prices for the objects in question. Alternative auction forms promise to help alleviate this problem. 3. Investigating multi-unit demand auctions in which there exist synergies, or complementarities, between the items up for auction. Such auctions create numerous problems in achieving efficient auction outcomes. 4. Understanding the effects of bidding in teams, as opposed to individual bidders. Most past auction experiments have focused on the latter, whereas in many real world setting bidding is done in teams doc17869 none Many consequential decisions are made by groups, from jury decisions over the guilt and innocence of defendants (Pennington ). An unfortunate reality of group decision making is that collective decisions are often beset by flaws, leading innocent people to be incarcerated and those in poor health to become sicker rather than healthier. One category of factors that leads groups to make faulty decisions is the manner in which information is sought, shared, and processed in a social context (Janis, ). Given the magnitude of the consequences of group decisions, it is important to consider how groups can seek, share, and process information in a more systematic and less biased manner. The purpose of the current research is to gain a better theoretical and practical understanding of the role of counterfactual thinking, or thoughts about what might have been or what almost happened, in influencing group decision making. Counterfactual mind-sets are expected to increase the propensity of groups to engage in mental simulations and consideration of alternatives. We predict that activating a counterfactual mind-set will improve the decision making accuracy of groups. The proposed program of research explores the nature, boundary conditions, and range of applications of activating a counterfactual mind-set in group decision making and problem solving contexts. The project will involve a series of controlled, experimental studies that establish the causal relationship between counterfactual mind-sets and group decision making processes and outcomes doc17870 none O Brien Ocean surface turbulent fluxes will be examined for climate-related variability. SSTs, winds, and pressures are typically examined in such studies. The observed changes in winds (speed and direction) and SSTs alter turbulent surface fluxes, which have a far-reaching influence on regional climatologies. It is expected that surface turbulent fluxes (stress, sensible heat, and latent heat) are more directly linked to climate-related changes than winds and pressures. Similar approaches will be applied to two overlapping periods. We will objectively derive a high quality set of monthly surface fluxes (and related fields), covering to , for the global oceans north of ~30 degrees S to examine variability on a wide range of spatial and temporal scales (seasonal to decadal). We will also create similar daily fields (including surface radiative fluxes) from July 22, through , with greater spatial resolution. Our goal is to produce the most accurate flux fields available. Variability on many time scales will be identified by applying traditional techniques such as Empirical Orthogonal Functions to appropriate regions. The location and time scale of the variability in turbulent fluxes, surface winds, and SSTs will be associated with known climate related oscillations. These objective analyses will provide insight into the processes through which surface fluxes, winds and SSTs are connected to climate change. The surface flux data set will also facilitate a wide range of studies relating ocean surface flux variability to regional climate change. In order to reduce the know biases in reanalysis surface fields, in-situ (ship and buoy) and satellite observations will be objectively combined to create a better turbulent-flux product. The surface flux fields developed though this study can be used to help validate flux fields created with couple ocean-atmospheric models. The satellite-related surface flux fields used in this study will be indirectly validated in-house by forcing a high resolution ocean model for the Gulf of Mexico, and our monthly products will be validated externally by long-time collaborators. Our in-situ based monthly products will be compared to the satellite products. All of the objective fields will be made publicly available doc17871 none Every day in the United States, on average, three communities reach a sufficient state of concern to contact their state health department for the investigation of a suspected cancer cluste, ran unusual and unexplained increase in the occurrence of cancer in space and time. State health departments investigate about a third of these cases in one way or another, but find that very few (about 1%) present suspect cancer rates. However, these cases of community concern and health department response present an effective circumstance in which to investigate risk perception, risk communication, and public participation in risk analysis. This project is the continuation and expansion of an established research effort designed to examine the social and psychological circumstances surrounding citizen-initiated cancer cluster investigations, with an emphasis on two aspects: the effects of state health department communications, and the experiences of citizens and officials in public meetings held during these cases. To meet the first goal, the project will integrate, and develop, two primary theoretical models, one central to risk perception (the Psychometric model) and one central to information processing and decision making (the Heuristic-Systematic model). Previous work in this effort has examined a series of five such cases. This expansion will use mail and phone survey methods to look at a larger and more diverse set of cluster investigations (about 50), enabling a comparison across cases. The analysis will continue the refinement of a model that describes the effects of information provided to communities in these cases, and will also evaluate the effects of the specific circumstances unique to theses cases (e.g., types of cancer, suspected causes). The analysis will also focus on the different communication techniques used by various state health departments to convey the results of their epidemiological investigations. To meet the second goal, a set of five cases will be more deeply studied with an emphasis on the public meetings that are almost always an important feature of these community experiences. That effort will make further use of mail and phone survey methods, and will also make use of extensive interviews and focus groups. Overall, the project is expected to provide a detailed examination of how information is conveyed in these cases, and how citizens make use of information to reach, or modify, their orientation toward concerns about cancer rates. Relative to scientific interests in risk perception, one of the most interesting aspects of this investigation resides in the fact that cluster cases almost always present a circumstance in which the scientific evidence indicates little or no risk, yet that evaluation is couched in the probabilistic language of cancer epidemiology. This investigation will advance scientific understanding of how individuals react to this form of information, a problem that has been a long-standing concern in the fields of psychology, social-psychology, and risk communication. In more practical terms, this project is also designed to evaluate the methods by which this form of information is provided to communities. The analysis will illuminate the more effective means of communicating the results of epidemiological studies and as such will provide important and useful feed-back for those who are charged with that work. The project s ultimate goal is that this kind of information will be communicated more effectively and the communities involved in such cases will be better served doc17872 none The trend toward international financial market integration has accelerated over the past decade. The effects of global market integration on asset prices is obviously an important issue for both policy-making and research reasons. Are equity prices being priced more as an asset in a single world market or are they still priced according to benchmarks from their own domestic country? And if equity markets are evolving towards a common integrated market, what do the effects on asset prices imply about traditional assumptions about the diversification potential of foreign assets? These general questions are the focus of a large literature spanning both macroeconomic and financial research. This project intends to take a different approach to these questions, however. It is commonly argued that the higher costs of foreign stocks interfere with global market integration. These costs are usually argued to be one of two kinds: (1) direct transactions costs of going to foreign markets and paying possibly higher taxes and fees; or (2) informational costs of learning about a foreign firm and its growth potential. This project examines a set of foreign stocks that are largely devoid of significantly higher costs along these two dimensions. The investigator builds a unique data set with information about foreign companies that cross-list their stocks in the U.S. through so-called ADR (American Depositary Receipt) programs. Acquiring these foreign stocks is no more costly than acquiring domestic stocks. Moreover, foreign firms that list these stocks on the NYSE must go through the same disclosure requirements as a domestic US firm, including following the same accounting standards. Therefore, these foreign stocks on domestic markets provide a unique opportunity to directly study the effects of global market integration on asset pricing and on the potentials for gains from international diversification. The data set is unique because it provides a full time series for the price of the foreign companies both at home and in the U.S. This project consists of three parts. The first part of the project focuses upon the effects of financial integration on asset pricing relationships. The issue of foreign stocks in the US market has been associated with a casual empirical observation: the stock price of the parent company tends to covary more positively with the US market after cross-listing. If these anecdotal stories are true, they are important for understanding international equity pricing, and thereby bear on most policy issues concerning international financial markets. This part of the project examines the question of whether greater international financial integration in the form of cross-listings of stocks has affected international equity pricing. It also calculates the welfare gains for international equity markets before and after integration. The second part of the project focuses more directly on the scope for diversification in the face of greater integration. This question is important for policy issues ranging from retirement and its associated social security questions to international allocation of capital issues. The project uses a time series of about foreign firms cross-listed stock price in the US and match these with their counterparts on their own markets. This allows a comparison of asset pricing behavior before and after cross-listing. A Bayesian approach is used that allows the calculation of what investors would choose once these stocks are issued in the U.S. and thereby address two different fundamental questions. First, comparing the degree of integration between the US and a given foreign market before and after cross-listing, what are the diversification gains from the increased integration? This question is important because the existing literature has generally compared gains only relative to perfect integration. Second, would US investors who hold cross-listed foreign stocks still choose to hold additional foreign stocks that are not cross-listed? Obviously, answering this question is important for determining whether domestic investors really need to hold assets obtained directly from foreign stock exchanges to be optimally diversified. The third part of the project asks: Has global integration through cross-listing improved the domestic resident s ability to hedge consumption risk? It addresses this issue by testing whether the variability of consumption growth that is explained by these stocks is significantly higher than the variability of the general foreign index. Addressing these issues is important since studies of international diversification from a macroeconomic viewpoint have focused upon the sharing of consumption risks. To the extent that international portfolio allocation has been considered, it has been to ask what assets would support the sharing of consumption risks. No study to date has examined the direct effects of market integration through cross-listing on the ability to insure consumption risk doc17873 none The study of computer networks, while a relatively young science, is no different from any scientific inquiry and as such needs to be built on top of a theory-validated-by-experiment foundation. In this award we focus on the use of computer-based simulation which provides the greatest flexibility in creating a general experimentation environment. Simulation offers several important challenges, however. First is the fact that the Internet is an ever changing, highly heterogeneous environment that is typically very difficult to model. Second is the question of how to faithfully reflect the large scale of the Internet in a computer-based simulation. We are primarily interested in addressing this latter challenge in this research. Our interest in large-scale network simulation is motivated by the fact that we view network simulation as an important tool to understand the true effect of a new protocol, mechanism, network service, or application when widely deployed on a large network such as the Internet. It is clearly problematic to simply extend conclusions derived from small simulations and make inferences regarding effect and behavior when extended to a large scale. While simulation of networks at the scale of the Internet remains infeasible today, there has been considerable progress made in the last few years in increasing the scale capability of network simulations. Our work uses this improved scaling capability as a starting point. This award represents an effort to go beyond the question of how to perform a large scale simulation run and address the question of how to perform a large-scale simulation experiment. A simulation experiment typically consists of multiple related runs and is also defined by a specific validation and or evaluation objective (e.g., what will happen if an ISP enables a certain queue management algorithm in all its routers). We note that our work focuses primarily on packet-level discrete-event simulation, as opposed to other approaches that allow scaling through aggregation and approximation. Our goal is to understand the limits of faithful packet-level discrete event simulation as a vehicle for experimentation and validation. With the goal of investigating the question of how to perform large-scale simulation experiments we focus on two principal areas of research: 1. We will develop and analyze techniques that allow for the efficient execution of multiple network simulation runs. A key observation is that the multiple runs that make up an experiment are often related. Exploiting this fact, we will develop techniques to allow computations from one run to be reused in other runs, thereby reducing the amount of time to complete a set of runs. Our preliminary work demonstrates the feasibility of this approach. We note that while many of our basic ideas can be applied to simulations in general, the specifics of their efficient instantiation is very much domain dependent. Much of the research in this project will focus on exploiting this idea in the context of network simulations for specific, important classes of network protocols and architectures. We consider two specific approaches, one based on the use of updateable simulations and the other based on simulation cloning. 2. Our second area of research uses as a starting point a presumed ability to perform large-scale network simulation experiments. The main question we ask is how large should a simulation experiment be in order for one to reach correct ``Internet-scale conclusions? This is admittedly a very hard question to answer. We feel, however, that recent advances in large-scale network simulations have made it possible to finally begin to address this question. We are now capable of considering the effect of non-trivial scaling of a network simulation on the results derived from it. The goal of this work is to develop and analyze a systematic, well-motivated approach for answering the how large is large-enough? question. We present a strawman approach which will represent the starting point of our investigation. We also provide experimental evidence demonstrating how scale can affect simulation results doc17835 none This project will complete an effort to calibrate isotope and trace element chemistry in the skeletons of sclerosponges as proxies for temperature and salinity. The study will measure Sr Ca and Mg Ca as well as O and C isotopes in sclerosponge skeletons from Discovery Bay, Jamaica previously stained in the field and for which continuous water temperature and composition data are available. In addition sclerosponge skeletons from different water depths at Lee Stocking Island will be analyzed to reconstruct the thermocline structure doc17875 none As more is discovered of the extent and nature of the large scale venting and circulation of hydrothermal waters through the oceanic crust, delineation of abiotic chemistries from subsurface biogeochemical cycles has become increasingly blurred in some senses, yet clearly intertwined in others. Consideration of the chemistry of organic compounds in aqueous hydrothermal fluids currently poses many uncertainties and intriguing questions. The deliberately constrained laboratory experimental approach of this study will use flexible-cell hydrothermal vessels to investigate a number of key chemical objectives: i) measurement of calcite solubility at temperatures and pressures appropriate to the conditions experienced during the hydrothermal alteration of oceanic basalts, ii) determination the mineral catalyzed rates of abiotic reduction of CO2 to CH4 and iii) evaluation of the influence of the thermodynamic activity of water on the effectiveness of catalytically active minerals on the abiotic formation of reduced carbon compounds. Interpretation of the results of these investigations has impact upon topics as seemingly diverse as the mid-ocean ridge carbon cycle, the geological sequestration of excess carbon dioxide, the existence of life in extreme environments and even its origin doc17876 none Asner This research will use advances in technology, theory, and vegetation-radiation models to determine the structural and chemical properties of tropical forest canopies from aircraft and spacecraft vantage points. The research will be carried out in forests of the Hawaiian Islands, that include unique species diversity, broad ranges of climates and soil types, and intensive ongoing biogeochemical research. Measurements of canopy structure and chemistry will be carried out at multiple ecological scales and across a range of Hawaiian forests conditions. Remote sensing measurements will then be obtained from a helicopter hovering above the canopy, from the aircraft-based AVIRIS instrument at 20 km altitude, and from the spaceborne Hyperion sensor. Forest structure and chemistry in a broader set of ecosystems will also be evaluated with the aircraft and satellite sensors, and checked with intensive ground and helicopter measurements. This approach offers the possibility of assessing spatial variation in canopy characteristics and ecosystem properties from the top down. Rather than being limited to a few discrete sites, it should be possible to use these new remote sensing observations to identify the magnitude and structure of spatial variation in biogeochemical properties of ecosystems. This research also will contribute to integration of remote sensing, biophysical modeling, and ecosystem ecology, and to the education of students. The results are expected to improve understanding of how forest canopies can be studied at large spatial scales, and how the measurements can be used to assess the contribution of different forest canopy conditions to ecosystem services in the region. Vitousek This research will use advances in technology, theory, and vegetation-radiation models to determine the structural and chemical properties of tropical forest canopies from aircraft and spacecraft vantage points. The research will be carried out in forests of the Hawaiian Islands, that include unique species diversity, broad ranges of climates and soil types, and intensive ongoing biogeochemical research. Measurements of canopy structure and chemistry will be carried out at multiple ecological scales and across a range of Hawaiian forests conditions. Remote sensing measurements will then be obtained from a helicopter hovering above the canopy, from the aircraft-based AVIRIS instrument at 20 km altitude, and from the spaceborne Hyperion sensor. Forest structure and chemistry in a broader set of ecosystems will also be evaluated with the aircraft and satellite sensors, and checked with intensive ground and helicopter measurements. This approach offers the possibility of assessing spatial variation in canopy characteristics and ecosystem properties from the top down. Rather than being limited to a few discrete sites, it should be possible to use these new remote sensing observations to identify the magnitude and structure of spatial variation in biogeochemical properties of ecosystems. This research also will contribute to integration of remote sensing, biophysical modeling, and ecosystem ecology, and to the education of students. The results are expected to improve understanding of how forest canopies can be studied at large spatial scales, and how the measurements can be used to assess the contribution of different forest canopy conditions to ecosystem services in the region doc17877 none LAY SUMMARY; ION CHANNELS in HIPPOCAMPAL ASTROCYTES. Harold K. Kimelberg and Min Zhou Voltage gated ion channels for the small cations sodium (Na+ ) and potassium (K+ ) are responsible for the wave of depolarization that travels down the neuronal axon and excites other neurons to which it is linked by synapses, where the depolarization releases neurotransmitters which rapidly diffuse across the synaptic cleft to stimulate the next neuron, and so on,. The formation of circuits by such connected neurons are thought to underlie how the brain works. The properties of the Na+ and K+ ion channels in neurons have been extensively studied. The other major type of brain cells are called glia and they are not excitable. Current studies have now shown that these cells can contain the same type of voltage sensitive sodium and potassium channels as are found in neurons, and also voltage dependant chloride channels. This is surprising as the function of these channels is thought to be to modulate neuronal excitability and the glia are unexcitable. This project will use a freshly isolated preparation of one of the main kinds of glial cells the astroglia to identify what ion channels are present in these cells and to help understand their functions. Our work to date shows that this preparation can be divided into two different classes of astroglia based on a different repertoire of channels. Knowledge of the detailed properties of these channels will give us important clues as to their functions. We will test one hypothesis that one type of astrocyte but not the other has K+ channels and Cl- channels designed to allow it take up K+ plus Cl- when K+ is released via the outward rectifying K+ channel on neurons during impulse conduction. (293 words doc17878 none Land use decisions by smallholders are an important influence on landscape change in the Brazilian Amazon and are a major cause of forest clearance. This research project will examine the factors that influence smallholder land use decisions to enable a fuller understanding of the patterns and processes of landscape change underway in this area. The 27-month project will begin with two follow-up surveys for previous studies to provide a systematic, longitudinal and comparative analysis of changing patterns of household land use in areas undergoing intensive deforestation pressures. These studies will be a 10-year follow-up survey of 240 rural households in Rondonia and a 5-year follow-up survey of 261 rural households in Para. The panel data collected will then be used to specify a dynamic behavioral model of landscape change. Using GIS software, this predictive model will be used to simulate the landscape evolution arising from the aggregated impacts of individual household land use decisions. The model will be validated using remote sensing data, and adapted into a visualization program to aid researchers and policy-makers in understanding the landscape impacts of different factors affecting smallholder land use decisions. Ultimately the research will explore new theoretical ground at the nexus of neoclassical economic, demographic, and political ecology interpretations of landscape change. Rising rates of tropical deforestation in the Amazon region, and elsewhere, raise concerns about loss of biological, genetic, and cultural diversity, increasing carbon dioxide emissions and global climate changes, and a host of regional impacts from soil erosion and river contamination to disruptions in local meteorological regimes. Between 30% and 50% of the forest clearing in the Amazon is caused by small-scale commercial shifting cultivators and ranchers. Although such smallholders have been the subject of considerable field research, surprisingly little is known about the dynamics of their farming systems and land use decision-making. With a few exceptions, most of this research has focused on one-time case study snap-shots , in which long-term patterns are inferred from cross-sectional data. This project will provide a genuine longitudinal analysis of data drawn from two distant and different settlement frontiers in the Amazon, capturing the range of diverse factors influencing the process of landscape change in this imperiled rainforest region doc17879 none Fine The goal of this project to estimate the uncertainties for individual tracer ages, and to associate differences in the magnitude of these uncertainties with known circulation phenomena. The focus is on thermocline and intermediate water masses, using World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) chlorofluorocarbon and tritium helium-3 data that have recently become available. Tracer ages are a measure of the ocean s ability to transport atmospheric constituents into the interior. Isopycnal mixing rates will be calculated for regions of the subtropical gyres where isopycnal mixing can significantly alter tracer ages. Errors in tracer ages arise from analytical, source function, and other factors. Here a differentiation will be made between errors in tracer ages and distributions. The effect of errors on tracer age distributions is small compared with effects of oceanic processes. Depending on the extent and pathways of mixing, a tracer can exhibit a broad distribution of ages within a given water mass. Mixing, therefore, compromises the ability to interpret tracer ages; i.e., the elapsed time since a water parcel was in contact with the atmosphere. Mixing histories will be assessed by analyzing distributions of tracer ages with an accepted theoretical framework. Isopycnal mixing rates and Peclet numbers will be calculated for sub-regions of the subtropical gyres. These values will be compared to tracer age distributions and non-linear mixing terms. The work will be extended using a high resolution numerical model of the North Atlantic with an assumed stationary circulation. This will permit analysis of simulated CFC and ideal ages, their distributions, comparison with observations, and assessment of ventilation and mixing in the model. Results from the proposed multiple tracer approach will contribute toward quantifying the rate at which the ocean takes up atmospheric gases, for example, CO2 doc17721 none Recent investigations of the biogeochemistry of iron in the ocean has spurred interest in the interaction of atmospherically sourced bioactive elements including iron, zinc, cobalt and copper on the speciation, organic complexation and bioavailability of these trace metals in surface seawater. In conjunction with a planned field expedition to the central western Pacific (NSF - Measures, Landing and Cutter) this collaborative research effort will employ a range of electrochemical and mass spectrometric based analytical techniques uniquely sensitive to the sub-nanomolar concentrations of the elements Fe, Co, Zn and Cu found in surface seawater. The use of competitive ligand equilibration experiments along with the sensitive voltammetric stripping analyses used in the electrochemical studies will provide relative indication of the binding strength of organic ligands either produced during surface phytoplankton blooms or found in atmospheric precipitation or dry deposition doc17881 none A time immemorial question in international economics asks what determines the relative price of a good, or a basket of goods, in one country vis-a-vis another. The first generation of empirical work, utilizing primarily consumer price indices, has documented large and persistent deviations from purchasing power parity (PPP). The outcome has been more one of raising additional questions than providing answers. The research agenda proposed here follows a second generation of work taking the next logical step: examining panel data on local currency prices of literally thousands of individual goods and services across many different countries. This project blends theoretical and empirical analysis to better understand how relative prices of individual goods evolve over time, how this relates to the behavior of aggregate relative prices, and what this tells us about nominal exchange rates. This project consists of three related parts. The essence of each is new data on many goods and services across many countries and time periods. An important goal of the project is to make these data available publicly. The first part focuses on the European Union, studying good-by-good deviations from the Law-of-One-Price for over 5,000 goods and services for the years , , and . It finds that between most countries there are roughly as many overpriced goods as there are underpriced goods. This phenomenon is stable across time, in spite of relatively large swings in nominal exchange rates. Equally weighted averages of Law-of-One-Price deviations are small, especially after controlling for national income levels. CPI-weighted averages are also small, indicating that deviations from Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) are small. Cross-sectional dispersion, in contrast, is large, but it is related to economically meaningful characteristics of goods such as international tradability, tradability of factors of production and the competitive structure of the markets in which the goods are sold. The second part extends the work to 122 cities across 79 countries. Compared to Europe, we find both similarities and differences. We find, as others have, that price levels are lower in relatively poor countries. When we distinguish between traded and non-traded goods we find that the latter play a dominant role in explaining the behavior of aggregate international relative prices. A decrease in the overall level of price dispersion between and , for instance, is primarily attributable to convergence in the prices of non-traded goods. The third project models the dynamics of microeconomic prices. Preliminary results find that the half-lives of deviations from the Law-of-One-Price are less than 1 year for most goods. This differs from previous work based on aggregate price indices, which has produced estimates between 3 and 5 years. Further dynamic reconciliation of our data, both across time and data sets, remains work-in-progress. Once complete, this reconciliation will open up many new lines of inquiry doc17882 none Analysis of the development of democracy in the advanced industrialized world has repeatedly pointed to the role of social protest and civic organization in expanding the franchise and consolidating the liberal rights associated with democracy. Consequently, the extent and nature of protest in post-authoritarian states might be expected to have an important impact on the development of democracy there. Yet so far there has been little research that gives us a systematic understanding of either how much, or what kind of protest has accompanied economic reforms and democratization in the East. As a result, the theory of the causes of protest and passivity, and their impact on democratization has been slow to develop. This Doctoral Dissertation research addresses the problem in two ways. First, it develops and makes available to other researchers a searchable database of strikes, hunger-strikes, demonstrations and other forms of protest that took place across the 89 regions of the Russian Federation between and . This original dataset will considerably enhance the scholarly community s ability to analyze in detail political protest in one of the largest post- authoritarian states. Second, it develops a theory of protest and passivity that integrates elite politics into the model. Protest mobilization is hypothesized to be a function of bargaining between central and regional elites and of political competition among elites at the regional level. These hypotheses are tested quantitatively using the database and qualitatively using a series of case studies. If support is found for the theory that intra-elite politics is driving mass politics, scholars will have gained insight into the top-down rather than bottom-up nature of much of mass politics in post-authoritarian societies and will need to reassess the relationship between political protest and democratization in light of this finding Funding from the NSF contributes to the research by supporting travel to and around Russia that is essential both to the development of the database and to the testing of hypotheses about mobilization. The database is being developed with a collaborator in Moscow. On-going collaboration is essential to ensure the reliability and accuracy of the data and will require meetings in Moscow. In testing hypotheses, the statistical research based on this dataset is combined with a series of qualitative case studies that permit analysis of the causal mechanisms at work. The case studies require visits to three regional research sites in Russia. NSF funding doc17883 none Novel extreme composite materials due to constituents of negative stiffness R. S. Lakes, R. W. Carpick, R. F. Cooper , W. J. Drugan Department of Engineering Physics and Department of Materials Science University of Wisconsin-Madison Madison, WI The proposed research is directed toward the attainment of extreme material properties by relaxing some of the assumptions commonly held about constituent behavior in a composite material. A composite material combines two or more constituent phases of different material properties to achieve a new material with enhanced mechanical transport properties. Effective mechanical properties of composites are determined primarily by the properties of the materials being combined, the interface behavior, and the spatial arrangement of the phases in the composite. Traditionally, the design variables associated with composites include (i) the choice of constituent materials, (ii) the volume fraction of the constituents, and (iii) the geometry of the phases. Recently, one of the writers (Lakes) and co-workers showed that several classes of composites can exhibit extreme behavior if one constituent has negative stiffness. An analysis of the possibilities in viscoelastic composite systems was reported in Physical Review Letters. Peak damping and large stiffness anomalies are possible even with a dilute concentration of inclusions, provided matrix damping is small. An experimental illustration of the behavior of a lumped unit cell was reported in Philosophical Magazine Letters. It disclosed singular mechanical damping tan(delta) [where tan(delta) is the tangent of the phase angle between stress and strain] in a system containing post-buckled tubes. A further experimental illustration of extreme behavior in a particulate composite was reported in Nature. Composites prepared with a dilute concentration of ferroelastic inclusions exhibited large peaks in tan(delta). The inclusions are more effective than diamond in increasing the composite stiffness at selected temperatures. These results point to the possibility of achieving extreme behavior in designed composites, and exceeding conventional bounds based on the assumption of positive constituent stiffness. The goal of this research is to explore the effects of constituents of negative stiffness in composite materials. We hypothesize on the basis of some initial theoretical analyses and experiments that if one phase has negative stiffness, the overall stiffness of the composite can be made large. Moreover, we hypothesize that extreme mechanical damping effects can occur if one phase has negative stiffness. Multiple methods of achieving inclusion negative stiffness are to be examined. Also, the question of stability of materials and composites is to be examined in new theoretical developments. For a composite with extremely high stiffness to be useful, it must be stable. Composites with inclusions of negative stiffness are of scientific interest in that current understanding of heterogeneous media is predicated on an assumption of each phase to have positive stiffness. Our preliminary theoretical and experimental results indicate extreme effects in stiffness and damping when that assumption is relaxed, so we anticipate that the present work will facilitate the development of new classes of materials with extreme properties, even materials stiffer than diamond doc17884 none Received theories of regional growth stress the role of firms and managers in making location decisions. In contrast, this research project investigates whether an occupational rather than an industrial approach might better explain regional growth differentials. The occupational approach emphasizes the causal role of human capital, especially as key generative occupations. Skilled workers of all sorts are less linked to specific industries than in the past, exhibit considerable inter-regional mobility and may provide a better vantage point from which to assess entrepreneurial potential than does the traditional reliance upon industries in regional analysis. To identify occupations key to regional development, the research effort uses four attributes: capturability, growth potential, cross-fertilization and entrepreneurship. Using federal and state level data on occupations, the effort will identify generative occupations for each of a set of US metropolitan areas and test hypotheses regarding the contribution of each to overall growth performance. It will also compare the results of an occupational approach to traditional industrial approaches. The research results will contribute methodological innovations to comparative regional growth analysis, expand the state of knowledge on the composition of regional economies and offer economic development practitioners an additional tool for guiding metropolitan growth and development. Billions of dollars have been spent by state and local governments in attempts to attract and retain firms, with mixed results. Encouraging the development of key occupations by working with the institutions that create and organize them (e.g. schools, colleges and Universities, training programs, professional associations) might prove a more economical and effective way of anchoring economic activity in regions than targeting industrial sectors. This research is designed to test the theoretical underpinnings of this novel approach to economic development doc17885 none We propose running a five day conference in July on the use of symbolic computation in algebra, geometry, and analysis, preceded by a two day workshop for graduate students and non-specialists. This will be a joint U.S. and Canadian event and will take place at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada. We request funds from the NSF to provide travel and support costs for participants from the U.S. The conference is intended to bring together researchers from a broad variety of areas within symbolic computation. The topics included will be computational algebra (both commutative and non-commutative) and algebraic geometry, solving polynomial equations, differential algebra, coding theory and geometric invariant theory. The conference will consist of approximately 10 one hour talks and 20 half hour talks. The one hour talks will be designed for an audience of nonspecialists, in particular, for students and researchers wishing to learn about the area. The shorter talks will be designed to discuss current developments in the field. In addition, the PIs plan to hold a two-day workshop before the start of the conference featuring coding theory and geometric invariant theory. The workshop will be aimed at graduate students and non-specialists. The conference is modeled in its scope, program and organization after the AMS-IMS-SIAM joint summer research conference Symbolic Computation: Solving Equations in Algebra, Geometry, and Engineering that was held at Mount Holyoke College in June and organized by the PIs. The Mount Holyoke meeting in turn was inspired by the special semester on Symbolic Computation in Algebra, Geometry and Analysis that was held at MSRI in the Fall of . The proposed conference will serve as a platform to present the most exciting results obtained since the summer of . We already have approved funding from the Fields Institute, Ontario Research Center for Computational Algebra (ORCCA), and the University of Western Ontario. The organizers plan to make a special effort to attract graduate students and recent Ph.Ds, as well as women working in the areas within the scope of the conference. A substantial portion of the requested funds would be used for support of graduate students and recent PH.Ds from the U.S doc17886 none Protein Structure, - As An International Dialogue: From Theoretical Debates To Interdisciplinary Races. Pnina Abiram Independent Scholar This project traces the history of research on protein structure in the period between - , as a major scientific problem in the 20 th Century, underlying not only the structural origins of molecular biology but also key aspects of biotechnology, most notably its most recent frontier in proteomics. The project documents in extensive archival detail three key stages of the international quest for protein structure: 1. The theoretical debates of the s which cast the scientific problem of protein structure in the context of historical movements, most notably British socialism, communism, and anti-fascism; the intellectual migration forced by Nazism and totalitarianism in central Europe; and American philanthropy s efforts to contain social unrest during the Great Depression. The novel aspect of this phase pertains to its documentation of the crucial process of arbitration, conducted by a dozen scientists from US, UK, Scandinavia, Holland, France, Switzerland. The project explains the arbitrator s failure to contain the debate or accomplish a sociopolitical partition of truth among the three main contenders. 2. The competition over models in the early s, culminating with the British model and the American model of , the latter known as the alpha-helix. This competition captures the post-WW2 shift of political scenery (especially the Cold War atmosphere which led to denial of visas to key protein researchers to visit the US or the UK. The project further explains why this stage had major consequences for the subsequent overshadowing of protein structure by DNA structure as the hot topic in the rise of molecular biology. 3. The empirical races over full molecular solutions in the s and s (e.g. lysozyme solved in by a team at the Royal Institution; and ribonuclease, solved by teams at the Brooklyn Polytech and Birkbeck College, London. The project explains the role of large scale government funding and team research in molecular biology in the s, as a prelude to current day scaling up into proteomics. This project provides a better understanding of international cooperation and competition over half a century, especially over the complex period divided by WW2. It also illuminates interdisciplinary research, a major feature of 20th Century science. Last, it explains proteomics, a current scientific frontier that goes beyond genomics into systematic research on the rational design of complex, megamolecular drugs doc17887 none Francioni, Joan Computing Research Association Managing the Academic Career for Women Faculty at Undergraduate Computer Science and Engineering Institutions. This award to the Computing Research Association (CRA), provides funds to support a workshop entitled Managing the Academic Career for Women Faculty at Undergraduate Computer Science and Engineering Institutions . The workshop will be co-located with the ACM s conference on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE ) and will be organized by the CRA s Committee on the Status of Women in Computer Science and Engineering (CRA-W). The workshop is planned to provide faculty members in undergraduate education information and tools to build successful academic careers. Further, the workshop will provide mentoring activities targeting women in undergraduate teaching and research who face particular challenges in pursuing and maintaining academic careers at primarily undergraduate teaching institutions doc17888 none A substantial literature in marketing is devoted to measuring the informative content in advertising, and loosely confirms that messages contain limited information. However, the economics literature has not addressed the issue of what information firms wish to convey to potential customers. That is, the literature on informative advertising has not studied the fact that firms choose the content of advertising messages. The goal of this proposal is to develop such a theory and to explore the firms incentives regarding the amount and the nature of the information they decide to provide in ads. Preliminary results suggest that the firm has a substantial incentive to hold back product information from the ad. When it does want to advertise, it wants to advertise the product characteristics that are most important to consumers. Moreover, it will advertise a greater range of features of the product the more costly it is for consumers to find out this information for themselves (for example, for goods that are infrequently purchased). The second part of the project will check whether these theoretical predictions are upheld in the data. Magazine and television ads will be analyzed for the amount and the type of information that they contain. It will then be determined whether the information in the ads conforms to the theoretical predictions. The project will further investigate the role of product quality on advertising content and the impact of competition on firms advertising strategy doc17889 none In this project, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will attempt to quantify the residence times of terrestrial vascular plant biomarkers between their synthesis on land and deposition in marine sediments. The approach will involve ultra-high resolution sampling of anoxic, annually laminated sediments and compound-specific AMS 14 C dating of leaf waxes and lignin phenols. Above-ground nuclear weapons testing peaked in , creating a large and abrupt peak in atmospheric 14C concentration that is discernable well above the uncertainty in compound- specific AMS 14 C measurements. The radiocarbon bomb spike individual biomarker compounds (or compound classes) will be identified with near-annual sampling resolution. The calendar age of the 14 C peak identified in the biomarker compounds will be compared to the known age layer in annually laminated sediments from four different marine sites to derive biomarker residence and transport times with precision as high as 1-2 years. A modeling approach will be used to examine the characteristics of the bomb spike curve, in order to distinguish between eolian and riverine transport pathways, as well as periods of storage in reservoirs (e.g., forest litter, soils, river beds, floodplains and lakes). In addition to timing of the bomb spike, the high-resolution sampling will permit identification of details of the magnitude and shape of the curves, key diagnostics for reservoir storage time as well as contamination with ancient organic compounds. The study locations will encompass a transect of climatic zones from the tropical Cariaco Basin (Venezuela), across the temperate United States (Pettaquamscutt River, RI; Santa Barbara Basin, CA; Eel River basin, CA), up to the boreal Saanich Inlet (British Columbia, Canada). These study sites vary according to drainage basin (area, topography), climate (mean annual temperature, precipitation), vegetation cover (tropical rainforest, semi-arid scrubland, temperate deciduous forest, boreal evergreen forest), and degree of human land-use impact. This proposed work should provide insights into a wide range of environmental and anthropogenic impacts on the residence times of terrestrial organic carbon, allowing results to be scaled globally. In addition, accurately quantifying terrestrial biomarker residence times will contribute greatly to the development of these compounds as geochronological and paleoclimatic proxies doc17890 none The growth, calcification, nutrition, reproduction, health and, in many cases, morphological form of reef corals and related cnidarians is the result of their mutualism with symbiotic dinoflagellates of the genus Symbiodinium, often referred to as zooxanthellae . Several different species of Symbiodinium, as well as dozens of genetically different types within at least five molecular clades have been described within the past 30 years, with at least a quarter of coral species able to harbor more than one type of Symbiodinium within their gastrodermal cells. New molecular techniques have enabled coral reef biologists to make rapid progress in distinguishing genomic similarities and differences among Symbiodinium symbionts, but research on differences in algal physiology and its repercussions on host coral physiology (photosynthesis, growth rates, reproduction, and general health of the host) lags far behind. Without such information, it is impossible to project what benefits to the symbiosis (or coral host) come from having which specific combinations of Symbiodinium. Coral reefs comprise one of the world s most diverse ecosystems, both in terms of number of species and complexity of interactions among genera. Yet, coral reefs worldwide are deteriorating: the coral colonies that provide reef framework and habitat to multitudes of fish and invertebrates are decreasing in percent cover, experiencing unprecedented incidents of disease, and showing obvious signs of stress largely in response to ocean warming. Especially alarming is the increased occurrence of coral bleaching in which symbionts are lost as the principal contributors of carbon (from photosynthesis) for host growth, reproduction and development. Upon severe bleaching, when the white skeleton shows through the animal tissue as symbiont densities decline, coral tissue biomass and energy stores decrease, host growth ceases, reproduction is impaired, and portions or entire colony may die. It is also thought that stressed (i.e. bleached) corals are more susceptible to disease. Understanding of the causative factors for the decline of corals and the processes that might promote their recovery is very poor. Particularly little is known the of the complexity and specificity of the integration of the different types of Symbiodinium with their hosts, especially which combinations of symbionts lead to greater host growth, reproduction and survival and how such optimal combinations are established and maintained. This research is designed to resolve the complexities of the coral host symbiont relationship, in terms of documenting the ability of different symbionts: (1) to provide nutrition to their host (photosynthesis of symbiont and translocation of photosynthate from alga to host), (2) to influence growth of the host, (3) to stably inhabit (=infect) different hosts, (4) to provide protection from ultra-violet light by the production of various sun screens , (5) to survive periods of higher-than-normal temperatures, (6) to photoadapt to different light conditions. The overall goal of the experiments is to be able to model seasonal and long-term changes in symbiont-host combinations, especially in regard to changes in the intact system in response to environmental change that might lead to greater or diminished physiological performance (including survival) of the intact association. The data will allow us to predict which associations are capable of surviving conditions expected in the world s tropical oceans over the next 50-100 years of global warming, and whether switching to algal types with higher tolerance levels might be a viable outcome doc17891 none This project continues ongoing theoretical research with Andrew Newman on the relation between capital markets, income distribution and the process of development. A class of theoretical models of trade and growth and income distribution are developed based on the premise that producers face imperfect credit markets. This premise is widely supported by the available data from developing countries. Moreover capital market imperfections are often cited as one important reason why liberal trade policies may not promote growth. Finally, capital market imperfections provide a natural basis for a dynamic theory of the personal distribution of wealth, and therefore this framework is particularly suited to analyze questions about the effect of liberalizing trade on inequality. More specifically, this project develops a simple Ricardian model of a small open economy with a large number of goods, imperfect capital markets and price-taking behavior in all markets. There is one final good that is produced using all the other goods, which are intermediates. The final good is not traded but all investment and consumption take place in the final good. Capital is the only input used for production of the intermediate goods. The relative productivity of different goods varies across countries, which provides the basis for trade. In the first best, each country would only produce the good in which its relative productivity is the highest and import the rest. As the technology of production is linear and there are no non-reproducible inputs, the economy is capable of long-run growth. Agents are long-lived and have standard forward-looking preferences. They borrow and lend to each other, with the interest rate moving to clear the capital market. The capital market imperfection is modeled as stemming from ex post moral hazard (borrowers may try to avoid repaying loans). This is shown to generate a limit on the extent to which a borrower can be leveraged. Each agent in the economy is initially assumed to have a particular skill that associates him with the production of a particular commodity. In the closed economy all goods will be produced. The conjecture is that in the steady state all sectors will be equally profitable, so it is reasonable to assume that the population will be evenly spread out across the sectors. If this economy is opened to foreign trade, the growth rate goes up on impact and continues to go up until the economy converges to its steady state growth path. At that point the economy should be completely specialized in the production of the good in which it has a comparative advantage. This slow transition is because the capital market imperfection limits the amount of capital that can flow into the most productive sector. The project examines the proposition that the increase in the growth rate that comes from opening the economy is always accompanied by an increase in inter-sectoral inequality and this increase will continue over a period. Unless the sectors that gain from trade were initially much poorer, this will translate into an increase in inequality of the personal distribution of wealth and consumption. It is worth emphasizing that in the first-best version of this economy, freeing trade would not increase inequality. This unambiguous result relies on the absence of labor inputs and other non-traded goods from the basic model. Once the model is extended to introduce some non-traded goods or make labor an input, the effect on inequality depends on the initial position of the workers and producers of the non-traded goods, relative to the producers of the traded goods that are no longer being produced. The effect on inequality will also be modified if people choose their occupations. If only newborns can switch professions, the dynamic process generated by the joint process of trade expansion and changes in the occupational distribution appears to be relatively tractable. Countries that have relatively good capital markets will follow a Kuznets (inverted-U) curve after being opened to trade, but countries with less good capital markets will follow an inverted-J curve (inequality will go up but will not come down in any reasonable time-scale). This framework is also used to study the impact of trade expansion (due, say, to the WTO) on inter-country inequality. If multiple countries simultaneously become more open, inter-country inequality is likely to go up in the short run, because the richer countries tend to have better capital markets. Finally, the framework is applied to questions of optimal trade policy. Since in this framework the allocation of capital between sectors is not necessarily optimal at any point of time, government policy can affect the growth rate by accelerating or decelerating the process of reallocation of capital. The conjecture is that an import tariff will always slow down growth but an export subsidy may sometimes help to raise the growth rate. The difference stems from the fact that import tariffs favor inefficient sectors while the subsidy favors the strongest sectors in the economy. The project plans further examination of a broader set of policies doc17846 none While many factors contributed to the rash of international currency crises over the past decade, many economists point to the use of pegged exchange rates as one of the most important. Such compromises between genuinely fixed and flexible exchange rates were one of the hallmarks of the post war international monetary system established at Bretton Woods, but as international capital mobility has grown pegged rates have become increasingly difficult for governments to defend. This has given rise to the hollowing out or unstable middle hypothesis -that exchange rate regimes will continually be driven towards corner solutions -arrangements comprised of either relatively free floats or hard fixed rates such as currency boards, currency unions, and dollarization. There are two versions of this hypothesis, however. One, accepted by most economists, is simply that countries will be driven away from dead center -the Bretton Woods type narrow band adjustable peg. The other, more controversial, version is that to avoid crises, countries must go all the way to one extreme or the other. Dissenters argue that smaller movements such as to crawling bands would be viable. Advocates can point to examples where such regimes have worked well while critics can point to others where they haven t. What is missing from the extant literature is a large-scale study of the relationships between different types of intermediate exchange rate regimes and currency crises. This is particularly important because there are good reasons to believe that many countries will try to avoid corner solutions. An important and under appreciated implication of the theory of optimum currency areas is that only a minority of countries are likely to be good candidates for firmly fixed or highly flexible exchange rates. For very large countries flexible rates tend to be preferable and for very small ones fixed rates are usually superior. There is a broad middle range of countries, however, where neither is likely to be optimal. This project will pay special attention to the role of politics and political institutions when it comes to managing middle exchange rate regimes. From this point of view macroeconomic policy more often than not reflects the desires of policymakers and not the equilibrium solution of economic models. In a world of increasing capital mobility, policymakers have to choose a mixture of exchange rate rigidity and monetary policy autonomy. Intermediate exchange rate regimes thus constitute a middle ground where policymakers can have some exchange rate flexibility and some monetary policy autonomy. However, if the two policies are not related to each other in a consistent manner then currency crises are likely to result. The economic literature correctly stresses how high capital mobility makes such management more difficult. We will develop a political economy analysis that shows how political considerations also add importantly to the difficulty of managing such intermediate exchange rate regimes. In this project we will examine the extent to which different types of exchange rate regimes are crisis prone and investigate how a number of economic, political, and institutional considerations interact with regime choice to increase or reduce the likelihood of crisis. We will undertake a large-N Statistical study of (i) the exchange rate regime types and their connection with currency crises, (ii) the degree to which regimes have to move away from to middle to decrease the likelihood of crisis, and (iii) the policies required to effectively manage the middle. We will pay considerable attention to the classification of various types of intermediate exchange rate regimes and will develop a new behavioral measure to compare with institutionally based classifications doc17893 none The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) will make data from the Census of Population and Housing of the United States available to social and behavioral scientists at colleges and universities throughout the country. In doing so, it will collect, preserve, enhance, and distribute data developed by the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, ICPSR will provide training to data users and data librarians in the academic community in order to ensure the most effective use of these data by the largest possible number of users. The project will enable researchers to use these data efficiently and economically for research and instructional purposes. This project has six key activities: (1) Acquisition and long-term archiving of substantially all data produced by the Censuses of Population and of Housing; (2) Re-formatting census data to facilitate use in statistical analysis programs; (3) Development of standardized documentation for census data that is compliant with the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) standard; (4) Development of new data products, including special subsamples and special summary files, that serve the needs of academic researchers; (5) Provision of web-based access to the data that will include a data-finder and custom subsetting capabilities; and (6) Provision of training and outreach activities to encourage use of the data. The Census is a unique source of data for a wide range of research topics about the United States. The Census of Population and Housing will constitute the single most important starting point for basic and applied social research during the decade of the s. Census data have value in many ways, but in brief they enable three basic research undertakings: (1) By themselves they are the basic source for research about the attributes of the U.S. population, housing stock, and economy, for the nation as a whole as well as its regions. Only the Census permits comparable research in depth for the entire country and its regions, and it includes detailed information for minority and other special populations. (2) Census data will be needed to provide contextual information for other types of investigations, such as research on school, hospital, and administrative records. Census data also provide denominators for calculating rates and proportions in many areas of research, not to mention the traditional role in apportioning legislative representation, and in the study of reapportionment. (3) The data will be vital to the design of research, including as the most obvious example the drawing of survey samples. This project will collect and preserve those data, add them to ICPSR s large collection of data from earlier censuses, and widely distribute those data and information about them doc17878 none Land use decisions by smallholders are an important influence on landscape change in the Brazilian Amazon and are a major cause of forest clearance. This research project will examine the factors that influence smallholder land use decisions to enable a fuller understanding of the patterns and processes of landscape change underway in this area. The 27-month project will begin with two follow-up surveys for previous studies to provide a systematic, longitudinal and comparative analysis of changing patterns of household land use in areas undergoing intensive deforestation pressures. These studies will be a 10-year follow-up survey of 240 rural households in Rondonia and a 5-year follow-up survey of 261 rural households in Para. The panel data collected will then be used to specify a dynamic behavioral model of landscape change. Using GIS software, this predictive model will be used to simulate the landscape evolution arising from the aggregated impacts of individual household land use decisions. The model will be validated using remote sensing data, and adapted into a visualization program to aid researchers and policy-makers in understanding the landscape impacts of different factors affecting smallholder land use decisions. Ultimately the research will explore new theoretical ground at the nexus of neoclassical economic, demographic, and political ecology interpretations of landscape change. Rising rates of tropical deforestation in the Amazon region, and elsewhere, raise concerns about loss of biological, genetic, and cultural diversity, increasing carbon dioxide emissions and global climate changes, and a host of regional impacts from soil erosion and river contamination to disruptions in local meteorological regimes. Between 30% and 50% of the forest clearing in the Amazon is caused by small-scale commercial shifting cultivators and ranchers. Although such smallholders have been the subject of considerable field research, surprisingly little is known about the dynamics of their farming systems and land use decision-making. With a few exceptions, most of this research has focused on one-time case study snap-shots , in which long-term patterns are inferred from cross-sectional data. This project will provide a genuine longitudinal analysis of data drawn from two distant and different settlement frontiers in the Amazon, capturing the range of diverse factors influencing the process of landscape change in this imperiled rainforest region doc17895 none Proposal Number: Flierl MIT The proposed work will examine the interactions of jets and eddies with coastlines and shelves using idealized models based on contour dynamics. The approximate model of Flierl ( ) will be extended to include tilted and curved coasts and asymmetric jets in order to determine the ways in which ocean currents meander and form eddies as they leave the coast and go into the deep ocean. Additional studies of the interaction of rings with shelves will be done with a coupled barotropic 11 2 layer model that is extended to include the beta effect. The baroclinic model will be used to study the conditions that influence eddy detachment from a coast. In cases where steady solutions are found, the linearized contour dynamics model will be used to examine the stability of these flows doc17896 none Contemporary U.S. metropolitan areas are characterized by decentralized or dispersed patterns of land use, have generally low average densities, and are dominated by private vehicle travel. Explanations for these trends in the U.S. include an array of policy decisions that have promoted decentralization and made the private vehicle easily accessible. Increasing rates of car ownership and use is a world-wide phenomenon, however, suggesting that per capita income growth and basic economic and social trends may be key explanatory factors. This research project will investigate the relationship between mobility and urban form using international comparative analysis. The project will develop and estimate models of individual travel behavior and will test hypotheses regarding the extent to which land use characteristics explain travel patterns. Using person-level travel survey data from the U.S., Great Britain and the Netherlands, individual mobility patterns will be examined. The following questions will be addressed: To what extent to differences in metropolitan spatial form explain differences in mobility? What local spatial characteristics affect mobility, and do these differ across countries? To what extent do differences in transportation supply characteristics explain differences in mobility? How important are these factors relative to demographics and socioeconomic factors? Do relationships differ by travel purpose? International comparative analysis will permit examination across a wide variety of spatial forms and transportation system characteristics as well as across very different policy environments. This broader approach should lead to greater understanding of the underlying processes that lead to observed travel outcomes. Mobility generates great benefits to individuals and society, but it also generates significant costs. Many critics argue that current trends are not sustainable and that coordinated policies must be developed to reverse current land use and transportation patterns. Policies to increase the density and mix of activities are proposed as effective strategies for achieving sustainability goals, as increased accessibility should reduce private vehicle use and increase use of transit and non-motorized modes. However, rising per capita incomes, economic restructuring and globalization, and changing demographics may make restrictive policies either less effective or less acceptable. Thus it is not clear that efforts to change land use patterns would lead to significantly different travel patterns. This project will provide a careful and comprehensive empirical analysis that is necessary for understanding the role of spatial form in travel behavior, thereby broadening fundamental understandings of these interrelationships and helping to guide future policy development doc17897 none This project consists of four related lines of research. 1. Model drift and stochastic volatility: The project uses computationally intensive Bayesian methods to organize evidence about the sources of drift in vector autoregressions of post WWII U.S. aggregate time series. It seeks to partition drift into parts due to the systematic or autoregressive part, on the one hand, and the conditional variances of innovations, on the other. There are some influential studies in the literature that purport to affirm drift in the systematic part of vector autoregressions, and other equally influential ones that deny it in favor of drifting volatilities. Insights about continuous time diffusions lead the investigator to suspect that it is much more difficult to detect drift in the systematic part than in the volatilities. Partitioning drift into these two parts is important for quantitatively evaluating monetary and fiscal policy rules and their effects. The project interprets the evidence assembled in the light of recent theoretical formulations of drifting coefficient models that focus on the government s learning process. 2. Self-confirming equilibria and monetary policy: A self-confirming equilibrium is a form of rational expectations that permits agents models to disagree on events that occur with zero probability in equilibrium. Recent theories of agents learning deliver this form of rational expectations equilibrium as a limit point. This project extends earlier work with self-confirming equilibria to an empirically more ambitious one based on a version of a new synthesis macro model. It also studies escape routes, a new form of dynamics, and the lessons that they carry for a possible threat to our current low-inflation regime. 3. Robust control and filtering in macroeconomics: This project pursues applications of dynamic models of robust filtering and control. The aim of this work is to provide positive and normative models of decision making where the decision-maker regards his model as an approximation. Robust decision theory provides a model of caution. Robust control theory is applied to asset pricing puzzles and the formulation of monetary and fiscal policies. 4. Macroeconomic history: This project studies in depth two or three important stabilizations of inflation and focuses on the conditions that contributed to high or low output and unemployment costs of stabilization doc17898 none Rossby This is a cooperative effort with the Bjerknes Center for Climate Research in Bergen, Norway to study the formation and structure of the Iceland-Faroes Front (IFF) and its continuation into the Norwegian Sea. This front delineates the boundary between the cold Arctic waters north and east of Iceland and the warm waters of the NE Atlantic. It is also a major supply route of warm saline water to the Nordic Seas. A Lagrangian study of the inflow of warm water along the IFF into the Norwegian Sea will be conducted using a total of 60 constant depth RAFOS floats. These will be deployed sequentially from Icelandic and Faroese research vessels at the southern entrance to the Iceland-Faroe ridge to determine from where the warm waters come, and continue their transit north across the ridge and beyond into the Norwegian Sea via the IFF. The Norwegian partners will study the spreading of the Arctic Intermediate Waters, an expanding water mass that appears to be displacing the Norwegian Deep Waters that overflow into the northeast Atlantic. The observations will be used together for detailed studies and syntheses of the circulation, and they will also be immensely valuable for the many modeling studies of the Nordic Seas circulation doc17899 none Existing theories of international technology transfer suggest that industrializing nations usually acquire new technology through inward investment, and from parent firms to subsidiaries. In contrast, this research is concerned with a new model of technology transfer in which firms from industrializing nations move to the technology source. By establishing subsidiaries inside the U.S., Asian companies are hypothesized to reverse the process of technology transfer through direct absorption of knowledge spillovers from U.S. firms and institutions. Innovations that arise from these spillovers can then be transmitted back to parent companies in Asia. This speeds up the process of technology transfer. This research project will assess the extent to which Asian companies obtain new technology via this model of outward foreign direct investment to the United States. Two approaches will be used. First, a large-scale postal survey of Asian branch facilities in the U.S. will be conducted . Approximately 600 establishments will be contacted. The survey will be restricted to subsidiaries from South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, which are four of the five largest sources of Asian investment in the U.S.. The survey will focus upon the types of spillovers that are absorbed as well as the transmission mechanisms that support technology transfer. Second, personal interviews will be conducted with senior managers of the parent companies in Asia. These interviews will supply qualitative insights regarding the types of benefits that are obtained from direct investment in the U.S. Data from the postal survey will be analyzed using cross-tabulation, correlation, and conditional logit techniques. Data from the interviews will be explored via content analysis. This project will shed light on an emerging model of international technology transfer in the global economy. This model delivers technological benefits to Asian subsidiaries and their parent companies as well as employment and production benefits to U.S. host regions. The role of local business conditions in attracting particular types of inward investment will be explored via statistical analysis. In addition, the transmission mechanisms that support technology transfer will be assessed from both a local and international standpoint. Overall, the project will contribute to social and regional science by identifying the main factors that have led to the emergence of this new model of local and international technology transfer doc17900 none This research project focuses on the formulation and estimation of structural models of producer entry, growth, and exit. The data source is new; a file of alcohol tax returns that contains the date of birth, date of exit, and a complete monthly history of the dollar value of alcohol sales for all licensed restaurants and bars in Texas. In the model, a firm s sales is proportional to its profits, but transitory cost shocks make it an imperfect indicator of profitability s persistent component. Because of this imperfect observation, the model s state variable is both persistent and hidden. The state variable s persistence distinguishes this model from the many estimable models of dynamic discrete choice that incorporate Rust s ( ) conditional independence assumption. To disentangle the persistent and transitory components of profitability, this project uses the fact that producers exit decisions depend only on the persistent component. In the model with normally distributed shocks, the information in producers exit decisions identifies the parameters describing both the persistent and transitory components of profitability as well as the producer s optimal exit threshold. An important component of this research project is the extension of this identification proof to semi-parametric and non parametric environments. The project s initial empirical research focuses on distinguishing Gaussian models of entrepreneurial learning similar to Jovanovic s ( ) from models with perfect entrepreneurial information, such as Hopenhayn s ( ). Additional information in the data set describing each restaurant or bar s location and the characteristics of its parent firm suggest further generalizations of the model and estimation technique doc17901 none John Reynolds Florida State University The past thirty years have witnessed considerable change in the gender norms surrounding men s and especially women s work and family roles. More women work full-time than ever before, and even in the most traditional families, two biological parents with young children, women are more likely than not to work for pay. On many work-related dimensions women still lag behind men, including lower median earnings, slimmer chances of being promoted, and a higher average share of household duties. In the area of education, however, women have surpassed men at many levels. Girls today are more likely than boys to plan to attend college, to graduate from high school, to attend college, and to complete a college degree. These trends suggest that the basic processes underlying educational attainment have shifted within recent decades. This research examines changes in girls and boys college expectations from to in an attempt to identify the most important forces behind women s advances in higher education. College expectations are students subjective assessments of the odds of completing a college degree in the future, and they have been shown to be an important cognitive link between family background, school performance, and eventual educational achievements. In addition, college expectations among high school girls have risen faster than boys since the s, and girls today are significantly more likely to expect to complete a college degree or plan to attend graduate or professional school. The proposed research hypothesizes the faster rise in college expectations among girls is due to changes in, and gender-specific effects of, parents achievements, family structure, and local job opportunities. The data come from four national longitudinal surveys of pre-college age youth: the National Longitudinal Survey, the High School and Beyond Survey, the National Education Longitudinal Study, and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Probit models for each survey estimate the effects of parents achievements, family structure, and local job opportunities on the probability that girls and boys expect to complete a college degree. Characteristics of parents, families, and local job markets may help explain the gender-related trends in college expectations if the factors that have a more positive effect on girls expectations become more positive over time (e.g., mothers educational attainments), or if the effects of these characteristics become more positive for girls over time than for boys (e.g., job opportunities). The findings will suggest how changes in gender norms are impacting a major institution in society, higher education, and they will provide a much-needed update to our understanding of gender differences in the process of educational attainment. The study will also contribute to the current debate over whether girls or boys are more likely to underachieve relative to their talents, a debate that has relevance for educational policy at the secondary and post-secondary levels doc17902 none Recent research on multinational firms leaves some important questions unanswered. One is how to reconcile the view that most foreign direct investment is market seeking with the fact that world trade is increasingly composed of intermediate inputs as part of what seem to be global outsourcing networks. Such networks appear to be based on finding the lowest cost destination to produce a specific good. A second question is how multinational firms produce and deploy their intellectual property and other knowledge capital. Knowledge capital is central to the existence of multinational enterprises, but has been the subject of little empirical research. This research will offer new empirical evidence on the activities of multinational firms. Rather than use aggregate data on foreign direct investment, as most previous studies have done, the project will make use of data on individual U.S. parent firms and their foreign affiliates. This will make it possible to examine the detailed mix of activities that multinational enterprises perform. The project has access to data on U.S. multinational firms for the period to from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Using standard statistical techniques, the research will show how choices by foreign affiliates of U.S. multinational firms over specific inputs, including host-country labor and capital, imports from U.S. parent firms for further processing, and imports from U.S. parent firms of knowledge-capital service, are influenced by host-country factor prices, tax rates, trade policies, and other variables. This will yield estimates of the sensitivity of input choices by foreign affiliates to host-country costs and policies. These results will in turn reveal how factor prices and trade barriers influence both the relative intensity of market-seeking versus cost-seeking foreign direct investment and the foreign demand for services derived from the knowledge capital of U.S. parent firms doc17903 none This project continues the development of optimization based general equilibrium models that characterize the joint dynamics of output and inflation. This work involves both a positive and normative analysis of monetary policy. Under a previous NSF grant the investigator developed and estimated optimization based models of inflation. This project measures the relative importance of price and wage rigidities for output and inflation dynamics. In addition to providing guidance for structural modeling, the approach leads naturally to a way to quantify the implied efficiency costs of output and inflation variability, in the spirit of recent literature. The project provides new insights into the sources and the costs of business cycles and improves the design of monetary policy, as well as certain fiscal policies. The approach taken begins with a monetary dynamic general equilibrium economy and then introduces certain frictions. Examples include imperfect competition, nominal price and wage rigidities, as well as various financial market frictions. In addition, preference and technological assumptions are introduced that improve the ability of the framework to account for cyclical output and price behavior. A sample includes: habit formation, various forms of adjustment costs on investment, and variable factor utilization. There are now a number of examples where these frameworks have been taken to the data with reasonable empirical success. This project explores the relative importance of the price and wage rigidities that underlie this approach for both output and inflation dynamics. In addition to providing guidance for subsequent structural modeling, the approach leads naturally to a way to quantify the implied efficiency costs of output and inflation variability. If prices and or wages are less than fully flexible, then the business cycle will produce fluctuations in the efficiency of resource allocation that are mirrored by fluctuations in the gap between the household s marginal rate of substitution between consumption and leisure and the marginal product of labor. This gap, which is called the inefficiency gap, corresponds to the inverse of the markup of price over social marginal cost. Further, it is possible to decompose this markup into two components: a markup of price over firms marginal cost and a markup of the wage over the household s marginal rate of substitution. Countercyclical movements in either the price or wage markup, accordingly, produce procyclical movements in the inefficiency gap. Given certain parametric assumptions, it is possible to construct time series measures of the inefficiency gap and to decompose this gap into its price and wage markup components. This is of interest because the gap measure leads naturally to a simple quantitative indicator of the efficiency costs of fluctuations and the decomposition of the markup provides a way to measure the relative importance of price versus wage rigidity in cyclical fluctuations doc17844 none The four collaborating principal investigators in this project (Stacia L. Haynie, Reginald S. Sheehan, Donald R. Songer, and C. Neal Tate) will continue and expand their efforts to develop for public use a systematic, replicable database to support comparative analyses of courts, judges, and their behavior. To further this objective, the principal investigators will extend and expand the multi-country database they are creating with support from National Science Foundation awards ( , , , ). That database supports descriptive and theoretical research by the whole scholarly community concerned with courts and judges and their functions and behaviors across a number of national cultural boundaries. It also allows the principal investigators to pursue an initial research agenda highlighting substantive areas that can be fruitfully studied across many nations and many times. The development of this database rests on a central proposition: Theory and data are intimately related. As new data become available, new theories and hypotheses are created and tested. For the overwhelming majority of the world s courts, social scientists lack even the most basic descriptive data summarizing their institutional characteristics, historical development, functional processes, or institutional and individual behaviors. With little more than such simple, descriptive data, scholars might be able to answer any number of theoretically interesting questions. The database that has been compiled under the previous awards show how even a simple analysis of those data provides impressive answers to questions, such as What Do Supreme Courts Do? and how general is Party Capability Theory? The initial project contains a sample of 100 reported supreme court decisions (or the universe, whichever is smaller) per year for 15 years for a sample eight nations with Anglo-American legal systems. The principal investigators will extend the temporal coverage of the database to include the 34 most recent years of available data and to expand the national and cultural coverage of the database by adding an important civil law, non-English-using court, the Suprema Corte de la Justicia de la Nacion of Mexico doc17905 none A global wave of democratization has transformed the political geography of Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa, but the Middle East has remained dominated by authoritarian regimes, with Turkey appearing as a regional anomaly. However, Turkish democracy remains riddled by problems. This research project will focus on civil society in Istanbul, Turkey s largest and most diverse city, as a window into the problem of democratic consolidation in Turkey. Civil society, most often defined as the realm of associational life distinct from both family-life and the state, has been identified as an arena in which values and attitudes that are conducive to democratic governance, such as trust, cooperation and tolerance, are reproduced. In the Middle East, the failure of democracy to take root has often been attributed to the presence of weak or disorganized civil societies incapable of acting as countervailing forces to strong states, and to the role of Islam in public life. The central research questions of this study concern the form and extent of civil society in Istanbul, the relationship between civil society and the consolidation of democracy, the diversity of modes of participation in civil society across neighborhood contexts and different groups (based on gender, class, ethnicity, migrant status and religion), and the role of Islamist networks as an alternative avenue of public participation. These research questions will be addressed through a multi-method research design that includes both quantitative and qualitative methods. Seventy-five Istanbul neighborhoods will be selected based on the stratification of all municipal neighborhoods using rates of population change (as an indicator of in-migration) and land-value (as an indicator of class-status). A survey will be administered to a random sample (proportionate to population within the sampled neighborhoods) of voting age residents, for a total sample of 4,000 respondents. In the second stage of the project, ten focus groups of population sub-groups (e.g. women, migrants, high socio-economic status residents, Kurds, Alevis etc.) will be used to explore the meaning and implications of differences across groups in their engagement in civil society, their use of urban space, and their relative acceptance of democratic values. Finally, a case study of Islamist networks in the city will be conducted through interviews with Islamist leaders and activists. This final research stage will provide greater insight into how the Islamist networks and associations function in the city. While the survey data will be analyzed using multi-level logistic modeling techniques, the focus groups and interviews will be discursively analyzed to provide qualitative depth to questions of Islam and difference in Istanbul. This study will offer a new understanding of the architecture of civil society, the variety of associations, relationships, and local contexts that comprise it, and the relationships between Islam, civil society and democracy in Turkey. Democracy in Turkey is of critical human, geopolitical, and theoretical importance. From a Turkish perspective, the consolidation of democracy has been an ongoing goal, not only of the state but also of civil societal elements concerned with human rights and free expression. Turkish democracy is also of international interest, with Turkey s bid to join the European Union hinging on the country s democratic consolidation. Further, as a secular democracy, Turkey is a model for the Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East and Central Asia and. Based on what has so far been established by the civil society literature, it is probable that the future of Turkish democracy will pivot on whether or not democracy takes root in the public sphere, in the values and attitudes of individuals and social groups. This project will be able to offer a clear indication of the level of civil societal activity, its geographical and social distribution, and the relationship between civic engagement (in a range of arenas of civic engagement, including Islamist associational life) and democratic values in Istanbul. This project will contribute to empirical and comparative analyses of the forms and intensity of civil society in different contexts, and to analyses of the relationships between civic engagement, Islamist associational life, and the creation of democratic values. In addition to these empirical contributions, this project will enable the extension of current theories of civil society beyond the historical limitations of Western models, not only by virtue of exploring these relationships in a Muslim-majority society, but also by focusing in the effects of locality, gender and diversity on civic participation and its significance doc17906 none This project seeks to improve our understanding of devaluation episodes. The first project studies the behavior of inflation in the aftermath of large contractionary devaluations. The second project investigates how the fiscal costs of banking crises that associated with currency crises are financed by the government. The third project characterizes the optimal time to abandon a fixed exchange rate regime in response to an increase in government spending that renders the peg unsustainable. The first project uses new data to understand how the prices of different goods behave in the aftermath of large devaluations. It examines a variety of episodes employing disaggregated Consumer Price Index (CPI) data together with new data obtained from a private provider that measures prices in different countries for a fixed set of brands. Some preliminary results suggest that there are two mechanisms important in shaping the behavior of prices in the aftermath of a devaluation. The first is the presence of distribution costs (transportation, wholesaling and retailing) that drive a wedge between the retail prices of tradable goods in different countries. The second mechanism is described as flight from quality in consumption. The large devaluations are associated with sizable recessions. The negative income effect associated with these recession induces agents to substitute away from imported good towards inferior local substitutes. This substitution can induce a significant downward bias in measured inflation rates. In principle the CPI measures the cost of purchasing a fixed bundle of goods. But in practice, in countries such as Korea and Thailand, the prices of imported goods are replaced in recessions by the prices of cheaper, inferior local alternatives in the CPl. This means that there is a sudden deterioration in the quality of the CPI consumption basket that is ignored in measuring the rate of inflation. The project documents the role played by flight from quality in consumption in influencing the behavior of CPI inflation. The second project explores the implications of different strategies for financing the fiscal costs of twin crises for inflation and depreciation rates. It uses a first-generation type model of speculative attacks which has four key features: (i) the crisis is triggered by prospective deficits; (ii) there exists outstanding non-indexed government debt issued prior to the crises; (iii) a portion of the government s liabilities are not indexed to inflation; and (iv) there are nontradable goods and costs of distributing tradable goods, so that purchasing power parity does not hold. The project shows that the model can account for the high rates of devaluation and moderate rates of inflation often observed in the wake of currency crises. The model and detailed fiscal and monetary data are used to interpret several twin banking currency crises. Preliminary results have been obtained so far for the Korea and Mexico crises. The third project discusses the optimal time to abandon a fixed exchange rate regime in response to an increase in government spending that renders the peg unsustainable. The preliminary work considers two variants of an optimization-based first-generation speculative attack model. In the first variant there are fiscal costs of abandoning fixed exchange rates. These costs may represent a bailout of the banking sector, loss of tax revenues, difficulties in refinancing public debt, etc. The second variant incorporates a fiscal reform that makes the peg sustainable and that arrives according to a Poisson process while the exchange rate is fixed. In both cases it is shown that for moderate government expenditure shocks it is optimal to abandon the peg when international reserves hit a pre-specified lower bound. When the government expenditure shock is large it is optimal to abandon the peg as soon as the shock materializes doc17907 none Vary Description: This award supports US-India cooperative research entitled Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD) - A Light Front Hamiltonian Approach. US investigator James Vary, Iowa State University (ISU) and Indian scientist Avaroth Harindranath, Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP), Calcutta will develop a new approach to solve for spectra and other properties of the elementary particles, which features the union of two major theoretical tools in physics. They will derive the Hamiltonian governing the dynamics from the light-front quantized theory of the strong interactions, QCD and then, they will solve for the wavefunctions of baryons and mesons expressed as amplitudes of multi-quark multi-gluon configurations using their newly developed methods of quantum many-body theory. The investigators expect to resolve several outstanding problems in nuclear physics. Scope: This activity has the potential to begin a strong collaboration between ISU and SINP. ISU has developed strength in microscopic nuclear theory and in the fundamental theory of strong interactions, as well as strong expertise in computational physics. SINP has a very strong tradition of basic research in physics; Harindranath has extensive experience in Light Front Quantization and in Hamiltonian-based methods in quantum field theory, which are central to this research. This award will greatly benefit US-Indo contacts and will provide highly deserved support to a very talented Indian theorist. The Office of International Science & Engineering and the Division of Physics are cofunders of this activity. On the Indian side, the Department of Science and Technology (DST) supports this activity under the NSF DST joint program doc17908 none Over the past decade, aid for post-secondary schooling has become increasingly tied to merit. During this period, a number of state governments have committed millions of dollars to merit aid, in most cases dropping means tests entirely. The model for these state actions has been Georgia s HOPE ( Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally ) Scholarship. Introduced in , the HOPE Scholarship covers tuition, fees, and book expenses for students attending Georgia public colleges, and provides a subsidy of comparable value to students attending in-state private colleges, without any income restrictions. Since its inception, more than $1.2 billion of HOPE scholarship aid has been distributed to over 525,000 students. The relative price changes induced by HOPE-style aid influence several important enrollment decisions: in-state versus out-of-state, 2-year versus 4-year, labor-market versus 2-year (or 4-year). Student movements along these margins raise important questions about the effects of merit aid on student sorting. This study will examine the degree to which programs like HOPE lead to college stratification by ability race and gender. Individual sorting is a pervasive fact of life. Resources early in life determine in large part the level and quality of a person s postsecondary education. From the perspective of sorting, parental resources determine where you live and where begin your schooling, which enhance a child s college prospects. A college degree, in turn, improves labor and marriage market opportunities. Thus, to the extent merit is correlated with household income, programs like the HOPE Scholarship reinforce the effects of sorting patterns established prior to the college enrollment decision doc17909 none The symposium will explore the role of law in changes taking place in both post-industrial and industrializing Pacific Rim nations. Papers will be presented at the symposium focusing on cultural, social and economic issues that affect the development of legal institutions and legal doctrine throughout the region. The trend towards globalization stretches the significance of these issues beyond the borders of individual Pacific Rim countries. External popular culture as well as legal culture comes on the heels of expanded free trade, but existing local cultures resist simple transplantation. Many Pacific Rim nations, whether highly developed or not, are in the midst of important struggles over the place of legal institutions and legality in their responses to globalization. This award supports travel and expenses for approximately twelve scholars from Pacific-Rim nations such as The Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Vietnam, and Thailand to join with social scientists from Japan, Korea, the United States and Canada. The symposium will be held prior to the annual meeting of the Law and Society Association in Vancouver doc17910 none Owens McWilliams This collaborative project will try to estimate the large scale, three-dimensional velocity field for the North Atlantic using velocity data from sub-surface floats, current meters, and surface drifters, hydrographic profiles, and sea surface height measurements taken prior to and during the field operations phase of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE). As new measurements, such as the gravimetry from the GRACE mission, altimetry from the JASON mission, and velocities and T and S profiles from the ARGO float program become available, they will be incorporated into the analysis. The estimates of the velocities and their expected errors will be made using generalized least-square error minimization based on a priori specification of expected measurement errors and space-time covariances and or basis functions. A hierarchy of a priori statistics will be used. They will be determined from general spectral shapes for stretched basin basis functions and analyses of simulations from numerical general circulation models run for other purposes, as well as statistical analyses from the measurements. The model covariances and basis functions initially will exactly enforce geostrophic dynamics, with additional ageostrophic processes added where necessary, such as in the surface boundary layer and near the Equator. The use of slightly less constrained covariances calculated directly from the simulations will also be examined. The a posteriori statistics of the estimates will be compared with the a priori ones to evaluate the estimation procedure and the validity of the models. A sequence of estimations with expanding comprehensiveness will be made. Initially these estimates will be obtained for the mean circulation in highly sampled regions, i.e., the Atlantic Climate and Circulation Experiment and then expanded to first basin then global maps. As we gain confidence in the procedure, maps for temporally varying velocities will also be made. The ultimate goal is to create a living estimation library and software system, capable of user-chosen variants and re-estimation with new data. This project is a contribution to WOCE doc17911 none An inevitable outcome as we move forward in calendar time and as information technology advances is an increase in the volume of data available. Methods previously developed for handling a few variables are not adequate for analyzing hundreds of variables. This research is motivated by the need for empirical tools that can synthesize the data concisely and in ways that facilitate economic analysis. The focus of this research is on factor models. In a factor framework, components that have explanatory power in a large number of series are distinguished from the idiosyncratic ones that do not have pervasive effects on the data. This common-idiosyncratic decomposition provides an effective way of compressing a large volume of data to a manageable number of factors. Statistical results currently available for factor analysis assume either the time or the cross-section dimension of the panel is small. This research develops tools for factor analysis when both dimensions of the data panel are large. We show how the common and idiosyncratic components, although unobserved, can be consistently estimated from the data by the method of principal components whether or not the data are stationary. We will develop statistical criteria for determining the unknown number of factors from the data. We will also develop tests to determine whether non-stationarity in the observed data is of the common or idiosyncratic type. We will establish statistical properties of the principal components estimator. Different methods of estimating the common factors will also be considered. Many issues in macro and financial economics can be studied within a factor framework. For example, business cycles are characterized by the co-movement of a large number of economic time series. Asset returns have been shown to have a factor structure, with idiosyncratic variations being diversifiable, while systematic ones are not. Notions such as global trends and worldwide economic downturns are used frequently. The factor framework provides a formal treatment of these concepts. By providing the statistical foundation for factor analysis of large dimensions, our results enable researchers to use hundreds of series over decades, thousands of asset returns over years, and hundreds of country level series over centuries, to estimate the factors and conduct inference. The results of this research will make it possible to make maximum use of information available without having to choose subjectively which series are to be analyzed doc17912 none An exciting research frontier in ocean sciences involves the role of micronutrient trace metals such as Fe, Mn, Zn, and Co in affecting the structure and function of plankton communities. Certain bioactive trace metals - in particular iron - can influence marine phytoplankton at the molecular, cellular, community and ecosystem levels. Of particular importance is the critical role trace metals such as iron play as biolimiting micronutrients, especially in areas where macronutrients are provided to the surface waters by upwelling or vertical mixing at high rates. The focus of this project is a major month-long field effort to the Bering Sea in July to investigate the role of micronutrient trace metals (with a focus on Fe) in influencing phytoplankton communities. Researchers at the University of California at Santa Cruz will study the major high-nutrient, low-chlorophyll regions of the oceanic Bering Sea gyre and the western subarctic gyre - regions that they believe are Fe-limited. They will also examine the Bering Sea Shelf - a productive region that covers almost half of the Bering Sea. This is an extremely wide continental shelf, ranging from 500 to over 800 km in width. There has been mention of an iron curtain occurring over the inner shelf of the Bering Sea, although there are no data available to confirm this idea. There is a Green Belt of high chlorophyll and primary production that occurs throughout the summer at the shelf break which must receive adequate Fe along with macro-nutrients to sustain itself. An emphasis of this study will be to examine the distribution of Fe (and other micronutrient trace metals) relative to the macronutrient distributions in order to gain insight into the relative supply and demand of micro- and macronutrient elements in the various regions of the Bering Sea. In addition to the major field effort in the Bering Sea, these researchers will conduct a study to address the role of iron in influencing phytoplankton communities in the central California upwelling system doc17913 none This research studies the determinants of electoral choice in emerging democracies, where the number of parties is large, there is a low degree of partisanship, and volatile electorates. In such environments, how do citizens learn about issues and candidates? How do social background and economic circumstance combine with partisan ties, ideological predispositions, and media-delivered information to shape mass political behavior? What are the effects of conversations with neighbors and political activists? Is there accountability in electoral processes with these microfoundations? This project tests a comprehensive model of political attitude formation and change in Brazil, a country ideal for the study of mass behavior under multiple parties and weak partisanship. With the nation about to embark on its fourth presidential campaign since redemocratizing, the number of parties is high but stable. Although a rough left-right continuum differentiates the major parties and many voters, only a small minority of citizens expresses any partisan identification. The media are politically and technologically sophisticated, and civil society is increasingly mobilized. At the same time, more Brazilians point to informal conversations with friends, family and colleagues as their main source of political information than to any other source. The result is that Brazil, like many countries with weak, multiple parties, has very volatile and unpredictable election campaigns. Finally, Brazil is also ideal for testing the institutional sources of mass political behavior because it varies internally in terms of partisan alignments, individual party strength and electoral rules. To capture these various influences on mass political attitudes, this project proposes a context- sensitive panel study during the elections of in two Brazilian cities: Juiz de Fora (Minas Gerais) and Caxias do Sui (Rio Grande do SuI). Neighborhoods will be sampling units: 100 adults, enough to establish aggregate neighborhood opinion, will be interviewed in each of 20 neighborhoods in each city. The first wave will take place before the campaign begins, in March. The second wave will be just before the first round of the election, and the third wave will be after the second round, in the middle of October. About 800 discussion partners of the main respondents will also be interviewed. Concurrently, print media sources, TV news, and party-controlled TV programs will be content analyzed. Finally, members of the associations Iand political organizations that comprise each neighborhood s political context will be interviewed. This project will produce the first theoretically and empirically grounded model of vote choice in a milieu of numerous weak parties; that is, the first model including all the major factors potentially influencing electoral behavior. Because the Brazilian environment is matched by many emerging democracies in Eastern Europe and Latin America, our results will illuminate questions of democratic accountability, media and campaign influence, and the effects of political and social networks in many other settings as well doc17914 none The rapid advancement of networking technologies and increasing use of embedded devices has extended the scope of traditional computational systems to include intelligent control of physical environments. There are many challenges in such embedded hybrid control systems. Traditionally, the programming language community focused on modeling and reasoning about the semantics of interactions between distributed agents, while the real-time computing community focused on how to manage CPU and network communication resources so that real-time tasks can predictably meet their end-to-end timing constraints. This proposed effort integrates the Actor theory with the theory of real-time elastic control. Real time elastic control theory is an innovative approach that integrates the design of a feedback controller with the design of a real-time scheduler. Traditionally, feedback control is a prototypical example of hard real-time applications. This work allows the controller to adapt to unpredictable surges in workload by slowing down its sampling frequencies and adjusting its gains. Such workload surges are unschedulable without the controller adaptation. The word elastic refers to the dynamic changes of controller deadlines to improve the management of available computing resources. This work broke the barrier between real-time scheduling theory and feedback control theory. By integrating this theory with Actor model, the barriers between programming language and concurrency control theory, real-time scheduling theory, and feedback control theory will be broken. In addition to the usual qualitative properties (such as eventuality) handled by current formalisms for distributed systems, this work will lay the foundation for a unified framework that will allow users to reason about quantitative properties including whether the timing requirements can be met and the physical system under control is stable doc17915 none The goal of this project is the design of joint power control, rate control, and base station assignment for multimedia wireless networks. Two key aspects of the multimedia network will be considered that have been given short shrift in the past: the requirements of data and system dynamics. The project will consider 4th generation Direct-Sequence Code-Division Multiple-Access (DS-CDMA) networks. The goal is to implement dynamic assignment of downlink transmit power, data rate, and codes to each mobile in accordance with the ability of each application to use the resulting QoS. The focus is on network-wide behavior, and therefore network-wide performance measures will be considered, jointly optimized between physical and networking layers. Three main thrusts will be considered: (a) Use of multiple state automata hybrid systems models as a novel tool to control wireless network dynamics. (b) Design and analysis of resource allocation algorithms using novel pricing theory. (c) Design and analysis of parameter estimation algorithms to achieve robust network behavior. The first thrust is intended to provide a powerful tool for generating control algorithms for systems with both discrete and continuous parameters and switching costs. It will be used in this project for controlling power, data rate, and handoffs. The research in this area will extend the dimensionality of a previously studied hybrid systems approach to handoff control. The second research thrust is the construction of joint power control, data rate control, and base station assignment algorithms. This research will be based on economic theory for resource allocation, and implemented using hybrid systems. The final thrust will address the reliance of many resource allocation schemes upon unknown communication parameters such as received SINR. Three investigators will work together: an expert in hybrid systems, an expert in resource allocation, and an expert in multiuser spread spectrum wireless systems doc17916 none Youth violence is a serious social health problem with physical, psychological, and legal implications. The most robust predictors of youth violence are frequent criminal acts and juvenile delinquency exhibited prior to or during adolescence. Types of delinquent behaviors most often seen during early adolescence include truancy, fighting, and minor, first-time offenses. The negative impact of early delinquency on the legal system can be seen in terms of high costs for court time, personnel, probation services, and residential facilities. However, delinquency also affects the educational and mental health fields as well. Since violent behavior is multi-determined, interventions that identify and prevent the multiple causes that lead to violence are necessary at this time. The present study is an empirical investigation of the efficacy of a school-based violence prevention program for 6th grade girls at-risk for violence due to signs of early delinquency and academic failure. Girls from low-income, inner-city schools in Baltimore City will participate in an intensive 10-week program that focuses upon preventing violence through reducing behavior problems, enhancing academic performance, and improving psychological functioning. Evaluation of the violence prevention program will be based upon indicators of delinquent behavior and academic status following completion of the program doc17917 none This proposal, extending previous work, pursues two lines of research. 1 Expansion of the Local Rectangular Refinement (LRR) adaptive gridding to 3D and 2 Numerical Modeling of Solidification of Aluminum Alloy. The former, an adaptive grid method for simultaneous, fully implicit solution of coupled systems of nonlinear partial differential equations arises from the modeling of complex 2-dimensional (2D) physical systems, such as those encountered in fluid flow, heat transfer, and combustion applications. The LRR method will be expanded to 3D, making it a viable tool for simulating real-world 3D systems, including solidification and combustion processes. The completed adaptive code on 3D thermofluids applications will be tested, quantifying its accuracy and efficiency by comparison with a structured-grid code. The latter, a new application for the LRR method, involves collaboration with WU, an expert in nucleation theory. His work will be embedded within the existing LRR-2D code and later with the 3D code. Because microscopic material properties such as strength and hardness depend strongly upon microscopic quantities (e.g., grain size distribution), the ultimate goal is a numerical model which will predict the grain size distribution in an aluminum alloy part of simple 3D geometry, under various processing conditions doc17918 none This project s agenda is organized around two main ideas. First, that the risks associated with non-traded assets have an important impact on individual choices and, therefore on how individuals value the risks associated with traded assets. Second, that these non-traded risks have an important life-cycle component to them. In most of the investigators work-to-date the non-traded asset has been human capital: the value of all future labor income that an individual will receive. Much of the ongoing work involves expanding what we mean by non-traded assets to include housing and consumer durables. Human capital is non-tradable in the sense that it is difficult for individuals to borrow against future wage income and, just as importantly, to insure them against the uncertainty of what this income will be. Human capital has a fundamental life cycle component in that young people have more of it than old people and, therefore, face more of the risks associated with it. The investigators work has shown that these factors can be important for many outstanding issues in economics. For instance, their work on asset pricing models shows that the life-cycle pattern in human-capital risk can inhibit the intergenerational sharing of aggregate risks and thereby helps to resolve the equity premium puzzle. Their work on consumption inequality exploits this life-cycle pattern to deduce strong restrictions on how the cross-sectional variance in income, consumption, and labor supply are related to one another. This proposal describes new work along similar lines, including the incorporation of cohort-specific risks and the intergenerational sharing of these risks, the associated role played by social security, and the impact of demographic shocks such as the Baby Boom. Like human capital, most non-human capital held by individuals is either non-tradable or is difficult to trade without incurring substantial costs. Housing, for instance, accounts for roughly one fourth of aggregate wealth and a much larger fraction of privately-held wealth. The costs of adjusting one s housing stock are large. Also like human capital, housing capital also has an important life-cycle component: young households hold much more of their wealth as real estate than older households. Unlike human capital the risks associated with housing are much more tangible and easily measured. The investigators develop a model, which incorporates housing into the existing framework, and they explore the implications. Where the previous work has emphasized idiosyncratic shocks, they model shocks to housing wealth as aggregate in nature, but non-uniformly distributed across the population. They argue that this, in conjunction with life-cycle issues, has important implications for asset pricing, portfolio choice, and various policy questions. Along similar lines, we discuss the incorporation of durable goods (more broadly defined than housing), and present some preliminary empirical evidence from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. An important part of this project has been, and will continue to be, the incorporation of large- scale panel datasets on labor market activity, consumption and wealth. The distinguishing feature of this work is restrictions -motivated by our life-cycle models - that are related to age. They show, for instance, that one can uncover much about how idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks interact by conditioning on the particular macroeconomic history experienced by each age-cohort in any panel dataset. They also show that age-dependent changes in the cross-sectional variance of consumption can reveal a great deal about the stochastic process that governs labor earnings doc17919 none Accurate network traffic measurement is required for accounting, bandwidth provisioning, and detecting DOS attacks. However, keeping a counter to measure the traffic sent by each of a million concurrent flows is too expensive (using SRAM) or slow (using DRAM). The current state-of-the-art (e.g., Cisco NetFlow) methods which log periodically sampled packets are slow, inaccurate, and memory-intensive. This proposal introduces a paradigm shift by concentrating on the problem of measuring only heavy flows | i.e., flows whose traffic is above some threshold such as 1% of the link. After showing that a number of simple solutions based on cached counters and classical sampling do not work, the resarchers describe two novel and scalable schemes for this purpose which take a constant number of memory references per packet and use a small amount of memory. Further, unlike NetFlow estimates, we have provable bounds on the accuracy of measured rates and the probability of false negatives. The researchers propose to implement, evaluate, and fine-tune these new ideas. Using these ideas as a basis, the researchers also propose to investigate the following questions. First, they will investigate a new form of accounting called threshold accounting in which only flows above threshold are charged by usage while the rest are charged a fixed fee. Threshold accounting generalizes the familiar notions of usage-based and duration based pricing. Second, they propose to investigate a more general question: the computation of flow statistics at very high speeds using very small amounts of high speed memory. Examples of other potentially useful flow statistics include the number of flows, the standard deviation of flow sizes, the average duration of a flow etc. Naive algorithms to measure such quantities all scale linearly with the number of flows. Finally, with colleagues at CAIDA, the researchers plan to deploy our algorithms in real-time on 5 traffic monitors placed at strategic Internet sites (AIX, the UCSD backbone, and possibly on Abilene). The potential impact of this proposal is the development of novel and practical tools for accounting, measurement, and security. These are three central problems as the Internet transitions from a research network to a commercial enterprise doc17915 none The goal of this project is the design of joint power control, rate control, and base station assignment for multimedia wireless networks. Two key aspects of the multimedia network will be considered that have been given short shrift in the past: the requirements of data and system dynamics. The project will consider 4th generation Direct-Sequence Code-Division Multiple-Access (DS-CDMA) networks. The goal is to implement dynamic assignment of downlink transmit power, data rate, and codes to each mobile in accordance with the ability of each application to use the resulting QoS. The focus is on network-wide behavior, and therefore network-wide performance measures will be considered, jointly optimized between physical and networking layers. Three main thrusts will be considered: (a) Use of multiple state automata hybrid systems models as a novel tool to control wireless network dynamics. (b) Design and analysis of resource allocation algorithms using novel pricing theory. (c) Design and analysis of parameter estimation algorithms to achieve robust network behavior. The first thrust is intended to provide a powerful tool for generating control algorithms for systems with both discrete and continuous parameters and switching costs. It will be used in this project for controlling power, data rate, and handoffs. The research in this area will extend the dimensionality of a previously studied hybrid systems approach to handoff control. The second research thrust is the construction of joint power control, data rate control, and base station assignment algorithms. This research will be based on economic theory for resource allocation, and implemented using hybrid systems. The final thrust will address the reliance of many resource allocation schemes upon unknown communication parameters such as received SINR. Three investigators will work together: an expert in hybrid systems, an expert in resource allocation, and an expert in multiuser spread spectrum wireless systems doc17838 none This research project investigates the refugee returnee process developed by the international community to implement Annex 7 of the Dayton Peace Accords, the peace treaty that brought the Bosnian war to an end in . The central research question is: how has the international community sought to reconstitute multi-ethnic Bosnian places and how have local authorities mediated this process? Field-research is grounded in three ethnically-cleansed Bosnian localities - Bosnian Croat-controlled Jajce, Bosniak-controlled Travnik, and Bosnian Serb-controlled Derventa - which were multi-ethnic places before the war. The international community has been active in all three localities promoting returns but with modest results so far. In answering the research question, data are collected from three sources: policy decisions, reports, and operational procedures generated by institutional actors involved in implementing Annex 7 of the Dayton Peace Accords; semi-structured interviews with key international, national, and local decision-makers in the returnee policy process; and focus group sessions with returnees in the selected research sites. Multiple methodological strategies will be used to study the data gathered including mapping the geographies of displacement and return, charting the reconstruction and return policy process, discourse analysis of policy-maker and implementation storylines at various scales, and discourse analysis of the perspectives of returnees themselves. This research project investigates a nascent contradiction in the Dayton Peace Accords, which, on the one hand, pledged to reverse ethnic cleansing, but, on the other hand, sanctioned a segregated Bosnia created by ethnic cleansing and ruled by local authorities committed to ethnonationalism. This contradiction has given rise to a struggle between the international community and local authorities to define the ethnic and political geography of Bosnia. The study focuses on local municipalities to analyze how the extensive efforts of the international community to reverse ethnic cleansing in Bosnia impacted particular places. More broadly, it develops a conceptual understanding of the problems associated with the rebuilding of post-conflict states, especially the political geographic aspects of ethnic identity. It offers insight into how post-conflict plans conceived in international peace agreements are mediated and thereby transformed by the local contexts of their implementation doc17922 none In this proposed study the PIs will investigate the interaction between channelized and porous flow of melt in the mantle and chemical heterogeneities that might be present at various length scales. Using theoretical models constrained by geologic and petrologic observations, they will examine the basic behavior of systems undergoing melting and their predictions. The research will primarily be undertaken by a graduate student, with close supervision by the PIs in a staged manner, progressing from simple to more complex (realistic) models. It is expected that the new models can be used to test emerging ideas and observations of chemical heterogeneity in melts and mantle residues in a variety of melting regimes (ridges, arc, plumes doc17923 none Metalliferous clays and Mn nodules and crusts contain highly radiogenic Hf isotopes and if subducted, the Hf isotopes could be used as a tracer for their presence in arc lavas. The purpose of this proposed study is to analyze Hf and Nd isotopes in marine sediments from outboard 12 subduction systems to determine how prevalent this signature might be. The origin of this unusual Hf isotopic fractionation is also uncertain, and these new data will help to constrain its cause. Finally, the new data will be helpful for constraining the terrestrial mass balance of Hf and Nd isotopic systems. The samples will mostly be ODP-drilled sediments obtained from arcs with potentially high variations of Hf isotopes and systems with very high sediment flux doc17924 none Proposal SES Proposal Documenting the History of Physicists in Industry Joseph Anderson, American Institute of Physics Corporate R 2) identify extant sources; and 3) study how to preserve the history of industrial R&D on a continuing basis. The project examines 15 of the 25 companies that employ more than half of the Ph.D. physicists in American industry. With lead support from the Science and Technology Studies program of the National Science Foundation to cover the salary and fringe benefits of the project historian for the first two years of the project, AIP provides funds for other project activities, with additional support from other funding agencies. The most important result of this undertaking is a new and original evaluation of ways to preserve the history of industrial research. American industrial growth has been based on knowledge and innovation, and these processes have created vast amounts of records, anniversary and historical publications, and other sources. Many of these materials have disappeared but some have survived. In addition, recent developments, especially maturing electronic records systems and more stringent contractual requirements for documenting R&D, offer opportunities for creating new approaches to preserving the history of industrial research on an ongoing basis. The project explores past and present patterns and new developments. Products include findings and recommendations based on an analysis of the records-creation patterns, information needs, and extant historical records of some of the most important research- centered U.S. corporations, as well as transcripts of the oral history interviews with approximately 100 senior scientists and science administrators. This is the first systematic oral history program to document industrial R&D. The oral histories are to be made available to researchers at the conclusion of the project, along with catalog of extant records identified during site visits and interviews. The immediate products of the project 1) give corporate scientists and managers a variety of approaches to preserving their heritage, 2) make available to historians new sources for studying the history of industrial R&D, and 3) provide archivists and other information professionals with new approaches and new tools to appraise and preserve records. Long-term products could include 1) an increased attention on the part of the private sector to preserving their heritage and 2) the integration of industrial research and development into mainstream science and technology studies. The project builds on the History Center s extensive experience in exploring neglected areas in the history of science and creating strategies for documenting them. The design and methodology are modeled on our successful ten-year Study of Multi-Institutional Collaborations, and we expect the findings and recommendations of this project to have an equally important impact in documenting the history of science. The project staff is assisted by an Advisory Committee composed of distinguished industrial scientists, leading corporate archivists, and historians who provide advice and recommendations on the companies to be studied, the scientists to be interviewed, the administrators to contact, and the questions to ask doc17925 none This is a combined experiment and theory modeling condensed matter physics project. The objective is to understand force propagation in granular materials. Granular materials have been the focus of an intensive and growing body of research that also extends to a broader class of materials, such as glasses, colloids, foams and others that exhibit jamming (frozen structures). New techniques are being invented to deal with these materials, which cannot be described in the context of conventional statistical mechanics. Thus, concepts arising from this project have potential to impact a broad range of materials handling problems, which arise with food grains, coal and ores and pharmaceutical powders and other granular materials. In these materials, forces are carried by an inhomogeneous network of so-called stress chains, which form and reform, leading to strong spatio-temporal stress fluctuations. This project will address at least four different systems that exhibit force propagation and fluctuations. Theory modeling aspects of this work focus on micro mesoscopic models of stress propagation, while Molecular Dynamics techniques are brought to bear on force fluctuations. This project involves undergraduates, graduate students and post-docs in an integrated program of training and development. More senior students and post-docs train undergrads through appropriate research projects. Graduate students and post-docs receive training in advanced research techniques that prepare them for either academic or industrial careers. This project will focus on the behavior of granular materials, which include a broad spectrum of technologically and industrially relevant products ranging from food grains to coal and ores to pharmaceutical powders. The value added to the US economy in the handling of these materials is estimated to be as much as a trillion dollars a year. However, our understanding of the basic physics of these materials is incomplete, and this translates into a corresponding loss of productivity in dealing with these materials. This project focuses on such basic physics issues as how forces are carried in these materials and how the materials behave when they are subject to applied forces, such as those that might be encountered in handling devices. Important insights sought with this project should include better predictability of materials properties, as well as insight into the limits of this predictability. This project involves undergraduates, graduate students and post-docs in an integrated program of training and development. Grad students and post-docs will help undergrads through appropriate research projects. Undergraduates learn key research techniques, and also training in instrumentation development. Graduate students and post-docs receive training in advanced research techniques that will prepare them for either academic or industrial careers doc17926 none This grant will fund a conference on important measurement issues in the economy. As the new economy has developed, intangible assets and high-technology investments have played an increasingly important role in the economy. Important measurement issues have emerged such as how to measure intangible assets, and whether we are measuring high-technology capital accurately. The conference, being co-sponsored by the Conference on Research on Income and Wealth of the National Bureau of Economic Research Inc., will be held in April . Topics to be addressed at the conference include: Financial markets and the valuation of intangible assets, the role of human capital and human resource practices in measuring and understanding intangibles, and the relationship between R&D and the measurement of intangible assets. The goal of the conference is to promote better measurement of capital, which would improve assessments of the economy s long-run rate of growth, the pace of technological change, and of the nation s wealth doc17927 none NSF has invested heavily in high-performance Internet infrastructure and development of distributed applications, resulting in burgeoning demand for additional capacity and services. We propose a project that 1) takes advantage of existing traffic measurement instrumentation, and 2) enhances availability and utility of existing and planned distributed heterogeneous network measurement data repositories. In today s cooperative Internet anarchy , competitive providers, struggling to meet skyrocketing needs, do not significantly invest in gathering or analyzing workload data on their networks. Rather, Internet service providers (ISPs) match rising demand by increasing network capacity as fast as possible; today s core backbone links are OC48 and will be OC192c by . This traditional approach of per-link excess capacity is typically based on brute force over-engineering (e.g., upgrade after you reach a certain link utilization), rather than identification or understanding of parameters describing how network capacity is actually utilized. Individual ISPs also suffer from the fact that visibility of traffic trends is usually limited to their local domain. In addition, there is as yet no instrumentation available for gathering fine-grained workload information from any link above OC12 bandwidth; few such links are instrumented to do so, and most of these are located at lightly used research sites. Larger providers have little incentive to invest in measurement instrumentation, much less to risk political damage by making any resulting data public. Exacerbating the situation is the lack of rigorous analysis tools to support wide-area Internet data collection, and the absence of baseline data against which to compare any independent results. The lack of identified parameters for characterizing and managing network growth in a cost-effective manner is a situation that shows little sign of changing without substantial shift in attention to this task. One detrimental side effect is that myths about Internet growth and performance abound, and plans for provisioning are often made based on locally attained data generalized to mythical proportions. One of the most important contributions of our proposed research is to provide the ability to base predictions of Internet traffic, performance, and growth on real data rather than obsolete assumptions[1]. The community could make better use of its collective intellectual resources if they could validate ideas against a larger variety of empirical data sets before investing research and development resources in further studies. This proposal takes advantage of and integrates existing NSF-sponsored technologies and tools to 1) more strategically instrument the Internet to capture real data of interest to both traf- fic engineers and Internet modelers, 2) create distributed repositories of experimentally derived traffic trend parameters while enabling access to heterogeneous network measurements, and 3) develop meaningful and timely analysis tools and reports. The research and tools proposed under this effort can lead to empirically-based understanding of the evolving Internet infrastructure, yielding results that benefit all who depend on this increasingly critical global resource. The proposed project will also assist in the development of much-needed tools for navigation, analysis, and correlated visualization of massive network data sets. This work is critical to advancing both research and operational efforts regarding the evolving commercial Internet, and has obvious relevance to public policy and regulatory questions concerning the organization and administration of Internet infrastructure doc17910 none Owens McWilliams This collaborative project will try to estimate the large scale, three-dimensional velocity field for the North Atlantic using velocity data from sub-surface floats, current meters, and surface drifters, hydrographic profiles, and sea surface height measurements taken prior to and during the field operations phase of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE). As new measurements, such as the gravimetry from the GRACE mission, altimetry from the JASON mission, and velocities and T and S profiles from the ARGO float program become available, they will be incorporated into the analysis. The estimates of the velocities and their expected errors will be made using generalized least-square error minimization based on a priori specification of expected measurement errors and space-time covariances and or basis functions. A hierarchy of a priori statistics will be used. They will be determined from general spectral shapes for stretched basin basis functions and analyses of simulations from numerical general circulation models run for other purposes, as well as statistical analyses from the measurements. The model covariances and basis functions initially will exactly enforce geostrophic dynamics, with additional ageostrophic processes added where necessary, such as in the surface boundary layer and near the Equator. The use of slightly less constrained covariances calculated directly from the simulations will also be examined. The a posteriori statistics of the estimates will be compared with the a priori ones to evaluate the estimation procedure and the validity of the models. A sequence of estimations with expanding comprehensiveness will be made. Initially these estimates will be obtained for the mean circulation in highly sampled regions, i.e., the Atlantic Climate and Circulation Experiment and then expanded to first basin then global maps. As we gain confidence in the procedure, maps for temporally varying velocities will also be made. The ultimate goal is to create a living estimation library and software system, capable of user-chosen variants and re-estimation with new data. This project is a contribution to WOCE doc17929 none This research interviews 75 low- to moderate-income couples, mostly unmarried, who had a child in in Chicago, Milwaukee, or New York. This award will fund the third wave of in-depth qualitative interviews with each parent in the sample. Interviews include detailed accounts of the couples relational history, ongoing couple dynamics, and relationships between each parent and the child. Contributions to the child of time, formal and informal child-support, and in-kind support are described. The study examines how some of these couples break up while others stay together, and how some fathers remain involved with their children while others do not. Two theoretical approaches are important in guiding the analysis of the interviews. Resource-based bargaining predicts that access to resources enables partners to get more of what they want in the relationship but may also make a partner more likely to leave if they are not getting what they want. Gender theories assert that the social pressures on men to follow gender norms may override the otherwise stronger bargaining power of women but that this imbalance may lead to women s exit doc17930 none In recent years, economic scholars in a wide variety of specializations have become increasingly interested in questions of Political Economy. A central objective of this movement has been to supplement our understanding of the relationships between the political environment (including institutions) and the economic policies that are adopted. Though much progress has been made, virtually nothing is known about the strategic issues arising from the possibility that a legislature might choose to reconsider some provision of a law after its passage but prior to its implementation. Legislative reconsideration is a common occurrence in practice. Moreover, it gives rise to complex strategic issues. The adoption of a policy provision for some future period changes the political landscape. Further discussion of the issues prior to the law s implementation takes place against a different backdrop. Though the provision can be changed, repealed, or replaced before it becomes effective, its adoption alters the terms of the ensuing debate. The purpose of this project is to explore the effects of legislative reconsideration on economic policy selection. The analysis identifies and explores a tendency for reconsideration to create high concentration of political power (irrespective of whether policies are actually changed after adoption and prior to implementation). Using the tools of game theory, the project undertakes comparative institutional analysis, examining the role of reconsideration under a variety of alternative rules and procedures within the context of particular economic problems. It seeks to understand the mechanisms by which particular institutions control (or fail to control) the tendency toward high concentration of power, and to elucidate the implications for economic policy. The findings of this research are relevant to a wide range of practical issues. Collective choice problems are pervasive not only in public policy making, but also in cooperative research, education, partnerships, networks, and many other forms of social activity. These problems are resolved through a wide variety of formal and informal procedures. By improving our understanding of the relationships between procedures and outcomes, the study of collective choice will provide constructive guidance concerning the choice of procedures and the design of institutions. Insights concerning the effects of various rules on the influence of under-represented groups may prove particularly useful doc17931 none Zhang This award supports the participation of American scientists in a U.S.-Japan seminar on annotation and resource discovery of geographical image data to be held in Karuizawa, Japan from October 9-11, . The co-organizers are Professor Aidong Zhang of the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo and Dr. Frederic Andres of the National Institute of Informatics (NII) in Tokyo, Japan. This meeting will discuss research results of a current U.S.-Japan project on metadata modeling, resource discovery, and querying of large-scale geographical image datasets. The seminar aims to demonstrate the current research achievement, clarify a variety of questions, and identify promising areas for future joint work. The specific topics include: 1) extracting semantic features of geographic images, 2) detecting clusters of arbitrary shape of geographic images, 3) formulating the metadata for the integrated system to direct a query to relevant databases, 4) establishing a theoretical foundation of resource selection approaches based on the metadata, and 5) query processing to support content-based retrieval of geographic images. The researcher s current project investigates novel approaches to supporting effective and efficient access to various geographic image databases over the Internet. These approaches establish a foundation for creating a meta-level system on top of geographic image databases to support distributed geographic image retrieval. Through this project a huge volume of geographic data (JIOMEDIA) is being collected and classified based on the semantics. This asset will be accessible by users for research and educational purposes. A set of software tools is being developed and will be made available for use of establishing a metaserver environment which manages large-scale geographic data resources. The seminar advances international human resources through the participation of many postdocs and graduate students with some of them presenting papers. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish proceedings of the seminar on their Web pages doc17844 none The four collaborating principal investigators in this project (Stacia L. Haynie, Reginald S. Sheehan, Donald R. Songer, and C. Neal Tate) will continue and expand their efforts to develop for public use a systematic, replicable database to support comparative analyses of courts, judges, and their behavior. To further this objective, the principal investigators will extend and expand the multi-country database they are creating with support from National Science Foundation awards ( , , , ). That database supports descriptive and theoretical research by the whole scholarly community concerned with courts and judges and their functions and behaviors across a number of national cultural boundaries. It also allows the principal investigators to pursue an initial research agenda highlighting substantive areas that can be fruitfully studied across many nations and many times. The development of this database rests on a central proposition: Theory and data are intimately related. As new data become available, new theories and hypotheses are created and tested. For the overwhelming majority of the world s courts, social scientists lack even the most basic descriptive data summarizing their institutional characteristics, historical development, functional processes, or institutional and individual behaviors. With little more than such simple, descriptive data, scholars might be able to answer any number of theoretically interesting questions. The database that has been compiled under the previous awards show how even a simple analysis of those data provides impressive answers to questions, such as What Do Supreme Courts Do? and how general is Party Capability Theory? The initial project contains a sample of 100 reported supreme court decisions (or the universe, whichever is smaller) per year for 15 years for a sample eight nations with Anglo-American legal systems. The principal investigators will extend the temporal coverage of the database to include the 34 most recent years of available data and to expand the national and cultural coverage of the database by adding an important civil law, non-English-using court, the Suprema Corte de la Justicia de la Nacion of Mexico doc17774 none Combining their expertise in calcification, satellite algorithms, sediment trap interpretation, water column chemistry, sediment geochemistry and global modeling, five principal investigators propose a multidisciplinary approach aimed at improving the uncertainties in the rates of CaCO3 cycling in the ocean. To achieve this goal, the PIs plan to address the following four objectives on both a regional and a global scale: (1) improve estimates of the standing stock and calcification rates of surface ocean particulate inorganic carbon; (2) improve estimates of surface CaCO3 export; (3) improve estimates of shallow (100- m) dissolution rates; and (4) improve estimates of deep ( m) dissolution rates. Results from this study will be basin-scale and global carbonate budgets to improve our understanding of carbonate production, export and shallow deep water dissolution in the marine environment doc17934 none Two distinct areas of economics use linear tractable frameworks for modeling tem structure. The first area, financial asset pricing, uses no-arbitrage latent factor models for bond pricing, derivatives pricing and for risk management. These affine models forecast poorly out of sample, do not incorporate non-linearities and the latent factors are given no economic interpretation. The second area of empirical macroeconomics uses Vector Auto Regression (VARs) to identify and compute the effects of monetary policy on inflation, economic growth and the behavior of the term structure. The VARs say little about how yields not included in the VAR may move, do not rule out arbitrage in the dynamics of the yield curve, and do not efficiently use forward-looking financial information. The goal of this proposal is to develop a framework that uses the best of the asset pricing and macroeconomic fields. The research has the following implications for macro and asset pricing term structure modeling. First, the framework identifies the effects of monetary policy and shocks from macro variables with priced time-varying factor risk. Second, incorporating inflation and real activity directly gives economic content to the asset pricing factor models. Third, imposing no-arbitrage provides greater efficiency, and preliminary results from the first project show that no-arbitrage models forecast better than unrestricted VARs, and incorporating macro variables further improves forecasting ability. Finally, incorporating regime switches has policy implications, as the impact of various shocks on the term structure may be very dissimilar across the regimes. More specifically, the new framework is no-arbitrage, incorporates latent and observable macro variables and introduces non-linearities. With time-varying risk premiums, the full specification is consistent with deviations from the Expectations Hypothesis, the Fisher Hypothesis, and in an international extension, Uncovered Interest Rate Parity and Purchasing Power Parity. The project builds to the full model by incorporating additional features in each individual project. The first two projects, joint with Monika Piazzesi, build a Gaussian no-arbitrage model with observable macro variables and latent variables. The model is related to the Taylor ( ) rules of monetary policy, where the surprise shocks to the short rate are identified by no-arbitrage cross-equation restrictions. The first project assumes that macro and latent variables are orthogonal, to focus on the ability of inflation and real activity to forecast the dynamics of the yield curve, before resorting to latent variables. The second project introduces feedback between the macro and latent factors. It identifies monetary policy shocks implied by no-arbitrage assumptions and investigates how shocks affect inflation, real activity, and yield curve dynamics. The third project, joint with Geert Bekaert and Bob Hodrick, introduces non-linearities in interest rates by incorporating regime switches. The model allows means, covariances and risk premia to switch across the regimes. Impulse responses for yields from shocks to macro factors, and impulse responses for macro variables from monetary policy shocks, differ across the regimes. In an international extension, expected currency depreciations and forward rates are affine functions of state variables, conditional on the regime doc17935 none SES Proposal RUI: Engineering the Imperative Mood: The Wartime Nexus of Economics, Statistics, and Control Engineering, - Judy L. Klein, Mary Baldwin College This project investigates how scientists drawing on three disciplines -- economics, statistics, and control engineering -- shaped a new applied mathematics as researchers designed mechanisms for warfare that controlled rather than simply recorded. Norbert Wiener described the contrast in what these scientists sought as that between new mechanisms in the imperative mood versus earlier devices that operated in the indicative mood. The significance of the shift is broad. In the course of designing physical devices in the imperative mood, researchers constructed mathematical models and algorithms that social scientists later appropriated. As they were passed between engineering and economic applications, similar models took on deterministic, stochastic or adaptive forms. The process of solving problems for a military client, which involved reasoning with physical analogies and tailoring the solution process to computational resources, changed the use and construction of models in applied mathematics, and ultimately changed the idea of what was a solution to an applied mathematical problem. By , the imperative mood had spread beyond the devices under initial study to the analytical disciplines themselves. Through cases of specific mathematical protocol, Klein uses World War II and cold war documents in the National Archives, the RAND Corporation Archives and the Economist Papers at Duke University to investigate the transformation in economics, statistics and control engineering to modeling optimal, multistage decision processes. These protocols include sequential analysis, exponentially weighted moving averages, optimal inventory control, dynamic programming, the Kalman filter, and adaptive models in general. In addition to researching the material origins of these model and algorithms, Klein examines the stages of formulation, user needs, media, and government financing that stimulated their diffusion to the managerial and social sciences. Outcomes of the research include a monograph, pedagogical examples for undergraduate courses in applied statistics and economics, and a treatment, of the case of the exponential smoothing circuit in lead gun sights, for consideration by the Public Broadcasting Service doc17936 none The purpose of the doctoral dissertation project is to experimentally test the effect of bidders information of their rivals types in standard auctions. Auctions are used widely for trading goods and services, ranging from artwork and agricultural products to government assets such as PCS spectrum rights, timber and mineral harvesting rights. While the existing studies on auctions have made great strides, our understanding remains far from complete. In particular, how bidders knowledge of their rivals affects their bidding behavior and the performance of various auctions is not well understood. The existing work assumes that bidders have either no information or full information about their rivals. In practice, however, bidders knowledge about their rivals tends to be asymmetric. For instance, in a procurement auction contested by domestic firms and foreign firms, domestic firms are likely to be better informed about the technical capabilities of their domestic rivals than those of their foreign rivals. The current project will contribute to our understanding of the impact bidders information has on their behavior and on the performance of standard auctions. Bidders asymmetric knowledge about their rivals matters and it may affect both the bidders behavior and the performance of alternative auction forms. The first chapter of my dissertation, written jointly with Yeon-Koo Che, has also established a number of hypotheses regarding how the equilibrium bidding behavior and the revenue performance of a given auction will change as bidders learn more about their rivals types. Testing our hypotheses requires controlling the information flow of the bidders, which would be virtually impossible if one relied on the traditional empirical method employing secondary data. A lab experiment is ideal since the experiment designer can control the information flow precisely the way it is modelled in the theory. We plan to conduct 6 sessions of lab experiments, each of which will invite 32 subjects to participate in a series of auction games. The research will feature some innovative techniques to improve the empirical identification of the subjects bidding behavior. While the main purpose of the experiment will be to test the specific hypotheses of the theory chapter, it will in the process contribute to the testing of the underlying Nash hypothesis, by subjecting it to more comparative static restrictions. Further, the test is expected to reveal the role bidders risk aversion plays in auction experiments doc17823 none In February long-term monitoring of Mid-Atlantic Ridge Seismicity was begun between 15 and 35 degrees north using autonomous hydrophones moored within the SOFAR channel. The goal is to obtain a first-order understanding of the spatial and temporal patterns in overall seismicity, and the partitioning between magmatic and tectonic events at this slow-spreading ridge. The current grant extends the deployment of the current hydropone array for an additional four years, and makes the information more widely available to the ocean science community doc17938 none Werne The main aims of this proposal are to develop a better understanding of mixing during the active phase of deep open-ocean convection and to obtain parameterizations of temperature and salinity changes occurring during convection. Its physical novelty is that it includes the study of physical processes not previously examined in detail, including: (a) vortical interactions between plumes and (b) slant-wise convection. The study will use ambitious numerical simulations to examine the dynamics of turbulent ensembles of convective plumes and will include the effect of the horizontal component of the Earth s rotation vector. Simulations will use both the full Boussinesq equations as well as less stiff, asymptotically reduced sets of dynamical equations developed by the PIs. The information on the lateral stirring and penetration of strong convective events in the upper ocean that will be developed in this project will be used to improve parameterizations of open-ocean convection in large-scale ocean models of the sort used to study global ocean circulation and climate doc17939 none Proposal Number: PI: R. Miller, OSU The physics governing the many paths of the Kuroshio will be investigated using dynamical systems analysis of barotropic and baroclinic quasigeostrophic model solutions. The dynamical systems tools will be used to determine the qualitative nature of model simulations of the Kuroshio s path off the coast of Japan. A baroclinic quasigeostrophic regional model and its adjoint will be used comparatively with existing solutions from previous model studies. It is expected that the bifurcation diagram will be similar between the barotropic and baroclinic systems but that the solutions will exhibit significant baroclinic effects. The adjoint of the baroclinic quasigeostrophic model will be used to investigate the sensitivity of the model to different types of perturbations and to determine the influence of assimilation of observations on the model predictions in each different small and large meander case. The data assimilation study will also help determine which observations predict the transition from one state to another. In addition, this portion of the study will help discriminate between the adequacies of different physics in different models for representing the natural variability of the system. This study will lead to a better understanding of the Kuroshio system off Japan, the different physical mechanisms that generate bimodality of the Kuroshio, and it has the potential to yield guidance towards the critical set of observations that capture the behavior of the system doc17940 none This research investigates the inter-relationships between dual careers and long distance family migration from to . The increase in families with two careers both encourages family migration (because two people are exposed to career opportunities) and discourages migration (because of the constraints on the spouse when one partner has an opportunity). Research with the Current Population Survey will investigate to what extent changes in overall family mobility can be explained by the growth in dual career families. Other analyses with the Panel Study of Income Dynamics will estimate how characteristics of the spouses occupations and of the local labor market influence family migration decisions. Those analyses will be extended to investigate gender differences in the consequences of family migration (or lack of migration). It is generally believed that women s careers benefit least from family migration, but that may be changing as couples make migration decisions to accommodate both careers doc17941 none In this project, researchers at the Texas A & M University will perform analysis, quality control, and adjustment of the transmissometer data from the Hawaii Oceanographic Time-Series (HOT) and from the Bermuda Atlantic Time Series (BATS) data sets collected during the last decade. These data were collected at fixed locations in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and provide important data on seasonal and interannual variations, covering all seasons at both sites. The unprocessed or pre-processed data reside in the appropriate laboratories, but several different characteristic errors are in the data, making them unreliable for modeling and analysis in their present condition. The researchers will analyze the data, control their quality and make necessary adjustments. The adjusted data will be used for assessment of the regional and seasonal Beam Attenuation - Particulate Organic Carbon relationships. After checking and adjustment, the data will be posted on HOT, BATS and TAMU web-servers. The data will be analyzed for seasonal and interannual variability and will be made available to the scientific community for the purpose of modeling ocean carbon cycles or evaluating the output from existing models doc17942 none The Endeavor Deep along the Juan Fernandez microplate exposes a 50 km-long 3-4 km-deep section of young ocean crust created at very fast spreading rates. This projects involves combined geophysical surveys with in situ observations and sampling along the northeast wall of the Endeavor Deep. High-resolution DSL-120 side-scan sonar will completely insonify the scarp and be used to map regional trends in lithology and structure at 10 m resolution. Rock dredging will identify specific targets for more detailed sampling. Digital imaging and petrologic sampling transects with Jason II will groundtruth the regional view and provide a high-resolution perspective of representative sections. Deep-towed 3-component magnetometer data will map the magnetization of oceanic crust at these same scales doc17943 none Megan Sweeney University of California, Los Angeles Although approximately one-fourth of all children born in the United States in the early s are expected to spend some time in a stepfamily, our understanding of the implications of parental remarriage for the well being of youth remains largely incomplete. In fact, a growing body of evidence suggests that remarriage may reduce children s well-being, which is surprising given the economic benefits of remarriage, the potential for increased supervision of children, and the emotional support remarriage offers to a potentially over-extended single parent. Most previous research on family structure, however, has focused on the well being of youth in single-parent families. The more limited body of research examining stepfamilies relies largely on cross-sectional comparisons of children in various family structures at a particular point in time, or on non-nationally representative longitudinal samples. The research addresses the following questions: (1) How do youth in stepfamilies fare, and do the effects of parental remarriage vary across child outcomes? (2) What underlying processes produce observed relationships between remarriage and child well being? Are these relationships causal or spuriously produced by the nature of selection into stepfamilies? (3) Do the effects of stepfamilies on children, and the processes producing these effects, vary across demographic groups defined by race, age, gender, or socioeconomic status? To investigate children s well being from middle childhood through late adolescence, data are obtained from The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-Child Supplement and The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The analyses begin with a descriptive examination of the association between remarriage and various domains of children s well-being, followed by the testing of specific hypotheses about processes through which stepfamilies impact youth. Attention will be paid to theoretically-relevant operationalizations of family structure and to potential mediating mechanisms such as family income, parenting style, family conflict, and extrafamilial social networks. Finally, because children and parents in stepfamilies may be unlike individuals in other family forms in many ways, models will be estimated that control both observed and unobserved characteristics of parents and offspring. Analytical techniques used in the analyses include OLS regression, logistic regression, Cox proportional hazards and fixed-effects models. The project has important implications for parents, clinicians, and members of the research community. This research will provide useful information about targeting interventions to help stepfamilies and the children living within them. The emphasis on appropriate measurement and model specification in this research will also be important for members of the social scientific community interested in assessing the extent to which differences in children s well-being result from variation in family structure histories, as opposed to other potentially confounding factors. Finally, this research will improve our conceptual understanding of how remarriage affects children by testing relationships suggested broadly by the life course model and by dominant mid- level perspectives emphasizing economic deprivation, socialization, stress and instability, and community connections doc17944 none ABSTARCT PI: HARDING INST. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-SCRIPPS-SD PROPOSAL # Award is for a project to further analyze seismic data collected during a cruise in that was undertaken to identify potential drill sites for a deep penetration, reference crustal section in the Guatemala basin. The crust in this area was created during an episode of rapid spreading during the middle Miocene. Because of the rapid spreading rate, theory suggests that the depth to the dike-gabbro transition should be shallower and therefore more accessible to drilling. The proposed work will include 1) waveform modeling of bright UCR reflections, 2) integration of reflection and refraction datasets, 3) slant stacking basement velocity determination, 4) simultaneous P- and S- wave inversion anisotropy investigations, 5) prestack depth migration of UCR LCDRs, and 6) characterization of reflectivity patterns at other survey sites doc17945 none Merril Silverstein University of Southern California The goal of this research is to investigate the role that grandparents play in promoting the well-being of their grandchildren who experience the marital disruption of their parents. Grandparents are considered latent resources who help their grandchildren adapt to stressful events such as divorce, single parenting, negative parental attachment styles, and problematic environments. The aims of the research are to better understand (1) how the investment of time, emotion, and support by grandparents buffers the impact of family disruption and other family stressors on the psychological, social, and material well-being of (a) pre- adolescent grandchildren as they make the transition to adolescence, and (b) adolescent children as they make the transition to adulthood and middle-age. Outcomes include self-esteem, depression, anxiety, affect balance, teen-age childbearing, delinquency, educational achievement, and occupational mobility. Two longitudinal data sets will be used. These include a long-term study of several cohorts of adolescent grandchildren surveyed along with their parents and grandparents over the last 30 years (the Longitudinal Study of Generations), and a nationally representative five-year, soon to be fourteen year, longitudinal study of pre-teen and adolescent grandchildren, and their parents (National Survey of Families and Households). Longitudinal models predict change in prospective outcomes as a function of the statistical interaction between grandparent involvement and family stressors experienced by the grandchild. Transitions over three, five, fourteen, and twenty-six years will be analyzed to investigate the short-term and enduring contributions that grandparents make to the well being of their grandchildren. Multiple regression, logistic regression will be used to estimate the strength of these effects. This research will extend our understanding of the value of extended family relations by documenting how and with what effect grandparents buffer the impact of social change on family systems. The knowledge gained through a rigorous investigation into the role played by grandparents as a resource to grandchildren will help expand the analytic lens of family sociology to include extended kinship relationships doc17946 none Boyer This project seeks to understand how coastally trapped waves (CTWs) interact with baroclinic currents and topography (canyons and ridges). Potential regimes where such interactions may be important are the Great Australian Bight and the Black Sea. Motivated by recent model results that suggest that a barotropic shelf wave in a retrograde current can generate strong mesoscale vortices and cross-shelf exchange after undergoing topographic scattering, the project will use laboratory experiments to see if scattering leads to strong mesoscale motion. Laboratory experiments will also be used to look for subcritical and supercritical transitions in CTW propagation. The main experimental tool will be laboratory experiments in a rotating tank in homogeneous, two-layer, and linearly stratified configurations. The tank will be fitted with both smooth shelf-slope topography, and abrupt topography such as canyons and ridges. Background currents will be introduced by impulsively varying the rotation rate or by introducing a source-sink flow. The laboratory experiments will be complemented with numerical modeling using modern coastal circulation models. Data from the laboratory experiments will be used to validate the numerical models and then the numerical models will be used to extend results to more oceanic regimes doc17947 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Katherine Spielmann, her students, and colleagues will analyze large collections of animal bones and botanical materials from seven years of excavation at three pueblo sites in the Salinas area of central New Mexico. These sites were missionized by Spanish friars in the s, and provide a unique opportunity to investigate how Pueblo populations modified their subsistence practices and diets in response to Spanish demands on their labor and resources. Spanish records document that tribute in the Salinas area was taken in corn and antelope hides, and that governors of the province required Pueblos to collect and transport pinyon nuts and salt. The documents do not discuss how Pueblo people modified their hunting, gathering, and farming in light of these demands. Two possibilities are evident. On the one hand, lack of time and labor to pursue agriculture sufficiently to meet their needs may have caused Pueblo peoples to rely further on wild, collected famine foods. On the other hand, time and labor may have been increasingly focused on agricultural production, with traditional gathering practices curtailed. Hunting may have focused on large game for their hides, rather than the more abundant small game available in the area. Analyses of the kinds of plant and animal remains present in Pueblo middens before and after Spanish missionization will allow them to evaluate these possibilities. The impact of subsistence changes on Pueblo health will then be investigated through a synthesis of a number of analyses of human skeletal remains from one of the sites. Previous interdisciplinary research in the southeastern and Plains areas of the United States has demonstrated marked variability in indigenous responses to European colonization. Thus far, however, indigenous changes in subsistence and diet have not been studied for the southwestern U.S. This project provides an unparalleled opportunity to undertake such an analysis, and to compare native responses in different environments and under different conditions of colonization across North America doc17825 none This is an investigation of the recently discovered Lost City Vent Field, atop the dome-like Atlantis Massif at 30 degrees north on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. This field is different from all other known seafloor hydrothermal fields in that it is located on 1.5 Ma crust, is dominated by steep-sided carbonate chimneys, and is underlain by significiant exposures of serpentinized peridotite. A detailed mapping and sampling program will be conducted to address the following: the tectonic and geologic controls that focus venting, the chemical and isotopic compositions of the vent structures and fluids, the indicence and phylogentic diversity of microorganisms, and whether macrofauna exist doc17949 none In this study, researchers at the University of California at Irvine will make high-precision measurements of radiocarbon (14C) in annual bands in corals from the Galapagos Islands in order to understand the variability of carbon dioxide fluxes from the tropical Pacific Ocean to the atmosphere between AD and . The radiocarbon measurements will be made by accelerator mass spectrometry. Measurements of the strontium calcium ratio and the oxygen isotopic composition (18O) will be made to identify changes in coralline 14C arising from upwelling-induced changes in sea surface temperature. The investigators expect that this study will yield a record of how the CO2 cycle in the tropical Pacific has changed on human time scales doc17950 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Kate Scow and Krassi Hristova of the University of California at Davis to study the diversity of microbial communities in uncontaminated and contaminated shallow groundwater aquifers. Groundwater communities are surprisingly diverse, both taxonomically and functionally, and reflect the considerable heterogeneity in geology, hydrology, and geochemistry found below the surface. Aquifers are sources of a major portion of the US drinking water supplies and aquifers directly connect with surface water environments. Many aquifers in urban and agricultural areas are polluted with organic and inorganic contaminants; their potential for recovery in part depends on the diversity of its microbial communities. The objectives of this study are to characterize community and discover new organisms in shallow groundwater aquifers, measure how petroleum contamination (including the fuel additive methyl tertiary butyl ether-MTBE) changes microbial diversity, and link community composition with environmental factors and process rates. Approaches used will include traditional culture-based methods, DNA fingerprinting coupled with cloning and sequencing, lipid analysis and measurements of process rates. Groundwater aquifers are important microbial habitats with potentially large impacts on society and the environment; understanding of the microbial ecology and diversity of these environments lags far behind that of soil and aquatic ecosystems. From an evolutionary perspective, contaminated aquifers are relatively new ecosystems and thus provide opportunities to study microbial adaptation. In addition to discovering new microbial diversity in shallow groundwater aquifers, other contributions of this study will include measuring how diversity of microbial communities responds to contamination and developing tools for linking ecosystem processes to specific groups of microorganisms. This knowledge has broader significance because many of the earth s ecosystems are perturbed by human activities. Understanding microbial adaptation to contaminants and other stresses will help in the rehabilitation and restoration of damaged ecosystems doc17951 none ABSTARCT PI: MOORE INST. HAWAII-MANOA PROPOSAL # Award is for a project to acquire and analyze all available marine seismic reflection data from the Nankai Trough region. This region is a high priority locality for drilling into an active seismogenic zone; an important objective for the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program. The goal of this study is to identify the best transect along which to acquire the 3D seismic surveys necessary for IODP rise drilling in the Nankai Seismogenic Zone, and to locate the best sites for non-riser drilling of seaward reference sites and landward prism test sites. This work will make it possible to assess globally important subduction processes such as the effects of seamount subduction collision on accretionary prism evolution doc17952 none Science . In this proposed study, Fialko has teamed with Staudigel and they propose a combined field and theoretical study of vertical and lateral diking at the Troodos ophiolite with expected applications to medium and slow spreading mid-ocean ridges. The study has three connected parts. First, theoretic models of diking will be improved and some initial simplifications will be relaxed to hopefully yield results more applicable to natural settings. New models will incorporate a wider range of magmatic overpressures and along-axis topographic slopes and tectonic stress. In addition, the PI will incorporate some thermal effects such as temperature dependent magma rheology. In the second part of the study, the PIs and a student will compile existing field data for dikes from the Troodos ophiolite, and acquire new field and lab data to constrain the amounts of magma that are intruded vertically versus laterally. They will also refine existing models of intrusive centers and distinctions between the behaviors of magmatically (and chemically) distinct systems. Finally, in the third part, the Troodos data will be combined with the models developed in the first part to produce forward models for the diking behavior of medium and slow-spreading ridges. A number of natural phenomena can be explored with these models to gain a deeper understanding of how magma is focused toward ridges, the frequency and volume relations of diking, and magmatic and tectonic segmentation of ridges doc17953 none The study of human adaptation and evolution is intimately tied to knowledge of the environments in which humans evolved. These environments have space-time dimensions that must be understood in order to answer key questions about how environmental change affected early human evolution. According to one hypothesis, global climatic change between 2 and 3 million years ago was responsible for a major evolutionary radiation of mammals in Africa that included our direct ancestors. It is likely that climate did affect human evolution in some way, but exactly how and when this happened remains controversial. Some researchers believe that empirical evidence has not yet demonstrated the role of climate change in African mammal evolution. Preservation biases in the fossil record, differing data-collection methods, and varying levels of chronological and spatial resolution across fossil localities in Africa must be carefully examined and controlled in order to rigorously test the climate change hypothesis. This project will test the linkage between the global climatic record and changes in mammal faunas from terrestrial ecosystems in Africa between 5 and 1 million years ago. The focus will be on the Turkana Basin of Kenya and Ethiopia and the Hadar-Dikika region of northern Ethiopia, two of the major sources of fossils of human ancestors (hominins) as well as a rich record of other mammals. The Turkana Basin Paleoecology Database will be assembled from existing separate datasets, museum collections, and new field initiatives that use standardized sampling of selected stratigraphic intervals. Comparisons with the Hadar-Dikika region will draw from the existing Hadar Faunal Database and new data collected in the field. The resulting information will demonstrate what environments were inhabited by early hominins in East Africa and how these environments changed through time, what mammal species early hominins were most closely associated with, and how global climate records correlate with terrestrial faunal and archeological change at different spatial and temporal scales. Information and interpretations derived from this research will be made available to the public via scientific journals, public science education media, and the internet doc17954 none This award provides partial support for the National Research Council s Solid State Sciences Committee (SSSC). The National Research Council is the working arm of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. The SSSC monitors field of materials research in the United States and provides guidance to federal agencies regarding their materials research programs. The Committee responds to requests for technical information and assistance; initiates conduct and publication of studies in the solid state sciences, acts as an educational resource for the community of the solid state opportunities; and provides a forum for discussion among solid state and materials scientists and Washington policymakers. The SSSC will continue these activities in the next three years, with projects such as the Materials Forum for Washington policy makers. The interface between the materials research communities and the biology communities will receive attention: a brochure at the lay level describing the interface between biology and the materials sciences will be produced. In addition a more technical study of biomolecular materials will be developed. The central role that solid state and materials science play in the emerging field of nanotechnology will also receive timely attention. The output of NRC SSSC an timely and useful materials and information that is widely disseminated to educational institutions, the Federal Government and technical industries. The project is co-funded with the Department of Energy and National Institute of Standards and Technology This award provides partial support for the National Research Council s Solid State Sciences Committee (SSSC). The National Research Council is the working arm of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. The SSSC will sponsor a Forum for discussion between solid state and materials scientists and Washington policy makers. In addition the SSSC will monitor and report on several topics of great current interest, such as nanotechnology, biomolecular materials, and materials in microgravity environments. The resulting materials will be widely disseminated to educational institutions, the Federal Government and technical industries doc17955 none This research project seeks to advance the art and science of novel optical probes of thin solid films. The project -emphasis is on spectroscopic probes with sub-monolayer resolution that can be performed in real time during film growth and modification. Such real time probes will lend new physical insights into the mechanisms of film growth, the optical properties of solids and their interfaces, and the relationships between film growth processes and the resulting properties. The scientific studies will focus on the following three themes: (i) phase evolution in thin films; (ii) optical models of nanoscale, microscale, and macroscale structures; and (iii) the optical effects of interfaces and anisotropy in thin films. Such efforts represent the continuation of a long-term research program, starting with the development of two-parameter multichannel ellipsometry over a decade ago and culminating with the recent development of sixteen-parameter multichannel Mueller matrix spectroscopy. This research endows undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral scholars with interdisciplinary skills in condensed matter, materials, and optical physics necessary for future positions in academia or industry. The project has great potential for transfer of technology and skilled researchers to industries developing thin film photovoltaics, optical and wear-resistant coatings, and semiconductor metrological instruments. This research project is devoted to the development of thin films and their associated measurement tools for applications in science and technology. Thin films are applied onto the surfaces of materials in order to provide functionality at low cost, and are used in numerous technologies from microelectronics to electrical energy production. Research and development on thin films for such advanced applications are expedited by measurement tools that can determine the film thickness and other properties in real time, i.e., non-invasively during the fabrication process. In this project, such tools will be developed and applied to optimize thin film growth processes used by a variety of industries. These efforts represent the continuation of a long-term research program that began more than a decade ago and has provided new tools and optimum processes now being used extensively in academia and industry. This research project will educate undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral scholars from diverse backgrounds who will acquire skills spanning a number of disciplines in materials research. The project will have great potential for transfer of technology and skilled researchers to industry, thereby enhancing the nation s science and technology infrastructure. Industries developing optical, mechanical and wear-resistant coatings, thin film solar cells, and semiconductor analysis equipment will benefit doc17956 none Sources for a Biography of Dr. Francis Crick Dr. Robert Olby University of Pittsburgh This project is the first phase of a biographical study of the career of Dr. Francis Crick. The study is not confined to the subject s contributions to the molecular biology of the fifties and sixties, but extends back to his applied research for the navy and forward to his neurobiological career in the eighties and nineties. The project supports research at several locations in California (La Jolla, Irvine, Los Angeles), Long Island (Cold Spring Harbor), and the U.K. (London, Cambridge, and Northampton) in order to examine archives; search for relevant correspondence, personal documents, and photographs; and conduct selected interviews. These sources are the basis, in conjunction with published sources, of chapters for a forthcoming book-length biography and articles for professional journals. The publications resulting from this research will complement and enlarge the information already available in Dr. Crick s autobiography, What Mad Pursuit. Dr. Crick continues to be immersed in neuroscience, but has agreed to the PI s request to prepare this biography. The aim is to inform the reader both about this central figure of the molecular revolution and about the birth, subsequent transformation, and impact of the molecular biology of the fifties with which Crick s name is so closely associated. Taking the study back to the war years will seek to show how his involvement in military research - his first career -- contributed to shaping his style of research. Extending forward to his third career in neuroscience will illuminate the subject of post-Nobel career changes. The study seeks to show how the multifarious topics taken up by Dr. Crick are related, and what motivation lay behind their choice. This full-length portrait will fill a gap in the biographies of twentieth century scientists, throw fresh light on the molecular revolution, inform the general reader about the remarkable evolution and transformation undergone by the molecular biology of the fifties and sixties, and underline the great impact the subject has had upon so many provinces of biology doc17957 none Proposal SES Proposal Epistemology and the Diversity of Cognitive Systems Robert Cummins, University of California-Davis This focused research and education program falls under the heading of Small Grants for Training and Research. The award supports graduate students and a postdoctoral fellow engaged in the study of diversity in cognitive systems. The basic assumption is that such diversity -- differences in architecture, resources and goals -- runs far deeper than can be accommodated by traditional epistemology. The PI holds that these differences provide a powerful prima facie reason for supposing that the Rules of Right Reason will differ substantially for systems of different types, in particular for the institution of science (which we take to be a cognitive system in its own right), for individuals, and for brains and their sub-systems. These Rules not only differ in what they require, they also differ in the basic concepts employed to describe their target systems and the norms appropriate to them. For example, it no longer seems plausible to apply epistemological concepts and norms designed to describe and evaluate the leisurely deliberations of adult human reflective consciousness to the workings of sub-personal agencies of the brain, or to the institution of science. Rather, different frameworks need be devised for cognitive systems whose functions and goals, and whose computational and representational constraints, differ widely and essentially. Our goal is to make a case for this diversity, to describe it, and to begin to outline the conceptual frameworks required to articulate the pluralistic epistemology it demands. The proposed research aims to identify exactly which computational, representational and architectural constraints are relevant to the characterization of brains, individual cognition and science as (distinct) epistemological strata, and then to use the insight gained into the nature of such systems to develop a stratified epistemology capable of handling the diversity of cognitive systems. This SGTR also supports a training component for several advanced graduate students, who pursue dissertation projects related to the overall project as part of a larger research group, including three faculty members and a post doctoral fellow. The group meets a weekly to discuss current projects, determine progress, and delegate responsibilities for the coming week. Everyone participates by coming up with some bit of research (literature search, web search, etc.) or writing (demonstration, explanation, argument, etc.). Dissertation projects are woven into the general research program in a way that produces a symbiotic relationship between the group research projects and individual dissertations. This model has real potential for accelerating and deepening graduate training in certain cientifically-oriented areas in philosophy. Students mature rapidly, and benefit greatly from access to post docs; learn to write grants, work as a team, present results at conferences; and to prepare jointly-authored articles. This philosophy lab has attracted attention from colleagues in other universities, and serves as a promising alternative to traditional advanced training in Philosophy. Thus, in addition to our scientific and philosophical findings, we hope to pioneer an alternative model for graduate training in philosophy that has proved successful in the sciences but has been difficult to apply in the humanities doc17958 none Laboratory studies of heterogeneous uptake and chemical reactions on model particles representing atmospheric dust will be carried out. The apparatus used will be a newly developed Knudsen cell flow reactor equipped with a mass spectrometer for monitoring gaseous reactants and a Fourier-transform infrared spectrometer for detection of the condensed phase species. The experiments will be carried out at temperature and relative humidity conditions representative of the middle upper troposphere. Specific reactions that will be studied as a function of relative humidity, temperature, particle mass and grain size include the hydrolysis of dinitrogen pentoxide (N205), the uptake of ozone, and the uptake and possible reaction of small organic molecules such as methanol. This work is important because it will provide direct measurements for processes long believed to be important in the atmosphere. Atmospheric aerosols affect the Earth s radiative budget and air quality doc17959 none The Grand Valley State University Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program will provide undergraduate students with a complete mathematical research experience. This involves problem selection, literature searches, background work, the work on the research problem itself, learning about research in areas of mathematics other than an individual s particular problem area, and dissemination of results through writing and giving presentations. To help achieve these goals, we will build a community of students and faculty, supporting students to make a gradual transition to intellectual independence. Students in the program will collaborate with nationally recognized mathematics professors who have a history of success in research projects with undergraduates. For the REU in the summer of , research areas will be chosen from fractal geometry, distance geometry, topology, differential games, dynamical systems, and wavelets doc17679 none Physical and biological interactions play a complex role in the partitioning of carbon between the atmosphere, upper ocean, deep ocean and sediments. At present, interdisciplinary models offer the best means to test hypotheses about how carbon partitioning is regulated in various oceanic regions on time scales of years to centuries. A new interdisciplinary model will integrate advances in several areas to test two related hypotheses: 1) that switches in community and productivity dominance between diatoms and other phytoplankton groups (e.g. non?siliceous picoplankton and calcifying phytoplankton) significantly affect carbon partitioning, vary spatially and temporally and are regulated by a combination of Si and Fe in combination; 2) that changes in Si trapping in the Southern Ocean affect Si(OH)4 concentrations in the mode waters that feed equatorial upwelling, and that Si and C uptake by equatorial phytoplankton alters air?sea exchange of carbon dioxide at the equator. An interdisciplinary science team of biological and chemical oceanographers and modelers will address these issues via four approaches. First, a calcifying phytoplankton component will be added to an existing model and used to incorporate water column production and dissolution of CaC03. Second, model experiments will be designed and executed to explore the regulation of switching between siliceous (diatoms) and non?siliceous (pico and calcifying) plankton. Third, an improved blogeochemical model developed for the equatorial Pacific will be spatially expanded to include the Southern Ocean, and used to conduct a series of simulation experiments on the processes that link high latitude mode water regions with the source waters for equatorial upwelling. Finally, iron?sensitive growth parameters of the phytoplankton components of the model will be manipulated to test the ecosystem response to iron enrichment in both the equatorial Pacific Ocean and the Southern Ocean. These objectives represent a significant step in the development of coupled physical biogeochemical models for exploring the response of marine biogeochemical processes to climate change doc17961 none In this project funded by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division and the Western European and the Central and Eastern European Programs of the Office of International Science and Engineering, Bhuiyan will use numerical simulation and theoretical methods of statistical mechanics to characterize the equilibrium behavior of charged fluids in the neighborhood of non-planar, electrified interfaces in both open and confined geometries. Particular emphasis will be placed on the study of the thermodynamic non-ideality and structural changes in the solutions arising from the effects of added co-solutes and or confinement of the fluid in a capillary. Modified Poisson-Boltzmann (MPB) theory, hypernetted-chain (HNC) theory, other integral equation theories, and Monte Carlo simulations will be used to study charged interfaces. Electrolytes will be described in terms of the primitive model and primitive models with neutral co-solutes. Electrolyte solutions are ubiquitous on earth in animate as well as inanimate materials. This project involves applications of fundamental theories and simulations to investigate electrolytes at interfaces. The theoretical formulations used in this research, which have been very accurate in many standard applications of electrolyte theory, are applied here to more complex geometries and electrolyte models. The resulting applications are more realistic, such as chemical catalysis, electrolytes in micropores, and reverse micelles. The results of this research effort thus affect the fields of materials science, biophysics, chemistry, and the environment. In this research project Bhuiyan collaborates with Prof. Christopher W. Outhwaite of the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom and with Prof. Vojko Vlachy of the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. The senior investigators will make reciprocal visits to each others laboratories each year, and a student from Professor Bhuiyan s group will also visit both European laboratories. Such a trip exposes the student early in his or her scientific career to international collaborations and helps broaden his her educational experience doc17791 none The ocean is second only to the atmosphere as a sink for anthropogenic CO2. Over the last decade, our ability to quantify the oceanic sink using observations has dramatically increased. The improvement derives from two major factors. The first is the JGOFS WOCE OACES global ocean carbon survey, which produced the first high-quality, global-scale inorganic carbon data set. The second is the continuing development of improved techniques to estimate anthropogenic carbon from new measurements. Still, significant uncertainties remain regarding estimation of the spatial distribution of anthropogenic CO2 uptake and storage in the sea. This uncertainty derives from the fact that the task of unambiguously discerning the natural and anthropogenic CO2 signals is far from trivial. The estimates require assumptions that are difficult to verify and whose uncertainties are hard to estimate. Better quantification of the spatial storage pattern and the associated uncertainties is required to assess the value of oceanic data constraints on the global carbon budget and ocean model evaluations, such as those undertaken by the Ocean Carbon-cycle Model Intercomparison Project (OCMIP). On this project, a team of researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Washington, and Princeton University will perform global analysis of observation-based estimates of the oceanic storage of anthropogenic carbon dioxide. Their goal is to assess a range of ocean data to provide a well-constrained estimate of the oceanic anthropogenic CO2 distribution. Particular emphasis will be placed on the estimation of uncertainties and differences between the several approaches. This work would depend upon and extend results from recently completed and ongoing research that these investigators have been involved in as part of the Synthesis and Modeling Project of the U.S. Joint Global Ocean Flux Study doc17963 none The study will focus on an important problem concerning the oceanic crustal structure, i.e., the extent to which seismic boundaries within the crust correlate with geological boundaries. It aims to link the seismic structure of upper oceanic crust with the known geology of the crust exposed at Hess Deep and the Blanco Transform areas. The PIs hope that the experiment will clarify the relationship between the seismic boundaries and the geologic units of oceanic crust. Two separate cruises will be undertaken to conduct refraction profiling with wide-angle MCS lines allowing high-resolution imgaging of the uppermost crust doc17964 none In this project, scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography will continue to produce and distribute a standard reference material for the quality control of oceanic carbon dioxide measurements, in particular those that are made as part of international global programs. This will help to ensure that such measurements are comparable and accurate although made in different laboratories at different times; and will be an important factor in the design of a Global Ocean Observing System. To achieve this, the Scripps laboratory will prepare standard materials (seawater) and certify them for the following parameters of the oceanic carbon dioxide system: total dissolved inorganic carbon, total alkalinity, hydrogen ion concentration, pH, and d13 C for a sample of sea water. These reference materials will be distributed to US and international investigators to assist in the quality control of oceanic CO2 measurements. They will also be used to provide test samples for use in collaborative studies of the analytical methods that are used to determine these various parameters. As part of this work, the scientific team plans to organize various such collaborative studies and will collaborate with the various investigators to ensure that the experience gained is documented in reports and in written methods that are widely disseminated. An important part of the project involves planning for the future. It is essential to assure a long- term supply of reference materials for future ocean science research, and it will be necessary to identify an agency or company that will take on this responsibility. To encourage this, the investigators propose to interact with the U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology, as well as with Ocean Scientific International (the IAPSO Standard Sea Water Service) and with various Japanese investigators to assess and recommend a plan for the future doc17965 none In many economic and social settings, the behavior or welfare of an individual is directly affected by the presence, characteristics, or behavior of other individuals in an associated reference group. Children might be affected by their classmates, home-owners by their neighbors, or commuters by their fellow motorists, to give just a few examples. In many of these settings, individuals are not randomly assigned to their reference groups but rather actively decide which group to join. This non-random sorting of individuals into groups leads to improper inferences about the influence of other group members both within the group and in the initial choice of group. A community with great amenities, for example, is likely to attract many high-income residents and have high housing prices. If the amenities are not seen in the data, a naive analysis is likely to attribute the high housing prices to the presence of high-income neighbors and suggest that high-income individuals have strong preferences to live with one another. This project develops a methodology for properly identifying the role of social interactions in the sorting of individuals into reference groups. This strategy draws on fact that each individual s choice of reference group is affected by the nature of their alternative options (the set of available neighborhoods in our earlier example). The research begins by developing a methodology that uses this source of variation to identify pure congestion and agglomeration interactions in sorting models. The methodology will then be extended to models with more complex forms of social interactions in which individuals are affected not only by the number but also the attributes of those in the same reference group. The scope of the currently identified applications of this methodology extends from urban, public, and environmental economics to models of non-price competition in industrial organization. Properly identifying social interactions in these settings is extremely important for a wide variety of policy considerations. We demonstrate the significance of this research with a series of empirical applications designed to both demonstrate the methodology and illustrate its practical importance. The first uses US Census data for the SF Bay Area to study neighborhood sorting. This analysis provides a complete picture of how households trade-off between important features of neighborhoods (location, schools, crime, socio-demographics, housing, and price), as well as how these trade-offs vary for households with different characteristics including income, race, education, employment, and family structure. Having properly identified the complex set of preferences that underlies the urban housing market, this project conducts a number of simulations designed to uncover the underlying causes of important aggregate urban phenomena such as racial segregation, crime patterns, school compositions, commuting patterns, and the geographic distribution of housing prices. This application will then be extended to focus more specifically on a series of education policy questions. The second set of applications address a very different policy issue: the consequences of global climate change in developing countries. While techniques are well developed to measure the marketed (agricultural) impacts of global warming, non-marketed impacts, such as those on climate amenities, have not been satisfactorily measured with traditional techniques owing to a lack of key data describing inter-location variation in the prices of housing and other geographically non-traded commodities. Specifying an equilibrium model for these commodities and estimating it with observed settlement patterns and our identification strategy yields a full measure of the amenity cost of global warming for Brazil, and its implications for post-Kyoto negotiations over greenhouse gas abatement efforts between Annex I countries and LDC s are discussed. This project will also fund the collection of data for the extension of this analysis to other developing countries in Central and South America doc17966 none PI: Luis Perrichi Proposal #: This award provides funds to partially support group travel to the seventh international Valencia meeting on Bayesian Statistics. The money, primarily, support junior researchers and graduate students with limited sources of funding. Members of the under-represented groups will be actively recruited and encouraged to apply. The meeting will be held in Tenerife, Spain, from June 1-6, . It brings together leading experts in the area of Bayesian Statistics and junior researchers, facilitating scientific interactions and providing a stimulating environment for the exchange of ideas. A pre-conference tutorial will be held that is targeted towards junior investigators, graduate students and people with limited exposure to the vast developments in the area of Bayesian statistics doc17967 none Lithospheric bending may give a fundamentally different window into the processes of fault initiation and development than does lithospheric stretching . The investigators will take advantage of this window by a systematic analysis of bathymetric data and sidescan sonar images for all trenches where data is available. Trenches offer a unique way to relate falut characteristics to the amount of strain required to develop a system of faults. Two-dimensional numerical models will be used to relate lithospheric properties to the observed spacing of faults and the amplitude of their offset doc17968 none This project will take advantage of advanced technologies and strategies proven successful in online role-playing games to create exciting opportunities for children in an after school context. There are almost no examples of learning environments that build on lessons and strategies from the commercial success of 3D online, role-playing games, environments that are populated by tens of thousands of users each day. Leveraging 3-D technologies and principles so successful for the gaming community to develop educationally meaningful environments is a topic of which we, as an educational community, know very little and which has much potential to engage typically under-represented groups in SMT learning. This work is exploratory and has exciting potential both in terms of its direct service to the disadvantaged children at the local Boys and Girls Clubs and in terms of the broader implications of the research to inform the education community. Our 18 month relationship with the Boys and Girls Clubs is currently strong and recently Compaq and Microsoft donated $100,000 in equipment, software, and service to both local Boys and Girls Clubs to create Technology Centers. The Quest Atlantis program is viewed as an exciting opportunity to integrate the computers in Club programming, and staff, and space will be committed to the project. Continuing this relationship and leveraging this still-new technology and the current interest in innovating with this equipment and software creates a timely opportunity doc17969 none The Investigators will conduct an integrated spatial analysis of committee markup voting and floor roll call voting in the United States House of Representatives and Senate. They have collected a comprehensive data set of markups staring in September, and will add to this during the project. All data will be web published and integrated into the VOTEVIEW software for congressional roll calls. The Investigators will incorporate methodological developments integrating the small committee methods developed by Londregan with the large legislature methods developed by Poole and Rosenthal and others. The analysis tests a number of theoretical hypotheses that concern the dimensionality of floor vs. committee voting. For example, are committees drawn, like the floor, mainly on liberal-conservative lines or are they more complex? The Investigators will also test the extent to which committees are preference outliers. Are certain interests over represented on committees doc17970 none It has long been recognized that actual and potential movement of households and factors of production across jurisdictional boundaries may have a significant impact on the politics and policy choices of subnational governments. Analysis of public good provision is increasingly based on models that characterize self-selection of citizens into municipalities and collective choice via majority rule within municipalities. This project combines a theoretical framework of interjurisdictional sorting with a newly-developed empirical strategy that takes sorting effects into account. The theoretical model yields strong predictions about the distribution of households by income within and across jurisdictions. These distributions can be; matched with empirical income distributions observed in a sample of communities. The key methodological insight is that matching income distributions allows us to characterize boundary indifference loci of adjacent communities, as well as loci of pivotal voters within each community in locational equilibrium. The estimator proposed here controls for both observed and unobserved heterogeneity among households, observed and unobserved characteristics of communities, the potential endogeneity of prices and expenditures and the self-selection of households into communities of their choice. The structural parameters of the model are estimated using data of the Boston Metropolitan Area and the project extends the analysis to other settings. The extent to which mobility constrains the choices of a jurisdiction depends not only on actual mobility, but also on how political actors or citizens perceive the impact of mobility on their communities. The project formulates and tests various hypotheses about voter behavior, with special focus on the extent to which voters in a community take mobility by others into account when making political decisions. The project also investigates the importance of clustering in communities by income or other characteristics, such as race or ethnicity doc17971 none This project continues the work of the Show-Me Center. The center consists of a Middle School Mathematics Center (University of Missouri) and four Curriculum Satellite Centers (University of Wisconsin, Michigan State University, University of Montana and the Education Development Center in Newton, MA. The goals of the center are fourfold: 1) disseminate information supporting awareness, examination and implementation of comprehensive, standards-based middle school mathematics curricula; 2) develop a leadership infrastructure to support curriculum reform utilizing Show-Me Regional Associates, experienced teacher users of curricula (Show-Me Master Teachers) and district leadership teams to carry the message and work at local levels; 3) provide professional development and teacher renewal. Center staff help school districts design and implement coherent and long-term professional development for teachers organized around standards-based curriculum adoption; and 4) monitor the impact of standards-based curricula on student learning. The Center initiates data collection through the Show-Me Postdoctoral Fellow Program so that the extent and quality of implementation and its effects on student learning and teacher development are documented and disseminated doc17972 none This condensed matter physics project seeks to elucidate electron-lattice coupling, soft mode dynamics, and spin-flip processes near the metal-insulator phase transition in doped perovskite manganites. Femtosecond time-resolved optical response techniques will be employed to measure the dynamics of the various processes that dictate the unusual transport properties of the manganese oxides. The primary objective is to study the coupled dynamics of the charge carriers and that of the lattice deformations, which surround them. The advantages of the time-domain approach to investigate these heavily damped responses are clear, especially near structural phase changes where the soft modes are characteristically heavily damped or over damped. Magneto-elastic coupling is important to understand the low-temperature spin dynamics of manganite. Information about the spin dynamics will be used to test various theoretical approaches that sensitive to this parameter. A femtosecond-tunable laser system will be employed for impulsive-stimulated Raman scattering (ISRS), pump-probe transient reflectivity and magneto-optical Kerr-effect experiments. Systematic studies of the natural frequency and damping of the soft optical phonon modes by ISRS measurements will provide new information about electronic and structural instabilities and phase changes of these strongly correlated electron systems. The goal of our magnetic field-dependent studies is to elucidate correlation effects of the mobile charge carriers and their dependence on the magnetic structure of the doped manganese oxides. The students involved in this project will be trained in an interdisciplinary field including modern optics, material science, and computational modeling. Interest in the manganese oxides as exceptional candidates for magnetic sensors and detectors has been rekindled because of the colossal magnetoresistance effect observed in these materials at room temperature. Thin films open up new possibilities for applications in diverse areas of technology such as magnetic random access memories and read heads for hard disk drives. The goal of this research program is to elucidate the unusual magneto-transport properties of doped manganese oxides by studying the coupled dynamics of the charge carriers and that of the lattice deformations that surround them. Femtosecond time-resolved optical response techniques will be employed to measure the dynamics of the various processes that dictate the unusual transport properties of the manganese oxides. The goal of the magnetic field-dependent studies is to reveal correlation effects of the mobile charge carriers and their dependence on the magnetic structure of the doped manganese oxides. Experimental studies of the spin dynamics can be used to test various theoretical approaches that are sensitive to this parameter. These fundamental studies will provide new information about the mechanism that governs the large spin-dependent transport in this strongly correlated material system. The training that graduate and undergraduate students will receive while working on this project will prepare them for attractive material science or optics related careers in industry, academe, or government doc17973 none This project is integrates educational objectives with research in developing two major criteria to predict ferroelectricity in polar crystals. Differential scanning calorimetry and differential thermal analysis are used to determine the presence of the predicted phase transitions in new ferroelectric materials, followed by the measurements of the melting point, decomposition temperature, and the nonlinear dielectric susceptibilities of the new materials. Presently, 300 pure materials are known that exhibit ferroelectricity. This project focuses on 15 new potential ferroelectrics that have not been fully characterized. %%% Technological demand is strong for new ferroelectrics with superior figures of merit that can be used in a wide range of devices including piezoelectric transducers and actuators, pyroelectric sensors, high-permittivity dielectrics, electrooptic and nonlinear optic devices, nonvolatile dynamic random access memories, and positive temperature-coefficient-of-resistivity devices. The integration of education with research in this project will introduce undergraduate students to many chemical and physical processes important in the evaluation of ferroelectrics for various applications. This type of expertise will make these students very competitive in the job market doc17974 none The PIs will measure Uranium series isotopes (230Th 238U, 226Ra 230Th, 231Pa 235U) in order to place constraints on the eruption ages of axial and off-axis lava flows in the 9-10N area of the East Pacific Rise (EPR), which has been well mapped and intensively studied with Alvin for the last decade. These U-series dates, together with new data on Sr, Nd, Pb, and Hf isotopes will be used to evaluate the petrogenesis of the samples and to evaluate the extent of near off-axis vs. axial additions to the ocean crust in this area, which seismic studies indicate should be an important process (off0axis thickening of lawer 2A). The samples will be selected by a randomizing process in order to determine theproportion of the crust that is added off-axis doc17922 none In this proposed study the PIs will investigate the interaction between channelized and porous flow of melt in the mantle and chemical heterogeneities that might be present at various length scales. Using theoretical models constrained by geologic and petrologic observations, they will examine the basic behavior of systems undergoing melting and their predictions. The research will primarily be undertaken by a graduate student, with close supervision by the PIs in a staged manner, progressing from simple to more complex (realistic) models. It is expected that the new models can be used to test emerging ideas and observations of chemical heterogeneity in melts and mantle residues in a variety of melting regimes (ridges, arc, plumes doc17976 none This project will obtain isotopic and trace metal analyses on planktic and benthic foraminifers to test initial results from subpolar North Atlantic cores suggesting that global ice volume during MIS 11 was similar to modern ice volume and that sea level during MIS 11 was not substantially higher than today. The project will measure oxygen isotope ratios on planktic and benthic foraminifers at three sites in the tropical Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to compare these values against new and existing data from subpolar North Atlantic cores. In addition Mg Ca ratios of benthic and planktic foraminifers in selected intervals will be measured as independent estimate of temperature effects. The new analyses will provide a means for separating temperature and salinity effects from ice volume effects on the isotope values. Cd Ca and carbon isotope measurements of benthic foraminifers will be used to detect deep circulation changes associated with the glacial - interglacial transitions doc17977 none This project will monitor microearthquake activity, vent exit temperatures, and tidal pressures at the TAG hydrothermal site on the Mid?Atlantic Ridge 26 degrees north. An active?source seismic survey will be focused on the TAG segment bathymetric high. The experiment will address the nature of the heat source driving hydrothermal circulation, the relationship between the faulting on the eastern flank and fluid flow at the mound, the possible existence of a low?velocity zone beneath the rise axis, and the hydraulic connectivity of the shallow TAG mound doc17978 none Alleman Wastewater nitrification is considered to be a highly sensitive biological process given the metabolic nature of the involved bacteria (e.g., low growth rate, etc.) and correspondingly low cell population. Furthermore, the daily loss of these nitrifiers within a reactor s necessary waste sludge stream creates a pragmatic limitation on the permissible amount of nitrifiers that can be maintained. This proposed research focuses on an innovative means to beneficially increase the population of nitrifiers beyond that of conventional systems by selectively detaching and recovering these valuable nitrifiers from the waste sludge such that they can then be recycled back into use. As compared to heterotrophic cells whose chemical-based attachment (via an adhesive exocellular polymer) and flocculation behavior does not afford this flexibility, we believe that attached nitrifying cells can be prompted to detach and deflocculate within a suitably motivating environment. The underlying mechanism would subsequently be that of a controlled chemical, physical, and or electrical effect which induces attached nitrifying cells contained within the waste sludge to detach and deflocculate, at which point these discrete nitrifiers can then be separated from the remaining waste sludge for subsequent reuse. As such, this capability would then facilitate a means of controlling (and beneficially raising) the nitrifier solids retention time (SRT) in a fashion that is independent from that of the remaining mixed-culture SRT doc17979 none Mountains exert a profound influence on the weather and climate. This research is aimed at investigating two important ways in which mountain-induced circulations directly impact human activities: strong surface winds and violent low-level rotors. Strong surface winds may be generated by the interaction of the larger-scale flow with the topography through two different mechanisms, gap winds and downslope winds. Significant weather hazards and extensive property damage can occur during extreme gap-wind and downslope-wind events. Gap winds are produced when air is forced through gaps in a mountain barrier. The winds above mountain top level need not have a component perpendicular to the ridge line while the gap winds are blowing. Downslope winds, on the other hand, only occur if there is a significant cross-mountain wind component at ridge-top level. Downslope winds attain their high velocities as the flow descends from the mountain crest. In some cases there may be synergistic interactions between the gap flow through a mountain pass and downslope winds on the slopes adjacent to the pass. A goal of this research is to better understand the dynamics of gap winds, to determine those conditions under which a given large-scale flow is more suitable for the generation of gap winds or downslope winds, and to ultimately improve the forecasting of high wind events in mountainous regions. Airflow over long ridges often produces low-level vortices with horizontal axes parallel to the ridge line. These horizontal vortices, known as rotors, pose a serious hazard to commercial, military and civilian aviation. The rotor flow is often very turbulent. Some aircraft have reported undergoing extreme rolling motions (with roll angles approaching 90 degrees), and some aircraft have been lost under conditions when strong rotors were believed to have been present. Recent work by the Principal Investigator and collaborators has identified the basic source of rotation within a typical rotor. Just as the tornadoes contain embedded regions of high vorticity (suction vortices), terrain induced rotors also appear to contain localized regions of very high vorticity. At present, almost nothing is known about the maximum strength or the dynamics of these subrotors, yet they may pose the most danger to aircraft. A goal of this proposal is to develop a better understanding of the probable strength, frequency of occurrence, and the dynamics of these subrotors. Successful completion of this research can potentially lead to better forecasts of mountain-induced severe wind hazards doc17980 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Lilliam Casillas and Carmen Hernandez (University of Puerto Rico-Humacao) and Pieter Visscher (University of Connecticut) to establish a Microbial Observatory in the Cabo Rojo solar salterns of Puerto Rico. The salterns provide an excellent setting for the study of life under extreme conditions due to the intense solar radiation, high wind velocity and salinity at the site. Using molecular tools different halophilic (i.e. salt-loving) organisms present at the site during wet and dry periods will be identified. Once such halophiles have been identified, some of their metabolic activities such as photosynthesis, aerobic respiration, sulfate reduction and nitrogen fixation will be studied. Using microelectrodes, in situ activities of the halophiles in the cyanobacterial mats and their contributions to the productivity of the site will be studied. At the same time, the chemical and geological composition of the sediments of the mats and the water column of the salt ponds will be identified. The main goal of this research is to understand how the various biological, chemical and geological processes act in concert to define the hypersaline ecosystems of Cabo Rojo. These studies will provide a scenario, as complete as possible, of the chemical and geological conditions in a Caribbean tropical saltern and establish the role of microorganisms in this ecosystem. Studies of this nature in the Caribbean are limited. While accessing the microbial diversity of the site it is anticipated that new organisms with novel adaptations and or physiologies will be isolated. Special focus will be placed on the role of halophilic microorganisms in the geochemical transformations required for life to flourish. As hypersaline environments are known to have existed since Precambrian times, study of the Cabo Rojo salterns should shed light on how microorganisms and their by products could possibly have contributed in the past to establish present ecosystems doc17981 none Barnacles create major problems worldwide related to biofouling in marine environments due to their growth on ships, docks and related structures. This biofouling results in the loss and destruction of structures in marine environments as well as loss of ship efficiency during transit due to increased drag resistance. Current options to control this growth of barnacles are either unsatisfactory or environmentally unacceptable. The mechanisms by which barnacles respond in the environment to adhere to different substrates are unknown. The goal of this project is to identify the key components in the glue secreted by the barnacle, Balanus crenatus, in order to develop an understanding of the mechanisms involved in their adhesion to environmental surfaces in marine environments. The rationale for this study is that once we understand the mechanisms of barnacle adhesion, we should be in a position to design better strategies to control or prevent this process. In the long run, this insight into mechanisms of barnacle glue curing should also serve as a basis for the design and development of adhesives that cure in water, such as for biomedical applications. Our preliminary data suggest that the mechanisms of adhesion by barnacles are distinct from the mechanisms reported for mussels such as Mytilus edulis, which has been well-studied. The approach planned for the program is centered on isolating and characterizing the components of the glue used by the barnacle to stick to surfaces. More specifically, we plan the following steps in the process: (1) isolation and characterization of the proteins present in the glue of the barnacle, B. crenatus, (2) cloning and expression of genes from the barnacle that encode the proteins found in the glue, and (3) characterization of the barnacle adhesion and cement curing process by studying the proteins that are produced and their interactions. These studies will provide the most comprehensive picture of the mechanisms of barnacle adhesion and cement curing available to date and also provide insight into how this marine animal responds to environmental substrate cues. Our preliminary data illustrate the feasibility of the proposed plans since we have gained important initial insight into: (a) some of the proteins present in the adhesive plaques, (b) some of the genes encoding the proteins present in the adhesive plaques, and (c) methods to assess changes in the proteins upon addition of chemicals that influence changes in the adhesion environment and the protein interactions involved (e.g., metals chelation chemicals and changes in oxidation-reduction state). This type of information and insight into adhesion and curing mechanisms will be critical to identifying mechanisms used by the barnacle to adhere to surfaces. With the plans to elucidate the mechanisms of adhesion of barnacles to surfaces, control of these surface interactions will then be feasible. This insight will be critical in order to identify long-term solutions to barnacle substrate colonization which leads to excessive pier and ship repairs and repainting, and the avoidance of the use of toxic compounds such as copper-based chemicals in material coatings to prevent barnacle adhesion in marine waters doc17982 none Charles Harris of the University of California, Berkeley is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program for research on the kinetics (at the femto-second time scale) and the intimate mechanisms of rather complex organometallic reactions. Using femtosecond infrared spectroscopy coupled with high pressure techniques, the intimate mechanisms of a variety of complex chemical reactions will be elucidated. Special attention will be paid to the role of solvent molecules in these reactions. Initial interest will be centered on the activation by transition metal complexes of selective C-H and Si-H bond ruptures. A variety of more complex reactions, including alkyne polymerization, will also be examined. Reaction dynamics will be interpreted with the aid of stochastic dynamic simulations. Several theoretical methods, including ab initio calculations and density functional methods, will be applied to characterization of intermediates. This research is extending the time range accessible in the study of the intimate mechanisms of solution-phase inorganic reactions by several orders of magnitude. The details of reactions that are instantaneous by other measures will be brought under examination. Such heretofore inaccessible chemical changes stand at critical points in networks of reactions that are of central importance in many scientific and technological areas. Specific examples of topics where this research may have great importance include studies of the mechanisms of biological processes such as photosynthesis and respiration, and also improvement of metal-catalyzed polymerizations that are of central importance in the chemical industry doc17983 none The purpose of this study is to investigate the causes of sexual size dimorphism (SSD) in primates. SSD is the presence of differences in mean overall body size between males and females. These differences are meaningful because they are often related to social structures and group compositions present in primates, and thus are useful in deducing the ways in which extinct primate species organized themselves. It is important to understand the strength of the correlation between SSD and these other factors when drawing inferences about extinct populations. The proposed study differs from earlier work in which analyses across species of SSD indices and categorical data (e.g., mating system, dietary type, substrate type) were compared to theoretical predictions. Instead, a quantitative model is used to generate predictions for populations of continuous data. Predictions are based on initial conditions that correspond to mechanisms that can potentially produce SSD - mechanisms that predict high correlation between SSD and certain social structures, and other mechanisms that do not. Data from primate populations will be compared to model predictions using analyses that take into account degree of relatedness between species to determine which mechanisms produce SSD in those primates. This study has multiple areas of significance. First, it tests the validity of an alternative technique for determining body size of skeletal specimens. Second, it introduces a new technique for testing the influence of particular forces on SSD in primates. Third, it will identify the forces that affect SSD within particular primate groups, as well as across the Order Primates. Finally, reconstructed values of ancestral size and distribution parameters can be compared with values of known fossils, furthering understanding of the relationships between fossil primates, ancestral primates, and living primates doc17984 none Burrill This award supports the participation of American scientists in a U.S.-Japan seminar on lesson study in mathematics teacher education to be held in Park City Utah from July 12-18, . The co-organizers are Dr. Gail Burrill of the Mathematical Sciences Education Board at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and Professor Toshiakira Fujii of Tokyo Gakugei University in Japan. The goal of the seminar will be to discuss in detail how the concept of lesson study can be framed as a medium for professional development, to identify common research priorities related to lesson study, and to explore possible areas of joint research cooperation. The meeting will focus on lesson design and classroom practice, considering K-8 teachers in each country, and how lesson study might be adapted for use at the secondary level. The framing of the seminar will be done jointly by educators from both countries under the direction of a Steering Committee representing the different constituencies and considering balance factors. The seminar will provide an opportunity for mathematics educators from the United States to probe into the underpinnings of lesson study, to learn how the Japanese think about mathematics and teaching mathematics, how they orchestrate discussion among teachers, and how they consider what is implicit in lesson study that helps teachers understand what it takes to teach well. The results can serve as the focus of follow-up activities in the U.S., stimulate teacher educators into thinking differently about their practice, and lay the groundwork for research concerning questions about the role of lesson study in professional development. Participants will be selected to include both ethnic and geographic diversity considerations as well as women and young researchers. The proceedings will be made available on the National Academy of Sciences web site doc17985 none Julien The main aims of this proposal are to develop a better understanding of mixing during the active phase of deep open-ocean convection and to obtain parameterizations of temperature and salinity changes occurring during convection. Its physical novelty is that it includes the study of physical processes not previously examined in detail, including: (a) vortical interactions between plumes and (b) slant-wise convection. The study will use ambitious numerical simulations to examine the dynamics of turbulent ensembles of convective plumes and will include the effect of the horizontal component of the Earth s rotation vector. Simulations will use both the full Boussinesq equations as well as less stiff, asymptotically reduced sets of dynamical equations developed by the PIs. The information on the lateral stirring and penetration of strong convective events in the upper ocean that will be developed in this project will be used to improve parameterizations of open-ocean convection in large-scale ocean models of the sort used to study global ocean circulation and climate doc17986 none This grant supports the Eleventh International Symposium on Nondestructive Characterization of Materials to be held June 24-28, , in Berlin, Germany. This will be the latest in a series of international symposia that was first held in . The objective of these symposia is to provide a unique focus on the science and technology of nondestructive evaluation applied to materials characterization. The ultimate goal is to develop innovative, more sensitive and more precise methods to characterize the properties of materials much earlier than possible with current nondestructive testing techniques, so that any material alterations detrimental to the desired application can be detected and corrected well before macroscopic defects occur. Papers will include research and applications for aging infrastructure, nondestructive characterization of microstructures, on-line measurements for process control, precision and accuracy of nondestructive characterization measurements, advances in computed assisted tomography, non-contact ultrasonics, microwave advances and applications, and advanced high resolution probing techniques. Of considerable interest will be state-of-the-art developments and applications where the complex nature of materials has been recognized. The recipients of funds will be selected by the organizing committee with awareness of geographical distribution and the desire to include as many women and minorities as possible. The nondestructive characterization of materials has been of immense interest to the materials community as well as practicing engineers concerned about the quality and sensitivity of nondestructive examination of real structures. This symposium functions to gather together both NDT technologists and NDE researchers. Research, needs, and applications in the nondestructive testing and evaluation of material characteristics such as yield strength, ductility, elastic modulus, grain size, microstructure, texture, fiber placement, and residual stress will be discussed. Several poster sessions will be held during the course of the symposium so that many participants can present the results of their research efforts, especially young scientists and graduate students. This grant supports the travel and registration of selected participants based on their need and expertise doc17844 none The four collaborating principal investigators in this project (Stacia L. Haynie, Reginald S. Sheehan, Donald R. Songer, and C. Neal Tate) will continue and expand their efforts to develop for public use a systematic, replicable database to support comparative analyses of courts, judges, and their behavior. To further this objective, the principal investigators will extend and expand the multi-country database they are creating with support from National Science Foundation awards ( , , , ). That database supports descriptive and theoretical research by the whole scholarly community concerned with courts and judges and their functions and behaviors across a number of national cultural boundaries. It also allows the principal investigators to pursue an initial research agenda highlighting substantive areas that can be fruitfully studied across many nations and many times. The development of this database rests on a central proposition: Theory and data are intimately related. As new data become available, new theories and hypotheses are created and tested. For the overwhelming majority of the world s courts, social scientists lack even the most basic descriptive data summarizing their institutional characteristics, historical development, functional processes, or institutional and individual behaviors. With little more than such simple, descriptive data, scholars might be able to answer any number of theoretically interesting questions. The database that has been compiled under the previous awards show how even a simple analysis of those data provides impressive answers to questions, such as What Do Supreme Courts Do? and how general is Party Capability Theory? The initial project contains a sample of 100 reported supreme court decisions (or the universe, whichever is smaller) per year for 15 years for a sample eight nations with Anglo-American legal systems. The principal investigators will extend the temporal coverage of the database to include the 34 most recent years of available data and to expand the national and cultural coverage of the database by adding an important civil law, non-English-using court, the Suprema Corte de la Justicia de la Nacion of Mexico doc17988 none In this study, the PIs will test and develop a new paleoclimate proxy- Rare Earth Element (REE) abundances of carbonate sediments that contain metalliferous sediment originating from hydrothermal plumes. In combination, the PIs will use Nd isotope values (?Nd) as a proxy to help unravel differences in weathering rates and sources from variations in seawater REE abundances due to other causes. The short residence times of the REE ( 1-4 Ka) mean that potentially, these proxies could provide high resolution data. Preliminary data show that metalliferous sediment records bottom water REE patterns and that the REE patterns are virtually identical for the Atlantic and Pacific. The entire REE pattern is reflected in differences in Nd Er. Preliminary data for a core for the last 135 Ka indicate that Nd Er and ???O are well correlated, showing good potential for the proxy. Additional preliminary data for a longer period (last 28Ma) show interesting patterns and large changes in ?Nd and Nd Er for this period, again arguing that these combined proxies have potential to identify changing weathering inputs to the ocean. In order to further evaluate this proxy, the PIs will analyze hydrothermal plume material from additional hydrothermal vents in the northern and southern EPR, carry out lab experiments of REE uptake in vitro, calibrate the Nd Er proxy using Holocene core tops from SEPR cores, evaluate possible diagenetic effects on the preservation of the proxy signals using cores with known and diverse diagenetic histories, and explore the behavior of both proxies on Ma to 10 Ka time scales for large climatic variations in the Oligocene and Miocene doc17989 none The ALOMAR Weber sodium lidar is a newly completed, state-of-the-art instrument built and installed at the Arctic Lidar Observatory for Middle Atmosphere Research (ALOMAR) in northern Norway (69.3 degrees N) with Air Force funding under the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP). Its capabilities for dual-beam temperature, wind, and momentum flux measurements have recently been demonstrated under continuing Air Force support. This is an NSF-funded collaborative project for a comprehensive study of the dynamics, structure, and variability of the mesosphere and lower thermosphere (MLT) using the Weber lidar and associated instrumentation at ALOMAR. Such funding of Weber lidar dynamics studies is expected to enhance dramatically measurement and research activities and the potential of U.S. PIs to participate in various collaborative programs, including ground-based support and correlative science with the thermosphere ionosphere mesosphere energetics and dynamics (TIMED) satellite and the MaCWAVE rocket dynamics studies, of considerable relevance to the NSF Aeronomy Program objectives. This award will also make ALOMAR facilities and correlative research opportunities available to other U.S. scientists doc17990 none With funding provided by the National Science Foundation, Dr. David Lentz and his associates will conduct fieldwork and laboratory experiments to determine whether the modern domesticated sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) is derived from: 1) a wild progenitor from populations in eastern North America, as previously hypothesized; 2) a wild population from Mexico; or 3) or the result of two separate domestication events. The issue of domesticated sunflower origins has been reopened because of recently discovered archaeobotanical remains of fully domesticated H. annuus from deep deposits at the San Andres site in the Gulf Coast region of Tabasco, Mexico. Radiocarbon age determinations +- 50 B.P. These findings represent the earliest indisputable record of domesticated sunflower. The San Andres sunflower seeds probably were imported into Tabasco as full-fledged domesticates because Tabasco lies to the south of the modern distribution of wild sunflowers. The precise location of sunflower domestication is unknown at present, but Mexican regions north of Veracruz with suitable habitat and wild populations of H. annuus now seem likely as possible areas of origin. The methodological approaches will include a major fieldwork component followed by laboratory analyses. The fieldwork will focus on collecting modern wild sunflower specimens from northern Mexico, the southwestern U.S., and the midwestern U.S. These collections will provide raw material for the taxonomic and molecular analyses that will enable the team to identify wild progenitor populations of domesticated sunflower. Previous authors have argued for an eastern North American origin for domesticated sunflower based on archaeobotanical data from several sites in the Mississippi River Basin and the recognition of sunflower as one of the keystone species in what eventually developed into the Eastern Agricultural Complex (EAC) of North American cultigens. Interestingly, sunflower was the only major cultigen that formerly was unchallenged as an eastern North American domesticate; now that origin, at least as a unique domestication event, appears in doubt. In addition to its anthropological implications, locating ancestral wild populations has significant practical applications for expanding the genetic base of a valuable resource; sunflower is one of the world s major oilseed crops with an annual global production of over 26 million metric tons. Once located, these ancestral sunflower populations, as valuable genetic reservoirs, will represent meaningful targets for conservation doc17991 none Reactive trace species such as Fe have an important effect on surface ocean chemistry and biological productivity. However, other trace species that can influence primary production, affect the chemical distribution of other elements or can be used as tracers have received less attention. For this reason, two PIs from the University of Southern Mississippi will participate in the 4th IOC cruise to the Northwest Pacific to determine Mn, H2O2 and Ga in surface waters, vertical profiles, rain samples, dust dissolution experiments and or incubation experiments. Determinations of H2O2 will be used for the following: (1) add measurements to a growing dataset aimed at examining photochemical dissolution of dust in surface waters; (2) determine whether it aids in the solubilization of particulate Fe in the surface ocean; and (3) assess rates of photo-production and dark decay. Values for Mn will be compared with Al and Ga to differentiate dust from shelf inputs. In addition, given the longer residence time for Mn in the surface ocean, the PI will attempt to use this metal to provide new insights into Fe inputs to the upper ocean. Comparison of Mn with H2O2 will allow the PIs to determine reductive dissolution of manganese oxides in seawater. Lastly, Ga concentrations will be compared with Al to assess if the former may not be a better proxy for dust inputs to the surface ocean, determine if any fraction is anthropogenic and whether any of the Ga is complexed with organics creating possible Ga-Fe competitive interactions doc17923 none Metalliferous clays and Mn nodules and crusts contain highly radiogenic Hf isotopes and if subducted, the Hf isotopes could be used as a tracer for their presence in arc lavas. The purpose of this proposed study is to analyze Hf and Nd isotopes in marine sediments from outboard 12 subduction systems to determine how prevalent this signature might be. The origin of this unusual Hf isotopic fractionation is also uncertain, and these new data will help to constrain its cause. Finally, the new data will be helpful for constraining the terrestrial mass balance of Hf and Nd isotopic systems. The samples will mostly be ODP-drilled sediments obtained from arcs with potentially high variations of Hf isotopes and systems with very high sediment flux doc17993 none Sierra The objective of the research is to develop a biomineralization process in high-rate sulfate reducing bioreactors applicable to the removal and recovery of heavy metals from aqueous waste or process streams. Metal immobilization will be stimulated by biogenic sulfides produced by sulfate reducing bacteria. Copper (Cu) was chosen as model metal, since this contaminant is present at high concentrations in many industrial effluents (e.g., mining, semiconductor, metallurgical and metal-finishing industries) and is a particularly toxic priority pollutant. The project will be initiated with continuous anaerobic bioreactors to determine the most suitable electron donor for sulfide production in mesophilic and thermophilic systems. The experiments will also assess the main factors controlling Cu removal from synthetic effluents. Molecular methods based on rRNA detection, electron microscopy and X-ray spectroscopy, will be used to evaluate the structure and function of the microbial population and to determine the speciation and distribution of the minerals in the anaerobic biofilm system. The knowledge gained will be applied to elucidate the underlying mechanisms-and identify the key microorganisms responsible for Cu removal in sulfidogenic bioreactors. In addition, a chemical equilibrium model will be developed to simulate Cu partitioning and removal in the bioreactors in order to facilitate process optimization. In the final part of the project, the treatment of a Cu-contaminated stream generated in semiconductor manufacturing (i.e., chemical mechanical planarization (CMP)) will be investigated to determine the efficiencies of Cu removal under practical conditions. CMP effluents were selected because of their significance to the host institution s State and to enhance collaboration with the NSF SCR Center. It is anticipated that this research will lead to improved scientific and technological understanding of the potentials of sulfate reducing bioprocesses for metal decontamination doc17994 none This award supports an American Physiological Society conference entitled The Power Of Comparative Physiology: Evolution, Integration And Application, scheduled for August 24-28, in San Diego, California. The fundamental goal of this conference is to bring together comparative biologists who utilize a diversity of approaches including molecular, cellular, organ, and organismal physiology biochemistry, functional morphology, biomechanics and biophysics, ecology and evolutionary biology to understand physiological processes and traits. The meeting will highlight the accomplishments that have occurred since the last large meeting on comparative physiology, and more importantly, will provide a forum to showcase new directions and approaches. The specific aims of this proposal are to: 1) Convene an internationally recognized interdisciplinary group of investigators to explore the rapid changes that comparative physiology has undergone as a result of the incorporation of a variety of new tools and technologies into the discipline; 2) Promote widespread participation of young scientists with an emphasis on women and under-represented minorities, through a travel award program; and 3) Interest new investigators and students in pursuing research using comparative approaches to understand physiological processes and traits doc17995 none Building an Agenda for Integrated Developmental Ethnographic Research: A Proposal for a Conference Sara Harkness yet, the integration of ethnographic perspectives and methods in research on children s development remains an unfulfilled agenda. The lack of integration of developmental and ethnographic approaches to the study of children is evident across a wide variety of academic contexts, including grant proposals, as well as published work. Indeed, it appears that trends in graduate education in the social and behavioral sciences over the past few decades have exacerbated the separation of anthropological and developmental inquiry, to the detriment of both. Despite these trends, however, there is currently high potential for a new level of integration of developmental and ethnographic approaches in research on children. In order to realize this potential in research, a small working conference has been designed. The 2 -and one-half day workshop is intended to bring together leading researchers in anthropology and developmental science. Participants will include approximately fifteen scholars from several disciplines, including social, demographic and psychological anthropology; developmental, social, and cross-cultural psychology; linguistics; sociology; and pediatrics to build an agenda for integrated developmental ethnographic research on children in cultural contexts. Discussion will focus around three related topics: 1) theoretical frameworks that are promising for the integration of developmental and ethnographic research; 2) integration of research methods so that both development and its context can be analyzed in systematic fashion; and 3) overcoming the dichotomy between qualitative and quantitative data doc17942 none The Endeavor Deep along the Juan Fernandez microplate exposes a 50 km-long 3-4 km-deep section of young ocean crust created at very fast spreading rates. This projects involves combined geophysical surveys with in situ observations and sampling along the northeast wall of the Endeavor Deep. High-resolution DSL-120 side-scan sonar will completely insonify the scarp and be used to map regional trends in lithology and structure at 10 m resolution. Rock dredging will identify specific targets for more detailed sampling. Digital imaging and petrologic sampling transects with Jason II will groundtruth the regional view and provide a high-resolution perspective of representative sections. Deep-towed 3-component magnetometer data will map the magnetization of oceanic crust at these same scales doc17997 none This award to Professors Jiri Janata and Miroslawa Josowicz of the Georgia Institute of Technology is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program in the Chemistry Division. Polyanaline and the closely related poly(phenylene sulfidephenyleneamine) are to be modified with non-aqeuous acids and or metal clusters in an effort to finely adjust the electronic work functions of these electrically conducting polymers. In this way, gas sensors made from these polymers are to have greater sensitivity and selectivity to specific gas molecules. A donacity scale of interactions is proposed to correlate gas polymer interactions with the polymer work function, with the goal of more predictable sensor performance. In addition, sensor fabrication methods are to be explored with a electrochemical molecular imprinting technique. Chemical sensing arrays can be prepared from a matrix of electrically conducting polymers. However, sensitivity, selectivity, robustness, and compatibility with solid-state fabrication processes remain as unresolved issues. In this work, fundamental methods for tuning the selectivity of a polymer matrix will be explored along with a new strategy for fabrication doc17998 none Karen Goldberg, Department of Chemistry, University of Washington, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program for her studies on the selective activation and functionalization of the C-H bonds of alkanes. She will conduct studies of the mechanisms, energetics, requirements and scopes of reaction steps involved in platinum catalyzed alkane oxidation. Reactions to be investigated include the oxidative addition reductive elimination of C-H and C-O bonds at platinum centers and reactions of platinum complexes with dioxygen. The selective activation and functionalization of alkanes is a major goal in organometallic chemistry. The production of useful chemicals directly from natural gas and other alkane reserves would have significant economic and environmental advantages over current processes. Students and postdoctoral associates will also be trained in important skills of synthesis, characterization, kinetics and mechanistic studies doc17869 none Many consequential decisions are made by groups, from jury decisions over the guilt and innocence of defendants (Pennington ). An unfortunate reality of group decision making is that collective decisions are often beset by flaws, leading innocent people to be incarcerated and those in poor health to become sicker rather than healthier. One category of factors that leads groups to make faulty decisions is the manner in which information is sought, shared, and processed in a social context (Janis, ). Given the magnitude of the consequences of group decisions, it is important to consider how groups can seek, share, and process information in a more systematic and less biased manner. The purpose of the current research is to gain a better theoretical and practical understanding of the role of counterfactual thinking, or thoughts about what might have been or what almost happened, in influencing group decision making. Counterfactual mind-sets are expected to increase the propensity of groups to engage in mental simulations and consideration of alternatives. We predict that activating a counterfactual mind-set will improve the decision making accuracy of groups. The proposed program of research explores the nature, boundary conditions, and range of applications of activating a counterfactual mind-set in group decision making and problem solving contexts. The project will involve a series of controlled, experimental studies that establish the causal relationship between counterfactual mind-sets and group decision making processes and outcomes doc18000 none ion. The intention is that the region is a neutral mechanism provided to address many problems, both within a single network layer and across layers. The research will lead to a better understanding of management of multiple layers and the impacts that one can have on another in a controlled way. The research is expected to lead to a framework for decision-making about adaptation to changes in size and usage patterns. Finally, the research is expected to provide a better understanding in each of the example areas of the problems that arise there and how to address them doc18001 none Sherman This award supports the participation of American scientists in a U.S.-Japan seminar on microbial and plant metabolism--function through genomics to be held in Honolulu, Hawaii from November 22-26, . The co-organizers are Professor Louis Sherman of Purdue University in Indiana and Professor Yuichiro Takahashi of Okayama University in Japan. The meeting will cover the extraordinary progress that has been made in the last two years in sequencing of the genomes of photosynthetic microbes, especially cyanobacteria. Over one dozen strains will have been sequenced by the meeting and this will lead to a wide array of new findings in many different disciplines and also in our understanding of gene regulation. Two of the newly sequenced organisms include Prochlorococcus strains that are of tremendous importance in the open ocean and may be the most abundant photosynthetic organisms on the planet. Two others are N2-fixing strains that will provide a tremendous opportunity to analyze N2 fixation, heterocyst development and the way in which these processes are regulated. The significance of the science to be discussed at this meeting is quite wide-ranging. The cyanobacteria and the other photosynthetic phototrophs have become among the most important of all model organisms and that a multitude of important problems for the biosphere can be studied through these organisms. This meeting will represent a timely opportunity for the major participants in this broad field of genomics to discuss their results, discuss the successes and the difficulties of recent work and focus on future directions. Younger members of the community will be invited into the international collaboration and hopefully maintain research collaborations throughout their careers. Most importantly, cyanobacteria represent one of the best and most advanced model systems for understanding the functionality of each protein in a cell. Results obtained from this photosynthetic microbe will be of great value for the Arabidopsis program aimed at the same goal. The cyanobacterial results will be significant for an understanding of chloroplast function as well as providing critical information on how a cell lives, replicates, and responds to its environment. Proceedings of the seminar will be published on the Web doc18002 none Tannenbaum, Allen The research program outlined in this proposal is driven by the need to develop novel means of acquiring, storing, manipulating and synthesizing signals and images for use in a feedback loop. This is the essential mandate of controlled active vision in which one uses a combination of techniques from systems and control, signal and image processing, as well as a computer vision for this purpose. The design of novel techniques for using visual information in control systems appears in a number of practical systems problems ranging from remote controlled weapons and vehicles to telesurgery, manufacturing systems, and ATR. Moreover, these efforts are leading to enhanced man-machine interfaces for interactions with computers. In this research, the PI will consider certain novel methods based on the notion of optimal mass transport for such problems in controlled active vision. This type of technique has appeared in econometrics, fluid dynamics, transportation, statistical physics, shape optimization, expert systems, meteorology, and nonlinear control analysis and synthesis doc18003 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Hector Neff and his collaborators will complete the analysis of five sediment cores from Pacific coastal Guatemala that are known to span the time periods when people first began modifying the landscape for agriculture and other subsistence purposes. Preliminary results from one location suggest that people brought maize or a direct ancestor of maize to the region before B.C. and that dramatic agricultural intensification took place beginning around B.C. The signal of human modification and other landscape changes can be detected in sediment cores via the changing frequencies of plant microfossils (phytoliths and pollen) and charcoal together with variation in sedimentation rates. When people cut or burn down the tropical forest for agriculture, weeds and charcoal become more common in the record as trees and other forest species decline. Sedimentation rates also tend to increase as forest cover is removed. Maize and other agricultural crops can be identified both from pollen and phytoliths, the combined evidence providing the most secure identification (phytoliths are microscopic silica bodies that accumulate growing plants). These changes are placed in a chronological context by AMS radiocarbon dating of organic matter from selected levels in the cores. The period between B.C. and 800 B.C. in Pacific coastal Guatemala is of particular interest because it was during this period that many of the distinctive characteristics of Mesoamerican complex societies coalesced. By the end of the period, people in most locations depended heavily on maize agriculture, large sites with monumental architecture and elaborate stone sculpture were being constructed, and social stratification had appeared. The fundamental shifts in subsistence, the increased tethering of people to specific locations, and the beginning of major investment in architectural infrastructure constituted the emergence of Mesoamerican civilization. Unfortunately this Pacific region has been relatively understudied and details of the sequence are poorly known compared, for example, to the Olmec heartland on the Gulf Coast of Mexico. The work of Dr. Neff and his colleagues will both establish an environmental context for this cultural progression and provide insight into the process itself doc18004 none Staff at the University of Wisconsin are developing the next version of the middle school instructional program, Mathematics in Context. Materials are also developed for teachers, administrators and parents. The work is done is in collaboration with the Freudenthal Institute at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands and the Encyclopedia Britannica. Some units will receive only minor changes and corrections and others will be completely revised. Among the more significant changes are: streamlining the fifth-grade units to facilitate the transition from elementary school reform materials; reducing the number of units at each grade level to facilitate more complete coverage; and the development of technology-based project units that could be used by groups of students outside regular class time. The revisions are based on reviews by experts and the experience of use in classrooms doc18005 none This award provides funding for the PI to establish a long term research program on the environmental effects (temperature, salinity, prey density) on the population dynamics of jellyfish (including scyphomedusae, hydromedusae, and ctenophores) in the waters of the Puget Sound basin. Jellyfish populations exhibit dramatic interannual fluctuations, and the reasons for this are largely unknown. The PI will conduct laboratory experiments to test the combined effects of temperature, salinity and prey density in combination with in situ sampling with a video system. The initial target species is Aurelia labiata, whose congeners are among the most abundant large jelly fish worldwide. This research is significant because jellyfish populations may be increasing around the world due to the combined effects of human activities. Jellyfish are important consumers of zooplankton, and are generally deleterious to fish populations and commercial fisheries through direct predation on fish eggs and larvae, predator competition, and interference with fish harvesting. It is important to understand the factors that affect their population fluctuations in order to understand the possible effects of changing ocean conditions. This ADVANCE award will promote the career of a female scientist at a critical point. This investment is likely to allow her to re-establish her career a new university, where she will be an excellent role model for students. In addition, the SPML has two strong programs focused on undergraduate research in which the PI will participate as a mentor and instructor. The programs, Minorities in Marine Science Undergraduate Program (MIMSUP) and an Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site program will allow the PI to mentor numerous undergraduate students doc18006 none This research is concerned with data analyses and modeling activities to gain further insights on the processes governing atmospheric trace gas dynamics, in particular ozone in the arctic boundary layer. The research activities will lead to improvements in the predictive understanding of tropospheric ozone and other trace gases, which can exert a critical influence in the arctic chemical and radiative balance. Our studies are motivated to derive further understanding of trace gas deposition rates and will achieve the following objectives: 1. to investigate the most appropriate methods for estimating trace gas transport in the surface layer of the arctic atmosphere, 2. to evaluate the suitability of electrochemical ozonesonde data for deriving ozone deposition rates, 3. to study and quantify ozone deposition rates at selected Arctic sites based on ozonesonde routinely obtained at selected arctic sites, 4. and to define the atmospheric conditions when maximum ozone surface deposition rates take place in the arctic boundary layer. These objectives will be addressed through a combination of data analyses and modeling studies employing three data sets deemed to be of high quality. During spring , we obtained high frequency data at Alert, Nunavut, Canada and Summit, Greenland, Denmark. These two data sets, involving vertical meteorological and chemical profiles from towers and tethered balloons, will be analyzed within the framework of investigating the most appropriate methods to derive trace gas fluxes between the surface and overlying atmosphere and or vice versa. Additional scientific outputs of these activities relate to the turbulent length scales associated with trace gas fluxes in the arctic boundary layer. Knowledge of turbulent scales is critically essential to understand the atmospheric layer impacted by trace gas emissions from the Arctic snowpack. The third data set involves the archived data from ozonesondes released at selected sites throughout the Arctic. We will employ these extensive historical data to develop a one-dimensional model to derive ozone deposition rates to the snowpack surface. Estimated deposition rates will provide upper threshold values that can then be incorporated in regional and or global models to constrain ozone budgets in the arctic troposphere. The research will lead to a simple modeling parameterization to routinely derive ozone deposition rates based on the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) ozone monitoring network, and thus provide critical information to decipher the processes governing ozone temporal changes in the Arctic boundary layer. Understanding of ozone dynamics is crucial to define the contribution of ozone in the chemical and radiative balance of the Arctic. Given the recent discovery that the arctic snowpack represents a substantial source of gases such as nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, nitrous acid and formaldehyde, this project will also yield methodologies to deduce fluxes of these important trace gases based on ambient (profile) concentrations doc18007 none ed from hold-up. Theoretically, the model merges the earlier dynamic GE insider outsider model with a hold-up friction in that workers can grab rents from firm investments made prior to the time that firms and workers bargain. The project shows how the equilibrium can be characterized and how it can be computed even with the additional complexity arising from industry-specific capital. This model has substantive quantitative implications for historical episodes in which government policies permitted labor to hold up capital. This model is used to study the macroeconomic effects of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which gave labor a significant ability to hold up firms. The specification of the model captures some key aspects of New Deal policies. The model with hold-up helps resolve two key puzzles highlighted in my earlier work: (1) the further deterioration of the economy after the NLRA was passed, and (2) the extraordinary low level of investment. The hold-up model predicts a further drop in output and employment and a further increase in the real wage after the NLRA was adopted, which is consistent with the data. The model also predicts a much lower level of investment than predicted by the earlier model without hold-up, and thus brings the theory closer in line with data. This finding suggests that rent-grabbing was a key factor that kept investment low during the New Deal. The proposal also outlines the application of this model to Europe. Second, past work is broadened by studying unemployment insurance policies that affect labor supply. A dynamic general equilibrium model is developed to study the macroeconomic implications of some historical depressions in which countries have adopted very generous unemployment benefits systems. This work indicated that Britain s unemployment insurance system -in conjunction with large, negative sector-specific shocks - was a key contributing factor to the depression. The new research develops a fully articulated model to quantitatively evaluate the macroeconomic impact of unemployment benefits during interwar Britain and during other historical episodes. This research differs considerably from the large existing literature that has analyzed the interwar British depression. It makes considerable use of dynamic general equilibrium theory, and it does not exclusively focus on UI. In fact, the research discusses how UI cannot be the whole story, because post-World War II employment was considerably higher than interwar employment, despite comparable levels of benefits. By focusing on the fact that Britain suffered large, negative sectoral shocks after World War I, but not after World War II, the research suggests a unified accounting of interwar and post-World War II. It develops a multi-sector model that includes a search friction on employment and takes into account the drop in human capital associated with sectoral shifts and spells of unemployment. Such a model is capable of assessing the impact of the large sectoral shocks on Britain s interwar unemployment given its generous VI system. The model is used to study Europe in s. A number of researchers have suggested that the problems Europe experienced during this period arose from a combination of generous unemployment benefits, high degrees of labor bargaining power and large sectoral shocks. Finally, the project constructs a comprehensive cross-country database on interwar economies to help foster additional research on the interwar period. This will be the only fully documented, downloadable database on this period available doc18008 none In this prepared ADVANCE Fellow award the PI plan to investigate the general area of networks and control, which can be broken down into two subareas. The first subarea considers the control of communication networks, which falls into the broader field of information technology. The second subarea is networked control systems (NCS), where one or more control loops is closed via a serial communication channel. The focus of this proposal is in the latter subarea. The idea of NCS is to bring multiple-input, multiple-output control system technology to application areas where the prohibitive cost of point-to-point wiring had previously barred its use. The PI has worked for the past five years on research that covers stability, encoding, estimation, perturbation and application issues for NCS. Applications of this research include control and communications of active, intelligent, dynamic networks; distributed sensor systems; secure, reliable wireless communication; and control of multi-vehicle formations. The PI will work with two other robotics professors at UW on a project with the goal of enabling groups of robots to work effectively under unstructured conditions and with close coordination and control by humans. There are many activities where it is desirable to substitute robots for humans ( dull, dirty and or dangerous tasks). Teams of robots, operating in an unknown and perhaps hostile environment can potentially accomplish important missions such as surveillance, situation awareness and understanding, damage assessment, search and rescue, and others. However, command and control of such a team requires effective coupling between the human supervisor and the robot teams. Furthermore, the sensory, motor and planning capabilities of the human exceed those of foreseeable autonomous robots. Therefore, an effective combination of the human and robot can potentially produce higher performance than a team composed entirely of humans or entirely of robots. Realizing this vision requires basic advances in research in the fields of mobile robotic sensing planning and control, as well as human interfaces to multiple robots. The PI s work on this project will focus on multi-robot communication and control. The PI is actively involved with community outreach at UW. During the past academic year, the PI has hosted three outreach events. The first was a 3-hour long workshop on mobile robotics for a group of Seattle YMCA teenagers. The second was three hour-long workshops on mobile robotics for teenage girls through the Shoreline Community College Expanding Your Horizons Day program. The PI also hosted a two-day open house in the Mobile Robotics Laboratory for the annual EE Department Open House. This past academic year, the PI developed three new senior-level capstone design courses on mobile robotics. The PI plans to improve the courses and teach them again in the upcoming academic year. The PI plans to research the two areas listed above. This will involve working with other professors and students in the UW Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering departments. To meet the ADVANCE goal the PI plans to support a woman graduate student each year. The PI is currently a graduate student mentor in the UW Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) program. The PI will also be an advisor for independent study projects from women in the EE department. The UW EE Department has most of the required infrastructure to support the PI and graduate students to perform the research proposed doc18009 none Michael Heinekey, Department of Chemistry, University of Washington is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program for continued explorations of metal-dihydrogen interactions or metal-alkane interactions. He uses unique NMR techniques including photolysis of precursors in the NMR probe; very low temperature NMR, exchange coupling and tritium NMR to explore the nature of these weak bonds. Heinekey also studies elongated dihydrogen complexes which display novel vibrational and dynamic properties that may provide a snapshot of an H-H bond rupture process. The education and training of future scientists and the development of new NMR methods are major impacts of this work. The activation of hydrogen is a critical reaction biologically (hydrogenase enzymes) and industrially. By better understanding how various metal species interact with hydrogen, better homogeneous catalysts and processes may be designed doc18010 none This grant by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program supports work by Professor Reuben H. Simoyi at West Virginia University to investigate the reaction mechanisms of small organic sulfur compounds. Focus areas are: S-oxygenation, enzymatic and nonenzymatic metabolic activation, radical species, decomposition and autoxidation reactions, and toxicity effects. These areas of investigation relate to important physiological, environmental and industrial processes involving oxidation, C-S bond cleavage and radical intermediates. Reactions of sulfur compounds will be studied, particularly with regard to their utility in understanding sulfur reactivities in physiological, environmental and industrial processes doc18011 none This Chemistry Division award supports a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at Michigan State University, where a previous REU site was funded for - . Louis Pignolet is the site s Program Director. Fourteen faculty are available to serve as REU student mentors. Over the award period ( - ), ten students will be supported each summer in a ten-week program. The research areas in this program are environmental, materials, and biological chemistry. Activities will include weekly lunch seminars and regular research group meetings. All students will present a report on their research in the form of a poster or oral presentation at the end of the program. The program is evaluated by exit surveys of all participants, tracking the career choices of the participants, and surveying the faculty research mentors doc18012 none Funds are provided to upgrade gas chromatograph facilities at Brown University that will allow high-resolution studies at Uk-37 and other organic paleoenvironmental proxies and biomarkers. The new configuration will allow through put of 110-125 samples, instead of the present 40-50 analyses. The University will cost share 30% of the total request. The new will result in improved productivity for the PI and other investigators at Brown engaged in serveral marine geological projects doc18013 none The Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Program will be continued in the School of Physics of the Georgia Institute of Technology. The program will encompass Chemical, Optical, Nonlinear, and Condensed Matter Physics but also has been expanded to include projects in MEMS (Micro-electrical Mechanical Systems), Biomedical Imaging, and Material Science- Microscopy. Twelve REU students participate in the program (ten supported by NSF, two by Georgia Tech), with the choice of participation in the research groups of 18 faculty investigators. The considerable experience of the participating faculty in undergraduate research training furnishes an ideal environment to pursue undergraduate research training among the supportive cast including graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. The closely monitored research environment is supplemented by (1) weekly seminars presented by both participating faculty and students, (2) faculty-student luncheons, (3) excursions to advanced technology facilities including Lockheed Aircraft, (4) a reasonable but not intrusive number of organized social events as students are encouraged to avail themselves of several cultural opportunities in the Atlanta area dictated by their individual interest. At the end of the summer session, each student presents the results of their research endeavors in a REU Symposium run in the American Physical Society format of 15-20- minute presentations doc17842 none This proposal request support for a comprehensive chemical and isotopic survey (major, trace, and rare earth elements along with Sr, Nd and Pb isotopes) to test the hypothesis that the source of particulate Fe to central equatorial Pacific surface waters is the Papua New Guinea region via the eastward flowing Equatorial Undercurrent (EUC). In addition the study will assess whether wind blown material is more important as a source of particulate Fe at 4oN and 5-2oS than is PNG-derived Fe. The study will examine downcore variations in the EUC-sourced Fe through glacial-interglacial cycles, and examine whether changes can be correlated with changes of export production recorded in the sediments doc18015 none This ADVANCE Fellows project examines the convergence of two relatively new and increasingly popular trends in state-led environmental resource management: marine protected areas (MPAs) and Geographic Information Science (GIS). It is argued that the combination of state-mandated MPAs and GIS has fostered political struggles and organized resistance among stakeholders (including fishers, environmentalists, and the state) unlike any previous marine resource regulations. While there has been a recent explosion of natural science publications on various dimensions of MPAs, studies on the social dimensions of MPAs are lacking. This project addresses these issues in a comparative study of two recently designed MPAs in the lagoon of Moorea, French Polynesia, and the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, California. This comparison is useful because the processes of designation MPAs in each locale were strikingly similar, yet there are differences between the First and Third Worlds, and different scales which will afford compelling analyses. The current conjuncture of the rising popularity of MPAs and the growing adoption of state-based GIS decision-making and management makes this research timely and precedent-setting. This award is supported through the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc18016 none This project consists of a series of experiments to study interacting cold atoms in far-off-resonant optical lattices (FORLs). In one experiment the three-dimensional FORL will be adiabatically altered into a two-dimensional FORL to achieve effective one-dimensional collisional behavior that has been predicted to lead to a Tonks gas. Other experiments include continued efforts to achieve Bose condensation in a fully optical trap and atom interferometry experiments in the three-dimensional FORL doc18017 none Hargus This linguistics project involves field research on the Yukon dialect of Deg Xinag (also known as Ingalik, Dig Hit an), an endangered Athabascan language spoken in several villages along the lower Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers and tributaries thereof. Primary results of the research will be a grammar and a dictionary. A special topic of investigation for the grammar is a sequence of tense. The proposed project will use standard linguistic interview techniques to elicit words and sentences, and grammaticality judgments. Some digital recordings will be made for analysis of phonetic structures of interest. The value of preserving endangered languages such as Deg Xinag is twofold. First, the information preserved is a valuable record of the culture, of interest to future members of the communities. Second, such information is needed to construct valid theories of human linguistic diversity doc18018 none Award: Principal Investigator: Arthur Apter The Mid-Atlantic Mathematical Logic Seminar (MAMLS), formed in the fall of under the aegis of Lee Stanley, has supported 3-4 regional meetings per year of 1-2 days duration since then. These meetings are held at various locations and cover a broad spectrum of mathematical logic with particular emphasis on complexity theory, theoretical computer science, fragments of arithmetic, pure and applied model theory, proof theory, recursion theory, set theory, subsystems of analysis in accordance with the program of H. Friedman and S. Simpson, and topos theory. NSF support is provided for some of the expenses of the speakers and attendees, in particular of the graduate students. Via the meetings sponsored, the MAMLS grant maintains the vitality of the field of mathematical logic. Special emphasis is placed on enhancing the participation of younger researchers and members of traditionally under-represented groups, especially women. This is done by providing an intellectual forum in which all interested persons are invited to contribute and in which there are lectures on current topics of research. The Mid-Atlantic Mathematical Logic Seminar (MAMLS), formed in the fall of under the aegis of Lee Stanley, has supported 3-4 regional meetings per year of 1-2 days duration since then. These meetings are held at various locations and cover a broad spectrum of mathematical logic with particular emphasis on complexity theory, theoretical computer science, fragments of arithmetic, pure and applied model theory, proof theory, recursion theory, set theory, subsystems of analysis in accordance with the program of H. Friedman and S. Simpson, and topos theory. NSF support is provided for some of the expenses of the speakers and attendees, in particular of the graduate students. Via the meetings sponsored, the MAMLS grant maintains the vitality of the field of mathematical logic. Special emphasis is placed on enhancing the participation of younger researchers and members of traditionally under-represented groups, especially women. This is done by providing an intellectual forum in which all interested persons are invited to contribute and in which there are lectures on current topics of research doc18019 none The impact of a data-validated radiation model RRTM, on multi-year climate simulations will be examined under this research effort. Previous work has shown that the improved accuracy provided by the RRTM in the longwave modifies the temperature structure, water vapor distribution, and tropical circulation in the CCM3 simulations. However comparisons between the RRTM and CCM3 in the shortwave show substantial clear sky differences that complicate the interpretation of the RRTM longwave impact on CCM3 in some regions. Experiments proposed here will consider the effect of both longwave and shortwave improvements. In addition, by comparing RRTM-modeled and observed spectral radiances, there are substantial discrepancies in the ability of the CCM3 to simulate upper tropospheric water vapor that appear unrelated to radiation. The collaboration with MIT (PI Emanuel) will examine the role of convection in this process doc18020 none With the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, Professor Sherwood and his coworkers at Kansas State University are exploring the corrosion of reactive metals in contact with liquids. Using anaerobic and UHV transfer cell methods, coupled with direct abrasion methods in deoxygenated solutions, oxide free metal surfaces are prepared and exposed to phosphate and other corrosion resistant overlayers. These layers, and the mechanisms of their formation and stability, are examined using a range of surface sensitive probes, principally valence band photoelectron spectroscopy. Coupled with quantum chemistry calculations for spectral assignment, this suite of tools provides a detailed and powerful probe of the complex chemistry of the corrosion process. These tools are being made widely available to the surface science community as a result of this research project. Understanding the process of corrosion and oxidation on structural metal surfaces is an issue of vital economic importance. Professor Sherwood and his colleagues at Kansas State University are studying this process using a variety of tools that allow the formation of well-characterized oxide and phosphate overlayers, and their analysis using photoelectron spectroscopic methods. This work promises a fundamental understanding of corrosion and corrosion prevention, significant real-world problems doc18021 none Support from the National Science Foundation will allow Dr. Glenn Schwartz to conduct two seasons of excavation at Umm el-Marra, Syria, in order to explore a royal mortuary complex dating to the period of Syria s first urban civilization. Previous excavation and survey work based at Umm el-Marra, located east of Aleppo in northern Syria, has revealed that the site was the predominant urban center of the Jabbul plain throughout the Bronze Age, ca. - BC. In the excavation season, an intact elaborate tomb dating to the earliest urban era was discovered in the site center. While an upper layer consisting of two young women, each with a baby, yielded numerous lavish ornaments of gold, lapis lazuli, and silver, the two layers of males underneath contained only modest amounts of burial goods. Such gender differentiation in grave wealth might be interpreted as evidence of high-ranking women accompanied by sacrificed lower-ranking males. Architectural evidence indicates that the Umm el-Marra tomb was a centrally-located, freestanding mausoleum, part of a larger complex on the site acropolis that may have been an elite funerary installation. In summer and , Schwartz plans to conduct two excavation seasons in order to investigate this complex. An area of 640 square meters will be excavated in the acropolis center in order to expose as much as possible of the hypothesized mortuary complex and to determine if earlier phases of the feature are to be found underneath it. This research promises to yield a number of important results. The study of early urbanism in Syria and Mesopotamia has thus far concentrated on economic and environmental factors. Excavation of an elite mortuary complex will allow for the consideration of the role of ritual, religion, and ideology. An hypothesis proposing that the Syrian elites legitimized their authority through veneration of elite ancestors will be tested. Additional data on status and gender hierarchies will also be obtained and further scrutinized using artifact and skeletal analyses. The complex can be expected to reveal important new information on the dominant elites in early urban Syria, the bases of their power, and the gender-related dimensions of such power. A large sample of elite data, complementing non-elite results from other parts of the site, would allow for a holistic view of an early Syrian urban center doc18022 none Ectomycorrhizae are symbioses between many important forest trees such as Douglas-fir and so called ectomycorrhizal fungi. The symbiosis is mutually beneficial to both partners, and neither can survive without the other. The trees provide carbohydrates to the fungi while the fungi facilitate nutrient uptake for the trees. Ectomycorrhizal fungi are taxonomically much more diverse than their tree hosts, but it remains largely unclear whether the different species of fungi differ in the functions they fulfill for the tree hosts and the forest ecosystem or whether they are functionally redundant . In addition to trees and fungi, bacteria have also been shown to live in close association with ectomycorrhizae, but have rarely been investigated, and it remains unclear whether and how they affect the functioning of the symbiosis. As a first step in assessing the potential influence of bacterial populations on the functional diversity of ectomycorrhizal fungi, the author of this proposal will study how bacterial diversity is structured between different species of fungi and different individuals within a species. Methods will be developed to measure the genetic diversity of bacteria directly from mycorrhizae thus avoiding the bias introduced by bacterial cultivation in the laboratory. By incorporating bacteria into the functional equation, this research will take the science of ectomycorrhizal ecology into a whole new direction doc18023 none Lelong This project uses direct numerical simulation to look at the effectiveness of internal gravity wave radiation from rapidly varying almost geostrophic currents. The primary scientific motivation is to determine to what degree such a process could explain the background level of internal wave radiation in the ocean, away from boundaries. The work is guided both by observations of high internal wave energy near oceanic fronts and by numerical studies of the radiation of gravity waves during the life cycle of baroclinic eddies in the atmosphere. The approach consists of using two types of numerical models, a hydrostatic isopycnal model (HIM) and a non-hydrostatic Navier-Stokes solver (S-FIT), at high spatial resolution to examine the nonlinear evolution of instabilities on a baroclinic jet. The project includes the use of a novel diagnostic tool for separating the internal wave component. A balanced model will be used to invert the potential vorticity field. The resulting balanced vortical flow will then be subtracted from the full flow doc18006 none This research is concerned with data analyses and modeling activities to gain further insights on the processes governing atmospheric trace gas dynamics, in particular ozone in the arctic boundary layer. The research activities will lead to improvements in the predictive understanding of tropospheric ozone and other trace gases, which can exert a critical influence in the arctic chemical and radiative balance. Our studies are motivated to derive further understanding of trace gas deposition rates and will achieve the following objectives: 1. to investigate the most appropriate methods for estimating trace gas transport in the surface layer of the arctic atmosphere, 2. to evaluate the suitability of electrochemical ozonesonde data for deriving ozone deposition rates, 3. to study and quantify ozone deposition rates at selected Arctic sites based on ozonesonde routinely obtained at selected arctic sites, 4. and to define the atmospheric conditions when maximum ozone surface deposition rates take place in the arctic boundary layer. These objectives will be addressed through a combination of data analyses and modeling studies employing three data sets deemed to be of high quality. During spring , we obtained high frequency data at Alert, Nunavut, Canada and Summit, Greenland, Denmark. These two data sets, involving vertical meteorological and chemical profiles from towers and tethered balloons, will be analyzed within the framework of investigating the most appropriate methods to derive trace gas fluxes between the surface and overlying atmosphere and or vice versa. Additional scientific outputs of these activities relate to the turbulent length scales associated with trace gas fluxes in the arctic boundary layer. Knowledge of turbulent scales is critically essential to understand the atmospheric layer impacted by trace gas emissions from the Arctic snowpack. The third data set involves the archived data from ozonesondes released at selected sites throughout the Arctic. We will employ these extensive historical data to develop a one-dimensional model to derive ozone deposition rates to the snowpack surface. Estimated deposition rates will provide upper threshold values that can then be incorporated in regional and or global models to constrain ozone budgets in the arctic troposphere. The research will lead to a simple modeling parameterization to routinely derive ozone deposition rates based on the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) ozone monitoring network, and thus provide critical information to decipher the processes governing ozone temporal changes in the Arctic boundary layer. Understanding of ozone dynamics is crucial to define the contribution of ozone in the chemical and radiative balance of the Arctic. Given the recent discovery that the arctic snowpack represents a substantial source of gases such as nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, nitrous acid and formaldehyde, this project will also yield methodologies to deduce fluxes of these important trace gases based on ambient (profile) concentrations doc18025 none This project will examine microbial diversity and ecology on a portion of the Colorado Plateau in Utah. First, it will expand and characterize an existing culture collection, which will serve as a resource to the research community interested in bacterial taxonomy and natural products. Data obtained from the characterization of this culture collection will allow the distribution of novel microbes found in this study to be examined. Second, a survey of community complexity will be conducted using molecular techniques to obtain qualitative and quantitative data about the structure of these microbial communities. Finally, the role of these microbial communities in stabilizing the friable sandstones of the region will be investigated. Experiments measuring the strength of the microbial communities when grown in a sand and sandstone environment will provide an estimate of the mechanical strength provided by the microbial community to the sandstone. Microbes impact our environment in multiple and quite often subtle ways. These subtle impacts are seen throughout our National Parks and Monuments located on the Colorado Plateau of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico. Microbial communities found in this region live within the pore spaces of the sandstones that dominate the area (cryptoendolithic communities). These organisms exert a nearly imperceptible influence on the rate of erosion through their growth. It is this change in erosion rate that results in the various land forms found on the Colorado Plateau. Studies have been conducted to examine the microbial diversity within these communities, but these studies have focused on the photosynthetic components while this study focuses on the organisms that use carbon compounds for energy (chemoheterotrophs). Results from this project can be used for a variety of purposes, including the design of better management practices for the National Park Service, better methods to control beach erosion, and advances in natural products discovery doc18026 none Foland This grant provides three years of partial salary support for technical assistance in the Radiogenic Isotope Laboratory in the Department of Geological Sciences at the Ohio State University. The Radiogenic Isotope Laboratory is a modern facility with new, first-class physical facilities that house a clean room and both thermal-ionization and noble-gas mass spectrometers, plus a full array of ancillary equipment, to support the research measurements. The laboratory conducts isotope geochemical and geochronologic research on diverse and wide-ranging issues. The principal isotopic systems of current investigation are Rb-Sr, Sm-Nd, U-Pb, K-Ca and also K-Ar especially with the 40Ar 39Ar technique. Studies include both isotope tracer research, using the radiogenic isotopes (e.g., Sr, Nd, and Pb), and geochronologic determinations (e.g., 40Ar 39Ar and Rb-Sr). Overall, the research objectives range from the fundamental and methodological to the applied and topical. In addition to the PI and intramural colleagues and students, the laboratory is utilized by a large number of extramural professionals and students, either as guest workers or by sending specimens for analysis. Research activities of the PI and Ohio State University colleagues as well as a number of external scientists with on-going collaborative and cooperative projects are quite varied. The topics range from geological and geochemical earth science to environmental and biomedical doc18027 none Many chemicals released into the environment disrupt the function of endogenous hormones by acting at their receptors and or by influencing hormone production by interfering with synthesizing enzymes. These endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), which have been found to have effects in several taxa during development and in adulthood, exert their greatest effects in tissues that are responsive to endogenous steroid hormones. These responsive tissues (e.g., reproductive tract, brain) often differ by gender (i.e., are sexually dimorphic) and are involved in display of gender-specific behavior (e.g., reproductive or courtship behavior). The overall objective of the research plan is to determine whether exposure of songbirds to environmental endocrine disruptors affects the normal function of sexually dimorphic (and hormone-sensitive) structures. In particular, effects on the brain regions that control singing (song control system), the song behavior itself, and female responses to song will be assessed after non-stressful exposure to EDCs. Abnormal function of the song control system could have implications for the ability of males to attract mates and of females to choose them, which ultimately could affect songbird populations. Songbirds have long been effective models for investigating hormonal effects on brain and behavior; as such, they also could serve as powerful models for investigating EDC effects on brain and behavior doc17989 none The ALOMAR Weber sodium lidar is a newly completed, state-of-the-art instrument built and installed at the Arctic Lidar Observatory for Middle Atmosphere Research (ALOMAR) in northern Norway (69.3 degrees N) with Air Force funding under the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP). Its capabilities for dual-beam temperature, wind, and momentum flux measurements have recently been demonstrated under continuing Air Force support. This is an NSF-funded collaborative project for a comprehensive study of the dynamics, structure, and variability of the mesosphere and lower thermosphere (MLT) using the Weber lidar and associated instrumentation at ALOMAR. Such funding of Weber lidar dynamics studies is expected to enhance dramatically measurement and research activities and the potential of U.S. PIs to participate in various collaborative programs, including ground-based support and correlative science with the thermosphere ionosphere mesosphere energetics and dynamics (TIMED) satellite and the MaCWAVE rocket dynamics studies, of considerable relevance to the NSF Aeronomy Program objectives. This award will also make ALOMAR facilities and correlative research opportunities available to other U.S. scientists doc18029 none This goal of this research is to examine the relation between perceived distance and physical distance, and also to determine the way in which perceived size is related to perceived distance over distances ranging from about one meter to optical infinity. Thus, the research will deal with size and distance of terrestrial objects, as well as celestial objects, such as the moon. One particular objective is to determine if the moon illusion is a special case of ordinary size perception, or if it must be treated as a special process. It is known that people can match the physical size of an object at one distance to that of another at a much greater distance, even though their images on the retina differ dramatically in size. The ability to match physical sizes regardless of distance (size constancy) entails processing distance information. In classic theories, the perceived size of an object does not depend upon its physical distance, but upon its perceived distance. If distance is misperceived, as may occur under conditions of limited visibility, then size is also misperceived. Some cues operate over large distances, while others play a dominant role at close distances. How different cues interact with each other to influence size perception is not well understood. For this reason, some have questioned whether perceived size really depends upon perceived distance, as in the classic view. This alternative view arose in connection with theories of the moon illusion. In this alternative view, the perceived distance to the moon depends upon its perceived size, which is opposite to the classic view and has important implications for size and distance perception in general. This research will measure how well people can discriminate small differences in depth (or size) between objects over a wide range of distances out-of-doors and in a darkened laboratory containing an artificial terrain. A small depth between two nearby objects is more easily detected than the same depth between distant objects. To be detected, the depth must be made larger with distance. Thus, since ability to discriminate depth (and differences in size) is affected by available cues to distance, manipulation of these cues will allow for examination of their effects. These studies will determine if size judgments are contingent upon capacity to discriminate differences in distance. These results will enhance our understanding of a number of tasks that are important in society in which size and distance need to be judged simultaneously. These include visual guidance of aircraft landings and similar vehicular control tasks. They will be relevant to the design of apparatus such as flight simulators doc18030 none Professor Joel Harris of the University of Utah is funded by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program to study single molecule fluorescence imaging and optical trapping techniques for the study of colloids and colloid-derived materials (e.g. silica). Single molecule fluorescence imaging spectroscopy will be used to determine distributions of dye labels, to count reactive surface sites, and to determine particle volume and areas. Optical trapping will provide long residence times to observe Raman scattering and determine chemical composition of individual particles and kinetics of surface reactions. A wide variety of chemical materials and industrial processes depend on the dispersion of finely divided solid materials in liquids, and probing the chemistry of these particles is a challenge for chemical analysis. The combination of single molecule spectroscopy and optical trapping is being used by others, especially in biological chemistry, but the proposal to use these on colloidal particles is unique doc18031 none This grant supports the design, construction, and testing of a balloon for atmospheric sounding that has an active buoyancy control to enable it to move with the wind. By faithfully tracking the air motions, it provides a so-called Lagrangian frame of reference for measurements of temperature, pressure, humidity, ozone, and other trace gases. These measurements are needed to observe the histories of air parcels as they undergo photochemical and cloud physical processes in the high atmosphere. For example, important details in the formation of polar stratospheric clouds are lacking because the temperature histories of the air parcels in which these clouds form are not known with sufficient accuracy. Moreover, uncertainties in air parcel motion in the tropics mask the mechanism by which water vapor enters the stratosphere, confounding attempts to predict how the ozone layer will respond to climate change. The Lagrangian balloon is of pumpkin design, nine meters in diameter, equipped with an interior servomechanism to change its volume in response to vertical air motions relative to the balloon. The buoyancy is continually adjusted to minimize the vertical air motion, so that the balloon tracks the air with a relative velocity held as near to zero as possible. The balloon can carry a light payload of instruments for measuring the vertical air velocity relative to the balloon, thermodynamic variables, and a satellite modem for communicating with the ground. Students from the University of Massachusetts and the Picker Engineering Program at Smith College will participate in the project doc18032 none Suggs Cardiovascular tissue engineering (CVTE) is an emerging field with the goal of creating vascular tissues that restore, maintain, or improve function based on the principles of engineering and the biologic sciences. The primary goal of this project is to develop a tissue-engineered vascular graft. Based on the current state of knowledge in the field of CVTE, several objectives can be outlined in the development of an ideal tissue-engineered vascular graft. The graft should have sufficient strength to be easily sutured and withstand arterial pressures. The cells used in developing the tissue-engineered construct, particularly endothelial cells, should be autologous and should be derived from adult individuals with minimal donor site morbidity. The PI plans to utilize techniques to drive multipotent cells towards smooth muscle cell and endothelial cell lineages. Once these cells have been differentiated using various soluble chemical factors, they will be seeded sequentially onto porous collagen foams and cultured under both pulsatile and shear stresses. The cell collagen constructs will be evaluated relative to static controls with the hypothesis that the differentiated phenotype of the cells comprising the graft and the strength of the graft itself can be controlled and maintained by a combination of both chemical and mechanical stimulation. Coronary artery disease can be treated with various interventional procedures; however, these procedures have a high failure rate due to restenosis and often must be followed by surgical reconstruction. Conduits are typically removed from the same individual and used as a bypass around the affected artery. Some individuals have unsuitable arteries or veins because of varicosities, branching, or inadequate lumen size. If these autologous conduits are not available or not in satisfactory condition, there are no currently available grafts to replace the small diameter ( 4mm) coronary arteries. The development of an autologous conduit engineered from bone marrow cells would save the lives of patients who have no other options doc18033 none In this project, researchers at Rutgers University will continue their ongoing studies of the dependence of cadmium uptake by coastal marine phytoplankton on taxonomic affinity, growth rate, relative concentrations of other bioactive metals, and the ambient dissolved concentration of carbon dioxide in seawater. With this renewal funding, the focus will be on laboratory culture studies to complement field work carried out over the last four years. Anticipating that the implications of the study will be of general applicability, the investigators have designed the study to quantify fundamental dependencies for several classes of phytoplankton. Nevertheless, a strong impetus for the work is the desire to understand cadmium phosphorous fractionation in Southern Ocean surface waters. The team hopes to develop ground rules for the robust estimation of phosphorous utilization in past Southern Ocean surface waters from the Cd Ca ratio of fossil planktonic foraminifera. The three-year project will address two major questions: (1) Does uptake of Cd depend strongly on phytoplankton phylogeny, or are cell size, growth rate and availability of other metals more important? (2) Is increased Cd uptake with decreased pCO2 found in all major phytoplankton groups, or just diatoms, and is it caused by a physiological response to pCO2 or by pH-dependent changes in water chemistry? To answer these questions the research team will conduct two sets of experiments. First, they will determine Cd uptake in phytoplankton species from four major taxonomic groups, and test the dependence of Cd uptake on availability of other bioactive metals and on growth rate. Secondly, they will investigate the mechanism and ubiquity of Cd uptake control by ambient dissolved CO2 concentration by measuring the effect of varying CO2 on species across a wide phylogenetic spectrum of the phytoplankton. As part of the latter studies, they will conduct experiments to distinguish a physiological role for Cd in carbon acquisition from pH effects on availability of competing metals doc18034 none Murray Description: This project supports a cooperative research project by teams of scientists and graduate students headed by Dr. James Murray, School of Oceanography, University of Washington (UW), Seattle, Washington, Dr. Ilkay Salihoglu, Institute of Marine Sciences (IMS), Middle East Technical University, Erdemli-Icel, Turkey, and Dr. Sergey Konovalov, Marine Hydrophysical Institute (MHI), Ukraine National Academy of Sciences, Sevastopol, Ukraine. This two-year project will take advantage of new samples collected during the R V Knorr research cruise in the Black Sea. The research is divided into three projects: 1. Spatial variability in the chemistry of oxygen, sulfide and nutrients in the upper layer of the anoxic zone in the Black Sea due to ventilation from the Bosphorus Inflow conducted by Dr. Murray and a UW graduate student, a Turkish scientist from IMS, and a Ukrainian scientist from MHI. 2. Geochemistry of redox metals (including Mn, Fe, Cd, Mo, U, V, and Re) in particulate matter across the oxic suboxic anoxic layers in the water column of the Black Sea, conducted by Dr. Murray, a Turkish scientist, and a Turkish graduate student from IMS. 3. Application of molecular genetic techniques for understanding population genetic structure of Calanus sp. conducted by two junior scientists from UW and a scientist and graduate student from IMS. Two Turkish scientists and two Turkish graduate students will visit UW between January and April . Two US junior scientists from UW will visit IMS in Turkey in June-July . The Ukrainian scientist will travel to the US in winter . Murray and his graduate student will travel to Turkey and Ukraine in April-May , and a Turkish scientist will visit the US in August . Scope: This project complements research dealing with the Black Sea being carried out by the US PI under separate funding from the NSF Division of Ocean Sciences. This project will provide graduate students and scientists from Turkey a chance to use state of the art analytical techniques available in the US, but not in Turkey. The collaboration will offer opportunities for two US junior scientists and one female US graduate student to participate in this international project. It will allow scientists from all three countries to develop future international collaborations. The project meets INT objectives of supporting projects of mutual benefit. Funding is provided by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Ocean Sciences doc18035 none Multi-scale, vertical, and horizontal topographic heterogeneity is a critical property of wetland ecosystems. The lack of topographic heterogeneity in restored systems could be a key constraint on their progress toward structural and functional equivalency with undisturbed sites. This project will test the role of heterogeneity in the progress of ecosystem restoration. We hypothesize that topographic heterogeneity enhances the development of restored wetlands and predict that ecosystem structure and function will develop much more rapidly where topographic heterogeneity is added. We will test this hypothesis using an 8-ha model marsh in the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve in San Diego County, CA. To maximize scientific benefits, the site was designed as a large-scale, replicated experiment. This one-of-a-kind project has tremendous potential to advance restoration science due to its state-of-the-art design, replicated treatments, and large scale. Over time, the replicated cells are expected to diverge in structure and function, as tidal creek morphology and marsh surface elevations respond to erosion and sedimentation; colonization by vegetation and invertebrates (including founder effects chance establishments); use by fish; and landscape position (distance along the tidal channel that feeds all three creek networks). Chance establishments by plant seeds and invertebrates brought into the system by tidal water could be particularly important. We will collect critical baseline data as we document early conditions at the model marsh, and assess changes in structure, function, and variability during marsh development. Such early information will strengthen our ability to predict and model the viability of other wetland restoration projects doc18036 none Ants, spiders, and lobsters (arthropods) are built from repeated parts called body segments. Typically each segment has one pair of limbs and these limbs define the lifestyles of different arthropods: they can be used for walking, swimming, feeding, etc. Comparisons of animals as different as crabs and flies, show that segments and limbs can be very differently specialized in different arthropod groups. However, it is still unknown whether segments can evolve such specializations independently. Are segments along the body axis free to evolve on their own or do evolutionary specializations of one segment cause neighboring segments to change? This question will be tested in selected groups of crustaceans by comparing changes to limb and segment structure in closely related species. From these data, the evolutionary pattern of segment evolution can be reconstructed to determine the degree to which segments can evolve independently. This evolutionary analysis will be coupled to a series of experiments on crustacean embryos to evaluate how evolutionary patterns of segmentation are linked to mechanisms that generate segments during development. The major groups of animals are distinct in the ways their bodies are built, that is, they show distinct body plans. Understanding how body plans are organized provides a tool for interpreting how they evolve. This works addresses a fundamental question about the evolution of arthropod body plans: do arthropods have a modular design? This work will then explicitly link the modularity shown in evolution to modularity in development doc18037 none The completion of several genome sequencing projects has resulted in a wealth of new information that raises two major challenges: to discover the function of all the DNA sequences, and to organize functional data so that all life scientists can benefit from them. Different aspects of gene function are now being characterized at a genomic scale in a number of organisms. New tools that are widely accessible to the scientific community are needed to facilitate their integration and analysis. Development of such tools, which will require close collaboration between biologists and computer scientists, will help transform the rapidly growing volume of functional genomic data from information into knowledge that can be used to the broad benefit of both basic and applied disciplines of science research. The aim of this project is to develop new bioinformatics tools to help integrate functional data from diverse genome-wide studies. The soil nematode C. elegans has been used as an animal model system in genomic studies and provides an exceptional platform for the development of integrative tools. The initial focus will be development of a public database of gene knockout phenotypes generated in C. elegans using a rapid method called RNA interference (RNAi) . These data will be used along with other genomic data, such as gene expression patterns and protein-protein interaction maps, to develop modular bioinformatics tools capable of addressing questions that combine these different layers of functional information from C. elegans and other organisms. Finally, these tools will be made accessible to non-programmers through development of a user-friendly interface for the integrated analysis of functional genomic data doc18038 none This study will produce a phylogeny (family tree) of the 38 flea beetle supra-generic groups and 5 galerucine tribes, which will test three proposed hypotheses of relationships, between the flea beetles and the galerucinae using a comprehensive taxon set and an exhaustive character set from adult and larval morphology and 3 gene fragments from the mitochondrial, nuclear and ribosomal genomes. This phylogeny will also be used to test hypotheses of evolution of jumping behavior, evolution of host- plant choice, Biogeography and geologic age of the flea beetles, and evolution of larval leaf feeding which are of general scientific interest. The flea beetles (Chrysomelidae: Alticinae) together with their sister group, the Galerucinae, are a huge group containing over 12,000 species; they are also extremely damaging to agriculture. The flea beetles are renowned for making shot holes in table crops such as potato, broccoli and grapes. The galerucines are infamous for the multi-billion dollar damage to corn and beans. Unfortunately, the taxonomic status of the flea beetles is so confusing that it impedes proper research and pest management. Over 500 described genera of flea beetles are divided into 38 supra-generic tribes, sub-tribes and sections and there is no taxonomic or phylogenetic hypothesis of how these tribes and series are related to one another. This lack of a trust -worthy phylogeny is especially important to pest management, where assumptions about pesticide applications or search for biological control agents are often made based on taxonomic position and where money is often wasted if these assumptions are incorrect doc18039 none With the support of the Organic Dynamics Program in the Chemistry Division, Professor Paul Wenthold, of the Department of Chemistry at Purdue University, will investigate pericyclic reactions of ions using flowing afterglow photoelectron spectroscopy. Among the reactions examined are radical cationic and radical anionic Cope and Diels-Alder reactions. The goal of the work will be to determine the products of the reaction, the mechanism by which they are formed, and the catalytic role of ionization. Solvated ions will be used to probe the role of solvent in determining reaction products. The proposal outlines an extensive program of experimentation to characterize the structure and reactivities of various ion radicals and related novel species, using the specialized capabilities of advanced flowing afterglow instrumentation and a negative ion photoelectron spectrometer now under construction at Purdue. While theory-based calculations will play a role, the main emphasis is clearly on defining structures and patterns of reactivity experimentally. The proposal rests on the curiosity of a mechanistically concerned physical organic chemist fully equipped with the more specialized technical repertoire of an experienced gas-phase ion chemist. Much new information and non-trivial conceptual advances should be gained. Professor Paul Wenthold, of the Department of Chemistry at the Purdue University, with the support of the Organic Dynamics Program, will also continue to train students who will become an integral part of the research and publications resulting from the work. The research results will provide a fresh understanding of novel structures and chemical transformations while demonstrating new applications of emerging technical instrumental capabilities doc18040 none This project proposes to evaluate the utility of retroviruses for the transgenesis of invertebrates. Transgenesis is a powerful technique that allows the manipulation of an organism s genome and experimental access to its genetic function. Despite the fact that among multi?cellular organisms, invertebrates dominate both in terms of biomass and species diversity, most transgenesis studies have been performed in vertebrates due to their possible relevance to human health. The primary challenge in transgenesis is the introduction of genetic material into the cells of an organism. To this end, vectors have been constructed from retroviruses, parasitic microorganisms that permanently (heritably) insert their genetic material into the chromosomes of host cells. This study will determine whether retroviral vectors will function in a diverse group of invertebrate organisms ranging from sponges to insects via a systemic analysis beginning with virus entry and culminating in gene expression in host cells. Even though invertebrates overwhelmingly contribute to the Earth s biomass and function as important model organisms for development, evolution, parasite?host relationships, and environmental changes, their genetics as a whole has been grossly understudied. This study will examine the utility of retroviral vectors in invertebrate systems leading to a better understanding of these vectors and the development of generic transgenesis vectors. The routine transgenesis of invertebrates will permit critical functional genetic studies of invertebrate organisms of vast biological, economic, and environmental importance doc18041 none This project will explore electron spin properties, from both the fundamental physics point of view and from the viewpoint of the technologically important area of spintronics. The emphasis will be on surfaces and interfaces that form the basis of spin transport phenomena. The intention is also to extend the technique of spin-polarized tunneling into new areas: (1) Determination of its relation to crystalline direction, barrier interface, and bulk magnetic moment, (2) Analytical study of tunnel barriers. Though having been addressed for nearly thirty years by many theoretical approaches, the origin and the magnitude of the polarization values measured by tunneling remain an open question. This work will investigate the poorly understood relation between spin polarization of tunneling electrons on crystallographic orientation and surface band structure. This includes spin-polarized tunneling from epitaxial ferromagnetic films, interfacial-bonding effects and tunnel barrier properties. Fabrication techniques will manipulate the interfaces and barriers in planar thin film magnetic tunnel junctions in efforts to maximize the spin polarization values. Spin tunneling is influenced by delta dopants (with or without magnetic moment) in the tunnel barriers - mostly flipping the spins and, except for the case of Fe dopants, even enhancing the spin tunneling probability. This area is yet to be understood and will be well investigated. A state of the art MBE system makes it feasible to engineer thin films with new types of interface materials leading to unique electronic and magnetic properties. The theoretical support comes from Prof. William H. Butler of Oak Ridge National Lab whose expertise is in band structure calculations, interface effects as well as ferromagnetic tunnel junction structures. Spin tunneling studies will possibly be initiated, a first of its kind study in heavy Fermion systems, wherein temperature-induced changes and pressure-induced changes of the magnetic transitions occur. Students of all levels and postdocs will be involved in this investigation thus creating a pool of technical experts particularly in the future field of information technology - spintronics, and in general magnetism as well as thin film science. This condensed matter physics project broaden our fundamental understanding of electron spin properties (a topic in magnetism) by using the unique tool of spin polarized tunneling technique (a quantum phenomenon). The results will contribute to the knowledge base needed for possible future spin-based information technologies. The project will build on earlier successful work in spin tunneling plus transport, and at a later stage of the program will push toward the new frontiers by examining a new class of magnetic materials, so-called heavy Fermion metals. A major goals is to expand a new and promising interaction between theorists who are now working to analyze the spin tunneling experiments. In addition, the fabrication methods, using state of the art molecular beam epitaxy tools will manipulate the material interfaces and tunnel barriers to create novel materials and to maximize the spin polarization values. Measurements will be made in ambient as well as liquid helium temperatures in the presence of a small or large magnetic field. Some of the earlier results of this project have generated worldwide interest, both experimentally and theoretically, with many major companies involved in developing nonvolatile memory elements as well as sensors for ultrahigh-density recording. The project integrates research with the education and training of high-school students, undergraduate students, graduate students and post-doctoral fellows. The training will be in spin transport and in specialized areas such as nanotechnology. The highly educated and trained people will be well prepared for careers as educators and workers in the area of spin-based information storage technology doc18042 none This proposal is concerned with physically-motivated thermomechanical models of materials, such as shape memory alloys, that undergo martensitic phase transitions. These materials are characterized by a strong coupling between temperature and deformation fields and exhibit markedly hysteretic behavior when subjected to cyclic mechanical loading. The origin of hysteresis, kinetics of phase boundaries and thermomechanical interactions are important open problems in modeling of martensitic phase transitions. The proposal includes several continuum models that account for both inertia and thermal effects. The important components of the models are nonconvex elastic energy, latent heat of transformation and time-dependent loading. The main goal is to develop a model capable of capturing the most significant experimental observations, such as size and features of hysteresis loops, volume fractions of material phases and details of interface dynamics. Important phenomena such as serrated hysteresis, inner loops, thermal trapping and evolution of twin microstructures will be investigated. The results of the proposed work will be important for the emerging applications of shape memory materials, such as damage, vibration and acoustic transmission control in composite structures. By advancing the scientific understanding of the dissipative properties of shape memory alloys, this research will potentially contribute toward the development of innovative seismic damping devices for buildings and bridges. The educational component of the proposed work includes involving graduate and advanced undergraduate students in the research program, developing new courses, creating an outreach middle-school program and mentoring women graduate students doc18043 none Dr. Demarest and his team will direct two seasons of NSF-sponsored archaeological and ecological investigations in the Upper Pasion River valley of the Peten rainforest of Guatemala. This multidisciplinary research will be the first intensive study of this region, which is located at the interface of Central America s largest rainforest zone and the mountainous volcanic highlands to the south. Investigations will begin at the site of Cancuen, an area of ruined elite and residential architecture that covers over five square kilometers. Cancuen was located precisely at the head of navigation of the Pasion Usumacinta River system, the major trade and transport artery of the ancient Maya world. Dr. Demarest hypothesizes that highland jade, pyrite, obsidian, and other volcanic rock were transported by foot to Cancuen through the highland passes to the south. From there these materials, or finished products, were exchanged along the Pasion Usumacinta River route to the rest of the ancient Maya world. Preliminary research has uncovered evidence supporting this hypothesis, including domestic workshops in jade, obsidian, pyrite, and other hard stone surrounding Cancuen s monumental royal palace. We also uncovered a protected formal river portage connected by causeways to the palace and workshop zones. The - NSF field seasons will investigate residences and activity areas throughout Cancuen, allowing statistical assessment of economic activities and their correlation to status levels and group affiliations, as determined by associated artifacts, architectural features, proportions of exotic materials, and osteological studies, including isotopic, micropathology, and paleopathology analyses of nutrition and diet. Extensive horizontal excavations of activity areas will explore workshops, and formal, statistical, and microwear study of recovered artifacts will be used to assess production technologies and organization, as well as the status and other activities of the artisans. In turn, these results will be compared to studies throughout the urban zone to characterize the nature of this ancient economy, including attached versus independent specialists, degree of state control, and the economic strategies of the artisan producers themselves, as well as overall organizational structure and distribution of finished products. Correlations with the subsistence economy of Cancuen will be based on ecological analyses and reconstruction. Ceramic, lithic, and figurine data will be subjected to a variety of chemical compositional analyses to determine source areas and exchange systems. The findings will clarify the role that trade and production of goods played in the rise, maintenance, and decline of Classic Maya civilization. In turn, the results contribute to our understanding of the nature of ancient economies and the impact of economic factors in the development and decline of complex societies doc18044 none In this project funded jointly by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, the Computational Mathematics Program of the Division of Mathematical Sciences, and the Molecular Biophysics Program in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, Stuchebrukhov will develop theoretical and computational methods to study long-distance electron tunneling in biological systems. The Tunneling Currents Method, developed earlier by Stuchebrukhov, will be further tested and applied to specific experimental systems. Among the issues this work will focus on are refining the computational approach to make it useful for calculating very small tunneling interactions and incorporating the inelastic effects that are due to protein nuclear dynamics. The work will examine a number of issues that are important to experimentalists, such as how protein dynamics affect the rates of long-distance electron transfer, whether electron-transfer pathways are real or not, and the problem of coupling proton-transfers with electron transfer steps over long distances. This project focuses on improving the accuracy of calculating electron transfer rates in biological systems, an important problem at the interface of chemistry and biology. The issues examined relate to understanding the function and dynamics of a number of important systems whose molecular structures have recently become known, such as photosynthetic reaction centers, allowing a comparison between theory and experiment. Ultimately this work is valuable in understanding how to utilize new technologies, including nanoscale science and biotechnology, as well as in training undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students in the applications of theoretical and computational chemistry to important problems in contemporary science doc18045 none Cellular cholesterol metabolism is a complex problem and in spite of tremendous progress remains incompletely understood. A great deal is known about the enzymes that synthesize cholesterol and about the processes that are involved in the uptake of cholesterol from the diet and how it is transported through the blood to be delivered to cells. The question of how cholesterol moves around within the cell however, remains largely unknown. The goal of this research is to determine if a protein called caveolin-1 is involved in this process. These studies are possible because the movements of caveolin within live cells can be monitored using a fluorescent tracer protein attached to the normal protein. Caveolin binds cholesterol and is known to travel within the cell to compartments where cholesterol is synthesized, used and stored. When completed these studies will determine the role of caveolin in cholesterol homeostasis. Cells absolutely require cholesterol to survive and strive to maintain the level of intracellular cholesterol within tightly controlled parameters. Humans can either obtain their cholesterol from the diet or they can synthesize it de novo. Defects in the pathways that regulate the level of cholesterol have important consequences and contribute to many human diseases. It is necessary to determine what proteins are required for these intracellular cholesterol movements in order to understand how defects result in disease doc18046 none The Advanced Materials program in the Division of Chemistry and the Electronic Materials program in the Division of Materials Research make this joint renewal award to Colorado State University. With this award, Professor Ellen Fisher will study detailed chemical and physical mechanisms of plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition and plasma etching, and will evaluate surface interactions of radicals produced during plasma processing using spatially resolved laser-induced fluorescence. The PI will evaluate the interactions between plasma and surfaces during processing of integrated circuits using dual beam imaging; will quantify and characterize the radicals formed during this processing; and will develop detailed chemical mechanisms for plasma etching and plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition on different substrates. Use of dual beam imaging will be enable to identify and quantitate a number of different processes that are taking place during the plasma processing, and will be able to develop a knowledge base to be useful to the plasma processing and modeling community. The research project will provide excellent opportunity to graduate and undergraduate students in chemistry and material sciences. This project will use dual beam spatially resolved laser-induced fluorescence imaging method to provide quantitative data on radicals produced at surfaces of different substrates during the plasma processing. Information generated will be useful to plasma processing and modeling community for the development of improved and high performance integrated circuits. In addition, the research activity in plasma processing will provide new opportunity to graduate and undergraduate students in chemistry and materials sciences doc18047 none The objective of this project is the development of a student-accessible sounding rocket program for the study of the Earth s ionosphere. The goal of ADVANCE is to increase representation of women in science and engineering, and this award would greatly advance such efforts to develop an externally-funded independent research program. The goal of this project is development of sounding rocket projects to explore various ionospheric phenomena, including plasma-neutral coupling, dusty plasmas, chemical-induced artificial aurora and ionospheric heating experiments doc18019 none The impact of a data-validated radiation model RRTM, on multi-year climate simulations will be examined under this research effort. Previous work has shown that the improved accuracy provided by the RRTM in the longwave modifies the temperature structure, water vapor distribution, and tropical circulation in the CCM3 simulations. However comparisons between the RRTM and CCM3 in the shortwave show substantial clear sky differences that complicate the interpretation of the RRTM longwave impact on CCM3 in some regions. Experiments proposed here will consider the effect of both longwave and shortwave improvements. In addition, by comparing RRTM-modeled and observed spectral radiances, there are substantial discrepancies in the ability of the CCM3 to simulate upper tropospheric water vapor that appear unrelated to radiation. The collaboration with MIT (PI Emanuel) will examine the role of convection in this process doc18049 none The PI will conduct a geochemical study of existing samples from the Galapagos Islands and dredged samples for the Galapagos archipelago in order to sort out the various mantle components that apparently contribute to mantle melts there. He will primarily analyze olivine and spinel-hosted melt inclusions, based on evidence that such inclusions generally contain more diverse melts and are less affected by mixing than bulk lavas. He will analyze major elements, trace elements, volatile abundances, Pb isotopes and Oxygen isotopes in order to determine the nature of various mantle endmembers, and to provide constraints on what these endmembers actually are (subducted sediment? recycled oceanic gabbro? Recycled altered basalt, etc..). The study will mostly be conducted using instruments at WHOI, DTM, and Caltech doc18050 none This project involves revising the Middle Grades MATH Thematics curriculum, a comprehensive grades 6-8 mathematics curriculum developed with NSF funding from through . Revisions will be informed by data collected from various stakeholders, including MATH Thematics teachers, research mathematicians and mathematics educators. Revised student materials will take advantage of new technologies and will be field tested in diverse middle-school settings. The professional development component of the curriculum will be greatly expanded. Materials for parents and administrators that are tailored to MATH Thematics will be developed. New materials will be designed that can be used with special learners, and existing multicultural materials will be evaluated and revised. Formative and summative evaluation of the project will be conducted. Cost sharing includes substantial contributions from the University of Montana and the publisher doc18051 none The research component of this project focuses on the study of the role of disease regulation and coevolution of host-parasite systems in populations with structure through the use of partial differential equations and dynamical systems theory. Research on this central objective is carried out through three specific systems. The first model elucidates the role of disease progression (age of infection) and super-infection in generating complex dynamics and multiple equilibria with alternating stability. The second investigates the impact of host heterogeneity on the evolution of infectivity and multiple infections of the same host. The third application is concerned with the role of host heterogeneity in the genetic diversity of a disease pathogen. The impact of age-structure on coexistence of competing strains of the same causative agent is investigated and so are the effects of complex dynamics on the coevolution of microparasite virulence and host heterogeneity. The educational component of this project is concerned with the integration of mathematics and scientific computing, and their application to life sciences, in the early and later stages of postsecondary education and training. As part of the project the investigator will work for the incorporation of MATLAB into the calculus curriculum through development of appropriate instructional materials. The investigator will also give lectures and mentor student research projects in a REU program in computational, mathematical and theoretical biology at Cornell University. Maia Martcheva proposes activities to develop an academic career in Mathematical Biology. The research plan focuses on the study of the role of disease regulation and coevolution of host-parasite systems in populations with structure through the use of mathematical modeling. Historically strategies for disease control have relied on threshold conditions, the most well-known of which requires that the reproductive number of the disease (given by the average number of secondary infections caused by one infective in a population of susceptibles) be smaller than one. The models considered in this project demonstrate that this threshold condition may not be sufficient for the eradication of the disease, particularly in case of diseases with high mortality. An alternative threshold requires that the reproductive number is reduced below another value (smaller than one), called transmission threshold. The transmission threshold may be difficult to calculate but an underestimate can be computed which gives a threshold condition leading to the eradication of the disease. Martcheva s educational activities include curriculum development and mentoring undergraduates in mathematical biology. Date: January 28, doc18052 none Morrison Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Professor Philip Morrison, Department of Chemical Engineering, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio and Dr. Lua y Zeatoun, Department of Chemical Engineering, Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST), Irbid, Jordan. In recent work at Case Western, a piston compression method was used to study high partial pressure kinetics of TiCl4 oxidation, and by analyzing the data a model was developed for predicting the fractional conversion of TiCl4. This work does not take into account heterogeneous reactions that will occur on the surfaces of the TiO2 particles as they nucleate. In this research the collaborating scientists plan to study the role of surface reactions in TiO2 formation by conducting experimental and modeling research. Dr. Morrison s team at Case Western will measure experimentally the surface reaction rate by seeding the reactive gas with TiO2 particles and performing compression experiments. Dr. Zeatoun s team at JUST will perform numerical simulations of the diffusion-reaction process occurring in both the gas phase and on the surface reactions. Scope: The two collaborators plan to combine their expertise in experimental work and in mathematical modeling in dealing with an interesting scientific problem. The PI has considerable experience and has access to extensive facility at Case Western. The Jordanian scientist has experience in modeling. This research should improve our understanding of the process of formation of TiO2b particles and should be especially useful in applications of nano-scale. The project meets INT criteria for support of cooperative projects that are mutually beneficial. Support for this project is provided by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Chemical and Transport Systems doc18053 none The recent collapse of a number of bridge structures has highlighted their vulnerability to earthquakes. The societal impacts of bridge failures on traffic, commerce, and public safety motivate the need to adequately evaluate their performance and rehabilitation. Structural forensic techniques are commonly used to examine the damage patterns, develop possible failure scenarios, and select retrofit designs to be applied to similar bridges in an effort to avoid future failures. This research will define appropriate seismic damage indices that quantify the level of damage experienced by the bridge structure during a seismic event. Performance-based criteria will be developed that accounts for all deformation and damage accumulated during the earthquake in order to facilitate optimal retrofit designs and remediation policies. Virtual reality provides a unique framework in which to understand complex problems. It provides the ability to visualize and interact with computer images using natural human interfaces. Through the use of display technology, users can enter the computer world and move around complex three-dimensional computer models. Thus, the solution of large-scale problems can be better understood and more effectively communicated to a wide audience. This research will employ the use of virtual reality technology to visualize the dynamic performance of bridge structures during seismic events and perform structural forensic analyses. An integrated process of analysis and visualization that addresses the sequencing of damage, performance levels, and interdependence of failure mechanisms will be developed in this research. Complex analytical models of bridges will be created while a virtual environment is used to display the results of the analysis and provide an effective communication tool. This research will solve seismic infrastructure problems using a systemic perspective and innovative information systems. Virtual reality technology will be used to enhance the capabilities of pre-event planning scenarios from an array of structural threats. The ability to forensically recreate and understand structural failures, such as the 9 11 disaster, will be advanced through this unique merging of structural analysis and virtual reality technology doc18054 none The objective of this work is to understand the chemistry involved in the formation of DNA-protein cross links. One electron oxidation of DNA fragments generates radical cations at a number of nucleosides which are then trapped by protein nucleophiles. The protein-DNA adducts will then be characterized by a number of spectroscopic techniques including NMR and LC-ESI-MS MS. Lastly, a 40 mer DNA sequence, and its complement, will be synthesized. This sequence contains a triple G track, a double G and several AT tracks which compliment GC pairs. This strand will then be prepared using G precursors which have been doped with 10% OG (oxidized G) leading to a random distribution of OG in all 10 G positions in the strand and an average of 1 OG strand. Reactions of these strands with amine and protein nucleophiles and characterization of the subsequent adducts will be used to identify hot spot sequences which are most susceptible to adduct formation following oxidative damage. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Cynthia J. Burrows of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Utah. Dr. Burrows will explore the reactions of proteins with DNA fragments which have been damaged by oxidative chemical reactions. Uncovering the chemical reactions involved in oxidative DNA damage is important to a fundamental molecular understanding of the chemical processes involved in aging, cancer and a number of neurological disorders. Students trained as a result of working on this project will gain experience in mechanistic organic chemistry as well as biochemistry, hence they will have skills needed by both the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries doc12715 none The waters and soils of our environment contain naturally-occurring organic matter (NOM), which helps to regulate soil fertility, pollutant toxicity, ecosystem behavior and carbon cycling. These in turn affect agricultural production, public and ecosystem health, and global climate change. However, the processes which produce NOM from plant and animal matter are poorly understood, due to the complex nature of NOM and the multitude of possible reactions in the environment. This project will combine the efforts of ecologists, geochemists and computer scientists in an attempt to model this complex system using a novel stochastic approach. In this approach, millions of individual molecules are simulated and reacted together in silico to provide a computer model of the complex natural processes. The model will be developed and tested via an internet collaboration, and ultimately will be accessible to agricultural, environmental and earth scientists via a simple web browser interface doc18056 none This award supports a major revision of the Core Plus Mathematics Project (CPMP; marketed as Contemporary Mathematics in Context) student materials for high school mathematics, the development of more informative teacher materials, and the development of materials for parents and other community stakeholders in mathematics education. The revision of student and teacher materials will be based on studies of student achievement conducted over eight years; a large collection of suggestions from teachers who have used the materials in their classrooms; results from expert panels, including the U.S. Department of Education, the American Association for the Advancement of Science; recommendations in the Principals and Standards for School Mathematics and a special review by university mathematicians sponsored by the developers. The development is done by a team that includes teachers, mathematics education specialists, mathematicians and statisticians doc18057 none Amount Rec: $ 300,000 Project Proposed This proposal, developing a hands-free meeting transcription system along with a remote transcript browsing capability via telephone, will incorporate new microphone array technology for audio capture of speech for high-quality speech recognition. The capture will take place in a realistic office scenario, as required for a transcription application. The research is geared towards developing a patient-centered care system that would allow patients and family members to access office visit information. The system will have a speech interface to a computer for disease management feedback between patient and physician. The main goal consists of developing a meeting transcription system that incorporates microphone array algorithms for sound capture from multiple talkers and speaker identification. The microphone array builds on the past research by the PI for incorporating room response information into array algorithms. The array output will be adaptively determined such that it is robust in environmentally changing rooms and for talker positions not initially calibrated. The transcription research, concerned with parsing dialog to distinguish multiple talkers at a meeting (which may not be stored at the database), will be tested using the physician s office dialog. Speaker identification will involve incorporating phonetic knowledge along with keyword content information and talker location to improve the tagging of multiple talkers. Performance will be measured with respect to speech recognition results doc18058 none When making a decision whether a company was negligent and therefore liable for harm to the plaintiff, juries are frequently asked to second-guess people s and companies decisions. The goal of such a legal system is to compensate the plaintiff for harm caused by another s wrongdoing or negligent behavior. Many psychological and other researchers have investigated the workings of the civil jury system, and frequently claim that its purposes are not being fulfilled. However, this research has usually focused on a limited number of independent variables or attitudinal variables at one time. In contrast, the first goal of this proposal is to incorporate a variety of independent variables, moderating and mediating variables, and jurors attitudes and perceptions into a comprehensive model of civil jury decision making. Also, the law of negligence (and to a lesser degree the law of product liability) has integrated cost-benefit analyses into the determination of whether a defendant should be held liable. Although the concept of a cost-benefit analysis is so incorporated into the law, how jurors perform cost-benefit analyses or how jurors respond to defendants who perform such analyses has not received much attention. The second goal of this proposal is to investigate variables associated with the claim that a defendant s performance of a cost-benefit analysis actually outrages jurors and leads to pro-plaintiff outcomes. This project uses products liability cases in which a cost-benefit analysis is or is not performed as a background for building a comprehensive model of civil jury decision making. Such cases include elements relevant to many variables that have been previously investigated as relevant to jury decision making, but which have been investigated usually in isolation. The elements of such cases include the risk involved with the product, the defendant s behavior in face of such a risk, jurors attitudes and perceptions of the case, and jurors outrage. This project will analyze the data from the proposed studies as a path model that includes the variables mentioned, and others. The independent variables in the studies will investigate what elements of the model are related to jurors outrage toward cost-benefit analyses, and how that outrage might be mitigated doc18059 none This research is devoted to the theory of quasi-one-dimensional (Q1D) organic conductors (TMTSF)2X and (TMTTF)2X, where TMTSF is tetramethyltetraselenafulvalene, TMTTF is tetramethyltetrathiafulvalene, and X represents a monovalent inorganic anion, such as PF6 and ClO4. These materials demonstrate an antonishingly rich variety of physical properties and states: metallic, insulating, superconductive, charge-and spin-density-wave states, antiferromagnetism, spin-Peierls states, and the state of Mott-Hubbard paramagnetic insulator. They exhibit a multitude of magnetic oscillations as a function of the magnitude and orientation of the magnetic field. A strong magnetic field induces the cascade of phase transitions between the magnetic-field-induced spin-density waves (FISDW), which exhibit the quantum Hall effect. Theoretical research will be conducted on the following topics: fractional quantum Hall numbers of the subgap electron states; electron states in superconducting junctions; bound electron states at the superconducting and FISDW vortices and impurities; collective modes in the triplet superconducting state; and, coesistence of metallic Fermi surface and charge gap. There will be close collaboration with experiments and an emphasis on real materials. %%% Theoretical research will be conducted on a novel class of organic conducting materials which display a rich variety of properties. These materials are of great fundamental interest due these properties arising in organic materials and of great practical interest due to many potential applications doc18060 none Wajsowicz This project seeks to untangle the complex pathways taken by water from different sources as they meet in the western tropical Pacific. One particular premise that will be tested is the idea that the location and strength of the Mindanao and Halmahera Eddies and of the Mindanao Dome may exert a strong influence on the relative mixture of water masses entering the North Equatorial Countercurrent, the Equatorial Undercurrent (EUC) and the Indonesian Throughflow (ITF). In part, this study is motivated by differences between the relative mixture of water of North and South Pacific origin in the EUC and ITF seen in data and the proportions seen in numerical general circulation models. The approach involves the dynamical study of two process models. One is a multi-layer diagnostic model, the second is a high-resolution version of the multi-layer POSEIDON model. In addition, the variability of the tropical gyre closure in the output from a GFDL data assimilation run doc18061 none In the current climate of nationwide education reform, a strong movement is afoot to place inquiry at the center of science education. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the National Science Education Standards (National Research Council, ), which recommend that students be ieengaged in inquiryld that involves combining ioprocesses and scientific knowledge as they use scientific reasoning and critical thinking to develop their understanding of scienceln (p. 105). Clearly, if teachers are to promote meaningful learning as advocated by the Standards, some of their instructional practices will have to change, and such changes must be supported by strong, research-based professional development programs. The proposed study will document the ways in which specific professional development opportunities influence science teachers beliefs and knowledge and, consequently, their instructional practices. Several factors influence teachers instructional decisions, including their beliefs about the nature of science, their theories about teaching and learning, and their knowledge of scientific concepts. Through a series of week-long summer institutes, teams of elementary and middle school science teachers will gain understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry, the role of models in scientific inquiry, and various strategies for creating robust inquiry opportunities in diverse classrooms. Ongoing monthly meetings throughout the academic year will provide teacher teams with opportunities to discuss issues related to implementing inquiry pedagogy, share materials, and seek assistance with particular concerns. A variety of professional development interventions will be employed to help alter teachers beliefs and develop their knowledge about scientific inquiry and conceptual models. These interventions include: collaborative study of a theoretical framework describing scientific inquiry; eflective writing; ongoing collegial interactions; and quality curricular materials. The analytical method employed for the study will be that of the collective case study. One focus teacher from each teacher team will be the subject of a case study. Collectively, the case studies will be formulated to shed light on the processes that teachers undergo in their attempt to adopt inquiry pedagogy and the types of professional development and support that have positive influences on these processes. Qualitative data such as interview transcripts, field notes, and teacher journals will be examined using QSR NUD IST, a theory-building qualitative analysis tool. It is undeniable that national and statewide reform initiatives, bolstered by renewed emphasis on standardized testing, are putting pressure on teachers to adopt inquiry-based instructional techniques. Unfortunately, utilizing inquiry-based curriculum materials and providing hands-on learning experiences in classrooms are not enough to enable students to ioengage in the same activities and thinking processes [italics added] as scientists who are seeking to expand human knowledge of the natural worldll (NRC, , p. 1). To accomplish this tall task, teachers will need support in developing greater understanding about the nature of scientific inquiry and ways of implementing inquiry instruction into their classrooms. The proposed study will make an important contribution to our knowledge of how specific professional development opportunities enable teachers to adopt more inquiry-based practices doc18062 none This project will capitalize on the availability of an organized data set consisting of thousands of video clips from the WGBH and PBS digital library. This resource is a searchable, Web-based repository of contextualized multimedia materials teachers can access easily and productively for their own professional development. With this award WGBH will produce a set of supporting resources to amplify the relevance and impact of this digital library for both students and teachers. These supporting resources include multimedia presentation features for curriculum units that feature self-contained video and interactive modules; descriptive annotations and background essays to accompany each asset in the collection; and detailed lesson plans and discussion questions for using these resources to support deep learning of the content. It is anticipated that five curriculum units will be produced, with each unit consisting of two or more modules. The curriculum units will be developed for the high school level and the five units will include genetics, ecology, evolution, cells and biochemistry doc18063 none Historically, the stark contrast in diversity between North America s sunfish and minnow and shiner species served as a fertile research area for studying differential rates of evolution in two groups of equal age (based on fossil record). Cladistic analyses of osteological characters revealed fundamental flaws with previous studies of this nature and classifications of these fishes, thus questioning the accuracy of prior evolutionary studies. Today, phylogenetic relationships of species of Notropis (shiners) and relatives are relatively well known due to recent morphological and molecular analyses by the PI and collaborators as well as other researchers. Relationships of species of Centrarchidae, also soon to be available using morphological and molecular data, will provide the necessary information to begin comparative studies between the sunfish and shiner groups as envisioned by earlier researchers - rate heterogeneity in evolution. However, a notable problem remaining in advancing this research is the phylogenetic placement of the species Notropis megalepis, the species used to date the Notropis lineage, to a clade appropriate for comparison. The PI proposes to conduct high-resolution CT scans of the fossil Notropis megalepis from the Middle Pliocene of western Kansas using the recent technology developed at The University of Texas NSF Multi-user facility maintained by Dr. Tim Rowe. This fossil is fundamental in dating the age of the North American shiner and minnow group to which it belongs and evaluating rate heterogeneity in evolution for these two groups of fishes. Producing accurate estimates of evolutionary relationships is necessary for the overall framework for information retrieval and biological prediction. Uses of such information and predictability include tracking the origins of disease, identifying biological control agents for invasive species, and evaluating risk factors associated with biological conservation doc18064 none The overall aim of this project is to develop a set of videos on a CD-ROM centering on the investigations of pond organisms to be used by elementary and middle school teachers as complements to existing life science curricula and environmental education programs. This product will be published nationally by a commercial publisher. During the three years of the project the videos will be pilot tested by EDC and the New England Aquarium staff and then field-tested in a range of school districts. The collaborators in the project will be the Education Development Center and the New England Aquarium. Peace River Films and Squid Country Safari will be subcontractors producing the videos and adapting them for a CD-ROM doc18065 none This award provides funding for the PI to study life history evolution in marine systems by combining biogeographical, biochemical, morphological and paleontological approaches to examining egg size evolution in a family of marine bivalves relative to a major biogeographic event, the rise of the Central American Isthmus (CAI) at 2.8-3.1 million years ago. The rise of the CAI separated the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and isolated populations of previously-continuous species (known as geminate species pairs). The presence of multiple closely-related species offers a unique, replicated natural experiment that can shed light on evolutionary forces. The PI will study the egg size evolution of bivalves in the family Arcidae to determine the rate and timing of the evolution relative to the rise of the CIA. This research will provide the first descriptive data on egg size in the past, and will add a new approach for exploration of oceanic change and evolutionary response to geologic events. In addition, funding will support research experience for five undergraduate students doc18066 none Project Proposed: This proposal, applying aspect-oriented (AO) approach, aims at building a framework design to open software systems in a systematic way that factors into the initial design the capacity to evolve, be extended, and be adaptive to future changes. The work will employ the Dynamic Weaver Framework (DWF) under development by the Concurrent Programming Research group lead by the PI. This framework allows for a separation of software system aspects from the system components, providing a systematic well-defined structure to open the software system to enable evolution, extendibility, and adaptation. Motivated by the increased complexity resulting from adding more basic software components, this research addresses the following for AO software systems: Modeling Supporting lifecycle development with End-to-End automation Experimenting with more real-life applications, with current case tools supporting the model, and with on-demand system re-modularization Aspect-oriented software development is an approach that cuts across functional components to present different views of software products. It supports and enhances software evolution by focusing on separation of concern issues, particularly to distributed systems. Results from this work are expected to demonstrate slower degradation in component cohesiveness, and improvements in maintainability and evolution capacity of systems that require inter-component dependencies and communication doc18067 none Coral reefs have declined dramatically over the last three decades. Several factors may have contributed to this process, including over-fishing, increasing CO2 levels, changes in sea surface temperatures, eutrophication, sedimentation, and pollutants. However the causal relationship between most of these stressors and reef decline has yet to be established. There has also been an alarming increase in coral disease incidence during the last two decades. The causes of the majority of these diseases remain unknown yet the diseases continue to cause massive die offs of corals. Of the 29 coral diseases that have been reported, only two pathogens have been isolated which fulfill Koch s postulates. Are some of the undiagnosed diseases caused by opportunistic, rather than specific, pathogens? Coral disease incidences and human activity are correlated. Again, the causal connection, if any, between these two observations is not known. Dr. Rohwer and associates suggest that corals exposed to anthropogenic and environmental stressors become susceptible to opportunistic infection resulting in coral mortality and disease. In preliminary studies, they have found that the microbial community normally living on corals consists of specific bacteria growing at a controlled rate. For example, corals living on reefs as far apart as Bermuda and Panama have characteristic microbiotas, that are specific to individual coral species. They have also observed that bacterial numbers and growth rates are very similar between healthy corals. The relationship between the coral and its associated microbial community rapidly changes when the coral is exposed to stressful environmental or anthropogenic conditions. In experiments, additions of organic nutrients rapidly lead to coral death, which was prevented by adding antibiotics. This strongly suggests that bacterial overgrowth is responsible for the stressor-induced mortality. Other investigators have shown that coral mortality caused by stressors, including sedimentation, crude oil, and copper sulfate, could be prevented using antibiotics. The investigators have also documented that both bacterial numbers and production rates increase by over an order of magnitude on diseased, as compared to healthy, corals. In this research, they will characterize the normal range of microbial growth parameters and prokaryotic diversity on healthy, unstressed M. franksi. They will then treat corals with a number of potential stressors to determine which kill corals by causing microbial overgrowth. Finally, they will monitor changes in bacterial growth and community composition that occurs with opportunistic bacterial infection. This research will improve our understanding of the relationship between a coral and its associated bacterial community, and how this relationship changes with stress and disease. This research will also provide a better understanding of the connection between human activities and the incidence of coral disease, providing important data for the conservation and management of coral reefs doc18068 none Maschner The Hot Springs Village site, located on the Alaska Peninsula, was excavated in the s and s by Professors Hiroaki and Atsuko Okada. The Okadas produced preliminary reports of the excavations, but were unable to complete the final analysis. Now contemporary archaeologists will assist the Okadas with the final analysis and transport the artifacts and other materials back to Alaska for curation at the Museum of the Aleutians doc18069 none Marilyn H. Blackman University of Colorado at Boulder This proposal, bridging the gap between what users know and what they need to know, pursues the problems of extending, refining, and validating a theory-based cognitive walkthrough for designing a complete informational website and for assessing website usability, parameterizing the walkthrough to validly simulate diverse user groups. The walkthrough was developed to facilitate the design of applications with GUIs that enable users to discover by exploration how to perform new tasks, simulating user behavior step-by-step for a given task on a given walk-up-and-use interface. Navigation is guided by the information scentific assigned a stronger value to the desired goal toward the target web page in the cognitive walkthrough of a website (CWW). CWW relies on Latent Semantic Analysis to objectively estimate the degree of semantic similarity (information scent) between representative user goal statements and heading link texts on each web page, and to assess the probability that a particular user group can effectively learn from texts they discovered by navigating the website. A series of experiments will first parameterize the CWW for college-educated users navigating informational instructional websites and then parameterize the CWW to validly simulate navigation behaviors of diverse user groups, including users with 6th-, 9th-, and 12th-grade reading levels in English doc18070 none Mishra, Mina Stanford University ADVANCE Fellows: Data Mining Algorithms for Business Intensive Applications This proposal, framing business intelligence applications as concrete theoretical problems, develops data mining techniques for applications in customer management, wireless mining, and product affinities. The work, studying clustering measures, alternate embedding techniques, and computational complexity, involves designing computationally efficient algorithms that find approximately good answers. The scalability and I O efficiency of proposed algorithms will also be studied. Two problems are mentioned for: (1)Identifying wireless communities and product affinities: the Maximum Edge Bi-clique problem and (2) Customer segmentation, text clustering, new clustering measures that combine inter and intra distances: the Conjunctive Clustering problem. The algorithms can be applied to various areas, including e-commerce. Results from this work are expected to impact (3) Customer relationship management by segmenting the customer population to target marketing programs more effectively and (4)Cell phone usage data to enable wireless companies to discover patterns in wireless access doc18071 none Edwards This award is being made an a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER). The Principal Investigator will modify existing software tools to produce three-dimensional charts of the arctic ice canopy using acoustic data collected during the and SCience ICe EXercises (SCICEX). Maps of ice keel lead locations and ice thickness can resolve the ongoing debate regarding whether the mass of the arctic ice canopy is, like the extent of sea-ice cover, measurably decreasing, and can improve climatic modeling. The Principal Investigator will use a unique dataset that has been collected and provides a rare opportunity to channel expertise and technology that have been developed in one field of research (seafloor mapping) to a very different set of scientific problems. In addition, the proposed project has practical applications for the U.S. Navy s nuclear submarine force and could engender future SCICEX seafloor mapping collaborations doc18072 none Alexander Wolf Association for Computing Machinery The Impact Project will identify and document research contributions that have had substantial impact, determine the research modalities that have been successful, identify technology transition approaches that have worked best, and anticipate directions that software engineering research might most effectively pursue, based on its history and positioning. Funding will support travel costs for a series of meetings to plan, discuss, and execute the studies. As a special initiative partially funded by the ACM Special Interest Group in Software Engineering (SIGSOFT), the project seeks to be highly inclusive, involving a large number of members of the software engineering community, as well as others whose interests overlap with software engineering. The project s outputs will be a series of documents and briefings, including scholarly, reports. Project results should be useful to the software engineering research and practitioner communities, to other academic disciplines, to government funding agencies, and to the public by helping objectively assess the software engineering community s record of achievement doc18073 none The Curricular Options Programs for All Secondary Students (COMPASS) Center focuses on issues related to the implementation of five national comprehensive secondary school mathematics curriculum programs as a means of initiating systemic change within a school district. The five programs are: Contemporary Mathematics in Context; the Interactive Mathematics Program; MATH Connections; Mathematics: Modeling Our World; and SIMMS Integrated Mathematics. The structure of COMPASS includes a Central Site and five Satellite Sites, one for each curriculum program. The primary functions of the Central Site are to inform various constituencies about these curricula, to assist school districts in developing the capacity for change by helping them formulate an implementation plan, and to coordinate requests for additional information and assistance from the Satellite Sites. The primary goals of the Satellite Sites are to provide curriculum program-specific information and to assist school districts with program-specific implementation strategies, including professional development for teachers. The work of all six sites involves working with policy makers at the school district, regional and state levels, as well as with parents, businesses and community leaders as they seek to institute or understand the kind of educational reform embodied in these curricula doc865 none This project will deploy 64 wide-band ocean-bottom seismometers and ten portable broad-band seismic island stations in a 15-month-long investigation. The objectives are to: locate and image the plume conduit beneath the Hawaiian hotspot, image the roots of the Hawaiian swell over a sufficient area and with a sufficient resolution to distinguish among competing hypotheses for plume-lithosphere interaction, and relate the findings from the seismic imaging experiments to geodynamical and geochemical, models for mantle plumes doc18075 none The conventional wisdom that economic sanctions are not an effective instrument of foreign policy is based on the empirical analysis of numerous cases in which sanctions were applied. This work may suffer from selection bias in that instances in which sanctions would be effective may be characterized by the absence of their imposition. That is, the target may be able to anticipate that it would alter its policies as a result of sanctions and may choose to acquiesce to the potential sanctioner s threat in order to avoid the cost of the economic dislocation. A game-theoretic model designed to explore this possibility is developed in this project. In equilibrium, any outcome of a sanctions episode is possible with some non-zero probability; but, sanctions that would be effective typically would bring about a change in the target s behavior at the threat stage and would never be applied. Derivations from this model also suggest that a rational, expected utility-maximizing sanctions strategy would produce more cases in which applied sanctions would fail than cases in which applied sanctions would succeed. The model produces expectations that are consistent with empirical observation and provides explanations for some of the puzzles regarding economic sanctions (such as why sanctions would continue to be imposed in spite of strong evidence that they are usually ineffective). The model also leads to a number of new hypotheses associating certain variables (such as the cost of the sanctions and the value of the issue at stake) with the probability that various outcomes would occur. The goals of this project are to continue the theoretical devlopment of this model and to develop a data set with which the hypotheses produced can be tested. Data on instances in which sanctions were threatened, but not imposed, do not currently exist. Such data are gathered as part of this project and are used to subject the theory to a rigorous, empirical test. The research promises to enhance substantially our understanding of the topic. doc18076 none Hinnov This ADVANCE Fellows career-development plan centers on an investigation of orbitally forced paleoclimate signals as carriers of first order geodynamical and astrodynamical information. Geodynamical theory predicts that the Earth s tidal dissipation and dynamical ellipticity will perturb the Earth s axial precession rate and tilt. The perturbations should appear in paleoclimatically recorded orbital modes as phasing irregularities. Observation of these irregularities depends upon the accuracy of the timescale assigned to the paleoclimate record. This typically involves adjusting an interpreted orbital signal in the record to a target curve based upon an assumed climate response to orbital forcing. If the target is wrong, however, timing errors will corrupt the true phasing of the recorded orbital modes. Until this source of error can be effectively managed, no firm conclusions about the Earth s physical behavior should be drawn from the paleoclimate record. Astrodynamical theory indicates that long-period amplitude and frequency modulations in the Earth s orbital modes track planetary orbital motions; these should be detectable in very long paleoclimate signals. Some planetary orbits resonate, e.g., Earth and Mars; in the remote past, the orbits of Mars and Earth may have moved chaotically between two resonance states. Verification of this behavior using the paleoclimate record is therefore a top priority in astrodynamics. Complicating the extraction of this information, however, is low frequency Earth noise that can interfere with long paleoclimate signals. To unravel these problems, a multi-task computer model will be developed that calculates insolation at any geographical location over any timescale, and is linked to adjustable rotational-orbital parameters that include effects from the Earth s tidal dissipation and dynamical ellipticity. The model will be explored in a series of sensitivity experiments, then evaluated against paleoclimate records using advanced time series analysis doc18077 none This project involves revising the Interactive Mathematics Program (IMP), a four-year, integrated, problem-based, college-preparatory, high-school mathematics curriculum developed with funding from the State of California and the NSF. Revisions will build on successful elements of the program in ways that respond to the changing context of mathematics education. The revisions will focus on three objectives. First, the curriculum will be strengthened by making changes that give the program greater flexibility. This will be accomplished by adding a major technology component, and by making content changes that respond to recent state and national policy documents. Second, the professional development program will be strengthened through leadership programs that produce more professional development leaders and by creating consistency and sustainability through a Professional Development Handbook that articulates IMP s vision of successful professional development. Third, dissemination and implementation efforts will be strengthened by developing new materials about all aspects of IMP that will inform and address concerns of educational decision makers such as school boards, administrators, parents, and teachers. These efforts will be carried out with the guidance of a broad-based steering committee. There will be general evaluation of all project components, as well as analysis of the mathematical content of the revised curriculum materials. Cost sharing includes substantial contributions from the publisher and from San Francisco State University doc18078 none This comprehensive, project-based, inquiry-driven, middle school, science curriculum builds upon modules developed for Learning by Design at Georgia Institute of Technology and by LeTUS at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University. The latter were specifically designed for urban settings. The 15 units address national science content and process standards, focus on helping students acquire a qualitative understanding of the science principles and moves them toward a quantitative understanding. The time per unit is long enough that students can change their ideas in light of the evidence. The project develops a framework to assure complete coverage of fundamental topics. The pedagogy, use of software and the development of a scientific and collaborative culture are consistent, persistent and pervasive across the entire curriculum. The materials cover topics in physical, Earth space and life sciences appropriate to the middle school and provide experience with diverse modes of scientific investigation -- experiment, observation, modeling, data mining, and history -- and standards of evidence are covered. Instructional technology is infused throughout and science is connected to the students world by the use of engineering design. Assessments are embedded. The student and teacher materials are pilot tested locally and field tested more broadly. Materials for professional development of teachers are also developed doc18079 none Visualization in Technology Education (VisTE) is a standards-based initiative designed to promote the use of graphic visualization tools among students in grades 9-12. By using simple and complex visualization tools, students can conduct research, analyze phenomena, solve problem and communicate major topics identified in the Standards for Technology Literacy (STL) as well as topics aligned with national science and mathematics standards. VisTE has forged a national coalition of institutions and individuals committed to the development of these materials, including North Carolina State University, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, Research Triangle Institute, the Southern Regional Education Board, and the International Technology Education Association, among others. Over three years, partnership members will create 12 modules reflecting the 20 STL standards and corresponding benchmarks. Combined, the modules will form a discrete course in graphic visualization. However, each of the 12 modules could be used in existing technology education courses as a stand-alone activity. Modules will be piloted in SREB High Schools that Work sites, selected to provide student diversity and to facilitate the collection of evaluation data. VisTE s final products and outcomes will include 12 standards-based modules (in electronic and print formats) written for a diverse student audience; national dissemination of the materials through teacher training workshops, local and national presentations, and a web site; and a formal evaluation of the project s process and student outcomes doc18080 none As interest grows in deciphering the factors that influence the Earth s climate, researchers have developed several proxies useful for reconstructing ancient environmental conditions. One of the most promising tools for reconstructing short-term (seasonal to annual) environmental fluctuations is isotopic analysis of vertebrate fossils. Analyses of fossil bison hold particular promise for such research. However, the precision of paleoenvironmental reconstructions based on analyses of fossil bison is currently limited because: (1) the rate of enamel biomineralization within bison teeth has not been studied in detail, and (2) the precise relationship between the d18O and d13C values of modern bison and local environmental conditions has not been precisely quantified. The purpose of this project is to quantify how precisely isotopic analyses of bison can be used to reconstruct paleoenvionemtal conditions. The first part of this study will document the patterns of biomineralization and isotope variations preserved within bison tooth enamel in order to develop an optimal sampling strategy. The second part of this study will quantify how well the d18O and d13C values of modern Great Plains bison correlate with environmental changes including: average temperature, seasonal temperature range, precipitation, relative humidity, and grassland composition (i.e., C3 C4 ratio). This study will thus quantify how precisely analyses of the d18O and d13C values of bison can be used to reconstruct annual and seaonal variations in local environments. It will produce a map of the isotope gradients in modern bison, which will serve as a baseline for interpreting the isotope signals preserved in fossil bison as well as other herbivores. This study will thus greatly increase the precision and accuracy of paleoclimatic and paleovegetation reconstruction based on isotope analyses of fossil herbivores doc18081 none The Education Development Center is continuing the work of the K-12 Mathematics Curriculum Center. The Center continues to offer seminars designed to build capacity in the field. In particular, this work will assist mathematics coordinators, lead teachers and staff developers design professional development programs that support teachers using Standards-based materials; help districts consider the alignment between their new curriculum, classroom assessment and high-stakes tests; and help school districts develop plans for collecting and analyzing data and reporting results in order to evaluate the impact of their curriculum implementation. The Center will draw upon its experience with delivering seminars to districts in the past to develop on-line courses as a way of extending the services of the center to a wider audience. Another strong focus of the Center is to support the work of other mathematics implementation projects by developing materials and other products of use to these projects, by studying successful approaches and barriers to implementation and by facilitating communications among these projects doc18082 none Gough Terrestrial arctic research has tended to focus on plant populations or the entire ecosystem, with community patterns and processes less well studied, generating a lack of predictive ability of effects of climate change on different arctic plant communities and potential biotic feedbacks to an altered environment. This proposal seeks better understanding of vegetation patterns at the community level as well as of how processes at the ecosystem level are influenced by plant community composition. The PI currently has two NSF-funded research grants. One project is examining two common arctic plant communities in northern Alaska, moist acidic and moist non-acidic tundra. By monitoring plant responses to nutrient and temperature manipulations in both communities, and conducting experiments to examine germination and survival of important species, the PI is determining how the communities are maintained and how they respond differently to manipulations. The differences are being linked to ecosystem function through collaboration with an ecosystem ecologist. The second NSF grant is examining competition among seven clonal sedge species in southeastern Michigan calcareous wetlands. Although clonal growth is the dominant method of production of new individuals by plants in many ecosystems, including tundra, its effects on plant community structure remain unclear. Using community and individual-level experiments, the PI is examining both short- and long-term effects of competition among species that differ in clonal growth form; the results of this project are being used to generate new hypotheses to be tested in arctic plant communities. From this work, the population-level processes that have been well documented for some arctic plant species can be explicitly linked to the community and the ecosystem, thus providing better understanding of patterns and processes at all levels of organization, as well as predictions for biotic feedbacks to the changing arctic environment. This award is supported through the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc18083 none Animals interact with their local environment in ways that determine their reproductive success and survival. By looking at how climate, topography, and vegetation interact with the physical properties of the animal, including its metabolic rate and heat gain and loss, a basic model can be developed. The current model uses global climate data, digital elevation maps, vegetation maps and animal properties to calculate available microclimates, animal energetics, behavior, activity patterns, food web structure, community structure and potential for and food-borne pathogen and pesticide exposure. New work will extend the model s availability by providing a graphical user interface and web accessibility, as well as by extending the database of information on animal reflectivity and morphology. The model can be applied to a wide range of questions from the appropriateness of environments for relocating endangered species to the impact of climate change on animal population dynamics and environmental impacts of pesticide spraying or forest burns or other management activities. Informed decision making is improved and a wide range of collaborators and students help to spread the use of the doc18084 none This grant will fund the participation of about ten United States scientists at a Conference on Computational Linear Algebra with Applications to be held in the Czech Republic in August . The theme of the conference is of basic importance in many areas of science and engineering. In particular, the topics of the conference address problems encountered in industrial and manufacturing modeling, chemical processing, material sciences, and simulation of fluid flows. The meeting is modeled after a very successful U.S.-Czech Workshop on Iterative Methods and Parallel Computing at the same location in June . As at the last meeting, attendance is expected from many scientists from several Eastern and Central European countries who rarely have a chance to travel to the United States. Participation in this conference will allow U.S. scientists to present their research to this audience, and to learn first-hand about recent developments in Eastern Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union. It is expected that the meeting will foster new collaborative projects. Priority will be given to funding the attendance of advanced graduate students and young scientists doc18085 none This project concentrates on broad aspects of bilingual research and has two goals: 1) to investigate bilingual processing in a series of language experiments and 2) to pilot the eye-tracking technology with bilinguals as a special population. Bilinguals represent a special population group due to a characteristic of their communicative abilities referred to as performance deficit. Four experiments will examine how general and language-specific sources of information influence processing performance of bilingual Russian-English adults and how on-line processing mechanisms are developed by bilingual Russian-English children using free head-mounted eye-tracking technology. By monitoring the eye movements during listening, much can be inferred about language interpretation in processing and development. The benefits that this technology can provide for research on very diverse classes of subjects, such as special needs populations, foreign speakers, and minority groups with cultural and language considerations will be explored. This research program will also help train graduate students in the multi-disciplinary areas of linguistics, neuroscience, and cognitive science. This award is supported through the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc18086 none Two high-school algebra modules will be developed consistent with current research on student learning. Each module will span from four to six weeks of classroom instruction; incorporate the use of technology; and include a curriculum unit, teacher guide, assessment materials and materials to support community-based mathematics literacy events. One module will use the Road Coloring Problem to introduce students to functions and lay the groundwork for matrix multiplication. The other module will use games to enhance students mathematical understanding, and will help students learn polynomials and introduce elementary counting and probability concepts. The materials will embody a pedagogical approach whereby mathematics emerges from students careful observation and systematic analysis of familiar events that are mathematically rich. Teachers using the materials will form professional communities by collaborating online. The materials will be pilot- and field-tested in several geographically and demographically diverse sites. The project will have formative and summative evaluation components doc18087 none This dissertation project provides travel funds to gather data in the U.S. and the Russia to examine the changing relationship between technology and Soviet society using rocketry as an entry point. The case of missile technology provides an excellent window into the relationship between technology and the state. The project focuses on how engineers and scientists handled the tensions between indigenous and appropriated technology on the one hand, and the tradeoffs between incremental and radical innovation on the other. Through the lens of Soviet rocketry, the project focuses on these two dichotomies within the broader context of Soviet history, and explores the relationship between technology (indigenous, appropriated, radical, incremental) and three elements of the Soviet state: public discourse on the role of rocket technology in modernization, the creation and evolution of institutions to develop rockets, and state policy towards rocket technology. The project will trace these relationships over a forty-year span from the emergence of the popular discourse on rocketry in the s to the galvanization of industrial power that led to the launch of Sputnik in . Finally, the project hopes to provide some final thoughts on the nature of knowledge and its relationship to state, society, and ideas. Four archives in Russia, and two in the U.S. will be visited under NSF funding doc18088 none Using assessment as the entry point, the Mathematics Assessment Resources Service (MARS) group at Michigan State University, University of California-Berkeley and the Shell Center at the University of Nottingham will create a set of assessment-related tools for educators engaged in reforming mathematics education in K-12 schools. Using a process of co-development with participating client systems (e.g., New York City, Clark County, Pittsburgh, El Paso, El Centro, Rhode Island) the project will create a set of specific tools that address critical issues such as how to use assessment information productively, designing effective professional development support around assessment and communicating effectively with parents about data and testing. The process of tool identification and development has been pilot-tested through a prior grant doc18089 none Active Chemistry is a modular, one year, stand-alone, inquiry-based, secondary school chemistry course. It is modeled in design and pedagogical strategies on Active Physics and is meant to follow it or to be used in conjunction with it to become a physical science course. Active Chemistry is aligned with the National Science Education Standards and State Frameworks that directs all students, grades 9-12, to learn the science necessary to solve real-world problems. The four chapters on Sports Science and Health, Environmental Issues, Entertainment, and Energy contain three modules. Each module includes a chapter challenge, a scenario, activities, and a final project assignment. Students work together in groups to acquire the knowledge needed to address the challenge. Chemical concepts are introduced on a need to know basis and topics reappear in various chapters providing multiple exposures in different contexts. The teacher resources provide a scope and sequence presented in matrix format with unifying and fundamental concepts identified, suggested instructional strategies and techniques, and other resources including precautions on safety issues, equipment lists and assessment tools. A professional development video for one chapter is provided doc16982 none Butterflyfishes of the genus Chaetodon (Teleostei, Family Chaetodontidae) are conspicuous inhabitants of coral reefs worldwide and are ecological indicators of reef health due to their dependence on coral as a food source. These fishes exhibit a wide range of social and feeding behaviors and their species-specific color patterns provide visual cues used in social communication, but until recently these fishes were not known to produce sound during natural social behaviors. We have shown that territorial butterflyfishes produce sounds during agonistic interactions in the field. Normally the ear is the organ responsive to sound (as in all vertebrates). In fishes of the genus Chaetodon, however, it appears that the mechanosensory lateral line system, which is normally responsive only to water flow, may be sensitive to sound. This is thought to be due to the presence of a unique linkage of the swim bladder with the lateral line system (the laterophysic connection), found only in fishes in the genus Chaetodon. The goal of the proposed research program is to understand the functional significance of this unique structural specialization and the ways in which the ear and lateral line system process and integrate sounds produced during natural social behaviors. In order to do this, we will study 8 species of Chaetodon and test the more specific hypotheses: 1) that fishes in the genus Chaetodon naturally produce sound in the context of specific behavioral interactions, 2) that the presence of swim bladder horns enhances sensitivity of the inner ear to sound pressure stimuli, 3) that the laterophysic connection uniquely makes the lateral line system sound-sensitive, where it is normally only sensitive to water flow (which is physically distinct from sound), and 4) that variation in the structure of the laterophysic connection (already defined in 21 species with prior NSF funding) has important functional implications for the degree of sound sensitivity. These hypotheses will be tested using comparative behavioral, anatomical, biomechanical and neurophysiological approaches. We are using an exceptional model system for an integrated, field and lab study of the sensory biology of an diverse and ecologically important group of coral reef fishes. Students at both Villanova University and the University of Hawaii will benefit from this collaboration by interacting with both PI s who bring complementary approaches and methodologies to the project. Undergraduates and graduate students will be important contributors to this project. Several undergraduate, and graduate theses and dissertations will arise from this research program, thus enhancing the education of all student participants. In addition, Villanova students will have the opportunity to carry out field research in Both PI s will continue to involve women and minorities in their laboratories, as their records show they have done in the past. Dissemination of research results will occur through paper presentations at a variety of national conferences (e.g. SICB, ASIH, Neurosciences, ARO), and international conferences by both PI s, and the publication of several independent and collaborative peer-reviewed papers and potential invited or review chapters doc18091 none The objective of the 9 th International Conference on Microbial Genomes is to provide a consistent forum for investigators from different fields to interact with each other and to update the recent advances in microbial genomics. This conference will focus on (1) defining gene functions and regulatory networks using integrative, multidisciplinary approaches and (2) exploring genome sequence information to understand various biological processes. This conference will identify research gaps, problems, challenges, trends, and directions in microbial genomics. Attendees will gain an extensive appreciation of the current status and development in microbial genomics, especially functional genomics. Attendees will also gain insight into how questions in their own fields can be addressed by taking advantage of the massive genomic information already available. In addition, to train the next generation of genomic experts, this conference will establish fellowship awards to support graduate students, postdocs, and young faculty attending this conference. This conference will consist of seven sessions: (1) Microbial genome diversity, evolution and microbial genome sequencing; (2) Bioinformatics and microarray-based genomic technologies; (3) Proteomics, cellular pathways and regulatory networks; (4) Functional genomics of bioremediation and carbon sequestration; (5) Functional genomics of microbial pathogens; (6) Functional genomics of model microorganisms, extremophiles and biofilms; and (7) Applied functional genomics. This conference will be held in Gatlinburg, TN, in October, doc18092 none This project addresses the input of nutrients (specifically, iron) to the oceans from atmospheric transport of dust, and the production of sulfur containing gaseous species (such as DMS, dimethyl sulfide) by the ocean organisms as a result. Increased production of DMS leads to increased atmospheric particle formation which in turn can affect climate. The principal investigator will participate in a research cruise where she will sample atmospheric particulates and analyze them for their trace metal content (including Fe(II)), and measure the gas-phase concentrations of sulfur dioxide (SO2), the atmospheric particulate concentrations of sulfate, and methane sulfonic acid (MSA), all oxidation product of DMS. She will also carry out photochemical leaching experiments which will simulate the interaction between atmospheric aerosols and ocean water. This project, supported under the ADVANCE program, will launch the independent career of a female scientist. It will expose undergraduate students to research at the interface of atmospheric chemistry and oceanography, and will improve our understanding of the role of atmospheric aerosols in enhancing ocean productivity doc18093 none This project will investigate interrelationships between feeding and swimming behavior in the evolution of sharks. The first study tests whether ecological habitat influences swimming behavior in sharks. High-speed video and electromyography will be used to analyze fin, body, and tail movements during swimming in the spiny dogfish shark, a shark that is an open ocean swimmer, and the bamboo shark, a bottom-dwelling shark. The study addresses the question of whether open ocean sharks swim differently than other sharks. Another question that will be addressed is whether bottom-dwelling and open ocean sharks can control their fin movements to change the forces generated during swimming. The second study investigates the feeding mechanism of sharks eating hard prey. Feeding on hard prey is rare in sharks. High-speed video and electromyography will be used to analyzing head and jaw movements and muscle activity during feeding. The PI will analyze bamboo sharks eating hard prey, bamboo sharks eating soft prey, and bonnethead sharks eating hard prey. The results will be used to test previous predictions for jaw force and lever systems in sharks. This research will increase our understanding of feeding and swimming behavior in sharks doc18094 none This ADVANCE Fellows award supports an anthropologist who is researching how patients access to medical knowledge on the internet is reshaping doctor-patient relationships. The PI will compile 100 illness case studies consisting of interviews, questionnaires, and recordings of doctor-patient interactions over the course of each patient s treatment. With carefully structured comparisons, the research will discuss the internet s impact on people s medical lives and relationships, comment on any correlation between access to medical knowledge and social inequities in health, and test models of anthropological theory on the relationships between anxiety and the pursuit of knowledge on the one hand, authority and the distribution of knowledge on the other, and the overarching relationship between the two, that is between person and society. The PI will also engage in a number of educational and outreach activities including giving talks on doctor-patient relationships and cultural sensitivity. This award is supported through the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc18095 none The purpose of the proposed research is to develop a new characterization technique for investigating the size-dependent magnetic, optical, and electronic behavior of nanomaterials. An understanding of the origin of these new properties is essential for their exploitation in a variety of technologies, including high-density magnetic recording, high-speed optical computing, solar energy, environmental toxicology, biomaterials, and biosensors. The technique that will be developed is electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) in the transmission electron microscope (TEM). New developments in the energy-resolution of EELS ( 0.3 eV) will be used in concert with the high spatial-resolution of TEM to correlate the electronic and optical properties of individual nanoparticles to their size, shape, composition, and surface morphology. Specific materials for initial investigation will be gallium nitride and silicon nanoparticles, synthesized by the PI and her collaborators. The electronic and optical properties of individual nanoparticles will be extracted from the low energy-loss and fine structure portions of the EELS spectrum. Results will be compared to information collected from X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) and optical spectroscopy, as well as modeling efforts. This information will in turn be related to the physical morphology (size and shape) of the individual nanoparticles, particular surface reconstructions present (via phase-contrast microscopy), and elemental composition and distribution (e.g. doping, core shell structures). The potential impact of this work on understanding the origins of size-dependent properties is expected to be enormous, given that the capability of the proposed technique is unique in permitting the study of individual nanoparticles, rather than ensembles of nanoparticles. Intense worldwide research over the last twenty years has been focused on understanding the effect on the magnetic, optical, and electronic properties of a bulk material when size is reduced to less than about 10 nanometers (less than one in a hundred millionths of a meter). Investigation of the behavior and origin of these size-dependent properties is critical for their full exploitation in a broad range of technologies: high-density magnetic recording, high-speed optical computing, solar energy, environmental toxicology (including chemical and biological weapons detection), biomaterials (for example, artificial organs), and biosensors for advanced medical testing. The small size scale of the materials under investigation demands that new techniques be developed for understanding their properties, since traditional characterization techniques typically study millions of particles at a time, rather than single particles alone. The goal of this project is to use new developments in electron microscopy to correlate the magnetic, optical and electronic behavior of individual nanoparticles to their specific size, shape, composition and surface structure. This will be achieved by taking full advantage of the ability of electron microscopy to image features less than 0.2 nm in size, as well as new developments in spectroscopic methods in the electron microscope that will allow optical and electronic data to be collected from individual nanoparticles. An understanding of how the properties of nanomaterials are influenced by these various factors will extend knowledge of the basic properties of matter, as well as point to new synthesis strategies to optimize the performance of this important class of materials. This award is supported through the NSF ADVANCE Fellows Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc18096 none Partial funding is provided for the purchase of a mass spectrometer at Texas A&M University to meet the requirements of paleoceanographic and paleoenvironmental research and teaching. Bulk of the funding for the instrument (70%) is already available and additional funds have been committed by the institution to pay for uninterruptible power supply system. The purchase of the instrument will benefit NSF funded research in paleoceanography and paleoclimatology doc18097 none This award provides support for a joint project aimed at the development of aggressive new analytical strategies for protein sequence analysis based on mass spectrometry. The effort involves investigators at Louisiana State University, who are accomplished in the manufacture of micrometer-sized devices, and their collaborator at the University of Cincinnati, who is skilled in high resolution mass spectrometry. Microfabrication techniques will be used to develop integrated micro-systems expected to permit analysis of the proteins in a single cell. The use of microfludics will help maintain the proteins at a high enough concentration to permit analysis even though the amount of each protein found in a cell is on the order of molecules. The devices to be used in this project are built using polymers and micromanufacturing techniques to fabricate high-aspect-ratio molding dies for hot embossing polymers. The devices will be tested and refined through studies of chloroplast-derived membranes thought to contain at least 150 different proteins. Within the context of the proposed effort, these studies will be extended to examine the proteome, i.e., the entire complement of proteins, of intact chloroplasts of Arabadopsis and of entire cells of the blue-green algae Synechocystis. If fully successful, the instrumentation will allow biochemical analyses of individual cells and thus contribute to a better understanding of the relationship of gene expression and cellular phenotype doc18098 none Proposal ID: PI: Gronwall, Caryl Dr. Gronwall is awarded funds at Pennsylvania State University to carry out a multi-wavelength study of the star formation history of the universe. She will use optical, infrared, and ultraviolet observations of large samples of emission-line galaxies to measure the density of the star formation rate at different look-back times. Dr. Gronwall will use data obtained from many sources, including the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, the Advanced Camera for Suveys on the Hubble Space Telescope, and the Space Infrared Telescope Facility. The observational results will be incorporated into Dr. Gronwall s models of the evolution of galaxies over time doc18099 none When walking, most quadrupeds typically put down each forefoot just after the hindfoot on the same side (that is, the right hind footfall is followed by the right fore footfall, and so on). Quadrupedal primates (lemurs, monkeys, apes, etc.) are atypical in placing down the forefoot from the opposite side just after each hind footfall (that is, the right hind footfall is followed by the left fore footfall, and so on). Although these so-called diagonal-sequence (DS) gaits of primates are well documented, their functional significance has eluded biologists for over a century. Preliminary data show that DS gaits are also characteristic of arboreal marsupials, which resemble primates in being tree-dwelling animals with grasping hind feet. DS gaits allow all these animals to support themselves with a protracted hind foot, placed on a proven support under the body s center of mass, before putting down a forefoot on a potentially precarious support. Theoretical considerations imply that the phase relationship ( diagonality ) between the movement cycles of the fore and hind limbs should vary directly with the duty factor of the hindlimb relative to that of the forelimb, that diagonality should vary directly with support slope and inversely with support diameter, and that the correlation between duty factor and diagonality has undergone a historical transformation from negative (as in typical mammals) to positive (as in higher primates). High-speed camcorders will be used to record footfall sequences on four support types for a suite of 15 species selected to control for the relevant variables. The data collected will be used to test the empirical predictions derived from the theory. The results are expected to shed new light on controversies concerning primate origins and the early stages of the human lineage doc18100 none The primary focus of this ADVANCE Fellows award is on new research and educational activities related to the development and influence of venture capital (VC) institutions. The VC research will look back over the past fifty years to pinpoint the functions of venture capitalists, explain the appearance of specialized VC firms, and identify institutional sources of risk capital before the advent of the VC industry. Using international comparisons, the research will examine the influence of legal, political, and economic contests on institutional design. The study will also explore further hypotheses about the link between capital markets and venture capital provision. International comparison will undoubtedly uncover a range of institutional structures and will therefore raise the further question of the relative efficiency of different forms of VC provision. The second component of the VC research project builds on the first, and explore the impact of venture capital on the economy. The fundamental question is whether there is more innovation or high-tech growth now than there was before the advent of the VC industry, and if so, whether such rapid growth truly stems from the burgeoning of VC finance. Critical to this line of research is establishing rigorous ways to measure innovation and high-tech growth as well as the impact of VC financing thereon. This project will take a longer-run view than past studies and will compare the US with a range of other countries, including some that have developed few or no specialized VC firms. In addition to large-scale statistical analysis, the VC projects will include case studies of specific countries, industries, and firms in order to elaborate on the general phenomena uncovered by the econometric work. The PI will also work on completing two book manuscripts related to banking history. The PI will be engaged in a range of educational activities, including teaching courses to graduates and undergraduates and advising students. Students will also assist with the research projects. This award is supported through the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc18101 none William Aspray Computing Research Association WORKSHOP: The Future Grand Challenges of Computer Science and Engineering This effort supports a conference to ask the question: What is the nature of the future grand challenge problems in computer science and engineering? The conference organizers believe that many deep and exciting issues remain. The purpose of the proposed conference is to provoke out-of-the-box thinking and thus to hasten the next golden age . The conference will serve as an experiment and possible prototype for a series of conferences on grand research challenges in computer science and engineering doc18102 none de Jongh Funds are provided to support the registration fees of the applicants and finalists of the young investigator competition in the conference Computers in Cardiology, Memphis Cook Convention Center, Memphis, Tennessee, September 22-25, . A series of conferences on computers in cardiology was established 28 years ago in recognition of the import role that computer technology would play in cardiovascular research and in clinical patient care. The conferences also facilitate important productive communication between engineers and clinicians that stimulates relevant research and development. Participants have found the meetings to be particularly helpful because of the manageable size, and the commonality of interests of attendees that fosters interpersonal interaction outside the formal sessions. Computers in Cardiology has proven to be a major world forum for presentation of new research over a wide spectrum of computer applications in cardiology. The conference serves as the prime site for gestation and early nourishment of a number of fundamental technologies that have led to major improvements in the practice of cardiology. The results from this award are expected to have broad impacts through the published Proceedings, which are to be produced by the IEEE press, with copies distributed to the attendees and some 300 libraries. Of special significance is the fostering of interdisciplinary research between researchers in different fields including medicine, physics, engineering, and computer science doc18103 none This ADVANCE Fellows project studies social and spatial change in residential and family patterns that occurred in Charleston, S.C., during the 20th century, with a particular focus on segregation patterns from the city s historic preservation movement. The main research questions to be addressed by this project involve the relationship between racial and economic segregation and the individual-level patterns of residential mobility resulting from changes in the urban environment. This project will combine historical census records with City Directories to follow a sample of residents from to . Patterns of spatial and social change will be mapped, overlaying ecological change and political change in the context of historic preservation. This will provide an overview of economic and residential segregation patterns. One of the main innovations of this study is that it will match individuals across multiple time periods. In addition, the study will combine traditional sociological perspectives with recent developments in spatial analysis. This award is supported through the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc18104 none This research project will contribute to the understanding of the ways in which political spaces are constructed and of the role that participation of groups traditionally marginalized plays in this process. It argues that the recognition of the existence of a new world order and of new political spaces, located beyond the nation-state, requires us to see political actions as involving a multi-layered web of interactions, originating and being articulated simultaneously from different sites across a variety of scales. The research will question the notion of politics as spatially bounded and political space fixed and it will show that a more adequate notion of scale requires the recognition of new forms of political action and an expansion of the meaning of political subject. The European Union (EU), as an institution operating at the supranational scale, and the process of the EU s eastern enlargement will be used to explore the ways in which women in two accession countries, the Czech Republic and Poland, have engaged as political actors in the construction of supranational political space. Particular attention will be given both to the restrictions on what women can do (through an analysis of constraints such as the lack of political culture, legacies of socialist uneven development, the limitations of the EU s primarily economic focus, and institutional rhetorical restrictions), and to what women do succeed in doing, as a result of the new opportunities that have been created by globalizing tendencies and by the post- transformations. Through an empirical and institutional analysis of processes, actions, and responses by women in the matter of the EU and of two different states, this research will provide an account of the ways in which women s political participation is mobilized and competing interests are negotiated in the process of constructing political space. This cross-national study will apply a multi-method approach and will be divided into four stages, (to be carried out simultaneously in the two countries: 1) textual analysis of documents reflecting preparation for the EU accession, with special attention to a gender analysis of the EU discourses of eastern enlargement; 2) data collection, through approximately 150 individual and 12 focus group interviews with women s NGOs, national politicians and policy-makers in each of the study countries, EU representatives and EU related women s NGOs in Brussels; 3) textual analysis of empirical data using ATLAS ti, a computer program for the qualitative analysis of non-numerical and unstructured data, and 4) final comparative analysis and theory construction, based upon the findings of the first three stages. Through an empirical and institutional analysis of processes, actions, and responses by women in the matter of the EU and of two different states, this research will provide an account of the ways in which women s political participation is mobilized and competing interests are negotiated in the process of constructing political space. In particular this project will: 1) produce the first extensive examination of discourses on eastern enlargement and gender and will provide an understanding of the ways in which women activists, state politicians, and EU representatives use and rework EU and gender discourse as a means of advancing their goals and formulating political agendas across various scales (supranational, national, local, individual); 2) develop an understanding of the ways in which women understand politics and their political activities; of how they mobilize, voice their interests, and construct their identities beyond the nation-state, and of how these identities translate into the mobilizing practices across various scales, and 3) have broader implications insofar as it reveals the intricacies of EU negotiations. The results of the research will be publicly available, and this research will in that way increase public awareness and stimulate gender debates regarding the benefits and costs of the EU eastern enlargement for groups socially and politically marginalized doc18105 none Under the direction of Dr. Carla Sinopoli, Ms. Lawson will carry out analyses of archaeological materials recovered during fieldwork in The Gambia, West Africa. Lawson s fieldwork in the Gambia Valley, conducted between and , represents one of the first attempts to systematically study the archaeology of this region of West Africa. Long known for its mysterious stone circle and tumulus monuments built in the first and early second millennia AD, very little is understood about the people of the Gambia Valley responsible for building these monuments, which often house human burials. In order to understand prehistoric polities in the region more fully, Lawson conducted a survey of archaeological sites located in the stone circle and tumulus zone. Over 60 village and associated iron-working sites were recovered, along with numerous monumental sites. Archaeological excavations were conducted at three of the village sites and at one iron-working site. National Science Foundation funds will be used 1) to conduct analyses of artifacts recovered during excavation and 2) to obtain radiocarbon dates from charcoal samples taken during excavation. Artifact analysis will concentrate on faunal and botanical remains. The analysis of such remains will give us a much better idea of the subsistence practices common in the Gambia Valley in the past. The identification of species utilized by past inhabitants will also help to reconstruct the natural environment at the time of site occupation; the environment has been subject to rapid deforestation in recent decades and so is different now than it was 500 or years ago. The attainment of radiocarbon dates from the excavated sites will allow for the construction of a regional chronology. Radiocarbon dating is one of the best dating techniques for archaeological sites, which are more than 500 years old. Because the Gambia Valley is so understudied, until Lawson s work only one radiocarbon date was available for the entire country (from a stone circle monument). By obtaining radiocarbon dates for each site excavated, it will be possible to study how politics and society have changed over the last 1,500 years in the Gambia Valley. Radiocarbon dating will also provide absolute dates for ceramic assemblages; changes in ceramic style are often chronologically sensitive. With the dates of ceramic assemblages firmly established, it will be possible to estimate the date of archaeological sites from surface finds alone. When the Portuguese first reached the Gambia River in the s, they found it to be part of a dynamic trading system and home to many independent polities. Lawson s archaeological work in The Gambia will help to flesh out our understanding of how these Gambian polities developed and the changing roles they played in regional African trading systems, the trans-Saharan trade, and the later Atlantic trade. Knowledge of Gambian prehistory will add to the growing corpus of African archaeological data doc18106 none This ADVANCE Fellows award, through the Divisions of Chemistry and Physics, will support the research of Marcia O. Fenley in the Institute of Molecular Biophysics at Florida State University. The project will use theoretical and computational approaches to elucidate the role of electrostatics on the structure and function of nucleic acids. Specifically, the ion atmosphere and electrostatic potential of model structures of triple-stranded nucleic acids will be examined using numerical counterion condensation and Poisson-Boltzmann methods. These calculations may elucidate the role of various ions on nucleic acid structure, conformation changes and phase transitions. This award is supported through the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers doc18107 none This award supports international collaboration on electrospinning of novel polyacrylonitrile (PAN) nanofibers. Research into the electrospinning of polymer nanofibers and their applications in composites is currently being conducted by the investigator at the University of Nebraska. This collaboration with researchers at the Institute of Polymer Science at the University of Stellenbosh in South Africa brings complimentary expertise in the synthesis, modification and characterization of these PAN nanofibers. In addition, modeling and theoretical optimization of nanofiber assemblies for improved thermal stability and reduced residual stresses will be performed at the University of Natal-Durban, South Africa. Active participation between the research groups includes graduate student participation and student exchanges. It is expected that this will lead to advances in nanotechnology and to extended collaborations as this research moves forward doc18108 none This project aims to understand the role of polymer composition, chain architecture, and individual chain dynamics in determining local structure at length scales less than the radius of gyration in the solid state for polyolefin blends. Solid state nuclear magnetic resonance will be the chief tool used to interrogate the morphology and dynamics in selected blends. Magnetic resonance is ideally suited for selectively probing structure and dynamics in macromolecules, even for polymer blends prepared without any special isotopic labeling schemes. The result of this work will be a detailed understanding of structure miscibility relationships for solid polyolefin blends at the chain level, which should lead to novel blend compositions based on designed chain architectures, and therefore, new and industrially useful materials. Graduate and undergraduate research students will apply the latest instrumentation and polymer synthesis techniques, and strong industrial relationships in this area will afford ample opportunity for working collaborations. In turn, they will share these experiences with middle school students in the North Carolina State University area as part of a project to develop programs for exposing these students to exciting aspects of polymer science. Polymers are a class of materials made from extremely large molecules that find applications in many important commercial areas ranging from food packaging to aerospace composites. Within this class of materials are the saturated hydrocarbon polymers, or polyolefins, which are among the most economically important industrial polymers. The research students trained in the science of designing new polymeric materials will be very competitive for employment opportunities in both the industrial and academic sectors doc18109 none The PI plans to develop a strong program of research and education activities in experimental magnetic resonance at George Mason University. The planned research consists of two lines of investigation: (i) study of the physical mechanisms responsible for the relaxation rates associated with quadrupolar nuclei in crystalline materials using nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR); (ii) study of the flow of polarization from laser-polarized xenon to its surrounding environment using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The proposed research on NQR has applications to the detection of landmines, explosives, and narcotics. The proposed work on NMR laser-polarized xenon has applications to quantum computing, as well as many other important applications to increase the sensitivity of NMR. By exposing women students to research projects on the proposed topics, the PI hopes to encourage them to continue their careers in science, engineering, and related fields. The planned education activities include the development of engaging introductory level courses to retain student interest in physics, the introduction of new laboratory experiments and demonstrations to promote hands-on learning of physical principles, mentorship of women students, and supervision of undergraduate and graduate research projects. It is anticipated that the ADVANCE award will not only advance the PI s career in academic science, but also allow her to serve as a role model and mentor to women students who are pursuing careers in academic science, engineering, or related fields doc18110 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Richard Haskell at Harvey Mudd College to construct an optical coherence microscope (OCM) to capture three-dimensional images of dynamic processes in the early development of plants and animals. An interdisciplinary team of scientists and engineers at Harvey Mudd will record critical events that occur 300 to 500 mm below the surface of a developing organism, too deep to be accessible to other light-based methods because of the strong light-scattering property of embryonic tissue. The ability of the OCM instrument to image non-invasively the development of an individual plant or animal will provide a key tool for gaining a full understanding of the relationship between gene expression and the structural changes that occur during tissue development. The light source of the OCM instrument will be an ultrafast laser operating in the near infrared ( nm) to provide good depth penetration in biological tissue. The laser output will have a broad spectrum that results in a depth resolution for the microscope of 5 mm. The lateral resolution is provided by the focused spot diameter, also 5 mm. The laser system developed for the OCM will be marketed by a commercial vendor so that it is available to other researchers. In addition, the instrument will be capable of measuring scatter motion, for example Brownian motion, which in preliminary experiments has been shown to provide effective intrinsic contrast between different cell types. Measurements of the local variation in refractive index will also serve as a source of intrinsic contrast. The new OCM instrument will be used to study the development of frog embryos and the differentiation of tissue at the apex of plant shoots. OCM images will be assembled to form time-lapse images of dynamic processes, permitting the first direct tests of proposed models of cell motions and differentiation. The research team will consist primarily of four faculty at Harvey Mudd College plus collaborators at four research universities. Their backgrounds span the disciplines of physics, biology, and engineering. An estimated 30 undergraduate researchers, drawn from all 6 major programs at Harvey Mudd, will make significant contributions to the program both during the summer and the academic year. The multidisciplinary nature of the project provides an unusual opportunity to integrate research and education resulting in exceptional training for students and faculty alike. Participants are motivated to develop careers in science and engineering, and to pursue significant research problems that stretch across traditional disciplinary lines doc18111 none This grant is intended to support a series of workshops that will help to prepare for the construction and coordination of the EarthScope facility, which is a proposal to NSF s Major Research Equipment account. EarthScope is a bold interdisciplinary initiative developed by a broad segment of the Earth Science community to apply modern observational, analytical and telecommunications technologies to investigate the structure and evolution of the North American Continent, and the active tectonic processes that shape our land. It will contribute to the mitigation of risks from geological hazards - including earthquakes and volcanoes, the development of natural resources, and the public s understanding of the dynamic Earth. Workshops supported by this grant will focus the science, advance coordination among the EarthScope components, and communicate the essence of the initiative to the full scientific community, other federal agencies, state geologists, local officials, and the general public doc18112 none The objective of this work is to develop a degradation method which will allow monosaccharides to be sequentially removed from the reducing end of oligosaccharides. Monosaccharides will first be removed from oligosaccharides containing 4-7 sugars and experiments will be performed to understand the mechanism of one of the key degradation reactions. The method will then be extended to oligosaccharides which contain sugars with nitrogen substitutents and protecting groups. The overall utility of the method is two fold: 1) it will provide a technique for structural elucidations for unknown oligosaccharides and 2) it will provide a preparative method for the generation of new oligosaccharides by the removal of one or more monosaccharide units from the reducing end. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Brad K. Bendiak of the Department of Cellular and Structural Biology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. Dr. Bendiak will develop a new chemical degradation method to be used primarily for determining the structures of polysaccharides (sugars). However, the overall utility of the method to be studied is two fold: 1) it will provide a technique for structural elucidations for unknown polysaccharides and 2) it will provide a preparative method for the generation of new polysaccharides by the sequential removal of one or more monosaccharide units from the starting sugar. Students trained as a result of working on this project will gain experience in bioorganic and supramolecular organic chemistry, hence they will have skills needed by the pharmaceutical and speciality chemicals industries doc18113 none Gwendolen Hines will collaborate with Konstantin Mischaikow on a mathematical model for the evolution of dispersal rates in a population which experiences both spatial and temporal heterogeneity. Together, they will analyze models with dispersal mechanisms other than simple diffusion, specifically dispersal described by integral operators. They will search for the existence of stable solutions for different combinations of spatial and temporal homogeneity and heterogeneity. The global dynamics of the system will be studied. Gwendolen Hines has been out of the full-time academic mathematics workforce for several years to care for her young daughter. She plans to reestablish her research career by spending a semester at Georgia Tech s Center for Dynamical Systems and Nonlinear Studies to work on a problem in evolutionary biology having to do with how natural selection is related to dispersal rates. Upon returning to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, she will resume her full-time tenure-track position in mathematics. She will continue to work on this research problem, intensifying the collaboration with summer visits to Georgia Tech. At Nebraska, she will promote the interaction between Mathematics and Biology departments, as part of the university s initiative in Quantitative and Integrative Biology. Dr. Hines remains active in outreach activities for girls and women in mathematics doc18114 none The unique cardiopulmonary system of crocodilian reptiles has interested biologists for hundreds of years. Yet the functional significance of many features of this system remains a mystery. The research proposed herein seeks to understand the functional significance of the dual aortas (left and right) and cardiovascular shunt of crocodilians. Unlike mammals, that have only one aorta that originates in the left ventricle and carries oxygen-rich blood from the heart to the body, crocodilians have two aortas. One aorta originates from the left cardiac ventricle and is analogous with the mammalian aorta. However, crocodilians also have a second aorta that originates from the right cardiac ventricle and terminates at the stomach. The crocodilian shunt refers to a blood flow pattern where oxygen-poor systemic venous blood is directed into this aorta to be sent to the stomach, rather than directed into the pulmonary artery to be sent to the lungs. The research will test two hypotheses regarding this cardiovascular system: (1) that the dual aorta system of crocodilians facilitates digestion of food and (2) that this system functions to maintain appropriate blood pH after exercise. It will consist of measurements of blood flow using ultrasonic technology and measurements of blood gases and pH. A major aim of this research is to contribute to our understanding of the evolution of the vertebrate cardiovascular system. A leading evolutionary biologist, Theodosius Dobzhansky, astutely said, Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Evolutionary theory is a profound contribution of biology to knowledge. All aspects of biology have benefited from the use of this theory, including clinically oriented biology. A full understanding of the human cardiovascular system in health and in disease is only possible if we understand the evolutionary history of the system. Because the cardiovascular system is made up of soft tissues and does not preserve well in the fossil record, most insight into the evolution of the cardiovascular system comes from comparing cardiovascular features and functions of different living vertebrates. The early ancestors of mammals almost certainly had a cardiovascular system that was similar to that of a typical reptile, such as is found in lizards and turtles. The crocodilian cardiovascular system is unique because it shares numerous features with that of mammals (e.g., a completely divided cardiac ventricle supported by a coronary circulation) but has many other features that are typically reptilian (e.g., two aortas, the ability to shut down blood flow to the lung and redirect that blood to the body). Thus, the paradoxical assemblage of mammalian and reptilian features found within the crocodilians provides scientists with an exceptional opportunity to gain insight into how and why the mammalian system evolved from the reptilian pattern doc18115 none This award provides support for a project focused on the development of a novel software package, Virtual NMR Spectrometer, for accurate and efficient computer calculation of the outcome of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experiments. As NMR experiments grow more elaborate it becomes increasingly difficult to predict the resulting spectra analytically. These difficulties are particularly great for spin systems of high complexity typical of biological macromolecules. The Virtual Spectrometer will be capable of simulating all contemporary experimental NMR approaches, including multichannel, multidimensional experiments involving shaped radio-frequency pulses and pulsed field gradients. The software will provide a powerful tool for designing new NMR approaches and for optimizing pulse sequences and experimental conditions prior to running NMR experiments. The Virtual NMR Spectrometer will also serve as an efficient tool for learning the general principles of magnetic resonance spectroscopy and for training students and novice users in pulse sequence design and data processing. In contrast to the existing software, use of the virtual spectrometer will not require computer programming skills. This will permit a variety of users with variedbackgrounds to use this program for learning purposes and or for improvement in design of experiments using NMR doc18116 none Stories from the Circle: Science and Native Wisdom, A Workshop with Extensive Dissemination Materials A workshop entitled Stories from the Circle: Science and Native Wisdom, will be held at the Tsaile campus of Dine College, near Chinle, Arizona on May 13-18 of . This is the first major gathering of Native scientists, scholars, and elders with Western scientists and scholars that is to be planned, organized, and carried out within Native, rather than Western, worldview. Extensive dissemination through a film, books, a museum exhibition, and curriculum materials is an integral part of this project. These means of dissemination will allow the workshop s objectives to be widely communicated. The objectives of the workshop are to make a statement about science from a Native cultural perspective and to show the dominant culture another way of looking at the world that can help solve some serious problems we all face. The workshop and dissemination materials are being planned by teams of Native scholars and scientists from many nations, in collaboration with selected non-Native scholars and scientists doc18117 none This award supports an effort to develop a miniaturized and integrated two-dimensional (2-D) protein separation platform based on non-native isoelectric focusing and SDS gel electrophoresis in a microfluidic network. The network will be embedded in a small plastic chip, and the device will employ laser-induced fluorescence for the detection of resolved SDS-protein complexes in the microchannel array using non-covalent, environment-sensitive, fluorescent probes. The resulting instrumentation system will be capable of analyzing complex mixtures of proteins, including crude cell lysates containing minute quantities of protein. In addition, the device will be amenable to much greater automation, throughput, and sensitivity than existing gel-based systems. This microfluidics-based instrumentation technology, positioned as the next generation of 2-D poly acrylimide gel electrophoresis, promises to have a major impact on proteomics research, particularly in comparisons of protein expression in organisms growing under different conditions doc18118 none This low temperature project seeks to understand the unique properties of helium films and to use these films to address problems of interest in Condensed Matter Physics. A primary objective is to study new aspects of the He-3-He-4 mixture film system. This work would include confirmation of two-dimensional Fermi liquid parameters and a search for a new superfluid state in the two dimensional 3He atop a 4He film at very low temperatures. Experiments are also conducted with helium films on patterned substrates in one and two dimensions. Topics of interest include two-dimensional localization and a possible shift of universality class due to an implied film flow. Experimental techniques include quartz crystal microbalance resonance, heat capacity studies of the thermal properties of He-4 and He-3-He-4 mixture films, and third sound studies of helium films on patterned substrates. In addition to contributing to progress in understanding the behavior of helium films themselves, the work has relevance to phenomena such as Fermi systems, localization, and two-dimensional phase transitions. It also provides excellent training for graduate students and undergraduates. The students gain experience in cutting edge technology and fundamental concepts that prepare them for careers in academe, government or industry. This research investigates the remarkable properties of liquid helium. Such study provides unique insights into nature that are not available by the study of any other substance. Study of the wave character of thin helium films on surfaces, that have been deliberately patterned, allows an enhanced understanding of how waves can be trapped in novel environments and of how an imposed flow can modify this behavior. The study of thin film mixtures of the two naturally occurring forms of helium is motivated by theoretical suggestions that a new kind of superfluid film may be found. These studies with mixture films also allow insight into the physics of two-dimensional systems. Students involved in this work gain hands-on research experience with sophisticated instrumentation. This training prepares them for careers in academe, government or industry doc18119 none Miller This is a collaborative proposal among Principal Investigators at the Universities of Colorado and Iceland. Iceland is situated at the boundary between cold, polar air masses and relatively warm air masses of tropical origin and between the cold, relatively fresh East Greenland Current and the warm, salty North Atlantic Drift. Subtle shifts in either atmospheric or oceanic circulation may have produced strong changes in the terrestrial environment. Therefore, the impact of North Atlantic Holocene circulation variability was likely to be stronger on Iceland than most other North Atlantic landmasses. There has been a historical record of environmental change on Iceland since its settlement and the large variations observed confirm Iceland s climate sensitivity. The goal of the project is to reconstruct Iceland s large ice caps through the present interglacial and document abrupt shifts that occurred during deglaciation, and the magnitude, timing and possible cyclicity of terrestrial environmental change. The Principal Investigators will attempt to answer two specific questions: 1) did some of the extant large ice caps disappear in the early Holocene, and if so, when did they regrow and 2) what were the terrestrial and near-shore environmental conditions during deglaciation? Continuous cores from two deep, high-sedimentation-rate lake basins will be recovered. These lakes were selected because the sediments are expected to provide high-resolution, quantitative evidence of environmental change over the past 10 to 15 thousand years. The Principal Investigators will undertake a multiproxy approach, with an emphasis on physical characteristics of the sediments, lacustrine primary productivity changes, palynology, and marine micropaleontology. These data should allow them to determine whether there is a natural cyclicity in Holocene environmental change on Iceland, similar to that reported from the adjacent oceans and the Greenland Ice Sheet doc18120 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Paul A. Garris at Illinois State University to develop a new instrument for wireless monitoring of neural activity in the brain of awake, unrestrained animals. The new instrument, called real-time animal telemetry (RAT), will combine two powerful technologies; microsensors for spatially and temporally resolved measurements, and digital telemetry for remote data transmission and system control with high speed and high fidelity. The primary advantage of RAT will be sub-second characterization of brain function with minimal perturbation of behavior. The proposed RAT instrument holds great promise for advancing the study of brain-behavior relationships. RAT will be a modular and multifunctional instrument, a design that advances development and affords flexibility to its application. Several types of measurement techniques will be incorporated into RAT: Voltammetry which monitors the chemistry of the brain and electrophysiology which measures brain bioelectrical activity. Combined, the techniques assess the release of a neurotransmitter and its postsynaptic effect to obtain a more integrative view of brain function. Although great strides have recently been made applying real-time voltammetry and electrophysiology to awake animals, the connection between sensor and recording equipment is made by a cable tether. Unfortunately, the hard connection affects behavior and hinders or even prevents investigation of important paradigms such as those involving social interactions and complex environments. To overcome this problem, the new instrument will use a wireless link. Moreover, because real-time voltammetric and electrophysiological measurements are very susceptible to transmission artifacts, RAT will use high fidelity digital telemetry. Ultimately, RAT should be commercially viable instrumentation in the support of biological research. The incorporation of well-established techniques will make the proposed RAT instrument attractive to large number of users working in the neuroscience fields. With further development, there is enormous potential for RAT to support other existing real-time microsensors. RAT can also evolve to accommodate sensor technologies that emerge in the future doc18121 none This award supports the development of an improved version of an oxygen electrode that is expected to have an oxygen sensitivity five orders of magnitude greater than that of commercially available electrodes of similar type, as well as an improved response time. The instrument will also have fluorescence excitation and detection capabilities. The instrument is expected to facilitate studies of photosynthetic reaction mechanisms, permitting the determination of the redox state and charge transfer kinetics of photosynthetic cofactors in the microsecond time range. In addition to these scientific goals, the project is expected to have a significant impact on training of graduate and undergraduate students doc18122 none This research will investigate recent, often clandestine, Chinese immigration into the United States. It combines interviews with recent immigrants in New York with a systematic sample of Chinese households from six community sending areas in Fujian province. Besides basic data on socioeconomic status of the households, the interviews will collect information on exposure to networks of migration agents. For long distance immigration such as from Fujian, these networks should be crucial, especially as the migration flows increase. Household data on remittances and community inventories will be used to evaluate the impact of the migration on business development in the sending communities in Fujian doc18123 none Serreze Changes in the freshwater budget of the Arctic Basin have potentially large impacts on the circulation and sea ice of the Arctic Ocean, which is in turn coupled to the global ocean circulation and climate. However, the atmospheric components of the arctic freshwater budget are characterized relatively poorly and difficult to model. This project will utilize state-of-the-art computational methods to improve climatological simulations of the atmospheric freshwater budget of the Arctic. The salient aspect of high latitude numerical modeling difficulties is the extreme range of scales that must be simulated adequately. Modeling moisture processes requires appropriate treatment of interactions at small spatial scales. By contrast, numerous observational studies have suggested that arctic climate variability is dominated by decadal time scales and planetary spatial scales. These requirements necessitate a trade-off between temporal and spatial scales that cannot be addressed readily with current Eulerian modeling methods, due to computational stability constraints. This study will implement semi-Lagrangian transport for state and dynamical atmospheric variables within the context of a fully coupled atmosphere-ocean-sea ice model. This new implementation would allow both long-term simulations of the fully coupled arctic climate at high resolution, as well as increased use of ensemble techniques for an uncertainty analysis of crucial components of the atmospheric hydrologic cycle. Model experiments will be used to address the following primary research questions: 1. What is the sensitivity of the arctic hydrologic cycle to variability in the simulated atmospheric circulation? 2. To what extent does the Northern Hemisphere semiannual oscillation influence surface moisture fluxes and or atmospheric moisture transport? What factors influence interannual variability and trends in the arctic semiannual oscillation? 3. What is the influence of anomalous sea ice and or snow cover on the atmospheric moisture budget over subsequent seasons? Do anomalies in wintertime climate indices translate into anomalous precipitation in other seasons? What summertime or year-round structures in the arctic climate can be identified in atmospheric moisture variables? 4. Does atmospheric convection over land play a significant role in the arctic hydrologic cycle during the summer season doc18124 none Schroeder Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Dr. Paul Schroeder, Department of Geology at the University of Georgia (UGA), Athens, Georgia and Dr. O. Isik Ece of the Geological Sciences Department of Istanbul Technical University (ITU) in Istanbul, Turkey. Tectonic evolution of North Anatolian Fault zone and Neo-Tethys suture belts from Aegean Sea to Western Anatolia and the recent discovery of kaolin deposits within these tectonic belts have become a new focus of earth scientists in assessing resources in the global clay industry and the magnitude of silicate alteration effects on global climate change. The purpose of this joint research is to determine (1) the alteration mechanism of volcanic rocks to kaolin group minerals, and estimate its role in the mass-balance of global element cycles, (2) the distribution of parent, secondary and tertiary minerals in order to estimate the extent of hydrothermal alteration zones, and (3) to verify alteration stages and physico-chemical conditions of volcanic tuffs by geochemical analysis of the waters. The area selected for field research in Turkey has unique features of mineral occurrences and hydrothermal alterations associated with branches of major active North Anatolian Fault system. Scope: The field setting is particularly suitable to examine the full range of geochemical and sedimentological conditions leading to the formation of economically viable deposits. Because Turkey is on one of the most active fault zones, it provides an ideal setting to study hydrothermal alteration of primary (and formation of industrial secondary) clay minerals. The project will shed new light on fossil hydrothermal systems and on the occurrence of high quality industrial phyllosilicates from the point of view of physical features and crystal chemistry. There is a possibility for the discovery of halloysite deposits that could serve the ceramic markets. This study could provide mineralogical and geochemical information that can be utilized in understanding the genesis of other kaolinite and halloysite occurrences. Turkish scientists will utilize the X-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscope and stable isotope facilities at UGA. Geology students from UGA will gain valuable field experience and will benefit from the international collaboration. The project meets INT criteria for support of cooperative projects that are mutually beneficial doc18125 none This research project, supported in the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, addresses the mechanism of etching of silicon surfaces. Using a combination of scanning probe microscopy and kinetic Monte Carlo simulation methods, Professor Hines and her colleagues in the Department of Chemistry at Cornell University are investigating the effect of etching conditions on the silicon surface morphology. Experiments are addressing the aqueous etching of the Si(111) surface by KOH solution, as well as the anodic etching of silicon surfaces used to create porous silicon materials. The effects of step orientation, step density, and silicon dopant, as well as etchant composition and concentration are being examined. Results of this work are important for the design of nanomaterial technologies, as well as for the development of electronic materials processing strategies. Information about how chemical etchants remove material from the surface of a silicon wafer is important for the design of processes to make micro-electromechanical (MEMS) devices, and for the production of electronic and photonic devices. The work of this research project is directed to developing an understanding of the aqueous and electrochemical etching of silicon, with the goal of developing a microscopic understanding of what controls the atomic and nano-scale morphology of the etched surface. With the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, Professor Hines and her colleagues at Cornell, are using a combination of microscopy and computer simulation to obtain this information doc18126 none This award supports the construction of a new, state-of-the-art single-photon spectrometer microscope. The instrument will enable study of the conformation of single molecules of enzymes and nucleic acids using photo-induced electron transfer techniques that have been pioneered by the PI. In comparison to available instruments, the device will have an extended excitation frequency range and significantly improved time resolution. The excitation makes use of a frequency-doubled and synchronously-pumped optical parametric oscillator. Through collaboration with an Italian group, a custom avalanche photodiode with a very small active area will be developed. The detector will permit the probing of short-distance conformational fluctuations. Among the types of experiments the instrument will permit are the use of photo-induced electron transfer between tetramethlyrodamine (TMR) dye and guanine to probe the conformational dynamics of double-stranded DNA, and the use of fluorescence resonant energy transfer (FRET) to probe dynamics of a DNA hairpin. The new instrument is expected to make a variety of other new single-molecule experiments possible, and to improve knowledge of macromolecular dynamics and of the role of conformational fluctuation on macromolecular function. The funds provided by the award will also support multidiciplinary training of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows working at the interface of physics, chemistry and biology doc18127 none This award will support two years of work to plan and implement a national conference of approximately 30 participants representing the major research-based natural history museums in America to consider best practices for enhancing museum visitor understanding of evolution. Evolution is the central paradigm of the life sciences, and natural history museums are of fundamental importance to an understanding of the paradigm of evolution. Despite this fact, recent surveys indicate that the majority of the American public, including visitors to natural history museums, neither understands nor believes in evolutionary theory. The three-day conference to be held at the Florida Museum of Natural History in will be preceded by a pre-conference planning workshop in and a synthesis of literature and practices pertinent to the understanding of evolution in museums. The conference will bring together chief scientists, directors of education and exhibits, and directors of research and collections as participants in a program professionally facilitated by informal science education experts. Findings and outcomes of the conference will constitute best practices for the field and will be published in the professional literature and disseminated via the Florida Museum website. With more than 10,000,000 visitors to natural history museums per year, once implemented in museum exhibitions and programs the results of this conference will have a broad impact on science literacy in America for years to come doc18128 none The proposal requests funding for partial support for the Meeting of the Division of Particles and Fields (DPF ) of the American Physical Society on May 24-28, at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA. The funds will be used to support graduate students and postdoctoral research associates who might otherwise not be able to afford to attend the meeting doc18129 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Gary Kirkpatrick at Mote Marine Laboratory, Dr. Mark Moline at California Polytechnic State University and Dr. Oscar Schofield at Rutgers University to develop and expand the present capabilities of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to study the distribution and taxonomic composition of phytoplankton communities. Traditional methods of study involve boats to collect water samples and then manual examination of the individual water samples. The results from the traditional approach have poor spatial and time resolution, their quality depends on the expertise of the investigator and they are very costly. The goal of this project is to develop a nested AUV observation capability that can provide near continuous in situ data over ecologically significant spatial scales. Specifically, this work will develop and integrate an optically-based phytoplankton detection instrument into two classes of AUVs to provide an end-to-end in situ phytoplankton detection and mapping network. The existing platforms for this network development effort include a Webb Research Corporation non-propeller autonomous glider (owned by Rutgers University) and a propeller driven Remote Environmental Measuring UnitS (REMUS) (owned by Cal Poly). The proposed optical detection system consists of a capillary waveguide system, which will provide quantitative hyperspectral measurements of particulate light absorption which will be used to differentiate between phytoplankton groups. PIs propose to test the developed network by detecting and mapping harmful algal blooms (HABs) along the West Florida continental shelf. The proposed systems will complement the broader research community efforts to use satellite remote sensing techniques to monitor the distribution and taxonomic composition of phytoplankton communities. The resulting systems will have world-wide applicability to monitoring and study of phytoplankton communities in freshwater and marine systems. The instruments resulting from the proposed development effort will have value as stand-alone tools and as components of observation networks. The undergraduate and graduate students to be involved in this project will gain insight into the scientific principals and engineering considerations underlying these technologies that will form the basis for future aquatic sciences. Finally, the public will be involved in the information transfer aspects of this system through near-real-time data products available on the World-Wide Web and visualization of biological community structure through existing formal and informal public outreach programs doc18130 none This award supports the development of a novel bioreactor system by investigators at Tufts and Harvard Universities. The bioreactor will be able to provide a broad range of environmental stimuli for study of tissue engineering and basic aspects of tissue development. The goal of the project is to provide an improved reactor system that can be used to increase understanding of the effects of perfusion, gas transport, mechanical forces, and biochemical stimuli on cell and tissue differentiation in vitro. The proposed reactor is expected to reduce the need to develop specific reactors whose design is specific to the cells and tissues to be studied. This advanced reactor system will build upon an initial design that was intended to permit the application of complex multi-dimensional strain to cells growing on matrices in a reactor. This system was used successfully to induce differentiation of adult mesenchymal progenitor cells into ligament forming cells, without the need for exogenous cell signaling factors, a major advance in the field. The planned improvements include a multi-dimensional force monitoring system, reactor vessel position control systems to increase options for cell seeding, and thorough fluid mechanics characterization of the reactor vessel and system to explore developmental cascades for a variety of tissues, as well as fundamental studies of cellular and tissue responses. Software for user programmable features (process variables, timing, data and sample collection) will be included. The system has the potential to become a platform used widely in applied and basic investigations of the environmental and chemical signals that lead individual cells to form well-differentiated tissues doc18097 none This award provides support for a joint project aimed at the development of aggressive new analytical strategies for protein sequence analysis based on mass spectrometry. The effort involves investigators at Louisiana State University, who are accomplished in the manufacture of micrometer-sized devices, and their collaborator at the University of Cincinnati, who is skilled in high resolution mass spectrometry. Microfabrication techniques will be used to develop integrated micro-systems expected to permit analysis of the proteins in a single cell. The use of microfludics will help maintain the proteins at a high enough concentration to permit analysis even though the amount of each protein found in a cell is on the order of molecules. The devices to be used in this project are built using polymers and micromanufacturing techniques to fabricate high-aspect-ratio molding dies for hot embossing polymers. The devices will be tested and refined through studies of chloroplast-derived membranes thought to contain at least 150 different proteins. Within the context of the proposed effort, these studies will be extended to examine the proteome, i.e., the entire complement of proteins, of intact chloroplasts of Arabadopsis and of entire cells of the blue-green algae Synechocystis. If fully successful, the instrumentation will allow biochemical analyses of individual cells and thus contribute to a better understanding of the relationship of gene expression and cellular phenotype doc18132 none Mazumdar Description: This award supports the US-India cooperative research project entitled Theory of Pi-Conjugated Photonic Materials. The investigators, Sumitendra Mazumdar, University of Arizona and Suryanarayana Ramasesha, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore will undertake theoretical studies on the photophysics of pi-conjugated oligomers and polymers. These materials are of high current interest for their applications in photonics. The PIs will study the optical properties of conjugated organic polymer materials with a focus on interpreting experimental results, developing mechanisms for photophysical processes, and predicting optical properties of new materials. The goals are to develop a comprehensive theory of charge-transfer and collision processes important in organic light emitting diodes and to develop a density matrix renormalization technique capable of calculating energies of low band gap polymers. Scope: This project extends research funded under grant, to Mazumdar and continues a highly successful collaboration with Ramasesha. Their work on organic light emitting diodes was published in Nature this year. The PI is a leading theorist in the area of excited states and optical properties of conjugated polymers. The research is expected to lead to greater understanding of correlated electron physics and to significant advances in the development of new concepts and methodologies for organic semiconductors and low dimensional correlated electron systems. Due to the technological importance of the materials and methodologies under study, this research is likely to strongly impact the development of this rapidly evolving field over the next few years. It extends DMR funded research and provides mutual benefits to students and junior colleagues in both countries. The project is supported by the Office of International Science & Engineering and the Division of Materials Research. In India, it is supported by the Department of Science and Technology doc18133 none This award provides support for development of a type of confocal microscope that will be able to scan samples much more rapidly than current commercial instruments. Optical imaging techniques play an important role in studying structure and function of nerve cells, a role that has been facilitated by advanced techniques such as multiphoton microscopy. This type of microscopy allows collection of high-quality structural images as well as high-fidelity transient signals from light-scattering preparations such as living tissue. While the spatial resolution of existing instruments of this type is remarkable, their temporal resolution has been limited by use of mechanical devices to scan the specimen. As a result, drastic sacrifices of spatial resolution are usually necessary when monitoring fast cellular signaling. The instrument to be developed will combine the use of Multiphoton Microscopy with Acousto-Optic Laser Scanning. For structural Imaging, the instrument will permit significantly higher spatial resolution at fast frame rates. For observation of transient signals (functional imaging), it will allow the user to select points of interest from previously imaged structures and perform multi-site measurements at frame rates of more than per second. The instrument will be of great advantage for experimental work in neuroscience where it will allow study the computational properties of individual neurons in brain slices by imaging dendritic structures and their function, and to study processing of sensory information in intact brain. Other applications are likely to include imaging of structure and function in excitable non-neuronal tissue, such as heart, smooth and skeletal muscle, and imaging of other light-scattering biological preparations doc18134 none Design and Fabrication of Gradient Generating Microfluidic Micro-Incubator A grant has been awarded to Dr. Noo Li Jeon at University of California, Irvine to develop a microfluidic device that can generate gradients of biological molecules and is capable of culturing cells in well-controlled environments. Chemical gradients of biologically active molecules on surfaces and in solutions play important roles in many biological processes such as development, wound healing, and cancer. Recent advances in the field of microfabrication and soft lithography enable the fabrication devices that have structures of submicron dimensions. The purpose of this proposal is to develop a microfluidic device that is capable of generating gradients of active biological molecules that are controlled both spatially and temporally. This device, a microfluidic micro-incubator will be compatible with microscopy techniques and will allow long-term cell culture of a variety of cell types. By significantly improving the resolution and stability of gradients and actively controlling both the temporal and spatial gradients, the microfluidic micro-incubator developed in this study will provide new capabilities for in-situ observation and quantification of biological phenomena such as chemotaxis (neutrophils, T-cells, and metastatic cancer cells) and growth cone guidance of neurons. The ability to expose cells to both temporal and spatial gradients of growth factors and other biologically active compounds will be broadly useful in a number of biological research applications. The gradient generating microfluidic micro-incubator can be used in understanding how cells navigate in complex tissue environments and specifically in investigating the processes behind tumor metastasis, wound healing, and other biological processes. With further development, it is envisioned that the micro-incubator will find applications in development and testing of new drugs for wound healing, breast cancer metastasis, and others doc18135 none S. Lin, Clarkson University It is proposed to carry out a combined experimental and analytical investigation on the suppression or enhancement of wave motion in film flows. There are five objectives of this research, three are in the experimental part, and two in the analytical part. The experimental objectives are (1) to see if suppression of onset of instability as predicted theoretically by the PI can be achieved, (2) whether enhancement of wave motion can be realized as predicted, and (3) to demonstrate experimentally that the Squire s theorem can be violated. Objective (4) is to extend the stability theory to a multilayer system, and (5) to investigate the weakly nonlinear effects of the wave motion. Broader impacts of the proposed research was not discussed explicitly by the PI, but three graduate students will be trained per year doc18136 none The Caltech REU Site program focuses on gravitational radiation and its detection at the Laser-Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). It consists mainly of a ten-week summer research program at Caltech and the two LIGO sites in Louisiana and Washington, involving ten undergraduate students from around the U.S. Research projects involve the physics and engineering of the LIGO initial and advanced detectors, data analysis techniques and software, and theoretical studies of astrophysical gravitational-wave sources. These projects typically cover a large number of physics and engineering disciplines, including astrophysics and gravitational physics, and the experimental research deals with metrology, optics, lasers, material science, mechanical systems, controls, and electronics doc18137 none Binhai Zhu In this project, we investigate a three-dimensional geometric problem that originated in neural maps, which model the motions of neurons so as to understand the human behavior. The problem is defined as follows: given a neuron, which is modeled as a polyhedron, compute a minimum set of (minimal) cylindrical segments to approximate the neuron. We plan to design a good approximation for this problem (i.e., the error between the cylindrical segments and the neuron is small). We also plan to have a good implementation, build a prototype system, and perform extensive empirical studies. Practically, a solution to this problem will have a great impact in computational biology. Theoretically, this problem generalizes the problem of finding a single line stabbing a set of balls in 3D (and has never been seriously studied to the best of our knowledge). Modeling the motions of human neurons is an important problem in biology, especially in understanding human behavior under different circumstances. To do that, we first need to model a single neuron, which is very much like a tree-shaped polyhedron, using a set of cylindrical segments. Different cylindrical segments of different radii have different functionality, so the union of the cylindrical segments should be as close to the neuron as possible. In practice this problem is estimated manually by technicians in the computational biology community. The process is time-consuming and error-prone. Our research will focus on automating this process with computers and a successful solution will have deep influence in the computational biology community. We will train two graduate students throughout this project doc18138 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Eduardo Wolf Institution: Notre Dame University The objective of this proposal is to investigate the effects of sulfur on the state of the surface of supported platinum, palladium, and rhodium catalysts and to develop structure-activity correlations for these catalysts during oxidation reaction. The approach is to conduct a comprehensive study on the effect of sulfur poisoning on model oxidation reactions by combining kinetic measurements, catalyst characterizations, and microkinetic and Monte Carlo simulations of the experimental results. High throughput catalyst evaluations will be used to ascertain the effect of sulfur on carbon monoxide, propane, and proplyene oxidation on Pt, Pd, and Rh on a variety of oxide supports. An array of catalysts will be used to identify the major trends in activity caused by sulfur poisoning of the catalysts surface. Selected samples will be studied using a variety of surface analytical techniques such as EXAFS and FTIR. An industrial collaborator brings expertise in surface science and catalyst preparation techniques. The results of this study may be useful in developing more sulfur-tolerant catalysts in automobile exhaust applications and for fuel cells doc18139 none This study will offer new insights into cross-cultural differences in superior-subordinate interaction in rapidly changing organizational settings in three countries of the European Union (EU) and in the U.S. The study will challenge the traditional assumption from U.S. research findings that managers are seen as subordinates major link to their information environment. In this light the subordinates information inquiry process will be explored in terms of frequency, types of information sought, other relevant information sources, and their information seeking tactics. Based on interview and survey data, the study will provide useful information on the underlying dynamics of superior-subordinate relationships in terms of: 1. the level of subordinate pro-activity in soliciting different types of information; 2. the differences in tactics used to solicit various types of information; 3. the effect of a superior s leadership style on the extent and nature of information inquiry; and 4. the influence of organizational norms rules on inquiry patterns. Upon exploring such dynamics within each of the four countries, cross-country comparisons will be made, looking at the moderating effect of major relevant cultural dimensions such as vertical individualism and power distance. The study will make a contribution to the field of organizational behavior through a distinctive inquiry into subordinate information seeking patterns in the context of both organizational turbulence and of cross-cultural comparison. This information is crucial in times of rapid organizational change and international interdependence, when information inquiry in the midst of such an environment is of strategic importance doc18140 none Nayfeh Description: This award supports a cooperative research project between Professor Ali Nayfeh, Department of Engineering Sciences and Mechanics, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VA Tech.), Blacksburg, Virginia and Dr. Sami El-Borgi, Department of Engineering, Ecole Polytechnique de Tunisie (EPT), Tunis, Tunisia. The investigators will examine the control of a seismically excited linear elastic or hysteretic structure by passive confinement of vibrations. The objectives of the research are: a) to develop a passive control strategy which allows the transfer of the vibrational energy from the structure to added passive elements, such as diagonal bracing elements, resulting in reducing the vibration amplitudes of the structure and bringing it down to its desired equilibrium state more rapidly at the expense of slowing down the convergence of the passive elements to their initial state; b) to ensure the sensitivity robustness of such a strategy against parameter uncertainties related to the mass, damping, and stiffness of the structure; and c) to preserve the vibration confinement in the passive elements for various types of seismic loadings. Scope: The protection of structures from harmful earthquake and or wind vibrations is a worldwide issue. The control of seismically excited structures by confinement of vibrations with the aid of passive elements is a novel design methodology in civil engineering applications. The idea is relevant to various fields, such as mechanical systems and multi-floor buildings. Dr. Nayfeh has been quite active in research on linear and nonlinear control of dynamical systems. He will collaborate with Dr. El-Borgi and two other Tunisian faculty members. Dr. El-Borgi has been quite active in nonlinear analysis and control of seismically excited structures and experimental testing of large civil engineering structures. Funding is provided by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Civil and Mechanical Systems doc18141 none This proposal outlines a two-year course of study to fully analyze and synthesize petrologic and geochemical data together with geologic and geophysical constraints to come up with fully integrated models of melting, melt ascent, plumbing and eruptive systems at the fast-spreading EPR 8 degrees -10 degrees N. The PI will collaborate with geologists and geophysicists at IPGP in Paris and WHOI. Distinct goals include using existing and new analyses to understand the mantle sources, melting, and fractionation of the axial and off-axis basalts, using gabbroic xenoliths, U-series dating, and geologic information to paint a picture of layer 2a thickening and the role of off-axis eruptions, and to evaluate the correlations between U-series ages, magnetic paleointensity values, and volcanic and geomorphic features. This ABR will bring together a decade of sampling and analytical work to produce a fully integrated interpretive model of crustal growth and evolution at fast spreading rates doc18142 none Aaron Kuppermann of the is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to use theoretical quantum reaction dynamics and associated ab initio reactive scattering calculations to understand bimolecular reactions in triatomic, tetraatomic, and larger polyatomic systems, including electronically nonadiabatic effects. Dynamic resonances will be located and explored, along with other significant properties of this benchmark reactive system. Also, a new hybrid quantum-classical approach will be combined with a Bohmian quantum-corrected force field to create a hybrid methodology with potential capabilities for describing complex three- or four-center chemical reactions. Elementary chemical reactions are the basic building blocks for designing and understanding complex technologically important systems, such as combustion processes, atmospheric chemistry, chemical lasers, and behavior in plasma reactors. Continuing improvements in high performance computing resources will enable new molecular level understanding of important gas phase chemical reactions doc18143 none Professor Andres Campiglia of North Dakota State University is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program for fundamental studies exploring the use of low temperature matrices for the spectroanalysis of polyaromatic hydrocarbons, which are toxic compounds found in the environment. The use of multiple parameters (e.g. excitation wavelength, emission wavelength, fluorescence and phosphorescence lifetime) will allow the analysis of complex mixtures of PAH s at very low concentrations. A fiberoptic is implanted in the matrix itself for sensitive detection. Polyaromatic hydrocarbons are extremely toxic compounds found in the environment, near oil refineries, for example. The spectroscopic detection and identification of complex mixtures of closely resembling compounds is an analytical challenge. Students will be trained in methods of low temperature emission methods that have the potential for significant impact in the rapid, cost-effective sampling of soils and water in polluted areas doc18144 none Thomas J. Peters The investigators will define new representations for intersecting spline surfaces within computer-aided design (CAD) geometric objects. They will also create algorithms to compute error bounds for approximated intersections representing topological boundaries. Many modeling techniques for geometric design depend upon reliable intersection algorithms. Intersection algorithms will be designed to deliver spline-based CAD geometric models that can be robustly used within a variety of engineering calculations. These intersection representations and error bounds will significantly improve robustness between engineering design and computational applications for stress analysis, fluid dynamics and electromagnetics. No single intersection representation or method will be appropriate for all intersection problems, similar to the mature view taken in computational linear algebra relative to matrix inversion. There, a matrix is first analyzed as to whether it is singular, ill-conditioned (as in the case of a Hilbert matrix), positive-definite, etc. For these approximated spline intersections, new guaranteed error bounds will be developed, as well as corresponding new criteria for semantic consistency of the intersection boundaries formed within spline-based geometric models. For example, the significant improvements to approximated spline models from this project will provide clear benefits to science, industry, and defense. The delivery of the Boeing 777 airplane has been hailed in the popular press as the first production of a paperless airplane, meaning that computerized models supplanted the traditional paper drawings of the engineering design room. While an impressive milestone, the next ambitious step is to eliminate many of the physical prototypes used for destructive testing and engineering analyses prior to releasing an airplane. These tests on physical prototypes are expensive. An appealing, cost-effective alternative is to reliably simulate the complex behavior of turbulence, stress and strain on computerized geometric models of these aircraft. Progress towards that goal has been delayed by inaccuracies introduced in the geometric input to these simulations, specifically along intersection boundaries, and improvement of such intersections is the primary focus of this project. This project will ensure relevance to these contemporary aeronautical design problems by the participation of Boeing scientists and engineers doc16726 none We know very little how evolution produces new species adapted to particular ecological niches. This project is to study two closely related species, one diurnal and the other nocturnal. The nocturnal animal has more rods for night vision, fewer cones, a bigger eye and a different eye conformation than the diurnal one. How many and what kind of genetic changes produce this constellation of differences? We hypothesize that a relatively simple change, an alteration of when maximal cell proliferation occurs to favor rods over cones in the nocturnal species, is the essential genetic change, and the rest of the alterations in eye conformation are epigenetic as eye growth patterns fall under the control of rods. To test this, we bring the together the expertise of three laboratories. The Finlay lab at Cornell University has developed the quantitative techniques for comparing the developmental schedules and morphologies of different animals; the Cepko lab at Harvard Medical School has pioneered studies of cell proliferation and differentiation of the eye; the Silveira lab of the Federal University of Para, Amazonia, Brazil has produced the fundamental descriptions of the visual systems of these species. We will investigate the development of the retina and the eye in both species, looking at the expression of developmental control genes, regulators of the cell cycle, and markers of cell type to see exactly what has changed between the two. At the heart of the project lies the question whether genes, over evolutionary time, have produced coordinated patterns in response to repeatedly encountered challenges like the shift from diurnal to nocturnal living. As a multi-institutional international collaboration, this project has special features. The universities of the north of Brazil struggle economically, so this project provides a link for the researchers and students of Amazonia to new technologies, research resources and ideas. All of the students, North American and Brazilian, benefit from the exposure to different educational systems and expectations; we plan to provide more formal means for student exchange in the near future. Financial support for the animal center is also very important: in addition to its role as a research facility and breeding colony, the center serves as a cachement center for animals confiscated by poachers and those endangered by natural or man-made ecological challenges doc18146 none This award to Professor Luis Colon of the SUNY at Buffalo is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program in the Chemistry Division. The proposed investigations are focused on the synthesis and characterization of silica-based organic-inorganic hybrid materials for use in high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and capillary electrochromatography (CEC). The silica hybrids will be synthesized by copolymerizing alkoxysilanes with hydrolyzable alkoxide groups. This approach results in the production of chromatographic materials in different formats (i.e., films, monoliths, and particles), some with the potential for stability over a wide pH range. The solution chemistry will be monitored with NMR; the physicochemical characteristics of the organic-inorganic hybrids will be assessed using ESCA, SIMS, FTIR, SEM and or TEM, microbalance gravimetric analysis, and nitrogen gas adsorption methods. The proposed investigations are directed toward the synthesis and characterization of silica glasses. Different formats of the material will be synthesized, suitable for chemical separations. The different parameters used during the fabrication process will be studied to establish the reaction conditions leading to materials with the best performance. The characteristics and compositions of the synthesized glasses will be assessed using a variety of spectroscopic and physical probes. Fabricated materials such as these have potential applications to the separation and purification of a large number of chemicals, ranging from pharmaceutical to environmental areas. These investigations are part of a long-term research program focused on the development and study of new and improved materials for chemical separations in the liquid phase. The research program mainly involves graduate and undergraduate in executing the experimentation, contributing to the education, development, and training of a new generation of scientists doc18147 none Manson Description: This award supports a US-India collaboration entitled Relativistic Effects in the Photoionization of Free and Confined Atoms. US PI Steven Manson, Georgia State University (GSU) and Pranawa Deshmukh, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras will continue to develop theoretical methodologies and perform calculations that explore ionizing collisions of electromagnetic radiation with atoms and ions. They will develop the relativistic random phase approximation (RRPA) methodology and apply it to a number of diverse problems in the area of ionization of free and confined atoms and ions by electromagnetic radiation. The investigators will work closely with experimental groups to insure quantitative accuracy of the newly developed methodologies. Scope: This research will provide further insight into the nature of fundamental atomic processes. By extending atomic theory methodology to confined atoms, the PI brings the expertise of atomic physics to bear on the broader fields of chemistry and condensed matter. Additionally, greater understanding of the properties of confined atoms may yield insight into the new physics of a largely unexplored area and possibly to the development of a whole new class of devices. The PIs have a highly productive collaboration and many joint publications to their credit. This project will enable a US graduate student to do research at the Indian collaborating institution and will contribute to internationalizing students at both universities. Additionally, it will facilitate the build-up of an internationally competitive research program at the IIT, Madras doc18148 none In this project supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry and the Geology and Paleontology Programs, Professor Klaus Schmidt-Rohr and coworkers at Iowa State University, advanced solid-state NMR methodologies will be developed and applied to identify at least 40 specific functional groups and estimate their concentrations in natural organic matter. This will be achieved by means of a set of efficient new spectral-editing pulse sequences based on heteronuclear dipolar couplings or chemical-shift anisotropies. Furthermore, the larger environment of a given functional group will be identified in two- and three-dimensional correlation experiments, and inhomogeneities on a 1- to 50-nm scale by spin diffusion. NMR dynamics measurements will enable the search for soft mobile regions that have been invoked to explain the partitioning of organic contaminants into soil organic matter. Near the end of the project, improved structural models for examples of soil and marine organic matter will be generated. Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy will be used to elucidate the chemical and supramolecular structures of insoluble organic substances that are presented by the natural environment, such as soil and marine organic matter, kerogen, or bituminous materials. To this end, advanced solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance methods are being developed that can identify and quantify a large number of chemical groups in organic solids. In addition, nanometer-scale domains will be characterized. The NMR methods will be used to characterize the chemical binding sites of contaminants; to help understand nutrient release into soil; to indicate methods for enhanced carbon sequestration in soil to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; and to shed light on the chemical processes of soil, kerogen, and fossil-fuel formation. This will help to provide deeper insights into the chemical history of natural organic matter, its role in the global carbon cycle, and the results of human activities on the environment doc18149 none This project partially supports the move of the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates (CUMV) to a new museum facility in a building currently under construction at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology (CLO). Cornell has raised over $6M (out of a total project cost of about $32M) for the new museum space in this building, which is on schedule for occupation in . NSF Funds will be used to: (1) purchase compact shelving and cases for storage of both fluid-preserved specimens and dry specimens (skins, skeletons, nests, and eggs) of vertebrates (fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals) and (2) provide partial funding for moving the collections into the new facility. This move will be the largest single enhancement to the CUMV in more than three decades: the new home for the Museum will relieve crowding of specimens, allow expansion space and safeguard the collections against a variety of problems related to the deterioration of the current facility. The new museum will also include a state-of-the art preparation facility, large teaching laboratory, radiography room, preparation lab, dermestid room, walk-in freezer, and molecular laboratory. The CUMV is an active university research museum of national importance. Students and staff are actively engaged in original research, and students are trained in curatorial techniques while they help disseminate the information in the Museum to scientists and wildlife managers throughout the globe. The CUMV contains one of the most comprehensive collections of fish, birds and mammals from the Northeastern United States, and its holdings are widely representative of the diversity of vertebrates throughout the world. Museum specimens are irreplaceable sources of data documenting changes in ecological conditions, both through the identity of specimens collected from pristine localities before alteration by humans, and through the tissues that specimens contain, which provide a biochemical window into the genetics of historical populations as well as the levels of pollutants their environments once contained. These collections thus provide measures of baseline conditions and, through continued accessions, on-going monitoring of the effects of environmental changes. Staff of the CUMV will collaborate with the large community of vertebrate biologists at the Laboratory of Ornithology to increase the information stored in and interpreted from the Museum s collections, and to disseminate the knowledge attained through the variety of web and media outlets doc18150 none The physiology and metabolism of Escherichia coli is perhaps the best understood of any organism (1). Nearly all of the major metabolic pathways have been elucidated, and much of the regulation of these pathways is well understood. There is, however, one significant deficiency in our knowledge: the pathways of L-alanine biosynthesis have not been fully elucidated (2). L-alanine is the second most abundant amino acid found in E. coli protein, is a component of peptidoglycan, is the precursor to another component of peptidoglycan, D-alanine, and is a precursor to biotin. With the availability of complete genomic sequences, it is now possible to make strong predictions about an organism s physiology and metabolism solely from analysis of its DNA sequence. A key to this analysis is having several model organisms whose metabolism and physiology are well defined. E. coli is one such model organism. Using whole genome comparisons, it has been possible to reconstruct the biosynthetic pathways of all 20 amino acids in E. coli, Haemophilus influenzae, and Bacillus subtilis. However, for L-alanine this required assuming a wider specificity for the aspartate aminotransferase. While this assumption is logical, it is not supported by experimental results (see below). A more recent analysis does use some of the reported enzymes used in L-alanine biosynthesis, but as outlined below, this information is incomplete (4). The fundamental reason that the biosynthesis of L-alanine has not been completely elucidated is that no strict L-alanine auxotroph has yet been isolated. This stems from the fact that there are multiple pathways of L-alanine biosynthesis. Clearly, understanding the synthesis of L-alanine and its regulation is important for a comprehensive understanding of E. coli metabolism. Moreover, understanding L-alanine biosynthesis in E. coli can then be used to predict its biosynthetic pathways in other organisms whose genome has been sequenced. This project will employ a genetic approach to determine the pathways of L-alanine biosynthesis in E. coli. Mutations that confer an L-alanine requirement will be isolated by either counterselection and screening or by directed mutagenesis of genes of unknown function that could potentially function in L-alanine synthesis (e.g. aminotransferases). Once the genes have been identified, the enzymes encoded by those genes will be purified and their biochemical activities and allosteric regulators identified. The regulation of the genes will be investigated using fusions of the promoter regions to the lacZc reporter gene. Deletion analysis of the promoter regions will be used to identify the important cis-acting regulatory sites. Additionally, these fusions will be used to determine the involvement of trans-acting factors in regulation. Since L-alanine is synthesized in large part from pyruvate and affects nitrogen metabolism, particular attention will be paid to several global regulatory factors that affect genes involved in carbon and nitrogen metabolism. One gene that has been shown to be involved in L-alanine biosynthesis is avtA, and it has been proposed that the global regulator, Lrp, is involved in its regulation (2). Computer analysis of its promoter region supports this hypothesis, and the influence of Lrp on avtA expression will be thoroughly studied. Xavier University of Louisiana is a historically black college and university (HBCU). The Biology Department has approximately undergraduates. It has been successful in training and placing students into medical school, and seeks to build on this success in preparing students to pursue an academic career. This project has been designed to allow undergraduates to be involved in research on a daily basis using modern molecular biology techniques. In particular, most of the strain construction can be performed in short segments of time, allowing students to integrate their research into a demanding academic schedule doc18151 none Wilson The Naval Support Force Antarctica (familiar name: Operation Deep Freeze) was the major provider of station and field operations, logistics, and direct science support for NSF-funded research in Antarctica from until 31 March , when the Department of Defense transferred military support of the U.S. Antarctic Program to the U.S. Air Force. Throughout its 44 years of existence, the Naval Support Force Antarctica produced and published annual end-of-season reports that contain authoritative narratives and statistics regarding its activities. The reports were published on paper; electronic copies do not exist. A collaboration of the Naval Research Laboratory Library, the Naval History Office, and NSF s Office of Polar Programs assembled a full set of paper copies of the reports. The Document Automation & Production Service, Defense Logistics Agency, will digitize them and make CD-ROM copies. NSF will distribute the CD-ROMs as needed, and the files will be available to the public doc18152 none This four year continuation of a program to monitor ELF VLF radio noise (frequencies in the range 5 Hz to 32 kHz) at Arrival Heights, Antarctica, will extend the observational record to more than twenty years, and will allow more precise estimates of noise statistics. The radiometer was first installed at its present location during the austral summer of -5 and has been operated continuously since that time, thus providing a record of ELF VLF noise in the Antarctic that is unprecedented in its continuity and duration. In parallel with this system, an identical one has been operating on the Stanford University campus for almost the same period of time, thus providing a (northern) mid-latitude comparison data set. Since the predominant sources of ELF VLF radio noise are thunderstorms occurring in the tropical regions, the Arrival Heights and Stanford systems provide complementary views of the thunderstorm activity occurring in the tropics. The long-term statistics can then provide independent information about global change. The low background in the Arrival Heights record further allows the determination of Schumann resonances. These are quasi-standing electro-magnetic waves that exist in the Earth s electromagnetic cavity (the space between the surface of the Earth and the Ionosphere). Temporal changes in these resonant frequencies can be related to variations in the characteristics of the ionosphere doc18153 none This research creates and compiles data to reinterpret the history of human health in Europe from the late Paleolithic era to the early twentieth century. During this period, human health was transformed enormously by the transition from foraging to farming; the rise of cities and complex forms of social and political organization; European colonization; and industrialization. Skeletons are the best single source available to scholars for measuring and analyzing very long-term trends in health. With a trans-Atlantic network of collaborators, the project will gather and analyze skeletal measures of health from 40,000 individuals who lived in Europe over the past 10,000 years. Specific information collected from skeletons housed in numerous European museums includes: age at death; sex; stature inferred from long-bone lengths; dental decay; degenerative joint disease; trauma; skeletal infections; and the occurrence of specific diseases such as tuberculosis, rickets, and leprosy. Project researchers will also scour the published and the gray literature of site reports that contain information on the heights of 100,000 men and women. When combined with ecological information to be collected, the data will have numerous uses, including studies of: (1) health, climate and habitat; (2) health and the transition to farming; (3) the social and economic causes and consequences of long-term changes in health; (4) the health of women and children; (5) patterns of trauma and violence; (6) biological inequality; (7) aging and health; (8) health during the rise and fall of civilizations; a doc18154 none Under the direction of Dr. Robert D. Drennan, Ms. Andrea Cuellar will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. Her research focuses on the initial development of complex hierarchical social organization in the Eastern piedmont of Ecuador during the last few centuries BC. As in other parts of the Andes, the development of complex societies has been attributed to the extremely varied environments packed closely together because of the sharp variations in altitude which this mountain range presents. At the time of the Spanish Conquest in the sixteenth century, residents of different altitude zones often specialized in the cultiva-tion of crops especially adapted to local conditions and exchanged their products for those of other zones. Andeanists have often tended to as-sume that such economic patterns characterized the much more distant past as well, but in fact there is very little archeological evidence to document patterns of agricultural production in these societies. This project will map out settlement distribution over a region of 200 km2 and conduct test excavations in a sample of sites for the recovery of pollen samples and plant macroremains. The pollen samples from cultural con-texts will provide a sensitive indicator of the species of plants culti-vated in gardens near the house, and thus monitor patterns of local ag-ricultural production. The plant macroremains will reflect plant species brought into the household and manipulated there, and thus will monitor patterns of consumption. The delineation of changing patterns of re-gional political centralization and social complexity by the settlement survey will combine with the reconstruction of patterns of production and consumption. It will, as a result, be possible to determine whether changes in the one accompany changes in the other chronologically, and thus whether they might be causally related. As a consequence we will be better able to evaluate whether patterns of specialized economic produc-tion must underlie the development of social hierarchies and political centralization, as some anthropologists have long argued. The two might be found to go hand in hand in the Valle de los Quijos sequence, or it could be found that complex regional organization emerged long before specialized agricultural production did. The research will provide ar-cheological documentation of a sequence of 2,000 to 3,000 years during which societies developed that integrated thousands of people in numer-ous communities scattered through a region. It will also document the nature of the economic base that sustained these societies, and evaluate the importance of specialized agricultural production in that economic base doc18155 none David Stanbury of Auburn University is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry program for research on kinetics and mechanisms of reactions in solutions (mainly aqueous) that involve redox changes of elements of the main group of the periodic table. One main aim of the research is to clarify the mechanisms of aqueous solution reactions that involve oxidation of thiols by direct ( outer sphere ) electron transfer from oxidants. A second main area will involve outer sphere oxidation of iodide ion in aprotic non-aqueous solvents. A third problem area involves investigations of aqueous outer-sphere oxidation of hydroxlyamine and thiocyanate ion. Spectroscopic (including stopped flow) and electrochemical techniques will be employed. The proposed research deals with the fundamental processes that determine whether the reactions of rather simple main-group element compounds that occur in aqueous media are fast or slow. Although such reactions have been studied for more than a century, many fundamental aspects of their reaction dynamics have only recently become accessible, through the use of recently developed techniques and instruments. Reactions of such species as iodide ion are involved in vast numbers of processes of the highest industrial and biological importance, but the subtle factors that determine the kinetics of these reactions are for the most part quite obscure. Research carried out under this program has high intrinsic interest, and will also lead to understanding that will be applicable in many related research areas doc18156 none The Advanced Materials Program in the Division of Chemistry makes this renewal award to University of California Riverside to design and synthesize novel chiral macromolecular materials based on thienylenes and Dewar benzene. Primary focus of the proposal will be to fine tune solid-state electronic and optical properties of this system by permanent (non-covalent) guest inclusion. These materials would have potential for applications in photomechanical actuators, photolithographic substrates and thermally induced chemiluminescent materials. Ultimate goal of the project will be to develop molecular actuators that function like molecular muscles . Planned research and education activities with graduate and undergraduate students including mentoring of minority students would prepare them for future careers and studies in science and engineering fields. The proposed web based outreach programs would benefit a large number of students in the community and would prepare them for future science education. Novel chiral macromolecular crystalline materials will be designed and synthesized from thienylenes and Dewar benzene, both of which possess dynamic topologies. Solid-state electronic and optical properties of this system will be studied, and these materials would have potential applications as photomechanical actuators, photolithographic substrates and thermally induced chemiluminescent materials. Participation of graduate and undergraduate students in the material chemistry related research would prepare them for new careers and higher education. Planned web based programs would benefit the whole community, and would create awareness and appreciation of science related topics in the community doc18157 none The goal of this research is to obtain a better understanding of the evolutionary and environmental events that may have affected the biology of the initial migrants into the New World. Most of the research conducted on early Americans (Paleoindians and Early Archaic) has tended to compare their observed morphology to that of modern Native Americans, effectively ignoring 8,000 years of potential evolution. Additionally, the majority of the current research has been focused on the entire North American continent, paying little attention to the potential for regional variation. This research project will analyze the skeletal variation present among early to middle Holocene (10,000- BP) skeletons from three distinct regions of North America (Great Lakes, Great Basin, Southeast). The variation and potential change through time of the skull shape will be assessed using multivariate statistical techniques. In order to help counteract small sample problems, randomization methods will be used. The data will also be used in several population genetic models to help determine which evolutionary factors may have affected the initial migrants. In addition, the parameters for several current Peopling of the Americas models will be used in population genetic computer simulations. The results from the simulations will be compared to the observed results to see which of the several models (and their corresponding implicit parameters) are most realistic considering the data. Data will be collected on relatively complete skulls from archaeological sites that date between BP and 10,000 BP and for which appropriate permissions have been obtained. The skulls are currently housed at several institutions throughout North America. This research will quantify the variation present among the first Americans, examine the Paleoindian Archaic transition from a biological perspective, and elucidate the morphological history of Native Americans. Finally, by incorporating a regional approach, the proposed study will evaluate the potential environmental effects on this morphological history doc18158 none Much is known about the molecular and genetic mechanisms controlling the regionalization of the developing brain, but much less is known about how this information ultimately gives rise in maturity to unique brain regions with distinct functions. One strategy to approach this is to dissect the molecular and genetic mechanisms controlling the expression of region-or cell-specific genes whose products contribute directly to a unique functional property of cells in the mature brain. The rodent cerebellum is ideal for the understanding of these mechanisms as there is a rich historical record of natural mutations affecting the development and function of this brain region. In addition much is known about the precise neurobiological functions of its constituent. The purpose of our proposed experiments will be to determine the molecular mechanisms of expression of the L7 Pep-2 gene in the rodent cerebellum. In the mature brain this gene is expressed only in cerebellar Purkinje cells and not in any non-brain tissues. In addition, the gene is expressed in a transient pattern of stripes in the cerebellum during the development and this pattern reflects the well know-known zonal wiring diagram of the cerebellum. Furthermore, the L7-Pcp-2 protein carries a GoLoco-domain and functions as a modulator of GDP binding to large heterotrimeric G-proteins suggesting a role of the protein in modulation of Ca2+channels, a major component of information flow in Purkinje cells. We have combined a novel in vivo expression strategy using transgenic mice with comparative genomics to identify key DNA sequence elements within the promoter (expression control region) of the L7 Pcp-2 gene. The data show very high conservation across species of both the sequence and spacing of seven elements within a short region of this promoter. One of these elements is a binding site for the orphan nuclear receptor, RORa, a likely modulator of Ca2+ metabolism genes in bone that is also known to be expressed in Purkinje cells. The aims will be i) to determine more precisely the role of these elements by expression testing in further transgenic mouse studies, ii) to use FPLC purification and MALDI-MS protein sequencing to identify the key factors that bind to these elements, and III) to test the effect of null mutation of these factors on the expression of L7 Pcp-2. These studies provide the best opportunity to-date to identify a precise molecular complex controlling both cell-specific and G-protein pathway-specific gene expression in the brain doc18159 none Patterns for Shaping the Network Society is an ambitious, somewhat experimental program, which uses web-based technology, and in-person venues in order to develop a web- and print-based pattern language. The aim of this pattern language is to reflect the composite knowledge of a large, evolving, worldwide, highly distributed community practice, namely those people pursuing the democratization and civic society uses of information and communication technology. The pattern language will be incrementally developed over the next year using a fundamentally open process. A four-day conference will be convened in Seattle in May , as an integral part of the process (http: www.cpsr.org conferences diacO2). This program is intend to address the acute demand for a coherent, shared research and action agenda for the development and maintenance of democratic communication and information systems worldwide. It builds on the increasing ubiquity of the web and the increasing importance and presence of civil society throughout the world. Our approach attempts to achieve the correct balance between technological and social mediation in a large collaborative project. To that end we are developing the web-based applications that leverage the technological capabilities and social processes that promote timely collaboration and human judgement and creativity. The challenge is to develop a complex information structure using an open and participatory process that effectively balances the conflicting demands of inclusiveness, high quality, coherence, and timeliness. The process, in other words, is as important as the product. In spite of this non-trivial challenge we feel that this program addresses important goals and is built upon reasonable assumptions and approaches: even if this program falls short of its ultimate objectives, important products such as the conference, proceedings, submitted patterns, and analysis will be created. This ambitious and unprecedented project is currently underway. As of this writing, the pattern input and editing portion of the online support system is operational and over 50 pattern proposals have been submitted. The proposals, so far, originate in Ghana, India, UK, US, Mexico, Australia, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Nigeria, South Africa, Malaysia, France, and Brazil and, hence, reflect the wide-ranging community that we intend to continue to engage as this project goes forward. Throughout the process a large number of important questions come to the fore: how do ideas evolve, what roles to people assume in collaborative processes, what legal and other considerations are raised how is intellectual ownership handled, how do aynchronous (electronic) collaborative approaches reinforce with or detract from synchronous (face-to-face) collaborative approaches and vice versa is the pattern structure amenable to collective knowledge building, is this approach portable to other disciplines how many patterns belong in a pattern language, how much of the work can be done with the technology and how much should be accomplished with people, how much of the work can be done in a totally inclusive, open group and how much should be done with an executive committee, etc., etc doc18160 none Shah Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Dr. S. Ismat Shah, Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware and Dr. S. Khurshid Hasanain, Magnetism and Superconductivity Laboratory, Physics Department, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan. They plan to study the magnetic behavior of nanometer sized magnetic particles by the techniques of DC and AC magnetometry. Dr. Shah s team will synthesize nano magnetic particles to be characterized by the team of Dr. Hasanain. The initial work will focus on nanoparticles of iron. The area of nanoparticles in general, and magnetic nanoparticles in particular, is rapidly growing due to the numerous potential applications. The development of the experimental framework will have broader application to magnetic systems. The study of the magnetic properties of nanometer sized iron particles will provide much needed information on the novel properties of these systems, and will also contribute greatly to our fundamental understanding of the behavior of magnetic nanoparticles. The work will help establish the framework for the analysis of magnetic properties of newly prepared samples of metallic nanoparticles. Scope: The University of Delaware has good programs and good equipment for magnetic nanoparticle research. The two scientists have complementary expertise, as Shah is an expert in the synthesis and characterization of these systems, and Hasanain has broad expertise in the area of superconductivity and thin-film magnetism. Some preliminary collaboration has already begun with encouraging results, and the proposed experimental techniques are already available in Dr. Hasanain s laboratory. The project will optimize interaction among scientists and graduate students from each of the participating universities. The students will be provided training in an international setting in one of the leading edge areas of research in the field of nanotechnology. The project meets INT criteria for support of cooperative projects that are mutually beneficial. Support for this project is provided by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Materials Research doc18161 none Reinhold This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Joerg Reinhold at the Florida International University in Miami, Florida and Professor Satoshi Nakamura of Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. The researchers will undertake a study of the high precision spectroscopy of lambda-hpernuclei. They will be looking at hypernuclear excitations in medium heavy nuclei. A hypernucleus contains a hyperon implanted as an impurity within the nuclear medium. This introduces a new quantum number, strangeness, into the nucleus, and if the hyperon maintains its identity it will not experience Pauli-blocking, easily interacting with deeply bound nucleons. In this sense, it has been proposed that the hyperon is a good probe of the interior of a nucleus, where information is difficult to obtain. The researchers will extract the characteristics of a hyperon embedded in a nucleus by observing the spectroscopy of its states. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. The U.S. researchers will have available a new magnetic spectrometer for kaon detection which will significantly enhance the capabilities of their Jefferson Laboratory s hypernuclear spectrometer system. For the foreseeable future, this instrument will be without competition and will considerably advance the field of hypernuclear spectroscopy. The Japanese researchers contribute a significant expertise in hypernuclear spectroscopy, on the experimental as well as the theoretical level. They are currently building a new facility, the Japanese Hadron Facility, which will be operational for this research project and will contribute to the next generation hypernuclear experiments. The research will offer a good opportunity to join efforts between the two countries. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. Florida International University s student body is largely Hispanic and a number of their graduate and undergraduate students will be participating in the research. A publication committee has been formed that will oversee and coordinate the publication of the research results and presentations at conferences doc18162 none Keniston Description: This award supports research experiences in India for graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The opportunity for students to conduct research is a new component of MIT s international program in India, which currently supports experiences in industry and teaching. Funding from NSF s Office of International Science & Engineering will enable four MIT graduate students to do research at some of India s leading centers of research and higher education. The program is designed to integrate them into groundbreaking research at India s finest institutions, allow them to explore careers in research, and finally, to give them global experience early on in their education and training. Scope: The PI is well connected with Indian institutions researchers and has recently completed a term as visiting professor at the Nehru Centre for Advanced Studies, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. His collaborations with Indian colleagues at the IISc, the Indian Institute of Information Technology, the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, and the National Centre for Biological Sciences have led to the development of opportunities for students in leading edge areas of telecommunications, information technology, genomics, and neurobiology. In addition to providing a unique research experience for MIT graduate students, it contributes to creating a globally-engaged workforce doc18163 none Evolution has long served to unify the study of biology, but now it has acquired a more central role. Today evolution serves to inform data acquisition, analysis and interpretation in all of the life sciences. This transformation comes in part from the explosion of raw data, from sources as far ranging as genome sequences, functional genomics, ecological genomics, large-scale ecosystem studies, long-term behavioral studies and phylogenetics. There is no institution or funding agency dedicated to the consolidation, synthesis and dissemination of this broad sweep of evolutionarily relevant information. NSF sponsored a workshop in Spring to address the need for an evolutionary synthesis center (ESC) and to develop an action plan to meet this need (award ; draft report at http: frog.biology.yale.edu esc). The participants unanimously agreed that there is a clear and compelling need for a center to promote and facilitate evolutionary synthesis. Although the first workshop made impressive progress in the development of an ESC working model, it became clear that a second workshop would be required to address several topics in more detail. The goal of this proposal is to hold a second ESC workshop to address the following issues. First, if a center is to be embraced by the diversity of the evolutionary community, it is critical that comments and suggestions from that community be incorporated into the earliest possible phase of ESC development. Thus a draft report from the first workshop was made available to the relevant scientific communities and comments and endorsements were solicited. One focus of the second workshop is to address all of the concerns raised. Second, the participants of the first workshop were chosen for their ability to represent the diversity of evolutionary research. The resulting group did not have adequate strengths in the areas of bioinformatics, information technology, statistics, and mathematics to determine the needs of the proposed Evolutionary Informatics Division (EID) of an ESC. An appropriate group of such specialists will be invited to participate in the second workshop to consider the goals, content and capacities of the EID more carefully. Finally, because in the first workshop little attention was paid to how to achieve the goals of the Outreach Division of an ESC, this will be another focus for the second ESC workshop doc18164 none Proposal Number: PI: Allan Greenleaf Three problems will be investigated, related by the common thread of oscillatory integrals with degenerate (or singular) phase functions. First, estimates for Fourier integral operators associated with two-sided Morin singularities, both symmetric and asymmetric, will be considered. This will be attempted by using new decompositions of the operators that reflect the underlying geometry of the phase functions. Secondly, global uniqueness will be considered in the Calderon problem for low-regularity conductivities and potentials in dimensions greater than two, using Radon transform decompositions of the potentials. Finally, a detailed microlocal analysis will be made of the problem for low-regularity and or conormal conductivities in two dimensions. The operators to be studied in this project transform functions on one space to functions on another space (possibly the same, possibly different) in a way in which oscillation (cancellation caused by high-frequency waves) plays an important role. This general type of operator has been central to progress in the last thirty years in the understanding of a wide range of partial differential equations governing, e.g., wave propagation of sound and electromagnetic waves. It turns out that the mathematical analysis of CAT scanners and other noninvasive medical imaging technologies falls under the same framework. The current project should give a better understanding of the mathematical foundations of these techniques. In the longer term, this might contribute to refinement and improvement of these imaging methods doc18165 none Angell Description: This award provides travel support for 20 American participants at the US-India Workshop: Viscous Liquids and the Glass Transition, Bangalore, India, January . US PI Austen Angell, Arizona State University and Srikanth Sastry and Chandan Dasgupta, Indian Institute of Science, are organizers for a workshop on transition from mobile liquid to glassy solid, a subject of much current debate and an important unsolved problem of condensed matter physics. They will convene leading international physicists and experts in the related areas of granular matter, foams, spin glasses and vortex glasses to discuss problem boundaries and explore a series of well-defined themes. US participants were selected on the basis of their valuable contributions to this research area and for their importance to future progress. The scope of the workshop is exploration of six themes that have generated the current wave of interest on glass transition in structural glasses. Scope: The US PI is one of the world s leading scientists in this field. Some of the most active contributing scientists to research in this field are Indian nationals. The workshop will take advantage of the presence in India of theorists attending concurrent statistical physics and condensed matter physics conferences. The Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, the workshop venue, has a long history of achievement in physics and materials research, including those of Indian Nobel Laureate C.V. Raman and CNR Rao. Indian hosts will meet local costs for US participants; the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Materials Research jointly support this activity doc18166 none Ilegbusi Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project between Dr. Olusegun Ilegbusi, Department of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts and Dr. Mahmut Mat, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Nigde University, Nigde, Turkey. This project is a combined theoretical and experimental study to understand hydrogen development and the hydrodynamics of bubbles in an alkaline electrolyzer. Other parameters to be investigated include current density, applied potential, electrolyte and electrode materials, spacing between the anode, cathode and membrane, and temperature and ambient pressure. A two-phase mathematical model will be developed for the electrolytic process. The model will consider heat and mass transfer, concentrations and ion transport, electricity field, and chemical reaction occurring at the anode and the cathode. Experiments will be designed and performed to validate and improve the mathematical model. The fluid velocity, gas fraction, and bubble growth rate will be measured using Laser Doppler Velocimeter (LDV) at Northeastern University. The ultimate goal of this research is to investigate and develop methods to increase the efficiency of electrolytic production of hydrogen by means of hydrodynamic enhancements. Scope: Hydrogen is one of the promising alternative sources of energy. There is limited systematic investigation on how to quantify and efficiently exploit this energy. The two collaborators plan to combine their expertise in experimental work and mathematical modeling to study this interesting scientific problem. The US PI has considerable experience and has access to extensive facilities at Northeastern University. The Turkish scientist has strong experience in mathematical modeling of two phase heat transfer. This research should improve our understanding of the processes involved in electrolysis to produce hydrogen using water and photovoltaic solar energy. The research will help in establishing the technical framework for cost-effective production and usage of hydrogen energy in Turkey and potentially for other developing countries doc18167 none This application requests partial funding to support the Gordon Conference on the Biology, Chemistry and Evolution of Floral Scent to be held March 3 to 8, , at the Ventura Harbortown Resort in Ventura, CA. The primary goal of this conference is to bring together researchers investigating the emergent field of floral scent from diverse disciplines and foster new interdisciplinary exchanges and collaborations that will increase our understanding of the evolutionary significance and mechanisms of floral fragrance emission. The conference will consist of 4 formal sessions, each consisting of 6 oral presentations (including 2 plenary talks by leading scientists in the area) and 4 afternoon poster sessions. The sessions focus on the principal disciplinary areas that are at the forefront of floral scent research and include the diverse fields of pollination ecology and systematics, analytical chemistry and methodology, neurophysiology and ethology, and biochemistry and genetic engineering. We have selected invited speakers on the basis of their current activity in the field while also striving for a program that has a balance of gender, includes peoples from different ethnicities and countries, and involves young promising investigators doc18168 none Alfven waves and the field-aligned electric currents associated with them form the primary basis for the electromagnetic coupling between the magnetosphere and the ionosphere. This project will use a particle-in-cell (PIC) computer code to perform kinetic simulations of the interaction of Alfven waves with gradients and structures in the ionosphere. The topics to be studied include the interaction with pre-existing density cavities, nonlinear reflections from boundaries, modulations produced by double-layers, the generation of high-frequency noise and the effects of cross-field plasma flows doc18169 none Computational approaches to handle the vast amounts of information in biology are increasingly important for deriving and evaluating hypotheses. Information management techniques to assemble a variety of different data are necessary. A proteomic database will be developed as a bioinformatics framework for genomic and proteomic studies. The integrated Protein Classification (iProClass) database will contain core components for the presentation of composite views of data that will include protein sequence, superfamily, motif and structure. All reports for each protein sequence will contain extensive cross-references and links. The system will be freely distributed view web and mirror sites and provide a resource for exploration of many features involving information from a number of sources. The modular and open architecture of the database will promote data integration in a distributed networking environment doc18170 none New Sorbents for Separation and Purification Processes As a means of meeting more stringent sulfur standards for gasoline and diesel fuels, adsorption under ambient conditions has become an attractive alternative (to hydrodesulfurization, which is a high-pressure catalytic process). In prior work pi-complexation has been exploited for fuel desulfurization. Thiophene in benzene was used as the model system to represent sulfur compounds and gasoline, respectively. Preliminary results showed that Cu(I)Y and AgY zeolites both adsorbed thiophene at low concentrations much more strongly than NaY, which is among the best sorbents for desulfurization. Molecular orbital calculations showed stronger pi-complexation bonds between these zeolites and thiophene than with benzene. Based on these promising results, a comprehensive study of both vapor-phase and liquid-phase adsorption has been undertaken. Two classes of pi-complexation sorbents are used: ion exchanged zeolites and monolayer salts supported on high-surface-area substrates involving Cu+ and Ag+ as well as other promising d-block cations. The study investigates thiophene, benzothiophene, and dibenzothiophene dissolved benzene and toluene. Also, the study examines the unique and promising adsorption properties of carbon nanotubes. Preliminary results showed that 2.5% (wt.) of hydrogen could be stored in alkali-doped nanotubes at 1 atm H2, and up to 1% (wt.) H2 could be stored in Ni-containing nanotubes, also at 1 atm H2. The project studies H2 adsorption by multi-wall and single-wall carbon nanotubes and graphite nanofibers doped with alkali metals, noble metals, and transition metals. Experimental conditions include hydrogen pressures up to psig, temperatures up to 500oC, and nanotubes of various inner diameters. The mechanisms of hydrogen storage in nanotubes are studied theoretically through molecular orbital and Monte Carlo calculations. Multiwall nanotubes appear to be effective for dioxin removal from combustion gases, exhibiting much better capacity that activated carbon so this application is also being tested. This project is aimed at developing efficient sorbents for desulfurization of gasoline and diesel fuels under ambient conditions. Success of this program will enable refiners to meet easily the new ( ) sulfur standards. The second aim of this program is to develop carbon nanotubes as sorbents for hydrogen storage as well as to explore other unique sorbent properties of carbon nanotubes. The results of this program will make a significant advance in the applications of carbon nanotubes and contribute to protection of the environment doc18171 none This research is focused on an understanding of the magnetic structure and exchange interactions present in hybrid magnetic semiconductor materials. Semiconductor superlattices consisting of conventional II-VI materials in which alternate layers are antiferromagnetic and non-magnetic exhibit interlayer spin correlations of a surprisingly long range comparable to that in metallic systems. Neutron scattering is used as a probe of the magnetic structure, order parameter, and correlation range in these systems as a function of semiconductor doping. The results indicate that a magnetic interaction other than conventional superexchange is dominant. One of the present research objectives is to investigate in detail this exchange coupling and its dependence on electronic structure, strain effects, and types of doping. In addition to the II-VI materials, the research will focus on a detailed investigation of new ferromagnetic III-V systems, including the unusual dependence of the ferromagnetic transition temperature on composition and on the effect of thermal annealing. Neutrons will also provide direct information on the formation of ferromagnetic clusters or other nanoscale inhomogeneities that may affect the onset of infinite-range ferromagnetism. Finally, neutron reflectivity will be used to investigate the spatial dependence of the order parameter, and to investigate proximity effects between a hybrid III-V ferromagnetic semiconductor and an adjacent II-VI antiferromagnetic layer. Semiconductor and magnetic materials both play essential, but distinct, roles in many common electronic devices. Examples are computer memories made of semiconductors and hard disk drives utilizing magnetic materials. Recently the potential has arisen for a marriage of semiconducting and magnetic properties in a single material utilizing the concept of spintronics. This research program is designed to use the powerful technique of neutron scattering to probe the magnetic state of materials that are both semiconducting and magnetic. The neutrons can be scattered by interacting with nuclei inside these systems, and in addition, since neutrons possess a magnetic moment, they can interact with magnetic fields inside materials. The result of such scattering provides direct information about the magnetic structure inside a material and over what distances the individual magnetic moments are coupled together. This type of information on the magnetism can be correlated with changes in the semiconducting properties of the materials as the system is doped with various chemical elements. The result provides necessary information to simultaneously optimize both the magnetic and the semiconducting aspects of these new compounds for future hybrid spintronic devices doc18172 none Harlander, John M. A unique, innovative Fourier Transform Spectrometer (FTS) will be designed and built to map the [O II] forbidden emission in the Galaxy. These data will be combined with similar data recorded of longer wavelength emission lines to determine the physical parameters of the hot interstellar medium. The results will influence work in star formation, and galactic dynamics as well as work in the hot interstellar medium. This innovative approach to instrumentation will also have application to other areas of astronomy. This work will support one graduate student and one undergraduate doc18173 none Superconductor-insulator (SI) transitions in ultrathin metal films and organic crystal field effect transistor configurations can be tuned by external control parameters and are believed to be zero-temperature quantum phase transitions, driven by quantum rather than thermal fluctuations. The nature of the underlying physical models of SI transitions is uncertain, as existing experiments do not distinguish between competing fermionic and bosonic descriptions, and there may be a distinct metallic phase separating the superconducting and insulating ground states. This individual investigator award will support a research project that will attempt to resolve these outstanding questions in our understanding of SI transitions. Keys to resolving the issues are the extension of the parameter space to very low temperatures to insure measurements in the critical regime, careful shielding from both external noise and thermal noise generated in electrical leads, and determining the structure of samples. The super-electron density critical exponent will be determined by measuring the penetration depth, avoiding the pitfalls of finite-size scaling in determining exponents. Transitions will also be tuned by applying magnetic fields, and by controlling dissipation. In addition, the SI transition will also be tuned by changing the carrier concentration of organic superconducting two-dimensional electron gases. This fundamental work is potentially significant for far-reaching technological applications of superconductivity at the nanoscale. It serves as an important training ground for doctoral students in physics, providing them with an extremely broad range of research skills. Phase transitions tuned by an external control parameter such as pressure, magnetic field, or carrier concentration, rather than temperature are called quantum phase transitions. These zero-temperature transitions are driven by quantum fluctuations governed by Heisenberg s uncertainty principle, rather than by thermal fluctuations, as when water changes to steam or ice. Systems that exhibit quantum phase transitions include two-dimensional superconductors, 4He adsorbed on random substrates, high-mobility two-dimensional electron gases, various strongly-correlated magnetic systems, and high-Tc superconductors. This individual investigator award supports a project that is focused on studying superconductor-insulator transitions in two-dimensional superconductors in the form of granular and homogenous metallic films, and in truly two-dimensional field-effect transistor configurations of organic crystals. The issues that will be addressed include the nature of the underlying physical models and whether there is a distinct metallic phase separating the superconducting and insulating ground states. This fundamental work is potentially significant for far-reaching technological applications in both nanotechnology and high-temperature superconductivity. The program breaks new ground technologically in the fabrication and characterization of samples, and provides important training for doctoral candidates in physics by developing an extremely broad range of research skills doc18174 none The main thrust of the research is the further development of methods to calculate QED corrections to energy levels and g-factors of loosely bound systems. Nonrelativistic quantum electrodynamics is applied to the Lamb shift in H, hyperfine splitting of muonium, Lamb shift in muonic H and the bound electrong g-factor doc18175 none Gatewood, George D. The Multichannel Astrometric Photometer (MAP) at the Thaw Refractor of the University of Pittsburgh will be upgraded to extend the magnitude limit from its current level of twelve to fifteen and will be upgraded to increase its precision by a factor of two better than the current system. Precise, relative astrometry to a few milliarcseconds for a night s observing will be enabled. Unique aspects of the instrument include: a Ronchi grating scanned across the star field to modulate the stellar flux, angular distances between stars measured using the phase of the resulting signals, and the replacement of the old photomultipliers with avalanche photodiodes doc18176 none Roesler, Fred A unique, innovative Fourier Transform Spectrometer (FTS) will be designed and built to map the [O II] forbidden emission in the Galaxy. These data will be combined with similar data recorded of longer wavelength emission lines to determine the physical parameters of the hot interstellar medium. The results will influence work in star formation, and galactic dynamics as well as work in the hot interstellar medium. This innovative approach to instrumentation will also have application to other areas of astronomy. This work will support one graduate student and one undergraduate doc18177 none Shevlin Description: This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. Philip Shevlin, Professor of Chemistry, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, and Dr. Fatma Sevin, Professor of Chemistry at Hacettepe University in Ankara. They plan to conduct studies of the reactions of carbon vapor with hydroxy- and alkoxy-substituted organic species with the objective of having deeper understanding of both carbon atom chemistry and carbene rearrangements. The chemistry of carbon vapor forms the intellectual foundation for topics as diverse as the formation of fullerenes nanotubes soot, combustion processes, and the reaction chemistry of interstellar clouds. Carbon atoms are among the few chemical species whose reactions from several excited states can be studied. These studies are intended to extend our knowledge of the effects of extreme electron deficiency on chemical reactivity. Many of the unusual molecules that are formed as products of carbon atom reactions, for instance the highly strained small-ring cumulenes to be studied in this project, are otherwise inaccessible. Practical benefits from carbon vapor reaction studies include the prospects for new materials such as modified fullerenes and fulleroids. Scope: The project brings together a leading US expert in the field and a young energetic Turkish (female) scientist to work in an important research area. Shevlin is the leading chemist in the US in studying the organic chemistry of carbon vapor, and will provide expertise in the intricacies of atomic carbon generation. Dr. Sevin has developed some experimental expertise through previous collaborations in Professor Shevlin s lab at Auburn, and also has considerable theoretical expertise. There is a potential for significant educational and developmental benefits. The investigation of carbon vapor chemistry involves extremely sophisticated ideas but the equipment required, now that it has been effectively developed by Professor Shevlin, is robust and transportable. Thus it is quite feasible to set up a facility at Hacettepe University in Turkey for these experiments. This will enable Dr. Sevin to provide cutting edge research opportunities to her students, and to enhance the training of young chemists in Turkey. Dr. Shevlin and his university will benefit from having Turkish scientists as graduate students and postdoctoral research associates. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual interest. The project is being funded jointly by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Chemistry doc18178 none Ge, Jian Silicon immersion gratings for astronomical applications in the infrared for wavelengths between 1 and 10-microns will be developed for telescope projects requiring spectral resolutions between 1,000 and 100,000. Immersing the grating in Silicon, which as an index of refraction of 3.4 in the infrared will enable much higher solid-angle throughput or etendu than is now possible for an instrument of smaller volume and mass. Spectrographs used on telescopes must be moved during the observations; either swinging through the sky at a Cassegrain or equivalent focus or rotating at a Nysmyth platform (to compensate for rotating field during exposure). Large heavy instruments present serious engineering challenges for cryogenic operation. Use of silicon immersion gratings will enable lighter-weight higher-performance instruments for cutting edge scientific research. The first astronomical observations will be on the Lick 3-meter telescope doc18179 none The project is a collaborative effort between the PI, Jim D. Karam, Ph.D. (Tulane University) and Henry M. Krisch, Ph.D. (CNRS, Toulouse, France). The purpose of the project is to sequence the genomes of up to 8 divergent members of the Myoviridae Family whose virion morphologies resemble phage T4 to varying extents. The genomes of the Myoviridae constitute a rich, and yet largely unexplored, genetic pool for proteins that play a wide variety of biological roles. The wild-type phage strains chosen for analysis infect phylogenetically diverse bacterial hosts that inhabit a variety of ecological niches. They include three coliphages (RB69, RB49 and RB43) that are distantly related to T4, three Aeromonas phages (44RR2.8t, Aeh1, and 25), a Burholderia cepacia phage (phage 42) that also infects some Pseudomonads, and an Acinetobacter phage (phage 133). It is expected that the project will generate a database and experimental tools that will enhance the research activities of evolutionary biologists, geneticists, biochemists, and structural biologists. A cost-effective agreement has been arranged with Integrated Genomics, Inc. (a biotechnology company) to construct genomic libraries for the phage strains of interest and to carry out high-throughput sequencing on these libraries. It is expected that each genome will receive 6X coverage during the high-throughput phase of the project and two subsequent rounds of primer walking to close gaps. Annotated sequences will be made available to the scientific community on the web (GenBank and Integrated Genomics servers) as soon as 6X coverage is obtained and verified. DNA samples and other assistance will be provided to potential collaborators and others in the scientific community. Monthly updates will be placed in the public databases (at GenBank and Integrated Genomics). Also, the project will be used as a backdrop for enhancement of graduate courses at Tulane University via instruction in genomics technology and bioinformatics. This is a Microbial Genome Sequencing Award funded through a collaborative activity between the National Science Foundation and the Department of Agriculture Initiative for Future Agriculture and Food Systems doc18180 none Silliman This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Stephen Silliman, with the Department of Civil Engineering and Geological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame, and Professor Moussa Boukari, with the Faculty des Sciences et Techniques at the Universite Nationale du Benin. The investigators will conduct a study of the groundwater hydrology of central northern Benin. Hydrogeologically Benin can be subdivided into three regions: southern, central northern, and northeastern. The central northern region consists primarily of fractured crystalline rock with water levels regularly being greater than 40 meters. Professors Silliman and Boukari will collect samples of groundwater, precipitation, and host rock from various sites in the central northern area. A set of sophisticated analytical techniques (ICP-MS and ICP-OES) will be used to conduct geochemical analyses to determine: (1) if chemical signatures in the groundwater can be used to differentiate atmospheric sources and geologic interactions influencing the quality of recharge, (2) whether anthropogenic signatures are observed in this groundwater system, and (3) the utility of high-precision element analysis for groundwater characterization. This project combines Professor Silliman s expertise in the areas of characterization of groundwater systems and statistical analysis with Professor Boukari s intimate knowledge of, and historical research regarding, the hydrogeology of Benin. Both investigators have extensive experience performing field studies. Through this project the investigators expect to achieve a greater understanding about the utility of groundwater geochemical measurements in terms of identification of forcing functions. Such information will be valuable to a broad spectrum of scientists, including geologists and hydrological and environmental researchers. It will also provide increased insight into the potential for development of non-coastal, western Africa, and the current chemical threats to water supplies in this area of the developing world. The results are also expected to have applications to improved drilling and hydrofracing techniques. The project will include the participation of a US graduate student, who will gain experience in conducting field research in a developing country. The Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Earth Sciences are jointly providing support for this project doc18181 none Uhlir This award supports 17 participants (11 from the United States and six from West Africa) in a US-West Africa Workshop on Scientific Data for Decision-Making Toward Sustainable Development: Senegal River Basin Case Study, scheduled for March in Dakar, Senegal. The co-organizers are Dr. Paul Uhlir, with the US National Committee for the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) at the National Academy of Sciences, and Dr. Abdoulaye Gaye, of the Senegal National Committee for CODATA. There will be a total of approximately 35 participants, who will be drawn from academia and governmental and nongovernmental organizations in the United States, Senegal, and other West African countries. Multidisciplinary discussions will focus on biodiversity and ecosystem assessment, as well as remote sensing and public health issues. The purposes of the workshop are to: 1) Identify all types of existing scientific and technical data and information sources relating to the Senegal River basin; 2) Examine how these data and information sources have been used for research and decision making regarding the environment and people in the Senegal River basin area; and 3) Determine the technical, scientific, management, and policy barriers encountered in both the creation of these databases and in their use for decision making, and how they might be overcome. Site visits will be made to the Diama Dam on the Senegal River and to two research institutions. Scientific databases relating to the environment, natural resources, and health on the African continent are, with few exceptions, very difficult to create and manage effectively. Yet the creation of these and other types of databases-and their subsequent use to produce new information and knowledge for decision makers-is essential to advancing scientific and technical progress in that region and to its sustainable development. This meeting will help identify local and foreign scientific databases related to the ecology and environment of the Senegal River system, as well as the related human health of its populations. The compilation of information on these databases will help policymakers and citizens make better, scientifically based decisions about activities in the region. The meeting will also afford the US participants a unique view of an African science and technology data program, and the co-organizers expect it to promote the development of linkages which will lead to future cooperative research activities. Workshop results and information on the databases will be made available through an online report, and will also be presented at the Summit on Sustainability in September in South Africa. The project supports the participation of two graduate students from the United States. The Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Biological Infrastructure jointly support this award doc18182 none A comprehensive analysis of sub-synoptic-scale variability of aerosol properties will be carried out. For this purpose, the PIs will assemble and merge data from a large number of field campaigns, including ground-based and airborne measurements of aerosol physical, chemical and optical properties relevant to direct climate forcing. Instrumental noise and uncertainty will be quantified. Then the merged data set will be statistically characterized to determine patterns of variation and covariation that apply across multiple regions and aerosol types. A general statistical model of aerosol variability will be built and used to interpret and design future field experiments. This project, if successful, will provide new information about patterns of aerosol variability and covariances of aerosol parameters. This information in turn will be useful for designing future field experiments as well as satellite instruments doc18183 none Cordes, J. The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) is a concept for a very large new radio telescope with a collecting area of one square kilometer, covering wavelengths in the meter and centimeter range. It is being conceived as an international project, with competing designs emerging in Europe, Australia, China, and the US. This project will develop a US design concept to be presented to the International SKA Steering Committee in . The Steering Committee will review all submitted designs and choose one for adoption and further development by the international community. The funded program will develop the US concept of many thousands of relatively small radio telescopes spread over a wide area, acting together as an interferometeric array. The timeframe for completion of the SKA, should it ultimately be funded, is around - . Therefore the proposed work falls in the realm of an initial concept definition and feasibility study. The astronomical community endorsed SKA technology development by listing it high in priority under Moderate Initiatives in the most recent NRC Decadal Survey report doc18184 none Batarseh Description: This project supports a cooperative research project between Dr. Issa Batarseh, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida and Dr. Ahmad Harb, Department of Electrical Engineering, Jordan University of Science and Technology in Irbid, Jordan. This project deals with bifurcation and chaos theory for power electronic circuits. Most of today s dynamic modeling methods applied in power electronic converters is based on either linear ripple approximation, assuming that the natural frequencies of the converter are well below the switching frequency, or on time-averaging the output or the duty ratio function, effectively eliminating the sampling effect of the switch. These methods fail to predict the system behavior at high frequencies. The accuracy of these models degrades as the modulation frequency approaches one-half the switching frequency; hence they fail to predict the instability occurring in this region of frequencies. The objective of this joint research project is to investigate the application of bifurcation theory to newly developed modern high frequency dc-dc converters. The project will focus on two groups of power electronic circuits: I) parallel-input series-output two-module boost-derived DC-DC converter with mutually coupled output filter inductors, and II) Single-stage Power Factor Correction (PFC) circuits. Scope: This project enables the US and Jordanian scientists to pool their complementary expertise and resources in providing a new approach to analyzing the behavior of power electronics converter systems. One US graduate student from UCF will participate in this international collaborative project. The project meets the INT objective in supporting workshops where mutual benefits and dissemination of information is likely to result. This project is funded by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Electrical and Communications Systems doc18185 none Persson, Sven E. The technical development and acquisition of six x HAWAII-2RG detectors for the Carnegie s DEEPSIX instrument to be used at Las Campanas will be completed. This is a large format near infrared camera for the F5.4 focus of the Magellan II 6.5 meter telescope. A significant fraction of the observing time is dedicated to large area deep surveys, including a number of programs carried out in concert with the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. A broad cross-section of the US community of astronomers will be engaged with this work doc18186 none DeSimone Description: This project supports a cooperative research between Dr. Joseph DeSimone, Department of Chemistry, University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Dr. Yusuf Menceloglu, Department of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Sabanci University (SU), Istanbul, Turkey. They plan to research means to improve the manufacturing of semiconductor devices. A bottleneck in advancing semiconductor devices to sub-micron features is the development of novel resist materials that show nearly unprecedented sensitivity at the desired exposures and undergo a fundamental shift away from the phenolic resins that have been used as the basis for virtually all optical resist development, while improving the environmental conditions associated with the process. The PI and his colleagues will synthesize an array of fluorinated polymers that will enable photoresist fabrication using a supercritical CO2 process. The two groups plan to develop new photoresists for 157 nm lithography. The new resists will be transparent, and will be soluble at liquid and or supercritical CO2. Their properties will be evaluated by theoretical calculations, and then their synthesis will be conducted at SU laboratories. The research may lead to significant change in future microelectronic processes and could have a major impact on rendering photoresist production an environmentally friendly process. Scope: The two groups at UNC and SU have complementary capabilities and technical resources. A combination of activities will be used to facilitate communication between the two groups over the proposed three-year collaboration including one-month per year visits to SU laboratories, electronic mail, and teleconferencing. The two groups have collaborated in the past to develop eight US patents on heterogeneous polymerizations in CO2 and to produce several publications in important journals on polymerizations and on characterizations of polymer materials. A graduate student at UNC will participate in the project providing him with an international experience. Funding is provided by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Chemical and Transport Systems doc18187 none The West Virginia Pilot Local Systemic Change project will build upon an NSF-funded teacher enhancement project targeting K-6 grade teachers. The proposed project will provide content enhancement and leadership development in science for sixteen seventh and eighth grade science teachers over a two-year period of time. Two participants from each of the five counties in the region served by the Northern Regional Consortium for science, mathematics and technology, and three rural counties outside of the Northern Panhandle will participate in the project. The six rural county teachers will be involved via distance learning technologies. Participants will experience a 10-day summer workshop, on-line chat sessions, informal science workshops during the academic year, and ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) technology. Four informal science education providers will help to expand upon the participants content knowledge and to link real life experiences to the study of science. During the two hundred professional development hours over two years, teachers will field test and evaluate modules from the STC MS, FOSS and SEPUP curricula. Appropriate teaching techniques and a redesign of the current curricula are required to allow all of the area s middle level students to learn concepts that will serve them well in their changing economy. As a result, science content, especially physical science, and materials will be the primary focus of this Pilot LSC project doc18188 none M. Sanderson This dissertation enhancement grant supports a US graduate student, Ms. Shelah Morita, working under the guidance of Professor Michael Sanderson, in the Section of Evolution and Ecology at the University of California-Davis, to conduct a study in South Africa on the coevolution of long-tongued horse flies (Diptera: Tabanidae) and the deep-throated flowers that they pollinate. The study of coevolution can provide knowledge about the importance of species interactions in speciation, but present day associations between species may not reflect their past relationships. Diptera: Tabanidae is an ideal system for studying coevolution because their unusually long mouthparts are thought to covary with the morphological features of the flowers on which they feed, and it has already been demonstrated that these horse flies are closely tied to the fitness of the endemic flora of the South African fynbos region. But the biogeographical distribution of this group of horse flies does not match the predicted biotic distribution provided by the current understanding of historical biogeography. Ms. Morita hypotheses that: 1) Nectar-feeding Tabanidae in South Africa have coevolved with the plants they pollinate, and 2) Blood feeding is ancestral in female long-tongued horse flies within the tribe Philolichini. She also seeks to learn if the current classification of horse flies correctly represents their evolutionary relationships. Through a unique combination of phylogenetic approach and population-level studies, Ms. Morita will first study the phylogenies of both plants and pollinators, after which she will analyze the coevolution of proboscis length and nectar spur length in order to understand the evolutionary relationships within this group of Tabanidae. The student will use data obtained from field collected samples and institutional specimens. Dr. Steven Johnson, with the School of Botany and Zoology at the University of Natal, is a noted authority on the pollination ecology and plant systematics of this system, and he will provide guidance on this project to Ms. Morita. The results of this study are expected to advance the current knowledge on how animals and plants coevolve and new feeding behaviors are acquired. This project will also support an international research experience very early in the career of an outstanding graduate student. The Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Environmental Biology jointly fund this project doc18189 none Recognizing the important role the African easterly waves (AEWs) play in forecasts ranging from daily to seasonal, this project seeks to understand the evolution of AEWs and their interactions with convection. The first part of the research is to obtain the statistical relationships in these interactions at various phases in the life cycle of AEWs and to investigate the physical processes involved in them using the ECMWF analyses, satellite data, radiosonde data and raingauge data. The study will then be enhanced through a case-study approach following the evolution of individual AEWs and their interactions with convection. The third part, albeit at a lower priority, is to investigate the intra-seasonal to inter-annual variability of the relationships that exist between the AEWs, the African easterly jets, and tropical convection. An important goal is to understand and gain knowledge of the precursors of Atlantic tropical cyclones through the interactions of the AEWs and tropical convection. If a conceptual model can be developed for the preconditioning for tropical cyclogenesis, it would be very valuable for the prediction community. The PI is actively involved in planning the international Western African Monsoon (WAM) experiment to be held in . The research from this grant will contribute to the planning of the WAM field experiment doc18190 none Allen This award supports the participation of ten US scientists in a US-South Africa Workshop on Bacterial Wilt Disease, to be held in White River, South Africa, in February . The co-organizers are Caitilyn Allen, University of Wisconsin, and Jody Terblance and Gerrit Prinsloo, Institute for Industrial Corps, South African Agricultural Research Council. The workshop is being held in conjunction with the Third International Symposium on Bacterial Wilt Disease, which is scheduled for February 4-8, . Three graduate students and one postdoctoral fellow are among the US participants. Bacterial wilt disease attacks many cash and subsistence crops in the tropics and subtropics, including tomatoes, potatoes, bananas, plantains, peanuts, and tobacco. The pathogen responsible for bacterial wilt is a soilborne bacterium, Ralstonia solanacearum. Because of its geographic distribution, the disease has received relatively little attention from researchers in Europe and North America, even as it causes devastating crop losses each year in the developing world. The goals of the workshop are to establish common areas of interest among US and South African researchers, design collaborative projects, identify and prioritize the most pressing issues currently confronting bacterial wilt researchers in these regions, and develop procedures for exchanging scientific materials necessary for effective bacterial wilt research doc18191 none Schloerb, F. Peter The sensitivity of the three-telescope IOTA, a Michelson Stellar Interferometer will be improved through the addition of a new high speed visible light tip tilt tracker, single-mode IR fiber optics, and an improved IR tip tilt tracker, which will be used to observe highly reddened objects that are untrackable with the visible sensor. These improvements will extend the limiting astronomical magnitude for science measurements from the current 7.5 magnitude limit (R-band) to a 9.0 magnitude limit (R-band). This new system will enable studies of surface features and mass exchange interactions across the surface of the photospheres of Herbig Ae Be stars and T Tauri stars doc18192 none Soboyejo Description: This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. Winston Soboyejo, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, Dr. Alfred Soboyejo, Department of Aerospace Engineering, The Ohio State University and Dr. Said Kenai, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Blida, Blida, Algeria. The research will focus on developing a basic understanding of the effects of limestone content on the fracture and fatigue behavior of limestone cements. The manufacture of limestone concrete and the characterization of their basic properties (composition, structure, strength and permeability) will be done in Algeria. Electron microscopy and x-ray diffraction techniques will be used to further characterize the structure of the cementious materials at Princeton University and at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Fracture behavior studies will be carried at Princeton University, including the crack-microstructure interactions and the process zone development associated with resistance-curve behavior. The crack-tip shielding mechanisms observed during the resistance-curve experiments and fatigue crack growth will then be modeled. The effect of relative humidity and temperature on fatigue crack growth will be investigated, and will be modeled. A U.S.-Algeria workshop on the durability of limestone cements will be held in Algeria during the final year of the program, to introduce state-of-the-art concepts on limestone cement concrete to graduate students, industrial representatives and researchers from Algeria and the U.S. Scope: This project deals with a problem of significant value to most developing countries and also of significance to the United States. Limestone cements are considerably less expensive and more environmentally friendly to produce than existing cements. The project will investigate the value of these materials as structural cement for static and dynamic loads. Limestone is readily available in Algeria and most Middle East countries and if it can be used in cements would help increase housing availability to the growing populations. In the U.S. such materials, if proven successful, would help reduce the environmental impact of producing cement. The project will initiate a US-Algeria collaboration in the area of science and technology. One US graduate student from the Princeton University will participate in the project in Algeria. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual scientific interest doc18193 none Olvi Mangssarian U of Wisconsin-Madison Support vector machines (SVMs) have played a key role in broad classes of problems arising in various fields. Much more recently, SVMs have become the tool of choice for problems arising in data mining. This proposal de-scribes some aspects of support vector machines that the proposer would like to study and contribute further to. These include: generalized SVMs (a gen-eral mathematical programming framework for SVMs), unconstrained SVMs (a strongly convex minimization reformulation of SVMs solvable by a fast finite method), Lagrangian classification (an unconstrained Lagrangian rep-resentation of SVMs leading to an extremely simple iterative scheme capable of solving classification problems with millions of data points) and reduced data classification (a rectangular kernel classifier that is characterized by as little as 1% of the data doc18194 none A project team of engineer educators, engineer practitioners, and philosophers with international reputations in engineering ethics creates a video dramatizing a fictional but realistic case study in engineering ethics. This is a sequel Gilbane Gold; a highly successful, award-winning video. This video will help meet the contemporary need for effective instruction in engineering ethics, prompted by recent accreditation requirements for engineering curricula to include aspects of engineering ethics, and by increases in requirements for awareness of professional ethics in the licensing of professional engineers by states licensing agencies. The video will reach hundreds of thousands of engineering students, practicing engineers, and others who work with engineers. It emphasizes the positive responsibilities of engineers and the resulting benefit to the public, rather than whistle-blowing, which was one aspect of Gilbane Gold. Because of the globalization of the economy, the new video is cast in an international context. The video is done in three versions to enhance its exposure and pedagogical effectiveness: a 20-25 minute basic story version along the lines of Gilbane Gold, a segmented version that can be viewed in parts, and an interactive version on DVD that allows the viewer to observe the consequences of different ethical decisions. The film will improve the ability of students and practicing engineers to: Evaluate alternatives according to basic ethical values and through simple tests Identify and distinguish ethical issues, technical issues, and economic issues Identify affected parties (stakeholders) and their rights and responsibilities Identify social and political constraints on possible solutions Determine whether additional information is needed to make a good decision Formulate alternative courses of action Test the alternatives and imagine possible consequences of those alternatives. Also, the video will help the viewers become more aware that: Ethical considerations are an integral part of making engineering decisions A code of ethics will provide guidance in the decision-making process The obligations of a code of ethics do not stop at the United States border The obligations of engineers go beyond fulfilling a contract with a client or customer. The effectiveness of the video in achieving these goals is assessed through questionnaires and a standard test of moral reasoning. As part of the dissemination plan and in order to assure its wide use in the educational environment, a free copy will be sent to every engineering dean in the United States who oversees ABET-accredited engineering programs. Free examination copies will also be sent to major engineering and applied ethics societies in the United States. This wide distribution will encourage use of the video in conveying the importance of ethics in undergraduate curricula, graduate curricula, and continuing education programs doc18195 none In many areas of the world (e.g., Africa, Asia and Southeast Asia), human and nonhuman primates increasingly occur in close proximity, often exploiting common environmental resources. This results in situations with strong potential for conflict. Human-nonhuman primate conflict, such as crop raiding, often occurs in protected areas (e.g., National Parks), where villagers must comply with restricted use access policies, thus perpetuating negative attitudes towards the protected area (and its wildlife) and potentially encouraging illegal land conversion and poaching. It is therefore critical that research, which occurs within the context of these protected areas, address both sides of the conflict. Ethnoprimatology is a new area of interest within anthropology that addresses ecological and cultural interconnections between human and nonhuman primates and their implications for conservation. An ethnoprimatological approach is therefore well-suited to an examination of both sides of human-nonhuman primate conflict. In this research the primary unit of investigation will be the human-nonhuman primate community which includes human residents of the village of Tomado and the Tonkean macaques (Macaca tonkeana) that border this village in Lore Lindu National Park (LLNP), Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. This project will contribute to ethnoprimatology by examining how Tonkean macaques respond to human-induced habitat alteration (e.g., forest use disturbance and the development of agriculture) and how the behavior and ecology of these macaques, as well as conservation policy associated with LLNP, affect the livelihoods of villagers. The significance of this project is threefold. First, this project will be the first long-term research effort to explore the ecology and social behavior of M. tonkeana; a little-known macaque species found only in Central Sulawesi. Second, by examining patterns of feeding foraging and habitat use, the researcher will determine the factors that allow these macaques to persist in what is becoming the dominant land type in the tropics: secondary forest or agriculture forest scrub, and thus contribute to our understanding of the ecological and behavioral flexibility of these primates. Lastly, this project will contribute to the improvement of conservation management plans for LLNP in two ways. First, by examining patterns of habitat use in M. tonkeana, the PI can help to improve the management of the area between agricultural lands and the forest edge, to minimize human-macaque conflict. Second, the examination of aspects of local human ecology, such as attitudes towards conservation and patterns of resource use will inform the development of culturally sensitive conservation efforts doc18196 none What are the location factors that explain successful high-tech centers? Do previous studies of the high-tech industry shed light on this question? If not, how can we identify plausible factors and causes? These questions will be addressed in this dissertation research project through a statistical study of U.S. high-tech centers. High-tech industries, as a major job generator and as a major industrial innovator, play a key role explaining the postwar U.S. economic prosperity. There has been considerable discussion of how to possibly duplicate the success of high-tech centers such as Silicon Valley, Route 128, or Research Triangle Park. Research has been directed at questions on the pivotal location factors of the major high-tech centers, in an attempt to assist planners and policy makers who desire to develop similar centers of innovation. Previous research has focused on: (1) the role of federal support, (2)universities as providers of basic research and as suppliers of educated workers, (3)business conditions such as local industry size, patent, venture capital, and foreign direct investment, (4) quality of life, which includes climate, cost of living, crime, recreation, and education, and (5) combinations of factors are considered significant. Most recent studies seek to identify the factors that explain the robustness of established centers, but a serious gap in these discussions is that they focus on the performance of the group of high-tech centers by themselves. The plausibility of conclusions from such studies is limited because, to our knowledge, no control groups were used. The proposed research would fill this gap by first identifying suitable control groups and then systematically testing hypotheses on the explanation of high-tech center success. Until the growth and development of these centers is clearly understood, it will be difficult to fathom the process on which a successful high-tech centers growth policy can be built. Other methods such as shift-share, econometric analysis, and panel data analysis will also be required to fully test the hypotheses. This research project will necessarily employ statistical approaches to identify reliable location factors that explain successful high-tech centers. Specifically, a quasi-experimental control group method will be used. This involves the selection of a control group with similar initial conditions as the successful high-tech centers, and requires measuring the differences between the control group and high-tech centers. County-level U.S. census data from will be utilized in order to exclude most endogenous effects. To prevent a scale problem among variables in the selection process of properly paired comparisons, Mahalanobis distance will be adopted; this is a measure frequently used in anthropology, biostatistics, epidemiology, and other disciplines (Isserman ). Regression analysis will be utilized to compare and to identify significant causal factors. Competing hypothesis will be tested, and conclusions and policy implications will be suggested. The results of this study should provide a better understanding of the success of selected high-tech centers. The results can offer guidelines for high-tech center development, more so than the available high-tech centers literature. In so doing, the study will shed light on plausible high-tech location policies that many local and regional governments and planners are interested in doc18197 none This award provides funding for an investigation of the normal subgroup structure of groups of rational points of algebraic groups over general as well as over special (primarily, global) fields. The principal investigator attempts to prove a new conjecture on solvability of finite quotients of the groups of rational points of simple algebraic groups over arbitrary infinite fields. He also plans to analyze finite quotients of the multiplicative group of a finite dimensional division algebra in order to obtain their reasonable classification. Another central problem is investigation of the Margulis-Platonov conjecture for special unitary groups over global fields. The principal investigator collaborates on these problems with Gopal Prasad, Yoav Segev and Gary Seitz. He also plans to work with Gopal Prasad on a joint book project in the congruence subgroup problem. Questions related to the normal subgroup structure of linear groups have historical roots in the 19th century (Galois, Jordan, Dixon), and have been an area of active research in the 20th century. Recently, new techniques for analyzing this problem for anisotropic groups over general fields have been discovered in the joint work of the principal investigator with Y.Segev and G.Seitz. These techniques enable one to investigate groups over general fields using methods of the theory of valuations, which were previously used only in the number-theoretic setting of global fields. This approach fits into the general area of investigation of the congruence subgroup problem, which is connected with other fundamental problems in number theory, currently applied in data transmission, data processing and communication systems doc18198 none Gary, Dale E. A 2 year study to investigate the technical challenges for constructing a new technology, frequency agile solar radio telescope called FASR will be conducted. The science measurement requirements for three key science areas: 1. coronal magnetography, 2. solar flares 3. particle acceleration, and space weather will be used to develop the instrument system functional requirements. The proposal contains detailed task lists, personnel assignments, areas of study, and an initial management plan. An initial design study is the deliverable. Products from the design study will be an improved cost and schedule estimates and a better understanding of the engineering and technology scope of FASR telescope and instrument system doc18199 none Walker, Chris Advanced technology in the areas of mixers, device fabrication, micro machining, digital signal processing, and telescope design and engineering will be innovatively integrated to create the first integrated submillimeter heterodyne arrays. These arrays will utilize the latest Nb and Nb-AU diffusion cooled hot electron bolometers (HEB) in an efficient micromachined waveguide mount. These arrays will be used first at the 10-meter Heinrich Hertz Telescope (HHT) operated by the University of Arizona. This work will take place at the University of Arizona s Steward Observatory where post doctoral and graduate and undergraduate students will participate doc18200 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Adria LaViolette and her colleagues will conduct three seasons of archaeological excavations on Pemba Island, Tanzania, to address changes in Swahili political economy in the context of Iron Age urbanism. In the first millennium A.D. Swahili society emerged based on farming, fishing, and trade. By the 11th century economic and political centers, called stonetowns, dominated the political and economic landscape of the entire eastern African seaboard. Stonetown merchants presiding over long-distance trade relationships to the African interior and along much of the Indian Ocean rim have formed the basis of reconstructions of Swahili society. With a high density of stonetowns and associated countryside settlements, Pemba Island offers a unique location to study the dynamics of an emerging urban polity. A team of American, Tanzanian, and European archaeologists will investigate households and domestic spaces in one Pemban polity, targeting non-elite households, both urban and rural, hitherto overlooked in reconstructions of Swahili society. Three sites have been chosen for intensive testing and excavations. These include Chwaka, a stonetown inhabited from the 8th -16th centuries, and two villages that date to the 8th-9th centuries and 14th-16th centuries. At these sites, Dr. LaViolette and her collaborators will institute an innovative approach to locating the remains of highly ephemeral earthen houses. Once identified, these household remains will be investigated through large-scale excavations at each site. This will allow a comparison of household assemblages across economic and social classes within a regional polity over an 800-year period. Close examinations of households will allow the reconstruction of the Swahili domestic economy including subsistence, manufacturing, provision of services, and local and regional movement of domestic goods. Targeting the domestic economy provides a counterbalance to the long-distance prestige economy that has dominated the reconstruction of Swahili political economy. The project will thus focus on three questions: What is the pattern of production and consumption in non-elite rural and urban households and how does this compare to that of their elite neighbors? If elites were involved in long-distance trade for the establishment and maintenance of social power, were they able to convert those symbols of power into economic wealth, and how? And, what is the relationship between the domestic and prestige economies in Swahili society? This project contributes to anthropological knowledge about the development of Swahili society; the range of sub-Saharan urban models and socio-economic systems; and cross-cultural approaches to households and regions within complex societies. Within the literature on African complex societies, this study also contributes to a growing understanding of the uniqueness and range of African urbanisms. By exploring the connection between economic wealth and social power-between agrarian economies and prestige economies-this project will draw non-elite people, places, and production into discussions of political economy and social complexity doc18201 none This award supports the improvement of instrumentation and techniques that can be used for measurement of movement of cell membrane proteins based on time-resolved phosphorescence anisotropy and fluorescence depletion anisotropy. Improved instrumentation will result from introduction of a high pulse rate diode-pumped Nd:YAG laser, low rearm-time digitizers, two-channel data acquisition and improved electronics. Improvements in detector gating for time-domain measurements will be explored by a combination of direct optical gating and low after-pulsing strategies for photomultiplier gating. This is expected to permit examination of rotational relaxations occurring within a few microseconds. The implementation of frequency-domain and continuous versions of fluorescence depletion anisotropy will be explored for examination of weakly- expressed cell surface proteins. Improvements will be evaluated by measuring protein rotation on a consistent test system, namely the Type I Fc receptor on 2H3 mast cells. Improvements in the ability to measure the dynamics of membrane proteins should provide greater understanding of the function of membrane-bound receptors and other proteins whose ability to move within the membrane is key to their role in intracellular signaling and other important biological processes doc18202 none Reinhard C. Laubenbacher This award supports research concerned with the algorithmic representation of cell complexes, a special type of topological space. These complexes arise as topological models of data and processes in science and engineering. Specific applications of interest are to biological, social, and communications networks, as well as to problems in statistics. Topological invariants of the complexes provide measures of certain characteristics of the processes producing the data. The use of cell complexes as data models represents a new application of these structures to science and engineering network problems. The methods employed include tools from computational algebra, combinatorics, and combinatorial topology, thereby making a contribution to the applicability of new mathematical areas to some pressing and challenging applied problems. Research results will be disseminated directly to the end user outside the mathematical community. The project impacts a number of graduate students, including students from under-represented groups doc18203 none Reinhart Description: This award is to support a cooperative project between Dr. Debra R. Reinhart, Associate Dean for Research, College of Engineering, Professor Manoj Chopra, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Central Florida (UCF), Orlando, Florida and Professor Wa il Abu-El-Sha r, Director, the Center for Environmental Sciences and Technology (CEST), Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST) at Irbid, Jordan. They plan to gather and exchange information and to identify common environmental concerns related to hazardous waste management. They will focus on the phosphate mining industry, a major industry in both the US and Jordan. The objectives of this research are to: collect and review information available on the phosphate mining industry in the US and Jordan, identify methods to minimize water consumption and environmental impact of byproducts, conduct site visits in both countries, identify training needs for regulatory personnel, identify methods to increase awareness for waste generators concerning waste minimization and regulations, and plan a follow up seminar for industry representatives, consultants, and regulators. Based on the data analysis and site visit results, it is anticipated that recommendations regarding phosphate mining environmental impacts will be made. A workshop on these findings is planned. Scope: The results of previous US-Jordanian collaboration reveal a lack of information on hazardous wastes and its management in Jordan. There is no operative hazardous waste disposal facility in the country, even though there are plans to finish constructing an already existing site in Jordan. The project will address a topic that is important to the United States and Jordan where the phosphate mining industry is strong. The two sides plan to increase the collaboration between JUST and the University of Central Florida. The project is mutually beneficial, is expected to promote research, teaching, training and learning in this field, and is expected to give US researchers an understanding of the issues faced in other geographical regions. The project meets INT criteria for support of cooperative projects that are mutually beneficial doc18204 none Shandarin Description: This award supports a US-India collaboration entitled Morphological Properties of the Supercluster-Void Network in the Universe. US PI Sergei Shandarin, University of Kansas and Varun Sahni, Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune will test current theories of cosmological structure formation by comparison of the statistical properties of the observed universe with those of numerical simulations. This is one of the the major themes of current cosmological studies; the collaborators are well-established in studying large-scale structure in the universe. The PIs will quantify the geometrical properties of the supercluster-void network using robust statistical measures called Minkowski functionals. This powerful technique will enable them to determine the texture and topology of the global cosmic web, as well as the properties of its individual components --clusters, superclusters and voids. Scope: The research will develop a software library consisting of sophisticated numerical algorithms for studying morphological and geometrical properties of large scale structures. It will be made available to the astronomy and astrophysics community through the internet. The tools developed through this research have the potential for use in a large number of applications for physicists and the larger scientific community. This research is cofunded by the Indian Department of Science & Technology (DST) under the NSF DST joint program doc18205 none Understanding what leads individuals to transfer resources to others, outside one s own family is fundamental issue within economics, and other social sciences. This planning grant pursues research that investigates two related questions using a new longitudinal household survey from Indonesia. First, what is the relationship between transfers to family members, and transfers to community organizations? Second, are there intergenerational linkages between transfers to family, and transfers to community institutions? The theoretical approach used in this project models the individual s decision to participate in a transfer network within the context of an overall utility-maximizing strategy. Family and community networks can provide important economic benefits such as insurance and credit, mutual labor exchange, as well as non-economic benefits such as caring, social status and group membership. An individual will choose to participate in a given network when the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs. The results from this research can inform important policy debates. Understanding which individuals and communities lack access to formal and informal mechanisms for consumption-smoothing, risk sharing and organizing economic production may improve the ability to target vulnerable groups within poverty alleviation programs. In addition, identifying the relationship between family and community networks can improve the effectiveness of public policy towards community organizations, so as to avoid unintended crowding out effects. If family networks and community-level networks are close substitutes, then the expansion of community organizations may displace family-level mechanisms for providing credit, insurance and mutual labor exchange doc18206 none Angel, Roger An innovative approach to creating a Giant Segmented Mirror Telescope (GSMT) that meets the requirements of the decade report will be investigated. The engineering and scientific issues for the coherent combination of two telescopes and the technically challenging multiple conjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) will be examined in detail. Replacing a single 30-meter telescope by coherently combining light from two 20-meter telescopes may be a less expensive, more reliable approach to the realization of the GSMT. Much of the science to be accomplished by the next generation ground-based telescopes relies on a working MCAO. MCAO has not yet been demonstrated. This effort will advance the state of the art in MCAO significantly by providing a critical test of the dynamic refocus at an actual astronomical telescope: The MMT near Tucson Arizona doc18207 none Lee, Adrian A millimeter wave bolometric receiver will be built for the 12-meter diameter Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope in transition with Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, Germany. This receiver is a 300-element bolometric receiver for observations at 150 and 217 GHz. The bolometers will be horn-coupled, spider-web devices with superconducting transistor-edge sensors (TES) each using SQUID ammeter readout configured for elements. This receiver will be used to discover and study galaxy clusters via the thermal Sunyaev-Zel dovich (SZ) effect at millimeter wavelengths. Data recorded with optical and x-ray measurements, when correlated with data recorded by this receiver promise to 1. reveal the formation history of galaxies, 2. Probe the nature of dark energy by measuring its equation of state, and 3. measure cosmological parameters including the mass energy density and the Hubble constant doc18208 none Abler Gaile Aspaas This award supports 30 participants (15 from the United States and 15 from the Republic of South Africa) in a US-South Africa Workshop on Space, Race and Urban Development, scheduled for August 8-10, in Durban, South Africa. The co-organizers are Drs. Ronald Abler, Gary Gaile, and Helen Aspaas with the International Research and Scholarly Exchange Committee in the Association of American Geographers; Dr. Christopher Rogerson, in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Witswatersrand; and Dr. Etienne Nel, in the Department of Geography at Rhodes University. There will be a total of approximately 38 participants, who will be drawn from academia and governmental organizations in the United States, the Republic of South Africa, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Workshop discussions will be organized around three themes: 1) Urban Dynamics, 2) Local Economic Development, and 3) Race and Space. The major goal of the workshop is to establish linkages between the geography communities in the United States and the Republic of South Africa for the development of collaborative research and education programs. An additional goal is to identify ways that geographers can help policymakers make better, scientifically-based decisions in order to contribute to the sustainability of democratic and fair economic urban systems. The United States has also experienced many changes that can be linked to the issues of Space, Race, and Urban Development, but these changes and major policy shifts have occurred much more rapidly in the Republic of South Africa. This changing urban situation in South Africa provides US geographers an opportunity to contrast and compare the urban situations in the two countries. At the same time South African geographers and policymakers will be able to learn from US experiences in more mainstream local economic and other urban development issues. A virtual conference will be conducted, via e-mail, one week prior to the workshop so the participants can become familiar with the agenda and begin to develop some ideas for cooperative research projects. Workshop results will be disseminated through professional journals, meetings, and a web site. The project supports the participation of five junior investigators from the United States. The Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences jointly support this award doc18209 none The atmospheric transport and air-sea exchange of aerosols and gases play major roles in the global geochemical cycles of many elements. These processes also exert significant controls on the global radiation budget and affect the concentrations and distributions of major anthropogenic pollutants. Much of our present knowledge of atmospheric transport and ocean- atmosphere exchange has come from time-series data collected at atmospheric sampling stations, of which oceanic sites are essential components. Bermuda has been a key sampling location for numerous studies of the marine atmosphere, owing to its strategic geographic location in the western North Atlantic, and it is likely to feature importantly in future field studies. In this project, the research team at the Bermuda Biological Station for Research will: (1) upgrade and maintain a state-of-the-art atmospheric sampling station at Tudor Hill, Bermuda; (2) operate this atmospheric sampling station to provide facilities for the collection of atmospheric samples and operation of analytical instrumentation in research programs led by other investigators; and (3) collect and store selected core meteorological data and atmospheric samples on a continuous basis, in collaboration with and in support of other investigators. The time-series data and samples collected in this program will provide the basic context for future marine-atmospheric research programs to be conducted in the Bermuda region, while the upgrade and maintenance of sampling facilities will provide the basic support needed for such programs doc18210 none Knap Funding is provided to continue the now 47-year long series of ( m depth) ocean hydrographic stations near Bermuda, known as Station S or the Panulirus Stations. The data have already been used by investigators in several disciplines to examine fluctuations at periods from weeks to years in the western Atlantic Ocean. Changes over periods of decades are starting to appear. The on-going dataset has proven to be an important link in global ocean monitoring for both climate research and for evaluating temporal changes of many parameters. Ancillary users have, through this program, enhanced the measurements at this site to provide a rich array of data available to the ocean sciences community. This time series is a contribution to the U.S. Climate Variability and Predictability Program (CLIVAR doc18211 none for DMS - This incubation project plans to start an interdisciplinary collaboration whose goal is the understanding of folding and unfolding processes for polygonal linkages and other related structures. We plan to investigate the topology and the algebraic-geometric structure of configuration spaces of two- and three-dimensional serial linkages, via generalizations of recent successful rigidity-theoretic approaches based on pseudo-triangulation mechanisms, and to advance the understanding of the global structure of the associated configuration spaces. The rigidity-theoretic techniques have allowed the definition of 2-d motions that are purely expansive or contractive: the former can guarantee that a chain will not self-collide. We plan to extend these techniques to three dimensions and subsequently develop efficient data structures and algorithms for planning, analyzing, approximating, tracking and querying such motions. We expect that folding problems, beyond their intrinsic mathematical interest, will lead to techniques that will impact areas such as molecular biology, where the protein folding problem is of central significance, as well as robotics and micromechanics, where modular kinematic mechanisms (with possibly large numbers of links) are often employed. The common denominator of these endeavors, and our main theme, is the general question of planning and reasoning about collision free motions for serial linkages of various kinds doc18212 none This project aims to study radiative and nonradiative properties of individual gold nanodots and nanorods and their self-assembly properties from solution. One aspect is to measure properties for silver and copper individual nanoparticles in solution and in different liquid and solid media. The second is to examine the properties of self-assembled forms of either gold, silver, or copper nanoparticles having different shapes. Different methods for self-assembly of these nanoparticles from solution will be examined. For the individual nanoparticles, the project will address: 1) the dependence of electron-phonon and phonon-phonon relaxation on the atomic mass of the metal; 2) the effect of the medium in which these nanoparticles are dissolved on the electron-phonon and phonon-phonon relaxation; and 3) the laser photothermal transformation of nanoparticles of different shapes. Because of the close proximity of the metallic nanoparticles they are able to couple electronically via the plasmon resonance, changing in turn the optical properties of the assembled structures compared to those of the individual particles. Accordingly, the proposed research will explore radiative and ultrafast nonradiative relaxation properties as a function of the particle type, size and shape of the multi-particle structure. This is very important when incorporating metallic nanoparticles into solid-state devices. By using time-resolved femtosecond pump-probe transient spectroscopy and microscopy, the dynamics of heating, cooling and structural transformation will be examined for the assembled structures of the individual particles. %%% The study of the electron dynamics of individual metallic nanoparticles is of great importance to fundamental physics and for their potential use in nanotechnology. Understanding the electron energy conversion into lattice phonons and the interactions of the hot metallic nanoparticles with their surrounding environment is of great importance for possible future applications. These areas are of high interest to industry, and the proposed studies will train these students to contribute to materials science and engineering areas of significant national interest doc18213 none Siepmann, Joern I. University of Minnesota - Twin Cities Accurate knowledge of the phase equilibria and other thermophysical properties of complex fluid mixtures are of enormous fundamental and practical importance. The success of molecular simulation in predicting thermophysical properties an in advancing our understanding of the relationship between molecular architecture and macroscopic observable depends on the availability of efficient simulation algorithms and accurate force fields. The goals of the research are to continue the development of three levels of transferable force fields and of biased Monte Carlo methods. The first-level force field, called TraPPE-UA (transferable potentials for phase equilibria-united atom), employs the united-atom representation for alkyl segments and simple Lennar -Jones an Coulombic terms. In the second level, called TraPPE -EH (explicit hydrogen), all atoms including alkyl group hydrogens and some lone-pair electron and bond-center sites are treated explicitly. In the third-level, called TraPPE-pol (polarizable), both the van der Waals and electrostatic interactions can respond to changes in the environment. Whereas the first level is designed for simplicity and computational efficiency with good accuracy, the second level is aimed at improved accuracy for mixtures of non-polar or apolar non-hydrogen-bonding compounds. The third level is directed solely at the highest possible level of accuracy and transferability. These transferable force fields will encompass linear, branched, and cyclic alkanes, alkenes, alkynes, alkylbenzenes, alcohols, ethers, ketones, aldehydes, esters, carboxylic acids amines, amides, nitriles, thiols, sulfides, heterocycles, perfluorinated alkanes, and last, but not least, water. In addition to the force field development, this proposal also addresses novel simulation algorithms which are targeted at efficient simulations of solid-fluid equilibria, spatially heterogeneous mixtures, and hydrogen-bonded networks. Molecular simulations using the transferable force fields will be employed as engineering tool to predict thermophysical properties of a variety of systems, thereby adding to the available experimental database. The simulations will also provide a wealth of microscopic-level information for complex chemical systems, thereby giving new physical insight into how molecular architecture and composition determine macroscopic phenomena. In particular, simulations will be carried out to investigate the association of alcohols in non-polar solvents, the influence of entrainers on structure and solubility in supercritical fluids, the effect of pressurization on gas-expanded liquids, the solute partitioning between water and octan-1-ol at elevated temperatures and pressures, the structures of minimum and maximum boiling azeotropic mixtures, the liquid-liquid equilibria of alcohol water mixtures, the partial solubilities of drugs and their sodium derivatives, and the influence of solvents on the stability of polymorphs and on solvate formation. This project will profit from extensive collaboration of a close university-industry team consisting of the PI and Dr. Sami Karaborni of Merck Research Laboratories doc18214 none Professor Qin will work in the general area of algebraic geometry and its interplay with representation theory and string theory. The main tools are the Hilbert schemes of points on projective surfaces, techniques of vertex algebras, quantum cohomology, the moduli spaces of Gieseker semistable bundles on surfaces, and the holomorphic Casson invariants for Calabi-Yau three folds. The investigation should increase the knowledge about the relations among Hilbert schemes, vertex algebras and quantum cohomology, and shed light on stable bundles over Calabi-Yau three folds and the S-duality conjecture from physics in the form formulated by Vafa and Witten. Algebraic geometry studies geometric objects described by polynomial equations. It has been at the central stage of recent confluence between mathematics and physics. Many of these interactions have led to profound improvement in the understanding of both mathematics and physics. Professor Qin s research areas provide solid mathematical foundation to the physics theories which are vital to explain the universe doc18215 none Jiles Description: This award supports the US-India cooperative research entitled Magnetic Evaluation of Fatigue Damage and Deformation. Collaborators David Jiles, Iowa State University and Amitava Mitra, National Metallurgical Laboratory, Jamshedpur will conduct advanced Non-Destructive Evaluations (NDE) to obtain measurements on the structure of materials at the micrometer scale by using magnetic force microscopy and scanning Hall sensor microscopy. These will improve understanding of the relationships between microstructure and magnetic properties, which can then be used to interpret the results of traditional magnetic NDE measurements. The measurement data will be analyzed through mathematical modeling of the magnetization processes in materials using a new approach to the magnetic Preisach model. The research goal is to obtain specific details on how magnetic inspection methods can reliably be used to infer changes in structure and stress states during fatigue and deformation processes. This will greatly enhance the predictive capabilities of magnetic inspection techniques for estimating the remaining lifetime of components. Scope: The idea that magnetic measurements could determine fatigue damage and deformation in materials has great potential and high relevance for the scientific community of engineers and materials scientists. For society, detection of impending failure in components could have significant impact for civil, aerospace, and mechanical structures. Jiles is the authority in the United States on using magnetic methods for NDE. The collaboration with the Indian scientists at National Metallurgical Laboratory will leverage the strengths of both laboratories. Under this grant, two US graduate students will have the opportunity to participate in the experimental work at the National Metallurgical Laboratory in Jamshedpur. This project is supported by the Indian Department of Science and Technology (DST) and by NSF s Office of International Science & Engineering and the Division of Civil and Mechanical Systems doc18216 none Kumar Description: This award is for US-India collaborative research in biochemistry entitled Enzyme-Inorganic Materials: Peroxidase Behavior at Selected Interfaces. The investigators will test the hypothesis that solid surfaces perturb enzyme structure, and that the extent of perturbation depends on the strength of interaction between the solid and the enzyme. The key issues addressed in this research are important for the rational design of materials for enzyme binding. Advanced materials of this type have applications in biocatalysis, biosensors, implants, and artificial organs. Scope: This initiates a three-way collaboration between US PI Challa V. Kumar of the University of Connecticut and C.P. Rao, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mumbai and V. Jagannadham, Osamania University (OU). The proposed studies are logical extensions of the research interests of the US PI and overlap with the collaborators interests. The IIT group brings to the collaboration their expertise in design, synthesis, and chacterization of ligands metal complexes, while the OU group brings its high level expertise in reaction kinetics and mechanistic studies. It will enhance research and teaching activities at all three institutions. The project is supported by the Indian Department of Science and Technology(DST) under the NSF DST joint program doc18217 none The chemical identification of nanometer sized features and individual molecules on solid surfaces is the focus of this research project. With the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, Professor Hipps and his colleagues at Washington State University, are using orbital mediated tunneling spectroscopy in combination with scanning tunneling microscopy to examine the electronic structure of large organic and organometallic molecular layers on metal and graphite surfaces. The role of intermolecular packing and interface structure in determining the electronic transport properties of these layers is being examined. The information gained from these studies will provide fundamental design information for molecule based electronic and opto-electronic devices. As electronic devices shrink to the nanoscale and molecular scale, more fundamental information about the electronic structure of these molecular electronic devices is needed. This research project, in the laboratory of Professor Hipps at Washington State University, uses orbital mediated tunneling spectroscopy to obtain this electronic structure information about well characterized molecular overlayers on metal and carbon surfaces. In addition to the fundamental understanding obtained by these studies, an improved tool for the electronic characterization of molecular electronic architectures will result doc18218 none Rida T. Farouki Though motivated by practical engineering considerations, surface intersection problems have deep roots in diverse areas of mathematics, including algebra, geometry, topology, analysis, and numerical methods. The proposed project will bring the diverse expertise and renewed commitment of an inter-disciplinary team of mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers to bear on this critical problem. Since successful solutions will require radically new approaches and paradigms, rather than incremental advances, special emphasis will be placed on re-visiting the problem from first principles, seeking new insights through synergistic dialog among participants with diverse areas of expertise, and use of exploratory software implementations as research tools. A central theme of the proposed research is the ab initio incorporation of topological information into the formulation and verification of intersection algorithms. Although failure to guarantee topological consistency is the main deficiency of existing algorithms, this remains a poorly explored domain. Our initial line of enquiry will focus on using the homotopy or embedding method to track topological changes in implicitly-defined algebraic curves, as they evolve from simple initial configurations into a prescribed intersection locus. The accuracy, efficiency, and reliability of modern computer-aided design (CAD) systems has been severely compromised by the persistent lack of rigorous algorithms for topologically-consistent representations of surface intersections and trimmed surfaces. The solution to this fundamental problem can have tremendous economic impact, in terms of eliminating the laborious geometry preparation and repair task that currently precedes the use of CAD data in analysis, manufacturing, and inspection applications, and in resolving data-exchange incompatibilities among different CAD systems. The ensuing productivity benefits, manifested in accelerated design cycles and greater reliance on virtual prototyping for design verification, are crucial to the maintenance of technological leadership doc18219 none Jarek Rossignac We propose to develop the theoretical foundations and a set of practical computing tools for the automatic analysis of time-evolving shapes. Given a family of surfaces that represent the boundary of a 3D shape whose geometry and topology change with time, we propose to construct a higher-dimensional multiresolution representation, which we have named Atlas Transition Diagram, abbreviated ATD, that will identify and track the morphological and topological features of the 3D shape as they evolve with time and with resolution. Our ATD will also associate a chart to each feature, thus providing a surface-parameterization that naturally follows the branches and handles of each shape in the family. The charts evolve smoothly with time and resolution and are topologically glued together at their common boundaries to provide a continuous mapping, S(r,t,u,v;f); f), that, given a feature ff, a resolution rr, a time tt, and two parameters u and v, will identify a unique point on the surface and will allow us to trace its evolution with rr and tt. The theoretical underpinnings and algorithmic designs that will lead to a practical implementation of an efficient system for building and querying ATDs go far beyond simple extensions of Morse theory, of surface segmentation approaches, and of multi-resolution techniques, which have so far been mainly explored for static surfaces in 3D. Evolving surfaces are important to many scientific and engineering disciplines, including medicine, developmental biology, cell biology, computational fluid dynamics and computer aided design. They may for example represent the growth of a tumor, the shifting in position of a vortex over an airplane wing, or the budding of fingers on the hand of a human embryo. We propose to develop and integrate a collection of theoretical and algorithmic tools for the analysis and automated visualization of such evolutions. These tools will allow us to partition the evolving surface into features upon which a high-level description of the shape of the surface and of its evolution will be based. Furthermore, they will allow us to track their points, and thus surface properties, through time and to better visualize their evolutions through texture maps that continuously evolve with the features and highlight their boundaries and natural orientation. Finally, these tools will help us support queries about the time and nature of topological changes in the evolving surface, which may be important for the automatic analysis and retrieval of scientific datasets. To achieve these results, we propose to build a surface representation that is controlled independently or simultaneously by time and resolution and to decompose the time resolution domain into cells where the surface topology (number of components and through holes) and its partition into features remain constant. To validate our theoretical contributions and to increase their impact on the community, we plan to develop a prototype implementation for animated objects with triangulated boundaries. We expect to make the source code of this implementation and its programming interface publicly available. We envision exploring collaborations with application developers in Science, Engineering, Medicine and Biology to help us refine and validate this approach doc18220 none Nanometer Resolution Spectral Self-interference Fluorescence Microscopy A grant has been awarded to Dr. Anna Swan and collaborators at Boston University to develop spectral self-interference fluorescent microscopy, a new technique capable of optically resolving in the sub-20 nm range. In comparison to confocal fluorescence microscopy, where depth resolution is achieved by focusing at different levels in the sample and the axial resolution is ~1 micron, spectral self-interference will achieve an improvement by a factor of 50 or better axial resolution. The grant provides funds for instrumentation development to create a platform to perform the spectral self-interference microscopy. It will consist of a microscope, spectrometer, laser, associated optics, control, data acquisition and data inversion, as well as specially designed and fabricated micromirrors and positioners to scan the standing wave and control the emission interference. The developed instrument will be a stand-alone, user-friendly system, and will be used to examine subcellular dynamics in a variety of biological systems. Throughout the history of biological and medical sciences, advances in imaging have lead to revolutionary advances in understanding. The next great revolution in understanding the mechanisms of life will occur when it is possible to observe real-time molecular activity within living organisms. While nanoscale resolution is routinely achieved in a variety of microscopic techniques including scanned probe, electron and ion beam, and single molecule or bead microscopy, none of these techniques can provide three-dimensional intracellular molecular imaging within living organisms. Self-interference fluorescent microscopy can provide the resolution necessary, and this project will develop the instrumentation and analysis to make it a versatile and widely useful tool for sub-cellular functional biology doc18221 none Jack S. Snoeyink Scientific measurements and computer simulations of phenomena like air turbulence, nuclear explosions, or combustion in an engine, when conducted at high-performance computing facilities, produce vast amounts of four-dimensional data representing how variables such as temperature and pressure change over time. This incubation project brings together researchers at UNC Chapel Hill, Georgia Tech, and Lawrence Livermore National Labs to develop a prototype visualization tool that can both quickly compute such iso-surfaces from such data sets and also provide a global summary that can indicate where a user should look in the data set to find interesting phenomena. The approach to be taken is to extend work on contour trees to a Morse theory for a parameterized family of functions that is sufficient to visualize 4D data from 2D iso-surfaces or slices. When scientists, engineers, and students can explore the data that comes from simulation, their understanding of the process that is being simulated can only improve. This not only increases the return from the national investment in high-performance computing centers, but can also result in, for example, cleaner-burning engines doc18222 none Cutkosky This six-month award will support a dissertation enhancement project of Sean Bailey, a student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. He will work with Prof. Paolo Dario at the ARTS Laboratory at the Scuola Superiore Santa Anna (SSSA), in Pisa, Italy. The objective of Mr. Bailey s research is to extend the layered manufacturing approach of Shape Deposition Manufacturing (SDM) to mesoscale robotic devices. The researchers at SSSA are experts in the design of small medical devices. While at SSSA, Mr. Bailey will become familiar with state-of-the-art small-scale processing machines. He will then develop SDM techniques using these machines for mesoscale robots and demonstrate these new techniques by producing a highly sensorized mesoscale probe. A particular goal is to formalize the process planning constraints that apply in this specialized variation on SDM doc18223 none James R. Arvo The most familiar principle of geometrical optics asserts that a ray of light impinging on an ideal mirror will emerge in such a way that the angle of reflection equals the angle of incidence. The trajectory of a photon (or a billiard ball, using another common metaphor), is thus completely determined by its initial conditions and the geometry of the mirrors it subsequently encounters. The geometry of such trajectories has been of interest in numerous fields, including plane geometry, computational geometry, and computer graphics, yet they comprise a vanishingly small subset (a set of measure zero) within the class of all optical paths that fall within the purview of geometrical optics. In particular, optical paths resulting from non-specular reflections constitute a vastly larger class. Moreover, they are of far greater importance to image synthesis as they result from physically realizable models of reflection. Nonetheless, non-specular paths have thus far been largely overlooked as a source of interesting geometrical problems. The main objective of this research is therefore to launch an initial investigation into the basic geometrical properties of non-specular optical paths, both in the traditional combinatorial sense, such as finding a optimal paths connecting two points, and in the continuous sense, such s finding extremal paths, or computing the measure of all k-segment paths connecting two regions. A secondary objective is to explore connections with probabilistic methods, such as standard Monte Carlo visibility techniques and Metropolis light transport, which will likely be the first direct beneficiaries of this work. This work is expected to contribute primarily to the mathematical foundations of image synthesis by identifying optical paths as interesting geometrical entities in themselves, and by exposing some of their fundamental properties in terms of density, measure, and computational complexity. Moreover, it is expected that this new perspective will ultimately be instrumental in studying the accuracy and computational complexity of realistic image synthesis in general, about which very little is known currently. While the problems investigated here will invariably have much in common with previous work on direct and indirect illumination problems in computational geometry, the approaches taken will have a distinctly more continuous flavor, drawing heavily from fields such as measure theory, differential geometry, and geometric probability. Finally, it is expected that this work will serve as a segue into a longer-term investigation of computational complexity in computer graphics by establishing basic tools and connections with other disciplines doc18224 none Denis Zorin Mathieu Desbrun Peter Schroder This is a collaborative project funded by the CARGO program under , , and . Accurate computational representations of complex geometry are of great importance in many disciplines ranging from engineering and manufacturing to medicine and biology. With the wide availability of powerful computational resources and ever better acquisition technologies such as 3D laser scanning and volumetric MRI or CAT imaging the geometries used in applications are becoming increasingly complex. One aspect of this complexity is topology, i.e., the presence of holes and tunnels and of a network of one and zero-dimensional surface features such as creases and spikes. Typical examples of topologically complex shapes are a perforated plate or the system of blood vessels of the body. Traditional representations of geometry are at worst weak and at best cumbersome and inefficient in representing such complex topologies. Modeling of macro- and microscopic biological structures is becoming increasingly important for medical research, training, and treatment support. Such structures often have extremely complex shape and topology (e.g., the blood vessel or the nervous system, facial muscles, a folded protein molecule). The representations and algorithms we develop will result in new efficient ways of manipulating and processing computer representations of such structures. In this project a team with expertise in numerical analysis, geometric modeling, discrete algorithms and computer graphics is studying ways to bring fundamental mathematical tools and highly efficient algorithms to bear on the challenge of creating efficient and accurate computational representations and algorithms for surfaces of complex topology. In particular we are investigating theory and practical algorithms for (I) removal of topological noise in existing models as well as in raw data used for surface reconstruction; (II) topology discovery in volumetric data sets; (III) construction of multiresolution representations of geometry which can meaningfully abstract fine level topology at coarser resolutions to enable powerful multiscale techniques for rendering, modification and simulation. Particular attention is paid to exploring measures of topological scale which are crucial to most of the algorithms being developed. The algorithms to be developed by the team will have immediate applications in two areas: Computer-Aided Design and Medical Visualization. In CAD, examples of potential applications include topology cleanup, simplification for integration of scanned 3D data with manually constructed models and use of multiscale representations for interactive conceptual design representations doc18225 none John Keyser Degeneracies are a major source of robustness problems in many geometric algorithms. Many degenerate situations can be expressed as a root of a multivariate system of polynomials. We propose to study the use of toric resultants to detect degenerate situations in solid modeling applications. By taking advantage of the underlying monomial structure of a system of polynomials, the toric resultant can provide a method for solving systems of polynomials that is dramatically more efficient than the classical dense resultants of Macaulay and Cayley. We will focus on application to boundary evaluation for curved solids. Our work will include enumeration of degenerate conditions and identifying detection algorithms for each category, using the toric resultant where appropriate. The work is intended to foster future collaborative research endeavors on topics including resolution of geometric degeneracies, general algebraic number computation, and computational Morse theory. Geometric degeneracies occur when a minor perturbation of the geometry would cause a qualitatively different positioning between the objects. Degeneracies, such as two overlapping surfaces or a vertex of one object lying on the face of another, are common occurances in many real-world solid modeling examples. The problems of detecting and dealing with degenerate situations becomes particularly difficult when dealing with curved surfaces. Usually, detecting such cases involves finding roots of polynomials. Thus, accurate and efficient root-finding is crucial to an effective approach for handling degeneracies. The toric resultant is an approach for finding solutions to systems of polynomial equations. Because of its efficiency compared to other methods of solving such systems, it is a promising approach for detecting and treating degeneracies. We propose to address degeneracies in solid modeling applications through the use of the toric resultant doc18226 none Leonidas J. Guibas The wide availability of scanning technologies for 3-d shape acquisition has led to the development of algorithms and software, in both academia and industry, for building surface meshes from the raw data returned by the scanner. For most optical and contact sensors this raw data is in the form of an unorganized point cloud, or PCD set (point cloud data); current scanners are able to generate object surface samplings at submillimeter accuracy. At such high resolutions, these dense PCD sets become adequate representations of object geometry in themselves, without any need to fit a mesh or surface. The work undertaken under this grant will exploit tools from algebraic topology and computational geometry to perform local and global analysis directly and efficiently on PCD data. Specifically, algorithms for PCD feature detection, segmentation, matching, fitting, and compression will be developed and analyzed. It is expected that PCD sets will become a lightweight and convenient representation of object geometry not only in reconstruction or visualization applications, but even more so in the largely unexplored area of directly interrogating object geometry in the PCD format for applications such as robotic exploration or product customization. Over the next five years we can expect to see wide commercial deployment of 3-d scanning and the appearance of compact, portable scanning devices. By exploiting the acquired PCD data it will become possible to customize and tailor manufactured products to their user to a degree that has been impossible up to now. Technology developed under this proposal should facilitate this transition in the apparel, footwear, hearing-aid, orthodontic, prosthetics, and automotive industries doc18227 none Peter Schroder Ronald A. Devore Mathieu Desbrun This is a collaborative project funded by the CARGO program under , , and . This is the Age of Information. Whether it be in scientific computation or reverse engineering, in remote sensing or medicine, data sets of incredible resolution and exquisite detail are created daily. These data sets often have geometric structure which contains important information about the data and its application. The usefulness of such geometric datasets rests on our ability to process them efficiently, whether it be for storage, transmission, visual display, correlation, or registration against data from other modalities. Compression is the common critical issue in all these applications. Current data processing technology does not provide the efficient and geometrically faithful representations demanded by applications. In fact, a satisfactory data processing platform will not be created by incremental advances of current technology but rather through a fundamental investigation of how to represent large data sets with inherent geometry. To pursue the necessary advances a team of researchers and application developers representing expertise from several disciplines including mathematics, computer science, and engineering has been assembled. As drivers of the research, specially targeted applications (DTED, reverse engineering, physical simulation) have been selected to guide the formulation of the most critical and meaningful problems, as well as testing approaches to solving them. The team is carrying out fundamental investigations on the representation and compression of data sets with geometry by building new mathematical theory including deterministic models, appropriate application specific error metrics (e.g., Haussdorf distance rather than Lp norms), an information theory based on Kolmogorov entropy to determine the optimal compression, and the development of nonlinear methods for representing the data sets which are near optimal in the entropy sense doc18228 none Lazzarini Description: This award supports a US-India cooperative research project entitled Extracting Gravitational Wave Signals of Inspiraling Compact Binary Stars from Laser Interferometric Data. US PIs Albert Lazzarini, and Lee Finn, Pennsylvania State University will collaborate with Sanjeev Dhurandhar and two young scientists from his group at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune. The aim of the research is to advance gravitational wave physics by raising the efficiency and probability of detecting gravitational waves. The first task is to devise computationally efficient signal extraction techniques for detecting inspiraling binary signals; the second is to increase the likelihood of wave detection by analyzing how these signals can be identified using a network of detectors. Scope: The Indian collaborators have complementary skills and the expertise to ensure a successful collaboration. Theoretical analysis, algorithm design, and simulations are the vital components from their side. Professor Dhurandhar and the IUCAA group, which he heads, is internationally recognized for theoretical work on extraction of inspiraling binary signals from detector data. The participation of two young scientists from India has the potential to be a valuable contribution to the US effort in gravitational wave detection. The US PIs are leading researchers in this field. The newly established Center for Gravitational Physics (CGWP) is dedicated to the physics and phenomenology of gravitational wave astrophysics and funded under the Physics Frontier Center Program. The CGWP will host the visits of the Indian researchers doc18229 none Dong Under this Investigator Initiated Award, the PI will focus on assessing the effect that human neutrophil leukocyte (PMN) adhesion to melanoma cells has on melanoma cell adhesion and transmigration across endothelium, i.e., tumor cell extravasation. Evidence suggests that leukocytes assist tumor cell adhesion and transmigration. Studies will be performed in a novel flow chamber that permits examination of the effect of flow on tumor cell attachment. The four aims are: 1) to characterize the role of tumor-elicited leukocytes in dynamic tumor cell extravasation, 2) to identify tumor-secreted chemokines associated with PMN recruitment and determine their ability to assist with tumor extravasation under flow conditions, 3) to determine hydrodynamic shear effect on adhesion efficiency in tumor-leukocyte interaction and 4) to foster education teaching through the application of engineering principles to cell biology doc18230 none Gosnold Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Professor William Gosnold, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, North Dakota and Dr. Abdallah Al-Zoubi of the Geophysics Department of the Natural Resources Authority, Amman, Jordan. They plan to conduct exploratory research in Jordan by making geothermal measurements in existing boreholes, made for purposes such as mining and oil drilling. These data would then be used to determine the terrestrial heat flux from the crust, and to reconstruct the ground surface temperature history for the past 500- years. Subsurface temperature bears importance to our understanding of the climate history at the Earth s surface and the tectono-thermal structure and evolution of the lithosphere. Understanding the terrestrial heat flux at various places in Jordan has the potential to shed light on the tectonic development of the Dead Sea Rift, as a part of the larger Red Sea rift system. The paleoclimate of the area over the past millennium may help explain the spatial transition from Mediterranean climate to desert climate in this region. The scientists will assess data quality to determine the feasibility of making extensive data collection through a full-scale collaborative research project. Scope: In this project the collaborators plan to combine their expertise to explore the soundness of using existing boreholes to make paleoclimatology and heat flow measurements. The two scientists have complementary expertise. The US PI is experienced in borehole measurements and in paleoclimatology. The Jordanian scientist has experience with the field research area and has produced strong publications on that area. The US PI will include a graduate student from U. North Dakota in the field research thus giving him experience in an international research setting. The project meets INT criteria for support of cooperative projects that are mutually beneficial doc18231 none The Summer Undergraduate Mathematical Science Research Institute (SUMSRI) is a program conducted under the guidance of Miami University s Department of Mathematics and Statistics. We seek talented undergraduate students in the mathematical sciences who are interested in pursuing advanced degrees. Because of the shortage of minorities and women mathematical scientists, we are especially interested in, but not limited to, African Americans and other under-represented minorities and women. The main goals of SUMSRI are: -Address the shortage of minority mathematical scientists by encouraging minority students and women to become mathematical research scientists. -Provide the students with a research environment and improve their research abilities. -Improve the students ability to work in groups and give them a long term support group. -Provide professional role models. -Improve the students technical writing skills. -Give the participants an opportunity to write a technical research paper and present a talk at a mathematics conference. -Inform the participants of available financial aid and opportunities for graduate school. -Make the students aware of career opportunities in the mathematical sciences. -Prepare the students for the GRE. To accomplish these goals, SUMSRI will run from June 2 to July 19, , on Miami University s campus in Oxford, Ohio. During these seven weeks, students will participate in problem seminars in mathematics, statistics, or computer science. The program will also include a technical writing seminar, a GRE preparation workshop, two short courses on algebra and real analysis, and colloquium talks given by well known mathematical scientists. There will also be panel discussions to present information on graduate school and career opportunities in the mathematical sciences. SUMSRI will pay for the students travel, room, board, and supplies. Each student will also be given a $2,500 stipend. Funds may also be available for travel and support to some selected national meetings. The ideal candidate will have completed the calculus series and at least one proof-based mathematics or statistics course with distinction. The candidate should be entering their junior or senior year after attending SUMSRI. All candidates must be returning to their home institutions as undergraduates after the SUMSRI experience. SUMSRI is not currently funded to support international students doc18232 none Harbor Major limitations in the successful use of ice sheet models for climate research arise from limited field data for model calibration. This may result in unrealistic simulations of ice sheet inception, growth, and decay, and uncertainties in reconstructing ice sheet basal boundary conditions and surface profiles. For example, trimlines and weathering differences have been interpreted as indicators of former ice sheet height in some locations, while mapping and cosmogenic nuclide-based assessment of glacial erosion patterns in Scandinavia suggest that such features in some cases represent internal thermal boundaries between wet-(warm) based erosive ice and dry-(cold) based non-erosive ice. Such radical differences in interpretation have profound impacts on reconstructed ice sheet thickness, dynamics, and extent, and paleoclimates interpretations derived from ice sheet reconstructions. The fact that uneroded areas have been identified in Scandinavia within the known limits of multiple ice sheet overriding events indicates that these uneroded areas must have survived as non-eroding (presumably frozen-bed) patches throughout ice sheet inception, growth, and decay. This observation represents a significant new constraint on basal thermal conditions for ice sheet models and is indicative of the types of constraints that field-based geomorphology and glacial geology can provide to enhance ice sheet modeling efforts. Over the past three years the Principal Investigator Arjen Stroeven, Stockholm University, and Derek Fabel, Australian National University, have worked collaboratively with support from National Science Foundation (NSF) and Swedish NSF to examine deglaciation chronology and patterns of erosion and landscape preservation in the northern Swedish mountains, the core area of the Fennoscandian Ice Sheet (FIS). The results provide the groundwork for proposing the next phase of this work, in which they will reconstruct FIS thickness, extent, and dynamics (including total ice volume-induced sea level change) over critical periods of the last glacial cycle (Marine Isotope Stage [MIS] 5d or 5b, inception phase; MIS 2, Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) phase, and; MIS 1, deglaciation phase). The paleotopography (height) of the FIS through a glacial cycle will be simulated using a state-of-the-art thermomechanical numerical ice sheet model, with key boundary conditions constrained both by cosmogenic nuclide-based reconstructions of subglacial conditions, and by an isostatic model. The team for this work has been expanded to include Alun Hubbard, University of Edinburgh, Kurt Lambeck, Australian National University, and Jens-Ove Naslund, Stockholm University, in the areas of glaciological and isostatic modeling. New reconstructions will likely have wide significance, both to European ice sheet and paleoclimate reconstructions and evaluations of evidence of sea level low-stands (proxy for total land-based ice on earth) and also in encouraging re-evaluation of the dynamics of inception, growth, and decay of other major ice sheets worldwide doc18233 none This is a U.S.-East European workshop on algebraic geometry and geometric modeling that will be held in Lithuania. The principal investigators are Dr. Ronald Goldman from William March Rice University and Professor Rimvydas Krasauskas from Vilnius University. Algebraic geometry has in the past affected and in the present continues to affect the progress of geometric modeling and computer aided design. The purpose of this workshop is to provide an opportunity to disseminate new trends and techniques in algebraic geometry to the geometric modeling community. The Lithuanian mathematicians and computer scientists have taken the lead in investigating applications of toric varieties to geometric modeling. These applications are largely unknown in the U.S. and Western Europe and this workshop will serve as an effective mechanism for promoting and disseminating this work. This workshop in mathematics and computer sciences fulfills the program objectives of bringing together leading experts in the U.S. and Central Eastern Europe to combine complementary efforts and capabilities in areas of strong mutual interest and competence on the basis of equality, reciprocity, and mutuality of benefit doc18234 none The principal goals of this program are to test and develop further the Interstitialcy Theory of liquids and glasses. This will be done with critical experiments on the interstitialcy concentration dependence of the shear modulus and volume, the kinetics of the non-linear, non-exponential aging effects found near the glass temperature, and the Boson Peak arising from interstitialcy resonant normal modes. According to the theory, liquids are crystals containing a few percent of self-interstitials in thermal equilibrium, while glasses are frozen liquids. If the behavior predicted by the theory is confirmed quantitatively, the results will add to our microscopic understanding of liquids and glasses. This information could be of importance to technologies based on amorphous materials. The post doctoral associate involved in this program can be expected to play a leading role in the development of this emerging area, while the students will be well prepared for a variety of career choices as a result of their training in leading-edge technologies. The principal goals of this program are to test and develop further a recent microscopic theory of liquids and glasses with several critical experiments. For this work, the extraordinary sensitivity of measurements of the shear modulus, which plays a central role in the theory, will be exploited. If the behavior predicted by the theory on the temperature, concentration and aging dependence of the thermodynamic and kinetic properties is confirmed quantitatively by these experiments, the results would add considerable to our microscopic understanding of liquids and glasses. This could provide information relevant to many fields of science (physics, chemistry, materials science, geology and biology) as well as technologies based on amorphous materials. The post doctoral associate involved in this program can be expected to play a leading role in the development of this emerging area, while the students will be well prepared for a variety of career choices as a result of their training in leading-edge technologies doc18235 none Clark Description: This award supports US-India cooperative research entitled Development of a Digital Artifact Archive: An American and Indian Collaboration for Pottery Visualization and Analysis. Jeffrey Clark of Archaeology Technologies Laboratory (ATL) at North Dakota State University (NDSU) in Fargo, North Dakota and Vinod Nautiyal of the Department of History and Archaeology at HNB Garhwal University in Srinagar will link their databases to create a digital archive of historic and prehistoric artifacts, with special emphasis on archaeological collections of Indian pottery. These databases will become part of an NDSU project, the Digital Archive Network for Anthropology (DANA), which is a federation of distributed, interoperable databases, each with specific content that is of value to archaeology, anthropology, and related fields. DANA will contain three-dimensional (3D) models of artifacts that are sufficiently precise to allow for detailed measurements and analyses. Scope: This research will make archival data and 3D renderings of physical objects through DANA available to researchers and eventually to other users via the internet using state-of-the-art technology for digital archiving and distributed networking. While the intention is to provide a unique and innovative set of products and services, the underlying technologies are understood on both sides and the collaboration will draw upon the strengths and experience of both partners. The immediate goal of the India collaboration is to demonstrate the viability of the DANA project internationally. In the long term, this effort is an important step toward enabling the conduct of research in a virtual environment. The Indian Department of Science and Technology(DST) is funding this research under the NSF DST joint program doc18236 none This award supports research by Professor Richard R. Shrock of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concerning the synthetic and mechanistic aspects of asymmetric olefin metathesis and the organometallic chemistry of the early transition metals involving triamidoamine and diamidoamine ligands. Olefin metathesis involves the 2+2 addition of two olefins to yield two new olefins in an economically efficient manner. The catalysts under study are the only known efficient catalysts for asymmetric metathesis reactions and are of interest for preparing chiral pharmaceuticals. Early transition metal complexes with new triamidoamine and diamidoamine ligands will be investigated in order to delineate how such complexes can facilitate both stoichiometric and catalytic reactions. Organometallic complexes will be investigated in order to improve their ability to catalyze organic transformations, particularly those needed for the synthesis of chiral drugs doc18237 none Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is a medical imaging technique in which low levels of current are applied through electrodes on the surface of the body, the resulting voltage is measured on the electrodes, and an inverse problem is solved computationally to determine the conductivity distribution in the interior. In EIT the imaged region is often a cross-section of the body, such as a patient s chest. The tissues and organs in the body have different conductivities, a fact which enables one to form an image from the conductivity distribution. There is an essential interplay in EIT between engineering and mathematics. The design of a fast and accurate EIT system poses many engineering challenges. Mathematics has helped solve design issues such as what are the optimal current patterns to apply, what number and size of electrodes should be used, and what measurement precision is need to distinguish inhomogeneities. In order to image human processes in real time, the reconstruction algorithms that solve the inverse problem must be very efficient. Furthermore, for certain applications, such as distinguishing a breast tumor from a cyst, the reconstructed conductivity values must be accurate. The design of reconstruction algorithms draws on many areas of mathematics including partial differential equations, analysis and complex variables, mathematical modeling, numerical analysis, and scientific computation. The goal of the Mummy Range Workshop in Electrical Impedance Tomography is to bring together mathematicians, engineers, and physicians working in EIT to increase the communication between the groups and address current problems in design issues, applications, and reconstruction algorithms. To the organizers knowledge, this is the first conference in EIT specifically designed to bring together these groups. The workshop will be held at the Pingree Park Campus of Colorado State University, a conference center located in the Mummy Range of the Rocky Mountains. By bringing these groups together, we hope to expand the clinical applications of EIT and push the technology forward in terms of system design and reconstruction algorithms. Several important existing clinical applications of EIT include monitoring heart and lung function, diagnosis of pulmonary embolis (a blood clot in the lung), diagnosis of pulmonary edema, monitoring for internal bleeding, and the early detection of breast cancer. Groups attending the workshop will be presenting work on these applications and others such as imaging changes in the brain during epilepsy and stroke and monitoring of cancer tissue during hyperthermia by impedance spectroscopy. Several groups are presenting work on the design of new systems for specific applications such as breast cancer detection, and novel reconstruction algorithms will be presented. The workshop website is http: www.eitworkshop.org doc18238 none Miller, Clarence A William Marsh Rice University The purpose of this grant is to hold a two-day workshop to be held at Rice University in Houston, Texas, on October 22 - 23, , to identify fundamental research opportunities that exist in connection with the use of surfactants to increase recovery of petroleum from underground reservoirs. This technology was investigated extensively by the oil industry and university groups between approximately and , when most work was discontinued owing to a decrease in oil prices to less than $10 per barrel. Now the prices seem unlikely to drop below $20-$25 per barrel, it is desirable to reconsider technology, especially in view of developments since , including application of surfactants for remediation of ground water aquifers, which indicate that both costs and uncertainty in process performance can be reduced. Approximately 30 people from universities, NSF, DOE, major oil companies, and smaller companies, which operate many of the fields in the U.S. where the technology would be most attractive, are invited to the workshop. A final report will be prepared and submitted to the National Science Foundation doc18239 none Dr. Mary T. Rodgers of Wayne State University is funded for her research on thermochemistry of noncovalent metal-ligand bonds of biological relevance by a grant in the Physical Chemistry program of the Chemistry Division. She will advance her work in the areas of mass spectrometry, chemical reaction dynamics, and gas-phase ion chemistry using the combined techniques of flow tube ion generation coupled with guided ion beam tandem mass spectrometry (GIBMS). These advances include: 1) development of an electrospray ionization (ESI) source coupled with an ion funnel to enable production of nonvolatile and thermally fragile ions in the gas phase and production of multiply charged species; 2) construction of an upgrade of her neutral reactant inlets for both the flow tube and the reaction region; 3) enhancement of computational resources. The proposed research emphasizes three related areas: 1) the determination of absolute bond energies for metal-ligand interactions of biological relevance; 2) development of a thermochemical database of noncovalent metal-ligand interactions of biological relevance; 3) development of threshold collision-induced dissociation and related methods as means to measure accurate thermochemical data on increasingly larger systems. Experimental studies will be supported and enhanced by complementary theoretical work. A prime motivation for this program is to make better correlations between the detailed information provided by gas-phase studies with those of functional biological systems. The pedagogical approach taken, i.e. starting with model systems and gradually increasing the complexity of the systems under investigation was chosen to maximize the probability that thermodynamic information on biological polymers can be obtained with accuracy and precision. Metal ions are involved in all biological processes that nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), the molecules of life participate in. The effects of binding a metal ion to a nucleic acid vary from stabilization of the molecular structure to cell death. This variation in effect results from several possible sites where the metal ion can interact with the nucleic acid: at the phosphate backbone, at the sugar moiety, or at the base. The work is designed to provide fundamental information about the strength of the interactions of metals with the constituents of nucleic acids to elucidate the contributions of particular functional groups to bio-interactions. In this work, a technique that has been specifically designed for the accurate determination of reaction thermochemistry and known as guided ion beam tandem mass spectrometry will be utilized to examine metal ion interactions with chemical species of biological relevance. A coupling of experimental work with theory provides additional insight and also enhances predictive capabilities doc18240 none Proposal ID: PI: Joseph Salah Dr. Salah is awarded funds to continue a successful Research Experiences for Undergraduates site and associated Research Experiences for Teachers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology s Haystack Observatory. Funding is provided jointly through the Division of Astronomical Sciences, the Division of Atmospheric Sciences, and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. Over the next five years, seven undergraduate interns and four K-12 science teachers will be hired per year at the observatory to do summer research projects in radio astronomy, atmospheric science, and instrumentation. Each undergraduate student will be paired with a staff mentor, and will participate in a seminar series. Research projects in radio astronomy will include investigations of star-forming regions, active galactic nuclei, and envelopes of evolved stars. Atmospheric science projects will include investigations of the structure of the upper atmosphere, space weather, and the effect of atmospheric delays on satellite transmissions. Instrumentation and software projects will include new designs for digital radio receivers, software radar, and signal processing. At the end of the summer each student will prepare a detailed report and give a presentation, and will be encouraged to present the results at a national meeting. The participating teachers will spend eight weeks at the site their first summer, and four weeks the following summer. During the first summer, the teachers will participate in a group research project and develop curriculum for their classroom that is related to the underlying scientific concepts of the research project. During the following school year, the teachers will test their lesson plans and then refine the plans during the next summer doc18241 none In this project funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Wodtke will use a new technique to study highly excited vibrational states of polyatomic molecules, with energies that bring them close to the reaction barrier. Hydrogen cyanide (HCN) will be used as a prototype system and will be studied by the combined techniques of stimulated emission pumping and electric hexapole focusing to obtain energy and dipole moment information in individual highly excited rotation-vibrational states. Such information will serve to better map out the wavefunctions for highly excited states especially for isomerizing transitions. This project addresses a major problem in contemporary physical chemistry, namely the characterization of molecules in excited states, high enough to affect reactions and isomerization transitions. Two separate techniques are combined in a novel way to obtain such information. Experiments on the prototype hydrogen cyanide molecule will be extended to other systems. The research will provide excellent training for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in modern research techniques doc18242 none With some 3 million specimens, UCR s Entomology Research Museum (ERM) is one of the 20 largest insect collections in North America, and one of the 10 largest strictly University-based collections. Given that insects represent the bulk of our biodiversity, and this diversity is highest in the southwest, the ERM is one of our nation s most important biological resource repositories. The ERM is, unfortunately, operating at a significant space deficit, preventing proper curation of the collection and inhibiting growth, affecting its ability to house reference material and vouchers for field research and biocontrol work. The need for additional space is immediate and compelling, but no such space is or will be available for the foreseeable future. The only viable solution is to improve the storage capacity of the existing space. Also, the present storage cabinets are inadequate; few offer an air-tight seal to deter destructive museum pests. By upgrading to a space-efficient compactor storage system with new high-quality cabinets, as requested, the ERM can add storage space for over 2 million additional specimens and simultaneously improve access to specimens, collection workspace, physical organization, earthquake safety, and pest control. The continued maintenance and acquisition of material by the ERM is vital to the identification of species in support of research, applied science, and for the training of new students of Entomology. The UCR Entomology department includes numerous faculty, staff, and students that work with and deposit specimens in the ERM, and the ERM participates in a global loan program, so its specimens are utilized all over the world. The ERM s parasitic wasp collection is one of the world s most diverse and fastest growing, and unlike most similar collections, the majority of its over 500,000 specimens have host records, making it one of the world s most valuable sources of information about beneficial parasitoids of agricultural pests. The value of this reference material of biocontrol agents (and pests) to agriculture cannot be overestimated, since the foundation of pest control is the ability to accurately identify the various organisms involved, and close ties to California s agriculture place the ERM in a recognized position of importance for the state s far-reaching biocontrol research. The ERM s bee collection is likewise widely recognized as one of the world s most important, with over 200,000 specimens representing over half of the 3,000 bee species native to the US, several of these being pollinators important to agriculture. The ERM s collections are also increasingly being used in making decisions relating to the environment (e.g., Multispecies Conservation Plans), including training of environmental consultants, plus acting as a repository and identification center for biodiversity surveys in California and elsewhere. The ERM itself has extensive ongoing collecting efforts throughout southern California, including surveys of several protected and restricted areas, and is not only crucial in assessing the present diversity, but the past, as well, as many specimens are 40-100 years old, representing species or populations that are extinct, in decline, or have changed substantially over the last century; a source of irreplaceable data on Californian insects, and some of the nation s most unique and or threatened habitats. The ERM further serves as a valuable resource for people working with urban pest control, public health, and environmental biology, as well as for the general public. It plays an important role in UCR s educational outreach programs, and responds to requests by schools and individuals. It gathers and disseminates information, including through the Internet, and local and national media draw on the expertise of the ERM staff doc18243 none Arpad Bergh The Optoelectronics Industry Development Association is establishing under NSF and DARPA support the Photonics Technology Access Program (PTAP), where government funds are used to procure pre-commercial photonics experimental research prototypes (hereinafter referred to as prototypes ) to be made available to qualified researchers in a competitive solicitation and evaluation process. These pre-commerical prototypes may comprise novel materials, material structures, devices and device arrays, circuits and modules. Academic researchers can use the prototypes to advance discovery and understanding in photonics and provide feedback to the industry. Professors may also use the prototypes to enhance teaching, training and learning in class demonstrations and teaching laboratories. The goal of the program is to improve the availability of novel experimental research prototypes to universities. New prototypes are evolving at increasing rate and frequency, and if researchers have access to them only when they are available commercially, they are one or two generations behind leading edge technology. The program is modeled after the successful parts of the U.S.-Japan Joint Optoelectronics Project (JOP). Although the proposed program is domestic in nature, it has the potential to be expanded internationally at a later date to include Japan, Europe and others. Such an expansion might be considered to enrich the offerings of the program to include prototypes that are not available in the U.S. and to collect feedback from academic researchers from outside the U.S. who might have different perspectives. OIDA is well qualified to provide the broker function for this program based on its five years of experience with the JOP, including managing the domestic competitive solicitation and evaluation process supported with NSF and DARPA funds. OIDA also has strong interactions with large and small photonics companies and photonics-active academic institutions. To further strengthen its ties with PTAP constituencies, OIDA would assemble an Advisory Board for this program comprising leading researchers and educators from academia, industry and government. Photonics is a key enabling technology for the information age and it complements the goals of the National Nanotechnology Initiative and the National Information Technology Initiative. The proposed Photonics Technology Access Program also contributes to workforce development in science, engineering and technology and benefits numerous existing photonics programs thoughout the government. The program also helps industry, especially small companies who might find new applications for their leading prototypes doc18244 none PI: Joseph G. Conlon, University of Michigan This project is concerned with elliptic and parabolic partial differential equations and their applications in statistical mechanics. The first part of the proposal is concerned with elliptic and parabolic equations in divergence form where the coefficients are random variables. The author intends to study the regularity properties of the expectation value of the Green s function, and the rate of convergence of the solution of the equation to the solution of the homogenized equation. The second part of the proposal is concerned with the application of ideas from the theory of divergence form parabolic equations with random coefficients to Euclidean field theory. The relationship between elliptic and parabolic equations with random coefficients and Euclidean field theory was discovered recently by Helffer and Sjostrand. It was then more fully developed by Naddaf-Spencer. The author intends to apply some ideas he and Naddaf have developed for random elliptic equations to the Euclidean field theory situation. In the third part of the proposal the author proposes to study nondivergence form elliptic equations with random coefficients, in particular an equation corresponding to Brownian motion with a random drift. It has been shown by Sinai that in one dimension diffusion with random drift is strongly subdiffusive for large time. It has been conjectured that in dimension larger than 2 the scaling limit of diffusion with random drift is Brownian motion. The author has found a connection between this conjecture and certain combinatorial problems concerning the existence of cycles in graphs. He plans to continue his program to solve these combinatorial problems. The final part of the proposal is concerned with uniformly elliptic equations with deterministic coefficients. The coefficients can oscillate arbitrarily rapidly however. The author plans to continue his work to obtain estimates on the underlying diffusion which are independent of the degree of oscillation of the coefficients. This part of the proposal is related to the previous parts since random equations have coefficients which are rapidly oscillating. The goal of the proposal is to understand properties of the solution to a partial differential equation when the only information one has is that the coefficients of the equation are bounded in some way. Within this goal there are two sub-themes: (a) understanding worst possible behavior, (b) understanding on average behavior -given our knowledge of the coefficients. The sub-theme (a) is the subject of the final part of the proposal. It is intimately related to problems of stochastic control theory. Examples of stochastic control theory abound in the world of engineering and finance. To take a financial example, consider the problem of valuing a stock option. The classic work of Black and Scholes shows that the value of the option depends only on the stock volatility. For a stock with constant volatility they have a formula for the value of the option in terms of the volatility. The formula is the solution to a partial differential equation in which the volatility is a coefficient. (a) is therefore related to the problem of estimating worst possible scenarios for option values when one can only assume some bounds on stock volatility. The sub-theme (b) has similar applications to (a). The most exciting of these to this author is that it offers a way of beginning to understand the problem of turbulence in fluids. Turbulence is roughly speaking the onset of random behavior in the velocity of a fluid. It is well known that a fluid will undergo turbulent behavior when subject to a sufficiently large disturbance. The mathematical problem of understanding turbulence is well defined. One simply needs to understand the solutions of a partial differential equation known as the Navier-Stokes equation. To date there is not even the beginnings of an understanding how to derive turbulence in a mathematically rigorous way out of the Navier-Stokes equation. The reason is that the fluid velocity is a coefficient of the equation. In the turbulent regime therefore the Navier-Stokes equation is like a partial differential equation with a random coefficient. The sub-theme (b) is then concerned with the typical behavior of the fluid velocity in this situation doc18245 none In this project funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Klemperer will investigate the properties of relatively strong bound molecular complexes in their ground electronic state, but excited to high energies in the range between 10,000 and 15,000 cm-1. This work will provide quantitative data on the potential energy surfaces of hydrogen bonded molecular complexes. Studies will be performed on complexes formed with He and H2, the rotational spectroscopy of high-energy isomers will be carried out, and the spectroscopy of high overtones will be pursued. This research will develop new areas of the spectroscopy of hydrogen bonded molecular complexes. Students and postdoctoral research associates will participate in this work. They will receive training in theoretical and experimental techniques of high resolution molecular spectroscopy in preparation for advanced studies or entry into the scientific technological workforce doc18246 none There are two main research directions in this project. The first one is the continuation of the work on a general theory of boundary values, in the sense of analytic functionals or hyperfunctions. In its present state this theory has clarified several points in the study of boundary values of functions, in particular viz the intrinsic character of the definitions. Points which they have clarified in the global setting need further study in the local version. A theory in the non real analytic setting is still to be done. The second direction is at the confluent of pluri-potential theory and complex geometry. A still remote goal is the possible extension of Poletsky s theory of disks to the case of almost complex manifolds, whose role in Mathematics is rapidly growing. It also leads to the study of approximate solutions to the d-bar operator. The primary field of this proposal is Several Complex Variables. This field is rich due to its connections to many fields in Mathematics. There is in particular a remarkable interplay between Several Complex Variables and the theory of Partial Differential Equations, which itself is the most basic tool in the study of many processes in Physics and Engineering. The first direction discussed above fits in that setting. In applications quantitative studies have often to be replaced by qualitative studies, either because the quantitative study is too difficult or because the qualitative study is in fact more illuminating. This is where the field of Topology is essential. Several important connections exist between Several Complex Variables and Topology. The second direction discussed above fits in that setting. Deformation theory is a major theme, in which the study of almost complex structures has already played a crucial role doc18247 none Wai Kiu Chan This grant supports the research of the principal investigator and his colleagues on the arithmetic theory of integral quadratic forms and related topics. They will work on the representation theory of positive definite quadratic forms, the almost strong approximation properties of simply connected algebraic groups of compact types, and the classification of quaternary quadratic forms with improper automorphism groups by their degree two theta series. Quadratic forms are homogenous polynomials of degree two in many variables. This research concerns the number theoretic problems which arises from deciding which integers can be values of the quadratic forms when the variables are replaced by integers. It falls into the area of number theory which is among the oldest branches of mathematics. Nowadays, quadratic forms and other kinds of number theory become indispensable tools in communication sciences, data transmission and processing, construction of error correcting codes, and cryptography in information technology doc18248 none The Department of Herpetology, American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) conserves one of the world s largest, globally diverse and most broadly utilized scientific collections of amphibian and reptile specimens. The records are computerized, but servicing users is hampered by two major problems:(1) about half of the specimens may become dissociated from their data owing to past use of metal tags that are corroding; and (2) gaps in data captured occur in the electronic records. NSF support would allow metal tag replacement and completing of data capture concurrently, improving the database in preparation for going onto the internet, and continuing current activities in serving the international user community. (1) Metal Tags: From - metal tags with unique catalog numbers were tied to 180,126 specimens stored in alcohol. The metal tags are corroding, some have become completely illegible, and some have fallen off their specimen. Consequently, specimens are at risk of becoming completely dissociated from their data, which would be a tragic loss to science. (2) Data Capture: The electronic database was compiled from the original hand-written catalog ledgers. We have recently discovered, however, that in past decades data in the ledgers were often abbreviated from other sources (e.g., jar labels, 3 X 5 card file). Thus, data from these other sources need electronic capture before they become dissociated from the specimens. The herpetological collection has accumulated for more than 130 years, obtained by AMNH expeditions around the world, purchase of historically valuable collections, and donations of private or orphaned collections from other institutions. The collection contains 315,784 individually cataloged specimens. In addition, 20,000 specimens await cataloging. The collection includes 100% of the world s families of amphibians and reptiles, 80% of the genera, and about 6,800 species (over 55%). There are more than 650 primary types (specimens used for original descriptions of the species). The collection is global in scope, with special strengths in the Western Hemisphere, Africa, Pakistan, China, New Guinea, Australia, and Pacific islands. The collections are used daily by students and professional scientists for global biodiversity research. For example, we provide loans involving - specimens per year and 169 loans are now open to scholars in 14 countries. In addition, last year 39 researchers studied specimens on-site in the Department for 261 days. Publications based on the collections are part of the primary technical literature in the natural sciences concerning: (1) discovery of new species; (2) faunal surveys (resource inventories, economic development, siting of nature preserves, conservation); (3) follow-up surveys decades later; and (4) monographs, or other research on specific groups of organisms, including ones of potential medical (pharmaceutical development) or other importance. The collections are also used extensively in education, by supporting the research conducted by undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students at diverse universities around the world doc18249 none This Chemistry Division award supports the continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at Furman University. Timothy Hanks is the site s Program Director and Moses Lee is the Co-Program Director. Twelve faculty will serve as REU student mentors. Over the award period ( - ), ten students will be supported each summer in a ten-week program. Of these students, 4-6 will be from regional institutions with limited research opportunities and at least 50% will be from NSF-targeted demographic groups. Another feature of the program is that a faculty member will accompany up to three of the visiting students and will serve as research mentors. The research focus of the program will be on nanoscience projects in one of three special interest groups: Monolayers and Surfaces, Supramolecuar Structures and DNA Complexes. All participants (students and research mentors) will provide a written evaluation of the program at its conclusion. In addition, the program will monitor the number of their REU students that pursue graduate degrees and the number of student co-authored publications in professional and peer reviewed journals doc18250 none The two intertwined goals of this project are to determine the suite of genes expressed by Pseudo-nitzschia under toxin-producing conditions, and to acquire a better understanding of the connections between environmental conditions and physiological responses leading to toxin production. A set of physiological experiments will permit evaluation of molecular probes generated from gene expression studies. In turn, the molecular probes will be used to interrogate natural populations and help determine the physiological status of Pseudo-nitzschia in the field. The ultimate goal is to find a specific gene transcript or a pattern of gene expression that is correlated with toxin production in the field. The following hypotheses will be tested: H1: There are genes or a suite of genes whose expression pattern is highly correlated with toxin production in Pseudo-nitzschia. H2: A primary trigger for toxin production in Monterey Bay is silicate limitation, so that certain oceanographic conditions permit bloom development. H3: Silicate limitation may sensitize cells to trace-metal (e.g. copper) stress and the toxin (domoic acid) can function as a metal ion buffer. Batch and continuous cultures will be stressed with silicate, copper, and iron. Growth, substrate utilization, and physiological parameters (variable fluorescence, nutrient quotas, amino acid pools, including domoic acid) will be assessed. Cells will be harvested for development of cDNA subtraction libraries under different stressors. Gene arrays developed from these libraries will provide molecular probes for field testing. Identification of genes related to toxin production, but not general metabolism, will be facilitated by information generated by the physiology experiments. The laboratory work will be combined with a limited field program for assessment of environmental triggers (e.g. copper, silicate, iron stress) and for testing of the molecular probes. Results from the molecular expression and physiological assays will permit an initial description of the cellular pathways mediating environmental triggers (e.g silicate and metals) for production of toxin doc18250 none The two intertwined goals of this project are to determine the suite of genes expressed by Pseudo-nitzschia under toxin-producing conditions, and to acquire a better understanding of the connections between environmental conditions and physiological responses leading to toxin production. A set of physiological experiments will permit evaluation of molecular probes generated from gene expression studies. In turn, the molecular probes will be used to interrogate natural populations and help determine the physiological status of Pseudo-nitzschia in the field. The ultimate goal is to find a specific gene transcript or a pattern of gene expression that is correlated with toxin production in the field. The following hypotheses will be tested: H1: There are genes or a suite of genes whose expression pattern is highly correlated with toxin production in Pseudo-nitzschia. H2: A primary trigger for toxin production in Monterey Bay is silicate limitation, so that certain oceanographic conditions permit bloom development. H3: Silicate limitation may sensitize cells to trace-metal (e.g. copper) stress and the toxin (domoic acid) can function as a metal ion buffer. Batch and continuous cultures will be stressed with silicate, copper, and iron. Growth, substrate utilization, and physiological parameters (variable fluorescence, nutrient quotas, amino acid pools, including domoic acid) will be assessed. Cells will be harvested for development of cDNA subtraction libraries under different stressors. Gene arrays developed from these libraries will provide molecular probes for field testing. Identification of genes related to toxin production, but not general metabolism, will be facilitated by information generated by the physiology experiments. The laboratory work will be combined with a limited field program for assessment of environmental triggers (e.g. copper, silicate, iron stress) and for testing of the molecular probes. Results from the molecular expression and physiological assays will permit an initial description of the cellular pathways mediating environmental triggers (e.g silicate and metals) for production of toxin doc18252 none David Wallace-University of Michigan-SGER Planning Grant to Investigate the Incorporation of Born Digital Records into an EFOIA Request Processing System: Current Practices and Promising Technologies This grant will support preliminary explorations in integrating 10 datasets, some digital and some paper, related to the modeling of the flow of freight carried by trucks, rail, and ship in the greater Los Angeles area. The collaboration will be between information scientists and experts in transportation planning and policy and will involve the collaboration of several government agencies doc18253 none Biochemistry and molecular biology employ methods from chemistry, physics, cell biology, microbiology, and genetics to study the structure and function of complex biomolecules. These functions include how they operate in living organisms and how alterations in these molecules perturb the living state. Biochemistry and molecular biology research integrates didactic and experimental material learned in many basic courses. This REU Site Program in Molecular Biosciences will continue to enable qualified undergraduates to do independent research projects using a variety of experimental approaches. The program is designed to offer the participants a variety of research areas from which to choose a meaningful and exciting independent study project. Students will learn how to formulate and test hypotheses and develop the ability to troubleshoot and problem-solve when confronted with the unexpected. They will have access to and training in the use of state-of-the-art instrumentation. Through weekly meetings and a research poster presentation, students will develop the ability to communicate their results to their peers. The program will provide appropriate role models for these students to reinforce their excitement for a scientific research career and will emphasize to all participants the gender and diversity issues that impact research careers in science. For the past two years, through International Internships, the program has provided and will continue to provide the opportunity for undergraduates who demonstrate superior research aptitude to work in a foreign host laboratory on a collaborative research project for which they have received prior training. These students have learned to appreciate scientific research as an international endeavor and have helped strengthen international collaborative research projects. The program will assist participants in preparing applications to graduate schools and graduate fellowships doc18254 none The project supports costs of travel and local arrangements for a workshop to define a future vision for Software Design and Productivity (SDP) research. The workshop is hosted by Vanderbilt University on December 13-14, , bringing together 50 to 75 software researchers to discuss the directions for research over the next 10 years to improve software development productivity and quality. The participation is determined by a national call for white papers on SDP research and a review by a Program Committee established for that purpose. Successful applicants are invited to join Federal agency representatives and policy makers to identify research needs, capabilities, and shortfalls through open discussions. The final product of the project is a full report on the outcomes of the workshop that will be made available to Federal SDP R&D program managers and the community at large doc18255 none This Pilot Local Systemic change project is a partnership between the University of Missouri-Columbia and the Columbia Public Schools. It supports forty mathematics teachers (grades 8-12) as they implement Contemporary Mathematics in Context (Core Plus). Using a model of professional development designed around four important issues (building teachers knowledge base about content and pedagogy, supporting teachers in both the planning and implementation phases of instruction, and helping teachers reflect on the entire process), project staff and a Core Plus author design and implement over 200 hours of professional development over a two-year period. The project seeks to understand the professional development support and its influences on teacher knowledge and practices. The project supports building a continuing educational infrastructure in which preservice mathematics teachers can actively participate and learn about teaching mathematics in classrooms where reform curricula are being faithfully implemented doc18256 none Understanding the mechanisms responsible for the development and maintenance of widespread severe convective windstorms (derechos), that are responsible for numerous casualties and significant property damage each year, remains an important research focus. These mechanisms have been examined with idealized simulations of strong, line-oriented convection (squall lines) of which derecho-producing convective systems are a subset. These past studies emphasize the importance of environmental wind shear in controlling the strength and longevity of squall lines. While recent studies describing observed derecho environments suggest that low-level shear is not as dominant a factor as some numerical simulations have suggested, the lack of a detailed observational baseline describing derecho environments has hindered the comparison of these ideas to observations. To address these issues three main objectives have been defined: 1) collect and analyze a large set of proximity soundings from derechos and determine the distribution of wind shear and other parameters associated with these events; 2) produce a set of idealized numerical simulations to examine the sensitivity of line-oriented convection to the range of environments identified in the observational portion of this project; 3) examine the forces responsible for maintaining the strong updrafts and the strong near-surface winds within the numerical modeling experiments. This study will produce a detailed classification of the observed wind and thermodynamics profiles in derecho environments and will increase our knowledge of the physical mechanisms responsible for the development and maintenance of the line-oriented convection and the strong surface winds within these types of weather systems. Results potentially will lead to better forecasts of these destructive wind storms doc18257 none The rapid development of technology and its by-products require increased precision in mathematical modeling of the relevant phenomena to make the models more realistic and more readily applicable. This has required some basic changes in the direction of research in many fundamental areas. The scientists concerned have been involved for some years now in promoting the use of advanced methods in Analytical Dynamics and Control, and in the Control of Complex Nonlinear Systems. The workshop will involve experts both in the purely dynamical aspects of such systems so that improved models with more realistic predictions can be generated and experts in Lyapunov formalisms for handling bounded uncertainties in system parameters so that control actions can be made in the face of uncertainties. A range of application areas is also intended to be broached, so that a crossover of information between various disciplines that have the same types of fundamental problems can be effected. Past experience has shown that such crossover of information has led to new ideas and new collaborative research projects among attendees of the workshop. Eleven workshops have been held to date between and . The first five were held in the US at the University of Southern California, and they helped to get together scientists and engineers mainly from the US and the Pacific Rim, with occasional participation from scientists from other countries. In an effort to initiate a technical exchange between US and West European scientists and engineers who are working in this area, the next two workshops were held in Vienna (Austria) and Ulm (Germany). The East European scientific community was drawn into the following workshop in Sopron (Hungary), which was co-sponsored by NSF and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The workshop was held in Rio de Janeiro and was sponsored by the Brazilian Ministry of Science. This workshop indicated that there were numerous scientists working in the area of Dynamical systems and Control in South America. The tenth workshop was held in Lambrecht (Germany) and was co-sponsored by the Volkswagen Corporation and the National Science Foundation. The large community of scientists and engineers working in South America caused the International Organizing Committee to select Brazil yet another time, and the 11th workshop was held in Brazil in . It has been decided by the International Organizing Committee to have the next workshop in the US, in Los Angeles, bringing the venue after an entire decade back to the location from which the workshops initiated. The workshop will be held at the University of Southern California. One of the main thrusts of this particular workshop is to focus more on bringing junior faculty (especially women-faculty) and graduate students, so that they can have a greater chance of increased exposure to the more established community in the area of dynamics and control, and so that they can have an opportunity to interact with their counterparts who are working outside the US. These workshops, each of whose proceedings have been published either as special journal issues or as books, have led to the realization that there are today a large number of scientists who are working in South America, the former USSR, as well as both West and East European countries like Germany, France, Russia and the Ukraine, in similar areas of dynamics and control. In particular the last three meetings have clearly pointed out the need for increased interaction between scientists from Europe, South America, and the former USSR. There appears to be a substantial body of information gathered in these countries that is yet unknown to US scientists and engineers. An exchange of information in this important area with our colleagues in these countries will be beneficial to the engineering and scientific community here in the US. These workshops have led, in the past, to collaborative research projects, not only among the US attendees but also between investigators from the US and those from different countries; some of these joint research projects have been funded by NSF. We therefore expect, as before, that the forthcoming workshop will open up new avenues for collaborative research and sustained long-term cooperation among scientists and engineers through joint research projects. This, we hope, will be more so true for this particular workshop, since its focus will be more on junior faculty who may be more active and enterprising doc18258 none This is a three-year national Teacher Enhancement project that leads to a Master of Natural Science degree from Arizona State University. It can be completed within three summers. The physics and integrated chemistry-physics courses for the degree program are tailored to meet the needs of inservice teachers and have three main categories of: 1) Research-based physics pedagogy and peer community building in accord with the NSES; 2) Interdisciplinary courses to promote collaboration among teachers in different sciences; and 3) Major advances in 20th century physics taught by research faculty. The courses are complemented by a Leadership Workshop offered one day a week. All courses will be offered in the summer to make the program accessible to teachers nationwide. Teaching Associates drawn from the Hestenes Modeling Physics project will share in the course instruction. During the three years the project will enroll 75 residential teachers and 75 local teachers doc18259 none Recently there has been renewed interest in determining the functional and adaptive significance of symphyseal fusion of the mandible in primates and other mammals. This interest is in part because symphyseal fusion is thought to play an important role in various adaptive scenarios of mammalian and especially primate evolution. This study tests the hypothesis that jaw muscle force recruitment and firing patterns vary between species of strepsirrhines, depending on the stiffness and strength of their symphyses. This hypothesis predicts that those strepsirrhine species such as the indriids, with their stiffer, stronger, and often partially-fused symphyses, have a jaw-muscle firing pattern that is similar to the derived condition found in living anthropoids, i.e., the wishboning pattern. Furthermore, this hypothesis also predicts that those strepsirrhines with a completely unfused and highly mobile symphysis, such as ring-tailed lemurs and thick-tailed galagos, do not have this pattern. Instead, they have the primitive mammalian motor pattern, which is also found in North American opossums and tree shrews. This hypothesis will be tested by analyzing masseter, medial pterygoid and temporalis muscle force recruitment and firing patterns using EMG techniques in (1) ring-tailed lemurs (Lemur catta), (2) gentle or bamboo lemurs (Hapalemur griseus), (3) sifakas (Propithecus verreauxi), and (4) aye-ayes (Daubentonia madagascariensis). It is predicted that EMG patterns in ring-tailed lemurs and aye-ayes will be more similar to patterns found in thick-tailed galagos, and that EMG patterns in bamboo lemurs and sifakas will be more similar to those patterns found in anthropoids. If the predictions for bamboo lemurs and sifakas are confirmed, this constitutes a refutation of the ontogenetic timing hypothesis regarding symphyseal fusion simply because strepsirrhines that exhibit late partial and or complete fusion are hypothesized to not have the wishboning pattern of anthropoids. Furthermore, these data would also indicate that the wishboning pattern of anthropoids evolved more than once within primates, and if so, perhaps it evolved independently several times in various primate lineages. In summary, the main purpose of this project is to pursue these matters further by analyzing jaw-muscle force recruitment and firing patterns in various strepsirrhine species that have completely or partially unfused symphyses, but yet vary in the amount of symphyseal stiffness and strength doc18260 none Davis This is a collaborative proposal by Principal Investigators at the University of Colorado and Bentley College. Over the past half century, the perception of the Laurentide Ice Sheet (LIS) has developed from a thick monolithic dome with a relatively stable central core, to a thinner, multi-domed and more dynamic system with inherent instabilities. The role of the ice sheet in the climate system includes perturbations to atmospheric flow as its height increased and altering the planetary energy balance due to albedo changes. In addition, through massive ice-berg and meltwater discharges, the ice sheet was a determinant on North Atlantic thermo-haline circulation, the greatest non-linearity in the climate system. Primary information on the timing and style of continental glaciation has played a key role in this conceptual evolution. Along the northeastern margin of the LIS, extensive series of moraines provide a direct record of past ice-sheet behavior. Early studies were limited by an inability to date these deposits directly. Consequently, arguments were advanced for both a similar timing and magnitude of glacial advances along all margins of the ice sheet, and for fundamentally asynchronous responses between different sectors of the former ice sheet. With the development of cosmogenic exposure dating, it is now possible to date the moraines directly and resolve much of this debate. Recent studies establish the utility of the method at Clyde and provide the basis for two competing, but testable hypotheses of the glacial history. Hypothesis 1 predicts that one of the moraine systems preserved on the Clyde and Cape Aston forelands is the last glacial maximum (LGM) marginal position, and that highlands above the moraines and coastal forelands outside the moraines remained beyond the limit of continental ice throughout the LGM. Implicit is the recognition that more extensive glaciations occurred earlier in the last glacial cycle. For hypothesis 2, preliminary results suggest that an alternative model might also be plausible: complete inundation of the region by non-erosive ice early in the LGM followed by a reorganization of the ice sheet later to a configuration similar to that projected in Hypothesis 1. Resolving these two hypotheses is probably the single most important step to understand the behavior of the LIS through the last glaciation. In addition to resolving the LGM ice limits and glacial style, the Principal Investigators will produce a detailed chronology of dated moraines from Clyde and Inugsuin fiords doc18261 none This study seeks to discover the mechanisms that evolution favored in human placentas that permit an unborn baby to grow normally, even when there is much less oxygen than is present at sea level. The hypothesis is that in people with a long evolutionary history at high altitude (Andeans), evolution has favored the development of more blood vessels and better transport of nutrients in the placenta as compared to women of sea level European ancestry. The project is important because despite profound socioeconomic disadvantages, women who are native to high altitude (Andeans, Tibetans) have larger babies and fewer complications of pregnancy than women without an evolutionary history of residence at high altitude (Europeans, Chinese). The broader merits of the proposal include international collaboration with Bolivian scientists and training of aspiring scientists in the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. The study includes marginalized and under-served Native American women in this region, providing them with ultrasound and other prenatal tests not available during pregnancy for poor women living in Bolivia. From a broader scientific perspective, the results of this study will point to the placental genetic systems most subject to evolutionary natural selection under conditions of environmental adversity, and thereby inform scientists about the reasons why some babies fail to grow normally during intrauterine life, regardless of altitude doc18262 none The Morton Arboretum has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to modernize its Herbarium. The grant will provide for installation of a new compactor shelving system, thereby providing greater accessibility and use of the collections by scientists and public users. The 155,000+ specimens of vascular plants are currently housed in 116 cabinets that are filled to capacity. A backlog of another 7,500 plants is stored in boxes. Approximately 4,500 specimens are added to the Herbarium annually. The new system will guarantee long-term accessibility and improved care of the specimens and will increase the Herbarium s storage capacity by more than 50%. Increased pressure is being placed on the Herbarium to make specimens and herbarium data available owing to 1) greater use by botanists, conservation scientists, land stewards, and students and 2) continued and extensive vouchering of specimens resulting from Arboretum research in taxonomy, conservation, and arboriculture. To provide greater use of and access to these collections and to responsibly curate them, a modernized herbarium is critical. Major plant collections housed in the Herbarium include: plants of the Chicago region s globally significant ecosystems, rare plants of the Midwest, plants of the greater Yellowstone area, several important historical collections, and a fine collection of lichens and basidiomycetes. The Morton Arboretum s Herbarium is the third largest of any arboretum in North America. This significance has resulted in a major National Leadership Grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to the Arboretum to develop a digital herbarium (www.vPlants.org) that includes Chicago regional flora housed at The Morton Arboretum, the Field Museum of Natural History, and the Chicago Botanic Garden. The award from NSF will complement that from IMLS, resulting in a premier botanical resource in the mid-continent US doc18263 none WEBB In accordance with the Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) between the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, Charleston (SPAWARSYSCEN) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) dated September , SPAWARSYSCEN is responsible for providing Air Traffic Control services, Ground Electronics Maintenance operational support services, and operational Meteorology observations and forecasting support services to the U.S. Antarctic Program. In addition, SPAWARSYSCEN provides engineering and Executive Agent support services. These include program management, planning, cost estimating, design, procurement, installation, integrated logistics support, configuration management, budgeting, and cost reporting. This award provides direct funding to SPAWARSYSCEN for this support This is the first funding award for fiscal year in the amount of $4,336,765 and will provide operating funds through September . The program manager recommends this award doc18264 none The Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science Collection of Genetic Resources is one of the largest and most active collections of wild vertebrate frozen tissues in the world. It contains more than 100,000 samples of frozen tissues and tissue extracts (e.g., DNA, proteins, and antisera) from over 52,000 individual vertebrate specimens. The Collection is housed in 13 ultracold freezers, but needs for its protection to be moved to liquid nitrogen (LN) storage. Ultracold freezers have a minimum temperature of -80oC, whereas liquid nitrogen has a temperature of -150oC. The colder temperature would preserve the tissues more effectively, and LN storage would protect the specimens from damage caused by electric power outages, which are not uncommon in Louisiana. In addition, many of the herpetological samples in the Collection require substantial curatorial attention, including transfer from old containers to Nunc tubes, database updating, and cross referencing with voucher specimens. This grant would fund the transfer of herpetological specimens from ultracold freezer storage to LN over the next three years. It would also fund the upgrade of the herpetological collection in the process. In the future, the rest of the Collection would be moved to LN storage. Specifically, the project would entail purchasing two LN freezers and associated equipment, which would be capable of holding about 60,000 samples, and employing a herpetology graduate student as a curatorial assistant to oversee the move. The curatorial assistant would review the packaging and data of each of our ca. 15,000 herpetological specimens while moving the samples to LN freezers. The project would have several benefits for the Collection and the research community. The herpetological specimens would be better protected, and their data would be verified, making them more useful as specimens. The graduate curatorial assistant performing the work would gain training in the curation of frozen genetic collections, a skill that will become increasingly important as the number of these collections grows. The research community will benefit from improved curation and care of the Collection in general. From through , the Collection accessioned 15,817 tissue specimens from 22 countries and provided 285 grants consisting of 3,908 tissues to researchers in 11 countries, plus the USA. Since , at least 240 theses, papers, and books containing results based on comparisons of the Collection s tissues and extracts were published. The contribution of the Collection to the productivity of the research community will grow directly as a result of the grant doc18265 none This award provides funding to Montana State University for a three year, REU Site at the Center for Biofilm Engineering, under the direction of Dr. Anne Camper. This twelve-week summer program will involve eight students annually in individual biofilm research projects. In addition, the participants will receive training in technical presentations and writing, give oral presentations throughout the summer, write a final research report, and learn about ethics in research through seminars and industry field trips doc18266 none Johnson This interdisciplinary study combines scientific ecological knowledge (SEK) and the traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) of the Inupiat people regarding Kotzebue Sound, Alaska. The research will focus on developing an ecological profile of the nearshore Kotzebue Sound and testing three hypotheses regarding food webs, sewage impacts, and ecosystem change. Common methods of ethnography will be used to elicit TEK, and standard oceanographic techniques will be used for the SEK portion of the study. The project includes outreach to local schools and will bring local students of all ages into the data collection process doc18267 none Miller This is a collaborative proposal by Principal Investigators at the University of Colorado and Bentley College. Over the past half century, the perception of the Laurentide Ice Sheet (LIS) has developed from a thick monolithic dome with a relatively stable central core, to a thinner, multi-domed and more dynamic system with inherent instabilities. The role of the ice sheet in the climate system includes perturbations to atmospheric flow as its height increased and altering the planetary energy balance due to albedo changes. In addition, through massive ice-berg and meltwater discharges, the ice sheet was a determinant on North Atlantic thermo-haline circulation, the greatest non-linearity in the climate system. Primary information on the timing and style of continental glaciation has played a key role in this conceptual evolution. Along the northeastern margin of the LIS, extensive series of moraines provide a direct record of past ice-sheet behavior. Early studies were limited by an inability to date these deposits directly. Consequently, arguments were advanced for both a similar timing and magnitude of glacial advances along all margins of the ice sheet, and for fundamentally asynchronous responses between different sectors of the former ice sheet. With the development of cosmogenic exposure dating, it is now possible to date the moraines directly and resolve much of this debate. Recent studies establish the utility of the method at Clyde and provide the basis for two competing, but testable hypotheses of the glacial history. Hypothesis 1 predicts that one of the moraine systems preserved on the Clyde and Cape Aston forelands is the last glacial maximum (LGM) marginal position, and that highlands above the moraines and coastal forelands outside the moraines remained beyond the limit of continental ice throughout the LGM. Implicit is the recognition that more extensive glaciations occurred earlier in the last glacial cycle. For hypothesis 2, preliminary results suggest that an alternative model might also be plausible: complete inundation of the region by non-erosive ice early in the LGM followed by a reorganization of the ice sheet later to a configuration similar to that projected in Hypothesis 1. Resolving these two hypotheses is probably the single most important step to understand the behavior of the LIS through the last glaciation. In addition to resolving the LGM ice limits and glacial style, the Principal Investigators will produce a detailed chronology of dated moraines from Clyde and Inugsuin fiords doc18268 none The project CourseMap: On-line Course to Enhance Precollege Mathematics Teaching proposes to create and disseminate a new set of on-line teacher development courses to enhance the skills and subject-matter understanding needed in our nation s mathematics classrooms. Over the proposal two-year period the PIs plan to create 8 one-credit-hour graduate courses, four at the middle school level and four at the high school level. Understanding that the distinction between content and methods can be artifical, they intend that all methods courses will reinforce important new content, and similarly, the presentation of content courses will model best pedagogical pratice. Consequently, there will be significant integration of the standards-based content and methodologies across the courses. This proposed project looks at new and emerging technologies to begin to address these concerns, with a team of some of the most prominent mathematics educators in the country. More specifically, the design and production teams comprise leading mathematics, educators, technology specialists and instructional video specialists. Moreover, Teachers College Columbia will offer the courses for graduate credit, with Lesson Labs to provide an authoring system, and with WebCT to provide expertise in course management and on-line community building, as well as to promote and host the courses. Their goal is to reach the largest possible in-service teacher audience doc18269 none Islam Description: This project supports a US-Bangladesh Workshop on Water and Environment in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna Delta to be held in Dhaka, Bangladesh, January 28-31, . The organizers are Dr. Shafiqul Islam, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, Dr. Charles Harvey, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Dr. C.S. Karim, Member, Physical Science, Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission. The workshop is to explore the issues of long-term sustainability of water resources and environments in the Ganges- Brahmaputtra- Meghna (GBM) Delta. The workshop will focus on five areas: 1) Geology and Hydrogeology of the GBM Delta, 2) Biology and Ecology, 3) Water Resources, Irrigation & Environmental Aspects, 4) Arsenic Contamination in a Tropical Delta, 5) Socioeconomic Aspects of Population Dynamics and Agriculture. The workshop goals are to explore areas of mutual interest for international collaborative research on the GBM delta, identify and prioritize key research questions within each thematic area, and disseminate information through the workshop proceedings and web based publications. Scope: This project enables US and Bangladesh scientists to participate in a workshop to discuss an area of importance to both countries and to identify potential collaborative research. Dr. Islam and Dr. Harvey are currently conducting research on arsenic contamination of well water in Bangladesh. The other US participants include well-respected scientists with long experience in the river network in south Asia. The Bangladesh delegation is being selected by Dr. Karim with the supervision of the Ministry of Science and Technology. The project meets INT objectives in supporting mutually beneficial joint workshops. This project is jointly supported by the Office of International Science and Engineering, the Division of Earth Sciences, the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, and the Division of Bioengineering and Environmental Systems doc18270 none Therapeutic proteins provide numerous unique treatments for human diseases (e.g., diabetes, and cancer). However, due to their delicate three-dimensional structures, proteins are very difficult to keep stable during the required 18-24 month shelf life of a pharmaceutical product. Furthermore, it is currently not possible to predict which solution conditions will result in sufficient stability. The Principal Investigators (PIs) propose to conduct fundamental studies of critical physical properties of proteins to develop methods for predicting optimal solution conditions for long-term stability. This multidisciplinary project combines efforts from Chemical Engineering and Pharmaceutical Sciences Departments at the University of Colorado with those of Amgen, an industrial partner. The PIs propose to determine the effects of critical solution conditions (pH, ionic strength and presence of stabilizing excipients) on rate and pathway for aggregation of several model proteins. Levels, and kinetics for formation and loss (where applicable) of soluble oligomeric species and insoluble precipitates will be measured, and structure of proteins in aggregates will be determined with infrared and derivative UV spectroscopies. To understand these effects, the PIs will determine the effects of pH, ionic strength and stabilizing excipients on protein structure and thermodynamic properties. Protein secondary and tertiary structures will be studied with circular dichroism, infrared, fluorescence and derivative-UV spectroscopies. The free energy of unfolding and hydrogen-deuterium exchange rates will be measured to test the hypothesis that increasing the thermodynamic stability of the native state and shifting the native state ensemble toward most compact species are important factors for inhibiting protein aggregation. The second osmotic virial coefficient will be measured by light scattering to assess the effects of solution conditions on the colloidal stability of the protein systems. High-pressure spectroscopic techniques will be used to complement these measurements. Finally, the effect of solution conditions on chemical stability (e.g., deamidation, oxidation and non-native disulfide formation) of the model proteins will be determined by the industrial collaborators at Amgen, and linkages between physical and chemical stability of the model proteins will be elucidated doc18271 none Ambrose This interdisciplinary study combines scientific ecological knowledge (SEK) and the traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) of the Inupiat people regarding Kotzebue Sound, Alaska. The research will focus on developing an ecological profile of the nearshore Kotzebue Sound and testing three hypotheses regarding food webs, sewage impacts, and ecosystem change. Common methods of ethnography will be used to elicit TEK, and standard oceanographic techniques will be used for the SEK portion of the study. The project includes outreach to local schools and will bring local students of all ages into the data collection process doc18272 none The investigator is studying the statistical properties of zeros and values of L-functions in the context of random matrix theory. Random matrix models are being used to conjecture the full asymptotic expansion and analytic continuation for the moments of L-functions, and to make predictions for the statistical behavior of ranks of elliptic curves. A C++ L-function class library along with a front end application is also being developed for computing zeros and values of L-functions. This software is being used by the investigator to numerically confirm the predictions being made, and will be released freely to the public as a much needed tool for studying L-functions. Many problems in number theory can be described in terms of the properties of so-called L-functions. These functions, which encode profound information about various number theoretic problems, have remained largely unyielding to mathematical analysis. Many deep problems in number theory would be solved if one could understand these functions in detail. Surprisingly, a seemingly unrelated field known as random matrix theory, a subject that originally arose in connection to experimental physics, has recently been found by number theorists and physicists alike to provide a framework in which to model the behavior of L-functions. This mysterious connection has been used successfully to make hitherto unimaginable predictions for the behavior of L-functions. The work in this proposal is concerned with exploring the connections between these two fields, number theory and random matrix theory. To assist in this project, the investigator is also preparing a software package, to be made freely available to the public, for numerically studying L-functions. This award is being cofunded by the Algebra, Number Theory, and Combinatorics Program, the Numeric, Symbolic, and Geometric Computation Program, and the Computational Mathematics Program doc18273 none This research is focused on experimental investigations of the spin fluid dynamics in ferromagnetic superfluid He-3. The spin-polarized He-3 constitutes a pure, nearly ideal, material system for studying fundamental processes governing spin transport, diffusion and relaxation. Earlier experiments indicated that an interface between the magnetic and non-magnetic fluid He-3 could present a new channel for spin relaxation. It is proposed to provide a direct test of the importance of the interface by eliminating the interface altogether. A new spin filter experiment is proposed to create a much greater polarization than heretofore possible by inducing ferromagnetic fluid flows through a superleak . The hydrodynamics and spin dynamics properties of such a fluid state with large non-equilibrium polarization will be studied for the first time. Experiments will be carried out with liquid He-3 cooled down to 0.5 mKelvin, in magnetic fields up to 15 Tesla. These studies of spin fluid dynamics are closely related to current research in the field of spintronics . The proposed research has certain advantages, in that simpler macroscopic structures are involved, it is relatively easy to alter material conditions and parameters, and the relaxation or decoherence time scales are longer. The proposed work will be carried out in collaboration with the Institute for Solid State Physics of the Tokyo University. The graduate students will participate in international cooperative research. They will gain experience in the state-of-the-art technology in ultra low temperature physics and in materials physics. They will acquire a solid foundation for scientific careers in industry, academia or government laboratories. Undergraduate students will also participate in the research. This project is directed at understanding of the nature of ferromagnetic fluid dynamics. The ferromagnetic fluid state occurs when an isotope of helium, He-3, is specially cooled to ultralow temperatures. The motivation for the experiments is that novel changes in the magnetic fluid properties may occur when the fluid is made to flow through a small structure called a spin filter. The model material system is ferromagnetic liquid He-3 cooled to nearly absolute zero: about 0. degrees Kelvin. In addition, a very large magnetic field, up to 15 Tesla, is required. These extreme conditions are only available in ultra low temperature laboratories. The work will be carried out via an international collaboration involving the Institute for Solid State Physics of the Tokyo University. The ferromagnetic He-3 is attractive because it is an ideal pure substance, free from impurities, and its magnetic relaxation properties can be related to more common or spintronic materials. The spin fluid dynamics provides a novel analog for spintronics device research where the spin degree of freedom of the electron is used to carry information. Hence the proposed research may ultimately contribute to spintronics device technology. The graduate students participate in international cooperative research and gain experience in the state-of-the-art technology in ultra low temperature physics and materials physics. They receive rigorous training that prepares them for careers in industry, academia or government. Undergraduate students will also participate in the research doc18274 none This project will improve the botanical collections facilities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in two ways. First, it will consolidate two campus museum facilities into one, by incorporating the USDA Forest Products Laboratory Herbarium (acronym MAD , with 45,000 specimens) into the larger UW-Madison Herbarium ( WIS , currently with 1,020,000 specimens). These collections are now located at opposite ends of the Madison campus, and their merger will consolidate physical, human, and computerization resources, as well as facilitate better research and curation of the collections. Whenever the incoming specimens from MAD are vouchers for actual wood specimens at the Forest Products Lab, they will be digitally photographed by the USDA-FPL before arriving at WIS, and these images will be linked to an online reference database. To fit the MAD herbarium into the limited space available at WIS, and to alleviate overcrowding and correct substandard collection storage conditions there, we will install compacterized and non-compacterized specimen storage cases in available sections of the main herbarium. The second major improvement entails expanding the computerized database of Wisconsin vascular plant specimens from the current 100,000 accessions to about 250,000, including all herbarium collections from the state at WIS. The Wisconsin Vascular Plants website (www.wisc.edu herbarium) is currently a searchable, species-based checklist, with extensive supplementary information and photographs of over 2,000 species. With the databasing accomplished by this project, we will be able to provide online computerized distribution maps for all 2,500 species in Wisconsin, as well as searchable record information from any of the 250,000 databased specimens. The Wisconsin Vascular Plant website (www.wisc.edu herbarium) is already a heavily consulted resource at the state and national levels (over one million hits in ), and we are proud that we are able to outreach to a broad public as well as to the scientific community. We do this by providing a simple user interface, effective search mechanisms, rich graphic content in plant photographs and distribution maps, and useful links to associated websites. Our user base includes natural resource managers, state and federal agencies, secondary schools and universities, and amateur naturalists. With the increased computerization of Wisconsin specimens, we will significantly expand the website s role as an effective and continually developing online flora. The consolidation of WIS and MAD will provide the infrastructure to safely and efficiently manage a combined herbarium of over 1,100,000 specimens (incorporating some of the unprocessed collections now in storage). We will then be among the top five university-based plant collections in the country in size and a forerunner in the electronic dissemination of plant-related data and images designed to serve both the general public and the more specialized scientific community doc18275 none The purpose of this satellite meeting of the Society for Neuroscience is to bring together an international group of students and researchers representing diverse fields related to the ontogeny of motor behavior in vertebrates to assess the current status of the field, to discuss strategies for future research, and to establish a foundation for interdisciplinary collaboration. In order to accomplish these objectives, researchers using diverse animal species as well as diverse methodologies ranging from the molecular to behavioral will be invited. This symposium will provide a rare opportunity for scientists from different disciplines and perspectives to develop new collaborations and new approaches to understanding the ontogeny of motor behavior. Announcements and other publicity for the symposium will encourage attendance by women and under-represented minorities. The summary of the meeting will be published in Neuron as a Meeting Review doc18276 none The UC Davis Herbarium is a reference collection of over 240,000 dried and pressed plant specimens and an associated botanical library that is used by faculty in over 20 campus departments for their research in the diverse fields of genomics, plant biology, entomology, ecology, conservation, veterinary medicine, and agriculture. The current were outgrown by the early s, at which time specimen cabinets were stacked on top of each other to a height of eleven feet. In the s when no further cabinets could be stacked in the main collections area, cases were placed in the hall. Since that time, many more cases and freezers have been added to the hallway to accommodate incoming specimens. In addition, the lack of temperature control results in temperatures close to ninety degrees within the collection area for at least one time period per year. This makes it impossible to completely control the population of herbarium beetles in the main collections, and the larvae rapidly eat the flowers and leaves off the dried specimens. To remedy these problems, space has been allocated for the herbarium on the first floor of the Life Sciences Laboratory Building. The new herbarium facility will be temperature controlled and insect-free. As space is extremely limited and expensive on the UC Davis campus, the herbarium cases in the new collections area and the herbarium library will need to be installed on a movable aisle storage system. The specimens of herbaria are an historic record of where and when plants have grown in all parts of the world, and as such are repositories of tremendous biological information including the current locations of invasive weeds and the former locations of extinct species. In addition, the UC Davis Herbarium houses unique collections of California vernal pool plants, wine grape varieties, grasses, and oaks which should be preserved for future generations. UC Davis trains hundreds of scientists in diverse fields every year. Many of those scientists make their way to the herbarium for help with plant inquiries. Herbarium staff routinely do plant identifications for both university affiliates and the general public, including federal and state agencies, and such a service is impossible without reference specimens. As herbarium specimens can be used for both sight identification of plants and a source of genetic material for evolutionary studies, it is critical that these specimens be rehoused in a safe and functional facility in insect-free cases doc18277 none Savin Gordan Savin is continuing his work on minimal representations, with applications to and explicit constructions of some cases of Langlands functoriality which can not be obtained by any other method. The subject of automorphic forms is a crossroad of analysis, algebra, and number theory. It is a subject with roots in indispensable mathematical theories such as Fourier Analysis which impact our everyday lives in many ways. Telecommunications, data transmission, and modern instruments of radiology would not be possible without Fourier Analysis. A purpose of this research is to use tools of analysis (calculus) to answer some questions in number theory, such as to get a better understanding of zeroes of polynomials. Almost everybody knows how to solve a quadratic equation. It is also possible, although it is less known, to find zeroes of any polynomial of degree 3 or 4. A higher degree polynomial, in general, cannot be solved, but can be studied using some special functions of complex variable (called modular forms). This circle of ideas, which surprisingly relates mathematical theories which at first glance do not appear related, is about 30 years old, and called the Langlands Program, after Robert P. Langlands of the Institute of Advanced Sciences in Princeton doc18278 none Over the past four years, the San Diego Natural History Museum has been building new facilities as part of a ten-year strategic plan and an ongoing $40 million capital campaign. The construction project and building renovation has increased the available space from 60,000 sq. ft. to 150,000 sq. ft., allowing for the expansion of research, collections, exhibits and education. The amphibian and reptile collection represents one of the Museum s highest priorities to correct for housing and storage deficiencies. With 67,514 amphibian and reptile specimens, collected primarily from the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico, the collection is a critical resource for biological information in the region. However, outmoded housing, overcrowded conditions, and outdated taxonomic organization have challenged the collection s accessibility and long-term preservation. To correct for this, the Museum has installed compactor shelving units in a new state-of-the-art room to house the fluid-preserved specimens, but is still in need of cabinets to house the skeletal material. Because the previous facility lacked room for expansion, over one-third of the 8,100 jars are full to capacity, though the optimum is no more than half full to minimize specimen damage. Lastly, specimen jar labels and their corresponding taxonomic names in the computer database are outdated, making retrieval of material burdensome and exceptionally time consuming. The goals of this project are to rehouse the collection to modern storage facilities, so specimens will be better preserved for future generations and more accessible to researchers, students and the many others interested in the reptiles and amphibians of the region. By purchasing 10 skeletal storage cabinets, 3,000 jars and lids, and hiring a full-time collection management assistant for two years (and summer undergraduate interns), the renovation of the physical housing, overcrowded conditions, and outdated organization can be achieved. Natural history collections serve as specimen repositories to document regional biodiversity and to provide baseline material for scientific research. The amphibian and reptile collection at the San Diego Natural History Museum plays a significant role towards this by documenting the region s rich diversity. Over the last century, these specimens have been the basis for research in historical biogeography, systematics, functional morphology, ecology, physiology, behavior, ethnozoology, and the introduction of exotics. More and more, they are playing a role in the conservation drama that is taking center stage in the coastal regions of southern California. For example, San Diego County is currently implementing national models for conservation plans to preserve lands and endangered species. The goals include the protection of the region s biodiversity and quality of life, while still allowing for economic development. Since the collection defines the historical distribution of amphibians and reptiles in this region, and helps locate biodiversity hotspots, it can help determine the effects of urbanization, development and habitat management. The collection has provided material for hundreds of scientific publications, numerous government studies, and dozens of graduate student research projects. The rehousing of the collection to modern storage facilities, without overcrowding, will ensure its accessibility to researchers, students, and the interested public for generations to come doc18279 none The world-class collection of preserved orchid flowers in the Herbarium at the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, Florida, is deteriorating, as metal caps and paper-lined closures show their age. As a result, the alcohol preservative is evaporating and rust is contaminating many of the 24,000 orchid flower specimens. The glass specimen bottles currently are stored in cardboard boxes, arranged by the Orchid Identification Center (OIC) accession number. In addition to OIC of research botanists, scientists from around the world and especially from countries with tropical rain forests use this valuable collection. The current arrangement makes it time consuming to locate all specimens of a given orchid species for comparison. The National Science Foundation project will allow for replacement of metal lids and paper liners with plastic caps and liners, storage of glass bottles in plastic crates, bar-coding of each bottle, and databasing of all accession information. The scope of the project encompasses processing all 24,000 preserved orchid specimens. In addition to OIC vouchers, the collection contains the irreplaceable field collections of such prominent research botanists as Galfrid Dunsterville, Alexander Hirtz, Calaway Dodson, and Carlyle Luer. A barcode label will be applied to each bottle, which will be refilled with preservative; caps and liners will be replaced as required; and inventory information will be entered into a database developed for the collection. The NSF project will preserve a scientifically significant taxonomic resource. The Selby Gardens Herbarium, known worldwide as SEL, is a library of plant specimens used by alpha (species level) taxonomists for plant identification. The preserved collection of orchid flowers at Selby Gardens is the largest in the Western Hemisphere and contains many type specimens (reference plant specimen for published scientific names). Many orchids have large complex blooms that are best preserved as 3-dimensional flowers rather than pressed-and-dried specimens. The preserved collection is crucial to orchid identifications made by the OIC. The societal benefits of the project include facilitating the work of the OIC, which is the only store-front in the United States for orchid identification. The preserved collection is also available to visiting scientists for morphological studies on the structure of orchids. Plant identification has societal impact because some orchids are edible, but others contain alkaloid compounds that, if ingested, can be harmful. Plant identification, using the preserved collection, has an economic impact by allowing plant breeders producers to correctly name their products. Orchids are not just pretty; they rank in the top three plant groups in the multi-million-dollar floriculture industry in the United States. The preserved orchid flower collection at Selby Gardens is a botanical resource to be maintained and cherished for the nation and the world doc18280 none Rural PTRA is a five-year national Teacher Enhancement project to accommodate physics and physical science teachers in a rural environment. Rural PTRA has a faculty member at a university as a Rural PTRA Coordinator to facilitate arranging and hosting PTRA instructional sessions. PTRAs from the previous PTRA and PTRA Plus projects will conduct the workshops as per the PTRA model. Following a phased plan for implementation, there will be 3 rural sites in year one, 10 in year two, 20 in year three, 33 in year four and 26 in year five. Rural physics and physical science teachers will be able to enroll in 36 workshop hours per year. During the course of the project 655 participants will receive a minimum of 108 hours and another 375 a minimum of 72 hours. Following the PTRA model the project will identify rural participants with leadership capability and content knowledge and will encourage them to apply for PTRA leader training to establish a cohort of Rural PTRA teacher leaders that can continue to serve science teachers from rural communities. In the pattern of previous PTRA projects this has led to long term sustainability doc18281 none Mexico, with nearly 30,000 plant species, represents one of the great centers of biodiversity in the world. Its diverse topography and climates harbor a complex mix of tropical, temperate, dry forest, and unique cloud forest floras. The Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, and particularly the dry tropical deciduous forests in western Mexico support one of the world s great arid-land floras. These rich floras are key to understanding plant evolution and biogeography, but are threatened by rapid changes in land and water use. The need for accurate and accessible biodiversity information on Mexico s flora has never been greater. In the last few decades a new and critical role for specimen collections has emerged. Degradation of global ecosystems and the accelerated pace of environmental change has led to massive loss of the World s biodiversity. Conservation of plant and animal species has thus become a major reason for research museums and herbaria. Most old collections from biodiversity-rich tropical regions are held ex situ, in museums and herbaria within developed countries. As developing nations build strong conservation programs they need to access information about organisms from their territory. For this reason, and to promote biodiversity research, more conscious efforts have to be made by the major, well-established institutions with large holdings of material to make this information widely available. The Michigan Herbarium with its nearly 1,700,000 specimens, is the seventh largest in the United States and the third largest university herbarium. It contains probably the second largest and most important collection of Mexican plants outside of Mexico, with approximately 240,000 land plant specimens. The project will catalog some 130,000 specimens over a three-year period. The data model used is SPECIFY, developed at the U of Kansas under the auspices of several federal agencies, currently in use for cataloging Michigan plants at the Herbarium. It will provide, via the Internet, a digital catalog of public access with specimen images and mapping serving capabilities that will allow users to perform searches and query spatially on particular areas on a map, download species lists and generate distributional data. The biological information contained in specimen collections constitutes an enormous but underutilized scientific resource. It is now possible through digital imaging and Internet technologies to easy and efficiently capture, store, and access specimen information, enormously reducing the potential damage to specimens from frequent loans to researchers throughout the world. This project will enhance the research value of Mexican plant collections at Michigan for botanists, ecologists, resource managers, teachers, students, institutions and Government agencies. The project proposed here will also enhance links between the University of Michigan and key Mexican scientific institutions like Mexico s National Commission for the Study and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO) and the Instituto de Biologia at the National Autonomous University (UNAM), as well as other US herbaria with important Mexican collections. The database will be part of the REMIB (Mexican Network on Biodiversity Information, to which many international institutions belong) and the Species Analyst networks doc18282 none This program aims to energize 6th-8th grade students in two middle schools within two St. Louis school districts, about math, science, and engineering through experimentation and computer visualization. Ten teaching teams with specific areas of expertise will be formed, consisting of a GK-12 Fellow, a UGTA, a K-12 teacher and a Washington University faculty member. Each team will develop a teaching module in conjunction with K-12 teachers in a K-12 subject area related to the research interests of the students. A team will rotate through four classrooms during each year and since each project is multidisciplinary, teaching teams will be expected to draw on the expertise of other teams as necessary. This program will achieve the maximum leverage possible by ensuring that each student has an opportunity to develop a depth of knowledge in at least four areas and learn how each is strongly tied to the other disciplines. Faculty from the Washington University Department of Education will develop and implement a GK-12 Teaching Workshop to instruct the teaching teams so that they will have a more effective interaction with the students. The GK-12 Fellows will be selected from diverse backgrounds and in addition to classroom activities will act as role models to the students, potentially influencing them to consider math, science, or engineering as career options. This project is receiving partial support from the Directorate for Engineering doc18283 none With the support of the Organic Dynamics Program in the Chemistry Division, Professor Robert D. Bach, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Delaware, will continue theoretical studies of oxygen transfer processes in both small molecules and in biomolecules. These are systems that are difficult to characterize and among the most challenging both theoretically and computationally. While the mechanism of oxygen transfer from such classical oxygen donors as peracids, dioxiranes and oxaziridines to a variety of nucleophiles such as alkenes, amines, sulfides and phosphines in two-electron processes are now reasonably well understood, much is yet to be learned about the oxidation of saturated hydrocarbons by one-electron oxidative reactions. Aided by a highly accurate systematic study of O-O bond dissociation energies, Professor Bach has placed his conclusions about the energetics of oxygen transfer on a sound thermodynamic basis. The proposed work will lead to a better understanding of oxidation reactions using high level theoretical and computational methods to explicitly examine the potential role of the excited singlet electronic structure of peroxynitrous acid in hydrogen atom abstraction processes. Professor Robert D. Bach, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Delaware, with the support of the Organic Dynamics Program, studies the mechanism of oxygen atom transfer, which is important in understanding the metabolism of drugs in the body. This work is especially important to understanding how the family of enzymes known as cytochrome P-450 metabolizes drugs in animals doc18284 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. James Albert and Mr. George Burgess at Florida Museum of Natural History to improve the Ichthyological Collection. Species are in decline around the world as we pass through a wave of mass extinctions due to human activities. While the biodiversity crisis accelerates efforts are being made to preserve our genetic heritage for future generations. The Florida Museum of Natural History ichthyological collection is a significant national resource, with principal strengths in western and eastern Atlantic shelf and deepwater marine fishes, western Atlantic reef fishes, and freshwater fishes from the Southeastern United States, Central and northern South America, and the West Indies. The UF collection continues to grow and is used by researchers throughout the nation and the world. The Florida Museum ichthyological collection presently contains about 216,000 identified lots (jars) bearing close to 2.2 million specimens ascribed to approximately 6,600 species. Of these about 150,000 lots are electronically catalogued. Among the uncatalogued materials are an estimated 73,000 lots of specimens identified to species acquired from orphaned collections. These uncatalogued lots include some of the Florida Museum s most valuable materials. At present a large number of these specimens are not electronically catalogued, greatly restricting their use and access. The lack of availability to these substantial resources on electronic databases dramatically reduces their utility and represents a significant loss of research opportunities. This project will electronically catalogue and physically integrate orphaned lots into the existing Florida Museum collection in newly provided facilities. The specific goals are to: 1: Install mobile, high density shelving units in the newly allocated space. 2. Electronically catalog 46,500 identified lots. 3: Physically integrate these materials into the existing catalogued collection on newly purchased and existing compactor shelving units. All lots will receive new labels, be topped off or receive new alcohol as needed, receive new closures or be rebottled if appropriate, and be shelved with conspecifics on compacted shelving units. To facilitate continued safety and access throughout the cataloguing process all materials will be maintained in phylogenetic order by family in air-conditioned facilities provided with access aisles. To expedite incorporation of new collections we will minimize new taxonomic identifications. Specimens representing highly redundant taxa or those terminally damaged will be recorded and discarded. Electronic cataloguing of the orphaned materials will substantially increase the flow of information into and out of the Florida Museum collection as a whole. Cataloguing and integrating orphaned ichthyological collections will provide visiting scholars, students and users of the Florida Museum and Internet databases access to these important data. Achieving the project objectives will facilitate long-term growth of the collection, promote research into the catalogued materials, and greatly increase the long-term management and public outreach capabilities of the Florida Museum and its information resources. These results will enhance the role of the University of Florida as a center for the education and training of a new generation of scientists in aquatic biodiversity doc18285 none This project will bring the storage conditions for the plant collection at the Academy of Natural Sciences (PH) up to archival standards. These specimens, representing many of the earliest and historically most significant plant collections of the United States, are currently threatened by environmental instability and pest incursions that result from current storage conditions. The mobile shelving systems installed more than 20 years ago were one of the first such installations and were thus something of a testing ground for several design features. Although designed with the best of intentions, the system has proven to be fundamentally flawed on several counts including absence of doors, storage spaces (cubbies) that are the wrong size for herbarium specimens, and construction materials that are not archival quality. The cabinet system is made of bulky yet permeable wood-composite materials that outgas volatile compounds. In addition to these flaws in the compactor system, the surrounding storage area is not adequately sealed from adjacent areas and has poor control of temperature and humidity. These conditions will be ameliorated by acquisition of new metal herbarium cabinets to be installed on existing, refurbished compactor carriages and by installation of a new HVAC system to control temperature and humidity. Metal cabinets with tightly closing, gasketed doors, will solve several problems including elimination of exposure of specimens to non-archival quality construction materials, correction of cubby dimensions, and buffering of local environmental conditions. Together with climate control, this will permit control of insect infestations and prevent pest movement between cabinets. The Herbarium of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia is home to unique resources of scientific and historical importance. Notably, it houses upwards of 44,000 type specimens and half again as many specimens of special historical significance. The collection totals more than 1.3 million specimens, including many of the most historically significant collections of the North American flora. Notable collections from the 18th and 19th centuries include those of B. S. Barton ( - ), H. Muhlenberg ( - ), T. Nuttall ( - ), and nearly all of the surviving specimens collected by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark during their historic exploration of the western U.S. ( -06). This project will preserve the current collection and allow for expansion of approximately 10-15%, sufficient to handle anticipated growth over the next 10-15 years. The new cabinets and HVAC system will have the immediate and long-term impact of saving the specimens at PH from further damage and protecting them for the future. Due to the many type specimens and wealth of historical material, these upgrades will benefit the national and international community of botanical and historical scholars, while doc18286 none This Chemistry Division award supports a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at six primarily undergraduate institutions. This dispersed site is coordinated by David Rheingold at Juniata College and involves 12 undergraduates each summer for , and . While this REU site is geographically dispersed, it is linked by the common theme of physical organic chemistry. The research projects include the synthesis and material science applications of hexaazaanthracenes (Brisbois, Macalester); antiaromatic fluorenyl and indenyl dications (Mills, Trinity University); rational syntheses of buckminsterfullerene (Mitzel, Trinity College); ordered arrays of polyphenols by tandem reactions (Rheingold, Juniata); synthesis and electronic structure of bicyclo[1.1.1]pentyl-phenylacetylenes (Mondanaro, St. Michael s College); and electronic effects in the cycloaromatization of arenediynes (Russell, Northern Kentucky University). Students will be recruited by each research mentor, with special efforts to recruit members of under-represented groups. The mentors and undergraduate researchers will meet as a group at least twice each summer (once at a national meeting) and use electronic bulletin boards or tele video conferences to discuss their research informally. The REU program will be assessessed by participant surveys and faculty evaluations of student progress doc18287 none In this project, TERC and the American Geological Institute have distilled the Earth science curriculum down to the essential knowledge and skills by focusing on the core ideas of the discipline, which they call the big ideas of science. The approach is based on Understanding by Design and aims to help teachers cover less material but do so more thoroughly and with the learning goals clearly in mind. It includes two-week summer institutes in content and pedagogy, trial teaching with peer observations and two mini conferences. Materials are developed to help middle school teachers use the freely-available scientific visualizations from NASA, NOAA, USGS and others. Two years of middle school field tests for the materials will be done in New England. In the third year, staff developers will work with ten districts to field test a handbook and launch Earth Science by Design in their districts. The deliverables include the Handbook, the website and at least 120 hours of inservice experiences for 250 teachers. The materials will be disseminated by print and on the World Wide Web. They will be complete, containing everything needed by school districts, museums and others to institute professional development programs for middle school science teachers to be entitled Earth Science by Design doc18288 none A primary type specimen holds a special status in scientific research, as it is the name-bearer specimen on which the recognition of the species is based. The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature states that institutions holding primary type specimens should take all necessary steps for their safe preservation, make them accessible for study and publish lists of the type specimens in their collections. The Entomology Department of the Academy of Natural Sciences has holdings of over 11,000 primary type specimens of insects and related invertebrates. The current housing of the primary type specimens is sub-standard, with antiquated metal cabinets with degraded felt gaskets that do little to prevent intrusions by pests and do not ameliorate greatly the fluctuations in room temperature and humidity. Some drawers in the cabinets show significant gaps that also can allow pests to enter. The type specimens of many groups of insects are stored with multiple species per storage tray, subjecting each specimen to unnecessary handling and causing problems in re-associating loose parts with the appropriate specimen. Some of the collections have been exchanged with other institutions in the past, and the lack of available lists of type specimen holdings of the Entomology Department at the Academy of Natural Sciences has caused unnecessary confusion for researchers and hindered their scientific research. This project will re-house the type specimens in state of the art cabinetry, and expand to safer storage of just one species per storage unit. This project will also develop a primary type computer database that will be used in the re-curation process, to help in collection management, and most importantly, to be available to users worldwide, through searchable Internet access. The entire two-year project will cost $124,020. The Academy of Natural Sciences and the Bradley Bequest (administered through Cornell University) will provide $31,588 (35%); the remainder is funded through the National Science Foundation. Accurate species identification is essential in scientific research, for example, as a tool for understanding global biological diversity, to confirm the identify of an invasive or beneficial species, or to help characterize a threatened species. Primary type specimens serve as the foundation of accurate identifications and act in an important role in stabilizing the naming system of species that is used worldwide by scientists, government agencies, conservationists, educators, and students. The type specimens not only must be preserved for use now and for future generations, but the information available with the specimens must be available for use worldwide. This project not only preserves the specimens, but the information on the specimen holdings will be available through the internet to users worldwide when they need to use it. This re-housing, cataloging, and internet accessibility for the primary type specimens in this project are all necessary first steps toward subsequent digital imaging of the specimens and internet image access in future years doc18289 none This project will transfer the Abbott personal collection of marine algae into the Bernice P. Bishop Museum s so that future generations of researchers and educators may benefit from them. All information associated with these specimens will be databased and assimilated into the Museum s algal collection. The correct names of the primary reef-building algae will be resolved. The resulting algal collection will be the most accurate comprehensive documentation of algal biodiversity of the Pacific region in the world. The Abbott Collection contains many thousands of valuable seaweed specimens that document the marine reef-building floristic biodiversity of the Hawaiian Island chain from Kure Atoll to the island of Hawaii and elsewhere in the Pacific. Research, monitoring and resource management efforts, especially pertinent to threats of marine invasive species and other environmental changes, are substantial activities of many federal, state, and commonwealth governments. Reliable records and accurate taxonomic identifications, with emphasis on the reef-building coralline algae, are of major ecological importance in understanding the dynamics of reef ecosystems. These data are crucial to any effective resource management throughout the Pacific. The Museum s virtual algal herbarium direct Internet access will enable immediate availability of precision information and rapid response via interactive data platforms. Educational benefits will range from general species information and images, to accurate known distribution, species range predictability, potential spread of invasive species, and ecological changes doc18290 none The focus of this research is the preparation of poly(paraphenyleneethynylene)s (PPEs) via alkyne metathesis. The goal will be the synthesis of PPEs with large chiroptical activities, PPEs that carry polymeric or conjugated side chains as novel rod-coil polymers and PPE-heterostructures for use in polymeric light emitting diodes. Also, the absolute molecular weight of the PPEs will be determined by transformation from rigid rods into flexible coils by catalytic hydrogenation. Further, synthetic methodology will be developed for access to polydiacetylenes and hybrids with PPEs and poly(paraphenylenevinylene)s (PPVs) by alkyne metathesis with simple in situ catalysts or defined molybdenum carbynes. Materials properties will be determined and the polymers will be exploited for device applications such as LEDs, circularly polarized LEDs and PPE-based lasing devices. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Uwe H. Bunz of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of South Carolina. Professor Bunz will focus his work on using alkyne metathesis for the synthesis of both new and known conjugated polymers. These polymers are attractive as stable, processable and emissive semiconductors with a wide range of potential applications. The research is also an excellent training ground for undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral students doc18291 none The goal of the project is to learn how isothermal frontal polymerization (IFP) can be efficiently used to produce gradient optical materials. IFP is a method of producing polymers in which a localized reaction zone of free-radical polymerization propagates at the rate of about one cm per day through an unstirred solution of monomer and initiator. A seed of polymer is placed at the bottom of a cuvette, and a solution of the polymer s monomer with a free-radical initiator is placed over it. The system is maintained at a constant temperature. Polymerization occurs slowly in the bulk solution but much faster in the region of polymer as the monomer swells it because of the gel effect. The overall effect is the slow propagation of a transition zone between polymer and the monomer initiator solution. Using Laser Line Deflection, we will measure the gradients created during the polymerization of methyl methacrylate and compare these to analytical and numerical models. A gradient optical material is a material that possesses a spatial gradient of an optical property. Two types can be prepared via IFP. One type is Gradient Refractive Index (GRIN) lenses and fibers. The other type is organic optical limiters. The RI gradient can be produced by adding a dopant, with a refractive index different from that of the polymer, to the monomer initiator solution. The dopant is redistributed by the propagating front to create a dopant concentration gradient and resulting refractive index gradient. Using a nonlinear optical dye as the dopant allows the creation of a concentration variation of this dye in a polymer matrix. Impact: This project will result in a superior understanding of how isothermal frontal polymerization can be used to prepare special materials with useful applications. Gradient refractive index fibers are used commercially for applications in which large amounts of digital signals must be transferred between devices over a short distance. Plastic fiber is cheaper to produce and so this research can help the production of consumer products and fibers for computer networks. Optical limiters are used for protecting human eyes from intense laser pulses. Preparing such devices with polymers can make their weight and cost lower and thus their utility greater. The research will benefit the education of two graduate students. The collaboration between mathematicians and chemists will provide them an important learning experience in collaborative research. Because of the significant number of African-Americans and women at USM, these groups will benefit from this project doc18292 none The vertebrate paleontology (VP) collection of the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History (OMNH), University of Oklahoma, constitutes a major, international resource of vertebrate fossils, with over 61,000 specimens. The collection is particularly strong in Permian vertebrates, Jurassic dinosaurs, Cretaceous faunas, and Miocene mammals. The core of the collection, amassed during the s-40s, remained largely uncurated and fell into disuse and inaccessibility. In , the institution began a multi-phased program of collection renovation. Two initial phases focused on specimen curation, preparation restoration, and storage; a third phase, data verification and computerization (including web access to specimens data and images), is in progress. Successful completion of the first two phases has led to a dramatic increase in collection activity and utilization, documented by sharp rises in visiting researchers, outgoing loans, and publications. In , OMNH opened a comprehensive new building with vastly expanded and improved resources for research, exhibits, and education. The resultant expansion of the VP program assures a strong potential for substantially higher utilization in the foreseeable future. However, current collection use is tightly constrained by available storage cabinets. This problem will be addressed through (1) purchase of additional storage equipment and (2) curation of these new acquisitions and rearrangement (decompression) of the collection. Within the context of our overall plan for collection improvement, the proposed project is timed to coordinate with a major, related initiative: specimen inventory and data verification. The recent move of OMNH natural history collections into a single building has brought new standards and concerns in collection management. Existing wooden pallets that hold oversized specimens pose a threat (pest infestation) to other collections now housed in the same facility. We propose to address this issue through replacement of wooden with archival plastic pallets. With the recent hiring of new curators and collection support staff, OMNH is poised to emerge as a major center for research and education in paleobiology. The VP collection is a fundamental resource to this fledgling program and to the biological community in general. Given this environment, demand for use of the collection will continue to increase sharply. Completion of the proposed project will permit proper housing, logical arrangement, and ready access to the entire holdings, thereby permitting us to meet the demands of increased utilization doc18293 none Talaria, Inc., proposes a three-year project to increase understanding of how to get research results on teaching and learning into teachers minds and actions. To accomplish this, a teacher professional development program will be designed to implement DIAGNOSER, a computerized diagnostic instructional tool. The DIAGNOSER is a web-delivered system in which students answer assignments questions and teachers access the report on the students after they have completed the assignments. DIAGNOSER focuses on physical sciences, force and motion at the middle-school level. The professional development program will provide teachers with opportunities to use formative assessment tools, interpret student data, interact with and reflect on each other s practice, and access research and science resources. Participating teachers include those involved in three middle-school Local Systemic Change Projects in Washington State. The program involves one workshop, teacher networks, face-to-face meeting with teachers and resource teachers for in-class coaching. The improvement of the program will be done through iterations (design-testing-redesign). The research will focus on two questions: What are the effects of the professional development and diagnostic instructional tools on teachers teaching and students learning? What are the teacher and system factors related to the effective implementation of the tools? The premise of the proposal is that at the end of the study there will be a prototype program that can be scalable nationally doc18294 none An ongoing observational record of nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, total peroxynitrates, total alkylnitrates, nitric acid, and total odd nitrogen (NOy) at the University of California Blodgett Forest Research Station will be extended. The PI has developed a novel instrument based on thermal dissociation - laser-induced fluorescence (TD-LIF) with four channels. In addition, the PI plans to measure UV irradiance. Through collaborations, measurements of ozone, hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide will be available. Box- and 1-dimensional modeling will be used to understand and interpret past and ongoing measurements. Furthermore, the PI intends to demonstrate the capability of his instrument for carrying out eddy-covariance flux measurements, and then carry out a full annual cycle of measurements. This project, if successful, will demonstrate new technology for trace gas concentration and flux measurements, and will provide new insights into the photochemistry of forested areas that are partially impacted by anthropogenic pollution doc18295 none This project will create, pilot, field-test and disseminate standards-based Professional Development materials that will support in-service needs of practicing technology education teachers. The Standards for Technological Literacy have been published, and this project will help teachers to implement them in the classroom. A consortium of institutions will develop the materials. The materials to be produced include two content primers in biotechnologies and medical technologies, and a curriculum vision monograph that details what technology teachers must know and do to be effective in teaching doc18296 none Despite a growing interest in, and concern over, global biodiversity, many priceless collections of marine invertebrates (crustaceans, echinoderms, marine worms, molluscs, and other groups) have become orphaned in recent years. This project will provide funds to care for several existing and diverse collections of marine invertebrates that have been donated to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. New shelving will be installed on existing tracks, and supplies needed to care for these collections will be purchased. Additionally, two persons will be hired in the Museum s Marine Biodiversity Processing Center to help sort, curate, and upgrade the collections. The broader scientific significance of the project is that these collections, and others like them, represent windows into historical marine diversity along the west coast. In some cases, the collections contain specimens from areas that are no longer accessible. Such collections form the basis for what we understand about marine biodiversity, past and present, and represent priceless storehouses of data on Pacific coast marine life. Knowledge gleaned from these collections can form the basis for strong educational programs and for making sound decisions in conservation and resource management doc18297 none Jewett This interdisciplinary study combines scientific ecological knowledge (SEK) and the traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) of the Inupiat people regarding Kotzebue Sound, Alaska. The research will focus on developing an ecological profile of the nearshore Kotzebue Sound and testing three hypotheses regarding food webs, sewage impacts, and ecosystem change. Common methods of ethnography will be used to elicit TEK, and standard oceanographic techniques will be used for the SEK portion of the study. The project includes outreach to local schools and will bring local students of all ages into the data collection process doc18298 none This project will develop six mathematics and six science graduate level courses. The goal is to provide science and mathematics content for teachers with elementary certifications who now teach at the middle school level. Each summer participants will take either two math or two science courses during an intensive four-week program. It is expected the same participants will return for three years, eventually taking all six courses. 150 teachers will be served over a three-year period. Teachers will receive follow-up support through the internet and or on-site support. Competitive $500 grants will be available for supplies and travel. In addition, the PI will establish a professional development support group, the Northeastern Oklahoma Math and Science Teacher Association (NOMSTA doc18299 none This project will contribute to the field of automatic planning by developing methods to determine what planner works well under various sets of conditions. It will construct a metaplanner that will be able to test performance of existing and hybridized planners on a suite of domains, especially more realistic domains than have been used commonly before. Based on the results of initial studies, predictive models of planner performance will be developed that translate problem and domain features to estimates of how much time would be needed by a given planner to solve the problem. The models, in turn, will be operationalized in the metaplanner. There are three steps to the work: 1) collect and develop applications and realistic domains to assemble a challenging benchmark set of problems; 2) modeling the performance of several state of the art planners, and 3) developing a metaplanner which is directed by the models to select a planner to solve problems in a particular domain. Planning underlies any complex human endeavor, from organizing a busy life to operating a large airline or testing large software systems. In each case, people need to track an enormous number of details, marshal resources and ensure that actions necessary to achieve their goals can be taken in a timely matter. However, automated planning has had little effect on how planning is actually accomplished. This research seeks to improve that situation through new methods to decide which planner is appropriate for a given task. The metaplanner can be used by both people learning about planning and new application developers who may not know which planner would be best for their application doc18300 none Dorfman The proposed research will be devoted to further studies on the foundation of the theory of irreversible processes in fluid systems. Such processes include viscous and thermal flows as well as diffusive motion, chemical reactions, in both classical and quantum systems. Recent work by the PI and co-workers has shown that for most systems of interest, there is an underlying chaotic dynamics which can be viewed as the source of the irreversibility. The sensitivity of the motion of a chaotic system of particles to the precise values of the initial conditions of the particles reflects itself as an apparent randomness in the dynamics of the system. Current research is devoted to a study of entropy production and related irreversible phenomena in classically chaotic systems, as well as to the quantum mechanical versions of the systems and their processes. This latter direction is stimulated in part by recent work by many authors on the quantum behavior of classically chaotic systems which can be fruitfully applied to a study of irreversibility in quantum systems. Finally, work will be carried out to determine the analogous properties of non-chaotic systems, or of mixed chaotic and non-chaotic systems, with transport to study the modifications of the theory needed to treat such systems, as well doc18301 none Willis This award to Oregon State University provides instrumentation to significantly improve the oceanographic research capabilities of the institution and the research vessel Wecoma, an NSF-owned ship operated by OSU as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The award supports acquisition of a phased array 75 kHz acoustic current profiler that is expected to significantly improve the R V Wecoma s capabilities for measuring currents. It also provides upgrades to the piston corers of the NORCOR facility and improvements to the shipboard computer network on R V Wecoma. All of these are shared-use capabilities that are available to all funded users of the R V Wecoma, or in the case of the coring systems, users of any UNOLS vessel. These improvements will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists during and future years doc18302 none Boolchand This three-year award for US-France collaboration in materials research involves researchers and students at the University of Cincinnati and at the University Pierre and Marie Curie (Paris VI) and the High-T Laboratory in Orleans of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Punit Boolchand in the US and Richard Kerner in France lead this team of theorists and experimentalists. The research addresses structural studies of oxide glasses. The objective is to develop models to predict thermal and structural properties. Alkali silicate glasses will be prepared; their thermal and spectroscopic properties compared and contrasted; and constraint and stochastic agglomeration theories applied to the experimental results. The US investigators bring to this collaboration expertise in synthesis of glasses and spectroscopy and constraint theory. This is complemented by French theoretical expertise in modeling glass structure and access to high temperature glass preparation facilities in Orleans. This award represents the US side of parallel proposals to the NSF and the CNRS. NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigators and graduate students. CNRS will support visits by French researchers and graduate students to the United States. The research will advance understanding of the thermal and structural properties of oxide glasses and their commercial applications as silica fibers for optical communications and for silicon microelectronic device fabrication. The project will advance doctoral thesis research of US and French graduate students, who will actively participate in the synthesis, characterization of oxide glasses, and analysis of experimental results doc18291 none The goal of the project is to learn how isothermal frontal polymerization (IFP) can be efficiently used to produce gradient optical materials. IFP is a method of producing polymers in which a localized reaction zone of free-radical polymerization propagates at the rate of about one cm per day through an unstirred solution of monomer and initiator. A seed of polymer is placed at the bottom of a cuvette, and a solution of the polymer s monomer with a free-radical initiator is placed over it. The system is maintained at a constant temperature. Polymerization occurs slowly in the bulk solution but much faster in the region of polymer as the monomer swells it because of the gel effect. The overall effect is the slow propagation of a transition zone between polymer and the monomer initiator solution. Using Laser Line Deflection, we will measure the gradients created during the polymerization of methyl methacrylate and compare these to analytical and numerical models. A gradient optical material is a material that possesses a spatial gradient of an optical property. Two types can be prepared via IFP. One type is Gradient Refractive Index (GRIN) lenses and fibers. The other type is organic optical limiters. The RI gradient can be produced by adding a dopant, with a refractive index different from that of the polymer, to the monomer initiator solution. The dopant is redistributed by the propagating front to create a dopant concentration gradient and resulting refractive index gradient. Using a nonlinear optical dye as the dopant allows the creation of a concentration variation of this dye in a polymer matrix. Impact: This project will result in a superior understanding of how isothermal frontal polymerization can be used to prepare special materials with useful applications. Gradient refractive index fibers are used commercially for applications in which large amounts of digital signals must be transferred between devices over a short distance. Plastic fiber is cheaper to produce and so this research can help the production of consumer products and fibers for computer networks. Optical limiters are used for protecting human eyes from intense laser pulses. Preparing such devices with polymers can make their weight and cost lower and thus their utility greater. The research will benefit the education of two graduate students. The collaboration between mathematicians and chemists will provide them an important learning experience in collaborative research. Because of the significant number of African-Americans and women at USM, these groups will benefit from this project doc18304 none The National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council Center for Education propose a two-year project, the goal of which is to determine the most viable approach or approaches for assessing technological literacy. Technological literacy, as defined in the proposal, includes an understanding of the nature of technology, the design process and the history of technology; a capacity to ask questions and make informed decisions about technology; and some level of hands-on capability related to the use of technology. The project will focus on three distinct populations in the United States: K-16 students, K-16 teachers and out-of-school adults. It is to be overseen by a committee appointed by the National Research Council in consultation with the National Academy of Engineering which is to be comprised of experts in such fields as cognitive science, assessment, curriculum development, technology education and teacher education. The committee will collect and analyze relevant literature and get information through workshops and commissioned papers prior making a recommendation for assessing technological literacy. The primary product will be a report that describes the committee s work, findings and conclusions, and then presents its recommendations. The outcome will be a widely disseminated, visible, well-supported document that will: (a) increase the ability of educational researchers and policy makers to critically evaluate established and new methods for assessing technological literacy; (b) encourage the inclusion of technology-related items in established assessments (e.g., NAEP); and (c) help develop new approaches for determining what various subsets of the U.S. population know about technology doc18305 none The Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Animal Behavior Site Grant enables promising undergraduate students to participate in laboratory or field research projects in animal behavior. Each year, the program awards internships to 10 students who experience firsthand the nature of the research process, the conduct of science in general, and the integrative study of animal behavior. To accomplish these goals, REU pays travel expenses, room & board, and a stipend so that interns can spend 10 weeks in the summer on the Bloomington campus or at a field site conducting research with scientists from Indiana University s Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior. Participation in the research project provides the main focus of the program, but interns also participate in research ethics workshops, attend lectures that introduce them to the integrative approach to studying animal behavior, and write up and orally present their research findings at a final REU Research Symposium. Interns also participate in social activities, field trips and activities that help them prepare for graduate school or other postgraduate training. An important objective of the REU in Animal Behavior program is to provide to students from groups traditionally under-represented in science and from institutions with limited research opportunities access to cutting-edge research and membership in a research university community. It is expected that in the long term this program will help such students consider careers in animal behavior or related disciplines and increase their representation in science in general doc18306 none The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) proposes a three-year project, the goal of which is to prepare reports on the 8th grade NAEP mathematics assessment conducted in , any NAEP items to be released in and several earlier NAEP assessments. The project concentrates on two issues: (1) Focus 1 which will be the preparation of the interpretive reports that include content and process analyses, comparison studies and trend analyses; and (2) Focus II which will be the creation of materials for teachers. Products for Professional Development and Teaching will be: (1) three sets of materials based on 4th grade, 8th grade and 12th grade student responses. The first set will be directed toward teachers of grades 3 through 5, the second toward middle school teachers and the third toward high school teachers. Materials will be organized around the five NAEP content strands (i.e., number sense; properties and operation; measurement; geometry and spatial sense; data analysis, statistics and probability; and algebra and functions) to correspond with the framework used for Focus I; and (2) facilitator s guides that will contain suggestions and strategies to be used by the workshop leaders. Materials for professional development will be piloted in the NCTM meeting and through the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE). Data will be collected in the form of surveys and interviews with participants, as well as copies of participants work. In addition, case studies of teachers sampled from elementary, middle and high school levels will be conducted in order to obtain a sense of the impact of the materials on teachers instruction. Evaluation will focus on the progress of Focus I and the impact of materials on teachers classroom practices (Focus II). An advisory board will oversee the analyses, process and products doc18307 none Greenshields Description: This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. Ian Greenshields and Dr. Reda Ammar, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, and Dr. Ayman El-Dessouki, President of the Electronics Research Institute (ERI), Cairo, Egypt. They propose to do research, which seeks to establish the ERI in Cairo as a Center of Excellence in Egypt in grid computing, linking Egyptian and US computation resources. The project will include three phases: an establishment phase, in which a small US-Egyptian cluster is established at ERI, together with extant grid middleware; an educational phase, in which they will jointly create an on-line educational resource for Egyptian (and also for U.S.) scientists regarding grid computing; and a research phase, in which they will exercise the small clusters with a collaborative project in computational medicine to assess loading characteristics relative to time differences and the effect of low bandwidth network connections relative to problem granularity and the ratio of compute time to data transfer time. Scope: The aggregation of widely distributed computing resources into a seamless massively parallel virtual machine (grid computer) has the potential for providing cost-effective supercomputing and for encouraging international scientific collaboration by the sharing of data in a massive virtual data space. However, scientists in developing countries tend not to have access either to massive grid computers or to the kind of IT support which allows them to exploit inexpensive clusters of commodity workstations as local nodes within a collaborative grid. The proposed development can provide the Egyptian scientific community with a medium-scale Grid computer, and because of the time differences between Egypt and the U.S., machines at U.S. sites which collaborate with Egyptian scientists can be harnessed by Egypt during the off-hours at the U.S. end, and the same holds for U.S. use of Egyptian machines during off-hours at the Egyptian end. The US PI and the Egyptian collaborator have extensive experience in this area of research. One graduate student from the University of Connecticut will work on the project in Egypt. This proposal meets the INT objective of supporting collaborative research in areas of mutual scientific interest doc18308 none The Tufts Pre-college Engineering for Teachers (PCET) project will provide professional development experiences for K-12 teachers in the state of Massachusetts to help them address the Science and Technology Engineering Curriculum Framework adopted by the state in . This framework clearly states that schools should provide a comprehensive science and technology engineering program enrolling all students preK-12. The project will build upon work that has already been done to infuse engineering literacy into K-12 schools. PCET is a collaboration between Tufts University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, University of Massachusetts-Lowell, and University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Each of these engineering schools will act as a local resource for the teachers participating from that section of the state, with Tufts University serving as the lead institution. The project model involves developing a cadre of 96 mentor teachers through a series of annual Summer Institutes, and assisting these teachers in the development of curriculum materials and adoption strategies for their local contexts. These mentor teachers will also, with the help of project staff, design and deliver similar training sessions to an additional 384 satellite teachers in their home institutions. Science and technology teachers have been identified as the target audience for these professional development experiences. Project work will begin with teachers in grades 9-12, and work backward through middle and elementary grade bands (6-8, 3-5, K-2) over the life of the project doc18309 none Addressing Accessibility in Mathematics, Phase 2 is a three-year Professional Development Materials project. Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC), in partnership with CAST, proposes to create professional development materials to help teachers enable all students, including those with cognitive, sensory, physical and emotional disabilities, to be successful with standards-based, middle-school mathematics. The proposed work is based on a two-year NSF proof of concept project (Addressing Accessibility in Middle School Mathematics, Phase 1). The proposed materials comprise six components: (1) an Accessibility Toolkit, (2) Workshop Modules, (3) Collaborative Planning Group Resources, (4) an Addressing Accessibility Implementation Guide, (5) a Guide for Writing Accessible Mathematics Curriculum, and (6) an Addressing Accessibility Website. The project s audience will be mathematics and special-education teachers, school and district leaders, professional-development and technical-assistance providers, curriculum developers and publishers because each is a key stakeholder in ensuring that students with disabilities receive the best possible mathematics education doc18310 none Haque Description: This project supports the participation of US scientists in an US-Bangladesh Workshop on Composite Materials and Thermal Loading to be held in Dhaka, Bangladesh between December 26, and January 2, . The US organizer is Dr. Anwarul Haque, Department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The co-organizer is Dr. A.K.M. Sadrul Islam, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), Dhaka, Bangladesh. The workshop will include discussions on response of composite materials to various loading conditions including static and cyclic, mechanical and thermal. It will include a short course on composite materials with emphasis on polymer matrix composites. The binational workshop is to be in conjunction with a meeting organized by the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME) and The Bangladesh Society of Mechanical Engineering (BSME) and titled BSME-ASME International Conference on Thermal Engineering . The organizers plan a publication of the proceedings. Scope: This project enables four US scientists to attend this workshop to exchange information with Bangladesh scientists about recent developments in the analytical and experimental research on composite materials in the United States and in Bangladesh. Discussions will be held on possible future collaborations among University of Alabama and BUET researchers. The project meets INT objectives in supporting workshops where mutual benefit and dissemination of information are likely to result doc18311 none The Delaware Science Coalition is a systemic partnership consisting of higher education, businesses, the Delaware Department of Education (DOE) and local districts. With this proposal they are continuing their collaboration to expand their prior K-8 efforts into high schools. The pilot proposal will initially be limited to a focus on improving the science program in the 9th and 10th grades. Ten schools (45 teachers) representing the statewide range of geographic distribution, demographic characteristics and size of student body will be active participants in the process of developing models of successful classroom practice. These schools will be charged with the responsibility of designing an educational system that recognizes their particular characteristics and needs. Common features of models for the selection of instructional materials and teacher professional development are anticipated and lessons learned from this pilot will serve to scale up the project to inform the future development of a comprehensive statewide LSC doc18312 none The Newark Public Schools Systemic Initiative in Mathematics is a five-year Local Systmeic Change project targeting K-8 mathematics. In association with higher education partners Rutgers University and Montclair State University, the project will effect change in three broad areas: the implementation and institutionalization of standards-based curricula, instruction and assessment in every K-8 mathematics classroom in Newark; professional development for the existing cadre of mathematics resource teachers as well as K-8 teachers and administrators; and intensive collaboration with parents, higher education partners and community agencies. The project targets elementary teachers, 260 middle school teachers, 30 mathematics resource teachers, and 60 school administrators. Teachers will participate in two-week summer institutes, monthly follow-up sessions and mathematics mathematics education courses at the universities. In addition, teachers will receive ongoing classroom-based support for their work. The mathematics resource teachers will receive professional development aimed toward enhancing their ability to provide instructional support to the classroom teachers. School administrators will participate in professional development to enhance their understanding of current mathematics educational practices, providing a basis for leadership and support of standards-based mathematics instruction. Project partners will also develop after-school centers to serve as laboratories for collaboration among unversity partners, prospective teachers, undergraduate graduate students, classroom teachers, mathematics resource teachers, administrators and parents doc18313 none A Distance Learning Model for High School Statistics Teachers proposes a collaboration between the American Statistical Association, university faculty (Cal Poly and UCLA), and secondary teachers to develop and pilot a sequence of two courses for high school mathematics teachers whose training has not adequately prepared them to teach statistics. The primary professional development resource currently available for enhancing statistics knowledge is a weeklong workshop, which lacks a mechanism for continued learning and sustained support. By combining a workshop with a yearlong distance education component, this project provides a model of professional development in content areas mandated by curricular change. More specifically, the project will have two parts: a Content Course and a Practicum Course. The two courses have a common format comprised of a weeklong workshop followed by a yearlong, online distance learning component. Both courses also include additional components. This three-year project will enroll a total of 108 high-school teachers. Upon completion of the project, efforts will be focused on the dissemination of (1) the content course and (2) a model for improving teacher qualifications in other SMET content areas undergoing curricular change, such as physics and chemistry doc18314 none Lesson Study Communities in Secondary Mathematics is a three-year Teacher Retention and Renewal project proposing to provide 21 teams of teachers -- or a total of 114 secondary mathematics teachers from varied school settings in New England -- with 150 hours of substantive professional development in mathematics and pedagogy within the framework of Lesson Study. This project will provide training and support for novice teachers as well as quality renewal for veteran teachers. Stipends of $1,000 will be offered to all participants, in addition to money for materials and food. Lesson Study is a collaborative form of lesson planning and observation, central to much of the professional development activity in Japanese elementary and middle schools. In a first phase, the school faculty selects a research theme or goal. Small groups of teachers then plan detailed research lessons and each lesson is taught and observed. Following the observations, the lesson is discussed in detail, improved and taught again. Finally, a detailed written record of the lesson is produced and shared with other teachers. Lesson Study Communities in Secondary Mathematics will build on several prior projects, including the NSF-funded Watertown Pilot, Park City Mathematics Institute (PCMI), and the NSF-funded PROMYS for Teachers, whose results are promising regarding Lesson Study s potential as a powerful vehicle for professional development in American secondary schools. Finally, recognizing that this is one of the first secondary-level Lesson Study implementations in the United States, the project will include a significant research component. The project s research and evaluation efforts will develop images of Lesson Study in the American secondary school that will help us understand how best to implement and support it doc18315 none The goal of this project is to support teacher retention and renewal through professional development institutes for two cohorts of rural teachers over 42 months. The first cadre will consist of 56 teachers, 28 from North Carolina and 28 from Illinois, constituting 7 teams in each state. The second cadre will consist of 104 middle and high school mathematics and science teachers from North Carolina and Illinois, 52 from each of the two states. Thus there are 13 teams from North Carolina and 13 teams from Illinois in each cadre. The following workshops and institutes will be conducted: Summer Institutes - ; Fall Workshops, - ; and Spring Workshops, - . The project addresses four interrelated elements for the revitalization of rural communities: 1) building and sustaining a community of master teachers who support novice teachers through mentoring programs; 2) providing resources and training to develop teachers use of visualization technologies and content expertise to create pedagogically sound conceptual models for student learning; 3) enhancing standards-based curricula through the use of visualization technologies to encourage student engagement; and 4) developing a sustainable and scalable model that continues to assist teachers to become effective leaders and agents of change doc18316 none This award provides funding for the development of a multichannel recording device that can be used to monitor activity of multiple individual neurons in the mammalian brain. Although it is now accepted by most neuroscientists that most brain functions reflect the concerted efforts of many neurons, direct demonstrations have been hampered by the limitations of currently available technology for single-cell recording from the brain, including the lack of automation in electrode placement, a relatively low number of electrodes that can be used simultaneously, and a relatively high cost. The device to be developed should significantly improve on the technical limitations of existing hardware, while not increasing the cost of the equipment needed . Important features include a low cost manipulator system that can position up to 64 electrodes independently of each other, a feedback control system that will couple positioning of the electrodes to the signals detected by the electrodes, and an implant device that allows implanted electrodes to be left in place for long-term recording doc18317 none The goal of this three-year project is to model the development of children s multiplicative reasoning in urban classrooms in grades K-5. The project proposes to analyze teacher-student interactions during instruction to understand how students productions (e.g., strategies, invented notations, arguments, claims, and explanations) are used for collective construction of complex mathematical knowledge that can lead to enhanced student outcomes. The project proposes, through observation at elementary classrooms in urban, low-income schools, to: (1) identify and classify teacher-student interactions that help generate student productions and the sequence that lead to significant mathematical understandings and practices; and (2) create models of thinking - a space of possible teaching and learning actions - that can help teachers adapt or reproduce effective teaching actions. The models created will be tested with other teachers in the last phase of the study. The research will use two types of cases: longitudinal cases of the development of individual student s thinking, and cross-sectional cases in which the focus is the sequence of teacher-student interactions. A secondary goal is to understand how children s reasoning about the strand of multiplicative structures - including fractions, rations, proportions, and multiplication and division - become integrated doc18318 none The intended three-year project will produce a robust Professional Development package for school districts to support the implementation of the middle school curriculum, Constructing Ideas in Physical Science (CIPS). The package will include a program to engage teachers in 120 hours of substantive professional development over a period of two years. The materials will consist of a weeklong getting started workshop to introduce teachers to CIPS, materials for seven follow-up workshops, a CIPS user s site and two CIPS discussion forums. The follow-up workshops address teachers emergent needs during the first two years of teaching CIPS and introduce and support the use of the users site and forums. The latter will support web-based discussions about science teaching, student learning and physical science. The package will be developed by an experienced team of university physical science education researchers, middle school science teachers and other experts, and will be piloted and field tested at three large school systems throughout the United States. Project evaluation will include classroom observations for the purpose of monitoring teacher practice and student learning doc18319 none In the Pacific region served by Pacific Resources for Education and Learning (PREL), lack of access to four-year degree granting programs, coupled with a rapidly growing student population, resulted in the increased hiring of inexperienced and under-qualified teachers. The MENTOR Project addressed this problem by establishing a mentoring program for novice teachers aimed at developing in them the knowledge, skills and dispositions necessary to be effective teachers of mathematics, thereby decreasing the length and trauma of their induction into teaching and increasing their commitment to the profession. Based on training led by PREL personnel, Project mentors provide summer institutes as well as in-class nentoring, inquiry group sessions, and lesson study for novice teachers. The Project includes two cadres, one a group of well-trained and effective mentors of novice teachers, and the other a group effective novice teachers who have an understanding of how to implement standards-based mathematics instruction and who exhibit a strong commitment to the profession. Working together these two groups will generate a collection of exemplary standards-based lesson plans, make presentations at three Pacific Education Conferences (in , and ), and prepare for publication a set of narratives describing novice teachers and mentors professional growth in the MENTOR Project. The MENTOR Project contributes significantly to the development of culturally responsive and appropraite mentoring models for neo-indigenous cultures characterized by linguistic diversity and geographic isolation. The insights gained inform attempts to establish mentoring and other professional development programs in cross-cultural settings in the Pacific and beyond doc18320 none This three-year Teacher Retention and Renewal project seeks to improve the mathematics performance of Yup ik Eskimo and urban Native students through four basic strategies: (1) improving teachers content and pedagogical knowledge, (2) involving teachers in action research, (3) recruiting (and retaining) mentor novice Alaska Native teachers, and (4) researching teacher training effects and its relationship to teachers knowledge and student performance. The principal vehicle to accomplish these goals is a National Science Foundation sponsored curriculum, Adapting Yup ik Elders Knowledge. This curriculum includes culturally relevant topics such as salmon fishing, kayaking, orienting and navigating. Including Native knowledge in the classroom may decrease the long-standing tension between school and community, which often leads to high teacher turnover. The instructional components of the project include three-week Summer Institutes, follow-up workshops in the communities, online support and community math activities. The Summer Institutes are devoted to the integration of culture, pedagogy and content knowledge through the use of the Adapting Yup ik Elders Knowledge curriculum. Through hands-on and inquiry-oriented sessions, participants generate questions, work in peer-assisted groups and keep journals as they explore mathematics, teaching and culture. As a teaching tool, the project uses videotapes from Alaskan classrooms, from other classrooms using culturally-based math programs and from international studies on math teaching and learning. Participants of the Summer Institutes receive credit for three University courses: Geometry and Spatial Reasoning; Algebraic Thinking; and Pedagogy, Content and Culture. The follow-up workshops occur in each community and involve teachers, elders, students and families. To further support the mentors and novice teachers, there are three audio conferences during the school year and on-line support via the use of Blackboard. The project also involves a large research study. The Principal Investigator uses both quantitative and qualitative research methods to investigate (a) the relationship between the teacher training component and teacher knowledge, attitude and performance, and (b) the effects of these processes on Alaska Native and Yup ik student mathematics learning doc18321 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Nonlinear Differential Equations, Mechanics and Bifurcation Shearer This award supports U.S. participants in the conference on Nonlinear Differential Equations, Mechanics, and Bifurcation held at Duke University on May 20-22, . The purpose of the conference is to explore connections between the fields of ordinary and partial differential equations, mechanics and bifurcation, and industrial mathematics, and to encourage the involvement of young mathematical scientists in these areas. The speakers include established leaders in these fields, as well as promising young mathematicians and scientists. The meeting is a collaboration between the Research Triangle universities of Duke University, North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The central theme of the conference is the role of nonlinearity in physical systems, especially elasticity, granular materials, and fluid flow. The interplay between experiments, modeling, theoretical mechanics, mathematical analysis, numerical simulation, and industrial design has proved particularly fruitful in recent years. This conference brings together scientists and mathematicians from all of these areas. The conference is designed to include lively discussion of the interplay between discoveries of new experimental phenomena, proposed mathematical models, theoretical developments and challenges, and corresponding innovations in numerical methods. Bifurcation and pattern formation are observed in experiments with solids, fluids and granular materials, and the mathematical techniques to analyze phenomena have grown quite sophisticated. This connection between experiment and theory, coupled to numerical simulation, occurs throughout the conference doc18322 none This Chemistry Division award supports a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at Michigan State University, where a previous REU site was funded for - . Michael Rathke is the site s Program Director. Thirty-eight faculty are available to serve as REU student mentors. Over the award period ( - ), ten students will be supported each summer in a ten-week program. The research focus will be synthesis, modeling and characterization of materials. The institution s DREW program will be used to assist in the recruitment of minority students. Activities include weekly brown bag luncheon meetings, weekly seminars, field trip to Dow Chemical, and participation in a regional REU mini-meeting poster session. Written feedback is provided at the end of the program from both the student participants and the research mentors. The students will be tracked for several years following the program with a series of questionnaires. The publications that result from REU participation are monitored doc18250 none The two intertwined goals of this project are to determine the suite of genes expressed by Pseudo-nitzschia under toxin-producing conditions, and to acquire a better understanding of the connections between environmental conditions and physiological responses leading to toxin production. A set of physiological experiments will permit evaluation of molecular probes generated from gene expression studies. In turn, the molecular probes will be used to interrogate natural populations and help determine the physiological status of Pseudo-nitzschia in the field. The ultimate goal is to find a specific gene transcript or a pattern of gene expression that is correlated with toxin production in the field. The following hypotheses will be tested: H1: There are genes or a suite of genes whose expression pattern is highly correlated with toxin production in Pseudo-nitzschia. H2: A primary trigger for toxin production in Monterey Bay is silicate limitation, so that certain oceanographic conditions permit bloom development. H3: Silicate limitation may sensitize cells to trace-metal (e.g. copper) stress and the toxin (domoic acid) can function as a metal ion buffer. Batch and continuous cultures will be stressed with silicate, copper, and iron. Growth, substrate utilization, and physiological parameters (variable fluorescence, nutrient quotas, amino acid pools, including domoic acid) will be assessed. Cells will be harvested for development of cDNA subtraction libraries under different stressors. Gene arrays developed from these libraries will provide molecular probes for field testing. Identification of genes related to toxin production, but not general metabolism, will be facilitated by information generated by the physiology experiments. The laboratory work will be combined with a limited field program for assessment of environmental triggers (e.g. copper, silicate, iron stress) and for testing of the molecular probes. Results from the molecular expression and physiological assays will permit an initial description of the cellular pathways mediating environmental triggers (e.g silicate and metals) for production of toxin doc18324 none Prop #: PI: Frederick Jones This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessel Wecoma operated by Oregon State University and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Frederick Jones is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire a rescue boat davit and a replacement forklift doc18325 none University of Arkansas at Fayetteville Dr. Sears is awarded funds to establish a Research Experiences for Undergraduates site in space and planetary sciences at the recently established Arkansas-Oklahoma Center for Space and Planetary Sciences, jointly run by the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville and the Oklahoma State University, Stillwater. Twelve students from regional schools will be placed into research groups. The research groups at the Center involve chemists, biologists, geologists, physicists and mechanical engineers who are interested in the biological and geological processes occurring on Mars, the geological evolution of asteroids, and the design and construction of equipment to be placed on missions. Most of the research projects will make use of the Andromeda planetary environmental chamber recently donated by NASA s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to the University of Arkansas. In addition to participating in research projects, the students will meet weekly with students from the other campus, visit a local aerospace company, and take a field trip to NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston doc18326 none Retention and renewal of accomplished science teachers in urban schools depend on opportunities and support for learning. This project will establish and maintain Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) focused on disciplinary knowledge of core scientific theories and models, on scientific ways of generating and validating knowledge; on students understanding and ways of learning; on standards and research based teaching; and on qualities of exemplary curricula that support teaching learning. In Phase I, Michigan State University (MSU) science education faculty and graduate students will work intensively collaboratively each summer and school year with a core group of 48 K-8 science teachers and principals from the Lansing School District (LSD). These individuals will become master teachers and co-leaders for Phase II. In Phase II, teacher leaders and principals will coach and mentor 45 new teachers and teachers new to standards-based, inquiry-oriented teaching, each year. It is expected that 200 new teachers will be mentored during the life of the project. Lansing School District will contribute $25,000 each year of the grant for teacher stipends, principal release time, meetings and coaching. Documentation of inquiry in Phases I and II will provide resources for the district s work with other teachers focused on inquiry into challenging, high-quality teaching and learning; exemplary curriculum matched to state and national standards, revised for local urban contexts; and experienced mentors and coaches for supporting teachers new to the district. Project impact will be assessed by student performance on district, state and national assessments; quality of units and assessments developed by teacher participants; quality of support provided by school administrators; and additional professional development opportunities sought by participants doc18327 none This project aims to synthesize and self-assemble a library of novel ortho phenyleneethynylene (OPE), compounds important to advancing the area of nano-materials with specific materials properties for possible applications in solid-state devices such as sensors. Heterocyclic modules will steer the self-assembly of OPEs to helically folded or linearly-extended nano structures. Metal ions will be utilized to make self-assembled nano grids. Depending upon the selected self-assembly mode, the conjugation in these OPEs can be switched on and off at will, without change of the primary structure of the phenyleneethynylene. Helically folded OPEs will have a large external surface, and almost no accessible interior cavity, similarly to helical proteins. Constituents at defined sites depending upon the utilized monomer will decorate the helical structures. As a consequence, helices with highly evolved outside surfaces, being recognition sites, are viewed as achievable. These decorated surfaces will provide a way to manipulate the aggregation of helices towards lamellar, micellar, and other super-structures. Novel luminescent metallosupramolecular nano-grids will be formed when metal-ions are successfully used to coordinate pyrazine-containing OPEs. Such hitherto unknown 2D-conjugated nano-structures offer exciting prospects for potential applications in sensory, device, and semiconductor nano-memory applications. This project will synthesize a class of novel ortho phenyleneethynylene (OPE) compounds with expected capabilities to assemble into extended, helical and grid-type nano-structures. The self-assembly process is guided by specific substitution patterns determined by the chemical environment. The overall goal is to develop novel conjugated oligomers displaying attractive emissive and sensory attributes relevant to the invention of efficient devices such as sensors. The proposed research is important to the education and training of young scientists and engineers to work in areas of current high national interests. This project is being co-funded by the Chemistry Division and the Division of Materials Research doc18328 none This Chemistry Division award supports a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the University of South Dakota. Andrew Sykes is the site s Program Director. Six faculty from the Departments of Biology and Chemistry will serve as REU student mentors. Over the award period ( - ), four students will be supported each summer in a ten-week program. The recruitment focus will be directed towards regional undergraduate institutions and a minimum of one student of Native American descent will participate in the program each year. The research activity focuses on photodynamics. Weekly meetings will be held, where students present their research and at the end of the summer students will submit written reports and make a formal presentations. Students will submit abstracts to the National Conference on Undergraduate Research. At the end of the program students and research mentors will each complete an evaluation form. All participants will be tracked until they complete their undergraduate educations doc18329 none This award provides support for an REU-Site as part of the Human-Environment Regional Observatory project (HERO). HERO is developing the infrastructure to study and monitor the human causes and consequences of global environmental change in local areas. Local HEROs will select three students from Pennsylvania, from Massachusetts, from Kansas, and from Arizona to participate in the Site. The students will start their summer research activities by taking a two-week short courses that will introduce them to the concepts and tools needed to study the local dimensions of global environmental change. After the short course, the REU students will return to their home states where they will conduct parallel research activities at the local HEROS. The three-person REU student teams will work for six weeks with a faculty research mentor, other faculty, post-doctoral researchers, and graduate students working at the local HEROs. Students will be introduced to such tools as geographic information systems, aerial photographs, remote sensing images, and geo-positioning systems. The activities will include the mapping and field checking of: land cover and land use; natural and technological hazards; essential facilities; potentially vulnerable socioeconomic groups, businesses, factories, resource extraction and processing facilities, and other commercial sites; and critical biological habitats. Students will also engage in interviews and focus groups. They will stay linked to their colleagues at the other local HEROs through HERO remote collaboration (collaboratory) tools. This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences doc18330 none Professor Christa Colyer of Wake Forest University is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program to perform studies on the use of noncovalent dye labels for protein detection by Laser Induced Fluorescence (LIF) after seperation by capillary electrophoresis (CE). LIF detection requires labeling of proteins with fluorescent dyes. The proposed work aims to label proteins noncovalently using dyes that are excited by near infrared photons, allowing the eventual use of cheap laser diodes aboard microchip CE. Seperation and quantitation of proteins, epecially from ultrasmall volumes, represents a particular challenge in analytical chemistry. CE requires only nanoliters of sample and so is appropriate for investigating the fluids of single cells. The methods are of great use in the investigation of proteomics doc18331 none Visual hand finger tracking and analysis has many important potential applications, including human-computer interaction, rehabilitation, and the recognition of sign languages. The major obstacle to real-time visual hand finger tracking is the huge dimensionality of the configuration space. E.g., using the finger joint angles to represent the posture, the number of degrees of freedom is about 27. Tracking in this high- dimensional space is computationally impossible. However, finger movement is highly constrained. We propose to use a 3D model-based approach, where the model will include both posture and motion constraints. Tracking is done by matching the image of the real hand and that of the predicted view of the hand from the 3D model. The crux is to use the constraints to reduce the search time. By the end of the proposed period, we expect to have a good constraint representation and a good real-time hand finger tracking algorithm, and to have demonstrated real-time tracking for the application of virtual object manipulation doc18332 none This award provides funding to Clarkson University for the support of a three-year REU in Environmental Sciences and Engineering under the direction of Dr. Stefan J. Grimberg. This 10-week summer program will provide seven undergraduate students with the opportunity to conduct independent research within the area of sustainable management of environmental systems with the assistance of a faculty mentor. In addition, the students will participate in research group meetings, write a report, present their work at a University-wide undergraduate research symposium and will be encouraged to publish their work in peer reviewed publications doc18333 none The objective of this work is the development of a second generation high-power, high-stability CO2 laser trap and its application to study resonant scattering interactions in ultracold two-state mixtures of Li-6 fermions. Of particular interest is the investigation of a new type of superfluid pairing which has recently been predicted to result from very strong resonant attractive interactions in the vicinity of a Feshbach resonance. In such resonance superfluidity, transition temperatures can be a large fraction of the Fermi temperature, far larger than in usual BCS pairing interactions, and much larger than even the highest temperature superconductors known doc18334 none DIMACS, the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, headquartered at Rutgers University, proposes a three-part domestic and international REU program. The program will be co-sponsored by DIMATIA, the Center for Discrete Mathematics, Theoretical Informatics, and Applications, at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. The REU program we are proposing will be modeled after the highly successful programs we have already run and will have the following three parts: (i) A group of five students from all across the U.S. will participate in an 8-week REU program headquartered at DIMACS; (ii) A second group of five students from all across the U.S. will participate in the 8-week domestic REU program and then spend 3 additional weeks at DIMATIA; (iii) a group of five students from the Czech Republic will participate in the 8-week domestic REU program and then act as hosts at DIMATIA when the U.S. students go to Prague. The REU program will focus on the strengths that are joint between DIMACS and DIMATIA, and in particular on the fields of extremal and algebraic combinatorics, graph theory, computational geometry, logic and complexity theory, and combinatorial optimization doc18335 none The Department of Bacteriology and the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin Madison will provide opportunities for summer research projects for undergraduates in microbiology, molecular biology and related fields. Students from colleges with limited opportunities for research and members of groups under-represented in science are especially encouraged to apply. The main goal of the program is to attract and stimulate motivated students to pursue careers in research, while providing them hands-on experience. Participating students will work as part of a dynamic research team investigating a basic problem in cellular or molecular biology. Students will become familiar with research techniques of microbiology, biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology using modern equipment and facilities. Students will attend professional seminars and make oral presentations of their research findings. They will attend workshops and seminars aimed at preparing them for admissions to competitive graduate programs. Students will be part of a collective group of approximately 100 other students from all over the United States and Puerto Rico participating in other Summer Research Opportunity Programs on campus. REU-Microbiology students will participate with other summer research interns in several social and educational events doc18336 none The University of North Texas (UNT) supports a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site with the theme of characterization of electronic materials and devices. Twelve students are recruited nationwide every year for a nine-week summer research experience. The REU Site includes faculty from the Physics, Materials Science and Chemistry Departments at UNT; it includes the facilities at the University s Ion Beam Modification Laboratory and the Laboratory for Electronic Materials and Devices. Students participate in a variety of research projects within the areas of surface studies of semiconductors, metals and insulators, electroluminescent polymer composites, and high-electric field gas phase and surface chemistries. Undergraduates also attend scientific seminars and tutorial sessions on research ethics and graduate studies, and participate in visits to semiconductor and high tech industries in the area doc18337 none This project will investigate the processes of formation and evolution of polar mesospheric summer echoes (PMSE) and mesospheric summer echoes (MSE). Non-turbulent and weakly turbulent PMSE and MSE events will be investigated through a combination of modeling studies and observational data from radar and rocket-based instrumentation. Rocket data will provide ion, electron, and temperature profiles at very high vertical resolution which can be used to constrain the modeling problems. The anticipated outcomes of this project are a comprehensive understanding of PMSE and MSE formation and structure and interpretation of rocket and radar data, which will lead to enhanced design of experiments and instruments doc18338 none algebraic objects whose structures can form the basis for deeper investigations. The use of advanced symbolic computation software plays an important role throughout. Students in the applied mathematics subprogram are introduced to the three components of applied mathematics research: modeling, analysis, and computation. The focus is on two topics arising in materials science: complex electro-magnetic permittivity of dielectrics, and exact relations for fiber-reinforced composites. Students working on complex electro-magnetic permittivity develop mathematical stratgies for predicting how much electro-magnetic energy a material will absorb, in a given frequency, if data for other frequencies is already known; such prediction techniques have the potential to reduce the cost of experimental measurements drastically. Students working on exact relations mathematically analyze the influence of composite microstructure on macroscopic properties; understanding this influence is crucial to developing new materials with various desired properties -- potentially applicable industrial products include skis, golf clubs, and aircraft parts doc18339 none The University of Idaho Physics Department will host seven undergraduate physics students annually for a ten-week summer research experience. These students will closely work with Idaho faculty members and subsequently present their research project results at an appropriate venue (e.g. National Conference on Undergraduate Research). The objectives of this program are: (1) to introduce undergraduate physics majors to the excitement of physics research, (2) to train these students in the laboratory skills needed in modern physics research, (3) to foster student personal growth by having the students work in teams and by teaching them the ethical dimension of scientific research, and (4) to promote diversity in the field of physics by encouraging applicants and participants from under-represented groups. The Idaho physics faculty will design research projects that are challenging yet viable. The areas of research in the department that will be represented are condensed matter physics, plasma physics, astrophysics, and nuclear physics. Both theoretical and experimental projects will be made available. The students will be encouraged to work in small groups to foster teamwork skills. Weekly meetings will be held to allow the students to interact and to keep each other posted on their progress. The REU students will interact with Idaho faculty, research staff personnel, post-doctoral researchers, graduate students and undergraduates. Weekend activities will take place that revolve around the tremendous outdoor experiences available in Idaho. A targeted recruiting plan will be undertaken. Particular attention will be given to recruiting from institutions with significant populations of students from traditionally under-represented groups. The program presented herein will benefit the REU participants by allowing them to learn and grow in an active research environment and will also benefit the Idaho physics department by bringing bright, enthusiastic researchers from around the country into our department doc18340 none This award provides support for an Undergraduate Research Experience in Native American Archaeology and Heritage Preservation: A Cooperative Project of the University of Arizona and The White Mountain Apache Tribe. A major focus of the project will be to demonstrate, through participatory activities, the scientific and heritage benefits of cooperative research in archaeology. The REU experience will combine the resources of the University of Arizona s Department of Anthropology, which has an archaeological research station in Pinedale, Arizona, with one of the most active tribal heritage resource management programs operated by the White Mountain Apache Tribe on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation. Ten students will be supported for the six-week program each summer. Students will be drawn from undergraduates from across the country, with special recruitment from Native American communities. Student research activities will include mapping of Pueblo and Apache sites, archaeological survey, surface collections, ruins stabilization, damage assessment, laboratory processing and analyses, field trips, and excavation. All but the excavation and field trip component will be held on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation in east-central Arizona. Excavations will be conducted on the Sitgreaves National Forest. A distingui8shed lecture series will be included as well as an ethics component. The results of the research projects will be presented in a mini-symposium at the end of the project and the symposium proceedings will be submitted to the White Mountain Apache Tribe. This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences doc18341 none Genevieve Giuliano-University of Southern California-SGER: Better Freight Flow Data for Analysis and Planning This grant will support preliminary explorations in integrating 10 datasets, some digital and some paper, related to the modeling of the flow of freight carried by trucks, rail, and ship in the greater Los Angeles area. The collaboration will be between information scientists and experts in transportation planning and policy and will involve the collaboration of several government agencies doc18342 none With the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, Professor Charles Campbell and his coworkers at the University of Washington are measuring the detailed adsorption and reaction energetics of small molecules and metal atoms adsorbed on well-characterized metal and semiconductor surfaces. Using a unique microcalorimetric approach, adsorption energies and bond strengths of metal-carbon and metal-oxygen bonds are determined. Adsorption and interaction of larger, more complex organic species are also examined. This accurate data is useful in developing an understanding of the reaction mechanisms relevant to heterogeneous catalysis, chemical vapor deposition processes, and adhesion at solid surfaces. The strength of a chemical bond between an adsorbed molecule and a solid surface is a crucial piece of information for developing an understanding of technologically important processes such as heterogeneous catalysis and electronic device manufacture. This information is very difficult to obtain in a direct way. Professor Campbell and coworkers at the University of Washington have developed a unique microcalorimetric approach to obtaining this information that has been applied to a wide range of important surface chemical systems. With the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, these important measurements will continue and be extended to organic molecules interacting with metal and semiconductor surfaces doc18343 none Under the direction of Dr. Robert Drennan, Mr. Mikael Haller will collect data for his doctoral dissertation in Central Panama. He will conduct archaeological investigations at the regional level by examining settlement occupation over a year period up to Spanish contact in the 16th century. Central Panama is an ideal area to investigate the development of chiefdoms since there is both archaeological and historical data relating to the region which can be used to test against current models for the development of chiefly societies. On the one hand, anthropologists have argued that long-distance exchange of esoteric knowledge was critical for establishing political power, as opposed to economic gain. In contrast others claim that chiefly control of local resources was the main factor. A third model, focusing on warfare as the key factor in the development of chiefdoms from autonomous societies, derives from a comparison of tribal and chiefly societies in South America and Panama. In evaluating these models, Mr. Haller will use survey data in determining the relative importance of five factors that combined include the major components of the three models: control of agricultural land, population growth, local exchange and craft production, long-distance exchange, and warfare. Despite recent archaeological work concerning important sociopolitical issues, there is still relatively little information about the geography, economy and development of Panamanian chiefdoms and various hypotheses remain unsubstantiated by the archaeological record. Clearly, using Panamanian chiefdoms as models for archaeological reconstruction of other cases and for comparative studies requires a better understanding of their emergence and development prior to the sixteenth-century, as well as the nature of the archaeological record at the time of contact. This research project addresses concerns similar to those of regional specialists working around the world on the formation of complex societies since an underlying goal is to determine the relative importance demographic stress, economic specialization, control of agricultural production, and local exchange in this process. This research project will add to current understanding of regional processes through an examination of the development of Panamanian chiefdoms and it will provide a specific case for comparative studies of sociopolitical organization. Therefore, this project has the potential to address several important lines of anthropological inquiry. Foremost is the contribution this research will make to the study of the development of complex societies. In addition, it will contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between archaeological and ethnohistorical accounts-crucial in reconstructing and interpreting prehistoric societies. On a general anthropological level, data from this research can be used in understanding the relationship between social complexity and population pressure, warfare, and control of economic resources. It will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc18344 none Proposal Number: PI: Dmitry Khavinson The work described in the proposal concerns several topics in Classical Analysis: approximation theory, several complex variables, miscellaneous problems on complex polynomials and classical operator theory. The most central questions for the project are: uniqueness of best approximation by harmonic functions in the supremum norm in dimensions three and higher (the two-dimensional case has been recently settled by the PI and H.S.Shapiro), sharp estimates relating to multidimensional analogs of H. Bohr s phenomenon for power series, counting zeros of complex-valued harmonic polynomials, Agler-Cole-Wermer interpretation of Ando s theorem in C^2 and, finally, understanding the spectral picture of the celebrated double layer potential operator -a topic going back to the pioneering work of I. Fredholm. Most of the questions in the project are rather simply stated and, accordingly, will attract a fair number of graduate students and young researchers. The problems are also open-ended and suggest several new paths of investigation in these classical areas away from the well traveled tracks. The investigations undertaken in the project have well-defined applications to Mathematical Physics (Potential Theory), Applied Mathematics (polynomials, special functions) and Numerical Analysis (explicit solutions of some of the most important boundary value problems). The project entails active involvement of undergraduate and graduate students at all stages of the project and, via local network of workshops and seminars for teachers, to disseminate some of the more elementary off-beats of the proposed work among high school students interested in science doc18345 none This award provides renewed funding for a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site that will host a total of ten students during ten weeks of summer research. Students will be working with researchers at the University of Delaware s College of Marine Studies (CMS) located in Lewes, DE. Students will also participate in a series of seminars and workshops exploring issues related to marine science, career options, and graduate education. The program recruits juniors and senior undergraduate students nationwide. These students are able to pursue research in a broad range of marine science, environmental science and marine engineering fields. The program has an excellent record of success with past groups of students and contains all the important elements of a good REU program, including a thorough orientation program, a well-designed lecture series, a research cruise, an ethics program, and required oral and written presentations. Past publication rates by students have been excellent. The number of scientists involved in the program and potential research projects for students is excellent. The proposal is based on the theory that mentoring and networking are the most effective methods for recruiting students into a profession and for training young researchers. It will advance students awareness concerning important environmental issues. Students selected for participation in this program gain a significant appreciation for the scientific process and often pursue a career in a scientific field. Matching funding provided by the University includes approximately one month of salary for the PIs doc18346 none This award provides funding to Georgia Institute of Technology, for a three-year, REU Site in electrical and computer engineering and electronics packaging, under the direction of Gary S. May. The project will involve ten undergraduate students, paired with both a faculty advisor and graduate student mentor, in individual research projects covering topics that include optoelectronics, integrated circuits and devices, and digital signal processing doc18347 none This award provides funding for a 5-year REU Site in Bridge Engineering at the University of Delaware, under the direction of Dr. Michael J. Chajes. This 10-week summer program will provide 10 students from other institutions, with research projects focused on bridge engineering based on the growing base of expertise in this area at the University of Delaware. The program recruitment efforts will focus heavily on students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU s) and on female undergraduates who have up to now not been significantly represented in this traditionally male-dominated field. This REU program will be administered by the Center for Innovative Bridge Engineering (CIBE) which was established at the University of Delaware in to serve as a primary resource for the world s highway and railroad bridge owners. Each student will work on an individual research project and will be assigned a faculty member as her his research mentor. In addition, the students will participate in weekly seminars where they will have the opportunity to discuss their work with fellow students, and hear from researchers, practicing bridge engineers and graduate students on topics of mutual interest. The students will also participate in field trips, several bridge tours, and will prepare and submit a brief report for presentation at a research symposium doc18348 none The investigators will continue their study of the representation theory of finite groups, especially the symmetric group and its double covers, by exploiting various connections to Lie theory. These connections arise at many different levels, combinatorial, algebraic and geometric, and involve the representation theory of algebraic groups, supergroups, quantum groups and infinite dimensional Lie algebras. The investigators intend to study in particular the Shapovalov form on highest weight modules over affine Kac-Moody algebras via vertex operators, Broue s conjecture for the symmetric group, and to further exploit the relationship between branching rules and crystal graphs in representation theory. This project is in the area of mathematics known as representation theory. The tools of mathematics provide a precise way to describe the symmetries of something. Representation theory is the study of the ways such symmetries can arise in the real world, and as such it has applications to many areas of mathematics, physics and chemistry. In the last few years, there has been some major progress in our understanding of representation theory, thanks in part to a new influx of ideas from mathematical physics. This project is concerned in part with the representation theory of the most important of all the finite groups, the symmetric group, which is closely related to the theory of symmetric functions. The work is expected to have applications to other areas of mathematics, as well as a wider impact in mathematical physics, statistical mechanics and coding theory doc18349 none The PI s will work with 9 undergraduates year using the latest digital survey instruments to develop a series of high-resolution analytical base maps of crustal deformation processes visible in outcrops of coastal Maine. This two-year summer research program of precision mapping and strain analysis will document the complex structural history of two key outcrop areas in relation to regional strain accommodation due to strike-slip shearing on the Norumbega fault zone as depicted in the geometry of deformed veins and intrusions. Both selected sites offer extensive exposure and complex strain histories associated with two newly recognized areas of shear wihin the southeast flank of the main Norumbega fault zone. Detailed geometries of deformed structural features will be mapped into a geographic information system (GIS) using global positioning systems (GPS) and electronic total stations for data collection. The project will include a six-week summer research session, and a fall semester independent study culminating with collaborative work on abstracts and posters for presentation of results at a professional meeting doc18350 none The Eastern Illinois University (EIU) Biology Department s Research Experience for Undergraduates Program, funded by the National Science Foundation, will provide an intensive research experience for 10 undergraduate students during the summers of and . The research experiences centered on the ecology, behavior and physiology of exotic species is designed to (1) stimulate the student s interest, intellectual independence and project ownership, (2) develop each student s technical skills and understanding of the research process, and (3) foster an appreciation of the cooperation and interdependence necessary for research teams to achieve success. To accomplish these objectives participants will be recruited nationally and selected based on their professional goals, motivation and maturity, and academic achievements. Students will be fully immersed in the research process as they choose their own research problem, write a proposal, conduct the work, and report their results and conclusions. Each participant will work closely with an individual mentor and as a member of a research team. Opportunities to interact and collaborate with other faculty and research teams will be provided through an orientation retreat, weekly group meetings, and a series of formal workshops and field trips. In addition, visiting scientists , recognized leaders in the field of conservation biology, will spend 1-2 days apiece interacting with program participants by presenting seminars, participating in informal discussion groups, and critiquing research projects. The overall goal of the 10-week research experience is to foster in each participant an understanding of the research process, encouraging each student s growth from dependent learner to independent researcher to interdependent member of a scientific team doc18351 none Weaver Chapman Conferences are topical meetings sponsored by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and are designed to promote opportunities not normally available through the format of larger meetings. Funds in the amount of $21,250 are being requested from the National Science Foundation to support participant travel for some domestic and international students and scientists. Applications for travel assistance will be evaluated and awards issued on a competitive and need basis. We expect to issue approximately 25 grants at an average of $800 per award. To be fully effective, approval of this proposal is needed not later than 01 March doc18352 none This project provides travel support for graduate students and early career scientists to attend the Chapman conference on Volcanism and the Earth s Atmosphere. The Chapman conferences are topical meetings sponsored by the American Geophysical Union that are designed to promote opportunities not normally available through the format of larger scientific meetings. This year s Chapman Conference will focus on the effects of volcanic eruptions on the Earth s atmosphere and environment and marks the 10th anniversary of these conferences. The meeting will be held on the island of Thera in Greece, the site of the Santorini eruption in the Late Bronze Age and one of the most important volcanic eruptions that profoundly affected civilization. It will draw together experts from the climatology, volcanology, glaciology, and petrology communities to review recent work and plan for joint efforts to further progress in this field doc18353 none This award provides support for an REU Site in Cognitive Development at Yale University. The goal is to provide undergraduates with an interest in developmental psychology from a cognitive science perspective to gain mentored research experience over the summer. The intellectual focus of the research will be on how children and adults grasp the causal structure o the world around them. Students will be involved in experimental design, data collection, data analysis, and presentation of results of various studies. Weekly laboratory meetings as well as several forms of training and small group meetings form an instructional component to the internship. Six to eight students, recruited nationally, will be involved in the 12-week program. This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences doc18354 none The Department of Biology at Hope College will utilize a grant from the NSF-REU program to provide research appointments for 48 undergraduate students (12 per summer for 4 years). Half of the students will come from Hope College and half will come from other colleges and universities throughout the U.S. We will make special efforts, including a formal preferred acceptance program with Howard University, to recruit and appoint both women and members of minority groups under-represented in science. To broaden the understanding by future teachers of the conduct of science, 2 student participants each year will have a career goal of teaching high school biology. Students will participate in research at all levels of biology, from characterizing a new receptor gene for vasopressin to studying the ecology of frugivory in a tropical cloud forest. One to 3 students will be involved in internationally-based projects each year. Interactions among students and faculty will provide each participant with knowledge about a wide range of biological problems and ways in which those problems are addressed. In addition to the research itself, participants will take part in weekly meetings aimed at improving oral and written communication skills, exploring ethical issues in biology, and learning about graduate school and career opportunities in biology. Students will communicate results of their research in formal talks (at Hope and at professional meetings), in a poster symposium and in a scientific paper. The Hope program will impact the student participants understanding of science, the sciences, as students present their results to the scientific community, and society as students move on to graduate schools and a variety of careers doc18355 none Autonomous parties - both companies and people - who exist in networked environments must perforce interact. Protocols structure and streamline those interactions. Traditional representations of protocols specify legal sequences of actions but not their content. Thus, traditional representations cannot adequately support flexible interactions (e.g., to handle exceptions and exploit opportunities.) This project will develop a richer model of protocols via an inference mechanism, called commitment machines, in which a declarative content is formulated for protocol states and actions in terms of the participants commitments. Because of its representation of content and its inferencing-based operational rules, a commitment machine effectively encodes a flexible version of a protocol, thereby allowing a wider variety of legal moves than traditional representations. This project seeks to study protocols and commitment machines, capturing the kinds of reasoning needed in practical protocols, such as for e-commerce. Specifically, this project will 1) formulate a semantics for protocols that applies in open, networked applications, 2) represent protocols as generalized commitment machines, 3) implement commitment machines in a tool for protocol analysis and design, 4) evaluate the approach by applying the tool on popular and emerging e-commerce protocols, and 5) classify useful and pathological kinds of commitment machines doc18356 none This award provides funds for an REU Site in Economics at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. The program s main short-term objective is to provide undergraduate students the opportunity to participate actively in policy research; the program is also intended to achieve the longer-term objective of attracting qualified, interested students to quality Ph.D. programs in economics, public policy, and other social sciences. This award will provide internships for 10 students each of the next three summers. Students will intern with an economics faculty member working in one of the five policy research centers or programs at the institution. Interns will receive formal and systematic training in a weekly seminar that will provide basic research skills and that will culminate in a presentation and a paper related to the research experience. This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences doc18357 none This project addresses the materials and mechanics issues involved in the forming behavior of precipitation hardened aluminum alloys that exhibit preferred orientations (textures) and directionally dependent properties (anisotropy). The study is aimed at understanding the springback of aluminum alloys during their forming operations that has hither to limited their use in many metal forming applications. The fundamental understanding of these behaviors will lead to the reduction in cost associated in forming of this important class of structural materials. The project is a highly leveraged cooperative program of research directed to clarify and extend the microstructural basis of metallic constitutive equations to include the effects of second-phase particles on anisotropic hardening. The objectives of the project include processing of model alloys of Al-Ge-Si by the industrial partner (Alcoa Technical Center or ATC), heat-treatments to produce different microstructures and a thorough characterization of second-phase microstructures in terms of precipitate size, orientation, morphology, grain size, etc. The study will establish fundamental linkages between the precipitate structure and anisotropic hardening. The alloy characterization is performed using advanced techniques such as orientation image microscopy (OIM) and TEM along with extensive mechanical testing as well as mechanics modeling leading to constitutive forms for inputting into finite element programs. The project takes advantage of the expertise and experimental facilities available at both the Ohio State University (OSU) and ATC. The educational impact of this work lies in close contact of the graduate students with the industrial counterpart through summer internships as well as the research direction by the co-investigator from ATC. %%% The project is a close collaboration between OSU and ATC with crosscutting implications to research areas in metals, mechanics and manufacturing. The study extends the fundamental understanding of the role of second- phase structures in producing anisotropic hardening behavior. Such knowledge is important for many research developments as well as commercial applications, with plausible cost reduction in the forming operations of aluminum alloys that are important for many technologies including aerospace and automotive. The close collaboration of the university personnel with the industrial counterparts provides significant opportunities for students doc18358 none The Undergraduate Institute in Physics-Research Experiences for Undergraduates (UnIPhy-REU) at Hampton University is an eight-week residential summer research program for undergraduate students. The program offers research opportunities to eight physics, science, or engineering students in the areas of nuclear, particle, medical, and optical physics. Research sites are the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, the Nuclear High Energy Physics Center, the Nonlinear Optical Nanomaterials Laboratory, the Center for the Study of the Origin and Structure of Matter, the Center for Particle Physics, the Center for Advanced Medical Instrumentation, and the Research Center for Optical Physics at Hampton University. UnIPhy-REU provides a strong REU site for students from groups under-represented in physics. Students conduct research under the guidance of a mentor; they are in daily contact with the mentor, researchers, and graduate students. Additionally, students attend seminars, go to twice-weekly lectures given by mentors and faculty, and participate in social activities. Some of these activities are conducted jointly with the REU group from the College of William & Mary. At the conclusion of the program, students give a thirty-minute oral presentation and submit a written research report doc18359 none This award provides funding to the Polytechnic University of New York for the support of a three-year, REU Site in Information Systems for Undergraduates, under the direction of Dr. Frank A. Cassara. This eleven-week summer program will involve twelve students annually in an intensive research experience on various projects in the area of information systems and electrophysics. Each student will be closely mentored by an individual faculty mentor who will plan work and review progress throughout the program. The students will benefit not only from extensive interactions with participating faculty, but also with graduate students. Participants will have informative tours of the institution s research laboratories and there will be two or three seminar presentations to the group by leaders from industry, universities or government agencies. The program will conclude with a research review during which each student will make a formal presentation and respond to questions. A formal final written report of professional quality will be required of all participants doc18360 none The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) operates a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site in its Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory. Students are recruited from across the country for a twelve-week summer research experience, with an emphasis on recruitment of members of under-represented groups in science and engineering. Students participate in a wide range of research in the areas of ceramics, solid state chemistry, metallurgy, polymers, neutron condensed matter science, and materials reliability. In addition, students attend a weekly seminar series and participate in various social activities. The REU students have access to exceptional instrumentation and facilities at NIST. The experience also includes an early and valuable exposure to the interdisciplinary research environment of a national laboratory doc18361 none The 6th International Conference on Nanostructured Material is to be held in Orlando, FL on June 16-21, . This is the latest in the series of International Nanostructured Materials held for the first time in US. The objective of the meeting is to exchange information on the latest developments and new trends in nanostructured materials. The topical areas range from theory and modeling to synthesis and processing as well as design and characterization of various nanostructured materials. The fabrication of various structural, functional and specialty materials for diverse applications will be discussed. The work shop will involve most countries with active research in nanotechnology with about 800 international attendees doc18362 none Zhiqiang Cai, Purdue University The project is about international collaboration with researchers in Korea, focusing on the development and analysis of new finitie element method using singular and dual singular functions for both interface and elasticity problems and implementation of multilevel methods for the resulting system of linear equations. From this study, the application of the proposed method will be identified in the are of fracture mechanics doc18363 none This joint Chemistry Division and Physics Division award supports the continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the University of Oregon. Geraldine Richmond is the site s Program Director. Twelve faculty members from the Departments of Physics, and Chemistry will serve as REU student mentors. Over the award period ( - ), ten students will be supported each summer in a ten-week program. Selection of the participants is based on a strong background in both chemistry and physics. A special effort is made to recruit female and minority applicants using contacts with science programs at several women s colleges, at historically black colleges and at institutions where there is a higher percentage of Chicanos and Native American students. This is an interdisciplinary Chemistry Physics research program. Students and research mentors participate in a collective program that includes research seminars, weekly meetings, social activities and follow-up activities after students return to their home institutions. At the end of the program students present their research in an oral presentation and provide a written report. At the closing of the summer, the students complete an evaluation. All participants are tracked after they leave the program doc18364 none During the summers of - the Department of Biology at Marquette University will sponsor a ten-week NSF-REU site program. Twelve undergraduate students, who have completed their sophomore or junior year, will be selected to work with individual faculty in the areas of microbiology, molecular and cellular biology, developmental biology, neurobiology and vertebrate physiology. The program is designed to provide a hands-on research experience that will enhance the students appreciation of experimental science and increase their ability to work independently in a research environment. This program is also intended to encourage students to pursue careers in science and research and to foster the participation of women, members of under-represented minority groups and persons with disabilities. Each participant will help design and carry out a research project during the summer and, at the end of the program, prepare a report and present research findings at an undergraduate research symposium. In addition to their research activities, students will participate in a variety of program-sponsored activities including a journal club, seminars by visiting speakers and workshops on contemporary ethical issues in biology and medicine. The program will thus provide its participants with a unique experience that will enhance their insight into the scientific process, facilitate their career decisions and, ultimately, positively impact their contributions to science and society. Further information on the program and application procedures is available at the department website (http: mendel.biol.mu.edu) or by contacting the Program Director, Dr. Stephen H. Munroe (telephone 414-288- ; e-mail stephen.munroe@marquette.edu doc18365 none This proposal supports a mini-conference on CP violation, in honor of Roberto Peccei on the occasion of his 60th birthday, Peccei Fest: Past, Present, and Future of CP-Violation. Topics covered in the workshop include CP-violation, axions, and heavy flavor physics---all areas where progress has been made and many open questions remain doc18366 none This project focuses on the spectroscopy and dynamics of size-selected group IV and III-V semiconductor clusters using several experimental techniques based on negative ion photodetachment to characterize how the properties of these species vary with size and stoichiometry. The corresponding bulk compounds play a key role in the semiconductor and electronics industries so these studies are highly relevant to nano-device technologies in that they probe how the properties of the bulk materials evolve from their atomic and molecular constituents. The project will focus on binary III-V nitride compounds, silicon clusters, and indium phosphide clusters. Properties of interest include vibrational frequencies and electronic state splittings in small clusters, the evolution of valence and conduction bands as the cluster size increases, electronic relaxation dynamics in excited states of the clusters, and the fragmentation patterns resulting from photodissociation. In all the experiments, mass-selected beams of semiconductor cluster anions are generated and photodetached. The primary experimental method is fixed-frequency anion photoelectron spectroscopy, which provides a general means to determine the electronic and vibrational structure of a size-selected neutral cluster. This technique will be complemented by tunable laser photodetachment, time-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy, and fast beam photofragment translational spectroscopy experiments. %%% Understanding how physical and chemical properties of matter evolve with size is crucial to many potential applications designed to meet significant societal needs. Emphasis is placed on select elemental clusters, for which the corresponding bulk compounds play a major role in the fabrication of fast devices such as transistors and photodiodes. The proposed studies are important because they provide training for future scientists and engineers in key areas of national interests doc18367 none The PI proposes to operate the liquid Xenon detector developed by the UCLA Torino group over a period of several years. The detector is designed to identify rare nuclear recoil events in a liquid xenon chamber. Performance data from this 30Kg detector will provide key R&D information for a future full-scale dark matter detector doc18368 none This award is to continue managing a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site. Undergraduate students will conduct research for six weeks on the Matanuska Glacier, a large valley glacier in south central Alaska. The glacier s terminus is easily accessible from the Glenn Highway. Students will stay at the Matanuska Glacier Research Camp, about two kilometers from the glacier s terminus. The Camp is maintained by the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory which also sponsors some of the ongoing research. Students will participate in field work that will involve collecting water samples, maintaining equipment, downloading data, filtering water for suspended sediment, and tabulating data. Each student will identify a research project to which he she will devote several hours a day. Directed research projects may be in subdisciplines of glacial geology, sedimentology, glaciohydrology, or hydrogeology. The faculty associates will supervise the students research to ensure appropriate projects are defined and that the students are able to collect the necessary information. The students will complete their undergraduate thesis projects at the respective home institutions during the subsequent school year and will be encouraged to present the results at a national meeting doc18369 none Duan The investigator studies complex geophysical flow phenomena modeled by finite or infinite-dimensional deterministic or stochastic differential equations. The research focuses on transport and mixing in random geophysical flows, nonlocal transport in-geophysical flows, variational methods for geophysical models, and stochastic geophysical flow modelling. In the area of transport and mixing, the investigator quantifies fluid transport and mixing in geophysical flown by computing escape probability and mean resident time. The work on nonlocal transport studies-the mean advoctive and eddy transport of passive tracers or pollutants in geophysical flown, when the eddy diffusivity depends on time and space. For the research on variational methods for geophysical models, the investigator gains better uncftrotanding of the rotating shallow water dynamics, by studying steady patterns, spatial and temporal periodic patterns and homoclinic motions via emrging techniques in calculus of variations. Finally, he derives a simplified coupled atmosphere-ocean model by averaging over random wind forcing and over intrinsic fast waves, quantifies the approximation error of the averaged dynamics, and studies some aspects of the coupled atmosphere-ocean system using this averaged mod 1. The geophysical flows in the oceans and the atmosphere affect our environment and our society in profound ways. This project is motivated by the need of better scientific understanding of the environment and global change. The investigator takes random or uncertain effects into account to describe geophysical flows. He develops both daterministle.and stochastic, numerical and analytical techniques to understand complex geophysical flow phonanuma. This research improves our knowledge about dispersion, transport and mixing of pollutants in our environment, and about evolution and pattern formation of geophysical flows. The techniques resulting from this research are also useful in studying other emerging problem in engineering and doc18370 none The objective of this work is to use ab initio calculations to determine the mechanisms leading to the observed stereochemistries from enolate condensation reactions. Lithium dialkyl amide bases are used for enolate generation and these form mixed aggregates in solution. Geometry optimization will be performed on each observed and suspected mixed aggregate using both microsolvation and bulk solvation models. Geometry optimization will then be repeated for lithium aggregate-ketone or ester complexes to determine relative activation energies leading to stereoisomeric enolates. Enolate condensations are one of the most important carbon-carbon bond forming reactions available to organic chemists and this work should lead to a better understanding of the mechanisms of those reactions. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Lawrence M. Pratt of the Department of Chemistry at Fisk University. Dr. Pratt will use molecular modelling and calculations to better understand a class of chemical reactions know as enolate condensation reactions. Enolate condensations are one of the most important carbon-carbon bond forming reactions available to organic chemists and this work should lead to a better understanding of how those reactions are occurring. Students trained as a result of working on this project will gain experience in theoretical organic chemistry and molecular modelling, hence they will have skills needed by the pharmaceutical and speciality chemicals industries doc18371 none The Los Alamos Summer School is a ten-week summer program for undergraduate physics students held in Los Alamos, New Mexico under the auspices of the University of New Mexico (UNM) and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The School s principal aims are to expose the students to frontier research in physics and to provide training and encouragement to them in their pursuit of careers in physics and related areas. About 20 participants are selected from a pool of applicants based on their responses to a web-based application form, their college transcripts, and two letters of recommendation. Of these, approximately 10 students are supported by NSF and 10 by DoE LANL. A stipend is given to each student to cover cost of living, transportation, and tuition for a special UNM graduate course, basically the student s project, with credit of 3 semester hours, into which the student is automatically enrolled. The students are given lectures by experts from UNM and LANL as well as by distinguished visitors, on topics in frontier areas of physics and applied physics including biophysics and quantum computing. They also participate in weeklong symposia on such subjects as astrophysics and supercomputing. Most of the students time is spent on individual research projects with mentors from the senior scientific staffs of LANL and UNM, working on topics of mutual interest. Final reports by the students on their summer research projects are published by LANL in a LA-UR report. Attention is paid to making the experience as enjoyable as possible, and the students share a number of extracurricular activities doc18372 none Georgia Tech operates a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site on structure-property correlations across length scales. The program emphasizes team research in projects addressing characterization and modeling of deformation and fracture in metals, mechanical properties of nanocrystalline alloys, optically active nanomaterials, and processing and characterization of functional composites. Fifteen students are recruited every year for an eight-week summer research experience. The program also includes the participation of six high school teachers every year. The teachers are part of the research teams and develop curricular materials such as demonstration projects on the research topics and computer-based materials modules. The teachers participation is supported by the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities of the NSF Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences doc18373 none The objective of this REU Site program (Research in Prokaryotic Biology) is to introduce undergraduate students to exciting areas of microbial research and to increase their awareness about careers in science. This goal will be achieved through an intensive, approximately 9-week long, hands-on summer laboratory research program in the Microbiology Department of the University of Georgia in Athens. Ten undergraduate student participants will be recruited from undergraduate institutions with limited research opportunities in Microbiology. In addition, students who are members of groups that are under-represented in the scientific community will be encouraged to participate in the program. REU participants will conduct independent projects under the supervision of faculty members, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students. A wide variety of research topics will address the diverse functions of prokaryotic organisms (bacteria and archaea). State-of-the-art techniques will be used in interdisciplinary approaches that combine knowledge from the fields of Genetics, Biochemistry, Physiology, Molecular Biology, Cellular Biology, and Ecology. Microbial investigations will address broad questions ranging from the role of prokaryotes in environmental and geochemical processes to their role in human health. Research experiences should generate enthusiasm among the students for the scientific topics and help them understand more about graduate education and careers in science. To enhance the research experience, the REU students will have informal meetings with faculty, attend scientific seminars, join the weekly research meetings of their lab groups, and participate in ethics-in-science workshops. Students will present their research results at the end of the summer. This program will have a significant impact both on science and education. The students will advance the research programs of the faculty mentors. Moreover, the exchange of ideas among faculty and students from around the country will help spread awareness of the importance of prokaryotic biology. Students will be able to communicate what they learn about scientific careers to their peers at their home institutions doc18374 none Dartmouth College operates a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site on materials and nanotechnology. The Site involves faculty from the Chemistry and Physics Departments and from the School of Engineering at Dartmouth. Ten students are recruited nationwide every year for a nine-week summer research experience. Research projects offered to undergraduates include topics on magnetic nanocrystals, thin film chemistry, micromechanical structures, nanoparticle arrays, and polymer blends. Students also prepare oral and written presentations on their research projects, attend an ethics-in-research seminar, and participate in a social program that includes scientific field trips and recreational activities doc18375 none This GK-12 project is a collaboration between the Fort Worth Independent School District and the University of North Texas Health Science Center (UNTHSC). The project will train and support biomedical science graduate students as resources for the district s high school biology students and teachers. The four participating schools serve predominantly minority students and the overall goal is to encourage entry of these students into science careers. The primary objectives of the project are to: 1) increase understanding of science and science processes in the Fort Worth educational system and 2) train biomedical science graduate students to function as resources for 9th and 10th grade biology classes. These goals will be met by: 1) adding to the science content of the District curriculum; 2) promoting understanding of science through age-appropriate inquiry-based experiences; 3) exposing students to science and science-related health and medical research careers relevant to specific topics in the districts biology curriculum; 4) developing a science web-directory and promoting the use of the internet based materials relevant to the curriculum; 5) creating research teams of UNTHSC faculty mentors, teachers and fellows to work with the school districts on science fair and research projects; (6) enhancing teaching mentoring and communication skills of Fellows; 7) conducting training and professional teacher development workshops in learning, pedagogy, biotechnology and new scientific discoveries; and 8) strengthening existing partnerships of outreach and enrichment programs among UNTHSC faculty, Fellows and Fort Worth Teachers doc18376 none Steven G. Krantz Washington University This project is to have a U.S.- Korea satellite conference to the International Congress of Mathmaticians to be held in Beijing, China. The conference will be held in Kyung-Ju, Korea jointly funded by KOSEF in Korea and NSF in U.S. The subject of the conference are complex variables and complex geometry doc18377 none s of water waves, and the subsequent stability analyses that are feasible in these cases; (4) the design and implementation of algorithms to make practical use of exact solutions of asymptotic models in shallow and deep water; (5) the relation between the detailed dynamics of three-dimensional, nonlinear waves and some commonly used ocean-wave transport models; and (6) the impact of a detailed local description of nonlinear wave dynamics on these transport models, in the presence of large amplitude nonlinear waves or under conditions of nonlinear wave focusing. These problems will be studied using analysis, computation, asymptotics, and algebraic geometry, involving the full equations and approximate models, all in conjunction with state-of-the-art physical experiments. The destructive force of large-amplitude ocean waves is well known. Large-scale ocean waves have a major impact on the design of ocean- going ships, of off-shore oil platforms, and of other structures in a coastal environment. These waves also impact the scheduling and routing of shipping patterns, and they strongly affect air-sea transport processes. Yet most theoretical models of ocean waves now in use are based on waves of small amplitude. In this investigation we focus on developing a thorough understanding of large-amplitude waves. The ultimate goal is to develop a practical, mathematical model that may be used operationally in the applications listed above. In particular, the investigators plan to build on their recent work in which they have observed certain coherent patterns of large-amplitude waves. They have observed these patterns in laboratory experiments, as solutions to the well-known equations of water waves, and as solutions to other equations that are (more) approximate models of water waves. Their work involves a variety of mathematical and computational tools as well as state-of-the-art laboratory experiments. In the present work the investigators will combine all of their tools to understand and describe these coherent patterns and to use them as the building blocks for a practical model of ocean waves doc18378 none The Coe College REU site has a focus on spectroscopy in physics and chemistry. It emphasizes different techniques and projects in the areas of Optics (laser induced time of flight mass spectroscopy, IR spectra), Materials Science (thermal properties, density, glass modeling), Acoustics (of free reed musical instruments), Gas Phase Chemistry (atmospheric science in a bottle), Environmental Chemistry (water pollutants and iron catalysis), and Chemical Synthesis (organic hypervalent compounds) . The site is very friendly and student centered, with students working directly with professors and alongside more senior research students. The site also offers a rich variety of research-grade equipment for student training. Other activities will include weekly seminars, the chance to make presentations at the end of summer, and many social diversions in a rich research culture doc18379 none The School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota Research Experiences for Undergraduates Program gives undergraduates the opportunity to participate in research at the forefront of knowledge of Physics. Participating students choose a research area in biophysics, cosmology astrophysics, condensed matter physics, nuclear physics, particle physics, physics education, or space and planetary physics. These efforts are both theoretical and experimental but typically it is experimental research that is most accessible to undergraduates. For the 10 weeks of the program, students work closely with faculty, postdocs, and graduate students in an ongoing research program. In addition to the individualized research experience, the REU students have seminars to discuss other current directions in physics research with physics faculty, share their own work in seminars, learn practical skills useful in research, learn about the opportunities and challenges of further study in physics, and visit research laboratories doc18380 none This award provides funding for a 3-year REU Site: Manufacturing Metrology and Quality Engineering at the University of Oklahoma, under the direction of Dr. Shivakumar Raman. The project will involve 12 undergraduate students annually in a 10-week summer program of individual and team research projects covering topics that include coordinate tolerance metrology, machine vision, in-process sensing and roughness metrology as well as emerging areas such as Scanning Probe Microscopy and optical interferometry. The students will work with the REU site P.I.s and a team of research mentors on selected projects. In addition, the program will include, weekly presentations by faculty, laboratory tours, industrial interaction, participant progress reports, social interaction and other discussions. Ethics discussions and issues will be incorporated throughout the program components doc18381 none Princeton University operates a multidisciplinary Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site affiliated with the Princeton Materials Institute (PMI). Fifteen undergraduate students are recruited nationwide every year for a nine-week summer research experience under the supervision of science and engineering faculty associated with PMI. Students also attend short courses and seminars on materials science and engineering topics, and participate in visits to local companies involved in materials processing and engineering. Through a series of presentations and organized discussion groups, students are challenged to examine the role of science and engineering research against a broader societal context doc18382 none As part of an effort to increase science literacy in the schools and community involved, this project builds on a number of ongoing outreach programs between the University and the school district and includes involvement of informal science resources (the McWane Science Center). Fellows work with a wide variety of people of varying ages, backgrounds and interests. The program is modified to accommodate first year, middle year or capstone students (fellows completing their final year of work) to take full advantage of their abilities and to meet their varying needs. Fellows are prepared to work in the classroom through a seminar providing an overview of learning theory and pedagogy that includes two observations of K-12 students in an informal science setting, two observations in a K-12 classroom, presentation of a science demonstration and one session assisting a mentor teacher. Fellows are then offered a variety of opportunities to establish a partnership with a teacher and work directly in the classroom helping to implement science standard related materials doc18383 none This award provides renewed funding for a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site that will host a total of seven students during eleven weeks of summer research. The REU program is based on the theory that mentoring and networking are the most effective methods for recruiting students into a profession and for training young researchers. Students will be working with researchers at the University of Maine s Darling Marine Center, located in Walpole, ME. Students will also participate in a series of seminars and workshops exploring issues related to hypothesis formation and testing, statistics, experimental design, scientific writing and data presentation, and career options. The program recruits juniors and senior undergraduate students nationwide. These students are able to pursue research in a broad range of marine science and environmental science. They will also be encouraged to attend a regional or national meeting to present their results. The program will advance students awareness concerning important environmental issues. Students selected for participation in this program gain a significant appreciation for the scientific process and often pursue a career in a scientific field doc18384 none This award provides funding to the University of Missouri at Rolla for an REU Site in micro mechatronic systems under the direction Dr. Vittal S. Rao. The project will involve 12 undergraduate students, who will be placed in teams of 2 to work together with a faculty advisor and a graduate students on a research project covering topics that include mechatronics, microelectronics and smart structures. The 8 week research program will consist of research projects, guest lectures, industrial field trips, and hands-on laboratory experience. At the end of the summer program each student will prepare a written final report and an oral presentation on the research project undertaken doc18385 none This award provides renewal support for an REU Site in archaeological research methods in Veszto, Hungary. This is part of a collaborative, multi-disciplinary, international research project co-organized by Florida State University, Ohio State University, and the Munkacsy Mihaly Museum, Bekescsaba, Hungary. Ten students will have the opportunity to participate in research aimed at understanding the later prehistory of the Great Hungarian Plain. They will help excavate the Early Cooper Age settlement of Veszto-Bikeri. They will (1) work side-by-side with Hungarian students as they receive instruction in survey and excavation techniques; (2) participate in seminars taught by experts on archaeological method and theory and on the culture and history of Eastern Europe; (3) visit museums and archaeological sites; (4) plan and complete an independent research project; and (5) live in the small town of Veszto and learn about life in Hungary from the villagers and Hungarian students and archaeologists. The students will be responsible not only for helping excavate the site, but also for analyzing archaeological material that will provide a better understanding of prehistoric economic and social organization. They will present papers and publish their results on the project website and in archaeological journals. This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences. science through active undergraduate research experiences doc18386 none This Chemistry Division award supports the continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at Georgia Tech. David Collard is the site s Program Director and Thomas Moran is the Co-Director. Over the award period ( - ), ten students will be supported each summer in a ten-week program. The student participants choose from more than thirty projects in analytical, biological, inorganic, organic, physical, and polymer chemistry. Each student will work closely with a faculty mentor. Activities will include regular group meetings, REU gatherings, and two REU Symposia. Field trips to local industrial organizations and government agencies are planned. Students are expected to be co-authors on submissions to scholarly journals. A series of exit interviews and follow-up surveys to both the participants and their undergraduate advisors at their home institution are planned as part of the assessment of the program doc18387 none Washington State University operates a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site on materials characterization. Twelve students are recruited nationwide every year for a ten-week summer research experience, with a recruitment focus in the Pacific Northwest region. Students participate in research projects that utilize modern characterization techniques to understand the relationships between processing, structure and properties of materials, such as the effects of crystal grain orientation on the corrosion of metals and the mechanical behavior of organic thin films. Students are grouped into project-based teams, each project is designed to be finished during the summer and requires team members to complete tasks in processing, structural characterization or properties measurements. The summer research experience culminates with a symposium where the students present the results of their work doc18388 none The UMBC Teaching Enhancement Partnership Project (TEPP) will organize and lead a university-middle school partnership with 5 local, high-needs middle schools in order to support and enhance mathematics and science instruction of under-represented middle school youth in the greater Baltimore area. Twenty-five graduate and advanced undergraduate student Fellows with majors in information systems, computer science, engineering, mathematics, and natural sciences will be recruited and selected from UMBC. One graduate student and five undergraduate students will be placed in each of the five middle schools to support teachers in the classroom and in co-curricular activities. Participating teachers will provide leadership to Fellows in instruction and classroom management, exposing them to the rewards of teaching in the K-12 public school system. Teachers will also participate in a continuous and sustained professional development efforts designed to enhance their understanding of mathematics and science concepts, and to introduce them to IT and inquiry-based instruction through UMBC sponsored seminars and courses. An emphasis will be placed on information technology (IT) as a tool for the enhancement of teaching and learning in science and mathematics doc18389 none Bechert This is a planning visit for Dr. Ursula Bechert, with the Department of Biomedical Sciences at Oregon State University, to travel to Maun, Botswana to consult with Dr. Lars Ramberg, Director of the Harry Oppenheimer Okavango Research Center. The purpose of the visit is to finalize plans for the initiation of a cooperative, multi-disciplinary project to study the role of hippopotamuses in wetland ecosystems and their interactions with humans. Hippopotamuses are a keystone species of the Okavango Delta, and many other animal and plant species are dependent upon them. No systematic studies have been conducted on the hippopotamuses in the Okavango Delta, and it is anticipated that such a project will yield valuable information on their population biology and interactions with their environment doc18390 none Auburn University s Physics Department will host 8-10 undergraduate physics students for 10 weeks during the summer in a Research Experiences for Undergraduates Site . During that time each student will complete a research project and then present the results during the subsequent academic year at either the National Conference on Undergraduate Research or an appropriate professional meeting. The objectives are (1) to expose undergraduate students to a thriving research environment, (2) encourage them to pursue careers in science, (3) reach out to students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and (4) teach students to work on team-oriented projects. The research projects are carefully designed to be challenging but to ensure the possibility of completion during the 10 week summer period. The projects are integral parts of the research efforts in the Physics Department guaranteeing interaction and communication among the faculty, postdocs, resident students, and the REU student(s) working in the group. Projects span the gamut of research activities in the Physics Department including many with experimental and some with theoretical emphasis. The principal areas are solid state physics, plasma physics and space physics doc18391 none The Center for Earth and Environmental Science at Plattsburgh State University (PSU) and the W. H. Miner Agricultural Research Institute will provide an eight-week summer research experience for 12 highly motivated undergraduate students interested in ecosystem research. The PSU summer research program will involve an interdisciplinary investigation of ecosystem-level processes in the sandstone-pavement jack pine barrens in northeastern New York. the physical environment of the pine barrens strongly influences ecosystem processes such as runoff, organic matter decomposition and nutrient cycling, and aquatic and terrestrial habitats. This special ecosystem is a distinctive component of the Champlain-Adirondack Biosphere Resserve and the REU studies will have significance for organizations like the Adirondack Nautre conservancy and Nature Conservancy Canada, which are developing management plans for these areas. The sandstone pavement ecosystems have been a focus of undergraduate research at PSU since and the REU program will build upon these ongoing efforts. The principal objectives of the Plattsburgh REU program are to promote the professional development of our undergraduate researchers and instill a better appreciation for ecosystem complexity, function and value. The REU participants, individually and in small groups, will work closely with the program s faculty mentors on research projects ranging from surface and ground water hydrogeology, forest biochemistry (nutrient cycling) and terrestrial plant, aquatic and wetlands ecology doc18392 none The River Basins Research Initiative (RBRI) NSF-REU Site, will incorporate 15 undergraduate science majors at the sophomore or junior level into an extensive 10-week interdisciplinary research program that is focused on the biogeochemistry of river systems in the upstate of South Carolina. Nine of the students will be funded by NSF-REU and six will be funded jointly by NSF-REU and the Universidad metropolitana, San Juan, Puerto Rico. The faculty involved in this program are from the departments of earth and environmental sciences, biology, and chemistry and have developed a moded system for interdisciplinary integration. Students involved in the research will be introduced to a variety of analytical systems, work on interdisciplinary teams and participate in all phases of the research from planning, to sample collection, sample analysis, and data analysis. The long-term goals of this research program are to quantify the extent of human impact on aquatic biota in the Lower Broad River Basin in the upstate region of South Carolina and to characterize biogeochemical cycles in a subtropical weathering regime doc18393 none The Center for Behavioral Neuroscience (CBN) is an NSF Science and Technology Center with eight participating Atlanta-area institutions: Clark-Atlanta University, Emory University, Georgia State University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Morehouse College, Morehouse School of Medicine, Morris Brown College, and Spelman College. These eight institutions have partnered to investigate those brain mechanisms that are responsible for social behaviors (e.g. fear, aggression, and reproduction) and to develop programs that expose students at all levels to the latest findings and career opportunities in the sciences. Funding from the NSF-REU program will allow participants to enjoy the opportunity to partake in an inter-institutional, interdisciplinary research environment. For ten summer weeks, ten undergraduate students will engage in research focused on topics including fear, reproduction and aggression. In addition, students will participate in weekly ethics and career seminars, a poster session coordinated in conjunction with the Emory s Howard Hughes summer research program, biweekly journal clubs and methods course, and professional development training sessions. Students at the freshman and sophomore levels from minority serving institutions, women colleges, and small colleges nationwide with limited research opportunities will be the primary targets of our recruitment efforts. Also, students from Atlanta will be invited to continue their research project throughout the academic year. In order to ensure that freshmen and sophomores will acclimate to the demands of an intense research environment, participants will be placed in CBN labs with junior and senior summer research students, who will serve as peer mentors. NSF-REU participants will receive a stipend of $ , room and board, and a travel award, which may be used to cover the costs of attending the summer program and or a national scientific meeting doc18394 none This award provides funding to the University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB) to establish the Internships in Nanosystems Science, Engineering and Technology (INSET) REU site program, to be hosted by the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI). The project will be under the direction of Dr. Evelyn Hu. The INSET program will involve a minimum of eight undergraduate students from California community colleges in a program that includes the following three research components: eight-week summer internships at the UCSB; school-year internships for UCSB students who previously attended community colleges; and off-site research internships at UCLA and industry for students in the summer following an initial UCSB summer or school-year internship doc18395 none This award provides funding to Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) for the support of a renewal five-year, REU Site entitled Undergraduate Research: Hybrid Synthesis of Advanced 3D Structures, under the direction of Dr. Subha K. Kumpaty. This ten-week summer program will involve nine students annually in research in areas in hybrid synthesis and fabrication working closely with undergraduate and graduate students in MSOE s exciting Centers of Excellence. A broad mix of students, typically 50% women and 25-30% under-represented minorities, from other institutions programs will be recruited for the program doc18396 none This Chemistry Division award supports the continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the University of South Carolina. Catherine Murphy is the site s Program Director and Hans-Conrad zur Loye is the Co-Program Director. Fifteen faculty will serve as REU student mentors. Over the award period ( - ), ten students will be supported each summer in a ten-week program. Increased minority participation is planned through working with the NSF AMP program at the University of South Carolina. Students will participate in a variety of synthesis and characterization approaches to study the novel properties of materials with structures ordered on the nanometer scale. Planned activities include a symposia, laboratory and lecture tutorials, and social functions to stimulate student-faculty interaction and student-student communications. A series of assessments are planned throughout both the summer program and following the summer, which includes evaluations from both the research mentors and the students and following the progress of the student after the program doc18397 none An REU(Research Experience for Undergraduates) Site will operate for each of the next three summers at Nevis Labs, the high energy physics laboratory of Columbia University. Each summer, we will recruit a group of 10 undergraduate student participants; diversity will be an important element of the recruitment process, and we will actively seek participants from historically under-represented groups. The broad Nevis research program, which seeks to address the most pressing issues of high energy physics, provides the opportunity for the students to gain experience in all aspects of high energy physics experiments, from initial conceptual detector design, hardware development and construction, to simulation software development and data analysis. The activities will also include a series of seminars on various topics in current physics research. At the end of the program, the students will prepare a written scientific report describing the research they performed, and give a short seminar-style presentation to the lab-wide audience doc18398 none b. Institution: Duke University Marine Laboratory c. Principal Investigator: Celia Bonaventura, Ph.D., Professor of Cell Biology, Duke University Medical School and Nicholas School of The Environment and Earth Sciences Co-Principal Investigator: Michael K. Orbach, PhD, Professor of the Practice of Marine Affairs and Policy, Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences d. Number of Fellows: Nine NSF Teaching Fellows, including 3 undergraduate students, 3 masters students, and 3 pre-doctoral students e. Target Audience: The Program will focus on high school and middle school grade levels, with some activities that attract students of all ages. f. NSF-supported disciplines: Within the broad context of Coastal and Marine Environments, topics of instruction will include disciplinary and interdisciplinary aspects of biology, chemistry, physical science, earth science, ecology, environmental social sciences, mathematics, statistics and technology. Throughout all aspects of the Program, covering many scientific disciplines, we will encourage development of communication skills, including written, spoken, and graphic communications. g. Brief description of project and benefits: This proposal is submitted in response to the NSF s solicitation for Graduate Teaching Fellows in K-12 Education. The overall goal of the proposed project is to team some of the best students from Duke University s Marine Laboratory (as undergraduate and graduate Teaching Fellows) with high school and middle school students from neighboring rural public schools. This effort will be strongly supported by the Dean of Duke University s Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, as well as an enthusiastic group of Duke faculty members and local school administrators and educators. The Duke University Marine Laboratory, staffed by Faculty of the School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, provides an outstanding setting for teacher and student training. Our program focus, Coastal and Marine Environments, includes a number of key domains that are relevant to NSF-supported science disciplines. Our project team has a broad, interdisciplinary nature, including expertise in biochemistry, marine ecology and zoology, environmental social science, integrated earth biological physical science and science education. We thus offer both a unique setting for science education and an excellent faculty and student support base for broad coverage of NSF-supported disciplines. The high-quality Duke students who will serve as Teaching Fellows are undoubtedly our best assets with regard to this program. Their talents and enthusiasm will be augmented by Duke faculty participants who have consistently demonstrated an exceptional interest in working with the public schools and in facilitating public school outreach for Marine Laboratory undergraduate and graduate students as a key component of their Duke experience. All of these participants will work with the Teaching Fellows and K-12 students to focus on the educational disciplines listed above. We believe one of the strongest aspects of the proposed project is the opportunity for students to pursue the in situ exploration of marine coastal environments to which the Marine Laboratory has direct access. This unique opportunity will prove to be exciting and fun for the students who live in and near these environments. Our program will provide the inquiry-based opportunity for K-12 students in coastal areas to integrate the knowledge they have acquired about their own backyard into a more complete picture of the complex functioning of coastal and marine ecosystems. Our previous experience in working with the public school students in Carteret County, North Carolina, confirms this to be an approach doc18399 none This joint Chemistry Division and Materials Research Division award supports a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the Iowa State University. Mark Gordon is the site s Program Director. James Evans, Bruce Harmon, Kai Ming Ho, and William Jenks are the Co-Directors. Seven faculty members from the Departments of Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry will serve as REU student mentors. Over the award period ( - ), eight students will be supported each summer in a ten-week program. The recruitment focus will be directed towards regional undergraduate institutions and several HBCU universities where personal contacts exist. The research focus will be computational chemistry and physics with special emphasis on applications in materials science. The specific areas of research are quantum chemistry, surface dynamics, solid state properties and dynamics, and dynamics of biomolecules. Students will participate in a series of short (half-day) courses on high performance computing. Weekly meetings will be held, where students, during the later part of the summer, present their research. At the end of the summer students will present their research in a poster session. Part of the assessment of the program will be exit interviews with each of the students. All participants will be tracked until they complete their undergraduate educations doc18400 none The NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates program makes effective use of mentoring and networking to recruit and train young researchers. As a newly named REU site, Davidson College has funding to support 10 undergraduate students for 10 weeks of intensive summer laboratory or field research. Under the mentorship of eight Biology and two Psychology faculty, students will conduct independent research at all levels of the life sciences, from molecular biology to neuroscience to field studies of animal populations. Formal and informal interactions among students and faculty will provide each participant with wide-ranging knowledge of biological problems and techniques. In addition to the research itself, participants will take part in weekly discussions of their own research, current issues in the life sciences, graduate school, writing grant proposals, and ethical issues in research. Participants will present the results of their research in a formal talk at the end of the summer and in a scientific paper. We will engage in a national recruitment effort via the Internet and personal contacts with faculty across the US. We will actively recruit African-American, Hispanic, and Native American students via contacts at historically black colleges and universities and other institutions with significant minority enrollments. By working closely with Davidson College Life Science faculty and gaining a better understanding of how science is conducted, students will be better able to make informed decisions about scientific issues shaping our world today and about their own career choices doc18401 none This research is aimed at establishing a vigorous project to synthesize various well-defined, conjugated diblock copolymers and to investigate their physical properties. A conjugated diblock copolymer possesses a rod-rod structure and will behave differently than rod-coil types of copolymers. These conjugated diblock copolymers are new architectures of electroactive polymers. The main goal of this work is to understand the kind of electronic and structural properties that the rod-rod types of diblock copolymers will exhibit. To probe these properties, various combinations of conjugated blocks and their synthetic approaches are outlined in this proposal. These combinations vary from having different amphiphilic properties to having different electronic properties. A series of functionalized conjugated oligomers, ranging from oligothiophenes and oligophenylenenvinylenes to oligophenlylenes, will be synthesized. The electronic and physical properties of these oligomers will be investigated as the database for their comparison with diblock copolymers (or co-oligomers). Several of the oligomers obtained will be coupled to form diblock copolymers with various conjugation lengths and electronic properties. Since these block copolymers can undergo phase separation and form self-assembly, microscopic studies of the self-assemblies will be carried out to find the principles underlying their molecular packing and phase behaviors. Copolymers with various redox properties will be coupled to explore electro-optic properties such as optical absorption and luminescence, and photoconductivity and electrical conductivity. Copolymers with an electron-rich block and an electron-deficient one will be functionalized with a hydrophilic side group attached to the first and hydrophobic moiety attached to the latter. These block copolymers will be sued to prepare L-B films, which are very interesting for their molecular-electronic effects due to their built-in molecular P-N junction. These block copolymers are expected to undergo phase separations to assemble into nanometer-continuous domains, which will be explored for photovoltaic effect. The investigation of possible applications of the diblock copolymers includes their use in electro-optic devises, such as photovoltaic and electroluminescent devices, molecular-electronic components, and optical switching. Experiments to explore the properties leading to those applications are also proposed doc18402 none The Summer Research Program in Biostatistics is offered by the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The program will give undergraduate students the opportunity to explore a career in biostatistics and bioinformatics by working closely with faculty mentors in the Department and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Department has an internationally recognized research faculty committed to undergraduate and graduate training, who will direct individual research projects. Our goals are to spark the students interest in biostatistical research and provide them with the tools and skills to successfully gain admission to post-baccalaureate programs. Students with strength in mathematics participate in coursework in statistical computing, biostatistics, and bioinformatics. A seminar series highlights the diversity of research areas utilizing biostatistics to solve real problems in biological and medical science and provides an understanding of the role of the statistician in a variety of scientific research areas. In addition the program includes workshops on ethics, career choices and other topics of interest.. There are a wide variety of biostatistics and bioinformtaics research activities for 6-8 students in the summer program. Research areas include clinical trials, epidemiology, bioinformatics, statistical genetics and laboratory experimental design. At the end of the 8 week period the students present their work on a chosen research topic to other program participants and mentors doc18403 none The physics Research Experiences for Undergraduates program at the College of William and Mary directly supports the participation of 10 junior level undergraduates for projects in physics of 10-week duration. In addition, the existence of this program has led to a private endowment, the DeWilde Fellowships for the support of 5 more, and other funds usually support an additional 5 undergraduates for a total robust program of 20. The William and Mary physics department, a large, nationally ranked Ph.D. granting program, together with the applied science department, and in cooperation with the NASA Langley Research Center and Jefferson Lab provides mentors and projects in atom-atom, atom-ion, and atom-surface scattering, surface physics, ultra-sonics, laser physics and laser-atom interactions, condensed matter physics with a variety of techniques, nuclear and particle physics, polymer physics, non-destructive evaluation, plasma physics, non-linear dynamics, quantum computing and quantum information, and astrophysics cosmology. Seminars by faculty and students are supplemented by a workshop on the nature of graduate study. An opportunity to learn how to use a machine shop is very popular. Some common activities are planned with the REU program of the Hampton University Physics Department including 10-minute, American Physical Society style talks by the participants from both institutions. The College has been especially successful in attracting women students to the program in the past and intends to continue striving in this direction doc18404 none Ratchford This award supports the second stage of the decade of U.S.-China Science Policy Dialogues that was initiated under a previous grant ( ). The Science Policy Dialogues occur under the auspices of the National Science Foundation of the United States (NSF) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). The principal objective of the decade of science policy dialogues is to explore issues facing the United States and China that have significant implications for the vitality of science and engineering in the borderless, knowledge-based economy of the 21st century. Funds provided in the first phase supported an initial seminar in October in Beijing under the theme Enhancing Links between the Production, Dissemination, and Application of Research and a second major seminar on in December entitled U.S.-China Forum on Biotechnology and Biomedicine held on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and will be used to support the Technical Innovation Workshop that will be held in Washington in March . The second phase will include four major events: 1) the Policy Strategy Workshop (i.e., the meeting of the Advisory Council), Beijing, June ); 2) the U.S.-China Seminar on Engineering Education for the Global Economy, Shanghai and Beijing, October ; 3) a trilateral U.S.-Japan-China seminar on Ethics and the Internet (tentatively targeted at spring ); 4) and a seminar on a yet-to-be-determined subject. The Advisory Council envisioned in the first phase will be fully implemented in the second phase to guide the selection of topics and to monitor progress toward the overall objectives doc18405 none This award provides funding for a 3-year REU Site in Chemical Engineering at the Nanoscale, at the University of Connecticut, under the direction of Dr. Joseph J. Helble. This 10-week summer program will provide 10 chemical engineering undergraduate students from other institutions with the opportunity to work with chemical engineering faculty on projects that emphasize chemical engineering at the nanoscale. Because all of the faculty are participants in major interdisciplinary research centers on campus, students will have access to technician-assisted state of the art instrumentation in analytical chemistry, surface science, and biotechnology for their research. Recruiting will be done nationally with a special emphasis on local small colleges and the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez. In addition to the laboratory research experience, communication skills development will be stressed through meetings, discussions, short written summaries, and an end-of-summer REU Research Symposium. A rich seminar program will also provide a practical perspective on the developing importance of nanotechnology through a plant trip and lectures by industrial scientists, and will stress recognition of issues of scientific ethics through a special program of faculty-moderated discussions and a half-day workshop led by the Director of the Scientific Freedom, Responsibility and Law Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS doc18406 none The University of North Carolina at Wilmington (UNCW) will conduct a three-year program with the New Hanover County School system to improve science education in the middle schools. A select group of science graduate students (GK-12 Fellows) from programs in chemistry, biology, earth sciences, and marine sciences will be prepared to serve as classroom resource persons for middle school teachers and students. The Science and Mathematics Education Center will serve as the management hub for the project and the liaison between UNCW and the New Hanover County School system. Other participants in the project include the Program in Environmental Studies and the Graduate School. For a three-year period, GK- 12 Fellows will be placed in all New Hanover County middle schools each year focusing on a different grade level. Year I of the project will focus on 8th grade classes, Year 2 on 7th grade classes and Year 3 on 6th grade classes. Through this partnership with New Hanover County Schools, this project will directly impact more than middle school students over the three years of which almost are minorities. In addition, over 60 middle school teachers will be directly or indirectly impacted by this project. The Science and Mathematics Education Center will maintain a website that provides a conduit between university science faculty, project staff and middle school science teachers and students. This website will provide a forum for questions and answers, the posting of project activities and a resource for database sharing. NSF fellows will receive special preparation in teaching science as inquiry and in using technology in instruction. Scientific instruction will be organized thematically for each grade level addressing the following four program strands: the nature of science, science as inquiry, science and technology, and science in social and personal perspectives. UNCW faculty will serve as the instructional staff for eight-day workshops each summer for GK-12 Fellows and selected middle school science teachers. These workshops will focus on policy regulations for working in K-12 schools, school safety, pedagogy instruction, and creation of a curriculum-sequencing guide that is aligned with the North Carolina Standard Course of Study for Middle Schools. Weekly seminars taught by UNCW science faculty will develop specific inquiry-based activities for each grade level according to the sequencing guide. Fellows will spend 10 hours per week over 36 weeks in middle school classrooms assisting classroom teachers with science lesson selection, setup, and demonstration. Participating middle school teachers will serve as resource persons to non-participant, in-service teachers within their schools, and along with GK-12 Fellows, develop and teach two, grade-specific day long workshops during the school year. In addition, program participants will develop a grade-specific activity book for distribution to all middle school teachers. Participating middle school teachers and selected GK-12 Fellows will also serve as workshop leaders each summer for new cohorts of Fellows and teachers doc18407 none This joint Chemistry Division, Division of Engineering Education and Centers, and Office of Multidisciplinary Activities award supports the continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at Virginia Commonwealth University. Suzanne Ruder is the site s Program Director and Sally Hunnicutt is the Co-Program Director. Sixteen faculty members from the Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering will serve as REU student mentors. Over the award period ( - ), eleven students will be supported each summer in a ten-week program and five teachers in a seven-week program. The students are drawn mostly from regional colleges, where research opportunities are generally not available. Recruitment approaches similar to those in the past, will be used. These have been successful with recruiting minorities into their REU program at the level of 40%. The teachers that are recruited are mostly from the Richmond Public School system. Students and teachers have a wide selection of research projects from which to select, that are divided into the three areas of synthesis, analysis, and modeling. Throughout the program there are research meetings, workshops, and seminars. At the halfway point the students and teachers give an oral presentation on the progress of their research. At the close of the program participants present their research results at a final symposium. For assessment of the program all participants and research mentors complete evaluation forms and students are tracked after their departure doc18408 none Inverse Problems For Electrical Networks An electrical network consisting only of resistors has a definite response to voltages applied at designated terminals. This response can be computed if the configuration (topology) of the network and resistances of the resistors are known. The inverse problems that will be studied are those in which the response is given and the resistances and or topology are not known but desired. Planar and non-planar networks will be studied. In addition, similar problems involving scattering theory and the Schrodinger equation will be studied. Relations to continuous inverse problems will be investigated. Eight undergraduates per summer will work on these problems doc18409 none Wubah This two-year grant supports the participation of eight undergraduate students (four per year) in a summer research program in Ghana. The students will be supervised by Dr. Daniel Wubah, Associate Dean of the College of Science and Mathematics at James Madison University, and Dr. Kobina Yankson, Dean of the Faculty of Science, and other faculty members at the University of Cape Coast (UCC). Students will also be assigned peer mentors, who will be senior level UCC students engaged in research projects in the faculty mentor s laboratory. The students projects will emphasize the importance of biodiversity to the health of ecosystems, and the human and environmental factors that impact biodiversity. Site visits will be made to nature preserves and national parks to examine the characteristics and components of biologically diverse habitats. The undergraduate students will participate in group meetings, research seminars, field trips, and technical workshops, and they will also take part in activities that will increase their knowledge about Ghanaian culture. At the end of the six-weeks the students will present their work in both oral and poster formats at an end-of-program symposium. Upon their return to the United States, the students will also present the results of their work at campus, regional, and national meetings. These research projects are expected to increase the students understanding of the ecology and biodiversity in a tropical region of West Africa, improve their skills in critical thinking and problem solving, and broaden their understanding of how science is conducted in a developing country. The project will also provide the students opportunities to develop collaborative linkages with the Ghanaian faculty and students. It is anticipated that the results of this program will increase their competitiveness for graduate and professional studies within the life sciences. This grant also promotes a collaborative linkage between a predominantly undergraduate institution in the United States, James Madison University, and a Sub-Saharan Africa university, University of Cape Coast, that is actively engaged in research in the biological sciences doc18410 none Fisk University operates a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site on materials modification and characterization; the Site is based in the Physics Department at Fisk. Twelve students are recruited nationwide every year for a nine-week summer research experience. Students participate in a variety of research projects that involve crystal growth, glasses, nonlinear optical materials, surface science, ceramics, and associated characterization techniques. Undergraduate participants also attend a research seminar series and prepare oral and written presentations on their research projects doc18411 none The Jackson Laboratory s Summer Student Program has provided a life-altering 10-week research apprenticeship for thousands of high school and college students for more than seventy years. The program immerses students in laboratory science: hypothesis-driven research, rigorous testing of ideas using the experimental method, collecting and interpreting experimental results to arrive at a conclusion, and reporting results in an open forum. It inculcates the unyielding demand for intellectual honesty in reporting and interpreting results. The object is to introduce students to the real nature of research and change perceptions of how science is done. Each summer student participant conducts original hands-on research as a contributing member of a sponsoring scientist s research team. Projects are tailored to the student s background and interests. Each student s independent project focuses on a vital subject such as cancer, the use of computers in biology, aging, genetics, how the immune system fights disease, or diseases of the nervous system. Students devote most of their effort to their individual research projects, but the program also provides formal exposure to the breadth of genetics research at the Laboratory, to different paths leading to careers in science, and to consideration of the ethical conduct of research. The overall theme is to introduce students to the professional life and habits of mind of a scientist. Science is both a body of knowledge and a way of exploring the natural world. In school, students are exposed to the body of knowledge but often do not appreciate the creative nature of scientific research. A research program changes these misperceptions. Alumni report that these lessons last a lifetime, shape careers, and change the way participants perceive their world. Students develop a close working relationship with a research scientist and come to better understand the profound satisfaction of a career in advancing human understanding of nature; more than 95% of Jackson REU participants are now in graduate or medical school or are employed in science doc18412 none This award provides funding to SUNY Binghamton for the support of a three-year, REU Site in Electronics Packaging, under the direction of Dr. Bahgat G. Sammakia. This ten-week summer program will involve eight students annually in the multidisciplinary field of electronics packaging research through the Integrated Electronics Engineering Center (IEEC). Students will have the opportunity to interact with scientists and engineers from industry. The research teams will include undergraduate students, faculty, graduate students, and industrial mentors. A broad mix of students, including women and under-represented minorities, not only from Binghamton but from other institutions as well, will be recruited for the program. While independent research will be stressed, students will have the opportunity to experience working in a team environment. Oral and written communication of research results will be required doc18413 none This award provides funding to the University of North Dakota for the support of a three-year REU Site entitled, Engaging Undergraduates in Multidisciplinary Remote Sensing Image Acquisition and Analysis Research at the University of North Dakota, under the direction of Dr. Richard R. Schultz. This 10-week summer program will provide eight undergraduate students and two math science middle high schoolteachers with the opportunity to conduct research on three remote sensing projects with the assistance of faculty mentors. The students will participate in research group meetings, professional development seminars, and a mini-conference at the end of the summer where they will be required to individually prepare and deliver an oral presentation to Senior Personnel and all other interested parties. Each participant will be required to submit a research paper to her his project mentors, which may be submitted by the mentors to an undergraduate research conference or an international research conference doc18414 none This Chemistry Division award supports a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the University of California where a previous REU site was funded for - . Robert Bau is the site s Program Director. Thirteen faculty will serve as REU student mentors. Over the award period ( - ), ten students will be supported each summer in a ten-week program. Minority students will be recruited through existing contacts with institutions in the LA area that have significant populations of under-represented groups and with the help of the institution s McNair Scholars Program. The available research will include imaging and manipulations with STMs and AFMs, optical imaging of reaction products, femtochemsitry experiments, X-ray crystallography, spectroscopy, and theoretical simulations. Students will participate in informal evening tutorials and seminars. Visits are planned to several large R&D labs in the LA area. All students will prepare a final written paper and a poster presentation on their research. Evaluation forms are to be completed by all students. In the future, the career choices of the students will be monitored doc18415 none The National Science Foundation s Research Experience for Undergraduates site at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory (Salisbury Cove, Maine) provides ten eight-week fellowships for undergraduate students majoring in biology or its allied fields of study. Students prioritize three mentors projects from a list of 30 senior scientists exploring timely questions involving marine molecular physiology and functional genomics. Using sharks, skates, flounder, sculpin and other sea fauna including invertebrates, students work at the laboratory bench to explore questions at the molecular level concerning reproduction, osmoregulation, acid base balance, ion transport and environmental toxicology. Students are trained in advanced techniques such as confocal microscopy and gene expression. To supplement bench work, undergraduates attend three weekly laboratory-wide science seminars on topics related to marine molecular physiology (Monday Morning Membrane Transport Seminar, Wednesday Evening Seminar, and Friday Brown Bag Short Lecture Seminar) and participate in an ethics course, Responsible Conduct in Laboratory Research taught by their mentors. Students are invited to attend a variety of MDIBL scientific conferences in which internationally renown researchers present their work. Selected undergraduates present their research at an end-of-the-season event, Future Scientists Night sponsored by MDIBL and the Jackson Laboratory. Finally, students write a research paper for possible publication in The Bulletin of the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory (http: www.mdibl.org parent-frames publications ). MDIBL s REU Fellowships are all-inclusive. Room, board, supplies, travel and a stipend are provided. Undergraduates are housed on campus in one of two residence halls adjacent to the Laboratory volleyball court. Three meals a day are provided in the MDIBL CO OP. On weekends, undergraduates cook their own meals, with raw materials provided in the dining hall. Activities outside the Laboratory include unlimited recreation in nearby Acadia National Park and small towns on Mount Desert Island. The dormitories, the community dining hall, dedicated mentors, energetic students, the Laboratory s natural setting and ambiance coalesce to a truly unique and productive scientific community. Student recruitment point of contact: Michael McKernan (Director of Education), tel. 207 288- , mmckernan@mdibl.org. For site and application information see web page at http: www.mdibl.org doc18416 none PI: James Ralston Gregory Eskin Inverse scattering problems arise when one wishes to recover physical properties of an object from data obtained by remote observations or from measurements made on its surface without penetrating the interior. Interpreted broadly they include methods of nondestructive testing and medical imaging. The problems proposed here include showing that it is possible, in principle, to determine the properties of an inhomogeneous elastic body from its response to pressures on its surface, and to determine both the acoustic properties of a medium surrounding a solid obstacle and the obstacle itself from reflected sound waves. More specifically, the problems we propose include: 1) showing that it is possible to uniquely determine the Lame parameters of an inhomogeneous elastic body from its response to infinitesimal boundary deformations. 2) For an obstacle in an inhomogeneous medium we propose to show that both the obstacle and the sound speed in the medium can be recovered from the scattering amplitude at a fixed frequency. 3) Do problem 2) in the more technically difficult case of two space dimensions, where it becomes a determined inverse problem doc18417 none The major objective of the ten week Summer Undergraduate Research Focus (SURF)-Anthropogenic Impacts on the Environment program is to provide research experiences and education for ten undergraduate students, particularly female and minority students. Recruitment efforts focus on students who are not likely to have research opportunities at their home institutions, for example students at community colleges. The common focus of the research activities is an investigation of the effects of human activities on the environment, particularly the coastal environment. Research projects will be mentored by faculty members of the Department of Physical a journal club; professional skills activities; and an ethics in science component. SURF will conclude with a symposium in which the students deliver oral or poster presentations of their research. In addition to the ten-week summer program, students are funded to present their research at one regional or national conference during the regular academic year doc18418 none This award provides funds for an REU Site in anthropology in West Central Highland Guatemala. The topic for the Site is culture change and continuity in Guatemala. Twelve undergraduate students will participate in the 12-week summer program. The students will be recruited from Brigham Young University, University of Illinois-Chicago, University of Texas-Pan American, and Southwest Texas State University. The goal of the Site is to prepare a diversified pool of talented undergraduates, especially those from under-represented groups, for full participation in the professional community of social science by experiencing all the stages of research, including problem conceptualization, independent field research, analysis, write up, oral presentation at academic fora, and scholarly publication. While in the field, students will conduct ethnographic field research and also attend a weekly methods and ethics seminar. This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences doc18419 none The REU program conducted by the Rice Quantum Institute brings together a number of students from outside universities as well as from Rice University for a ten-week interdisciplinary summer research program. The focus is to provide undergraduate students, frequently from schools with more limited resources, with a jump start into many aspects of research that cannot easily be learned in classes. The students are exposed to different disciplines by contact with a variety of research groups, organized lab tours, weekly seminars by Rice grad students, and frequent scientific and social interactions with other REU students. Each student also works on a project with a particular research group from among the departments of Physics and Astronomy, Chemistry, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, Bioengineering, Chemical Engineering, Computational and Applied Mathematics, and Civil and Environmental Engineering. This involves an accelerated learning period where students become familiar with a new field and depend on the undergrads, grads, postdocs and faculty mentor of the group to show them the relevant literature, lab expertise, instrument and computer skills, etc. This leads into the major period of research where they are given the responsibility for bringing the project to a successful completion. Participants are given an opportunity to to present their work on the last day at the RQI Colloquium. This annual event, which assembles a large audience made up of REU students, of research groups and others from Rice, as well as interested outsiders from neighboring schools and industries, showcases research going on within the Institute doc18420 none This research by Professor Yi Lu of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program. The goal of this work is to elucidate the role of each ligand of an artificially introduced dicopper, Cu-A, center in azurin, which, in nature, contains a mononuclear copper site. This will enable determining ligand effects on geometric parameters, electronic structure and behavior of the Cu-A center, which are essential to the function of important charge-transfer proteins, such as cyctochrome oxidase. In addition, this study provides for the direct comparison of the structural and functional properties of three important electron transfer centers: blue (type 1) copper, Cu-A and Fe2S2. The di-iron center will be inserted into the azurin by a new technique, expressed protein ligation (EPL), which shows promise as a very efficient and cost-effective way to generate milligram quantities of proteins containing unnatural amino acids. Electron-transfer proteins are vital to fundamental life processes. The effects of the various amino acids surrounding the unusual Cu-A site artificially placed in this protein will be systematically determined and compared with that of the normal blue copper site and another two-metal site, Fe2S2, which also occurs in essential electron-transfer proteins doc18421 none The program provides a collaborative research atmosphere for undergraduate students in the sciences to work with faculty mentors in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Chemistry at Western Michigan University. Participating faculty and their students focus on basic and applied approaches to interdisciplinary understanding of signal transduction cascades at different scales of biological organization from molecules to ecosystems. Signal transduction is the study of mechanisms by which biological molecules or chemical agents initiate action within cells, tissues, organisms or systems. Emphases within the program include (1) interdisciplinary research under the broad umbrella of environmental signal transduction, (2) student ownership of research, (3) ethical conduct within a research environment, (4) the development and implementation of defensible scientific methods, (5) active recruitment of under-represented groups to a career in science, (6) peer-motivated and mentor-motivated interactions within a cohort of collaborators, (7) communication, presentation and publication of research results, and (8) post-research experience tracking to encourage the pursuit of a career in science. Interactions within the group lead to new and innovative ways of studying biologically relevant signals that have broad applications in agriculture, health, and the environment. Research projects within the program vary from signal cascades within cells that may trigger immune responses to disease, to physiological responses to heavy metal stress, to the impact of genetically engineered plant products on non-target organisms. Students are exposed to a wide range of scientific methods and modern equipment, in both laboratory and field settings, and they are encouraged to take full advantage of available facilities. Students benefit scientifically from addressing highly focused questions from an interdisciplinary perspective and the communication of results from team efforts. Participating students also benefit socially and personally from deeply motivating interactions within a culture of deep commitment, interdisciplinary respect and societal relevance. In today s highly competitive research environment, the ability to apply a wide range of methods, skills, ideas, and theories from multiple disciplines is vital to the solution of both applied and conceptual problems doc18422 none William Evans, University of California-Irvine, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program for continuing studies of the special reduction chemistry of the lanthanide metals. Specifically, he is studying sterically induced reduction , a recently discovered reaction observed with (C5Me5)3Sm, a very crowded molecule with unusually long metal-carbon distances. Evans hopes to extend this size-related reduction to other lanthanides, which do not usually participate in reductive chemistry. The second research area involves the chemistry of TmI2, DyI2, and NdI2, highly reducing compounds that have only recently been prepared. The reactions of these divalent lanthanides with nitrogen, small molecule oxides, and hydrocarbons will be studied. The unique properties of the lanthanide metals offer opportunities to develop new types of reductive reactivity. Since reduction is one of the basic types of chemical reactions, this can broadly impact both synthetic and catalytic chemistry. In addition, through this research, students will be trained in the chemistry of the f-elements doc18423 none Prop #: PI: Robert Knox This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessels Revelle, Melvelle, New Horizon and Sproul operated by the University of California San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Robert Knox is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquirea replacement work boat, a portable winch, replacement radars, and a fathometer doc18424 none With National Science Foundation support a team from UC Berkeley will conduct research on the cacao plant, the natural source of chocolate, in its original area of cultivation in Central America. The project will develop a means to identify evidence for this important crop in archaeological sites, allowing researchers to tell whether different sites were centers of production prior to the Spanish conquest. Under the direction of Professors Rosemary Joyce and Christine Hastorf, postdoctoral researcher Dr. Kirsten Tripplett will conduct a baseline survey seeking examples of cacao plants in areas of Mexico, Belize, and Honduras that were recorded as important chocolate producing regions in the sixteenth century AD. Samples of cacao plants representing native populations of the species will be collected for further research in the United States. In a specialized laboratory for the study of ancient plant remains operated by Professor Hastorf, Dr. Tripplett will explore the possibility of identifying pollen, starch, and other cacao plant parts in archaeological sites. She will create a reference database for the identification of ancient cacao plant remains, that will be made accessible by computer. Dr. Tripplett will test the reference collection by comparing it to plant remains recovered from archaeological sites where cacao production is suspected to have been important. Because cacao was used as a form of money in the region in the sixteenth century, identifying it in archaeological sites will be a critical step in understanding the economy of the Aztecs, Mayas, and earlier Mesoamerican societies. Archaeologists have proposed that production or trade of cacao was a factor in many different sites, but until now, no systematic model has allowed identification of remains of the plant. This project will establish procedures for recovering and identifying evidence of this critically important plant doc18425 none Funding from the National Science Foundation will bring seven undergraduates to the California Academy of Sciences for an 8-week summer session in the Academy s Summer Systematics Institute. Recruitment will be on a national level, with selection emphasis given to female students and students from groups traditionally under-represented in the biological sciences. African-Americans, Native-Americans, and Latinos are especially encouraged to participate. Participants will receive a stipend, housing allowance and travel funds to and from his her place of residence. Each prospective intern will apply to work with an Academy research scientist on a research project. Successful applicants will participate in formal lectures in systematic biology, tours of each of the Academy s nine research departments, and research seminars in systematic biology. Students will work on directed projects that provide them with an introduction to the problem and organisms to be studied and introduce them to the data collection, interpretation, and dissemination aspects of research in systematic biology. Each student will produce a manuscript of the project s results, in the form of a scientific paper, and make an oral presentation of their results to their peers. Evaluations of interns and participating Academy staff will be conducted each year with a view towards improving the Institute for succeeding years doc18426 none This award will provide funding to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for a REU Site in electrical engineering and electronics, under the direction of Dr. David B. Newell. The project will involve up to nine undergraduate students for a 10-12 week summer program and internationally known NIST research engineers and scientists in individual research projects covering topics that include fundamental electrical measurements, national electrical standards, electric power systems, flat panel displays, electronic data exchange and micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS doc18427 none Cornell s Summer REU Program in Mathematics (Analysis on fractals, dynamics, geometry, combinatorics, mathematical biology) Each summer, 10 undergraduate students will participate in an 8 week research program in the Cornell University Mathematics Department directed by 3 faculty members (the Principal Investigator, R. Strichartz, and 2 others chosen from among department members and visitors). The students will work on research projects that are within their grasp, and which present real opportunities for new discoveries that will be of value to the mathematical community. It is expected that some, but not all, of the research will lead to published papers. Two types of projects will be emphasized: 1) computer related research, with students writing programs, or using existing software, to work out examples, generate conjectures, and perform experiments in areas such as analysis on fractals, iterations of rational mappings, dynamics of differential equations, and probabilistic models in genetics; 2) problems in geometry and combinatorics that do not require a great deal of background knowledge. In addition, the students will gain experience in communicating mathematics by presenting talks to each other and to the public. Website: www.math.cornell.edu Undergraduate REU doc18428 none Rosenthal The International Symposium on the Mathematical Theory of Networks and Systems (MTNS) is a major international conference. It attracts typically 400 mathematicians and other scientists working in theoretical aspects of systems theory. The symposium is interdisciplinary and attracts mathematicians, engineers and researchers working in all aspects of systems theory. Mathematical methods which play a role in the areas mentioned above stem from a broad range of fields of pure and applied mathematics, including ordinary and partial differential equations, real and complex analysis, numerical analysis, probability theory and stochastic analysis, operator theory, linear and commutative algebra as well as algebraic and differential geometry. In August the MTNS symposium will be held on the campus of the University of Notre Dame. Travel support will be provided by this award for approximately twenty new researchers (graduate students and recent doctoral recipients) and 2-3 international researchers needing special assistance to attend this conference. The symposium program will include plenary lectures, special topic invited lectures, mini-symposia, mini- courses, special topic sessions and contributed papers. The symposium will cover serious mathematical issues as well as some important applied areas. Several broad application areas were selected: (1) Systems theoretic questions in biology, (2) Applications in the area of telecommunications, (3) Computational questions arising in control and systems theory and (4) Systems theoretic questions in the area of mathematical finance. In each of these important application areas 2-3 established researchers were asked to organize a Mini-symposium . This is a sub-symposium which typically consists of a sequence of tutorial lectures as well as a sequence of invited sessions each consisting of 4 research papers. The organizers had these areas of research in mind at the time the plenary speakers and the special topics speaker were selected doc18429 none The Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at Texas A&M University is sponsoring a NSF-Research Experiences for Undergraduates Site for undergraduate research in biochemistry during the summers of - . The major goals of this program are to prepare students to pursue graduate training and careers in research and to instill in those students an appreciation of the effort and satisfaction involved in this pursuit. Students will be trained in a diverse array of modern biochemical methods in a vibrant department, and will develop effective oral and written communication skills to describe scientific projects. Up to fifteen students will be selected to participate in a 10-week summer program that will coincide with the summer session at the university (typically from the end of May until early August). Although not strictly limited to this geographical area, we will focus our recruiting efforts on students who have completed their junior or sophomore year at colleges and universities in Texas and mid-Southern states, particularly those from institutions that do not offer doctoral degrees. Applications from students in under-represented minority groups are particularly encouraged. Undergraduate participants will perform cutting-edge research in biochemistry while integrated into pre-existing laboratory groups of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, undergraduate students and technicians. At the conclusion of the program the students will present their research accomplishments in both written and oral reports doc18430 none This Chemistry Division award supports the continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at Columbia University. Leonard Fine is the site s Program Director and Bhawana Venkataraman is the Co-Program Director. Twenty-four faculty will serve as REU student mentors. Over the award period ( - ), ten students will be supported each summer in a ten-week program. To increase their record in the past of 15% minority students to at least 20%, they will actively develop personal contacts at minority serving institutions with faculty and administrators. Research available to the students includes analytical and theoretical chemistry, synthetic and biological chemistry, physical and inorganic chemistry, solid state and nanochemistry, polymer chemistry and materials research. Students will participate on a regular basis in group meetings and seminars. Two daylong field trips are planned -- one to a national laboratory and the other to an industrial laboratory. An external review is being developed in addition to students and research mentors completing a survey both at the start and at the end of the program. Students in the program will be tracked in subsequent years doc18431 none This Chemistry Division award supports a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the State University of New York at Stoney Brook. Nancy Goroff is the site s Program Director and Robert Kerber is the Co-Program Director. Ten faculty will serve as REU student mentors. Over the award period ( - ), ten students will be supported each summer in a ten-week program. The students will have a wide choice of research to choose; in addition to research in the basic areas of chemistry there are several interdisciplinary areas available, which include chemical physics, chemical biology, pharmacology, and materials. Students will give oral presentations of their research at the end of the summer and will be invited back to present their research at a poster session later in the academic year. Student surveys at the end of the program along with interviews of both the student and research mentors will be the basis of assessing the program doc18432 none This project will support a reconnaissance team using recently developed handheld technology to collect damage assessment data from structures damaged during the terrorist attack on the World Trace Center. The team will use the PQuake system developed by the Principal Investigator under NSF support for collection of damage data immediately after earthquakes. The system includes a GPS for recording location, a digital camera for photographic records, a handheld computer with customized software for recording data and a digital voice recorder to rapidly record notes. This system has been used successfully following the earthquake in Gujarat, India. Only minor modifications would be required in the software to adapt it for use in collecting damage from terrorist attacks, as the system already designed to record structural damage. The purpose of the data collection is threefold. First, systematic collection of damage data from structures damaged, but not destroyed, during the terrorist attack will aid in the assessment of the structural integrity of these buildings. These data will speed up the assessment of damage and the repair of these structures. Second, the data will serve as a valuable resource for future research related to performance of structures subjected to terrorist attack, explosions and fires; the development of methods of minimizing damage from such occurrences; and future design of urban structures. Third, this work will support the development of data acquisition and storage protocols for all post-disaster reconnaissance activities. The earthquake engineering community in particular is just starting to address the question of how to collect and archive data. The PI is a pioneer in the utilization of handheld technology for rapid data collection. This project will provide continued support for the development of these methods and will extend their use to disasters other than earthquakes doc18433 none Fundamental problems are addressed in wavelet theory, non-uniform sampling, frames, and the theory of spectral-tile duality. These problems are inextricably interwoven by concept and technique. Operator theory provides the major unifying framework, combined with an integration of ideas from a diverse spectrum of mathematics including classical Fourier analysis, noncommutative harmonic analysis, representation theory, operator algebras, approximation theory, and signal processing. For example, the construction, implementation, and ensuing theory of single dyadic orthonormal wavelets in Euclidean space requires significant input from all of these disciplines as well as deep spectral-tile results. There is intrinsic mathematical importance in the aforementioned problems, and the solutions to be formulated have broad and creative implications, both for mathematics and for applications in engineering and physics. The topics of this project have direct bearing on fast acquisition and motion problems in MRI, as well as in formulating algorithms for compression and noise reduction by means of proper cochlear modelling. There are further applications in quantum computing and image processing, and the development of non-uniform sampling strategies by this project play a role in state of the art A D conversion methods used in multifunction RF systems. These interdisciplinary applications depending on modern mathematical analysis have educational implications in terms of cross-fertilization of ideas and research opportunities for graduate students doc18434 none This award provides funding for a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site that will host a total of fourteen students per summer during twelve weeks of summer research. The REU program is based on the theory that mentoring and networking are the most effective methods for recruiting students into a profession and for training young researchers. Students will be working with researchers at one of three estuarine and coastal research sites, including Horn Point Laboratory (HPL), Chesapeake Biological Laboratory (CBL) and the Academy of Natural Science Estuarine Research Center (ANSERC). Organizers of the program have four main goals including, 1) to foster a close student-mentor relationship 2) to have students develop and complete a scientific project, 3) to have students communicate their scientific findings, 4) to ensure students understand ethical issues involved in scientific research. Matching funding is provided by the Maryland Seagrant Program (MSGP doc18435 none The project will provide science teachers in the middle schools in the Springfield, Massachusetts school district with opportunities to acquire science content knowledge and training in inquiry and project-based teaching, including the opportunity to conduct research as a part of a team with GK-12 Fellows, and UMass faculty. The Fellows and faculty will gain an understanding of the needs and culture of the schools, laying the foundations for future collaborations. The project will provide Fellows with increased experience in effective pedagogical approaches, and will also provide a diverse population of middle school students with role models and mentors. Middle school teachers in a master s degree program will work in teams (six in all) consisting of a UMass faculty participant, two GK-12 Fellows, and up to three middle school teachers) on the implementation of research projects with theirs school students. STEM Connections will start with summer workshops for the Fellows and teachers. Teams will then work together for two semesters in a course focused on teacher learning of project-based instruction while concomitantly developing similar projects with middle school students. This project is receiving partial support from the Directorate for Engineering doc18436 none Analysis of mitochondrial DNA obtained from skeletal materials can be used to examine the relatedness of long extinct populations. This award will be used to investigate the biological relationships of four populations, totaling approximately 75 individuals, located in the Great Lakes region, as well as indicate some aspects of demographic history that are reflected in the pattern of genetic diversity. This investigation will test ancestral relationships proposed by linguists and archaeologists regarding the relationship between the diverse and expanding populations of the Archaic and Woodland periods in this region. Specifically, this study will test the genetic relationships within Glacial Kame and Red Ocher populations, as well as between these and Old Copper, Mississippian, and modern Algonquian speaking populations in the lower Great Lakes region. This study can help determine if archaeological similarities were primarily the result of cultural spreads or population expansions, in addition to estimating the extent of genetic differentiation that existed in the Great Lakes during the last years. The mtDNA of populations included in this study will also be compared with that of other ancient populations of the Lower Great Lakes region including Archaic Indian Knoll, early Woodland Adena, Hopewell, and Late Prehistoric Fort Ancient populations, all previously or currently being studied. In addition, data generated from this study will contribute to the growing body of information that can be used to address broader questions regarding the peopling of the New World doc18437 none This award provides support for an REU-Site in geography at Oklahoma State University. The project deals with applicdations of the geographic information system (GIS) to soil and water research problems. With the assistance of their mentors, student researchers will be responsible for: (1) conceptualizing a research question; (2) data collection, (3) GIS and statistical analysis; and (4) interpretation and presentation of project results. Examples of the topic areas for projects include GIS-based investigations of phosphorus and sediment transport, evaluating soil and water constraints on urban development, and studies of regional evapotranspiration. Students will have opportunities to take advantage of research support resources including ArcView Certification, GPS training, and mentor peer seminars. This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences doc18438 none This award provides funds for the continuation of a project in applying the THz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) technique pioneered by the group, and a new technique of waveguide Thz-TDS, to several problems. Among these are included the study of coherent THz pulse propagation in molecular vapors, the combined action of the Stark effect together with TEM-mode linear and nonlinear THz propagation on a parallel plate metal waveguide within a vapor cell, and measurements of the complex conductivity of conducting polymers. In addition, the research will involve new efforts in linear and nonlinear THz coherent transients, and the experimental study of the propagation of a THz pulse consisting of a coherent superposition of whispering gallery modes of a silicon cylinder doc18439 none This award provides funding to initiate a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site that will provide a eight-week summer research experience in limnology and environmental science for a total of five students. The REU site will be run by Kent State University and will focus on the environmental issues in Lake Erie, its tributaries and its coastal wetlands. The REU program is based on the theory that mentoring and networking are the most effective methods for recruiting students into a profession and for training young researchers. This program will provide students with an in-depth understanding of the ecology and limnology of the Great Lakes, particularly Lake Erie. Plans for the site include all the essential elements for an excellent REU site. A team of faculty mentors will help the students develop research projects on the freshwater ecology, microbiology, geology and environmental chemistry of the Great Lakes. Students will participate in a series of lectures focused on scientific methods, ethics in science, and an interdisciplinary view of the Great Lakes, and they will receive one-on-one mentoring from researchers. They will also participate in field trips in the Lake Erie watershed. At the end of the program, students will develop a presentation on their research project and will be encouraged to present their results at a major scientific conference. This program fills an important niche in the continuum of program supported under the REU program by the Division of Ocean Sciences. It s focus on the ecology and limnology of the Lake Erie is unique. The program will advance the awareness of students concerning important environmental issues in the coastal regions and watersheds of the Great Lakes. The program also has the potential to recruit minority students to the Geosciences doc18440 none One of the most important factors in quality of life for the elderly is their ability to move about independently. Mobility impairments due to age, injury or disease cause a downward trend in their quality of life. Lack of independence and exercise can have dramatic results. Although various types of mobility aids exist in research labs and on the market, walkers are used more than any mobility aid except the cane. Our work is concerned with developing an intelligent walker to assist the elderly and increase the ease and safety of their daily travels. The benefits to the user include assistance avoiding dangerous situations (obstacles, drops, etc.) and help with navigation through cluttered environments. It is hoped that this assistance will provide the user with a feeling of safety and autonomy that will encourage them to move about more, incurring the benefits of walking and helping them to carry out the activities of daily living (ADLs). Our walker employs a shared control strategy in which both the user and the walker can provide control of the walker s heading. By dynamically shifting the balance between the degree of control provided by the walker and that provided by the user, our prototype can extend the time that a user can move independently on both a long term (as user abilities changes with age) and a short term (as user abilities change due to fatigue or medicinal cycles) basis. This point is critical because our work seeks to augment the abilities that people possess instead of replacing them. While wheelchairs and other self-powered mobility aids are viable solutions for some people, they are not a panacea. Our work seeks to help people who can and want to walk doc18441 none The Principal Investigator will extend prior research concerning the initiation, structure and behavior of atmospheric convection utilizing numerical simulations. Part of the research is dedicated to the study of squall line storms and part focuses on convection associated with sea breeze fronts (SBFs) and horizontal convective rolls (HCRs). There is a considerable and profitable synergy between the two, particularly with regard to the study of convective initiation. In squall line simulations, the small perturbations that are often seen in the inflow just upstream of the model storms can act as convective triggers, expediting new cell formation and even keeping the organized convection active. These perturbations appear to be generated in response to storm motions and circulations and reside in a portion of the environment that appears to be preconditioned by the storm itself, making it more favorable for this initiation to occur. In the case of the SBF, the boundary layer rolls provide the (now independent) upstream perturbation. The SBF and HCR circulations can combine to create deep convection in situations where neither phenomenon could do so in isolation. Both the squall line and the SBF HCR phenomena provide an interesting interplay of the three factors that influence convective initiation: kinematic controls, moisture controls and dynamical forcing. Kinematic controls include the direct effect of waves, vortices, etc., on convective initiation or inhibition; the HCRs represent one example. The aforementioned preconditioning is a moisture control: the environment, responding to latent heating and cooling in and around the storm, tends to adjust by creating a cooled and moistened tongue of air in the storm s immediate upstream environment, and the triggers tend to form in this tongue. These triggers may have their genesis in transient gravity waves excited by the convection itself and passing through the upstream environment; this would represent a dynamical forcing. One of the tools to be utilized in this research includes an adjoint cloud model, which will be used for sensitivity analysis and dynamical tracking. The adjoint will be of significant use in situations such as the convective initiation study, in which more than one process or factor may be active and it isn t clear which is the pivotal or primordial one. Successful completion of this research will lead to better understanding of the initiation of convective precipitating systems doc18442 none The principal investigator, together with various collaborators, studies the cohomology of arithmetic groups as modules over an algebra of Hecke operators. He considers conjectures connecting (1) mod-p cohomology classes of congruence groups which are eigenclasses for all the Hecke operators with (2) mod-p representations of the Galois (symmetry) group of the algebraic numbers. These conjectures amount to saying there should exist reciprocity laws (usually non-abelian) connecting the two types of objects. The conjectures are tested computationally, which leads to further refinements of them. The principal investigator outlines an approach for proving them in some special cases. Another set of computer calculations probe for the existence of automorphic representations of cohomological type which are not lifted from smaller rank groups. These are conjecturally connected with reciprocity laws of Langlands type. Finally, the investigator and a colleague develop a theory of p-adic families of not necessarily p-ordinary cohomology classes for congruence groups. They use this to study the question whether non-lifted automorphic representations are p-adically rigid . Algebraic number theory studies the properties of polynomial functions and equations whose coefficients are whole numbers. Ever since Descartes invented analytic geometry in the early s, the ability to solve algebraic equations has been central to mathematics, science and engineering. In the last 50 years a new set of applications of number theory has opened up in the field of cryptography. The principal investigator studies delicate questions involving the fine structure and properties of solutions to certain systems of algebraic equations. Although one can often obtain approximate solutions using computers, there are many very subtle and difficult questions concerning the existence and form of the exact solutions. There are a number of conjectures on the table to explain what is going on, and the principal investigator has contributed some of them. He and his colleagues study these conjectures by verifying them in some cases by extensive computer calculations, and by proving them in special cases. At the core of this research is the surprising connection with geometric objects ( cohomology classes ) that can be constructed in spaces of n-dimensional crystal lattices doc18443 none This three-year project Discrete Random Structures will enable the Principal Investigator, Anant Godbole, to consolidate his involvement with undergraduate research by leading eight students each year in a series of contemporary and high-level research endeavours, each designed to convince the participants that they may contribute in a meaningful way to the development of the field of mathematics. The team-members problems, while emanating in areas such as combinatorics; number theory; graph theory; geometry; algorithms; and molecular biology, will have a stochastic flavor -- so that solutions will be sought through the use of methods in contemporary probability and classical analysis. The participants will be selected after a nationwide search, and will spend two months at East Tennessee State University during the summer. Based on the Prinicipal Investigator s track record over the last twelve years, it can be predicted that the student researchers will each work on an average of two problems, either individually or in teams of two or more, and be able to make significant progress on at least one of these endeavors. The students findings will be presented at national meetings such as the Annual AMS MAA Meeting, or at a carefully selected Probability Combinatorics conference. As in the past, every effort will be made to submit the students papers to high-level journals for possible publication. We expect to select students from a broad range of colleges and universities, and are totally committed to the vigorous recruitment of women, minorities and disabled students doc18444 none On Tuesday, September 11, , terrorists struck the United States by hijacking planes in Boston, Washington D.C., and Newark and crashing them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in rural Pennsylvania. Tuesday, September 11, has immediately been classified with a small group of infamous dates, including December 7, , November 22, , April 4, , January 28, , and April 19, . Each of these dates mark tragic and history-altering events in America. Furthermore, most Americans who witnessed these days will tell you, I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news . Cognitive psychologists have referred to the phenomenon of exceptional memory for salient events as flashbulb memory . To the layperson, flashbulb memories are unique in that they are more vivid and more easily recalled than other memories. However, research on flashbulb memory has suggested that they are not special. Instead, research suggests that flashbulb memories are susceptible to the same restructuring processes as other memories. However, research on flashbulb memory is limited for obvious reasons. Further, since the cognitive revolution of the s, this country has witnessed very few events that compare to the events of Tuesday, September 11. If ever there was an event that should fall under the category of flashbulb this one should be it. Therefore, the purpose of this project is to assess people s memory for the events of Tuesday, September 11. Memory for events, confidence in memory, and emotional reaction will be assessed immediately (i.e., approximately one week following the events) and will be assessed again 11 and 23 months later. The hypothesis under investigation is whether salient events, which are accompanied by strong affect and emotion, are recalled with accuracy over a long period of time, or whether memory of these events is susceptible to distortion doc18445 none This project involves the third set of three years of a summer institute in research design in cultural anthropology. Experts in research design and in the link between data and theory will teach a set of 12-15 graduate students chosen competitively from Ph.D. programs throughout the US during a period of 3 weeks. Course content will cover a broad spectrum of issues focusing on the link between theory and the development of research objectives, concepts, definitions, variables, measures and hypotheses; the relationship between quantitative and qualitative approaches in the ethnographic context; systematic data collection procedures; probability and non-probability sampling; statistical distributions and elementary data analysis. The emphasis will be on concepts (e.g., sampling theory), research design, an introduction to data management in both a qualitative and quantitative context, and strategies of hypothesis testing. This project is important because it will provide an introduction to research issues in scientific anthropology for graduate students who may not be receiving an adequate exposure to these issues in their departments. The results of this workshop should be to increase the competence of students to do significant dissertation research projects and to become more proficient social scientists in general doc18446 none The neutrino is the lightest known elementary particle. It has no electric charge but has an intrinsic angular-momentum(or spin) of one half unit of Planck s constant just like it s cousin the electron. Discovered in by Reines and Cowan, it remains one of the least understood particles in the elementary zoo. According to conventional wisdom, in modern cosmology the universe is densely populated with neutrinos. Accordingly,if they would have a large enough mass, they could have played an important role in the evolution of the universe in it s early stages and even at present. Approximately 90% of the mass of the universe has not been identified. In it was announced that neutrinos resulting from the decay of cosmic-ray muons in the atmosphere were found to oscillate between different families. This would require that they do have some mass but such experiments do not yield how much. The rate of the hypothesized rare radioactive decay called double-beta decay can yield this very valuable information when combined with the neutrino oscillation results. The interesting version of this phenomenon would result if a nucleus would decay by emitting two electrons and nothing else. An important conservation law would be violated by such a process unless two anti-neutrinos were also emitted with the electrons. Since the electrons are leptons and the anti-neutrinos are anti-leptons the total number of leptons is conserved in the the decay with anti-neutrinos. For the decay to occur without anti-neutrinos, neutrinos in general must have mass and an important symmetry in physics must be violated. The Majorana and CUORE experiments, which are the subjects of this proposal, are next generation no-neutrino double-beta decay experiments with an improvement in the sensitivity to neutrino mass that is predicted to be about one hundred times better than the best experiments done to date. Considering all the data available, they have a significant probability for discovery, for being able to provide important information on the mass of neutrinos as well as to determine if neutrinos are there own anti-particles. CUORICINO is a smaller first step towards building the full version of CUORE doc18447 none This award provides funds for an REU Site in Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. The program will support 24 students over the course of three years. The substantive focus of the Site will be centered on protest and activism with an emphasis on urban rioting and violent protest in the U.S. during the s. The data driving the research are the contents of a recently re-discovered archive of data on riots, race relations, and civil rights activism in the s. Very little of these data have ever been analyzed or even systematically compiled and summarized; therefore students will have the opportunity to make substantial contributions to the recently resurgent sociological literature about racial rioting and collective violence. The year-lengh program will allow sustained engagement with the research project and thereby a rich research experience. Students will begin by engaging in foundational activities such as reviewing literature and learning about how to process and interpret the specific kinds of data available to them for the project. Following this, students will develop their own research topics, write formal proposals, and compile the data necessary to complete their projects. The second half of the experience will focus on the execution of their research plans and writing of formal research reports. The Site will culminate with a mini-conference in which the students will present their work. Students will also be encouraged to submit their reports to social science conferences and to revise toward publication. This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences doc18448 none This goal of this program by Florida State University and the Leon County School District is to increase the number of science professionals who are prepared and willing to make meaningful contributions to science and mathematics activities in grades K-8. Graduate fellows engage in extensive learning to prepare them to become valuable classroom resources for K-12 teachers and students. Topics of study include an overview of child development, assessment techniques, state and national science standards, and how students learn. Following this preparation, Fellows will co-teach with selected K-8 teachers. Fellows also participate in district summer school enrichment classes and summer science camp activities. This project is receiving partial support from the Directorate for Mathematics and Physical Sciences doc18449 none This project builds on strong existing collaborations between Saint Joseph s University (SJU) science faculty and a Philadelphia museum, the Wagner Free Institute of Science (WFIS), and between WFIS staff and principals at three nearby urban Philadelphia public schools. GK-12 Fellows are M.S. candidates or advanced undergraduates studying Biology, Chemistry, or Environmental Science. Each year 4-8 Fellows will collaborate with WFIS education specialists, SJU faculty, and K-6 teachers to develop and present semester-long thematic units to students attending schools in one of Philadelphia s most underserved neighborhoods. GeoKids incorporates a place-based approach that uses the local environment as a resource to teach earth and life sciences, a unique and challenging learning strategy for an inner-city program. GeoKids emphasizes hands-on science, project-based learning, and development of fundamental skills such as reading, writing, and observing. The program includes annual summer workshops where Fellows, K-6 teachers, and participating SJU and WFIS educators review curriculum standards, study in appropriate content areas, and become more familiar with education issues specific to students from the target schools. Doctoral education students will collaborate with an education assessment expert in designing and administering assessment tools. Expected outcomes of the program include: development, testing, and documentation of environmentally-based lessons, K-6 teachers empowered to develop their own place-based lessons, SJU faculty and graduate students committed to enhancing science literacy, and incorporation of GK-12 program elements into existing Service Learning activities at SJU. The grant activities support efforts underway at SJU to enhance and expand the graduate programs in Chemistry and Biology doc18450 none Impact of the World Trace Center Disaster on Critical Infrastructure Interdependence This exploratory research focuses on time sensitive data and field research related to the devastating impacts of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York City, NY on September 11, . The objective of this research is to increase our knowledge base of and model the interdependencies of critical infrastructure systems with the aim of understanding their vulnerabilities to disasters of this type and scale. A systems approach will be used to represent 1) designed or intended infrastructure interdependencies; 2) the impacts of the attack overall and during emergency response; and the effects and needs related to interdependencies during recovery operations. Much of the information will only be available in the early phases of response. Infrastructure interdependencies have been identified by Presidential Decision Directive 63 as a part of the Critical Infrastructure Protection initiative. Understanding interdependencies is key to efficient funds allocation for design, construction, operations, maintenance, operations and security of our nation s infrastructure. Interdependencies imply the potential for cost-efficiencies through redundancy reductions as well as disastrous vulnerabilities through cascading losses of lifelines and lives. This results of this research will be used to identify opportunities for reducing vulnerabilities, developing countermeasures to mitigate the impacts of disruptions, and guide actions for response and recovery doc18451 none The goals of this project are: to develop modules about engineering concepts and applications for high school students; train fellows and teachers in engineering content and instructional methods; design engineering competition as capstone experience for undergraduate fellows and involve high school teachers and students in these projects; develop a virtual engineering community using WebCT software; and develop an M.S. program in engineering education. This project is being co-funded by the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Office of Multidisciplinary Activities doc18452 none Observing and Documenting the Inter-Organizational Response to the 9 11 Terror Attacks This research entails collecting, documenting analyzing time sensitive data from the sites of the devastating terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York City, NY and the Pentagon in Washington, DC on September 11, . The objective of this research is to build on the knowledge base relating to the coordination of emergency responders. While communication and coordination of emergency management and medical efforts is an active area of research in earthquake and other natural disasters, this event is the first time where, at such a large scale, emergency efforts have been required to integrate with those of law enforcement and military resources as well. Information flows between and within response organizations as well as information management problems that occur will be collected using personal observation, structured interviews, document collection. They will be analyzed and written up as a summary document for use by emergency planners and researchers. The results will support future research to enhance the emergency management and response in the US. More generalizable impacts are expected in terms of decision-making and inter-organizational coordination in complex, stressed environments doc18453 none Project STEP, involves graduate and undergraduate Fellows, secondary science and mathematics teachers, University of Cincinnati faculty and a graphics web developer, working in teams to design, develop, and implement hands-on activities and technology-driven inquiry-based projects which relate to the students community issues, as vehicles to teach science and math skills. Activities will be incorporated into lessons, demonstrations, laboratory exercises, individual and group projects, and field experiences to enable middle and high school students to directly experience authentic learning practices that requires them to use higher-order thinking skills; encourage creative problem-solving skills that require collaborative learning, teamwork, writing, and presentation; cultivate an interest in service learning in which students are active participants, achieve outcomes that show a perceptible impact, and engage in evaluative reflection; and better motivate and prepare secondary school students for advanced education. The Fellows will be trained to create and implement these activities by taking an educational methods course, an advanced course in instructional technology, and by serving as teaching assistants and tutors in guiding summer academies for middle and high school students. Quantitative formative and summative evaluation will be conducted to assess the project s effectiveness on Fellows teaching skills, its impact on middle and high school science and mathematics education, and to continually improve the program as it develops. This project is receiving partial support from the Directorate for Engineering doc18454 none The goal is to engage K-12 classrooms in inquiry teaching and learning and create a culture of cooperation between the scientific community and the classroom. The graduate student fellows will bring their discoveries and excitement for investigation into classrooms to improve content knowledge and provide opportunities for inquiry learning for teachers and students. Graduate students will participate in courses, reflective seminars and classroom experiences to provide them with the knowledge of learning processes and opportunities to encourage and support inquiry learning related to their research interests. Cooperating teachers will participate in summer seminars, research internships and reflective seminars. As a team, the fellows and teachers will design and implement lessons designed to spark the interest of students in science and related careers doc18455 none The Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame is sponsoring a NSF-REU Site for undergraduate research during the summers of - . The focal point of the proposed REU projects is the use of model systems and basic research to study the cellular and molecular basis of disease. A nationwide search will be conducted for 14 sophomore or junior participants. The primary goals of our program are to 1) expose students to the excitement of scientific discovery, 2) help students develop the skills needed to generate, analyze and report scientific data, 3) educate students on the professionalism needed to succeed in graduate school and beyond, 4) give students opportunities for leadership roles, and 5) encourage students to be responsible scientists and citizens by providing international research experiences and service opportunities. To reach these goals, participants will carry out research projects for 9 weeks. During these 9 weeks, they will speak on their proposed work twice, attend and coordinate a weekly seminar program to develop students professional and leadership skills, as well as to educate them on various career paths in biological sciences, attend weekly journal clubs where students will present current published research, and participate in an optional service component mentoring high school students. New to our proposed program is an international research component for two students each summer. The underlying aim of the program is to give students strong incentives for pursuing careers in research doc18456 none The University of Maine (UMaine) College of Engineering proposes to partner with Bangor High School (BHS) to develop a model university K-12 partnership based on the disciplinary theme of sensors. The proposed model integrates education and research for the benefit of BHS students and teachers, and graduate and advanced undergraduate students, and faculty, within the College of Engineering at UMaine. GK-12 Sensors! will involve faculty and students from the chemical, biological, electrical, computer, mechanical, civil environmental, and spatial information engineering programs at the University of Maine. Five advanced undergraduate and ten graduate students will serve as GK-12 Sensor Fellows. Faculty members recognized for their teaching and research expertise in sensor-related areas will represent each of the major Engineering programs at UMaine. High school teachers and students will benefit from the integration of cutting-edge, standards-based STEM content within a variety of classes and extramural activities such as students competitions. Undergraduate and graduate students, and faculty will gain an understanding of the challenges and opportunities of K-12 education, while improving their communication and teaching skills. Industry involvement is also a key component of the proposed program. A variety of technologies, including ATM, as well as traditional media and presentations will disseminate best practices from GK-12: Sensors! across Maine and the nation. This project is receiving partial support from the Engineering Directorate doc18457 none The program aims to help improve articulation between high school mathematics and science courses and between middle and high school science courses. It capitalizes on existing programs and partnerships between the schools and Boston University and the technology already present but underutilized in the schools. The fellow-teacher teams are combining virtual models and existing software (such as Biologica or MathSoft Study Works) with hands on data collection to enhance student understanding of concepts in the state science standards. The Fellows understanding of classroom practice is enhanced through participation in a teacher enhancement summer workshop that precedes their work with their teacher team members and their classroom experience, and participation during the year in a GK-12 seminar series and specifically designed education courses. The project includes work with Fellow faculty advisors to help them understand the potential benefits to their students and specific efforts by the evaluation team to explore ways to ensure sustainability of the project. This project is receiving partial support from the Directorate for Mathematics and Physical Sciences doc18458 none The goals of this KTI-S project are to: enhance the professional development of the participating fellows and teachers; enhance science and mathematics capabilities and enthusiasm among the populations served; and investigate the effectiveness of the methods used. The project builds on and expands the K-Through-Infinity Professional Development Partnership (KTI-P), a prior GK-12 project. Four different educational environments are included: a metropolitan science museum that serves urban Milwaukee schools; a local public school district revising its science and mathematics curricula and pedagogy; a local private K-16 school organization seeking to integrate its science curriculum; and a new District of Columbia Charter School that is working with UW-Madison researchers to develop its science curriculum. The key element of our approach is a robust concept of team design developed during our first GK-12 project and implemented in many different settings. Fellows and teachers work with university and school district resources to develop new curricula and relevant, cutting edge materials coming out of research, map the standards to these products, and then implement them in classroom learning environments. Some fellows work intensively with a small number of teachers and classrooms, while others work with a larger number of teachers through such mechanisms as summer institutes and degree programs, and then follow those teachers back into multiple classrooms in different schools and even different districts and states. The KTI-S teams work in ways aligned with school, district and state resource allocations. KTI-S takes advantage of the four distinct educational settings and the extensive and intensive evaluation activities included to encourage Fellows, teachers and project staff to reflect on a larger question: how can team activities in very different settings be aligned with district, state, and university resources to most effectively help K-12 students learn, and experience the excitement of, science and mathematics, and in ways that provide fellows valuable K-12 classroom experience doc18459 none Old Dominion University (ODU) in collaboration with Norfolk Public Schools, Portsmouth City Public Schools and the Virginia Space Grant Consortium, seek to enhance existing resources for mathematics and science teachers and provide opportunities for graduate students to work with teachers from these two urban school districts. The program will allow ODU to place graduate students from the College of Engineering into 4th and 5th grade classrooms to support specially designated Master Teachers. The program will be integrated through the ODU College of Education, Center for Urban Education, Professional Development Schools (PDS) program which fosters joint inquiry into research problems by reviewing and revising curricula: drawing on shared expertise, co-teaching experiences; and through sharing insights with colleagues in the educational community. Teaching Fellows and Master Teachers will collaborate in this atmosphere through four professional development seminars designed to address applied mathematics, problem-solving, gender equity and inquiry based instruction in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. Hands on classroom activities, focused on inquiry and teamwork, will incorporate the Lego Control Laboratory as the tool to introduce elements of modern technology into the classroom. This project is receiving partial support from the Directorate for Engineering doc18460 none The PI proposes to carry out analyses on a broad range of hydroxyl radical (OH) Meinel bands in the nightglow throughout the 500- nm spectral region. Included will be 15 different OH bands, with upper levels in the v = 3-9 range and with multiple examples of common emitting levels. The data to be used come from astronomical sky spectra obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea. The data will be carefully calibrated against standard star spectra, so that true relative intensities can be compared over the entire spectral range. This procedure will make it possible to determine which of the current transition probability determinations in use in the aeronomic community is the more valid, and to propose an empirical correction if none are deemed adequate. The OH Meinel fluorescence is widely used to monitor nightside mesospheric conditions, and the extensive historical record of Meinel band observations provides a unique data set to monitor global change in a region of the atmosphere where change may be the most dramatic doc18461 none The goal of the program is to provide K-12 teachers and students with recent knowledge and innovative learning activities in the areas of biology, environmental science, aquatic science, geology, meteorology, and oceanography and to relate these topics to the impacts of environmental change on Texas habitats and residents. The school districts involved range from 1 to 17% limited English proficiency, from 23 to 47% economically disadvantaged, and from 12 to 65% minority. This project emphasizes field research for students and teachers and builds on three existing programs between The University of Texas at Austin and local school systems from the Texas coast to the State s interior: The Marine Science Institute s Study of Arctic Change, The Institute for Geophysics Adopt a School, Teachers in the Field, and the Environmental Science Institute s Outreach Lecture Series. Special features of the program include numerous field activities for K-12 students and teachers led by Graduate Fellows, summer workshops for teachers focused on developing content knowledge in targeted interdisciplinary subjects aligned with State educational standards and goals, joint participation by teachers and Graduate Fellows at local and regional science conferences, and building partnerships between undergraduate science and mathematics students seeking teaching certification with Graduate Fellows and K-12 teachers. This project receives partial support from the Geoscience Directorate doc18462 none This USF NSF STARS GK-12 project focuses on K-5 students. The objective is to engage graduate and senior level undergraduate students in the challenge of infusing engineering and science principles in such cutting edge areas as nanotechnology, optics, and advanced manufacturing into the elementary school environment. The partnerships involve five area elementary schools, three of which predominantly serve minority students. 15 graduate and undergraduate students from diverse ethnic backgrounds will be selected as Fellows. Fellows will be trained in both pedagogy and in communication skills. The project will work closely with the School District science and mathematics coordinators and the school principals in developing and implementing a plan to help the Fellows become valuable resources to the teachers. In addition to a stipend, each mathematics and science teacher will also participate in professional development scheduled for the summer of each year. As part of the professional development, teachers will have the opportunity to participate in research experiences with researchers in engineering and the sciences doc18463 none This award provides funding for the University of Southern Mississippi (USM) to develop a GK-12 program. This program will provide fellowships for twelve graduate students per year to work with K-12 teachers in six south Mississippi school districts. Fellows will be selected from the graduate programs in biology, chemistry, geology, mathematics, physics and polymer science. Each Fellow will pair with a K-12 teacher and a university mentor to develop and implement standards-based activities and lessons that will be integrated into the mathematics and science curriculum. The USM s Center for Science and Mathematics Education (CSMEd) will serve as the coordinating unit for the project. When taken as a whole, the school districts involved include a population of students that is representative of the state, approximately 51% African American, 48% White, and 1% Other. The plan for the GK-12 program includes a summer workshop to bring teachers and Fellows together for planning, weekly seminars for Fellows during the school year, joint meetings for all participants (university faculty, Fellows and teachers) at least once during each semester, professional development opportunities for the teachers, and travel for teachers and Fellows to science outreach centers (science museums, zoos, aquaria), and local, regional, and national conferences doc18464 none This Research Experience for Undergraduates Site project, Training American Indians in Environmental Biology - 2, has four objectives. It will: (1) Increase the number of American Indian students entering graduate school and careers in environmental biology by providing research experiences and mentoring; (2) Expand the existing collaborative relationship between the University of Montana (UM) and Salish Kootenai College (SKC) to include the other tribal colleges in the state; (3) Increase the knowledge of UM faculty and students about minority issues; and (4) Disseminate throughout Indian country the relevance of training in environmental biology. It will provide support to expand and improve an existing NSF-funded program, Undergraduate Mentoring in Environmental Biology: Project TRAIN by providing support for eight additional summer fellowships and increasing the number of fellowships from six to fourteen per summer. Students will be recruited from Montana s seven tribal colleges and those from other tribal colleges in the region. The summer research experience will consist of an eight-week program, with possible extension to 12 weeks based on student interest and performance as well as project requirements. Each fellow will participate in an independent research project under the supervision of an academic mentor. Fellows will have the opportunity to choose from a broad array of topics in Environmental Biology. Faculty and staff from both UM and SKC will conduct a summer course in research methods as well as arranging orientation and other events as part of a multilayered mentoring structure where students interact with faculty, previous program participants and one another doc18465 none Faculty members from the physics, chemistry and engineering departments at the University of California at Santa Barbara are collaborating with teachers in the Santa Barbara School District to improve articulation of hands-on, minds-on learning in physical sciences in the middle grades. This program builds on existing teacher and school outreach efforts of these departments. Fellows are selected from outstanding research-experienced graduate and undergraduate students in the participating departments. Teachers are selected from those who already have interacted with the university through participation in such outreach programs as Research Experience for Teachers. Activities to be designed and implemented by the teacher fellow teams are based on the California State Standards. A grade appropriate model for small group investigation of physical science concepts is being developed, pilot tested and disseminated. This project is receiving partial support from the Directorate for Mathematics and Physical Sciences doc18466 none FRG Collaborative Proposal PROPOSAL NUMBER PI INSTITUTION Benedetto University of Maryland, lead PI Aldroubi Vanderbilt University Jorgensen University of Iowa Heil, Wang Georgia Institute of Technology Baggett Univ. of Colorado Olafsson Lousiana State Univ. Larson Texas A&M : Fundamental problems are addressed in wavelet theory, non-uniform sampling, frames, and the theory of spectral-tile duality. These problems are inextricably interwoven by concept and technique. Operator theory provides the major unifying framework, combined with an integration of ideas from a diverse spectrum of mathematics including classical Fourier analysis, noncommutative harmonic analysis, representation theory, operator algebras, approximation theory, and signal processing. For example, the construction, implementation, and ensuing theory of single dyadic orthonormal wavelets in Euclidean space requires significant input from all of these disciplines as well as deep spectral-tile results. There is intrinsic mathematical importance in the aforementioned problems, and the solutions to be formulated have broad and creative implications, both for mathematics and for applications in engineering and physics. The topics of this project have direct bearing on fast acquisition and motion problems in MRI, as well as in formulating algorithms for compression and noise reduction by means of proper cochlear modelling. There are further applications in quantum computing and image processing, and the development of non-uniform sampling strategies by this project play a role in state of the art A D conversion methods used in multifunction RF systems. These interdisciplinary applications depending on modern mathematical analysis have educational implications in terms of cross-fertilization of ideas and research opportunities for graduate students doc18467 none The goal of our Rural Science Ed. program is to offer rural schools in Oregon the opportunity to provide advanced and innovative inquiry-based science education to their students through a partnership with the academic community at Oregon State University. In our program, trained NSF Fellows from Oregon State University, in collaboration with Teacher Mentors from participating rural schools, will develop inquiry-based science curricula that meet the needs of middle and high school children in Oregon. The curricula will include simple and innovative experiments that integrate advances in biotechnology and ecology to encourage critical thinking about the impacts of agriculture on the environment, and the implications of advanced scientific research on human lives. Twelve NSF Fellows, 6 graduates and 6 undergraduates from Oregon State University, will be selected from the disciplines of Entomology, Botany & Plant Pathology, Horticulture, Crop & Soil Science and Science and Math Education. One graduate and one undergraduate will work as an NSF Fellow Team in each classroom. Each Fellow s program will consist of the following activities: on-campus instruction in science and rural education provided by the Department of Science & Math Education, provision of year long science education in participating schools, involvement in outreach activities of Oregon State University such as 4-H, Science & Math Investigative Learning Experiences, and Museum Days, and year-end evaluation of the program. Science teachers from participating schools will serve as Teacher Mentors for NSF Fellows to facilitate development of experiments that complement existing science curricula. Videos and web pages will be developed for experiments conducted for future use by science teachers in Oregon. The program will be evaluated using before and after quizzes in the classroom, and term and year-end evaluations by K 12 students, Teacher Mentors and NSF Fellows. K-12 student will benefit by hands-on experience in scientific research using live material and exposure to current scientific ideas and advanced technology to make them more competitive and better prepared for later schooling. The partnership will better equip Teacher Mentors for providing advanced scientific inquiry based science instruction in the future. Besides obtaining a stipend for their programs, NSF Fellow will benefit by the hands-on teaching experience that they will gain in the classroom. The program will enable Oregon Styate University professionals to recruit high quality graduate students, provide teaching experience to complement research experience that students can acquire on campus, and form partnerships with Oregon schools for extending science education doc18468 none This project will provide students with an exceptional opportunity to contribute to a timely, important research problem in sedimentary geology. Eight undergraduate students, along with two student Teaching assistants and the PI, will conduct field and laboratory research to determine the sedimentary history of fossil-bearing Lower Cretaceious strata in Dinosaur National Monument, Utah and Colorado. Recent discovery of a new bone bed within Dinosaur National Mounument (DNM) has led paleontologists to recognize that large sauropods, previously thought to be restricted to Eurasia in mid-Cretaceious time, were still extant in North America. Sedimentologic analysis, especially facies interpretation to characterize ancient dinosaur habitats, is relatively undeveloped in the Cretaceous strata that contain the newly discovered sauropod skeletons. This research project will progressively develop students research skills toward understanding and interpreting the sedimentology of the Cretaceious Cedar Mountain formation. The project combines field work in fluvial sedimentology with analog modeling of fluvial processes. The results of this project will be highly significant to North American paleontologists, and will thus provide student participants with an immediate sense of the relevance of their research. Throughout the program, the PI and visiting scientists will develop students thinking about conducting research based on observation and interpretation, and the development of actualistic facies models doc18469 none The project interacts with and expands PISCES, a district-based, community-supported elementary improvement program for grade K-6 in 14 districts in San Diego County, Arctic Alaska, and La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico. Fellows and teachers together develop hands on science experiences using standard school district kits (e.g. FOSS). Educational features include summer and school year on-site institutes and seminars for the fellows and cooperating teachers and extensive use of the San Diego County Office of Education s educational technology resources. GK-12 Fellows benefit from a program to help them develop good communication and teaching skills. Participating teachers benefit by having the opportunity to interact with environmental research projects in a wide variety of climatic, biotic and social scientific conditions doc18470 none The study and conservation of natural resources in insular areas are necessary for and critical to the preservation of the myriad, unique ecosystems present. This is of immediate concern in Hawai i, with its high levels of endemism, geographic isolation, and biodiversity. In order to continue and hopefully increase the number of future researchers focusing on these ecosystems, it is important to capture the interest of undergraduates. The Island of Hawai i, with its diversity and high representation of almost all ecological niches found in the archipelego, presents an excellent living laboratory in which to train these future researchers. This program represents a collaboration between the University of Hawai i at Hilo (UHH) and state and federal research organizations conducting research on the Island of Hawai i, to develop an undergraduate research opportunity program focused on tropical conservation biology. UHH, with its growing student enrollment in sciences (more than 20% over the last four years alone), and diverse student base, is committed to providing valuable research opportunities for undergraduates with faculty mentors at UHH available in Biology, Marine Science, Agriculture, Forestry, and Natural Resource Management. The Island of Hawai i is also home to numerous agencies and offices that have ongoing conservation biology research programs. The US Department of Agriculture Forest Service, the US Geological Service Biological Resources Division, the National Park and others work together on many research projects and are will to provide additional research opportunities for undergraduates. This program entails a summer component and a continued effort during the academic year. Ten students will be selected for 10-week research experiences during the summer. Following a one-week orientation, student participants will work side by side with researchers on conservation biology projects located on the Island of Hawai i. Weekly meetings will allow students to interact with each other and with other researchers and faculty, and give oral presentations on the progress of their individual projects. Students will also submit written sections of their final report in progressive pieces throughout the summer, which will be edited, compiled and polished into a final report at the end of the summer. Each student will give a final presentation at the end of the 10-week period. Students who are attending UHH following their summer research experience and have shown promise to develop a publishable research project will have the opportunity to continue their research during the academic year. These students will also be responsible for scheduled meetings throughout the academic year and a final presentation and paper. Information is available from Sharon Ziegler-Chong at UHH (telephone: 808- 933- ; email: ziegler@hawaii.edu doc18471 none The September 11, terrorist attack on the WTC and Pentagon has created an infrastructual catastrophe. While the recovery effort is underway, engineers from FEMA and ASCE s disaster response teams are concurrently inspecting adjacent buildings for damage. The objective of this research is to conduct post-disaster reconnaissance at the affected sites in order to recover ephemeral data for detailed damage assessment. This SGER award is to support a team from the University of Florida in using a new land-based laser system to produce very high-resolution 3-D maps of both interior and exterior areas of damaged buildings. This system, based on airborne laser swath mapping technology, can quickly generate very valuable data, especially on damage related to deformations and cracking. The reflection of laser pulses (at 2 kHz) is used to obtain X, Y, Z coordinates and ultimately a digital elevation model. This results in photographic-like images and spatial coordinates with an absolute accuracy of 4-5 mm and a relative accuracy of 1-2 mm. The spacing of data points is user selectable and can be extremely small, but for this research, it is anticipated that spacing of several cm for large areas and several mm for smaller areas such as rooms would be used. The laser system is integrated with digital photography to compliment building damage analysis. For example, exposed beams and columns can be checked for plumbness and deformations; exterior walls for lateral deformations, architectural damage and cracking. Other methods of obtaining these data are very time consuming and less accurate. The purpose of the data collection is threefold. First, systematic collection of damage data from structures damaged, but not destroyed, will aid in the assessment of the structural integrity of these buildings. These data should expedite damage appraisal and if warranted, their eventual repair. Second, the data will serve as a valuable resource for future research related to performance of structures subjected to terrorist attack, explosions, fires, etc. It should help in the development of methods to minimize damage from such occurrences; and may result in better designs of urban structures. Third, this work will support the development of land based laser swath methods that have tremendous applications in civil engineering and construction. The PIs are leaders in the application of this technology to civil engineering related issues doc18433 none Fundamental problems are addressed in wavelet theory, non-uniform sampling, frames, and the theory of spectral-tile duality. These problems are inextricably interwoven by concept and technique. Operator theory provides the major unifying framework, combined with an integration of ideas from a diverse spectrum of mathematics including classical Fourier analysis, noncommutative harmonic analysis, representation theory, operator algebras, approximation theory, and signal processing. For example, the construction, implementation, and ensuing theory of single dyadic orthonormal wavelets in Euclidean space requires significant input from all of these disciplines as well as deep spectral-tile results. There is intrinsic mathematical importance in the aforementioned problems, and the solutions to be formulated have broad and creative implications, both for mathematics and for applications in engineering and physics. The topics of this project have direct bearing on fast acquisition and motion problems in MRI, as well as in formulating algorithms for compression and noise reduction by means of proper cochlear modelling. There are further applications in quantum computing and image processing, and the development of non-uniform sampling strategies by this project play a role in state of the art A D conversion methods used in multifunction RF systems. These interdisciplinary applications depending on modern mathematical analysis have educational implications in terms of cross-fertilization of ideas and research opportunities for graduate students doc18473 none Freitag This award to University of Rhode Island s Graduate School of Oceanography provides instrumentation to improve the oceanographic research capabilities of the research vessel Endeavor, an NSF-owned ship operated by URI as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The dissolved oxygen sensors, pure water system, water sampling bottles and improvements to the ship s isotope van supported here will replace aging systems with modern ones, maintaining state of the art capability for researchers using the ship. These improvements will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists using the ship in their research during and future years doc18474 none Shah, Mubarak University of Central Florida Special Projects: REU Site Principle Investigator Meeting Each REU site in way is unique and follows different model for providing research experiences to undergraduates. It will be nice to bring together Pis of different REU sites in one place so thats and NSF program directors can share their experiences, and exchange ideas on Research Experience for Undergraduates. Therefore, we propose to organize a meeting of PIs of CISE REU sites in January in Orlando, Florida. This will be a one-day meeting, all twenty or so PIs of REU Sites will be invited to attend. Since Orlando has several tourist attractions, and January is a very good time to visit Florida, we expect maximum attendance doc18475 none This award provides funding to initiate a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site that will provide a ten-week summer research experience in estuarine science for a total of eight students each year. A team of over 30 faculty mentors will help the students develop research projects on the physical, chemical and biological aspects of estuaries. Their research site will be Charlotte Harbor, one of Florida s largest and most ecologically and economically important estuaries. At the end of the program, students will develop a presentation on their research project and will be encouraged to present their results at a major scientific conference. One important aspect of this REU site is that the PI will attempt to recruit at leat 3 or 4 Native Pacific Islanders (NPI s) each year. Recruitment of NPI s will be facilitated by a subcontract to the University of Hawaii s Hawaiian Internship Program. The proposal is based on the theory that mentoring and networking are the most effective methods for recruiting students into a profession and for training young researchers. This program will provide students with an in-depth understanding of the ecology of an estuarine system. Plans for the site include all the essential elements for an excellent REU site. The students will receive one-on-one mentoring from researchers and will gain a broad understanding of the scientific process. This program also fills an important niche in the continuum of program supported under the REU program by the Division of Ocean Sciences as it will be the only site that will focus on recruiting Native Pacific Islanders into ocean sciences doc18476 none Award # Tarokh, Vahid Dr. Vahid Tarokh, a recognized leader in the research field of wireless communications, will receive the National Science Foundation s (NSF) Alan T. Warterman award for his work as the primary inventor of space time coding , a new technique that significantly improves the speed and reliability of wireless data transmission. These innovations helped form international standards for the latest cell phones, personal digital assistants and other wireless devices. By some estimates, more than one billion handsets might be employing the space-time codes within five years doc18477 none This award provides funding to the University of Maryland-College Park for the support of a five-year, REU Site Research Internships in Telecommunications Engineering-RITE Site, under the direction of Dr. Steven I. Marcus. This eleven-week summer program will involve twenty-two students annually in a diverse research experience on a wide range of topics in the field of Telecommunications including communications systems and theory, networking, signal processing, multimedia technology, information security, and neuromorphic engineering. Each student will work in small groups (2-3 students) with faculty members and graduate students. In addition to the fundamental aspects of engineering disciplines, aspects of existing programs that combine engineering and business perspectives will be incorporated into the RITE students experiences. The students will participate in industrial site visits and interactions and will work closely with graduate research assistant mentors throughout their summer research experience doc18478 none The global theory of minimal surfaces in space is in a phase of explosive growth. Many new methods of constructing complete embedded minimal surfaces have recently been found; in place of a dearth of examples just a few years ago, we now have a quite varied collection of surfaces, including infinite families. A basic problem is to classify these examples, i.e. collect them into families with common properties and understood limits. Fruitful approaches have recently been developed that combine numerical simulation with methods from the theory of geometric structures on surfaces and classical complex analysis, notably Teichmuller theory. Some of the problems the team will attack are: Are there embedded minimal surfaces with one heliciodal end and arbitrary genus? Is the classical Scherk surface the unique desingularization of a pair of planes? Of what families is the Scherk surface the limit point? At the same time, the group hopes to make progress on simulation of minimal surfaces. For example, we hope to set up a library of Weierstrass representations of minimal surfaces which is reproducible, fully documented, and useful as a research tool. A guiding philosophy in many areas of science, from physics to biochemistry to ecology, is that nature is maximally efficient; indeed, many explanations of natural phenomena have at their foundation the assumption that the phenomenon has optimized some or several of its features in the expression we witness. At its base, this philosophical principle is mathematical in nature: we search for principles in science that can be formulated as extremal problems. In mathematics, we can make this assumption of optimality very rigorous by expressing it as an equation. This leaves us with the problem of understanding all of the solutions of that equation. In this project, we aim to study one very rich type of optimization problem, the minimal surface problem, which is already known to have a number of quite subtle characteristics. (A minimal surface is one for which each small piece has less area than any other surface with the same boundary.) The study of these surfaces has its origins in physical problems studied first by Euler; then, a century later, the problem also arose in the studies of the behavior of rotating droplets and soap films by F. Plateau. Today the applications range from cosmology to the understanding of the structure of stable periodic structures in compound copolymers. As in many other optimization problems, for the minimal surface problem, we do not have much general information about solutions to the equation expressing extremality. At present though, we do have a wide variety of examples which help to guide our intuition, and which we are beginning to organize. It is thus a good model problem, enriching our understanding of all optimization problems doc18479 none This project addresses the electrodynamics of complex solids using complimentary spectroscopic approaches to model organic conductors including low temperature, high magnetic field synchrotron based spectroscopy. Compounds of interest include prototypical superconducting, composites, and molecular ladder materials. Issues being addressed include chemical structure physical property relationships, disorder, charge transfer characteristics in ladder compounds, and the microscopic characteristics of the high-field phase of low-dimensional superconductors. These projects will advance the training of high school, undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students in areas of materials spectroscopy. %%% The fundamental understanding and development of new materials, and the development of advanced spectroscopic tools to probe new phenomena exhibited by superconducting and conducting organic solids, is a crucial area for emphasis in the training of materials scientists and engineers. Students with expertise in these materials science and engineering areas compete well in both the academic and industrial job markets doc18480 none This award provides renewed funding for a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site that will host a total of ten students during twelve weeks of summer research each year for two years. Students will be working with researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) located in Woods Hole, MA. Students will also participate in a series of seminars and workshops exploring issues related to marine science. The program recruits juniors and senior undergraduate students nationwide. These students are able to pursue research in a broad range of marine science, environmental science and marine engineering fields. WHOI provides significant matching funding in this proposal. The program has an excellent record of success with past groups of students. The number of scientists involved in the program and potential research projects for students is excellent. The proposal is based on the theory that mentoring and networking are the most effective methods for recruiting students into a profession and for training young researchers. Students selected for participation in this program gain a significant appreciation for the scientific process and often pursue a career in a scientific field doc18481 none California State University, San Bernardino, one of 23 campuses of the largest public university system and a designated Hispanic Serving Institution, hosts this REU in Mathematics. The program provides the opportunity for eight undergraduate students, primarily from groups under-represented in mathematics, to carry out guided independent and collaborative research in a residential environment. For eight weeks during each of the summers of through , participants will increase their level of mathematical independence by completing well-designed research projects. The objectives of the REU in Mathematics at CSUSB are to Get undergraduates actively involved in, and enthusiastic about, mathematical research, Move students towards mathematical independence and maturity, and Encourage participants to pursue careers in mathematics in either academia or industry. Effective recruitment is essential to achieving these objectives, and minimum requirements for participants include a course in Combinatorics or Discrete Math as well as a class that requires proofs. Participants will be chosen in March of each year, and the program will run from late June through mid-August. Research projects will be taken from topics in Combinatorics and Knot Theory, with a group of students working in each field. Projects within a given field will be chosen so that significant mathematical interaction occurs between students working in the same field. Moreover, participants will work closely with experienced faculty advisors to complete background reading related to their topic, give presentations on relevant material, and begin writing a journal-style paper. As the summer progresses, students will perform their own literature searches, make independent discoveries and conduct creative mathematical research. In addition to regular presentations and paper assignments, each student will create a poster describing their results, give a twenty-minute final presentation to the campus community at CSUSB, and complete a journal-style paper about their project. Thus participants will have a comprehensive research experience, as well as having communicated mathematics visually, verbally, and in writing. Field trips that introduce participants to careers and graduate school in mathematics have been scheduled. Recreational trips will also be taken in an effort to maximize moral and minimize monotony. Upon completing this program students will have actively experienced mathematical research, increased their level of mathematical maturity, and have been introduced to career paths that involve mathematics. The result is a student that is better prepared to pursue a career in mathematics and more aware of the available career options. For further information regarding the REU in Mathematics at CSUSB contact Dr. Joseph Chavez by phone at (909) 880- , via e-mail at jchavez@csusb.edu, or visit the web site http: www.math.csusb.edu reu doc18482 none This award provides funds for an REU Site on Excavation and Reconstruction of a Northern Plains Bison Kill Site at the University of South Dakota. The project represents a unique cooperation between academic units of the University and the W.H. Over Museum, a natural history museum which resides on the University Campus. The project is highly interdisciplinary and provides opportunities for students with a wide variety of backgrounds, including social science, physical and natural science, education, and museum science. The scientific aspects of the REU Site project are threefold: (1) the excavation of the bison kill site using state-of-the-art archaeological methodology; (2) analysis and documentation of the artifacts taken from the Site; and (3) an educational program consisting of a professional exhibit at the museum and an accompanying K-12 curricular module. In addition to the scientific component, the Site will offer students field trips, social events, weekly discussions, and written and oral presentation of results in a variety of local and national venues. This award will support eight students per year for three years. In addition to students from the University of South Dakota and smaller schools in the surrounding region, an emphasis will be placed on involving Native American students who are enrolled at two tribal colleges in South Dakota. This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences doc18483 none The proposal is to continue a well-established and successful Summer program that provides undergraduates the opportunity to participate in the excitement of working in a premier science laboratory. The goal of the program is to recruit students from the physical sciences with the hope they will be stimulated to the point of pursuing a research career in the Earth Sciences. Recruitment of under-represented minorities and women is emphasized. Students in this program will work with faculty members of the Mineral Physics Institute (MPI) on projects that probe the physical and chemical properties of materials with a particular emphasis on the use of high pressure. Working closely with members of the MPI, students will pursue their own projects and discuss their progress during weekly seminar sessions. During the program, students will have the opportunity to visit other laboratories and institutions affiliated with the MPI doc18484 none This award provides continued funding for a 3-year REU Site Program in Membrane Applied Science and Technology, at the University of Cincinnati, under the direction of Dr. William B. Krantz. This 10-week summer program will provide 10 chemical engineering undergraduate students from other institutions with research experiences with particularly emphasizing biomedical and pharmaceutical applications. This Site Program will be linked to the Cincinnati site of the NSF Industry University Cooperative Research Center for Membrane Applied Science and Technology (MAST), the only block-funded membrane research center in the U.S. Each student will be assigned a faculty mentor and will work with graduate students in the MAST Center on challenging research problems defined by interaction with industry, interdisciplinary research, and exceptional facilities. In addition, the students will participate in a seminar focusing on research methods, probelm solving, ethics, communications skills and a student posters competition doc18485 none The main objective of the proposed research is to develop and test the use of the stable carbon isotope composition of bacterial phospholipid fatty acids (PLFA) for the investigation of microbial carbon sources in streams. The question of how well the isotopic composition of organic matter sources in streams can be resolved over different spatial and temporal scales remains unanswered. Additionally, the stable carbon isotope composition of bacterial PLFA is a new method that has yet to be related to dissolved organic matter (DOM), a more challenging task due to the heterogeneous composition of compounds of varying isotopic composition that form DOM. The proposed research will establish the use of the proposed approach for investigating biogeochemical processes of stream ecosystems. The specific objectives of the proposed research will be to determine: (1) the relationship between the stable carbon isotope composition of bacterial PLFA and DOM, (2) the separation in the stable carbon isotope composition of allochthonous versus autochthonous materials across spatial and temporal scales within streams, and (3) how the stable carbon isotope composition of organic matter and bacterial PLFA are related in streams. The objectives of the study will be accomplished through both laboratory and field investigations of the isotopic composition of DOM, bacterial PLFA and organic matter sources in two stream ecosystems with contrasting watersheds. The relationship between the stable carbon isotope composition of DOM and the PLFA of both free and attached bacteria will be determined in experiments of natural assemblages of stream bacteria in both enrichment cultures and glass bead bioreactors grown on different sources of stream DOM. These experiments will represent the first studies to investigate the isotopic composition of individual fatty acids of natural assemblages of bacteria in relation to DOM. The ability to determine the source of carbon fueling bacterial activity would advance understanding of the biogeochemical cycling of DOM in the aquatic environment, and the linkage between DOM composition and microbial food web dynamics doc18486 none This award continues support for the Summer Undergraduate Research Program in the Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Minnesota. This ten-week program will emphasize student participationh in the research activities of faculty affiliated with the Center for Cognitive Sciences. Eleven undergraduates will be selected from across the country. They will (1) work as a full member of a faculty mentor s research team; (2) give an oral presentation to peers and participating faculty and write a formal report on the research project engaged during the program; (3) take part in workshops devoted to research ethics, technical writing, and preparation for graduate studies; and (4) participate in a thrice-weekly multidisciplinary research training seminar. Seminar activities include presentations by faculty, laboratory tours, and field trips. The integrated program includes opportunities for the participants to learn specific research methods, to apply these methods in the context of their own research, and to examine broad conceptual and methodological issues relevant to the cognitive sciences and related areas. Participation in special social and cultural team building events as well as common housing in a university dormitory is designed to foster a strong community of students. This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences doc18487 none Objectives The overall purpose of this program is to motivate and prepare talented students, specifically more women and minority students, to earn their PhD degree in basic life science disciplines and eventually to become members of the faculty at colleges and universities or to take leadership roles in the private sector. Means to achieve objectives This NSF award will sustain the highly successful NSF-REU program developed by University of Minnesota faculty over the past twelve years. For the next five years, the participants will continue to be recruited nationwide, but particularly from Historically Black Institutions and other small private colleges. Each year, twelve high ability undergraduate students will come to Minnesota for the 10-week summer program. The students will spend the first three weeks of the summer in an intensive three-credit laboratory course at the Lake Itasca laboratories learning basic molecular biology techniques. Following the course, each student will spend seven weeks on the Twin Cities campus completing an independent research project that uses many of the molecular techniques learned in the course. The research project will be conducted under the direction of one of the more than 100 faculty members affiliated with the program who share a common interest in molecular biology research. Supplemental activities will include weekly student seminars and evening workshops designed to strengthen future applications for postgraduate studies. All students will present the results of their research project through a scientific poster at a campus-wide symposium at the end of the program. An orientation weekend at the start of the program, the laboratory course at Itasca, communal housing in campus dormitories and numerous social, cultural and recreational activities throughout the summer weekends will foster the formation of strong personal and professional student-student and student-faculty bonds. Outcomes and significance of award Students will have an interesting and exciting summer that will strengthen their confidence and their desire to go to graduate school to earn an MS, PhD or MD PhD degree in a basic life science discipline. Intensive exposure to the high quality and quantity of research opportunities as well as the supportive and nurturing relationships with faculty mentors will motivate many participants to pursue graduate studies. In addition, undergraduate students from all backgrounds and ethnicity will have the opportunity to interact with graduate student role models to encourage undergraduates from diverse backgrounds to seek graduate school degrees. Over the long term, increased numbers of African American, American Indian and Hispanic students will be motivated to earn graduate degrees in basic life science disciplines and eventually to become members of the faculty at colleges and universities or leaders in the private sector. These new recipients of MS and PhD degrees will be role models and mentors who can help move a much larger number of individuals from under-represented minority groups closer to full participation in the scientific and technological workforce doc18488 none This research is focused on investigation of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The one-dimensional structural characteristics of SWNTs could lead to novel correlated electronic states which is one of the most fundamental issues in condensed matter physics. NMR will be used to examine the correlation of electrons in SWNTs. The properties of SWNTs can be modified by Li and K intercalations and NMR will be used to investigate the intercalation mechanism and characterize changes of electronic properties. This could lead to new methods for tailoring the properties of SWNTs with applications including Li batteries. Finally, the accessibility of SWNTs by gas molecules and the characteristics of adsorption will be investigated. This study provides insight into the nano-confinement effects on nanofluids and could provide crucial information for the development of SWNT-based molecular sensors and filters. This research provides an excellent opportunity for students to acquire a broad knowledge and research capabilities including novel materials synthesis, state-of-the-art spectroscopy, fundamental physics, and applications suitable for a wide range of careers including in academe, industry, and government. This research is focused on investigation of single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNT), a seamless cylinder formed by wrapping a graphene sheet. The study aims at understanding the electronic properties, especially novel characteristics associated with the one-dimensional nature of the structure. Modifications of SWNT properties by lithium and potassium intercalations will also be explored with potential applications such as high-density lithium batteries. Trapping of ambient gas molecules inside the tubes of SWNTs will be studied. This could lead to sensitive molecular sensors and efficient gas filters. The main technique to be used is nuclear magnetic resonance, which provides detailed information on structures, molecular motion, and electronic properties. This research provides an excellent opportunity for students to acquire a broad knowledge and research capabilities including novel materials synthesis, state-of-the-art spectroscopy, fundamental physics, and applications suitable for a wide range of careers including in academe, industry, and government. It will also attract high school and undergraduate students to the exciting field of nanotechnology doc18489 none This project will enable the attendance of students, young scientists and distinguished Russian and East European scientists at the Ninth International Conference on Muon Spin Rotation (MuSR) in Williamsburg, Virginia, June 3-7, . MuSR is in the forefront of research in the richest areas of solid-state physics and chemistry, such as superconductivity, weakly ordered magnetism, defects and diffusion. Although MuSR was first developed in the US, this is the first MuSR conference coordinated by US based MuSR scientists. Many attendees will be from the major MuSR research facilities: TRIUMF in Vancouver, BC; PSI in Switzerland, RAL in the UK; and KEK in Japan. The support for students and young scientists will aid in their further understanding of the field and enable contacts with potential collaborators from the MuSR facilities. The support for Russian and East European scientists will encourage collaborative research, e.g., on understanding the high temperature superconductors. This project will enable the attendance of students, young scientists and distinguished Russian and East European scientists at the Ninth International Conference on Muon Spin Rotation (MuSR) in Williamsburg, Virginia, June 3-7, . MuSR is in the forefront of research in the richest areas of solid-state physics and chemistry, such as superconductivity, magnetism, and diffusion and trapping of this hydrogen like particle in metals. Although MuSR was first developed in the US, this is the first MuSR conference coordinated by US based MuSR scientists. Many attendees will be from the major MuSR facilities, which are in Vancouver, BC; Switzerland, the UK; and in Japan. The support for students and young scientists will aid their further understanding of the field and enable contacts with potential collaborators from the MuSR facilities. The support for Russian and East European scientists will encourage collaborative research on, e.g., understanding the high temperature superconductors doc18490 none THz optoelectronic devices, imaging, and spectroscopy have the potential for widespread use in commercial applications. This program will focus on the development of wideband THz devices based on electro-optic polymer composites. Focus will be placed on two important applications: (1) the development of a THz emitter-detector pair that has significantly wider bandwidth than is currently available and (2) the development of large area THz detectors for direct imaging applications. The goal is not merely to demonstrate the highest frequency of detection but rather to develop an ultra-wide bandwidth emitter-detector pair that will have significant impact on spectroscopic applications in the THz regime. In addition to these two major goals, detailed measurements and analysis will be performed and on various electro-optic and photorefractive polymer composites in the THz regime. These studies will help to develop a body of knowledge about these materials and devices that will be needed to understand and bridge the gap between very high speed electronic devices and photonic ones doc18491 none This study examines how gender, education, and occupation affect science reasoning, basic knowledge, and pseudoscience support. It will employ a unique, underutilized, NSF archive: the Surveys of U.S. Public Attitudes Toward Science and Technology - . In earlier research, the principal investigator discovered sex differences in knowledge and pseudoscience after controlling for education and occupation. In this proposal, education and occupation will be examined in more detail, and will include aspects of science reasoning, such as understanding experiments or basic probability. It will examine how these predictors interact with reasoning and knowledge over time, including causal structural equation models that assess the effects of gender, dimensions of education, and dimensions of occupation. It will also study relationships among basic knowledge, reasoning, and pseudoscience support, controlling for gender, education, and occupation. These results could prove useful to government agencies, educators, concerned citizens, and scholars who study gender, public opinion, and science, technology and society doc18492 none This award supports the development of a variable frequency pulsed Ka-band (26-40 GHz) EPR spectrometer for electron spin echo envelope modulation (ESEEM) and electron-nuclear double triple resonance (ENDOR ENQOR) studies of proteins containing paramagnetic metal atoms. Paramagnetic metal centers in biomolecules are exquisitely sensitive beacons , whose magnetic coupling to nearby magnetic nuclei reveal the immediate surroundings of the metal atom and can thereby provide detailed information about catalytic reaction pathways. Ligands with coordinated O, N, or S atoms play crucial roles in the paramagnetic metal centers of many biomolecules. The hardware and software to be developed will enable powerful multi-dimensional pulsed EPR methods to be extended to the investigation of nearby magnetic nuclei such as 17O and 33S. In addition, this new instrument will substantially simplify the analysis of coupling with 14N atoms. The hyperfine interaction (hfi) and nuclear quadrupole (nqi) parameters obtained for these atoms will provide direct insight into their paramagetic metal centers. The project includes construction of the instrument, and development of software for data acquisition, data processing and spectral simulation. The initial applications of this new pulsed EPR spectrometer system will be to the catalytic processes of molybdenum enzymes and ferriheme electron-transfer proteins. However, this advanced pulsed EPR instrument will be a powerful tool that will enable the surroundings of paramagnetic metal centers in biological systems to be mapped out in unprecedented detail by biochemists, biophysicists and bioinorganic chemists. A large number of national and international collaborative studies are envisioned once the instrument becomes fully operational, and the software developed in this project will be made generally available to the scientific community doc18493 none This award provides funding to Duke University for a five-year REU Site Program for Increasing Diversity at Duke University s Pratt School of Engineering, under the direction of Ms. Martha Absher. This nine-week summer program will provide in-depth research opportunities for 8 women, under-represented minorities, and disabled undergraduate students in projects covering a wide range of topics including diagnostics and biomaterials, medical imaging, cochlear implants and drug transport in solid tumors. The REU Fellows will work closely with a Pratt researcher and or graduate studentmentor on individual research projects especially designed for them in laboratories on the Duke campus doc18494 none The University of Texas at El Paso will be offering ten Undergraduate Research Positions for ten weeks during June and July beginning . These positions will be funded through the NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Program in biological research. The main goal of this program is to provide an exciting and nurturing research experience for students, one that will encourage them to pursue careers as research scientists. Each student is paired with a faculty advisor, who is often supported by interested graduate and advanced undergraduate students. Students are required to engage in a 10-week research project. Areas of research conducted by our faculty include: host-parasite interactions, DNA repair, toxicology, lipid metabolism, autoimmunity, neurobiology, systematics, desert ecology, behavioral ecology, and many others. In addition to the work with their faculty advisors, students attend several weekly meetings: lab meetings with their mentor and fellow lab colleagues, a faculty lecture series on research opportunities in biology, and a journal club to discuss cutting-edge science that is followed by an informal gathering with current UTEP undergraduate and graduate students to discuss questions, issues and concerns. Students will also have the opportunity to visit a national research laboratory so as to expand student exposure to biology beyond the campus. Towards the end of the program, students are asked to give a short talk at the Undergraduate Summer Research symposium and to provide a written summary of their summer research. As recognition for student achievement, two of the ten students will be selected to attend a national meeting with their REU mentor based on their overall performance. Several social activities are also organized throughout the summer to help students get acquainted with each other, with the University, and with the surrounding area doc18495 none The REU program at the University on Michigan provides ten selected undergraduate students from around the United States and ten students from the University of Michigan the opportunity to participate for ten weeks during the summer in research in the fields of astrophysics, atomic, molecular, and optical physics, biophysics, condensed matter physics and high energy physics. Special emphasis is placed on recruiting promising students from small liberal arts colleges and historically black institutions that cannot provide this range of research opportunities. The research experience is complemented by a wide range of educational and social activities, helping the students to put their work in a wider perspective and building a network of professional contacts for a future career in physics. The program is continuously evaluated through a number of short- and long-term measures, ensuring continued success in training the next generation of scientists doc18496 none The foci of this research are fourfold and all involve the development of methodology based on the use of chiral tert-butanesulfinamide. The goals include: Asymmetric synthesis and applications of highly substituted beta-amino acids; reactions of metalloenamines derived from tert-butanesulfinyl imines, in particular for the synthesis of 1,3-amino alcohols; parallel asymmetric synthesis of amines in solution and solid support for the rapid preparation of natural products and compounds with interesting biological properties; development of tert-butanesulfinamide derived ligands as a new class of ligands for asymmetric catalysis. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Jonathan A. Ellman of the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Ellman will focus his work on exploring the applications of tert-butanesulfinamide to asymmetric synthesis. Since more than 75% of drugs and drug candidates contain amine functionality, the work could have significant impact on the pharmaceutical industry. The research also provides an excellent training ground for students in current organic synthesis doc18466 none FRG Collaborative Proposal PROPOSAL NUMBER PI INSTITUTION Benedetto University of Maryland, lead PI Aldroubi Vanderbilt University Jorgensen University of Iowa Heil, Wang Georgia Institute of Technology Baggett Univ. of Colorado Olafsson Lousiana State Univ. Larson Texas A&M : Fundamental problems are addressed in wavelet theory, non-uniform sampling, frames, and the theory of spectral-tile duality. These problems are inextricably interwoven by concept and technique. Operator theory provides the major unifying framework, combined with an integration of ideas from a diverse spectrum of mathematics including classical Fourier analysis, noncommutative harmonic analysis, representation theory, operator algebras, approximation theory, and signal processing. For example, the construction, implementation, and ensuing theory of single dyadic orthonormal wavelets in Euclidean space requires significant input from all of these disciplines as well as deep spectral-tile results. There is intrinsic mathematical importance in the aforementioned problems, and the solutions to be formulated have broad and creative implications, both for mathematics and for applications in engineering and physics. The topics of this project have direct bearing on fast acquisition and motion problems in MRI, as well as in formulating algorithms for compression and noise reduction by means of proper cochlear modelling. There are further applications in quantum computing and image processing, and the development of non-uniform sampling strategies by this project play a role in state of the art A D conversion methods used in multifunction RF systems. These interdisciplinary applications depending on modern mathematical analysis have educational implications in terms of cross-fertilization of ideas and research opportunities for graduate students doc18498 none The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) proposes a new Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site for summers - . The research focus of the REU site will be Information Technologies. Information technologies are crucial for manipulating large amounts of information in electronic formats. Berkeley is at the forefront of many areas of IT research, and is known for its large-scale interdisciplinary and experimental research projects. This area represents one of the most critical technological developments of our era. Information industries use these technologies to assemble, distribute, and process information in a wide range of media. The field of Information Technologies, including embedded systems, is by far the fastest growing job category in the U.S. The overall goal of this research is to demonstrate new architectural solutions for the converged information and communication networks of the next century. The REU site will bring students together in computer networking, wireless communication, embedded systems, and data acquisition through censoring, video and image processing, and network-enabled applications from the EECS Department doc18478 none The global theory of minimal surfaces in space is in a phase of explosive growth. Many new methods of constructing complete embedded minimal surfaces have recently been found; in place of a dearth of examples just a few years ago, we now have a quite varied collection of surfaces, including infinite families. A basic problem is to classify these examples, i.e. collect them into families with common properties and understood limits. Fruitful approaches have recently been developed that combine numerical simulation with methods from the theory of geometric structures on surfaces and classical complex analysis, notably Teichmuller theory. Some of the problems the team will attack are: Are there embedded minimal surfaces with one heliciodal end and arbitrary genus? Is the classical Scherk surface the unique desingularization of a pair of planes? Of what families is the Scherk surface the limit point? At the same time, the group hopes to make progress on simulation of minimal surfaces. For example, we hope to set up a library of Weierstrass representations of minimal surfaces which is reproducible, fully documented, and useful as a research tool. A guiding philosophy in many areas of science, from physics to biochemistry to ecology, is that nature is maximally efficient; indeed, many explanations of natural phenomena have at their foundation the assumption that the phenomenon has optimized some or several of its features in the expression we witness. At its base, this philosophical principle is mathematical in nature: we search for principles in science that can be formulated as extremal problems. In mathematics, we can make this assumption of optimality very rigorous by expressing it as an equation. This leaves us with the problem of understanding all of the solutions of that equation. In this project, we aim to study one very rich type of optimization problem, the minimal surface problem, which is already known to have a number of quite subtle characteristics. (A minimal surface is one for which each small piece has less area than any other surface with the same boundary.) The study of these surfaces has its origins in physical problems studied first by Euler; then, a century later, the problem also arose in the studies of the behavior of rotating droplets and soap films by F. Plateau. Today the applications range from cosmology to the understanding of the structure of stable periodic structures in compound copolymers. As in many other optimization problems, for the minimal surface problem, we do not have much general information about solutions to the equation expressing extremality. At present though, we do have a wide variety of examples which help to guide our intuition, and which we are beginning to organize. It is thus a good model problem, enriching our understanding of all optimization problems doc18500 none This award provides continued funding to Colorado State University (CSU) for the support of a 3-year REU Site entitled, Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Chemical Engineering Using the Colorado Bioprocessing, under the direction of Dr. Vincent G. Murphy. This 10-week summer program will provide an opportunity for 8 undergraduate students from other institutions to participate in a variety of bioprocessing research opportunities at both the undergraduate and graduate levels in preparation for a career in bioprocessing research and development. The students will work on individual research projects in the Colorado Bioprocessing Center (CBC) with the guidance and support of a faculty advisor and CBC staff. In addition the students will participate in weekly colloquia and a concluding symposium where they will share their research experiences with fellow participants doc18501 none This award provides funds for a Research Experiences for Undergraduates Site on Human Technology Interactions at the University of Oklahoma. This interdisciplinary REU Site will give undergraduates the opportunity to engage in research on human-technical systems. A total of 12 students, 10 funded by NSF and 2 funded by OU will spend eight weeks in the program. The students time will be divided into three activities: individual research, team research, and collective activities. Each student will participate in individual research within an active laboratory. Research assistantships will be available in Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology, Computer Science, Industrial Engineering, Library and Information Studies, History of Science, Information Systems, and Communication. A distinguishing characteristic of this program is that students will also participate on one of three multidisciplinary research teams composed of undergraduates and supervised by faculty and graduate students. To futher promote the experience of scientific inquiry, students will also participate in seminar and workshop series and special events. A multi-session ethics workshop will allow students to explore ethical issues in a variety of fields. Students will be recruited nationally and regionally with an emphasis on students who would otherwise have little opportunity to gain research experience or to develop technical expertise. This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences doc18502 none This Americas Program proposal requests support for Dr. Richard N. Abbott, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC, to conduct a research of an unusual metamorphic rock called Alpine-type spinel-garnet peridotite, recently discovered by the PI in the Cuevas River in the Caribbean nation of the Dominican Republic. Dr. Abbott will be collaborating with Engineers P.V. Chavez, and V. Silva, Direccion de Mineria (bureau of mines geological survey),Santo Domingo, and Dr. Ivan Tavares, Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo. The principal objectives of the research are to determine and map the relationship between this rock and others in the same unit; find the source of the boulders, and analyze the samples in the laboratory. Understanding these unusual rocks will help to refine the current model of the origin of the islands of the Greater Antilles in the broader context of the origin of the Caribbean basin. Identifying the geological sources of these peridotite boulders will provide fundamental first order on the tectonic processes that have occurred in this part of the Caribbean. Dominicans will participate in the project through the government s quadrangle mapping program and will benefit from the resulting geologic map that will be useful for the development and management of their natural resource doc18503 none The primary goal of this research is to analyze three ice cores collected by a joint Chinese-US team of researchers in the spring of . At that time, a 117-meter ice core was recovered from the East Rongbuk (ERC) glacier at meters above sea level. In addition to these analyses, the researchers will participate in a joint Chinese-US expedition to the region to retrieve modern day glaciological and meteorological data to aid in the interpretation of the ice core data. Based on local accumulation rates and layer thinning estimates, the new 117-meter ERC core likely represents at least several centuries of snow deposition. Thus, the researchers have the opportunity to develop a calibrated, high-resolution paleoclimate record from the region that will complement previous paleoclimatological research from Mt. Everest and Central Asia. The analysis of the ice cores will focus on producing a detailed time-series of major ion concentrations (i.e., chloride, nitrate, sulfate, calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium and ammonium), stable isotope ratios (i.e., oxygen and deuterium), and total element concentration (i.e., iron, aluminum, calcium, and sulfur). These data will be used to develop: -- high-resolution time series of Late Holocene climate variability for the region involving atmospheric circulation, temperature, and precipitation, and -- detailed environmental records of biomass burning, dust storms, anthropogenic pollutants, and marine and continental biogenic source productivity. The analyses of the ice cores could increase our understanding of the atmospheric dynamics of an important weather system that impacts a heavily populated region of the world. The interaction and cooperation of scientific colleagues from the United States and China will enhance the prospects for success doc18504 none Under the direction of Dr. John Harris, Ms Purity Kiura will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. Her project is a study over the annual cycle by direct observation and stable isotope analysis of the food consumption of three groups of people with different subsistence strategies (the Dassanetch, Gabra and El-molo) living today to the East of Lake Turkana in Northern Kenya. The ultimate goal of this study is to provide an interpretive framework for investigating the subsistence strategies and diet of people believed to have occupied the region during the last 10,000 years (Holocene period). These three modern groups are not direct analogues for the Holocene peoples but do have diets similar to those proposed in the region by prior researchers. However, if by direct observations, including the analysis of food residues discarded in garbage pits, and by the study of stable isotope signatures of modern peoples that these are found to be discrete, then it may be possible to identify similar subsistence strategies in the regions Holocene record. Ms Kiura and her field assistants will conduct daily observations and interviews of the people s dietary behavior (food types, processing, preparing and sharing) while at the same time they will document the food remains that are discarded in garbage pits through the people s food processing and consumption activities. Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis to determine the food types consumed will be carried out on the people s hair, bone and teeth from the animals consumed by the people, and also the plants eaten by these animals. Daily weather observations (i.e. rain, humidity, temperature and wind patterns) will also be recorded to provide seasonal changes in the region. The data collected here will have broad implications beyond setting up a base for the study of the Holocene people s subsistence strategies. The data will also provide novel information on the dietary activities through the annual cycle of three modern groups of people that are poorly studied. Plants and animals in the region are poorly understood and this project will therefore provide very important information to plant physiologists, mammalogists, paleontologists and others. Daily weather records will also prove important to all scientists interested in the region s seasonal changes and effects on the overall environment doc18505 none The Harvard Forest is a center for NSF-Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) and related studies involving more than 75 researchers from Harvard University and other institutions. Since Harvard Forest has provided a diverse and talented group of undergraduate students with training in independent research and guidance to graduate study and professional development through a Summer Research Program in Ecology. This program, which is dedicated to promoting career development in ecological sciences, includes between 13-18 students each summer. The research theme of the Harvard Forest REU program addresses the relative importance of environmental change, natural disturbance, and human activity in controlling current and prospective ecological patterns and process in the northeastern U.S. Studies are diverse and mentors are lead scientists and educators in areas ranging from atmospheric chemistry and ecosystem studies to wildlife biology, population ecology, ecophysiology, paleoecology, and conservation biology. Mentors in the program include researchers with Marine Biological Labs-Ecosystem Center, Woods Hole Research Center, University of New Hampshire, University of Massachusetts, Holy Cross College, and three academic departments at Harvard University (Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Harvard Forest). To provide the most productive student experience the program utilizes an effective protocol comprising: selection of diverse and productive students; advanced preparation; individual mentorship within research groups of faculty, graduate students, post-doctoral associates and undergraduates; weekly seminars and discussion groups on science, careers, graduate studies, and ethics in science; field trips to other research sites and institutions; recreational opportunities; an annual student symposium and published proceedings; program evaluation and discussion; and follow-up of publications and presentation, theses and careers. The REU program at the Harvard Forest uses exceptionally well-equipped field, laboratory, analytical, and housing facilities. Each student is closely supervised in independent studies by a mentor and the program is overseen by a coordinator working closely with the Harvard Forest Director, Administrator, Museum Coordinator, and Data Manager. Participants are recruited nationally with a strong emphasis on geographic coverage, small colleges and participation of women, minorities, and students with disabilities. The program runs 12 weeks during the summer although many students continue with research projects beyond this period. Detailed information on past and proposed REU research projects and the Summer Research Symposium, which includes past REU student research results, is available at www.lternet.edu hfr doc18506 none Clemson supports a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site in its Chemical Engineering Department with an experimental materials studies theme. Eight students are recruited nationwide every year for a ten-week summer research experience, with a recruitment focus on the Southeastern United States. Undergraduates with a chemistry, chemical engineering and materials science background are especially targeted. Students participate in a variety of research projects within three major categories: polymeric, catalytic and bio-inspired materials. Undergraduates also participate in oral and written communication workshops and in tours of chemical and manufacturing companies nearby doc18507 none The Nebraska REU is an eight-week summer program for 10 undergraduate students, most of whom will be from other institutions. The Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is a Ph.D. granting research department that is regionally and nationally recognized for excellence in teaching. The Nebraska REU draws on these qualities to cultivate an environment that emphasizes interaction among its students and among its students and the Department as the students develop their research skills. In addition to research, there is an emphasis on developing written and oral communication skills in mathematics. The Nebraska REU offers the opportunity for mathematically talented students to carry out research in areas of applied mathematics, each under the guidance of a team of applied mathematicians. It is anticipated that two to four students will work under an advisor team on closely related problems with daily seminars for the first few weeks to get the research off to a good start. There will be weekly lectures on topics of a general mathematical interest given by faculty, students, and visitors. Social activities are planned throughout the eight weeks with a greater frequency during the first week. On-campus room, board, and the student recreation center are provided. The Department will also provide students up to $400 toward the cost associated to presenting their REU work at a conference doc18508 none Scientists who study systematics are interested in determining how living things are related and in understanding the evolutionary processes that generate biological diversity. Bioinformatics, on the other hand, is a relatively new discipline whose practitioners are involved with management and analysis of molecular data. Brigham Young University (BYU) has developed a summer program in systematics and bioinformatics to provide undergraduate students with an interactive and hands-on research experience. We will recruit 30 undergraduate students (10 students in each of the years - ) to spend 10 weeks (June - August) at BYU, Provo, Utah. Successful students will be paired with a faculty mentor who will assist them in conducting an original research project. Potential research areas include conservation genetics, HIV evolution, systematics and evolutionary biology, molecular evolution, methods of phylogeny reconstruction, and parallel processing of large data sets. We will recruit students who do not have substantial research opportunities at their own institutions and will focus on ethnic minority and female applicants. Opportunities to interact with other students, faculty, post-docs and graduate students will be provided through weekly meetings, workshops and a series of weekend field trips. In addition, students will present results of their research at a symposium to be held the 10th week. The overall goals of this program are to assist students in understanding the scientific method of investigation and to expose students to the possibilities of pursuing a career in the biological sciences doc18509 none This award provides funding to the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities for the support of a five-year, REU Site in Electrical and Computer Engineering, under the direction of Dr. Douglas W. Ernie. This ten-week summer program will involve fifteen students annually in an intensive research experience on a wide range of topics including biomedical engineering, computer engineering and VLSI design, control systems, power systems and electronics, magnetic recording technology, optics and photonics, microelectronics materials, device design and fabrication, and signal processing and communications. Each student will be paired with an electrical and computer engineering faculty mentor and will be actively involved with the mentor s research group. In addition, the participants will be involved in extensive complementary educational activities, including a weekly seminar series focusing on heir research projects, career seminars field trips, and specialized workshops on assorted topics. As a capstone to their REU experience, each student will prepare a final written report and give a presentation at a concluding departmental poster session and an all-campus summer research program symposium doc18510 none Tellurium has a wide range of abundant stable isotopes. The tellurium nuclei have two valence protons with respect to Z = 50 and a range of neutron numbers. Three different types of structure are thought to be active in these nuclei:collective, two-particle, and particle-hole excitations known as intruders. Because there are seven stable even-even Te nuclei, one can study the evolution of these excitation modes over a wide range in neutron number. Emphasis centers on understanding the interplay between particle and collective features and on the aspects of the nuclear forces and shell model orbitals that determine the relative importance. Several models are now able to reproduce the level scheme. Often level energies are more important for evaluating whether a model has sufficient built-in complexity rather than distinguishing between physical descriptions. Transition rate information is crucial to revealing the amplitudes of particle and collective components in the wavefunctions. Excited levels in 130Te below 3.3 MeV will be studied at the University of Kentucky Nuclear Structure Laboratory utilizing inelastic neutron scattering techniques. Electromagnetic transition rates,multipole mixing and branching ratios, and level spins and parities will be deduced from measured gamma-ray excitation functions, coincidences,angular distributions, and Doppler shifts. The excited levels in 118Te and 120Te will be studied at the University of Cologne. The low-spin level scheme will be first verified with gamma-ray spectroscopy following a few-neutron emission reaction. The lifetimes of states in 118Te and 120Te will then be determined using the recoil-distance Doppler shift technique doc18511 none This Chemistry Division award supports the continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the University of Florida. Randolph Duran is the site s Program Director and Benjamin Smith is the Co-Program Director. Thirty faculty will serve as REU student mentors. Over the award period ( - ), ten students will be supported each summer in a ten-week program. In addition to the recruiting efforts used in the past, a partnership will be established with Tuskegee University to identify additional under-represented minority students. The students will live and interact with French undergraduate students, as part of their experience. The research focus is a biological and materials chemistry. Students will participate in weekly seminars and will present their research results in the form of papers, talks, and or posters. There will be a three-day weekend post-REU meeting and poster session each October after the program ends. Students will be surveyed several times throughout the summer program and research mentors provide evaluations of each student at the conclusion of the program. All students are tracked after the program ends doc18512 none This grant advances methods of atmospheric sounding based on measurement and interpretation of GPS signals received by low earth orbiting (LEO) satellites. Because of refraction, radio signals follow a slightly bent path and have a slightly reduced speed when they propagate through the earth s atmosphere from a GPS transmitting satellite to a LEO receiver. From the amount of bending and the excess time delay can be inferred the vertical profile of the radio refractivity of the atmosphere. The refractivity is related to the electron density in the ionosphere and to the temperature, pressure, and water vapor content of the neutral atmosphere. Atmospheric sounding using the occultation technique separates the different contributions to the refractive index to determine both the electron density profile in the high atmosphere and the profiles of temperature and humidity in the lower atmosphere. The project is divided into two main parts. The first is concerned with solving certain problems in using the existing system of GPS satellites to monitor profiles of temperature, humidity, and electron density. It includes (1) developing corrections for the effects of the ionosphere on measurements in the lower atmosphere; (2) studying the effects of multipath propagation in the lower troposphere; (3) extending the profiling down to the boundary layer; (4) assimilating radio occultation data into weather forecasting models. The second part of the project is aimed at developing an advanced sounding system in which an array of as many as six LEO satellites will be equipped for both transmitting and receiving signals at frequencies within selected water vapor and ozone absorption bands (so-called crosslink experiments). Measuring the amplitudes and phases of such signals enables the determination of profiles of temperature, water vapor, and ozone from radio occultations. This research lays the groundwork for new methods of atmospheric sounding that will have important application in numerical weather prediction models and, through the detection of long-term trends, in climate studies doc18513 none The Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS), a consortium of 64 research universities, plans to implement a three-year REU program at the La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica. This project will provide hands-on, field-oriented research experiences to undergraduate students from throughout the United States, including minority students identified through the OTS Minority Scholars Program. This program provides support for ten undergraduates each year to have a ten-week research experience at La Selva, located in the lowland rainforest of Costa Rica. Students selected to participate in the REU Program will be paired with a research mentor at La Selva and will be responsible for supervising all aspects of the student s research design; Though the students targeted for the REU research experience will be participants in OTS Undergraduate Program, REU fellowships will also be available on a competitive basis to undergraduates who have not participated in an OTS undergraduate course. Most importantly, through the OTS National Fellowship Advisory Committee a major effort will be made to recruit students from under-represented groups in the sciences. The overall goals and objectives of the REU Program at La Selva are: (1) Encourage student interest in careers in field research and tropical ecology. (2) Establish a clear understanding of the design of field experiments and the logic and application of statistical analysis. (3) Build skills in the interpretation of the results of scientific experiments and the communication of these results to both technical and non-technical audiences. (4) To introduce students through scientific study to the importance of tropical ecosystems and facilitate a full understanding of evolution and ecology. (5) Increase the participation in research of women, ethnic minorities and economically disadvantaged students. The REU students will have an immersion experience in a tropical rain forest setting that will likely become a career-determining summer. They will develop intellectual and practical skills in one of the world s most important ecosystems and contribute to improved understanding of the biodiversity conservation and ecological research priorities doc18514 none The Atlanta Consortium for Research in the Earth Science (ACRES) will conduct a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site program at Georgia State University. The purpose of the proposed REU program is to extend opportunities to participate in geoscience research to undergraduate students and secondary school science teachers from the southeast region. REU program participants will work in teams with ACRES faculty on selected research problems in regional geology. Projects are: 1) The Paleontology, Petrology, Depositional Environments and Early Diagenesis of the Sandersville Limestone member of the Tobacco Road Sandstone (Eocene), Coastal Plain of Georgia 2) A Comparative Study of the Geochemistry, Sedimentology and Micropaleontology of Developed and Undeveloped Marginal Marine Systems on the Georgia and South Carolina Coasts 3) Comparative Geochemistry of Flat Rock park Gneiss, Motts Gneiss, and Other Granitoidal Gneisses in the Uchee Belt and 4) Fluid Inclusions from the Uchee Belt: Theoretical and Experimental Evaluation of Decrepitation Behavior and Microthermometric Determination of Pressure-Temperature Conditions During Metamorphism doc18515 none The Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Northern Arizona University will host a summer research program for six students recruited nationwide. Minority students and students from colleges and universities without doctoral programs are especially encouraged to apply, and have been a major component of previous programs. The program will run for eight weeks, with each student working on an individual project tailored to his or her own mathematical background. Two students will work with each faculty advisor in a subject area to include Applied Mathematics and Analysis and Combinatorics. Descriptions of projects available for each forthcoming summer are posted on the department s homepage at http: odin.math.nau.edu REU . As well as carrying out their research, students participate in seminar series, each giving a fifty-minute presentation at the end of the program. Students also write up their work in a form suitable for publication; these will put into a single bound volume. Students are encouraged to give talks at meetings etc. after the program has concluded, and the most successful will submit their work to a journal for publication doc18516 none This award provides funding for a three year Research Experiences for Undergraduates Site program in Brain, Sensory Systems and Behavior, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, under the direction of Dr. Aixa Alfonso. This program exposes a diverse group of undergraduates to the excitement and challenges of pursuing original research at the intersection of the biological and behavioral sciences. This is a renewal of a previously funded REU project that will continue to train students in integrative neural and behavioral science by working wih biologists, psychologists, and engineers who conduct research within the areas of sensory processing and behavior, and synaptic integration doc18517 none This Chemistry Division award supports the continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at Santa Clara University. Julie Mueller is the site s Program Director and Patrick Hoggard is the Co-Program Director. Eight faculty will serve as REU student mentors. Over the award period ( - ), eight students will be supported each summer in a ten-week program. The goal is that at least six of the eight students each year should be women and under-represented minorities. Students select research from among projects in organic, biological, and physical chemistry. Ethical issues in scientific work will be examined through weekly meetings directed by ethicists from the Santa Clara University Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. The Societal Dimensions of Engineering, Science, and Technology Program support this portion of the REU program. Summer activities will end with a symposium. A written evaluation by each of the students of the overall REU program will be provided at the conclusion. Periodic surveys of all REU alumni will be done to assess the long-term impact of the program doc18518 none This award provides support to the University of Colorado, Denver to host the American Economics Association Summer Training Program. A primary goal of this program is to increase the number of minorities in the economics profession. This Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site is a nine-week program for 15 student participants aimed at strengthening their analytic skills and to demonstrate the relevance and excitement of economics as a profession. The program will combine hands-on empirical research with honors-level coursework in economic theory, econometric methods, and mathematical economics. Weekly workshops and seminars by outside speakers will familiarize students with policy issues and career options. This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences doc18519 none This award provides funding for a 3-year REU Site at Cornell University entitled, Protecting Water Quality: An REU Site for Research Experience of Undergraduates in Environmental and Biological Engineering, under the direction of Dr. Tammo S. Steenhuis. This 10-week summer program will provide 10 undergraduate students from Florida A&M University, Clark Atlanta University, and the University of Puerto Rico with the opportunity to do research, with the assistance and guidance of a faculty mentor, on various aspects of biological and environmental engineering associated with protecting water quality. In addition, the students will attend weekly seminars, make weekly presentations on their work to their fellow REU students, and make a final technical presentation in a department wide setting doc18520 none Pennsylvania State University s Astrobiology Summer Program supports 10 undergraduate students from colleges and universities across the U.S. to participate in unique interdisciplinary research that combines biology, chemistry and geology to better understand the early evolution of life on Earth and elsewhere in the universe. Students spend 10 weeks over the summer performing independent research under the supervision of a faculty member at the main campus of Penn State. After a day of orientation, the summer program begins with a three-day field trip to an unusual salt-water lake in New York State believed to be analogous to early oceans on Earth 3-4 billion years ago. The lake is part of active astrobiology research and therefore data will be collected during the trip. After returning to Penn State, students spend the remainder of the summer engaged in astrobiology research in faculty laboratories. They also attend weekly seminars, give oral presentations, are involved in tours of laboratories, and present their research in a symposium at the end of the summer. Women and minorities are encouraged to apply to this program doc18521 none The summer research program in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Oklahoma will be continued, providing undergraduates with an opportunity to participate in substantial scientific research in one of four areas: astrophysics, condensed matter, atomic and molecular physics or high energy physics. External students will be funded by the REU site grant, and additional OU students will be funded by the University each year. The goal of the program is to encourage and prepare students to seek further educational and career opportunities in physics and astronomy. External students will be recruited nationally with emphasis on under-represented groups and participants who otherwise lack opportunities for research experience. They will be matched with individual research mentors in their stated area of interest. Students will present their results at regional SPS and APS conferences. The program will build upon the previous success in introducing students of diverse backgrounds to modern research in an engaging setting doc18522 none Abbott This Americas Program proposal requests support for Dr. Richard N. Abbott, Appalachian State University to conduct research of an unusual metamorphic rock called Alpine-type spinel-garnet peridotite, recently discovered in the Caribbean nation of the Dominican Republic. Dr. Abbott will be collaborating with Dr. Draper Greenville of Florida International University, Miami, Florida, Engineers P.V. Chavez, and V. Silva, Direccion de Mineria (bureau of mines geological survey),Santo Domingo, and Dr. Ivan Tavares, Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo. The principal objectives of the research are to determine and map the relationship between these rocks and others in the same unit, find their source, and analyze samples in the laboratory Understanding these unusual rocks will help to refine the current model of the origin of the islands of the Greater Antilles in the broader context of the origin of the Caribbean basin. Identifying the geological sources of these peridotite boulders will provide fundamental knowledge on the tectonic processes that have occurred in this part of the Caribbean. The resulting geologic maps from this research will be useful for the development and management of natural resources doc18523 none This project extends and continues previous work on the behavior of photons and neutrinos in a medium. Concrete calculations to be performed include: (1) The effects of the presence of a magnetic field on neutrino damping rates due to the effects of the matter-induced electromagnetic couplings of the neutrino. These effect, independent of neutrino mixing, could provide a mechanism for pulsar kicks; (2) The imaginary part of the photon self-energy (from which the photon damping rate is determined)in a medium that contains, besides the usual background of charged particles, a background of neutrinos that moves, as a whole, relative to the stationary background. This type of system has been considered in connection with energy generation mechanisms in supernova explosions; (3) The photon self-energy in a medium with an external plane wave field to study chirality effects. This is a novel application of thermal field theory methods in the context of optical and condensed matter physics. The properties of photons and neutrinos in a medium, and their interactions, have been the subjects of continuous attention over the years because of they provide information about underlying processes in the environments in which they occur. This information can be important in various astrophysical and cosmological situations and in condensed matter and physical optics laboratory experiments. Apart from the details that are specific to the particular calculations and physical contexts of the calculations in this project, the treatment of these problems involve ideas, methods and techniques that can be useful in other branches of physics doc18524 none The Atlanta Consortium for Research in the Earth Science (ACRES) will conduct a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site program at Georgia State University. The purpose of the proposed REU program is to extend opportunities to participate in geoscience research to undergraduate students and secondary school science teachers from the southeast region. REU program participants will work in teams with ACRES faculty on selected research problems in regional geology. Projects are: 1) The Paleontology, Petrology, Depositional Environments and Early Diagenesis of the Sandersville Limestone member of the Tobacco Road Sandstone (Eocene), Coastal Plain of Georgia 2) A Comparative Study of the Geochemistry, Sedimentology and Micropaleontology of Developed and Undeveloped Marginal Marine Systems on the Georgia and South Carolina Coasts 3) Comparative Geochemistry of Flat Rock Park Gneiss, Motts Gneiss, and Other Granitoidal Gneisses in the Uchee Belt and 4) Fluid Inclusions from the Uchee Belt: Theoretical and Experimental Evaluation of Decrepitation Behavior and Microthermometric Determination of Pressure-Temperature Conditions During Metamorphism doc18525 none On September 11, , World Trade Center towers collapsed because of a terrorist attack. The twin 110-story buildings had tube steel structures steel and were the fifth and sixth tallest buildings in the world with a height of about feet. The tragic collapse due to this criminal act will require comprehensive analyses of the structure subjected to initial impact of airplane as well as the intense fire that followed. Such analyses no-doubt will be conducted in the future to establish the cause(s) of the collapse and failure sequence in order to improve design of new buildings and retrofit existing structures. The studies will need reliable data on mechanical properties of materials used in the towers, actual as-built steel connections and members as well as floor systems. The objective of this SGER is to conduct post-disaster reconnaissance and collection of perishable data. Specifically, samples of material and structural members and connections that later can be used to establish their properties will be collected. Of particular interest is to collect samples of steel from areas that were heavily affected by heat of the jet fuel and or impact of the planes. The PI is collaborating with David McCallen of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who is providing expertise in computational mechanics, modeling and analysis of large structural systems. He is also collaborating with Frederick Mowrer of the University of Maryland who is collecting perishable data on the fire protection engineering aspects of the WTC. Together, the data obtained in these projects will be of critical importance to future analyses of the WTC collapses doc18526 none Stephenson This award supports a collaborative research project between Professor Steven Stephenson of Fairmont State College and Dr. Ceridwen Pearce of the Australian Tropical Mycology Research Centre in Kuranda, Australia. The project will assess the biodiversity and ecology (including patterns of distribution, relative abundance, host substrate associations, and interactions of different groups) of mycetozoans associated with litter microhabitats of tropical forests in northern Australia. Comparison of results with data from forests in the Northern Hemisphere will enrich our understanding of this little understood group of organisms. This project will benefit from the expertise and facilities of both the U.S. and Australian institutions, and will include the active participation of American students in the international collaboration doc18527 none The Atlanta Consortium for Research in the Earth Science (ACRES) will conduct a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site program at Georgia State University. The purpose of the proposed REU program is to extend opportunities to participate in geoscience research to undergraduate students and secondary school science teachers from the southeast region. REU program participants will work in teams with ACRES faculty on selected research problems in regional geology. Projects are 1) The Paleontology, Petrology, Depositional Environments and Early Diagenesis of the Sandersville Limestone member of the Tobacco Road Sandstone (Eocene), Coastal Plain of Georgia 2) A Comparative Study of the Geochemistry, Sedimentology and Micropaleontology of Developed and Undeveloped Marginal Marine Systems on the Georgia and South Carolina Coasts 3) Comparative Geochemistry of Flat Rock Park Gneiss, Motts Gneiss, and Other Granitoidal Gneisses in the Uchee Belt and 4) Fluid Inclusions from the Uchee Belt: Theoretical and Experimental Evaluation of Decrepitation Behavior and Microthermometric Determination of Pressure-Temperature Conditions During Metamorphism doc18527 none The Atlanta Consortium for Research in the Earth Science (ACRES) will conduct a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site program at Georgia State University. The purpose of the proposed REU program is to extend opportunities to participate in geoscience research to undergraduate students and secondary school science teachers from the southeast region. REU program participants will work in teams with ACRES faculty on selected research problems in regional geology. Projects are 1) The Paleontology, Petrology, Depositional Environments and Early Diagenesis of the Sandersville Limestone member of the Tobacco Road Sandstone (Eocene), Coastal Plain of Georgia 2) A Comparative Study of the Geochemistry, Sedimentology and Micropaleontology of Developed and Undeveloped Marginal Marine Systems on the Georgia and South Carolina Coasts 3) Comparative Geochemistry of Flat Rock Park Gneiss, Motts Gneiss, and Other Granitoidal Gneisses in the Uchee Belt and 4) Fluid Inclusions from the Uchee Belt: Theoretical and Experimental Evaluation of Decrepitation Behavior and Microthermometric Determination of Pressure-Temperature Conditions During Metamorphism doc18529 none This award provides funding to the University of Illinois-Chicago for a three-year, REU Site in Novel Materials and Processing under the direction of Dr. Christos G. Takoudis. This ten-week summer program, will involve ten students annually in individual research projects covering topics that will include property-based appraches to materials design and manufacturing, facilitated fluidized bed combustion synthesis, measuring activity and selectivity of novel catalytic materials, thin film growth, and nanostructures of colloidal micelles. The students will be provided with a comprehensive research and educational experience in novel materials and processing and will be given ample opportunity to exercise their originality and creativity, to develop enthusiasm for technology development, and to experience technology creation as an exciting and challenging career path doc18530 none The Biology Department at James Madison University (JMU) is characterized by its focus on undergraduate research as the ultimate teaching tool. This focus is manifested in the number of undergraduates conducting research projects (over 100 per year) and the number of established faculty having extramurally-funded research programs (66%). In the summer of a pilot summer research program was enormously successful in supporting the continuation of research conducted during the academic year and achieving the educational goals of the department. Funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will enable JMU to expand this pilot program to include students outside the boundaries of JMU and to enhance the research pedagogy within the department. The new NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates Program will provide an exciting 10-week summer research experience at the JMU campus. The experience will begin with a research workshop aimed at ensuring that all students have the fundamental tools necessary to conduct their research program. Mini-lectures and discussion sessions will be interspersed with experiential activities throughout the day and each day will end with a summary session where fundamental concepts will be reinforced. Topics covered will include thinking outside the box , quantitative methods, data interpretation, technical writing, bioethics, multimedia strategies, and an introduction to basic laboratory instrumentation. The remaining 9 weeks of the experience will be largely devoted to research along with seminars, student research talks and faculty-originated case study scenarios. It is anticipated that the research project conducted in the summer will continue into the academic year, either in a JMU laboratory or through a collaborative arrangement with the student s home institution. It is also expected that the results of these projects will be disseminated via presentations in regional national meetings and peer-reviewed journals. Recruitment will focus on four primary groups of constituents within our geographical region, 1) non-JMU students at institutions that do not support robust summer research programs, 2) students from minority-serving institutions, 3) community college students, and 4) JMU students. We have already built liaisons with these college universities through our recently funded Undergraduate Mentoring in Environmental Biology (UMEB) program. Recruitment will be accomplished using mailings, e-mails, personal contacts, personal visits, and the resources of the Office of Multicultural Activities at JMU. Applications will be assessed on the basis of the student s academic achievements potential, minimum course requirements, potential for continuation of the summer research project, and ability to support the diversity of the program. In addition to students, we will also recruit potential faculty mentors from these institutions via the use of Research Opportunity Awards to faculty that have active NSF grants doc18531 none The Center for Plant Cell Biology (CEPCEB) in association with the Genomics Institute at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) is committed to provide fulfilling research experiences to undergraduates. As a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site, CEPCEB will bring research experiences to students of two- and four-year colleges who have limited opportunity to learn about the excitement and career options that research in plant cell biology offers. Outreach efforts will be centered on a number of colleges in Southern California with high enrollment of under-represented groups. Qualified students will be encouraged to apply for the 10-week residential summer research program; eight students will be accepted each summer. Each student will have a faculty and a graduate or postgraduate mentor. In the initial week of the program, students will be introduced to the basics of plant cell biology as well as developing areas in plant cell biology in which UCR has expertise, including genomics, proteomics and bioinformatics, through a series of lecture laboratory exercises. Students will then spend nine weeks on a research project of their choice. To further enrich the students and to guide them toward graduate studies, students will participate in workshops to enhance learning skills and professional development, and to discuss ethics in science. In addition to the ten-week research experience, a three-week summer laboratory course called Arabidopsis Biology will be offered. During this course, students will use Arabidopsis to study basic concepts in plant biology. Students who complete this course will be given priority for admission to the 10-week research experience the following summer, although the course is not a prerequisite. Students requesting information about the program should contact the Genomics Institute at (909) 787- (genomics@ucr.edu) or Dr. Elizabeth Bray at (909) 787- (bray@citrus.ucr. edu). The anticipated impacts of the NSF-sponsored REU are numerous. These include an increased awareness of research options in the broad area of plant cell biology and expanded research opportunities for students at Hispanic Serving Institutes and Minority Post Secondary Institutes in Southern California. The underlying goals of this educational outreach program are to encourage completion of four-year degrees by under-represented students and to present research plant biology as a career option to young biologists doc18532 none This award provides renewed funding for a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site that will provide an eight-week summer research experience in biological oceanography for a total of nine students. The REU site will be run by Cornell University, but all research will be conducted at the Shoals Marine Laboratory (SML), a seasonally operated field station that is jointly run by Cornell and the University of New Hampshire. SML is located on Appledore Island, a small island in the Gulf of Maine about six miles off Portsmouth, NH, and it provides an isolated setting noted for its rich biota, geology and history. Students will be able to conduct research in a variety of marine habitats, and they will have access to a wide variety of instrumentation. The Cornell site was started in the summer of with two years of initial funding. The success of the program is demonstrated by the large number of students who continued with their research projects beyond the 8 weeks of the program. Minority participation in the program has been excellent. Institutional support for this program will be provided by Cornell and SML, and SeaGrant will fund one student s participation. Students who participate in this program will advance their awareness of important environmental issues in the Gulf of Maine coastal region. The program also has the potential to recruit minority students to the Geosciences doc18533 none Proposal ID: PI: Linda Sparke Dr. Sparke is awarded funds to establish a Research Experiences for Undergraduates site in astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The first year, six students will work with researchers in the Astronomy Department and in the Astrophysics group based in the Physics Department. The number of students will be increased to eight beginning in the second year. The research projects include theoretical and observational studies of stars, galaxies, and the interstellar medium; instrumentation; and gamma-ray and X-ray observational astrophysics. In addition to their research projects, students will participate in a weekly lecture series, social events, and two organized weekend field trips. The students will be housed in a dormitory together with students involved in undergraduate research campus-wide doc18534 none Shirazi, Behrooz University of Texas at Arlington REU: Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Distributed Rational Agents The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) is one of the leading research-oriented institutions of higher education in Texas. The purpose of this proposal is to sustain a highly successful NSF REU site program in UTAs Computer Science and Engineering Department. Through this program, we intend to continue to provide opportunities for highly talented and qualified upper division women, minority, and disabled undergraduate students to participate in research programs in the field of distributed rational agents. The goal here is to augment the students educational experience and to attract qualified undergraduates to graduate studies in computer science and engineering. The student participants will be recruited nationally, but due to the geographical location of UTA, one of our goals is to emphasize recruitment of students from women and minority institutions as well as institutions lacking research facilities in the southwest region. In the course of previous and current REU site projects we have already established contacts to a number of these schools and we intend to utilize these contacts in order to optimize our recruitment efforts doc18535 none New hybrid inorganic organic materials with open-framework structures and improved properties based on various multifunctional linkers will be synthesized. The emphasis on transition-metal - multifunctional linker systems will lead to new open-framework compounds with new structures and novel properties. For example, the borophosphate group, a multifunctional linker with borate and phosphate functionalities, is a novel species that acts similarly to the aluminophosphates in some compounds, but brings unique structural features in others. Envisioned for this project is further utilization of such capabilities by using analogies with known open-framework compounds where various templates, transition metals, and synthetic conditions will be systematically studied. Other multifunctional linkers to be investigated include di-phosphonates, carboxy-phosphonates, and phosphonated a-aminoacids to provide various coordination modes to the transition metal centers as well as different functionalities to the solid. Students involved with this project will acquire valuable skills in structure characterization, property measurements and novel synthetic techniques. Their training in cutting-edge research methodology is emphasized. %%% Inorganic organic hybrid materials have significant potential for applications in molecular separation and sensing, ion exchange, and catalysis in the petrochemical industry and for chemicals production. The technological impact of the latter will be in improvements in chemical processing and, subsequently, an increase in energy-use efficiency. The educational aspect of the program is aimed at teaching undergraduate and graduate students not only in particular lab techniques but also in general understanding and appreciation of solid state chemistry. Training in these areas will make these chemists highly competitive for employment in universities and in chemical industry doc18536 none The total collapse of both 110-story tall towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) as a result of the fires initiated by the commercial passenger jet collisions on September 11, , raises a number of important scientific questions regarding the performance of high-rise buildings in response to such impacts and the resulting fires. For the fire safety of current and future high-rise buildings, it is important to determine why the WTC towers collapsed in the way they did and in the relatively brief period of time they did. To make such a determination and to improve the design and construction of high-rise buildings against catastrophic collapse, comprehensive studies of the WTC collapses will be needed in the future. For such studies to be valid, reliable information and data will be needed on many aspects of the WTC towers. The purpose of this project is to collect perishable data on the fire protection engineering aspects of the WTC affecting the fire and collapse that may be lost as the material and debris are removed from the site and as these events fade from the news. The PI is collaborating with Prof. Astaneh-Asl of the University of California at Berkeley who is collecting perishable data on the structural engineering aspects of the WTC. Together, the data obtained in these projects will be of critical importance to future analyses of the WTC collapses doc18537 none Eight students who have a solid background in mathematics and some knowledge of computation will be selected to participate in an eight-week research experience in computational number theory and combinatorics to be held at Clemson University. Preference for four of these positions will be given to qualified applicants who have roots in the Southeastern United States, provided that there are a sufficient number of qualified applicants from this region. No more than two of these four special positions will be filled by Clemson University students. The eight students selected will be offered up to $350 in travel support, a dorm room to be shared with another participant in the REU, up to $600 for meals and a stipend of $2,660 in return for their participation in this program. Participants will be introduced to various tools, techniques and problems from computational number theory and combinatorics. The participants will be divided into teams of two and allowed to pick one problem on which to focus for the remainder of the REU. The goal of the program will be to help students attain a higher level of independence in mathematical research by giving them the opportunity to take part in a significant and interesting research project. For the first two weeks of the program participants will meet daily with the PI and co-PI. As time progresses, these meetings will become less frequent in order to allow the students to reach an increased level of independence. Students will also be encouraged to attend the SouthEastern Regional Meeting On Numbers (SERMON) in the spring of the following year and present their work there. As a complement to working on their research, students will be required to attend a weekly lecture series. These lectures will be given by faculty who have been recognized as leaders in the various fields related to the students research problems and who have demonstrated the ability to clearly communicate mathematical ideas to audiences of varying levels of mathematical maturity doc18538 none This is an interdisciplinary program to teach mathematics, science and technology at middle schools in Arkansas. The approach is based on a learning through doing paradigm, using the theme of optic and electronic concepts in everyday life. Goals are to be achieved by creating (teaching) teams consisting of graduate fellows, school teachers, university faculty, administrators, and parents of students. This project is being co-funded by the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Office of Multidisciplinary Activities doc18539 none The Atlanta Consortium for Research in the Earth Science (ACRES) will conduct a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site program at Georgia State University. The purpose of the proposed REU program is to extend opportunities to participate in geoscience research to undergraduate students and secondary school science teachers from the southeast region. REU program participants will work in teams with ACRES faculty on selected research problems in regional geology. Projects are: 1) The Paleontology, Petrology, Depositional Environments and Early Diagenesis of the Sandersville Limestone member of the Tobacco Road Sandstone (Eocene), Coastal Plain of Georgia 2) A Comparative Study of the Geochemistry, Sedimentology and Micropaleontology of Developed and Undeveloped marginal marine Systems on the Georgia and South Caroline Coasts 3) Comparative Geochemistry of Flat Rock Park Gneiss, Motts Gneiss, and Other Granitoidal Gneisses in the Uchee Belt and 4) Fluid Inclusions from the Uchee Belt: Theoretical and Experimental Evaluation of Decrepitation Behavior and Microthermometric Determination of Pressure-Temperature Conditions During Metamorphism doc18540 none The Savannah River Ecology Laboratory s (SREL) research experiences for undergraduates (REU) program provides scientific training and hands-on experience in the process of research by actively involving undergraduates in projects with full time research ecologists. Project participants will examine the influence of nuclear and fossil fuel energy production and associated technologies on selected biological and chemical properties in southeastern ecosystems. SREL is located on the US Departments of Energy s 720 km2 Savannah River Site (SRS), where a variety of habitats including pine forests, abandoned farmlands and freshwater wetlands adjoin industrial facilities and anthropogenetically-disturbed areas. Participant selection is based on written statements of interests and goals in the application, letters of recommendation, and academic record. We seek diversity and actively recruit minority applicants. The objective of this program is to provide the next generation of ecologists and environmental scientists with an introduction to the practice of scientific research. Students accepted into the program perform independent research projects that interface with ongoing research programs at SREL. Faculty members actively engaged in research and publication are paired with students with compatible research interests. At the beginning of their residence, students participate in a series of workshops led by SREL faculty and staff on research design, ethics, data collection and processing, and oral and written presentation of results. They also prepare a formal research proposal in collaboration with their faculty advisor. Students receive hands-on training while performing their projects, as well as through brown bag seminar-discussion groups, formal seminars, group field trips to representative biomes of the southeast, and collegial interactions among themselves and permanent research staff and faculty. Near the conclusion of their residence, there is a formal workshop on graduate study. Each student must present a brief seminar on their project before their peers and SREL faculty and staff. They also prepare a scientific manuscript based on their research, and participate in an exit interview and survey to provide feedback for program improvement. These activities continue and refine undergraduate research training at SREL, which began over 30 years ago, and has involved over 600 undergraduate participants to date. This type of hands-on training and experience has proved highly beneficial in attracting quality students to careers in environmental science, and preparing them for graduate study and future research endeavors doc18541 none Pless, Robert Washington University TITLE: Summer Undergraduate Research Program The department has a long history of supporting undergraduate summer research opportunities, and these opportunities will exist with or without external support. However, external support does further particular NSF objectives having to do with the size of the program, the quality of the student experience, and the balance f student recruiting. In particular, the requested funding would: oMaintain an efficient size of the program, sixteen summer students. In addition to summer research projects funded from their research funds, this gives a critical mass of students that improves the overall student experience. oFoster a broader range f student projects. oClearly separate the objectives of the program from individual faculty research agendas. Faculty who support students from individual research grants tend to be conservative in hiring and must choose projects that serve the objectives of their funding sources. This may negatively impact both the student experience and the student selection. There are three explicit goals for this REU program. First, to give undergraduates from many backgrounds the opportunity and training to participate in frontier research. Second, to foster and extend the undergraduate research culture already present at Washington University. Third, to create a supportive and encouraging environment to do research. This first goal will be met with a targeted advertising campaign. This campaign will not exclude any source of potential students, but will focus n (a) predominately teaching colleges, (b) historically minority schools, (c) non-computer science departments. Second, a coherent program involving a designated group of summer research program students gives a reason to organize events, a social group, and a critical mass for which it is appropriate to offer programs which aid all undergraduate students involved in research. Finally, we propose a program that includes an explicit training component to teach students the tools t attack research problems effectively. A set of defined check points during the course of the summer will allow program coordinators to identify and solve potential problems doc18542 none Summer Program for Undergraduate Research in Biological Systems (SuPURBS). SuPURBS is a new, summer residency program to support students for 10 weeks of undergraduate research at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michgan. The Program objectives are to: (i) facilitate undergraduate research with a cross-disciplinary, thematic emphasis on molecular and cellular systems analysis; (ii) broaden the exposure of students to mathematical skills that apply to biological questions; (iii) promote student and faculty interaction; (iv) broaden awareness of career opportunities in research, education and industry; and (v) utilize educational and research collaborations between faculty at undergraduate institutions and at Michigan State University to prepare students for increased use of mathematical approaches to solve biological questions. The Program focus is to combine a research experience in areas of molecular and cellular biosciences, along with classroom exposure to methods and strategies for analysis of biological systems. Over 54 faculty associated with 15 academic departments, three research centers, and two graduate, interdepartmental, academic programs comprise the pool of research mentors who are accessible to SuPURBS program participants. Research disciplines represented include microbial biology; biochemistry; cell biology; microbial ecology; molecular evolution; immunology; signal transduction; parasitology; cryobiology; phylogenetics; plant biology; astrobiology; infectious diseases; genetics and molecular genetics. Maximizing the time for student research and promoting interaction among students as well as between students and faculty are key features of the overall program design. Core program activities for SuPURBS participants include: a) four weeks of four hours per week mathematics exposure under the theme of Analysis of Biological Systems; b) weekly, group journal club and research discussion; c) informal seminar and discussion with faculty or graduate students and postdocs about research and career opportunities. Students will complete a written report of progress and a powerpoint poster of results from the summer research. Group recreational activities will be planned and scheduled by student participants. The SuPURBS program provides student participants with free room and three meals per day in a residence hall on campus; round trip travel expenses up to $500; and a stipend of $ . The SuPURBS program will generally start after Memorial Day in the last week of May and run through the first week of August. A SuPURBS website at http: www.msu.edu ~supurbs is under development and will be accessible from the webpage of the College of Natural Science (www.ns.msu.edu), and the Department of Microbiology & Molecular Genetics (www.mmg.msu.edu), Michigan State University. Email supurbs@msu.edu for information and an application doc18543 none The University of Florida operates a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site affiliated with its Physics Department. Fifteen students are recruited nationwide every year for a ten-week summer research experience. The main scientific theme of the REU Site is the modern physics of materials, with a secondary focus on detectors for large-scale physics experiments. As part of their scientific training, students prepare a report and present a short talk on their research activities; the reports are published in the University of Florida Journal of Undergraduate Research as appropriate. Participants also attend weekly scientific seminars, workshops on scientific communication skills, field trips to nearby research facilities, and collective recreational activities doc18544 none Sethi, Ishwar Oakland University TITLE: Undergraduate Computer Research for Women at Oakland University The primary objective of the proposed REU Site is to promote graduate studies in Computer Science and Engineering to bright, talented undergraduate women students. The objective will be achieved by creating a nurturing environment and a first hand experience in the activities most directly related to graduate study and research careers, and by targeting the pool of recruitment to women from undergraduate institutions and women from majors related to Computer Science and Engineering. We are planning on enrolling eight students in each of the three summers covered by this program. The activities planned include conducting research as part of a team, communicating research results orally through presentations and in writing through research reports, and disseminating project information and results through the web. In addition, each participant will attend a national conference to gain an up-close experience about research as a profession, and be enrolled in ACM and SWE (Society of Women Engineers). The national and local statistics [2] confirm the existence of a large pool of women students who have the Intellectual potential and the academic preparation for graduate studies in Computer Science and Engineering, but who never receive the exposure and motivation that led them to such career choices. The proposed REU Site will actively seek and recruit such students from Oakland University as well as from neighboring undergraduate institutions. There are many 2 and 4-year colleges in the geographical vicinity of Oakland University with limited or non-existent research programs. Examples of near-by four-year institutions that will be targeted include Central Michigan University, Eastern Michigan University, Lawrence Technological University, University of Detroit-Mercy, Madonna University and University of Michigan at Flint. The two-year colleges that will be targeted for participants include Macomb Community College, Oakland Community College, Henry Ford Community College, Marygrove College and Rochester College. The intellectual focus of the proposed REU Site will be intelligent information processing and management. This focus was selected both because it represents a unifying theme to the research activities of the investigators and other faculty participants, and because it is an area at the edge of research with a wealth of applications. The match between the faculty s research and the selected focus provides a natural setting for students to get involved in on-going research projects, and an opportunity to follow up on this research and continue to contribute after completion of their REU participation. The wealth of potential and existing applications of the selected area of focus will serve as a great motivator for the undergraduate students targeted doc18545 none The UNLV Physics Department will host a 10-week undergraduate research participation project, Undergraduate Research in Physics, during the summers of - , with followup during each academic year. Research in the department is in the areas of atomic, molecular, chemical and optical physics, condensed matter physics, high pressure physics, and materials science. Students will obtain hands-on laboratory experience in our well-equipped laser laboratories, and use major condensed-matter research facilities: the Scanning Electron Microscope, an Electron Probe Micro Analyzer, an X-ray Photoelectron Spectrometer, and an X- Ray Diffractometer. A series of group activities includes seminars on an introduction to research, research ethics, giving a scientific presentation, and getting into graduate school, as well as social functions. Students will be recruited from UNLV undergraduates and from other colleges and universities, with special attention paid to selected schools in the West and Mid-West. Applicants from institutions where research opportunities are limited will be given higher priority over those from major research universities. The program ends by students creating a poster presenting their research results, which they display at a special poster session that attracts a large university-wide audience doc18546 none This award provides funding to the University of Maryland-College Park for the support of a four-year, REU Site in Molecular and Cellular Bioengineering, under the direction of Dr. Timothy A. Barbari. This ten-week summer program will involve eleven students annually in an intensive research program in bioengineering at the molecular and cellular level. Each student work with full-time faculty, visiting scientists, post-doctoral research associates, graduate students, and other undergraduate students on research that promises to lead to important new discoveries and technologies. They will be exposed to state-of-the-art research, multidisciplinary research laboratories, research group meetings, and scientists engineers from local industry and nearby research institutions (NIH, NIST, USDA, FDA, NRL). In addition, the students will participate in non-technical seminars on the graduate school process, industrial field trips to nearby biotechnology companies, technical and presentation skills training doc18547 none The research focuses on providing a better understanding on the non-perturbative interaction of matter with short, intense laser pulses. Computer simulations are used to provide a detailed picture, spatially and temporally, of the evolution of these systems in the electromagnetic field. Where appropriate, the relativistic form of the Schroedinger equation is used to study the dynamics doc18548 none The Department of Physics of the University of Michigan will administer a Research Experience for Undergraduates program at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. This Laboratory is home of the world wide web and a leading high energy physics center, viewed by many as the world s premier international scientific laboratory. Approximately nine students will be competitively recruited nationally to participate in the program. They will spend an orientation week at the University of Michigan prior to their journey to Geneva. During that week they will take computing courses, and hear lectures on CERN, high energy physics and research ethics. During their period at CERN they attend daily lectures given by experts in areas such as physics, cosmology and computing. Each day they also work with assigned mentors on current physics problems. An onsite Coordinator is present at CERN to assist the students with any matters related to program or personal needs. Each student must give a final talk on their accomplishments and participate in the program evaluation doc18549 none This award provides funding to the University of Florida for a renewal of a three-year, REU Site in Design and Construction of Autonomous Robots and Machine Learning, under the direction of Dr. Antonio Arroyo. This thirteen-week summer program will involve twelve students annually in individual state of the art research projects in autonomous robots and machine learning. In addition, the participants will receive training in technical presentations and writing, give weekly semi-formal design reviews, bi-weekly progress reports throughout the summer, write a final research report, and learn about ethics in research through seminars and industry field trips doc18550 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: John Vohs Institution: University of Pennsylvania The objective of this project is to provide a more detailed fundamental understanding of support effects on monolayer vanadia catalysts. Specific goals of the investigations of this system are to provide quantitative information on the nature of the bonding at the vanadia-support interface. The methods by which the identity of the support influences the strengths and redox properties of V-O support bonds will be studied. Reactivity of the catalytic surface will be characterized through a study of kinetic parameters for elementary surface reactions involved in the selective oxidation of alcohols. The model catalytic systems studied will consist of vapor deposited vanadia films supported on the surfaces of metal oxide single crystals. Surface sensitive spectroscopic techniques including high-resolution electron energy loss spectroscopy (HREELS), x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and temperature programmed desorption (TPD), among others will be used to characterize the catalytic surface and the chemical species on the surface. Supported metal oxides are used industrially for a variety of chemical processes including selective oxidations and the catalytic reduction of NOx, and this study may lead to improved methods for the production of catalytic materials doc18551 none This award provides funding to the University of Central Florida for the support of a three-year, REU Site in Nanomaterials Process and Characterization (NANOPAC), under the direction of Dr. Sudipta Seal. This ten-week summer program housed in the Advanced Materials Processing and Analysis Center (AMPAC), will involve ten students annually in an intensive research experience on a wide range of topics including applications in sensors, optics, coatings, thin films, and high resolution transmission electron microscopy. Each student will be paired with an engineering faculty member with on-going research programs in AMPAC faculty mentor and will be actively involved with the mentor s research group. In addition, the participants will be involved in extensive complementary educational activities, including a weekly seminar series focusing on heir research projects, career seminars field trips, and specialized workshops on assorted topics. As a capstone to their REU experience, each student will prepare and give a presentation at a concluding poster session to UCF faculty and invited industry participants doc18552 none Honeycutt Dr. Honeycutt is awarded funds to establish a Research Experiences for Undergraduates site in astronomy at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. The site will host six students per year for three years. Recruitment will target students from small colleges and state universities without astronomy Ph.D. programs. The focus of the student projects will be observational stellar astronomy using ground-based photometric and spectroscopic data. The students will be organized into three research groups in the areas of variable stars, open cluster color-magnitude diagrams, and high dispersion spectroscopy. Student activities will include a week-long trip to Kitt Peak to use the 0.91-m WIYN (Wisconsin-Indiana-Yale-NOAO) telescope, an internal research symposium in the final week of the program, and the preparation of abstracts and posters for presentation at a professional meeting doc18553 none The Experiences in Molecular Biology Academic Research Careers (EMBARC) Program at UMBC offers a focused, comprehensive ten-week residential summer research program to ten undergraduates recruited from two and four year colleges. This program, which is supported by the National Science Foundation as one of its Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Sites, offers a $3,000 student summer stipend with paid campus housing and program activities. EMBARC Trainees will be paired with faculty mentors to guide their individual research projects, which will be focused on the Structure and Function of Biological Molecules. Faculty mentors will be drawn from three departments at UMBC: Biological Sciences, Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Chemical and Biochemical Engineering. EMBARC Trainees will work closely with their faculty research mentors to ensure the quality of the student experience. In addition to conducting individual research projects, EMBARC Trainees will participate in an Ethics in Science Course and a GRE Preparation Course stressing math and verbal skills. To enhance research training and promote the pursuit of post baccalaureate education, each EMBARC Trainee will also be paired with a graduate student peer mentor, who will be selected from under-represented groups in the sciences whenever possible. They will participate in field trips and team building activities with other undergraduate researchers, mentors and peer mentors. Program outcomes include the creation of student portfolios and presentation of research projects at an end-of-the-summer Research Fest. Parents and advisors mentors from home institutions will be invited to the Research Fest, which will showcase each student s efforts and will encourage continued support for post program research activities and the pursuit of careers in science doc18554 none This award provides funding to Clemson University for the support of a three-year, REU Site entitled Innovations in Biomaterials, under the direction of Dr. Karen J. Burg. This ten-week summer program will involve eight students annually in cutting edge research in areas including stem cell technology and cell-based biosensors, working closely with two faculty mentors and one graduate student mentor. A broad mix of students, including women and under-represented minorities, from other institutions without bioengineering programs will be recruited for the program. Students will also participate in a series of lectures and workshops involving critical issues and topics in bioengineering doc18555 none Knight and her students will work on various aspects of computable structure theory. Knight plans to continue work with D Aquino on weak fragments of arithmetic. She expects also to continue work with Goncharov and Harizanov, with Young, and with Shore, on a collection of inter-related problems involving complicated relations on computable structures, structures of high rank, and paths through Kleene s O. She is currently working with Csima, Hirschfeldt, and Soare on prime models and lowness properties. She plans to work with Lempp, McCoy, and Solomon on Boolean algebras. The funds are mainly for student travel and books. The remainder is for partial support of the Notre Dame Logic Seminar. Currently, Knight has two students. Andrew Arana, who may finish this summer, has a number of results on complexity in arithmetic, using some new independent sentences (variants of the Godel-Rosser sentence). Arana is now concentrating on problems of a more foundational nature. Wesley Calvert, a second year student, is working on complexity of the isomorphism problem for various familiar classes of computable structures. He already has results for several classes of fields. Knight may acquire new students during the period of the grant. The goal of Knight s research, and that of students working with her, is to determine which aspects of mathematical structures are computable, and for those which are not computable, whether there is some nice, computable approximation. The grant will facilitate new work of this kind. There is a larger goal---enabling students to become first-rate research scientists. The grant will be used mainly for student travel and books. Without money for books, Knight s students would hardly own any. She has found that, given money to buy the most important references, her students read much more than they would otherwise. They see how the problems they are working on arose, and what their work means for the field as a whole. Knight s past students, and other logic students at Notre Dame, have benefited tremendously from opportunities to travel to meetings. They meet researchers from other universities and hear about new developments. As soon as they have results of their own, they give talks, and they get valuable suggestions. In short, they have the opportunity, as students, to join the community of research mathematicians doc18556 none This Chemistry Division award supports the continuation of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the University Alabama at Birmingham. Tracy Hamilton is the site s Program Director. Eight faculty will serve as REU student mentors. Over the award period ( - ), ten students will be supported each summer in a ten-week program. Recruitment efforts will be focused through the close links that the Department of Chemistry has developed with regional HBCUs. The REU group of students will meet weekly for progress reporting and for visits to local cultural and historical sites of interest. The summer program will conclude with a poster session. Evaluation of the program will be the number of refereed publications with student co-authors and the number of students going to graduate school doc18557 none White Mountain Research Station, University of California This REU program will link nationally recruited undergraduates with accomplished academic scientists. Special emphasis will be placed on including minority and women students so they may benefit from the research and team building experience. These research teams will work in the unique and challenging environment of the eastern Sierra Nevada region of California and will use four laboratory facilities in the White Mountains. This REU site will encompass a wide range of environmental biology research, from high altitude physiology to population ecology. These projects will expose students to broadly related research questions and state-of-the-art technologies, while allowing each student to explore a particular aspect of a project in depth. Project mentors will facilitate the REU by supporting the technological, logistical, and organizational needs of the students. Week long orientations at the beginning of the program will introduce the research projects and mentors to the students, and provide the students with basic knowledge of the region and the team building process. Led by faculty mentors, weekly research team meetings will provide time for traditional scientific reviews of the previous week s work. Additionally, students will also meet as a group and discuss how they are progressing as members of their research teams. An important emphasis of this program will be team building and positive work environments and the direct role of students in the process through discussions and feedback. As a result, the impact of this REU program will be to expand a student s understanding of, and participation in, effective research programs while producing research that has the potential to contribute substantially to a particular doc18558 none EIA - Williams, Frank University of Alaska - Fairbanks TITLE: Alaska Research Summer Challenge at the Artic Region Supercomputing Center of the University of Alaska - Fairbanks. The Alaska Research Summer Challenge is an intern program offered by the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). This program allows up to ten undergraduate students to perform research in the areas of Computer Science, Supercomputing, and Visualization. This minority outreach program is open to students primarily from minority institutions, with preference given to minority applicants. Recruitment is done by onsite recruiting at target institutions. ARSC focus our efforts on these groups, as they have traditionally been under-represented in the science and research fields. With intern input, each participant is assigned a project related to their field of study, to be performed under the direct supervision of a faculty member or senior staff. Students spend an average of 10 weeks in Fairbanks where they live in campus housing with undergraduate interns from other groups and work an average of 40 hours per week to complete their projects. Under the oversight of the Program Manager, they work independently and within research groups, live in housing with other interns, gain new work and study skills and establish a stronger sense of self-assurance. The program manager ensures that each participant fully understands their project and what is expected of them. Through this program ARSC strives to promote and further interests in many areas of arctic research. The program also serves to develop positive research and life skills while increasing involvement of various minorities in science and research doc18559 none The Advanced Materials Program in the Division of Chemistry makes this renewal award to Colorado State University to develop new electrochemically-active metal-centered polymer materials based on transition metal complexes of diimine ligands. With this award, Professor Elliott will functionalize ligands to polymerize them and to fine-tune their redox properties. Polymer films of single and multi-layer multi-composition structures will be prepared and studied to control counterion motion both within polymer phases and across their boundaries and to control the oxidation-state distribution of redox sites. Determination of the differences and similarities between electroluminescence and electro-generated chemiluminescence, and potential application of these polymers in organic light emitting diodes will also be studied with this award. In addition, training in materials chemistry will be provided to a diversity of students with this award. New electrochemically-active materials with transition metals in the center will be prepared using functionalized ligands based on diimines. Polymer films will be prepared to control counterion motion both within polymer phases and across their boundaries and to control the oxidation-state distribution of redox sites. These dendrimeric polymers with controlled oxidation-reduction properties will have applications in catalysis, phase transfer reactions, drug delivery systems and sensors. Determination of the differences and similarities between electroluminescence and electro-generated chemiluminescence would provide insight into potential applications of these polymers in organic light emitting diodes. In addition, the award would expose both graduate and undergraduate students in different aspects of experimental materials chemistry doc18560 none PI: Timothy H. Hankins The end state of stellar evolution for many stars is collapse into a highly compact object. These objects often appear as radio sources emitting very frequent short radiation pulses and have become known as pulsars. Pulsars offer many examples of extreme physical conditions that cannot be realized in the laboratory. In this project, Dr. Timothy Hankins and collaborators will study the pulsar plasma region via its coherent radio emission. The research team will carry out a combination of observational and theoretical studies in order to determine conditions in the radio emission region and to test current theoretical models of that region. High time resolution observations with a new data acquisition system capable of time resolution as short as one nanosecond will be used directly to confront and test the theory. The theoretical modeling will predict the characteristic time signatures arising from plasma dynamical processes that are believed to occur in such regions. The new instrumentation will be made available to the radio astronomy community doc18561 none This award provides funding to Johns Hopkins University for the support of a three-year, REU Site in Chemical, Cell and Tissue Engineering, under the direction of Dr. Michael E. Paulaitis. This ten-week summer program will involve ten students annually in an intensive, challenging research experience in the exciting and rapidly growing areas of biochemical, cell, and tissue engineering. Each student will be closely mentored by an individual faculty mentor and will become a member of his or her research team working on a specific project in the faculty mentor s laboratories. The students will take a required technical communication course that introduces them to the fundamentals of technical writing and oral presentations. Students will present oral and written reports on their research as part of this course. Finally, the Department of Chemical Engineering will sponsor an undergraduate research symposium for students in the REU program as an open forum for presenting their research results doc18562 none This award provides funding to the University of Kansas for a three-year REU Site in Biomechanical Engineering under the direction of Dr. Kenneth J. Fischer. The project will involve 10 undergraduate students each year for a ten week summer program. Students will work with a faculty mentor on individual research projets in biomechanical engineering. In addition to individual research experiences, students will be involved in several group activities. These activities will provide the student with 1) a breadth of exposure to different scientific problems and research approaches, 2) detailed information about additional educational career opportunities, 3) an environment that facilitates student-student and student-faculty interactions, and 4) an opportunity to explore research ethics in the field of biomechanical engineering. These group activities will include a weekly seminar, a research ethics mini-series, tours of research laboratories, and social activities. At the end of the summer program students will give an oral presentation at a research symposium, and will submit a report on their research project to their faculty mentor. Students will also have the opportunity to attend a national scientific meeting of their choice doc18563 none This award supports an REU site that was initiated in with the purpose of introducing students and faculty members at Clark Atlanta University to interdisciplinary studies in geosciences. Ten students are selected each year from Clark Atlanta and other academic institutions to participate in a ten-week summer program consisting of lectures and research projects. These activities are designed to complement the regular program in Earth System Science (ESS) at Clark Atlanta. The projects include data analysis and modeling activities on topics related to (1) the effects of atmospheric gases and aerosols on solar radiation, and (2) micrometeorological processes in the atmospheric boundary layer. The students work closely with the principal investigator in defining and planning their research projects, writing final reports that document their summer activities, and preparing oral and poster presentations on their research findings. Objectives of the program are to enable students to think critically, to encourage them to approach problems from an interdisciplinary point of view, and to increase the number of minority students seeking graduate degrees and careers in ESS and related areas of study doc18564 none North Dakota State University (NDSU) is organizing what it refers to as The First Virtual Conference on Genomics and Bioinformatics to be held on October 15-16, . NDSU will be using technology jointly funded, originally, by ANIR and EPSCoR. The goals of the conference are to 1) transcend geographical and economical factors limiting researchers around the world, 2) increase the exchange of ideas and establish new ways of collaborating with others and 3) establish new ways to excite the K-20 community about today s multidisciplinary science. Some speakers will participate from the NDSU campus while others will telecommute via the Access Grid. Individuals will be able to participate from Access Grid Node sites around the world and via real-time video-streaming technology from their computer desktops doc18565 none The Undergraduate Research Experience in Phylogenetic Approaches to Biological Problems will allow undergraduates to participate for ten weeks during each of the summers of -04. Research projects will span diverse areas of biology from phycology, molecular evolution, behavioral ecology and microbial diversity but will all have a common phylogenetic perspective. Ten highly qualified undergraduates will be selected for each summer s program from local and national institutions with attention paid to recruiting from under-represented groups. The main objectives of this program are to 1) train students in basic methods of molecular biology and bioinformatics , 2) provide a mentored research experience using these techniques, 3) educate students about the diversity of problems to be understood with such techniques, and 4) raise awareness of research career opportunities. These objectives will be attained by a combination of tutorials in theory and techniques common to all of the projects of the program, mentored research by individual faculty, a seminar program delivered by visiting specialists, and career advising by local staff and former alumni of the program. The program will culminate in a day-long research symposium presented by the participants. The long-term goals of the experience are increased awareness of and competitiveness for careers in research and or university-level teaching doc18566 none This award provides support for an REU Site in Sociology at Texas A (2) participation in a research project under the supervision of a faculty member, (3) participation in research-oriented field trips and professional-development seminars; and (4) formal presentation of a research paper at a student session at a professional conference. Students will participate in an eight-week summer program and continue their research and mentoring experiences the following year at their home institutions. Ten students each year will be recruited from universities in Texas that do not have doctoral programs in sociology and that have large enrollments of students from population groups that are under-represented in graduate programs in sociology. This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences doc18567 none This award provides funding to Louisiana State University (LSU) for the support of a three-year, REU Site in the Chemical Sciences, under the direction of Dr. Steven F. Watkins and Dr. Kerry M. Dooley. This is a renewal of a successful site for summer research in the chemical sciences and will result in the training of 42 undergraduate students (14 per year). The nine-week summer program is a joint effort by chemical engineers, chemists, and biochemists at LSU and offers a diverse cadre of students, who are drawn from all parts of the U.S., the opportunity to contribute in a meaningful way to well-funded, active research projects. The REU site builds on past achievements, most notably that more than sixty percent of its interns haven chosen to attend top graduate schools in chemical engineering or a closely related discipline. The program is particularly successful in leveraging regional resources from industry and its emphasis on written and verbal communications skills through mini-proposals, final reports, oral presentations and posters doc18568 none This award provides funding to the University of Notre Dame for the support of a three-year, REU Site on Water Resources in Developing Countries, under the direction of Dr. Stephen E. Silliman. This eight to ten-week summer program, conducted in collaboration with the University of New Mexico and the University of Nevada, Reno, will involve eight students annually in international research opportunities in several developing countries focused on improving water resources (including water supply, water distribution, water disposal, water management and or water treatment. In addition, the REU participants will participate presentations of technical, social and ethical outcomes at conferences and symposia. The NSF Office of International Science and Engineering is providing co-funding for this REU Site doc18569 none This award provides renewed funding for a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site that will provide a Fall semester (twelve weeks) research experience in oceanography for a total of seven students. The REU site is located at the Dauphin Island Sea Laboratory (DISL), a permanent field station located in the Gulf of Mexico about four miles off the coast of Alabama. The DISL provides courses and research facilities for students and faculty from twenty-two colleges and universities in Alabama. Participants in the REU program will be recruited nationally and matched with a faculty mentor. Under the guidance of the faculty mentors, the students will design, implement, analyze and report on independent laboratory and field research. Research areas include aspects of the ecology and early life history stages of marine fishes and invertebrates; coral reef ecology; evolution of benthic communities; the ecology of seagrass ecosystems; marine conservation biology; the role of microorganisms in transforming organic and inorganic compounds in marine systems; and phytoplankton and zooplankton ecology. In addition, the program holds seminars on career opportunities and scientific ethics. In the past, the program has successfully attracted disabled and minority participants typically under-represented in the marine sciences. Cost-sharing will be provided by the DISL doc18570 none This award provides funds for an REU Site in Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Members of the Sociology Department, in collaboration with faculty from a variety of other disciplines on the campus, are currently involved in launching a large-scale research project concerning contemporary urban life in Los Angeles called LA Observed. The REU Site will focus on the training of undergraduate students to conduct ethnographic field research in one substantive area of that project: cultural activities around the city. Fifteen undergraduate students will participate in the eight-week program. The majority of students will be recruited from the regional campuses of the California State University system, with a smaller number coming from the host institution. The goal of the Site is to attract a diversified pool of talented undergraduates, especially those from under-represented groups, who might not otherwise have the opportunity to participate in an intensive research environment. Students will work closely with faculty research supervisors in classroom activities for 8-10 hours per week, and will engage in independent fieldwork at their chosen site for an additional 10-15 hours per week. They will receive rigorous academic training that will quickly allow them to gain first-hand knowledge about the nature of sociological inquiry and analysis. Each student will produce a professional-quality final research paper. Students will thus have the opportunity to contribute to the success of the larger LA Observed project. This award contributes to the Foundation s continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences doc18571 none In this project, meteorologists and applied mathematicians are collaborating to study the weak temperature gradient (WTG) equations for large-scale tropical atmospheric dynamics. The WTG equations form a balance model , or set of singular limit equations, asymptotically valid in a parameter regime relevant to the tropical atmosphere. The WTG equations are designed to facilitate study of key aspects of the tropical climate problem, such as the large-scale dynamical roles of moist convection and other diabatic processes. This focus is achieved by eliminating other processes which can be present in solutions to the primitive equations, such as gravity waves and baroclinic instability, in the same way as gravity waves are eliminated in extratropical balance models such as the quasi-geostrophic equations. One goal of this project is to develop new mathematics by studying the WTG equations properties. Another goal is to solve the equations under geometries, boundary conditions and forcings which represent idealizations of those relevant to the real earth s climate, and then to study the sensitivity of the solutions to key parameters. Achievement of these goals is expected to lead to deeper understanding of both the real climate and more complex mathematical models of it, such as general circulation models (GCMs). The earth s climate system is notoriously complex. Many different physical processes interact in a tangled web of feedbacks to produce the dynamic and variable climate we observe. Unlike a laboratory science, meteorology and oceanography are hindered by the impossibility of controlled experiments which might allow the key mechanisms to be conclusively revealed. We are stuck with the one planet on which we live and cannot change its basic properties to see what happens. Consequently, the science proceeds by observation and by a heavy reliance on numerical simulation with GCMs, which are sophisticated computer programs run on the most powerful computers available. These simulations offer the possibility of a certain kind of controlled climate experiments: we can create virtual earths on the computer, control their properties, and observe their behavior with precision. One obvious limitation of this approach is that the models are imperfect representations of reality. A less obvious, but equally important problem is the models complexity, which both limits the number and type of simulations which can be done and renders the results nearly as difficult to understand as the real climate system. Because of these problems, there is a need to supplement observational and GCM studies with theoretical studies using models that are simpler than GCMs - if not simple enough to allow solution with pencil and paper, then at least using very simple computer programs that run quickly on a PC. To the extent that these simpler models have key features in common with the real system, their simplicity allows a deeper level of understanding of the basic dynamics of climate and leads to explicit hypotheses that can be tested against observations and GCM simulations. This project harnesses the physical insight of climate scientists and the sophisticated methods of applied mathematicians to develop and study simple models designed specifically to represent the tropical atmospheric component of the earth s climate system doc18572 none The University of Kansas offers a 10-week summer program of Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Molecular Biosciences. Complete details of the scientific and social aspects of the Molecular Biosciences summer program including an on-line application are available at http: rnaworld.bio.ku.edu reu . Because independent research is pivotal in a student s commitment to a career in biological research, we encourage applications from students at colleges with limited research opportunities, and members of groups traditionally under-represented in this field. Our program has several objectives: to attract students to careers in science by allowing them to contribute meaningfully to on-going laboratory research of national importance; to ensure that students who are already interested in research, or are just starting, receive the encouragement they need to continue; and to facilitate this by providing faculty mentoring as well as peer mentoring from undergraduates already involved in research. Participants gain the direct experience they need to make an informed career decision and, if they so choose, to succeed in graduate school. University of Kansas undergraduates currently engaged in research serve as peer mentors and role models for the summer students, helping them to become more quickly acquainted with the University and making them feel more at ease in their labs. Our research focuses on several overlapping areas of biochemistry; molecular, cellular, and developmental biology; microbiology; and neurobiology. Major strengths are in the areas of protein structure and function, enzyme mechanisms and protein engineering; proteins involved in cytoskeletal structure; the structure, function and regulation of membrane proteins - receptors, ion channels and ion transporters - and of their genes; and molecular analysis of signal transduction and gene regulation in microbial metabolism, virus infection, learning and memory, and eukaryotic developmental biology. Projects have been chosen so that a student can logically build upon previous laboratory and course experience in the natural sciences. During the course of the summer, students gradually gain more independence and control over their research. Participants will engage in a variety of enrichment activities. At weekly lunch meetings, participants give 20-minute presentations describing their project - background, plans, and current status. A second weekly series targets career development and career choices in the area of molecular biosciences, including careers in academic, industrial, or medical research, as well as the nature of science and its professional ethics doc18573 none Proposal ID: PI: Gillam, Stephen Dr. Gillam is awarded funds at California State University-Los Angeles (CSLA) to continue a Research Experiences for Undergraduates site. Ten students annually will be recruited through CURE, the Consortium for Undergraduate Research Experience, which consists of CSLA, Pasadena City College, Los Angeles City College, Los Angeles Southwest College, East Los Angeles College, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The goal of the program is to recruit, train, and retain under-represented minorities in science and engineering. Participating students will work on research projects with mentors from CSLA and JPL; most of the students will observe at JPL s Table Mountain Observatory. The projects available range from astrometry of asteroids to planetary observations to ages of globular clusters. The students will also participate in field trips and training classes doc18574 none Cook This is a 36-month AWARE REU proposal submitted by Dr. James Cook, Central Washington University (CWU), on society and environment in China. He proposes to establish a collaborative training program in undergraduate social science research on the impact of environmental degradation, economic growth, and social change within two cities, Shanghai and Xiaman, in coastal China. The CWU will cooperate with Shanghai Jiaotong University and Xiaman University to design a program to mentor U.S. students through the complete process of planning a research agenda and performing primary research in the environmental and social sciences at an international field site. The eight week program will include a pre-field experience at CWU, a field experience in Shanghai and Xiaman and a post field wrap-up at CWU comprised of closely-mentored group interaction on the organization, interpretation, and analysis of primary data, preparation of the final report, and presentation of their findings at professional venues. This research and training program will provide an excellent opportunity for U.S. undergraduate students to perform social science research in an international setting, and allow them have a in-depth understanding of the complex relationship between environmental degradation, economic growth and societal changes in coastal China doc18575 none This Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site award provides support for ten undergraduate students in mathematics and mathematical computer science. The students will be chosen from applicants from across the country and will work on research projects under the supervision of faculty advisors at Oregon State University. The program will run for eight weeks each summer during the years , , and . The principal investigator organizes and supervises the program. Three faculty members from the Mathematics Department and the Computer Science Department will supervise the student research projects. The students will also attend a seminar and will be given information about various areas of mathematics and computer science. The projects that the students work on will be designed so as to make the students familiar with the process of mathematical research. The projects will emphasize the interaction between pure and applied mathematics. Each student must complete a report on their research activities for inclusion in written proceedings of the summer program. Some post-program support will be available for the students to present the results of their research at conferences doc18576 none Hillery Quantum information is a new field that studies the representation and processing of information by quantum mechanical systems. Present computers, which are classical devices, represent information by bits, which can be either 0 or 1. A quantum computer represents information by qubits, which have the potential to be 0 and 1 simultaneously. This leads to profound differences in what can be done with classical and quantum information. In this project we will study programmable quantum information processing logic circuits. Most of the quantum circuits that have been proposed so far perform a single task. It is essential to go beyond this and to be able to design circuits with two inputs, one the data to be acted upon and the second, the program, that encodes the operation be performed. Both the data and the program are quantum states. These circuits can be either deterministic, succeeding in performing the desired operation all of the time, or probabilistic, performing the operation only some of the time. Probabilistic circuits can perform a much larger class of operations than can deterministic ones. We want to study how one can design circuits to perform specific sets of operations, how these operations are to best be encoded into quantum states, and how to optimize the probability of successfully performing the desired operation in a probabilistic processor doc18577 none Focused Research Collaboration Proposal: Differential Algebraic Inequalities and their Applications to Engineering This focused research project proposes a comprehensive investigation of Differential Algebraic Inequalities (DAIs) and Dynamic Complementarity Problems (DCPs), with the goal of developing an extensive theory, designing and analyzing efficient algorithms, and applying the results to problems in engineering of practical importance. The two problem classes of DAIs and DCPs represent a significant extension of an ordinary differential equation (ODE) and a differential algebraic equation (DAE). The proposed study necessitates the use of state of the art mathematical programming methods in conjunction with ODE and DAE methods to deal effectively with the inequalities and complementarity conditions in a DAI DCP. The latter are novel features that are absent in ODEs or DAEs. Since the main methods for solving DCPs and DAIs in realistic situations are numerical, the research will emphasize the interactions among formulation, computation, and mathematical issues such as convergence and approximation including numerical approximation and sensitivity to parametric perturbations. DAIs and DCPs provide a powerful mathematical framework for the comprehensive treatment of a host of important complex system applications that have so far received only minimal attention from applied and computational mathematicians. The project will open a new chapter in applied mathematics in which classical differential equation theory is merged with contemporary mathematical programming methods. The deliverables of the project will a set of broadly applicable mathematical and computational tools that will have a direct impact in several distinct engineering disciplines including: constrained mechanical systems with frictional contact arising in robotics and manufacturing, conditional modeling in chemical and hydraulic processes, and hybrid systems with variable-structure control encountered in avionics, intelligent highway systems, and automotive systems doc18578 none This award provides funding for the continued conduct of an open workshop on decision-based design. The workshop will be conducted via a series of face-to-face meetings, and with continuing interaction between all interested parties via electronic and Internet technologies throughout the three-year continuation period. Specifically, the workshop will include the continuation of a web site for conduct of the workshop. A primary component of the workshop will be the continual, open development and dissemination of the philosophical, theoretical and practical results of the workshop discussions and activities. The workshop will continue to concentrate on a diversity of research efforts directed at the development of a theory of engineering design based on the emerging notion that engineering design is a decision making process amenable to the tools and theories that have developed in the field of decision theory. Specific goals for this phase of the workshop include continued development of a mathematically sound theory of engineering design, the building of a repository of foundational materials (a lexicon, case studies, references, text materials), the establishment of ties between decision-based design and other areas of science, and the transfer of decision-based design tools to industry. The workshop web site address will be located at: http: dbd.eng.buffalo.edu This workshop will provide new directions for research and education in engineering design. New theoretical concepts should lead to approaches to engineering design that will enable the design of better products, products that have greater market appeal, cost less, have lower environmental impact, and that are more friendly for customers. Further, these concepts are likely to lead to entirely new approaches to engineering education, with a strong focus on engineering design as a decision making process doc18579 none The project is aimed at deeper development of the science of interdiffusion taking into account the type and shape of diffusion paths and the effect of microstructure morphology on diffusion. An objective of the study is to develop verified and validated computational models that can make quantitative predictions of interdiffusion kinetics and microstructural evolution as functions of processing and test variables. It will lead to a greater understanding of interdiffusion kinetics and microstructural evolution as functions of processing and test variables. The formation of interdiffusion microstructures can lead to significant changes in properties of the structural components in various fields such as materials protection, composites, metal joining, and heat-treating. It is desirable to know how to promote or prevent interdiffusion and hence control the interdiffusion microstructure, and to model the changes in order to predict the service life of components. The approach will integrate error function analyses, finite difference and phase field modeling in order to predict the precipitate morphology, and to calculate its effect on interdiffusion. The proposed research activities will impact science, technology and education. The further development of multicomponent diffusion concepts and corresponding modeling techniques will provide impetus for including the topic in graduate courses on diffusion. As a result, engineers and scientists will be better prepared to work on technological problems that by their nature involve diffusion in complex commercial alloys. This research develops an improved understanding of fundamentals related to interdiffusion in multi-component and multiphase systems, which will help in the interpretation of experimental data taken in both industry and academe. By developing verified and validated computational models that have the capability to deal with the complexity of commercial alloy systems, it will be possible to apply them to assist in the design of practical processes that involve interdiffusion doc18577 none Focused Research Collaboration Proposal: Differential Algebraic Inequalities and their Applications to Engineering This focused research project proposes a comprehensive investigation of Differential Algebraic Inequalities (DAIs) and Dynamic Complementarity Problems (DCPs), with the goal of developing an extensive theory, designing and analyzing efficient algorithms, and applying the results to problems in engineering of practical importance. The two problem classes of DAIs and DCPs represent a significant extension of an ordinary differential equation (ODE) and a differential algebraic equation (DAE). The proposed study necessitates the use of state of the art mathematical programming methods in conjunction with ODE and DAE methods to deal effectively with the inequalities and complementarity conditions in a DAI DCP. The latter are novel features that are absent in ODEs or DAEs. Since the main methods for solving DCPs and DAIs in realistic situations are numerical, the research will emphasize the interactions among formulation, computation, and mathematical issues such as convergence and approximation including numerical approximation and sensitivity to parametric perturbations. DAIs and DCPs provide a powerful mathematical framework for the comprehensive treatment of a host of important complex system applications that have so far received only minimal attention from applied and computational mathematicians. The project will open a new chapter in applied mathematics in which classical differential equation theory is merged with contemporary mathematical programming methods. The deliverables of the project will a set of broadly applicable mathematical and computational tools that will have a direct impact in several distinct engineering disciplines including: constrained mechanical systems with frictional contact arising in robotics and manufacturing, conditional modeling in chemical and hydraulic processes, and hybrid systems with variable-structure control encountered in avionics, intelligent highway systems, and automotive systems doc18581 none PI: Feng, Wei and Lu, Xin Proposal: Institution: University of North Carolina at Wilmington The Fourth International Conference on Dynamical Systems and Differential Equations will be held at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington on May 24-May 27, . This is a continuation of the Conference Series on Dynamical Systems and Differential Equations, a biennial event with a new hosting university each time to benefit researchers in USA. Details, including history of past conference series, can be found at http: AIMsciences.org. The goal of this conference is to gather mathematicians and scientists, with different training backgrounds and research interests, to report on their recent achievements, exchange new ideas and look for future directions. A majority of the NSF funds will be used specifically for partial support of 35 graduate students and ten new Ph-D s in mathematics. Priority will be given for support of students from under-represented groups in mathematics doc18582 none The Investigator and his colleagues will study a number of problems in complex algebraic geometry. First, they will explore some new asymptotic invariants of linear series on a projective variety, especially their variational behavior. While the geometry of linear series is a very classical topic, new methods have the potential to shed light on basic properties that have not up to now received much attention. A second project involves the exploration of some new invariants arising from multiplier ideals: these jumping numbers generalize the much-studied log-canonical threshold of a divisor or ideal, and they seem to encode quite interesting geometric and algebraic information. Lazarsfeld also intends to use multiplier ideals to study the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity of reduced projective varieties defined by equations of given degree. The basic focus of this project (so-called linear series on algebraic varieties ) can be viewed as families of functions constrained by geometric spaces. When the spaces have low dimension such linear series have been used to find efficient ways to encode data, for example on CD s. The Investigator and his colleagues will study the new phenomena that arise when the geometric spaces have higher dimension doc18583 none The objectives of this work are to design and test new transition metal catalysts for effecting asymmetric carbon-carbon bond forming reactions. Two reactions in particular will be studied in detail, asymmetric rhodium catalyzed ene reactions and silver and copper catalyzed asymmetric 1,3 dipolar cycloadditions of azomethine ylides. In each case, new sets of chiral phosphine ligands will be prepared and then an understanding of the mechanisms of these reactions will be used to fine tune metal ligand catalysts systems for these reactions. The rhodium catalyzed enyne cycloisomerization will be applied to asymmetric syntheses of the natural products Oppositol and alpha-Kainic acid. The silver and copper catalyzed reactions will be applied to core structures found in hexahydrotriquinacene, hydantoin, and polycyclic fused lactam containing natural products. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Xumu Zhang of the Department of Chemistry at Penn State University. Dr. Zhang will explore stereoselective cyclization reactions which are catalyzed by rhodium, silver, and copper reagents. The ability to form carbon-carbon bonds in molecules which are chiral (have two nonsuperimposable mirror images) and make only one of the two possible forms (a single enantiomer) is one of the most important problems facing the pharmaceutical industry today. When developed, Dr. Zhang s rhodium catalyzed work could be applied to the synthesis of natural products such as Oppositol and alpha-Kainic acid. The marine natural product Kainic acids are potent neurotransmitters and a worldwide shortage of these compounds has hindered work in the neuroscience community. The silver and copper catalyzed reactions will be applied to core structures found in hexahydrotriquinacene, hydantoin, and polycyclic fused lactam containing natural products which have a broad range of biological activities as antivirals, antifungals, antibacterials, and herbicidals. Students trained during the course of this work will gain skills needed by the pharmaceutical industry which now produces a number of single enantiomer compounds doc18577 none Focused Research Collaboration Proposal: Differential Algebraic Inequalities and their Applications to Engineering This focused research project proposes a comprehensive investigation of Differential Algebraic Inequalities (DAIs) and Dynamic Complementarity Problems (DCPs), with the goal of developing an extensive theory, designing and analyzing efficient algorithms, and applying the results to problems in engineering of practical importance. The two problem classes of DAIs and DCPs represent a significant extension of an ordinary differential equation (ODE) and a differential algebraic equation (DAE). The proposed study necessitates the use of state of the art mathematical programming methods in conjunction with ODE and DAE methods to deal effectively with the inequalities and complementarity conditions in a DAI DCP. The latter are novel features that are absent in ODEs or DAEs. Since the main methods for solving DCPs and DAIs in realistic situations are numerical, the research will emphasize the interactions among formulation, computation, and mathematical issues such as convergence and approximation including numerical approximation and sensitivity to parametric perturbations. DAIs and DCPs provide a powerful mathematical framework for the comprehensive treatment of a host of important complex system applications that have so far received only minimal attention from applied and computational mathematicians. The project will open a new chapter in applied mathematics in which classical differential equation theory is merged with contemporary mathematical programming methods. The deliverables of the project will a set of broadly applicable mathematical and computational tools that will have a direct impact in several distinct engineering disciplines including: constrained mechanical systems with frictional contact arising in robotics and manufacturing, conditional modeling in chemical and hydraulic processes, and hybrid systems with variable-structure control encountered in avionics, intelligent highway systems, and automotive systems doc18585 none March 11, PI: Michael Taylor, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill FOR MICHAEL TAYLOR S PROJECT Professor Taylor proposes to investigate problems in partial differential equations, particularly in the areas of wave propagation, boundary problems for elliptic PDE, and functional calculus for elliptic self-adjoint operators. Taylor will study wave propagation in fairly rough media, in which rays of geometrical optics are just barely defined, and in even rougher media, in which such rays are not uniquely defined. He will examine to what extent wave propagation in such media behaves like that in more regular media and to what extent it differs. He plans to pursue the effects of curvature bounds on a manifold on the nature of such wave propagation, and also investigate propagation, reflection, and diffraction of waves at a boundary for a rough medium. Taylor will also continue a program of studying elliptic equations with rough coefficients on Lipschitz domains. This will include nonlinear equations, such as arise in the study of harmonic maps between manifolds with rough metric tensors. In the area of functional calculus, one attack is to synthesize general functions of the Laplace operator from the solution operator to the wave equation. A detailed knowledge of wave propagation can then yield highly nontrivial information on such functional calculus. Taylor is pursuing a variety of projects in this area, ranging from detailed behavior of eigenfunction expansions to singular perturbation problems arising in the study of pattern formation. Wave motion, from sound passing through air to pressure and shear waves passing through the earth to radio waves traveling through space, is a ubiquitous phenomenon, whose mathematical analysis has for a long time been a major part of mathematics. A variety of partial differential equations have arisen to describe different aspects of wave motion, and their study continues to stimulate work on analytical tools to elucidate the behavior of solutions to such PDE. Analyzing a wave as a superposition of various frequencies gave rise to the area of harmonic analysis. Localizing the study of a wave simultaneously in space and in frequency is at the heart of the more recent area of microlocal analysis. Taylor has been active in developing tools in these areas and using them to produce results in PDE. Some of his efforts have focused on treating PDE with rough coefficients and PDE in domains with rough boundary. These arise to describe waves traveling through complicated media, whose boundaries have many corners and other irregularities. While harmonic analysis techniques have provided much insight into partial differential equations, the reverse direction has also led to significant results in harmonic analysis. Taylor is continuing to investigate how results on Fourier synthesis of singular functions can be explained in terms of propagation and focusing of waves doc18586 none Prop #: PI: Timothy Askew This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessels Seward Johnson I and Seward Johnson II operated by the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Timothy Askew is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire Markey Winch Control System and a Hydro Van Replacement (through UDEL group purchase doc18587 none mathematical structures. Representations of groups provide a way to extract information about the internal structures of a group. Roughly speaking, representations can be thought of as linearized snapshots of the group which are given by explicitly described matrices. In this project, the investigator studies deformations of representations. The deformations of a given representation form a family of representations which are associated to this representation in a certain way. In case there is a single deformation which can be used to describe all deformations, one talks about a universal deformation. Universal deformations provide universal constructions which can be used to solve certain problems all at once, which otherwise would have to be solved in a case-by-case fashion. It is the goal of this project to study certain generalizations of deformations of representations which in turn should lead to more powerful applications in different areas doc18588 none Several aspects of theories with extra spatial dimensions will be studied. The main focus will be understanding what the resulting observable consequences for particle and gravitational physics of such models could be, that is understanding the phenomenology of such models. Secondly, the cosmological evolution and the fundamental theory of these models will also be investigated. Models with extra dimensions have shown new avenues to resolve some of the most fundamental problems in particle physics. These include possible explanations for why gravitational interactions are so much weaker than other particle interactions (like electromagnetism), and perhaps even new directions toward understanding the cosmological constant problem pointed out by Einstein. Due to the potential applications of these models it is very important to study them and to find out which of these could describe our Universe. This is the main goal of this project doc18433 none Fundamental problems are addressed in wavelet theory, non-uniform sampling, frames, and the theory of spectral-tile duality. These problems are inextricably interwoven by concept and technique. Operator theory provides the major unifying framework, combined with an integration of ideas from a diverse spectrum of mathematics including classical Fourier analysis, noncommutative harmonic analysis, representation theory, operator algebras, approximation theory, and signal processing. For example, the construction, implementation, and ensuing theory of single dyadic orthonormal wavelets in Euclidean space requires significant input from all of these disciplines as well as deep spectral-tile results. There is intrinsic mathematical importance in the aforementioned problems, and the solutions to be formulated have broad and creative implications, both for mathematics and for applications in engineering and physics. The topics of this project have direct bearing on fast acquisition and motion problems in MRI, as well as in formulating algorithms for compression and noise reduction by means of proper cochlear modelling. There are further applications in quantum computing and image processing, and the development of non-uniform sampling strategies by this project play a role in state of the art A D conversion methods used in multifunction RF systems. These interdisciplinary applications depending on modern mathematical analysis have educational implications in terms of cross-fertilization of ideas and research opportunities for graduate students doc18377 none s of water waves, and the subsequent stability analyses that are feasible in these cases; (4) the design and implementation of algorithms to make practical use of exact solutions of asymptotic models in shallow and deep water; (5) the relation between the detailed dynamics of three-dimensional, nonlinear waves and some commonly used ocean-wave transport models; and (6) the impact of a detailed local description of nonlinear wave dynamics on these transport models, in the presence of large amplitude nonlinear waves or under conditions of nonlinear wave focusing. These problems will be studied using analysis, computation, asymptotics, and algebraic geometry, involving the full equations and approximate models, all in conjunction with state-of-the-art physical experiments. The destructive force of large-amplitude ocean waves is well known. Large-scale ocean waves have a major impact on the design of ocean- going ships, of off-shore oil platforms, and of other structures in a coastal environment. These waves also impact the scheduling and routing of shipping patterns, and they strongly affect air-sea transport processes. Yet most theoretical models of ocean waves now in use are based on waves of small amplitude. In this investigation we focus on developing a thorough understanding of large-amplitude waves. The ultimate goal is to develop a practical, mathematical model that may be used operationally in the applications listed above. In particular, the investigators plan to build on their recent work in which they have observed certain coherent patterns of large-amplitude waves. They have observed these patterns in laboratory experiments, as solutions to the well-known equations of water waves, and as solutions to other equations that are (more) approximate models of water waves. Their work involves a variety of mathematical and computational tools as well as state-of-the-art laboratory experiments. In the present work the investigators will combine all of their tools to understand and describe these coherent patterns and to use them as the building blocks for a practical model of ocean waves doc18591 none This award supports the purchase of an transmission electron microscope (TEM) for the Laboratory for Ultrastructural Research, a central electron microscope facility operated by the Department of Biology at the University of South Florida (USF). The new instrument replaces an obsolete, 23-year old microscope, which is currently inoperable because spare parts are no longer available. The instrument will support the research programs of four major users in the Department of Biology, three of whom have joined the institution in the last 2 years. Areas of investigation include viruses of marine invertebrates, attachment of marine algal ephiphytes, mechanical and structural properties of invertebrate eggs, and studies of the aryl hydrocarbon receptor translocator pathway in freshwater fish. The TEM will be used for instructional purposes by USF graduate and undergraduate students on a regular basis, and also used on an occasional basis in a course taught at the University of Tampa doc18577 none Focused Research Collaboration Proposal: Differential Algebraic Inequalities and their Applications to Engineering This focused research project proposes a comprehensive investigation of Differential Algebraic Inequalities (DAIs) and Dynamic Complementarity Problems (DCPs), with the goal of developing an extensive theory, designing and analyzing efficient algorithms, and applying the results to problems in engineering of practical importance. The two problem classes of DAIs and DCPs represent a significant extension of an ordinary differential equation (ODE) and a differential algebraic equation (DAE). The proposed study necessitates the use of state of the art mathematical programming methods in conjunction with ODE and DAE methods to deal effectively with the inequalities and complementarity conditions in a DAI DCP. The latter are novel features that are absent in ODEs or DAEs. Since the main methods for solving DCPs and DAIs in realistic situations are numerical, the research will emphasize the interactions among formulation, computation, and mathematical issues such as convergence and approximation including numerical approximation and sensitivity to parametric perturbations. DAIs and DCPs provide a powerful mathematical framework for the comprehensive treatment of a host of important complex system applications that have so far received only minimal attention from applied and computational mathematicians. The project will open a new chapter in applied mathematics in which classical differential equation theory is merged with contemporary mathematical programming methods. The deliverables of the project will a set of broadly applicable mathematical and computational tools that will have a direct impact in several distinct engineering disciplines including: constrained mechanical systems with frictional contact arising in robotics and manufacturing, conditional modeling in chemical and hydraulic processes, and hybrid systems with variable-structure control encountered in avionics, intelligent highway systems, and automotive systems doc18593 none March 6, PI: John L. Lewis : The aim of this project is to investigate further some problems originating from my work on (a) caloric measure in parabolic flat domains, (b) inverse problems and (c) Kato type problems. Under (a) I would like to know to what extent such concepts as uniform rectifiability, Reifenberg flatness, and asymptotic optimal doubling which have been extensively studied in regard to Laplace s equation, can be generalized to the heat equation. As regards (b), I would like to investigate whether very weak overdetermined boundary conditions for solutions to certain p-Laplacian type equations in a domain D imply that the boundary of D satisfies a regularity condition similar to uniform rectifiability. Finally under (c) I would like to know if an extrapolation technique, used by the author and co-authors on some parabolic measure and Kato problems, could be applied to other Kato type problems. Many physical problems can be described in the language of partial differential equations (PDE s). Well known examples of such equations arising in the 19 th century are Laplace s equation, the heat equation, the wave equation, Maxwell s equations, and the Navier- Stokes equation. Without question knowledge derived from a theoretical study of these equations led to many fundamental technological advances during the 19 th and 20 th centuries. Three questions often asked by those who study PDE s are (a) does there exist a solution, (b) is it unique and (c) does it possess nice properties or is it regular? As concerns (a) and (b) one is often concerned with so called boundary values or boundary conditions for a solution in its domain of existence. So called overdetermined boundary value problems have no solution whereas such classical problems as the Dirichlet and Neumann problems have solutions if the boundary of the given domain and the boundary conditions are sufficiently nice (smooth). My work is concerned with how much one can relax these assumptions and still get meaningful theorems. For example, my co-authors and I have obtained nearly optimal results, which show that certain boundary value problems for Laplace s equation can only be solved if the given domain is a ball. As another example of my work, classical theorems for the Laplacian in smooth domains have been shown to hold in a class of rough domains called Lipschitz or sawtooth domains. More recent work has generalized these results to nongraph domains satisfying `uniform rectifiability assumptions. My co-authors and I have obtained the analogue of Lipschitz and uniformly rectifiable domains for the heat equation. Our work provides a model for certain free boundary problems such as ice melting (the Stefan problem doc18594 none In this project supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Schwartz will study chemical reaction dynamics in condensed phases and complex systems using both quantum mechanical and classical methods. The PI will develop his existing approach to extended modes in liquids as well as a quantum Kramers methodology for examining the dynamics of chemical reactions in condensed phases. A new enzymatic system will be studied in detail using both this quantum methodology and a classical approach to discover rate-promoting vibrations in complex systems. The investigation of the dynamics of enzyme reactions and the search for promoting vibrations addresses central problems in chemical and biological systems, such as the catalytic importance of such vibrations. This project presents a balance between developing new theory and applying it to interesting and important problems in both isotropic fluid systems as well as in highly anisotropic environments such as enzymes. The proposed research will provide an approach for predicting rates for chemical reactions in which quantum effects are important. The results are applicable to biological systems as well as to systems in other branches of chemistry and materials science where electron- and proton-transfer reactions are important doc18595 none FRG Collaborative Proposal PROPOSAL NUMBER PI INSTITUTION Benedetto University of Maryland, lead PI : Fundamental problems are addressed in wavelet theory, non-uniform sampling, frames, and the theory of spectral-tile duality. These problems are inextricably interwoven by concept and technique. Operator theory provides the major unifying framework, combined with an integration of ideas from a diverse spectrum of mathematics including classical Fourier analysis, noncommutative harmonic analysis, representation theory, operator algebras, approximation theory, and signal processing. For example, the construction, implementation, and ensuing theory of single dyadic orthonormal wavelets in Euclidean space requires significant input from all of these disciplines as well as deep spectral-tile results. There is intrinsic mathematical importance in the aforementioned problems, and the solutions to be formulated have broad and creative implications, both for mathematics and for applications in engineering and physics. The topics of this project have direct bearing on fast acquisition and motion problems in MRI, as well as in formulating algorithms for compression and noise reduction by means of proper cochlear modelling. There are further applications in quantum computing and image processing, and the development of non-uniform sampling strategies by this project play a role in state of the art A D conversion methods used in multifunction RF systems. These interdisciplinary applications depending on modern mathematical analysis have educational implications in terms of cross-fertilization of ideas and research opportunities for graduate students doc18596 none The Calder Summer Undergraduate Research (CSUR) program will provide eight undergraduate students each summer the opportunity for independent research in ecology and field biology at the Louis Calder Center, Fordham University s biological field station. Since , the Calder Center has provided undergraduate and graduate students opportunities to study relatively undisturbed communities near an urban center, and has afforded many urban students their first opportunity to examine the natural world first hand. As part of this mission, the Calder Center and Fordham University have established the CSUR program. The CSUR program is a 12-week, intensive curriculum in which students learn the fundamentals of experimental design, use of the scientific literature, data collection and analysis, preparation of manuscripts, and oral presentation. A core component of the program is an independent research project each student will conduct in conjunction with faculty mentors. Projects may be developed in a broad range of topics including aquatic ecology, forest ecology, physiological ecology of plants and animals, soil ecology, vector ecology, and wildlife conservation. Students will also participate in weekly scientific seminars, seminar courses on the philosophy of science and ethics in science, and a student exchange program with the American Museum of Natural History. In addition, CSUR participants will be able to interact with other undergraduate and graduate students at the Calder Center who are supported through university fellowships and extramural grants. The CSUR-REU project targets highly motivated students interested in pursuing a career in ecology, especially those who are from institutions that offer limited opportunities for independent research, are from urban backgrounds, or are from groups under-represented in science. In addition to these considerations, students will be selected based on academic performance, research interests and potential, and previous research experience. Students interested in participating in the program may contact Dr. John Wehr at 914-273- ext. 11 or at wehr@fordham.edu for information and application forms. Students may also obtain information and forms online at http: www.fordham.edu calder_center calder-center CSUR-Program.html doc18377 none s of water waves, and the subsequent stability analyses that are feasible in these cases; (4) the design and implementation of algorithms to make practical use of exact solutions of asymptotic models in shallow and deep water; (5) the relation between the detailed dynamics of three-dimensional, nonlinear waves and some commonly used ocean-wave transport models; and (6) the impact of a detailed local description of nonlinear wave dynamics on these transport models, in the presence of large amplitude nonlinear waves or under conditions of nonlinear wave focusing. These problems will be studied using analysis, computation, asymptotics, and algebraic geometry, involving the full equations and approximate models, all in conjunction with state-of-the-art physical experiments. The destructive force of large-amplitude ocean waves is well known. Large-scale ocean waves have a major impact on the design of ocean- going ships, of off-shore oil platforms, and of other structures in a coastal environment. These waves also impact the scheduling and routing of shipping patterns, and they strongly affect air-sea transport processes. Yet most theoretical models of ocean waves now in use are based on waves of small amplitude. In this investigation we focus on developing a thorough understanding of large-amplitude waves. The ultimate goal is to develop a practical, mathematical model that may be used operationally in the applications listed above. In particular, the investigators plan to build on their recent work in which they have observed certain coherent patterns of large-amplitude waves. They have observed these patterns in laboratory experiments, as solutions to the well-known equations of water waves, and as solutions to other equations that are (more) approximate models of water waves. Their work involves a variety of mathematical and computational tools as well as state-of-the-art laboratory experiments. In the present work the investigators will combine all of their tools to understand and describe these coherent patterns and to use them as the building blocks for a practical model of ocean waves doc18598 none Darren Long The problem of constructing infinitely many number fields of class number one descends from Gauss s work on quadratic forms, and remains one of the major unsolved problems in algebraic number theory. This has been the inspiration for many new ideas and techniques in algebraic number theory and arithmetic geometry. The proposers plan a sustained attack on this problem using geometric methods based upon recent advances in the theory of hyperbolic manifolds coupled with a natural broadening of the classical Bianchi- Hurwitz theorem. Possible important mathematical by-products include new techniques for estimating class numbers and an improvement of the understanding of properties of the trace fields of hyperbolic manifolds. Further consequences of this work of a somewhat broader impact also seem possible. The most obviously relevant applications seem to come from the direction of cryptography. The difficulty of factoring numbers into primes is the basis for the RSA cryptosystem. The fastest known algorithm for factoring large whole numbers into primes is the so-called number field sieve, and the techniques from algebraic number theory involved in this sieve were developed in part from work on class numbers. This project could impact such algorithms and progress on factoring problems would have significant implications for cryptography doc18599 none The process of gravitational collapse with an emphasis on strong field effects and the threshold of black hole formation will be studied. This work will examine the collapse of a variety of matter fields with axial symmetry. A numerical code which has been developed and successfully tested for vacuum gravitational collapse and scalar field collapse in axisymmetry will be extended in new directions in order to consider additional fields and more extreme scenarios. Included in these directions is the incorporation of adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) which will provide high resolution for large dynamic ranges. An additional gravitational degree of freedom will be added as well as electromagnetism. Work will continue on examining the head-on collision of black holes and boson stars using black hole excision. This work will advance understanding of strong field gravity and will provide new and important dynamical results concerning black hole formation and evolution. In addition, this work will aid in the ongoing development of a computational laboratory with which to explore the gravitational processes and astrophysical objects in the universe doc18466 none FRG Collaborative Proposal PROPOSAL NUMBER PI INSTITUTION Benedetto University of Maryland, lead PI Aldroubi Vanderbilt University Jorgensen University of Iowa Heil, Wang Georgia Institute of Technology Baggett Univ. of Colorado Olafsson Lousiana State Univ. Larson Texas A&M : Fundamental problems are addressed in wavelet theory, non-uniform sampling, frames, and the theory of spectral-tile duality. These problems are inextricably interwoven by concept and technique. Operator theory provides the major unifying framework, combined with an integration of ideas from a diverse spectrum of mathematics including classical Fourier analysis, noncommutative harmonic analysis, representation theory, operator algebras, approximation theory, and signal processing. For example, the construction, implementation, and ensuing theory of single dyadic orthonormal wavelets in Euclidean space requires significant input from all of these disciplines as well as deep spectral-tile results. There is intrinsic mathematical importance in the aforementioned problems, and the solutions to be formulated have broad and creative implications, both for mathematics and for applications in engineering and physics. The topics of this project have direct bearing on fast acquisition and motion problems in MRI, as well as in formulating algorithms for compression and noise reduction by means of proper cochlear modelling. There are further applications in quantum computing and image processing, and the development of non-uniform sampling strategies by this project play a role in state of the art A D conversion methods used in multifunction RF systems. These interdisciplinary applications depending on modern mathematical analysis have educational implications in terms of cross-fertilization of ideas and research opportunities for graduate students doc18601 none Savrda With funds from this grant, the Department of Geology and Geography at Auburn University will acquire a carbon sulfur determinator system for the analysis of organic carbon and sulfur components in sediments and sedimentary rocks. Acquisition of this equipment, which will replace a now-inoperative and obsolete carbon analyzer, will help maintain and enhance existing research and teaching programs that involve detailed characterization of fine-grained sedimentary materials and evaluation of their depositional environments and their hydrocarbon-source potential. The principal investigator and his students are and will be involved in research programs that will benefit significantly from accurate measurement of sedimentary organic carbon and or sulfur contents. These programs involve (1) reconstruction of marine basin paleo-oxygenation histories; (2) evaluation of causal mechanisms for depositional cyclicity in rhythmically bedded pelagic carbonate sequences; (3) sequence stratigraphy of passive-margin successions and interpretation of sea-level dynamics; and (4) analysis of ancient nearshore and marginal marine environments and processes doc18571 none In this project, meteorologists and applied mathematicians are collaborating to study the weak temperature gradient (WTG) equations for large-scale tropical atmospheric dynamics. The WTG equations form a balance model , or set of singular limit equations, asymptotically valid in a parameter regime relevant to the tropical atmosphere. The WTG equations are designed to facilitate study of key aspects of the tropical climate problem, such as the large-scale dynamical roles of moist convection and other diabatic processes. This focus is achieved by eliminating other processes which can be present in solutions to the primitive equations, such as gravity waves and baroclinic instability, in the same way as gravity waves are eliminated in extratropical balance models such as the quasi-geostrophic equations. One goal of this project is to develop new mathematics by studying the WTG equations properties. Another goal is to solve the equations under geometries, boundary conditions and forcings which represent idealizations of those relevant to the real earth s climate, and then to study the sensitivity of the solutions to key parameters. Achievement of these goals is expected to lead to deeper understanding of both the real climate and more complex mathematical models of it, such as general circulation models (GCMs). The earth s climate system is notoriously complex. Many different physical processes interact in a tangled web of feedbacks to produce the dynamic and variable climate we observe. Unlike a laboratory science, meteorology and oceanography are hindered by the impossibility of controlled experiments which might allow the key mechanisms to be conclusively revealed. We are stuck with the one planet on which we live and cannot change its basic properties to see what happens. Consequently, the science proceeds by observation and by a heavy reliance on numerical simulation with GCMs, which are sophisticated computer programs run on the most powerful computers available. These simulations offer the possibility of a certain kind of controlled climate experiments: we can create virtual earths on the computer, control their properties, and observe their behavior with precision. One obvious limitation of this approach is that the models are imperfect representations of reality. A less obvious, but equally important problem is the models complexity, which both limits the number and type of simulations which can be done and renders the results nearly as difficult to understand as the real climate system. Because of these problems, there is a need to supplement observational and GCM studies with theoretical studies using models that are simpler than GCMs - if not simple enough to allow solution with pencil and paper, then at least using very simple computer programs that run quickly on a PC. To the extent that these simpler models have key features in common with the real system, their simplicity allows a deeper level of understanding of the basic dynamics of climate and leads to explicit hypotheses that can be tested against observations and GCM simulations. This project harnesses the physical insight of climate scientists and the sophisticated methods of applied mathematicians to develop and study simple models designed specifically to represent the tropical atmospheric component of the earth s climate system doc18603 none The Penn Math Physics group studies a range of topics, all involving significant interactions of ideas from mathematics and physics. For example the geometry of metrics with G2 holonomy and their role in M-theory compactifications which are relevant to particle physics; instantons, vector bundles, and small instanton transitions; non-Abelian Fourier-Mukai duality; heterotic M-theory and realistic standard model vacua; K-theory of gerbes as it relates to both fivebranes and higher boundary topological field theories; the mathematics of the Ekpyrotic universe and related cosmological scenarios; notions of stability in triangulated categories as they relate to D-branes;and black-hole physics via resolution of singularities. The Penn Math Physics group studies the rich interdisciplinary boundaries of modern geometry, superstring physics and cosmology. New ideas in algebraic geometry have allowed the formulation of realistic theories of particle physics and quantum gravitation within the context of superstrings and M-theory. Recently, these ideas have led to the concepts of brane worlds, heterotic M-theory and a new formulation of the cosmology of the early universe, Ekpyrotic cosmology. Flowing in the reverse direction, many of the physical concepts in superstring theory motivate new research directions in mathematics, such as the enumerative geometry emerging from mirror symmetry, the new flowering of calibrated geometries, and new results in derived categories, K-theory and gerbes. This award is cofunded by the Programs in Algebra, Number Theory, and Cominatorics, Geometric Analysis, and Topology doc18604 none Following A.P. Calderon s program (sketched in his Helsinki ICM address in ), many basic boundary value problems in physics and engineering can be attacked by starting with a representation of the solution in the form of a potential operator, and then reducing matters to analyzing the functional analytic properties of a system of pseudodifferential operators on the boundary. The new phenomenon, occurring when non-smooth structures are present, is that these boundary operators belong to a larger class, consisting of singular integral operators. The lack of a symbolic calculus in this context makes the study of such operators fundamentally harder, particularly when one has to address such delicate issues like Fredholmness and invertibility. While in the intervening years these ideas have undergone a dramatic development, much remains to be done. The main goal of the current proposal is to investigate the specific nature of the singular integral operators arising in connection with basic problems in mathematical physics, such as Maxwell s equations, vector Poisson problems, Hodge decompositions, and Stokes s system of hydrodynamics, in light of recent advances in the fields of harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. For maximum applicability, it is important to consider these problems in the context of general Sobolev-Besov spaces and when the underlying structures are minimally smooth doc18605 none There are two main approches to motivic (co-)homology appearing in recent years. First, one tries to construct it as cohomology groups of certain complexes with terms being given by explicit generators and relations generalizing Milnor s K-groups. Second, one can construct cohomology of a scheme as cohomology of a complex defined in terms of algebraic cycles thus generalizing the classical defintion of Chow groups. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Dr. Jianqiang Zhao s research will continue his work on understanding both approaches by using polylogarithms and their generalizations. Polylogarithms have been around for centuries in one form or another, but only recently has their whole theory become available. They have deep connections with both number theory and modern mathematical physics. This project should shed light on these connections. This research is in the field of arithmetic algebraic geometry, a subject that combines the techniques of algebraic geometry and number theory. In its original formulation, algebraic geometry treated figures that could be defined in the plane by the simplest equations, namely polynomials. Number theory is the study of numbers that can be expressed in terms of whole numbers, 1, 2, 3... In the second half of last century these two seemingly far apart subjects have produced tremendous impact on each other. The field of arithmetic algebraic geometry now uses techniques from all of modern mathematics doc18606 none Ted Chinburg The problem of constructing infinitely many number fields of class number one descends from Gauss s work on quadratic forms, and remains one of the major unsolved problems in algebraic number theory. This has been the inspiration for many new ideas and techniques in algebraic number theory and arithmetic geometry. The proposers plan a sustained attack on this problem using geometric methods based upon recent advances in the theory of hyperbolic manifolds coupled with a natural broadening of the classical Bianchi- Hurwitz theorem. Possible important mathematical by-products include new techniques for estimating class numbers and an improvement of the understanding of properties of the trace fields of hyperbolic manifolds. Further consequences of this work of a somewhat broader impact also seem possible. The most obviously relevant applications seem to come from the direction of cryptography. The difficulty of factoring numbers into primes is the basis for the RSA cryptosystem. The fastest known algorithm for factoring large whole numbers into primes is the so-called number field sieve, and the techniques from algebraic number theory involved in this sieve were developed in part from work on class numbers. This project could impact such algorithms and progress on factoring problems would have significant implications for cryptography. This award is jointly funded by the programs in Topology and Algebra, Number Theory, & Combinatorics doc18578 none This award provides funding for the continued conduct of an open workshop on decision-based design. The workshop will be conducted via a series of face-to-face meetings, and with continuing interaction between all interested parties via electronic and Internet technologies throughout the three-year continuation period. Specifically, the workshop will include the continuation of a web site for conduct of the workshop. A primary component of the workshop will be the continual, open development and dissemination of the philosophical, theoretical and practical results of the workshop discussions and activities. The workshop will continue to concentrate on a diversity of research efforts directed at the development of a theory of engineering design based on the emerging notion that engineering design is a decision making process amenable to the tools and theories that have developed in the field of decision theory. Specific goals for this phase of the workshop include continued development of a mathematically sound theory of engineering design, the building of a repository of foundational materials (a lexicon, case studies, references, text materials), the establishment of ties between decision-based design and other areas of science, and the transfer of decision-based design tools to industry. The workshop web site address will be located at: http: dbd.eng.buffalo.edu This workshop will provide new directions for research and education in engineering design. New theoretical concepts should lead to approaches to engineering design that will enable the design of better products, products that have greater market appeal, cost less, have lower environmental impact, and that are more friendly for customers. Further, these concepts are likely to lead to entirely new approaches to engineering education, with a strong focus on engineering design as a decision making process doc18377 none s of water waves, and the subsequent stability analyses that are feasible in these cases; (4) the design and implementation of algorithms to make practical use of exact solutions of asymptotic models in shallow and deep water; (5) the relation between the detailed dynamics of three-dimensional, nonlinear waves and some commonly used ocean-wave transport models; and (6) the impact of a detailed local description of nonlinear wave dynamics on these transport models, in the presence of large amplitude nonlinear waves or under conditions of nonlinear wave focusing. These problems will be studied using analysis, computation, asymptotics, and algebraic geometry, involving the full equations and approximate models, all in conjunction with state-of-the-art physical experiments. The destructive force of large-amplitude ocean waves is well known. Large-scale ocean waves have a major impact on the design of ocean- going ships, of off-shore oil platforms, and of other structures in a coastal environment. These waves also impact the scheduling and routing of shipping patterns, and they strongly affect air-sea transport processes. Yet most theoretical models of ocean waves now in use are based on waves of small amplitude. In this investigation we focus on developing a thorough understanding of large-amplitude waves. The ultimate goal is to develop a practical, mathematical model that may be used operationally in the applications listed above. In particular, the investigators plan to build on their recent work in which they have observed certain coherent patterns of large-amplitude waves. They have observed these patterns in laboratory experiments, as solutions to the well-known equations of water waves, and as solutions to other equations that are (more) approximate models of water waves. Their work involves a variety of mathematical and computational tools as well as state-of-the-art laboratory experiments. In the present work the investigators will combine all of their tools to understand and describe these coherent patterns and to use them as the building blocks for a practical model of ocean waves doc18609 none In this work the PI will exploit the mode selectivity properties of two-dimensional arrays of closely spaced leaky-mode VCSELs to achieve spatially-coherent light sources. Two-dimensional arrays of closely spaced antiguided VCSELs offer a unique platform to study the optical modal properties of an active photonic lattice. He proposes the first comprehensive above-threshold study of the leaky-modes supported by such photonic lattice structures. The allowed leaky-mode photonic bands of 2-D active photonic lattices have not been studied to date. An understanding of the propagating leaky-modes and the influence of nonlinear gain, carrier-induced-index variations, and thermal lensing, above laser threshold will result in a valuable knowledge base for the development of next generation optical sources. He proposes a closely coupled experimental and theoretical program to study the unique properties of these structures and exploit these properties for the development of novel diode laser sources. These structures have high potential for the realization of compact monolithic surface emitting sources with high-spatial coherence. Unlike conventional VCSEL arrays, the proposed devices have gain placed in the low-index lattice sites, thus relying on long-range (coherent) coupling via leaky waves. Based on an MOCVD regrowth process, the built-in refractive index step of the antiguides can be quite large (Dn = 0.10 - 0.20), making the structure less sensitive to waveguide pertubations which occur above laser threshold. Novel device structures based on 2-D active photonic lattices are proposed for achieving spatially-coherent surface emitting sources: 1. Laterally resonant, large-area spatially-coherent 2-D phase-locked arrays: Antiguided VCSEL devices involving large-area phase-locked arrays of rectangular- as well as of triangular-lattice configuration relying on radially resonant leaky-wave coupling, which in turn insures uniform intensity profile across the entire array structure, and thus coherent operation to high drive levels above threshold. 2. Radiation fanout vertical cavity semiconductor optical amplifiers: Arrays of leaky-wave-coupled vertical-cavity surface-emitting amplifiers (VCSOA) hold potential not only for providing high amplified output powers but also act as a large-volume gain media for nonlinear interactions such as four-wave mixing. 3. Low-index defect based lasers: lattice-defect VCSEL devices are proposed relying on radially antiresonant devices, which allow single-mode operation from emitting areas an order of magnitude larger than conventional VCSELs. The proposed devices have potential as high-coherent-power ( 100 mW), circular-beam monolithic sources for use as transmitters (l=1.3-1.55mm) or amplifier pump sources (l=0.98mm) in fiber-optical communication systems doc18610 none This Focused Research Group project includes investigators from three different universities: Luca Dieci at Georgia Institute of Technology, Michal Jolly at Indiana University, and Erik Van Vleck at the University of Kansas. The project considers the approximation of Lyapunov exponents and other spectral information for dynamical systems. The main goal is to study and implement numerical techniques to approximate Lyapunov exponents of continuous dynamical systems, as defined by a system of time dependent differential equations. The investigators are implementing and comparing so-called continuous and discrete QR and SVD approaches. They distinguish between linear and nonlinear problems, the chief difference being that in the linear case no approximation of solution trajectory is attempted. The investigators study Lyapunov exponents for systems of large dimension, such as spatially discretized time dependent PDEs. In particular, they consider PDEs for which an inertial manifold is known to exist, and study the relative merits of techniques that compute the exponents after a prior inertial manifold reduction versus those that work with the full (spatially discretized) PDE. Methods that use the Jacobian and Jacobian-free methods are compared. The investigators also develop general purpose algorithms and software for approximation of Lyapunov exponents and aim to include the algorithms within standard software for differential equations. In many areas of science and engineering, physical and biological systems are modeled with differential equations. In a nutshell, a differential equation is a rule specifying how a given initial state of the system evolves into future states. In practice, we are given the differential equation and the initial state, and need to find the solution (i.e., the evolution of the initial condition). Realistic models depend on parameters and the solution of the differential equation will of course depend on the values of the parameters as well. The ultimate goal of this project is to provide scientists with quantitive means of assessing the dependency of solutions with respect to variations of the initial state or the parameters in the problem. Lyapunov exponents, and other related spectral quantities, do exactly this. A chief effort of the investigators is the development of algorithms and computational software for approximation of Lyapunov exponents and other spectra doc18571 none In this project, meteorologists and applied mathematicians are collaborating to study the weak temperature gradient (WTG) equations for large-scale tropical atmospheric dynamics. The WTG equations form a balance model , or set of singular limit equations, asymptotically valid in a parameter regime relevant to the tropical atmosphere. The WTG equations are designed to facilitate study of key aspects of the tropical climate problem, such as the large-scale dynamical roles of moist convection and other diabatic processes. This focus is achieved by eliminating other processes which can be present in solutions to the primitive equations, such as gravity waves and baroclinic instability, in the same way as gravity waves are eliminated in extratropical balance models such as the quasi-geostrophic equations. One goal of this project is to develop new mathematics by studying the WTG equations properties. Another goal is to solve the equations under geometries, boundary conditions and forcings which represent idealizations of those relevant to the real earth s climate, and then to study the sensitivity of the solutions to key parameters. Achievement of these goals is expected to lead to deeper understanding of both the real climate and more complex mathematical models of it, such as general circulation models (GCMs). The earth s climate system is notoriously complex. Many different physical processes interact in a tangled web of feedbacks to produce the dynamic and variable climate we observe. Unlike a laboratory science, meteorology and oceanography are hindered by the impossibility of controlled experiments which might allow the key mechanisms to be conclusively revealed. We are stuck with the one planet on which we live and cannot change its basic properties to see what happens. Consequently, the science proceeds by observation and by a heavy reliance on numerical simulation with GCMs, which are sophisticated computer programs run on the most powerful computers available. These simulations offer the possibility of a certain kind of controlled climate experiments: we can create virtual earths on the computer, control their properties, and observe their behavior with precision. One obvious limitation of this approach is that the models are imperfect representations of reality. A less obvious, but equally important problem is the models complexity, which both limits the number and type of simulations which can be done and renders the results nearly as difficult to understand as the real climate system. Because of these problems, there is a need to supplement observational and GCM studies with theoretical studies using models that are simpler than GCMs - if not simple enough to allow solution with pencil and paper, then at least using very simple computer programs that run quickly on a PC. To the extent that these simpler models have key features in common with the real system, their simplicity allows a deeper level of understanding of the basic dynamics of climate and leads to explicit hypotheses that can be tested against observations and GCM simulations. This project harnesses the physical insight of climate scientists and the sophisticated methods of applied mathematicians to develop and study simple models designed specifically to represent the tropical atmospheric component of the earth s climate system doc18377 none s of water waves, and the subsequent stability analyses that are feasible in these cases; (4) the design and implementation of algorithms to make practical use of exact solutions of asymptotic models in shallow and deep water; (5) the relation between the detailed dynamics of three-dimensional, nonlinear waves and some commonly used ocean-wave transport models; and (6) the impact of a detailed local description of nonlinear wave dynamics on these transport models, in the presence of large amplitude nonlinear waves or under conditions of nonlinear wave focusing. These problems will be studied using analysis, computation, asymptotics, and algebraic geometry, involving the full equations and approximate models, all in conjunction with state-of-the-art physical experiments. The destructive force of large-amplitude ocean waves is well known. Large-scale ocean waves have a major impact on the design of ocean- going ships, of off-shore oil platforms, and of other structures in a coastal environment. These waves also impact the scheduling and routing of shipping patterns, and they strongly affect air-sea transport processes. Yet most theoretical models of ocean waves now in use are based on waves of small amplitude. In this investigation we focus on developing a thorough understanding of large-amplitude waves. The ultimate goal is to develop a practical, mathematical model that may be used operationally in the applications listed above. In particular, the investigators plan to build on their recent work in which they have observed certain coherent patterns of large-amplitude waves. They have observed these patterns in laboratory experiments, as solutions to the well-known equations of water waves, and as solutions to other equations that are (more) approximate models of water waves. Their work involves a variety of mathematical and computational tools as well as state-of-the-art laboratory experiments. In the present work the investigators will combine all of their tools to understand and describe these coherent patterns and to use them as the building blocks for a practical model of ocean waves doc18613 none With the support of the Organic Dynamics Program in the Chemistry Division, Professor Paul Floreancig, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, has begun a program in which electron transfer initiated carbon-carbon sigma-bond activation serves to trigger new synthetic transformations. Homobenzylic ethers and amides are used as the starting materials for electron transfer initiated cyclization (ETIC) reactions. In these reactions, photoinitiated single electron oxidation of the substrates form radical cation intermediates that undergo a facile displacement of a benzyl radical by pendent nucleophiles. The ultimate objective of the projects described in the proposal is to advance the ETIC method to a sufficient extent that it can serve as a method for efficient syntheses of complex natural projects and other medicinally and structurally important compounds. Professor Paul Floreancig, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, with the support of the Organic Dynamics Program, will establish new synthetic methodology and plans to develop applications of the chemistry, which minimizes impact to the environment and uses ETIC in the synthesis of acylaminals. This substrate will allow increased understanding of the structurally intriguing anticancer agent, pederin, which is isolated from South Pacific sponges doc18614 none The award addresses offering of Symposium Y: Nanopatterning - from ULSI to Biotechnology, to be held in the context of the Materials Research Society (MRS) Fall Meeting in Boston, MA, during November 26-30, . The Symposium is to be preceded by a tutorial on Nanofabrication for Cellular Engineering. The purpose of the Symposium and tutorial is to bring together an interdisciplinary group of experts representing materials science, physics, chemistry, electronics, biology and medicine, to explore the fundamental processes and tools for nanoscale patterning. The technologies to be addressed include optical as well as next generation lithography (EUV, X-ray, e-beam, ion-beam); probe arrays; self assembly processes; maskless and soft lithography including imprinting and holographic interferometric methods; materials design and characterization for data storage, NEMS, displays, systems-on-a-chip, molecular devices; metrology issues; bionanotechnology including tissue engineering, biomimetics and interfaces; and theory, modeling and simulation. The Symposium technologies in nanoscale patterning address critical challenges in a broad industry spectrum, from semiconductor to biotechnology, where the development of such nanofabrication techniques is particularly timely. It is expected that the Symposium and tutorial will promote transfer of ideas and research expertise from the senior speakers to the young faculty, postdoctoral fellows and student participants, and therefore contribute to the professional research development of new people in nanomanufacturing, as well as the dissemination of information to the research community and the development of educational materials for teaching doc18615 none An archaeological survey in the southern French Alps will be carried out as the first, pilot phase in long-term, comparative research. The survey will focus on the late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods of the Stone Age, ca. 13,000 - 6,000 BC, and will seek to understand: 1) how areas at higher elevations were colonized after the end of the last ice age and how they were integrated with the coast and lowlands, 2) how the Alpine ecology affected cultural adaptations and their change through time, 3) how this area s economies differed from those of the quite different environments of central Europe, where the investigator s previous work has concentrated, and 4) what role the last hunter-gatherers in this region played in the transition to agricultural societies. A variety of different field techniques, including surface-walking of plowed fields, coring of upland bogs, and test-trenching at the base of rockshelters will be used in initial investigations of two promising areas: the upper valley of the Loup River and the basin of the Lac d Allos. Analysis of collections of stone artifacts will give particular attention to stone raw materials and their sources, the technology of stone tool manufacture, and the typology of stone artifacts. These data will facilitate comparisons with better known regions, such as the lower Rhone Valley to the west and Italian Liguria to the east, as well as forming the basis for interpretations of patterns of movement and the organization of technology. Other types of artifacts, such as bone and shell, will allow preliminary inferences about site activities, movement, and exchange. The Neolithic Revolution , the transition from a hunting and gathering to a settled village agricultural and pastoral lifestyle, constitutes a significant change in human adaptation and set the stage for the rise of civilization. Thus archaeologists wish to understand how it occurred and Dr. Jochim s exploratory research, if successful, has the potential to shed additional light on this process. Because student assistants are included in the fieldwork, the project will also serve a valuable training function doc18610 none This Focused Research Group project includes investigators from three different universities: Luca Dieci at Georgia Institute of Technology, Michal Jolly at Indiana University, and Erik Van Vleck at the University of Kansas. The project considers the approximation of Lyapunov exponents and other spectral information for dynamical systems. The main goal is to study and implement numerical techniques to approximate Lyapunov exponents of continuous dynamical systems, as defined by a system of time dependent differential equations. The investigators are implementing and comparing so-called continuous and discrete QR and SVD approaches. They distinguish between linear and nonlinear problems, the chief difference being that in the linear case no approximation of solution trajectory is attempted. The investigators study Lyapunov exponents for systems of large dimension, such as spatially discretized time dependent PDEs. In particular, they consider PDEs for which an inertial manifold is known to exist, and study the relative merits of techniques that compute the exponents after a prior inertial manifold reduction versus those that work with the full (spatially discretized) PDE. Methods that use the Jacobian and Jacobian-free methods are compared. The investigators also develop general purpose algorithms and software for approximation of Lyapunov exponents and aim to include the algorithms within standard software for differential equations. In many areas of science and engineering, physical and biological systems are modeled with differential equations. In a nutshell, a differential equation is a rule specifying how a given initial state of the system evolves into future states. In practice, we are given the differential equation and the initial state, and need to find the solution (i.e., the evolution of the initial condition). Realistic models depend on parameters and the solution of the differential equation will of course depend on the values of the parameters as well. The ultimate goal of this project is to provide scientists with quantitive means of assessing the dependency of solutions with respect to variations of the initial state or the parameters in the problem. Lyapunov exponents, and other related spectral quantities, do exactly this. A chief effort of the investigators is the development of algorithms and computational software for approximation of Lyapunov exponents and other spectra doc18617 none Alan Reid The problem of constructing infinitely many number fields of class number one descends from Gauss s work on quadratic forms, and remains one of the major unsolved problems in algebraic number theory. This has been the inspiration for many new ideas and techniques in algebraic number theory and arithmetic geometry. The proposers plan a sustained attack on this problem using geometric methods based upon recent advances in the theory of hyperbolic manifolds coupled with a natural broadening of the classical Bianchi- Hurwitz theorem. Possible important mathematical by-products include new techniques for estimating class numbers and an improvement of the understanding of properties of the trace fields of hyperbolic manifolds. Further consequences of this work of a somewhat broader impact also seem possible. The most obviously relevant applications seem to come from the direction of cryptography. The difficulty of factoring numbers into primes is the basis for the RSA cryptosystem. The fastest known algorithm for factoring large whole numbers into primes is the so-called number field sieve, and the techniques from algebraic number theory involved in this sieve were developed in part from work on class numbers. This project could impact such algorithms and progress on factoring problems would have significant implications for cryptography. This award is jointly funded by the programs in Topology and Algebra, Number Theory, & Combinatorics doc18618 none This award in the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research by Professor Dale Margerum at Purdue University to study the rapid kinetics and reaction mechanisms of both nonmetal and metal containing oxidants. Mechanistic studies of the reactions of chlorine dioxide with hydroxide, oxone, metal reagents, nitrite ion and oxybromine species will be done. This research has recently discovered that nucleophiles can assist a thermodynamically unfavored electron transfer from chlorite to bromine dioxide to yield a chlorine dioxide complex that oxidizes hydroxide. The reactions of Br(III) and Br(IV) will also be studied because of their possible environmental importance as intermediates when bromide in drinking water is converted to bromate ion in disinfection treatments. Highly reactive Cu(III) and Ni(III) peptide complexes will also be studied. Peptide complexes of these metal ions form as reactive intermediates in some methods for site-specific DNA cleavage. These studies encompass a broad and fundamental area of inorganic solution chemistry and include many reactions of vital concern to environmental chemistry. The research involving chlorine dioxide is particularly relevant as this oxidant has recently been used to fumigate buildings contaminated with anthrax doc18619 none The goal of this research is to define multi-attribute infrastructure performance indicators for system condition and security ways using emerging databases and software systems. The indicators will enable identification of inefficiencies and vulnerabilities of three interdependent infrastructures-road transportation, electricity, and water supply. The work initiates a new assessment system for overcoming institutional inertia in publicly- and investor-owned infrastructure systems: one based on interdependencies of regional services. As government- or investor-owned monopolies, road transportation, electricity, and water supply support basic functions of society, but even large, well-managed organizations publish little data about condition and security, and where indicators exist, they are not used much. The project seeks to avoid the overgeneralization problem of infrastructure research by focusing on information-based indicators that apply both within and across infrastructure categories. The hypotheses to be tested include: 1) condition and security measures exist, but are detail-oriented and used mainly in budget processes; 2) the public lacks information about condition and security of infrastructure services; 3) indicators will facilitate detection of problems and inefficiencies, 4) improve coordination and cooperation, and enhance condition and security; 5) better system information will lead to more robust systems that operate better and last longer, with measurement of effectiveness; 5) information for indicators can be made available through new software; and 6) new incentives can stimulate better reporting through computer-based information systems. In the study, indicators will be selected from the large number available and from past failure incidents to be refined in a case study of infrastructure systems in the Northern Colorado study region. A workshop will be conducted in which agency managers will learn how use the indicators and insights will be sought on why indicators are not used more often or more effectively. Based on this case study, multi-attribute indicators will be constructed. The indicators will then be tested on a stakeholder and public audience at a second workshop to determine 1) whether the public judges the information to be relevant for decision making and 2) the management of public infrastructure can be improved if the public has more relevant and easily-understood information about condition and security. The project reports will provide a comprehensive review of infrastructure indicators, evaluate indicators and discuss how to synthesize fewer and more meaningful ones; evaluate the actual status of use of indicators by managers; evaluate public acceptance of the indicators for their decision-making; and present reports with state-of-the-art assessments of use of performance indicators to improve independent and interdependent management of infrastructure systems doc18620 none The School of Biological Sciences of The University of Texas at Austin offers a ten-week REU Site Program in Molecular Biology designed to introduce talented, upper-level undergraduates to intensive, independent laboratory research. A ten-week summer program, involving ten students each year for three years, will provide each participant a stipend, room and board, travel allowance and tuition for the independent research course in which all are enrolled. We seek participants who have good course work preparation in molecular biology and are interested in post-graduate study but have not had the opportunity to do research. Participants will work individually with faculty mentors matched with the student s interests and background, and they will have access to all faculty members in the School of Biological Sciences and the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology through seminars and lab visits. Students will be placed in active faculty research labs that deal with such problems as gene structure and control, cell signaling, developmental genetics and pathogenic mechanisms, which are being studied in a variety of model organisms, including bacteria, yeast, plants and mammals. In weekly group meetings, students will discuss current issues in molecular biology, prepare for the GRE, and learn about graduate school. Each participant will present an oral progress report to the group and will write an abstract and prepare a research poster for a closing symposium doc18621 none This project addresses the dominant new scientific theme of our time, the fundamental and practical importance of understanding complex, self-organizing behavior exhibited in transition metal oxides (TMOs). The objective of this research program is to explore and understand the microscopic origins of various phases in the TMOs using neutron scattering as a primary tool. Specially, the project will focus on high-transition temperature (high-Tc) superconductors and colossal magneto-resistance (CMR) manganese-oxides. For high-Tc superconductors, the project will investigate the nature of the interplay between magnetism and superconductivity. For CMR manganese-oxides, the project will focus on understanding how the microscopic spin lattice dynamics determine the bulk magnetic and transport properties of these materials. Neutron scattering experiments, the core part of this research program, will be performed mostly at the newly upgraded high-flux isotope reactor (HFIR) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). However, the project will also utilize other world-class facilities in the U.S. and Europe when similar capabilities are unavailable at HFIR. The impact of this research program will include the training of the next generation of neutron scatters and elucidating the nature of the exotic properties of the TMOs. Physics in the new millennium will take us into the world of emergent complexity from simple and basic laws. This project addresses the fundamental physical processes that give rise to novel collective phenomena. The materials known to exhibit these collective phenomena are the strongly correlated electron transition metal oxides (TMOs). The understanding of these phenomena will not only enhance our knowledge of basic science, but also gives us the ability to design materials with novel and predictable properties. This project will use neutron scattering to investigate two families of the TMOs, the high-transition-temperature copper-oxide superconductors and colossal magneto-resistance manganese-oxides. The objective of the program is to explore and understand the microscopic origins of various phases in the TMOs using neutron as a probe. Neutron scattering experiments will be performed mostly at the newly upgraded high-flux isotope reactor (HFIR) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). However, the project will also utilize other world-class facilities in the U.S. and Europe when similar capabilities are unavailable at HFIR. The impact of this research program will include the training of the next generation of neutron scatters and elucidating the nature of the exotic properties of the TMOs doc18622 none Swager This award supports the participation of American scientists in a U.S.-Japan seminar on advanced polymer chemistry for the 21st century to be held in Nagoya, Japan from December 7-10, . The co-organizers are Professor Timothy Swager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Professor Yoshio Okamoto of Nagoya University in, Japan. The emphasis of the seminar will be on polymers that in contrast to commodity materials are chemically complex and not necessarily inexpensive to produce. New generations of polymers that can justify such expenses are expected to play a role in many evolving technologies. The last decade has resulted in enormous progress in the development and understanding of synthetic chemistry, molecular recognition, molecular scaffolds, biological processes, and self-organization. Presently these advances are under-utilized in the design and synthesis of new advanced polymers. The term advanced is used to describe polymers with non-traditional properties. This seminar seeks to bring together specific individuals from the United State and Japan that have synergistic programs to catalyze new advances in the design and synthesis of advanced polymers. The seminar advances international human resources through the participation of a number of younger researchers. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. Arrangements are being made with the Journal of Polymer Science to have proceedings published in a special issue doc18478 none The global theory of minimal surfaces in space is in a phase of explosive growth. Many new methods of constructing complete embedded minimal surfaces have recently been found; in place of a dearth of examples just a few years ago, we now have a quite varied collection of surfaces, including infinite families. A basic problem is to classify these examples, i.e. collect them into families with common properties and understood limits. Fruitful approaches have recently been developed that combine numerical simulation with methods from the theory of geometric structures on surfaces and classical complex analysis, notably Teichmuller theory. Some of the problems the team will attack are: Are there embedded minimal surfaces with one heliciodal end and arbitrary genus? Is the classical Scherk surface the unique desingularization of a pair of planes? Of what families is the Scherk surface the limit point? At the same time, the group hopes to make progress on simulation of minimal surfaces. For example, we hope to set up a library of Weierstrass representations of minimal surfaces which is reproducible, fully documented, and useful as a research tool. A guiding philosophy in many areas of science, from physics to biochemistry to ecology, is that nature is maximally efficient; indeed, many explanations of natural phenomena have at their foundation the assumption that the phenomenon has optimized some or several of its features in the expression we witness. At its base, this philosophical principle is mathematical in nature: we search for principles in science that can be formulated as extremal problems. In mathematics, we can make this assumption of optimality very rigorous by expressing it as an equation. This leaves us with the problem of understanding all of the solutions of that equation. In this project, we aim to study one very rich type of optimization problem, the minimal surface problem, which is already known to have a number of quite subtle characteristics. (A minimal surface is one for which each small piece has less area than any other surface with the same boundary.) The study of these surfaces has its origins in physical problems studied first by Euler; then, a century later, the problem also arose in the studies of the behavior of rotating droplets and soap films by F. Plateau. Today the applications range from cosmology to the understanding of the structure of stable periodic structures in compound copolymers. As in many other optimization problems, for the minimal surface problem, we do not have much general information about solutions to the equation expressing extremality. At present though, we do have a wide variety of examples which help to guide our intuition, and which we are beginning to organize. It is thus a good model problem, enriching our understanding of all optimization problems doc18624 none The Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL) will conduct a regional conference on December 12-15, , in San Antonio, Texas, for the Division of Educational System Reform s (ESR) 19 grantees in the southwestern region of the nation. The purpose of the conference is to provide assistance to these awardees on critical issues and challenges related to educational reform in mathematics and science education and to explore effective and promising strategies to address these. The conference has three major outcomes: (1) to provide for a deeper understanding of common critical issues and challenges in the region as systemic reform initiatives are implemented; (2) to examine current research and practices that address the selected issues and challenges, including the exploration of existing exemplary practices; and (3) to share information, concerns, and questions through effective networking with other regional reform initiatives aimed at building the awardees capacity to address the issues and challenges. The two central topics for the conference arise from the growing need in the Southwest for a reliable supply of quality mathematics and science teachers doc18610 none This Focused Research Group project includes investigators from three different universities: Luca Dieci at Georgia Institute of Technology, Michal Jolly at Indiana University, and Erik Van Vleck at the University of Kansas. The project considers the approximation of Lyapunov exponents and other spectral information for dynamical systems. The main goal is to study and implement numerical techniques to approximate Lyapunov exponents of continuous dynamical systems, as defined by a system of time dependent differential equations. The investigators are implementing and comparing so-called continuous and discrete QR and SVD approaches. They distinguish between linear and nonlinear problems, the chief difference being that in the linear case no approximation of solution trajectory is attempted. The investigators study Lyapunov exponents for systems of large dimension, such as spatially discretized time dependent PDEs. In particular, they consider PDEs for which an inertial manifold is known to exist, and study the relative merits of techniques that compute the exponents after a prior inertial manifold reduction versus those that work with the full (spatially discretized) PDE. Methods that use the Jacobian and Jacobian-free methods are compared. The investigators also develop general purpose algorithms and software for approximation of Lyapunov exponents and aim to include the algorithms within standard software for differential equations. In many areas of science and engineering, physical and biological systems are modeled with differential equations. In a nutshell, a differential equation is a rule specifying how a given initial state of the system evolves into future states. In practice, we are given the differential equation and the initial state, and need to find the solution (i.e., the evolution of the initial condition). Realistic models depend on parameters and the solution of the differential equation will of course depend on the values of the parameters as well. The ultimate goal of this project is to provide scientists with quantitive means of assessing the dependency of solutions with respect to variations of the initial state or the parameters in the problem. Lyapunov exponents, and other related spectral quantities, do exactly this. A chief effort of the investigators is the development of algorithms and computational software for approximation of Lyapunov exponents and other spectra doc18626 none There is a growing consensus among scientists that aspects of our planet s climate are changing due to human influences, though the scientific community acknowledges that substantial uncertainty exists regarding the forms, levels, and impacts of change. Quantifying these uncertainties requires new statistical research informed by climate science. Effective solutions to climate change problems will rely on new methods for combining the information content of models and data in a fashion that quantitatively manages uncertainty. The research team will rely extensively on Bayesian hierarchical modeling and analysis strategies. Specific projects will include (1) developing new probabilistic climate change assessments based on an extensive suite of climate simulations; (2) statistical procedures for combining different climate models to produce climate projections; and (3) assessing regional and local impacts of global climate behavior. Describing the Earth s climate and predicting its responses to human influences are critical problems in science and public policy. The research team of statisticians and climate modeling experts from the National Center for Atmospheric Research will develop new statistical strategies that combine observations with the information present in computer models for the climate system, while managing the uncertainties implicit in both. Assessing potential impacts of climate change on the environment and human activities is also fraught with uncertainty. The research team will develop integrated methods for predicting climate impacts on regional and local phenomena. These methods will be applied in predicting the El Nino-Southern Oscillation and properties of tornado occurrence in the Central United States doc18627 none PI: Lomonosov Proposal Number: The principal investigator will conduct research on two projects which relate to both Operator Theory and Geometry of Banach spaces. The recent solution of the complex version of the Klee s Conjecture using ideas from Operator Theory suggests further research on support points and convex sets. Some new geometric approaches will be used for investigating the Invariant Subspace Problem in general Banach Spaces. The principal investigator recently solved a long-standing problem, constructing a convex body which has no tangent hyper-planes. It is important to understand under which conditions such a strange phenomenon can exist. Another project starts with the fundamental fact that every matrix has an eigenvector. A natural extension of this to infinite-dimensional spaces would be that a linear operator has an invariant subspace. We will investigate whether this statement is true in a number of important cases doc18626 none There is a growing consensus among scientists that aspects of our planet s climate are changing due to human influences, though the scientific community acknowledges that substantial uncertainty exists regarding the forms, levels, and impacts of change. Quantifying these uncertainties requires new statistical research informed by climate science. Effective solutions to climate change problems will rely on new methods for combining the information content of models and data in a fashion that quantitatively manages uncertainty. The research team will rely extensively on Bayesian hierarchical modeling and analysis strategies. Specific projects will include (1) developing new probabilistic climate change assessments based on an extensive suite of climate simulations; (2) statistical procedures for combining different climate models to produce climate projections; and (3) assessing regional and local impacts of global climate behavior. Describing the Earth s climate and predicting its responses to human influences are critical problems in science and public policy. The research team of statisticians and climate modeling experts from the National Center for Atmospheric Research will develop new statistical strategies that combine observations with the information present in computer models for the climate system, while managing the uncertainties implicit in both. Assessing potential impacts of climate change on the environment and human activities is also fraught with uncertainty. The research team will develop integrated methods for predicting climate impacts on regional and local phenomena. These methods will be applied in predicting the El Nino-Southern Oscillation and properties of tornado occurrence in the Central United States doc18629 none Under this award, numerical tools will be developed for the study of astrophysical systems involving relativistic gravity, strong electromagnetic fields, and rotation. These tools will include computer codes for evolving fluids and electromagnetic fields in a fixed gravitational field, codes for evolving the relativistic gravitational field itself, and a combined code that will evolve gravitational fields with both material and electromagnetic sources. Tools for verifying the accuracy of the integrations will also be developed. The codes will be optimized for use on the latest generation of supercomputers, publicly released, and made available within the scientific community. In the course of developing these codes, computational scientists will be trained at the undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels. The codes will also be applied by the developers to problems at the forefront of astrophysics and gravitation physics research. This work is motivated by a number of astrophysical systems, including: accreting black holes and neutron stars; coalescing binary neutron stars and black holes; rapidly rotating neutron stars formed in core-collapse supernovae; and collapsing supermassive stars. Taken together, these objects are the focus of a large fraction of current astrophysical research. They are the likely source of detectable gravitational waves, powerful X-ray emission, and gamma-ray bursts. So far, however, they have resisted understanding because the underlying physics of the fluid, the electromagnetic field, and the gravitational field is complicated, nonlinear, and time dependent. Only numerical integrations can unlock the fundamental physics of black hole accretion, test scenarios for the generation of gamma-ray bursts, and generate more accurate predictions for gravitational waveforms from coalescing compact binaries. The required numerical methods do not yet exist; they will be developed under this award doc18630 none PI: Mansoor Moaddel Eastern Michigan University The investigator currently has NSF funding ( ) to complete surveys of the worldviews of nationally representative samples of 1, citizens in Egypt, Iran, and Jordan using face-to-face interviews. The objective of the study is to (1) analyze the value orientation of the publics; (2) understand the connection between social groups and value structure; (3) assess the relationship between secularization, rational-legal authority and liberal urgency; and (4) examine the degree of similarity dissimilarity of the values in the three countries. Funds requested by this Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) would be used to gather data on concerns and attitudes of people in Egypt, Iran, and Morocco after the September 11th terrorist acts. A survey presently in the field in Jordan will capture the same information from citizens in Jordan. The rationale informing this request is that the current events have introduced a significant contextual factor (i.e., socio-political crisis) that potentially will impact the determinants of the publics attitudes and value orientations in Islamic countries. Pre-and post terrorist events will allow the investigator to capture and examine such changes, (e.g., whether and how the September 11th events affects values and beliefs of citizens in the Middle East, and shed light how sociopolitical crises may affect attitudes and concerns more generally doc18631 none The goal of this project is to develop rational and implementable methods to measure and control risk in the finance industry. The topic is timely because there have been some spectacular failures in the finance industry, because regulations are under discussion which would institutionalize quantitative risk measures, and because the leading risk measure, value- at-risk, has undesirable properties. Chief among these is that in certain situations, situations that often arise in credit-risky markets, meeting regulatory value-at-risk requirements encourages concentration of risk rather than diversification. The proposal builds on the idea of coherent risk measures developed by a team, which includes one of the principal investigators on this proposal. This team developed a set of axioms deemed to be desirable, and then characterized those coherent risk measures which satisfy these axioms. Their work showed that every coherent risk measure can be characterized by a set of probability measures over possible future scenarios. A three- part project is proposed. The first part is to develop a decentralized implementation of risk control based on coherent risk measurement. This requires development of duality theory and equilibrium pricing within a firm. The second is to elicit scenarios and estimate model parameters in real settings. This mandates refining the mathematical models to the point that a manageable number of measures over future scenarios present themselves, and appealing to statistical theory to make those choices. Finally, it is proposed to extend the existing theory of coherent risk measures. This project is being supported under the Focused Research Groups in the Mathematical Sciences activity doc18632 none This research addresses a fundamental question regarding the nature of the charge structure of the neutron --- one of the basic building blocks of matter: What is the spatial distribution of the constituent quarks within the neutron, which has a net zero charge? This question was addressed in Jefferson Laboratory Experiment 93-038 by scattering longitudinally polarized electrons quasielastically from a neutron in deuterium. Deuterium consists of a neutron and a proton bound loosely together; it represents the best neutron target available. In a collision with the neutron, the electron transfers polarization to the neutron. Both components of the neutron polarization vector lie in the scattering plane: The transverse (or sideways) component is normal to the momentum of the neutron, and the longitudinal component is parallel (or antiparallel) to the neutron momentum. By measuring both the sideways and the longitudinal polarizations, it is possible to extract a quantity called the neutron electric form factor, which is designated by the letters GEN. Measurements of GEN as a function of momentum transfer are related to the spatial distribution of charge within the neutron. The uncertainty in our knowledge of the interior charge density of the neutron becomes smaller as measurements of GEN are extended to higher momentum transfer. Knowledge of GEN is essential to understanding the structure of matter. GEN is a fundamental quantity needed to challenge models of nucleon structure, to make detailed microscopic calculations of electric structure functions, and to interpret the results of parity-violating experiments. The current research involves carrying out and completing a detailed analysis of the data obtained from E93-038, preparing the results for publication, and preparing and carrying out a new experiment to extract GEN at still higher momentum transfers doc18633 none The investigator and his colleagues undertake a coordinated effort to bring to bear ideas from analysis, geometry, and statistics on the problem of analysing spectroscopic data in high dimensions. A major challenge confronting the analytical chemist involves the organization and manipulation of massive amounts of data, both measured and computed. Recent work indicates that special geometric structures allow for efficient transcription and modeling of the relation between spectral measurements and material composition. The investigators develop tools to identify such structures and to automate the process of analysis and feature extraction. In particular, the investigators concentrate on near-infrared spectra of blood, with the goal being to estimate concentrations of various blood analytes from noninvasive spectrometric measurements. The multidisciplinary team undertakes a coherent approach in which various aspects of chemical analysis, blood pathology, and sensor engineering interact with mathematical analytic tools. They adapt and extend computational software to the particular geometry of chemical spectra, for which the data manifolds need to be parametrized by the concentrations of various constituent materials. To achieve such parametrizations, they exploit mathematical tools for local multiscale descriptions of data together with clustering techniques that occur naturally in the context of data analysis for expression profiles of gene arrays. Shining a light on the skin allows one to get spectral data about the blood beneath the skin and its chemical components. Hence noninvasive blood analysis is possible, if only one could make sense of the data. The investigator and his colleagues apply a range of mathematical and statistical ideas to build tools that can make sense of such data. There are important medical payoffs because of the role blood chemistry plays in health. Moreover, the underlying mathematical problem, to find efficient ways to make sense of enormous volumes of high-dimensional data, arises across science and engineering, so the potential impact of the project is even wider. The project provides interdisciplinary research and training opportunities for students and postdocs doc18634 none Proposal Number: PI: Michal Misiurewicz The Principal Investigator will perform research in the theory of dynamical systems, mainly low-dimensional (both smooth and continuous) and symbolic. He will apply analytical, topological and combinatorial tools in order to investigate real and complex systems. A substantial part of the project is aimed at providing bridges between real and complex, one- and two-dimensional dynamics. A new class of two-dimensional systems will be considered. Quadratic laminations will be looked upon from the point of view of combinatorial dynamics and rotation theory. For other systems attractors, periodic orbits, rotation sets and topological entropy will be in the center of attention. Moreover, symbolic systems with an additional local order structure will be studied. For almost every phenomenon from Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Medicine, Economy and other sciences one can make a mathematical model that can be regarded as a dynamical system. Sometimes the study of this system is extremely difficult, but quite often it can be reduced to the study of a much simpler, low dimensional or symbolic one. This project is devoted mainly to the investigation of the properties of these types of systems from the mathematical point of view. The results that can be obtained are usually much stronger than in the general case and often lead to much deeper understanding of the original systems doc18571 none In this project, meteorologists and applied mathematicians are collaborating to study the weak temperature gradient (WTG) equations for large-scale tropical atmospheric dynamics. The WTG equations form a balance model , or set of singular limit equations, asymptotically valid in a parameter regime relevant to the tropical atmosphere. The WTG equations are designed to facilitate study of key aspects of the tropical climate problem, such as the large-scale dynamical roles of moist convection and other diabatic processes. This focus is achieved by eliminating other processes which can be present in solutions to the primitive equations, such as gravity waves and baroclinic instability, in the same way as gravity waves are eliminated in extratropical balance models such as the quasi-geostrophic equations. One goal of this project is to develop new mathematics by studying the WTG equations properties. Another goal is to solve the equations under geometries, boundary conditions and forcings which represent idealizations of those relevant to the real earth s climate, and then to study the sensitivity of the solutions to key parameters. Achievement of these goals is expected to lead to deeper understanding of both the real climate and more complex mathematical models of it, such as general circulation models (GCMs). The earth s climate system is notoriously complex. Many different physical processes interact in a tangled web of feedbacks to produce the dynamic and variable climate we observe. Unlike a laboratory science, meteorology and oceanography are hindered by the impossibility of controlled experiments which might allow the key mechanisms to be conclusively revealed. We are stuck with the one planet on which we live and cannot change its basic properties to see what happens. Consequently, the science proceeds by observation and by a heavy reliance on numerical simulation with GCMs, which are sophisticated computer programs run on the most powerful computers available. These simulations offer the possibility of a certain kind of controlled climate experiments: we can create virtual earths on the computer, control their properties, and observe their behavior with precision. One obvious limitation of this approach is that the models are imperfect representations of reality. A less obvious, but equally important problem is the models complexity, which both limits the number and type of simulations which can be done and renders the results nearly as difficult to understand as the real climate system. Because of these problems, there is a need to supplement observational and GCM studies with theoretical studies using models that are simpler than GCMs - if not simple enough to allow solution with pencil and paper, then at least using very simple computer programs that run quickly on a PC. To the extent that these simpler models have key features in common with the real system, their simplicity allows a deeper level of understanding of the basic dynamics of climate and leads to explicit hypotheses that can be tested against observations and GCM simulations. This project harnesses the physical insight of climate scientists and the sophisticated methods of applied mathematicians to develop and study simple models designed specifically to represent the tropical atmospheric component of the earth s climate system doc18636 none In this project, jointly funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division and the Atmospheric Chemistry Program of the Division of Atmospheric Sciences of the Directorate for Geosciences, Baer will conduct research on the morphology and chemistry of individual aerosol particles. A unique aerosol time-of-flight mass spectrometer has been developed for this purpose. Individual aerosol particles will be vaporized by an IR laser, and ionized by a VUV laser to allow a quantitative determination of chemical composition, coating thickness, and reaction depth. The data obtained will be of use to researchers in physical chemistry and atmospheric chemistry. In this project a novel instrument will be developed and used for the investigation of the chemistry and morphology of individual aerosol particles. Significant improvements over existing methods are envisioned. The results of this research will be of value to scientists working in physical chemistry and atmospheric chemistry. The results will contribute to a better understanding of the role played by aerosols in the environment and atmospheric pollution. Students and post doctoral research associates will participate in this research doc18637 none The importance of biogels in the function of biological systems is increasingly recognized, yet little theoretical work has been done to understand their behavior. Mathematics is well-suited to sorting out the interplay among the many forces (mechanical, electrochemical, and biochemical) that determine biogel structure and function. The investigators use mathematical tools to explore four closely related problems of biogel growth and dynamics, with an emphasis on pattern-forming mechanisms and the relationship between pattern and function. The four problems are biofilm and blood clot formation and function, gastric protection of the stomach, and the behavior of biogels in contact with a moving fluid. Models are developed to understand how physical properties such as the viscoelastic constitutive properties and the gel morphology are determined and controlled, and how these properties affect the biological function of the biogel. The investigators use analytical and computational tools to examine gel growth and dynamics on different scales using various models (continuum, discrete, isotropic, anisotropic), while attempting to incorporate what is known experimentally, and to expand the experimental database about specific biogel systems. Biogels are composites of water, filamentous protein networks, and other chemicals, and are increasingly recognized as having profound influence on the function of many biological systems. Important biological settings in which these biogels play a major role include blood clot formation, difficult-to-treat bacterial infections, and the proper protective functioning of the stomach lining. Improved understanding of how biogels are formed and how their properties are regulated is critical to understanding these important processes and how they can be manipulated to improve human health. Because the formation and regulation of biogels is governed by physical and chemical properties and because these properties can be expressed mathematically, mathematical tools can be brought to bear on these problems. Through mathematical analysis and computational simulations of biogels, a wealth of detailed data can be obtained that complements the data obtainable from traditional laboratory experiments. Hence the combination of mathematical and experimental investigators brought together in this project is expected to lead to important new insights about biogel behavior. The project includes mathematicians, a bioengineer, and a biologist, and provides interdisciplinary research and training opportunities for students and postdocs doc18638 none Brownian motion, the scaling limit of a simple random walk, is a stochastic model for diffusion. Probability densities for this stochastic process solve the classical diffusion equation. A continuous time random walk is a simple random walk subordinated to a renewal process, used in physics to model anomalous diffusion. Increments of the simple random walk represents particle jumps, and the renewal epochs represent the particle jump times. Infinite variance particle jumps cause superdiffusion, in which a cloud of particles spreads faster than the classical model predicts. Infinite mean waiting times lead to subdiffusion. Scaling limits of continuous time random walks are stochastic processes whose densities solve fractional partial differential equations. Infinite variance particle jumps lead to operator stable Levy motions, while infinite mean waiting times induce subordination to an inverse stable subordinator. Fractional derivatives are generators of stable continuous convolution semigroups. The research funded by this grant is developing a sound mathematical basis for this physical theory, and pursuing practical applications to problems in contaminant transport. The goals of this research include limit theory for continuous time random walks with possible dependence between the jump sizes and the waiting times, extension to more realistic multidimensional jump vectors with matrix scaling to allow different rates of particle spreading in each coordinate, parallel development of multiscaling fractional derivative operators in space, analysis of the fundamental physical basis of fractional diffusion to elucidate the physical meaning of the model parameters, development of useful statistical methods for parameter estimation, numerical methods for fractional partial differential equations, and application of these methods to real data from laboratory and field experiments and remediation efforts involving porous media and fracture flow. Movement of contaminants in a mountain stream takes place over a vast range of time scales. A majority will move away quickly, but a small amount can be caught in eddies for minutes or days. Another fraction may move into the relatively motionless water beneath the streambed, and it may take months or years for the last molecules to disappear completely. The movement of contaminants in underground water spreads over a similar range of time scales. Our team of mathematicians and hydrogeologists uses modern interdisciplinary research methods to develop accurate models for the movement and spread of these contaminants. Much more than an academic exercise, this work is needed for realistic models of contaminant and nutrient movement in drinking water supplies. The research is necessary because existing diffusion models greatly underestimate the time and concentration at which contaminants arrive downstream, when compared to actual data doc18639 none A new approach to calculate the energies, transition rates, hyperfine constants and other related parameters for large atoms with two or more electrons is developed within the framework of relativisitic many-body theory. The goal is to evaluate the amplitudes of parity non-conserving transitions in thallium, lead and bismuth to 1% or better. This will provide invaluable tests of the standard model of electroweak interactions doc18640 none This project continues first principles studies of quantum chromodynamics (the theory of the strong interactions) through the use of high performance computer simulations. Emphasis is to be placed on using improved algorithms to extract the most precise values to date of key numbers in the Standard Model of the fundamental interactions in Nature. Results to be obtained are essential for analyzing experimental measurements at national accelerator laboratories and to test the internal consistency of the Model. They may lead to clues about more fundamental interactions. They will also be used to continue studies of the high temperature phase transition between confined matter and the quark-gluon plasma and of the strange quark content of the plasma. Such a phase transition occurred in the evolution of the early Universe and is thought to be achievable in the laboratory in collisions of heavy ions at the RHIC accelerator, which recently began operation at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. These studies are important for extending our understanding of the most fundamental basis of our physical world and of the origins of our Universe. Algorithmic ideas are likely to have applications in other computational fields doc18641 none Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU), a historically black university (HBU), will establish a year round undergraduate research program which will provide research experience for minority undergraduates in a positive friendly environment. Four students will participate during the academic year while eight (four preferably from community colleges) will participate during the ten week summer program. These students will work with pre-selected mentors on research projects in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, biochemistry, physics and agriculture focused on Material Science for Space and Aerospace Applications. The academic research program will start Fall semester while the summer program will start around the start of June. Orientation will begin on day 1 of the academic year, and revisited at the beginning of the summer program. Faculty mentors will meet with their students to focus on the progress and or problems in research projects. Seminars will be held weekly throughout the program. Speakers will be invited from research-intensive universities (Baylor College of Medicine, University of Texas Houston Medical School and MD Anderson Cancer Center), industry and government. Representation of minority and female presenters will be given special attention. A seminar series will give the students an appreciation of the diversity of available research fields. A panel of minority and women scientists from academia, industry and government will discuss the job opportunities that are available to persons who are involved in scientific research. A second panel discussion will involve former students of PVAMU who have entered Ph.D. programs at Research Intensive Universities (RIUs). There will be three workshops throughout the academic year and summer which will be half-day sessions with open discussion and will include computer tools and technology, scientific writing, and professional career development. Field trips will be arranged to Research Intensive Universities (RIU), agencies and companies such as the Texas Medical Center (TMC) and NASA Johnson Space Center throughout the program. At the end of the ten-week summer session, students will present their research in oral and written form. E-mail: Laura_Carson@pvamu.edu or Gloria_Regisford@pvamu.edu for information and an application doc18642 none It is proposed to conduct local spectroscopic and potentiometric measurements on submicron scale devices to investigate some of the most interesting issues in mesoscopic physics. The tools that will be developed will enable a host of new experimental investigations that would not be possible by any other means. The probe to be used in these studies is scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), one that has been used extensively in recent years to investigate structures on the nanometer scale. The requirements of the proposed experiments necessitate the assembly of a number of experimental techniques in one experimental tool, which has not been done before. After assembly of the instrument, the experiments to be performed involve imaging the magnetic vortices created in a superconducting film by an external magnetic field, and by the magnetic field emanating from ferromagnetic particles embedded in the film. The project will entail a close collaboration with Professor Herve Courtois group at the CRTBT in Grenoble, France. Ferromagnets are becoming increasingly important as components of a wide variety of potentially useful devices. These experiments seek to answer a number of fundamental questions regarding the properties of ferromagnets on the nanometer scale, and their interactions with other materials such as superconductors. Given the increasing importance of scanning probe microscopies in investigating and characterizing the properties of nanoscale systems, the students involved in this project will be well-trained in techniques that will be useful in their future careers, whether those careers are in industry, academia, or government laboratories doc18638 none Brownian motion, the scaling limit of a simple random walk, is a stochastic model for diffusion. Probability densities for this stochastic process solve the classical diffusion equation. A continuous time random walk is a simple random walk subordinated to a renewal process, used in physics to model anomalous diffusion. Increments of the simple random walk represents particle jumps, and the renewal epochs represent the particle jump times. Infinite variance particle jumps cause superdiffusion, in which a cloud of particles spreads faster than the classical model predicts. Infinite mean waiting times lead to subdiffusion. Scaling limits of continuous time random walks are stochastic processes whose densities solve fractional partial differential equations. Infinite variance particle jumps lead to operator stable Levy motions, while infinite mean waiting times induce subordination to an inverse stable subordinator. Fractional derivatives are generators of stable continuous convolution semigroups. The research funded by this grant is developing a sound mathematical basis for this physical theory, and pursuing practical applications to problems in contaminant transport. The goals of this research include limit theory for continuous time random walks with possible dependence between the jump sizes and the waiting times, extension to more realistic multidimensional jump vectors with matrix scaling to allow different rates of particle spreading in each coordinate, parallel development of multiscaling fractional derivative operators in space, analysis of the fundamental physical basis of fractional diffusion to elucidate the physical meaning of the model parameters, development of useful statistical methods for parameter estimation, numerical methods for fractional partial differential equations, and application of these methods to real data from laboratory and field experiments and remediation efforts involving porous media and fracture flow. Movement of contaminants in a mountain stream takes place over a vast range of time scales. A majority will move away quickly, but a small amount can be caught in eddies for minutes or days. Another fraction may move into the relatively motionless water beneath the streambed, and it may take months or years for the last molecules to disappear completely. The movement of contaminants in underground water spreads over a similar range of time scales. Our team of mathematicians and hydrogeologists uses modern interdisciplinary research methods to develop accurate models for the movement and spread of these contaminants. Much more than an academic exercise, this work is needed for realistic models of contaminant and nutrient movement in drinking water supplies. The research is necessary because existing diffusion models greatly underestimate the time and concentration at which contaminants arrive downstream, when compared to actual data doc18626 none There is a growing consensus among scientists that aspects of our planet s climate are changing due to human influences, though the scientific community acknowledges that substantial uncertainty exists regarding the forms, levels, and impacts of change. Quantifying these uncertainties requires new statistical research informed by climate science. Effective solutions to climate change problems will rely on new methods for combining the information content of models and data in a fashion that quantitatively manages uncertainty. The research team will rely extensively on Bayesian hierarchical modeling and analysis strategies. Specific projects will include (1) developing new probabilistic climate change assessments based on an extensive suite of climate simulations; (2) statistical procedures for combining different climate models to produce climate projections; and (3) assessing regional and local impacts of global climate behavior. Describing the Earth s climate and predicting its responses to human influences are critical problems in science and public policy. The research team of statisticians and climate modeling experts from the National Center for Atmospheric Research will develop new statistical strategies that combine observations with the information present in computer models for the climate system, while managing the uncertainties implicit in both. Assessing potential impacts of climate change on the environment and human activities is also fraught with uncertainty. The research team will develop integrated methods for predicting climate impacts on regional and local phenomena. These methods will be applied in predicting the El Nino-Southern Oscillation and properties of tornado occurrence in the Central United States doc18645 none This award wil support the experimental nuclear physics group at Florida State University. The research will be carried out at the FSU Tandem LINAC accelerator facility and at other laboratories around the U.S. Nine FSU faculty members are actively involved. Research focus areas include a variety of nuclear reactions of astrophysical importance, isospin purity of nuclei, new insights into nuclear collective behavior, and properties of loosely bound halo nuclei. The FSU has had primary responsibility for the Ring Imaging Cherenkov detector for the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), and will pursue electron measurements to look for nuclear medium effects on the perperties of light vector mesons. At Jefferson Laboratory, the FSU group will use high-quality tagged photon beams at the CLAS detector to search fo rmesons with so-called exotic quantum numbers. This activity also ties directly to participation in the development of the proposed Hall D detector for Jefferson Laboratory. Graduate education will be an essential component of the group s activities doc18646 none Research in theoretical elementary particle physics will be concerned with the production of the so-called Higgs particle , and the W and Z particles, at high-energy colliders. Precise calculations of the rates for production of these particles and their decay patterns will be performed. The existence of the Higgs particle is predicted by the current theory of the weak nuclear force. The W and Z particles are the carriers of the weak nuclear force, and the calculations to be carried out are important to the testing of our understanding of this force and of the origin of mass doc18647 none The NSF proposal enables the PI to continue and expand his research activities at Jefferson Lab, Newport News, VA, in collaboration with the nuclear physics group at CUA. The research program concentrates on those experiments that are expected to have a major impact in our understanding of the spectrum of excited nucleons and the constituent quark models. Various model calculations show that the photoproduction of vector mesons and hyperons is most sensitive in the search for missing resonances , i.e. excited nucleon states which are predicted by constituent quark models but haven t been observed experimentally. The experimental program covers analysis projects as well as the design of new instrumentations, especially a frozen spin target and highly segmented start counters, for polarization experiments in Jefferson Lab s Hall B, the only place where such experiments can be performed doc18648 none Lieberman Chemically reactive plasma discharges are widely used in the semiconductor and flat panel display industries for etching and deposition processes: moreover, their use has become critical for very large scale integrated (VLSI) circuit and thin film transistor (TFT) production. High density rf inductively coupled plasma sources are playing an increasing role in processing as feature sizes shrink and as wafer and TFT substrate sizes increase. This proposal is for continuation of research on such discharges. Almost all processing applications require the use of fluorine, chlorine or oxygen-containing feedstock gases, which produces an electronegative discharge plasma containing a high concentration of negative ions. Such discharges have been found to be unstable in certain regimes of discharge pressure and applied radio frequency power, adversely affecting processing performance. The proposed research program has the following components: (a) Experiments will be performed and analytical models will be developed for instabilities in inductively coupled plasma sources with electronega-tive gas feedstocks. The program continues the PIs experiments with more complete diagnostics and improves the chemistry in their present models, which now only qualitatively agree with the experimental results. (b) They will perform general theo-retical studies of electronegative discharges in support of (a) above, continuing a program to develop increasingly accurate models. The experimental studies of electronegative discharge equilibrium, hysteresis, and instabilities will be performed in a planar inductive discharge (transformer-coupled plasma, or TCP) of the conventional type used for VLSI processing. A sulfur hexafluoride argon feedstock gas mixture allowing control of the negative ion density will be used doc18649 none Quantitative methods for the display and analysis of a complex mixture of proteins are needed to analyze changes in the proteome. Two-dimensional gels are capable of separating a large number of proteins and permit visualization of patterns of protein expression and post-translational modification (PTM) under different physiological conditions--but suffer from gel-to-gel reproducibility problems. The best post-separation protein staining methods are able to detect proteins down to the range of about 300-1,000 copies per cell, a level insufficient to monitor many important cellular control proteins that are present in low copy numbers. New fluorescent dyes that are designed to overcome major limitations in proteomic methods, as commonly practiced using two-dimensional gel electrophoresis, will be synthesized and tested in this project. The new dyes are designed to (1) enhance sensitivity about 300 fold to allow detection of proteins in the range of 1-3 copies per cell, (2) increase the solubility of dye-labeled proteins for increasing loading capacity and reduction of gel artifacts to foster improved protein identification by mass spectrometry, (3) allow multicolor detection of proteins produced by cells under different physiological conditions, and (4) permit removal of dyes from labeled proteins to enhance protease cleavage and improve identification of proteins by mass spectrometry. The novel, ultrasensitive, multiplex proteomics methods under development promise to be very widely useful in biological research and education doc18650 none Studies of both plant and animal genes have illustrated the key role that chromatin and chromatin modulators play in regulating gene expression during development. Correct spatial and developmental expression of phaseolin, the major seed storage protein in bean, requires chromosomal integration. Chromatin structural analyses have established that a nucleosome is rotationally positioned over the phaseolin promoter in non-seed tissue, thereby blocking transcription initiation. This repressive chromatin structure is disrupted prior to beta-phaseolin gene activation in the maturing embryo, suggesting a mechanism by which gene expression can be regulated during development. However, the role that tissue-specific transcription factors and chromatin modulators play in the transition from a silenced to an active phaseolin gene has not been elucidated. The overall aim of this project is to develop an in vitro chromatin assembly and transcription assay to study chromatin-mediated regulation of plant genes. To achieve this goal, the PI will combine existing animal in vitro chromatin assembly systems and a previously developed plant in vitro transcription assay with purified plant transcription factors to reconstitute phaseolin gene regulation in vitro. The three specific aims are 1) to reconstitute physiological chromatin on the phaseolin gene in vitro, 2) to transcribe the phaseolin gene in vitro using a tobacco cell transcription extract, and 3) to reconstitute hormonal and tissue-specific regulation of phaseolin gene expression in vitro. Results from these studies will provide definitive evidence that the chromatin assembly transcription system faithfully recapitulates the endogenous chromosomal context and tissue-specific expression pattern of a plant gene in vitro. If successful, this in vitro system may provide a universal tool for elucidating the mechanisms driving chromatin-mediated gene regulation in plants. An increased understanding of how chromatin context influences gene expression during plant development will greatly facilitate the engineering of stable transgenic plants for both commercial and agricultural use doc18651 none Tabakin Past research on predicting spin observables in the photoproduction of mesons led us to an interest in the general dynamics of spin, which is an integral part of the new field of quantum computing. Examination of strong interaction dynamics led us to the subject of nonlinear interactions. Therefore, the focus of our research evolved into two directions; (1) the application and development of a new approach to solving nonlinear equations and (2) the study of the behavior of qubits (typically an atomic or nuclear spin system) and their role in quantum computing and information. A novel quasilinearization method has already been shown, with Prof. Mandelzweig (Hebrew University), to yield rapid convergence for a wide range of nonlinear Physics problems. We plan to combine that method with a wavelet basis approach to examine nonlinear shock-wave and soliton problems. Development of methods for treating nonlinear dynamics has broad applications in many other fields, such as in biology and economics, where effects are enhanced by dependence on higher powers of interaction. Quantum Computing hopes to use quantum spin effects to perform otherwise impossible computational feats. We will focus on developing a computer simulation of a quantum computer. The time evolution of the spin density matrix for a quantum computer will include quantum gates and error corrections, plus the effect of the environment. The goal will be to study the stability of a quantum computer under the influence of loss of quantum coherence and entanglement. This will indicate the feasibility of producing an actual quantum computer. Graduate student researchers will work in both of these activities, which provide excellent and broad training that will lead to opportunities for them in many directions doc18652 none The Boise Extravaganza in Set Theory (BEST) is an annual conference in Set Theory hosted by Boise State University. It has run continuously since it began in and is the only regular conference in North America devoted primarily to Set Theory. The talks and the participants are representative of set theoretic research in North America with topics ranging from large cardinals, cardinal invariants of the continuum, core models, fine structure, descriptive set theory, set theoretic topology and analysis, forcing axioms, and combinatorics. The small scale of the conference --- about 20 participants, most presenting talks --- allows for an informal atmosphere and encourages discussion between the representatives of various areas of set theory. The general format is that of a three day conference. Four invited talks running approximately 50 minutes each are spread throughout the conference with the remainder of the schedule consisting of shorter contributed talks. NSF funds are used to cover the expenses of the invited speakers and to help defray the local and travel expenses of those who do not have their own form of travel support, especially graduate students. The organizers make a sincere effort to invite women, minorities, and young members of the field doc18653 none The Small Grant for Exploratory Research will support a national random digit dial telephone survey of public reaction to the terrorists attacks on September 11, . The survey will examine the impact of the events from sociological and psychological perspectives, including behavioral, affective, and cognitive aspects. It will consider responses at both the individual and collective levels. Survey items will focus on four major areas: (1) interpersonal communication, (2) personal and communal responses, (3) psychological and psycho-physiological responses, and (4) basic beliefs and values. In selecting questions for the survey the investigators will draw significantly from the Presidential Assignation Study and from the NSF-supported General Social Survey. By using existing questions, the PIs will be able to compare responses to those that occurred during both another period of national tragedy and to those that occur during more normal times. Oversampling will also be done in the New York City area will allow comparisons of responses of people near ground zero who likely to have viewed some of the events directly and to have personal ties to areas and people directly involved with others who were more remote. On a general theoretical level, the investigators will test existing hypotheses about how social support and interpersonal networks, socio-economic status, and religious beliefs affect how people cope with tragedy doc18654 none Investigations in theoretical high energy physics in areas of supersymmetry phenomenology, CP violation, dark matter and extra dimensions and their applications to model building will be carried out. The implications of the data from the Brookhaven g-2 experiment and of RUNII of the Tevatron for supersymmetry and surperstring theory will be explored. Correlated studies of nonuniversalities, flavor and CP violation in grand unified and string models will be carried out with the goal of achieving correlated predictions for the electric dipole moments of leptons and of flavor violating processes. This investigation is of importance in view of the proposed experiments for the sensitive search of the muon electric dipole moment and of the process mu-e+gamma. Studies of the amount of supersymmetric dark matter in the coannihilation region including effects of nonuniversalities will be carried out. Further, studies of dark matter under the influence of CP violation will also be carrried out in the coannihilation region. Additional research will include investigations of new grand unified models which can remove the current constraint on such models brought about by the recent SuperKamiokande limit on the p-nubar+K mode. Such models include grand unified models with large representations and models in extra dimensions. Specifically the possible deduction of supergravity GUTs with a cascade from higher dimensional supergravity theories to lower dimensional ones along with supersymmetry breaking related to extra dimensions will be investigated doc18655 none Miller This project is concerned with modeling and algorithmic issues surrounding functional brain imaging from diffuse optical wave data. The primary objective is to efficiently obtain high-quality spatial and temporal three-dimensional image maps of hemodynamic processes in the brain from sparsely sampled scattered wavefield data in conjunction with auxiliary data collected from fMRI scans. The specific aims are: 1) development of spatial and temporal inversion algorithms that exploit the high spatial resolution of simultaneously available MRI and fMRI data as well as the high temporal resolution of diffuse optical wavefield data, 2) fast solution of the underlying forward problem that models that physics of the diffuse optical scattering problem and 3) validation of the algorithms and efficiency using data from experimental studies. One level of efficiency and accuracy will be achieved by developing a low-dimensional, spatially adaptive parameterization of the unknown physical parameters (specifically, optical scattering and absorption coefficients) that reduces the ill-posedness of the inverse problem and concentrates degrees of freedom so as to focus resolution over cortical regions of interest. Further spatial accuracy will be achieved by constraint-based incorporation of anatomical information provided by MRI and fMRI images. To attain better computational efficiency, the proposed work will also focus on parallel, preconditioned Krylov subspace methods for solving the linearized subproblems that arise at every iteration of the inversion process. In the interest of amortizing the cost in temporal imaging, the proposed research will also address how to optimally exploit information obtained from previous reconstructions. All modeling and algorithmic work will be validated and modified based on experimentally obtained diffuse optical and MRI data doc18656 none The research discussed here deals with the implications of a very unusual form of energy. The existence of this so-called negative energy is allowed by the laws of quantum field theory, which describe the behavior of matter and energy on microscopic scales. Since negative energy would have repulsive gravitational effects, this work lies at the intersection of quantum field theory and Einstein s theory of gravity, general relativity. The focus of the research is the extended investigation of restrictions imposed by the laws of physics on negative energy. These generalized restrictions would involve the placement of constraints on the distribution of negative energy in both time and space. In addition, the scope of the constraints would be extended to include the effects of gravitation. Regions of negative energy also appear to be accompanied by large fluctuations in energy density, which could perhaps lead to large fluctuations in the gravitational fields produced by the negative energy. How this would affect the description of gravity, given in Einstein s theory as the curvature of the geometry of space and time, in these circumstances is currently not well understood. It is hoped to investigate this issue as well. These topics are of interest for several reasons. Situations involving negative energy, such as the Casimir effect and squeezed states of light, have been produced in the laboratory. The amounts of negative energy generated in these experiments are extremely tiny. However, if the laws of physics impose no constraints on negative energy, then one might be able to create large amounts of it and thereby produce bizarre macroscopic effects. Such effects could include: traversable wormholes (tunnels connecting otherwise distant regions of space and time), warp drives (for faster-than-light travel), time machines for travel into the past, violations of the second law of thermodynamics (e.g., refrigerators requiring no power sources), and the destruction of black holes (the remains of collapsed dead stars). However, research by Larry Ford and the author has shown that quantum field theory does impose some rather strong restrictions on negative energy. These constraints have come to be known as quantum inequalities , and yield severe limitations on the macroscopic effects of negative energy mentioned above. Loosely speaking, they say that large negative energies can exist for only short periods of time. It has recently been realized that even the currently known quantum inequalities, although formulated as restrictions in time, can be used to rule out or constrain the ways in which negative energy can be distributed in space as well. These results, together with some explicit examples of spatial distributions of negative energy which are allowed by the laws of physics, indicate that negative energy must be subtly intertwined with positive energy in space. Must this always be the case? A major focus of the proposed investigation will be to narrow the gap between distributions which can be ruled out and those which are definitely allowed. The latter will involve the construction and analysis of additional explicit examples. This represents a continuation of my previous research and essentially aims to extend the scope of all of these results doc18657 none This research project investigates the transition from hadronic degrees of freedom to quark-gluon degrees of freedom in several systems, both nucleons and light nuclei. This will be done by investigating short-range structure in light nuclei on the one hand, and quark-hadron duality on the other hand. Both parts of the research program are immediately relevant to the experimental program at Jefferson Lab. This project will contribute to current research at a national facility, and provide training for students at The Ohio State University. Coincidence electron scattering from nuclei is the canonical tool for investigating short-range structures. Many properties of nuclei can be described in a picture containing only nucleons, deltas, and the lightest mesons. However, it is clear that when one proceeds to smaller distances, or higher energies and momenta used to explore the nuclei, one will find a situation where the relevant degrees of freedom are no longer the hadrons, but quarks and gluons. Appropriate theoretical tools for disentangling the nuclear ground state information from the data will be developed and tested, and suitable observables will be identified. I will also perform conventional nuclear physics baseline calculations for processes in which one expects to observe the onset of color transparency. Quark-hadron duality states that in certain kinematical regions, the proper average of hadronic observables is described by a perturbative QCD result. While this phenomenon is well established experimentally, a satisfying theoretical explanation of duality is still lacking. Modeling duality and studying how it arises in simple models is the most promising road to understanding duality. This project will continue this approach. I will focus on providing the necessary theoretical understanding for the highly promising applications of duality, which will allow for the extraction of deep inelastic information from resonance data doc18658 none mathematical formulations more understandable through simple physical examples, and in convincing teachers and textbook writers that students deserve something better than the traditional ( Copenhagen ) approach, the one Feynman could not understand. The second focus of this research is quantum information theory, the fundamental science behind both quantum computing and quantum cryptography. Classical information theory was developed half a century ago by Claude Shannon, and plays an important role in the modern theory of communication, as in the efficient use of weak radio signals to transmit information from distant space probes to the earth. Quantum information theory generalizes Shannon s ideas to situations where quantum effects are important, and while it has had some notable successes, it has also run into the following difficulty: Shannon s formulation is based on the use of probabilities, but incorporating probabilities into quantum mechanics in a consistent way is the source of many of the conceptual difficulties that troubled Feynman. The histories approach resolves the problem of quantum probabilities in a consistent manner that allows an immediate extension of many of Shannon s ideas into the quantum domain. Whether this provides a satisfactory foundation for quantum information theory remains to be seen, but it looks promising. If it succeeds, there will be a double benefit: a clearer understanding of what quantum computing and cryptography can and cannot do, and a new way to think about quantum mechanical processes in terms of the generation and transmission of information doc18659 none The process of gravitational collapse with an emphasis on strong field effects and the threshold of black hole formation will be studied. This work will examine the collapse of a variety of matter fields with axial symmetry. A numerical code which has been developed and successfully tested for vacuum gravitational collapse and scalar field collapse in axisymmetry will be extended in new directions in order to consider additional fields and more extreme scenarios. Included in these directions is the incorporation of adaptive mesh refinement which will provide high resolution for large dynamic ranges. An additional gravitational degree of freedom will be added as well as electromagnetism. Work will continue on examining the head-on collision of black holes and boson stars using black hole excision. This work will advance understanding of strong field gravity and will provide new and important dynamical results concerning black hole formation and evolution. In addition, this work will aid in the ongoing development of a computational laboratory with which to explore the gravitational processes and astrophysical objects in the universe doc18660 none Lieb The understanding of the interaction of many particles, e.g., atoms, raises significant physical and mathematical questions, some of which go back to the early days of quantum theory and statistical mechanics. The theory encompasses such classical subjects as the stability of solids as well as some very recent experimental developments on the strange and wonderful properties of trapped gases of bosonic atoms -- which might eventually shed light on how to store information on ultra-small scales. Among the topics in this project two stand out for particular emphasis. One is the understanding of Bose-Einstein condensation and superfluidity in Bose gases. Considerable progress in this area has already been made in previous grants by the PI and collaborators. The other concerns ongoing attempts to understand quantum electrodynamics which continues to be one of the most accurate physical theories, yet one of the most puzzling because of its internal inconsistencies. The PI will continue his attempts to reconcile quantum electrodynamics with true many-body physics doc18661 none The Langlands-Shelstad conjecture (and its special case, the so-called fundamental lemma) has emerged as one of the most pressing and stubborn problems in the modern approach to automorphic forms and representation theory. The principal investigator, together with his colleagues Robert MacPherson and Robert Kottwitz, have discovered that the kappa-orbital integrals which occur in the fundamental lemma may be expressed as the trace of Frobenius acting on the cohomology of an affine Springer fiber . So the (conjectured) fundamental lemma is equivalent to a (fairly complicated) statement concerning the structure of the cohomology groups of affine Springer fibers. (An affine Springer fiber is the fixed point set, on the flag manifold of a loop group, or of a Kac-Moody Lie group, of the vectorfield which is determined by a semisimple element in the Lie algebra of the group. These researchers have been able to prove the required cohomological statement for affine Springer fibers which are associated to elements in unramified tori in the loop group. They are addressing the many technical problems associated with understanding the homology of affine Springer fibers associated to elements of ramified tori. In the s, R. Langlands (of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton N.J.) developed an elaborate theory, indicating that there should be deep and hidden connections between several widely separated areas in mathematics: number theory, representation theory, algebraic geometry, and automorphic forms. He showed, for example, how results from representation theory could be used to deduce results in number theory. This vision was so far-reaching and broad in scope that it became known as Langlands program , and it is perhaps the mathematician s version of grand unification . However, most of this program was conjectural and to some degree, even speculative. Progress on these conjectures was slow at first, as research in this subject demands an understanding of several different, highly technical branches of mathematics. Nevertheless, after decades of research by scores of dedicated and talented mathematicians worldwide, enormous progress has been made on Langlands conjectures. For example, Andrew Wiles celebrated proof of Fermat s Last Theorem depends in an essential way on some of these results. However, one step in this program, which was originally felt to be a relatively minor one, has turned out to be one of the most difficult questions in the area: the so-called fundamental lemma (and its generalization, the Langlands-Shelstad conjecture). While the supporting evidence for this conjecture is overwhelming, the conjecture has only been proven, after Herculean efforts, in a handful of special cases. It is a stubborn obstacle which threatens to indefinitely delay further progress in the area. The principal investigator and his colleagues Robert MacPherson (Institute for Advanced Study) and Robert Kottwitz (University of Chicago) have discovered that the Langlands-Shelstad conjecture may be restated in terms of the geometrical properties of certain objects ( affine Springer fibers ) which have recently attracted the attention of mathematicians for completely different reasons. Using these geometric techniques, the investigator and his colleagues expect to outline a proof for the Langlands-Shelstad conjecture in a broad class of cases, the so-called unramified cases. They are also addressing the many difficulties involved with the remaining ramified cases. It is expected that this exciting connection between Langlands program and Springer theory will lead to new developments in both subjects doc18662 none The primary goal of this program is to develop two-photon lasers that operate in different regimes and that are based on a new technique for super-enhancing the two-photon stimulated emission process in laser driven potassium. The researchers are using this device to explore the operating characteristics of a broad-area two-photon laser that is expected to spontaneously form two-dimensional bright localized structures in a dark background (transverse spatial solitons), a topic of current interested in the nonlinear and laser dynamics communities. They are also investigating whether the system displays quantum images, that is, quantum-correlated spatial structures. In addition, the researchers are performing experiments to determine whether the single-transverse-mode version of the laser is capable of generating bright polarization-entangled twin beams of light, which may be useful in application such as quantum lithography, for example. In the final phase of the project, the researchers are using an ultra-high-finesse optical resonator to head toward the regime of strong atom-cavity coupling for two-photon processes, which may find applications in multiple photon quantum state engineering and the controlled generation of two-photon states. The research is being conducted in an interdisciplinary environment that has been successful in recruiting and retaining women scientists. An international collaboration is another important educational aspect of the program doc18663 none Cold atom interactions and dilute Fermi degenerate atomic gases have become very dynamic areas of research. One of the most intriguing new frontiers is the creation of quantum degenerate dipolar fermionic gases. Such gases are predicted to exhibit exciting new phenomena including dipole-induced mean field effects and, perhaps, BCS superfluidity. Ultracold dipolar gases could also play a role in the construction of a robust quantum computer. Dilute Fermi degenerate atomic gases have numerous features that need to be explored. Similar to their charged particle counterparts (electrons), their behavior in the condensed state will be varied and depend crucially on the subtleties of their interactions. Very little is known about ultracold dipolar Fermi systems. One promising route to the study of such systems is through evaporative and sympathetic cooling of magnetically trapped atomic gases. The goal of this research proposal is to investigate the magnetic trapping and evaporative cooling of Fermionic atoms, the interactions between cold and ultracold atoms, and the possible creation of atomic Fermi degenerate gases with high magnetic moment. This will be accomplished using magnetically trapped metal atoms (such as chromium). Spectroscopy will be used for detection of the trapped species. Precise determination of elastic and inelastic collisional cross sections will provide important information about these systems. Fermi degeneracy will be pursued through a combination of laser cooling and evaporative cooling of magnetically trapped co-resident bosonic and fermionic isotopes doc18664 none Recognizing an opportunity to address new physics, a strong collaboration representing 20 institutions, has formed and is proposing funding for the project entitled Rare Symmetry Violating Processes (RSVP). RSVP represents an opportunity to empower the university community to make discoveries of extraordinary importance. The current scope of RSVP includes 130 scientists, about 60% from the United States, and the others from Canada, Switzerland, Italy, Japan, and Russia, along with an expected 100 graduate students and post-docs. KOPIO, a component of the RSVP project, is an experiment to measure the branching ratio of the decay of a neutral K meson into a neutral pion, a neutrino, and an anti-neutrino. The interest in this decay mode is that it yields the single, most incisive determination of the parameter describing CP (or time reversal symmetry) violation involving quarks. This in turn will shed light on the reason that our Universe is populated with matter, rather than equal amounts of matter and anti-matter as expected from the naive Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe. This matter anti-matter asymmetry, a critical factor in our origins, is one of the fundamental issues in particle physics today doc18665 none Our proposed research program is directed towards developing a better understanding of the quark structure of protons, neutronsand light nuclei. Particular emphasis is placed on measurements of electromagnetic and weak properties of the nucleon using electron scattering at Jefferson Laboratory and MIT-Bates. Such data provide precise information about the spatial distribution of charge and magnetization in the nucleon. A major component of our program is the G0 experiment at Jefferson Laboratory, in which parity violation in polarized electron scattering from hydrogen and deuterium is used to identify the contribution of strange quark-antiquark pairs to the proton s charge and magnetic moment. Coupled to this activity is the determination of anapole contributions to proton structure, which arise from parity-violating electromagnetic effects. Also proposed are studies of nucleon excitations using polarization measurements of the recoiling nucleon, and the use of kaon electroproduction to create hypernuclei in which one nucleon in a nuclear system is replaced by a lambda particle doc18666 none Research in theoretical elementary particle physics will focus on the phenomenology of noncommutative spacetime, the physics of extra spatial dimensions, including higher-dimensional theories of particle masses, and six-quark cluster models of the deuteron. The first two topics deal with the possibility that the structure of spacetime itself may be altered at distance scales just beneath those currently accessible in experiments. This leads to novel particle physics signatures and provides a new framework for understanding the mysterious pattern of elementary particle masses. The third topic deals with a model for the short-distance structure of the deuteron (the nucleus of an isotope of hydrogen) that may lead to a better understanding of the dynamics of the strong nuclear force doc18667 none March 6, PI: Gustavo Ponce. Proposal title : Nonlinear Dispersive Equations. In recent years there has been a significant progress on the study of qualitative behavior of solution to nonlinear dispersive systems. The relation between dispersive and nonlinear effects has motivated several remarkable works. Among them one finds sharp local and global wellposedness theories under minimal regularity assumptions on the data, precise blow up results as well as ill-posedness ones. As a consequence our understanding of several phenomena in nature is now more complete. The principal investigator will focus on several representative problems connected with partial differential equations arising in wave propagation and fluid mechanics. The wave propagation in diverse mediums and the interaction of different kind of waves can be modeled by complicated systems of partial differential equations. These systems involve many variables which depends of the particular physical setting of the problem. In many cases, these systems are too complicated to be treated with reasonable accuracy, thus one has to consider approximated models. The validity of these approximations is essential to further study of the physical phenomenon. One has to give precise conditions under which the qualitative behavior of the solution of these approximated models captures the features of the physical setting. It is here where the theoretical study of these solutions become essential. Thus, one starts with special solutions and its properties, stability, long time behavior, ill-posedness, etc. In situations where these theoretical results are unavailable one needs to start the study with appropriate numerical simulations doc18668 none Peter S. Bearman and Mary Clark Columbia University The project will collect the first wave of narrative oral histories from six samples of New York residents with varying degrees of contact with the World Trade Center. These oral histories are planned as the first wave of what would be three waves of interviews that would track how individuals narrative accounts of those events are shaped over time by public narratives and come to conform to a standard narrative account. The project will also analyze differences in these narrative accounts across the six New York samples, comparing for instance, the stories from people who lost family members, stories from surviving rescue workers, and stories from the general population less directly involved in the World Trade Center events. The use of oral histories will provide broad textual sources that reveal not only what people know but how people (and society) construct narratives and create meanings for critical events such as September 11. Network and sequence analysis methods will be used to explore the structure of how the textual elements are put together into a coherent narrative, and how that structure changes over time and differs among groups doc18669 none Leifer This award supports a one year planning visit between Professor Ira Leifer at the University of California at Santa Barbara and Professor Tomoaki Kunugi of Kyoto University in Japan and Professor Katsumi Tsuchiya of the University of Tokushima in Japan. The researchers will devise a plan to improve understanding of the behavior of deep-sea bubbles by intercomparing field observations with laboratory studies. Currently, few studies exist in the literature on these bubbles, and thus incorporation of appropriate parameterizations of deep-sea bubble behavior (chemico-hydrodynamic) into numerical simulations requires potentially unjustified assumptions. Research to generate more realistic parameterizations will improve the accuracy of numerical models of processes such as hydrocarbon seepage bubble-mediated gas transfer into the ocean and atmosphere. This research will facilitate collaboration between three groups with complementary expertise and capabilities, allowing an important technical problem to be addressed with a broad array of modern methods. Professor Leifer has expertise both in laboratory research of bubble hydrodynamics (at atmospheric pressure) and field bubble observations at depths from 20 to 540 m. Professor Tsuchiya has experience in laboratory research both at atmospheric and high pressure, and is a well-recognized theoretical expert on bubbles and bubble wake hydrodynamics. Professor Kunugi is a well-recognized expert on direct numerical simulation of two-phase flows. The project will offer a good opportunity to join efforts between the two countries. This research impacts important areas such as oceanic carbon dioxide injection to counter human emissions, studying the fate of seep oil and hydrocarbons in the environment, and the use of rising seep bubbles for location of marine petroleum resources. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation doc18670 none This proposal supports an experimental research program that studies atomic coherence and interference phenomena in cold atoms, and explores related applications in nonlinear optics and quantum optics. The approach is based on interactions of multilevel atoms with multiple laser fields that lead to electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) and dramatic enhancement of optical nonlinearities. Cold atoms confined in a magneto-optical trap (MOT) are well suited for this type of fundamental studies because of the high atomic density in a MOT and the near zero Doppler shift experienced by the atoms. The objectives are to study nonlinear optical phenomena manifested by quantum coherence and interference at low light intensities and carry out nonlinear spectroscopic measurements in coherently prepared rubidium atoms. Specific experiments include giant Kerr nonlinearities manifested by EIT, absorptive photon switching at the single-photon energy level, the EIT enhanced four-wave mixing at low light intensities and its application in photon storage and recall, experimental quantification of dark-state decoherence, and the time-dependent response of the EIT medium. The program provides research related education and training activities for graduate and undergraduate students, especially for minority students, who make up more than 65% of the total student population at Florida International University doc18671 none Seventh US National Congress on Computational Mechanics Albuquerque Convention Center Albuquerque, New Mexico, August 4-6, The U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics, USACM, has asked a group of scientists from academia and government to organize the 7th National Congress on Computational Mechanics, to take place in the Albuquerque Convention Center, August 4-6, . The Albuquerque meeting will occur at a time of increasing interest in computational mechanics, spurred by innovative approaches in materials engineering, nanotechnology, biology and medical science and by the availability of powerful new parallel and distributed computing systems. The biannual Congresses of the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics are major scientific events that attract an international audience. The seventh U.S. Congress, hosted by Sandia National Laboratories, will highlight the latest developments in all aspects of computational mechanics - from new applications in nanotechnology and bioengineering to recent advances in numerical methods and high-performance computing. The technical program features invited plenary lectures by distinguished experts as well as minisymposia that focus on topics of current scientific interest. Participants will have a special opportunity to experience the unique scientific environment of Sandia National Laboratories through interactions with research staff and to envision its future in initiatives such as the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT) and the Microsystems and Engineering Sciences Applications Complex (MESA). The 7th Congress will be the first where a National Laboratory is taking the lead organizational role. Dr. Bickel, director of the Engineering Sciences Center of Sandia National Laboratories, and Professor Fish, vice-president of USACM, will be the Congress general co-chairs. Dr. Bickel will exploit Sandia s many contacts in industry, academia, and government in planning and promoting the conference. Sandia will also provide administrative support, drawing on its extensive experience in planning scientific events. Dr. Christon from Sandia and Professor Haber from the University of Illinois will co-chair the technical program. The Local Organizing Committee is comprised of Tom Bickel, Mark Christon, Jacob Fish (RPI) and Robert Haber (University of Illinois). The Congress organizers are working closely with the Executive Committee of USACM, which is currently composed of twenty distinguished computational mechanicians, including the past presidents Ted Belytschko, Thomas Hughes, Tinsley Oden, Ahmed Noor, J.N. Reddy and Mark Shephard. Our main objective is to bring together the diverse communities that are active in computational mechanics and to promote interactions between government, academia and industry. We will make a concentrated effort to attract new participants from consulting engineering firms and from key computer and software companies, while retaining the Congress s core constituency of scientists from academia and government laboratories. We also plan to support the participation of young researchers, especially graduate students, affording them a unique opportunity to disseminate their research results, to contact potential employers, and to learn about the latest advances in this rapidly developing field. Complete information about the meeting is available at the Congress web http: www.esc.sandia.gov usnccm.html doc18672 none The central theme of this proposal is the development of new methods for approximately solving the Schroedinger equation for atomic nuclei and their application to problems of contemporary importance in nuclear structure physics. Methods having their parentage in the nuclear shell model and in mean-field theory will be considered, with the goal of developing algorithms that significantly expand their ranges of applicability. A principal focus will be on the development of the Density Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG), a method first introduced in the context of quantum spin lattices. Here we will focus on a new DMRG methodology that is tailored to such finite fermi systems as the atomic nucleus. We will also consider its application to an important non-nuclear problem, the two-dimensional Hubbard model, which is of relevance to systems that undergo transitions to superconductivity at high critical temperatures. A second focus will be on the properties of weakly-bound nuclei far from stability. A method recently proposed for reliably solving the Hartree Fock Bogolyubov mean-field equations for very weakly-bound nuclei will be developed further, so as to make it computationally more viable, and will then be applied systematically to both spherical and axially-deformed nuclei throughout the periodic table. Other methods for solving the Hartree Fock Bogolyubov equations in weakly-bound systems will also be considered, to make sure that the spatial properties of such systems are being reliably treated doc18673 none To recognize and build upon recent advances within the Langlands program, a conference with the above title has been approved by CIRM for June 17-28, . The investigators, who are among the organizers, feel that such a conference will serve to advance the careers of any young researchers who are in attendance. We are proposing that ten junior people receive funds to support their participation in these proceedings. The amount requested will be sufficient for travel as well as local expenses. In administering these funds we shall make every effort to support those who have no other means of funding. The focus of this conference is to survey recent results within a branch of mathematics referred to as the Langlands program. The underlying philosophy of this program is that there should be deep, and in some sense, fundamental connections between three seemingly disparate mathematical fields: Algebraic Geometry, Number Theory, and Harmonic Analysis. The Shimura-Taniyama conjecture, which posited the equivalence of the theory of elliptic curves (geometric objects) and a certain classes of automorphic forms (analytic objects with number theoretic applications) is just a ``simple (that is simple within the context of the program) example of what the Langlands program is expected to produce. By proving this conjecture, Andrew Wiles delivered a long sought proof of Fermat s Last theorem, that for integers larger than 2, there is never a choice of two non-zero integers whose n-th powers sum to the n-th power of another non-zero integer. More general conjectures within the Langlands program can be stated with some more technical language, but have a similarity to the Fermat problem in that the proofs are much harder than the statements. The last several years have witnessed a series of remarkable breakthroughs in the Langlands program. Wiles s work is one of many examples of these exciting results. As outlined in the proposal, this is critical point in the history of the program, in that new ideas must be found to build upon this recent momentum. Thus, providing funding for relatively new researchers to attend a high level conference, such as the one being sponsored by CIRM, will serve the field, and the greater mathematical community greatly. It is through such development that mathematics continues to play a critical role in our society, both culturally and technologically doc18674 none Zhang During the initial stage of relativistic nuclear collisions, enormous amount of energy is deposited in the collision region and the temperature and density can be high enough that individual hadrons lose their identities. Instead of being confined in hadrons, quarks and gluons can now move freely in this collision region. The matter thus produced is called the Quark-Gluon Plasma. The transition between hadronic matter and the Quark-Gluon Plasma gives us insight into the interactions between quarks and gluons under extreme conditions. It is also useful for the understanding of processes going on in other high temperature and or high density regions, for example, in the early Universe and in the cores of neutron stars. To extract information about the Quark-Gluon Plasma from the experimental observables, to bridge the initial quark and gluon distributions and the final hadron distributions, the PI will investigate the effects of the space-time evolution of the strongly interacting matter produced in relativistic collisions. In particular, a transport model approach will be further developed and used as the major theoretical tool for a detailed study of the transient formation and evolution of the finite size, ultradense system produced in relativistic nuclear collisions with nonequilibrium, viscous effects automatically taken into account. The research will advance the understanding of strong interaction physics that is the focus of current experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the nuclear physics program at the future Large Hadron Collider at CERN doc18675 none Hariharan Electromagnetic interference (EMI) and high frequency noise are major sources of signal loss and data corruption in electronics, communication and mass storage devices. In addition, there have been major advances in areas like high-speed, high-density memories and computer processor speeds. For example, nowadays, CPUs operate at frequencies over 1GHz. Rapid progress in microelectronics fabrication processes have led to miniaturization of electronic device modules. Space is at a premium and this causes power sources and IC components to be packed very close to each other. Moreover, there are major efforts to design and develop solid-state quantum computers that would be inherently highly susceptible to EMI. These advances place stringent requirements and underscore the critical need for improved materials that combine optimal device characteristics and excellent EMI--suppression properties particularly at RF and microwave frequencies. To obtain these new materials exhibiting desirable properties, a combinatorial approach involving materials synthesis and electromagnetic characterization is necessary. Conducting materials, capacitors, ferrites have all been popular choices for near-field and far-field EMI suppression at frequencies in the low RF (few MHz) to the microwave (up to 100 GHz) range. While these materials individually are somewhat effective over different frequency bands, they are often tagged on to circuits as additional components. The PIs propose a novel scheme using layered composite materials where wideband EMI--suppression functionality is integrated into the base materials that are used in devices for RF and microwave circuits. Their primary target will be to achieve integrated functionality and improved shielding effectiveness over the frequency range of 1 MHz to 10 GHz. The PIs proposed research includes development of the following three strategies: [1] Synthesize a series of nanocomposite materials comprised of magnetic nanoparticles embedded in doped intrinsically conducting polymers. Study the fundamental magnetic properties, complex impedance and shielding effectiveness up to 10 6Hz. [2] Investigate the RF response in variable thickness layered nanocomposite materials processed using thick film spin coating methods. [3] Monitor the device performance and EMI-suppression of a PC mother board and a microwave circulator coated with the downselected nanocomposite materials. The synthesis of nanoscale materials will be carried out in collaboration with Materials Modification Inc. (MMI) using a patented microwave plasma technique. Systematic magnetic and electromagnetic characterization will be done using resonant and non-resonant methods developed in their laboratory at University of South Florida. This GOALI project will contribute to extensive training and education of graduate students at USF in two major topical areas: Nanomaterials technology and Electromagnetic measurement methods. It also affords a direct opportunity for Applied Physics PhD students at USF to travel and work on-site at MMI and gain industry experience doc18676 none This proposal describes a novel research program on nonlinear and adaptive attitude control of complex rotating mechanical systems. The special feature of the research program is that it is framed in terms of control experiments that can be carried out in unique laboratory facilities at the University of Michigan. Control experiments will be integrated with and guided by recent advances in nonlinear and adaptive control theory. Research on adaptive and nonlinear control theory will be motivated by the experimental results. The research is expected to advance the state of the art in adaptive and nonlinear control, especially as applied to control of complex rotating mechanical systems doc18677 none The research proposed here seeks the answer to two fundamental questions about matter. The first is what role does the sea of strange quark-antiquark pairs in the nucleon play in the determination of its electromagnetic properties? We are participating in the G0 experiment at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility to address this issue. The experiment will measure the parity-violating asymmetry in the scattering of polarized electrons from the proton and deuteron over a wide range of momentum transfers; this will allow for the strange electric and magnetic form factors to be separately extracted. This experiment will be in a commissioning and data-taking phase during this grant period. The second question is whether or not there is any new physics beyond the Standard Model of electroweak physics. This question will be addressed by the QWEAK experiment at TJNAF, which will measure the proton s neutral weak charge via parity-violating electon scattering at very low momentum transfer. This proton s weak charge has a well-defined prediction in the Standard Model; a precise measurement of it is sensitive to many poplular scenarios for extending the Standard Model. This experiment will be in a construction phase during this grant period doc18678 none Buechler s proposed research is to extend the scope of geometrical stability theory outside of the context of a first-order theory. His test project is an analysis of the geometries induced by bounded linear operators on a Hilbert space and more complex structures like von Neumann algebras. With his student Berenstein Buechler has shown that many self-adjoint operators induce dependence relations satisfying all of the conditions of the dividing dependence relation. Buechler hopes that the dividing dependence relation will give insight into the structure of von Neumann algebras. In another project Buechler will investigate dividing relative to a closure operator . While this study is analogous to the study of p-simple types in a superstable theory it presents dramatically different results when the original theory is not simple and the closure operator is chosen creatively. Applications to metric spaces and Vaught s conjecture are expected. Buechler will also study a class of scale-free networks with model-theoretic methods. Scale-free networks are ubiquitous in nature and technology. Random graph theorists have discovered some of their properties, such as the degree functions. However, techniques for building models are limited. Model theorists have developed techniques for building graphs that are random relative to some constraints. These methods may lend themselves to building scale-free graphs with specified parameters. Frequently a significant advancement in science occurs when a problem arising in one area is viewed from the perspective of another discipline. For example, problems in genetics have yielded to techniques from graph theory. In mathematics algebra has lead to great insight into geometry and knot theory. Buechler s specialty is model theory, a subfield of mathematical logic. Recently, Hrushovski applied model theory to solve problems in number theory. Buechler is adapting these same model-theoretic methods with an eye to problems in analysis and network theory. In analysis Buechler is looking at the model-theoretic content of operator theory, which has connections to mathematical physics. The networks Buechler will study are at the heart of such disparate systems as the metabolic pathways in a cell and the World Wide Web. Buechler will attempt to adapt model-theoretic techniques for constructing graphs of interest in pure mathematics to building models of these networks arising in nature and technology. Graduate students will be involved in all of these projects. The cross-disciplinary nature of the work will require the students to learn science that their normal curriculum would not expose them to, and to learn the value of viewing research in a broader context doc18679 none McBay Quality Education for Minorities (QEM) Network, a non-profit organization, has been instrumental in improving the education of under-represented groups that have been historically undeserved by the nation s educational system. A successor to the Quality Education for Minorities Project based at MIT, QEM continues to develop effective strategies for STEM education for minorities, and focuses on issues and barriers that prevent minorities from receiving a high quality education. This project continues to provide internship opportunities for students at the National Science Foundation as a mechanism to increase students understanding of science policy; encourage potential for becoming leaders and proponents for increased STEM participation by students from low-income communities; and encourage interns to continue STEM interests and studies through the doctoral level. Complimentary to the internship experience at NSF, students are required to engage in a science-oriented community outreach activity during the following academic year at their respective institutions doc18680 none Ruan The operator space theory is a natural quantization of functional analysis. The major difference between operator spaces and Banach spaces is that one must consider operator matrix norms and completely bounded maps in the category of operator spaces. This was first realized by William Arveson in and was characterized by the PI in his Ph.D thesis in . Since then the theory has been quickly developed into a very exciting research area in modern analysis. This remarkable development is mainly due to the contributions of D.Blecher, E.Christensen, E.Effros, M.Junge, E.Kirchberg, C.Le Merdy, G.Pisier, V.Paulsen, H.Rosenthal, R.Smith, A.Sinclair and the PI. Recently, the PI s research has been mainly centered on the local theory of operator spaces and their applications. One of his main goals is to find the appropriate quantization of classical results in Banach space theory, and to apply these results to C -algebras and von Neumann algebras, as well as to some other related areas such as non-commutative harmonic analysis and locally compact quantum groups. In this proposal, the PI plans to continue his investigation in this direction and proposes the following four research projects. (1) Investigate the local properties of non-commutative Lp spaces and their applications to operator algebras. (2) Investigate the local structure of the operator preduals of von Neumann algebras and the operator duals of C -algebras. (3) Investigate the further applications of operator spaces to Kac algebras and locally compact quantum groups. (4) Investigate the geometric structure of the matrix unit balls of operator spaces, and investigate the possible applications of operator spaces to non-commutative probability and free probability. The most profound distinction between classical and quantum mechanics is Heisenberg s principle that one should represent the basic variables of physics by operators rather than functions. The work of J. von Neumann emphasized that it is important to pursue the quantized forms of mathematics. Collaborating with F.J. Murray, von Neumann succeeded in quantizing integration theory during the s. Since then, mathematicians have tried to quantize many other areas of mathematics such as topology, differential geometry, analysis and probability theory. The theory of operator spaces is a natural quantization of functional analysis, which is a very important field in modern analysis. During the last fifteen years, the PI together with his colleagues has established the foundation of operator space theory and has also discovered a number of far-reaching applications to some related areas in mathematics. In this proposal, he plans to continue his work on operator spaces and their applications. He expects that the solutions the proposed research projects will make important contributions to related fields doc18681 none The research proposed lies at the interface between measurable and topological dynamics. In these and other areas of dynamics the problems concerning the relationship between the dynamical and cohomological properties of systems proved to be very important. One circle of the proposed problems can be informally called inverse problems for coboundaries , and, roughly speaking, is aimed to understand how and to what extent the dynamics of a measurable group action can be recovered from the cohomological information, and in particular, from the collection of all measurable coboundaries. It turns out that, in the case of group actions, the algebraic properties of the acting group play an important role. Another line of the proposed research is an attempt to get a complete understanding of the possibility of constructing minimal topological models for arbitrary families of measurable dynamical systems. In the case when the family consists of one single ergodic automorphism, the answer is given by the famous Jewett-Krieger theorem. The classical theory of dynamical systems originated with the study of qualitative behavior of the solutions of differential equations describing the motion of a mechanical system. The fundamental theorem of Liouville provided the bridge between the classical theory and modern measurable dynamics. The study of the connections between the different and seemingly unrelated properties of the measurable systems, as well as relations between the measurable and continuous structures in dynamics, strengthens our sense of connectedness of the entire building of mathematics doc18682 none Three topics in cold-atom physics are investigated. First, low-energy collisions with dipolar interactions are studied to provide a realistic assesment of the effect of laser induced dipoles in atomic gases. Second, evaporation and loading dynamics are studied in far off resonance traps. Finally, squeezing and entanglement in spinor-1 condensates are examined for quantum correlations and the effect on qunatum information science doc18683 none This award will provide support for approximately 20 participants (graduate, post-docs, and junior faculty) to attend the IEEE INFOCOM Conference being held in New York, NJ on June 23-27, . INFOCOM is a major conference in networking, which focuses on state-of-the-art research in all areas of computer networking and data communications doc18684 none Previous investigation into the dynamics of a gaseous Bose-Einstein condensate has revealed a number of interesting phenomena such as solitons and vortices. The current research is designed to examine the validity of the mean-field approximation previously employed by including correlation effects using a multi-configurational approach well known in quantum chemistry. The new method will be applied to condensates in optical lattices where transitions from delocalized to localized states are known to occur doc18685 none Research will be conducted into models of diffusion-limited reactions and the method of empty intervals which we introduced originally for the treatment of coalescence, A + A - A. We have extended the method of intervals to annihilation, A + A - 0, the branching- and double branching-annihilating process, and the q-state Potts model in the T=0 limit. The method yields detailed information: we derived explicit expressions for the n-point correlation functions of coalescence and annihilation, for all n. Different research groups have recently adopted the method of intervals for the analysis of models not amenable to the complementary method of free Majorana fermions. Research will be conducted into several abstract open questions, including the kinetics of reactions with anomalous, subdiffusive transport; exactly solvable models of nonuniversal kinetic phase transitions; and the shielding effect in coalescence, as a basis for more exact solutions and for novel approximation methods. Research will be conducted also into a number of practical questions motivated by our work so far. These include: (1) A new method, due to Fokas, for solving PDEs in convex domains with arbitrary boundary conditions; (2) Speedy computer algorithms for the simulation of reaction-diffusion systems; (3) Stability of networks, such as the Internet, in the face of random failure or a coordinated attack; (4) Mechanisms of signal transduction in eukaryotic cells; and (5) Statistical physics interpretation of various experiments in contemporary chemistry. The project is particularly well-suited for educational purposes. One student has completed a M.Sc. in physics and another is graduating with a Ph.D. degree. Several undergraduate students have already been involved (mainly with computer simulations), and their effort has resulted in at least three publications in refereed journals. We forsee many more opportunities for students involvement doc18686 none This research seeks to construct the initial data for a pair of black holes in an astrophysically realistic close binary system. This data represents the state of the binary system at an instant of time, and is the necessary starting point for determining the evolution of the system. Two new approaches for constructing the initial data will be explored. Both approaches build into the data the idea that the systems are nearly in equilibrium. However, the two approaches differ drastically in how the black holes themselves are treated. The collision of a pair of orbiting black holes is a dramatic event that we hope to detect soon in gravitational wave observatories such as LIGO. Simulations, starting from binary black hole initial data, will provide the theoretical foundation for interpreting much of the data obtained by LIGO. The detection of black holes with LIGO will offer the most direct evidence possible for their existence, and will open up an exciting new window for exploring the universe doc18687 none The Algebra Problem: US Mathematics Education has an increasingly difficult in Algebra Problems to solve. The standard indicators of student achievements international comparisons, NAEP and other national measures, as well as state test results all point in the direction of lower achievement as grade levels increase. Well-known TIMSS analyses of US curricula point in the direction of repetition of elementary skill building and superficiality of topic coverage as important contributors to the problem, combined with tell-and-drill pedagogy that puts students in overly passive position as learners. And, of course, high failure rates in first year algebra courses contribute to alienation on the part of students and low morale among teachers. Responses involve a wide variety, but largely ineffective tactics involving middle and early high school curricula: pre-algebra courses of various kinds, screening and diagnostic tests, district and state mandates that all students take Algebra I, lengthened courses, modifying the definition of if algebra, creating different versions of if algebra, end-of-course exams, among others. Each adjustment produces small improvements, although, since the tactics tend to be ad hoc and implemented independently, improvements do not accumulate or multiply. NCTM recommendations for integrating the development of algebraic reasoning across K-12 are implemented only in a few of the standards-based curricula, and these mainly at the middle school level. Research Towards Solutions: Several research teams studying the development of algebraic reasoning in the early (K-5) grades, who are represented in this proposal, have formed an informal research collaborative, renewing a prior collaboration funded by the US DoE OERI in the early mid . These researchers share broad hypotheses regarding the large positive potential of building algebraic reasoning in the context of elementary mathematics, the need to exploit untapped student learning capacities among younger students, the powerful role of generalization and formalization in deepening students experience and understanding of elementary mathematics especially arithmetic and the potential for using changes in the curricular relationships between algebra and elementary mathematics as a catalyst and vehicle for faculty development of elementary teachers. These researchers are engaged in several complementary lines of work focusing on different aspects of the challenges student learning, classroom practice, curriculum development, professional development, capacity building, and so on. Proposed Combination of Travel, Conferences and Monograph: The collaborating researchers have all been invited to present papers to an important conference to be held December 8-15, , in Melbourne, Australia on The Future of the Teaching and Learning of Algebra which is being sponsored by the International Commission on Mathematics Instruction. Professor Kaput has been designated to Co-Chair the Early Algebra Group at the conference. We request funds to exploit, in 3 ways, this unique opportunity to bring an intensely international perspective to bear upon our active research program: (1) To support travel to the international conference. (2) To hold two meetings in the US, one prior to and one following the Melbourne conference, involving a slightly larger group of mathematics educators working in this area. (3) To write and publish a monograph expressing our findings in order to inform policy makers, curriculum developers and assessment builders of the latest developments in this rapidly changing field. Hence we also request a small amount of funding for editorial work to pull together and publicize the monograph, which in turn will point to additional web resources illustrating relevant research doc18688 none This proposal requests support for a group at Michigan State University for a program of research and education in experimental elementary particle physics based on the CDF experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron proton-antiproton collider and on the ATLAS experiment at the proton-proton Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, Geneva. The MSU group has been a member of the CDF experiment since . The group has major responsibilities to the Run II upgrades for the new plug calorimeters, to the new central tracker, to the muon system upgrade and to a new central pre-radiator detector. They are actively engaged in the analyses of QCD physics. The group s work on ATLAS involves the construction and testing of the hadron calorimeter subsystem, involving scintillator tiles and optical fibers. Members of the MSU group are involving undergraduates and high school teachers and students in their research activities. The group is a member of QuarkNet, the multi-institutional effort to involve high school teachers and their students in particle physics research doc18689 none This proposal requests support for a group at Michigan State University for a program of research and education in experimental elementary particle physics based on the D0 experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron proton-antiproton collider and on the ATLAS experiment at the proton-proton Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, Geneva. The MSU group formed the nucleus of the D0 experiment and one of the members of the group, H. Weerts, is currently a co-spokesman for the experiment. The group has major responsibilities to the Run II upgrades at each of the three levels of the trigger. They are actively engaged in a number of physics analyses, including top quark and QCD physics as well as searches for new phenomena. The group s work on ATLAS includes design and construction of the Level 2 trigger system as well as integrating it with the data acquisition system. Members of the MSU group are introducing technical and intellectual expertise into the classroom for both physics and non-science majors and one of their members, B. Pope, is an active member of QuarkNet, the multi-institutional effort to involve high school teachers and their students in particle physics research doc18690 none The first experiment to measure the ratio of the elastic and magnetic form factors of the proton at large four-momentum squared, Q^2 with good accuracy produced unexpected results. This experiment realized in at Jefferson Lab used the recoil polarization technique, which takes advantage of the fact that the transverse component of the recoil proton polarization is proportional to the product of the 2 form factors, thus allowing accurate determination of the small electric form factor. In a second experiment at JLab in , the measurement was extended to 5.6 GeV^2 , the results confirmed the intrinsically different Q^2-dependence of the electric and magnetic form factors of the proton beyond any doubt. The data from these 2 JLab experiments have been a challenge for theoretical models which attempt to describe the proton structure in the non-perturbative domain of Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD). As the simplicity of perturbative QCD may not be encountered at accessible laboratory energies, an understanding of the structure of the proton (and likewise of the other nucleon, the neutron) requires the use of phenomenological models which depend in parts on data. Nucleons are the building blocks of the matter we are made of and in which we live. A full understanding of the structure of the nucleon in terms of its quark and gluon constituents will be achieved only when we accumulate a complete data base of its response to the electromagnetic probe, electrons and photons, over a large enough Q^2-range; such experiment represent the main part of the research program at JLab. We now have a third experiment, recently approved with highest priority; it will extend the range of Q^2 probed to 9 GeV^2.This grant will make it possible for me to continue leading this project to and through the next phase, which require new detectors (a new polarimeter to measure the recoil proton polarization, and a new calorimeter to measure the associate scattered electron) and will take 3 years to prepare doc18691 none Haus The PI proposes to design, fabricate, characterize, and test waveguide-geometry, periodically textured nonlinear optical devices. Proton exchange and reverse proton exchange processes will be used to fabricate waveguides in lithium niobate. The superstrate is patterned over a wide area using UV laser lithography. The PI has developed the capability to fabricate one- (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) photonic band gap (PBG) structures with the UV laser facility with lattice constants varied from 150 nm to about 2 microns. Patterning will be done using plasma etching techniques, especially inductively coupled plasma etching to control reactivity and retain anisotropy of the etch process. The optical properties of the waveguides, such as mode index and loss, will be characterized in our laboratories. The laser diode pumps will be used to make compact, short wavelength, emission sources. Other spin-off applications will be examined, such as, terahertz wave generation, PBG-based electro-optic modulators, and parametric generation or oscillation at infrared wavelengths. Planned simulations of our complex three-dimensional propagation geometry will help optimize the design parameters and minimize the losses. For lithium niobate PBG waveguides his vector coupled-mode theory calculations predict that the second-harmonic and parametric generation output efficiency will be enhanced by two orders of magnitude over quasi-phase matched devices of the same length. His experiments are designed to test these results. Furthermore, he will explore the properties of 2D photonic crystals to further improve frequency generation based on the large dispersion, resonant field enhancement, and low group velocity, which is an ubiquitous feature of higher dimensional PBGs not related to a band edge. He will conduct a theoretical study of the resonant mode characteristics of 1D and 2D PBGs to determine the grating and waveguide fabrication issues and test the designs in the sample fabrication process. Photonic band gap structures have received wide attention because of their unique properties and potential for diverse applications. The coherent, PBG sources could impact future developments in storage technology, imaging, space communications, xerography, medical photo-therapy, bio-assays, and UV lithography. Students will be trained with the skills and knowledge to develop future PBG-based optoelectronic devices. They will fabricate and characterize the devices and test the accuracy of the designs by comparing with modeling and simulation results. Hence they will have developed a broad range of laboratory and modeling experien doc18692 none A research program carried out by scientists at the University of Florida and the Institute in collaboration with the Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences to investigate how high power laser beams can distort precision optical components in gravitational wave detectors through absorption and heating. Methods will be developed for remotely measuring optical path distortions on the order of one billionth of a meter. In addition, novel methods for isolating back-propagating high power laser beams will be developed to prevent interactions with sensitive, phase-stabilized lasers. This research will play a major role in facilitating the operation of ground-based gravitational wave detectors such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO). The detection of gravitational waves by large-scale high power laser-based interferometers will open a new window on the universe through the detection of cataclysmic astrophysical phenomena such as black hole-neutron star collisions. To enhance the sensitivity of future interferometers, highly sensitive measurement techniques such as those developed here are crucial for sensing the operational state of these interferometers, the most sensitive instruments ever constructed doc18693 none generalizations of the Sz.-Nagy dilation theorem which naturally encode Pick interpolation and in many cases commutant lifting. They also provide a natural setting for versions of Beurling s theorem. The Agler boundary and C-star envelope have been explicitly computed for the families of completely contractive representations of the algebra of multipliers of symmetric Fock space, the algebra of multipliers of the Dirichlet space, as well as quotients of the disc and annulus algebra. The PI will investigate situations in which strong versions of Pick interpolation, Beurling s theorem, and commutant lifting hold as a function of the complexity of the corresponding Agler boundary and C-star envelope. The investigation will make contact with function theory, special functions, differential equations, and the general theory of operator algebras. Thre are also plans to continue studying factorization of polynomials in several non-commuting variables pursuing the theme that one-variable results most naturally generalize to the non-commutative setting. Operator theory has a history of rich interplay with engineering and physics as well as other vital areas of mathematics including complex function theory and algebraic geometry. Originally developed as a tool to study integral and differential equations arising in physics, operator theory, operator algebras, and operator systems play an important role in modern quantum physics. Four fundamental themes in operator theory, Sz.-Nagy dilation, Pick interpolation, commutant lifting, and Beurling s theorem are now basic technology in systems theory which in turn has important applications in image processing and control theory - the mathematics behind automatic controllers such as autopilots. A major emphasis in the proposed work is generalizations of these themes with a view toward applications to systems theory, control theory, operator algebras, and function theory. McCullough will also study factorization problems for polynomials in several non-commuting variables. (Here xy may not equal yx.) This investigation is expected to make connection with non-commutative algebraic geometry and Linear Matrix Inequalities or LMI s which frequently arise in engineering applications doc18694 none Flavonoids are metabolites produced exclusively by plants that are well known as the blue, red, and purple pigments in flowers, fruits, and leaves. As such, these compounds are important for attracting pollinators and seed dispersers. However, flavonoids are also used by plants for a large number of other purposes, such as protecting exposed tissues from UV radiation, as signaling molecules, and as part of the chemical arsenal against pathogens, predators, and other challenges. Although all higher plants synthesize flavonoids, these compounds clearly participate in distinct processes in different plants. Therefore, it is important to understand how flavonoids are synthesized in different plant species. Our laboratories study the organization and regulation of the flavonoid biosynthetic pathway in plant cells, how the products are transported to their final destination inside the cell, and how this system has developed over the course of plant evolution. Despite the success of genetic and biochemical analysis of flavonoid synthesis, current studies into detailed mechanisms are hampered by the extraordinarily expensive reagent costs and the lack of radiolabeled compounds, while analysis of enzyme levels and localization are confounded by the lack of adequate antibody reagents. This project is aimed at assembling a standardized collection of flavonoid compounds and antibodies. These reagents will be stored at specific locations for distribution among the group and, if feasible, to other publicly-funded groups working on flavonoid synthesis. The project will immediately impact the quality of the work that is done in our laboratories and at the same time open up entirely new avenues of investigation doc18695 none The Pittsburgh group studies spectroscopy of subatomic particles (size less than 1 femtometer) in a variety of ways. They come in two kinds, baryons (e.g. proton) and mesons (e.g. pion). By measuring the masses, widths (effectively lifetime)and decay brancing fractions to the possible final states for each excited state, a large body of information is available as a test for models of the strong interaction. Quantum chromodynamics is strongly felt to be the appropriate theory, but has not been adequately tested in hadron spectroscopy. Experiments must be done at large accelerators; we have been active at Jefferson Lab where a large number of experiments have produced results in the last few years. We were prominent workers in the details of tracking particles in CLAS and had primary responsibility for one of the key results, eta electroproduction. We have also been very active in constructing a theoretical framework and doing complex fits to the data in order to determine the parameters discussed above. Our results are expected to cause major modifications to the Particle Data Group compendium of baryon properties. A new program to study mesons in a particularly clean experimental environment at Cornell Electron Storage Ring has been started doc18696 none ion often led to non-algorithmic solutions . Lempp s research focuses on the analysis of unsolvable problems, mainly in algebra and combinatorics. Techniques and results in this area are often not only of great theoretical interest, but also have practical applications in computer science doc18697 none Research in theoretical elementary particle physics will include studies of supersymmetry and other new theories of fundamental particle interactions. Supersymmetry is a promising idea which predicts the existence of many new heavy subatomic particles. The properties of these particles, including their masses and the rates at which they decay into other particles, will be studied under a variety of different theoretical assumptions. The resulting predictions are important because they will affect both the planning and the analysis of many present and future experiments that search for new particles. These studies are of central importance for understanding the behavior of particle physics involving interactions at very high energies. They will also impact on our understanding of the physics of the very early universe, when the particles under consideration would have been plentiful doc18698 none The exciton resonance in semiconductors is often used to demonstrate resonant phenomena first observed with atoms, such as photon echoes, quantum beats, vacuum Rabi splitting, and coherent-field Rabi flopping. Nonresonant optical excitation into the free-carrier continuum produces an entirely different initial condition, much closer to that of a gas plasma whose electrons and ions eventually recombine into atoms that emit photons to return to their ground state. In a semiconductor, the initial plasma consists of free carriers, electrons and holes, whose kinetic energies depend upon how much the excitation energy exceeds the band gap. Exciton formation from the free carriers has been studied for more than four decades, yet little is known. With few exceptions data have been analyzed assuming that each photon emitted with the energy of the 1s electron heavy-hole transition must have come from an exciton recombining. A recent theoretical breakthrough showed that the plasma emission is also peaked at the 1s resonance. This important finding calls for the reevaluation of all previous conclusions. It is proposed to study the dynamics of exciton formation in a quantum well and to learn how to control the population of the 1s ground state. The goal of the project is to understand the fundamental transition from an initially purely fermionic system (free-carrier plasma generated by optical absorption) to a bosonic system (exciton population). If the bosonic nature of low-density excitons dominates over the fermionic nature of its components, as is the case for atoms, then Bose-Einstein condensation could be achieved in semiconductors at much higher temperatures than those of atomic systems doc18699 none Rock glaciers are considered a glacial or periglacial feature that slowly creep downslope as a result of deformation of ice that has been consolidated with angular, coarse rock. Although rock glaciers have been studied using a variety of field techniques and, more recently, with remote aerial photography analysis, much still is unknown regarding the dynamics of flow. The mechanism by which factors like micro-topography, ice content, or rock glacier form influence rock glacier behavior is unknown. Similarly, little is known of the possible existence of regional flow patterns as a result of climate change. Previous analyses have been primarily limited to the Alps in Europe. This doctoral dissertation research project will investigate the mechanics of rock glacier creep in the U.S. and Canadian Rocky Mountains, using an approach that combines analyses using high-precision temporal aerial photography and a geographic information system (GIS). The doctoral student will design a digital methodology for detecting motion of the rock glaciers to maximize the advantages of data analysis within a GIS. Rock glacier sections within a variety of different rock glacier forms will be analyzed to gain a greater comprehension of rock glacier motion. Because active rock glaciers are considered an indicator of discontinuous permafrost, a regionalized approach to rock glacier motion will be undertaken to detect climatically induced changes in permafrost distribution. The methods employed in this study will resemble those presented in earlier studies, but they will incorporate GIS-based analytic procedures. A sequence of temporal air photos for rock glaciers will be selected and scanned at a high resolution. The photos will then be enhanced, orthorectified, and co-registered to a common scale. Point-to-point methods will be conducted in a GIS to temporally track large boulders and rocks. Attribute data about the points as well as ancillary data will be included to determine the factors affecting flow. Detailed digital elevational models (DEM) will also be constructed to monitor surface slumping. Vertical and horizontal velocities will be calculated for approximately five to ten rock glaciers extending across a latitudinal transect of the Rocky Mountains for dates ranging from to the present. As development and recreation continue to increase in mountainous regions, the nature and stability of these areas is threatened. Global warming will further alter stability. An important component to the alpine geomorphic system, rock glaciers, are expected to experience substantial change. Rock glaciers may become unstable or may cause catastrophic releases of water that could damage nearby residential areas, communication towers, ski lifts, hiking paths, campgrounds, or other recreational areas. The results of this study should help monitor the form rock glaciers. They also will provide a better understanding of the dynamics of rock glacier flow, which will enhance our understanding of other rock glaciers and permafrost distribution on other terrestrial planets such as Mars. The study will develop methods using a GIS that will allow the input of ancillary data and incorporate IKONOS data for future analysis. This GIS-based format will be easily updateable and transferable to other parts of the world. As a result, this research will help advance the monitoring of global changes in permafrost. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc18700 none This RUI activity focuses on two projects. The first project uses a laser-cooling and trapping system for the measurement of metastable lifetimes in magneto-optically trapped krypton and argon, using a method of photon counting and metastable-state quenching to determine the single-atom spontaneous decay rate to a few percent. The second project builds on an earlier discovery and characterization of one-dimensional spatiotemporal patterns in a novel dielectric-barrier discharge (DBD) system, a class of high-voltage, ac-driven gaseous discharges that typically operate in the atmospheric pressure range and produce reactive chemical species and intense excimer fluorescence. This pattern formation is of basic interest in the field of non-linear dynamics and may hold promise in various diagnostic and or control schemes in DBD applications doc18701 none The Einstein theory of general relativity predicts the existence of gravitational waves, which are literally ripples of curvature in the fabric of space and time that are generated whenever massive objects oscillate. Among the best sources for gravitational waves are neutron stars, which are the remnants of supernovae, the spectacular explosions that result when the cores of heavy stars collapse after they have exhausted their nuclear fuel. After a few months of cooling, the core of a neutron star is predicted to become superfluid, a special state of matter that can flow with no friction and can rotate only by forming a dense array of Ultra-thin vortices --- very skinny tornados --- that thread the star. This project will develop computer-based models of the oscillations of superfluid neutron stars and the gravitational waves that they emit. Because of the special properties of superfluid matter, the modes of oscillation of a superfluid neutron star should be very different from those of an ordinary fluid star. Consequently, the gravitational waves that are created from their oscillations should carry a distinct signature of superfluidity. Suitably advanced gravitational wave detectors should be able to extract this signature from the gravitational wave data. Because of their extreme mass (on the order of the same mass as the Sun) and compact size (about 20 kilometers in diameter), neutron stars represent a form of matter that cannot be created in Earth-based laboratories. Direct detection of gravitational waves thus allows neutron stars to become, in effect, astrophysical laboratories for the study of matter under the most extreme conditions doc18702 none Research will focus on two areas of computational biology - (1)application of methods which explore conformation space for biomolecules, and (2) development of methods to help in protein structure determination both for soluble proteins and for membrane proteins. Understanding protein folding is important in a number of contexts such as protein design and the more general issue of finding general rules relating the folding process to the primary sequence of the protein. A major problem for computer simulation of protein folding is the fact that the dynamics takes place over many decades of time, from sub-picoseconds to milliseconds or even seconds. The approach we adopt is to constrain the motions of a protein so that it moves from an initial state, such as an unfolded state, to a final folded state in a fixed number of time steps. This trajectory annealing approach has the capability to explore a number of possible pathways by which a protein may fold while keeping the system at a physiological temperature. We will continue our present studies of trajectory annealing and apply them to two small proteins whose folding properties have been extensively sampled experimentally. The trajectory annealing simulations offer the possibility of interpreting those experiments in terms of changes in probability of various pathways for folding which are very difficult to observe experimentally. As a result of the tremendous progress in large-scale DNA sequencing projects, rapid growth in accumulation of biological sequence information has put strong pressure on the structural biology community to produce structural information for new genes with high throughput. Experimentally, large scale X-ray crystallography and NMR measurements now aim to determine all ( to ) available protein folds within a few decades or even years. However there remain many soluble proteins which have difficulties in crystallizing and for which NMR methods may be ineffective. Structural homology is a very powerful tool by which we can try to assign functions in silico to new genes which bear only remote if any association with known genes in terms of sequence homology. We will build on our current computational methods of ab initio structure prediction by adding additional physical information contained in small angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) data. This will improve our ability to find structural homologs of a given protein with proteins of known structure but for which there is little or no sequence homology. We will also extend our methods of reconstructing low resolution electron density maps from small-angle scattering data to x-ray scattering from membrane proteins bound in small vesicles. Some 25% of gene sequences in the database code for expression of membrane proteins. Although structures for several thousand soluble proteins have been determined, only a handful of structures for membrane proteins are known owing to the difficulties of crystallizing proteins which are naturally stabilized by the hydrophobic environment of the s urrounding lipids. By embedding a membrane protein in small lipid vesicles, we believe we can generate SAXS data which contains information about the shape and size of the protein in addition to data on the vesicle, and also about the x-ray interference pattern between the scattering from the vesicle and the scattering from the protein. By making a preparation in which vesicle sizes can be varied, we believe we can extend our present reconstruction methods to sort out the protein contributions to the scattering from the vesicle contributions and hence obtain low resolution structural information on the membrane protein doc18703 none This dissertation research project provides a cultural history of theoretical physics in Imperial Germany ( - ). The general problem considered is that of examining and describing the development of the discipline , from its multiple origins to the beginnings of its golden-age. Within the boundaries set by this general framework, the project deals in turn with three major problems: that of defining theoretical physics; that of determining the importance of a single understudied research school (the Sommerfeld School); and that of exploring the complex interlinkages between classical and modern physics. The dissertation is divided into three corresponding sections. NSF funding provides support to collect data for two of these sections. In the first, the researcher seeks to define the term theoretical physics in the fin-de-siecle, a time when the discipline was not yet coherent, when it lacked research or pedagogical centers, central texts and common histories. By focusing on the debate over the so-called failure of the mechanical world-view, the researcher will elucidate the practice of theoretical physics research, while a concentration on the teaching of the subject in both universities and Technische Hochschulen will provide a novel insight into the importance of both industrial applications and pedagogy on the growth of what would become the most prestigious scientific field of the twentieth century. This latter work will require the examination of course listings (Vorlesungs-Verzeichnisse), lecture notes and examination questions at university and Hochschule archives in Aachen, Berlin, Dresden, Karlsruhe and Munich. In Section 2 the focus is narrowed, as attention turns to the means by which disciplinary coherence was achieved. The central part of the project involves a detailed study of the Sommerfeld School, looking both at Sommerfeld s own research as well as his pedagogical style. Research for this section will be centered on the Sommerfeld archive at the Deutsches Museum, Munich, and will include not only a technical analysis of the work done by both Sommerfeld and his students in Munich, but also a similar examination of research content for his students early on in their own professional careers doc18704 none The research topic of this award is superstring theory, which is the most promising candidate for a complete unification of the four fundamental forces of Nature (electro-magnetic, weak, strong and gravitational) into a framework consistent with all known physical principles, including quantum mechanics and general relativity. Strings are one-dimensional extended objects which, under time-evolution, sweep out fluctuating two-dimensional surfaces. The quantitative understanding of the dynamics of superstring theory, for weak coupling, requires precise mathematical methods for defining and calculating the quantum mechanics of these fluctuating surfaces. The research carried out under this award demonstrates how to overcome certain longstanding difficulties with both the definition and calculation of these effects and leads to concrete and beautiful quantitative formulas. The above results have exciting applications, including the first reliable calculation, at two-loop order, of a number of physically important quantities. The first is the scattering amplitude of massless superstrings, one of the key dynamical quantities of superstring theory. The second is the so-called cosmological constant, which provides a possible modification of the equations of general relativity, and whose effects interfere with the presence in the Universe of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. String theory, being a theory of quantum gravity, is expected to make the calculation of the cosmological constant possible. D Hoker s results show that the cosmological constant in flat space-time must vanish, and provides a general expression in (more realistic) non-supersymmetric models doc18705 none M. Nathan, U of Minnesota-Twin Cities Devices based on III-nitride semiconductors have great potential for many applications in optoelectronics and power electronics. Polarization effects in these materials provide new opportunities for new device designs and raise challenges for existing ones. At present, while a qualitative understanding of these effects exists to some extent, a complete quantitative model and experimental characterization is lacking. The main thrust of this proposal is directed at a quantitative understanding of polarization effects in III-nitride compounds. Polarization effects and nitride-based devices are inextricably connected with dominant effects in heterojunction FETs, heterojunction bipolar transistors, and lasers. Consideration of spontaneous and piezoelectric effects is therefore imperative in device design. In addition to high-power, high-temperature electronic devices, we envision possible applications of these phenomena in stress (or force) sensors, such as those needed for accelerometers and seismic detectors intended to operate in caustic environments. We propose a coordinated experimental and theoretical investigation of electric polarization effects in III-nitride heterostructures and Schottkv barriers. Our study will address lattice polarization effects on charge carrier transport at heterojunction interfaces in structures with currents either parallel or perpendicular to the interfaces. Examples of structures to be fabricated and tested will include n- and p-channel single heterostructures, metal semiconductor Schottky contacts on III-nitrides, and n+- and p+Si III-nitride Schottky contacts. To avoid possible surface contamination, Al III-nitride and Si III-nitride contacts will be fabricated in situ, i.e. without removing the samples from the ultra-high vacuum environment. For reasons discussed in this proposal, we view these latter structures (with the non-polar polar interface grown in situ following III-nitride epitaxy) as particularly promising for the study of III-nitride surface polarization charges. We will measure the uniaxial and hydrostatic stress dependences of the electrical characteristics of these structures. Exploring different stress geometries will advance the understanding of piezoelectric effects in III-nitride compounds. Our physical model development will address band structure and electric polarization effects and their consequences for the terminal characteristics of the devices under uniform and non-uniform, uniaxial and hydrostatic stress. The characterization and modeling work builds on capabilities developed by the PIs over the last 11 years in the context of their past and ongoing joint exploration of piezoelectric effects in conventional III-V heterostructures. The crystal growth for this program will performed by Professor Hadis Morkoq s group at Virginia Commonwealth University. The proposed research will involve both graduate and undergraduate students, and will enhance the PIs ongoing course development with focus on large gap semiconductor materials and devices doc18706 none PI: Leonid Bunimovich Proposal Number: The proposed research deals with the studies of finite- and infinite-dimensional dynamical systems as well as of some hybrid (intermediate between dynamical and stochastic) systems. The class of hybrid systems which will be specifically addressed is formed by deterministic walks in random environments. It has been shownrecently that a large subclass of such systems (walks in rigid environments) is completely solvable in 1D. The proposed study deals with the case of environments with variable rigidity. Another part of the proposal deals with the farther development of recently constructed first natural examples of Hamiltonian systems with divided phase space. The goal now is to show that a rather general class of such billiards has positive metric entropy in any (finite) dimension. The considered problems of statistical mechanics deal with the rigorous derivation of formulas for kinetic coefficients and for escape rate in open systems. Among the problems which deal with infinite-dymensional systems are chaos-order transitions in Lattice Dynamical Systems and chaos in nonlinear wave equations. Other problems deal with various systems ranging from the Ergodic Theory (Benford s law) to some simple models of brain dynamics and logistics. Traditionally the mathematical models of real systems are either purely deterministic or purely stochastic. These two classes of models enjoy having a rich theory, and researchers have quite good intuition on their behavior, i.e. they basically know what to expect. This intuition is essentially based on a rich collection of completely solvable (i.e. completely understood) models. However, a majority of real systems are neither purely deterministic nor purely stochastic. Instead they have both (deterministic and stochastic) features. This project deals with a big class of such models which were independently introduced in communication theory, statistical physics,chemical kinetics, theory of artificiall intellect, etc doc18707 none The investigator studies IIA and IIB superconformal field theories on a Calabi-Yau variety in an attempt to give a rigorous mathematical definition of the vertex algebra of the theories. This algebra is expected to be a deformation of the cohomology of the chiral de Rham complex constructed by Malikov, Schechtman and Vaintrob. The second aim of the project is to extend the definition of IIA and IIB models to some singular varieties. The most pressing question is to connect two existing definitions of elliptic genus of singular varieties, which is a generalization of cohomological McKay correspondence. The third part of the project focuses on problems from number theory that arise in connection with the concept of elliptic genus and are related to products of Eisenstein series. String theory in its various flavors is a leading candidate for the ``theory of everything in mathematical physics. Its development has led to rapid growth in several areas of mathematics, in particular algebraic geometry, which concerns itself with spaces of solutions of polynomial equations. Unfortunately, there is still a lack of rigorous understanding of some of the underlying rich mathematical structures, which the project aims to rectify. Such mathematical understanding is important, because it may be a necessity for future development of string theory which in turn may yield a more coherent picture of the basic processes and forces of our universe. A separate part of the project deals with certain number-theoretical questions inspired by string theory. These are related to long-standing mathematical problems in the theory of elliptic curves. The theory of elliptic curves is a crucial part of the proof of Fermat s Last Theorem and has practical applications to cryptography. This project is jointly funded by the Algebra, Number Theory, and Combinatoric Program and the Topology and Geometric Analysis Program doc18708 none Many important composite materials are made by melt infiltration, in which polymers or metals are infiltrated into fibrous preforms. To minimize post-processing and machining, it is desirable to create parts directly from the impregnation step, a procedure called net-shape fabrication. While numerical simulation is a crucial part of process design, standard models operate at the continuum scale (i.e., the underlying fiber matrix is viewed as a continuum phase). This approach is necessary for practical reasons, but it requires significant empiricism to generate spatially averaged constitutive equations and parameters. Furthermore, current empirical techniques do not effectively account for important microcscale phenomena such as fiber anisotropy, wetting effects, and void formation during impregnation. In this collaborative research project conducted by researchers at Louisiana State University and Tulane University, state-of-the-art microscale modeling techniques will be applied to the impregnation process, which will allow analyses to be performed using first principles. Experiments will be performed to aid in the model development and to validate its quantitative capabilities. In a second phase of the research, results from the microscale simulations will be scaled up and transferred to continuum-scale models for net-shape fabrication. The ultimate goal is for this multiple-scale approach to replace much of the empiricism associated with current methods, thereby improving fabrication techniques. The collaborative nature of this project will provide unique learning opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, with graduate students from LSU participating in experimental aspects of the research at Tulane, and undergraduates from both institutions being included in research meetings at LSU. In addition, active participation in the Louisiana Alliance for Minority Participation is planed to provide summer research opportunities for students from under-represented groups doc18709 none Vittoria The proposes a two-fold research plan for the purpose of producing the first generation of self-biased ferrite circulator devices. In the first research plan he develops techniques to prepare composite ferrite dielectric materials consisting of dielectric paste filling material and oriented hexaferrite particles. In the second phase of the research plan, he will utilize the special properties of the composites to design and test circulation devices from 1 to 20 GHz. He anticipates that the performance of the self-biased circulators to behave similarly to circulators using spinel and garnet ferrites in terms of frequency bandwidth of operation, insertion loss and isolation. Whereas the traditional circulator devices is characterized by the so-called puck design, his design will integrate the circulator devices into a semiconductor dielectric substrate utilizing the well known thick film glass on screen print technolagies. In addition, the self-biased hexaferrite circulators proposed here will do away with permanent magnets which in most cases occupy considerable space in a microwave circuit board. Reduction in circulator size translates into reduction of fabrication costs and increased efficiency in the performance of the overall microwave circuit board. The research program comprises of preparation of composites of hexaferrites and dielectric paste on glass, characterization of the oriented ferrite composite materials, fabrication of stripline microstrip circulators, testing of the circulators and modeling of the microwave and static properties of the composite materials doc18710 none Hubler One aspect of biocomplexity is the ability of biota to self-adjust to their environment. Previous studies of adaptive behavior have shown that adaptive systems will evolve over time to states that are weakly chaotic, a condition known as the edge of chaos. These studies typically use a genetic algorithm (computer-based evolution) to implement adaptation. It is conjectured that most self-adjusting dynamical systems that initially have chaotic behavior will also adapt toward the edge of chaos. A model for self-adjusting dynamical systems is introduced which treats the control parameters as slowly varying, rather than constant. The dynamics of these parameters is assumed to be governed by some low-pass filtered feedback from the dynamical variables of the system. Under the influence of noise, at least in numerical models, the probability of chaotic breakout shows a universal scaling with the duration of the breakouts. Applications of the model to biochemical oscillators as the simplest possible adaptive system relevent to environmental dynamics will be investigated. A high degree of interdisciplinarity is required, as the research involves expertise in dynamical systems, plant biology, instrumental measurements, cybernetics, enzymology, chemistry, and physics. The system is chosen to be biocomplex, yet simple enough that meaningful measurements can be made and quantitative models can be evaluated. We intend to experimentally demonstrate adaptation using the peroxidase-oxidase oscillator as an example. This system is known to exhibit non-linear, complex, and even chaotic behavior. We will explore if the in situ behavior of this enzyme provides the first experimental evidence for adaptation to the edge of chaos in a naturally occurring system. Detailed chemical models are available to guide our experiments. We will experimentally implement low-pass filtered feedback from the dynamical variables to the control parameters through: 1. a computer based probe-actuator system, and 2. the comparatively slow response of the metabolism of a thin section of horseradish root tissues suspended in a reactor, and check for adaptation to the edge of chaos, and critical scaling of chaotic outbreaks of chemical oscillations. Outreach activities to local secondary schools will be incorporated into our existing collaborations with high school science teachers. If our initial experiments on plant peroxidases show the anticipated complexity, we will then explore the related complexity in the behavior of peroxidases and oxidases in human neutrophils, cells associated with anti-bacterial activity and response to systemic afronts doc18711 none Many important composite materials are made by melt infiltration, in which polymers or metals are infiltrated into fibrous preforms. To minimize post-processing and machining, it is desirable to create parts directly from the impregnation step, a procedure called net-shape fabrication. While numerical simulation is a crucial part of process design, standard models operate at the continuum scale (i.e., the underlying fiber matrix is viewed as a continuum phase). This approach is necessary for practical reasons, but it requires significant empiricism to generate spatially averaged constitutive equations and parameters. Furthermore, current empirical techniques do not effectively account for important microcscale phenomena such as fiber anisotropy, wetting effects, and void formation during impregnation. In this collaborative research project conducted by researchers at Louisiana State University and Tulane University, state-of-the-art microscale modeling techniques will be applied to the impregnation process, which will allow analyses to be performed using first principles. Experiments will be performed to aid in the model development and to validate its quantitative capabilities. In a second phase of the research, results from the microscale simulations will be scaled up and transferred to continuum-scale models for net-shape fabrication. The ultimate goal is for this multiple-scale approach to replace much of the empiricism associated with current methods, thereby improving fabrication techniques. The collaborative nature of this project will provide unique learning opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, with graduate students from LSU participating in experimental aspects of the research at Tulane, and undergraduates from both institutions being included in research meetings at LSU. In addition, active participation in the Louisiana Alliance for Minority Participation is planed to provide summer research opportunities for students from under-represented groups doc18712 none This project consists of a series of relatively small-scale experiments using lasers and atoms which will address fundamental questions about physics of the electroweak interaction as well as other possible symmetry-violating interactions. Recent atomic parity nonconservation (PNC) experiments in several elements have attained very high precision. However, before new experimental results can lead to fundamental insights, the effects of the complex atomic structure of the relevant atoms must be understood. In thallium, new atomic structure calculations presently underway have the potential to make this element a particularly important system for testing electroweak physics. Recently completed transition amplitude, and hyperfine splitting measurements, as well as Stark shift and Stark-induced amplitude measurements now underway in our laboratory provide some of the first high-precision atomic structure tests in this element. Experiments using very similar techniques will be undertaken in other atomic systems of potential importance to electroweak tests such as lead. These experiments make use of diode laser systems and thallium samples in heated vapor cells as well as an atomic beam apparatus. The experiments will serve as ideal research training for undergraduate physics majors, the large majority of whom attend graduate school in the physical sciences doc18713 none This work addresses questions ranging from the possible charges of elementary particles to the possible shape of our universe. The main research tool is finding and using classical features of diverse physical systems. The classical aspects make it feasible for undergraduate as well as graduate students to contribute significantly, also advancing their own education. Besides the questions, the method itself is important because classical intuition strengthens and speeds the research and eases understanding of the results for other researchers as well as the public at large. For example, properties of the neutrons and protons found in all atomic nuclei may be understood by viewing each such object as a kind of knot, and using experience about how a knot responds to squeezing and to tugging doc18714 none Proposal Number: PI: Janine Wittwer The method of Bellman functions is a powerful method that can be used to bound sums indexed by dyadic intervals. Many discrete results in Harmonic Analysis have been obtained with this method in the last few years. To date it can be used on sums involving inner products of a function with the scaling or wavelet functions from the Haar wavelet system, but not the scaling or wavelet functions of general wavelet systems. Many of the discrete results obtained with the current Bellman function method could be expanded to the continuous setting if the Bellman function method was available for more general wavelets. The PI proposes to expand the method of Bellman functions from its current scope to sums involving any MRA wavelet. Wavelets have been useful in many areas such as mathematics, physics, engineering and signal processing. They are the basis of the new world wide web image compression standard JPEG . They prove to also be a useful tool in harmonic analysis. It is frequently necessary to estimate the size of sums involving wavelets. The Bellman function method is a very useful tool in doing so, but currently only works for a very special wavelet called the Haar wavelet. The PI is interested in generalizing the method where possible to more general classes of wavelets doc18715 none Proposal Number: PI: Robert Strichartz Research will be conducted in analysis on fractals. Analysis on fractals studies the properties of functions defined on fractals, centering on certain analogs of differential equations. Over the past few years, the P.I. has been actively involved in developing this area, in particular establishing connections with more traditional areas of mathematical analysis, including harmonic analysis, analysis on manifolds, partial differential equations, and numerical analysis. On a limited class of self-similar fractals it is possible to construct operators that play the role of the Laplacian, one of the central objects in traditional analysis on Euclidean spaces and manifolds. The work of the P.I. has led to a deeper understanding of these Laplacians. At the same time he has studied certain related nonlinear problems on these fractals, and has worked on extending the scope of the theory to include a wider class of fractals. This project will build on and continue this work. A second area of research is the study of harmonic analysis of fractal measures and functions with fractal spectrum. Previous research has shown that for a special class of fractal measures there is a generalization of the theory of Fourier series. By duality this yields a sampling theorem for functions whose spectrum lies in certain special fractals. The proposed research will attempt to find out what happens outside this narrow class of examples. Analysis on fractals is an emerging area with tremendous potential in both pure and applied mathematics. Scientists in diverse areas have realized that many objects in the real world can be modeled by fractals, and mathematicians have been exploring the properties of fractal sets and measures. This project will enhance the mathematical theory, both by making connections with more traditional areas of mathematics, and by developing numerical tools that could be used by applied mathematicians and scientists in the future. This project includes collaborative work with undergraduate students (REU) on computer experiments to explore examples and generate conjectures. It is expected that this experimental work will lead to deeper theoretical understanding of the subject doc18716 none This research will employ a faculty student team to develop an epistemological study using non-occupational, psychosocial, and personal risk factors to predict occupationally related low back pain. The study will validate the usability and predictive power of the Back Index model to predict a manual materials handling job s risk for producing low back pain. This work will be an extension of the work done by the PI at the Texas A&M Ergonomics Industry University Cooperative Research Center which will collaborate in this study. Research results will be incorporated into undergraduate teaching. Low back and trunk injury was responsible for 30% of the 2.8 million industrial injuries in . In the total cost of industrial injuries was $122.6 billion doc18717 none This project focuses on the study of the effects of varying the strength of the atomic interactions in a binary, two-spin-state Bose-Einstein Condensate in Rb-87. Two avenues of research will be pursued. In the first series of experiments the physics of a Feshbach resonance will be uniquely examined using the double-condensate system. In these experiments the second condensate component is used as a tool that permits approaching the resonance suddenly from both sides, and in a novel manner. In the second series of experiments the Feshbach resonance will be used to create binary Bose fluid systems of varying interaction strengths, with a particular emphasis on the physics of component separation. In this set of experiments the second component serves as a phase reference for interferometric studies of a condensate in the vicinity of a resonance doc18718 none Theoretical research will be carried out on the properties of objects with strong gravitational fields, such as neutron stars, black holes, and the Universe as a whole, with a particular focus on understanding the gravitational waves that such objects produce, and on developing and extending analytic approximation methods in general relativity to study these objects. The particular objects to be studied include (i) newly born neutron stars in supernovae explosions, (ii) neutron stars and or black holes spiralling into supermassive black holes in distant galaxies, and (iii) the dynamics of the very early Universe in models motivated by string theory with extra spatial dimensions and membranes. These studies will be useful in teaching us about the physics of relativistic gravitational fields, particularly when combined with future observational data from gravitational wave detectors and other sources doc18719 none Myhrer The main aim of the research is to investigate nuclear-hadronic dynamics with a particular emphasis on its relation to quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the fundamental dynamics of quarks and gluons. We are particularly interested in the role of chiral symmetry, which is one of the basic symmetries of QCD. Chiral perturbation theory offers a systematic and practical framework to translate the symmetries of QCD into those of hadrons, particles that actually constitute nuclei. Our research makes extensive use of this formalism. At the same time, for those phenomena which are at present beyond the applicability of chiral perturbation theory, we resort to models that preserve chiral symmetry and that can be applied to complex nuclei. Specifically, we study: (1) Consequences of nuclear chiral perturbation theory as applied to few-nucleon systems; (2) Muon capture on light nuclei and its relation to neutrino interactions with light nuclei; (3) Radiative corrections for the neutrino-deuteron cross sections, corrections that will be of importance for next-generation high precision solar neutrino data to be obtained at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory; (4) Comparison of the sigma model and chiral perturbation theory; and (5) Strangeness condensation in dense matter doc18720 none In this project funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Bowers will conduct research on the ion mobilities of molecules, clusters, metal ions, peptides, oligonucleotides, and other biomolecules. Specifically, work will be done on the energetics and mechanism of solvation of salt crystals, as well as on the conformations of polypeptides proteins and DNA RNA oligonucleotides. The energetics associated with their folding, hydration and interaction with metal ions will be investigated. These systems will be studied in the gas phase in order to avoid complications due to a solvent effect. This research attacks fundamental problems on the mobilities of ions and biomolecules in the gas phase. The results of these studies will be correlated with theoretical modeling. Graduate and undergraduate students as well as postdoctoral research associates will participate in this research. They will receive training in one of the forefront areas of contemporary physical chemistry and be thus prepared for advanced studies, or employment in industry, academia, or government laboratories doc18721 none In this project laser light forces will be used to directly focus gallium and indium atoms during the molecular beam epitaxy of III-V heterostructures. The ability to focus the Group III atoms is particularly interesting because they are the key building blocks of modern III-V semiconductor lasers. The optical method will provide unprecedented control in the location and size of the nanostructures. Thus, the work has the potential of revolutionizing nanofabrication at the system level, and will have significant impact on the field of optoelectronics and on the physics of heterostructures doc18722 none This award provides support for the Institute for Theoretical Atomic and Molecular Physics (ITAMP) at the Harvard Smithsonian. The funds are used for a postdoctoral program, a long and short term visitor program and for wokshops. The postdoctoral students are provided a unique atmosphere where they can work freely with the Harvard faculty or staff members of the Smithsonian. The visitor program provides a focus for bringing together geographically dispersed members of the AMO community to work together or separately on problems of current interest in atomic, molecular and optical theory. The workshops, which are attended on a regular basis by senior and junior scientists, students, and postdoctorals are devoted to current hot topics in the field or are designed to focus the community on subjects of broad interest doc18723 none Parker The Water Science and Technology Board (WSTB) of the National Academies provides a focal point for studies related to water resources and the role of environmental engineering in this context. The Board s objective is to provide information to improve the scientific and technological basis for resolving important questions and issues relating to the management of water resources. A major function of the WSTB is to conduct studies and sponsor workshops and conferences that can be utilized for program planning purposes. In this way, the WSTB provides a means for coordination of research plans with other Federal Agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U. S. Geological Survey, the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U. S. Department of Energy, and the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers doc18724 none This project focuses on the high-precision measurement of both the nuclear spin-independent and the nuclear spin-dependent parity-nonconserving (PNC) effects in atomic ytterbium (Yb). While based on proven experimental techniques, these measurements represent a radically different approach compared to earlier work in that they use an atom with an unusually large PNC effect and do not rely on highly accurate atomic calculations. The nuclear spin-independent effect will have a significant impact on our understanding of the semi-leptonic electroweak interactions, while the nuclear spin-dependent effect will provide important information concerning the hadronic electroweak interactions within the nucleus doc18725 none This is an excellent example of a successful program at an undergraduate institution. The PI has focussed his efforts on experiments of a scale that allows his undergraduate students to participate effectively. All of the experiments are at the sensitivity frontier and even with a comparatively large teaching load, the PI has established leadership positions. Further, he is addressing workforce related issues by coordinating the recruitment of African - American students doc18726 none A program aimed at understanding the interaction of high intensity, ultrashort pulse laser light with complex systems will be undertaken. The goals are to: 1) study high intensity photoionization beyond the single active electron model; 2) study the role of laser induced resonances in multielectron atoms and diatomic molecules; and 3) develop a unified picture of photoelectron spectra and ion charge-state yields. In order to accomplish these goals separate but complementary photoionization experiments will be pursued: 1) alkaline earth and alkali atoms at wavelengths from 400 nm to nm to isolate the role of excited states and core ionization in above-threshold ionization; 2) diatomic molecules from 400 nm to nm to understand the role of electronic resonances and nuclear degrees of freedom in ionization; and finally 3) noble gas atoms at laser wavelengths near 800 nm to directly compare current measurements with theories of photoelectron kinetic energy spectra. This work will study the ion yields and electron energy distributions of photoelectrons emitted in strong field ionization of complex systems in order to find a unifying theory of high field processes in atoms and molecules. In addition, wavelength tuning will be used to correlate electron energy shifts with the total number of photons absorbed. This will distinguish between multiphoton absorption from the ground state or excited states. It is expected that this course of study will have a large impact on our understanding of multielectron atoms and molecules in intense laser fields doc18727 none This study is concerned with developing procedures for modeling queues with heavy-tailed distributions for interarrival and or service times. These type of probability distributions decay much slower than exponential. Distributions of this type render queueing analyses very difficult, in that the Laplace-Stieltjes transforms (LSTs) of interarrival and or service times, which play such a crucial role in analytical queueing theory, often do not have closed form. Previous researchers, to get around this, have approximated these heavy-tailed distributions by families of exponentials. The approaches proposed herein avoid the problems and pitfalls of finding approximating distributions by using the actual heavy-tailed distributions themselves. One method approximates the LSTs needed to produce the output measures (waiting-time and system-size distributions) of interest by directly approximating the LSTs using a discretized version of the heavy tailed distribution itself (transform approximation method [TAM]). Another method avoids using the LST directly by solving an integral equation involving the complementary cdf of the heavy-tailed distribution (level crossing method [LC]). While discrete-event simulation is an alternative to analytical queueing analyses, this also has its limitations in that it usually can only produce mean measures of output performance. It also has difficulty simulating certain of the heavy-tailed distributions, especially with large coefficients of variation (standard deviation divided by mean). New procedures for discrete-event simulation involving quantile estimators are also proposed. The usual assumptions that made queueing analyses so productive (Poisson arrivals and exponential-type holding times) clearly do not hold when arrivals and holding times are heavy-tailed. These distributions are important, however, in modeling some important situations. The impact of this research can benefit a variety of areas where heavy-tailed distributions come into play, such as the analysis of extreme events in insurance claims and risk models and some Internet traffic situations. Developing analytic numeric queueing theoretic procedures and better ways of simulating traffic congestion for general distributions (heavy-tailed as well as any other type) can provide very effective additional tools in the queueing modeler s arsenal doc18728 none This project focuses on the study of the interactions of photons with negative ions in two series of experiments. The first studies will use the crossed kilovolt ion beam tunable laser method to measure high precision photodetachment cross sections near threshold in a static electric field. Both I- and Bi- will be studied in electric fields up to several kV cm to characterize rescattering effects in which the emerging electron s wavefunction is reflected by the electric field potential and scattered by the now neutral atomic core. Subsequently, the faculty and student researchers will investigate static electric effects on the newly discovered unique excited states in Os-. The second series of complementary experiments will proceed in parallel. Using the Advanced Light Source (ALS) as a source of high energy photons, inner-shell photodetachment from C- and B- will be investigated doc18729 none This project continues the development of an interface between 3D numerical simulations of colliding black holes and an approximate description of the merging black holes as a single distorted black hole (close limit approximation). The successful development of the interface would allow the evolution of the black hole collision to continue through the plunge phase through the final ringdown phase. The simulation of the two stages would allow estimates of the waveform and radiated angular momentum and energy to be made. These estimates would represent a useful first step in producing information useful to gravitational wave detectors and could be used to cross-check similar studies using different 3D codes and interfaces doc18730 none This award will fund U.S. graduate students and post-doctoral fellows attending the Centre de Recherches Mathematiques in Montreal for periods of several weeks during a semester of activities centered on the theme of Groups and Algebraic Geometry during Spring, . The activities planned include a strong component of training, including 1) a four day workshop on Hilbert Modular Varieties and Forms, 2) a one week Winter school on Computations in Coxeter Groups, 3) a one week workshop on Group Actions on Rational Varieties, 4) a two week workshop on Invariant Theory, 5) a one-month concentration period on the Langlands Program for Function Fields, 5) a two week workshop on Computational Lie Theory, and 6) a one week workshop on Algebraic Transformation Groups. The Centre de Recherches Mathematiques in Montreal is one of Canada s three research centers in the mathematical sciences, and has a broad mandate covering all of the various aspects of development of the discipline, with activities comprising theme years in various topics, a general conference program, an industrial program, a publications program in partnership with the American Mathematical Society, as well as activities devoted to education. The themes cover some of the most exciting areas of the mathematical sciences and typically alternate between pure and applied disciplines. This award will provide support for U.S. students and postdoctoral fellows so that they can attend the events during the Spring semester. This semester is thematically devoted to Groups and Algebraic Geometry, a difficult area of research in which few, if any, universities can offer coverage by advanced courses which allow for adequate graduate student preparation. This award will allow students to take advantage of an exceptional opportunity for education and training by the world s leading experts in areas that have seen significant numbers of recent breakthroughs doc18731 none The Plasmid Biology Conference will be held in Pittsburgh in June . Plasmids represent a unique group of genetic elements found in prokaryotes, eukaryotes and archaeon. In addition to their use as models for basic biological studies, plasmids are also important tools in the biotechnology industry, including their use in applications relevant to medicine and agriculture. Plasmids are a major source for genetic diversity amongst various organisms and are responsible for the spread of a variety of genes in nature. Plasmid Biology represents a continuation of the symposium held to discuss the highlights of major advances in this field every two years. This meeting deals with all aspects of plasmid biology, including their replication and maintenance, transfer, their role as a source of a horizontal gene pool, evolution, and ecology. Approximately 200 scientists are expected to attend. There is no similar meeting that has an in-depth discussion of the various areas of plasmid biology. This meeting serves the international plasmid biology community and provides an excellent forum for exchange of ideas that are critical for the continued advances in the field. Participants in the meeting have traditionally included leaders in the field as well as younger scientists such as graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Oral presentations by young scientists are encouraged and are designed to stimulate their enthusiasm for this field. NSF funds will help defray travel expenses of graduate students and postdoctural fellows doc18732 none This one-year NSF support is solely used for the support of graduate students in their thesis research on (1) the physics and technology of beam cooling and (2) applications of quadrupole-mode transfer functions in beam manipulation, measurements of beam properties, etc. The beam cooling techniques can provide high brightness beams for high energy and nuclear physics research with higher precision and higher luminosity. The quadrupole-mode transfer function can be used to manipulate beams distribution for emittance measurements, space charge compensation, and impedance measurements doc18733 none A very exciting development of the past decade in nuclear astrophysics has been that of beams of short-lived nuclides, often those along the pathways of processes of explosive nucleosynthesis, and sometimes critical to their progression. Notably, the r-process is thought to occur near thecore of a supernova in a fraction of a second, and to synthesize half thenuclei heavier than iron. It occurs in a hot neutron-rich environment, passing through nuclei that are 20 neutrons beyond stability. One componentof the research will be to measure half-lives and structure of nuclei along the r-process path, thus greatly improving our understanding of ther-process. Another process, the p-process, occurs in a high-temperature hydrogen-rich environment in tens of seconds, as matter from one star is accreted onto either a white dwarf or neutron star companion. The result can be a nova or an x-ray burst. This process proceeds by successive proton-capturenreactions and beta-decays through nuclei a few protons to the proton-rich side of stability, but has critical points at which it may require a beta-decay in order to proceed unless the next reaction proceeds very rapidly. Thus it is important to measure proton-capture reaction rates on the unstable nuclei along its pathway in order to understand how it synthesizes nuclei and generates energy. We plan to study several crucial p-process reactions. The final component of the program involves the Observatory for Multiflavor NeutrInos from Supernovae. OMNIS will detect several thousand events, mostly from e-neutrinos , from the next galactic supernova. But, because of neutrino oscillations recently established by the Super-K and SNO neutrino observatories, these will actually reflect the energy distributions of the more-difficult-to-detect mu- and tau-neutrinos just as they emerge from the very core of the exploding supernova. OMNIS data will enable a variety of results, ranging from (1) diagnosis of the stellar collapse process at a level that will test for several recently hypothesized effects, (2)direct measurement of neutrino masses several orders of magnitude more accurately than some present results, (3) determination of poorly determined neutrino oscillation modes, (4) observation of the signatures of someprocesses of nucleosynthesis, and (5) possible observation of the sharp neutrino luminosity termination that would signal the collapse to a blackhole doc18734 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Conference on Progress in Partial Differential Equations and Applications Yin This award supports U.S. participants in the Conference on Progress in Partial Differential Equations and Applications held at Washington State University on May 15-18, . The workshop emphasizes recent progress in nonlinear partial differential equations arising from applied sciences and industrial applications. The focus is mainly on three topics: control and inverse problems, free boundary problems, and numerical analysis. One of the days of the workshop features the Pacific Northwest Partial Differential Equations seminar series. This workshop will help researchers develop new tools to tackle nonlinear problems in their own research fields. It will provide an excellent opportunity for communication and collaboration among faculty and between senior and junior investigators. It will motivate young researchers and graduate students to learn the latest developments in the field of partial differential equations and applications. It will also facilitate collaboration between mathematicians and researchers from other physical sciences and engineering fields doc18735 none This project involves research on two different topics in (2+1)-dimensional theories. Increased tractability of these lower dimensional models allows explicit calculations that cannot be done in higher dimensional theories. These calculations yield important insights that may also be relevant for higher dimensional theories. 1) Nonperturbative aspects of gauge theories. The PI and collaborators have developed a special matrix parametrization for the gauge fields in order to develop a gauge invariant Hamiltonian analysis of Yang-Mills theory in (2+1) dimensions. Recent results will be extended to analyze higher order corrections to the calculated string tension, investigate screening versus confinement in this framework, and include quark degrees of freedom. 2) Noncommutative theories and quantum Hall effect (QHE). There has recently appeared an interesting connection between QHE and noncommutative field theory. Previous studies by the PI and collaborator indicate that a (noncommutative) finite matrix model proposed by Polychronakos to describe fractional quantum Hall fluids of finite extent (for a filling fracton of 1 m) does not agree at small distances with standard wavefunctions and calls into question the matrix model approach. The correspondence between the matrix model and standard approaches will be explored and extended to include more general filling factors and electron degrees of freedom doc18736 none Proposal: Parity Violation in Moller Scattering and Real Photon Experiments PI: Piotr Decowski, Smith College : The grant will support involvement of undergratuate women students in cutting edge experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center: in the high precision measurements of electroweak mixing angle at very low momentum transfer and in the first two experiments that will use the new photon facility in the SLAC End Station A. The photon experiments will measure nuclear mass dependence of J psi and psi-prime photoproduction cross sections and will determine gluon spin density in protons from open charm photoproduction. Students will participate in building and testing parts of detection systems at Smith College, and in analysis of data at SLAC doc18737 none PI: Mehdi Bozorgmehr CUNY Graduate School The research focuses on the backlash that targets Middle Eastern and South Asian (MESA) Americans in the aftermath of the September 11, terrorist attacks on America. It is a well known sociological finding that external hostility leads to internal group solidarity to advance its goals and objectives. Past sociological models of conflict and solidarity based on studies of Jews, Asians and Cubans are based on assumptions of different forms of economic or political competition between groups. The investigator acknowledges that these structural models are useful, but notes that inter-ethnic relations are often more dynamic and may be dictated by global forces between the sending and host societies. Thus, the PI proposes to develop an alternative model of inter-ethnic relations, arguing that the main source of host hostility of Middle Easterners, unlike the groups listed above, is the anti-American policies of the Middle Eastern and South Asian regimes (or terrorists) rather than the action of the exiles and immigrants themselves. Also, MESA Americans are panethnic and have not created group solidarity, but are instead represented by various national religious and ethnic organizations. The investigator will study the current backlash by examining the role of religious and ethnic MESA organizations in averting, coping and responding to the backlash against MESA in response to the events of September 11th. The investigator will interview leaders of approximately 50 of these national ethnic and religious organizations; presently the only existing organs that can act on behalf of their respective communities in response to the current crisis. The project is significant on three levels: (1) historically because data will be collected on the crisis, as it unfolds; (2) substantively because our knowledge of a understudied minority groups in American will be enhanced; and (3) theoretically because the research will contribute our general understanding of inter-ethnic group conflict doc18738 none Ludu This 2-year research plan is focused on modeling and understanding some classes of nonlinear phenomena at the surface of fluid objects, namely large amplitude shape oscillations like solitary waves on compact surfaces. Solitary waves are the only singular traveling stable excitations known in quantum field theory. However, the existence of such special solution on compact (sphere-like) objects is still an open question. These topics are related with PI s long experience in nonlinear physics, especially with the successful introduction of the roton model in order to explain spontaneous alpha- and cluster-decay of heavy ions (Phys. Rev. Lett. 80 ( ) ). The aim here is to extend this theoretical model and to apply it to any compact (almost spherical) system, in order to explain and predict its shape, modes, patterns, and its strange nonlinear behavior. In nonlinear science, finding an exact solution, or even formal classification of possible evolution paths of a system, is rather the exception than the rule. This is the basic reason to investigate such new exact solitary wave solutions for spherical objects, of different space scales from heavy nuclei, atomic clusters, biological cells, macroscopic liquid drops, shells, bubbles to neutron stars. Last but not the least, these results will be applied to the recently discovered new form of matter, Bose Einstein-Condensates (BEC drops). All in all we ll try to predict the evolution of such systems, their modes of motion, possible catastrophes, break-up processes, fission, etc., beyond the limits of linear approximation. This will be described theoretically in terms of causal fluid equations (also called Hamiltonian systems). Exact traveling singular stable solutions will be investigated (soliton theory) and later on the equations will be solved numerically using large computer codes. The behavior of the free surface of such compact fluid systems, that is drop-like objects or fluid layers is of special interest in many natural and industrial processes, from cell division in biology or spraying and atomization to exotic nuclear shapes, exotic radioactivity, or impact between stellar objects. The basic aim in the study of such nonlinear collective modes is the understanding of the interaction of the bulk with the boundaries. Another aim is the understanding of the transitions between different modes and patterns. A generalized KdV equation, valid for different geometries, including viscoelastic properties and damping is introduced and solved. The theoretical tools used in this research will have a certain degree of novelty, since there will be used self-similarity techniques in order to solve such NPDE. This research is expected to impact the teaching and learning enterprise through the student research, and through building international collaborations doc18739 none The primary aim of the project is to explore connections between theories describing two different fundamental forces, namely, the nuclear force and gravity. The strong and weak nuclear forces are described by gauge theories, whereas quantum gravity is thought to be described by string theory. String theory, however, contains not only strings but also D-branes, extended objects whose properties involve supersymmetric gauge theories, thus providing the connection between the two types of theory. Specifically, the project focuses on the properties of particular string theories containing D-branes and orientifold planes; in these theories, the supersymmetric gauge theories describing the D-branes include the analogs of quarks. The interest of this line of research is that questions impossible to answer in one theory may be easy to answer using the other theory, and vice versa, allowing progress to be made in both. For example, well-understood properties of gauge theory could lead to a better understanding of string theory, and thus quantum gravity, which has long been an unsolved problem. Conversely, string theory could be used to probe gauge theories in the poorly understood strong-coupling regime. Ultimately, this could explain the phenomenon of quark confinement (that is, the fact that free quarks cannot be observed) and yield a quantitative understanding of the structure of protons, nuclei, etc., in terms of the properties of their constituent quarks doc18740 none This project will study the production and properties of Rydberg states of laser-cooled rubidium inside a holographic atom trap (HAT). The HAT is produced by sending a high power continuous-wave YAG laser though a holographic phase element, then imaging the diffraction pattern onto a cloud of atoms formed inside a dark magneto-optical trap. The resulting trap is an array of lattice sites that strongly confines atoms in three dimensions. Each lattice site contains thousands of atoms at densities more than two orders of magnitude higher than in a magneto-optical trap. Traps of similar design are of great current interest for Rydberg atom quantum computation. Narrow-band excitation of Rydberg states in high density atom clouds has been recently predicted to be strongly affected by the dipole-blockade collisional effect in which the presence of a single excited Rydberg state can frequency shift neighboring atoms out of resonance with the excitation light. The HAT will be used to study this process at densities comparable to those needed for mesoscopic Rydberg quantum computation doc18741 none Theoretical and computation research into the collision of ultra-cold atoms is undertaken to better understand the long-range forces governing these collisions. The cross sections are required to better understand and model the dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates doc18742 none This proposal deals with research activities that will lead to the detection of ultra-high energy cosmic rays to study their origin and identity. The PI s proposal will enable him to cover the following responsibilities: 1. Management, integration, and quality assurance of surface detector elements. 2. Implementation of detector trigger and calibration schemes and refine software for event reconstruction. Funding is recommended at a slightly reduced level, a level that will enable the PI to fulfill his commitment at the rate AUGER is progressing doc18743 none Research extending the ideas of quantum defect theory to the interaction of atoms at ultra-low kinetic energies is explored. In contrast to most formulations of quantum defect theory, the current methodology is angular momentum insensitive. This is a substantial step forward and has potential implications for the simplification of the treatment of multi-channel interactions in ultra-cold gases doc18744 none The structure and decay dynamics of highly excited states in molecules is a research area that has provided a rich and diverse sampling of interesting and important physics. Investigations of processes such as photoionization, photodissociation, and photo-association have required more detailed and accurate knowledge of the unique way molecular systems behave. In particular, understanding the role of electronic and nuclear spin in molecular systems has emerged as important in several areas, for example, high resolution photoionization studies, chemical reaction dynamics and loss mechanisms in cold molecule production in atomic traps. This has led to new theoretical efforts to incorporate electronic and nuclear spin dynamics into the highly successful theoretical approach of multichannel defect theory (MQDT). Fundamental questions are being raised, including: 1) How does spin angular momentum coupling vary with energy in molecular Rydberg states? 2) At what values of principal quantum number and electronic angular momentum do different behaviors emerge for different species? 3) Does nuclear spin affect either electronic or rotational autoionization of Rydberg states into different ionic states? 4) Do spin interactions play a role in the relative branching ratio between ionization and dissociation in the decay of highly excited states? 5) What role does internuclear separation play in these spin dynamics? This project proposes to begin addressing these questions by investigating the structure and dynamics of highly excited molecular states, including the effects of orbital and rotational angular momentum and vibration on molecular spin interactions, by using the novel approach of time-resolved, resonant four-wave mixing spectroscopy. The goal is to perform high energy resolution measurements within a given Rydberg series or a given vibrational progression in order to follow the evolution of angular momentum coupling as a function of energy and internuclear separation. By examining three fundamental systems with distinct molecular structures; H2, N2 and the OH radical, prototypical interactions and dynamics can be systematically investigated. This kind of data, taken together with MQDT analyses, promises to provide new insights into the unique nuclear and electronic angular momentum interactions that molecules exhibit doc18745 none The Stanford gravitational wave detection group is working in direct support of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) project supported by the NSF. The research aims to develop cutting edge technologies in the areas of: high power lasers; low absorption materials for optics and mirror coatings; high-power high-quantum-efficiency photo-detectors; advanced interferometer configurations; adaptive-optics; active seismic isolation and feedback and control systems. The LIGO observatory is being commissioned and when operational should give us a glimpse of the range of astronomical gravitational wave sources that may be detectable. Gravitational wave sources such as interacting black holes, coalescing compact binary systems, stellar collapses, pulsars and low-mass x-ray binaries are all possible candidates for detection. Observing gravitational wave signals will significantly enhance our understanding of the Universe and detectors of higher performance are required to exploit the potential of gravitational wave astronomy. The Stanford research program is directed towards developing the technology essential to the operation of Advanced LIGO and future gravitational wave detectors doc18746 none Draayer The nuclear theory program at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge is focused on understanding the structure of atomic nuclei; specifically, we examine key ingredients of the strong interaction that binds nucleons (neutron and protons) in the nucleus. There is both a basic science and an applied aspect to what we do: On the basic science side we probe the nuclear soup - trying to understand how the strong interaction, which can be drilled down to a consideration of the structure of the nucleons themselves, manifests itself in the nuclear medium. This is important since we cannot claim we really understand an object unless we can tear it apart and put it back together again. We know, for example, that nuclear display certain characteristic features, such as independent particle behavior near closed shells and collective rotations - like that of a quantum top - away from closed shells. The drivers of these simple characteristics, which the composite system filters from the complex nucleon-nucleon interaction, remain elusive and hence a roadblock to a deeper understanding of the structure of atomic nuclei. On the complementary applied science side, one can gain a better appreciation for practical implications of what we do by asking a very general but important question: Is it important to understand systems and related processes that are responsible for most of the energy stored in the universe? If it is important to understand at a deeper level this ultimate source of energy , then the study of nuclear physics, as well as the training of students who will shepherd future developments in this area, has real value to our nation and humankind. It is within this larger framework that we see and do our work. We are particularly interested in the structure of rare earth and actinide nuclei because in these nuclei that the collective modes are strongly enhanced through the involvement of a large fraction of the total number of constituent nucleons. Such studies require theoretical tools beyond those of the usual shell and collective models, which nonetheless by virtue of their successes provide guidance and limits on all new approaches. Our research exploits symmetry methods, from point groups to q-deformed and infinite-dimensional algebras, as well as non-linear dynamics. The proposed work, which will continue our ongoing program, is organized into three areas: 1) shell-model and related investigations; 2) group theory and algebraic methods; and 3) collective motion and nonlinear dynamics. Recent successes in each of these areas include, respectively: 1) the articulation of twist and scissors + twist modes as collective M1 transitions in strongly deformed nuclei; 2) an algebraic solution of the generalized pairing problem, inclusive of non-degenerate single-particle energies; and 3) the evolution of deformation in nuclei to solitons (dubbed rotons) on the surface of a liquid drop. The training of graduate students, most from abroad, has been and will continue to be an important complementary educational and out-reach feature of our program. To date, the PhD student profile in theoretical nuclear physics program at LSU is: 1 African- American (the first in physics to graduate from LSU), 1 Korean, 1 Pakistani, 4 Germans, 1 Indonesian, 1 Ukrainian, 1 Romanian, 4 Bulgarian, and 2 Armenian doc18747 none A broad program of research in the theory of elementary particles and quantum field theory will include investigation of composite models of particles thought to be elementary up to now using the existence of extra space dimensions. The relation of violations of CPT symmetry, where C is charge conjugation or matter-antimatter exchange, P is parity or space inversion, and T is time reversal, to violations of Lorentz invariance (i.e., of the theory of relativity) will be investigated. The nature of elementary particle statistics will be explored. These investigations are central to the understanding of the properties and interactions of elementary particles doc18748 none Salvatore Stolfo-Columbia University-SGER: Mitigating Access Risks of Browsing Government Data and Websites by Secure Private Portals This proposal from a computer scientist and a social scientist will study the social and policy implications and citizen perceptions of government gathering of Personally Identifying Information through Federal web sites, and will explore the use of alternative privacy-enhancing technologies. These technologies will be evaluated and further developed. Initial discussions with several interested Federal Government agencies have already begun doc18749 none The behavior of complex natural systems results from the coupling of causal dynamical evolution with random events. This work is a coordinated experimental and theoretical investigation of how nonlinear dynamical processes shape the statistics of multiple noise sources in moderately complex physical systems. The nonlinear processes on which this work will focus occur in optical fiber and consist of multi-order stimulated Raman Scattering (SRS), stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS), and four-wave mixing (FWM) of polarization components of Q-switched laser pulses. These processes are present or actively exploited in a wide range of applications such as frequency conversion, signal amplification and processing, and pulse compression. Understanding how these nonlinear processes shape noise is therefore of both practical and fundamental importance doc18750 none The scaling limit of open strings propagating in a neutral electromagnetic background is known to give rise to non-commutative gauge theories (introduced by mathematicians in the context of non-commutative geometry), but many interesting questions remain. This research programs investigates non-commutativity in more general string backgrounds. In particular, non-commutativity in charged strings (as opposed to neutral strings) is studied, as well as the related issues of generalization of the star product, and of the interpretation of the corresponding scaling limit in the D-brane language. Non-commutativity in solvable backgrounds of the plane wave type (the Nappi-Witten model is one example) will be also investigated. The latter are time dependent backgrounds, and are very interesting in their own merits, and the center of much current research. The physics question one aims to answer is how intrinsic to string theory is non-commutativity of space-time variables. The possibility that space-time coordinates might not commute at the string scale is a very radical departure from our current understanding of space-time, and points to a novel type of uncertainty principle. It might induce deviation from smoothness of space-time at small distances, and possible modifications to the inflationary perturbation spectrum doc18751 none This work examines two aspects of the interaction of light and matter under conditions of strong response: 1) supercontinuum generation (SCG), the dramatic transfer of pump photons to modes covering a broad spectrum and 2) adiabatic passage (AP) in atoms, the transfer of atomic population from one state to another via pulses in counter-intuitive sequence. SCG is fundamentally important to the study of intense pulse propagation through media and has found important application in the generation of tunable short laser pulses, high-speed communication systems, frequency metrology, and medical diagnostics. AP is a robust and efficient technique for population transfer which has found useful application in atom optics and quantum measurement. Experiments will be undertaken to examine the details of SCG in order to establish understanding at a fundamental level. AP will be explored through the use of shaped laser pulses and via various intermediate states doc18752 none This proposal requests funds to support experimental studies of heavy quark physics with the BaBar Collaboration at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. The proposed research centers on the study of hadronic decays of the B-meson. Such studies are challenging both theoretically, since they are difficult to calculate from first principles using Quantum ChromoDynamics (QCD), and experimentally, since they occur with very small branching ratios. One focus will be on the study of color-suppressed B decays, such as Bo ? Dopo, and tests of factorization that express one matrix element which is the product of two weak currents as the product of matrix elements of two single-currents. The second area of study will be that of semi-leptonic B decays into non-charm mesons, such as B ? pln. The goal here is to measure the CKM matrix element Vub and test factorization for B-meson decays into two light mesons doc18753 none Observing neutrinos requires large detectors and great patience. Neutrinos are able to cross the entire universe, traversing space, planets, galaxies at almost the speed of light, without leaving a mark. Only the extremely rare collision with the core of an atom stops a neutrino and reveals its presence, transforming it into a charged particle. Depending on the type of neutrino hitting an atom, either an electron or a similar but heavier particle emerges from the collision. Physicists can detect light emitted by the charged particle, thereby learning more about the properties of the initial neutrino. MiniBoone is an experiment at Fermilab designed to measure neutrino masses. The specific goal of this proposal is to fund detector equipment for a novel kaon secondary beam monitor which will constrain the background in the neutrino beam. While playing an important role in a large high energy physics experiment, this effort is a rare opportunity for students, particularly undergraduates. This is essentially a table top high energy experiment bringing all aspects, including physics and technical Design, assembly and testing of detectors, layout and assembly of electronics, analysis of data down to a manageable scale. The remaining parts of the project, prototyping the detectors and data acquisition system, assembling and testing detectors, and analysis of data, would each make excellent senior theses or projects for graduate students doc18754 none of collective features of Oxygen-16 that will permit quantitative evaluation of spectroscopic factors for single-nucleon knockout and cross sections for two-nucleon removal, (iii) analysis ofexperimental data to deduce the properties of the highest-momentum protons in the nucleus (the last missing protons ), (iv) application of incisive new methods of analysis and computation in pairing theoryto elucidate the superfluid phase diagrams of neutron matter, symmetrical nuclear matter, liquid Helium-3, and quantum chromodynamics, (v)exploration of the breakdown of Fermi-liquid theory, as manifested in fermion condensation and other rearrangements of single-particle degrees of freedom in strongly correlated systems, and (vi) investigation of mathematical and many-body aspects of quantum control relevant to laser control of chemical reactions and to quantum computation. Continuing a long tradition, the preparation of graduate students for productive careers in teaching and research plays a central role in the program, essential to its success doc18755 none Mao Nanoscale multilayers, composed of sub-micrometer thick layers of two or more species of materials are of significant interest for high-technology applications and devices in many fields of industry, including microelectronics, magnetic recording, optics, and micro-electro-mechanical systems. The physical performance and reliability of these devices depend on the structural integrity of the multilayers. Hence, there is considerable worldwide research interest in the mechanical response of multilayers, including the deformation and fracture behavior. The development of viable novel devices based on these advanced multilayer systems and their further improvement requires a basic understanding of the fundamental processes that are the agents of the macroscopic deformation and fracture performance. The main goal of the proposed project is the investigation of the processes of micro-plasticity involved in the fracture of carefully selected model nanoscale multilayer systems by dynamic in-situ straining TEM experiments as well as static post-mortem TEM. This research will produce new insights regarding dislocation mobilities and interactions with interfaces and their relationship to crack growth in multilayers. Hence, the fundamental relationships between processes of plasticity, local flow and fracture in Cu Ni, Cu Cr and Cu TiN multilayers with selected interfacial structure and layer thickness will be elucidated. The project objectives are: to investigate the deformation and fracture process of metal metal (Cu Ni, Cu Cr) and metal ceramic (Cu TiN) multilayers by in-situ straining transmission electron microscopy. to predict the fracture resistance and the effect of interfaces on crack tip stresses in the nanolayers as a function of layer thickness, and crystal orientation using a dislocation-interface interaction model. Both in-situ TEM fracture experiments and dislocation based modeling of the deformation and fracture processes in the nanolayers will be performed. Two graduate students (one in materials science and one in mechanical engineering) will be trained during the project as the follows: Student 1: in-situ TEM experiment on microplasticity and fracture in nanolayers (Dr. Wizorek) Student 2: dislocation based modelling on the deformation and fracture process (Dr. Mao). Dr. Mao will be responsible for the design of the in-situ straining experiments and dislocation-based modeling. Dr. Wiezorek will be responsible for the performance of TEM characterization and in-situ TEM testing. Because of the comprehensive and interdisciplinary nature of the proposed research, the involvement of students in the project will provide effective means for training of the new generation of materials scientists for the new century doc18756 none The research is divided into two parts; 1) low dimensionality effects on melting, and 2) stick-slip experments in 2-d crystals. The PI will search for a possible intermediate hexatic state between liquid and solid and study the response of 3d structure s to mechanical stress. The approach should be able to yield direct measurements of exact individual particle dynamics and provide answers to many fundamental questions doc18722 none This award provides support for the Institute for Theoretical Atomic and Molecular Physics (ITAMP) at the Harvard Smithsonian. The funds are used for a postdoctoral program, a long and short term visitor program and for wokshops. The postdoctoral students are provided a unique atmosphere where they can work freely with the Harvard faculty or staff members of the Smithsonian. The visitor program provides a focus for bringing together geographically dispersed members of the AMO community to work together or separately on problems of current interest in atomic, molecular and optical theory. The workshops, which are attended on a regular basis by senior and junior scientists, students, and postdoctorals are devoted to current hot topics in the field or are designed to focus the community on subjects of broad interest doc18758 none Hyperspherical methods are applied to the 1)interaction of atoms in clusters and Bose condensates, and 2) the interaction of electrons and positrons with matter. In 1) three body effects are treated using a combination of multi-channel quantum defect theory (MCQDT) and the adiabatic, hyperspherical representation. The method incorporates Feshbach resonances in a natural way and enables a realistic analysis of the effect of the resonances on three-body recombination. In 2) the hyperspherical hidden crossing method, again coupled with MCQDT is used to examine positron-atom interactions doc18759 none This proposal will provide for continuing research at the Nuclear Structure Laboratory (NSL) of the University of Notre Dame for a period of three years. Research at the NSL is based on a broad program in low energy nuclear physics and includes studies of nuclear reactions, structure, dynamics, and fundamental symmetries spanning the subfields of Nuclear Astrophysics, Weak Interactions and Fundamental Symmetries, Nuclear Structure, and studies of Nuclear Reactions with Radioactive Ion Beams (RIBs). This proposal represents a growing trend towards a more cohesive and synergistic research program as our interests coalesce in the area of Nuclear Astrophysics. We are enthusiastic about future developments in low energy physics with the proposed construction of the rare isotope accelerator RIA. Our funding request includes the support of three accelerators (JN, KN, and FN) and various new developments in detectors, ion sources, and new systems for fast transport of radioactive materials. While the scientific output of the NSL and its impact to low-energy nuclear physics has been tremendous, the most important part of our mission is education. The obvious impact to Technology transfer via our education mission has been substantial. Typically, 9 Ph.D. are awarded in a given three year period. The Nuclear Structure Laboratory is a national and an international resource with a lively user program from 14 US facilities including universities and national laboratories, 11 foreign countries, and I industrial laboratory doc18760 none Gravitational waves are ripples of gravity thrown off by violent interactions of astrophysical bodies. They were first predicted to exist by Einstein in , but because they are weakened by traveling incredibly large distances before reaching Earth, they have not yet been detected. Presently, a number of countries are completing the construction of detectors which might finally see gravitational waves, including the NSF-funded LIGO detectors. The gravitational waves which should be most easily detected by such instruments will come from colliding black holes. Unfortunately, even these events are likely to be undetectable without powerful techniques to extract the gravitational wave data from the instrumental noise. The research funded by this award will use cutting-edge computer simulations to provide partial, but vital, information about the gravitational waves from colliding black holes. This information will then be used to develop powerful new techniques for detecting the gravitational wave signals. The confirmation of Einstein s prediction of gravitational waves is a laudable scientific objective in itself. However, there is also a much greater promise. Gravitational waves can be produced by objects, like black holes, that cannot be directly observed in any other way. Because so little is known about such objects, it is almost certain that new insights into their origins and workings will result from observing them directly for the first time. Furthermore, it is widely believed that gravitational waves will reveal aspects of the universe that have not yet even been conceived of, thus revolutionizing the current picture of the nature of the cosmos itself. While this revolution will take years to realize, this award enables the important first step of predicting what should be sought and how to seek it doc18761 none Research is proposed on semiclassical methods for calculating the behavior of quantum systems whose classical counterparts are chaotic. The primary focus is on the absorption spectrum of atoms in strong electric and magnetic fields. In addition, new work will be started on systems having two active electrons undergoing breakup doc18762 none This research addresses the question of atoms interacting with light in a radically nonperturbative, ultrahigh laser intensity range from W cm2 to W cm2. The science has direct bearing on a number of topics, including new multi-electron phenomena, nonperturbative magnetic field-atom interactions, relativistic continuum dynamics, the breakdown of the semiclassical WKB approximation in strong field physics, and high-energy radiation from laser-atom interactions. The atomic physics and laser technology in the proposal has a direct impact on fourth generation XUV and X-ray radiation light sources, with applications as wide-ranging as device lithography and single molecule x-ray diffraction. The education component of the proposal is directed toward high-school and college student perceptions of physics and addresses the new pedagogy behind real-world, electronic teaching resources doc18763 none A new era in gravitational wave detection is about to begin, with the completion of the three interferometers of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, or LIGO. The gravitational wave research group at Syracuse University intends to play a key role in LIGO s improvement and observing activities over the next three years. They will carry out detector characterization activities to guide this work, will strive to understand the data produced by the interferometers, and will help optimize methods for searching for gravitational waves. In support of these activities, they will devote their laboratory facilities at Syracuse to experiments that will investigate any anomalies that may be discovered in the instruments at the LIGO observatories. In addition, the group will develop a set of laboratory teaching stations, as the nucleus of a summer school for scientists new to the field of gravitational wave detection. Once LIGO is collecting the sort of data for which it was designed, we will be in a position where dramatic new discoveries about the universe are possible. The results of LIGO s initial data run could shed light on black holes, gamma ray bursts, neutron stars, and supernovae. The instruments carrying out these observations have dramatically extended the state of the art of precision measurement technology doc18764 none March 11, . PI: Luis Caffarelli [caffarel@math.utexas.edu], University of Texas, Austin : Our research focus in a series of phenomena that bring together different areas of non linear PDE. For instance, a flame front propagating in a layered medium brings together the interaction of the fast phase transition at the edge of the flame, with the linking of large scales (front speeds) and small scales (possibly random , thin layering). Recent models of front formation, bring together the interaction of optimal allocation,that provides the variational framework for front formation (the Monge Ampere equation ) with the issue of how vorticity is transported within, and affects the front. Finally, problems in financial engineering, bring together fully non linear equations ( for instance as extremals or intervals of trust when only rough bounds on volatility and correlations are available) with issues of phase transition , when trading strategy changes discontinuously at certain values of the parameters,or there are constraints on the range of trading, and homogeneisation, when the underlying space changes randomly. We plan to study several models from different sciences that bring together interactions of complementary non linear phenomena. A good example would be flame propagation in a thinly layered material: Observed at short range, the flame front will wiggle , moving faster in some of the layers, depending on their composition. From far away, the flame will appear as a homogeneous front. Its speed , though, will depend in a very subtle way from both the nature of the ignition process at the edge of the flame ( free boundary problem) and the properties of the very fine, ( possibly randomly organized, as it usually occurs in nature) thin layering. Another example has to do with the formation of weather fronts: according to some models, globally the front organizes itself trying to spread its energy in an optimal way, and within, vorticity ( the rotational component of wind) is transported in an interactive way with the front organization. A third example comes from financial engineering when seeking optimal ( or safest) trading strategies, but , as in most cases, only a rough knowledge is available of the way different ways in which different components of the portfolio, or parameters ( interest rates, exchange rates, etc ) interact.This rough or incomplete knowledge, gives rise to non linear strategies, that couple with constraints in the trading range, discontinuous trading strategies, etc doc18765 none Zhanov The purpose of the research is to further extend and apply the asymptotic three-particle Coulomb scattering wave function to problems in nuclear astrophysics. Knowledge of the three-body Coulomb scattering wave function is important both from fundamental and practical points of view. On the fundamental side, it will pave the way to a solution, both in nuclear and atomic physics, of the long-standing three-body quantum-mechanical problem with three charged particles. As a practical application, we will use the three-body Coulomb scattering wave function to estimate both the effect of the post-decay Coulomb acceleration in Coulomb breakup reactions and the effect of the a third spectator proton (medium) on the hydrogen burning p-p reaction that involves two protons inside the sun. Nuclear capture reactions between charged particles in stellar interiors occur at such small energies ( hundred keV) that their cross sections are very small. Hence, direct measurements in the lab are extremely difficult or impossible. Thus indirect techniques have been developed to determine stellar cross sections. One such indirect technique uses breakup reactions of a projectile in the Coulomb field of a heavy target. However, the Coulomb field of the target being a source of the reaction, plays not only a positive but also a negative role: the positively charged fragments formed from the projectile breakup are moving in the repulsive Coulomb field of the target. This acceleration effect due to the Coulomb field, called post-decay Coulomb acceleration (PCA), distorts the experimental results that are used to extract the radiative capture reaction rates. Unfortunately, a real quantum-mechanical estimate of PCA has not been done because the three-particle Coulomb scattering wave function describing the motion of two fragments in the Coulomb field of the target is unknown. Recently we have found the leading asymptotic terms of this wave function in the asymptotic region where two fragments are close to each other and far away from the third particle. This is just configuration region that contributes to Coulomb breakup reactions. Hence, the asymptotic Coulomb wave function found in our earlier work and its extension can be used to estimate, for the first time, the effect of the PCA on the nuclear astrophysical radiative capture processes determined from the Coulomb breakup reactions in a full quantum-mechanical approach. The same wave function also will be used to estimate the impact of the proton-spectator on the fusion cross section of two protons inside the sun. This is the first of the hydrogen burning reactions in the sun and hence it defines the sun s luminosity. Further we will apply the asymptotic normalization coefficient (ANC) concept to calculate the external region contribution to radiative capture widths for resonances decaying to bound states that are important in nuclear astrophysics. In some cases it is difficult to measure the radiative widths and the calculated ANC s allow us to put the limits on the possible radiative width values doc18766 none Principal Investigator: J. Craig Jenkins Institution: Ohio State University This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) provides funds to supplement the existing standard sources of international events data (primarily computerized content analyses of Reuters Business Briefs) with a field reporting system based on observers in seven Central and South Asian countries (Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgzstan and Pakistan). The field reporters are trained in a systematic event reporting format that captures many more conflict events than are reported in the Reuters sources and provides more comprehensive data for subsequent analyses. The grant would support the training of the field reporters, improve their infrastructure, and enlarge the geographic coverage of the reporting system. In addition, the PI will refine the computerized coding of the standard news reports to improve their reliability. Comparisons between the two sources will be made. The project will expand the systematic data collection of conflict events in an area of the world that has been under-reported in past conflict data files but has become an increasing area of internal and international conflict. The resulting publicly available data will increase our ability to test and refine theories of conflict, especially the relationships between internal and international conflict doc18767 none The proposal deals with several topics in low-dimensional dynamics. The PI plans to investigate the topological dynamics of laminations; in particular he would like to further develop the dynamics of growing trees and use it to study the behavior of the vertices of the Julia set. He also wants to consider classes of non-analytic plane maps for whom analogs of well-known results for polynomials can be proven. Other directions of his research are related to attractos for classes of rational maps and to further developing the rotation theory which studies coexistence of cycles depending on their characteristics similar to rotation numbers for circle maps of degree one. The theory of dynamical systems gives tools to study complex systems, for example the evolution of a complicated deterministic process over time. There is a rich and distinguished tradition of using these powerful tools in other sciences like communication theory, statistical physics, and chemical kinetics doc18768 none Polarimetric radar measurements of precipitation contain information about the shape of the precipitation particles. For raindrops, the shape may oscillate with time, but the average shape is approximately spheroidal, and the larger the drop the greater the deviation from spherical. Hence polarimetric measurements of rain contain information about drop size - information in addition to what is provided by the radar reflectivity alone. This is the basis for improved estimates of rainfall rate using polarimetry. This project contributes to radar polarimetry by directly measuring the sizes, shapes, and canting angles of individual drops at the ground. It employs an upgraded version of a video disdrometer manufactured by an Austrian firm, Joanneum Research. This instrument records the front and side view of each individual drop as it falls through a square, horizontal sampling area about 10 cm on the side. It measures the particle size, shape, canting angle, and fall speed. The data enable the calculation of a parameter relevant to polarimetric measurements, called effective beta, which depends on the relation between size, shape, and canting angle. A recent theory shows that this parameter can also be inferred indirectly from radar observations of three polarimetric quantities, the reflectivity at horizontal polarization, the ratio of the reflectivities at horizontal and vertical polarization, and the differential propagation phase between the two polarization components. Furthermore, knowing the effective beta enables more accurate estimation of the rainfall rate. The purpose of the experiments is to test the theory by comparing radar estimates of beta with the values of this parameter determined directly from the disdrometer-measured properties of the drops. Experiments will be conducted at two sites: in Colorado, using the CSU-CHILL radar, and in Darwin, Australia, in collaboration with the Bureau of Meteorology Research Center. Using these sites will enable the evaluation of the theory in two climatic regimes with possibly different rainfall characteristics. The work should improve the accuracy of rainfall estimation by radar doc18769 none This project is a continuation of work in progress to measure, using laser spectroscopy, magnetic dipole transition wavelengths within the ground terms of selected multiply-charged ions. The basic goals of the research are determination of the g-factor of an electron in a bound state of a highly charged ion, and precision laser measurement of the hyperfine structure of a high-Z one-electron ion. Immediate goals are fine-structure measurements on intermediate-Z ions, using a laser beam to induce the transitions in ions condensed to an ordered state at low temperature in a Penning ion trap. The research is done in collaboration with scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Theoretical support is provided through a collaboration with an atomic structure theorist at the University of Texas, Pan American, an undergraduate institution doc18770 none This award provides funding for the continuation of a research project in the study of Bose-Einstein (BE) condensation in cold lithium atoms. Both Li-6 and Li-7 and mixtures of these two isotopes will be studied. BE condensation in Li-7 is particularly interesting because one of the spin states has attractive interactions, and some of the work will focus on the continuation of studies of this condensate, particularly the effect of the application of a magnetic field to produce Feshbach resonances. A Feshbach resonance will also be used to tune the interaction in a pair of Li-6 spin states, with the goal of producing an s-wave Cooper pairing phase transition. Finally, two-photon photoassociation to a molecular ground state in Li-7 will be used to change the interaction strength with the goal of producing and trapping ultracold molecules of diatomic lithium that may then undergo BE condensation doc18771 none This research program explores quantum dynamical processes for individual atoms strongly coupled to the field of an optical cavity. The scientific objectives of the proposed research include investigations of atomic kinetics in a quantized light field and of the resulting entanglement between atomic motion and the optical field. The specific setting for the research is that of cavity quantum electrodynamics (cavity QED) in a domain of strong coupling whereby single atoms and photons can profoundly impact the evolution of the composite system. The proposed research builds upon the previously realized atom-cavity microscope for tracking the motion of individual atoms bound in orbit by single photons inside a high-quality optical resonator. The strong interaction of atom and cavity field allows atomic motion to be sensed in real time at the quantum limits, thereby enabling the implementation of quantum feedback to control atomic motion within the resonator. The proposed program of research investigates the operating principles for such quantum servos , including probing the quantum limits for observation and control of the microscopic quantum world. The goal is the coherent manipulation of quantum motion in ways that are not possible using ordinary feedback control. Although the proposed research is principally experimental, a supporting theoretical effort is also to be undertaken. Within a more general context, the significance of the research program lies in its attempt to exploit the atom-cavity system as a paradigm for the investigation of quantum dynamical processes for open quantum systems in a regime of strong coupling. Cavity QED with strong coupling propels optical physics well beyond traditional nonlinear optics and laser physics into a new regime with dynamical processes now involving atoms and photons taken one by one. By developing qualitatively new technical capabilities in optical physics, the research addresses fundamental issues related to the advancement of quantum information science and technology doc18772 none Prop #: PI: Russell McDuff This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessels Thompson and Barnes operated by the University of Washington and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Russell McDuff is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire replacement radars (through a group purchase) and a dynamic positioning sytem doc18773 none Lebed Three topics will be investigated under this grant, spanning both nuclear and particle theory. 1) Flavor Symmetries. The PI and his graduate dissertation student (partially funded by this grant) will investigate possible flavor symmetries among the three fermion generations, especially the constraints imposed upon them by recent and forthcoming experimental results on neutrino masses and mixing. Additional constraints to be taken into account arise from limits on flavor-changing neutral current processes and proton decay. These studies are designed to work toward answering the question of why there are three replicated generations of fermions with nonetheless widely differing masses and mixings. 2) Baryons in the Large N Limit. The PI will build upon the numerous successes of QCD with a large number N of color charges (large N) to study the dynamics of baryon resonances. These particles are now being produced in huge numbers at Jefferson Lab, but the theoretical tools currently used to study them are limited. In particular, the PI will seek model-independent results that respect not only the large N expansion, but also the chiral symmetry implied by coupling among pions and nucleons (to which the resonances decay). 3) Rigorous QCD Constraints on Hadronic Quantities. The imposition of constraints from dispersion relations allows one to make precise statements about QCD amplitudes even in the nonperturbative regime. One obtains relations between fundamental quantities such as quark and gluon parameters on one hand, and measured quantities such as form factors on the other. These relations can provide subtle and highly nontrivial information on the way that the strong interaction works, and form the motivation for this work. The PI will continue this successful program to consider such cases as expanding the range of applicability and including additional information from the region of asymptotic freedom doc18774 none This proposal requests support for a group at Vanderbilt University for a program of research and education in experimental elementary particle physics based on several heavy quark experiments. They are finishing up the FOCUS experiment at Fermilab, preparing for BTeV, a second-generation B-factory experiment, also at Fermilab and considering working on CLEO-c at Cornell. Heavy flavor physics yields information about the strong and electroweak interactions, quark mixing and CP asymmetry and may lead to hints concerning the source of the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe, one of the most fundamental questions in science. FOCUS is a fixed-target, charm production experiment searching for D0`D0 mixing in semielectronic and hadronic decays, searching for rare and forbidden charm decays, studying charm baryon spectroscopy and semileptonic charm decays. BTeV is a Tevatron collider experiment that will study charm and beauty decays in order to confront the Standard Model explanation of CP violation in B0 and Bs mesons, Bs mixing and rare b decays. The CLEO-c program includes precision measurements of charm and QCD physics in the vs = 3-5 GeV CM energy range doc18775 none Waldron Einstein both proposed and retracted an addition of a cosmological constant Lambda term to his equations describing gravity as curvature of space and time. Recent observations indicate the presence of a small, positive Lambda. As shown by the PI and collaborators, the notions of spin and mass are mathematically richer if this the case. The project will in part be devoted to a study of these new phenomena. In addition, the theoretical understanding of what a quantum theory of gravitation might look like, has significantly advanced in a large part through studies of string theories which replace particle excitations with those of fundamental strings. Strikingly, many new results in mathematics have arisen from these considerations. The PI will investigate various aspects of this math physics interplay, including a generalization of strings to membranes, random matrices and supersymmetry doc18776 none This proposal concentrates on the experiment E158 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, which will determine the weak mixing angle (Weinberg angle) at low momentum transfer by measuring the parity-violating asymmetry in Moller (electron-electron) scattering. The experiment will provide the world s best low energy measurement of this fundamental parameter of the Standard Model of particle interactions. By comparing the E158 results with the existing high energy measurements of the weak mixing angle, we will establish, for the first time, its momentum transfer dependence, predicted by the Standard Model. Deviations from the prediction would signal the presence of new phenomena beyond the Standard Model, including new neutral currents mediated by Z bosons in the mass range of up to 900 GeV and new contact interactions with a scale of up to 11 TeV. This sensitivity matches or exceeds the direct and indirect search sensitivities of the high-energy collider experiments at CERN and FNAL. Small asymmetries associated with measuring parity violating effects at low momentum transfer mount many challenges to the experimenters, in particular, in controlling systematics effects related to the polarized electron beam. The UC Berkeley Nuclear Physics group brings an extensive experience in the beam instrumentation and data analysis to the E158 experiment. We take major responsibilities in the running of the experiment, physics analysis, and possible upgrades. While being at the forefront of the fundamental research, this project also provides unique opportunities for training and education of graduate and undergraduate students, giving them hands-on hardware experience as well as exposure to the modern analysis techniques doc18777 none This project takes advantage of the proximity of the ALLEGRO resonant bar gravitational wave detector at LSU to the LIGO Livingston Observatory to search for a stochastic background of gravitational radiation. The new ability of the ALLEGRO bar to rotate allows the introduction of a modulation to the signal by alternately aligning and mis-aligning the bar with the LIGO interferometer. This gives the signal a definite periodicity and distinguishes it from any correlated noise that does not have the expected quadrupolar spatial dependence of the gravitational radiation. Undergraduate students from Loyola University will participate in this project. A stochastic background of gravitational radiation could be a relic of the early Universe, produced by inflation or a phase transition. The current limits on such a background are very loosely constrained. Thus any observation or upper limit placed on a stochastic background of gravitational waves could bring new information about the Universe doc18778 none In this project the investigators will carry out a set of experiments to study the physics of quantum communication. They will study two approaches to transmitting data by encoding it onto the quantum states of physical objects - either light fields or collections of atoms in a vapor. The investigators will explore the use of macroscopic light pulses to represent each data bit. Special squeezed states of light will be used to increase the security while at the same time allowing accurate encoding and reading of the bits. Nonlinear-optical amplifiers will be used to create these states. This will be a generalization of current methods that use single photons to store each bit. Relative advantages and disadvantages of the methods for transmitting data securely will be explored. In the other approach the investigators will study a class of systems that uses a macroscopic ensemble of atoms to represent quantum information. The atomic ensemble is excited in a way that lends itself to a description as a collective harmonic-oscillator mode, represented by a Bosonic degree of freedom. As such, the concepts of continuous-variable quantum information will play a role. The goal of this work will be to create quantum states of collective atomic ensemble variables by conditional measurement and to create entanglement between two such distant ensembles. This will set the stage for further development of quantum communication networks over long distances doc18779 none Observing neutrinos requires large detectors and great patience. Neutrinos are able to cross the entire universe, traversing space, planets, galaxies at almost the speed of light, without leaving a mark. Only the extremely rare collision with the core of an atom stops a neutrino and reveals its presence, transforming it into a charged particle. Depending on the type of neutrino hitting an atom, either an electron or a similar but heavier particle emerges from the collision. Physicists can detect light emitted by the charged particle, thereby learning more about the properties of the initial neutrino. MiniBoone is an experiment at Fermilab designed to measure neutrino masses. The specific goal of this proposal that forms part of a collaborative research project with a team from Princeton University is to fund detector equipment for a novel kaon secondary beam monitor which will constrain the background in the neutrino beam. While playing an important role in a large high energy physics experiment, this effort is a rare opportunity for students, particularly undergraduates. This is essentially a table top high energy experiment bringing all aspects, including physics and technical design, assembly and testing of detectors, layout and assembly of electronics, analysis of data down to a manageable scale. The remaining parts of the project, prototyping the detectors and data acquisition system, assembling and testing detectors, and analysis of data, would each make excellent senior theses or projects for graduate students doc18780 none This award is for continuing support of a program of fundamental investigations of physical phenomena important to understanding x-ray interactions with atoms and molecules. The primary scientific focus is probing the limits, especially at low photon energies, of the dipole approximation, the simplest reasonable treatment of photon interactions. Although well-known breakdowns of the dipole approximation exist (e.g., the dipole approximation is known to be completely invalid at photon energies greater than 20 keV), recent work of this program has demonstrated quantitatively significant breakdowns at surprisingly low energies and in unexpected ways; further studies may well lead to changes in some of the foundations of x-ray spectroscopy. The work proposed not only will further understanding of fundamental x-ray interactions, but determining the limits of the dipole approximation is important to myriad applications of x-ray absorption, x-ray photoemission, and x-ray fluorescence to other fields because these applications routinely assume the dipole approximation. In addition to the focus on nondipole effects in x-ray photoemission and x-ray fluorescence, related work is proposed on multi-atom resonance effects, transient species, and probing the limits of the independent-particle approximation doc18781 none Proposal Number: PI: Xiaochun Li Research will be conducted on a variety of problems in harmonic analysis arising in the study of multilinea singular integral operators. These problems are related, but not limited, to the study of the Carleson operator and the bilinear Hilbert transform. Recently a significant breakthrough on the bilinear Hilbert transform was made by the inspiring work of Lacey and Thiele. It turns out that the time-frequency analysis is a powerful tool to solve problems related to the study of multilinear operators. Moreover, although this is still under investigation, the analysis of these problems gives us hopes to solve other important and difficult problems in the field, such as the Hilbert transform along vector fields, the Kakeya problem, and Carleson s maximal operator of the partial sums of Fourier series in two dimensions. It will also be very interesting to see how to use this delicate analysis to solve some problems in other fields such as partial differential equations, number theory, etc. Actually, multilinear operators have been used in the study of partial differential equations, since they naturally appear in series expansions of solutions of many equations. Harmonic analysis is not only an area of theoretical mathematics, but also an applicable area lying at the heart of the intersection of fields as diverse as optics, signal processing, meteorology, and music. The main them in Harmonic analysis is about disassembling and assembling complicated objects into simpler well-understood pieces, by analogy to decomposition of intricate musical pieces into arrangements of a few basic notes. In signal processing, harmonic analysis is used to detect irregularities of signals and images. The Fouriertransform is a very useful tool to locate these irregularities. The appearance of a nonsmooth symbol inthe study of multiplier problems is analogous to physical phenomena where the frequencies of signals are altered by an abrupt operation, such as the interruption of radio communication or television transmission by meteorological phenomena. Such a sudden and unexpected operation causes the loss of information. To avoid the loss of information or to retrieve the original data is the main topic of the theoretical research proposed here doc18782 none A fundamental aspect of quantum phenomena is the non-local coherence of the quantum wave that describes the state of a particle, which is called the wave-particle duality. A consequence of this is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle according to which there is a minimum to the product of the uncertainties of the position and momentum or time and energy of the particle that is given by the Planck s constant. We plan to investigate the latter uncertainty principle in relation to the general relativistic gravitational field, using our earlier work that obtains this uncertainty relation using only measurements intrinsic to the system under investigation. We shall also use new non-local quantities that we have introduced, called modular variables, to study the non-local quantum coherence of the wave function. This will be used to investigate the Aharonov-Bohm effect (discovered by the PI), which is the non-local interaction of the wave function with the electromagnetic field. Some new aspects of scattering due to the Aharonov-Bohm effect will be studied. The latter work is relevant to a wide class of problems involving surface waves and polarized light propagating in optical fibers, where various impurities may be present. The quantum coherence of the wave function also opens up the possibilities for secure communication using quantum systems and the construction of a quantum computer. Computations which would take a present state-of-the-art computer more than the life-time of the universe to do would be done in less than a second by a quantum computer. We shall try to use the weak measurement, discovered by the PI, to obtain better quantum communication. We shall also try to use the geometric phase discovered by the PI and a co-PI towards constructing a quantumcomputer doc18783 none The investigator and his coworkers study elliptic curves, special values of L-functions, and related topics. Some of the most interesting open questions and conjectures in arithmetic algebraic geometry relate arithmetic invariants with special values of L-functions. Iwasawa theory and Euler systems have proved to be among the most successful tools for attacking these problems, by serving as a bridge between the algebraic world and the analytic world. The investigator continues to pursue this approach, by extracting additional information from Euler systems and their derivative Kolyvagin systems. In another direction, the investigator and his colleagues study ranks of elliptic curves, especially the asymptotic distribution of ranks in families of quadratic twists. Elliptic curves play a central role in many parts of mathematics including its most applied areas. For example, elliptic curves are used in algorithms to encrypt data for transmission, and for efficient digital signatures. In its most basic form, an elliptic curve is a special kind of polynomial equation in two variables. Historically number theorists are interested in finding solutions of these equations in which the variables take values which are either whole numbers, or fractions. The rank of an elliptic curve is a basic invariant which measures the size of the set of solutions. The investigator and his coworkers study ranks of elliptic curves and their interrelations with other mathematical objects and concepts. These questions are related to the cryptographic applications of elliptic curves, which come about by considering solutions in which the variables take values in finite fields doc18784 none This effort is the beginning of a multi-step project that has the long-term goal of demonstrating the existence of an annihilation photon laser based on annihilation radiation from positronium in a dense gas. The specific goals of the first three years are: 1) Compress a cold, spin-aligned, non-neutral plasma of positrons trapped in a magnetic field to near the Brillouin limit. Extract the positrons and focus them to a microscopic spot on a sample in a short time pulse; 2) Demonstrate the existence of a high positron surface density by forming and observing the di-positronium molecule, Ps2. The density dependence of the Ps2 yield may be interpreted to give the binding energy of Ps2 relative to two free Ps atoms and the accommodation or sticking coefficient SPs2 for Ps2 absorption at the surface; and 3) Form a gas of high-density triplet Ps within a cavity. The research efforts will be accompanied by an educational effort in which undergraduate students will be involved in part time work creating demonstration experiments suitable for encouraging high school students to work in scientific fields and creating a high school level interactive internet web site on Antimatter to eventually permit remote real time participation in demonstration experiments doc18785 none This grant provides funding for the development of efficient and effective tools for the estimation of cycle time-throughput (CT-TH) curves via computer simulation. Unlike analytical queueing models, computer simulation can be used to represent almost any manufacturing system regardless of how complex. Unfortunately, simulation allows for the evaluation of only one point at a time on the CT-TH curve, so tools are needed to guide the simulation for development of the full curve. Since the CT-TH curve for real manufacturing systems is subject to variability, this research will identify and derive appropriate models and tools to represent not only the mean of the curve, but also its variance and selected percentiles, especially in the region of maximum system capacity. The tools for constructing the CT-TH curves will be adaptive and selective both in terms of the models used and the precision required by the user. Accurate model determination will be directed under both fixed-budget and fixed-precision settings. Experiments to evaluate the methods developed will be conducted on a test bed of tractable queueing models and a large-scale simulation of a semiconductor manufacturing facility. If successful, the results of this research will provide methods for efficiently generating the CT-TH curves associated with simulation models of semiconductor manufacturing facilities. Since CT-TH curves can be used to quantitatively evaluate different scenarios of product mix, production targets and capital expansion, the primary goal of this work will be to develop simulation methods for generating accurate CT-TH curves given finite resources. Compared to existing methods, this work will increase the number and complexity of manufacturing system evaluations that can be conducted leading to improvements in production facilities. Production improvements will lead to subsequent reductions in production cost and or increases in throughput. The proposed work will also contribute to the tools available for model fitting, variance reduction and fixed sample allocation in large-scale simulation models doc18786 none The interactions of atmospheric flows with mountains are an important issue in atmospheric sciences. Orography plays a role in both local weather as well as influencing the larger scale flow. The isolation of the mountainous Island of Hawaii provides a natural laboratory for studies of the impacts of orography. In a cooperative project among several researchers, the Hawaiian Rainband Project (HaRP), was executed to study the influence of the island on local weather and fundamental mountain atmospheric flow interactions. To date, most HaRP analyses have focused on the airflow, thermodynamic fields and radar echoes on the windward side and the evolution of early morning rain bands offshore of Hilo. In this project the Principal Investigator (PI) will extend analysis to the airflow along the windward coast and offshore as well as circulations on the lee side. Furthermore, the PI will simulate the complete diurnal cycle of the island-scale airflow and weather under different trade-wind conditions (e.g. strong trades vs. weak trades; low trade-wind inversion height vs. high trade-wind inversion height) using an advanced mesoscale numerical model. Analysis of observations will be used to validate model results. Results from modeling studies will improve basic understanding of the diurnal and local effects for the island of Hawaii under the summer trade-wind weather. These results potentially can have benefits in helping to interpret airflow in other complex terrain situations doc18787 none McKeegan This award, provided by the Antarctic Geology and Geophysics Program of the Office of Polar Programs, supports student participation in the 65th Annual Meeting of the Meteoritical Society which will be held on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), from July 22-26, . The principal scientific focus of this international meeting is deciphering the clues to the origin and evolution of the solar system that are contained within the chemical, petrologic, and isotopic properties of meteorites. Meteorites made available to researchers through the US Antarctic meteorite program sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the Smithsonian Institution are an important aspect of international meteoritical research. This award will provide travel support to enable students to participate in the meeting. The student travel awards will be made on a competitive basis and will support primarily U.S. and also some foreign students. Additional financial support for the meeting is anticipated from NASA, The Barringer Foundation, and a number of scientific instrument manufacturers (JEOL USA, Inc., Cameca, Inc., Finnigan, Inc., and Micromass, Inc.). This award will provide a scientifically enriching experience to the student recipients of the travel support doc18788 none The goal of this project is the study of collisions between relativistic nuclei and ultimately the determination of the properties of nuclear matter over a wide range of temperatures and densities. Extremely hot or dense objects which are made of nuclear matter exist in the cosmos, however, without the possibility direct study of neutron stars, supernovae, or the Big Bang, one resorts to the challenging studies of finite and transient systems as provided by nucleus-nucleus collisions. It has become clear that in order to understand the nuclear equation of state or to identify a transistion to a new state of matter, the quark-gluon plasma, it will require a comprehensive and correlated set of measurements as well as extensive calculations which relate the observables to the nuclear matter variables. This project focuses on the acquisition and analysis of such a set of data using the Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC (STAR) experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) located at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The collection of detector systems which make up the STAR experiment provide detailed information about individual collision events. The UCD group will use data from these detectors to reconstruct the events and infer, from the recorded debris, both the dynamics and the thermodynamics of the collision doc18789 none Prop: PI: Kenneth H. Coale This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessel Point Sur operated by the Moss Landing Marine Laboratory and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Kenneth Coale is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire a winch monitoring system doc18790 none Since , plastics have been the most widely used materials in the U.S., surpassing steel, copper and aluminum combined by volume. Among the various plastics processing methods, injection molding accounts for one-third of all polymers processed. This research is aimed at developing the scientific basis for a novel co-injection molding process that combines the aesthetic and processing advantages of injection molding with the property attributes and benefits of microcellular plastics (MCPs). By integrating solid plastics with MCPs via co-injection molding, synergistic benefits, such as increased productivity, reduced energy consumption, additional design freedom in part geometry, and a means to control the microstructure and properties of the molded products, can be realized. Furthermore, this environmentally benign process is a perfect candidate for recycling of post-consumer plastics. This research involves systematic analytical, experimental, and computational efforts to demonstrate the feasibility and advantages of this novel process, advance the understanding of the process physics, develop computer modeling and simulation tools, and incorporate the research activities results into the curricula to stimulates students interest in advanced research and education. Collaboration with industrial partners in this research facilitates the sharing of expertise and resources, validation of research outcome, transfer of technology, education of the workforce, and assessment of the economic gain. Successful execution of this research will extend the applicability of MCPs and injection molding, ultimately helping the U.S. plastics industry gain competitive strength in the global marketplace doc18791 none This project is an unsolicited submission. The goal of this project is to develop strategies to enhance the efficiency and utility of retrovirus-mediated gene transfer. Retroviruses are a widely utilized vector system in current gene therapy clinical trials, which has resulted in the rapid advancement of retroviral vector technology. Despite this, retroviral gene transfer efficiency has remained disappointingly low, hampering the emergence of retroviral gene therapy as an effective clinical tool. It has been found that charged molecules greatly influence the efficiency of the gene transfer process. Specifically, positively charged compounds have been shown to enhance gene transfer, whereas negatively charged compounds inhibit the process. This project seeks to accomplish the following: (1) to investigate in detail the mechanism of charged compound enhancement and inhibition of the retroviral gene transfer process, (2) to develop a mathematical framework for analyzing the effect of charged compounds on virus transport and transduction, and (3) to compare gene transfer efficiency in an animal model using ex vivo and in vivo gene therapy protocols optimized to enhance the electrostatic interaction between the retrovirus vector and target cell. To achieve these goals, the investigators will utilize a complementary set of enzymatic and immunohistochemical assays, molecular imaging techniques, and cytofluorometric analyses to quantitate various steps of the retroviral gene transfer process. Engineering analysis of the resultant biomolecular transport and kinetic reaction data will be used to facilitate the construction of an integrative model of retrovirus transport doc18792 none There are three main areas of proposed activity. The first one is developing a technique based on quasiderivatives of solutions of Ito s equations and applying it to processes considered up to the first exit time from domains. The second area is investigating smoothness of solutions of SPDEs arising in filtering problems and the theory of measure--valued processes in order to be able to guarantee certain rates of convergence of approximations to their solutions. The third area is estimating the rate of convergence of numerical approximations for degenerate controlled diffusion processes. The project relates to the investigation of the probabilistic behavior of certain objects. Part one is aimed at better understanding of averaged quantities related to optimal control of random processes arising in all types of applications from finance to aerospace engineering. Part two aims at problems directly related to many practical issues such as image reconstruction or high-performance computing in eliminating friendly fire . It is also vital in dealing with problems like evolution of bacteria population which may be important in biotechnology. Part three deals with ways of solving practical problems of optimal control of random processes which arise in the applications mentioned above doc18793 none The physics activities of the Northeastern University group in the recent past have concentrated on electroweak physics with complementary analyses taking place at several detectors at the energy frontier. The group plans to continue to work within this framework in the proposed grant period, taking advantage of the new data to come from Run 2 with the upgraded Fermilab detector D0. The group also plans to continue high sensitivity searches for processes which are either rare or forbidden in the Standard Model. Hardware and software activities are also concentrated in areas in which the group has longstanding expertise. Interdisciplinary and outreach activities, including Quarknet and a CERN RET site, have been very successful doc18794 none Scientists love a mystery, because solving a mystery in nature means the opportunity to learn something new about the universe. High-energy cosmic rays are just such a mystery. Something out there -- no one knows what -- is hurling incredibly energetic particles around the universe. Do these particles come from some unknown superpowerful cosmic explosion? From a huge black hole sucking stars to their violent deaths? From colliding galaxies? From the collapse of massive invisible relics from the origin of the universe? We don t yet know the answers, but we do know that solving this mystery will take scientists another step forward in understanding the universe. This group from Northeastern University wants to be a part of the team that solves this mystery doc18795 none Complex Dynamics in Higher Dimension Proposal The principal investigator proposes to study the dynamics of meromorphic self-maps of compact complex manifolds. If such a map expands some cohomology class of the manifold, then the main idea is that there ought to be a distinguished invariant current representing this class. Intersections between invariant currents should in turn give rise to invariant measures that describe the distribution of orbits where the action of the map is most complicated. Hence the linear action of a meromorphic map on cohomology should go a long way toward determining a probabilistic picture of the pointwise dynamics of the map. To justify these ideas, the investigator proposes to use a combination of techniques from complex geometry, smooth ergodic theory, and pluripotential analysis. Various problems in physics and mathematics reduce to questions about the dynamics of particular meromorphic maps. The investigator proposes to use some of these as starting points and test cases for his research. The study of dynamical systems has grown increasingly important in the past several decades. Put briefly, a dynamical system is anything--e.g. the weather, the stock-market, the solar system, etc--that evolves in time according (at least theoretically) to definite and codifiable rules. The general goal in studying a dynamical system is to make predictions about its future state given its present one. If the future is very far off then this, as any honest forecaster will admit, is typically quite difficult. Small changes in the present state of the system can imply huge differences in eventual outcome. The research proposed here is devoted to better understanding instability in dynamical systems--when it occurs, why it occurs, and how to recognize it. The research is also devoted to attaining partial control over instability by making statistical predictions about the eventual behavior of an unstable system that do not depend on perfect understanding of its present state. The dynamical systems that the investigator proposes to study are mathematical in nature, but they are also archtypes for the systems that one analyzes in connection with real-world phenomena. The idea is that weather and the stockmarket and the solar system ought not be treated as a separate and totally unrelated dynamical systems but as particular examples of the same general phenomena and subject to similar kinds of analyses doc18578 none This award provides funding for the continued conduct of an open workshop on decision-based design. The workshop will be conducted via a series of face-to-face meetings, and with continuing interaction between all interested parties via electronic and Internet technologies throughout the three-year continuation period. Specifically, the workshop will include the continuation of a web site for conduct of the workshop. A primary component of the workshop will be the continual, open development and dissemination of the philosophical, theoretical and practical results of the workshop discussions and activities. The workshop will continue to concentrate on a diversity of research efforts directed at the development of a theory of engineering design based on the emerging notion that engineering design is a decision making process amenable to the tools and theories that have developed in the field of decision theory. Specific goals for this phase of the workshop include continued development of a mathematically sound theory of engineering design, the building of a repository of foundational materials (a lexicon, case studies, references, text materials), the establishment of ties between decision-based design and other areas of science, and the transfer of decision-based design tools to industry. The workshop web site address will be located at: http: dbd.eng.buffalo.edu This workshop will provide new directions for research and education in engineering design. New theoretical concepts should lead to approaches to engineering design that will enable the design of better products, products that have greater market appeal, cost less, have lower environmental impact, and that are more friendly for customers. Further, these concepts are likely to lead to entirely new approaches to engineering education, with a strong focus on engineering design as a decision making process doc18797 none Mixing is an important component of most processing operations. Blending and compounding also play a major role in the development of new materials. Thus better understanding of mixing phenomena and development of new criteria to assess mixing quality are of paramount importance. In previous work we have defined dispersive and distributive mixing criteria for process control and optimization and for machine scale-up. However, we expect additional fundamental insight and enhanced applicability can be gained by defining a new complex mixing index based on entropy, which synthesizes both dispersive and distributive mixing components. Entropy is a rigorous measure of disorder or system homogeneity used in several sciences such as statistical mechanics and information theory. This new index can be applied in a variety of technologies in polymer processing including fabrication of nanocomposite materials. Furthermore, understanding the influence of machine geometry and processing conditions on mixing as reflected through correlations between flow features and the new complex mixing index can point out to new directions in equipment design. The proposed mixing characterization methodology can be applied in other engineering processes beyond the polymer processing industry. This research is an interdisciplinary effort involving a chemical engineer whose expertise lies in polymer processing and a physicist with expertise on statistical mechanics. This collaboration between Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland State University will enable application of concepts from theoretical physics to problems relevant to the manufacturing engineering community. Moreover, such collaborative efforts have also an educational impact with the potential of inducing student interest for interdisciplinary research projects dealing with complex problems. Students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels will benefit from this collaborative research project doc18798 none The investigator is carrying out a program in the theory of automorphic representations. The program is to find different methods to produce automorphic funtoriality and then relate such methods. The point of finding such connections is to determine automorphic-type formulae( such as periods or theta integrals) for special values of automorphic L functions. Specifically the techniques of the regular trace formula (as well as the relative trace formula) and the use of the converse theorem produce examples of such functorial lifting. The investigator relates these techniques to theta correspondence and the descent method. Such new techniques make it possible to determine the nonvanishing of the new liftings in terms of special values. The motivation of the above work is to have an analytic formalism to study the special values of certain automorphic L functions. It turns out that some of the most famous problems in number theory (such as Fermat s last theorem and more generally the determination of integral solutions to polynomial identities) have as a goal the concrete analysis of such L functions as above. The information given by the investigator s approach may be useful in the qualitative study of these L functions doc18799 none This RUI award provides support for a research program on collisions of cold, dense samples of Rydberg atoms. The Rydberg atoms in this environment are strongly coupled by the dipole interaction. Two novel features define this environment. First, the atoms move a distance that is significantly less than their mean separation during the time the collision lasts. Second, the mean atomic separation is less than the impact parameter, indicating that many-body effects are important. The interactions of a dense sample of cold Rydberg atoms are therefore less like those in a normal gas, and more like those characteristic of a diffuse liquid or disordered solid. The term frozen gas has been used to describe this environment. Two major areas of research will be pursued: 1) Exciton processes in a frozen gas, in which various predictions of an exciton diffusion model for migration of population away from close atoms will be investigated and 2) Preliminary investigations of multiphoton radiatively assisted collisions in the many-body regime. By virtue of being at an undergraduate institution with a significant number of physics majors, this research program offers educational preparation for students wishing to continue on to graduate school or enter the advanced high-tech workforce doc18800 none This U.S.-Czech-Hungarian research project involves three teams led by Fred Roberts of Rutgers University s Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) with partners in Prague and Budapest. His counterparts are Jaroslav Nesetril of the Czech Center for Discrete Mathematics, Theoretical Informatics and Applications (DIMATIA) at Charles University and Gyula Katona of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Alfred Renyi Institute for Mathematics. Their collaborative research plan involves the formation of multinational working groups in research areas of discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science. These working groups will consist of a complementary mix of expertise from each center and include graduate students as well as senior and junior faculty. New members may be added as projects progress. Some participants may be drawn from other institutions, when appropriate. Additionally, smaller team collaborations resulting from working group interaction will be fostered through a visit program that allows researchers and graduate students from the partner centers to work together more intensively, with emphasis on a senior researcher in one center and a junior researcher or student at another. The topics to be studied include: 1) extremal combinatorics, 2) graph colorings and their generalizations, and 3) algebraic and geometric methods in combinatorics. Our knowledge of the interactions between algebraic geometry and combinatorics will be extended through examination of power series, hidden convexity phenomenon, and combinatorial characterizations of algebraic sets. Results should lead to advances in discrete mathematics which may be applicable to problems in group testing, communications, and statistical physics. Additionally, the involvement of outstanding junior researchers in this international network of excellence should have a significant and long-lasting influence on human resource development in all three countries. This international project linking three leading mathematics research centers fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc18801 none The proposed project involves research on Heterojunctions concepts, for developing infrared detectors having potential applications in important areas such as spectroscopy in chemistry and biology, optical communication, plasma diagnostics, medical and biological imaging systems, and astrophysics. In the previous NSF program, emphasis was on QWIP detector formats for IR detection and the improvement of the performance by understanding transient effects. Here the development of tailorable solid state IR detectors for 3-30 um (100-10 THz) range (a technologically important region for a wide range of applications) is proposed. These detectors show better performance (responsivity, efficiency, operating temperature and D ) than the available detectors. Recent breakthroughs in THz generation have started bridging the gap between terahertz frequencies and the frequencies above and below. However, in THz detector development, extreme cooling capabilities are still a requirement as in superconducting hot electron bolometers. In order for the field to develop substantially, both source and detectors should develop at the same pace. The primary goal of this proposal will he to design and characterize detectors based on a novel concept [heterojunction interfacial workfunction internal photoemission (HEIWIP)] and optimize the devices for various frequency (wavelength) ranges. The work will include both experimental and theoretical effort studying the role of device parameters on the performance including doping, barrier parameters, layer thickness, resonance cavity effects and dark current issues. In collaboration with scientists at other universities (Cornell), national laboratories (NRC - Canada and U.S. Army Research Lab) and other institutes (Institute for Physics of Microstructures, Nizhny Novgorod) these problems will be addressed by exploring structures grown by different groups and different methods. Optimized designed features, well-doping profiles, energy-selective barriers, emitter collector barriers, etc. will be modeled and incorporated. The high national importance of this cutting-edge technology, and the close involvement of highly qualified staff and students at Georgia State with our collaborators will continue to impact significantly on advancing knowledge, and physics and engineering education, making a significant contribution to the nation s science and technology base by supplying the scientific community with leading young scientists. The collaborations will also ensure effective transfer to emerging high-tech applications both in commercial and government laboratories. The results of the proposed research will vastly improve the understanding of detectors and form the basis for the next generation of THz detectors doc18802 none The objective of this research is to advance the fundamental understanding of high speed, very deep laser welding processes by estabishing a quantitative descriptions of the welding plasma. Laser material processing has rapidly replaced or complemented many conventional manufacturing techniques in production lines. As industrial lasers become capable of delivering very high power, 10KW to 20KW, economically, they open up applications to weld sheet metals over 10 mm thick at speeds over 2 m min. One of the most critical issues in very high power laser welding is to control and overcome violent plasma generated during welding. Excess plasma can absorb, reflect, or refocus the laser beam resulting in insufficient penetration, burn-through, irregular weld shape, or contamination of the beam delivery optics. The PI has formed a close research collaboration involving Purdue University, Osaka University, Japan and Caterpillar, Inc. in an attempt to provide a more complete picture of plasma and its effect on laser absorption mechanism. The theoretical modeling will focus on characterizing plasma electron temperature and density inside the keyhole which is a capillary into the workpiece created by the laser beam. Experiments will be conducted mainly at Osaka University and affiliated industrial laboratories using state-of-the-art 2KW CO2 and 8KW diode-pumped Nd:YAG lasers. In addition to advancing the fundamental understanding of high energy laser interactions with materials, this collaboration will provide an effective opportunity to bring the experience and expertise in laser welding of the Osaka University group together with the academic research group at Purdue and the industry partner, Caterpillar. This will promote technology transfer to the industry as well as training for industry practioners doc18785 none This grant provides funding for the development of efficient and effective tools for the estimation of cycle time-throughput (CT-TH) curves via computer simulation. Unlike analytical queueing models, computer simulation can be used to represent almost any manufacturing system regardless of how complex. Unfortunately, simulation allows for the evaluation of only one point at a time on the CT-TH curve, so tools are needed to guide the simulation for development of the full curve. Since the CT-TH curve for real manufacturing systems is subject to variability, this research will identify and derive appropriate models and tools to represent not only the mean of the curve, but also its variance and selected percentiles, especially in the region of maximum system capacity. The tools for constructing the CT-TH curves will be adaptive and selective both in terms of the models used and the precision required by the user. Accurate model determination will be directed under both fixed-budget and fixed-precision settings. Experiments to evaluate the methods developed will be conducted on a test bed of tractable queueing models and a large-scale simulation of a semiconductor manufacturing facility. If successful, the results of this research will provide methods for efficiently generating the CT-TH curves associated with simulation models of semiconductor manufacturing facilities. Since CT-TH curves can be used to quantitatively evaluate different scenarios of product mix, production targets and capital expansion, the primary goal of this work will be to develop simulation methods for generating accurate CT-TH curves given finite resources. Compared to existing methods, this work will increase the number and complexity of manufacturing system evaluations that can be conducted leading to improvements in production facilities. Production improvements will lead to subsequent reductions in production cost and or increases in throughput. The proposed work will also contribute to the tools available for model fitting, variance reduction and fixed sample allocation in large-scale simulation models doc18804 none The investigator studies the theory of algebraic cobordism, recently constructed by the investigor and F. Morel, as well as generalized cohomology theories for algebraic varieties and schemes, the relation of rational equivalence in the Morel-Voevodsky algebraic-homotopy category, and a refinement of Asakura s arithmetic Hodge cohomology. The investigator attempts to construct a theory of higher algebraic cobordism, along the lines of Bloch s higher Chow groups, examines the category of cobordism motives, and tries to give a theory of algebraic higher elliptic genera. In addition, the investigator examines the generalization of the motivic cohomology to K-theory spectral sequence to other cohomology theories on algebraic varieties, and considers the relationship of this spectral sequence to the slice spectral sequence of Voevodsky, using the notion of rational equivalence in the algebraic homotopy category. Finally the investigator defines a variation of Asakura s arithmetic Hodge cohomology and uses this to construct an infinite sequence of cohomology theories which conjecturely give a better and better approximation to motivic cohomology. The investigator s research involves a mixture of algebraic geometry and algebraic topology. Algebraic geometry is the study of solutions of equations using both algebra and geometry. For example, one can study a circle by examining its equation, or by looking at its geometric properties. Algebraic topology studies spaces by attaching algebraic invariants to them, invariants which can often be computed explicitly. The investigator takes methods and constructions in algebraic topology, and then modifies and refines them so that they can be used to define algebraic versions of the topological invariants. These new algebraic invariants are then applicable for studying subtle properties of solutions of equations doc18805 none The MIT group will build a novel atom interferometer with which to measure the fine structure constant at the ppb level. This will be used to measure h m, which will be combined with the group s recent atomic mass measurements to determine the molar Planck constant. This can be combined with other recent measurements to yield a measurement of the fine structure constant. The new interferometer uses Bose-Einstein condensates in a contrast interferometer - one in which the contrast of the fringes rather than their position oscillates when the phase being measured increases. This interferometer, a prototype of which was recently demonstrated, contains the following three major advances, any one of which would have substantially improved previous h m experiments. Since the atoms are all in the same state, first-order AC Stark shifts are eliminated, the interferometer is insensitive to vibration, and an accurate phase measurement can be made in a single shot of the interferometer. The interferometer has the additional feature that the phase increases quadratically with the order of the beamsplitters. This will be exploited to make measurements to 1ppb in a single shot. The next generation interferometer will feature magnetic shielding and high optical quality viewports to reduce other systematic errors such as inhomogeneous magnetic fields and optical wavefront distortions doc18806 none This project will develop a terahertz (FHz) wave microscope for microscopic sensing and imaging applications. A THz pulse (T-ray) contains information for both sensing and imaging applications. Biological and organic compounds have distinct signatures within the THz region of the electromagnetic spectrum, such as molecular vibrational and rotational levels, and their chemical compositions can be examined by this proposed T-ray system. This T-ray microscope is capable of sensing and imaging structures at the cell level with a 0.5-p.m spatial resolution (1 of one THz wavelength), and it is an exciting new way to carry out research projects for biomolecular spectroscopy and T-ray imaging. The microscope will generate and detect picosecond electromagnetic pulses (T-ray signal) by using nonlinear optical crystals, ultrafast laser pulses and computer analysis. To overcome the wavelength diffraction-limit, this approach uses a near-field imaging modality by focusing the optical beams into an electro-optic crystal to generate (by optical rectification) and detect (by the electro-optic effect) the T-ray to a sub-micron resolution. The imaging area of the biomedical tissue, which is attached to the top of the electro-optic crystal, is comparable to the optical focal spot, and is independent of the THz beam wavelength. This microscope will have a superior throughput of THz radiation when compared to any other T-ray microscope. Moreover, this device will make significant contributions to student education, academic research, instrumentation development, and medical sensing and imaging applications doc18807 none Mukhin E. Mukhin studies the representation theory of affine Lie algebras and their quantizations in several directions including the theory of coinvariants of integrable representations of affine Kac-Moody algebras (with B. Feigin, M. Jimbo and T. Miwa), the theory of finite-dimensional representations of quantum affine groups (with E. Frenkel) and the functors between categories of representations of Lie algebras and quantum groups defined by Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov and quantized Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov equations (with A. Varchenko). The project is expected to result in description of many features of the beautiful algebraic-combinatorial structure related to representation theory of complex semi-simple Lie algebras and their affine and quantum analogs. In particular, this research has connections to many areas of mathematics such as theory of symmetric functions and combinatorics of Young tableaux, theory of special functions, exactly solvable lattice models, conformal field theory, massive field theory in 1+1 dimensions, etc; as all these theories have symmetries described in terms of Lie algebras of different kind doc18808 none This grant provides funds for the development of a processing tool, as well as a processing planning system, for the rapid deposition of concentrated colloidal gels. This is a solid freeform fabrication technology and the current grant is focused at performing deposition based fabrication on length scales the order of microns. The tool to be developed is a robotic system consisting of dual stage serving axes in 3 dimensions. A coarse stage driven by linear motors will carry a fine stage driven by piezos which will actually support the deposition head. Process modeling will be performed to determine material flow behavior and solidification characteristics. These models will then be used in a process planning CAE tool to determine optimal machine processing conditions. The overall project will fuse together expertise from the fields of Robotics, Controls, Manufacturing, and Materials Science to create very small scale periodic structures in an extremely rapid fashion. If successful, this work will enable the creation of microscale periodic lattices. By developing intentional defects in the structures, these lattices can then be used to provide optical waveguide capability for advanced photonic devices. The benefit of the proposed method is the time taken to construct such devices. While standard lithography methods can achieve the same resolution, the time for processing is on the order of days. The current system will have build times on the order of minutes. This will allow for the exploration of a huge design space in creating photonic bandgap structures that could be the future backbone of computing and communication applications doc18809 none Morin This award to Texas A&M University provides instrumentation to update, improve and expand the capabilities of the TAMU Technical Support Group in conducting analysis of nutrients in seawater. Specifically, it provides colorimeters, peristaltic pumps, a chart recorder, a computer, and components for data acquisition. These shared-use systems will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists using this group to support their programs in ocean nutrient research during and future years doc18810 none With the support of the Organic Dynamics Program in the Chemistry Division, Professor Josef Michl, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Colorado- Boulder, will work on three projects in the area of his traditional interest, photophysics and photochemistry. One of the projects is a continuation of a current effort to understand heavy atom effects, while two are new. In one of the latter, it is proposed to take a fresh angle of attack on the venerable problem of the molecular structure responsible for anomalous ( TICT ) emission from donor-acceptor compounds, and test the proposal that a twisted biradicaloid excited state is responsible. In the other, it is proposed to separate and evaluate the electronic spectral properties of individual conformers of saturated linear chains in a complex conformer mixture. In addition, a fourth project is proposed in a research subject that is relatively new to this research group. This is a broad effort in the areas opened by the recent synthesis of carborane anions and radicals of the type CB11(CH3)12-, CB11(CH3)12., CB11(CF3)12-, etc., in the PI s laboratory, and the proposed synthesis of the still unknown CB11(CF3)12.. In the previous grant period, these compounds were shown to offer new avenues of access to inorganic and organometallic reactive intermediates, and their lithium salts catalyze several kinds of organic reactions. It is now proposed to explore the applicability of these new tools in wide areas of organic and inorganic chemistry. These fundamental studies of the synthesis and properties of reactive intermediates may have applications in lithium batteries, fuel cell membranes, and catalysts for olefin polymerization doc18811 none Proposal Number: PI: Richard Laugesen Wavelet expansions are a mathematical tool that enable functions and data to be analyzed at multiple scales and locations simultaneously. The investigator seeks first to characterize all (non-tight) wavelet frames - these frames permit more flexibility than the widely-used orthonormal wavelets. Then he aims to characterize and find examples of wavelets whose dilation matrices expand in some directions but not in others. Another goal is to prove that the Mexican hat wavelet family is dense in all Lebesgue spaces, so that this family can be used to approximate data in more than just the mean-square sense. On a different topic, the investigator will also pursue questions about the fundamental model equations that underlie motion of thin fluid films. The proposed research aims to mathematically determine the stability of steady states of these equations. In particular, droplet steady states will be studied. The existence of such stable steady states would signal the possibility of creating a pattern in the film. Wavelet theory draws on fundamental mathematics and on engineering disciplines such as signal processing to create tools for efficiently analyzing and storing information. The two-way street between basic research and practical applications has been particularly effective in recent years. mathematical theories from harmonic analysis have been transformed into large scale engineering solutions (for example the FBI uses a wavelet compression technique to store its fingerprint images), while engineering challenges continue to stimulate fundamental research in mathematics. Many questions about the mathematical equations of fluid flow are famously difficult. In view of this difficulty, much research has concentrated on special situations, such as a thin film of fluid either sitting on or hanging from a flat surface. These films arise in many industrial coating situations, such as the manufacture of photographic film, or the coating of magnetic disk drives. The mathematical understanding of these problems became substantial only in the s, and even now, much more is known in one space dimension than in the physically relevant case of two space dimensions, where this research will concentrate doc18812 none Mirov It is proposed to extend a collaborative research effort between the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and Laser Materials and Technology Research Center of General Physics Institute RAS (LMT RC GPI). The current cooperation in laser spectroscopy, investigations of the fundamental optical properties and optical relaxation processes of the energy of electronic excitation in laser crystals would be continued and broadened to include a comprehensive study of the relaxation processes which affect the optically excited state of promising rare-earth and transitional metal doped laser materials. The proposed research would combine the expertise of the Russian investigators in lasers and fundamental physical processes with the expertise in lasers and laser spectroscopy and state-of-the-art facilities at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Investigation of the multiphonon relaxation (MR) at the potential mid- IR laser transitions (4- 7 um) in the fluoride, chalcogenide, chloride and bromide crystals with short phonon spectra doped with trivalent rare- earth ions like Pr 3+ , Nd 3+ , Dy 3+ , Ho 3+ , Er 3+ and Tm 3+ and divalent transient metals ions like Ti 2+ , V 2+ , Cr 2+ , Mn 2+ , Fe 2+ , Co 2+ and Ni 2+ will be done. A search of doped crystal matrixes with highly efficient radiative transitions in the mid IR spectral region minimally by-passed by multiphonon relaxation will be provided. In doing so the normal modes of vibrational spectra of crystal matrixes and electronic transitions selections rules for possible types of optical centers of different rare- earth dopants will be considered theoretically. Their influence on both radiative and nonradiative transition rates will be analyzed. After theoretical study the crystal matrixes having the electronic transitions in the mid- IR spectral region with large radiative and low multiphonon relaxation rates will be grown. Site- selective spectroscopic studies and temperature dependent fluorescence kinetics measurements using highly sensitive correlated photon counting technique and highly sensitive in the mid- IR spectral region fast photodetectors will be provided at the potential mid IR laser transitions. The temperature dependencies of multiphonon relaxation rates of practically all optical RE transitions perspective for mid IR lasing will be measured and analyzed. Spontaneous (without temperature simulation) multiphonon relaxation rates will be measured at helium temperatures and calculated theoretically. The calculations will be provided considering nonlinear mechanisms of multiphonon relaxation taking into account the real phonon spectra of crystal matrix and partial level- to level inter- multiplet spontaneous multiphonon relaxation rates. These results will be compared with the simple single frequency approximation of lattice vibrations. Comparison of the theory and experiment will be provided. The quantum yield of fluorescence and absorption and emission cross- sections of corresponding optical transitions will be determined and compared with the predicted ones. The general regularities of the radiative and the multiphonon relaxation rates on the anion and cation masses and unit dimensions of crystal lattice and on the rare- earth ion and optical transition types will be determined. The anticipated result of this research effort is a better understanding of relaxation processes which effect the optically excited states of promising RE and TM doped mid-IR laser materials. The perspectives of obtaining mid-IR lasing including broadly tunable for divalent transient metal ions will be analyzed in different types of above-mentioned crystals doc18813 none This proposal seeks funds to implement and evaluate a model of instructional strategies for prekindergarten teachers in order to enhance their ability to support young childre s learning in language, early literacy, and math. The model will be experimentally tested across Head Start and public school educational settings and is guided by a strong body of recent research. As the two settings have different goals for children, funding of this proposal will provide important information on the conditions under which the model is effective. The outcomes of this research will determine critical elements for models of instructional approaches such as intensity and duration, teacher background characteristics, role of mentor teachers, and the importance of including a home literacy component. The model is based on research that has clearly established a group of key elements for prekindergarten language literacy programs (e.g., expressive language, vocabulary, early reading skills). Results will answer a critical remaining question regarding how a model of instructional strategies can support teachers to implement a comprehensive set of teaching practices supporting language literacy development in ways that are sensitive to the broadest range of social, emotional, and cognitive needs of young children doc18814 none The complexity of modem day aerospace, industrial, DoD, civil infrastructure, and vehicle systems is increasing, and performance requirements are becoming more stringent in terms of both accuracy and speed of response. Such systems are characterized by complex dynamics having nonlinearities, unmodeled dynamics, flexibility effects, varying parameters, unknown friction, high amplitude disturbances, and actuators with deadzones, backlash, and saturation. The control problems associated with such complex systems are not easy, as they do not satisfy most of the assumptions made in the controls literature. Therefore, most existing control algorithms do not work well. Optimal nonlinear control systems hold out the hope of successfully confronting these problems but are expressed in terms of solutions to the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation. However, HJB is not analytically solvable for practical systems, and the dynamic programming solution for discrete-time systems suffers from NP-complexity problems ( the curse of dimensionality ). Approximate solution techniques for the HJB equation have been explored and show great promise in reducing NP-complexity issues. However, such HJB approximate techniques must be tied to real-time on-line feedback control techniques that simultaneously stabilize the system while adapting to approximate the HJB solution. Recent developments show that nonlinear network structures, both neural network (NN) and fuzzy logic (FL) systems, hold out the hope of providing approximate solutions to the HJB equation and other nonlinear design equations. Structured nonlinear networks hold out the hope for confronting problems of NP-complexity in complex systems control. The structure inherent in FL systems holds out the hope of designing new NN architectures of increased structure. Approximate HJB solution also holds out the hope of bridging the gap between high-level computer science architectures and servo-level feedback control. This research has three goals: (1) Nearly Optimal HJB Control Using Neural Networks; (2) 0N0ovel High-Level Nonlinear Network Control Architectures; (3) and UTA High School Teams and Courseware for Nonlinear Network Control doc18815 none A large class of applications access XML data through XPath expressions and need to make routine decisions based on a simple test: whether one XPath expressions is contained in another, meaning that the answer to the first is always is subset of the answer to the second. Examples of such applications include query optimization, query rewriting, semantic caching, XML-based content routing. Despite its apparent simplicity, the containment problem turns out to be surprisingly difficult to analyze when XPath expressions include wild-cards, descendant axes, and predicates. Previous work has focused on only toy fragments of XPath for which the containment problem is in PTIME, but these simple results fail for more realistic fragments. This project studies the containment problem for a large fragment of XPath. During initial investigations for the project it was established that the containment problem for XPath expressions that contain wild-cards, descendant axes, and filters is co-NP hard, suggesting that a complete and efficient containment algorithm is impossible to find. In light of that, several algorithms will be designed in order to explore the tradeoff between efficiency and completeness. One goal of the project is to design a complete algorithm that always returns the correct answer, runs in exponential time in general, but runs efficiently on special instances of XPath expressions. Another goal is to design a heuristic algorithm that always runs efficiently, but that may return false negatives in certain cases. Both algorithms will be analyzed formally, in order to provide a full insight into what performance or precision guarantees they offer. The most promising algorithm will be implemented and made available in the public domain doc18816 none MEMS designers would like more functionality on a chip, akin to the VLSI technology comprising of hundreds of thousands of components on a chip, but they are currently handicapped with the limited design tools for Bio-MEMS design. A structured design methodology for Bio-MEMS can address many of the challenges currently facing Bio-MEMS design. The objective of this research is to develop analysis and design tools for device, reduced-order, and circuit modeling of Bio-MEMS for structured design of Bio-MEMS. The objectives of device modeling are to develop mathematical models to include all significant microscopic effects in Bio-MEMS, develop fast and efficient scattered point and mixed-regime techniques for mixed-domain analysis of bio-fluidic devices. The objective of reduced-order modeling is to represent the device by a low-order model that can capture the functional behavior. Low-order models based on a weighted snap shot approach will be developed to capture multiple time scales encountered in Bio-MEMS. By identifying several Bio-fluidic components, that could form the basic building blocks for complex Bio-MEMS on a chip, and developing reduced-order models for these building blocks, circuit models will be developed to design large-scale biointegrated circuits on a chip doc18817 none PI: Lindenstrauss Proposal Number: Quantum Unique Ergodicity and Rigidity in Dynamical Systems The research proposed lies at the interface of dynamical systems and several other mathematical disciplines, and in particular number theory and the mathematical theory of Quantum Chaos. It is well known that the collections of invariant probability measures and closed invariant sets for hyperbolic maps or flows is very large; remarkably, in many dynamical systems of algebraic origin where there are two (or more) commuting hyperbolic maps or flows it is conjectured that there are actually very few measures or closed sets invariant under this bigger action. Despite (or perhaps because of) important contributions by several authors, the mystery of this rigidity property of multidimensional actions is still one of the central problems in modern ergodic theory.While seemingly unrelated, the methodology of the study of rigidity of multiparameter actions is very suitable to study the arithmetical case of the Quantum Unique Ergodicity Conjecture, regarding the limit of the spatial distribution of a free particle on certain manifolds in a quantum steady state as the energy of the state tends to infinity (the semiclassical limit). This question has been considered previously by many authors mostly using tools from analytic number theory; the approach proposed, using the dynamical approach, is new and has already borne fruits. The theory of dynamical systems gives tools to study complex systems, for example the evolution of a complicated deterministic process over time. There is a rich and distinguished tradition of using these powerful tools in other mathematical disciplines, most notably in number theory and combinatorics. The research proposed is connected to several of the most exciting possible applications, including new implications to the theory of quantum chaos in mathematical physics doc18818 none PI: Hart Smith, University of Washington DMS - : -------------------------------------------------------- The investigator s research focuses on the behavior of solutions to hyperbolic equations in the setting of metrics of low regularity. The key tool is the construction, through wave packet techniques, of approximate solutions for linear wave equations with minimally regular metrics, which are then used to establish Strichartz and related estimates for exact solutions. One application of this work is to well-posedness for quasi-linear hyperbolic equations with initial data of low Sobolev regularity. In joint work the investigator has established a best possible result for general quasi-linear equations with quadratic growth in the inhomogeneity; proposed work investigates relaxing the regularity assumption in special cases such as the Einstein vacuum equation, where a null condition indicates that better results should hold. Wave packet techniques are also being used to establish norm estimates for eigenfunctions on Riemannian manifolds with metrics of limited differentiability. The proposed research includes establishing best possible bounds for compact manifolds with Lp pinched curvature. The investigator is also adapting the above methods to establish norm estimates on solutions to mixed-type wave equations with Dirichlet conditions on a convex obstacle. This is carried out by reflecting the metric across the boundary to obtain a Lipschitz metric on an open set. The geometry of the resulting geodesic flow suggests that wave packet techniques can be used to establish the same norm estimates on solutions as hold in the non-obstacle case. The proposed research involves the study of waves traveling in rough media; a rough medium being one where the physics which governs the speed of waves changes abruptly from point to point. By studying the properties of a special family of localized solitary waves, the investigator is able to answer questions about the possible concentration of energy that can occur for general waves traveling in such media. This work has important applications in the study of nonlinear wave equations; that is, situations where the wave can be considered to interact with itself. One such example is the gravitational field equation arising from Einstein s general theory of relativity, where the geometry of space itself is the object of the equation. Rough solutions, and thus a rough media, necessarily arise when considering what kind of singularities the theory can lead to. The research also has implications for investigating the fundamental vibrational modes in rough media. It is known that refraction in such media can lead to high concentrations of energy that can be detected by examining these modes. Work is being done to relate the possible degree of concentration of energy to the roughness of the underlying media. The research finds applications as well in studying the reflection of waves off obstacles. The techniques developed to study rough media are being used to show that waves reflecting off of convex obstacles must diffuse to the same degree as do waves traveling without reflection doc18819 none This theoretical project will study several important biological problems utilizing powerful methods from polymer physics. This is possible because the hydrocarbon chains of biological lipids, which make up all membranes within the body, are short chain polymers. One such problem is the study of rafts, high density islands of sphingolipids and cholesterol in the phospholipid sea; islands which attract, inter alia, signalling proteins. Although there is unusual excitement about this phenomena, as it requires significant revision of the standard view of membranes, there is little molecular theory on the unusual ordered fluid phase typical of the raft. This is a phase in which the chains have fewer gauche bonds than the normal liquid crystal phase, yet is without the translational order characteristic of the gel phase. Several methods, including self-consistent field theory, will be utilized along with a realistic description of the lipid chains to understand the factors which encourage, or inhibit, the formation of rafts. A second problem of great importance is that of membrane fusion, a process necessary for viral infection, fertilization, and most intra-cell trafficking. The process is not understood. This group has carried out simulations of this process utilizing models which have proved of great use in the study of polymers. These simulations reveal a very different fusion mechanism than that commonly accepted. These studies will continue in order to elucidate the pathway which is followed during fusion. The potential impact is great given the connection between fusion and infection, and fusion and fertilization. Another project of note is that concerning the study of crystallization of membrane proteins. The structure of these important proteins is not known, in general, as most of them have not been crystallized, a prerequesite for x-ray analysis. Rather recently crystallization of such proteins was accomplished using cubic lipid phases. Why such unusual phases should bring about crystals of proteins is not understood. This problem fits well with the techniques used by this group, which successfully predicted the existence, and non-existence, of various bicontinuous cubic phases in block copoloymers, and have extended these techniques to include interaction between lipid membranes and proteins. If the basic principles underlying this process can be understood, it could lead to an increase in the number of such proteins whose structure can be analyzed. %%% This theoretical project will study several important biological problems utilizing powerful methods from polymer physics. This is possible because the hydrocarbon chains of biological lipids, which make up all membranes within the body, are short chain polymers. The projects studied illustrate the great potential of bringing methods of polymer physics to bear upon important problems in the biological sciences doc18820 none The specifics of this project concern three directions which arose out of a general interest in definable equivalence relations. The first of these directions relates to the treeable equivalence relations. Following work of Adams and Kechris, we know that there is a mass of countable Borel equivalence relations which are mutually incomparable. No such result is known for the treeable Borel equivalence relations. We do not know whether there are infinitely many distinct examples, and we basically have only one established example which is not hyperfinite. More generally we do not know whether the implicit involvement of measure theoretic examples involving free actions of the free group is the sole obstruction to hyperfiniteness. The second direction of Hjorth s project concerns issues in the fine study of Borel complexities of countable isomorphism types in the topology of quantifier free logic, and may be connected with a translation of some basic concepts from first order logic into a quantifier free context. The third direction of the proposal is to investigate some combinatorial questions, such as having a model with a certain partition property for definable partitions, for infinitary sentences, especially those arising as the Scott sentence of some countable structure; this may be related to a still open problem posed by Shelah in the s on the Hanf number up to the continuum for countably infinitary logic. In very general terms, this project can be located inside the branch of mathematics known as descriptive set theory . This area arose around the end of 19th century as part of an effort to better understand the basic objects -- such as the real number line, real valued functions, subsets of the reals, subsets or regions of two dimensional and three dimensional space, the area or volume of such subsets -- which appear in calculus, and which are needed for applications in engineering, physics, and differential equations. Descriptive set theory does not itself actually address any of these eventual applications, but is rather preoccupied with purely foundational issues. Following Silver s theorem in the s, many descriptive set theorists have become interested in equivalence relations on spaces such as the real number line, or two dimensional space, or similar classes of topological spaces . The study of such equivalence relations leads to quotient objects which arise by considering the collection of all equivalence classes. For instance if we set two real numbers to be equivalent when the result of subtracting one from the other is an integer (i.e. a whole number ), then the collection of equivalence classes may be naturally identified with the result of basically wrapping the real number line around itself, to obtain circle of circumference one. In this simple example the quotient object is easily understood, and has a geometrical representation. Most of the work in Hjorth s area deals with the so called non-smooth equivalence relations whose quotient objects do not admit such a representation, and the study of these quotient spaces is known to have connections with a variety of mathematical disciplines, such as dynamics , and ergodic theory , and some of the more abstract branches of analysis , such as infinite dimensional group representations doc18821 none Proposal Number: PI: Boris Kalinin The proposed research lies at the area of smooth dynamical systems and ergodic theory. The main goal of the project is to investigate higher rank dynamical systems. In particular, the investigator will study actions of discrete and continuous higher rank abelian groups, which are natural generalizations of diffeomorphisms and flows on smooth manifolds. Higher rank dynamical systems appear naturally in the study of various geometric and algebraic objects. The prime examples of these systems include hyperbolic and partially hyperbolic actions by automorphisms and translations on compact cosets of Lie groups. Using dynamical, analytic, and group theoretic methods the investigator will study rigidity properties of such systems. The examples of possible rigidity properties include description of invariant measures, regularity of measurable isomorphisms, and existence of smooth isomorphisms to the algebraic models. Dynamical systems and ergodic theory is a relatively new field of mathematics which studies the evolution of physical and mathematical systems over time, for example planet systems, air and fluid flows. This field originated from the classical studies in differential equations and celestial mechanics. Dynamics and ergodic theory introduced new mathematical tools into these areas of physics and mechanics, such as the study of the qualitative behavior in the long run as well as various analytic and probabilistic methods. New ideas and concepts in dynamics, such as fractals and chaos, have not only affected the field itself dramatically, but also fundamentally changed our understanding of the world. The influence of the studies in dynamical systems nowadays goes as far as meteorology, biology, and computer science doc18822 none A fundamental problem in algebraic geometry is the study of the nature of the moduli space M(g) of curves of genus g as an algebraic variety. It is known that for low g this space behaves very much like a projective space which means that one can describe explicitly most curves of given genus. However for g large the nature of M(g) changes completely and the investigator studies this transition by constructing new loci in the moduli space, which are of a completely different nature than those studied by previous mathematicians. The geometry of these new loci strongly suggests that the transition in the nature of M(g) appears much earlier than the leading conjecture in the field has predicted. The technical machinery developed by the investigator to solve this problem is also employed to study some open problems about vector bundles on general curves of genus g. A different project concerns the moduli space of pointed curves of genus 0. Obects of striking beauty, these spaces are important because of their pivotal role in new developments in enumerative geometry and because often statements about curves of arbitrary genus can be reduced to questions about pointed curves of genus 0. The investigator studies several invariants of these spaces and the proposed approach has been succesful in low dimensional cases. Algebraic curves are ubiquitous objects in mathematics. They appear in complex analysis (as Riemann surfaces), in algebra (as field extensions) and in algebraic geometry (as curves in projective spaces). The most important problem in algebraic geometry is to classify algebraic varieties. For one-dimensional varieties (that is, for algebraic curves) this problem is approached by considering the moduli space M(g) of all curves of given genus. This is the universal parameter space for curves of fixed genus and interest in its geometry comes from fields as diverse as algebraic geometry, theoretical physics, number theory or coding theory. By understanding this space not only can we learn about families of curves but quite often the moduli space itself has beautiful geometric and arithmetic properties which one cannot expect to find on an arbitrary space doc18823 none for NSF Proposal - Equipment for Automated Acquisition of DNA Sequence and DNA Fragment Size Data A grant has been awarded to Dr. David E. McCauley at Vanderbilt University to support the purchase of an automated DNA sequencer, a DNA extraction system, and supporting computer hardware. The BaseStation gathers DNA sequence data from slab gels and stores it in a form that can be interpreted by sequence analysis software. The machine can also gather and process other types of DNA fragment size data such as microsatellite DNA genetic markers. In the case of both DNA sequence and microsatellite analysis, products of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) are labeled with a florescent dye and separated by size during electrophoresis. The advantage of the BaseStation is that its 96 well capacity and automated loading allows for high throughput, and its configuration makes it equally suited for gathering sequence and microsatellite data. The associated DNA extraction system will allow for rapid extraction of genomic DNA from a large number of samples. The data gathered by these machines will be used by five P.I. s (D. McCauley, J. Burke, D. Funk, C. Johnson and N.O. Pellmyr) in a variety of studies in evolutionary and population biology which rely on large quantities of DNA sequence and or microsatellite data. Some of the specific research projects that will make use of data generated by the equipment include the following. 1) A study designed to use both DNA sequence information and polymorphic microsatellite markers to investigate the population genetics of Silene vulgaris, a plant invasive in North America. Comparison of the genetic characteristics of the plant in North America and in its native Europe should indicate the mechanism or route of invasion. 2) A comparative molecular systematics study of several species of yucca plants and of the moths that pollinate them. This phylogenetic study will help document how highly coevolved plant-pollinator systems develop. 3) A study using polymorphic microsatellite loci that will help to map genes associated with the domestication of sunflowers from their wild relatives. 4) A DNA sequence based study of adaptive radiation and host plant shifts in the Neochlamisus bebbianae beetle complex. 5) A study of the adaptive significance of biological clock genes that follows changes in the frequency of molecular markers in model laboratory populations of cyanobacteria. All of these studies will contribute to understanding basic biological processes such as range expansions, coevolution, host plant shifts and the evolution of the biological clock. However, knowledge coming from these studies will also contribute to the solution of more applied problems such as how invasive species might be controlled, how insects shift feeding from native plant species to plants of economic value, how the genetic manipulation of domesticated species might be made more efficient, or how we might overcome health problems associated with biological rhythm disorders. Finally, the results of all of the studies will contribute to the emerging field of bioinformatics, in that each study will require the P.I. to refine methods of gathering, storing, and analyzing a large volume of genetic information doc18824 none This proposal highlights the role of the Hardy-Littlewood (circle) method as a flexible tool that underpins progress in many areas of mathematics intersecting with number theory. The proposer intends to pursue a number of investigations that illustrate this intersubdisciplinary aspect of the method, concentrating on applications in arithmetic geometry and combinatorics. First, the researcher constructs a large class of examples of algebraic varieties, of relatively small dimension in terms of their degree, that may be studied by means of the circle method. Questions concerning the density of rational points and weak approximation should be accessible, the intention being to shed light on conjectures of Manin and others. In a second direction, the proposer applies results from the modern theory of diophantine approximation in order to refine Gower s recent explicit version of Szemeredi s theorem. In a more traditional line of enquiry, the researcher investigates the distribution of the number of representations of integers as sums of powers. The latter work enables higher moments than the traditional mean square to be considered, leading to multidimensional applications of previously inaccessible type. Number Theory studies the properties of integers (``whole numbers ). Since antiquity, the study of diophantine equations (equations to be solved in integers) has formed a core component of Number Theory, and has recently influenced the development of codes and cryptosystems (applied, for example, in data storage systems such as compact disks and DVDs, communications systems and banking security). The investigation of moment problems is a fundamental topic for Fourier analysis, which in the larger setting plays a crucial role in electrical engineering and communications. The circle method, in its modern incarnations, provides a mechanism for transferring technology from one of these areas to another, and this proposal pursues basic research that facilitates such transfers doc18825 none Busnaina Particulate contamination of silicon wafers after chemical mechanical polishing processes is a major problem that affects yield in semiconductor manufacturing. The removal and adhesion forces of slurry particles are greatly affected by the polishing, cleaning, rinsing and drying processes that follow the particle initial contact with the surface. In this proposed international collaboration between Hanyang University and Northeastern University, the interaction between slurry particles and wafer surfaces will be investigated by electrical characterization of the particles and wafer substrates and by measuring the removal and the adhesion forces of these particles. The goal of the project is to understand particle adhesion and removal mechanisms for submicron particles. Hydrodynamic removal forces and the effect of the zeta potential on slurry particle adhesion and removal will be investigated. The study will also determine the effectiveness of the cleaning techniques for each particle film systems doc18826 none This award supports the purchase of eight plant growth chambers and related equipment to be used for studies of major crop plants including maize, rice and tomato, as well as studies of other plants whose genetics and physiology are of general interest. These chambers are suited for high-throughput and large-scale projects that often require well-defined plant growth conditions, including light, temperature and humidity, or experimental treatments that are not possible without modern growth chambers. Planned uses include studies of plant-pathogen interactions, nuclear-plastid signaling, and light signal transduction in several major crop plants and in Arabidopsis. Use of such chambers allows investigators to standardize plant growth conditions that often vary widely from one research group to another. Such standardization facilitates verification of results by other investigators, as well as new investigations that build on the results of previous work doc18827 none Proposal IDs: , , , PIs: Donoho, Candes, Huo and Jones TITLE: A Focused Research Group on Multiscale Geometric Analysis--Theory, Tools, Applications An interdisciplinary team, bridging Harmonic Analysis, Statistics, Image Analysis and Astronomy, proposes a united effort to exploit and extend recent breakthroughs in computational harmonic analysis. The team will consolidate several scattered advances into a unified body of theory and methods to be called Multiscale Geometric Analysis, which can probe the fine structure of 2-, 3- and higher- dimensional functions and point clouds, able to isolate and manipulate intermediate-dimensional phenomena. Simple examples include edges in 2-d images, filaments and sheets in 3-d point catalogs. Characterizing such intermediate-dimensional phenomena is essential for fundamental progress in a wide range of problem areas (including 2-d and 3-d imaging) where traditional multiscale methods have now run their course. Our united effort has three main outcomes. 1. Theory. Coherent, comprehensive knowledge, showing what can and cannot be accomplished with computational harmonic analysis. 2. Tools. A wide range of practical MGA algorithms and a unified, publicly available software environment - BeamLab - deploying them. 3. Applications. Our main initial focus will be on the analysis of 3-d point catalogs in astronomy, such as those coming on-line soon from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We know a priori that the data contain filaments and sheets, embedded in a scattered background, and MGA provides a decisive set of tools to resolve the structural properties of such catalogs, far more sensitive and more comprehensible than any tools currently available for such analysis. Many new kinds of massive databases are being created in our era s revolutionary transition to a data-rich society. Many of these databases contain geometric structures such as surfaces, and filaments, albeit in a sometimes hidden manner. Databases of this sort can include galaxy catalogs in astronomy -- in which the filaments and sheets are predicted by various theories of universe formation -- 3-D scanning of faces and other objects -- in which filaments and surfaces are caused by structures such as skin and hair -- and statistical databases in which curves and surfaces arise from existence of predictable patterns. This Focused Research Group on Multiscale Geometric Analysis is a research effort bringing together mathematicians, statisticians, image analysts and astronomers to create new tools and theories to help extract geometric structure and meaning from such databases. The participants are skilled at multiscale analysis, which will be a central organizational principle. We expect multiscale methods to have an impact here comparable to what wavelets have had over the last twenty years in many other problems in science and technology doc18828 none This project, submitted under the Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) program, will examine public attitudes toward civil liberties following the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In particular, the researchers will conduct a national survey to probe how public anxiety and fear influence support for civil liberties and personal freedom. The survey will ask whether respondents are willing to limit their own personal freedom, the freedom of people who are like them, or those who are different from them. It is exactly the fact that efforts to constrict personal freedom are motivated by a threat to public safety that allows the researchers to question whether people are differentially committed to civil liberties norms. The study will test whether during a time of widespread social anxiety, people view civil liberty standards as universal or instead as more of a way to constrain the behavior of others - in particular those who are viewed as different from the respondent in ethnicity, race, or citizenship doc18829 none The investigator has discovered that, for extremely large input sizes, modern factorization algorithms such as the number-field sieve can be carried out with far less memory per processor than was previously believed. Consequently, for extremely large values of d, the number-field sieve can factor 3d-digit numbers at the same cost that was previously believed to be required for d-digit numbers. The investigator is studying the practical effectiveness of this discovery for small input sizes, such as bits and bits. The investigator is also continuing his research into the fundamental computational tools in commutative rings of Krull dimension 1. The number-field sieve is the best known attack on many public-key cryptosystems used to protect the secrecy and authenticity of Internet communications. Understanding the power of this algorithm is essential in choosing safe key sizes for the cryptosystems. If, for example, criminals can factor integers as large as bits, then users must choose key sizes larger than bits. This award is being cofunded by the Algebra, Number Theory, and Combinatorics Program and the Numeric, Symbolic, and Geometric Computation Program doc18830 none The investigator studies conditions under which systems of homogeneous polynomials in many variables have nontrivial zeros in p-adic completions of the rational numbers. A conjecture usually attributed to Artin states that if the coefficients of the polynomials are all integers, then such zeros exist in all p-adic completions provided that the number of variables is large enough when compared to the degrees of the polynomials, and gives a bound on the required number of variables. While the first part of this conjecture has been shown to be correct, the conjectured bound is false in general. However, the bound is correct if the prime p is sufficiently large. This leads to the questions of what the correct general bound should be and also how large the prime p needs to be for Artin s bound to hold. The investigator studies these questions in general, and also when the polynomials are restricted to being additive (i.e. having no cross-terms). These questions are studied both when the degrees of the polynomials are all equal and when they may vary, and are also studied in the more general setting where the p-adic completions of the rational numbers are replaced by extensions of these fields. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, a fundamental question in number theory has been to find solutions of (systems of) equations in which all of the variables are integers. When attempting to show that such solutions exist, it is often first necessary to obtain information about the so-called local solutions. These are solutions in the number systems of p-adic integers, where p may be any prime number. In fact, it turns out that if there is even one prime p for which the system does not have a solution in p-adic integers, then it has no solutions in ordinary integers either. There are also some special situations in which the converse holds: if the system has solutions in p-adic integers for every prime p, then it automatically has a solution in regular integers. Hence it is an interesting problem to attempt to determine when equations have p-adic solutions. Such questions are also interesting apart from their connection to integral solutions of equations, since they provide insight into the nature of p-adic numbers, and how they differ from ordinary real numbers doc18831 none The definition and implementation of Science & Technology (S &T) policies requires information that is timely, reliable, and clear. Because of the character of the production of intellectual knowledge, the development and measurement of S&T indicators is an extremely complex problem. Namely, there are many difficulties in developing indicators that are general and robust and can be applied across (i) the different S&T fields, (ii) for different aggregations levels (from research groups to entire countries), and (iii) equally well for input and output measures. Specifically, fields where advances are slower or where the resources involved are not too large are much easier to quantify and manage than, for example, the life sciences where Federal investment is nowadays very large and for which the pace of change is staggeringly fast. The goal of this interdisciplinary proposal is to address this challenging research problem by using recent concepts of statistical physics, namely, scaling and universality. This research has already been applied in other areas, such as identifying common growth characteristics of countries on the basis of the size of their economies. In addition, preliminary work by these researchers in S&T systems suggests that S&T systems exhibit common universal physics characteristics. The project will try to identify robust, universal, characteristics of the evolution of S&T systems using a variety of input and output measures at varying levels of aggregation. For example, the project will investigate whether national research systems exhibits similar statistical physics characteristics, based on their level of research and development expenditures, and will compare publishing output of European and U.S. university departments using bibliometric data doc18832 none This grant will research friction at the tool-chip interface in machining and will attempt to quantify the extents of seizure and sliding islands. Preliminary analysis conducted through a prior exploratory grant will be extended to better examine the non-Euclidean nature of frictional contact. The role of cutting conditions, tool and work materials, tool preparation and atmospheric oxidation will be determined in evaluating map areas and perimeters. The primary objective of this research is to develop a fractal model of the frictional contact geometry at the tool rake face in machining. The physics and mathematics of friction will be investigated using a fractal geometric approach, to determine relationships for cutting variables such as area of contact, cutting forces, energy consumed, tool temperatures and wear, extending on preliminary work. These models will be validated and improved with data obtained from conventional as well as specialized experiments. Seizure will be examined at a fundamental level and the role of physical mechanisms in its creation and extinction at the interface quantified. Seizure will be studied by varying tool surface preparation, oxidation, controlled tool coatings, work material prior processing and tool wear. The material and cutting conditions leading to different fractal dimensions will be physically modeled and validated experimentally. Issues of similarity, scaling and stationarity will be suitably studied to develop predictive models of the cutting process. This project is expected to lead to improved models of the cutting process and consequently to its imminent automation. This research will be useful in cutting tool design, tool coating evaluation, and process optimization. The scalability of frictional models to finer scales of machining will also result from this treatment doc18833 none This project is for emergency funding to carry out additional interviews in the World Values Surveys (WVS) being carried out in Pakistan and Bangladesh. These interviews use the version of the WVS interview schedule designed for Islamic societies, and adds supplementary questions to measure approval or disapproval of the recent terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. The investigation also assesses whether such attacks are seen as compatible with Islamic teachings. The researchers also probe into support for democratic institutions and openness to ties with the West. The existing WVS questionnaire explores the basic values and worldviews of each society without touching on current political issues. Adding a battery of questions measuring attitudes toward terrorism and relations with the West makes it possible to analyze the extent to which these orientations are linked with enduring core elements of Islamic belief systems, and the extent to which they may be changing. The pilot surveys conducted in Iran, Egypt and Jordan found surprisingly widespread support for democracy and indications of an intergenerational change in the direction of growing support for social and political liberalization. This Small Grant for Exploratory Research investigation is extremely timely and will enhance substantially our understanding of this very important topic doc18834 none Carbon nanotubes have long been expected to be the ultimate fibers because of the theoretical predictions that their elastic modulus along the tube axis is about five times larger than that of steel. These fibers are not only expected for applications as constituents in composite materials but also as components in nanoscale instruments, such as the GHz molecular oscillator recently predicted by the PI and reported by the Scientific American ( http: www.sciam.com news 2.html ). These expected applications have led to numerous investigations, both experimental and theoretical, on determination of the mechanical properties of carbon nanotubes. The experimentally determined values of the elastic modulus of carbon nanotubes are not only often inconsistent with theoretical predictions but also scattered in a wide range. All the experimental measurements to date are indirect because the difficulties associated with handling such samples of extremely small diameters have prevented researchers from obtaining reliable data through direct measurements. The primary causes for the wide scattering of measured values of mechanical properties and the inconsistency with theoretical predictions are the quality variations of experimental samples and the inaccuracy of the mechanics theory used in deriving these values from the measurements. The carbon nanotube samples usually contain defects, which inevitably affect the mechanical properties, and there have been intensive efforts towards further understanding and improving the current synthesis methods and developing new methods, which are expected to lead to nanotubes of increasingly superior quality. Most theoretical studies to date are computer simulations based on either molecular dynamics or atomistic modeling. These studies have provided many insights into some experimentally observed fascinating phenomena, such as super-flexibility of carbon nanotubes in bending, but they are severely limited by the system complexity of multiwalled carbon nanotubes. Physicists have recently turned to the continuum theories of beams, shells and columns for effective modeling, and the predictions based on the continuum theories and the molecule dynamics are compared amazingly well for a few mechanical phenomena, namely buckling instabilities and bending instabilities. However, the general applicability of the continuum theories of mechanics to multiwalled carbon nanotubes is not possible because of the strong evidence that the intermolecular interactions between adjacent walls in multiwalled carbon nanotubes have a crucial effect on the mechanical behavior of these nanotubes. The primary objective of this investigation is to develop a hybrid atomic continuum inter-length-scale model to characterize the mechanical behavior of multiwalled carbon nanotubes. In this model, each wall is modeled as a continuum with their mechanical behavior being characterized by their effective mechanical properties determined by the atomistic and molecular models, and the interactions between adjacent walls are characterized using the existing theories of intermolecular interactions. A detailed analysis for a multiwalled carbon nanotube, subject to tension compression, torsion and bending as well as their combinations, will be carried out and comparisons with experimental measurements will be made using the available data in the literature and through a collaborative experimental program doc18835 none The investigator and his colleagues study permutation and linear representations of finite and algebraic groups. The focus is on primitive permutation representations and irreducible linear representations. These results will be applied to monodromy groups of coverings of curves and higher dimensional varieties over finite fields and to various questions in probabilistic group theory. The investigator expects to make significant progress on outstanding conjectures about automorphism groups of curves in positive characteristic, the size of images of rational points for maps between varieties over finite fields and monodromy groups of coverings of curves of small genus. In characteristic zero, the investigator and collaborators plan to obtain a complete classification of the possible monodromy groups of indecomposable rational functions. This is a much more ambitious project than the solution of the Guralnick-Thompson conjecture that was recently solved. The techniques involve detailed analysis of properties of simple groups and translating problems in arithmetic algebraic geometry to group theory. Many of these results will give detailed information about questions in probabilistic group theory as well. Since the classification of finite simple groups was announced in the late s, there have been some remarkable applications of this theorem in many areas of mathematics. This proposal continues in this tradition. There is also a long history of translating problems in number theory and geometry (particularly over finite fields) to group theory. The investigator intends to obtain quite detailed results about finite simple groups and their subgroups. Some of the investigation into finite simple groups is quite natural but other aspects are motivated by applications to curves and varieties over finite fields. This will give insight into various problems about maps over finite fields -- in particular, about polynomials and rational functions. This has applications to coding theory and cryptography as well as answering basic questions in the field. A special case of this is the study of exceptional polynomials. These were first studied by Dickson in his thesis in the s. The major result in the area, using the classification of simple groups, was only obtained in by Fried, Saxl and the proposer. The investigator intends to classify all such polynomials. These results about simple groups will also give detailed information about probabilistic generation of finite groups. These kinds of questions have become increasingly important in the design of algorithms in computational algebra. These results show that by following certain recipes, one can be reasonably sure of picking a generating set for your favorite finite group doc18836 none This project will obviate the diffusion annealing by introducing deuterium through ion implantation. In MOS transistors, for example, deuterium will be implanted on silicon substrate before the thin gate oxide was grown. To achieve the objective, we will investigate (1) effect of deuterium implantation energy and dose on oxide growth and its interface. An appropriate dose can reduce substrate damage or eliminate creation of dislocation loops while satisfy the dangling bonds even after the subsequent thermal cycles of oxide growth. Thermal budgets will be optimized to control the physical incorporation and subsequent electrical characteristics by studying the distribution of deuterium after ion implantation. (2) Secondly, thermal kinetics of deuterium desorption from the interface will be studied and its effect on electrical characteristics of finished device will be evaluated. (3) Thirdly, the mechanisms of deuterium diffusion in Si Si02 system due to oxide growth will be investigated. The focus of the proposal is to conduct an experimental investigation of incorporating deuterium effectively through ion implantation. Tasks will be undertaken for a comparative study of this process to other means of interface passivation such as various annealing treatments, deuterium implantation at a partially completed device (TI approach) and hydrogen implantation. In addition, we will incorporate deuterium using ion implantation in silicon nanocrystals used for optoelectronics applications. Even though the main focus of this research will be towards Si Si02 interface, an additional task will study GaAs devices to investigate behavior of deuterium implantation in optoelectronic devices. Extensive physical and electrical characterization will be employed. Sub-micron MOSFETs will be used to achieve a fundamental understanding of the behavior of implanted deuterium at the ultra-thin silicon-dioxide silicon interface, which is, at present, poorly understood. Test devices will be processed at the Microfabrication Center at NJIT with the help of graduate and undergraduate students. Since NJIT has a significant presence of minority and women students (~40% and ~18% respectively) it is expected that some of these students will have the opportunity to contribute to this project. A recently acquired state-of-the-art device characterization system (NSF supported) will be used for electrical characterization at NJIT whereas some of the physical characterization will be carried out at Agere Labs formerly Lucent Technologies. GaAs samples will be prepared by Anadigics. Deuterium implantation will be carried out at NJIT and at Ion Implantation Company (IICO). The high national importance of this cutting edge technology and close involvement of qualified staff and students at NJIT and researchers at Agere Labs and Anadigics will significantly impact on advancing knowledge base in this area doc18827 none Proposal IDs: , , , PIs: Donoho, Candes, Huo and Jones TITLE: A Focused Research Group on Multiscale Geometric Analysis--Theory, Tools, Applications An interdisciplinary team, bridging Harmonic Analysis, Statistics, Image Analysis and Astronomy, proposes a united effort to exploit and extend recent breakthroughs in computational harmonic analysis. The team will consolidate several scattered advances into a unified body of theory and methods to be called Multiscale Geometric Analysis, which can probe the fine structure of 2-, 3- and higher- dimensional functions and point clouds, able to isolate and manipulate intermediate-dimensional phenomena. Simple examples include edges in 2-d images, filaments and sheets in 3-d point catalogs. Characterizing such intermediate-dimensional phenomena is essential for fundamental progress in a wide range of problem areas (including 2-d and 3-d imaging) where traditional multiscale methods have now run their course. Our united effort has three main outcomes. 1. Theory. Coherent, comprehensive knowledge, showing what can and cannot be accomplished with computational harmonic analysis. 2. Tools. A wide range of practical MGA algorithms and a unified, publicly available software environment - BeamLab - deploying them. 3. Applications. Our main initial focus will be on the analysis of 3-d point catalogs in astronomy, such as those coming on-line soon from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We know a priori that the data contain filaments and sheets, embedded in a scattered background, and MGA provides a decisive set of tools to resolve the structural properties of such catalogs, far more sensitive and more comprehensible than any tools currently available for such analysis. Many new kinds of massive databases are being created in our era s revolutionary transition to a data-rich society. Many of these databases contain geometric structures such as surfaces, and filaments, albeit in a sometimes hidden manner. Databases of this sort can include galaxy catalogs in astronomy -- in which the filaments and sheets are predicted by various theories of universe formation -- 3-D scanning of faces and other objects -- in which filaments and surfaces are caused by structures such as skin and hair -- and statistical databases in which curves and surfaces arise from existence of predictable patterns. This Focused Research Group on Multiscale Geometric Analysis is a research effort bringing together mathematicians, statisticians, image analysts and astronomers to create new tools and theories to help extract geometric structure and meaning from such databases. The participants are skilled at multiscale analysis, which will be a central organizational principle. We expect multiscale methods to have an impact here comparable to what wavelets have had over the last twenty years in many other problems in science and technology doc18838 none PI: Barry Simon, Professor Simon will continue his research focusing on direct and inverse spectral problems for Schrodinger operators and their discrete analogs. He plans to explore the impact of sum rules for spectral theory both for Jacobi matrices (where he and Killip recently solved several long open conjectures from the Orthogonal Polynomial community using sum rules) and Schrodinger operators. Other problems he expects to look at include the structure of the isospectral manifold for problems with discrete spectrum, resonance counting in higher dimensions, and the study of mixed singular continuous and point spectrum. A fundamental problem in wide swaths of science is determining the relation between some object that can only be observed indirectly and the information you can observe indirectly. There are two sides of issue: determine what is indirectly observed for a given state of the system, called the direct problem, and trying to induce properties of the system from the indirect observations, called the inverse problem. Professor Simon will study various aspects of direct and inverse problems in quantum mechanics. While the focus will be on the equations of quantum theory, there are potential spinoffs to tomography and radar sonar direct and inverse problems doc18839 none Hydroforming is a relatively new process for shaping tubular components out of metals. A simple tube can be hydroformed into a fairly complex shape suitable for use as a frame for a structural component. A tube is placed between two half dies and then pressurized internally. It expands, comes into contact with the dies and is forced to conform to their shape. The simple radial expansion of the tube can lead to a number of defects, with a major concern being thinning of the expanded wall. This can lead to tube burst. In order to reduce thinning, the burst strain can be increased by axially feeding undeformed material into the dies from the two ends using actuators. However, the extent of the developed axial compression in limited by buckling and wrinkling and by friction. Thus, for every part, a working envelope in the axial feed-pressure plane must be established which is free of these modes of failure. While aluminum in tube form is ideal for hydroforming, it is less ductile than steel and has more complex constitutive behavior, which make the hydroforming working envelope tighter. This need for a better understanding of processing control coupled with the empirical manner in which the dies and the process have been designed, have not allowed wide use of hydroforming for aluminum components. The objective of this three-year project is to develop a scientific basis for establishing the working envelopes of the process parameters. The problem will be tackled in a three prong manner consisting of hydroforming experiments, development of constitutive models for appropriate aluminum alloy extruded tubes, and development of several levels of numerical models for analyzing hydroforming and establishing its limits. An important component of the project is a custom hydroforming facility, which will be fabricated and used to study the process parametrically. Alcoa and GM will be act as industrial partners to the project and will interact with graduate and undergraduate students on a regular basis doc18840 none Jemison This proposal describes a systematic investigation into microwave-photonic techniques for the direct modulation, downconversion, and demodulation of millimeter wave signals for high-speed wireless applications such as telemedicine, multimedia distribution, and advanced satellite and military communications. Direct modulation eliminates the spurious emissions and filtering requirements associated with multiple frequency conversions, resulting in potentially increased modulation bandwidth and greater carrier tuneability. The use of photonics provides the wide bandwidth needed for direct conversion from baseband to millimeter wave frequencies and visa versa and offers the potential to significantly simplify millimeter wave transmitter and receiver architectures. Photonic transmitter and receiver approaches also are attractive since they are compatible with low-loss fiber optic distribution of millimeter wave signals prior to wireless transmission and subsequent to wireless reception. Specifically, microwave-photonic modulation demodulation (MP-Modem) techniques that work directly at millimeter wave frequencies and can support data rates approaching 1 Gbs will be developed. The techniques will be assessed via a combination of theoretical, simulation, and experimental work. Candidate techniques will be analyzed theoretically to develop models to quantify critical performance criteria such as link gain, linearity, and bit-error-rate (BER). These models will be implemented in commercially available microwave and system-level simulation packages using a recently developed modeling approach for microwave-photonic systems. Closed loop operation of promising MP-Modem techniques will be demonstrated experimentally. The experimental work will focus on proof-of-concept demonstrations using commercially available photonic components. System-level applications that exploit the inherent wideband nature of the MP-Modem approach also will be identified and studied. These applications may include, but are not limited to, support of ultra-wideband frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS); support of other wideband modulation techniques (e.g. quasi-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (quasi-OFDM) by simultaneous operation in multiple wireless bands); support of multiple modulation formats (e.g. M-ary PSK and M-ary FSK); and support of multiple access. Approaches for implementing the techniques using advanced technologies such as integrated optics and or MEMs also will be explored. The knowledge gained from these investigations will be applied to develop a new class of transmitters and receivers that will meet the performance demands of emerging high-speed digital millimeter-wave wireless communications while providing implementation simplicity and advanced functionality that cannot be achieved via traditional electronic design techniques doc18841 none Lloyd This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Douglas Lloyd at the University of Texas, Austin and Professor Hideto Matsuyama of the Kyoto Institute of Technology in Japan. The researchers will undertake a study of hydrophilic hydrophobic membrane development via thermally induced phase separation (TIPS). A great deal of valuable research has been done on the thermodynamics of polymer systems that undergo phase separation. However, a more thorough understanding of the kinetics of phase separation and structure development is necessary to complete the picture and allow membrane manufactures to control the porous characteristics of the membranes. Specific goals are to: 1) conduct kinetics studies of membrane structure formation; 2) to form a series of membranes using TIPS with various copolymers and diluents; and 3) to measure performance parameters such as flux and solute rejection. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. The U.S. scientists have considerable expertise in membrane formation and the kinetics of structure development and the Japanese researchers have a greater mastery of membrane characterization techniques, especially in terms of fouling and protein adsorption. In addition, the U.S. group has the optical microscopy equipment to do some of the kinetics experiments and the Japanese group has the light scattering equipment to extend the studies into the range of smaller domains and earlier times in the phase separation process. It is anticipated that the results of this research will enable membrane manufactures to control the microstructure of the membranes (that is, pre size and pore size distribution). Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The project advances international human resources through the participation of a graduate student. The researchers plan to make their research results available to membrane scientists through the open literature, oral presentations at meetings of professional society meetings, and Professor Lloyd s web site doc18842 none PI: Changfeng Gui, University of Connecticut : The PI will work on two projects on qualitative properties of partial differential equations. In the first project, he will study phase transitions modeled by the Allen-Cahn equation and its generalized vector equations, which are the gradient flows of the Allen-Cahn energy with either double-well potentials or multiple-well potentials of equal depths. The objectives are to determine the existence, uniqueness and stability of some special configurations, and then to further study the fine structure near the interfaces or near the triple junction and the dynamics of these sharp interfaces and triple junctions. One of the immediate goals is to classify the optimal configurations of anti-phases. This is indeed to solve a conjecture of De Giorgi which concerns the one dimensional symmetry of certain entire solutions of the Euler-Lagrange equations of the Allen-Cahn energy. The De Giorgi conjecture is also related to the study of minimal surfaces, and is still open in dimensions bigger than three. In the second project the PI will study the Gierier-Meinhardt systems of equations arising in biological pattern formations and chemical reactions. In particular, the proposor will try to show mathematically the existence of some special concentration patterns and to understand their stabilities. Diffusion is a very common phenomenon, and it generates very complex structures when several different substances are involved. Phase transitions, pattern formations are well observed in material sciences, in biological and chemical reactions, and they are closely related to diffusions. Special nonlinear partial differential equations and systems are used to model these phenomena mathematically. The proposor hope to develop analytic techniques to obtain good qualitative properties for solutions of these equations, which will lead to better numerical methods for simulations. The study will help to understand the finer structures and long time behaviors of phase transitions, pattern formations, and other similar phenomena doc18843 none Funding is provided under this RUI award to permit 8 teams of undergraduate students over the course of a two-year period to participate in a continuous research project evaluating the thermomechanical fatigue of solder joints. To make this experience successful it is proposed to create a unique learning experience which is a combination of innovative classroom instruction and research. A master s student will assist in this project, and by doing so have a unique master s level experience designed to require the evaluation of the work of others, the synthesis of their work with that of the undergraduates and the development of leadership skills. There are research and teaching components to this proposed project. Research: Thermomechanical fatigue (TMF) is the leading cause of solder joint failure in electronic assemblies. TMF of solder joints is difficult to model as there are many complex and interacting factors effecting the progression of damage to the joint. Because of the high homologous temperatures (0.8 or higher) significant microstructural evolution occurs during TMF, changing the properties of the material as TMF progresses. An experimental investigation will be conducted to 1) identify those more readily measured material properties most likely to affect TMF resistance, 2) evaluate the various acceleration factors used in TMF testing, and 3) evaluate the role of wetting in TMF failures. As a result of this research much insight into TMF failure will be gained - 1) progress will be made toward the development of an experimentally verified energy model, and 2) the role of wetting in adhesion will be assessed. This means that those considering using lead-free solder alloys will be able to use diagnostic tools not currently available -- the combination of material properties which correlate to TMF resistance. Teaching: To enable undergraduates to participate in a continuing research program, a unique classroom experience will supplement the research. These class sessions will embrace interactive learning techniques, and expose the undergraduates to 1) the necessary theoretical background, 2) the status of the project, 3) necessary lab techniques including statistical analysis, 4) oral and written communication skills, and 5) broader issues including ethics and economic impact. All of these subjects will be context based. The philosophy of this course is that upper level undergraduates need to perform at the synthesis level of Bloom s Taxonomy, and their experience is designed to enable them to do so. The master s student will be required to perform at the evaluation level of Bloom s Taxonomy (evaluating the work of the undergraduates) and synthesize this work with their own study on wetting, thus participating in a unique integrating experience. Additionally the student will develop leadership skills, and possibly be persuaded to pursue a doctoral degree and develop a desire to teach. The master s students experience may also encourage the undergraduates to pursue a graduate degree. It is felt that this comprehensive plan will maximize the chances for success and serve as a demonstration project for others desiring to incorporate research into the undergraduate experience and developing a novel masters program. Impact: It is felt that this program can significantly impact undergraduate education by serving as a proof of concept in the development of research oriented courses, generating an appreciation of life-long learning, and demonstrating the value of undergraduate research to the outside community. This work complements the current work of the PI and lays the foundation for his future plans doc18844 none PI: Karen A. High Institution: Oklahoma State University Proposal Number: The Woman s Initiative Committee Session entitled Women Engineering Sucess from the Inside Out will be held at the annual American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) meeting in Reno, Nevada. It will be a full morning session from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. with speakers including women from industry, academia government. Some of the presentations include: - Barbara Todd, from Phillips Petroleum, presenting A History of Four Female Chemical Engineering Graduates from the s. - Carol Muller, from MentorNet, discussing Opening the Black Box of Mentoring . - Valerie Young, from Making Waves, detaling Overcoming the Imposter Syndrome: A workshop for Women. - Peggy Layne, from the National Academy of Engineering, describing the NAE Program on Diversity in the Engineering Workforce. The presentations will be followed by a luncheon sponsored by corporate sponsors, hopefully to attract 50 to 75 chemical engineering professionals, faculty members and graduate students. The session is a part of a more comprehensive program to help women at all stages of their careers - from graduate student to tenured faculty as well as women in various industrial positions in the chemical process industries - to advance in their careers. Some of the women are pregnant and can not attend the meeting. Arrangements have been made for two-way video conferencing. Philips Petroleum is covering half of the expense, NSF the other half doc18845 none This project requests travel support for 18 participants from U.S. universities in the Student Paper Competition at the IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium (IMS). The IMS is the annual meeting of the Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S) of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Inc. (IEEE). The IMS is also the major international symposium in the microwave field and a focus of research results in wireless telecommunications. The IMS will be held in Seattle, WA, USA on June 2-7, . Each year, the Microwave Theory and Techniques Society promotes student education in microwave theory and techniques through a number of mechanisms. One of the most important is the Student Paper Competition at the IMS. This selective program brings the best students from around the world together in an integrated program in which they present their work not only to a technical audience but also to a group of judges. The program helps develop the technical acumen of the students as well as their communication and presentation skills. It also helps introduce them to the international technical community and helps to build a community of students who will lead the next generation of microwave engineers. The IMS provides financial support of various forms but does not reimburse travel expenses. Travel support from NSF will ensure that the program is open to the widest range of interested applicants from U.S. universities doc18846 none The objective of this work is to prepare foldamers (unnatural oligomers or biopolymers) that adopt defined and predictable conformations. They will synthesize and conformationally analyze a number of heterogeneous oligomers where one type of monomer (such as alpha amino acids) provides functional diversity while another type of monomer (cyclically constrained beta or gamma amino acids) provides conformational specificity and stability. Homogeneous oligomers containing just gamma amino acids will also be synthesized and analyzed as will oligomers that are heterogeneous due to monomer stereochemistry variations. Once new oligomers are identified that adopt specific conformations in aqueous solutions, they will be tested for stability to proteolytic degradation and for their ability to move across membranes of living cells. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Samuel H. Gellman of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Gellman will explore the synthesis of new proteins using combinations of natural and unnatural amino acids. These proteins will then be screened to look for those which adopt specific conformations (shapes) in aqueous (water based) solutions. Those which do fold into specific and predictable shapes will be screened for their affinity to biomolecular targets. In particular, they will be screened for their ability to disrupt other protein-protein interactions. Controlled disruption of protein-protein interactions has possible future biomedical science applications in cancer prevention. Students trained as a result of working on this project will gain experience in bioorganic and supramolecular organic chemistry, hence they will have skills needed by the pharmaceutical and speciality chemicals industries doc18827 none Proposal IDs: , , , PIs: Donoho, Candes, Huo and Jones TITLE: A Focused Research Group on Multiscale Geometric Analysis--Theory, Tools, Applications An interdisciplinary team, bridging Harmonic Analysis, Statistics, Image Analysis and Astronomy, proposes a united effort to exploit and extend recent breakthroughs in computational harmonic analysis. The team will consolidate several scattered advances into a unified body of theory and methods to be called Multiscale Geometric Analysis, which can probe the fine structure of 2-, 3- and higher- dimensional functions and point clouds, able to isolate and manipulate intermediate-dimensional phenomena. Simple examples include edges in 2-d images, filaments and sheets in 3-d point catalogs. Characterizing such intermediate-dimensional phenomena is essential for fundamental progress in a wide range of problem areas (including 2-d and 3-d imaging) where traditional multiscale methods have now run their course. Our united effort has three main outcomes. 1. Theory. Coherent, comprehensive knowledge, showing what can and cannot be accomplished with computational harmonic analysis. 2. Tools. A wide range of practical MGA algorithms and a unified, publicly available software environment - BeamLab - deploying them. 3. Applications. Our main initial focus will be on the analysis of 3-d point catalogs in astronomy, such as those coming on-line soon from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We know a priori that the data contain filaments and sheets, embedded in a scattered background, and MGA provides a decisive set of tools to resolve the structural properties of such catalogs, far more sensitive and more comprehensible than any tools currently available for such analysis. Many new kinds of massive databases are being created in our era s revolutionary transition to a data-rich society. Many of these databases contain geometric structures such as surfaces, and filaments, albeit in a sometimes hidden manner. Databases of this sort can include galaxy catalogs in astronomy -- in which the filaments and sheets are predicted by various theories of universe formation -- 3-D scanning of faces and other objects -- in which filaments and surfaces are caused by structures such as skin and hair -- and statistical databases in which curves and surfaces arise from existence of predictable patterns. This Focused Research Group on Multiscale Geometric Analysis is a research effort bringing together mathematicians, statisticians, image analysts and astronomers to create new tools and theories to help extract geometric structure and meaning from such databases. The participants are skilled at multiscale analysis, which will be a central organizational principle. We expect multiscale methods to have an impact here comparable to what wavelets have had over the last twenty years in many other problems in science and technology doc18848 none This project is aimed at demonstrating the feasibility of investment casting with ice patterns generated by Rapid Freeze Prototyping, a novel solid freeform fabrication process which builds a three-dimensional part according to a CAD model by depositing and freezing water droplets layer by layer. The feasibility study includes: exploring ways of handling and transporting ice patterns between stations for the subsequent investing casting process; identifying suitable materials including powders and binders for making ceramic shells from ice patterns; studying limitations on feature shapes and sizes of ice patterns for investment casting and ability to retain sharp features of ice patterns over time; and investigating the dimensional accuracy and surface finish of the metal castings obtained from ice patterns. If the project is successful, it will likely create a significant new approach for rapid prototyping and small-quantity manufacturing of investment casting parts with ice patterns fabricated by a cost-effective and environmentally benign method. This could significantly improve the environmental impact of processing molds in the investment casting industry doc18849 none This project deals with questions from pluri-potential theory and dynamics in several complex variables. Pluri-potential theory is the higher dimensional version of potential theory in the complex plane. The investigator plans to study certain classes of pluricomplex Green functions for the complex Monge-Ampere operator, from the point of view of their foliation structure and also in relation to some questions from algebraic geometry. A second goal of the project is to consider polynomial estimates of Bernstein-Walsh type related to graphs of entire transcendental functions. The investigator plans to study certain properties of entire functions from this point of view. Such properties are also of interest in transcendental number theory. Finally, the investigator is concerned with studying the dynamics of classes of polynomial automorphisms in higher dimensions. Complex analysis in one and in higher dimensions has important connections with many fields of pure and applied mathematics and, indeed, with other sciences. It is often the case that one gains insight about concrete problems once they are formulated in the context of complex numbers. This is because of the powerful methods and tools developed in the study of holomorphic functions in complex analysis. Studying complex dynamical systems proved to be important for understanding the behavior of more complicated real dynamical systems arising in mathematics as well as in physics and biology doc18850 none This proposal is submitted under the Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) program. Distributed generation is emerging as an important part of the power grid. The smaller generating units and renewable energy, e.g., micro turbines, wind and solar power, fuel cells and diesel generators, provide the resources that are critical at the peak load conditions. The availability of such generators also helps industrial, commercial or residential users avoid power outages caused by problems of the power grid. These distributed generators need to be connected to the grid in order to increase the flexibility of utilization. Small generators can also participate in the electricity market in an environment where the transmission access is open. After the recent energy crisis in California, distributed generation or distributed power has attracted even more attention. Many technical and economic issues are involved in distributed generation. The voltage and frequency of the generating units need to be regulated. Protective devices are needed to ensure that the faulted devices can be isolated and such protective functions must be coordinated with the grid. There are also economic issues from the suppliers point of view such as market monitoring and decision support for buying and selling. These economics related tools allow the distributed generation to be able to respond to the market needs, leading to a larger pool of available resources for the grid. This study will develop an intelligent multi-agent system that is able to handle the technical and economic functions of a control center for a micro grid. If each generating device and load has the ability and intelligence to communicate with the micro grid control agent and work together to solve technical and economic problems, then the grid can be managed by a multi-agent system. A Micro Grid Agent (MGA) works with generation, load and other control agents to manage the grid and maintain the grid security. New micro grid phenomena related to distributed generation and their integration into the power grid will be explored. This study will also explore the new dynamic phenomena and the protection concepts associated with the micro grids. The other goal is to develop an intelligent system method that allows the micro grid to be operated by intelligent hardware and software tools without the sophistication and costs associated with a control center. The results of this exploratory research grant to serve as a roadmap for researchers interested in the important and futuristic area of distributed generation. These researchers may come from the communities of power engineering, power electronics, and intelligent systems, optimization, control and economics doc18851 none The research of Imamoglu focuses on the analytic theory of L-series of several complex variables. The PI and her collaborators have recently defined Rankin-Selberg Dirichlet series of several complex variables attached to Siegel cusp forms. She proposes to exploit the analytic properties of these series to establish non-vanishing results for special values of Rankin-Selberg convolutions of Fourier_Jacobi coefficients of Siegel forms and to improve bounds for their classical Fourier coefficients. She also proposes to investigate a possible generalization of the classical Dedekind zeta function of a number field to a zeta function of several complex variables. The investigations of this proposal belong to number theory, which is a branch of mathematics that deals with problems involving whole numbers. Mathematicians have discovered that many of the important properties of whole numbers can be encoded into certain objects called L-functions . These L-functions have their origin in the study of calculus but our understanding of their fundamental properties are far from complete. The PI and her collaborators proposes to investigate the analytic properties of these functions to fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge doc18852 none An accurate and efficient approach to power quality monitoring will be developed. A power disturbance is typically a non-stationary signal with magnitude variance and frequency deviation. The proposed work deals with constructing the complex Time Frequency Atom (TFA) for power quality monitoring, in which there is no coupling between the central frequency and frequency radius. The TFA based Wavelet Transform (WT) approach has the following advantages over that based on a complex Wavelet function: (1) Since the central frequency and frequency radius of each filtering channel can be set or tuned separately and flexibly, the separation of different filtering channels, which are designated for a fundamental component and harmonics, in the frequency plane can be achieved, i.e. eliminating the interference between each other. The concept of Wavelet Energy Distribution (WED) is proposed, which is based on a complex Wavelet function and WT, to fulfill the spectrum scanning by a non-uniform frequency window. Further, novel power quality indices will be created that use the TFA and WED. The approach will be evaluated by using simulated power disturbance waveforms, followed by an on-line evaluation in the laboratory and in industrial sites, based on hardware implementation. The accurate estimation of magnitudes and frequencies of fundamental as well as harmonic components is also essential to power system control and protection. Therefore, the project will promote research and teaching in not only the power quality field but also power system control, protection, and the development of power instruments apparatus doc18853 none Although building codes and practices in the United States and Japan have been developed to the point where they provide a large measure of protection of life safety, the recent Northridge and Kobe earthquake have demonstrated that near-field ground motions present severe challenges even to structures designed according to current codes. While the response spectrum provides the basis for the specification of design ground motions in all current design guidelines and code provisions, there is a growing recognition that the response spectrum alone does not provide an adequate characterization of near-fault ground motions. This indicates the importance of developing an improved representation of near-fault ground motions using time domain parameters such as the amplitude, period and number of cycles of the near fault pulse, and its energy characteristics, in addition to the response spectrum, for use in analysis and design of structures. The objectives of this project is to develop methods for characterizing near-fault ground motion for use in engineering design and evaluation. The project will be done in collaboration with Professor Iwata of Kyoto University, and colleagues from several other Japanese research organizations, with whom the Principal Investigators have a long term collaborative relationship doc18854 none Wysocki This award provided support for a workshop entitled Analytical Instrumentation for the New Millennium - Biological Sciences to be held Dec 2-5, in Tucson, Arizona. The workshop will bring together scientists with broad interests in biological measurements, including both the biologists who need the measurements and the instrument developers who design and build instrumentation. The format of the workshop will include highlight presentations by cutting-edge researchers who will conclude with a brief description of goals for the future and the major obstacles to be faced in meeting those goals. These presentations will be followed by breakout sessions to critique evaluate the proposed goals and obstacles. The expected outcomes of the workshop are a report to be written jointly by the breakout leaders and organizers and presentations to be made at national meetings. This workshop is jointly supported by the Directorate for Biological Sciences and the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences doc18855 none This fund will support two undergraduate students working on Jefferson lab PrimEx project. They will work on hybrid crystal calorimeter development, and be responsible for the photo-multiplier tube s examination and selection by measuring the linearity and high rate stability. They will also work on Monte Carlo simulation for the coordinate reconstruction of HYCAL. Upon the availability of travel funds, they may stay at Jefferson Lab for two months in the summer to work on the detector assembling and beam test. The participation of undergraduate students in the physics frontier research will provide them with interesting challenges while developing skills in many areas. Funds from this proposal will therefore enrich a solid undergraduate physics program doc18856 none PI: Antonio Sa Barreto, Purdue University of the project: Research on Wave Equations and Scattering Theory on Manifolds In the first part of this project, the investigator will seek an improvement of the currently known lower bounds for the counting function of resonance for arbitrary second order self-adjoint perturbations of the Laplacian in Euclidean space. The second part consists of studying scattering theory in asymptotically hyperbolic manifolds. Establishing upper, and possibly lower, bounds for the counting function of resonance in these spaces, and also giving a dynamical definition of the scattering matrix in terms of the radiation fields. The latter part is also expected to be possible in the asymptotically Euclidean case. The third part consists of studying problems of recovering information about an asymptotically hyperbolic, or asymptotically Euclidean, manifold, and its Riemannian structure, from the scattering matrix. It is expected that the dynamical definition of the scattering matrix will also play an important role in this part. This project concerns the investigation of how waves propagate in a medium, and reciprocally, what type of information about a medium can be extracted from a certain knowledge on the propagation of waves in it. For example, how a certain perturbation of a known medium, like an obstacle in space, affects the propagation of waves, and, vice-versa, determine properties of the obstacle from information obtained from waves reflected by it. It also concerns the study of the wave equation on spaces that are geometrically different from the usual Euclidean space, e.g., spaces that resemble the hyperbolic space at infinity doc18857 none This award supports the purchase of a digital confocal microscope and image analysis system. The image analysis system will allow custom-design of unlimited programming routines for automated and semi-automated image capture for conventional, confocal and real-time video microscopy. The confocal system will employ an inverted microscope to accommodate imaging of live cell cultures, whole tissue mounts and fixed, slide-mounted samples. The group of 5 major users who will share the instrument have research programs in diverse aspects of cell biology, including neurobiology, cytoskeletal dynamics, cell-cell interactions, and environment interactions between bacteria and algae. Confocal microscopy has become a standard tool in cell biology. However, there is currently no confocal microscope at or near the institution. Thus the impact on the users research will be substantial. In addition, over 20 students at all levels from undergraduate to postdoctoral have ongoing projects that will directly benefit from the confocal system doc18858 none This project concerns the further development of Henson s logic for structures based on metric spaces and, especially, the continued application of this theory to problems in functional analysis and in the geometry of metric spaces. The syntax of this logic is restricted to the class of positive bounded formulas and the semantics of the logic uses an approximate satisfaction relation. Its potential role in analysis and geometry is parallel to the role of ordinary first order logic in the more algebraic aspects of mathematics. During the past 40 years or more, techniques from logic have not only clarified the foundations of mathematics, but they have contributed new tools for solving mathematical problems. These tools have been especially effective in those areas of mathematics that are close to algebra and number theory. In this project, C. Ward Henson aims to make those tools from logic equally effective in the areas of mathematics that are close to topology, geometry, and analysis doc18859 none High-speed fiber optics plays a key enabling role in today s information technology revolution by providing a means for high bandwidth communications. Commercial optical transmission bandwidths are increasing at an impressive rate. In light of these advances, new effects which were previously considered insignificant are now viewed as key limiting factors in high performance lightwave systems. In order to sustain the growth in bandwidth, new technologies are needed to compensate new transmission impairments that arise with rapidly growing data rates. One such impairment, which has become a key factor limiting transmission rates and distances in high-speed fiber systems, is an effect called polarization-mode dispersion (PMD). PMD arises due to small, spatially varying random birefringences in optical fibers, which lead to decorrelation of the input and output polarization states and pulse spreading in the time domain. The latter effect can cause errors in digital communication systems. This problem is especially acute in the embedded fiber base where many fibers exhibit strong PMD. This proposal describes a university-industry collaborative project which aims to demonstrate a novel and advantageous method for compensation of PMD. The concept is to exploit and extend technology developed in the field of ultrafast optical pulse shaping to compensate PMD of wide-band optical signals in parallel on a wavelength-by-wavelength basis and under computer control. This improves on current approaches that only allow compensation of so-called first order PMD for a single wavelength and which do not apply to situations with wide-band optical signals where the distortion caused by PMD varies substantially across the optical bandwidth. This research project will encompass several aspects. One goal is to perform experiments demonstrating the validity of the proposed new PMD compensation scheme. Research will also target programmable generation of PMD for use in test equipment. Both of these activities will be backed up by numerical simulations. Additionally, new PMD measurement strategies will be devised in order to provide the data necessary to suitably control the proposed wavelength-by-wavelength PMD compensators. This should also result in a major advance in instrumentation for state-of-polarization sensing applicable to multiple-wavelength systems doc18860 none Prop #: PI: Braxton Tesh This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the Research Vessel Savannah operated by Skidaway Institute of Oceanography and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Braxton Tesh is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire a counter-balanced block with cable metering and mercury slip rings doc18861 none This proposal is from the University of Utah group and requests funding to continue to operate the High Resolution Fly s Eye (HiRes) Observatory, located at the U.S. Army s Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. The HiRes observatory consists of two stations separated by 12.6 km and detects ultra high energy (UHE) cosmic rays via nitrogen fluorescence in the atmosphere. The goals of the experiment are to study the spectrum, composition and anisotropy of cosmic rays with energies starting from about eV up to beyond eV. Previous experiments, including the original Fly s Eye experiment, have shown evidence that the spectrum may continue past the predicted Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin (GZK) cutoff and the nature of the events above the GZK cutoff is a puzzle. The goal of the HiRes experiment is to achieve an order of magnitude greater sensitivity than the previous Fly s Eye experiment. In earlier running of HiRes, a few outstanding events have been observed above eV, but the flux of these events is in significant disagreement with the published results from the AGASA ground array. This proposal requests funds to continue running in order to resolve this and other outstanding issues of UHE cosmic rays by measuring the properties of events with energies above eV. In addition, HiRes has a vigorous educational outreach program, ASPIRE, funded by the NSF and conducted in collaboration with the Utah State Office of Education. The goal of this program is to communicate the excitement of the scientific research to the general public. The HiRes experiment is a collaborative effort between the University of Utah, the University of Adelaide, Columbia University, Rutgers University, Montana State University, the University of New Mexico, and the University of Tokyo doc18862 none The investigator studies how local properties affect the global parameters of different combinatorial structures. This is a very general framework of the so called Turan number problems. The investigator emphasizes four different aspects 1. To study the Turan numbers of triple systems and multigraphs, as a tool to achieve a general theory for hypergraphs. 2. To study covering radius problems, especially concerning constant weight codes where Turan numbers naturally emerge. 3. To study more general coding theory problems, like superimposed codes, identifying codes which lead to hypergraph intersection problems. 4. To find geometrical, and algebraic representations, like Lovasz Shannon capacity bound, Ramanujan graphs, polarity graphs, Prague dimension of graphs, where Turan numbers naturally emerge. Most finite problems can be formulated as extremal graph or hypergraph problems. Extremal combinatorics applies a broad array of tools and results from other fields of mathematics like number theory, linear and commutative algebra, probability theory, geometry, and information theory. On the other hand it has a number of interesting applications in all parts of combinatorics, and in geometry, integer programming, computer science, coding theory, dimension theory of partially ordered sets, encryptions. Applications of extremal combinatorics and coding theory in computer science and communication theory are indispensable doc18827 none Proposal IDs: , , , PIs: Donoho, Candes, Huo and Jones TITLE: A Focused Research Group on Multiscale Geometric Analysis--Theory, Tools, Applications An interdisciplinary team, bridging Harmonic Analysis, Statistics, Image Analysis and Astronomy, proposes a united effort to exploit and extend recent breakthroughs in computational harmonic analysis. The team will consolidate several scattered advances into a unified body of theory and methods to be called Multiscale Geometric Analysis, which can probe the fine structure of 2-, 3- and higher- dimensional functions and point clouds, able to isolate and manipulate intermediate-dimensional phenomena. Simple examples include edges in 2-d images, filaments and sheets in 3-d point catalogs. Characterizing such intermediate-dimensional phenomena is essential for fundamental progress in a wide range of problem areas (including 2-d and 3-d imaging) where traditional multiscale methods have now run their course. Our united effort has three main outcomes. 1. Theory. Coherent, comprehensive knowledge, showing what can and cannot be accomplished with computational harmonic analysis. 2. Tools. A wide range of practical MGA algorithms and a unified, publicly available software environment - BeamLab - deploying them. 3. Applications. Our main initial focus will be on the analysis of 3-d point catalogs in astronomy, such as those coming on-line soon from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We know a priori that the data contain filaments and sheets, embedded in a scattered background, and MGA provides a decisive set of tools to resolve the structural properties of such catalogs, far more sensitive and more comprehensible than any tools currently available for such analysis. Many new kinds of massive databases are being created in our era s revolutionary transition to a data-rich society. Many of these databases contain geometric structures such as surfaces, and filaments, albeit in a sometimes hidden manner. Databases of this sort can include galaxy catalogs in astronomy -- in which the filaments and sheets are predicted by various theories of universe formation -- 3-D scanning of faces and other objects -- in which filaments and surfaces are caused by structures such as skin and hair -- and statistical databases in which curves and surfaces arise from existence of predictable patterns. This Focused Research Group on Multiscale Geometric Analysis is a research effort bringing together mathematicians, statisticians, image analysts and astronomers to create new tools and theories to help extract geometric structure and meaning from such databases. The participants are skilled at multiscale analysis, which will be a central organizational principle. We expect multiscale methods to have an impact here comparable to what wavelets have had over the last twenty years in many other problems in science and technology doc18864 none Joint Performance Optimization of Wireless Networks and Control Systems Current control technology is not well suited to operation over a packet based network, and conversely, most networks are not optimized for control applications. Moreover, critical network performance parameters that affect control system performance, such as bit rates and delay and packet loss statistics, depend on various choices made in the network, such as powers allocated to wireless transmitters, bandwidths or time-slot fractions allocated to channels, and routing methods. So in addition to the challenge of working out how a control system can be made to work in a packet-based networked environment, we also have the challenge of working out how the network should be configured, or operated, so as to improve control system performance. This proposal addresses two fundamental issues that arise. Neither solves the whole problem, but each addresses a critical issue. The first topic involves joint optimization of a controller and critical communication and network parameters such as transmit powers, packet routing, and bandwidth and time-slot allocation. To simplify this problem, only the affects of these network parameters on bit rates, hence quantization noise, is considered. The second topic considered is simultaneous routing and resource allocation for wireless data networks. This is the problem of jointly finding an optimal set of flows and communication resources that maximize the performance of the network, with respect to some objective such as optimal control system performance. Here we hope to develop algorithms to dynamically allocate communication resources (such as transmit powers, bandwidth) and simultaneously optimize routing decisions doc18865 none One important link in the health monitoring system is the data processing techniques, including the corresponding theory and algorithms, to extract relevant information for a rapid assessment of the state of the structure from a large amount of measured data. Such a link has been pointed out during many conferences as one of the weakest link in the sensor-based health monitoring system of civil infrastructures. This project is aiming at the development of innovative and efficient data processing techniques, based on the Hilbert-Huang spectral analysis, for the damage detection, condition assessment and integrity evaluation of civil infrastructures. New and efficient methodologies will be developed for: (i) damage detection and system identification of linear structures, (ii) determination of the optimal placement of sensors, (iii) damage detection and system identification of nonlinear structures, including conservative (elastic) and nonconservative (hysteretic) nonlinear structures, and (iv) preliminary assessment of structural damages after an extreme event, such as strong earthquakes, all based on the Hilbert-Huang spectral analysis. Further, Hilbert-Huang spectral analysis computer software modules for incorporating into the sensor-based monitoring systems of civil infrastructures will be developed. This proposal is a part of an integrated collaborative research effort among U.S.A., Hong Kong and P.R.C., under the US-China Protocol for Scientific and Technical Cooperative Research on Earthquake Engineering and Hazard Mitigation. Basically, advanced health monitoring system research for civil infrastructure systems will be conducted at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HPU); advanced sensor technology will be developed at Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), China; sensing materials for sensors will be investigated at Institute of Engineering Mechanics (IEM), China; advanced and smart damping and devices will be developed at University of Notre Dame (UND); and novel data processing techniques will be developed at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). In addition, Dr. N. E. Huang of NASA Goddard Flight Center, who is the pioneer of the Hilbert-Huang spectral analysis, will collaborate with us in the proposed research efforts to develop novel data processing techniques for sensor-based monitoring systems for civil infrastructures. The research proposed herein is unique, which is different from all the data analysis techniques currently available. The Hilbert-Huang spectral analysis can be used to develop powerful techniques with which intrinsic nonstationary and nonlinear characteristics of the measured response signals can be extracted. The results of this research are expected to have a significant impact not only on the state-of-the-technology in data analyses for the sensor-based health monitoring systems of structures but also on the sensor technologies to be developed by the collaborative research institutions in U.S.A., Hong Kong and China doc18866 none The objective of this research is to create a process for the design and fabrication of structural components with optimized composite microstructures. Here the term microstructure refers to the component s inner structure, the scale of which is small compared to the scale of the component; the microstructure is not, for examples relevant to this project, microscopic. The major phases of the research program include: (1) creating a multi-scale design process to optimize a component and its microstructure, (the microstructure s geometry will be a lattice or, for composites with multiple constituent materials, a set of intertwined lattices and the iterative design process will address material density, anisotropy, and orientation in distinct steps, identifying optimal rotations and distortions for the lattice to create an optimized microstructure), (2) refining and extending hybrid fabrication techniques, based on Solid Freeform Fabrication, to construct the components with finely scaled microstructures, and (3) designing, fabrication and testing example components. If successful, this research will lead to practical procedures for the design and fabrication of lightweight, high performance structure and machine parts. The ability to design the microstructure within a component will provide the opportunity to adjust material properties where appropriate, and to adjust the properties via gradients rather than discontinuities. Applying this concept to composites made from multiple constituent materials, one could design a component that has two different material properties, for example, stiffness and thermal or electrical conductivity, optimized independently doc18867 none This project is concerned with the geometry of algebraic varieites. It builds on past experience which indicates that much can be learned about the geometry of a given algebraic variety by studying its Chow group. The Chow group is obtained from the free abelian group on all subvarieties of a given variety by modding out by the relation of rational equivalence. For algebraic curves the Chow group is a close relative of the Jacobian. While the Chow group is known to have good functorial properties, it is often very difficult to compute. Thus it is difficult to gain access to the subtle and valuable information that it frequently contains. This investigation focuses on three different aspects of the problem of computing Chow groups. First the torsion subgroup of the Chow group is being studied with an emphasis on the quotient by the subgroup generated by cycles algebraically equivalent to zero. Secondly, the relationship between the Chow group and singular cohomology with rational coefficients is being investigated. The Hodge Conjecture is an important concern here. The theory of Abelian varieties and techniques from classical algebraic geometry will be brought to bear on this problem. The third line of investigation involves the relationship between the Chow group and singular cohomology with integrer coefficients. An ancient guidepost here was the so called Integral Hodge Conjecture. It has turned out that the Integral Hodge Conjecture is false in some instances. The extent of its failure is poorly understood, so the principal investigator and a PhD student are working to clarify this. To a significant extent, the value of basic research in algebraic geometry results from the tendency of mathematicians to reduce problems in various other fields of mathematics to problems in algebraic geometry. This tendency is due to the ultimate simplicity of algebraic geometry, where remarkably effective approaches to certain geometric problems have been developed with minimal reliance on infinite processes. While the initial translation of a problem from the physical world into mathematics frequently involves limits, derivatives, integrals, and further notions involving infinite processes which go well beyond ordinary calculus, mathematicians have learned to search for hidden aspects of these problems which are essentially of an algebraic or finite nature. Neither the task of translating real world phenomena into mathematical problems, the task of discovering a hidden algebraic core in a problem formulated using infinite processes, nor the task of solving this core problem using algebraic geometry is often easy. Nonetheless, this lengthy process has led to profound insights. For example, algebraic geometry and some of the algebraic varieties studied by the principal investigator are of great interest to physicists in their current attempts to unify quantum mechanics with the theory of gravity doc18868 none This project, in conjunction with similar support from American Automatic Control Council will support travel expenses to facilitate participation of roughly 50 students to the American Control Conference. It will provide a setting for exchanging ideas, cultivating friendships, building networks, educating students, and for preparing students for their professional careers in control engineering. Special sessions that should be of particular interest to students, including a session for graduate students seeking academic positions that will focus on proposal writing and the NSF CAREER program. Every effort will be made to select both an ethnically and scientifically diverse group of students to represent all areas of control engineering doc18869 none Daniel J. Inman Virginia Tech Proposal Number: Proposal Title Updating for Model-Based Simulation The general aim of the research is to develop improved methods of model updating for normal and damped flexible structures. The improvement is expected to be in the algorithms themselves, in the numerical schemes that will realize them, and in tools for evaluating the outcome of the updating method. Specific issues that will be investigated are: Obtaining a physically meaningful updated model using reference basis model method. Mode shape correction and order matching. Deterministic and stochastic sensitivity analysis. Robust updating and reliability issues. Method validation and improvement by experiment. The intellectual contribution is twofold. From a theoretical point of view such modification of the reference basis method has a clear scientific merit. Secondly, each one of the indicated issues corresponds to a genuine practical problem facing industries seeking model-based simulation. Solution of these will lead to better modeling and understanding of vibrating systems. To be more specific, it is our belief that the parametric reference basis method is a very promising approach to model updating and with the appropriate tuning it will perform better than any other method. The proposed effort is expected to impact industry by providing algorithms to provide accurate simulation models, a long-standing problem of importance. Secondly, the proposed effort will improve graduate training of under-represented groups, involve undergraduates in research and promote the pursuit of academic careers doc18870 none This award funds a conference in Groups and Computation at the Ohio State University, March 24-28, . The conference focuses on the interplay between theory and practice in computing with groups, algorithms for computation being at the heart of the conference. The primary conference goal is to provide a forum for computational group theorists, both mathematicians and computer scientists, to meet with colleagues in order to learn of recent research developments in this area, to learn of and work on new open problems, to further existing large projects in this area, and to develop software for large computer systems that handle group computations. A second goal is to give graduate students and recent Ph.D s an opportunity to learn of new work and of open problems in the area. Group theory is often described as the algebraic theory of symmetry in the abstract. Group theory arises and is used in a wide variety of other fields, including solid state physics, chemistry (crystallography), coding theory and cryptography. Understanding the structure of groups is the major task of group theory. The subject of the conference is the interaction between this mathematical discipline and algorithmic questions used in extensive computer computations with these fundamental algebraic objects doc18871 none The objective of this research is to (1) develop an integrated framework and methodology to aid robust selection of product designs, either a single product or a product line, taking into account the uncertainties in measuring customer preferences, uncertainties due to changing preferences over time, uncertainties in competitive reactions, and uncertainty in uncontrollable engineering design parameters, and based on this framework (2) construct and validate a prototype decision support system. In the proposed approach, the product product-line design selection is viewed as a selection with two main stages: design alternative generation and design alternative evaluation. In the first stage (design module), commonality information, along with uncertainty in the engineering design formulation, is fed into a multi-objective robust optimization to generate a Pareto robust optimal set of design alternatives. In the second stage (market module), demand and market share estimates are generated for each alternative in the set by accounting for customer preferences and choices. Based on the demand function and commonality, cost functions are calculated for each generated design alternative and are used to compute the net present value of profit for each alternative. A recursive process between the two modules will be undertaken to account for the uncertainty in uncontrollable parameters in both modules using simulation methods and to obtain a robust set of recommendations. If successful, the outcome of this research will advance the state of the art across different domains in engineering design, marketing science and management. The results of this investigation will be broadly disseminated in the engineering design automation and marketing science communities, the knowledge integrated into courses at the University of Maryland, and the technology and techniques transferred to industry. The proposed research will also provide opportunities for students to learn business and engineering practices involved in product design selection and ways to enhance the effectiveness of such practices through basic research doc18872 none The Principal Investigator studies fundamental groups and absolute Galois groups of varieties, especially in finite characteristic. In particular, he investigates the fundamental groups of affine curves over an algebraically closed field of finite characteristic; the absolute Galois groups of function fields of curves over non-algebraically closed fields of finite characteristic; and the fundamental groups and absolute Galois groups of higher dimensional varieties over algebraically closed fields of arbitrary characteristic. This study is in large part guided by possible generalizations of Abhyankar s Conjecture for curves, which the Principal Investigator has proven. A major goal is to determine the properties of the fundamental groups and absolute Galois groups in question, and to determine which finite groups are quotients of these profinite groups, in order to obtain greater insight into the algebra and geometry of these spaces. Methods include formal patching, embedding problems, cohomology, valuation theory, and group theory. The area of this project relates aspects of algebra and geometry in a way that makes it possible to solve problems that would be intractible in either field alone. The linkage between the algebra and geometry arises from geometric spaces that are defined by algebraic equations. These spaces can have complicated patterns of symmetry, which manifest themselves both in the algebra and the geometry. This project seeks to understand what types of symmetries can occur in the context of these spaces, and how spaces with one type of symmetry can relate to a given space with another type of symmetry. These spaces are in many cases defined with respect to an algebraic system in which a particular prime number plays a special role; and the properties of those spaces can be interpreted as giving information about the solvability of equations involving prime numbers doc18873 none This proposal focuses on problems in q-series and partitions. There are five separate parts of this work. The first part considers research tied to applications of the construction of representations of Lie algebras. Next the investigator looks at new q-series methods related to special problems in number theory. The third part discusses applications of the Omega software package (http: www.uni-linz.ac.at research combinat risc software Omega ) which is being developed by the investigator in collaboration with colleagues at Linz. The focus in this latter section is on mutli-dimensional partitions. The fourth section is devoted to the study of Bailey chains and a consideration ofhow recent discoveries of the investigator may lead to new applications of this concept. The proposal concludes with consideration of three major unsolved problems in the theory of partitions: (1) the Friedman-Joichi- Stanton conjecture, (2) the Borwein conjecture and (3) the Okada conjecture. Each of these three conjectures has been around for some time. The theme of this proposal put succinctly might be: Building bridges from partitions and q-series (two intrinsically deep and charming but sometimes rather introverted topics) to several branches of mathematics and science. The first two sections are devoted to relating this work to representation theory and number theory, two branches of mathematics; in each instance, it is clear that this interaction will not only enrich the object fields, but also will provide new insights for partitions and q-series. The work on the Omega package has great potential. Here the investigator and his collaborators have found numerous instances where research discoveries have gone from being unthinkable to easily reached. The possible applications to multi-dimensional partitions should lead to insights in combinatorics and, hopefully, the combinatorial aspects of physics. The work on Bailey chains in the past has had profound impact on statistical mechanics in physics. The more this method is advanced, the more we may expect these mutually beneficial applications to continue. The final section on three unsolved problems appears, at first, to be a purely internal study. However, as has often happend in the past, whenever new methods are discovered to solve really hard problems, there is almost always a spillover into vital applications doc18874 none INVOLVEMENT OF GLUTAMATE METABOTROPIC RECEPTORS IN SYNAPTIC PLASTICITY IN THE SPINAL CORD It is now well established that the primary afferent fibers use glutamate as a principal fast excitatory transmitter in the superficial dorsal horn (SDH) of the spinal cord, the first modulatory site in the relay of sensory information from the peripheral receptors to the brain. Glutamate acts through two broad classes of receptors, ion-channel-linked (ionotropic) receptors (AMPA kainate and NMDA receptors) and metabotropic receptors (mGluRs), which couple via G-proteins to the intracellular second messenger cascades. Group I mGluRs (mGluR1 and 5 subtypes) are expressed by neurons in the SDH, but their roles in synaptic function, and contribution to spinal somatosensory transmission and synaptic plasticity, have yet to be elucidated. The recent development of ligands that bind specifically to these receptors, and availability of mutant mice lacking mGluR1 or mGluR5 receptors, has provided means of characterizing the important roles they may play in tuning of fast and slow excitatory synaptic transmission, including the induction of long-term changes in synaptic efficacy, as suggested by our recent preliminary evidence. Two major objectives in the proposal are: 1) to study involvement of Group I mGluRs via ICAN (non-selective Ca2+-dependent cation channels) in the generation of primary afferent-evoked slow excitatory synaptic potential (sEPSP) in the SDH region; and 2) to study regulation of AMPA and NMDA receptor-mediated sensory transmission by activation of Group I mGluRs. A combination of intracellular and whole-cell patch-clamp recordings, Ca2+ imaging, and pharmacological techniques will be employed to study the involvement of Group I mGluR activation in synaptic transmission and plasticity in SDH neurons within spinal cord slices prepared from young rats and mutant mice lacking mGlu1 or 5 receptors. Delineating the physiological roles of the Group I mGluRs in the SDH region, and cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying their actions, is an important step toward understanding of implications of glutamate-mediated transmission in the spinal cord DH synaptic function, but in particular for synaptic plasticity and nociception doc18875 none Black This award to Bermuda Biological Station for Research provides instrumentation to expand the oceanographic research capabilities of the research vessel Weatherbird II, a ship operated by BBSR as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS) research fleet. The acoustic current profiler and attitude determination unit will be a shared-use capablity that will enable all researchers using the ship to measure ocean currents in the upper few hundred meters of the water column while the vessel is both underway and on station. Funds have previously been provided to build a well in the vessel to house the current profiler, and it can be installed without requiring drydocking. These improvements will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists using the ship in their research during and future years. They will provide an important new and routine set of measurements of currents to augment the long time-series data on water and atmospheric properties collected in the vicinity of Bermuda doc18876 none A problem located at the foundations of the Statistical Process Control (SPC) field is how to adjust a manufacturing process that is suspected to be operating in a malfunctioning mode. Rapidly adjusting a manufacturing process when the setup operation is defective is particularly important. The object of this research is to develop optimal sequential adjustment methods for the setup and within-run control problems. The setup adjustment problem was first analyzed by F. Grubbs who derived a simple sequential scheme. A Bayesian formulation for process adjustment will be developed based on Kalman filters. The formulation unifies several adjustment rules including Grubbs scheme, Stochastic Approximation, and classical control methods such as Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control. The proposed work will follow two main research thrusts: a) parametric optimization and robustness assessment of existing adjustment rules; b) development of a new ensemble-optimal adjustment rule. It is proposed to utilize Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques, and in particular, Gibbs Sampling, applied to the problem of estimating the mean of a sequentially-adjusted process that experiences errors in the setups according to some stable distribution. The main outcome of this research will be a new set of process adjustment tools that will provide efficient setup and within-run control in short-run manufacturing processes. This formulation has the major advantage that after a few runs or lots are produced, it allows to start adjusting a new lot prior to obtaining the first measurement in the lot. This is clearly an advantage for the type of flexible, short-run manufacturing systems this research is expected to benefit. Use of Penn State s FAME manufacturing laboratory will provide a realistic testbed for the techniques developed in this project. Collaboration with industrial researchers (Eli Lilly and SAS Institute Inc.) will provide expertise in the real-life application of the techniques developed in this research and guidance about software implementation. To allow technology transfer, software tools will be written and will be freely distributed at Penn State s Applied Statistics laboratory web site doc18877 none The objective of this research grant is to establish a computer design procedure for product structures that will provide the highest strength or highest stiffness for a given weight of material. This will be accomplished by direct solution of the equations defining the optimum structural layout for desired loading and boundary conditions. The method of solution will involve the use of matrix operators, and one part of the work will be the extension of the set of matrix operators to handle a range of different boundary situations. The procedure will be appropriately applied on personal computers so that it can be widely used in the engineering design community. The research program will also involve the manufacture and testing of prototype structures to validate the design process at each stage of the research. Case studies will be carried out to illustrate the range of weight reduction opportunities. If successful, the principal benefit of the study will be a new approach to weight reduction, spanning a wide range of applications from aerospace to mass-produced durable goods. It is also anticipated that the fundamental and direct approach to structure design, developed in the research, will be appealing to engineering educators and will impact the teaching of structural engineering and engineering design doc18878 none van de Sande Quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is a theory that describes how quarks are bound together by strings of gluons. Various combinations of the quarks and gluons form particles such as the pion, neutron, and proton.. These particles are very important for nuclear and particle physics and have been studied extensively over the last fifty years. However, it has proved to be quite difficult to start with the theory of QCD and calculate many of the properties of these particles that are of experimental interest (such as structure functions). In the transverse lattice approach to QCD, one takes advantage of the fact that gluons behave as relativistic strings. The goal of this project is to calculate the masses and wavefunctions of the mesons (states containing two quarks). These masses and wavefunctions can then be compared with various experimental results. Each summer, undergraduate students will work on this project as student interns. They will work on computer calculations as well as more physics-related issues doc18879 none Exploratory studies will be conducted for the development of novel micro plasma reactors that are less than a millimeter in size, for the deposition of metals, dielectric materials, or polymers for microfabrication. An intense plasma ball of less than a few hundred microns diameter can be generated under atmospheric pressure between a microelectrode and a counter electrode under suitable conditions. Such a plasma ball is self-sustaining and is of cold type similar to the high vacuum plasma sources used in microchip manufacturing. Based on this micro plasma ball, a radically different method of microfabrication - plasma-assisted net-shape deposition (PAND) - is proposed. With the PAND method, the deposition will be carried out under atmospheric pressure to eliminate the costly high vacuum equipment. Also, the net shape of the desired feature is printed at the substrate surface directly thereby eliminating the time-consuming and capital-intensive photolithography. The proposed one-year project also addresses the fundamental mechanisms affecting the design and operation of the PAND reactors. Since the experimental characterization of the atmospheric pressure micro-plasma discharge is a challenging task, comprehensive process modeling is proposed to understand the inherent physics and chemistry of the system. Innovative modeling strategies will be used to simulate the unique discharge ( cold atmospheric pressure micro-plasma) addressed here. A high-resolution discharge physics model will be developed for the reactor to examine the effects of various process parameters on the ionization and dissociation characteristics of the feed gases. The results from numerical computations and laboratory measurements will help in characterizing the cold atmospheric pressure micro-plasma doc18880 none Recent trends in submicron CMOS scaling suggest that global interconnects will increasingly become a major performance limitation due to increased signal delay and cross-talk noise. The implementation of copper and low k wiring technology mitigates the effect of scaling on signal delay and cross-talk in local and intermediate interconnects. However, the benefits of new materials may not be sufficient for scaling long global interconnects due to the increasing RC delays. The near term solution adopted by the semiconductor industry to minimize the relative delay, according to the 1TRS roadmap, has been to increase the aspect ratio of interconnects. However, the increase in metal thickness, reduction in metal pitch and continuing voltage scaling with each technology generation will progressively exacerbate the noise problem due to interconnect capacitive and inductive coupling effects and will eventually become the dominant problem over local and global propagation delays. The research described in this proposal will address the signal propagation delay and cross-talk noise limitations in deep submicron interconnects by introducing a fundamental change in the signaling approach: the use of current-mode band-limited signaling to reduce the signal delay and cross-talk noise bottlenecks in CMOS VLSI s. To reduce cross-talk noise due to capacitive and inductive effects, the proposed signaling scheme based on band-limited basis waveforms will partially replace the square pulses in critical communication links within the system. A preliminary remit from the proposed band-limited signaling scheme in 0.35-urn CMOS process shows capacitive cross-talk noise reduction beyond 30 percent for aluminum and copper interconnects. An attractive result from the proposed signaling approach is that given the signal bandwidth and noise margin requirements, longer interconnects lines or higher interconnect densities can be achieved. To overcome the bandwidth limitations in the deep submicron regime, new approaches to high-speed signaling are required. In the proposed research, we intend to use current-mode circuit techniques to improve the bandwidth performance and reduce signal delay. Current-mode sensing has received limited attention for signaling in global interconnections partially due to the popularity of voltage-mode full swing repeater insertion methodologies. . It can be shown that as CMOS technology continues to scale, the number of repeaters required to achieve the projected performance criteria will increase dramatically and constitute a significant portion of the total system power dissipation. Therefore, current-mode sensing circuits will increasingly become popular in this deep submicron IC era. Accurate estimation of propagation delay and cross-talk noise in long global interconnects plays an important role in the early design stages of high performance VLSI systems. Various techniques based on simulations and or analytical closed-form formulations have been proposed to model delay and cross-talk in interconnects. The bulk of the work dedicated to this area targets capacitively terminated lines for voltage mode signaling. However, with the increasing speed requirements in VLSI circuits, current mode signal transporting techniques may provide an attractive solution to some of the challenges caused by aggressive interconnect scaling. To accommodate current-mode signaling techniques, we propose to derive efficient closed-form analytical models for a driven distributed RC line with arbitrary termination. The accuracy of this work is predicted to be the same as Elmore Delay formulation, extended to accommodate current-mode type circuits. In this research, we intend to develop the theoretical basis for the proposed current-mode band-limited signaling scheme and analytically formulate its impact on cross-talk noise and signal delay reduction. We will target our study toward understanding its effects on interconnect coupling noise. Study of circuit design issues will be followed by prototype fabrication for conceptual and experimental verification. Finally, we intend to apply this knowledge to build a high performance wide bus system to prove the noise reduction advantages doc18881 none Herring Funds from this grant will support activities of the newly formed University consortium UNAVCO, Inc. that is a non-profit membership-governed organization, which supports and promotes Earth science by advancing high-precision geodetic and strain techniques such as the Global Positioning System (GPS). Part of the funds will support the operation of the president s office that oversees the financial management of UNAVCO, Inc. and provides a focus for community activities. The remainder of the funds will provide support for planning workshops and studies for the Plate Boundary Observatory (PBO), which will provide new insights into earthquake and volcano dynamics in the Western United States and Alaska. The four pre-PBO workshops to be held in will address the type of instrumentation and monuments to be used in PBO; the coordination of PBO activities in Canada and Mexico; the characteristics of the strainmeters to be used in PBO; and the management structure to be developed for PBO. The study to be funded will address the design criteria to be used in deploying the PBO instrumentation doc18882 none This planning grant is the first step toward the setting up a multi-institutional Polymer Engineering Center (PEC) of the Center for Advanced Polymer and Composite Engineering (CAPCE) at the Ohio State University (OSU). This proposed multi-institutional I UCRC is a university-industry-government collaborative initiative to create, integrate, transfer, and apply knowledge of polymer engineering and processing. It is aimed at enhancing the competitiveness and effectiveness of companies involved in design and manufacturing of plastic components or production of manufacturing and sensing equipment related to the plastics industry. The Engineering Polymer Industrial Consortium (EPIC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison provides a formal means for the PEC faculty and its industrial collaborators to jointly set up a research agenda, share expertise and resources, validate research outcome, educate a preeminent workforce, and facilitate two-way transfer of technology doc18883 none This project investigates the areas of harmonic analysis and wavelets concerning the mathematical theory of multi- dimensional wavelet expansions. One of the fundamental problems of the subject is how to construct higher dimensional wavelet bases with desired characteristics, e.g., wavelets with good time-frequency properties. These areas of research have seen significant progress due to the contributions of I. Daubechies, R. Coifman, and Y. Meyer, along with many others. However, the majority of research has been concentrated on isotropic theory, leaving many questions involving non- isotropic wavelet theory unanswered. The proposer will investigate this theory of non-isotropic wavelets from three directions. The first is to study non-isotropic analogues of the standard function spaces associated with expansive dilations. In particular, to examine characterization by wavelet expansions of Calderon-Zygmund operators associated with non-isotropic dilations. The second is to construct orthogonal wavelets with good time-frequency localization for large classes of non- isotropic expansive dilations. The third is to identify non- isotropic expansive dilations for which the construction of well-localized wavelets is impossible. More generally, this proposal represents work on wavelet analysis which is a powerful technique in harmonic analysis. This technique has produced wide-ranging applications to signal and image processing, such as the JPEG image compression system. It is expected that further research on multi- dimensional non-isotropic wavelets will continue to produce many other contributions in pure and applied mathematics doc18884 none This Grant Opportunity for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) project deals with two important issues in polymer processing. Research will be focused on enhancing the control of the processing through the development a new methods for indirect measurement of the elongational viscosity of the polymeric material. In addition, efforts to optimize die channel geometry for polymer extrusion will be investigated in terms of the effects of elongational viscosity on the polymer flow in the die. In this project, strain-rate dependence of elongational viscosity will be determined by finding the optimal values of the four parameters in the Sarkar-Gupta elongational viscosity model such that the difference between the pressure loss predicted by a finite element simulation and the corresponding experimental data from a capillary or slit rheometer is minimized. The optimization model, which will be developed in this project, is expected to provide much better die design than the design obtained by using currently available software packages, which do not account for the elongational viscosity of a polymer. Even though this proposal involves optimization of extrusion dies, a successful completion of the proposed research will open the avenues for including the effect of elongational viscosity on design of the equipment for other polymer processing techniques involving elongation-dominated flows such as blow molding and fiber spinning. The software developed in this project will be used in a senior-level course to educate the students on importance of elongational viscosity in polymer processing. For the next three years, a graduate student will spend one month per year at The Dow Chemical Co. to conduct various experiments resulting in additional educational benefit from the project doc18885 none This award supports the acquisition of eight plant growth chambers and computerized monitoring system that will provide the foundation of a new multi-user plant growth facility in the Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics at the University of Maryland. The facility will be used by investigators whose work with the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, but address diverse problems. These include the function of vacuolar ion pumps and ethylene receptors, the control and function of genes encoding gluconases used in cell-wall formation and remodeling, and splicing of messenger RNA. Arabidopsis has been increasingly adopted as the experimental material of choice for studies of basic plant biology because of the knowledge of the complete genomic sequence and the availability of large mutant collections, extensive databases and powerful new molecular genetic tools. These chambers will increase the growth area available to these researchers by 3 to 4-fold, and will provide precise control of day-length, light and temperature, all of which can affect the outcome of experiments intended to increase knowledge of plant development, physiology and genetics doc18886 none This project will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessel Cape Henlopen operated by the University of Delaware, College of Marine Studies and dedicated to use in support of ocean science research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. This Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Matthew Hawkins, is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire a scientifically clean deck winch to improve trace metal sampling capability doc18887 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Chloroplast gene experssion studies on the toxic bloom-forming organism Heterosigma akashiwo during resting cell formation and activation. Massive blooms of the toxic golden-brown alga Heterosigma akashiwo negatively impact all levels of the food web. It can form a resting stage which allows it to withstand stressful environmental conditions. This research examines chloroplast genes involved in environmental recognition and the regulatory processes that enable Heterosigma to enter and escape dormancy doc18888 none The need to reduce the thermal budgets (time, temperature) of next generation semiconductor device processing has created a significant interest in short-term rapid thermal processing (RTP) of silicon. One of the most important applications for RTP is the formation of the source and drain regions of CMOS gate stacks. Another application is the bonding of wafers for fabrication of micromechanical and power microelectronic devices. This proposal requests support for basic research of microwave and radio frequency (RF) rapid electromagnetic induction heating (EMIH) of Si. EMIH would provide valuable and unique capabilities for wafer bonding. Moreover, EMIH may be the only viable method to anneal ultrashallow implanted impurity dopant regions to the specifications required to manufacture the next generation of high density VLSI integrated circuits (the so-called 100 nm technology node). The research program involves investigations of rapid microwave and RF EMIH of Si wafers. For example, initial data indicate that EMIH spike-annealing of ultra-shallow boron-implanted wafers is superior to conventional lamp RTP. Experiments with ultra-shallow boron-implanted wafers are proposed to establish just how effective EMIH RTP can be, and to elucidate the unconventional mechanisms responsible for the observed superior performance. Similarly, initial results indicate that EMIH enables very rapid wafer bonding without the need for intermediate glue layers. The research will more thoroughly determine the quality of the bond, the minimum time and temperature required to obtain a good bond, the prospects for multi-level wafer stack bonding, and the mechanisms that explain how uniformly strong bonds are obtained during RF EMIH, even with significant radial temperature gradients. Supporting collaborations with leading semiconductor fabrication industrial organizations will provide critical input to experimental design and results analysis, and valuable mentorship of students. These collaborations will also leverage grant resources by providing sources of ultrashallow implanted wafers and post-anneal characterization from institutions with unparalleled experience and expertise in this technology area doc18889 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Biosynthesis of two coenzymes in methanogenic microorganisms. The methanogenic microorganism Methanococcus jannaschii grows in hydrothermal vents, using hydrogen and carbon dioxide to make methane gas. This project seeks to identify how M. jannaschii produces two coenzymes, Coenzyme M and Coenzyme B, that cooperate in the final steps of methanogenesis to release methane and conserve energy for the cell doc18890 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Does coniferous forest plant community composition influence the evolution of host specificity in mycorrhizal fungi? We have little understanding of spatio-temporal variation in the interactions of mycorrhizal fungi with their host plants. This research investigates the impact of large-scale variation in plant community composition in the Pacific Northwest on the evolution of host specificity of ectomycorrhizal fungi in the genus Rhizopogon doc18891 none This Grant Opportunity for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) research project seeks to integrate the development of a series of optimization-based models for digital human motion simulation and the synthesis of movement performance descriptors such that the developed models are physically realistic and computationally efficient. Three new models, formulated as optimization problems, will be developed: (1) an end-point trajectory model, (2) a parameterized differential inverse kinematics model, and (3) a parameterized forward dynamics model. These models will have open structures to incorporate movement performance descriptors that can be formulated as objective functions, constraints, or parameters, and then be empirically synthesized, tested, and determined. In return, the determined or evaluated descriptors will allow the models to render complex simulated motions via efficient computations. The project will employ empirical databases of several types of complex human movements most relevant to computer-aided workplace or vehicle design and virtual prototyping. Digital human motion simulation is an integral part of the enabling technology that will profoundly change the process of designing and prototyping a wide variety of products or systems that are used, operated, inhabited, or maintained by human beings. Such changes, including tremendous cost reduction, efficiency improvement, and quality (usability, serviceability, and manufacturability) enhancement in product development, will be central to the vitality of the US economy and its global competitiveness. The proposed research identifies and explores a unique and important area for novel, strategic application of various optimization techniques. A successful completion will lead to a new generation of digital human motion simulation models for computer-aided human-centric design and human-machine systems engineering, and will yield results addressing some of the most fundamental questions about human movement control. Educational outcomes from this project will include new course materials on advanced modeling tools for a graduate class, and a collection of examples of operations research problems in biomechanics and ergonomics doc18892 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Molecular characterization of microbial respiratory arsenate reduction: diversity and environmental expression of metalloid reductase genes. Microbial respiratory arsenate reduction can significantly alter the mobility and toxicity of arsenic in the environment. Little is known about the molecular mechanisms for arsenic respiration. The research goals of this research are to identify genes involved in arsenate respiration in a variety of species, including Sulfurospirillum and Shewanella strains, and measure arsenate respiratory activity in contaminated sites doc18893 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. David Ribble of the Biology Department at Trinity University to fund state of the art image acquisition and analysis instrumentation and software. This equipment will be housed in the Center for Image Acquisition and Analysis, a multi-user research facility that will enhance the research capabilities of all faculty and undergraduate students in the Department of Biology at Trinity University. Trinity University will remodel an existing laboratory to provide a site for this Center and will share in the cost of the equipment and software. To satisfy the needs of this diverse research community, the Center will contain equipment and software to acquire, store, and analyze images appropriate to research studies in molecular biology, cellular biology, physiology, ecology, and evolution. To meet these needs, the following items of equipment will be purchased: a gel documentation system; a fluorescence microscope with deconvolution capabilities, digital cameras, computers, and support software. The Center for Image Acquisition and Analysis will significantly increase faculty and student research capabilities, enhancing the activities of the varied research groups within the Department of Biology. Each of these groups will make intensive use of this new facility. These ongoing research projects include the study of the following topics: The mechanisms for selective destabilization of secretory protein mRNAs at the ER Changes in ovarian gene expression during ovulation Regulation of photosystem production by a putative GTP-binding protein in Rhodospirillum centenum Paracellular permeability of tight junctions in intestinal epithelial cells Rat epidermal cell responses to radiofrequency radiation Evolution of monogamy and conservation of mammals Sociality and social parasitism in galling aphids Not only will this equipment support the ongoing research activities of faculty and students; the sensitivity, resolution, and analysis capabilities of the proposed equipment will provide opportunities for research initiatives and directions not currently possible at Trinity. Furthermore, use of this shared facility will help develop collaborative research projects between the diverse sub-disciplines within the Department of Biology doc18894 none In work with G. Pareschi, Popa has introduced a notion of Mukai regularity for coherent sheaves on abelian varieties, defined using the Fourier-Mukai transform, and developed its theory. Popa and Pareschi are now interested in using the concept of Mukai regularity in the study of irregular varieties, especially to give effective results on adjoint linear series and pluiricanonical maps. Also, Popa and Pareschi intend to use invariants arising naturally from this theory in order to differentiate between Jacobians and other abelian varieties, and thus approach the Schottky problem in a new way. Using some of their results that carry through in the more general context of an arbitrary Fourier transform, Popa and Pareschi intend to obtain constraints on the existence of equivalences of derived categories, which is a main concern in this line of approach to mirror symmetry. In other work, Popa has established effective results for linear series on moduli spaces of vector bundles on curves. Popa is interested in approaching the Strange Duality by refining his methods based on the Fourier-Mukai transform of Verlinde bundles on Jacobians and combining it with representation theory techniques. Popa also intends to approach some optimal conjectures on effective base point freeness on these moduli spaces for general curves, using degeneration to stable curves. In work with G. Farkas, Popa has obtained Brill-Noether type non-existence results for rank 2 vector bundles on general curves, via generalized limit linear series and stability of pairs on reducible curves. Popa and Farkas intend to further refine these techniques in order to prove a conjecture of Bertram-Feinberger-Mukai on Brill-Noether theory for rank 2 vector bundles with canonical determinant, and to find non-existence results in higher ranks. This will allow them to define new divisors in moduli spaces of stable curves for appropriate genera. The ultimate goal of this project is to compute the class of these divisors and determine whether they provide counterexamples to the Harris-Morrison Slope Conjecture as expected. Algebraic curves and abelian varieties are ubiquitous objects in mathematics. Apart from their realizations in algebraic geometry, they appear in complex analysis (as Riemann surfaces or complex tori) or algebra (as field extensions or group schemes), and play a fundamental role in recent progress in mathematical physics. One of the most important problems in algebraic geometry is to classify algebraic varieties. For one-dimensional varieties (that is, for algebraic curves) this problem is approached by understanding the geometry of a space M(g) parametrizing all curves of given genus. In the case of abelian varieties, one way to approach this is to understand the totality of a specific kind of algebraic objects (called coherent sheaves) which can be associated to them. The investigator is pursuing these directions in research related to this proposal doc18895 none Models involving general integer variables with nonlinear constraints are very hard to solve. There has been some, but limited progress towards solving large scale models of this type. Computational results on practical test problems suggest that the gap between the optimum objective value and a bound from the solution of the relaxed problem at the root node is significantly larger when compared with bounds obtained in the linear case, and the size of the enumeration tree explodes quickly. To overcome the difficulties in solving large scale problems of this type, advances in several directions are needed. Methods for generating good cutting planes need to be developed further, as well as more advanced heuristics for identifying a feasible solution quickly need to be developed. However, we think that the most fundamental advance may come from the development of advanced branching schemes in a branch-and-cut method. The standard branching schemes branch on a single variable disjunction at a time. Lenstra showed that by branching on general hyperplanes we can solve a mixed integer linear programming problem in polynomial time. Lenstra s algorithm has found limited practical value. This is because the computational cost of finding the branching hyperplane in his algorithm is very high. However, there is a possibility for finding branching planes that are ``good quality but computationally not as expensive. This research will focus on this problem as well as related issues towards solving nonlinear mixed integer programs. Several engineering and management problems lead to models that are nonlinear, possibly stochastic, integer programs. These problem areas include inventory, production and chemical process planning, layout, location, logistics and financial optimization. For example, nonlinearity arises naturally while modeling uncertainty using the second moment. This proposal request funds to support our ongoing research for finding efficient techniques for solving such models. The development of general purpose solution methodology for solving nonlinear integer programming problem will have a wide ranging impact, as it would facilitate solving such problems arising from many different areas doc18896 none The research objective of this grant is to develop a new class of high damping structures having a shape memory metal alloy composite casing over a carbon fiber reinforced polymeric (FRP) composite tube. It is expected that the traditional FRP core will provide the high stiffness while the damping capacity accomplished by the shape memory alloy casing. The research will be conducted in three key segments: (1) developing the fabrication technology (spray forming) for building shape memory alloy casings on the FRP cores, (2) characterizing the stiffness, strength and damping capabilities of the new structures, and (3) integrating the design, manufacture, and field testing of prototype automotive half -shafts. The fabrication technology to be developed as part of this project will introduce a new way of making multi-material, multi-functional structures that cannot be conveniently fabricated by other manufacturing methods. These novel high damping structures would find use in challenging, vibration prone applications in the automotive, aerospace, and cutting tool industries. The project includes collaboration among university researchers, REU students, and industrial engineers. The automotive and composite manufacturing industries have pledged support for the project and will be collaborative partners providing composite manufacturing and prototype field-testing. Learning modules will be developed from the research and included in the undergraduate and graduate curriculums. A goal is to stimulate undergraduate and graduate students to pursue advanced educational degrees. The integrated research and educational objectives will benefit the participating industries and will provide their engineers with unique training for further advancing the state-of-art doc18897 none This grant provides funding to develop methodology and tools for the design and extension of reverse production systems. The methodological basis is mathematical programming, specifically mixed-integer linear programming. The model uses a robust objective function that minimizes the maximum deviation of the robust solution from the best solutions for a set of scenarios. The approach builds on previous research in reverse production systems in four ways. First, it extends the scope of the system to overlay decisions in the forward production system. Second, it considers multiple commodities. Third, it develops richer representations of uncertainties that have a major impact on the decision-making. Fourth, it addresses reverse production systems with several independent players that may have conflicting goals. The strong links between the principal investigators and organizations involved in recycling for carpet and electronics will allow these tools to be tested and refined in a variety of contexts. Production systems that support the recovery, processing and resale of materials and sub-components at the end of their useful life are an important part of the U.S. and world economy. There are estimated to be 73,000 firms employing 350,000 people, generating revenues of US$53 billion year in remanufacturing alone. Working with companies, non-profits, and government agencies, successful results from the research enable better decision making for strategic reverse production system design, with practical application to recycling and reuse in the carpet and electronics industry. They will contribute to the knowledge base for complex supply chain decision-making, both by making the problem representation richer, and by developing new approaches for solving large-scale mathematical programming problems in the context of supply chain design. The students and our industrial partners will gain exposure to a rich class of problems of significant importance to modern industrialized societies and a set of techniques that can be brought to bear on a wide range of decision-making problems doc18898 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Retrieving novel bacterial genes involved in aromatic compound degradation from natural environments using Acinetobacter as a host. Many naturally-occurring aromatic compounds are broken down by microbes via the beta-ketoadipate pathway. This research manipulates the genetic system of a naturally transformable soil bacterium and uses it as a vehicle for understanding the versatility and diversity of this ecologically important pathway in uncultivated natural bacterial assemblages doc18899 none As the scale of engineered systems such as electric power grids, communication networks, and the internet expands, and as society s dependence upon reliable operation of these networks increases, it is vital that system engineers seek a better understanding of how small scale failures of individual elements may propagate to produce global system-wide failures. The work proposed here is motivated largely by the electric power systems application, and the challenge in bringing analytic stability techniques to bear on the problem of cascading line and generator tripping. The goal is to capture the role of transient dynamic response following a specified initiating disturbance, and examine subsequent ( cascading ) element failures that are induced when operating thresholds for individual elements are exceeded along the state trajectory. This approach will exploit Hamiltonian-like structure that appears in power system dynamics and related classes of networked systems, in which the differential equations governing behavior are often closely related to an easily identified storage function. By relating element failure to thresholds of maximally allowable energy storage in network elements the work will seek to develop a tractable, smooth model for element failure that is amenable to Lyapunov type stability analysis. It will be argued that cascading element failure can then be captured as a sequence of transitions between potential basins about (possibly) stable equilibria, with each equilibrium defined by a partially degraded network configuration doc18900 none Determinants of Toeplitz matrices have arisen in many branches of mathematics and physics. For example, they describe the spin correlation between two sites in the classical Ising model of a two-dimensional magnet. More recently, they have been used to describe statistical properties of random matrices, whose eigenvalues model complicated systems. The asymptotic behavior of determinants of Toeplitz matrices is described using the Strong Szego-Limit Theorem and its generalizations. Recently, this theorem was improved in the sense that a new identity was found for the determinant that allows one to find very good estimates for the error in the Szego expansion of the determinant. The major purpose of this project is to extend this identity to other classes of matrices and operators. This has applications such as finding the distributions of linear statistics in random matrix theory, as well as finding the level spacing of the eigenvalues. Many physical systems possess such complicated behavior that exact predictions become impossible, so instead average properties of these systems are studied. For example, the energy level of a particle of a compound nucleus in a slow nuclear reaction has complicated unpredictable behavior. Random matrix theory provides mathematical models that allow a simulation of the energy levels of the particle. One of the tools that is used to study the statistical behavior of the random matrices and thus of the energy levels, is a determinant of a Toeplitz matrix. A determinant is a number that yields important information about a square array of numbers. These Toeplitz determinants occur in many branches of applied mathematics. One classical use was to study the properties of models of two-dimensional (or very thin) magnets. Determinants are often hard to compute. However, there is a result, called the Strong Szego Limit Theorem, which yields an estimate for such a determinant. Recently, this estimate was improved so that error terms could be calculated more easily. One major goal of the project is to extend these results to other classes of determinants. This will yield information about the energy levels of complicated systems in other types of models, not covered by the Toeplitz case doc18901 none Calculus of Variations in L-infinity and Nonlinear PDE s PI: Robert R. Jensen, Co-PI: Emmanuel N. Barron : The study of nonlinear essential supremum functionals is the focus of this project. In variational problems with such functionals the natural questions of interest are existence of an absolute (or local) minimizer, i.e., a function which minimizes the functional on every subdomain, necessary conditions for the minimizer leading to very nonlinear differential equations, and regularity of the minimizer. In contrast to the classical calculus of variations, even under very strong assumptions, regularity beyond continuous differentiability is not expected, but even this much smoothness is unknown. Virtually every question posed in classical variational analysis can be posed for supremum functionals-- constraints, relaxation, homogenization, duality--and this can be done for both scalar and vector valued problems where the results are more difficult. This subject has placed a new focus on viscosity solutions for fully nonlinear equations, and a new emphasis on an old area of convex analysis, quasiconvexity. The motivation for the study of such problems comes from consideration of physical problems in which the use of the typical energy norm is not adequate, that is, one must design for the worst case. Supremum norm functionals lack strong differentiability and the subsequent difficulties associated with this lack must be dealt with using all forms of nonlinear analysis. The use of variational analysis in engineering, physics, medicine, economics, and other fields is well established. Extreme value engineering is an area in which one seeks to consider the worst case in order to properly design or build some mechanism. In this project these two disciplines are merged to apply variational analysis in order to accomodate a worst case analysis. In certain areas, such as medicine, or structural engineering, it is clear that the worst case analysis is the only realistic design. For example, an oncological treatment cannot seek to minimize the average tumor load, but must minimize the maximum tumor load. A bridge should not be designed to minimize average stresses but maximum pointwise stresses. Many control mechanisms implemented only when a maximum indicator is triggered. These are all problems which are applications of the project considered and in which many new techniques must be developed. The basic and fundamental results of this area of variational analysis, including existence and the determination of criteria sufficient to determine the optimal function, will be studied. The analysis leads to the study of nonlinear partial differential equations and systems of such equations doc18902 none Sankar Das Sarma, U of MD College Park This proposal requests funding for comprehensive theoretical and computational research on spin electronics involving active control and manipulation of spin dynamics in electronic materials. The main thrust of the proposal understands in quantitative details carrier spin transport in semiconductors (although metals and superconductors are also considered mostly in the context of semiconductor hybrid structures) from the perspective of novel multifunctional spintronic device operation. The proposed research will utilize a dual approach using microscopic atomistic frilly quantum mechanical transport calculations based on modern condensed matter physics where feasible, and macroscopic device simulation type phenomenological analyses based on the drift diffusion equations for realistic and complex device configurations. The goal of the proposed research is to develop the fundamental knowledge base for simulating semiconductor spintronic devices by providing quantitative theories for the mechanisms controlling spin injection into semiconductors, spin relaxation and coherence, spin transmission across interfaces, spin dependent scattering, spin-polarized tunneling, and spin-polarized current flow in inhomogeneous (particularly bipolar) structures. The proposed research will obtain qualitative and quantitative understanding of the relationships between specific materials systems and prototypical device structures and spin polarized transport behavior. The proposal seeks to carry out the generalization of the existing electronic transport theories including both the microscopic atomistic transport theory based on the Boltzmann equation approach, and the phenomenological device modeling theories based on the drift diffusion approach, which form the foundation of modern microelectronics device simulation studies allows arbitrary spin-polarized densities and spin-polarized currents for both electrons and holes in general bipolar systems in the presence of external an electric fields, magnetic fields and possibly external radiation fields. The proposed theory will include important microscopic processes such as surface interface roughness scattering, spin-orbit coupling, magnetic scattering from impurities, band structure effects, interface spin sensitivity, size quantization effects, and quantum interference and phase coherence effects (when the situation demands). The goal of the proposal is to develop the definitive fundamental transport theory for spin electronics. The proposed research will utilize two graduate students, who will he carrying out their PhD s in spintronics, thus developing the human resource base for the projected spin electronics technology doc18903 none PI: John Mallet-Paret, Brown University : We propose a fundamental study of qualitative properties of various classes of nonlinear dynamical systems, in particular as they arise from differential and difference equations. Among the systems to be considered are those from ordinary and partial differential equations, systems of lattice differential equations (that is, spatially discrete systems), differential delay equations, and nonlinear maps on cones. Issues such as existence of equilibria and their stability, spontaneous formation of spatial patterns and spatial chaos, and existence and qualitative properties of traveling fronts, will be studied for these equations. In addition to established techniques (both theoretical and numerical) from differential equations and dynamical systems, a significant portion of the proposed research involves the development and implementation of new tools and techniques with which to study these systems. Among the techniques to be employed are those involving singular perturbations, invariant manifolds, exponential dichotomies, and topological methods (Morse decompositions, fixed point theorems, degree theory). We are developing new mathematical techniques for analyzing and understanding differential equations and difference equations which arise as models in various areas of science. Very broadly, these types of mathematical systems model time-dependent or evolutionary behavior, as it occurs in a wide range of scientific areas, including biology, chemistry, electrical circuit theory, image processing, and material science. While this is a very broad scope of inquiry, the specific problems to be studied exhibit features in common -- spontaneous formation of patterns, self-sustained oscillations, regulation by internal feedback (often with time delays) -- which can be analyzed with some of the basic tools of dynamical systems theory. It is expected the resulting mathematical advances arising from these studies will increase the knowledge of and will provide insight into both the abstract theory of dynamical systems and the scientific areas of inquiry doc18904 none Proposal Number: PI: Andreas Seeger The proposed research will be concerned with several interrelated topics in Fourier analysis. In particular it is proposed to work on precise regularity properties of oscillatory integral and Fourier integral operators with degenerate canonical relations. The mapping properties are governed by the geometry of the canonical relations. Here we are, in particular, interested in the cases that come up when studying averaging operators associated to curves in higher dimensions. Other projects include the behavior of singular maximal functions and rough singular integrals on classes of integrable functions, the mapping properties of wave operators on nilpotent groups, and questions concerning the failure of weak amenability of Lie groups. The research project is focused on some fundamental question in Fourier analysis, with an emphasis on estimates for various oscillatory integral operators. Such estimates are in particular crucial for understanding the qualitative and quantitative behavior of Radon transforms and related Fourier integral operators. These operators arise in various areas of mathematics, such as partial differential equations, complex analysis and integral geometry, as well as in non-mathematical applications such as tomography and medical imaging. As an example we mention that X-ray tomography involves inverting a Radon transform operator; i.e. one seeks to determine an image from knowledge about the averages of a function for a prescribed family of lines. The operators involved in inverting this restricted X-ray transform tend to be Fourier integral operators as considered in this proposal doc18905 none PI: Vladimir Temlyakov, University of South Carolina : Nonlinear approximation seeks ways to approximate complicated functions by simple functions using methods that depend nonlinearly on the function being approximated. Recently, a particular kind of nonlinear approximation, namely, greedy approximation attracted a lot of attention in both theoretical and applied settings. Greedy type algorithms proved to be very useful in various applications such as image compression, signal processing, design of neural networks, and the numerical solution of nonlinear partial differential equations. The theory of greedy approximation is emerging now: some fundamental convergence results have already been established; many fundamental problems remain unsolved. The purpose of the proposed research is to continue investigations of greedy approximation. We propose to continue to study greedy approximation with regard to bases, where substantial progress has been achieved recently. We propose to place emphasis on studying the efficiency of greedy algorithms with regard to redundant systems (dictionaries). Redundancy on the one hand offers much promise for greater efficiency in terms of approximation rate, but on the other hand gives rise to highly nontrivial theoretical and practical problems. We note that there is a solid justification of importance of redundant systems in both theoretical questions and practical applications. Approximation theory is a branch of Mathematics that studies methods of replacing complicated objects by simpler objects. This idea has proved to be fruitful in many applications to the real world problems. Among these applications are signal processing, image compression, finance problems, and many others. As one of the model problems consider image compression. Take for example an image (picture) on a TV screen. Why should we approximate it? In many cases we cannot afford to transmit (or store in a computer memory) the whole information of an image, perhaps because of a high cost for transmission of a bit of information or limited channel capacity. This is exactly the point where an application of approximation theory can be fruitful. Clearly, when we replace an image by its approximant we lose the quality of picture: the more information we keep the better approximation to the original image we have. As a result we have an interplay between the reduction of information and the quality of approximation. In approximation theory we try to find the best (optimal) solution to this problem. The purpose of the proposed research is to continue the investigations of methods of approximation which are motivated by these types of applications. We note that nonlinear approximation is at the current frontiers of approximation theory. Nonlinear approximation is the only hope at present for the increase in available approximation power still needed to handle problems of real practical interest doc18906 none The rapid expansion of global communications has placed increased requirements on optical fiber infrastructure and has stimulated the demand for increased system capacity. As a result, high data rate, dense wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) systems are being widely deployed in long-haul terrestrial and trans-oceanic links. In these systems, polarization effects can severely limit the performance of the system. System designers commonly allocate a prescribed power penalty margin to polarization effects say 2 dB. An outage is said to occur when this margin is exceeded. A common constraint is to limit outage to a probability of 10-6. Because outages are rare events, it is difficult to quantify their probability of occurrence either theoretically or experimentally. In the past year, we have achieved a theoretical breakthrough by the use of importance sampling, which allows us to accurately quantify rare events. We both extend this technique theoretically and apply it for the first time experimentally. Our focus is on determining the causes of outage and, from that, effective mitigation techniques. The proposed research is based on a close experimental and theoretical cooperation to study the issue of channel outage due to polarization effects in long haul, high data-rate, terrestrial WDM transmission systems. A series of experiments will be carried out and theoretically modeled to study the interactions of polarization effects with nonlinearity, chromatic dispersion, and amplified spontaneous emission noise, and to assess the impact these combined effects have on channel outage for both RZ and NRZ formatted data. We will experimentally determine the region of validity of a reduced model that only follows the Stokes parameters in a WDM system, rather than the full time-domain behavior. We have already validated this model in simulations. Other modeling tools will be developed and validated as needed to accurately and efficiently calculate the channel outage probability due to polarization effects doc18907 none This project deals with questions in commutative algebra. While the questions address a variety of topics, there is an underlying common thread that unifies them all: the theory of integral closure. The PI, together with her collaborators, first plans to develop methods that produce the integral closure of an ideal. In joint work with Bernd Ulrich the proposer has established that linkage is a method for capturing integral elements over a complete intersection. Now the investigator wants to extend this same procedure to Gorenstein linkage and residual intersections. Second, the PI intends to clarify the connection between the core of an ideal and the adjoint of Lipman (or the multiplier ideal of Ein and Lazarsfeld), find an explicit formula for the core, and compute the core of monomial ideals (a question posed by Eisenbud and Sturmfels). The investigator intends to use linkage theory, residual intersection theory and Groebner basis theory. Third, the investigator would like to study the special fiber ring. This object is very important from a geometric point of view because it encodes algebraic information on the special fiber of the blowup. The focus here is on finding conditions that force the fiber to be unmixed or even Cohen-Macaulay. Last, the PI plans to study the Hilbert function of zero-dimensional normal ideals (an ideal is normal if all its powers are integrally closed). One of the proposer s goals is to show that all the Hilbert coefficients of such ideals are non-negative, while another goal is to characterize the vanishing of the Hilbert coefficients in terms of the Cohen-Macaulayness of the associated graded ring of the ideal itself or of one of its powers. The proposed research is concerned with problems in commutative algebra. On a basic level commutative algebra is about techniques for solving systems of polynomial equations. Commutative algebra had a revolutionary growth in the past fifty years as it provided the tools for understanding many problems in pure and applied mathematics. In many applied problems, polynomial equations and hence commutative algebra play a crucial role. Applied areas where commutative algebra results have been used in the past include operations research, computer science, robotics, control theory, coding theory and cryptography to mention a few doc18908 none of the structure of quantum physical systems the theory of classical groups is not sufficient, this is why the new theory of quantum groups was invented. Among these new objects the notions of weak Hopf algebras and quantum groupoids are of special interest, as they have recently seen many applications on both sides of the mathematics-physics divide. The present proposal is devoted to the study and classification of weak Hopf algebras and exploring their applications to various areas of mathematics and physics doc18909 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled The microbiology of iron reduction in the salt marsh. This research is investigating the importance of microorganisms that use iron to obtain energy for growth in the salt marsh ecosystem. Comprehensive geochemical and microbiological laboratory techniques are being used to quantify the contribution of microbial iron respiration to total organic matter decomposition in different salt marsh environments to estimate the importance of iron respiration to carbon cycling on a marsh-wide scale. The diversity and community structure of iron-reducing microorganisms is being investigated using serial dilution cultures, 16S rRNA based techniques, fluorescent in situ hybridization, and microscopy. This research could lead to the discovery of new iron-reducing organisms that are important in coastal marine environments doc18910 none Chemical-mechanical planarization (CMP) is one of the most critical steps in the production of multilayer silicon microelectronic devices. The goal of the research project is to develop a framework for environmental modeling which combines mechanical-chemical modeling of CMP tool components, environmental impact factors and cost of ownership (CoO) based upon competent variable sensitive process models of material removal in CMP. This work will extend earlier work to more detailed process capable models within an integrated process assessment framework. We focus here on the continued development of models for the mechanical interactions as well as models of the chemical effects and influence on the process. We expect to determine the dependency of material removal (both at a specific point and over the wafer surface) on process variables such as slurry, pattern density, wafer material, etc. The model will be able to offer information on designing new or novel pad geometries to facilitate environmentally efficient CMP. The work at UC, San Diego, on chemical removal mechanisms, is added to prior work at Berkeley. The resulting software will link process models to higher-level tools for assessing the environmental impact of the process and the upstream and downstream energy, consumable and waste requirements. A result of this model-based environmental analysis tool will be quantitative suggestions to process engineers and product and tool designers to enable them to insure that energy, waste and consumable use is minimized while maintaining the capability of the process and high product standards - that is - Environmentally Benign Manufacturing doc18911 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Molecular analysis to identify genes that contribute to the establishment and maintenance of a protistan symbiosis. Little is known at the molecular level about the mechanisms underlying symbiotic associations. This project seeks to identify the genes involved in the symbiosis between two protistan species. Biological screens for symbiosis using mutagenized symbionts and 2D gel electrophoresis will yield mutants or proteins, respectively, which can be used ultimately to derive DNA sequence. The sequence data will allow for the identification of the involved genes doc18912 none Proposal Number: PI: Jeffrey Geronimo Research will be conducted into the Fejer-Riesz factorization of two variable positive trigonometric polynomials. The results obtained recently with Hugo Woerdeman on this problem will be used to investigate the properties of stable two variable polynomials. A two variable polynomial is said to be stable if it is non vanishing inside and on the bicircle. Results obtained from these investigations will then be applied to the construction of two variable wavelets, two variable filter design, and image processing. An important problem with many applications that was solved early inthe twentieth century was the problem of factorizing positive trigonometric polynomials. A trigonometric polynomial of degree n in x is a polynomial that can be written as linear combination of sines and cosines of integer multiples of the frequency x. It was shown by Fejer and Riesz that such a polynomial can be written as the magnitude squared of another polynomial. This result has had many useful applications in the area of filter design for electrical circuits, prediction theory, and more recently in wavelets doc18913 none This research will develop new lift-and-project methods for 0-1 mixed-integer programming. These methods will encompass two classes of techniques. The research team will consider lifting an n-dimensional point to a zeta-vector of the subset algebra of the n-dimensional hypercube, thereby extending the Lovasz-Schrijver, Sherali-Adams, Lasserre methods, as well as the disjunctive programming ( lift and project ) method of Balas, Ceria and Cornuejols. Such a lifting appears promising in that it produces higher-dimensional objects faster than the previously mentioned methods. The second class of techniques will consider successively refining a disjunction to generate deeper cutting planes. Integer programming embodies the systematic solution of planning problems arising in numerous practical settings, e.g. transportation, logistics, supply chain, finance, power generation and others. Such problems are inherently non-continuous: they involve the allocation of discrete units of resources. As such, they are extremely intractable. At the same time, accurate solutions translate into substantial savings, and thus there is a need for effective solution methodologies. The impact of this research will be to broaden the class of problems that can be successfully tackled, using innovative techniques doc18914 none Trebino Probably the most exciting event in optics in the past two years has been the development of microstructure optical fiber. The dispersion properties of this fiber can be tailored to a far greater extent than conventional optical fibers. As a result, it can be used to transform commercially available, low-energy ultrashort pulses into ultrabroadband continuum light with a bandwidth of 500 THz. This light has numerous far-reaching applications in telecommunications, solid-state spectroscopy, coherent control of chemical reactions, and ultrahigh-spatial-resolution optical coherence tomography. It has already completely revolutionized the field of optical metrology. Unfortunately, techniques for working with ultrabroadband light remain in their infancy. At this stage, it is not possible to measure its properties other than the power spectrum. Pulse shaping and compression techniques, which are successful in narrowband applications, are not applicable to this type of ultrabroadband radiation. Even simple tasks such as collimating and propagating ultrabroadband light are not yet possible. For example, ultrabroadband lenses do not exist, and mirrors also fail because the diffraction angle of this light is over 60s. Furthermore, the process by which this light is created is at best poorly understood. As a result, we propose to 1) perform extensive modeling to understand the underlying mechanisms and the properties of the continuum light, 2) develop experimental techniques for its characterization, and 3) devise new techniques for manipulating and compressing this light. We will take two distinct approaches to ultrabroadband-light generation. One will utilize a standard fs Ti:Sapphire laser and microstructure optical fiber to produce continuum light with spectrum from 400 nm to 1.6 um. The second approach, which is equally promising-but as yet unexplored-will use amplified fiber lasers developed by IMRA America to generate ultra-broadband continuum in conventional telecommunications fiber in the IR: from 800 nm to 2.5 um. This ultrabroadband light is extremely complex, having a time-bandwidth product (TBP) in excess of , whereas the most complex ultrashort pulse that has been completely characterized had a TBP of ~10. This latter measurement used frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG), and it pushed the FROG technique to its limits. As a result, we propose to develop a much broader-band version of FROG for measuring ultrabroadband continuum with more than two orders of magnitude of additional complexity. It will necessarily involve several innovations, including, for example, angle-dithering the nonlinear crystal for much greater bandwidth doc18915 none Telecommunication industry is a highly competitive industry. Since divestiture and government de-regulations, various telephone services, such as cellular, local and long distance, domestic and commercial, have been the battle fields for telecommunication service providers. To remain competitive, it is important for the companies to establish business planning systems to support management for strategic planning and decision making. Statistical process control (SPC) techniques have been used routinely for on-line process control and monitoring and have resulted in cost-effective returns on investment in manufacturing industry. Our research builds on the powerful SPC and modeling methods to develop efficient statistical techniques for data mining and activity monitoring in telecommunication industry. We identify the limitations of the current SPC methods in telecommunication applications. We develop efficient methods for monitoring large volume of univariate and multivariate data and construct economic models to evaluate and compare various monitoring methods. We also develop design of experiments and churn modeling methods to identify important characteristics responsible for abnormal activities and to predict likelihood that the activities would happen. The major impact of the proposed research is to improve the existing techniques and tools in the business planning system for data mining and knowledge extraction in the telecommunication industry. The enhanced system will allow marketing and sales managers to apply data mining methods routinely, efficiently, and effectively to solve their problems. As a result, our research will help the company reduce cost through efficient fraud detection systems and improve revenue through customer churn prevention, customer retention programs, and new business opportunities based on extracted useful knowledge doc18916 none study of symmetry patterns (of any object). Many algorithms of Group Theory are implemented in modern computer algebra systems. Proposed research uses these computer algebra systems to find and study families of highly symmetric algebraic curves. Algebraic curves are basic objects in mathematics, physics and applications, e.g., cryptography. Elliptic curve cryptography provides encryption schemes used for data security on the internet doc18917 none PI: Hans Lindblad, Univ. of Cal. San Diego : Lindblad s research concerns basic mathematical questions for systems of nonlinear hyperbolic equations in mathematical physics. These include several important equations in classical field theory and continuum mechanics as well as in classical physics, e.g. Einstein s equations in general relativity and the equation of fluids and elastic bodies. These basic questions are: (i) Do we have local existence and uniqueness of solutions in a certain class? (ii) Do we have blow-up of solutions? (e.g. black holes in general relativity) (iii) What is the long time behavior of solutions? More specifically, Lindblad is mainly working on two projects. One on proving the well-posedness for a class of problems that occur in fluid dynamics and general relativity, in particular proving the well-posedness for the free boundary problem of the motion of the surface of a fluid in vacuum. A long term goal is to study the long time behavior of astrophysical bodies such as gaseous stars as well as the surface of the ocean. Another project is to study global solutions of equations related to Einstein s equations. A long term goal is to simplify and generalize the global existence results for Einstein s equations. These two problems are related to the question of whether the fundamental equations in physics have global solutions. Solution to these questions could have important consequences. For instance, it is conceivable that one could use the knowledge obtained from the solutions of Einstein s equations to permit the use of gravitational waves to observe the Universe. Understanding the properties of and controlling the interface between two fluids could have industrial applications. To solve these problems Lindblad and his collaborators are developing new techniques that could be useful for studying many other problems as well. In particular, they are using geometric methods to study hyperbolic differential equations doc18918 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Role of histone deacetylases in the virulence of a plant pathogenic fungus. Histone deacetylases (HDACs) are important regulators of many cellular processes. Four HDAC genes have been identified in the maize pathogen, Cochliobolus carbonum, and one of them has been shown to be important for virulence. Biochemical, immunological, and genetic techniques are being used to study the role of these HDACs in development and pathogenicity doc18919 none Project title: Quantum corrections to classical approximations PI: Laszlo Erdos, Georgia Institute of Technology : The proposal contains three related projects that investigate residual quantum effects in classical approximations of complex quantum problems. The first project considers the correction due to the self-generated magnetic field in the Thomas-Fermi theory of large atoms. The optimal magnetic field obtained from a variational principle is spatially inhomogeneous. The second project aims at deriving nonlinear self-consistent evolution equations from the quantum dynamics of many particles interacting via weakly coupled Coulomb force. The quantum statistics of the particles determine the scaling and the limiting classical equation (Hartree or Vlasov). The last project studies the long time dynamics of noninteracting electrons in a random environment in the diffusive regime. On the shorter kinetic time scale the Boltzmann equation has been established earlier. The goal is to determine the quantum corrections to the classical diffusivity obtained from the Boltzmann equation and verify some predictions of the celebrated scaling theory of conductance. The physics of charged particles governs all electric phenomena. From theoretical point of view, these particles can be accurately described using many-body quantum mechanics. In practice, however, the fundamental equation of quantum physics, the Schr\ odinger equation, is too complicated. Typical electronic devices contain a huge number of electrons and it is impossible to describe their precise microscopic behavior even with the current computer technology. The Schr\ odinger equation is usually replaced with much simpler equations that are computationally more feasible. These equations do not contain all information about the complex electronic system, but they may describe certain quantities of interest with a sufficient precision. The proposal studies three complex quantum systems: (i) a large atom in a self-generated magnetic field; (ii) many charged particles with a weak interaction; (iii) a single electron in an impure medium. The goal is to find the correct approximating equations and to justify rigorously that they are consistent with the Schr\ odinger theory in certain limits. Heuristically, some of these equations can be guessed based upon classical mechanics. Quantum mechanics, however, may modify the classical picture. The proposed work identifies the quantum correction effects in the classical description of these three basic models doc18920 none Proposal Number: PI: Michael Lacey Research will be conducted on several aspects of phase plane analysis. The specific questions come from three different areas. One is to study a conjecture of E.M. Stein on a certain extension of Carleson s theorem. This conjecture seeks to place Carleson in a larger context. Consider this theorem as a supremum over all linear choices of phase functions. Stein s conjecture concerns a supremum over all polynomial choices of phase functions, with however the degree of the polynomial fixed. Advances on this question already suggest that it might be fruitful to consider certain discrete analogues of Carleson s theorem. Here, arithmetic aspects of Number Theory, as exemplified by the Hardy-Littlewood Circle Method should predominate. A third area is continued investigation into the question of the boundedness of the Hilbert transform on smooth families of lines. These investigations seek to deepen our understanding of phase plane analysis: The study of functions in the temporal and oscillatory variables simultaneously. Past successes in this area have lead to a broadening of the synthetic and analytic techniques that can be brought to bear on a wide range of questions. This is especially true for the bilinear Hilbert transform and Carleson s theorem. These new questions are far more subtle than those addressed in the past, and so the new techniques that we seek to develop are hoped to be more powerful than previous ones doc18921 none This research effort aims to study experimentally the effect of earthquake-induced lateral spreading due to liquefaction on pile foundations, both in full size and centrifuge model conditions. Comparable tests instrumented single piles and pile groups embedded in 1-and 2-layer soil profiles will be conducted in slightly inclined laminar boxes subjected to base shaking at three facilities: 1) The 100g-ton geotechnical centrifuge, laminar box and in-flight shaker at RPI, 2) The 6m high laminar box and 1g shaking table at NIED, Japan (largest laminar box in the world), and 3) The 1.9 m high laminar box and 1g shaking table at UCSD (largest laminar box in the US). Taking advantage of the successful experience at RPI in this kind of testing, this research constitutes the first opportunity for direct comparison of results in controlled experimental environments between centrifuge and full size tests to be conducted at NIED. Additionally, centrifuge and full size NIED results will be used to validate the medium-size experiments to be performed using the UCSD shaking table and laminar box. Advanced data analysis techniques-including system identification and visualization-will be used to process and compare the results from the three facilities, with engineering interpretations and computer simulations doc18922 none This condensed matter physics project focuses on the measurement and understanding of factors that determine the range of spin ordering in metallic magnets. The fundamental measure of spin ordering is the spin-spin correlation length, L. For example, the critical temperature, Tc, for magnetic ordering depends on the strength, i. e. range, of the interactions between individual spins. This material parameter is often unknown, so that the critical temperatures at which magnets lose their strength cannot be predicted with certainty. The parameter L also determines how Tc decreases as the dimensions of a magnet are reduced. Tc goes precipitously to zero in the nanoscale regime when the dimensions of the magnet approach L. Plotting and fitting experimental curves of Tc as a function of the thickness of nanoscale thin films provides a measure of the intrinsic spin-spin coupling length, L. The experimental plots also reveal the onset of quantum finite-size effects as the thickness approaches a few nanometers. The correlation length L also determines the coupling between thin magnetic layers in magnetic heterostructures. The coupling strength between spins can be tuned to different values by carefully alloying different magnetic elements. The research program will investigate these effects in ultrathin layers and heterostructures of different coupled magnetic materials as a function of material composition. The results are of importance to the future development of magnetic recording and magnetic memory devices as the dimensions approach the nanoscale. The technology is cutting edge so that the program will serve to train a new generation of scientists in this high technology field and prepare them for careers in academe, industry and government. This research focuses on measuring and understanding those factors that determine the range of magnetic coupling between magnetic moments in magnets. This parameter, the spin-spin correlation length, is a fundamental quantity that determines how the magnetism decays to zero with increasing temperature. This parameter is unknown so that the critical temperatures at which magnets lose their strength cannot be predicted with certainty. This parameter also determines how the critical temperature decreases as the dimensions of a magnet is reduced, going precipitously to zero in the nanoscale regime when the dimensions approach that of this unknown length parameter. A new discovery reveals that by plotting and fitting experimental curves of this parameter as a function of the thickness of nanoscale thin films provides a measure of this parameter. The coupling between thin magnetic layers in magnetic heterostructures is also a consequence of this same parameter. This coupling strength can be tuned to different values by carefully alloying different magnetic elements. The research program will investigate these effects in ultrathin layers and heterostructures of different coupled magnetic materials as a function of nanoscale thickness and material composition. The results are of importance to the future development of magnetic recording and magnetic memory devices as the dimensions approach the nanoscale. The technology is cutting edge so that the program will serve to educate a new generation of scientists in a rapidly evolving, high technology field doc18923 none The objective of this research project is to create techniques for capturing and reusing design procedures for parametric design. The proposed techniques will be implemented as a transparent software layer that will be placed over existing design tools, transforming them into trainable design automation tools. The designer will train these tools by solving a few sample design problems. Once trained, the tools will be capable of solving similar problems with a minimum of human intervention. The proposed approach will use decision tree learning algorithms to learn which attributes of the design best indicate which parameter the designer will change at any given point in the design procedure. Background knowledge will be used to improve the learning accuracy and to generalize the learned procedures. Neural networks will be used to learn representations for the implicit design constraints. If successful, this work will help to preserve design knowledge in a reusable form. A tremendous amount of useful information is generated during the process of designing, but often only the final result is recorded, in the form of detailed drawings. When design information is lost, future efforts to maintain the design may result in unexpected failures. Similarly, future designers may have to reinvent what was once known, or they may repeat past mistakes. The proposed work directly addresses these issues by creating techniques for capturing the procedures by which design problems are solved. Solution procedures are the distillation of the designer s understanding of a problem, thus preserving them provides a valuable resource for others who must solve similar problems doc18924 none PI: Wilfrid Gangbo, Georgia Institute of Technology The proposal uses the Monge-Kantorovich theory to study problems that originate in the kinetic theory of gases, and meteorology. The mass transportation problem was first introduced by G. Monge in and consists into finding the optimal way for moving a pile of dirt with a prescribed distribution to holes with prescribed distributions. Optimality is measured against a prescribed cost function. The original Monge problem deals only with measures that are absolutely continuous with respect to Lebesgue measures, and so, it makes sense to talk about distribution functions. We show that one can interprete the kinetic Fokker-Planck equations (KFPE) as the gradient flux of the entropy with respect to manifolds that vary in time. These manifolds are sets of probability densities for which the first moments and the standart deviation are prescribed. That restriction on the probability densities are needed to ensure conservation of total energy for the solutions constructed. This conservation law is a big deal in kinetic theory for inhomogeneous equations. Our investigations, in a special case, the so-called Maxwellian model of (KFPE), show that the Monge-Kantorovich distance is an appropriate tool for studing these problems. The cost function used here is the square of the euclidien distance. We intend to investigate the implication of our results in the study of hydrodynamic equations. To deal with measures such as combination of dirac masses, in , Kantorovich generalized the Monge problem to measures that may have singular parts. This generalization by Kantorovich turned out to find applications in various fields, including shape recognition, where one wants to compare how two curves living in the space look alike. In that case, clearly, the curves can be represented by one-dimensional measures and so, have singular parts. Other applications that are relevant to this proposal are the semigeostrophic systems, introduced by Hoskins in . The semigeostrophic systems are approxamations of the celebrated Euler equations of incompressible fluids in a system, rotating around a fix axis. These system where introduced in meteorology as models which develop fronts. There is a complete lack of analytical results on these models, and so, there is a need to develop a theory that would confirm or infirm previsions made by meteorologists. We show that these systems are infinite dimensional hamiltonian systems with respect to the Monge-Kantorovich distance, whose cost function is the square of the euclidien distance. In this proposal, we intend to extend results obtained in previous works with collaborators or graduate students. The Monge-Kantorovich theory became central in many fields of mathematics including meteorology, kinetic theory, and shape recognition. Over the past few years, it has been noticed that a class of problems in various fields, including the study of evolution of gases, can be realized by minimizing a free energy functional under the penalty that one should not pay to much to change the state of the system. Based on preliminary investigations, we believe that in this proposal, we can use the Monge-Kantorovich theory to solved problems that are considered important in the kinetic theory of gases. We start our study with the Fokker-Planck equations, a class of equations similar to the Boltzmann equations, that are fundamental in kinetic theory doc18925 none The objective of this project is to advance the fundamental understanding of the Laser Additive Manufacturing processes that is necessary for the industrial implementation of LAM in a wide range of aerospace applications. LAM combines characteristics of conventional laser welding with the ability to automatically produce complex geometries. One goal of LAM is to reduce the cost of manufacturing new aerospace components with complex features. In conventional manufacturing methods, complex features must be incorporated into a casting or forging process, at substantial cost. Cost savings can be realized by using LAM to add complex features to easy-to-produce, generic manufactured components. Other applications of LAM include the repair of worn or cracked components by selective material addition, which is substantially more economical than part replacement. In this project, the relationship between deposition process variables and the three key deposit characteristics critical to aerospace applications: melt pool size, residual stress and microstructure will be developed. This understanding will be demonstrated through model results presented in the form of process maps, which map out the dependence of deposit characteristics on process variables such as laser power and laser velocity. Process maps will be of direct use to industry researchers working to advance LAM processes. This research establishes a strong collaborative team including academic researchers from three universities, government researchers from two national labs, and several industry partners. The results of this work are expected to have a significant impact on the widespread industrial implementation of LAM processes. This project will also expose graduate, undergraduate and high school students to research integrating aerospace applications and manufacturing constraints with the fundamentals of solid mechanics, heat transfer and materials science doc18926 none ly. The purpose of this project is to study and develop the properties of a new representation-theoretic tool, double affine Hecke algebras, that can be used in the application of representation theory to physics (conformal field theory) and combinatorics. Combinatorics is the science of counting the possible arrangements and ways of organizing collections of anything (e.g., atoms, pebbles, star clusters doc18927 none The principal investigator proposes to study linear systems of higher dimensional varieties. In particular, he plans to apply the methods of higher dimensional geometry to study some basic questions from different areas of algebraic geometry such as birational geometry, commutative algebra, computational complexity, geometry of algebraic curves, jet schemes of singular varieties and geometry of big divisors. He has already obtained results in the following areas, (1) effective results on Nullstellensatz and syzygies of ideals, (2) singularities of theta divisors and birational geometry of irregular varieties, (3) Fujita s problems on adjoint linear systems and (4) studying symbolic power of an ideal. But there are still many fundamental problems remain unsolved. He plans to develop new methods and techniques to study them. Algebraic geometry is one of the oldest areas in mathematics and it studies geometric, algebraic and arithmetic properties of geometric objects defined by algebraic equations. Algebraic geoemtry also has applications to mathematical physics and cryptography. In this project, the principal investigator develops new techniques to study algebra, computational complexity and properties of higher dimensional geometric objects doc18928 none The recent increase in demand for information bandwidth has created the need for improving current technologies for data, voice and video transmission. The telecommunications industry has increasingly emphasized the development of fiberoptic networks to meet this demand. One key to creating this infrastructure is the production of economical fiberoptic components, such as wave guides and Bragg gratings. Current manufacturing techniques for optical components and fiber preforms are limited to vapor deposition techniques and photolithographic processes. This research is to advance the field of optical component manufacturing through innovative direct-write processing. Our goal is to develop a novel manufacturing process based on laser sintering of materials produced from sol-gel processing techniques. Research tasks include: (1) characterizating the chemistry and processing of sol-gels; (2) design, construction, and testing of a workstation for combined sol-gel preparation and laser densification of multi-layer optical components; (3) developing a real time controller for the workstation; and (4) fabricating three-dimensional optical components to demonstrate the process. We expect fundamental science-based results in the areas of unique sol-gel materials and chemistry, repeatability of sol-gel processing, materials characterization, models for optical property control, machine design of sol-gel deposition and densification, and laser processing methods for micron and sub-micron materials. We also expect overall deliverables of a repeatable direct-write process and example 3D optical components. Collaboration with an industrial partner, 3M Corporation, will provide fundamental understanding of the industry needs and capabilities, leading to a higher potential for future commercialization. These unique research experiences will provide direct educational benefits to both graduate and undergraduate students in systems design engineering and optical product realization. We believe our approach will lead to innovative optical component designs, not producible by current vapor deposition techniques. These components will provide higher performance and enable the telecommunications industry to better meet the needs of society doc18929 none This project involves the connections between generating functions for height pairings of arithmetic cycles on certain Shimura varieties, on the one hand, and second terms in the Laurent expansions of elliptic modular and Siegel modular Eisenstein series at certain critical points, on the other. The generating functions can be viewed as arithmetic analogues of theta functions and can be use to define arithmetic analogues of the classical theta correspondence, now taking certain types of modular forms to elements of arithmetic Chow groups. A main goal is to prove analogues of Rallis s inner product formula for these arithmetic theta lifts, which will now involve derivatives of L-functions. Thus, it is hoped that one may ultimately obtain information about higher dimensional analogues of the Gross-Zagier formula and the Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. In the later part of the 20th century significant advances were made in developing a `number theoretic geometry, in which an additional dimension is added to carry information involving the interaction between the geometry and prime numbers. To a point on such a space, one can attach a number call its height, which is a measure of its `arithmetic complexity . More generally, heights can be defined for higher dimensional objects, curves on surfaces, for example. The present project studies combinatorial relations among such heights, which reflect hidden structure carried by the spaces of `number theoretic geometry doc18930 none This award supports improvements in the capability and reliability of the X-ray diffraction laboratory used for study of single crystals of biological macromolecules at Purdue University. The equipment to be obtained with this support will be used for in research aimed at determination of the three-dimensional crystal structures of proteins, RNA molecules, and of protein-nucleic acid complexes. Knowledge of such structures are essential to molecular level understanding of how biological macromolecules function in a variety of processes. Three types of equipment will be obtained: a new diffraction instrument that will improve throughput and, by providing a more monochromatic and intense X-ray beam, that will facilitate the study of very large macromolecules. The new instrument will allow flash-frozen crystals to be saved in their frozen state for later diffraction experiments. A new optical system for an existing diffraction instrument will improve the intensity and quality of the X-ray beam, permitting more pricise measurements and use of smaller crystals than now possible. Finally a new microspectrophotometer will be obtained to monitor enzymatic reactions and measure ligand binding of crystalline macromolecules. The award provides improved infrastructure for one of the nation s leading academic laboratories in one of the most important areas of contemporary biology doc18931 none The project focuses on cluster algebras recently discovered by the investigator in collaboration with S.Fomin. Cluster algebras are integral domains of a special kind designed to provide an algebraic framework for the study of total positivity and canonical bases in semisimple groups and their representations. The investigator studies structural properties of cluster algebras and their quantum deformations. This study uncovers unexpected connections with such diverse subjects as the structural theory of Kac-Moody algebras, thermodynamic Bethe ansatz, quiver representations, and integrable systems. One of the main instruments of the study is polyhedral combinatorics, more specifically, an interplay between piecewise-linear and subtraction-free birational transformations based on the tropical calculus. The main motivation for this project comes from two classical areas of mathematics: representation theory and the theory of total positivity. Representation theory is a mathematical approach to studying symmetry; more specifically, it encodes the symmetry properties of various physical and biological systems that occur in nature. Total positivity is a remarkable property of matrices (arrays of numbers) that generalizes the familiar notion of positive numbers. Both theories find numerous applications in physics, chemistry and other sciences, as well as in other mathematical disciplines. In fact, representation theory serves as the mathematical foundation of quantum mechanics, while total positivity is a major tool for explaining oscillations in mechanical systems. During the last decade, deep connections were found between the two fields, and the scope of their applications was greatly extended. This project explores the modern framework of representation theory and total positivity, with the goal of making its formalism much more explicit and understandable doc18932 none Wallach This project will study several related problems in representation theory, non-commutative harmonic analysis and algebraic group theory. In representation theory it involves the construction, study and application of small unitary representations of real reductive groups. In harmonic analysis, it involves dropping the K-finite condition in Paley-Wiener theorems for rapidly decreasing functions on a real reductive group. This analysis will be applied to proving a version of the Casselman-Wallach theorem depending on parameters. This theorem will imply a meromorphic continuation of non-K-finite Eisenstein series. Related to these more analytic problems we will study the algebraic problem of determining graded multiplicities for the irreducible constituents of the action of a reductive algebraic group on an affine cone. The latter work also has applications to the analysis and to the study of measures of entanglement in quantum computing. Representation theory has its roots in nineteenth century invariant theory, early twentieth century quantum mechanics and mid-twentieth century number theory. In this first decade of the twenty first century the theory has returned to its roots. The nineteenth century invariant theory emphasized concrete questions on binary forms with algorithmic solutions. These problems have reemerged and are now being generalized to apply to quantum computation. Early quantum mechanics studied puzzling and weird measurements involving photons, electrons etc. These phenomena led to the Hilbert space approach to quantum mechanics. The philosophical debates of the early quantum mechanics have reemerged as quantum information technology. The Hilbert space approach also gave birth to representation theory, which has as one of its main applications in number theory. The Langlands program has established a goal for the twenty first century to establish a non-commutative class field theory (Wile s proof of Fermat s Last Theorem is actually proof of a special case of the Tanayama-Shimura conjecture which is a special case of the Langlands program). This project is in the interface of all of these exciting directions doc18933 none In this project we focus on the class of capacity planning and resource allocation problems in which customers view waiting times as one of their major concerns. The objective is to develop a methodology for joint optimal capacity planning and demand allocation for such problems. An important phase in this project is to develop an understanding of customer reactions to capacity allocation rules. The project will be conducted through the following steps: (i) Develop mathematical models for the joint capacity planning and demand allocation problem. (ii) Determine structural properties of the main sub-components of the problem, viz., capacity planning and demand allocation, including customer s individual optimization for any given capacity allocation. (iii) Develop optimal combined capacity planning and demand allocation algorithms for use in diverse settings. The expected output of this project includes theoretical insight as well as algorithms for capacity planning and demand allocation in dynamic environments that will be of use to manufacturing managers, supply chain managers, distribution systems planners, and service operations managers. Growing global competition and rapid changes in information technology are forcing companies to pay more attention to customer needs and system responsiveness; service delivery has become a key factor in improving a company s competitive position. Many US companies have expanded both nationally and internationally not only to take advantage of tariff, labor and other incentives but also to provide better customer service. These firms, both manufacturing and service, operate over a wide-spread geographic area and face a dynamic environment in which there are random changes in demand within and across geographic boundaries. However, capacity planning alone will not guarantee success in such global diversification ventures. In most realistic situations, even though customers can be served by any one of many regional facilities, some customers may have a natural affinity for being served at a specific facility because of time or cost considerations. On the other hand, as the capacity at one location is expanded, more customers are attracted from other regions to this location for service. The overall effect of these inter-region flows can deteriorate the performance at some facilities while other facilities remain underutilized. This project develops methodologies and understanding for these capacity allocation problems by taking into consideration how customers react to the firm s allocation decisions.Growing global competition and rapid changes in information technology are forcing companies to pay more attention to customer needs and system responsiveness; service delivery has become a key factor in improving a company s competitive position. Many US companies have expanded both nationally and internationally not only to take advantage of tariff, labor and other incentives but also to provide better customer service. These firms, both manufacturing and service, operate over a wide-spread geographic area and face a dynamic environment in which there are random changes in demand within and across geographic boundaries. However, capacity planning alone will not guarantee success in such global diversification ventures. In most realistic situations, even though customers can be served by any one of many regional facilities, some customers may have a natural affinity for being served at a specific facility because of time or cost considerations. On the other hand, as the capacity at one location is expanded, more customers are attracted from other regions to this location for service. The overall effect of these inter-region flows can deteriorate the performance at some facilities while other facilities remain underutilized. This project develops methodologies and understanding for these capacity allocation problems by taking into consideration how customers react to the firm s allocation decisions doc18934 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Bacterial-fungal interactions: novel signals and response mechanisms that influence development of bacterial communities in the presence of fungi. In the natural environment, many microorganisms construct complex communities known as biofilms. This research focuses on signaling interactions between bacteria and fungi in the context of biofilms through characterization of multiple bacterial-fungal pairs. Genetic techniques and microarray analyses are being used to identify genes involved in dual-species interactions, in order to define signaling mechanisms important to bacterial-fungal communities doc18913 none This research will develop new lift-and-project methods for 0-1 mixed-integer programming. These methods will encompass two classes of techniques. The research team will consider lifting an n-dimensional point to a zeta-vector of the subset algebra of the n-dimensional hypercube, thereby extending the Lovasz-Schrijver, Sherali-Adams, Lasserre methods, as well as the disjunctive programming ( lift and project ) method of Balas, Ceria and Cornuejols. Such a lifting appears promising in that it produces higher-dimensional objects faster than the previously mentioned methods. The second class of techniques will consider successively refining a disjunction to generate deeper cutting planes. Integer programming embodies the systematic solution of planning problems arising in numerous practical settings, e.g. transportation, logistics, supply chain, finance, power generation and others. Such problems are inherently non-continuous: they involve the allocation of discrete units of resources. As such, they are extremely intractable. At the same time, accurate solutions translate into substantial savings, and thus there is a need for effective solution methodologies. The impact of this research will be to broaden the class of problems that can be successfully tackled, using innovative techniques doc18936 none Fast Algorithms for a Class of Large-Scale Semidefinite Programs that are Widely Encountered in Systems and Control Applications Semidefinite programming (SDP), i.e., convex optimization with linear matrix inequality (LMI) constraints, is now widely recognized as a powerful numerical tool in several areas of engineering, including control, communication, signal processing, and circuit design. However, some limitations of SDP have become apparent. Most important, the reduction of an engineering problem to an SDP often requires a large number of auxiliary variables, so that the resulting SDP problem can be very large, even though the underlying engineering problem is not particularly large-scale. This limits the problem sizes that can be handled by general-purpose SDP solvers, and hence the applicability of SDP in practical engineering problems. In order to have an impact on engineering practice, future SDP solvers will have to be able to take advantage of problem structure, without overly restricting their scope of applicability or sacrificing reliability. Motivated by these observations, we have identified a class of engineering problems with a rich enough structure that much faster special SDP algorithms can be devised for it, but with wide enough applicability that the benefit is widespread. Specifically, we address the fast solution of SDP problems where the underlying LMIs have a special form that is typically encountered with the application of the Kalman-Yakubovich-Popov Lemma. The research component of the proposal will contribute to the propagation of SDP into the mainstream of engineering practice. The educational component will provide graduate student researchers with an interdisciplinary training in control, optimization, and numerical computing doc18937 none What is proposed is the study and use of periodic dielectric structures with modulated optical gain, so called active photonic lattices (APLs), for the realization of watt-range coherent, surface-emitted powers from two-dimensional (2-D) horizontal-cavity devices with 2nd-order gratings of novel design. In sharp contrast to conventional APLs, the proposed devices have gain in the low-index lattice sites. In turn, long range (coherent) coupling via traveling waves will become possible via resonant leaky-wave coupling between the low-index lattice sites. The proposed 2-D APLs combine antiguided phase-locked arrays with surface emission from 2nd-order DFB DBR grating structures. Unlike all previously reported 2nd-order grating DFB surface emitters, the proposed structures employ central grating phase shifts of around pi, which insure emission in an orthonormal, single-lobe beam at no penalty in device efficiency. In addition, the grating structure, besides insuring single-longitudinal-mode operation, will act as a highly effective selector of a single lateral mode: the in-phase array mode. As a consequence large-aperture (200mm x mm) coherent sources of nearly uniform 2-D guided-field profiles will be capable to operate in a stable, single diffraction-limited beam to watt-range CW output powers. First, a Bloch-function model will be developed for analyzing the proposed 2-D APL-type device. Then, upon applying the model for device-design optimization, the device structure will be fabricated by metal-organic chemical vapor deposition, followed by grating fabrication via holographic interferometry and wet chemical etching. To create the necessary grating p phase shift, a dual-tone photoresist will be used. To create the phase-locked array (in the lateral direction), narrow periodic trenches will be etched into the top surface, and then high-index material (GaAs) will be regrown as to provide an antiguided array. After depositing the necessary metallization on the device p-side, a stripe window will be created in the device n-side metallization, to allow 1st-order diffracted light to be emitted in a direction normal to the laser-chip surface. Initial work will be done on 20-element arrays to prove the concept of lateral-array-mode selection via the 2nd-order diffraction grating as well as to confirm enhancement in beam brightness due to the grating existence only in the antiguided-array cores. 40-element arrays will then be developed. For effective lateral-mode selection, longitudinally tapered DBR reflectors will be used. For analysis of such intermodal discrimination the beam-propagation method will be employed. Devices will be fabricated (by using standard photolithrography and wet chemical etching in the DBR-grating (reflector) regions doc18938 none Lynne Cassimeris A grant has been awarded to Dr. Lynne Cassimeris at Lehigh University to purchase a Laser Scanning Confocal Microscope. This microscope will support a research community that includes faculty in biological sciences, physics, chemical engineering, earth and environmental sciences, materials science, and biology faculty at nearby colleges and universities. The confocal microscope will facilitate rapid three-dimensional imaging of microscopic structures, allowing researchers to examine specimens in ways that are not possible with conventional light microscopes. The confocal microscope images will be used to answer questions about where and when specific molecules are active during biological processes. The confocal microscope will have a major impact on the research programs of numerous faculty at Lehigh University, ranging from cell biology and neuroscience to the structure and dynamics of colloidal crystals. Studies in the research areas conducted at hehigh will not only contribute to our understanding of basic cellular and organismal processes, but may also have future practical applications to human health. The microscope system will also provide valuable training to young researchers by exposing undergraduates, graduate students and post-doctoral fellows to state-of-the-art light microscopy doc18939 none This project seeks to develop novel nanocomposite foams, based on a combination of nanoparticle technology and supercritical fluids (SCF) technology. With proper design of the nanoparticle type, content, dispersion, an orientation, the solubility of SCF in the polymer matrix, the rheological properties of nanoparticle containing polymer, and nucleation and foam growth mechanism can be tailored to generate a wide spectrum of foams with well-defined pore structure. They include closed or open cellular structures; macro, mire, and nano-cellular foams. The presence of nanoparticles can provide improved mechanical strength and physical properties, such as diffusion barrier and fire retardance, that are essential for many engineering applications. The large surface area of nanoparticles may also serve as templates for added functions to the polymer foams. Examples are bioactive molecules such as growth factors to facilitate cell growth in tissue engineering, an electric or magnetic conductive molecules for EMI shielding. This project decribes a scientific effort at developing environmentally benign technology in direct response to regulatory action. In order to remain viable and compete in the construction industry of the twenty-first century, industries producing polymeric foam products have no choice but to operate in an ecologically conscious manner. Education impact and recruitment of under-represented minorities is addressed through collaboration between the Center for Advanced Polymer and Composite Engineering at The Ohio State University and Florida A& M University - FSU. By combining expertise in foam production from industry with thermodynamics, rheology, and polymer processing in academia, this project demonstrates the potential for rapid development of this alternative blowing agent doc18940 none Recent striking results establishing the existence of the functorial symmetric powers of degree 3 and 4 for cusp forms on GL(2) as automorphic forms on GL(4) and GL(5), as well as transfer of generic cusp forms from odd special orthogonal groups to general linear groups, by the investigator and his collaborator, has opened a new front in automorphic forms and number theory. They have resulted in surprising new estimates towards Ramanujan--Selberg and Sato--Tate conjectures, together with a large number of impressive, definitive and new results in number theory, automorphic forms and geometry obtained by other mathematicians. The investigator explores extensions of these to higher powers of forms on GL(2) as well as transfers of generic forms on other classical groups and their simply connected similitude coverings. The well-known and still open case of transfer from GSp(4) to GL(4) then becomes a special case of this. Beside exploring new ideas of Langlands on transferring beyond endoscopy, a situation which is already present in the third and fourth symmetric powers, he plans to investigate any possible extension of his method to infinite dimensional groups. He has a solid approach to establishing the stability of root numbers necessary for these transfers, by means of his method, and studies Bessel functions and the full generality of all the root numbers defined from his method. Stability of a subclass of these root numbers is the last serious problem in establishing these transfers. The investigator is also working on a number of problems concerning poles of local intertwining operators as well as those of automorphic L-functions coming from his method. Much of this work is carried out in collaboration with collaborators. The theory of automorphic forms is a very powerful, exciting and promising part of modern mathematics. Through a number of deep conjectures, mainly due to Robert Langlands of the Institute for Advanced Study (Langlands program), it tries to unify objects from different parts of mathematics such as number theory, analysis and geometry. Wiles proof of Fermat s Last Theorem, which is a consequence of relating plane curves defined by equations of degree three with rational coefficients to functions on complex upper half plane, provides an excellent example of this vast program. The investigator s recent work with his collaborators has led to new, striking and surprising correspondences of this sort with many consequences in number theory and geometry. While this has resolved some very long standing and significant problems, many more important questions need to be answered. In this project, the investigator uses methods of analysis, i.e., the study of continuous objects, that he has developed over his career and have been fundamental in the recent progress, to establish new correspondences of this kind between objects of a discrete nature with many applications to different parts of number theory and geometry. The project involves many collaborations and training for graduate students and postdocs doc18941 none PI: Vladimir Sverak, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities Proposal Regularity Theory for Partial Differential Equations with Super-critical Nonlinearities by V. Sverak : In this proposal we suggest to study open problems in regularity theory of the following partial differential equations: 1. strongly elliptic systems arising as Euler-Lagrange equations for multiple integrals in the Calculus of Variations; 2. three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations and some related model equations; and 3. Complex Ginzburg-Landau Equations and Landau-Lifschitz equations. The regularity theory for these equations is mainly governed by two factors: the smoothing properties of the linearized operator, and the tendency of the non-linear part to produce singularities. In all the cases above there is a certain critical dimension below which (and, in many cases, at which) the natural energy estimates for the equations together with smoothing properties of the linearized operator are sufficient to guarantee regularity of solutions. For most of the equations above the critical dimension is two. The situation is more complicated above the critical dimension, when the specifics of each equation come much more into play, and not many results are known. The research will concentrate on problems in this relatively unmapped area. The study of regularity theory for Partial Differential Equations (PDE) is usually motivated by the following factors: (1) A good regularity theory can serve as an important check that a PDE is appropriate for modeling a given phenomena. (2) The more information we have about regularity of solutions of a given PDE, the better chance we have to design a good numerical method for calculating its solutions on a computer. It is no coincidence that the equations for which we can calculate solutions accurately are more or less exactly those for which we have a good regularity theory. (Confirming that There is nothing quite so practical as a good theory .) Roughly speaking, the more we know about solutions, the easier it is the avoid some of the many pitfalls into which numerical simulations can fall. The work suggested in this proposal will address basic open problems in regularity theory for important classes of equations with strong non-linearities. Many of these equations (such as the Navier-Stokes equations, or the Landau-Lifschitz equations) are of considerable practical interest doc18942 none This grant provides funding for the development of techniques for the simulation of machining at the atomic level, known as, molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. The following three important areas of simulation that would have a significant impact on our understanding of the cutting process will be considered. They are: (1) simulations of machining at conventional cutting speeds, never before attempted due to long processing times involved with conventional MD simulations, (2) simulations of machining of semiconductor materials, such as silicon, germanium with a diamond tool. Also, included under this category are the simulations of machining of iron with a diamond tool to investigate the chemical nature of wear and simulations of machining of bcc (body centered cubic) and hcp (hexagonal close packed) materials (in addition to fcc (face centered cubic) metals currently being modeled), using the Modified Embedded Atom Method (MEAM), and (3) use of parallel processing in a distributed computing environment (or Beowulf cluster) to significantly reduce the computational time per run so that large size work pieces (up to 1 million atoms) or lower cutting speeds can be considered. The hybrid Molecular Dynamics Monte Carlo (MD MC) approach enables addressing of the machining problem at conventional cutting speeds. In MC simulations, time (or the cutting velocity) is not an explicit variable as one is concerned with a series of equilibrium states. However, it is involved indirectly through the temperature in the cutting process. If one knows the temperature distribution at conventional cutting speeds a priori, then this information can be used as an input to the MC moves. The work proposed under this grant will enable determination of mechanical properties of semiconductor materials at nanoscale for application to microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and for ultraprecision machining of a wide range of materials (both metals and semiconductor materials). It may be noted that experimental techniques require very expensive high precision, high rigidity machine tools in a temperature controlled environment and costly single crystal diamond tools. The simulations can provide adequate information such that only a few tests to verify the MD simulation results are necessary. The new hybrid MD MC approach also enables use of larger size workpieces (up to a million atoms) and cutting speeds close to conventional doc18943 none This grant provides for the development of a metrology tool to enhance quality assurance of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). The micro-interferometers developed will enable the high-speed geometric measurement of micro-geometries providing feedback as to the conformance of the micro-part geometry to target specifications. The sensors to be developed in this research are based on diffraction grating interferometry making them extremely accurate, reliable and fast. As the sensors are fabricated using MEMS technology, they can be inexpensively fabricated in the form of an array. Furthermore, electrostatic drives will be integrated into the sensor arrays along with electronics and logic for tuning individual sensors in the array. This will permit the generation of self-tuning, parallel sensors increasing the speed at which a group of MEMS parts can be measured with sub-nanometer resolution. Inspection results will be generated for several known geometries to validate the sensors. The micro-interferometer arrays, which provide three-dimensional information, will also be compared to current two-dimensional metrology systems used in IC fabrication as another means of determining their capabilities. If successful, the proposed work will enable the measurement of micro-components that are critical in micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). To date, measurement of such devices has been slow and inaccurate at best. The new metrology capabilities will enable both an increased understanding of the quality level of such systems that will, in turn, permit the monitoring and enhancement of the processes that are used in fabricating such systems. Furthermore, the speed at which measurement can be taken with the proposed sensors will enable dynamic measurement of moving MEMS devices. This will permit the validation of not only the static geometry of the devices, but also the validation of the dynamic behavior of these devices doc18944 none Laser shock processing (LSP), also known as laser peening, is a process in which beneficial compressive residual stress is imparted into surface layer of metallic parts by directed laser pulses. Parts are treated the specific areas prone to premature failures. It was incepted in early 70 s and is currently in production for parts such as turbine blades using millimeter-sized laser beams. Motivated by the rapid progress being made in microsystem design and fabrication, preliminary studies on micro-scale LSP (i.e., using laser spot size of a few microns) have shown feasibility. While the dominant material in microsystems is silicon, metallic thick- and thin-film structures are often an integral part. Some of these metallic microstructures, such as MEMS actuators, metal-coated micro-gears, micro medical implants, micro-switches, and relays, experience cyclic loads in service. The goal of the project is thus to advance the state of knowledge in micro-scale LSP technology, and to develop reliable ability to modify metallic structures in microsystems, with controlled mechanical proper-ties, microstructures and fatigue performance. More specifically, the aims of this project are (1) to de-velop better understanding and reliable prediction capabilities for the micro-scale LSP by properly consid-ering phenomena important to the micro scale concerned, and by considering both bulk, thick- and thin-film materials; and (2) to design and properly execute an aggressive experimental program to complement the modeling effort and to accumulate experimental data for further development. This program will in-vestigate characterization methods appropriate for the micro-scale concerned to measure residual stress distribution; and methods to quantify microstructure change caused by LSP. This research is of substantial interest to industry, and support from IBM, LSP Technologies and Brookhaven National Lab will provide intellectual and characterization exchanges. Education outreach to a diverse group of undergraduate stu-dents through local chapters of professional societies in the New York City area will enhance efforts to recruit and retain these students in engineering doc18945 none Biomicromechanics of Heart Muscle Tissue Function Ellen M. Arruda, Ph. D., PI Karl Grosh, Ph. D., co-PI Sixty thousand patients under the age of 65 die each year from end-stage heart failure in the U.S. as a result of cardiomyopathy. Cardiac function is altered as a result of both systolic and diastolic impairment; usually the diastolic dysfunction precedes the systolic component. There is a critical need for very early diagnosis of this disease in order to provide an appropriate treatment. The long-term objective of our work in this area is the development of an echocardiograph-based biosensor of heart muscle tissue for early non-invasive detection of cardiomyopathy. This will consist of an echocardiograph, a strain imaging module and a constitutive law for heart muscle tissue. Currently pressure loads can be estimated via real-time blood flow information available from the doppler ultrasound measurements of the echocardiograph. A module for strain imaging is available on only a few specialized machines, but it is currently not used for diagnosis. The third element that is critically needed in the development of a biosensor, and addressed in this Proposal, is a predictive constitutive model of the heart muscle tissue. The aim of this Project is to develop a constitutive law for cardiac muscle tissue that describes its overall motion in terms of its response to electrical and mechanical stimuli in vivo. This will enable a correlation between changes in tissue properties with various stages of disease and echocardiograph-identified changes in cardiac function with cardiomyopathy, as well as the establishment of non-invasive criteria for the early diagnosis of cardiomyopathy prior to the stage of systolic dysfunction. Strain speckle imaging via echocardiographs will also be developed in this Project to non-invasively detect early stages of disease in patients with cardiomyopathy. These studies will lead to a better understanding of the mechanism of this process and better and earlier treatment of these patients. Canines involved in current studies at University of Michigan, in various stages of health and cardiac disease, will be euthanized and their ventricles excised for investigation of the changes in cardiac tissue response with cardiomyopathy. Mechanical tests and histology will be conducted on the ventricle and papillary muscle tissue to characterize them. Changes in material properties and physical characteristics with diseased myocardium will be documented by using dilated and hypertrophied canine populations and comparing them to the healthy populations. Our orthotropic constitutive model for soft tissue will be extended by including the role of additional deformation mechanisms in the response of myocardium, such as muscle activity and viscoelasticity. Moreover, the ability of the modeling approach to continue to capture the response of diseased myocardium will be assessed using the various canine populations. Mechanisms of cardiomyopathies will be described in terms of the changes in the physical parameters in the model. A commerical ultrasound strain imaging module donated for this project will be tested as a tool for in vivo elastography using canines. The accuracy of this technique will be examined by in vitro mechanical testing of excised cardiac tissue from the same animals. Mechanisms for cardiomyopathy will be examined by comparing the response of the myocardium at various stages before and after rejection and comparing these with echocardiograph-identified changes in cardiac function in the same patients doc18946 none Microwave processing of polymer composite materials is an increasingly important technology for the polymer industry and its customers. Polymer composites combine the best properties of its constituent parts, namely a polymer matrix along with a suitable filler such as glass, to achieve a new material that has superior properties to the original materials, including low cost. Desirable and achieved properties of polymer composite materials include improved strength and temperature tolerance among others. Microwave processing, as compared to convection processing, has been shown to yield superior mechanical properties as well as be more efficient in terms of energy requirements and time-to-manufacture. Microwave processing of polymer composites is similar to microwave heating of food in the ubiquitous microwave ovens. The electromagnetic energy within the microwave oven interacts with the material being processed and heats it throughout the volume rather than via surface heating. The temperature change causes a change in polymer composition (hence the curing process). This coupling between electromagnetic energy, temperature rise, and composition changes is not well understood resulting in unexplained over- and under-cured regions in the composite. The Departments of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering are combining expertise in polymer processing, microwave energy, and thermal propagation to investigate the fundamental interaction between electromagnetic energy absorption, temperature change, and composition change. In addition, development of a multi-port microwave applicator is planned that will significantly reduce the cost of applicator construction due to the use of lower power microwave sources than is used in practice today. Both theoretical modeling of these coupled phenomena as well as experimental verification of results will be pursued. It is anticipated that the results of this project will be an improved microwave applicator and processing protocol that will significantly improve industrial polymer composite processing methods. The principal investigators are actively participating in a program at MSU to provide education and mentoring to under-represented minority and women engineering students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels doc18947 none The research component of this proposal involves two overall topics, which the P.I. has been investigating in the past few years. The first is the study of random objects such as random graphs, random matrices and random walks. This study is one of the central topics in modern combinatorics with vital connections several fast developing areas such as theoretical computer science and statistical physics. The P.I. and his colleagues consider several open questions about various models of random graphs, with the main focus on random regular graphs. They also attack several problems on random walks on graphs and the spectra of random matrices. Some of these questions have high potential in practice and are very exciting from the computer science point of view. For instance, one of the key questions of the proposal is to find a fast algorithm to generate a random graph. The second topic of the proposal is additive theory. Here the P.I. considers questions about the length of the longest arithmetic progression in various sum sets. For instance, a typical question is the following: Given m integers from 1 to n, what is the length of the longest arithmetic progression obtained by the partial sums of these integers. He also studies a fundamental problem about thin basis, which went back to a problem posed by Sidon more than sixty years ago. Here is a sample question: What is the smallest density of a set P of primes so that every natural number can be represented as a sum of at most 100 elements of P ? Random objects such as random graphs and random walks have been widely used to model real-life processes for a long time (think of the movement of a particle, for instance). The newest and perhaps most exciting example is the Internet graph, which has been modelled as a random graph where the number of connections to each node (site) satisfies certain laws. Therefore, the study of random objects is not only theoretically challenging but also has high potential in practical applications. A large part of the P.I. s work is to develop a better understanding of random graphs to answer very fundamental questions such as how does the graph expand ? or how does the graph change if more edges (connections) are added ? or how to simulate a random graph by computers . Despite their simplicity, these questions have been open for many years and their answers might require the development of entirely new ideas and methods. The second part of the P.I. s work deals with classical questions in number theory, motivated by results and questions of great mathematicians such as Waring, Erdos, Freiman and Sidon. The work in this part would lead to a better understanding of the additive properties of natural numbers doc18948 none This grant provides funding for developing systematic optimization-based design methodologies for contact-aided compliant mechanisms. Compliant mechanisms are joint-less elastic structures that are not only easy to manufacture at macro and micro scales but are also superior in performance to traditional rigid-body jointed mechanisms. In this project, intermittent contact between different portions of the elastic continuum of the compliant mechanism is utilized to obtain non-smooth motions. Non-smooth motions to be considered in this research include sudden changes in the slopes and curvatures of paths traced by relevant points on the mechanism as well as force-deflection characteristics. The design methodologies will be developed by exploiting the change of boundary conditions that result when a point on the mechanism contacts another point or the rigid surface and causes a sudden change in the kinematic and kinetostatic be havior of the mechanism. The topology and the shape of the mechanism as well as the rigid surface near the mechanism will be designed for desired non-smooth behavior. Large deformation-based nonlinear elastic analysis, design sensitivity analysis, and non-smooth optimization techniques will be utilized to achieve the goals of this project. The successful completion of this project will lead to general principles and systematic design methodology for achieving non-smooth motions with single-piece compliant mechanisms - a capability not possible today. One of the anticipated goals of this project is to design a compliant crank , which makes conversion of reciprocating translation input to continuous uni-directional full rotational output with a single elastic structure. It will have an impact on micro scale devices as well as macro scale products. On the theoretical side, the optimization techniques to be developed in this research will contribute to general area of non-smooth optimization. One of the educational contributions of this project will be to make contact analysis and non-smooth optimization codes available on the internet for general access by the students, practicing engineers, and researchers doc18949 none This research is on the Theory of Symmetric Functions and its applications to Representation Theory and Combinatorics. The connection between Representation Theory and the Theory of Symmetric Functions is provided by the Frobenius map which relates group characters to symmetric functions. Combinatorics plays a role in that multiplicities of irreducibles are often obtained by counting tableaux, paths, trees and a growing variety of newly emerging discrete structures. In the more than ten years since its discovery, the Macdonald basis has progressively emerged as a central element in these connections. For more than a decade of research in the Theory of Macdonald Polynomials, the investigator and M. Haiman have been led to a variety of conjectures in Representation Theory, Algebraic Geometry, Combinatorics and Symmetric Function Theory. Efforts in proving these conjectures have yielded fundamental facts and methods in each of these areas. More recently the investigator discovered a variety of summation formulas (PNAS V. 98 (April ) - ) which permitted the proof of the first significant positivity result in the Theory of Macdonald Polynomials. In joint work with J. Haglund the investigator proved a beautiful combinatorial formula (conjectured by J. Haglund) for a rational function which had come to be known as the $q,t$-Catalan. The investigator in collaboration with students and associates plans to use his recently discovered symmetric function identities for a direct attack of some of the conjectures that are still unresolved. The Theory of Symmetric Functions is a powerful symbolic manipulation tool. The reason for this is that non linear problems may often be linearized by the introduction of an infinite number of variables. Now it develops that the change of bases matrices of Symmetric Function Theory may be used to mimic the presence of infinities within a finite device, thereby permitting the linearization and solution of many a computational problem. Discoveries in the theory and applications of symmetric functions, should also turn out to be of significant impact in the various areas of mathematics in which symmetric function methods have been shown to be effective. This given, we can see how important it is to pursue investigations in the Theory of Symmetric functions that extend and deepen the computational power of the theory. This is the foremost goal of the present project doc18950 none Optical buffering is essential to optical packet switch implementations which have been proposed worldwide to overcome future problems with large electronic packet switches. We propose to design and fabricate semiconductor-based optical buffers by using sampled gratings, Moir gratings, and chirped Moir gratings. These gratings will be fabricated using a new method to obtain a photonic bandgap-engineered material that has a large index contrast, which is essential for group velocity reduction in our proposed gratings. Optical fiber delay lines have been commonly used in recent years in the design of optical buffers, typically through a fiber loop with standard components such as optical isolators, 3-dB couplers, and semiconductor laser amplifiers for the gating, interconnection, and signal amplification. The fundamental difficulty facing the design of an optical buffer is that variable-length buffers must be implemented with delay lines; however, by their nature, fiber loop optical delay lines are of fixed length. Our proposed optical buffer, unlike fiber loop delay lines, is variable by using current injection. Another significant advantage is that other semiconductor optoelectronic and optical devices can be integrated with our proposed variable optical buffers since they are based on the same semiconductor III-V compounds. Our proposed tasks include the design and fabrication of sampled gratings, Moir gratings, and chirped Moir gratings as slow-wave devices. The wavelength range for our proposed devices will be centered at 1.5-1.6 micron wavelength. Sampled gratings and Moir gratings can be shown to have a large group delay factor when a large contrast in the refractive index is introduced. This large refractive index contrast will be achieved using our proposed semiconductor and oxide materials. This contrast is at least two orders of magnitude larger than that of the fiber gratings. A chirped Moir grating allows for a broader bandwidth for the pass band. A novel photonic bandgap structure will be fabricated using periodic buried AlOx channels with growth on a patterned substrate. The advantages of this structure include tight optical and electrical confinement with very low defect densities. One or multiple current sources can be applied to the gratings via the doped AlGaAs layer to change the refractive index in the slow-wave structures for controlling the buffer delay. Our research will lead to the realization of a new class of semiconductor optical buffers, which can be immediately integrated with many optoelectronic devices doc18951 none This award is in support of studies of spatial squeezing in optical second harmonic generation. Practical sources of radiation fields exhibiting time domain quadrature squeezing, twin-beam correlations, and other quantum optical phenomena were developed in the s and s. We will investigate spatial aspects of non-classical light generated by optical second harmonic generation. Spatial squeezing has been theoretically predicted to appear in second harmonic generation as a sub-critical precursor of transverse modulational instability. We are working on a series of experiments aimed at observing both classical patterns above the modulational instability threshold, as well as the below threshold quantum signatures. The experimental work uses singly and doubly resonant optical cavities driven by continuous wave and nanosecond pulsed near infrared sources. Detailed measurements will be made of the degree of squeezing as a function of cavity tuning, phase mismatch, and spatial wavenumber. We will also work with parameter regimes where the second harmonic field that is internally generated in the optical cavity directly drives the competing process of optical parametric oscillation. This so-called internally pumped optical parametric oscillator (IPOPO) has the unique feature that the down converted parametric fields that display non-classical correlations are generated at the same wavelength as the incident pump beam using a single nonlinear crystal. This eliminates the need for separate frequency doubling stages, which reduces device complexity, and greatly facilitates frequency tuning of the combined process. The resulting quadrature squeezed fields will be used for measurements of spatial displacement with sub shot-noise resolution. In parallel with the experimental work we will perform theoretical calculations of the spectrum of spatial squeezing for the different possible cavity configurations. In particular a search will be made for parameter regimes that provide continuous variable entanglement of spatially modulated fields in the IPOPO device. The educational component of the project will include training graduate students in modern experimental and theoretical techniques that enable applications of non-classical light fields doc18952 none This Minority Research Planning Grant (MRPG) provides funding for the planning of a full proposal to the Manufacturing Enterprise Systems program for the development of a tool that will offer distributed intelligent control of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). FMS is a fairly a new concept in manufacturing where the manufacturing plant produces a large variety of parts in very low quantity. This type of manufacturing is suitable for manufacturing replacement parts where parts are manufactured as needed and no inventory is kept. While this manufacturing concept is very promising, because it is always operating in a transient state, it requires a very complex control system that continuously optimizes its operation. This planning activity will compliment the future proposal in two areas. First industry partners will be sought to advise and educate the research team on the current needs and practices of industry in this area of research. These Industry partners will play a key role in guiding the research effort through its development. They will also allow the team to look at real applications of the tool and real problems. Second a prototype of the controller tool will be developed to measure its potential improvement over current technology and measure its capability to control a FMS. If successful the results of this research will demonstrate and validate the capabilities of this new type of controller and show its obtainable improvement over current systems. The manufacturing partners will educate the team on the current practices and needs and allow the team to study actual systems. Potential performance improvements will prove the need for such complex control architectures. The results of the eventual research will optimally control a FMS and allow this new manufacturing concept to reach the goals that they were originally designed to meet doc18953 none The goal of this project is to fabricate high-Q (~10,000), small-volume (cubic wavelength or smaller) 3D semiconductor nanocavities. Single-oxide-aperture microcavities have yielded Q = 2,000 with a diameter of 2 microns. The Q will be increased by fabricating a nanocavity with multiple aluminum-oxide apertures (Dennis Deppe, U. Texas - Austin), thus combining the advantages of etched pillars and oxide apertures, or by using a very small volume photonic-crystal nanocavity (Axel Scherer, Caltech). The Q will be measured by detecting the linewidth of photoluminescence of the quantum dots grown into the center of the nanocavity spacer. Professor Deppe, who has much experience with the growth of InGaAs quantum dots, will grow the material for both types of nanocavities. During this grant the emphasis will be shifted from interface-fluctuation dots at 750 nm to the more strongly confined self-assembled quantum dots of InGaAs at nm. 1.3 mm is an attractive wavelength not only because of its obvious importance for optical communications but also because the ratio of vacuum Rabi splitting to photon escape rate from the cavity is more than twice as large there. The longer wavelength increases the feature size of a wavelength-in-the-material cavity, making it easier to fabricate. The stronger confinement promises higher temperature operation. Finally instruments for characterizing 1.3-mm samples have been acquired by the PI. Minimum-volume, high-Q nanocavities are the natural nanotechnological limit for the shrinking size of light-emitting diodes and VCSEL s. Such structures are also of current interest to quantum information processing as sources of single photons on demand or for quantum entanglement. The Q volume ratio can be lower for a useful single-photon turnstile than for strong coupling, so the values of Q and volume obtained will determine the emphasis upon single-photon source versus strong coupling. Radiative coupling between a single quantum dot and a nanocavity mode would be seen as a narrowing of the cavity linewidth as the cavity mode is temperature scanned through the dot s lowest energy transition in a dewar with very small temperature dependence of the sample position. Strong coupling would result in double-peaked transmission or luminescence, and absorption of a single photon would already change the absorption spectrum for the next probe photon doc18954 none This planning grant award is the first step toward the setting up of the Center for Experimental Research in Computer Systems (CERCS) seeks to address complex communication computation systems by bringing together researchers with knowledge of the key technologies underlying these systems, and thereby, create research teams that can address future systems and applications in a fashion that is integrated across multiple technologies and heterogeneous system components. The mission of CERCS is to develop new hardware and software technologies, to create technological advances, and to take advantage of these advances to remove technological barriers faced by complex, integrated systems. The CERCS approach is experimental and fosters research in which new technologies are evaluated experimentally, with large-scale applications and on systems of substantial size or complexity. The aim is to understand the challenging application requirements that cause novel system-level research, where insights at the system level motivate changes in how certain applications are implemented, and where new system technologies enable new classes of applications. The Center will work with external partners to comprehend their needs and requirements, and to experiment with alternative solutions and approaches doc18955 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled The fungal community on corn (Zea mays) resistant and susceptible to smut (Ustilago maydis). The effects of selective breeding and changing host genetic environment on non-target, potentially beneficial microorganisms are often overlooked. This research investigates these effects by studying the fungal microbial community on corn plants resistant or susceptible to one its major pathogens, smut. It will have important implications for understanding how altering the host plant genetic environment can affect species diversity and genetic structure of non-target microorganisms doc18956 none The primary objectives of this project are to understand the sensitivity of a newly designed sensor for strain measurement and crack detection in reinforced concrete (RC) structures, to validate its performance by testing of a large-scale structure, and to compare its performance and cost with those of distributed fiber-optic sensors. A new coaxial cable (distributed sensor) is developed to meet the critical requirements for high sensitivity and resolution, low cost, and ruggedness in the structural health monitoring of civil infrastructure. The new sensor improves the sensitivity of commercial communication cables for the crack detection of RC members using more flexible and more permeable dielectric layer between inner and outer conductors. An additional load transfer mechanism is included to alter the direction of external disturbance from longitudinal deformation to transverse crushing, resulting in more sensitive measurement in reflection coefficient of the cable under tension. Several sensors are designed and fabricated in-house, calibrated with standard instruments, and finally validated with a large-scale beam-column assembly for its superior performance. The project involves multidisciplinary and US-Japan collaboration. It will be a showcase to K-12 students as part of the high school students summer program at UMR doc18957 none The objective of the project is to perform basic research leading to better understanding of surface fitting technologies in reverse engineering. Given a set of unorganized or semi-organized points, sampled from an engineering part, methodologies and algorithms are sought to fit a set of smooth surfaces to the data forming the boundaries of the original part design. The process is called reverse engineering and is used to re-engineer an existing part in the absence of the original design. Critical issues to be addressed are efficient surface definition, continuity across surface patches, data reduction, output surface data size, and recognition of conventional surfaces types, such as cylindrical or spherical parts. If successful, the benefits of the research are: (1) a new paradigm for approximation in reverse engineering, (2) a set of visually describable algorithms that can be used in an academic course as well as in an industrial system, and (3) theoretical and computational foundations of robust and easy to implement fitting methodologies. The project is built upon a partnership between academia and industry to conduct basic research to leverage the competitiveness of computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing industry doc18958 none Newman Recent developments in the separate domains of robot force control and neurocontrol have advanced to the point where integration of these technologies may yield a dramatic leap forward in robot competence. At present, robot contact operations are clumsy and ineffective, except in instances where the environment is highly predictable and the tasks can be accomplished using position control alone. However, for futuristic applications of robots, such as autonomous assembly of a space-based power system, robots for defense applications, or a potential industry in domestic robotics, competence in contact operations in unstructured environments is essential for success. The exploratory project will evaluate the use of intelligent control algorithms with appropriate set of assumptions and representations of robot environment contact dynamics, using Natural Admittance Control and virtual dynamics as a means to integrate high and low-level controls. It will consider four tasks in intelligent control research: (1) constructing a reflexive damage-avoidance layer to assure the safety of a robot and its environment and enable the capability for safe, autonomous learning; (2) human strategies for contact operations will be analyzed and cloned for robot execution, using identification of atomic behaviors and recognition of events that trigger sequential behaviors; (3) on-line identification of environment dynamics; (4) neural-net based optimizing control algorithms employing adaptive critics will be constructed in the context of NAC virtual dynamics doc18959 none These research projects address problems in the model theory of differential fields and the model theory of the field of real numbers with exponentiation. The model theory of differential fields is a fascinating area requiring a sophisticated mixture of ideas from stability theory, differential algebra and algebraic geometry. The work of Buium and Hrushovski has shown that these ideas have important consequences in Diophantine geometry. In particular, the principal investigator will study the model theoretic behavior of solution sets of families of algebraic differential equations. This line of research on the model theory of the field of real numbers with exponentiation is expected to concentrate on the relationship between global solutions to differential equations at infinity and formal solutions in the field of logarithmic-exponential series. Model theory is a branch of logic that explores mathematical structures such as the real numbers together with their arithmetic operations and ordering relation, analyzing the degree to which the basic rules or axioms for a collection of objects and their operations determine the shape of that collection. The methods and results of model theory are cast in terms of definable sets and functions, where a construction is definable exactly when it can be expressed by first-order logical formulas in the language of the structure. Model theoretic methods for the field of real numbers with exponentiation have been remarkably successful in proving new results on the geometry of exponential varieties and sets defined from them. This work has already found applications in asymptotic analysis, control theory, microlocal analysis, and neural networks. The model theory of differential fields has had significant applications in number theory doc18960 none An investigation is proposed to develop an innovative built-in diagnostic technique for a reliable and quick initial assessment of composite retrofitted rehabilitated civil infrastructure upon inspection after a major seismic event or at a routine maintenance. The major components of the smart composite system consist of composite materials for structural reinforcement and a diagnostic sensing system for assessing the integrity of the retrofit. The diagnostic sensing system is made of thin diagnostic sensor films, external hardware far signal generation and processing, and diagnostic software for signal interpretation. To assess the integrity of the retrofit after a major earthquake or at routine inspections, pre-determined diagnostic signals will be generated automatically from piezo-actuators built in the film to neighboring optical fiber sensors. Diagnostic software will compare sensor measurement with a baseline reference taken at a healthy condition to determine quickly and reliably the status of the integrity of the structures in three possible levels: Green-no damage and continuing usage, Yellow-minor damage and continuing usage with caution, and Red-severe damage and no usage with immediate repair. Upon completion of the study, a prototype of the proposed system will developed. Field implementation and tests will be followed to further verify the efficiency and reliability of the smart systems. This project will be conducted in collaboration with the Smart Structure Research Center of Japan and the California Department of Transportation doc18961 none In this project we focus on the class of capacity planning and resource allocation problems in which customers view waiting times as one of their major concerns. The objective is to develop a methodology for joint optimal capacity planning and demand allocation for such problems. An important phase in this project is to develop an understanding of customer reactions to capacity allocation rules. The project will be conducted through the following steps: (i) Develop mathematical models for the joint capacity planning and demand allocation problem. (ii) Determine structural properties of the main sub-components of the problem, viz., capacity planning and demand allocation, including customer s individual optimization for any given capacity allocation. (iii) Develop optimal combined capacity planning and demand allocation algorithms for use in diverse settings. The expected output of this project includes theoretical insight as well as algorithms for capacity planning and demand allocation in dynamic environments that will be of use to manufacturing managers, supply chain managers, distribution systems planners, and service operations managers. Growing global competition and rapid changes in information technology are forcing companies to pay more attention to customer needs and system responsiveness; service delivery has become a key factor in improving a company s competitive position. Many US companies have expanded both nationally and internationally not only to take advantage of tariff, labor and other incentives but also to provide better customer service. These firms, both manufacturing and service, operate over a wide-spread geographic area and face a dynamic environment in which there are random changes in demand within and across geographic boundaries. However, capacity planning alone will not guarantee success in such global diversification ventures. In most realistic situations, even though customers can be served by any one of many regional facilities, some customers may have a natural affinity for being served at a specific facility because of time or cost considerations. On the other hand, as the capacity at one location is expanded, more customers are attracted from other regions to this location for service. The overall effect of these inter-region flows can deteriorate the performance at some facilities while other facilities remain underutilized. This project develops methodologies and understanding for these capacity allocation problems by taking into consideration how customers react to the firm s allocation decisions doc18962 none This grant provides funding for developing innovative algorithms for solving scheduling problems with due dates. Almost every manufacturing and service enterprise must schedule something; jobs through a shop, customers to appointments, or trucks to delivery stops. Often a specific time for each job, customer etc., called a due date, is promised. Meeting these due dates is very important both for customer satisfaction and economic reasons. It is well known that these are among the most difficult problems to solve optimally. Optimal algorithms, which can solve realistically sized problems, will be developed for basic models, e.g. single processors. These algorithms will combine mathematical programming with traditional scheduling approaches. They will then be extended to more complex models such as flow shops. The algorithms will be computationally tested to verify their efficacy. These tests will also be used to explore what factors make an instance difficult to solve. The results of this research will lead to improved ability to schedule in both manufacturing and service environments. The resulting schedules will have better on-time performance as well as reduced costs. To verify results, one of the algorithms will be incorporated into a larger production control software package being developed for the Tunisian textile industry. Additionally, the solution methods proposed for these problems should also have application to other difficult combinatorial problems, such as routing, network design and analysis, reliability and project selection doc18963 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Diversity of fungi within living leaves: molecular insights into ecology and evolution of endophytic fungi in leaves of tropical trees. Fungal endophytes, fungi inhabiting plants without causing disease, are highly diverse in tropical trees, yet are poorly known. This research assesses tropical endophyte diversity using (a) traditional isolations and multilocus sequencing and (b) direct amplification of endophyte DNA from leaves. Its overall goal is to integrate endophytes into the broader fungal phylogeny and explore the evolution of fungus-photobiont associations doc18964 none Probably the most exciting event in optics in the past two years has been the development of microstructure optical fiber. The dispersion properties of this fiber can be tailored to a far greater extent than conventional optical fibers. As a result, it can be used to transform commercially available, low-energy ultrashort pulses into ultrabroadband continuum light with a bandwidth of 500 THz. This light has numerous far-reaching applications in telecommunications, solid-state spectroscopy, coherent control of chemical reactions, and ultrahigh-spatial-resolution optical coherence tomography. It has already completely revolutionized the field of optical metrology. Unfortunately, techniques for working with ultrabroadband light remain in their infancy. At this stage, it is not possible to measure its properties other than the power spectrum. Pulse shaping and compression techniques, which are successful in narrowband applications, are not applicable to this type of ultrabroadband radiation. Even simple tasks such as collimating and propagating ultrabroadband light are not yet possible. For example, ultrabroadband lenses do not exist, and mirrors also fail because the diffraction angle of this light is over 60s. Furthermore, the process by which this light is created is at best poorly understood. As a result, we propose to 1) perform extensive modeling to understand the underlying mechanisms and the properties of the continuum light, 2) develop experimental techniques for its characterization, and 3) devise new techniques for manipulating and compressing this light. We will take two distinct approaches to ultrabroadband-light generation. One will utilize a standard fs Ti:Sapphire laser and microstructure optical fiber to produce continuum light with spectrum from 400 nm to 1.6 um. The second approach, which is equally promising -but as yet unexplored - will use amplified fiber lasers developed by IMRA America to generate ultra-broadband continuum in conventional telecommunications fiber in the IR: from 800 nm to 2.5 um. This ultrabroadband light is extremely complex, having a time-bandwidth product (TBP) in excess of , whereas the most complex ultrashort pulse that has been completely characterized had a TBP of ~10. This latter measurement used frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG), and it pushed the FROG technique to its limits. As a result, we propose to develop a much broader-band version of FROG for measuring ultrabroadband continuum with more than two orders of magnitude of additional complexity. It will necessarily involve several innovations, including, for example, angle-dithering the nonlinear crystal for much greater bandwidth doc18965 none The PI will continue her investigations on the decompositions of ideals and how different operations on the ideals interact with the decompositions. The particular operations in the proposal are integral closure, tight closure, adjoints, Rees valuations, symbolic powers, Groebner bases. The PI works in the area of mathematics known as commutative algebra, with applications to the area of algebraic geometry. In particular, there are algebraic constructs that describe geometric objects, such as spheres, cones, cylinders, etc. The (non) smoothness as well as many other geometric properties of a geometric object are reflected in the properties of its corresponding algebraic construct, which is useful because the latter is much more susceptible to manipulation. A familiar example might be the prime factorization of integers or polynomials, such as used in cryptography, but in more general situations the corresponding factorizations are more complex and highly non-unique doc18966 none This project applies adaptive optics and laser interferometry to the sensing of bound analytes on an optical compact disk. The compact disk contains spots of antibodies (for immunological and proteomic biosensors) or complementary DNA (for genomic biosensors) arranged in concentric tracks. After exposure to a sample containing multiple analytes, the laser scans a single track at a time with sampling speeds up to one megasample per second. Bound analytes on the spinning disk modulate the phase of the reflected laser light up to a Megahertz. This phase is measured using homodyne detection in an adaptive interferometer. The key element to the interferometer is an adaptive holographic grating (a semi-insulating GaAs heterostructure) that mixes the signal (carrying the phase modulation) with a reference beam (local oscillator). The adaptive mixer is insensitive to the problems of laser speckle and mechanical vibrations that have previously prevented the use of sensitive interferometry in this application. The disk will be fabricated using soft lithography and ink-pad stamping. An important goal of the research is to study multi-analyte up-scaling from a few up to thousands of different analyzer tracks on the disk. The long-range goal of this research would be to ultimately assay almost every blood protein in a single 10 p1 sample without the need for analyte amplification. For the same reason that shot-noise-limited interferometers can detect sub-picometer surface displacements, this Biosensor CD can detect approximately 300 bound analyte molecules per spot per track. Such sensitivity can only be achieved by combining the high sampling rate of the spinning disk with the high sensitivity of adaptive interferometry. The experimental program presented here, if successful, would represent a significant improvement in the ability of biosensors to detect many low-concentration analytes doc18967 none This project focuses both on methodological and applied aspects of financial engineering. The goal is to develop new and original methods to value complex financial products, manage financial risks, and evaluate investment opportunities. The project will focus on the following problems: developing stochastic models to describe dynamics of asset prices and financial variables; developing new, powerful, analytical and computational tools to value complex derivative instruments (path-dependent and multi-variable contracts in particular) and manage risks of derivatives transactions; the eigenfunction expansion approach to derivatives pricing; investigating the issue of model risk in financial engineering; financial engineering for the energy industry; stochastic optimization methodologies in financial engineering, including investment portfolio management under transaction costs and taxes, and dynamic asset liability management; and real options applications in manufacturing and service industries. To address the national need for advanced training of specialists in financial engineering, the educational component of the project proposes to develop a comprehensive financial engineering curriculum at Northwestern, from the beginning undergraduate to the doctoral level, and create a new Ph.D. major in financial engineering as a part of the IEMS Ph.D. program at Northwestern. The discipline of financial engineering includes applications of mathematical and statistical modeling and computational technology to problems in the financial services industry and financial management of non-financial corporations and public institutions. This project outlines a broad research program for the next three years. Additionally, it outlines a curriculum development effort, including a new Ph.D. major in financial engineering. This project will support the new Ph.D. program. This project is a part of a long-term development effort at Northwestern in the area of financial engineering. Modeling methodologies, analytical results, and computational algorithms developed in this project will help financial institutions, corporate treasuries, and energy companies accurately value derivative securities, assess model risk, manage investment portfolios, manage assets and liabilities, and apply real options technology to the valuation of businesses and strategic managerial decisions. The education and curriculum development efforts will result in training of highly qualified personnel to enhance competitiveness of the U.S. financial services industry doc18968 none The objectives of this project are to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of the way both engineers and scientists address the life-threatening, most severe ground motions; these are defined as those motions that can induce highly nonlinear dynamic response and hence damage even those building and structures that have undergone modern aseismic design. Current means of structural safety determination are limited by an inability to anticipate what the ground shaking will look like when it reaches these damaging levels. Based on an effective new (structure-dependent) scalar measure of ground motion severity, suites of real and samples of realistic synthetic accelerograms will be ranked and the most severe identified for study in depth to learn why and how these records differ from the more benign. Directivity-induced pulses can be one such phenomenon for certain structures at sites close to large faults. These results will lead to project development of joint engineering and earth science tools for the assessment of the hazard of severe motions. These tools will include a new probabilistic seismic hazard analysis procedure that takes advantage of the modern practicing engineer s knowledge of certain linear and nonlinear dynamic properties of his specific structure to then produce a particular measure of the threat that far more accurately predicts the demands on the structure when it is assaulted by these rare, severe ground motions. A major project product is a dynamic rupture modeling capability that allows simulations of ground motion in the very near field of large earthquakes. From this, we gain a better understanding of the factors that control behavior of aspects of the earthquake source, principally the rise time, that are important in controlling the level and character of severe ground motion. Our models are tested relative to their ability to produce samples of records that accurately capture the properties found earlier to produce severe effects in structures. Thus the project requires an unusual degree of interaction between engineering and earth scientists doc18969 none This grant provides funding for a rigorous analysis of several classes of multi-stage supply chains in both deterministic and stochastic settings. Novel models will be developed for the structural analysis of optimal production and distribution policies. These models will be used as a foundation for the development of new, efficient, and robust heuristics for integrated production and transportation planning. These models and heuristics will be extended to a variety of relatively complex environments, including settings featuring multi-stage serial production, multi-component assembly networks, multi-class transportation cost functions, multi-class demand, and make-to-stock and make-to-order production strategies. After exploring these models in a centralized setting in which all stages are working toward the same objective, decentralized settings where each stage strives to achieve its own objective will be considered. Loss of efficiency due to decentralization will be explored, and coordination mechanisms will be developed. These models and algorithms will be validated with industrial data, in order to test the applicability of insights and the effectiveness of algorithms. If successful, the results of this research will lead to a deeper understanding of integrated production and transportation planning in modern supply chains, and in particular, will help to explain the impact of finite capacity and distribution economies of scale in typical manufacturing supply chains. This insight, as well as the algorithms which will be developed, will lead to more efficient and effective decision-making in these supply chains, and will ultimately lead to effective heuristics for even more complex real-world models. Finally, the insights developed in this research will be incorporated into a case study and a teaching module doc18970 none Freeze thaw cycles can damage concrete by causing internal cracking or superficial scaling. The physical mechanisms responsible for these two types of damage are apparently different, but the details are controversial. The purpose of this project is to examine the fundamental mechanisms responsible for the damage, and to test novel methods for preventing it. Concrete is conventionally protected from frost damage by introducing surfactants that create air voids with diameters on the order of 50-100 um and spacing of about 200um The voids serve as sinks into which water can flow when ice forms in the pores of the cement paste; this prevents development of destructive hydraulic pressures created by the expansion as water transforms to ice. However, the voids do not protect the paste against crystallization pressure when ice forms in the surrounding mesopores. We intend to examine the relative importance of crystallization pressure and hydraulic pressure with respect to internal cracking. To control the occurrence of crystallization, we will introduce nucleating agents for ice into the air voids, so that ice forms preferentially in those open spaces, where it can grow without creating stress. If effective, such nucleating agents could be incorporated into concrete along with the surfactants that create the voids. To examine surface scaling of concrete, we will employ a novel experimental approach. A pool of liquid is established on the surface of a plate of cement paste, and the system is cooled until freezing occurs. As the ice forms, internal stresses develop that are revealed by warping of the plate; by measuring the deflection with an optical probe, we can study the kinetics of stress development. Preliminary experiments have revealed several stress-generating mechanisms: thermal contraction of the pore liquid relative to the solid paste, transfer of pore water toward the ice at the exterior surface of the body, and thermal expansion mismatch between the superficial ice and the paste. The relative importance of these mechanisms will be quantified, and we will explore the effectiveness of air voids, nucleation control, and other methods for minimizing the damage. This research will be the subject of a doctoral thesis, and will be integrated into the undergraduate curriculum by having parts of the study done as senior theses and independent research projects. Freeze thaw testing will use special facilities and expertise in the labs of the W.R. Grace Corporation. We will also collaborate with Prof. Leo Pel (Eindhoven) to obtain magnetic resonance imaging of the freezing process within the concrete samples doc18971 none Our objective in this proposal is to explore the use of the spatial and temporal dispersion characteristics of photonic crystals and related structures for optical communication applications. Photonic crystals are artificial microstructures where the index of refraction is strongly modulated at a length scale comparable to the wavelength. They provide a new mechanism for the manipulation of light. In particular, several unique characteristics of photonic crystals make them a particularly intriguing material system for novel components in optical communication systems. The crystals exhibit strong spatial dispersion characteristics. These characteristics have been exploited in the super-prism effect. The crystals also possess large temporal dispersion effects, such as large group delay, strong chromatic dispersion, and significant polarization dependency. Thus, photonic crystals may hold tremendous potential in performing some of the critical functionality in optical communications, such as tunable optical delay, dynamic dispersion compensation and mitigation, and wavelength division multiplexing and demultiplexing. To realize the potentials of photonic crystals, however, it is critically important to understand how photonic crystal structures can be engineered to meet the stringent requirements of optical communications. For example, a fundamental challenge for high bit rate applications is to achieve significant dispersive effects with a large enough bandwidth that is sufficient to cover the signal of interest. For wavelength division multiplexing, for example, it is important to provide sufficiently low dispersion constant over the wavelength range of interest. Understanding how to go about designing such structures will require a deeper understanding of device principles that could give such behaviors. We therefore propose to undertake a project that will systematically examine some of the fundamental dispersive properties of photonic crystals and related structures, in the context of optical communication applications. The proposed activities will be theoretical and computational in their nature. A key objective here, however, is to produce designs of novel and functional structures that are experimentally feasible, and to answer questions that are of immediate experimental relevance and importance. In doing so we seek to directly impact wide ranges of experimental efforts that are already ongoing in this emerging area of photonic crystal technology doc18972 none Robert R. Bitmead, U. of Cal-San Diego Nonlinear System Identification with Application to Combustion Instabillty Control Robert R Bitmead, Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, U of California-San Diego. System Identification is the science of fitting mathematical dynamical models using measured data from experiments together with candidate model structures from physical reasoning. Identification is critical in developing models of complex and imprecisely known systems prior to their analysis. This project is concerned with developing techniques and underpinning theories for nonlinear system identification. At present there is a dearth of tools and guidance of how to proceed in this case. While the focus is scientific and broad, the study will proceed by considering in tandem with theory a major driving application of combustion instability control, of interest in jet engines and gas power turbines. The project has phases in which general concepts are developed and then are explored in the context of the combustion instabilities. Developing suitable measures of fit and then tests of confidence of models will be early goals. These should capture the important features in the data records from the nonlinear oscillating system while ignoring the unimportant detail. Here tests can be made with models already fitted to the data. Specifically nonlinear tools such as bifurcation analysis then can be applied for the assessment of model properties which are preserved from experiment to experiment and which might form the basis of control design. Chief among the theoretical tasks is to address the concept of model validation for such systems as oscillators. That is, how might one develop an experiment, which is capable of revealing the weaknesses of a particular candidate model fitted using some criterion. This is intimately connected with confidence in the identified model and with uncertainty in its suitability for a use. Should generalized concepts and meaningful tests be developed, there is a ready market for the application of these tools. Indeed, nonlinear control design has moved forward greatly recently in theory and practice, but it needs good models of known reliability to go much further doc18973 none for NSF Instrument Grant A grant has been awarded to Dr. Peter H. von Hippel of the Institute of Molecular Biology at the University of Oregon, serving as Principal Investigator for a group seven co-PIs, whose research groups will all use the new equipment in their various research programs. The equipment to be purchased is a Spectrofluorometer, which will make possible new and incisive studies of protein-protein, protein-nucleic acid, and protein-ligand interactions involved in the functioning and regulation of a variety of macromolecular machines of physiological importance. A variety of sophisticated research problems will be pursued using this facility, which will permit fluorescent measurements at very low concentrations and within cells. The equipment will be coupled to a stopped-flow kinetic device to follow biological reactions in milliseconds, and can be used in either a steady-state or a time-resolved mode to measure fluorescence quenching and anisotropy. Research problems to be studied include assembly and regulation of DNA replication and transcription complexes (P. von Hippel laboratory), energetics of signaling in bacterial chemotaxsis (Frederick Dahlquist laboratory), structure and functional regulation of nuclear receptors by hormones (Beatrice Darimont laboratory), development and characterization of green fluorescent protein-based biosensors (S. J. Remington laboratory), measurement of the mobility of mitochondria and other organelles in live cells and studies of protein and nucleic acid dynamics in vitro (Andrew Marcus laboratory), studies on the assembly of eukaryotic RNA polymerase II transcription complexes (Diane Hawley laboratory), and analysis of protein folding and assembly reactions (Brian Matthews laboratory). These research projects, as well as those of other groups within the Institute of Molecular Biology, will take advantage of the full range of capabilities of the new fluorescence facility. All the research projects will focus on gaining increased molecular understanding of the functional and regulatory systems of cells and tissues, and the results will contribute both to our basic knowledge of biological regulatory systems doc18974 none A four day workshop in Algebraic Geometry is planned, focusing on the training of graduate students and junior faculty. The format will emphasize participants working together in small groups led by mentors. The workshop is designed to engage students and junior faculty in related areas of algebraic geometry focusing on stacks and perhaps including computational algebraic geometry. The working groups will organize around problems and topics within these subfields. Senior faculty will give plenary lectures to set the general direction. The expected composition of the workshop is approximately 60 graduate students, 15 junior faculty, and 8 senior faculty. Algebraic geometry is the study of the relationship between algebraic properties of polynomial equations and the geometry of their solution sets. During the past century, algebraic geometry has been applied repeatedly to a wide range of areas of study in pure algebra and pure geometry. More recently applications have emerged in theoretical physics, cryptography, and engineering. The workshop is designed to complement other forms of training received by junior algebraic geometers, providing them the experience of actively doing research with their peers and mentors doc18975 none This award supports the acquisition of an isotope ratio mass spectrometer (IRMS) to be shared by a group of UC Santa Barbara investigators who have made extensive use of stable isotope analysis in their research programs. The new IRMS system will permit high-precision measurement of carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and hydrogen stable isotope ratios. The instrument would be configured to allow isotope measurements on solid samples of biological and geological origin, on both major and minor components of gas samples, and on purge-able gaseous, liquid, and ionic solutes in aqueous solutions. The instrument will be used in research that addresses a wide range of important and timely topics, including: measurements of fundamental microbial processes in marine environments, atmospheric methane levels, nutrient dynamics in soils from a variety of ecosystems and environments; and nutrient and food web linkages within coastal ecosystems. The instrument will be housed and maintained in a professionally managed, shared-use analytical and instrumentation facility at the University s Marine Science Institute. Besides providing a tool that is critical to the success of vital research programs, this equipment would also allow graduate student and postdoctoral users to become experts in this key technology for environmental science doc18976 none In this project the principal investigator will apply methods from computability theory to study the effective content and proof-theoretic strength of various areas of mathematics. In particular, he will concentrate on computable model theory and algebra, reverse mathematics and effectiveness of combinatorial principles, and effective notions of randomness and relative randomness. In computable model theory, this project will continue the development of methods to address issues raised by effectivizing model-theoretic notions. These issues include the relationships between the different ways that a given structure may be effectivized, the relationships between the degree of effectivity of different models of theories with few models, and the differences between the computability-theoretic phenomena that can occur in general and those that can occur within well-known classes of structures. Hirschfeldt will also study computability-theoretic and proof-theoretic aspects of combinatorial principles, exploiting the connections between effective mathematics and the reverse mathematics program. Finally, the principal investigator will study the structure of (effectively approximable) reals under notions of relative effective randomness defined through the use of prefix-free Kolmogorov complexity of initial segments. The study of the effective content of mathematics has received increasing attention in the last few decades. It is a natural outgrowth of the efforts to understand and formalize the notions of algorithm and computable function undertaken in the early part of the twentieth century. It is of both pure mathematical and foundational interest, and has important connections with computer science. This project aims to further our understanding of how structure affects computability, and how computability interacts with other fundamental notions of modern mathematics and foundations of mathematics, such as randomness and proof-theoretic strength. Computability theorists have developed a highly successful theory of relative computational complexity of sets of numbers, which, in addition to its intrinsic mathematical interest, has been influential in theoretical computer science. One of the goals of this project is to continue the development of an emerging parallel theory of relative algorithmic randomness, which can act as a theoretical framework in which to consider questions such as: When should we say that an infinite set is more random than another, and what consequences does the relative randomness of sets have for their relative computational complexity doc18977 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Effects of environmental change on a generalist microbial pathogen: barley yellow dwarf virus in wild grass communities. A major challenge for microbial biology is understanding how environmental change affects microbes. Pathogenic microbes infecting multiple host species are influenced by altered host community composition. This research is testing how three other components of environmental change - nitrogen deposition, decreased species diversity, and land-use change - interact with host community composition to affect barley yellow dwarf virus, a generalist viral pathogen of grasses doc18978 none This planing grant plans to expand the research on Fuel Cells by creating an NSF Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC) for Fuel Cell Research. This center builds on the strength of electrochemical engineering in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of South Carolina. The center provides an opportunity to focus research, nationally and perhaps internationally, to benefit commercialization of an environmentally friendly technology with a $10 billion US economic potential. The vision for the Center is to be recognized internationally for developing mathematical models useful for PEMFC design; producing experimental data and techniques that provide an understanding of PEMFC stack performance; studying hydrogen storage materials, devices, and their interface with PEMFCs; and developing new catalysts development for reforming hydrogen from hydrocarbon fuels and the oxygen electrode doc18979 none In this project, the investigator investigates two kinds of moduli spaces in algebraic geometry, one is the moduli of stable morphisms and the other is the moduli of stable sheaves. Both moduli spaces are closely related to the research in Super- String theories. Specifically, the investigator works on four research directions. The first is on the effective construction of virtual moduli cycles. The second is to continue working on degeneration of the moduli spaces, including the moduli of stable sheaves and stable morphisms. The third is to study open string theory in Calabi-Yau manifolds and the last to study some new conjectures on the moduli of stable sheaves. This project is a research in algebraic geometry, a branch of mathematical science. The investigator studies the properties of certain spaces (called moduli space in mathematics) that consist of objects that can be characterized by algebraic properties. (An example is the roots of polynomials). These spaces are important because they are part of the building blocks of the Super-String theory in high energy physics, a theory devoted to unify quantum mechanic and gravity. In the last decade, research in Super-String theory raised many challenging questions about these spaces, some remains open. This research project will address some of these challenge doc18980 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Symbiotic regulation and function of proteins in Sinorhizobium melilota Outer Membrane. Sinorhizobium melilota, a gram negative bacterium, and the legume Medicago truncatula are partners in a symbiosis that requires coordinated differentiation for productive nodulation. This research seeks to identify bacterial outer membrane proteins (OMPs) differentially expressed in plant-associated bacteroids compared to free-living bacteria, to be followed by a genetic and physiological analyses of the role these proteins play at the interface of the bacterium and plant. This will ehnhance our understanding of the complex metabolic coupling between bacteria and plant required for nitrogen fixation doc18981 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Phillip Danielson at the University of Denver to fund the purchase of a Transgenomic Nucleic Acid Fragment Analysis System. Based on established DNA size separation and mutation detection technology, this system will increase the quality and cost effectiveness of undergraduate graduate research and education in molecular biology. Specific research programs that will benefit immediately include National Science Foundation-funded studies to identify novel genes that encode: (1) endocrine hormones in the brain; (2) cytochrome P450 toxin-metabolizing enzymes - which are critical to the control of crop pests and disease-carrying organisms; 3) microbial proteins that can be used to clean up of toxic waste sites contaminated with heavy metals and 4) molecular markers that can be used to identify and track genetic diversity in endangered species - work is conducted in collaboration with the Denver Zoological Gardens and Denver Museum of Science and Nature. Until recently, the identification of mutations required the laborious screening of hundreds to thousands of genes for subtle variations in DNA sequence. Analysis of a single novel gene by the direct sequence approach currently used, can require a day or more to complete. The Transgenomic WAVE System funded by this grant will reduce the analysis time to 2-4 minutes sample. The discovery and analysis of genes that encode proteins involved in toxin breakdown, as well as neuropeptides linked to stress is the focus of several research programs. Since these genes often exist as duplicates with subtle but critical differences, it is essential that both copies be isolated. The WAVE system will be used to reduce the potential number of competing non-target gene fragments by precise size fractionation of the initial pool of DNA used for gene amplification reactions. The instrument s mutation detection and fragment capture functions will be used to increase the efficiency with which these related genes are identified and recovered - even where two genes sequences differ by less than 0.5%. In research focused on conservation biology and microbial ecology, the WAVE system will provide an extremely sensitive approach to the analysis of DNA sequence differences among and within species. Finally, the WAVE s high-speed genotyping capabilities will be used to gather gene frequency data from hundreds of samples for large-scale, multi-state conservation genetic projects. Beyond the benefit to the research activities at the University of Denver, a broad range of laboratory and classroom-oriented educational goals will be advanced at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Benefits will be particularly evident in the molecular-oriented laboratory courses that are at the heart of the Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Arts degrees in Molecular Biology. On a broader level, department-sponsored biotechnology classes offered to high school students and teacher-training workshops that promote hands-on science education at the secondary school level will also be greatly enhanced by providing first-hand experience in one of the most modern methods of genetic analysis. The benefit to high school outreach efforts will immeasurable given that these programs target students in urban and low-income school districts who have traditionally been under-represented in the natural sciences. In short, acquisition of the WAVE Nucleic Acid Fragment Analysis System will provide significant and immediate benefits to education at the high school, undergraduate and graduate levels doc18982 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Do fungal endosymbionts of grasses structure community diversity and modify food web dynamics? Endophytic fungi form symbioses with grasses and produce toxic alkaloids that reduce herbivory to their hosts. This research evaluates how grass endophytes modify the diversity and dynamics of plant, pathogen, and arthropod assemblages and asks how fungal alkaloid chemistry influences these effects. This investigation will expand our understanding of how plant-microbe mutualisms influence community dynamics and biodiversity doc18983 none The field of Chemical Reaction Engineering is key in the development of efficient, environmentally friendly and effective manufacturing. Promoting the exchange of ideas among leading researchers in this field will not only favorably impact the future growth of the Chemical Reaction Engineering discipline but should ultimately result in more efficient and cleaner technologies and an improved way of life for the society as a whole. The international symposium in Chemical Reaction Engineering (ISCRE) is the premier meeting in the field, which takes place every two years and sets the tone for progress in the field. Its impact has been without any doubt tremendous as measured by the number of citations the ISCRE proceedings have received, the increased industry-university interactions that is has fostered, and the improved education and exposure of young researchers in the field. With the Asia Pacific region hosting the upcoming ISCRE 17, it is hoped that this premiere event for Chemical Reaction Engineering (CRE) researchers will provide a step-jump for the participation of researchers in that region, taking a historic step towards the globalization of ISCRE. The meeting of US academic and industrial researchers with an insight into the fast growing CRE community in that region an opportunity that was not available in previous ISCRE s. NSF s travel support for ISCRE 17 will make it possible for up to twenty five young researchers from the US to attend the meeting covering registration and defraying some of the travel and lodging expenses. NSF funding will allow these researchers to profit by listening to state-of-the-art review talks and research papers and from the opportunity to interact with their fellow researchers in the area. The public at large will significantly benefit by the advancement of the Chemical Reaction Engineering field as a whole and the use of the new ideas generated for the development of more efficient and environmentally friendlier technologies for the production of fuels, materials and chemicals doc18984 none The hypothesis that intermediates in many metabolic pathways are channeled from one pathway enzyme to the next is widely, but not universally, accepted. The mechanism of channeling is presumed to be the transient associations of pathway enzymes. It is postulated that the proximity of sequential enzymes would cause the product of the first enzyme to have an advantage in competition for the active site of the second enzyme when compared to molecules of the same species within the bulk medium. An alternative formulation is that pathway intermediates are not part of the same pool as are identical molecules within the cell. Intermediates produced within the pathway are channeled to the next enzyme. Investigations of this hypothesis often center on the presumed mechanism; i.e., the association of sequential pathway enzymes. Methods employed include several chromatographic techniques, co- precipitation and co-purification. While positive results are suggestive, they are not conclusive since channeling need not occur even if the enzymes are associated. Other approaches, including isotope dilution experiments, have often supported the existence of channeling, but in vitro systems are a poor proxy for the crowded, structured environment of the living cell. Approaches employed in in vivo experiments include genetic approaches, NMR and isotope dilution. While some of the reports from these experiments strongly support the existence of channeling, use of these techniques allow only a qualitative assessment of channeling. The work proposed here should lead to a quantitative evaluation of channeling in an in vivo, functioning system. For simplicity, consider a 2-enzyme pathway. Substrate A binds to Enzyme 1 to make intermediate B. B is the substrate for Enzyme 2. The product is C. If the cells can be induced to take up B (the asterisk indicating B has a different stable isotope, say 13 C, than does B), and B serves as the substrate for Enzyme 2, then the product will be C . If there is no channeling, then B B = C C. If there is 100% channeling, then C = 0. Given knowledge of the ratios B B & C C, quantitative values for channeling can be calculated. No other method presently in use can provide this information. The appropriate ratios will be measured using a mass spectrometer (MS) interfaced with an appropriate column. The metabolism of glucose-6-phosphate (G6P) is one of the foci of this proposal. Whether G6P produced by hexokinase is channeled to the next enzyme in the oxidative limb of the pentose phosphate pathway, G6P dehydrogenase will be investigated. The appropriate mutant of yeast will take up galactose (gal) in the presence of glucose (glc). In four steps, gal is converted to G6P, which is oxidized to 6-phosphoguconate (6PG) Yeast will be incubated in 13 C-glc and 12 C-gal. The ratios 13 C-G6P 12 C-G6P and 13 C-gal 12 C-gal will be measured and the results interpreted as described above. G6P and 6PG have isomers which, if entered into the MS at the same time as the compounds of interest, would give artifactual results. To avoid this, the isomers will be separated on a Dionex column off-line. If necessary corrections for any isomeric impurity using MS MS techniques will be made. An analogous experiment will be done with a prokaryote, E. coli, to investigate channeling between aldolase and glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase. With this method in place not only can the degree of channeling be quantified, but also changes in channeling in response to changing environmental conditions or nutritional states may be evaluated for its possible contribution to directing the flow of metabolites doc18985 none Many existing buildings designed according to older code provisions have performed poorly in recent strong earthquakes (e.g., Northridge, U.S., Hyogo-Ken Nanbu, Japan). The damage caused by these events reached unprecedented figures which resulted in some of the costliest natural hazard events in recent history. Since damage and lateral deformations are interrelated, the control of lateral displacement during an earthquake is key to providing for damage control. The main objectives of this investigation are: a) to quantify the influence of the degrading characteristics of older buildings on the lateral displacements and b) to develop approximate expressions to compute displacement amplification factors. These objectives will be accomplished by computing the lateral displacement of a variety of older systems subjected to a large database of earthquake records. Statistical and regression analysis of the data will be conducted to develop simplified expressions for the calculation of displacement amplification factors. The project will be conducted in close collaboration with investigation at Nagoya Institute of Technology in Japan. The results of this investigation will provide new and needed data that will allow researchers and practicing engineers to make better decisions in their evaluation and rehabilitation procedures in both the U.S. and in Japan doc18986 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Investigating the Role of Cell-to-Cell Communication by the Endophytic Bacterium Xylella fastidiosa in the Colonization of Grapevines. Bacterial cells can communicate using signaling molecules, allowing them to monitor population size and to coordinate behavior as a group. Xylella fastidiosa colonizes the xylem vessels of plants, causing blockage and water-stress symptoms in some hosts. The role of cell-cell signaling and community behavior in successful colonization of the xylem is being investigated doc18987 none This grant provides funding to develop shape memory polymer (SMP) reinforced nanocomposites, a new class of materials for Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS). The fundamental scientific challenges to be addressed by the proposed research include the dispersion of nanoscale reinforcements in polymer matrix materials, fabrication of micron scale MEMS from nanocomposites by micro-casting and photopolymerization, and the realization and characterization of functional shape memory properties at micron scales. The research will also investigate the size scale and geometrical limits on the processing of nanoreinforced SMP-based MEMS composites. The effect of volume fraction and type of reinforcement on strain recoverability and stiffness (important for self-actuation) will also be characterized and modeled. Mechanical characterization will be accomplished by using novel test structures materials that can be deformed by micro-actuation via a micro-indentor or similar tool. Nanomechanical modeling that incorporates the material nanostructure and unique polymer matrix properties will be used to guide processing and mechanical characterization studies. Nanostructural characterization, necessary to provide a property-processing link, will be accomplished using electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy. If successful, the proposed research on SMP-based nanocomposites in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) will have impact on micro scale actuation in complicated environments for many biomedical and microsensor applications. The primary goal of the research is to develop fundamental tools knowledge for the simultaneous engineering of nanomaterials and microdevices as these are intrinsically linked, and can not be attacked independently. The work will provide processing routes for microcasting and photopolymerization of nanocomposites, and models that can be used to guide the fabrication and design of nanocomposites. The research will also draw undergraduate and high school students into science and engineering via the unique interaction between design, nanomanufacturing, and characterization of functional SMP nanocomposites. The research on these active nanomaterials will also be integrated into the Summer Multicultural Access to Research and Training (SMART) Program for under-represented undergraduate students doc18988 none The overall objective of this research project is to understand the fundamental science affecting the nanoscale processing of plastics. Manufacturing is responsible for control of molecular morphology and geometry. At the nanoscale, control implies understanding interfacial effects. While much of the current nanotechnology research has focused on ceramic and metallic materials, there has been relatively little work done on the processing of polymers at the nanoscale. Yet, because of their low density, high toughness, and versatility, polymers will play an important role in the nanotechnology revolution. We intend to focus on the effect of polymer properties and process conditions on internal interfaces between phases in polymer blends and on the external material tooling interface. Applications of this technology include extruded multicomponent thin films for conformable, high-density data or energy storage, injection-molded low-cost calibration standards, and electrospun nanowires and nanotextiles for circuits and selectively permeable membranes. This research project builds upon our unique strengths in the area of plastics processing, our exceptional contacts with industry and government labs, and our interdisciplinary interactions with faculty in polymer chemistry and the engineering programs at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell (UML). The discoveries made as a part of this research project will be broadly disseminated through support of graduate and undergraduate students and yearly workshops open to industry and academia. To educate industry and the general public, a series of nanotechnology seminars will be developed in conjunction with UML s highly successful continuing education plastics seminar program. For the broader audience, through coordination by the UML Institute for NanoScience and Engineering Technology and the College of Engineering, the excitement of nanotechnology and research in general will be conveyed to middle school and high school students and teachers with hands-on demos and activities doc18989 none The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) will build significantly upon its successes to date in conducting transdisciplinary research toward understanding the complex behaviors arising in systems composed of relatively simple, highly interacting components. Specifically, SFI will study the emergent behaviors of real complex systems whose components are themselves complex-genetic regulatory networks, financial markets and social institutions for example-through mathematical investigation and simulation in concert with empirical studies and data analysis. Researchers involved in these activities will come from many disciplines, including biology, physics, mathematics, computation, and the social behavioral, and economic sciences. Integration and synthesis underlie this research, which is thus complementary to the more well-established methods of reduction and analysis that characterize disciplinary science. It is, of course, essential that complex systems such as the immune system or the global economy be decomposed into their constituent parts and that the behavior of these parts be elucidated as completely as possible for the subsequent understanding of the system as a whole. But in addition to understanding these constituents, understanding of their collective organization is required. It is necessary to refer separately to the parts and their organization to call attention to the fact that the properties of the parts alone do not uniquely determine their collective organization; there are many organizational structures possible with the same parts. Furthermore, the observed organization, or the emergent collective entity, is itself perpetuated independently of its parts. Thus, a market persists even as the individual traders turn over, an ecosystem persists even as the organisms die and are replaced, a cell persists, though its molecules degrade. SFI will further develop the fertile concept of emergence by strengthening the theoretical understanding of emergence through rigorous mathematical study direct and by intensive study of empirical data from specific real-world complex phenomena, including: Structure and Dynamics of Networks, Novelty in Evolution, Computation in Nature, Market Evolution, and Human Behavior and the Emergent Properties of Social Structures doc18990 none This planning grant award is the first step toward the establishment of a National Science Foundation Industry University Cooperative Research Center I UCRC at the College of Engineering at Arizona State University (ASU). The focus of the proposed consortium is to develop a Telecommunication Circuits and System Center through leadership that offers the vision, focus and direction for the advancement of the next generation of telecommunication systems. The Connection One: Telecommunications Circuits and Systems Center has established a foundation for ASU researchers and industry partners that are committed to the advancement of integrated circuits and systems for wireline and wireless communications. The focus of the Center will be to simplify communication by identifying new circuits and system technologies that will enable a system on a chip single communication device doc18991 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Molecular and biogeochemical investigations of microbial communities associated with ocean-ridge basalts. The proposed research is directed towards identifying which microorganisms are involved in the initial stages of basalt weathering reactions, their phylogeny and modes of metabolic activity, and how transient these microbial communities may be. The research combines sampling of marine, ocean-ridge environments with laboratory enrichment culturing techniques and molecular biology methods doc18992 none Meso-Scale Plasticity and Deformation Processing Henry T. Y. Yang, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA Srinivasan Chandrasekar, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN A recently discovered phenomenon with important consequences for plastic deformation at the meso-scale (0.1-10 mm) is strain gradient plasticity, which refers to the collective effects of strain gradient on flow behavior of materials. The discovery of strain gradient plasticity has its origins in measurements, which show that materials display strong size effects in their mechanical response when the characteristic length scale associated with non-uniform plastic deformation is small. Two novel techniques are explored for estimating the flow stress-strain curves of metals and alloys in the presence of strain gradients. The first of these involves simulation and measurement of meso-scale indentation to study the variation of hardness with indenter apical angle. A unique aspect of this approach is the use of cone indenters with different apical angles to impose a wide, but controlled, range of strains and strain gradients in a solid. The second technique involves a study of material response in quasi-static, meso-scale machining where strain gradients are even more intense than in indentation. Here, meso-scale machining is a vehicle for estimating the constitutive stress-strain curve. The research is intended to provide fundamental insights into meso-scale plasticity phenomena; develop and validate techniques for estimating meso-scale flow stress data of relevance to deformation processing; and generate detailed stress-strain data for multi-scale modeling of materials processing operations. These should facilitate the development of sustainable materials processing systems that operate at a high level of efficiency, while creating products of enhanced quality doc18993 none This research effort aims to study experimentally the effect of earthquake-induced lateral spreading due to liquefaction on pile foundations, both in full size and centrifuge model conditions. Comparable tests of instrumented single piles and pile groups embedded in 1-and 2-layer soil profiles will be conducted in slightly inclined laminar boxes subjected to base shaking at three facilities: 1) The 100g-ton geotechnical centrifuge, laminar box and in-flight shaker at RPI, 2) The 6m high laminar box and 1g shaking table at NIED, Japan (largest laminar box in the world), and 3) the 1.9m high laminar box and 1g shaking table at UCSD (largest laminar box in the US). Taking advantage of the successful experience at RPI in this kind of testing, this research constitutes the first opportunity for direct comparison of results in controlled experimental environments between centrifuge and full sized tests to be conducted at NIED. Additionally, centrifuge and full size NIED results will be used to validate the medium-size experiments to be performed using the UCSD shaking table and laminar box. Advanced data analysis techniques-including system identification and visualizations-will be used to process and compare the results from the three facilities, with engineering interpretations and computer simulations doc18994 none This project addresses the design and analysis of algorithms for the identification of dynamical models of image sequences for the purpose of detection, classification and recognition of spatio-temporal events from video. In particular, we concentrate on (segments of) image sequences that satisfy certain statistical regularity conditions, such as second-order stationarity, or certain physical constraints, such as Lambertian reflection. While this does not cover the most general video sequences, generality will follow from compositionality, by segmenting each sequence into portions that do satisfy the assumptions. The purpose of our models is to enable the detection, classification and recognition of dynamic events, such as the presence of smoke, moving foliage, fire, walking humans etc. in live video doc18995 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Measuring activity and diversity of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria in estuarine sediments. This research focuses on ammonia-oxidizing bacteria as a model system to study the relationship between microbial diversity and community processes in estuarine sediments. It employs real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to measure changes in the expression of the enzyme responsible for ammonia oxidation, that is, ammonia monooxygenase (AMO doc18996 none This grant provides funding for the development of high bandwidth fast actuators and control for machining applications. The fast tool servos will be used to machine software programmed deterministic surfaces and compensate for dynamic errors occurred in the process. The research will first develop an innovative fast actuator, which combines dual-stage solid state actuators with fluid power transmission for high bandwidth actuation in a compact package. Multivariable linear robust performance control design method, which incorporates repetitive control, previewed feedforward control, and the effect of the cutting force in a unified feedback control formulation, will be developed for the actuator to precisely generate dynamic trajectories. To realize the fastest possible actuator response so that a fine feature may be machined, switching control for pulse width modulation will also be investigated. Machining experiment will be conducted to test the actuator and control capabilities. In particular, the fast tool servos will be used to generate non-circular engine cylinder bore shapes for compensating cylindrical errors and surface texture to provide improved cylinder-piston fit and tribology conditions, thereby reducing emission, increasing fuel economy, and simplifying manufacturing processes. If successful, the results of this research will lead to improvements in the speed, accuracy, and consistency of machining such irregularly shaped parts as engine piston profiles, piston pin holes, and cylinder bores. Potentially the proposed work could also be applied to machining deterministic tribology surface in parts like journal bearings, linear guide ways, and hydraulic valves cylinders. The proposed work also contribute in the general motion control field. The proposed actuator and control design methods may contribute to extend the motion control performance and find new applications besides machining doc18997 none If neurons are the business end of brain function, glia comprise the support staff. Homeostatic interactions between neurons and glia provide the healthy environment in which the brain functions best. This research explores one type neuronal-glial interaction - that between peptide neurotransmitters and microglia. Microglial cells reside in brain and are capable of a pro-inflammatory response to infection, neurodegenerative disease, or CNS trauma. They can also serve as resident antigen-presenting cells, and data from our previous NSF funding suggests that they also produce growth factors that promote survival and or differentiation of immature neurons. Neuropeptides -- specifically vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP), pituitary adenylate cyclase activating peptide (PACAP) and galanin - seem to play a role in regulating microglial responsiveness. Our preliminary data show that all three neuropeptides serve to dampen the inflammatory response, possibly by different mechanisms. An exploration of these intracellular mechanisms is the focus of one goal of the project. Another goal is to determine the mechanism underlying the means by which VIP and PACAP modulate microglial antigen-presenting capability. The final goal of the project is to determine the role that neuropeptides - specifically galanin - play in regulating microglial growth factor production and, hence, neuronal development doc18998 none Originating in the mid- s, Stark s Conjecture remains one of the deepest unsolved problems in number theory. Tate s book on the sub- ject provided a generation of researchers with a solid exposition of the state of the conjecture at that time, and a foundation for further in- vestigation. Work related to the conjecture has recently grown to in- volve more and more number theorists, but there has never been a major conference on the subject. This NSF award will provide major funding for a conference dedicated to Stark s conjecture and its variations to be held at John s Hopkins University in Baltimore August 4-9, . Plans include plenary talks devoted to background and current research in the mornings, followed by contributed talks in the afternoons. The gathering of researchers from various strands of inquiry should lead to insight into the links between various conjectures and provide an ideal platform for further research on all aspects of Stark s Conj- ecture. In particular, one would expect that this conference would lead to a number of new and fruitful collaborations, and to the greater in- volvement of graduate students in this research. Indeed, graduate stu- dents, junior faculty members, women, and members of traditionally under-represented minorities are especially encouraged to attend and to apply for funding. Stark s conjecture in number theory suggests that there is astonishing and useful structure waiting to be discovered behind the fundamental concepts of higher arithmetic. In higher arithmetic, one seeks to de- scribe the solutions of polynomial equations and their properties. This is the algebraic side of number theory. The conjecture states that the solutions of certain polynomial equations can be obtained from the values of specific limits and infinite sums which naturally involve the methods of calculus. This is the analytic side of number theory. Thus Stark s conjecture makes a striking connection between two branches of mathematics: algebra and analysis. Understanding this type of connection is just what leads to major breakthroughs. Indeed, the conjecture has already led to new and more efficient methods of performing certain computations doc18999 none DeBacker The investigator will work on a number of topics which arise in the study of harmonic analysis for reductive groups over nonarchimedian local fields. The unifying theme for these topics is their relation to homogeneity statements. At their most basic level, homogeneity questions ask: given two distributions, what is the largest set of functions on which the two distributions will agree? The first topic concerns the homogeneity question for invariant distributions supported on the compact elements in the group. This is the last unproven (in general) homogeneity statement, and it has implications for the fundamental lemma (which is a conjecture). The second topic concerns questions of stability for distributions supported on the unipotent set. The final topic concerns the meaning of the constants occurring in the Harish-Chandra-Howe local character expansion. The topics discussed above fall under the rubric of harmonic analysis on Lie groups. This area of mathematics, which is solidly rooted in physics, was pioneered by Harish-Chandra beginning some fifty years ago. Since the s, much of the work in this area has been directed toward questions which arise naturally in the Langlands program (which seeks to relate, in a strong sense, number theory, representation theory, and harmonic analysis). For example, Harish-Chandra studied the distributions which arise when one integrates over a conjugacy class. From the perspective of the Langlands program, it is also important to study the distributions which arise when one integrates over certain stable conjugacy classes, that is, classes which become conjugate over an algebraic closure of the ground field. The investigator hopes his program of research will contribute to future progress in this area doc19000 none The theory of special values of L-functions is a major, active area of research within the general fields of number theory and arithmetic algebraic geometry. Stark s Main Conjecture provides a link between special values of Artin L-functions and the arithmetic of the associated Galois extensions. In recent years, Rubin and Popescu have formulated refined, integral versions of Stark s Main Conjecture in the case of abelian L-functions of arbitrary order of vanishing at the origin. Also, Burns and Flach, by reworking earlier conjectures of Bloch-Kato and Fontaine-Perrin Riou, have formulated the Equivariant Tamagawa Number Conjecture for certain classes of motivic L-functions. If restricted to the case of Artin L-functions, the Burns-Flach conjecture can also be viewed as a refined, integral version of Stark s Main Conjecture. The Principal Investigator focuses on providing evidence for, studying the functorial behavior of, and finding links between the Conjectures of Rubin, Popescu, and Burns-Flach. He also works on developing Gross-type p-adic refinements of these statements, as well as building bridges between these statements and the Theory of Euler Systems, Equivariant Iwasawa Theory, and the Conjectures of Brumer, Leopoldt, and Chinburg. The L-functions are mathematical objects of analytic (continuous) nature, encoding an enormous amount of extremely interesting and useful information of arithmetic (discrete) nature. The main goal of this project is to continue a program initiated by Stark, Rubin, the principal investigator, and Burns-Flach, and develop general recipes (conjectures) aimed at retrieving the arithmetic data encoded in a special type of L-functions (the Artin L-functions), and follow these recipes (in other words prove these conjectures) in several important special cases. In parallel, the Principal Investigator is developing links between these conjectures and other, already developed theories, dealing with objects of arithmetic (discrete) nature, such as the theory of Euler Systems and Equivariant Iwasawa Theory. Aside from its importance for the central areas of pure mathematics called number theory and arithmetic algebraic geometry, this research could have far reaching practical applications to the development of new data encryption algorithms doc19001 none Walden This award to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts provides instrumentation to significantly improve the oceanographic research capabilities of the research vessels Atlantis, Knorr and Oceanus, three ships operated by WHOI as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. Specifically, this award will provide new sensors for CTD operations on all three ships, new software firmware for acquisition of satellite imagery on two ships, an new attitude heading sensor (GPS-based) for one ship, plus pumps for collecting clean sea water samples from any vessel and moored ocean profilers for long-term studies of physical oceanography. These improvements will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists using these three ships in their research during and future years doc19002 none Proposal Number: PI: John P. D Angelo An important aspect of complex analysis concerns inequalities on absolute values of holomorphic functions or, more generally, on norms of holomorphic mappings. In recent work the proposer has developed a systematic approach to this subject. He has given a complex variables analogue of Hilbert s 17th problem, applied the techniques to proper holomorphic mappings, and (with Catlin) proved an isometric imbedding theorem for holomorphic vector bundles. Also he has recently written a Carus Monograph entitled Inequalities from Complex Analysis , thereby laying a foundation for more work in this area. The current proposal describes how to expand these research directions and discusses possible mathematical applications. Although the proposal focuses on pure mathematics, one can imagine the application to the sciences of some of this work. For example, in Quantum Mechanics, an observable is a self-adjoint (Hermitian) operator on a Hilbert space. The proposal allows for a more general approach, by describing a notion of self-adjointness for non-linear mappings. One of the main ideas of the proposer s work has been to describe various notions of positivity for such mappings. Several new conditions arise; these conditions are equivalent in the linear case from Quantum Mechanics, but distinct in general, and therefore may lead to applications in physics. In particular the proposer hopes to develop applications of the non-linear analogue of the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality doc19003 none Powder metallurgy is a classic discrete component fabrication process that relies on the flow of metal particles into a die cavity, where the powders are compressed into a preform that is subsequently sintered. Current technological limitations trace to the inability to achieve undistorted, full-density parts. For example, density gradients induced from shaping processes lead to nonuniform shrinkage during sintering. Thermal debinding, used to remove binders prior to sintering, introduces defects or shape distortions: subsequent sintering exacerbates the situation. High temperature sintering can produce full density microstructures, but dimensional accuracy decreases as powder particle size increases. Supersolidus liquid phase (SLP) sintering offers an alternate processing method for high-alloy materials, but thermal protocols are not well understood. Thus, the industrial protocol has been to work from historical data and iterations to specify tooling and processing cycles to produce target components. Our research addresses these barriers by forming a team with complementary skills in powder metallurgy, ultrasonic inspection, binder lubricant technology, and computer-based design in manufacturing processing. Tool steel and 316L stainless steel powder parts with axisymmetric geometries will be the focus of the investigations. A set of protocols will be established to reduce the dimensional variability that arises at two key processing steps: debinding (low temperature), and SLP (high temperature) sintering. We will establish thermal cycle guidelines to achieve distortion free, full density components. Furthermore, the investigation will produce a resource of constitutive models, increase the understanding of the microstructure evolution, and advance the development of ultrasonic techniques to evaluate full-field density and detect defects throughout the process cycle. The educational plan includes integrating undergraduate and graduate student experiences across the breadth of the research tasks. The creation of design tools for the powder processing industry will be a significant advance for industry, and it will be disseminated to some 90 industrial companies from materials suppliers and equipment manufacturers to part fabricators and end users doc19004 none Proposal Number: PI: Mario Bonk The investigation of non-smooth phenomena is one of the main subjects of contemporary Geometric Function Theory. The purpose of this project is to study metric structures on spaces and appropriate nonsmooth classes of mappings between these spaces such as bilipschitz, quasisymmetric, quasiconformal, and quasiregular mappings. Many basic questions in this area are open. For example, a satisfactory characterization of two-dimensional metric spheres that are quasisymmetric to the standard two-dimensional sphere is unknown. This problem is relevant in connection to Thurston s hyperbolization conjecture. Progress in the field relies on a combination of geometric and analytic methods that were recently established in the analysis of metric spaces. The particular question of how to map surfaces has a long history. Cartography aims to preserve particular features of a surface under suitable mappings. This has lead to major mathematical developments. In the nineteenth century basic problems of surveying and geodesy motivated Gauss to build up a systematic theory of curved surfaces which laid the foundation of modern differential geometry. For the investigation of wrinkled and fractal objects new mathematical tools are required. A clear understanding of the mathematical concepts for describing nonsmooth phenomena will benefit research in other areas and lead to practical applications. For example, methods for attacking the theoretical questions of quasiconformal parametrizations of spheres were also used for finding algorithms for mapping the surface of the human brain. One of the aims of the project is to involve graduate students in this promising and important area of mathematical research doc19005 none The author proposes to work on various extremal problems for functionals which are defined in terms of integrals or eigenvalues. These problems include: Lieb-Thirring inequalities for the number bound states of Schrodinger operators; sharp Moser-Trudinger and Sobolev inequalities for the CR sphere, with applications to determinants of CR invariant operators; sharp inequalities for integrals involving cross-ratios, with applications to zeta functions of Laplacians on the sphere; sharp inequalities of log-Sobolev type on the disk, with applications to zeta functions of Dirichlet and Neumann Laplacians on the disk; dimension -free Carleson measure inequalities. The research will touch on important questions arising in differential geometry, harmonic analysis, and mathematical physics. It is difficult to understate the importance of eigenvalue estimates in both applied and theoretical sciences. It is very often the case that to given physical structures, such as systems of particles, vibrating membranes, or strings, one can attach certain characteristic numerical values, called eigenvalues . These numbers are important, as some relevant properties of a given structure can be often coded into numerical functions of the eigenvalues, called spectral functionals . In an extremal problem one tries to find out which structures of the same type would yield the highest (or lowest) possible spectral functionals; very often, they are the ones with exhibit the most symmetrical geometry doc19006 none This award provides support to a consortium of faculty from the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS) and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) for purchase of an ultra-high field magnetic micro-imaging device to be used for biological research. The instrument includes a 9.4T, 89 mm bore, actively shielded, superconducting magnet, console, dual fullband RF system, gradient amplifier, two gradient coils, and five RF probes for multi-nuclear spectroscopy from 20 MHz to 480 MHz. The instrument is made cost effective by the small bore, a constraint that contributes to enhanced gradient performance and field homogeneity. Ultra high-field, large bore systems used for medical research and diagnosis cost millions of dollars and push the limits and performance of gradient coils. Ultra high-field microimagers give unprecedented anatomical and functional images, allow multiple and single voxel spectroscopy, and have the potential to determine up to eighteen neurochemical signals simultaneously in vivo. The microimager is expected to provide research and training opportunities for students in 1) MR imaging, 2) data acquisition, management, image processing, and informatics, 3) development of radiofrequency electronics, and 4) neurophysiological and biological experimental design and implementation. The planned biological applications include: imaging functional brain activity, quantitative developmental neuroanatomy, imaging brain metabolism, and imaging brain receptors with ligand specific contrast agents, all using small animals. The success of these studies will require new developments in electronics, computer science and chemistry. Hence there is a natural collaboration between engineers, computer and biological scientists at WPI and neuroscientists at UMMS doc19007 none Proposal Numbers: and PIs: Alexander Volberg, Fedor Nazarov, and Serguei Treil Research will be conducted on non-homogeneous harmonic analysis and on weighted norm inequalities with matrix weights. In previous work by the PIs a technique for estimating Calderon-Zygmund operators on spaces with non-doubling measures was developed, and a novel method of Bellman functions was introduced for problems in Harmonic Analysis. These techniques will be applied to solve several open problems in harmonic analysis and operator theory and to investigate new directions, which previously were deemed untractable because of the lack of technical tools. Special attention will be paid to uncovering new relations between Operator Theory, Harmonic Analysis and Stochastic Control. Among the main directions of the proposed research are: - Spectral theory for perturbations of normal operators and related problems in Harmonic Analysis: two weight estimates for Hilbert Transform and embedding theorems for the co-invariant subspaces. - Non-homogeneous T(b) theorems and their applications to generalizations of analytic capacity (electric intensity capacity); the role of curvature in higher dimensions. - Bellman function method in stochastic optimal control and in harmonic analysis; functions with matrix arguments and their applications to non-commutative problems. Harmonic analysis investigates complex processes by representing them as a sum of elementary ones (sinusoidal waves, wavelets) with well understood behavior. A central part of modern harmonic analysis deals with singular operators of one type or another. Such operators are pervasive in the scientific landscape: they turn up in mathematical physics, probability, engineering, image processing, etc. A new way to treat multivariate signals will be discussed. The main difficulty here is that the mathematical objects arising in such problems are non-commutative: the product depends on the order of terms, and that complicates things immensely. A new method based on Bellman functions, which originating in the stochastic optimal control, will be exploited in harmonic analysis. One important direction of research is the spectral theory for the perturbation of normal operators: results in this direction would have important consequences in mathematical physics. Another direction deals with non-commutative harmonic analysis, i.e. with treating multivariate signals doc19008 none PI: Zhijian, Wu Project Number: : The core of this proposal is to systematically study certain interactions between holomorphic function spaces and operator theory. These holomorphic spaces include Dirichlet spaces, potential capacity related scale space which covers Bloch space and BMOA, and the analytic Morrey spaces. The operators are multipliers, bilinear forms, such as Hankel operators and Toeplitz operators, and commutators. The study involves the following objects: the orthogonal projection, the point evaluation operator, mean value operator, the differential operator such as d-bar, Laplacian and Dirac operators, Clifford analysis, atomic decomposition, approximation numbers, predual, intermediate spaces, Carleson measures and potential capacity. Techniques in harmonic analysis, complex analysis and operator theory will bebe used and developed in this study. Beside its own charm in pure mathematical research, the interaction between holomorphic function spaces and operator theory has many applications in several fields of applied sciences. Automatic control, navigation and system design in engineering are examples of the applications. Operator theory has its roots in the rigorization of quantum mechanics and it is now widely used in control theory doc19009 none Rieffel Over the past several years I developed a theory of quantum metric spaces, within the setting of algebras of operators on Hilbert space. My theory includes an analog of the classical Gromov-Hausdorff distance between metric spaces. I gave several applications of these ideas, notably to the convergence of matrix algebras to coadjoint orbits of compact Lie groups. I propose to continue to strengthen this theory, and to apply it in several directions suggested by the many situations in the physics and mathematics of quantization where one has a sequence of quantum spaces which appear to be converging to another space, either quantum or classical. As a major new direction I will try to develop an analogous theory for the quantum versions of the superstructure of vector bundles, connections, Yang-Mills actions, etc. I will also try to extend my theory beyond the quantum analog of locally compact spaces, so as to attempt to deal with the approximations of quantum field-theory models, especially those of integrable systems, say by quantum lattice models. Our nation s technological and economic success has at its foundation the mathematical models of the world around us which scientists develop in order to understand how to use the flood of data which flows from the laboratories of the experimental scientists. But human beings and computers can only deal with finite collections of numbers at a time. Thus in applying these mathematical models it is almost always necessary to approximate the infinite variability of our world by finite collections of numbers. It is then crucial to understand how valid any given approximation is. With respect to individual calculations this matter has received extensive study. But less study has been made of how complex models as a whole can be approximated well by simpler models as a whole. Relatively little is known about such global approximations in the case of the models of quantum physics, which is the part of physics which governs chemical and biochemical reactions, the functioning of semi-conductors, and many other key technologies. In the classical realm there is an important form of global approximation called Gromov-Hausdorff distance. I have developed a quantum analog of it, and successfully applied it to a few examples. I propose to strengthen this theory, and to apply it to a broader class of examples, so as to better understand how to effectively approximate various models of quantum phenomena of current interest doc19010 none ions of the notion of symmetry. They are among the most basic notions in many fields of mathematics and are applied widely, for example in cryptology, physics, chemistry, and computer science. Representations of groups are manifestations of a particular type of symmetry on other mathematical objects, as for example the four rotations and four reflections, that a square in the plane allows, form a representation of a group with 8 elements on a two-dimensional vector space. More specifically, the principal investigator studies mysterious coincidences in the representation theory of finite groups which have been discovered about fifteen years ago but could not be explained so far. This research is not aimed at immediate applications outside mathematics. However, in the history of the interplay between mathematics and other sciences, in particular with physics, it is a repeated pattern that theories and results which were considered as important within the edifice of mathematics became precisely what was needed in the other sciences in order to describe our real world. For example, group representations which have been studied a century ago became much later the right tool to describe particles in nuclear physics doc19011 none A graph is perfect if for every induced subgraph, the chromatic number is equal to the maximum size of a complete subgraph. The Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture (SPGC) of Berge from asserts that a graph is perfect if and only if it has no induced subgraph isomorphic to an odd cycle of length at least five, or the complement of such a cycle. A related open question is whether perfectness can be tested in polynomial time. The PI and his colleagues are pursuing a strategy for proving the SPGC. They have formulated several conjectures about graph decomposition that together with earlier conjectures and results imply the SPGC, and are working toward establishing the validity of those conjectures. This work falls within the area of graph theory, and is closely related to theoretical computer science and mathematical programming (operations research). A graph is an abstract mathematical notion used to model networks, such as telephone networks, transportation networks or the Internet. Within graph theory the class of perfect graphs is important for several reasons. For instance, many problems of interest in practice that are intractable in general can be solved efficiently when restricted to the class of perfect graphs. Also, the question of when a certain class of linear programs always have an integer solution can be answered in terms of the perfectness of an associated graph. Thus the Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture is believed to be an important open problem, and its resolution is likely to have implications in the design of efficient algorithms of interest to theoretical computer scientists and operations researchers doc19012 none The investigator studies problems in enumerative combinatorics related to permutations, symmetric functions, and lattice paths. One of the investigator s approaches is to apply Richard Stanley s theory of P-partitions and its generalizations to the study of descent algebras of symmetric and related groups. Several other problems related to the enumeration of permutations by descents are also studied. The investigator also studies a generalization of two-stack-sortable permutations leading to a symmetric-function refinement of the formula of West (proved by Zeilberger) for counting these permutations, and several problems involving the enumeration of lattice paths. Enumerative combinatorics involves counting mathematical objects with given properties. It has applications to computer science, physics, and chemistry, as well as to other areas of mathematics, such as algebra, probability and statistics, topology, analysis, and number theory. The investigator s long-range goal is to develop, extend, and systematize the methods of enumerative combinatorics, and the problems studied will contribute towards this goal doc19013 none Dadarlat Research conducted in the last ten years has revealed unexpected rigidity properties of noncommutative C -algebras. Whereas the cohomological invariants of a space (commutative C -algebra) will determine the space at most up to homotopy equivalence, in the class of nuclear simple C -algebras, the objects are often determined up to isomorphism by their K-theoretical invariants. Elliott s conjecture states that, far from being an accident, this is always the case for the entire class of separable nuclear simple C -algebras. (Tracial invariants are needed if the real rank is nonzero.) The proposed research aims to uncover and explain rigidity properties of nuclear C -algebras. The basic idea beyond the classification program is that that the simplicity and the stable or real rank conditions for a nuclear C -algebra translate to certain internal dynamical properties of the algebra which forces a behavior typical to that of a combinatorial object. The C -algebra becomes a rigid object built around its K-theory skeleton. The ramifications of the classification theory into the structure theory of C -algebras will be explored with emphasis on dynamical systems and group C -algebras. The investigator will analyze the impact of the recent advances around the Baum-Connes conjecture on the classification theory with the long term goal of formulating and exploring a Baum-Connes type conjecture for general nuclear C -algebras. This is closely tied with the universal coefficient theorem problem in KK-theory and deformation theory of C -algebras. Geometry was developed in an attempt to describe the ambient physical space. Its history has seen a series of remarkable achievements from the Euclidian geometry to the non-Euclidian geometries which culminated with the Riemannian geometry providing a successful model for large-scale spacetime in general relativity. The noncommutative geometry of Alain Connes is a far reaching generalization of the Riemannian geometry, well adapted for the study of a variety of large and small scale structures. The theory can be viewed as a significant development in the quest of quantizing of mathematics following the successful quantization of physics. As in quantum physics, the coordinates in this theory are no longer ordinary numbers but noncommuting operators acting on infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces. The ordinary spaces are being replaced by algebras of operators. The proposed project aims to contribute to the extensive effort of a community of researchers to extend the mathematics of commutative spaces to operator algebras doc19014 none The PI and his collaborators, will continue their investigation of the relations between periods and special values of L-functions. Specifically, those pertaining to the conjecture of Bloch and Beilinson for elliptic curves and those implied by Borel s theorem for a number field and their connection to the Mahler measure of Laurent polynomials and the geometry of hyperbolic 3-manifolds. The PI s research area is in Number Theory, a very old subject with connections to every other conceivable area of Mathematics as well as Physics. It is remarkable how the type of questions one would like to answer in Number Theory, for example, can we write the number 1 as the sum of the cubes of two rational numbers?, which at the time of Fermat ( s) say, most likely had no direct implications to everyday life, have evolved into highly relevant issues today. In our current technology age, Number Theory is behind much of the safety of common activities like, for example, shopping on the internet. The PI s specific research concerns L-functions, certain analytic objects one associates to questions like the one above, which are central to modern Number Theory and from which one expects to, and often does, retrieve answers doc19015 none PI: Dechao Zheng Proposal Number: Research will be conducted on problems arising from the interaction between function theory and functional analysis. Primary emphasis will rest on the study of Toeplitz operators on some function spaces. The topics to be considered include compact operators ``closely associated with function theory on the Hardy space or the Bergman space, bounded Toeplitz operators, algebraic and spectral properties of dual Toeplitz operators, Hankel and Toeplitz operators on the Segal-Bargmann spaces and quasi-invariant subspaces of the Segal-Bargmann spaces. This project focuses on the central problem of establishing the relationship between the fundamental properties of those operators and analytic and geometric properties of their symbols. The proposed work involves ideas and problems from operator theory and complex analysis. Operator Theory grew out of ideas used to study certain partial differential equations arising in physics, and became increasingly important with the advent of Quantum Mechanics. There are at least two reasons for the continuous and increasing interest in Toeplitz operators. In addition to differential operators, Toeplitz operators constitute one of the most important classes of non-selfadjoint operators and they are a fascinating example of the fruitful interplay between such topics as operator theory, function theory, harmonic analysis and operator algebras. On the other hand, Toeplitz operators are of importance in connection with a variety of problems in physics, probability theory, information and control theory, and several other fields doc19016 none Proposal Number: PI: Mattias Jonsson The principal investigator will use valuations, a tool from algebra, to study local problems in dynamics and analysis in two complex dimensions. Valuations can be visualized concretely as the different ways that a sequence of points can converge to the origin. In fact, they parameterize all the local data at a point. Local phenomena in complex variables, such as the singularity of a plurisubharmonic functions or the rate of convergence of an orbit to a fixed point, can be effectively studied by observing the behavior along different approaches to the point. Valuations constitute a very powerful tool for this study. The success of the approach depends on the fact that the set of all valuations at a point in two dimensions is a set that can be understood: it is a tree in the sense of an infinite collection of real intervals welded together at branch points so that no cycles appear. This tree is a complicated but manageable object and its one-dimensionality has striking applications. Dynamical systems are mathematical models that are widely used in virtually every science for any situation that undergoes a time-evolution. Sir Isaac Newton invented calculus, or mathematical analysis, for the study of the planetary system, a prime example of a dynamical system. Much of mathematics has developed as a respond to the need to model and understand the world around us. In this proposal the principal investigator will use a tool from a different field of mathematics in order to understand certain dynamical systems. One example of a system that can be studied arises from numerical (iterative) algorithms, and the study of the dynamical systems in this proposal will give information on the performance of the algorithms doc19017 none The September 11, , terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted immediate and longer-term concerns about the nature of vulnerabilities to terrorism and the more general nature of societal responses to environmental, biological, chemical, and terrorist security threats. As different scientific communities have assessed the new realities revealed by the terrorist attacks and subsequent promulgation of anthrax through the mails, geographers have identified a broad range of ways in which they can contribute to deeper understandings of the causes, consequences, and responses to terrorism. This Small Grant for Exploratory Research will expand the examination of geographic dimensions of terrorism-related research through two related sets of activities. First, faculty and students from Hunter College of the City University of New York, the University of Colorado-Denver, and the University of South Carolina will conduct a pilot project to assess the role and utility of geographic information in emergency management and response to the World Trade Center attack. This pilot study will briefly summarize the knowledge base on the use of geographic technology in hazards response and what has been learned to date. It will evaluate local experiences in providing spatial data in support of rescue, relief, and recovery efforts; and it will include a broader survey on the use of geographical technologies during the immediate-response phase for the first three weeks following the disaster. A combination of web-based sources, media accounts, and personal interviews will be used to gather the necessary data. The second part of this project will include the conduct of a workshop during late or early to formulate a more substantive research agenda on the geographical dimensions of terrorism. Using the pilot study as a backdrop for discussion, participants identified through their extant research and from submissions evaluated by workshop organizers will develop a general research agenda that provides a clearly focused set of research themes, needs, and tasks. The agenda will be widely disseminated to the geographic research community and to related disciplines. The outcomes of the workshop include: a published book or article on the material prepared for the workshop, establishment of multi-institutional research collaboratives, and the enhancement of the research infrastructure of the discipline to address important public policy needs and issues. This project will have both immediate and longer-term benefits. The pilot study will coalesce knowledge about the ways that geographic information technologies were used in response to the September 11 attacks, and it will address wider-ranging issues associated with the anticipation of and responses to cataclysmic events. Th workshop will provide a forum for the development of a more fully articulated research agenda, and it will be a setting to stimulate dialogue among academic researchers, private-sector practitioners, and federal, state, and local government officials. The resulting agenda and expanded networks should facilitate the capabilities of geographers to respond to this pressing national concern doc19018 none The Principle Investigator studies a new class of inequalities on the flag f-vector of convex polytopes. The flag f-vector contains all the enumerative incidence information between the faces of a polytope. Thus to classify the set of all possible flag f-vectors is one of the great open problems in discrete geometry. To date only partial results to this problem have been obtained. In a related problem, the Principle Investigator and his Research Assistant will study the homology groups of Newtonian coalgebras that arise in polytopal theory. These homology groups were recently used to give an algebraic proof of the existence of the cd-index, an important invariant in poset theory. Understanding the homology of these chain complexes will give insight into new applications of Newtonian coalgebras. Polytopes are basic mathematical objects that appear in discrete geometry. The methods to attack these problems are unusually interdisciplinary as they involve insights from both geometry and algebra. The results of this investigation are important as they relate both to the pure branches of mathematics, such as commutative algebra, algebraic geometry and Hopf algebras, and to the applied sciences, including optimization and computer science. Understanding the enumerative information of polytopes will give a theoretical basis for stress and rigidity problems in mechanical engineering, for the reconstruction using sampling problem in computer vision, and for determining the complexity of geometrically-based problems in optimization doc19019 none PI: Sagun Chanillo, Rutgers University : In this proposal several problems are proposed, all in the field of PDE. Most of these problems are in the sub-field of non-linear PDE, and some in linear PDE. The non-linear problems arise naturally from Physics and Geometry and the interaction of Physics and Geometry. The linear problems are also tied in with Geometry and Physics. There is a strong focus in this proposal on various qualitative features of solutions to PDE, their level lines, nodal lines of eigenfunctions, smoothness of solutions and so on. We have selected the problems in part because we view many of them as having very natural connections with classical Harmonic analysis, and in fact we have made some start on solving them using techniques from classical Harmonic analysis. This is described in the body of the proposal. Some of the problems that arise from Physics in our proposal are connected with the phenomena of vortices. Here we continue work that was funded by previous grants. The vortices we study are those that arise from fluid flow on two-dimensional spheres and on the plane. Taking the continuum limit of the point vortex distribution leads us to a new technique for solving the prescribed Gauss curvature equation which also gives a tremendous insight into conformally invariant PDE s. Problems are also posed that stem from the Schrodinger equation and Geometry and its influence on the spectrum of elliptic operators. We single out an important component of the proposed research proposal. In todays environment it has become important to study so-called smart materials, more principally composites. Because of their lightness they are preferred materials to use for their strength and lightness. In this proposal we study as one problem the vibrational characteristics of composites. In particular how should one build objects using composite materials so as to minimize their basic vibrational characteristics. Intuitively the larger the natural frequency with which an object vibrates, the more it is susceptible to stress and breakage. For example one question one can ask is, if we need to build a symmetric object like a washer does it mean the composite has to be arranged symmetrically respecting the symmetry of the washer? We find that in our research for example that this necessarily does not minimize the stresses that can be caused by vibration and we need to arrange the composite in a non-symmetric way to construct the washer. This is not the only problem we study in our proposal but also problems in Differential Geometry and Physics doc19020 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Have colicin type antibiotic genes evolved to increase their host bacteria s competitiveness, or are they selfish addictive genes? Colicin type bacteriocins are believed to have evolved as allelopathic agents that confer a competitive advantage to bacterial strains that harbor them. This research investigates an alternative hypothesis that colicin plasmids are selfish elements and utilize a form of post segregational killing to insure their maintenance by host bacteria doc19021 none PI: Mikhail Feldman, University of Wisconsin -------------------------------------------------- The project consists of two main topics: (1) Free boundary problems for nonlinear elliptic equations. One of objectives is to develop techniques for studying free boundary problems arising in the models of compressible fluid dynamics, in particular to study existence, uniqueness and stability of multidimensional transonic shocks for Euler equations for steady and self-similar potential flows. Euler equations can be written as a single second order, nonlinear elliptic-hyperbolic equation of mixed type for the velocity potential, if the flow is steady or self-similar. Transonic shocks are discontinuities in the gradient of the solution such that the type of equation changes from hyperbolic to elliptic across the shock surface. Transonic shocks arise in many situations of physical importance (steady supersonic flows around an obstacle, shock reflection for self-similar flows). (2) Monge-Kantorovich mass transfer problem. The questions to study include geometric and measure-theoretic properties of solutions, and applications to partial differential equations. Free boundary problems arise naturally in many models in physics, fluid dynamics, economics. Free boundaries correspond to sharp changes in the variables describing the problem. Significant progress has been made during last several decades in the study of free boundary problems. However in the case of nonlinear partial differential equations many important questions are yet to be studied. This is the first theme of the project. Better understanding of properties of free boundaries, such as stability, makes possible to understand complex phenomena in models and applications. We plan to study transonic shocks in a flow of compressible fluid or gas. Another area of the project is optimal transportation problem. Recently many fundamental properties and important applications of this problem within and beyond mathematics were discovered, in particular its connections to nonlinear partial differential equations, and applications in models for front formation in the atmosphere, kinetic theory, fluid flow, elastic crystals, granular materials, and microeconomic decision problems. We plan to work on theory and applications of optimal transportation problem doc19022 none PI: Matthew Gursky, Notre Dame University %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Fully nonlinear and higher order equations in geometry . The work described in this proposal lies at the intersection of three fields: higher order elliptic partial differential equations, fully nonlinear equations, and differential geometry. The equations we study are geometric in origin, and given by elementary symmetric polynomials of the eigenvalues of the Weyl-Schouten tensor, specifically under conformal deformations of the metric. There is a strong structural analogy between this problem and the more classical problem of prescribing the curvature(s) of a surface in three-dimensional space. To analyze our equations we use techniques from the field of fully nonlinear and higher order elliptic equations. The geometric consequences are most interesting in low dimensions: for example, we have developed a technique for constructing large families of conformal manifolds which admit metrics with positive Ricci curvature, The interaction of geometry and analysis dates back to at least the eighteenth century, and yet continues to be an important and highly active field of mathematical research. The classical subject of geometry grew out of our desire to understand certain properties of the physical world, and differential geometry was developed to understand the geometry of curved spaces--for example, the curvature of the surface of the earth, or the curvature of space by matter predicted by general relativity. In the same way that Descartes realized that plane geometry can be studied using algebra, so differential geometry can be studied using techniques from analysis, especially differential equations. This research in this proposal involves several such problems from Riemmanian and conformal geometry, whose analysis requires techniques from various fields within mathematical analysis doc19023 none PI: Brian C. Hall, University of Notre Dame : The PI s research concerns the quantization of certain special classical systems, those whose classical configuration space is a compact symmetric space, such as a sphere. The simplest physical example of such a system is (the rotational degrees of freedom of) a rigid body, whose configuration space is the rotation group SO(3). The phase space of any such system, namely, the cotangent bundle of the compact symmetric space, has a natural complex structure that makes the phase space into a Kahler manifold. Thus the quantization of such a system can be done in two ways, one using the usual position Hilbert space and the other using a Hilbert space of holomorphic functions. The latter space generalizes the classical Segal-Bargmann space. The two possible quantum Hilbert spaces are related by a unitary transform, the generalized Segal-Bargmann transform, developed by the PI and M. Stenzel. The unitarity of this transform can be re-formulated as a resolution of the identity for the associated coherent states, as shown in detail by the PI and J. Mitchell. These results have been applied to the quantization of two-dimensional Yang-Mills theory and to the classical limit of Thiemann s quantum gravity theory. The PI is continuing to investigate several aspects of the theory, including the semiclassical localization properties of the coherent states, properties of the associated quantization schemes (generalized Wick, anti-Wick, and Weyl quantizations), and the relationship of the theory to geometric quantization. Broadly speaking the PI s research is in the boundary region between classical and quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is the theory that governs the world at the atomic scale. Although classical (Newtonian) mechanics works well for macroscopic phenomena, it cannot account for the structure of atoms and molecules--at this level the quantum theory takes over. For the two theories to be consistent with one another the predictions of quantum mechanics must pass smoothly into those of classical mechanics as the scale passes from microscopic to macroscopic. On the other hand, the mathematical structure of the two theories is very different, so it is challenging to understand how this quantum-to-classical transition takes place. The PI s research concerns a reformulation of quantum mechanics which is equivalent to the usual one but which brings the description of quantum mechanics closer to that of classical mechanics. Specifically, the PI s work takes one standard reformulation of quantum mechanics, the Segal-Bargmann transform, and extends it to apply to systems with more complicated degrees of freedom, such as rotations. This work has been applied in a simplified model of the strong interaction in particle physics and in an ambitious program of T. Thiemann and collaborators to develop a quantum theory of gravity doc19024 none Rationally connected varieties form a class of varieties that coincides with rational and unirational varieties for curves and surfaces, but represents a very different (and better behaved) class in higher dimensions. The investigator studies aspects of rational connectivity; in particular, the relation between rational connectivity and unirationality and the implications of rational connectivity for existence of points on varieties over non-algebraically closed fields. In relation to the latter, the investigator studies the geometry of parameter spaces for rational curves on a rationally connected variety. The central goal of algebraic geometry is to learn more about the solutions of polynomial equations by studying geometric objects, called varieties, associated to them. For example, if an ellipse is given to us by a polynomial in two variables, we might ask how the shape of an ellipse affects the solutions of the polynomial. Recently, algebraic geometers have introduced a new property of varieties, called rational connectivity, and results to far indicate a strong connection between the algebra of a system of polynomial equations and the rational connectivity of the variety they define. The investigator studies this connection further doc19025 none PI: Pencho Petrushev, University of South Carolina ======== The project will be focused on specific problems in nonlinear n-term approximation from large redundant systems, which is commonly referred to as highly nonlinear approximation. Redundant systems have already had a serious impact in signal and image processing and upon Approximation Theory in general. The research community is currently developing two forms of redundant systems. The first deals with libraries of bases such as the wavelet packets and cosine packets. The second major thrust has been to study dictionaries such as the Gabor functions and neural networks. The focus of our investigations is toward dictionaries of a different nature, which fall in two categories: (i) Dictionaries consisting of shifts and dilates of infinitely smooth, rapidly decaying functions which include the Gaussian, radial partial fractions, or more general anisotropic systems consisting of certain transformations of such functions. (ii) Collections of piecewise polynomials generated by multilevel dyadic partitions of the pace, multilevel nested triangulations, or simplex partitions. The primary goal of project is to understand nonlinear and highly nonlinear processes. In particular, we must develop an understanding of the nature of the smoothness conditions (specified by specific spaces) which govern the rate of approximation in a collection of important metrics. The second major effort of the project is to develop algorithms which are grounded in fundamental analysis, capable of achieving the rate of the best approximation (i.e. compression), and are practical to implement. This project is actively coordinating its investigations with collaborators involved in the analysis and presentation of data for a wide range of application fields, including digital elevation maps and associated imagery arising from geographical information systems (GIS), signal and image analysis, computer aided geometric design (CAGD), graphical rendering and visualization of large scale numerical simulations. In each case, the objective is to analyze complicated data and signals in the context of prescribed dictionaries and to decompose them into basic elements which are natural for the physical system under investigation. The amplitudes associated with the base elements, whether they be wavelets, a multiresolution redundant system, or anisotropic systems, provide inherent information about the data and ideally lead to the maximal entropy encoding of classes of signals (data). This encoded representation of data is important for the storage, transmission, fast query, visual display, correlation, or registration against data from other modalities. The primary motivation of this project is to make substantial contributions to the underlying theoretical foundation for these investigations doc19026 none This project has three parts: (1) To study the versal deformations of A_\infty , L_\infty algebras, which are generalizations of Lie and associative algebras; (2) To study the problem of deformation quantization of polynomial Poisson algebras; (3) To address some problems in the study of the moduli space of Riemann surfaces with marked points that arise from the combinatorial equivalence of this space and the orbifold of metric Ribbon graphs. The first part continues a program being carried out jointly with Alice Fialowski. The second part is about generalizing a purely cohomological construction of the PI and Pol Vanhaecke of the unique generic deformation quantizationof order three which extends to a fourth order deformation. The third part, which is joint work with Motohico Mulase, is more open-ended. Reasonable goals might be: to establish a canonical orbifold diffeomorphism between the moduli space of Riemann surfaces and the Ribbon graph complex; to give concrete characterizations of the Strebel differential in some interesting cases; to study solutions to the KP system determined by the correspondence between ribbon graphs and Riemann surfaces over the algebraic closure of the rationals; to describe in detail the correspondence between the homology of the Ribbon graph comples, and the moduli space of Riemann surfaces with marked points. This project consists of three problems in mathematics related to or motivated by physics. The first problem is to study what happens when a very general kind of algebraic structure, one that arises in both mathematics and physics, is deformed, for example by incorporating some special little twisting process into the usual algebraic operation of multiplication. This investigation continues collaborative work with a colleague in Hungary. The second problem involves a different kind of deformation process applied to a certain class of polynomial algebras. The third, and most open-ended problem, is about investigating a remarkable and unexpected correspondence between an algebraically defined geometric space and a differentially (as in calculus) defined geometric object. This third part also provides numerous opportunities for undergraduate involvement in research doc19027 none PI: Lev Kapitanski, Kansas State University %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% . This project will focus on the analysis of the properties of solutions for both linear and nonlinear Schrodinger equations and on the analysis of ground states and evolution in the models of Skyrme and Faddeev. The principal investigator will continue his study of the exact and approximate fundamental solutions for time-dependent Schrodinger equations on noncompact and compact manifolds, with special emphasis on estimates relevant for nonlinear problems. For the models of Skyrme and Faddeev, he will study the existence of ground states and their regularity. Also, he will study the Cauchy problem for these models. The PI will extend the techniques developed recently in connection with wave maps and Schrodinger maps to these more complicated sigma-models. In addition, he will initiate computational analysis of the ground states and the Cauchy problem in the case when the base manifold is compact. The Schrodinger equation is the basic equation of quantum physics. The properties of its solutions for different physical systems and environments are of great importance to our understanding of quantum phenomena. On the other hand, to describe and better understand elementary particles, physicists design various mathematical models, or field theories. Of special interest are the models that use subtle topological invariants. The models of Skyrme and Faddeev are examples of such models. Their analysis poses challenging mathematical problems on the intersection of the theory of partial differential equations and geometry topology and may bring new physical insights doc19028 none These research projects concern the set theory of the real line, a part of descriptive set theory. The principal investigator studies various ideals of sets of real numbers. Cardinal characteristics of the continuum and the associated families of small sets are central to this research. Specifically, he focuses on problems concerning the consistency of various generalizations of the Borel Conjecture, a statement asserting that the families of sets in question consist entirely of countable sets. He also studies the extent of the duality between the two classical notions of smallness: measure zero and the first category. This problem concerns finding parallels between the measure concepts such as strong measure zero and universal measure zero, and their first category analogs. The study of the structure of the real numbers marks the origins of set theory and has been the object of systematic research since the beginning of the last century. Concepts of measure and category have been studied rigorously for about one hundred years, and have been successfully used in many areas of modern mathematics. Bartoszynski pursues several problems in this area. These problems may yield positive answers that are theorems of mathematics or they may turn out to be independent from the standard axioms of set theory. The positive answers involve new results in both finite and infinite combinatorics and have applications reaching beyond traditional set theory to real analysis, measure theory, and topology. On the other hand, the independence results, particularly ones using forcing, have applications within set theory itself doc19029 none The principal investigator plans to investigate detailed connections among representation theories of finite groups of Lie types, algebraic groups, Lie algebras, and quivers. The research will concentrate on relating the cohomology theory of finite groups of Lie type and that of restricted Lie algebras and infinitesimal group schemes. The goal is to describe, for a given rational module for an algebraic group, its support varieties over finite groups of rational points over finite fields in terms of its support varieties over the higher Frobenius kernels. The principal investigator will also study the connections between representations of quivers and representations of Kac-Moody Lie algebras and quantum groups (and their generalizations). This will involve the study of subalgebras of Hall algebras using perverse sheaves, construct canonical basis of generic subalgebras, realize affine Lie algebras in terms of representations of quivers, and relate them to Fock spaces. The beauty of mathematical research lies in linking many different subject areas together to apply available theory in many different fields. This project is in the area of mathematics known as representation theory. At its core, representation theory derives from the study of symmetries, i.e., the symmetries that natural objects, from subatomic particles to planetary orbits, have. Nowadays there are many different kinds of representation theory, each having evolved as the best way to deal with different kinds of problems. The purpose of this project is to find and explore some of the links between some of the different kinds of representation theory. Such links will benefit not only the study of representation theory, but also physics and other sciences that use representation theory as a standard tool doc19030 none The PI will continue observational and modeling research of pollution over Asia and neighboring oceans that he first conducted for the INDOEX field phase. The new research will provide a database for meteorological and aerosol histories covering the last decade. This database will be developed using variational data assimilation methodology, where satellite and surface based meteorological and aerosol data sets are incorporated in the global analysis. The data assimilation is designed to capture some details of vertical layering of aerosols from global modeling where the winds and atmospheric state are independently defined. A major component of this study will be in the area of sulfate chemistry using the global model. Here the components of the modeling include data assimilation, inclusion of processes such as gas phase oxidation, aqueous-phase oxidation in clouds, wet removal of precipitating clouds, dry and wet deposition. The PI also proposes to participate in an international aerosol model inter-comparison exercise where several major modeling groups will explore the impacts of pollution on regional climate and circulation anomalies. This research is important because aerosol-radiation-cloud processes represent a knowledge gap responsible for a major part of the uncertainty regarding future, human-induced climate change. This research will enrich our understanding of these processes and thus help scientists to develop improved climate models for prediction and projections doc19031 none Streator This project is a 3-year experimental and theoretical investigation of capillary effects in tribological contacts. The proposed investigation is motivated by the technological trend for smaller and smaller form factors, leading to higher surface-area-to-volume ratios and an increasing significance of liquid-mediated interfacial adhesion. Direct measurements of negative capillary pressures will be conducted with several different liquids at sub-micron interfacial spacings, under dynamic conditions. The liquids to be studied include selected perfluoropolyether (PFPE) oils as well as water. The effects of liquid properties such a molecular weight, viscosity, polarity and surface tension will be investigated. Mathematical modeling will be conducted in conjunction with the experiments. It is anticipated that this work will lead to better models of capillary effects in tribological contacts, thereby providing micro- and nano-system designers with improved mathematical tools. Graduate and undergraduate students will be exposed to modern experimental and computational methods, and will learn fundamentals of liquid-mediated contact. Additionally, special efforts will be made to involve under-represented students in this project by taking advantage of an existing NSF-sponsored program at Georgia Tech that provides graduate stipends and undergraduate research funds to under-represented students in engineering and science doc19032 none Noam Elkies The investigator studies problems in number theory, notably the arithmetic of varieties such as elliptic curves and surfaces and their relations and applications to other areas of mathematics such as error-correcting codes and Euclidean lattices. Specific projects include: proof and computational exploitation of new relations between p-adic modular forms of weight 3 2 and the arithmetic of quadratic twists of odd analytic rank; refinement of the Shioda-Usui theory relating Mordell-Weil lattices with Weyl groups, and generalization to certain complex reflection groups; continued study of optimal recursive towers and the investigator s modularity conjecture for such towers; extended study of the connection between bilinear (Somos) recurrences, theta sequences, and explicit moduli spaces; and novel applications of lattice reduction to study and efficiently compute solutions of Diophantine equations and inequalities. The investigator continues his study of problems in number theory concerning the mathematical structure of algebraic solutions of equations. This should lead both to better understanding of those equations and their solutions (elliptic curves, etc.), and to further connections with other topics such as efficient computation, error-correcting codes, and sphere packing doc19033 none Research will be conducted on a number of problems in Several Complex Variables and Cauchy-Riemann Geometry. More specifically, the better understanding of various rigidity phenomena in complex analysis and complex geometry will be sought. The study the analytic structure of real surfaces in the complex space of dimension two, and the investigation of its intrinsic connections with many well-known problems in classical mechanics will be pursued. Complex numbers and functions of complex variables have become, since the 19th century, indispensable tools in many areas of mathematics and in its application to other areas of science and engineering. Indeed, the solutions of many problems in the applied sciences could ultimately depend on improvements in these complex analytic tools and a better understanding of their basic properties. For instance, in material science the standard method for treating multidirectional stresses in a uniform way is to represent them as complex numbers or, in more complicated situations, as complex functions. It then turns out, for instance, that the direction of the propagation of cracks in materials is related to the properties of certain equations associated with these complex numbers or functions. Results of the research to be carried out in this project could lead to the discovery of new properties of solutions of these equations doc19034 none for William B. Johnson and Gilles Pisier, PIs The principal investigators will investigate problems in the theories of Banach spaces and operator spaces. The problems to be considered fall into several subcategories; namely, affine approximation of Lipschitz functions, non linear infinite dimensional and finite dimensional geometry, finite dimensional subspaces of Lebesgue spaces, measures on infinite dimensional spaces, similarity theory, tensor products of operator spaces, bounded and completely bounded approximation properties, and amenability of spaces of operators. There will be coordination of the proposed project with the existing Workshop in Linear Analysis and Probability Theory at Texas A&M University. This Workshop encourages interactions among researchers and apprentices in different mathematical fields by bringing together graduate students, young investigators, and junior and senior postdoctoral participants in several areas of analysis. Banach space theory, the study of notions of distance which are not necessarily Euclidean on both finite and infinite dimensional vector spaces, forms the basis for both Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry and the analytic geometry of infinite dimensional function spaces, including the space of continuous numerical functions on an interval as well as more complicated classes of functions. From the beginning, the ideas at the root of Quantum Mechanics have had a major impact on mathematics, stimulating the study of operators and their spectrum instead of numerical functions. These ideas have led recently to the new field of Quantized Functional Analysis or Operator Space Theory and this development has led to the solution of several major problems as well as opened new avenues of research. Analogously, the non linear geometry of Banach spaces also is a rather recent development which is beginning to have considerable impact in geometrical analysis in both the finite and infinite dimensional settings doc19035 none object and attempts to classify all the objects of which G is the symmetry group. Traditionally, research has focused on the case where the objects are finite-dimensional vector spaces. In this project, the methods of mathematical logic are applied to include the infinite-dimensional cases called pseudo-finite dimensional. These are the situations that the limited power of expression of the mathematical language in use cannot distinguish from the finite-dimensional. It has been shown that many such objects exist, but to unlock the secrets behind any particular one of them remains a baffling question doc19036 none The research will focus on several problems concerning the boundary behavior of analytic functions and their applications in functional analysis and mathematical physics. In analytic function theory the PI plans to study the interaction between singular and non-singular components of Cauchy integrals near the boundary of a complex domain. The results will then be applied to study the resolvent functions of linear operators in perturbation problems. This area has connections with mathematical models of solid state physics, which provides most of the motivation. Another part of the project is the study of the connections between the Beurling-Malliavin theory, inverse spectral problems for partial differential equations and properties of kernels of Toepliz operators. Analytic Function Theory is one of the classical yet rapidly developing parts of modern mathematics. The present stage of its development features many promising new applications in various parts of mathematics and physics. One of the cornerstones of Analytic Function Theory is the integral formula named after the famous French mathematician Cauchy. The importance of this formula is due to the fact that most analytic functions in complex domains can be defined through Cauchy integrals. The PI plans to study various properties of Cauchy integrals near the boundaries of their domains. The results will then be applied in several areas of mathematics as well as in mathematical physics. The applications in mathematical physics will concern, among other things, mathematical models of wave propagation. The general question that will be considered is how to recover full information about a disordered environment from the spectrum of the wave operator and partial information on the potential field doc19037 none Proposal Number: DMS- PI: Randall McCutcheon This project focuses on multiple recurrence in ergodic theory, with applications to combinatorial number theory, specifically density Ramsey theory. The analysis of the returns of positive measure sets under measure preserving actions along combinatorially benign trajectories, such as the ranges of polynomials or IP-systems, has led to a variety of strong theorems not accessible by other methods. Theoretical dynamics originated with the investigation of the long term average behavior of physical systems evolving over time, and abstract ergodic theory grew out of such developments. Study of the applicability of this theory to seemingly unrelated, non-physical entities, such as those arising in combinatorics, strengthens our sense of the connectedness of and the unification of the landscape in the whole of mathematics doc19038 none Proposal Number: PI: Anthony Quas The work will focus on the areas of higher-dimensional shifts of finite type and almost everywhere convergence in ergodic theory. Higher-dimensional shifts of finite type are symbolic dynamical systems whose points are arrays of symbols from a finite alphabet satisfying certain adjacency rules. While there is a well-developed theory for one-dimensional shifts of finite type, the general situation for higher-dimensional shifts has been very unclear. Recently a number of organizing concepts have started to emerge and it is hoped that these will lead to a satisfactory theory for at least some reasonable collection of higher-dimensional systems. Birkhoff s theorem is concerned with the effects of averaging a sequence of measurements of a system taken at equal time intervals. The result then states that in the case of a measure-preserving transformation, for almost every initial condition, the time averages are convergent. Further, the limit is identified if the transformation is ergodic. The work will focus on variations to this scenario where the measurements are taken at varying intervals. The higher-dimensional shifts of finite type that will be studied are of relevance in designing efficient data storage schemes. Due to physical restrictions on storage media, in many cases certain patterns of binary digits cannot be reliably written and read back from digital storage media. In these cases, it is necessary to encode the data so as to ensure that the encoded data does not contain any of the forbidden patterns of binary digits. This applies to magnetic tapes, but also to conventional hard disks, where data is stored in a number of tracks, all separated from one another. It is likely that in order to continue the growth in the amount of data that can be stored on a single device, it will be desirable or maybe even physically necessary to consider two-dimensional storage schemes. Efficient methods for doing this will depend on a good understanding of the properties of higher-dimensional shifts of finite type. The almost everywhere convergence results lie at the intersection of a number of diverse areas of mathematics: probability, dynamical systems, ergodic theory, number theory and harmonic analysis. It is hoped that progress made in this area will have knock-on effects in the other disciplines doc19039 none The subject of this research proposal is the Anderson metal-insulator transport transition and other phenomena in disordered systems. A new approach to the Anderson metal-insulator transition based on transport instead of spectral properties will be investigated. In addition, several related topics will be investigated. Constructive criteria for localization in random media will be developed; an application is planned for the Landau Hamiltonian with a random potential. Local Poisson statistics for the strong insulator spectrum of Anderson-type Hamiltonians in the continuum will be studied. The spectrum of the Anderson model on the Bethe lattice will be studied. Localization at low disorder in one or two dimensions will be investigated. Fortysome years have passed since P. Anderson s seminal article on localization of electrons in random media, but our mathematical understanding of the metal-insulator transition is still very unsatisfactory. In three or more dimensions a transition is believed to occur from an insulator regime, characterized by localized states, to a very different metallic regime characterized by extended states. The energy at which this metal insulator transition occurs is called the mobility edge. The standard mathematical interpretation of this picture is that there should be a transition in the spectrum of the random SchrAdinger from pure point spectrum (localized states) to absolutely continuous spectrum (extended states). But up to now there are no mathematical results on the existence of continuous spectrum and a metal-insulator transition (except for the special case of the Anderson model on the Bethe lattice). A new approach to the Anderson metal-insulator transition is proposed based on transport instead of spectral properties. It is motivated by the fact that the intuitive physical notion of localization has a dynamical interpretation: an initially localized wave packet should remain localized under time evolution, and delocalization may be interpreted as nontrivial transport. The main goal of this proposal is to show the existence of such a transport transition doc19040 none PI: Vladimir Peller Proposal Number The principal investigator will use vectorial Hankel and Toeplitz operators in noncommutative analysis. In spite of the recent progress of approximation theory for matrix and operator functions there are still many open problems important in applications such as control theory, multivariate stationary processes, etc. The principal investigator will look for a sharp estimate of the degree of the superoptimal approximant of a rational matrix function and sharp estimates of the resolvents of Toeplitz and Wiener-Hopf operators acting on spaces of vector functions, study properties of Wiener-Hopf, thematic, and canonical factorizations of matrix functions, study different regularity conditions for multivariate stationary processes in spectral terms, study Hankel-Schur multipliers, study Schatten--von Neumann properties of certain integral operators arising from Schrodinger operators. Among operators acting on spaces of analytic functions there are two classes that play an extremely important role. These are Hankel operators and Toeplitz operators. The theory of such operators has been rapidly developing for the last 20 years. Recently it has become clear that to satisfy the needs of control theory, prediction theory and other applications, it is necessary to study Toeplitz and Hankel operators on spaces of vector functions. This leads to a considerably more complicated theory, The principal investigator has obtained recently interesting results that required a new technique. He is going to continue to work in this direction and apply Hankel and Toeplitz operators on spaces of vector functions to different problems in noncommutative analysis doc19007 none Proposal Numbers: and PIs: Alexander Volberg, Fedor Nazarov, and Serguei Treil Research will be conducted on non-homogeneous harmonic analysis and on weighted norm inequalities with matrix weights. In previous work by the PIs a technique for estimating Calderon-Zygmund operators on spaces with non-doubling measures was developed, and a novel method of Bellman functions was introduced for problems in Harmonic Analysis. These techniques will be applied to solve several open problems in harmonic analysis and operator theory and to investigate new directions, which previously were deemed untractable because of the lack of technical tools. Special attention will be paid to uncovering new relations between Operator Theory, Harmonic Analysis and Stochastic Control. Among the main directions of the proposed research are: - Spectral theory for perturbations of normal operators and related problems in Harmonic Analysis: two weight estimates for Hilbert Transform and embedding theorems for the co-invariant subspaces. - Non-homogeneous T(b) theorems and their applications to generalizations of analytic capacity (electric intensity capacity); the role of curvature in higher dimensions. - Bellman function method in stochastic optimal control and in harmonic analysis; functions with matrix arguments and their applications to non-commutative problems. Harmonic analysis investigates complex processes by representing them as a sum of elementary ones (sinusoidal waves, wavelets) with well understood behavior. A central part of modern harmonic analysis deals with singular operators of one type or another. Such operators are pervasive in the scientific landscape: they turn up in mathematical physics, probability, engineering, image processing, etc. A new way to treat multivariate signals will be discussed. The main difficulty here is that the mathematical objects arising in such problems are non-commutative: the product depends on the order of terms, and that complicates things immensely. A new method based on Bellman functions, which originating in the stochastic optimal control, will be exploited in harmonic analysis. One important direction of research is the spectral theory for the perturbation of normal operators: results in this direction would have important consequences in mathematical physics. Another direction deals with non-commutative harmonic analysis, i.e. with treating multivariate signals doc19042 none The theory of operator spaces has advanced very rapidly during the past ten years, combining ideas and techniques from Banach space theory and the theory of C -algebras. The investigator will concentrate on three aspects of geometry of operator spaces: examples of operator spaces with few completely bounded maps, the structure of non-commutative L^p spaces, and various extension properties doc19043 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Pseudomonas aeruginosa Multi-Host Virulence. Using a novel system of invertebrate hosts to rapidly identify Pseudomonas aeruginosa genes that confer virulence, significant overlap in the genes required for pathogenesis in both invertebrate and mammalian hosts has been discovered, suggesting that the mechanisms that direct pathogenesis are common among the many hosts of P. aeruginosa. To dissect the molecular events of pathogenesis the role of the fatty acid biosynthesis gene, fabF, a gene isolated by multi-host screening, is being examined. Novel virulence factors are also being identified using a library of non-redundant mutants with a disruption in every non-essential open reading frame in the P. aeruginosa genome. The defined nature of this library allows exhaustive screening for all genes required for P. aeruginosa pathogenesis. Such analyses will provide a comprehensive view of the universal mechanisms employed by P. aeruginosa to infect its many hosts doc19044 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Effects of plant roots, mycorrhizal fungi, and rhizosphere bacteria on soil carbon cycling. The aim of this research is to elucidate how interactions among plants, arbuscular mycorrhizae, and rhizosphere bacteria affect carbon cycling both locally and at the ecosystem level. This requires a combination of DNA-based microbial community characterization, engineered bacterial reporter gene systems to detect specific carbon compounds, traditional isotope techniques and 13C PLFA for following the flow and fate of carbon, and an experimental design incorporating different rhizosphere communities from congeneric native and introduced plant species in CA and the UK. The results of this work will add to our understanding of microbial interactions in the rhizosphere and their consequences, improve our ability to predict system-level responses to global change, and add to our capacity to manage biological invasions doc19045 none Przebinda The aim of this project is to study the characters and matrix coefficients of the representations of the classical groups from the view point of the theory of reductive dual pairs. In particular of interest are formulas for the characters in terms of the natural moment maps, and the wave front sets. Regarding the matrix coefficients, the central question is to decide which absolutely integrable positive definite matrix coefficients have positive integral, and corollaries regarding the preservation of unitarity under Howe s correspondence. We shall apply the ideas sketched above to signal processing. Specifically we are interested in the information compression and denoising of signals which are well balanced in the time-frequency domain doc19046 none This project develops new algorithms and new applications for computational algebraic geometry. If focusses on the following four specific topics: Computing amoebas, toric algebra of graphical models, semi-definite programming and the real Nullstellensatz. It involves tools from combinatorics, commutative algebra and symbolic computation, specifically the method of Grobner bases. The investigator also writes two books, one on Solving Systems of Polynomial Equations, and the other on Combinatorial Commutative Algebra. This project develops new algorithms and new applications for computational algebra. The research in this project is partly collaborative with researchers in other fields, and it has applications to Statistics, Bioinformatics and Computer Science. The use of algebraic methods plays an increasingly important role for the analysis of the U.S. census data provided by the National Institute for Statistical Sciences, and this project provides foundational research for this application. In Computer Science, these techniques are used in machine learning and artificial intelligence doc19047 none PI: Maciej R. Zworski, UC-Berkeley. : The main interest of the PI is the study of quantum mechanics from the mathematical point of view, and of its many manifestations in the theory of partial differential equations and geometry. Specific current interests are the classical quantum correspondence, resonances, geometric scattering, and non-hermitian quantum mechanics. More precisely, the PI is interested in resonances, which are mathematical objects modeling states which have certain frequencies of oscillations (or rest energies) and rates of decay, such as unstable molecules or classical system responding to resonant forcing terms. Despite a long tradition and a lot of recent progress our understanding is still very limited. Current experimental and numerical advances provide new stimuli for our studies. Another interest of the PI is non-hermitian quantum mechanics, which deals with systems in which energy is not conserved. That is almost always present when we localize a part of a system and the global conservation of energy disapears. In a subtle way resonances already fall into this category of phenomena. The mathematical problems present here are the stability of eigenvalues and measuring the size of the resolvent of non-self-adjoint operators. That leads to the study of ``pseudospectra which is then related to many interesting phenomena in PDEs. Finally, the PI s interest involves mathematical scattering. It replaces spectral theory for problems on non-compact domains, and in physics almost all the data comes from scattering experiments. Many new things are constantly discovered now, ranging from scattering on locally symmetric spaces to problems related to conformal field theory. Many of the phenomena discussed in this proposal are in fact more general: for instance, electromagnetic scattering can be used to model quantum scattering, and its understanding can benefit from the development of the classical quantum correspondence. The PI s work focuses on the search for general mathematical principles, and the detailed study of specific examples is motivated by that doc19048 none Proposal Number: PI: Nikola Lakic Vector fields defined on closed sets in the plane have recently found several new applications in various branches of mathematics and other natural sciences. The definition of the norm of these vector fields depends on which application the fields are used for. One norm comes from looking at vector fields as tangent vectors to the Teichmuller space of the given closed set. This norm, called the Teichmuller norm, is suitable for applications in holomorphic motions and complex dynamics. It turns the space of vector fields into a space of all initial velocities of holomorphic motions of the closed set. Since the holomorphic motions of the fixed closed set are defined by an intrinsic condition on the closed set, it is natural that there is a criterion that guarantees that the vector field has bounded norm, and which is expressed purely in terms of the values of the vector field on the closed set. Such a criterion was found recently by considering the velocity of the cross ratio for every possible quadruple in the given closed set. The velocity is measured with respect to the Poincare density of the Riemann sphere punctured at three points. This leads to an alternative norm on vector fields, called the cross ratio norm. The cross ratio norm is equivalent to the Teichmuller norm, and the equivalence constant is universal and independent of the closed set or vector field. Hence, a vector field is a derivative of some holomorphic motion if, and only if, it has bounded cross ratio norm. This equivalence led to the introduction of a new canonical density on any Riemann surface. The new density is equivalent to Poincare density, and this equivalence has several important applications of the vector field theory to hyperbolic and conformal geometry. It provides a link between, on the one hand, hyperbolic geometry, Riemann surfaces, and geometric function theory, and on the other hand, Teichmuller theory, quadratic differentials and h olomorphic motions with their applications to complex dynamics. For many years the analytical and geometrical techniques developed in dynamical systems and Teichmuller theory have been applied to a number of important nonlinear problems with broad impact on ecology, economics, and genetics. One can expect these trends to continue. This project will feature the applications of the finite earthquake theorem to various directions. This, recently stated and proved, theorem provides a way to code each finite or countable string of data into the weighted tree associated to a finite lamination and vice versa. That could turn out to be an efficient way of coding. The applications will be based on recently made program in Maple that sketches the graph of finite laminations corresponding to a given homeomorphism and lists weights associated to each leaf of those laminations. The third component of the project is based on integrating research and education doc19049 none The principal investigators, Guihua Gong and Liangqing Li, propose to continue their research on the classification of separable, amenable C -algebras. They also plan to study the cross product C -algebras which arise naturally in the study of dynamical systems. The methods to be employed include KK-theory, E-theory, homotopy path with controlled length, and spectrum cutting and absorption. The passage from a finite to an infinite number of degrees of freedom in quantum physics led to the mathematical theory of certain infinite dimensional algebras, called C -algebras. A C -algebra is an algebraic system, similar to that of numbers, with its operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. But unlike the multiplication for numbers, the multiplication in a C -algebra is not commutative ---- that is, in general, X times Y is not as same as Y times X. This important feature corresponds to Heisenberg uncertainty principle in Quantum Mechanics. The investigators propose to work on a complete enumeration (or classification) of a large class of amenable C -algebras. They expect that progress on the proposed research will result in important contributions to several mathematical fields including operator algebras, differential topology, and also to the understanding of the infinite dimensional world of quantum physics doc19050 none The PI studies several problems about triangulations of (lattice) polytopes which are motivated by connections to other fields of mathematics: The reconstruction problem is concerned with the relation of a polytope and its graph, which is of interest for linear optimization. Algebraic applications are concerned with polytopes whose vertices have all integral coordinates. The existence problem of unimodular triangulations and its variations has implications to computational algebra, algebraic geometry, and physical string theory. The methods used are mainly discrete geometric or combinatorial, with some ideas borrowed from topology and differential geometry. Convex polytopes are fascinating objects that have intrigued not only mathematicians since the ancient Greeks. The Platonic solids --- the tetrahedron, the cube, the octahedron, the dodecahedron, and the icosahedron --- are the most prominent and most mystified examples. Since George Dantzig s simplex method, linear optimization has been a driving force behind polytope theory, and it certainly is one of the most successful applications of mathematics to the `real world . In the mean time, polytope theory found many more applications within mathematics, and beyond. Besides linear and integer programming, there are optimization, CAD, visualization, and even theoretical physics, just to name a few doc19051 none Radulescu Radulescu will investigate in this project a range of problems in the structure theory of von Neumann algebras. He will concentrate on the harmonic analysis of the von Neumann algebras arising in connection with discrete groups, free probability and in deformation quantization theory. The goal is to determine the structure of the von Neumann algebras that reflect the properties of non commutative probability, and to relate this structure to the representation theory of Lie groups and their discrete subgroups. Radulescu intends to investigate the problem of characterizing the factors of discrete groups by computing their invariants, using ideas of Murray and von Neumann, related to the fundamental groups of such an algebra, the set of all index values for subfactors or the structure of convex sets of non-commutative moments. He will investigate also Connes embedding conjecture via tensor products on operator algebras. The aim of this research is to discover non-commutative aspects of the real word hidden in quantum structures. Non-commutativity is a true aspect of the nature: for example two matrices do not necessary commute when multiplied. The famous Heisenberg s Uncertaneity principle reveals the same non-commutative aspect of nature. Von Neumann has developed a class of continuous matrices, that, while keeping some of the properties of usual matrices, are subtle enough to encode many of the aspects of quantum mechanics. Recent developments by Jones have proven that aspects of such von Neumann algebras are intimately related to aspects of topology, knot theory and ultimately biology. Likewise recent work by Voiculescu has proven that the there is a non-commutative probability theory encoded by the same type of objects. The aim of this research project is to contribute to the understanding and classification of some of the structural aspects of von Neumann algebras doc19052 none Proposal Number: PI: Evgeny Poletsky This project proposes the further study of the geometric complex analysis, mostly, through pluri-potential theory. Research will be conducted in the following topics: the existence of a general potential theory containing all the necessary background; the complex geometry of infinite-dimensional spaces related to classical problems for plurisubharmonic functions; the complex geometry of compact sets via the pluri-potential theory on such sets; the geometry of domains and multipole Green functions (the classical analog is the Martin-Caratheodory compactification) and Bernstein-Walsh and Markov inequalities for generalized polynomials. Other geometric questions will also be considered. In this project research will be conducted on geometric complex analysis. Geometry, as a part of mathematics, aims to describe qualitative links between different objects. For example, parallel lines do not meet and the heights in a triangle meet at the same point. When Euclidean objects: points, lines and planes are replaced by more complicated structures: functions, surfaces and sets, the research is of a more delicate flavor. It happens because the mechanism providing links between objects is not transparent. In our proposal we will look for such a mechanism in the form of potentials similar to the energy levels of electrical charges doc19053 none Jackson This three-year award for US-UK cooperative research in physical experimental chemistry involves Michael Jackson and students at Unviersity of Wisconsin La Crosse and John M. Brown at Oxford University s Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory. The objective is to perform high-resolution spectroscopy in the far-infrared region using laser magnetic resonance (LMR). LMR is a technique for the detection of transient species in the gas phase and the study of their rotational or vibrational-rotational spectra. The researchers propose to investigate several important molecular species, including chlorine monoxide, which is found in the upper atmosphere, and the super oxide anion radical, which is one of the most important biological free radicals and a major factor in the aging process, auto-immune diseases and tissue rejection. They will examine these species at high sensitivity from the visible to microwave regions. The US investigator brings to this project expertise in LMR studies in the far-infrared region. This is complemented by British expertise in geometrical and electronic structures of small unstable molecules (free radicals). The study will advance understanding of the structure and behavior of free radicals of interest to the fields of atmospheric chemistry, astronomy, biology and biomedical research. Students from a predominantly undergraduate teaching institution will gain international experience and benefit from training in LMR spectrometer system and studies of free radicals using LMR experimental techniques doc19054 none Lemurs have presented a puzzle to scientists trying to understand their social behavior, because they do not conform to the general social patterns found in most monkeys and apes. One of the possible explanations for this difference assumes that Madagascar (the home of modern lemur species) has fewer and less dangerous predators than other areas where primates live. Anecdotal studies have questioned this assumption, but there are few systematic data concerning predation on lemurs. This study of the behavioral and ecological interactions of lemurs and raptors in Ranomafana National Park, Madagascar is designed to provide information on 1) the specific ecological interactions between lemurs and diurnal birds of prey, and 2) anti-predator behaviors of lemurs in response to distinct predator species. The first question will be addressed by measuring the actual rate of mortality on lemurs imposed by the four largest diurnal birds of prey in Madagascar (Buteo brachypterus, Accipiter henstii, Polyboroides radiatus, Eutriorchis astur). Each of these raptors will be the focus of nest observations, prey remain collections, and radio-tracking studies designed to measure the number of lemurs killed by each raptor species, the area over which this mortality occurs, and the prey population size. In addition, two experiments will address the behavioral responses of lemurs to the existing predator guild. The first experiment involves predator vocalization play backs to three species of lemurs with varying body sizes: the diademed sifaka (Propithecus diadema edwardsi), the rufous lemur (Eulemur fulvus rufus), and the gentle lemur (Hapalemur griseus). The second experiment consists of exposing three independent groups of diademed sifakas to model avian and terrestrial predators. The analysis of both raptor and lemur data will provide a clear understanding of the ecological influence of raptor predation on lemurs as well as the behavioral responses of lemurs to predation risk doc19055 none This award renews support for maintenance of a collection of prosimian primates housed at the Duke University Primate Center (DUPC). Study of the biology and behavior of Prosimians continues to increase in scope, intensity, and sophistication, and it is now one of the most active and exciting fields of primatology. The DUPC houses the largest and most diverse collection of prosimian primates in the world, most of whom are native to Madagascar. The Center is recognized as the focal point for prosimian research and conservation activities outside Madagascar. As part of its research mission, the DUPC provides on-site access to animals, and ships tissues and blood samples to faculty and students from diverse local, regional, national, and foreign institutions for off-site use. Users are charged a fee scaled to the kind and quantity of usage. This award insures the continued availability of animals and tissues for use by outside researchers at relatively modest cost doc19056 none PI: Ken McLaughlin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill : McLaughlin s research concerns applications of Riemann-Hilbert problems and new techniques developed for their asymptotic analysis to classical problems in (1) random matrix theory, (2) integrable systems, and (3) approximation theory and orthogonal polynomials. In integrable systems, the proposed research will continue McLaughlin s work on singular limits of integrable nonlinear partial differential equations. Integrable nonlinear partial differential equations provide canonical models for a wide variety of physical settings. For some integrable models, such as the semi-classical limit of the focusing nonlinear Schroedinger equation, the Korteweg-de Vries equation, and the Toda lattice in a continuum limit, McLaughlin (with collaborators) is developing methods to understand, predict, and control their behavior. In random matrix theory, McLaughlin will continue his work on the asymptotic behavior of eigenvalues of random Hermitian matrices. He will study the asymptotic behavior of the partition function of random matrix theory. This basic quantity is a partition function in the classical sense of statistical mechanics, for an interacting log-gas. The asymptotics McLaughlin proposes to study are as the number of particles grows. The research will impact upon several areas of mathematical research, such as the theory of Hankel determinants pioneered by Szego some 70 years ago, the theory of 2 dimensional quantum gravity, and approximation theory. In approximation theory, McLaughlin will investigate new connections (recently discovered by McLaughlin and collaborators) between the asymptotic analysis of Riemann-Hilbert problems and rational approximation. This includes the classical problems of Pade approximation. In related work, McLaughlin will study the asymptotic behavior of discrete orthogonal polynomials, which are polynomials orthogonal with respect to a measure that is a sum of Dirac masses. A primary goal of scientific research is to understand and control complicated phenomena. Such understanding and control of a physical process enhances our ability for technological advancement. Physical models for complex nonlinear phenomena often boil down to the study of partial differential equations in parameter regimes where their solutions exhibit singularly wild behavior. In other instances, statistical theories with great amount of randomness are developed to understand complex phenomena. Three examples: laser beams in optical fibers can explode, or signals they carry can degrade due to noise or the onset of violent oscillations. Waves in the ocean can organize themselves into trains transporting energy. In the s, nuclear resonance level experiments indicated a new type of universality, whose mathematical explanation has only recently been explained. Scientists ability to predict dramatic behavior through the analysis of such general nonlinear partial differential equations, or statistical theories, is limited. However, there is a class of canonical models, under the heading integrable models , for a wide variety of physical settings. Their singular behavior is a guide for the understanding of some complicated phenomena in nature. Some of these are partial differential equations, others are statistical models, but the unifying feature of these integrable models is that researchers are making great progress in their analysis. McLaughlin s research involves the detailed rigorous analysis of these models; he (with collaborators) is developing methods to understand, predict, and control their behavior doc19057 none PI: Aimo Hinkkanen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign : The six Painleve differential equations are prototypes of second order differential equations which do not have movable singularities. In this project, the principal investigator will study the following fundamental problems for the Painleve equations and Painleve-related analysis. Firstly, the task of obtaining rigorous proofs for the Painleve property of the solutions to Painleve equations in the remaining open cases. Secondly, the question of finding sharp upper and lower bounds for the usual order of growth of single-valued meromorphic solutions, and for other natural measures of growth for multi-valued solutions, as well as the determination of the cases where less than maximal growth occurs. Thirdly, applications motivated particularly by differential geometry lead to the question of classifying Painleve-type differential equations which are allowed to have movable branch points subject to restrictions on their multiplicity. The principal investigator will work towards such a classification and to determine whether certain particular equations arising in applications have this property. Over the last ten years, after a quiet period of many decades, an enormous amount of literature has appeared on the Painleve equations and their generalizations, due to a great number of interdisciplinary connections and applications that have been found. On the theoretical side, the Painleve property is related to the concept of integrability for non-linear ordinary and partial differential equations. Other applications in pure mathematics include differential geometry and random matrix models. On the interdisciplinary side, the applications of Painleve equations include the following: the Ising and antiferromagnet models in physics, statistical mechanics in elasticity, quantum field theory and topological field theory, general relativity and cosmology, supersymmetric gauge theories in physics, resonant oscillations in shallow water, Hele-Shaw problems in viscous fluids, plasma physics, superconductivity, nonlinear optics and fiber optics, polymers, and polyelectrolytes. This provides a clear manifestation of the enabling power of mathematics in science and engineering, and of the value that theoretical understanding and precise problem solving in mathematics can add to modeling and theory building elsewhere. Work performed under this proposal will lead to a greater understanding of and concrete results for this class of differential equations which is being used in numerous applications in other areas of mathematics as well as in other sciences and engineering doc19058 none Proposal Number: PI: Eric Weber In the past twenty years, wavelet theory has developed into a fundamental area of mathematics and applied science. Intimately related are frame theory and sampling theory, all with a connection to harmonic analysis. The proposed research will investigate group representations as a unifying theme since they appear in the settings of wavelet, frame, and sampling theory. The research of Weber will use existing tools from functional and harmonic analysis, while also developing tools related to group cocycles and maximal abelian self adjoint algebras as models of these objects. The proposed research is theoretical in nature, though much of it is motivated by problems in applied mathematics. The goal of the research of Weber is to establish a solid mathematical foundation of wavelet and frame theory. However, the research will potentially impact problems in applied mathematics and signal processing, such as digital signal multiplexing, redundant communications and secure communications doc19059 none This award supports the research of Michaela Vancliff to work in non-commutative algebra, with special emphasis on problems arising from the theory of regular algebras and non-commutative algebraic geometry. Vancliff s main objective is to add to the body of knowledge on regular algebras and to further the existing geometric techniques. In particular, she is interested in the graded-module category of such an algebra viewed as a geometric space, with certain graded modules playing the role of geometric objects. The linear geometric modules (point modules, line modules, etc) are parametrized by so-called linear schemes. Vancliff plans to study how the structure and role of higher-dimensional linear schemes generalize the structure and role of point schemes. She is also interested in connections between this type of geometric analysis and that of various Poisson-geometric structures. Some of these activities entail the development of fundamental computational algorithms, and their implementation using a computer-algebra package, in order to enable explicit computation of linear schemes. Systems of polynomial-style equations and their solutions play a critical role in almost every scientific field, such as statistical mechanics, elementary-particle physics, quantum mechanics, robotics, crystallography, networking, etc. The solutions are often results that cannot be found by experimentation nor other methods, and often they are not numbers but are functions (e.g., differential operators or matrices), and so, in general, they do not commute. The business of seeking methods that find all solutions to any system of polynomial-style equations in non-commuting variables is called non-commutative algebra. The main idea to find the solutions is as follows. One associates to such a system of equations an abstract object called an algebra, which encodes all the properties of the system. To the algebra is associated abstract objects called modules, and these encode all the properties of the solutions. Hence, in order to find all the solutions, one should find and understand all the modules for the associated algebra. In many of the applications, the algebras that arise in this way tend to share certain properties; they are called regular algebras and are the main focus of Vancliff s projects. One of the goals of non-commutative algebraic geometry, the subfield in which Vancliff works, is to use geometric techniques to find some of the modules (point modules, line modules, etc) of the regular algebra, and then to use those modules to find the modules giving the solutions to the original system of equations. Vancliff s underlying goal is to improve on these geometric techniques and to understand better how they relate to the structure of the category of modules doc19060 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: The Slip Boundary Condition Lichter Although the no-slip boundary condition, which requires fluid adjacent to a solid substrate to move with the same velocity as the substrate, serves reliably to model fluid behavior in most circumstances, recent experiments and numerical simulations have shown that, in fact, there is a relative velocity between the fluid and the substrate. While the effects of this slip may remain negligible in some flows, accounting for slip is a prerequisite for predicting the correct behavior in many other types of flows, such as those in small geometries, flows in which an interface (between two fluids) moves along a solid, and flows in which particles must pass through an interface. This project seeks to develop models of the slip boundary condition. The formulation will incorporate results of recent experiments and numerical simulations to construct the equations of flow in the neighborhood of a solid substrate. Preliminary work indicates that such a model, as well as related useful simpler approximations, can be developed. The simplicity of the equations and consequent efficient numerical procedures for evaluating the dynamics near the wall should provide insight into how slip occurs and how the characteristics of the fluid and the substrate determine the amount and nature of slip. The recent availability of high quality experimental data and simulation results, as well as the advent of technologies demanding flow in small geometries, make this a timely undertaking. This project concerns mathematical modeling of the behavior of fluids where they adjoin solids. The results will allow highly accurate computation of fluid flow, which is essential for the design of small hydrodynamical instruments, including lab-on-a-chip devices doc19061 none Leonard, Godoy, McDade This pilot research by three anthropologists will study subjective and objective quality-of-life in an indigenous population of lowland Bolivia (the Tsimane ) undergoing rapid lifestyle change. The researchers will develop and field-test new measures of quality-of-life in order to ultimately test hypotheses about the effects of economic development. They intend to collect primary information from a sample of people; to collect repeated observations from the same people and communities to control for fixed attributes; and to evaluate a broad range of explanatory variables relating to economic success, nutritional status, and stress. This research will be significant in its theoretical advance in estimating how inequalities affect quality of life. It will advance the methodology of eliciting information from people about their subjective state of happiness, and in its broader aspects, will contribute to a more informed discussion and a new way of thinking about he degree to which economic development, integration to a market economy, trade opening or globalization hurts or helps traditional people doc19062 none Xu The PI will study interactions between operator algebras and conformal field theories which have proved to be very fruitful lately. The main emphasis of this research is placed on the study of certain representation theory questions such as Kac-Wakimoto conjecture, orbifolds and boundary states in conformal field theories using operator algebraic techniques. The applications of these operator algebraic techniques will lead to proofs of representation theory questions and shed lights on exotic subfactors such as those coming from conformal inclusions. The theory of operator algebras was introduced by John von Neumann in order to provide a proper mathematical framework for Quantum Mechanics. Conformal field theory was a theory describing critical phenomena in condensed matter physics, and it also plays an important role in string theory. The remarkable interactions between operator algebras and conformal field theory has led to many interesting mathematical issues. The aim of this research is to find solutions to some of the important mathematical issues that surface in this context which have a wide range of applications doc19063 none The PI intends to undertake a combinatorial study of structures arising from affine algebras with applications to mathematical physics, representation theory and q-series. The primary combinatorial objects are crystal graphs which are colored directed graphs. They provide a combinatorial description of the deep theory of crystal bases of modules over quantized universal enveloping algebras developed by Kashiwara and Lusztig: As the quantum parameter q tends to zero, these bases are described precisely by the crystal graphs encoding nearly all the essential algebraic data. Despite their importance, little is known about the combinatorial structure of crystals corresponding to finite-dimensional modules of affine algebras. The PI proposes a method to undertake such a combinatorial study. These studies will have applications to q-series, branching functions and fusion coefficients in conformal field theory and statistical mechanics, and the theory of symmetric functions. This is a project in combinatorial representation theory with applications to mathematical (theoretical) physics. Representation Theory is the area of mathematics most intimately involved with studying the nature of symmetries, of any sort, whereever they occur. Combinatorial representation theory refers to a methodology that uses explicitly computable formulas. About a decade ago it was realized that certain models in the area of physics known as statistical mechanics have symmetries that are not yet completely understood. This project carries out a combinatorial study of the structure of those classes of symmetries that can be represented by colored directed graphs. Remarkably, the structures that occur have applications in many diverse areas of mathematics and physics, such as statistical mechanical models, representation theory, the theory of symmetric functions and combinatorics. For example, they lead to formulas which encode the particle structure of the underlying physical model doc19064 none PI: Yu Yuan, University of Washington : The theory of a priori estimates and solvability for fully nonlinear equations with the convexity condition are well developed. While other concrete equations like Isaacs equations from the stochastic optimal control theory and special Lagrangian equations from calibration geometry do not have the usual convexity condition. Only preliminary attempts were made toward this direction in recent years. Though the complex Monge-Ampere equations have the usual convexity condition, the holomorphic invariance is too large. There is no theory of a priori estimates for the complex Monge-Ampere equations with non-smooth right hand side. This project concentrates on the following four parts. In part one, the objective is to derive Holder a priori estimates for finitely piecewise linear Isaacs equations by further employment of the ideas in recent work. In part two, the attempt is to study the regularity for general fully nonlinear elliptic equations in 3-d in the light of recent work that any homogeneous order two solution to fully nonlinear elliptic equation in 3-d must be linear. In part three, the purpose is to answer whether any homogeneous order two solution to special Lagrangian equation of dimension four or higher is trivial. In part four, the aim is to study the Bernstein problem for complex Monge-Ampere equations. Differential equations and differential geometry are further applications of Newton s calculus to the investigation of laws and shapes of nature, and even some phenomena of our real world. This project deals with some particular equations, like Isaacs equations from optimal stochastic control theory, special Lagrangian equations and complex Monge-Ampere equations from differential geometry. Understanding those equations would have impacts on not only the related mathematical fields, but also fields outside mathematics like physics doc19065 none The investigator intends to pursue a diverse set of projects related to Selmer groups, elliptic curves, modular forms, p-adic L-functions and Iwasawa theory. Selmer groups have traditionally been an important tool for studying the Mordell-Weil group of an elliptic curve over a number field. They have also played an important role in proving special cases of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture which provides a relationship between arithmetic properties of an elliptic curve E and the behavior of the Hasse-Weil L-function for E. In recent years it has become clear that certain natural generalizations of the Selmer group should provide similar conjectural relationships to the behavior of much more general kinds of L-functions. Iwasawa theory provides a framework for studying these conjectures by allowing the L-functions to vary in families defined by congruences modulo powers of a prime p. This leads to the notion of a p-adic L-function and to the formulation of analogous conjectural relationships relating the behavior of such p-adic L-functions to the corresponding Selmer groups. The investigator, together with several collaborators, intends to study this kind of conjectural relationship in some new settings: (1) p-adic analogues of classical Artin L-functions, (2) families of L-functions associated to certain families of Galois representations of varying dimension. In addition, the investigator intends to study relationships between Selmer groups associated to modular forms and ideal class groups of certain number fields and to study some unresolved questions about the derivatives of p-adic L-functions. One of the fundamental questions in the theory of numbers is the study of solutions of an algebraic equation. The difficulty of this question depends on the degree of the equation and the number of variables. It has been understood since antiquity how to study this question when the degree is one or two and the number of variables is also one or two. However, the question becomes much more subtle when one considers equations of degree three, even if the number of variables is just two. A fundamental conjecture concerning this kind of equation was formulated in the s by Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer. Although considerable progress has been made since then, the conjecture remains unresolved. Such equations define a class of curves known as elliptic curves. The study of their properties has proved to be of importance in crytography - designing codes for the secure transmission of information. Professor Greenberg intends to continue his study of Selmer groups which have been a traditional tool in understanding the arithmetic properties of elliptic curves and in studying the conjecture of Birch and Swinnnerton-Dyer. The ultimate goal is to achieve a deeper understanding of the solutions to the algebraic equations that define an elliptic curve, and to develop a more general point of view concerning conjectures analogous to the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture doc19066 none The focus of this research is the development of asymmetric methods for activating carbon-carbon pi-bonds for attack by external nucleophiles and for the stereospecific cross-coupling reactions of stereogenic secondary carbon centers will be developed. In the former, Pd(II)-catalyzed processes will be used to develop both carbon-heteroatom and carbon-carbon bond-forming reactions. In the latter, palladacyclic intermediates containing Pd sigma-bonded to a stereogenic secondary carbon will be used to develop the reaction chemistry for stereospecific catalytic cross-coupling of stereogenic secondary carbons. With this renewal award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research efforts of Dr. Larry E. Overman in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. Professor Overman will focus his work on developing catalytic, asymmetric reactions for the formation of carbon-carbon and carbon-heteroatom bonds. The research has broad implications for the environment by minimizing the production of chemical wastes and resulting methodology could be of great interest to the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries. This area of research has proven to be a valuable setting for the training of undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral students doc19067 none PROJECT: Tomography and Integral Geometry PI: Eric Todd Quinto, Tufts University : Professor Quinto will pursue problems in tomography and the mathematical analysis of Radon transforms. He will develop and refine singularity detection algorithms (including limited data Lambda CT and wavelet methods) and apply them to electron microscopy and limited data industrial and medical X-ray tomography, with the goal of testing the algorithms on real data and using them in scanners. Professor Quinto will continue to develop a boundary detection method that is applicable to Sonar in shallow water, and he will begin to develop these methods for synthetic aperture Radar. The theoretical underpinnings will be based on Professor Quinto s pure mathematical research. Radon transforms have an intimate relation to harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, and complex analysis, and he will use integral geometry to prove theorems in these fields. The principal investigator will prove uniqueness and support theorems for Radon transforms defined by spreads of polynomials, including spherical transforms in Euclidean space and other settings. He and Professor Agranovsky will use these results to characterize zero sets of solutions of the wave equation on crystallographic domains and other sets. Zero sets, where the solution is zero for all time, are important and difficult to characterize. He will prove uniqueness theorems for Radon transforms on spheres and other surfaces and use these to solve Morera and mean value problems on manifolds. He will prove support theorems for X-ray transforms. This research encompasses both applied and pure mathematics: tomography and integral geometry. The pure research will be used to develop, understand, and justify the applied algorithms, and the applied problems will motivate much of the pure research. Computed tomography (CT) algorithms will be developed for the nondestructive evaluation of rockets and other objects. The algorithms will allow scientists to detect cracks in rocket bodies, air pockets in rocket fuel, and delaminations in rocket exit cones. Limited data algorithms will be developed for electron microscopy as a part of a joint industrial project. The goal is to produce an algorithm that reliably produces accurate pictures for a SIDEC electron microscope. He will develop pure mathematics that will show how well the algorithms work and where their limitations might show up. These pure mathematical underpinnings are required to ensure that his (or any other) reconstructions are correct and are not lucky guesses. SONAR data can be modeled as averages over spheres (the spherical wave fronts of the sound) and Professor Quinto will prove theorems about these averages. He will use these theorems to develop simple algorithms to map the ocean floor and to find boundaries of objects in the ocean and to apply to Radar. This pure mathematics is intriguing in its own right. Professor Quinto will prove theorems about spherical averages which will be used to understand the wave equation (the equation that describes how sound and light behave). The wave equation describes the motion of a drum head, and he will specify which points on the drum do not move at all. Finally, he will prove theorems he will apply to complex and harmonic analysis, fields in pure mathematics doc19068 none Nanorope Mechanics, Rod Ruoff and Wing Kam Liu, Northwestern University Carbon nanotubes, CNTs, are a multifunctional material that may find applications as a reinforcing component in a variety of composites, where the matrix could be polymer, ceramic, or a metal, including ductile metals such as aluminum. Additionally, CNT s may be applied as a new type of cable material that would exploit the high stiffness and potentially the high strength. There are two types of carbon nanotubes, the single walled carbon nanotubes, SWCNTs, and the multiwalled carbon nanotubes, MWCNTs. This grant from the National Science Foundation addresses the mechanics of SWCNT bundles with a combined experimental and modeling effort. In particular, the goal of this project is to develop a detailed understanding of the mechanics of both parallel and twisted SWCNT bundles. Inspiration for this effort comes from the rather well established fields of twisted wire, and textile, mechanics. These disciplines have treated the mechanics of twisted wire structures, or textile fabrics, typically by continuum mechanics. One may expect that twisting a bundle, or achieving a woven bundle, of SWCNTs will enhance the load bearing capacity of the SWCNT rope. The extent of load transfer between individual tubes in the bundle is a crucial aspect of their potential application in structural applications in either composites, as cabling, and even for example, as windings in electromagnets. Our experimental effort involves the use of a nanomanipulator testing stage in which we will pick up SWCNT bundles, mount them for tensile loading, and apply twists with a component of this testing stage, which can undergo individual steps per 360 degree revolution, and can continue to wind up a SWCNT bundle through n turns. The stiffness as a function of applied twist, and also the bundle strength as a function of applied twist, will be studied with this tool, which has been previously used to study the tensile loading of individual MWCNT s and of untwisted SWCNT bundles. Our modeling effort involves using a variety of approaches, including molecular dynamics (MD), molecular mechanics (MM), and continuum mechanics, to study such issues as load transfer as a function of both twist and contact length, for both idealized bundles (for example, where every tube in the bundle is identical, such as all tubes being (10,10) tubes with perfect closest-packing) and bundles that might more closely mimic those actually tested in experiment, such as having different diameter tubes in the bundle, without perfect closest packing. There is a close collaboration between the groups doing theory and experiment, and each effort is meant in part to guide the other, and to provide deeper overall understanding doc19069 none The Seminar on Stochastic Processes will be held at Princeton University from March 21 to 23, . The seminars have become one of the most important regular seminar series for probabilists. They attract and bring together an active group of eminent researchers and young specialists in probability and stochastic processes. This award will provide travel support for participants. The funds will be used primarily for women and junior researchers doc19070 none The objective of WISE is to support the participation of fifteen engineering students each year in the - Washington Internships for Students of Engineering (WISE) programs. The NSF grant will be used to help facilitate the participation of students from under-represented minority groups and currently under-represented engineering disciplines to make the program truly multidisciplinary and diverse. Since , the WISE program has brought up to 18 students each summer a total of 324 thus far to Washington, DC to learn first-hand how government officials make decisions on complex technological issues and how engineers contribute to legislative and regulatory public policy decisions. Throughout the ten weeks, the students interacted with leaders in the Congress and the Administration, industry, and prominent non- governmental organizations. Meetings with Congressional committees, executive office departments, and corporate government affairs offices were daily activities. In addition, each student researched and completed a paper on a current and topical engineering-related public policy issue doc19071 none Nistor This project is devoted to the analysis and spectral theory of differential operators on non-compact manifolds. The investigator is especially interested in generalizing the classical results of elliptic theory for compact manifolds, including index theory. Little can be said about all non-compact manifolds in general, but results of Bismut, Beunning, Cordes, Mazzeo, Melrose, Meuller, Shubin, and others have singled out a class of manifolds that is more amenable to study: the class of manifolds with a uniform structure at infinity. The local theory (regularity, local existence) for these manifolds is the same as for compact manifolds, so our methods will necessarily be global. Thus, in addition to the methods of Partial differential equations and Differential geometry used by the above mentioned authors, methods from Operator algebras have come to play an increasingly important role in the study of non-compact manifolds with a uniform structure at infinity, as is seen from the work of Connes, V.F.R. Jones, Lauter, Monthubert, Skandalis, Taylor, and the investigator. Manifolds with a uniform structure at infinity appear naturally in Scattering theory, Differential geometry, Representation theory, Mathematical physics, and certain problems of Applied mathematics. The results of the proposed research will have, in the long run, applications to all these domains. The main methods that are proposed belong to Analysis, especially Partial differential equations, Operator algebras, Spectral theory, and K-theory. A main technical tool will be provided by algebras generated by differential operators on non-compact manifolds with a uniform structure at infinity. By using Sobolev spaces, one can reduce many of our basic questions to questions about algebras of bounded operators. A novel feature of this proposal is the study of boundary value problems for manifolds with a uniform structure at infinity that have Lipschitz boundaries, as in the work of Mitrea and Taylor on such compact domains doc19072 none Ocneanu Since their introduction a century ago, subgroups of SU(2) and simple Lie groups have evolved almost separately. In operator algebras no geometrical structure of subfactors has been previously found. The proponent has found the natural link between subfactors, the subgroups of quantum SU(2) and the classical and quantum Lie groups, showing that the information for building a simple Lie group comes naturally from the fusion structure on representations of a quantum subgroup of SU(2). The bridge between these two areas of research is a new crystallographic property of homology theory, wherein for instance six term exact sequences correspond to regular hexagons. These methods yield a natural elementary construction of a canonical basis of the quantum enveloping algebra of the semisimple Lie groups. The link found between quantum subgroups and root lattices extends beyond SU(2) and the classical Lie groups. The proponent found new unimodular root systems in weight lattices associated to general quantum subgroups, which are not connected to any known structures. The proponent considers the development of the higher analogs of simple Lie groups corresponding to the new root systems a priority. These are likely to be essentially new mathematical objects with natural many-to-one laws, which have potential applications in constructive QFT in a physical (3 or 4) number of dimensions, while the usual binary laws produce naturally 2-dimensional field theories. The project is centered around the construction, classification and study of the properties and manifestations of the quantum subgroups of Lie groups. The quantum deformations of the semisimple Lie groups have, when the quantization parameter is a root of unity, subgroups which are the analogs of the finite subgroups of the classical Lie groups. The proponent has introduced this structure over the years, starting with the classification of the algebraic structure of small index subfactors in the noncommutative Galois theory for operator algebras. Other manifestations of these structures appear in topological quantum field theory, where they provide boundary extensions of numerical invariants for 3-manifolds , conformal field theory, and modular invariants. The quantum subgroups of SU(2), SU(3) and SU(4) are now classified by the proponent, and show that the quantum world is very different and apparently nearly unrelated to the classical world, with a markedly simpler situation for the exceptional quantum subgroups than for the corresponding classical subgroups. The project introduces geometrical structures associated to quantum subgroups, with the quantum subgroups of SU(2) producing the roots weights and canonical bases for the simple Lie groups, while the other quantum subgroups give raise to essentially new generalized root systems in weight lattices. It is hoped that the new structures produced by the project could play a role in constructing models of quantum field theory in a physical number of dimensions doc19073 none DMS - . One motivation for this project comes from F theory heterotic string duality. In this duality, given the data of an elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau manifold, a principal bundle over it with the appropriate structure group and connection, and a B-field, which is roughly like a holomorphic 2-form, one expects to find a new Calabi-Yau manifold fibered in elliptic K3 surfaces over the same base. A second motivation is to understand some of the mathematical issues raised by the first question, in a purely mathematical framework. These issues lead to a rich set of questions concerning two or more commuting elements in compact Lie groups, conjugacy classes in semisimple algebraic groups or complex Lie algebras, the moduli space of semistable principal bundles over elliptic curves, and the geometry of del Pezzo surfaces and K3 surfaces. This project is concerned with the study of certain geometric structures arising in mathematics and physics. One goal of this study is a mathematical understanding of the relation between two physical theories of elementary particles arising from string theory. The relationship is best expressed mathematically by relationships between several geometric structures. These relationships, and various generalizations, are also very interesting from a mathematical point of view, because they are connected with the possible symmetries of spaces in any number of dimensions and with geometric structures connected with these symmetries doc19074 none This research investigates the application of the phase of laser light to understand and manipulate the behavior of electrons and or nuclei in isolated molecules and in condensed matter. By varying the relative phase of two electromagnetic fields, it is possible to control the interference between two competing excitation paths and thereby to alter the branching ratio of a chemical reaction or the direction of a photocurrent. Moreover, from the laser-phase dependence of the observable, it is possible to obtain fundamentally new information about continuum structure. Three new initiatives are designed to deepen our understanding of such interference effects. The first is the application of coherent control to bond-selective chemistry of complex molecules. Specifically, the interference between one- and three-photon excitation will be used to control the product distribution in the photodissociation of vinyl chloride. Second, coherent control will be used to manipulate the photodissociation of hydrogen molecules in selected vibrational and rotational levels. The phase lag spectrum for this process will then be compared with theoretical predictions. Finally, the theory of phase-lag spectroscopy will be extended to deal with surface resonances, thereby providing a tool for understanding a variety of decay and decoherence mechanisms relevant to photon- and electron-triggered surface chemistry and to electron transport in molecular devices. This project is jointly funded by the AMOP program in the Physics Division and the EPC program in the Chemistry Division doc19075 none Prop #: PI: C. Lee Black This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessel Weatherbird operated by the Bermuda Biological Station for Research, Inc. and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, C. Lee Black is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire a Furuno Radar system and INMARSAT Mini-M satellite communication terminal doc19076 none The project is to investigate the shear instabilities at the interface between two streams of granular materials flowing down an inclined surface. The modes of instability produce various mixing characteristics which are of interest in many applications including pharmaceutical and food processing. The PIs will investigate this problem through experimental and computational methods based on MD and cellular automata simulations doc19077 none A numerical model will be developed to simulate solar energetic particle (SEP) event charge distributions, energy spectra, and relative abundances as functions of space and time due to a propagating coronal mass ejection (CME) driven shock. This model couples the hydrodynamics of the moving shock to the ion kinetics, while at the same time accounting for non-equilibrium charge and energy change processes. The level of realism is such that self-consistent comparisons with SEP ion and plasma observations will be possible. In addition, a dedicated parallel computing laboratory will be established at Roanoke College. This laboratory will not only address the needs for numerical implementation of the proposed model, but it will also provide training for undergraduate science and non-science students in the developing information technology art of parallel scientific computing doc19078 none Rabalais This award to Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium provides instrumentation to update and expand the oceanographic research capabilities of the research vessel Pelican, a ship operated by LUMCON as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS) research fleet. The present award supports acquisition and commissioning of a new, 75 kHz acoustic current profiler with phased array technology. It will significantly extend the depth to which profiles of ocean current velocity can be collected during vessel operations. These improvements will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists using the ship in their research during and future years doc19079 none Susan Sinnott of the University of Florida is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to examine particle-surface interactions that can lead to chemical reactions and material modification using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Three closely related problems will be studied. First, the deposition of covalently bound polyatomic ions on polymeric substrates will be examined. The unique capabilities of polyatomic ions for material modification and thin-film growth motivate this research, which aims to shed light on the analogous and more complex processes that take place in low-energy plasmas. Second, the use of polyatomic and single-atom ions to chemically functionalize and modify carbon nanotubes and nanotube-polymer interfaces will be explored, motivated by the fact that carbon nanotubes are being considered for use as fibers in the next generation of composite materials. Finally, the novel size-specific reactions that occur in gas solvent assisted chemistry when molecular clusters are deposited on solid surfaces will be studied, along with the growth of covalently balanced nanostructured thin films that can be generated experimentally through cluster-beam deposition. This project requires expansion and refinement of existing MD programs to include kinetic Monte Carlo simulations of thermal surface diffusion and relaxation between MD simulations of each cluster deposition event. Collaborative efforts are planned with experimentalists and theorists on all three projects. This computational project has the potential to provide new understanding that will be important for industrial materials processing. For example, ion deposition can serve as a model for several aspects of thin-film growth through low energy plasmas, which is the leading industrial method for depositing polymer thin films under dry conditions. Organic thin films are important for optoelectronic applications, coatings, electronic devices, and mechanical applications. The present studies aim to model film deposition and surface modification issues relevant to ongoing experimental studies doc19080 none A large number of the technologically useful, unusual, and exciting superhard and superstrong materials such as diamond, carbon nanotubes, and SiC are derived from carbon by covalent bonding of C to itself, and with other elements such as N, B, and Si. There are an important class of amorphous, partially amorphous, and nano-crystalline materials such as diamond like carbon and highly tetrahedral amorphous carbon with unusual properties. It has been shown that the amorphous phase plays an important role in the nucleation and growth of diamond and cubic-BN upon non-equilibrium processing. The primary objectives of this focussed research group will be to: (1) synthesize unusual C-based covalently-bonded amorphous and nano-crystalline materials with controlled nano-structures and properties in the focussed region of the ternary (C-B-N) system, (2) develop apply advanced techniques to characterize the nano-structures of these materials, and (3) relate the scale of the nano-structure and connectivity of the amorphous network to the selected properties. With this vision in mind, the premise of the proposed FRG is that the functionality property of nano-structured materials in the form of thin films and coatings can be designed by employing a suitable nanoscale architecture and distribution of the basic structural building blocks to control the properties. In this FRG comprised of researchers at the University of Cincinnati and Prof. Kleebe at the CO School of Mines, the design of nano-structured thin films will go beyond just refining the polycrystalline microstructural scale, to exploring the amorphous routes for synthesizing, characterizing, and controlling the nano-structure of new materials in order to achieve unusual mechanical, physical, thermal, and possibly other properties. Thus, materials will be first designed and synthesized produced to have only short-range order and then nano-structured thin films will be created by clever modifications of the non-equilibrium processing methods, and kinetic thermal manipulation of the networks nanostructues to create nano-crystalline thin films. The eventual aim of these activities will be to develop predictive tools for designing and synthesizing materials with unusual properties so that a knowledge base for creating materials by design will be obtained. On a broader scale, a successful completion of this research will lead to a knowledge base for designing nano-structured materials in C-B-N ternary with unusual mechanical and physical properties for applications in machining, electronic devices, MEMS, and functional protective coatings. In particular, the scientific understanding of the role of the nano-scale structure, microstructure, and interfacial materials in creating novel materials will be obtained. Graduate and undergraduate students and research associate post doc will be trained through participation on this research project and their theses. A new course on Plasma Processing of Thin Films will be developed and taught to undergraduate and graduate students. In addition, minority women high school students will be mentored and exposed to this research through NASA-SHARP program at University of Cincinnati doc19081 none Adams The representation theory of linear reductive groups, such as GL(n) is a very active subject, in part because of applications to the automorphic forms and the Langlands program. However important interesting examples of automorphic forms come from non-linear groups, i.e. groups pwhich can not be realized as a subgroup of GL(n). A fundamental result in the theory of real reductive groups is Vogan duality. In joint work with Peter Trapa I plan to extend this to non-linear groups. There are a number of interesting features in this setting which are quite different from the linear case. In a joint project with Rebecca Herb I propose to study the characters of real reductive non-linear groups, by relating them to linear groups via a lifting theory. This lifting is closely related to Vogan duality for these groups. In a project with Niranjan Ramachandran I am studying the structure of non-linear p-adic reductive groups. This is an important first step in studying character theory for these groups. Finally Annegret Paul and I are working on a project to parametrize the theta-correspondence over R for one-dimensional representations as completely as possible doc19082 none This grant supports the development of gravitational wave source modeling and signal processing techniques, and the implementation of a data analysis system designed to detect gravitational radiation using the Laser Interferometric Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). The award also supports the analysis of LIGO data using both the LIGO Data Analysis System (LDAS) and the Grid Physics Network (GriPhyN) in an effort to detect the four principal categories of sources: gravitational-wave stochastic background, unmodeled burst sources, inspiral signals from binary neutron stars and black holes, and slowly modulated sinusoidal signals expected from rapidly rotating neutron stars. LIGO is an ambitious project to detect gravitational waves from astrophysical sources, which were predicted by Einstein almost a century ago but have not yet been directly observed. This work will make a significant contribution to the overall success of the LIGO project, and may ultimately lead to the first detection of gravitational waves. This award also supports research into the nature of highly energetic astrophysical sources of gravitational radiation which will provide valuable insight into the nature of Einstein s theory of gravity and will open a new field of astronomical observation doc19083 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor R. Daniel Little, of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is studying the reaction chemistry of trimethylenemethane diradicals and 1,3-diyl radical cations. Using diazenes as diradical precursors, Professor Little is exploring the factors responsible for selective formation of 8-membered ring carbocyclic compounds or their 6-membered ring isomers, as well as oxygen- and nitrogen-containing heterocyclic analogs. Symmetrical and unsymmetrical 1,3-diyl radical cations are the subjects of studies relating to the assembly of 7- and 8-membered ring compounds as well as mechanistic analyses of cation radical equilibration and recoil accompanying loss of nitrogen from diazenes. Many organic compounds which display interesting chemical or biological activity contain 7- or 8-membered rings of atoms. The development of efficient techniques for the synthesis of such cyclic compounds remains of great interest, particularly in light of the generally greater stability of smaller-ring (5- and 6-membered) compounds. Professor R. Daniel Little, of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is developing new reactions allowing the selective synthesis of 7- and 8-membered ring compounds and studying the factors responsible for the selectivity of these reactions doc19084 none The project addresses problems covering a rather broad spectrum of discrete mathematics (DM), some drawn from related areas such as statistical mechanics (SM), probability, and theoretical computer science (TCS). A common thread in many of these problems is:one is given a probability distribution on some large discrete space (e.g. independent sets in, or proper colorings of, a graph), and wants to know whether behavior in one part of the system can significantly affect behavior in other, distant parts. The loose term ``long range effects (LRE s) is used for such interactions. Both strong and weak LRE s are of interest: For SM what s wanted is, more often than not, strong LRE s, usually under the name ``phase transition (PT). In very recent work, the investigator and his student David Galvin used mainly combinatorial ideas to settle one much-studied question in this area (concerning PT s in the ``hard-core lattice gas model ), and a particular hope at present is that ideas from this work, and, more generally, the investigator s combinatorial perspective, will lead to progress on various more or less related questions. From the perspectives of DM and TCS, on the other hand, weak LRE s are often desirable, e.g. because of their connections with rapid mixing of Markov chains (a topic of major interest in TCS), and because in combinatorial applications of probability, systems with sufficiently weak LRE s can sometimes substitute for probability spaces based on purely independent choices. (This again involves the hard-core model, which arises in surprisingly diverse mathematical contexts.) Speaking very generally, the (main part of the) project aims at understanding the degree of order or disorder in various large random systems, for instance the extent to which the global structure of a physical system can be predicted from knowledge about interactions between neighboring particles. In recent years, random systems similar to those used to model physical reality have played increasingly important roles in TCS and DM, partly because they can be helpful in analyzing (algorithmically and or theoretically) even non-random problems in these areas; and there has been an increasing realization of the degree to which the issues arising in these three disciplines are related. One major theme of the present project is an interest in applying ideas and methods across mathematical boundaries: especially in using ideas from the investigator s core area (DM) to attack problems in SM and TCS, but also in bringing an increasing familiarity with techniques from the latter areas to bear on several problems of longstanding interest in DM doc19085 none Passing from an affine algebra or an ideal to the integral closure is a fundamental operation. The investigator intends to examine computational aspects of this process. While there exist algorithms for computing the integral closure of an affine domain, little is known about the complexity of such calculations. To address this problem the investigator intends to find estimates for the number of algebra generators of the integral closure and for the degrees of these generators. In the case of ideals on the other hand, one still has no efficient method for computing integral closures. In view of this lack of an algorithm, the investigator intends to express, or at least approximate, the integral closure of an ideal by a sum of colon ideals that are more readily accessible. The core of an ideal is a counterpart of the integral closure: it encodes information about all possible reductions of a given ideal, i.e., all ideals over which the given ideal is integral. The investigator intends to work on a conjectural formula that, if proved, would give an explicit expression for the core of a large class of ideals. Continuing the somewhat computational theme the investigator proposes to establish bounds for the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity of embedded projective varieties in terms of their defining equations. The known results require strong assumptions on the singularities of the variety which the investigator hopes to weaken. In this vein he intends to show that rational singularities persist under generic linkage of ideals in the linkage class of a complete intersection. In continuation of his earlier work on blowup algebras the investigator plans to study the rings representing special fibers of blowups. These `special fiber rings describe, for instance, images of rational maps, including secant varieties and Gauss images. The investigator intends to study the Cohen-Macaulayness of special fiber rings, estimate their depth and compute multiplicities. Suitable depth estimates would have a bearing on a conjecture by Mazur that originates in Wiles work on deformations of Galois representations. Formulas for the multiplicity on the other hand would lead to an extension of the Teissier-Pluecker formula for the degrees of certain dual varieties. The investigator works in the area of Mathematics called Commutative Algebra, which deals with the qualitative study of systems of polynomial equations in several variables. Such systems arise in numerous applications outside mathematics. Over the past two decades commutative algebraists have become more concerned with computational aspects, thereby emphasizing connections to applied areas such as computer algebra, robotics, cryptography and coding theory. This project addresses both theoretical and computational aspects of commutative algebra doc19086 none PI: Dmitry Novikov A. Gabrielov, Purdue University %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% D. Novikov and A. Gabrielov propose to investigate the global finiteness properties of solutions of Fuchsian systems of ordinary differential equations. The goal of this research is to establish effective upper bounds on the global oscillation of polynomial combinations of these solutions in terms of quantitative characteristics of the Fuchsian systems, and to apply these results to the infinitesimal Hilbert s sixteenth problem. The main interest is the oscillation of solutions near confluent singular points of the hypergeometric equation. Stable oscillations of many natural systems in biology, electronics, engineering, meteorology, etc., are described by limit cycles in the corresponding dynamical systems. If the dynamical system is close to a conservative one, its limit cycles correspond to zeros of an Abelian integral, a solution of an ordinary differential equation with polynomial coefficients. Unlike solutions of algebraic equations, such functions can have many zeros even when the coefficients are low-degree polynomials. The goal of the proposed research is to give an effective upper bound on the number of these zeros in terms of the magnitude of the coefficients, and the corresponding upper bound on the number of limit cycles of the dynamical system. This can be considered as an effective version of the famous Hilbert s sixteenth problem doc19087 none A large number of the technologically useful, unusual, and exciting superhard and superstrong materials such as diamond, carbon nanotubes, and SiC are derived from carbon by covalent bonding of C to itself, and with other elements such as N, B, and Si. There are an important class of amorphous, partially amorphous, and nano-crystalline materials such as diamond like carbon and highly tetrahedral amorphous carbon with unusual properties. It has been shown that the amorphous phase plays an important role in the nucleation and growth of diamond and cubic-BN upon non-equilibrium processing. The primary objectives of this focussed research group will be to: (1) synthesize unusual C-based covalently-bonded amorphous and nano-crystalline materials with controlled nano-structures and properties in the focussed region of the ternary (C-B-N) system, (2) develop apply advanced techniques to characterize the nano-structures of these materials, and (3) relate the scale of the nano-structure and connectivity of the amorphous network to the selected properties. With this vision in mind, the premise of the proposed FRG is that the functionality property of nano-structured materials in the form of thin films and coatings can be designed by employing a suitable nanoscale architecture and distribution of the basic structural building blocks to control the properties. In this FRG, Prof. Kleebe at the CO School of Mines will collaborate with researchers at the University of Cincinnati (Profs. Singh and Boolchand) in the designing of nano-structured thin films that goes beyond just refining the polycrystalline microstructural scale, to exploring the amorphous routes for synthesizing, characterizing, and controlling the nano-structure of new materials in order to achieve unusual mechanical, physical, thermal, and possibly other properties. Thus, materials will be first designed and synthesized produced to have only short-range order and then nano-structured thin films will be created by clever modifications of the non-equilibrium processing methods, and kinetic thermal manipulation of the networks nanostructues to create nano-crystalline thin films. The eventual aim of these activities will be to develop predictive tools for designing and synthesizing materials with unusual properties so that a knowledge base for creating materials by design will be obtained. On a broader scale, a successful completion of this research will lead to a knowledge base for designing nano-structured materials in C-B-N ternary with unusual mechanical and physical properties for applications in machining, electronic devices, MEMS, and functional protective coatings. In particular, the scientific understanding of the role of the nano-scale structure, microstructure, and interfacial materials in creating novel materials will be obtained. Graduate and undergraduate students and research associate post doc will be trained through participation on this research project and their theses. A new course on Plasma Processing of Thin Films will be developed and taught to undergraduate and graduate students. In addition, minority women high school students will be mentored and exposed to this research through NASA-SHARP program at University of Cincinnati doc19088 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. David Foster at Harvard University to purchase a mobile canopy access platform to support research at the Harvard Forest. Forest canopies are key sites for the exchange of mass, energy and momentum within forest ecosystems. However, examination of the physiological and physical processes occurring within the canopy is hampered by logistic difficulties of conducting research that involves sophisticated equipment at heights far above the ground. The funds provided in this grant will allow the purchase of a mobile canopy access platform of the type referred to as an articulated boom lift in the construction industry. This macromanipulator will enhance ongoing projects of six investigators whose work at the Harvard Forest focuses on tree physiology, ecosystem processes, and atmosphere-biosphere exchange. Forests are inherently three-dimensional systems. A mobile canopy access system will provide investigators with the ability to expand their research into new areas and new dimensions. A mobile platform is well suited to research at the Harvard Forest due to the relatively low stature of the forest (~ 20 m) and the extensive network of fire roads. At present, canopy access at the Harvard Forest is limited to a small number of fixed towers. A mobile canopy system will allow us to extend our studies to a broader range of community types and to sample from a larger number of trees. In addition, a mobile canopy access platform is compatible with physiological studies that frequently require the collection of destructive samples. Specific projects that will benefit from the purchase of this instrument include: Dr. Foster s studies of the impact of the hemlock wooly adelgid, a recently introduced pest of hemlock trees, Dr. Bazzaz s research on photosynthesis-nitrogen dynamics in forest trees, Dr. Holbrook s studies of water transport in tall trees, Dr. Wofsy s studies of CO2 exchange between forest ecosystems and the atmosphere, Dr. Aber s studies of the effects of chronic nitrogen deposition on forest ecosystems, and Dr. Steudler s research on global warming and carbon storage in mid-latitude forest ecosystems. The Harvard Forest is an important site for both research and teaching. Much of the research at the Harvard Forest is directed at understanding the function and stability of forest ecosystems in relation to human disturbance and global climate change. Thus, the acquisition of this instrument will contribute to our understanding of the health and resilience of this important ecosystem doc19089 none PI Taam The observed masses and orbital periods for many classes of close binary star systems are difficult to reproduce in evolutionary scenarios without significant angular momentum and mass loss. A mechanism which facilitates these losses involves the transfer of orbital angular momentum and energy to a common envelope which is subsequently ejected as a result of the gravitational interactions between the two components. This common envelope phase of evolution will be investigated in this project for massive stars (as applied to low mass X-ray binaries containing neutron stars and black holes)as well as low to intermediate mass stars (as applied to cataclysmic variables containing white dwarf stars). The primary goal of the research will be to determine the parameters for which the progenitor binary systems at long orbital periods are transformed and survive as short period systems, and the parameters for which mergers takes place. These investigations include the treatment of multi-dimensional hydrodynamical processes, and in this proposal the investigators will undertake high resolution three dimensional studies of the common envelope phase using an adaptive, parallel simulation code. This research provides a foundation upon which the formation and evolution of close binary systems containing compact objects can be understood doc19090 none The principal investigators study the complex hyperbolic geometry of the moduli spaces of cubic surfaces and cubic threefolds. For stable cubic surfaces over the complex numbers, previous work of D. Allcock and the investigators gives a period map from the moduli space to the quotient of the four-ball by a lattice defined over the Eisenstein integers, which is an isomorphism between these two spaces and which takes the subspace of moduli of singular surfaces to a configuration of hyperplanes in the ball. The investigators now study the arithmetic properties of cubic surfaces whose periods are Eisenstein rational points. For stable cubic threefolds over the complex numbers, there is a period map from their moduli space to the quotient of the ten-ball by a lattice also defined over the Eisenstein integers. The investigators study detailed properties of this period map in order to prove that this map is an isomorphism between the two spaces (after some blowing up and down) which carries the subspace of moduli of singular threefolds to a hyperplane configuration in the ball. The main technical point under study is the computation of the differential of the restriction of the period map to each stratum that parametrizes equisingular varieties. The extension of the Griffiths residue calculus to this situation turns out to be quite involved and to require new techniques in commutative algebra. The understanding of cubic equations has been a central theme in mathematics, whith deep implications for mathematics, science and engineering. In the sixteenth century cubic equations in one variable were solved by finding a formula for its solutions analogous to the well-known formula for the solutions of quadratic equations. This formula led to the introduction of complex numbers, which are now a standard tool in science and engineering. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was realized that quadratic equations in any number of variables could be understood, and that, for a fixed number of variables, all quadratic equations are essentially equivalent by a change of variables. It was also realized that cubic equations in two or more variables are not all equivalent by change of variables. The different equivalence classes are now called the moduli space. The moduli space of cubic equations in two variables is the hyperbolic plane of non-Euclidean geometry. This connection has led to many discoveries, from special functions used to solve problems in physics and engineering, to advances in number theory and cryptography. The aim of this project is to study the special non-Euclidean geometry that has recently been discovered on the moduli spaces of cubic equations in three and four variables. The reason for carrying this study is not only the solution of the problems posed in the proposal, but also the expectation that this study of cubics in more variables will continue to be a point of departure for new ideas that will affect other areas of mathematics, science and engineering doc19091 none The project suggests investigations in the area of Harmonic Analysis and Nonlinear Hamiltonian Equations. One direction of the research in the analysis of singular integral operators. Current interests include Lebesgue space estimates on Fourier integral operators associated to singular and nonsingular canonical relations. Such estimates provide important tools for the analysis of properties of solutions to nonlinear Hamiltonian systems: global existence, smoothness, and stability. The other direction of the research concerns specific properties of solitary wave solutions to nonlinear Hamiltonian systems. Such soliton-like solutions were proved to exist in many different contexts. If the equation is invariant under the action of some Lie group, then the solitary waves may possess stability properties. The program of research focuses on the stability of solitary waves with minimal energy, which are expected to be of particular importance for applications. When the amplitude of the waves increases, their interaction with the medium becomes important. This interaction may seriously change the behavior of the waves and lead to the appearance of nonlinear solitary waves, or solitons. Such nonlinear waves describe central phenomena in fiber optics, plasma physics, theory of superconductivity, theory of elementary particles, meteorology, and oceanology. Detailed knowledge of properties of such waves, and in particular their stability or instability, will allow to predict the chances of sudden weather changes, develop optical waveguides, and describe quantum effects on the scales being inexorably approached by today s electronics and chip manufacturers, let alone the Experimental Physics. Natural phenomena pose new challenges to the intricately related fields, Harmonic Analysis and the Theory of Nonlinear Equations, and stimulate further refinement of the tools of modern Mathematics doc19092 none I. The Principal Investigator, David Eisenbud, will support the travel from the US of participants in the International Workshop on Algebra and Geometry to be held at the University of Hyderabad, India, 7-12 December, , website http: 202.41.85.102 icag.htm . The main themes of the Workshop will be Commutative Algebra and Algebraic Geometry, Computational Algebraic Geometry, and Quantum Algebra. In each of these topics there will be one or two survey talks and several research talks. Plenty of time will be reserved for discussions between the participants, and it is expected that new collaborations and research associations between Indian and US mathematicians will come from these contacts. II. In recent years both US and Indian mathematicians have made major contributions to the fields of Commutative Algebra, Algebraic Geometry, and Quantum Algebra. These three fields increasingly use tools from Computational Algebraic Geometry to check conjectures and to aid research. They also contribute tools which are used in the computational systems that underly robotics, cryptography, and other national applications of strategic interest. The proposed conference will foster collaboration in these fields between the US and Indian communities doc19093 none Proposal PI Ian Dinwoodie Title Computational algebraic methods for high-dimensional statistical applications This project has the goal of research in algebraic methods for high-dimensional parametric statistical problems where classical asymptotic methods are not useful. Connected with the research goal is work with existing and future graduate students. The research problems are: high-dimensional Gibbs-distribution models for network reliability and traffic with incomplete data; optimization for parameter estimation in high-dimensional models with incomplete data and nonconvex log-likelihood functions; fast simulation methods including fiber walks with Markov chains for integer data tables; and multivariate exponential generating functions for computations on lattice points with the hypergeometric distribution. A range of algebraic tools will be used, including Groebner bases in commutative rings and D-modules, elimination theory, polynomial homotopy methods, and Markov Monte Carlo methods. This project will bring recent developments in computational algebra to new statistical applications where classical methods do not work. Examples of such new and challenging applications are large-scale network traffic and reliability, and large databases of tabular data such as census information where security and analysis are difficult. The algebraic tools can help to solve problems of model formulation and model fitting and statistical analysis. Many algebraic techniques have been recently developed to solve computational problems in robotics and differential equations, and these methods are very promising for statistics. The investigators will develop these algebraic methods to solve statistical applications doc19094 none The investigator studies diophantine approximation from the point of view of the analogy with value distribution of holomorphic curves (Nevanlinna theory), and vice versa. Specifically, this work includes: (i) work on relating Faltings theorem on the Shafarevich conjecture to Thue s method, (ii) work on finding further applications of the geometric logarithmic derivative lemma, (iii) a search for a number-theoretic counterpart to the lemma on the logarithmic derivative, and (iv) technical improvements in proofs using Thue s method (Dyson s lemma). This project involves number theory (specifically, solutions of polynomial equations in integers or rational numbers, as well as related inequalities) and value distribution theory (inequalities satisfied by power series functions of one or several complex variables). These two seemingly disparate areas of mathematics have many phenomena in common. This has been partly explained by a formal analogy between the two fields, which has led to new conjectures, shorter proofs of existing theorems, and new theorems. The present project uses this analogy to further elucidate the underlying structure of number theory, value distribution theory, and the analogy between the two fields doc19095 none The aim of this project is to further the understanding of the behavior of families of complex curves on a complex projective manifold X.This will be done by addressing both enumerative questions (e.g. How may curves are there with given degree and genus and incidences?) and deformation-theoretic questions (e.g. What deformations of curves lie in a generic deformation of X?). Some of the important tools for attacking such questions include the Atiyah-Bott localization theorem and Kuranishi s formal deformationtheory. In addition to the research component, the investigators will restart the successful WAGS (Western Algebraic Geometry) conferences. This research relates to counting problems. For example, given the set of solutions of a polynomial equation in several variables, how many objects of a certain type (e.g. lines) lie entirely inside the solution set? We further study the shape of the collection of objects even in cases in which that collection of objects is no longer finite. This research is related to a celebrated modern theory in physics, called string theory, which proposes to resolve the problem of unifying the fundamental forces of nature by slightly thickening space-time in six independent directions. Our research studies the geometry of the (tiny) cross-section of the universe in those six new directions doc19096 none The PI requests support for continuing his research activities at the Super-Kamiokande experiment. His activities will be concentrated in the area of lower energy solar neutrinos to study the long-standing problem of the solar neutrino deficit. The Detector has suffered an accident that will disable the Detector for about two years. The group, however, is obligated as a collaborator to participate in the repair and recovery effort that is scheduled to be completed by the end of November of . Bulk of the funding for repair and restoration will be provided by the Japanese Government with some support from DoE. This proposal would also allow the Maryland group to continue to analyze the data collected up to the time of the accident and operate the experiment after restoration doc19097 none Moore Many search and optimization problems that occur in the real world consist of constraint satisfaction tasks where we wish to simultaneously satisfy many demands. These problems occur in scheduling, manufacturing, compilers, and many other contexts. Many of these problems are NP-complete, meaning that they can probably not be solved with less than an exponential amount of computational effort. However, this definition of computational complexity focuses on the worst case, not on the typical cases we might find in the real world. As a mathematical bridge between the worst case and real-world problems, we will consider random, or average, cases of NP-complete problems. Many people have observed that when the density of constraints passes a critical threshold, these problems undergo a phase transition from solvability to unsolvability. Approaches from physics have already helped us understand this transition. We will prove rigorous upper and lower bounds on the value of this threshold, analyze the performance of heuristics that attempt to solve these problems quickly, and research the effectiveness of the Replica Trick of statistical physics in this area doc19098 none Under this SGER grant, the PI will implement a physically-based parameterization of the spatially varying vertical diffusivity in the ocean component of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM). Recent observational studies show vertical mixing in the ocean can be strongly enhanced over rough bottom topography. The PI will evaluate the impact on the ocean s circulation, its heat transport and its role in climate. The work is important because it will provide strong diagnostics underpinning of simulated climate variability of the CCSM using a new physically-based scheme for diffusivity in the ocean model doc19099 none This application requests support for the 19 th Gordon Research Conference on the Chemistry and Biology of Tetrapyrroles, to be held at Salve Regina University, Newport, RI, from July 14-19, . The specific aims of this conference are the following: 1) To provide a forum for discussion of recent unpublished data by scientists with common interest in the study of the chemistry and biology of tetrapyrrole compounds. 2) To promote the exchange of ideas between established and new investigators from a wide variety of scientific disciplines (e.g., chemists, biochemists, clinicians, plant biologists, microbiologists, biotechnologists) by providing ample discussion time following formal presentations, by holding poster sessions which serve as a focus for the discussion of common interests. This biennial interdisciplinary conference has stimulated collaborations between basic biologists, chemists and clinicians interested in tetrapyrroles for more than three decades. In association with proteins, tetrapyrroles serve diverse roles as biological redox catalysts, in the harvesting of light energy, in the activation and delivery of oxygen, and as signaling molecules. Free tetrapyrroles are also essential nutrients (e.g., vitamin B12), serve as regulators of gene expression (e.g., hemes), and are being utilized as therapeutic agents (e.g., photodynamic cancer therapy, target delivery of radionuclides). Owing to their photodynamic activity, toxicity and lipophilicity, the accumulation of tetrapyrroles (e.g., porphyrins, bilirubin) is associated with numerous pathologies of the skin, liver and brain. For these reasons, this conference represents an important venue for exchange between basic and applied researchers on tetrapyrroles and for refinement of new tools and therapies for development by the biomedical industry. Funds requested in this application are targeted to support 10 young investigators who have not previously had the opportunity to attend this conference and for travel of two young ioprimarily undergraduate institutionle researchers. The sessions, which highlight recent technological progress, will include 22 invited speakers, a plenary lecturer and 14 discussion leaders. All of these individuals have been selected for their scientific excellence, recent innovative work and contribution to the breadth of the program. The remaining 100 conferees will be chosen to ensure a broad representation of women, ethnicity and young scientists from various disciplines in academia, medical research institutions and industry. Strengths of this ongoing Gordon conference are its high disciplinary diversity, integration of research from basic chemistry through practical and clinical applications, focus on new unpublished work, time for discussion, informal atmosphere, and ban on dissemination of conference proceedings, (which it is essential to assure confidentiality when discussing unpublished results doc19100 none The investigator will continue his work on the interplay between probability and algorithms. He has identified two distinct but very important aspects of such study. In the first instance he will study randomized algorithms i.e. those algorithms that introduce randomness as a means of speeding up computation. In the second instance, he will consider the average case performance of algorithms. Here, he wants to try to explain the good performance of simple algorithms on typical problems as opposed to the worst-case performance exemplified by the pathological examples of complexity theory. In the area of randomized algorithms, the investigator will consider problems arising in the study of Monte Carlo Markov Chain algorithms. In particular he will study their use in problems associated with combinatorial counting problems and with problems in Statistical Physics. He will also continue his study of the Edge Disjoint Path problem and the construction of a generalisation of the well known matrix Singular Value Decomposition to multi-dimensional matrices. In the area of average case analysis, he will continue his work on the Traveling Salesman Problem and try to extend his ideas to the independent symmetric model. He will continue his work on analysing the efficacy of the Sequencing By Hybridization technique in Computational Biology. Finally, he will continue to work on probabilistic models of the World Wide Web in an attempt to find a useful model for the testing of algorithmic ideas doc19101 none Central to many facets of geotechnical engineering design is the problem of determining how local interactions between soil materials and manufactured inclusions dictate overall behavior of a geotechnical composite system. Whether the inclusion is geosynthetic, steel, concrete, or a new material yet to be developed, the interactions between soil and construction materials are governed by underlying physical principles related to measurable properties. Unfortunately, there are few, if any, predictive relationships for interface systems available to the research and practice communities. This deficiency is important because innovative applications are arising which require close control over interface resistance. The goals of this project are to: 1) Formulate new practical design methods and tools for interface systems; 2) Quantify the micro-mechanical behavior of soil-construction material interfaces in two- and three-dimensions; and 3) Determine the spatial scales that control behavior of interfaces for a given soil material and inclusion geometry. Results from previous NSF-sponsored research, a laboratory testing program, and two and three-dimensional discrete element micromechanical models will be used to accomplish these goals. Specific issues to be addressed in the experiments and modeling include the role of grain shape; surface topography; relative hardness; particle movements with respect to the surface asperities; particle breakage; and, solid surface wear on the strength and dilatancy of the soil within the interface shear zone. Broader impacts of this research will be realized in five primary impact areas: integration of education and research; participation of minorities and women; enhancing infrastructure for research; rapid and broad dissemination of research results; and, societal benefits. Education and research will be integrated by bringing research results and new materials into undergraduate and graduate courses. The PIs will continue their long-standing practice of involving undergraduate students in research through the REU program. Participation of under-represented minorities and women is encouraged. The Ph.D. student involved in this project will serve as a model for her fellow women graduate and undergraduate student colleauges. McNair Scholars, especially those from the Appalachian region, will be actively recruited to conduct their summer internship on this project, and as graduate students. The three-dimensional models and algorithms produced will enhance the research and teaching infrastructure by providing advanced computing resources for solving problems in soil structure interaction. In addition, project findings will be widely disseminated in print and web-based media. A surface profile database will be created in downloable format on the world wide web. Finally, society at large will benefit from cost saving opportunities and technological advancement doc19102 none Anne McCoy of the Ohio State University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to investigate photoinitiated processes in weakly bound clusters theoretically. The following three categories of processes will be examined: (1) ultraviolet photodissociation of binary complexes in which the dissociation induces a bimolecular reaction, (2) reaction dynamics photoinduced in complexes by vibrationally exciting one of the cluster molecules, and (3) cluster size effects on transition state dynamics of IHI clustered with argon atoms and the photodissociation of water clusters with argon atoms. Studies of photoinitiated processes in clusters pose serious challenges theoretically and computationally. A significant component of this research will involve developing approximate approaches that will enable treatments of at least some of the degrees of freedom classically in the dynamics studies, as well as investigating hybrid quantum classical methods for propagating the dynamics. Clusters of molecules provide a laboratory through which interactions between molecules can be examined both experimentally and theoretically. Clusters cannot be considered simply as the sum of their constituent molecules, as the cluster environment generally changes chemical reactions of the complexed molecules. This research will explore theoretically cluster chemical reactions, many of which can be compared to related experimental results of current interest doc19103 none Ding The long-term goal of this project is to develop statistical methods and software for improved prediction of RNA secondary structure, and for improved computational design of antisense oligonucleotides (oligos) and trans-cleaving ribozymes as the vehicles for high-throughput functional genomics and drug target validation in the post-genomic era. The objectives of the project include: 1) development of statistical algorithms and methodology for the rational design of antisense oligos and ribozymes; 2) experimental testing and improvement of antisense design method with experimental feedback data; 3) development of a statistical RNA folding software Sfold for RNA folding prediction and design of antisense oligos and ribozymes; and establishment and maintenance of a Sfold Web server for RNA folding and antisense oligo and ribozyme design. The Web server will be freely accessible by the scientific community for non-commercial applications. Of the estimated 30,000-40,000 genes in the human genome, definitive functions have been assigned to only a few percent. Through gene down-regulation, antisense oligos and ribozymes are important tools for the assignment of gene functions and for the validation of human therapeutic targets. There is compelling experimental evidence that the accessibility of the messenger or viral RNA by antisense oligos or ribozymes is most constrained by the secondary structure of the target. Recently, statistical approaches to the prediction of RNA secondary structure and antisense targets have shown promise and advantages over established methods. It is thus important to explore fully the advantages of statistical approaches to RNA folding prediction and antisense oligo and ribozyme design. It is expected that the methods and software developed from this project will be widely used for functional genomics applications. This grant is made under the Joint DMS NIGMS Initiative to Support Research Grants in the Area of Mathematical Biology. This is a joint competition sponsored by the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) at the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) at the National Institutes of Health doc19104 none In this project funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Bevan and Lucchese will use high-resolution spectroscopic experimental techniques and theoretical methods to obtain accurate interaction potential energy functions for prototypical hydrogen-bonded systems and related interactions. Gas-phase neutral reactive radical dimers and molecular complexes will be investigated using high-resolution microwave, millimeter-wave, submillimeter-wave, and infrared spectroscopy. Spectra will be measured for dimers of the type X-HY (where X and Y are typically halogen atoms) as well as for HX clusters and hydrogen-bonded systems of biological interest, such as formamide:water. Potential energy surfaces will be computed using ab initio techniques and used to predict spectroscopic data. The potential energy functions will then be morphed until the predicted and experimental data agree. This project aims at obtaining a broader knowledge about fundamental properties related to chemical bonding. The accurately determined potentials for the prototypical systems being studied will provide benchmarks for modeling and predicting the behavior of larger and less tractable systems. The results will aid in understanding the structure and internal dynamics of larger species, including proteins and other biological molecules, as well as in resolving problems associated with other diverse fields such as atmospheric pollution and materials engineering. Students supported in this project will receive training in both state-of-the-art experimental and theoretical techniques and will be exposed to international collaborations that will enhance their preparation for careers in academia and industry doc19105 none Two fundamental material parameters are required to analyze geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering problems involving the flow of fluids through unsaturated soils: 1) the soil-water characteristic curve, and 2) the hydraulic conductivity function. Together, these functions describe the relationships among matric suction, hydraulic conductivity, and water content in unsaturated soils. The functions may either be measured directly or modeled indirectly. Currently, there is a considerable shortage of practical, cost-effective, and reliable experimental techniques for direct measurements of these two important parameters. Several techniques have been developed for independently measuring either the soil-water characteristic curve or the hydraulic conductivity function; however, very few are available for concurrent measurement of both functions, particularly for a single undisturbed specimen under stress-controlled conditions. Most of the existing techniques tend to be impractical for general use because they are limited in terms of complexity and or cost. As a result, engineers in practice more often rely on indirect estimations of characteristic curves and conductivity functions using analytical or empirical models based on routinely measured material properties such as grain-size. In most situations, however, direct measurements are much more desirable. This research attempts to develop the constant-flow method (CFM) for direct, steady-state, and concurrent measurement of both the soil-water characteristic curve and hydraulic conductivity function of unsaturated soils. The majority of the work will be in the form of modifications to a prototype CFM permeameter system developed in the mid s by project Co-PI Dr. Harold Olsen at the Colorado School of Mines. Early results demonstrated several distinct advantages over the more traditional measurement techniques. Most notably, both functions could be obtained for a single specimen without the requirement for separate testing procedures on split sub-samples. Hydraulic conductivity (HC) measurements could be obtained much more rapidly and with substantially smaller hydraulic gradients. Because testing was conducted in a triaxial cell, HC and matric suction could be evaluated as functions of water content as well as applied effective stress. Unfortunately, several limitations were also evident in the prototype CFM system. Specifically, HC measurements were limited to relatively fine-grained soils (k 10 -8 cm sec), pore-air pressure was applied at only one end of the specimen, diffused-air flushing circuits were not incorporated, specimen volume changes could not be measured, and problems with leakage due to an overly complex design were encountered. The primary goal of this work is to expand the capability and practicality of the CFM approach for unsaturated soils testing by addressing and eliminating these limitations. Key modifications to the prototype system will allow HC to be measured for both coarse- and fine-grained soils, account for specimen volume change, decrease testing time, and increase the system s overall robustness and ease-of use. Flushing circuits will be added so that measured pore-water pressures will be less affected by diffused air in the system and permeation rates may be more accurately controlled. The entire system will be computer automated and tailored for compatibility with conventional triaxial permeameter systems. Finally, the system performance will be evaluated for a wide range of soil types and the experimental results will be compared with commonly used analytical and empirical models to check their mutual validity. New testing methods are needed to more accurately analyze the increasingly widespread geoenvironmental problems involving unsaturated fluid flow. This research will establish the constant-flow method as a reliable, practical, and economical testing alternative. NIOSH IC , pp. 111-132 doc19106 none Deering This award to University of Delaware provides instrumentation to update and expand the oceanographic research capabilities of the research vessel Cape Henlopen, a ship operated by the University s College of Marine Studies as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS) research fleet. New water sampling bottles, Carousel sampler and serial data uplink systems will be used to enhance existing CTD (conductivity-temperature-depth) instrumentation. The new acoustic current profiler will provide optimum resolution for shallow operations, especially work in and around Chesapeake Bay. The new acoustic transponder system will provide improved capabilities for locating instruments on the bottom, either for detailed navigation or recovery if lost. These shared-use systems will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists using the ship in their research during and future years doc19107 none Procedural synthesis of natural and contextually appropriate gestures in embodied virtual human agents is challenging. Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) offers a descriptive system for human gesture qualities that fills the gap between pre-defined gesture playback systems and human animator intuition. A computational analog of LMA called EMOTE has been constructed whose parameters modify the performance qualities of arm gesture movements. EMOTE will be developed in several new ways: Connect EMOTE with an agent model so that an agent s affect, personality, and communicative needs set appropriate EMOTE parameters for gesture performance. Investigate motion analysis techniques for extracting EMOTE parameters from live dual or single camera views. Experimentally validate the automated acquisition of EMOTE parameters by using professional LMA notators for ground truth. Use the extracted parameters to create instances of parameterized actions which may be subsequently used for action, affect, and manner descriptions and, ultimately, for content-directed analysis of existing film or video material. This study will help set synthetic agent animation techniques on a sound empirical footing, provide evidence that computers can in fact observe important motion qualities, and lead to strong connections between internal agent state and external behavior qualities doc19108 none PI: Richard Moeckel, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities : Hamiltonian and Celestial Mechanics This project is devoted to research in the general area of dynamical systems theory with emphasis on Hamiltonian and celestial mechanics. Several very different aspects of the subject will be studied. Part of the project deals with the special periodic solutions of the n-body problem arising from central configurations. It is a long-standing open problem to determine how many central configurations are possible, or even if the number is finite. Techniques from algebraic geometry and computational algebra will be used to attack this question. A second part of the project involves the construction of isolating blocks in the phase space of the three-body problem. It is known that it is possible to find simple, explicit isolating blocks at the collinear Lagrange points of the restricted three-body problem. These blocks can be used to study the complicated invariant set nearby. The project is to carry out such a construction near the collinear central configuration of the unrestricted three-body problem. Here the dimension of the phase space is higher and the geometry is much more complicated. A final part of the project is concerned with understanding the mechanism of Arnold diffusion for Hamiltonian systems. The approach taken here is based on the construction of an invariant Cantor set of annuli and subsequent analysis of the resulting dynamics. The gravitational n-body problem remains an active topic for mathematics research three centuries after Newton proposed it. Over the years it has been a stimulus for the development of new mathematics of wide applicability. It is the classic example of a nonlinear mechanical system and its solutions include orderly cyclical motions, multi-body collisions, and irregular, chaotic behavior. The simplest solutions are the rigidly rotating orbits arising from the central configurations. Central configurations are special arrangements of the masses such that the gravitational forces can be exactly balanced by centrifugal forces when the configuration rotates. Although these solutions are dynamically very simple, the problem of finding or even counting the central configurations turns out to be very difficult when there are four or more masses involved. Part of this project is about how to deal with very complicated algebraic problems such as this, perhaps using the help of computers. The central configurations are important landmarks which provide a starting point for further analysis. It turns out that there are many other interesting solutions near the simple, rigidly rotating ones. One way to trap and study these nearby orbits involves the construction of so-called isolating blocks. The geometry of these blocks provides qualitative information about the solutions inside and can also form the basis of numerical methods for approximating these solutions. Finally, there is the problem of understanding chaotic dynamics in mechanical systems and how such behavior can lead to large-scale instability. Instability in celestial mechanics can give rise to such phenomena as the slow drifting of the orbital parameters of planets or asteroids. It also occurs in a variety of other mechanical systems. This phenomenon of Arnold diffusion is only partially understood at present. The new approach which will be pursued here seems promising but much work remains to be done before it can be applied to complex systems like the n-body problem doc19109 none It is proposed to study the fluid physics of an actively forced jet in cross flow, or the transverse jet, for the eventual goal of developing control methodologies to optimize mixing of such jets. Preliminary experimental and computational studies made by the PI and her colleagues have shown enhanced mixing characteristics of transverse jets by acoustic excitation. A more detailed study is planned for the present proposal doc19110 none Gunaratne Osteoporosis is a major socio-economic problem in western societies. Since excessive use of therapeutic agents can have adverse consequences, non-invasive diagnostic tools to determine the need for intervention are essential for bones from older adults is the inner porous region whose structure is reminiscent of disordered cubic networks. The strength of a bone depends on several facets of this network, including its connectivity, the anisotropy, and the level of bone turnover. It is extremely difficult to account for these factors and complex interactions between them in clinical studies or in experiments on ex-vivo bone samples. We have introduced a model of porous bone, and propose to use it to develop a more comprehensive understanding of mechanical causes underlying bone decay. The insights gained from this study can be used to identify novel diagnostic tools to determine the need for therapeutic intervention. In particular, such properties cannot depend on most details of the porous bone; i.e., they need to be invariant characteristics. The model system was used to derive a new expression that relates the strength of a bone to its effective density. It will be tested using previously published data on human bone. Analysis of the model also provided a diagnostic (based on linear response) of the strength of networks. Tests will be conducted to determine how accurately it can predict the strength of bone samples. We also propose to study effects of factors like anisotropy on bone strength, and to develop methods to estimate these factors in-vivo. The second problem proposed is an application of a characteristic that quantifies the level of disorder in a pattern. The form of this measure was deduced by requiring its invariance under all rigid (i.e., Euclidean) motions of the pattern. We propose to use it to estimate the roughness of a surface on a nano-meter scale by characterizing the disorder in a speckle pattern formed by reflecting a laser beam from the surface. Such a characterization is expected find application in (for example) the auto industry doc19111 none Tung The next trend in micro and nano technology is in the direction of integrating micro and nano systems with active bio-elements and means of information transduction. Along this line, the PI s propose to design, fabricate, and test a novel electrical microfluidics pump actuated by biological cell motors. The proposed micro pump will be realized through the integration of a harmless strain of E. coli cells with a MEMS-based microfluidics channel. Each E. coli cell consists of several flagella driven at the base by a rotary motor. If the cell is attached to a surface by a single flagellar filament, the motor turns the whole cell body at a high rotational speed. The proposed design utilizes this mechanism to transport liquid in a microfluidics channel through viscous pumping. According to a preliminary fluid mechanics simulation, the proposed cell motor pump can deliver a flow rate of almost 0.25 nanoliter per minute. Electro-rotation will be used to electrically control the cell rotational speed and thus the flow rate. With this novel control scheme, it is envisioned that the proposed integration of cell actuation biology and MEMS will result in an intelligent microfluidics system for next generation applications. The following objectives have been established for the proposed project. Design and fabricate MEMS microfluidics channel: A series of fluid dynamics simulations will be conducted to investigate the dependence of the volumetric flow rate in a microfluidics channel on the distribution and rotational speed of cell motors. Based on the results, a microfluidics channel system will be fabricated using MEMS processing techniques on a silicon substrate. The sidewall of the channel will consist of gold pads for cell attachment and metal electrode for controlling cell rotation through electro-rotation. Integrate cells with microfluidics channel: Gold will be used as the interface material between the cells and the microfluidics channel. Two mature technologies will be adapted to attach the cells to a gold patterned substrate. One involves generation of a suitable substrate for attachment of the flagellar filaments. The second concentrates on engineering flagellar filaments that will provide good ligands for attachment doc19112 none Underlying most methods for analyzing gene expression is the key notion of profile similarity. Genes with similar profiles are likely to form structural complex or to participate in common cellular processes. Yet whether two genes are co-expressed or not is often affected by activities of other genes and sometimes a positive correlation can be turned into a negative one. In this research, Liquid association (LA) is introduced as a method to quantify changes in correlation. A preliminary study showed that LA can help identify functionally related genes that have no profile similarity. This development is harbored on three fronts: biological motivation, large scale computation, and statistical theory. The specific aims of the LA system include (1) to identify a small list of master expression genes- genes that have more expressional influence than others; (2) to help understand how genes regulate each other through important metabolic intermediates; (3) to analyze the co-expression pattern for genes associated with a known pathway; (4) to help the functional prediction of unknown genes; and (5) to provide an expression network through master genes. Large scale gene expression profiling has become increasingly more popular in tumor research and many other biological areas. Microarrays enable the full genome mRNA measurement. They have been applied to monitor gene activities under various physiological or environmental conditions. Investigations on differential expression between normal and disease tissues or cell-lines have also led to the identification of genes with potential diagnostic and clinic values. The LA-system will help unearth the biological information hidden beneath many expression databases that are publicly accessible. The results will be available for free use by other academic researchers. This grant is made under the Joint DMS NIGMS Initiative to Support Research Grants in the Area of Mathematical Biology. This is a joint competition sponsored by the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) at the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) at the National Institutes of Health doc19113 none The project of Professor Paul Gemperline of East Carolina University, supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry and International Programs, seeks to develop a new class of mathematical modeling techniques. The objective is to extract quantitative chemical composition data from on-line monitoring of chemical reactions with multiple instrument systems. Improved modeling is possible with the combination of intrinsic and extrinsic measurements, such as Raman spectroscopy and on-line calorimetry. The combination should reduce both the number of reference spectra and the frequency of instrument calibrations. Mixtures of chemicals are common, occurring in industrial chemical production, chemical separations, spatially distributed chemicals on surfaces, and even in protein folding processes. Currently, rapid, automated quantification requires complete sets of reference spectra and frequent instrument calibration. Also, it is difficult to combine the results of two or more instruments into a single report of chemical composition. Professor Gemperline and his students will work closely with several European Union research groups, particularly groups in Spain and the Netherlands doc19114 none Sinkholes in areas with soluble bedrock (e.g., limestone and dolomite) are a cause of cost overruns during construction and of structural failures. These areas can be found in 15% of the United States and estimated costs of failures caused by sinkholes in eastern central Pennsylvania since exceed 30 million dollars. The frequency of these problems can be reduced by improving methods for locating subsurface voids that cause sinkholes. Two-dimensional earth-resistivity testing has been demonstrated to be useful, but because 2D geometry is assumed, this method has limited ability to determine void size and orientation. Features adjacent to the 2D resistivity line and directly below the line affect the results. Three-dimensional resistivity tests are time-consuming and do not provide sufficient detail for geotechnical investigations unless thousands of electrodes are used. In this project, interpretation of resistivity data is being improved by comparing two field methods. The first method incorporates multiple 2D resistivity lines into three-dimensional models. The second method develops large 3D data sets from multiple smaller, overlapping 3D surveys. Both approaches should be able to determine void geometry by developing a 3D resistivity model from data collected with a practical number of electrodes. To test the methods, the geometry of a natural subsurface cave is being mapped and resistivity results over the cave are compared to actual cave geometry. The project will result in an improved investigation strategy for sites located in sinkhole areas. Two additional features of this project should be noted. First, the project is being conducted at a site that has been used by other researchers. Further characterization of the conditions at the site will encourage additional collaboration to test new investigation methods. Second, the project involves collaboration of an undergraduate institution with a graduate institution. Such collaboration will encourage students to obtain post-graduate education doc19115 none The project is concentrated around the following topics: 1.Conformal superalgebra encodes an axiomatic description of the operator product expansion in conformal field theory. 2.Representation theory of finite Lie pseudoalgebras. The next goal is representation theory of finite simple Lie pseudoalgebras and the corresponding cohomology theory. 3.Representation theory of linearly compact Lie superalgebras and the Standard Model. The next challenge is to build their representation theory. 4.Integrable representations of affine superalgebras and near modular functions. This is a proposal in the area of mathematics known as Lie Algebras. Lie algebras are one of the tools mathematicians use to study all kinds of symmetries that occur in nature. In recent years, infinite-dimensional Lie algebras have been used to describe the symmetries of subatomic particles. The main objective of the project is to explore connections of the theory of infinite-dimensional symmetries to other fields of mathematics and to theoretical physics. It is hoped that this will lead to a better understanding of the structure of quarks and leptons doc19114 none Sinkholes in areas with soluble bedrock (e.g., limestone and dolomite) are a cause of cost overruns during construction and of structural failures. These areas can be found in 15% of the United States and estimated costs of failures caused by sinkholes in eastern central Pennsylvania since exceed 30 million dollars. The frequency of these problems can be reduced by improving methods for locating subsurface voids that cause sinkholes. Two-dimensional earth-resistivity testing has been demonstrated to be useful, but because 2D geometry is assumed, this method has limited ability to determine void size and orientation. Features adjacent to the 2D resistivity line and directly below the line affect the results. Three-dimensional resistivity tests are time-consuming and do not provide sufficient detail for geotechnical investigations unless thousands of electrodes are used. In this project, interpretation of resistivity data is being improved by comparing two field methods. The first method incorporates multiple 2D resistivity lines into three-dimensional models. The second method develops large 3D data sets from multiple smaller, overlapping 3D surveys. Both approaches should be able to determine void geometry by developing a 3D resistivity model from data collected with a practical number of electrodes. To test the methods, the geometry of a natural subsurface cave is being mapped and resistivity results over the cave are compared to actual cave geometry. The project will result in an improved investigation strategy for sites located in sinkhole areas. Two additional features of this project should be noted. First, the project is being conducted at a site that has been used by other researchers. Further characterization of the conditions at the site will encourage additional collaboration to test new investigation methods. Second, the project involves collaboration of an undergraduate institution with a graduate institution. Such collaboration will encourage students to obtain post-graduate education doc19117 none Actuators (motors) are a key element of mechanical design Significant advancements have been made using smart materials, with piezoceramics delivering compact, high energy density actuators useful for vibration, shape, flow and noise control. Unfortunately, current piezoceramic actuation technologies suffer from reliability problems limiting their use in practical applications. The fabrication of monolithic functionally graded piezoceramic (MFGP) actuators promise to overcome the reliability issues associated with delamination and stress discontinuities commonly found in the current bonded-layered piezoceramic technologies. Additionally, MFGP s graded in multiple directions could produce complex motions such as bending, twisting, warping, and dimpling from a solid, one-piece actuator. The goal of this research is to investigate the capabilities of monolithic functionally graded piezoceramics to improve the reliability of piezoceramic actuators and to open the door to multi-dimensional distributed piezoceramic actuation technologies. Specific objectives of this research effort are: Develop analytical and finite element models that accurately predict the quasi-static actuation behavior and evaluate any performance penalties due to grading. Experimentally characterize the variation in graded material properties through monolithic functionally graded piezoceramics and extend the current one-dimensional doping process to multi-dimensions. Investigate the reliability of monolithic functionally graded piezoceramics with respect to the current state of art of piezoceramic benders. This research will begin to lay the fundamental science (models, manufacturing processes, experimental data) for monolithic functionally graded piezoelectrics enabling us to tap into the potential of piezoceramics for reliable high performance and multi-dimensionally graded actuators for complex motion in practical applications doc19118 none Research supported by this grant will focus on mathematical and statistical analyses of genome rearrangements and the interaction of natural selection and spatial population structure in shaping genome diversity. Statistical methods will be developed to study the evolution of DNA sequences due to large scale processes: inversions within chromosomes, reciprocal translocations between chromosomes, transpositions that move genes, chromosome fissions and fusions, and duplication of whole genomes. Major goals are to obtain statistical estimates of the number of events with associated measurements of uncertainty, test hypotheses concerning for example, constancy of mutation rates among lineages, and to compare the likelihood of various genome duplication scenarios in Arabidopsis thaliana, maize, and other organisms. Mathematical results and statistical techniques will also be developed to distinguish the causes of observed levels and patterns of DNA sequence variation across genomes, concentrating on the effects of the fixation of advantageous mutations ( selective sweeps ) and of spatial population structure. Statistical work will include the development of composite likelihood methods for data from large genomic regions for which full likelihood or Bayesian methods are not tractable. Research supported by this grant will focus on quantitative studies of variation in genomes within and between organisms. Two scales are considered. The first is the evolution of genomes due to large-scale processes which rearrange gene order on chromosomes or exchange genetic material between them. An understanding of the rates and sizes of these changes will be important for improving comparative maps between species. These maps which, for example, identify the mouse homologues of human genes or give the relative order of genes in cattle and sheep are important in medicine and agriculture. A second scale is the level of DNA variation observed within species. Mathematical and statistical studies will focus on distinguishing the effects of adaptation (natural selection) and spatial (geographical) population structure on shaping patterns observed in DNA sequence data from humans and other organisms. These results will provide insights into how organisms respond genetically to novel environments and challenges (including pathogens and environmental stress), and can help identify those genes important in that adaptation. These approaches will be important for understanding the enormous genome diversity detected in humans and most other organisms. An important component of the proposed activities is the training of researchers at the interface between biology and mathematics. This grant is made under the Joint DMS NIGMS Initiative to Support Research Grants in the Area of Mathematical Biology. This is a joint competition sponsored by the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) at the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) at the National Institutes of Health doc19119 none The research program examines novel procedures of spectral estimation related to the processing of seismic data. Wavelet analysis is employed to describe the time-dependent characteristics and localized events present in earthquake records. The wavelet transform is increasingly being used in a variety of applications. Various wavelets families are examined for use in seismic spectrum estimation problems. The suitability of the various methods for estimating the cross spectra of two accelerograms is investigated, and the spatial variability of seismic records examined. The method developed will be applied in processing a small but representative number of records from important earthquakes, such as the Kocaeli seismic event in Turkey, and the Northridge seismic event in California. The evolutionary spectral content of seismic records, obtained via the wavelet method, has potential application to the safety of critical constructed facilities doc19120 none The 10th International Conference on the Cell and Molecular Biology of Chlamydomonas will be held in Vancouver, B.C., Canada on June 11-16, . The biennial Chlamydomonas meetings bring together a highly interactive and collaborative community of approximately 200 researchers from Europe, Asia, Australia and North America. The international nature of this relatively small group of scientists has proven invaluable in the development of Chlamydomonas as the model organism of choice for many fundamental biological problems, including flagellar and basal body function and assembly, organelle biosynthesis and its nuclear organelle control, gametic differentiation and life-cycle progression, photosynthesis and phototaxis. This award provides travel funds to enable invited speakers, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students to attend the meeting in Vancouver doc19121 none This project concerns the fluid dynamics and force-generating mechanisms of microorganisms, with applications ranging from dynein activation in a eucaryotic flagellum to the motility of pathogenic spirochetes. Computational models are developed that couple the internal molecular motors and elastic mechanisms of motile microorganisms with a viscous, incompressible fluid. A unified computational approach is adopted to model the internal axoneme mechanics of cilia and spermatozoa, the action of the internal periplasmic flagella of spirochetes, as well as mucociliary interactions. In addition to modeling the dynamics of a single organism, the collective hydrodynamic interactions of groups of organisms and their environment can be examined. The moving boundary problem posed by a flexible, swimming organism is very difficult to analyze, even when an organism s waveform is assumed to be known. In fact, the waveform of a microorganism is an emergent property of the coupled nonlinear system consisting of the organism s force-generating mechanisms, its passive elastic structure, and the external fluid dynamics. The investigators develop a mathematical model and a numerical method designed to study this coupled mechanical system. Modern methods in computational fluid dynamics are used to create a controlled environment where the measurement and visualization of locomotive effects can be made. The motion of microorganisms in fluid is of fundamental importance in physiology. Human reproduction requires the successful journey of spermatozoa through both the male and female reproductive tracts. The robust locomotory ability of pathogenic spirochetes enable these bacteria to efficiently move through viscous fluids and mucosal surfaces. A multidisciplinary research team of mathematicians, computational scientists and experimental biologists coordinates their efforts to investigate the fundamental mechanics of cell motility in a number of systems. These systems include cilia and flagella, spirochetes (such as those that are the causative agents of Lyme disease and syphilis), bacterial biofilms and mucus-ciliary transport in the respiratory tract. A greater understanding of how the internal biochemistry and biophysical mechanisms of microorganisms are coupled to the fluid environment in which they move can have an impact on drug design for bacterial infection as well as infertility treatment. This project draws ideas from many disciplines such as fluid mechanics, scientific computing, cell biology, and numerical analysis. Our multidisciplinary approach enables significant progress in the understanding of microorganism motility. Furthermore, the algorithms and methods developed are useful in studying other biofluiddynamic problems and contribute to expertise in high performance computing doc19122 none Farsi Ramsay Yu This is a proposal for the tenth West Coast Operator Algebra Seminar (WCOAS),to be held at the University of Colorado on October 12-13, . The WCOAS is a decade-long tradition among the operator algebraists in the western United States. The Seminar provides an invaluable opportunity for these researchers to stay abreast of their field, fosters and reinforces ties among the western universities, and provides young researchers with a forum in which to present their latest results and discuss them with senior mathematicians. The high concentration of operator algebraists in the western United States and Canada has been one of the main reasons for the success of the WCOAS doc19123 none This award supports theoretical research and education in the area of strongly correlated electron systems. Research will focus on fundamental issues in two areas: high temperature superconductivity and quantum magnetism. The work in the former area has a more phenomenological bent includes the study of the why a magnetic moment appears with the addition of a nonmagnetic impurity and various issues related to transport properties in d-wave superconductors. Of particular interest is the physical origin of the experimentally observed scaling relation for the thermal hall conductivity and the appearance of a finite Nernst effect above the superconducting transition temperature. The study of quantum magnetism will emphasize understanding the role of quantum fluctuations. Of particular interest is the study of the Capriotti state and the conditions under which a spin liquid ground state might exist. %%% This award supports theoretical research in condensed matter physics with a focus on the physics of electrons in high temperature superconductors and other materials with strong electronic correlations. The research involves the creation of fundamental new knowledge and concepts in condensed matter theory that contribute to the formation of the pillars that support future technologies. More specifically, research will use the study of aspects of thermal and electronic transport properties in high temperature superconductivity to illuminate the fundamental nature of the strongly correlated state and that of the d-wave superconducting state that arises below the superconducting transition. Theoretical work is needed both to interpret experimental discoveries and to guide the search for new materials and new phenomena. This award also supports advanced training at the frontiers of condensed matter theory doc19124 none The objectives of this research are to advance the understanding of cloud development and precipitation formation and to provide observations that can be used for evaluating large-eddy simulations of air flow and mixing processes in clouds. The work is based on observations using ground-based remote sensing instruments consisting of a vertically-pointing 94 GHz (3.2 mm wavelength) radar, a UHF wind-profiling radar, and a newly built vertically-pointing X-band (3.2 cm wavelength) radar. Together, these radars enable the measurement of vertical motions of both the air and the raindrops in clouds. The fall speed of the drops relative to the air can be determined, enabling the estimation of the drop-size distribution. The main site of the experiments is a field station at Virginia Key, although the equipment will be installed on a 20-ft trailer to enable observations from other locations. Observations will be used to document the structure of fair-weather cumulus clouds as well as the relations between precipitation development and vertical air motions in clouds producing heavy rain. The work contributes to precipitation physics by direct observation and to cloud modeling by providing the data needed for validating numerical simulations doc19125 none Compact Value Functions for Value-Based Control of Distributed Systems This project will extend the P1 s work on a previous NSF grant on intelligent control for distributed systems. That previous grant started from recent results in value-based intelligent control, sometimes called approximate dynamic programming (ADP) or reinforcement learning (RL). Older forms of control typically guarantee stability, under certain theoretical assumptions, but do not focus on optimal performance. The new methods focus on optimal performance, without assuming linearity or perfect knowledge of system dynamics. By using new model-based versions of ADP or RI, and by developing value approximation schemes suitable for distributed systems, he was able to demonstrate new levels of performance in test problems in distributed tasks such as fluid flow control and missile interception. The new project is intended to be the first stage in addressing larger and more general distributed control problems, such as manufacturing processes, job scheduling, network traffic, etc. The first stage will be to explore more powerful value approximation schemes, in order to enhance the ability to control systems governed by partial differential equations, such as fluid flows encountered in aerospace, plasma and industrial applications, to the extent possible in a small-scale exploratory effort doc19126 none Today s industry garment manufacturing employees are seriously deficient in the needed math skills for quality control inspection, costing, data analysis, pattern-making, pattern grading, calculating piece work payments, and many other processes. The educational level of math skills of workers is not sufficient to carry out the tasks. Partly this is due to an immigrant work force and partly due to the misperception that the apparel industry is fashion rather than technically oriented. The lack of these skills leads to ineffective work processes because of repeated operations and lack of quality measures. This project develops, applies, and assesses mathematical curriculum modules as applied in manufacturing; specifically apparel manufacturing. While the development of such curricula is not new, math concepts are being created for an industrial setting where such a direct application is strongly needed. A Teaching Factory allows educators to test theoretical materials and disseminate these materials to students in the apparel production program. This project uses educational resources to solve industrial problems at a core level. The success of the technical assistance, train-the-trainer, supervisory training, and modular training programs are founded in an understanding of and commitment to workplace and workforce development. The math modules developed are implemented in credit classes (apparel production, pattern making, CAD CAM), at nearby community college and university classes (fashion merchandising, apparel technology), and in some non-credit classes (introduction to manufacturing, time study, supervisory training) held at the Teaching Factory doc19127 none This award supports the investigator s work in algebraic number theory and his collaboration with colleagues. The proposed projects revolve around two central questions in the theory of local number field extensions: What are the invariants that determine the Galois module structure of ideals (and also that of the higher unit groups)? What is the effect of twists by characters of Galois representations on these structures? In addition, this award provides support for undergraduate research. Number Theory is an area of mathematics that begins with the properties of the whole numbers and is currently applied to problems in cryptography and coding theory. Efforts to resolve questions such as Fermat s Last Theorem, have led mathematicians to expand the set of numbers they consider (i.e. beyond the whole numbers, beyond the rational numbers). Fundamental properties of these sets, called algebraic number fields, and the fundamental properties of their localizations, are the focus of the investigators research. The Galois group captures the symmetries of an algebraic number field. Using the Galois group, the investigator proposes to investigate subsets of basic importance ? additive ones that generalize the integers and multiplicative ones that generalize plus minus one. Beyond supporting the research described above, this award will support undergraduate students who are engaged in number theoretic research with the investigator doc19128 none PI: Andras Vasy, MIT : The object of the proposed research is the geometric study of scattering theory. This encompasses such apparently distant areas as many-body scattering and the Laplacian on symmetric spaces. Powerful geometric techniques recently adapted from the study of hyperbolic equations have already played a major role in the detailed study of many-body scattering, which describes how quantum particles interact, e.g. in an accelerator. The proposed project will employ these microlocal techniques to explore new problems in many-body scattering, and to bring insights to analysis on symmetric spaces. These problems include the detailed study of the behavior of particles at threshold energies, which are energy levels where new configurations of particles become accessible. For many chemical phenomena Planck s constant, h, may be considered small, motivating the study of semiclassical many-body phenomena. A particular example is the spectral shift function, which has been the subject of an ongoing joint project of the PI with Xue Ping Wang. Another area of proposed research, joint with Gunther Uhlmann, is finite energy inverse many-body scattering, i.e. whether one can determine the interaction between particles from the scattering matrices, which are objects describing the outcome of scattering experiments. Perhaps surprisingly, there are very algebraic objects which are analogous to many-body problems, namely higher rank symmetric spaces. The structure of so-called flats in these spaces is very similar to the structure of the configuration space in many-body scattering, with the walls of the Weyl chambers playing the role of collision planes. In a joint project, Rafe Mazzeo and the PI plan to use the constructive techniques from many-body scattering to obtain the full asymptotic behavior of various analytic objects on these spaces, showing that many of the phenomena observed there have their counterparts in much greater generality. Indeed, many people are familiar with the following two descriptions of the propagation of light. First, in geometric optics, light propagates in straight lines, reflecting from surfaces according to Snell s law. That is, the angles of incidence and of reflection are the same, as if light consisted of little billiard balls. Second, light can be described by the wave equation, its propagation thus being similar to that of water waves. There is a close relationship between these two viewpoints. Namely, for solutions of the wave equation, the propagation of sharp signals (or `singularities of signals), which are the signals used to carry information, is precisely described by the simpler geometric optics picture. There is a similar correspondence between classical and quantum mechanics in many-particle interactions. Namely, for quantum particles the evolution of wave functions `at infinity is almost described by the classical picture, as was proved previously by the PI. The only divergence between the classical and the quantum pictures is the emergence of bound states. For example, for a system consisting of two protons and two electrons, one of the protons and one of the electrons can form a hydrogen atom -- which may in turn break up if an electron with high energy hits it. In this proposal the PI will in part use these results, and related tools, for further investigation of many-body phenomena, such as examining the quantum-classical correspondence more precisely for small Planck s constant, and analyzing whether one can determine the interactions between particles from the result of a scattering experiment, and in part to extend such results to more geometric settings. These results are thus related to important questions in physics and chemistry doc19129 none This research will develop models of the mechanical aspects of shape change in (1) cylindrical fiber-reinforced hydrostats, (2) pattern formation by traction forces in mesenchymal tissues during development and remodeling, and (3) glandular branching morphogenesis. In this Stokesian multiphase area of biological fluid dynamics, there is no inertia, but there are forces across interfaces and transfers of forces between the fluids and fibers embedded in the fluids. In some applications, the models have multiple viscous fluids separated by active interfaces, and in others, the models have a single fluid whose motion and material properties are coupled with the motion of contractile fibers. The models will be used to gain a better understanding of the anisotropic behavior of cylindrical hydrostats (trunks, tentacles, and tongues). They will be used to increase understanding of the mechanical instabilities and pattern formation which can emerge when cells modify their extracellular matrix by moving through it or pulling on it. They will also be used to help define the developmental implications of mechanical hypotheses about how branched tubular structures (like lungs) form in the body. Some results will generate interpretations of theories, some will suggest experiments to test the implications of theories, and some will suggest industrial applications of biomechanical principles. The project will also develop the finite difference numerical methods necessary to solve the partial differential equations arising from modeling the physical forces in these tissues. The development of robust three-dimensional algorithms for the solution of biological fluid dynamics problems will be key to the effective modeling of dozens of problems in the mechanics of cell motion and tissue remodeling. This project involves several biomedical problems in the dynamics of tissues. At all stages of an organism s existence there are mechanical forces at work. How does a completely round egg get to be a very complicated-looking human being, with limbs and eyes and ducts and glands and a wrinkled brain? There are genes that switch on and off, but that is not the whole story. An airplane has switches too, but to understand how it really works, we need to study fluid mechanics - the physical forces that lift, stabilize, and occasionally disturb the craft. Fluid dynamics is equally relevant to biology. As an organism - or part of it - is growing, it creates physical forces, and is shaped by physical forces. The science of Tissue Dynamics is relatively new, and requires expertise in many areas. A biological modeler, a numerical analyst, a developmental biologist, and an industrial researcher have teamed up to study the biomechanics of tissues which are changing their shape, size, strength, orientation, and function. Results of the work should increase our understanding of processes in developmental biology, wound healing, cancer, vascular health and disease, and many other areas of biomedicine involving tissues. This grant is made under the Joint DMS NIGMS Initiative to Support Research Grants in the Area of Mathematical Biology. This is a joint competition sponsored by the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) at the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) at the National Institutes of Health doc19130 none The goal of the project is to investigate the behavior of Fourier transforms under various restrictions and to obtain sharper estimates of Fourier transforms and Periodizations. The research will be focused on two main objectives. The first one is to obtain new versions for the Uncertainty Principle in Harmonic Analysis. The Uncertainty Principle is a statement which says that a function and its Fourier transform can not be simultaneously concentrated on small sets. The famous Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in Quantum Mechanics is one of the examples of the more general Uncertainty Principle in Harmonic Analysis. In particular, the investigator will study functions with Fourier transforms supported on sets with certain type of densities to get new versions of the Uncertainty Principle and apply the results for Partial Differential Equations and Signal Processing. The second objective is devoted to the relation between functions and their periodizations over integer lattices in higher dimensions. Periodizations are often used in Harmonic Analysis as a link between Fourier series and Fourier integrals. They arise in problems having periodic structure that is why they are an important tool in such applied sciences as Electrical Engineering, Signal Processing and Crystallography. In this proposal the investigator studies various properties of Fourier transforms. The Fourier transform is a major mathematical tool extensively used to represent, convert and recover digital data, information and signals in Signal Processing, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Crystallography and Tomography. The author proposes to further investigate properties of Fourier transformations which should lead to a deeper understanding of the behavior of Fourier transforms under various restrictions. The development of the proposed Uncertainty Principle in Harmonic Analysis will lead to tools to determine how much information is sufficient to recover signals and data. In return, this study of Fourier transforms will give new techniques not only in theoretical areas such as Mathematical Physics, in particular, Partial Differential Equations but also in applied sciences such as Image Processing, Electrical Engineering and Numerical Methods doc19131 none The goals of this project are threefold: (1) to contribute to the mathematical theory of the evolution of host-pathogen systems, (2) to apply the theory to amphibian populations, and (3) to conduct an intensive biological investigation of amphibian populations and their associated diseases on the Southern High Plains. Deterministic and stochastic structured epidemic models with host and pathogen genetics will be developed, analyzed, and numerically simulated. Discrete and continuous time structured models are based on difference equations, differential equations, Markov chains, and stochastic differential equations. The mathematical models will be used to study how disease affects persistence, duration, onset of an epidemic, and population size, and how host and pathogen coevolve in response to various control strategies and to different selection pressures. The models will be applied to specific amphibian populations on the Southern High Plains. The proposed research includes a three-year experimental investigation (two years of intensive fieldwork) to determine amphibian abundance, disease prevalence, and immunological characteristics of two common species of amphibians on the Southern High Plains, the tiger salamander and the plains spadefoot toad. The study sites consist of twelve playa lakes on the Southern High Plains. Mathematical and statistical analyses of the data collected from this study address some basic biological questions about the relationships among amphibian abundance, immune response, disease prevalence, life cycle stage (larvae, juvenile, and adult), landuse practices (grassland versus cropland), and climatic conditions. This study provides important information for determining critical factors that are significant in the transmission and persistence of diseases in amphibians. The emergence of infectious diseases in humans and wildlife is a major threat to public health and to the conservation of global biodiversity. Increased population densities, changes in agricultural and livestock practices, dam building, deforestation, encroachment into wildlife habitat, climate change, environmental pollution, and introduction of pathogens into new areas are some of the factors leading to the emergence of infectious diseases. Understanding the dynamics of the pathogens responsible for the emergence of these diseases and the complex and changing relationship between their host and their environment is needed for potential control of these diseases. A variety of human and environmental influences have caused many host-pathogen systems to evolve and to adapt to these changing influences, making control an even more difficult task. Theoretical studies which contribute to our understanding of the evolution of host-pathogen systems are urgently needed. It is the purpose of this investigation to develop, analyze, and simulate mathematical models based on principles from epidemiology, genetics and population dynamics, to apply these models to host-pathogen systems, and to conduct an experimental investigation on a particular host-pathogen system. The host population models developed in the proposed investigation are applied specifically to amphibian populations. The global decline in amphibian populations is thought to be one of the most pressing and enigmatic environmental problems today. Recent evidence indicates that emerging diseases (viral and fungal pathogens) are responsible for mass die-offs of frogs, toads, and salamanders. Indeed, recent outbreaks of diseases in amphibians should be given serious attention as they may signal environmental change on a global scale that may threaten many organisms. A major part of the proposed research involves a two-year field and three-year laboratory investigation. The purpose of the experimental investigation is to assess amphibian abundance, disease prevalence, and immunological characteristics of two common species of amphibians on the Southern High Plains. This study lays the groundwork for future studies on causes of population declines in amphibians. This grant is made under the Joint DMS NIGMS Initiative to Support Research Grants in the Area of Mathematical Biology. This is a joint competition sponsored by the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) at the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) at the National Institutes of Health doc19132 none Continuum Mechanical and Micromechanical Fundamentals of Mechanochemistry of Energetic Materials Shear stress and shear banding are suggested by many investigators as possible sources of ignition in energetic materials and explosives. A three-year program is proposed to develop continuum mechanical and micromechanical fundamentals of mechanochemistry of energetic materials, new analytical and computational methods, and to investigate and systematize possible new reasons for shear stress and strain initiation of explosives. We will concentrate on plastic bonded explosives (e.g. PBX- ) which consist of HMX energetic crystals connected by a polymer binder. The objectives of the research proposed are as follows: 1. To develop a systematic multiscale continuum thermodynamic, kinetic and micromechanical theory for stress- and strain-induced chemical reactions (CR) and phase transformations (PT) in energetic materials allowing for thermodynamic and kinetic coupling between CR, shear stress and large plastic strains, temperature and pressure. New analytical and numerical methods for CR and PT in inelastic materials will be developed. 2. To study analytically and numerically some typical problems for modeling of PT and CR at the microscale and mesoscale under various prescribed stress tensors. These problems include: a) Nucleation and growth of the d phase inside of the b phase matrix; b) Nucleation of the gas phase during sublimation and CR inside the HMX crystal or at the boundary with the binder, as well as in existing and collapsing voids; c) Multistage PT and CR. 3. To investigate analytically and numerically reaction-induced plasticity and transformation-induced plasticity phenomena in the shear band at micro-, meso-, and macroscales, and their effect on the thermodynamics and kinetics of CR and PT (as positive mechanochemical feedback), as well as on the mechanical behavior of energetic materials (as the new deformation mechanism). 4. To conduct multiscale finite element modeling and description of experiments on combined shear-pressure ignition and initial post-ignition processes in explosives. Material parameters and loading conditions responsible for shear sensitivity of explosives will be found doc19133 none This project will utilize laboratory plasma experiments to investigate plasma instabilities that are likely to be of importance to magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling at high latitudes. The experiments will be performed using the West Virginia University s Q machine, which was specifically designed to generate conditions that would be relevant to space plasmas. Three instability mechanisms will be studied. The first mechanism derives the necessary free energy from the electron current perpendicular to the magnetic field. The second mechanism involves the filamentation of parallel currents, and the third mechanism centers on the role of parallel velocity shears doc19134 none This U.S.-Czech materials research project involving Ctirad Uher of the University of Michigan and his Czech partner, Petr Lostak at the University of Pardubice, will build upon their recently reported observation of long-range ferromagnetism in a class of ansiotropic semiconductors based on antimony telluride [Sb2Te3], doped with a minute amount of vanadium. They now plan to study the effect of transition metal ions incorporated in the crystal lattice of Sb2Te3 single crystals with the goal of identifying dopants that enhance the Curie temperature beyond the vanadium-doped value (~25K). Specifically, the researchers will examine the role of chromium, manganese, iron, nickel and cobalt. The collaborative effort benefits from the Michigan group s expertise in transport and magnetic properties of tetradymite-type structure semiconductors and the Czech partners strengths in growth of single crystals and characterization of these materials. Results in this area of diluted magnetic semiconductors may lead to applications in information technology given the promising dual features of charge carrier transport and spin manipulation in thin films. This collaborative project in condensed matter physics fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc19135 none The subject of the proposal is to understand the underlying physics of the standard model of particle physics, which unifies the strong and electro-weak forces but treats the gravitational force separately leading to a hierarchy of scales. to treat the forces from a more unified perspective we will look at the implications of formulating the laws of physics in higher dimensions and try to understand the implications of how the low energy theory contrains and leads insight into the higher dimensional theory and how the higher dimensional theory yeileds new ways of looking at field theory and cosmology in the more familiear three-space and one time dimensional universe we are familiear with. the hope is to have a better understanding of the hierarch of energy scales as well as cosmology from the study of geometries in extra diementions and the existence of extended objects (branes) in these higher dimensional spaces and their relevance to the universe we live in doc19136 none The proposal is to develop a Markovian reduced description for the dynamics of large colloidal particles in a mixture. This approach is based on the separation of the time scales characterizing the motion of the particles and the surrounding macromolecules. With this approach, considering that the evolution of the particles is governed by a generalized Smoluchowski equation, the effect of the macromolecules will be captured by depletion potential and the effective mobility tensor, the later having a nontrivial dependence on particle separation and the distance from the wall doc19137 none The investigator is working on the following two problems: (A) He is attempting to describe integral models for Shimura varieties at primes of non-smooth reduction. In particular, he studies ``local models for PEL Shimura varieties and tries to formulate exact predictions about the non-smooth reduction of a general Shimura variety. The motivation is to obtain information that can be used in the calculation of the Hasse-Weil zeta function of these varieties and in other arithmetic applications. (B) He is studying the representations that appear in the cohomology of arithmetic varieties with a group action. He will continue his work on describing relations between invariants describing such representations and L-functions and develop a theory of ``non-abelian cubic structures for the determinant of cohomology of general bundles over curves. This is research in the field of arithmetic algebraic geometry, a subject that blends two of the oldest areas of mathematics: the geometry of figures that can be defined by the simplest equations, namely polynomials, and the study of numbers. This combination has proved extraordinarily fruitful - having recently solved problems that withstood generations (such as ``Fermat s last theorem ). The investigator s work mainly concentrates on the study of specific polynomial equations that have many symmetries. The general field has connections with physics, the construction of error correcting codes and cryptography doc19138 none Borexino is a new solar neutrino experiment that will use 300 tons of high purity liquid scintillator to measure the low energy part of the solar neutrino spectrum (E 1MeV). More than 30 years of experiments have shown that fewer solar neutrinos are detected than expected from the nuclear fusion reactions that power the sun. Recent experiments indicate that the discrepancy is due to neutrino oscillations , a process in which neutrinos produced in the sun as electron-neutrinos , oscillate to a non-electron-neutrino state. The oscillation process is possible if neutrinos do indeed have a finite mass, rather than a zero mass, as is the case in the present standard model of elementary particles. If oscillations are confirmed, and neutrinos have mass, the result would be a major departure from our current understanding of elementary particle, with important implications in physics and astronomy. The latest experimental data of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, together with the SuperK experiment, provide the most convincing evidence that neutrinos are oscillating. The interpretation of these and other data in the Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein theoretical framework indicates that oscillation effects for neutrinos below 1 MeV could be dramatic. One observational possibility is a large day night asymmetry in count rate for low energy neutrinos. Borexino is designed to measure the 0.86 MeV 7Be neutrinos and is thus well positioned to explore this unique low energy neutrino oscillation effect. The Borexino detector is located in the Gran Sasso underground laboratory in Italy. The low background requirements necessary for detecting 7Be neutrinos pose formidable technical challenges. After several years of R&D with a prototype detector, and four years of construction, Borexino is expected to become operational in . The objective of this proposal in the two-year period - is to complete the commissioning and start-up phase of Borexino and begin taking solar neutrino data. This proposal will support the Princeton University Group in completing and operating the muon detector and the scintillator purification, filling, and containment subsystems of the detector. It will also support the early stages of data acquisition and data analysis doc19139 none This project, submitted under the Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) program, will examine public attitudes toward immigration and civil liberties following the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In particular, this project will examine public attitudes regarding the freedoms of Muslims in the United States, as well as public attitudes about the arrival of new immigrants from Muslim countries. Using a panel survey of 1,000 adult respondents, the principal investigator will probe attitudes toward security and freedom. A split sample design will be employed to determine differences in attitudes toward restrictions on freedom broadly in contrast to those applied to Muslims. The principal investigator will also test hypotheses about attitudes on immigration. In addition to economic and social explanations of these attitudes, the survey will allow the study of feelings of personal safety doc19140 none ScienCentral, Inc. is producing and distributing one two-minute television science story per week based on NOVA, the long-format PBS science series. Each segment will be produced using footage from the award-winning NOVA series as well as original and archival footage. They will be distributed by ABC News to its 200+ local affiliates for their use in their newscasts that run throughout the day. NOVA Minutes also will be integrated into WGBH NOVA s extensive web and outreach materials. All NOVA Minutes will contain the following: A sentence stating: As reported (or explored) by PBS NOVA A lower third notification of footage from PBS NOVA. 30 - 80 seconds of WGBH footage 30 or more seconds of non-WGBH footage A PBS NOVA branded element with a graphic, animation, or video that is integral to the story. Two versions, with and without pre-recorded voice over (both have interview, natural sound) A script with a list and cures for lower-third supertitle of names, institutions and footage sources for stations to use in their own graphic style. The script will include a line for the news anchor to read that states Watch PBS NOVA for more information. A catalogue number and ScienCentral copyright notice doc19141 none We propose a pilot study to analyze, design, and predict RNA structures using a combination of graph theory and computational methods. The design and prediction work aims to expand the set of RNA sequences and structures available, and hence our knowledge of RNA functions. By representing RNA secondary structures as tree or pseudoknot graphs, we exploit the mathematical results in graph theory for graph comparison, enumeration, and construction. This approach allows us to enumerate all possible RNA graphs which may represent both natural and hypothetical RNA topologies. Our proposed investigations consist of three related stages: (1) survey and analyze existing RNAs; (2) design RNA sequences for novel RNA tree topologies; and (3) predict the three-dimensional structures of designed RNA sequences. In survey and analysis (goal 1), we will systematically search for the occurrence of RNAs within a larger RNA system, especially for ribosome structures; use RNA topological characteristics to survey and classify functional RNA families; and develop graph theory algorithms to estimate the probable size and diversity of various functional RNA groups within genomes. Our RNA search tools, survey results, and classification methods will be made available to the public through the Nucleic Acid Database. To generate novel RNA topologies for three-dimensional structure prediction (goal 2), we will apply two strategies: sequence mutation of known RNAs and de novo sequence design. Finally, our goal of predicting the three-dimensional structures of designed sequences (goal 3) will be accomplished through the development of empirical force fields and folding algorithms for reduced RNA models. For this challenging goal, we will consider several computational approaches, including the use of elastic energy models with Brownian dynamics as employed for long DNAs. RNA molecules play vital and diverse biological roles in the cell. In parallel with protein genomics efforts, the development of RNA genomics or ribonomics --- a systematic analysis and prediction of RNA sequence structure relationships --- will help advance our understanding of the biological functions of RNAs. In marked contrast to proteins, only a small number of distinct RNA structures is currently known. The methodologies currently used to search for novel functional RNAs are either restricted to small RNAs or to known RNA classes. In an effort to overcome these limitations, we have developed a novel approach based on an area in mathematics called graph theory and computational biology methods to allow comprehensive search through RNA s structural possibilities. Since known RNA structures represent only a small subset of all distinct structures, we postulate that some of the missing structures represent novel functional RNAs which may occur naturally in cells or be generated in the laboratory, but as yet unidentified or do not exist. The three-dimensional structures of novel RNAs will be predicted through design and folding methodologies. Our approaches will likely expand the number of RNA types and lead to the identification of unknown RNA families. Designed RNAs with novel properties have potential applications as catalysts, molecular sensors, and therapeutic agents in biotechnology and molecular medicine. In addition to RNA structure prediction, graph theory will allow us to systematically characterize, classify and establish structural functional relationships between existing RNAs. The results and tools developed for this analysis will be made available through the publicly accessible Nucleic Acid Database. Our proposed investigations will contribute to the development of RNA genomics, a field currently lagging behind protein genomics or proteomics. This grant is made under the Joint DMS NIGMS Initiative to Support Research Grants in the Area of Mathematical Biology. This is a joint competition sponsored by the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) at the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) at the National Institutes of Health doc19142 none Recent advances in quantitative genetics show that there is a distribution of locus effects on quantitative traits, with some loci (henceforth called QTLs) explaining a large proportion of the genotypic trait variance and others having minor but detectable effects on phenotype. For QTL results to be incorporated into existing theory, a crucial task is to develop models of quantitative trait variation that allow for a finite number of loci with finite effects. In this project, such models are developed and analyzed. Our theoretical work focuses on diffusion models, i.e. models in which both time and allele frequencies are continuous. The models developed are compared with previously-derived models, with the results of simulations, and with experimental data, with the aim of identifying models useful for predicting quantitative trait evolution in natural and agricultural populations. The results of the analysis and simulations are used to create statistical tests for the action of selection on quantitative traits in populations. Quantitative traits are among the most conspicuous features of organisms, features that we immediately recognize. Examples abound, including the height of humans, the number of ears on a corn plant or the weight of piglets in a litter. The study of quantitative traits and their genetic basis is fundamental to our understanding of evolutionary biology as well as to applied genetics such as animal and plant breeding. Using recently developed technology, it is now possible to identify regions of the genome that contribute to quantitative traits. Such QTL mapping studies have revealed discrepancies between the data and classical theories intended to explain the contribution of individual genes to such traits. This project aims to extend our theoretical understanding of quantitative traits, and to use the theory developed to create practical statistical methods for analyzing quantitative trait data. This grant is made under the Joint DMS NIGMS Initiative to Support Research Grants in the Area of Mathematical Biology. This is a joint competition sponsored by the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) at the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) at the National Institutes of Health doc19143 none SELF-ASSEMBLY OF HIGHLY IMMISCIBLE POLYMERS USING BALANCED SURFACTANTS The PI s objective is to create a library of surfactants for controlling the nano-scale self-assembly in mixtures of highly immiscible polymers. This will enable the creation of new nano-structured polymer materials. It may also enable reusing commingled polymeric waste. The proposed approach represents a risky departure from the large body of previous experimental and theoretical work in this field which relied of the surfactancy of A-B copolymers for organizing mixtures of A and B homopolymers. It is now recognized that these types of copolymers can only organize interfaces if the homopolymers are weakly immiscible. The surfactant that will be uses in the study is a balanced A-C block copolymer. The notion of balance is adapted from the rich literature on surfactancy in aqueous systems. Nonionic surfactants with balanced hydrophobic and hydrophilic character have been successful in creating nano-scale organization in oil water mixtures in spite of their high degree of incompatibility. The goal is to apply this principle to polymers. The proposed experiments will be conducted on mixtures of highly immiscible polyolefins, polybutene (PB) and polyisobutylene (PIB). The PI will use a polybutene-block-head-to-head polypropylene (PB-PP) copolymer as a surfactant. The objective is to demonstrate that PB PIB PB-PP blends exhibit the rich self-assembly characteristics found in aqueous systems. The PI chose this system because the magnitude and sign of the temperature dependence of the PB PP and PIB PP Flory-Huggins interaction parameters are (approximately) equal and opposite, respectively. Model polymers required for this study will be synthesized by anionic and cationic polymerization. Self-assembly will be studied by small angle neutron scattering, light scattering, and electron microscopy. IMPACT STATEMENT This proposed research on balanced surfactants holds the potential of introducing radically new technology for controlling the morphology of polymer blends. It will enable the creation of new blended materials from industrially important polymers such as polyisobutylene (a polymer of considerable current importance because of its use in the manufacture protective garments for working in chemically and biologically contaminated areas). Industrial production of nanostructured blends of electrically conducting and non-conducting polymers may also be enabled by the proposed research. The approach of using balanced surfactants is inspired by the efficacy of synthetic and natural surfactants in aqueous systems. However, the scientific challenge of applying principles learned in aqueous systems to hydrocarbon polymers is considerable because of the difference in fundamental intermolecular interactions. Interactions with water molecules are dominated by their permanent dipole and specific interactions such as hydrogen bonding. The SGER proposal seeks to explore the possibility of designing balanced surfactants in the absence of these interactions doc19144 none Heat straightening has been used to repair damaged steel structures for many years. However, until recently practitioners use of the method was based on experience gained through trial and error. Recent research had provided and engineering basis for the method and established procedures for its use. The engineering and construction community has been hesitant to utilize heat straightening for several reasons including: past misuse of the process which has produced fractures during repair; concerns about the effect of heat straightening on material properties, especially ductility; and a general lack of understanding of the method. Its current application is primarily in repair of damaged bridge girders with limited application for other types of construction. Even though a scientific basis now exists for the method, there is a major gap in available data that has limited the application of heat straightening. There have been no significant investigations into the fracture sensitivity of heat straightened members. Without this knowledge, a performance based design approach cannot be used for designing heat-straightening repairs. The purpose of this proposal is to describe a research plan that will quantify the process and define the limiting parameters for a successful repair doc19145 none It is well known that natural soil deposits are inherently anisotropic due to their deposition and its effect on the ensuing fabric. In particular, for sandy soils the fabric induced inherent anisotropy may have dramatic effects on the mechanical response of the soil to subsequent loading in the range of plastic deformations. Otherwise identical sand samples (same sand, same void ratio, etc.) may behave in totally different ways if prepared by different methods; or, if they are identically loaded in different directions, as if they were samples of very different densities. The constitutive modeling of such inherent sand fabric anisotropy and its effect in the numerical analysis of geo-structures is the main objective of this research award. In order to address the main objective, a sand constitutive modeling platform will be required. This platform is based on an existing sand constitutive model (Manzari and Dafalias, ; Li and Dafalias, ) within the framework of Critical State Soil Mechanics (CSSM), which despite its simplicity has been proved capable of modeling the sand response under a large variation of densities, confining pressures and monotonic or cyclic loading conditions with the same set of model constants, but, with one exception. It cannot account for the effect of inherent initial anisotropy due to fabric formation. And such effect is often truly drastic, as shown experimentally. The incorporation of anisotropy in the theory of plasticity has a well understood theoretical framework in terms of the so-called joint isotropic invariants, but if used in its utmost generality, it will produce extremely complicated constitutive models which are not feasible tools for practical applications and analysis. In order to avoid such complications, the inherent anisotropy effect will be introduced in the chosen constitutive platform by a very simple method. The main theoretical tool, motivated by micromechanical observations on particles and voids orientation distribution, will be the introduction of a scalar-valued anisotropy parameter A, which will effect some, but not all, of the basic features of the platform constitutive model in order to achieve the simulation of anisotropic behavior. A number of different avenues will be investigated, and preliminary results show that this is a very promising approach, despite its simplicity. In the process the fundamental premise of CSSM on the uniqueness of the Critical State Line in the void ratio-confining pressure space is questioned, and instead, its dependence on fabric via the anisotropic parameter A is proposed. Once the inherent anisotropy has been successfully modeled, the second important step will be to evaluate its effect at the level of the response of a geotechnical structure subjected to different loadings and analyzed by numerical implementation of the proposed constitutive model. It is expected that the effect inherent anisotropy has on the dilative and contractive characteristics of sand, will have a dramatic effect on the overall geo-structural response under monotonic and cyclic loading. Besides the plausible impact of the research findings on the specific area of soil constitutive modeling and analysis, some broader impact characteristics will emerge. It is of great importance to increase our ability to use simulations of natural phenomena in the modern era of computations, in order to address societal needs for optimum and safe design of infrastructures. Such phenomena are not only geo-mechanical, but the latter are integrated in a larger network of other systems. Thus, the poor performance of a simulative component such as a geo-mechanical simulation, is detrimental to the overall performance of the larger system of phenomena simulations (e.g. in seismic design). The provision of a reliable soil modeling approach that accounts for the important issue of fabric effect, is in fact a contribution to better overall performance of this broader system of simulations of natural phenomena. Another broader impact the successful completion of this award will have, is educational at large scale. Despite the advanced character of the research, the central idea of the dependence of the critical state line on a scalar-valued measure of fabric anisotropy has an inherent simplicity that can easily be conveyed to undergraduate students of geotechnical engineering and constitute a standard addition to textbooks of soil mechanics everywhere. Finally, its incorporation in many different modeling techniques the geotechnical profession uses (and not only the modeling platform used in this research) will be a simple matter once the main findings are published and distributed doc19146 none Radiation reliability of semiconductor devices is an important area of concern with the rapid growth in the number of satellites launched for military and commercial space-applications. Given the high cost of launching and maintaining a satellite-base resource, it is very important to give a careful consideration of the reliability of the sophisticated electronic systems on board the satellite. Similarly, all the electronic systems, especially the safety equipment used in nuclear reactor and weapon environment must operate reliably even in the case of an accidental exposure of the equipment to a burst of neutrons. Radiation effects in silicon devices have been studied extensively. In comparison, the current knowledge of radiation effects in III-V compound semiconductor (e.g. GaAs) based heterostructure devices is very limited. It is well known that these devices exhibit superior performance especially at higher speeds frequencies than the conventional silicon devices. Hence, increasing numbers of GaAs and related III-V compound semiconductor devices are being used in satellite-based high speed communication systems. The objective of this project is to conduct research on the radiation effects in two important types of heterostructure devices: (a) High Electron Mobility Transistors (HEMTs) and (b) Heterojunction Bipolar Transistors (HBTs). Both types of devices are extensively used in a number of GaAs RF circuits and high-speed digital integrated circuits. The following three different types of radiation sources will be used in this investigation: (1) protons (2) electrons and (3) neutrons. The current status of our knowledge on the effects of the above types of radiation on the devices of interest and the specific details of the work to be conducted are discussed in the main body of the proposal. Some key elements of research issues addressed in this program are: o Conduct experimental investigations of the characterization of the radiation-induced defects in the different layers of the device and the performance degradation of the devices (HEMTs and HBTs) under different types of radiation. o Develop a systematic understanding of the relationship between the characteristics of radiation-induced defects, the basic mechanisms and degradation of the performance of the devices. o Develop a complete model for the prediction of device degradation in actual radiation environment given the knowledge of the radiation-induced defects in the constituent materials of the device structure. A major impact of this research plan will be on the development of new device circuit designs for greater reliability against radiation effects. The proposed program will also educate a new generation of device engineers with specialized skills in the design, fabrication and analysis of advanced heterostructure devices meant for applications in radiation environment. This is expected to result in advanced III-V compound semiconductor devices with improved radiation reliability doc19147 none Weingartner This award to University of Alaska Fairbanks provides instrumentation to significantly upgrade and expand the oceanographic research capabilities of the research vessel Alpha Helix, a ship operated by the University s Institute of Marine Science as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS) research fleet. Specific instrumentation supported here includes a towed, undulating vehicle system for studying mesoscale processes, especially in physical and biological interactions, as well as spares for the MOCNESS net system, a new phased array acoustic current profiler, new incubators and spare CTD sensors. These shared-use systems will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists using the ship in their research during and future years doc19148 none Shang-Ching Cou Wichita State U Automated geometry reasoning has been a very successful area in the past twenty years. Highly successful methods for automated geometry theorem proving and discovering have been introduced since the late 70s. With these methods, one can not only prove most of the geometry theorems within seconds, but also discover many new theorems. One may also prove and discover theorems in differential geometries and mechanics. In the early 90s, methods were developed to generate human-readable proofs, multiple proofs, and the shortest proofs in geometry. Methods for automated geometry diagram generation (AGDG) have been developed recently. The purpose of AGDG is to draw a declaratively described diagram automatically. Compared to automated theorem proving, AGDG has a wider range of applications, including intelligent CAD, robotics, linkage design, computer vision, nanotechnology and chemical molecular modeling, interactive constraint-based graphic systems, numerically controlled machines, and computer aided instruction doc19149 none The identification and elimination of defects that produce nonlinearity in superconducting microwave materials and devices is an important goal for the superconducting microwave industry. The measurement of the nonlinear Meissner effect in d-wave superconductors is a key goal of fundamental condensed matter research. This GOALI award supports a project uniting the efforts of an investigator at an academic research laboratory with two corporate research entities, ISCO International and Neocera, in order to locally measure nonlinearities in superconductors. The experimental methods employed for the fundamental research will help the practical project, and vice versa. The expected outcomes of this project are: 1) the most sensitive measurement of the intrinsic nonlinear Meissner effect in d-wave and s-wave superconductors, and 2) identification and elimination of specific extrinsic defects that cause microwave nonlinearities in practical superconducting materials. The research contributions of the industrial partners include: assistance with the scanning near-field microwave measurements, providing materials for imaging, helping to understand the complicated microstructure of oxide superconductors, helping to identify and eliminate extrinsic sources of nonlinearity from the materials, and helping to bring the practical aspects of our research to the applied community. Through this project it is expected that new local electrodynamics measurements in superconductors will be made possible. This work will provide key tests of theories of cuprate superconductivity, and open up new applications of high-Tc superconducting materials in wireless and high-speed device applications. Two graduate students will be trained in skills necessary for high-tech careers and will benefit from the close collaboration with industry. There will also be substantial outreach activities to engage elementary and secondary schools students. High Temperature Superconductors (HTS) have begun to make an impact on the commercial wireless communications field. Because of their low resistance and compact size, HTS thin films produce superior performance when used to filter out un-wanted signals in wireless telephone base stations. This translates into improved call quality, longer range and fewer dropped calls for the wireless consumer, and greater profits for the wireless operators. However, these advantages are jeopardized by uncontrolled defects and disorder in the superconducting materials used to make these devices. These defects limit the use of HTS materials to low power receive applications, and prevent the benefits of superconductivity from being achieved in high power transmit applications. This GOALI award supports a microscopic investigation of the sources of these defects and disorder. The project is also an effort to work with manufacturers of HTS thin films and wireless devices to eliminate these defects and therefore substantially enhance their products. In addition the project involves synergistic fundamental research that will focus on basic measurements of superconducting nonlinear properties and use these measurements to rigorously test the leading theories of high temperature superconductivity. Two graduate students will be trained in skills necessary for high-tech careers and will benefit from the close collaboration with industry. There will also be substantial outreach activities to engage elementary and secondary schools students doc19150 none , Archuleta, U. California-Santa Barbara COSMOS Virtual Data Center This action supports the continued development of the COSMOS Virtual Strong-motion Data Center (COSMOS VDC), an unrestricted, Web-based, interactive strong ground motion data resource for the practicing earthquake engineering, emergency response, research, and other earthquake professional communities. The major goal of the Virtual Data Center (VDC) is to expand and significantly improve the accessibility and the use of all strong-motion records collected by the ever-growing number of US and international organizations. The VDC operates under the direction of The Consortium of Organizations for Strong-Motion Observation Systems (COSMOS, www.cosmos-eq.org), a public-interest nonprofit corporation for earthquake safety. Its mission is to expand and modernize significantly the acquisition and application of strong-motion data in order to increase public safety from earthquakes. The COSMOS structure enables the VDC to respond to both the organizations that collect the data and the users of the data (academic and professional), and ensures that the VDC evolves so that it remains responsive to the community of engineers, scientists and other users of strong-motion data. This action will advance the capability of the COSMOS VDC by further developing the proven concept of a virtual data center and its important role in coordinating the access and dissemination of strong-motion data. It will: 1) advance Web-based interfaces with the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS) data management system; 2) advance methods for augmenting the existing VDC metadata database; 3) advance Web-based methods to facilitate efficient query and retrieval of a variety of event, station, and processed time history information; 4) develop Web-based methods for dissemination of information according to user selectable format, processing and visualization; 5) facilitate development of COSMOS standards for data formats and processing; 6) advance Web-based interfaces with other databases to enhance the metadata on earthquakes, recording site characteristics, and other relevant information for the VDC; 7) enhance Web-based interfaces and links for replication sites; and 8) advance Web-based interfaces with geotechnical databases. The VDC provides a very cost-effective way to leverage the data processing and management resources of all of the participating agencies and organizations. It continually develops, updates, and maintains a sophisticated parameter metadata environment in a state-of-the-art relational database. This approach provides a major step forward in improving accessibility of the data to the research, practicing, and emergency response communities for purposes of earthquake hazard mitigation doc19151 none This dissertation research analyzes results from a - survey of current and laid-off (xiagang) workers from six Chinese cities. Outcomes being studied include layoffs, earnings, and job search strategies. Among individuals, variations in human capital (education, experience) and political capital (party membership, cadre status) determine these outcomes, but the relative importance of these determinants depends on firm-level factors (e.g., productivity) and city-level factors (e.g., degree of market development). Additional firm and city data will be collected to supplement the existing survey data. Qualitative data will also be added to explore individual workers rationale for leaving state enterprises and their understanding of the new labor market structure doc19152 none Gould Microlensing observational capabilities are continuing to expand rapidly in several directions: for the first time, microlensing is being used to look for planets and probe the atmospheres of stars. Microlensing surveys toward M31 are returning their first substantial lists of candidate events. Within the next decade, microlensing should give us a detailed picture of the galactic bulge mass function down to 0.01 solar masses. These developments are presenting both new theoretical challenges and new observational opportunities. At the same time, they lay the basis for a strong interplay between microlensing and Galactic-structure studies. Dr. Andrew Gould, at Ohio State University, will build on these developments with two specific projects. 1. Characterization and Resolution of Binary and Planetary Degeneracies. Microlensing by binary and planetary systems often gives rise to dramatic caustic-induced jumps in the light curve, that both signal the presence of the binary or planet, and can be exploited to learn about the atmosphere of the source star being lensed. However, to fully extract this information, an unambiguous reconstruction of the geometry of the lensing system is required. Dr. Gould has demonstrated that even with the spectacular improvements in microlensing photometry, binary light curves can be subject to multiple interpretations. He has already solved the problem of classifying (and so understanding how to break) these degeneracies for the larger subclass of binary-lensing events. He will now do an analogous study of the smaller, but more difficult (and often more valuable) subclass. Similarly, he has already solved the problem of classifying the larger subclass of planetary degeneracies, and will now tackle the smaller, more difficult subclass. 2. Pixel Lensing of M31. Dr. Gould will continue his ongoing program of microlensing observations of M31, and will continue to give the data so acquired to competing groups. Good temporal coverage remains the weakest link in this subfield, so Dr. Gould s access to the MDM 1.3m and 2.4m telescopes can be of critical importance. Of almost equal importance to the scientific results to be obtained, is the training of the graduate students who will do a substantial part of the work. Dr. Gould has developed a very intensive and interactive mode of training students with extremely successful results, and that will continue with this award doc19153 none Kleinstreuer The knowledge of detailed and accurate deposition of toxic particles in the human respiratory system is most important for toxicologists and regulatory agencies to use in evaluating possible health effects, especially in vulnerable population groups such as industrial workers, children, and the elderly. For drug aerosols, it is desirable to predict where and at what concentration the medicine reaches targeted lung areas. In this project an experimentally validated computer simulation model will be developed to predict and analyze micron and submicron aerosol transport in representative human conducting zones. Computer simulations and analyses of airflow, particle transport, and particle deposition such as to be made in this project are invaluable tools to provide answers to research problems in both toxic particles and aerosol areas. The computational fluid-particle dynamics studies to be conducted are most useful for: (a) quantitative exposure-dose-and-health-effect studies done by regulatory agencies; (b) hypotheses effect testing, e.g., air-particle inlet conditions, airway geometry features, and particle characteristics; (c) comparison studies on particulate matter deposition in upper airways between people with respiratory diseases (i.e., partially occluded airways) and normal individuals; (d) the development of transient one-dimensional particle deposition models for whole-lung representations; as well as (e) for medical researchers interested in biological impact analyses of toxic or therapeutic aerosols; and (f) for the development of drug aerosol inhalers and subsequent lung site targeting or interest to manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies. Dissemination of results from the investigations will be made through peer-reviewed journal articles, review chapters, conference presentations, and fluid-particle flow visualizations to impact textbook writing, teaching, and learning doc19154 none Recognizing an opportunity to address new physics, a strong collaboration representing 20 institutions, has formed and is proposing funding for the project entitled Rare Symmetry Violating Processes (RSVP). RSVP represents an opportunity to empower the university community to make discoveries of extraordinary importance. The current scope of RSVP includes 130 scientists, about 60% from the United States, and the others from Canada, Switzerland, Italy, Japan, and Russia, along with an expected 100 graduate students and post-docs. Observation of muon to electron conversion by MECO would be the first evidence for a process that violates muon and electron type lepton number and that cannot be explained by the Standard Model of particle physics, extended to include massive neutrinos. It would be direct evidence for previously unknown physics processes involving new forces. This experiment is proposed to achieve a sensitivity 10,000 times that of current experiments doc19155 none Bornhop Under this exploratory research project, a new contrast agent that specifically labels glioma cells and that can provide both MRI and fluorescence signatures will be developed. This proposal seeks to capitalize on the observations that human glial tumors display a high density of peripheral benzodiazepine receptor (PBR) binding sites and that the conjugable form of the PBR ligand PK- will preferentially bind to human primary brain tumors. Thus, a new contrast agent (Ln-Q-Y-CTMR-PK ) that will pass the blood brain barrier and selectively label viable glioma cells will be possible through chemical conjugation of unique polyazamacrocyclic lanthanide chelating agents (Ln-Q-Y-CTMR) to the peripheral benzodiazepine receptor ligand, PK- . Under this exploratory effort, cocktails of both the Gd 3+ containing complex to provide macroscopic scale images by MRI, and the Eu 3+ or Tb 3+ species to give microscopic scale fluorescence images from the same tissue will be developed. After the synthesis has been accomplished, specific uptake by PBR expressing glioma cells in-vitro will be established and the influence of linker chain length on complex stability will be investigated doc19156 none The rehabilitation, upgrading and retrofitting of existing reinforced concrete (RC) structures is one of the most difficult challenges facing structural engineering today. One retrofitting method that has gained widespread acceptance over the last decade involves externally bonding fiber reinforced plastic (FRP) patches on to the tension face of a concrete beam or slab, thus increasing the beam s (or slab s) flexural stiffness and loading capacity. The increased usage of these FRP patches in these applications has created the requirement for reliable nondestructive evaluation (NDE) techniques capable of characterizing these bonded patches. Any candidate NDE technique must be capable of providing quantitative and meaningful information (from an engineering design perspective) about the characteristics of an in situ FRP patch. The most critical element from a quality assurance (and thus NDE inspection) point of view is the adhesive bond layer - as opposed to the FRP patch itself. Concrete repair procedures typically use a high quality FRP patch that is manufactured in a controlled environment. This is in contrast to the adhesive bond layer, which is field assembled, often under adverse conditions. There are two important quality assurance NDE inspection problems for these adhesively bonded FRP patches that can be addressed with guided wave techniques. The first is concerned with the measurement of the material properties of the adhesive layer. Guided waves can be used to determine in situ adhesive bond properties, such as the shear modulus of an epoxy bond. The second inspection problem is the measurement of the adhesion properties, the quality of the bonding at the two interfaces between the adhesive and the adherends. This is a critical issue for bonded FRP patches, especially the adhesion properties of the concrete-to-adhesive interface. The proposed research develops a NDE methodology that uses guided ultrasonic waves to characterize the in situ bond properties of a FRP patch in three tasks: Task 1. Understand the underlying mechanics of the propagation of guided ultrasonic waves in these bonded components. This task examines the behavior of ultrasonic waves in a FRP patch bonded to a concrete component, quantifying the effect of certain bond parameters on the propagation of guided waves in the bonded assembly. This forward problem involves both experimental studies and numerical simulation of FRP patches, concentrating on directly measurable acoustic parameters. Task 2. Interpret the experimental numerical results from Task 1 in terms of relevant, engineering parameters in order to develop a quantitative relationship between these acoustic measurements and critical FRP patch performance metrics. This task relates these directly measurable, guided wave attributes (such as dispersion curves that provide wave speed frequency relationships) to material properties that are essential to engineering design. The specific parameters quantified in this research are: the bulk properties of the in situ adhesive layer, including thickness and stiffness; and the adhesion properties of this adhesive layer (particularly the concrete-to-adhesive interface), including detection of any voids, gaps or regions of disbonds. Task 3. Conduct a preliminary study that establishes the effectiveness of an inversion technique for the evaluation of these guided waves. This inverse problem uses neural networks to determine the bulk elastic properties, thickness and adhesion characteristics of an in situ adhesive bond from experimentally measured guided waves. The results of this proof-of-principle study are critical for the development of an efficient, real-time field inspection methodology. This research project operates under the premise that education and research are equally important in developing innovative NDE methodologies for civil infrastructure. In addition to performing basic and applied research, academic institutions have a primary responsibility to train students so that they can meet the requirements of the workplace. With this in mind, an education program is proposed that will educate and train a new generation of engineers to address issues relating to NDE of repaired and rehabilitated RC components doc19157 none The investigator studies applications of algebraic geometry to coding theory. In this proposal, the investigator focuses on problems relating semigroups and algebraic geometry codes. This involves exploring connections between Weierstrass semigroups of m-tuples of points on a curve and algebraic geometry codes formed using these m points. The first aim of this project is to better understand the structure of Weierstrass semigroups of m-tuples of points on certain curves over finite fields. The second goal is to apply this knowledge to improve bounds on the minimum distances of codes constructed using these curves as well as arbitrary curves over finite fields. This builds on the investigator s previous work showing that Weierstrass semigroups of pairs of points can be used to construct algebraic geometry codes with parameters exceeding the usual lower bounds. These codes, constructed using two points on a curve, have better parameters than any comparable code constructed using a single point on the same curve. Thus, in the third component of this project, the investigator compares codes constructed using m points on a curve to those constructed using fewer than m points. In addition to these topics, this project includes a focus on semigroups used in decoding algorithms for algebraic geometry codes. Error-correcting codes are used to ensure reliable transfer of information across noisy communication channels by detecting and correcting errors. Such codes are found in a wide range of devices, from computing equipment to cellular telephones to compact disc players. For practical applications, codes should be efficient and correct as many errors as possible. While there are many ways to construct codes, one of the most promising uses tools from algebraic geometry. In particular, curves over finite fields are used to define error-correcting codes, called algebraic geometry codes. One can gain information about these codes by studying the curves used to define them. In this proposal, the investigator examines curves commonly used to define algebraic geometry codes by studying semigroups associated with the curves. This knowledge is then applied to obtain better estimates of the efficiency and error-correcting capabilities of the corresponding codes. In addition, the investigator pursues applications of semigroups to the process of decoding algebraic geometry codes doc19158 none Thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) offer the potential of increased performance for high temperature applications such as diesel engines, gas turbines and aircraft engines. Compositionally graded TBCs offer an excellent alternative to enhance the resistance to thermomechanical damage by providing a gradual transition in properties through the coating thickness. The objective of this project is to study analytically and experimentally, compositionally graded material systems of similar thermal resistances, but different architectures. At high temperatures, thermally activated time-dependent (viscoplastic) effects in the lower layers comprised of ceramic bond coat alloy mixtures are expected to become significant. Therefore it is proposed to: (1) develop new models that allow the prediction of viscoplastic behavior of zirconia-bond coat alloy mixtures; (2) to use these models to study the time-dependent behavior, crack initiation and propagation in compositionally graded TBC systems of similar thermal resistances; (3) to perform controlled experiments with high heat fluxes that provide verification of the analytical predictions. The results are expected to yield design guidelines that would allow TBC designers to optimize the architecture of graded TBC systems to achieve improved durability for specific temperature loading conditions. In addition, these investigations will enhance basic scientific knowledge in the areas of viscoplastic deformation and fracture in two-phase and compositionally graded material systems. This new knowledge will be incorporated in undergraduate and graduate courses and help in the education of women and minority undergraduate students with the possibility they may embark on graduate studies doc19159 none The research is focused on developing a novel mechanism for actuation that would enable fabrication of various microfluidic components that require no moving mechanical parts. The novel actuation mechanism is based on electrochemistry to generate bubbles, which acts as control elements of a microfluidic system. This method is intrinsically low power in nature, requires a simple on-chip electronics circuitry, and the control elements are self-repairing. Detailed studies are being performed on making valves, pumps, switches, and fluid logic system. The experimental studies are being complemented with fundamental investigation of bubble formation, including bubble nucleation and collapse as a function of pressure, applied voltage, flow rate, and interface conditions between the bubble and microchannel walls. These studies are of fundamental as well as technological interest in fields ranging from microbiology, biotechnology, and drug delivery, to combinatorial and analytical chemistry. The educational, training, and outreach includes hands-on experience by graduate as well as undergraduate students, along with specific high school summer program targeted at women and minorities. It is providing students with important training in areas such as microfabrication technology, thin film growth, metrology, device fabrication, testing, and characterization doc19160 none Ronaldo Luna, U. Missouri-Rolla Upgrade of Geodynamics Laboratory Equipment This action is to upgrade and modernize the existing geodynamics equipment available in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Missouri at Rolla. The existing equipment is old and obsolete and requires upgrading or replacement. It will be upgraded to full digital control and data acquisition. The UMR Civil Engineering Building is being renovated and a new geodynamics laboratory will house this equipment. The new equipment will consist of triaxial equipment capable of dynamic soil testing at the low and large strains, in order to develop modulus degradation and damping curves to be used in ground and structural response analysis. These upgrades and modernization will make the new geodynamics laboratory a state-of-the-art laboratory for research and graduate instruction. They will be of immediate use in two existing projects, and for future projects that require dynamic material properties of soils. The equipment will be used in earthquake engineering research projects; in particular for projects related to the Midwest United States region. One of the largest liquefiable soil deposits in the country occurs near the New Madrid Seismic Zone in the southeastern corner of Missouri and adjoining states (the Mississippi Embayment doc19161 none Integration of Unstructured Text Documents in A E C Model Based Systems The Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (A E C) industry is adopting established communications and information technologies to improve collaboration, coordination, and information exchange among the many organizations that participate in all phases of a construction project life cycle. Inter-organizational information systems, are currently used for this purpose. They can be described as a set of interrelated components that collect, retrieve, process, store, and distribute information to support planning, control and decision making between different organizations. In distributed and dynamic construction environments, the ability to exchange and integrate information from different sources and in different data formats becomes crucial to improving the processes supported by these systems. Previous research showed that a major hurdle in integrating A E C information in such systems is related to its variety of data types. Since a large percentage of construction information is stored as unstructured text documents, methods for managing this type of data become important for construction information management. This research focuses on developing methods to integrate unstructured text documents for use in inter-organizational processes, developed by large dynamic distributed virtual organizations in construction project value systems. This investigation is based on available data from internet-based project-oriented inter-organizational information systems developed for the construction industry. In this research, automated processes for retrieval, classification, and integration of unstructured text documents in A E C model based systems are explored. Specifically, a combination of techniques from the areas of information retrieval and text mining are analyzed to develop intelligent search engines to identify documents relevant to each component of the project model. Afterwards, an association between relevant documents and project objects will be implemented according to the IFC specification doc19162 none D Rafal Ablamowicz and John Ryan This award provides partial support for active research mathematicians and scientists with limited means of support to attend in The 6th Conference on Clifford Algebras and their Applications in Mathematical Physics to be held at the Tennessee Technological University from May 20 through May 26, , in Cookeville, Tennessee. The award, together with other funding, will provide travel support for some of the speakers and for some participants who do not have funds available through other source, with priority given to graduate students, recent Ph.D. s, minorities and women. As part of the conference, a Lecture Series on Clifford Algebras and Applications aimed at graduate students and recent Ph.D. s will be presented on May 18 and 19, . The 6th Conference will be sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the American Mathematical Society, the International Society for Analysis, its Applications and Computation (ISAAC), University of Arkansas, George Mason University, and the Tennessee Technological University. The organizers of the conference look for interaction among mathematicians, scientists and engineers. The conference will include the following speakers, five sessions, six 90 minute lectures, and other activities: Speakers: Christian Bar, Helga Baum, Carlos A. Berenstein, Michael Eastwood, Bertfried Fauser, Alexander J. Hahn, Jacques Helmstetter, David Hestenes, Tadeusz Iwaniec, Jan J. Koenderink, Bertram Kostant, Heinz Kruger, Anthony Lasenby, Shahn Majid, Michael McCarthy, Marius Mitrea, Victor Nistor, Tao Qian, Lee Smolin, Joseph Varilly, S.L. Woronowicz, Sijue Wu Sessions: - Clifford analysis (Dirac operators, Wavelets, non-linear transformations, Harmonic analysis Fourier analysis, Singular integral operators, Discrete potential theory, Initial value and boundary value problems) - Geometry (Geometric index theory, Conformal and noncommutative geometry, Geometric integral transforms, Spin structures and Dirac operators, Twistors, tractors, and related topics, Invariant differential operators, Quaternionic geometry) - Mathematical structures (Hopf algebras and quantum groups, Category theory, structural methods, Quadratic forms, Hermitian forms, Witt groups, Clifford algebras over arbitrary fields, Lie algebras, spinor representations, exceptional Lie algebras, super Lie algebras, Clifford algebras and their generalizations, Infinite dimensional Clifford algebras and Clifford bundles) - Physics (Perturbative renormalization and Hopf algebra antipodes, Spectral triples and elementary particle physics, q-deformations and noncommutative spacetime, Quantum Field Theory using Hopf algebras and other algebraic techniques, Spin foams and quantum gravity, Quaternionic quantum mechanics and quantum fields, Dirac equation in electron physics, Electrodynamics, Non-associative structures, octonions, division algebras and their applications in physics) - Applications in computer science, robotics, engineering (Quantum computers, error correction, algorithms, Robotics, inverse kinematics, space control, navigation, cybernetics, image processing and engineering, Neural networks) Lectures on Clifford Algebras and Applications (May 18 and 19, ): Lecture 1: Introduction to Clifford algebras (Pertti Lounesto) Lecture 2: Mathematical structure of Clifford algebras (Ian R. Porteous) Lecture 3: Clifford analysis (John Ryan) Lecture 4: Clifford algebras in mathematical physics (Heinz Kruger) Lecture 5: Clifford algebras in engineering (Jon Selig) Lecture 6: Clifford algebras in differential geometry (Tom Branson) Additionally, poster session, round table discussion, and book exhibits are also planned. The organizers expect to recruit two additional speakers. Further information is available at http: math.tntech.edu rafal cookeville cookeville.html doc19163 none The nation s civil transportation infrastructure of structural concrete bridges is aging and deteriorating - principally as a result of the corrosion of the steel reinforcement tendons that give these structures their strength. Current estimates place the total cost of inspection, rehabilitation, and replacement of existing corroded structures in the US at $210 billion. Assessing the condition of the steel reinforcement is still based primarily on qualitative visual inspections and anticipated design lives, since the steel is typically buried beneath 1 to 2 inches or more of concrete. A multi-disciplinary team of three researchers, with expertise in the areas of non-destructive evaluation (NDE), wireless communication, and structural modeling have joined with bridge designers and managers from their state department of transportation to develop a wireless embedded sensor system to examine corrosion of tendons in prestressed concrete girders. The results of this project have the potential to deliver advanced, accurate information about the internal condition of steel reinforcement as well as the efficacy of new materials and rehabilitation methods and could save the nation billions of dollars annually. The research plan consists of three thrust areas and a demonstration project. In Thrust 1, a corrosion detection and monitoring method will be developed that uses embedded sensors. Thrust 2 will integrate the internal sensors with wireless systems for the harsh, embedded environment of a concrete girder. Thrust 3 involves the development of a software program for relating embedded sensor data to changes in significant structural characteristics. Finally, in cooperation with the Illinois Department of Transportation, the embedded sensor system will be installed in a prestressed girder during fabrication so that in-field measurements can be taken over an extended period of time to validate the effectiveness of this new embedded sensor system. This research will illustrate the importance of integrating technologies and expertise from several fields in solving complex information flow problems, not only for the structural health-monitoring and assessment community, but also for other areas where the link between any kind of sensor data and decision-making is not well-defined. The development methodology implemented in this project can also be applied to other problems to produce sensor systems that provide cost-effective and useful information to resource managers doc19164 none A Multi-user Automated Telemetry System for the study of ecological interactions in a tropical rainforest A grant has been awarded to Dr. Martin Wikelski at Princeton University to purchase an automated telemetry system (ATS) that allows him to track position, activity and physiological data on up to 200 rainforest animals consecutively and in real time. His study site is on Barro Colorado Island (BCI) Panama, the premier research station of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). Wikelski s tracking system is planned around specialized automated receivers that utilize electrically steerable antenna arrays. Six of these units will operate above-canopy tower-mounted antenna arrays for general coverage of the entire BCI rainforest area supplemented with 10 portable units for below-canopy deployment in specific areas for special project needs. The tower-deployed units will communicate data through radio-transmission to a central laboratory and processing center. The maintenance and expansion of the ATS equipment will be financed by modest user fees. The ATS system is currently being constructed on BCI, with first field tests projected for June . The PI envisions a future expansion of the system to include state of the art monitoring techniques (digitally encoded physiological or locomotor transmissions, GPS). The ATS will allow researchers from all over the world to pursue basic ecological, eco-physiological, applied management, and conservation questions that are currently beyond scientific reach. ATS research will start with the following exemplary projects: In basic ecology researchers will address the importance of species interactions for the maintenance of rainforest diversity. In particular, keystone predators like ocelots may control population sizes of rodents, which in turn are thought to be major seed dispersers and predators for trees. ATS enables researchers to study the interactions among animals as well as between animals and seeds - a prerequisite for the understanding of these basic ecological principles. In eco-physiology, research projects will address why many tropical birds live longer than their temperate zone counterparts, using heart rate telemetry to quantify energy expenditure in the wild. Other research groups will study the neuro-endocrinology of year-round territoriality vs. commuter territoriality. Such territorial and associated aggression systems are currently largely elusive. Conservation projects include the reintroduction of Harpy Eagles and other locally extinct birds on BCI and a study of the influence of habitat fragmentation on species persistence and diversity. Tropical biodiversity, conservation, and management of tropical rainforests are key components of modern biology. Automated telemetry allows biologists to address key ecological and conservation questions that are presently beyond reach because of methodological inadequacies. The ATS will also enable field ecologists to conduct large-scale, controlled experiments. The ATS will be constructed at one of the world s premier rainforest study sites allowing researchers to build upon, and incorporate new data into the largest existing framework of botanical, zoological and conservation knowledge of a single tropical site. Researchers and students from 30 nations will have access to ATS. Such a pioneering effort is expected to be emulated by research groups on different continents to supplement existing rainforest research networks such as the rainforest canopy network doc19165 none , Ronaldo Borja, Stanford University Static and Dynamic Instability of Liquefiable Soils The objective of this project is to develop a finite element model for analyzing the dynamic instability and flow liquefaction of soils, including the accompanying lateral flow and large ground movement during and following an earthquake. The model is based on a two-phase mixture theory with the following essential components: (a) a constitutive model that replicates the buildup of excess pore pressure prior to liquefaction; (b) a criterion for the onset of flow liquefaction instability; and (c) a constitutive response at residual state following flow liquefaction. A bounding surface plasticity model is used to model the anisotropic cyclic stress-strain behavior of soils before the onset of flow liquefaction, as well as to predict the accompanying pore pressure buildup. Large deformations are employed through the use of a finite deformation theory based on a multiplicative decomposition of the deformation gradient. A major component of the project is devoted to analyzing the results of monotonic undrained triaxial tests and cyclic undrained simple shear tests as a boundary-value problem. A universal assumption employed in interpreting the results of these tests is that the specimen is deforming homogeneously, suggesting that any measured specimen response may be interpreted as a material response. However, there are strong indications that this is far from being correct. Among the issues addressed by performing boundary-value problem simulations is whether or not the quasi-steady state condition commonly observed in saturated sand specimens of intermediate density is non-local. Also being investigated are the effects of imperfections and other perturbations on the response of soil specimens taken as a structural system. Finally, a systematic methodology is being devised for re-calibrating the constitutive model parameters in the finite deformation regime, and the finite element model is used to reanalyze the collapse of the Lower San Fernando Dam following the San Fernando earthquake of doc19166 none Maroudas Device interconnections in modern integrated circuits consist of metallic lines with cross-sections characterized by sub-micron length scales. Electromechanically-induced failure of such metallic lines is a major materials reliability problem in microelectronics. Failure is commonly mediated by the dynamics of microvoids that exist in these metallic lines. Void migration, growth, and morphological change are driven by electromigration, curvature-driven surface diffusion, and stress-induced surface diffusion, coupled with plastic flow in the strained metallic film. Fundamental understanding of such microstructural-scale dynamical phenomena and development of computational tools for their quantitative analysis are necessary for enabling engineering strategies to improve interconnect reliability. Toward this end, the proposed research addresses systematically the complex, nonlinear void dynamics in ductile metallic thin films over the range of electromechanical conditions that interconnect lines are subjected to. A number of interrelated problems will be pursued that involve single- and multiple-void dynamics, including: (i) combined effects of electromigration and mechanical stress on the migration and morphological stability of single voids, (ii) current-induced wave propagation on single void surfaces, (iii) void-void interactions that may lead to void breakup and coalescence phenomena, (iv) plastic deformation mechanisms around evolving voids, and (v) the role of plastic flow in interconnect failure. The proposed research plan emphasizes a self-consistent mesoscopic formulation of void surface evolution due to surface mass transport and plastic flow under the action of electric and stress fields, as well as systematic parametric studies to determine the onset of instabilities that may trigger failure modes. Computational implementation of the self-consistent model will be based on novel boundary-integral methods, standard finite-element methods, and recently developed methods for tracking moving interfaces. The predictive capabilities of this mesoscopic modeling will be enhanced by atomistic calculations of surface and interface properties according to many-body interatomic potentials. In addition, multi-million-atom molecular-dynamics (MD) simulations will be carried out to probe the nano-scale mechanisms that govern plastic deformation in the vicinity of voids in strained ductile metallic systems. Analysis of the MD results will provide the constitutive relations for plastic deformation required for the closure of the meso-scale problem doc19167 none This proposal seeks to continue the development of a redundancy-based monitoring and management system for civil structures with uncertain dynamic properties located in seismically prone regions. Such a system could also be applied to other mechanical systems. This Hierarchical Intelligent Monitoring and Management System will be expanded to five (previously three) integrated software components that interact seamlessly with each other in real time and are interfaced with the physical structure. These components have data-processing and decision making capabilities organized into a hierarchy of shielded layers, with each layer employing a decentralized topology of information processing units. The Expert Module coordinates the functions of the other modules with one another, and with data from outside the system. The Health Monitoring Module monitors data from the Sensor Module and employs advanced damage detection, localization, and classification techniques. The Identification Module is responsible for maintaining an active database of system models, which are updated based on information from the Health Monitoring and Sensor Modules. Controller design and implementation are handled by the Control Module, using models provided by the Identification Module, current data obtained from the Sensor Module, and some form of actuation. New paradigms for model identification and control can now be explored based on new options available in sensor technology. The Sensor Module monitors sensors of a variety of types and feeds the data from these sensors to the other modules. Rapid advancements in new types of sensors and methods for monitoring and networking them provide particular incentives for the development of a generic sensor module. The objectives of this proposal are: (1) To expand the current expert system s capabilities to monitor structural systems by encompassing new technologies in sensing and structural health monitoring; (2) To explore new opportunities for system identification using these emerging technologies; (3) To continue with the creation of robust control software, expanding the database of options available to control designers by using improved models, integrating new sensor options, and refining control objectives to account for structural faults; (4) To develop specific damage detection and classification algorithms and evaluate their utility; (5) To evaluate current and emerging sensor technologies and their applicability to civil structural monitoring and control applications; (6) To illustrate features of the monitoring and management system through simulation studies, and to make recommendations for its practical implementation on actual structures. It is believed that the proposed study will broaden the scope and enhance the capabilities of ongoing research by the Principal Investigator by integrating new ideas in structural monitoring and sensor technology and thus contribute significantly to the development of safer and more reliable civil structures doc19168 none Over the last decade there have been dramatic improvements in proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells that enabled fuel cell power to transcend from the laboratory to experimental vehicles. However, the viability, efficiency, and robustness of this technology depend on understanding, predicting, and controlling the unique transient behavior of the Fuel Cell (FC) breathing system. Although steady-state FC behavior is considered the normal operating mode; start-up, shut-down, and sudden load changes are characteristic and ubiquitous to all power producing devices. During all operating modes, our ability to precisely control the reactant flow and pressure, stack temperature, and membrane humidity is critical. To this end, phenomenological models and robust control methodologies are developed to address the subsystem conflicts and account for the nonlinear interactions and constraints imposed by sensor fidelity and actuator authority. Insight and rigorous metrics are provided for the vehicle power management and level of hybridization with battery and or ultra-capacitor. Finally, the impact of the control architecture for the coordination of all the three electric power sources (FC, battery, ultra-capacitor) with the traction motor inverter is systematically analyzed. This project allows students to develop control theoretic tools for the highly interdisciplinary areas of FC vehicles and power systems. Both of these technologies are important to our national competitiveness and a sustainable environment doc19169 none Problems are posed in three areas of application of linear algebra in which the theories and methods of nonnegative matrices and of generalized inverses of matrices play very significant roles. The areas are (i) population models in mathematical biology, (ii) the algebraic measurement of the connectivity of graphs, and (iii) finite homogeneous Markov chains in probability and statistics. In all these areas nonnegative matrices and or their associated M--matrices are used to represent the basic model according to weights or probabilities connecting between states or vertices. The sensitivities and elasticities of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors, as well as other properties, of such matrices are used to analyze and understand the behavior of the models and their response to changes in the input data. Generalized inverses are needed because they enter into expressions for the derivatives, when they exist, of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of matrices as functions of the entries and thus generalized inverses help in measuring the effects of various types of perturbation on the models. Many physical phenomena can be modeled by mathematics, and mathematics is a primary tool for understanding and predicting the behavior of the phenomena. Take the simple-looking problem of a population, be it of humans or of animals or of germs, that is divided according to age. At each age the females may have a different birth rate and at each age members of the population may have a different probability of survival to the next age group. If one knows the initial distribution of the population into the different age groups, then can one predict the short and long term evolution trends of the population?! Could it be that the population can reach in time a situation that is called an equilibrium? This is a situation in which the sizes of each age group may continue to change, but the relative size of each age group to the other age groups does not change. There are many problems of this sort which the fields of mathematics called Linear Algebra and Matrix Theory can help model and solve. In this project matrix methods are applied to investigate the behavior of three models, one from population growth, one from a networking problem, and one from physical systems that is governed by probability rather than by surety doc19170 none The investigator studies various effective methods in the theory of elliptic, hyperelliptic, and cubic curves and their function fields. Classical problems in these areas are computing class numbers, regulators, and discrete logarithms, as well as determining cardinalities of Jacobians. The first part concerns arithmetical invariants of hyperelliptic and cubic curves. In particular, the investigator and his colleagues hope to advance counting points methods for these curves over large prime fields. Effective methods make use of modular equations, the distribution of the zeroes of the zeta function, the Hasse-Witt matrix, approximation of Euler products, optimized algorithms, and others. The second part concerns with the Weil descent methodology for elliptic curves or other Galois descent methods. The Weil descent methodology is a means to reduce the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP) over composite finite fields to the discrete logarithm problem in an abelian variety over a proper subfield. This leads to an effective method of reducing any instance of the ECDLP over a finite field to an instance of the discrete logarithm problem in the Jacobian of a hyperelliptic curve over a subfield. Since subexponential-time algorithms for the latter problem are known, this shows how important the method is for cracking certain elliptic curve cryptographic schemes. Similar ideas are applicable for curves of genus bigger than one. The proposed research belongs to the interface between number theory and algebraic geometry. On the theoretical side, it advances the theory of algebraic function fields and curves. At the same time, on the practical side, it advances the connection between the theory of algebraic curves and a highly relevant application to cryptography. In recent years, elliptic and hyperelliptic curves have become objects of intense investigation because of their significance to public-key cryptography. Hereby, tools from algebraic geometry, number theory, and the theory of algorithms are central in the cryptanalysis of elliptic and hyperelliptic curve cryptosystems. Methods of this proposal can be applied to guarantee the security of these curve cryptosystems or reveal weaknesses of certain curves. The proposed research also advances the number theoretic computations and applies a variety of strong recent results to the algorithmic aspects of number theory doc19171 none The decision making process for transport systems is a multistage problem, ranging from long-term strategic and tactical planning decisions to operational and real-time control. Uncertainty in supply and demand experienced in the real-time, operational and tactical stages as well as the effectiveness of potential control decisions impact earlier strategic decisions. However, these future impacts are often neglected when strategic decisions are made for the optimization of a network. By neglecting such impacts, planners are missing opportunities to develop networks that are more resistant to fluctuations and capable of exploiting the full potential of information. This research will develop methods for accounting for the transport system stochasticity (and dynamics) with a focus on representing actions such as real-time routing and control as recourse. This will then be used within the context of prior stage decisions (such as network design), where new methods will be investigated to account for the potential recourse. By viewing the system within the overall strategic, tactical, operational, and real-time framework, stage interactions will be explored as well as the role of information and uncertainty within the integrated decision process. The true value of information and control under such a view can be given both in terms of real-time improvement and with the benefits from improved recourse on prior decisions. In addition to the research problems, several fundamental complementary educational issues are raised in this context. Students and practicing transportation engineers do not generally have sufficient technical background to fully appreciate the complex behavior of stochastic and dynamic systems, and the know-how to exploit the potential of real-time data for actual online operational purposes. This research will explicitly address this problem by developing teaching material for a new course on multi-stage transportation optimization, educational simulators, and tools that will successfully convey the fundamental principles related to the optimization and control of dynamic and stochastic transportation systems to students. By further developing the fundamental research of this area, and integrating it into the education curriculum, future planners will be able to better account for the unavoidable uncertainties that exist as well as the recourse options that will be available in later stages. In turn, this allows for the creation of a more robust and efficient transportation network doc19172 none Development and Application of 3D Measurement Methodologies at Reduced Length Scales The development and application of measurement methodologies for quantitative determination of three-dimensional surface deformations on planar or curved objects with spatial resolutions extending to the nanometer scale is the focus of this research effort. A unique aspect of the research is the emphasis on both 3D metrology and also the development of methodologies applicable to generic imaging systems (e.g., SEM, optical) for identification and accurate correction of complex image distortions. Applications of the resulting methodologies will include studies of local deformation behavior in (a) nano-structured materials, (b) micro-scale tensile and bending tests of non-homogeneous materials and (c) this-film blister bulge specimens undergoing delamination doc19173 none This project investigates the statistics of vibrational and acoustic energy, its mean flow and its fluctuations, in complex irregular reverberant structures. The work is conceived with a view towards improved statistical energy theories for the mid-frequency range in such structures, and involves numerical simulations, analytic theory and laboratory measurements. The project consists of two complementary thrusts. A method for efficient estimation of flow of mean energy will be extended to the time dependent case, and tested by comparing with results from direct numerical simulation and conventional Statistical Energy Analysis. Comparisons will be carried out on models and structures from industrial applications. The l variance of fluctuations away from that mean will be investigated using Random Matrix Theory and compared with laboratory measurements and numerical simulations. Technical impact will be in the creation of better statistical energy models for the vibrations and acoustics of large structures, with implications for noise and vibration design for consumer machinery, and space and naval structures. Other applications will lie in reverberation room acoustics, ultrasonics, stochastic seismic waves, mesoscopic electronics, and diffuse optics for lidar and medical imaging. Broader impact is ensured by the industrial collaborations that are envisioned, by collaborations with seismologists and physicists, by archival publications, by the training of PhD students, by the PI s participation in technical meetings, and by his introduction of new material in advanced courses, with new software on statistical energy analysis doc19174 none This work focuses on mechanical systems in which one or more of the frequencies of oscillation are dynamical variables, whose evolutions are dependent on the state of the system. As time evolves these systems can slowly move in and out of a state of resonance. This proposal investigates the dynamical behavior of these slowly-varying systems near resonance, accounting for the full complexity of the coupling between components that exists in these systems. Two primary research topics are to be addressed in this work, i) the effects of resonances on the dynamical behavior of directly coupled, multi-degree-of-freedom systems, and ii) resonant effects in nonlinear systems in the presence of period-amplitude dependence of one or more of the components. These include mistuned systems where the components with dynamical frequencies are coupled to all the remaining resonant modes as well as examples in the presence of additional internal resonances. The multi-degree-of-freedom systems will be reduced using singular perturbation methods and the transport of phase space through the resonance region will be analyzed through analytical techniques and numerical investigations. Finally, the analytical predictions will be verified on an existing experimental apparatus that will be used to more fully account for the complexities of physical systems. Resonances in dynamical systems provide a mechanism by which complex coupled systems can undergo unexpected qualitative changes in their dynamical behavior, and this work will lead to a more complete understanding of this behavior. These topics represent a significant class of problems with relevance to complex, interconnected mechanical systems and will identify parameters and the characteristics of coupling which play an important role in determining the impact of resonances in interconnected mechanical systems doc19175 none Cable-Stayed bridges are commonly exhibiting large-amplitude vibrations of the main stays, frequently associated with the simultaneous occurrence of wind and rain. These vibrations are of concerns because they potentially induce fatigue in the cables and cable anchorages. Past research on excitation mechanisms has generally been conducted using wind tunnels, and several distinct aerodynamic mechanisms have been proposed. While considerable progress has been made in understanding and mitigating these vibrations, the state of the art has still not enabled the prediction of field behavior based on a set of supplied parameters, nor does a plausible, accepted model exist for the phenomenon. This research effort is building upon previous findings and the wealth of full-scale data collected in past projects in order to develop an understanding of the mechanics of stay-cable vibration at a more fundamental level and to enable the recommendation of more effective and economical mitigation strategies doc19176 none This dissertation research will investigate how well a sense of community survives the rapid incorporation of an existing town into a larger metropolitan area. Divisions between newcomers and longtimers may emerge in conflicts over zoning, schools, and political office. These divisions may be reinforced by distinctive subcultures and interaction networks within the town. As the town grows and becomes more integrated into the metropolitan area, the town will become less important as an identity for local residents. These issues will be investigated using a variety of methods (a survey, oral histories, secondary data, and ethnographic observation) in Burlington, Kentucky, a small town on the outskirts of Cincinnati, Ohio doc19177 none Richards-Kortum Funding is sought to enable graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and young investigators to participate in the Lasers in Medicine and Biology Gordon Conference Kimball Union Academy, Meriden, NH July 14-19, . The conference is to include investigators from academia, government agencies, national laboratories, and industry in examining emerging applications of lasers and optical sciences in medicine and surgery. Particular emphasis is given to technological advances close to clinical application and or commercial development. Sessions include: Optical Coherence Tomography; Nanotechnologies for Optical Sensing, Imaging, and Manipulation; Biological Applications of Micro-optical Devices; Combined Imaging Methodologies; Fluorescence Methods for Biomedical Diagnostics; Advances in Optical Microscopy; Intra-vital Imaging and Microscopy; Wavefront Sensing and Adaptive Optics in Vision Correction; and Photodynamic Therapy. Seven of the nine program sessions include at least one talk with substantial applications in the area of early diagnosis. An important feature is to bring students and post-doctoral fellows in biomedical engineering together with academic engineers and scientists, clinicians, and members of industry to discuss and define the most important questions and problems to be solved in this field. Two special symposia will facilitate the discussion process. The first symposium, Career Paths in Biomedical Engineering , features short presentations from clinicians and engineers in academia, industry, and government to provide career advice to graduate students and post- doctoral fellows. The second symposium highlights new technologic developments on the cusp of clinical viability. A special issue of the Journal of Biomedical Optics is to be devoted to Optical Detection: Clinical and Industrial Advances . The meeting is of high intellectual merit with the program being organized so as to focus on emerging medical technologies holding a high likelihood of making broad and important impacts on medicine and surgery doc19178 none Ronald Pak, U. of Colorado-Boulder Advanced Engineering Framework for Dynamic Foundation Interaction with Granular Soils under Multi-Directional Loads A major source of difficulty in obtaining consistent predictions of the dynamic behavior of foundations on sandy and gravelly soils under multi-directional excitation is the inadequacy in the conceptual and analytical framework for the dynamic contact problem, considering the complex nature of granular materials. This problem is the foundation of many important applications in dynamic soil-structure interaction, and geotechnical and earthquake engineering. This action is to support a comprehensive research program to: (i) develop, by means of centrifuge modeling, an enlarged experimental data base with significant parametric variations, so as to delineate the spectrum of dynamic characteristics of the embedded and surface foundation response for a variety of soils, foundations, and loading parameters; (ii) develop and implement, using the new comprehensive data base, a dual set of analytical frameworks. The first provides a simple and conceptually succinct engineering format to address the special characteristics of the dynamic behavior of granular materials not accounted for in current approaches. The second provides an in-depth understanding of the granular continuum mechanics problems underlying the dynamic physical phenomena. Through these developments, an up-to-date reassessment of existing field and laboratory experimental data can be pursued doc19179 none Gonzalez, Anthony Dr. Gonzalez is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at the University of Florida. He will conduct a multiwavelength survey for galaxies of intermediate redshift which he will use to constrain models of the formation and evolution of early-type cluster galaxies and assess the validity of estimators of cluster mass. This redshift regime is one in which the most dramatic evolution in the properties of galaxies and their clusters occur, and his observations are designed to provide constraints on cosmological parameters and models of the formation of structure in the universe. His educational program involves organizing a public seminar series designed to introduce the general public to recent discoveries in astrophysics and to serve as a forum for discussion of astronomical topics appearing in the news. He will also work with science teachers in local public schools to establish a Project Astro program in north central Florida doc19180 none The proposed work aims at developing a comprehensive theory for the robust control of both linear and nonlinear systems. A new approach will be investigated that uses a real-time nonlinear estimator to determine model-error corrections to the control input. The estimator determines the model error using a one time-step ahead approach. Also, the estimator can be used to determine state quantities. Control compensation is achieved by using the estimated model error as a signal synthesis adaptive correction to the nominal control input so that maximum performance is achieved in the face of significant model uncertainty and disturbance inputs. A significant advantage of this approach over other adaptive methods is that model parameters need not be updated online. Instead, the effect of these errors is used to update the actual control signal, which leads to a simple design strategy. The novel part of the control approach is that it combines a nonlinear estimator and a nonlinear controller in a cohesive approach to provide system robustness. The design procedure is straightforward, unlike other methods such as standard adaptive control methods that may involve extensive design procedures to guarantee performance specifications. The impact of this proposed work will be the development of a methodology that is at once of basic theoretical value and will enable a large class of system applications in engineering applied science. Additionally, Prof. Crassidis will be engaged in both international collaborations and workshops for dissemination of this research doc19181 none This project develops an innovative framework that incorporates asset condition evaluation techniques for more effective infrastructure reporting. The research design includes the development of a life-cycle model for condition assessment of wastewater infrastructure, prioritization of the scheduling of maintenance and rehabilitation, including demand for such infrastructure, and developing and maintaining an up-to-date inventory of wastewater infrastructure. Traditionally, governmental agencies at the local and the state level have used cash accounting methods to report infrastructure assets (roads, bridges, water and sewer facilities, etc.) In this method of financial reporting of infrastructure, the value of existing physical assets does not appear on financial reports. The rapid rate of deterioration of municipal infrastructure assets is forcing owners to examine the state of their assets and plan for the future. With the issuance of the Governmental Accounting Standards Board s Statement 34 (GASB 34) in June , local and state agencies are now required to report on the existing value of the agency s capital assets. This will entail developing consistent methodologies for condition assessment, deploying asset management systems, and preparing estimates of future demands and enhancements. The framework developed through this project will help municipalities take advantage of the GASB 34 modified approach to infrastructure reporting. It can contribute to improvements in the assessment and management of underground infrastructure systems since municipalities will be able to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of long-term rehabilitation of assets versus replacement of assets. There will also be a shift in focus from capital formation to an emphasis on rehabilitation. This project will be done in cooperation with the Department of Public Works, City of Indianapolis, Indiana. This collaboration will be an asset not only in providing access to data for the development of the comprehensive models, but also for testing the results and transferring them to state and local governments doc19182 none This award will focus on the analysis of the dynamic behavior and wave propagation characteristics of cellular solids with deterministic periodic architecture. The resulting periodic assembles generate frequency bands and directions where elastic waved do not propagate (stop bands) and the corresponding vibrations and sound radiation are substantially reduced. The scalable geometry of deterministic periodic architectures allows for their application as innovative vibration control hazard mitigation systems both to small-scale and large-scale structural systems. Particular emphasis will be placed in the analysis of honeycombs with re-entrant architectures. Their unique mechanical properties will be fully investigated emphasizing their potential for vibration hazard mitigation as well as impact energy absorption. Efficient use of the intervening space will be also addressed for improving performance. This award is a multidisciplinary and collaborative research effort, where analytical computational and experimental work will be interlaced. The PIs will collaborate throughout the duration of the project in teaching common courses and in developing a new advanced course in Passive and Active Structural Control. This team effort will foster both civil and mechanical engineering students multidisciplinary background. The concept and the results of this award will be progressively introduced in several courses of instruction in order to expose the students to innovative research ideas and their applications. The student will be given hands-on experience that will contribute to the growth of their technical and professional skills doc19183 none David Stanley University of Nebraska-Lincolnl The project is about international collaboration with researchers in Korea, focusing on insect immunity: The insect pathogen Xenorhabdus nematophilus depresses host immunity by inhibiting eicosanoid biosynthesis. Insects are the most successful group of animals and the only serious biological competitor with humans. Insects exert tremendous economic and public health impacts on human life and life quality. The development of effective and environmentally compatible insect management strategies is necessary. The earlier collaboration study shows that a bacterial factor which is present in the organic fraction of the bacterial culture medium inhibits cellular immune reactions. The proposed study is to identify the bacterial factor responsible for inhibiting eicosanoid biosynthesis and to determine the influence of this factor on bacterial pathogenesis doc19184 none The project is aimed at understanding the physics of the formation of deformation twins in a-Ti and its alloys and the precise role of deformation twinning in strain hardening response of the a-Ti and its alloys. A major goal is to develop robust crystal plasticity models and simulation tools that can predict the evolution of both the anisotropic stress-strain response as well as the crystallographic texture evolution in these metals subjected to large plastic strains in a range of industrially relevant cold-working processes. The experimental work involves a combined experimental and modeling study. The experimental work involves includes a range of large strain mechanical tests in a variety of deformation paths and deformation path changes, and a systematic characterization of the deformed samples using optical microscopy, orientation image mapping in the scanning electron microscope, X-ray texture studies and transmission electron microscopy. The modeling work constitutes formulation of appropriate constitutive functions for evolution of the twin volume fraction in the individual crystals, and constitutive descriptions for slip and twin hardening including the coupling between them. The physics elucidated from the experiments will guide the formulation of these constitutive functions. The proposed work also includes an extensive validation of the models by direct comparison of the crystal plasticity model predictions for both the anisotropic stress-strain response as well as crystallographic texture evolution against corresponding measurements. Both the Taylor-type models and the finite element polycrystal models will be considered in the crystal plasticity model. The microstructural state of the material plays a governing role in shape and size control during deformation processing, structural integrity of the produced component, and its performance characteristics in service (including mechanical, electrical and magnetic properties, and their anisotropy). Since the tools developed in this study can be used for designing the deformation process to yield optimal microstructures for a given application, they can lead to substantial improvements in performance characteristics of various metallic components. This study will produce two Ph.D.s with expertise in a technical field important to the US metal working industry, in which the United States is currently lagging behind several European countries. In addition, two undergraduate students will be participating in this research. The proposed study is expected to have a strong impact on the metal working industry, since it will provide predictive tools that can yield a great deal of quantitative information on microstructure evolution during deformation of Ti alloys. Titanium and titanium alloys constitute an important class of metals with many commercial applications in the defense, aerospace, biomedical, and sporting goods industries doc19185 none Karpeschins The main area of Yu.Karpeshina s research in the previous years was the perturbation theory for multidimensional Schroedinger operators with periodic potentials. One encounters a small denominator problem, considering the perturbation of the Laplacian by a periodic potential in the high energy region. It comes from the fact that the Bloch eigenvalues of a multidimensional periodic Schroedinger operator are located very densely in the high energy region. The PI has developed a method of advanced perturbation theory to treat this small denominator problem. Yu. Karpeshina showed that most of generalized eigenfunctions of the multidimensional periodic Schroedinger operator in the high energy region are close to the unperturbed ones: for every sufficiently large energy there is an extensive set of solutions of the Schroedinger equation which are close to plane waves. The PI will prove that even in the almost-periodic situation a lot of generalized eigenfunctions of the multidimensional Schroedinger operator are close to unperturbed ones in the high energy region: for every sufficiently large energy there is an extensive set of solutions of the Schroedinger equation which are close to plane waves. The main difficulty to overcome is the small denominator problem, which is much more intricate in the case of almost-periodic potentials then in the periodic case, due to particularly complicated nature of wave propagation processes in solids with non-local deviations from regular structure. The PI suggests an effective approach to the small denominator problem. The methods developed by the PI for the multidimensional periodic Schroedinger operator will be combined with basic ideas of the KAM (Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser) theory in order to produce a new technique which works for almost-periodic potentials. Schroedinger operators with almost-periodic potentials are used in physics to describe solids with non-regular inner structure, e.g. alloys, ceramics, glasses, polymers. The spectral study of these operators leads to understanding of the mechanism of electrical conductivity in such materials. The goal of the project is to understand the phenomenon of the insulator-metal transition. The insulator-metal transition means that a material behaves as an electrical insulator if it stays below a certain temperature and abruptly starts to act as a conductor when the temperature surpasses a certain value characteristic for a given material. The understanding of the phenomenon of insulator-metal transition is extremely important for applications, particularly in electronics industry doc19186 none The project will develop an understanding of the mechanism of animal locomotion from biological observations at the neuronal level, hypothesize the knowledge as engineering principles for feedback control design, and establish a systematic procedure for designing neurodynamic controllers to achieve optimally efficient autonomous locomotion. A simple yet accuratemathematical model for neuronal dynamics is developed first from a control perspective. Lyapunov-based methods will then be employed to analyse the oscillation properties of neuronal circuits to drive mechanical systems for locomotion. A prototype mechanical rectifier is used to experimentally validate the design principles to be developed for locomotion control. The next technological revolution seems to rely on our understanding of complex biological systems. Such understanding would enable us to develop a completely new kind of robust, adaptive, and autonomous machines. The intellectual merit of this project is the basic understanding of the mechanism underlying such sophistication, through formalization of biological knowledge on animal locomotion in terms of engineering language of feedback control. The impacts of this research include innovations in a variety of fields. Realizations of new type of robotic locomotion systems for space explorations would be a direct application. Physiological control of the heart beat profile for stabilization of defective heart may be another application doc19187 none Since , metropolitan regions of the United States have nearly tripled in population from 84 million (55% of U.S. total) to 226 million in (80%). During the same period, the number of designated metropolitan regions grew from 169 to 347 and their aggregate land area doubled from 9% to about 19% of the lower 48 states. As metropolitan regions have expanded, land development has degraded and disrupted natural drainage systems, watersheds, wetlands, aquifers, and coastal estuaries. In the process, natural stormwater detention, water quality filtering, biotic habitat, water-based recreation, and scenic amenity have been impaired. Efforts to replace these Nature s services through technology, as with flood control projects and water treatment plants, have proven costly, environmentally damaging, and sometimes ineffective. This dismal process was challenged in the s by scientists, environmentalists, and other writers (e.g., Eugene Odum, Garrett Hardin, William H. Whyte, Barry Commoner, Gilbert White, Ian McHarg, Luna Leopold, William Neiring, and John and Mildred Teal). In response, certain cities and metropolitan regions have attempted in McHarg s phrase to design with Nature rather than trying to overwhelm biophysical constraints through technology. This shift is tentative, geographically uneven, and poorly documented. But its results are evident in the form of widely established stream corridor greenways, daylighting of channelized streams, floodplain and wetlands management, building regulations for steep slopes, and urban forestry programs. These and related initiatives may be subsumed in the broad rubric of urban watershed management for purposes of this study. Since watersheds typically embrace multiple political and ownership units, watershed management requires creative use of partnerships, special districts, and other regional strategies. Urban watershed management is also influenced, for better or worse, by federal laws such as the Clean Water Act, the National Flood Insurance Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, and the Safe Drinking Water Act. This study will analyze and compare regional experience in urban watershed and estuary management in light of scientific and institutional challenges. Research questions that will guide the study include: 1. What alternative institutional models are available to overcome legal fragmentation in urban watersheds and estuaries? 2. What indicators of effectiveness may be applied to the models identified in Question 1? 3. How and to what extent do federal programs encourage or inhibit urban watershed and estuary management? 4. What is the influence of the property rights movement and the takings issue as constraints upon governmental efforts to retain natural functions of urban watersheds? The study will assess comparative regional experience in urban watershed management through four broad tasks: Task 1 -- Survey of State of Practice: A sample of state and regional resource managers stratified by geographic area and discipline will be surveyed regarding the above questions in relation to their respective geographic localities; Task 2 -- Regional Workshops will be conducted in 3-5 representative metropolitan areas to ascertain more detailed local and regional experience in multi-objective management of urban watersheds, stream corridors, and estuaries; Task 3 -- Detailed Case Studies will more closely analyze selected programs identified in the earlier tasks that representative a spectrum of geographical context and institutional strategies of broader significance; Task 4 - Publication and Dissemination of Results through a book, scholarly articles, and conference papers doc19188 none The need for advanced tribo-systems with wear resistant sliding interfaces pervades current technology, emerging technology, and much of the technology of the foreseeable future. Whether in the foreground, as in the design of high-temperature gas turbine engines, the development of highly reliable navigational and tracking systems, and the performance of magnetic storage devices, or in the background, as used in fusion reactors, tribology of sliding interfaces play a critical role in the success of the technology. Better understanding of the physics of material interaction under these harsh conditions is expected to lead to the development of more efficient tribo-systems would benefit our society in many ways. In the proposed investigation we seek to capitalize on our experience gained during the development of the plate-impact pressure-shear friction experiments and the torsional Kolsky bar friction experiments, to better understand the behavior of technologically important material interfaces under extreme conditions. Key modifications will be made to these configurations in order to provide a more direct access to the frictional interface such that local critical interfacial quantities can be directly measured by using high-speed digital photography and thermal imaging systems. In this way, these experiments will not only provide information on quantities such as interfacial tractions and slip history, but also on key local thermo-mechanical interactions in the vicinity of the tribological interface. Interfacial quantities of interest include but are not limited to local plastic strains, plastic strain rates, temperature profiles, details of formation and growth of third body, kinetics of formation and growth of molten interfacial layers, and the details of slip-waves generated during the intense local thermo-mechanical interactions at the tribo-pair interface. Detailed optical and scanning electron microscopy along with the atomic force microscope will be used to examine the micro- and or nano- changes in the topology of the tribo-pair surfaces during the slip process. In addition, X-ray diffraction and flourescence (EDS) will be employed to contribute to our understanding of the changes in the microstructure and transfer of material during the complex chemical mechanical interactions that occur at and near the sliding interfaces. Along with the experimental study finite element simulations of the experiments will be conducted to correlate the experimental observations with our present state of understanding of the high-speed slip phenomena. The proposed approach is innovative and novel and entails considerable experimental and computational challenges. It represents a marked departure from experimental procedures to investigate dynamic friction in the past. The proposed is expected to contribute significantly towards strengthening our national capability by (a) contributing to the development of an experimental methodology for characterization of high speed sliding behavior under extreme conditions, (b) extending our present state of understanding of critical mechanisms operative during high-speed slip at technologically important material interfaces, and (c) by training graduate students at the interface of solid mechanics and materials science in technologically important areas doc19189 none This project concerns birational geometry of complex varieties and the study of rationally connected varieties. The main objective is to study spaces of rational curves on rationally connected varieties, with the goal of constructing new birational invariants of these varieties and determining the relationship between these varieties and unirational varieties. The secondary objective is to develop further some of the techniques and tools of algebraic geometry: to develop techniques for determining when moduli stacks are rationally connected, to construct and study new compactifications of the space of smooth rational curves in projective space, and to refine the Behrend-Manin stratification of the Kontsevich moduli stack so that it detects mutliple covers. Systems of polynomial equations in some collection of variables arise in every branch of mathematics, science and engineering. Determining the solutions of these systems of equations is of paramount importance. Unirational varieties precisely correspond to those systems of equations where the set of solutions is most easily described -- the set of solutions is the set of all outputs of some sequence of polynomials with arbitrary inputs. So it is very important to recognize which systems of equations correspond to unirational varieties. From the point of view of geometry, a closely related notion is rational connectedness . This notion is far simpler to recognize in practice. Potentially both notions are equivalent. If one could prove that both notions are equivalent, this would give a simpler way to recognize which systems of equations correspond to unirational varieties. The investigator intends to continue his research of this problem doc19190 none PI: Lawrence A. Fialkow, SUNY New Paltz This research concerns an approach to the multidimensional truncated power moment problem based on an extension theory for the associated moment matrix. When this matrix admits an infinite, positive, finite rank moment matrix extension, this approach yields an explicit formula for a finitely atomic representing measure supported on the joint spectrum of a normal tuple of operators corresponding to the extension. The aim of this research is to determine concrete conditions on the moment data which permit the desired extension. Much of this research concerns, specifically, the multivariable truncated K-moment problem, where the support of a representing measure is required to be contained in a prescribed closed set K. For K an algebraic variety, this research concerns a new conjecture for solving the moment problem in terms of concrete algebraic and geometric invariants closely related to the moment data. For K semi-algebraic, this research seeks to apply the abstract solution of the truncated K-moment problem due to Curto-Fialkow to specific semi-algebraic sets such as the closed unit disk. A direct application of this study concerns the multidimensional cubature problem in Numerical Analysis. By applying the moment matrix extension technique in the context of cubature, this research seeks to construct minimal cubature rules for sets such as the disk, square, triangle, or annulus. One aspect of this research, the Quadrature Problem, concerns the efficient measurement of the size of an irregular area, or the measurement of the weight of a volume whose density is unevenly distributed. We seek to identify a small number of test points (or nodes) within the body in such a way that by measuring the density just at these few points, we may closely approximate the overall size or weight of the body. In the case of a linear body, such as a thin rod, the quadrature problem was solved with the fewest number of test points by the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss ( - ), using a technique now known as Gaussian Quadrature. At the present time, surprisingly few minimal-node quadrature rules are known for shapes in the plane or in 3-dimensional space, even for basic sets such as a disk or sphere. In order to study the Quadrature Problem, we actually study a more general problem, the Multidimensional Truncated Moment Problem. Many real-world systems can be described by a sequence of physical attributes called moments, such as mass, weight, momentum, etc., which relate to the physical space underlying the system. The truncated moment problem asks whether a system is uniquely determined by its sequence of moments, and also whether the moments of a system can be computed by studying the system at just a finite number of nodes in the underlying space. In this research, we develop algorithms for recognizing when such a sequence of nodes exists, and for efficiently computing them. In this way, we may describe a system in terms of just a finite number of points in the underlying space doc19191 none This research addresses the concept of using multi-stable equilibria (MSE) devices as a type of adaptive system. MSE systems are those that have more than one configuration at which their potential energy is at a minimum such that no power is required to maintain the equilibrium position. As opposed to adaptive structures that use active materials such as piezoelectrics and shape memory alloys, the adaptive states of MSE systems are passive and need only actuation to move among the stable states. Because of this focus on passive and nondissipative aspects of energetic systems, the impact of MSE systems is in improving system performance in terms of operating range, accuracy, reliability, and energy efficiency. The approach of the research is to synthesize MSE systems for specific engineering tasks such as designing devices to have specific stable geometrical configurations and or natural frequencies at each equilibrium position. Although some analysis has been done on a few bistable structures, the significance of this research is in providing insight into the MSE design process by creating a synthetic, rather than analytic, approach to a more general class of systems. Some areas of application for MSE devices are those in which single operating points limit system efficiency, actuator characteristics inhibit a large range of adaptability, and where the minimization of dissipative effects are important. Fully compliant structures when combined with magnetic actuation lead to smooth nonlinear systems, which are amenable to accurate modeling. They also possess ultra-high precision and repeatability, and long system life due to wear-free operation. Such systems also have several advantages when scaled down to the micro-systems domain. The results of the proposed research should have broad impact on design and analysis of multi-state precision mechanical systems, adaptive transducers, passive human augmentation systems, and adaptive structures doc19192 none Proposal Number: PI: Donald Marshall and Steffen Rohde Conformal mapping and Loewner evolutions Marshall and Rohde will investigate conformal mappings generated by the Loewner differential equation, and related topics. The Loewner differential equation describes the flow associated with the conformal mappings onto a continuously decreasing sequence of simply connected planar domains. It relates a sequence of domains to a real-valued function, the driving term of the equation. Schramm s recent discovery of the stochastic Loewner evolution SLE, the Loewner equation driven by one-dimensional Brownian motion, has opened up a new area of investigations involving conformal mappings, probability theory and mathematical physics. The Loewner equation is also related to an algorithm for numerical conformal mapping. Conformal mappings have applications in many areas, both within and outside of mathematics, such as control theory, heat conduction, fluid dynamics, and complex dynamics. They are often used to change coordinates from one region to a simpler region like a disc. Regions with smooth boundaries are well understood. However, the appearance of fractals in many branches of science led to the natural problem of investigating regions bounded by highly nonsmooth, fractal curves, from the conformal mapping point of view. In recent years, fractal curves generated by random processes arising, for instance, in statistical physics, have received enormous attention. The core of Marshall s and Rohde s research is to better understand random fractal curves by means of conformal mappings, and conversely to study some problems about conformal mappings by analyzing domains bounded by fractal curves doc19193 none The funds provided in this award will be used to relocate a thermal ionization mass spectrometer (TIMS) from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to the Department of Earth Sciences at Florida International University. The TIMS is a very versatile and powerful instrument used to measure ratios of isotopes in natural and man-made materials, and it has applications in scores of scientific disciplines. Since its purchase by LLNL, this mass spectrometer has seen relatively light use, and it will be replaced there by a newer instrument. At FIU, the TIMS will be installed in an academic research lab where it will see heavy use from faculty and students alike involved in geological, archaological, environmental and forensic research. The faculty at FIU who will supervise the use of this instrument, including the PI, have been using TIMS machines for many years, but have had to travel to labs in far distant locations to use them. Projected uses of this instrument at FIU include: The isotopic and chemical fingerprinting of the sources of elements in ores, glasses, ceramics, metal alloys and other materials for archaeological and forensic research. Isotope ratios of several elements vary greatly in different natural sources, so that analysis of natural and man-made materials can indicate the sources from which it was made. Analyses of natural ores can reveal the original geological sources or the contained metals, and illuminate the processes that formed the ores. Analyses of archaeological artifacts such as metal alloys and ceramics can reveal where the geological raw materials were obtained that were used in their manufacture, and therefor how the technologies developed and spread. Forensic analyses of glass, metals and paint can trace the origins of materials found at crime scenes. The precise dating of rocks provides a framework for geological events such as volcanic eruptions, mountain building events and the formation of ore deposits. Such analyses are essential for understanding how many types of rocks form, when and how mountain building events have taken place, and how major deposits of metals like copper, silver and gold form and where they are most effectively found. They are also essential for providing the baseline information on the geological variability of natural materials that forms the context of archaeological and forensic studies. This instrument can also be used to determine the sources of lead contamination in soils and blood in urban areas of Miami-Dade County. Recent studies have shown that blood lead poisoning of children is a serious problem in some older areas of urban Miami-Dade County. Potential sources of this lead contamination include soil contamination from leaded gasoline, lead-based paint, and atmospheric fallout from incinerators and other remote sources. Measurement of lead isotope ratios in soils, paint, Everglades peat samples, and blood samples will allow us to determine the isotopic fingerprint of each source, and which source is the dominant contributor to blood lead contamination doc19194 none Findley This award to University of Miami s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences provides instrumentation to improve the shared-use scientific instrumentation available to researchers using three research ships operated by University of Miami and the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution. These three vessels, R Vs Seward Johnson, Seward Johnson II, and Walton Smith, are all operated as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The specific instrumentation supported by this award includes a phased array, 75 kHz acoustic Doppler current meter for installation on R V Seward Johnson II, and a multi-corer device for collecting undisturbed seafloor samples from any of the three ships. These new capabilities will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists using the ships in their research during and future years doc19195 none Fang-Hua Lin, NYU Courant Institute. : The first part of this proposal is to study the dynamics and the stability of topological singularities in several concrete cases including :magnetic vortices in the Landau-Lefschitz equations(Schrodinger and wave maps coupled with magnetic fields),vortices and vortex rings in the trapped dilute Bose-Einstein condensates(certain nonlinear Schrodinger systems coupled with potentials).The second part of the proposal is concerned with topological singularities of Sobolev mappings.We shall examine the effects of singularities on the denisity of smooth maps,the topology of mapping spaces,the regularity and singularity of various energy minimizers.Of particular interest is the global structures of singular sets and asymptotic behavior of energy minimizers near such topological singularities. Many interesting natural phenomena contain some sort singular behavior and they are often manifiested through energy concentrations.Singularities of solutions of partial differential equations which describe these phenomena are,therefore,an important part of facets.We propose here to establish a rigourous mathematical theory concerning probabilly a most important class of such singularities ,topological singularity.Topological singularities arise in many physical problems and have been an important subject of much study over past many years.Among known examples are magnetic bubbles in a fereomagnetic(or anti-ferromagnetic)continuum,vortices in Bose-Einstein condensates and superconductivity,topological defects in liquid crystals,as well as skyrminors,monopoles and instantons which are particle like solutions in generic models of high energy physics.These singularities not only carry definite topological informations but also quantified amount of energies.Because of this they are often more observable and stable energitically and dynamically.Thus a rigourous mathematical theory for such singularity would be not only mathematically challenging and interesting but also of fundamental importance in sciences doc19196 none revision 1 Surfaces at the micro nano scale are comprised of many peaks and valleys (asperities) that together determine the surface roughness. It has long been shown that if one could control the size, shape and distribution of the asperities, then the lubrication properties of such surfaces could be enhanced substantially. The objectives of this project are to experimentally quantify the effects of micro asperity pattern geometry on hydrodynamic lubrication in conformal contacts, and to evaluate the effectiveness of a modified LIGA MEMs fabrication process in manufacturing controllable and repeatable micro-asperities of a specified geometry (deterministic micro asperities). Thrust bearing samples will be fabricated with various asperity patterns and geometries (e.g. - hexagons, cylinders, squares) with heights in the range of 500 nm to 50 mm. The friction coefficient, film thickness, load capacity and operating temperature of the thrust surfaces will be measured and the data compared to existing theoretical models. The thrust surfaces will also be analyzed using 3-d surface metrology and SEM techniques. The project results can be used by future researchers for further model theory refinement and by industry engineers for the design of innovative bearing and seal systems. The research and education infrastructure will also be enhanced by making the results available to students and researchers via the world wide web. A sample industrial application of the expected results indicates a long term cost savings in excess of 160 M$ and an energy savings in excess of 1.2 Trillion BTU yr, showing a potential benefit to businesses and the environment doc19197 none Macroscopic Behavior and Field Fluctuations in Heterogeneous Materials: Theory and Applications This project is concerned with heterogeneous material systems with nonlinear constitutive behavior and complex, random microstructures that evolve in time. Because of their scientific and technological importance, the focus will be on viscoplastic systems including porous and other composite materials, as well as polycrystals. There are three principal themes that will be investigated in the context of multi-scale modeling of these material systems: (i) macroscopic, or effective behavior, (ii) field fluctuations, and (iii) microstructure evolution. Close interactions with experimentalists and numerical analysts will ensure the practical relevance of the work, as well as the development of numerical tools for eventual industrial use. The effective behavior serves to characterize the average response of heterogeneous materials at a sufficiently large length scales, and can be estimated by means of suitable homogenization techniques. Although homogenization estimates are already available for composites and polycrystals, it is proposed here to make use of the second-order method that has been developed recently by the PI. This method has been found to deliver accurate estimates for some model, two-dimensional problems and it is proposed to apply it to model the effective behavior of three-dimensional viscoplastic composites and polycrystals using experimentally measured microstructural information. This second-order method has the further advantage that it automatically delivers estimates for the second moments of the field fluctuations. The field fluctuations can be used to measure the strain and stress heterogeneities in the constituent phases of a composite, or grains in a polycrystal. Such information can be useful to model the development of twinning and other instabilities in polycrystals, as well as incipient failure in composites. The field fluctuations can also be used to generate more accurate (and smoother) predictions for texture evolution. Analogous investigations can also be carried out in the context of porous materials, where the microstructure (pore size, shape, orientation and distribution) is also known to evolve during a typical deformation process, such as extrusion or hot forging. Parts of this work will be carried out in close collaboration with three C.N.R.S. laboratories in France. Complementary numerical and experimental investigations will be carried out in these laboratories, which will be supported by the CNRS in France. A separate proposal will be submitted to the Division of International Programs for additional travel expenses under the NSF CNRS cooperative scheme doc19198 none Steve Gonek The investigator and his colleagues are studying problems in analytic number theory centered mainly on the Riemann-zeta function and L-functions, and relations between their zeros and the primes. Two projects focus on the remarkable, recently discovered applications of random matrix theory to the zeta-function. Keating and Snaith s characteristic polynomial model of the zeta-function is providing heuristic answers to many previously intractable problems in analytic number theory. However, a serious drawback of the model is that it does not contain the primes. Instead, they have to be inserted in an ad hoc manner with each new application. The investigator and his colleagues have a new model that explicitly integrates the primes and zeros in a most natural way. They are applying it to a variety of problems, such as moment and order estimates for the zeta-function, and they expect it to give them new insights into the connections between the zeros and the primes. A related project explores the relations between the Gaussian Unitary Ensemble Conjecture on the zeros, the distribution of primes and almost-primes, and mean-value theorems involving the Riemann zeta-function. They also study geometrical aspects of the zeta-function, such as its curvature near the critical line, and the size of gaps between zeros. Two final problems lie in an altogether different area of number theory. These concern additive patterns of elements in the multiplicative group of a finite field and the related question of the value distribution of incomplete exponential sums containing multiplicative characters. This is a project in the area of mathematics known as number theory. The fundamental questions of interest in number theory have to do with the structure of numbers, and in particular the prime numbers, as these are the fundamental building blocks of arithmetic and, therefore, of much of mathematics. Many of the most important questions in this area are so intractable that it is impossible even to guess correct answers to them. Recently, a remarkable partnership has developed between theoretical physicists and analytic number theorists, which is succeeding in answering some of these questions. At the center of this collaboration is a model of something called the Riemann zeta-function, which is a special mathematical function known for over a century to encode within its properties a great deal of information about prime numbers. This model is based on the theory of random matrices, objects previously used to model complicated physical systems such as heavy nuclei. Although the model has been quite successful, it has the serious drawback of not containing the prime numbers which, after all, are the principal objects of interest. The investigator and his colleagues have now developed a model that does integrate the primes and zeros in a most natural way, and a main goal of this project is to explore further applications of our new model. A related project concerns arithmetic and analytic consequences of a widely believed conjecture about the zeros of the zeta-function. Using recent developments in the field, we also investigate geometrical aspects of the zeta-function such as its curvature, and gap sizes between its zeros. Two problems in a different area of number theory concern the structure of finite fields, objects with important applications to coding theory and cryptography doc19199 none This award supports the purchase of an Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometer, an Autoanalyzer, and related peripheral equipment for the stable isotope laboratory at Boston University. The laboratory provides service for a significant number of researchers at the University and at other institutions in the area who use stable isotope analysis to answer questions in ecosystem ecology, animal physiology, marine food web dynamics, coastal biogeochemistry, and paleo-oceanography. Besides increasing basic knowledge in these areas, the data to be obtained will contribute to the management of highly eutrophied coastal areas and to pest control practices in agriculture doc19200 none In this project, controllers are being developed for maneuvering flexible structures, with particular application to disk drive systems, where the flexibility of the read write arm are being addressed. The control approach separates the non-flexible and flexible dynamics of the system. Because of the desire for fast read write access times in disk drives, the approach starts with the time-optimal control for the non-flexible dynamics. Depending on how complex these non-flexible dynamics are, this time-optimal control may be solved analytically or numerically. The notions of input shaping are then used to address the flexible dynamics of the system, where a technique is being developed that incorporates the ideas of input shaping and time-optimal control to derive a feedback control law that causes flexible systems to track desired projected phase-plane trajectories that are constructed based upon state responses to shaped time-optimal control inputs. The research ideas proposed provide a clear methodology for deriving a complete theory for designing feedback controllers for multi-modal flexible structures, including non-ideal effects such as back EMF, inductance, and slew rate limitations. The PI s involvement with the Colorado Center for Information Storage (CCIS) ensures interaction with disk drive companies (such as Maxtor Corporation and Seagate Corporation) so that the techniques developed can be transferred successfully to industry. The results of this research are expected to make an impact in the disk drive industry and hence ultimately an impact on every computer user. Further, because several aspects of the basic approach are more general in nature, it is expected that the proposed research will impact other fields where structural flexibilities must be controlled doc19201 none Joseph Wartman, Drexel University Collaborative Research: Investigation of Site Effects, Seismic Compression, and Liquefaction in the June 23, Southern Peru Earthquake During the past 25 years, the largest seismic event worldwide was the Southern Peru Earthquake of June 23, (Mw = 8.4). It damaged regions in and around the cities of Moquegua, Tacna, Arequipa, Camana, and Ilo. A collaborative team of United States and Peruvian researchers conducted a geotechnical reconnaissance of the region shortly after the event. Among the key finding were: (i) the concentration of structural damage in some areas suggested the influence of site and possibly topographic amplification in the resulting damage levels; (ii) considerable damage occurred to roadways and bridges in the affected regions as a result of seismic compression, liquefaction, landslides, and rockfalls. Large magnitude seismic events such as the Southern Peru Earthquake provide an opportunity to advance the state of geotechnical earthquake engineering practice through the development and study of detailed case histories. These case studies are invaluable for calibration of existing design procedures and seismic codes, and they often serve as a springboard for developing new, more reliable analysis procedures. The objective of this collaborative research between Washington State University and Drexel University is to: (1) document and study site amplification and topographic effects in the cities of Tacna and Moquegua; (2) develop and analyze case histories of seismic compression of compacted fills; and (3) assemble and evaluate case histories of liquefaction and associated lateral spreading. The research plan takes advantage of the investigators current working relationship with the Catholic University of Peru, and from their contacts with local officials from government, engineering societies, and industry. The research involves several tasks: (a) development of representative ground motions, (b) characterization of subsurface conditions by test borings, shear wave velocity measurements, and laboratory experiments, (c) compilation and development of detailed case histories, (d) analysis of the case histories, and (e) timely dissemination of the data and findings. The case histories and associated data will be freely available on a dedicated Internet site, which will be developed in both English and Spanish to make it accessible to individuals in both the Unites States and abroad. This research will provide the profession with a series of case studies that may be used for calibration or validation of existing design and analysis procedures. It will also aid the development of new or updated analysis procedures and building design codes and seismic guidelines. The findings will have implications for the seismic safety community worldwide, and will be particularly relevant to regions such as the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, where the seismic hazard is controlled by subduction events doc19144 none Heat straightening has been used to repair damaged steel structures for many years. However, until recently practitioners use of the method was based on experience gained through trial and error. Recent research had provided and engineering basis for the method and established procedures for its use. The engineering and construction community has been hesitant to utilize heat straightening for several reasons including: past misuse of the process which has produced fractures during repair; concerns about the effect of heat straightening on material properties, especially ductility; and a general lack of understanding of the method. Its current application is primarily in repair of damaged bridge girders with limited application for other types of construction. Even though a scientific basis now exists for the method, there is a major gap in available data that has limited the application of heat straightening. There have been no significant investigations into the fracture sensitivity of heat straightened members. Without this knowledge, a performance based design approach cannot be used for designing heat-straightening repairs. The purpose of this proposal is to describe a research plan that will quantify the process and define the limiting parameters for a successful repair doc19203 none The goal of this research is to understand the influence of second-phase particles on the mechanical behavior of selected metals and alloys as their grain sizes are reduced to the smallest nanosized scales that can be achieved with processing methods that produce bulk, artifact-free metals. The scientific approach is as follows: (1) introduce second-phase particles with controlled size, spacing and volume fraction into selected fcc, bcc and hcp metal matrices; (2) reduce the grain size of the matrix to the order of 100- 200 nm and the parameters that define the particle distributions by suitable processing and heat-treatment methods; (3) characterize the grain size distributions and particle distributions using electron microscopy, scanning-probe microscopy, x-ray diffraction and thermal analysis; (4) compare mechanical behavior of multi-phase alloys with matrix metals to reveal effects of second phases on the mechanical properties as the grain size is reduced to nanometer size scales; (5) develop test methods suited for the available sample sizes to optimize the mechanical testing effort. Hardness, automated ball-indentation and miniaturized disk-bend testing are employed to provide an initial screening. Tension and compression testing will be added for selected ranges of the test conditions and microstructural parameters. Task (6) involves analysis and modeling using phenomenological and model-based analyses appropriate for the identification of the underlying deformation mechanisms. A micro-mechanical model for stress-strain behavior mechanisms as a function of grain size should aid in defining strategies for optimizing the properties and performance of this class of alloys. To optimize their mechanical properties and performance, structural metals used for engineering applications are predominately multi-phase alloys rather than pure metals. It is expected that multi-phase alloys will provide these same benefits in nanocrystalline form. The properties of this class of metals and alloys have not been documented by systematic mechanical testing, and the deformation mechanisms as a function of grain size are not understood with any degree of confidence doc19204 none The project will study the use of fiber optic sensors for health monitoring, for continuous data collection, and for sensor-based operational control of the elevator movements to ensure safety and improved performance during earthquakes and during abnormal events such as a terrorist-induced emergencies. Both analytical and experimental studies will be conducted. Several Fabry-Perot Interferometric sensors, especially developed for this task, will be installed on the guide rail system of the counterweight and the car. The dynamic sensor information will be used to make a decision about the operation of the elevators. The fiber optic sensors for temperature measurements will also be developed to aid the rescue operations in case of fire-induced emergencies. All sensors will be multiplexed. New technology for effective multiplexing of a large number of optical sensors will be developed. Experimental setup will be used to verify the effectiveness of the sensor and data acquisition and processing systems. The completed system will be able to collect technical data of much use during future earthquake occurrences. A sensor-based robust control scheme will be developed for operational control of the elevators. The control scheme will be based on the dynamic characteristics of the elevator-building systems and would include the uncertainties associated with the ground motion, uncertainties in the system parameters, and reliability of the sensor system doc19205 none Overconsolidated clays and clay shales provide engineers with some of their most challenging geotechnical problems, generally involving landslides and expansive behavior. It has been estimated that the average annual direct and indirect economic cost of landslides to public and private entities in the United States is over $3 billion in dollars. The areas most affected by landslides and expansive soils in the continental United States coincide with locations of overconsolidated clays and clay shales, including the Appalachian Mountains region, much of prairies of the Midwest from Texas to North Dakota, and the front range of the Rocky Mountains. In recent years considerable advances have been made in understanding the role of mineralogy and system chemistry on the behavior of overconsolidated clays and clay shales. In particular, it has been observed that weathering of the materials combined with changes in the pore water chemistry of the soil system can lead to significant reductions in the soil s strength. In this study a fundamental investigation of the physiochemical changes associated with the weathering of clay shales will be undertaken, using the Pierre shale of South Dakota as the test material. The objective is to identify changes in mineralogy, micromorphology and pore water chemistry that accompany the weathering processes of the Pierre shale and to correlate these changes with the reduction in shear strength. If these processes are better understood, it is likely that materials susceptible to strength loss can be more readily identified and that more effective means of mitigation can be devised. Based on the conceptual understanding developed in this research it is anticipated that recommendations for improved construction and mitigation procedures for shale slopes can be developed. Shale is one of the most commonly encountered earth materials in civil construction works. Hence, the results of this research may have a significant impact to society in terms of reduced costs associated with public works including dams, bridges and highways, as well as private projects such as housing developments and commercial properties doc19206 none The proposal is for a cooperative program between investigators at the University of Minnesota and eV Products to develop, validate, and apply new theoretical models for vertical Bridgman growth of cadmium zinc telluride (CZT), a semi-conductor material important in infrared and nuclear detector applications. Specific tasks include model development for vertical Bridgman growth, assessment of process improvements that may be expected from crucible rotation techniques, and the application of model based control strategies for melt-crystal interface shape and for suppression of flow instabilities and compositional inhomogeneities. The research program will combine experimental and process development expertise at eV Products with the theoretical computational capability and advanced control algorithm development at the University of Minnesota. If successful, the results could lead to better process operation and design for a broad spectrum of crystal growth systems, yielding better quality crystals at higher production rates and lower costs doc19207 none Cyclic Plasticity and Fatigue of Ultra Fine Grain FCC Metals at Low Plastic Strain Amplitudes This project is aimed at achieving a fundamental understanding of low plastic strain amplitude cyclic deformation and fatigue behavior in ultra fine grain FCC metals that have a low initial dislocation density. Ultra fine grain metals are those that have grain diameters in the submicron range, but generally greater than about 10 nm. Such materials are only beginning to be produced in large quantities and little is known about their mechanical behavior relative to conventional grain size materials, but ultra fine grain metals have been shown to exhibit exceptional strength with, in many cases, reasonable ductility. They are generally produced in one of three ways: by inert gas condensation and powder metallurgy, by severe plastic deformation of conventional grain size materials, and by electrodeposition. Materials produced by severe plastic deformation can exhibit both high strength and good ductility, but they have a very high dislocation density, a property that is very important in determining subsequent mechanical behavior. Materials produced by inert gas condensation and powder metallurgy generally exhibit poor ductility - they are somewhat brittle. Only materials produced by electrodeposition have both low dislocation density and exhibit high strength and good ductility. For this reason they offer potential for achieving good fatigue life characteristics relative to conventional grain size materials and ultra fine grain materials produced by other means. Because it is possible to produce large samples of ultra fine grain metals by electrodeposition, there is significant potential for commercial development for structural uses, but more needs to be known about the mechanical properties of these materials. The project will execute a focused experimental program using ultra fine grain nickel produced by electrodeposition. The objectives of the project are to develop and analyze a detailed cyclic plasticity database for ultra fine grain nickel at low plastic strain amplitudes. Fatigue experiments will be performed on specimens produced using electrodeposition of nickel. Various techniques such as optical microscopy, scanning and transmission electron microscopy, and x-ray diffraction will be used for characterizing the materials produced by electrodeposition and for studying the effects of fatigue loading. Additional objectives include the development of an understanding of fatigue crack initiation behavior in ultra fine grain nickel. Fatigue crack initiation is a precursor to the eventual loss of load-carrying capacity. The project will involve at least one graduate student in thesis work that encompasses elements of materials science, electrochemistry, solid mechanics and ferromagnetics. It will also involve undergraduate students, particularly those from under-represented groups. The results will be disseminated through conference presentations and publications in referred journals and via a website maintained by the principal investigators and their students doc19208 none The proposed research project is concerned with three classes of problems of algebraic combinatorics. They are related to several aspects of Schubert calculus and its links with representation theory, inverse boundary problems, algebraic geometry, and physics. The first part is devoted to the inverse boundary problem for certain class of networks. This problem emerged in an attempt to explain, generalize, and simplify algebraic and combinatorial constructions related to representation theory of general linear groups and canonical bases. It is directly linked to the study of total positivity on Grassmann manifolds. The second part focuses on combinatorial and algebraic problems came up in quantum Schubert calculus, which deals with quantum cohomology of complex flag manifolds and corresponding Gromov-Witten invariants. The third part is devoted to a new approach to smoothness of Schubert varieties. The investigator and his colleague suggest how to extend the notion of pattern avoidance in a general context of root systems. The main goal of the proposed research project is to investigate several problems that originally came from various areas, such as geometry and physics, and all share a discrete nature. The investigator suggests an approach to the problem of identification of networks by boundary measurements. These networks present a simple model for computer microchips. The problem can be rephrased as follows: How to identify a microchip by external examination? Another problem is related to certain geometric invariants that play a role in mathematical physics and algebraic geometry. These invariants are usually extremely hard to calculate. The investigator and his colleagues suggest a new efficient technique for computing invariants of this kind. The last part concerns with a new approach to the classical problem of smoothness doc19209 none This study aims to observe and analyze the car-following behavior of subjects who do not know they are part of an experiment, and to develop a model that can explain the stochastic effects in car-following behavior across and within drivers, as well as those caused by variability of critical factors such as human characteristics, traffic and road characteristics, and environmental characteristics. This is a significant improvement over previous empirical studies, conducted sparingly by pairs of trained professional traffic engineers on closed test tracks. The results of this project should contribute significantly to the development of more realistic microscopic car-following laws that incorporate variation across and within individual drivers. A combination of inertial, GPS, infrared sensing, and video equipment will be used to collect the data. The lead (control) vehicle will be driven by an experimenter, but it is the behavior of the follower (random members of the driving population) that will be observed. Video will be used for manual confirmation of recorded events, as well as to record certain characteristics that might play a statistically relevant role, including human, traffic and road, and environmental parameters doc19210 none James R. Martin, Virginia Polytechnic Institute Analysis of Improved Ground and Reinforced Soil System Performance During the Turkey and Nisqually Earthquakes: Reinforced Soil Structures Reinforced soil structures, such as soil-nailed walls and mechanically-stabilized embankments, have been shown to be feasible alternatives to conventional earth retaining structures. They are becoming increasingly popular, and designs are becoming more challenging with taller walls and a wider variety of reinforcing and facing materials. Design methods for static conditions are fairly well established; however there is a lack of knowledge regarding seismic performance, and a corresponding lack of comprehensive seismic design procedures. Current guidelines are very limited and are based on generalized assumptions due to the scarcity of documented seismic field performance data. Also, there are no simplified methods that can be used to predict permanent wall displacement - often the controlling serviceability criterion. Although some centrifuge and shake table model experiments have been performed to simulate seismic loadings, these experiments were not designed to assist in the development of improved design procedures. There is a need for case history analysis, parametric numerical study, and additional model experiments to fully understand the seismic behavior of reinforced soil structures and to develop improved seismic design guidelines. A unique opportunity to evaluate the behavior of these systems under a range of ground shaking levels and for a variety of soil conditions and performance levels is provided by the more than sixteen reinforced-soil structures located within the affected region of the M (7+) earthquakes in Turkey, and four walls associated with large earthquakes in Taiwan and Seattle, WA. Through field reconnaissance studies, the principal investigator collected required performance data, construction details, and subsoil data, providing a comprehensive database of wall performance. The objective of this research project is to: 1.) perform a detailed case history analysis of the most promising and potentially instructive reinforced soil systems identified, and document the findings; 2.) use the field cases to calibrate and or assess the predictive capability of the numerical models; 3.) perform dynamic parametric numerical analyses to establish behavioral trends and effectively extend the database of wall performance under seismic loading; and, 4.) use this data to develop improved seismic design guidelines for reinforced soil structures. The project ivolves a collaboration between Virginia Tech and Turkish researchers at Bogazici University and Zetas, Inc, and interfaces with a collaborative microzonation project in Turkey involving Virginia Tech, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Bogazici University, and Yokohama National University. It also addresses limitations in current seismic design methods for reinforced-soil systems that have been identified by the Federal Highway Administration in Demonstration Project No. 82 ( doc19211 none This project is to design and build a wind tunnel for aerodynamic and atmospheric boundary layer simulation and testing at Iowa State University. It address the need for investment in wind hazard research and education infrastructure by building a facility that represents a new generation of boundary layer wind tunnels designed for more realistic simulation of extreme winds. Extreme wind loads result from extreme weather events (gust fronts, thunderstorms, hurricanes) where non-stationary gusts, transitional flow structures and rapid wind directionality changes might play a significant role. The current state-of-the-art boundary layer wind tunnels cannot simulate such events. The usual assumption in current practice is that atmospheric wind is adequately simulated with stationary mean and turbulence flow properties. Adequate modeling of small-scale turbulence is important and requires a capability to generate high velocities in a relatively large test section. The wind tunnel design in this project incorporates two test sections (2.44m x 1.83 m and 2.44 m x 2.21 m) with capabilities to generate gusts, active turbulence, and a high velocity of 50m s. It will be part of the Wind Simulation and Testing Laboratory that also includes a tornado simulator, a microburst simulator, and an open circuit wind tunnel doc19212 none This project, submitted under the Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) program, will study the effect of the recent terrorist events and subsequent American actions on the nature and structure of trust in political and social institutions in the United States. The researchers are undertaking a two-wave national panel survey designed to capture the effects of information on the levels of various forms of trust and the relationships among these forms of trust. The research offers the unique opportunity to study public trust in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks and assess the effect of a national crisis on the dynamics of trust. These data will be of value to scholars interested in the topic and also to decision-makers trying to differentiate between various forms of trust and how it rises or falls as new information becomes available to the public. The researchers will be able to gauge how public trust changes over time based on the actions taken by the U.S. government in tandem with changes in the perceived threat doc19205 none Overconsolidated clays and clay shales provide engineers with some of their most challenging geotechnical problems, generally involving landslides and expansive behavior. It has been estimated that the average annual direct and indirect economic cost of landslides to public and private entities in the United States is over $3 billion in dollars. The areas most affected by landslides and expansive soils in the continental United States coincide with locations of overconsolidated clays and clay shales, including the Appalachian Mountains region, much of prairies of the Midwest from Texas to North Dakota, and the front range of the Rocky Mountains. In recent years considerable advances have been made in understanding the role of mineralogy and system chemistry on the behavior of overconsolidated clays and clay shales. In particular, it has been observed that weathering of the materials combined with changes in the pore water chemistry of the soil system can lead to significant reductions in the soil s strength. In this study a fundamental investigation of the physiochemical changes associated with the weathering of clay shales will be undertaken, using the Pierre shale of South Dakota as the test material. The objective is to identify changes in mineralogy, micromorphology and pore water chemistry that accompany the weathering processes of the Pierre shale and to correlate these changes with the reduction in shear strength. If these processes are better understood, it is likely that materials susceptible to strength loss can be more readily identified and that more effective means of mitigation can be devised. Based on the conceptual understanding developed in this research it is anticipated that recommendations for improved construction and mitigation procedures for shale slopes can be developed. Shale is one of the most commonly encountered earth materials in civil construction works. Hence, the results of this research may have a significant impact to society in terms of reduced costs associated with public works including dams, bridges and highways, as well as private projects such as housing developments and commercial properties doc19214 none Emotional and Cognitive Influences on Responses to the September 11 Attacks PI: Jennier Lerner Proposal: Sadly, the events of September 11 provide a natural laboratory for advancing emotion and judgment research, as well as testing the generalizability of the results of previous research. Emotion and judgment research might inform public policy by identifying measures that address people s cognitive and emotional needs in relation to the September 11 attacks. This panel study traces the same set of 800 participants (600 adults and 200 adolescents). The goal is to examine the differential effects of fear, anger, and sadness on risk perceptions, attributions of causality, preferences among policy options, intentions to take risk-mitigating actions, and economic behavior in response to the September 11 attacks. A second goal is to examine developmental differences in emotional reactions between adolescents and adults.More specifically, the project will use samples purchased from a firm that recruits for internet surveys through random-digit-dialing selection methods. The dataset has measures of health behavior and consumer decision-making both before and after the attacks. Wave 1 of the proposed survey and experiment consists of dispositional emotion measures, emotion-priming manipulations, and outcome measures of risk perceptions, attributions of causality, expectations of future feelings, consumer decision-making, health behaviors, and policy preferences. Wave 2 (3 months after the first wave or immediately after another national event, whichever comes first) will examine how changes in emotion over time affect the same outcome measures doc19215 none This individual investigator award supports a project that will investigate the electrical and magnetic properties of metallic heterostructures fabricated from superconducting (S), normal metal (N), and ferromagnetic (F) elements. The goal is to explore the nature of the interaction between ferromagnetism and superconductivity in FS structures, and to investigate the influence of long-range phase coherence on the thermal transport in NS heterostructures. Electrical transport properties of FS heterostructures, will be used to attempt to verify the existence of long-range superconducting correlations in a diffusive ferromagnet placed in contact with a superconductor. In addition, effects of finite spin polarization in the ferromagnet on the transport properties of FS structures will be studied. Using a novel local thermometry technique, effects in the thermopower of NS devices, as well the thermal conductance of NS structures, will be explored. Samples will be fabricated by electron-beam lithography and measured at millikelvin temperatures using various low temperature cryostats, including a dilution refrigerator and a 3He refrigerator. The students and post-docs trained on this project will gain experience with both microfabrication and low temperature techniques. Thus becoming well-prepared for careers in industry, academia or government laboratories. Superconductors are materials that show a number of unusual electrical and magnetic properties at low temperatures, the best known property being their ability to carry an electrical current without resistance. These properties form the basis for a number of useful applications, such as very high field magnets. When a superconductor is placed in good contact with a conventional normal metal such as copper or gold, or a ferromagnet like iron or nickel, the interaction between the two different elements results in new effects with potential device applications. The goal of this project is to investigate the electrical and thermal transport properties of normal metals and ferromagnets placed in close proximity to a superconductor. Electrical properties of structures incorporating ferromagnets and superconductors will be studied to investigate the interplay between magnetism and superconductivity in very small devices. In addition, heat transport in a normal metal placed in contact with a superconductor will be explored. These measurements will help us gain further insight into the interaction between superconductors, ferromagnets and normal metals on very small size scales. The samples for these experiments will be fabricated using advanced electron-beam lithography techniques, and measured using sophisticated techniques at temperatures near absolute zero. Post-doctoral associates and graduate students trained on this project will be exposed to a number of experimental techniques which will be useful in future careers in either industry or academia doc19216 none The investigator proposes to study the nonlinear dynamics and control of a class of canonical fluid systems: flow over a backward facing step, flow separation from two sharp convex corners of a bluff body, and high frequency flutter of one or multiple airfoils. Here, Control should not be interpreted in the traditional sense. Recent control efforts have focused on triggering instabilities in the fluid shear layers; by creating certain vortex dynamic interactions, system performance often improves dramatically. The proposed research seeks to gain an understanding of the nonlinear dynamic processes and the bifurcation structure of the systems, so that it may be possible to synthesize such triggering controllers systematically, rather than relying on ad hoc trial and error. The approach consists of constructing low order vortex models that capture essential features of the systems, and then performing normal form and bifurcation analyses. It is believed that lessons learned from the three canonical problems to be studied here will be applicable to a broad class of fluid flow problems whose performance is sensitive to nonlinear vortex dynamics within shear layers. The project will support close collaboration between the PI and United Technologies Research Center, whose engineers scientists are searching for practical ways of incorporating triggering controllers into several products. Furthermore, the proposed project will form a focal point around which to generate several undergraduate research projects. The PI has observed that such experiences, in which undergraduates make meaningful contributions, often buoy their motivation and desire for pursuing advanced degrees doc19217 none Advances in nanomanufacturing greatly depend on basic understanding of how to control building blocks of materials. Polymers have attracted significant attention in recent years, largely due to the rapid emergence of biotechnology and microelectronics. However, basic knowledge of the surface properties of polymers, often affecting component functionality more profoundly than bulk properties, and in-depth understanding of underlying deformation mechanisms at the nanoscale is very sparse. The central theme of this research is to bridge this gap by performing nanomechanical testing and surface chemical analysis on micrometer-thick polymer specimens manufactured by spin casting. The model polymers selected for study are polyurethane elastomers, comprising two insoluble monomers of relatively low and high glass transition temperatures, referred to as soft and hard segments, respectively. The principal objective is to examine the surface nanomechanical properties and adhesion (friction) characteristics in terms of polymer composition, contact load, elongation strain, and time under fixed elongation. The surface texture and material properties of pre-strained nanocomposite specimens will by studied by atomic force and surface force microscopy, while the surface chemical behavior at different strain levels and time under constant elongation will be analyzed by sum frequency generation vibrational spectroscopy. The information derived from this research will enhable enginnering of chemomechanical behavior of polymer nanocomposites, with direct implications to the manufacturing of nanodevices exhibiting tailor-made properties and multi-arrays bio-implants possessing either hydrophilic or hydrophobic chemical behaviors, depending on the surface composition and applied strain. In addition, this project will provide the opportunity to two graduate students to become invovled with interdisciplinary research dealing with polymer mechanical property evaluation and chemical analysis at submicron scales using surface-specific state-of-the-art microsocpy and spectroscopy techniques. Such combination of surface-sensitive instrumentation is one of the strengths of this proposal. Results from this research will be incroporated in the content of a graduate course taught annualy by the PI, which currently addreses only bulk polymer behavior. This initiative will also enable the development of collaborations with industry involved with polymer biomaterials research and development, thereby increasing the application range of the obtained basic knowledge regarding the evolution of surface mechanical properties and chemical characteristics of strecthed polymer nanocomposites doc19218 none Professor Glass will lead a collaborative project involving the research groups of Professor Potapov (Irkutsk, Russia) and Professor Glass (Tucson, AZ, USA) on the synthesis and redox chemistry of tetrachalcogentetraasteranes (sulfur, selenium and tellurium) is proposed. The synthesis of these star-shaped molecules is based on the photodimerization of 1,4-dichalcogenins. The oxidation of these materials will be studied using the electrochemical technique of cyclic voltammetry and chemical oxidants. One-electron oxidation of these compounds may provide stable radical cations with novel structures in which the charge and the odd electron are delocalized equally over all four chalcogen atoms. Spectroscopic methods, especially EPR spectroscopy, are proposed for determining the structures of these materials. Two-electron oxidation of the heteroatom asteranes will be investigated to evaluate the theory of a-aromaticity. The dications may show unusual properties if they are a-delocalized. This possibility will be evaluated by spectroscopic methods, especially NMR spectroscopy. This proposed collaborative work combines the research strengths of Professor Potapov s group in synthetic heteroatom chemistry with that of Professor Glass group in structural and redox chemistry in a mutually beneficial project which may extend our understanding of multicenter bonding and structural factors that affect electron-transfer. With this Award, The Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program and the Central and Eastern Europe Program in the Office of International Science and Engineering will support the research and international collaboration of Professor Richard S. Glass of the University of Arizona doc19219 none In the past decade, it has become evident that nanotechnology will make fundamental contributions to science and technology in diverse areas including cell-biology, quantum computers and molecular machines. There are considerable challenges that need to be overcome before the promise of nanotechnology becomes a reality, pivotal among which is broadband nanopositioning. To overcome the challenge of providing angstrom resolution at ultra-high bandwidth, a concerted paradigm of modeling, control design, experimental validation and device fabrication is proposed in this investigation. Ferroelectric materials are identified as the primary means to provide actuation for nanopositioning. However, they exhibit undesirable nonlinear behavior. In this investigation, these mechanisms will be quantified in a manner that promotes both a fundamental understanding of the underlying physics and will provide models amenable to control design and real-time implementation. The high-bandwidth nanopositioning demands are posed in a highly uncertain environment, and are multi-input multi-output in nature. In this investigation multiobjective robust control theory will be employed and enhanced with regard to nanopositioning. The theory addressed will be complemented by a comprehensive experimental setup that can be utilized to validate and suggest various strategies for nanopositioning. This investigation will provide fundamental and broad contributions to atomic force microscopy. Based on the models and control theory developed in this initiative, in collaboration with Asylum Research, a new state of the art scanning probe microscope capable of achieving the speed and resolution required for future applications will be developed. To expose a broad range of students to this nascent field, related projects will be solicited for each of the - Industrial Mathematics Modeling Workshops sponsored annually by the Center for Research in Scientific Computation at North Carolina State University. In this manner, the investigation will strongly impact students as well as provide a mechanism for transferring the technology to a leading biology-related microscope manufacturer doc19220 none Juan Pestana-Nascimento, UC Berkeley Triggering of Submarine Slide Under Multidirectional Loading Juan M. Pestana-Nascimento The behavior of relatively gentle submerged slopes on the continental shelf has become an important element in risk assessment, and in predicting the performance of offshore structures, and the complex network of pipelines carrying oil and gas from offshore drilling platforms. In addition to the obvious environmental disaster resulting from the failure of such oil gas pipeline network, underwater slide failures can potentially generate destructive tsunamis such as the Great Alaska Earthquake that devastated towns along the Gulf of Alaska and caused damage and loss of life at locations as far away as Hawaii; or more recently in the Papua New Guinea disaster associated with a submarine landslide. It is now recognized that submarine slides are a major threat to the integrity of engineered structures and to the safety of coastal communities. The ultimate goal of this project is to develop a tool for predicting the stability and displacements of submerged slopes due to irregular multidirectional cyclic loading. The research will improve the ability of numerical analyses to predict the response of submerged slides under multidimensional excitation, including both storm and seismic loading. The modeling component of the project includes the initial development of a two-dimensional site response analysis program for sloping ground (stand alone version), in which the new simplified constitutive model will be implemented and available on the web. This combination permits including the effects of the slope, and the interaction between the shearing on the plane parallel to the slope, in the dip and strike direction. Extensive parametric studies will be performed to evaluate uncertainty in the soil parameters and heterogeneity of the soil profile. The research will contribute to the fundamental understanding and prediction of failure mechanisms for submerged slopes - and these can be extended to aerial slopes. The incorporation of the constitutive model into a finite element code to predict earthquake or storm induced permanent deformations and or failure represents a significant contribution to performance-based engineering. It will enhance the estimation of forces induced on pipelines due to moving sediments, and will be the basis for more elaborate analyses coupling the hydrodynamic fluid-sediment interaction. In addition to the benefit to the geotechnical component, the results are expected to contribute to the estimation of masses that may mobilize during a slope failure and its consequences in the generation of tsunamis doc19221 none PI: Tom Kennedy, University of Arizona : The first part of the project concerns self-avoiding walks in two dimensions and their relation to Schramm s stochastic Loewner evolution process. Schramm s process is believed to describe the scaling limit of a variety of two-dimensional models, including the self-avoiding walk. The pivot algorithm provides a fast method for simulating self-avoiding walks. Recently, the principal investigator has found a new implementation of this algorithm that is as much as eighty times faster in two dimensions. This will be used to test both the conjectured conformal invariance of the self-avoiding walk and its equivalence with stochastic Loewner evolution. A version of the weakly self-avoiding walk in which the penalty for self-intersections decays with the length of the loop produced by the self-intersection will be investigated by simulations and perturbative means. The second part of the project concerns excited states in quantum spin systems. Recent work by the principal investigator has developed a method for studying the dispersion relation of one quasi-particle states and interface states in one dimension. The method is based on assuming a certain ansatz for the wave function of the states and then proving there is indeed an eigenstate of this form by a contraction mapping argument. This method will be used to study interface states in two dimensions and the excited states above these interface states. Self-avoiding walks are random walks which are not allowed to visit the same place more than once. They provide a model for linear polymers in a dilute solution. The interest in this model is, however, much broader since it is one of the simplest models that exhibits critical phenomena and in two dimensions conformal invariance. Recently there has been an explosion of conjectures relating the self-avoiding walk and other two-dimensional models to a new two dimensional stochastic process, called stochastic Loewner evolution, introduced by Schramm. Part of the project will study many of these conjectures for the self-avoiding walk by Monte Carlo simulations and by perturbative methods. The simulations will be done with a recent implementation of the pivot algorithm by the principal investigator that is much faster than previous implementations. This fast algorithm will also be used to study versions of the self-avoiding walk that are important in physical chemistry. Another part of the project is devoted to studying the low energy excitations in a variety of quantum spin systems. These are models of the behavior of the electron spins in crystals. At low temperatures the electron spins tend to align. However, several domains may form within which the spins are aligned, but between which the spins point in opposite directions. The interfaces between these domains will be studied by an approach which has proved very successful for studying one quasi-particle states. In particular, the nature of the excitations just above the interface states will be investigated doc19222 none , Adrian Rodriguez-Marek, Washington State University Collaborative Research: Investigation of Site Effects, Seismic Compression, and Liquefaction in the June 23, Southern Peru Earthquake During the past 25 years, the largest seismic event worldwide was the Southern Peru Earthquake of June 23, (Mw = 8.4). It damaged regions in and around the cities of Moquegua, Tacna, Arequipa, Camana, and Ilo. A collaborative team of United States and Peruvian researchers conducted a geotechnical reconnaissance of the region shortly after the event. Among the key finding were: (i) the concentration of structural damage in some areas suggested the influence of site and possibly topographic amplification in the resulting damage levels; (ii) considerable damage occurred to roadways and bridges in the affected regions as a result of seismic compression, liquefaction, landslides, and rockfalls. Large magnitude seismic events such as the Southern Peru Earthquake provide an opportunity to advance the state of geotechnical earthquake engineering practice through the development and study of detailed case histories. These case studies are invaluable for calibration of existing design procedures and seismic codes, and they often serve as a springboard for developing new, more reliable analysis procedures. The objective of this collaborative research between Washington State University and Drexel University is to: (1) document and study site amplification and topographic effects in the cities of Tacna and Moquegua; (2) develop and analyze case histories of seismic compression of compacted fills; and (3) assemble and evaluate case histories of liquefaction and associated lateral spreading. The research plan takes advantage of the investigators current working relationship with the Catholic University of Peru, and from their contacts with local officials from government, engineering societies, and industry. The research involves several tasks: (a) development of representative ground motions, (b) characterization of subsurface conditions by test borings, shear wave velocity measurements, and laboratory experiments, (c) compilation and development of detailed case histories, (d) analysis of the case histories, and (e) timely dissemination of the data and findings. The case histories and associated data will be freely available on a dedicated Internet site, which will be developed in both English and Spanish to make it accessible to individuals in both the Unites States and abroad. This research will provide the profession with a series of case studies that may be used for calibration or validation of existing design and analysis procedures. It will also aid the development of new or updated analysis procedures and building design codes and seismic guidelines. The findings will have implications for the seismic safety community worldwide, and will be particularly relevant to regions such as the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, where the seismic hazard is controlled by subduction events doc19223 none Astract: The primary objective of this research project is to develop a rockbolt support element that is capable of modeling actual rockbolt behavior, particularly nonlinear movement between the bolt and the rock which is critical for numerical modeling. Discontinuous Deformation Analysis, DDA, has several unique features that make it a perfect candidate for development of a bolt element that has the ability to characterize rockbolt behavior to a much higher degree of realism and accuracy than has previously been possible. DDA is an implicit discrete element method that already has the capacity to model blocks of any irregular shape, and the contact routines are specifically designed to efficiently capture contact between blocks with both convex and concave vertex angles. The method accounts for frictional, cohesive, and tensional forces which are present at the contacts, and allows blocks to slide, separate, and impact without penetrating. A rockbolt element will be implemented as a block with a particular geometry and special material properties consistent with those of a typical rockbolt. The support-rock interaction mechanics will then be incorporated into the model as manifested by displacement between the bolt element and the surrounding rock blocks. This capability to model bolt behavior, especially pull-out failure, will make the DDA rockbolt element a more accurate modeling tool than other previously developed numerical rockbolt support elements. Mark ( ) states that the reinforcement mode is actually dictated to the bolts by the ground, rather than the reverse. One of the real strengths of the DDA approach is that this outcome is a natural result of the analysis. The behavior and failure mode do not have to be specified before or during the analysis - they are part of the calculated results. The NIOSH Spokane Research Laboratory, which was a branch of the US Bureau of Mines until and is now part of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, has invested significant resources into the development, installation and testing of instrumented rockbolts since the mid- s. Analysis of the data collected using the instrumented rockbolts has contributed a great deal to the general understanding of the behavior of rockbolt supports, and collaboration with NIOSH personnel is an important component of this project. The development of the bolt element will involve bolt type selection, theoretical development, algorithm development and implementation. The PI and Ms. Kathryn Clapp, the Montana Tech graduate student involved in this project, will jointly work on all of these aspects, with assistance from Mr. Steve Signer of NIOSH. One fairly unique aspect of this project is that once the theoretical development is finished and the rockbolt algorithms have been implemented into the software, validation will be performed using the large archive of NIOSH instrumented rockbolt data which has already been collected. This is a tremendous advantage and will allow the project to be completed in a relatively short period of time, with a modest budget. Ms. Clapp will perform the bulk of the validation activities, which will entail constructing DDA models corresponding to each of the different laboratory test configurations used, and performing analyses with model conditions specified to represent the lab tests as closely as possible. The DDA calculations of the head displacement and load values at points along the bolt will be recorded and compared to actual bolt behavior as observed during the tests. Reference: Mark, C. ( ). Design of Roof Bolt Systems. In C. Mark, D.R. Dolinar, and R. Tuchman, eds. New Technology for Coal Mine Roof Support, Proceedings of the NIOSH Open Industry Briefing, NIOSH IC , pp. 111-132 doc19224 none Unlu This three-year award involves researchers and graduate students at two national centers of photonics research: Boston University s Photonics Center and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology s (Lausanne) new Microelectronics System Laboratory and National Competence Center for Research in Photonics. The project is led by M. Selim Unlu in the US and Yusuf Leblebici and Marc Ilegems in Switzerland. The research is aimed at the fabrication on the same chip of integrated opto-electronic transreceivers, and the development of input and output signals transmitted over a bundle of optical fibers or on a single fiber. This international cooperative program brings together researchers with complementary expertise. Professor Unlu and his students work on design, fabrication and characterization of optoelectronic devices with specific expertise in resonant-cavity enhanced (RCE) photodector structures. These structures will be fabricated using double -SOI silicon process. Silicon is recognized as the material of choice for large-scale integration in electronics and computing. US expertise is complemented by Swiss experience in clock data recovery (CDR) circuitry development. The investigators propose to integrate RCE and CDR on the same chip. The expected product is a commercially viable single chip for applications in high-speed, optical telecommunications and data transmissions using fiber channels doc19225 none Emily Carter of UCLA is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program and the Materials Theory Program to continue exploring methodologies that aim to develop systematic first principles improvements to density functional theory (DFT) predictions of energetics, structure, and forces in a local region of condensed matter, enabling the investigation of phenomena such as local many-body excited states on metals by first principles techniques. The specific project goals are: (1) to extend the current technique to multi-reference single and double excitation configuration interaction (MRSDCI) embedding theory, in order that surface reactions involving simultaneous breaking forming of multiple covalent bonds can be studied quantitatively, (2) to implement reduced scaling local pseudo-spectral MRSDCI within the embedding theory so that medium-sized molecule-surface reactions can be examined, (3) to implement forces in the embedding theory so that structure optimization and dynamics can be performed, (4) to continue various aspects of method benchmarking, (5) to apply the method to ground state adsorbate-surface systems where DFT has been shown to fail, (6) and to apply the method to many-body physics problems involving multiple excited states. The development of accurate techniques for the first principles prediction of condensed matter energetics, forces, and structure remains a challenging research goal with practical implications. Applications of such computer simulation methods can lead to insights that encourage changes in current technologies to more environmentally friendly industrial processes, more efficient sources of energy, and the production of more advanced materials doc19226 none The introduction of short discontinuous fibers into hydraulic cement composites can improve material toughness, strength, resistance to shrinkage cracking, and durability. The degree to which such improvements are achieved depends on many factors, including fiber type, fiber dosage, properties of the matrix, phase, hygral and thermal loading conditions and the spatial distribution of the constituents. Enhancing performance is paramount for repair and retrofit technologies that utilize such materials, including fiber-reinforced composite overlay systems. However, direct quantitative relationships between the basic material parameters and the desired composite performance measures are still lacking. One of the main complicating factors is the multi-scale, three-dimensional nature of cement composite materials, damage processes and transport mechanisms. The proposed research addresses the need for model-based simulation, experimentation and visualization procedures that tie the material parameters (including those of the fiber components) to performance measures defined at the structural scale. While the focus here is on overlay systems for structural repair and retro fit, the proposed methods have general application toward optimizing the use of fiber-reinforced cement composites within the civil works infrastructure. The project involves interactive, iterative comparisons between model-based simulation results and data from in-house experimentation. The numerical model development, including development of pre-and post-processing modules, and experimentation will be conducted. First, the basic numerical algorithms will be coded on locally available computer facilities. As the algorithms near maturity, large scale simulations will be performed using both in-house high-performance computing resources and resources at the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) based at the San Diego Supercomputer Center doc19227 none Several investigations into processes of high energy atomic physics are proposed. All of these are releated to understanding the role of relativity, retardation , higher multipole efeects and electron correlations in ionization, and scattering doc19228 none Markoff, Sera Dr. Markoff is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at MIT s Center for Space Research. She will conduct a theoretical and observational study of astrophysical jets, twin outflows of relativistic plasma formed and expelled near the event horizons of accreting black holes. She will develop models for predicting the contribution of jets to the broadband spectra of stellar X-ray binaries and low-luminosity active galactic nuclei, which are orders of magnitude apart in mass, but close in scaled power. Her participation in observational campaigns will provide data for testing these predictions and the underlying similarities between the engines that drive jets of stellar and galactic scale. Her program of research will address fundamental outstanding questions pertaining to jets, such as their formation and matter content. She will incorporate her research into a new educational unit for classrooms participating in Project Astro and for an exhibit for the Boston Museum of Science, Current Science and Technology Center. She also plans to teach associated courses at the Museum and at local teachers professional development workshops doc19229 none Proposal: Principal Investigator: Qingbo Huang, Wright State University This mathematical research focuses on equations of Monge-Ampere type and fully nonlinear elliptic equations with geometric or physical motivation. The first part of this project is devoted to several equations of Monge-Ampere type. In particular, we propose to study regularity of solutions and other quantitative properties such as the large time behavior of solutions and characterization of associated nonlinear semigroups for several parabolic Monge-Ampere equations arising in the deformation of surfaces, to develop regularity theory for weak solutions of degenerate Monge-Ampere equations and study its interaction with Monge-Kantorovich optimal mass transfer problem stemming from economics and other areas of science, and to consider an equation arising in geometric optics for the synthesis of reflector antennas. The second part of the project is concerned with fully nonlinear elliptic equations without concavity condition, regularity theory of weak solutions of Hessian equations, and the infinity Laplacian equation as the Euler equation of minimizing Lipschitz extension. This research is in the area of nonlinear partial differential equations. These equations play a crucial role in the application of mathematics to real world. Most phenomena in nature and society, such as heat transfer, flows in porous media, construction of reflectors, optimal disposition of air masses, are described by nonlinear partial differential equations. Study of these equations will greatly help understand the nature of these phenomena and develop practical, fast, and reliable numerical algorithms. One of the proposed problems is related to Monge-Kantorovich optimal mass transfer problem appearing in economic, physics, and meteorology. Another problem arises from the engineering problem of construction of reflector antennas. The parabolic Monge-Ampere equations are motivated from differential geometry and appear in the model of worn stones. The proposed project has a strong connection with real harmonic analysis and differential geometry. We expect that this research will stimulate more interplay among these areas doc19230 none PI: Jarek Kwapisz, Montana State University Torus Maps and Cocyclic Subshifts The PI proposes research in two areas: rotation sets for maps of tori and symbolic dynamics of cocyclic subshifts. The first is motivated by classical questions about the flow on invariant tori in Hamiltonian systems or systems of coupled relaxation oscillators and concentrates on maps of a two-torus that are isotopic to the identity. The rotation set is a compact and convex subset of the plane that roughly collects all the average winding vectors (frequencies) exhibited by the orbits of the system. The PI s goal is to establish results on a priori degeneracy of the rotation set to a single point and to understand the extent to which the dynamics must then be equivalent to that of the rigid rotation. The tools involved include the number theory of the rotation set, hierarchies of dynamical tilings, geometric topology, quasi-conformal estimates, and renormalization techniques. Cocyclic subshifts are a new class of algebraically defined dynamical systems obtained as the supports of locally constant matrix cocycles on the full shift over a finite alphabet. They generalize sofic systems and play a role in the symbolic dynamics based on the Conley index similar to the role of subshifts of finite type in the context of Markov partitions. The PI will study the interplay between the algebra of the cocycle and the dynamics of its subshift. Nonlinear oscillatory behavior is typical of many systems encountered in science and technology. The examples include plasma particles (in magnetic fields of the sun or plasma containment devices), electrical currents (in electronics or living tissue), Belousov-Zhabotinsky type chemical reactions, convection currents (in a heated fluid), and planets of our solar system. Many realistic models are impossible to solve analytically and may be accurately followed on a computer only for a limited time. The theory of rotation sets tries to remedy this problem by studying the fundamental properties of systems of coupled oscillators in an abstract setting so that qualitative predictions of the long time behavior can be made for broad classes of models. Symbolic dynamics deals with infinite sequences of zeros and ones and is motivated by problems of telecommunication, where routinely data is encoded by such sequences and the volume is huge enough to justify the idealization to infinite sequences. Loosely speaking, the main goal is to understand the relation between the properties of the sequences and the design of the (mathematical or physical) device generating them. The cocyclic subshifts arise from a new kind of device capable of matrix multiplication. They generalize the so called subshifts of finite type, which are generated by finite state automata and are a standard tool in coding information for magnetic recording. Cocyclic subshifts are also used to detect chaos in dynamical systems doc19231 none Investigation into the geomicrobiology of deep continental rocks is still at its infancy, partly due to the high cost of the deep continental drilling. This project takes full advantage of the recently initiated Chinese Continental Scientific Drilling project to obtain rock cores from depth up to m in a geologically complex tectonic setting, plate subduction zone. Previous geological studies have revealed ultra high-pressure metamorphic rocks and minerals in this region, along with abundant fluids and gas in fractures and fault zones. We propose to study abundance and diversity of microbes in metamorphic rocks and their impact on geological and geochemical processes. We will develop procedures of sample processing, including detection of contamination, sample preservation, and extraction of microbes from crystalline rocks. Chemical and microbial tracers will be used to evaluate contamination of rock cores by surface microbes. Pristine subsurface rocks will be used to determine microbial biomass by the phospholipid fatty acid method. Attempts will be made to extract DNA from uncontaminated rock cores, followed by sequencing and identification. Culturability of microbes in rock cores will be assessed doc19232 none Michael Schatz George Institute of Technology This is a one-year exploratory program to study the use of thermocapillary-based opto-microfluidics with water based samples. It is a proof-of-principle study to determine whether evaporation effects adversely affect the intended motion of such fluid samples by the proposed opto-microfluidic techniques. Experiments will be focused on aqueous microdroplets on immiscible liquid substrates. The effect of biologically-based surface-active agents on the motion of the microdroplets, and the metering and mixing of such samples by the proposed technique will also be studied doc19233 none This U.S.-Czech research project involves two teams led by Carol Auer of the University of Connecticut and her counterparts in Prague, Vaclav Motyka and Radomira Vandova, from the Institute of Experimental Botany, Czech Academy of Sciences. Their collaboration features examination of a group of plant hormones called cytokinins which influence plant growth. Plants regulate the level of active cytokinin molecules within tissues and cells to achieve normal vegetative and reproductive development. In the complex process of cytokinin homeostasis, the regulatory mechanism is the reversible or irreversible conjugation of cytokinins to sugar molecules. This US-Czech effort looks at irreversible conjugation that down-regulates active cytokinin levels in cells. The goal is to biochemicaly characterize the enzyme N-glucosyltransferase (N-GT) so that we may understand its function in cytokinin homeostasis and plant development. Radish and Arabidopsis are the primary experimental materials. The Czech partners will define the biochemical properties and enzyme(s) of the regulatory pathway while isolation of mutants and eventually cloning of genes involved in N-GT will be conducted by the U.S. team members. If successful, findings may be applicable in future efforts to manipulate plant growth and develop agricultural crops. This international project in plant hormone research fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the Untied States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc19234 none Holmes Under this Investigator Initiated Award, the PIs will develop methods to characterize cardiac motion from 4D echocardiographic images (3D over time), thus taking advantage of advances made in recent decades by cardiologists in imaging technologies and by engineers in strain analyses. A multidisciplinary team will analyze 4D ultrasound images in a database obtained with a novel 4D ultrasound scanner at Columbia. The proposal has three objectives: 1) Establish a parametric 4D representation of endocardial wall motion in a parameter space optimally suited to detecting regional wall motion abnormalities and test potential detection strategies, 2) Use a 3D finite element model to estimate the sizes of ischemic regions or scars that would produce detectable wall motion abnormalities on 3D ultrasound images and 3) select a method for displaying information on detected wall motion abnormalities that best enhances detection while promoting acceptance among cardiologists. Teaching materials will be developed to describe various historical approaches to analyzing heart function and to outline the current state of the art doc19235 none A collaborative research and education relationship among Purdue University, University of Minnesota, and Xerox Corporation is being formed to engage in the high risk and high payoff task of developing new theoretical perspectives for sensing and control for the 39 billion on-demand printing industry. The charge of the industry-university research team is to develop fundamental understanding of the sensing and control issues for digital color xerography and to develop practical and theoretically sound control systems that expand the operation envelop of printing systems while producing consistent, high quality prints in a predictable manner. Our approach will 1) use existing models of human visual perception in control analysis and synthesis, 2) exploit process elements to maximize sensing and actuation opportunities, 3) use the principle of coordination to achieve the final performance objectives, and 4) exploit the transformation between spatial and temporal system representations. The methodology and control-centric system approach developed by this endeavor will significantly improve the image quality of digital color xerography. This technology will help propel the industry to a new era and maintain the competitive edge of the U.S. short-run and office printing industry. The control strategies and design methodologies will be applicable to other printing and imaging systems, such as inkjet, image scanners and microscopy doc19236 none O Connor This award provides continued funding to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) to help promote scientific collaboration and improve communication among Biomedical Engineering researchers and their professional societies from 48 countries worldwide. AIMBE is the U.S. member organization to the International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering and this award provides funds to support travel of AIMBE S appointed representative to participate in meetings of IFMBE s Administrative Council. Representation on the Administrative Council provides the United States with the opportunity to develop new lines of communications and collaborative projects among biomedical engineering researchers globally, thereby extending the U.S. leadership role in medical science and technology research and development. This is particularly relevant to investigations concerning emerging medical technologies. The current AIMBE representative to IFMBE is Dr. Dov Jaron, who also serves as the current President of IFMBE. Proceeds from a grant would be used to support the cost of attending Council meetings and regional conferences in Asia, Latin America, and Europe. The Council meetings entail strategic planning of the organization, planning of scientific meetings, publications, dissemination of scientific information and initiation of advanced projects in critical and emerging areas. The regional conferences are designed to promote collaboration and networking among Bioengineering researchers and educators from the United States and developing countries and as a mechanism to implement the critical projects. The funding level is modest compared to the anticipated value for the U.S. community of biomedical engineering researchers. And the project is expected to promote the role of the National Science Foundation in advancing research and education in this field globally while assisting NSF in achieving its strategic objectives doc19237 none The project will investigate the role of ULF waves in the energization and diffusion of highly energetic radiation belt particles. It will extend a previously existing two-dimensional model of energetic particles in the Earth s radiation belts to three dimensions, which will allow the model to include effects such as losses of energetic particles to the upper atmosphere. It will couple the model to a more realistic model of the magnetic field and electric field produced by Magnetohydrodynamic modeling of the global magnetosphere doc19238 none Paul Herrnson University of Maryland SGER: Human Factors Research on Voting Machines and Ballot Design: An Exploratory Assessment This grant will support an exploratory assessment of the current state of knowledge regarding the human element in the voting process. The grantee will lay a groundwork for the systematic comparison of different methods of voting, including comparisons of the accuracy of different methods of voting, including ease of use and other factors related to voter confidence in the voting system. This work is especially relevant given the controversy surrounding the November national elections, and the movement of many political jurisdictions toward the purchase of new voting systems doc19239 none Arras, Philip Dr. Arras is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). He will conduct theoretical studies of the tidal interactions between stars and planets. His work will explore the tidal effect of the primary star on various orbiting objects: close-in extrasolar planets, Jupiter-type planets, stars which are still forming, and ordinary low-mass stars. He hopes to use his calculations to explain recent observations of extrasolar planets as well as observations of Jupiter s atmosphere. For his educational component, he will develop two new physics courses to be taught at UCSB: a graduate course on galactic dynamics, and an undergraduate course on fluid mechanics called The Physics of California that will apply the material to local natural phenomena such as waves and earthquakes doc19240 none This project, submitted under the Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) program, will examine public attitudes toward the terrorist attacks of September 11, . The researchers are undertaking telephone interviews with approximately 100 individuals each week for six months as part of a national rolling-cross section design. The research offers the opportunity to study public attitudes in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks and assess the impact of threat on public opinion and its interaction with public policy decision making. These data will be of value to scholars interested in the topic and also to decision-makers trying to differentiate among threats to physical safety, the American economy, and the American culture, status and way of life. The researchers will be able to gauge how public opinion changes over time on issues under debate in Washington in tandem with changes in perceived threat doc19241 none Prop: PI: Conselice, Christopher Dr. Conselice is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a program of research, education, and public outreach at the . He will study the problem of how galaxies form and evolve by making observations of merging galaxies and comparing the observations to models that trace the evolution of galaxies by both mergers and initial collapse. Dr. Conselice has developed a novel method to quantify the merger status of individual galaxies by measuring their asymmetry. He will use this method, as well as others, to distinguish between galaxies that were formed by the merging of smaller galaxies, and those that were formed by rapid collapse. Dr. Conselice will also supervise undergraduates in research, teach undergraduate seminars, and write essays on astronomy for the general public doc19242 none Sheinis, Andrew Dr. Sheinis is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at the Center for Adaptive Optics at the University of California Santa Cruz. His primary focus will be the development of an astronomical spectrograph which uses Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) technology. This new technology should allow a spectrograph to have multi-slit capability without the construction of a fixed multi-slit mask for each observation. He will use the new instrument to obtain optical and near-IR spectra of QSO s in order to study the environment of the host galaxies. As part of his fellowship, he will participate in the center s Science, Engineering and Technology Training program which targets undergraduates under-represented in those areas. Twice every year, he will give a one-week seminar on general optics to these students in order to prepare them for participation in group research projects doc19243 none Since its inception in , the main goal of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual Conference has been to encourage promising and established young researchers to write empirically oriented papers that draw out and test the empirical implications of new theories as well as papers that use relevant theory to analyze empirical or policy issues of current interest. There has also been a tendency within the field of macroeconomics to split into different schools of thought with little communication between these schools. Another goal of the Macroeconomics Annual has been to provide an opportunity for macroeconomists within different points of view to focus on different approaches to problems, not in the abstract, but in relation to specific empirical issues. The conference series will continue to encourage the writing of empirically oriented papers by both established and promising young economists. In addition, the series will continue to serve as a forum for communication among economists from the different schools of macroeconomics. The annual conference volume has become a widely cited and influential research reference doc19244 none Gawiser, Eric Dr. Gawiser is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at Yale University. He will conduct a wide-field, multicolor survey for galaxies of high redshift (z=3 to 5), which will allow him to measure galaxy clustering. The large number of objects identified in this survey will provide measures of galaxy mass that will discriminate among competing theories of galaxy formation and evolution. His educational program involves a program of public education and outreach at the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He will develop tools that will provide general public access to the future virtual observatories of astronomical archival data and will conduct seminars introducing visitors to the techniques for using these virtual observatories doc19245 none Under the direction of Dr. Jon Erlandson, MS Torben Rick will collect data for his doctoral dissertation research, excavating five archaeological sites on California s Northern Channel Islands that date within the last 4,000 years. Native peoples of the southern California Coast and Channel Islands were among the most populous and culturally complex hunter-gatherers in the world. During the historic era, Chumash and Tongva peoples in the region lived in large villages or towns, some with as many as 1,000 residents, had hierarchical sociopolitical organization, and used shell bead money to purchase a variety of goods and services. The Northern Channel Islands also contain the earliest evidence of maritime peoples in North America and a spectacular record of coastal hunter-gatherers that spans the last 12,000 years. This continuous archaeological sequence, along with the excellent preservation of Channel Islands archaeological sites, provides a unique opportunity to investigate the evolution of cultural complexity among hunter-gatherers with great time depth and relatively high precision. The archaeological sites where research will be conducted are extremely well preserved villages that contain dense accumulations of shellfish, fish and sea mammal bones, a variety of artifacts, and three of the sites also contain circular depressions that are the remains of house structures. These sites provide an important laboratory for documenting aspects of community and household life among coastal peoples in the region. Excavation and mapping of these villages will provide a means to assess the evolution of Chumash society, with a specific focus on how communities and households structured and maintained hierarchical sociopolitical organization. This project will increase our understanding of community and household archaeology, maritime adaptations, the evolution of complex hunter-gatherers, and the relationships between environmental and cultural changes. Ultimately, the data gathered will enhance our understanding of the causal mechanisms behind the development of hierarchy, social inequality, and other highly significant evolutionary changes in human behavior doc19246 none The aim of this project is to study various aspects of cubature formulae (CF), synonym for higher dimensional numerical integration formulae, and orthogonal polynomials of several variables (OP). The project calls for a study of cubature formula from an algebraic point of view as well as new constrction method, such as through studying of polynomial interpolation in several variables. It also proposes to investigate further properties of OP with respect to weight functions on various regular domains, such as the cube, the ball, the simplex and the sphere. The aim is to uncover further hidden properties of CF and OP, and to find closed formulae and explicit construction, so that further theoretic results and methods with practical implication can be built upon. Cubature Formulae (CF) and Orthogonal Polynomials (OP) of several variables have fruitful connections with many branches of applied mathematics such as numerical integration, approximation, coding theory, data fitting, combinatorics and statistics, to name a few, as well as with areas such as harmonic analysis, group representation, computational algebraic geometry and differential equation. CF itself is essential for practical evaluation of high dimensional integrals, which is one of the basic questions in numerical analysis and is often taken as a test problem in high speed computing. The proposed project seeks new understanding in the nature of CF and OP in several variables, and it aims at workable results that have practical implications, such as new method for constructing CF. Date: June 18, doc19247 none Venkatesan, Aparna Dr. Venkatesan is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a program of research, education, and public outreach at the University of Colorado. She will develop theoretical models of the formation of the very first generation of stars in the early universe. Recent observations of high-redshift quasars have provided new constraints on the epoch of formation and on the gas out of which the stars were formed. In addition to her theoretical work, Dr. Venkatesan will collaborate with other astronomers at the University of Colorado in further observations of high-redshift objects in order to learn more about the properties of the intergalactic medium at various epochs. As her primary outreach activity, she will tutor and teach for the local Upward Bound program which targets Native American students. Her educational skills will also be developed by teaching astronomy courses for the general public doc19248 none for This project concerns problems at the juncture of geometry, topology, and physics. The mathematical challenge we address is :(i) to provide a rigorous framework for functional integrals in geometrical quantum field theories, and (ii) to use the rigorous framework to prove results which may be conjectured in the heuristic informal setting suggested by physics. Specifically, we will be concerned with : (a) quantum Yang-Mills gauge theory over surfaces, (b) a three dimensional Chern-Simons gauge theory, and (c) other functional integrals arising from geometrical topological quantum theories. The goal will be to give rigorous foundations to the mathematical expressions and objects which arise in these theories and then to use them to further develop mathematical ideas and solve specific problems. The mathematics involved includes geometry and topology connected with fiber bundles and Lie groups, as well as stochastic analysis and infinite-dimensional integration. Stochastic analysis has often been applied in the study of the geometry of manifolds. The present proposal addresses situations which promise deeper applications of stochastic analysis in settings enriched by geometry and topology. This research program will bring together geometry and topology with stochastic analysis to provide solid mathematical foundations for certain computations done in physics, solve certain specific problems and develop new mathematical ideas arising from quantum physics. The physics is quantum field theory, which describes the quantum behavior of forces that govern the interaction between elementary particles in nature such as those which make up protons and neutrons. This project is concerned with development of fundamental mathematics connected with an area of physics. There may be potential applications to surface physics and other phenomena involving geometry and stochastics, but this project itself is devoted primarily to foundations rather than application. History shows that mathematics arising through an investigation of fundamental notions associated to one particular context later finds application in areas far removed from the original context, this being an essential aspect of the centrality of mathematics to applied sciences doc19249 none Burdea Under this Investigator Initiated Award, studies will be performed that develop and test a computerized system for at-home mobility rehabilitation. The PI has developed the Rutgers Ankle System that provides a 3D, 6 degrees of freedom interface. The system provides the position and pressure force information from the human foot. The present system is for a single limb. Developing a duel platform for the measurement of both limbs is the first aim of this proposal. The patient subject is asked to control pilot a plane through 3D hoops in the Virtual Reality (VR) world using the ankle-foot complex. A VR exercise library will be developed including exercises incorporating stair climbing, walking on uneven surfaces, etc. After the system is validated in the clinical setting, the PI will implement a VR based tele-rehabilitation system using the INTERNET and network technology so as to provide in home VR rehabilitation exercises with remote monitoring of the patient s progress. Though initially developed for stroke survivors, other patient populations, such as orthopedic, arthritic and cognitively impaired patients, may benefit as well doc19250 none The investigator and his collaborators study the following topics in arithmetic algebraic geometry: the uniformity of small points for family of heights, the arithmetic Kodaira-Spencer class for arithmetic surfaces with applications to the effective Mordell conjecture, the Gross-Zagier type formula for Shimura varieties with applications to the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture and the Andre-Oort conjecture. This is a project in a subfield of mathematics known as number theory. Many of these questions are motivated by the philosophy that algebraic information can be obtained by geometric methods. At the center of this project is the use of a symmetric group, or algebraic group, which is an object that is both algebraic and geometric in nature. These symmetric groups arise naturally in physics and chemistry. It is not too ambitious to say that the solution to the problems in this proposal will one day affect research in cryptography, theoretical physics, and quantum computing doc19251 none John R. Klein This proposal contains two programs. The first is to study a variety of homotopy theoretic problems associated with space of smooth embeddings of one manifold in another. Among these problems are obstruction theory for embeddings, linking phenomena, compression problems and splitting questions. The second program is a new approach to the study of the equivariant structure sets of topological manifolds equipped with a tame action of a finite group. The new ingredient is to use Poincare embeddings to analyse the difference between the equivariant structures and the isovariant ones. A manifold is a topological space which is locally euclidean. A fundamental problem in topology is to enumerate the embeddings one manifold into another one. The set of all such embeddings forms a topological space. The first part of this proposal is to study various topological aspects of the space of embeddings. The second part concerns the classification of manifolds equipped with a finite group of symmetries doc19252 none This dissertation research will construct an experiment to test how the encouragement of cheating has an effect on the frequency of subjects cheating and their tendency to encourage others to cheat. Two aspects of the situation are varied: the person encouraging the cheating has high, low, or undefined status; and the encouragement to cheat is endorsed or not by the subjects workgroup. The experimental test is derived from well established theories and research on deviance that emphasize the importance of peers on deviant behavior. The results should specify more precisely how this influence operates doc19253 none PI: Evans, Michael J Proposal: Institution: Washington & Lee University This proposal requests funding for a Summer Symposium in Real Analysis, that is part of an established series of conferences in Real Analysis. This conference has a long and successful history and it is expected that it will attract a fair number of graduate students and young researchers form all of the US. A substantial part of the award funds will be used to enable them to attend the Symposium. This symposium will highlight lectures by experts, provide a dynamic forum for the discussion of research problems, and allot prime speaking time to young researchers doc19254 none The electromagnetic coupling between the ionosphere and the magnetosphere ultimately takes place through small-scale currents and fields. Auroral arcs form on scales smaller than 1 kilometer. This project will investigate the processes by which electromagnetic energy can be transferred to these small scales in the topside auroral ionosphere. It will focus on two of primary processes: (1) linear phase mixing of Alfven waves where there are perpendicular gradients in the Alfven speed, and (2) nonlinear interactions between Alfven waves trapped in the ionospheric Alfven resonator. The research will be carried out by using two and three dimensional simulations of the propagation of Alfven waves using a nonlinear MHD code. The currently existing linear MHD code will be modified to include electron inertial effects along auroral field lines. It will include the effects of the formation of density cavities and the outflow of ions along auroral field lines doc19255 none This dissertation research will analyze organizational texts to evaluate the degree of organizational isomorphism: the extent to which organizations come to resemble each other in response to external institutional expectations. Texts from universities and corporations will provide the principal data for these analyses. Comparisons will be made between texts from individual speakers (e.g., university presidents) and from organizational sources (e.g., privacy policies). Texts will be coded using two established computer programs and human coders doc19256 none In this project funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Vilesov will investigate fundamental properties of hydrogen molecules and clusters trapped in ultracold helium droplets. The work consists of two parts. In the first, the focus is on H2, D2, and HD molecules clustered to chromophores with different properties. The second part will be devoted to the study of neat hydrogen clusters, special attention being given to those in the size range below 30 molecules. Infrared and CARS spectroscopy will be employed in these investigations. Research on molecules and clusters entrapped in ultracold droplets of liquid helium provides new information on their behavior not available with conventional techniques. Not only do the trapped species vibrate, but they also rotate in the droplets, which indicates that the interaction between the trapped species and the embedding bath is minimal. The slight changes in the rotational energies relative of those that pertain to gaseous molecules allow a quantitative assessment of the forces that bind the molecules into the droplets doc19257 none Barrett The purpose of this project is to provide a meaningful design experience for University of Wyoming, College of Engineering students that will directly aid individuals with disabilities within the state of Wyoming. This activity will provide a vital link between the University s talented students and individuals with assistive technology needs. Students will create and provide prototype, custom designed devices that will enhance the quality of life for the individual. Also, this program will educate new design engineers on the special needs of community members with disabilities. The project has the following objectives: Provide engineering students a multi-disciplinary, meaningful, community service experience Provide persons with disabilities assistive devices to empower them to achieve the maximum individual growth and development and afford them the opportunity to participate in all aspects of life Provide engineering students education and awareness on the special needs and challenges of persons with disabilities Provide undergraduate engineering students exposure to the biomedical field of engineering. The College of Engineering has partnered with three organizations that provide education and service related to disability. The organizations are the Wyoming Institute for Disabilities (WIND) assistive technology program, Wyoming New Options in Technology (WYNOT) and their Sports and Outdoor Assistive Recreation (SOAR) project along with the university s Special Education program. Individuals with disabilities will be linked with a team of engineering students to provide a prototype custom-designed assistive device specific to their needs doc19258 none The PI proposes to design, build and test a prototype liquid xenon time projection chamber (TPC) to observe collisions between weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) and xenon atoms. By the end of the two-year program, the key technical issues associated with the TPC module of a larger scale will have been identified and resolved. This new design will be based on a liquid-xenon TPC that she developed for studying astrophysics gamma ray sources doc19259 none Although the role of magnesium (Mg2+) in biochemical and physiological processes is more widely appreciated now than it ever was, huge gaps remain in our understanding of normal Mg2+ physiology. Compared to our understanding of the multifarious roles of calcium, our understanding of the molecular, biochemical and physiological roles of Mg2+ are woefully inadequate. For example, Mg2+ concentrations are tightly regulated inside cells, but the mechanism of Mg2+ entry into cells is entirely unknown. No Mg2+-channel has been identified to this date, and the first membrane Mg2+ transporter (channel, carrier, or pump) has yet to be isolated. As to Mg2+ outside cells, Mg2+ concentrations in the blood (plasma) are tightly regulated (like calcium), but a Mg2+ hormone has not been discovered to date. Hence it is important that new, young investigators of magnesium biology are encouraged intellectually and supported financially. This award provides funds to support the travel of 12 young molecular biologists to present posters of their work at the 8th Gordon Conference on Magnesium in Biological Processes and Medicine to be held in Ventura CA from Feb. 3 to Feb. 8, . In view of the promise that molecular biology holds for our understanding of magnesium in basic processes of life (photosynthesis, the stabilization of DNA and proteins, the activation of over 300 cell enzymes), the NSF funds will be earmarked for young investigators who study the basic science of magnesium. The funds will be used to subsidize their travel and or conference fees at the level of $ 600 each. This new cadre of magnesium investigators will be selected according to three criteria: 1) they must have published a significant paper on the chemistry, physiology, or molecular biology of magnesium in the past 3 years, 2) they must be new to the Magnesium Gordon Research Conference, and 3) they are likely to make a long-term commitment to basic research on the physiology, biochemistry and molecular biology of magnesium. The recruitment and the nurturing of young investigators are particularly appropriate for the Gordon Conferences that focus on the Frontiers of Science doc19260 none Schmidt The long-term goal of this Investigator Initiated effort is to engineer improved therapies to aid peripheral nerve repair, with the hypothesis that vascularization at the site of nerve injury is a key step. The objectives of this project are to develop methods to modulate angiogenesis in a nerve repair model and to assess the relationship between new blood vessel growth and nerve fiber regeneration. Critical to the success of the project is formulation of a degradation resistant hydrogel containing hyaluronic acid (HA), a biological polymer that is known to promote angiogenesis but is broken down very quickly in the body. Specific aims are: 1) develop and characterize HA hydogels, 2) quantify and optimize the angiogenic potential of HA hydrogels, and 3) use the HA hydrogels to study the effects of varying vascularization on peripheral nerve regeneration via rat embryo dorsal root ganglion assays and in vivo rat sciatic nerve regeneration analyses doc19261 none The objective of this project is to study tropical cyclongenesis and, in particular, what roles different environmental flows play in it. Three research avenues will be pursued. The first one is to examine tropical cyclogenesis in the eastern Pacific using data from the East Pacific Investigation of Climate Processes (EPIC) experiment in which the PI actively participated and the Outgoing Long-wave Radiation (OLR) data from NOAA. The focus will be the relationship between the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) and easterly waves before tropical cyclones form. For the second avenue, the PI will attempt to reconcile two paradigms of tropical cyclogenesis in the western Pacific and Gulf of Mexico, namely, the spin-up of vortices in the monsoon trough versus easterly waves interacting with the Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO) as pre-cursors to cyclogenesis. The working hypothesis is that tropical cyclogenesis often occurs under the following circumstances: 1) an active MJO producing a strong monsoon trough with westerlies to its south and 2) upstream waves reach the active MJO, grow in amplitude, and are ultimately the locus of depression formation. In this way, the MJO, monsoon trough, and upstream waves all participate and interact in cyclone formation. The third avenue is to conduct numerical simulations using shallow water and barotropic models to test the working hypothesis, using both idealized background states and those extracted from observational data with MJO signals. Tropical cyclogenesis remains one of the most challenging tasks in weather prediction. Increasing the understanding of how environmental flows affect genesis is important both from the prediction and modeling perspectives. The planned research has the potential of shedding some light in this area and the research will provide good opportunities for graduate studies doc19262 none The biological sciences have become more quantitative and information-driven since the emergence of computational and mathematical tools have facilitated collection and analysis of vast amounts of biological data. Complexity analysis of biological systems provides knowledge for the organization, management and mining of biological data by using advanced computational tools. The biological data are inherently complex and non-uniform and collected at multiple temporal and spatial scales. The investigations of complex biological systems and processes require an extensive collaboration between biologists, mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers to improve our understanding of biological processes from genes to systems. The objectives of this summer school are to expose undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral biological science and bioengineering students to relatively new mathematical and computational approaches and challenges in integrative biology; knowledge discovery from biological data mining; new directions in computational biology, bioinformatics and molecular engineering research; and to facilitate rapid diffusion of these mathematical and computational tools in the biological sciences. These methods will be helpful, also, to both students and post-doctoral fellows in computer science and mathematics who are interested in pursuing research in biology and bioengineering, since the summer school provides exceptional insights into fundamental challenges in biology. The summer school uses lectures, oriented toward biological science students, by expert faculty, and will focus on biological data mining and knowledge discovery that can be used to understand highly interconnected and complex biological systems. In addition to these lectures, the summer school will employ 3 two-hour panel discussions, with active participation of undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral fellows, focused on future developments in computational biology, bioinformatics and molecular engineering and science. In addition, students will present the results of their projects in a culminating poster session, which will facilitate discussion of both the biology and computational approaches. The summer school will stimulate further interdisciplinary research and collaborations among engineers, mathematicians, computer scientists, and medical researchers, and will help in identifying new, challenging directions in complex biological science and bioengineering research doc19263 none This joint award made to Northwestern University by the Advanced Materials Program in the Division of Chemistry (MPS) and the Electronic Materials Program in the Division of Materials Research (MPS) is to synthesize new macrocyclic nitrogenous polyketonato polyketoiminato complexes as well as metal alkyls and dialkylamides with polar metal-carbon and metal-nitrogen linkages for use as precursors in conventional, pulsed organometallic beam epitaxy, and atomic layer epitaxy film growth processes. With this award, Professors Chang and Marks will study precursor molecular architecture-volatility-thermal stability-surface reactivity relationships leading to more effective precursors. Transparent thin films of conducting oxides will be grown from these precursors using precision-pulsed vapor deposition techniques, and these thin films would have potential applications in flat-panel display and photovoltaic devices. Lattice-matched cubic film systems with oxidative dopants will be studied for producing efficient p-type conductor films using vapor phase deposition onto self-assembled monolayer templates to create desired film microstructural, optical and electrical functionalities. This highly collaborative effort will bring together materials science and chemistry research groups with educational and research opportunities for graduate and postdoctoral students. With this award, novel precursors with polar metal-carbon and metal-nitrogen linkages will be prepared for use in conventional and precision-pulsed vapor deposition processes to prepare transparent thin films of conducting oxides. These precursors are expected to possess optimum molecular architecture, volatility, thermal stability and surface reactivity for the deposition of transparent thin films of conducting oxides. Sub-micrometer and nanometer scale patterns of the oxide films by soft lithography and coherent growth of dislocation-free islands will also be prepared doc19264 none In this proposal we aim to build on our recent discovery of ferroelasticity and hysteresis in mixed ionic-electronic conducting (MIEC) lanthanum cobaltite (LaCoO3) perovskites and generate a fundamental understanding of the origin of this behavior. The effect of the external loading on the elastic hysteresis and ferroelastic behavior of perovskites will be characterized by the compression tests. The main hurdle is to demonstrate unambiguously that pressure induced domain reorientation, followed by phase transformation, occurs in a compression loading. Unique in situ techniques in electron microscopy and x-ray diffraction will be employed to analyze the lattice distortions and defect structures, domain and domain wall microstructures, and vacancy ordering clustering that occurs during the paraelastic to ferroelastic phase transition in lanthanum cobaltite perovskites as a function of pressure, temperature and composition. Therefore, the proposed research will allow us to investigate different first or second order phase transitions, order-disorder transitions, nonmetal-metal transitions, and martensitic transitions, which could lead to the possible toughening of perovskites and an increase in the stability and reliability of these materials both at room and high temperatures. A more complete understanding of the effect of pressure, temperature, and composition on the phase and microstructural stability of perovskites will subsequently be achieved. As a basic understanding of the ferroelastic properties of these materials is not currently available, such research is essential to understand the origin of elastic instabilities and the mechanical properties of MIEC materials used for high-temperature syngas reactors, oxygen sensors, catalysts, and solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs). It is anticipated that the results of the proposed research will involve new fundamental insights into ferroelasticity and hysteresis in mixed ionic electronic conducting perovskite materials. The proposed project will also be an ideal basis for Materials Engineering students to actively participate in project-based learning. Both undergraduate and graduate students will undertake research and present their results at technical meetings. It is expected that both undergraduate and graduate students research will result in high-profile publications and prestigious conference presentations. Special efforts will be made to attract under-represented students to careers in materials science and engineering doc19265 none The Ecosystem Model-Data Intercomparison (EMDI) program of the International Geosphere- Biosphere Programme (IGBP) task force on Global Analysis, Integration, and Modelling (GAIM) is facilitating interactions between international modeling and data synthesis teams, beyond what any individual team can reasonably propose or fund. This proposal is for a third EMDI workshop to be held at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) in March, . The proposed workshop will focus on the development of a new understanding of the nature and geographic variations in the carbon cycle, based on two earlier workshops in which model intercomparisons and model-data comparisons have been carried out. This workshop will focus on spatial analyses of regional and global ecosystem model results with observed annual net primary productivity (NPP), seasonal NPP, and time-series of carbon fluxes from FluxNet flux tower observations. Further analyses of model results and the new IGBP-DIS GAIM Global Primary Production Data Initiative (GPPDI) data sets will be made. The comparisons of model outputs with field measurements will help to establish the level of confidence that we have in the processes and mechanisms that underlie the modeled carbon cycle dynamics. The workshop will also increase the ongoing collaboration between scientists developing models and those conducting field measurements doc19266 none Paul S. Wang Kent State U The Kent State University requests a three year research grant to support research on Internet Accessible Mathematical Computation (IAMC) and Web-based Mathematics Education (WME). The research will be conducted by Professor Paul S. Wang as Principal Investigator and two grad-uate research assistants. The proposed effective date is August 1, . The proposed work extends progress already made, by the PI s group and others, in making mathematical computations easily accessible and conveniently interoperable on the Internet. The research involves protocol specification, design and implementation of prototypes, architecture of a WME system, and design implementation of a WME content authoring language. The results have great potential for scientific research and mathematics education doc19267 none Lewis Mechanical ventilators play critical roles in saving lives of patients with pulmonary dysfunction. Emergency manual resuscitators are used daily by paramedics to revive trauma patients. For life support these devices must sense respiratory pressures. Size and electric power requirements of current pressure transducers restrict sensing of pressures to points within the machine and distal to patient airways. This can severely degrade the efficacy of the ventilator or even create patient trauma, as the natural airway anatomical variability creates unpredictable pressure losses. Moreover, chronic pulmonary illnesses due to air pollution and asthma are increasing. To understand and quantify the effects on respiration, better sensors are needed. This GOALI proposal focuses on designing, fabricating and testing in vivo novel microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) pressure and flow sensors based purely on optics that can be deployed into the airways, e.g. into endotracheal tubes, nasal masks, ventilators and resuscitators. The research team, which includes collaborations between three academic units and three industrial partners, will perform fundamental research in detecting sensor activation effects using purely optical techniques and will develop new design, analysis, testing, calibration, and production practices for optical MEMS biosensors. New digital signal processing approaches will be developed to obtain required accuracies and ranges of measurement. . As part of the outreach plan, the GOALI team will 1) develop a new design course on MEMS sensor and actuator analysis, design, prototyping, and applications, including biomedical, 2) develop courseware that can be used over the internet for training of industry engineers and students and 3) offer two industrial seminars on-site at industrial partners doc19268 none Best Under this Investigator Initiated Award, studies will be performed that will improve understanding of the fundamental biomechanics of skeletal muscle and its mechanical response to stretch injury and healing. In particular, the stretch rate and stimulation effects on normal muscle behavior, and that of muscle recovering from eccentric stretch injury will be addressed. Skeletal muscle is a complex material that exhibits nonlinear viscoelastic behavior. Mechanical response to uniaxial stretch begins with nonlinear strain-stiffening, or toe-in behavior, followed by a linear response, and ultimately material softening prior to failure. Sensitivity to stretch rate and stimulation state variations, in both healthy and stretch-injured skeletal muscles, will be examined in vivo in rabbit Tibialis Anterior muscles. The PIs new phenomenological muscle model consisting of a nonlinear Maxwell fluid element combined in parallel with a contractile element and a stimulation induced linear spring, already demonstrated to explain the mechanical response outlined above, in conjunction with a carefully planned statistical design, will be used to interpret the experimental load-displacement data. Results of the studies have the potential of influencing treatment plans for skeletal muscle injuries doc19269 none This research is focused on coherent manipulation and cavity QED of confined phonons in semiconductor quantum dots. In colloidal quantum dots such as CdSe nanocrystals, not only electronic energy levels but also lattice vibrations are completely quantized. Properties of confined phonons in these quantum dots will be investigated and exploited for the development of a mesoscopic system in which a single or an array of quantum dots couple strongly to a single mode of electromagnetic fields. Coherent nonlinear optical techniques will be developed and used for the optical excitation and detection of confined acoustic phonons in these quantum dots. Optical manipulation at the level of a single phonon per quantum dot, and understanding decoherence of quantized mechanical excitations in a nanomechanical system are important goals. A cavity QED system where confined acoustic phonons coupling to a high-Q whispering gallery mode in a fused silica microsphere through a driven two-photon Raman transition will also be developed. The proposed cavity QED system provides a unique model system for isolating and manipulating fundamental dynamical processes in simple quantum systems and for creating controlled entanglement of quantum dots. In addition to potential applications in quantum information processing, the ability of optical manipulation of confined phonons in colloidal quantum dots can also stimulate further applications of these quantum dots as nanomechanical systems in areas such as biology. The research program provides training for graduate and undergraduate students in cutting edge research techniques in areas including optics, semiconductor physics, nanotechnology, and quantum information that are of both scientific and technological importance. This training will prepare them for a range of careers in academe, industry, and government. This research program is focused on studies of electronic and mechanical excitations in semiconductor quantum dots. In semiconductor quantum dots such as CdSe nanocrystals with a dimension of a few nanometers, both electronic and mechanical excitations are completely quantized or completely discrete. Properties of electronic and mechanical excitations will be investigated by using coherent nonlinear optical techniques and will be exploited for the development of a mesoscopic system in which a single or an array of quantum dots couple strongly to a single mode of electromagnetic fields. This composite quantum dot microcavity system can be used for the coherent manipulation of dynamical processes in simple quantum systems and for the exploration of quantum information processing, an area of considerable technological importance. The ability of optical manipulation of mechanical excitations in semiconductor nanocrystals can also stimulate further applications of these quantum dots as nanomechanical systems in areas such as biology. Students involved in this program receive rigorous training in areas including optics, semiconductor physics, nanotechnology, and quantum information that are of both scientific and technological importance and can pursue careers in academe, industry, and government doc19270 none This research will study the incidence of civil unrest in Early Qing China, from the full establishment of the dynasty in to the beginning of its decline in . A database of unrest events, state power, commercial development, and population to land ratios will be developed based on official records. Comparisons over time and across areas will be used to evaluate political, economic, and ecological explanations of social unrest. The results will be compared to similar studies of China in more turbulent earlier and later periods in order to evaluate whether the origins of the unrest that pushed China into its confrontation with modernity can be traced back to the Early Qing period. The results will also be compared to studies of unrest in Japan and Europe in order to evaluate the multiple paths to modernity in the East and West doc19271 none Moghe Cardiovascular disease takes a staggering toll of casualties among adult Americans each year. Two of the significant vascular pathologies related to the abnormal accumulation of lipids are atherosclerosis (the hardening of arteries due to build-up of low density lipoproteins (LDL)), and macrovascular disease, typically correlated with insulin resistant diabetes, which claims a million lives each year globally. Much research has been directed at the molecular design of drugs to alleviate the disorders of lipid metabolism. However, such drugs can be toxic to the liver and kidneys, and fail to comprehensively treat lipoprotein transport and retention dynamics, particularly at peripheral vascular sites. Thus, a comprehensive approach to treating lipid-related vascular disease could involve use of molecules regulating lipid metabolism as well as molecules that are suitably lipoprotein-philic and serve as multifunctional carriers for processing lipoproteins in transit. Ultimately, such carriers could be engineered to (a) sequester lipoproteins from macromolecular depots such as proteoglycans that heighten atherogenic tendencies; (b) reduce lipoprotein oxidation (which leads to unregulated uptake of LDL by macrophages, transforming them into foam cells, the precursors to atherosclerosis); and (c) enhance lipoprotein transport and clearance of mildly oxidized lipoproteins (via macrophages, and the liver). However, to engineer such carriers, an understanding of the chemical and geometric determinants of lipoprotein-retentive carrier substrates is necessary. This proposal describes a major research initiative toward this goal. The proteoglycans of the vascular intima are bulky, negatively charged molecules that present multimeric glycosaminoglycan (GAG) chains, which can co-operatively recruit low density lipoproteins, and encourage LDL hyperoxidation, which leads to foam cell formation during atherosclerosis. As a competitive strategy for LDL retention, the investigators propose to design novel diffusible, nanoscale carriers that can present GAG-mimetic chemistry and retain LDL with high affinity. To this end, two significant questions will be addressed: (a) Can the GAG-mimetic chemistry and nanoscale topography of model substrates be designed to synergistically recruit oxidized low density lipoproteins? (b) How can the insights derived in (a) be applied toward the use of mobile nanocarriers for LDL retention? To address (a), the investigators will theoretically simulate and experimentally explore the ability of immobilized gold nanoparticles (model substrates to test the LDL-reactivity of various chemistries) and substrate arravs of gold ZnO nanopillars. functionalized with alkanethiols terminating in negatively charged groups (-COOH, -OSO3H), to sequester LDL. The hypothesis is that at adequately high densities, and in topographic substrate configurations affording inter-pillar cooperativity, such chemistries can electrostatically sequester LDL through the positively charged aminoacid residues from the apolipoprotein B-100 of the LDL. To address (b), the investigators will explore the use of polymeric dendrimer-Iike hyperbranched nanocarriers to present the most LDL-retentive chemistry observed in (a), in various nanoarchitectural configurations, that is, by systematically manipulating the valency, branching, and tethering of the molecular bait for the lipoprotein doc19272 none A broad program of research in elementary particle physics and an associated education and outreach program is proposed by a research group of the University of Chicago Physics Department. Their program includes: the ATLAS detector construction project, which will be at the energy frontier at CERN s Large Hadron Collider; the CDF collaboration that shared in the discovery of the top quark at the Fermilab proton-antiproton collider and is operating at the current energy frontier; the OPAL collaboration, which was operating at LEP, the highest energy electron-positron collider, which is performing stringent tests of theoretical models; and the KTeV experiment, investigating the asymmetry of matter and antimatter in the universe. Education and Outreach activities include TAMS (Teacher s Academy for Mathematics and Science) which is becoming internationally known for its positive impact on under-achieving schools, and Quarknet, which is making high- school teachers a respected part of the particle physics research community doc19273 none Green This award continues the successful NSF-supported Design Projects program at North Dakota State University in which students design and build custom projects for individual persons with disabilities. The objectives of the activity are to enhance engineering education, provide students with insight into careers in rehabilitation, improve the quality of life of people with disabilities, and serve the community. The different design projects meet special needs of individuals that are not addressed by commercial devices. Approximately 40 engineering students participate annually in the Design Projects activity with facilities provided in three separate laboratories for analysis, prototyping, printed circuit board layout, fabrication, and redesign development. The engineering students interact with 8 organizations involved with aiding persons with disabilities to identify candidates who would benefit from the program s activities. Design Projects completed each year of the award are to be published in an Annual Review available at http: nsf-pad.bme.uconn.edu doc19274 none This project will use a number of indices to study the asymmetric ring current in the Earth s inner magnetosphere. The indices to be used include Asym-H, Dst, VBs, and AL. The analysis will use a combination of case histories, statistical analysis, superposed epoch analysis, linear prediction filtering, LT-UT maps of magnetic perturbations and inversion of line current models of storm time currents. One hypothesis to be tested is that there is no systematic westward propagation of ground perturbations following substorm expansions as the standard substorm models suggests there should be. A database of events used in this analysis will be made available to the scientific community doc19275 none This research project deals with fluid dynamics. It is co-funded between the Condensed Matter Physics Program In the Division of Materials Research and the Fluid Dynamics and Hydraulics Program in the Division of Chemical and Transport Systems. It is a study of turbulence at the free surface of a closed body of fluid. The fluid motion or turbulence is detected by observing the in plane, horizontal velocity components of small particles entrained at the air water interface. A large laser illuminates the surface particles, which are tracked with a fast camera. At points at and below the surface, the flow is incompressible; this implies that the surface velocity is, by contrast, compressible. Because energy and vorticity can be freely exchanged with the fluid below, Kolmogorov-type dimensional arguments are not available, so one must turn to computer simulations to model the motion. One phenomenon of interest is the tendency of particles to cluster rather than disperse. The observations are relevant to practical issues such as dispersal of pollutants at the surface of a turbulent sea and the growth rate of biological organisms at an air water interface. The educational component is focused entirely on undergraduate students. The experimental techniques, which are computer intensive, provide an excellent training ground for physics majors, engineers, and those interested in pattern recognition issues. They will be prepared for a range of careers in academe, industry and government This fluid dynamics turbulence research project is co-funded between the Condensed Matter Physics Program In the Division of Materials Research and the Fluid Dynamics and Hydraulics Program in the Division of Chemical and Transport Systems. Turbulence invariably appears when objects move rapidly through the air or the sea. An understanding of the complex phenomenon of turbulence is necessary in order to improve weather prediction and to better cope with natural and man-made disasters such as storms and pollution spills. The focus here is on the motion of small particles that float on a turbulent body of water. These floaters may be thought of as a surrogate for the motion of buoys, ships, or floating pollutants. Turbulence at the surface has the unusual effect of causing the floaters to clump together, whereas they are dispersed elsewhere in the bulk sea or the air. This study is one of the first to be carried out under laboratory-controlled conditions. The educational component is focused entirely on undergraduate students. The research utilizes cutting-edge technology for tracking the particle motion (high-speed cameras and powerful new solid-state lasers) and provides an excellent training ground for students majoring in fundamental science or engineering doc19276 none The ecological effects of anthropogenic global climate change are of increasing concern for understanding and predicting climate driven vegetation change. Global circulation models exist that predict future climates and changes in coarse scale vegetation patterns. However, the efficacy of these models is limited by temporal and spatial scale problems and a poor understanding of how climate variation and human land use changes influence disturbance regimes and subsequent vegetation patterns. This doctoral dissertation research project will help to understand how annual to decadal scale climatic variation interacts with human influences on the landscape in north-central Mexico to effect changes in the fire regime and subsequently affect the regeneration success and species distributions of Madrean pine-oak ecosystems after fire. The specific objectives are: 1) to assess how climate variation and changes in human land use practices influence the fire regime in Madrean pine-oak ecosystems, 2) how climate variation and alterations to the fire regime interact to regulate seedling establishment and success, and 3) to test if ecosystem community responses to climate and land use identified in other regions of North America are general ecological responses or are dependent on the life history traits of specific taxa. Standard tree-ring study techniques will be used to derive tree establishment dates, tree age frequencies, and reconstruct past fire regimes in a set of study sites that have been repeatedly disturbed by humans within a context of pronounced climatic variability. A combination of correlation analysis and regression analysis techniques will be used to identify temporal patterns of tree establishment at different spatial and temporal scales. The results of this study will be used to test the general hypothesis that seedling establishment in Madrean pine-oak ecosystems is related to climate variation and variations in the fire regime. Seedling establishment is predicted to occur during multi-annual to decadal periods of above average precipitation that follow widespread, biologically severe fires. Widespread fire years are predicted to occur during annual to multi-annual periods of below-average precipitation and above-average temperature. Humans are predicted to influence the occurrence and severity of fires by altering fuel quantity and continuity and serving as ignition sources. Ultimately, the site specific ecosystem community responses to climate and land use variation identified in north-central Mexico will be compared with previous results from studies in other regions to test if these are general ecological responses, or if they are dependent on the life history traits of specific taxa. The study of how climate variation and human land use affect the fire regime and subsequent vegetation patterns has important consequences for predicting the ecological effects of global change. This study will provide basic information concerning how climate and human interactions with the fire regime affect the success of seedling establishment after fires in north-central Mexico. This research has broad ecological significance in that it will test previous hypotheses of climatic influences on fire, tree establishment, and tree mortality that were developed in other regions of North America with taxonomically different ecosystems under different precipitation and temperature trends. This study will also provide additional information to clarify the roles of climatic and human influences on vegetation change due to the climatic differences, and the differences in the timing of human migrations and subsequent land use practices throughout North America. Moreover, the differences in ecosystem characteristics between our sites in Mexico and other areas of North America will allow us to test whether the ecosystem responses to climate and land use changes identified in previous studies are general ecological responses or are if they dependent on the life history traits of specific taxa. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc19277 none Four-dimensional variational analysis (4-D Var) is the most advanced data assimilation system currently employed in operational numerical weather prediction centers. While the scheme has many strengths and advantages, one shortcoming is that the error covariance matrix is fixed. The Kalman filter (KF) approach alleviates this shortcoming by explicitly propagating the error covariance matrix for model variables so that it is flow dependent. However, the computer memory requirement for the KF approach is very large, rendering it unfeasible in operational applications. To address this problem, this project will study the feasibility of developing a reduced rank Kalman filter to be coupled with the 4-D Var system. Namely, the 4-D Var scheme will be used to perform the analysis but the background cost function will use a flow-dependent error covariance matrix for the subspace defined by the leading Hessian singular vectors. The research will be built on an advanced numerical weather prediction model for which the second order adjoint system will be developed. A comparison of the reduced rank Kalman filter with the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) will be made using the ECMWF analysis data and satellite observations. 4-D Var remains the leading-edge technology for data assimilation of NWP systems. This research has the potential to improve 4-D Var applications in the operational environment doc19278 none The Fifth International Conference on Forensic Statistics will be held at Isola di San Servolo, Venice, Italy, on August 30th to September 2nd, . The conference is intended to allow statisticians, forensic scientists, lawyers, and scholars from related disciplines to discuss the many and varied uses of statistics and probability in legislative, administrative and judicial proceedings. Forensic Statistics, the application of statistics and probability to legal matters, is an expanding field. The current debates surrounding the presentation of evidence based on DNA profiling, epidemiological studies on the health effects of various drugs, and racial profiling are just three examples. There is a great need for statisticians to provide guidance to forensic scientists, and lawyers and the courts. By bringing together statisticians, forensic scientists, lawyers and other scholars, this fifth international conference will further the interdisciplinary understanding of Statistics and Probability applied to legal matters. Previous conferences in this series have been held at North Carolina State University, the University of Edinburg, and the Arizona State University. This proposal provides funds to insure that U.S. participants will be able to hear and network with experts on this topic from around the world, and to provide access to the conference for selected new researchers and members of under-represented groups doc19279 none The worldwide engineering community has identified failures of unreinforced masonry (URM) walls as one of the major causes of material damage and loss of human life during seismic events. The development of effective and affordable retrofitting techniques for masonry members is an urgent need. Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) composites may provide attractive solutions for the strengthening of URM walls subjected to in-plane and out-of-plane loads resulting from high winds or earthquakes. Reinforced concrete (RC) or steel frames with infill URM walls are a common construction practice. Interaction of infill walls with the structural frame has often been neglected to simplify the design. Ignoring the contribution of the infill wall does not necessarily indicate a conservative design. Infill walls can greatly stiffen a flexible frame and significantly affect the horizontal load distribution to different structural members of the building. Strengthening of existing walls must account for this behavior. The proposed project will focus on the study of the shear behavior of infill masonry walls strengthened with FRP bars and laminates. The former is a novel technique denominated FRP structural repointing. FRP structural repointing consists of inserting FRP bars into the masonry bed joints. The FRP bars can be embedded either in an epoxy-based paste or a cementitious paste. Preliminary tests on masonry specimens strengthened by this technique have shown promising results. In addition to increasing in-plane wall capacity, structural repointing is less intrusive than FRP laminates because the masonry aesthetics are preserved. Two series of walls will be tested. The first series, Series A, will assess the shear behavior of URM walls strengthened with FRP composites to determine the most efficient strengthening schemes in terms of structural performance. The walls belonging to Series A will be constructed with concrete masonry units (CMU). The specimens will be tested under in-plane cyclic loading. The test setup configuration will ensure the occurrence of shear failure. The most efficient strengthening schemes tested in Series A will be selected for the strengthening of the infill walls in Series B. This series will investigate the shear behavior of infill walls and their interaction with the surrounding structural RC frame. The infill walls will be surrounded by a RC frame and tested under in-plane cyclic loading. After failure due to in-plane loading, the specimen will be moved to a shake table where it will be subjected to out-of-plane acceleration to observe the out-of-plane stability of the wall. Analytical and numerical models will be developed to verify and understand the experimental findings using both complex and simple idealizations. The analytical results will be used to implement design protocols for the shear strengthening of URM infill walls to be used by practitioners. This project will represent a milestone in the development of affordable and effective retrofitting techniques for existing infill walls. Within the constraints of funding and time, it will integrate the three phases of experimentation, analysis, and design to provide scientists and professionals with a clear snapshot of the advantages and characteristics of a highly promising new technology doc19280 none The principal investigator will study combinatorial models of categories of perverse sheaves on spaces which carry important combinatorial and representation theoretic information, mainly flag varieties and toric varieties. The models use data obtained from natural symmetries on these spaces via the moment map. These methods will be applied to problems in representation theory, including Lusztig s conjecture on modular representations and Beilinson, Ginzburg and Soergel s theory of Koszul duality for Lie algebra representations. The PI and his collaborators will develop computer algebra software to do computations with these models. This project involves geometry related to representation theory. Representation theory studies ways to present a given algebraic object, usually a group of symmetries, as a collection of linear transformations. It has applications to many fields, from number theory to mathematical physics. An important thread in modern representation theory involves extracting algebraic information from the geometry of an associated space, which is generally also intrinsically beautiful in its own right doc19281 none Satellite imagery reveals that China is losing forests and farmland to rapidly expanding urban areas, with negative consequences for environmental sustainability and food security. This doctoral dissertation research project will explain where and under what circumstances land conservation policies succeed in China, with special emphasis given to identifying the effects of regional economic contexts on land-use decisions by local officials. This project will use both remote sensing techniques and social science approaches to understanding the patterns and causes of land-use change in rural China. Imagery from AVHRR, DMSP, and Landsat satellites spanning two decades will be being analyzed to quantify the rates of urban expansion and the loss of undeveloped land across north China, with detailed studies focusing on Zouping County and Beijing. In those locations, interviews with land managers and village leaders will provide community land-use histories, allowing the doctoral student analyze land-use decisions made in different points within the North China regional system. Rates of land-use change will be interpreted within the Hierarchical Regional Space (HRS) model developed by anthropologist G. William Skinner, which builds on the geographical concepts of von Thunen, Christaller, and Hagerstrand to explain the spatial structure of agrarian societies. This analysis will test the importance of the regional economic context, as represented by the HRS model, in defining the constraints and opportunities for land conservation, and it will facilitate the development of more effective, spatially targeted conservation efforts. Land-use change in China is a phenomenon with global consequences. China is estimated to be losing millions of hectares of forest and farmland to urban development, thereby releasing tremendous volumes of carbon into the earth s atmosphere, which contributes to global climate change. Policies to control land use must assert a collective claim on land resources, countering the trend of Chinese society towards economic liberalization. The interdisciplinary methods applied in this study bridge the gap between remote sensing techniques and the social sciences, linking people to pixels. By developing a more nuanced, theoretically grounded understanding of land-use change in China, this research will suggest how land-conservation policies can be made more successful by targeting political and economic incentives appropriate to specific locales. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc19282 none Principal Investigator: Eric Sommers [esommers@math.umass.edu] : The principal investigator will study several questions in representation theory which are related to nilpotent orbits in Lie algebras. More specifically, the investigator will study a new duality map that he defined (and that has recently been extended by Achar). He will continue to study the Lusztig bijection. He will try to complete the determination of which nilpotent orbits in the exceptional Lie algebras have normal closure and prove results (in all Lie algebras) about the structure of functions on covers of nilpotent orbits. Representation theory is a branch of modern algebra that is concerned with understanding symmetries. A central idea is that complicated algebraic or geometric structures can be represented by a certain set of matrices (arrays of numbers), which are easier to understand than the original structure. For example, the symmetries of the square can be represented (in one possible way) by a certain set of eight two-by-two matrices. This view of representation theory has many applications in chemistry and physics. The investigator s work will contribute to understanding the representation theory of Lie algebras and Lie groups doc19283 none Hawkins Muscle-tendon units are complex biological actuators able to impart considerable force to bones to stabilize and or move segments of the body and to absorb energy imparted to the body. Due to the integral role muscle-tendon (MT) units play in human function and quality of life, considerable interest exists in understanding 1) the basic structural properties of MT units, 2) how MT properties change throughout life and in response to altered environmental stimuli (e.g. disuse, exercise), 3) risk factors associated with MT injury, 4) how best to maintain or restore normal MT function throughout life, and 5) how to compensate for a loss in MT function. Difficulty in quantifying the structural properties of muscle-tendon units in-vivo has limited understanding of the normal and adaptive behavior of these units. The two objectives of this study are: 1) to develop a methodology to non-invasively quantify muscle and tendon force-deformation properties in-vivo, and 2) to demonstrate the utility of this approach by using it to investigate two specific questions (a) are there age-related differences in the strain induced in a tendon during a maximum isometric muscle contraction performed by people of similar physical activity level, and (b) are there age-related differences in the rate of structural property adaptation of a tendon relative to the rate of muscle strength adaptation in people of similar initial physical activity level? A methodology that combines ultrasonography, a force transducer, and an ankle-testing fixture is being developed to study the Gastrocnemius-Soleus-Achilles Tendon Complex, which provide the primary forces to plantar flex the ankle. The ultrasound images will be used to quantify the length and cross-sectional area of the Achilles Tendon, muscle fascicle orientation, and movement of anatomical landmarks during muscle contractions or joint movements. The ankle-testing device will be used to quantify ankle position and torque for a given muscle effort. Anthropometric data will be used to relate joint torque to Achilles Tendon force. Force-deformation and stress-strain behaviors of the tendon are quantified. The validity of these methods will be tested using instrumented cadaver specimens. Tissue force and or deformation will be controlled within the cadaver leg and compared to similar quantities determined from the non-invasive ultrasound and joint testing procedures. The utility of the non-invasive technique for studying basic muscle-tendon performance and adaptation will be investigated by studying the affects that aging and exercise have on MT behavior and joint mechanics. Twenty-five subjects within three age groups will participate in a 16-week strength-training program and an 8-week detraining program. Every two weeks the subjects will perform gradually increasing isometric plantar flexion efforts while Achilles tendon force and deformation are recorded. These data will be used to construct force-deformation curves for the tendon and to quantify tendon stiffness, maximum isometric muscle strength, and tendon strain during maximum isometric muscle force. Additionally, electromyography from the soleus and gastrocnemius muscles will be recorded to quantify muscle recruitment strategies during these muscular efforts. Data will be compared between subjects, test sessions, and age groups doc19284 none A collaborative research and education relationship among Purdue University, University of Minnesota, and Xerox Corporation is being formed to engage in the high risk and high payoff task of developing new theoretical perspectives for sensing and control for the 39 billion on-demand printing industry. The charge of the industry-university research team is to develop fundamental understanding of the sensing and control issues for digital color xerography and to develop practical and theoretically sound control systems that expand the operation envelop of printing systems while producing consistent, high quality prints in a predictable manner. Our approach will 1) use existing models of human visual perception in control analysis and synthesis, 2) exploit process elements to maximize sensing and actuation opportunities, 3) use the principle of coordination to achieve the final performance objectives, and 4) exploit the transformation between spatial and temporal system representations. The methodology and control-centric system approach developed by this endeavor will significantly improve the image quality of digital color xerography. This technology will help propel the industry to a new era and maintain the competitive edge of the U.S. short-run and office printing industry. The control strategies and design methodologies will be applicable to other printing and imaging systems, such as inkjet, image scanners and microscopy doc19285 none Kirkpatrick The proposal focused on continued development and implementation of a high resolution, imaging laser speckle-based strain gauge for biomedical research and medical diagnostic purposes. During the period of this award, the investigators propose to expand the useful range of the system to the level of single cells and single-cell thick cell layers and to develop and implement an optical means by which the viscoelastic properties of tissues and cell sheets can be measured directly in a nondestructive manner. The hypotheses driving this research are: 1) Improved laser speckle strain measurement technology can provide detailed information on the mechanical behavior of tissues at the cellular level with better strain resolution than strain technologies conventionally employed for these purposes, including classical interferometric technologies, 2) Variations of the speckle strain gauge can yield information regarding the viscoelastic constants of biological tissues such as mechanical loss factor (tan d), storage modulus, and loss modulus and 3) The strain gauge technology can be modified to provide full 2D strain data of tissues under biaxial loading. The specific aims to test these hypotheses are: 1) To implement an imaging laser speckle strain gauge for evaluating the micromechanical behavior of single-cells and cell sheets, 2) To develop a variation of the speckle strain gauge to yield viscoelastic constants such as loss factor (tan d), storage modulus and loss modulus and 3) To modify the speckle strain gauge to acquire and analyze 2-dimensional strain data. Results of the studies should have a significant impact on a variety of modern diagnostic and therapeutic applications doc19286 none In this project funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Lineberger will conduct research in negative ion photoelectron spectroscopy, time resolved photodissociation spectroscopy, and time resolved photoelectron spectroscopy. Systems to be studied include biradical and triradical (e.g., 1,3,5-dehydrobenzene anion) species; complex biradical and clustered radical species; and anion complexes for the investigations of transition state spectroscopies and time resolved spectroscopy. A Negative Ion-Neutral-Positive Ion (NeNePo) technique will be developed to investigate the evolving structure of complexes along a reaction coordinate. Ongoing studies of energy flow and caging dynamics in size-selected anionic clusters will be continued, with extensions to include asymmetric chromophores, triatomic chromophores, and mixed solvents, in order to provide deep new insights into their dynamics. Studies of time resolved dynamics in cluster ions will be extended from diatomic chromophores to triatomic species. This work will include work on prereactive complexes where photoexcitation can stimulate chemical reaction. Here the emphasis will be on photoexcitation that results in significant charge redistribution in the cluster complex, affording a direct look at solvent reorganization processes. This research deals with fundamental problems of reaction chemistry. The goal is to obtain new insights into the structure and reactive processes of chemical intermediates and solvated ions. The research will be conducted with internal and external collaborators as well as with postdoctoral research associates and graduate students. The postdocs and students gain valuable experience in one of the forefront areas of physical chemistry in preparation for advanced studies or employment in industry, academia, or government laboratories. An active outreach program is conducted for the recruitment of the next generation of scientists and to bring the excitement of chemistry to high school and college students as a contribution to the development of a scientifically educated citizenry doc19287 none Edwards Catastrophic iron corrosion sometimes occurs in the presence of SRB with profound consequences. A theory of SRB induced iron corrosion is proposed based on the observations that reduced phosphorus species such as phosphine (PH3) can catalyze the rate limiting reaction in iron corrosion, and that phosphates added to iron metal or drinking water as corrosion inhibitors can serve as the source of catalyst in the presence of sulfides. Three phases of experimental work are planned to examine aspects of reduced phosphorus species chemistry. This includes 1) development of analytical protocols and a survey of reduced P occurrence, 2) examination of the aqueous chemistry of reduced P and pathways leading to its production, and 3) defining the role of reduced phisphorus in iron corrosion. This research, although fundamental, has important applications to the engineering community. The investigators note that there is ample evidence supporting the idea that reduced phosphorus could catalyze iron corrosion under conditions present in water distribution systems. Therefore, where these forms of phosphorus are present, there can be high costs associated with pipe replacement doc19288 none This proposal primarily funds a large workshop involving all KDI PIs (2 years, 3 areas). The workshop will permit exchange of results among the KDI awardees and also permit an understanding of what has been accomplished by the awards in this program. Of particular importance is an effort to understand the effects of the interdisciplinary focus of KDI and what that has meant in terms of final research results. The meeting will be held in New Orleans in the late spring of . Statistics, new research results, and information about the KDI program will be gathered as part of the workshop doc19289 none Co-infection of a single host by multiple viruses is very common in nature. Within-host interactions can profoundly affect the severity of disease and efficiency of virus transmission, depending on the exact number of viruses that enter the host. This co-infection number can be impacted by (1) the host species experiencing the infection, and or (2) the relatedness of viruses causing the infection. However, the relative importance of these two factors is not well-understood, and the current project seeks to fill this intellectual gap. In particular, the project addresses the question using a family of viruses that infect bacteria. Laboratory experiments will study the evolution of virus traits that govern co-infection numbers. Results will show whether a host species can limit the number of co-infecting viruses, and whether viruses restrict entry of certain other virus species depending on their genetic relatedness. Results of this project are widely applicable because viruses are important disease agents in animals, plants, and bacteria. The lifestyle of the project virus is similar to that of many human viruses (such as influenza and HIV). Therefore, the project data should contribute greatly to a better understanding of the generalized role of virus co-infection in human illnesses doc19290 none Wyatt This research project is to develop and test a prototype prosthetic device for restoring some useful vision to blind humans who have retinal disease. The investigators will apply their microfabrication and surgical expertise to the development of a prosthesis, which can be successfully implanted for a period of months or years without affecting the delicate surrounding tissue in the eye. The wireless, inflatable prosthesis is to receive its power from outside the body by radio frequency transmission. A new form of low-power circuitry is to be developed for the implant to reduce heating effects in the eye. This thin silicon circuit, integral to the implant, will transmit simple patterns to an array of stimulating electrodes located on flexible, spider-like arms which are to be folded-up for insertion through a small incision in the eye. Once inside the eye they can then be inflated for attachment to a larger area of retina. A parallel effort will develop encapsulation technology to protect these implants from bodily fluids. This project is jointly funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) under the terms of a Letter of Agreement of April 19, . The research will be conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Cornell University Nanofabrication Facility. Testing of the various versions of the prototype implant is to be done at MIT and the DVA Center for Innovative Visual Rehabilitation in the DVA Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts doc19291 none Clark Support provided for this design project at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell will make possible senior level engineering design projects involving the application of computer and electronics technologies to the specific needs of persons with disabilities, thereby enhancing the quality of life of those individuals. The individual design projects involve the work of l-4 senior students, each of whom must visit and communicate with their client. Through these meetings, a specific definition of the needs and therefore the specific objectives of the student design project are formulated. The students then develop project schedules and budgets and within one academic semester generate a solution to the need. Assistive devices or software resulting from successful projects are delivered, at no cost, to the client. The Assistive Technology Program where the students work has been in existence for the past ten years. This design project is a continuation of the work that has been supported by the National Science Foundation for the past six years doc19292 none In response to the national need for information technology workers with expertise in information systems security, this project is developing an associate degree program in computer security and data assurance at Norwalk Community College. The new program leads students either to immediate employment or to a related four-year degree at Western Connecticut State University. In developing the curriculum, investigators are examining existing computer security curricula and standards in order to adapt and build on exemplary resources. The investigators are also introducing a faculty externship program, which provides faculty members with relevant workplace experiences so they can better prepare their students for careers in the computer security field. Although the project s primary audience is two-year college faculty and students, the goal is to create a computer security career pathway from secondary schools to two-year colleges and on to universities. Objectives and activities in the project include: adapting computer security curricula to create a career pathway from secondary schools to two-year colleges and four-year universities; implementing an externship program for faculty; creating practical lab experiences with a Unix NT anti-hackers lab and teleconferencing equipment for distance learning; utilizing a faculty externship and student outreach coordinator to administer externship placements and recruit students for the computer security program; disseminating the computer security materials, curriculum, and model throughout Connecticut; and hosting an annual cybersecurity conference. The project is guided by an advisory committee of representatives from business and industry, professional associations in the computer security field, other colleges and universities, and law enforcement doc19293 none Bresler Since its inception in the early 70 s, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become a premier diagnostic imaging tool. Although its early applications were largely limited to stationary objects, MRI has also proven extremely useful, in recent years, for dynamic imaging applications, such as cardiac, functional or interventional imaging. An important challenge confronting dynamic MRI (D-MRI) is obtaining both high spatial and high temporal resolutions. Over the last two decades, many fast imaging methods including fast-scan techniques, phased array RF coils for parallel acquisition, and reduced sampling of the data space have been developed. In spite of these advances in fast MRI, many applications are still critically dependent on additional speedups, and virtually all applications could benefit from them. Examples include 3D multiphase cardiac imaging, coronary angiography and plaque characterization, cardiac imaging without breath-holding, diffusion-tensor functional brain imaging, and interventional MRI with high tissue contrast and temporal resolution. The general goal of the proposed research is to develop, implement and test a new unified theoretical framework for minimum-redundancy D-MRI data acquisition and image reconstruction. In this framework, dynamic imaging is treated as a higher-dimensional image reconstruction problem, with time being an independent axis. Instead of attempting to freeze all motion by sufficiently fast acquisition, time variation during acquisition is explicitly accounted for in the steps of MRI sequence design, data acquisition, and image reconstruction. The approach will draw on and extend theories and algorithms introduced by the PIs over the past few years, which offer the potential for significant speedups of the imaging process. Furthermore, combination of the theory and techniques developed in this project with fast scan methods and with methods based on phased-array RF coils will produce combined speedups, greater than any one of the individual approaches doc19294 none Hagness Under this Investigator Initiated Award, studies will be preformed to develop an ultrawideband microwave imaging method for detection, monitoring and noninvasive treatment of early-stage breast cancer. The intrinsic dielectric-properties contrast between malignant and normal breast tissue provides the basis for highly sensitive detection of malignant lesions using microwaves. The objectives are to: 1) develop robust space-time signal processing algorithms that exploit the dielectric-properties contrast for the detection and monitoring of malignant lesions, 2) develop space-time signal-processing algorithms for non-invasive microwave hyperthermia treatment of malignant breast lesions, 3) investigate the performance of the approach for early-stage cancer detection, monitoring, and treatment using anatomically realistic numerical breast models, 4) develop realistic physical breast phantoms and pre-clinical hardware prototype instrumentation, and 5) investigate the performance of the approach for breast cancer detection using the pre-clinical instrument in both synthetic breast phantom and ex vivo breast tissue imaging experiments. The proposed approach offers the potential of a easy-to-use, low cost, comfortable, non-ionizing breast screening technology capable of reducing the rate of false negatives and false positives associated with conventional X-ray mammography. The treatment protocol will minimize the complications, discomfort, and need for invasive procedures for women with breast cancer doc19295 none Hering The proposed project will examine the mobilization of arsenic from sediments where it occurs in association with iron oxyhydroxides. The project will focus on a specific study site, North Haiwee Reservior near Olancha, California, where the input of arsenic to the sediments is controlled by engineering practices of known duration and magnitude and which has been the subject of a preliminary study by the research group. The project focuses on a specific field site because of the unique opportunities that site offers. It is anticipated that the mechanisms of iron and arsenic mobilization at Haiwee will be relevant to a variety of iron-dominated systems including aquifer sediments. Further, the information that is obtained on the timescales for arsenic release from sediments and the factors governing these timescales will increase understanding of the kinetic controls on arsenic concentrations in contacting porewaters and groundwaters doc19296 none Gonzalez Upper extremity movement coordination and control remains a critical area of research as the mapping from neural control to specified movements becomes better understood. The areas of (1) upper extremity motor control and musculoskeletal dynamics, (2) the interaction of the upper extremity with the surroundings, and ultimately (3) fine end-user control of prosthetics in normal and altered environments, have been individually studied by many investigators. These three distinct areas are merged into one cohesive project, permitting the development of a comprehensive research tool to aid in studying upper extremity motor-control and musculoskeletal dynamics, and new scientific advancements in prosthetic neural-control. This research instrument represents the anatomical characteristics of the human arm in a fully-functional linkage that can be controlled by a user via a series of muscle electrical signals (EMG). Control of this human-like arm that can accurately simulate movements based only on a user s neural signals, is termed the Intelligent Prosthetic Arm. The research entails the design and development of a graphical and musculoskeletal dynamic model using 4 degrees-of-freedom at the elbow and wrist joints to study the interaction of the major muscles crossing these joints. The computational model will be used subsequently with a hybrid optimal control neural network algorithm to predict joint moments from a series of EMG signals. The predicted trajectory will direct the position of the Intelligent Prosthetic Arm in order for a subject to test the reliability of the motion of the prosthetic arm under various tasks. The arm will be adapted into different virtual environments by the use of a servomotor and a mobile Adept robot to simulate various altered dynamic environments. Extensive sets of experimental data will be gathered to quantify the motion of the elbow and wrist joints. These data will represent joint kinematics and EMG signals from a variety of muscles and are used to develop and verify the computational model. Experimental data will also be used to train the model toward accurate predictions of joint motion for use in the Intelligent Prosthetic Arm. The research project will be performed primarily by undergraduate students at LeTourneau University. To enhance the experience, 2 to 3 weeks during the summer months will be spent at the biomechanics lab at the University of Delaware to review and consult with other investigators and students involved in related research projects doc19297 none Bellamkonda Inability to successfully target chemotherapeutic agents to tumors, specifically gliomas of the brain, has been a major obstacle for successful treatment and prognosis. While liposomal delivery to gliomas has been promising, non-specific delivery of chemotherapeutic agent(s) remains high. The investigators propose a novel, multiple-ligand approach to target drug-laden liposomes to brain tumors in an efficient manner while minimizing non-specific uptake at the same time. The approach is based on the following hypotheses: A) The overall affinity between receptor targeted drug delivery vehicle and tumors can be increased by using multiple weak interactions generated by multiple targeting ligands on the delivery vehicle that target multiple differentially (but not exclusively) expressed receptors on tumors, and B) Specificity of targeting can be achieved by delivery vehicles presenting sub-optimal levels of each ligand (with optimal being maximum possible affinity for a given ligand), so that non-specific uptake by healthy cells is reduced because they do not coincidently over-express all of the targeted receptors that are differentially expressed on gliomas. Based on these hypotheses, the specific aims are to: 1) Design and fabricate multiple-ligand presenting liposomal vehicles; 2) Determine doxorubicin loaded multiple ligand vehicles targeting capacity when tumor and non-tumor cells are co-cultured; and 3) Determine the in vivo performance of these vehicles in a rodent model of glioma doc19298 none This is a project in the conformal mapping subfield of complex analysis and stochastic processes. Its goal is to solve several well-known problems concerning conformal maps and their applications. The main topics of the study are the following: (i) conformal welding, (ii) universal spectrum of harmonic measure, (iii) diffusion-limited aggregation and other processes with critical behavior. Conformal mapping theory is a classical area of complex analysis; it is an important tool in the study of geometric invariants. The phenomenon of conformal invariance is manifest in many mathematical structures as well as in certain physical theories (conformal field theory and statistical mechanics). The project deals with metric and universality properties of some key conformal invariants, and with conformally invariant probabilities and processes doc19299 none Attention and Performance Meeting With National Science Foundation support, junior researchers will be provided the funds to participate in the XXth meeting of the International Association for the Study of Attention and Performance (IASAP). This meeting will be held from July 1-7 in Erice, Sicily, and will address the topic of Functional Brain Imaging of Visual Cognition. Functional brain imaging may have by now surpassed all other techniques in cognitive science in terms of expense, growth rate, and public visibility. But how much has this new set of techniques actually contributed to the study of human cognition? When if ever has a finding from brain imaging constrained a cognitive theory? We are sympathetic to those who have watched from the sidelines and felt underwhelmed by the contributions of brain imaging to cognitive science. Many of the early imaging studies in fact had little to offer researchers interested in cognition. However, we are encouraged by more recent results and hopeful that a new era is beginning in which functional brain imaging may realize its potential as a powerful tool for the study of cognition. It is the goal of this meeting to tackle all of these issues by addressing whether, when, and how functional brain imaging can constrain theories of human cognition. We have chosen to focus our discussions around the specific topic of visual cognition, where much of the best recent imaging work has been carried out. We have selected 65 of the top researchers in the world who either do imaging work on visual cognition, or who have expertise in a closely related field the understanding of which is critical for our advancement of brain imaging research (e.g., cognitive psychology, single-unit recording, computational modeling). At the meeting, these researchers will present the latest results from their labs and discuss the ways in which imaging can and cannot provide answers to cognitive questions. The meeting will include sessions on modularity, visual object representation, development and plasticity, visual attention, and sensorimotor integration. Every effort was made to include minorities, women, and researchers at early stages of their careers. We anticipate that several factors will guarantee that this meeting will have a broad impact not only on those attending it, but also on the field as a whole. These factors include the prestige of the IASAP, the high visibility of many of the meeting participants, and the long tradition of publishing from each Attention & Performance meeting an excellent and widely-cited volume of articles doc19300 none Szeri In current clinical practice, Shock Wave Lithotripsy (SWL) is routinely used for treatment of urolithiasis (kidney stones). It also causes acute renal injury: including hemorrhage, hematoma and edema. The rupture of small blood vessels is a primary feature of vascular injury associated with SWL. The potential mechanisms are: stretching and rupture of vessels by growth of constrained bubbles, or damage of vessel walls by asymmetric collapse of constrained cavitation bubbles, and possibly damage of vessel walls by attack of free radicals produced in the bubble collapses. Prior work has shown that bubbles are associated with phantom vessel damage by an XL-1 lithotripter in vitro . However, there is doubt as to the precise mechanism of damage. Prior work has also shown that, to compare well with experiments, vapor dynamics need to be included in SWL bubble simulations. A simulation has been developed of non-spherical collapses including heat and vapor transfer. A slight modification to a Dornier HM-3 clinical lithotripter can reduce problematical bubble growth and thus decrease the potential for vascular injury in SWL while maintaining satisfactory stone comminution. Finally, the investigators have developed an analytical theory and computer simulation of the focusing of spherical compression waves into shocks, even where there are strong material inhomogeneities. The first goal of the proposed research is to determine the mechanism of damage by bubbles in blood vessels interacting with lithotripter shock waves (LSW). The second goal is to develop a rational procedure to optimize the compression wave that becomes the LSW, so as to minimize the potential for bubble growth while maintaining stone comminution. Both goals will be reached through theory, simulation and experiment doc19301 none Laurencin This research effort is aimed at developing useful biomimetic constructs for bone while furthering our fundamental understanding of factors important in determining the success of these designs. A multidisciplinary tissue engineering approach is to be followed using principles from chemical, mechanical, and materials engineering as well as cell and molecular biology. The development of constructs of this sort is expected to have clinical applications in grafting of non-unions, surgical arthrodeses, cranio-facial defects, and prosthetic implants and or implant coatings. This research project builds on the knowledge produced during a series of research projects directed by the Principal Investigator dating from . This new project seeks to design, develop and optimize three-dimensional matrices for use in bone repair. The first aim is to explore the development of new polymer-ceramic constructs fabricated by direct synthesis and incorporation of amorphous calcium phosphate into microspheres used to form the matrix, as well as optimize physicochemical parameters surrounding these new composite microspheres. In the second aim, the delivery of growth factors will also be studied further, building on the previous work by incorporating proteins and factors into the matrix that may enhance cellular endothelialization and bone growth. Finally, in the third aim, extensive in vivo studies will be performed utilizing the constructs designed from aims 1 and 2, paying careful attention to the mechanical strength of the healing defect and the short- and long-term histology and histomorphometry of the defect site. From a basic science standpoint, studies under this work have provided and will continue to provide a better understanding of polymer and ceramic chemistry as it relates to cellular response, matrix fabrication, and ultimate matrix performance (both in vitro and in vivo). In addition to furthering our basic science knowledge, the development of matrices for bone tissue engineering may lead to graft materials for healing bony defects, and thus provide direct benefits to society. As one of only a handful of under-represented minority principal investigators in bioengineering in America, the Principal Investigator is committed to encouraging the academic growth of younger minority undergraduate and graduate students currently so under-represented in science doc19302 none Humayun The goals of this project will be to design and develop a retinal prosthesis module for intraocular implantation. The design will have a sensor power unit and an electronic retinal stimulator array. Both components will use available technologies to the maximum extent possible. Program elements: a) Assess and develop a novel implantable image sensor power receiver unit using available technology (via DARPA NRL program) to the maximum extent possible. b) Integrate the camera power unit and channel glass electrode package with stimulator electronics and verify system operation doc19303 none Community-based-conservation (CBC) projects are being initiated to protect wildlife corridors and connect ecological processes across landscapes. The conservation of wildlife in the Maasai Ecosystem of northern Tanzania relies on this approach for protection of migratory species outside of national parks on lands predominately occupied by Maasai pastoralists. The objective of this research project is to explore how the geographical knowledge of local Maasai residents contributes to scientific dialogues regarding CBC initiatives in the region that are based in both conservation biology and GIS (Geographic Information System) mapping. The project, therefore, involves a critical engagement with both local Maasai geographical knowledge and Western conservation science, to propose alternative wildlife conservation measures for the Maasai Ecosystem. The project explores theoretical questions regarding the value and place of indigenous knowledge within science and the politics of resource management, within the context of a political ecology research approach. The project first will ask what a Maasai geography of the region looks like, by exploring Maasai knowledge claims concerning historical as well as contemporary patterns of local ecology, wildlife resource use patterns, Maasai resource use patterns, Maasai-wildlife interactions, and Maasai notions of territoriality. The project will then investigate how dialogues of negotiation and translation can be built between Maasai knowledge and Conservation science by creating a final text of negotiation, based on in-depth ethnographic field work, ecological analysis, and participatory GIS mapping. Natural and social science techniques will include integrated use of in-depth interviews, key-informant led transects, group meetings, participant observations, ecological transects, air photo interpretation. In this manner, information obtained through social science methods will be continually reinforced and cross-checked, both geographically and with ecological methods. Traveling interviews with Maasai key informants will provide the most essential and innovative method used. By traveling with Maasai during their daily and seasonal land-use activities, ethno-botanical ecological sampling will be coupled with participatory observation and in-depth interviews to gain an understanding of Maasai resource use patterns and knowledge of local ecology. Ecological fieldwork will be conducted at specific sites deemed valuable for wildlife conservation purposes (as proposed by both conservation agencies and local Maasai) to delineate wildlife presence, wildlife-livestock interactions, and vegetation coverage at these sites. Participatory GIS mapping will be utilized to map information obtained through these combined methods. The challenges of translation and the politics of negotiating between competing knowledge claims, an essential component of the project, will be directly addressed throughout the project through self-reflective ethnography, participant observations, and additional interview questions. By investigating the process of incorporating integrating local knowledge claims into conservation planning and GIS mapping, this project will directly address the social and ecological complexities involved in building new participatory conservation geographies in human landscapes. By utilizing participatory GIS, the project will contribute to a better understanding of the capabilities of GIS as a technique for the translation and negotiation between different knowledge claims. The urgency with which CBC and participatory GIS mapping projects are being pursued throughout the developing world makes this research question a timely one for policy makers and academics alike. The project informs the theoretical frameworks of political ecology, science studies, GIS and critical cartographic theory, and conservation biology. Studies of local knowledge are often separated from critical reviews of science, and critical science studies is often theoretically removed from scientific productions. By combining the insights of science studies with a politically sensitive investigation of local knowledge and an ecological analysis of local land use, this study will transcend such disciplinary boundaries and open new doors for investigation into human-environment relations. As such, this project will contribute to a better understanding of the various ways in which we mediate the middle ground between conservation and development, people and nature, Western Scientific and local knowledge claims. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc19304 none The goal of this research is to understand how physically active women living in the lower Brazilian Amazon adapt to the increased energy demands of lactation and the impact of their choices on their own health and the health of their infants. Lactation is the most energetically demanding portion of reproduction and successful reproduction is a most important aspect of adaptation. How women meet this additional energy demand is important from both evolutionary and health perspectives. In developed countries women often meet the additional demands of lactation by increasing their dietary intake or decreasing their activity levels. However, these options may not be available to women living in developing nations, especially those who practice subsistence agriculture. In the latter case, women may be more reliant on their body fat stores or on making metabolic adaptations that would allow them to decrease their energy expenditure. In order to understand the adaptive strategies being used by these women, data on their dietary intake, energy expenditure and body composition will be measured during early, peak and late lactation. In addition to these biological data, cultural data will also be collected to identify potential cultural practices that may impact women during this period of time. By studying the energetics of lactation in women with physical activity patterns closer to those of our ancestors, we have the opportunity to increase our understanding of human reproductive biology and the flexibility of our reproductive system. In addition, this study will provide information on the health of women of reproductive age, as well as on their diets and activity patterns, which can inform potential development projects in the area doc15627 none Detachment faults are large-scale extensional structures that are responsible for much of the extension observed in the crust, however the origin and evolution of detachments are poorly understood and controversial. This project will attempt to address the mechanisms and rates of detachment and associated basin development in an active modern example - the Cordillera Blanca detachment fault in the Peruvian Andes. The work centers on the temporal and spatial evolution of the supradetachment basin, the denudation history of the uplifted footwall, and the Quaternary kinematic history. Results will be incorporated into tectonic models for detachment faulting in oceanic-continental convergent settings, which are expected to be of general application in this tectonic setting doc19306 none He Locating the source of cardiac arrhythmia currently requires an invasive and complex procedure. Noninvasive localization of sites of origin of arrhythmia would be of enormous value for numerous patients and would allow cardiologists to focus the intervention at the source of the arrhythmia without the need for lengthy intra-cardiac mapping. Currently, invasive mapping procedures in conjunction with programmed stimulation techniques have been steadily increasing in use in combination with newer therapeutic techniques including implantation of automatic intra-cardiac defibrillators and selective radio-frequency ablation of myocardial tissue. The availability of a noninvasive means of localizing sites of origin of activation in three-dimensional (3D) myocardium will greatly increase the ability to help monitor and guide invasive therapeutic and diagnostic techniques such as programmed stimulation and selective catheter-tip ablation. The goal of this project is to develop and evaluate a novel electrocardiographic localization methodology for accurate and rapid localization of sites of origin of cardiac activation from noninvasive electrocardiogram (ECG) measurements. To accomplish this goal the following aims will be addressed: (1) To develop and evaluate a novel heart-model-based approach to rapidly and accurately localize sites of origin of cardiac activation from noninvasive body surface ECG measurements, with the aid of an anisotropic realistically shaped heart model. (2) To systematically evaluate the capability of the proposed 3D electrocardiographic localization approach in a series of well-controlled computer simulations. (3) To validate the proposed 3D electrocardiographic localization approach in a clinical setting. The working hypothesis for these aims is that, by incorporating a priori information on physiological processes, one will be able to achieve greater stability and accuracy when solving the inverse problem, allowing accurately localizing sites of origin of cardiac activation doc19307 none O Day The proposed project will examine the mobilization of arsenic from sediments where it occurs in association with iron oxyhydroxides. The project will focus on a specific study site, North Haiwee Reservior near Olancha, California, where the input of arsenic to the sediments is controlled by engineering practices of known duration and magnitude and which has been the subject of a preliminary study by the research group. The project focuses on a specific field site because of the unique opportunities that site offers. It is anticipated that the mechanisms of iron and arsenic mobilization at Haiwee will be relevant to a variety of iron-dominated systems including aquifer sediments. Further, the information that is obtained on the timescales for arsenic release from sediments and the factors governing these timescales will increase understanding of the kinetic controls on arsenic concentrations in contacting porewaters and groundwaters doc19308 none Salamanca-Riba Dr. Salamanca Riba intends to investigate various problems in the representation theory of Lie groups. The first problem is the question of classifying all genuine unitary representations of the metaplectic group. Jeff Adams and Dan Barbasch have obtained a correspondence between these representations and a set of unitary representations of certain inner forms of the metaplectic group. The PI plans to study this correspondence and see if these representations go to interesting Zuckerman functor modules under this map. In addition, the PI will also work on a program already in progress in collaboration with David Vogan. The problem they want to solve is the following conjecture: There is a bijection between the set of unitary representations of a Lie group G, whose lowest K type is associated to a fixed parameter, and the set of unitary representations of a special subgroup with lowest K types associated to the same parameter. Lie groups have connections in many areas of applied Mathematics like Materials Science, Quantum Field Theory, Particle Physics, Control Theory and Robotics and Biology. For example, Control Theory and Robotics is related to some representations of certain compact Lie groups. In addition, Lie groups and their representations have also connections with other areas of pure Mathematics as well, like Differential Equations, Harmonic Analysis, Topology, Geometry and Ergodic Theory. For example, the study of problems in Analysis such as the behavior of solutions of differential equations, partial differential equations, integral equations, etc. leads naturally to formulating these problems not only in Euclidean space, but on differentiable manifolds. Many examples of these manifolds are classical Lie groups of matrices. This is particularly true of problems of this type arising in classical mechanics and physics and in modern problems of Lie groups and homogeneous spaces. Modern Analysis, when it goes beyond local results, becomes analysis on differentiable manifolds and Lie groups doc19309 none Regionally, anthropogenic aerosols can lead to large reductions in the surface solar irradiance, a corresponding increase in atmospheric solar heating, stronger low-level inversions, suppression of rainfall due to the direct microphysical effect, and less efficient removal of pollutants. These aerosol effects, in addition to altering the temperature distribution, can also lead to a weaker hydrological cycle, a major environmental issue for the 21st century. The overall goal of this project is to understand the above-mentioned aerosol effects. The specific objectives are twofold: 1) To quantify the direct and the indirect aerosol radiative forcings on regional scales by integrating in-situ, surface and satellite observations with a comprehensive Monte-Carlo Aerosol-Cloud Radiation (MACR) model that accounts for hybrid mixing of inorganic, organic and black carbon species. MACR will also account accurately for aerosol forcing (direct and first indirect) in cloudy skies. These estimates will also be used to improve the treatment of aerosol radiative effects and aerosol-cloud interactions in the NCAR Community Climate Model (CCM). The focus will be on regional Aerosol Hot Spots, which contribute the most to the global mean anthropogenic aerosol loading including the Asian, African and N. American regions. The selected regions coincide with regions where field observations are available. 2) To use the regional aerosol forcing as input to the NCAR CCM Climate System Model (CSM) and estimate impacts of the forcing on climate and the hydrological cycle. Our focus will be primarily on the Asian aerosols which contribute as much as 3O~5O% of the global anthropogenic aerosol optical depth. The climate model will be run both in prescribed-surface sea temperature mode (CCM) as well as in fully coupled mode (CSM). So far, aerosol has been portrayed simply as counteracting greenhouse gas induced arming, and its counteracting extent has been the primary concern. The inclusion of absorbing carbonaceous aerosols is likely to challenge this traditional view substantially. Preliminary CCM experiments with the Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX) absorbing aerosols reveal that the South Asian haze regionally cools the surface, shifts the inter-tropical convergence zone northwards and remotely suppresses the convection in the equatorial western Pacific with implications to El Nino-Southern Oscillation cycles. The proposed research builds on the infrastructure developed under NSF Center for Clouds Chemistry and Climate (C4) and INDOEX, including: C4 Data Integration system (CIDS); MACR; Satellite aerosol retrieval based on chemical data; three dimensional aerosol assimilation model; Beowulf cluster computers; and the network of collaborators developed through INDOEX. An array of ground based, airborne and satellite observations will be used. The aerosol forcing and climate response results generated by this work should contribute directly to future national and international climate impact assessments. The aerosol forcing from this work will serve as an independent estimate from that provided by global models. It also should lead to significant improvements in GCM treatment of aerosol forcing doc19310 none The PI s are requesting funding from NSF to support the attendance of US students and young scientists to the 8th International Conference in X-Ray Lasers , that will be held at the Aspen Institute, in Aspen Colorado during the last week of May of . This bi- annual international conference is recognized as the most important in the field of X-Ray lasers, and constitutes a forum to report the most recent advances in one of the frontiers of laser research. The conference will cover advances in ultrashort wavelength laser development, theory, and applications. Advances in the field of soft x-ray lasers have a synergistic effect in several disciplines. After decades of research these sources have now reached the point at which they are making important contributions to numerous disciplines, including plasma physics, material surface characterization, nanoelectronic metrology, and biology. The continuation of advance of this field is therefore of significant scientific and industrial interest. The conference has historically changed locations, to give at different times the maximum opportunity for attendance to scientists and students from different countries. In May it will be 8 years since the conference was held in the United States, in Williamsburg (Virginia), in May . The Aspen conference follows very successful meetings in Sweden (Lund, ), Japan (Kyoto, ) and France (Saint Malo, ). The Aspen meeting will offer the United States scientific and broad technical community the opportunity to actively participate in this international forum. National Science Foundation support will be important in assisting the participation a maximum number of US students and young scientists, and to make the presentations at the meeting accessible to the scientific community in general through the rapid publication of the conference proceedings. More than 250 scientists from all over the world are expected to attend doc19311 none This award supports theoretical research and education on topological defects in condensed matter physics. Research will focus on three areas: (1) The PI will use results from the previous grant period related to the forces acting on quantized vortices to make detailed studies of vortices in liquid helium, in dilute systems of trapped atoms, and in superconductors. A clear understanding of the vortices in superconductors is particularly important, as it is the dynamics of vortices that primarily determines dissipation of energy in superconducting magnets. (2) Trapped atoms at low temperatures will be studied with an aim to understand what happens when the interactions are not very weak, and to understand how the rotational motion observed in such systems relates to rotational motion in superfluid helium and to the penetration of magnetic flux in superconductors. (3) The PI will continue work on the construction of a theory of the size of corrections to topological quantum numbers. It is supposed that corrections to flux quantization in superconductors and to quantization of electrical conductance in the quantum Hall effect can readily be made negligibly small; modern determinations of fundamental constants are based on the precision of the Josephson voltage-frequency relation and of the integer quantum Hall effect. The PI intends to examine more closely the corrections to quantization in the Josephson effects for neutral superfluids, and the possible edge corrections to the quantum Hall effect. %%% This award supports theoretical research and education on topological defects in a wide range of condensed matter systems. Topological defects play a fundamental and ubiquitous role in condensed matter and materials physics. They are key players in dissipation processes in superconductors and in determining the mechanical strength of materials. This award is concerned with fundamental aspects of topological defects and has an emphasis on the study of a particular kind of topological defect, vortices in superfluids and superconductors. Superfluid includes not only the traditional superfluid states of the helium liquids that occur upon cooling to very low temperatures, but also the quantum coherent states recently realized in dilute gases of alkali atoms. The latter is not only of fundamental interest but contributes to the emerging area of quantum coherence control; quantum computing may be viewed as an application in this area doc19312 none Keaveny Under this Investigator Initiated Award, the investigators will test the theory that cells adapt in a mechanically integrative fashion to become tuned to their mechanical environment. The overall hypothesis is that a cell loaded habitually by high stresses will behave in a stiffer fashion than one loaded by low stresses, but that the cell deformation would be similar for both. The overall hypothesis will be tested by addressing three objectives: 1) develop a technique to measure the force deformation characteristics of whole cells using a modified atomic force microscope and provide a detailed description of the whole cell behavior for various loading conditions; 2) develop constitutive mathematical models of the cell using both phenomenological and micromechanical approaches; and 3) determine the effects of loading history on the mechanical behavior of both osteoblasts and osteocytes, with a focus on mechanical loading that result from both fluid flow (constant versus pulsatile) and bone matrix deformation. Results of the studies will contribute to the advancement of bone adaptation computational models and design of tissue-engineered bone substitutes doc19313 none Luthy This research proposes to examine the availability, biotransformation, and fate of perfluorinated compounds in aquatic sediments. These compounds have been used extensively and have been detected in fish, birds and humans. Little is known, however, about their behavior in the environment. The research will examine microbial degradation pathways and sediment interactions which will be used in developing a preliminary model for determining the fate of perfluorinated compounds doc19314 none Tesh This award to Skidaway Institute of Oceanography in the State of Georgia provides instrumentation to significantly improve the oceanographic research capabilities of the new research vessel Savannah, operated by SkIO as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The award supports acquisition of sensors to be used in the vessel s surface mapping system and on its CTD system, as well as an uninterruptible power supply. All of these are shared-use capabilities that are available to all funded users of the R V Wecoma. These improvements will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists during and future years doc19315 none This dissertation research will analyze data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to examine the impact of friendships on mental health. The principal outcome studied is the one-year change in high school students scores on standard depression scales. Positive mental health changes are hypothesized to result from higher prior levels of integration into friendship networks and improvements in those friendship networks. Special attention will be paid to how friendship networks may explain different levels of mental health for minority adolescents. School characteristics such as school size and urban location will be studied both for their direct effect on mental health and how friendship networks may affect mental health differently in different contexts doc19316 none Under the direction of Dr. Michael A. Jochim, Ms Sarah McClure will collect data in eastern Spain for her doctoral dissertation. She will conduct archaeological survey of the Canoles river valley in the Province of Valencia, Spain to identify changes in land use patterns during the transition from hunting and gathering to agricultural economies ( - BC). Domestic plants (wheat, emmer and legumes) and animals (goats, sheep, pigs and cows) were introduced to the area by BC. The remains of these domesticates are found in conjunction with the first ceramics of the region. However, in stark contrast to other parts of the Mediterranean, the farmers of eastern Spain did not live in villages until over a millennium later. The aggregation of people in villages indicates changes in their economies such as an intensification of agricultural practices and corresponding changes in social organization and cultural behavior. Current research in the Province of Valencia suggests that this reconstruction of the transition to farming may well be biased, since it is based largely on information from individual sites (caves and rockshelters). Ms McClure will use a regional approach to characterize the timing and nature of the shift to village farming economies. The primary aim of the study is to investigate the commonly held idea of a slow shift to intensified farming and to examine the social and ecological underpinnings of the transition. The archaeological survey of the Canoles valley will elucidate the role available wild resources played in the transition to agriculture. The Canoles valley is particularly suitable for this kind of analysis since it is a large valley connecting the Mediterranean coastal plain with the central plateau (Meseta) and contains a wealth of different ecological zones. Land use patterns will indicate how people were using their landscape and how this changed with new forms of subsistence practices. The transition to agriculture was a major turning point in human and environmental history, setting the stage for the rise of civilizations and changing the relationship between humans and their environment. In order to understand this transition, archaeologists must look to different regions of the world to identify fundamental similarities and differences in the timing, tempo, and impact of the cultural and organizational changes associated with the transition to food producing economies. Ms McClure s research in eastern Spain will contribute to the understanding of this fundamental shift and will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc19317 none Science for Future Elementary School Teachers (FEST) joins El Camino College (ECC), Moffett Elementary School, and California State Universities Dominguez Hills and Long Beach in a partnership to (1) link the content taught in two ECC science courses with pre-teaching experiences in the elementary schools; (2) introduce preservice teachers to the use of instructional technologies in science education; and (3) strengthen and sustain an articulated transfer path for future science teachers. Science FEST participants (1) take reformed physical and life science courses targeted for future teachers to develop their knowledge of content and pedagogy; (2) concurrently enroll in a curriculum development course in which they design inquiry-based, technology-enhanced science modules for elementary school students; (3) present the modules in classrooms, informal education settings, and at professional conferences; (4) develop leadership skills by advising and mentoring elementary school students via the After School Science Clubs and field trips; and (5) receive additional support services (academic career counseling, technology training, transfer admission assistance) to facilitate their transfer into four-year teacher preparation programs. As a result, these future teachers have a stronger foundation in science and instructional technology, experience inquiry-based science, and better understand the integral nature of science in the world. This foundation helps them deliver science content more effectively once they enter their own classrooms doc19318 none McDuff This award to University of Washington s School of Oceanography provides instrumentation to significantly improve the oceanographic research capabilities of the research vessels Barnes and Thompson, two ships operated by UW as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The specific items supported with this award include a hull-mounted acoustic current profiler and a water purification system for R V Thompson, and a thermosalinograph for R V Barnes. These improvements will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists using these two ships in their research during and future years doc19319 none This dissertation will use - panel survey data on 800 Chinese firms to investigate business responses to changes in the Chinese social welfare system (e.g., housing, medical care). These quantitative panel data will be supplemented by more qualitative in-depth interviews with managers in forty firms to inquire how decisions regarding welfare benefits were made. Hypotheses specify which types of firms are most likely to have reduced welfare spending (e.g., firms associated with local rather than the central government; managers not previously Communist Party members). It is also expected that firms, especially state owned firms, that reduced their welfare spending performed better financially as a result doc19320 none This project will use an analytical approach to describe the evolution of ring current ions and electrons during magnetic storms. A more realistic magnetic field and electric field will be used than has previously been done in analytic studies. It will examine the radial transport and loss mechanisms of particles in the inner magnetosphere and will examine the role the ring current and its associated magnetic field play on the particle dynamics. The motion of both electrons and ions will be described using a Hamiltonian formalism. This formalism will allow the model to treat the particle motions even near the inner boundary of the ring current region (L ~ 2 doc19321 none This dissertation investigates how immigrant Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley use social networks to develop their enterprises. The dissertation hypothesizes that the strong social ties typical of co-ethnic networks are especially important for success in startup phases but that the weak ties found in broader networks beyond the ethnic community become more important during the expansion phase. Data will be collected in a survey followed up by more intensive interviews doc19322 none This project will continue the development of realistic models of the Earth s magnetic field in the magnetosphere. In particular, this effort will be directed at improvements to the inner magnetosphere during magnetic storms. A new index will also be developed as a mechanism for parameterizing the state of the magnetic field during magnetic storms. The data for generating the improved models will come from the existing multi-spacecraft database available from the National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC). The resulting models will be made publicly available through the NSSDC doc19323 none This dissertation research will investigate changes between and in issue agendas of environmental social movements. Annual data will be coded for the almost 500 environmental organizations listed in the Encyclopedia of Associations. Issues have been grouped into seventeen categories based on activities described in the Encyclopedia. Issue agendas are expected to vary as a result of variations in organizational structure (e.g., local, participatory movements versus international organizations), tactics (ten overlapping categories such as electoral, legal, and direct action), other organizational characteristics such as size and location, influences from the international environmental movement, legislative successes and debates, media attention, and foundation support doc19324 none This doctoral dissertation research project explores the relationships among women s environmental identity, agency, and agricultural and resource extractive practices in the southern Yucatan peninsular region of Mexico. The project also examines whether and under what circumstances there can be a coincidence between women s interests and conservation interests, in a particular location - the rural farming communities bordering the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve. This location is undergoing an intensification of agricultural land-use in conjunction with state and non-governmental organization efforts to protect and manage the forest. Conservation and development projects target women s groups organized at the community level, encouraging the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices and sustainable forestry uses. The central thesis of this research project is that some women s groups respond to the presence of these projects through an active adoption of an environmental stewardship identity and that this response is associated with access to formal programs whose projects of sustainable development affect opportunities and constraints on the wellbeing of women and their households. The management of environmental identity is part of a broader strategy to achieve individual and household food security and pursue improvements in consumption by taking advantage of alternative practices promoted by formal programs. The research focuses on the following questions: (1) How do women s groups around the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve respond to local conservation and development projects? Is one response the active management of group environmental identity? (2) Why do some women s groups self-identify as environmental stewards and adopt more sustainable practices, while others do not? And (3) what is the impact of these responses on (a) women s access to natural resources, (b) agricultural and extractive practices adopted by the groups, and (c) the wellbeing of participating women? The project is structured into two primary components: personal interviews of smallholder women whose households are engaged primarily in farming, and an ethnographic study of six women s groups active in the project area, with a range of histories, activities, and degree to which the group self-identifies as green. For the personal interviews, the researcher will interview a random sample of women, stratified to include thirty-five households with participation in green women s groups and thirty-five households without participation. A farm visit will accompany each interview, and the researcher will statistically analyze interview responses. The ethnographic research attempts to access the complexity of group processes, as well as enrich and situate the personal interview data of the first research component. The significance of this research centers on its examination of how common ideas within sustainable development, such as the coincidence of rural women s interests in developing countries with environmental conservation interests, are perhaps being used by groups to their own advantage. There is a tendency to polarize discussion into either or terms: either women are natural environmental stewards or they are not. The thesis that women s groups in the southern Yucatan peninsular region might be using the notion of women as natural environmental stewards to their material advantage does not necessarily mean that these groups are not in fact adopting more environmentally sound practices. Both theory and conservation and development practice will benefit from a more nuanced understanding of when, why, and under what circumstances particular women consider themselves to be environmental stewards and then also engage in corresponding green activities. The results will contribute to local sustainable development efforts around the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve and be of comparative interest to conservation and development efforts elsewhere in the world. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc19325 none Behrman There are two major advantages to quantum computing as such: the vast increase in computing power that comes from the quantum evolution of states, and the ability (at least in principle) of performing computations that cannot be done, classically. However major problems exist to their practical implementation. The marriage of quantum computing to artificial neural networks potentially solves three pressing problems in quantum computing: 1) the paucity of quantum computing algorithms; 2) the need to have continuous error correction to deal with decoherence and incomplete and or damaged data; and 3) the practical difficulties of scaling up to large numbers of qubits. This marriage also addresses a major hurdle in neural networks: 4) that of supplying the connectivity for large scale neural networks. Here the PI s propose an interdisciplinary collaborative research effort between experimental work with SQUIDs at the University of Kansas and theoretical work in quantum neural networks at Wichita State University. This research is directed toward building a quantum neural network to exploit the advantages both of quantum computers and of neural networks. There are two avenues they wish to explore. First, they will extend their work on temporal quantum neural networks, in which information flows in the temporal dimension (temporal network), to the case of using superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) as qubits. An experimental physical implementation of their temporal quantum neural network will be trained to learn complex behavior such as logic gates. Second, they will continue and expand their current work in theoretical characterization and simulation of a quantum neural networks in which information flows in the spatial dimension (spatial network), and extend their experimental work to the case of several entangled qubits doc19326 none Mikania micrantha is a rapid growing vine that is native to Central and South America but which has spread throughout the tropics. This species has had a major impact on the economies and environments of several regions of the world, especially in South Asia, Southeast Asia and throughout the Pacific islands. In South Asia especially, the plant is a major threat to silviculture, and researchers in many parts of the world are searching for biotic controls. In Samoa, this species appeared during the s and is now the most common weed in the archipelago. Farmers here, however, have incorporated M. micrantha into the shifting cultivation system, where it is used as cover, mulch and cattle forage. Additionally, people use this species medicinally. Implementation of biotic controls risks depriving the rural population of a valuable natural resource. With the goals of conservation and indigenous use at odds, this study will engage the theory and methods from cultural, political and landscape ecology to answer several questions. First, the project will assess whether M. micrantha poses a risk to Samoa s various habitat types in general or whether it is restricted mainly to areas of human disturbance. This will be assessed through stratified random sampling in each vegetation type. Aerial photographs, field mapping and GIS will also be used to construct the mosaic of habitat patches and corridors and, in conjunction with the sampling, will be used to construct a testable model of the distribution of M. micrantha. Second, the study will assess the dimensions of human use of this species. The investigation here will gather both biophysical and ethnographic data. Each field in the study village will be mapped and vegetation and soil samples will be taken, to assess the feedbacks between plant communities and soil. Interviews with each of the farmers will be conducted to assess how they manage the plant communities in their fields, especially regarding whether M. micrantha is actively managed for its specific advantages, actively managed against as an undesirable weed, or simply adapted to as a means of making the best of a bad situation. Finally, the study will utilize ethnographic techniques to investigate how each farmer is situated in power laden social networks and how this feeds into the farmers decision-making. The study will examine the networks for accessing land (form of land tenure), acquiring inputs, disposing of agricultural outputs (through subsistence and or marketing), and knowledge (whether traditional, educational or government extension). The study crosses several biophysical and social scales, from the microscale (field, patch, household) to mesoscale (village, landscape mosaic) and macroscale (biological invasions, national and international environmental policy and discourse). This analysis links social, political and economic forces to the individual decision-makers that shape the landscape mosaic. Mikania micrantha is a species that is impacting the environment and economies of several tropical countries, but little is known about it. This study in Samoa serves as a unique opportunity to investigate this species such that it will inform a variety of disciplines from diverse perspectives. This investigation will inform the broader research into invasive species, especially in terms of studying this biological invasion in the context of human dominated ecosystems and the social dimensions of this domination across several scales of interaction. Furthermore, this study will elucidate factors that can be used to determine whether an invasive species is a threat that must be dealt with or whether it is benign or even beneficial; implementing control of invasive species simply because they are invasive species may impose a greater cost on society than is necessary. Finally, the study will bring to light the local knowledge and practices surrounding this species that can inform more equitable environmental policy. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc19327 none This dissertation research investigates the interrelationships among tourists, tour guides, and the historical sites in Jerusalem. The principal focus is on the role of tour guides who mediate the tourist experience for a variety of groups who come to the site with different expectations. The guides also have to manage the logistic difficulties in a city with repeated conflict. In-depth interviews and participant observation are used to build a description of how the tour guides manage the often competing relationships with the government, the citizens, and the tourist groups. The results are expected to modify conventional views of tourism that tourists simply consume the products offered by the tourist sites; rather the tourist experience is a product of complex mediation by tour guides and their social relations with several different actors doc19328 none EIA 02- Das, Chita R. Acharya, Raj; Giles, C. L.; Irwin, Mary Jane; Plassman, Paul E. Pennsylvania State University (I^3\)C: An Infrastructure for Innovation in Information Computing This proposal, advancing the state-of-the-art in cluster computing, addresses a broad spectrum of interactive and archival information processing issues that require intensive computational capabilities. A high performance compute-engine (clusters), the Access Net, Storage Network (file and database server), and a Media Lab (multimedia and graphics equipment, workstations, laptops, PDAs, and software) comprise the infrastructure that will support the following three core areas, with respective research activities: 1. Applications a. Computational Science b. Digital Immortality c. Bioinformatics 2. System Software a. Cluster Scheduling b. Shared I O Support c. Fault Tolerance 3. Architecture a. QoS Support for Multimedia and E-Commerce Applications in Clustered-Servers b. Design of Energy-Efficient Hardware and Software Optimizations c. Energy Perspective Optimization of Different Layers of the Wireless Protocol Stack The project focuses on three application areas (Computational Science, Digital Immortality, and Bioinformatics) to examine common research issues, which in turn drive the Software and Architecture research for providing holistic solutions to challenging problems. A research team, consisting of 25 investigators from three different colleges, will benefit from this infrastructure by strengthening their interdisciplinary research through cross-fertilization of new ideas doc19329 none The objective of the symposium is to present by example the power of integrative biology in approaching complex biological phenomena. This includes integration across all levels of biological organization: taxonomic, habitat, and methodological; from molecules to global ecosystems; from observation to experimentation; and from different perspectives, including those from different cultures. Integrative biology can and should be used both for research and to train the next generation of biologists so they can better think broadly and synthetically about solutions to complex problems of pressing importance. With the Society s strong student membership, we are particularly concerned about training in integrative biology. Funding from the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS) will bring two prominent foreign scientists (from France and Japan) together with five US biologists to share their approaches in integrative biology. The presentations will be published in the Society s journal, The Journal of Integrative and Comparative Biology, and sent to all members of the Society, as well as widely distributed to subscribing scientific libraries around the world doc19330 none This project focuses on the study of cold season, subtropical surface cyclones, known as the Kona lows, that occur in the northern Pacific and Atlantic Ocean basins. The Kona lows are responsible for much destructive weather in the Hawaiian Islands. These cyclone systems originate from extratropical upper level shortwaves and then develop and propagate to the lower troposphere in sub-tropical regions. The research will include: 1) building the climatology of the Kona lows and the evolution of their associated large-scale environment, and constructing the composite structure of the Kona lows using the ECMWF reanalysis; 2) studying single cases selected either as a trapped occluded cyclone or an example of cyclogenesis in the tradewind easterlies beneath a strengthening upper tropospheric disturbance. The diagnostics for these cases will employ output from simulations using a mesoscale model; and 3) investigating the energetics of both the composite and the single cases. This study will provide insight into the dynamics and thermodynamics of cyclones that bear both extra-tropical and subtropical characteristics. The research will provide good opportunities for graduate studies and thesis topics doc19331 none Vidic Catastrophic iron corrosion sometimes occurs in the presence of SRB with profound consequences. A theory of SRB induced iron corrosion is proposed based on the observations that reduced phosphorus species such as phosphine (PH3) can catalyze the rate limiting reaction in iron corrosion, and that phosphates added to iron metal or drinking water as corrosion inhibitors can serve as the source of catalyst in the presence of sulfides. Three phases of experimental work are planned to examine aspects of reduced phosphorus species chemistry. This includes 1) development of analytical protocols and a survey of reduced P occurrence, 2) examination of the aqueous chemistry of reduced P and pathways leading to its production, and 3) defining the role of reduced phisphorus in iron corrosion. This research, although fundamental, has important applications to the engineering community. The investigators note that there is ample evidence supporting the idea that reduced phosphorus could catalyze iron corrosion under conditions present in water distribution systems. Therefore, where these forms of phosphorus are present, there can be high costs associated with pipe replacement doc19332 none This experimental condensed matter physics project focuses on electron interaction physics in high-quality, quantum-confined semiconductor structures. The program includes studies of both fabrication, via molecular beam epitaxy technique, and of electronic transport properties at low temperatures and high magnetic fields where electron correlation phenomena dominate. The emphasis is on high-quality two-dimensional (2D) electron systems confined to selectively-doped AlAs quantum wells. The 2D electrons in AlAs have parameters that are very different from those of the standard 2D electrons in GaAs: they have a much larger and anisotropic effective mass, a much larger effective g-factor, and they occupy multiple conduction band valleys. Since these parameters influence the electron-electron interaction, AlAs 2D electrons thus provide a crucial and important test-bed for new many-body physics. The proposed projects are performed primarily by students, both graduate and undergraduate, and form a crucial part of their education and training. Quality education, in cutting edge technology and physics, is therefore integrated into the research. This research involves an experimental study of interaction between electrons in specially designed semiconductor structures. In these structures, the electrons are confined to specific layers in the material and are spatially separated from the dopant atoms (impurities). As a result, the electron system iis very pure and the physics is dominated by electron-electron interaction rather than electron-dirt (-iimpurity) interaction. Such systems serve as a testing ground for some of the most exciting physics involving interaction. The particular system that is explored in this work involves the confinement of electrons in an AlAs (aluminum arsenide) layer. The electrons in AlAs have parameters that are very different from the more conventional system of electrons in a GaAs (galium arsenide) layer so that new phenomena is expected to occur. This research program includes studies of both fabrication, via molecular beam epitaxy technique, and of electronic transport properties at low temperatures and high magnetic fields where electron interaction phenomena dominate. The major part of the research will be performed by graduate and undergraduate students. The students will do state-of-the-art research, under close supervision, on some of the most exciting and challenging problems in solid state physics. Both the fabrication and the physics of advanced layered semiconductor structures are at the forefront of today s science and technology. Therefore, while the subject of the proposed research is fundamental, well-trained and educated students in this field will be invaluable resources for the US as well as the rest of the world doc19333 none This dissertation research will investigate the development of political consciousness in German young men. Nine young men in their third year of vocational school in Berlin will be interviewed four times. All have been interviewed in a previous wave of interviews. The nine have been selected to represent a range of political positions from radical right to democratic and to sample from a variety of vocational programs, including information technology electrician, cook, and concrete worker. Oral histories, observations of work and social life, and discussions of the previous interview will be used to understand why some working-class men adopt radical right politics while others develop a democratic political consciousness doc19334 none This doctoral dissertation research on the revolutionary memorials in China will extend China Studies scholarship on the political and cultural implications of economic development and reform since the late s, and Cultural Geography scholarship on interpretations of memorial landscapes. It will examine the effects of economic development (including fiscal decentralization) on the cultural landscapes of commemoration - evolutionary memorials and shrines - as an indicator of broader ideological shifts associated with market reforms in China. It is structured on a provincial scale with three specific revolutionary memorial sites in Jiangxi: Jinggangshan, Nanchang, and Lushan. The field research will primarily involve secondary data collection of on-site archival research and primary data collection based on interviews with managerial staff, random visitors, and visitors with deeper personal involvement. Secondary data will serve as the baseline for comparison, indicating whether the sites are commercialized due to economic reform. Primary data analysis will be based on the reduced data (transcribed and coded file) for drawing inferences as to how people interpret the transformation, and how cultural landscapes of commemoration in China reveal the dynamic nature of Chinese cultural, social, and political values over time. By examining development in relation to the changing cultural landscape of commemoration in China in the case of Jiangxi, the fieldwork will help to investigate what transformation is occurring with the revolutionary memorials in China and what ideological shift is revealed in this transformation. The research will shed light on the impacts of economic development on political and cultural phenomena in China, revealing new insights into the rapidly changing economy and social structures of China. It will help interpret the relationship between ideology, development, and landscape in a country where such studies have been rare. It will address the gap between the geography of regional development and the cultural geography of China s regions, bridging the study of cultural landscapes of commemoration in the West and similar landscapes in China since studies on the cultural landscape of monuments tend to concentrate more on regions such as Europe and North America. The research will also introduce to the discipline of geography a rich cross-cultural resource for discerning contested ideologies as a result of economic development in the changing cultural landscape in China, providing the China Studies field with a cultural and political perspective in addressing the greater issue of how Chinese identity adjusts according to the effects of regional development in the reform era. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc19335 none Proposal Number: PI: Akos Magyar The proposed research will deal with several problems in harmonic analysis some of which are also of interest in ergodic and number theory. The emphasis is on a combination of techniques from analysis and of other fields such as analytic number theory and singularity theory. The objects of study are related to diophantine equations, maximal averages over subvarieties and their discrete analogues, polynomial type ergodic theorems as well as oscillatory integrals and integral operators with degeneracies. A set of problems are discrete in nature, where mapping properties of operators related to classical exponential sums play a crucial role. Tough these appear as discrete analogues of well known constructs in analysis, they in turn can yield to new insights both in ergodic and number theory. Another direction is to study problems related to oscillatory integrals with degeneracies, where the usual curvature type conditions are replaced by assumptions on the singularities or only assuming genericity. During roughly the past decade the scope of harmonic analysis has been vastly extended by incorporating methods from seemingly different fields of mathematics. This has led to an essentially deeper understanding of basic partial differential equations under periodic conditions (such as the nonlinear Schrodinger equation of quantum mechanics and the Wave equation), new phenomena in ergodic theory meaning that measurements do not have to be taken regularly but only very rarely to understand physical processes. The proposed research will concentrate on these types of problems Where a combination of methods of different fields of mathematics seems to be needed doc19336 none The principal investigator proposes to study the geometry of low-dimensional dynamical systems, especially symplectic and volume-preserving maps, using both computational and analytical techniques. While much is known about the two-dimensional case, there are still many questions about the onset and development of chaos for three- and higher-dimensional systems. While most oscillators are anharmonic (have twist), twistless bifurcations occur in one-parameter families of these systems. In the proposal, the geometry of twistless bifurcations will be studied leading to an understanding of fold and cusp bifurcations in the twist. The resulting geometry of the reconnection of resonances and exotic twistless tori will be studied numerically. These should play a role in limiting the stability domains for many dynamical systems. From the other side, the destruction of chaos can be profitably studied using a limit of extreme chaos, the anti-integrable (AI) limit as a starting point. In this proposal, the PI will use the AI limit to study coupled systems of maps and chaotic boundaries. Near this limit, structures such as exotic versions of the Smale horseshoe, and other heteroclinic tangles should occur. The onset of chaos in conservative systems is signaled by the destruction of tori. These have been studied by a rescaling analysis called the renormalization transformation. The structure of this transformation for four and higher dimensional systems is only beginning to be understood. The PI proposes that recent approximate versions of this transformation will give effective numerical strategies for finding the destruction and analyzing the topology of the resulting objects. Developing an understanding of the dynamics of conservative systems is important to applications including the design of particle accelerators, obtaining rates for simple chemical reactions, calculating confinement times for charged particles in plasma fusion devices, understanding the spectra of highly excited atomic systems, and designing efficient spacecraft trajectories in an era of lower budgets. Dynamics is such systems is often chaotic, which implies that prediction of specific trajectories is difficu however, chaos can be profitably utilized to improve efficiency, for example of spacecraft trajectories, by judiciously applying small course corrections. Chaos can also dramatically affect the lifetimes of particles in confinement devices and the rates of chemical reactions. The PI proposes to develop geometrical and computational techniques that can be used to address these questions. In addition extending our understanding of chaos to higher dimensional cases will help populate the zoo of chaotic objects in multidimensional systems doc19337 none Little The mixing mechanisms induced in water by bubble-plumes will be identified and incorporated into a coupled bubble-plume reservoir model for design and operation of hypolimnetic oxygenation systems. Field testing will be conducted using a linear bubble-plume diffuser in a small water supply reservoir in Virginia and using six circular bubble-plume diffusers in a mid-sized eutrophic lake in Switzerland. Oxygen transfer and plume induced mixing will be monitored before, during and after diffuser operation. In addition, biogeochemical fluxes will be monitored. This research will enable the development of the first scientifically rigorous coupled bubble-plume two dimensional reservoir model that includes mechanistic features of oxygen transfer, plume-induced mixing and the impact on biogeochemical fluxes, including SOD doc19338 none John Protasiewicz, Department of Chemistry, Case Western Reserve University, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program to investigate new compounds containing multiple bonds to phosphorus. The project has three main goals: 1) to develop new and better methodologies for the synthesis of phosphaalkenes, diphosphenes and other P=X bonds; 2) synthesize and study new ligands containing several low coordinate main group elements; and 3) characterize extended systems having interesting optical and electronic properties. The fundamental chemistry of phosphinidenes will be examined following their thermal or photochemical generation from phosphinidene precursors. In addition, phosphinidene precursors will be used to construct discrete oligomers and ultimately polymers with desireable properties. Phosphorus-containing analogs to poly(phenylenevinylenes), PPV, and poly(phenyleneethylenes), PPE, are two of the polymers to be prepared and studied. Conjugated oligomers and polymers are technologically important as organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), molecular wires and molecular switches. Incorporating phosphorus or related main group elements into the backbone of these polymers can change the properties in many ways. Students and researchers trained to work in this project will gain a broad knowledge in inorganic and organometallic synthetic methods as well as interdisciplinary areas such as polymer chemistry and molecular electronics doc19339 none This dissertation investigates how Beirut s locally based ethnic and religious factionalism affects the plans for urban reconstruction in the wake of the Lebanese civil war. Global and national elites have championed plans for a new modern commercial city but now have to negotiate with previously subordinated ethnic groups who seized neighborhood power bases during the war. Urban reconstruction is therefore shaped by struggles between centralization and decentralization, elite and subordinate groups, global and local economics. The process in Beirut is expected to reflect similar conflicts in multi-ethnic cities around the world. Archival newspaper data will supplement qualitative field work and interviews that have already been completed doc19340 none In this proposed RUI research, we will apply our current research results supported by NSF to design efficient parallel algorithms and to develop software to reliable numerical solutions for both unconstrained and constrained multivariate global nonlinear optimization problems. To achieve high reliability, even in the presence of uncertainty in the data, roundo error, and nonlinearities by finite digit computations, we apply interval arithmetic in this project. The basic algorithms to be used are interval branch-and-bound method and interval Newton generalized bisection method. In designing parallel algorithm and developing portable software, we will take full advantages of parallel computing to significantly reduce not only elapsed computation time but also total amount of computation due to the spatial nature of the problem we address. To achieve high efficiency, we will balance workload dynamically among available processors through inter-processor communication. The software will be architecture independent. General sparsity and scalability will be considered as well. The research results, parallel software package, installation and user guides, and testing examples will be freely disseminated through the Internet doc19341 none Wise, David S. Indiana University - Bloomington RI: A Research Infrastructure for Collaborative, High-Performance Grid Applications This project, developing an experimental infrastructure for distributed high performance computing, supports ten research projects extending the location-transparency that the Grid provides for computation resources to the full spectrum of activities which end-users require. Services being explored include software development, parallel code middleware, distributed software components for scientific computing, security for parallel remote method invocation, managing large-scale data streams, and collaboration methodologies. The research builds on and extends the institutions collaborations with several national Grid research teams. In contrast to existing national and university infrastructure available through production machines, this research requires an environment tolerant of experimental network protocols, temporary middleware, and other system-level changes. The infrastructure will contribute to the following research projects: a. Opie: basic work on parallel matrix algorithms that achieve high efficiency across many architectural platforms b. LAM: middleware MPI implementations supporting hierarchical and fault-tolerant parallel computing c. dQUOB: application of SQL queries to live data streams d. RMI Security: basic research into security mechanisms for remote method invocation, allowing security to be traded off with efficiency e. HPJ: High Performance Java creating a language platform for portable high performance coding f. Grid Broker: reliable, robust publish subscribe service for introducing fault tolerance into the distributed Grid environment g. Community Grids Collaboratory: advanced collaboration capabilities with applications to both distance education and distributed communities h. Xports: design of methodologies for remote instrument access and data management of the resulting extremely large data sets i. Software Components: distributed software component model designed for applications that use parallel computing nodes in wide-area Grid environments j. Science Portals: set of tools that allow programmers to build Grid distributed applications accessed and controlled from desktop environments and web browsers Major improvements to infrastructure supporting all these projects include a 16-node cycle server and a large-scale file server as well as network upgrades to and within the building doc19342 none This dissertation investigates how state actions help to create an informal labor sector in Argentina. Past theory and research has identified the informal sector with the absence of state protection, but this definition neglects the formal legislation that explicitly legitimizes informal sector work. For instance, a Argentine labor law legislated temporary, low-wage, unprotected employment with reduced employer contributions to social security. The research will investigate the impact of this law and its amendments on workers in La Rioja, Argentina. Studying a smaller city will help expand the scope of research on the informal sector beyond the usual focus on large global cities. A wide variety of data will be collected including surveys of workers, in-depth interviewers with political and labor leaders, official statistics, and content analyses of legislation and newspaper coverage doc19343 none Collaborative ( ) David Meyer, UCSD the latter (putting aside the fact that large scale quantum computers have not yet been built) has a known algorithm for only one specific practical problem-factoring large numbers--but that algorithm runs immensely faster than the best classical algorithm known. The project combines both of these computational models. It will address the possiblility of quantum learning for practical reasons. The ultimate goal is to develop quantum learning models which have strengths analogous to classical ones-the ability to find quantum solutions to problems for which there is no apparent quantum algorithmic solution. Only the most rudimentary steps have been taken in this direction-hence the project will approach this goal from the bottom up. The PI s will investigate a specific architecture (inspired by biology): quantum perceptrons, and more generally, quantum neural networks. Then will carefully define a completely quantum perceptron which can be connected into a network, analyze its capacity, derive learning rules for it, apply these rules to various tasks, and extend each of these objectives to quantum neutral networks. This work will emphasize the importance of designing quantum systems with performance not achievable by corresponding classical systems doc19344 none Leonid Germanovich Georgia Institute of Technology SGER: Fracture Processes on Small Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Solar System Traditionally, asteroids and comets are considered to be an important source of information on the early Solar System. The defense against asteroids and comets has become a popular media and research topic. They pose a risk to life on Earth, but also represent a potential source of metals and other raw materials in the near-Earth space. The vast majority of data concerning asteroids and comets has been obtained via remote observations based on the assumed surface properties, which are functions of former and ongoing geomechanical processes. Yet, there has been no or hardly any quantification and mathematical treatment of the possible role of these processes in the evolution of asteroids and comets. The goal of this proposal is to incorporate principles of terrestrial geomechanics in the framework of mechanical processes that occur on asteroids and comets. Geomechanical processes on terrestrial planets (i.e., Mercury, Venus, Earth, Moon, and Mars) are significantly affected by such factors as gravitation, tectonics, volcanism, and erosion, which are considered absent, or of no consequence, on small extraterrestrial bodies. In essence, asteroids represent the simplest geomechanical systems (no air, no water, extremely low gravity, primitive rocks) and studying this extreme case would not only assist astronomical developments but could also provide valuable feedback for conventional (terrestrial) geomechanics. The proposed research consists of three parts: (1) devising a new mathematical model accounting for various temporal and spatial scales associated with fracture processes on asteroids; (2) investigating mechanics of the formation of the soil (regolith) on asteroids; and (3) developing a new model of cometary outbursts associated with fractional sublimation of nucleus material. It is suggested that thermal stresses induced by the seasonal periodic heating due to the motion of the asteroid around the Sun in elliptical orbits coupled with short daily rotations around the axis of inertia are primarily responsible for the disintegration of asteroid material. Furthermore, the regolith soil formation is an ongoing process caused by thermal space weathering, which is an effective means of erosion even in the airless, waterless, and low-gravity environment. Finally, sublimation of cometary material caused by crystallization of amorphous ice produces large hydraulic fractures. Propagation of these fractures transports pressurized vapor-dust emulsions to the surface of the comet nucleus resulting in catastrophic vapor-dust outbursts doc19345 none During recent decades, tourism has been one of the most rapidly growing segments of the world economy. The total number of international tourists was estimated at nearly 700 million people in , with the estimated $476 billion in tourist-related transactions constituting about a tenth of the global GNP. Although the tourism industry frequently has been criticized for fostering environmental harm, a growing number of firms are seeking to adopt and adapt alternative-tourism policies that are more ecologically and culturally responsible. This doctoral dissertation research project will conduct a comprehensive analysis of the implementation of alternative-tourism policies and practices by conventional mass-tourism corporations through a case study of the Sandals Resorts International corporation, which is headquartered in Jamaica. Sandals is the largest and most successful all-inclusive mass-tourism corporation operating in the Caribbean. In , Sandals transformed its Negril facility by creating economic, cultural, and environmental programs that mimic those of alternative-tourism developments. In so doing, Sandals Negril became the first all-inclusive hotel in the world to be certified to the Green Globe 21 Standard for its environmental policies and management. This study will investigate Sandals Negril s economic, cultural, and environmental programs and practices in order to understand the difficulties a traditional mass-tourism corporation faces in implementing policies of sustainability as well as the corporate rationale lying behind such transformations. The study will focus on the decisions behind Sandals Resorts move to mass ecotourism, and it will investigate how the corporation develops, implements, and evaluates programs of sustainability. Sandals five other Jamaican resorts, all of which have retained their mass-tourism character, will serve as a baseline for comparison, as will one alternative-tourism site located on the island. The bulk of the research will consist of an organizational ethnography of Sandals, with inquiries ranging from the highest levels of corporate management in Montego Bay to waste-management workers in the Negril facility. Interviews also will be conducted with government tourism officials and with people living in proximity to each of the resorts. The study will be the most comprehensive analysis of an international tourism corporation in a less developed country. Sandals is central to Jamaica s economy and to Caribbean tourism more generally. An industry leader, Sandals is a potential harbinger of changes underway in tourism. The transformation of Sandals Negril is widely recognized as one of the more important changes in the industry, with widespread implications for the further development of new resorts and for intra-industry competition. If mass-tourism corporations begin to more widely adopt the characteristics of alternative-tourism resorts, there will be pervasive effects on the economic, cultural, and environmental footprints of tourism facilities. Furthermore, these transformations in the mass-tourism industry will also affect the future of alternative-tourism development in other contexts throughout the world. Methodologically, the research will contribute a much-needed corporate case study to the literature on tourism development in less developed countries. As an organizational ethnography, the research will also offer a model for similar investigations into the restructuring of corporations. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc19346 none Projected Proposed: This project, developing a flexible department-wide collaborative work infrastructure, Pervasive Pixels, that will serve as a testbed for research in collaborative systems, aims to use this collaborative framework to conduct research and teaching. Pervasive Pixels will capture and deliver multimedia information across heterogeneous networks and devices. The system will schedule meetings, manage and prefetch multimedia objects, laying out material on individual and shared displays. Meetings are facilitated by locating, tracking and identifying users as they desire and are recorded, annotated and summarized, with extensive research capabilities. While improvements in core computation and communication technologies encourage working and interacting remotely, engaging in interdisciplinary collaborations that span buildings, cities, and countries, routinely encounters severe limitations imposed by current collaboration support systems. Pervasive Pixels is created to address these problems and should make possible Capturing and delivering multimedia information (including video), through heterogeneous networks, clients, and devices; Scheduling meetings, managing and prefetching work documents and multimedia objects, and laying out materials of individual and shared displays, based on models of workflow needs and models of temporal, spatial, and semantic interrelationships; Facilitating meetings by locating, tracking, and identifying users, and understanding their gestures, in live and captured video and audio; Recording, annotating, summarizing, and searching meeting content, from multiple physical perspectives and via multiple types of database queries, thus maximizing the effects of temporal differences. The infrastructure emphasizes Large, instrumented, multi-display workspaces in a variety of locations, to accommodate group interactions. Networked mobile devices of various capacities, used individually and in the context of larger workspaces. Transparent and automatic adaptability to changes of place, platform, or group composition, allowing mobile users to interact as they move about, without having to account for these changes manually. Support a wide range of hardware and software, beginning with commercial off-the-shelf commodity components, whose capabilities are retained while the system evolves, ultimately leading to new standards for meeting environments doc19347 none EIA 02- Bestavros, Azer Betke, Margrit; Crovella, Mark E.; Matta, Ibrahim; Sclaroff, Stan Boston University RI: SENSORIUM: Research Infrastructure for Managing Spatio-Temporal Objects in Video Sensor Networks This project, developing an open sensor network research infrastructure (SENSORIUM), aims to catalyze fundamental advances in image and video computing, network protocols, and resource management to deal with unique spatio-temporal constraints of sensor networks. SENSORIUM is composed of a sensor network of video cameras spanning several rooms, networked processing units, and a terabyte database, managed together to satisfy queries using those generated by mobile users within this environment. The infrastructure enables the following research projects: a. Modeling, interpretation, and prediction of human motion in video streams at multiple scales in space time and at multiple layers of detail; b. Development of efficient location management, routing, transport, and content distribution protocols for multi-resolution scale streaming sensory data networks; c. Characterization of traffic and access patterns in mobile sensory networks; d. Instrumentation of embedded real-time operating systems to enable coordinated resource management and the development of middleware services for the management of active sensor networks; e. Indexing and mining of large spatio-temporal non-textual sensory datasets, with a particular emphasis on mining of human motions and activities; f. Enhancing code safety for embedded systems through the use of type systems and run-time support, with emphasis on flow-oriented programming; g. Development of algorithms and protocols for supporting security and trust, and for protecting the confidentiality and integrity of data in video sensor networks and repositories. These collaborative projects target two vertical applications. The first aims to merge the physical and cyber worlds in an integrated, well defined, privacy-protecting manner. It involves the development of a system capable of gathering, interpreting, routing, and storing data from distributed video sensors, and answering queries about the physical world on the Web. The second aims to develop assistive environments for people with severe disabilities, to help them gain access to computers, and thereby obtain a tool to communicate with their environments. These applications will unify the various research projects leveraged by the SENSORIUM by acting as catalysts for the development of generic technologies that could be used (and reused) in other vertical applications doc19348 none Rabideau This research involves adding reactive transport modeling to a grid-free flow model, and the decoupling of ground water flow, advection, and dispersion. The overall approach is original using modular code design. A modular grid-free ground water model would be able to handle problems with multiple spatial and temporal scales. It should eliminate or lessen computational problems that exist with current finite-element finite-difference codes. The code will also take advantage of parallel processing architecture, which will help in long-term simulations. The proposal presents a well-organized set of work, and builds on work currently in progress. The model testing and benchmarking will be done on a problem that involves multiple scales. The PIs have experience in coding these types of algorithms, and experience in sorption and vertical barriers doc19349 none This proposal is a request to support the operation of the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR) and the CLEO detector for the next five years. Since the new B-Factories, PEP-II at Stanford and KEK-B at the Japanese National Laboratory for Accelerator Research, KEK, now have luminosities routinely exceeding that of CESR, this is a proposal to alter CESR for operation over the energy range 1.5 to 5.6 GeV per beam to provide CLEO with access to unique and important physics and to address some of the original goals of the CESR CLEO program in a way complementary to the PEP and KEK machines. In addition to the particle physics program, it is proposed to continue a vigorous program of accelerator science and technology for the future. The Cornell University group proposes to continue a strong program in x-ray science at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source that, using synchrotron radiation from the CESR beams, has operated simultaneously with particle physics since the inception of CESR. The program described herein will be complete in . At that time it will be appropriate to cease using CESR for particle physics and to devote it largely to x-ray science and to some accelerator R&D measurements. The funds are requested primarily to support operation of the CESR facility, support infrastructure for CLEO collaborators including operation of the laboratory computing facility, research by the Cornell portion of the CLEO collaboration, accelerator R&D, and related educational and outreach activities. The proposed particle physics program contains opportunities for original discovery, precision measurements for unique tests of the Standard Model and enabling measurements that will be necessary for analyzing data to be taken at the B-factories and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva. The program will begin with a year of Upsilon 1S, 2S and 3S resonance running. For the majority of the operation, however, it is proposed to run at and near the charm resonances and above DsDs threshold. By exploiting capabilities that are unique to the charm energy region, CLEO measurements will explore a large set of critical weak and strong interaction phenomena, will extend and enable flavor physics worldwide and will lay the foundation for mastery of a non-perturbative, strongly interacting theory. This is essential for a full understanding of QCD, will quite likely be crucial for understanding new theories revealed by the next generation of frontier accelerators and will impact many fields beyond particle physics where strongly-coupled theories arise. During this period, the CESR CLEO program will serve as an important vehicle for accelerator and detector R&D in support of the national and world particle physics programs to come. Because of its great flexibility, CESR is an excellent laboratory for studying the effects of non-linearities attending the use of strong wiggler magnets and space charge detuning in high-density beams, both important features of the damping rings planned for future linear colliders. Additionally, they propose continued R&D in the physics of superconducting radio frequency acceleration techniques. As a result of this R&D, the Energy Recovery Linac has been put forward as an ultra bright source of synchrotron radiation, capturing worldwide attention and interest. To their routine training of science and engineering graduates and undergraduates in particle physics and accelerator science, they propose to add a professional degree MS program in accelerator science and technology. An education outreach coordinator has been added to enhance their K-12 outreach to local and inner city young people doc19350 none The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support an twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Glenn R. Almany to work with Dr. Geoffrey P. Jones at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, and with Mr. Max Benjamin and Mr. Shannon Seeto at Mahonia Na Dari Conservation and Research Centre in Papua, New Guinea. A majority of scientists and managers advocate a network of marine reserves to help rebuild depleted fisheries. One principal mechanism by which reserves can rebuild fisheries is the spillover effect , whereby juveniles and adults emigrate from protected reserves to nearby fishing areas. Although there is indirect evidence that spillover occurs, little is known about the underlying mechanisms of this phenomenon. If we understand how ecological and behavioral factors influence spillover, we can predict which systems, habitats, and species are most likely to exhibit spillover before reserves are established. Only with such detailed insight can we effectively design and manage marine reserves established to help rebuild fisheries. The goals of this project are to document whether and under what circumstances spillover occurs, to determine which ecological and behavioral factors are correlated with spillover, and to document movement patterns of important food fishes over short (days to months) and long (years) time scales, and small ( 100 meters) and large (kilometers) spatial scales. The PI will use acoustic telemetry to monitor the movements of individuals tagged within each of four fully-protected reserves and external tagging to document fish movement via tag returns and experimental trapping. The PI expects that increased movement will correlate with high fish density, large fish size, high predator density, high habitat connectivity, small reef size, and the reproductive season. The coral reefs and marine reserves in Kimbe Bay, Papua New Guinea provide an ideal system in which to study spillover doc19343 none Collaborative ( ) David Meyer, UCSD the latter (putting aside the fact that large scale quantum computers have not yet been built) has a known algorithm for only one specific practical problem-factoring large numbers--but that algorithm runs immensely faster than the best classical algorithm known. The project combines both of these computational models. It will address the possiblility of quantum learning for practical reasons. The ultimate goal is to develop quantum learning models which have strengths analogous to classical ones-the ability to find quantum solutions to problems for which there is no apparent quantum algorithmic solution. Only the most rudimentary steps have been taken in this direction-hence the project will approach this goal from the bottom up. The PI s will investigate a specific architecture (inspired by biology): quantum perceptrons, and more generally, quantum neural networks. Then will carefully define a completely quantum perceptron which can be connected into a network, analyze its capacity, derive learning rules for it, apply these rules to various tasks, and extend each of these objectives to quantum neutral networks. This work will emphasize the importance of designing quantum systems with performance not achievable by corresponding classical systems doc19352 none Previous research on industrial districts has shown that interaction, cooperation, and collaboration are crucial elements to innovation and regional industrial success. However, this previous research has focused primarily on the regional organization and operation of craft and manufacturing industries; it has not examined how social power and strategy are fundamental to regional industries or investigated how the institutions and practices of industrial districts might operate in an agro-industrial context. This doctoral dissertation research project will contribute to this field by investigating the contemporary policies, politics and operation of agro-industry in California. It will focus on the North Coast Wine District, in particular, Napa and Sonoma counties. The project will determine the character and extent of cooperation, learning and interaction often identified in the research literature with craft industries. It seeks to understand the more complex interaction of industrial districts. The research will highlight how social power derived from economic performance underpins the operation of the industry. It will also delineate how political action, self-organization, community participation, governance, leadership and cooperation are necessary for industrial preservation in a rapidly changing production region like the North Coast Wine District, a region under significant and increasing development pressure and experiencing related development and land-use conflicts. Data will be collected through a survey and interviews with winery owners, grape growers, and vineyard managers. Additional interviews will be conducted with other industry representatives, government officials, and activists. This information will be combined with material collected from archival sources (government documents, library collections, and other records), and with statistical analysis of regional and industrial indicators. A commodity chain approach will be used to map the regional supply, production and distribution networks of a random sample of wine firms to determine their geographic extent. In addition, an ethnographic approach will be used to trace the professional histories of winery entrepreneurs, grape growers and vineyard managers to measure the extent of their interaction, learning by doing, formal industry participation, and understand the industry s power relations. Comparative case studies will round out the analysis by exploring how industry participants and other regional centers of power, such as new rural residents, tourists, developers, and other farmers, conflict in some cases, and collaborate in other cases involving industry-related policy development and land use in the two counties. The project is expected to provide new knowledge of the North Coast wine industry, its regional context, and its social basis. It will contribute to on-going theoretical debates and understandings of the process of regional agro-industrial development and change in rural areas. It will inform and assist rural policy makers by examining what kinds of practices and policies generate competitive industry, innovation and regional learning, and what sorts of processes are capable of negotiating conflicting development objectives among diverse interests. More generally it will provide new information on how rural regions and industries respond to broader forces like globalization and urbanization. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc19353 none This award funds young mathematicians (graduate students and recent Ph.D. s) from the United States to travel to the fourteenth annual Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics (FPSAC) international conference, being held this year at The University of Melbourne (Australia), July 8-12, . This continuing series of conferences bring together researchers from various areas of combinatorics and theoretical computer science and links them with leading scientists from allied disciplines in pure mathematics, applied mathematics and physics. The focus of the conference is on algebraic and enumerative combinatorics, again with emphasis on interdisciplinary links to allied fields doc19354 none The paired eolian system of the Columbia Plateau is composed of the extensive Palouse loess of variable thickness and upwind dune fields that are derived from reworking of sand- and silt-rich slackwater deposits from multiple episodes of Wisconsin giant outburst flooding from Glacial Lake Missoula. Few models exist that explain changes in the thickness and distribution of loess accumulations. We will investigate three models that describe the interaction of migrating sands with loess and influences of topography, bioclimate, and source sediment character that control the thickness and distribution of loess. Field mapping will include sample collection on a regional scale to determine the temporal and spatial distribution of saltation- versus suspension-dominated eolian units. Timing of stability (represented by paleosols) and eolian activity (represented by eolian sand an loess units) will be determined by luminescence dating that measures the last time sediments were exposed to sunlight. We will determine 1) when and where loess deposition began following latest-Wisconsin outburst floods, 2) if eolian saltation in upwind dunes was active concurrently with suspension fallout downwind, 3) if periods of saltator release inferred from sand-rich intervals in the loess were associated with periods of heightened aridity, and 4) the mass accumulation rates of loess. Dust emissions on the Columbia Plateau today resulting from dryland farming are hazardous through the presence of particulate matter less than 10 microns in size in the air and reduced visibility. This regional study will show how the Columbia Plateau system has responded to climate change through time, allowing future dust emissions to be predicted. While paired eolian systems do exist elsewhere in the world (China, Europe, Alaska, North American Great Plains), the Columbia Plateau offers the opportunity to study multiple models of loess generation on a workable geographic scale, to add to the knowledge of the dynamics of paired eolian systems, and to enhance the record of late-Pleistocene to Holocene climate change for the Columbia Plateau. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award will also provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc19355 none Since the beginning of the twentieth Century, diverse social groups, including early conservationists, bison producers, and regional planners, redefined (with greater or lesser success) the position of bison within the modern American landscape. Through their actions, networks were established that facilitated the transportation, redistribution, and privatization of bison within the United States. This research project will examine these social networks affecting the geographical distribution of bison in America. The research has four primary objectives. First, it will define the practical goals and personal motivations of early conservationists who worked to conserve bison. Second, it will quantify the interconnections between public and private bison herds, in particular specifying the role the former has played in the growth of the modern bison industry. Third, it will delineate the social, material, and informational networks that comprise the emerging bison industry. Fourth, it will examine perspectives on the privatization and commodification of bison, emphasizing their potential impact on material relations with bison and the degree to which these processes affect symbolic aspects of the species. To achieve these goals, the project will employ three research methods: mail surveys, interviews, and analysis of archival materials, government documents, and popular literature. Mail surveys will be sent to bison producers, representatives of bison associations, and managers of public bison herds. Individuals selected for interview include bison producers, bison association representatives, bison meat distributors, and other individuals with alternative perspectives on bison. Quantitative data will be analyzed using basic statistical techniques to identify population and regional growth patterns, trends within the emerging bison industry, and distinctive subgroups with the bison industry. Qualitative data will be coded and analyzed using computer software to examine the diversity of opinions concerning bison and bison management practices. By utilizing these methods, this research will provide an accurate description of human relations with bison during the last century. This project will generate information with which to evaluate the current status of bison, and enable a re-examination of several larger themes in geographic and environmental theory. At the most basic level, this project will fill a gap in academic research that has resulted from the narrow focus on the near-extermination of bison and the commensurate lack of consideration given to the species recent demographic resurgence. More generally, this research will determine whether economic, cultural, or environmental factors have played a dominant role in facilitating the species re-population of the American landscape. Due to the relative youth of the emerging bison industry, research on modern bison also provides an ideal opportunity to investigate the methods by which a given agricultural product practice is diffused throughout a region. Although diffusion and agriculture are traditional topics of interest within the discipline of geography, rarely do circumstances permit an empirical examination of the diffusion of agricultural practices at an early stage of their growth. The spread of most agricultural products predates modern geographic theory on the subject. While bison production certainly exhibits distinct attributes, some of the general findings revealed by this research may provide valuable insight into the growth and diffusion of other agricultural products. Looking toward the future, the data contained in this project will provide a baseline of information for other researchers that may wish to revisit this topic in subsequent decades. Lastly, this research will provide an indication of the factors that enable and constrain modern society s ability to coexist with other species. Such information will likely become increasingly important in the future. Recognizing the various options available, as well as the diverse benefits and drawbacks of each approach, will assist in forming a sustainable, yet ethical, relation between society and nature. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc19356 none This award will help support the Big Sky Conference on Discrete Mathematics which is held in Missoula, Montana. There are two main objectives of the conference. First, the conference is designed to bring together researchers and educators from the geographical area with interests in discrete mathematics in order for them to share ideas, present their work, and collaborate. Topics for the conference cover areas of discrete mathematics including combinatorics, graph theory, discrete geometry, design theory and theoretical computer science. The conference attracts mathematicians and computer scientists from western US and Canada and in doing so has strengthened the discrete mathematics community in the region. The conference also includes two research-level invited addresses. One is given by a senior-level experienced mathematician and the other by a younger researcher who has made significant contributions to the field. The presence of these internationally-known researchers greatly enhances the conference. Secondly, the conference seeks to provide an opportunity for students, teachers, and others in the region to learn more about contemporary mathematics. This award provides support for undergraduate and graduate students to attend the conference and present their work. In addition, a public lecture (given by one of the invited speakers) is an integral part of the Big Sky Conference. The audience, comprised of people of all ages and many different walks of life, is treated to a dynamic lecture on the beauty and relevance of mathematics. The conference will be hosted by The University of Montana. The Big Sky Conference on Discrete Math is held in the early fall at The University of Montana. The primary focus of the conference is stimulation and dissemination of research and creative ideas in discrete mathematics. This includes promoting collaboration among regional colleagues, supporting student research, and demonstrating to the general populace that mathematics is a dynamic evolving field with applications in modern society. The events of the conference include contributed talks by faculty and students and three invited addresses. One of the principle speakers is an internationally acclaimed specialist and outstanding expositor. This speaker gives a research level seminar and a public lecture. With attendance at the public lecture between 300 and 500 people, public awareness of mathematics has flourished during the years of the Big Sky Conference. The other speaker is a younger researcher who has made a significant contribution to an area of discrete mathematics. This person typically gives a specialized talk about a recent advancement in the field. The conference attracts researchers, educators, and students from the US and Canada, especially those in the northwest region doc19357 none This project will investigate the role of stretched magnetic field lines as a mechanism for the loss of relativistic electrons from the radiation belts. Relativistic electron precipitation into the ionosphere can be divided into two categories, brief microbursts lasting for less than a second and precipitation bands lasting for more than a second. Microbursts have been extensively studied, but the physics behind the precipitation bands have not received much attention. This project will focus on the role that the stretching of magnetic field lines has on the creation of the precipitation bands. A statistical database of precipitation data from the SAMPEX satellite will be used. In order to examine the effect of magnetic field line stretching, the Tsyganenko magnetic field models will be used doc19320 none This project will use an analytical approach to describe the evolution of ring current ions and electrons during magnetic storms. A more realistic magnetic field and electric field will be used than has previously been done in analytic studies. It will examine the radial transport and loss mechanisms of particles in the inner magnetosphere and will examine the role the ring current and its associated magnetic field play on the particle dynamics. The motion of both electrons and ions will be described using a Hamiltonian formalism. This formalism will allow the model to treat the particle motions even near the inner boundary of the ring current region (L ~ 2 doc19359 none This low temperature physics project will investigate the behavior of 3He, and phase-separated mixtures of 3He and 4He, in Aerogel. Aerogel, a dilute glass that occupies between 0.1% and 3% of the volume is the only means by which a structural disorder can be introduced to the 3He. One project will examine flow and the onset of dissipation (the breakdown of superfluidity) in this disordered superfluid. Magnetic resonance will be used to characterize the superfluidity of isolated bubbles of superfluid 3He trapped in the isotope mixtures. This will establish dimensional constraints that may limit superfluidity. These demanding experiments, which involve cutting edge instrumentation and development of new techniques, provide a challenging environment where graduate students and post-doctoral researchers acquire skills and analytic tools to prepare them for careers in the Nation s scientific and technological infrastructure. Liquid 3He, available only near absolute zero is one of the purest materials that can be prepared by any means. Impurities simply freeze out during the arduous cooling and liquefaction procedures required to obtain the liquid. Like its more abundant sister isotope 4He, 3He can be obtained in a superfluid state. But the superfluid is complicated by the magnetism of the 3He atoms, each of which acts like a tiny compass needle. The atoms themselves undergo mutual orbital motion, and their compass needles pair up in various ways depending on the orbital motion of the atoms. Because of its complex magnetic character, the superfluid properties of 3He are of fundamental interest, and in some circumstances can be related to more common phenomena like the flow of electrons in a wire. One project under this award will study how the ultra pure superfluid 3He changes when it is diluted and disordered by the addition of Aerogel, a dilute glass that occupies less than 2% of the total volume of the container. The disorder introduced into the helium changes the orbital motions of paired atoms, and in some conditions of temperature and pressure can destroy superfluidity altogether. The research will also look for changes in the pairing when the helium is confined to small bubbles , which approximate a so-called zero-dimensional superfluid dot . Finally the effects of fluid flow on the disordered superfluid will be examined with the objective of detecting energy dissipation, analogous to heating of a wire by current flow. This is signaled by loss of superfluidity. Besides adding to the understanding of quantum systems and superfluid flow, this research provides a demanding experimental environment that educates and trains graduate students and post-doctoral researchers for successful careers in the Nation s scientific and technological infrastructure doc19360 none This award is in support of the first Gordon Research Conference (GRC) meeting on Photosensory Receptors and Signal Transduction to be held May 19-24, at the GRC site in Barga, Italy. This new conference was developed and approved in view of the recent breakthrough discoveries of new photosensory receptors and current rapid progress on their activation and signaling mechanisms. The focus is on molecular mechanisms of receptor phototransduction, and the conference brings together investigators of structure function of archaeal, eubacterial, eukaryotic microbial, plant, and animal photoreceptors. The meeting will provide a very much-needed opportunity to exchange information and ideas and for investigators to become aware of the diverse and incisive molecular tools available in this fast-moving area of research. It is expected that the conference will stimulate exciting discussion of emerging insights on photoreceptor evolution, molecular mechanisms, photosignal transduction principles, and the most engaging mysteries on the cutting edge of photosensory reception in biology doc19361 none Tseng This award supports Hung Tseng and a student from University of Pennsylvania in a collaboration with Ingrid Grummt of the Section for Molecular Cell Biology at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, Germany. The project will focus on the biochemical function of basonuclin, a zinc-finger protein and a cell-type specific transcription regulator for the rRNA genes. The US-German collaboration will use biochemical purification, immunological detection, and in vitro and in vivo transcription assays to investigate the role of basonuclin in polymerase transcription. All cell require rRNA transcription, but its enhancement is particularly necessary when the rate of protein synthesis increases in proliferation and protein accumulation. One of the novel aspects of the action of basonuclin is the it is cell-type specific, which makes it different from all previously described polymerase I transcription factors. The US side brings current knowledge about basonuclin and reagents to the collaboration. The laboratory of Dr. Grummt is one of the leading groups in the world in RNA polymerase I research. That lab will provide expertise and state-of-the-art equipment in biochemical purification and analysis of the polymerase transcription complex. This collaboration will help institutionalize the collaborative relationship between the German and US research groups doc19362 none DMS - . The goal of this project is to study the geometry of conformally compact Einstein manifolds and other related problems. These manifolds were first studied by mathematicians about ten years ago. New ideas and stimuli came up a couple of years ago when it was found that they are the mathematical framework for the new proposal ADS CFT correspondence in string theory. Therefore the study of conformally compact Einstein manifolds has even become important for physics. The author has done work on the geometry of such manifolds, but there remain many problems to be studied. In the future the author hopes to tackle the problem of existence. If the conformal infinity has enough symmetry one hopes to find explicit solutions. The global uniqueness is also a challenging problem and requires new ideas. Many recent results have shown that there is a profound relationship between the global geometry of ambient manifolds and the conformal geometry of the boundary. The author intends to further explore this direction. This proposal studies a class of geometric objects called conformally compact Einstein manifolds. They are not only mathematically interesting, but also important for physics because they serve as the framework for a deep correspondence in string theory. The author will study various geometric aspects of these manifolds as well as problems arising in physics. The study of this special class of noncompact manifolds whose geometry at infinity is well under control will also provide insights and ideas to study more general noncompact manifolds doc19363 none NSF Sociology Program Fall Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Award Competition Barbara Brents and Pete Simi University of Nevada at Las Vegas DDR: Adult Consequences of Participation in Youth Subculture This dissertation research will investigate the life histories of early participants in the Los Angeles white supremacist subculture. The results will supplement our knowledge of how early social movement participation affects later politics and life outcomes. Past studies of the long term consequences of social movement participation have focused almost exclusively on liberal and leftist social movements. This study will investigate similar consequences but for a white supremacist movement. Political, occupational, marital, and criminal outcomes will be investigated in follow-up in-depth interviews with at least 25 men who were members of such white supremacists movements as youths prior to doc19364 none The Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) industry is presently struggling with a problem that affects its credibility with owners and occupants of buildings: installed, renovated, and maintained building HVAC systems are not meeting the conditions, comfort, and economy of operation expectations of owners, occupants and other end users. As evidenced by articles and letters of concern in HVAC and building trade periodicals, building mechanical system owners, designers, installers, and occupant representatives need a commonly understood, scientific means of field testing HVAC system control performance which can more readily determine compliance with desired and specified operation. A previous NSF grant to the Sinclair Community College ( ) sponsored a symposium attended by national representatives of colleges and universities, HVAC industry professionals, and HVAC equipment manufacturers. At the symposium it was demonstrated that control systems performance could be analyzed through hard copy recordings of controller responses. This textbook-described method of analysis was in lieu of the non-scientific practice of visual monitoring, or vague self tuning programs used for observing and correcting controller behavior. As the result of a request at the symposium, Sinclair faculty is developing a curriculum module to teach the utilization of a hand-held graphing calculator to be substituted for the fragile, expensive, sophisticated laboratory test equipment that was used at the symposium to demonstrate the method of controller behavior analysis based on textbook control theory. The curriculum module is used in existing HVAC control courses at Sinclair Community College and is available to other Associate and Bachelor degree programs in mechanical engineering technology. All materials and technology developed are disseminated through engineering education professional associations. The final report serves as the basis of technical papers presented to general meetings of such professional societies as ASHRAE, IEEE, ASEE, and ISA. Development of curriculum is accomplished in cooperation with faculty from the University of Dayton, a professional advisory panel, and curriculum developers at the National Center of Excellence for Advanced Manufacturing Education. The Sinclair faculty researchers administering this development project have years of experience in designing and installing major commercial HVAC control systems. In addition, such material can find ready use nationally in continuing-education courses offered by two-year colleges to employees of local industry. With the articulation agreements and working arrangements that Sinclair has with such four-year colleges as the University of Dayton, Miami University of Middletown, University of Cincinnati College of Applied Science, University of Toledo, and Ferris State University, the developed material is being used in many engineering and technical programs doc19365 none Dvorsky The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support an eight month research fellowship by Dr. Alexander L. Dvorsky to work with Dr. Daniel Sternheimer at the University de Bourgogne in Dijon, France. Co-funding for this project comes from the Math and Physical Science Directorate s Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. Quantization is the process of forming a quantum-mechanical system starting from a classical one. There exist different methods of quantization, and Dr. Dvorsky is interested in deformation quantization. Intuitively a deformation of a mathematical object is a family of the same kind of objects depending on some parameter. An example is deforming a cummutative algebra of functions (with the ordinary product) leads to the non-commutative star-products suitable for quantum mechanics. This project addresses the applications of deformation quantization to the central questions of analysis on Lie groups (mathematical objects which encode the symmetries of various classical-and quantum-mechanical constructions) and Lie supergroups. The host and his laboratory at the Universite de Bourgogne have strong connections with leading research performed in France and other countries of the European Union doc19366 none This project is adapting Revitalizing Classroom Teaching and Learning: A Beginning for Two-Year College Mathematics from Greenville Technical College in South Carolina. It partners with local industry to incorporate problem-solving and real industry-based application into mathematics curriculum at three levels of education: high school, two-year college, and four- year college university. Using the pedagogical approach developed in the Greenville project, this project is accomplishing four objectives: 1. Revitalizing the mathematics curriculum with work-based experiences, incorporating technology as both a teaching and a learning tool, and fostering an interactive learning environment. 2. Building a strong connection among high school, community college, four-year college university and industry by integrating mathematics content and industry-based applications by spiraling through the three levels of education; understanding the similarities and differences in mathematics vocabulary from the academic to the work setting; and improving communication and articulation among the three academic levels and industry. 3. Providing faculty professional development opportunities to support collaborative learning methodology, student engagement in learning and use of appropriate technology. 4. Developing The Process Guidelines to revitalize curriculum, using from faculty journals. The project accomplishes these objectives by: 1. Developing a replicable and self-sustaining infrastructure that builds collaboration between education and industry; highlighted by interaction through shadowing, site visits, classroom visits, and externships; 2. Offering professional development activities to increase teamwork use of technology in the classroom, and knowledge of alternative teaching techniques that target different student learning styles; 3. Class piloting, refining and implementing of new teaching methods, work-based problems, and student interaction within the classroom; and 4. Synthesizing and generalizing faculty journals into a clear manual, The Process Guidelines doc19367 none Professor Allen Bard of the University of Texas Austin is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program to study photoelectrochemical and optoelectronic effects in solid thin films and nanoparticle dispersions. The materials include traditional semiconductors like silicon and CdSe (quantum dots), as well as molecular films of substituted porphyrins, conjugated organics and inorganic salts. Low melting liquid crystals will be investigated, as well as inorganic molecular crystals like tris (2,2 -bipyridine)ruthenium(II). Methods include electrochemistry and electrogenerated chemiluminescence as well as scanning probe microscopy. Charge transfer and electrical characteristics of novel material films are not well understood, and fundamental studies could lead to better high density memories, light emitting diodes and other electronic devices. Nontraditional semiconductor materials will be explored, with potential use in solar energy conversion and charge storage devices, for example doc19368 none Nahmod s research lies in the overlap of harmonic analysis, geometry and partial differential equations. It aims at studying the behavior of nonlinear waves arising in geometry, ferromagnetism and gauge field theories; and that of functions along vector fields whose integral curves lack sufficient curvature. In the first part the focus is in geometric partial differential equations. Of special interest are Schroedinger maps, Wave maps and other gauge field theories such as the Yang Mills equations in Minkowski space-time. All of these equations model `wave like phenomena . Their solutions arise as minimizers of the corresponding energy functionals. To conform with natural physical situations, it is of interest to study their existence, uniqueness under minimal regularity assumptions. These are difficult issues because the nonlinearities of these equations involve not just the solutions but also their derivatives. Nahmod will address these questions and plans to show that in the scale invariant set up solutions to the Cauchy initial value problem exist globally provided that the data is sufficiently small when measured relative to the critical regularity norm. She also plans stability issues; e.g. whether such a system remains close to its initial state as time evolves when the data has small energy. From a physical viewpoint the latter models whether such systems are close to equilibrium. The techniques exploit geometric aspects of these equations to extract crucial information -such as special structures in the nonlinearity- which is then used in the analysis. The method combines deep Fourier analysis with gauge theoretic geometric tools. The goal of the second part is the study of the Hilbert transform along vector fields and its associated maximal operator in two dimensions. Their treatment departs from the classical study of singular integrals for in the present situation, the singularity lives on some variety that is changing at each point. Nahmod will investigate how to develop time frequency techniques to study operators under no curvature assumptions. This is the case, for example, in studying differentiability properties of functions along vector fields. Partial differential equations are the mathematical models to the laws governing much of the phenomena in our physical world. The wave equation models the propagation of different kind of waves -such as light waves- in homogeneous media. Nonlinear models of conservative type arise in quantum mechanics while other variants appear for example in the study of vibrating systems and semiconductors. The nonlinear Schroedinger equation arises in various physical contexts in the description of nonlinear waves- such as propagation of a laser beam in a medium whose index of refraction is sensitive to the wave amplitude, water waves at the free surface of an ideal fluid as well as in plasma waves. Some of the interesting questions are those about local and global existence of solutions, uniqueness as well as long time behavior of global solutions. The role of mathematical analysis is to understand the behavior of the solutions to these equations, provide the tools to extract their quantitative and qualitative information and lay the foundations upon which methods to accurately approximate the solutions are developed. Fourier analysis and more generalized adapted frequency decompositions such as time-frequency analysis consists in decomposing complex objects via `modulated waveforms into basic building blocks which are localized and easy to understand, and then piecing them back together in a straightforward manner. It works very similarly to a musical score. The modulated waveforms have four attributes: amplitude (loudness), scale (duration), frequency (pitch) and position (instant it is played). The objects could be speech, radar signals, as well as oscillatory expressions arising in optics, AC ousting scattering, wave propagation and other phenomena of nonlocal nature doc19369 none This project isl developing and implementing an Associate of Applied Science (AAS) degree program in Aquarium Technology and Marine Interpretation. The program is educating individuals to work in the growing number of aquariums, ornamental fish enterprises, aquaculture facilities, and marine recreation and interpretative centers in the Pacific Northwest and throughout the country. As an Advanced Technology Education (ATE) Adaptation and Implementation Project, Oregon Coast Community College is: (a) Reviewing and adapting curricula on Fisheries Technology developed by Northwest Center for Sustainable Resources (DUE ) and aquarist curricula developed by Marine Advanced Technology Education Center ( ); (b) Developing additional curriculum specific to aquarium technology and marine interpretation using the DACUM ( Developing A CurriculUM ) process; (c) Submiting and receiving approval for the AAS degree from the Oregon Department of Education, Division of Professional Technical Education; (d) Enrolling 25 students in the program in each of years two and three of the grant; (e) Developing articulation agreements with Oregon State University and other four-year institutions to facilitate successful transition to related bachelor s degree programs; and (f) Sponsoring annual marine education and career institutes for high school students. These institutes give 100 students per year the opportunity to explore careers in aquatic life support, aquatic animal husbandry and health, and marine interpretation. The project is accomplishing these tasks with the assistance of local and national partners. The partners provide technical expertise, training facilities, and internship opportunities for students. Local partners include the Oregon Coast Aquarium, the Bureau of Land Management, the Port of Newport, private nature-based tourist enterprises, and the Oregon State University Hatfield Marine Science Center, which includes Oregon State University s Marine Science program, Extension Sea Grant and research facilities for the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. A National Science Foundation funded nation-wide survey indicated strong employer demand for a technical training program of this nature doc19370 none Paul Kirk The PI proposes to study computations and applications of spectral invariants, in particular the eta-invariant of generalized Dirac operators, to problems in geometric topology and geometry. The focus will be to use analytic and differential geometric machinery to study spectral flow, the Atiyah-Patodi-Singer rho-invariant, and the $SU(3)$-gauge theoretic Casson invariant. The main goal is to develop usable cut-and-paste machinery for spectral invariants using the theory of boundary-value problems for Dirac operators. The PI s work in pure mathematics has as its goal the solution and clarification of geometric problems in 3 dimensions. The setting of 3 dimensions on the one hand is familiar to all of us since the universe we live in is 3-dimensional. But geometric problems in this area turn out to be very difficult for the odd reason that in such low dimensions there is not enough room to move. The PI s approach to the area is to combine traditional 3 dimensional techniques with methods from other mathematical disciplines such as differential geometry and analysis doc19371 none Henry I. Smith, MIT Partial travel support for the speakers at the U.S. - Germany Joint Meeting on Nanoscale Science and Engineering to be held at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on December 5 and 6, . The objectives are to evaluate new trends in research and education and exchange information among leading research centers in both countries, to promote the exchange of researchers and establishment of joint projects, to introduce younger investigators to nanotechnology, and create opportunities for long-term collaboration. The main list of topics includes self-organization, molecular electronics, nanotubes and applications, nanoparticles, nanomechanics, catalysts, polymers and pharmaceutics. Representatives of the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Centers (NSEC) from U.S. and Centers of Excellence in Nanotechnology from Germany, as well as leading experts and young reserachers from both countries will participate. The meeting is co-organized by MIT (U.S.) and the University of Munster (Germany). About 60 participants, half from U. S. and half from Germany will have the opportunity to participate in presentations and discussions during the two-day meeting. A website will be created to post the program and contributed papers. Visits at the MIT and Harvard nanotechnology laboratories will be organized doc19372 none In a complex commons there are diverse stakeholders engaged in multiple, concurrent, and sometimes conflicting, uses of the same geographical arena. Governance of common pool resources often entails a complex, even messy, interplay of formal legal rules and informal de facto arrangements, creating institutional complexity. This doctoral dissertation research will examine how social actors secure rights to a common pool resource, and therefore, their livelihood, in the complex commons of the Long Island Sound estuary (LIS). The LIS is situated between the states of New York and Connecticut in the eastern United States. The lobster fishery of the LIS is the entry point for this inquiry due to its economic significance and current problems. The American lobster industry is one of the most valuable fisheries in the United States, and New York ranked third in domestic landings during the late s. This fishery is subject to rising ecological uncertainty as evidenced by episodes of hypoxia, shell disease, and recently, environmental surprise in the form of acute, extensive mortality of lobster in portions of the LIS. The study will examine how social actors in the lobster fishery navigate the complex institutional environment of the Long Island Sound to secure entitlements to resources, expressed as the legitimate effective command of environmental goods and services. Social networks and institutions in de facto (informal and local) and de jure (formal and legal) arenas will be the focus of this investigation. The objectives of this project are (1) to determine the opportunities and constraints on resource access that emerge within a complex institutional landscape and (2) to ascertain the role of social networks with respect to entitlements within a complex commons. The environmental entitlements approach, a form of institutional analysis that examines the linkages among livelihood, environment, and institutions, provides the conceptual framework for this case study. Multiple types and sources of evidence will be engaged such as existing data including newspapers, landings data, environmental quality indicator maps, and event timelines; direct observation through fishers and lobstermen s forums, and community visits; and key informant interviews with actors familiar with marine resource issues in the LIS. These will include lobstermen, cooperative extension agents, dealers, and representatives of state and federal regulatory agencies. In-depth interviews with lobstermen in three communities identified as important by key informants will follow. Convergence of multiple sources of evidence will provide the basis for a broader integrated analysis incorporating environmental analysis, livelihood analysis, and institutional analysis. Networks in communities will be mapped and incorporated into the livelihood analysis as a form of social capital. Analysis across the three community cases will be undertaken. The research will clarify the role of social networks and institutional complexity in enabling and constraining access to common pool resources. This study will examine social and institutional aspects of an economically valued common pool resource in a complex setting. The research process will facilitate the identification of elements and relationships considered necessary for pursing a livelihood in a complex commons. The project will contribute to current developments in common property resource research in three ways. First, complex commons occur at various scales (e.g., urban ports, regional water bodies, and the high seas) and the notion of a complex commons acknowledges this complexity in institutions and places common pool resource use within its broader social and ecological context. Second, there is an emerging focus on community heterogeneity, social interdependencies, communication, and daily practice in shaping use in the commons so institutions are also sites of social interaction, contest, and negotiation. This study will engage these concepts by examining social networks and inter-institutional relationships. Finally, the study will contribute to the further development of the environmental entitlements framework, applied initially in with community-based sustainability initiatives, by employing it as an integrated analysis in a developed North American setting. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc19373 none Advances in research and operational weather observation systems and numerical modeling techniques have led to progressive improvements in understanding of physical processes involved in the development and evolution of lake-effect snow storms. In particular recent observations taken during the Lake-Induced Convection Experiment (Lake-ICE) and mesoscale numerical models have been utilized to better understand isolated classic lake-effect systems that develop primarily from lake surface heat and moisture fluxes in fall and winter months. The enhanced scientific understanding of interactions between microscale and mesoscale processes in classic lake-effect systems can now be applied to more complex, and perhaps more common and intense, non-classic lake-effect storms. This collaborative research project will build on past research results and use new observations and numerical models to develop a physically-consistent understanding of complex interactions of synoptic systems and mesoscale lake-effect systems and factors controlling the coherence of, and structure along, mesoscale lake-effect convective bands. In particular the Principal Investigators will analyze data obtained from radars, aircraft, satellites and surface instrumentation and perform detailed mesoscale model simulations to study unresolved issues for non-classic lake-effect situations. Four specific research objectives are to: 1) Determine differences in the cloud microphysical structure and thermodynamics of lake-effect boundary layers that occur with and without large-scale precipitation aloft; 2) Determine the effects of a warm lake on the mesoscale dynamics and structure of moving mesoscale precipitation systems (such as associated with synoptic fronts); 3) Determine the processes by which the convective boundary layer and mesoscale circulations from an upwind lake influence lake-effect development over a downwind lake; 4) Determine the dynamic mechanisms leading to the development of mesoscale structures along lake-effect snow bands and the influence of vertical wind shear on band structural coherence. Successful completion of this research could help improve the forecast of intense lake-effect snowstorms doc19374 none This award supports theoretical research and education in the study of magnetic macroscopic quantum phenomena and large magnetic molecules. The PI will investigate: (a) the magnetic properties of solids containing large magnetic molecules, (b) the semiclassical formalism for spin, and (c) unresolved physical issues in magnetic macroscopic quantum phenomena. The observations of hysteresis loop steps in the compounds commonly abbreviated Mn 12 and Fe 8 and oscillatory tunnel splittings in Fe 8, have opened new areas for the study of spin dynamics with novel interplays of quantal and classical behavior. The PI will study these single molecule magnets, especially the way in which they interact with their solid state environment. As an example, the PI will study how the sound propagation in these materials is affected by the magnetization dynamics, as a way of probing the latter. These studies are expected to elucidate magnetic hysteresis at the molecular level and to lead to ways of manipulating the dynamics of such systems. The formalism of the semiclassical limit for spin will be studied with a view to remedying gaps in present understanding. The physical origin of a rich and unexpected structure of degeneracies that has been discovered in models for Fe 8 and rotating nuclei will be sought. These degeneracies suggest an as yet undiscovered higher symmetry. The PI will also exploit connections between molecular magnets and macroscopic quantum phenomena in magnets to examine outstanding questions that may impact future attempts to look for magnetic macroscopic quantum phenomena. This research also provides an environment for training of doctoral students at the frontiers of theoretical condensed matter physics. %%% This award supports theoretical research and education in the study of magnetic macroscopic quantum phenomena and large magnetic molecules. The work focuses on large molecules that have a large spin associated with them. The spin is large enough that it can be considered to be macroscopic, but at the same time small enough to exhibit various quantum mechanical phenomena, such as quantum mechanical tunneling of the spin orientation. Two examples of families of these large molecules are Mn12 and Fe8, in a standard shorthand notation. The PI will investigate: (a) the magnetic properties of solids containing large magnetic molecules, (b) the semiclassical formalism for spin, and (c) unresolved physical issues in magnetic macroscopic quantum phenomena. This work contributes to the intellectual foundation of quantum mechanical and magnetic phenomena in real materials and may contribute to future information and communication technologies. This research also provides an environment for training of doctoral students at the frontiers of theoretical condensed matter physics doc19375 none Project The Maryland Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (MAGEP) is a coalition of three campuses of the University of Maryland dedicated to increasing the number of minorities who earn Ph.D.s in SEM fields. MAGEP has the further goal of preparing our students to be successful in their careers, with a focus on the professoritate. This alliance, led by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), is made up of the three state supported research universities in Maryland: UMBC, the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP), and the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB). MAGEP embraces the notion that we must educate the whole person. Our comprehensive approach will foster excellence in education and research while providing emotional support, peer advising, group study, role models and mentoring. MAGEP builds on a number of initiatives at the undergraduate and graduate levels that have been quite successful on the individual campuses and within partnerships between some of the alliance institutions. The University System of Maryland (USM) Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP), also led by UMBC in partnership with UMCP, the University of Maryland Eastern Shore (UMES) and the public community colleges, has more than doubled the number of bachelor s degrees awarded to minority science, mathematics, engineering and technology students from 201 to 502 during - . Large numbers of these students continue on to graduate schools across the nation. The LSAMP provides partial support for the nationally recognized Meyerhoff Scholars program at UMBC. Both UMBC and UMCP have a large contingent of McNair Scholars who receive strong preparation for graduate school. UMCP has received recognition for its success in graduating minorities with Ph.D.s in SEM fields, including 3 African American women in mathematics in one year. In , a minority graduate training program was initiated at UMBC, supported by a NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) grant. The Graduate Meyerhoff program is focused on biomedical science, and currently has four participating departments. Enrollment in the program has grown from 2 when the program started to 22 today. The Graduate Meyerhoff program has proven to be highly successful and has attracted excellent applicants. Our results demonstrate clearly that a comprehensive approach is successful at the graduate level. The programs and activities of MAGEP will be modeled after the Graduate Meyerhoff program and will incorporate best practices in diversifying graduate education from MAGEP and other universities. To achieve its goals, MAGEP will focus on the following specific and measurable objectives: 1) cultivating new graduate students: including not only increasing the numbers of applicants but also recruiting students with higher qualifications (GPA, undergraduate research experience); 2) retention through degree: increasing the rate of successful completion of the Ph.D. degree; 3) excellence in academic performance: providing support mechanisms to ensure outstanding classroom performance; 4) excellence in research performance: providing appropriate infrastructure and research opportunities to enhance research productivity (including publications and presentations); and 5) pursuit of careers in the professoriate: increasing the number of students who enter and thrive in academic careers by providing preparation in the issues and responsibilities that shape professional life in the academy. MAGEP will institute a comprehensive set of programs and activities that have proven to be effective in pilot efforts at MAGEP institutions and at others around the country. They are clustered into three areas: cultivating new students, building a supportive community, and professional development. Many of the programs span more than one of these areas. Each institution will participate in all of these programs and activities to some extent. However the emphasis on individual campuses will be tailored to the needs of the students and graduate programs doc19376 none 2. Project : In this age of accelerated technological advances, increasing career specialization and extremely competitive job opportunities, society has a vested interest in promoting graduate and professional education as never before. The need for specialized knowledge and the acquisition of professional credentials place increasingly high demands on all college graduates, yet documented evidence shows that there exists a disparity in the opportunities for certain populations to gain access to programs conferring advanced degrees in science, mathematics and engineering (SME). Member institutions in the alliance spearheaded by Syracuse University with the collaboration of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Cornell University, and Puerto Rico-Mayaguez called the Central New York to Puerto Rico-Mayagilez (CNY-PR) are prepared to confront the challenge of making graduate study more available to reportedly under-represented populations. The CNY-PR alliance is based on mutual commitment to research experiences for undergraduate and graduate students, faculty development programs in an environment where recruitment, retention and mentoring are essential. The CNY-PR alliance brings valuable experience and resources for the enhancement of minority graduate education that will contribute to the diversification of the professoriate. The CNY-PR alliance goal is to use holistic approaches to substantially increase minority SME Ph.D. degree recipients entering academic positions. The CNY-PR alliance proposes the following objectives to achieve its goals: 0 Provide inter-institutional engaging research experiences for undergraduate and graduate students 0 Review and recommend innovative measures and guidelines for graduate admission criteria 0 Aggressively recruit and retain excellent minority students to the alliance institutions Provide multi-year funding package for accepted minority graduate students Expand professoriate and mentor training programs to alliance institutions Develop and implement continuous assessment tools to evaluate the alliance s objectives Each component of the program builds on the previous, creating a corridor the student moves through that motivates, guides, and supports from K-12 to Ph.D. to a successful career in academia or industry. The alliance institutions are excited about this program, and have begun laying the groundwork. External funding from industry is already being sought to ensure the continuous doc19377 none Iowa Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate Project The Iowa Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate, a group consisting of faculty in Science, Mathematics and Engineering and Technology (SMET) fields and administrators from all three Iowa State Regents Universities, requests five years of NSF funding under the Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate program in partial support of a coordinated series of activities designed to recruit, retain and graduate a substantial number of under-represented US minority graduate students in SME fields, as well as to change the culture at all three universities in order to guarantee real and permanent access to, through and from Alliance universities and programs. Support is requested for five major program areas: o Buildingpartnerships with minority-serving institutions o An Alliance Summer Research Experience Program for Minority Undergraduates o An Alliance Graduate Teaching Fellowship Program o An Alliance Graduate Student Summer Workshop o An Alliance Campus Awareness Program Partnerships with minority-serving institutions will be built and maintained by a series of yearly conferences in each of three regions in which Alliance universities have been active in recruiting. Undergraduate students from minority-serving institutions will be introduced to the programs and culture of the Alliance universities through anAlliance Summer Research program. Iowa State University and the University of Iowa will each provide support for five.41liance,Teaching Fellows during each year of the program. These five-year Teaching Fellowships will be made permanent at the end of the grant period. The University of Northern Iowa will provide support for two one-year Alliance Teaching Fellows through its teaching assistantship program. NSF will be asked to supplement these positions with an initial one-year traineeship. UNI Teaching Fellows will be encouraged to transfer to one of the other Alliance universities to complete work on the doctorate. A key role in all of this will be played by the Alliance Student Development Coordinator who, together with supporting student development staff at each of the three Alliance universities, will have primary responsibility for faculty and staff training; the development of programs and activities in and out of the classroom to enhance retention and the quest for excellence among students; and the development and administration of a system to assess the progress of the student development aspects of the program. The Director, together with faculty mentors and staff, will design and implement an introductory two-week Summer Workshop for incoming Teaching Fellows as well as academic-year programs designed to promote campus awareness, build community and ensure access. Career counseling and placement assistance will be provided for Fellows as they near the completion of the doctorate. Through these programs and in cooperation with other Alliance University programs and other AGEP Alliance and AMP programs, a substantial number of minority students will complete the doctorate in SME fields at Alliance universities beginning at the end of year five of this project and continuing in subsequent years doc19378 none Biodiversity of the Russian Far East is a long-term international effort to document the diversity of plants and animals that occupy the landmasses that surround and enclose the Sea of Okhotsk. This region is one of the most biologically diverse yet poorly known areas within the northern hemisphere. At the same time, compared to most other high-latitude regions of comparable size around the world, its biota is relatively undisturbed. For political reasons, but also because of its remoteness and severe climate, all but a few Russian biologists have ignored this region. Information about the plants and animals of Okhotskia is largely unknown outside of Russian and what little is available is published in Russian and thus relatively inaccessible. Each summer since , three-dozen scientists, along with their students, from the University of Washington, the Far East Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Sapporo and Hakodate campuses of Hokkaido University, Japan, spend eight weeks exploring remote islands and continental shorelines, utilizing land-based field stations or ocean-going Russian research vessels. While our primary center of focus has been the island biotas of the Kuril Archipelago, our destination over the next two years will be Sakhalin Island. Our goals are to record the detailed species-level diversity of life in aquatic and terrestrial habitats of the Russian Far East as a prologue to investigations of biological patterns and processes, and as a basis for the development of conservation strategies for this part of the world. Biological materials from lichens to liverworts, from spiders to frogs are being collected, curated, and made available to specialists around the world. Dozens of species new to science are being named, described, and classified, and numerous scientific and popular articles are being published. In the area of conservation, our work is providing an important foundation of information that will promote long-term environmental protection of these unique biotas. Finally, our biodiversity studies in the Russian Far East contribute significantly to education and to the development of human resources in science at the undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate levels. Since , the project has provided financial support and direct involvement in field and laboratory research for dozens of students. With major responsibility for collecting, identification, and curation, as well as data collection, analysis, and interpretation, students share authorship on scientific publications. International collaborative interaction between students and scientists of diverse interest and training provides unique opportunities to address important new questions ranging from comparative biology to conservation doc19379 none A large part of Professor Lyubeznik s research on local cohomology over the last decade has been devoted to the study of a number of striking connections with several quite diverse areas of mathematics, such as etale cohomology, topology of algebraic varieties, D-modules and others including the theory of tight closure and cohomology of groups. Professor Lyubeznik is going to continue to study these (and some other) questions by using methods that have been successful in the past as well as developing some new methods. It is always fascinating when a connection is discovered between two very different fields of mathematics because it can result in unexpected and significant discoveries inaccessible by the methods of only one of those two fields. This project is in the areas of mathematics known as Algebra and Algebraic Geometry, with connections to Topology. Algebra is a vast generalization of high school or college algebra, think of it as the algebra of many simultaneous polynomial equations in many variables. Algebraic Geometry gives a way of studying the solutions to such a system of equations as a geometric object. Topology is the study of those properties of geometric objects that don t change when the object is stretched or twisted, as if it were made of rubber. Over the last decade local cohomology, an algebraic tool used in all three areas, has been shown to have some striking connections with a number of very different areas, including differential equations and others. These connections are mutually beneficial. For example, D-modules, an algebraic version of differential equations, has helped establish some important algebraic properties of local cohomology, while local cohomology has helped prove some striking topological results. Even though considerable progress on this circle of ideas has been made, much remains to be done doc19380 none Cannon The objective of this research is to develop granular activated carbons tailored for the removal of organic taste and odor compounds from water. In particular, methyl isoborneol (MIB) and geosmin impart musty tastes and odors to drinking water even when they occur at concentrations as low as 5-10 parts per trillion; although these compounds pose no health risks, their presence invariably causes complaints and safety concerns among consumers. Activated carbon adsorption offers an important approach for removing geosmin, MIB and other odorants. The research will be conducted in three sequential tasks: (1) fundamentals-oriented bench scale testing, including methane-steam thermal treatments of the carbon with characterization of diffusion rates versus reaction rates during thermal treatment, (2) coordination with pilot-scale manufacture of the tailored GAC and (3) pilot scale evaluation at a municipal water treatment facility. The research will test the hypothesis that, using a methane-steam heat treatment process, increased odorant removal corresponds to increased pore volume, decreased surface acidity and increased graphene plane elongation. If successful, this project will result in activated carbons tailored to the effective removal of MIB, geosmin and other organic compounds. This project is supported under the GOALI program of NSF; the PIs will work closely with NORIT Americas, Inc. in the developmental work and with the Passaic Valley Water Commission (NJ) in the pilot-scale evaluations doc19381 none Graduate Alliance for Education in Louisiana PROJECT SUMMARY We propose to establish an alliance for increasing diversity in graduate education and the professoriate in Louisiana. Alliance partners will include Tulane and Louisiana State University (the two Carnegie Research I universities in the state and the institutions responsible for 94% of the minority doctoral degree production in the state between - ), Xavier University of Louisiana, Dillard University, and Southern University Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The Graduate Alliance for Education in Louisiana (GAELA) will build upon existing minority SME research training programs at these institutions, and develop new programs to encourage more minority students to pursue SME graduate education and academic careers. One of the goals of the GAELA project will be the early identification and nurturing of promising students during their undergraduate years. A concerted effort will be made to recruit doctoral fellows from participants in LS-LAMP, the College Fund - Xavier AMP, and other pre-graduate training programs in the state. We expect that the nurturing students receive in these programs, and the familiarity they gain working with faculty at Tulane and LSU will increase their chances of successfully completing their doctoral training. The second major goal of the GAELA Program will be to affect significant change in the culture of graduate education at the State of Louisiana s top research universities in order to significantly increase minority SME doctoral degree production. We have set a numerical goal of 45 Ph.D. per year by , more than triple the annual output on minority doctoral degrees. The project has a strong component of recruitment and early exposure of students to academic career opportunities focused on participating HBCU s, and a variety of retention activities focused on the two graduate research institutions. The recruitment component consists of exposing students at HBCU s to study and academic career opportunities at LSU and Tulane through recruiting visits by LSU and Tulane faculty, annual recruitment fairs on Tulane and LSU campuses, and involving HBCU students in Tulane LSU faculty-mentored research. We will establish GAELA campus programs at Xavier, Dillard, SUBR and SUNO to coordinate these activities. The retention component will consist of mentoring workshops for Tulane and LSU faculty, awarding research funds and professional travel grants to doctoral students that are making satisfactory progress toward completing their degrees, SME academic career training sessions, and #I survival sessions for helping minority students cope with the majority graduate educational environment doc19382 none Rida Farouki U of Calif Berkeley Minkowski geometric algebra is concerned with the complex sets populated by the sums and products of all pairs of complex numbers drawn from given complex Cset operands.Whereas the Minkowski sum under vector addition in R n has been thoroughly studied,from both the theoretical and computational perspective,the Minkowski product in R 2 induced by the multiplication rule for complex numbers is a relatively unexplored oncept. Conceptually, Minkowski geometric algebra is the natural generalization of real interval arithmetic to complex Cnumber sets.With the transition from real to complex,however,the trivial geometry of real intervals and their consequent closure under addition and multiplication is relinquished. The two Cdimensional haracter of Minkowski geometric algebra endows it with a rich geometrical ontent,in which simple operands (e.g.,circular disks) yield subtle results described by analytic curves such as the Cartesian oval ovals of Cassini and their higher Corder generalizations,while sophisticated algorithms are required to approximate Minkowski combinations for general sets.Apart from being a basic tool to monitor the propagation of uncertainty in complex Cvariable computations,the algebra o .ers a versatile language for two Cdimensional shape operators and the description of (direct or inverse) wavefront re .ection refraction problems in optics.It is also fundamental to the stability analysis of systems with uncertain parameters,in the context of the Routh CHurwitz criterion and the Kharitonov robustness theorem doc19383 none Life is the most complex physical phenomenon in the universe, manifesting an extraordinary diversity of form and function over an enormous scale ranging from the largest animals and plants to the smallest microbes and sub-cellular units. Yet, many of its most fundamental and complex phenomena scale with size in a surprisingly simple fashion. For example, metabolic rate (the power needed to sustain life) scales as the 3 4-power of mass over 27 orders of magnitude ranging from molecular and intra-cellular levels up through the smallest unicellular bacteria to the largest multicellular organisms. Similarly, time-scales (such as lifespan and growth-rate) and sizes (such as genome length and density of mitochondria) scale with exponents that are typically simple powers of 1 4. The universality and simplicity of these scaling relationships suggest that fundamental universal principles underlay much of the generic structure, function and organization of many biological phenomena. The premise of this project is that regardless of size, almost all life is sustained, and ultimately constrained, by space-filling, fractal-like hierarchical branching networks (both real and virtual), which are optimized by the forces of natural selection. Previous work has shown how these principles explain universal quarter-power scaling and how they lead to a quantitative understanding of many diverse biological systems. This project will continue to explore and elaborate on these universal principles by applying them to other fundamental problems in biology while extending the paradigm into other areas of science where their analogs might be applicable, such as corporate structures and urban development. The biological problems will include aging and mortality, minimum and maximum sizes of mammals, size and energy distributions in ecosystems, quantifying evolution including thermodynamic considerations, and understanding the scaling of genome size and its relationship to the complexity of the organism doc19384 none SGER: Effective Models of Science Research Partnerships in the Classroom: Resolving Key Pedagogical Issues PRI (the Paleontological Research Institute) is requesting funding to develop and evaluate student-scientist partnership (SSP) resources for fourth through ninth grade student participants in the Devonian Seas Project. Through the proposed activities PRI will contribute a fully evaluated model laying out protocols for effective linkage between Earth science research and pre-college classroom teaching. Age-appropriate materials and an associated project database will be catalogued with the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE). This will greatly increase access to real world data sets while providing DLESE with content usable in tests of new Digital Library protocols. The timing of this award is critical and urgent since PRI has recently acquired corporate support for its Devonian Seas classroom outreach SSP. This award will allow PRI to leverage corporate funds to develop and evaluate new SSP materials in the formative stages, one of the major challenges facing SSP development and implementation. Funding will help to establish the Devonian Seas Project as a model that may catalyze change in the way students experience science education doc19385 none David Farrelly of Utah State University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to use diffusion Monte Carlo (DCM) methods to study the rotational structure of atomic and molecular clusters with weak interactions. The major project goal is to develop new computational approaches for examining large amplitude rotational dynamics of impurity molecules and cluster impurities in liquid helium nanodroplets, as in helium nanodroplet isolation spectroscopy. The new techniques will be generally applicable to rotational structure of assemblages of rigid top molecules in helium droplets or in the gas phase. Also, investigations will continue into ultrahigh molecular Rydberg states, with applications to zero electron-kinetic energy (ZEKE) spectroscopy. An important task in theoretical chemistry is the computation of properties of matter in unusual or extreme situations. It is often under such conditions that new and interesting properties come to light. Nanodroplets of superfluid liquid helium provide such an environment to explore molecules or small, weakly bound clusters of molecules inserted into them. Such droplets have been called the ultimate spectroscopic matrix, because of their very low temperatures and the weak influence they exert on the dopant molecules under study. These nanodroplets present significant opportunities to understand new properties of matter and fundamental solvent effects doc19386 none This project is developing and disseminating low-cost laboratory apparatus and innovative, competency-based, activity-based, interdisciplinary curriculum materials that integrate mathematics, science, and technology. The project objectives are to: 1. Develop four curriculum modules incorporating 24 Authentic Learning Tasks to be distributed to high school and community college faculty using inquiry-based activities that apply rigorous mathematics and science to realistic technological tasks. 2. Offer four in-depth summer institutes based on the curriculum modules to 72 Ohio high school and community college faculty. The project is implemented in two major phases: Curriculum Development and Summer Institutes. Phase 1: Four curriculum modules incorporating laboratory apparatus and innovative, competency-based, activity-based learning through 24 Authentic Learning Tasks (a series of discrete learning events that build experience and competencies related to the module s goals) are being created in the following curriculum modules: Algebra, General Mathematics and Trigonometry, Science Physics, Technology and Electronics. Leading developers of hardware and software are participating in this phase. Phase 2: A series of four institutes are being offered for 72 mathematics, science, and technology high school and two-year college faculty in Ohio doc19387 none In research supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry program, Professor Lindner and his coworkers at the University of Memphis are developing ion-selective electrodes with sub-micromolar detection limits. The best results are expected when the parasitic, transmembrane ion fluxes, across the ion-selective membrane, are prevented through the application of a few nA cm2 direct current. Chrono-amperometric and chrono-potentiometric measurements will be employed in combination with spectroscopic imaging of transport processes in the sensing membrane to develop measurement protocols for the analysis of extremely dilute samples. The methods will be adapted to small size, microfabricated sensors and tested in environmental and biological samples. Ion-selective electrodes are simple, accurate and cost effective devices for both in vivo and in vitro measurement of ion concentrations. Dr. Lindner and his coworkers in the Joint Graduate Program for Biomedical Engineering at the University of Memphis are working on experimental techniques that project several orders of magnitudes improvement in the performance of ion sensors. This improvement is expected to profoundly affect the role of ion-selective electrodes in microanalysis, e.g., in environmental monitoring, or cellular biology doc19388 none Southern Rings is a consortium of three two-year colleges and a four-year college to establish a regional center to increase the number of technologically-trained information technology technicians in south Georgia. The planning process is to define and develop roles of industrial partners and secondary schools, an effective co-principal investigator structure, a multi-institutional approach to academic programs and content delivery, technical support for activities, and management and evaluation plans. The process determines specifics of the models to ensure scalability and sustainability of the efforts and to extend them to rural communities that have no institutions of higher education doc19389 none This project is showcasing a diverse range of ground-breaking Advanced Technology Education (ATE) programs currently operating in community colleges across the country, through production and dissemination of a series of media-based products. The project also features a robust outreach campaign to awaken students, parents, guidance and career counselors, policymakers, and community colleges themselves to the enormous potential of these programs. Five 15-minute videotapes illustrate successful ATE programs in such fields as Agriculture, Biotechnology, Chemical or Process Technology, Information Technology, and Manufacturing. Each video profiles two students, highlighting the ethnic, geographic, and age diversity reflected in community college demographics. In addition, an introductory video, drawn from the library as a whole and also produced in CD-ROM format, provides an overview of exemplary ATE programs in community colleges across the country. A companion Web site is expanding on the topics addressed in the videos, providing additional information through text, interactive activities, streamed clips from the series, and links to related sites. A National Advisory Group is guiding all aspects of the project. Dissemination activities feature widespread distribution of copies of the video series, the overview CD-ROM, and print guides to facilitate use. In addition, through partnerships with the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), the American School Counselor Association (ASCA), and Jobs for the Future, Inc., there is use of common messaging to place listings and articles about the series in the online community college guides published by Peterson s, USA Today, and U.S. News and World Report.The project is also working to reach the 5 million members Phi Theta Kappa and marketing the series via general educational distributors. All project materials are designed for use as tools by community colleges in recruiting students, educating policymakers, and encouraging expanded involvement of business and industry in ATE programs.The intention of the project is to bring community colleges to the forefront of consideration when students (e.g., high schoolers, older-adults, displaced workers) and those who support them (e.g., guidance counselors, workplace supervisors, and parents) are exploring educational and career options doc19390 none Under normal conditions, American metropolitan areas are subject to constant change. These changes are the product of a complex set of cause-effect interactions among different systems, with each contributing factors acting to differing degrees in different settings. All of these factors have contributed to the expansion of areal metropolitan areas. Among the dynamic processes occurring in metropolitan areas are the myriad decisions of households regarding whether to stay in their current residence or to move. One conceptualization of this kind of household decision posits that a threshold exists beyond which households find the strains of remaining in their current housing unit to be too great, thereby leading them to decide to move to a different unit. Changes in lifestyles and in the perceived characteristics of neighborhoods also have been found to affect household mobility decisions significantly. One of the strongest influences on mobility is the perceived safety of a neighborhood. Extant notions regarding safety and security received a profound shock on September 11, , however, when terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center in New York City and attacked the Pentagon near Washington DC. These events directly affected thousands of people, but millions watched in horror as events unfolded again and again. Follow-up reports on television, on radio, in newspapers, and via other media kept the events constantly in mind. Almost no one in the U.S. remained untouched. This Small Grant for Exploratory Research will support a post-September 11 study of household attitudes to determine the degree to which householder perceptions of the safety and security may have altered their locational decision making. The project will consist of a new survey of nearly 2,000 households in the Columbus, Ohio, metropolitan area. The survey will build on a mail survey of a random sample of Franklin County homeowners conducted during the Summer of . That survey asked questions about housing and neighborhood satisfaction and desires, mobility and remodeling plans, and household demographic characteristics. The responses from the survey were combined with county auditor records, so that the resulting data set contained physical information about the housing unit as well as the survey answers from the nearly 50 percent of the randomly drawn sample that responded. The original research plan called for using these data to study the influence of household and neighborhood-level characteristics on normal urban processes of growth and change. This Small Grant for Exploratory Research support a follow-up inquiry that will proposal requests funds to add eight to ten questions to the original survey and immediately send it to a new random sample of Franklin County homeowner. Research on residential mobility responses to hazards has shown that the standard demographic predictors of mobility have it stronger influence on movement patterns than perceptions or attitudes about the hazard. The events of September 11 were unique in the nation s history, however. Nearly all U.S. households experienced the events through the media and may now view their own cities as hazards -- as places where terrorists may attack. This project will examine what effect these events have had on households attitudes towards their home, neighborhood, and likelihood of moving by collecting additional survey data on homeowners attitudes and comparing these responses to data gathered via the same survey of homeowners just prior to September 11th. This pre- and post-event information provides a unique opportunity to examine the impact that this kind of event may have on the decisions that households make about their housing and will shed light on whether such events could shape the spatial structure of American cities and regions in the future doc19391 none The investigators will use line-of-sight (LOS) velocity drift measurements from the Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN) to characterize the statistical nature of velocity variability in the high latitude ionosphere. They will use the existing SuperDARN dataset to determine the temporal variability in LOS measurements on 100X45 km spatial scales and 1 minute time scales over the entire high latitude ionosphere. It has been shown that variability in the convection electric field is a significant factor in determining the amount of Joule heating in this region. General circulation models of the thermosphere use statistical or averaged convection electric fields which contain no information about the small-scale variability and thus seriously underestimate the amount of Joule heating. The wide coverage of the SuperDARN radars will allow determination of the relationships between velocity variability and magnetospheric features. The resulting comprehensive characterizations of the electric field variability will facilitate more realistic inputs to global models and better understanding of the magnetosphere-ionosphere system doc19392 none The Maricopa Advanced Technology Education Center (MATEC) is transitioning to serve as the NSF s leading dissemination center for skill standards, ideas, materials, contacts, and mentoring in the field of semiconductor industry education. Since MATEC has collaborated with industry and educators to increase the number of semiconductor manufacturing technology (SMT) programs from 32 to 80; create the industry s first national skill standards; and develop and distribute 44 modules of learning materials through a unique electronic delivery system. As a dissemination center, MATEC s goals are 1) to motivate at least 50 percent of the nation s SMT faculty to adopt the MATEC learning system by , in part by developing an industry-accepted ChipReady job-screening assessment; and 2) to broadcast best practices and new ideas among SMT faculty nationwide. MATEC continues to use the dissemination vehicles developed in the last six years (adopter and topic workshops, Web site, quarterly print newsletter and e-mail bulletins, conference attendance, faculty development, and sponsorship of the industry s most influential annual workforce development conference). MATEC is also developing five new dissemination vehicles (Learning Invention Lab, lesson plan recognition, exemplary instructor video, collaboration with Arizona State University East, collaboration with industry workforce developers doc19393 none Under the leadership of St. Louis Community College at Florissant Valley (SLCC-FV), the University of Missouri-Rolla (UMR), and the St. Louis Area Tech-Prep Consortium of 28 school districts partner for this project. The project focuses on the development of a 3-D Solid Modeling (Unigraphics) course, professional development for secondary school teachers, student enrichment and outreach activities for high school students, and adaptation and implementation of South Carolina ATE Gateway to Technology program. Through the legislative and former governor s leadership and financial support from the state of Missouri, St. Louis Community College at Florissant Valley has already been involved in an extensive upgrade of its facilities and programs. In the last three years the state of Missouri has awarded over $1.5 million to the college to enhance its laboratory facilities for manufacturing related programs, and has appropriated $2.1 million to expand the physical facilities. Scope of the project includes developing one course at the associate s level in a manufacturing related topic, organizing workshops and training sessions in manufacturing related topics for high school teachers and students, and implementing Gateway to Technology (developmental) program to improve preparedness of SLCC-FV students for engineering and engineering technology programs doc19394 none This project is responding to a growing demand for technically trained employees for automotive manufacturing industries in north central Alabama. The faculty at Jefferson State Community College (JSCC) formed partnerships with regional manufacturers, area secondary schools, universities, and the Alabama Technology Network to develop a Manufacturing Technology Training Center. Over $2 million has been spent to renovate and equip the facility, which serves college and high school students as well as economically disadvantaged adults referred from the One-Stop career center established through the Workforce Investment Act. The Center offers degrees, certificates and short-term training in five manufacturing-related tracks. This project focuses on two tracks: industrial maintenance and automated manufacturing. The project goal is to meet the workforce needs of area manufacturing industries by fully developing curricula for industrial maintenance and automated manufacturing that integrates technical experiences into the classroom and laboratory, and is complemented with workforce experience. The four major goals are to: (1) Develop faculty trained to teach in these two programs, (2) Establish specific program requirements including entry and exit requirements for certificate, degree, and short term training that correlate with specific assessments and standards, (3) Fully develop and teach each course in these two programs, and (4) Develop additional partnerships with industries, secondary schools and colleges to establish comprehensive 2+2+2 programs in industrial maintenance and automated manufacturing. The curriculum development team composed of JSCC faculty, industry representatives and educators from local high schools and universities has developed the curriculum. DACUM and or Work Keys processes were used to establish specific academic and technical skills required for employment in each area. This information has been organized into courses within the Alabama Common Course and Curriculum Guide for Colleges and Universities doc19395 none The Tennessee Information Technology (IT) Exchange Center provides an effective workforce capacity building system by increasing the IT educational strength in a consortium of two year colleges, four year colleges, secondary schools and industries in North Central Tennessee. The goal is to develop a sustainable Center to meet need by industry for a qualified IT workforce. Faculty and students in long-term relationships with experts from industry create real world scenarios based on industrial needs and use them as the basis for instruction in IT courses. The learning strategies are developed in workshops at the Center for Learning and Teaching at Vanderbilt University. The cases are used in high school academies to interest high school students in IT careers. A web site provides information about the availability and content of education and training programs in the region, a clearinghouse of job opportunities and regular communications among partners. Regional stakeholder forums bring industry and educators together to develop a shared vision based upon research for effective delivery of instruction. The audience includes both students in educational institutions and re-careering workers doc19396 none Prop #: PI: Paul Ljunggren This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessel Ewing operated by the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Paul Ljunggren is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire a Tasman P-Code GPS Receiver, seismic air compressor oil coolers and valves, a fire detection system, and refurbishment of an inflatable workboat doc19397 none Moraine Valley Community College is updating the existing exemplary Mechanical and DesignDrafting CAD A.A.S. degree and three corresponding certificates by incorporating 3D Parametric Modeling skills into the curriculum. Employers have identified that 3D Parametric Modeling must be incorporated into curriculum to ensure graduates have mastered the advanced CAD skills used currently in business and industry. Parametric modeling combines the power of three-dimensional modeling as an intuitive engineering design tool with the ability to manipulate and control the corresponding engineering drawings in an adaptive environment. This simplifies the design process, reduces the engineer s design cycle time, achieves better design visualization, more closely associates 2D and 3D drawings, and makes the design process easier to manage. Rapid prototyping is also being incorporated into curriculum in order to provide faculty and students the opportunity to produce a prototype, or model, of their designs. A collaborative partnership with three other community colleges and four high schools is forming to fully develop, pilot test, evaluate and revise curriculum for three existing and two new courses in the Mechanical Design and Drafting CAD A.A.S. degree. Each member of this partnership, the Content Development Team, is participating in summer curriculum development workshops and year-round curriculum pilot testing, evaluation, and revision activities. The PI and three Co-PIs from Moraine Valley are serving on the Content Development Team and ensuring that the following project goals and corresponding objectives are implemented. Goal 1: Revising updating current Mechanical Design and Drafting A.A.S. degree and three Certificates to include 3D Parametric Modeling. Goal 2: Building on existing partnerships with high schools and other community colleges to develop, pilot test and evaluate 3D Parametric Modeling courses. Goal 3: Utilizing E-Learning tools to incorporate Web-assisted instructional course resources. Goal 4: Disseminating the Mechanical Design and Drafting A.A.S. degree and three Certificates to other educational institutions. Goal 5: Developing and implementing recruitment strategies to promote the revised programs to high school students - focusing on students currently under-represented in Mechanical Design and Drafting CAD courses. To respond to student learning styles, alternative instructional techniques, such as group project work, and Web-assisted eLearning tools are incorporated into instructional delivery. 3D CAD instruction occurs using a variety of delivery methods, including traditional instructor-led classes and Web-assisted learning resources, such as online assignments, skills assessments, lab exercises, teacher guides, tests, quizzes, and course evaluations. Dissemination of the updated Mechanical Design and Drafting CAD degree includes providing summer teacher training workshops for 20 high school and college faculty in year two and three of the project. In addition, the college is implementing a variety of career awareness activities to increase high students knowledge about CAD careers. In each of these activities, students currently under-represented in CAD careers (minorities and women) are targeted for participation. A total of 51 high school and college faculty and several hundred of their students are gaining expertise and or awareness of 3D parametric modeling and CAD careers doc19398 none This research program will test current theories and models of the radiation belts by comparing the theoretical and model results with observational data obtained from the NASA Polar satellite and the GPS satellites. It will develop statistical descriptions of the particle pitch angle distributions for different L-shells and different local times as a function of the phase of a magnetic storm. This will make it possible to distinguish among competing theories for the transport and loss of relativistic electrons. It will also determine which mechanisms dominate the transport and loss processes under different conditions. In addition, the project will develop time-dependent phase space density profiles for the events selected for study in the Geospace Environment Modeling campaign on the inner magnetosphere and magnetic storms. These profiles will be made available to the space physics community to help establish an understanding of when and where relativistic electron acceleration is occurring. The profiles will also be useful in constraining the theoretical work currently being done doc19399 none of all affine groups. The investigator with A. Mezard approaches affine groups by generalizing to all algebraic relations over finite fields Grothendieck s famous results for tame relations. Applications for exceptional functions alone include ways to manipulate data for encryption and to assure integrity. This will mean faster, more efficient and accurate file back-ups; more stable software; and more secure data transfers doc19400 none This project is enabling secondary school teachers and college faculty in Baltimore County and the surrounding region to effectively integrate computer technology into their classrooms. Activities include: (1) expanding the current NSF-funded Information and Multimedia Technology (IMMT) program (NSF Award No. ) to include a new Instructional Multimedia curriculum with a certificate option for educators interested in becoming proficient in using multimedia technology to create effective interactive learning materials for their classrooms; (2) providing two-week intensive experiences in classroom multimedia technology applications to develop the technological currency of in-service secondary school teachers and college faculty in science, mathematics, and technology fields, and to prepare in-service technology teachers to teach articulated multimedia technology courses at secondary schools; and (3) creating a new digital audio video computer production laboratory at CCBC Essex to support the new Instructional Multimedia certificate option and to enable project participants to develop Multimedia Learning Activities (MLAs) (small computer- or Web-based animations and interactive applications) for their classrooms. The developed materials incorporate national science, mathematics, technology, and industry standards in education. Science, mathematics, and technology faculty from CCBC Essex are developing instructional design and technology courses in collaboration with teachers and administrators from the Baltimore County Public Schools, professionals from businesses that use multimedia in the workplace (including Apropos Media, BreakAway Games, and System Source), and faculty from the College of Notre Dame of Maryland. At least four new credit courses are being developed for both traditional and online delivery: Ethical Responsibilities in the Computer Age, Managing Learning with Technology, Educational Technology Process, and Online Course Management doc19401 none Information Technology (IT) programs in two-year colleges have provided personnel qualified for the IT workforce. Yet corporate hiring preferences favor those with four-year degrees in almost any field combined with IT certificates or courses at the two-year college or two-year college degrees and much experience. Present articulated degree programs emphasize business fields such as sales and personnel supervision rather than advanced standards-based technical skills. This project investigates the extent to which industrial support exists for four-year degrees in IT that are consistent with skill standards. Upper division skill standards in IT are developed to codify those technical and non-technical elements that are important in the selection, placement and promotion of IT workers. The clusters of Enterprise System Analysis and Integration, Programming, Technical Writing and Database Development and Administration are emphasized. The project also investigates best practices in the structure and use of conventional articulation models between two-year and four-year colleges and the development of a framework for offering standards-based upper division technology degrees doc19402 none The Construction Technology Center of Red Rocks Community College has joined with secondary education representatives and industry leaders throughout Colorado to develop a model in the recruitment and preparation of prospective technicians. The Technical Education Pathways (TEP) produces skilled technicians with improved skill adaptability as a result of integrated classroom and internship experiences reinforcing real world application of science, and mathematics. Through adaptation of promising approaches in the marketing of technical career education developed by other National Science Foundation grantees, career awareness activities with high school students includes job shadowing and real opportunities to interact in the technical workplace. A college level course offered for high school students introduces the application of science and mathematics and effective communication in the workplace as students are prepared for matriculation as college freshmen with improved academic competencies. Faculty development joins secondary faculty of mathematics and the sciences with the postsecondary technical faculty in collegial exchanges improves the integration of the core academic subjects with the application that occurs in the technical work place. Faculty are engaged in developing an instructional approach that facilitates learning by encouraging active inquiry-based exploration that coaches learners in the multiple applications of the theoretical knowledge in the sciences and mathematics. The postsecondary classrooms and laboratories replicate the technology in the manipulation of the tools and the equipment found in the actual technical workplace as college freshmen are prepared in a series of paid internships and apprenticeships. Professional practicing technicians are prepared through training provided by the TEP as workplace mentors in the guidance of the prospective technician student in the integration of the new knowledge gained in the classroom with real work using the principles of contextual learning. Students are engaged in project-based learning in the workplace, using mathematic and scientific concepts to solve problems and honing reasoning skills useful in diagnosing and resolving problems yet to be encountered. At the completion of the applied associate of science program, the new technician has multiple career options as well as opportunities to continue his or her undergraduate studies with universities offering articulation for the graduating technician doc19403 none Florence-Darlington Technical College and Piedmont Technical College are collaboratively serving as a national Resource Center for dissemination of educational materials, curricula, pedagogical practice, and recruitment strategies resulting from the highly successful South Carolina Advanced Technological Education Center of Excellence (SC ATE). As a national Resource Center for Excellence in engineering technology education, this partnership serves as a highly visible resource for ideas, materials, contacts, and mentoring focused on recruiting, nurturing, and teaching students at the beginning of the engineering technology educational pipeline where most attrition occurs. The institutions involved were an integral part of the SC ATE Center of Excellence work for the past six years, and the envisioned systemic reform has taken root. They have the largest number of SC ATE-prepared, reform-ready faculty and the most experience in implementing the SC ATE curricula and fostering numerous other improvements in the teaching learning environment. These two colleges are carrying this significant statewide work from a base of experience and success in South Carolina to the next level to benefit the greater two-year technical and community college engineering technology (ET) community. The vision of the project is to serve as a national model and clearinghouse to increase the quantity, quality and diversity of engineering technology graduates from two-year ET degree programs. The goals of the project are to: (a) Serve as a national focal point for improvement in ET education; (b) Refine and share successful SC ATE recruitment strategies (e.g., ATE Scholars) and share new recruitment strategies; (c) Refine and share the SC ATE Technology Gateway (pre-engineering technology) curriculum (three courses) and the SC ATE Engineering Technology Core curriculum, ET Core ; (d) Develop multiple course and curriculum scheduling options to increase use of the SC ATE curricula; (e) Introduce a pilot electronic version of Technology Gateway to facilitate greater access to ET programs for students for whom a full-time or an uninterrupted course of study is not possible; (f) Share insights into organizational change issues that can support or hinder lasting improvement in the teaching learning environment for engineering technology students; (g) Deliver a pilot version of ATE Teaching Team Training via an interactive web-based workshop; (h) Leverage the experience of SC ATE s principal investigators, college administrators, and faculty by providing mentoring for others as they adapt and implement SC ATE models or otherwise address the special needs of beginning engineering technology students; and, (i) Demonstrate how the processes of project evaluation, program evaluation, and accreditation can be linked to implement total quality improvement in the preparation of students for successful careers in engineering technology and beyond doc19404 none In the Appalachian region of southwest Virginia, geographic barriers often prohibit travel to educational centers, thus limiting the region s ability to assist in meeting the growing need for information technology workers. Further complicating the ability to train qualified IT workers has been the traditional difficulty of transferring AAS credits from a community college to institutions granting baccalaureate degrees. This project joins 11 community colleges from the Appalachian region of southwest Virginia with Radford University to form a Regional Technology Education Consortium (RTEC). RTEC is designed to (1) provide a clear path for AAS students to attain a Baccalaureate degree in computer science or information systems; (2) develop curriculum to meet the technology competency requirements of the information technology industry; (3) insure that articulated programs meet industry certification standards and recommended guidelines from professional associations and ; and (4) institutionalize procedures and organizational structures to guarantee continued congruence between the community college and 4-year university curricula in information technology. To further enhance success, RTEC is expanding business and industry partnerships to improve the congruence between needs of employers and the institutions preparing future IT workers. Radford University s Business and Industry Council has a committee assigned to advise the College of Information Science and Technology. Business and Industry Council members, including representatives from SunTrust Bank, First Union National Bank, EDS Corporation, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), First Virtual Corporation, Polycom Network Systems, Verizon Communications, and SAP provide significant input from an employer s perspective. The dynamic partnership of RTEC combined with the collaborative efforts of the information technology industry is energizing and broadening the technology-based learning experiences available to AAS graduates in the Appalachian communities throughout southwestern Virginia. The demand for the next generation of information technology professionals is being met by incorporating industry needs with academic preparation doc19405 none This is a proposal to prepare a planning grant for Tampa Bay regional center for manufacturing. This Center involves educational material development, adaptation and implementation from existing centers, and professional development for educators. A new manufacturing program at Hillsborough Community College (HCC), an emerging manufacturing technology program at St Petersburg College (SPC), and an active industry focused Engineering College at the University of South Florida (USF) form a strong academic foundation for the creation of this regional center. Furthermore, the manufacturing companies also recognize the urgent need to refocus manufacturing education in the region. Hence, the planning grant time and funds are going to be directed to conducting job and skill analysis, DACUMs, and fine tuning of results of the state-wide effort that are currently underway to assure maximum coupling among these schools and the manufacturing companies in the region. Planning grant funds are also going to be used to shape the proposed center s activities. Besides providing the needed synergy for academic and industrial partners focused on manufacturing issues, the Center is also going to build a bridge between the Associate of Science Degree at HCC in Manufacturing Technology and the B.S. Engineering degree (manufacturing emphasis) offered at the Industrial Engineering Department within USF s College of Engineering. In addition, the ATE Center is going to serve as a greater Tampa Bay regional umbrella for SPC s and HCC s Manufacturing Technology programs. The center is going to support all the regional high schools and community colleges that have courses or programs in manufacturing or related technology fields that should be revitalized doc19406 none Stochastic systems underlie the models applied in most areas of modern science. These concepts have evolved over a long period of time but were heavily influenced more recently by the cybernetics movement spanning the late 40s until the late 70s. Those involved on the electrical engineering side of this movement used flow graphs to represent the systems. Interesting time-dependent system characteristics were naturally characterized in terms of the Laplace transforms that could be associated with the flow graph. Their efforts lead to a general theory of finite state semi-Markov systems that generalized the very restrictive Markov systems that are commonly applied even today. Unfortunately, the inversion of the transforms in this approach proved to be a challenge that ultimately limited the impact of the flow graphs. This proposal addresses these inversions along with other missing tools so that a general systems theory may be fully developed into a complete mathematical discipline. These inversion tools, using saddlepoint methods, allow for the determination of the transient behavior of complex systems. In addition, the bootstrap is introduced for nonparametric statistical inference about the true system based on system observation. The range of applications in the engineering and biomedical sciences include communication and computer networks, queueing theory, multi-state survival models, and right left and interval censoring in the context of the competing risks associated with such models. More specifically, this proposal addresses the following issues: (1) New techniques are required for inverting the Laplace transforms that characterize the complex behavior of systems; the author proposes several new saddlepoint methods for achieving this by using the method of steepest descents. (2) Transforms describing system characteristics need to be specified in ways that make the saddlepoint methods easy to use. Often Mason s rule is used but, because of its form, it is much too complicated to apply to large systems. The author has proposed several alternative co-factor rules that greatly simplify computations for the saddlepoint inversions. (3) Nonparametric statistical inference is to be developed for such semi-Markov systems using the bootstrap and its relationship to empirical transforms. The single and double bootstrap lead to a practical means for computing confidence bands of survival and hazard functions related to the semi-Markov process. The proposed double bootstrap is implemented through saddlepoint inversions. This proposal studies the statistical and probabilistic traits of dynamic stochastic systems with feedback. The models for such systems are commonly used to make extrapolations and predictions in most areas of modern science. In engineering, for example, a communication or computer system changes from state to state and the dynamics of these state transitions determine the evolution of the system. This proposal considers the computation and estimation of reliability or performance evaluation for such an evolving dynamic system. The proposed methods have important applications in reliability analysis, electrical engineering, biomedical sciences and manufacturing doc19407 none This project is expanding the pipeline of qualified high school students, especially minority students, into the biotechnology program at Oklahoma City Community College (OKCCC) through infusion of high quality biotechnology experiences into the high schools. The state of Oklahoma lists biotechnology as a priority growth area, but currently the labor pool of skilled biotechnicians cannot meet local demand, and the average high school student knows little about the world of biotechnology and its career potential. Educational teams from Oklahoma City Public Schools (OKCPS), led by a science educator biotechnology faculty at the community college, are selecting and adapting exemplary materials from NSF-supported projects such as Shoestring Biotechnology, BioLink, and Cases in Industry Practice in Biotechnology as well as bioinformatics activities from the Dolan DNA Learning Center of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Intellectual support for the teachers starts with intense summer workshops, where teachers run the labs, study the concepts, and map material to national and state science standards as well as bioindustry skill standards. As the biotechnology learning community takes shape, ongoing advice, encouragement, and sharing of experiences comes through regular meetings, a list-serve, and visits from the Principal Investigator (PI) and Coordinator. Practical support to teachers comes from the equipment loaner center, providing needed equipment as well as supplies for ready-to-go experiments. In the course of implementing this project, teachers develop professionally. Some assume a leadership role in dissemination of results and continuation of the project. OKCPS is enriched with minority students who are potential first-generation college students. OKCPS is also in the midst of a NSF-funded Urban Systemic Program, which aims to bring inquiry-based learning into the science and mathematics programming. Biotechnology Bioinformatics Discovery! augments the district s ongoing efforts to improve the performance of minority students by using nationally developed biotechnology experiences well suited to these students needs. The project also plans to address cultural barriers to science career and higher education choices by including parents mentors in the programming. In the first year, three Oklahoma City Public School (OKCPS) high school teams (a minimum of three teachers per school) are implementing the biotechnology modules at various levels as part of existing courses, not limited to science courses. The second year, the project expands to include a full biotechnology course, additional OKCPS schools, and more biotechnology modules within additional courses. The third year, the scheme expands to schools throughout the region. Student learning is augmented with capstone experiences: more elaborate sophisticated experiments at OKCCC, and visits to working biotechnologists at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center (OUHSC) and the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF) to witness exciting applications of this knowledge. The extensive exposure to high-quality biotechnology experiences as well as to higher education and research sites is expected to increase the college attendance rate and entry into science careers of these high school students doc19408 none s. The third aspect of this research is part of a subject called representation theory. The main objects of study here are representations , processes which encode information about symmetry in nature. The last part of this proposal stands at the intersection of three subjects: number theory (where number systems are studied), representation theory, and topology. In topology spaces are studied to determine which properties do not change under elastic deformations such as twisting and stretching. The spaces to be studied in this research encode number theoretic information. The goal is to investigate whether there are invariants of these spaces which themselves satisfy some symmetry doc19409 none Technology educators generally agree that the workplace of today is very different places than the workplace of yesterday. There is also a general sense that if a community is to maintain a position of economic strength there must be fundamental changes in the workplace as well as in the educational programs which support them. These emerging high performance work environments increasingly demand technician level employees with sophisticated technical skills, team skills, and critical thinking skills. It is in response to this need that our team in the Eastern Iowa Community College District, in collaboration with 14 public and private sector partners, has created the Advanced Manufacturing Technology Education Center (AMTEC). To address these workplace changes our team s efforts involve a number of key areas to support regional workforce needs. We are collaborating with existing ATE manufacturing programs to develop and deliver an advanced manufacturing technology curriculum that is responsive to the needs of our regional industries. Our AMTEC has been developed to have the flexibility to meet the diverse scheduling and learning style needs of students. We are also establishing a seamless educational pathway for advanced manufacturing technology education. We are offering three Associate of Applied Science programs in Industrial Control Systems, Industrial Mechanical Maintenance, and First Line Supervisor Training. Through professional development opportunities for community college and secondary school educators we are maintaining and strengthening the region s manufacturing technician programs. Our state-of-the-art training facility has been developed to support 340 students in a variety of advanced manufacturing areas. Our dissemination plans involves an annual Manufacturing Academy for high school students; a Technicians Speakers Bureau; job shadowing experiences; Manufacturing Careers program; Manufacturing Seminar for high school vocational instructors; and a Manufacturing Internship program doc19410 none This award supports participation by the principal investigator and three other US scientists in two consecutive day-long workshops concerned with regulations affecting research on wild animals. The workshops will be held at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. All four scientists will speak during one or both of the workshops. The first of the two is an Animal Care Regional Workshop convened by the Canadian Council on Animal Care (CCAC), the Canadian group responsible for establishing Animal Care Committees, the Canadian equivalent of Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUCs) at US institutions. The second is a Workshop on Cross-Border and Multi-Center Wildlife Studies. Previous US workshops have underscored the need for additional and ongoing discussion of how the animal welfare act, the endangered species act, and other relevant regulations affect the conduct of field research with vertebrates. The Vancouver workshops will address, among other issues, transportation of wildlife, projects involving migration and endangered species, multi-center project approval, and wildlife management relative to basic research. The impact of newly revised Canadian wildlife guidelines will also be discussed. Approximately 150 attendees are anticipated. Because the NSF, like the NIH, delegates most responsibility for enforcement of all pertinent animal care and use regulations to grantee institutions, there is a significant need for ongoing discussion and education efforts in this area; participation of these four speakers will enhance the value of the workshops. Additional support will be provided by the CCAC, by the Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare of the NIH, and by the host institution where the workshops will be held doc19411 none A two-day workshop will be held in June, to bring together practitioners, researchers, and government agency end-users for the purpose of exploring and advancing the new, integrated field of Geotechnical Composite Systems. Geotechnical composite systems incorporate man-made elements into soil or rock to create large-scale composite materials. The workshop will involve 25 participants with differing backgrounds from academic institutions, specialty construction companies, governmental agencies, and engineering design firms. The most exciting and compelling issues in modern geotechnical engineering are found at the boundary between disciplines, and cannot be addressed by a single group or single individual. The principal goal of this workshop is to bring together a diverse group of researchers, practitioners, end users, and other interested persons to accomplish the following six specific objectives: 1. Establish common ground, and a language for communication, between disciplines. 2. Identify gaps in knowledge about geotechnical composite systems as they are used in existing applications. 3. Propose new types of geotechnical composite systems and new applications for existing geotechnical composite systems. 4. Explore how methods from other disciplines, such as composite materials engineering, may apply to the field of geotechnical composite systems. 5. Identify and prioritize research needs in geotechnical composite systems. 6. Broadly disseminate the workshop results. In addition to invited participants, other individuals interested in the topic will be invited to apply for funds to attend the workshop. Underrepresented minorities, female and academically young investigators will be particularly encouraged to apply doc19412 none The Earth s magnetosphere exhibits a variety of behaviors that appear to represent distinct states of the magnetosphere. An alternative theory, however, is that these apparently disparate states are simply manifestations of a unified response of the magnetosphere to the solar wind driver. This work will clarify the situation by examining the relationship between magnetic substorms and magnetic storms and the relationship between magnetic substorms and steady magnetospheric convection (SMC). This project will examine these relationships primarily from a data analysis point of view, using data from global auroral imagers (Viking, Polar, and IMAGE satellites), neutral atom imagery (Polar and IMAGE), energetic particle measurements from the Los Alamos geosynchronous satellites and grand-based auroral and magnetic data doc19413 none This project will provide the genome sequence of a Bacillus anthracis strain isolated from the recent anthrax outbreak in Florida. This sequence can then be compared to that of other strains of Bacillus anthracis. Such comparisons will help investigators in their quest to understand the phylogenetic diversity of Bacillus anthracis and may point to genomic factors that affect virulence doc19373 none Advances in research and operational weather observation systems and numerical modeling techniques have led to progressive improvements in understanding of physical processes involved in the development and evolution of lake-effect snow storms. In particular recent observations taken during the Lake-Induced Convection Experiment (Lake-ICE) and mesoscale numerical models have been utilized to better understand isolated classic lake-effect systems that develop primarily from lake surface heat and moisture fluxes in fall and winter months. The enhanced scientific understanding of interactions between microscale and mesoscale processes in classic lake-effect systems can now be applied to more complex, and perhaps more common and intense, non-classic lake-effect storms. This collaborative research project will build on past research results and use new observations and numerical models to develop a physically-consistent understanding of complex interactions of synoptic systems and mesoscale lake-effect systems and factors controlling the coherence of, and structure along, mesoscale lake-effect convective bands. In particular the Principal Investigators will analyze data obtained from radars, aircraft, satellites and surface instrumentation and perform detailed mesoscale model simulations to study unresolved issues for non-classic lake-effect situations. Four specific research objectives are to: 1) Determine differences in the cloud microphysical structure and thermodynamics of lake-effect boundary layers that occur with and without large-scale precipitation aloft; 2) Determine the effects of a warm lake on the mesoscale dynamics and structure of moving mesoscale precipitation systems (such as associated with synoptic fronts); 3) Determine the processes by which the convective boundary layer and mesoscale circulations from an upwind lake influence lake-effect development over a downwind lake; 4) Determine the dynamic mechanisms leading to the development of mesoscale structures along lake-effect snow bands and the influence of vertical wind shear on band structural coherence. Successful completion of this research could help improve the forecast of intense lake-effect snowstorms doc19415 none This project will develop a generalized model for the equilibrium conditions for the Earth s magnetic tail during conditions when the magnetosphere is characterized by (1) quasi-steady convection, (2) the growth phase of magnetic substorms, and (3) directly driven solar wind effects. It will use analytic methods in conjunction with a computer simulation code that will ensure appropriate topological conditions and conservation of flux and or entropy. The result will be an equilibrium model that can be embedded in a Geospace General Circulation Model, or other global magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations of the magnetospheric system doc19416 none The Community Colleges of Colorado plan to establish a regional center in information technology (IT) to significantly increase the supply, capability and diversity of the IT workforce in Colorado. The Center is a consortium of the community colleges with the Colorado Institute of Technology, the National Workforce Center for Emerging Technologies and a proposed Colorado IT Industry Advisory Council. A technology symposium is held to engage industry and colleges in a dialogue about key issues. Industry needs to become aware of the roles for two-year college graduates in IT. The IT curricula in two-year colleges need to be upgraded and expanded based upon standards and industry requirements. The faculty, teachers, counselors and administrators need ongoing professional development. Students need to be provided consistent information and advising about IT positions. This symposium serves to develop the basis for the Center doc19417 none Ellis The main focus of this project is on the asymptotic analysis of statistical mechanical models of turbulence, using powerful techniques in the theory of large deviations as well as other areas of analysis. The research will consider a number of problems, including the following: (1) a detailed study of the equivalence and nonequivalence of statistical mechanical ensembles for a wide range of models of turbulence; (2) an investigation of central-limit-type fluctuations of the stochastic processes arising in the large deviation analysis of the various ensembles; (3) a new approach, based on large deviation results for Gaussian measures, to the asymptotic analysis of soliton turbulence governed by the nonlinear Schroedinger equation; (4) a refinement, based on ideas arising in the study of nonequivalence of ensembles, of classical results due to Arnold on the nonlinear stability of flows for a class of partial differential equations governing turbulence phenomena; (5) an analysis of a random walk model having applications to queueing theory, communication theory, and stochastic approximation. In the context of problems (1)-(4) the principal investigator will develop mathematical tools that can be applied to one of the great unsolved problems of the physical sciences, which is the understanding of turbulent fluid flows. In this project the inherent unpredictability and randomness of turbulent flows are studied via sophisticated probabilistic models based on the formalism of statistical mechanics. The models are analyzed using techniques in the theory of large deviations and probability theory, convex analysis, partial differential equations, and other areas doc19418 none Bristol Community College s (BCC) Department of Computer Information Systems in a partnership with the Department of Computer and Information Science at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (UMD) is developing a fully articulated computer science transfer program. Course alignment and professional development activities for two-year college faculty, as well as recruitment of high school students and adult graduates, are major activities. Special outreach efforts to women and minorities are also being implemented. Retention activities for community college students in the first two years and for students transferring are planned. A formal articulation agreement and a seamless pathway from high school to community college to university is being established. Six computer science courses at the community college level are being aligned so that students may transfer, without loss of time or added expense because of non-transferable courses, into UMD s computer science program. Three new courses are being developed: Introduction to Computing Systems, Computer Organization and Design, and Software Specification and Design. BCC faculty, as well as other invited faculty are participating in professional and curriculum development activities for adopting these courses. Three other courses have being adopted and are being shared with other invited community college faculty. An intensive plan for professional development is being developed, including inter-institutional workshops, consultations, and professional meetings. In order to insure a true 2 + 2 + 2 seamless pathway from high schools to community college to university, strategies for outreach, recruitment, and retention are planned. The Bristol Tech Prep liaison is going to assist in outreach and implementation of early start activities for teachers, students, and parents. These activities are designed to motivate and prepare students for placement in the computer science program. Strategies for retention at the college and university levels include tutoring and mentoring. The program design includes plans for developing tangible products to be shared with participating faculty at BCC, UMD, and other community colleges. These products include videotaping of the six courses, three intensive faculty-to-faculty courses and three courses in the classroom, in order to provide community colleges with a two-year professional and curriculum development strategy for instituting an articulated transfer program from the A.S. degree in computer science to the B.S. degree in computer science doc19419 none Del Mar College, a South Texas Hispanic-serving community college, in partnership with Texas A GIS; electronics; engineering technology; health sciences; biotechnology; or aviation technology. ACCESS-TP goals and objectives include: (1) Recruit and retain Del Mar College students into technology, mathematics, and science teaching fields; (2) Give ACCESS-TP preservice teachers an understanding of teaching and modern workplace applications of Career and Technology, mathematics, and science; and (3) Position participants in the program to transfer to a four-year preservice teacher degree program. The ACCESS-TP project is recruiting students majoring in technology, mathematics, and science into preservice teacher degree paths. Retention of participants in teaching fields and student support for academic success include mentoring and tutoring by peers and mentoring by in-service teachers. The Teaching and Learning Center provides additional support for ACCESS-TP preservice teachers. The inservice teachers who provide mentoring are former participants in the Applied Connections program, through which they created instructional materials that infuse modern workplace applications into instruction. The ACCESS-TP student participants see first-hand how these materials are used in the classroom. This project leverages other projects that focus on teacher preparation and the underserved population of South Texas doc19420 none With funding from NSF since , Athens Technical College (ATC) has developed and alpha tested a six-module, contextually driven, laboratory-based curriculum in chemical technology, known as C3T. The curriculum module development has been carried out in two phases. In the first phase, the project team developed and alpha tested three modules which address Aqueous Systems, Polymer Systems, and Metal Systems. During the second phase three additional modules on Drug Delivery Systems, Petroleum Energy Systems, and Remote Monitoring Systems were developed. Each laboratory module has a flexible design to facilitate integration into the first or second year of any two-year chemical technology program. All six modules have been field tested at ATC and Los Angeles Trade-Technical College. The current project constitutes the final phase of work to complete the contextually-based, laboratory-driven curriculum. Specifically, this project is (1) field testing all six modules at 12 two-year technical colleges, (2) conducting two summer faculty training workshops for two-year college faculty to prepare for use of the curriculum materials at their sites, and (3) preparing and disseminating the modules, including student and instructors manuals in electronic and printed form for two-year chemical technology faculty as well as undergraduate chemistry faculty doc19421 none The Colorado Commission on Higher Education and the Colorado Community College System has encouraged the development of an articulated model of teacher preparation to be replicated statewide. Red Rocks Community College, the Jefferson County School District and the University of Colorado at Denver have created an alliance known as the Denver Metro Teacher Preparation Partnership (DMTPP) for the purpose of increasing the number of certified teachers with degree credentials in mathematics, and the sciences, and demonstrable competencies in the integration of technological tools in classroom instruction. The project includes recruitment of prospective teachers, teacher educator development, and pre-teaching experiences. An integrated advising network comprised of advisors from each partner institution supports the degree planning and efficient transfer from high school Teacher Cadet programs to the community college and on to the university. High school and community college students interested in teaching are participating in an intensive summer camp program hosted by the University of Colorado at Denver to introduce the teaching profession and life as an undergraduate teacher candidate. The project includes strategies for recruiting paraprofessionals into the preservice program. As instructors of prospective teachers, science and mathematics secondary and postsecondary faculty receive professional support from faculty trainers from the Rocky Mountain Teacher Collaborative in the integration of inquiry-driven learning. A Technology of Teaching Certificate is facilitating cohort teams comprised of prospective teachers and classroom teachers in the development of interactive standards based curriculum using technological adaptations to increase student achievement. Mediated internships in secondary classrooms mentored by master classroom teachers from Professional Development Schools (PDS), tutoring of secondary students and co-leading special science and technology projects sponsored by professional societies and museums with secondary students from high risk populations are strategies of the DMTPP that support the pre service preparation of prospective secondary teachers doc19422 none PROJECT SUMMARY A workforce crisis exists in the Information Technology (IT) industry. Many jobs go unfilled nationally, regionally and locally because the supply of trained graduates from institutions of higher education does not meet industry s demand for workers. This urgent need for IT professionals and technicians requires innovative instructional solutions that will expand and diversify the IT workforce. The objective of this three-year project is to retain and graduate non-traditional community college (two-year) IT students who are being lost to the field because they are alienated, intimidated or excluded by traditional IT teaching methods and culture. Applying the results of recent research in science and engineering pedagogy, this project creates and evaluates instructional methods intended to work for non-traditional IT students, instead of against them. This project creates educational materials for students and professional development materials for faculty. The activities include: - developing and implementing a new program to assess personality and learning styles of IT students and a program of advising based on that assessment; - developing and delivering new curricula incorporating alternative learning strategies into key introductory IT courses; - developing and instituting special workshops and study support groups aimed at non-traditional IT students; and - developing and delivering workshops to assist IT faculty to learn about and implement alternative teaching strategies for the target population. Expected outcomes for nontraditional IT students are: - improved academic performance; - increased retention in IT; - increased numbers of IT majors; and - improved graduation rates. Expected outcomes for IT faculty are: - a more positive attitude toward a variety of learning styles, - increased knowledge about alternative learning styles, and - implementation of alternative teaching strategies. The project will be tested at two additional community college sites in Year 3. Deliverables from this project include: - the non-traditional curricula for two introductory IT courses; - the student assessment advising program for non-traditional students; - the non-traditional student success workshops; and - the workshops to assist faculty in developing teaching strategies for non-traditional students doc19423 none This project consists of two components: (1) developing a curriculum and instructional materials that provide community college students with actual research experience as a core part of their instruction and (2) designing a recruitment strategy to attract a variety of students to programs and retain them. The research focuses on developing a treatment for a genetic disorder called xeroderma pigmentosum (XP). XP is a serious disorder that causes patients to suffer severe skin damage (including serious burns and DNA damage) when exposed to minimal sunlight. The disorder is caused by mutations in genes responsible for repairing DNA damaged by UV light. When DNA cannot be repaired, mutations accumulate and cancer develops. In fact, approximately half of all XP patients are diagnosed with skin cancer by age 10. City College of San Francisco (CCSF), Bio-Link, and the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), are collaborating on this project. The motivation to undertake this project rests on three factors. First, students learn best when they see the real-world, human connections of the content they are learning. By teaching courses in this manner, students gain an immediate practical understanding of two important concepts: (1) the importance of biotechnology in the search for treatments for diseases and (2) the essence of life as a research assistant. The second reason for undertaking this project is to increase the diversity and number of students pursuing careers in science generally and biotechnology specifically. Third, the motivation rests on the fact that this project exposes students to world-class researchers from UCSF, and the research in which they are involved is leading to advancing knowledge about genetic disorders generally and XP specifically. The tangible deliverables of this project include: (1) a model for curriculum design that blends education and technical research experiences; (2) a set of instructional materials in cell culture and research that promote real-world applications, hands-on experiences, and problem-solving skills; (3) a model recruitment strategy based on research and tested through actual experience; and (4) research findings with respect to XP (and other related diseases) to which students have contributed. Bio-Link is disseminating the Fix-a-Gene products by making them available through the online instructional materials clearinghouse; featuring the project and materials at the annual Bio-Link Summer Fellows program that brings together community college and high school biotechnology educators from across the nation; and showcasing the project in the national Bio-Link newsletter. An advisory panel composed of individuals with expertise in XP research, cell culture, and community college biotechnology education is guiding the project. In addition, an external evaluator provides formative assistance in developing the curriculum and instructional materials and recruitment strategy in addition to conducting a summative analysis doc19424 none The RoboEducators ATE project was initiated by the faculty in the Engineering Technology Center at American River College in conjunction with staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to create an engaging pathway for student to enter the world of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) via robotics competition. The work is a collaborative effort between three regional engineering and technology consortia in California. Through their efforts they have been able to join the Silicon Valley Engineering Technology Consortia (SVE TC) and the Sacramento Regional Engineering and Technology Consortia (SETRC) together with California State University-Northridge (CSUN) to establish the Los Angeles Engineering and Technology Consortia and create deliver support a world-class K-12 robotics curriculum. The project has two structural and three functional components. The structural elements are to organize the Los Angeles consortium and expand the interrelationships of the regional consortia in the state to create a pathway for K-16 students engaged in manufacturing and technology careers. Functionally the project builds a standards-based K-12 robotics curriculum to attract and engage students in manufacturing and technology and provide extensive professional development in support of robotics curricula and competitions. The project is also engaging non-traditional students and teachers in technology careers through robotics courses. Teachers are contracted to develop the curriculum and training materials as well as deliver workshops specific to the needs of a range of teachers from entry through advanced levels. Strong industry support is expected for these training activities that range from conference presentations up to two-week workshops. During the second and third years, a Statewide Robotics Conference is held in the Los Angeles area. Efforts have been directed toward creating an infrastructure to engage middle and high school students along with an audience of K-16. Teachers are delivering and receiving robotics-related professional development through the three regional consortia and their industry partners. The ultimate goal is to continually excite students and engage them in order to encourage them toward careers in STEM. The project is doing this by engaging students in regional and national competitions including Lego League, Bot Ball, Red Rover and Robotics FIRST doc19425 none Under the direction of Dr. Douglas Price, Kelly Knudson will collect data for her doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She will use archaeological chemistry to investigate the Precolumbian Tiwanaku culture, which existed from AD 500- in the South Central Andes. The large and impressive site of Tiwanaku, located in Bolivia, was a religious, economic and political center that exerted influence over what is now southern Peru, northern Chile and western Bolivia. However, the nature of that influence is unclear and very controversial. More specifically, the relationship between the capital city of Tiwanaku and smaller sites associated with Tiwanaku has been heavily debated. While some scholars argue that these sites in southern Peru and northern Chile are colonies established by the Tiwanaku empire to gain access to valuable agricultural goods, others insist that these sites were populated by local people with religious or economic ties, but not political, ties to the capital. While archaeologists have tried to address this debate through various means, only archaeological chemistry can definitively identify colonists from the capital city of Tiwanaku in the proposed Tiwanaku colonies. Through a new technique that utilizes the strontium and lead isotope ratios in archaeological human teeth and bone, Knudson will determine where people buried at the proposed Tiwanaku colonies lived for the first 5 years of their lives. By determining the patterns of residential mobility at the proposed Tiwanaku colonies and their biological relationship to the capital city of Tiwanaku, Knudson will test the various hypotheses concerning the nature of the Tiwanaku polity. This research is important on a variety of levels. Since this powerful methodology is still relatively new, this dissertation research will help refine the use of strontium and lead isotope analyses in archaeology, and will help convince the archaeological community of its utility. In addition, this research will elucidate the relationship between the capital city at Tiwanaku and possible Tiwanaku sites in the hinterlands, and will help Andeanists resolve the debate on the nature of the Tiwanaku polity. Finally, because most information on imperial strategies comes from regions and time periods for which written records exist, this research on Tiwanaku heartland-hinterland interactions and imperial strategies will expand current knowledge on the role of residential mobility in prehistoric state development and maintenance. The work will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc19426 none The Connecticut Business and Industry Association (CBIA) Education Foundation, the Connecticut Community College System, Central Connecticut State University, the State Departments of Education and Higher Education, more than 15 technology companies, and other partners are collaborating in a statewide NSF Advanced Technological Education (ATE) project. This project supports comprehensive professional development for community college faculty, high school mathematics, science and technology teachers and limited numbers of pre-service teachers. This project complements two existing NSF grants to the Connecticut Community College System (CCCS), including a new NSF grant for ATE curriculum development and a new CSEMS award for students entering state, two-year postsecondary ATE programs. Project goals are to: (1) strengthen relationships among business and industry, the CCCS, state comprehensive and vocational high schools, and other ATE institutions; (2) build a stronger feeder system for the state s two-year ATE programs in three areas: manufacturing, engineering technologies and computer science information technology; and (3) increase the supply of technically trained AS graduates. As the state s largest business association, with over 10,000 companies, CBIA is extremely well positioned to work with the state s secondary and post-secondary institutions to develop a more effective feeder system and expand the supply of technically trained workers. The members of this ATE collaborative are co-developing and co-sponsoring an array of professional development technology activities. Two cohorts of 12 ATE faculty and 10 high school ATE Leaders are participating in intensive professional development, including instructional leadership, industry-based hands-on applications of technology, collaborative research, and ongoing technical experiences. An additional 256 community college faculty and secondary teachers are involved in larger group professional development activities. This ATE project builds on CBIA and CCCS industry collaborative education and training initiatives and involves at least three other national ATE Centers (NWCET, NCTT and the South Carolina Center of Excellence) for ongoing technical assistance and guidance doc19427 none As a result of a critical needs analysis, the faculty of Mount Wachusett Community College (MWCC), Gardner, Massachusetts, applied for and received a grant from the National Science Foundation (ATE Award No. ). Under this project faculty developed an educational program for woodworking technicians, employing a unique combination of educational videos, classroom and in-plant instruction utilizing a Corps of Craftsman. The latest efforts build on this work to further develop and implement a national model offering distance-learning courses to industry professionals or students in existing woodworking training programs. Through this program, students earn a wood technician certificate which is applied towards an associate degree in wood products technology. MWCC is completing the development of and is offering the full associate degree program for woodworking technicians on a distance-learning basis in conjunction with an ongoing Winrock International apprenticeship program in Arkansas. Once their full program is underway in Arkansas, it will be expanded to at least one other state during the project period. The intent is to eventually use the Arkansas program as a national model. Courses are being offered through a unique combination of distance-learning and classroom instruction. The Corps of Craftsmen, consisting of both retired and non-retired personnel, was established as part of the initial NSF project. These craftpersons also assist in some of the hands-on educational instruction of the program. The course materials developed for the education of apprentices in Arkansas are also being used for a project currently underway in Washington, D.C. MWCC faculty are working in Washington, D.C. to train a diverse group of inner-city youths in woodworking, with partial support from their previous NSF grant. Ongoing participation of these youths in the project enhances their opportunities for learning. Another unique component of their program involves the inclusion of an industry trade magazine. Non-credit and for-credit course modules (portions of full courses) are being administered in cooperation with Wood Digest magazine on a national level. A major strength of their project is the involvement of several public and private organizations doc19428 none The overall goal of this project is to establish a Consortium for Education in Renewable Energy Technologies (CERET) to facilitate implementation of a broad-based interdisciplinary approach to technical education in renewable energy technologies. This goal supports the vision of the consortium to embrace and mainstream renewable energy technologies through: (1) development of a technically-competent renewable energy industry workforce. (2) fostering of the production of more energy from Wisconsin grown agriculture products and by-products. (3) encouragement of the use of distributed sources of energy generation. (4) promotion of the understanding and knowledge of renewable energy applications. CERET focuses on: (1) establishing a technology demonstration site where business, industry, farmers, agribusinesses, consumers, legislative and governmental leaders, trades people, students, and educators can learn about renewable energy technologies and distributed sources of energy generation from the around the U.S. and the world. (2) working with business and industry partners to provide hands-on training and new curriculums for skilled workers in the distributed energy generation, new and emerging energy technologies, and renewable energy field. (3) encouraging the use of ethanol, bio-diesel, and other Wisconsin-based renewable fuels from agricultural sources. (4) making the promise of renewable and distributed energy technologies a reality for Wisconsin. CERET includes as partners and collaborators: Madison Area Technical College, Nicolet Area Technical College, the University of Wisconsin Madison Biological Sciences Engineering, the Wisconsin Technical College System Board and Foundation, Milwaukee School of Engineering, Wisconsin state agencies including the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, Department of Commerce, and Department of Administration Divisions of Energy and Alternative Fuels, Alliant Energy Corporation, Wisconsin Public Service, and energy consultants, equipment producers and skilled trades associations. CERET offers technical training and education to incumbent workers as well as students seeking careers in renewable energy technologies. To insure that faculty of college students and teachers of high school students are well prepared in these technologies, the project is conducting workshops and courses for teachers. The project also facilitates discussion and implementation of a public voice for renewable energy technologies through a partnership with the Wisconsin Educational Communications Board. CERET provides training for the workforce needed to implement technologies for energy generation and distribution to sustain the economic strength and competitiveness of Wisconsin and the United States doc19429 none The investigator and his colleagues study interactions between Representation Theory, Knot Theory, and Mathematical Physics. These fields are interrelated and motivate each others development. Representation theory, among other things, helps mathematical physicists predict the existence of particles. It has played a significant role in describing symmetry and in providing a language for conformal field theory and statistical mechanics. In turn, mathematical physics has led Representation Theorists to new conjectures, interesting generalizations, and fascinating results. Invariants of knots and links such as the polynomials of Kauffman and Jones arise as the trace of representations of certain algebras (Hecke algebras, Birman-Wenzl-Murakami algebras, group algebras of braid groups). And of course, knot theory is related to mathematical physics through concepts such as statistical mechanics. This conference fosters a dialogue between the Researchers, and helps students, in particular graduate students, and recent Ph.Ds become acquainted with the areas of research that is of significant importance to high performance computing. This workshop brings together experts in many different areas of Mathematics, Mathematical physics, and quantum computation, etc. This is helping research in areas that could help creation of quantum computers doc19430 none This project establishes an interdisciplinary mathematics and science program that engages students and faculty in real world technology projects. The goal is to improve core mathematics and science education in an effort to better prepare remedial two-year college students for higher-level coursework and careers in technical fields. Instructional innovations integrate basic mathematics, elementary algebra, introductory physics, and basic reading, writing, and study skills. Activities include curriculum adaptation and implementation, industry field experiences for community college faculty and students, and professional development opportunities for regional community college instructors and K-12 teachers. At its heart, this project remedies basic skill deficits and fosters motivation for the pursuit of technical careers among a regional student population increasingly under-prepared for college-level work in mathematics and science. To accomplish this mission, this three year effort: 1) establishes a year-long interdisciplinary mathematics and science learning community for developmental two-year college students that emphasizes problem solving and collaborative learning strategies; 2) integrates faculty internships and hands-on class projects into the curriculum to ensure workplace relevancy and enhance student motivation; and 3) facilitates regional training and dialogue activities for K-12 teachers and community college faculty, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary teaching methods, technology applications, and success strategies for under-represented students. Chabot College has established critical partnerships with the University of California, Davis, Edward Teller Education Center (ETEC), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), and the Hayward Unified School District to support this initiative. ETEC and the national laboratories actively participate in curriculum modifications, faculty internships, and hands-on student class projects in robotics, optics, and laser technologies. Additionally, ETEC and the Hayward Unified School District collaborate on the project s faculty enhancement activities. The project s underlying mission is to increase students educational and career options through challenging, applications-oriented curriculum. Working collaboratively, this project revitalizes core mathematics and science education at Chabot College and serves as a model for developmental reform efforts doc19431 none Electrical generation system operators are essential to the reliable and safe distribution of electric power. Recent federal regulations, certification requirements, and projected need for a trained workforce have created an urgent need for this program. Bismarck State College (BSC), expanding upon existing energy programs and distance education expertise, joins industry and technology partners, in the development and delivery of an anytime, anywhere accredited Associate Degree in Electrical Transmission Systems Technology. This project encompasses several national funding priorities including: response to a national workforce education need; collaboration and effectiveness of multiple partners; balance between cost efficiencies and flexibility; development of high quality, interactive courses, and; accountability of student learning and program success. An industry advisory committee works with the project team to develop curriculum for a competency-based program with measurable performance outcomes. This team is designing and developing 18 technical courses for flexible, online delivery to a targeted workforce audience in a 7-state region that is challenged by time and place constraints. Through internal and external assessment, BSC continually evaluates this model in terms of student learning, retention, performance, success and overall program effectiveness. The major outcomes and innovations of this project are: 1) To design a comprehensive, accredited associate degree program for electrical transmission system operators. 2) To demonstrate and record the outcomes of leveraging partnership resources. 3) To deliver the system operator program to a targeted region and workforce audience. 4) To demonstrate student success in an interactive learning environment, that ensures program effectiveness through continuous modification and improvement. 5) To disseminate student learning and program results, and market for distribution in other locales doc19432 none The goals of the High School Technology Initiative (HSTI) are to attract and retain more high school students in science and technology career paths. Today s high school students, while familiar with high technology as users, frequently fail to connect underlying scientific principles to the technologies that enable their lives in so many ways. The objective of this project is to create curriculum content modules that engender an interest in pursuing technology, engineering, or science related careers by providing students with connections between technology and its underlying science as part of state mandated science instruction. The HSTI team consists of high school science teachers from schools in the greater Tampa Bay region, the University of South Florida (USF) Engineering College, Hillsborough Community College (HCC) faculty, engineering graduate students, and professional multimedia and video personnel. Each HSTI educational module contributes to the project goals and objectives by: 1. Providing instructional materials to teachers on topics they currently teach, but packaged in the context of high technology examples that are relevant to their students everyday lives. 2. Providing the curriculum material in a high-tech, computer based presentation format so the lessons grab the student s interest and hold their attention. 3. Making the materials easy to use by including detailed instructions and suggestions on how to use the curriculum materials as well as background materials about the engineering and technology involved. 4. Making the instructional materials integrate throughout all levels of high school physical sciences (chemistry, physics, and physical science) and some mathematics courses so students work with the same concepts several times during their high school studies but from different perspectives and to different depths and details. HSTI was created as a follow up and extension to a traditional set of high school pipeline activities for science teachers. USF and HCC presented these pipeline activities as participants in an NSF Advanced Technology Education grant ( ) aimed at developing a high technology workforce for semiconductor manufacturing industries within the State of Florida. During these workshop-type activities to increase technology awareness, teachers requested materials for classroom use, but also stipulated a number of constraints for any materials produced. Continued interaction with a group of teachers resulted in the HSTI curriculum concept and initial material development. This project is serving to refine materials currently under development and create, evaluate, and distribute two additional modules. Additionally, HSTI is providing an array of science and mathematics teachers professional development opportunities to teach the teachers about the technologies integrated into the modules and also to provide them with hands-on training experience for using the multimedia materials (CD navigation, downloads, altering and adapting, etc). Finally, an efficient and cost-effective nationwide distribution system for the materials is being developed with the help of MATEC (Maricopa Advanced Technology Education Center doc19433 none Project ProBase Project Project ProBase (Problem-based technology curriculum) will develop an innovative set of 8 secondary level, technology-rich curriculum units based on a validated set of bridge competencies. The materials will be targeted for the 11th and 12th grade levels and will be designed to develop a comprehensive technical foundation for post-secondary community college technician education. The materials will be designed to be delivered using a constuctivist approach that utilizes a series of technological problem solving activities. ProBase will provide pre-technical high school students with a comprehensive curriculum, designed to prepare them to enter community college technician programs. ProBase will develop and field-test curriculum materials designed to fill the gap between (a) the curriculum content standards developed at the national level (i.e., Standards for Technological Literacy, the National Science Education Standards, and the Curriculum Standards for School Mathematics) and (b) the entry-level knowledge and skills needed by students entering community college technical education programs. This curriculum will focus on core concepts identified in the Standards for Technological Literacy as well as a set of Bridge Competencies identified by the Community College consortium involved in the project. The materials will be produced and disseminated by the International Technology Education Association doc19434 none Funds from this award will enable young scholars to attend a workshop entitled, Exclusive Reactions at High Momentum Transfer, to be held at Jefferson Laboratory (Newport News, VA) May 15-18, . This workshop will bring together both experimental and theoretical practitioners of this filed both to stimulate cooperative activity and to raise community awareness of the vitality of this field. Among the subjects covered by this workshop are: wide-angle Compton scattering, large-t meson photo and electroproduction, baryon elastic and transition form factors, and high-t deuteron photoproduction doc19435 none group theory. The importance of such a study is in its many connections to other branches of mathematics, as well as to computer science and logic. Progress will shed light on a number of other subjects. These include the theories of hyperbolic and automatic groups, computability, genetic and other algorithms and may lead to a deeper understanding of finitely presented groups as a whole. This proposal represents a first step in an overall study of one-relator groups, using the number of steps in a so-called Magnus breakdown, as the basis for induction. The principal investigator, together with his many colleagues, will initiate this study by focussing attention on one-relator groups of planarity one. These are the very special HNN extensions of a free group that arise in the first step of the Magnus breakdown referred to above. Groups are mathematical structures which are designed, in part, to capture the intrinsic nature of symmetry. Consequently groups play an extremely important role in geometry, in chrystallography, in particle physics, in chemistry and in cryptography as well as in much of mathematics. Their uses in cryptography are yet to be exploited; RSA encryption may be viewed as a first step in this direction. Many of the problems of the physical world can be translated into problems in group theory. On the other hand, many processes, such as evolution, can be used to unravel the nature of particular groups. Thus group theory provides a testing ground for a better understanding of these processes. The principal investigator, in the work to be undertaken, will, in particular, use group theory to attempt to improve on one of the most exciting new aspects of computer science, so-called genetic algorithms. Such algorithms appear to be a means for designing ever more intelligent computers doc19436 none The Advanced Technology Education Demonstration Project (ATEDP) is structured to take full advantage of the new Advanced Technology Center (ATC) in Norfolk, Va. The ATC is located on Tidewater Community College s (TCC) Virginia Beach Campus. This center is described as the most advanced joint workforce technology project in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The ATEDP brings together an initial consortium of Tidewater Community College, the Virginia Beach City Public Schools, the regional workforce investment board, three manufacturing business partners, and the City of Virginia Beach to create shared curricula and materials for science and engineering technology students in both high school and college. The ATEDP improves the learning environment, course content and learning experiences each year for 850 to 1,000 Virginia Beach high school students enrolled at the ATC in CADD, industrial engineering technology, and information systems technologies. New curricula and materials in the area of Metrology, as well as the above technology areas, are also being used for about 800 Tidewater Community College students. The ATEDP provides intensive shared professional development and technical experiences for high school and college faculty in collaboration with the industrial employers. The new curriculum and educational materials are being developed for articulated placement of students, dual enrollment and distance education courses. High school students in these curricula are able to earn a minimum of 12 credits toward an associate degree while attending the ATC. TCC faculty are involved in completing laboratory-intensive course content, including a distance education component, for a recently approved metrology curriculum. The employer partners are providing mentored, on-site internships for students, while the workforce investment board continues to develop new employer partners, particularly in manufacturing. Outcomes deliverables include: 1) curricula for articulated and or dual enrollment courses, targeted to the industry standard, which enables high school students to earn a minimum of 12 college credits toward A.A.S. degrees in Industrial Manufacturing Engineering Technology, Information Systems Technology, Computer Aided Drafting and Design or related options of the A.A.S. degree in Technical Studies, while they are completing their high school diplomas. 2) content for a laboratory-intensive metrology curriculum and at least six new or upgraded modules for other courses in the identified curricula not scheduled for implementation as dual enrollment and or articulated courses. 3) relevant, mentored, 80-hour or longer work site experiences for both high school and other TCC students. 4) an 80 percent pass rate for those students who attempt regional and national certifications after completing the relevant courses and taking the certification exams. 5) detailed plans for implementing the reforms in the other three school systems in the college service area and for disseminating them nationally doc19437 none Project The Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Technology (PMT) program is establishing an A.A.S. degree in PMT at Bronx Community College, the first of its kind in the City University of New York. The PMT program is a chemical technology program specifically designed to prepare technicians to meet the growing needs of the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut tri-state pharmaceutical, cosmetics, and related industries. To accomplish the primary goals of the PMT program, objectives and activities addressing the following categories are being implemented: a) Curriculum and course development; b) Instructional materials adaptation and development; c) College faculty and high school teacher training and professional development; and d) Student enrichment and internship activities. The PMT curriculum is incorporating the Voluntary Industry Standards (VIS) of the American Chemical Society. Long established ties between the Department and local chemical and pharmaceutical industries are an integral component in the design of this program. The Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Technology A.A.S. degree curriculum is related to a series of secondary school programs such as the Tech Prep, School-To-Work, STEP and C-STEP programs in the Bronx and supported by the Bronx Educational Alliance and the Greater New Jersey Process Technology Alliance. Articulation agreements leading to the B.S. and B.A. science degree programs in CUNY and other colleges are in place. Thus, the program is providing new career pathways for minority students and other individuals by establishing strong viable links from high school to college level science and technology education to job placement. Graduates of the program will be in a competitive position to fill rewarding entry-level technician positions in the regional industries. Other long-term results, beyond the duration of the project, will be to increase the retention and the enrollment of minority and female Bronx students in science and technology programs doc19438 none This award provides funds to support the participation of graduate students in a summer research conference organized by the Southern Regional Council on Statistics (SRCOS) and the American Statistical Association. The conference will be held on June 2-5, , in Natchez, Mississippi. The objectives of the conference are to bring together senior researchers, junior researchers and advanced graduate students to focus on several current research areas in statistics and to discuss some current and future issues in statistical education and training. Sessions are organized around the topics of Statistical Education and Biostatistics, Statistics for Dependent Data and Environmental Statistics. Leading researchers will present new developments in an environment that is conducive to the development of new human resources doc19439 none The CREATE Center is a joint effort between seven community colleges, five universities, and over fifty employers in a regional approach to educate the workforce in new technological advances in a wide range of high demand information and manufacturing technologies. The consortium members serve a large portion of coastal and central California of over 9,000 square miles, representing a population of over one million. Two previous NSF-ATE projects have educated over 4,000 students, developed and implemented 30 new degree programs and 105 new courses, and facilitated more than a million dollars in additional funding through innovative industry and college partnerships. The goals of the Center are: 1. Increase pools of trained teachers for both Information Technology and Manufacturing Technology. An award winning training program (Hesburgh Certificate of Excellence) at College of the Canyons has been adapted to a three-year model to train part-time teachers from industry to be pedagogically strong and adept classroom teachers. 2. Increase feeder programs at the high school level. Summer hands-on workshops for high school faculty and academic year mentoring give high school faculty easy to use electronics kits modules to incorporate back at their schools. 3. Increase Bachelor s level transfer programs that both articulate and are accessible with the new technology Associate degree programs. Five universities are working with CREATE to not only develop strong articulation between all the programs, but to also begin to offer BS programs on-site at the community college campus, a University Center concept already successfully pilot tested at College of the Canyons and now at Allan Hancock College. 4. Create an organized system for developing, documenting (through student portfolio), and implementing work site internship experiences for both Information Technology and Manufacturing Technology. 5. Develop, adapt, and implement regionally programs in network security, wireless and telecommunications technologies and more problem-based, modularized manufacturing technology curricula and standardization 6. Evaluate and contrast the learning, workplace competencies, and pass rate in industry certification programs of students who complete technical certifications in on-line (learner-centered vs. traditional) vs. in-class formats. 7. Implement a model evaluation that is going to follow both past and future students as they enter and participate in the workplace and or transfer to measure longitudinally the success of the educational experience for all stakeholders, including colleges, students, and employers. The CREATE Center colleges and their partners act as demonstration sites for curricula implementation, regional meetings, teacher training, and continue to foster the consortium partnerships to deliver the best set of skilled technicians for the region. All curricula and material developed both in technical and teacher training is available to any college who would like to adapt them to their needs. Dissemination includes conference presentations, publications, and center web site doc19440 none The vision of the Case Files project is to be a catalyst for reform of the learning experience for students in engineering and information technology program throughout the nation. This vision is being realized through the creation of a national community of educators who are skilled and experienced in the delivery of case-based learning. The secondary objective is to develop a systematic process that will capture case ideas, develop a forum for sharing case concepts with other faculty, and to publish and distribute these materials. The Case Files follows up the work currently being concluded by the South East Advanced Technological Education Consortium (SEATEC) that has developed model case studies for technological education and evaluated their effectiveness. SEATEC s work has revealed evidence that using cases improves learning and creates a learning centered environment for students. Interest in using the case method has grown among technological educators in the past 3-5 years. Currently, no resource exists for those educators who wish to use the case study method. Three major goals of the project are: improve knowledge and understanding of case studies among technological educators in Tennessee and across the nation; create an on-line clearinghouse for case ideas and cases developed by faculty; and disseminate case ideas and fully developed published cases to a national audience. Experienced faculty are mentoring those new to using cases. Partners in the project are Nashville State Technical Institute, the LITEE Center at Auburn University, and the Learning Technology Center at Vanderbilt University doc19441 none A nation s success in any economic sector is directly related to the strength of its educational system, and the aerospace industry is no exception. To address the need for skilled technicians and to spur student interest and motivation to study, Community Colleges for Innovative Technology Transfer (CCITT) is establishing SpaceTEC, a national Aerospace Science Technical Education Center of Excellence under the NSF s ATE Program. The vision of SpaceTEC is to be the focal point for technical education resources featuring aerospace, providing motivation for academic studies and professional development services for faculty, students, and aerospace employees. The mission of SpaceTEC is to create and implement an industry-driven, government-endorsed, technical education process for aerospace technicians that can be shared with other educational venues. The goals of SpaceTEC are to foster interest in science, mathematics, and technology education in the U.S., and to provide education for the technical workforce using a national alliance of representatives from business and industry, government, and academic institutions. The strategy is to formalize aerospace technician education nationally, establish a skills-based standards program that has industry-wide support, and infuse aerospace themes into other areas of study. Methods include regional and national advisory committees, national articulation among K-12 and post-secondary institutions, a national professional development organization, a formal certification process, innovative faculty development, resources for national dissemination, and coordinated curriculum development. Instructional materials with aerospace themes are being shared with non-aerospace disciplines. The nine CCITT member colleges participating in this initiative are affiliated with a NASA center or Department of Defense location. Together they enroll over 400,000 students annually. United Space Alliance is an industry partner providing a co-principal investigator. CCITT colleges are each leading one or more of the elements of the national program, and Brevard Community College is serving serve as the fiscal agent and Center manager. Internal reviews are being provided by a National Aerospace Technology Advisory Committee, with representatives from advisory committees affiliated with CCITT colleges. External review is by representatives from the Air Force Academy, the Air Force Institute of Technology, and a National Visiting Committee (NVC). The NVC includes members of industry, academia, and government groups. There are several major benefits from a national Center. Program graduates receive nationally recognized competencies for employability. Participating academic institutions receive funding for their roles, access to relevant curriculum, program articulation, faculty development, and recognition for industry-endorsed programs for critical workforce needs. Business and industry are provided with a dependable source of well-educated entry-level technicians and a means of sustaining workforce development. Government is provided an improved educational capability and qualified technicians for a key economic sector. Educators have new space-related curricular themes to enrich their courses in many disciplines. SpaceTEC is serving as a national resource to strengthen our country s technical education base and motivate interest in academics doc19442 none In Milwaukee and the State of Wisconsin too few high school graduates transition into technical careers. A gap exists between the existing supply of graduates and the high wage technical jobs available. The 21st Century Urban Technical Education Project, funded in by the National Science Foundation, has responded to this problem by creating a new approach to technology education. Focusing initially on the construction trades during Phase I, the current initiative focuses on the application of this technology education model design to Energy and Power and Transportation. Phase II begins to diffuse this technology education model at three district high schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools in an effort to bring about systemic change in the future. The project continues to prepare technical high school students for technical career opportunities through an articulated 2+2+2 approach and the development of an integrated connected education model. This project refines and assesses the template for standards-based educational reform designed and developed in Phase I as part of the construction technology cluster. Phase II addresses the areas of curriculum reform, faculty development, diversity, marketing and recruitment, partnerships, and the integration of applied technology in education. The major partners in Phase II include the Milwaukee Public Schools, the Milwaukee Area Technical College, the University of Wisconsin-Stout, Wisconsin Energy Corporation, the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Association of General Contractors of Greater Milwaukee, and various business, industry, and labor organizations. Phase II curriculum for grades 11-14 in Energy and Power and Transportation is being aligned to state and national standards. A coordinated secondary and post-secondary teacher training initiative, which is based on the successful NSF WASDI (Wisconsin Academy for Staff Development Initiatives) project, is being established in collaboration with business and industry for ongoing faculty development. A committee of partners, using a shared decision-making model, is guiding and overseeing technical education initiatives and providing technical training opportunities for staff and students. A career development model and a marketing plan are also being developed and implemented. In addition, research and implementation strategies are breaking down barriers for women and minorities in non-traditional technical careers and supporting and increasing involvement by under-represented populations doc19443 none The Center for the Advancement of Process Technology (CAPT), based at College of the Mainland in Texas, is using a systematic process that includes curriculum development, professional development, capacity building, dissemination and evaluation. Process industry sectors to be served include chemical and refining, exploration and production, pharmaceuticals, and power generation. Collaborations also exist with the pulp paper, food processing, and ammonia refrigeration industries. CAPT envisions opportunities in which students from diverse backgrounds are encouraged to enter Associate in Applied Science (AAS) Process Technology degree programs. These students are succeeding in rigorous, consistent and quality programs of study available through CAPT s community college and secondary school partners. This national partnership is identifying the knowledge and skills needed to succeed as a process technician in all process-related industries and agreeing upon common courses of study and educational standards. Partners are developing and offering classroom and web-based technical courses that are being validated by the partnership and enabling students to learn anytime, anywhere. Testing and validation of students knowledge and skill attainment are being standardized. The registered website of the partnership, www.captech.org, is home to a national clearinghouse of process technology information and resources. Faculty at partner colleges and secondary schools are using the classroom and web-based technical courses and textbooks to guide and supplement instruction. Faculty are also attending workshops in preparation for delivering courses. Faculty and students complete internships with business and industry to assure workplace understanding and knowledge. Industry is hosting internships; providing subject matter experts to validate skill standards and work with course designers; providing local colleges with scholarship monies, laboratory equipment and software; and facilitating dissemination of program success. University partners assure articulation of programs and courses and aid in the definition of best practices. Governmental agencies and professional agencies, such as the American Chemical Society and American Petroleum Institute, aid in the development of skill standards, encourage networking and market career opportunities in process technology. College partners of this effort include Alvin Community College, TX; Baton Rouge Community College, LA; Bismarck State College, ND; Brazosport College, TX; College of the Mainland, TX; County College of Morris, NJ; Del Mar College, TX; Delaware Technical and Community College, DE; Houston Community College, TX; Lamar Institute of Technology, TX; Lamar State Colleges, TX; Lansing Community College, MI; Lee College, TX; Los Angeles Trade and Technical College, CA; Louisiana Technical Colleges, LA; McNeese State University, LA; Middlesex County College, NJ; Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, MS; Montana State University, MT; New Jersey Institute of Technology, NJ; Northern Oklahoma College, OK; San Jacinto College, TX; San Juan College, NM; Southwestern Illinois College, IL; Texas A Texas State Technical College, TX; University of Alaska System, AK; Victoria College, TX; and Wharton County Junior College, TX. Selected industry partners include American Ref-Fuel, BASF, BP, Celanese, Chevron, Coastal Refining, Colonial Pipeline, Conoco, Dow Chemical, Dupont, Eastman Chemical, ExxonMobil, Formosa Plastics, Lyondell-Citgo Refining, Merck, Oklahoma Gas & Electric, Phillips Chemical, Roche Pharmaceuticals, Roche Vitamins, Shell Chemical, Tosco Refining and Uniqema. These institutions and industries are represented by six alliances: AK Process Industries Careers Consortium, CA Alliance, Greater New Jersey Process Technology Alliance, Gulf Coast Process Technology Alliance, OK Partners for Business Industry and Higher Education, and the National Power Generation Alliance doc19444 none The North Texas Regional Technology Consortium combines the strengths of regional educational institutions and business and industry partners to improve Information Technology (IT) Programs to increase the quantity and quality of IT resources available to the workforce. A partnership with the National Workforce Center for Emerging Technologies (NWCET) provides access to cutting edge information and access to successful existing curricula that can be adapted to so that multiple IT certification options can be integrated into associate degree bearing curricula. Articulation agreements are developed between high schools and two-year colleges and between two and four-year colleges in the area. The partnership with NWCET also provides access to affordable Educator-to-Educator professional development workshops for faculty in community colleges and high schools. A convergence laboratory at Collins County Community College provides students with experiences with interoperability of equipment and technologies. This laboratory is available to industry as a test bed. An industry council provides guidance to the project as well as opportunities for faculty and students to become acquainted with industrial practice and concerns. A dual recruitment process with industry helps increase the number of students from underserved populations. The project develops metrics for measuring increase in IT enrollments and in employer satisfaction with those employees who have participated in the program doc19445 none Wurtz The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Nicholas R. Wurtz to work with Dr. Erick M. Carreira at Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland. This project will be co-supported by the Math and Physical Sciences Directorate s Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. A study of the molecule, Amphotericin B (AmB), will be carried out with Dr. Erick M. Carreira. AmB remains one of the most important and effective antifungal drugs with a broad range of activity. While it is generally accepted that the mode of action of AmB is the creation of lethal pores in fungal cell membranes, little is known about the exact mechanism of pore formation or what structural aspect allows for selectivity of fungal over mammalian cells. Synthesis of AmB derivatives for mechanistic studies has been limited since published routes do not allow synthesis of sufficient quantities for assays. An improved efficient modular synthesis of AmB and subsequent analogues is proposed. The synthesis will combine the best aspects of published syntheses with methodology recently developed in Dr. Carreira s group. The analogues will be assayed for their propensity to form pores using liposomes designed to mimic mammalian and fungal cell membranes. The proposed synthesis and characterization of AmB analogues will provide insight about pore architecture and potentially the discovery of structural features that allow the design of less toxic derivatives that retain potent the antifungal activity of AmB. Dr. Carreira s program at ETH is at the forefront of asymmetric synthesis of biologically active, stereochemically complex, natural products doc19446 none A critical and timely issue facing the U.S. Food and Agricultural system in the 21st century is how to provide highly technical and qualified agricultural individuals to meet demands of the industry within the new millennium. To address the region s agricultural industry requirements, Murray State University has partnered with three community colleges located in Henderson, Hopkinsville, and Madisonville, Kentucky, to form Agriculture Consortium for Comprehensive Education, Service and Support of Project ACCESS. The project is focusing on providing a solid mechanism to develop a highly trained and qualified agricultural workforce for western Kentucky, and neighboring regions. This well-trained and qualified agricultural cohort is being developed mainly through higher-level agriscience technology curriculums at the associate and baccalaureate levels. A major goal of the project is to increase access for students and agriculture workers into these modified agriscience technology programs by developing a joint, cutting edge, and articulated agriscience technology baccalaureate program. Other specific goals are to: (1) to strengthen and raise the level of educational expertise in the national agriculture system, (2) to provide increased student and agricultural worker ACCESS into associate and baccalaureate agriscience degree programs, and (3) to strengthen a regional and state agriculture system to be highly competitive in the global economy. Project objectives are to: (1) develop a wide-entry, multiple-exit and seamless agriculture educational system from high school through the baccalaureate level in the articulation partnership service region by June, (2) continue to raise the current academic level of Associate degree programs to allow for a successful transition of an increasing number of students into the workforce and or a baccalaureate degree program by June, (3) develop an articulated joint baccalaureate Agriscience technology curriculum by August, , and (4) increase the current matriculation rate of western Kentucky students into all educational levels of Agriscience technology by 25% by June, doc19447 none The goal of this project is to develop a comprehensive teacher preparation program at Amarillo College, with emphasis in mathematics and science, and formal articulation with schools of education at Texas universities. The objectives of the project are to: 1) develop the mathematics courses, refine the science curriculum, and update the general education curriculum for elementary education; 2) enhance the Amarillo College Teacher Education project through new Introductory Education courses, and by emphasizing hand on, collaborative learning pedagogy and the use of technology in the classroom; 3) develop and implement partnerships and articulation agreements with Texas Universities Schools of Education, beginning with West Texas A and 4) increase the number of teachers well-prepared to teach the students of the Texas Panhandle at all pre-college levels, K-12. The objectives are being implemented through the newly formed Teacher Education Department in the Division of Sciences and Engineering. New mathematics and science courses incorporate real-world experiences and labs, and the use of technology in teaching and in science. Technology as a teaching tool is taught through the use of technology including Smart classrooms, interactive TV classrooms, computer lab assignments, and Internet ancillaries. Recruitment efforts are designed to attract women, minorities and those who are considering a career change. Industry partners enrich the teacher preparation program by involving scientists and technicians with instructional course development and onsite labs, hosting field trips, and offering internships. Collaborations with school districts provide mentor teachers for preservice students, field observations of K-8 classrooms, and tutoring opportunities doc19448 none This project formulates a strategic plan for the development of the national center for pulp and paper technology through the partnership of the four two-year colleges and with strong backing and support from industry. The center is going to establish and perpetuate a technology program and network providing students around the nation an effective education and training program. The center is also going to provide the pulp and paper sector of the U. S. forest products industry with a globally competitive, technologically advanced workforce. Alabama Southern Community College (ASCC) and Auburn University alliance continues in this project with the addition of four two-year colleges strategically located throughout the United States. These institutions include: (1) Kennebec Valley Technical College, a rural college in Fairfield, Maine, (2) Fox Valley Technical College in a more urban area in Appleton, Wisconsin, (3) Century Community Technical College in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, and (4) Lower Columbia College in a more urban area in Longview, Washington. The project includes participation of several national pulp and paper industry organizations under an industry-academia-governmental initiative called Agenda . These national organizations consist of (1) The American Forest and Paper Association (AF&PA), (2) The Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry (TAPPI), and (3) The Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical & Energy Workers International Union (PACE). This initiative enables focusing the industry s technology vision, sets the industry s technology agenda, and provides science and technology foundation for the industry. A major focus of Agenda is the development of a technologically advanced workforce (TAW) to operate and maintain the new technologies of today, and more importantly, in the coming years. The planning for this center is going to closely coordinate the workforce development needs of today and in the future as new and sophisticated technology is ushered in for purposes of efficiency and quality improvement so that our nation s pulp and paper industries can successfully compete internationally doc19449 none The critical shortage of photonics technicians in U.S. industry can be remedied, in part, through effective associate degree programs. The knowledge and skills needed to succeed as a photonics technician are obtainable via associate degrees, and companies often prefer graduates of two-year colleges. But, to meet the challenge of producing qualified photonics technicians, community and technical colleges need more up-to-date educational materials and well-trained faculty. They also need a larger pool of high school graduates who have good academic skills and who, through exposure to photonics via articulation, are inclined and prepared to enter two-year programs in photonics. The Scientific and Technological Education in Photonics (STEP II) project is enhancing the ability of community and technical colleges to produce larger numbers of qualified photonics technicians. The project is addressing that goal through (1) development of up-to-date photonics curriculum materials (including both new materials and an updated version of the materials produced through the NSF-funded STEP I project, Fundamentals of Photonics; (2) promotion, dissemination, and facilitation of the use of project materials at community and technical colleges; and (3) demonstration of how articulated technical curricula, beginning in the ninth grade and continuing through the baccalaureate degree, enhance the value of associate degrees in photonics by making the transition from high school to two-year colleges seamless and by providing options for education beyond the associate degree level. In addition to curriculum materials, the project is producing a number of supporting items, including an updated and reconfigured version of the National Photonics Skills Standard for Technicians ( ), which serves as a guide for future curriculum and assessment development; new or updated clustered curriculum frameworks; online supplements; a math remediation guide for two-year post-secondary photonics students; and a curriculum planning guide describing the logistical steps necessary to implement a two-year post-secondary photonics program or to infuse photonics courses into existing technical programs. The project is disseminating and facilitating the use of project materials at two-year colleges and technical schools and providing professional development (some delivered via the web) for new faculty members. It is anticipated that, as a result of the project s dissemination efforts, 20 to 30 community and technical colleges will be using STEP materials as of the school year doc19450 none Alabama Southern Community College, with its partners from the Alabama Technology Network Center for Forestry, Paper and Chemical Technology, the Auburn University Chemical Engineering Department, and the Pulp and Paper Research Education Center at Auburn University, regional industry and participating regional K-12 school systems, are working on the development, evaluation and refinement of 12 curriculum modules. These industry driven and national skill based curricula are being utilized in training process operators and technicians for pulp, paper, chemical industries. This strategy of providing tools for a technician and operator education initiative is seen as the best possible solution to successfully develop qualified workers required to maintain and improve the competitiveness and sustainability of the pulp, paper and chemical manufacturing industry in the United States. Once fully developed, the program utilizes all 12-curriculum modules (8 already developed and being used under previous NSF ATE funding and 4 to be developed under this project) to extend hands-on technical education experiences for three technical degree programs at Alabama Southern as well as with regional industry to upgrade employee skills. These curricula include classroom, multimedia as well as instructor-led and teaming laboratory experiences that emphasize safety and environmental issues of the process operations being modeled. The project is producing publication-ready curriculum modules with aligned industry driven laboratory ready for regional and national dissemination. it is also developing two workshops; one for community college faculty preparing students for employment in pulp, paper and allied industries throughout the southeast region of the US. The second is for high school faculty and interested high school students to provide opportunities for experiencing an industry simulated environment to strengthen math, chemistry, teaming and workplace leadership skills. In addition, the project focuses on increasing scholarship and internship opportunities of students particularly for minorities and other groups that have been traditionally under-represented in these industries. Dissemination is through a project web page, presentations at national conferences and publication of articles in refereed journals doc19451 none Analyzing Evidence is focusing on the Forensic Science Program at Prince George s Community College (PGCC). Individuals who are competently trained in forensic science are essential to the quality of justice administered in the court system as these personnel are responsible for evidence gathering, analysis, and court testimony relevant to that evidence. The overriding purpose of this award is to increase the number of forensic science personnel with the scientific knowledge and instrumentation skills needed for the rapidly changing forensic field. To achieve this purpose, the College is 1) creating inquiry-based mock crime scene modules that incorporate laboratory experiments using state-of-the-art instrumentation to infuse into a variety of forensic science courses, 2) creating an inquiry-based Analytical Forensic Chemistry Identification and Instrumentation course, 3) improving the instrumentation at the College by the purchase of equipment and accessories to perform the laboratory experiments in the crime scene modules and new forensic chemistry course, 4) training faculty to use the instrumentation, and 5) improving career opportunities for students by enhancing internships with local crime laboratories and creating pathways from high school through the baccalaureate degree in the field of forensic science. Modules with laboratory experiments and other teaching materials are being published online and linked from the Payton Scientific website for dissemination to other forensic programs. The Forensic Science Program was created at PGCC in response to a documented need in the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area for well-trained forensic technicians. The award has the support and cooperation of state and local police departments and crime laboratories, the University of Baltimore to which the PGCC A.S. program articulates, and the local school system doc19452 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Global Description of Patterns Far from Onset Newell Natural patterns turn up all over the place. One sees them on windswept sand dunes, as ripples on long sandy beaches, on plant skins and animal coats, as fingerprints, on optical beams, in cloud formations. The striking similarities between the textures of patterns and their defects which arise in diverse microscopic situations lead one to the conclusion that patterns are macroscopic objects whose behaviors are well described almost everywhere by universal equations that reflect overall symmetry properties shared by the individual systems. For example, the triradius defect on each human fingertip is also seen on optical beams and in magnetic materials. The reason is not that there is any fundamental connection between light and the fetal epidermis but rather that in both contexts the system under stress is two dimensional with translational and rotational invariance. The equations describing the overall pattern will be the same. The central goal of this research is to develop a global description of such stationary patterns far from onset. Up to now, certain individual parts of the textures were well understood, but there was no theory, for example, to say what the total convection pattern would be in an elliptical container whose side walls were heated. This research project will investigate the common mathematical structure that underlies the diverse occurrence of patterns in nature. The work will contribute to the understanding and prediction of important physical phenomena doc19453 none This project is creating a model for integrated regional workforce development for students majoring in semiconductor technology at the A.A.S. and B.S. degree levels. The multifaceted project comprises curriculum and materials development, faculty development, and technical experiences for students. The goal is to educate more and better-prepared technologists to answer the persistent workforce needs of the region s semiconductor industry. The strategy the project is using is to consolidate in a single world-class facility known as the Teaching Factory the hands-on laboratory instruction for all semiconductor students from multiple campuses throughout the region. Located on the campus of Arizona State University East (ASUE), the Teaching Factory is a 15,000-square-foot teaching model of a semiconductor cleanroom. Intel, Motorola, Microchip, and Amkor Technology have donated a full complement of the major semiconductor process tools, and today the Teaching Factory is capable of producing fully functioning integrated microchips. Partners in the project include three community colleges (Central Arizona College, Chandler-Gilbert, and Mesa Community College); the NSF s Center of Excellence in Semiconductor Manufacturing, the Maricopa Advanced Technology Education Center; and Intel, Motorola, Inc., Microchip, and Atomika Instruments. In this regional model, A.A.S. and B.S. degree seeking students are continuing to learn semiconductor principles on their home campuses via distance and classroom delivery, but all students in the region travel to the Teaching Factory for practical lab instruction and practice doc19454 none This proposal studies changes in opinion and judgment that follow as consequences of the ongoing War on Terrorism, declared in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, . It is anticipated that military and diplomatic success and failure and renewed terrorist events will influence opinions regarding security versus liberty. The research will be done in the lab, by national telephone polling, and via the Internet using several of the new WWW methods for conducting research. The primary goal of the research is to study models of how biasing phrases affect judged agreement with questions posed in polls. It has long been known that the results of polls depend strongly on how questions are worded. This research will attempt to separate the effects of bias from those of more stable true psychological values. A secondary goal is to compare results obtained with inexpensive, efficient, new Internet methods to those obtained from more standard polling. This project will also attempt to determine which of several Internet methods of sampling is most accurate in matching the results of more standard polling doc19455 none A consortium of four community colleges, each serving a geographically defined region, together with seven affiliate supercomputer sites and business partners, constitute a National Science Foundation Advanced Technology Education Center of Excellence for High Performance Computing (HPC) technology. High Performance Computing refers to multi-processor computers performing complex computational operations with a particular focus on clusters. Each college in the consortium has at least one partner High Performance Computing facility, referred to as an HPC site. The National Center is partnering with business and industry to develop skill set standards and competencies needed for certifying HPC technicians and for developing an articulated Associate Degree program in HPC technology. The Regional Education and Training Centers (RETCs), established at each community college, are developing curricula in HPC Technology that articulate with four- year college information science, computer science, and high performance computing technology programs and that include the establishment of 2 + 2 agreements with regional high school Tech Prep Programs. Maui Community College is the lead institution in a consortium with Wake Technical Community College, Pellissippi State Technical Community College, and Contra Costa College, each chosen because of the diversity of student populations, partnerships with HPC sites and regional business and industry, and potential four-year college affiliations. An NSF planning grant (award ) supported a nation-wide survey that revealed that within the next 2 to 5 years, a) 71% of surveyed business and industry will utilize high performance computing, (2) PC-cluster use will grow by 9% and there will be a distinct shift offsetting the balance between PC-cluster and supercomputer use in favor of PC-clusters and c) industry will continue to struggle to recruit, train and or retain HPC employees. The National Center administrator is responsible for (a) creating and administering a web-based certification examination for technical personnel, (b) overseeing curriculum development and teaching methodologies, (c) developing strategies for recruitment, retention and placement; (d) creating a national repository of PC-cluster software, curricula and training materials for HPC technician educational programs; (e) providing professional development activities for college faculty, secondary teachers and business professionals; (f) developing and providing a consortium communications infrastructure; and (g) supervising dissemination, evaluation and reporting activities. RETC directors are responsible for (a) developing curriculum and learner centered teaching methodologies, (b) educating faculty, people from business and industry, and secondary teachers in PC-cluster construction, management and use; (c) providing professional development activities; (d) developing and coordinating professional internship programs at HPC sites and business for college faculty and secondary teachers; (e) coordinating student internship programs; (f) assisting with program graduate placement and (g) developing four-year college articulation agreements and local high school 2 + 2 agreements doc19456 none Chuang Knowledge of molecular interactions alignment and their relations to friction between two contacting, moving surfaces are becoming important as the scale of mechanical engineering devices continues to shrink to microscopic and eventually nanoscopic scales. A lack of in situ techniques to monitor molecular interactions alignment not only presents a challenge to understand the molecular origin of friction but also hinders the development of novel lubrication systems to minimize friction and wear. This exploratory research project proposes the development of an in situ infrared spectroscopic technique to characterize molecular interactions alignment between two contacting, moving surfaces under working conditions with simultaneous friction measurement. The contacting surfaces will be grafted with organic molecules containing with CF3, phosphate, alkyl, aryl, ether and COOH groups. These various types of molecular surfaces allow investigation of the role of van der Walls forces, hydrophobic hydrophilic interactions, polar functional groups, and electrostatic interactions in friction. Changes in intra- and intermolecular interactions, molecular conformation, packing, and alignment during friction measurement will be determined by the shift in molecular vibrational frequencies. This work is expected to develop a fundamental understanding of ghe friction on the moving surfaces with the well-defined molecular arrangement. This understanding coupled with the molecular grafting approach will provide a technical basis for the development of permanent, ultra low-friction coatings for moving surfaces. This type of liquid-free lubrication will provide a contaminant-free environment and eliminate the need for oil (i.e., lubricant) change. The results of this proposed study could have a far-reaching impact on the design of nanostructured surfaces for controlling friction for meso-, micro-, and macroscopic moving devices ranging from MEMS devices, artificial joints, bearings, to gears doc19457 none This dissertation research will investigate how adolescents from non-intact families are affected by the involvement of the nonresident parent in their lives. The results will extend past work on the importance of financial involvement to a consideration of parental practices such as talking, arguing, and engaging in joint activities. Outcomes to be studied include academic achievement, school attendance, grades, emotional well-being, and behavioral problems. Secondary analyses of existing national surveys will be complemented by in-depth interviews with 50 adolescents and 30 parents from the local area doc19458 none Funding is provided to continue partial support for the ICES GLOBEC North Atlantic Regional Program Office within the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES). ICES is an intergovernmental organization designed to coordinate scientific research, fisheries assessment, environmental concerns, and oceanographic matters of common interest to countries bordering the North Atlantic. The ICES GLOBEC program is the North Atlantic regional component of the International GLOBEC Implementation Plan. GLOBEC (Global Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics) is an international research program intended to improve forecasts of the responses of the marine ecosystem to physical forcing and global change by developing our understanding of its structure and functioning under varying physical conditions. The project office is responsible for coordinating efforts to keep interested research communities informed about ongoing work, design means for data exchange, plan cooperative research, organize workshops for the collective appraisal and analysis of information, and publish results in a timely and adequate way doc19459 none Science and technology are driving attempts to understand the physics underlying spin-polarized transport in metallic magnetic multilayers. Such understanding can usually be achieved most directly in the geometry with current flow perpendicular (CPP) to the metallic layers, pioneered by the Michigan State University group. Novel experiments will be performed to address the following questions: (1) What is the source of unexpectedly large spin-flipping found at certain non-magnetic non-magnetic metal interfaces? (2) What are the resistances and dynamics of individual magnetic domain walls and vortices? (3) What is the importance of interfacial roughness on the CPP magnetoresistances of Fe Cr multilayers? (4) How far can a polarized current penetrate into a superconductor? (5) Can a predicted magnetic analog of the AC Josephson effect be observed? This research will play an important role in educating BS, MS, and PhD students, including women and minorities. An outreach component of this program involves supervision of the physics portion of the Michigan Science Olympiad. In one decade, Giant Magnetoresistance in metallic magnetic multilayers has moved from discovery to marketed devices, such as read heads for high-density computer disk drives. But further progress requires still larger magnetoresistance and still smaller detectors. A candidate for the next generation of detectors is Giant Magnetorisistance multilayers measured with current flow perpendicular to the layers, a geometry pioneered by the group at Michigan State University. This geometry promises larger magnetoresistance in smaller samples. But both fundamental and practical issues still need to be resolved. This research program will address several such issues in novel ways, and will involve BS, MS, and PhD students, including women and minorities. The students will learn how to pose significant scientific questions, assemble state-of-the-art equipment to address them, and analyze data obtained with the equipment doc19460 none DMS - . Jeff A. Viaclovsky s project has three parts. The first part is joint work with Gang Tian, dealing with orbifold compactness of Bach flat metrics in dimension 4. The second part is joint work with Matt Gursky, and is about curvature functionals and conformal deformation of curvatures in dimension 3. The third part deals with existence of solutions to some fully nonlinear equations in conformal geometry. The first project is to understand compactness properties of the moduli space of critical points of the L2 norm of the Weyl tensor in 4 dimensions. The Euler-Lagrange equations are known as the Bach equations, and there are many known solutions, for example, metrics that are locally conformally Einsten, and self-dual or anti-self-dual metrics. Since it is known that these metrics exist in abundance, it is an interesting problem to understand the moduli space of solutions. The project of Viaclovsky and Tian is to show that, with certain geometric conditions, one may compactify this space by adding metrics with orbifold singularities. The other parts of the project deal with fully nonlinear equations in conformal geometry. The goal is to conformally deform a metric so that the kth elementary symmetric function of the eigenvalues of the Schouten tensor is constant. This may be viewed as a fully nonlinear generalization of the well-known Yamabe problem. An application of this is to improve the curvature by conformal deformation. For example, given an initial metric, conditions are found so that the metric can be conformally deformed to positive sectional curvature. The project with Tian generalizes some well-known results for Einstein metrics. Einstein metrics are particularly interesting from the connection with Eisteins s theory of general relativity, and the Bach equations are a natural higher order generalization of the Einstein equation. The work in conformal geometry is naturally conformally invariant and also has applications in physics through conformal field theory. Firthermore, new notions of mass arise for these equations, and this is also of interest in general relativity. These equations also have applications to determining the topology of 3-manifolds, given some geometric constraint on the curvature doc19461 none The Virginia Community College System develops a consortium of two-year colleges, industry, and four-year universities to provide students throughout Virginia with a consistent set of IT knowledge and skills. The consortium integrates into the curriculum industry-desired value delivery skills, which include the employability skills described by the SCANS report and also more mathematics and science. The SCANS Center at Johns Hopkins provides guidance for adapting or designing classroom and laboratory activities. Assessments with rubrics are developed to measure the extent to which students gain the needed competencies. Workshops, along with electronic follow-up, educate the faculty in new ways of facilitating the learning of IT knowledge and skills. Pilot test activities determine the efficacy of the courses and the faculty professional development. Connections are made to high schools through Tech Prep doc19462 none We develop and solve numerically a low Mach number model for deflagrations in stellar envelopes. For many stellar environments the Mach number, the ratio of flame or convection speed to the sound speed, is very small (order .01 or less) so that for explicit computations based on full hydrodynamics timesteps are limited by the acoustic speeds, thus requiring excessive computation time to simulate the relatively long timescales associated with the deflagrations and associated convection flows. Our model filters out the sound waves while accounting for strong vertical pressure stratification (of the order of ten orders of magnitude). The model is based on initially pre-computing a strongly stratified hydrostatic solution by solving a boundary value problem in the vertical coordinate. The hydrodynamic equations are then expanded about this solution. The resulting system for the velocities and the non-hydrostatic pressure is then expanded in Mach number, effectively filtering out sound waves and yielding a system where timesteps are restricted by fluid and flame speeds rather than the sound speed. The new model will be applied to the study of convection in the envelope of an accreting white dwarf during a nova outburst. The model will allow simulation over convective timescales and thus allow a theoretical description of the multi-dimensional nuclear burning development of novae. We propose to simulate the hydrodynamics of nuclear fluids in a stellar envelope in which sound waves are filtered out. It is typical of such environments that energy is released via nuclear reactions in a manner similar to terrestrial combustion (nuclear combustion). In many such configurations the flame speed and associated fluid speeds are much smaller than the sound speed. This limits the length of time for which these models can be solved and effectively precludes a simulation of phenomena associated with the burning and convection. For example, a simulation of burning in a neutron star envelope required approximately 30,000 hours net processor time, i.e., the time for all processors on a parallel Silicon Graphics computer, for approximately 200 milliseconds of simulated time. For this problem, the burning and convection timescales were of the order of minutes, e.g., about 5 minutes. Thus, a simulation and computer analysis of such phenomena would be prohibitive using current models. We anticipate that such analyses would be feasible with the proposed new model, because acoustic effects would be eliminated. The model will be used to study the nature of white dwarf novae, and in particular to resolve competing theories regarding the role of mixing of different species in promoting nova outbursts. The numerical solution of the model will employ parallel algorithms and computers and thus the project will entail the use of high performance computing to explain observed astrophysical phenomena. Date: June 21, doc19463 none The objective of this research program is to develop algorithms and architectures, and fabricate and demonstrate a rugged, compact, modular, versatile, opt electronic, integrated-circuit (OEIC) neural network and fuzzy logic coprocessor system that would work in conjunction with the standard PC microprocessor. This OEIC co-processor will perform sophisticated parallel and or fuzzy processing operations more efficiently than the standard PC microprocessor. The proposed OElC co-processor will be about the size of a CD-ROM drive, and thus would fit easily inside the case of a conventional personal computer. Another important goal of the program is that this compact OEIC co-processor be amenable to mass manufacturing. To demonstrate the feasibility of the co-processor, the proposed hardware development tasks include: (I) design, fabrication and characterization of novel 2-D arrays of GaAs-SOS (silicon-on sapphire) OEIC cascadable smart pixels with a detector, integrated-circuit logic and a light source in each pixel (resonant cavity light-emitting diodes (RCLEDs) in the first two years of the program, and vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) replacing the RCLEDs in the third year), (2) design, fabrication and characterization of novel reconfigurable optical interconnection elements based on arrays of Bragg-holographic phase gratings, (3) aligning (with the help of a mask aligner) and gluing all the components of the co-processor (OEICs. interconnection elements, and output photodetector array) together into a rugged, compact, modular multi-layer sandwich configuration so as to permanently solve any micro-optics alignment problems, and (4) characterizing the resulting high-speed, multilayer optoelectronic co-processor. The early focus of the program will be on neural network configurations. So in addition to the above-mentioned fabrication tasks, the PI will also carry out the following theoretical, modeling and simulation tasks: (a) develop algorithms, especially those suitable for programmable nearest-neighbor interconnections (e.g. pulse-coupled networks) to solve a large class of multi-dimensional information processing problems, and (b) explore the application of these novel co-processors to three different types of problems: (i) associative-memory-based pattern recognition, (ii) medical image segmentation and (iii) fusion of a set of low-contrast spectro-polarimetric infrared images into a single high-contrast image doc19464 none Proposal Number: PI: Ricardo Perez-Marco Research will be conducted on several projects on the theory of Dynamical Systems, and more specifically, in Holomorphic Dynamics and Small Divisor theory. Using heuristic ideas from Holomorphic Dynamics it is proposed to investigate an effective selection of polynomials as iterators in Pollard rho method of factorization. Factorization algorithms are a central topic in Cryptography. Numerical explorations show that there is room for improvement in this field. In Holomorphic Dynamics and Small Divisors, it is proposed to extend the general theory of dynamics on Hedgehogs. The focus of the proposed research is on weak forms of stability when arithmetic conditions, typical of Small Divisors, fail. It is proposed to investigate Siegel disks and their boundary, and to attack the hard problem of classifying invariant annular continua. It is anticipated that the techniques of tube-log Riemann surfaces should play an important role. Another project consists in extending geometric techniques to higher dimensional Small Divisors problems. In particular, a new geometric construction of invariant tori is envisioned. In the theory of Renormalization in Holomorphic Dynamics it is proposed to develop the new theory of renormalization. This involves a better understanding of Degenerate Quasi-Conformal theory (i.e. for non bounded Beltrami coefficients). A last topic in Complex Analysis on which research is proposed is the theory of Borel Monogenic functions. We project to develop a theory that is flexible enough to apply to problems in Small Divisors. Dynamical Systems is a branch of Mathematics with ancient roots linked to Celestial Mechanics. It was founded as a distinct branch of Mathematics more than a century ago by H. Poincare. It is a rich field with multiple interactions with other parts of Mathematics and Science. The main goal is the study of the long time behavior of evolution processes. Some of the most important problems come from fields as Biology, Physical Sciences and Chemistry. One of the central questions is the Problem of Stability. For example, is the Solar System stable according to Newton laws ? K.A.M. theory (also called Small Divisor theory) is one of the major branches in Dynamical Systems. It was founded in the second half of the XXth century and had an important impact in Dynamical Systems and related fields. It is the very first theory that provides stability results in non-linear conservative problems. It continues its expansion to fields as diverse as Partial Differential Equations, the theory of foliations, Holomorphic Dynamics, etc. In the proposed projects some of the most difficult open questions in KAM theory will be explored. What happens when stability fails? Can we still recover some traces of stability that may be useful in the applications doc19465 none DMS - . The first proposed project is to understand the topology of complete manifolds whose Ricci curvature is bounded from below by a negative multiple of the bottom of the spectrum of the Laplace operator. In this case, the bottom of the spectrum is assumed to be positive. The second project of the Principal Investigator is to investigate the size of the space of harmonic functions with polynomial growth on complete manifolds with non-negative sectional curvature. In particular, the primary goal is to prove that the dimension of the space of harmonic functions of polynomial growth with degree at most d is bounded by the dimension of an analogous space in Euclidean space of the same dimension. The third project is to understand the geometry of stable minimal hypersurfaces of Euclidean space. More generally, he would like to study minimal hypersurfaces with have finite index. The PI also proposes to support a postdoc, Dr. Xiaofeng Sun, in his research projects. Dr. Sun proposes to study the regularity theory of harmonic maps into a metric space. These proposed projects have the unified theme of using analytical techniques in studying the underlining geometric spaces. In many instances, topological and geometrical conclusions can be drawn by detail analysis of solutions of some appropriate partial differential equations defined on the space doc19466 none Kaye The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a six-month research fellowship by Dr. Jason Kaye to work with Dr. Ramon Vallejo at the Centro de Estudios Ambientales del Mediterraneo (CEAM) in Valencia, Spain over a period of 36 months. The objective of this project is to quantify the effects of fire and fire management on carbon storage in eastern Spain and the southwestern United States. Both of these regions contain dry forests that supported frequent fires prior to human management (millennia ago in Spain, a century ago in the U.S.). Contemporary fire suppression facilitates tree establishment, carbon storage, and fuel accumulation. In Spain, this accumulated fuel eventually burns in stand-replacing fires that convert plant material to atmospheric CO2. In the U.S., fire suppression is more effective and most forests have not burned for a century. Thus, these regions contain complementary information regarding fire-based CO2 emissions. The Spanish ecosystems provide information on CO2 released from forests experiencing repeated stand-replacing fires. The U.S. ecosystems provide information on CO2 stored in forests when fire is persistently suppressed. To measure carbon accumulation following stand-replacing fires in eastern Spain, the PI will locate forests that have burned at different times in the past and measure the total amount of carbon in each ecosystem. The rate of carbon accumulation can be calculated from the age and carbon content of each forest. To measure carbon accumulation following fire suppression in the U.S., the PI will use tree-ring reconstructions of past forest density and mass. Tree-rings represent an annual record of tree size that can be converted into carbon storage. The main results from this research will be equations describing the accumulation of carbon in dry forests following fire suppression and stand replacing fires. These equations will rapidly be incorporated into global carbon models. Dr. Vallejo has been studying fire in this region for 25 years. He has on-going projects with researchers in the European Union, which will enable interactions with international carbon and fire scientists. Dr. Vallejo has already established research sites that are ideally suited for the carbon sampling outlined above doc19467 none Faculty of Florida Community College in Jacksonville (FCCJ) and Gulf Coast Community College (GCCC) are adapting and implementing curricula developed by the Advanced Integrated Manufacturing Center in Dayton, Ohio (AIM Center). The project enables students to have virtual work experiences, and provides faculty development for regional college instructors and high school teachers. The new curricula, adapted to the Florida Community College System, features a modular design that allows students to complete their education in a compressed time while gaining real world experiences in new laboratories. Existing collaborations with industry groups, state universities, public schools, and workforce development organizations are helping to recruit and retain students, particularly those from under-represented groups. Faculty professional development opportunities are being provided through the new Advanced Technology Center developed at the Downtown Campus of the College and with partner universities and the AIM Center at Sinclair Community College. Follow-up activities at FCCJ and GCCC involve both academic and technical faculty in collaborative curriculum development and implementation of supportive learning opportunities, such as integrated problem-based learning and learning communities congruent with the AIM Center s modular, competency-based approach doc19468 none A first goal of this proposal is to study mathematically singularities in fluids and plasmas, and their connection to physical processes. Specific problems include free surface pinch-off in fluids, geometric depletion of singularities in active scalars, incompressible Euler and MHD equations related to vortex and magnetic reconnection. A second goal of the proposal is to study statistics of long time behavior of dissipative systems, such as thermal fluid convection. Specific goals include bounds on heat transport in convection, energy cascades, coarse inertial manifolds, and turbulent front propagation. Fluids and plasmas involve many active length and time scales that interact dynamically. The long time behavior of complex systems, such as turbulent convection, involves also many interacting spatial and temporal scales. Mathematical studies are needed to guide computer simulations. What quantities are well behaved, and can be safely predicted with rather inexpensive, coarse computations? What conditions produce rapid generation of small scales? Which of these are important and result in qualitative changes? What are the characteristics of the ensuing dissipative energy transfer? These are fundamental questions for progress in understanding and computation of complex phenomena. This proposal is aimed at a core of such questions. Date: April 12, doc19469 none Research in superconductors on the nanometer scale has made strong headway in recent years, evidenced by the observation of scores of new physical phenomena and the publication of several intriguing theoretical predictions. The latter include negative Josephson coupling that results in pi-junctions, and therefore, half-flux quantum and novel vortex states, in conventional s-wave superconductors, a metallic state of Cooper pairs, and the Berry s phase in mesoscopic systems. This individual investigator award supports a project that will seek out these predicted physical phenomena, through innovations in sample fabrication and measurement techniques. At the same time the project will pursue its educational goals, including undergraduate and graduate student training as well as public outreach with an emphasis on attracting more women and minorities to science. The discovery of new physical phenomena and the development of novel techniques in sample fabrication will have a broad impact on nanoscale technologies. In order to maintain the impressive growth in the semiconductor industries such as seen in the computer, telecommunication, and e-commerce sectors, alternatives to the traditional technology need to be developed. It is recognized that new technologies operating at the nanoscale will become increasingly important. Within this context, research in superconductors on the nanometer scale has made strong headways, evidenced by the observation of scores of new physical phenomena and the publication of several intriguing theoretical predictions. This individual investigator award supports a project that will seek out the novel physical phenomena predicted by theory. At the same time the project will pursue the educational goals of student training and public outreach with an emphasis on attracting more women and minorities to science and engineering. The discovery of new physical phenomena and novel techniques in sample fabrication will have a broader impact on nanoscale technologies doc19470 none This award by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research by Professor Carl J. Carrano at Southwest Texas State University to study a family of ligands that allows for the systematic variance of donor atom, charge, steric bulk, hydrogen-bonding and other factors that can have an important effect on metal-catalyzed biotransformations. Ligand effects on oxygen atom transfer reactions between acceptors such as organophosphines and models for molybdoenzymes will be systematically studied. New sulfur-rich model complexes to more closely mimic enzyme active sites will be prepared. Pentaacoordinate complexes of iron will be prepared as models for several non-heme iron oxygenase enzymes in order to determine the effects of the donor atom set, charge, and hydrogen bonding and other factors that control oxygenation versus oxidation. Pseudotetrahedral iron complexes will be synthesized and studied as models for peptide deformylases and compared with analogous complexes of Co(II), Ni(II) and Zn(II) in order to determine why Fe(II) rather than Zn(II) is employed by nature in these unique hydrolytic enzymes. Relatively small complexes of metal ions will be prepared that simulate the structure and function of metal active sites in enzymes. Studying these complexes will help to elucidate the fundamental nature of the function of the metal ions in a number of important enzymes doc19471 none DMS - . This project concerns two major themes. The first is the study of rigidity theorems (i.e. metric uniqueness) on compact manifolds. Here for example we consider isospectral problems: to what extent must spaces with the same spectra (e.g. eigenvalues of the Laplace Beltrami operator, or Lengths of closed geodesics) be isometric. This also includes questions about metric rigidity induced by conjugacy of geodesic flows, as well as inverse scattering problems. The other theme considers infinite groups G acting cocompactly on nonpositively curved spaces H (in the sense of Alexandrov). The project is to study the relationship between the geometry of H and the induced action of G on the ideal boundary of H. This can be considered an aspect of geometric group theory and is partially motivated by some questions of Gromov. As well as these two major themes the proposal concerns the authors continuing work on various isoperimetric inequalities. These groups show up as symmetries of Hadamard spaces H (which include spaces of nonpositive curvature.) The first theme of the project concerns the question of whether a space can be determined by a certain set of data. One part of this relates to questions of remote sensing. For example: can you determine the density of an object (say a persons body or the moon) from measurements taken from the outside ? The CAT scan is a practical example where one determines the mass density (or more accurately the absorption coefficient) of an object from measurements of the total mass along straight lines. An alternative set of measurements is the set of times it takes for sound to travel between any two points on the boundary (this is a special case of the boundary rigidity question dealt with in the proposal). The thrust of the proposed study is to determine under which circumstances certain sets of data (e.g. eigenvalues, lengths of closed geodesics, distances between boundary points) are sufficient to completely determine the geometry of the spaces in question. Groups show up naturally as symmetries of various spaces. The second theme of this project concerns the study a certain class of infinite groups doc19472 none This proposal requests funding for an exploratory field effort to test the feasibility of acquiring long multi-decadal to multi-century coral time series from subaerially exposed reefs in the western Pacific warm pool. Large coral heads from raised terraces in the Western Solomon Islands will be cored. A limited set of x-ray analyses, U-series dating, and isotopic measurements will be done to test the suitability of these locations for providing reliable multi-decadal to multi-century coral time series records for intervals of the Holocene doc19473 none This is a collaborative research project in the area of fluid turbulence. The participating institutions are the University of Oregon (UO) and the University of Maryland (UMD). The research involves three subprojects. First, at UO, controlled, laboratory investigations of turbulent convection are being performed, under conditions relevant to geophysics and astrophysics: Extremes of control parameters such as Rayleigh and Prandtl numbers are sought via a large convection cell, whose aspect ratio and surface roughness properties can be varied. Second, at UMD, advanced development of a cryogenic Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) technique, usable in liquid helium, is being carried out. Third, homogeneous and isotropic turbulence is being studied at the highest Reynolds numbers in both classical (UMD) and super-fluids (UO, UMD), with dynamically similar apparatus allowing meaningful comparisons. The research program builds on apparatus and skills acquired under grant DMR95- . Both undergraduate and graduate students will participate in cutting edge interdisciplinary research. The training they receive will prepare them for careers in academe, government or industry. Fluid turbulence is ubiquitous in nature and engineering. It is a complex non-linear phenomenon that is a paradigm for problems with many degrees of freedom, from economics to fracture dynamics. Further progress, however, requires significant input from experiments that truly push the envelope. Technology is being developed for this task in a collaboration between the University of Oregon and the University of Maryland. In particular, ultra-high levels of turbulent intensity are attained under controlled laboratory conditions using low temperature helium, which has the lowest viscosity of any known fluid. These experimental efforts are helping to catapult fluid turbulence from the status of the last important unsolved problem in classical physics, with possible applications to many branches of science and numerous practical problems. A specific area that is addressed is turbulent thermal convection, which is a fundamental and important part of all atmospheric and oceanic circulations, the intense motions inside stars, and myriad engineering processes that involve heat transport. Both undergraduate and graduate students will participate in cutting edge interdisciplinary research. The training they receive will prepare them for careers in academe, government or industry doc19474 none Shefelbine The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Sandra J. Shefelbine to work with Dr. Lutz Claes at the University of Ulm s Institute of Orthopaedic Research and Biomechanics, in Germany. The purpose of this project is to combine Quantitative computer tomography (QCT) and Finite element analysis of a fracture callus in a rat femur in order to predict bone stiffness during fracture healing. This will be done by: the development of a model of fracture healing in the rat femur; imaging the healing fracture using micro computer tomography (CT); creating a finite element model of the healing fracture to predict bone strength and; validating the finite element predictions with mechanical testing of the bones in bending and torsion. The combination of QCT and finite element modeling in determining the bone strength in fracture healing will be a powerful technique for determining detailed, quantitative information during the healing process. The Institute is a well-known lab for experimental biomechanics. Dr. Claes lab focuses on the effects of mechanics on fracture healing and has a wide range of experimental facilities doc19475 none This project will examine the physical processes that accelerate electrons and ions in the discrete auroras. These processes are of fundamental importance to the electrodynamics coupling between the magnetosphere and the ionosphere. The project will use a combination of theoretical tools such as 1 and 2 dimensional Vlasov codes, 1 and 2 dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) codes and analytical modeling. Results from the theoretical investigation will be combined with observations from the FAST satellite to determine how relevant different physical processes may be to the particle acceleration. In addition to the direct results of the study, the improved simulation codes are likely to be applicable to a broad range of other problems doc19476 none This project is intended to discover and develop the most fundamental and crucial mathematical principles and frameworks for highly diversified applications of digital inpainting. These frameworks will allow us to further construct many universally applicable inpainting models, and design their efficient and robust computational algorithms. Our proposed approach is to employ several high level mathematical tools for the modeling and computation of inpainting, which include the Bayesian decision theory, nonlinear partial differential equations (e.g. mean curvature motions, nonlinear transport and diffusion), variational methods in the space of Bounded Variations and for free boundary problems, a variety of state-of-the-art tools from harmonics analysis such as wavelets and multiresolution analysis, and many efficient schemes in numerical analysis and computational partial differential equations. The project is also highlighted by the fact that we are proposing for the first time to integrate visually important curve, surface, and image geometry into the traditionally statistical models and dynamic processes. Digital inpainting is to develop an automatic process to intelligently recover and complete the missing, unavailable, or purposely disguised image information. Such loss of information occurs ubiquitously in a variety of important fields including computer vision, network (especially wireless) communication, robust image coding and transmission (from the Hubble Space Telescope for example), three-dimensional volumetric organ reconstruction from two-dimensional medical images, disguise of enemy weapons and personnel in the battlefields, and the digital restoration of cracked ancient paintings in digitized fine art museums. This project will develop a mathematical framework for image inpainting. Besides the broad impact on the numerous important fields mentioned above, the project will also strengthen the integration of high level pure mathematics into the contemporary digital, computer, and artificial intelligence technology, and in return, create numerous opportunities for mathematical modeling, analysis, and computation. It will also help the principal investigator develop new curricula and train new graduate students in this booming fresh field of applied mathematics. Date: May 22, doc19477 none The science technology industries in and around the service area of Los Angeles Trade Technical College (LATTC) have long created a demand for chemical technicians that greatly exceeded the number of graduates from our Chemical Technology program. The Chemical Technology program at our school has a thirty-two year track record in the preparation and training of its graduates for immediate employment as highly skilled technicians in applied chemistry physics, as well as in providing an adequate foundation for students seeking bachelors degrees. Employers, as well as faculty, recognize the program is rendered less effective than it should be by the many applicants who fail to qualify for the program as a result of inadequate high school preparation, especially those from inner city schools and minorities of immigrant backgrounds. Employers also reject many high school applicants seeking work, as they are grossly ill equipped academically to handle the workplace environment. We are attempting to remedy the problem by launching a high school science technology program based on Science in a Technical World, a NSF-funded project product from the American Chemical Society, with an alliance of local employers, the college, and the inner city high schools. Our goal is to develop a model by which two-year colleges can take a leadership role in outreach programs which encourage disadvantaged high school students to choose science and science-based technology careers. Our objectives are to assure that: (1) 180 high school students demonstrate a 10% increase in basic science and technical knowledge through participation in this program; (2) 20% of students completing this training program enter a two-year science-based technology program at a community college upon completion of their high school education, (3) six high school science teachers from the same schools complete a vocational applications of science knowledge and skills training program, and (4) all participating students complete an introduction to instrumentation and a math lab that prepares them for the industry work environment or a two-year college chemistry-based technology program doc19478 none Zupan The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support an eighteen-month research fellowship by Dr. Marc Zupan to work with Dr. Norman A. Fleck at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. This goal of this project is to demonstrate strategies for minimum weight energy absorption systems based on egg-box panels and to develop a group of design parameters that allow egg-box panels to be adapted for specific protection needs. The realizations will be manifested in (1) characterizing the mechanical response of egg-box panels in both crash and blast situations; (2) analytical models will be developed so that minimum weight designs can be achieved for specific needs; (3) design maps will be produced and validated by the production and experimental analysis of new geometries to meet current industry demands. Egg-box panels are a new category of energy absorption devices. It is feasible that egg-box cores, when configured correctly, can be used in a broad range of protective situations for both crash and blast protection. Energy absorbers based on egg-box panels promise to have a significant influence on vehicle protection providing a novel minimum weight, low cost energy absorber leading to the combined goal of reduced weight, and superior energy absorption across widespread applications. The University of Cambridge s Micromechanics Centre will provide a diverse environment, providing direct partnerships not only with the host, but also with many others. The interdisciplinary facility currently maintains close international links with both European and American research groups doc19479 none Braswell The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-one month research fellowship by Dr. Geoffrey E. Braswell to work with Dr. Jaime Awe at the Department of Archaeology at the Ministry of Tourism in Belmopan, Belize. This project will involve the gathering of data to test two contrasting hypotheses about weakly and strongly integrated Classic Mayan states. The Pis will work on a program of archaeological investigation, preservation, and consolidation at the ancient Maya city of Pusilha, Belize in Central America. Pusilha is a mid-size population and political center located in the extreme southwest of Belize. The site is known for its many carved monuments dating to AD 573-751 and for a unique engineering feature: an ancient triple-span bridge over the Pusilha (Machaca) River and two artificial diversion canals. Dr. Awe is the Archaeological Coordinator of the Ministry of Tourism s Development Project. As a fellow under Dr. Awe, Dr. Braswell will learn the archaeological and engineering techniques used to consolidate ancient monuments. They will test specific centralist and decentralist hypotheses regarding the horizontal and hierarchical integration of ancient Maya economy against a historical-political framework derived from monumental texts of Pusilha. Their research will contribute new and refine existing models of organization, stability, and change in Maya society, and - by extension - will be of relevance to the study of archaic states throughout the world doc19480 none Brown The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a three month research fellowship by Dr. David J. Brown to work with Drs. Keith D. Shepherd and Markus Walsh, at the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF) in Nairobi, Kenya. Organic matter (measured as carbon content) plays a vital role in soil functioning and with a growing concern about climate change there has been increased attention paid to soil as an important source or sink for global atmospheric carbon dioxide. Addressing these concerns, the PI proposes to 1) combine terrain and reflectance information to model the vertical and geographic distribution of soil organic carbon for a selected watershed in Kenya; and 2) refine statistical methods for characterizing soil carbon using reflectance data. Land degradation, food security, and fresh water sedimentation assessments in countries like Kenya (and in the United States) can be closely linked to the type, amount, and distribution of organic matter in the soil. The scientific community has a vital interest in research that improves the estimates of regional and global soil carbon, and the identification of potential sites for carbon sequestration. The hosts are pioneering the use of reflectance spectral analysis to characterize soil properties. Using a spectrometer in the field or lab, they snap a soil sample just as a tourist snaps photos of local culture - except that their camera digitally captures light reflection over hundreds of bands from infrared through the visible light spectrum. Ultimately, this research will allow scientists to map surface soil using satellite imagery - providing early warnings of land degradation and precise measurements of global carbon pools. This project will complement this work with lab and field dimensions. In the lab the PI will sequentially strip away inorganic, labile and non-labile carbon; scanning the soil material at each step of the process. With these scans, he can then isolate the contributions of the various fractions to the overall spectral signature of the soil, and refine models predicting soil carbon from spectral data. In the field, he will employ digital terrain models in conjunction with spectral analysis to predict subsurface soil carbon distributions. Slope, curvature and other more complex terrain indices can predict erosion, deposition, infiltration and depth to the water table - all factors that contribute to organic matter accumulation doc19481 none This award to the Neutron Scattering Society of America (NSSA) is from four NSF units, the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities, the Chemistry Division, the Division of Materials Research and the Division of Biological Infrastructure. The award provides partial support for the first biannual American Conference on Neutron Scattering (ACNS) organized by the NSSA with an inaugural four-day conference planned for June 23-27, , in Knoxville, Tennessee. Neutron research in the past 40 years has played a crucial role in advancing fundamental science, technology and medicine in the U.S. However, for the US to remain globally competitive in neutron science and continue to reap its technological rewards, it is important that the community of scientists and engineers using neutrons in research continue to grow in number and increase its public presence. The ACNS will serve a dual role as a national user meeting and a scientific meeting, providing a much-needed focal point for the U.S. neutron user community and a mechanism for outreach to prospective users of national neutron facilities. The scientific portion of the meeting agenda will include a plenary session followed by parallel oral sessions over several days in the topical areas of Neutron Sources & Instrumentation, Soft Condensed Matter, Magnetism, Materials Science, Biology, Chemistry & Chemical Physics, Industrial Applications, and Fundamental Physics. Time has also been designated for poster sessions, user discussions, and a tour of the SNS. NSF funds will be used to support travel expenses of young faculty, students and postdocs who attend the first ACNS. This award to the Neutron Scattering Society of America (NSSA) is from four NSF units, the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities, the Chemistry Division, the Division of Materials Research and the Division of Biological Infrastructure. The award provides partial support for the first biannual American Conference on Neutron Scattering (ACNS) organized by the NSSA with an inaugural four-day conference planned for June 23-27, , in Knoxville, Tennessee. Neutron research in the past 40 years has played a crucial role in advancing fundamental science, technology and medicine in the U.S. However, for the US to remain globally competitive in neutron science and continue to reap its technological rewards, it is important that the community of scientists and engineers using neutrons in research continue to grow in number and increase its public presence. The ACNS will serve a dual role as a national user meeting and a scientific meeting, providing a much-needed focal point for the U.S. neutron user community and a mechanism for outreach to prospective users of national neutron facilities. The scientific portion of the meeting agenda will include a plenary session followed by parallel oral sessions over several days in the topical areas of Neutron Sources & Instrumentation, Soft Condensed Matter, Magnetism, Materials Science, Biology, Chemistry & Chemical Physics, Industrial Applications, and Fundamental Physics. Time has also been designated for poster sessions, user discussions, and a tour of the SNS. NSF funds will be used to support travel expenses of young faculty, students and postdocs who attend the first ACNS doc19482 none This workshop seeks to bring together experts in the area of parallel manipulators from around the globe for two days in order to disseminate recent research progress and to identify the most promising future research directions for parallel manipulators. This meeting is not a routine conference, wherein the primary responsibility of the participant is to present his or her paper. Instead, through a series of focused keynote presentations, round-tables, focused paper and poster sessions and in-depth discussion sessions the participants will seek convergence on key issues related to parallel manipulators. The objectives of the workshop include: (1) Identify roadblocks that must be resolved to increase the industrial use of parallel manipulators; (2) Identify promising approaches that may yield significant advances in the theoretical framework; (3) Discuss educational needs and methods; (4) Develop a strategy for the research community as a whole to accelerate the development and use of parallel manipulators; (5) Establish and reinforce international collaboration and collaboration between academia and industry. The workshop will be held in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada, on Oct 3-4, , immediately following the ASME DETC conferences in Montreal (Sept 29-Oct 2, doc19483 none A major part of understanding the proteome, the entire array of proteins produced by a cell or organism, is understanding how proteins interact with each other and the structure of that interaction. Much of the information about this is in literature and not easy to search or follow. A categorization of known information about protein interactions will be compiled and put into a web-accessible, user-friendly database. The database structure will reflect the biology of the proteins involved. The series of students are involved in producing the raw data and in formatting the database. The data, accessible to the general public, will be of particular use to researchers investigating protein interactions and structures doc19484 none Agrawal The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Alka Agrawal to work with Dr. Robert Menard at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France. This project will involve the study of the basis of the irradiated sporozoite vaccine, which remains the most effective malaria vaccine to date. Irradiated sporozoites are able to infect liver cells, but in the liver they fail to develop into stages of the parasite that later infect red blood cells. The PI will develop a technique for identifying genes in P. berghei, a species that infects rodents, that are essential for parasite differentiation in the host liver. She will then test the defective mutants for their ability to serve as attenuated malaria vaccines. The expectation is that a number of genes will be found that are essential for parasite development in the liver, as well as parasite mutants that could serve as attenuated vaccines or the starting point for new vaccines. The Pasteur Institute is well known for its focus on infectious disease and has several investigators working on malaria doc19485 none Deocampo The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a thirteen-month research fellowship by Dr. Daniel M. Deocampo to work with Dr. William Dubbin at the Natural History Museum in London, United Kingdom. This project will test current hypotheses linking climate change, paleoecology, and hominid evolution by reconstructing regional paleoclimate in East Africa during selected intervals over the past 2 million years. This will be accomplished by laboratory analysis of ultrafine paleolake clays from the Olorgesailie (Kenya) and Olduvai (Tanzania) basins to provide evidence of ancient environmental conditions, and laboratory analysis of water-mineral interactions under experimental and modern environmental conditions to guide the interpretation of ancient clays. The hydrologically-closed basins on East Africa are sensitive to climate change and may provide relevant sedimentary records of environmental change. From this work, will come a partial chronology of Olorgesailie and Olduvai paleolake salinity alkalinity fluctuations before and after the cyclicity shift 900,000 years ago. Good correlation with marine records would be among the first African land-sea paleoclimate correlations and poor correlation would prompt further exploration of the role of orbital cyclicity in African environmental change. This application of clay mineralogy and geochemistry will play an important role in understanding East African ecosystems and early hominids. The research team led by Dr. Dubbin is uniquely suited to collaborate on this project, with expertise in studying mineral transformations, biological effects on mineral processes, clays, and experimental approaches doc19486 none Orbifold subfactors have been first described by Y. Kawahigashi as an application of paragroup theory. It is known that subfactors of type D_4n and D_4n+2 give rise to fusion algebras of bimodules with different natures, but the origin of the difference is unknown. Asaeda has been working on this problem, and obtained the clue to clarify the fusion structure of orbifold subfactors. On this research, the relation between the representation theory of classical Lie group and that of quantum group (WZW model) plays a crucial role. Her research includes further research on this matter, and clarification of the relation between orbifold of WZW model, structure of the representation of the classical Lie groups, and the nature of subfactors arising from WZW model. On the other hand, her research extends to the study of subfactors which are not arising from quantum groups or classical groups. These subfactors are called exotic subfactors. Her focus is on the structure of quantum double constructed from exotic subfactors. The theory of operator algebras was founded by von Neumann as a mathematical background of quantum mechanics. Lately the relation among operator algebras, quantum physics, and low dimensional topology has been sought from the aspect that is totally different from that of von Neumann. The research on this subject and it s relation with other subjects will contribute the development of many subjects in mathematics and mathematical physics doc19487 none Henderson The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Wesley A. Henderson to work with Dr. Stefano Passerini at the Italian Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment (ENEA) in Rome, Italy. This project is based on the study and development of alternative electrolytes (molten salts and ionic plastic crystalline materials) for lithium air batteries. The development of such materials could provide critical breakthroughs in battery technology for a wide array of applications (e.g., electrically powered automobiles, power generation equipment, and electronics.). The lithium air batteries potentially have an order of magnitude higher specific energy than zinc air batteries, which are used currently, but these suffer from problems such as corrosion of lithium metal with water. These problems have inhibited their commercial use with conventional, highly hydrophobic electrolytes such as poly(ethylene oxide) lithium salts. The hybrophobic molten salts to be studied in this project represent a potential solution to this problem. ENEA s Advanced Electrochemical Energy Division conducts projects on both lithium rechargeable batteries and polymer electrolyte fuel cells for electric vehicles doc19488 none This project will explore how ancient elites in the lower Rio Verde valley, Oaxaca, Mexico, interacted with the Central Mexican state of Teotihuacan during the Early Classic Period (AD 250 to 500) . Archaeological research by Dr. Arthur Joyce has shown that, by the Terminal Formative Period (100 BC to AD 250), a state polity had developed in the lower Rio Verde valley (LRVV). The polity s center lay at the 200 hectare (500 acre) city of Rio Viejo. The Rio Viejo city-state suddenly declined in the Early Classic Period, as evidenced by disuse of public spaces such as temples, a decrease in the population and size of the city, and the development of communities in defensible locations. Concomitant with these events, lower Rio Verde valley residents began using imported volcanic glass (obsidian) from mines at Pachuca, located over 400 miles away, just beyond the massive ancient city of Teotihuacan. Other objects with clear stylistic or manufacture connections to Teotihuacan, such as ceramic funerary vessels, also appear in the lower Rio Verde valley s Early Classic archaeological record. These changes in Early Classic Period lower Rio Verde valley material remains clearly indicate new political and economic ties between the Oaxaca coast and the bourgeoning Teotihuacan polity. The character of these ties, however, remains difficult to ascertain given currently available data. It is the objective of this research project to fill the existing data gap on this time period in the Rio Verde valley and allow for a more complete understanding of the relationship between the two regions. Exploration of the relationship between the LRVV and Teotihuacan will be done through archaeological excavation of elite residences, an often overlooked source of information on ancient political and economic exchange practices. I will then compare the archaeological data against four models that predict how material culture might have changed at elite residences with the establishment of interaction between the LRVV and Teotihuacan. Using a suite of seven material culture categories-such as ceramic serving vessels and burial style-I have attempted to determine how different types of relationship with Teotihuacan would have impacted elite residences. After excavation, I will compare patterns in excavated materials with patterns predicted in the models. The closest fit between excavated materials and one of the four models should serve to identify what type of relationship existed between Teotihuacan and the lower Rio Verde valley. This project will offer key data on ancient political and economic relations, especially in relation to the Teotihuacan, as well as developing a methodological approach distinct from that used in most research on this topic. It will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc19489 none Dyke This award supports a one-year collaborative research project between Professor Shirley Dyke at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri and Professor Masato Abe of the University of Tokyo in Japan. The researchers will undertake a program of engineering research experiences for undergraduates in advanced technology in Japan. It will focus on structural control, structural health monitoring, innovative materials, etc. for the mitigation of damage to structures when subjected to severe dynamic loading. The program will support a total of eight students from institutions around the country to spend approximately one summer month in Japan conducting an independent research project that is relevant to their ongoing research in the U.S. The participants will likely include minorities and women. The remainder of the summer would be spent at their host institution in the US conducting research activities. Participants will prepare a paper on their research outcomes and give a short presentation at a colloquium. Current research pertaining to these advanced topics in structural engineering would be significantly enhanced through input from creative young minds. Given the opportunity to participate in research experiences, students discover that they are excited by the challenges they encounter, and intrigued by the innovative ideas and technological advancements brought about by their research. Research is also an excellent avenue for increasing students enthusiasm to pursue advanced degrees. The program will add an international dimension to the development of undergraduate researchers. The exposure to research excellence abroad and the early experience with international collaboration will greatly enhance the future career opportunities of the participants. The program will also encourage collaborative research projects and the initiation of new international collaborative efforts in advanced technology doc19490 none Wright The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twelve month research fellowship by Dr. Daniel Wright to work with Dr. Joseph Zyss at the L Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan in Cachon, France. This project will be co-supported by the Math and Physical Sciences Directorate s Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. This project will advance research on organic microlasers in the lab of Dr. Joseph Zyss at the L Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan. The research will be directed in two areas, one focusing on the laser gain media and the other on the laser feedback structure. The work on the gain media will concentrate on the development of organic microlasers that operate in the near infrared portion of the spectrum at the industrially useful wavelengths of 1.3 and 1.55 um since there are currently no organic laser sources that work at these wavelengths. The project will entail the examination of new polymers doped with rare-earth ions that could provide efficient laser light in this spectra region. The PI s work on microlaser cavity design will focus on improving the directionality of the emissions of these devices by fabricating organic microdisk structures with engineered defects and also exploring other planar cavity shapes such as ovals, mulipoles, and polygons. He will subsequently investigate the coupling of these planar cavities to optical fibers, waveguides, and other microdisks. In order to characterize and improve the feedback structures, he will perform experiments in which the emitted light of each new cavity will be collected such that the angular dependence and spectral properties of the light can be examined. The results of these experiments will be compared to mathematical models of the systems under study. Dr. Zyss is one of the leading researchers in organic non-linear optics and photonics doc19491 none Werner The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a ten month research fellowship by Dr. Cynthia A. Werner to work with Dr. Fred Bosveld at the Royal Netherland Meteorological Institute in De Bilt, The Netherlands. This project will evaluate the CO2 fluxes by instrumenting the Cabauw meteorological tower in the Netherlands. This experiment should yield the first realistic estimates of the errors in CO2 flux measurement and in advective CO2 flux. The Cabauw site affords a unique opportunity because of its height and lack of surface heterogeneity. Dr. Werner will establish a baseline value for advective flux which will determine the minimal amount of error that sites located in more complicated terrain can expect due to the advective component. This baseline value is particularly significant because only a few sites have the ability to assess the advective componenet and typically this is performed only when very large errors are expected. The data collected will complement research done by others studying the carbon cycle and global climate change across Europe. In addition to working with Dr. Bosveld, who is in charge of all measurements made at Cabauw, the PI will also work with Dr. Peter Duynkerke of the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research (IMAU), Dr. Alex Vermeulen of the Energy Research center of the Netherlands (ECN doc19492 none This proposal requests funds to support the Wayne State University group s fraction of a collaborative effort on the research and development of hardware and reconstruction algorithms for charged particle tracking at a future Linear Collider. The collaboration consists of the University of California at Santa Cruz, University of Colorado, Indiana University, University of Michigan, Wayne State University, and Yale University Brought together in this group from the participating institutions are experts in tracking detectors, both in the hardware aspects of such detectors and in tracking and reconstruction algorithms. The aim of the research is to specify the tracking system for a Linear Collider detector by determining the requirements that a list of interesting benchmark collider processes put on the detector design. The PIs and a post-doc will explore a Silicon Drift Detector (SDD) array as the tracking device for Linear Collider detector. The main physics interest is the study of Higgs production and properties through quark tagging and the physics at the top-antitop threshold doc19493 none Eppley The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Sarah M. Eppley to work with Dr. John R. Pannell at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Dr. Eppley and her host will test population and metapopulation models for the evolution of mating systems in Mercurialis annual. This annual plant is an excellent species for empirical studies designed to test theoretical models such as this because it is a short-lived annual that can be grown to sexual maturity within weeks. It also offers an exceptional opportunity to determine the relationship between various mating-system parameters and breeding systems. Ongoing research has established baseline information and techniques for this species, including development of molecular markers that lend themselves to the study of specific questions regarding mating-system evolution. This study is the first of its kind to compare the rates of gene flow between inbreeding and outbreeding populations in the context of combines versus separate sexes. The project will also provide information on the consequences for gene flow of contrasting sex allocation strategies in a wind-pollinated plant species. The University of Oxford s faculty has been actively investigating plant evolutionary processes, with cross-disciplinary interactions between plant ecologists, geneticists, physiologists, and molecular biologists. Dr. Pannell has been working with M. annua for seven years and is an authority on the genetics of plant mating systems and on the construction and interpretation of theoretical models exploring mating-system evolution doc19494 none Modeling complexity across levels: social insect societies as multilevel integrated systems. Social insect colonies provide a model system for understanding biological complexity. They are exemplars of multi-component, multi-level causal structures. All levels of organization are involved in the production, maintenance and modulation of behavior in a colony of ants, bees, wasps or termites from genetic effects on neurological process and behavior to selection effects at the group and individual levels The recent explosion of research on complex systems in general has produced a variety of new theoretical, mathematical and computational tools with which to model spatial and temporal dynamical processes. Models of self-organization, evolutionary computation, functional genomics, data mining, multi-agent simulations, etc. can clearly aid in the understanding of complex social insect behavior. The PIs will bring together graduate students, postdocs and junior faculty members who study processes at different levels of organization of social insects with those developing some of the current array of modeling methods. The purpose of this workshop is to educate the next generation of researchers about multilevel approaches to behavior science, and to tighten the connection between empirical studies and abstract modeling efforts. The workshop will be held at the Santa Fe Institute, and is structured as a tutorial. That is, it will be highly interactive with hands-on applications of the models to current research questions and data. The PIs expect that new collaborations will arise from this workshop, that generalizations about integrating models will be discovered, and that these results will be relevant to a wider scientific community investigating complexity doc19495 none Tripp The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Jennifer A. Tripp to work with Dr. Robert Hedges at Oxford University s Research Laboratory for Archaeology (RLAHA) in the United Kingdom. Co-funding for this project comes from the Math and Physical Science Directorate s Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. The dating and isotopic analysis of specific compounds from archaeological materials is a new and promising approach to artifact analysis. Isolating individual compounds from ancient materials ensures that input from modern or ancient impurities is eliminated, and that analyses are performed on well-defined material. Currently no general techniques for performing compound-specific dating on collagen, chitin or cellulose exist. The aim of this project is to develop and refine technologies for isolating components of hydrolysates from these three biological polymers in order to perform reliable and routine accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) C14 dating and stable isotope analyses. The anticipated outcomes of this project are (a) specific improvements in the compound-specific analyses of archaeological materials, and (b) the development and publication of a methodology that would be of general use in archaeological science laboratories. The RLAHA is one of the world s premier locations for studying archaeological science. The UK has numerous facilities and an active community of researchers conducting ongoing archaeological science research, and Oxford has a particular reputation for the purification of archaeological material for isotope measurement doc19496 none Although a great deal is known about how individuals react to personal bereavement, less is known about how individuals respond to collective loss. The terrorist attacks of September 11, were of such a magnitude as to significantly affect millions of people living in the United States, irrespective of whether they knew anyone personally who died or who narrowly escaped death. The purpose of this small grant for exploratory research is to examine the extent to which collective loss reactions may be similar to well-documented reactions to personal bereavement, such as grief and depression, or to survivor reactions, such as survivor guilt and anxiety. The project examines the levels and kinds of affective reactions experienced in the immediate aftermath of the attacks as well as personality and background variables that may be uniquely associated with these different reactions. Given the on-going nature of terrorist threat and the need to understand how reactions to traumatic events may unfold over time, college students will complete questionnaires at 3-6 weeks after the September 11 attacks and again six months later. Results from the study will expand theoretical understanding of how individuals, even those thousands of miles away from the actual event, react to collective loss. In turn, this understanding may aid intervention efforts directed at coping with such loss doc19497 none Lyons The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-two month research fellowship by Dr. Kelly G. Lyons to work with Dr. Alberto Burquez at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, in Hermosillo, Mexico. This project is designed to test the general hypothesis that the presence of an invasive, exotic plant species negatively affects native plant species with emphasis on documenting changes in native species abundance and separating the effects of direct and indirect interactions. Four studies will be conducted. Three of these will employ paired plots in invaded and non-invaded areas along an invasion front in intact, native habitat. A descriptive study (1) will test whether the presence of an exotic species adversely affects native species through direct and or indirect means by correlating native and exotic species abundance on either side of an invasion front. Two studies will employ descriptive and manipulative experiments to test the hypothesis that an aggressive exotic impacts native species fitness indirectly by altering community food web dynamics and pollinator mutualisms. Finally, through experimental removal of an exotic, a fourth study will examine exotic species effects on native species persistence. The investigation will take place in the Plains of Sonora subdivision in the Sonora Desert near Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico where the aggressive perennial grass Pennisetum ciliare (L.) Link (buffelgrass) has been introduced for rangeland improvement. This exotic species is spreading from grazed areas into natural, intact habitats and is a widely perceived threat to native biodiversity. These studies are expected to demonstrate the role of exotic species invasions in the decline of native species abundance and fitness and highlight the more elusive, indirect mechanisms mediated by native pollinators and insect herbivores. Invasive species honor no boundaries, and this project will facilitate a dialogue between the U.S. and Mexico on this pressing conservation issue. Dr. Burquez specializes in pollination ecology, is an expert of plant biogeography and pollinator fauna of the region and has been documenting the spread of P. ciliare into native desert thornscrub for 6 years doc19498 none Sinton The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support an eight-month research fellowship by Dr. Diana S. Sinton to work with Dr. Ana Scopel at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. The objectives of this project are to understand the invasion of exotic woody species and native shrubs into a protected area, by a case study of El Palmar National Park in Argentina. First, they will characterize the changes in the abundance and spatial distribution of exotic woody species and native shrubs since the Park was created, second, they will characterize the expansion of each species in relation to disturbances and management, and third, they will create models for the dispersal of M. azedarach and its predicted growth. They will use aerial photograph and satellite image analysis and interpretation, and supplementary fieldwork. GIS-based, spatial analyses and other modeling techniques will be used to illuminate the processes affecting M. azederach and other woody and shrub species. Biological invasions into protected areas are a worldwide problem, compromising conservation efforts and threatening biodiversity. Dr. Scopel has an extensive background in population ecology and a thorough understanding of the Park landscape and specific properties of M. azederach doc19499 none Spectral and Transport Properties of Random Media PI: Peter D. Hislop, University of Kentucky : This proposal concerns continuing investigations of the principal investigator into the spectral and transport properties of random media. The basic question is: How do random perturbations of a background medium, for example, a perfect crystal, influence the propagation of quantum and classical waves in the medium? The proposed work concentrates on properties of the integrated density of states and models related to the quantum Hall effect. Several other models and related technical problems are discussed. The main aspects of the proposal include: 1) Continuity and Regularity of the Integrated Density of States; 2) Spectral and Transport Problems in the Quantum Hall Effect; 3) the Aizenman-Molchanov Method for Localization, Energy-Level Statistics, and Random Magnetic Fields. The overall goal of this work is to describe the effect of disorder on the measurable properties of the system, such as the density of states, the conductivity, and the edge currents. The proposer also discusses localization for some previously untreated systems like random magnetic fields and nonlocal potentials. The proposed methods will contribute to the understanding of wave propagation in random media. Our understanding of many basic electronic properties of solids is based on the simple one-electron model of an electron propagating in a periodic array of atoms. This simple idea explains many fundamental phenomena such as metals, insulators, and semiconductors. One of the limitations of this model is that it predicts infinite conductivity. In , P. W. Anderson proposed disorder as a mechanism for limiting the ballistic behavior of an electron in a periodic array of atoms. He argued that the electron wave function should be localized in space due to multiple and incoherent scattering from the randomly distributed impurities, with probability one. Disorder-induced localization of states for many models has now been proved. Some of the work in this proposal involves applying these ideas to the study of systems with interesting geometries, such as a strip or a torus, that exhibit the quantum Hall effect. The principal investigator is interested in the nature of the quantum Hall edge-currents, and the nature of the electron states for regions with two-edges, such as a strip. One of the tools for studying these systems is the density of states that provides a measure of the number of electronic states per unit volume. The continuity of the density of states measure provides a measure of the effectiveness of the disorder in breaking degeneracy of the ordered system. Very little is known about this function. The principal investigator is also interested in exploring the effect on electron propagation of randomness in the magnetic field, and the influence of randomness on certain systems with nonlocal interactions doc19500 none Tracy The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Christopher R. Tracy to work with Dr. Keith A. Christian at Northern Territory University in Darwin, Australia. This project involves the exploration of the relationship between thermoregulation, the competing process of evaporative cooling, and body size in 10 closely related Australian frog species (in family Hylidae) that are known to have a wide range of evaporative water loss rates and body sizes. To do this, they will develop a biophysical model that uses physical and physiological properties of frogs (water loss rates, surface area, body mass, color) and climate conditions (relative humidity, solar radiation, ambient temperature) to determine what combinations of body size and evaporative water loss (EWL) rates allow frogs to thermoregulate effectively. They will then measure EWL and performance (sprint speed, hopping distance) for each species of frog across a range of environmentally relevant temperatures. Temperature selection will then be measured in the lab to determine whether each species selects a narrow range of temperatures, an indication of thermoregulation. They will also measure body temperatures and behaviors in the field using radio telemetry (larger species) and direct observations and measurements to determine whether wild frogs actually regulate temperature to a narrow range. They will then determine whether there is a relationship between EWL, body size and the precision with which a species selects temperature, with the prediction that these species with lower EWL and smaller body sizes will be better able to regulate temperatures, and therefore select a narrower range. Understanding the physical and physiological constraints on how frogs interact with their environment will lend insights into the potential impacts of human habitat modification on frog species. It will help us understand which species are more susceptible to extinction due to habitat modifications like deforestation, urbanization or even global climate change. Dr. Christian has a long history of research on temperature regulation and a great depth of expertise in the techniques and extensive knowledge of the important scientific questions involved in the study of thermoregulation doc19501 none The principal investigator will do research on non-linear problems in Kirchhoff s theory of elastic rods with the goals of (i) finding, for knotted and unknotted closed rods and open rods subject to terminal forces and torques, precise analytic representations of equilibrium configurations that show both isolated points and intervals of self-contact; (ii) deriving practical necessary and sufficient conditions for an equilibrium configuration to be stable in the sense that it gives a strict local minimum to elastic energy; (iii) obtaining insight into the dependence of bifurcation diagrams on knot type and the presence of intrinsic curvature; (iv) understanding the way in which the occurrence of plectonemic loops leads to hysteresis in torsion-stretching experiments for elastic rods and in single molecule manipulation experiments on DNA. The analytical representations of equilibrium configurations will be employed to develop a new Metropolis Monte Carlo procedure for evaluating partition functions for thermally fluctuating DNA molecules subject to specified constraints and end conditions. Graduate students will participate in this research which lies, as described below, at the interface between modern continuum mechanics and molecular biology. Each human cell has a meter of DNA in a nucleus that is less than 1 micron in diameter. Throughout the life of the cell, its compacted DNA is in a state of rapid, yet controlled, activity, because the regulation of life functions requires repeated transcription of appropriate portions of the genetic code into strands of RNA. The present research project addresses issues in theoretical mechanics that must be resolved before one can attain full understanding of the way in which highly compacted DNA is made available for the processes of transcription, replication, and recombination doc19502 none Bixby The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support an eight-month research fellowship to be done over two years by Dr. Rebecca J. Bixby working with Drs. Jose Vargas and Pedro Leon and Dr. Ursula Wydrzycka at Universidad de Costa Rica and Universidad Nacional respectively, in Costa Rica. Support for this project is provided by the Americas Program of the Office of International Science and Engineering. The objectives of this project are to investigate biodiversity and community structure of attached algae (periphyton) in tropical streams at La Selva Biological Station, located in lowlands on Costa Rica s northern Caribbean slope. No detailed taxonomic studies of algae have been conducted at La Selva. This work will build upon ongoing ecological studies of streams at this site (and adjacent environs), funded through NSF s LTREB Program. Seasonal, qualitative surveys will focus on microhabitats, sampling substrates such as plants, sediment, and rocks. Taxonomic studies from collections will result in detailed taxa lists including new species. Quantitative samples will be taken from colonized tiles incubated for a month in streams along a phosphorus gradient. These collections will be analyzed for community structure and correlated with solute concentrations. Results from this comparative study are expected to show shifts in community structure and diversity with varying phosphorus levels. Dr. Vargas is an aquatic biologist. Dr. Leon is chair of the Organization of Tropical Studies Board of Directors and has worked at La Selva. Dr. Wydrzycka is a botany faculty member working on Costa Rican algae doc19503 none Dagastine The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Raymond R. Dagastine to work with Dr. Franz Grieser at the Particulate Fluids Processing Center at the University of Melbourne in Parkville, Victoria, Australia. The goal of this project is to quantitatively study forces between two oil drops in the presence of a variety of different types of emulsifiers and surface-active additives. The PI will develop an experimental approach to measure these forces directly using atomic force microscopy (AFM) and a theoretical framework for interpretation of these measurements. The approach builds on his work on the interpretation of measurements between a single oil drop interacting with a rigid probe. The additives and emulsifiers that are common in industrial processes are commonly amphiphilic molecules, which partition themselves in the oil-water interface. Adsorption to the interface can be competitive or cooperative and the increased mobility of these absorbed species can provide different force behavior than that of the same species absorbed at solid-liquid interfaces. This work will provide correlation between additives and emulsifiers in oil-water emulsions and the interparticle between drops, leading to insight in formulation, emulsion stability, and processing. Understanding of the interaction forces between liquid-liquid interfaces, where attraction between droplets can lead to coalesce and phase separation in emulsions, is vital to predict and model emulsion stability in processing and storage situations. The Particulate Fluids Processing Center is part of the world-leading program in colloidal and interfacial science research that has been established at the University of Melbourne for more than twenty years. Dr. Grieser is a leader in making AFM measurements at liquid-liquid interfaces doc19504 none Responding to stressful events in the environment is a fundamentally important activity for all organisms. Within the stress response, there is a plasticity of glucocorticoid action, allowing for specificity in the response depending on life history strategy, reproductive stage, body condition, or even time of day. This proposal explores the mechanisms, environmental regulation, and functional consequences of this plasticity among three subspecies of the white-crowned sparrow (Zonotrichia leucophrys gambelii, Z. l. oriantha, and Z. l. pugetensis). The three subspecies have different distributions that are likely to affect the evolutionary pressures shaping the stress response. In particular, these sparrows breed at different elevations and latitudes and thus have breeding seasons that differ markedly in length. Gambelii is the northern-most subspecies, breeding in the arctic and sub-artic regions of North America. The breeding season is short (allowing only 1 clutch per season). Oriantha breed in sub-alpine meadows of the western United States. They can raise one and sometimes two clutches per season. Pugetensis breeds at low elevations in the Pacific Northwest and usually raises 2 or 3 clutches per season. This proposal explores the possibility that the length of breeding season has a strong evolutionary influence on how birds respond to stress. Specifically, in birds with time to raise only one or rarely two clutches, the fitness consequence of abandoning the nest may be substantially larger than in birds that can raise up to three clutches per season. Thus, animals with short breeding seasons should be less responsive to stressors, and therefore less likely to abandon their young. The stress response of each subspecies will be evaluated measuring basal and stress-induced corticosteroid responses to capture and handling, corticosteroid binding globulin levels (to estimate the bioavailability of glucocorticoids), and glucocorticoid receptor levels (to estimate the tissue-specific sensitivity to glucocorticoids doc19505 none The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Julie D. H. Spears to work with Dr. Ulla Lundstrom at Mid Sweden University in Sundsvall, Sweden. The goal of this project is to gain greater understanding of the controls on and ecosystem effects of ectomycorrhizal fungi (EM) weathering via low molecular weight organic acids (LMWOAs). It will address two major questions: (1) do high production and decomposition rates of LMWOAs explain the high evolution of CO2 sometimes observed from forest soils? (2) To what extent could trees get their supply of nutrients directly from mineral grains? The PI will study the impact of EM infection (P. involutus and Suillus sp.) on weathering rates (Si, Al, Ca, Mg and K release) of soils and pure minerals with Pinus sylvestris and Picea abies as host plants under sterile non-sterile conditions. Weathering budgets for the soil including accumulation in seedlings will be constructed. LMWOAs and siderophores will be determined in solution. She will also evaluate CO2 production due to biodegradation of LMWOAs in forest soils under field and laboratory conditions. LMWOA concentrations in micropores will be estimated using a mechanistically based mathematical diffusion model. The contribution of EM fungi exudates will be calculated estimated. Dr. Lundstrom s lab is one of the leaders in researching the impacts of soil mycorrhizae on forest soil chemistry doc19506 none In this project funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Judge will carry out research in the area of high-resolution electronic spectroscopy. Specifically, the singlet-triplet band system of selenoformaldehyde (CH2Se)will be investigated. Thiophosgene (Cl2CS) and nitrosomethane (CH3NO) will also be analyzed. Improved computer codes will be written for the simulation of spectra, for the absorption and emission that originates from an initial single vibronic level, for the calculation of Franck-Condon factors, and other features. The codes will be shared with other investigators in the field. The work will be done in collaboration with groups at the University of Kentucky, the University of Akron, and the University Claude Bernard in Lyon, France. Undergraduate students will participate in this research. This project deals with problems in the area of high-resolution molecular electronic spectroscopy. The research will be done in collaboration with groups at the University of Kentucky, the University of Akron, and the University Claude Bernard in Lyon, France. The experimental work will be accompanied by the development of computer codes specifically designed to deal with the complexity of the spectral band systems. This research will be conducted with the aid of undergraduate students. They will participate in the work done at their home institution as well as with on-site activities at the University of Kentucky. The students will gain valuable experience in modern research techniques and acquire both experimental and theoretical skills. These will be of advantage in their advanced studies, or work in industry, government laboratories or academia doc19507 none Hernandez The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twelve-month research fellowship by Dr. Arturo Hernandez to work with Dr. Angela Friederici at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive Neuropsychology in Leipzig, Germany. This project will involve the exploration of the neural correlates of grammatical gender processing in German. The PI will explore the nature of gender processing in a three-gender system and studies which compare gender decision to error detection. These studies are expected to further extend our knowledge about the neural correlates of grammatical processing. This work will involve a new line of research on the neural correlates of second language processing. The Max Planck Institute will provide access to a state-of-the-art Magnetic Resonance Imaging System especially designed for psychological experimentation doc19508 none Major The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support an eighteen-month research fellowship by Dr. Candace O. Major to work with Dr. Laurent Labeyrie at the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l Environnement in Gif Yvette, France. For this project, Dr. Major will use paleoceanographic proxies, including isotopes of strontium, oxygen, and carbon, and trace elements such as strontium, magnesium, and barium, in material from giant piston cores with the goal of determining the evolution of the Mediterranean-Black Sea corridor. Such data will provide valuable paleoclimatic information. Knowledge of the effects of past climate change on the continents is crucial to our understanding of how future climate change will impact our environment. Inland basins, such as the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, are at the interface between continents and oceans, and are unique windows into the terrestrial climate record. Recently, a joint French-Turkish research expedition recovered a suite of long sediment cores from the Sea of Marmara. Examination of these cores (which are archived in Turkey) will allow for the first time a high-resolution study of the last several glacial cycles in this corridor. In addition to collaborating with Dr. Labeyrie, Dr. Major will work with Dr. Namik Cagatay at Istanbul Technical University in Turkey. Dr. Labeyrie is Chairman of the International Marine Global Change Study program, which is an international effort to get paleoceanographers from over 25 countries to combine efforts in retrieving and studying giant sediment cores. Their goal is to better understand the role of the oceans and ice in rapid climate changes doc19509 none Hayes The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Marshall L. Hayes to work with Dr. Christine Ferrier-Pages at Centre Scientifique de Monaco, Observatoire Oceanologique European in Monaco. The goal of this project is to understand how environmental conditions control an animal-bacteria symbiosis, using an experimental model based on the stony coral Stylophora pistillata and the bacterial community that lives on the coral tissue surface. Two questions will be answered: first, whether environmental changes in temperature and nutrient chemistry regulate bacterial community composition and abundance; and second, whether environmental changes influence the bacterial community by causing the host animal to alter its biochemistry. The first objective will be to employ molecular and non-molecular methods to identify bacteria collected from the surface of S. pistillata with the result being a database of long-term bacterial cultures and of bacterial DNA information. The second objective will describe the carbohydrate composition of mucus on the surface of S. pistillata under different temperature and nutrient regimes. This project will broaden understanding of animal-bacteria interactions, providing insights into how symbioses respond to large-scale environmental change in general. Dr. Ferrier-Pages and her research team specialize in the fields of microbial ecology, coral nutrition and coral-microbe interactions. The OOE is situated within the Musee Oceanographique de Monaco, a museum and aquarium that has the ability to cultivate corals for lengthy experimentation doc19510 none Gonzalo The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Susana Gonzalo to work with Dr. Manuel Serrano at the National Center of Biotechnology in Madrid, Spain. For this project, the PI will identify the cis-activity promoter elements of the INK4a ARF locus that are responsive to the transcriptional repressor Bmi-1, and then identify the transacting transcription factors that mediate Bmi-1 repression of this gene. The INK4a ARF locus encodes two proteins (p16in4a ARF) that are important for two different tumor suppressor pathways in mammalian cells. The expression of both of these proteins is repressed during normal cell growth, but becomes elevated in response to oncogenic stresses to prevent the proliferation and survival of cells in which an oncogene has become activated. This study is critical to understand the control mechanisms that cells use to fight cancer. Dr. Serrano is an authority in the fields of cell-cycle and tumor suppression. His lab has critical tools necessary to develop this project doc19511 none Shields The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Colleen Shields to work with Dr. Maarten Kamermans at the Netherlands Ophthalmic Research Institute in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This project aims at a functional characterization of the network formed by the cones, horizontal cells, and bipolar cells in the vertebrate retina. The negative feedback pathway from horizontal cells to cones is an essential element of this network. Although we are approaching a quantitative description of this first stage of retinal processing, no psychophysical correlate for this network activity exists. Fortunately, a new tool for analysis of horizontal cell function from the cellular to the behavioral levels has recently become available. Recent studies in the Kamermans laboratory have indentified connexin 26 (Cx26) hemichannels as key actors in the communication between horizontal cells and cones. Cx26 forms putative hemichannels on horizontal cell dendrites near the glutamate release site of the cones. Blocking these hemichannels abolishes all feedback-mediated responses in cones and horizontal cells, suggesting an ephaptic feedback mechanism in which the release of neurotransmitter by the cones depends on the polarization of the horizontal cells. To do this, they will generate transgenic zebrafish with a modified dominant negative Cx26. Wild type and transgenically modified animals will be studied electrophysiologically to verify the importance of Cx26 hemichannels in the feedback from horizontal cells to individual cone photoreceptors. The creation and study of zebrafish lacking Cx26 function will yield a quantitative physiological description of this neural network and will provide a psychophysical correlate of its role in visual perception in both man and fish. The lab of Dr. Kamermans first described the role of Cx26 in horizontal cell feedback to cones. The expertise in the group encompasses electrophysiology, anatomy, psychophysics, and molecular biology. Dr. Kamermans is an expert in outer retinal circuitry doc19512 none Parker The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Timothy H. Parker to work with Dr. Benjamin C. Sheldon at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Bird song is one of the most ubiquitous sounds in nature. In many species, song may act to attract mates, but this possibility has not been well studied. Studying animal behaviors, such as bird song, is important both to our basic knowledge of nature and to our ability to address applied problems of conservation and species management. This project breaks new ground by 1) using experimental manipulations to determine the causes of variation in songs among individuals within a species and 2) integrating the results of the song study with the collaborators ongoing study of visual (feather) signals and mate attraction in the same population. Thus, this will be the most comprehensive study to date of the relative condition dependence and signaling roles of multiple signals (song and bright feathers) within a single species. The PI and his collaborators will manipulate brood size (add or remove chicks from nests) in a common European bird. This manipulates the provisioning demands on the parents and the food delivered per chick and is thus a proven method for increasing or decreasing condition in both parents and offspring. In the year subsequent to brood manipulations, the PI will record the songs of the fathers of manipulated broods, and the songs of returning males who were reared in manipulated broods. This will be a uniquely thorough assessment of the degree to which different song components contain different information about their bearer s condition. If signal expression (i.e., song) is condition dependent, theory predicts that it can be useful in intra-specific communication. The PI will assess the importance of different aspects of song in determining male access to females and male success in holding a territory. Once again, song and plumage data will be integrated to generate a comprehensive picture of the function of sexual signals in the study species. In addition to Dr. Sheldon, the PI will collaborate with Dr. Simon Griffith. Both of researchers have been involved in some of the most important avian sexual selection research in recent years. The host department is one of the leading institutions in the world for the study of avian field ecology, with a tradition of innovative research extending back over a half a century doc19513 none Tallmon The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twelve month research fellowship by Dr. David A. Tallmon to work with Dr. Gordon Luikart at Joseph Fourier University s Lab of Alpine Population Biology in Grenoble, France and Dr. Mark Beaumont at Reading University in the UK. Their project involves the evaluation of the power, bias and precision of new methods to detect cryptic population barriers, low levels of current gene flow among populations, and natural selection in threatened populations. The PI and his collaborators will use available shareware programs to generate genetic data from simulated populations with known demographic and evolutionary histories. They will analyze this data with other existing statistical programs to do the evaluation. The results will be published to aid those working on the conservation of natural populations. Dr. Beaumont is a world leader in the application of Bayesian and maximum likelihood approaches to conservation genetics problems. The Laboratory of Alpine Population Biology is internationally known for its pioneering research in the application of molecular techniques to population genetics doc19514 none Phillips The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Nicole E. Phillips to work with Dr. Jonathan Gardner at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Support for this project is provided by the U.S.-New Zealand Program. The influence of larger scale ocean processes on the local ecology of marine species is poorly understood. This project addresses these processes, using intertidal mussel populations in New Zealand as a model system. In marine ecosystems, most species have complex life cycles characterized by a benthic, or bottom-dwelling, adult stage and a larval stage that is free-living and drifts in the plankton for weeks to months. The ocean environment can, therefore, shape patterns of distribution and abundance of these organisms through its action on both the free-living and the bottom-dwelling stages. To date, no studies have applied the necessary integrative approaches to ascertain how the ocean environment influences benthic invertebrates over the course of their entire life cycle. Such integrative approaches are critical to our understanding of the cumulative ecological effects of oceanographic processes on marine populations, because different life-stages may respond differentially to the same ocean features. The focus of this project will be the influence of ocean processes on larval stages and the subsequent interactions that arise from varied responses by different life-stages. Two approaches will be used, field monitoring and manipulative experiments, to examine the role of oceanographic processes shaping larval dynamics and how different life-stages of marine organisms interact to ultimately shape local and regional patterns of distribution and abundance. This collaboration will produce a more complete understanding of the role of benthic-pelagic coupling on the abundance and distribution of benthic marine invertebrates on rocky shores. Dr. Gardner s current focus is on demographic consequences of variable ocean conditions to populations of adult mussels on the shore, mediated through effects of variable planktonic food doc19515 none Scurto The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twelve month research fellowship by Dr. Aaron M. Scurto to work with Dr. Walter Leitner at the Max Plank Institut fur Kohlenforschung in Germany. A goal of this project is to create technically feasible and economical replacement processes for traditional environmentally polluting solvent systems. The project will work to optimize the production of a certain ring-forming compound using homogeneous catalysis in supercritical fluids. A homogeneous catalyst is usually a chemically-active metal that has been bonded to organic molecules rendering it soluble in a supercritical fluid phase with the reactants. Its purpose is to accelerate the reaction and to selectively yield one product over other byproducts. A catalyst will be molecularly engineered to be both soluble in a supercritical fluid phase and selective for the compound. The sensitivity of the product formation to density will be investigated. It is believed that clustering of the reactants at lower pressures produces one product, while higher pressures produce a different species. Another approach will be to create a catalyst that is soluble in ionic liquids but not in supercritical CO2. Ionic liquids are salts that are liquid at room temperature and neither evaporates nor dissolves in supercritical fluids. Thus the catalyst promotes the reaction in the ionic liquid, and only the products and reactants are soluble in the supercritical fluid phase, not the ionic liquid or catalyst. This two-phase system will be used to develop a continuous process, which is highly desirable for industry. Dr. Leitner is one of the seminal researchers in the area of homogeneous catalysis in supercritical fluids doc19516 none This award supports purchase of a state-of-the-art scanning laser confocal microscopy system that includes an upright microscope with motorized stage and multiple lasers. The instrument is equipped for use of methods requiring oil or water immersion, and has fast scanning capabilities suitable for study of motile cells undergoing rapid physiological changes. Research projects that will employ the microscope include studies of sperm-egg interactions and the physiological and biochemical events surrounding fertilization in marine and freshwater organisms. Other projects include studies of metabolic depression in cells connected with intracellular translocation of a molecular chaperone after environmental challenges, and studies of photobleaching of corals in the tropics and its relationship to DNA damage caused by ultraviolet light. In addition to its role in research, the instrument will be used by undergraduate and graduate students in formal courses and related training activities. The instrument will be located in the Fluorescence Imaging Facility at the Bodega Marine Laboratory along with other instruments used for complementary methods. The instrument will be available for use by investigators and students from the University s main campus as well as those at the Laboratory doc19517 none As noted in the proposal, optical networking actually encompasses a range of technologies which are under continuous improvement. Many universities and research organizations are currently interested in deploying a subset of these technologies using various strategies to enhance research and learning. This proposal is for SURA to facilitate a workshop that explores the current state of optical technologies, assists in educating campus networking professionals about optical technologies, explores current best practices involving the deployment of optical technologies in support of advanced academic networks at the local, regional and national level. This will be a 2-day meeting in North Carolina, December 13-14, . The long-term outcome of the conference is expected to be an Optical Networking Cookbook doc19518 none Ramsey The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Justin M. Ramsey to work with Dr. Brian C. Husband at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. This project will involve the investigation of Achillea millefolium (asteraceae), a native wildflower with tetraploid and hexaploid populations. Recent studies document the local adaptation of hexaploid genotypes to xeric environments. This research extends those investigations to address the following questions: (1) What are the dynamics of polyploid establishment, and how do genetic and ecological factors influence this process?; and (2) What is the phylogenetic history of polyploidy in North American Achillea? Numerical simulations based on a life-history model (transitions from gamete to seed, seed to seedling, seedling to adult, and adult to gamete) will track the fate of hexaploid mutants in tetraploid populations, and identify the conditions in which hexaploid populations establish and persist. Previous empirical data will be used to parameterize the simulation. Phylogenetic analyses of Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphisms (AFLP) genetic markers and DNA sequence data will be conducted at both regional and continental geographic scales to quantify local incidences of hexaploid formation as well as successful establishments of hexaploids over the species range. This multi-faceted research will elucidate the mechanisms, ecological significance, and patterns of polyploid evolution. Dr. Husband has a strong background in molecular markers, population genetics, and quantitative methods in ecology and evolution. He has developed quantitative approaches in polyploidy research doc19519 none Goetz The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a seven month research fellowship by Dr. Arek J. Goetz to work with Dr. Pierre Arnoux at the University of Marseille in France. Dr. Goetz will join a group of active researchers at the University of Marseille II, Institut de Luminy, and the Center of Theoretical Physics, in research pertaining to the dynamics of transformations with low symbolic complexity. In particular, he will explore the relationship between the symbolic dynamics induced by invertible piecewise rotations, the geometry and fractal structure of the coding partition. The last month of the fellowship will be spent at the University of Exeter in the UK where he will join a team of researchers in dynamical systems led by Dr. Peter Ashwin and apply results from the theory of piecewise isometries to electrical engineering, in particular to the theory of digital filters. Digital filters are computer algorithms used currently in electronic devices such as cell phone and voice and image recognition devices doc19520 none This project addresses the formation of pollutants (other than dioxins and furans) in the cool zone--the region downstream from the flame in a combustor where radical quenching and surface catalysis are the dominant modes of reaction. A dual-chamber reactor is used in which the first chamber houses a diffusion flame and the second chamber (simulating the cool zone) can be configured to study gas-phase reactions, wall and surface effects, or catalysis by entrained particles. Effluents from both chambers are analyzed by gas chromatography. The study uses methane as a fuel pure and doped with ethylene, benzene or trichlorobenzene. Dopants can also be added to the effluent of the combustor, hydrogen chloride, nitrogen oxides, and water are used. Surfaces studied include silica, solica doped with copper oxide or iron oxide, a model fly ash, and real fly ashes from a municipal solid-waste incinerator and a coal combustor. This effort provides fundamental data on formation of pollutants and provides a rational basis for strategies to reduce pollutant emissions from incinerators, power and heating plants, and industrial operations doc19521 none The objective of this work is to establish the mechanisms of combustion of complex metal particles consisting of two different metals, typically an aluminum core covered by another metal such as nickel, titanium or zirconium, in inert or oxidizing atmospheres. The study includes the fundamental processes that control ignition and combustion of single particles and propagation of reaction waves in clouds of particles. Influences on combustion of chemistry, morphology (size and shape), and concentration of particles, as well as composition of the gas phase, are clarified on both the microscopic (single particle) and macroscopic (particle cloud) scales. To do this, advanced experimental techniques are developed based on electrodynamic levitation and electrodynamic fluidization. Also, computer-assisted electrothermography of complex metal wires is used to obtain kinetic data on metal-metal and metal-gas reactions. These data provide a basis for modeling combustion of complex metal particles, accounting for such characteristics as intermetallic reactions and cracking of solid shells. The results of this work are directly relevant for applications in both materials synthesis and propulsion. Combustion of particle suspensions in gas is an attractive method for continuous production of intermetallic compounds. Complex metal particles in rocket propellants offer reduced agglomeration and lower ignition temperature than pure aluminum doc19522 none Thin film deposition processes are capable of nanometer and even atomically precise fabrication of layered structures. While the capabilities of deposition are well developed to the point of routine use by the optics and semiconductor devices manufacturers, application of deposition methods to extreme precision patterning and lithographic fabrication has received, at best, limited consideration. This degree of precision is especially needed in the fabrication of sub-wavelength diffractive optics. This study is aimed at a preliminary evaluation of the potential of multilayer stacks to be fabricated and processed into three dimensional master stampers for molding or casting high aspect ratio, nanoscale features in polymers. The vertical dimension of the pattern is produced by cleaving the material, polishing the cleaved surface as required, and chemically etching back selected layers of one material type to produce a bi-level topography. Not only can stamps for one-dimensional bragg-type gratings be produced by deposition, but curved stamps (used to mold sub-wavelength lenses) can be produced by deposition onto curved surfaces (e.g. optical fibers or anisotrpically etched silicon.) Layers of from 5 to 200 nanometers will be deposited using and extending our recent electroplating methods that are noted for increased mechanical strength, reduced grain size and the potential for producing films on the order of one nanometer roughness. One of the most significant outcomes of this study would be the successful demonstration of electrodeposition to fabricate precisely controlled layers as an alternative to the more traditional, but much more expensive, physical deposition methods of sputtering and evaporation doc19523 none This project uses a variety of techniques in nonlinear partial differential equations to study several different open questions connected with the equations that describe the motion of a fluid, namely the Euler and the Navier-Stokes equations. Stability of a fluid flow is one of the most basic problems in fluid dynamics: stable flows are robust under the inevitable disturbances in the environment, while unstable flows may break up, sometimes rapidly. The investigator will continue to explore the relations between different types of instability with the goal of defining scales or degrees of instability. Sufficient conditions are sought to demonstrate nonlinear instability for classes of inviscid fluids. Another topic studied in the project is the equation for a viscous fluid when there is a nonlinear relation between the stress and strain tensors (a so-called non-Newtonian fluid ). A fundamental mathematical question asked for any of the fluid equations is the possibility of the development of singularities in finite time. Motivated by results from a dyadic model for the non-Newtonian equations, the investigator and collaborators use techniques of wavelets and Littlewood -Paley theory to give an upper bound on the dimension of the singular set in the case of the Navier Stokes equations with nonlinear viscosity. The greater portion of our world is composed of fluids: e.g., the atmosphere, the oceans, even our own bodies. However fluids behave in very complex ways that are presently understood only to a very minor degree. This project uses rigorous mathematics to examine several questions that are fundamantal to the nature of fluid motion. These include the stability or instability of a fluid configuration. In the view of many scientists, waves and instabilities lie at the heart of long term weather prediction with all its practical implications for global change and the world economy. Another topic under investigation concerns fluids with a nonlinear viscous force relation. This happens, for example, in models for turbulent eddies and also in fluids with a special molecular structure such a blood or some polymers. The investigator seeks to bound the development of singularities (e.g. infinite energy spikes) in the motion of such fluids. Date: April 26, doc19524 none The September 11, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York City was a traumatic event of unparalleled magnitude. In addition to the thousands who perished in the attack, literally tens of thousands of others were directly and without warning exposed to grave danger as they fled the buildings. Still others not in immediate physical danger nonetheless were forced to watch in horror as people jumped from the towers, or were engulfed by debris. Such images and experiences will undoubtedly leave thousands vulnerable for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Yet, based on past research, it can be anticipated that many of the individuals directly exposed to the WTC attack will recover their equilibrium and return to normal functioning within a month or two after the event. The goal of this small grant for exploratory research is to understand this remarkable resilience. In two previous studies, the principal investigator and his colleagues found that individuals disposed toward self-enhancement were better able to cope with extremely adverse conditions. The current study is designed to explore whether self-enhancing individuals who were directly exposed to the WTC attack (i.e., in or near the WTC and either in immediate danger or witnessed horrific sights) might cope better than other individuals. The relationship between self-enhancement and long-term adjustment will be examined using multiple measures, including a biological marker of stress reactions and ratings of participant s adjustment provided by close friends and family members. In addition, this study will further explore the social cost of self-enhancement and how it relates to overall adjustment and well being by including a wider range of measures of social relations than had been used in previous research. Finally, the study will examine how survivors of the WTC attack experience express emotions when they talk about their experiences on September 11. These data will help determine whether self-enhancers process emotions differently than other individuals and, if so, whether these differences hold the key to their unusual ability to cope with extreme adversity doc19525 none Zigler The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Kirk S. Zigler to work with Dr. Harilaos A. Lessios at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa, Panama and with Dr. R. A. Raff at Indiana University. The goal of this project is to understand the mechanisms by which development evolves. In sea urchins, it is known that numerous features of oogenesis and embryonic development have been modified in the evolution of direct-development from the ancestral mode of indirect-development. By exploiting a species whose development is intermediate between these two extreme modes of development, the Pis will seek to understand how the early steps of the evolutionary transition occurred. The work will focus on the sea urchin Clypeaster rosaceus, which develops as a facultatively feeding larva. The primitive state is the obligatory feeding pluteus larva. This species possesses some features of indirect-development (pluteus larva), and some of direct-development (large egg), combined with an intermediate life history (ability to develop either as a feeding pluteus or as a non-feeding pluteus). Dr. Lessios has worked extensively on sea urchin life history and phylogeny and Dr. Raff is one of the leaders in the field of evolutionary developmental biology doc19526 none The major challenge in technological applications of magnetic arrays for storage is to control the magnetic switching precisely. To achieve this one needs to have reproducible remanent state and, second, the switching process itself must be simple and reproducible. Only in very few cases with well-defined anisotropies does the reversal take place via a coherent rotation of the magnetization. More common, however, is that the reversal occurs via the domain formation at the ends of the element. For arbitrary shape nano-scale elongated elements, in general, it has been impossible to reliably calculate the field at which domain first forms from basic principles. If the memory element is ring instead of elongated, the magnetization flux forms a closure in the circular mode and the problems associated with the ends of the linear elements are eliminated. The ring elements exhibit two different highly stable onion states in addition to the vortex states. Two possible onion states, forward or reverse magnetized, can be realized at remanence and can be used for magnetic storage. On the other hand, it has been suggested that the inverse structure, nonmagnetic antidots (same as negative dots) in magnetic media, could be a potential system f or magnetic recording with areal densities approaching 750 Gb in2. The PI proposes the systematic experimental study of periodic antidot arrays to compare with theoretical predictions presently available. The investigation of the changes in the magnetic properties induced by the antidotes, different remanent states for antidotes of various shapes, influence of magnetocrystalline anisotropy, film thickness and possible application for high-density storage will be performed and the exploration of the high-density limits will be studied doc19527 none PI: McHale, Jeanne L. In this project funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, McHale will conduct a series of spectroscopic investigations of interfacial electron transfer and chromophore aggregation. Resonance Raman intensity analysis and absorption and fluorescence spectroscopies will be used to investigate the sub-picosecond dynamics of interfacial charge-transfer from excited electronic states of dyes adsorbed on semiconductor surfaces. Details of the electron injection by dye sensitizers adsorbed on colloidal titanium oxide nanoparticles suspended in aqueous and non-aqueous solution will be investigated. Along with electronic absorption and emission spectroscopy, resonance Raman experiments will also probe the nature of the electronic coupling of the dye and the semiconductor. This research deals with fundamental photophysical processes of dyes adsorbed on semiconductor surfaces. The results of the work will be of interest in the development of dye-sensitized solar cells and related photoelectrochemical, photovoltaic, and photocatalytic devices. Students will participate in this research and acquire research skills in a technologically important area doc19528 none Rus, Daniela Dartmouth College CISE Postdoctoral Associates in Experimental Computer Science: Postdoctoral Research in Distributed Robotics This proposed research is intended to create more versatile robots by using self-configuration: the autonomous organization and reorganization of large numbers of modular robots into geometric structures. Structures of such robots would be well-suited to a variety of situations where environmental models (e.g., terrain, hazards) and task specifications (e.g., sensing, manipulation) are uncertain. To create autonomous robotic systems of this nature, the fundamental goal of this research is to develop a science-base for modular self-reconfiguring systems. The postdoctoral research associate will explore new ideas on distributed planning and control and focus on general rather than architecture-specific algorithms. The plan is to use existing designs and robot systems to demonstrate the applicability of such algorithms to locomotion and simple manipulation tasks doc19529 none This project is a collaborative effort among researchers at the University of Utah Physics De-partment with expertise in Organic Materials Science, Transport and Device Physics, Optics and Optoelectronics, and Theoretical Physics. The project research goals are the synthesis and growth of novel semiconductor pi-conjugated organic crystals and self-assembled polymer thin films; fabrication, applications and theory of organic optoelectronic devices and microlasers with un-usual resonators; and study of the photoexcitation dynamics, laser action and charge carrier prop-erties in these systems. The approach is to study pi-conjugated polymers and long oligomers that form self assembled 2D lamellae and or other highly planar chain morphologies in spin cast films, as well as novel single crystals of oligomers, acenes, and their alloys. These polymer films and single crystals can be grown with very low defect densities, consequently substantially in-creasing their carrier mobilities. The photogeneration and dynamics of excitons and polaron pairs in the polymer films and single crystals at low excitation intensities, the formation of stimulated emission, laser action and exciton nonlinear processes at high excitation intensities will be stud-ied. Additionally, organic light emitting diodes (OLED) and field effect transistors (FET) will be fabricated using self-assembled polymer films and single crystals, along with study of the prop-erties of carriers injected into the OLED active material and FET channel transistor using a novel spectroscopic technique. A variety of unusual microlaser resonators will be fabricated, tested and investigated experimentally and theoretically. These include randomly formed resonators, which give rise to the phenomenon of random lasers in pi-conjugated films and infiltrated opals; asym-metric resonators that form both chaotic and stable laser modes with improved directionality over existing microdisk laser resonators; and 2D photonic crystals that will be directly patterned onto the organic crystals using electron beam lithography. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in topical areas of electronic photonic materi-als science having technological relevance. An important feature of the project is the strong em-phasis on education, and the integration of research and education. The combined resources, in-cluding crystal growth, polymer synthesis, experimental and theoretical physics methods, device fabrication, processing and testing, provide special opportunities for education and training of post doctoral associates, graduate and undergraduate students involved in highly interdisciplinary forefront research doc19530 none , Philip Liu, Cornell University The Third International Workshop on Long Wave Runup Models This action is to provide support for The Third International Workshop on Long Wave Runup Models, which will be held in July at Okushiri Island, Japan. This island was severely damaged during the Hokkaido-Oki tsunami on 12 July . The IUGG Tsunami Commission (IUGG TC) biennial meeting will be held in Sapporo, Japan, prior to this workshop, providing the opportunity for the workshop participants to attend both meetings. Approximately 45 active researchers (with a strong international component) will discuss the following critical issues concerning the accuracy of tsunami runup models: 1 -D and 2-D analytical solutions for shoreline movements Modeling of bathymetry and topography data 2D and 3D landslide generated tsunamis Tsunami forces on a coastal structure An in-depth examination on each topic will be presented. Discussion sections will center on several benchmark problems designed specifically for each topic. The workshop will have a dedicated WWW page, which will include the benchmark problems as well as other workshop information. In addition to the technical discussions mentioned above, the workshop will also focus on the NSF sponsored NEES (National Earthquake Engineering Simulation) project; in particular, the status and future plans for the large-scale tsunami wave basin at Oregon State University. This will also provide a good opportunity to discuss the international collaboration and linkage for the NEES facilities. The organizing committee members are Dr. Philip Liu (Cornell University), Dr. Harry Yeh (University of Washington), Dr. Costas Synolakis (University of Southern California), and Dr. Nobuo Shuto of Iwate Prefectural University, Japan. Drs. Liu, Synolakis, and Yeh organized the two previous workshops on long wave runup. The results of this workshop will be widely disseminated for further community input doc19531 none DMS - . PI: Dan Knopf My research centers on geometric evolution equations, notably the Ricci flow and related curvature flows. I plan to study seven areas in which I have obtained prior results, and where continued work is likely to yield new and useful mathematics. [1] When a flow converges, it is valuable to study the stability of its limit, in order to improve our global understanding of the dynamics of flows. [2] If a flow fails to converge but behaves in a nonsingular way, one can still study the dynamics of this collapse by classifying the asymptotic behavior of nearby solutions. [3] In most cases, a flow does become singular; so it is of paramount importance (particularly in regard to Hamilton s program to resolve Thurston s Geometrization Conjecture) to develop a better classification of singularities. [4] The basic method of studying singularities is the construction of a sequence of parabolic dilations (blow-ups). To take limits of these solutions, one must obtain (partial) injectivity radius estimates by various means. [5] The most powerful (but perhaps most difficult) way to obtain such injectivity radius estimates would be to study and extend existing Harnack estimates of the type pioneered by Li and Yau and further developed by Hamilton. [6] It is also useful to study the asymptotic behavior and stability of parabolic dilations at certain model singularities (a method which has been very fruitful in studying the mean curvature flow). [7] Further information about singularities can be obtained by constructing and studying solitons: self-similar solutions that often arise as limits of blow-ups. Moreover, Kaehler Ricci solitons have interesting connections with complex geometry and algebraic geometry. Geometric evolution studies the way an object s shape changes. In some cases, such as the mean curvature flow and porous media flow, the motivation is to model certain physical phenomena such as the motion of an interface in forming metallic alloys, the shape of a thin film of highly viscous oil, or the flow of oil in shale. In other cases, the goal is to improve the shape of an object, either to find optimal (most efficient) shapes, or else to help mathematicians recognize and classify geometric objects. My own research is part of a large program to resolve one of the most compelling open questions in mathematics: the desire to understand and classify all possible 3-dimensional shapes. But regardless of whether their motivation comes from material science or pure mathematics, all geometric evolution problems have much in common; so that the field benefits from rich cross-fertilization. In particular, ideas and techniques that are developed for any of these highly nonlinear problems are usually quickly adaptable to related applications doc19532 none Fang This award supports a two-year collaborative research project between Professor Jiasong Fang at Iowa State University and Dr. Chiaki Kato at the Japan Marine Science and Technology Center (JAMSTEC) in Kanagawa, Japan. The researchers will undertake a study of the biochemical and molecular investigation of piezophilic bacterial adaptation to the deep-sea high-pressure environment. They will investigate the biosynthesis of fatty acids and pyospholipids in piezophilic bacteria in response to high pressures. Specific objectives include: 1) determine the source (de novo synthesis vs. dietary uptake) of the membrane fatty acids in different piezophilic bacteria; 2) elucidate the extent of coupling between fatty acid and phospholipid synthesis and determine if molecular retailoring (acylation-reacylation) is utilized by piezophilic bacteria in regulating membrane lipid composition; 3) determine the variation of the ratios of different classes of phospholipids associated with growth under selected temperatures and pressures; and 4) conduct molecular cloning and sequencing of EPA and DHA biosynthetic pathways in piezophilic bacteria and analyze molecular mechanisms of the gene expression and regulation of fatty acid and phospholipid synthesis in piezophiles. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. Dr. Fang s expertise is in lipid biochemistry and instrumental analysis and Dr. Kato s expertise is in isolation and cultivation of piezophilic bacteria as well as in molecular genetic analysis. Results of the project will broaden our understanding on the mechanisms of lipid biosynthesis in different types of piezophilic bacteria in response to pressures and answer if microbial synthesis of polyunsaturated fatty acids is a widely occurring phenomenon in the marine environment. In addition, the research will increase our understanding of the environmental contexts conductive to the maintenance of life on Earth or extraterrestrial planets. The project will also provide a unique opportunity for multidisciplinary exposure to an undergraduate student. Throughout the project, results will be published in peer-reviewed journals and presented at scholarly conferences and meetings doc19533 none PI: Donatella Danielli, Purdue University ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ : This proposal presents a collection of problems motivated by the study of elliptic and parabolic free boundary problems, calculus of variations, and geometric measure theory. The P.I proposes to study a class of free boundary problems of interest in flame propagation. The model is obtained via an asymptotic method that simplifies a complicated system of conservation laws describing the process of combustion on the basis of physically sound approximations. The very way the problem is derived suggests viewing it as the limit of regularizing problems. One of the main objectives of the proposed research is to determine conditions under which limit solutions of the approximating problems converge to classical solutions to the original one, and to prove optimal regularity properties of the free boundary. Another area of interest is the optimal regularity of the solution and of the free boundary in the subelliptic obstacle problem. The necessary tools from harmonic analysis and pde s for the study of these problems will be developed concurrently. The P.I. has also a program aimed at developing the regularity theory of minimal surfaces in Carnot groups, and at investigating the validity of the Bernstein property in this setting. Such program entails the study of several basic questions. Among these, we mention the existence and characterization of traces on lower dimensional manifolds of Sobolev or BV functions. This question is instrumental also in the study of boundary value problems for subelliptic operators. In particular, the P.I. plans to investigate the solvability of the Neumann problem for sub-Laplacians, and to determine the optimal regularity of solutions. Free boundary problems naturally arise in physics and engineering when a conserved quantity or relation changes discontinuously across some value of the variables under consideration. The free boundary appears, for instance, as the interface between a fluid and the air, or water and ice. One of the proposed projects aims at studying regularity properties of the free boundary in burnt-unburnt mixtures. The results of this investigation will lead to a better understanding of the models, to the improvement of simulation methods, and ultimately to a description of how flames propagate in non-homogeneous media. The P.I. has also a research program that lies at the interface of calculus of variations, partial differential equations, and geometric measure theory. The focus is on the study of analytic and geometric properties of solutions to variational inequalities and pde s involving a system of non-commuting vector fields. The problems described in the proposal not only arise in a variety of mathematical context (e.g. optimal control theory, mathematical finance, and geometry), but are also of interest in other fields such as mechanical engineering and robotics doc19534 none In the late s, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA) recognized that the driving force behind the 21st century economy is knowledge, and that developing intellectual capital is the best way to ensure prosperity. In a series of publications NGA began to describe the ways that state governments, including their public colleges and universities, need to change to help their citizens develop this intellectual capital. Necessary changes include becoming flexible and adaptable, consumer friendly, reinvented with technology, accountable and performance-driven. Meanwhile, the market for postsecondary education has continued to grow in size and importance and on-line learning has begun to proliferate. The quantity and nature of the new economy s educational demands place extraordinary pressure on this new, more diverse postsecondary education market. Our nation not only needs more of its adults to have education and training beyond high school; it also needs more of its adults to possess scientific, mathematical, and technological competencies. Tightening state budgets intersect with these trends to heighten traditional gubernatorial concerns with access, cost, and accountability. Together, these trends lead Governors to ask for better measures of higher education quality. Specifically, they seek measures that are more performance than input-driven, focused on the customer, and adaptive to such technological changes as e-learning. NGA is engaged in a set of activities whose combined objective is the development of state policies that reward postsecondary efficiency and effectiveness. (1) A policy academy for eight states designed to develop new quality assurance practices for postsecondary education. State teams are participating in two annual meetings of the academy, where governors, state higher education executive officers, legislators and other key higher education stakeholders are working with national experts to identify new models for i) providing customer-driven, course-level quality assurance, and ii) assessing undergraduate student learning at the discipline and institutional levels. (2) A national forum for fifty states designed to help Governors define expectations and refine their postsecondary education accountability systems. Key themes of the meeting include: supporting K-12 reform with linked accountability systems; integrating learning outcomes and other measures of quality into accountability systems; and linking economic and social indicators to postsecondary education accountability. In addition to presentations of research findings and lessons from states, the forum includes workshops for board members, college presidents, and policymakers. (3) An Issue Brief designed to share existing research and practice in the emerging and important policy area of undergraduate student assessment. The desired outcomes of this proposed set of activities are: - Databases measuring course-level quality that are online and usable. - Comments and actions of Governors that reflect greater knowledge of the basic methodological and policy issues related to undergraduate student assessment. - Commissions, pilot studies, and or large scale assessment investments that reflect stakeholder consensus for the need to comparably measure undergraduate competencies, including science, mathematics and technology literacy. - State higher education accountability systems that incorporate student learning data and link more closely to accountability systems for K-12 doc19535 none L. Peterson, T. Branson, G. Jensen, G. Olafsson, A. Ryan This award provides partial support for students and active research mathematicians and scientists with limited means of support to attend and participate in the , , and meetings of the Midwest Geometry Conference. The award together with other funding will cover all expenses of the plenary speakers. The conference will be held on the main campus of the University of North Dakota (April 26-28) and will be sponsored by the NSF, North Dakota EPSCoR, North Dakota State University, and the University of North Dakota. The conference will include the following four sessions and speakers: 1. Lie Groups and Geometry. Speakers: Jiri Dadok (Indiana), C. Robin Graham (Univ. of Washington), and Bernhard Kroetz (Ohio State) 2. Quantum Geometry and Topology. Speakers: Abhay Ashtekar (Penn State, Physics), Louis Kauffman (Univ. of Illinois at Chicago), and Jack Morava (Johns Hopkins Univ.) 3. Geometric PDE. Speakers: Sigurd Angenent (Wisconsin), Bennett Chow (Univ. of California, San Diego), 4. Gravitation. Speakers: Peter van Nieuwenhuizen (SUNY Stony Brook, Physics), Andrew Waldron (Univ. of California, Davis) The organizers expect to recruit two additional speakers. Further information is available at http: www.und.nodak.edu dept math mgc The conference will take place at Washington University in St. Louis, probably in May. Gary Jensen, of Washington University, is the lead organizer. Tentative conference plans include sessions on the following four topics: 1. Three-manifolds, hyperbolic geometry, and geometric group theory 2. Geometry, analysis, and probability on discrete groups 3. Minimal submanifolds 4. Surface immersions in space The University of Arkansas will host the conference sometime in , most likely in the spring. John Ryan, of the University of Arkansas, will be the lead organizer. A tentative list of topics for the conference is as follows: 1. Nonlinear analysis on manifolds and metric spaces 2. Spinor geometry 3. Geometric group theory 4. Non-commutative differential geometry Organizers of the and conferences will develop more detailed plans in the months immediately preceding the respective conferences doc19536 none Knessl The investigator, together with colleagues and students, studies a variety of problems in computer science, information theory, and applied probability. These have the common feature that they can be reduced to solving recursion or differential equations. Sometimes these equations can be solved exactly using transform methods. Then one can obtain asymptotic information by expanding the results using methods such as the Laplace or saddle point methods, the Euler-Maclaurin and Poisson summation formulas, Watson transformations, etc. Many applied problems of interest (especially nonlinear ones) cannot be solved exactly. For these the investigator and colleagues develop appropriate asymptotic techniques that analyze directly the governing equations. These are variants of applied mathematics methods, such as WKB expansions and matched asymptotic expansions. The latter are especially useful for asymptotic problems that involve several different scales. The focus is on problems in combinatorics, data compression, analysis of algorithms, digital and binary trees, queuing, and coding. Computers play a progressively greater role in all of our lives. Important problems in computer science include sorting and searching, efficient data storage, and data compression. To decide on what is a good method to search out a given item in some database, or a good method for storing music or video with minimal use of memory, it is important to analyze the method or algorithm. For example, one might ask for the average search time, or for the likelihood that the search time will be very long, exceeding some prescribed tolerance. Such questions involve the analysis of algorithms. They can frequently be reduced to solving certain classes of equations. The investigator and colleagues develop mathematical tools for obtaining solutions of these equations, either exact ones or accurate approximations. Approximations are often sufficient, because for example the searching problem is most important if the total number of items stored is very large. This largeness shows up as a parameter in the governing equation that facilitates its solution. Related mathematical problems arise in other important areas such as molecular biology and communications, and the investigators methods and results should thus find applicability to a wide range of problems doc19537 none Life history refers to the reproductive patterns characteristic of species, and the schedule and processes by which their members grow, mature, and die. The evolution and diversification of life history strategies among Old World monkeys and apes, and the origin of the unique life history pattern characteristic of humans, is a major interest of anthropologists. To extend investigations to extinct primates, including hominids, a focus has been the identification of anatomical signatures of life history that can be recognized in fossilized bones and teeth. The majority of studies to date have focused on aspects of dental development (e.g., microscopic near-weekly increments in enamel) that reflect the growth patterns of individuals. However, numerous studies of other vertebrates have demonstrated that microscopic structures in bone tissue constitute another important source of information about life history, thus expanding the foundation for studies of fossils. The current study is designed to examine the influence of life history on the developing micro-structural organization of the midshaft femur and humerus, focusing on a restricted comparative sample comprised of growth series of vervet monkeys, white-handed gibbons, and common chimpanzees. Using novel microscopy techniques, the specific aims of this study are: 1) to describe and quantify variability in several microscopic features of bone known to reflect individual growth patterns; 2) to assess the correspondence of micro-structural variables with more traditional measures of postnatal growth (e.g., known body weight, bone length, and dental eruption); 3) to determine whether species differences in bone micro-structural variables reflect life history variation; and 4) to consider the influence of changes in bone related to skeletal function on interpretations of life history. If the potential of bone micro-structure for discriminating aspects of life history is established in modern animals, this approach may contribute to our understanding of the evolution and diversification of life history strategies among primates, including the growth patterns of early hominids and their paleoenvironments doc19538 none The focus of this research will be the development of the synthetic methodology necessary to achieve the asymmetric total synthesis of the following naturalproducts: (1) azomethine ylid dipolar cycloaddition reactions as applied to the asymmetric total synthesis of spirotryprostatin A; (2) intramolecular nitrone cycloadditions as applied to cylindrospermopsin; (3) Mannich-type reactions to construct alpha, beta-diamino acids and application to the asymmetric total synthesis of capreomycin 1B; (4) further development of peptide isostere methodologies and application to the asymmetric total synthesis of leuhistin; (5) lactone homologation methodology development as applied to the asymmetric total synthesis of N-acetylneuraminic acid; (6) development of stereoselective methods to construct peptide isosteres with three contiguous stereogenic centers; (7) development of methodology to prepare alpha-alkyl-isoserine derivatives; (8) development of novel intramolecular azomethine ylid dipolar cycloaddition reactions for application to the asymmetric total synthesis of palauamine; (9) diastereoselective aldol and lactone functionalization methods for application to a short, asymmetric total synthesis of quinine featuring a facially selective intramolecular SN2 cyclization reaction. With this renewal award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Robert M. Williams of the Department of Chemistry at Colorado State University. Professor Williams will focus his work on the asymmetric synthesis of complex, optically pure, densely functionalized amino acids and amino acid derivatives. The methodology will be extended to the preparation of natural products having interesting and important biological properties. The research has broad impacts for the pharmaceutical industry and for the training of graduate and postdoctoral students doc19539 none Baum Non-commutative geometry seeks to extend geometry and topology from the classical setting of Riemannian manifolds and topological spaces to a new setting of mathematical structures whose coordinate algebras are non-commutative. In this context, approximately twenty years ago, P.Baum and A.Connes conjectured a formula for the K-theory of the (reduced) C algebra of any locally compact topological group. At the present time no counter-example is known to the conjecture and-due to the work of many mathematicians-the conjecture has been proved for several very interesting classes of groups (e.g. real Lie groups, p-adic algebraic groups, adelic algebraic groups, discrete hyperbolic groups, amenable groups). Also established is that the conjecture, when valid, has many corollaries (e.g. Mackey analogy, Atiyah-Schmid construction of the discrete series, Novikov higher signature conjecture, stable Gromov-Lawson-Rosenberg conjecture, Kadison-Kaplansky conjecture). This project aims to discover and develop further corollaries of the conjecture in representation theory and in geometry-topology. Analysis is the branch of mathematics based on calculus. The fundamental ideas of calculus (differentiation and integration) were introduced by Newton and Leibniz and played a central role in the scientific revolution of their era. Topology is the most basic form of geometry and was founded by such eminent nineteenth and twentieth century mathematicians as Riemann, Poincare and Lefschetz. A major theme in modern mathematics has been the interplay between analysis and topology. For example, Maxwell s equations for electricity-magnetism are formulated via analysis, but many of the implications are topological. This project continues the interaction of topology and analysis by using and applying a new synthesis of analysis and topology known as non-commutative geometry doc19540 none The investigator will study mathematical boundary-value problems in continuum mechanics for new classes of nonlinear elastic constitutive models describing the mechanical behavior of rubber-like materials undergoing large strains. The material models exhibit strain hardening at large strains, in contrast to the classic models used in the literature. In the molecular theory of elasticity, the models to be investigated are called non-Gaussian, because they involve a distribution function for the end-to-end distance of the polymer chain composing the material that is non-Gaussian. From the phenomenological point of view, the models can be divided into two classes: models with limiting chain extensibility and power-law models. The former have the feature that a stress singularity occurs at the limiting strain and thus offer new mathematical challenges. It is proposed to use theories of nonlinear continuum mechanics to analyze some fundamental mechanical problems for these materials. These challenging problems will be formulated as boundary-value problems for nonlinear ordinary and partial differential equations, the latter involving second-order quasilinear elliptic partial differential equations and coupled systems of such equations. Since the stress response of nonlinearly elastic material models with limiting chain extensibility is significantly different from that of classical models currently used in science and engineering practice, the proposed research should have important practical implications. The work proposed here is relevant to the mechanical behavior of rubber and rubber-like materials (of critical importance to the automotive, aerospace and defense industries) as well as to the behavior of biological soft tissues including both natural and tissue derived engineered biomaterials. In industrial practice, finite-element based large-scale commercial computer codes are based primarily on classical material models and their predictions for rubber-like materials at large strains warrant reassessment. In particular, fracture of rubber leading to automobile and aircraft tire degradation is an important current technological problem to which the proposed work will contribute. Applications to biological materials include the study of arterial wall mechanics with emphasis on the role of strain hardening in the development of cardiovascular disease. The work is interdisciplinary involving modern methods of engineering mechanics, applied mathematics and physics. Fundamental mathematical studies of the type proposed here are necessary to ensure the safe reliable utilization of rubber-like materials in modern technology doc19541 none RECRUIT is an experimental alternative science and mathematics teacher certification program that aims to increase the number of secondary science and mathematics teachers from under-represented populations in the profession and simultaneously enhance the quality of their preparation. RECRUIT emphasizes two central themes: quality and innovation in science and mathematics teacher preparation. Specifically, the program: 1) creates a venue to recruit and prepare qualified secondary science and mathematics teachers from populations that are under-represented in the teaching profession. These populations comprise recent and advanced science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduates, and mid-career scientists, mathematicians, and industry personnel contemplating a shift into pre-college teaching, 2) develops an exemplary science and mathematics teacher preparation program that is consistent with recommendations and goals put forth in recent national reform documents in teacher preparation. Toward achieving this end, the program features: a) extensive long-term collaboration between education faculty, STEM faculty, and school personnel toward the preparation of reform-minded reflective teachers; b) a support community comprising prospective teachers, veteran mentor teachers, and education and STEM faculty, that aims to provide a seamless transition from teacher preparation into teaching; c) an extended induction, support, and professional development period that extends beyond initial coursework and training, that aims to develop participants pedagogical content knowledge and increase their retention rate in the profession; and d) advanced coursework in both content and pedagogy pursued after participants have spent time teaching in collaborating districts, with the aim of helping participants address advanced instructional outcomes, such as higher order and critical thinking skills, inquiry, and nature of science and mathematics, and 3) contributes through an intensive research component to our knowledge base on: a) developing science and mathematics teachers cognition, and subject matter, pedagogical, and pedagogical content knowledge; b) creating and sustaining communities to support and facilitate the professional growth of teachers; and c) developing effective models for collaboration between education faculty, STEM faculty, and school personnel through investigating the disciplinary and professional commitments and barriers that often impede such desirable collaboration doc19542 none This award is concerned about developing a new technology to study potentially damaging characteristics of near-field seismic ground motions and their impacts to building structures. By using a moving reference coordinate system, the motion (acceleration, velocity and displacement) trajectories can be decomposed into kinetically separated parameters that represent different effects of the combined dynamic forces. This approach is useful to probe the various types of structural damages caused by a near-field ground motion with prominent velocity or acceleration pulses-a phenomenon that has been observed as the cause of various types of near-field structural damages. The research will consist of three major tasks: (1). Analyze and extract damage parameters from recent major earthquake ground motions; (2). Develop a new sensing system to measure the damage parameters; (3). Integrate the identified key damage parameters into structural demand and capacity models for potential earthquake engineering application doc19543 none In order to address the increasing science and mathematics teacher shortage in rural Missouri, the Science and Mathematics Academy for the Recruitment and Retention of Teachers (SMAR2T) project is developing and testing models of Alternative Pathways to Teaching that will recruit and prepare individuals who possess STEM baccalaureate degrees to teach at the middle and secondary levels. The University of Missouri-Columbia (MU), with five rural school district partners, is designing and implementing two models of post baccalaureate certification: 1) an accelerated post baccalaureate program (APB) which certifies individuals within a 15-month intensive program that takes place both at the university and in residence in a partner school; and 2) a 2-year alternative certification program (ALT) in which individuals with provisional teaching licenses, who are employed full time by a school district, are supported over three summers and two academic years. A defining feature of the program design is the partnership among science and mathematics educators, scientists and mathematicians, and Missouri school districts in the preparation and induction of these teachers into the profession. Another defining feature is the role of technology in delivering innovative Internet-based distance learning opportunities for interns, their mentors, and university faculty through the Shadow netWorkspace software developed at MU. Project evaluation includes formative assessments to inform and continuously improve the project, and summative measures that allow the dissemination of project outcomes to a wider audience across the state and nationwide. The 4-year project is resulting in the certification of 80 new science and mathematics teachers for Missouri schools, as well as effective models of recruitment, preparation, and induction for post-baccalaureate students that can be adopted on a broader scale doc19544 none Hunter College is addressing the need for effective secondary teachers of science with the creation of three new five-year BA MA teacher-training programs in biology, chemistry, and physics. The new BA MA programs include six central courses designed to substantially integrate discipline and pedagogy content. The development of these courses draws on the considerable experience of the science and education faculty with integration and inquiry gained during the construction of the 23-credit, integrated chemistry physics mathematics course for entering freshmen. The six central courses of the BA MA programs are being designed by collaborative teams of faculty from the School of Education, faculty from the science departments, and high school teachers. A central theme in the new programs is training the future teachers to think and act like scientists through the use of inquiry. The preservice students experience inquiry in their early science courses, continue to gain practice with inquiry in many of their teacher training courses, and are required to use inquiry in their student teaching experiences. Recruitment is a significant component of the program. Early opportunities for students to participate in teaching experiences are provided and mechanisms are established to alter the climate in the science departments, broadening the focus to include careers in education. Support for newly graduated teachers in their classroom environment include a mentoring program and an outreach to Assistant Principals to build a community that can function as local support for the use of inquiry in the classroom. Approximately fifty new teachers are expected to graduate from this program in the fourth year of the funding period. These science teachers will be fully prepared to use inquiry pedagogy in their class-rooms, and will be supported locally at their high school and by Hunter College faculty mentors so that they can successfully translate their learning into classroom practice doc19545 none There is now powerful evidence that changes in the Mg Ca ratio of seawater have produced the oscillations during Phanerozoic time between intervals when nonskeletal carbonates precipitating from seawater have consisted of low-Mg calcite and intervals when these chemical precipitates have consisted of high-Mg calcite and aragonite. In previous work that focused on patterns in the geologic record, we showed that throughout Phanerozoic time biologically simple carbonate-secreting organisms, especially those that hypercalcify (produce massive skeletons or generate sediment rampantly) have adhered to the calcite sea aragonite sea pattern. This correspondence implies that simple organisms hypercalcify only when the Mg Ca ratio of ambient seawater favors their mineralogy. Thus far, PI s research has been based on patterns in the geologic record. They are now embarking on an entirely new approach: they plan to conduct laboratory experiments to test the effects of the Mg Ca ratio on the calcification of living organisms. Specifically, they plan three kinds of controlled aquarium experiments that they anticipate will be particularly tractable. They will determine whether, when grown in water having low and very low ( Permian and Cretaceous ) Mg Ca ratios, (1) specimens of coralline algae, which secrete high-Mg calcite in modern seawater, incorporate less Mg into their skeletons than when they are grown in modern seawater; (2) specimens of aragonitic algae grow at lower rates than when grown in modern seawater; and (3) calcareous nannoplankton, which secrete calcite, experience more rapid population growth than comparable populations cultured under identical conditions but with an ambient Mg Ca ratio equal to that of modern seawater. (in other words, when extant species of nannoplankton are grown in Cretaceous seawater, in which the Mg Ca ratio is close to unity and there is a large total concentration of dissolved Ca, will they bloom as their ancestors did in the chalk seas of the Cretaceous doc19546 none Bielecki The proposed research will be organized into two principal research areas: 1) Development of mathematical theory for risk adjusted portfolio optimization and fixed income investment management, incorporating factor modeling of security returns, and 2) Development of mathematical theory for credit risk valuation and hedging. There are three fundamental aspects of the first research area: 1A) The concept of risk adjusted control (optimization) criteria for investment problems with finite and infinite planning horizons. More specifically, we shall continue to develop theory and applications for mean-variance stochastic control. This kind of control problems is appealing to financial industry as it extends to more realistic dynamic framework the classical approach of Harry Markowitz ( Nobel Prize in Economics). 1B) Development of control methodologies for the fixed income investment problems with finite planning horizon coinciding with the maturity of the underlying bond. We shall attempt to overcome certain singularity problems arising in this context, which will lead to derivation of applicable fixed income investment strategies. 1C) Explicit consideration given to statistical estimation issues. Optimal control methodologies are rarely used in the financial industry, largely because of statistical difficulties associated with the estimation of constant drift coefficients in diffusion process models of individual securities. Practitioners typically channel their energies into forecasting security returns based upon exogenous factors such as interest rates and firm- specific accounting measures. The proposed research will serve to reduce the gap between theory and practice by developing optimization models, which explicitly incorporate exogenous factors. By explicitly modeling the dependence of the assets on factors, it will be possible to obtain more realistic models, to better understand the statistical estimation difficulties, and to be in a position to apply adaptive control methods. The fundamental aspects of the second research area are: 2A) Explicit consideration given to possibility of credit migrations of defaultable contingent claims. This will be done in the context of conditionally Markov chains both with regard to a single defaultable claim as well as with regard to several such claims. The latter situation is very important for applications to basket credit derivatives. 2B) Development of mathematical theory for hedging of certain classes of credit derivatives that are vital for financial industry. This will be done in the context of martingale representations associated with conditionally Markov chains. 2C) Development of analytical tools for computation of certain class of functionals of conditional Markov processes. This will build upon the classical Feynman-Kac characterizations, and will find applications for valuation and hedging of some fundamental (basket) credit derivatives such as default swaps. Although the proposed research will require fundamental advances within the areas of applied mathematics, probability, and financial economics, it is anticipated that the proposed research will lead to new and practical tools that eventually become widely used in the financial industry, and possibly in the insurance industry as well. The main reason for this expectation is that the proposed research addresses the need of the two industries for quantitative methodologies that would enable financial and insurance decision makers to properly manage certain categories of risks. The major implication of incidence of risks in financial insurance decision- making is the possibility of financial losses. In general, neither the possibility of financial losses, nor their occasional severity, can be completely eliminated. However, workable tools, such as pricing and hedging strategies, are sought for controlling some of the risks underlying financial and insurance industries, so that both the possibility and severity of losses are kept to minimum. The proposed research will provide mathematical basis for development of such tools doc19547 none The California State University, Fresno Science and Mathematics Education Center (SMEC) is implementing a collaborative teacher education partnership project within the service region of the university. SMEC, in collaboration with numerous school districts in its service region along with 2 community colleges, Reedley College and West Hills Community College at Lemoore (including their satellite campuses), is providing a range of program components designed to enhance science and mathematics teacher recruitment, induction, support, and preparation in the Central Valley of California. Activities are facilitated and coordinated through a new network of SMEC satellite partners known as Learning Communities centered at the regional community colleges in collaboration with neighboring school districts. Project activities include: 1) expansion of efforts to recruit and support future science and mathematics teachers (middle and high school) throughout the service region of California State University, Fresno with recruitment efforts focusing on under represented minority groups; 2) development of a network of Science and Mathematics Future Science and Mathematics Teachers Clubs based at the two new Learning Community Centers; 3) use of a highly developed and successful model for early field experiences for all SMECTEP participants in the project; and 4) creation of a user-friendly Alternative Pathways Program designed to assist potential science and mathematics teachers entering the profession from other professions that incorporates special programs and summer institutes designed to assist in the career transition process. SMECTEP incorporates new recruitment and support strategies building upon the successful Fresno Collaborative for Excellence in the Preparation of Teachers (FCEPT) in an effort to greatly expand outreach to the service region of the university. STEM Site coordinators based at each of the Learning Community Centers (partner community colleges) serve as primary liaisons to SMECTEP and as key facilitators in the project. They serve as the primary recruitment facilitators at their site in collaboration with key district science and mathematics teachers. They are also establishing Future Science and Mathematics Teacher Clubs in collaboration with local SMECTEP school districts and identifying science and or mathematics faculty on their campuses who may be interested in attending or leading professional development workshops. Academic Year and Summer Institutes focused on the modeling approach to learning are offered for preservice students. A partnership with the University High School is providing a campus-based demonstration site for the teaching strategies introduced at the Institutes. SMECTEP is improving the preparation of future science and mathematics teachers through early field experiences and other support and mentoring programs. The project is increasing the pool of credentialed middle and high school mathematics and science teachers in the Central Valley with special consideration for attracting prospective teachers from under served ethnic communities doc19548 none The James Agee Film Project is conducting planning to facilitate the integration of insights from a wide range of scientific disciplines into a filmscript for a four-part television series on the environmental and social history of the Appalachian region. Appalachia: A Story of Mountains and People will be the first film to weave the findings of the natural and social sciences into a story that examines the impact of landscape on culture and of human culture upon landscape. The planning phase will include the following activities: The film producers writers will work with a science content director to develop an outline of the themes and general organization of the film. The project staff will meet with scientists in small groups to brainstorm ways to integrate ideas and content into the script. The science content director and the producer writers will draft a script using input from the small groups. A large group meeting of the science advisors will review the script focusing on the overarching themes and to refine ideas. The script will be revised based on the recommendations from the meeting. The project director will review the scripts with rural school districts and get reactions and suggestions to guide the development of outreach projects and materials to support use of the film in formal educational settings. Review of the script and outreach plans will be conducted with two general audience focus groups, one in Appalachia and one outside the region. The principals for the project bring a background of filmmaking and science. Ross Spears, the producer director writer, has produced a number of award-winning films. The co-producer writer is Jamie Ross. She is a free-lance writer and consultant with expertise in ecology, history, literature and culture of Appalachia and the American South. George Constantz, the content director, is a biologist, naturalist, ecologist, educator, watershed administrator and science writer editor. The 15-person advisory committee includes members whose expertise includes: archaeology, anthropology, economics, geology, geography, sociology, ecology and evolutionary biology. A professional science writer also is a member of the committee doc19549 none The proposed research program lies on the interface between continuum physics and the theory of hyperbolic systems of conservation laws. It involves the following projects, which are motivated by the recent breakthrough of Bianchini and Bressan on the vanishing-viscosity method: (a) The study of balance laws with dissipative source terms through the vanishing-viscosity method; (b) An attempt to extend the layering method from scalar conservation laws to systems thereof; and (c) The study of the classical Riemann problem with the help of the new estimates of Bianchini and Bressan. Hyperbolic conservation laws belong to a class of nonlinear partial differential equations that govern the dynamics of materials with nonlinear elastic response, including solids like rubber and gases like air. The special feature of these equations is that the nonlinearity induces the development of discontinuities, akin to the familiar phenomenon of the breaking of waves on the beach. The discontinuities then propagate as shock waves. The proposed research program is to investigate a number of methods for constructing solutions with shocks. The objective is to settle questions of a theoretical nature, such as the issue of existence of solutions, by an approach that brings out the intimate connection between mathematics and physics, while suggesting, at the same time, algorithms for the actual computation of such solutions doc19550 none Yue Wu University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill $24,000 The project is about international collaboration with researchers in Korea, focusing on the structure and opto-electronic properties of inorganic nanostructure dye molecule hybrid systems. This research will use nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to study gas adsorption in single walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) and the structure of SWNT dye system. These nanostructure-based hybrid systems could play an important role in future technological developments such as molecular sensors and solar cells. The collaboration will help to advance research on the opto-electronic properties of nanostructure dye hybrid systems doc19551 none This award is to support research that will develop new and extend existing tree ring records from the North Pacific Rim. These data will be analyzed to provide multi-century time series of coastal and oceanic conditions. Field work will be undertaken to collect samples from northern Alaska, Canada, Russia and northern Japan during the first two years of the study. Ring width measurements will be cross-dated visual, graphical and computer assisted techniques. Tree ring data generated during this project will be used to evaluate several climate indices and reconstruct North Pacific sea surface temperatures. The broader impacts of this proposed research are that it will lead to a better understanding of natural climate variability for the North Pacific region which in turn is critical for identifying anthropogenic signals in the short instrumental climate records. This information will help the community understand future climate change scenarios doc19552 none Hart This award, provided by the Office of Polar Programs, allows a US investigator to join a marine geological research cruise (the CARBONANT project) sponsored by the Italian National Antarctic Research Program and to begin a new collaborative research project with Italian scientists. The project is to study Quaternary to recent biogenic carbonate production and sedimentation in the Ross Sea. Sediment facies enriched in biogenic carbonate are known from several portions of the Ross Sea continental shelf and slope, however, the content and distribution of these facies are incompletely known. In addition, the accumulation rates for these facies have never been documented. Shipboard work will provide an initial assessment of carbonate preservation and faunal content. Marine biogenic carbonates (e.g. mollusc shells, foraminifera) are important vectors for paleoclimatic and geochronologic information. Collections made during this cruise are intended for use as baseline for Ross Sea biogenic carbonate stable isotope and geochronologic data. Following the shipboard work, samples will be analyzed in the Amino Acid Dating Laboratory at INSTAAR at the University of Colorado. This lab will perform amino acid analysis on carbonate shelly fossils isolated from sediment samples collected on the CARBONANT cruise. Amino acid analysis is a useful geochronologic tool that has received only limited use in previous Antarctic geologic studies. This analytical method can discern fossil ages between modern and 5 million years before present. Amino acid analysis is best applied to biogenic carbonate (e.g. mollusc shells). Paired geochronologic analyses will be performed on single shell specimens including AMS radiocarbon and amino acid analysis. The use of paired analyses will enable calibration of amino acid racemization rates in Ross Sea sediments and an initial assessment of Ross Sea bottom water temperatures. The data collected through this project will be interpreted jointly with Italian researchers doc19553 none This research considers the development of resistant procedures for visualizing regression data and the development of rigorous statistical theory for practical robust estimators. Regression is the study of the conditional distribution of the response variable given a vector of the predictor variables. Many of the most used statistical procedures, including multiple linear regression and generalized linear models, are special cases of regression. Existing methods for regression often make rather strong assumptions on the predictor distribution. If this distribution is skewed or if outliers are present, then regression graphics methodology such as ordinary least squares, sliced inverse regression, and principal Hessian directions may fail to give useful results. Of primary interest in this research is the question of how to visualize regression when the predictor distribution assumptions are violated. Previous research has shown that robust estimators can be useful for visualizing regression. Since robust estimators for which there is rigorous theory are generally impractical to compute, another focus of this research is to develop practical consistent robust estimators. This research will lead to a better understanding of the increasingly complex high dimensional data sets collected for scientific, social and strategic purposes. Many methods using regression have been developed, and applications include biomedical research, predicting future observations based on previous data, and the analysis of economic and social data. Robust statistics combined with regression graphics has the potential to make simpler but more accurate models and diagnostics. New robust estimators are needed since robust methods that perform well on text book sized problems frequently fail if applied to larger high dimensional data sets that actually occur in practice doc19554 none Michigan, like the rest of the nation, faces a critical shortage of qualified middle school science teachers. This shortage reflects a complex set of interrelated problems associated with recruiting new individuals into the profession, preparing them to meet the needs of young adolescents, and providing them with sufficient professional support during the crucial first few years of their careers. This project models excellence in middle school science teacher preparation as well as addressing local needs by developing programs that comprise an integrated solution to these problems. Faculty and staff at Western Michigan University, Lake Michigan College and Kalamazoo Valley Community College and Kalamazoo, Portage and Vicksburg school districts are working together in the pursuit of several distinct strategies aimed at:1) enlisting motivated and qualified prospective middle school science teachers by promoting teacher education programs at Western Michigan University, Lake Michigan College, and Kalamazoo Valley Community College and disseminating this information to K-12 counselors in participating school districts, 2) equipping prospective middle school teachers by deepening and extending the program of science content courses offered at these colleges that model effective teaching strategies and meet their unique needs. This project is also creating a middle school science minor, composed of specific inquiry-based science courses for elementary teachers and science discipline courses for majors and minors, and 3) empowering middle school science teachers by providing professional mentoring and developing appropriate programs for novice teachers that address their needs for additional content background and inquiry-based learning strategies. Professional development meetings and workshops in the cooperating districts to support novice teachers and their mentors are a part of the project. Workshops for graduate credit through existing organizations are offered as well. In the short term, implementation of this program is resulting in the creation of a new middle science minor, enhanced science content courses, and professional development meetings and workshops. Curricular materials from undergraduate and graduate courses, as well as professional development meetings, are available nationwide via written materials, seminars, and the world wide web. In the long term, current research suggests that this comprehensive approach leads to improved scores on teacher certification exams, increased participation of teachers at regional and national meetings, lower teacher attrition rates, and improved student scores on local, state, and national standardized exams doc19555 none Large sparse unstructured matrices arising from various computer simulation and modeling are commonly solved by preconditioned iterative methods. This research project will study and design robust high performance preconditioners for parallel solution of large sparse linear systems, based on a class of multistep successive sparse approximate inverse preconditioning techniques. We will develop new concept and parallel algorithms of multistep successive preconditioning for enhancing the robustness of standard sparse approximate inverse preconditioning techniques, and generalize this concept to the context of other preconditioning techniques. Study will be conducted to show the advantages of such approach to enhance both preconditioning accuracy and factorization stability. We will build portable software packages to implement new preconditioning strategies for solving unstructured general sparse linear systems on high performance parallel computers. The general purpose high performance preconditioned iterative solvers from this research project are expected to make significant impact in the field of applied scientific computing. Our experience and existing strength will ensure that the project be carried out fully as proposed. As U.S. industry is more and more relying on computer aided design and manufacturing, large scale computer simulation and modeling will be a vital component in new products research and development. The outcome of this research will benefit U.S. industry as well as scientific research community by providing more efficient kernel software for large scale computer simulations doc19556 none Durrett Durrett proposes to study a variety of problems in probability theory that arise from questions in ecology and genetics. In the area of stochastic spatial models, he will study the asymptotic behavior of multitype voter models where voters have several opinions and are more likely to imitate neighbors with similar opinions. With Ted Cox he will work to extend their conclusions for the stepping stone model to samples of size k 2, and will study equilibrium properties of a hybrid zone which results when each of two alleles is favored in one half of the space. With Ed Perkins he will study measure valued limits of particle systems to produce limit processes with interactions between different types of particles. Not all of the systems Durrett studies will be spatial however: he will work with Jason Schweinsberg to develop approximations of genetic hitchhiking that involve the coalescent with multiple collisions, will study the phase transition in a quasi-species model which models properties of viruses with high mutation rates, and will continue his work with Vlada Limic on Kauffmann s NK model, which is a prototypical example of a fitness landscape with a large number of local maxima. Durrett s research is motivated by a variety of applications. Durrett will work with Ted Cox to extend their work on spatial genetics models to investigate explanations for the surprisingly large amount of linkage disequilibrium (genetic correlation) in the human genome. Understanding the possible sources of patterns in DNA sequences is important for using association mapping to locate genes and to identify footprints of positive selection. In relation to the latter question, Durrett will work with Jason Schweinsberg to develop an approximation to the genetic hitchhiking that occurs with the fixation of favorable mutation, which will allow for the derivation of analytical results for quantities that can currently be understood only by simulation. A major theme of Durrett s research is the influence of a spatial distribution of competitors on equilibrium properties of a system. With Simon Levin, he will study a collection of stochastic spatial models for the evolution of social norms. With Ted Cox, he will investigate hybrid zones where closely related but genetically differentiated populations coexist in close proximity. With Ed Perkins he will investigate scaling limits of stochastic spatial models, in order to construct new interesting examples of interacting measure-valued diffusions and to obtain approximations for particle systems with large range doc19557 none This research is devoted to questions involving heat equations in both finite and infinite dimensional contexts. The following issues are to be addressed. 1. The existence of differential type inequalities related to hypoelliptic heat equations in finite dimensions, including the existence of logarithmic Sobolev and Poincare (or mass gap) type inequalities. 2. The existence of differential inequalities related to heat kernel measure and Wiener measures on path and loop spaces of Riemannian manifolds 3. The relationship between heat kernel measures and pinned Wiener measures on Loop spaces of compact Riemannian manifolds. 4. Extensions of Fock space like representations from finite dimensional groups to infinite dimensional loop groups. 5. The generalization of certain finite dimensional approximations to Wiener measures to include the super symmetric quantum mechanics setting used by physicists. Most of the questions to be studied in this research are motivated by, or are outgrowths of, questions coming from studying a number of fields, namely the spread of heat in curved metal plates, quantum mechanics, quantum field theories, and certain aspects of probability theory. These seemingly disparate fields turn out to share a common mathematical description, namely parabolic partial differential equations or equivalently the probabilistic theory of Brownian motion. In most interesting (physically relevant) cases it is seldom possible to find explicit solutions to the complicated partial differential equations to be studied by the P.I. Nevertheless, it is often possible to discover interesting and relevant properties of the solutions. A typical phenomenon of parabolic partial differential equations is the fact that their solutions tend towards steady state values after waiting a sufficiently long time. For example, if a metal plate is heated in a non-uniform way and then left alone, the heat in the plate will redistribute itself over time so that the temperature reaches a constant equilibrium value throughout the plate. A fundamental problem, related to Poincare and logarithmic Sobolev inequalities, is the questions of how quickly do the systems described by the parabolic partial differential equations to be studied in this research converge to their equilibrium value. This same rate of convergence question has another interpretation in the context of quantum field theories describing relativistic (i.e. moving near the speed of light) elementary particles. For these theories the existence of a Poincare inequality has the desirable interpretation that the mathematical theory does not predict an unreasonable plethora of elementary particles. The particle interpretation of parabolic and related quantum mechanical Shrodinger equations will be another point of study. The particle interpretation goes under the title of Fock space representations which were mentioned in the first paragraph doc19558 none The Louisville Area Science and Mathematics Alliance for Recruitment and Teacher Education Reform (LA-SMARTER) brings together the University of Louisville (U of L), Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) and 10 school districts of the Ohio Valley Educational Cooperative (OVEC). Its goal is to ensure that the Louisville area has an adequate number of qualified and certified middle and high school teachers of mathematics and science over the next decade. To meet this general goal, LA-SMARTER is building a model teacher education program in mathematics and science education with an accessible alternative certification option; Preparing at least 50 certified middle and high school mathematics and science teachers in the greater Louisville area in the next three years; and Building a support system in four schools for prospective and new teachers that extends beyond preparation and induction experiences. In support of these objectives, LA-SMARTER is (a) enriching mathematics and science courses in the teacher education program; (b) establishing an accessible alternative certification program for non-traditional students; (c) implementing an aggressive recruitment plan; and (d) creating a support system for new teachers that ensures retention in teaching beyond five years. The Alliance is using teams of mathematicians, scientists, mathematics and science educators, and exemplary middle and high school teachers to develop four mathematics and science courses that help prospective teachers develop a deep understanding of the content that they will teach. It has established and is supporting professional development teams (PDTs) in two middle schools and two high schools. These teams are comprised of a mathematics or science educator, all teachers in the mathematics or science departments, and a group of three or more student teachers in mathematics and science. Mathematicians and scientists will work with PDTs as needed. The Alliance employs a full-time faculty member in the College of Arts and Sciences to recruit and advise students and coordinate courses. This faculty member is recruiting into both traditional and alternative certification programs, focusing on students majoring in biology, chemistry, geology, mathematics, and physics and students who have withdrawn from the College of Engineering. Also LA-SMARTER has established a team of staff members from partner schools and the University to develop and distribute print materials explaining the certification programs in mathematics and science, and to actively recruit persons in mathematics and science teaching. This project is also recruiting and creating a pool of emergency-certified teachers that subsequently complete a one- or two-year alternative certification program in middle or high school mathematics or science doc19559 none This multi-year collaborative project is developing, pilot testing, institutionalizing, and disseminating a comprehensive program to recruit, prepare, and retain future K-12 mathematics teachers with deep content knowledge, effective pedagogical skills, and technological capabilities necessary to enable all K-12 students to attain high standards of mathematical achievement. Project partners include the Kansas State University (KSU) Center for Science Education, KSU s College of Education and College of Arts and Sciences, and three school districts: Geary County Unified School District, Kansas City, Kansas Unified School District, and Manhattan-Ogden Unified School District. The project team features mathematicians, mathematics educators, and K-12 mathematics teachers, to ensure that teacher preparation is part of the continuum of teacher education that extends through the induction years and beyond. Five key components are: (1) innovative recruitment initiatives to increase the number of traditional and nontraditional students entering K-12 mathematics teacher education (including minority and bilingual students, STEM majors, community college students, and professionals); (2) a strong foundation in challenging mathematics content and technological knowledge based on state and national mathematics content standards linked to effective pedagogical strategies; (3) effective research-based methods of teaching focused on national and state mathematics teaching standards, current research, and best practice; (4) extensive clinical field experiences teaching diverse learners in a variety of Professional Development Schools under the guidance of mentor teachers; and (5) continuous support and assistance for graduates during their initial three years of teaching to facilitate their transition from teacher preparation to practice. The project builds on established collaborations with mathematics faculty from two-year feeder colleges to strengthen the mathematics courses future teachers take at these colleges doc19560 none South Carolina is facing a critical shortage of properly prepared teachers of science and mathematics at the middle school level. The state must recruit more teachers into the profession, these teachers must be properly prepared for the duties they will assume, and well-trained and experienced teachers must be encouraged to remain in the classroom. To be successful in the middle school, science and mathematics teachers must have a strong background in content as well as pedagogy, and they must be familiar with the way students learn in the middle years. In response to these needs, the University of South Carolina College of Science and Mathematics and College of Education in collaboration with selected middle schools in the Columbia, South Carolina Metropolitan area are developing and evaluating a Science and Mathematics Middle School Teacher Training program to provide pre-service middle school teachers of science and mathematics with the content and pedagogy they require to successfully enter and succeed in the teaching profession. The content portion of the program consists of six new courses in science and three new courses in mathematics for pre-service teachers. These courses are taught by content area faculty in association with master middle school teachers and faculty from the College of Education. The objective in each course is to provide the appropriate content while modeling proper pedagogy and assessment strategies. In addition, the project is designing a new professional education course in which the pre-service teachers study and develop ways to describe what goes on in a classroom and how it can influence the interests, learning, and social development of the students. The future teachers observe middle school students and record what the students are doing and how they set about learning the concepts presented to them. The pre-service teachers also have the opportunity to take part in a rounds program that allows them to observe and discuss exemplary teaching in the middle school. Finally, the future teachers spend at least six hours each week working with a middle school teacher. These experiences allow the new teachers to enter their classrooms with a broad knowledge of how schools work, how students react to learning, and how best to help students learn while they cope with all of the changes occurring within them and around them. An important part of the project is recruitment of additional candidates for the middle school certification program in university science and mathematics classes and in college transfer programs in Technical Colleges doc19561 none of a recipe for the seller of the instrument to follow in order to protect himself from the risk he accepts through the sale. A complete market is one in which the theory explains how to do this in principle, and in such a market the theory often provides an explicit guide to implementation of this recipe. In other words, in complete markets a new type of insurance has been created, and this has been made possible by existing probability theory. This type of risk insurance generated the revolution mentioned above. A real problem, however, is that in reality markets are not complete, and thus new mathematical techniques are needed to extend the theory and to make it more truly applicable. This has already begun, but it is in its infancy, and this extension of the theory will be a large focus of the proposed project. In addition, recently new models have been proposed to better incorporate liquidity issues and market frictions (such as transaction costs when implementing stock trades), in part by the PI himself. These models will continue to be developed, calibrated, and statistically verified doc19562 none The investigator will continue his study of L-functions. Specifically the problem of a subconvex estimate for general automorphic L-functions. These have wide applications to classical problems in number theory (e.g. Hilbert s 11-th problem on representing integers in a number field by a quadratic form) and to eigenfunctions on arithmetic surfaces. The use of the families of L-functions and symmetries associated with them is crucial. This project is concerned with the study of mathematical objects called zeta functions. They encode deep information about the arithmetic and geometry which lie at their definition. Understanding the functions has far reaching applications to the theory of whole numbers (and prime numbers) and more surprisingly to some foundational problems in quantum theory doc19563 none The investigator proposes to study arithmetic questions arising in the theory of automorphic forms and linear algebraic groups, especially in the context of the Langlands program. As an example, it is well-known that a wealth of arithmetic information is contained in the Fourier coefficients of a classical modular form on the upper half plane. The investigator has an ongoing project (with B. Gross and G. Savin) to develope a theory of Fourier coefficients for certain modular forms on the exceptional group G2 and to extract arithmetic information from these coefficients. The investigator is also interested in constructing and classifying arithmetically interesting cusp forms on reductive groups, and relating them to certain influential conjectures of Arthur. He intends to exploit the exceptional theta correspondence for the construction of some of these cusp forms. The theory of automorphic forms is one of the main themes of modern mathematical research. Besides being a beautiful subject in its own right, it is intimately connected with other important areas of mathematics such as number theory (the study of properties of numbers, with applications to cryptography) and representation theory (the study of symmetries, with applications to physics). Often, it has surprising applications to concrete problems, such as the construction of Ramanujan graphs which are of great interest in communication and network theory. Particularly important and elusive in the theory of automrophic forms are certain primitive objects known as cusp forms. The investigator hopes to further our understanding of these basic objects by giving explicit constructions of some of them doc19564 none The Transition to Teaching Partnership (T3 ) is a collaborative effort among the Cincinnati Public Schools, the Mt Healthy Schools, University of Cincinnati College of Education, Procter and Gamble, the Cincinnati Business Committee, and multiple community agencies. Its purpose is to recruit, prepare, and retain effective mathematics and science teachers committed to teaching in urban schools. Using Ohio s Alternative Educator Licensure process, recent college graduates and adults changing careers are receiving the education, support, and mentoring required for a successful transition from other activities to teaching math or science in grades 7 through 12. T3 is based on the University of Cincinnati s Cincinnati Initiative for Teacher Education, a nationally recognized, award winning teacher preparation program and Cincinnati Public School s award winning Peer Evaluation and Assistance Program. T3 combines the best practices of both programs in providing 24 recruited pre-service teachers with content preparation, pedagogical knowledge and skills, and follow-on support and development as new teachers. Recruitment for participation in the program is taking place in the local communities in which the schools exist and through partnerships with downsizing corporations. Grass-roots organizations have been included as partners to address the needs of community members. T3 is collaborating with these groups to identify and recruit qualified individuals. T3 also is working with the human resources departments of companies to make classroom teaching a viable option for their laid off chemists, mathematicians, biologists, and others. There is particular emphasis on attracting minority teacher candidates. Special features of the retention component of the project include financial planning, personal and family counseling, and contingency funding for unanticipated life events. Recruited candidates are enrolled in university courses required to meet the Ohio Alternative Educator License requirement and other refresher content courses. Candidates are required to become Cincinnati Youth Collaborative mentors and form one-on-one relationships with Cincinnati or Mt Healthy public school students. This feature of T3 is assisting teacher candidates in building rapport based on knowledge and trust with their students. It also serves as a reality check to ensure that candidates have an accurate understanding of urban youth and the difficulties they face. Teaching experiences begin in summer school sessions. Teacher candidates teach in those schools where they are scheduled to become full-time teachers in the fall (in accordance with Ohio s Alternative Educator License). Cincinnati and Mt. Healthy have a large cadre of experienced teachers who have been trained to mentor and support new teacher candidates. These teacher-mentors are leading teams of 3 to 4 teacher candidates with support from university faculty. Teacher candidates continue working with a mentor teacher until they earn a professional teaching license. Coursework completed in T3 also counts toward a master in education degree, a feature that enables continued university participation in the professional development of program participants. This program has the potential to become a model for the State of Ohio and the nation. The evaluation strategy has a dual purpose, one focused locally on the project and one focused on the effectiveness of this approach for wider dissemination doc19565 none Catherine Constable The PIs propose to hold a community workshop at Scripps Institute of Oceanography to develop a consensus plan for modern paleo, rock and geomagnetic databases. As discussed in detail in the proposal, the conference is being held to bring together an interdisciplinary group of experts to discuss how to bring technological advances in IT to develop web-based handling for magnetic data. The community will be considering how to integrate with other developing IT database activities in the geosciences, including the international community. Funds will be used to cover travel and accommodations of key participants from the different sub-disciplines involved in magnetism research. It is expected that a broad and interdisciplinary cross-section of researchers from academia, government labs, and the broad international community will participate in the conference doc19566 none Proposal Number: PI: Huyi Hu This project is devoted to the study of ergodic properties of nonuniformly hyperbolic systems. We focus on almost hyperbolic systems and some related systems. An smooth dynamical system is almost hyperbolic if it is hyperbolic everywhere except at a finite set of points. Such systems may have quite different ergodic behaviors from uniformly hyperbolic systems. In this project we will study existence of equilibrium states, including SRB measures and absolutely continuous invariant measures in multidimensional spaces; rates of convergence to the equilibrium states for both finite and infinite measure cases, and some related topics such as rates of decay of correlations of the systems and the central limit theorem; some other ergodic properties of the systems such as stochastic stability, Gibbs properties, topological conjugation. We are also interested in using these or similar systems to construct varies examples of systems that have given properties, for instance, diffeomorphisms or flows on any manifolds that preserve the Riemannian volume, have nonzero Lyapunov exponents almost everywhere, and have countably many ergodic components. Ergodic theory concerns the statistic behavior of systems. Ergodic properties of uniformly hyperbolic systems were the main research subject in smooth dynamical systems from 60 s to 80 s. The behaviors of such systems are regarded as chaotic. Now nonuniformly hyperbolic systems become a main research topic in the field. This project is devoted to the study of ergodic properties of almost hyperbolic systems and some other related systems. Almost hyperbolic systems are smooth dynamical systems in which hyperbolic conditions are violated at only finitely number of points. These systems lie on the boundary of the set of uniformly hyperbolic systems, and are the simplest but nontrivial nonuniformly hyperbolic systems. Earlier studies on examples of such systems, such as systems on the intervals and torus, show that some ergodic properties may change dramatically. In this project we try to develop some theorems for general almost hyperbolic systems rather than individual examples doc19567 none Geometric confinement of electrons in quantum structures including films, nano wires, and nano dots leads to quantization and the formation of discrete states or subbands. As a result, electronic properties including the total energy, electronic charge distribution, and density of states can exhibit quantum variations as a function of system size and boundary conditions. The structure and dynamic properties may also be affected due to electron-lattice and electron-phonon coupling. This project aims at a fundamental understanding of these quantum effects and phenomena. The proposed work will include photoemission at the Synchrotron Radiation Center in Stoughton, Wisconsin, and x-ray scattering and diffraction at the Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory. Besides the quest for fundamental knowledge, an important mission of this project is the education and training of students and postdoctoral research associates. The rigorous training provided by this project involving national synchrotron radiation facilities, state-of-the-art instruments, and detailed theoretical modeling matches well with the highly technical personnel needs of universities, industry, and national laboratories. Nanoscale features prepared on solid surfaces in the form of thin films, narrow wires, and small dots offer opportunities for creating novel properties. Namely, electrons in the system, confined by the geometry, can exhibit modified electronic structure, and thus the physical properties of the system can be size-dependent and thereby tunable. This project aims at a fundamental understanding of these quantum effects and phenomena. The proposed work will include photoemission measurements of the electronic structure at the Synchrotron Radiation Center in Stoughton, Wisconsin, and x-ray scattering and diffraction studies of the lattice structure at the Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory. Besides the quest for fundamental knowledge, an important mission of this project is the education and training of students and postdoctoral research associates. The rigorous training provided by this project involving national synchrotron radiation facilities, state-of-the-art instruments, and detailed theoretical modeling matches well with the highly technical personnel needs of universities, industry, and national laboratories doc19568 none This award supports collaboration between Dr. Shiferaw Berhanu of Temple University and Dr. Jorge G. Hounie of the Universidade Federal de Sao Carlos in Sao Carlos, Brazil to study a number of properties of solutions of systems of complex vector fields with smooth or real analytic coefficients. In cases to be considered, an integrability condition is always assumed to hold. These problems are motivated by classical results of holomorphic functions in one and several complex variables. Results from this research may have important applications to function theory in several variables and to the theory of linear partial differential equations doc19569 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Sarah Wisseman and her colleagues employ a small, Portable Infrared Mineral Analyzer (PIMA) to locate the sources of stone materials used to make pipes and figurines dating to the Middle Woodland (ca. 50 B.C. to A.D. 250) period and later in the eastern United States. This project unites archaeologists and geologists to better define the nature of materials used by prehistoric and historic societies in the Midwest and the relationships between raw material sources, production patterns, and trade of finished artifacts. The PIMA spectrometer is an accurate and precise addition to modern analytical instruments, with the advantages that it is easy to operate, fast (30 seconds per reading), and totally non-destructive. The PIMA is equally useable in field or museum settings, and has been successfully used to determine mineral composition and likely source of valuable artifacts that cannot be destructively sampled. For example, PIMA readings were taken of a museum figurine thought to be from Mississippi, but with no documentation of provenance. Surprisingly, analysis showed a good match with flint clay from quarries in eastern Missouri, known from the team s previous work as the source of most of the Middle Mississippian (ca. A.D. to ) red goddess figurines found at or near the site of Cahokia in East St. Louis. In another example, PIMA readings confirm a local source of pipestone for Hopewellian (Middle Woodland) pipes found in northern Illinois, negating the earlier theory that all such pipes were manufactured in Ohio and then traded to the west. The PIMA technique is complementary to X-ray diffraction (XRD), a well-established laboratory technique that is used by the team to check and refine compositional readings. The research team is using both techniques to build a reference database of stone materials specific to the Midwest. The current project will focus on a) identification of source materials for pipes beyond those already identified in Scioto County, Ohio and Sterling, Illinois, and b) sourcing catlinite, a red pipestone that has been consistently misidentified in the literature. The catlinite problem has two key components: defining the range of variation of catlinite composition, both between sources and within a single source such as Pipestone National Monument, MN; and determining the extent of catlinite use by prehistoric and historic period Native Americans. Since many artifacts in museum collections have never been tested by either PIMA or XRD, the team s goal is to vastly expand the compositional database for pipes and figurines and to identify new, local sources of pipestones and catlinites that have not previously been documented. The results will radically alter the picture of long-distance trade and exchange of prestige items in the Eastern Woodlands doc19570 none DMS - . PI: Lei Ni The principle investigator proposes to study the interplay between the geometry and the analysis on complete Kaehler manifolds. The focus will be linear and nonlinear analysis on such manifolds. The main tool is solving the linear equation, such as the Poisson equation and Poincare-Lelong equation, and the nonlinear equations such as the Kaehle-Ricci flow. The goal is to understand the space of holomorphic functions (plurisubharmonic functions), the interplay between the geometry and the function theory and applying the results to the uniformization of complete Kaehler manifolds with nonnegative curvature. The manifold is the space where every physical event happens. The global analysis on manifolds studies the overall properties of the manifolds by piecing together the local information. Kaehler manifolds are the basic block in the universe model according to the string theory. The proposed study has close connection with the theory of general relativity and string theory. The nonlinear differential equations studied in the proposal have applications in the study of the structure of complicated molecules, liquid-gas boundary, and even the large scale networks doc19571 none In this project funded by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Herman will develop numerically efficient and accurate semiclassical methods to evaluate quantum transition probabilities and correlation functions in nonequilibrium condensed-phase, gas-phase, and molecular-beam systems. These density-evolution methods require consideration of the full quantum nature of the evolution only for times on the order of the loss of quantum phase coherence. These methods are systematically correctable and provide an estimate of the calculational error at each level of approximation. The procedures will be tested on simple model problems for which exact quantum results can be obtained and then on problems for which experimental data is available. The results of calculations using these methods will also be compared with those obtained using other computational methods. At a time when experimental methods are able to characterize increasingly fast processes, it is imperative to develop theoretical formalisms that are capable of describing such processes. The work proposed here addresses that need. It further promises to provide a framework for analyzing and interpreting ultra-fast nonequilibrium processes in excited-state systems. The planned extension of the methods to systems that are far from equilibrium will allow simulation of new classes of chemical reactions doc19572 none Mladen Bestvina The project encompasses different aspects of geometry, topology, and geometric group theory. The unifying theme is the geometric and topological study of spaces with large symmetry groups. Sometimes it is the group that arises first, for example as a symmetry group of an algebraic object, and then a space is constructed with symmetries reflecting this group. This allows for geometric topological methods to be used in algebra. Another aspect of the project involves finding hyperbolic structures on 3-dimensional manifolds. The possibility that all (compact) spaces that locally look like our ordinary 3-dimensional space are in fact geometric objects was first conceived by W.P. Thurston and verified in many cases. Yet another aspect involves Diophantine geometry over groups. This is about a study of logical statements that hold for a particular class of groups. Surprisingly, as shown by the work of Z. Sela, topology enters this study; for example, surfaces appear naturally when one considers free groups. More specifically, the topics of the project are: Singularities of character varieties and topological dynamics on character varieties, Explicit bounds in the compactness theorems for spaces of discrete and faithful representations, Weak hyperbolization conjecture and immersed surface laminations in 3-manifolds, Constructions of Kaehler groups of low cohomological dimension, Diophantine geometry over groups, Finiteness properties of the Torelli group, Rigidity theorems for Coxeter, Artin, and related groups doc19573 none A variety of astronomical systems will be studied. These include modeling the dynamical evolution of high mass binary star systems in star clusters, simulating the formation of binaries containing a neutron star or black hole, modeling the population of close white dwarf binaries, studying the inspiral of compact objects into central supermassive black holes, and studying possible background gravitational radiation due to non-standard model physics in the early universe. This research will be carried out under the auspices of the Center for Gravitational Wave Physics since all of the research topics are important in understanding the nature of sources of gravitational radiation and their likely strength and rate of occurrence. Detection strategies for gravitational wave detectors require such information doc19574 none Dr. Deepak Kapur U of New Mexico The problems of (i)determining whether a given polynomial equation system has a common solution, (ii)deriving conditions on parameters appearing n polynomial equations,such that they have a common solution,as well as (iii)developing an e .cient representation of common solutions are of fundamental significance. These problems arise in numerous applications:engineering and design, robotics, universe kinematics, manufacturing, design and analysis of nano devices in nanotechnology, image understanding, graphics,solid modeling,implicitization,CAD-CAM design,geometric construction,design,and control theory. Multivariate resultants and related elimination methods have been found useful for addressing these problems. The resultant of a polynomial equation system gives the necessary and su .cient condition on its parameters for a common solution to exist. When there are parameters in a polynomial system,numerical techniques often do not apply. Investigations of efficient elimination methods are also of considerable importance in algebraic geometry,polynomial ideal theory and other related aspects of computational algebra and symbolic computation. Experimental and theoretical analysis indicates that the generalized Dixon formulation developed by Kapur,Saxena and Yang,based on Bezout-Cayley-Dixon methods and efficient elimination resultant method. A particularly attractive feature of the generalized Dixon formulation is that t s problem-adaptive since timplicitly exploits the sparse structure of the associated polynomial system as well as its non-genericity doc19575 none This funding provides support for the Principal Investigator to sponsor a visit for five researchers from Latin America to the Center for Indigenous Languages of Latin America at the University of Texas. The guests will participate in activities and a conference focusing on preserving oral indigenous languages. Activities in this area are regarded by many as essential to prevent the disappearance of these languages and the knowledge and cultural assets they embody from the human record. It has been documented that indigenous languages around the world are disappearing at an alarming rate. The Digital Libraries Initiative is funding several projects focusing on the capture and retrieval of audio content and transcripts. Having indigenous linguists present and involved in centers which are focusing on preservation of indigenous languages using digital technologies is essential to the overall success of the endeavor doc19576 none Dillon, Laura Michigan State University CISE Postdoctoral Associates in Experimental Computer Science: Automating Development of Interactive Distributed Applications Interactive distributed applications (IDAs) are software applications that involve direct interaction with users and are distributed across a computer network. IDA development is complicated by application characteristics such as interactivity, concurrency, non-determinism, heterogeneity, and severe resource constraints. Current software development tools address some of these complications, but development environments supporting integrated use of IDA development tools are lacking. The postdoctoral research associate will work on the integration and validation of Meridian, a collection of tools designed to help automate the development of IDAs. Specifically, the associate will 1) research the automated generation and integration of analysis tools that are easily and efficiently integrated into a comprehensive environment, and 2) perform case studies of different classes of IDAs and populate class-specific IDA information repositories for reuse doc19577 none Palumbo This three-year award involves researchers and undergraduate engineering students in a multinational, interdisciplinary, high temperature, solar thermal chemistry project led by Robert D. Palumbo of Valparaiso University and Alexander Wokaun of the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. During each of three summers, two Valparaiso students will spend 10 weeks at PSI with scientists and engineers from ETH, the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel), the French National Center for Scientific Research, and industries, chemTEK in Germany and ScanArc in Sweden. The researchers participate in a European Union funded project called SOLZINC. The goals of the project are: (1) to develop technology for the long-term storage of solar energy in the form of chemical energy and (2) to develop means for reducing industrial CO2 using solar energy as the source of process heat for industrial production of Zn (Zinc). Students will participate in reactor design, experiments using a solar furnace, and interpretation of experimental data. Some student projects include mathematical modeling to predict the performance of a solar reactor effecting the ZnO (Zinc Oxide) carbothermic reaction; and studies of biomass as a potential carbon source for thermal reduction of ZnO. The project takes advantage of complementary expertise of US, Swiss, Israeli, and European academic and industrial engineers and of excellent facilities at PSI, in particular, a high flux solar furnace that delivers 40kW of solar power. The project will be used to evaluate the potential of a solar thermal reactor for long-term storage of solar energy in the form of chemical energy and the potential of reducing CO2 emissions in the metals production industry by using a solar process. Students will be trained in international research and establish international connections for future work as researchers and engineers doc19578 none The project studies, using probabilistic methods, the behavior of finite random structures as their size grows larger and larger, focusing on five specific topics. Two are from theoretical combinatorics: non-uniform random mappings; and largest common substructures in settings such as partial orders or leaf-labeled trees. One is from statistical physics: mean-field models of disordered systems, in particular of first-passage percolation and its associated percolation function. Another is from biology: models of purely random macroevolution which can handle simultaneously phylogenetic trees on extant species and time series of extinct species. The final topic is random affinity graphs, which seek to abstract one aspect of the structure of real world graphs such as those for human social networks (``small worlds ) or WWW links. Conceptually, the project is intended as a bridge between abstract mathematical theory of random structures, which focuses on difficult properties of unrealistically simple models, and the engineering type of examples of complex networks (the physical and hypertext links of the Internet; transportation networks) whose models exploit the details of the particular structure. It is hoped that study of these five particular models will lead to novel mathematical methodology useful in these more applied areas doc19579 none This project aims at studying problems fundamental in cellular networks and specifically related to the call admission control schemes. Efficient call admission control schemes provide the users with access to wireless networks and at the same time are crucial for network operators in guaranteeing services and operating efficiently. In this three-year project, the following research activities will be particularly pursued. First, a novel call admission control algorithms for signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) based power-controlled direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) cellular networks that provide multiple classes of services will be developed. When a new call (or a handoff call) arriving at a base station requesting for admission, the new, desired, power level for that new call as well as the power levels for all existing calls will be calculated. These calculations are based on the interference received at the base station and the desired quality of service target (i.e., the desired SIR) for each call. In the case of a higher priority calls, e.g. handoff calls, different thresholds for new calls and handoff calls can be allowed. The research within this project will particularly focus on the admission control decision based on a computationally tractable calculation of the target power level, which would avoid the iterative process of power control for determination of the required power levels for all users. Finally, power control algorithms with vigorous theoretical results regarding stability, convergence, and feasibility of solutions will also be studied for the best applicability in future cellular networks. This project will include graduate and undergraduate students in research and will be conducted as means of creating awareness and interest among students on the issues surrounding wireless networks doc19580 none The Accessible Retired Computers in Biology (ARCiB) project will provide ongoing transitional support for software packages, especially those associated with structural biology, as existing hardware platforms are replaced. This will reduce disruption to research and education programs that use these software packages. ARCiB will be used to help support existing packages and make them available by remote access. If packages are open source and developer would like to transfer all or part of the support, the ARCiB will offer both an archive location for source and binaries as well as making the packages available. Undergraduates are actively involved in the research program for maintaining this multi-platform interoperability doc19581 none The research is directed at the synthesis, characterization and assembly of passivated, colloidal nanocrystals of metals into ordered superlattices with the fundamental goal of understanding the evolution of their static and dynamic magnetic behavior as a function of nanocrystal size and shape, superlattice dimensionality, organizational symmetry and interparticle interactions. The objective of the work is to use magnetometry methods to get a deeper understanding of the magnetic metrology of nanoscale structures. The study will provide fundamental mechanisms of magnetic reversal with emphasis on the role of finite size and interaction effects as well as the origin of dipolar ferromagnetism, in the absence of interparticle exchange interactions. The study emphasizes on the entropy-driven self-assembly and template-assisted crystallization processes for the synthesis of large-area (mm size) superlattices along with systematic structural and chemical characterization using electron and photon probes. Newly emerging MEMS based metrology methods and electron holography on the nanocrystal samples will be studied through collaborative work. The fundamental goal is a thorough understanding, prediction and control of cooperative magnetic behavior over different length scales and time signatures in artificially tailored solids. In addition, the work will provide solutions to fundamental questions associated with magnetic reversal. The research has broad technological implications for it will contribute to the development of the ultimate magnetic recording media, i.e. single-particle per bit recording as well as in MEMS technology doc19582 none DMS - . The principal investigator plans to study three separate topics: i) Eigenvalue estimates for the Laplacian on Hermitian holomorphic line bundles, ii) Quantum Unique Ergodicity, and iii) Behavior of eigenfunctions near the ideal boundary of hyperbolic space. Consider the tensor powers of a Hermitian holomorphic line bundle, over a compact complex manifold. If the curvature form of the line bundle is strictly positive, then the first non--zero eigenvalue, of the Laplacian, acting on sections of the $k$th power, is bounded below uniformly in $k$. The proposal is to prove that the first non--zero eigenvalue is uniformly bounded below when the curvature is semipositive everywhere and positive for at least one point. The problem can be reformulated in terms of CR geometry. Microlocal analysis will be applied to the reformulated problem. The problem of quantum unique ergodicity concerns concentration of eigenfunctions on manifolds with ergodic geodesic flow. We propose to construct examples where sequences of eigenfunctions concentrate along isolated closed geodesics or on one parameter families of closed geodesics. The first step is to find quasimodes (approximate eigenfunctions). Next one must show that these quasimodes correspond to individual eigenfunctions rather than sums of several eigenfunctions. The hyperbolic space has essential spectrum which is a proper subset of the positive real line. There do exist eigenfunctions, defined on the complements of compact sets, whose eigenvalue lies below the start of the essential spectrum. The behavior of these eigenfunctions will be studied near the ideal boundary at infinity. The goal is to understand the nodal set by means of a perturbation expansion. It appears that the case of surfaces is much more tractable than the higher dimensional cases. To develop our understanding of the quantum phenomena, mathematicians are often inspired by the analogy with classical mechanics. The passage from the classical to the quantum level is called the semiclassical limit. If the classical motion is chaotic, one expects the probability distribution of the quantum particle to be dispersed. Exceptions to this pattern, where the particle concentrates, are of particular interest. Similarly, if an energy estimate holds under strict positivity conditions of a classical curvature form, one naturally investigates the borderline case where the curvature form is non--negative. One hopes that regularity properties will persevere in the more general situation. This type of question is interesting because non--negative objects often occur as the limits of positive objects. The nodal set of a quantum particle is the stationary set for the associated wave motion. Its distribution and shape are of fundamental interest, but poorly understood, especially in dimensions larger than two doc19583 none The SIAM project, DSWeb, will explore new ways of communication via the web. DSWeb is an Internet portal with a goal to become the primary site for the organization and distribution of timely information about all aspects of dynamical systems and its applications. DSWeb will promote research and the exchange of ideas across a broad, but focused community. DSWeb will not only serve the dynamical systems community. It will also serve the purpose of outreach to other sciences and to a general scientifically literate audience. Aspects of DSWeb are intended to reach this broad audience. It will be offered with free access doc19584 none Proposal Number PI: Laszlo Lempert This project has two components. One concerns complex analysis on infinite dimensional manifolds, and the proposed problems are mostly cohomological in nature. They center around the computation of Dolbeault and sheaf cohomology groups. Two types of manifolds will be investigated: loop spaces of finite dimensional compact complex manifolds and Stein manifolds. One (longer term) goal will be to prove a Hirzebruch--Riemann--Roch type index theorem on loop spaces, another to discover an appropriate class of sheaves for which cohomology can be proved to vanish on infinite dimensional Stein manifolds (generalization of the notion of coherent sheaves). I will also work on solving the inhomogeneous Cauchy--Riemann equations in pseudoconvex domains in Hilbert spaces. The finite dimensional component is about extending the concept of holomorphic motion from the complex plane to motions of higher dimensional complex manifolds and their subsets. This will hopefully provide a useful tool for higher dimensional complex dynamics. Mathematics in general elucidates the formal structures that underlie the exploration of our world. An example of such a structure is a function, which formalizes the notion of dependence among variable quantities. For instance temperature at some location on Earth depends on the latitude and the longitude of the location, but also on the altitude, and the time of the measurement: we have a function of four variables. In another context, the temperature of say a mole of a gas depends on the velocity of each molecule of the gas, thus on trillions and trillions of variables. Functions of such a huge number of variables are best understood by idealizing to infinitely many variables. These are the main objects of the proposed research: functions of infinitely many variables. The variables are complex rather than real numbers. Introducing complex variables typically streamlines problems, and having solved the complexified problem one can often go back and obtain, by restriction, a solution to the original real problem. The problems to be considered are partly motivated by various mathematical disciplines, and also by theoretical physics doc19585 none Interest in a class of new class of liquid crystal materials referred to as banana liquid crystals is presently very high among the chemistry, physics and liquid crystal device community. A workshop to be held in the Fall of will be hosted by the Ferroelectric Liquid Crystal Materials Research Center, an NSF MRSEC at the University of Colorado at Boulder to address important and timely research issues that have recently emerged. This will include discussing and agreeing on a much needed classification system to replace the existing convention based on order of discovery. The funds will be used to assist junior faculty, post-docs, and graduate students to attend and present their own research. The liquid crystal community continues to have direct impact on education and the development of new materials for technological advances of high significance to society. The latter include the development of novel electro optic devices of high commercial interest doc19586 none The International Children s Digital Library requests funds for a series of stakeholder meetings. The purpose of the meetings is to explore and develop strategies for implementing a comprehensive digital library of children s literature. The Children s Library is dedicated to providing worldwide digital access to children s literature. The meetings will be held in conjunction with The Library of Congress Special Collection Division. There will be six meetings focusing on specific interests: writers, librarians, publishers, children s advocates, technologists, and a summary meeting. The meetings will be held between January and June at The Library of Congress in Washington D.C doc19587 none Statistical methods will be developed to sharply improve time-resolution for the recently proposed technique of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The objective of the project is to improve the time-resolution of fMRI by sampling only a small fraction of the Fourier transform of the spin density, and using a prolate wavelet filter to approximately obtain an integral representing the total activity of the difference in susceptibility between task and pre-task, over various regions of interest in the brain at successive time -points. The cost for this is a decrease in spatial resolution. This space time trade-off allows us to obtain, at high-time resolution, the total activity in specified regions of the brain, believed to process the specific stimulus task, to learn or verify where the brain function takes place. Furthermore, the proposed methodologies is believed to be applicable to other types of MRI studies, especially magnetic resonance spectroscopy. The proposal focuses on developing statistical methods and related theory for fast functional magnetic resonance (fMRI), to sharply improve the time resolution of present techniques via 3-dimensional sampling. The principal investigators and their collaborators have conducted a fMRI imaging experiment to answer the feasibility question. The results based on this small experiment are quite encouraging. Further experiments will conducted to confirm the preliminary results and improve upon technology. Fast fMRI is expected to have profound and far-reaching consequences in the understanding of brain function, a problem of central scientific interest at the present time doc19588 none Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has struggled to define a new role for itself in world political affairs. Through the transformation of Russian political culture into a democratic system, the opinions of Russian citizens have come to play an increasingly important role in that process. Relatively little scholarly attention has been given to comparing the actions of the Russian government with the attitudes of its citizens, however, largely because of the absence of data on citizen perspectives and views. The September 11, , terrorist attacks on the U.S. and the ensuing responses, particularly the U.S.-led attacks on the Taliban government and terrorists in Afghanistan, created dramatic shifts in Russian governmental policy, however, both through direct participation by Russian in the multi-national anti-terrorist coalition and through its approval of the stationing of U.S. troops in nations formerly part of the Soviet Union. The degree to which these new policies and actions of the Putin administration coincide with the attitudes of the Russian people is uncertain, however. This Small Grant for Exploratory Research will assess the relationship between formal Russian policies and the opinions of Russian citizens through the conduct 1,600 face-to-face interviews in the homes of Russian citizens. The 30-minute surveys, which will be conducted by the largest public surveying organization in Russia, will be draw from a nationally distributed cluster sample of residents. The surveys will probe the reactions of Russian citizens to the terrorist attacks on the U.S. and on responses to those attacks. A major emphasis in this study is on the degree to which Russian citizens concur with actions and policies of the Putin administration and to the citizens preferred future role of Russia in the anti-terrorist coalition and in world affairs in general. Information also will be elicited on socioeconomic characteristics, ideology, and political preferences of responders in order to better assess survey responses. Survey results will have a margin of error of + - 3.8 percent. The results of this survey and its analysis will be disseminated through scholarly publications and through presentations at major meetings. This project will provide valuable information about the degree to which the actions of Russia s government are based on popular opinions shared by a majority of the Russian people. Survey data and analyses will inform scholarly discussions of the evolving nature of Russian political culture and Russia s real and desired place in world affairs, and it will also provide new insights of value to U.S. officials engaged in foreign policy making doc19589 none David Eisenbud will work on three groups of problems from commutative algebra and algebraic geometry: The use of exterior algebra methods in projective geometry and their extension to toric geometry; the study of infinite free resolutions; and the study of codimensions of determinantal (and related) ideals. This last includes the circle of problems around the existence of vector bundles of low rank on projective spaces. His activity will also include the development of fundamental algorithms in computational algebraic geometry and their implementation in the Macaulay2 package written by Grayson and Stilllman. By far the largest portion of the project budget is devoted to the support of graduate students. This and the computational tools produced by the project will broaden its impact. Algebraic geometry deals with geometric forms defined by simple equations (polynomials). The subject is central in mathematics because these forms include the fundamental examples in most disciplines of mathhematics; and it is important in the applications of mathematics because these forms provide the models most often used in representing nature in equations or in the computer. Over the last 150 years the group of techniques called commutative algebra has been developed to study and unify this and problems arising in number theory. Much more recently it was realized that an extension of commutative algebra into the noncommutative domain of exterior algebras gives a fruitful new approach to some old problems in this field. Independently, computers and algorithms became powerful enough to help research in algebraic geometry. Eisenbud s proposed work has to do with some of the most classical problems in algebraic geometry as well as with new uses of exterior algebra and computation in this domain, and he will also continue his work developing computational tools for others to use. The largest part of his grant will be devoted to the support of graduate students, whom he will train in these techniques and methods doc19590 none Cunningham This award supports a one-year collaborative research project between Professor Clifford Cunningham at Duke University in North Carolina and Professor Hisashi Imamura at the Hokkaido University Museum in Japan. The researchers will undertake a study of the biogeographic history of northern hemisphere coastal fishes (pholis and chirolophis). They will use multi-locus DNA sequence data (mtDNA d-loop, nuclear a-enolase, and nuclear a-tropomyosin) in conjunction with morphological data to investigate how past climate changes and ecological shifts (changes in vertical depth) have affected patterns of speciation and morphological evolution in temperate rocky coastal fishes of the superfamily Stichaeidae (Yatsu ). Their research will be undertaken in Japan, Wales, Norway and Iceland. The findings of this study will illuminate our understanding of the timing, conditions and consequences of speciation in temperate coastal fishes. Although we know little about the causes of speciation in temperate coastal fishes that are restricted to a single ocean, DNA sequence data has the ability to distinguish between different allopatric speciation explanations as well as explanations that invoke changes in vertical depth. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. The U.S. researchers have expertise in many of the fish species being studied and the Japanese researcher is Japan s foremost intertidal fish specialist. Results of the research could suggest that the present species diversity found in temperate marine coastal fish assemblages is largely the result of the Earth s periodic and extreme climate changes of the last 10 Mya. This would mean that changes in oceanographic conditions brought on by climate changes could have separated conspecific populations of marine taxa, even in the face of gene flow via planktonic larvae. The research could also suggest that speciation in coastal fishes was associated with invasions of new habitat depths, such as a subtidal species invading the intertidal with subsequent reproductive isolation between the two intraspecific ecotypes. The research will offer a good opportunity to join efforts between the two countries. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. A graduate student will also be participating in the research. The researchers plan to distribute the results of their findings through the Web, publications and presentations at conferences doc19591 none This two-day symposium on self-assembled photonic band gap materials will take place at the Spring American Chemical Society Meeting in Orlando, FL. The symposium will address a diverse array of subjects ranging from organic synthesis to optical characterization. In order to maximize the benefit of this symposium, it will begin with three tutorial lectures that will head from conventional optics to a description of photonic materials. The tutorials will give the participants the necessary background. The organizers have invited a diverse array of speakers from industry and academia, including a number of Assistant Professors. They will also encourage graduate students to present their latest results at the symposium. The funds obtained from the National Science Foundation will be used primarily to support the participation of Assistant Professors and graduate students doc19592 none This RUI project is a collaborative study of two issues in growth of thin films on Group IV semi-conductor surfaces, i.e., on silicon and germanium. A team of four researchers at Bradley Univer-sity will address growth and characterization of ultra thin metallic films on silicon single crystal surfaces, and electron and photon assisted deposition of SiGe alloy films on Si(100) and Ge(100) surfaces under very low thermal budget conditions. Issues to be explored include electrical con-ductivity in ultra-thin metallic films on silicon as well as electromigration effects which may ac-company high current densities in such films. Also, fundamental issues of electron and photon driven processes in adsorbates which may serve as precursors to growth of SiGe alloy films will be studied. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in topical areas of materials science having technological relevance. Undergraduate students will play a primary role in the project, with op-portunities for research integrated directly into their academic program. The research program will provide access to state-of-the-art surface science equipment and unique opportunities for un-dergraduates to participate in and develop skills in exciting areas of materials science at the na-noscale level. An important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education doc19593 none Elimination of the need for painstaking alignment of coronal X-ray images with vector magnetograms and for expert scrutiny of the X-ray structure of the core field is an important step toward practical operational forecasting of Earth-directed Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) and their geoeffectiveness from vector magnetographs. An empirical evaluation of the reliability of core magnetic field determinations based upon three distinct methods will be carried out. These magnetogram-alone methods of resolving the 180 degree ambiguity in the direction of the transverse magnetic field in cases of strong shear and twist will be tested with a set of 20-30 active regions where coeval X-ray data can be used to define the field direction. The active regions that have strongly sheared core magnetic fields are most likely to produce CMEs, and knowledge of the orientation of this core field is important for anticipating the direction of the Interplanetary Magnetic Field (IMF) at Earth doc19594 none s at the molecular level, the results are expected to be widely useful in reaction dynamics as well as spectroscopy. Theoretical chemistry attempts to understand and predict the behavior of real systems, both microscopic and macroscopic, based on knowledge of the fundamental interactions at the atomic and molecular level. The fundamental processes of interest include reactions in the gas phase, catalytic reactions at surfaces, absorption and emission of radiation, photodissociation, solvation and reactions in condensed phase, electron transfer, and diffusion. Theoretical and algorithmic advances are required in order to assess quantum effects of these larger systems. Quantitative understanding of such processes can lead, for example, to control of combustion processes, synthesis of novel materials, and biological processes doc19595 none The research project is focused on application of the Lax Pair and the Riemann-Hilbert Method to the solution of scattering problems in inhomogeneous geomaterials. This approach is based on a new version of the Inverse Scattering Transform suggested recently by A. Fokas for studying boundary problems for linear and integrable nonlinear PDEs. Topics of investigation include: (i) analysis of the Riemann-Hilbert problem on the elliptic curve related to the vector Lax pair of the elastodynamic equation; (ii) explicit evaluation of scattering coefficients of Raylegh wave in a quarter-space and a corner; (iii) the Riemann-Hilbert approach to scattering of elastic surface wave at a vertical interface of two homogeneous quarter-spaces. The analysis of seismic waves is the major source of information about the Earth internal structure and its sesmicity. The elastodynamic equation serves as a basic mathematical model for studing diffraction and scattering of seismic waves on deep fault zone areas and other inhomogeneities in the Earth Crust and Upper Mantle. The research program indicated above would allow to make a considerable progress in solving some of the longstanding problems related to realistic geometry of seismic zones. Moreover, the important nature of the method developed in the project is that it can be also applied to various nonlinear versions of the elastodynamic equation. During the last decades it has been discovered that nonlinearity of the Earth materials may be responsible for some peculiar characteristics of the wavefield, hence the research project would provide an analytic tool for studing these completely new kind of seismic phenemena as well doc19596 none The PI proposes to: 1. Analyze AMANDA II data and a program, Eview, for muon propagation in ice. 2. Develop and test a fused silica module. 3. Develop a fluorescence data logger to be lowered at the time of drilling a hole in ice. This device is to provide a way to characterize the optical property of ice as a function of depth. Funding for the duration of three years is recommendation. Funding level for years two and three will depend on IceCube funding doc19597 none Monteiro, Renato GA Tech Res Corp -GIT In a semidefinite programming (SDP) problem, a linear function of a symmetric matrix variable X is minimized subject to linear equality constraints on X and the essential constraint that X be positive semidefinite. Many mathematical optimization problems can be cast as SDP problems including linear programs, convex quadratic problems with convex quadratic inequality constraints, matrix norm minimization problems, and a variety of maximum and minimum eigenvalue problems. In addition, SDP has many applications in combinatorial optimization, engineering, statistics, and robust optimization. Today, there are numerous algorithms and codes available for solving SDPs, and these methods can be loosely grouped into two classes: second-order interior-point (IP) methods and first-order nonlinear programming (NLP) methods. The choice of which class to use for a particular application is determined primarily by problem size --- second-order IP methods are more efficient on small- to medium-scale problems while first-order NLP methods are better for large-scale problems doc19598 none Geology (42) This project supports the publication of an Earth Scientist s Periodic Table of the Elements and Their Ions (ESPTEI). The ESPTEI is a ground-breaking change in the way geochemistry is being taught and understood. The ESPTEI is a large format (14 x 36 ) color document that can be seen on the World-Wide Web at http: www.gly.uga.edu railsback PT.html. Unlike the traditional periodic table where elements are organized according to the nature and behavior of elemental (uncharged) forms of matter, the ESPTEI is organized by charged forms (for example, Si4+ and S2-). The table also shows some elements multiple times to account for their multiple naturally occurring valence states. This is done because earth scientists study matter in both oxidizing and reducing conditions. Another feature of this table is the placement of contours of equal ionic potential or charge density. Finally, the ESPTEI has symbols showing the abundances of ions or charged forms in soils and in natural waters, their roles as nutrients, and their occurrences in minerals, igneous rocks, and deep-sea nodules. Those symbols largely follow the contours of ionic potential over this newly-reorganized table, allowing many trends in mineralogy, aqueous geochemistry, igneous petrology, soil geochemistry, sedimentary geochemistry, nutrient chemistry, and even atmospheric chemistry to become apparent doc19599 none Professor Carol Korzeniewski of Texas Tech University is funded by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program to study oxidation pathways of methanol and related small molecules on electrodes, which constitute fundamental steps in fuel cells. Bulk and graphite-supported nanoparticles that contain platinum and platinum-group metals will serve as substrates. The reactions will be studied by vibrational spectroscopy, scanning force microscopy and Monte Carlo simulations. The objective is to identify steps that limit current flow, an understanding of which can help to improve electric power generation. Different molecular behaviors are observed on bulk and nanoparticle materials. This research could lead to a molecular understanding of this paradox. Fuel cells are an exciting growing technology based on an electrochemical device that combines hydrogen fuel and oxygen from the air to produce electricity, heat and water. Fuel cells operate without combustion, so they are virtually pollution free. Research is needed to overcome some of the problems and to further develop this technology doc19600 none This U.S.-Czech mathematics project is a cooperative effort between Thomas Lada at North Carolina State University and James Stasheff of the University of North Carolina with their counterpart in Prague, Martin Markl at the Mathematical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Their goal is to clarify the homotopy invariance properties of various algebraic structures. To do so they intend to utilize operads to study the question of homotopy invariance in several algebraic settings. While homotopy invariant structures in the topological setting have been well studied, similar questions in algebraic settings still require attention. The problems to be investigated by this U.S.-Czech team deal with the category of strongly homotopy algebras and their homotopy theoretic properties. If successful, their investigation will integrate these ideas with several sophisticated algebraic structures that arise in mathematical physics. Results should improve the theoretical underpinning for cross-disciplinary advances in perturbation theory and deformation quantization. This international project in topology fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc19601 none Students in Computer Science and Engineering This ITWF award provides support to the Computing Research Association (CRA) to study an important aspect of the largest under-represented group in the IT workforce, the graduate education of women. Using experience gained in a previous Best Practice Report (Janice Cuny and William Aspray, Recruitment and Retention of Women Graduate Students in Computer Science and Engineering , Computing Research Association, Washington, DC ) on recruiting and retaining women in computer science and engineering (CS a measure of the impact recruitment practices have on the female proportion of new students enrolled; a measure of the impact retention practices have on the female proportion of students retained through the doctorate; a set of materials that departments can use to make self-assessments; an evaluation of the effectiveness and comprehensiveness of the practices recommended in the Best Practices Report; and findings that can be generalized on the link between recruitment and retention practices and their outcomes with respect to female graduate students doc19602 none Stavros Garoufalidis Stavros Garoufalidis plans to study applications of quantum field theory to 3-dimensional topology and geometry. This work is motivated by the Chern-Simons path integral, its exact computation (in terms of quantum invariants of knots and 3-manifolds) and its perturbative expansion. Quantum field theory predicts that invariants of knots and 3-manifolds which are defined via cut-and-paste topology carry geometric information of the underlying structures; in particular of the fundamental group of a 3-manifold and its representations to Lie groups. A key question is to recover the geometric information (described in terms of surgery theory or Riemannian hyperbolic geometry) by taking an appropriate limit of quantum invariants. The above mentioned relation between physics and mathematics has deep roots in the past century. Mathematics has strongly influenced Physics, as is evident from the development of Mechanics, Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, which describe our world in three quite different scales. Knotedness is a fundamental property that binds fundamental particles together, but also the DNA molecule. The most recent interaction between 3-dimensional quantum field theory and topology aims at describing knotedness in terms of geometric and topological language. Topology could be a unifying language to describe the building blocks of physics, but also of life itself doc19603 none Dorothy H. Gibson of the University of Louisville (Kentucky) is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry program for research on cyclical catalytic systems that reduce carbon dioxide to organic compounds that contain one or two carbon atoms (together with oxygen and hydrogen atoms). A long-term benefit of such research would be development of efficient cyclical catalytic systems that could produce fuels from the ubiquitous green-house gas, carbon dioxide. One main aim of the research is to identify effective catalysts and catalytic cycles. A second main goal will be to increase understanding of how such cyclical catalysts function. A main thrust of the research is to explore the causes and effects of catalytic reactions in which there are changes in the number of coordination sites (on metal atoms) spanned by particular ligands ( variable denticity ). Both electrochemical and photochemical techniques will be employed. Target reduction products include formic acid, formaldehyde and methanol, and also glyoxylic acid and glycolic acid. Catalytic species being investigated include a number of rhenium, rhodium and ruthenium complexes that contain both bipyridine molecules (as electronic reservoirs ) and other ligands that have the ability to change (reversibly) between bidentate and terdentate configurations. Preliminary results have identified several promising catalytic systems. A number of examples of putative reaction intermediates have been prepared and characterized doc19604 none This award provides funding for a three-year Combined Research-Curriculum Development (CRCD) program, entitled CRCD in Geoenvironmental Engineering, at Kansas State University, under the direction of Dr. Lakshmi N. Reddi. The overall objective of this project is to develop a research-integrated curriculum in geoenvironmental engineering to serve the needs of senior-level undergraduate and first-year graduate students in allied science and engineering disciplines doc19605 none Forming ceramics into complex shapes has traditionally been accomplished by slip casting, injection molding, hot pressing, and machining. The subject of this proposal is a forming technique to shape thin ceramic bodies by introducing strains into the component during the firing operation, without the application of external pressure. The method can be considered a synthesis of mold-based and hot-forming methods in that while molds are not needed, complexity in a component is realized by operating at high temperature. The feasibility of this technique has been demonstrated by applying a chromia coating onto thin alumina substrates to deform the originally flat sample into an arc shape and into a ceramic wave spring. Preliminary calculations suggest that the internal stress that drives the deformation arises as a consequence of cation diffusion from the coating into the substrate. %%% The outcome of the research efforts proposed here will provide for a scientific understanding of this ceramic shape forming process, which in turn will lead to more wide-spread examination and possibly use of the methodology as a forming method. The potential advantages of such a forming method are that the costs of molds and machining can be eliminated and that a more rapid manufacturing process may be realized. These two advantages may help to advance the penetration of advanced ceramic materials into more widespread applications doc19606 none Dr. Driscoll and the Co-PI Dr. Ceccio have developed a time-resolved cinema-PIV(particle image velocity) system that is capable of acquiring 8,000 PIV images second. In the current proposal, they propose to use this new instrumentation to study the characteristics of a turbulent jet, more specifically, the temporal structure and evolution of eddies and their relationship to the generation of subgrid stresses and dissapation. The experiments will consist of issuing a water jet into a co-flowing stream in a water tunnel. The broader impact of this proposal will be to improve our ability to develop better subgrid scale models for the prediction of the characteristics of turbulent flows, and in the training of graduate students in this advance instrumentation technique. Knowledge gained in this research will be useful in the development of 3D cinema-PIV system doc19607 none With this award Professor Falvey will continue his work on the chemical and spectroscopic studies of nitrenium ions and related electron deficient nitrogen species. A variety of experimental techniques will be used to elucidate the chemical and physical properties of nitrenium ions. The chemistry of aryl nitrenium ions will be studied in detail in the course of this work. Aryl nitrenium ions are generated in biological systems through enzyme catalyzed metabolism of aromatic amines. These nitrenium ions are electrophilic and hence very reactive so the production of these species in living organisms is believed to be mutagenic and or carcinogenic. Aryl nitrenium ions are also implicated as intermediates in the synthesis of polyanilines, a conducting polymer. Aniline oxidation will be used to generate nitrenium ions and their reactions with a variety of electron rich arenes will be studied. Professor Falvey and his group will also work to prepare and study ground state triplet nitrenium ions since theory predicts they will have different chemical reactivities than the ground state singlet nitrenium ions outlined in the first part of this proposal. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Daniel E. Falvey of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Falvey will work on the generation and study of a family of reactive molecules known as nitrenium ions. These molecules contain an electron deficient and hence chemically reactive nitrogen atom as part of their molecular structure. Nitrenium ions are generated in biological systems through enzyme catalyzed metabolism of aromatic amines. The production of these species in living organisms is believed to be mutagenic and or carcinogenic. Nitrenium ions are also implicated as intermediates in the synthesis of polyanilines, a conducting polymer. A thorough understanding of how these species are generated and how they react should contribute to a better understanding of the fundamental chemistry involved in both of the processes outlined above. Students trained during the course of this work will gain skills needed by the speciality chemicals industry and the pharmaceutical industry doc19608 none (B.F. Spencer, Univ. Notre Dame) This project provides support for a joint US-Europe Seminar Workshop in Sensors and Smart Structures Technology in April in Somma Lombardo, Italy.. The objective of this project is to establish a common framework for expanded future joint research through mutual learning in the emerging subject areas between US and Europe. In the last few years, significant progress has been made in the area of sensing technology and structural health monitoring condition assessment in the US and Europe. Innovative concepts involving new hardware, algorithms, and software, as well as vibration control have been proposed. There have also been several full scale trial implementations of densely sensor instrumented infrastructures and health monitoring systems, as well as case studies on bridges in Europe and the US. There is much can be learned from the European experts and vice versa, especially in the area of experimental verification on small, medium, large and full scale projects. The program will consist of four seminar sessions on the theme topics of (1) innovative sensing hardware, (2) advances in wireless technology, (3) damage detection characterization and condition assessment methodology, and (4) case studies and experimental verification on international testbeds. Then four workshop sessions will follow to summarize the status of the sensors and smart structures technology in these topics, to identify the outstanding research issues, and to formulate an action plan with recommendations for development and implementation through possible collaborative research projects and sharing of scientific data. A final report of the workshop will be prepared and made available to the research and practitioner community through normal distribution means and also through Internet for wider information dissemination doc19609 none It proposes to convene at Atmospheric CO 2 Inversion Intercomparison Workshop at the Colorado State University campus in Fort Collins, Colorado in February . This workshop will focus upon issues central to the IGBP Task force on Global Analysis, Interpretation and Modelling (GAIM) with strong links to the Carbon Joint Project (CJP). The workshop will build on the results of a previous TransCom workshop held in Melbourne, Australia in March . Proposed project seeks to bring the research community together for the purpose of finalizing current activities through the analysis and synthesis of several ongoing activities: 1) Analysis of seasonal, stationary and time-dependent inversions in an attempt to identify a central, control TM version of each; 2. Data sensitivity tests (testing inverse results against various spatial and GCM sub-sampling schemes); 3. Optimization of sampling networks, both selectively and with a genetic algorithm; 4 Comparison of the seasonality, the phase and amplitude of the rectifier effects with data; 5. Collaboration with other groups (SCRIPPS SIO) on an Atmospheric Potential Oxygen (APO) experiment; and 6) Development of collaboration with the Biosphere-Atmosphere Stable Isotope (BASIN) community. Workshop will include 20 participants representing inverse modeling groups that are currently contributing to TransCom analyses and syntheses doc19610 none Fleming This award supports Fraser Fleming and a student from Duquesne University in a collaboration with Paul Knochel of the Institute for Organic Chemistry at the University of Munich, Germany. The project will focus on a fundamentally different approach to functionalized Grignard reagents with potential for significantly advancing knowledge of bifunctional reagents. Three new amide-containing Grignard reagents will be examined where deprotonatin and silylation is used to mask and unmask the carbonyl group in situ. The collaborative project provides an excellent opportunity for Fleming and the graduate student to pursue new ideas, cultivate creative solutions to significant problems, and learn new skills. The project also provides an opportunity to establish a long-term relationship with the German group with the possibility of continued exchange of students. The students will be able to experience the smaller, more personal environment of Duquesne University, and then perform research at the larger, research-intensive University of Munich, where they will also garner international experience and contacts doc19611 none Xiao, Jing University of North Carolina at Charlotte CISE Postdoctoral Associates in Experimental Computer Science: Haptic Representation and Rendering of Complex Contact States The proposed research is concerned with 1) how to simulate, with high fidelity in a virtual environment, the effect felt by a human operator holding one or more parts during a manual assembly or manipulation process, and 2) how to automatically render such an effect in real-time so that a human in a virtual environment feels as though the parts are real. The experimental and interdisciplinary nature of the proposed research will provide opportunities for the postdoctoral associate to broaden and deepen research skills and expertise in geometric and physical computation algorithms, human-computer interaction, mechanics of robotic manipulation, computer simulation, animation, teleoperation, and collaboration over the Internet. Potential applications of the proposed research include virtual prototyping, distance learning, e-commerce, and entertainment doc19612 none The investigator will develop tools that will enhance the adaptive solution of parabolic and elliptic systems in three space dimensions. A new a posteriori error estimation strategy, interpolation-error based error estimation, developed in one dimension will be extended to three dimensions. This strategy provides asymptotically exact estimates of the error not only for the current grid, but for a grid whose elements are one degree higher than the current one. The estimates involve obtaining approximations of appropriate solution derivatives from the finite element solution and are thus, easy to compute. They will enhance the reliability of hp-refinement codes. The investigator will also improve efficiency through the development of new assembly and solution algorithms for large linear systems. A new incomplete assembly algorithm that appears promising in a nonadaptive setting will be extended to an hp-adaptive code. Incomplete assembly is analogous to incomplete factorization in that only a fixed number of nonzero entries are stored per row and a drop tolerance is used to discard small values. A variable order-variable step implicit explicit solver will be built. A method for selecting a good initial guess for an approximate inverse preconditioner for time-dependent problems based on past history will be investigated. These strategies will be embedded in an hp-refinement code developed previously by the investigator and tested on a set of reaction-diffusion systems. Many important physical and biological processes can be modeled by elliptic and parabolic partial differential equations, especially those of the reaction-diffusion type. Some examples include pattern formation in chemical and biological systems, combustion and voltage propagation in the heart. Solving such problems often involves significant computational resources, both time and storage, especially when the problems must be solved in three space dimensions. Adaptive methods have proven effective by automatically targeting these resources to areas where the solution must be enhanced while reducing the effort in areas where the solution is changing little. They also increase the reliability of the solution by basing resource allocation on appropriate estimation of the error. The aim of this proposal is to significantly improve adaptive methods in two ways. First a new error estimation strategy will be developed that is cheaper and provides more information on which to base resource allocation, thereby increasing reliability. The second involves the creation of several new methods to solve large systems of equations thus improving both time and storage efficiency. This in turn, means that scientists and engineers will be able to explore more realistic models rather than deliberate over the finer details of numerical analysis doc19613 none This award supports theoretical research and education in condensed matter physics centered on three related areas: quantum magnetism, nanoelectronics and superconductivity. Although a classical view of magnetism is often successful, it fails badly in certain cases, in particular for quasi-one-dimensional (1D) systems where the atomic spins interact much more strongly along chains in a crystal than between chains. From a classical viewpoint, at zero temperature the atomic spins would align in fixed directions ( up and down ). This often doesn t occur in low dimensional systems. Instead, strongly quantum mechanical groundstates occur, in which the spins are in collective linear superpositions of up and down. In recent years this has become a very active experimental field, with numerous examples of quasi-one-dimensional antiferromagnets being synthesized and studied by increasingly refined techniques. This is motivated in part by the connection of these materials, and some of the phenomena that occur in them, with high-temperature superconductivity and spintronics. The PI will continue developing fundamental theory and useful phenomenology for understanding current experiments on various quasi-one-dimensional and quasi-two-dimensional magnetic insulators. As electronic components continue to miniaturize, a limit approaches where the largely classical views of memory elements, transistors, etc. break down and quantum mechanics plays a crucial role. In particular, remarkable quantum phenomena have been recently observed in single electron transistors or quantum dots, where the number of electrons on the dot can be varied in single steps. Such nano-engineered devices can exhibit behavior previously studied in atomic impurities doped into metals, with the quantum dot playing the role of a single atomic spin. Such a spin gets screened by an electron from the metal (or the leads connected to the quantum dot). It has been claimed that this screening electron is spread out over a very large distance, of order .1-1 microns. This large length scale has never been verified experimentally and has been a source of theoretical confusion. Quantum dots provide unique opportunities to finally observe this Kondo screening cloud. The PI will develop a theoretical understanding of this screening cloud and aims to propose realistic devices and experiments whereby it could be measured. The high-temperature superconductors hold out the promise of important technological applications and, at the same time, raise very difficult fundamental science issues. The will address several theoretical issues in this field. In particular, by collaborating with experts on large scale numerical simulations, he intends to study the possibility of holes arranging themselves into narrow stripes separated y insulating antiferromagnetic regions in some of these materials (and in some models used to study them). How generally this occurs, for what reasons and whether it hinders or helps superconductivity are important open questions in the field. %%% This award supports theoretical research and education in condensed matter physics centered on three related areas: quantum magnetism, nanoelectronics and superconductivity. Although a classical view of magnetism is often successful, it fails badly in certain cases, in particular for quasi-one-dimensional (1D) systems where the atomic spins interact much more strongly along chains in a crystal than between chains. From a classical viewpoint, at zero temperature the atomic spins would align in fixed directions (say, up and down ). This often doesn t occur in low dimensional systems. Instead, strongly quantum mechanical groundstates occur, in which the spins are in collective linear superpositions of up and down. In recent years this has become a very active experimental field, with numerous examples of quasi-one-dimensional antiferromagnets being synthesized and studied by increasingly refined techniques. This is motivated in part by the connection of these materials, and some of the phenomena that occur in them, with high-temperature superconductivity and spintronics. The PI will continue developing fundamental theory and useful phenomenology for understanding current experiments on various quasi-one-dimensional and quasi-two-dimensional magnetic insulators. As electronic components continue to miniaturize, a limit approaches where the largely classical views of memory elements, transistors, etc. break down and quantum mechanics plays a crucial role. In particular, remarkable quantum phenomena have been recently observed in single electron transistors or quantum dots, where the number of electrons on the dot can be varied in single steps. Such nano-engineered devices can exhibit behavior previously studied in atomic impurities doped into metals, with the quantum dot playing the role of a single atomic spin. Such a spin gets screened by an electron from the metal (or the leads connected to the quantum dot). It has been claimed that this screening electron is spread out over a very large distance, of order .1-1 microns. This large length scale has never been verified experimentally and has been a source of theoretical confusion. Quantum dots provide unique opportunities to finally observe this Kondo screening cloud. The PI will develop a theoretical understanding of this screening cloud and aims to propose realistic devices and experiments whereby it could be measured. The high-temperature superconductors hold out the promise of important technological applications and, at the same time, raise very difficult fundamental science issues. The will address several theoretical issues in this field. In particular, by collaborating with experts on large scale numerical simulations, he intends to study the possibility of holes arranging themselves into narrow stripes separated by insulating antiferromagnetic regions in some of these materials (and in some models used to study them). How generally this occurs, for what reasons and whether it hinders or helps superconductivity are important open questions in the field doc19614 none We have been studying problems in Riemannian geometry that concern with interplays between curvature and topology, and the major part of our work are about the controlled topology of collapsed manifolds with sectional curvature bounded in absolute value and applications to the global Riemannian geometry. For the past three years, we have made substantial progresses in this field pioneered by Cheeger-Gromov-Fukaya: we established the isomorphism finiteness result for the higher homotopy groups, the diffeomorphism finiteness result for a certain class of manifolds, and the convergence of collapsing sequences in this class. We have made a progress on investigating some rigidity phenomena for the class of closed manifolds of non-positive sectional which are not locally symmetric spaces. We have made a progress in the homeomorphism classification of positively curved manifolds whose isometry group contains a torus of large rank, and extend this result to the larger class of manifolds which only admit isometric discrete abelian group actions. We will continue our programs in these fields in the near future that represents a continuation of the work proposed three years ago for NSF Grant . One of the most important developments in Riemannian geometry in the last two decades is our understanding of the Riemannian manifolds which appear to be smaller than their actual dimension (i.e collapsed). For instance, the surface of a very thin donuts looks like a circle while whose curvature and diameter are bounded. Our progress is amplified by the amazing fact that among the manifolds whose curvature and diameter are bounded, all but finitely many appear to be smaller than their actual dimension doc19615 none Burke In this research we develop theoretical and numerical tools for understanding and exploiting the variational behavior of spectral functions. Briefly, spectral functions are mappings of the spectrum of real or complex valued matrices to the real numbers. Two examples are the spectral abscissa (the maximum real part of the spectrum) and the spectral radius (the maximum modulus of the spectrum). The spectral abscissa and the spectral radius play an important role in understanding the asymptotic behavior of continuous and discrete dynamical systems, respectively. For this reason, understanding their variational behavior will greatly impact a number of application areas. In general, spectral functions have a number of features that make them difficult to analyze. Foremost among these is that they are typically nondifferentiable, indeed non-Lipschitzian. These functions can be very poorly behaved especially in regions of interest for optimization. Thus, even though these functions have a classical history in mathematics, science, and engineering, intimate knowledge of their variational behavior has proven elusive. For this reason, new tools of analysis in conjunction with classical techniques are required. In this research we bring together the modern techniques of variational analysis and classical methods of Puiseux-Newton series, semi- algebraic sets, conformal mappings, and the geometry of polynomials. These tools have proven to be phenomenally successful in shedding new light on this very important class of functions. In optimization theory and practice one tries to either minimize or maximize a performance measure subject to limitations on how the performance measure can be adjusted. Optimization is a fundamentally interdisciplinary area of research having a significant impact on a wide range of academic, industrial, and government research activities. Research in optimization requires theoretical advances, the development of numerical solution methods, and a firm grounding in applications. The particular research outlined in this proposal focuses on optimization problems that are closely related to the stability properties of systems that evolve with time. In particular, it impacts the design of structures such as buildings and aircraft that are subject to temporal deformations from environmental factors such as an earthquake or a wind-shear. The underlying optimization problem in this context is to make the structure as stable as possible in a potentially hostile environment while satisfying certain design limitations on such things as weight, size, and cost. The great difficulty in this research is that the performance measures under consideration, such as stability, do not vary in a smooth manner as the underlying parameters vary. Consequently fundamentally new methods of analysis are required to understand the variational behavior of these performance measures. Indeed, the mathematical tools necessary for this kind of analysis have only very recently been developed. In this research we intend to make significant inroads into the analysis of these kinds of problems and to develop a range of numerical methods that can be used to solve them doc19616 none Wilkin The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Francis P. Wilkin to work with Dr. Susana Lizano at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, in Morelia, Mexico. Co-funding for this project comes from the Math and Physical Science Directorate s Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. This project will involve the development of models of both the dynamics and radiative cooling of molecular out-flows from young stars. They will elucidate the process of acceleration of ambient material by protostellar winds. The principal new features will be 1) the inclusion of shear between the shocked wind and ambient matter, 2) the calculation of the detailed flow in the cloud core region of interaction, especially the location of the wind shock relative to the swept-up ambient matter, including the effects of magnetic fields, and 3) a detailed model of the infrared emission expected to be observed by ISO, SOFIA, and SIRTF, constructed by assembling planar shock models over the geometry of the shocks deduced from the dynamical model. The model will also be relevant to comparison with mm-wave interferometric observations of molecular outflows, where we will predict kinematics such as position-velocity diagrams that are directly comparable to the data. The results obtained will be: geometric shape and location of the protostellar wind shock; the elucidation of the role of shear in the kinematics of molecular outflows; the kinematics of swept-up molecular material, which has been limited in the past by unnatural assumptions of mixing and or sticking to the shock; the initial conditions for molecular outflows propagating beyond the cloud core; detailed, testable predictions of the consequence of the x-wind model of magnetocentrifugal, protostellar winds. Morelia has a strong group of researchers beyond Dr. Lizano, who are working on observations and models of the environments of young stars, including Dr. Luis Rodriguez, Dr. Stanley Kurtz, Dr. Alan Watson, Dra. Paola D Alessio, Dr. Enrique Vazquez-Semadeni, and Dr. Javier Ballesteros-Paredes doc19617 none A. Ellis, University of Wisconsin-Madison The proposal is for travel support for the speakers at the EC-NSF workshop on Nanotechnology - Revolutionary Opportunities and Societal Implications to be held in Lecce, Italy on January 31-February 1, . The workshop will involve approximately 16 U.S. speakers and poster presenters and about the same number from the European Commission (EC). The workshop is a part of a series of four workshops on nanotechnology organized by NSF and EC in . The objectives are to evaluate new trends in research and education, to exchange information among leading research centers in both countries, and to promote the exchange of researchers and establishment of joint projects. Given the rapid expansion of Nanotechnology and the significant impact it has on products and services in the society, it is important to periodically examine and explore opportunities and implications on broad societal impacts doc19618 none Jennings, G. Kane Weinstein, Randy D Vanderbilt University EXPLORATORY: Environmentally Friendly Formation of Self-Assembled Monolayers and Surface-Initiated Polymer Films in Carbon Dioxide This collaborative research will investigate the use of environmentally benign carbon dioxide (CO2) as a solvent in the formation of self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) and ultrathin polymer films grown by a surface-initiated process. Due to its small molecular size and weak interaction with metal surfaces such as gold, CO2 is a nearly ideal solvent to promote the formation of densely packed, highly crystalline SAMs, as recently reported by the authors of this project. Further research will examine the formation of SAMs onto gold from partially fluorinated alkanethiols and the effect of co-solvent on the structure and barrier properties of monolayer films. This research also seeks to correlate for the first time the surface-averaged structure and barrier properties of SAMs as obtained by reflectance-absorption infrared spectroscopy (RAIRS) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), respectively, with their microscopic properties such as domain size and defect content as determined by scanning probe microscopy (SPM). This research will also develop a new class of surface-initiated, living polymer films based on the synthetic process of polyhomologation. The films are initiated from a boron-terminated SAM and have the interesting property that the terminal groups of the polymer film can be selected to create a wide variety of surface compositions. During the growth of these films, the precursor molecules must diffuse through the growing film and react at the active boron site so that solvents that enhance the transport of the precursor through the film will increase the rate of film growth and the ultimate thickness of the films. Carbon dioxide is a potentially effective solvent for enhancing the growth of these novel polymer films due to its ability to swell many polymers, its low viscosity and zero surface tension, and the high diffusion rates of many small molecules in CO2. In addition, the use of CO2 in this polymerization process enables a much simpler one-pot synthetic procedure in contrast to the use of organic solvents that must be conducted with numerous solvent transfers in a dry box. To date, there has been no previous investigation of the use of CO2 in the formation of surface-initiated polymer films and only one other study involving the formation of SAMs in CO2. The successful completion of this project will provide new strategies for forming these technologically important ultrathin films through environmentally friendly processing. Furthermore, this project should enhance the knowledge base for materials processing in CO2 and facilitate the increased use of CO2 in research and industry doc19619 none Participation in the US-Japan Joint Panel on Wind and Seismic Effects offers a unique vehicle for U.S. and Japanese agencies interested in seismic and wind effects on structures to collaborate on research, exchange technical data and information, and exchange researchers for the benefit of both countries. Further, the Panel provides the opportunity to leverage limited research resources by closely coordinating work conducted in the U.S. and Japan to avoid duplication of effort doc19620 none For each of the next four years, the investigators will continue and expand an ongoing and successful series of two successive summer workshops on Fractal Geometry at Yale University, and develop related outreach efforts. The intended workshop participants are high school, community college, and college teachers interested in offering fractal geometry courses for non-science students. Such a course has been run very successfully at Yale since . Fractal geometry presents these students with a branch of mathematics that is recent, is visual, is computer-based, has real mathematical content (in contact with the works of eminent living mathematicians), and encourages student exploration and discovery. In addition, the tremendous range of applications of fractal geometry extends beyond science and engineering to arts and humanities. The applications outside science make the course most attractive to liberal arts students. Generally, students come out of this course with a feeling that mathematics is something they can approach, is alive and well, and is relevant to their own interests. Yet teaching this course is quite challenging. The very applications that make it so appealing are outside the training of most mathematicians. The purpose of the workshops is to survey fractal geometry and some applications in detail sufficient to enable other teachers to incorporate this material in their own courses. This lesson planning will be aided by a support infrastructure. These ideas will be spread to a wider area through other outreach activites, including establishing similar workshops at satellite sites and producing a videotape illustrating these courses. In addition, the proposers have prepared a webpage http: classes.yale.edu math190a Fractals Welcome.html to support the workshops and to be a resource for the participants in their courses. The proposers main goal is to build on what has already been achieved. Specifically, (i) to refine these workshops, draw participants from a larger area, and establish a support infrastructure, (ii) to expand and elaborate the above-mentioned website for use as the basis for Distance Learning courses on fractal geometry, (iii) to develop and grow another website that emphasizes the uses of fractals and extends the brief Panorama chapter of the forthcoming book Fractals, Graphics, and Mathematics Education, MAA . A preliminary version of this site already is online at http: classes.yale.edu math190a Fractals Panorama Welcome.html (iv) to prepare a lab manual of simple experiments and classroom activities, illustrating basic concepts of fractal geometry, and (v) to develop an outreach network for growing these workshops at other locations and disseminating these ideas through other media, including a videotape doc19621 none Stephen A. Mitchell The proposed work is centered on K(1)-local homotopy theory and its applications to algebraic K-theory. One goal of the project is to compute the mod 2 homology of the general linear group of a number ring. A broader objective is a systematic study of K(1)-local homotopy theory from the perspective of Iwasawa theory, with a view toward applications to the algebraic K-theory spectra of number rings. One of the most striking features of modern mathematics is its essential unity. Time and again one finds that seemingly unrelated branches of the subject interact in unexpected ways. The interaction of of algebraic topology and number theory is a noteworthy example of this phenomenon. Number theory began as a discrete subject, then turned analytic in the 19th century and increasingly geometric in the 20th. In the last thirty years or so, algebraic topology (the study of properties of geometric objects, such as curves and surfaces, that remain invariant under deformation) has entered more and more into number-theoretic questions. The proposed work will explore further the remarkable connections between these two subjects, by analyzing the topology of certain geometric objects that can be associated to classical number-theoretic data doc19622 none Mueller This U.S.-Mexico award will support Dr. Peter Mueller of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, in a research collaboration with Dr. Andres Christen of CIMAT in Guanajuato, Mexico. The researchers intend to work on sequential design approaches in the context of sampling designs for estimating species diversity and for inference about areas of high habitat potential. Appropriate probability models for these applications will involve optimal sequential design strategies, using a hybrid strategy of reduced action spaces and Monte Carlo simulations. The collaborators will bring complementary skills to the project with the Mexican collaborators contributing expertise in inference for biodiversity, and the U.S. collaborators contributing research focus and experience in simulation-based optimal Bayesian design. Both investigators also have extensive research experience in Bayesian data analysis, modeling, and simulation. The involvement of graduate students will broaden the basis of the collaboration doc19623 none PI: Mary Beth Ruskai, University of Massachusetts Lowell : This project is concerned with a number of mathematical problems which arise when quantum particles are used to process and or transmit information. The P.I. plans to continue the analysis and refinement of models of noise; these are important in both quantum communication and error analysis in quantum computation. Work in quantum communication includes a proposal which may resolve the long-standing question of whether or not entangled inputs can enhance the capacity of quantum channels to transmit classical information. The P.I. also plans to construct new classes of error correcting codes as prototypes for codes which can be designed to deal with those errors to which a particular implementation of quantum computation is most vulnerable. Such codes could be combined with other techniques to reduced the overall code length. The P.I. will also consider a random Hamiltonian approach to the analysis of the efficiency of a proposed scheme for adiabatic quantum computation. Finally, the P.I. plans to continue the study of metrics in information geometry, and their connection to measures of purity, relative entropy, and distances between states. It has now been established that quantum particles have the potential to provide the basis for vastly more powerful computers, and new methods of secure communication. Although building quantum computers remains a formidable experimental challenge, the feasibility of several methods of quantum communication and encryption have already been convincingly demonstrated. However, it is also clear that all practical instrumentation is imperfect and subject to noise and errors. This is not surprising; dealing with noise has long been an important facet of classical communication. However, quantum information devices are subject to a much larger and more complex variety of errors arising from noise. This gives rise to new mathematical challenges. This proposal deals with a number of these questions. Effective methods of dealing with noise are essential to the success of the nation s ability to exploit the power of quantum theory for next generation of computers and cryptographic protocols doc19624 none Control variables such as chemical composition, applied pressure and applied magnetic field can be used to change the low temperature state of many intermetallic compounds of the element Ce from antiferromagnetically ordered to non-magnetic. This is achieved through lowering the ordering temperature, using a control variable, to T = 0K, the so-called quantum critical point. The realization that the rarely found unconventional superconductivity occurs in many if not all cases in this quantum critical regime now brings to the study of highly correlated electronic materials a focussed avenue for exploring the deep and imperfectly known connection between magnetism and exotic superconductivity, physics strongly implicated in high Tc cuprtate materials. This individual investigator award supports a project that will extend these studies into ferromagnetic Ce materials, allowing exploration of new aspects of the physics involved. The investigation of new materials is a primary experimental strategy in this research, pursuing in particular structure property correlations - the elusive goal of materials driven physics. In addition to training post doctoral fellows and graduate students in materials driven condensed matter research, undergraduate and high school students will be introduced in the laboratory to condensed matter research through single crystal growth of new materials. The graduate students and postdoctoral fellows involved with this research will gain the experience of performing research at national facilities and laboratories. In addition they will become more globally aware through participation in international collaborations. Almost magnetic metallic materials near absolute zero have properties differing from usual metals. Exotic superconductivity has been discovered in a number of such materials in the neighborhood of this so-called quantum critical point, superconductivity which appears closely associated with the incipient magnetism and which may be closely related to the superconductivity of high Tc cuprates. This individual investigator award supports a research project that will explore cerium ferromagnetic materials across the magnetic non-magnetic boundary, a class of materials which has been little studied in this connection and which presents new aspects of the physics involved. The goals are to understand the deep tie between unconventional superconductivity and magnetism, learn how to discover new materials which express this physics and extend this understanding into the richer and vaster field offered by new transition metal materials with potential technical applications. Graduate students and post doctoral fellows will be trained how to use the variable of new materials to conduct condensed matter physics research. They will have the experience of performing research at national facilities and laboratories. In addition they will become more globally aware through participation in international collaborations. Undergraduate and high school students will be introduced to condensed matter physics through the synthesis of new materials doc19625 none The investigator and his colleagues consider novel, nonparametric modeling of univariate and multivariate non-Gaussian response data. The usual generalized linear models are extended to generalized nonlinear models by modeling the mean function in a flexible way. Data adaptive multivariate smoothing splines are employed to do this, where the number and location of the knot points are treated as random. The posterior model space is explored using a reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampler. Computational difficulties are partly alleviated by introducing a residual effect in the model that leaves many of the posterior distributions of the model parameters in standard form. The use of the latent residual effect provides a convenient vehicle for modeling correlation in multivariate response data and as such the method can be seen to generalize the seemingly unrelated regression model to non-Gaussian data. In the next part of the project the investigator and his colleagues develop semiparametric Bayesian methods for generalized non-linear models where a predictor is measured with either classical or Berkson error. In the presence of covariate measurement error, estimating usual regression function nonparametrically is extremely difficult, the problem being related to deconvolution. In the case of generalized linear model it is more difficult. Again combinations of spline regression and MCMC techniques are used to handle the problem. Function estimation is an important statistical tool that tries to understand accurately the functional relationships between variables based on data and it has applications in many disciplines for successfully addressing scientific questions. Most of the flexible, nonlinear regression problems are developed when the response is a continuous variable. In important applied problems the response may be count or indicator variable and flexible function estimation is much more harder in these situations. In this proposal the investigator intend to develop the methods that adaptively estimate the functional relationships in these more complicated situations. The area of biotechnology is an especially application for these methods. Scientists now have techniques for measuring gene expression levels for thousands of genes at the same time, allowing the exciting possibility of determining which human genes are involved in a disease such as cancer and heart disease. These methods will be useful to explore nonlinear relationship between gene expression levels and the chance of the disease. Other possible applications are to model correlated multivariate disease or accident counts data where the methods being developed here will improve modeling disease or accidents maps (with uncertainties) which will be useful for disease or transportation risk assessments doc19626 none Under the direction of Dr. Barbara Mills, Ms. Susan Stinson will collect data for her doctoral dissertation on the Hohokam archaeological region of the Greater Southwest USA. Her research addresses ritual within prehistoric households by determining the function and subsequent discard practices for ceramic figurines. These small figurines were used in Hohokam houses from 300 BC to AD 700 and they often were placed in household trash when discarded. Approximately figurines in museum collections will be analyzed as part of this project, and most of these were recovered from the two large sites of Snaketown and Grewe in southern Arizona. Hohokam researchers have previously assumed that these figurines were used in community-wide ceremonial activities associated with ballcourts that are similar to those in Mesoamerica. Ms. Stinson will determine whether the figurines were instead part of domestic ritual by testing three different hypotheses for their use: (1) they were used in healing and curing ritual, (2) they were used in ritual designed to promote a connection to deceased relatives (ancestors), or (3) they were used as children s toys. In order to determine figurine function, patterns of construction material, form, wear or damage, and the location and manner of disposal will be analyzed. In addition to these analyses, Ms. Stinson will determine who the producers of these figurines were by examining fingerprint impressions left on the wet clay surface of the figures before they were fired. These fingerprint analyses provide a direct link between the manufacture of figurines and gendered roles within the household. Ridge counting will be used to distinguish between children and adults, and males and females. A ridge count is an objective, quantitative measure of the size of the fingerprint pattern, and it is recorded by counting the number of friction ridges within a certain specified area. Ms. Stinson has already tested this technique on both archaeological ceramics and a set of modern prints from an extended family in the Philippines. This fingerprint technique is new to archaeological research and has the potential to revolutionize how gender roles are assigned in prehistory. This project also contributes to research on households, figurines, and ritual and gender in the household. It tests hypotheses about figurine function in an archaeological region of the American Southwest that have been assumed, but never scientifically tested. The project also assists in training a promising young scientist doc19627 none DMS - . Professors Boyer and Galicki propose to investigate several projects in geometry and topology. The objective of all the projects is to study fundamental questions in Riemannian Geometry with two main focal points: Contact Geometry of orbifold bundles over Fano varieties and the existence of some special (i.e., Einstein, positive Ricci curvature) metrics on such spaces. The questions and problems proposed here are deeply rooted in the principal investigators earlier work which exploited a fundamental relationship between contact geometry of Sasakian-Einstein spaces and two kinds of Kaehler geometry, namely Q-factorial Fano varieties with Kaehler-Einstein orbifold metrics with positive scalar curvature, and Calabi-Yau manifolds with their Kaehler Ricci-flat metrics. The most recent work of the principal investigators has led to an important breakthrough in the study of such structures when, using recent results of Demailly and Kollar, the principal investigators were able to construct new examples of compact Einstein manifolds in dimension 5 as well as many positive Einstein metrics on families of rational homology 7-spheres. The techniques used by the principal investigators borrow from several different fields; the algebraic geometry of Mori theory and intersection theory, the analysis of the Calabi Conjecture, and finally the classical differential topology of links of isolated hypersurface singularities. These methods can be extended much further and in various directions. An example that stands out in this respect is the question of the existence of Einstein metrics on exotic spheres, which is one of the main objectives of this proposal. More generally the principal investigators want to address several classification problems concerning compact Sasakian-Einstein manifolds in dimensions 5 and 7. These two dimensions are important for two separate reasons. In view of earlier work higher dimensional examples can be constructed using the join construction. At the same time these two odd dimensions appear to play special role in Superstring Theory. In the context of recent developements in String and M-Theory the principal investigators also propose to investigate some related problems concerning self-dual Einstein metrics in dimension 4 and exceptional holonomy metrics in dimension 7 and 8. This project is intended to further the understanding of the mathematics of certain important types of geometry. While this endeavor is not directly motivated by advances in technology, the history of mathematics adequately demonstrates that today s pure mathematics often becomes tomorrow s applied mathematics. Indeed the mathematics being considered in this project is currently being used in the field of Elementary Particle Physics, more specifically, in the attempts at understanding a unified description of the fundamental forces of the universe doc19628 none The research builds upon previous work in the area of protein diffusion on the surface of erythrocytes. The investigator will develop numerical algorithms to efficiently evolve the shape of the cell membrane as a function of time. Thermal fluctuations insure that the membrane s dynamics will be stochastic and it is anticipated, on the basis of preliminary results, that these fluctuations will be sufficiently large in amplitude and sufficiently long in duration to account for the escape of band 3 protein from the cytoskeletal corrals on the surface of the red blood cell. The simulations may provide a microscopic justification for the choice of empirical parameters in earlier studies, or, it may prove necessary to include the dynamics of the cytoskeleton to achieve agreement with experiments. In either eventuality, the investigation will quantify the relative importance of membrane fluctuations and cytoskeletal dynamics on protein mobility. The algorithms developed will be of use in future studies of cell motility and other biological behavior that is dependent upon dynamic membrane fluctuations doc19629 none Ileana Streinu Smith College Workshops on Topics in Computational Geometry This proposal is to support a series of annual problem-posing and problem-solving workshops on emerging new topics in Computational Geometry, with applications in Graphics, Robotics, CAD, BioComputing, etc. The requested funds will support students, post-docs and some invited participants. The workshop is aiming at fostering collaborations between disciplines (mathematics, computer science, engineering), identifying new directions and problems to work on, and engaging representatives from under-represented groups in collaborative research opportunities (we anticipate about half of the participants to be female researchers or students). A new topic will be chosen each year by the organizer. A web page will be prepared for each workshop, which will include links to resulting publications. There will be no registration fee. The chosen location (Bellairs Research Institute of McGill University in Barbados, West Indies) already has a long tradition within our community (McGill researchers have very successfully organized such workshops on various topics for over 15 years, and the institute s facilities have been used by other academic institutions in the US and Canada). It allows for informal and very productive interaction, it has inexpensive lodging and is accessible via major US carriers at reasonably priced airfare doc19630 none The objective of the proposed work is two?fold. At the level of the individual the objective is to advance understanding of the complexities of cognition and affect during problem?solving. The other objective is at the level of community: cognition?and?affect interaction in the context of collegiate mathematics classroom culture. In pursuing these objectives, the relationships among affect and cognition during non?routine problem solving should prove particularly important. The Proposal incorporates one of the most effective methods developed to date for research in collegiate mathematics education: research working groups involving graduate students as well as junior and senior researchers. The research methodology ensured by the make?up of the working groups is both broad: quantitative methods (e.g. survey), experimental methods (e.g. teaching experiment) and deep: qualitative methods (e.g. interview), experiential methods (e.g. case study). Investigating the relationships and causalities among what problem?solvers think of their feelings, attitudes, beliefs, and selves in mathematics and how those aspects of affect interact with cognitive efforts during problem solving would, of course, take more than the next year. What this Proposal provides for is the organizing of research working?groups around the objectives given above. One result of this cooperation will be the design, implementation, and completion of at least one pilot study. A second result will be the creation of a research design for continued work on both individual and community cognition?and?affect interaction in the various contexts of mathematics learning. At the individual?level, it is well known that significantly reducing the anxiety of a mathematically anxious student is challenging (at best, and often fails). What does show promise, however, is meta?affective self?control. Rather than insisting a student no longer feel anxious, an individuallevel pilot study would investigate ways to encourage an empowering meta?affect. Most work in this area has been at the school level. The proposed pilot?study would be at the collegiate level. A pilot study aimed at the community?level objective could offer a way to revitalize curricular reforms. Many curricular reforms in mathematics lose momentum because their one?size fits all approach fails to influence enough instructors. A community?level pilot study could investigate for which cognition?and?affect profiles an existing reform appears to be effective and then work through teaching experimentation and research to create several sizes, i.e. tailor curricula for classroom and or distance?learning formats based on the goals of the original reform efforts. The proposed avenue of research addresses one of the large issues confronting higher education today: distance learning. The format of an internet education site has, implicitly, assumptions about cognition?and?affect; i.e. a cognition?and?affect profile can be compiled from the forms and processes at a website. In many distance learning settings, the interaction of teachers and students does not disappear, but rather is made more complex by the mediation of the website (or other vehicle). This is especially so as distance learning in this country is shifting from a concern mainly with procedural knowledge to the teaching of conceptual knowledge (for example, in non?routine problem solving or theorem proving). As an area for research and development, this three?way relationship between students, teachers, and a mediating website has been little studied (in mathematics education) and is very promising. The proposed work would contribute to the foundation for future investigations of this topic doc19631 none This study makes use of SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (SOHO LASCO) and Extreme-ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) data to identify coronal mass ejections (CMEs), and Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) soft X-ray data to determine any associated flares. The major objectives are: (1) to study the initiation and acceleration of the CMEs focusing on those that are well-observed in the inner C1 coronagraph, (2) to investigate the temporal relationship between CMEs and flares, (3) to test the validity of a proposed three-type classification scheme for CMEs based on their time-height velocity profiles, and (4) to test CME models based on a matrix of observable parameters developed at the SHINE workshops. This observational study will reveal properties of CMEs and related flares, especially their origins and near-Sun evolution, and should better enable one to identify coronal environments that are propitious for their occurrence doc19632 none This study will provide improved resolution of 3D structure and the first 3D images of lower crustal upper mantle structure beneath a slow-spreading ridge. The results will constrain models of magma plumbing. The project requires some technique development to best combine the wide-angle reflection and refraction data, and will provide insights into the 3D nature of the ridge thermal structure, the existence of any deep crustal or mantle magma reservoirs, the variability in magma supply along the ridge, and the importance of along-axis transport of magma at deep versus shallow levels doc19633 none This Nanotechnology research project seeks to develop a science base connected with surface diffusion and surface ordering of amorphous materials, with the ultimate goal of developing a new method for directed surface self-assembly on the nanoscale using amorphous semiconducting materials. Diffusion over amorphous and other energetically heterogeneous surfaces plays a role in sintering of ceramics and in reflow processes and memory device fabrication in microelectronics. There presently exists virtually no literature for diffusion on amorphous surfaces, and very little that specifically addresses continuously distributed energetic heterogeneity on highly defected crystalline surfaces. Such heterogeneity should lead to values of the diffusivity D that differ significantly from those measured for well-defined crystalline surfaces, however. For amorphous materials, fabrication processes can be devised based upon promoting or inhibiting surface ordering driven by surface diffusion. Example applications include fabrication of memory device electrodes, efficient solar cells, and amorphous ceramics. The rates of ordering cannot be followed experimentally by conventional techniques, rendering creation of process models difficult. The first goal of this project is to develop a science base for surface diffusion and ordering on amorphous and other energetically heterogeneous surfaces, using the combined expertise of the two laboratories. An experimental method will be developed to quantify the distribution function describing surface diffusion on energetically heterogeneous surfaces, using amorphous silicon and the ceramic titanium dioxide as paradigm cases. Experiments will also confirm that optical illumination can be used to drive surface diffusion non-thermally. With respect to surface ordering, fluctuation microscopy will be adapted to the study of near-surface regions by implementation on a scanning transmission electron microscope, with spatial resolution as small as 0.8 nm. Furthermore, the method will be extended to the study of binary compounds like titanium dioxide; up to now application has been restricted to single-element systems. The second goal of this project is to develop a new surface self-assembly method at the 10-200 nm length scale using amorphous semiconducting materials containing controlled amounts and size distributions of subcritical nuclei. Patterned optical or electron beam exposure should yield a spatially varying surface mass flux that, when performed at an annealing temperature just at the cusp of crystallization, provides the extra nudge to crystallize subcritical nuclei in regions dictated by the light flux. The full-fledged crystallites should then grow by surface diffusion and Ostwald ripening until the desired fraction of the film has accreted onto the original nuclei. Demonstrations will focus on amorphous silicon and titanium dioxide. Some computational aspects of the proposed work will be incorporated into a new interdisciplinary laboratory course for undergraduates focusing on nano-materials synthesis. The core goals of elucidating diffusion phenomena on amorphous surfaces, extending the capabilities of fluctuation microscopy, and demonstrating a version of the self-assembly method will remain in place. The downward revision in budget will impact the proposed work in several ways involving the scope of the individual tasks outlined. 1. Reduce the accuracy with which we can determine the locus of conditions giving optimal medium range order in amorphous silicon. 2. Limit the scope of studies for controlling medium range order via variations in hydrogen addition, ion energy and flux, and related parameters. 3. Limit the implementation of the directed self-assembly method to optical means, rather than including an electron-beam. 4. Limit the accuracy with which distribution functions describing surface diffusion can be obtained. (The distribution functions are more accurate with more data doc19634 none Gravity waves have been shown to be very important to weather. They can transfer significant amounts of energy and momentum, initiate and organize convection, and generate atmospheric turbulence. Observational studies have repeatedly demonstrated that mesoscale gravity waves with horizontal wavelength of 50-500-km are prevalent in the vicinity of the upper-tropospheric jet streaks. The exact generation mechanism of these waves, however, remains unknown. The ultimate goal of this research is to understand the dynamics and impacts of the gravity waves initiated by the upper-tropospheric jet-front systems and baroclinic instability. A high-resolution mesoscale model with nesting capability will first be used to reproduce the life cycle of the baroclinic waves and to simulate the gravity wave emission from jet streaks. The characteristics, distribution and variability of the gravity waves and their relationship to the parent baroclinic jet-front system in these idealized simulations will be examined in great details. Next, the interaction between balanced and unbalanced dynamics in the initiation of the simulated gravity waves will be investigated through applications of the various balance imbalance diagnostics including Rossby number, omega equations, nonlinear balance and potential vorticity inversion and also through an extension implementation of the QG+ theory. QG+ is a systematic asymptotic framework from which the balanced, next-order corrections of quasi-geostrophy in Rossby number are obtained. The final phase of this research will compare the characteristics and dynamics of the gravity waves in the idealized baroclinic-wave simulations with observations and apply the findings from the idealized study to understand the dynamics of the observed gravity waves. Successful completion of this research may lead to better understanding and prediction of the timing and location of local and regional weather events doc19635 none Spectroscopy makes optical sensing and imaging a powerful tool relative to other modalities. However, a large number of domains of interest have significant degrees of scatter, thereby precluding direct interpretation of optical measurements using standard holographic or spectroscopic techniques. For instance, using light it may be possible to detect tumors at an early stage and to determine blood chemistry using safe and inexpensive instruments, with correct interpretation of the influence of scatter. Environmental sensing applications include measurements of or within aerosols, turbid water, sea ice, and snow. There has also been significant recent interest in random media with optical gain, which may find application in displays and for inexpensive lasers. Coherent light in all these situations can produce speckle. While efforts have been made in some applications to reduce the confounding impact of speckle, such as in optical coherence tomography, speckle has the potential to determine important properties of the scattering medium. They have used frequency correlations of laser speckle to characterize diffusely scattering material. This characterization involves determining impulse response or scattering parameters that can be used to form spatial images and to extract quantitative spectroscopic data. Of particular note, the PIs recently showed that it is possible to use third order speckle intensity correlations to directly determine the impulse response of a scattering medium, independent of a model, extending the second order intensity interferometer concept of Hanbury-Brown and Twiss. This project involves the study of fundamental aspects of speckle, with a view toward several applications. The PIs will extend their single linearly polarized speckle measurement to a set of input output polarizations, and couple this data to a polarized transport model that will be developed. This should allow treatment of varying degrees of scatter and also characterization of the scatterers. They will also investigate source correlation concepts doc19636 none A number of nonparametric regression type problems are investigated. These problems are connected through the use of spline smoothing in their solution methodology. Specific problems that are studied include: 1) testing the lack-of-fit of a parametric regression model using a spline smoother in a setting where standard smoothing parameter consistency asymptotics do not hold under the null hypothesis, 2) estimation using spline smoothers in varying coefficient models, 3) variance estimation and testing for heteroscedasticity for partially linear models, 4) computational methods for nonlinear spline smoothing problems with both linear and nonlinear parameters, 5) adaptive selection of regularization parameters for spline smoothing of data from ill-posed integral equations and 6) computation and large sample properties of equality constrained local polynomial smoothers with applications to copula density estimation. The problems that are investigated in this research project concern regression analysis which represents the standard statistical approach to studying relationships between variables. The classical approach to regression analysis assumes that the form of the relationship between a collection of variables is known apart from a few unknown parameters that must be estimated from the data. This project uses more modern techniques that employ flexible or nonparametric curve fitting methods to produce estimators as well as to assess the validity of parametric models. New estimation methodologies are developed for several settings which include time varying coefficient models and partially linear models. Time varying coefficient models provide a generalization of parametric models where the parameters in the regression relationship are allowed to evolve as a function of some other variable such as time. This type of model is useful in a number of settings such as for analyzing data from longitudinal case studies and for prediction of lottery sales as a function of jackpot level. Partially linear models provide a mix of parametric and nonparametric methods where the regression relationships for some of the variables can be modeled parametrically while others must be handled using flexible nonparametric techniques. This latter type of model has been found useful, for example, in modeling yield from agricultural field trials as a function of field fertility and for examining the utility of particular blood enzymes in pregnant women for prediction of future incidences of cancer doc19637 none This low temperature physics project involves the phase behavior of quantum fluids, 3He and 4He, which are confined in highly porous low-density solids , vycor and aerogel, or adsorbed on high-surface-area solids such as graphite. The first subject will be a study of the Bose Einstein Transition (BEC) in low-density helium systems. In this work, porous Vycor glass is used to provide a trapping potential that confines a low-density gas of helium atoms in three-dimensional space. Under normal circumstances, a gas of helium atoms would condense into a liquid phase long before the temperature could be lowered enough for BEC to take place, however for mobile helium atoms adsorbed on the surface of the porous glass the gas phase is stable to the lowest temperatures and the BEC temperature can be reached in practice. The ability to continuously vary the particle density in this system, from the dilute Bose-gas regime to almost the full liquid density, provides a unique opportunity for the study of the evolution of the properties of a Bose-condensed system over a wide range of interaction parameter. The second topic is a study the superfluid transition in the 3He-aerogel system. This system is currently receiving much attention from the low temperature community because its unusual properties. This project will contribute a high-resolution heat capacity and superfluid density measurement. The third experiment seeks to provide a clearer understanding of the reentrant superfluid phase that is found for a certain range of partial coverage of the second layer for 4He adsorbed on hexagonal basal plane graphite. A tentative interpretation is that the superfluid signal arises through percolation of 2-D droplets in the second layer. The very unusual, almost logarithmic, temperature dependence of the superfluid signal is not understood at this time and so remains as fascinating open question. This research program and the previous program provide an excellent training ground for both undergraduate and graduate students inclined toward industrial or academic careers. This training develops experimental management and decision-making skills that are transferable to diverse areas, including genomics or management consulting where former students are currently pursuing successful careers. Phase transitions, the change of one matter form into another, are ubiquitous phenomena in nature. One of the goals of physics has been to achieve a more complete understanding of the phase transition process. It is natural to turn low temperature examples for study for these present several of the least complex systems in which to study the phase transition process. Research supported in this grant will study three contrasting examples of essentially the same phase transition, one that is important from a number of fundamental viewpoints. It is the transition from the superfluid to non-superfluid state. The first example is a system of low-density gas of helium atoms, which undergoes a superfluid or Bose Einstein Condensation (BEC) transition at very low temperatures. If interest is the evolution of this transition as the strength of the interaction between the particles by is increased as the density of the atoms is increased in controlled fashion. The second example is superfluid 3He entrained in low-density aerogel glass. This is a model system for the exploration of the influence of quenched impurities, the complex aerogel network, on the nature of the superfluid transition in liquid 3He. The final example explores the 4He superfluid transition in the world of two dimensions where things are quite different from the 3-D examples mentioned before. The 4He-graphite system has been known for many years to display a large number of different 2-D phase transitions. Most of these involve changes in crystallographic structure of the adsorbed helium, however the superfluid transition is also observed at various coverages in the graphite. One of the least understood of these transitions, and the one that will be investigated, is the so-called reentrant (a property appears and then disappears as a function of experimental variable) superfluid transition observed for partial coverage of the second layer of adsorbed 4He. The superfluid phase appears with increasing second layer coverage and then vanishes as the layer is completed. This interesting behavior is complemented by a yet to be understood temperature dependence for the superfluid signal. Students, both undergrads and graduate, are provided the opportunity to participate in leading-edge research, in projects of modest size. The scientific management and decision-making skills acquired in this type of research have launched successful careers for several graduates who are now working in areas outside of low temperature physics such as genome studies and management consulting. Still others have pursued notably successful physics careers in academe and government doc19638 none Dr. Braja K. Mandal, Department of Chemistry, Illinois Institute of Technology is jointly supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program in the Division of Chemistry and the Solid State Chemistry program in the Division of Materials Research to create new photonic materials based on the self-assembly of metallo-organic building blocks into organized nanoscale assemblies. This research builds on his recent construction of fused multi-ring phthalocyanines ligands by a Diels-Alder reaction between a diene bearing solubilizing groups and a quinone dienophile containing sites for the incorporation of nitrile groups. These phthalocyanines will contain helicene, perylene and benzoperylene groups to solubilize them in organic solvents, facilitate self-assembly and promote linear and nonlinear optical properties. These highly conjugated molecules will be capable of modification to tune their optical, and electron and energy transfer properties. New cyclic molecules with high aromaticity will be prepared to facilitate self-assembly into aggregates capable of electron and energy transfer that can be integrated into electronic devices doc19639 none Solar energetic particle (SEP) events associated with coronal mass ejections (CMEs) will be studied by developing a detailed convection-diffusion model of particle transport and acceleration in the solar corona and in interplanetary space. The model results will be compared with energetic particle population observations obtained at 1 AU, using the ACE and Wind data, and at several AU, using the Ulysses data. The focus of the effort will be on the low-energy (20 keV nuc to 5 MeV nuc) particles which remain poorly understood since they interact more readily with entrained solar wind structures. Low-energy particles are more strongly affected by the convection, wave-particle interactions, and adiabatic deceleration. Accordingly, these transport effects, as well as those associated with continuous acceleration, will be incorporated into the modeling effort. Because energetic particles precede the arrival of the CME by at least one day, characterizing these SEPs can potentially aid in the formulation of space weather forecasts doc19640 none This award will allow 23 scientists from U.S. universities to participate in an international conference on Southern Hemisphere Temperate Ecosystems and Biota: Contributions towards a Global Synthesis to be held January in Cape Town South Africa. This conference will constitute the IV Congress of the Southern Connection, an organization of approximately 400 scientists with an interest in comparative studies of the biota and ecosystems of the southern hemisphere temperate latitudes. The Congress will include plenary addresses, symposia, oral contributed papers, contributed posters, special discussion sessions on chosen topics including technical workshops, and field trips. Works to be presented and discussed at the conference will describe the results of original research in fields such as ecosystem ecology (primarily terrestrial ecosystems but also marine ecosystems), evolutionary ecology, landscape ecology, paleontology, plant-animal interactions, phylogeny, evolution, paleoecology, ecological and historical biogeography, biological invasions, vegetation history, and ecosystem restoration and sustainable management. This workshop is co-funded through Ecosystem Science; Ecology; Geography and Regional Sciences; and the Office of Science and Engineering doc19641 none Science : This study will provide laboratory measurements of the coefficient of friction of natural sediments entering the subduction systems of Nankai, and Costa Rica. The frictional studies will be conducted in a combination of ring shear and direct shear experiments at effective confined stresses between 0.1-50 Mpa. Samples will be characterized by X-ray diffraction (for bulk and clay mineralogy) grain-size, SEM EDS geochemistry, and wet chemistry (for biogenic silica content). The mechanical properties will be compared with the clay mineralogy to determine the effect of clay minerals on the coefficient of friction. The study will assess the role of the smectite to illite transition and opal to quartz reactions on controlling the up-dip limit of seismogenic activity in subduction zones doc19642 none This proposal requests support for a group at the University of Cincinnati for a program of research and education in experimental elementary particle physics based on the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). They are also completing the analysis of a hadronic charm production experiment E791 at Fermilab. The main aim of BaBar is to study the origin of particle-antiparticle asymmetry (CP violation) as seen in the decays of neutral B mesons (B0s) and their antiparticles. The Standard Model of elementary particle interactions predicts such CP asymmetries. The BaBar experiment is designed to detect many of the B decay modes and thus to study the time-dependence of CP violation. In addition to the analysis contributions, the group is also involved with the operations and software development of the DIRC (Detector of Internally Reflected Cherenkov radiation doc19643 none The Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Tulsa has created a program that provides sufficient time, guidance, financial support and facilities for undergraduates to undertake and complete a substantial research project in environmental biology. The program provides incentives that make pursuing a graduate degree a very attractive educational path by creating the means to integrate undergraduate work with the Department s Master of Science program, or to prepare for graduate work at some other institution. The heart of the program is year-round independent research fostered through a one-on-one mentoring relationship with a faculty member engaged in research, but it also includes a variety of experiences designed to initiate students into the culture of science. A sophomore junior-year colloquium that connects extant freshman and senior experiences will not only afford students time and guidance to engage in critical literature review integrated with an invited-speaker series but also will provide a forum for critical peer review of their work and for practice of their presentation skills. New course work in environmental ethics and experimental design will also benefit UMEB students as well as others in the campus community. Each year will culminate in a research symposium where students present their work to the campus community and their families. As part of the research experience, students will attend scientific meetings annually. The target group for the UMEB program is under-represented groups in the scientific research community. The University of Tulsa is positioned in a metropolitan area with the second highest concentration of urban Native Americans in the country. Although Oklahoma is known for its Native populations, it also has a large number of Historically Black Towns, and more recently Oklahoma has seen a significant rise in its Hispanic population. The Faculty of Biology will also use the UMEB program to improve its mentoring of students, particularly in helping minorities since many do not have established role models in the scientific community. The core of this endeavor involves engaging in a dialogue to improve the faculty s collective mentoring skills based on readings and presentations of consultants from other faculties and the community. The project will be evaluated yearly to discern whether its goals are being met and how the program is impacting participating students. That evaluation process will include not only course and overall program evaluation by students but also evaluation of the program by the PIs through review of each participant s progress and the type of students participating in the program. Those results will be shared at national meetings doc19644 none Davis, Timothy University of Florida The focus of this project is the development of innovative library-quality software and under- lying mathematics for dual active set techniques in optimization.The dual active set algorithm (DASA)was .rst introduced in the context of state constrained control problems,and later in the context of constrained mathematical programs.For linear or quadratic programming,each step of the algorithm is equivalent to solving a linear system of equations,and in successive steps,there is a small rank change in the matrix corresponding to the change in the active set.Numerical experience has shown that the dual active set framework is an extremely e .cient approach for solving some broad classes of optimization problems,including problems in optimal control and quadratic network optimization.A version of the algorithm targeted to linear programming has already solved some LPs that other state-of-the-art packages are unable to solve.We will develop a variety of sparse matrix techniques,which have broad applicability,and which provide,in par- ticular,the numerical foundation for DASA.Each technique will be developed into library-quality software and made widely available.These include doc19645 none Under the direction of Dr. Christopher R. DeCorse, Mr. Gerard Chouin will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will continue his archaeological and historical study of the Eguafo State, an historic polity located in coastal Ghana. The landscape of Eguafo includes a number of sacred groves which are patches of tropical forest recognized by today s farming communities as dwelling places of spiritual beings. A set of preliminary surveys suggest a correlation between the presence of such groves and the location of early settlements founded before the arrival of the Europeans in this part of West Africa in the late fifteenth century and probably abandoned in the late seventeenth century. Far from being surviving patches of virgin forest degraded by people, as common sense often put it, sacred groves are major historical and archaeological markers of sites where the archaeologist can study the transformation of pre-contact coastal communities into a mercantilist society fully integrated in the Atlantic world. The dissertation will aim at 1) understanding the processes that led to the formation, conservation and, nowadays, accelerated clearing of sacred groves in relation to archaeological sites; 2) ascertaining and interpreting the chronology of regional change in human occupation in relation with the opening of the Atlantic trade. To this end, a sample of an estimated forty to sixty groves within the study area will be surveyed. Oral history and ethnographic observations will be recorded. Excavations will be conducted at five settlement sites associated with surveyed sacred groves. Analyzes of ceramics and the artifact inventory, will allow the establishment of a regional chronological sequence and insights into change in settlements patterns, material culture and sociopolitical organization during the little known transition between the Late Iron Age and the period of post-European contact in coastal West Africa. The chronology of change in settlement patterns will be used to critically assess the notion of impact that is largely used in culture contact studies in the sense of brutal, rapid change induced by the emergence of European actors in West African trade. If indeed, it can be demonstrated that from the late fifteenth to the late seventeenth century, the network of settlements (and therefore trade routes), remained the same as before the Portuguese arrival in West Africa, the idea that the European presence brought about sudden structural change in West Africa will have to be reconsidered. Instead, Mr. Chouin s research will contribute to understanding how the opportunities of the Atlantic trade and the gradual adoption of mercantilism generated internally induced mechanisms of social change. The research is also important because it will call the attention on the on-going massive destruction of cultural resources in West Africa, including archaeological and natural sites such as sacred groves, it will help to document and salvage part of this endangered heritage. It will also assist a young social scientist to lay a foundation for a much-needed larger historical and archaeological study of long-term social change in the West African forest environments doc19646 none The Grotte XVI archaeological site, located in the Dordogne region of southwestern France, contains a sequence of human occupations that began prior to 70,000 years ago and that continued until the end of the Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago. The cave was first occupied by Neandertals, but the later occupants were modern in all ways, with the transition between the two presumed to have occurred around 30,000 years ago. Not only does the archaeological sequence at Grotte XVI span at least 60,000 years, but the preservation of the bones and teeth of large mammals is excellent, and the archaeological assemblages assumed to represent the latest Neandertals-the Chatelperronian -and the earliest modern peoples-the Aurignacian -are well-represented. The site is rich in the remains of such large ungulates as reindeer, red deer, ibex, and horse, all of which provide information on the diets of the residents of the site, and on the mammal history of this part of southwestern France. Previous work on these faunal assemblages, supported by the National Science Foundation, has shown that the diet of the Chtelperronian residents of the site (presumably Neandertals) did not differ in significant ways from that of the people (presumably modern in biology and behavior) who used the site immediately after them. This demonstration joins work from other parts of Europe in suggesting that if modern peoples truly replaced Neandertals, the differential use of animal resources may not have played a major role in allowing this to occur. In fact, the only important difference between the ChAtelperronian and Aurignacian large mammal assemblages involves cave bears. These huge carnivores were common in the ChAtelperronian level (as well as in earlier ones), but disappear soon thereafter, and it appears that increasingly intense use of caves in post-Neandertal times may have hastened the extinction of these remarkable animals. In addition, analysis of the history of the large mammals that occur at Grotte XVI between about 36,000 and 12,000 years ago has shown that the abundances of reindeer (known in North America as caribou) rose and fell in concert with summer temperatures: reindeer were far less abundant when summers were warmer. Ultimately, at the end of the Ice Age, summer temperatures became so warm that reindeer became extinct here. This long-term view of reindeer history suggests that current caribou populations in northern North America may be particularly vulnerable to global climate warming. Although the detailed picture that we have of human diet and large mammal history currently goes back to about 36,000 years ago, the Grotte XVI sequence includes a rich Mousterian assemblage, clearly reflecting Neandertal use of the site, that dates to about 65,000 years ago (less detailed records from the site are older yet). Support from the National Science Foundation will allow this earlier material to be studied as well. This analysis will let us know whether earlier Neandertal diets differed from those represented in later deposits, and will also tell us whether the relationship between summer temperatures and reindeer abundances existed this deeply into the Ice Age doc19647 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Applying biological informatics and chemical genetics to explore developmental processes regulated by the plant hormone auxin. The plant hormone auxin arbitrates plant development at multiple levels. This research deconvolutes the complex regulatory network controlled by auxin and its effectors using small molecules, oligonucleotide microarrays, and bioinformatics. More broadly, it develops a general experimental and analytical framework for using chemical genetics and biological informatics to elucidate intricate signaling pathways in plants doc19648 none Proposal Number: PI: Dennis Stanton Several topics in q-analysis will be studied. A family of generalizations of the Gaussian integral is considered which has several q s. These integrals are closely related to the Rogers-Ramanujan identities, and new results are found which are motivated by the integrals. An investigation of the root system version of the integrals will be undertaken. Some new classical q-orthogonal polynomials, q-Taylor series and combinatorial enumeration problems will also be considered. One of the simplest types of functions is a polynomial. More complicated functions such as sine, cosine, or exponentials can be approximated accurately using polynomials. The general theorem in calculus which allows such results is called Taylor s theorem, and it is used in applications throughout science. One of the objects of study in this proposal is a generalized approximation result, a q-Taylor theorem. It can be applied to functions currently under study in mathematics and statistical physics. Several related integrals, derivatives, and polynomials are also studied doc19649 none PROPOSAL NUMBER: TITLE: Testing UML Designs PI: Robert France The proposed research is concerned with developing mechanisms that support the generation of design-level test cases from UML design models. The generated test cases are intended to be used in UML design reviews and inspections as a means for evaluating UML models and identifying errors in software designs. Developing a UML design testing approach and test generation support requires addressing the following issues: (1) Providing an analyzable representation of UML models and test artifacts, and (2) providing a flexible test generation mechanism. To address these issues the proposed research effort is structured into the following research activities: (1) Deriving test objectives from test-oriented formalizations of Class and Collaboration Diagrams. (2) Defining strategies for creating test objectives. These strategies will be expressed in terms of model coverage goals. (3) Providing techniques that can be partially automated for systematically generating test cases from test objectives. (4) Assessing the effectiveness of the design testing technique developed in this research. This research will produce results that can be used to develop industrial-strength techniques and tools for evaluating UML designs. The results produced by this research will also deepen understanding of how OO designs can be formally interpreted and evaluated doc19650 none The Global Change SysTem for Analysis, Research and Training (START), as the major international outreach program of three of the major international global change research programs - the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), and the International Human Dimensions (of Global Environmental Change) Program (IHDP) - will undertake efforts to develop scientific capabilities in global change research in developing countries of Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. START will also promote collaboration in global change research and related scientific activities among scientists from the countries of these regions and between scientists from these countries and scientists from the United States and other countries with advanced capabilities in global change research. START will focus on six scientific areas of high priority for the international programs and for U.S. research on global change. These areas are: (1) regional climate variability and change; (2) changes in the composition of the atmosphere and its effects; (3) land use land cover change, especially its biophysical and biogeochemical aspects; (4) interaction between global change and terrestrial ecosystems and their biodiversity; (5) interaction between global change and oceans, coastal zones, and inland waters and their biodiversity; and (6) scientific problems that cut across these areas, e.g., interactions between global change and food systems and between global change and water resources. These activities are expected to lead to improved understanding of global change and its particular characteristics and consequences in Asia, the Pacific, and Africa; improved and expanded input from the scientists of these regions to global efforts, especially to global modeling; and improved scientific capabilities in these regions to contribute to and participate in global change research at local, regional and global levels. In Asia and the Pacific, START will collaborate closely with the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN). START will extend the monitoring system for extreme events it has developed in northern Africa to other parts of the continent and will convene a workshop on the relationship of global change to freshwater resources, with a special focus on the arid and semi-arid regions of Africa. START will work closely with the Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) to assure full and active participation by African scientists in these activities. Two other areas of emphasis in Africa will be (1) the interactions between global change and food systems and (2) land use land change ecosystem variability, both areas of exceptionally high priority for African countries. START will also extend efforts to assess the impacts of and adaptation to climate change in southern Africa, particularly by promoting development of a network for this process and development of analytical tools for such an assessment. START will also address polar coastal zones and change in these zones by convening a synthesis and futures meeting to bring together scientists active in the Russian Arctic to review past research on changes in coastal zones in the Arctic and their relationship to global change and then to consider how best to plan future research in this area doc19651 none Ammar Description: This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. Reda A. Ammar, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut and Dr. Ayman El Dessouki, President of the Electronics Research Institute, Cairo, Egypt. They plan to study real-time scheduling of task graphs on grid computing. The investigators will focus on developing a set of new techniques and heuristics to schedule real-time applications on a grid. They will assume that each application consists of a set of connected tasks. The objective of this work is to meet the requirements of task deadlines, to improve the processing power utilization, and to increase the throughput. Their scheduling approaches utilize the available processing power on each processor to accommodate as many tasks of different applications as possible while satisfying the required deadline of each task. The algorithms reduce the communication cost among tasks and the possibility of processing power fragmentation. They will demonstrate that the proposed scheduling technique produces an adequate acceptance rate compared to other approaches. Finally, evaluation of the research results will be through initial simulation studies, followed by experimental testing on an available grid. Scope: Scheduling a large number of high performance computing applications on a grid computing environment is a serious obstacle to achieving a good performance, and this becomes more critical in real time systems. A grid scheduler without enough knowledge of the state of the Grid and the scheduled tasks of a given application cannot adequately manage the Grid resources, may fragment the available processing power and introduce a high volume of communication among the application s tasks, and may cause rejection of some submitted applications if some of its tasks miss their deadlines. This project seeks to provide mechanisms to satisfy the performance requirements while maximizing the processing power utilization, and thus advance the field of grid computing. Applications that are computationally extensive, such as weather prediction, numerical simulations in physics, biology and chemistry, geodynamics, telecommunications, real-time image recognition, e-business, e-engineering will benefit from the proposed scheduling algorithms. The two PIs had prior collaboration and their institutes are well equipped for the proposed project. The project will involve U.S. and Egyptian graduate students. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc19652 none This proposal supports meetings and other activities of the National Academy of Science s Board on Physics and Astronomy (BPA). The role of the Board is to identify important new developments at the scientific forefronts, foster interactions with other fields, strengthen connections to technology and facilitate effective service to the nation by the scientific community. Members of the BPA are drawn from universities, industry and federal laboratories. Meetings are devoted to evaluating activities being carried out under its auspices, discussing critical issues and developing new initiatives. In general, studies initiated by the BPA focusing on particular areas of physics and astronomy are carried out by ad hoc groups of experts in those areas. Reports produced by these groups will have considerale impact in shaping the future directions of the field doc19653 none Gary Parker This project focuses on two fundamental questions: 1) How does flow and sediment routing through a lowland floodplain system moderate short and longer-term variations in sediment delivery towards offshore depositional environments? and 2) What controls the proportion of a river s sediment load that is deposited on its floodplain? It is hypothesized that net sediment loss to the floodplains was highest during Holocene sea-level rise and, after near stabilization of sea level, the proportion of the sediment load deposited in the floodplain has progressively declined. These two basic question are being addressed by comparing the flow and sediment routing processes, and the proportion of sediment lost to floodplains on the middle Fly and lower Strickland Rivers. Historically, the Strickland carried about 7 times the load of the Fly and it is hypothesize that this larger load has led to greater channel dynamics, steeper slopes, coarser bed, more elevated floodplain and possibly a lower trapping efficiency than the Fly. A numerical model is being developed that is sufficiently mechanistic that it can address the questions of damping and trapping efficiency on the event and seasonal scale, yet simplified enough that it can also model the co-evolving bed grain size, channel slope and floodplain topography, a crucial capability for understanding the time evolution of trapping efficiency. Though ambitious, many parts of the model have been assembled in previous research. The hydrodynamic model accounts for the effects of floodplain morphology and hydrology. The sediment routing includes effects of channel migration and accounts for the deposition and erosion of sediment by grain size. A field program is being conducted to document the flood wave damping rates, the sediment trapping efficiency of the Strickland and Fly Rivers, and to parameterize the numerical model. Quantification of floodplain morphology is being done through topographic surveys and analysis of remote sensing imagery. Intensive surveys of the velocity and suspended sediment fields are used to motivate and parameterize the hydraulics and sediment transport model. Short and longer-term (less than 100 years) rate of floodplain deposition is being documented from shallow cores. Extensive flow and sediment monitoring data are being provided by Ok Tedi Mining, Ltd. on the Middle Fly and by Porgera Joint Venture on the Strickland. Previous research on the Fly River enables the research focus to be on the Strickland River doc19654 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Collaborative Research: Absolute and essential instabilities in spatially extended systems Scheel This project explores several instability mechanisms of coherent states, such as fronts, pulses and spiral waves, that occur in spatially extended systems far from equilibrium. The common theme of these mechanisms is that they involve transport phenomena caused by diffusion and nonlinearities. Examples of such transitions are backfiring instabilities of fronts, period-doubling bifurcations of spiral waves, and the effect of inhomogeneities on the dynamics of spiral waves. While transport is most conveniently modeled and described using an idealized unbounded domain, boundaries may well enhance or inhibit the instability through partial reflection or generation of waves. It is the aim of this project to develop techniques that can help to investigate instability mechanisms simultaneously on bounded and unbounded domains. One of the expected outcomes will be a description of instability mechanisms that is robust with respect to typical boundary conditions in large reactors. Technically, our approach is based on methods from spatial dynamics that allow us to derive sharp pointwise estimates which capture explicitly the effects of boundaries. Complicated spatio-temporal patterns that arise due to the interplay of chemical reactions and diffusion have been observed experimentally in a number of specific reactions (among them the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction and the chlorite-iodide-malonic acid reaction). Similar phenomena have been observed during fibrillation of cardiac tissue where spiral waves act as organizing centers for the complex spatio-temporal dynamics. Other examples where irregular patterns occur are the interaction of pulses in oscillatory media, backfiring of excitation pulses in catalytic reactions, and optical bistability in nonlinear photonic gratings. The focus of this project is to analyze some of these instability mechanisms by analytical means. This will not only further our understanding of pattern formation in chemical and biological systems, but will eventually allow for a systematic control of patterns, for instance, in the catalytic oxidation of carbon-monoxide and in the propagation of calcium waves in intracellular tissue doc19655 none This award provides funding for a three-year, Combined Research-Curriculum Development (CRCD) program, entitled Collaborative Case-Based Learning in Engineering Ethics, at the University of Pittsburgh, under the direction of Dr. Kevin D. Ashley. The overall objective of this project is to design, build, field and evaluate the COM-PETE (Collaborative On-line Methodology for Professional Ethics Tutoring Environment) program which will support students in collaboratively analyzing and deliberating about professional ethics problems doc19656 none The project is aimed at developing a variety of models in superconductivity. The specific areas that are covered include mesoscopic networks, Josephson junctions, and time-dependent models. One of the goals is the derivation of specialized models in certain distinguished asymptotic limits. Another goal is to study the relation between the applied magnetic field and the resulting current distribution as a function of the geometry and the topology of the network. Superconductors form a special kind of material with the unique property that they exhibit quantum-mechanical (that is, atomic) effects on large scales that can be observed by the unaided eye. This makes them wonderful candidates to our understanding of the basic laws that govern atomic phenomena. It also makes them candidates for many applications ranging from very precise measuring devices and unusual generators of magnetic fields (already on the market) to quantum computers. To understand the behavior of superconductors we need mathematical models. Moreover, since the standard model is very complicated, it is very useful to derive simpler models that fit special circumstances. For example, some of the fascinating effects of superconductivity are observed when the material forms a complex network of thin wires. I therefore derive special models to describe such geometries doc19657 none Ronald Goldman William Marsh Rice U Resultants have many applications in Computational Science and Engineering. They are a powerful tool for determining whether or not a system of polynomial equations have a common root for solving for the common roots when they exist. Resultants are currently employed to compute intersections of rational curves and surfaces, to solve inverse kinematics problems, and to analyze dynamic systems. Robotics, Computer vision, Comptuer Graphics, Solid Modeling, and Computer Aided Geometric Design all utilize resultants doc19658 none PI: Jon Wellner Proposal Number: This proposal deals with research on statistical inverse problems and point process methods in combinatorics. The first part of the proposal will involve work on non-standard asymptotics for likelihood ratio statistics and profile likelihoods, distribution theory for new limiting distributions, and new distribution theory for point processes. New computational algorithms will be investigated and comparisons of various competing algorithms for several inverse problems will be studied. Basic empirical process tools and methods will be developed and applied to statistical problems concerning semiparametric models and inverse problems. Applications include regression models for panel count data, bivariate interval censored data of several kinds, regression models for multivariate survival data, and studies of non- and semi-parametric maximum likelihood estimators used in AIDS research, two-phase data dependent designs, and animal carcinogenesis experiments. The second part of the research will involve applications of point process methods to combinatorial problems, including study of the longest increasing sequence in a random permutation and related problems concerning random Young tableaux doc19659 none Nancy Kaplan University of Baltimore Baltimore, MD An HCI Partnership Serving Underrepresented Groups This is a multinstitutional project that leverages prior and ongoing research in the area of Human Computer Interfaces (HCI) into new curricula. In particular, the project s focus is: (a) to create a Human-Computer Interaction curriculum at the University of Baltimore s School of Information Arts and Technologies (SIAT) that will actively involve early-stage graduate students in ongoing research; (b) to construct and deliver this curriculum so that it is maximally effective in attracting and graduating students from groups under-represented in the sciences, especially women, African-Americans, and students from non-traditional age groups; (c) to structure this curriculum around the results, and ongoing inquiry, of research at the University of Maryland s Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) in the design of children s technologies; (d) to embed this curriculum and research in a partnership spanning SIAT, HCIL, and local private and public sector institutions, and (e) widely disseminate this partnership model, and the results of its evaluation, with the goal of creating further partnerships between research and comprehensive institutions that will result in the involvement of students from under-represented groups in ongoing research. Students who participate in this project s curriculum will also engage in field research that prepare them to join the workforce as professionals who have experience with research-grounded methods of developing HCI technologies, particularly those that are components of the HCIL s work on children s educational information technologies (including contextual inquiry, task analysis, participatory design, low-fidelity prototyping, querying interfaces, and spatial interfaces doc19660 none Scarlatos, Lori CUNY Brooklyn College Innovative Approaches to Computer-Human Interfaces This project, involving two universities, addresses the transfer of Human Computer Interfaces (HCI) research into undergraduate and graduate curricula. The PI and Co-PIs explore alternative approaches to HCI including immersive interfaces, virtual reality and ubiquitous computing as well as alternative input modes, such as voice, gesture, and eye tracking. They have also experimented with using objects in the environment as input devices (tangible interfaces) and giving those objects intelligence about where they are in relation to others (smart objects). This proposal describes a way to address the need to expand the pool of HCI practitioners through curricular changes integrating the PI s and others research. This project involves the development of a sequence of courses for both computer science and math science education students that teach them how to 1) utilize new interface technologies, 2) apply those skills in multidisciplinary teams, and 3) evaluate their resulting projects in public settings. The computer science and math science education students collaborate to develop educational tools designed to get K-12 students interested in math and science. The new courses are taught at two public universities, Brooklyn College (CUNY) and Stony Brook University (SUNY), where they reach students and future current teachers from both the suburbs and the inner city. In addition, the PI plan two teacher workshops at Stony Brook s Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, and the installation of the projects in two museums: the New York Hall of Science, and the Goudreau Museum of Mathematics in Art and Science. This combined research curriculum development effort is expected to yield several benefits. (1) The work may impact a broad range of people, including a large number of students in groups that are under-represented in math and science in college classrooms, public museums, and public schools, (2) This multidisciplinary program will facilitate and support collaboration between computer science students and math science education students (who are generally practicing teachers). These undergraduate students will learn about state-of-the-art research advances in the area of computer-human interfaces, and how those interfaces can be used to enhance education, apply these technologies to educational applications in a collaborative effort, and participate in research evaluating their applications in real-world settings, (3) Student projects, installed at the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, the New York Hall of Science, and the Goudreau Museum of Mathematics in Art and Science, will provide learning opportunities and inspiration to a wider audience including both students and educators, (4) Two workshops, held at the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, will help to further disseminate the findings of this project among the community of educators (5) A new textbook, with supplementary materials available online, will enable others to teach these courses at their institutions. Educational applications utilizing innovative computer interfaces may then become the tools of an even greater pool of educators and students doc19661 none for : This award provides support for a one-day workshop of separations specialists to identify needs and opportunities for research on capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is the leading greenhouse gas that may be responsible for global warming. Much carbon dioxide is produced by power plants and by transportation as well as industrial operations. To deal with the potential treats of global warming it is desirable to develop efficient and economical methods for separating and stabilizing carbon dioxide so that discharges to the atmosphere can be controlled. The experts attending the workshop will provide guidance to NSF regarding appropriate research investments in this area. The workshop is being organized by the University of Colorado. It will be held at Tulane University during the week of March 11, . It is planned to coincide with an AIChE conference that will offer a symposium on global warming. Thus, a number of experts will be available at that site. It is expected that staff from DOE will also participate so the workshop should provide an opportunity for coordination of research efforts by the two agencies. The impact will be to enhance development of greenhouse-gas-control technology for the protection of the global environment doc19662 none Kostka Clays, which are ubiquitous in natural sediments, soils, and other geologic formations, affect the fate of such chemicals as pesticides, organic contaminants, heavy metals, and plant nutrients in the environment. This effect is strongly correlated with the surface chemistry of the clay minerals, which is influenced by the charge or oxidation state of iron (Fe) in their crystal structures. The long-range goal of our work is to understand the role of iron on these surface reactions, and the specific objective of this proposed study is to identify the underlying cause(s) for the effects of structural Fe oxidation state on clay surface properties, and to characterize the nature of the resulting interactions with surface species such as water, metals, and organic compounds. The central hypothesis for the proposed research is that reduction of structural Fe by either biotic (bacterial reduction) or abiotic (chemical reduction) means, not only yields a new redox potential and electrostatic charge at the clay surface, but invokes in situ changes in crystal site occupancy of structural Fe and introduces structural defects, which, in turn, further alter the clay surface chemistry. We plan to test our central hypothesis and accomplish the overall objective of this proposed study by pursuing the following four specific aims: (a) Determine the site occupancy of structural Fe in mixed Al-Fe-Mg dioctahedral smectite clay minerals before and after Fe reduction; (b) Identify the causal relationship between changes in Fe oxidation state and surface chemistry; (c) Determine the reversibility of redox processes; and (d) Characterize the relative effects of bacteria versus inorganic reducing agents on clay properties. The fundamental understanding to be gained during this study will provide a powerful tool for using redox behavior to predict and control chemical reactions at clay surfaces doc19663 none The ability to make well-controlled structures on the nanometer scale represents one of the most important scientific advances of recent decades. Such nanostructures are already in use in a variety of optoelectronic devices, and promise to be of increasing importance as communication speeds increase. The fundamental physics of these structures lies in the quantum confinement of electrons. However, the influence of such confinement on the ultrafast electronic interactions which determine both nonlinear optical response and relaxation rates is unclear. This project will use ultrafast spectroscopy to determine how confinement influences interactions on the femtosecond time scale. It begins with the development of a very pure set of semiconductor heterostructures with varying width. These samples will then be studied via several ultrafast optical techniques to fully characterize the influence of confinement on ultrafast dynamics. This project will take place at Williams College, an entirely undergraduate institution in which young students take active, central roles in research. The research training provided by this project will allow ten undergraduates to become familiar with research, and specifically with cutting edge optical and electronic techniques, at the earliest point in their careers. The drive for increasing speed in communications and computers is pushing technology toward ever smaller semiconductor devices. A fundamental question as these devices are developed is the following: is smaller always faster, or is miniaturization not the best way to increase speed? This project begins to answer the question by exploring the ways in which electron interactions change as semiconductors become extremely small. It will proceed by using an ultra-fast laser to inject energy into nanoscale semiconductor structures, and then to measure how those structures respond. The results will demonstrate the ways size alters the fastest electronic interactions, which take place in less than a trillionth of a second. This work is of both fundamental and technological importance, since these interactions ultimately allow electrons to relax after excitation, and thus set the speed limit for electronic and optical device performance. This project will take place at Williams College, an entirely undergraduate institution in which young students step up to take active, central roles in research. The research training provided by this project will allow ten undergraduates to become familiar with research, and specifically with cutting edge optical and electronic techniques, at the earliest point in their careers doc19664 none This award provides funding for a three-year Combined Research-Curriculum Development (CRCD) program, Seamless Integration of Information Devices: A Focus on Emerging Technologies in New Product Development, at the University of Pittsburgh, under the direction of Dr. Michael Lovell. The overall objective of this program is to develop an integrated and innovative curriculum, to enhance the product design and entrepreneurial skills of graduates, that incorporates a multi-disciplinary research program across the School of Engineering and into the Katz School of Business doc19665 none This project will investigate the thermal expansion characteristics of materials that determine suitability for various applications. For example, frameworks that display low or negative thermal expansion at high temperatures often undergo a phase transition on cooling to a denser form with a higher coefficient of thermal expansion. The phase transition of quartz can be suppressed by stuffing , that is replacing some silicon with lithium or aluminium to produce materials such as the commercially useful beta-eucrytpite. The stuffing of phases with the zirconium phosphatre structure will be explored as a means of producing new materials with interesting thermal expansion characteristics. Additionally, the replacement of zirconium plus four with mixtures of metal plus three and plus five ions will be examined as a means of suppressing this unwanted phase transition. Many negative thermal expansion materials become amorphous at modest pressures and this limits their application. The mechanism of this amorphization will be investigated using techniques that include x-ray absorption fine structure determinations at high pressure. The proposed work will provide several graduate and undergraduate students with experience of a wide variety of methods that are of general utility in the field of materials science chemistry. %%% The thermal expansion characteristics of a material play a very important role in determining if it will be suitable for a particular application. Low or zero thermal expansion is necessary in areas where dimensional stability is a major issue, such as in the fabrication of precision optical devices. Low or zero thermal expansion is also necessary in ceramics that are exposed to thermal shock, such as those used in cookware and in some internal combustion engine and aerospace applications. Negative thermal expansion can be very valuable in niche applications, such as compensating for the positive thermal expansion of another component in microelectronics. This project focuses on the preparation of new materials displaying low or negative thermal expansion and extending our understanding of both their preparation and physical properties. The knowledge gained will be of value in the search for new engineering materials. The project provides several graduate and undergraduate students with experience in a wide variety of synthetic and characterization methods that are of great and general utility in the fields of materials chemistry and materials science doc19666 none Christopher Cramer of the University of Minnesota is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to develop new theoretical methods for organic and inorganic systems characterized by multiple electronic states spanning relatively narrow energy ranges. Development will focus on several areas, including generalized-Born equilibrium and non-equilibrium solvation models, the extension of existing continuum solvation models to new atoms and new functionalities, and the development of new orthogonalized density functional theory schemes for treating low-lying excited states. These models will be applied in conjunction with existing methodologies to target chemistries of particular interest, including applications to arylnitrenium ions, phosphinidenes, arynes, dioxodicopper compounds, and metallocenes. Many theoretical calculations apply only to molecules in the gas phase, rather than the more common experimental conditions of molecules in the condensed phase. This research will improve the understanding of complex molecular reactions in solution, with applications to a variety of useful problems important to chemistry and biology doc19667 none The PIs will carry out a swath bathymetry survey of the southern Gulf of California, obtain 3.5 kHz, magnetic and gravity profiles and collect dredge samples of the volcanic basement. The objectives are to test hypotheses concerned with the generic problems of how continental rifts are segmented tectonically and whether this relates to asymmetries of faulting, how rift propagation occurs tectonically and what type(s) of magmatism accompanies continental break-up and earlist seafloor spreading. The Gulf of California is a MARGINS focus site and this study will complement other research being carried out and planned for this region doc19668 none Transversal hot zones can form in commercial packed-bed reactors and may be deleterious because they may decrease the yield of the desired products, deactivate the catalyst and initiate runaway reactions that may ultimately result in explosions. The PI plans to conduct experiments and theoretical numerical studies on hot zone formation and dynamics. The problem is of both academic interest and engineering importance as the goal is not just to observe, analyze and characterize such hot zones, but to gain the ability to predict and control them. The PI plans experimental studies using an infrared imager of hot zone formation and motion for two test reactions: the oxidation of carbon monoxide and acetylene hydrogenation. These experiments will be used to determine under what conditions hot zones form and what are their characteristic motions. Numerical simulations of a three-dimensional two-phase model will be used to gain an understanding of the critical rate processes and parameters affecting hot zone formation in a uniform packed bed reactor. The model will provide guidance about interesting regions for experimental study and for the organization of experimental observations. Impact: Hot spots and hot zones are a perennial problem of packed bed reactors. Providing guidance from first principals on how to avoid or control them would have significant safety benefits for the industrial operation of chemical manufacturing systems doc19669 none This project will investigate the processes of sediment transport and accumulation that lead to development of the shelf clinoform in the Gulf of Papua off the Fly River. The study will include a variety of sampling and monitoring stations from near the river mouth to the base of the clinoform that will provide time-series observations on the spatial and temporal variation in present day sediment transport and accumulation. The study will specifically investigate the role of fluid muds as primary mechanism for across-shelf transport of sediment that leads to clinoform morphology. Core studies including radioisotope measurements will provide information of sediment transport and accumulation on seasonal to millennial time scales doc19670 none The investigator proposes to study the renormalization of period integrals on GL(n). More specifically, this project concerns the development of a theory of truncation of GL(n) Eisenstein series, thereby leading to a definition of renormalized torus integrals. Such results in turn make it possible to compute the polar divisor of the integrals and therefore to find unexpected functional equations of renormalized period integrals of Eisenstein series. This is a project in Number Theory, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. The foundations of Number Theory lie in the study of the positive integers. Some basic objects that have emerged in Number Theory are automorphic forms, objects that possess surprising symmetries. This project studies certain integrals of particular automorphic forms called Eisenstein series. These integrals, if interpreted in the usual way, are infinite, so part of the proposed research deals with reinterpreting these integrals, using renormalization to give them a definite meaning. This has already been carried out by the investigator in a special case, which gave rise to a relationship with another renormalized integral that was developed in a different fashion. More striking, however, was the occurrence of an unexpected symmetry in four dimensions. The aim of this project is to extend this technique of renormalization to the most general case, and to look for generalizations of this unexpected phenomenon doc19671 none This theoretical project explores the fundamental physics of electronic, magnetic and Transport properties of nanoscale magnetic junctions. The major emphasis is on spin- Polarized electronic transport in the nanojunctions, in which a small amount of various Metallic, semiconducting or insulating materials is placed as a contact between two Ferromagnetic nanowires. First-principles density functional calculations will be Performed to predict electronic, magnetic and transport chacteristics of these Nanojunctions. Micromagnetic modeling will be used to understand the magnetic Structure of nanocontacts and tight-binding models will be developed to tread disordered Systems and to explore the influence of localized states on magnetotransport in magnetic Tunnel junctions. These theoretical studies will guide experimental investigations of the Nanoscale junction fabricated by state-of-the-art nanofabrication techniques and will Complement the established experimental program at Nebraska. The research will Facilitate the development of novel magnetoelectronic devices, which merge spin degrees Of freedom into electronic nanotechnologies. %%% This theoretical project explores the fundamental physics of electronic, magnetic and Transport properties of nanoscale magnetic junctions. The major emphasis is on spin- Polarized electronic transport in the nanojunctions. These theoretical studies will guide Experimental investigations of the nanoscale junction fabricated by state-of-the-art Nanofabrication techniques and will complement the established experimental program at Nebraska doc19672 none The research component of the proposal is to explore a new methodology for clock networks that explicitly accounts for the interplay between the various design factors. The educational component will provide graduate student researchers with an interdisciplinary training in VLSI, optimization, and numerical computing. Furthermore, the research results will be integrated in graduate courses at Purdue University. The design of clock networks is a fundamental problem in synchronous circuit synthesis, and requires trading off between design effort, physical resource costs and performance. Most existing clock design methodologies do not explicitly perform this trade-off. Instead, a design is first proposed, and then evaluated in terms of physical resource costs and performance, and the design repeated if necessary. As a large number of such iterations may be required, the design effort is minimized with some simplifying assumptions. One of these artificially imposed constraints is that of ``zero-skew , where it is required that all elements are clocked (i.e., switch) at the same time-instant. This requirement constrains the physical layout of clock distribution networks, as the variation in the arrival of the clock signal at the various switching elements must be held small. Perhaps more important, as all circuit elements switch together, the demand from the power supply is not uniform over time but peaks sharply once every clock cycle. This uneven demand on the power supply leads to what is commonly referred to as power-supply noise: As the demands on the power supply peak sharply, its ability to deliver power degrades, leading to possibly degraded performance of the circuits. With these observations serving as the backdrop, we propose to develop a design methodology for clock networks that employs nonzero clock skews, and directly addresses the interplay between various factors that determine the trade-off between the design effort, physical resource costs and performance. We present preliminary results that show that our approach holds much promise. Specifically, we propose to perform together scheduling and synthesis of clock networks such that both power supply noise and physical resource costs are reduced. Essential to our objectives is the efficient analysis of power supply noise. We propose a framework and techniques for power-supply noise analysis that draw upon our past successes with model reduction techniques for interconnect modeling both in the time and frequency domain doc19673 none This project will develop a scalable parallel computing framework for high-end computational research, which will achieve scalability beyond tightly coupled Teraflop architectures, i.e., for distributed supercomputing on multiple Teraflop computers as well as on future Petaflop computers with deep memory hierarchy. To accomplish this goal, the PI will conduct the following research tasks: Topology-preserving computational-space decomposition to minimize the number of messages using a structured message-passing scheme; Wavelet-based adaptive load balancing in dynamic, heterogeneous metacomputing environment using simulated annealing to minimize load imbalance and message sizes; Recursive and reconfigurable grouping of processors with message renormalization and computation communication overlapping to hide latency at each grouping level; Spacefilling-curve-based adaptive data compression --- in situ processing of interoperable compressed data to reduce message sizes with user-controlled error bound. A suite of scalable scientific programs developed within the new framework will be disseminated as a computational-scientist s toolkit through a Web portal to have significant impacts on high-end computational research, including the design of quantum-dot architectures for future quantum computing doc19674 none This award provides funding for a three-year Combined Research-Curriculum Development (CRCD) program, entitled Real-World Wireless Communications in the Graduate and Undergraduate Curriculum, at the University of Notre Dame, under the direction of Dr. Thomas E. Fuja. The overall objective of this project is to bring elements of the Notre Dame digital communications research and the capabilities created by the wireless facility, the WAND Lab, into the undergraduate and graduate electrical engineering curriculum at Notre Dame doc19675 none The research in this project focuses on several dynamical and numerical aspects of stochastic differential equations. Stochastic ordinary differential equations (sodes) on finite-dimensional manifolds generate stochastic flows on the manifold. One objective of the research is to construct invariant manifolds for such flows near stationary solutions, under suitable regularity and growth conditions on the driving vector fields. In particular, the investigator will prove the existence of stable, unstable and center manifolds near each stationary point on the manifold. In order for sodes to constitute viable physical models, the investigator conjectures that a Kupka-Smale type theorem must hold. An important class of infinite-dimensional semiflows on Hilbert space is generated by dissipative semilinear stochastic partial differential equations (spdes) on smooth compact manifolds. For these semiflows, the investigator intends to prove the existence of finite-dimensional invariant manifolds near stationary points. Important examples of spdes covered by this analysis are Burger s equation, affine linear stochastic evolution equations and stochastic reaction-diffusion equations. The results of the research will reveal new features of the stochastic dynamics of these well-studied models. One encounters models of stochastic systems with memory (sfdes) in many engineering and physical applications. Deterministic smooth constraints on the solutions of such models lead naturally to sfdes on (compact) Riemannian manifolds. The investigator will study the path-space-valued Markov process generated by trajectories of sfdes on the manifold. The investigator will establish an Ito formula for the infinite-dimensional segment process and will attempt to obtain its infinitesimal generator in terms of geometric invariants of the ambient Riemannian manifold. From the pathwise dynamical point of view, the investigator will construct perfect semiflows on the path space which are induced by solutions of sfdes on a compact Riemannian manifold. The existence of invariant manifolds will also be examined. The project focuses on qualitative and long-term behavior of a large class of probabilistic models known as stochastic differential equations. These equations are widely used by scientists and engineers. Of special interest is a class of models that are used in physics, engineering and biology in order to analyze dynamical systems whose evolution is influenced by random fluctuations and past history. These models are very important in a variety of diverse areas such as signal processing, stock market fluctuations, economic and labor models, aircraft dynamics, materials with memory, population dynamics and fluid flow. The investigator will use the most current probabilistic techniques in order to develop a deeper understanding of these models. The outcome of the research in this project will yield precise information on the long-term behavior of solutions of the underlying stochastic equations on states that are near statistical equilibria. Numerical algorithms will be developed whereby real market data will be used to test option-pricing models where the stock price is governed by its past history. In a different direction, the research will solidify important connections with other areas of modern mathematical research, in particular the theory of dynamical systems and geometry. The results of the project will be compiled in a research monograph targeting graduate students majoring in mathematics, engineering, and finance doc19676 none This workshop brings together researchers and government officials engaged in investigative, response, and recovery activities at the World Trade Center (WTC) site of the terrorist attack on September 11, . The workshop dates are December 12-13, and the location is New York City, reflecting its sponsor and coordinating organization for the WTC research efforts: the NSF-supported Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems, housed at New York University s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. The workshop s goals are to enable information sharing with the aim of identifying technological, economic, and social research areas to pursue; potential collaborators or partners; gaps of knowledge that new research must address, and areas of research and participation that will not be productive nor useful. Outputs from the workshop will include 1) a web site resource for researchers; 2) preliminary findings papers from the participants; and 3) a summary of the research themes and input from decision-makers , which will also be disseminated on the web doc19677 none This project pursues several interconnected research areas: 1) Optimizing III-nitride material quality; n- and p-type doping, particularly for AlGaN ternary alloys and InAlGaN quaternary al-loys with relatively high Al contents (x 0.5); and reduction of dislocations and line defects. When submicron-strip lateral epitaxial overgrowth is employed, relaxation of excess strain at the mesa edges may dominate, resulting in fewer dislocations above the window region. The poten-tial of lattice-matched quaternary quantum wells (QWs) of GaN InAlGaN as active media for UV emitters with improved performance will also be explored. 2) Fabricating and processing III-nitride wavelength-scale photonic structures and devices. E-beam lithography patterning and plasma dry etching to create wavelength-scale photonic structures and devices will be studied. Unique properties of III-nitrides make them very attractive for the generation, guiding, and switching of light, and new architectures for integrating III-nitride photonic components (e.g., resonators, waveguides, emitters, detectors, etc) onto single chips will be explored to lay the foundation for achieving integrated photonic circuits based on III-nitrides for a wide range of ap-plications. 3) Deep UV time-resolved nano-optical studies. A specially designed deep UV pico-second time-resolved nano-optical spectroscopy system will be used for probing optical proper-ties [photoluminescence (PL), electro-luminescence (EL), etc.] of semiconductor materials and photonic devices with time-resolution of a few ps, spatial resolution of 50 nm, and wavelength range spanning from IR to deep UV (to 195 nm). This system integrates a deep UV femtosecond laser spectroscopy system with a deep UV near-field-scanning-optical-microscopy (NSOM) AFM system. It will be utilized to probe carrier dynamics, optical transitions, as well as defect properties in nitride materials and QWs, especially in AlGaN alloys, GaN AlGaN and GaN InAlGaN QWs with high Al content (x 0.5). The aim is to gain new understanding and methods of controlling optical and optoelectronic properties. The emission and light propagation properties in wavelength-scale emitters and waveguides will also be investigated to provide input for improved integrated photonic device design. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in a topical area of electronic photonic materi-als science having high technological relevance. An important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education. Through direct involve-ment in research, students will have unique learning and discovery opportunities in the areas of advanced semiconductor materials, nano-fabrication techniques, semiconductor physics, semi-conductor materials fabrication and device processing using state-of-the-art epitaxial growth, lithographic patterning, plasma etching, and advanced materials characterization. The project also encompasses development of strategic alliances with industry, which further enhances edu-cation and training opportunities for postdoctorals, graduate, and undergraduate students doc19678 none This experimental condensed matter physics project will explore the fundamental properties of complex fluids, which include colloidal suspensions, emulsions, polymer solutions, membranes, and mixtures thereof. These soft materials find applications in the paint, food science, and cosmetic industries, in the practical control of fluid rheologies, in cell biology, and in high-tech problems of photonics, lithography, and biochemical sensors and processors. This work addresses three basic issues in suspension science:(i) Microscopic interactions, (ii) Assembly, and (iii) New macroscopic model systems. Experiments are planned to: (1) Measure interactions in suspension produced by macromolecules, vesicles, and membranes, by subtle hydration effects, by polymer-induced steric interactions, and by dipolar or anisotropic background fluids; (2) Study the equilibrium assembly of colloidal crystals with templates that bias growth towards metastable states; and (3) Study the equilibrium phases of rods and plates at very high densities, and at very low densities (i.e. in the low-screening limit). (4) Develop methodologies to assemble colloidal crystal heterostructures. (5) Synthesize new suspension constituents that offer us the possibility to create new macroscopic model systems, for example macroscopic surfactants. Knowledge gained in these studies will improve our fundamental understanding about interactions and assembly in complex fluids, and should lead to new techniques for controlling assembly and for studying microscopic interactions in soft materials. Graduate students involved in the project receive training in fundamental cutting edge experimental techniques such as microscopy, optics, applied computation, and suspension science. This training will prepare students and associates for careers in industry, government or academe. This experimental condensed matter physics project investigates the properties of a range of complex fluids, examples of so-called soft matter . Complex fluids include colloidal suspensions, emulsions, polymer solutions, membranes, liquid crystals and mixtures thereof. The structure and dynamics of soft materials are strongly influenced by disorder (entropy) and by relatively weak mechanical forces (as in thixotropy, catsup). These materials provide a fascinating testing ground for many-body statistical physics, and for investigations of phase transitions such as melting and solidification. Research on these substances is technology driven too. They are attractive starting materials in high-tech applications such as photonics, lithography, ceramics and biochemical sensing; particle additives also offer a means for practical control of fluid flow, improving the performances of conventional materials such as paints, motor oils, foods, and cosmetics. Finally, complex fluids experiments are increasingly stimulated by analogies from cell biology, in some cases providing critical insights about mechanisms that arise in crowded cellular environments. This research focuses on three basic issues: measurement of microscopic forces in suspension, the study of phase transitions and self-assembly, and the creation of exotic new macroscopic model systems. Students in this program receive rigorous training in optics, physics, and materials science that prepares them for careers in academe, industry, and government doc19679 none Lin This program will systematically develop a nonsmooth feedback design methodology for the control of genuinely nonlinear systems that may not be dealt with, even locally, by any smooth feedback. Nonsmooth feedback designs offer the potential to overcome some topological obstructions of the system that cannot be addressed by smooth controls, for example, to globally stabilize a nonlinear system that is not stabilizable by any linear or smooth state feedback. The research will address some of the most critical and challenging issues in the field of nonlinear control, including global strong stabilization, practical output tracking and adaptive control for nonlinearly parameterized systems with uncontrollable unstable linearization. A unique thread in our development is the explicit construction of homogeneous-like Lyapunov functions and non-Lipschitz continuous controllers, based on a synthesis of methods drawn from differential geometric control theory, homogeneous systems theory, as well as the development of feedback domination design techniques for the control of nonlinear systems whose Jacobian linearization contains uncontrollable modes associated with eigenvalues on the right-half plane. This work will also include a geometric characterization and a higher- order normal form for a significant class of nonlinear systems. Many control systems of practical importance (e.g. internet network, manufacturing systems, biomimetic actuator systems, electrically stimulated muscles, underwater or aerospace vehicles and so on) have genuinely nonlinear characteristics that cannot be dealt with by existing feedback design methods; most of them are smooth in nature. In fact, a goal of active research has been to transform a physical dynamic system into a linear one for which the well-developed modern control techniques (linear systems theory) are readily applicable. These linearizing techniques have serious limitations due to canceling the system nonlinearity by feedback or neglecting the complexity of dynamic systems. Consequently, these design methods have not found wide applications in a number of new real-world problems, such as control of complex network (e.g. internet or power systems network) or controlling the position and speed in sophisticated weapons (e.g. missiles and advanced combat aircraft). The purpose of this research is to find ways to take advantage of the potentially dramatic, though nonintuitive, effects caused by the inherent nonlinearity or complex interactions of physical forces with physical systems. The main outcome of the proposed research will be new, nonsmooth feedback design methodologies for the control of dynamic systems. It is expected that the benefits to a systematic approach towards using nonsmooth control will be becoming widely appreciated, particularly in industries (e.g. manufacturing, aerospace, power and biomedical engineering) where many applications of nonsmooth control can be found doc19680 none Michael J. Carr Several important questions about the nature of the subduction process require a transition from existing qualitative subduction signals, such as Ba La and 10Be 9Be, to quantitative fluxes such as Ba flux in gm unit arc length yr. This is accomplished by employing 40Ar 39Ar dating techniques to measure the ages of the older units in several large Central American volcanic centers. These new data, along with previously determined volume measurements, enable the determination of average volcanic flux rates for different segments of the arc. Integrating volcanic flux rates with regional geochemical data allows an estimate of element fluxes to be made. From these integrated data several major problems are being addressed, including the physical cause of along-strike variations in subduction signal in Central America, the mass balance of elements cycling through the Central American arc, and the quantity of incompatible elements that are delivered to the deep mantle through subduction doc19681 none Ying-Qing Wu The PI of this proposal intends to study the topology of 3-dimensional manifolds via Dehn surgery, essential surfaces and essential laminations. It is a common method to use 2-dimensional surfaces as a tool in studying 3-manifolds. The most useful surfaces in studying 3-manifolds are essential surface, essential laminations, and Heegaard surfaces. The purpose of this project is to study the properties of 3-manifolds using these surfaces and Dehn surgery. There have been great progress in this area in the last few years, for example we now know that an essential surface will remain essential after most Dehn surgeries, and the exact upper bounds on distances between all ten pairs of nonsimple surgery types have been determined. However there are still some very important problems remaining to be solved in this area. An objective of this project is to determine how many surgeries are ``exceptional in certain sense, for example, how many will produce so called Seifert manifolds, and how many will kill an essential surface. The PI will also study the problem of how an immersed surface intersects a Heegaard surface. 3-manifolds are objects that are locally like ordinary 3-dimensional spaces, but whose global structure may be quite complicated. Such objects appear naturally from different areas of mathematics as well as physics and other sciences. The ultimate goal in the study of 3-manifold topology is to have a thorough understanding of the structure of 3-manifolds. This has not been achieved yet, but there has been a great progress towards the proof of a conjectural picture described by Thurston more than 20 years ago. The PI proposes to continue studying 3-manifolds via Dehn surgery, which is a method of constructing new 3-dimensional spaces from an existing 3-dimensional space, by removing a neighborhood of a circle and then gluing back in a different way. The achievement of this project will be an important step towards the goal of having a clear understanding of the topological and geometric structures of 3-manifolds doc19682 none Marek Kimmel William Marsh Rice University Bioinformatics: From Sequence to Expression and Structure. An Inovative Research-Oriented Course The primary goal of this project is to teach advanced students how to investigate cutting-edge problems in computational biology. The project involves developing and disseminating an innovative course based directly upon leading multidisciplinary research. Graduates who know how to identify and work on solving leading research problems gain the significant benefit of being able to apply bio-informatics to a broad range of problems. In addition to being immersed in a burgeoning research sector, graduates of this program, who have free access to the newest knowledge and skills in the field as it evolves, may enjoy a competitive advantage in the workforce. To produce students capable of leading independent research, the project focuses on three educational outcomes: 1. Students develop meta-cognitive knowledge of scientific and mathematical problem solving in this field, 2. They acquire an integrated knowledge base of leading bio-informatics models and research methods for genomic and post-genomic research, and finally, 3. Students improve at working both as individuals and in multidisciplinary teams. To reach these objectives, the project presents a course in bio-informatics, on a senior undergraduate or graduate level, which integrates cutting-edge research-related content with novel and unique means of teaching, evaluation and dissemination. The long-term goal of the course is related to prospective professional careers of students. The cutting-edge bio-informatics research in industry and academia already is shifting from the DNA sequence level to exploration of gene expression and interaction and bio-molecular interactions. Students enrolled in the proposed course will develop a high level understanding of bio-informatics research and computational biology doc19683 none This RUI project uses simultaneous, variable temperature cathodoluminescence (CL) and electron beam induced current (EBIC) to image transport properties, with micron scale resolution, in the near-contact region for a variety of high resistivity materials and devices. A new approach allows imaging of the motion of charge, in response to fixed-point generation. This approach is similar to CL in that an electron beam is used to generate charge, but different in two significant ways: the beam is not scanned during a given measurement and the collection of light allows for spatial resolution of the source of its emission. The motion of charge is tracked by detecting the light emitted along its path. Imaging will be used to view transport behavior, providing a new window on the transport of charge in the high field, highly non-uniform region adjacent to contacts, especially in high resistivity materials where space charge and internal fields play dominant roles over extended distances. Specific research goals include the study of charge transport patterns near contacts in SiC devices, improved understanding of contact performance and reproducibility in photorefractive heterostructures and direct imaging of electric field profiles in high energy radiation detectors. In addition, the technique has potential for directly observing fundamental changes in transport behavior in the near-contact region. A thermoelectrically cooled CCD will be used to image the light emitted in response to the point generation of charge in a semiconductor material. In standard CL, the spatial information of the emitted light is lost as the total emission signal is displayed as a function of position of the generation point. That information is maintained in this approach by using an internal optical microscope to collect and re-image the luminescence pattern. A magnification of ~ - x can be obtained, suggesting spatial resolution of the luminescence on the order of five microns or better, depending on generation conditions. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in a topical area of materials science having technological relevance. Undergraduate students will play a primary role in the project, with opportunities for research integrated directly into their academic program, and continued full time in the summer. The research program will also enable access to a state-of-the-art microanalysis facility for a wide variety of students, in addition to those engaged directly in the proposed project. An important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education doc19684 none The Advanced Materials Program in the Division of Chemistry makes this award to Furman University to prepare solid-state charge-transfer complexes from functionalized diacetylenes. With this award, Professors Timothy Hanks at Furman University and William Pennington at Clemson University will prepare three types of polymeric materials - crystalline and microcrystalline powders, and amorphous thin films - from hosts derived from donor diacetylene molecules with attached inclusion acceptor-compounds - organo-iodides - in a pocket or cavity of the polymeric material. Nanoporous zeolite type materials will be prepared from these polymers after removal of the inclusion compounds by thermolysis or solvent extraction. A number of donor molecules, which not only photopolymerize, but also provide cavities of different sizes and shapes for acceptor molecules, will be synthesized and characterized, and these studies may result in new classes of porous organic solids with tunable optical, electronic and chemical properties. The zeolite-like nanoporous materials that will be prepared in this study are expected to have tunable optical, electronic and chemical properties. This project at a primarily undergraduate institution, which has an active research program with undergraduate and high school students, will provide, in addition, research and educational opportunities in material synthesis and characterization doc19685 none Pierotti This project involves collaboration between three universities in Kansas and will train a number of Native American undergraduates in research techniques related to ecology and environmental science. Unlike many programs that offer only a brief research experience, this program will work with students over a 2-4 year period and mentor them through to graduation with a bachelor s degree. The PIs on this program have graduated more than 25 Native Americans over the last 7 years, and most of these graduates have gone on to attend graduate school. This award includes a supplement from the Central and Eastern Europe Program of NSF s Office of International Science and Engineering to fund student and mentor travel to Siberia for research on indigenous knowledge as part of a collaboration with scientists and students at Gorno-Altaisk State University. The significance of this program lies in recent discoveries that Indigenous communities represent stores of knowledge that both add to and compliment scientific knowledge obtained through the methods of the Western scientific tradition, e.g. indigenous knowledge 1) reveals connections between ecological communities that are studied separately and remain unlinked under Western scientific paradigms, and 2) give insight into the role of high quality individuals within population dynamics that are obscured by Western traditions of population level thinking. Students completing this program will be better prepared to conduct scientific research within the context of indigenous knowledge than any other group. Such approaches can simultaneously increase scientific awareness without losing sight of spiritual dimensions of human experience doc19686 none EIA- Becker, Shirley Florida Institute of Technology SGER: A Toolset for Making Web Sites Accessible to Aging Adults in a Multicultural Enviornment As US citizens becomes more reliant on the Web as a primary source of information, we must ensure that all have accessibility to that information in formats that are useful and usable. This becomes an issue in the US, with its growing elderly population. This grant is to develop and explore the usefulness and capability of automated tools to assist government agencies in determining accessibility for the elderly and to develop metrics by which such accessibility can be measured doc19687 none Integral passives are considered to potentially provide alternatives to current discrete passive components with benefits on system cost, size, functionality and reliability. For embedded capacitor applications, polymer-ceramic nano-composite has been previously investigated as high dielectric constant (K) materials. However, there are some technical barriers to the use of polymer-ceramic composite in organic substrate, e.g., limited dielectric constant value ( 150) achieved and poor adhesion towards the substrates. The proposer has discovered a novel dielectric material, which is based on polymer-conductive filler composite. The preliminary results have shown an effective dielectric constant as high as over , and nearly the same adhesion as the neat polymer matrix. In order to successfully apply such ultra-high K material to integral capacitor application in next-generation advanced electronic packaging, the proposed project will perform fundamental studies on the following issues: Ultra-high K polymer-conductive filler composite formulation optimization: Continued efforts will be devoted to optimize the formulation for potentially even higher material performance. Modeling of integral capacitor component: This could aid the design and process of integral capacitor components by providing quantitative estimates of the critical material and process parameters. Processability of integral capacitor component using the developed ultra-high K polymer-conductive filler composite: Prototyping of integral capacitor will be constructed from liquid or film composite material. Both rigid and flexible substrates will be used for capacitor development. Reliability performance of the integral capacitors fabricated from the proposed processes: stability degradation of electrical properties such as dielectric constant as well as adhesion strength, etc. will be monitored against 850C185%RH aging, temperature, humidity and bias (THB) aging, liquid-liquid thermal shock (LLTC), and air-air thermal cycle (AATC), etc. Expected results from the proposed research will enrich the fundamental understanding about the integral capacitor component based on ultra-high K dielectric materials, which will be essential for the realization of integral capacitor application in next-generation micro-electronic packaging doc19688 none This award provides funding for a three-year Combined Research-Curriculum Development (CRCD) program, entitled, Intermetallic Compounds and Composites, at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, under the direction of Dr. Peter K. Liaw. The overall objective of this project is to integrate the long-standing research advances on the manufacture, characterization, modeling, and design of intermetallics and composites, achieved by UT and the nearby Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), into a multidisciplinary undergraduate and graduate curriculum at UT doc19689 none Aschbacher and S. Smith recently completed the classification of the finite simple quasithin groups. This work fills a significant gap in the classification of the finite simple groups. Aschbacher and Smith are editing their manuscript to make it ready for publication. Aschbacher is continuing his project to produce a unified, accessible, and complete treatment of the existence, uniqueness, and structure of the sporadic groups. He is writing up his work on recognition theorems for small groups with one class of involutions. He is working with R. Guralnick and K. Magaard on lower bounds on the genus of coverings with a classical monodromy group. He is investigating the p-radical subgroups of the sporadic groups. Groups are algebraic objects of crucial importance in mathematics; for example they are the basis for the study of symmetry. Finite groups can be decomposed into building blocks know as ``simple groups ; the classification theorem lists the simple groups explicitly. Together with descriptions of the structure and representations of the simple groups, the classification theorem forms the foundation for the modern theory of finite groups. Several years ago it was discovered that an important case in the classification had not been completely treated. Aschbacher and his collaborator S. Smith have now dealt with this case and are readying their manuscript for publication, in order to place the classification theorem on solid ground. The completion of this work, together with efforts to answer certain questions about the structure and representations of the simple groups, make up the project doc19690 none This award provides funding for a three-year Combined Research-Curriculum Development (CRCD) program, entitled Towards a New Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Curriculum, at the University of Notre Dame, under the direction of Dr. Agnes E. Ostafin. The overall objective of this project is to develop curricular material (text, web and laboratory) that will demonstrate how to integrate molecular and cellular biology into chemical engineering, in the same way as chemistry has traditionally been integrated, to produce Chemical and Biomolecular Engineers doc19691 none Burer, Samuel Iowa State In a semidefinite programming (SDP) problem, a linear function of a symmetric matrix variable X is minimized subject to linear equality constraints on X and the essential constraint that X be positive semidefinite. Many mathematical optimization problems can be cast as SDP problems including linear programs, convex quadratic problems with convex quadratic inequality constraints, matrix norm minimization problems, and a variety of maximum and minimum eigenvalue problems. In addition, SDP has many applications in combinatorial optimization, engineering, statistics, and robust optimization. Today, there are numerous algorithms and codes available for solving SDPs, and these methods can be loosely grouped into two classes: second-order interior-point (IP) methods and first-order nonlinear programming (NLP) methods. The choice of which class to use for a particular application is determined primarily by problem size --- second-order IP methods are more efficient on small- to medium-scale problems while first-order NLP methods are better for large-scale problems doc19692 none DeSalle This UMEB project seeks to increase the participation of students from under-represented groups at two New York City colleges by engaging them in hands-on research projects in conservation genetics and environmental science in collaboration with scientists at their colleges and at the American Museum of Natural History. In order to accomplish this, each year a cohort of 4-6 students from each college will be recruited and the students will conduct research projects over a two year period. During the academic year, the research will be done on the home campuses. Over the winter breaks and summers, research will be conducted at the American Museum of Natural History. These students will serve as a nucleus to get other students involved in environmental projects throughout the metropolitan area. This UMEB project will involve students in workshops in molecular biology techniques, seminars in population biology, and workshops that provide graduate school and career guidance. The students will be closely mentored and their progress monitored and assessed in order to help them become our future scientists in environmental biology and in order to develop additional programs capable of broadening participation in careers in environmental biology doc19693 none DMS - . Frank Morgan will study minimal structures in singular universes: with conical singularities or with Lipschitz metrics, for example. He will also study mathematical models for soap bubbles clusters and immiscible fluids with multiplicities, following work of Fleming and White. Methods include standard and innovative applications of geometric measure theory, differentiable geometry, differential equations, and techniques from the proof of the Double Bubble Conjecture. He will supervise related undergraduate research, especially on variations on the double bubble problem in various ambients and settings. The guiding principle of nature seems to be energy minimization, from the microstructure of materials to black holes in the universe. As one of the simplest examples, soap bubble clusters seek to minimize surface area. If successful, Morgan s study of such problems will enhance our understanding of fundamental physical principles, with implications for the structure of materials and the universe doc19694 none Michael Georgiopoulos University of Central Florida Orlando, FL Machine Learning Advances for Engineering Education This project, at the University of Central Florida (UCF), integrates research results from the theory and applications of Machine Learning into the Engineering Computer Science curricula. Two new courses and several revised courses include material from Adaptive Reasoning Theory, Genetic Algorithms, Human Behavior Representation, and Simulation Meta-modeling. The objectives of this CRCD project include: 1. Incorporating current state-of-the-art Machine Learning research results into the undergraduate and first year graduate curriculum to enhance students critical thinking, intellectual growth and communication skills, 2. Offering a unique curriculum, by traditional undergraduate standards, where the PIs integrate their current research results into the curriculum. This curriculum is timely and dynamic, reflecting the PIs and the machine learning community s research interest changes with time, 3. Offering the opportunity to a multi-disciplinary group of students (spanning the spectrum of electrical, computer, industrial, civil, mechanical, and computer science students) to benefit from research and its transfer into curricula, 4. Assessing and evaluating the educational impact of the project through a sequence of carefully chosen evaluation instruments developed by an educational consultant, and 5. Disseminating the curriculum development efforts to a number of affiliate Universities doc19695 none This award provides funding for a three-year, Combined Research-Curriculum Development (CRCD) program, entitled, Team Based Design: Collaboration Across Time and Space, at Carnegie Mellon University, under the direction of Dr. Daniel P. Siewiorek. The goal of this project is to facilitate computer-based collaborative learning in project-based design courses by developing collaboration tools for mobile computers doc19696 none This project integrates recent search developments in ad hoc netorks into mainstream computer science and electrical engineering curricula. It explores students to challenges posed by this emerging class of systems, improving studets exposure to future infrastructures by developming real world ad hoc networking test-beds and deployment platforms, and permits educators at other U.S. institutions to do the same by sharing the system infrastructure and educational materils developed for this project. Specifically, the project transforms several undergraduate and graduate level courses in computer systems to address the challenges posed by wirless, mobile and embedded networks of computers that form transient alliances in ad hoc networks. This project transforms classes in networking, databases, operations systems, adaptive systems to integrate pervaive, ubiquitous, ad hoc networking and sensor networks. A three-tiered approach benefits both current classsroom instructions as well as ongoing research on ad hoc network, and involves: 1) The development of software and courseware infrastructure necessary to build, use and evaluate system services for ad hoc networkss in a classroom setting. 2) Deployment of the critical mass of equipment to field a large, physical test-bed. This network consists of mobile computers, ranging form sensors and pocket-sized information appliance through hand-helds to laptops. Equipped with a wireless networking card, and multi-purpose sensors such as camera, these machine provide a real physical test-bed on which system services are evaluated for ad hoc networks. 3) Collection of information from the deployed test-bed on application communication pattersn, mobility models, and observed link characteristics. This information can be used to carry out better-informed simulations of ad hoc networks. This grant impacts computer challenges the nation is facing, it results in innovative research on operating systems, database and telecommunications, and it generates course materials and define infrastructure that will allow the project to be repeated elsewhere in the country doc19697 none This award provides funding for a three-year Combined Research-Curriculum Development (CRCD) program, entitled Curriculum Development in Systems for Smart Communications, at Villanova University, under the direction of Dr. Robert H. Caverly. The overall objective of this project is to develop a series of educational concept modules covering basic and advanced topics in smart communications technology that overlap not only the principal investigators research but also the best practices in the field doc19698 none Nicolas-Bolnet This UMEB project seeks to increase the participation of students from under-represented groups at two New York City colleges by engaging them in hands-on research projects in conservation genetics and environmental science in collaboration with scientists at their colleges and at the American Museum of Natural History. In order to accomplish this, each year a cohort of 4-6 students from each college will be recruited and the students will conduct research projects over a two year period. During the academic year, the research will be done on the home campuses. Over the winter breaks and summers, research will be conducted at the American Museum of Natural History. These students will serve as a nucleus to get other students involved in environmental projects throughout the metropolitan area. This UMEB project will involve students in workshops in molecular biology techniques, seminars in population biology, and workshops that provide graduate school and career guidance. The students will be closely mentored and their progress monitored and assessed in order to help them become our future scientists in environmental biology and in order to develop additional programs capable of broadening participation in careers in environmental biology doc19699 none Nolan This UMEB project seeks to increase the participation of students from under-represented groups at two New York City colleges by engaging them in hands-on research projects in conservation genetics and environmental science in collaboration with scientists at their colleges and at the American Museum of Natural History. In order to accomplish this, each year a cohort of 4-6 students from each college will be recruited and the students will conduct research projects over a two year period. During the academic year, the research will be done on the home campuses. Over the winter breaks and summers, research will be conducted at the American Museum of Natural History. These students will serve as a nucleus to get other students involved in environmental projects throughout the metropolitan area. This UMEB project will involve students in workshops in molecular biology techniques, seminars in population biology, and workshops that provide graduate school and career guidance. The students will be closely mentored and their progress monitored and assessed in order to help them become our future scientists in environmental biology and in order to develop additional programs capable of broadening participation in careers in environmental biology doc19700 none Lloyd L. Lee University of Oklahoma CRCD: Integration of High Performance Computing in Nanotechnology: A Combined Research in the Curricular Development This is a multi-institutional (University of Oklahoma and Worcester Polytechnic Institute) and multi-disciplinary project, involving departments of chemical engineering, computer science, and educational technology. The project addresses the integration of the fields of nano-technology and computational science; areas of science and engineering that have experienced fast-paced developments in the past few years. The project synthesizes these two disciplines by establishing a curriculum that will combine the latest developments in high performance computing with computational nano-technology. A three-year curriculum consists of five elements: (1) nano-materials manufacture and characterization; (2) high performance computing and molecular simulation; (3) wet laboratory experiments for manufacture and testing of nano-structured materials; (4) design of nano-devices with the help of the National Nanofabrication Users Network (NNUN); and (5) lectures from invited guest speakers in nano-technology. The computational science materials are packaged as portable modules that can be applied to other scientific disciplines, such as computational fluid dynamics and bio-informatics. In the context of computational science, the project has several goals: (1) It inculcates a sufficient level of interest in performance and an appreciation for the associated issues, so that students will develop the habit of incorporating performance issues into every aspect of software design, and especially in initial design phases; (2) Students will learn about the fundamental issues of performance, especially parallel performance, thereby creating the ability to improve and evaluate software optimization. (3) Students will be educated in the methodologies required to transform a problem from physical description to mathematical representation, then to algorithmic specification, and finally to software implementation; (4) Students will acquire the means and understanding necessary for proper testing, validation and evaluation of their software. In this context, performance involves two aspects: algorithm and implementation. (5) It undertakes the professional development of students, cultivating their abilities in interdisciplinary project management. In particular, the students will learn to leverage the synergies between engineering, mathematics and computer science, in order both to fully exploit available resources and to evaluate the resources required for future endeavors doc19701 none This award provides funding for a three-year Combined Research-Curriculum Development (CRCD) program, entitled, Environmental Informatics in Coastal Margins, at Texas A&M University College Station, the regional campuses in Corpus Christi and Kingsville, and the Texas Engineering Experiment Station, under the direction of Dr. James S. Bonner. The overall objective of this project is to develop four new and significantly modified courses, which will provide the nation with the next generation of engineers and decision-makers able to utilize the latest environmental modeling tools in their designs and fully comprehend the environmental impacts of new developments on infrastructure and serve industries doc19702 none This proposal is concerned with questions related to the behavior of solutions to nonlinear wave equations under perturbation. In particular we are concerned with geometric PDEs such as wave maps and Schrodinger maps. These equations can be viewed as constrained motion in space where the constraint forces the solution to lie on a subspace such as a manifold or a metric space. This leads to singularly perturbed wave and Schrodinger equations. We propose to study the relationship between the wave map equations and the constrained motion in terms of convergence and in terms of the dynamics of solutions. Specifically we propose to study: 1) Convergence of the constrained motion when the data are not well prepared leading to rapid oscillations; 2) the persistence of periodic, quasi-periodic, and homoclinic orbits that asymptote to quasi-periodic orbits; 3) wave maps into the Heisenberg Group, as a metric space; and finally 4) the relationship between Schrodinger maps and wave maps, where the wave map is considered as a constrained motion on a Lagrangian submanifold of the Schrodinger map into a Kahler manifold. The dynamics of many physical systems can be described by geometric evolution equations. For example dynamics of the magnetization field in a ferromagnetic material is described by the Landau-Lifshitz equation; the study of a vibrating membrane in a crystalline structure where there is a uniform distribution of dislocations, is described by wave equations into the Heisenberg Group (which also arises in other physical applications such as control theory, and the motion of robot arms). These geometric evolution models need not be exact, but should be considered as a limit of a singularly perturbed system. The general questions that we propose to study are: What relationships exist between solutions of the geometric equations and the singularly perturbed equations? How much of the rich dynamical structure (periodic, quasi-periodic, and breather type solutions) that the geometric equations have will persist under this type of singular perturbation? One of the major goals of our work is to develop analytical methods to deal with convergence questions related to this type of perturbations. Another important goal is to develop and use infinite dimensional dynamical systems techniques in conjunction with analytical methods to answer the persistence question and ultimately to bridge the gap between finite dimensional dynamical systems and PDEs doc19703 none s of links, in the sense of Turaev. Topology is the study of intrinsic shape. It is sometimes called rubber sheet geometry because the objects under investigation can be twisted and stretched (but not torn) without losing their identity. It is a subject which impinges on many areas of mathematics and science. Topological Quantum Field Theory is one of the most current and exciting areas of topology with intimate connections to high energy physics as well as other areas of mathematics, for instance number theory and symbolic dynamical systems. Gilmer is applying this subject to answer questions about knots, links and 3-dimensional manifolds. A 3-dimensional manifold is a topological object which looks locally like the familiar space we live in. One may also consider manifolds of other dimensions. It is ironic that manifolds of dimension three and four are least well understood. One would guess that our intuition should be strongest in these dimensions. A knot is a closed loop in a 3-manifold. A link is a collection of closed loops in a 3-manifold. In , Hilbert gave a famous list of problems for mathematicians to study. His sixteenth problem concerns the topology of real algebraic curves in the real projective plane, It is still unsolved but it has lead to many beautiful developments and partial solutions. Hilbert asked how the components (called ovals) of the set of zeros of a nonsingular real homogenous polynomial of given degree can be arranged in the plane, if the number of these ovals is maximal for the given degree. This project further studies certain type of links to make progress on Hilbert s problem and related questions doc19704 none The conceptual interpretation of forest community establishment and maintenance in tropical forests is heavily influenced by the theoretical concepts of succession and gap dynamics. While these concepts are appropriate to upland forests we suggest that they are inappropriate to describe plant community dynamics for Amazon floodplain forests. On the floodplain seasonal inundation is the strongest mechanism influencing the ecological processes that maintain the landscape heterogeneity and complexity so characteristic of this environment. Floodwaters act most strongly on the edges of landscape elements-rivers, lakes, levees-where transitions in vegetation occur. This doctoral dissertation research project will provide an alternative conceptual interpretation of forest community dynamics on the Amazon floodplain which is based on the ecological functions of edges. Riverine farmers who take advantage of the rich alluvial floodplain soils also create edges in their small-scale agriculture production systems. Their production and resource management technologies also influence the development of forest communities. The focus of this research is on a single tree species native to varzea forests--Calycophyllum spruceanum, a tremendous tree in the coffee family--but broadly treats the composition and dynamics of floodplain forest environments. Research conducted at the landscape level combined with studies on the autecology of C. spruceanum will show how the distribution and population dynamics of this tree species are influenced by the fluvial dynamics acting on edges and by land use practices of varzea residents. Research will be conducted in several Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon floodplain forests and riverine villages. The project employs methodologies at both the landscape and field scales including participant-observation techniques, interviews with local farmers, land use surveys, vegetation inventories of agricultural fields and forests, and experimentation. The stand inventory data will be analyzed using Principal Components Analysis (PCA). A multivariable analysis will be employed to test the relationship of flood duration, light levels, and edge type to the establishment and growth of seedlings in fields, fallows, and forests. The outcome of this study will include an ecological and management analysis of the woody component of production systems developed by varzea residents and a monograph on the ecology of an important tree species native to the varzea. Amazon flooded forests provide critical habitat for fish and other animals and plants specially adapted to long periods of seasonally flooding. The maintenance of tree cover is critical for the conservation in this fragile environment which absorbs the floodwaters of the mighty Amazon River and its major tributaries over a period of four to six months annually. Despite its ecological and conservation importance, the Amazon flooded forest environment and the production systems of its inhabitants are not fully understood. To address the information gap this doctoral dissertation research project will focus on the natural and social processes that control the regeneration, establishment, and growth of tree species in the natural forests and landholdings of farmers. Non-indigenous riverine farmers, who occupy and steward these forests, are also often overlooked in development and conservation agendas. A second goal of this research project is to identify and promote their traditional knowledge and local technologies that maintain tree cover in this critical environment. The results of this project will be applicable to development and conservation programs specific to floodplain environments throughout Amazonia. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc19705 none This project is an observational and data analysis project to examine and understand the differences between the two types of coronal mass ejections (CMEs). CME events during solar cycles 22 and 23 will be identified using the coronagraph data from Skylab, the Solar Maximum Mission, Solwind, and SOHO. Groundbased coronal measurements from the Mauna Loa coronagraph will also be used. The association of CME events with active regions and with quiescent prominences will be studied. The observations will be used to test different models of CME eruptions doc19706 none Manfred Huber University of Texas Arlington An Active, Collaborative Learning Program in Smart Home Technologies This project provides opportunities for students, through the transfer of knowledge advances from research in Smart Home technologies, to engage in educational experiences that prepare them for the workforce in the expanding area of embedded, smart systems. The project focuses on the upper-level undergraduate and beginning graduate curricula at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) and Texas Christian University (TCU). The curriculum developments enabled by this project draw from expertise in the computer science and the engineering departments of both institutions and are also used to augment courses within various engineering disciplines. New course elements developed in this project incorporate state-of-the-art advances in fields such as Machine Learning, Requirements Modeling, Product Development Processes, Mobile robotics, and Multi-agent systems. Smart Home technology provides a vehicle to investigate and integrate these diverse topics and thus represents an environment suitable for cross-disciplinary team projects in which students with different expertise learn to cooperate to address a task. A Smart Home lab at UTA and a similar lab (Smart Frog Condo) at TCU are equipped with a variety of sensors and devices to provide hands-on experiences for students. These two similar labs permit experiments to be largely interchangeable to ensure the most efficient use of resources and available expertise at the two universities doc19707 none Knox This award to University of California at San Diego will provide instrumentation for oceanographic research for use by the Oceanographic Data Facility of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, as well as specific instruments for use on the four research vessels operated by the institution, R Vs Revelle, Melville, New Horizon and Sproul. All four of these research vessels are operated by the university as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. Specific instrumentation to be acquired includes a GPS unit for vessel attitude monitoring, a thermosalinograph, sixteen computers for shipboard use, two new CTD (conductivity-temperature-depth) systems with carousels for water sampling, three conductivity temperature pump sets for use with the CTDs, three new oxygen sensors, upgrades for autotitrator systems, and new cable and fairing for the towed, undulating vehicle system. The shared-use instrumentation supported here will assist marine scientists conduct studies worldwide on SIO and other research vessels during and future years doc19708 none This award provides funding for a three-year Combined Research-Curriculum Development (CRCD) program, entitled, Photovoltaic Device Processing-A Systemic Curriculum and Research Program, at the University of Arizona, under the direction of Dr. Dunbar P. Birnie. The overall objective of this project is to expose and integrate numerous students into the complexities of photovoltaic device design-both in their class work and by incorporating them into state-of-the-art research doc19709 none This award provides funding for a three-year Combined Research-Curriculum Development (CRCD) program, entitled, A Research-Based Electromagnetics-Circuits Curriculum for Giga-Scale Microelectronics, at the University of Washington, under the direction of Dr. Vikram Jandhyala. The overall objective of this project, which aims at a dramatic paradigm shift, is to combined electromagnetic (EM) and circuits principles in a unified, hierarchical manner in order to target high-technology areas doc19710 none This individual investigator award will support an experimental project at a predominately undergraduate institution. The project concentrates on the study of intrinsic inhomogeneous structures in correlated electron materials, with a goal of elucidating the nature of phase transitions and the role played by disordered dynamics in the behavior of these systems as the temperature is decreased. Static and dynamic properties of local magnetic-field and electric-field-gradient distributions in systems undergoing phase transitions will be characterized by means of magnetic- and quadrupolar-resonance techniques. In addition, muon spin rotation techniques will be used to characterize and assess the role of disordered dynamics in the ground state of systems displaying characteristics consistent with a quantum critical point. Undergraduate and graduate (masters level) students working on this project will receive training in the techniques of magnetic resonance, radio-frequency electronics, cryogenics, and interfacing computers with experiments. The research will be carried out in collaboration with The University of California, Riverside, The University of Florida, and the Kamerlingh Onnes Lab in the Netherlands. This individual investigator award will support an experimental project at a predominately undergraduate institution. The project concentrates on increasing our understanding of correlated electron materials. These are systems in which the electrons interact strongly with each other, resulting in a behavior completely different from that displayed by the more common non-interacting electron systems such as normal metals. Correlated electron materials are currently the subject of great deal of interest for science and technology due to the wide variety of behaviors they display in response to changes in temperature and magnetic field. These materials may exhibit superconductivity, magnetism, antiferromagnetism, small-moment and quadrupolar ordering, non-Fermi liquid behavior, colossal magnetoresistance or hidden order. Nuclear-magnetic and quadrupolar-resonance and muon spin rotation techniques will be used to study the static and dynamic properties of correlated-electrons in rare-earth and actinide compounds such as heavy-fermion systems. The emphasis is on elucidating the nature of phase transitions and the role played by disordered dynamics in the behavior of these systems as the temperature is decreased. Undergraduate and graduate (masters level) students working on this project will receive training in the techniques of magnetic resonance, radio-frequency electronics, cryogenics, and interfacing computers with experiments. The research will be carried out in collaboration with The University of California, Riverside, The University of Florida, and the Kamerlingh Onnes Lab in the Netherlands doc19711 none This award funds a planning visit to Brazil for Dr. Derek Dunn-Rankin of the University of California-Irvine to meet with Dr. Joao De Carvalho of the Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP) and to visit the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE) to develop a research plan to experimentally analyze thermoacoustic oscillations in confined combustion systems. A better understanding of such systems could lead to improved heat transfer and lower pollutant levels. The detailed experimental plan that will result from this planning visit could form the basis for a future U.S.-Brazil Cooperative Research proposal doc19712 none Geometric tomography uses data concerning sections by planes and projections on planes of geometric objects to obtain information about these objects. The latter include general compact sets, but often they are convex bodies, polytopes, star-shaped bodies, or finite sets. One advantage of this setting is that it becomes more probable that inverse problems have a unique solution. Generally, the a priori knowledge that the unknown object is of uniform density can be exploited to retrieve more information than would otherwise be possible. This can lead to algorithms that are more effective when few measurements are available, and less sensitive to measurement errors or noise. Geometric tomography has links to functional analysis, convex geometry, Minkowski geometry, and combinatorics. The project will continue the development of geometric tomography. New directions include an extension of Lutwak s dual Brunn-Minkowski theory by the introduction of moments of sets; work towards a coherent discrete Brunn-Minkowski theory that applies to finite sets, with volume replaced by cardinality; and an investigation into the possibility of a Brunn-Minkowski theory for capacity. In related applications, the plan is to consolidate links between geometric tomography and a practical method called local stereology, and to solve an inverse problem concerning finite sets with an application to medical imaging. New discoveries about intersection bodies are anticipated, with an application to the reconstruction of star bodies from the volumes of their sections through the origin. Also included is a program designed to stimulate undergraduate research. CAT scanners are machines that save lives daily. They take X-rays in a number of different directions, and synthesize the information to create an image of a two-dimensional section of part of the body. The mathematics behind this process is called computerized tomography. It is very successful, but not perfect; the reconstructed image is only approximate, and to get a better picture with the same procedure one has to take more X-rays, causing greater expense and likelihood of side effects. In geometric tomography, only homogeneous objects are allowed - the density of the object is the same everywhere inside it. An example from medicine would be a bone or a kidney. One can use this information to find better reconstruction procedures. The scope of geometric tomography is actually much wider. Any measurement involving sections of a homogeneous object by lines or planes or its shadows on lines or planes can be considered. Because of this, it has many links to other areas, both in mathematics (there is a large overlap with convex geometry, the geometry of shapes without holes or dents) and outside. For example, a new technique called local stereology depends on measurements of planar sections of biological tissue; each section passes through a fixed point, usually the nucleus of a cell, and the measurements can be made optically rather than physically. This project continues the development of several aspects of the mathematics of geometric tomography. Also included is a program designed to stimulate undergraduate research doc19713 none Tara Hutchinson University of California Irvine Expanding Engineering Thinking: Interactive Visualization of Numerical Models This project involves the development and application of a new interactive learning tool and the use of visualization techniques, enabled by the tool, in teaching engineering. The overall goal of this project is to contribute to a redesigned engineering curriculum that better matches the practice of engineering in the 21st century. The curriculum focuses on (1) visualization and hands-on manipulation, (2) computer-assisted design and virtual reality, (3) interactive learning, (4) critical thinking, (5) creative problem solving, and (6) problem-based learning. These objectives are achieved through the redesign of existing courses and through the creation of a new interdisciplinary course. The project directly addresses the connection of engineering with the changing needs of industry and society in merging technology areas by educating future engineers in the office of the future environment. This instructional environment (VizClass) includes tele-conferencing capabilities, interactive whiteboards, spatial tracking and semi-immersive visualization operating within a completely wireless environment. The VizClass system uses readily deployable, cost effective components, such that other academic institutions may easily replicate it. The hardware configuration leverages existing technology where possible and introduces system components for the real-time control and the middleware required for fusing numerical solvers with visualization tools and hardware components. Components of the environment include a series of interactive projection display boards (white boards) and a semi-immersive projection table or wall display controlled by a dedicated visualization server. Digital whiteboards, with touch sensitive input surfaces, enable more accurate tracking of user input. Active white board screens providing either an input or output workspace are linked via a high-speed (large storage capacity) server. This in turn is connected to a numerical solver. The solver receives feedback from the input or working screen in the form chosen by the user. If the input-mode is of type equation, the solver manipulates the equations and outputs the solution as either a 2- or 3-dimensional visual object to the selected output device in either mono- or stereoscopic form, respectively. Visual output can be a distorted or contoured mesh (with, for example stresses, strains or heat distribution), or figures annotating important engineering parameters. The advantage of teaching in this environment is the near-real time visual feedback articulating results of the solved equations utilizing the finite element method approach as applied to structural engineering, mechanics or electronics problems. The VizClass is equipped with a wireless network, giving collaborators and students instant access to all available on-line resources doc19714 none This individual investigator award provides support for an investigation of the electronic and magnetic ground states of molecular solids. These are a unique class of materials, where organic molecules are stacked in chain or plane-like structures. The research is motivated by recent developments involving molecular solids where superconducting and or magnetic properties appear under special conditions of composition, temperature, magnetic fields, and electric fields. The project involves investigations of three sequential hierarchies of molecular solids where electrical charge is introduced in different ways: 1) an unusual organic material where charge is introduced by a magnetic ion; 2) a single component molecular solid, engineered to produce a metallic state solely by the molecular arrangement (without need for a counter ion); and 3) chemically engineered, or functionalized forms of the acenes (i.e. tetracene and pentacene). In the latter, electrical charge will be introduced at the surface of thin films or crystals optically and or with an electric field. Both the fundamental physics, and potential new device applications for these molecular systems, will be pursued. The graduate students involved in this research will obtain training that will provide them with the skills needed for a future career in academia or in industrial or government laboratories. In addition, a strong commitment to educational outreach K-16 and teacher programs is integrated into the research agenda. Recent developments indicate that molecular solids are likely to form the basis for future technologies utilizing bio-molecular materials. Molecular solids are a unique class of materials where organic molecules are stacked in chain or plane-like structures. Here superconducting, and or magnetic properties appear under special conditions of composition, temperature, magnetic fields, and electric fields. This individual investigator project will probe the electronic and magnetic properties of molecular solids. The project will study three kinds of molecular structures: first, where both electrical charge and magnetism is introduced into the molecular layers; second, where a molecular solid is engineered to conduct electrically, solely by the molecular arrangement; and third, where functionalized forms of molecular building blocks are chemically engineered. Here optical and electric field methods will be employed to switch the conducting and magnetic properties on and off. New device applications, and fundamental science, will be pursued in these molecular systems. The graduate students involved in this research will obtain training that will provide them with the skills needed for a future career in academia or in industrial or government laboratories. In addition, a strong commitment to educational outreach K-16 and teacher programs is integrated into the research agenda doc19715 none This work is concerned with the mathematical study of propagation of waves and fronts in heterogeneous media. Ryzhik plans to concentrate on two areas of research: refocusing of time-reversed pulses in random media and the effect of flow motion on combustion and chemical reaction processes. Time reversal of acoustic waves is a recent experimental technique that refocuses a signal that arrived from a localized source at its original location even if it has been recorded at a very long distance from the source. This method has been successfully applied in a number of applications, that range from medicine, where it was used for destruction of kidney stones, to long distance propagation of acoustic waves in the ocean, cellular communications, and imaging in noisy environments. Remarkably, refocusing of the time-reversed and re-propagated signal is very robust, and is greatly improved in a highly heterogeneous random medium as compared to a uniform domain. Ryzhik intends to build on his previous work on wave propagation in random and other complex media to advance the mathematical understanding of this important phenomenon. The second major component of the proposed research is the mathematical analysis of the combustion processes in fluids, and the effect of fluid motion on combustion. It is well known that stirring by a fluid flow may both speed up chemical reactions and stop them, depending on the nature of a particular problem. These phenomena have been intensively studied by physicists, engineers and mathematicians alike. Nevertheless, there are few quantitative rigorous mathematical results in the area. Ryzhik intends to continue his work in this field, concentrating on mathematical studies of models that take into account both the affect of the flow on the chemical reaction via improved mixing, and the effect of combustion on the fluid, through changes in temperature and density of the fluid. The potential impact of this research is development of our understanding of combustion processes in turbulent flows in various settings. The mathematical tools that are necessary to address the above problems include homogenization, averaging of equations with random coefficients, maximum principles and estimates on solutions of partial differential equations. Date: April 25, doc19716 none This RUI project is a multifaceted study of single crystal germanium surfaces modified by reactive halo-gen etchants and energetic ion bombardment. Using scanning probe microscopy (SPM), reflection high-energy electron diffraction (RHEED), and photoemission spectroscopy (PES) a sequence of experiments on etched germanium substrates are planned. Initial stages will investigate the morphology of Ge(100)-(2x1) and Ge(111)-c(2x8) surfaces etched by diatomic halogen molecules (Cl2 , Br2 , I2 ). Through statis-tical analyses (correlation functions, size distributions, etc.) of SPM images from the etched surfaces, comparisons with theoretical models of surface roughening will be made to assess competing smoothing and roughening mechanisms. These data will also be compared to data collected from etched silicon sur-faces with the same orientations. The chemical similarity of germanium and silicon is predicted to yield the same halogenated surface species upon exposure to the halogen etchant-this will be verified by PES measurements to be carried out with collaborators at the University of Wisconsin Synchrotron Radiation Center. Structural differences, particularly on the (111)-oriented surfaces are expected to yield different surface structures, thereby yielding insight into structural mechanisms of surface evolution. Chemical sputtering (the simultaneous exposure of a surface to energetic ions and neutral halogen molecules) will be carried out on Ge(100)-(2x1) surfaces. SPM results from these experiments in conjunction with those from simple etch systems and those from simple sputter systems will identify similarities and differences in surface structure. Features unique to the chemical sputtering method are expected due to the synergis-tic enhancements in etching that can occur in the presence of both energetic ions and reactive chemical etchants. Dynamic RHEED measurements taken in situ during etching will enable monitoring of surface crystallinity. Etching parameters can be tuned so that RHEED oscillations are obtained, indicative of layer-by- layer removal. PES measurements will be used to assess concentrations of highly halogenated species after chemical sputtering. Unique surface morphologies result from material removal. Etch pits, surface defects, regrowth dimer chains, and regrowth islands are examples of the kinds of nanostructures that can be controlled via etchant flux, etchant fluence, and substrate temperature. Large domains of these surface features can be created and used as templates for thin-film growth. The goal of the research is to explore the influence of these nanostructures on the nucleation and growth of thin films. Statistical analysis of SPM data will allow monitoring evolution of surface morphology. Questions being addressed include whether or not these surface structures enhance nucleation density, how island coalescence is af-fected, and how interface abruptness is affected. Before the thin-film growth experiments take place, re-sidual halogen atoms must be removed from the surfaces, preferably without disturbing the structure of the etched surface. Extraction of halogen atoms by atomic hydrogen has been shown to be effective using spectroscopic techniques; however, the effect of this procedure has not been explored from a morpho-logical perspective. SPM and PES data will be collected in order to verify the effectiveness of this tech-nique with respect to surface modification. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in a topical area of materials science having techno-logical relevance. Undergraduate students will play a primary role in the project, with opportunities for research integrated directly into their academic program, and continued full time in the summer. The re-search program will enable forefront research and access to state-of-the-art surface science equipment to undergraduate students. An important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education doc19717 none Hynes This three-year award for US-UK cooperative research in atmospheric chemistry involves Anthony J. Hynes and his students at the University of Miami s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and Michael J. Pilling at the University of Leeds School of Chemistry. The project will focus on the role of complex intermediates in reactions of the hyroxyl radical (OH) in the atmosphere. The objective is to use theory to examine important OH reactions in the atmosphere and use the results to guide experimental procedures. Chemical reactions of OH and NO2 to form nitric acid will be studied along with the role of intermediates in recombination and impact in the troposphere and stratosphere. These reactions are of importance to understanding ozone production and causes of air pollution. Each group brings unique complementary expertise to the project. The US investigator is an experimentalist and the British are expert theorists in atmospheric chemical kinetics. The project will advance doctoral research of US students and provide research training in an international environment doc19718 none The objective of the proposed research program is to establish an interdisciplinary group of researchers from UN-Charlotte, NCSU and U TN with the necessary range of expertise to characterize the role and influence of the high pressure phase transformations of silicon, germanium, and silicon nitride during manufacturing processing. It is envisaged that this material behavior may be exploited to improve the manufacturing processes by increasing yields, decreasing defects, and reducing the manufacturing costs of devices and products manufactured from these materials. The research plan proposes to extend significantly the understanding of the fundamental principles and mechanics of the deformation and machining of these materials. The high-pressure phase transformations that occur during machining of silicon, germanium, and silicon nitride are a recently discovered manufacturing process mechanism. Existing scientific and engineering models do not include this important effect. It has been suggested that the knowledge of the existence of the high-pressure metallic phase of silicon has about it the unmistakable scent of a major advance: it is likely to lead to a host of consequential researches . This knowledge is a major breakthrough for the semiconductor and optical research and materials community. The use of the high-pressure phase transformations of these materials to improve the manufacturing process is a strategic change in the basic conception of the fundamental material process mechanisms. The necessary conditions for exploiting the high-pressure phase transformation of semiconductors and ceramics will be evaluated. This research will advance the knowledge of the mechanics of these materials and permit manufacturers to hurdle the present obstacles that confront them as they attempt to produce products of higher precision and lower cost. The high pressure phase transformation work on these materials promises to be applicable to other engineering ceramics, such as silicon carbide, and to manufacturing processes such as slicing, grinding, lapping and polishing. The high-pressure phase transformation represents a new means for controlling materials, manufacturing processes, and equipment to produce the desired end effect or product. The global importance of semiconductors and ceramics has led to extensive research into the nature of surface deformation as a consequence of materials processes such as machining, grinding, lapping and polishing. With the exception of steels, semiconductors and their various physical properties as the target for research are unsurpassed in terms of human effort invested. In spite of this a detailed knowledge of the physical processes involved in elastic and more so plastic deformation is still at issue. Based on accumulated knowledge it is recognized that the high-pressure phase transformations of silicon (Si), germanium (Ge), and silicon nitride (Si3N4) are responsible for their ductile material behavior during mechanical deformation-based material fabrication processes. The proposed team-based project will provide the direction, focus and synergy needed to successfully bring current knowledge of the influence of the high pressure phase transformation to the forefront of research activities in such areas as materials, tribology, and precision engineering. Through the proposed multi-university small group effort our effectiveness is enhanced by providing for the extension of the basic knowledge and potential relevance of the high pressure phase of these materials to applications involving friction, wear and precision machining. This small group of researchers will provide a coordinated and integrated resource group to industry. The group will provide a reference source for information and expertise on material processing of silicon, germanium and silicon nitride doc19719 none Ishman This Americas award will support collaborative research between Drs. Scott E. Ishman and Nicholas Pinter of Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and Dr. Jacobus Le Roux, University of Chile, Dr. Guillermo Chong, Catholic University of Antofagasta, and Dr. Ruben Martinez-Pardo, National Museum of Natural History for their work on the Cenozoic Paleoceanographic and paleoclimatic evolution of Northern and Central Chile. The project will be done in the Mejillones Peninsula (MP) region in the north near Antofagasta and the Navidad region in central Chile to the southwest of Santiago. The northern region of Chile provides a unique geographic setting to investigate the oceanographic and climatic sensitivity of the eastern South Pacific to significant changes in Antarctic ice volume change as interpreted from sea-level records. The Mejillones Basin is ideal for this research. It represents a shallow marine setting developed on an active margin with nearby volcanism and other significant tectonic features. Results from this proposed project will provide a better understanding of the interconnection between Antarctic ice volume change, oceanographic and atmospheric circulation, and the impacts these have on recurring oceanographic and meteorological events such as El Nino, which have global and economic significance doc19720 none While many of the insights are readily demonstrated for dense linear algebra operations, there are natal extensions that impact sparse direct methods. It is the goal of the proposed project to pursue a unified approach to all of these insights in an effort to put software architectures of linear algebra libraries for this domain of operations on a solid scientific footing. We will undertake a one year pilot project that will demonstrate the following: (1) The systematic approach can be used to derive highly efficient kernels for specialized dense linear algebra operations that are encountered in sparse direct methods; (2) The abstract program interface that has been demonstrated to allow high-performance implementation of dense linear algebra operations will be extended to apply to sparse matrices that are viewed as hierarchical matrices; (3) We will lay the foundation for a mathematical description of sparse matrices as hierarchical matrices which we believe will allow the derivation methods to be extended to operations on hierarchical matrices doc19721 none This is an Information Technology Research Proposal (ITR). Until recently, an intrinsic property of electrons, their spin, has been overlooked in potential applications in electronics. Understanding and manipulating spin in appropriate semiconductor structures offers promise for entirely new types of future spintronic devices and for producing elements of quantum computers. Spintronic devices are non-volatile, consume less power, and can be faster than conventional electronic devices that are based on the charge of the electron. This project will focus on investigating the complex states of electrons and holes and their interactions with the local environment in semiconductor quantum structures that have potential for application in spin-based devices which ultimately might find their way into future quantum spin based computers. An array of optical techniques will be used to probe spin-related effects in semiconductor nanostructures. The project will couple extensive experimental investigations with theoretical calculations and predictions. Three graduate students, one undergraduate student and one or more high school physics teachers will be involved in these projects. Results are expected to reveal new physics and bring improved understanding to issues that will be important for implementing future generations of devices for information technology. This is an Information Technology Research proposal (ITR). Until recently the carrier spin has been overlooked in electronic devices. Understanding and exploiting carrier spin in semiconductors offers promise for spintronic devices, which are non-volatile, consume less power, and can be faster than devices based on manipulation of carrier charge. This project couples experimental and theoretical research directed at understanding and manipulating spins in semiconductor structures. The detailed nature of electronic states of neutral and spin-singlet -triplet charged excitons in GaAs AlGaAs lateral fluctuation quantum dots will be investigated with the goal of understanding their role in possible implementation of quantum bits. The spin states of carriers in spin-injection devices will be probed with the goal of understanding the effects of lattice vibrations, band structure, phonons, interfaces and diffusion distances on the degree of spin polarization. Polarized photoluminescence (PL) and PL excitation spectroscopies combined with optically detected resonance (ODR) spectroscopy of free electrons and holes, and internal transitions of excitons will be employed in these studies. Three graduate and one undergraduate students, one or more high school physics teachers will be involved in these projects. Results are expected to reveal new physics and bring improved understanding to issues that are important for future information technology applications doc19722 none The Mathematical Science Research Institute is developing and producing a 15-minute pilot for a regular mathematics slot in a new PBS magazine format program that is being developed. Keith Devlin will be responsible for the mathematics content as well as appearing as the on-camera host. The segments will be based on Devlin s popular radio Math Guy segments that have been appearing on NPR s Weekend Edition. The topic for the pilot is the Clay Millennium Problems. The pilot is being produced by Jon Palfreman, an award-winning science documentary producer. Evaluation of the pilot will be conducted by Rockman et. al. If successful, a future segment would explore a range of mathematics topics including mathematics education, epidemiology, scientific visualization, uses and misuses of statistics, how the brain acquires and processes mathematics, and the mathematics of voting doc19723 none William E. Dietrich This project focuses on two fundamental questions: 1) How does flow and sediment routing through a lowland floodplain system moderate short and longer-term variations in sediment delivery towards offshore depositional environments? and 2) What controls the proportion of a river s sediment load that is deposited on its floodplain? It is hypothesized that net sediment loss to the floodplains was highest during Holocene sea-level rise and, after near stabilization of sea level, the proportion of the sediment load deposited in the floodplain has progressively declined. These two basic question are being addressed by comparing the flow and sediment routing processes, and the proportion of sediment lost to floodplains on the middle Fly and lower Strickland Rivers. Historically, the Strickland carried about 7 times the load of the Fly and it is hypothesize that this larger load has led to greater channel dynamics, steeper slopes, coarser bed, more elevated floodplain and possibly a lower trapping efficiency than the Fly. A numerical model is being developed that is sufficiently mechanistic that it can address the questions of damping and trapping efficiency on the event and seasonal scale, yet simplified enough that it can also model the co-evolving bed grain size, channel slope and floodplain topography, a crucial capability for understanding the time evolution of trapping efficiency. Though ambitious, many parts of the model have been assembled in previous research. The hydrodynamic model accounts for the effects of floodplain morphology and hydrology. The sediment routing includes effects of channel migration and accounts for the deposition and erosion of sediment by grain size. A field program is being conducted to document the flood wave damping rates, the sediment trapping efficiency of the Strickland and Fly Rivers, and to parameterize the numerical model. Quantification of floodplain morphology is being done through topographic surveys and analysis of remote sensing imagery. Intensive surveys of the velocity and suspended sediment fields are used to motivate and parameterize the hydraulics and sediment transport model. Short and longer-term (less than 100 years) rate of floodplain deposition is being documented from shallow cores. Extensive flow and sediment monitoring data are being provided by Ok Tedi Mining, Ltd. on the Middle Fly and by Porgera Joint Venture on the Strickland. Previous research on the Fly River enables the research focus to be on the Strickland River doc19724 none Discrete models of the Euler equations governing fluid mechanics will be analyzed with the goal of understanding high Reynolds number turbulent flows. The comprehensive approach will involve a combination of mathematical analysis of Hamiltonian dynamical systems, physical modeling based on discrete particle representations of the Euler equations, and high performance computing. The mathematical problem is of N-body type, thus numerical algorithm development for these systems and dynamical systems visualization techniques will be an essential component of the work carried out under this award. The four main projects described in the proposal are each designed to develop new analytical techniques in dynamical systems theory, test current techniques on models that are physically well grounded, develop new numerical algorithms and visualization methods for particle interaction problems, and push the models closer towards applications. This project involves the development of discrete models for fluid flow, using a combination of mathematical tools and high performance computing. One major emphasis will be on studying these models on the surface of a sphere, both rotating and non-rotating, a problem which has direct applications to the flow in a planetary atmosphere on such large scales that the curvature of the planet plays a role in the dynamics. This problem is potentially of great importance to the understanding of environmental processes in the atmospheres and oceans of Earth and to the large vortices, including the Red Spot, observed in the atmosphere of Jupiter doc19725 none Moret, Bernard University of New Mexico CISE Postdoctoral Associates in Experimental Computer Science: A Hierarchical Methodology for SMP Clusters The promise of high-performance computing implicit in parallel computation has so far been realized in a limited range of applications, but parallelism in large distributed-memory systems is hampered by the cost of message passing. Symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) clusters combine distributed memory with true shared memory access and offer the potential for effectively solving complex, irregular optimization problems with reduced message passing costs. The proposed research is to extend work on high-performance SMP computation, using computational biology, to develop a hierarchical methodology for clusters of SMPs. The postdoctoral research associate will develop and test the methodology, suited to future multilevel parallel architectures, using problems and algorithms from research in high-performance computational biology as test cases doc19726 none Cvetic This three-year award for US-Spain collaboration on particle physics of implications of M-theory involves Mirjam Cvetic and his students of the University of Pennsylvania and Luis Ibanez and Angel Uranga at the Universidad Autonoma of Madrid, in Spain. The purpose of the project is to investigate the fundamental aspects of strings and branes, as well as the powerful applications of string theory to particle phenomenology, astrophysics, and cosmology. The US researchers and Spanish researchers bring to this collaboration expertise in string model building and string phenomenology. The Penn theory group has also begun to broaden the scope of string phenomenology to astrophysical and cosmological issues. The objectives of the joint project are to bring the state of the art of model building in new regimes of M theory to the next level doc19727 none Johnstone, John U of Alabama @ Birmingham The work of this proposal can be divided into three categories: (1) the study of dual representations of the tangent space of a curve and surface, (2) the application of these dual representations to the computation of bitangency, and (3) the application of bitangency to several problems in geometric modeling, computer graphics and robotics such as visibility, lighting and motion. The problem that binds together these areas of study is bitangency. There are basically three bitangent structures: the bitangent line (a line that is tangent to two curves), the bitangent plane (a plane that is tangent totwo surfaces), and the bitangent developable (the envelope of a familyof bitangent planes). While the tangent is important in the analysis of individual curves and surfaces in isolation, the bitangent is important in the analysis of collections of curves and surfaces, since it relates two curves or two surfaces. As the analysis of large scenes becomes increasingly important, the bitangent becomes an important tool doc19728 none This research focuses on the exact study of the statistical mechanics of model systems. Research concentrates on critical percolation in two-dimensions, and important and extensively studied statistical system, and the phase transition of the farey fraction spin chain, a new and interesting one-dimensional model with connections to multifractals and Monte Carol simulations, mathematically exact solutions of model statistical mechanical systems, and techniques from number theory. The goal is to gain new insights into, and understanding of, these systems. An important feature of the project is the use of techniques from pure mathematics and close collaboration with mathematicians. %%% This research focuses on the exact study of the statistical mechanics of model systems. Research concentrates on critical percolation in two-dimensions, and important and extensively studied statistical system, and the phase transition of the farey fraction spin chain, a new and interesting one-dimensional model with connections to multifractals and Monte Carol simulations, mathematically exact solutions of model statistical mechanical systems, and techniques from number theory. The goal is to gain new insights into, and understanding of, these systems. An important feature of the project is the use of techniques from pure mathematics and close collaboration with mathematicians doc19729 none This research investigates the parallel efficiency of an important class of bulk synchronous applications, as exemplified by computational molecular dynamics, in clusters of workstations. Bulk synchronous applications are often characteristic of non-deterministic computational requirements over time. In a multiprogramming environment, the nodal capacities allocated to an application may also change as other jobs join and leave. With respect to the dynamics of the computation and uncertainties of the cluster resources, this research aims at developing stochastic scheduling strategies in support of high performance computing in the clusters. It constructs a framework for modeling and analyses of adaptive scheduling algorithms by characterizing scheduling factors as random variables. It develops efficient application-level remapping policies by taking into account the dynamic systems of workload evolution and capacity change. The scheduling strategies are evaluated in the application of molecular dynamics computer simulations. The research will blend formal modeling analyses, experimentation, and evaluation of stochastic scheduling algorithms. Success of this research will help increase the industrial acceptance of high performance cluster computing and advance computational molecular dynamics to simulations of large, multi-atom systems in a timely manner doc19730 none Yong-Geun Oh Floer homology in symplectic geometry was introduced by Floer in an attempt to prove the Arnold conjecture. Various results by Chekanov, Oh, Polterovich and Seidel have proved that the Floer homology is a general powerful tool to investigate symplectic topology. In this project, Oh proposes to further investigate structure and applications of the Floer theory for deeper understanding of the Hamiltonian diffeomorphism group and Lagrangian submanifolds or more generally symplectic topology. The Floer theory of Lagrangian submanifolds, via Fukaya s A-infinity category, also provides a geometric framework for Kontsevich s homological mirror symmetry proposal on Calabi-Yau manifolds. Oh s recent work with Fukaya, Ohta and Ono provides several key steps towards a rigorous construction of Fukaya s category by developing an obstruction theory for defining the Lagrangian intersection Floer homology. Complete construction will involve study of singular Lagrangian submanifolds, Lagrangian surgery and their relations to the Floer homology. Oh proposes to investigate these new aspects of the Floer theory in relation the mirror symmetry on the Calabi-Yau manifolds. The Hamiltonian formalism plays important roles not only for solving problems in classical mechanics but also for quantizing the classical mechanics into quantum mechanics. The Poisson bracket is the crucial geometric structure that plays a key role in the classical mechanics and the quantum mechanics through the quantization process. When one considers mechanics in a constrained system, i.e., mechanics on a curved space, description of the corresponding phase space and the geometric structure corresponding to the Poisson bracket requires the notion of the symplectic structure and symplectic manifolds. Symplectic geometry and topology is the study of symplectic manifolds. In symplectic geometry, there are two most important objects of study. One is the study of Hamiltonian systems, a special type of differential equation, and their periodic orbits. This is dynamical in nature. The other is the study of geometry and topology of Lagrangian submanifolds. This is geometric in nature. Understanding the intersection theory of Lagrangian submanifolds is the core of symplectic topology. Floer homology introduced by Floer in the end of 80 s is a general machinery to study this intersection theory. The Floer theory also provides a geometric framework for the mirror symmetry phenomenon that was discovered by physicists in string theory. Oh s proposed research aims at, on the one hand, deeper understanding of symplectic topology, and also aims at understanding inter-relations between the symplectic and the complex geometry via the study of mirror symmetry doc19731 none The research focuses on two areas of short-pulse laser plasma interactions; first - pulse wavelength tuning using a fs-laser produced semiconductor plasma and a clean test of the proposed Superradiant Amplification (SRA) of a fs-laser pulse in a plasma. A semiconductor plasma composed of electron-hole pairs will allow the PI to avoid some of the difficulties that have plaqued recent work on this topic doc19732 none This award is for an 18 month deployment of 43 PASSCAL broad band seismometers in Nicaragua and Costa Rica to seismically image the mantle subduction factory of the Central American volcanic arc in the region. In addition to the PASSCAL instruments, the PIs will also collaborate with Costa Rican and Nicaraguan seismologists to use data from existing short period and broadband instruments. The experiment will image the mantle wedge with receiver functions and other converted waves, together with regional waveform inversions. Tomographic imaging will be used to try to map the region of slab dewatering (and intermediate depth earthquake generation), melt generation and melt migration in the mantle wedge. Patterns of mantle flow will be interpreted from shear wave splitting data, and crustal structure will be inferred from receiver functions. Overall, the idea is to infer the workings of the subduction factory by combining seismic images of the crust and mantle with the modeled interpretations of large observed differences in magma composition along strike in the arc volcanoes doc19733 none This individual investigator award will support an experimental project that focuses on quasi-two-dimensional (2D), nanostructured films near their superconductor to nonsuperconductor quantum phase transitions (QPTs). Nanostructured proximity effect arrays, consisting of nanoscale superconducting grains embedded in a metal film and nanoscale wire arrays of superconducting films will be tuned through their superconductor to non-superconductor transitions and probed with electron magnetotransport and tunneling measurements at dilution refrigerator temperatures. The physics behind the QPTs in the nano-arrays, while similar to the well-known superconductor to insulator transitions is expected to sharply contrast with them. Because of the nanoscale dimensions, the phase and amplitude degrees of freedom in the superconducting order parameter, rather than just the phase, will vary strongly through these transitions. These experiments have the potential to reveal new classes of QPTs, and to provide physical insight into the origin of pseudogaps, and unconventional metallic phases in 2D correlated electron systems, such as the underdoped high temperature superconductors. While being immersed in important current problems in condensed matter physics, the students involved in this research will develop expertise in nanotechnology, scanning probe microscopies and low temperature techniques that will make them potentially attractive to industry and prepare them to be future leaders in science. The ability to produce and obtain images of electronic materials with features as small as a few billionths of a meter (a few nanometers) leads to new opportunities in technology and fundamental science. In technology, as more speed and power is demanded from our computers the dimensions of the electronics necessarily rapidly shrink toward the nanodimensions. On a fundamental side, new properties can emerge in seemingly familiar materials such as the metal copper when its dimensions are reduced to the nanometer scale. How small can a piece of copper be and still maintain the properties which are commonly associated with a metal? This individual investigator award supports a project that focuses on how the properties of superconducting materials (i.e. materials which lose all of their electrical resistance when cooled close to the absolute zero of temperature) change when some of their dimensions are pared down to the few nanometer scale. Measurements on two types of structures, nanostructured proximity effect arrays and nanoscale superconducting wire arrays, will test recent theories that suggest that the superconductors go through a dramatic change, becoming more like a metallic state of matter, when their dimensions become small enough. This metal state is predicted to have exotic properties that are similar to those of the technologically relevant high temperature superconductor materials. Thus, these nanostructured superconductors will serve as a model system that can lend new insight into other more complex materials. In addition, they will be used to address the simple and fundamental question of how finely structured can a superconductor be and still maintain its superconducting properties? While being immersed in important current problems in condensed matter physics, the students involved in this research will develop expertise in nanotechnology, scanning probe microscopies and low temperature techniques that will make them potentially attractive to industry and prepare them to be future leaders in science doc19734 none The Research Vessel (R V) Cape Hatteras is a general purpose Regional Class vessel, owned by the National Science Foundation and operated by the Duke University University of North Carolina Oceanographic Consortium. Since its construction and delievery in , the vessel has operated from its homeport at Duke University Marine Laboratory in Beaufort, North Carolina. For the past 20 years, the vessel has supported a variety of oceanographic research funded by the National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, United States Geological Survey, Naval Oceanographic Office, the Department of Energy, and the State of North Carolina. Funds in this proposal were requested to upgrade and enhance the capabilities of the R V Cape Hatteras. Renovations and modifications will enable scientists to utilize state of the art instrumentation and equipment; to work on a safe and modern platform; and allow the ship to operate for approximately another 10 years in the North Atlantic coastal region. This mid-life refit would include the renovation and upgrading of all cabins, labs, and interior spaces; relocation of the aft crane to the winch deck; the addition of two science berths; the replacement of all helm and engine controls; the replacement of most interior plumbing; and the replacement of all exterior and interior coatings doc19667 none The PIs will carry out a swath bathymetry survey of the southern Gulf of California, obtain 3.5 kHz, magnetic and gravity profiles and collect dredge samples of the volcanic basement. The objectives are to test hypotheses concerned with the generic problems of how continental rifts are segmented tectonically and whether this relates to asymmetries of faulting, how rift propagation occurs tectonically and what type(s) of magmatism accompanies continental break-up and earlist seafloor spreading. The Gulf of California is a MARGINS focus site and this study will complement other research being carried out and planned for this region doc19736 none In terms of marine ecosystems and climate change issues, tropical regions of the Atlantic Ocean are among the most poorly represented in the World Ocean Database (National Oceanographic Data Center, Washington D.C.). However, the Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas (Ukraine) holds extensive data archives on the region from numerous former Soviet Union expeditions carried out from to . These archives include over 4,000 biological samples collected on 19 major expeditions, the vast majority of which are enumerated to the species level for phytoplankton, zooplankton, and mesopelagic fish. Those samples are accompanied by detailed physical and chemical measurements. The project will allow a team of US, Ukrainian, and Russian scientists to produce, for broad dissemination, an inventory and database on the above expeditions. The database will enable full accessibility, viewing, sorting, and exporting of information by oceanographic station, location, or taxa. The project participants will further explore the spatial-temporal variability of tropical pelagic communities using the compiled database as a primary source for guiding ongoing field research. Resulting data products, including abundance, biomass, and species diversity indices will be used to elucidate general patterns linking community structure in the tropical Atlantic and atmospheric physical influences. The present study will substantially advance understanding of species diversity in the tropical ocean by providing a large, detailed database for poorly studied regions. Future research on biodiversity and potential climate-change influences in the Atlantic Ocean will benefit greatly from the detailed taxonomic analyses of phytoplankton, zooplankton, and fish species that will comprise a major portion of the database doc19737 none The PIs plan mapping and sampling features on the Cocos and Nazca plates to provide a basis for inferring the properties of the subducted Cocos plate under Central America. The basic premise is that the Nazca plate south of Grijalva was formerly contiguous with Cocos plate under Nicaragua and parts of Costa Rica and that this fossil plate boundary could form an important structure in the down-going slab. Because a small fragment remains unsubducted, the investigators propose to not only study it, but also it s conjugate off Peru, where much more remains. At that locality, the structure can be mapped more thoroughly and the results extrapolated to the subducted slab beneath Costa Rica. Further, dredging will provide essential samples to measure the composition of the lithosphere that is beneath the Central American arc doc19738 none DMS- The object of this proposal is to continue our research on the topics below using techniques such as complex analysis, spectral theory, non-linear analysis and ergodic theory: i) Spectral theory of the Laplacian on functions and forms - connections with ergodic theory. ii) Global injectivity theorems. iii) Topology of umbilics. iv) The generalized Hilbert theorem. Topic i) is a collection of problems coming from (and relating to) spectral and ergodic theory, dynamics, vanishing theorems and the topology of manifolds of non-positive curvature. Topic ii) is an outgrowth of our efforts to understand embeddedness of minimal surfaces. It centers on the problem of finding conditions for a local diffeomorphism between non-compact manifolds to be injective. This type of question arises in areas of mathematics as diverse as algebraic geometry and mathematical economics. Our methods here come from geometry, topology and global analysis. Topic iii) is a classical problem in differential geometry namely, understanding the topology of umbilical singularities. The plan is to continue studying this problem as a question about the blow-up of certain hyperbolic partial differential equations. Topic iv) is also a classical problem, dealing with isometric immersions of hyperbolic spaces. As in iii), we plan to approach this question as a blow-up problem. In our approach to research, starting with the earlier work on minimal surface theory, we have always sought to achieve a balance between technique and creative mathematics. This proposal is full of problems and ideas coming from diverse areas, such as spectral theory, dynamical systems, hyperbolic equations, algebraic and Riemannian geometry. We have already contributed to all these questions. Given the variety of topics, we would like to believe that this proposal advances the internal conversation of mathematics. On the other hand, the work on Global Inversion is potentially of interest to applied disciplines, since it addresses the question of solvability of systems of non-linear equations doc19739 none The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) proposes to investigate the feasibility of developing an online magazine in the history of mathematics and its use in teaching, with a target audience of grades 9-14 teachers of mathematics. The online magazine, a new component of the NSF-funded Mathematical Sciences Digital Library, is intended to be a living, growing resource, and will incorporate features such as hyperlinks and interactive graphics. A range of materials will be included in the magazine including expository articles, translations of original sources, historical problems, a mathematical calendar, reviews of books and websites, teaching materials and translations of articles previously published in other languages doc19740 none Proposal title: Complex differential geometry and rigidity Proposal number: DMS - The proposer plans to do research in the following three topics in differential geometry: 1) the geometry of nonpositively curved Riemannian manifolds with degenerate Ricci tensor; 2) the structure of compact Kaehler manifold with nonpositive bisectional curvature; 3) metric rigidity non-rigidity for complex hyperbolic spaces. For topic 1), the proposer has obtained some results in the real analytic cases, and he proposes to investigate the smooth cases in this context. For 2), he has studied the class of compact Kaehler manifolds with nonpositive bisectional curvature. Under some additional non-degenerateness assumption, he was able to obtain a structural result for such manifolds, which can be viewed as the dual version of classical Howard-Smyth-Wu splitting theorem. He would like to study the general case, as well as some other related questions regarding this type of manifolds. For topic 3), he proposes to study two metric rigidity questions about the complex hyper! bolic space, in dimension two or higher. One is a non-equivariant metric rigidity question for quarter-pinched metrics, the other is for some special type of CAT(0) singular metrics. The proposed research lies in the field of differential geometry, which is a branch of mathematics aimed at understanding the interplay between the global structure and the curvature (which measures the bending) of a given space. The major models of spaces in this study are Riemannian manifolds and Kaehler manifolds. This field is of importance not only to many branches of mathematics, but also to other sciences and engineering such as physics. A well known example is the use of Riemannian geometry in Einstein s theory of the general relativity. Another example is that the modern control theory uses almost exclusively tools developed in differential geometry. Within the field of differential geometry, the study of nonpositively curved spaces and the rigidity phenomenon often associated with such spaces has been on the center stage since early 70 s, after the discovery of Mostow and Margulis. It has drawn much attention in 80 s and 90 s from the mathematical world. The proposer and others are trying to investigate these topics for Kaehler manifolds, which are Riemannian manifolds with a special type of structure. The recent development in string theory suggests that the universe is the ten dimensional product space of the usual (four dimensional) space time and a compact six dimensional cross section which should be a special kind of Kaehler manifold (the so-called Calabi-Yau spaces). Besides reasons and existing potential application outside mathematics, Kaehler geometry has become more of more important within many fields of pure and applied mathematics doc19732 none This award is for an 18 month deployment of 43 PASSCAL broad band seismometers in Nicaragua and Costa Rica to seismically image the mantle subduction factory of the Central American volcanic arc in the region. In addition to the PASSCAL instruments, the PIs will also collaborate with Costa Rican and Nicaraguan seismologists to use data from existing short period and broadband instruments. The experiment will image the mantle wedge with receiver functions and other converted waves, together with regional waveform inversions. Tomographic imaging will be used to try to map the region of slab dewatering (and intermediate depth earthquake generation), melt generation and melt migration in the mantle wedge. Patterns of mantle flow will be interpreted from shear wave splitting data, and crustal structure will be inferred from receiver functions. Overall, the idea is to infer the workings of the subduction factory by combining seismic images of the crust and mantle with the modeled interpretations of large observed differences in magma composition along strike in the arc volcanoes doc19742 none Engineered organic-ceramic interfaces offer a wealth of opportunities for materials synthesis. Furthermore, studying the formation and properties of organic-inorganic materials affords improved understanding of the interactions between these dissimilar components on nanoscopic and microscopic scales. Ceramic thin films formed from aqueous solutions on organic self-assembled monolayers (SAMs), the focus of this GOALI research program, constitute a geometrically simplified and chemically versatile model configuration with important technological applications. The research will study three aspects of these systems: 1) solution optimization; 2) substrate engineering; and 3) process design, directed toward economical, environmentally benign synthesis of nanocrystalline ceramic thin films. The specific systems to be studied include aluminosilicate coatings on ceramic particles for pigments; indium-tin oxide films as transparent semiconductors; and vanadium-titanium oxides for catalytic applications. The major theoretical and experimental tools to be utilized include the Gorer-Hodes theory of critical solution ratios, ceramic-organic interfacial force measurements using the atomic force microscope, and in-situ conversions of organic surface functionalities. Materials that combine ceramics with organic substances range from indispensable and familiar objects like paint, tires, bones, and flexible magnets to innovative organic-inorganic nanocomposite materials for optics, electronics, sensors, catalysts, coatings, and biomedical applications. This research program will use ultrathin engineered organic layers two nanometers thick as primers to develop low-cost, energy-efficient, environmentally friendly routes for forming ceramic thin films and coatings. The versatility of the approach is reflected in the specific objectives, which include improved paint pigments (through a university-industry collaboration between Case Western Reserve University and Sherwin Williams Corporation), thin-film catalysts, and transparent semiconducting coatings. This work also seeks a clearer understanding of the fundamental interactions between engineered organic surfaces and ceramics, to facilitate more widespread applications for organic-inorganic composite engineering materials. Significant features of the educational plan include annual involvement of undergraduate students in year-long research projects, active collaborations (including extended reciprocal visits) with leading research groups in Germany and Israel, and continuous side-by-side collaboration between academic and industrial scientists at both the senior and junior level. Academia-to-industry technology-transfer discussions are underway, involving an active patent with significant commercial potential for the industrial partners doc19743 none This award seeks to develop the relationship between the molecular structure of a novel class of semifluorinated polymers, and their interfacial structure and energies. Long term it seeks to test the potential of these polymers as support layers to orient liquid crystal thin films. This will be attained using a novel fluoropolymer with a mesogenic group (i.e. liquid crystal molecule), beta-methylstilbene on its backbone bridged by a perfluorocyclobutyl ring (PFCB). The bridging groups are used to control the surface energy and flexibility of the polymer. Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM), polarized optical microscopy, contact angle measurements, and X-ray neutron scattering and reflectivity will be used. For any liquid crystal based device, the liquid crystal molecules have to be aligned by the surface, however, the have to respond quickly, without any memory effects to an external stimuli. A delicate balance between two opposing factors, surface orientation and weak azimuthal anchoring is requires. The significance of the problem is manifested in the large number of studies, which address the issue. In the last 10 years fluorine has been introduced as a modifier for the surface anchoring. In the present study we propose to utilize the chemical structure of a polymer confined to construct orienting layers. Their surface interactions will depend solely on the nature of the polymer with no further external treatments. The design of the polymer includes incorporating a mesogenic group, or similar chemical backbone, which are expected to serve as a nucleation site for inducing ordering, bridged by a group that can modify the surface energy of the polymer to alter the anchoring energy. Standard techniques including differential scanning calorimetry X-ray scattering NMR and polarized optical microscopy will be utilized to characterize the bulk properties of the newly synthesized polymers. Films will then be cast on different supports and will be studied by atomic force Microscopy polarized optical microscopy, contact angle measurements, and X-ray neutron scattering and reflectivity, to study their structure and surface energies. Following the formation of the energy controlled interfaces; composites with well-characterized liquid crystalline molecules will be formed. The orientation of the LC cast on the polymer layers and its response to electrical stimuli will be studied. The significance of the proposed research lies in the basic understanding of interfacial characteristics of polymers and its correlation with interfacial alignment of liquid crystals leading to far-reaching technological applications, ranging from new fast responding LC devices, to optical wave-guides and new fiber optics doc19744 none Gold This U.S.-Mexico award will support a collaborative project between Dr. Scott Gold, of the University of Georgia, in Athens, Georgia, in collaboration with Dr. Jose Ruiz-Herrera of the Centro de Investigaciones y de Estudios Avanzados (Cinvestav) in Irapuato, Mexico. The researchers aim to study corn smut fungi, a plant disease of cultivated maize, whose close relatives are important pathogens of many grain crops. Smut fungi grow in two morphologies, one form is a budding yeast while the second is typical of most fungi and is made up of long tubular cells of filaments. In corn smut, yeast cells cannot attack the plant but filaments can. These two forms are also common in animal and human fungal pathogens and, again, morphology is often correlated with the ability to cause disease. The researchers have discovered mutations in genes that control the ability of the fungus to alternate between these two forms. The mutations thus far characterized dramatically affect smut disease progression. However, the morphogenetic stimuli used by the two research groups differ, the U.S side studying the signal transduction pathways and the Mexican side studying the effects of pH variations, with both groups observing similar phenotypic results in their studies. The work proposed here will continue to determine the relationship between these morphogenetic pathways by means of various experimental approaches. The information to be derived from this collaboration is likely to increase our understanding of fungal growth and diseases in general. In addition, the involvement of undergraduate and graduate students in the collaboration will provide them with a significant international research and cultural experience doc19745 none This project is continuing a professional development model that is increasing the successful participation of community colleges and community college faculty in NSF programs. The Council for Resourcement Development (CRD) is building upon its existing regional conferences to offer a series of workshops designed to: familiarize faculty with NSF programs in general, showcase regional NSF funded projects and the faculty conducting those projects, and offer a workshop on proposal development strategies specific to NSF. The objectives and activities are to: 1) Provide coordination for workshop development and implementation at the regional level, 2) Recruit faculty to attend the workshops who have not yet received grant awards fromNSF, and 3) Evaluate the workshops with particular emphasis on the longitudinal outcomes. Follow-up activities with faculty are designed to increase grant submissions to the National Science Foundation. An increased emphasis is placed on attracting and assisting colleges in regions that have been under-represented in the submission of grant applications to NSF. Longitudinal evaluation on grant submissions and awards are also being implemented doc19746 none Under this award, the PI will examine a well-documented Eocene- Paleocene rock complex from a paleo subduction thrust, now exposed in Alaska, in order to quantify and understand the differences, at a variety of length scales, between the upper aseismic parts of a subduction trust and the lower seismogenic parts. This study will test the hypothesis that deposition of minerals in cracks strengthens and locks subduction thrusts in the periods between major eatthquakes. During field work, the PI and a PhD student will document changes in structural fabric and mineral veins of various generations. Later lab studies will look at changes in physical properties, and mineralogy under similar PT conditions as presently exist in the SW Japan subduction zone. Quantification of shear zone paramenters, changes in mineralogy, intensity of pressure solution, density and porosity, and size shape of blocks and matrix, will allow interpretations of the importance of simple sliding (aseismic) vs. stick-slip (seismic) behavior. Further, the results of the lab experiments can be used to interpret textures and structural features indicative of sliding, stick-slip, and heating. These observations and measurements, including fluid inclusion studies with Vrolijk, will be useful for testing ideas about velocity weakening in actural subduction zones, providing guidance for experimentalists on what types of materials are best for deformation studies, a preview of what will be seen in riser drilling at Nankai, and 10-100m scale constraints on interpreting 3D seismic studies in subduction complexes doc19747 none PIs: Jiang Rao This research involves development of model selection procedures for linear and generalized linear mixed models. The focus of this research will be on studying asymptotic properties and finite sample performance of the procedures, which will include comparisons to commonly used ad hoc methods. The research will also develop applications of the selection methodology to selecting factors in longitudinal data, genetic screening of genes related to quantitative traits of interest, and to model selection in small area estimation problems from surveys. In addition, the methods developed will be made accessible through the development of freely available software. The research will also improve work recently completed by the investigators where the conditions for consistent factor selection in linear mixed models were established. These improvements will include developing a more efficient method for linear mixed model selection, and studying some adaptive procedures. Linear and generalized linear mixed models are important classes of models which allow relaxation of standard assumptions like independence or homogeneity of variances of observations, and take into account more complicated data structures in quite general ways. Typical applications include repeated measurements made on a patient over time or screening of candidate genes that might be related to a quantitative trait of interest. Selecting which factors should or should not be in the model can be of importance for model inference and predictions, yet little if anything has been developed to formally study this problem. This research attempts to fill this important gap in the field of developing new procedures for correct factor selection from a theoretical perspective, and evaluating real-world performance via extensive simulations. Another important component of this research is to apply it in a variety of real-world settings including longitudinal data, genetic screening, and small area estimation in survey sampling doc19748 none This work focuses on the study of phase coherent properties of low-dimensional tunnel junctions and tunable semiconductor quantum dots. These systems juxtapose competing zero-, one- and two-dimensional states separated by a precise, nanometer-scale barriers. Quantum tunneling mixes and enhances the coupling between the degenerate ground states, leading to potential development of long-lived quantum coherence in nanometer scale devices. Precise control and detection of quantum states within solid-state environment remain important challenges in condensed matter physics today. The development of macroscopic quantum coherence in these systems arises from quantum phase transitions that break the underlying symmetry. The underlying physics of phase coherent systems in nanostructured environment is largely unexplored, the dominant decoherent mechanisms unknown, and no detailed theoretical model is currently available. A series of electrical, tunneling, and dynamical measurements to study the quantum coherent transport of electrons in nanometer-scale semiconductor devices is proposed. An important feature of the work is fabrication and characterization of tunnel junctions with barriers down to few lattice spacings. Undergraduate and graduate students involved in the project will receive training in the state of art fabrication and characterization techniques. This training is intended to prepare them for careers in academe, industry or government. This research is centered on the study of quantum coherent phenomena arising from quantum mechanical interplay of electrons in nanometer-scale semiconductor devices. Quantum mechanical coherence is normally difficult to sustain for extended period of time because of coupling to the external perturbations and presence of imperfections. The quantum coherence in these systems derives from recent advances in fabrication of semiconductor nanostructures. In these unprecedentedly clean systems, theories predict quantum phase transitions into novel collective states that can sustain exceptionally long-lived excitations. Electrical and high frequency measurements designed to probe and characterize the postulated quantum states are proposed. Control and manipulation of quantum states can be exploited for applications in quantum information processing, a field of increasing technological importance. Potential applications include quantum computation, quantum cryptography, and test of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox within a solid state environment. Undergraduate and graduate students participating in this research receive broad training in the state of art fabrication and characterization techniques and can pursue careers in industrial or fundamental research doc19749 none Jennifer C. Schultens The proposed research concerns the study of 3-manifolds. The notion of a 3-manifold constitutes the 3-dimensional analogue of the 2-dimensional notion of a surface. The 2-dimensional notion of surface is to be understood in a rather broad (and rather technical) way. It includes the 2-dimensional sphere (that tends to be pictured as all points in 3-space at distance exactly 1 from the origin), the torus (often, jokingly, described as ``the icing on a doughnut ), the Klein bottle, and many others. The study of 3-manifolds is considerably more complex than that of surfaces. Surfaces are completely classified, 3-manifolds are not. In fact, it is at present unknown whether 3-manifolds can be classified (in an algorithmic sense). It is known that 4-manifolds cannot be classified. The research here endeavors to employ different types of surfaces lying in 3-manifolds and their relation to each other in a structural study of 3-manifolds. The proposed research grows out of a study of the relation of Heegaard splittings to Haken decompositions. It turns out that the lessons learnt in that investigation have applications to a wider range of problems in 3-manifold topology ranging from additivity properties of the generalized bridge numbers of knots and additivity properties of the width of knots to questions about the genus of a Heegaard splitting that is a common stabilization of two given Heegaard splittings. The methods for this investigation include a counting technique developed by M. Scharlemann and the P.I along with the notion of an orbifold Heegaard splitting. The methods further include the notion of untelescoping of Heegaard splittings, Cerf theory, thin position arguments, and the analysis of foliations induced by Morse functions corresponding to Heegaard splittings or untelescopings of Heegaard splittings. The proposed research also includes a strategy to obtain a more structural theory of surfaces in knot complements doc19720 none While many of the insights are readily demonstrated for dense linear algebra operations, there are natal extensions that impact sparse direct methods. It is the goal of the proposed project to pursue a unified approach to all of these insights in an effort to put software architectures of linear algebra libraries for this domain of operations on a solid scientific footing. We will undertake a one year pilot project that will demonstrate the following: (1) The systematic approach can be used to derive highly efficient kernels for specialized dense linear algebra operations that are encountered in sparse direct methods; (2) The abstract program interface that has been demonstrated to allow high-performance implementation of dense linear algebra operations will be extended to apply to sparse matrices that are viewed as hierarchical matrices; (3) We will lay the foundation for a mathematical description of sparse matrices as hierarchical matrices which we believe will allow the derivation methods to be extended to operations on hierarchical matrices doc19751 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Modeling the genetics of species using biological informatics: interactions of gene flow, selection, and dispersal. This simulation model uses parameters compiled from biological databases to evaluate the role of gene flow, selection coefficients and dispersal on the rate of allelic spread across subdivided populations. The research provides information on how species may remain cohesive at only a handful of major loci while simultaneously diverging at many minor loci, and has implications for explaining the relationship between macro- and microevolution doc19752 none DMS - PI: Wolfgang Ziller The principal investigator plans to continue his work on various ways in which Lie groups arise in geometry. Special emphasis will be put on geometry and topology of cohomogeneity one manifolds, i.e. manifolds on which a Lie group acts with one dimensional quotient. In our previous proposal we conjectured that every cohomogeneity one manifold has a metric with non-negative sectional curvature. A particularly interesting case are the Kervaire spheres which are exotic in many dimensions. We will try to construct metrics with nonnegative curvature on these Kervaire spheres. A further goal is to classify all cohomogeneity one manifolds with positive sectional curvature in the hope of finding some new examples, with good candidates available in dimension 7 and 9. We will also study variational properties of homogeneous Einstein metrics. In our previous proposal we showed that a partial Palais Smale condition is satisfied which enables one do carry out Morse theory and Lusternik Schnirelmann theory. A subject of major interest in global Riemannian geometry is studying manifolds whose curvature have special properties, in particular those whose curvature has a fixed sign. Manifolds with positive curvature or nonnegative curvature have been studied since the beginning of global Riemannian geometry. Very few examples of this type are known and new ones seem to be difficult to construct. A main objective of our proposal is to construct such knew examples. Of particular interest are exotic spheres, which are manifolds that look like spheres but on which ordinary calculus is quite different. These objects were discovered 40 years ago by Milnor and ever since then geometers were interested in finding a geometric description of them where the natural local invariants look like spheres, i.e. where the curvature is positive or non-negative. Whether they have metrics of positive curvature is in fact one of the major open problems in the subject. Another subject of major interest in global Riemannian geometry is the existence of Einstein metrics, which have many applications in physics in particular to building new models of Kaluza Klein theory. In this context homogeneous Einstein metrics have been studied a lot by various physicists. We develop a general variational theory for homogeneous Einstein metrics which enable one to find many new examples without having to solve the algebraic equations which the Einstein equations reduce to in the homogenous case and which can be quite difficult or impossible to solve explicitly doc19753 none Richard Canary The topology and geometry of hyperbolic 3-manifolds Professor Canary will study the space AH(M) of marked hyperbolic 3-manifolds homotopy equivalent to a fixed compact 3-manifold M. The interior of this space is well-understood due to work of Ahlfors, Bers, Kra, Marden, Maskit, Sullivan and Thurston. Roughly, the components of the interior are enumerated by topological data and each component is parameterized by analytical data. Thurston s Ending Lamination Conjecture predicts that points in the entire space AH(M) can be classified by topological data (coming from the marked homeomorphism type of the hyperbolic 3-manifold) and geometric data (which encodes the asymptotic geometry of the ends.) Yair Minsky has made substantial progress towards the resolution of Thurston s Ending Lamination Conjecture in the case that M has incompressible boundary. Prof. Canary will collaborate with Jeff Brock and Yair Minsky on a program to complete the proof of this conjecture and a number of related conjectures. Recent work, by Anderson, Brock, Bromberg, Canary, Holt, McCullough and McMullen, has revealed surprising new phenomena concerning the global topology of AH(M). Components of the interior may bump (i.e. have intersecting closures) and individual components may bump themselves. Prof. Canary proposes to further study the global topology of AH(M). In particular, the techniques used in the attack on the Ending Lamination Conjecture will be used to study the continuity of the ending invariants. The study of 3-dimensional manifolds employs tools from geometry, topology, dynamics and complex analysis. It is the interplay of these tools which gives the subject its rich flavor. A 2-dimensional manifold or surface is a space which looks locally like 2-dimensional Euclidean space; examples are given by the surfaces of familiar 3-dimensional objects such as doughnuts. Similarly, a 3-manifold is a space that looks locally like 3-dimensional Euclidean space. A Riemannian metric is a way of measuring distances and angles in a manifold. For example, the universe we live in is a 3-manifold with a Riemannian metric. Surfaces were classified in the 19th century, and it was shown that all surfaces admit a beautiful Riemannian metric of one of three types: Euclidean, spherical or hyperbolic. The study of all possible such metrics on a fixed surface was begun in the 19th century and has played a key role in topology, complex analysis, Riemannian geometry and algebraic geometry. Thurston revolutionized the study of 3-manifolds by conjecturing, and proving in many cases, that every 3-manifold may be canonically decomposed into pieces which admit metrics of one of 8 geometric types. Hyperbolic metrics are the most common and least understood class of such metrics. Prof. Canary will study the space of all hyperbolic metrics on a fixed 3-manifold doc19754 none Ivanov This U.S.-Chile Program award will provide support for cooperative research between Dr. A. F. Ivanov of Pennsylvania State University and Drs. Manuel A. Pinto and Sergei I. Trofimchuk of the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, and Dr. Samuel A. Castillo of Universidad del Bio-Bio in Conception, Chile. They will work on aspects of the qualitative theory of functional differential equations. The aim of this project is to study both qualitatively and numerically, the global dynamics of solutions of functional differential equations and systems of such equations including questions of the existence, stability, dependence on parameters and bifurcation of periodic solutions, chaotic behavior, and global stability of equilibria. It will emphasize the study of global stability and periodic solutions of equations modeling real life of phenomena and asymptotic behavior in difference and discretized functional differential equations. The significance of the project lies in its potential to solve several important theoretical mathematical problems, thus further developing the qualitative theory of the field doc19755 none for Contact geometry, complex analysis and imaging DMS- Dr. Epstein s research proposal contains projects in four distinct areas: (1) Invariants of contact structures, (2) Problems in CR-geometry, (3) Multi-parameter perturbation theory, (4) Magnetic resonance imaging. The proposed work in (1) will likely be done in collaboration with Richard Melrose. They intend to use their prior work on the Heisenberg calculus to find invariants of contact manifolds. A problem of particular interest is to use spectral flow invariants of Toeplitz operators to distinguish contact structures with homotopic hyperplane fields. The work in (2) is part of Dr. Epstein s ongoing project on embeddability of CR-manifolds, he proposes to consider CR-structures in dimensions greater than 3 to understand why some CR-functions are unstable and why some are stable under deformation of the underlying CR-structure. The project described in (3) concerns the problem of analytically parameterizing the eigenvalues and eigenspaces of a self adjoint analytic family of matrices. In broad terms Dr. Epstein would like to see what the modern theory of functions of several complex variables has to say about multi-parameter perturbation problems. Preliminary investigations show that real progress is now possible in this field. His main goal is to find reasonably simple and explicit analytic spaces on which the eigenvalues and eigenspaces of a self adjoint family are analytically parametrized. Finally (4) is an entirely new direction for Dr. Epstein s research. He plans to study the feasibility of magnetic resonance imaging using inhomogeneous background fields. Dr. Epstein s work is in the application of analysis and algebra to problems in geometry. A principal focus of his research is the geometry and analysis of contact manifolds. These arise is many contexts from several complex variables to differential geometry to topology to partial differential equations. Using the tools developed in collaboration with Richard Melrose, Dr. Epstein hopes to elucidate the analysis and geometry of these ubiquitous spaces. Dr. Epstein also plans to investigate the feasibility of magnetic resonance imaging using inhomogeneous background fields. This is largely beyond the capabilities of present day technology. If it proves feasible it would allow many new applications of MR imaging and should also lead to less expensive equipment. This is a multifaceted problem with significant mathematical and engineering aspects doc19756 none This research is aimed at the development of a new class of stimuli-sensitive polymers based on low polydispersity, poly-N-isopropylacrylamide homo- and co-polymer core-shell hydrogel particles (microgels). These nanostructures will allow for a high degree of control over the microgel porosity, deswelling magnitude, sharpness of the volume phase transition (VPT), position of the VPT, responsivity to stimuli other than temperature, number of transitions to a specific stimulus, and kinetics of deswelling. Accordingly, the proposed research is aimed at a systematic investigation of these parameters and their relationship with microgel structure. A suite of techniques including dynamic light scattering, fluorescence resonance nonradiative energy transfer, differential scanning calorimetry, and electron microscopy will be used to investigate the morphology (core compression, core-shell interpenetration, and phase separation) of various core-shell morphologies. The relationship between these structural characteristics and the thermodynamics and kinetics of the volume phase transition will then be investigated in order to establish a rational basis for the construction of complex microgel materials. These studies will then lead to the synthesis of complex multifunctional microgels for two specific applications: (1) fluorescent core-shell particles with ionochromic behavior for applications in metal ion sensing, and (2) hollow shells (via controlled core degradation) for encapsulation and controlled release applications. Taken together, this effort will provide fundamental groundwork for the fabrication of nanostructured hydrogel materials. The significance of this work relates both to its fundamental scientific and societal impact. Scientifically, it will expand our knowledge concerning the chemistry and physics of nanostructured colloidal hydrogels. With respect to broader societal impact, these materials should have tremendous utility in numerous applications such as drug delivery, chemical sensing, chemical biological separations, photonic materials, artificial muscles, micro-fluidics valves, and cell culture tissue growth substrates, where advances in chemical sensing and drug delivery will be the focus of this work doc19757 none Stochastic programs involve time, probability and concurrency. The classical research into reasoning about probabilistic models of concurrency provides methods to establish when two processes can be considered the same and be inter-substituted for each other. Such equivalences are too exact since they are usually not robust under even slight perturbation of probabilities. This is particularly unfortunate since practice dictates that probability numbers are to be viewed as numbers with some error estimate. The focus of this proposal is approximations and approximate reasoning for stochastic concurrent systems. The PI proposes to use metric based frameworks to formalize approximation schemes and develop compositional reasoning methods to study robust notions of approximately inter-substitutable programs. The first intended application is the exploration of secure substitution in mobile code applications, where programs (such as tax software) are downloaded as needed, executed on a trusted host (the home computer), require access to sensitive local data (such as financial information) and yet should not be permitted to leak information. Probabilistic modeling is used in such applications to quantify the amount of information flow between systems. A permissible secure substitution of one component for another in a program context has to preserve such information flow properties in addition to the usual observations. The goal of this project is to define a robust notion of secure substitution, and develop compositional proof rules and algorithms to determine if a component can be securely substituted for another. The second intended application is the design and implementation of StochCC, an executable specification language for stochastic hybrid systems. This research will build on the PI s prior work into HybridCC, a declarative language for specifying and simulating hybrid systems. Users of HybridCC(in biological systems modeling) have already found it useful to add limited forms of discrete probabilistic specification to HybridCC. StochCC will perform a full and general integration of probabilities into HybridCC. In order to come to computational grips with such systems, one needs a notion of discrete approximation. Such discrete approximants play a role in both simulation (executing the system within some error bound) and approximate reasoning (calculating the observations of the system within some error bound doc19758 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Modeling the influence of climate change on fire regimes and successional patterns in topographically diverse landscapes in the Rocky Mountains. Understanding the response of fire regimes to variation in regional climate and local topography is critical to predicting potential effects of global warming in forested ecosystems. This research combines dendrochronology and GIS techniques to model potential responses of fire regimes and successional patterns to plausible climate change scenarios within two national parks in the Rocky Mountains doc19759 none Yukich This proposal focuses on the rigorous probabilistic analysis of random structures in Euclidean space. Building on previous research, we focus on the stochastic analysis of (i) random packing, random growing interfaces, and loose sphere packing, all in two or more dimensions, and (ii) functionals of Boolean models and random Euclidean point sets in computational geometry and combinatorial optimization. The aim in (i) is to establish thermodynamic limits, Gaussian fluctuations, and functional central limit theorems for functionals associated with packing models, interface models, as well as for random Euclidean point sets in general. All of these models exhibit finite range interactions and long-range dependence. Part (ii) focuses on the probabilistic analysis of functionals of random point sets in Euclidean space. The proposed work in (ii) will further our understanding of solutions to Euclidean optimization problems, random graphs in computational geometry, and the statistical analysis of random data. One of the central problems in physical, chemical, and biological processes involves understanding the growth of random interfaces. Such interfaces arise naturally in understanding chemical deposition, the morphology of vascular networks, growth patterns in fracture analysis, and the porosity of media. Dynamic random interfaces, ones which change with time, are useful in understanding and modeling crystal growth as well as understanding patterns in nature which change with time. This includes diverse phenomena such as the spread of disease in a population, the growth patterns in a forest fire, as well as the fracture analysis of metals such as those found in aircraft. Much of our understanding of random interfaces is only experimental. This proposal seeks to put our understanding of random interfaces on a solid theoretical foundation. Understanding the behavior of random interfaces currently forms a central part of the principal investigator s collaboration with scientists from the Lehigh University engineering school as well as with scientists from Lucent Technologies doc19760 none This project will identify all the shocks in 1 AU spacecraft data from IMP 8 ( - ), WIND ( - ), and ACE ( -end of grant) and characterize their strength and orientation. Comparisons of multi-spacecraft data for the same shock will be used to determine the scale size of the events. These long data sets will then be employed to document the solar-cycle variations in shock frequency and characteristics. A cross-correlation of the determined shock characteristics with geomagnetic activity indices will be carried out in order to determine if knowledge of upstream shock characteristics is useful in predicting the duration and severity of geomagnetic storms doc19747 none PIs: Jiang Rao This research involves development of model selection procedures for linear and generalized linear mixed models. The focus of this research will be on studying asymptotic properties and finite sample performance of the procedures, which will include comparisons to commonly used ad hoc methods. The research will also develop applications of the selection methodology to selecting factors in longitudinal data, genetic screening of genes related to quantitative traits of interest, and to model selection in small area estimation problems from surveys. In addition, the methods developed will be made accessible through the development of freely available software. The research will also improve work recently completed by the investigators where the conditions for consistent factor selection in linear mixed models were established. These improvements will include developing a more efficient method for linear mixed model selection, and studying some adaptive procedures. Linear and generalized linear mixed models are important classes of models which allow relaxation of standard assumptions like independence or homogeneity of variances of observations, and take into account more complicated data structures in quite general ways. Typical applications include repeated measurements made on a patient over time or screening of candidate genes that might be related to a quantitative trait of interest. Selecting which factors should or should not be in the model can be of importance for model inference and predictions, yet little if anything has been developed to formally study this problem. This research attempts to fill this important gap in the field of developing new procedures for correct factor selection from a theoretical perspective, and evaluating real-world performance via extensive simulations. Another important component of this research is to apply it in a variety of real-world settings including longitudinal data, genetic screening, and small area estimation in survey sampling doc19762 none DMS - . The research proposed lies at the interface of dynamical systems and differential geometry. Its principal goal is the investigation of the dynamical and geometric structures of higher rank systems. Such systems naturally appear both in dynamical systems and geometry. In particular, the principal investigator will study rigidity properties of actions of higher rank abelian and semisimple Lie groups and their lattices with the ultimate goal of classifying such systems under suitable geometric or dynamical hypotheses. In particular, he will study higher rank hyperbolic abelian actions, and actions by semisimple groups and their lattices preserving affine and geometric structures. He will also investigate invariant measures of algebraic higher rank abelian actions. The investigator will also investigate Riemannian manifolds (especially higher rank ones) and their geodesic flows. Geometric, dynamical and group theoretic tools will be used in this research. Dynamical systems and ergodic theory are relatively new fields that investigate the evolution of a physical or mathematical system over time (e.g. turbulence in a fluid flow). New ideas and concepts from dynamics (e.g. chaos, fractals) have changed our perception of the world fundamentally. Dynamics and ergodic theory provide the mathematical tools and analysis for these investigations. Dynamical systems have had a major impact on the sciences and engineering. Symbolic dynamics for instance has been instrumental in developing efficient and safe codes for computer science. Tools and ideas from smooth dynamics are used as far afield as cell biology and meteorology. Geometry is one of the oldest fields in mathematics, and generally studies curves, surfaces and their higher dimensional analogues, their shapes, shortest paths, and maps between such spaces. Differential geometry had its roots in cartography, and is now studied for its close ties with physics and other sciences and applied areas (computer vision e.g.)as well as internal aesthetic reasons. Geometry and dynamics are closely related as some important dynamical systems originate from geometry, and geometry also provides tools to study dynamical systems. One main goal of this project studies when two dynamical systems commute, i.e. when one system is unaffected by the changes brought on by the other. Important examples of such systems arise from geometry doc19763 none This project focuses on electronic properties of CuO(2) planes in electron-doped cuprates, e.g., Pr(2-x)Ce(x)CuO(4) and La(2-x)Ce(x)CuO(4), in comparison with hole-doped cuprates, especially the closely-related compound La(2-x)Sr(x)CuO(4). At issue is the nature of the superconducting state in e-doped cuprates, and whether there is a transition in pairing symmetry near optimal doping. The project will provide the first measurements of two quantities of fundamental importance. One is the magnitude and temperature dependence of the superfluid density, which is proportional to the inverse square of the magnetic penetration depth. The penetration depth will be measured from 0.5 K up to the superconducting transition temperature in samples spanning a wide doping range, x. Another is the electronic heat capacity anomaly at the superconducting transition. Supporting measurements of normal-state transport, e.g., resistivity and Hall coefficient will also be made. Research will provide excellent training in state-of-the-art experimental techniques to graduate and undergraduate students. This project benefits from a collaboration with the world s premier maker of electron doped cuprate films, Dr. Michio Naito of NTT, Japan. A central issue in condensed matter physics and in materials science is identification of microscopic mechanisms that enable electrons to move within a solid, rather than being attached to a particular atom. The present project focuses on understanding electrons that move within copper-oxide planes in a class of superconducting compounds that includes Pr(2-x)Ce(x)CuO(4) and La(2-x)Ce(x)CuO(4). Superconductivity in these copper-oxide compounds has been the subject of intense international research efforts since their discovery in . The main question now is whether the superconducting state in these compounds is the same as found in a very similar compound, La(2-x)Sr(x)CuO(4). To illuminate this issue, the project will provide measurements of the magnitudes and temperature dependencies of quantities of fundamental importance, namely, the density of superconducting electrons, and the contribution of superconducting electrons to the heat capacity at the transition into the superconducting state. The research will provide excellent training in state-of-the-art experimental techniques to graduate and undergraduate students doc19764 none This project will develop techniques to engineer suspensions of DNA-labeled microspheres that will spontaneously self-assemble into novel, 3-dimensional colloidal crystal structures. The self-assembly of the spheres will be driven by a short-ranged, reversible attractive interaction induced by large numbers of very weakly associating single-stranded DNA molecules bound to their surface. Importantly, this interaction is determined by the sequence of the DNA molecules--enabling the creation of binary and ternary colloidal mixtures where the interactions between the different sphere populations are independently programmable in magnitude and sign, attractive or repulsive. This flexibility will permit the creation of previously unobserved alloy phases, such as BCC, SC and diamond-like phases, which are of interest both as model systems for atomic crystals and phase transitions as well as 3D templates for photonic bandgap crystals. Over the long-term, the goal is to produce and disseminate automated design tools for generating DNA recipes yielding a desired crystal structure. In addition, this work will provide chemical engineering students outstanding opportunities to pursue basic materials research, as well as master techniques ranging from microscopy to computational genomics. A major outstanding topic in Condensed Matter Physics concerns how crystals form and grow, and what determines their atomic structure. Many experiments use microspheres floating in water to model atomic processes--like atoms they will spontaneously crystallize into ordered 3D arrays, but unlike atoms, the process is visible under a simple microscope. The proposed research will develop new methods for sticking these spheres together into new types of crystal structures by using DNA molecules attached to their surfaces. When two spheres come together bearing complementary halves of the double helix, the molecules will zip up pulling the spheres together. Besides being of fundamental interest, these new alloy-like crystals will be technologically useful as templates for so-called photonic bandgap materials, which some researchers believe will lead to more efficient lasers as well as faster computers and telecommunication systems. In addition, this work will provide chemical engineering students outstanding opportunities to pursue basic materials research, as well as master techniques ranging from microscopy to computational genomics doc19765 none This combined experiment and theory project is in the area of soft condensed matter physics. The research will explore phases, structures, and interactions, in supramolecular assemblies of filamentous cytoskeletal proteins and their associated biomolecules. The importance of the experiments lies in their potential to uncover the origin of fundamentally new attractive forces between charged biological polymers, which can lead to new states or arrangements of matter. The project should shed light on the physics of charged polymers, which constitute a group of technologically important industrial materials. The program trains graduate students in state-of-the-art techniques required to address complex multidisciplinary problems at the interface between physics, engineering, chemistry, and biology. The research includes structure characterization at National Synchrotron X-ray Laboratories and in-house imaging with laser-scanning confocal microscopy. This will provide student training in research settings where traditional discipline boundaries between physics, engineering, chemistry, and biology, have been removed, and teamwork and problem solving are emphasized. This will prepare the students to tackle and solve complex technological problems in their careers in academe, industry, or government. This combined experiment and theory project is in the area of soft condensed matter physics. The research focuses on producing and characterizing novel materials that are obtained when biological polymers (e.g. proteins) are brought together to form new structures with dimensions between one-billionth of a meter and one-thousandths of a meter. New composite materials in this size range can have technological applications in areas such as molecular-based chemical sensors, molecular sieves for separations and purification technologies, and chemical and drug delivery vehicles. The project is highly interdisciplinary and exposes graduate students to a broad spectrum of techniques. These include state-of-the-art structure characterization with synchrotron x-ray diffraction at National Synchrotron X-ray Laboratories, and in-house imaging with cutting edge optical and electron microscopes. The educational significance and impact of this interdisciplinary project, at the interface between physics, engineering, chemistry, and biology, is in the training of students with a broad outlook toward problem solving. They will be valuable not only in academic settings, but also in the industrial and government job force where interdisciplinary research is required and rewarded doc19766 none Balachandran This U.S.-Mexico award will support Dr. A.P. Balachandran and Dr. R.D. Sorkin of Syracuse University together with Dr. A.B. Stern of the University of Alabama in a research collaboration with Dr. D. O Connor and Dr. R. Capovilla of the Centro de Investigacion y de Estudios Avanzados del IPN (CINVESTAV) in Mexico City, Mexico. The researchers intend to work on various ideas in the general area of non-commutative geometry with important applications to quantum physics, string theory, and relativity theory. The Office of International Science and Engineering and the Physics Division of NSF will contribute funds for the research. This project has two components. The first is to develop an alternative to lattice field theory using emerging ideas from non-commutative geometry. The approach uses matrix algebras that approximate the algebra of functions of a space with the approximation becoming finer as the matrices become larger. The method has the advantage of preserving the underlying symmetries including chiral and supersymmetry and easily capturing topological data. This component also incorporates the more complete study of field theories on non-commutative spaces, with particular emphasis on the noncommutative Chern-Simons theory. The second component involves the causal set approach to quantum gravity where the quantum spacetime emerges from a discrete causal structure. The principal goal of this aspect of the project is to find a suitable quantum sequential growth dynamics for causal sets. Both components of the project have a significant numerical component with Monte Carlo simulations for the first component currently in the calibration stage. The numerical work is being carried out by the Mexican group, who are experts in the statistical physics involved, while the US counterparts are experts in the algebraic and topological aspects of the project doc19767 none This project is an investigation of factors that influence the start and end of the rainy season in tropical South America and hence influence agricultural productivity and the availability of water resources. The objectives are: (i) to determine the influence of large-scale circulation anomalies, especially those forced by interannual variations of sea-surface temperatures in the adjacent oceans, on the key thermal and dynamic factors that control the onset and demise of the rainy season over the northern part of South America, (ii) to explore how land-surface processes and bio-mass burning modify the atmospheric boundary layer conditions needed for the onset of the rainy season by influencing pre-seasonal climate conditions, (iii) to characterize the link between regional climates in tropical South America, Central and North America via cross-equatorial flow and to identify the underlying dynamic processes. The approach to be taken consists of a diagnostic study of a number of data sets relevant to the climatology of the region. The data include: ECMWF reanalyses, South American rain gauge data, in situ surface fluxes and soil moisture from the Large Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia, instantaneous cloud data from the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project, aerosol optical depth from the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer, and the NASA-Ames 8-km Amazon Ecology Mapping data doc19768 none The Monte Carlo method of sequential importance sampling (SIS) provides a versatile and powerful tool for solving complex statistical inference problems. A number of basic issues concerning the method remain to be resolved for it to be more widely applicable: How should the proposal distribution be chosen to strike a proper balance between computational complexity and statistical efficiency? What is the role of resampling and what is a good choice for the resampling schedule? An objective of this proposal is to address these questions through the detailed study of SIS in three important applications. The first area is time series and stochastic dynamic systems. Research will develop resampling schedules and proposal distributions for SIS to solve some long-standing filtering and smoothing problems in continuous-state hidden Markov models. Change-point problems, which can be seen as a special case of hidden Markov models, will serve as a test ground for the new methodology. The second area is statistical inference in molecular population genetics. Research in this area will enhance currently available SIS methodology by developing a new resampling approach, and by combining such resampling strategy with suitably chosen proposal distributions. The final area of research is conditional inference on contingency and zero-one tables. New theories arising from these applications will be of interest across a broad range of areas. The Monte Carlo method of sequential importance sampling has been fruitfully applied to a wide range of scientific problems including simulating molecules, filtering and smoothing time series arising in engineering and economics, and making Bayesian statistical inferences. However, a number of basic issues need to be resolved to make the method more widely applicable and effective. For example, how should a proper balance be struck between computational complexity and statistical efficiency in implementing the method and what is the role of various enhancements to the method. This research will address these issues through the development of more efficient sequential importance sampling techniques for three important areas of application. The first area is filtering and smoothing problems in continuous-state hidden Markov models, which have important applications in communications signal processing. The second area is statistical inference on genealogical trees. Recent advances in biotechnology have provided an abundance of data on the genetic variation of DNA within a population. This data, which often poses computationally challenging statistical inference problems, can shed light on the evolutionary process of a population and yield important information for locating genes that are responsible for genetic diseases. The third area of application is conditional inference on contingency and zero-one tables, which is motivated by the interest in psychology in testing the Rasch model and in ecology in testing theories about the relationship between evolution and the competition among species. This research will improve the sequential importance sampling methods used in these three applications and strive to develop a systematic theory that provides insight into general strategies for applying sequential importance samplin doc19769 none This proposal seeks to extend the PARINT software package for parallel integration, furnishing it with the characteristics of a Problem Solving Environment. The main goals of the project are to offer a complete set of tools for composing problem secifications, compiling and running applications, while providing state-of-the-art problem solving power to the end user. To this end, we propose adding new techniques for extending the PARINT problem domain, e.g., to allow for a variety of integration regions, high dimensions, and singular integrated behavior. These include a transformation interface, new distributed Quasi-Monte Carlo strategies and extapolation methods. Specific contributions are in the development of numerical techniques and evaluation of parallel integration algorithms. Important issues in parallel and distributed computations such as load balancing are addressed, with an emphasis on loosely coupled and heterogeneous systems. Other contributions are in the areas of user interfaces, visualization and web computing doc19770 none This grant supports the management of the US Africa South American Materials Workshop on Civil Infrastructure and Manufacturing that will be held January 6-7, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. This international workshop will host eleven scientists and engineers from North America and none of their counterparts from Africa, South America, Asia and Europe. On the first day, invited papers on materials for infrastructure and development, and papers on materials and manufacturing are scheduled. The second half-day will focus on discussion, planning future interactions and collaborations, and drafting a workshop report. In addition to reporting the workshop results by publications, they will immediately be reported to the broader research community attending the National Science Foundation s Design, Service and Manufacturing Grantees and Research Conference at the same venue on January 7-10, . Developing the infrastructure to support the global practice of engineering and manufacturing is a key issue for the economic well being of all nations. This group of experts from around the world will advise and develop a joint agenda on collaboration among nations to provide the technical and educational infrastructure needed for the 21st century doc19771 none The grant explores the application of recently developed diamond anvil technology to characterize the electrical and magnetic properties of rare earth metals and alloys. A major focus is on the f-delocalization transitions in rare earth systems such as Cerium, Praseodymium, Neodymium, Praseodymium-Neodymium alloys and Samarium, in the pressure range of ambient to 300 GPa and in the temperature range of 10 K to 350 K. The study will develop new understanding of the equation of state and phase transitions in the rare earth metals as well as carbon nanotubes. The central objective of this research is to directly monitor the f-delocalization pressure (loss of permanent magnetic moment on rare earth ions) at ultra high pressures, especially, where no crystallographic volume collapse transitions are known to occur. The research will employ an eight probe designer anvil for electrical conductivity measurements and a designer loop anvil for magnetic susceptibility measurements. A significant goal of this study is to systematically improve the designer diamond anvil technology by critically examining the role of nitrogen impurity in the chemical vapor deposition process. We also envision a new generation of designer diamond anvils with multi-tasking capability. The broader impact of the work is in the involvement of under-represented minorities and undergraduate students in the high-pressure research. The magnetic susceptibility measurements would provide a sensitive probe for the changes in magnetic order and electrical conductivity measurements would track changes in the electronic and phonon density of states at high pressures. The f-delocalization pressure for the light rare earth metals will provide critical test of the existing Mott transition and Kondo models and further spur theoretical calculations on these systems at high compressions. This research is likely to advance the state of the art in high-pressure research, enabling experiments that were hither-to inaccessible or very difficult doc19772 none The goal of this project is to develop parallel algorithms and a parallel software system for clustering Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs). ESTs are derived from fragments of reverse transcribed mRNA isolated experimentally and thus directly correspond to protein coding genes. The proposed project is aimed at overcoming the computational limitations of current software systems such as inability to handle large data sets within reasonable time and memory resources. This project will provide a strong context for fundamental research in practical parallel string algorithms, including the development of parallel algorithms for constructing suffix trees and suffix arrays, applications involving suffix trees and arrays such as containment and overlap detection. Particular emphasis will be placed on the design of space-efficient algorithms because space-complexity often determines whether the use of an algorithm is feasible for large data sets. The software will be validated using large EST data sets from organisms with small and known genomes, which will be exploited to derive correct clustering though alternate methods. The algorithms developed will provide the basis for other similar projects including protein repertoire comparisons and testing of biological hypotheses such as exon shuffling and gene duplication. The human EST collection at the National Institute of Health currently has over 3.8 million ESTs and parallel processing is essential for discovering biologically useful information from such large EST collections. Throughout the project, emphasis will be placed on design of parallel algorithms using realistic models of parallel computation, rigorous proofs of optimality with respect to best known sequential algorithms, careful evaluation of the communication complexity and the constants involved in asymptotic run-time estimates, and development of user-friendly software. Experimental evaluation of the algorithms will be carried out both on conventional tightly-coupled parallel computers and clusters. The project will be carried out by an interdisciplinary team of researchers having the required expertise in parallel algorithm design, building large parallel software systems, bioinformatics and life sciences. To further ensure the success of this project, collaborations have been established with researchers from the University of Bielefeld and the National Institute of Health doc19773 none The scientific goal of the program is to learn how to manipulate the magnetic coupling between nanocrystalline particles to create soft magnetic materials in which the bulk magnetic properties, such as permeability in field, magnetization and coercive losses can be independently varied. In monolithic materials these properties are not independent. The approach being taken is to synthesize nanocrystalline magnetic oxide particles and manipulate their packing into a bulk material to alter, through composition, particle size, shape and volume fraction, the inter-particle magnetic coupling. Initially, nano-particles of ferrites and rare-earth oxides are being synthesized using inverse micelle processes and their spacing and packing varied through the choice of surfactants and solvents to form bulk material compatible with use in electrical power converters and related devices. The materials are characterized at different stages to determine how the bulk magnetic properties are related to the properties of the nanocrystalline particles and their magnetic coupling. The overall justification of the program is to assess the potential for nanocrystalline-based materials in replacing existing magnetic materials in dc-dc electrical power converters by enhancing their performance and decreasing their physical size. Power converters are used throughout the electronics industry to provide a stable, low voltage power supply to almost all-digital electronics and microprocessors. Increasing demands for smaller, higher power, higher frequency dc-dc converters can only be realized with the development of magnetic materials having improved permeability and lower magnetic losses. The challenge being addressed is how to create new magnetic materials, using nanocrystalline particles, which can be fabricated into an integrated and functional power-converter whilst preserving their novel combination of magnetic properties. The collaboration with Rockwell Scientific Company provides students with experience in the design of the magnetic components of power devices as well as the opportunity to test their candidate materials as they are being developed doc19774 none Selker This US-Chile award will fund a collaborative project between Drs. John S. Selker and Richard H. Cuenca of Oregon State University, Mr. David E. Rupp, Oregon State, and Dr. Mark B. Parlange of Johns Hopkins University, in collaboration with Drs. Oscar Reckmann, Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Agropecuarias, Samuel Ortega, Universidad de Talca, and Eduardo Varas, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. Their project will be to model and characterize the water budget in a region with a Mediterranean climate and high-slope, low permeability soils, the Chilean Secano Interior and Secano Costero. The investigation of this system will involve the integration of field measurement and modeling, taking advantage of important advances in methods of data analysis, computation, and the upcoming availability of high resolution global digital elevation models. This international collaboration will advance our scientific knowledge in determining the spatial and temporal distribution of the water budget in semi-arid regions. The Chileans will gain technical expertise in new methods and instrumentation for water resource analysis and increase their understanding of the hydrologic fluxes in an impoverished region of their country doc19775 none This project addresses issues related to semiparametric regression models with censored data as well as testing and estimation of item differential functioning arising from IRT-based standardized tests. The investigator and his collaborators develop new algorithms for obtaining parameter estimators for the accelerated failure time regression. These algorithms are based on linear programming which is easy to implement. The estimators are shown to be asymptotically normal, with the limiting variance estimated via a simple resampling method. The approach is extended to censored quantile regression models, which are common in econometrics literature. They study the class of semiparametric transformation models via estimating equations, resulting in a general method for parameter estimation and inference, justified by a large sample theory. They develop a new approach for adaptive standardized tests to detect possible item differential functioning via a generalized logistic regression model with measurement errors. The statistical problems dealt with here are motivated by applications in biomedical sciences, sociology, economics, marketing, psychology and education. The project develops appropriate statistical models, computer algorithms and mathematical theory. The results can be used to facilitate design of clinical trials and epidemiological studies, particularly in studies of cancer, cardiovascular diseases and AIDS, to analyze unemployment duration data, to quantify consumer responses to marketing strategies and to screen out items for use in large-scale standardized tests that are tilted against certain group or groups to ensure fairness doc19641 none Science : This study will provide laboratory measurements of the coefficient of friction of natural sediments entering the subduction systems of Nankai, and Costa Rica. The frictional studies will be conducted in a combination of ring shear and direct shear experiments at effective confined stresses between 0.1-50 Mpa. Samples will be characterized by X-ray diffraction (for bulk and clay mineralogy) grain-size, SEM EDS geochemistry, and wet chemistry (for biogenic silica content). The mechanical properties will be compared with the clay mineralogy to determine the effect of clay minerals on the coefficient of friction. The study will assess the role of the smectite to illite transition and opal to quartz reactions on controlling the up-dip limit of seismogenic activity in subduction zones doc19777 none This project involves the application of solid state magnetic resonance techniques to address current questions related to competing ground states in selected correlated electron systems. The approach is based on the examination of several materials where antiferromagnetism competes with a paramagnetic Fermi Liquid phase (and possibly superconductivity) or a Spin-Peierls phase. The materials under study are from two families: heavy fermion and organic superconductors. They are characterized by very different microscopic physics. The goal of the project is to identify common trends in the physical properties of these materials, as well as to explore the physical properties of novel phases. Particular attention is paid to the vicinity of discontinuous and continuous quantum phase transitions, where the qualitative and quantitative effects resulting from varying the amount of disorder is examined. Pressure is the predominate means used to tune the ground state of the systems in question. The project trains two graduate students in the course of measurement design and execution. A course in magnetic resonance for the graduate level is planned for the - academic year. Smaller technical projects, both specific to particular experiments and for general laboratory improvements, are assigned to undergraduates. In a number of materials of current interest, the electrons behave in a correlated manner. The electrical behavior, or state, of the material depends upon which interaction involving the electrons dominates. Some of the materials in this class have properties related to these interactions that are technologically useful, i.e. no electrical resistance at relatively high temperatures or a large response in the electrical resistance to magnetic fields. Typically, the state that is stabilized is controlled by external parameters such as charge doping, high pressure, high magnetic fields, and so on. In this project, a combination of experimental techniques, though primarily solid state magnetic resonance, are used to gain an increased understanding of the competing states in correlated electron systems. The emphasis is on the physical properties of novel phases, and the effects of disorder on these materials. The systems investigated fall into two classes: organic superconductors and heavy fermion materials. Tuning is achieved with pressure and magnetic field; disorder is introduced through chemical substitution. The goal is to use controlled disorder in the efforts to classify transitions, and also to understand the qualitative, and sometimes dramatic, changes in the physical properties induced by the disorder. The project trains two graduate students in the course of measurement design and execution. A course in magnetic resonance for the graduate level is planned for the - academic year. Smaller technical projects, both specific to particular experiments and for general laboratory improvements, are assigned to undergraduates doc19778 none As integrated circuit chips are becoming more complex to design, pre-fabricated platform chips, intended to meet the needs of a wide variety of embedded computing products, are becoming increasingly common. The trend towards platforms creates the need for parameterizing computing architectures such that platforms can have their performance and power consumption adapted to the different needs of different products, and that can be tuned to the particular compute patterns of a particular product. This project will investigate several aspects of such parameterization. It will demonstrate the feasibility of extensive parameterization of an architecture s memory components, key contributors to power and performance. It will define the basic tasks that make up platform-oriented CAD, partition computer-aided design (CAD) tasks between desktop and platform resources to yield fast yet accurate and cost-effective CAD solutions, and develop new CAD exploration algorithms for desktop platform co-exploration. The research will benefit platform designers, who need an understanding of parameters and tuning issues to effectively build heavily parameterized platforms and their associated CAD tools, and platform users, who can utilize such platforms and CAD tools to develop more efficient platform-based designs than currently possible doc19779 none A combined global magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) model of the solar corona and inner heliosphere will be used to interpret SOHO and Yohkoh solar observations in addition to ACE and Ulysses in-situ measurements of coronal mass ejections (CMEs). SAIC s global model will be employed to initiate the CME disturbance and follow its evolution out to 20 solar radii. NOAA SEC s heliospheric model will subsequently pick up these structures at 20 solar radii and propagate them out to 5 AU. Thus a global context will be constructed wherein one may connect the disparate solar and in situ observations. A unique and powerful perspective is thus provided to address fundamental issues concerning the origin, magnetic topology, and space weather evolution of CMEs. The events identified for simulation are to be selected by the SHINE community, and the simulation results will be available to the community on-line, in order to enhance the scientific return of this investigation doc19780 none Zheng Let [x(t), 0 t T] be a realized path of a diffusion process with an unknown multi-dimensional parameter u in its coefficients. The Principle Investigator and his students are interested in estimating the real value of u. They discovered that they can define a Maximum Likelihood Estimator U of the unknown u even if u appeared in the diffusion coefficient. They are going to find the rate of convergence of U to the true parameter u under reasonable assumptions when the observation time is relatively long enough. Since in the real applications, x(t) can be only recorded at discrete time spots, they are particularly interested in the problems of error estimates related to discretizations of their models. The Principle Investigator and his students research has its interests in the real applications. There are many examples of parameter estimates of diffusion processes in the applications. For example, it may be related to the trace of a military missile, or the price of a stock. All those models contain some unknown parameters. Moreover, any observation of the real path contains errors. Assuming that the observation error can be only bounded by a constant c, then no matter how one increases the computation steps in the time discretization method, the error of the estimate can not be significantly reduced beyond some number. In other words, the Principle Investigator and his students will find out the minimum steps needed for a computer to get enough accurate result when an observation error is recognized. This study has its potential military and financial applications doc19778 none As integrated circuit chips are becoming more complex to design, pre-fabricated platform chips, intended to meet the needs of a wide variety of embedded computing products, are becoming increasingly common. The trend towards platforms creates the need for parameterizing computing architectures such that platforms can have their performance and power consumption adapted to the different needs of different products, and that can be tuned to the particular compute patterns of a particular product. This project will investigate several aspects of such parameterization. It will demonstrate the feasibility of extensive parameterization of an architecture s memory components, key contributors to power and performance. It will define the basic tasks that make up platform-oriented CAD, partition computer-aided design (CAD) tasks between desktop and platform resources to yield fast yet accurate and cost-effective CAD solutions, and develop new CAD exploration algorithms for desktop platform co-exploration. The research will benefit platform designers, who need an understanding of parameters and tuning issues to effectively build heavily parameterized platforms and their associated CAD tools, and platform users, who can utilize such platforms and CAD tools to develop more efficient platform-based designs than currently possible doc19782 none BR UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SCRIPPS Award is for a project to conduct a series of flux meter measurements along transects across hydrological boundaries in the down going plate off Costa Rica. This region is characterized by anomalously low heat flow, except over regions of topographic highs that exhibit anomalously high heat flow values. The flux meter measurements will test the hypothesis that the regions of low heat flow are characterized by downward fluid flow, while the high-heat-flow areas are characterized by upward fluid flow. A second portion of the project will be to return the areas on the accretionary prism where 35 flux meters were deployed as part of a previous study, to collect piston cores and heat flow measurements. Analyses of these cores will result in co-located temperature, chemical gradient, and direct fluid flux data sets that will provide a more complete hydrological picture of the incoming plate and the Costa Rica forearc doc19783 none This project addresses local vibrational mode (LVM) spectroscopy of semiconductors such as GaN, ZnO, Si, and CdTe in order to determine the structure of defect centers and their vibrational interactions with the host environment. Impurities such as hydrogen, oxygen, and DX centers will be studied in these technologically important materials. Hydrostatic pressure will be used, with infrared (IR) and Raman spectroscopy, to probe the LVMs arising from such impurities. In addition to inorganic semiconductors, organic semiconductors such as pentacene will also be investigated. Time-resolved experiments using ultrafast IR spectroscopy will be used to probe vibrational lifetimes and resonant interactions in semiconductors. The project addresses fundamental research issues in a topical area of electronic photonic materials science having high technological relevance. An important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education. The proposed educational activities will benefit a range of students from the eighth grade to graduate school. Educational programs integrated with research include outreach activities with a public school on the Colville Indian reservation, improvements to undergraduate physics courses, and the development of laboratories and lecture demonstrations. These activities are pursued to encourage students from diverse backgrounds to enter fields related to materials science and solid-state physics doc19784 none This individual investigator award supports a project that will investigate the ultra-fast manipulation of the magnetization in nanostructures by spin currents. In particular, the work explores novel opportunities to manipulate the magnetization on the nanometer length scale and picosecond time scale, based on utilization of the strong, short range quantum mechanical exchange interaction. The project involves sample preparation, sample characterization, and direct imaging of the time dependent magnetization by photoemission electron microscopy (PEEM) measurements. Magnetic images will be recorded by pump-probe techniques using magnetic excitations triggered by picosecond spin current pulses produced by an optical switch and 50 ps x-ray probe pulses from the Advanced Light Source in Berkeley. Such measurements promise scientific breakthroughs in this scientifically and technologically exciting area. The ability to manipulate the magnetization on these time and length scales will have a strong impact in the field of high density magnetic storage and in the emerging area of spintronics. Both are areas of importance for future growth in information technology. The research will be carried out mainly by a Stanford graduate student and postdoctoral research associate. It involves work at Stanford University and at the near-by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the IBM Almaden Research Center. The interactive character of the work involving a University, a National Laboratory and an industrial laboratory will be of great educational value for the young scientists involved. Today, all magnetic devices ranging from low tech transformers to high tech magnetic storage devices are switched by long-range magnetic fields that surround wires or coils through which a current is passed. This individual investigator award supports a project that investigates a completely new approach that is superior for the smaller and faster magnetic devices that underlie tomorrow s technology of storing or processing information in computers. The new idea is to switch a small magnetic area or bit by an injected spin current, relying on the strong, short range quantum mechanical exchange interaction. The goal of the work is to directly image, through ultrafast snapshots, how the magnetization of a small magnetic area is switched by the injected spin current. These images will be recorded with synchrotron x-ray pulses at the Advanced Light Source in Berkeley and they may lead to improved methods of storing and processing information. Because the work requires sophisticated sample preparation and measurements it utilizes facilities at Stanford University, the near-by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the IBM Almaden Research Center. The interactive character of the work involving a University, a National Laboratory and an industrial laboratory will be of great educational value for the young scientists involved doc19785 none This award supports a collaborative research project between Dr. Richard T. Scalettar of the University of California Davis and Dr. Raimundo dos Santos of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to study the nature of superconductivity in an attractive Hubbard Hamiltonian model. The model to be studied will have a random mix of attractive on-site interactions and sites with no attraction. A related model of borocarbides in which attrative Hubbard layers alternate with free layers where there is no interaction will also be studied. It is anticipated that this research will provide new insight into the nature of the superconducting phase transition and in particular the effect of impurity sites on pairing doc19786 none Gagan Agrawal Ohio State University An Integrated Middleware and Language Compiler Framework for Data Intensive Applications in a Grid Environment We propose to develop methods that will enable data intensive applications to be developed or specified using high-level interfaces, and yet effectively utilize grid resources. This will be accomplished by developing runtime techniques, a middleware based upon filter-stream programming, and Just in Time (JIT) compilation techniques for decomposing high-level programs into a set of filters. Our tools and techniques will exploit important commonalities of the data intensive applications we target. Our target class of applications include both scientific and commercial data intensive applications. We are developing a middleware framework called DataCutter. DataCutter provides support for processing of datasets stored in archival storage systems in a wide-area network. DataCutter exports an interface for specifying processing as a set of coordination filters. While DataCutter offers a framework suitable for developing scientific and commercial data intensive applications in a grid environment, its programming interface is a relatively low-level one. The programmers need to decompose their application into a set of filters and specify the filters and their interaction. In this project, we propose a series of high-level language interfaces that can be used for expressing data-intensive applications. We target data parallel Java, XML query language (XQL), and mining operators as interfaces that will allow processing to be specified assuming that all data and compute cycles are available at a single site. We propose research in compiler techniques that will decompose such applications into a set of filters, based upon the availability of data, computing, storage, and networking resources doc19787 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Collaborative Research: Absolute and essential instabilities in spatially extended systems Sandstede This project explores several instability mechanisms of coherent states, such as fronts, pulses and spiral waves, that occur in spatially extended systems far from equilibrium. The common theme of these mechanisms is that they involve transport phenomena caused by diffusion and nonlinearities. Examples of such transitions are backfiring instabilities of fronts, period-doubling bifurcations of spiral waves, and the effect of inhomogeneities on the dynamics of spiral waves. While transport is most conveniently modeled and described using an idealized unbounded domain, boundaries may well enhance or inhibit the instability through partial reflection or generation of waves. It is the aim of this project to develop techniques that can help to investigate instability mechanisms simultaneously on bounded and unbounded domains. One of the expected outcomes will be a description of instability mechanisms that is robust with respect to typical boundary conditions in large reactors. Technically, our approach is based on methods from spatial dynamics that allow us to derive sharp pointwise estimates which capture explicitly the effects of boundaries. Complicated spatio-temporal patterns that arise due to the interplay of chemical reactions and diffusion have been observed experimentally in a number of specific reactions (among them the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction and the chlorite-iodide-malonic acid reaction). Similar phenomena have been observed during fibrillation of cardiac tissue where spiral waves act as organizing centers for the complex spatio-temporal dynamics. Other examples where irregular patterns occur are the interaction of pulses in oscillatory media, backfiring of excitation pulses in catalytic reactions, and optical bistability in nonlinear photonic gratings. The focus of this project is to analyze some of these instability mechanisms by analytical means. This will not only further our understanding of pattern formation in chemical and biological systems, but will eventually allow for a systematic control of patterns, for instance, in the catalytic oxidation of carbon-monoxide and in the propagation of calcium waves in intracellular tissue doc19788 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: $L^1$ stability of hyperbolic conservation laws with geometrical sources and kinetic equations Ha This research addresses the stability of weak solutions of hyperbolic conservation laws and related problems in kinetic theory. Stability will be studied by constructing explicit Lyapunov functionals. Specific goals are: (i) establish the stability of weak solutions to hyperbolic conservation laws with geometric source terms and certain kinetic models with collision terms; (ii) study the nonlinear stability of shock waves of the Boltzmann equation with boundary effects, and hydrodynamic limits of some collisional kinetic equations. Hyperbolic conservation laws with geometric source terms appear in many physical situations, such as shallow water flow through a channel, nozzle flow through a duct, and self-similar gas flow in multi-dimensional Euler equations. The issue of stability of solutions is important in the design of systems modeled by these equations, which include aircraft and space shuttle engines. The Boltzmann equation and the Smoluchowski equation are fundamental equations in kinetic theory. Stability analysis for these equations can be used in development of accurate methods for numerical simulation of the corresponding physical systems doc19789 none A Gordon Research Conference on Electronic Processes in Organic Materials (EPOM) will be held July 21-26, at Salve Regina University, Newport, RI. The main goals of the conference are to provide a forum for the presentation of new and exciting experimental and theoretical results on EPOM and to bring together investigators from diverse disciplines so that they can share their experimental and theoretical approaches in solving problems related to electronic and photophysical processes in complex organic materials of many different types. The scientific program is multi-faceted and will also serve to educate young and established scientists in areas they are not so familiar with. Topics include fundamental science and device applications, e.g., organic superconductors, field-effect transistors, lasers, conducting wires, light emitting diodes, semiconductors, electronic structure and dynamics in low-dimensional systems, light harvesting and electron transfer in artificial and photosynthetic systems, organic-inorganic heterostructures, single polymer and biomolecular spectroscopy and, nano-architectronics. The conference will consist of nine formal sessions with a total of 28 oral presentations, and two afternoon poster sessions. Invited speakers and discussion leaders were selected on the basis of their relevant expertise and recent achievements while emphasizing a program with gender balance, minority representation, and participation of young investigators. Along with the opportunity to assess the field and future directions, it is expected that new ties will be established between universities, research institutions, and industry. %%% An evaluation of the progress and status of Electronic Processes in Organic Materials and related device issues along with current assessments of the most important developments will be of significant value to the understanding and enhanced utilization of electronic photonic materials in computing, data processing, and communications. This conference is co-supported by the Chemistry and Materials Research Divisions within the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate doc19790 none Interest in organic solid state chemistry has undergone explosive growth in recent years due to the broadly based recognition of the scientific challenges and technological importance attached to the discovery and study of new organic andpoilymeric materials. Many scientists from other disciplines see opportunities for performing exciting research in this area. The Electronic Processes in Organic Materials Gordon Research Conference will be held at Salve Regina University, Newport, Rhode Island from July 21-26, . The goal of the conference is to facilitate international collaborations and informatation exchange across a broad spectrum of researchers with interests in solid state organic materials. The NSF funds will be used to support the attendance of 5 graduate students and post-doctoral scholars and 7 senior U.S. session chairs and invited speakers. %%% The Solid State Chemistry community continues to have direct impact on technological areas that are crucial to advancing societal needs through the design, synthesis and application new materials. Specific area in which important advances are being made include organic superconductors, field-effect transisters, lasers, conducting wires, light emitting diodes and semiconductors. J Since these technical areas are of very high priority to industry, students educated and trained in these multidisciplinary areas involving solid-state organic chemistry compete very well in the job market and go on to contribute in many significant ways to the global economy doc19791 none This project is investigating and analyzing the role of undergraduate physics instruction at two-year colleges (TYCs) in encouraging students, particularly women and minorities, to pursue undergraduate degrees in physics as well as in other areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). The project is seeking to discover how some two-year colleges succeed in encouraging students to take introductory physics and then transfer to four-year institutions and become physics majors. Based on information gathered through a survey of TYC physics activities and site visits to ten TYCs, the project is publishing a series of case studies that physicists in other two-year colleges can use to enhance their teaching of introductory physics and to encourage the production of STEM majors, particularly physics majors. The SPIN-UP TYC project is investigating the basic mechanism of change in the two-year college physics program. The site visits and survey that this project is sponsoring seeks to identify the key personnel at the TYC responsible for implementing changes in the physics science programs. The project is also investigating ways to better bridge two-year college and four-year college physics faculty. Better communication between these segments of the physics community not only encourage recruitment of physics majors and pre-service physics teachers in the TYCs and facilitate transfer to the four-year programs, it strengthens undergraduate physics as a whole. During the SPIN-UP TYC project, information concerning teacher preparation (particularly physics and physical science teaching preparation) at two-year colleges is being gathered. The teacher preparation information concerns both the processes and scope that selected two-year colleges use in their preparation of future teachers. The SPIN-UP TYC project is a collaboration between the American Association of Physics Teachers, Lee College, and Southwest Texas Junior College in association with the American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society doc19792 none Mason Problems on the asymptotic behavior of functionals of the empirical distribution have long attracted the interest of probabilists and have led to the development of new methods and theory that have enriched both mathematical statistics and probability theory. A classic example is the problem of the asymptotic distribution of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic, which ultimately led to the development of the theory of weak convergence and strong approximations. Over the next few years the investigator plans to concentrate his efforts on large sample theory problems connected with particular functionals of the empirical distribution. These include the L1-norm density estimator process, integral functionals of density estimators and local empirical and U-statistics processes. The anticipated results should have potential use in the development of a class of practical goodness-of-fit techniques and statistical estimators. In fact, these investigations have already given rise to a number of new methods to assess and describe in an intelligent way the behavior of the underlying mechanism that generates natural phenomena doc19793 none TITLE: Software Innovations for Liquid Architectures We propose to bring the advantages of custom logic to low-volume but high-performance applications by semiautomatically generating custom logic, deployed in reconfigurable logic. By coupling (hard-or soft-core) commodity processors with reconfigurable logic, an application is essentially offered a liquid architecture, where the definition and implementation of the computer s instruction set, its coprocessors functionality, and its supporting structures can be easily changed. These architectural changes can improve performance by supplying instructions and efficient implementations for frequently occurring operations, by changing the size or policies of caches and other supporting structures, and by dynamically exchanging speed for power-savings where required. With proper software support, liquid architectures can improve the performance of many kinds of applications, ranging from high-performance, scientific calculations to low-power, embedded systems. Our research aims to develop the software infrastructure and methodologies needed to facilitate execution of applications on liquid architectures, addressing the following issues doc19794 none TITLE: Towards Community Services: Putting Parallel Network Services On-line This project will investigate a community service system architecture and run-time infrastructure needed to support such high-end services. We will focus on two key run-time issues for performance: dynamic resource management and scaling. Dynamic resource management allows: (i) resources to be {de-} allocated to service requests on-the-fly, (ii) resources to be acquired via negotiation, and (iii) resources to be shared across inter-service domains. Resource management will be based on a performance estimation technique that learns service execution time as function of dependent inputs and resources allocated. We will produce a set of next generation tools and libraries that can be leveraged by community services running in single-site clusters and in multi-site Grids. The toolset will be evaluated by applying it to several high-end network services in the area of visualization, astronomy, and bioinformatics doc19795 none Daniel Menasce George Mason University A Framework for the Dynamic Composition and Reconfiguration of QoS-Aware Next Generation Software Systems In large, dynamic, highly distributed, loosely coupled, component-based systems, it is necessary to use a framework for software system composition and dynamic reconfiguration that can support the evolution of functional and performance requirements as well environmental changes (e.g., network, hardware and software failures). The proposed method by which software systems in these environments are composed of autonomous components. All components must have several capabilities (e.g., QoS negotiation, registration, QoS monitoring, etc) that are identical to all components. What makes a component unique is the set of services it provides. QoS-based approach , proposed to distribute software system composition and reconfiguration. Our method uses resource reservation mechanisms at the component level to guarantee QoS requirements at the software system level doc19796 none Gail E. Kaiser, Columbia University This project investigates wide-area publish subscribe event system models and architectures. The focus is on two new models called Smart Events and Active Events, and an event bus architecture called Virtual Private Event Networks (VPENs). Smart events are associated with a structural type model (a grammar or schema), and a semantic model that defines the processing to be performed on the structural subcomponents. Smart events are routed via content-based messaging, where subscriptions may specify complex patterns indicating the events of interest. Active events include their semantic model directly as mobile code. Active events operate as mobile agents transported (conceptually) under their own power point-to-point. Smart events may optionally include active event substructures, enabling content-based messaging to be applied to this subset of active events. VPENs extend multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) protocols and mechanisms to the application layer, to improve the performance of content-based routing by preplanning label switched paths when publisher advertisements as well as consumer subscriptions are available. VPENs also add encryption-based security and privacy in the style of virtual private networks (VPNs doc19797 none G. Peter Scott Geometric Group Theory and the Topology of 3-Manifolds The proposer plans to continue his joint work with Gadde Swarup on connections between geometric group theory and the topology of 3-manifolds. In the s, the theory of the characteristic submanifold of a compact 3-manifold was completed. Starting in the mid s, it began to be apparent that there were analogues of this topological result in the purely algebraic setting. Several authors have worked on this in the last 15 years, but so far none of the results have been truly analogous to the topological results except in very special cases. Now the proposer and Swarup have produced the first true algebraic analogues of the topological results and they plan to continue their investigations in order to see how far their results can be carried. Their arguments and results have already given new insights into the topology of 3-manifolds and led to new results in geometric group theory. The proposer expects that further work in this area will have a significant impact on geometric group theory. The proposer plans to continue his joint work with Gadde Swarup on connections between group theory and the theory of 3-dimensional manifolds. About 40 years ago, some remarkable, and entirely unexpected, work of Stallings first demonstrated the depth of these connections. More recently, work of several authors continued this theme by showing that groups can be decomposed in a fashion closely analogous to the way in which 3-dimensional manifolds can be decomposed. The proposer and Swarup have given a new approach to this area and they plan to continue their investigations in order to see how far their results can be carried. Their arguments and results have already given new insights into the theory of 3-dimensional manifolds and led to new results in group theory. The proposer expects that further work in this area will have a significant impact on group theory doc19798 none The first major contribution of this project is a study of nonparametric tests of function fit in the context of both density estimation and regression, hereby generalizing existing results in several directions. The proposed apparatus can be applied to test the adequacy of any parametric family, subject to the usual conditions of regularity, and is also suitable for use in higher dimensions. The second research topic focuses specifically on estimation after model selection and introduces a general approach to frequentist model averaging. A third line of research addresses the problem of generalizing the methods mentioned above to the setting of missing data. This will require the development of new model selection criteria. The goal of nonparametric testing is to construct an omnibus test, consistent against essentially any alternative model. Proposed tests are applicable to almost any parametric family of functions. There are several reasons why model selection criteria and their asymptotic properties merit further study, one of the most important ones being that only a minority of the past research provides a full integration of model selection into statistical inference. The traditional use of model selection methods in practice is to proceed as if the final selected model had been chosen a priori, without acknowledging the additional uncertainty introduced by model selection. A general framework is developed, in which several modeling and estimation strategies can be included and compared. Aspects of these problems are addressed first in the setting of complete data, and then in the general situation of missing data doc19799 none EIA - Smith, Lloyd University of Wisconsin TITLE: ITR: Multiple-Word DNA Computing on Surfaces This effort will extend the scope and power of surface-based DNA computing in two major respects: i) by scale-up of the size of problem addressed experimentally, ii) by increasing computational generality by extending capabilities to the solution of circuit-SAT problems. Goal (i) will be scaling up the computing process using a problem size of 24 bits as a target goal. 24 bits corresponds to a solution space size of 1.7 x 107 elements, a factor of ten million increase over the 4 bit problem addressed previously. Goal (ii) - For a computing model to be general, that is, capable of efficiently simulating algorithms used in conventional electronic computing, it must be able to efficiently simulate circuits. The ability to simulate Boolean formulas is not sufficient. In theoretical work, it is shown that the surface-based approach, when using multiple words and the MARK, DESTROY-UNMARKED, UNMARK, and APPEND operations, is such a generalizable approach to computing, but it has not been implemented experimentally. This proposal seeks to implement this approach experimentally and to apply it to the solution of circuit-SAT problems doc19800 none TITLE: Supporting Compiler Simulator Co-Evolution for Architectural Exploration and Evaluation The project will address these issues by building a system that constructs key optimizer and simulator components from a common architectural description. Prior work in generating compilers or simulators using only formal architecture descriptions had not succeeded in producing systems capable enough for real work. That difficulty will over-come by not insisting on fully automatic construction. Rather, the project focuses on making it easier for researcher and engineers to extend and modify key components using more specific model descriptions and a flexible, extensible framework. Rather than building components from scratch, makes it easier to evolve components: incremental architectural changes should require incremental effort to support. This is a co-evolution approach since one must evolve both simulators and compilers optimizers simultaneously and consistently doc19801 none This award is for a comprehensive research project for a joint investigation, to be conducted by PI Meng of Harvard University (the lead institution) and PI Lee of Colorado State University, on the use of the self-consistency principle for wavelet regressions with irregular designs. Wavelet estimators enjoy excellent theoretical properties and they are capable of adapting to very complex spatial and frequency inhomogeneities. In addition, their computation is very fast when the regression design points are regular. However, when the design points are not regular, as is typical in statistical applications, standard wavelet methods are no longer applicable. This collaborative research proposes to attack this problem from a missing-data perspective by viewing an irregular-design problem as a regular-design one but with missing data. This new perspective allows the investigators to apply well-established missing-data methods, guided by the self-consistency principle, to construct efficient irregular-design wavelet estimators, as well as fast algorithms to compute such estimators. Wavelet regression is a powerful curve and surface fitting method that has attracted enormous attention from researchers across different fields, in particular applied mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, and statisticians. Self-consistency is a fundamental statistical principle for constructing the most efficient statistical estimators in many incomplete data problems. This collaborate research effort combines these two powerful methods with the aim to make wavelet methods much more applicable to real-life problems, varying from medical imaging to fishery economy to global warming, where irregularities are rules rather than exceptions doc19802 none William J. Floyd This project is an attempt to resolve the hyperbolic case of Thurston s Geometrization Conjecture. Specifically, the goal is to resolve the conjecture that a Gromov-hyperbolic group with space at infinity a 2-sphere has a cocompact, properly discontinuous action on hyperbolic 3-space. The investigator and his collaborators are approaching the conjecture from the point of view of proving conformality of certain recursive sequences of tilings on the space at infinity of a Gromov-hyperbolic group. Previous work has indicated that conformality of a recursive sequence of tilings might follow from finding an invariant conformal structure for a branched surface associated to the recursive structure. This possibility arose from a connection between the recursive structures and rational maps, and Thurston s classification theorem for critically finite branched maps of the 2-sphere gives insight into how the theory might develop. Multiple approaches are planned for finding an invariant conformal structure. Further work is also planned on twisted face-pairing 3-manifolds. Much of the basic theory of twisted face pairings has been completed, but some questions remain which are central to further developments of the theory. Significant progress here could help the main part of the project, since twisted face pairings are a good source of test examples for the conjecture stated above. The immediate focus of this proposal is on sequences of planar tilings. Given an initial tiling and a combinatorial rule for subdivision, one recursively obtains a sequence of subdivisions of the initial tiling. The goal is to understand when these combinatorial subdivisions can be realized geometrically so that the tiles stay almost round at all stages of the sequence. This problem is interesting in its own right, but it is being studied here as part of a deeper problem. It is a key feature of a program of the investigator and his collaborators to resolve the hyperbolic case of William P. Thurston s Geometrization Conjecture. The Geometrization Conjecture, which is the central outstanding problem in low-dimensional topology (it includes the Poincare conjecture as a special case), states that every compact 3-manifold can be naturally subdivided into geometric pieces. The techniques being developed for approaching this have potential applications in other disciplines doc19803 none Garnett Dr. Donald Garnett, at the University of Arizona, will study the problem of why recombination lines (RLs) from twice-ionized oxygen (O), carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and other heavy elements yield much higher abundances than the corresponding collisionally-excited forbidden lines (FLs) from the same species. This problem challenges our confidence in abundances derived from planetary nebulae and ionized hydrogen (HII) regions in the Milky Way and other galaxies and their interpretation for stellar nucleosynthesis and chemical evolution studies. In this project, Dr. Garnett will (1) map the spatial distribution of RLs and FLs in a variety of planetary nebulae and giant HII regions to determine how physical structures affect their distribution, (2) study the hot gas content using data from FUSE and X-ray satellite missions to see if the presence of hot gas is a contributing factor, and (3) examine the spatial variation of electron temperature using a variety of diagnostics to determine if large observed differences between the temperature derived from the Balmer line continuum ratio and the temperature derived from forbidden line ratios are related to physical structures. This project will use already existing and scheduled ground-based spectroscopy, FUSE spectra and Chandra XMM imaging, as well as new ground-based spectroscopy of RLs in HII regions doc19804 none This individual investigator award will provide support for a project that will investigate the effect of adding magnetic moments to semiconductors. Amorphous Si, Ge, and C doped with magnetic ions such as rare earth elements and Mn will be prepared and their electronic, magnetic, thermodynamic, and structural properties measured. The influence of the phonon stiffness and the semiconductor band gap on these properties will be determined. The interaction between these added local moments and the spontaneous moments formed at the Metal-Insulator transition as electrons localize will be studied. The research will provide a phenomenological underpinning for a microscopic model for the three dimensional Metal-Insulator transition, and an understanding of the effect on both transport and magnetic properties of introducing local magnetic moments into a semiconductor. The project will provide research training and education for two graduate students and an estimated 5-6 undergraduates, including exposure to industry through the PI s connections with the Center for Magnetic Recording Research at UCSD and to two National Labs, the National High Magnetic Field Lab and Los Alamos. Magnetic moments play a crucial role in many materials (e.g. the high Tc superconductors and the colossal magnetoresistance manganites). It is known that adding magnetic moments to semiconductors produces effects that are extremely large, but these effects are not well understood. In particular the change in the electrical resistance when such a material is placed in a magnetic field (magnetoresistance) can be enormous. This project will investigate the effect of adding magnetic moments to semiconductors. Samples of amorphous Si, Ge, and C doped with magnetic ions such as rare earth elements and Mn will be prepared. Their electronic, magnetic, thermodynamic, and structural properties will be measured over a wide range of temperature, magnetic field, and doping levels. The research will attempt to determine the principles governing the large effect of magnetic moments in amorphous semiconductors. An increased understanding of these effects may point the way to making the very large magnetoresistance of use to the developing spin electronics technology. In addition this research may increase our understanding of why magnetic moments play such a crucial role in other materials of current interest. The project will provide research training and education for two graduate students and an estimated 5-6 undergraduates, including providing them with an exposure to industry and to the national labs through the PI s collaborations. Thus, they will be well prepared for future careers in academia, or industrial or government laboratories doc19805 none Craig D. Chambers University of Washington Efficient, Adaptable Software via Staged Compilation A common strategy for supporting adaptable software is to use a just-in-time run-time compilation model, as in Java. However, this approach sacrifices performance, since any run-time optimizations must be quick and therefore simple to avoid slowing the program, with excessive compilation overhead. To achieve high performance, particularly for highly modular software, a whole-program static compiler can be used. But this strategy sacrifices run-time extension and adaptability, and forgoes the usual benefits of separate compilation as well. This research is investigating a more flexible approach, staged compilation, that strives to combine the high performance advantages of static compilation with the flexibility advantages of dynamic compilation. In the staged compilation model, each part of a program passes through multiple compiler stages on its journey from source code to optimized machine code, including stages at separate compilation time, library link time, complete-program link time, and run-time doc19806 none EIA - Hodgins, Jessica Carnegie Mellon University TITLE: CISE Postdoctoral Associates in Experimental Computer Science: Programming Entertainment Robots To make humanoid robots a viable alternative for small scale entertainment applications, easier ways of programming them are needed. They must have a natural and entertaining style of motion and often require substantial motion databases to ensure a sufficient variety of behaviors. One potential solution to this problem is to use human motion data as the source of joint trajectories. Automatic techniques for human motion data use would provide the variety of motion that is required for compelling robotic performances. The postdoctoral associate will develop techniques that will allow human motion data to be used to control a wide variety of humanoid and entertainment robots and simulations. This project will involve significant experimentation both in the development of optimization techniques and in the construction and control of physical robots. The research will combine the expertise of the postdoctoral associate in dynamics, planning and motion filtering with the principal investigator s experience in simulation, control systems for human motion, and processing motion capture data doc19807 none This material synthesis and processing project is focused on next generation magnetic materials. Of primary importance is the preparation and characterization of high anisotropy CoPt and FePt nanoparticles. The particles will be prepared by a cluster gun assembly equipped with a special heat-treating stage, required to transform their structure from the fcc phase to the high anisotropy fct phase. Specially prepared substrates will also be used to assemble these nanoscale particles into ordered arrays. The properties of the particles and their arrays will be investigated as candidate media for high-density magnetic recording. The project will provide one post-doctoral associate with cutting edge training and education in magnetism and materials science. The project is co-funded between the Metals Program and the Condensed Matter Physics Program. This material synthesis and processing project is focused on next generation magnetic materials. As a magnetic particle is continually reduced in size to the nanometer regime, it becomes susceptible to temperature effects that can cause its magnetization to fluctuate in different directions. It is no longer possible to store information in the particle s magnetization orientation. These issues are among the most important limits to how dense information can be stored on hard disk drives. The objective of this research is to develop recording media that will function at room temperature while using particles of sizes below one millionth of an inch. The materials are alloys or compounds of cobalt, platinum and iron. The project will provide one post-doctoral associate with cutting edge training and education in magnetism and materials science. The project is co-funded between the Metals Program and the Condensed Matter Physics Program doc19808 none This research concerns the theoretical and empirical investigation of the mutual information coefficient. It extends the ordinary correlation coefficient to the case of random processes. The processes to be studied include: point processes, time series, spatial-temporal processes and random networks. The mutual information coefficient will become a function of time or space or frequency amongst other quantities. The statistical properties of a variety of types of estimates, including kernel-based, wavelets with shrinkage, recurrence times will be developed. The tools of strong approximations, limit theorems, ergodic theory and nonparametric estimation will be employed. Claude Shannon introduced the concepts of entropy and mutual information in . These have both revolutionized and driven the way that our technological society has developed. Mutual information characterizes the strength of dependence between variates and of scientific relationships. It is intended to develop extensions of the idea to random functions and random scatter. The work will be both theory and data driven. The work may have important payoffs for science is about laws and relationships doc19809 none Bianchini, Ricardo Rutgers University New Brunswick CISE Postdoctoral Associates in Experimental Computer Science: Low-Level Optimizations for Next-Generation Disk Drives File input output (I O) has traditionally been a performance problem for several applications. The proposed research seeks to optimize the performance of file I O operations by taking advantage of next-generation disk devices (i.e., devices with embedded and programmable high-performance processors). The postdoctoral research associate will be involved with the introduction and evaluation of a new device-level architecture, new disk controller software, and modifications to standard host operating systems. The expected outcomes are performance improvements for a wide spectrum of disk workloads, ranging from random and small file accesses to large sequential accesses. Evaluations will employ combinations of detailed simulations and actual implementations along with native executions of disk-bound applications (e.g., video-on-demand, data mining doc19810 none Choset, Howard Carnegie Mellon University TITLE: CISE Postdoctoral Associates in Experimental Computer Science: Topologically Inspired Multi-Agent Robotic Systems with Coverage Tasks The proposed research will contribute to the development of the underlying science in using topological information encoded in a free space to spatially allocate members of a multi-agent team to achieve a particular task. Converge path planning (a new motion planning approach that determines a path ensuring a robot s end effector will pass over all points in a target region) will be used as the focusing task for multi-robot team allocation theory development and experimental verification. The postdoctoral associate and the principal investigator will consider how to decrease the time of operation (i.e., work in parallel) and create qualitative synergies among robots working together in a team. The expected outcome is a new geometric result based on Kalman filtering theory, which will support planning optimal motions for agents engaged in mutual positioning. The associate will also participate in educational activities, specifically including robotic LEGO modules for undergraduate and middle school education doc19811 none DMS - . The objective of this project is to study analytic and geometric aspects of Hamilton s Ricci flow of Riemannian metrics, and related topics. In particular, the principal investigator proposes to investigate injectivity radius estimates for solutions to the Ricci flow. The PI proposes to study Li-Yau-Hamilton (Harnack) inequalities for both the Ricci flow and the linearized Ricci flow. The PI also proposes to study collapsing sequences of solutions to the Ricci flow and the related compactness theory. Finally, the PI proposes to study estimates for the linearized Ricci flow and their applications. The PI will focus on dimension 3, where there are the most tools available and the problems posed have the most topological applications. The Ricci flow is an evolution equation which deforms geometric structures on surfaces and manifolds both improving and smoothing out the structures. It has been at the cutting edge of the recent rapid progress in geometric evolution equations and has greatly influenced the study of the mean curvature flow and many other geometric evolution equations. The work on understanding the singularities which develop under the flow has led to the development of new and powerful analytic and geometric tools, which have found applications in the study of many geometric evolution equations. Many phenomena are modeled by geometric evolution equations, such as heat transfer, the evolution of interfaces between molten and solid metal, and the interfaces between ice and water. Geometric evolution equations are also used to smooth out images and have applications in computer vision doc19812 none Gortler, Steven Harvard University Image based rendering is a promising area of innovation in computer graphics. In image based rendering, one starts with an input set of images or a video sequence. One then applies some degree of processing to this data to obtain an intermediate representation. This intermediate representation is then used in an interactive computer graphics setting. These interactive uses include but are not limited to: viewing the scene from novel points of view that were not available in the input sequence, relighting the scene using virtual lights that were not available in the input sequence, and geometrically manipulating the objects that make up the scene. This functionality greatly enlarges the uses of digital photographs, and introduces a rich source of content for use in interactive computer graphics. For image based rendering, we plan to focus on lumigraph representations, which are a sampled repre-sentation of the light that travels along the rays in the scene. In particular, the visual information of a static scene is represented by the five dimensional radiance function. This function describes the intensity and color of light for every 2D direction at every 3D spatial position (x; y; z). If we consider only the subset of light leaving the convex hull bounded object (or equivalently entering a bounded empty region of space), the fact that radiance along any ray remains constant 1 allows us to reduce the domain of interest of the radiance function from five to four dimensions doc19813 none Charles W. Rezk The goal of this project is to apply homotopy theoretic methods to algebraic problems. There are two threads of ideas involved here. One is the description of homotopy theory as a kind of topologically enriched category theory, as has been developed by Dwyer-Kan and many others. Another thread is in the theory of commutative ring spectra (a homotopy theoretic generalization of commutative ring theory), and in particular the development of a topological version of the algebraic de Rham complex of a ring. Homotopy theory is a branch of topology; it arose as the study of certain invariant properties of spaces, namely those left unchanged by continuous deformations. It is a surprising fact that there are deep analogies between the methods of the homotopy theory of spaces (which would seem to be geometric and topological) and those of several branches of algebra (such as homological algebra, sheaf theory, and category theory). For example, there is a close analogy between the way we can describe an algebraic object (such as a group or ring) by giving generators and the relations between them, and the way we can describe a topological space by giving polyhedra and the way they are attached together to give the space. The goal of this project is to develop certain homotopy theoretic methods in the context of ring theory and of category theory, and to allow them to be applied to traditional algebraic problems doc19814 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Randomness in Fluids and Waves Bronski Fluid mechanics is an important subject that plays a central role in modern applied mathematics. Many phenomena in fluids, such as turbulence and intermittency, are still understood poorly even at the physical level, and as such provide a rich source of mathematical problems. In this project we will study mathematically the transport properties of a randomly stirred fluid. In earlier work, the principal investigator and collaborators were able to deduce a great deal of information about the transport properties and induced intermittency in a particular model of fluid flow, using ideas of asymptotic analysis, semiclassical eigenvalue problems, and probability. In current work we extend these ideas to more complex flow fields, where exact solution formulae are not available. In addition to the above techniques, we intend to make use of the Donsker-Varadhan theory, giving large deviations principles for quantities defined via Feynman-Kac integrals. The goal of this project is to bridge the gap between physical understanding and mathematical proof in the area of fluid transport. At present only a few very simple models for the transport of a passive quantity, such as a dye, by a turbulent fluid are understood in a rigorous mathematical sense. By extending the mathematical understanding to more complex models, we will clarify the question of what properties these simple models do and do not share with the more realistic flows of interest to scientists and engineers. We also hope to expand the physical understanding of transport properties, which is still far from complete doc19815 none The Japan-USA Symposium on Flexible Automation co-organized by Georgia Tech will be held in Hiroshima, Japan, July 15-17, . The symposium will consist of three days of technical presentations, panel discussions, and keynote speeches, followed by tours to major university research laboratories and industry production facilities in Japan. The financial assistance will make it possible for many promising U.S. researchers such as faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students to attend the conference and learn about research, development, and implementation of flexible automation technologies in Japan. It will also enhance the ability of the symposium organizers to attract top university researchers in U.S. to contribute to the symposium doc19816 none John Etnyre The focus of this proposal is to better understand the nature of contact structures in all (odd) dimensions, with special attention given to dimension three, and to apply contact topological techniques to questions in hydrodynamics. The first main theme of the proposed research is Legendrian knots. Legendrian knots are knots that are tangent to a contact structure and seem to encode a great deal of information about the contact structure. For example, the famed tight vs. overtwisted dichotomy in dimension three can be understood in terms of Legendrian knots. These knots also give an important invariant of a contact structure. As part of this proposal the general structure of Legendrian knots will be studied. The expected outcome will be various classification result for certain Legendrian knots and contact structures; and, moreover, a better understanding of Legendrian surgery (an important surgery construction of contact structures). Legendrian knots in higher dimensions will also be studied using contact homology. There is very little known about contact structures, or Legendrian knots, in dimensions above three. By investigating Legendrian knots in these dimensions the nature of contact structures should be illuminated, just as the corresponding study revealed much about three dimensional contact structures. The final part of the proposed research centers on the connection between contact structures and hydrodynamics discovered a few years ago by the Principal Investigator and R. Ghrist. Here work with Ghrist will continue with the aim of understanding when, and what type of, closed flow lines occur in fluid flows. We shall also study hydrodynamic instability from the contact topological perspective. This naturally leads into the study of energy minimization for fluid flows and relations between contact and Riemannian geometry. Contact structures are very natural objects, born over two centuries ago, in the work of Huygens, Hamilton and Jacobi on geometric optics. Through the centuries contact structures have touched on many diverse areas of mathematics and physics, including classical mechanics and thermodynamics. In everyday life one encounters contact geometry when ice skating, parallel parking a car, navigating a submarine, using a refrigerator, or simply watching the beautiful play of light in a glass of water. Many great mathematicians have devoted a lot of their work to this subject but only in the last decade or two has it moved into the foreground of mathematics. This renaissance is due to the recent remarkable breakthroughs in contact topology, resulting in a rich and beautiful theory with many applications. The most remarkable feature of all this recent work is the intimate connections between contact structures and topology in dimension three. Moreover, there were important newfound interactions with Hamiltonian mechanics, symplectic and sub-Riemannian geometry, foliation theory, complex geometry and analysis, topological hydrodynamics, and knot theory. The Principal Investigator will explore new connections between contact structures and topology in all (odd) dimensions and continue his study of idealized fluid flows (hydrodynamics) via contact geometry doc19817 none There is a renewed interest from the part of statisticians in solving noisy integral equations. This kind of problem is ill-posed because the integral operator involved typically has an unbounded inverse and such models boil down to a generalization of traditional curve estimation. The purpose of this proposal is to pursue the general theory that is being developed into three directions. The first question is whether asymptotically efficient estimators of sufficiently smooth functionals of the input signal can be constructed despite the presence of the possibly unknown error density as an infinite dimensional nuisance parameter. The second question to be dealt with is the asymptotic distribution of the integrated squared error centered at its mean. Such precise asymptotic behavior of a global measure of accuracy has important applications to model checks. Finally a new method expedient for convolution equations with mathematical irregularities will be developed. The method is based on expansion in a wavelet basis coupled with inversion of the convolution operator in the time domain. Experimenters are often faced with the problem of recovering the input of a system when only the output is observable. Typically the observations will be blurred by measurement error and statistical procedures become pertinent. Examples include computer tomography employed in medical imaging, and Wicksell s problem in stereology where a transform of the particle size distribution is observed. Inverse heat conduction requires the recovery of the initial heat distribution (input) when the present one (output) is given. There are many more examples and related questions. For instance, can one estimate the total weight of a cable suspended at its endpoints, when only data regarding its shape are available? The construction of efficient estimators of such functionals of the input is one purpose of this research. A second question considered is precise information about the frequency distribution of the discrepancy between the estimated input and its expectation. Results can be useful in checking the validity of certain prior assumptions and could, for instance, be applied in recovering the luminosity distribution of the Milky Way. Finally a new method of input reconstruction in irregular cases will be developed using wavelets with potential application to image reconstruction doc19818 none Two models of disordered systems, first-passage percolation (FPP) and stochastic Ising dynamics with random initial state, are the main focus of this proposal. Rigorous unconditional results about the geometric features of lattice-based FPP models are hard to come by, largely due to technical difficulties associated with the anisotropy of the underlying lattice. Models of Euclidean FPP take place on graphs constructed from a homogeneous Poisson process and enjoy complete statistical invariance under all rigid motions. In this sense, Euclidean FPP is a natural setting in which to study geometric properties of FPP. One objective of this proposal is to refine, for Euclidean FPP, existing estimates of key fluctuation exponents associated with these models with the ultimate goal of proving interesting qualitative results. Another goal is to exploit a certain re-scaling relation that holds for Euclidean FPP to obtain results about the stochastic monotonicity of passage time viewed as a function of distance. Other closely related open questions under investigation concern issues such as how massively a local perturbation of the Poisson particle configuration affects minimizing paths and how far parallel geodesics typically travel before coalescence. In Stochastic Ising models, rules of dynamics interact with a random initial state to produce a system that evolves with time. The state at any particular time is a configuration of + -1 spins associated with the sites of some regular lattice; the configuration at time 0 makes the spins i.i.d. random variables. For the homogeneous ferromagnetic models of this proposal, the dynamics tend to produce increasing agreement of spins for neighboring sites as time elapses. Key matters of investigation concern how quickly and in what sense the system evolves to a limiting state as well as various percolation properties of the configuration as a function of time. Disordered systems are a large class of probabilistic models generally motivated by problems arising in condensed matter physics and materials science. First-passage percolation and other closely related models have served as a mathematical model for phenomena as seemingly diverse as properties of randomly porous media (such as aquifers), the growth of cancerous tumors, and the propagation of cracks through brittle material. Ising models capture the basic features of magnetized materials. The proposed work aims at a rigorous understanding of some of the many fundamental mathematical properties of these models doc19819 none Today s challenge for optimization research is to develop new techniques and approaches that yeild performance improvements that were typical of early optimization research-20 to 40 percent and more. In this research, we address this challenge by investigation and developing an innobative system or applying optimizations. Our system, the Continuous Compilation System (COCO), applies optimizations both statically at compile-time and dynamically at run-time using optimization plans developed at compile time and adapted at run time. To demonstrate the practicality and utility of our approach, initially we will apply COCO to several large, long-running applications. Examples of such applications include ecological simulations, weather simulation, architecture simulators, and VLSI routing and placement applications. As we gain insight and experience with the application of continuous compilation, we will investigate its effectiveness on other types of codes such as multimedia applications, signal processing applications, and web servers doc19820 none The purpose of the project is to organize the International Conference on Modern Algebra in Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN, May 21-24, ) in conjunction with the 19th Shanks lectures. Professor Efim Zelmanov (Yale University), has agreed to deliver the Shanks lecture. The conference will focus on several fundamental areas of modern algebra and its applications: group and semigroup theory, lattice theory and ordered tructures, model theory and universal algebra. Current and future trends in modern algebra will be the general theme. This grant will provide partial support for speakers, graduate students, post-doctoral students, and younger faculty. At a fundamental level, group theory, lattice theory, and model theory, the topics of this conference, are tools for understanding and analyzing symmetries and patterns in the world around us. For example, crystallography, the study and analysis of crystals, used once for inproving transistors and used today for studying protein structures, has advanced as group theory and lattice theory have advanced. As another example, codes may be thought of as man-made patterns, and as such advances in group theory, lattice theory, and model theory lead to advances in cryptography and cryptanalysis doc19821 none Jack W. Davidson Illinois Institute of Technology Collaborative Research: Continuous Compilation: A New Approach to Aggressive and Adaptive Code Transformation Today s challenge for optimization research is to develop new techniques and approaches that yield performance improvements that were typical of early optimization research-20 to 40 percent and more. In this research, we address this challenge by investigation and developing an innovative system or applying optimizations. Our system, the Continuous Compilation System (CoCo), applies optimizations both statically at compile-time and dynamically at run-time using optimization plans developed at compile time and adapted at run time. To demonstrate the practicality and utility of our approach, initially we will apply CoCo to several large, long-running applications. Examples of such applications include ecological simulations, weather simulation, architecture simulators, and VLSI routing and placement applications. As we gain insight and experience with the application of continuous compilation, we will investigate its effectiveness on other types of codes such as multimedia applications, signal processing applications, and web servers doc19822 none Anupam Joshi University of Maryland-Baltimore County Agent Oriented Approaches to a Ubiquitous Grid At the level of computing and networking hardware we will see dramatic changes in the next few years. Computing will become pervasive. These developments will lead to wireless networks that will scale all the way from ad hoc body area networks to satellite WANs, and link together supercomputers, palmstations and embededded sensors & controllers. Given this scenario, our proposed research will seek to extend the computational grid by making it ubiquitous and pervasive. In particular, we will develop agent based runtime systems where each component is autonomous, articulate, social and adaptive. Such a system will seamlessly partition computation across elements of the grid ranging from palmtops to supercomputers. Issues that we will investigate include (i) Component Service Discovery, (ii) Dynamic Composition of components, and (iii) computation partition across highly asymmetric and heterogeneous systems doc19823 none Marty A. Humphrey University of Virginia Legion-G: Delivering a Scalable and Secure Programming Model for Grid Computing To date, Grid computing lacks a secure, persistent, fault-tolerant, Grid-enabled object model that is standards-based and interoperable with the isolated Grid computing solutions that are emerging from the work in the Global Grid Forum. Grid-enabled objects must be dynamically instantiated and located, and users and administrators need to be able to better visualize performance and debugging, and graphically move objects across Grid boundaries. This project addresses these problems with three contributions. First, the lack of flexibility will be solved via the creation of Legion-G, a revolutionary applications-level interface of Legion to Globus. Second, new scheduling support for components across Grids will be developed. This Continuous Scheduling modeling will facilitate faster customization and more powerful, dynamic control of Grid-based component applications, resulting in higher performance and productivity. Third, the Grid Debugging Visualizer (GDV) will give Grid systems administrators and Grid users more precise, real-time information regarding the timing errors and functional errors of the component-based Grid computations doc19824 none Pascu The PI will study several connected problems related to reflecting Brownian motion in convex domains. Motivated originally by the interest of the proposer in solving the hot spots conjecture, the first problem concerns the construction of couplings of reflecting Brownian motion in convex domains. The author introduced a new type of coupling of reflecting Brownian motions, which led him to a partial resolution of the hot spots conjecture; the author will try to develop these coupling arguments, with the hope of solving this long-standing conjecture with roots in mathematical physics. In connection to this problem is the more general conjecture of the diagonal monotonicity of the Neumann heat kernel of convex domains with one axis of symmetry (which implies the hot spots conjecture). A related open problem which the PI intends to study is Chavel s conjecture on the domain monotonicity of Neumann heat kernel. In the view of the PI, coupling techniques can be used here to obtain classes of domains for which Chavel s conjecture holds true. Finally, in connection to all above-mentioned problems is the more general problem of finding a precise dependence of the Neumann heat kernels of two convex planar domains. Reflecting Brownian motion has been observed and studied for more than one century, since it was first observed by the English botanist Robert Brown in . Its most recent spectacular application is probably the famous work of Black-Scholes, which changed forever the guessing game of the price of a stock option in a mathematical sense by tying it to the random behavior of a Brownian motion. This led to the award of a the Nobel prize for Economics in . Other applications of reflecting Brownian motion are in potential theory, partial differential equations, mathematical physics and mathematical finance. The present research aims to develop and study certain properties of reflecting Brownian motion (monotonicity properties and domain dependence of the transition density), which will give a deeper understanding of this fundamental stochastic process. In turn, this gives as applications properties of functions arising from real-life situations, whenever a connection to this process can be established (for example the extremum properties of the temperature of a thermally insulated body doc19825 none This is a theoretical grant funded jointly by the Divisions of Materials Research and Molecular and Cellular Biology. The past few years have seen the development of new techniques based on micromanipulation technology to study the mechanical properties of single and small numbers of biomolecules. Current state-of-the-art involves the monitoring of biochemical reactions on micromanipulated molecules, leading to a statistical mechanical picture of the operation of biomolecular machinery. These types of experiments typically involve distance measurements in the nanometer range, and force measurements in the piconewton range. The objective of this project is to develop theoretical descriptions of these kind of single-molecule force-distance experiments that study the organization of DNA by proteins, and to apply those ideas to understand experiments of this type on chomosomes. Specific types of problems to be studied include: equilibrium and nonequilibrium aspects of folding of large DNA molecules by proteins which bind to, and then distort, the double helix; effects of DNA folding on the topological state of large DNA molecules, as a model for how disentanglement of duplicated DNAs is coupled to their folding during cell division; kinetics of opening and closing of dsDNA or RNA helix-loop structures in response to applied forces, including those applied by other biomolecules; kinetics of communication processes between DNA sites, where that communication occurs through juxtaposition of DNA sequences, or alternatively through a messenger (typically protein) molecule which sequentially visits two sites; mechanical response of networks of dsDNA-based nucleoprotein filaments as found in folded chromosomes, and the modification of that response by sequence-directed cutting. %%% This is a theoretical grant funded jointly by the Divisions of Materials Research and Molecular and Cellular Biology. The past few years have seen the development of new techniques based on micromanipulation technology to study the mechanical properties of single and small numbers of biomolecules. Current state-of-the-art involves the monitoring of biochemical reactions on micromanipulated molecules, leading to a statistical mechanical picture of the operation of biomolecular machinery. These types of experiments typically involve distance measurements in the nanometer range, and force measurements in the piconewton range. The objective of this project is to develop theoretical descriptions of these kind of single-molecule force-distance experiments that study the organization of DNA by proteins, and to apply those ideas to understand experiments of this type on chomosomes doc19826 none The terrorist attacks on September 11, represent the greatest homeland threat to America since Pearl Harbor. As in times of war, the attacks have prompted increased patriotism and national identification. This small grant for exploratory research will examine Americans national versus racial ethnic identifications in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Among the questions to be addressed are the following: How strongly do Americans identify with their national identity? Does national identity correspond with an inclusion of traditionally stigmatized groups (e.g., African Americans) into the common national in-group? If so, is this inclusion observable in unconscious associations of stigmatized groups with the category American? Or, instead, is it merely a conscious extension of patriotism, unlinked to underlying representations of social categories? What factors predict the magnitude of these identity effects? Are these identities durable or will they fade over time? The research entails a multi-site study of white Americans national identities and their inclusion of African- versus Arab-Americans relative to the broader category American. To date, empirical examinations of the malleability of identity and inter-group bias have been largely limited to manipulations involving minimal groups of relatively low self-importance to participants. The recent terrorist attacks represent a unique opportunity to explore the impact of extreme threats upon social identities of significant self-relevance. National identities such as these are likely to be stable except in times of relatively severe national threat doc19827 none Gianfranco Ciardo College of William & Mary Structured Methods to Evaluate the Performance of Distributed Software Our goal is a collaborative research effort aimed at removing the computational barriers to the widespread adoption of Markov chain modeling technology in the software performance engineering process. We will approach the problem from different and complementary points of view, and have the necessary means to solve many of the remaining computational issues. The results of the proposed research will open up the Markov modeling field to a surge of new, and probably unanticipated, research activity in very diverse areas of national and international importance, and provide a path towards the compositional performance assessment of systems built from off-the-shelf software modules doc19828 none Chrisochoides, Nikos P. College of William and Mary Mesh Generation and Optimistic Computation on the Grid . The goal of this proposal is to investigate exactly these issues using an identified application as a test case. Mesh generation and dynamic manipulation is an integral part of many important scientific computing applications and must take place on the same platform with the rest of the application. Mesh generation is a memory-intensive application with major impact on the overall performance of the end-to-end field simulations-an important class of applications that could benefit greatly from a grid platform. Traditional approaches for generating, partitioning, and placing very large meshes have tow weakness when used on grids: (i) I O and data movement due to mesh re-partitioning, for adaptive applications, is prohibitively expensive, and (ii) there is a trade-off between the performance of field solvers and the quality of the resulting elements and partitions doc19829 none Proposal Number: PI: Andre de Carvalho The study of 2-dimensional dynamical systems is an active area of research. Families such as the Henon and Lozi families have been intensively studied in recent years and many beautiful results have been obtained. However, we are still far from having a complete understanding of them. In dimension 1, due to the efforts of many researchers during the past two decades, there is an almost complete theory. Parallels and differences between the dynamics of families in dimensions 1 and 2 have been exploited by several authors. The past work of the PI includes the development of a 2-dimensional analogue of Milnor and Thurston s kneading theory and the study of braids and braid forcing. The present project proposes to further the study of dynamics in dimension 2 as well as some aspects of braid theory and Teichmuller theory. The main topics to be studied are: Horseshoe braids, Generalized pseudo-Anosov maps and piecewise linear models for diffeomorphisms in dimension 2, Real and Complex Henon maps and the Pruning Front Conjecture, Renormalization in dimension 2, and some aspects of infinite-dimensional Teichmuller Theory. Dynamical systems is the branch of mathematics that describes systems that evolve in time. Typical examples are planetary motion, population patterns, weather prediction or the economy. Since Newton, it is believed that simple mathematical laws are capable of describing the long term behavior of many of such systems. The problem is that often such simple mathematical laws lead to extremely complicated long time behavior doc19830 none Yair Minsky In this project Minsky will study connections between the geometric structure of hyperbolic 3-manifolds, and the combinatorial structure of surfaces. The main focus of the project is a program to solve Thurston s Ending Lamination Conjecture, which states that a hyperbolic 3-manifold is uniquely determined by its topological type and a list of invariants describing the asymptotic geometry of its ends. This conjecture is central in the field and would settle a number of outstanding questions about the structure of the deformation space of all hyperbolic structures on a given manifold. The principal tool in this approach is the Complex of Curves, a combinatorial object which describes the set of all essential homotopy classes of simple loops on a given surface. Such a complex, viewed as a metric space, is hyperbolic in the sense of Cannon and Gromov, and the invariants which describe the geometry of a 3-manifold turn out to be points at infinity for the complex. A study of geodesics within the complex of curves then allows us to construct a model for the geometry of the 3-manifold which depends only on its end invariants. Part of the program is joint work with Brock and Canary. The complex of curves is also instrumental in studying the Teichmuller space of hyperbolic structures on a surface, and its symmetry group, known as the Mapping Class Group. Hyperbolicity of the complex implies a type of relative hyperbolicity property for the Teichmuller space and the Mapping Class Group, and in collaboration with Brock and Masur, Minsky hopes to apply this to study the geometric properties of Teichmuller space, and to answer a number of group-theoretic and algorithmic questions about the mapping class group. Topological spaces appear in mathematics at varying levels of abstraction. The earth, for example, can be thought of as a sphere, spinning around its axis. The set of all positions of this sphere, perhaps as parameterized by the time of day in New York, can itself be visualized as a circle. The positions of the earth in its orbit around the sun also make up a circle, and all this information together can be described by a 2-dimensional surface, called a torus, so that each point in the torus corresponds to exactly one position of the earth-sun system, and our motion in space gives rise to a trajectory winding around the torus. Once a surface is being studied, we often give it various structures: it can have a metric, which is a way of measuring distance in it; it can also be filled up in different ways by loops. The set of all possible metrics can itself be studied as a space , where motion in this space corresponds to changing shapes of the surface. The set of all loops in the surface gives rise to another space, of a more combinatorial character. A fascinating phenomenon, not uncommon in mathematics, is the appearance of analogies between these different levels of abstraction. For example, a property of a single metric on a surface called hyperbolicity appears again, in another guise, as a property of the space of all metrics on the surface and the space of all loops. The interaction between these different levels yields interesting phenomena and tools which can be applied to solve a number of problems in doc19831 none In this project funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Wittig will investigate photoinitiated processes that involve polyatomic molecules embedded in helium droplets, He(n). This work stands at the forefront of contemporary physical chemistry and its goal is to obtain quantitative understanding of relaxation and reactive processes that take place in an exceptionally well-characterized bath of liquid helium. Broad knowledge developed for gas phase photochemistry will be used in the modeling of processes in the condensed medium. New chemical systems, almost unperturbed by surroundings, but difficult in being formed and studied in jet expansions, will be investigated. This research deals with the properties of molecules trapped in and on the surfaces of ultracold droplets of liquid helium. Such embedded, or attached, molecules can rotate freely, but with a rotational parameter that is different from the one that characterizes the rotation of molecules in a dilute gas. Molecular systems that are very difficult to prepare by conventional methods due to their high reactivity can thereby be made accessible to study. Such highly reactive species play an important role in chemical reactions and the proposed research will provide information not otherwise available or very difficult to obtain. The research will be conducted with the assistance of graduate and undergraduate students, and postdoctoral research associates. These collaborators will acquire skills and knowledge in a forefront area of physical chemistry that prepares them for advanced studies or employment in industry, government research laboratories, or academia doc19832 none DMS - . This project deals with three areas of Riemannian geometry, namely, nonnegative sectional curvature, negative sectional curvature, and almost nonnegative Ricci curvature. Specifically, we continue the search of new examples of metrics of nonnegative sectional curvature and obstructions to their existence, especially in the simply-connected case, we plan to analyze the structure of open pinched negatively curved manifolds with nilpotent fundamental groups, and to study the difference between nonnegative and almost nonnegative Ricci curvatures. One of the main goals of modern geometry is to obtain global qualitative information about a space by measuring its local quantitative properties. Say, it has been known since the nineteenth century that a space that locally looks like an egg must globally look like an egg, not like a doughnut or a jungle gym. This project deals with similar matters for higher dimensional spaces, some of which occur naturally in physics and engineering doc19833 none Michael Mandell A. This grant proposes to use E-infinity differential graded algebras to study the homotopy theory of spaces and proposes to study the homotopy theory of E-infinity differential graded algebras and E-infinity ring spectra. The concept of E-infinity differential graded algebra is a generalization of the concept of commutative differential graded algebra; commutativity holds only up to homotopy, and E-infinity differential graded algebras admit Steenrod operations on their cohomology, which measure to some extent the deviation from actual commutativity. E-infinity ring spectra are a stable homotopy theory generalization of E-infinity differential graded algebras. Most commonly studied generalized cohomology theories that have commutative ring structures are represented by E-infinity ring spectra. This extra structure yields important calculational information about the theory and is useful for various constructions of related theories. Algebraic topology tries to reduce topological or geometric classification problems into algebra. Because the algebra is usually discrete, it is typically invariant under changes by continuous deformations, or ``homotopies. Because of this, fundamental problems in algebraic topology are often phrased in terms of understanding the homotopy equivalence classes of spaces or in terms of computing the number (or more often the ``group or ``module ) of homotopy classes of maps between spaces. Quite generally this kind of question can be reformulated as an equivalent question in algebra. The purpose of this proposal is to develop tools to study the sort of algebra that arises in this context doc19834 none Dr. William A. Ducker of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University is funded for his research on proximal adsorption in colloidal systems by a grant in the Physical Chemistry program of the Chemistry Division. He will measure the adsorption of surfactants as a function of the separation between particles (the proximal adsorption) in a model system consisting of silica particles and quaternary ammonium surfactants. In the analysis of particle forces and stability, it is common to assume that surfactants do not adsorb or desorb when particles collide. This can lead to serious errors. His results of force-distance-adsorption measurements will be used to determine the effect of proximal adsorption on colloidal forces. The results will also be compared to the thermodynamic theory developed by Hall and by Ash et al., and the microscopic mechanism behind proximal adsorption will be explored using self-consistent field calculations. He will use the concept of interaction-driven adsorption as a route for improved understanding of colloidal stability in surfactant and polymer systems. The advantages of this approach over conventional electrostatic and statistical mechanical calculations are that the approach is simple, and the force is directly linked to the most easily controlled experimental parameter: the concentration of additive in solution. Graduate and undergraduate students will be trained in both theoretical and experimental approaches to surface chemistry, and will join in the development of a new apparatus for measuring proximal adsorption. Many of the objects that we encounter in everyday life actually consist of very fine particles. For example, bricks, paper, clothing, china, soil, most foods, cosmetics, and even humans are composed of small particles. The physical properties (e.g. stiffness, flow, and workability) of these objects depends on the forces between the particles. Part of the process of creating new and improved products is the manipulation of the forces between particles to obtain desirable material properties. In practice these new properties are obtained through the addition of surfactants and polymers, which adsorb to the surface of the particles. We know that this adsorption is modified by collisions between the particles, but this effect is not taken into account in most theories, and therefore the reasoning commonly employed in formulating products is missing a key step. The aim of this research is to measure, model, and understand the change in adsorption during a collision. This should provide new guidelines for predicting the physical properties of materials doc19835 none This project addresses interfacial phenomena that are commonplace in nature. There are two goals in this project. One is to develop an applicable model describing motion of soluble substances in a liquid environment. The other is to use existing reaction--diffusion systems and free boundary models to study certain interfacial phenomena that are important in industrial applications. When chemical reactions are concerned, existing models to be used are reaction--diffusion systems such as the activator--inhibitor, FitzHugh--Nagumo, Belousov-Zhabotinsky, Gray--Scott, and Gierer--Meinhardt. Most of the focus here will be on slow diffusion--fast reaction equations and their singular limits, namely, free boundary problems. A large part of the investigation will be to find solutions related to interfacial phenomena, such as traveling spots, spikes, target patterns, checkerboard patterns, rotating spiral waves, and self--replicating behavior. The underlying investigation for patterns in free boundary problems and reaction--diffusion systems will enable people to predict and to control the seemingly complicated yet natural interfacial dynamics. It can also develop mathematical theories and ideas. As a particular example, certain evolution equations that do not possess uniqueness and thus classically are regarded as ill--posed, will be carefully investigated and regarded as good models since they reflect the nature in which an unobservable local microscopic change may affect the whole observable macroscopic outcome. Such a research will be guided by the current industrial needs. In chemistry, biology, and many applied sciences, it is common that chemical substances move around in a liquid environment, due to dissolution or chemical reaction. Quite often circular shapes are stable and circular spots move and interact each other like elastic objects, with their own special ``momentum laws . One purpose of the project is to develop, at least for soluble solids in a liquid medium, a model enabling one to calculate the speed of a traveling spot and the reflection principle---the relationship between the incoming and outgoing angles when a traveling spot bounces off another spot or the physical boundary of a container. The model developed for the motion of spots is expected to find useful industrial applications in many areas such as water contamination control, chemical testing, chemical processing, etc. This project will involve graduate students and stimulate their interest in mathematical problems of practical importance. Date: June 14, doc19836 none Honeycutt The Texas A&M University System, including the main campus at College Station and four primarily undergraduate serving institutions, will establish an extended and mentor-supported research experience for undergraduates primarily from under-represented groups. The program is designed to provide training in the objective assessment of scientific theories based on critical thinking, experimentation, collaboration, and synthesis of information. Students in the program will be supported throughout the year and for multiple years. Student participants will be recruited from disciplines in environmental biology, and training will emphasize interdisciplinary research based on modern techniques in environmental biology and engineering. Research projects will pertain to complex environmental problems that require knowledge of ecological principles, population biology, genetics, environmental risk assessment, environmental engineering, and toxicology. The program is designed to provide each student co-mentors who will provide guidance for the student throughout the program. This award includes a supplement from the Americas Program of NSF s Office of International Science and Engineering. This supplement will support travel to Latin America, where students and their mentors will engage in research collaborations between U.S. and Latin American research groups. Solutions to complex environmental problems require integrated multi-disciplinary approaches. While society struggles to devise a means for sustainable economic development, the degradation of ecosystems threatens renewable natural resources. Such degradation also impacts biological diversity, human health, and prospects for future economic gains. Inherent ecosystem complexity often complicates our understanding of how the various components interact for effective functioning of a healthy ecosystem. This complication also makes it difficult to identify potential risks and enact programs that minimize risk. Future scientists must be trained to collaborate across diverse disciplines in both the life sciences and engineering. This project is designed to train the next generation of young scientists, so that they can contribute to resolving some of the environmental issues that our nation and the world will face in the near future doc19837 none The goal of this proposal is to obtain polymers confined in nano-environments with different geometric shapes and sizes using block copolymers and blends as templates to achieve a fundamental understanding of how polymers behave during phase transformations in these nano-confined spaces. The main research includes several important objectives. First, a series of new amorphous-crystalline block copolymers and blends will be designed and synthesized (by collaborating with the synthetic professors at Univ. of Akron). The basic idea in constructing these nano-confined environments involves manipulating the relationships among the order-disorder transition temperature of the phase morphology, the glass transition temperature of the amorphous blocks, and the crystallization temperatures of the crystallizable blocks using different chemical structures, molecular weights, and shapes. These confined geometric shapes may range from relatively simple lamellar, cylindrical, and spherical geometries to complex hexagonal perforated layers, double gyroids, and inverse phases. Second, systematic studies of the phase orientation and structural changes of the crystallizable blocks in thin film and bulk samples will be carried out at different crystallization temperatures within various confined geometric shapes and sizes. By comparing the results from these confined samples with those of their corresponding unconfined polymers, the size and geometry effects on the phase orientations and structures can be elucidated. The third objective of this research will concentrate on the concept of phase stability inversion based on the phase size. For this purpose, the designed amorphous-crystalline block copolymers will need to have crystallizable blocks which exhibit polymorphism. With this approach, a quantitative understanding of the relationship between the size of the phase and the phase stability will be attained. The approach presented in this proposal will not only be valuable by enhancing the scientific understanding of the size effect on polymer phase structures and transformations, it will also provide a gateway in designing novel nano-materials that possess desired mechanical, electrical, and optical properties in different nano-technologies doc19838 none DMS - . The PI s first program in this proposal is concerned with the geometry of Hermitian or hyper-Hermitian connections with totally skew torsions. The results will be applicable to an investigation in quantum mechanical black holes. The PI s second program is to study the complex deformation theory and Hermitian geometry of nilmanifolds. Parallel to the algebraic analysis on the classical and extended moduli, he and his collaborators investigatge the geometry on these spaces from the viewpoint of special holonomy and symplectic structures. A senior participant proposes to analyse the structures of compact quaternionic Kaehler manifolds and the A-hat genus of non-spin manifolds with finite second homotopy. Both issues are tackled through an analysis of the rigidity of elliptic genus. Through the theory of elliptic genus, the two proposers will jointly calculate a Hilbert polynomial relevant to holomorphic contact structures or rational curves invariant with respect to a holomorphic automorphisms. The proposed projects here are enabled by theoretical physicists and mathematicians knowledge on field theory, complex deformation theory and differential topology of fixed point sets. All proposed projects are intended to address issues relevant to current physcial or mathematical issues. The PI s projects will address a type of geometry less known to mathematicians than to physicists. The results will increase mathematicians knowledge on Hermitian geometry and directly addresses issues to theoretical physcists concerns. The senior participant s project addresses a long- standing conjecture in the field of holonomy. The central tool in this project is a novel differntial topological mechinary for studying fixed point sets with respect to group actions. The investigators joint project will combine their expertise to extract topological information on a class ofspace central in algebraic geometry doc19839 none Adamchik, Victor Carnegie Mellon U Great progress has been made in recent years in the construction of software for numeric and symbolic computation of transcendental functions. The algorithms have been implemented in the most widely used symbolic algebra systems such as Maple and Mathemat-ica. Recently, the National Institute of Standards and Technology started a project of creating the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions (http: dlmf.nist.gov ). The goal of the project is to collect all recent scientific results regarding theory and computational algorithms of the well-known special functions and make them available to the public in electronic form. How-ever, enormous gaps remain for new transcendental functions. One of such functions is the multiple gamma (also called Barnes) Gn-function. The Gn function, defined by a recurrence-functional equation as a generalization of the Euler gamma function, was originally intro-duced (but in different forms) by Kinkelin, Glaisher, and Barnes around . Today, due to the pioneer work of Peter Sarnak of Princeton University, the interest to the Barnes function is revived. Sarnak has been pushing the idea that zeros of certain zeta functions (L-functions) can be understood in terms of the distribution of eigenvalues from classes of random matrices. It has been conjectured that the limiting distribution of the non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function is the same as that of the eigenphases of matrices in the CUE (the circulat uni-tary ensemble) It has been shown in works by Mehta, Sarnak, Conrey, Keating, Snaith that the Barnes function naturally appeares there as a closed representation for statistical averages over CUE of N x N unitary matrices (as well as some other classical compact groups), when doc19840 none This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) provides funds for an examination of fluorescence as a means for identification of bacteria on solid surfaces. A number of constituents common to all organisms, including several amino acids and vitamins, fluoresce in response to ultraviolet or visible light. Because the amount, duration and wavelength of such florescence should vary with the exact composition of each organism, measurement of florescence could provide a means to identify bacteria in the presence of other materials and distinguish one type of bacteria from another. Using a synchrotron light source for irradiation of bacteria at well-defined wavelengths between 170 and 700 nm., the peak wavelength and time-decay of fluorescence by several, non-pathogenic species of Bacillus and other bacteria will be determined and then compared to the fluorescence of other particulate materials including plant pollen and clay. The goal is to investigate the potential utility of fluorescence as the basis for a device to detect bacteria on the surface of envelopes and other objects doc19841 none Logistical Networking promotes an innovative model of network storage that views data transmission and storage as part of a unified framework, just as military or industrial logistics view transportation lines and storage depots as coordinate elements of a single infrastructure. Under the Logistical Computing and Internetworking (LoCI) project, we have created and implemented a primitive abstraction of network storage, called the Internet Backplane Protocol (IBP) [43], as the lowest network layer in a storage stack for Logistical Networking. The goal of the proposed research is to test this hypothesis by creating a Logistical Runtime System (LoRS) designed to support advanced applications on a well-provisioned network of IBP-based storage, and then exploring its value and performance along several dimensions using real-world Grid applications doc19842 none Nonregular designs, such as Plackett-Burman designs and many other orthogonal arrays, are widely used in practice due to their run size economy and flexibility. However, many commonly used nonregular designs are not optimal. Unlike regular designs, which have been studied thoroughly in recent years, theory and construction of nonregular designs are still very primitive and urgently needed. The objectives of this proposed research are to classify and construct optimal nonregular designs. In the classification part, general frameworks and novel approaches are proposed for investigating the following important issues: estimation capacity, design efficiency, projection properties, and aliasing structure. In the construction part, novel methods and algorithms are proposed for constructing optimal nonregular designs for a wide variety of situations, including supersaturated designs and block designs. Coding theory will be employed to develop general results for multi-level and mixed-level nonregular designs. Experimental design is an effective and commonly used tool in scientific investigation. Over the last century, it has made tremendous impact in many areas of research, including agriculture, biology, manufacturing and high-tech industries, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. While most of the existing research has concentrated on the study of regular designs, this proposed research focuses on the study of nonregular designs. Nonregular designs are widely used in practice due to their run size economy and flexibility, for example, Taguchi designs for process improvement and quality control. However, it is important to note that many commonly used nonregular designs are not optimal. Unlike regular designs, which have been studied thoroughly in recent years, theory and construction of nonregular designs are still very primitive and urgently needed. The objectives of this proposed research are to classify and construct optimal nonregular designs. This proposal emphasizes an important interdisciplinary connection between error-correcting codes and factorial designs. The proposed work will develop fundamental results for nonregular designs, and will lead to remarkable new advances in design theory and better practice in experimentation doc19843 none The focus of this proposal is on extremely high performance (very high speed, but also energy efficient) digital IC design. The proposed research has three tasks: 1) high performance digital logic techniques, 2) CAD tool development to aid rapid deployment of the high performance logic techniques, and 3) applications of the high performance logic techniques; in particular, the design of circuit blocks that demonstrate unprecedented speed, while still having reasonable energy efficiency Task 1: Research on High Performance Digital Logic Techniques: Focus is on maximizing the performance of the output prediction logic (OPL) technique, and developing yet faster and or more energy efficient logic techniques. Task 2: CAD for Rapid Implementation of High Performance Digital Logic: Techniques Two CAD tools will be developed to ease design and verification of OPL circuits under this proposal: 1) A static timing analysis tool for OPL circuits, and 2) an automatic transistor gate sizing tool for OPL circuits that minimizes energy consumption subject to delay goals. Also a powerful convex-optimization-based tool for automatic transistor and gate sizing for OPL circuits is being investigated. The tool will minimize energy consumption while achieving a specified delay target. Task 3: Research on Applications of High Performance Digital Logic Techniques: Applications include: 1) a new 64b adder architecture having a simulated worst-case delay (under severe process, voltage and temperature variations) of 3.3 fanout-of-four inverter delays. 2) a very fast floating-point divider with the possibility of a latency of 6ns for a 0.20-micron TSMC process. This divider will run at a frequency of at least 3 GHz in this 0.20-micron process, enabling the use of division for the very first time in signal processing and communications circuits. 3) a new FPGA architecture, called OPL-FPGA, which suggests an FPGA could approach the circuit speeds obtained by standard cell ASICs. Mapping common datapath circuits to this architecture further suggests that speedups of at least 3.3X over state-of-the-art commercial FPGAs are attainable doc19844 none Griffeath Griffeath will continue his ongoing research program, focusing initially on theorems for the Traffic Cellular Automaton (TCA), and on rigorous derivation of asymptotic densities for von Koch two-dimensional solidification rules. Foundations of the traffic project are described in a recent paper, joint with Lawrence Gray of the University of Minnesota, in the Journal of Statistical Physics. Motivated by empirical work of Kai Nagel and others, the authors give convincing evidence that the TCA exhibits several phase transitions as the density of cars increases, and for a certain range of densities clusters into a mixture of two self-organized extreme ergodic states called free flow and synchronized jam. The research program will further analyze this model, intended to establish the new phenomenon of conservative clustering, and also to shed light on the underlying mechanism. In a separate project, Griffeath will study Von Koch crystals, very simple deterministic nearest-neighbor Cellular Automaton growth rules on the two-dimensional integer lattice, many of which are exactly solvable but aperiodic. A novel computational machinery will be developed in order to rigorously describe the self-organized, often fractal structure of these crystals by means of a generalized formal language, interactive visualization, nonlinear recursion, and computer-aided proof. The research of David Griffeath combines mathematical analysis and computer visualization in the study of complex spatial systems. Over his career, the investigator has exploited this interplay for the theoretical and empirical study of a wide variety of dynamics which serve as prototypes for phenomena across the sciences: spiral formation in excitable media, crystal growth, and various other nonlinear processes such as nucleation, flocking, host-parasite interactions, dendritic growth, phase separation by surface tension, ecological competition, and growth of biofilms. Griffeath is currently launching a major study of Traffic Cellular Automata models which emulate the emergence of traffic jams. Most of the initial effort on this project has been simulation-based. Now that effective software tools have been developed for visualization and quantitative measurement of these subtle, self-organizing systems, Griffeath intends to derive a mathematically rigorous theory of the observed doc19845 none Developing a Resource-Aware Adaptive Compilation System for High-Performance Distributed Computing The goal of our work is to combine successful Grid infrastructure with novel program compilation and optimization techniques to support portable and high-performance distributed computing. We plan to develop adaptive compilation and runtime techniques that are guided by the dynamic performance characteristics of underlying Grid resources. To investigate these techniques, we will use language environments that come from Internet computing (Java and .Net) as development vehicles. The framework we propose, a Resource-Aware Adaptive Compilation System, makes resource performance and availability predictions, e.g. for networks, CPUs, memory, disk, etc., available to a dynamic compilation system so that programs compiled just-in-time achieve minimum overall execution time adaptively. That is, we will adapt the level of program optimization (and subsequent execution time tradeoff) dynamically, based on the instantaneous performance profile of the Grid resources at hand. To address this problem of achieving portable high-performance using the Grid, we propose to investigate adaptive program compilation and on-the-fly optimization of high-performance distributed applications using Computational Grid resources. We will guide runtime and compiler optimization using predicted resource performance (generated by the Network Weather Service) and re-optimize code to adapt to changes doc19846 none Theoretical and computer simulation studies of effective interactions and thermodynamic phase behavior in macromolecular materials will be undertaken. Three classes of system will be investigated: charge-stabilized colloidal suspensions, polyelectrolyte solutions, and colloid-polymer mixtures. The main objectives are to characterize effective interactions between macromolecules in solution and to input these interactions into statistical mechanical theories and computer simulations to predict thermodynamic behavior. The project will benefit the new Computational Physics program at North Dakota State University doc19847 none PI Herbig The project has two goals: (1) To investigate at high resolution the spectra of the so-called Herbig Ae Be stars, believed to be intermediate-mass analogs of the young stellar objects known as T Tauri stars, by concentrating on those of known age and luminosity because the are members of five well-investigated young star clusters; and (2) to extend the spectroscopy of several FU Orionis-like eruptive variable stars in order to clarify a number of possibly critical conflicts with the standard interpretation of the so-called Fuor phenomenon in this class of star. The FU Orionis stars are pre-main sequence stars that have brightened significantly sometimes on short time scales and are not well understood doc19848 none Phillip M. Dickens Illinois Institute of Technology End-to-End Performance Modeling of Applications Executing in the Internet2 Domain The objective of this research project is to advance the state-of-the-art in modeling and simulation to the point that the Internet2 network infrastructure and protocols, the high-performance applications that are and will be developed within this environment, and the interactions between these individual components can be studied, Analyzed, and predicted. This project will provide significant support to both systems engineers, and application developers and users. From a systems point of view, it will provide and environment in which new and existing networking hardware and software can be tested and studied as a function of expected (and observed) application types and loads on the system. From the point of view of an application, this research will support its performance and scalability analysis as a function of its execution environment doc19849 none There are three outstanding problems in our pursuit of a fundamental understanding of detonation dynamics, all of which are important in an engineering tool, such as those above, that utilizes detonations. These concern the propagation and stability of curved detonations with realistic reaction kinetics; the problem of how a deflagration (flame) undergoes a transition to detonation (DDT) and the mechanisms which cause a detonation to ignite or fail (criticality). One of primary goals of this project is to obtain intrinsic surface propagation laws for both steady and unsteady curved detonation waves that are governing by several forms of realistic, but fundamental, reaction kinetics. Also, one of the most important concerns in engineering applications has to do both with the successful initiation of detonation and preventing premature failure. Mathematical investigations of these events will be conducted, including research on a new mode of detonation propagation that must be accounted for in failure problems, namely the edge-detonation. Subscale mathematical modeling will be used, applying rational asymptotic perturbation methods to derive, for example, intrinsic surface propagation laws for the motion of the detonation wave in a given system. The aim of this project is to further our understanding of the basic mathematical physics of detonations in explosive systems ranging in size from micro-detonic applications to the collapse of stars (supernova). Traditional applications of detonation theory have focused on important issues such as safety, to defense and mining related uses. In recent years, there has been substantial interest in modern high-tech engineering applications ranging from hardening, forming and welding of metals, to precision cutting devices and thin-film manufacturing doc19850 none s that enable concurrent exploration. The DRE applications to be explored in this work are representative of a range of real world distributed computing scenarios form Grids to microelectronic systems-on-chip (SOCs). SOC-based computing resources incorporating diverse sensing and substantial processing capabilities are useful in many DRE application domains, such as avionics, biomedical computing resources and tele-medicine, remote sensing, space exploration, and command and control systems. Examples of domains that could benefit from these advances include: automated transportation systems distance learning, tele-medicine, analysis for combat situations, video conferencing, virtual reality simulation, and weather forecasting and analyses. The core of our proposal focuses on coordinated compile-time and runtime strategies that enable simultaneous and integrated optimization of (1) DRE application and middleware software and (2) the underlying hardware platform consisting of distributed high-performance processing elements and customized memory systems doc19851 none PI: Jerry Friedman This proposal seeks support for research in predictive and descriptive data mining (DM). Decision tree methods are the most popular predictive DM tools. Research under this grant will investigate ways to overcome their most serious limitation: severe over fitting in the presence of categorical (factorial) predictor variables with very large numbers of values (factors). Cluster analysis is often used as a tool in descriptive DM. In most DM applications a large number of variables are measured on each observation. Usually clustering, if it exists, occurs only within (often small) unknown subsets of all the measured variables. Moreover, individual clusters may represent groupings on (possibly overlapping) variable subsets. The goal is to identify the clustered groups as well as the particular variable subsets on which each one preferentially clusters. Traditional clustering algorithms are not well suited for this task. Research under this grant will investigate new approaches for solving this problem, especially in situations where there are a very large number of measured variables. Data mining is used to discover patterns and relationships in data, with an emphasis on very large data bases. It has had a major impact in business, industry, science, medicine, and most recently homeland security. Data mining activities divide into two types: predictive and descriptive. Predictive DM involves using past observational data from a system to build a mathematical model of that system. The model is used to predict some future unknown property (attribute or variable) of the system, given other properties that will be known in the future. Descriptive DM seeks to construct compact, interpretable summaries of the data in order to understand patterns and relationships, without focusing on the prediction of particular attributes. This research will investigate new methodologies for increasing the power of both descriptive and predictive DM in problems for which they have been traditionally weak doc19852 none Ward This is a collaborative research project between Dr. James R. Ward of University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Dr. Raul Manasevich and Marta Garcia-Huidobro of Universidad de Chile and Pontifica Universidad Catolica de Chile respectively. The investigators intend to work on the mathematical analysis of boundary value problems for partial differential equations. These problems appear in modeling both slow and fast diffusion, and are useful in the study of populations and diseases, porous media, and problems that are inherently nonlinear. The investigators will use topological tools, such as degree and homotopy indexes, that are useful indicators of system behavior. Each side brings their own strengths to the collaboration: Drs. Garcia-Huidobro and Manasevich have extensive experience in quasilinear differential equations and bifurcations, while Dr. Ward has worked at length with the topological tools to be used in their joint effort doc19853 none Khapalov In the modeling of controlled distributed parameter systems additive boundary and internal locally distributed controls are typically used. (Examples of such controls can be a source in a heat mass-transfer process or a piezoceramic actuator placed on a beam.) In terms of applications it appears that such controls can adequately model only those controlled processes that do not change their principal physical characteristics due to the control actions. They rather describe the effect of various externally added alien sources and or forces on the process at hand. This limitation, however, excludes a vast array of new and not quite new technologies, such as, for example, smart materials and numerous biomedical, chemical and nuclear chain reactions, which are able to change their principal parameters under certain purposefully induced conditions ( catalysts ). The intent of this proposal is to address the just-outlined issues in the context of global controllability of semilinear partial differential equations (PDEs) through the introduction and study of multiplicative (or bilinear ) controls. These controls enter the system equations as coefficients. Accordingly they can change at least some of the principal parameters of the process at hand, such as, for example, the natural frequency response of a beam or the rate of a chemical reaction. (In the former case this can be caused, e.g., by the embedded smart alloys and, in the latter case, by various catalysts and or by the speed at which the reaction ingredients are mechanically mixed.) The focus of this proposal is on the development of a new methodology for the study of global controllability of the semilinear reaction-diffusion-convection equation and of the wave and beam equations in the framework of bilinear controls. We are particularly interested in the effect such multiplicative controls may have on the issue of controllability of highly nonlinear PDEs, in which case the classical additive controls often appear to be inadequate doc19854 none Mary Hall University of Southern California Resource-Aware Off-line and On-line Empirical Optimization The research we propose herein explores a new paradigm that fundamentally restructures the compilation process to enable resource-aware optimization. We will demonstrate how this system can alleviate some of the problems that lead to inefficiencies in big science and engineering codes today: register pressure, cache conflict misses, the trade-off between synchronization, parallelism and locality in SMPs, and process migration in computational grids. There are three essential components of this research program: Compiler-directed off-line empirical optimization; Dynamic feedback, for user-and compiler-directed on-line optimization; and Experience base to guide optimization from history: The results of experiments from both off-line and on-line empirical optimization will be maintained in an experience base, which can be used to generalize prior optimization results and plan a future optimization strategy doc19855 none Ronald Stern For the last 25 years it has been the goal of exciting and deep mathematics to classify smooth 4-dimensional manifolds. An arsenal of techniques has been thrown at this problem; it is the focus of dozens of research groups. The most successful attempts have associated to each 4-dimensional manifold the solution space to complex systems of equations that arise in particle physics: the Yang-Mills equations and the monopole equations of Seiberg and Witten. These solution spaces are useful in distinguishing cunningly constructed 4-dimensional manifolds. The result of this assault is that 4-dimensional manifolds are more complicated than we ever expected. As a result, it is impossible to predict a classification scheme. It is the goal of this project to more systematically approach the existence and uniqueness framework for a classification scheme. The first goal is to understand why smooth structures on 4-manifolds are sensitive to local topological change. This project describes the underpinnings of how the smooth structures change in the known constructions. Log transformations on null-homologous tori are shown to play a significant role. The first step is to determine if two smooth structures on a fixed homeomorphism type of simply-connected smooth 4-manifold are related by a sequence of log transformations on null-homologous tori. The second step is to determine the characteristic numbers of irreducible smooth 4-manifolds and to determine how these topological invariants affect their Seiberg-Witten invariants. A notion of general-type smooth 4-manifolds is given and a conjectured restriction on their Seiberg-Witten invariants is proposed. This project outlines new constructions that show that there are general-type manifolds that fill out the regions determined by these restrictions. Careful investigation of these constructions should indicate why they are best possible. Other questions related to potential restrictions on the characteristic classes of irreducible simply-connected smooth 4-manifolds will be investigated. Excitement has been generated by the idea that the puniest of all forces, gravity, may in fact be a strong as nature s other three fundamental forces: the strong force which binds protons and neutrons together in atomic nuclei; the weak force which governs radioactive decay; and the forces that govern electricity and magnetism. The perceived mismatch between these three forces and gravity creates a theoretical nightmare; it s the principle reason we have yet to find a grand unified theory. However, it has recently been hypothesized that this weakness is a mirage; the force of gravity only appears weak because its force is diluted in our own universe and most of gravity s force radiates out into extra dimensions. All other forces remain trapped in our 3-dimensional world, while gravity is free to roam other dimensions. With this hypothesis, there could be other worlds that are parallel to our own; they all neatly stack up, each oblivious of the other, with gravity the only force that moves between them. This would also account for the missing dark matter of our universe; it actually resides in other parallel universes. New mathematics will be generated in this project to further explore these ideas. Much of the relevant mathematics has already exposed the special nature of dimensions three and four. These parallel universes may be explained by the theory of (singular) foliations. The proposed study of singular foliations may structure the way in which we view our own universe -how we stack up with possible parallel universes. These singular foliations will also provide new insight into the classification of 4- dimensional manifolds. At bottom, the goal of this project is to develop more systematic constructions of smooth 4-dimensional manifolds with the hope that a general picture begins to emerge that will at least suggest a classification scheme doc19856 none PI: Siu, Yum-Tong Proposal: Institution: American Institute of Mathematics A conference at Princeton University will be held in September to study geometric applications of D-bar estimates which have appeared in the past decade. The conference will bring together researchers in D-bar estimates and mathematicians in related fields to survey the techniques and problems of D-bar estimates and their geometric applications. One special feature of the conference is an emphasis on the participation of young and women mathematicians. Moreover, for the benefit of young researchers (and mathematicians in other fields) interested in learning to get into the topics of the conference, a formal session of open problems is planned for the conference and, after the conference, a website will be put together and maintained under the umbrella website of the American Institute of Mathematics (http: www.aimath.org doc19857 none level. A direct educational impact of the proposed activity will be the introduction of new curriculum in academia, to impart knowledge on algorithm design aspects for dynamic system architectures. This will include initiating new course-work along with traditional courses offered on analysis of algorithms and architectures. One of the broader impacts we foresee is the preparation of future Grid GiBs SoC PCA application developers doc19858 none Integrating Software Architecture and Software Development Craig Chambers The goal of the research is to extend the benefits of software architecture from design into later stages of the software lifecycle by ensuring a rigorous connection between architecture and implementation code. Existing architecture description languages are not tightly coupled to implementation languages in a way that ensures that the implementation code conforms to the architectural specification. To overcome this limitation, this project is developing ArchJava, a simple extension to Java that allows programmers to express software architecture within their implementation. The language is flexible, supporting dynamically changing software architectures as well as common object-oriented implementation idioms, but it also rigorously guarantees that the program semantics conform to the constraints in the architectural specification. A system s design can be expressed in ArchJava before any implementation exists; this design can then be fleshed out incrementally into a complete implementation. At all times, conformance between the architecture and the (partial) implementation can be mechanically verified. By extending the benefits of software architecture throughout the software lifecycle and by allowing developers to trust the accuracy of the architecture, this work has the potential to make software architecture a much more effective and commonly used tool doc19859 none Scalable Distributed Real-Time Simulation of Embedded Systems and Environments Kane Kim University of California -Irvine Major improvements in the validation technology for embedded systems are under increasing demands from industry. Not only description but also simulation of non-computer parts and application environments of embedded systems is needed in validating many embedded system software designs and implementations. Here the desired types of simulators are real-time (RT) simulators which exhibit the timing behavior that are the same as or sufficiently close to the timing behavior of the simulation targets. Such simulators can enable highly cost-effective testing of the embedded system software and such testing can be a lot cheaper that the testing performed in actual application environments while being much more effective than the testing based on non-RT simulators of environments. In this research, the joint university-industry research team intends to establish the scientific foundation for the DTS scheme in a sound form, thereby realizing fundamental advances in the state of the art in RT simulation. Development of support middleware and other tool prototypes is planned. Successful accomplishment of these will mean that the validation technology for embedded systems will be advanced in fundamental ways. Case studies for evaluating the improvements in simulation performance and validation effectiveness realized by use of the DTS scheme in practical contexts will be conducted with the assistance of industry partners. Advanced instrumentation and performance measurement technologies and graphic interface technologies developed by international collaborations partners will also be incorporated and integrated with the DTS scheme. More specifically, the proposing team intends to establish: (1) Scientific foundation for DTS, including that related to consistency among distributed simulator nodes and maximization of concurrency, (2) Middleware and application programming interfaces that support DTS and simulator programming, (3) A methodology for validation of RT object-structured distributed software for embedded systems, which is centered around the use of RT simulators of the non-computer parts and environments and additionally uses performance measurement and graphic visualization tools, and (4) Case studies involving an RT simulation of immune buildings designed to protect inhabitants against bio-weapon attacks and that of miliary command-control environments doc19860 none This individual investigator award supports a project that will use Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) techniques to investigate the behavior of hydrogen in three different materials: lanthanum and yttrium hydrides, fullerenes, and quasicrystals. Thin films of lanthanum and yttrium hydrides switch from a reflecting state at low hydrogen concentrations to a transparent state at high concentrations. This switchable mirror behavior is due to a metal-to-non-metal transition, but a detailed understanding of this transition is still lacking. NMR will be used to characterize the crucial structural and electronic phenomena underlying the optical transition. Carbon-based materials are attractive candidates for new hydrogen storage media, and recent attention has focused on the use of carbon nanotubes. Difficulties in nanotube sample preparation and analysis have hampered progress in measuring crucial properties, including the hydrogen transport rate. The rate of hydrogen transport in solid fullerene, as a first step towards understanding the more complicated nanotube materials, will be studied using NMR techniques. Quasicrystals are solids with aperiodic yet highly ordered structures and remarkable electronic properties. Calculations showing fine structure in the electronic density of states may explain these properties; however, the experimental evidence remains controversial. NMR relaxation measurements combined with control of the hydrogen content of a titanium-based quasicrystal will be used to test for the existence of the fine structure. All of this work will be carried out at a liberal arts college using undergraduate research assistants, who will gain valuable experience as they prepare for and pursue careers in physics and related fields. %%% Hydrogen is absorbed by a surprising array of solids, often yielding materials with significant technological importance. This individual investigator award will support a project at a predominately undergraduate institution that utilizes Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) to study the behavior of hydrogen in three different materials: solid C60, rare earth switchable mirrors, and titanium-based quasicrystals. NMR measurements of the motion of hydrogen in C60 will serve as the first step in understanding hydrogen motion in more complicated derivatives of C60, such as carbon nanotubes. Carbon nanotubes are attractive candidates for next generation hydrogen storage media, crucial for the development of clean-burning hydrogen as a viable fuel. Switchable mirrors are thin films that change from reflecting to transparent depending on the hydrogen content. NMR measurements of their structure and electronic properties will yield a better fundamental understanding of the switching phenomenon. This understanding will aid the development of useful devices, such as switches for optical fiber networks. Quasicrystals are solids with unusual atomic structures that have a number of novel electronic properties. NMR measurements of the electronic properties combined with careful control of the hydrogen content of a quasicrystal will be used to test some of the more controversial theoretical explanations of the unusual properties. All of this work will be carried out at a liberal arts college using undergraduate research assistants, who will gain valuable experience as they prepare for and pursue careers in physics and related fields doc19861 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Inferring evolutionary importance of genes from the shapes of multi-species gene genealogies. It is predicted that loci causally involved in divergences of incipient species have gene trees that are monophyletic within species and concordant with species phylogenies. This research develops coalescent-based probabilistic models to describe shapes of multi-species gene genealogies. These models are being applied to genomic sequence data to identify loci potentially involved in species divergences doc19862 none In this project functional analysis will be used to understand how the shapes of systems are connected with energy levels, whether arising as eigenvalues of linear equations, such as the Schroedinger equation which describes quantum mechanical particles, or arising from nonlinear equations like those describing carrier transport in semiconductors. Small parameters are often present, whether Planck s constant or a physical dimension, and careful asymptotics are required in order to elucidate the role of the geometry of a domain. It is intended to seek useful estimates of energies and other physical quantities in terms of curvature, and to determine the shapes and geometric properties that optimize those quantities. This rigorous mathematical research will contribute to nanotechnology and quantum mechanics. Laboratories are beginning to produce very small-scale electrical devices, including quantum wires and quantum waveguides. The properties of these devices, such as conductivity and energy levels, are sensitive to their shape and configuration. This project will make these effects quantitative and help guide the design of devices. The work also has implications for other quite diverse phenomena described by similar equations. These include practical applications to the seepage of fluids and the stability of bulk matter, as well as purely mathematical applications to geometry doc19863 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled How much influence do the collateral effects of selection have on natural levels of genetic variation? Genetic variance among populations, FST, is being measured at multiple mapped loci from specific linkage groups in Silene latifolia. The relationship between FST-values and genetic map distance is used to estimate the differential effects of selection across the genome, elucidating the overall effect of selection on population genetic structure doc19864 none Teasdale The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Rachel Teasdale to work with Dr. Steve Sparks at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. The purpose of this project is to quantify the crystallinities of basaltic lava flows to increase understanding the conditions that occur prior to eruption and during transport. The PI will measure crystallinities from magmas with high volatile content from non-gassed submarine lava flows and experimentally produced lavas at variable volatile content; combine crystallinity data collected from degassing experiments with crystallinities that develop in the open flow channel at atmosphere pressure cooling experiments and she will develop an analog flow model for morphology-crystallinity behavior. This project, with its modeling and observations to determine the characteristics of lava flow behavior, will have an impact on public safety issues. Dr. Sparks is a leader in the study of volcanic flows and has expertise in the area of crystallization of lava flows doc19865 none PI: Richert, Ranko In this project, funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Richert will perform research using triplet state solvation dynamics to study relaxation and dynamical heterogeneity in glass-forming liquids. Experiments will be performed on probe rotation, polarization-angle-dependent detection of the solvation time correlation function, and heterogeneity on the microsecond to nanosecond time scales. A new technique developed by Richert allows the first simultaneous measurement of probe rotational dynamics and solvation dynamics. This project deals with the important topic of how supercooled liquids make a transition to the solid state of aggregation. Many previous experiments have pointed to the existence of heterogeneous regions in the otherwise homogeneous liquid, with the heterogeneous regions exhibiting different dynamical behaviors from the homogeneous ones. The principal investigator has invented a unique technique by means of which the properties of the heterogeneous regions can be obtained separately from the homogeneous ones in a single experiment. Great advances in the understanding of the liquid to glass transition are expected to result from this research, with potential applications to polymer science and plastic crystals. Students will participate in this research doc19866 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Modeling the dynamics of mechanoreception in fish. Fish can perceive mechanical vibrations even when water flows over the body during swimming. Both the swimming motion and mechanical stimuli generate forces on mechanosensory structures on the surface of the body. By integrating experimental and computational approaches, this work examines how these forces vary with stimuli and with the swimming motion doc19867 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled The effect of winter variability on biodiversity and community dynamics: analysis of long-term lake data. Strong contrast between winter and summer abiotic conditions annually provides distinctly different habitat within one location, promoting biodiversity. To determine effects of reducing this environmental heterogeneity, this research uses multispecies autoregressive analysis (MARs) to analyze complex seasonal community transitions, discerning biotic pathways through which winter conditions affect both summer and winter communities doc19868 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Computer simulation of lipid bilayer permeation. Phospholipid bilayer membranes regulate the transport of molecules into and out of the cell. Though most transport is assisted by channels or membrane proteins, passive transport directly through the bilayer does occur. A molecular-level understanding of membrane permeation can shed light on the blood-brain barrier, the mechanisms of anesthesia, and basic processes such as osmosis and the diffusion of oxygen and carbon dioxide. It may also assist in predicting the bioavailability of orally-administered drugs. The proposed research is the computer simulation of the permeation of small molecules through lipid bilayer membranes using recent algorithms developed for long-time molecular dynamics simulations doc19869 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Using Spatial and Species Explicit Forest Dynamics Models to Optimize Biodiversity Conservation in a Managed Landscape. Managing biodiversity in tropical forests requires solving an optimization problem that simultaneously maximizes biodiversity and timber value over time. This optimization problem is being solved through the development of sample based biodiversity indices, the development of spatial and species explicit forest dynamics models, and the quantification of the opportunity costs of biodiversity protection doc19870 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Stability of Waves with Continuous Spectrum Oh Periodic waves and spiral waves arise in a rich variety of applied problems. Important examples include periodic wave patterns in models of media with multiple phases, for example van der Waals gas dynamics and elasticity, or three-phase flow in porous media. Planar spiral wave patterns occur in chemical reactions, such as the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, and in various biological and physical systems. There is a similarity between periodic waves and spiral waves, since the continuous spectrum associated with a periodic wave or a spiral wave touches the imaginary axis. The goal of this project is to investigate linear and nonlinear stability of such waves in not only the one-dimensional case but also multi-dimensional cases. Mathematical models of interest in physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering often have classes of special solutions that are particularly important for understanding behavior of the systems under study. This project analyzes two such important classes of solutions in models that involve partial differential equations: periodic waves and spiral waves. The goal is to provide rigorous mathematical analysis of the stability of these solutions. This qualitative information determines the suitability of the differential equations to model the physical phenomena under investigation doc19871 none The goal of this research is to develop system-on-a-chip (SOC) test resource partitioning techniques based on test data compression. Topics being investigated under this grant include: (i) data compression codes; (ii) efficient on-chip decompression architectures; (iii) low-power scan testing. This project is expected to lead to a unified framework to reduce SOC test data volume, testing time, and test power doc19872 none Several lines of evidence suggest that there exists a strong analogy between natural languages and biological sequences, i.e. there appear to be organism-specific words, phrases and paragraphs in the collective of proteins encoded by the genomes of fully sequenced organisms. It is proposed that the biological analogy of meaning in a natural text is the ability of a protein sequence to fold into its functional three-dimensional fold. In natural languages, frequent words carry little meaning, while rare words often allow identification of the topic of a particular text. The hypothesis predicts, therefore, that rare stretches of amino acids indicate the location of folding initiators. The distribution of global properties along the sequence of lysozyme, a model protein for protein folding studies, indicated that features in these properties can be recognized when inverse frequencies of amino acid n-grams were plotted, supporting the analogy to natural languages. In the next 12 months the focus will be on studying the distribution of rare n-grams in the human genome. If a correlation between folding domains and distribution of rare n-grams can be established, this would (i) provide compelling support for the hypothesis and (ii) shed light on one of the major unsolved questions in biology today, the mechanism by which functional three-dimensional structures are formed from a one-dimensional sequence of amino acids doc19873 none Proposal Number: PI: Kuperbeg Research will be conducted on continuous dynamical systems on manifolds of dimension three and higher, with emphasis on compact invariant subsets on which the flow is minimal. Continuing the work related to the real analytic solution to the Seifert conjecture on aperiodic flows acting on the three-dimensional sphere, the PI plans to classify the minimal sets in such flows with respect to their homological and shape theory properties. Minimal sets shape-equivalent (in the sense of Borsuk) to a polyhedron often appear in flows as attractors, and are of special interest. Minimal sets of non-polyhedral shape are usually approximated by circular orbits or by other movable sets with the so called UV-property. They have very complicated dynamics around them, which can be investigated through the structure of the family of the approximating invariant sets. Circular orbits are extremely important in celestial mechanics as they appear as paths of movement. Smaller particles, dust, can align along a braided orbit, and in the continuous case, in a mathematical model, this orbit could be an invariant set, aperiodic but circle-like , or graph-like such as the well-known Denjoy continua. A volume-preserving dynamical system, associated with incompressible fluids, imposes restrictions on the flow outside the special invariant collection and is an important area of study as well. The theory of dynamical systems was developed in an effort to provide a mathematically rigorous description of real physical phenomena. It is therefore closely connected to many domains of science: mechanics, various areas of physics, biology, and economics. Dynamical systems connect several branches of mathematics such as analysis, topology, geometry, algebra, and combinatorics doc19874 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Recovering the influences of environmental change on vertebrate faunas using a morphological phylogeographic analysis of recent and fossil erycine snakes. Morphometric analysis and robust statistics are being used to determine phylogeographic responses of recent and fossil erycine snake faunas to environmental transitions. This research examines the systematic levels at which fossils can be recognized by osteological variability, how reptiles respond to environmental changes through time, and the extent that fossils can predict faunal responses to anthropogenic environmental modifications doc19875 none Gilbert Stewart University of Maryland College Park Krylov sequence methods are widely used in the solution of large eigenproblems (e.g., the Lanczos and Arnoldi methods) and the solution of large linear systems (e.g., the conjugate gradient method and GMRES). In their ordinary applications these methods are well understood and have a firm theoretical basis. In more exotic applications, however, the theory and practice are not as advanced. This proposal in concerned with three of these applications. Residual Krylov methods. The property of being a Krylov sequence is very sensitive to error. A single error toward the beginning of the sequence causes permanent loss of accuracy in the approximations to eigenvectors in the Krylov subspace. This has the consequence that when shift-and-invert techniques are used to enhance the spectrum of a matrix, the resulting linear systems must be solved to full accuracy at each step of the process. It turns out, however, that if the sequence is extended using the residual for a targeted eigenvector, the sequence converges to that vector even when the shift-and- invert equations are solved inaccurately. The practical consequences of this observation, which needs new theory to support it, promises to be great doc19876 none This research addresses the creation of efficient algorithms for incrementally re-placing and re-routing small portions of a VLSI circuit to correct problems such as signal integrity, speed and high heat density that have been discovered therein via simulation. The challenge is to quickly re-layout only the affected portion of the circuit, while minimizing any layout changes of the much larger unaffected part of the circuit in order to capitalize on the enormous resources and time already spent on the physical design of the chip, to retain the already optimized features of the design, and to meet time-to-market requirements. Algorithms for both regular VLSI chips and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are being addressed in this project. For the incremental placement problem, a min-cost network-flow based algorithm is being investigated using both deterministic and probabilistic edge costs. In the incremental routing realm, the following areas are being researched: (a) Algorithms for constraint-driven bump-and-refit (this allows exploration of solution spaces with different sets of constraints like upper bounds on the increase in net lengths and or delays, on the number of vias, and on crosstalk coupling). (2) Performing incremental global and detailed routing in one consolidated framework in order to obtain better optimized routings. (3) Incremental Satisfiability (SAT) methods and their application to incremental routing. (4) Various additional issues and solution techniques needed for incremental routing of VLSI circuits doc19877 none Erlandson This grant continues the successful Design Projects activities supported by award in which students design and build custom projects for individual persons with disabilities. The objectives of the program are to enhance engineering education, provide students with insight into careers in rehabilitation, improve the quality of life of people with disabilities, and serve the community. The projects meet special needs of individual disabled persons not addressed by commercial devices. Students from four engineering disciplines participate in the Design Projects activity: Mechanical Engineering; Electrical and Computer Engineering; Industrial Engineering; Biomedical Engineering. (ETL) student project devices and systems are being used daily at schools and businesses throughout southeastern Michigan. ETL is part of a consortium of eight Regional Educational Service Agencies, representing eight counties in southeastern Michigan (termed Region IV) and the majority of ideas for student design projects come from teachers working at schools within that Region. Descriptions of completed design projects are found in the Annual Review of Design Projects at http: nsf-pad.bme.uconn.edu doc19878 none Alan Weinstein Recently, for reasons arising from mathematical physics (string and membrane theory) as well as from deformation theory, increased attention is being paid to nonassociative algebraic structures and, along with them, bracket operations which do not satisfy the Jacobi identity. Weinstein applies his previously developed theory of Courant algebroids and Dirac structures to investigate geometric models for some of these nonassociative structures, generalizing Poisson structures. A second part of the research concerns convexity theorems for momentum mappings of hamiltonian symmetry groups and related questions about the linearization of proper Lie groupoids. The search for the ``optimal convexity theorem in Poisson geometry is related to the problem of describing the local structure of proper groupoids in terms of group actions. The analysis of proper groupoids leads in turn to the problem of averaging families of submanifolds in riemannian geometry. Previous results on this problem are being extended and improved, with one goal being an understanding of the metric geometry of infinite dimensional spaces of unparametrized submanifolds. Finally, applications to mechanics are be investigated: groupoids applied to discretized lagrangian systems, and generalized Poisson structures applied to nonholonomic systems. Weinstein s research concerns symmetry in geometry, with applications to physics. Traditionally, symmetry has been described mathematically in terms of the operation of groups, and the corresponding infinitesimal operation of Lie algebras. Recently, for reasons arising from mathematical physics (string and membrane theory) as well as from deformation theory in mathematics, increased attention is being paid to more general notions of symmetry, involving algebraic structures lacking the associativity of a group operation and, along with them, bracket operations which do not satisfy the Jacobi identity essential to the notion of Lie algebra. The study of these (and more traditional) symmetries also involves the use of ``groupoids, where different groups are operating on different parts of a space with symmetry. Weinstein s study of these symmetries involves a combination of algebra and differential geometry, as well as some very concrete geometric questions, a simple form of which is ``what is the average of two nearby unparametrized curves in space? This question is easy to pose and may have applications in computer graphics, but it is surprisingly difficult to solve. Finally, Weinstein is using groupoids in the analysis of discrete lagrangian systems used to create numerical algorithms doc19879 none Magnetic semiconductors currently receive a great deal of attention because these materials are expected to revolutionize the computer and communication technologies. The new-generation electronics, usually referred to as spintronics , exploits not only the electronic charge, but also its spin - a feature not taken advantage of in the presently used semiconductor chips. A number of teams in the US, Japan and Europe are now competing to find the best ways of synthesizing new magnetic semiconductors suitable for building practical spintronics devices. Parallel to the ongoing efforts of material technologists, much effort is also needed from condensed matter physicists to characterize the magnetism and other related properties of the new emerging materials The scattering of neutrons and synchrotron radiation are two powerful experimental tools that allow one to obtain a detailed atomic-level insight into the magnetism of a condensed matter system. The aim of this project is to use these two techniques for investigating new spintronics materials, with particular emphasis on the physical mechanism underlying their magnetism. It should be stressed that the mechanism giving rise to semiconductor magnetism is not exactly the same as in most other known magnetic systems (e.g., iron), and not all details of that mechanism have yet been fully understood. The building blocks of future spintronics devices will be nanostructures such as superlattices - i.e., sandwiches made of alternating extremely thin layers of magnetic and non-magnetic semiconductors. One question concerning such sandwiches - very important from the viewpoint of designing spintronics devices - is how two magnetic layers communicate across the intervening non-magnetic spacer . Neutron and synchrotron radiation tools are particularly well suited for investigating these phenomena. Such studies are also an essential part of our project. Ferromagnetic semiconductors (FMSC) currently receive a great deal of attention because such materials are essential for developing spintronics - a new-generation electronics in which not only the current magnitude, but also its spin polarization can be controlled. The aim of this project is to exploit the potential of neutron and synchrotron radiation scattering techniques to shed light on several important issues concerning newly synthesized FMSC materials and their nanostructures. It should be stressed that FMSCs differ in many respects from conventional ferromagnetic materials, which are either metals or insulators. As in metals, the magnetism of certain novel FMSC systems (e.g., Ga(Mn)As) is induced by carriers - however, not by electrons, but by holes. Details of this new physical mechanism have yet to be understood. Inelastic neutron scattering tools may greatly help in such studies because they enable one to obtain very accurate values of the exchange parameters characterizing the interactions between magnetic ions. Another important issue is understanding the mechanism of exchange interaction transfer between FMSC layers separated by a non-magnetic spacer. Neutron and synchrotron radiation reflectometry are powerful tools for investigating such interactions. These techniques also enable one to study structural defects in the interface regions in heterostructures made of magnetic nonmagnetic semiconductors. Such defects may significantly influence the performance of future spintronics devices. Therefore, insight into this issue is of considerable importance doc19880 none Haesun Park University of Minnesota- Twin Cities Due to today s exponential growth of the internet and computing power, an information retrieval system is expected to handle a tremendous amount of data, and users demand more efficient techniques to obtain useful information from the flood of data. The goal of this proposed research is to find lower dimensional representations of text data in vector space based information retrieval. Dimension reduction is imperative for achieving high efficiency and effectiveness in manipulating the massive quantity of data in today s information retrieval system. A problem of fundamental importance here is to achieve better representation of the data with relatively severe dimension reduction, rather than simple dimension reduction through a lower rank approximation of a matrix. One difficulty is that it is not easy to measure by a theoretical formula how well a certain dimension reduction method provides a good representation of the original data, and it will be essential to conduct theoretical research in parallel with experimental study doc19881 none Hanson, Andrew Indiana U Bloomington Complex variables form the basis for virtually every aspect of modern science, and complex projective spaces are the home to the rich world of objects and structures that arise from com-plex variables. Yet attempts to depict geometric aspects of these spaces have been scarce due the prodigious difficulty of higher dimensional visualization and poor understanding of the wealth of relevant problems that touch on complex projective spaces. Modern computer technology provides a number of very significant new tools symbolic manipulation programs, numerical optimiza-tion programs, and interactive computer graphics visualizations that can provide powerful as-sistance for the human mathematical intellect. The benefits of exploiting these tools fall into two major categories: (i) lowering the bar, so to speak, so that a larger number of people, possibly even interested lay persons, can understand the significance and excitement of previously inacces-sible mathematical concepts; and (ii) raising the potential level of research attainment to allow the solution of problems that would be nearly impossible using conventional mathematical research methods doc19882 none Gene Cooperman Notrheastern U The proposed research is part of an ongoing project to provide the software infrastructure for large symbolic computations. It is proposed to employ the rich set of computational group theory algorithms, with which the P.I. is intimately familiar, as a testbed for analyzing the barriers to wider use of parallelism. In addition to the algorithmic difficulties of irregular computations that characterize much of symbolic computation, there are barriers based on limitations of RAM in today s hardware. These hardware barriers are demonstrably real. A random access to RAM can cost more than 1,000 CPU cycles on the most recent architectures. This affects symbolic algebra computations to a much greater extent than traditional numerical or commercial applications, which emphasize sequential access to RAM. Even some non-parallel applications in symbolic algebra are shown to be primarily memory-bound (bound by slowness of RAM), rather than CPU-bound, on current architectures. This requires a revised, non-uniform complexity model of RAM doc19883 none This project will combine summative and formative evaluation techniques to apply to completed Phase 1 and ongoing Phase 2 Model Institutions for Excellence awards. The evaluative study will interpret the quantitative and qualitative outcomes and the elements of the program that led to success or failure to accomplish the goals of the MIE program. The outcome of the study will be a document describing the successes and failures of the MIE projects, the factors that led to success and failure, and a summation of the MIE projects that can be used to guide other institutions in developing models to increase participation of under represented groups in SMET undergraduate and graduate programs. This research will be of value in determining how to assess and disseminate successful models that lead to institutional change in promoting the participation in SMET careers of under represented groups doc19884 none Pankaj Argarwal Duke University Collaborative Motion, like shape, is one of the fundamental modalities to be modeled in order to represent and manipulate the phys-ical world in a computer. As such, motion representations and the algorithms that operate on them are central to all computational disciplines dealing with physical objects: computer graphics, computer vision, robotics, etc. Mod-eling motion is also crucial for other disciplines dealing with temporally varying data, including mobile networks, temporal databases, etc. Motion algorithms require com-putational resources, and frequently sensing and commu-nication resources as well, in order to accomplish their task. Despite the prominent position that motion plays in so many computer disciplines, little has been done to date to provide a clean conceptual framework for representing motion, describing algorithms on moving objects, and an-alyzing their behavior and performance. It is the goal of this proposal to push the frontiers of the computer sci-ence representations and algorithms that deal with motion in its various manifestations. The aim is to create a firm algorithmic theory for the processes of acquiring, model-ing, reasoning about, planning, manipulating, or executing motion and their relevant complexity measures doc19885 none This project concerns the study of multi-frequency oscillations, including quasi-periodic, almost-periodic and almost-automorphic oscillations, in physical systems that are either regularly or singularly perturbed. Quasi-periodic oscillations will be studied mainly for Hamiltonian and generalized Hamiltonian systems originating in fluid mechanics, solid state physics and biology. Almost-periodic and almost-automorphic oscillations will be studied for quasi-periodically forced oscillatory systems and weakly coupled networks of quasi-periodic oscillators. The goal is to better understand the complicated dynamics resulting from the interaction of several frequencies and the intermittency phenomena that occur especially when the frequencies are close to resonance. For singularly perturbed oscillatory systems, the study of multi-frequency oscillations will focus on those of either relaxation or fast type, with particular attention to ecological, bio-medical and communication systems. The results of this project will have significant applications to the analysis, computation and design of certain biological, electrical and mechanical oscillators. This project is concerned with mathematical models of dynamics arising in biological, electrical and mechanical systems that present multi-phase oscillations. Multi-phase oscillations are universal phenomena in physical systems that involve a large number of degrees of freedom, multi-parameters, and many oscillating frequencies. Their study is of great importance for the understanding of complicated phenomena in nature, such as turbulence in fluids, noisy signals in telecommunication, transport of DNA chains, and transmission dynamics of infectious diseases. The results of this project will also have a large impact on practical engineering designs of mechanical and electrical systems and devices, in particular the identification of useful design parameters and the prediction of singular oscillatory behavior doc14850 none The Infinity Scholars program at Iowa Lakes Community College provides scholarship assistance to 32 academically talented, financially needy students enrolled full-time in computer science, computer technology, engineering and mathematics programs. The overarching goal of the program is to increase the number of talented, low-income students enrolled and retained in these degree programs enabling them to enter the high technology workforce. The program establishes and maintains an infrastructure of support services for Infinity Scholars that includes a one credit hour Infinity Scholars Course that concludes with the completion of a capstone project. The Infinity Scholars program focuses on delivering a menu of educational services and learning experiences that retain students and support a seamless transition to job placement upon degree attainment from the community college, or transfer of students to 4-year institutions doc19887 none Shelus The Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) experiment accurately measures the round-trip travel time for a laser pulse that is emitted from an observing station on the Earth and returns after bouncing off of a retroreflector array on the surface of the Moon. Such observations have been made at McDonald Observatory for more than 30 years. The data provide for varied, multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary science results in areas of solid Earth sciences, geodesy and geodynamics, solar system ephemerides, terrestrial and celestial reference frames, lunar physics, general relativity and gravitational physics. Standing alone or combined with data from other observing techniques, LLR expands the understanding of the precession of the Earth.s spin axis, the lunar nutation, Earth orientatation, the Earth.s obliquity to the ecliptic, the intersection of the celestial equator and the ecliptic, lunar and solar solid body tides, lunar tidal deceleration, lunar physical and free librations, the structure of the moon and energy dissipation in the lunar interior. LLR provides input into lunar surface cartography and surveying and helps determine Earth station and lunar surface retroreflector locations and motions, mass of the Earth-Moon system, lunar and terrestrial gravity harmonics and Love numbers, relativistic geodesic precession, and the equivalence principle of general relativity. Due to the passive nature of the reflectors and the improvement of observing equipment and data analysis capabilities with time, LLR data will continue to provide for improved results. Gains are steady and, as the data base expands, we are striving to learn even more by applying more clever observation strategies. Under this proposal, we continue the LLR observational effort at the McDonald Laser Ranging Station (MLRS). With routine single-person operation and a 24 hour day, 7 day week schedule, lunar coverage will be substantial in the years to come, as we share the use of the MLRS with artificial satellite laser ranging (SLR) efforts. We are cooperating with other observing efforts around the world, especially the French LLR SLR station in the south of France. In addition to the observations, an analysis effort with world-wide communication, cooperation, and coordination will be ongoing here at the University of Texas at Austin. We cooperate with analysis efforts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Paris Observatory, and the BKG in Frankfurt and Munich. Also, the University of Texas McDonald Observatory, since the inception of the International Laser Ranging Service (ILRS) in , houses the ILRS LLR Operations and Analysis Center. The small size of the LLR observing network, and the relatively small number of LLR analysis centers, dictate the unique nature and operational procedures of this LLR Operations Analysis Center. The responsibility of the LLR Operations Center has evolved to be one that assures the smooth flow of data through the LLR network, in a form and format that is useful for obtaining scientific results. The center also coordinates the observations and their scheduling in a manner to maximum the scientific gains. Predicts are coordinated on-site at each LLR station and the data are automatically transferred from all observing sites to the ILRS data centers. LLR data analysts can secure their data directly from the data centers as needed. Feed-back from these analysts often goes directly back to the individual observing stations. Under the auspices of this National Science Foundation Grant, we are looking forward to additional years of successful LLR observation and analysis, resulting in the steady and rapid expansion of scientific results doc19888 none Paul G. Goerss Homotopy theory is the study of topological phenomena that remain invariant under fairly flexible sorts of continuous deformations. Most basically, we seek to compute and to understand homotopy classes of maps between finite simplicial or CW complexes, perhaps after some sort of stabilization. Computation and understanding are not the same: we have forty or more years of computations, but only lately have we begun to have the language to in which to make a coherent theory out of the data we have. This project is, therefore, as much about exploring and refining the language as it is about calculations -- although there will be a mixture of both. The entry point is the observation that any cohomology theory with a good theory of Chern classes gives rise to a formal group law and, hence, a formal group. Conversely, given a formal group we can ask whether there is an associated cohomology theory. These cohomology theories then delineate the finer structure of stable homotopy theory. This is the chromatic picture of stable homotopy: we seek to use the algebraic geometry of formal groups to organize and direct investigations into the deeper structure of computations and theory. This project seeks to develop this point of view in two directions, one local and one global. The first, or local, direction is an investigation into K(n)-local homotopy theory in general and into the K(n)-local sphere in particular. The second, or more global, direction, would be to make systematic our knowledge of structured ring spectra using stacks and the moduli stack of formal groups as the basic parametrizing device doc19889 none On almost every measure of mathematical achievement and persistence, African American students lag behind their peers. Because mathematics serves as a gatekeeper for information technology majors and careers, African Americans are also disproportionately shut out of these areas. In order to better understand the societal, community, school, and intra-personal forces that affect their under-representation, Contra Costa College and Dr. Danny Martin have been awarded a three-year ethnographic and observational study that will focus on mathematics socialization and mathematics identity among a diverse group of African Americans. The participants in this study will be African American parents, community members, students and teachers of students selected from communities in two northern California cities-Richmond and San Pablo. Both cities are located within 50 miles of Silicon Valley and have significant African American populations. The two cities also have school systems that are representative of many urban districts. The project will also focus on selected programs, services, staff, and students at Contra Costa College, an institution that has had a high rate of success in transferring minority students to four-year colleges and universities in mathematics, computer science, and engineering doc19890 none Safety analysis is essential for high-assurance software systems. Safety analysis identifies the hazards, derives the software safety requirements to eliminate or control these hazards, and ensures that the design and implementation incorporate those safeguards. A product line is a set of products that share a common set of features and a related market or mission.Currently, high-assurance product lines are being built without the tools or conceptual framework necessary to perform effective safety analyses. This research addresses the question of how safety analysis can become a reusable asset of a product line by developing a framework and asuite of techniques for the safety analysis of critical product lines. Anticipated benefits of the research include extending safety analyses toproduct lines, providing a framework for reuse of safety analyses within a product line, deriving formally specified limits on reuse of product-line safety analysis, and enabling safer product-line systems at lower cost and reduced schedules. The results will be empirically evaluated by application in industrial case studies. This project will expand the opportunities available to student researchers to participate in development of safety-analysis techniques for product lines doc19891 none Culler and Shalen are continuing to investigate consequences of their work on the character variety of a knot group. This involves studying the relationship between the boundary slopes of a knot and the topological properties of essential surfaces that realize the slopes. It also includes their ongoing project with Dunfield and Jaco about smallish knots in non-Haken manifolds, which is part of a program to prove the Poincare Conjecture. A joint project by Agol, Culler and Shalen, concerning the construction of covering spaces of a triangulated 3-manifold by an inductive process, is also relevant to this program. Agol is also continuing his work on geometric finiteness of geometrically defined subgroups of knot groups, volume estimates for non-fibered Haken manifolds and hyperbolic orbifolds, and the complexity of algorithms in 3-manifold theory. A fundamental problem in many areas of mathematics is to classify all examples of a certain type of mathematical object. The objects of study in this proposal are 3-manifolds, which are mathematical models of 3-dimensional spaces. Since our universe is a 3-dimensional space, the classification of 3-manifolds is directly related to our understanding of nature itself. The classification problem for 3-manifolds is far from solved, but the work of many mathematicians over the last 25 years has at least produced a conjectural answer. Remarkably, the conjectures, if true, will provide a unification of the most classical, rigid kind of geometry---both the Euclidean version first studied by the ancient Greeks and the non-Euclidean kind that constituted an exciting discovery in the 19th century---and topology, a subject devoted to studying much more flexible geometric structures, which until recently had developed quite independently of the more classical theories. The work supported by this grant forms part of the effort to verify the conjectured geometric classification of 3-manifolds doc19892 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for fiscal year . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce. The title of the research and training plan is Investigation of factors influencing large-scale ecological and evolutionary patterns among Caribbean Anolis lizards. The research investigates macroecological patterns of body size, abundance, and character displacement in Caribbean Anolis lizards from a phylogenetic perspective. It integrates phylogenetic information on approximately 140 species, morphological data from specimens in museum collections from nearly 7,000 study sites, and landscape data from Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to examine factors influencing the diversification of these lizards doc19893 none This project focuses on two problems related to heterogeneous materials: (1) the effect of texture and grain anisotropy on the strength of polycrystals, and (2) the electrical properties of high-contrast matrix-particulate composites. The investigation involves analysis of the mathematical models as well as numerical computations. In most applications, crystalline materials are used in polycrystalline form. Polycrystals of the same material but with different textures may exhibit different behavior. One goal of the present research project is to gain a better understanding of the dependence of the behavior of polycrystals on their texture. Better understanding will lead to better guidelines for materials selection and processing procedures. A second goal of this project is to contribute to a better understanding of composite materials---materials composed of two or more integrated pure phases. In general, a composite has better properties than the pure phases alone. Examples of composite materials are plastics that are reinforced with glass fibers or glass particles: the result is a much stronger and stiffer material. The results of this project will be useful for the design of composite materials with specific properties doc19894 none This research focuses on the development of symbolic formulations for timing and reliability analysis that can handle a wide range of custom-designed, complex circuits in an efficient, cost-effective manner. This symbolic approach enables handling of any arbitrary circuit structure and allows for an efficient means of incorporating information on the functional operation of the circuit into the analysis. Two areas are being explored: (1) Symbolic algorithms are being developed to analyze electrical noise problems due to such things as leakage currents and charge sharing. To improve accuracy, the analysis is constrained by timing and input conditions. Based on the results of this analysis, circuits may be flagged for design violations or automatically re-designed to improve electrical reliability. (2) Symbolic formulations to calculate the delay through a channel-connected region (CCR) of CMOS devices are be developed. These formulations will handle nearly all commonly-used digital circuit families, as well as handle multiple inputs transitioning and accept arbitrary input-exclusivity constraints. The goal of this work is to develop an efficient means to identify problem circuits for further analysis while avoiding the need to verify many non-realizable worst-case conditions with other more costly simulation techniques doc19895 none DMS - . PI: Tatyana Foth I will study holomorphic automorphic forms on bounded symmetric domains and related problems of quantization. Let X be a quotient of a bounded symmetric domain by a lattice. The space of holomorphic automorphic forms can be identified with the space of holomorphic sections of a tensor power of the canonical line bundle on X. In the context of geometric quantization this is the quantizing line bundle, X is the classical phase space, and automorphic forms are quantum states, i.e. wave functions of a particle. I shall investigate properties of Poincare series and relative Poincare series associated to real submanifolds of X. From the point of view of quantization they are components of the delta-function. Explicit construction of relative Poincare series associated to closed geodesics in finite volume smooth ball quotients and the spanning result can be used to obtain rational structures on the spaces of cusp forms for arithmetic subgroups of SU(n,1). Another problem I shall address is the computation of curvature of a natural connection in the vector bundle over a space of compatible complex structures on a symplectic manifold X, whose fiber over J is the space of J-holomorphic sections of k-th tensor power of the quantizing line bundle. To begin with, I will compute the symbol of the curvature in the semiclassical limit for certain types of X. The first interesting example would be the case when X is a hyperbolic Riemann surface, where an explicit basis in the space of automorphic forms can be used as a moving frame. The main object of my research is automorphic forms on bounded symmetric domains. They are functions with very special properties on spaces which have interesting geometry and many symmetries. In addition to being an important and intensively studied subject by itself it has a very close relation to geometric quantization which is a part of mathematics whose development was strongly motivated by physics and by general desire to understand better the nature of the world and to describe it in terms of suitable mathematical formalism. The main goal of geometric quantization is to find a rigorous mathematical way to pass from classical mechanics to quantum mechanics in a space which may have a very complicated geometry. More precisely, the question is how one can establish a suitable correspondence between classical observables and quantum observables. The space of wave functions is, clearly, a fundamental and very important object. It turns out that for certain classical phase spaces automorphic forms are wave functions of a particle. Properties of automorphic forms are strongly related to the complex structure. One of the questions I shall address is to what extent the procedure of geometric quantization depends on the complex structure. That leads to discussion of connections in vector bundles on certain moduli spaces which are of great interest and significance for both mathematicians and physisists doc19896 none Stern Description: This award is for support of a research project by Dr. Robert Stern, Center for Lithospheric Studies, University of Texas, Dallas (UTD), Dallas, Texas and Dr. Mamdouh Abdeen, National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences (NARSS), Cairo, Egypt. They plan to study the use of remotely sensed geographical data to help in the development in Upper Egypt, specifically the Aswan-Kom Ombo-Gallaba Plain region. The two investigators will focus on understanding mid-Pleistocene drainage reorganization resulting from tectonic uplift of the Nubian Swell, and on identification of new groundwater resources. The project will have three components: 1) Investigation of paleodrainages using ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and trenching; 2) Mapping of surface and shallow subsurface drainages and structures using Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and SPOT images and Shuttle Imaging Radar and 3) Building a Geographical Information Science (GIS) database. Fieldwork will focus on evaluating the hypothesis that the Gallaba Plain is underlain by a buried river channel, which drained the Eastern Desert. Processing and interpretation of remote sensing imagery will provide regional perspective for understanding drainage reorganization and will be used as a layer in the GIS. The two scientists plan to build up a complete GIS database of an 80 km wide corridor flanking the Nile and extending from Aswan north. This project will be a continuation of joint activities by UTD in Texas and the NARSS in Egypt. Scope: This proposal brings together new technology, GPR, and remote sensing to create a database that can be used to determine the Pleistocene history of drainage in the Gallaba plains region. A million years of climate change in Egypt are represented by several different generations of drainage in separate parts of the desert and Nile valley, and this research is to test one of the areas where an old river channel may exist. Such an understanding will potentially aid in the identification of new groundwater reserves. The research will ultimately lead to an improved supply of water for this region of Egypt, and possibly to an improved evaluation of natural hazards. The developed database will be of use for scientific studies and also for future development efforts. The two teams are qualified and have a successful record of past collaboration, and the project has the advantage of involving U.S. junior researchers and graduate students. There will be training of U.S. and Egyptian researchers in the use of the GPR and in the development and use of the GIS database. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc19897 none Funderlic, Robert E. North Carolina State U This section summarizes the progress the co-PI has made under the support of NSF grants (07 01 98 06 30 00)for the project Adaptive Control Algorithm for Adaptive Optics Applications and (08 01 00 7 31 03)for the project Algorithms for the Inverse Problem of Matrix Con- struction of the former,the objectives are to design,analyze,and evaluate adaptive control algorithms for adaptive optics applications.The co-PI has established a mathematical framework for the linear econstructor problem in adaptive optics,and has made progress in the understanding of a latency-delay control algorithm. Fo the latter,the proposed objectives were to investigate both the theory and the practice of constructing a physical model,described mathematically in the form of a matrix,from prescribed spectral data.The co-PI has collected,classi .ed,and de .ned the egimen of inverse eigenvalue problems as a whole,and has developed new numerical methods for tackling some inverse eigenvalue problems.Thus far,a signi .cant portion of these objectives has been accomplished under the NSF support as is evidenced below doc19898 none Thang Le Thang Le plans to continue his study of quantum and finite type invariants of links and 3-manifolds. In particular, he would like to study problems arising around the volume conjecture which connects quantum invariants to classical objects like fundamental groups, torsions, and volumes. Other problems involve integrality properties (in broad sense) of quantum invariants and the topology behind them, and their applications. The field has interactions with geometry, combinatorics, number theory, and physics. The theory of knots and 3-manifolds is an old branch of mathematics which has gained renewed interest among mathematicians and physicists after the discovery of the Jones polynomial and its relation to theoretical physics (quantum field theory, high energy physics). In fact, it is now one of the most active domains in mathematics. Many results of knot theory may also find applications in molecular biology. To classify knots and 3-manifolds, mathematicians use invariants . This research project studies new classes of invariants of knots and 3-manifolds and their relationships with the classical ones. The new invariants are very powerful in distinguishing knots and 3-manifolds doc19899 none Symbolic Representation Based Partial Order Methods S. Purushothaman Iyer Symbolic representations are used in analysis of finite and infinite state concurrent system. However, they could be subjected to constraint explosion much like state explosion in analysis of finite state designs of concurrent systems. The reason for both of these explosions is the consideration of all interleavings, of a concurrent system, during their analysis. Partial-order techniques depend upon the notion of independence among actions to avoid considering all possible interleavings. The proposed research will investigate the notion of unfolding, which aids both in discovery of independent actions and in succinctly representing the state space of systems. In particular, the proposed research will address the following topics: o How to build unfoldings for real-time automata as available, for instance, in the tool-set UPPAAL. o Implementation of an unfolding-based partial order method for UPPAAL. o A comparative (theoretical) investigation of unfoldings and current partial order methods, with a view to generalizing unfoldings to other infinite state systems. o Empirical evaluation of the proposed implementation against current practices. The proposed research will aid in faster, and more complete, analysis of infinite state concurrent systems than is currently possible doc19900 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Identifying rapidly changing genes and their impact on the speciation process in sunflowers through genome level sequence comparisons. If speciation is caused by adaptation to different environments, genes under strong selection for different adaptations may also be speciation genes. This study uses comparative analyses of genome sequences among sunflower species to identify genes on which natural selection is strongest and then tests to see if these genes are involved in speciation doc19901 none Systems where components share information and resources indiscriminately are often fragile. Conversely, the control of sharing contributes to modularity, reliability, and security. Java, C#, and other modern programming languages rely on sophisticated concepts and methods for controlling sharing. These are embodied in constructs such as locks, abstract data types, and unforgeable object references, and in type systems and static analyses. This project aims to study and develop techniques for controlled sharing in programming languages. For this purpose, it relies on the development of foundational calculi (e.g., calculi of objects or processes). It focuses on capabilities (such as unforgeable references), on related packaging constructs (such as objects and abstract data types), and on disciplines for the safe use of run-time mechanisms for controlled sharing doc19902 none Laurence R. Taylor William G. Dwyer E. Bruce Williams This is a proposal in algebraic topology, and deals primarily with questions in stable and unstable homotopy theory. The stable side has to do with the study of ring spectra. One goal is to study duality in stable homotopy theory and relate it to classical types of duality for commutative rings; a possible outcome is a clearer understanding of Gross-Hopkins duality. Another goal is to study spaces of associative ring structures from a general deformation theory point of view. On the unstable side, the proposal envisages a conceptual classification of p-compact groups (especially at the prime 2), a comprehensive theory of spaces of natural transformations between various familiar functors, and a study of the homology of homotopy limits. There are also geometric topology components involving smoothings of four-space, L-group calculations, and questions related to Riemann-Roch theorems for Waldhausen K-theory. In a general sense, the proposal deals with the problem of understanding geometric shapes, especially shapes with more than three dimensions. These shapes (called spaces) can arise, for instance, as the collection of all states of a physical system, or the collection of all configurations of a complicated mechanical device. The basic goal is to develop a method for describing spaces in terms of numbers and other algebraic objects, in the expectation that this will make it possible to quantify the subtle geometric characteristics of spaces, and allow for the study of relationships betweens spaces of various types. Some spaces, called manifolds, are particularly symmetrical, and among other things the proposal involves studying the associated symmetry properties of their algebraic invariants doc19903 none Marian Neamtu Verderbilt University The final properties of polymer products are largely determined by process conditions such a low rate, shape of processing die and cooling temperature, which are represented as condition parameters in mathematical models. In this sense, modeling viscoelastic fluid behavior provides a fundamental explanation of the structure of polymer products such as fibers and films. Advances in the finite element computational methodologies for simulating the fiber and film process is a recent development in polymer industries. The goal of this work is to introduce mathematical optimization techniques into the nu-merical simulation of viscoelastic fluid, in order to determine optimal process conditions for polymer products. Two research projects are involved in the proposal: film casting and a vorticity minimization problem. The overall strategy will be to integrate recently developed viscoelastic models and optimization techniques in order to meet objectives through various control mechanisms such as shape control and boundary control. As an equation solver for the film casting problem, the commercial software package Poly ow, which simulates film and fiber processing in various settings, will be used. For the other problem, a finite element code currently under development will be used. In solving the optimization problems, recent results from current research will be extended to the more general and high dimensional viscoelastic regime doc19904 none Jonathan I Maletic Kent State U A Framework to Combine Semantic and Structural Information for Static Analysis Jonathan I. Maletic The research involves combining semantic and structural information of program source code for the static analysis of software. Static analysis normally takes into consideration only structural information of the source code. The research investigates the use of information concerning the domain semantics to enhance existing static analysis methods. The semantic information is derived from the comments, documentation, and identifier names associated with the source code. A framework will be developed that allows the combination of semantic and structural information of the source code. The framework will provide means to compute new measures and metrics that describe the software (e.g., cohesion and coupling). Additionally, the research will study different information retrieval methods and how they can be used to extract relevant semantic information from the source code. An empirical assessment of the framework and the use of semantic information for static analysis will be undertaken. Combining semantic information with existing static analysis methods will result in new and improved analysis tools. These tools will help software engineers better analyze, maintain, and assess the quality of large software systems doc19905 none DMS - . PI: Peter Petersen The PI proposes to investigate manifolds with integral curvature bounds as opposed to the usual pointwise curvature bounds. Many traditional results carry over, but people do not have a complete picture of what can go wrong with the weaker curvature assumptions. The second and main part of the proposal addresses the specific but very hard question of which 3-sphere bundles over the 4-sphere have positive curvature. Only one of these spaces, namely the 7-sphere, is know to have positive curvature. We expect that several exotic spheres of this type have positive curvature and also that we will get some interesting infinite families of manifolds in dimensions 6 and 7 out of this project. The PI is proposing to work on two separate projects. The first deals with gleaning information from objects where one has fuzzy rather than specific assumptions about how they curve. The PI has already established some interesting results in this direction, but much is still unknown. The second and more ambitious part is an investigation of how round one can make twisted objects. Here one imagines a sphere as perfectly round and untwisted. There are no intuitive examples in the dimensions that can be visualized, but in dimension 7 there apear to be several objects which are not spheres but still could be fairly round. A positive solution to this problem would solve one very prominent problem and two lesser known problems doc19906 none The objective of this research is to investigate the applications of a new likelihood function, called weighted empirical likelihood, in constructing confidence sets and tests for various important nonparametric or semiparametric statistical inference problems in survival analysis using different types of incomplete data, including right censored data, doubly censored data and interval censored data. Weighted empirical likelihood function is formulated in a unified form through the probability mass of the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator for different types of incomplete data. The PI has shown that the high-order expansion of the log-likelihood ratio for a quite general class of statistics can be obtained in a unified way for various types of censored data aforementioned. Thus, with the help of the adjusted n out of n bootstrap, the weighted empirical likelihood ratio can be used to construct efficient confidence intervals or tests. The proposed procedure does not require the precise knowledge of the convergence rate of the statistic of interest, which is particularly appealing for interval censored data. All preliminary studies show that the desirable properties of weighted empirical likelihood method include accuracy, efficiency, generality, and independency of the precise knowledge of the convergence rate of the statistic of interest. In this research, the issues under consideration include: (a) Applications of weighted empirical likelihood in statistical inference problems with various types of incomplete data, including the construction of confidence intervals and tests associated with profile likelihood problems, accelerated life model, proportional hazards model, and logistic regression model, etc.; (b) Coverage accuracy of weighted empirical likelihood ratio confidence intervals; (c) Efficiency of weighted empirical likelihood inferences; (d) Comparison with alternative methods if they exist. Incomplete data are frequently encountered in medical follow-up and reliability studies. Recently, statisticians are paying more attention to some more complicated types of incomplete data, such as doubly censored data, interval censored data, truncated data, etc., as these data occur in important clinical trials and scientific research. For instance, doubly censored data were encountered in a recent study of primary breast cancer, interval censored data were encountered in AIDS research, and doubly truncated data were encountered in astronomical research. Up to now, the statistical research on these more complicated types of incomplete data still generally lags behind that on right censored data. Since Owen ( ), the empirical likelihood method has been developed to construct tests and confidence sets based on nonparametric likelihood ratio. Studies have shown that the empirical likelihood ratio inferences are of comparable accuracy to alternative methods. However, so far the applications of empirical likelihood method to censored data are relatively few and are mostly on right censored data. Examples show that for complicated types of incomplete data, such as interval censored data, the investigation of the limiting distribution of log-likelihood ratio can be quite difficult. In this context, aiming to provide solutions for various difficult problems that arise in medical and scientific research, this project intends to develop reliable statistical methods based on a new likelihood function, called weighted empirical likelihood function doc19907 none infinite-dimensional algebraic structures whose invariants are closely related to invariants of Outer space. Finally, small regions of Outer space can be identified with spaces of finite trees. Such trees are used as a tool by evolutionary biologists, and another focus of this project is understanding the local geometry of these regions in a very concrete, algorithmic way which can be applied to problems in molecular phylogenetics doc19908 none This proposal is concerned with the effect of curvature bounds on the local geometric properties and global topology of Riemannian manifolds with various sectional and Ricci curvature bounds and of their Gromov-Hausdorff limits. The principal investigators will study the structure of the singularities that spaces satisfying some natural geometric assumptions can develop. Understanding the structure of such singularities can often give a lot of information about the topological properties of such spaces. They will study the structure of Gromov-Hausdorff limits of manifolds with Ricci curvature bounded below; topology of convergence with lower sectional curvature bound; the structures of the fundamental groups for manifolds with lower curvature bound; optimal bound of isoperimetric constant; obstructions to nonnegative curvature on simply-connected manifolds. Geometric objects such as manifolds appear naturally in science and engineering, as configuration spaces, as Einsten s model of universe. Ricci curvature is a fundamental concept in Einstein s general relativity. Thus the fundamental research in these area should not only be important in its own right but also should have implications in physics and engineering doc19909 none DMS - . The principal investigator will seek analytic realizations of stringy cohomology of singular varieties with trivial canonical bundle. He will study the implications of such analytic realizations (and their generalizations) towards providing new explanations of gauge symmetry enhancement mechanisms in string theory. In collaboration with S. Sethi, the PI will continue his program to analyze the supersymmetric matrix model quantum mechanics which has been conjectured to provide a definition of M theory. Graduate student G. Firestone, will study the L2 index theory for the nonFredholm Dirac operators whose L2 kernels give the ground states for this theory. Sethi and the PI will examine methods for computing gravitational anomalies of field theories arising from string theories on singular spaces. S. Paban, S. Sethi, and the PI will examine the constraints imposed by supersymmetry on deformations of the supersymmetry algebra associated to an isolated five brane. The PI will investigate the extension of Witten s spinor technique of proving the positive mass conjecture by replacing the hypothesis of a smooth spin structure by the assumption of a spin structure degenerating on a codimension 2 submanifold. M theory gives a potential framework for providing a physical theory which incorporates both gravitation and the quantum physics describing high energy particles. The precise form of this theory is not yet fully developed. The measurable consequences are even further from being fully worked out. This project attempts to determine, for branches of this theory, fundamental consequences, such as the number of particles of different types, when these particles combine to make more complex matter, and the size and shape of these particles and their combinations. In addition to developing the physical consequences of M and string theory, such computations can be used to check for potential errors in the underlying hypotheses of M theory. This project also seeks a better understanding of a mathematical model for the physical interactions between certain particles known as 5 branes, whose existence is predicted by M theory doc19910 none DMS - . The principal investigator is interested in concrete problems in classical differential geometry and topology of curves and surfaces in Euclidean space, specially those which involve some notion of convexity. The proposed investigations include: (i) Certain nodal domains (shadows) cast on a surface by vectorfields which correspond to natural transformations, and developing the applications of these for surfaces of constant mean curvature, and surfaces whose gauss map satisfies a two-piece-property; (ii) Closed curves without parallel tangent lines (skew loops) and their relation to quadric surfaces; (iii) Global properties of locally convex surfaces with boundary, including connections with Monge-Ampere equations, and a convex hull property which is dual to that of minimal surfaces; (iv) Existence and regularity of certain deformations of space curves (unfoldings) to study extremals of knot energies and distortion. The study of curves and surfaces has been the primary motivation for the development of much of differential geometry and geometric topology, which in turn has found significant applications in physical sciences. Notions of convexity have often proved fruitful for solving problems in this area, specially those which involve optimizing various quantities. Those aspects of the principal investigator s work dealing with shadows on illuminated surfaces is motivated in part by a study of soap films and may lead to applications for computer vision. Further, the investigations on knot energies may be of interest in studying the DNA. The primary motivation of the investigator, however, is based on aesthetic considerations and the intuitive visual appeal of low dimensional geometric problems doc19911 none PI: Georgios Daskalopoulos The PI proposes three projects. In the first, the PI proposes to study regularity of harmonic maps into the completion of Teichmueller space. The two main applications are on symplectic Lefschetz pencils and on superrigidity of lattices in the mapping class group. In the second project the PI proposes a proof of higher dimensional partial analogues of the conjectures of Atiyah and Bott on Yang-Mills equations over Riemann surfaces. These are nontrivial generalizations to higher dimensions of the PI s previous work on the connection between Yang-Mills and the theory of holomorphic vector bundles. Finally in the third project the PI proposes some questions about harmonic maps from three-dimensional manifolds to trees which generalize the well-known theory of harmonic maps from surfaces. The motivation for the first project is to use harmonic maps in order to understand analytically the results of Kaimanovich-Masur and Farb-Masur on the superrigidity of lattices of rank at least 2 in the mapping class group. In the process the PI realized that the methods should also shed light in the rank one case. The second project shows that there are still very close connections between the analysis of the Yang-Mills equations and algebraic geometry. These connections have been exploited in great detail by several people in the case of Riemann surfaces but very little is known in higher dimensions. The PI s work sheds some light in this direction doc19912 none Kreitz, Christoph Cornell U Interactively guided proof assistants have been successfully used in the formal design, verification, and optimization of software and hardware systems. Because of their expressive logics, they are more generally applicable than fully automated tools, yet at a much lesser degree of automation. The main goal of this project is to combine the expressive power of proof assistants with the automatic reasoning capabilities of proof search procedures, proof planners, decision procedures, model checkers, etc. and to use the enhanced system in the formal design of reliable software. In particular we aim at providing proof automation for the Nuprl proof development system, a tactical proof environment that has been used in numerous applications. It offers a proven basis for solving mathematical problems and for designing reliable hardware and software systems. The newest release of Nuprl features one of the most exible architectures for interacting with external problem solving devices. Our experience with connecting Nuprl with JProver, a theorem prover for first-order intuitionistic logic, has shown that Nuprl supports interoperability between formalsystems in a way that makes our goal feasible doc19913 none This award supports theoretical and computational research on complex fluids. The PI aims to combine field-theoretic and particle-based approaches to develop hybrid simulation tools that can be used to study the thermodynamics and self-assembly of particles in complex fluids. These hybrid techniques can account for the disparate length scales accompanying particle dispersions in complex fluid media, while efficiently incorporating steric and short-range interactions. Two classes of studies and tools are proposed: (1) Field-Theoretic Simulations (FTS), an approach recently developed by the PI, will be used to systematically evaluate the interactions between particles of arbitrary geometries in different complex fluids. The results may yield fundamental insights into the different factors that influence fluctuation-induced forces, in particular, their nonpairwise additive nature, as well as the interplay between energetic (arising from a physical interaction between the complex fluid and the surface of the particle) and entropic interactions. The results from these studies will also be used in effecting an in vacuo simulation of the particles, in order to glean insights into the self-assembly features of the particles. (2) The PI will develop a hybrid multibody simulation approach to the self-assembly of particles in complex fluids. A combination of FTS and mean-field equations for the fields at every step determines the effective interactions between the rigid units. These effective interactions will be used to evolve the rigid units through a particle-based simulation. The studies are aimed to clarify the role of multibody interactions, nonpairwise additivity of forces and excluded volume interactions in modulating the self-assembly of a variety of mixtures of complex fluids and particles. The research will be effected in the context of studies of the interactions and self-assembly in polymer-particle mixtures, charge stabilized colloidal dispersions, and multiblock rod-coil copolymers. These are ideal model systems in which to study effects pertaining to fluctuations, self-assembly, and dynamics. Each of these can be tuned independently and in a controlled way by tailoring the synthesis conditions. This capability allows for a synergistic interaction with experimental studies to compare predictions and experiments. In each of these model systems, the PI plans to carry out studies, linked by a common objective, to discern the self-assembly arising from a competition between steric and energetic interactions, as well as the interplay between nematic smectic ordering, crystallization and microphase separation. The successful implementation of these hybrid simulation approaches is expected to have significant impact on the development of multiscale computational approaches to the design of advanced materials. %%% This award supports theoretical and computational research and education on complex fluids. The PI aims to combine distinct and powerful computational approaches to develop hybrid simulation tools that can be used to study the thermodynamics and self-assembly of particles in complex fluids. These tools will be used to study the interactions and self-assembly in polymer-particle mixtures, charge stabilized colloidal dispersions, and multiblock rod-coil polymers to elucidate important issues in the physics of complex fluids. The simulation tools also contribute to efforts to use theoretical methodology to predict the morphological characteristics and properties of advanced materials that result from specific molecular parameters doc19914 none of system dynamics will be undertaken, leading ultimately to the development and implementation of algorithms for solving them. Decision making under uncertainty and the theory and techniques of mathematical programming merged in the s to create the field now known as stochastic programming. A stochastic program is a mathematical program (e.g. a linear program) that includes in its formulation a probability distribution to describe uncertain parameters. Research consists largely of understanding problem structure, deriving duality results and optimality conditions, developing approximation techniques, and exploiting the structure and theory in the development of solution schemes. The field s development began with a two-stage recourse model, where the cost of a decision made now (e.g. production) is affected by an uncertain outcome in the future (e.g. demand), and the possibility of taking recourse action once the future is revealed (e.g. overtime). A typical problem is to determine the present decision that minimizes expected cost. While much knowledge has been gained from the investigation of two-stage models, a limited view of many-stage stochastic programming has resulted in which multistage problems are considered as simple extensions of the two-stage case. This fails to address the inherently dynamic nature of problems with many time stages. Additionally, two-stage applications tend to come largely from areas such as production and manufacturing, whereas the bulk of problems with many time stages arise from financial, economic, and environmental planning applications and other problems where dynamics are driving a system. Thus, much of the new many-stage theory should be geared toward these sorts of applications. The proposed research will explore the additional dynamic structures, theory (duality, approximation), and questions regarding implementation, of stochastic optimization problems involving many (possibly even infinitely many, or a continuum of) stages. This will be motivated primarily by financial applications doc19915 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Predicting the effects of land use change on nutrient limitation to ecosystem productivity and carbon storage in the humid tropics. Where land-use alters nutrient dynamics, nutrient impoverishment may alter recovery rates, maximum recoverable productivity, carbon storage, and water and energy fluxes. Current biogeochemical models have insufficient representation of phosphorus and other rock-derived nutrients often critical in tropical systems, and are unable to deal with rapid shifts typical of land-use change. This study develops mechanistic nutrient models at various spatial temporal scales incorporating improvements into general biogeochemical models (Century Terraflux) and testing predictions under various land-use scenarios doc19916 none This ITWF award to North Carolina State University will support the development and testing of a model of the factors associated with young women s decisions to persist in advanced mathematics and computer science courses so as to prepare themselves for, and decide to make Information Technology (IT), their career. IT careers are defined as those requiring an electrical engineering, computer science, or Computer engineering bachelor s degree. Success factors rather than failure factors will be examined in order to make a significant contribution to the research on gender and IT. The project s objectives are to: a) Identify school, social, and personal factors associated with young women s decisions to pursue undergraduate study in IT fields. b) Create and test a model using the above factors to predict young women s decisions to pursue (enroll into) IT undergraduate study. c) Disseminate the results of this study in professional publications, professional meetings, advisory board meetings, and in an electronic monograph to scholars, teachers, policy makers, parents, and young women. d) Propose appropriate interventions to increase young women s interest in IT careers based on this research model. To identify the factors, the investigators will implement the inquiry from a grounded theory perspective. Subjects will be young women, already identified as talented in mathematics in middle school, who participated in the NSF Gender Equity project, Girls on Track (GoT), beginning in the Summer of doc19917 none The investigator continues studies of nonlinear problems in conservation laws and fluid dynamics and related nonlinear partial differential equations and their applications, along with the analysis and development of efficient nonlinear methods. The objective of this research program is twofold: (1) to investigate important nonlinear problems such as multidimensional transonic shocks and free boundary problems, vacuum problems, asymptotic stability problems, compressible fluids with various constitutive relations, singular limit problems, multiphase problems, and the Riemann problem to gain new physical insights, to guide the formulation of efficient nonlinear methods, and to find the correct function spaces in which to pose the nonlinear conservation laws and develop the numerical methods that converge stably and rapidly; and (2) to analyze and develop nonlinear methods including free boundary methods, kinetic methods, geometric measure methods, weak convergence methods, shock capturing techniques, energy methods, and related potential techniques to formulate new, more efficient nonlinear methods and to solve various more important nonlinear problems in conservation laws and fluid dynamics. The nonlinear problems and related partial differential equations in this research program arise in such areas as gas dynamics, hydraulics, combustion, magnetohydrodynamics, semiconductor, elasticity, multiphase flow, phase transitions, kinetic theory, biophysics, and material science. The award will support research on the solvability of these nonlinear problems and related partial differential equations, the qualitative behavior of their solutions and related applications, as well as the analysis and development of nonlinear methods in applied analysis and numerical analysis. This research will lead to a deeper understanding of nonlinear phenomena and will provide more efficient nonlinear methods and theories for applications. Date: May 1, doc19918 none A collisionless plasma is a fully ionized gas in which electromagnetic forces dominate collisional effects. The motion of a high temperature, low density collisionless plasma is described by the Vlasov-Maxwell equations, a nonlinear system of hyperbolic partial differential equations. In this setting collisions are ignored while the charge and current densities (which drive the Maxwell system) are determined in a self-consistent manner from velocity moments of solutions to the Vlasov equation. The major question to be studied is this: are there shocks in a three dimensional collisionless plasma? That is, could a singularity develop from smoothly prescribed initial values as time progresses? Smooth global solutions are known to exist in lower dimensional situations (e.g., two space and velocity variables) and when the data are small. Kinetic Theory includes the study of the motion and properties of plasmas. Plasmas are often called the fourth state of matter (after solids, liquids and gases); they account for practically all of the material in the universe. Plasmas are charged gases and hence are excellent conductors of electricity. Plasma engines have been used recently to power some NASA spacecraft. Notable examples of collisionless plasmas include the solar wind, the ionosphere, galactic nebulae and comet tails. The motion of a plasma is described by a number of complicated equations dictated by physics. Among the mathematician s goals are to show that these equations have solutions (under appropriate conditions) and to approximate them numerically (so that one can predict certain behavior in future situations). To show that the Vlasov-Maxwell system has a nice solution would at least partially confirm this system as the right one to describe these phenomena doc19919 none Adaptive designs use sequentially accruing data in allocation decisions to reach some objective. In this proposal, the objective is based on an optimization criterion, such as minimizing the cost of an experiment. The investigators use the power of a hypothesis test as a benchmark for comparisons of adaptive designs. They explicitly derive the relationship between power and the design in terms of bias of the target allocation from the actual allocation and variation induced by the design. For four classes of adaptive designs: urn models, sequential maximum likelihood procedures, doubly adaptive biased coin designs, and treatment effect mappings, the investigators will uniquely unify the theory for easy comparison based on power, optimality, and variability. Adaptive designs are useful in many scientific disciplines and have application in clinical research, industrial experiments, bioassay, to name a few areas. The idea is to dynamically use sequentially accruing data in decisions for collecting future data in order to satisfy some objective, which could be minimizing the cost of an experiment, maximizing expected treatment successes in a clinical trial, etc. The use of adaptive designs can improve efficiency of an experiment by incorporating current knowledge into design decisions. Heretofore what has been unknown is the relationship of variability of the adaptive designs to efficiency of the experiment. The investigators will develop guidelines that will allow direct comparison of efficiency of designs by exploring their variability. The grant will involve both undergraduate and graduate students across two campuses and will lead to increased understanding of how to efficiently design costly or ethically demanding experiments doc19920 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY . The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled Microarray analysis to discover light-quality regulated genes in the cyanobacteria Fremyella diplosiphon. Microarrays allow researchers to analyze global gene expression. Fremyella diplosiphon has an adaptive response to light color called complementary chromatic adaptation (CCA). However, only three operons have been identified as regulated by light color. This research uses microarrays of PCR amplified genomic fragments to discover novel genes that are light color regulated and then uses gene-specific microarrays to examine the expression kinetics of these genes doc19921 none A close relationship between linear elliptic and parabolic partial differential equations and Markov diffusion processes played an important role in the development of both fields during the last century. A new chapter in this direction -- an interplay between a class of semilinear equations and superdiffusions -- has evolved over the past 15 or so years. The theory has reached a certain stage of maturity. However some key problems remain open (for instance, the uniqueness of the solution with a given fine trace and the structure of exit boundaries of superdiffusions). The work on these problems is the subject of the proposal. Superdiffusions is a special class of branching measure-valued processes also known as superprocesses. Outside of pure mathematics, they play a significant role in population genetics and they provide new tools for the study of complex physical systems with infinitely many degrees of freedom. For about two decades these processes have attracted the efforts of many investigators around the world doc19922 none Research is proposed on the specification and verification of computer programs written in languages that provide a low-level view of storage and other resources. This research will focus on novel formal methods for two particularly crucial programming techniques:Shared mutable data structure - the use of representations that may contain more than one pointer to a location that can be updated by the program. These data representations will be specified in an extension of predicate logic, called separation logic, in which the structure of assertions mirrors the separation of storage into Disjoint components. Embedded code pointers - the use of data representations Containing updatable components that point to program instructions. Programs using code pointers will be specified by using a reflection Operator that allows code to occur within assertions. Specific aspects of low-level programming to be investigated include storage allocation, share-variable concurrency, and the relation between specifications and tye systems. As a consequence of this research, it will become easier to avoid errors in an important class of useful but difficult computer programs. Eventually, it should be possible to automate the logic so that programs in this Class can be accompanied by machine-checkable proofs of their correctness doc19923 none New classes of materials are processed as liquid mixtures of designer macromolecules either in viscous solvents or in flexible polymer solutions. These macromolecules range from small molecular weight, rod-like liquid crystals to nano-clay platelets, targeting a diverse family of high-performance materials and devices. The molecules are well approximated as ellipsoids, precisely falling within the class of macromolecular fluids accessible by emerging theory, computation, and experiment. Furthermore, rigid-unit, monodisperse molecules suspended in viscous solvent are fundamental model systems. Mathematically, they represent the leading edge of theory; physically, they are the foundation from which many micro-fluidic systems can now be ideally modeled, and eventually understood. Conductivity or barrier properties, while governing material end-use, are passive during processing. Rather, the fundamental issue for design and control is the emergence of structures during processing at length scales (up to microns) far removed from individual molecules, called mesostructures, which empirically dominate ultimate performance features. Examples include sequestered island arrays of liquid crystals and distinguished patterns that arise in rod-like and disc-like nano-composites. The onset, development, and saturation of mesostructures in prototypical flows of rigid-unit macromolecular fluids is the primary focus of the workl. The work identifies open mathematical, numerical, and experimental issues, and constructs collective strategies toward their resolution, combining experimental, theoretical and computational expertise. New class of materials are processed as liquid mixtures of designer macromolecules either in viscous solvents or in polymer melts and solutions, in which the designer macromolecules are of simple geometry in a few to several hundred nanometers (1 nanometer is equal to 1 billionth of 1 meter). The material properties are dominated by the emergence of the mesostructure at the micron level (1 micron is 1 millionth of 1 meter) during the material processing. The PI, teamed up with a group of leading experimentalists in the field of complex fluids, identifies the open mathematical, numerical and experimental issues and constructs collective strategies toward their resolution combining experimental, theoretical and computational expertise doc19924 none The under-representation of women in the information technology (IT) field is a significant factor in the American IT skills crisis. Unfortunately, there is a lack of sufficient theory to provide a basis for explanation and prediction about this gender imbalance. The goal of this research is to investigate the particular ways that women IT professionals in America are influenced by and react to the social shaping of both gender identity and IT. Three specific objectives are directed at the achievement of this overall goal. The first objective is to refine an emergent theory of individual differences about women s participation in the IT sector. The second objective is to articulate the ways in which individual and environmental factors are influencing American women in their professional development and current working lives as IT professionals. The third objective is to develop recommendations for proactive responses by public policy makers, employers and educators. This research builds upon and extends into the American context the emergent theory and methodology that were developed by the Principal Investigator and applied in Australia, New Zealand and Ireland. Participants in the study are women who work in the IT field both as practitioners and as academics. In-depth interviews with women in the IT sector in selected geographic regions of the U.S. capture the influence of socio-cultural factors in different geographic regions of the country. Four themes about environmental influences that emerged from previous research are used to structure the interview schedule: culture (expressed through societal and workplace influences), educational institutions, family, and government policy. The emergent theory of individual differences is used to focus the data analysis on the ways in which these respondents - as individual women - are responding to socio-cultural influences. Interview data is supplemented by participant observation data and by documentary data about gender and the IT sector in the regions involved in the study. Three themes that emerged from previous research are used to focus the analysis of the data: personal characteristics of the respondent, individual influences experienced by the respondent, and individual responses to environmental influences doc19925 none Degradation data are a very rich source of reliability information and offer many advantages over the analysis of time-to-failure data. This project will develop a flexible class of models for analyzing degradation data and related reliability inference. These results will be used to obtain efficient methods for the design and analysis of accelerated tests and reliability improvement experiments. In this work, time-to-failure is defined as the level crossing (first-passage time) of a specified degradation threshold. The first part of the project will consider models based on diffusion processes for analyzing degradation data with continuous sample paths. These models can accommodate a variety of degradation rates and shapes. They also lead naturally to a wide class of time-to-failure distributions. The inverse Gaussian distribution plays a central role, similar to the exponential distribution with constant hazard rates. The second part will study a class of degradation-based models for repairable systems data that is quite analogous to non-homogeneous Poisson processes with failure data. Multi-state degradation models will also be considered. This work is an interesting generalization of the formulation in traditional statistical process control. Degradation data allow for more informative accelerated tests and reliability improvement studies. Several research topics on design of accelerated degradation tests, analysis of data from reliability improvement experiments, and robust design studies will be pursued. There has been tremendous emphasis on quality and reliability improvement in industry, driven by global competition and increasing customer expectations. There is also continued pressure to reduce product development costs and cycle times. Design, development, and manufacturing of highly-reliable products in this environment raise many challenges. The focus within the reliability area has traditionally been on the collection and analysis of time-to-failure data. High reliability implies few failures, so reliability estimation and improvement for product and process design can be extremely difficult. Fortunately, recent advances in sensing and measurement technologies are making it feasible to collect extensive amounts of data on degradation and other performance measures associated with components, systems, and manufacturing processes. However, the lack of flexible models and methods inference has been a major deterrent to the widespread use of degradation data for reliability analysis. This project will develop new models and methods for analyzing reliability data and use them for quality improvement doc19926 none SF Proposal Type Refinements Frank Pfenning and Robert Harper An important aspect of software development and maintenance is to understand properties of a complete system, its individual components, and how they interact. There is a wide range of properties of interest, some concerned only with the input output behavior of functions, others concerned with concurrency or real-time requirements of processes. Upon examining the techniques for formally specifying, understanding, and verifying program behavior available today, one notices that they are almost bi-polar. On the one extreme we find work on proving the correctness of programs, on the other we find type systems for programming languages. Both of these have clear shortcomings: program proving is very expensive, time-consuming, and often infeasible, while present type systems support only minimal consistency properties of programs. The proposed research is intended to help bridge this gap by designing and implementing more refined type systems that allow rich classes of program properties to be expressed, yet still be automatically verified. Through careful, logically motivated design the research combines the best ideas from abstract interpretation, automated program analysis, type theory, and verification doc19927 none There has been burgeoning interest in the last decade or so in artificial likelihoods for nonparametric problems. The investigators also propose to develop tractable approximations to the usual and adjusted nonparametric likelihood ratio statistics. These approximations are intended both to make bootstrap inference feasible and to yield insight into inaccuracies of the standard asymptotic approximations. Maximizing the adjusted profile nonparametric likelihoods yields adjusted estimators, and the investigators propose to study their properties, particularly as a basis for the popular bootstrap-t method of inference. Small sample inference in discrete data problems, such as contingency tables, log-linear models, and logistic regression, has received much attention. One approach is saddlepoint approximations; another approach is the use of Monte Carlo methods to simulate from the relevant conditional distributions. Important new ideas from computational ring theory may pave the way for the next generation feasible methods in highly discrete problems, just as the network algorithm provided methods that are currently being implemented routinely in practice. The investigators propose to use analytic and computational concepts from the theory of Groebner bases and toric ideals to provide correct and feasible simulation methods in complex discrete problems. The proposed research concerns feasible methodologies for accurate inference in both nonparametric and parametric settings. In the nonparametric framework, the focus is on approximate inference based on pseudo-likelihoods, while in the parametric context, the focus is on simulation methods for exact inference in discrete models. The inferential methods that are to be addressed in the proposal have broad application in data analysis of numerous areas of modeling scientific phenomena doc19928 none This ITWF award provides support to study institutional contexts and their related factors that are theorized to affect the work-related outcomes of women after they enter the information technology (IT) workforce. By work-related outcomes is meant job tenure, job satisfaction, job mobility, and job status, earnings and workforce retention. The project will focus on the IT specialties of software and information systems (as opposed to hardware or telecommunications) because they represent one of the fastest growing segments of the computer and IT industry. The expanding employment opportunities in IT work have encouraged a popular view that possession of IT skills should level the playing field for all workers. In effect, this perspective implies that job opportunities, or alternately the lack of opportunities, are correlates of levels and types of skill workers possess. Collectively, the bundle of skills and experiences individuals bring to employers is known as human capital. The human capital view says little about the institutional contexts that circumscribe IT work, or about IT workers and their gender. This project theorizes that the job-related outcomes for women entering the IT workforce will be influenced by various institutional factors and that the outcomes of women will be different from those of men doc19929 none This ITWF award provides support to the University of Arkansas, Little Rock to use the tools of IT to serve the educational enterprise in the same way that these tools support business enterprises. In the state of Arkansas recognized the shortage of IT workers and created the College of Information Science and Systems Engineering, called the Cyber-college of Arkansas, at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. The Cyber-college will design a database that will house data on every facet of the college s recruitment and first-year student experience across four computer-based four-year degree programs. The database will: provide a test-bed for conclusions derived from demographic and pedagogic research from other studies. be mined for new associations and clusters of experience and behavior patterns that will suggest research in new directions. provide data on the IT students of Arkansas and on the efficacy of the various strategies that the Cyber-college has implement to achieve its mission. prototype recruitment and retention databases that could be installed in other IT college and thereby contribute an important tool to further the understanding of the efforts of IT colleges to serve under-represented population groups. Once built, this dynamic data model will be sustained within the Cyber-college and the data that it collects and the analysis that it engenders will provide insight to the longitudinal problem of maintaining the supply of college-trained professionals in the IT workforce nationally doc19930 none This proposal concerns the question of whether some solutions of the equations of incompressible, inviscid fluid flow develop spontaneous singularities in finite time. The objective is to uncover the mathematical structure of possible blowup flows suggested by the PI previous investigations. Two projects are planned. The first will be to use advanced computational techniques to reveal the asymptotic behavior associated with collapse and blowup. Previous work indicates that there exists an inner Leray-type self-similar solution which exhibits a finite-time singularity, a regular outer solution and a matching region of poloidal vorticity. The other project expands upon the observation that all candidate blowup flows found by all investigators have one or more discrete symmetries and can be associated with the finite number of point and space groups. All fluid field variables can be associated with irreducible representations. How the characteristics of the discrete point groups, such as degeneracy, commutivity, associated lattices and space groups effect flow solutions will be explored. The equations that govern the motion of an incompressible fluid, such as water, are routinely used by engineers and scientists for design and research. The most fundamental question about these equations, however, has been open for more than 250 years and reflects directly on the validity of using these equations as a model of fluid flow: whether solutions remain smooth or blowup in finite time. Finding an answer to this question for frictionless flow is addressed in this work. It is a very challenging problem computationally and will be a severe test on modern numerical techniques. Because of its importance, the related viscous problem has been selected as one of seven Clay Millennium prize problems regarded as the Hilbert problems for this century doc19931 none Although software reuse improves both the quality and productivity of software development, systematic reuse has not yet met its expected success due to difficulties in creating and maintaining reuse repositories and enabling software developers to build new systems with components from the reuse repository. The two issues are in a deadlock: if software developers are unable to reuse, the investments on reuse cannot be justified; if companies are unwilling to invest in reuse, software developers have little to reuse. This project takes a social-technical approach to address both issues. It will develop reuse-conducive environments based on the Seeding, Evolutionary Growth, and Reseeding (SER) model to guide thedevelopment and evolution of reuse repositories. It will instantiate the conceptual framework for reuse by creating a set of tools to support each phase of the SER model: SEEDER, BROKER, ENHANCER, and RESEEDER. This research will create a new understanding of the social, cognitive, and technical issues in software reuse, and explore new approaches and develop innovative tools to support reuse. The results of the research will make a significant impact on the design of information repository systems and human-centered software development environments doc19932 none The research component of the proposal is to devise automatic macromodeling procedures that extract higher-level models from detailed lower-level ones for automated design of Systems-on-Chip. An important aspect of this process, particularly for analog, mixed-signal and RF modules, is the incorporation of nonlinearities. This is essential for distortion and intermodulation characteristics. This work is concerned chiefly with modeling weak circuit nonlinearities. A significane increase in the predicted fidelity over current (essentially linear theory-based) procedures is expected. The proposed work is based on Volterra non-linear series expansion that captures essential non-linearities of a broad class of devices which include power amplifiers, mixers, frequency doublers, and switched-capacitor filters. The work is likely to be expandable to companding filters and Analog-to-Digital converters doc19933 none Many computation problems, including program analysis and model checking problems in particular, are most clearly and easily specified using realtional rules. Yet, developing and implementing efficient algorithms for these problems is a nontrivial, recurring task. This project proposes to develop a unified method for transformaing rule-based specifications and transformations to provide both time and space guarantees for the derived algorithms. We will focus in particular on rule-based specifications for program analysis and model checking problems and develop fully automatic methods for the transforamtions and the time and space analysis in this domain doc19934 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled The directionality of acoustic communication in passerine birds. The goal of the research is to develop a system for mapping the radiation of sound from vocalizing animals. The system is to be used to measure the directionality of different call types from passerine birds in open and forest habitats, and to test hypotheses about the functional significance of directionality in acoustic communication doc19935 none Suneeta Ramaswami Rugers U New Brunswick The broad goal of this project is the complete development of robust algorithms for the modeling and visualization of data in a specific application domain, namely medical imaging. The focus of the proposal is on the generation of quadrilateral and hexahedral meshes for medical data obtained from structural studies (MR and CT) of human organs. The generation of good quadrilateral and hexahedral (quad hex) meshes is not well-understood and several important questions remain open. By exploiting the geometry that is central to these problems, we aim to develop algorithms for generating guaranteed-quality surface and volume meshes composed of quadrilateral and hexahedral elements. Algorithmic techniques and data struc- tures from computational geometry will be utilized towards this end. We also investigate adaptive quad hex meshes, i.e., meshes designed to have varying levels of refinement depending on factors such as the desired level of detail in a localized part of the input domain. The algorithms will be designed for and tested on medical imaging data. Improved surface and volume meshing algorithms will directly impact automated clinical analysis of medical data, which is typically carried out by procedures that require finite element simulations on discrete anatomical models. Some examples of such procedures are elastic matching and viscous uid ow. Our work will be done in collabo- ration with researchers in the area of brain image analysis in the Department of Radiology at the University ofPennsylvania doc19936 none This research focuses on two main new ideas. First, the concept of breakdown point is generalized to correlated observations by defining the critical region of the badness measure implicitly rather than explicitly, thus covering situations with both uncorrelated and correlated observations. Secondly, a new method to robustify likelihoods is introduced that can be applied in any situation where a parametric likelihood is available. This new approach is intimately connected to measurement error models and reduces to well-known contaminated normal likelihoods in location-scale independent, identically distributed settings. This new approach will be used to robustify many of the commonly used methods in spatial data settings. The applications of this research include real data sources from environmental sciences, namely ozone concentrations and fine particulate matter in the U.S. This work will have impact on both, theoretical statisticians and practitioners of spatio-temporal statistics, and hence will foster collaboration between academia and industry. It aims to provide more reliable analyses of spatio-temporal data sets, and thus contribute to a better understanding of physical processes governing atmospherically-transported pollutants. In particular, it will provide more reliable evaluations of the effectiveness of the legislated emission reductions mandated in the Clean Air Act Amendments of . Moreover, this project will support the teaching and promotion of robust statistics and spatio-temporal statistics at North Carolina State University doc19937 none This project will investigate the problem of providing better access to web information and services to a rapidly growing user population. The goal is to take the next step toward scalability by performing a systematic study of architecture, problems, and performance issues in content distribution networks. New ways to reduce response time and the load imposed on the network will be explored. An integrated approach is adopted to study the synergetic effect of different components in content distribution systems. Specifically the research will include developing dynamic content delivery techniques, designing application-level multicast delivery protocols, developing dynamic server selection algorithms, and studying dynamic replica placement methods doc19938 none Hislop This award supports graduate students from US universities to participate in a special program on partial differential equations and spectral theory at the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Djursholm, Sweden. The workshop will provide a unique opportunity for young mathematicians to develop collaborations with their counterparts from Sweden, as well as with leaders in the field from all of Scandinavia. The theme of the program is the interaction between partial differential equations and spectral theory, and applications to microlocal analysis and Schrodinger operators. The Mittag-Leffler Institute is a world-renowned mathematics research institute located near Stockholm. The Institute has a research building with offices, conference room, and up-to-date library, and apartments for researchers are located on campus. As a result, the Institute is an ideal place for in-depth and collaborative mathematical study and provides an optimal milieu for fostering collaboration. The Fall Program is the third such program on differential equations and spectral theory held at the Institute, two others having been held in and doc19939 none This award supports simultaneous mathematical and numerical study of various low Reynolds number sedimentation flows. These systems are complicated by the long range nature of the fluid flows generated by individual solid particles as they fall, requiring efficient algorithms for particle simulations, introducing variable nonlinear coefficients of different dependencies into model continuum partial differential equations, and leading to nontrivial distributions in the statistical mechanics of the interacting particles. In this work, efficient algorithms specialized to dilute wall-bounded sedimentation, previously developed to investigate the scaling of velocity fluctuations in monodisperse sedimentation, will be used to provide quantitative data for comparison with existing and newly-developed kinetic and fluid models. The simulations will be generalized to include effects due to inclined channels, polydispersity, non-spherical particles, and small non-zero Reynolds numbers. Interactions between solid particles sedimenting in a fluid are important in many natural and industrial processes, including the settling motions of silt in rivers and dust in the air, and in applications which use centrifugal or gravitational separation such as those for proteins, minerals, waste water, and recyclable plastics. While the mathematics describing the interactions between individual particles and the suspending fluid are well known, simulations of large scale flows based on these rules are computationally prohibitive. It would be far preferable to use macroscopic models which are less costly to solve because they neglect the detailed motion of individual particles. Unfortunately, existing macroscopic models for sedimentation have very limited ranges of validity. This work will consider restricted classes of sedimentation systems in which efficient computation of the interactions between large numbers of particles remains possible because of simplified geometries and limits for the mathematical rules describing particle motion. Results will be used to help identify improved macroscopic models to describe both these restricted classes and more general sedimentation flows. Ultimately, this work will lead to improved equations for modeling sedimentation flows in nature and for better design of separation processes based on sedimentation doc19940 none G. Robert Meyerhoff The monumental work of W. Thurston has shown the fundamental importance of hyperbolic 3-manifolds within the study of 3- manifolds. The proposer plans to work on a hard open problem in the theory of hyperbolic 3-manifolds, and to attempt to strengthen connections between number theory and the study of invariants of hyperbolic 3-manifolds. The hard open question is the problem of finding the closed hyperbolic 3-manifold of minimum volume. The proposer, working jointly with D. Gabai and P. Milley, and in consultation with N. Thurston, has a computer-based scheme to attack this problem. The computational aspects of the approach are interesting in their own right. The connection between number theory algebraic K-theory and invariants of hyperbolic 3-manifolds is well-known, but a new approach to understanding it is proposed. Specifically, a new method for computing the Chern-Simons invariant of a hyperbolic 3-manifold might lead to interesting properties of the dilogarithm function. Almost 200 years ago, J. Bolyai, C. Gauss, and N. Lobachevsky revolutionized mathematics by claiming that a legitimate geometry could be constructed by taking the five classical postulates of Euclid and negating the fifth postulate (the parallel postulate). Further, they theorized that this new and mysterious non-Euclidean geometry (now called hyperbolic geometry ) would have important applications. Their theorizing has been borne out: hyperbolic geometry is vitally important in the modern study of geometry. For example, hyperbolic geometry turns out to be much more important than Euclidean geometry in the study of 3-dimensional manifolds (our 3-dimensional Universe is an example of a 3-dimensional manifold). As another example, it is quite possible that our Universe adheres to the laws of non-Euclidean geometry rather than the laws of Euclidean geometry. The proposer, working jointly with D. Gabai and P. Milley, and in consultation with N. Thurston, plans to work on a computer-based approach to solving one of the hardest and most fundamental problems about hyperbolic 3-manifolds: finding the smallest one. In addition, the proposer will try to strengthen the already existing connection between hyperbolic 3-manifolds and number theory. The history of mathematics has borne out the importance of finding strong connections between (supposedly) disparate areas of mathematics doc19941 none There has been much recent work on scheduling techniques that ensure fairness, temporal isolation, and timeliness among applications multiplexed on the same resource. Many systems that could benefit from the use of fair scheduling principles have workloads that necessitate the use of multiple processors; consider, for example, the proliferation of Internet service providers that host third-party websites on multiprocessor servers. Unfortunately, most prior work on multiprocessor fair scheduling has been rooted in task models that are too rigid to apply in many settings. The little research on more flexible models that has been done has been almost entirely experimental in nature, with little or no formal analysis of the scheduling algorithms being tested. In this project, fair scheduling algorithms based on rate-based scheduling principles will be developed and analyzed, both formally and experimentally. Specific project objectives include the development of (i) fair scheduling algorithms that minimize task migrations; (ii) extensions to these algorithms that allow tasks to synchronize and share resources; (iii) extensions that allow real-time and non-real-time applications to execute under a common framework; and (iv) techniques for managing dynamically-changing workloads in which tasks may join and leave the system doc19942 none This ITWF award provides support for the Alternate Pathways to Success in Information Technology (APSIT) program which seeks to explore the nature of the IT and engineering educational and career pathways used by successful female and minority Georgia Tech alumni. The objectives of the project are: 1. To determine, through the use of paper and telephone surveys, face-to-face interviews, and institute records of Georgia Tech alumni, whether the educational and career strategies used by white women and by men and women from under-represented ethnic groups differ from the strategies used by white men in their successful pursuit of IT and engineering degrees and careers. 2. To explore correlations between high school and college educational success (as measured by grade point average, and standardized test scores) with indices of later success in the IT and engineering work force, and to analyze these correlations by gender and ethnicity. 3. To explore IT and engineering field-specific differences in educational and career success for women and minorities doc19943 none Effective processes are of fundamental importance to manufacturing, government, engineering, and management. In all of these areas greater understanding and control of key processes can lead to improved effectiveness. For the past 15 years, it has also been recognized that processes are fundamental to software development, and that effective control of processes can lead to similar benefits, such as improved understanding, coordination, efficiency, and automation. It has been hoped that this would lead to reductions in software development cost, improvements in software product quality, and reductions in software development time. Our hypothesis is that progress towards these goals can be speeded by establishing a scientific basis upon which to build the process technologies that will support more effective software production. This research project will lead to the development of needed improvements to the Little-JIL process definition language, and the Juliette interpreter. These improvements will be validated by programming and running multiuser, iterative software design processes that are effective in integrating the activities of humans and computer automation. These processes should be of considerable value in themselves. Their development, moreover, will sharpen and validate the Little-JIL process language, resulting in clearer understandings of the underlying requirements for effective process definition languages doc19944 none Execution of distributed applications over the Internet involves method invocations on remote objects and coordination tasks. This proposal addresses the task coordination problem by (1) limiting the model of computation to tree structured concurrency, and (2) assuming that there is an environment that provides sacilities for remote method invocation on distributted objects, persistent storage,and computation using standard function library. Tree structured concurrency permits only restricted communications among the tasks: a task may spawn children task and all communications are between parents and their children. It can be shown that such structure communication, though less powerful than interactions in process networks, are sufficient to solve most problems of interest, and they avoid many of the problems associated with concurrency. The broader impact of this research will be to (1) design a theory for restricted class of concurrent computing, which still exhibits the power to solve a variety of task coordination problems, and (2) develop prototype implementations that allow non-programmers to develop with ease distributed applications on the Internet doc19945 none DMS - . M. Gross plans to study the geometry of mirror symmetry for Calabi-Yau manifolds. This will be done from the perspective of the Strominger-Yau-Zaslow conjecture and algebro-geometric analogues of this conjecture currently being developed by M. Gross and B. Siebert. These ideas will be pursued with a goal of finding a general mirror symmetry construction, associating to any polarized maximally unipotent degeneration of Calabi-Yau manifolds a mirror family of polarized Calabi-Yau manifolds. Implications of these ideas to understanding the behaviour of Ricci-flat metrics near maximally unipotent degenerations and the counting of rational curves using the notion of log Gromov-Witten invariants will also be pursued. The work proposed by M. Gross lies at the intersection of string theory and geometry. String theory replaces the traditional notion of the point particle with a small loop of string, moving through space-time. To make string theory compatible with quantum mechanics, space-time must be ten-dimensional. Since space-time appears four-dimensional, one expects six of these dimensions to be a very small `curled up geometric object. These geometric objects are called Calabi-Yau manifolds. In the early s, string theorists proposed a remarkable association between completely different Calabi-Yau manifolds: certain calculations extremely difficult to perform on one Calabi-Yau manifold could be completed by performing completely different, and much easier, calculations on a different Calabi-Yau manifold. This discovery was known as mirror symmetry. Since this time, many geometers have been trying to understand the mathematics behind this miraculous observation. The work of M. Gross hopes to give mathematical insight and explanation for the phenomenon of mirror symmetry doc19946 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Multi-species sequence comparison and compositional analysis of plant centromeres. This research seeks is to understand the composition, organization and evolution of centromeres--regions that mediate chromosome partitioning. Centromere sequences from relatives of the flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana are being compared to assess sequence conservation and determine the types and abundance of sequence classes. This will distinguish rapidly evolving sequences from those exhibiting significant conservation doc19947 none PI: Jianqing Fan The objectives of this proposal are to develop new and widely applicable approaches for semiparametric and nonparametric estimation and inferences, to study theoretical properties of these new approaches, and to evaluate their efficacy in data analyses. This proposal not only introduces a number of innovative techniques, but also provides various new and deep insights into statistical foundation. It will have significant impact on the future research of statistical methodologies, computation and theories. In particular, three inter-related areas are proposed for study. Firstly, a family of flexible semiparametric and nonparametric models is introduced. This allows one to study the extent to which response variables are associated with their covariates. The generalized likelihood ratio statistics is proposed for testing various hypotheses in multivariate semiparametric and nonparametric models. Secondly, new semiparametric and nonparametric models are proposed for understanding interest-rate dynamics, and stock price volatilities. Furthermore, the information on state-domain is incorporated to improve the efficiency of volatility estimation for bonds and to more accurately estimate the market risks of a portofolio. Thirdly, new techniques for variable selection, in the presence of a large number of variables, are proposed via nonconcave penalized likelihood. The innovation is that they estimate parameters and select variables simultaneously. The above techniques are widely applicable to many scientific and engineering problems. Multivariate nonparametric, semiparametric and large parametric models have been widely used. Statistical questions often arise such as if certain variables or factors are important to public health; if some risk factors contribute significantly to the survival time of patients; and if interest-rate dynamics or stock price processes are time-dependent or follow certain famous hypotheses, among others. Yet, there are no generally applicable tools available to answer these questions in multivariate semiparametric and non-saturated nonparametric models. The techniques proposed here permit one to objectively test scientific hypotheses without restrictive model assumptions. The techniques allow to better price financial derivatives and manage investment risk, to identify important risk variables and their possible interactions in the analysis of large epidemiological studies and to scrutinize famous hypotheses on stock prices doc19948 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. David R. Abbott and his colleagues will conduct 21 months of archaeological research focused on the unusually complex economy and the regional ceremonial network of the ancient Hohokam people. The Hohokam were desert farmers and craftsmen who inhabited hundreds of villages with populations of 200 residents or more through out southern and central Arizona from ca. A.D. 300 until A.D. . During previous NSF-funded research, it was shown that nearly all ceramic containers used during the Sedentary period (ca. A.D. 900- ) were made by few hands and were widely distributed to households across a large territory. An efficient and dependable mechanism for supply was clearly extant at that time, but by the succeeding Classic period (ca. A.D. - ) ceramic production had reverted to local manufacturing for local consumption. Those results evoke questions about how far back into Hohokam prehistory large-scale pottery production was practiced and how so many pots were so widely distributed. One hypothesis explains the Sedentary period ceramic distributions with possible periodic marketplaces associated ritual ball games played in more than 225 ballcourts spread throughout the region. These ball games drew crowds from surrounding and probably distant villages and may have served as venues where specialist-made pots and other domestic necessities were regularly bartered beyond the limits of kinship networks. This idea implies far more sophisticated economic arrangements than any previously supposed for the Hohokam. To further investigate this idea, the vessel forms and production sources of ceramic assemblages from the Colonial (ca. A.D. 775-900), late Pioneer (ca. A.D. 700-775), and early Pioneer (pre-A.D. 700) periods will be analyzed to determine how ceramic production and distribution were organized during each time period and determine for how long the sophisticated division of labor for ceramic production was extant among the Hohokam. Did it precede, parallel, or succeed the development of the ballcourt network, which began during the late Pioneer period and greatly expanded during the Colonial and Sedentary periods? The new research will also use recent chronological refinements to determine if the shift to localized ceramic production was coeval with the collapse of the ballcourt ceremonialism near the end of the Sedentary period. This research is important because it contributes to building cultural evolutionary theory and highlights the remarkable accomplishments of ancient Native American peoples in the Southwest. Sophisticated economics without centrally controlled and hierarchical political institutions make the Hohokam a fascinating exception to evolutionary suppositions that link organizational complexity with hierarchical structures. As such, reconstructing how their large and intricate networks developed and worked may be pivotal for improving synthetic theories of culture change doc19949 none Ma The principal investigator proposes to study various issues involving stochastic differential equations (hereafter SDEs), stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs), and their relations with partial differential equations (PDEs). A new functional form of nonlinear Feynman-Kac formula is sought, via a study of the general theory of backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs) with non-Lipschitz coefficients. The path regularity of the solutions to reflected backward SDEs (RBSDEs) will be studied, with an eye on its application to the numerical method for such equations. The study will also lead to the regularity of solutions to a class of obstacle problems in PDEs, via some new probabilistic representation formulae for the derivatives of such solutions. The PI proposes to continue his research on the new notion of stochastic viscosity solution for nonlinear SPDEs, including the stability and uniqueness results in the fully nonlinear case. Some stochastic control stochastic finance problems, inspired by a risk reserve model involving investment, will receive strong attention. One example is the optimal retention investment problem for an insurance company that uses the ruin probability as its stability criterion. The Feynman-Kac Formula is a powerful tool that links probability theory to analysis, especially to the theory of partial differential equations. The nonlinear form of this formula is useful for studying many nonlinear parabolic partial differential equations such as reaction diffusion equations, derived from expansion of advantaged genes in biology, combustion theory, as well as chemical kinetics. The celebrated Black-Scholes formula in modern stochastic finance theory and the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation in stochastic control theory are also, in essence, examples of the formula. The main part of the proposed research is to discover the possibility of advancing such formulae to a higher level, either by considering the functional form , or by considering the stochastic form (viscosity solution of fully nonlinear SPDEs). Some stochastic control problems arising from finance, insurance, and many other fields are naturally considered as applications of the theory doc19950 none Multiprocessor systems use synchronization primitives to coordinate the activities of multiple threads of control. Spin locks in particular are widely used in multiprocessor operating systems and in scientific appliactions. With the proliferation of multiprocessor servers, these locks have come to be widely used in commercial applications as well. The multiprogrammed nature of server workloads, however, requires that threads be able to time out and abandon an attempt to acquire a lock. Timeout is easy on small machines, which can use traditional test-and-set spin locks, but these locks do not scale to large machines. The principal alternative--scheduler-based locks such as those provided by Java--has also proven to be prohibitively expensive. The proposed research aims to address the cost of user-level synchronization in multiprocessor servers by means of two principal techniques: (1) the incorporation of timeout in scalable queue-based locks, and (2) the development of practical mechanisms for the construction of lock-free data structures. These techniques will be evaluated with respect to each other and to existing techniques, and will be incorporated into threaded run-time systems such as the Java Virtual Machine doc19951 none This research develops an integrated strategy for the effective testing of ubiquitous software systems accessed by the massive user population, such as those used to support the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW), to ensure their satisfactory performance and reliability from the users perspective. This strategy includes three important components: 1. Development of a set of high-level operational profiles (OPs), which enumerates major functions to be supported by a software and their usage frequencies by target users, organized in groups of related user functions. 2. For each high-level function group above, a Markov chain based model is constructed to exhaustively test high-level operations and selectively test important low-level implementations, with the testing results analyzed to identify system bottlenecks for reliability improvement. 3. Reliability of the critical parts identified above can be assured using traditional testing techniques or other quality assurance techniques. This research will involve industrial partners, including IBM, Nortel Networks, and Lockheed-Martin Aeronautics, for result validation, software tool support, and future deployment doc19952 none Distributed, heterogeneous (DH) software systems are critical for the operation of modern, globalized organizations. Like all software, DH systems come under evolutionary pressure as organizational needs evolve. Adapting DH systems to meet changing needs in areas such as security is challenging: Co-ordinated changes, made in different languages, and on different platforms must still preserve type-safety, and must not increase complexity and or complicate maintenance. This project investigates enhancements to standards-based middleware (e.g., CORBA) to support evolution. We preserve and enhance the core IDL-based heterogeneous philosophy of middleware. First, interface-description language (IDL), used to model the architecture-level interfaces of components, is enhanced to support modeling of the evolutionary changes made to a DH systems. Location of changes, types and life-times of new information to be created are all explicitly modeled in an aspect-oriented style at the IDL level. Code generation supports a wide range of implementation choices to realize these architectural change-models. All implementations are fully inter-operable. Finally, change-models and implementations can be compononentized , packaged up and added to existing systems. Like this research, our educational plans also span several topics areas, including functional programming, object-orientation, and architecture. We develop practically-grounded pedagogy on software evolution, comparing the varying approaches to separation of concerns in object-orientation, higher-order polymorphism (including monadic programming), connectors, and aspects doc19953 none Greg Turk GA Tech Res Corp GIT Methods of data capture such as range scanning, still photography, video and motion capture have begun to alter the manner in which computer graphics modelling, rendering and animation is performed. We propose to widen the applicability of captured data for model creation by develop-ing methods for re-use of geometry and images. We plan to pursue two related research directions. The first of these is to improve methods of performing texture synthesis. We plan to address a num-ber of the shortcomings of current texture synthesis methods, including the loss or mis-registration of fine features, the lack of variation in synthetic textures, the tuning of the parameters of the algo-rithms and the lack of user control. Two of the ideas that we plan to draw upon for this work are image metrics for human visual perception and the evaluation of the quality of synthesized images. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to these issues with regard to texture synthesis. Our second goal is the adaptation of texture synthesis methods to the creation of 3D geometry. Specifically, we plan to address the problems of creating height fields, displacement maps, and arbitrary 3D volumetric geometry. There are many challenges to extending texture synthesis ideas into 3D, so we plan to approach this increasingly difficult list of representations in a methodical fashion. Of course, our work in texture synthesis will inform much of the geometry synthesis work. Geometry re-use should allow a user to create synthetic terrain with the locations of mountains, rivers and hills specified by the user. Natural erosion and other characteristic features will come not from costly simulations, but from geometry synthesis from examples. Examples of terrain data are easily found from the USGS, and other digital geometry can be captured through range scanning and merging techniques doc19954 none As intrinsic leakage in transistor increases with technology scaling the effectiveness of quiescent current (IDDQ) testing reduces significantly. Transient current (IDD) based testing has been often cited and investigated as an alternative and or supplement to IDDQ testing in Digital CMOS circuits. While the potential of IDD testing for fault detection has been established for digital and analog circuits, there is no known efficient method for fault diagnosis using IDD analysis. We propose a novel integrated method for fault detection and diagnosis in digital CMOS circuits using IDD waveform analysis using wavelet transform. We use wavelet transform to decompose the IDD waveform in both time and frequency domain. The time-frequency resolution of the IDD signal helps us detect as well as localize faults. Initial experimental results on an 8-bit ALU show that wavelet based IDD analysis has the potential to efficiently detect and localize faults considering practical issues like effect of process variation and measurement noise. Transient current (IDD) analysis can also be effective for defect oriented testing of analog circuits. We observe that wavelet transform renders an efficient way for analyzing IDD for fault detection in analog circuits. The property of wavelet for resolving events in both time and frequency domain simultaneously and the property of better sub-banding than Fourier analysis, makes it a effective tool for IDD analysis. Moreover wavelet transform can be easily adapted to current waveforms from different circuits. We have observed that for equivalent number of spectral components, sensitivity of wavelet based fault detection in analog circuits is much higher than fourier or time-domain analysis for both catastrophic and parametric faults. Initial experimental results on a benchmark circuit show that wavelet based method is on average 25 times more sensitive than DFT for parametric faults and can be considered as a promising alternative for analog fault detection amidst measurement hardware noise and process variation. In the proposed research we will develop an integrated fault detection and diagnosis methodology using wavelet based transient current analysis for mixed-signal circuits. We will present the results of our research in domestic and international conferences. International conferences include (International Conference on CAD and CG in Macau, December , and International Conference on CAD and CG ; IEEE Design and Test in Europe doc19955 none Applications of Data Grouping for Effective Mobility Darrell D. E. Long The problem of reducing a mobile computer s communication and power requirements will be investigated. Specifically, this research will address both issues through improved storage management. Based on successes with automated data grouping and predictive power conservation, research will be conducted into improved data hoarding and disk power management techniques. Effective grouping of data will make it possible to improve the automation of mobile file hoarding, and decrease the effects of network latency and disconnections on the mobile user. Similarly, through the grouping and retrieval of related on-disk data, it is possible to improve disk power management beyond the theoretical limits of any previously attempted scheme. This will be done by actively modifying the access sequence to minimize power requirements. Through transformation of data access workloads, this novel approach reshapes disk idle times to effectively increase the amount of time a disk can be spun down. Improving the battery life of mobile computing devices is critical to their usefulness, and such power efficiency is clearly an environmentally responsible goal. This research will establish the effectiveness of on-line data grouping techniques to increase the amount of data accessed per operation, while simultaneously reducing the total number of disk operations doc19956 none Beeson, Michael San Jose State Univ Fdn This award will enhance the theorem-prover Otter to cope better with second-order logic. It will use this enhanced version of Otter to formalize a small amount of elementary number theory, a small amount of set theory, and theorems about the cardinality of finite sets, as required to proceed to theorems in group theory as usually presented in an undergraduate course in algebra, up to and perhaps (but not necessarily) including the Sylow theorems. It will also enhance Otter by adding a capability for polynomial simplification, which in turn will enable it to proceed further in number theory. Although first-order group theory has been a source of many test problems for automated deduction, the material in an undergraduate course typically begins with theorems about subgroups and homomorphisms, and uses the concept of a prime number, so second-order logic (or set theory) and induction are essential ingredients to even sophomore-level mathematics. It is high time that theorem-provers be made able to cope with these fundamental areas of mathematics, which are naturally multi-sorted (elements, numbers, functions, and sets) and second-order (elements, cosets, subgroups). The long-term aim of automated deduction is to make the computer useful as a mathematician s assistant . The goal is that the computer could check proofs, filling in any missing details, and verify their correctness. Perhaps the computer could carry out some of the simpler parts of the mathematics mechanically. Maybe (in the distant future) the computer might even prove interesting new theorems on a regular basis. At present computers can be used for some kinds of calculations, but their use for helping with proofs is in its infancy, in spite of half a century of research. Part of the problem is the richness of mathematical language; part of the problem is the complicated relationship between calculations and proofs; and part of the problem is the needle-in-the-haystack difficulty of finding a proof or disproof of an unsolved conjecture. Otter is a theorem-proving program developed at Argonne National Laboratories. This research will provide some enhancements to Otter that should help it deal with the richness of language problem and the calculations within proofs problem. To test the effectiveness of our efforts, the PI will try to computerize some theorems in mathematics that are usually taught in the sophomore or junior year to mathematics majors. These are theorems in an area of mathematics called group theory , which usually comes after calculus and is widely used in many branches of mathematics and physics. Many of the theorems found in the first course in this subject have so far resisted attempts to get computers to prove them doc19957 none Managing the energy consumption of computers requires cooperation between energy aware applications and operating systems. This research seeks to fully explore the energy management space surrounding the interaction of applications and the operating system. Applications should adjust their energy consumption when appropriate, but must be provided accurate information on their individual energy consumption. The operating system must implement the mechanisms and policies to determine energy consumption and allocate it fairly as a global system resource. This research will first re-examine operating system structure with an emphasis on managing energy as a first class resource. Energy management cuts across all traditional system resources, with the CPU, disk, network, and memory all exhibiting unique energy consumption characteristics. Next, the work will explore policies for allocating energy to competing tasks. The goal is to maintain fairness while observing user-specified priorities and soft real-time deadlines. The end product of this research will be a comprehensive framework for globally managing energy in a diverse set of scenarios, ranging from a single mobile computer, to wireless sensor networks that may have aggregate goals across a large number of sensors, to hosting centers that wish to provide maximum performance with minimum energy consumption doc19958 none Margaret F. Symington The Principal Investigator proposes to use singular Lagrangian fibrations to gain insight into the topology of symplectic manifolds. The ultimate goal is to develop an effective language for constructing and analyzing symplectic four-manifolds, analogous to Kirby calculus for smooth four-manifolds. This work lies at the intersection of toric geometry, integrable systems and smooth four-manifold topology. Progress on this project will allow the presentation of symplectic four-manifolds as generalized sums of well-understood manifolds. For instance, this approach has allowed the Principal Investigator to specialize a smooth surgery to the symplectic category and thereby determine the existence of symplectic structures on an infinite family of four-manifolds with exotic smooth structures. Further work will include extensions to dimension six where such fibrations arise in the ground-breaking theory of mirror symmetry. A manifold is the generalization of a surface to other dimensions. For a manifold to be symplectic it must have an internal structure akin to the space of positions and velocities of a mechanical system such as a pendulum. Symplectic manifolds are ubiquitous in topology, geometry and physics. Recently great progress has been made in understanding symplectic manifolds, especially of dimension four, but many basic questions remain unanswered. For instance, given a manifold there is no general way to determine if it permits the internal structure required for it to be symplectic. One way to attack such a question is to require some additional structure on the manifold. The Principal Investigator proposes to deepen our understanding of these manifolds by appealing to a higher-dimensional analog of topographic maps for measuring elevation. The additional structure could be thought of as the analog of lines of constant elevation. In essence, the Principal Investigator plans to develop two-dimensional maps that yield enough information to completely determine the terrain (the four-dimensional manifold) and a legend that make these maps interpretable doc19959 none Michael Gleicher U of Wisconsin-Madison As the dangers of our world become more apparent, and our desire to prepare for them increases, there is a growing need for virtual experiences: simulated environments that convey to a participant the sense that they are in a situation, not just a place. A virtual experience can provide an opportunity to explore a situation that is too dangerous to rehearse, too impractical to create, or too inconvenient to attend. They may be used for training, for example to give first hand experience to emergency response personnel in directing panicked crowds; for design, for example to determine how people interact with a space before it is constructed; or for entertainment. The key to a virtual experience is that they combine environment and situation. Simply creating a visually compelling virtual environment is insufficient. Our vision is to use compelling virtual experiences in training, research and entertainment. To be effec- tive in these applications, virtual environments must be authored to meet specific pedagogical and commu- nicative goals. Realizing this vision, therefore, requires technologies for both simulating and rendering the worlds and enabling an author to specify behavior effectively doc19960 none H. Chen, The University of Arizona, Tucson It is proposed to investigate the feasibility of applying intelligent search techniques for the filed of nanoscale science and engineering (NSE) on databases and websites. The motivation for the research is that searching the World Wide Web for information in NSE with conventional search engines (like Google or Yahoo!) yields several thousand hits, most of which are of low value or relevance to the search objective while other related data are missed. Therefore, customized intelligent search techniques are needed to enable NSE researchers and the public to learn about recent developments in the subspecialties of NSE in which they may have interests. The focus is on the academic and industrial data, in US and abroad. A phased approach is proposed: a prototype portal (web site) and vertical search engine in three months, based on adaptations of existing tools plus NSE discipline knowledge, followed by enhancing in the subsequent six months with intelligent searching and clustering, post-retrieval analysis, automated directory generation, and user testing and evaluation. Successful implementation of a domain-specific portal and intelligent search capability for NSE will benefit not only academic community but also the government and industry users doc19961 none Gravner Professor Gravner will pursue further research in cellular automata. The research will continue in several new directions. The growth models featured in this project range from simple threshold rules and competition dynamics, to interacting systems of random walks and percolation models in low- and high-dimensional spaces. Among the principle topics are: effects of random perturbations in the environment and in the rule, fluctuations of random interfaces, generation of fractal patterns, behavior of large--neighborhood systems, large scale limits of systems of random walks, and relationship between structure of genotype space and genetic diversity. The aim of this project is to understand microscopic and macroscopic principles by which various physical systems propagate disturbances far from the equilibrium. Among instances of such growth dynamics are crystal growth, spread of epidemics, propagation of waves, competition between species, and genetic diversification. Such research can contribute to understanding of such natural phenomena as: threshold density for survival and growth vs. the range of interaction for species in an unfriendly environment, transition between sharp geometric crystal shapes and rough random ones, effects of noisy environments on spread of infections, validity of approximation based on large range of interaction or fast diffusion, and role of neutral mutations in genetic drift doc19962 none Shewchuk, Jonathan U of Calif Berkeley We intend to develop fast, versatile, and visually accurate computational models for viscoplas-tic materials ranging from stiff, non-compliant solids to low viscosity fluids. We are designing these models for applications where visual realism, computation speed, and robustness are the predominant requirements (with numerical accuracy being subordinate). Examples of such applications include real-time interactive training simulations (e.g. surgical simulation or haz-ardous duty simulations) and off-line generation of visualizations (e.g. cinematic effects or accident reenactment). To achieve this goal, we must develop fast, guaranteed-quality methods for generating and in-crementally updating unstructured (irregular) triangular and tetrahedral meshes. Dynamically changing meshes are a necessity to model the complete range of viscoplastic materials, espe-cially where large deformations and mixing may occur. Thus, the actions of the numerical simulation and the remeshing algorithms must be tightly integrated, especially if we wish to minimize errors due to interpolation and reinterpolation. To ensure that our dynamic meshing algorithms and implementations are useful for other applications as well, we will develop a general methodology for communicating information between the numerical simulation and the mesh generator doc19963 none Daniel Ruberman, Jerome Levine, and Kiyoshi Igusa The topology group at Brandeis University proposes research on knot theory and 3-manifolds, gauge-theory and 4-manifolds, and on higher Reidemeister torsion of families of manifolds. Jerome Levine plans to continue his study of finite type invariants of 3-manifolds. In particular, he plans to investigate a graphical interpretation of a new surgery-theoretic theory proposed in a recent paper. He also will investigate various questions concerning boundary link invariants such as the signature-type invariant and the relationship between the Farber invariant and non-commutative Reidemeister torsion. Daniel Ruberman s research uses gauge theory to investigate the geometry and topology of 4-dimensional manifolds. He will extend his program of using Seiberg-Witten theory and Yang-Mills theory to explore families of diffeomorphisms of 4-manifolds and positive scalar curvature metrics on a 4-manifold. Further work explores whether finiteness theorems of Riemannian geometry hold in dimension 4. Seiberg-Witten and Donaldson theory will also be used to investigate a simple but important class of non-simply-connected 4-manifolds. Kiyoshi Igusa s work extends his study of higher Franz-Reidemeister torsion to the complex case and to various new spaces of graphs. He will use this to interpret the Miller-Morita-Mumford classes in terms of the higher Franz-Reidemeister (FR) torsion. Our research encompasses a number of themes in geometry and topology. One of these is the interplay between topology and algebra, and another is the interplay between topology and theoretical physics. To study spaces or other topological objects such as knots, we encode some aspects of the space into familiar algebraic objects such as matrices or polynomials. Some of the algebra used to study 3-dimensional objects is connected with ideas developed by physicists to understand quantum field theory, especially the Feynmann integral. Investigating this interplay contributes to our understanding of the 3-dimensional world in which we live. Part of our work is concerned with the evolution of spaces--the study of the way in which they change as some parameter is varied. Some of the research in this direction develops algebraic tools which apply in the case when there are many independent parameters. Another component studies the evolution of 4-dimensional spaces and geometries, using techniques arising in gauge theory, a fundamental geometrical tool in theoretical physics doc19964 none Ming Gu U of Calif - Berkeley The San Andreas Fault zone Observatory at Depth (SAFOD) Pilot Hole will provide an excellent opportunity for exploring the relationship between fault slip and the thermal evolution of the crust by studying core samples from varying depths using two complementary thermochronologic methods. The Pilot Hole, located in Parkfield less than two kilometers from the San Andreas fault will reach a depth of 2.1 km. The borehole will intersect Salinian granitic rocks at a depth of less than 1 km and similar granitic rocks outcrop at the surface within a few kilometers of the Pilot Hole. We will analyze samples from borehole cuttings at depth intervals of 100 - 200 m and from the surface outcrops. We will determine the thermal history of the samples using apatite fission track and U Th-He thermochronometers doc19965 none Zena Ariola U of Oregon Eugene The general objective of this proposal is to gain a more robust understanding of the semantics and logical foundations of programming languages. The activities will be based on the close correspon-dence between syntactic theories for realistic programming languages and sequent calculi for logic. This correspondence is a generalization of the Curry-Howard isomorphism that relates the simply typed calculus and intuitionistic natural-deduction logic, and is at the heart of many automated proof systems for reasoning about programs. The specific objectives and their potential impact are: Algorithms and Tools: Our experience has shown that the proposed study of syntactic the-ories and associated logics is tedious and error-prone: it requires many mundane but fun-damental tasks to be repeatedly performed. Such tasks include verifying that the syntactic heory is well-formed, that evaluation is a well-defined partial function, and that subject re-duction holds. On the logical side, these properties are related to the consistency of the logic and the soundness of the proof simplication rules. Hence, to enable the study of non-trivial syntactic theories and logics, previous work by the investigators included the design and im-plementation of algorithms and theorem-proving techniques suitable for the automation of the manipulation of syntactic theories. This effort has led to a prototype system (SL) for lightweight description and reasoning about syntactic theories. This proposal includes ac-tivities to extend and refine the current prototype and to make it available to all interested researchers and students doc19966 none Krener This proposal is for research on several promising new approaches to designing an observer for a nonlinear control system, including linearization of the state error dynamics, backstepping and multiple extended Kalman filters. In order to decide which type of observer is appropriate for a given nonlinear system, one needs a classification of the range of possibilities. Therefore a study of the normal forms of a nonlinear system under a group action that is appropriate to observer design is also proposed. A control system is a mathematical model of a real world process. It has inputs and outputs which model the way the way the system interacts with the external world and has state variables, which describe the internal memory of the system. The state evolves according to some dynamical model driven by the inputs and the output is some function of the state and possibly the input. The fundamental problem of control systems is to close the loop in such a way as to achieve stability. We wish to use negative feedback based on the current state to stabilize the system to some desirable operating regime. But usually the current state is not directly measurable so we must design an observer to estimate it from the past inputs and outputs. The development of nonlinear observer design methodologies is a paramount problem of systems theory and its applications. There is no current approach that is effective for all nonlinear systems doc19967 none The Girl Scouts, Hornets Nest Council has been extremely active in the lives of adolescent girls in the Charlotte regional community for over 65 years. In the 21st century, this involves reaching out to widely diverse populations including recent immigrants from Asia, Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe. The success of these outreach programs depends on understanding the language and culture of the families in these communities and providing activities, support, and education that is deemed appropriate and relevant for all of the girls and adults involved. Girls all over the country are faced with a range of opportunities that were not available to previous generations. Part of the Girl Scout mission is to help girls gain insight into coping with contemporary moral and social dilemmas. Through a series of Girl-Scout-sponsored series of innovative and engaging programs, girls learn about preventing teen pregnancy, avoiding substance abuse, and understanding the influence of popular culture on creating faulty self-images regarding one s body and mind. With support from ITWF, the Hornets Nest Council will deliver this content in a new and innovative way - through a custom technology-based simulation entitled, Making Choices. Making Choices will use a variety of technologies including wireless networked laptop computers, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), printers, scanner and digital cameras to deliver a series of simulation activities (totaling 3-5 hours of instructions). A research evaluation study will assess attitudes of girls and women volunteers who participate in the standard programs versus the technology-based programs doc19968 none Software systems evolve over time in order to adapt to changes in environment. Graceful software evolution requires that only expected changes in functionality occur; while desirable, this is difficult to achieve. Software tools are needed to automate the evolution of complex software systems containing heterogeneous components, by reporting change impact information to programmers, allowing examination of the effects of code edits. Tool support for change impact analysis has a clear potential to boost programmer productivity and enable safe code enhancement. This research in change impact analysis assumes that an object-oriented system is developed with a suite of tests, run as the system is updated to check the safety of changes. Analyses can determine which tests are affected and which changes affect each of these tests. Since these tests often exercise independent functionalities, the tests affected correspond to those functionalities that may have been altered. This research will develop an interactive tool for change impact analysis of Java, as part of a industrial-strength programming environment to ensure practicality. The tool will allow experimentation with the granularity of changes and program representations, incrementalization of the analyses, collection of a Java benchmark suite, and application to collaborative software development doc19969 none High-speed circuits are highly pipelined, use latches as opposed to flip-flops, and practice extensive time borrowing to reduce overheads of pipelining. Since speed is a critical objective, high quality delay testing, such as path delay testing, is imperative for such circuits. Use of latches and extensive time borrowing have two important consequences that give rise to new problems in delay testing. First, since the paths in one block interact with the paths in the blocks in its fan in and fan out, it becomes necessary to test for delay faults multi-block paths, i.e., paths that traverse multiple blocks of a circuit. The number of such paths is often astronomical. Second, due to time borrowing, values at a latch output are not applied at any fixed time, but at some time within a range. Since the exact time when values are applied at the outputs of a latch vary from vector to vector and from one fabricated copy of a chip to another, it is impossible to design design-for-testability (DFT) circuitry that mimics the timing of events during the normal mode of operation. Two types of test application schemes are proposed that can be implemented using scan designs that do not try to mimic the timing of events during the circuit s normal operation but apply values and capture responses at specific clock edges. It is then proven that it is indeed possible to use such scan to precisely test, for path delay faults, latch based circuits that use time borrowing. Techniques to use above DFT technique to efficiently test such high-speed circuits will be developed. This will include development of a technique to generate optimal test plans as well as tools that can generate the types of tests and perform detailed design of DFT circuitry required by the proposed approach. The proposed research will provide the first systematic approach for achieving, at reasonable costs, efficient testing for path delay faults in high speed circuits while providing provably high test quality. The tools developed will be leveraged and extended for instructional purposes doc19970 none of the non-linear sigma-model describing the superconductivity. Jointly with P.-E. Paradan we a planning to use the deformed Dirac operator in the study of discrete series representations of Lie groups. The elliptic operators on compact manifolds have very nice properties. In this project we introduce a class of operators on non-compact manifolds with similar properties. The study of these operators not only leads to a generalization of many theorems from compact manifolds to non-compact ones, but also provides new results and methods in the theory of compact manifolds. The applications of these results and methods range from the mathematical theory of superconductivity to representation theory and complex geometry doc19971 none This research involves several topics in the theory and application of interacting particle systems. These processes are stochastic models for large systems of interacting components. Among the phenomena these systems model are: competition of species, epidemics, spread of genetic traits, catalytic chemical reactions, and more. The investigator will pursue research on several specific problems. The first project involves the mutually catalytic branching process, which models the evolution of two populations whose growth rates depend on one another. The second project concerns the relationship between low density interacting particle systems and measure-valued diffusions, especially the convergence of rescaled versions of the former to super-Brownian motion. The third project treats some questions from mathematical genetics, especially limiting results for the stepping stone model on the two dimensional integer lattice. In the fourth project a class of generalized branching random walks is considered. The key to resolving the main question of local extinction versus stability for this class appears to be the analysis of a particular case with a certain minimal branching rate which takes a form not previously considered. This research involves several topics in the theory and application of interacting particle systems or stochastic spatial processes. The goal of this research is to obtain a better qualitative understanding of various complex phenomena that interacting particle systems model well. These are large systems made up of many interacting components, usually with a stochastic or random element. For example, a simple model for the evolution of a genetic trait through a spatially distributed population fits into this framework. It incorporates the movement of individuals across spatially distributed colonies, and mutation at a small rate. The investigator hopes to show that this type of model can give more accurate results than the traditional, simpler non-spatial models widely used. Part of the proposed research concerns very specific models and questions such as this one, and part of the proposed research will aim at developing general mathematical techniques for handling models of this type doc19972 none Xingru Zhang The study of compact irreducible 3-manifolds splits naturally into cases of finite fundamental groups and infinite fundamental groups. In the case of infinite fundamental groups, the virtual Haken conjecture of Waldhausen has been serving as a guiding open problem, because virtual Haken 3-manifolds possess similar nice properties as Haken 3-manifolds, such as topological rigidity, residually finite fundamental groups and geometric decomposition in Thurston s sense. Concerning 3-manifolds with finite fundamental groups, the Poincare conjecture is perhaps the most fundamental open problem. The well known Property-P conjecture may be considered as a special case of the Poincare conjecture. Xingru Zhang proposes to continue his investigation of the virtual Haken conjecture and the Property-P conjecture, along with some closely related problems, such as embedded or immersed essential surfaces in 3-manifolds, various exceptional Dehn surgeries on hyperbolic knots, and representations of 3-manifold groups. Three dimensional manifold topology, including the knot theory, has been one of the most active research areas in topology over the last twenty-five years. This is a rich, beautiful and challenging area where topology meshes up harmonically with algebra and geometry. For instance, if a compact 3-manifold without boundary admits a complete hyperbolic metric, then the topology, the fundamental group and the hyperbolic metric of the manifold mutually determine each other. In general, it is fundamental to know that to what extent the topology of a compact 3-manifold is determined by the fundamental group of the manifold, and that whether the interior of a compact 3-manifold admits one of the eight standard complete metrics under the condition that the manifold contains no essential 2-spheres or 2-tori. In this proposal the PI plans to continue his investigation in this direction doc19973 none Cluster computing systems are becoming increasingly popular for providing cost-effective and affordable computing environments for a range of applications (such as databases, data mining, visualization, collaborative computing, and high performance computing). These applications require four fundamental communication services from the underlying communication subsystem: point-to-point communication, collective communication, synchronization, and Quality of Service (QoS). Modern Network Interface Cards (NICs) for clusters incorporate one or more programmable processors, DMA channels, and large amount of memory. The NICs are becoming faster, smarter, and intelligent and are being designated as Active Network Interfaces. Research is proposed along the following directions to take advantage of such active network interfaces for implementing and delivering scalable communication services for next generation clusters: 1) Using multi-CPU NICs and their architectural features to provide fast point-to-point communication, 2) Designing NIC-level support for high-performance and scalable collective communication and synchronization, 3) Taking advantage of programmable NIC-level features to provide QoS support, and 4) Experimentally evaluating the benefits of the new enhanced communication services for a wide range of applications using message passing programming model. Through extensive theoretical, experimental, and simulation studies, NIC-based solutions are planned to be designed, developed, implemented, and evaluated for clusters with Myrinet and Gigabit Ethernet interconnects doc19974 none This ITWF award provides support to investigate how characteristics of the information technology (IT) workplace can foster increased retention and advancement of women and minorities. In the first year, several work organizations with IT departments of varying sizes and demographic compositions will be recruited to participate in the study. Survey and interview data will be collected from human resource directors, IT supervisors and IT employees in order to assess the climate for opportunity and inclusion of each department. The goal is to identify barriers and enablers to the career success of women and minorities in IT departments. In the second year, a survey feedback intervention will be conducted in each participating organization to encourage IT departments to capitalize on their strengths and improve their weaknesses with regard to opportunity and inclusion for all employees. In the third year, survey and interview data will again be collected to assess the effectiveness of the interventions implemented during the second year. The objective is not only to assist the participating organizations in establishing an inclusive workplace environment, but also to develop best practices that can be shared, through publications and presentations, with others in the IT field and researchers interested in workplace diversity issues doc19975 none This small grant for exploratory research investigates the mechanisms by which people show resilient responses to the events surrounding the September 11, terrorist attacks. The project focuses on how positive emotions allow for psychological resilience in the face of ongoing threat. Psychological resilience involves the ability to overcome stress and even thrive in the face of adversity. Much of the existing literature focuses on the predictors of resilience (e.g., individual, social protective factors) and their outcomes (e.g., positive mental and physical health). Remarkably, very little attention has been given to the underlying mechanisms that contribute to this capacity to fare well, especially in the face of ongoing stressful experiences. In light of the continuing threat and vulnerability associated with the aftermath of the September 11, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, including threats involving bioterrorism, war, and economic turbulence, it is important to examine the factors that protect individuals from developing negative psychological consequences associated with on-going stress of a serious nature. The continued threat associated with the ambiguity of future events could have dire consequences on an individual s decision-making strategies for future events in a host of life domains, possibly resulting in psychological and physical damage to the individual. This project examines three possible mechanisms that might begin to explain the process by which positive emotions are useful in achieving resilience, especially in the face of ongoing threat: emotional complexity, attention, and tolerance of ambiguity. The aim of the project is to conduct initial tests of a conceptual model, which illustrates how positive emotions promote psychological resilience doc19976 none The objective of the project is to produce useful and practical methods for the development of large complex software systems. The research will address the problem of composing software components into large systems that have guaranteed correctness properties. State-explosion (the exponential growth of the number of possible system behaviors with the number of the system s components) is avoided by analyzing interactions among every pair of components separately, rather than inspecting the interaction of all components at once. This local approach nevertheless enables us to prove that the overall system behaves as desired. Since the number of behaviors that have to be analyzed is much smaller, the amount of effort needed to rigorously analyze and verify large systems is greatly reduced. The main activities are: 1. Develop techniques for the precise description of the required behavior of a software component. 2. Develop practical methods for reasoning about the behavior that results when a set of components are connected to form a large system. The benefit of this research is to reduce the cost of creating realistic size software systems that have demonstrable correctness properties doc19977 none A critical issue for process-based software development tools and methodologies is to balance the need for innovation with knowledge of past experiences and best practices. Achieving this balance is particularly important for software development, which involves the development of a highly variable product requiring continuous process adjustments. Past work has focused on either creating process frameworks at a high level of abstraction that avoids issues of variance or composing fine-grained activities with process languages. These approaches miss important opportunities to capture and reuse process knowledge as a resource for future development efforts. The research objectives are to: Advance the state of research in knowledge-based support for process-centered software engineering through meta-modeling tools capable of constructing a variety of organization-level methodologies that can be tailored to specific development efforts. The tools are complemented by an experience-based approach that captures development practices to continuously refine and improve the methodology to meet emerging needs of software development organizations. Employ a mixture of empirical studies to investigate process improvisation and the impact of delivering process and product knowledge sources during the development process. This strategy will be used to both evaluate innovative system building efforts and improve the overall understanding of software development practices doc19978 none This research is to study various aspects of inverse scattering problems arising in wave propagation and in quantum mechanics and their applications. These include wave propagation in a nonhomogeneous and absorptive medium and the determination of the nonhomogeneities and absorptivity of the medium, X-ray reflectometry and the determination of material properties of stratified thin films by probing them with X-rays, focusing of waves at target locations and the determination medium properties by using wave focusing, developing exact quadratures to analytically continue a reflection coefficient from an interval to larger domains and their numerical implementation, and solving inverse scattering problems in order to recover functions with slower decay conditions at infinity. The inverse scattering problems investigated have important applications in many areas such as materials science, nondestructive testing, acoustic imaging, and remote sensing. The principal aim is to determine properties of a target in a remote fashion: send a wave onto the target, analyze the scattered wave, and infer the properties of the target from the scattering data. In addition to its practical importance in physical sciences, engineering, and other applied areas, the research will contribute mathematical techniques to various areas of mathematics and it will also help to train some graduate and undergraduate students in applied mathematics doc19979 none The primary goal of the research is to create more efficient propagators for atomistic computer simulations that reliably achieve acceptable levels of accuracy and thus to make possible more ambitious scientific calculations. A second goal is to explore innovative techniques that simulate long-time molecular motions without sequentially stepping through billions of intermediate states, as would be necessary with standard approaches. New algorithms for both dynamics and sampling are to be constructed using such techniques as modified energy functions that compensate for finite steps, stochastic stabilization, and optimization of method parameters, together with physical insight. Promising algorithms are tested and compared using mathematical analyses and computer experiments. Tools for mathematical analysis include the concept of effective accuracy, the method of modified equations, linear analysis, and KAM theory. Computer experiments are performed on model problems chosen to reveal unambiguously the properties of interest. Faster algorithms are to be implemented in molecular simulation software developed and distributed for public use in a project at the University of Illinois Beckman Institute. Many of the techniques will apply not only to molecular simulations but also to simulations in astrophysics, structural mechanics, and fluids. Computer simulations of atomic detail are heavily employed in physics, chemistry, materials science, and structural biology. These calculations require the generation of sequences of atomic configurations either for the purpose of modeling actual motion or for the purpose of calculating averaged values and structures from a wide range of representative samples. The computing time ranges from hours to months, so it can benefit tremendously from faster algorithms. It is the objective of this research project to do this: to create much more efficient propagators for dynamics and sampling that reliably achieve acceptable levels of accuracy. The construction of such algorithms employs ideas from mathematics and computer science together with physical insight. Promising algorithms are tested and compared using mathematical analyses and computer experiments. The successful ones are implemented in molecular modeling software being developed for widespread use in a project at the University of Illinois Beckman Institute. These advances in methodology are also to be disseminated in articles targeted to practitioners. Many of the techniques will apply not only to molecular simulations but also to simulations in astrophysics, structural mechanics, and fluids. Potentially, the availability of accelerated propagation algorithms will lead to a variety of scientific results that otherwise would not be obtained. The performance of the research will be a valuable interdisciplinary experience for a graduate student doc19980 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Using Geographic Information Systems in spatially explicit analyses of population genetic structure. This research uses geographic information systems (GIS) to explore methods that incorporate explicit environmental information in distributional analyses of genetic variation within species. The investigations are focused in Southern California, where previous research has produced detailed environmental data layers and many genetic data sets for species in similar functional groups. It is being determined the extent to which landscape-level processes influence the creation, distribution, and maintenance of genetic biodiversity across this region doc19981 none Eugene Lerman and Susan Tolman The main subject of our proposal in the geometry and topology of group actions on symplectic and contact manifolds. The underlying theme is that these symmetries offer a very powerful tool for classifying or computing invariants of such manifolds. More specifically, ideas that we will investigate include: the cohomology of symplectic quotients by loop groups, the cohomology of contact quotients, highly symmetric manifolds, the Gromov width of coadjoint orbits, the topology of the group of symplectomorphisms, uniruled symplectic manifolds, foundational work on group actions on contact manifolds, the relationship between completely integrable systems and toric contact manifolds, and explicit constructions of special metrics on contact manifolds. The goal of the project is to further our understanding of two important types of geometry --- symplectic and contact. Both geometries have their origins in mechanics and optics and are currently of interest to physicists investigating string theories doc19982 none Error estimates for both interpolation and approximation are central in developing rigorous algorithms or numerical methods in any application. A major difficulty in scattered-data problems has been that the class of data-generating functions for which the methods are known to converge is much smaller than what one encounters in practice. This is problematic in numerically solving partial differential equations via Radial Basis Function collocation, since target functions need to be smoother than the basis functions, which is a major restriction in hyperbolic problems. One of the goals of this project is to obtain error estimates for a greatly expanded class of target functions. In our very recent work on interpolation via a restricted class of Spherical Basis Functions on the sphere, such estimates were obtained. This provides hope that the broader goal is attainable. Another important goal is to develop and implement rigorous, computationally efficient algorithms for numerical partial differential equation problems, neural networks, and problems from the geosciences requiring scattered-data surface fitting on the sphere. The investigation of scattered-data modeling is of great potential importance for the understanding of earth based phenomena of every kind. Fitting surfaces to meteorological or geophysical data collected via satellites or ground stations is a good example of such an application. Spherical basis functions (SBFs) have been used in such problems. Radial and periodic basis functions have been extensively employed in a variety of neural networks, including architectures used for direction-finding via phased-array radar. Very recently, they have been employed in grid-free numerical methods for solving partial differential equations, and to do computer graphics and computer aided design problems. Calculations assocaited with these are time consuming. Recent advances have ameliorated these difficulties and the work under this project will continue to improve efficiency doc19983 none Melching This is a U.S.-China joint workshop proposal on sediment transport and environmental studies submitted by Dr. Charles Melching, Marquette University, in cooperation with Dr. Zhao-Yin Wang, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. The meeting will be held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in July . This is the second of the two workshops on river sediment related problems. The first was on sediment transport and sediment-induced disasters in Beijing, China in March . The topic of the second workshop is important and could contribute to the U.S.-China cooperation on research concerning remediation of comtaminated sediments and restoration of river ecosystems. The NSF and the Natural Science Foundation of China jointly support this workshop doc19984 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Development and testing of genetic algorithms for inferring maximum-likelihood based phylogenies from very large, heterogeneous molecular data sets. Likelihood-based phylogenetic algorithms become very computationally expensive as data sets become larger. However, genetic algorithms offer an efficient alternative to existing methods. This project uses a large molecular data set to test the efficiency and accuracy of a recently developed genetic algorithm under various models of evolution and search conditions. The data are being used to construct a phylogeny of frogs doc19985 none Prop #: PI: Steven Rabalais This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessel Pelican operated by the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON) and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Steven Rabalais is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire a multi-purpose oceanographic winch system and a group purchase of 18 gas detection meters for distribution to the academic research fleet doc19986 none Jeffrey F. Brock THE CLASSIFICATION PROBLEM FOR HYPERBOLIC 3-MANIFOLDS The PI, Jeffrey Brock, will synthesize diverse techniques in the deformation theory of hyperbolic 3-manifolds to address classification problem for hyperbolic 3-manifolds. Brock will undertake joint work with K. Bromberg that employs the theory of hyperbolic cone-manifolds to show that each tame hyperbolic 3-manifold M is approximated by geometrically finite 3-manifolds. This conjecture, known as the Density Conjecture has recently been solved by Brock and Bromberg in certain cases. Brock will also work toward completing joint work with R. Canary and Y. Minsky to prove Thurston s ending lamination conjecture, which predicts that a tame hyperbolic 3-manifold is determined by its topology and its end invariants: combinatorial invariants attached to the ``ends of a hyperbolic 3-manifold. In new joint work with Bromberg, R. Evans, and J. Souto, Brock will study the question of whether each algebraic limit of a sequence of geometrically finite hyperbolic 3-manifolds is itself topologically tame. This joint project has implications for a conjecture of Ahlfors that the limit set of a finitely generated Kleinian group has either measure zero or full measure in the Riemann sphere. Classifying mathematical objects plays much the same scientific role as classifying biological, chemical, or physical phenomena in the development of these fields. For example, with the human genome cracked, scientists may now isolate specific genetic causes or predispositions to diseases, greatly furthering the ability of science to address these problems. In the proposed research, Brock will endeavor to solve the classification problem for a generic class of 3-dimensional spaces, the hyperbolic 3-manifolds. These non-Euclidean spaces have geometry locally like our own Euclidean space, but their large scale geometry is expanding exponentially: for example, light rays (a metaphor for geodesics) emanating from a point-source diverge exponentially rather than linearly. William P. Thurston s revolutionary and pioneering work in the s and s showed that almost all 3-manifolds are hyperbolic, and went on to raise as many questions about hyperbolic 3-manifolds as it answered. From his contributions, a compelling conjectural picture of the right classification of hyperbolic 3-manifolds has emerged as a lasting problem for researchers in the field of geometry and topology. Recent work of the PI and his collaborators has put the solution of this problem within reach; the PI will make use his NSF support to facilitate ongoing collaborations to solve this fundamental problem, thereby making a database of hyperbolic 3-manifolds available for wider use by other mathematicians and physicists alike doc19987 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Emphasis Year: Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations and Their Applications Chen This award supports participants in a workshop, held in Fall , and an international conference, held in Spring , at Northwestern University. The meetings, part of an emphasis year on nonlinear partial differential equations and applications, will bring together a diverse group of applied mathematicians and analysts who are able to explore connections between their fields. Discussion will be devoted to the development of new connections between nonlinear partial differential equations and such diverse areas as fluid dynamics, kinetic theory, free boundary problems, phase transition phenomena, biophysics, and modeling and computation, as well as nonlinear analysis, approximation theory, geometric measure theory, and harmonic analysis. The interdisciplinary meetings will provide excellent opportunities for communication and collaboration between senior and junior researchers doc19988 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled High-Resolution Imagery and New Visualization Tools for Reconstructing a Horned Lizard Ancestor. Complex images generated by high-resolution x-ray computed tomography are being combined with phylogenetic hypotheses and algorithms to estimate and visualize ancestral traits in a genus of lizards, Phrynosoma. The primary hypothesis, that horn complexity increases along phylogenetic branches, is being tested by reconstructing ancestral morphology and visualizing changes from ancestor to extant species using comparative methods doc19989 none This award provides support for a study that will identify important decision points in the educational and work experiences of Information Technology (IT) workers that have led them to enter and remain in the IT workforce. The results of this study will document the normal patterns of entry and retention in the IT workforce to provide a baseline to examine the special problems of women and minorities who are greatly under-represented in this expanding and lucrative sector of the economy. Through a survey of both current IT and non-IT workers in the greater Kansas City area, the project will gather data on individual personality traits in conjunction with detailed family background, and educational and work histories. These data will in turn be used to identify aspects of attitudes, family background, and educational and work experiences that have influenced individual decisions to enter IT jobs, as well as to remain in (or exit from) them. Among IT workers the same data will be used to explore differences by sex, and race and ethnicity. The results will illuminate both the similarities between IT and science and engineering career choices, and the differences doc19990 none The goal of this research is to develop a comprehensive co-design methodology, including algorithms and tools to facilitate the simultaneous power, noise margin, signal integrity, and power economy design with few, if any, design iterations. The key objectives are: 1. Develop novel hierarchical, efficient, distributed and accurate system-level power delivery RLS models and analysis tools to evaluate power reduction and noise-immune design techniques for power delivery. 2. Develop efficient power and area estimation algorithms at the architecture level and at the physical design level doc19991 none Washington State University has been awarded an ITWF grant to examine beliefs about the attributes of successful IT professional, applying social psychological research on gender stereotypes and cognitive processes in performance evaluation to the case of IT professionals. The study will examine associated effects on employee satisfaction, commitment, and performance. Key research questions include: What are the desired characteristics of IT workers that are necessary to be successful in IT occupations? Do the desired characteristics fit men more so than women? How do evaluation and reward systems impact the retention of workers in the IT workforce doc19992 none Work under this NSF grant will develop geometric mechanics and reduction theory in the context of several problems of interest: integration algorithms and reduction theory for discrete mechanics, the symplectic nature of collision algorithms, controlled Lagrangian and Hamiltonian systems with symmetry, reduction in the context of covariant field theory (such as electromagnetism and gauge fields) using covariant Poisson brackets as well as Lagrangian reduction, and bifurcations in mechanical systems with symmetry using the blowing-up technique, including the establishment of connections with singular reduction. The combination of geometric and analytical techniques continues to play an important role in many aspects of mechanics. This includes developments in computational algorithms. For instance, recent advances in variational integration algorithms have produced state of the art collision codes, for example, for collisions between elastic bodies and elastic shells. The work in this proposal further develops the mathematical framework that led to these algorithms in the first place. This includes proving, in a precise sense, that the algorithms respect the special structure of mechanics, such as conservation laws. In addition, studying the effect of symmetry on such algorithms and factoring out this symmetry directly on the discrete level is an important aspect of these algorithms which is only understood in special cases at the moment; this proposal will develop and extend these techniques. Another area where symmetry and geometric techniques are important is that of the control of mechanical systems (such as how rotors are used to control spacecraft orientation). Symmetry reduction for the control of such mechanical systems is one of the techniques that will be developed under this grant doc19993 none DMS - . PI: C. Robin Graham This project will study conformal and CR geometry. Algebraic, analytic, and geometric aspects will be considered via the introduction of metrics in higher dimensions which are associated to the original conformal or CR geometry. Understanding the higher dimensional spaces gives rise to problems of independent interest. Motivation is provided by the AdS CFT correspondence in physics. Conformal geometry is the study of properties of space which are unchanged by transformations which preserve angles but not necessarily lengths. Conformal mapping and geometry has found numerous applications to practical problems for many years, such as the design of airplane wings. Conformal geometry in higher dimensions has recently been the object of much interest in so-called holographic correspondences in physics. This project will study properties of the underlying geometric spaces, partially motivated by the interaction with the physical theories doc19994 none This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY . The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled New procedures for modelling the thermal environment of small animals. The spatial and temporal distribution of thermal resources across landscapes influences the abundance and distribution of organisms. Existing techniques to evaluate thermal habitats do not adequately represent the complexity of most environments. Novel procedures are being developed to generate detailed, dynamic, thermal maps using artificial neural networks that incorporate thermographic imaging and microclimate data doc19884 none Pankaj Argarwal Duke University Collaborative Motion, like shape, is one of the fundamental modalities to be modeled in order to represent and manipulate the phys-ical world in a computer. As such, motion representations and the algorithms that operate on them are central to all computational disciplines dealing with physical objects: computer graphics, computer vision, robotics, etc. Mod-eling motion is also crucial for other disciplines dealing with temporally varying data, including mobile networks, temporal databases, etc. Motion algorithms require com-putational resources, and frequently sensing and commu-nication resources as well, in order to accomplish their task. Despite the prominent position that motion plays in so many computer disciplines, little has been done to date to provide a clean conceptual framework for representing motion, describing algorithms on moving objects, and an-alyzing their behavior and performance. It is the goal of this proposal to push the frontiers of the computer sci-ence representations and algorithms that deal with motion in its various manifestations. The aim is to create a firm algorithmic theory for the processes of acquiring, model-ing, reasoning about, planning, manipulating, or executing motion and their relevant complexity measures doc19996 none Principal Investigator: Richard A. Wentworth (Johns Hopkins University) The PI proposes three research projects in the area of geometric analysis. This work will produce new results on rigidity problems in low dimensional topology, a better understanding of certain geometric structures on 3-manifolds arising from complex analysis, and a new approach to regularity issues for a type of minimizing subvariety. The first project deals with homomorphisms from fundamental groups of Riemannian manifolds to the mapping class group of a compact oriented surface. Examples arise as monodromy representations of surface bundles. Building on previous work in this area, the PI will use harmonic map theory to give a new proof of the finiteness theorem of Farb-Kaimanovich-Masur for lattices in higher rank Lie groups. New results for lattices in rank one groups will be obtained from these techniques. Symplectic Lefschetz pencils also provide especially interesting examples to which this method may be applied. The second project studies spherical CR structures on 3-manifolds. The PI will consider three aspects of the subject: uniformizability, rigidity, and compactness. The research will develop a new approach to these problems based on subelliptic analogs of harmonic map equations. A goal of the work will be to prove a compactness theorem which will have implications for new 3-manifold invariants. The third part of the proposal seeks to extend the method of Taubes to prove regularity results for certain calibrated rectifiable currents. This will provide a clarifying framework for a variety of geometric constructions that are of current interest. In addition to these new projects the PI will complete previous work on a conjecture of Bando-Siu concerning the Yang-Mills flow on higher dimensional Kaehler manifolds. One of the most fascinating subjects in contemporary mathematics is the study of spaces of dimensions three and four. These are also the most important from a physical point of view, since we live in three dimensional space, and dynamical behavior takes place in four dimensional space-time. The use of analytic techniques to understand the geometry and topology of low dimensional spaces continues to be a fruitful avenue of research, but there is much work still to be done. The focus of the PI s research in the area of the geometry of low dimensions and mathematical applications of new ideas in physics doc19997 none S. S. Antman proposes to treat a variety of dynamical and steady-state nonlinear problems for rods, shells, and three-dimensional solid bodies. The bodies are composed of nonlinearly elastic, viscoelastic, plastic, viscoplastic, or magnetoelastic materials. In each case, properly invariant, geometrically exact theories encompassing general nonlinear constitutive equations are to be used. (Such correctly formulated nonlinear problems of solid mechanics can seldom be directly subsumed under available mathematical theories.) The goals of these studies are to discover new nonlinear effects, determine thresholds in constitutive equations separating qualitatively different responses, determine general classes of constitutive equations that are both physically and mathematically natural, examine important kinds of instabilities, determine how existence, regularity, and well-posedness depend on material behavior, contribute to the theory of shocks and dissipative mechanisms in solids, and develop new methods of nonlinear analysis and of effective computation for problems of solid mechanics. Among the specific areas to be studied are (i) eversion of nonlinearly elastic shells, (ii) nonlinear stability of structures subject to nonconservative loads, (iii) dynamic stability of inelastic bodies subject to stick-slip friction, (iv) global multiparameter Hopf bifurcation, (v) fluid-solid interactions, (vi) parametric resonance, (vi) attractors for problems with forcing, (vii) dynamics of incompressible elastic and viscoelastic rods, (viii) quasilinear hyperbolic problems from nonlinear elasticity, (ix) asymptotics of small inertia, (x) dissipative mechanisms, (xi) hysteresis, and (xii) control. S. S. Antman proposes to treat a variety of dynamical and steady-state nonlinear problems for a variety of solid bodies composed of a variety of materials. The governing theories, needed to describe accurately the behavior of bodies suffering large and rapid deformations, possibly under extremes of temperature and loading, present severe mathematical challenges and have seldom been analyzed. The research is to encompass (a) the development of physical theory, (b) the development of mathematical theory capable of handling the governing equations, (c) contribution to the development of numerical methods, and (d) the treatment of specific problems and classes of problems. Examples of the latter include: (i) Large buckling (collapse) of shells under high pressure. (ii) Dynamic instability of deformable structures under nonconservative loads. (Such loads may be induced by rotations, by contact with moving fluids, or feedback.) (iii) Stability of structures subject to periodic forcing. (iv) Fluid-structure interactions, e.g., like that of a propeller or panel of a ship or a helicopter in contact with a moving fluid and undergoing large and possibly destructive oscillations. (v) Fluid-solid interactions in physiology, such as blood flowing in an artery. (vi) Large motions of rigid bodies joined by deformable bodies (like space vehicles joined by a tether). (vi) The analysis of problems of electromagnetic solid mechanics with applications to the use of smart materials to control the response of vibrating solids, e.g., to bring a vibrating part of a submarine or space vehicle to rest in a short time doc19998 none Bruce Kleiner The proposal consists of two projects which are motivated by the geometry of three dimensional manifolds. The first project uses quasisymmetric homeomorphisms as a framework to understand the asymptotic geometry of hyperbolic groups. Several uniformization and rigidity problems are discussed. The central problem is Cannon s conjecture that a hyperbolic group with boundary homeomorphic to the two-sphere is a lattice in the isometry group of hyperbolic space. A resolution of this conjecture would be a major step toward Thurston s Hyperbolization conjecture. The second part of the proposal addresses the Weak hyperbolization conjecture, the other missing step in the proof of Thurston s conjecture. The proposed attack uses geometry and dynamics of surface laminations in three manifolds. One of the major open problems in Mathematics is to determine the possible shapes (topologies) that a three dimensional space might assume. In the s, Thurston formulated his famous Geometrization conjecture, which is a precise statement about how the classification of such spaces should look. The proposal addresses a piece of Thurston s conjecture known as the Hyperbolization conjecture. The general line of attack is to associate a two dimensional self-similar fractal sphere with each three dimensional space, and reduce the original conjecture to showing that one can find good coordinate systems for this associated fractal sphere doc19999 none Mark E. Feighn The proposed work is in the area of geometric group theory. A motivating question is: Given a graph of groups G with some kind of restriction on the vertex and edge groups, what can be said about G? For example, is G a non-trivial free product?; does G split over the integers?; what is the JSJ-decomposition of G? A focus will be on finite graphs of finitely generated free groups. As an indication of progress along these lines, with his graduate student Guo-An Diao, the principal investigator has found an algorithm for determining whether a finite graph of finitely generated free groups is a non-trivial free product. Topological spaces are often analyzed by cutting them open and then considering the resulting simpler pieces. An easy example of this is that if a circle is cut then an arc remains. Analogously, groups are often studied by cutting them open along subgroups. Since groups may be represented as symmetries of spaces, splittings of groups and splittings of spaces are two manifestations of the same construction. For example, the splitting of the circle above gives a description of the integers. One of the most exciting developments in group theory over the past 20 years is the description by Rips-Sela of all splittings of groups over subgroups such as the integers. Dunwoody-Sageev and Fujiwara-Papasoglu have extended the types of splittings that can be described. The principal investigator will explore the extent to which these descriptions can be made algorithmically doc20000 none Li This research centers on developing Gaussian methods for the study of rare events, mainly depending on small values of a positive random quantity. The major objectives are to extend the understanding of related topics and build a general theory based on systematic study of various techniques and applications. The recent completion of the connection between small ball probabilities and metric entropy problems allows applications of tools and results from functional analysis to provide the most powerful method available at this time for estimating the lower bound for Gaussian processes. In turn, it suggests many further questions connected to applications in probability theory and geometric functional analysis. Similar relationships will be studied for other random processes such as stable processes and Gaussian chaos. The overview on rare events depending on small values unifies many problems from diverse areas in mathematics. The very successful applications of Gaussian methods to lower tail probabilities, the Brownian pursuit models and the first exit times will be expanded to a detailed study of zeros of random polynomials, balancing vectors, and Hadamard matrices. The primary focus of this research is a better understanding of rare random phenomena related to Gaussian processes and others which serve as models in many applications. These types of problems often arise in estimating the chances for rare events to occur in areas where such events are of fundamental importance, such as weather, economic indices, epidemics, etc. This research should improve our understanding of rare random events and provide basic tools for the study of our random environment doc20001 none Loeb According to the most current theories of cosmology, hydrogen, the most abundant element left over from the big bang, was formed out of free electrons and protons when the Universe cooled below a temperature of a few thousand degrees. However, recent observations imply that most of this relic cosmic hydrogen was dissociated once again (i.e., `re-ionized ) less than a billion years after the big bang. It is commonly believed that the cosmic hydrogen was re-ionized by the ultraviolet radiation emitted by the first generation of stars and black holes in the universe. How and when did the first galaxies form in the Universe? What was their effect on the surrounding cosmic gas? These are two of the most exciting questions in observational and theoretical cosmology today. This project will combine analytic calculations and limited numerical simulations of radiative transfer problems to address these questions and make detailed predictions for the expected clues that future, cutting-edge observations might reveal. In particular, it will identify observational probes that could signal the cosmic time at which most of the hydrogen was re-ionized. The interplay between theory and observations of the hydrogen re-ionization epoch will constrain the properties of the first sources of light in the early Universe as well as fundamental cosmological parameters (including the nature of the dark matter doc20002 none The NCSU Industrial Mathematics Modeling Workshop for graduate students (IMMW ) is designed to expose students in mathematics, statistics and engineering to problems from industry and government laboratories, and introduce them to a team approach to problem solving. The workshop is scheduled for the time period July 22, to July 30, and is organized by Pierre Gremaud, Zhilin Li, Ralph Smith, and Hien Tran. The workshop accommodates approximately 36 graduate students (for a total of 6 teams) from national and international institutions. Scientists from industry or government laboratories will be invited to present current research problems and lead teams of 6-7 students through model formulation and at least partial solution of the problems. This enriches the traditional graduate experience and provides valuable training for both students considering academic careers and those students preparing for noncademic careers. For students preparing for an academic career, the workshop provides experience which will significantly broaden their perspective in the classroom and may provide a catalyst for later research. The experience is even more significant for students pursuing nonacademic careers since it provides them with an exposure to important ``real life problems and gives them some initial experience at addressing such problems doc20003 none multivariate auxiliary information; and alternative smoothing techniques. Parametric and nonparametric techniques are blended using semiparametric additive models to provide a flexible tool for use in complex surveys. Large-scale surveys are used to collect data in a wide range of fields, from studies of human populations to inventories of natural resources. Information external to the survey, such as administrative records or remote sensing, is often available. This research project makes it possible to incorporate auxiliary information easily and effectively into survey estimates, by using nonparametric regression methods. Nonparametric regression, sometimes referred to as smoothing, is widely used in other areas of statistics, but its use in survey estimation has been limited so far. The investigators show that incorporating auxiliary information into survey estimation through nonparametric regression can improve the precision of the surveys, often at reduced costs doc20004 none The goal of this project is to find efficient designs for experiments conducted over time to compare different treatments, varieties of objects or methods. A substantial part of the project deals with crossover experiments, where it often happens that subjects drop out prior to the conclusion of the experiment, thereby reducing the information content of the data, or even jeopardizing the validity of the conclusions. Here the aim is to identify efficient designs that are largely robust to subject dropout. Another part of the project deals with experiments where a trend over time must be accounted for in the model and analysis. Here the aim is to identify efficient designs that are flexible enough to accommodate a wide variety of experimental conditions and models that arise in real applications. Proper statistical design is a critical aspect of scientific experiments; it ensures that the conclusions, based on observed data, remain valid in the larger context. This project deals with experiments in a variety of fields, including biomedical, agricultural and industrial experiments, that are conducted over time. As the experiment progresses, uncontrollable factors could influence the outcome. The aim of this project is to develop designs that perform well in diverse experimental conditions as well as designs that are robust against the inadvertent loss of experimental subjects before the conclusion of the experiment doc20005 none Shuguang Wang The project will study several issues in Topology and Geometry. The central theme is that of real structures which can be defined on symplectic and contact manifolds. With the presence of such structures, the proposal aims to introduce new versions of Gromov-Witten theory, Seiberg-Witten-Floer theory, and to apply the resulting invariants to String Theory as well as Real Algebraic Geometry. Another aspect of the project will study related analytical problems on manifolds that possess open conical singularities. Real Algebraic Geometry concerns the real solutions of real polynomials which arise naturally in many real-life applications. Despite the fact that this is one of oldest Mathematical branches, we have so far made very little progress in understanding it. Our project will attempt to fill the gap partially by using new machinery following from the pioneer work of Donaldson, Floer, Taubes etc. It was Einstein s dream to unify all four fundamental forces in the nature. Through Quantum Mechanics, it is possible to unify the strong force, the weak force and the electro-magnetic force. However the unification with the fourth force, the gravity, has eluded some of the greatest thinkers of our time. Nowadays it is commonly believed that String Theory offers the best hope to achieve this last unification. Complex manifolds with real structure are called orientifolds in String Theory. These are popular but still poorly-understood objects for Physicists. A purpose in the project is to lay down a rigorous mathematical foundation for Gromov-Witten doc20006 none This research by two anthropologists will make use of probability sampling and comparative research methods to better understand how collective action can develop in the governance of pre-modern states. This is an interesting problem, because collectively-based organizations may be unstable due to behavioral problems. Ideally, compliant taxpayers produce surpluses that go to a communal fund controlled by rulers that benefits the collectivity (public goods), but tensions may develop owing to the fact that rulers and subjects will expect each other to behave appropriately with respect to the production and distribution of public goods. Ruler agency (appropriation of public goods for personal benefit) and subject free riding (benefiting from public goods but not contributing to their production) may threaten organizational stability. To assure that collective organizations can function, institutions must be developed to detect and control both agency and free riding. To evaluate the theory, and to better understand how such institutional features have been developed in complex societies, the research will code data from the Human Relations Area Files and other sources on 40 to 50 well-described cases from all world areas. Variables to be coded include measures of public goods (such as roads, public water systems, public safety, and redistributive economies), subject tax compliance, voice (the ability of subjects to communicate opinions to rulers), and exit (the opportunity for dissatisfied subjects to leave the polity), as well as ruler behavior monitoring and controls, ruler morality, and measures of income and expenditures which affect policy. This research will advance our understanding of the nature and causes of variation in pre-modern states and will evaluate the degree to which collective action theory can be applied in diverse social and cultural settings. The research should be of interest to a wide range of students in the biological and social sciences interested in the evolution of cooperative social behavior, including the social and cultural origins of democracy doc20007 none The ongoing work involves the analysis of the structural behavior of the Pentagon building on 11 September . There are two poignant questions about the observed behavior of the building that deserve investigation: 1. Immediately upon impact of the Boeing 757, the reinforced concrete building lost approximately 30 columns in the ground story. Instead of an immediate collapse the structure remained standing to allow its occupants to be rescued. What were the structural attributes that prevented progressive collapse? 2. The Boeing 757 crashed into the building at a speed exceeding 750 ft sec. It had enormous kinetic energy. The debris was stopped in 300 ft. What characteristics of the structure were the main factors in absorbing the energy? The insights gained are made available a Group. The final report will include the development of a web site containing the data and their studies. Presentations are made at professional society meetings doc20008 none It is proposed to apply nonlinear dynamics methods from dynamical systems theory and fluid dynamics to three problems in industrial mathematics: 1) The organization of production lines with flexible workers. A dynamical systems model will be derived and analyzed. The goal is to determine whether chaos or other instabilities are present, to find out whether the production line is still self-organizing, and to determine the resulting throughput. 2) A switched arrival system for three parallel machines has been shown to be chaotic. Increasingly realistic production scenarios will be added to this model, and the resulting dynamics will be determined. Networks of such systems will be studied to determine whether synchronization or partial synchronization can occur. Such systems are hybrid dynamical systems that require new tools to study their dependence on changing parameters. Such tools will be developed as extensions of standard dynamical systems methods. 3) A hierarchy of fluid-dynamical models to describe the flow of products through factories based on conservation laws will be developed. These models are based on the methods of gas dynamics and fluid averaging and promise to allow fast and accurate simulations for supply networks. This project is based on an ongoing collaboration between researchers from Mathematics, Industrial Engineering, and Intel Corporation. We expect that our results have a significant impact on the understanding of the relationship between policies and management decisions and the resulting performance of factories and whole business networks. The three major areas of inquiry will be: i) The management concept of bucket brigades: The organizational principle of bucket brigades will be studied for workers with different skill levels along the production line as well as changing skill levels due to learning. ii) There are theoretical results stating that certain work allocation rules for parallel machines will lead to chaotic behavior. These results are based on highly abstracted models. We will study more realistic models and larger networks of production machines. iii) Supply chain modeling and simulation: We will derive models that allow fast scalable simulations of production flows in a supply chain. The long-term goal is to optimize production across the whole supply chain, an intermediate goal is to generate simulation tools that allow to explore business questions and to pose what if questions on these simulations doc19801 none This award is for a comprehensive research project for a joint investigation, to be conducted by PI Meng of Harvard University (the lead institution) and PI Lee of Colorado State University, on the use of the self-consistency principle for wavelet regressions with irregular designs. Wavelet estimators enjoy excellent theoretical properties and they are capable of adapting to very complex spatial and frequency inhomogeneities. In addition, their computation is very fast when the regression design points are regular. However, when the design points are not regular, as is typical in statistical applications, standard wavelet methods are no longer applicable. This collaborative research proposes to attack this problem from a missing-data perspective by viewing an irregular-design problem as a regular-design one but with missing data. This new perspective allows the investigators to apply well-established missing-data methods, guided by the self-consistency principle, to construct efficient irregular-design wavelet estimators, as well as fast algorithms to compute such estimators. Wavelet regression is a powerful curve and surface fitting method that has attracted enormous attention from researchers across different fields, in particular applied mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, and statisticians. Self-consistency is a fundamental statistical principle for constructing the most efficient statistical estimators in many incomplete data problems. This collaborate research effort combines these two powerful methods with the aim to make wavelet methods much more applicable to real-life problems, varying from medical imaging to fishery economy to global warming, where irregularities are rules rather than exceptions doc20010 none PI: Jianhua Huang Longitudinal data, which involve variables observed repeatedly over time, are common in biomedicine, epidemiology, economics, sociology, and many other fields. Nonparametric and semiparametric statistical methods provide effective tools for extracting useful information from this type of data. These methods allow scientists, policy makers and researchers to draw conclusions from their data without depending on pre-specified assumptions that may be too restrictive to their settings. The objective of this proposal is to develop systematic, theoretically well-founded, and more efficient such methods. The focus is on the following five topics: (i) further theoretical and methodological development of the spline-based approach to time-varying coefficient models; (ii) estimation of covariance structures; (iii) extension of time-varying coefficient models to generalized linear models; (iv) extension of time-varying coefficient models to take into account accumulative covariate effects; (v) semiparametric efficient estimation in partly linear models. These projects involve developing novel estimation and inference procedures, providing theoretical justification, and discussing their theoretical and practical importance to the advancement of biomedical and statistical science. The research approach will be a combination of theoretical asymptotic analysis, Monte Carlo simulations and real data analysis. Global smoothing techniques with spline functions will be used doc20011 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: RUI: Integrable Dynamics of Knotted Vortex Filaments Calini In this continuing project we explore the implications of integrability for the Vortex Filament Equation, which is the simplest model of the self-induced motion of a slender vortex filament in an ideal fluid, and which is known to be equivalent to the focusing nonlinear Schrodinger equation (NLS). The goals of our research are to relate geometric and topological properties -- in particular, knot types -- of large classes of closed filaments to the Floquet spectra of the corresponding periodic NLS solutions, and to understand how the knot type of a filament can change as it evolves. The methods we employ include algebro-geometric constructions of multi-phase solutions, Backlund transformations, isoperiodic deformations, and perturbation theory. Our work is part of a larger trend of making connections between differential equations, which usually model physical phenomena, and knot theory, which is traditionally a part of pure mathematics. Here, we study a simplified model of vortex motion, which possesses a rich class of knotted loops among its solutions, and whose mathematical structure is well understood, in order to develop the mathematical tools necessary to effectively address questions such as knot formation, stability of knotted structures, and knot classification doc20012 none Jonathan L. Block In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in the applications of large scale or coarse methods in geometry, topology, index theory and group theory. For many topological and geometric problems of interest, this large-scale structure is relevant in answering them. The Principal Investigator will study three such instances. First, on a singular space, phenomena are affected not only by the global fundamental group, but also by a local picture of the fundamental group. The fundamental groups of the link of a stratum changes from stratum to stratum and affects the topological behavior of the space, in particular, the classification of stratified spaces must take into account this behavior. The PI proposes to study via operator K-theory how the index theory of the strata of singular spaces (as non-compact manifolds) fit together to give an index theory for the singular space itself. Second, the PI proposes to study more generally quantitative aspects of homology theory, taking into account such issues as the images of the homology of balls of a given size in the homology of a non-compact manifold. Applications to existence of infinitely many null-homotopic geodesics are proposed. Third, the large-scale small-scale duality between a discrete group and its unitary representation theory has been studied under the rubric of the Baum-Connes conjecture. The PI, motivated by his work in large scale geometry proposes a broader study of this duality. This requires the development of tools from algebraic geometry (especially moduli space theory) to apply to infinite dimensional unitary representations. These tools place families of representations at the fore, which as two effects. First, families of representations seem to be more rigid then single ones. And secondly, one can concentrate ones attention on specific parts of the representation theory. Thus, the PI demonstrates, in several situations, that for lattices in Lie groups, the representation theory in an infinitesimal neighborhood of the trivial representation coincide for the lattice and the ambient group. A second type of question proposed by the PI are called reconstruction problems. When can one reconstruct representations on the ambient group knowing its values on the lattice? The PI views this as a version of the Sampling theorem from signal processing. Large scale geometry is the study of spaces as seen from an increasingly distant perspective. For many problems in geometry and topology, the phenomena at a small or moderate scale only obscure the situation and the large scale perspective shines the essential light on the subject: seeing the forest for the trees. This proposal focuses the attention of large-scale geometry on problems in index theory and representation theory of discrete groups. Students of PI and his collaborators are involved at various stages of the project. The developments and anticipated results are intended as a bridge between algebraic and geometric topology, harmonic analysis and functional analysis. This should provide a clearer understanding of all these subjects and enhance the interaction between the experts in them doc20013 none Traditional approaches to reducing dimension in a regression context focus on modeling: a sequence of models are fitted and associated diagnostic tools that may lead to a reduction of the dimension of the predictors a posteriori are used in order to select the most reliable yet simplest model. A different approach is taken in this proposal where the goal is to investigate and develop methods of reducing the dimension of the regressor vector at the outset of the analysis without applying any a priori fitting or model selection procedures. The methods proposed in this project use inverse regression as a tool to estimate the structural dimension of a regression, which is defined to be the dimension of the subspace generated by a sufficient number of linear projections of the regressor vector. Furthermore, the case of intrinsically nonlinear relationship between response and regressors will be considered. A translation of the nonlinear manifold of the regressors to an equivalent linear subspace (equivalent in the sense that all information on the response is retained) is proposed. The research should make a significant contribution to the available inferential tools and software for analyzing high-dimensional data. The goals of the proposed research are (a) to extend and generalize existing parametric-based dimension reduction methodology to nonparametric techniques, (b) to apply the developed methods and devise new ones in order to fully estimate the structural dimension of a regression and not only a lower bound on the full dimension, (c) to generalize the methods so that they apply to nonlinear manifolds of the regressor vector, (d) to develop state-of-the-art implementation computer code, which will be freely available to the research community, and (e) to compare the proposed dimension reduction techniques to the existing ones using simulated and real world data sets. High-dimensional data have become increasingly common in practically all scientific and business related fields. Modeling such data is challenging, mostly because of our inability to visualize them. Consequently, it is practically imperative to reduce the dimension of the input data prior to any attempts at modeling. Dimension reduction is especially relevant and appealing in the era of cheap and easily available computing power and technology, where huge multivariate data sets are collected or continuously generated and accumulated. The proposed research will extend existing and develop new technology for reducing the complexity of the input data at the outset of the modeling process doc20014 none This research project is concerned with several equations of statistical mechanics and transport theory at the nano- and mesoscale. Of particular interest are integrodifferential equations for kinetic collisional transport (like the Boltzmann equation) and systems of integrodifferential and partial-differential equations for transport of charged particles (quantum hydrodynamic-Poisson equations). The goal is to rigorously analyze these equations by proving existence and stability theorems and by numerically simulating the underlying physical problems. The project requires the development and application of new tools from nonlinear analysis, as well as the design of new computational strategies linking the different models from the quantum level to the kinetic level to the fluid level. This research program has applications in several areas. We mention the rapid flow of granular materials, which is described by statistical models for collisional transport of inelastic particles, and electronic nanodevice modeling, where channel lengths are of the order of nanometers and quantum tunneling effects are important. The results of this research are expected to lead to the design of deterministic computational tools that can be applied to the simulation of multiscale phenomena in highly heterogeneous media, for example in turbulent granular flow problems and electronic or biological nanodevice modeling doc20015 none The method of alternating projections (MAP) is an iterative procedure for determining nearest points from a set that is the intersection of a finite number of closed convex sets. This method has found use in at least 15 different areas of mathematics, which includes solving linear equations and inequalities, signal analysis, and computed tomography. The main practical drawback of the MAP, at least for some applications, is its slow convergence. We will study rates of convergence for the MAP by extending the notion of ``angle between subspaces to that of more general convex sets, as well as determine means for accelerating the convergence of the MAP. In addition, we expect to show that the speed of convergence of the MAP is directly related to a property (the ``strong conical hull intersection property) of the convex sets in question that we have studied in several papers over the last 20 years. The method of alternating projections is an algorithm for computing nearest points in certain sets by a repetitive application of the same few simple steps. Since the method has applications to so many different areas of mathematics (one of the earliest being in medical imaging via X-rays), it is important to know how fast (i.e., how many steps) this algorithm needs to take before the results give good accuracy of the exact solution. The ``rate of convergence of the algorithm deals with the question of how fast the algorithm is for any given problem. For those problems when the rate of convergence is slow, we will also study ways to make the algorithm work faster by making appropriate modifications of certain steps in the algorithm. Date: May 13, doc20016 none Consider the problem of estimating a function given observations with some random component. The function may be a regression function, a density, or a probability density function such as in bioassay models. Shape-restricted methods allow the practitioner to impose only qualitative restrictions on the class of functions, such as increasing, concave, or sigmoidal. Estimates may be obtained using maximum-likelihood ideas; there are many problems in inference to be solved. Goals for this proposal include developing confidence bounds for regression functions using shape restrictions, developing tests for an ANCOVA type of model with a shape-restricted covariate, time-series analysis with shape-restricted trend function, smooth shape-restricted function estimation, and developing a robust regression estimator using a shape-restricted error density. Traditional statistical methods for regression, density estimation and bioassay problems include: 1) estimating a function, 2) estimating the quality of fit, perhaps using confidence bounds, and 3) testing hypotheses about the function. The investigator wishes to develop these methods nonparametrically, that is, without imposing a parametric form for the function. Shape-restricted methods in statistics approach these estimation and inference problems with a minimum of assumptions about the functional form. For example, a growth curve may be assumed to be increasing and concave, or a probability curve might be sigmoidal- a more general assumption than the usual logistic model. A density function might be assumed to be symmetric and unimodal, in a situation where stronger assumptions like normality might not be justified. A fit to a function using fewer assumptions will have more fidelity to the data. Perhaps more importantly, these shape-restricted fits may be used to test the validity of the parametric models, or to select from several candidate parametric models doc20017 none and understanding of crystalline materials. The applications range from predicting the failure of mechanical parts (for example, in jet turbines) to controlling the growth of crystals (for example, in forging steel or growing gem stones doc20018 none Kevin M. Whyte This project is concerned with several aspects of large scale geometry and topology. One of the main points of study is the problem of producing actions from quasi-actions, along the lines of the classical theorems of Sullivan and Tukia. Such results have significant implications in the quasi-isometric classification of groups, especially for groups with natural splittings as a complex of groups. A second area of study is large scale versions of rigidity phenomena in the geometry of symmetric spaces, and specifically the classification of quasi-isometric embeddings between symmetric spaces, giving a geometric analogue of superrigidity. A third and independant project involves coarse versions of topological rigidity, including the coarse Borel, Novikov, and Baum-Connes conjectures. Roughly speaking, large scale (or coarse) geometry is the study of geometric properties of objects seen from far away . From this perspective, any bounded object is indistinguishable from a point, and a line of dots is indistinguishable from a solid line. This sort of geometry has been influencial recently in many areas of mathematics, notably group theory, topology, and geometric analysis. This research will explore the large scale geometry of several classes of mathematical objects, both classical geometric spaces and objects only now being viewed in a geometric manner doc20019 none This research effort addresses a spectrum of fundamental and applied problems in the slow flow of granular materials. It is organized into four projects, chosen partly because of their importance in the field of granular materials, but also because they raise intriguing mathematical and scientific issues of broader significance. The first project attacks a fundamental physical problem: How to include micromechanical effects in a continuum description of granular flow, especially the effect of velocity fluctuations. The second project concerns the mathematics surrounding multidimensional continuum models for granular flow, specifically the issue of extracting mathematically rigorous information from ill-posed partial differential equations. The third project proposes to extend Jenike s radial solution for flows in axisymmetric hoppers to conical hoppers with a general cross section. The fourth project deals with flows of fine granular materials, where the interstitial gas significantly affects the flow. The research program involves coordinated efforts in modeling, analysis, numerical simulations, and experiment. At the heart of this research project is a basic question concerning the flow of granular materials: What behaviors of slowly flowing granular material can be understood in terms of a continuum formulation? This question may be viewed as an attempt to reconcile continuum models, used in industrial design and engineering problem solving, with discrete models, introduced to understand the results of small- to medium-scale physical experiments. Continuum models are highly desirable since they are much more tractable analytically and computationally than particle dynamics simulations, which treat the discreteness of the flow directly. An important issue that arises from this basic question, and which is addressed in this project, is the form that a continuum description should take. This issue has been the subject of debate in the engineering literature ever since Janssen in demonstrated that stresses in a column of granular material do not increase indefinitely with depth, but approach asymptotically to a constant. The research program has significance well beyond the context of granular materials in mathematics as well as physics. The project is supported by a long-standing industrial collaboration doc20020 none Selman Akbulut Proposer plans to investigate the topology of smooth 4-manifolds by decomposing them into Stein pieces which are easy to understand (since they turn out to be Lefschetz fibrations over the 2-disk). He would like use the techniques of complex and symplectic manifolds to understand the restriction this decomposition imposes to the topology of the original manifold. Proposer hopes to apply these techniques to attack some unsolved problems of 4-dimensional topology, such as finding 4-dimensional fake s-cobordisms, and to the problem of constructing a fake S^3 x S^1. Proposer also plans to work on the topological problems arising from complex algebraic geometry, such as problems coming from the complex conjugation, branched covers and the curve counting problem in real algebraic geometry. Proposer plans to investigate structure of 4-dimensional manifolds by decomposing them into pieces that are topologically easier to understand (4-manifolds are spaces which locally look like 4-dimensional Euclidean space-time we live in). These smaller pieces carry certain `natural complex structures which analytical techniques apply. By these techniques Principal investigator hopes to construct certain 4-manifolds believed to exists but not yet have been found. One of the reasons 4-manifolds are of interest is because of the physicists model of the 10-dimensional universe which consists of a 4-dimensional space-time plus 6-dimensional complex piece doc20021 none The aim of this proposal is to use a number of mathematical tools and techniques (Hamiltonian normal forms, variational analysis, exponential asymptotics, integrability methods, multiscale techniques, homogenization and Evans function methods among others), in conjunction with numerical methods (continuation and bifurcation theory tools, Newton type methods together with numerical linear stability analysis and direct time integration) to systematically explore nonlinear waves in discrete systems. In particular, we plan to address the following aspects of the behavior, dynamics and stability of the waves in lattice settings: (1) The role of spatial dimensionality on nonlinear waves. Most of the earlier studies had been conducted in 1+1 (1 space, 1 time) dimension. We can now go even in 3+1 dimensions and examine physically realistic settings. (2) The interplay between disorder, nonlinearity and discreteness. It is well known that disorder can induce localization. Understanding the interplay of this mechanism with nonlinearity, especially in realistic discrete settings is then crucial, as defects are ubiquitous in physical systems. (3) Travelling waves in discrete systems are also of paramount importance. Intrinsic Localized Modes (ILM s) have the intriguing property of bottlenecking the energy. But could they carry it over (even more so in a targeted way) from one molecule to another (from one lattice site to another)? If so, they would be natural candidates for many bioenergetics processes, such as photosynthesis. (4) The study of instabilities of such waves. We believe that we are now close to a general classification of the possible instabilities and to a connection of these with the underlying symmetries of the physical problem. (5) Finally, the comprehension of progressively more complex physical models is also of interest. The latter involve additional physical perturbations such as, for example, long range interactions, boundary conditions, the interaction of multiple waves between them and with defects. Intrinsic Localized Modes (ILM s) have been a topic of increasing focus over the past decade as their role in energy localization and transport has been appreciated in a variety of contexts. Their applications span nonlinear optics and telecommunications (optical fibers and waveguides), atomic physics (BEC, an issue of fundamental relevance as highlighted by the Physics Nobel Prize in awarded for its experimental observation), condensed matter physics (superconductivity and charge density waves), biophysics (the local breaking of DNA and conformational changes in proteins), and environmental science (nucleation of liquid droplets in the atmosphere). The areas of interest are diverse and broad, the impact of the understanding of the fundamental physics is potentially very deep, but the underlying mathematical principles are simple and unifying. These models share a common structure of nonlinear complex behavior, the spatio-temporal variation of which we wish to explore. Understanding this behavior and the role of (nonlinear) waves in it is of fundamental interest in all these fields. The nonlinear waves represent the electric field of light in optics, the quantum-mechanical Bose particle wavefunction in BEC, the DNA base-pair distance or the liquid-vapor interface of a nucleating droplet in the atmosphere. The properties of these waves, their stability, dynamical evolution and internal structure are therefore at the heart of a wealth of physical effects. The goal of our research is to explore these features using a combination of analytical and computational mathematical techniques and physical intuition. Our project addresses, in particular, lattice dynamical systems, where space is discrete, as is the case in many fundamental applications, such as optical waveguides, DNA, and arrays of superconducting Josephson junctions doc20022 none The principal goal of this effort is to identify and understand colliding Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) preceding complex interplanetary activity: solar energetic particle (SEP) events, solar wind structure and composition variations, interplanetary ejecta, radio bursts, and geomagnetic storms. Multiple data sources will be employed to (1) identify, list, and characterize CME interactions, (2) investigate solar wind signatures 2-4 days following colliding, Earth-directed, CMEs, (3) identify large SEP events which exhibit mixed impulsive and gradual characteristics and determine their relation (if any) to colliding CMEs, (4) classify types of interactions between CMEs, and (5) determine if there are solar-cycle dependences of CME interaction occurrences and characteristics doc20023 none Proposal #: Conference on Minimal Varieties in Geometry and Physics PI s: M. Anderson, D. Gromoll, C. LeBrun, M. Rocek (Stony Brook) The Dept. of Mathematics at SUNY Stony Brook will host a conference on MINIMAL VARIETIES IN GEOMETRY AND PHYSICS June 1 - June 7, on the occasion of Blaine Lawson s 60th birthday. The progress in the study of minimal varieties in a broad sense has had a profound impact on numerous areas in geometry and physics. This conference will bring together mathematicians and physicists working on minimal varieties and their recent applications. The award provides partial support for active researchers in this area, who otherwise have limited means of funding, to participate in the conference. Most of the funds will support younger mathematicians and mathematicians from under-represented groups. Confirmed Speakers: S. Bloch, J.P. Bourguignon, R. Bryant, J. Cheeger, T. Colding, J. Figueroa-O Farrill, E. Friedlander, H. Gillet, H. Gluck, P. Griffiths, M. Gromov, R. Harvey, D. Hoffman, P. Lima-Filho, R. MacPherson, W. Meeks, W. Minicozzi, R. Osserman, M. Rocek, J. Rosenberg, R. Schoen, I. Singer, G. Tian. Organizing Committee: M. Anderson, D. Gromoll, C. LeBrun, M. Rocek, A. Phillips, S. Simanca. The conference has 4 main themes: minimal submanifolds of Riemannian manifolds, calibrated geometries, complex subvarieties and algebraic cycles, and the Dirac operator. There will be 3 mini-courses: I. Minimal surfaces in 3-manifolds (Colding and Minicozzi) II. M-theory and calibrations (Figueroa-O Farrill) III.Algebraic Cycles (TBA) Detailed information on the conference is available at http: www.math.sunysb.edu varieties doc20024 none IN DIFFERENTIAL GEOMETRY : Fully nonlinear elliptic and parabolic equations arise from many problems in differential geometry. In recent years these equations have attracted a lot of attention and significant progresses have been made to understand these equations and related geometric problems. In this project, the principal investigator will continue his research in this direction. The problems to be investigated in this project include isometric embeddings of metrics of nonnegative curvature; questions about hypersurfaces of nonnegative constant Gauss curvature with boundary in Euclidean space and more general Riemannian manifolds, including existence, uniqueness and regularity; spacelike entire graphs of constant Gauss curvature in Minkowski space; Minkowski type problems of finding closed convex hypersurfaces of prescribed Weingarten curvatures; regularity of solutions to degenerate Monge-Ampere equations in non-convex domains; regularity of pluricomplex Green functions and existence of holomorphic functions in Kahler manifolds; Hessian equations on Riemannian manifolds and applications in geometric problems; hypersurfaces in hyperbolic space of constant mean curvature (or Weingarten hypersurfaces) with prescribed asymptotic boundary at infinity; and evolution of hypersurfaces by curvature functions. Equations arising from most of these problems are highly nonlinear. These equations also model various phenomena in sciences and engineering. Solving such equations heavily depends on establishing apriori estimates up to second order derivatives. For many of the proposed problems in this project, these estimates alone are often not enough to lead to existence of solutions; there are other obstructions from geometry and analysis. These all impose challenging questions. Research on these problems may also develop methods of numerical approximations to the solutions that are useful in engineering and science doc20025 none The investigator and his colleagues consider the problem of design selection for fractional factorials. In situations where there is little or no knowledge about effects that are potentially important, it is appropriate to select designs using the minimum aberration criterion. Very often, the experimenter may have reasons to believe that certain two-factor interactions are important. Appropriate designs under such circumstances are those allowing joint estimation of all main effects and these potentially important interactions. If the effects not in the postulated model, which consists of the main effects and potentially important interactions, cannot be completely ignored, they bias the estimates of the effects in the model. In the proposed research, this problem of design selection is solved by developing a general theory of minimum aberration. The general criterion of aberration to be introduced generalizes the usual criterion of minimum aberration, and it has the robust property that the best designs given by this criterion sequentially minimize the contamination of nonnegligible effects on the estimation of the effects in the postulated model. Developing a general theory of minimum aberration is also motivated by the desire of unifying various versions of minimum aberration in the literature. Is it possible to derive these versions of minimum aberration from a general theory that is based on a sound statistical principle? The general theory of aberration provides a positive answer to this question. What is more important is that such a general theory enables researchers to derive other versions of minimum aberration that may be more appropriate for given design situations. In the proposal, many research problems are discussed and in some cases, solutions are outlined. Design of experiments is an area of study in statistics that concerns efficient data collection for industrial experiments and many other areas of scientific investigation. Fractional factorial designs are a class of experimental plans and their importance, both theoretical and practical, cannot be overstated. As exploratory designs, they are directly useful in identifying important factors at the early stage of an investigation. They also form a basis on which other more sophisticated designs can be built. In the proposed research, the investigator and his colleagues study the problem of selecting the best fractional factorial designs when certain prior knowledge regarding the effects of factors is available. The problem is solved by developing a general theory of design selection criteria. In addition to solving the above practical problem, the general theory unifies various existing design selection criteria, and allows researchers to derive other criteria that are more appropriate for their situations. Involving students in research activities is an important aspect of the proposed research. The proposed research sheds new light on the study of fractional factorial designs, leads to new economical designs for the experiments in the physical, chemical, and engineering sciences, and most importantly, promotes the application of factorial designs in the areas such as biotechnology and medical research that have huge potential to benefit further from the design methodology doc20026 none The PI plans to establish rigidity and finiteness results for infinite groups, both in geometric and dynamical contexts. In an attempt to broaden the scope of rigidity as initiated by Mostow, Margulis, Zimmer and others, we aim at results for very general (finitely generated) groups, notably fundamental groups arising in geometry. The proposed methods are however also new and relevant for the more classical study of arithmetic and S-arithmetic groups. There are three aspects to the project. The first is to construct cohomological invariants characterizing various geometric situations; a typical example is the interpretation of negative curvature in terms of bounded cohomology that we propose with Shalom. The second step is to develop a suitable theory to handle these invariants in an efficient way, notably by using tools from ergodic theory. Last, one has to apply this to concrete situations. We focus in particular on superrigidity and cocycle superrigidity for non-linear groups and on orbit equivalence of ergodic actions. The last forty years have witnessed the birth and remarkable development of what is now called rigidity theory . The first discovery in that field was this: Even though a flat space (which is the kind of space one thought we live in, from the ancient Greeks to Newton) can be deformed in many ways, some curved spaces (whose relevance to our world has been discovered by Einstein) are in a sense rigid. Later came a discovery regarded as yet much more fundamental: The most symmetric geometric spaces turn out to be in fact arithmetic objects. The project under consideration here is to broaden the scope this rigidity theory to many more geometric spaces, and especially to deal with situations in which the geometry cannot be reduced to arithmetics. Actually, we propose new methods that stand out by their abstract nature and allow us to tackle situations which do not even stem from geometry, but rather regard the study of dynamics. (Dynamics is the theory of systems that evolve in time, typically ocean currents or galaxies, and may have chaotic behaviours.) Our project proposes new methods for obtaining more results both in this dynamical setting and in geometry, and this in a unified way doc20027 none Yakov Eliashberg The proposal is devoted to Symplectic Field Theory (SFT) whose framework was recently described by A. Givental, H. Hofer and the author of this proposal. SFT is a large project which lies on the borderline between Symplectic Geometry, Hamiltonian Dynamics, Enumerative Algebraic Geometry, Low-dimensional Topology, Theory of Integrable Systems in Mathematics, as well as String Theory and Mirror Symmetry in Theoretical Physics. Among the goals of the theory: - definition of new, SFT-based invariants of symplectic and contact manifolds and their Lagrangian and Legendrian submanifolds; - applications to the Low-dimensional topology; - development of new tools for proving enumerative results about periodic orbits of Hamiltonian systems; - understanding of the appearance of integrable hierarchies in Gromov-Witten theory. Symplectic Field Theory has already proved to have important applications. In particular, the ideas of the SFT were instrumental in the solution of several old outstanding questions in Symplectic Geometry and Hamiltonian Dynamics. There is a hope that some current research in the SFT may bring some breakthrough in the low-dimensional topology. Further development of the theory should also bring new applications not only inside Mathematics, but possibly in some areas of Theoretical Physics, including String Theory and Mirror Symmetry. Besides developing new applications the work under this project will also concentrate on building the rigorous foundations of the SFT doc20028 none The work in this proposal is aimed at furthering our understanding of the basic laws and forces of nature. New ideas and techniques in string theory will be developed. String theory is currently the most succesful attempt to combine quantum mechanics and gravity into a unified framework with the strong, weak and electormagnetic forces. The standard model of particle physics has had many experimental successes, but it must be replaced by a more complete theory at higher energies. Supersymmetry, a relation between particles with different spin, is an important ingredient in many theories of particle physics at higher energy scales. This work should lead to new insights into the role of supersymmetry in string theory and particle physics. This work is also likely to have applications to areas of mathematics concerned with geometry and singularities doc20029 none Over the next year, the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP) will publish four Arctic environmental assessment reports and a second State of the Arctic Environment Report (SOAER), and also conduct a Second AMAP International Symposium on Environmental Pollution of the Arctic. The publication and the international symposium will be based on updated information and a substantial amount of additional data that were not available for similar activities in - . Acting on behalf of the U.S. federal agencies participating in AMAP, NOAA will coordinate Federal support for the publications and the symposium. Other federal agencies are expected to contribute (or have already contributed) $85, 500 for these purposes. NOAA s Arctic Research Office will arrange transfer of all the contributed funds to the AMAP Secretariat and will oversee expenditure of the funds by the AMAP Secretariat doc20030 none The investigator and his students will study the popular support vector machines from the viewpoint of the traditional logistic regression model (with regularization). While the latter exhibits very similar generalization performance to the SVM, it has several advantages: it estimates class probabilities, and generalizes to multiclass problems seamlessly. This and several other even simpler approaches will be developed for the classification of gene expression arrays. This proposal will thus develop useful models for making class predictions in a variety of high-dimensional situations, in particular for gene expression arrays. While the science journals abound with exotic statistical and computational algorithms for use in this fashionable domain, this investigator and his colleagues firmly believe that some very simple modifications of classical approaches perform as well or better, and are easier to understand doc20031 none Hu It is well-known that the fractional Brownian motions are not semimartingales. The powerful stochastic calculus for semimartingales are not applicable to them. Motivated by the urgent need from applications the principal investigator and his collaborators have developed a new stochastic calculus of Ito type based on the Wick product. He proposes to continue this research topic and to study the stochastic differential systems driven by fractional Brownian motions. First he shall study the existence, uniqueness and approximation of global solutions to stochastic differential systems driven by fractional Brownian motions. Many researchers have attempted to obtain result on these aspects with little success. The principal investigator has discovered a relationship between stochastic differential systems driven by fractional Brownian motions and quasilinear hyperbolic equations (of infinitely many variables). It is well-known that the latter equations are also difficult to solve. However, there are a number of results which are useful. This connection will lead to a better understanding of stochastic differential systems and the PI plans to explore this relation. Secondly, in application of the stochastic systems driven by fractional Brownian motions, one also needs to identify the coefficients and the Hurst parameter. The PI proposes to study one such identification problem and apply it to the investigation of the stochastic volatility model in financial market. To obtain the maximum benefit from a physical or social system, one needs to understand the system in the most precise way possible. This requires building a mathematical model for the dynamic evolution of the system. When the system is under the influence of some uncertain factors, the system should be modeled by a random process. Up to now one of the random processes which has received the most attention and has been studied the most is stochastic differential equations based on the so-called Brownian motion. Brownian motion has some nice properties such as Markovian: Its future state depends only on the present state and does not depend on the past. This simplicity makes the mathematics for it easy and very profound results have been achieved. In fact there have been enormous work on it over the past century. However, this elegant property also limits the applicability of such a random process, since it cannot be used to describe those systems whose future depend not only the present but also on past history! Fractional Brownian motions are random processes having this long range dependence and may be used to describe such systems. This proposal aims to construct mathematical tools for the fractional Brownian motions which have already found applications in hydrology, climatology, network traffic analysis, and finance. This research will have impact on these areas as well as in life science doc20032 none J. Peter May This project deals with research in a wide range of topics in topology, geometry, and related areas of mathematics. May studies a variety of categorical and homotopical structures in stable homotopy theory, equivariant algebraic topology, and other fields. Although his current work is primarily foundational, his students and collaborators, among others, make extensive calculational applications of it. He and his collaborators have recently unified the foundations of stable homotopy theory by proving that all of the new highly structured categories of spectra are Quillen equivalent model categories, via structure-preserving functors. The analogous, and deeper, unification of the foundations of equivariant stable homotopy has also been carried out. Within algebraic topology, May has been working on various other projects in equivariant and non-equivariant homotopy theory. He has also been working on various topics that have roots in algebraic topology but are of a more general nature. In particular, he has recently obtained a new definition of enriched weak $n$-categories and has spearheaded a very large scale unification project in higher category theory. Weinberger studies various areas of geometric topology and differential geometry. He has a longstanding interest in transformation groups, especially surgery theory on manifolds with group actions. In particular, he studies problems concerned with removing the ``gap hypothesis that obstructs the direct generalization of the nonequivariant theory. Weinberger also has a longstanding interest in the Novikov, Borel, and Baum-Connes conjectures, and he has made recent progress on them. In a new direction, Weinberger has been engaged in a large scale collaboration with Nabutovsky that concerns applications of logic to Riemannian variational problems and to the large scale geometry of moduli spaces. Some of his recent results defy easy characterization. For one example, he has applied an old theorem of Browder about finite H-spaces to obtain a theorem about the social choice problem . For another, in recent work with Farb he has shown that hidden symmetries on a locally symmetric manifold force it to be arithmetic. Besides May, the algebraic topology group at Chicago includes four nontenured faculty and eight graduate students. The geometry group includes Weinberger and four other tenured faculty, six nontenured faculty, and fifteen graduate students. There is considerable interaction between these groups, and between them and other groups at Chicago, such as the geometric Langlands group and the algebraic geometry group. The research funded by this grant is part of a web of research projects in progress at the University of Chicago doc20033 none This project proposes to develop and apply homogenization techniques for estimating the macroscopic behavior of heterogeneous hyperelastic material systems that are characterized by nonconvex energy functions. Two prototypical examples will be analyzed in detail: porous elastomers and polydomain liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs). The first is an example of a two-phase composite with one void phase and one elastic phase. These materials are used extensively in various industries for their insulation and shock absorption properties. The second is an example of a polycrystalline aggregate involving single-crystal grains made of a liquid-crystal elastomeric phase. They are materials that exhibit soft modes of deformation, are capable of being actuated by temperature and light inputs, and also exhibit the remarkable property of becoming optically transparent at sufficiently large stretches. In particular, we propose to develop simple estimates of the Hashin-Shtrikman and self-consistent type for these materials, which have already been found to be extremely useful in other contexts. However, because of the finite deformations involved in elastomeric systems, it will be necessary to also characterize the evolution of the microstructure (e.g., porosity, texture, void or grain shape and orientation) in these systems and its implications on the overall behavior. Because of the non-convexity of the relevant energy functions, the possible development of instabilities must also be taken into account, especially because such unstable modes may be useful in the design of devices. This program of research will involve an exciting combination of several tools in mathematical analysis, including calculus of variations, convex analysis, differential equations, and optimization, and is likely to impact our understanding of constitutive theory of complex materials in general. This proposal is concerned with heterogeneous material systems that can undergo large elastic (recoverable) deformations. Examples of these material systems include, among others, carbon-black-filled elastomers, polymeric foams, liquid crystalline elastomers, block copolymers and skeletal muscle tissue. Two essential features characterize their mechanical response: 1) they can undergo large elastic (recoverable) deformations; and 2) they exhibit non-unique behavior (micro-buckling and other instabilities). In addition, most importantly from the applications point of view, the behavior of many of these material systems can be controlled by external fields (temperature, electric, magnetic, chemical inputs). Because of their remarkable properties, these materials, usually appearing in the form of composites or polycrystalline aggregates, will continue to provide the vehicles for many technological innovations, ranging from rubber tires, more than a century ago, to light-activated switches and artificial muscles, today. Because of their highly nonlinear properties, the characterization of these material systems is also mathematically challenging. In particular, even though much progress has been made in recent years in developing rigorous homogenization frameworks for these material systems, much work remains to be done in terms of developing constructive mathematical tools to estimate the constitutive behavior of specific systems within this class doc20034 none Joanna Kania-Bartoszynska Since the introduction of quantum invariants of three dimensional manifolds the fact that these invariants are only defined at roots of unity has been an obstruction to analyzing their properties. However, there is ample evidence that quantum invariants of three manifolds exist as holomorphic functions on the unit disk that diverge everywhere on the unit circle but at roots of unity. The investigator uses the results of her previous research to study further quantum invariants and to find additional applications of that research to classical 3-manifold topology. Specifically, she works on the problem of extending the parametric domain of the quantum 3-manifold invariants beyond roots of unity. She also studies the application of quantum topology to detecting symmetries of 3--manifolds and to answering questions relating to Dehn surgery on knots. Quantum topology is a rapidly developing area of mathematics that brings together ideas from physics, algebra, geometry and topology. This theory has produced a wealth of new invariants for three dimensional manifolds. Three-manifolds are objects which locally look like the common 3-dimensional space we live in, and topological invariants are numbers which can be associated to manifolds that encode some information about their structure and help to classify them. The investigator works on one of the fundamental problems in this area, namely that of finding topological interpretations for these new invariants doc20035 none Leon Takhtajan The proposal is devoted to the study of quantum field theories on algebraic curves from complex analytic and algebraic points of view. String theory is the unifying theme of the complex-analytic part of the project. The main goals of this part are: 1) geometric formulation of two-dimensional quantum Toda theories associated with simple Lie algebras; 2) Fermi-Bose correspondence for compact Riemann surfaces and closed smooth Jordan curves; 3) proof of general Kleinian reciprocity on deformation spaces; 4) construction of the universal Weil-Petersson potential for the universal Teichmuller space; 5) curvature properties of the new Kahler metric on moduli spaces of punctured Riemann surfaces; 6) explicit form of factorization formula for determinants of Laplace operators acting on higher order differentials; 7) Faddeev-Popov ghosts for string field theory of open strings. Symmetries and Ward identities for correlation functions are guiding principles of the algebraic part of the project. The immediate and long term goals of this part are: 1) proof of adelic Fermi-Bose correspondence for vertex operators, complete construction of quantum field theory of multiplicative bosons and proof of A. Weil s reciprocity law; 2) construction of quantum field theories on algebraic curves in non-zero characteristic with Artin-Schreier and Kummer theories as main examples, proof of Artin s reciprocity law using quantum field-theoretical methods; 3) adelic formulation of the WZW theory on algebraic curves in characteristic zero. In mathematical development a pivotal role is played by ideas from physics, originated in the study of the surrounding world. The last twenty five years have been characterized by dramatic success in application of quantum fields and strings to different areas of mathematics. The idea is to probe mathematical objects by quantum theories and to measure their response in order to get new information about the various mathematical properties of these objects. Usually the output is encoded in terms of partition function and correlation functions of physical theory, and the problem is to decode it back in mathematical terms. The goals of this proposal are the following: 1) to extend further quantum-theoretic method for the study of complex analytic properties of surfaces in two dimensions and their families; 2) to develop a new systematic quantum-theoretic approach for arithmetic surfaces and algebraic number fields (like the usual field of rational numbers). Fundamental properties of these objects are discrete and it is only natural to study them at a microscopic scale using quantum theory. In particular, many classical mathematical results about fields of algebraic functions and algebraic numbers, known as reciprocity laws, can be interpreted as conservation laws (like conservation of energy) in quantum theory. The main goal of the algebraic part of the project is to develop a new approach based on quantum theory towards fundamental laws that are satisfied by the very basic mathematical objects: algebraic numbers - solutions of algebraic equations with coefficients being rational numbers, and algebraic functions - solutions of algebraic equations with coefficients being rational functions. Realization of the goals of the proposal will contribute to the fundamental interface between mathematics and physics doc20036 none Richard Hind One can associate to a smooth manifold a symplectic structure on its cotangent bundle, and to a real-analytic Riemannian manifold a canonical complex structure on a domain inside its cotangent bundle. This project will continue work of the investigator studying these symplectic and complex structures. A broad aim is to discover how closely the symplectic geometry relates to the smooth structure on the original manifold, and how the complex geometry reflects the Riemannian properties. Also, since much symplectic infomation is contained in properties of compatible complex structures, it is also interesting to relate the symplectic and complex geometry. Cotangent bundles are the simplest examples of symplectic manifolds, yet many fundamental problems in symplectic geometry are still elusive in these cases. The investigator will conduct research into the uniqueness of symplectic structures and of isotopy classes of Lagrangian submanifolds. The complex manifolds we study arise naturally in many branches of mathematics, notably algebraic geometry and representation theory. Important aspects of their geometry remain to be understood, together with analytical problems which should have applications to number theory. Symplectic geometry originated as the modern mathematical language of classical and quantum mechanics. It is now an exciting area of pure mathematical research, but continues to benefit from current physical ideas. Since the eighties it has been clear that much insight into symplectic geometry can also be gained from studying compatible complex structures. Fortunately the study of complex geometry has long been a main focus of mathematics. This project will conduct research into both symplectic and complex geometry, focussing on interactions between the two. The specific objects of study arise as the first examples of symplectic manifolds, and as examples of complex manifolds occuring frequently in many branches of mathematics and theoretical physics doc20037 none Over the past 40 years, substantial experimental and computational efforts have revealed the existence and importance of complex coherent structures in shear turbulence. The nature and role of the coherent structures have remained subjects of debate at a qualitative level due to a lack of theoretical understanding and foundation for these structures. However, the gap between theory and experiments is closing thanks to recent discoveries of three-dimensional traveling wave solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations that are best described as exact coherent structures. This research will continue the study and characterization of these rich solutions in plane shear flows and seek to elucidate the connections between their instabilities and the disorder that is characteristic of turbulence. The approach is that of bifurcation and dynamical systems theory applied to the nonlinear partial differential equations of hydrodynamics. Extensions of these traveling wave solutions to pipe flow and mixing layers will be considered. Shear turbulence is an ubiquitous phenomenon that occurs in the flow of simple fluids, such as air and water, and the more complex fluids that arise in biological and industrial processes. Turbulence has an enormous impact on the properties of fluid flows, such as the transport of momentum and energy and the mixing of chemicals in combustion, manufacturing and the environment. However, the complexity of turbulent flows severely limits our ability to predict the properties of fluid flows. This research promises to provide a fundamental understanding of the nature of shear turbulence thanks in large part to high-performance scientific computing. A database of the exact coherent structures mentioned above will be developed and posted on the Internet doc20038 none ABSRACT The scientific core of this proposal is centered around four areas. Homogenization is the common theme of all four areas, and it is expected that the proposed work will result in the development of new homogenization techniques and tools. The first area concerns the discrete network approximation for highly packed high-contrast composites. The main objective is to characterize the dependence of the effective transport properties of composites on the shapes and random locations of the filling particles in a rigorous mathematical framework with a controlled error estimate. Our objective in the second area is to obtain analytical formulas for the effective properties of composites. Such formulas reveal the explicit dependence of the effective properties on geometrical and physical parameters and provide a valuable physical insight, which can be used to test numerical algorithms developed for generic situations. The important practical issue of polydispersity will be addressed from different perspectives in the first as well as the second area, and the results will be compared. The third area concerns the rheology of complex fluids such as polymeric composites, suspensions and micellar fluids. The main features here are: (i) the interaction between micellar tubes or balls, which leads to a drastic change in the effective constitutive equations as compared with the constitutive law of the phases, (ii) the laminarization of the flow and drag reduction in viscoelastic flows (reduction in pressure). The fourth area is the exploration of novel features of homogenization for some nonlinear problems with nonstandard boundary conditions arising in modeling of superconductors and liquid crystals. The main objective is to characterize the dependence of the homogenization limit on the domain size and to explore the ramification of this size effect in physical problems. Composite materials are of critical technological importance. The modeling and design of these materials raises fundamental questions of physics, materials science, and mathematics. Many of these questions are not yet answered, and mathematics has much to contribute. This project will advance our understanding of composite materials through a theoretical effort of the principal investigator, his collaborators and advisees coordinated with experimental studies by materials scientists. The long-term goal is to enhance the contribution from mathematics to very contemporary technological problems. This will be done with an emphasis on fostering interdisciplinary connections across neighboring disciplines, as well as between academia, laboratories and industries. The results of this research will be used in developing new materials with superior properties for various industrial needs. The main applications include the design of thermal protection packages for electronic industries, which will address the need for further miniaturization of modern electronic devices (e.g., cell phones); the use of fluids with polymer and micellar additives for cooling of various devices (e.g., reactors) and more efficient transport of oil; and the optimization of transport properties of polydispersed suspensions doc20039 none PI: Per Mykland Gambling has been one of the main sources for conceptual understanding of statistics and probability, ever since the invention of the latter in the s. Following this tradition, the development of ideas and results in statistics is pursued, on the basis of an application that resembles gambling in many respects. The application is derivative securities such as options. Among the conceptual issues to be investigated, two stand out as recurring themes. One is the need to integrate statistical inference with the needs of the application. The other is that this need often leads to deliberately misspecified models, beyond what is usually the case in ordinary statistics. This proposal is also about the application. Options trading differs from gambling both in its importance to the economy, and (most of the time) in its social value. It is also an industry where mistakes and insufficient understanding can lead to substantial calamity for the rest of society. One of the primary goals of this project is to improve understanding of the (data) processes involved in options trading, and to facilitate government regulation. The dual intentions are conceptual development in statistics and the study of the major sectors of contemporary economy. The reason why these two aims go together is that statistics relates to three of the most substantial problems facing the derivatives industry today. One is the common failure to incorporate statistical findings into decisions of pricing, trading and regulation. Another is the effect of big discontinuities (jumps, due to various shocks, or simply endogenous) in the prices of securities. And, finally, the frequent lack of transparency in the setting of options values. These are the applied questions to be answered. The three difficulties are of keen interest to regulators and financial institutions alike. Results from the project should be broadly useful to the economy, benefiting both consumers of derivatives and governments trying to regulate a business that is opaque from the outside. The problems are also often mirrored in the setting of corporate governance. On the theoretical side, the proposed project is about statistical inference with a twist, in that the goal is to take the application and integrate it with the process of inference. Since inference will be for longitudinal data, such as diffusions and jump diffusions, the conclusions will also give insights to general inference for such data. A main contention of the project is that the chain from data analysis to actual trading and regulation is best studied by taking apart its different links. These can then be studied separately, often with different methods and deliberately different model specifications, or frequently even useful misspecifications. This permits the isolation of those links, which makes an integrated analysis quite ill posed. And it gives greater transparency to those other links, which are amenable to a reliable analysis. This willingness to use separate tools for separate purposes appears to be quite successful, both from a statistical and a financial perspective. A main example is the analysis of variance (ANOVA) for diffusions. This device leads to trading that can adapt to the markets in more sophisticated ways than by calibration or modeling alone doc20040 none The recent literature has seen an explosion of interest in the field of numerical magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). This stems from the fact that robust total variation diminishing (TVD) schemes have been formulated and adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) techniques have been designed. The MHD equations evolve the magnetic field in divergence-free fashion and this divergence-free evolution is essential for physically consistent computation of the MHD system. The ideal MHD schemes that have been formulated have second order accuracy. In this project we focus on the formulation of second order accurate methods for resistive MHD on AMR meshes. The work will rely on the use of Krylov subspace techniques. The equations of resistive magnetohydrodynamics are used in various settings in physics, astrophysics and engineering. They are useful for advanced methods for rocket propulsion as well as in nuclear fusion-based power generation. As a result, being able to understand how to solve these equations will help society because it will help us make progress on those very useful applications. In several of these societally useful applications, interest often focuses on solving these problems on an adaptive mesh in order to efficiently resolve solutions. As a result, we will focus on formulating second order accurate techniques for resistive adaptive mesh refinement magnetohydrodynamics in this work. Date: June 24, doc20003 none multivariate auxiliary information; and alternative smoothing techniques. Parametric and nonparametric techniques are blended using semiparametric additive models to provide a flexible tool for use in complex surveys. Large-scale surveys are used to collect data in a wide range of fields, from studies of human populations to inventories of natural resources. Information external to the survey, such as administrative records or remote sensing, is often available. This research project makes it possible to incorporate auxiliary information easily and effectively into survey estimates, by using nonparametric regression methods. Nonparametric regression, sometimes referred to as smoothing, is widely used in other areas of statistics, but its use in survey estimation has been limited so far. The investigators show that incorporating auxiliary information into survey estimation through nonparametric regression can improve the precision of the surveys, often at reduced costs doc20042 none This project is devoted to the mathematical modeling of nano-scale self-organization and pattern formation in electrochemical processes. The focus is on (i) electroconvection during anodic dissolution and the growth of anodic oxide layers; (ii) the growth and stability of pores in dielectric and semiconductor layers; (iii) the stability and nonlinear dynamics of pattern formation at solid-solid interfaces in the presence of chemical reactions, electric field, and elastic stresses. Mathematical techniques to be used are linear stability and bifurcation analysis, asymptotic analysis, as well as numerical implementations of boundary integral methods, phase-field models, and level-set methods for free-boundary problems. From the scientific point of view, the research is aimed at understanding the basic physico-chemical mechanisms responsible for the formation of highly regular nano-scale patterns in electrochemical systems. The goal of this project is to develop mathematical models of the most important processes leading to self-organization (pattern formation) on the nano-scale. These mathematical models can be used in numerical simulations and thus enable the creation of a new generation of electronic, opto-electronic, and magneto-electronic devices. From the educational point of view, the proposed project, being essentially interdisciplinary and devoted to the cutting edge of modern science and technology, will attract graduate students who will be able to acquire knowledge and research experience in several interconnecting scientific disciplines and become capable of carrying out interdisciplinary research doc20043 none Ruth Gornet - This proposal addresses several topics in inverse spectral geometry. In the first project, the Principal Investigator will show that the classical trace formula, which relates the Laplace and length spectra for generic manifolds, provides less information about isospectral manifolds than was previously speculated. In joint work with P. Perry, the wave trace on Heisenberg manifolds will be explicitly calculated in order to understand the behavior of the length vs. Laplace spectra. Additionally, a new notion of length spectrum will be studied in order to prove a necessary condition that lengths of closed geodesics on isospectral manifolds must satisfy. A further project (joint with J. McGowan) studies the p-form spectrum on lens spaces. The Principal Investigator has constructed examples of lens spaces whose p-form spectra are equal for certain p but with unequal spectra on functions. This behavior will be further studied toward constructing p-isospectral lens spaces with unequal absolute length spectrum; i.e., different lengths of closed geodesics. In the final project (joint with R. Brooks) tools from representation theory of the symmetric groups will be used to construct an explicit upper bound on the number of isospectral Riemann surfaces of a fixed genus that can be constructed from the Sunada method. When this final project is completed, an explicit upper bound on the number of nonisomorphic number fields with a given zeta function will result. In , Mark Kac popularized the question, Can one hear the shape of a drum? The mathematical formulation of this question is: ``What geometric information is contained in the spectrum of a Riemannian manifold? Isospectrality, i.e., the study of isospectral families and or the geometric properties they may or may not share, impacts areas outside of spectral geometry; the research funded by this proposal thus supports the pure-mathematical foundations of these areas. The first examples of closed isospectral manifolds, Milnor s flat tori, have appeared in string theory in physics (related to mirror symmetry). The empirical science of spectroscopy has studied frequencies of atoms and molecules to provide information about vibrating objects. Inverse spectral problems also arise in medical imaging, geophysical prospection, and non-destructive testing doc20044 none DMS - . We plan to study isoperimetric inequalities for Dirichlet eigenvalues of biharmonic operator in dimensions greater than 3, for the sums of reciprocals Neumann eigenvalues, for the Willmore functional of a surface, isoperimetric inequalities for Dirichlet Laplacian with Bonnesen type term. By isoperimetric inequality we mean any inequality relating two or more domain functionals (defined on the same domain) which is such that the equality sign actually holds for some domain of the class under consideration (or in some appropriate limiting sense). There are still some open fundamental questions in this classical area doc20045 none DMS - . PI: David Auckly This project is centered around a list of problems on the border of topology, geometry and analysis. The least speculative problem is part of a collaboration with V. Kapovitch to prove that there are compact topological 4-manifolds that do not admit Alexandrov metrics. The result should follow by a suitable modification of previous work of S. Donaldson and D. Sullivan. The most speculative problem in the list is to study the interaction between Gromov-Witten invariants and finite type invariants. Many different ideas are used in geometric analysis, and developments in this field will effect a broad range of other disciplines. For example symplectic geometry and gauge theory were developed to describe mechanics and electrodynamics. These ideas were developed into subtle invariants of smooth manifolds defined via the solution to systems of partial differential equations. Various gluing formulae developed to compute these invariants resulted in relationships with other invariants that arise from a combinatorial point of view. Properties of the combinatorial invariants lead to conjectures about the smooth invariants, and vice versa. It is exactly this interplay that makes geometric analysis such an important field doc20046 none The quality of existing infrastructure appears to have played an important role in restoring the quality of life after September 11th, including the safety and security of the population. This exploratory research focuses on time sensitive data and field research on urban infrastructure services provided before, during, and after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York City, NY on September 11, . The objective of this research is to better understand urban infrastructure systems behavior, resilience, and recovery under critical conditions with the aim of generalizing design and management (both operational and policy) characteristics that lead to resilient infrastructure. Understanding the role of infrastructure in restoration involves examining a constellation of facilities and services at many levels, the impact of the event on them, the conditions of these services prior to the event, and the ability of the system to rebound. The research, therefore, explores pre-event infrastructure condition, service interruption, and infrastructure resiliency. Historical precedents and analogies as well as the trends in response and recovery are critical components of the evaluation of both initial vulnerability of the infrastructure and subsequent resiliency of the facilities services during the restoration period. The research will also include an evaluation of the impacts on the transport, energy, telecommunications, water, sewer, and solid waste management. The research will identify performance frameworks used in the emergency response, outputs such as measures that reflect management arrangements, system resiliency, and transferability to new situations. Moreover, interactions among the facilities will be examined, generalizations across infrastructure systems will be sought, as well as common lessons about how infrastructure organizations work together. Such lessons offer the broader impact of improved preparedness and response to future catastrophes, regardless of whether they are induced by natural, technological, or deliberate mechanisms. The research will also be conducted in the context of infrastructure services citywide and regionally and will thus provide valuable information to other municipalities and regions doc20047 none PI: Bing Li This research will develop methods in dimension reduction, which aim at increased accuracy and a wider spectrum of applications. Specifically, the work will proceed in three main directions. (1) The classical formulation makes the conditional density in regression the target for dimension reduction. This does not take into consideration that in many applications the primary interest centers in the conditional mean. Moreover, the classical formulation requires homoskedasticity among predictors, which can be too restrictive for some problems. To address these issues the investigator proposes to reformulate the problem as reducing the dimensions of the predictors as they appear in the conditional mean. This will allow further dimension reduction, it will improve accuracy and remove the requirement for homoskedasticity. (2) Within the classical formulation one cannot handle categorical predictors, which occur frequently in practice. This research will broaden the proposed formulation so that it can handle such cases. (3) It is then possible and natural to combine these two new elements to further develop a more focused, and less restricted dimension reduction method for conditional means for regressions involving categorical predictors. The methods of dimension reduction were introduced originally to provide a comprehensive graphical tool for exploratory data analysis. Recently, active developments are under way due to the rapid growth of computing power; this has dramatically increased the scope and dimensions of the collected data sets. Besides its important role as a graphic method, dimension reduction is particularly useful in problems where interest lies in identifying connections among the variables, such as classification and clustering. It is also useful when the dimension of a data point exceeds the total number of data points, which is typically the case for many scientific data sets, such as gene expression data. But the available dimension reduction methods have several limitations, such as assuming homogeneity between predictors and not be able to handle categorical predictors. This research will tackle these limitations of the current methodology doc20048 none The principal investigator proposes to analyze the critical behavior of lattice models in classical equilibrium statistical mechanics by using renormalization group methods based on Osiris wavelets. Various types of wavelets have been successfully applied to problems in signal analysis and image reconstruction. Since critical phenomena in statistical mechanics are intimately related to scaling, one expects wavelet analysis to be very useful in the study of statistical-mechanical models as well. Osiris wavelets appear to be particularly well-suited for this purpose. One of the goals is to obtain cleaner hierarchical models by which renormalization group calculations of critical exponents can be determined. The lattice models in classical equilibrium statistical mechanics are designed for the study of condensed matter physics, which deals with the critical behavior of solid materials with respect to changes in pressure, temperature, magnetic field intensity, etc. For example, the low temperatures at which supercomputers need to be maintained is a consequence of the fact that certain materials become super-conducters below a critical temperature. Other examples of critical behavior would include the agnetization of a bar of iron, which can be induced at room temperature, but not above a certain temperature. There are countless examples in nature. Wavelets are mathematical functions that are especially effective in recovering structures from compressed data. As such, they should be suited to the multiscale resolution of of these types of problems. This project aims to exploit the properties of a special class of wavelets, Osiris wavelets, to obtain better models in statistical mechanics doc20049 none DMS - . PI: Zhiqin Lu On the Geometry of Kaehler-Einstein Manifold In this project, the proposer is going to understand Kaehler-Einstein metrics, especially Calabi-Yau manifolds using the theory of moduli spaces, through three different ways. The first way is to study the potential function of the Bergman metric of a polarized compact Kaehler manifold. For the application in the Kaehler-Einstein geometry, one needs to estimate the potential function from below for a family of manifolds. The problem is related to the stability of manifolds in the sense of Geometric Invariant Theory. The second way is to study the relation between the K stability and the Mumford stability. Such a relation, if exists, would give one new insights of the relations between the Kaehler-Einstein geometry and the stability of manifolds. The third way is the geometry of moduli space of polarized Calabi-Yau manifolds. A Kaehler metric on the moduli space has been defined and was found that the Ricci curvature of such a metric is negative away from zero by the proposer. In order to introduce geometric analysis to the place, one needs to prove a version of the maximal principle on the moduli space, even if the moduli space, in general, is not smooth. Einstein s general theory of relativity is a theory that interprets the concept of gravity into the geometric property of the space. Recent development of in physics shows that the universe may be of dimension ten, with three dimension in space and one dimension in time plus a tiny six dimensional space called Calabi-Yau threefold. One of the main mathematical tool to study the geometry of the space is differential geometry. Since the discovery of the general relativity, differential geometry becomes crucial to both mathematicians and physicists. The project is one of the main field in differential geometry. It will help a lot in understanding one of the basic force of the universe: the gravity and ultimately understanding the space we are living with. It is difficult to believe that without an extensive study of fundamental sciences such as general relativity, modern technology like the use of atomic energy can come true. By the same reason, today s fundamental study will not only enlarge our knowledge but eventually benefit people s life as well doc20050 none Duncan The major focus of this research is the application of a stochastic calculus for a fractional Brownian motion to stochastic systems, especially for the problems of identification and control. The importance of a fractional Brownian motion in stochastic models has been exhibited in a wide variety of applications, such as, hydrology, economics and telecommunications. One goal of the research is to develop further a stochastic calculus for a fractional Brownian motion similar to the way that the stochastic calculus for Brownian motion was developed to provide the tools for solving problems of stochastic systems with a fractional Brownian motion. Some tools of stochastic calculus that are planned for development are necessary for solving the problems of identification, filtering and control of a stochastic system with a fractional Brownian motion. The fractional Brownian motions for study include processes with values in both finite and infinite dimensional spaces. The study includes the existence and the uniqueness of solutions of stochastic differential equations and stochastic partial differential equations with a fractional Brownian motion and martingales that are formed from a fractional Brownian motion. Another family of stochastic models that are planned for study is hidden Markov models. An investigation of adaptive control for systems described by both fractional Brownian motions and hidden Markov models is planned. This research focuses on a stochastic calculus for a fractional Brownian motion. A fractional Brownian motion is a stochastic process that has been important in modeling physical systems such as those arising in hydrology, economics and telecommunications. Stochastic calculus provides the basic tool for solving problems of stochastic models that contain a fractional Brownian motion. Fractional Brownian motions have a self similarity property and many have a long range dependence property that often occur in physical phenomena. It is planned to study the control of partially known systems that contain fractional Brownian motion and hidden Markov models. Such control problems naturally arise in applications doc20051 none The adequate numerical treatment of nonlinear phenomena governed by partial differential equations with several disparate scales is a formidable computational challenge. Modern algorithms should be able to resolve fine scales for certain physical quantities without overresolving others, thereby optimizing the computational effort and making realistic 3d simulations feasible. Epitaxial and crystal growth in materials science, and viscous incompressible fluids are typical yet quite distinct examples addressed in this proposal. The goal of this project is to design, test, and analyze reliable and efficient adaptive finite element methods for such problems, with space-time error control and based on refinement coarsening mesh modification. This project blends quite delicate analytical and computational issues, and applies them to free boundary problems, constrained problems, geometric PDE and the Navier-Stokes equations of incompressible fluids. Scientific computing has joined theory and experiment to form together the three central aspects of scientific inquiry. The current strengths in computational mathematics draw on the widespread acceptance of computational modeling as a complement to, and even a replacement for, physical tests in a broad number of fields. In this vein, the investigator develops reliable and efficient computational tools that may be useful in several areas of strategic importance such as nanotechnology, materials science, and high-performance computing. This project is a collaborative endeavor, involving a number of scientists in the US and abroad, as well as several students and postdocs. A substantial effort is devoted to education and human resource development doc20052 none DMS - . The principal investigator plans to continue his work on global problems in differential geometry and related areas. Special emphasis will be devoted to the pursuit of global Riemannian geometry via additional structures. This includes but is not limited to structures arising from the presence of symmetries, and to structures arising from taking external or internal limits. Our efforts concerning investigations of relations between curvature, symmetry and topology is guided by the program set forth by the aim: ``Classify or describe the structure of manifolds with positive or nonnegative curvature and large isometry groups . This area is currently experiencing significant advances in various directions. The project will also include investigations of structures arising from the collapse of manifolds under a lower curvature bound, and of metric invariants coming from investigations of the structure of various spaces of finite metric spaces. The significance of the main part of the proposal is twofold. On the one hand there are many geometric situations where no symmetries are present from the outset, but where symmetries emerge non-trivially from the geometry. Among such situations are rigidity problems and collapsing problems under bounded curvature. General results achieved through the work proposed can then be invoked and help solve the original problem, where no symmetries were present. This method has already been used successfully. On the other hand, the proposed work provides a systematic approach for finding new examples of spaces with positive or nonnegative curvature, arguably one the most central and difficult issues facing global Riemannian geometry today doc20053 none This project focuses on the development and study of dynamic materials, i.e., material composites assembled on a microscale in space and time. Both analytic and computational means will be used to analyze the effective properties of such materials in many spatial dimensions and time. Analytically, by applying homogenization to the relevant hyperbolic systems with spatio-temporally varying senior coefficients, attainable bounds will be specified for the effective parameters of the binary mixtures of isotropic dielectrics in the framework of Maxwell s theory. Computationally, a direct numerical simulation of the original equations will be used to better understand the physics of wave propagation through heterogeneous media with complex microstructure. Together, both approaches will lead to a correct formulation and analysis of optimal material design in space time in response to a dynamic environment. By allowing spatio-temporal variability in the material properties, it is possible to create effects that are unachievable through purely spatial design. For example, by appropriately controlling the design factors of an elastic construction, i.e., its mass and stiffness, it is possible to selectively screen major parts of it from the invasion of destructive dynamic disturbances caused by impacts or other dynamic factors. Disturbances can be purposefully guided into regions where their effect is less pernicious. Another example is related to electromagnetic or acoustic waveguides. To function properly, a conventional waveguide must have a certain minimum diameter relative to the wavelength of the signal. If the waveguide is too narrow or the frequency of the waves is too low, then propagation will not be possible. However, by allowing the material properties of the filling of the waveguide to vary both in space and in time, it will become possible to transmit waves of all frequencies doc20054 none With the completion of genomes of many species and the advances of microarray technologies, biological researchers begin to possess a tremendous amount of data --- but these raw products are still far from usable. One of the most challenging problems of this century is to decipher this huge amount of biological information, turning the data into knowledge. Simultaneously, there also has been a revolution in chemistry research: scientists can now use advanced technology to make observations on single-molecule dynamics, which promises to rewrite some fundamental laws in physics and chemistry derived from traditional ensemble-averaged experiments. As the data concerning molecular movements are inherently noisy, the development of advanced statistical tools for handling such data is a pressing need. The past decade has witnessed the power of formal statistical modeling, especially the use of hidden Markov models, in revolutionizing the field of computational biology. It is the investigators belief that using proper statistical models to describe the underlying chemical processes and to derive efficient inference methods can also greatly strengthen the data analysis in single-molecule studies. For the biological information analysis, the investigators describe a few problems related to the statistical models used for finding motifs, whose solutions can deepen the understanding of a few popular Bioinformatics algorithms for sequence analysis. The investigators show that these algorithms are based on special hidden Markov or semi-Markov models and can be generalized to accommodate more detailed biology knowledge. For single-molecule data analysis, the investigators outline an efficient likelihood-based approach for inferring quantities of special interests in single-molecule studies. The form of the observed data naturally calls for a data augmentation framework, which is a promising means for solving the computational difficulty. In single-molecule studies, besides the problem of model inference, model selection is also an important and difficult task, as it is often the case that there are competing models describing one chemical reaction, making it necessary to use the experimental data to choose the appropriate model. The investigators, using a data augmentation approach, propose a few generalized methods for choosing among different chemical models doc20055 none The objective of this proposal is to develop new methods to study the existence and stability of traveling wave solutions for a class of functional differential equations arising from applications. A dynamical approach combined with an analytic method will be developed. A particular type of flow generated by the proposed functional differential equations is defined. A traveling wave is given by the equilibrium of this flow that will be identified from the positive limit set corresponding to a bounded solution. This will be achieved by extensive investigation of the property of a positive limit set and analysis of the spectral property for the variational equation associated to a global solution contained in the positive limit set. The advantage of the proposed approach is that it will provide information on both the asymptotical behavior of a solution and the existence and stability of a traveling wave solution. The method will also have the potential of application to other problems, such as the existence of traveling wave solutions for spatially discrete systems and the existence of heteroclinic solution for the delay differential equation arising from singular perturbation problems. The techniques of spectral analysis developed in this research will also be a contribution to the spectral theory of operators in Banach space. Traveling waves have been observed in many models in the fields of biology, ecology, chemistry, and physics. In particular, the existence of the existence of stable traveling waves provides the most important information on the asymptotical behavior of a dynamical system or identifies the target pattern that describes the most interesting phenomenon. The functional differential equations studied in this proposal include a large class of models found in the literature. These models address questions of interest to ecologists and epidemiologists that include competition, dynamics of disease transmission and persistence, and that how the time delay and diffusion jointly affect the existence of traveling waves. Results from the proposed research will increase our understanding of mechanisms responsible for observed patterns and the common feature of wave propagation in nature. The proposed research project will also be incorporated into the research and education programs in the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The research project will expose graduate students to biologically important and mathematically interesting questions to attract them to the field of functional differential equations and mathematical biology doc20019 none This research effort addresses a spectrum of fundamental and applied problems in the slow flow of granular materials. It is organized into four projects, chosen partly because of their importance in the field of granular materials, but also because they raise intriguing mathematical and scientific issues of broader significance. The first project attacks a fundamental physical problem: How to include micromechanical effects in a continuum description of granular flow, especially the effect of velocity fluctuations. The second project concerns the mathematics surrounding multidimensional continuum models for granular flow, specifically the issue of extracting mathematically rigorous information from ill-posed partial differential equations. The third project proposes to extend Jenike s radial solution for flows in axisymmetric hoppers to conical hoppers with a general cross section. The fourth project deals with flows of fine granular materials, where the interstitial gas significantly affects the flow. The research program involves coordinated efforts in modeling, analysis, numerical simulations, and experiment. At the heart of this research project is a basic question concerning the flow of granular materials: What behaviors of slowly flowing granular material can be understood in terms of a continuum formulation? This question may be viewed as an attempt to reconcile continuum models, used in industrial design and engineering problem solving, with discrete models, introduced to understand the results of small- to medium-scale physical experiments. Continuum models are highly desirable since they are much more tractable analytically and computationally than particle dynamics simulations, which treat the discreteness of the flow directly. An important issue that arises from this basic question, and which is addressed in this project, is the form that a continuum description should take. This issue has been the subject of debate in the engineering literature ever since Janssen in demonstrated that stresses in a column of granular material do not increase indefinitely with depth, but approach asymptotically to a constant. The research program has significance well beyond the context of granular materials in mathematics as well as physics. The project is supported by a long-standing industrial collaboration doc20057 none Michael Hutchings This project involves the development and application of new enumerative invariants in low-dimensional, symplectic, and contact topology. There are two main goals. The first is to develop and compute ``periodic Floer homology , a theory defined for an area-preserving surface diffeomorphism, which counts periodic orbits together with embedded pseudoholomorphic curves in R cross the mapping torus. This theory is conjectured to agree with the Seiberg-Witten Floer homology of the mapping torus, thus giving a link between low dimensional topology and surface dynamics. Also, an analogue of periodic Floer homology for three-dimensional contact manifolds should have applications to the topology of overtwisted contact structures and smooth four-manifolds. The second main goal is to develop and compute invariants of families of equivalent objects in different versions of Floer theory. These give topological invariants of families of symplectomorphisms, three-manifolds, Legendrian knots, and any other type of object for which a version of Floer theory can be defined. This project fits into the broad theme of developing tools to understand the possible global shapes of three and four dimensional spaces. For example the universe we live in is a four dimensional space if one includes time, and its global structure is not known. The tools used here to understand the shape of a space involve counting interesting geometric objects inside the space. An important class of such objects are pseudoholomorphic curves, which are surfaces resembling soap films. By counting the number of such surfaces with appropriate constraints that exist in a space, one can gain information about the global structure of the space doc20058 none The research program has a two-pronged approach aimed at identifying important areas in imaging that are ripe for enhanced mathematical treatment. The PI s main goal is to apply newly developed mathematical tools to such imaging problems as well as to consider new imaging situations that suggest the need to develop or adapt new mathematical techniques. The classical theory of scalar valued spherical functions unifies a number of classical approximation methods. These include Jacobi polynomials, Bessel functions, Laguerre polynomials, Hermite polynomials, and Legendre functions. The PI has extended this theory to matrix valued situations. This will be the main tool in solving the imaging problems. Natural candidates involve areas where polarization or anisotropy (as in optical tomography) play important roles. These imaging methods will be applied in biomedical areas, including X-ray, magnetic resonance, X-ray crystallography, and optical tomography. The National Research Council rported that there was a potential for great progress in the emerging field of optical or diffuse tomography, where one aims at obtaining images with the use of very low energy probes, like infrared lasers. From the beginning there was a need to deal both with attenuation and scattering. The techniques developed in this research should improve the ability to reconstruct images using these techniques. Other applications envisaged are repeated mammographies and certain brain blood flow studies (measuring oxygen content) in neonatal clinics. The PI will work closely with those who are developing the instrumation hardware doc20059 none PI: Ian McKeague This project aims to enhance the scope of semiparametric models for use in weather prediction, ocean circulation and biomedical applications. A synthesis of Bayesian, empirical likelihood, counting process and Monte Carlo methods is used to advance statistical methodology in these areas. Five specific topics are investigated: Bayesian single-index models, Bayesian inversion of ocean circulation data, empirical likelihood methods for treatment comparisons, tests for mark-specific hazards and cumulative incidence functions, and covariate selection for semiparametric hazard function regression models. The initial phase of the project is motivated by a weather prediction problem and introduces Bayesian methodology for single-index models, incorporating some frequentist methods, as well as useful prior information, into the inference machinery. Next, a Bayesian inversion approach for the ocean circulation inverse problem is developed, motivated by the success and popularity of this approach in other ill-posed inverse problems. With a view towards biomedical applications, empirical likelihood based methods for comparing two or more treatments are studied. A new approach for comparing mark-specific hazard functions, which is useful for the analysis of HIV genetic data collected in AIDS clinical trials and the assessment of HIV vaccine efficacy, is introduced. Finally, a model selection procedure for finding the best subset of covariates in a flexible new class of semiparametric hazard function regression model is developed doc20060 none This research involves development of new probabilistic and Bayesian statistical models for the analysis of biopolymer sequences. Emphasis is on predictive modeling of proteins and RNA. Models for sequences of random variables with complex short- and long-range interaction structure are developed and explored. Particular focus is placed unifying statistical models estimated from data with statistical mechanical models of polymer folding estimated via experimental parameter measurement. Targeted applications include protein structure prediction, protein folding kinetics, and protein-RNA binding. Statistical methodology development focuses on connecting statistical models for sequence analysis and change-point problems, including graphical Markov models and random fields, to statistical mechanical models of polymer folding, especially on biopolymers (proteins and RNA), to develop predictive theories. An additional core component of this research program concerns development of computational methodology for probabilistic inference in these models, including novel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for multi-modal distributions and rough energy landscapes. Modern research in the molecular biosciences and biomedicine relies increasingly on both computational modeling and analysis of large collections of experimental data. This research concerns development of novel and unified methods for combining these areas. This work leverages physical models to develop improved methods for statistical data analysis, and uses statistical methodology for improving predictive accuracy of physical models. The focus is on analysis of protein and nucleic acid sequences and structures being generated by high-throughput whole-genome analyses. These advances will provide important new statistical methodology for computational biology, as well as provide domain scientists with improved tools for data analysis and predictive modeling doc20061 none This award by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research by James Mayer, Department of Chemistry, University of Washington, in the fundamental processes of transition metal-promoted oxidations. The properties and reactivity of a new osmium compound, tris(pyrazolyl)borate osmium dioxo nitride will be studied. This compound has shown olefin dihydroxylation activity. Novel electrophilic reactions of coordinated ligands will be explored, starting from the unique attack of an anilido ligand bound to osmium. Mayer will also extend his work into high oxidation state ruthenium and iridium complexes. In these strongly oxidizing complexes, ligands that are usually electrophiles act as nucleophiles and show unusual reactivity. The selective oxidation of organic compounds by transition metal reagents and catalysts is of fundamental and technological importance. Selective oxidation is a key part of the production of many commodity chemicals, specialty organic chemicals and pharmaceuticals, and there is much room for improvement in these processes. Undergraduate and graduate students will also be trained in this important research area that combines synthetic and mechanistic chemistry doc20062 none The proposer will continue his research on the modelling and analysis of scattered data on the sphere and other manifolds. For the analysis of data, he will develop frames having small or compact supports, and having dual frames with other desirable properties. The proposer will study the optimal representation of functions on the manifolds using finitely many bits, rather than real coefficients, and develop algorithms for these representations based on scattered data. An important new mathematical tool in this study will be quadrature formulas with positive weights based on data near (rather than on) the manifolds, and local quadrature formulas based on data near parts of the manifolds. The research is expected to have applications in the areas of signal processing, analysis of satellite data, and the study of development of tumors. The problem of approximation of functions on the sphere is a very old one; among the early workers in this area was Gauss. It arises naturally in geodesic studies, for example, the study of the environment, and variations in the gravitational and electromagnetic fields around the earth. The data taken from a satellite is most naturally modelled as a function on the sphere. Additional applications arise in mathematical biology, where the growth of a tumor is modelled by a system of differential equations satisfied by functions on a sphere, which need to be approximated efficiently and accurately in real time. Many recent applications require a study of functions on slight perturbations of the sphere. For example, the data from the satellite may be taken not from the surface of the earth itself (which is not perfectly spherical either), but from different heights above the surface. Similarly, in biological applications, a tumor which may be initially assumed spherical, no longer remains so after its evolution. The proposer will study the analysis and modelling of data collected at arbitrary sites on a nearly spherical manifold, using ideas from wavelet analysis and metric entropy. Date: June 18, doc20063 none The objectives of this work involve a detailed experimental and theoretical analysis of the atmospheric oxidation chemistry of isoprene. Isoprene is the major unsaturated organic compound emitted into the atmosphere by vegetation. Product analysis and kinetic studies will be performed on reactions of isoprene with oxygen and nitrogen radicals. These experimental results will be compared to theoretical predictions of yields and rates for these same reactions. Oxygen and nitrogen radical competititve reactions with isoprene will also be studied and the combined results used to develop a mechanistic understanding of isoprene oxidation reactions. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program and the Atmospheric Chemistry Program are supporting the research of Dr. Simon W. North and Dr. Renyi Zhang of the Department of Chemistry at Texas A 2) long range transport of organic nitrates; and 3) carbon cycling in the atmosphere. Students trained during the course of this work will gain experience in environmental, atmospheric and organic chemistry doc20064 none William H. Jaco This project involves the development and use of efficient triangulations in the study and understanding of 3--manifolds. A triangulation of a 3-manifold determines a class of surfaces in the 3--manifold called normal surfaces. A fundamental observation is that in most cases when a 3--manifold contains an interesting surface, then for any triangulation of the 3--manifold the same interesting feature is exhibited by a normal surface in the triangulation. This has provided a powerful method for studying 3-manifolds and solving certain decision problems. Normal surface theory has, for example, lead to the theoretical resolution of determining when two 3--manifolds, which contain injective surfaces, are homeomorphic, to the classification of these same manifolds, and to the determination of whether a knot in the three-sphere is the unknot. However, even with the presence of interesting normal surfaces, a given triangulation may have numerous uninteresting normal surfaces, which make theoretical arguments quite tedious and computational attempts nearly impossible. The guiding principle of efficient triangulations is reducing unnecessary normal surfaces and improving the efficiency of computations for triangulation based algorithms. They have exhibited remarkable success in doing this. However, more surprisingly, efficient triangulations have exposed interesting relations between one-vertex and ideal triangulations of three-manifolds and new combinatorial structures, which seem to be intimately related to the topology of the three-manifold. This project will explore efficient triangulations with particular emphasis of their application to the Homeomorphism Problem Classification Problem for three-manifolds and issues of computational complexity. Low-dimensional topology brings together many areas of mathematical research and provides a common ground for interaction and advance across all of mathematics. It provides a natural geometric model of most physical phenomena. Research in this area is making significant contribution to computational geometry and topology and complexity theory. It has consequences in physics, computer visualization and medical and biological modeling doc20065 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Dynamical Systems Methods and Geometric Integrators for Nonlinear Wave Equations Schober This project consists of three interrelated topics in the theory and application of nonlinear dispersive waves: chaotic dynamics in perturbed nonlinear Schrodinger (NLS) equations, the role of homoclinic chaos in the generation of high amplitude (rogue) ocean waves, and the development and analysis of structure-preserving integrators for nonlinear wave equations. Combined experimental and theoretical studies of water waves recently yielded a characterization of the chaotic evolution in perturbed NLS equations that is generic, observable, and physically significant. Preliminary analysis indicates that similar results hold in fiber optics. In this project, further experimental, numerical, and theoretical analysis will be carried out. The latter includes extending the geometric interpretation of the Floquet discriminant and the associated Melnikov integrals for solutions in the full phase space and obtaining criteria for the existence of homoclinic structures for symmetry-breaking perturbations of the NLS equation. The implication of these results in the context of homoclinic chaos and the likelihood of rogue wave formation will be examined. The research also involves the development of efficient, stable multi-symplectic integrators for equations of interest in the water wave and optics problems. A comparison of the multi-symplectic, energy, and momentum errors to the overall performance of the integrators (including accurate capture of qualitative features of the system) will be carried out. Error bounds on the approximate preservation of the local conservation laws will be sought. The proposed research focuses on mathematical and computational issues central to water wave dynamics and nonlinear optics. Rogue wave events can have a devastating effect on offshore structures and ships. The results of this project will address fundamental properties of rogue wave generation and potentially have impact on the design and analysis of structures such as offshore oil rigs. Soliton solutions of the NLS equation are used to model light pulses in high-speed optical telecommunication systems. The research on multi-symplectic integrators will yield fast, efficient codes that can be used in numerical simulation of high data rate communication systems and rogue wave events doc20066 none R. Schoen, H. Bray, J. Isenberg, N. Kapouleas This award provides partial support for active research mathematicians to attend a program in general relativity to be held at Stanford University and the American Institute of Mathematics in the spring quarter (April 1-June 7) of . The main topic of the conference concerns aspects of the Cauchy problem for the Einstein equations, and it will include researchers with expertise in differential geometry, nonlinear hyperbolic PDE, and relativity theory. There will be approximately 50 total visitors averaging two weeks each during the period of the workshop together with a few people for longer periods. Focus periods on specific subtopics will be arranged. The program will include regular talks, lecture series on particular papers and topics, and open problem sessions. In addition, we will create a web site for the program which will give a detailed look at open problems, relevant literature, background references, and links to preprints and reprints. Further information will be linked from http: math.stanford.edu and http: www.aimath.org doc20067 none The investigators will study new nonparametric methodology focusing on the mid-range and high-range dimensions to better understand data modeling, the curse of dimensionality, and problems associated with massive data sets in multivariate regression and density estimation as well as closely related problems in clustering, mixtures, pattern recognition, and dimension reduction. A new data-based parametric estimation algorithm, based upon integrated squared error, will be investigated for its flexibility and robustness. By applying the criterion to the fitting of local polynomials, a new robust nonparametric regression algorithm can be proposed, which will be applied to automatic detection of hundreds of overlapping tracks in subatomic detector experiments. This project will examine semiparametric models for density estimation that can work better than ordinary nonparametric algorithms, extending feasibility by several extra dimensions. Of special interest, this algorithm can be used to fit subsets of a full mixture model. Applications include regression, image processing, clustering, outlier detection, density estimation, and visualization. The project will extend work on spatial modeling and the combination of multiple data surveys into useful data modeling and maps of conditional estimators of factors and their covariates. Currently, simultaneous mapping of variables is difficult to interpret, due to the availability of data only in discrete spatial areas (e.g. census tracts) and cross-tabulation of the two variables of interest. By constructing a smooth map of one variable as a second variable varies, a more faithful and accurate understanding of the spatial relationship may be obtained. Nonparametric methodology is widely used in one and two dimensions, but less so in higher dimensions. This research focuses on the mid-range and high-range dimensions and provides a deeper understanding of the implications to data modeling of the curse of dimensionality and problems associated with massive data sets. Particular emphasis will be given to multivariate regression and density estimation problems, and closely related applications such as clustering, mixture estimation, pattern recognition, and dimension reduction. This proposal examines new points of view, especially related to locally adaptive and spatial estimation, as well as some recent extensions of nonparametric criteria to parametric problems. The new parametric approach has potential for new nonparametric formulations and applications. At a recent National Research Council workshop, numerous scientists identified critical statistical needs in their work with massive data sets: alternatives to principal components, specialized visualization tools for exploring massive data, better clustering algorithms, and techniques for handling nonstationary data. Results from this research directly impact three of these four critical opportunities. This program represents a comprehensive and long-term attack on a host of important data analytic problems in multivariate estimation. The results will be of long-term theoretical interest and will provide near-term solutions to real-world problems doc20068 none DMS- Ernesto Lupercio This proposal consists of a number of research projects on the topic of cohomology theories for orbifolds and related subjects. The suggested methods combine algebraic topology with techniques coming from stack theory in algebraic geometry and tools arising in symplectic geometry. It proposes the use of the theory of groupoids as a unifying tool in the solution these questions; a methodology that has proved successful before in our study of orbifolds. The following is a brief summary of some aspects of the project. The first project is program whose objective is the study of the cohomological invariants that can be naturally obtained from several natural spaces associated to an orbifold. A second project consist of a study the orbifold elliptic genus, its modularity and rigidity properties from the homotopy theory point of view. The third project describes a program to define and study Orbifold Deligne cohomologies and their relation to gerbes defined over the orbifold. The fourth is a project to study the relation between the Hodge-Deligne numbers of an orbifold resolution of singularities of an orbifold and the original orbifold. Orbifolds are geometric spaces in which it is very important to keep track of the local symmetries of the particular situation. So in general the points of an orbifold are classified by the amount of local symmetry. In ordinary spaces all points are equal, while in an orbifold points carry different weights corresponding to the amount of local symmetry. Orbifolds have been used in the study of structural crystallography allowing for a convenient book-keeping device by reducing the redundant information in the space group diagrams of the crystallographic groups. Orbifolds have also become extremely important in the field of theoretical physics referred to as Superstring theory. In String Theory, the multitude of particle types of classical high energy physics is replaced by a single fundamental building block, a `string . As the string moves through time it traces out a tube or a sheet, according to whether it is closed or open. Moreover, the string can vibrate, and different vibrational modes of the string represent the different particle types, since different modes are seen as different masses or spins. In an attempt to make these theories describe the physical universe, physicists have been motivated to let the string move on an orbifold space. In these cases the theory acquires properties that are very desirable for it to model reality. The work proposed in this project involves the development of rigorous mathematical methods to study the geometry of these spaces doc20069 none DMS - . PI: Qiu-Dong Wang This research proposal is mainly on the subject of non-uniformly hyperbolic strange attractors. We propose to apply an abstract setting we previously formulated and studied to rigorously prove the existence of non-uniformly hyperbolic strange attractors in certain systems of ordinary differential equations, including a modified system of van der Pol and certain periodically excited systems experiencing Hopf bifurcations. We also propose to analytically establish the fact that non-uniformly hyperbolic strange attractors naturally arise when an asymptotically stable periodic solution of a given system of ordinary differential equations is periodically excited by generic external forcing. These non-uniformly hyperbolic strange attractors have properties that include most of standard mathematical notions associated with chaos: positive Liapunov exponents, positive entropy, SRB measure, exponential decay of correlation, nice symbolic coding of orbits etc. We also propose to study the geometric structure of the integral manifold of the spatial four-body problem. This research proposal is mainly on the subject of non-uniformly hyperbolic strange attractors. In general an attractor is a state to which a system will eventually evolve. One of the most important way of studying systems in nature is to first model then study them as solutions of certain differential equations. We propose to apply a theory we previously developed to prove the existence of a class of strange attractors in some systems of differential equations arisen from various scientific disciplines including in the studies of turbulence, fluid mechanics and plasma mechanics. The attracting states we propose to study have very complicated dynamical properties and sophisticated geometric structures. They were observed in many numerical and laboratory experiments but their existence were rarely established mathematically in the past. We also propose to study the geometric structure of the integral manifold of the spatial four-body problem. This is a long standing mathematical problem with potential applications on orbit design for artificial celestial objects doc20070 none ly, without any direct reference to iterability. The aim of this project is to extend the existing methods in a manner that would yield the complete description of combinatorial properties of extender models. The open problems are related mainly to cardinal transfer theorems and stationary reflection. This part of the project includes also direct applications of the inner model theory in determining the consistency strength of various principles from infinitary combinatorics. The focus here is on improving the PI s results on Jensen s guessing principle. The second part of the project consists of two areas that are less tightly related to the PI s past research, namely the construction of inner models, iterability and applications in the descriptive set theory. The subject of set theory is the analysis of methods which arise in mathematics. The methods that are widely accepted by the mathematical world have been formalized into so-called Zermelo-Fraenkel system of axioms (briefly ZFC). However, it turns out that we more and more often encouter questions whose solutions require more than mere ZFC. Set theory provides us with tools for recognizing such problems and approaches which enable us to determine which methods to use. More precisely, set theory provides us with a general method for determining the complexity of various problems quantitatively. The scale used here is the hierarchy of the large cardinal axioms. Extender models play a crucial role here -- there are the actual technical means which enables us to establish the connection between various concrete problems from mathematics and large cardinal axioms doc20071 none NSF Proposal DMS - : Rafe Mazzeo The proposed work in this project involves the continuing development of analytic tools to study a variety of problems in geometric analysis. These include the global theory of the moduli space of constant mean curvature surfaces in Euclidean space, the application of new gluing techniques to construct new types of Einstein metrics, a more detailed study of the analytic and geometric behaviour of conformally compact Einstein metrics and the deformation theory of such metrics, with special attention to self-dual conformally compact Einstein metrics in four dimensions. The proposed techniques here include further extensions of Cauchy data matching, as developed by the PI and Pacard, as well as refinements of the PI s `edge calculus . for Other parts of the proposal involve use of the pseudodifferential calculus of fibred boundary operators, as developed by the PI and Melrose, to the study of gravitational instantons, particularly their L2 cohomology. Finally, the PI and Vasy propose to investigate the connections between geometric scattering theory on symmetric spaces of rank greater than one, as well as a class of spaces asymptotically modelled on these, and the microlocal theory of quantum N-body scattering. For the human resources component, the PI proposes to continue his directorship of the Stanford University Math Camp, a residential summer program for talented high school students, and also to continue his other outreach efforts to disseminate mathematics appreciation to the general public. From a more general point of view, the PI s research concerns problems arising in geometry and analysis involving what are known as curvature equations (the theory of Einstein metrics in general relativity being the best-known case) as well as scattering theory on spaces which possess high degrees of symmetry `at infinity . A central concern throughout is the application of somewhat novel techniques from harmonic and microlocal analysis to these problems. The theme is that one should develop analytic techniques which are specifically adapted to each geometric problem, and these geometric settings in turn should suggest new developments in the analytic technology. This approach has proved very successful in the PI s previous research. The problems considered here are inspired by main trends in various aspects of mathematical physics, most specifically the two somewhat separate fields of quantum scattering and some parts of string theory. Some of the current and proposed work has already stimulated interest on the part of some communities of physicists, and their intuitions provide an interesting guide for further mathematical directions in this work. Beyond these motivations, the PI regards this particular interplay between geometry and analysis as an important one, particularly because the types of geometric objects studied here are becoming increasingly important in many other places in mathematics. The PI has also undertaken extensive human resources development, including the above-mentioned summer program, and is active in mentoring a number of young researchers doc20072 none Models of smoldering combustion require a description of porous fluid flow as well as a description of the reaction process. The resulting partial differential equations are highly nonlinear, making description of the solutions difficult. Numerical simulations involving adaptive methods which change resolution as the process evolves are necessary to resolve these solutions. Asymptotic methods have also been successful in describing steady and slowly varying approximate solutions to these models. The proposed project involves extending both asymptotic and numerical methods in order to study non-steady and spatially varying smolder combustion. These techniques will then be used to describe the details of the dynamics and transitions of these solutions. The techniques developed will likely be applicable in other areas of combustion and problems of flow in porous media. This project should be of interest to scientists using asymptotic methods, using adaptive numerical methods for high-performance computing, interested in issues of stability of solutions with many time scales, or interested in the development of chaotic solutions. The results should be of particular interest to fire safety experts and combustion control engineers who wish to understand dynamics of smoldering near extinction limits, transitions from smoldering to flaming and patterns such as fingering of smolder waves as they move through materials. Smoldering combustion refers to fire in a porous medium in which the oxygen supply to the reaction site is limited, for example when it must flow through the porous substance to reach the fuel. Smolder is often a precursor to airborne flames and is particularly dangerous because of the amount of smoke produced and the difficulty of ensuring extinction. When controlled, smolder also has important applications to material synthesis (high temperature synthesis) and to the design of timing devices (fuses). A better understanding of the processes controlling smolder combustion will enhance fire safety as well as allow better control for engineering uses of smoldering combustion. This Research in Undergraduate Institutions project includes a training program and participation of several undergraduate students, mentored by the principal investigator. Date: May 7, doc20073 none The nature of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City demonstrates the need for understanding the interdependencies between physical infrastructure and social networks. The benefits of such understanding may include possible recommendations on modifying the design of the physical infrastructures to improve their resilience to catastrophic disruptions. Models of social networks relying on wireless and wired communication infrastructures would allow the development and testing of efficient algorithms to determine critical blocks in the infrastructures, whose distraction will adversely affect the communication traffic inside of and among social networks. This research project will use the graph-theoretic approach to model social networks and their reliance on physical infrastructures, focusing mainly on social networks in the New York City area and the providing infrastructures, including telephone networks, towers for the wireless communication, transportation and emergency services. This knowledge will be used to identify opportunities for reducing vulnerabilities, developing countermeasures to mitigate the impact of disruptions, and guiding actions for timely response and discovery doc20074 none This is a study of the kinetics and mechanism of the gas-phase reaction of hydroxyl (OH) radicals with two-and three-ring polycyclic automatic aromatic hydrocarons (PAHs); this matter is of fundamental concern in both combustion and atmospheric chemistry. Experimental data are collected over extended temperature (300- oK) and pressure (50-750 torr) ranges. A pulsed laser photolysis laser-induced fluorescence (PLP LIF) technique refined for the study of semivolatile compounds is used for the kinetic and mechanistic measurements. Experiments include measurements of the effects of pressure on observed reaction rates and kinetic isotope effects. Experiments are complemented with a theoretical study of addition and obstruction reactions using ab initio quantum chemical methods. Transition-state theory (TST) is used to obtain rate constraints and branching rations, and Rice-Ramperger-Kassel-Marcus (RRKM) theory to estimate lifetimes of intermediates doc20075 none Kenneth Bromberg The investigator plans to study spaces of hyperbolic metrics on a fixed 3-manifold. Unlike on a closed manifold, on an open 3-manifold there will typically be a large space of hyperbolic metrics. The investigators goal is to understand this space. Some questions are simple to state: Is the deformation space the closure of its interior? A more detailed description of the space is the ending lamination conjecture, which gives invariants that classify every hyperbolic metric on the manifold. This classification is not a parameterization; the map to the space of invariants is not continuous. The investigator is interested in understanding these discontinuities and describing the topology of the deformation space of metrics. Hyperbolic cone-metrics are a key tool used throughout this work. The philosophy is that very complicated geometry in a smooth hyperbolic structure can be exchanged for a less complicated, but singular, hyperbolic cone metric. Three manifolds are mathematical spaces that locally look like the universe we live in. Mathematicians, beginning with Poincare, have been interested in classification question about three manifolds. Hyperbolic geometry is also a very old field dating back to the middle of the eighteenth century. In the last twenty-five years, largely due to the work Thurston, it has been realized that there are deep and beautiful connections between the two topics doc20076 none PI Baron Supernovae have become exceedingly interesting astrophysical objects in recent years owing to their use as cosmological probes (standard candles visible at great distances) to determine expansion of the universe and to measure the dark energy of the universe, and also due to their possible association with mysterious gamma-ray bursts. The main work in this project will focus on the comparison of observed data with theoretical models in order to clarify the connection between specific classes of supernovae and stellar evolution models of the progenitor star. The principle investigator will study effects such as the metallicity dependence of the progenitor on its observed spectrum and light curve, and extend to every type of supernovae consideration of their use as distance indicators. Three central questions that are to be addressed concern the progenitor systems of each type of supernova, the consistency between stellar evolution hydrodynamical models for supernovae and observations of them, the values of the cosmological parameters when they are calculated using the detailed spectral models of the Spectral-fitting Expanding Atmosphere Method applied to high redshift Type II supernovae, and finally, the statistical and systematic uncertainties associated with these values doc20077 none Despite the importance of a whole spectrum of knowledge from general thinking strategies to specific content in scientists thinking, most science instructors focus their courses only on content knowledge and neglect to equip students with appropriate thinking strategies. Thus, it is not surprising that students often gain factual and procedural knowledge, but are unable to link and use these ideas to solve novel problems, give coherent explanations, or construct a principled understanding of science. This is unfortunate because, without these abilities, science content knowledge is practically useless to students. On the other hand, understanding of the fundamental principles and thinking strategies of science fosters independent science learning and problem solving. Research in cognitive science and education illustrates that instructors can promote better understanding by explicitly teaching students to use thinking strategies that experts use implicitly. Metacognition refers to the monitoring and regulation of one s own thoughts, and includes the use of both general and domain-specific thinking strategies. An example of a general thinking strategy is evaluating new ideas by comparing them with other things you know about to see if the ideas fit together and make sense to you. A strategy that is more specific to the domain of chemistry is making connections between macroscopic observations and molecular-level explanations. Research has shown that high levels of metacognition are key for understanding ideas and for problem solving. While it is clear that metacognition contributes favorably to learning, many open questions about its specific role remain. With funding from a PFSMETE starter grant, I propose to continue my research regarding metacognition and chemistry learning. First, I propose to use funds from this starter grant to provide a bridge between my PFSMETE postdoctoral work and plans for larger-scale dissemination and study of student learning in the laboratory via the MORE Thinking Frame. Thus, a major focus of this project will be to study the use of the MORE Thinking Frame as implemented by a graduate student instructor who has never used the tool before and the student learning that results from such an implementation. Second, of the three arenas in which chemistry is taught at the college level (lecture, laboratory, and recitation), by far the most challenging context in which to promote student metacognition is that of the large lecture class. Thus, the second major focus of this project will be to develop and study instructional methods that can be used to promote student metacognition during a lecture period. I expect that the research and development activities of this project will result in information about how to best design and disseminate metacognitive methods and materials, including an understanding of how use of such innovative methods may be sustained in different instructional contexts; valuable professional development opportunities for graduate students involved in the project; and improved metacognitive abilities, understanding of chemistry ideas and problem solving abilities for students. Overall, the proposed research can be expected to advance understandings of methods for promoting and assessing metacognition in chemistry courses, the cognitive mechanisms underlying chemistry learning, and approaches to the design of more effective learning environments doc20078 none The Large Hadron Collider now being built at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics promises discoveries of great scientific importance. This will be the first particle accelerator with sufficiently high energy to enable researchers to study fundamental interactions of a kind never before observed - those responsible for giving particles mass. With its ability to explore the mass energy region of one trillion electron volts (1TeV), the LHC will be instrumental in the completion of the Standard Model of the strong, electromagnetic and weak forces. The construction of the Large Hadron Collider is an international effort with collaborators from many countries. 20% of which are from the United States including a number here at the University of Iowa. The Collaborators from the University of Iowa are involved with the CMS portion of the LHC and are particularly involved with its Forward Calorimeter part of the Hadron Calorimeter. The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS): CMS is a proton-proton detector designed to run at the highest luminosity in the LHC. The main features of the CMS are a muon system, an electromagnetic calorimeter, a central tracking, and a hadron calorimeter. One of the goals of the CMS project it to find the Higgs Boson HO which is predicted to exist by the Standard Model of Particle Physics. This proposal focuses on the scientific exploitation of the CMS detector, one of two general-purpose detectors at the LHC. This group plan to strengthen university infrastructure in four areas critical to the long-term success of the CMS research program: software and computing, maintenance and operations, detector upgrade research and development and education and outreach (E O doc20079 none Computer predictions of phenomena on large or global scales, for example weather or climate forecasts, need to compromise between accuracy of the predictions and available computing resources. It is therefore a grand scientific challenge to derive global climate models which are reliable and trustworthy. Exploiting certain geophysical balances, such as geostrophic balance (due to earth rotation) or hydrostatic balance (due to the shallowness of the ocean and atmosphere) geophysicists derive reasonable, yet less complex, balanced models. It is therefore essential to justify rigorously the validity of these models, for the relevant spatial and time scales. The focus of the proposed project is on the analytical, statistical and numerical properties of solutions to nonlinear ocean dynamics models and turbulent sub-grid models. The first aspect of this project is to: show existence, uniqueness and continuous dependence on initial data, to some of these reduced geophysical models. In particular, a two-layer zonal jet model, a planetary geostrophic ``thermocline model, the lake equations with degenerate varying bottom topography and the two-dimensional primitive equations. This is the first and the most essential step in validating the derivation of these models. In order to justify the long-time behavior of fluid dynamical models, one has to compare the statistical properties of their attracting invariant sets, rather than compare individual solutions. To do so, it is necessary to focus on models which include some mechanism of dissipation. This project addresses questions related to the asymptotic derivation of these models and the effect of numerical dissipation on their solutions, which include boundary layer analysis. The second aspect of this project is to: derive new large-eddy simulation models, the so-called alpha-models, in the context of the two-layers geostrophic zonal jet models. The alpha-models are asserted to reproduce the right energy spectrum for a wide range of large scales. It is proposed to investigate this claim using rigorous analytical tools. It is also proposed to perform computational tests on the newly derived two-layers geostrophic zonal jet alpha-model to verify the above assertion. Furthermore, it is proposed to explore the implementation of the alpha-models approach as sub-grid models. The grand challenge in climate prediction is that the mathematical equations governing the ocean and atmosphere dynamics, are too difficult to study analytically, and still prohibitively expensive computationally. Indeed, it is well established, based on physical grounds and collected experimental data, that atmospheric and oceanic turbulent flows involve a broad spectrum of spatial and time scales. This in turn makes them inaccessible to the most powerful and state-of-the-art computers. However, due to the rotation of the earth and other geophysical situations, such as the shallowness of the oceans and the atmosphere - in the sense that they are much wider than they are deep - geophysicists take advantage of certain geophysical balances to derive simplified balanced models. The first theme of this project is to: establish existence and regularity of solutions to some of these nonlinear reduced models. This is a crucial step in justifying the derivation of these models and their consistency with the physical observations for the relevant length and time scales. Furthermore, in global climate prediction one is interested in the long-time statistical features of the climate. The second theme of this project is to develop a systematic approach for deriving and studying new averaged models, in the context of ocean and atmosphere dynamics, which are reliable in reproducing the correct long-term statistics doc20080 none Steckler, Nicole Oregon Graduate Institute SGER: Organizational Facilitators and Inhibitors to Information-Sharing Across Federal Agency Boundaries This small grant will study the organizational facilitators and inhibitors to sharing of information across government agencies. This testbed is an existing multi-agency group working on the topic of Adaptive Management Areas of the national forests in the Northwest US. Participating agencies are the US Department of Agriculture and the US Department of the Interior. This multi-agency group also collaborates on a multi-agency portal with another Oregon Graduate Institute grantee of the Digital Government program, thus providing a natural collaboration between the disciplines of computer science and social science doc20081 none Two deficiencies in the NCAR Community Climate System Model (CCSM) are believed to be related to the parameterization of convection in the model. The model is thus biased toward weak intraseasonal variability in the tropical atmosphere and excessive precipitation in the Arabian Peninsula, compared to observations. Because of the wide use of the CCSM, it is important to conduct research to address them. The goal of this research project is to address these issues by focusing on convective parameterization in the model. Specifically, the investigation aims to achieve the following fundamental scientific objectives: (i) Understand how convection interacts with the large-scale processes in different climate regimes; (ii) Incorporate observational data to improve convective parameterization in CCSM; (iii) Improve the simulated temporal variability of convection and the atmospheric state in CCSM; (iv) Determine the cause of the erroneous precipitation simulation over the Arabian Peninsula in CCSM and eliminate it. The basic research tools used in this work are the NCAR CCM3, which is the atmospheric component of CCSM, and the Zhang-McFarlane convection scheme, together with field observational data from different convection regimes in the tropics and midlatitudes. Simulations with improved convective parameterization will be analyzed using statistical and composite techniques to examine the improvement in the tropical intraseasonal variability. Systematic initial tendency error analysis will be applied to simulations from a series of carefully designed numerical experiments to understand the causes of large summer precipitation bias in the Arabian Peninsula in CCM3. The research should result in an improved convective parameterization, a better understanding of the role of convection and a better simulation in tropical climate and its variability in the NCAR CCM3. This research is important because it has potential to improve climate predictions and projections, which are of great value to world societies doc20082 none Wallerstein, George Travel Funds for Stellar Abundances Conference AST- This conference, to be held March 27-29 in Seattle, WA, is on chemical abundances in stars and on nuclear astrophysics. The invited speakers are leading experts in the field. They will discuss the observations relevant to the determining the content of elements such as Helium, Lithium, Iron, and others in stars of various ages throughout the universe. There also will be presentations on the current state of our theoretical knowledge and of modeling the production of various elements in the deep interiors of stars and how they are mixed into the outer layers of a star, as well as the creation of the elements at the time of the Big Bang. The conference is international in scope with attendees from several European countries as well as the U.S. The proceeding are to be published by World Scientific under the auspices of the Institute for Nuclear Theory. The funds support the travel for two of the invited speakers, 10 young American presenters, and 5 young European presenters to this meeting who would not otherwise be able to attend doc20083 none The work is concerned with the theory of free surface flows. Here a free surface refers to an interface between two fluids. The position of such a surface is not known a priori and has to be found as part of the solution. This leads to a highly nonlinear mathematical problem, for which the PI will develop new numerical and analytical approaches. The objective is to develop numerically and analytically theories for three-dimensional nonlinear free surface flows and for two-dimensional interfacial flows. Specifically: (A) Derive efficient and accurate numerical approaches for three-dimensional nonlinear free surface flows. (B) Use these new schemes together with analytical techniques to further the understanding of three-dimensional free surface flows. This includes extending linear and weakly nonlinear theories to the fully nonlinear regime and discovering the limiting configurations of these flows. (C) Check the validity of existing approximations in ship hydrodynamics and improve them. (D) Investigate the existence of new types of waves propagating at the interface between two fluids of constant densities. These waves should have properties intermediate between those of ``generalized solitary waves and those of ``classical fronts . Therefore it is appropriate to describe them as ``generalized fronts . Their existence is strongly suggested by previous work but they have not been calculated explicitly. (E) Calculate the generalized fronts and perform a numerical study of their stability. Free surface flows are common in many aspects of science and everyday life. Examples are waves on a beach, bubbles rising in a glass of champagne, melting ice, pouring flows from a container and sails blowing in the wind. In these examples the free surface is the surface of the sea, the interface between the gas and the champagne, the surface of the ice, the boundary of the pouring flow and the surface of the sail. The PI will concentrate on applications arising from fluid mechanics. However the methods developed are general and have applications outside fluid mechanics and the PI proposes to investigate them as well. The research will benefit applied mathematicians interested in nonlinear free surface flows and applied scientists in need of accurate schemes to solve three-dimensional free surface flows. The proposed application to the nonlinear wave pattern generated by a ship is relevant to ship hydrodynamics. The study of waves on sharp interfaces has applications in oceanography. Such sharp interfaces form in oceans, lakes and the atmosphere between adjacent masses of different density associated with differences in temperature, salinity or amount of suspension. One of the reasons for studying such sharp boundaries is that they appear at the surface as frontal lines where dust, foam, timber and others accumulate. Many of the problems proposed can be done in collaboration with graduate students doc20084 none Fetea Current understanding of both nuclear structure and nucleo-synthesis is largely based on what is known of the properties of stable and long-lived near-stable nuclei. An unexplored landscape containing more than 90% of all expected bound nuclear systems, a region where many new nuclear phenomena are anticipated still needs to be explored. Early experiments on unstable nuclei have already revealed surprises. Such phenomena as halo nuclei suggest that some of the cherished concepts of nuclear structure may apply only to a set of relatively stable nuclei. This project will theoretically study, the nuclei in the and 160 mass regions. These nuclei have shown a number of features that challenge our understanding of nuclear structure, of particular interest being the signature splitting inversion and chiral twin bands phenomena. Calculations in various model frameworks (particle rotor model including both a residual pn interaction and a deformation, total routhian surface calculations, cranking shell and tilted axis cranking model) will be performed to elucidate the underlying physical properties responsible for the signature splitting inversion and chiral twin bands phenomena. The involvement of undergraduate students in this research project will enhance students interest in physics and provide a training environment for their preparation for mainstream study doc2752 none The Polar Research Board (PRB), a unit of the National Research Council, was established in to advise the government on polar issues. The PRB strives to make research in the polar regions more productive and responsive to the needs of the United States, to maintain U.S. awareness of, and representation in, international science programs, and to enhance understanding of issues in polar regions. The Board provides national and international scientific and technical information to U.S. government policy makers and the polar community, represents U.S. interests in international nongovernmental polar scientific organizations and conducts focused studies in areas of polar science, technology and resource management. The PRB facilitates participation of U.S. scientists in two critical international committees dedicated to planning and coordination research in the Arctic and Antarctic [i.e., the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) and the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR)]. PRB activities are conducted by a group of volunteer experts, supported by a small staff, selected from academic institutions, industry and national laboratories. The PRB will continue to serve as an information center for distributing materials on IASC and SCAR to U.S. government agencies and the polar community. Other federal agencies and foundations also provide support to the PRB doc20086 none of certain gauge invariants in terms of group homology. The two simplest types of homology class are connected with known physical phenomena: systematic extinctions in diffraction patterns and crossing of electronic bands ( band sticking ). The next simplest type first occurs in a rank-five tetragonal modulated crystal and should be connected with some similar phenomenon. Tiling models are produced, and the ideas are also extended to magnetic and color groups. Crystallography underlies and informs much of physics, chemistry, and geology. The present research has applications to recent experiments in liquid crystals (related to the popular LCD displays on wristwatches and other electronic equipment), plasmas, and modulated crystals, highly symmetric systems that cannot be described by the classical theory of crystals. Ever since , when the French abbot Rene Just Hauy deduced the microscopic structure of crystals, it had been believed impossible for a crystal to have the symmetries of an icosahedron (or a soccer ball). Precisely 200 years later, such materials, called quasicrystals, were discovered, and much research has ensued into their properties. Quasicrystals possess strange electronic and physical properties and have already found application as high-quality, non-stick coatings on electrosurgical blades. The present research aims to classify the symmetry types of crystals and to study physical properties associated with these symmetries. This project is being funded jointly by the Division of Mathematical Sciences and the Division of Materials Research doc20087 none Takashi Kimura The goal of this proposal is to investigate geometric constructions inspired by the analogy between the moduli space of curves together with higher spin structures and the moduli space of curves together with maps into orbifolds. The former is related to higher KdV integrable hierarchies while the latter is related to the quantum cohomology of orbifolds. We will analyze the resulting algebraic structures suggested by integrable systems and the topology of these spaces. The KdV equation is a nonlinear equation modeling the behavior of water waves in a straight channel and is the first of a hierarchy of equations whose solutions are mutually compatible. Such hierarchies and their generalizations are intimately related to surfaces endowed with additional fields possessing internal symmetries. We will investigate this relationship and its ramifications doc20088 none of how external loads on a structure are resolved into tensions and compressions of different structural elements. The project views the tension in a tight knot as exerting a force directed towards the inside of each curve of the rope, and aims to show that such a curve is tight if this force can be resolved into a system of self-contact forces acting on the surface of the tube. This balance criterion has surprising consequences. Imagine a rope stretched horizontally, like a clothesline. If another rope is passed over the line, and pulled down until the pair is tight, the ropes form four straight segments joined to a central region where the strands curve around one another. One would expect the ropes to maintain contact throughout this curved clasp, with the two points on the inside of each bend touching one another. However, according to the balance criterion, this cannot happen: there is always a small gap between the two strands at the center of the turn. This model has already been used in molecular biology to describe the behavior of DNA strands; the new geometric information provided by the project will help to refine and extend many other appications of this model in physics, biology, and engineering doc20089 none Glasses are traditionally classified as amorphous materials having isotropic properties. As a class of noncrystalline solids, glassy liquid crystals are characterized by a uniaxial, lamellar, helical, or columnar molecular arrangement underlying liquid crystalline mesomorphism. Thanks to optical anisotropy and device robustness, glassy liquid crystals are well suited for optics, photonics, and optoelectronics. However, most liquid crystals tend to crystallize on cooling from melts, thereby losing the desired order and yielding grain boundaries that scatter light and limit charge transport. Under prior NSF support, a definitive set of materials has been generated following an empirical approach in which liquid crystalline groups are chemically bonded to a volume-excluding central core. Unique features of glassy liquid crystals include: a well-defined molecular structure with a low to medium molecular weight, superior chemical purity and film-forming ability, and favorable rheological properties that facilitate processing into large area monodomain thin films. In addition, feasibility has been demonstrated for latching electro-optic devices, such as optical switches, attenuators and tunable filters; efficient circular polarizers and polarized light emitters; and high-performance optical notch filters and reflectors. To take on new intellectual and technological challenges, the PI s propose to develop glassy nematics and cholesterics with a high glass transition temperature (80 to 150 C) and a wide mesomorphic fluid temperature range; to furnish molecular-level understanding of vitrification, as opposed to crystallization, of liquid crystals; to functionalize glassy liquid crystals with photoresponsive moieties that are thermally stable and fatigue resistant; and to demonstrate concepts for reversible tunability of reflective coloration and patterning as well as rewritable optical data storage. Glassy liquid crystals are particularly promising because of their ability to undergo repeated heating-cooling cycles across a wide temperature range (through the glass transition temperature) without encountering crystallization. The project involves implementation of deterministic synthesis strategies for multifunctional materials; preparation and characterization of ordered solid films; analysis of material stability against thermally activated crystallization; determination of crystalline lattice structures with x-ray crystallography and powder diffractometry; and reversible modulation of optical properties through photoinduced ring closure ring opening of diarylethene moieties. Aimed at cultivating new knowledge crucial to the development of novel optical materials, the proposed research is highly relevant to optical information technology that is undergoing a rapid growth worldwide. Transition of academic research to civilian and defense applications will be facilitated through collaboration and partnership with government and industry laboratories. From an educational perspective, students participating in the project will develop unique skills from conducting their thesis research in a multidisciplinary environment, gaining a broad perspective in a strategically important area of research and development doc20090 none This project is aimed at fundamental understandings of the mechanisms by which nanocrystal size, composition and structure control both localized corrosion and acid-induced depassivation properties in nanocrystalline-amorphous alloys. The alloys being considered include early transition metals such as zirconium, late transition metals such as iron and simple metal elements such as aluminum. Various compositions are processed at different temperatures to investigate the influence of composition and structure. This generic class of materials exhibits greater mechanical strengths and elastic moduli than conventional polycrystalline alloys while simultaneously retaining the excellent macroscopic corrosion resistance of the fully amorphous state as long as nanocrystals remain smaller than 20 nm in diameter. A major goal of the project is to investigate the underlying aspects associated with nanocrystal size that govern the resistance to general corrosion in acids and the formation of localized corrosion pits. This study develops new fundamental understanding involved with preserving corrosion resistance along with high mechanical strength of these nanomaterials. The project includes both modeling and experimental efforts with extensive electron microscopy. Corrosion properties will be linked with understandings of nm-scale electrochemical properties as well as nm-scale composition and structure. Thus, this research will provide new nanometer-scale structure-property knowledge regarding the corrosion behavior of a generic class of materials of technological significance. These new alloys may be useful in components requiring high specific strength and shape control such as MEMS and NEMS where little corrosion can be tolerated. The funding of this research provides an opportunity for graduate and undergraduate students including under-represented minorities to develop understanding and experience in the multi-disciplinary fields of corrosion and materials science. This research develops new understanding of the corrosion mechanisms in nanocrystalline-amorphous alloys and strives to avoid the trade-off between high strength and good corrosion resistance in these new alloys. In addition to scientific advances, this research will be useful in the development of high strength alloys with excellent corrosion resistance required in MEMS and NEMS technologies doc20091 none Roald Hoffmann of Cornell University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to carry out research that aims to (1) explain the electronic structure of molecules, discrete or extended, that present puzzles in bonding, (2) develop a qualitative understanding of the chemical bonding in important classes of molecules, with a focus on relationships between molecular and extended systems, stressing the construction of conceptual bridges between organic and inorganic structures, (3) look broadly and qualitatively at problems of reactivity on surfaces and at interfaces, (4) predict as yet unsynthesized systems with unusual properties, and (5) devise further analytical tools for applied quantum chemistry. The methodology to be employed will be quantum mechanical calculations of both qualitative (extended Huckel method) and quantitative (density functional theory) reliability, as well as the apparatus of perturbation theory for constructing interpretations. Outcomes are expected to provide a wide range of chemists, physicists, and materials scientists with the tools to analyze and understand qualitatively bonding, structure, and reactivity over a wide range of discrete molecules and extended structures. Although the computational apparatus of quantum chemistry is at a stage where it is possible to attain predictive chemical accuracy for medium-sized molecules, there remains a strong need in the chemical community for explanations and increased understanding. These explanations represent a portable, qualitative accounting of the factors responsible for the structure, energetics, and reactivity of molecules, and are the goals of this research. Such accounting can be couched using chemical ideas that are qualitatively useful to the broad scientific community, such as electronegativity, orbitals, electrostatics, and steric effects doc20092 none of certain gauge invariants in terms of group homology. The two simplest types of homology class are connected with known physical phenomena: systematic extinctions in diffraction patterns and crossing of electronic bands ( band sticking ). The next simplest type first occurs in a rank-five tetragonal modulated crystal and should be connected with some similar phenomenon. Tiling models are produced, and the ideas are also extended to magnetic and color groups. Crystallography underlies and informs much of physics, chemistry, and geology. The present research has applications to recent experiments in liquid crystals (related to the popular LCD displays on wristwatches and other electronic equipment), plasmas, and modulated crystals, highly symmetric systems that cannot be described by the classical theory of crystals. Ever since , when the French abbot Rene Just Hauy deduced the microscopic structure of crystals, it had been believed impossible for a crystal to have the symmetries of an icosahedron (or a soccer ball). Precisely 200 years later, such materials, called quasicrystals, were discovered, and much research has ensued into their properties. Quasicrystals possess strange electronic and physical properties and have already found application as high-quality, non-stick coatings on electrosurgical blades. The present research aims to classify the symmetry types of crystals and to study physical properties associated with these symmetries. This project is funded jointly by the Division of Mathematical Sciences and the Division of Materials Research doc20093 none This small grant for exploratory research examines how individuals respond to a salient and pervasive health threat. This issue is particularly relevant in the context of recent biochemical terrorism involving anthrax. Because all individuals are at some risk to this health threat over which they have little control, the public s temporary elevated concern represents a unique and particularly salient context within which to study the cognitive antecedents and consequences of a low probability, but potentially high consequence health threat. Individual differences in health vulnerability beliefs will be assessed and perceived control over the health threat will be experimentally manipulated. The cognitive consequences of the health threat will include self-reported assessments of perceived risk for contracting anthrax, a perceptual index of attention to anthrax-relevant stimuli (as indicated by RTs on a modified Stroop task), and an index of health goal behavior. This research will determine whether individuals with health vulnerability beliefs are especially susceptible to anthrax fears, and whether perceived control can mitigate these fears. Because most individuals express health invulnerability beliefs (i.e., the belief that they will not get ill), even when health threats are significant, this research will explore some of the mechanisms that might result in these invulnerability beliefs. Finally, the research can also help us understand why individuals undertake, or fail to undertake, protective actions against various health threats doc20094 none PI: Larsen, Sarah C. In this project, funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Larsen will conduct an experimental and computational investigation on electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) of paramagnetic transition metal complexes. Density functional theory will be used to augment the experimental work in computing the electronic g-tensor and the hyperfine coupling tensor A, for transition metal complexes. CW and pulsed EPR will be used to study the local environment of transition metal catalysts. The experimental and computational techniques are synergistically linked in this project. This research deals with properties of certain metals that act as efficient catalysts to facilitate chemical reactions. These metals, known as transition metals due to their position in the periodic table, have magnetic properties that are probed by the technique of electron paramagnetic resonance. In conjunction with the experimental work, theoretical tools are used to elucidate the paramagnetic properties of these metal catalysts. Among the goals of this research is a better understanding of the catalytic process, which may ultimately lead to their improved technical use. Students and external collaborators participate in this research doc20095 none Oey Radiative feedback from massive stars is energetically fundamental to galaxy and cosmic evolution, and it also provides essential emission-line diagnostics of conditions both locally and in the distant universe. Our current limited understanding of radiative feedback greatly hampers investigations of present-day local processes as well as of galaxy formation and the early universe. Dr. Sally Oey, at Lowell Observatory, will carry out a comprehensive investigation of radiative feedback processes ranging from specific nebular ionization conditions to large-scale, global ionization processes in galaxies and the intergalactic medium. The goals are: 1) To understand specifically how ionizing spectral types and chemical abundances affect nebular emission, and to calibrate corresponding nebular line diagnostics; and 2) to understand global radiative feedback processes in galaxies by investigating large-scale properties of diffuse ionized gas, HII region populations, and implications for the escape of ionizing photons from galaxies doc20079 none Computer predictions of phenomena on large or global scales, for example weather or climate forecasts, need to compromise between accuracy of the predictions and available computing resources. It is therefore a grand scientific challenge to derive global climate models which are reliable and trustworthy. Exploiting certain geophysical balances, such as geostrophic balance (due to earth rotation) or hydrostatic balance (due to the shallowness of the ocean and atmosphere) geophysicists derive reasonable, yet less complex, balanced models. It is therefore essential to justify rigorously the validity of these models, for the relevant spatial and time scales. The focus of the proposed project is on the analytical, statistical and numerical properties of solutions to nonlinear ocean dynamics models and turbulent sub-grid models. The first aspect of this project is to: show existence, uniqueness and continuous dependence on initial data, to some of these reduced geophysical models. In particular, a two-layer zonal jet model, a planetary geostrophic ``thermocline model, the lake equations with degenerate varying bottom topography and the two-dimensional primitive equations. This is the first and the most essential step in validating the derivation of these models. In order to justify the long-time behavior of fluid dynamical models, one has to compare the statistical properties of their attracting invariant sets, rather than compare individual solutions. To do so, it is necessary to focus on models which include some mechanism of dissipation. This project addresses questions related to the asymptotic derivation of these models and the effect of numerical dissipation on their solutions, which include boundary layer analysis. The second aspect of this project is to: derive new large-eddy simulation models, the so-called alpha-models, in the context of the two-layers geostrophic zonal jet models. The alpha-models are asserted to reproduce the right energy spectrum for a wide range of large scales. It is proposed to investigate this claim using rigorous analytical tools. It is also proposed to perform computational tests on the newly derived two-layers geostrophic zonal jet alpha-model to verify the above assertion. Furthermore, it is proposed to explore the implementation of the alpha-models approach as sub-grid models. The grand challenge in climate prediction is that the mathematical equations governing the ocean and atmosphere dynamics, are too difficult to study analytically, and still prohibitively expensive computationally. Indeed, it is well established, based on physical grounds and collected experimental data, that atmospheric and oceanic turbulent flows involve a broad spectrum of spatial and time scales. This in turn makes them inaccessible to the most powerful and state-of-the-art computers. However, due to the rotation of the earth and other geophysical situations, such as the shallowness of the oceans and the atmosphere - in the sense that they are much wider than they are deep - geophysicists take advantage of certain geophysical balances to derive simplified balanced models. The first theme of this project is to: establish existence and regularity of solutions to some of these nonlinear reduced models. This is a crucial step in justifying the derivation of these models and their consistency with the physical observations for the relevant length and time scales. Furthermore, in global climate prediction one is interested in the long-time statistical features of the climate. The second theme of this project is to develop a systematic approach for deriving and studying new averaged models, in the context of ocean and atmosphere dynamics, which are reliable in reproducing the correct long-term statistics doc20097 none Creating a universal, free to read, digital library containing over one million scanned books with optical character recognition to support full text searching is the goal of this million book project. Such a resource furthers the democratization of knowledge by making this large digital library available to scholars, students, and citizens around the world. The availability of online search allows users to locate relevant information quickly and reliably thus enhancing student success in their research endeavors. This 24x7x365 resource would also provide an excellent test bed for further research in database creation, OCR technique, machine metadata creation, and textual language processing research such as machine translation, summarization, intelligent indexing, and information mining. National Science Foundation resources would be amplified at a rate of almost twenty to one because the countries of India and China will be providing the labor to digitize these materials. In addition, members of the U.S. Digital Library Federation would ship materials to be scanned and returned. Private grant funding is being sought to cover shipping expenses doc20098 none Information Technology will be playing an important role in addressing the research problems relevant to national security. The National Science Foundation will be calling upon its research communities to focus their research efforts on problems relating to national security. NSF has identified current projects that are important to this area, including but not limited to the following: Knowledge Discovery and Dissemination (datamining, knowledge representation, and knowledge sharing) and Biological Defense (bioinformatics, biosensing, pathogen normalcy baselining). This workshop is designed to bring selected university researchers together with NSF and other appropriate government staff to communicate their needs and get community input. CNRI will hold the workshop in order to assess some of the current programs and projects, gather government input, identify which projects hold the most relevance to the mission, and help identify new areas of research doc20099 none Logan The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Andrew J. Logan to work with Dr. Petter D. Jenssen at the Agricultural University of Norway and with Dr. Trond Mahlum at the Norwegian Centre for Soil and Environmental Research in Aas, Norway. This project will explore the physical chemical nature of soil treatment systems by measuring the changing hydrophobicity with depth and operation time and define how these changes affect pathogen collection. Pathogen surrogates including virus and bacteria, will be introduced to vessels and allowed to contact granular media with differing hydrophobicities. Collection behavior will then be measured and the treatment efficiency of the systems will be measured relative to pathogen removal. Results from this research can be used to provide a strategy for the construction and operation of such treatment systems to optimize pathogen collection and minimize the risk of pathogen discharge to groundwater. At these two institutions, current research includes developing enhanced treatment systems for domestic wastewater, exploring the effects of wastewater application regime on the treatment efficiency of soil-based systems, and investigating pathogen transport in porous media doc20100 none The investigator will focus on statistical models, theory, algorithms and applications geared towards the analysis of high-dimensional and in particular functional data. Semiparametric methods are particularly appropriate for such data since usually little is known about the structure of these data, while at the same time a dimension reduction step is necessary in order to avoid the curse of dimension . Dimension reduction in the form of projections by fitting single index or multiple index models, or by truncating the number of terms included in an expansion of functional data, is therefore a major emphasis of this project. Another emphasis of this project are statistical methods that take into account that curve data often are random curves that are subject to individually varying time scales. This leads to models, theory, methodology and algorithms for time warping of functional data. Curve data are abundant in genetics where dissemination of gene expression profiles is of highest interest and also in the field of aging and mortality. The investigator will develop methods for functional regression, correlation, discriminant and cluster analysis. These methods will provide tools to establish relationships between random functions and allow classification of observed sample curves into distinct categories. Large and increasingly complex data that are being collected in scientific and other experimental and observational studies are often data that may be viewed as curves or functions. Such data often contain valuable information about the time-dynamics of physical and biological phenomena, and advance statistical techniques are needed to extract it. For example, recordings of repeated cDNA expression data with genetic microarrays may contain valuable information about the dynamics of gene activation patterns and gene regulation. Other examples where such data play a major role concern the relationship between reproduction and aging, the dynamic structure of aging and longevity, or the relationship between various blood proteins that are recorded continuously. The investigator will develop statistical methods and models specifically designed for the analysis and interpretation of such data doc20101 none This individual investigator award will provide support for a program that focuses on the study of electron correlation effects in two-dimensional systems, such as ultra-thin magnetic-impurity-doped Be films, and ultra-thin superconducting Be and Al films. Some bulk materials with a strongly layered structure such as superconducting LaSb2 and metamagnetic SmSb2 will also be studied. One of the primary goals of the program is to investigate the transport and tunneling characteristics of these systems in high magnetic fields and low temperatures. Their behavior in such extreme environments gives insight into how low dimensionality, disorder, and correlations can give rise to exotic effects such state memory, reentrance, multifold magnetoresistance, non-equilibrium fluctuations, and quantum transitions. Besides being at the forefront of condensed matter research, the program will provide an important venue for the training undergraduates, graduate students, and K-12 science teachers. The latter will be made possible by sponsoring summer internships for Teach For America corps members. This individual investigator award provides support for a program that investigates how the repulsive interactions between electrons affects their ability to conduct electricity and more importantly how these interactions can orchestrate seemingly improbable behavior such as memory effects and extremely large increases in resistance with the application of magnetic field. Emphasis is placed on systems for which the electron motion is confined to a plane such as is the case for metal films that are only a few atoms thick. The behavior of these systems gives insight into how low dimensionality, disorder, and electronic correlations can give rise to novel and perhaps useful properties that may one day be of technological relevance. This type of search and discovery research is important for maintaining the health of the national research and development enterprise. The program also provides an important venue for the training undergraduates, graduate students, and K-12 science teachers. The latter is made possible by being a summer internship sponsor for Teach For America corps members doc20102 none The ATLAS detector is currently under construction for operation at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. Extensive studies show that the LHC should be able to elucidate the mechanism of electroweak (EW) symmetry breaking and to study a variety of other topics related to physics at the TeV scale. In particular, a Higgs boson with couplings given by the Standard Model will be observable in several channels over the full range of allowed masses. If supersymmetry is relevant to EW interactions, it will be discovered and the properties of many supersymmetric particles elucidated. This proposal requests support for the research of approximately 250 physicists and engineers from 33 U.S. institutions that comprise the U.S. ATLAS Collaboration. The U.S. ATLAS groups are making major contributions to the construction of the ATLAS detector and have continuing responsibilities for the components they have built as the detector is installed in the experimental cavern and during the commissioning and installation phases. The U.S. ATLAS groups are planning to establish Tier 2 regional computing centers as part of an overall hierarchical grid of ATLAS computing centers spread around the world. The Tier 2 centers, a key component of this proposal, will play a powerful role in allowing U.S. universities to fully exploit the potential of the LHC, and will set an important precedent for future collaboration on large-scale, international projects. The groups continue to expand their education outreach programs, with a particular focus on high school teachers and students (closely coordinated with QuarkNet) and on outreach to traditionally under-represented populations doc20103 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Pulse propagation and capture in Bragg grating optical fibers Goodman This project studies the interaction of waves with localized structures, through mathematical analysis, asymptotics, and numerical simulation. Motivating this study are simulations in which light, travelling through a specialized Bragg grating optical fiber, is stopped upon reaching a specially engineered defect at a given location in the fiber. A heuristic hypothesis has been put forward to explain how and why this trapping of light occurs. The project aims to understand the mechanism behind this light capture, and to use this understanding to improve the efficiency and usefulness of this process. A main tool is the derivation and analysis of ordinary differential equations that model the interaction of the light pulse with the localized defect. In order to gain intuition about this physical problem, the project will look at related problems in other nonlinear wave equations. In modern optical communications, information is sent as pulses of light through glass fibers. To process the information requires light pulses to be manipulated or redirected as they travel. This project investigates the possibility of trapping light at a given point in an optical fiber, which could be useful as a component of optical communication devices, for example as a component in an optical memory unit. The project will also look at similar problems of wave trapping in physical systems that are described by similar underlying equations doc20104 none Hildebrand Discoveries in the last few decades have shown that magnetic fields affect the structure and energy balance of gas in galaxies; that they provide substantial vertical support for the gas layer; that they transport energy and modify the structure of interstellar shocks; that they accelerate and confine cosmic rays; and that they strongly influence the collapse of clouds to form stars. Much of our understanding of these fields has been gained by observations of the polarization of starlight due to partial absorption in magnetically aligned grains along the line of sight, and by observations of polarized emission from magnetically aligned dust grains in relatively dense regions. Although the polarization measurements have advanced our understanding of magnetic fields, the interpretation of the results has been limited by unknown factors. The polarization depends on the inclination of the mean magnetic field from the line of sight; on the turbulence of the field; on the degree of alignment of the dust grains with the local field; and on the size, shape, and composition of the dust grains. This project, directed by Dr. Roger Hildebrand at the University of Chicago, addresses opportunities to expand the role of polarimetry by investigating each of the factors. The University of Chicago polarimeter, built by Dr. Hildebrand, has an important role in these investigations, but there is increasing reliance on complementary observations in other parts of the spectrum. The work on the magnetic field inclination combines submillimeter wavelength polarimetry with measurements of line widths for ionic and neutral molecules. Observations in the wavelength range from 850 to micron will be made with the instrument SCUBA at the James Clerk Maxwell telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Observations of the microwave foregroung will rely on the instruments DASI (at the South Pole) and MAP (space mission) which are already deployed for measurements of background polarization doc20105 none The IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) is held yearly at different locations in the world. The ISIT will be held at the Palais de Beaulieu in Lausanne, Switzerland, from Sunday, June 30, to Friday, July 5, . This grant provides support for the travel expenses of ISIT participants from the U.S. These participants would be individuals whose papers have been selected for presentation at the Symposium, but who lack funds and would not be able to attend without travel support doc20106 none Paczynski, Bohdan The Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) has undergone a major upgrade from a x CCD camera (OGLE-II) to a mosaic x CCD camera (OGLE-III). The new system became operational in the summer , and it is expected to be fully streamlined, with a real time detection of microlensing events, by . The 1.3 meter OGLE telescope is located at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. With the OGLE-II, Dr. Paczynski and his colleagues were detecting about 170 microlensing events per year. With the OGLE-III and new software, they expect to detect up to 1,000 events per year. This high rate virtually guarantees a detection of Jupiter mass planets and stellar mass black holes. The same data will be searched for planetary transits. Almost all OGLE-II data ( - ) are now available on WWW and on DAT, in a highly compressed format: 1 Terra Byte of original CCD images has been reduced to less than 10 GB. The archive includes high signal-to-noise images of about 16 square degrees in the Galactic Bulge, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), and the photometry of about 30 million non-variable stars. The AC archive has 300 - 400 data points for about 250 thousand variable stars. The group expects to make the photometry of about one million variable stars detected by OGLE-III available on-line, first within 24 hours, and some time later within 10 minutes of taking CCD images. OGLE data will be used to study the structure of our Galaxy, the structure of the LMC and SMC, as well as to determine ever more accurate distance scale doc20107 none PI Ziurys During the past thirty years since the initial discovery of interstellar molecules at radio wavelengths, much has been learned about the chemistry of such species, and their subsequent use as tracers of the physical conditions in dense gas has proved extremely valuable. Despite the obvious success of molecular astrophysics, there are still many unanswered questions pertaining to interstellar molecules, one of which concerns the chemistry and abundances of species containing the metallic elements. This project will continue the investigation of the chemistry of the metallic elements in the interstellar medium through a joint laboratory observational chemical modeling program. The observations will identify the major molecular carriers of the metallic elements in circumstellar envelopes of evolved stars and in dense clouds through measurements in the millimeter sub-mm wavelength region. This data will lead to the establishment of likely synthetic pathways, be it gas-phase radiative association reactions, dust-grain processes or formation in shock waves. The laboratory work will supply the necessary millimeter and sub-mm rotational spectra from which rest frequencies for the astronomical searches are obtained. Finally, chemical modeling of metal chemistry in circumstellar envelopes will be performed in conjunction with new nucleosynthesis calculations. A complete picture will thus be constructed of metal-containing molecules, their abundances, formation mechanisms, and significance for understanding mass loss of the heavier elements from circumstellar envelopes to the interstellar medium doc20108 none ITR: Enhancing Crystal Structure Determination through Data Mining, Collaborative Environments, and Grid Computing X-ray crystallography, with its unique ability to reveal the atomic or near-atomic structures of a wide range of biomedically important molecules, is the cornerstone of modern structural biology. This project will support critical advances in the enabling technologies of automated tuning of software, learning via data mining, geographically distributed collaborative environments, and grid computing for the enhancement and determination of crystal structure. Computer programs based on direct methods are used to determine the majority of small-molecule organic crystal structures. These methods begin to fail in the 100-200-atom range because the accuracy of the underlying probabilistic relationships is inversely proportional to the square root of the size of the structure. The Shake-and-Bake algorithm and SnB program have extended the size of crystal structures amenable to direct-methods phasing from 100 to atoms. SnB has also been used to increase the size of heavy-atom substructures in large proteins that can be determined from 10 to 180 Se atoms. This provides a bootstrap by which complete structures, containing hundreds of thousands of atoms, can be elucidated. Such accomplishments would have been regarded as impossible only a few years ago, and the ultimate potential of the Shake-and-Bake approach to ab initio structure determination of macromolecules is unknown. The integrated SnB collaborative environment will allow multiple simultaneous users at distinct locations to work together in a virtual environment via a variety of platforms (from 3D fully immersive to desktop PC). Users will be able to navigate through a structure, search and import structures available from public crystallographic data banks, edit structures, and interface directly with SnB while running either in solution mode or in refinement mode. The users will have the ability to work in a collaborative fashion as they would if they were all situated in close physical proximity. Finally, platforms consisting of computational grids are available in many academic and commercial institutions that use crystallographic software. A grid-enabled version of SnB will be created so that it can take advantage of computational grids and networks of workstations that have available computing cycles. The introduction of SnB has had an enormous impact on the crystallographic community. The integration of the Shake-and-Bake methodology with automated data warehousing and data mining should provide equally spectacular advances in the near future. The introduction of collaborative environments and the ability to exploit computational grids is expected to have a significant impact as well. Advances in enabling technologies coupled to a widely-distributed package, provides a unique opportunity to evaluate the viability of these enabling technologies, which have far-reaching applications to a wealth of diverse areas, including computational chemistry, advanced design, optimization, and edutainment doc20109 none The objective of this research is the development of reliable and accurate techniques for the determination of structural and vibrational properties of complex materials. A major goal of the study is to investigate the disorder in metallic alloys with the unique chemical environment selectivity of Mossbauer diffractometry. The unique feature of the technique is its capability to select iron atoms in a particular chemical environment, and obtain a diffraction pattern from those iron atoms alone. With the new Mossbauer diffractometer, it is possible to measure the periodicity of an irregular chemical site of iron atoms with 3 aluminum first-nearest neighbors in ordered FeAl. Studies will also be made on alloys of FeRh and PdFe with emphasis on investigating the inelastic spectra to obtain the phonon partial density of states of iron atoms. Extreme high pressures using diamond anvil cells will be used to investigate the influence of pressure on interatomic force constants. In a different style of experiment, the Mossbauer diffractometer will be used to study the spatial scale of thermal relaxations in magnetic nanoparticles. A specific experiment on thermal relaxations on hematite nanoparticles will be developed over the course of the work. Such results show how the vibrational entropy of alloys depends on interatomic separations, and can elucidate the reasons for the P(V,T) equation of state of iron alloys. The broader impact of the proposed work lies not only in developing reliable techniques for the structural determination of complex materials but also in obtaining detailed information on interactions in solids at the atomic level. Thermodynamics and atom arrangements are at the core of materials science, and the proposed work will apply new experimental methods for studying them. The methods are specialized, but have unique capabilities for resolving a high level of detail about the structure and dynamics of materials. The structure of materials is the focus of the work on Mossbauer diffractometry. The entropy of materials is the focus of the work on inelastic nuclear resonant scattering. The basic issues in diffraction and scattering are also of broad academic interest in materials science doc20110 none Hunter Dwarf irregulars are the most common type of galaxy in the Universe. They evolve relatively slowly over time and chemically resemble the outer parts of present-day spirals and young galaxies seen at high redshift. They have no density waves and little shear. Some are very close to us, permitting the resolution of clusters and star-forming regions. As a result, dwarf irregulars are ideal laboratories for studies of star formation in a pristine environment. They are also useful for comparisons with spirals, leading to a better understanding of both. The goals of this project are to determine what regulates star formation in dwarf galaxies on a wide range of scales, and then to apply this knowledge to other galaxies. Why do star formation rates in normal dwarf galaxies span a factor of over 104, and why are young stars always limited to the inner galaxy regions, far inside the radial extent of other stars and gas? What governs how and where dense molecular clouds form? To address these questions, Dr. Deidre Hunter, at Lowell Observatory, and Dr. Bruce Elmegreen, at IBM, have observed 139 reasonably normal, non-interacting, nearby galaxies without spiral arms. The data include optical and near-infrared images that allow the star formation to be determined over the lifetimes of these galaxies, atomic HI maps that show the raw cloud material and environment for cloud formation, and observations of the warm and cold molecular clouds that give birth to the stars themselves. Although a previous grant emphasized data collection and processing, these investigators have already analyzed the properties of the HII regions in the sample, including their sizes, pressures, luminosities, and locations. They studied the neutral interstellar structure in the LMC and combined all their data for a comprehensive study of NGC . The results have led to a revision in the theoretical framework for star formation: global instabilities and threshold column densities for star formation are less important than local processes and conditions; the thermal equilibrium properties of the interstellar medium are as important as self-gravity; turbulence and phase changes generally structure the gas into cloud and intercloud media, yet global disturbances such as bars and interactions change this, producing anomalously massive bound clusters. The results have also enhanced our perspective on star formation processes in normal spiral galaxies by illustrating how the expansion of shells and the condensation of clouds becomes more severe at low shear. With this new award, the investigators will capitalize on their large, multi-wavelength survey to finish the project by addressing the big-picture questions posed above. They will find how star formation evolves over space and time in a dwarf galaxy; consider the special effects at galaxy edges; show how the star formation history relates to the gas structure and other conditions for cloud formation; determine the formation requirements for star forming regions of different sizes and densities; determine the porosity of the interstellar medium and its role in possible feedback; and determine the overall structure of the dwarfs. Many of these results will have applications to other galaxy types and to other epochs in the Universe doc20111 none Wang This is a 36 month project submitted by Dr. Yang Wang, Florida State University with Professor DENG Tao, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, CAS, China, to study isotopic evidence for late Cenozoic climate and ecosystem changes in China. They propose to collect isotopic evidence of the expansion of C4 plants in China, and to see whether this expansion corresponds to the late Miocene C4 plant expansion noted in America, Africa, Pakistan and Nepal. This project will advance our knowledge of the timing and extent of the global C4 grassland expansion in the late Cenozoic. The long-term climate data collected in the course of this project can fill a data gap for the area adjacent to the Tibetan plateau. A U.S. graduate student and undergraduate student will benefit considerably from collaborating with the Chinese scientists and from the experience of working on this research in China. The NSF and the Chinese Academy of Sciences jointly support this project doc20112 none The main goal of the proposal is to apply methods of noncommutative geometry and supergeometry to the mathematical problems arising in theoretical physics. The development of (super)string theory led to the idea that this theory should by embedded into more general theory called M-theory. This hypothetical theory should live in 11-dimensional space and the corresponding low energy action should be given by 11-dimensional supergravity. At this moment a rigorous definition of M-theory is not known. Nevertheless, using various heuristic tools (first of all, dualities) physicists have created a beautiful and consistent picture, where all versions of (super)string theory can be obtained as limiting cases.A promising approach to a rigorous definition of M-theory is based on so called M(atrix) theory. The action functional of BFSS M(atrix) model can be obtained from ten-dimensional supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory ( 10 D SYM theory) by means of dimensional reduction to (0+1)-dimensional space.(This means that we should consider only gauge fields that do not depend on spatial variables, but can be time-dependent.) It was shown by A.Connes, M. Douglas and A. Schwarz ( ) that compactification of M(atrix) theory can lead to gauge theories on noncommutative spaces, in particular, on noncommutative tori.This paper opened the way for application of Connes noncommutative geometry to string M-theory . It became very popular, especially after the appearance of the influential Seiberg-Witten paper ( ) , that contains together with important new results, the understanding of Nekrasov-Schwarz noncommutative instantons ( ), gauge (complete) Morita equivalence defined by A.Schwarz ( ),and Pioline-Schwarz background independence ( ) from the string theory viewpoint. The number of papers considering the relation of string M-theory to noncommutative spaces grows exponentially (today it is close to a thousand); many of these articles were influenced by the papers of A. Schwarz and his collaborators. A. Schwarz intends to continue his work on applications of noncommutative geometry to string M-theory. He is planning to analyze thoroughly the general theory of gauge fields on noncommutative spaces and its relation to the duality in physics. He would like to apply (in collaboration with M. Movshev) this general theory to the construction and analysis of gauge theories on noncommutative curved spaces. One more direction the PI would like to pursue ( also together with M. Movshev) is a search of formulation M(atrix) theory ( and, more generally, maximally supersymmetric gauge theory) in a manifestly supersymmetric form. The solution of this problem is interesting by itself, but M. Movshev and A. Schwarz are planning to use it also as a starting point in the construction of a maximally supersymmetric Dirac-Born-Infeld action for nonabelian gauge fields and on noncommutative spaces. A. Schwarz is planning to develop a complex version of Connes noncommutative geometry and the theory of noncommutative theta functions having in mind possible applications to noncommutative instantons and other BPS fields.He aims also to study the role of K-theory in string M-theory. M. Movshev is planning to analyze algebraic structures arising in open string field theory. It is clear now that noncommutative geometry is quite useful in physics. The PI intends to develop methods of noncommutative geometry and to apply these methods to various problems arising in string M-theory. It seems that noncommutative geometry should play an important role in rigorous formulation of M-theory. The PI hopes that his work will contribute to the search of appropriate mathematical formalism doc20113 none ITR: Multi-scale Analysis, Modeling, and Simulation This proposal will operate in the context of the Caltech Center for Integrative Multi-scale Modeling and Simulation (CIMMS) whose purpose is to develop, and foster multi-scale innovations in a wide range of areas spanning the physical, mathematical, information, and computational sciences. It provides the infrastructure that allows for the mix of domain experts from fluids, materials and geophysics with specialists in mathematical and computational analysis. This proposal aims to: 1. Develop fundamental insights into multi-scale interactions, especially the coarse graining of dynamics and how they affect the accuracy of naive coarse-scale simulations; 2. Assemble existing ideas about multi-scale interactions scattered across a wide range of disciplines into a coherent whole, ready for broad dissemination; 3. Codify and develop systematic techniques to accurately model and simulate across space and time scales; 4. To test them systematically in a wide range of important scientific settings; 5. Develop and distribute software and associated infrastructure supporting the rapid and thorough diffusion of these techniques; 6. Raise consciousness among scientists, engineers, educators, and society in general about the importance of accurate physical modeling, the fundamental role of the multi-scale hierarchy as an obstacle to naive modeling and the existence of powerful ideas and convenient tools available to scale the hierarchy. Overarching Research Themes. Two key themes cut across and unifying the scientific research: modeling across scales, and multi-scale algorithms. They reflect two groups of researchers: those developing modeling techniques to get the physics and computations right across scales and those who develop the computational and information technology infrastructure, including algorithms and other mathematical tools, such as ridgelets and curvelets. The first years will concentrate on macromolecules and crystalline materials, and imaging and data analysis. In future years, other areas may be included, such as geophysics, space sciences and additional topics in biology, all of which present challenging multi-scale problems doc935 none This proposal requests funds to support detailed petrological and geochemical studies of abyssal peridotites recovered by the Ocean Drilling Program from the Hess Deep (Leg 147) and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, south of the Kame Fracture Zone (Leg 153). Extensive abyssal peridotite suites recovered on each drilling leg. Studies by shipboard scientists form the framewrok for this study in which we propose to investigate the following key questions: (1) Are the calculated whole-rock NaxO contents inabyssal peridotites conclsively higher than melting and melt percolation models predict? (2) What are the localized distribution patterns of clinopyroxenes and spinals in abyssal peridotites? (3) What are the minor element and trance element abundances of clinopyroxene, spinal, orthopyroxene, and olivine in these abyssal periootites? What correlations exist in these minor and trace elements at mid-ocean ridges? (5) Is it possible to more accurately quantify melt-rock interactions, such as the particularly well developed examples from the Hess Deep doc20115 none Pullin In this US-Argentina award, Dr. Jorge Pullin of Louisiana State University will collaborate with Dr. Oscar Reula of the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba in Argentina to study the application of hyperbolic formulations of the Einstein equations of general relativity in order to provide stable evolution schemes for the binary black hole coalescence problem. Among the studies they will undertake is the use of linearized and other approximation techniques and lower dimensional modeling to determine stable configurations of equations, boundary condition issues, and how various gauge choices influence the stability of the schemes. The problem of how to solve Einstein s equations numerically for astrophysically interesting simulations is one of the most urgent problems in general relativity today. To numerically model the collision of two black holes is of critical importance, since that is expected to be one of the main sources of gravitational radiation to be detected by the NSF-funded Laser Interferometer Gravity Wave Observatory (LIGO). It is expected that the last moments of the collision will produce a significant burst of gravitational radation that, due to the strong field nature and lack of symmetries of the problem, can only be predicted by numerical simulation. The combined knowledge and experience of this international collaboration will work toward solving this important problem doc20116 none The phenomenon of phase segregation is commonly observed in many multispecies thin films, where secondary-phase islands may nucleate and grow on the surface of a film and thus influence the properties of the film. The influence may be detrimental or beneficial. For example, barium-rich YBCO films may loose their superconducting properties but, on the other hand, islands on YBCO films may act as pinning centers for the magnetic field. Further applications of phase segregation and the formation of secondary-phase islands are found in quantum dots and wires in semiconductors. Understanding the mechanisms underlying phase segregation and the stability of secondary-phase islands is therefore crucial for the design and controllability of thin films. One objective of the present research project is to provide, in the context of deposition of multispecies thin films, a mathematically rigorous and thermodynamically consistent derivation of the equations governing the evolution, away from equilibrium, of interfacial triple junctions along which the film, vapor, and secondary phases intersect. Such a continuum model lends itself to a stability analysis and may thus shed light on the conditions under which surface precipitates can be expected to form and grow. When the film surface is a vicinal one, growth can occur via step flow---that is, lateral motion of atomic-high steps which separate several-unit-cell-wide terraces. In multicomponent films, the deposition of gas-phase atoms can be competitive---that is, adsorption of distinct species on individual terraces can occur on the same site. The second objective of this proposal is to develop a micromechanical model for multicomponent films that accounts for the combined effects of the terrace-and-ledge microstructure, adatom diffusion, and competitive adsorption-desorption kinetics. A third objective of this project is to link the nanoscale to the microscopic scale by incorporating averaged information obtained by homogenization of the micromechanical model of film growth discussed above into macroscopic models in the form of constitutive relations. Thin films constitute a fundamental component of numerous novel technologies. Examples include semiconductors in micro- and opto-electronic device applications, diamonds in industrial cutting tools, various anticorrosion and antiwear coats, shape-memory alloys as actuators in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and superconductors in wireless communication devices. In most industrial applications, multispecies films are more widely used than their single-component counterparts. The properties of these films and their performance under very stringent conditions depend on their chemical composition and the morphological details of the film surface. To better control the chemistry and microstructure of thin films during the growth process, a mathematically rigorous understanding of the fundamental physical and chemical mechanisms at play is necessary, especially as the atom-by-atom fabrication of materials is no longer a remote dream. Applied mathematicians can (and already do) make a significant contribution to such a global effort by developing physically sound predictive models which can be analyzed rigorously and implemented for numerical simulations. The concepts of modern continuum physics, when combined with the tools of modern mathematics (for example, homogenization and the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations), constitute a potent methodology with which to address many of the challenging issues related to the growth of multicomponent thin films doc20117 none This effort will provide more accurate measurement of our Sun s spectral output in the range 360 to nm. This will be done by deploying a state-of-the-art CCD-array solar spectrograph to a high altitude favorable site (either Mauna Loa or Mauna Kea), as part of a self-contained autonomous system. Calibration will be carried out using a monochromator and absolute photodiode trap detectors. Data will be reduced using Langley extrapolation (and in the stronger absorption bands methods similar to Reagan-Brugge fitting), to yield the solar output free of atmospheric absorption doc20118 none Thomas G. Goodwillie We propose to continue our investigations in several versions of functorial calculus . Each of these is a technique that exploits multirelative connectivity estimates to describe continuous functors in some context in terms of special values; for example a functor of spaces might be recovered from its values at highly connected spaces, or a functor of subspaces of a manifold from its values at low-dimensional subspaces, or a functor of real inner product spaces from its values at high-dimensional spaces. Part of the proposal is to refine the purely homotopy-theoretic version of calculus . Other parts are concerned with combining several versions and applying them to various questions in both high- and low-dimensional differential topology. Each functorial calculus mentioned above is so called because of a not-entirely-fanciful resemblance to the ordinary diferential calculus of Newton and Leibniz. Sometimes a fact about numbers is best proved by placing it in a context where the number is part of a huge family of numbers -- a numerical function. Properties of the function then lead, by general theorems of calculus that may seem a bit magical when encountered for the first time, to a computation of the number. So it is here: sometimes a fact about some geometrically defined object is best proved by placing it in a context where the object is part of a huge family of such objects -- a functor -- and using some magic of a more modern kind. This analogy may show something of the flavor of the work; the content is harder to get at, because most of the geometric objects in question are connected to everyday reality by rather long chains of abstract ideas doc20119 none Reynolds An accurate knowledge of interstellar matter and processes is crucial to understanding the cycle of stellar birth and death and the evolution of galaxies. The Wisconsin H-Alpha Mapper (WHAM), a remotely controlled Fabry-Perot facility dedicated to the detection and study of faint diffuse interstellar emission lines, has opened a new window to the interstellar medium by making it possible for the first time to explore the warm ionized phase of the gas with as much or more accuracy and detail as the other principal phases of the medium have been explored. These optical emission line studies provide unique new information about the nature of the interstellar medium and the principal sources of ionization and heating within the disk and halo of the Galaxy, information that cannot be obtained through other techniques at other wavelengths. Using the WHAM facility, Dr. Ronald Reynolds and his colleagues, at the University of Wisconsin, will carry out a comprehensive study of the variations in ionization and excitation conditions within the ionized gas and explore the strength and spectrum of the radiation field. Their recently completed WHAM Northern Sky Survey has given the first comprehensive picture of the distribution and kinematics of this gas over the sky and thus provides the basic foundation for this investigation. The complete set of survey data has been released to the community and is available through the website: http: www.astro.wisc.edu wham . In this second phase of the program the investigators will observe fainter diagnostic emission lines to explore the nature of the new emission features discovered by the survey and to study the surprising differences in temperature and ionization state between this widespread, low-density phase of the interstellar medium and the bright, classical H II regions near hot stars. From observations of faint emission lines of oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, and helium, they will investigate the physical conditions of the diffusely emitting gas, the faint WHAM point sources , the enormous filaments and loops of ionized gas that reach pc or more from the Galactic midplane, and the relationship of the ionized gas to the warm neutral hydrogen phase of the medium. By comparing these observations with those toward classical O star H II regions and extended regions of ionized gas associated with high latitude hot white dwarf stars, B stars, and supernova remnants, they will study the relationship between these known sources of ionization within the Galaxy and the warm ionized phase of the medium. Observations of the intermediate and high velocity clouds will be used to trace the changing conditions in the ionized gas and radiation field from the Galactic midplane to the Galactic halo, while observations of H Beta H Alpha will provide information about the influence of interstellar dust along the lines of sight of these optical line studies. The ability of WHAM to carry out the observations of these and other faint emission lines was verified during the first phase of this program. The diverse observational program in this second phase takes full advantage of this powerful, unique facility and will produce a substantial advancement in our understanding of interstellar matter and processes within the disk and halo of the Milky Way doc20120 none Lada Giant Molecular Clouds (GMCs) are the dominant sites of star formation in the Galaxy, yet the nature and distribution of their young stellar content has yet to be thoroughly or systematically investigated due to the large distances to and large angular sizes of the clouds. Dr. Elizabeth Lada and her colleagues, at the University of Florida, have been awarded roughly 200 nights of survey time allocated over 5 years from the National Optical Astronomy Observatories. This extremely large allocation of time on the 2.1-m and 4-m telescopes at Kitt Peak will be used to study the full mass range of young stars within nearby GMCs. These researchers are using the world s first near-IR multi-object spectrometer called FLAMINGOS, to obtain sensitive near-IR imaging surveys and for the first time extensive near-IR spectral classifications for stars in GMCs. The survey observations will provide a statistically significant census of near-infrared sources within the nearest giant star forming molecular clouds to a depth and completeness unequaled by any other existing or planned survey. A complete catalog of the near-IR photometry and spectroscopy for all sources will be constructed and provided to the entire astronomical community. This database will provide a unique and valuable resource for studies of star formation and molecular clouds using both ground based optical and radio telescopes (e.g. Gemini & ALMA) and space missions (e.g. SIRTF, Chandra & XMM doc20121 none This proposal was submitted in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 01-157, in the NER category. The proposal focuses on (a). the fabrication of planar spin-valve and light-emitting devices using ferromagnetic eletrodes and pi-conjugated materials; (b) the study of organic inorganic interfaces and the effect of the interfaces on spin-transport. Although spin-dependent effects have been widely studied in a variety of metals and conventional semiconductors, very little has been done in organic semiconductors for nanoscale device applications. There are two main advantages for using organic semiconductors, in particular pi-conjugated semiconductors for spin-electronics. Firstly, the spin relaxation time in these materials is relatively long, typically of the order of a microsecond at room temperature. This is caused by the light atoms from which these semiconductors are made and the small hyperfine interaction of the pi-electron wave function. The second advantage is that the main mechanism for carrier injection into organic semiconductors is by tunneling, which preserves spin states, so that the acute problem of conductance mismatch between the ferromagnetic spin aligner and the semiconductor is less troublesome. In addition, organic materials offer a wide range of work function values so that the tunnel barrier can be relatively easily engineered for spin-dependent low tunneling resistance, which is essential for high-density information storage and memory applications. Our feasibility study consists of two types of nanoscale devices. The first type is the planar spin-valve devices using pi-conjugated materials as a spacer. The objective is to explore low tunnel barrier spin-valves with high magnetoresistance. The second type is the organic spin light-emitting devices, where the electroluminescence emission will be modulated by an external magnetic field. The improved emitted light efficiency and magnetic field sensitivity are anticipated. These two types of devices involve with new material fabrication, fine lithography, and new material processing, which are highly non-trivial and of high risk. The PI and co-PI (Shi and Vardney) have expertise in magnetic tunnel junction materials and nanoscale device fabrication, polymer synthesis, organic crystal growth, magneto-transport, optics, and magneto-optics. Thus the two graduate students and two undergraduate students participating in this project will be well-trained in a rather interdisciplinary field doc20122 none DMS - PI: Borthwick The principal investigator will study spectral geometry in three basic contexts. For smooth infinite-volume hyperbolic manifolds (without cusps), he will study the question of finiteness of classes of surfaces with the same resonance set, refine techniques involving determinants that he and his co-authors have already developed, and study resonances as functions of the deformation space of a hyperbolic structure. For the more general class of asymptotically hyperbolic manifolds, the main goal is to analyze the determinants and relative determinants and use them to derive geometric constraints from resonance data. The techniques developed will be applied to define determinants and obtain constraints for exterior domains in two and three dimensions as well. A final goal is to understand the basic spectral theory of a broader class of negatively curved surfaces. Here the objectives are to determine the essential spectrum and prove a limiting absorption principle which will characterize the essential spectrum and lead towards the establishment of a scattering theory. Geometric spectral theory lies at the interface of the fields of differential geometry and mathematical physics. In physical theories such as quantum mechanics or wave propagation, one can draw a natural distinction between geometric properties of a system, meaning the underlying structure, and analytic properties, which reflect how the physics of the system behaves. Analytic properties, of which the spectrum is a prime example, are generally the aspects of a system most readily determined by experiment (for example, component colors of light emitted by stars, or frequency spikes in a radar scan). In many physical applications, the basic goal is to derive information about the geometric structure from the spectral data. The PI will pursue this goal in settings for which one already has good sources of conjectures and mathematical tools. Understanding the spectral theory of these cases will provide new geometric invariants of interest in differential geometry, while developing intuition for problems of a more applied nature doc20123 none Rosinski A novel approach, based on infinite dimensional group representations, is proposed for the analysis of isotropic and isotropic homogeneous stable random fields. There are many analogies between problems considered in this project and representation theory in quantum physics, in particular, Mackey s theory. This project is intended to build on these analogies to establish spectral representation of isotropic stable random fields in possibly the most explicit form that could be used for analysis, modeling and computer simulation of such random fields. The second part of this proposal is concerned with infinite dimensional stochastic integrals. Various sample path properties of stochastic processes, such as continuity and boundedness, can often be described in terms of the existence of such infinite dimensional stochastic integrals. It is proposed to simplify and unify the present approach to infinite dimensional stochastic integrals of deterministic functions and then to extend these results to nonanticipating integrands using decoupling techniques, among others. This is an outgrowth of the present research of the PI with Professor Michael B. Marcus. Development of stochastic integrals with respect to cylindrical semimartingales in Hilbert spaces is also proposed. This development will follow a recent progress of the PI and his collaborators on the radonification of cylindrical semimartingales. Isotropic random fields play an important role in the statistical theory of turbulence and other areas of natural sciences and engineering. They can be used to model 3-dimensional turbulent velocity, velocity and pressure, etc. The classical theory of isotropic random fields is not suitable for modeling random phenomena with long range dependence and high variability, that are often observed. Therefore, the PI proposes to investigate isotropic random fields with heavy tailed stable distributions. Puzzling connections with certain methods of quantum physics are found under this approach; they will be further investigated and exploited. The second part of this proposal is concerned with the theory and applications of infinite dimensional stochastic integrals. The importance and need for the study of such integrals comes from the theory of random systems characterized by very large or continuous set of parameters. Infinite dimensional approach makes such systems simpler and mathematically tractable doc20124 none Viens The PI s research program on the behavior of parabolic stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) focuses on four topics: local behavior, long-term behavior, particle representation, and fractional Brownian motion (fBm). The goals are to exhibit a strong interdependence between local and long-term phenomena and to develop an implementable particle representation. The PI considers stochastic perturbations of the heat equation, with additive or multiplicative noise that depends on time and space. The dependence in time is of white-noise type, while the dependence in space can span a wide range of behaviors. The differential operator is the standard Laplacian on the real line or on the circle (or sometimes in higher dimensions), with a small diffusion parameter kappa included. In the multiplicative noise case, a nonlinearity may be included. The basic point of view is simple: an SPDE with a unique solution is an input-output system, and as such the solution s behavior must be inherited from the equation s coefficients. The local behavior to be considered is the modulus of continuity of the solution in the space variable. The long term behavior of interest, specific to the linear multiplicative case, is the large-time exponential asymptotics of the solution (Lyapunov exponent question). The PI characterizes both of these behaviors via the spatial modulus of continuity of the potential itself, extends some of the results to equations driven by fBm, and designs a new numerical method for the solution using a system of interacting particles. It is shown that the solution s Lyapunov exponent is of the order of kappa to the power of alpha (1+alpha) where alpha is the almost-sure spatial Holder exponent of the solution. It is also shown that the solution has spatial Holder exponent alpha if and only if the same holds for the potential s antiderivative. An investigation of how these results change when one uses fractional noise instead of white noise is also considered. For the nonlinear equation, a branching and interacting particle system is constructed as the basis for a numerical method for simulating the solution. It is proved that the numerical scheme, when properly mollified, converges to the solution in the Skorohod space of continuous-function-valued cadlag processes. The particles interact because, as they branch at evenly spaced short intervals, their mean number of offspring is a random variable whose mean is calculated relative to a certain fitness of all the other particles, and depends explicitly on the non-linearity of the potential. The main physical meaning of the research is that a complex space-time-dependent system with significant random perturbations can exhibit an exponentially strong increase of size or energy in the long term, and that the exponential rate of increase can be predicted precisely by looking at the short-range spatial variability of the physical environment. This has potentially important applications in hydrodynamics and turbulence, including a local characterization of the so-called fast dynamo effect. It would say that a magnetic field in a magnetic fluid can be enhanced precisely by controlling the fluid s mezoscopic level of turbulence. The research has important educational effects. Ph.D. students and, under the PI s supervision, undergraduates and MS students, conduct computer simulations in connection with the particle methods, with an emphasis on designing efficient algorithms. The simulations are being integrated as class projects in a new curriculum emphasis in computational finance and other applications, preparing the students for the technology-dominated job market and workplace. From the purely theoretical point of view, the research brings together several areas of great current interest in probability theory: infinite dimensional stochastic analysis, branching and interacting particle systems and numerical methods, Gaussian regularity theory, Lyapunov exponents doc20125 none White Cosmology has made tremendous advances in the past decade, with many fundamental questions approaching resolution. We now have a highly predictive theory for the emergence of large-scale structure in the Universe. As is often the case, this theory raises new questions, and several crucial issues still remain to be understood. First, the nature of most of the matter in the Universe remains mysterious. Second, while we have known for some time that earthly matter doesn t dominate the energy in the Universe, we now believe that not even exotic `dark matter plays that role. At present the Universe appears to be accelerating, driven by a mysterious component dubbed dark energy . Luckily we are in a golden era of cosmological observations. Upcoming observations will soon constrain the initial conditions for structure formation and many cosmological parameters, allowing us to address the next frontier: the era of structure formation. A thorough understanding of structure formation is instrumental in determining both the consequences of the developing cosmic web paradigm and the constraints on variations within this paradigm. The key to this understanding is clusters of galaxies. These are the largest known objects. They exhibit remarkable regularity, but our understanding of their structure is sensitive to our modeling assumptions. This project will construct computer models of galaxy clusters to develop and refine methods which will relate the properties of these clusters to the distribution and nature of the dark matter and the dark energy and thus to sharpen our tests of this dominant paradigm doc20126 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Hyperbolic and kinetic partial differential equations Tzavaras This project deals with several aspects of the theory of weak solutions for hyperbolic systems, and the mathematical theory of transport equations that arise in kinetic theory of gases. Specific themes are: (i) To exploit the interface between the theory of weak solutions for hyperbolic systems and the theory of transport equations in the kinetic theory of gases, particularly with regard to issues of propagation and cancellation of oscillations. (ii) To study well-posedness and hydrodynamic limits for certain collisional kinetic models, problems that are intimately connected to the thermomechanical issues arising in the passage from microscopic to continuum theories. (iii) To exploit variational techniques in the study of the structural properties for the equations of multi-dimensional elastodynamics and viscoelasticity. (iv) To analyze various instances of diffusion-sensitive dynamics, like the effect of small-viscosity on the long-time evolution of hyperbolic systems and the notion of graph solutions for diffusion sensitive systems. The mathematical research on hyperbolic systems of conservation laws is to a large extent motivated by the fundamental conservation laws in physics and continuum mechanics. From its early stages, analytical and numerical methods in this field have developed together, and analytical understanding contributes in the design of high performance computational algorithms. In recent years there has seen a very fruitful exchange between ideas in the theory of kinetic equations and the theory of weak solutions for hyperbolic systems. At the core of this exchange is the issue of deriving continuum theories from microscopic models of kinetic theory of gases or statistical physics. This project will make use of this exchange of ideas to develop mathematical techniques to better understand the wide variety of important physical systems that are modeled by conservation laws doc20127 none s of natural phenomena governed by random or chance mechanisms. Mathematical models of such phenomena may attempt to describe variation in time, in space, or both. The research to be performed is concerned with developing methods for specifying these mathematical models, approximating complex models by simpler ones, obtaining information about the true state of a system from corrupted or noisy observations, and determining how to influence or control the evolution of the models and the phenomena they represent. Motivating examples include models for the effects on asset prices of the valuations assigned by a large number of traders and for communication and computer networks doc20128 none Deeb The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twelve-month research fellowship by Dr. Christopher Deeb to work with Dr. Jacques Castaing at the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musees de France (C2RMF - the Scientific Laboratory at the Louvre Museum) in Paris, France. This project involves the examination of the methods by which the ancient Egyptians processed raw mineral powders into cosmetics. Artifact powders from Egyptian tombs dating between - BC have previously been studied to determine their mineral composition. These powders are composed of a suite of naturally occurring materials - galena (PbS) and cerussite (PbCO3) - and materials which are not naturally occurring - laurionite (PbOHCl) and phosgenite (Pb2CL2CO3). By consultation with Greco-Roman texts, it is presumed that the latter compounds are the result of wet chemistry. The Ancient Egyptians then performed a certain degree of mechanical grinding and annealing to form the final product. The relationship between the mined and chemically derived raw materials, mechanical processing, and annealing temperature and time will be determined and compared to the actual artifact powders. By this method the Pis will reveal the processing conditions the Egyptians used to make these powders and also shed light on the processing available at that time. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) will be the main tool used, resulting in a precise definition of the processing conditions used by the Ancient Egyptians being the end result. Dr. Castaing has a long history of international collaborations in a wide array of materials science related projects doc20129 none Klass In work with various co-authors, the PI plans to work on the following five tasks. 1) Complete a paper on (nearly optimal) approximation of quantile location for sums of independent and otherwise arbitrary random variables. 2) Complete a paper in finance which introduces a new constraint to augment the optimal growth criterion and thereby provide local wealth stability. A natural sub-optimal strategy can be exhibited. It is further shown how one can create a long-term portfolio strategy which asymptotically withdraws money at the (same) asymptotic rate at which the portfolio is growing, without diminishing that long-term rate(!). 3) Extend previous work on self-normalized martingales. 4) Attempt to construct and or identify extremal distributions which arise in various situations maximizing the expected value of some random quantity subject to infinitely many linear inequality constraints. 5) Develop an idea, conveyed to him in by Prof. David L. Allen, to show how to construct a natural posterior distribution on densities in R, given only the data acquired, and extending the result to R^d by means of the Radon Transform. This approach permits one to establish confidence intervals for parameter estimation, to perform hypothesis testing and data classification with only finite samples. Goodness of fit tests are also contemplated. The principle investigator plans work in five areas: quantile approximation for sums of arbitrary independent random variables, optimal investment strategy designed to guard against local capital losses of more than a pre-set proportion of the previous maximal accumulated wealth (plus a method of permitting consumption at the long run growth rate without sacrificing that long-run rate), extend previous work on self-normalized martingales, solve or find approximately optimal solutions to certain infinite dimensional linear programming problems, demonstrate how to make full use of the data acquired in statistical settings which involve hypothesis testing or classification (categorization) of data. The investment work should be of fundamental interest and importance to individual, corporate and community (governmental) investment. The data analysis efforts may suggest a best possible approach to determining whether a particular datum came from A or B given limited prior data on A and B. Such work could be useful in character recognition, hand-writing decipherment, etc. The other topics were motivated by prior work of the PI doc20130 none Rodgers The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Kathryn D. Rodgers to work with Dr. Reinhard Fassler at Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsreid, Germany. This project will provide valuable information about the different roles of proteoglycans in basement membrane development and how they compensate each other functionally. The first goal is to cross heterozygous mice to generate agrin perlecan knockouts to assess the roles of these proteins in development and to clarify the results from the single knockouts. The second is to analyze whether perlecan expression has an effect on cartilege development and collagen fibril development. The PI will generate mice expressing perlecan under control of the type II collagen promotor, and then to cross these mice with the perlecan-null mice. Detailed EM-level analysis together with biochemical methods will be used to assess the collagens that are formed. The third goal is to use Cre loxP system to develop a mouse with a deleted IG3 module of domain IV of perlecan, as well as antibodies to detect the IG2 IG4 recombinant molecule. This will address more specifically the portion of the perlecan molecule that has particular functions, with a great level of molecular detail. In addition to Dr. Fassler, the PI will work with Drs. Rupert Timpl, Max Planck Institute, Anders Aspberg, Lund University in Lund, Sweden, and Peter Bruckner, Westfalische Wilhelms Universitat Munster, in Munster, Germany doc20131 none EIA- Ray, Animesh Keck Graduate Institute TITLE: A Twin-Framework To Analyze, Model and Design Robust, Complex Networks Using Biological and Computational Principles Vulnerability of natural networks (such as the Internet, power supply grid, or gene regulatory circuits of cells) to accidental or deliberate attack is an important area of study. To date most work has focused on observations of existing static networks or on computer simulations, because most natural networks are difficult to manipulate experimentally. The complex molecular machinery regulating the synthesis of RNA molecules in the nucleus of budding yeast, a single-celled organism, is a real-world instance of a natural network that can be experimentally perturbed by defined genetic manipulations, and the results of these perturbations can be studied at the molecular level with unprecedented accuracy by current genomic techniques. The goal of this project is to develop a biology-driven computational framework for network robustness. To achieve this goal, a biological test-bed of sufficiently complexity, the gene regulatory network of sporulation in yeast, has been adopted as an experimental network model. Systematic gene knockout mutations (equivalent to node removal), and regulatory site deletion mutations (equivalent to edge removal), are being used as tools to actively alter the network. Effects of these perturbations in the gene regulatory network architecture are being analyzed at the level of whole-genome transcriptional profiles. A generic data model for large-scale networks is being developed. The relevant experimental behavior of the biological network is being emulated with the data model. Design principles underlying the architecture of complex networks selected through evolution are being probed through mathematical modeling and testing. Insights obtained from these studies will be valuable for defensive strategies in complex network design, with implications in, among others, communication technology, disaster response, and in designing robust communication infrastructure resistant to planned attacks doc20132 none This research project, supported in the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, is a fundamental computational study of the chemisorption of small molecules on transition metal surfaces. Using state of the art Density Functional Theory, Professor Rahman and her coworkers in the Department of Physics at Kansas State University, are systematically exploring the adsorption of carbon monoxide on stepped and kinked nickel and palladium surfaces. The dependence of adsorbate binding energy, substrate surface relaxations, electronic charge transfer and the nature of the adsorbate-substrate bond on the local geometry and coordination obtained from these calculations is being explored. Model interaction potentials developed from these calculations facilitate large scale simulations of catalysis and thin film growth processes. Using state of the art computational tools, Professor Rahman and her colleagues are examining the fundamental aspects of electronic structure in the adsorption of small molecules on transition metal surfaces. The detailed understanding obtained from these studies is useful in the design of catalytic systems and for developing our knowledge of surface reaction processes in several technologically important areas doc20133 none The proposed study will assess the state of smaller multi-user facilities within the materials research complex in the United States. It will consider methods for optimizing the use of existing resources, including consideration of structural strategies and actions to provide services more efficiently, such as consolidation of smaller facilities into regional centers. The study will consider university and national laboratory facilities and possible some facilities in the commercial sector. The study will also examine the ways other countries manage smaller facilities. The assessment will include: (1) a definition of such facilities and their role in the scientific complex; (2) collection of data on, and an analysis of, the usage, structure, and cost-effectiveness of facilities currently in use; (3) an analysis of verious models for facility operations, their effectiveness, and appropriate metrics for success; (4) an assessment of opportunities for instrumentation research in the context of facilities; (5) the educational role played by smaller facilities; (6) the optimization of investment in smaller facilities, including the reallocation of existing resources; and (7) the development of long-range models for the support of regional centers doc20134 none Goldberg, David M. One of the outstanding questions in extra-galactic astronomy and cosmology pertains to the search for the missing matter in the universe. Dark matter lies hidden in the largest galaxies and clusters of galaxies, and until the advent of gravitational lensing, there was no way to probe the outer reaches of these objects. Weak lensing analysis has proven a boon to modern astrophysics in that it allows for an accurate measurement of cluster masses without recourse to assumptions about the dynamical state of the system, its composition, or its 3-dimensional geometry. Lensing introduces an elliptical distortion to galaxies behind clusters. The mean ellipticity determined from many background galaxies may then be used to reconstruct the cluster s gravitational potential, and thus its mass distribution. This analysis has already been successfully applied to a number of galaxies, clusters, and to large-scale structure generally. In previous work, the awardee has expanded existing lensing analysis to second-order, thus describing a transition regime in which lensing is too weak to produce dramatic arcs, but for which an arc-like signal can still be detected. The present project will expand upon this previous work. These techniques, if successfully demonstrated, can be applied to a number of existing and publicly available datasets. The award is for seed funding for a proof of concept of advanced lensing analysis doc20135 none The research program will develop a large-scale digital archive of children s literature and explore problems in technology for access and use by children, and in rights management. There are five primary goals: (1) to give children around the world access to international children s literature, (2) to understand data acquisition and rights management in the creation of a large-scale digital library, (3) to develop interface technologies that support children using large amounts of digital information, (4) to evaluate the impact of such a collection on children s librariesa and children s librarians, (5) to evaluate the impact and benefits of such a collection for children. The project plans to develop a digital library of 10,000 children s books representing 100 cultures doc20136 none Ledzewicz In the project, optimal control problems will be investigated which arise as mathematical models for biomedical systems in the chemotherapy of diseases which have a strong cell proliferation aspect such as cancer or AIDS. Three directions of research will be pursued: the analysis of models in cancer chemotherapy, an analysis of models for HIV-infection and anti- viral treatment of AIDS, and the design and analysis of a general mathematical framework which combines common features of both cancer and HIV models. The investigators will use their previous experience working on cancer chemotherapy models and apply new tools based on the method of characteristics and high-order conditions for optimality. In compartmental models for cancer chemotherapy the cell-cycle is controlled by clustering its phases into compartments and using phase specific cytostatic killing and blocking agents. The goal is to maximize the number of cancer cells that the cytostatic agent in the drug kills while keeping the toxicity to the normal tissue acceptable. In this project a synthesis of optimal controls for these models will be constructed. Furthermore, more complex mathematical models that take into account additional aspects such as evolving drug resistance or bone marrow destruction will be analyzed. Due to the complexity of HIV infection, mathematical models for AIDS have only recently been developed and still are constantly being revised and updated taking new medical data into account. With the main attention so far given to the form of the dynamics that best models the interactions between the virus and the human immune system under drug treatment, many of these models still have not been formulated as optimal control problems. The investigators will analyze a variety of these models in the framework of optimal control and compare the solutions aiming at a design of optimal treatment protocols. In the project, the investigators will consider mathematical models in the chemotherapy of diseases that have a strong cell proliferation aspect such a cancer or AIDS. These models will be analyzed as optimal control problems with the drug dosage serving as control parameter with the goal of maximizing the number of cancer cells killed by the drug in the case of cancer (respectively maximizing the number of uninfected cells in the case of chemotherapy for AIDS) while minimizing the harmful side effects and cost of the chemotherapy. Although individually these problems are very different in their specifics, they also have many aspects in common and can be put into one general mathematical model that encompasses them all. Thus, while on one side there is a need to consider these problems separately to understand the implications for the underlying disease, on the other side there are simplifications and insights to be gained by looking at the general properties common to these models. This project will address both directions. A biomedical interpretation of the conditions that optimal controls satisfy will be given in terms understandable by biomedical personnel and the conditions will be related to the underlying biological situation. It is expected that the outcomes of this project will be of interest to the medical community by giving some insights into the analysis of existing chemotherapy protocols for cancer or HIV and possibly aid in the design of new improved protocols. These results are particularly important for HIV treatments which so far do not cure the disease, but only provide a long-term maintenance program doc20137 none Elmegreen Dwarf irregulars are the most common type of galaxy in the Universe. They evolve relatively slowly over time and chemically resemble the outer parts of present-day spirals and young galaxies seen at high redshift. They have no density waves and little shear. Some are very close to us, permitting the resolution of clusters and star-forming regions. As a result, dwarf irregulars are ideal laboratories for studies of star formation in a pristine environment. They are also useful for comparisons with spirals, leading to a better understanding of both. The goals of this project are to determine what regulates star formation in dwarf galaxies on a wide range of scales, and then to apply this knowledge to other galaxies. Why do star formation rates in normal dwarf galaxies span a factor of over 104, and why are young stars always limited to the inner galaxy regions, far inside the radial extent of other stars and gas? What governs how and where dense molecular clouds form? To address these questions, Dr. Deidre Hunter, at Lowell Observatory, and Dr. Bruce Elmegreen, at IBM, have observed 139 reasonably normal, non-interacting, nearby galaxies without spiral arms. The data include optical and near-infrared images that allow the star formation to be determined over the lifetimes of these galaxies, atomic HI maps that show the raw cloud material and environment for cloud formation, and observations of the warm and cold molecular clouds that give birth to the stars themselves. Although a previous grant emphasized data collection and processing, these investigators have already analyzed the properties of the HII regions in the sample, including their sizes, pressures, luminosities, and locations. They studied the neutral interstellar structure in the LMC and combined all their data for a comprehensive study of NGC . The results have led to a revision in the theoretical framework for star formation: global instabilities and threshold column densities for star formation are less important than local processes and conditions; the thermal equilibrium properties of the interstellar medium are as important as self-gravity; turbulence and phase changes generally structure the gas into cloud and intercloud media, yet global disturbances such as bars and interactions change this, producing anomalously massive bound clusters. The results have also enhanced our perspective on star formation processes in normal spiral galaxies by illustrating how the expansion of shells and the condensation of clouds becomes more severe at low shear. With this new award, the investigators will capitalize on their large, multi-wavelength survey to finish the project by addressing the big-picture questions posed above. They will find how star formation evolves over space and time in a dwarf galaxy; consider the special effects at galaxy edges; show how the star formation history relates to the gas structure and other conditions for cloud formation; determine the formation requirements for star forming regions of different sizes and densities; determine the porosity of the interstellar medium and its role in possible feedback; and determine the overall structure of the dwarfs. Many of these results will have applications to other galaxy types and to other epochs in the Universe doc20138 none Sohn, Lydia L Princeton University QuBIC: : NSF Information Technology Research QuBIC Principal Investigators MeetingPrinciple Investigators Conference This workshop is designed to foster communication between the grantees of the QuBIC program, the ITR Revolutionary Computer program, and the DARPA Bio-Comp program in the areas of DNA and biomolecular computing. This workshop will be the primary forum for the exchange of research ideas, and interaction between EIA and its grantees doc20139 none Hughes Jets of gas, flowing at close to the speed of light, are a common feature of our Universe and are found wherever compact objects such as black holes capture material. In this project, computer simulations of these jets will be used to advance our understanding of such energetic flows. In particular these simulations will be designed to help us understand how such jets can penetrate their environment without disruption and also shed light on the nature of the `engines which produce them. The technique used in this study incorporates Special Relativity and uses state-of-the-art methods originally designed for fields such as aerospace engineering. It enables large computations to be performed with modest computer resources, thus allowing an exploration of many facets of the problem. Among these are: how shock waves form in the gas flow, and how the flow responds to impacting dense surrounding material, or being spun around in space due to changes in the direction of the engine s nozzle. An important aspect of the study is that it provides a probe of the poorly understood jets of stellar binary systems, and should reveal the extent to which these really are mini-quasars -- scaled down versions of active galaxies. The same technique is applied to the nebulae that result from pulsar winds, where moving through the ambient medium causes the nebula to be swept back into a tail of gas, similar to the galactic and stellar jets. Understanding these `wind nebulae will provide insight into the flow from the pulsar itself, which is not directly observable doc20140 none EIA- Eduard Hovy Information Sciences Institute, USC This grant will explore the automated construction of domain ontologies across governmental datasets. There are many data silos in government; that is, collections of data which cannot be cross-compared or queried. This is a major problem in presenting government information to consumers which is tailored according to their interests, rather than according to the organizational structure of government agencies. While such automated tools cannot completely construct accurate ontologies, they can take much of the labor intensiveness out of such efforts, particularly where the number of terms or variables is so large (in the thousands) as to prevent manual efforts. Working with the US Environmental Protection Agency, which has many datasets of interest to the public, the research team will develop a semi-automated toolkit to aid in the construction of ontologies doc20141 none Fred Roberts Rutgers University ITR: Special Focus on Computer Science and Epidemiology Mathematical methods have become important tools in analyzing the spread and control of infectious and also noninfectious diseases. The size of modern epidemiological problems and the large data sets that arise call out for the use of powerful computational tools in conjunction with the mathematical analysis. This project believes that partnerships between computer scientists and epidemiologists can make important new contributions to the usefulness of these mathematical methods. Research efforts in the project will be carried out by interdisciplinary, international working groups which will investigate issues in computer science and related mathematics that need to be resolved to make progress on important problems in epidemiology and will explore and apply methods of computer science and related mathematics not widely used in epidemiology. Topics to be studied by these groups include: Adverse Event Disease Reporting, Surveillance, and Analysis; Data Mining and Epidemiology; Analogies Between Computer Viruses and Immune Systems and Biological Viruses and Immune Systems; Distributed Computing, Social Networks, and Disease Spread Processes; Phylogenetic Trees and Rapidly Evolving Diseases, Spatio-Temporal and Network Modeling of Diseases; and Methodologies for Comparing Vaccination Strategies. Other important goals will be to involve more computer scientists in epidemiological research; develop and strengthen collaborations and partnerships between mathematical scientists and biological scientists; introduce young investigators from both the computer science and biological science communities to the issues, problems and challenges of epidemiology; and involve biological and computer scientists together to define the agenda and develop the tools of computational epidemiology doc20142 none , , , TITLE: Collaborative Research: ITR: Acquiring Accurate Dynamic Field Data Using Lightweight Instrumentation Dynamic analyses, such as testing and profiling, play a key role in state-of-art approaches to software quality assurance (QA). With rare exception, these analyses are performed in-house, on developer platforms, using developer-provided input workloads. Shortcomings of this approach include that the results simply cannot be trusted to tell us how the software actually performs in the field. The project goal is to give developers unprecedented insight into the actual runtime behavior of their software, allowing developers (and ultimately the software itself) to change, optimize, and adapt the software based on highly accurate field data. Lightweight, collaborative dynamic analyses conducted around-the-world and around-the-clock form the new platform: (1) lightly instrument fielded software (i.e., each program copy performs a small part of the analysis) (2) collect the partial data from many instances of the software, fusing it to conduct the complete analysis, (3) change the running program instances based on the findings and (4) repeat the process. Seven critical research challenges form the core of the project: 1. Lightweight instrumentation--Develop instrumentation that is virtually transparent to individual users. 2. Compositional analysis techniques--Develop distributed analysis techniques that decompose traditional analyses into smaller steps, distribute the steps among multiple users, and then fuse each user s results into an accurate solution to the original problem. 3. Scalability--Develop storage and analysis techniques to deal with the high data volumes we expect to encounter. 4. Anomaly Detection--Define data-driven techniques to automatically identify anomalous behaviors of deployed software. 5. Privacy and Security--Incorporate privacy and security safeguards into our data collection and analysis approaches. 6. Dynamic updating mechanisms--Develop techniques to make runtime changes to the location and function of instrumentation, and to parts of the software itself. 7. Validate approach on industrial software doc20143 none Griffin This award supports Dr. Kevin Griffin of Columbia University for a three-year collaborative research project with Dr. David Whitehead of Landcare Research Institute and Dr. Matthew Turnbull of the University of Canterbury, both in New Zealand. The research will assess the contribution of woody tissue respiration to the carbon balance in a forest ecosystem. Objectives include 1) making continuous real time measurements of respiration from stems, branches and roots for periods of days to weeks under field conditions, 2) determining the processes influencing wood respiration by monitoring responses to natural environmental variability in different forested ecosystems, and 3) quantitatively describing these responses for use in a model to estimate ecosystem carbon balance. Understanding the processes that regulate the carbon balance of forest ecosystems is a critical issue in predicting how forests will impact the atmospheric carbon dioxide balance in the future. This collaboration brings together the efforts of international laboratories that have complementary expertise and research facilities. The project will also enhance the international research competence of the American graduate student who will participate in the research in New Zealand doc20144 none Lawler The study of abundances of the heavy elements in metal-poor halo stars is contributing to a more quantitative understanding of stellar nucleosynthesis and Galactic chronometry. The odd-even sawtooth pattern of abundances throughout the lanthanides is examined to separate out the contributions of the r- and s- processes (synthesis by rapid and slow neutron capture) throughout the evolution of the Galaxy. The abundances of the radioactive chronometers Th and U are measured along with abundances of other near-lying r-process elements such as Os, Ir and Pt to determine stellar age and thereby put a lower limit on the Galactic age. Abundance accuracy is key in these studies, and yet the database of transition probabilities on which the abundance determination depends is sorely lacking for many of the heavy elements. Often astronomers must make use of solar gf-values which have many sources of uncertainty, particularly for heavy elements which are relatively weak in comparison to the Fe group in the solar spectrum. Old laboratory measurements and semi-empirical results are also often used, although they are known to have large errors for weaker lines. With modern beam-laser techniques, gf-values can be eliminated as the major source of uncertainty in solar and stellar abundance determinations. Dr. James Lawler and colleagues, at the University of Wisconsin, will conduct laboratory measurements of large sets of accurate, absolute transition probabilities. Transition probabilities will be determined by combining radiative lifetimes with branching fractions. The radiative lifetimes will be measured using time-resolved laser-induced fluorescence on a slow beam of atoms ions. Branching fractions will be measured using Fourier transform spectroradiometry. Priority will be given to the lanthanide spectrum Nd II, as well as spectra of important chronometers Th II and U II. The gf-values of these spectra have been identified as the most in need of improvement, and as critical in studies of halo stars. As time and resources allow, measurements will continue on the spectra Os I, Pt I and Ir I, which have also been identified as needing improved gf-values, and as important in studies of halo stars doc13332 none The objective of this collaborative Focused Research Group (FRG) project is to invent a new class of thermoelectric (TE) materials that will significantly enhance the efficiency of cooling and power applications. Based on the theory of electronic and heat transport in solids, a theoretical model of semiconducting TE materials has been available for several decades. However, no known material has all the needed electronic and thermal characteristics. The purpose of this collaboration is to design, synthesize and characterize new classes of semiconducting thermoelectric materials that exhibit high efficiency as device materials. Electronic structure theory will provide general guidelines in the search for such materials. The main impediment is the inability of scientists to predict the composition or structure of new compounds, unless they are chemically similar to known compounds. However, once a new material is found and its crystal structure determined, its electronic band structure as well as transport properties can be calculated. Thus this research has both strong theoretical and experimental components. A close interaction between the chemists, physicists and theorists and their students through quarterly meetings, exchange visits, and internet communication, will provide rapid feedback and planning of the next experiments and calculations. The education and research components of this interdisciplinary project are well integrated, and overall success in this complex project will be realized through exceptional synergy. %%% Thermoelectric (TE) materials allow the construction of small, purely electronic devices that provide thermal cooling on passing a current, or that produce electricity directly from heat. TE coolers eliminate the need for compressors and gasses, such as freons. However, current TE coolers have low efficiency (only 10 % of the maximum allowed, while home refrigerators operate at about 30 % of Carnot efficiency.). Yet these devices are used in applications where efficiency is less important than small size or reliability. Their use would greatly expand if the efficiency could be raised to 30 % or more, resulting in environmental improvements and economic benefits. This is an ideal training ground for students. This experimental and theoretical project is highly interactive and interdisciplinary with strong synergy exhibited among the participating chemists and physicists and their graduate and postdoctoral students doc20146 none The proposal requests funding for partial support for U.S. scientists to attend two sequential high energy physics conferences in Les Arcs, Savoie, France. The first conference addresses Electroweak Interactions and Unified Theories. The subjects are CP violation, heavy flavor physics, neutrino physics, tests of the Standard Model, searches for new particles and theories beyond the Standard Model. The second conference concerns Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) and High Energy Hadronic Interactions. The topics to be covered include heavy flavor physics, structure functions, diffractive phenomena, low-x physics and saturation, tests of perturbative QCD, heavy ion collisions, the search for new phenomena and physics at future accelerators doc20147 none This project consists of three parts. The first part deals with a fundamental theoretical question of dynamics: To understand the nature of physically observable chaos. Despite the great amount of work done over the past five decades, the fundamental question of demonstrating genuine chaotic behavior in a physically realistic differential equation has not been answered. The answer seems finally within grasp, due to incremental progress in understanding two-dimensional mappings on the one hand and some new insights into differential equations on the other. The second part of the project deals with rapidly vibrating systems. High-frequency oscillations lead to fascinating phenomena, which have found their use in such areas as particle confinement, particle accelerators, and laser tweezers. A recent observation of the author shed a new light on these phenomena and opened connections with other fields, which will be further explored in this project, along with possible new applications. The third part of the project deals with the mathematical analysis of a geometrical object (a class of area-preserving cylinder maps) which is of independent mathematical interest on the one hand and gives insight into physical systems on the other. These systems include (i) charged particles in magnetic fields, (ii) the Frenkel-Kontorova model of an equilibrium configuration of electrons in a crystal lattice, and (iii) arrays of Josephson junctions. This project involves three different research directions. The first direction addresses a major gap in our understanding of how chaos really manifests itself in physical systems. Surprising as it may seem, despite the large amount of sometimes deep work in the field of chaos, chaotic behavior has not been proven (understood in the mathematical sense) in realistic physical systems. The nature of chaos has really been understood only in mathematical models that are too simplified to include some key features of real systems (although even those simplified models can be quite complex). The theory, however, has reached a level where such understanding seems finally within grasp. A mathematical proof of the existence of chaos for a realistic physical system would be the culmination of a long development over the past five decades or more. The second direction of the project deals with the study of physical systems with rapid oscillations, where phenomena occur that are both utterly fascinating and useful. For example, subjecting the end of an open bicycle chain to high-frequency vibrations will, in theory, enable the chain to stand up stably (!) on its end. The theory which underlies this curiosity is also responsible for the workings of such seemingly unrelated devices as particle traps, particle accelerators, laser tweezers (which allow one to move a particle inside a cell by a laser beam without breaking the cell wall), and acoustic levitators. Over the past few years, the author has found an explanation of these effects; prior theory predicted the result but did not answer the why. The explanation opened new directions, which we plan to explore further. We plan, in particular, to better understand the concept of vibrational control and explore the use of vibration for filtering (using acoustic waves). The third direction is of basic mathematical interest but has significance in several physical situations. The mathematical theory will give insight, otherwise inaccessible, into at least three different phenomena: (i) the behavior of particles in magnetic fields of certain patterns; (ii) the electric conductivity of certain types of crystals, and (iii) the electric behavior of some arrays of Josephson junctions known as superconducting quantum interference devices (the so-called SQUIDS doc20148 none PI Jayawardhana The past five years have seen the identification of a large number of sub-stellar objects in the solar neighborhood and in star-forming regions. Indeed, it appears that brown dwarfs may be as common as stars. However, there are few observational constraints on their origin and early evolution. Studies of young brown dwarfs provide valuable clues to their formation mechanism(s). This program explores the physical properties of brown dwarfs in star-forming regions and compare them to the much better studied pre-main sequence stars, in order to shed light on their origin. The program employs many of the methods developed in the study of T Tauri stars, and includes (1) a search for thermal infrared emission from disks around young sub-stellar objects, (2) optical spectroscopy to derive their accretion luminosities and mass accretion rates, (3) modeling of scattered light and thermal emission of disks, (4) observations of X-ray emission, as an indicator of activity, and (5) measurements of rotation periods based on photometric variability in the optical. The results of this program will help distinguish among different formation scenarios for brown dwarfs, such as cloud fragmentation, protostellar disk instability, and ejection from newborn multiple systems, whether young sub-stellar objects undergo a T Tauri-like phase doc20149 none Support is provided for the DIMACS workshop Data depth: Robust multivariate analysis, computational geometry and applications at Rutgers University. The workshop brings together theoretical and applied statisticians and computer scientists to promote and further the use and development of depth functions in nonparametric multivariate analysis. Data depth has applications in and connections with a number of different research areas, such as aviation safety, data compression, image analysis, data mining and analysis of genetic data. The workshop addresses significant open conceptual issues and establishes perspective on applications. It also sets primary directions for further research, emphasizing the role of computational geometry in understanding concepts of and developing algorithms for data depth doc20150 none Buta The principal objective of Dr. Ronald Buta s project is to use a new, direct technique for quantifying the strengths of bars in disk galaxies, and to derive the distribution of bar strengths in order to evaluate various scenarios for the origin of bars. The technique involves using near-infrared images to infer the gravitational potentials of galaxies, and then from these potentials estimating the actual torque due to the bar. The maximum value of the ratio of the tangential force to the mean radial force (called the relative bar torque parameter Qb) provides a single number that can characterize the bar strength of a whole galaxy. It is the most promising, direct technique for quantifying bar strength, and should supercede a host of other indirect methods that have been used in the past. Dr. Buta will refine the technique to improve its accuracy. A second objective of this project is to examine correlations between bar strength and other properties of galaxies, such as the shapes of bar dust lanes, chemical abundance gradients, the shapes and orientations of rings, the distribution of star formation, global star formation rates, nuclear activity, and bar ellipticity. These correlations are important because they allow us to understand how bars affect galaxy structure once they have formed. Secular evolution of structure is of critical importance in barred galaxies, and the role of bar strength on that evolution can be evaluated by studying these correlations. Measuring the distribution of bar strengths in galaxies is a critical piece of information that has not yet been used to constrain bar formation models. The origin of bars is a fundamental problem in astronomy. Through their nonaxisymmetric potentials, bars are thought to generate or at least influence the development of a host of phenomena including circumnuclear starbursts, bulge growth, global spiral structure, secondary bars, lenses, noncircular motions, and inner and outer rings. Bars are so pervasive, being found in at least 70% of disk galaxies, that they are clearly important to the structure and evolution of galaxies. Models can predict the distribution of expected Qb values for a given bar-formation scenario doc20151 none In this project funded by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Michael Klein of the University of Pennsylvania will use computer simulation and modeling techniques to investigate structural and dynamical phenomena in molecular solids and fluids. Ab initio Car-Parrinello molecular dynamics (CPMD) as well as classical Monte Carlo (MC) and molecular dynamics (MD) techniques will be used to characterize the behavior of a variety of condensed-phase molecular systems. CPMD methodology will also be utilized to explore fundamental chemical reactions in both aqueous and superacid media. Novel methodologies and algorithms for condensed-phase simulations will be developed and implemented, with emphasis on using the latest generation of massively parallel computing platforms. Computer simulation of molecular systems provides rich insights into chemical behavior at the molecular level. As computer algorithms and force field models continue to improve, it is possible to study larger systems and to gain useful insights regarding more and more physical and chemical properties. Using a combination of computer simulation techniques Klein is able to perform calculations on systems consisting of large numbers of molecules, such as polymer melts and polyatomic fluids, and to bridge regimes of vastly differing time scales. In this way he is able to study a number of important chemical and physical properties of interest in, for example, biophysical systems or the design of new materials doc20152 none Hansen The focus of the proposed research is to analyze controllability and stabilization properties of systems of partial differential equations (PDE s) that model layered elastic media. Specific layered elastic systems we are concerned with include constrained-layer damping models, laminated plates, plates with surface-mounted and or embedded actuators and general multilayer plate theory. For a given layered structure, generally there are many different PDE systems of varying complexity that could be used to model the vibrations. Often the various PDE s are connected through a perturbation, which may be singular. The central concern will be to determine the dependence of stability and controllability upon the perturbation parameters that connect the possible models. This way model dependence, accuracy, and robustness properties of control and feedback strategies can be tested. The plan is to apply this type of analysis to practical control applications such as optimal design for constrained-layer damping and the stabilization of elastic structures using surface-mounted and embedded piezoelectric actuators. Several theoretical challenges present themselves in attempting to develop control methods that are useful for multilayer plates. In particular, it is hoped to develop a theory of Carleman multipliers that is applicable to boundary control of layered systems. The objective is to obtain the sharpest possible results regarding boundary control. Understanding the modeling, control and stabilization of layered elastic systems is becoming increasingly important due to the rapid advances in material sciences, fabrication of composite materials, and speed of processing. The models considered are motivated by practical real-world applications involving composite layered structures. These include the design of ship hulls and airplane fuselage, sound-proofing in auto bodies and the design of sporting goods such as skis and tennis rackets. Often, it is possible to utilize a composite construction to achieve a far superior design compared to what is possible with a single material. Developing a theory for control and feedback of these structures is a challenging problem due the complicated nature of the coupling between the layers. On the other hand, for a model to be useful in practical engineering applications, various crude approximations need to be made to reduce the complexity. Thus, a large part of the goal is to quantify the connection between an accurate, but complex mathematical model and a simplified, but more useful engineering model. Specific problems of practical interest which will be addressed include: feedback control of vibrating structures using strategically placed actuators, optimal design and stability analysis for damping in layered and laminated composites doc20153 none EIA- Sharon Dawes SUNY Albany Modeling the Social and Technical Processes of Interorganizational Information Integration This grant will develop and test dynamic models of information integration in multi-organizational government settings. Three questions will be addressed: 1) What are the critical factors and processes involved in integrating information across levels and agencies in government? 2) How do the factors and processes vary for different types and degrees of integration? and 3) Can the process of integration be modeled in ways that improve understanding of information system development and of inter-organizational collaboration? Two policy areas in particular will be featured; law enforcement and environmental protection. Both areas include a full range of functions across Federal-State-Local levels of government and both areas have efforts underway to bridge those levels. The project will combine perspectives from organizational behavior, computer and information science, and political science, and will use system dynamics modeling and social processes modeling doc20154 none Under this award, numerical tools will be developed for the study of astrophysical systems involving relativistic gravity, strong electromagnetic fields, and rotation. These tools will include computer codes for evolving fluids and electromagnetic fields in a fixed gravitational field, codes for evolving the relativistic gravitational field itself, and a combined code that will evolve gravitational fields with both material and electromagnetic sources. Tools for verifying the accuracy of the integrations will also be developed. The codes will be optimized for use on the latest generation of supercomputers, publicly released, and made available within the scientific community. In the course of developing these codes, computational scientists will be trained at the undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels. The codes will also be applied by the developers to problems at the forefront of astrophysics and gravitation physics research. This work is motivated by a number of astrophysical systems, including: accreting black holes and neutron stars; coalescing binary neutron stars and black holes; rapidly rotating neutron stars formed in core-collapse supernovae; and collapsing supermassive stars. Taken together, these objects are the focus of a large fraction of current astrophysical research. They are the likely source of detectable gravitational waves, powerful X-ray emission, and gamma-ray bursts. So far, however, they have resisted understanding because the underlying physics of the fluid, the electromagnetic field, and the gravitational field is complicated, nonlinear, and time dependent. Only numerical integrations can unlock the fundamental physics of black hole accretion, test scenarios for the generation of gamma-ray bursts, and generate more accurate predictions for gravitational waveforms from coalescing compact binaries. The required numerical methods do not yet exist; they will be developed under this award doc20155 none Quantitative parameters for short-term (24-48 hours) forecasts of solar activity will be computed from high-resolution vector magnetographs obtained at the Big Bear and Huairou solar observatories. These parameters include the power-law index b of the longitudinal magnetic field structure functions (i.e., two-point correlation functions), and the cancellation exponent k of the electric-current helicity. Data from a four-station global Ha network will be used to identify solar flares for comparison analyses with changes in active region magnetic fields. Extrapolation of the observed photospheric magnetic fields will permit inferences of the field orientation in active region filaments, which in turn may be used to forecast filament eruptions and their geoeffectiveness doc20156 none The University Materials Council (UMC), an organization of department chairs of materials science and engineering programs, and the Federation of Materials Societies (FMS), a network of materials-related professional societies, are co-organizing a meeting on materials education entitled in Materials Education: Opportunities over a Lifetime. This meeting will involve a thorough interchange of beneficial ideas and practices in materials science and engineering education among concerned citizens, professional educators, and funders policy makers at three levels: grassroots, K-12, and college university. The goals are for all groups involved in materials education to learn about the possibilities for parallel activities and collaboration. Professional educators will become aware of the broad spectrum of potential sources of support. Funding organizations and policy makers will become acquainted with the needs, opportunities, and activities in materials education. This one and one-half day forum will take place at the University of Maryland- College Park on May 20-21, , with a registration fee that will cover all meals and will feature a presentation by a concerned member of Congress. The meeting is a continuation of the series of FMS Biennial Meetings. Outside sponsorship is requested in order to allow participation by a wide and varied group of individuals interested in materials education doc20157 none Prop #: PI: Thomas Smith This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessel Alpha Helix operated by the University of Alaska and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Thomas Smith is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire a replacement anchor chain, radar, Iridium Satellite Telephone system, and INMARSAT B Satellite communications system doc20158 none Richard Byrd and Robert Schnabel of U. Colorado, and Teresa Head-Gordon and Silvia Crivelli of UC-Berkeley are supported by the Chemistry Divsion through the Information Technology Research Initiative to develop a global optimization package for protein structure prediction. Their approach combines optimization research from numerical computation, energy-modeling research from computational biophysics, and parallel computation research from computer science. Key features of this research include a novel representation of the aqueous solvent, incorporation of secondary structure prediction, and energy-smoothing models to increase accuracy and efficiency. The prediction of the three-dimensional shape, or native state, of a protein given its sequence of amino acids is one of the fundamental challenges of modern science. Protein structure knowledge is fundamental in understanding protein function, and important to many biomedical and biomaterial applications. This research will result in advances in large-scale and parallel numerical computation, and models and prediction methods for computational biophysics doc20159 none This Interagency Argeement supports activities of the Interagency Arctic Research Policy Committee (IARPC) for which NSF has lead agency role. These activities include editing and preparation of the camera copy of the Spring and Fall issues of the Journal, Arctic Research of the United States. The Journal serves an essential step in fulfilling the requirements of Public Law 98-373, the Arctic Research and Policy Act. It contains information on research activities of the Federal agencies involved in the Arctic and reports and minutes of meetings from the Arctic Research Commission and IARPC. Under this agreement, CRREL also provides editorial support services for the U.S. Arctic Research Plan and the IARPC doc20160 none PI Dwarkadas Hot stars, more massive than about eight solar masses, tend to have strong, high-speed outflows of gaseous material, which can result in the formation of wind-blown nebulae around these stars and also can produce effects on the interstellar medium. Recent observations, which have explored the nature of these nebulae with unprecedented resolution, have revealed a variety of aspherical morphologies, with bipolarity being a common theme. Using the theory of radiatively driven winds and numerical simulations, the formation and evolution of these circumstellar nebulae, and the origins of the bipolar structure, will be investigated. These winds are modulated by physical processes such as stellar rotation, gravity darkening, bistability jumps, magnetic channeling of the outflow, and inhomogeneities in the stellar atmospheres. The effect of these processes, both individually and cumulatively, on the latitudinal variation of the winds, and thereby on the morphology of the surrounding nebulae, will be explored. Furthermore, the impact of this circumstellar medium on the subsequent evolution of the massive star as it ends its life in a supernova explosion will be investigated. The results will be compared to recent and archival data in the optical and X-ray regimes doc20161 none Paul Kantor Rutgers University Novel Modeling of Dynamic Brain Images for Indexing and Retrieval The proposed research will develop new techniques for representation, organization and retrieval of dynamic brain images. High resolution brain imaging facilities at two sites will conduct targeted experiments to develop image sequences supporting the research. Multiple techniques will be used to provide higher time resolution than the native fMRI format. Images will be archived with web access for the research team, and for other teams elsewhere around the world. The research will develop novel models of episodes of brain activity and effective schemes for indexing and retrieving those episodes. A practical research goal of the project is to support a new kind of Query by Example access to archives of space-time brain images, usable by clinicians and researchers for research and diagnosis. The project also contributes to clinical applications of cognitive science, to the advance of scientific knowledge, and to scientific education, at the undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate levels. The Rutgers-Princeton project is a collaboration among cognitive scientists, computer scientists and engineers, information scientists, applied mathematicians, statisticians, and cognitive neuroscientists, with guidance from an advisory committee of clinicians and radiologists. The algorithms developed will better approximate judgments that trained humans make when scanning an array of stored images for ones similar to a given image, that is, Query by Example . This project will help to make neuro-imaging analysis tools available to the clinical and industrial investigators who are best positioned to adapt new methods to applied domains doc20162 none This proposal is to host a workshop bringing together animal behavior and information technology experts to design an on-line computer database of behavioral information. The database might include, for example, videotaped images or audio-recordings of animals engaged in various types of behavior, measurements of the frequencies and contexts with which different sorts of behavior are produced, and useful techniques for collecting behavioral data from different species. It would also include software tools to link and extract information from existing databases, as well as to visualize and analyze the behavioral data effectively. The resulting database will help animal behavior researchers share their data with each other (n a search for general patterns), with researchers in other fields (e.g., genomics, neurobiology, ecology), and with the general public who are often fascinated by animal behavior. Funds will be used to host the workshop (travel expenses), to produce a prototype version of the database, and to share this prototype database with other behavioral researchers doc20163 none J. Tinsley Oden University of Texas, Austin ITR AP: A COMPILATION INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RELIABLE COMPUTER SIMULATIONS The research of this project will develop mathematical and computational processes for validation analogous to those used for verification and evaluate these processes by actual and computational experiments. At the core of the proposed integrated framework for verification and validation lies the concept of hierarchical modeling. Hierarchical modeling is a systematic coarsening of mathematical models from a base model which is known a priori to contain all of the information, which can be extracted from a given experiment to within quantifiable bounds. The goal is to determine, by introducing approximations into the base model, the computationally simplest model which contains the information content of the experiment. This process requires an ability to evaluate the error introduced by each approximation to the base model, a capability for capturing the semantic content of both models and experiments, a capability for comparing the information content of the experiments and simulations and a capability for implementing a family of computational systems implementing the sequence of models so that the conceptual process can be realized and evaluated doc20164 none Most studies of the behavior and biology of extinct primates rely upon the examination of the size and external features of fossil material. Often overlooked is the information that can be derived from the analysis of the microscopic structure of bone. The benefits of the latter approach, evidenced for example in the recent dinosaur literature, are particularly great where fossil materials are incomplete, as is usually the case. Despite this tremendous potential, studies of mammalian bone microstructure are rare. This project provides a much needed foundation regarding microstructural variability among the living primates. Four bone microstructural features are examined in the long bones from 10 living primate species, and several other relevant mammals. Each of these features - visible when thin cross-sections of bone are observed under a microscope - has been linked to bone strength in locomotion and or aspects of life-history (the schedule by which animals grow, reproduce, and die). The intent is first to observe and describe existing variation. But, more importantly, the study is designed to identify the factors that may be driving this microstructural variability (body size, locomotory patterns, etc.). Once the relationship between these factors and the microstructural features is elucidated, several fossil primates, selected for their relevance to the understanding of early primate evolution, will be examined. It is expect that the microstructural investigation will illuminate previously obscure aspects of the biology and behavior of these extinct animals. This research constitutes one of several ongoing projects in the Hard Tissue Research Unit at Hunter College, City University of New York. As a whole, the laboratory is generating a database of information with applications to anthropology and to the study of vertebrate skeletons in general. These data are additionally relevant to the clinically-oriented bone biology field; all bone is not like human bone, and an appreciation of the variability that exists provides the context within which human bone structure and function is understood. Finally, new methods developed in the course of the study will become available to the community of bone biologists and comparative morphologists at doc20165 none This individual investigator award will support a project with the objective of using microwave and optical measurements to study the changing character of both static and dynamic aspects of electromagnetic transport in the transition from diffusive propagation to localization. By using a wide variety of samples, measurement techniques, and methodologies, it is expected that a description of wave propagation will be developed that can deal effectively with the complexity of the Anderson localization transition, which is the touchstone of wave transport in disordered systems. A new statistical approach will be pursued, in which the statistics of transport in a single sample, rather than in an ensemble or random samples, will be studied. The statistical approaches that will be developed are expected to further our understanding of a full range of fundamental and applied problems including: electronic mesoscopic physics, lasing in random media, propagation in photonic band gap materials, liquid crystals, and structured thin films, multiantenna cellular communication, medical imaging, atmospheric communication and sensing. The success of this work will strengthen the nascent CUNY Photonic Center, established to strengthen the technological base of the New York City metropolitan area and to serve as a magnet for students and researchers from our immediate area and around the world. The graduate and undergraduate students involved in this research will receive world-class training in skills and ideas that will be of use to their future academic or technological careers. This individual investigator award will support a project with the objective of using microwave and optical measurements to chart the changing character of static and dynamic aspects of electromagnetic transport in the transition from diffusive propagation to strong trapping of radiation. By using a wide variety of samples, measurement techniques, and methodologies, it is expected that a description of wave propagation will be developed that can deal effectively with the complexity of wave transport in random media. The research will further our understanding of such fundamental issues as electronic conduction, lasing in disordered media, and wave propagation in photonic materials, liquid crystals, and fabricated thin films. In addition, the research will have an impact on applied problems including bandwidth enhancement for cellular communication, medical imaging, and atmospheric communication and sensing. The success of this work will strengthen the nascent CUNY Photonic Center, established to strengthen the technological base of the New York City metropolitan area and to serve as a magnet for students and researchers from our immediate area and around the world. The graduate and undergraduate students involved in this research will receive world-class training in skills and ideas that will be of use to academic or technological careers doc20166 none This exploratory research focuses on time sensitive data and field research related to devastating impacts of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York City, NY on September 11, . These devastating events offer a unique opportunity to understand the impacts of extreme events on passenger travel choice as well as some of the relationships between travel, job, and residence choice. Since some of these behavioral effects may be of a transient nature, the data are effectively perishable and requires rapid investigation. The research aims to investigate and model how this event and subsequent actions of firms and transportation providers impact travel decisions. The objectives of the proposed research are to assess the behavioral changes with respect to transportation that have taken place since the attacks and to begin to lay the foundation for studying the impacts of extreme events on travel behavior. The methodology entails modeling travel behavior using information gleaned from interviewing people in the areas affected by the WTC attack. The post-attack sample will be drawn from two different sources: (a) a subset of the Household Interview Surveys (HIS), which is a transportation survey conducted prior to the attack; and (b) volunteers from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (NYMTC), i.e., survivors at the WTC. These agencies were housed in the WTC. A control data set will be drawn from the population that was not directly affected by the WTC attack. The HIS administered prior to the attack will be used to estimate pre-attack behavioral models. The NYMTC is supplying backup copies of these data since the originals were destroyed in the attack. These data will be analyzed to provide information on the behavioral changes in transportation, job and residence choices. This research can enable transportation agencies, specifically transit agencies, to devise policies aimed at restoring the perception of safety. In this regard, the research will help to answer questions about the future of lower Manhattan. It would help planners better understand the impact of extreme events on travel choices doc20167 none The overall goal of this project is to develop general computational tools, and associated software, for assimilation of atmospheric chemical and optical measurements into chemical transport models (CTMs). These tools are to be developed so that users need not be experts in adjoint modeling and optimization theory. These developments will foster a deeper understanding of: (1) inaccuracies in CTMs; (2) sensitivities of CTMs input and parameter uncertainties; and (3) the comparison of model predictions and atmospheric measurements. These computational tools have the promise to move the field of atmospheric chemical modeling to the next plateau of understanding the extent to which model predictions encompass available measurements, an understanding that is currently hampered by the absence of systematic theory and general analysis tools. These techniques and analysis tools will be applied both to the interpretation of observational data and to forecasting activities. The research approach will entail: (1) Development of novel and efficient algorithms for 4-dimensional-Var data assimilation in CTMs; (2) Development of general software support tools to facilitate the construction of discrete adjoints to be used in any CTM; and (3) Application of these techniques to important applications including: (a) analysis of emission control strategies for Los Angeles; (b) the integration of measurements and models to produce a consistent optimal analysis data set for the ACE-Asia intensive field experiment; (c) the inverse analysis to produce a better estimate of emissions; and (d) the design of observation strategies to improve chemical forecasting capabilities. The objective of this project is the development and utilization of Information Technology Research (ITR) tools to integrate measurement and modeling analysis with the goal of providing an optimal analysis state of the atmosphere, that is an intimate and close integration of modeled and measured quantities. This improved estimate of the state better defines the spatial and temporal fields of key chemical components in relation to their sources and sinks. This information is critical in designing cost-effective emission control strategies for improved air quality, for the interpretation of observational data such as those obtained during intensive field campaigns, and to the execution of air-quality forecasting. The development of the tools to integrate measurements and models is also critical to the challenge of a full utilization of the vast amounts of satellite chemical data in the troposphere that are now becoming available, and which will become more prevalent in the coming years. In addition to these broader impacts in the fields of information technology, atmospheric chemistry, air quality, and global change, this project will provide opportunities for students and post-docs to participate in a highly interdisciplinary and collaborative activity doc20168 none In this project, a number of outstanding issues related to the OH HO2 chemistry in the upper stratosphere and lower mesophere will be investigated. Current understanding of the HOx chemistry in this region of the atmosphere is complicated because standard photochemical models or any modifications of them are unable to consistently account for the odd hydrogen abundance above and below the stratopause. This is due, in part, to uncertainties in the rate coefficients of the reactions that determine the OH HO2 ratio in the stratosphere and mesosphere, and or due to the lack of full understanding of the HOx chemistry. The key reactions that partition the OH HO2 abundance in the stratosphere and mesosphere whose rate coefficients have come under increased scrutiny in recent years will be investigated. Rate coefficients for the reaction between vibrationally excited H2 and O(3P) atoms which has recently been proposed as a novel source of OH in the mesosphere will be evaluated using explicit quantum mechanical calculations. Nonthermal energy distribution functions of O(3P) atoms in the mesosphere and their contributions to OH formation in O(3P)+H2 collisions will be determined. Further, quenching of vibrationally excited OH produced by the reaction between hydrogen atoms and ozone will be investigated doc20169 none is conceptually possible, yet unavailable in closed form. It circumvents the difficulty in obtaining and closing such macroscopic models, while computationally extracting precisely the information that would be obtained by a macroscopic model, had the model been available in closed form. This provides the link between ITR and a spectrum of application areas. Impact: The impact of the research will be on establishing a powerful and general link between state-of-the-art microscopic-level simulations and fast systems level analysis capabilities. Although the research focuses on specific problems in heterogeneous hard materials and complex fluids, the computational framework is applicable to a broad range of complex systems, including biological systems, their processing and function. Since it has the potential to revolutionize engineering systems-level analysis, it could have educational impact as well as furthering advances in microelectronics, bioinformatics and nanotechnology doc20170 none This project focuses on compiler-enabled power-aware architectures. Its purpose is to leverage static program information in smart ways, to reduce power and energy consumption in both embeddded and general-purpose architectures. We follow three key general ideas to achieve this goal: (1) we use static information to throttle processor resources, (2) we incorporate architectural features to directly support static compiler managed modes of operation, and (3) we leverage speculative static information in addition to the predictable static information to support (1) and (2). We have demonstrated, in a number of processor architectural domains, that our approach is feasible, and can be easily implemented, and that considerable energy savings, beyond what would be possible with circuit and architectural techniques alone, can be achieved. We estimate that our techniques if combined, can give an additional 30% or more energy savings compared to state-of-the-art low-power designs, while not significantly affecting performance doc20171 none As computer systems become increasingly ubiquitous, computer systems research and design has moved from being a highly performance-centric process to being one that juggles many design goals and metrics. Mobile and embedded computing systems must, in addition to providing sufficient performance, be rugged, reliable, power-efficient, and lightweight. Because of the extreme and multidimensional design constraints they face, they must also be attentive to the specific needs of application domains, so they can be designed to satisfy these needs while still meeting power budgets and weight limits. The Princeton ZebraNet Project is an inter-disciplinary effort with thrusts in both Biology and Computer Systems. On the computer systems side, ZebraNet is studying power-aware, position-aware computing communication systems. Namely, the ZebraNet project works to develop, evaluate, implement, and test systems that integrate computing, wireless communication, and non-volatile storage along with global positioning systems (GPS) and other sensors. On the biology side, the technology enables novel studies of animal migrations and inter-species interactions. From a computing standpoint, key research breakthroughs are required in protocol and system design in order to make the system power-efficient and reliable. From a biology standpoint, the system enables fundamentally new types of biological observations that allow us to: (i) understand long-range migrations in large mammals, (ii) observe inter-species interactions between carnivores (predators) and ungulates (prey), and (iii) track the behavior of extremely endangered species. As a computer systems research problem, ZebraNet is compelling because the needs of the biological researchers are stringent enough to require real breakthroughs in wireless protocols and in low-power computer systems design and computer systems power management. These breakthroughs can be leveraged into other (non-wildlife-oriented) fields of research; essentially ZebraNet is a power-aware wireless ad hoc sensor network, but with more serious bandwidth and computational needs than most prior sensor networks research problems. As a biology research problem, ZebraNet allows researchers to pose and to answer important long-standing questions about long-range migration, inter-species interactions, and nocturnal behavior. Major research activities span a broad range, including: Modeling long-range animal migrations Observing inter-species predator-prey interactions Analyzing the impact of human development on animal behavior Developing power-aware systems for position-aware computing Incorporating error resilience and domain-specific performance optimizations into lightweight wireless protocols Managing logged sensor data to minimize the number of required uploads from tracking nodes ZebraNet is engaging in a mix of theoretical research, prototyping, and field experimentation. The project is not solely about systems-building, but rather mixes theory with practical hands-on evaluations of the ZebraNet designs. Research is conducted both at Princeton University and at the Mpala Research Centre. Mpala is a biology field station in central Kenya that Princeton University administers along with the Kenya Wildlife Service, the National Museums of Kenya, the Mpala Wildlife Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution. Overall, ZebraNet represents a truly interdisciplinary effort bringing together research strengths from disparate fields over a challenging problem. The potential contribution of the project includes significant advances in computing technology as well as in our understanding of wildlife migrations. The three main researchers bring strengths in wildlife biology, power-aware computer systems, and wireless technology. The interplay between these disciplines fosters creative to the research problems in both arenas doc20172 none CareMedia provides automated video and sensor analysis for geriatric care. Through activity and environmental monitoring in a skilled nursing facility, a continuous, voluminous audio and video record is captured. Through work in information extraction, behavior analysis and synthesis, this record is transformed into an information asset whose efficient, secure presentation empowers geriatric care specialists with greater insights into problems, effectiveness of treatments, and determination of environmental and social influences. CareMedia allows the behavior of senile dementia patients to be more accurately interpreted through intelligent browsing tools and filtered audiovisual evidence, leading to treatment that reduces agitation while allowing awareness and responsiveness. The research begins with disruptive vocalization, a particular behavior noted across senile dementia assessment scales. The coverage is then broadened ambitiously to integrate sensor and visual data for behavioral analysis and summarization in support of OBRA regulations requiring behavior management strategies that are not just chemical restraints. This effort includes automatic techniques to recognize disruptive vocalizations, more complex behavioral occurrences such as falls or physical aggression, and circadian patterns of activity. This research builds on key Carnegie Mellon research efforts in digital video analysis, wearable mobile computers, computer-based vision systems, and information retrieval systems for multimedia metadata doc20173 none Our ability to capture human motion data has increased dramatically making possible human motion databases that can support creative and educational endeavors such as training of athletes, diagnosing and treating motion disorders, and preserving our cultural heritage. To have an impact, however, motion databases must be accessible to a wide audience, including children and adult users with little programming experience. During the time frame of this project, we will undertake an exploration of a performance-based interface for a human motion database. The interface will allow the user to act out the desired motion and will require comparing time sequence data from the performance, perhaps with missing or noisy entries, to time sequence data in the database. Retrieval techniques must compute the distance between a sample and arbitrary motion subsequences in the database, making brute force techniques prohibitively expensive, particularly for interactive performance. Algorithms for dimensionality reduction, feature transformations, and automatic segmentation will be implemented, distance functions will be compared both quantitatively and via user studies, and the performance of these algorithms with missing data will be assessed. The research will be evaluated with traditional database retrieval evaluation techniques and through observation and analysis of users of the interfaces doc20174 none As CMOS technology enters the nanometer-regime, one of the most fundamental challenges will result from the loss of predictability of design behavior due to both variations during manufacturing and interferences between components during normal operation. As features on the die continue to shrink, control of the physical parameters, such as the feature size of transistors, their doping levels, and oxide thickness, will become increasingly difficult to control, resulting in dramatic increased uncertainty in the electrical characteristics of individual devices. Also, the close proximity of devices to each other will give rise to significant interference from elements surrounding a device, due to inductive and capacitive coupling, and due to environmental factors, such as power supply and temperature fluctuations. The increase in the number of uncertainties, as well as their severity will result in a general loss of predictability in nanometer-CMOS design and will threaten the ability to produce robust designs. In this project, we are developing a statistical framework for analysis and optimization of system performance, power, and functional integrity, as well as their newly emerging trade-offs in nanometer design. In the presence of variations due to process fluctuations and environmental interferences, signals are inherently stochastic as are the basic measures of design quality, such as delay and power. The research is therefore investigating the development of stochastic models for performance metrics that capture their dependence on the various sources of uncertainty. The new design methodology will focus on robustness as a new measure of design quality, including delay, power consumption and measures of functional integrity, and will allow these design objectives to be constrained at prescribed levels of confidence. Furthermore, the research team is considering new methods for simultaneous optimization of performance, energy, and functional integrity that effectively exploit new trade-offs and interactions between these objectives in nanometer design doc20175 none Umashankar & Choi This is a planning visit grant for Drs. Ray Umashankar and Christopher Choi, in the College of Engineering at the University of Arizona, to travel to Namibia to meet with Professor Ibo Zimmerman and his colleagues in the Department of Natural Resources with the Polytechnic of Namibia, to explore the feasibility of developing a US-Namibia REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) Site in the area of Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) with Web-cam and CAD applications. CEA is the production of plants and their products within structures, such as greenhouses, that are engineered to control the environments of the plants. Structures are monitored by Web-cams and Web-based control systems. Student projects would focus on the mechanatronics and hydrophonics areas. This project is being jointly funded by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Engineering Education and Centers doc20176 none This award is made under the Information Technology Research initiative and is funded jointly by the Division of Materials Research and the Advanced Computational Infrastructure Research Division. This collaborative research project involves two materials scientists, a computer scientist, a mathematician, and two physicists from academia, industry and a national laboratory. The project is a synergistic effort that leverages the overlapping and complimentary expertise of the researchers in the areas of scalable parallel scientific computing, first-principles and atomistic calculations, computational thermodynamics, mesoscale microstructure evolution, and macroscopic mechanical property modeling. The main objective of the proposal is to develop a set of integrated computational tools to predict the relationships among the chemical, microstructural, and mechanical properties of multicomponent materials using technologically important aluminum-based alloys as model materials. A prototype GRID-enabled software will be developed for multicomponent materials design with efficient information exchange between design stages. Each design stage will incorporate effective algorithms and parallel computing schemes. Four computational components will be integrated, these are: (1) first-principles calculations to determine thermodynamic properties, lattice parameters, and kinetic data of unary, binary and ternary compounds; (2) CALPHAD data optimization computation to extract thermodynamic properties, lattice parameters, and kinetic data of multicomponent systems combining results from first-principles calculations and experimental data; (3) multicomponent phase-field modeling to produce microstructure; and (4) finite element analysis to obtain the mechanical response from the simulated microstructure. The research involves a parallel effort in information technology with two main components: (1) advanced discretization and parallel algorithms, and (2) a software architecture for distributed computing system. The first component includes: (a) a coupling of spectral and finite element approximations, (b) local adaptivity and multi-scale resolution, (c) high order stable semi-implicit in time schemes, (d) parallelization through domain decomposition, and (e) scalable sparse system solvers. The second component involves computational GRID-enabled software for the overall design process; this software architecture enables the use of geographically distributed high performance parallel computing resources to reduce application turnaround time while providing a flexible client-server interface that allows multiple design cycles to proceed. The research project will be integrated with education and training of graduate students in the broad area of computational science and engineering through the participation of students and the PIs in the High Performance Computing Graduate Minor offered through the Institute of High Performance Computing at The Pennsylvania State University. Existing programs at Penn State will be used to integrate undergraduates into the project. %%% This award is made under the Information Technology Research initiative and is funded jointly by the Division of Materials Research and the Advanced Computational Infrastructure Research Division. This collaborative research project involves two materials scientists, a computer scientist, a mathematician, and two physicists from academia, industry and a national laboratory. The project is a synergistic effort that leverages the overlapping and complimentary expertise of the researchers in the areas of scalable parallel scientific computing, first-principles and atomistic calculations, computational thermodynamics, mesoscale microstructure evolution, and macroscopic mechanical property modeling. The main objective of the proposal is to develop a set of integrated computational tools to predict the relationships among the chemical, microstructural and mechanical properties of multicomponent materials using technologically important aluminum-based alloys as model materials. Prototype GRID-enabled software will be developed for multicomponent materials design. Effective algorithms and parallel computing schemes will be incorporated into the design. The GRID-enabled software allows geographically distributed high performance parallel computing resources to be harnessed bringing greater computational power to bear on a given problem and enabling practical application of these computational tools. The prototype software, with improved predictive power in multicomponent materials design, may enable scientists to develop new materials with unique properties and to tailor existing materials for better performance. The research project will be integrated with education and training of graduate students in the broad area of computational science and engineering through the participation of students and the PIs in the High Performance Computing Graduate Minor offered through the Institute of High Performance Computing at The Pennsylvania State University. Existing programs at Penn State will be used to integrate undergraduates into the project doc20177 none This ITR proposal supports a focused and coordinated effort over five years directed toward creating a 32 qubit quantum processor using individually addressable neutral Rb atoms trapped by laser beams on a two-dimensional lattice. It builds on recent very promising, but experimentally undemonstrated, theoretical concepts about manipulating the quantum coupling between atoms using lasers and highly excited atomic states. The team will use a reconfigurable atomic lattice defined by the beams from holographic optical elements. With a site to site spacing of 7 microns each qubit is individually addressable. Qubits are represented by hyperfine ground state levels and arbitrary state vector rotations are performed using laser pulses. The conditional two-qubit interaction that is needed for a complete set of logical primitives is achieved by exciting to a high lying atomic Rydberg level. A novel aspect of the implementation of these concepts is the exploitation of the dipole-blockade to allow massively sub-Poissonian loading of the qubit sites. The project is a collaboration between the Physics and Computer Sciences departments at The University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Electrical Engineering department at The University of Colorado Boulder doc20178 none This individual investigator award will support a project to investigate the complex dynamics of glassy systems using scanning probe microscopy. In particular fluctuations on nanometer length scales of dielectric and visco-elastic properties as a function of frequency, time, position, electric field, and temperature in polymers and super-cooled liquids will be studied. The goals of the work are to probe individual cooperatively-rearranging-regions (CRR), to understand their structure, detailed dynamics, and their role in glassy phenomena. In addition, nonequilibrium fluctuations will be investigated in aging glassy materials. Theoretical work has predicted that the fluctuation-dissipation-relation will be violated in a model-dependent way in slowly relaxing systems such as glasses. The experiments will investigate the frequency, temperature, and aging-time dependences of these violations in super-cooled liquids and polymers, and thereby constrain theories of the glass transition and aging and advance our understanding of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. The graduate students involved in this research will be trained in skills that will enable them to pursue future careers in academe or the high-technology industries. In addition, through undergraduate-research-fellowships, cooperative-education, and experiential-education programs, undergraduates will participate in this research, gaining valuable nanoscience experience and preparing them to contribute to important nanotechnologies of the future. When studying the properties of a material by probing ultra-small regions (nearly as small as a molecule), it has been found that properties such as hardness, elasticity, or electrical conductivity can vary considerably from nano-region to nano-region or with time. As nanotechnology is developed over the next few years, these variations will be increasingly important to understand. Nano-properties are also key to a fundamental understanding of disordered materials. Materials such as glass, polymers (plastics), and some metal alloys are called disordered because their molecules are randomly arranged. This individual investigator award will support a project to use advanced scanning probe microscopy techniques to investigate nano-property variations in disordered materials. These studies will advance our understanding of this important but poorly understood class of materials. The graduate students involved in this research will be trained in skills that will enable them to pursue future careers in academe or the high-technology industries. In addition, through undergraduate-research-fellowships, cooperative-education, and experiential-education programs, undergraduates will participate in this research, gaining valuable nanoscience experience and preparing them to contribute to important nanotechnologies of the future doc20179 none , , TITLE: Collaborative Research: ITR: Acquiring Accurate Dynamic Field Data Using Lightweight Instrumentation Dynamic analyses, such as testing and profiling, play a key role in state-of-art approaches to software quality assurance (QA). With rare exception, these analyses are performed in-house, on developer platforms, using developer-provided input workloads. Shortcomings of this approach include that the results simply cannot be trusted to tell us how the software actually performs in the field. The project goal is to give developers unprecedented insight into the actual runtime behavior of their software, allowing developers (and ultimately the software itself) to change, optimize, and adapt the software based on highly accurate field data. Lightweight, collaborative dynamic analyses conducted around-the-world and around-the-clock form the new platform: (1) lightly instrument fielded software (i.e., each program copy performs a small part of the analysis) (2) collect the partial data from many instances of the software, fusing it to conduct the complete analysis, (3) change the running program instances based on the findings and (4) repeat the process. Seven critical research challenges form the core of the project: 1. Lightweight instrumentation--Develop instrumentation that is virtually transparent to individual users. 2. Compositional analysis techniques--Develop distributed analysis techniques that decompose traditional analyses into smaller steps, distribute the steps among multiple users, and then fuse each user s results into an accurate solution to the original problem. 3. Scalability--Develop storage and analysis techniques to deal with the high data volumes we expect to encounter. 4. Anomaly Detection--Define data-driven techniques to automatically identify anomalous behaviors of deployed software. 5. Privacy and Security--Incorporate privacy and security safeguards into our data collection and analysis approaches. 6. Dynamic updating mechanisms--Develop techniques to make runtime changes to the location and function of instrumentation, and to parts of the software itself. 7. Validate approach on industrial software doc20180 none A system called Aura will be designed, implemented, deployed and evaluated. Aura will exploit the abundance of computing resources made possible by Moore s Law to reduce demand on the scarcest resource, human attention. Aura is targeted for environments involving wireless communication, wearable or handheld computers, and smart spaces. The research spans every system level: hardware, operating system, applications and end users. Aura applies two broad concepts. First, is proactivity, or the ability of a layer to act in anticipation of requests by a higher layer. Second, is self-tuning: layers adapt by observing the demands and adjusting performance and resource usage to match. Both techniques contribute to lowering demand on human attention. These ideas will be evaluated through controlled experiments and live use by a small community. The metrics used in evalutation include both traditional computer systems metrics plus user-centric metrics. There are three major research thrusts. First, operating system and networking capabilities required by Aura-like systems are investigated. Second, how high-level user intent can be captured and exploited for proactivity is explored. Third, how contextual information can be used is examined. A unique aspect of the research is its tight integration with education since the Aura prototype will be used in graduate-level courses doc20181 none Although large parts of our brains are devoted to the processing of sound cues and sound plays an important role in the way we interface with the world, this rich channel has not been extensively exploited for displaying information. The mechanisms by which received sound waves are processed neurally to form objects with auditory properties in many perceptual dimensions, including three corresponding to the source location (range, azimuth, elevation) and three to qualities ascribed to the source (timbre, pitch and intensity), are beginning to be understood. There has been significant progress over the last decade in understanding the mechanisms by which acoustical cues arise and how the biological system performs transduction and neural processing to extract relevant features from sound, and in the way we perceive and organize objects in acoustical scenes. Our goal is to exploit this understanding, and uncover the scientific principles that govern the computerized rendering of artificial sound scenes containing multiple sound objects that are information and feature rich. We will test, use and extend this knowledge by creating auditory user interfaces for the visually impaired and the sighted. The work aims both at developing interfaces and answering fundamental questions such as: Is it possible to usefully map X to the auditory axes of a virtual auditory space? Here X could be an image (e.g., a face), a map, tabular data, uncertain data, or temporally varying data. Are there neural correlates that can guide natural mappings to acoustic cues? What limitations does our perception place on rendering hardware? How important is doc20182 none The establishment of unlicensed communication bands has successfully encouraged innovation, most recently in wireless devices and infrastructure that use unlicensed spectrum to provide connections to the Internet. A key aspect of Internet usage is an almost unlimited capacity for growth. For unlicensed wireless, the transition from 11 Mb s 802.11b to 54 Mb s 802.11a marks the start of an industry race toward ever-higher data rates. The combination of increasing data rates and a proliferation of devices could easily lead to inefficiency in the use of unlicensed spectrum due to a combination of overuse and failure to develop mechanisms for efficient sharing of this resource. While the overload of any finite band may be inevitable, this project is addressing the increase in capacity of the available unlicensed bands as much as possible, and is developing approaches that can predict overloads and prevent sudden, unexpected failure modes. This multi-disciplinary project seeks efficient use of unlicensed spectrum by combining an engineering and technology perspective with insights from the literatures on regulation, property rights, and economic coordination. The team includes researchers with expertise in property rights, networking fairness, and wireless communications and network engineering. This team is developing a general framework for understanding cooperation in unlicensed band wireless networks by studying the following issues: Property rights as applied to spectrum management Protocols for collaboration between technology neutral wireless devices Pricing mechanisms for efficient and fair sharing of congested unlicensed spectrum Radio-level interference avoidance techniques The above problems are being studied with a combination of formal and conceptual analysis, simulation and experimental methods, including a dynamic spectrum management testbed which implements potential collaboration protocols and cooperation models. The thrust is to preserve the creative chaos of the unlicensed bands while creating a degree of long term stability and predictability that is appropriate to the size of the investments being made and the strategic importance of these uses to the nation. Results from the project are of value to both policy makers and emerging unlicensed band wireless Internet providers as well as wireless technologists doc20183 none David A. Wood University of Tennessee ITR: SafetyNet: Synergist Support for Availability, Designability, Programmability, & Performance Information services, supported by remote server computers, are becoming part of society s essential infrastructure for commerce, science, education, and government. Many servers are shared-memory multiprocessors that multiply the 60-fold single-processor performance improvements of the last decade by an additional factor of two to 64. These incredible performance improvements are putting increasing pressure on sever designs to improve complementary computer properties, such as: Availability. Society needs information services that are as dependable as our electricity and fresh water supplies. Unless new architectural techniques are developed and applied, however, server availability will go down with time, since deep submicron transistors are less reliable (and more susceptible to radiation) and future servers will employ more transistors, offering more failure opportunities. Designability. Designability is the challenge of deploying a completely correct computer. Getting the bugs out of today s computer systems is expensive, in both manpower and time, and getting worse as the transistor bonanza enables more complex designs. Furthermore, unpredictable delays leave expensive manufacturing facilities underutilized and cost 5% performance per month (due to Moore s Law). Programability. Servers typically run multi-threaded software to turn their raw computing power into high-throughput information services. Unfortunately, hard-to-test races make writing such software a challenge that stresses current programming practices and leads to bugs in deployed software. Hardware that facilitates rapid development of robust software should be prized. Performance. Solutions that improve availability, designability, and programmability will more likely flourish if they have, at most, a modest impact on cost-performance. Better yet would be hardware that actually improves performance, in addition to the other properties doc20184 none This research involves the discovery and development of scalable algorithms for solving hard computational problems that routinely arise in engineering. In particular, the investigators observe that man-made artifacts have innate structures that make those artifacts tractable for design, synthesis, and verification independent of their absolute size. Artifacts such as the Internet, integrated circuit chips, and large distributed software systems, continue to increase in size at a breath-taking pace. Algorithms that deal with such artifacts (e.g., searching the Internet, synthesizing integrated circuits, or verifying the correctness of software systems) but which are oblivious to their inherent structure and regularity are unable to cope with their ever-increasing complexity. Scalable algorithms, on the other hand, recognize, and take advantage of, the structure and regularity of the objects they manipulate in order to bring computational complexity down. The study and development of scalable algorithms, thus, is essential for maintaining progress in our fast-changing technological world. Despite the fact that many of the computational tasks employed in designing, synthesizing, and verifying human-engineered objects are worst-case NP-hard, such objects continue to increase in complexity and are routinely made and deployed. Well-known examples range from aircraft crew scheduling to microprocessor verification and the routing of field-programmable gate arrays, yet the sheer complexity of problem instances often defies modern solution methods. Reuse of intellectual property does not always imply reductions of computational problem instances to smaller ones, and even when such reductions are applied they may lead to sub-optimality s. The ability to solve large instances of hard problems is critical to the design of leading-edge computer hardware, and instance size will increase rapidly with advances in silicon lithography (EUV, X-ray, electron beam, etc.), nano-manufacturing (molecular electronics) and integration complexity (system-on-a-chip). Therefore, empirical improvements in solving mainstream NP-complete problems are critical to sustained increase in sophistication of Information Technologies. This project aims at significantly extending the performance envelope of practical algorithms in order to handle very large hard problem instances through intelligent utilization of problem structure. The investigators are pursuing this goal through generic and fundamental results with applicability beyond currently popular worst-case bounds that are at variance with empirically observed performance doc20185 none ions to be presented to protocol programmers. Basic research in programming languages is needed to develop the primitives and formalisms that enable the expression of protocol properties and the verification of certain safety properties of the protocol. The proposed work will focus on the following specific areas: (1) Transport Services to support various degrees of reliability, congestion management, and timeliness, (2) Routing Services to support various degrees of mobility and multicasting, (3) End-to-End Services to support various degrees of QoS and security, (4) Naming mechanisms to support flexible composition of Internet services, and (5) Type inference to support efficient and safe flow-oriented programming. Towards the goals outlined above, the proposed research will be a collaborative effort carried primarily by members of established research groups in Networking Systems and in Programming Languages. A key component of the proposed work is implementation and prototyping. To that end, the utility of a paradigm in which Internet flows are first-class values will be demonstrated by implementing NetBench a programming environment in which a core set of network flow types and operations will be supported, along with a type-checking and type-inference system to handle types of network flows. The pursuit of the research goals outlined in this proposal is timely. Achieving these goals will leapfrog current piecemeal attempts aiming at supporting Internet growth. The researchers believe that the proposed effort will improve the flexibility, reliability, safety, and security of network software development environments, leading to economic efficiencies similar to the higher productivity of software developers arising from traditional programming language research. The research team assembled to pursue these ambitious goals has made significant, nationally-recognized contributions to research in Programming Languages and Internet Technologies and has an established record in software development and technology transfer. Boston University is committed to supporting this team through substantial financial and infrastructural commitments that complement and leverage the support sought from NSF doc20186 none PI Gies The majority of the most massive stars are born in close pairs that are destined to interact over their lifetime. The influence of a companion can dramatically alter the evolutionary paths of the stars: the mass donors can be stripped down to a fraction of their original size while the mass gainers can become rejuvenated as more massive and luminous stars. These altered stars will eventually explode as peculiar supernovae, and their remnants dominate the appearance of the high energy universe (as massive X-ray binaries containing neutron stars and black holes). Although the starting and end-points of binary evolution are understood the processes that forge the intermediate stages are still mysterious, and great uncertainties surround the issues of mass and angular momentum transfer and loss. This project will be an investigation of these processes at various stages in the evolutionary drama through spectroscopic studies of a number of key systems. The first part is a survey of two dozen targets for new binaries with hard to detect companions. The second section is an orbital analysis of the H a emission flux formed in the circumstellar gas in two currently interacting systems. The third part examines the link between mass transfer and the spin up of rapidly rotating stars, and includes a hunt for faint post-mass transfer companions of Be stars. The final component is a joint H a -X-ray study of mass transfer in massive X-ray binaries as documented in extensive H a spectroscopy obtained with the KPNO Coude Feed Telescope doc20187 none Albert Corbett Carnegie-Mellon University ITR: Collaborative Research: Putting a Face on Cognitive Tutors: Bringing Active Inquiry into Active Problem Solving Collaborative project with: Michelene Chi University of Pittsburgh This project builds on a growing body of research concerning effective learning and tutoring strategies. The project involves constructing and evaluating educational technology that emulates human tutors by integrating a state-of-the art educational technology called Cognitive Tutors with a innovative interactive questioning environment called Synthetic Interviews to produce an inactive learning environment that rivals the effectiveness of human tutors. Cognitive tutors are built around a cognitive model of problem solving knowledge and provide precisely the support students need to complete problems successfully. Used alone, cognitive tutors do not support the help-seeking and meta-cognitive skills that characterize active learners. By incorporating a novel interactive communication technology called Synthetic Interviews, an Active Learning Environment is offered that rivals the effectiveness of human tutors in supporting deep student learning. Synthetic Interviews allow learners to engage in active inquiry by providing the means for conversing in-depth with an individual. Synthetic Interviews permit knowledge capture in a new form providing utility similar to an expert system but a development effort approaching the simple video taping of a conversation. The Active Learning Environment serves as a research tool to examine both computational and pedagogical challenges and also as an educational environment in classrooms and homes. In particular, the domains of knowledge that are constructed around this learning environment are mathematics and biology courses. The project promises to make important contributions to cognitive science, computer science and educational practice including the following: 1) The analysis of student questions during synthetic interviews will contribute to basic cognitive models of the functional relationship between declarative conceptual knowledge and procedural problem solving knowledge, 2) This project will integrate cognitive models of student knowledge and tutorial dialogue structure. More generally, the project will help define a design and engineering process for intelligent learning environments, 3) The research will inform the design of more effective computer-based learning environments. 4) The research and the active learning environment can support improved professional development both for pre-service and in-service teachers. The Active Learning Environments for mathematics and biology that are developed in this project promise to directly improve educational practice nationally. Current generation cognitive mathematics tutors are already in use in about 2% of middle schools and high schools around the country. The demand for effective mathematics and science education continues to grow. States are increasing mathematics graduation requirements and instituting assessments that govern student graduation and school evaluations. If Active Learning Environments are more effective than current generation Cognitive Tutors, they promise to rapidly enter widespread classroom use doc20188 none The information age is built on software. Web browsers and servers, office productivity tools, anti-lock brake systems, cellular telephones, and online trading systems are all implemented in software. Most of that code is prepared for execution using a compiler. For four decades, compilers have applied a fixed sequence of transformations to the code. The fact that different transformations, applied in different orders, can produce different results has been known, but the techniques for picking effective transformation sequences have not. The computational power available with modern processors makes it possible to experimentally discover good transformation orders. This project will systematically explore the problems of choosing transformation sequences. This five-year program will develop practical techniques for building adaptive compilers - compilers that change their behavior in response to the input program and the end-user s stated goals for optimization. This will require experimentation, algorithm development, application of techniques from machine learning, and basic software engineering. This project will produce the tools, techniques, and insights needed to make adaptive compilation both practical and productive. The resulting compilers will give users greater control over the run-time characteristics of their programs and will reduce the performance variability that plagues compiled code today doc20189 none This project focuses on the physical layer of digital communication system design - in particular on the design of graph-based error control coding techniques for noisy, fading channels, such as those encountered in wireless communication systems. The research addresses those issues that have made practical implementation of graph-based coding techniques problematic. Those issues include: The development of LDPC and turbo codes with algebraic structure, suitable for high speed implementation. The development of LDPC and turbo codes with moderate block length, suitable for practical real-time applications. The design of bandwidth efficient coded modulation schemes incorporating these new code constructions in order to fatten the bit pipe in high data rate applications. The adaptation of these new coding schemes for use in the fading environment that characterizes wireless channels doc20190 none This project models and builds systems that augment human physical capabilities for performing skilled tasks. Areas of importance for human-machine physical collaboration include micro-manipulation such as microsurgery or microassembly, and remote operation (eg in outer space or under the ocean). It is also important to study such techniques in areas where great dexterity is required, such as medical palpation. These systems are also important for training the disabled and in various educational applcations. Human-machine collaborations of this sort, where a person and a robot are both holding the same knife or stick, differ from traditional interfaces in their richness of sensory inputs and the coupled computation and external physical reality. The inclusion of the human in the feedback loop makes these systems more complex than older robotics applications; human expectations and reactions must be modeled and provided for in the system. Depending on the application, vision, sound, and force-feedback may be involved; reaction times may vary; and the robot manipulator may be used to add stability, micro-scale capability, and or safety to the system doc20191 none The River Project provides an opportunity for high school students in Manhattan, New York, to become directly involved in the study of urban wildlife, habitats and water quality. Each year 50 students will participate in an internship for up to100 hours under the supervision of professional scientists and graduate students. Previous projects have included fish occurrence and distribution, inventory and monitoring, uptake route of pollutants in tomcod, water quality monitoring, etc. Students learn techniques for observation, recording, manipulating and analyzing data, species identification and field methods. Students are trained to use scientific instrumentation and laboratory equipment, including computers for data analysis and presentations. Participants are also trained to conduct interpretive tours of the Estuarium and interact with the public while describing the facility and research in which they are involved. At the conclusion of this three-year project, 150 students from Manhattan will have participated in this program doc20192 none Valuable information about the world around us is being lost. Every day we lose information of both current and historical significance, simply because it is too difficult to capture 3D models of our environment. Today, such models are primarily created by hand, making measurements with tape measures and entering the results manually. Even after models are constructed, we do not know the best ways to visualize them effectively. This research proposes to design and develop an end-to-end solution to the problem of documentation, dissemination, and display of real-world environments. To focus the research, two driving problems are targeted: forensic science and education. This research brings together an interdisciplinary team including the law enforcement community, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Additionally, one of our team members, from the New Orleans Museum of Art, is directing a major exhibition in which we propose to include a virtual environment of Monticello, President Jefferson s home. We will tackle the problems of acquiring, processing, representing, rendering and display of real- world data, focusing on the two target applications. Our goal is to design and build a complete end-to-end prototype system. The work includes: Acquisition. We will mount an accurate rangefinder on a motorized cart and tackle the problem of capturing as complete a model as possible. This requires accurate tracking and a solution to the next best view problem in a practical sense, including resolution, reflectance, and importance of the surfaces. Processing. A very difficult problem is the registration of color with depth data, and of scans from multiple locations. We will develop algorithms to robustly register the data, and filter to reduce outliers and noise. Representation. We will develop algorithms to process the massive amounts of data (100 MB per scan, tens of scans per room) into both efficient geometric and image-based representations. We will compare and contrast the representations in terms of quality and efficiency. Rendering. We will develop hierarchical and out-of-core algorithms to render the image- based and geometric models at interactive rates, and research perceptually driven rendering techniques to maximize rendering efficiency. Display. This is perhaps the most difficult part of the problem because it involves the way humans perceive the environment. We will develop a hybrid projector head-mounted-display system to provide stereo views to multiple viewers in a life-sized walking environment. The goal is to give the participants a sense of presence, of being in Mr. Jefferson s house doc20193 none David E. Evans University of Virginia ITR: A Framework for Environment-Aware, Massively Distributed Computing We propose to develop a programming language for swarms of devices that allows a programmer to express an application in terms of desired aggregate behavior rather than explicitly programming individual devices. We will produce a program synthesizer that automatically generates the appropriate device programs that will implement the aggregate behavior for a particular deployment. The program synthesizer draws from a library of primitives that can be combined to produce complex applications with known scaling and non-functional properties. In addition to analytical results, we will test our approach using simulations and using a physical swarm composed of wireless devices with sensors and actuators doc20194 none This award is made under the Information Technology Research initiative. The Division of Materials Research funds this award with cofunding from the Chemistry Division. A collaboration involving Georgia Tech, Clark Atlanta, and Cornell Universities will carry out a comprehensive investigation of the structural and electronic properties of one-dimensional nanowires. State-of-the-art atomistic simulation and electronic-structure methods will be used, including density functional theory, ab initio molecular dynamics simulations, quantum Monte Carlo methods, and many-body perturbation theory. These methods are complementary; each focuses on different aspects of nanowire quantum properties. The goal of the study is to understand the determining factors in growth processes and the effect of dimensionality and size on various physical properties, and to explore possible novel phenomena exhibited in these systems. This study of nanowires is enabled by information technology and impacts information technology in two ways. First new algorithms and parallelization schemes will be developed to properly handle the geometry of these systems and to increase computational efficiency. Second, the influence of theoretical and computational work on fundamental experimental research may provide the foundation for future information technologies. Educational and outreach activities will introduce young students, especially minority students in Atlanta, to forefront scientific research using information technology. Other activities include a special monthly seminar series on applications of information technology, a new course on computational approaches to scientific and engineering problems, and scientific workshops to train new users to use codes developed in the course of the research. %%% This award is made under the Information Technology Research initiative. The Division of Materials Research funds this award with cofunding from the Chemistry Division. A collaboration involving Georgia Tech, Clark Atlanta, and Cornell Universities will carry out a comprehensive investigation of physical properties and growth processes of one-dimensional nanowires. State-of-the-art computational condensed matter and materials physics methods will be used. The goal of this study is to understand the determining factors in the growth process and the effect of low dimensionality and size on various physical properties, and to explore possible novel phenomena exhibited in these systems. Nanowires are one-dimensional nanometer scale atomic structures. They can be at once, functional devices and the wires that access them. Controlled doping and assembly of freestanding single-crystal semiconductor nanowires has been achieved within the last few years. Prototype structures have already been constructed that function as nanoscale devices, such as light-emitting diodes, bipolar transistors, logic gates, photodetectors, and biological and chemical sensors. This study of nanowires is enabled by information technology and impacts information technology in two ways. First new algorithms and computational techniques will be developed. Second through information technology enabled or catalyzed fundamental scientific advances that may provide the foundation for future information technologies. Educational and outreach activities will introduce young students, especially minority students in Atlanta, to forefront scientific research using information technology. Other activities include a special monthly seminar series on applications of information technology, a new course on computational approaches to scientific and engineering problems, and scientific workshops to train new users to use codes developed in the course of the research doc20195 none The design, planning, control and management of high performance networks require a much more integrated approach than the conventional layered approach, where each layer is designed and optimized independently from the others. In this proposal the researchers propose to exploit inter-layer dependencies in network protocols for improved network performance. In particular, the researchers will focus on ad-hoc wireless networks, in which these interdependencies are more pronounced and in which the network will benefit significantly by crosslayer designs. The main focus is on the interaction between the physical layer, the MAC layer, and the routing transport layers. The researchers take into account the nature of the wireless medium by detailed modeling of the transmission parameters and of the detector structure and consider both TDMA(scheduled) and CDMAmedia-accesscontrol mechanisms. The researchers couple these with the flow and route assignment problems and, furthermore, consider how the transport protocol interacts with route selection and bandwidth allocation. In addition, the researchers address the role of network control and management in ad-hoc wireless networks and exploit its interaction with the aforementioned layers. Finally, the researchers consider the interaction of signal compression with rate and quality control and are mindful of the energy consumption repercussions of the joint protocol design doc20196 none This research pursues the development of a network of robots with cameras and their optimal, dynamic positioning for monitoring a cluttered scene, under different conditions of visibility. The robots must discover their neighbors, localize themselves with respect to their neighbors and integrate information with that available from the other members of the team on the fly. Further this information must allow a remotely located human operator to immerse herself in the environment. The project addresses the development of enabling algorithms and technology tailored to such applications as fire-fighting doc20197 none This project will develop a new, integrative theory of software problem management by studying software problems in their ongoing sociotechnical contexts. The researchers willcomparatively analyze large bodies (gigabytes) of longitudinalproblem-report data from open-source software development projects such as networked computer games, Internet Web infrastructure, X-ray astronomy deep space imaging, and academic software research, using grounded-theory and automated concept, data, and text-mining methods. The project will analyze instances of (mis-)alignment between software artifacts, problem episodes, problem-management activities, problem-management infrastructure, and underlying social organization. Explanatory models will be built by linking patterns of (mis-)alignment among these elements to outcomes such as ease-of-repair, persistence of problems, amount of information exchanged, kinds of skills needed, and structure of social organization. The resulting models can guide the development of new tools, infrastructures, and organizational practices for software. They will also provide new perspectives on community-wide practices of capturing and managing knowledge. This research will provide a conceptual shift in understanding how system development and use are bound together with the richness, variety, and temporal evolution of the socio-technical contexts provided by the global software industry doc20198 none The establishment of unlicensed communication bands has successfully encouraged innovation, most recently in wireless devices and infrastructure that use unlicensed spectrum to provide connections to the Internet. A key aspect of Internet usage is an almost unlimited capacity for growth. For unlicensed wireless, the transition from 11 Mb s 802.11b to 54 Mb s 802.11a marks the start of an industry race toward ever-higher data rates. The combination of increasing data rates and a proliferation of devices could easily lead to inefficiency in the use of unlicensed spectrum due to a combination of overuse and failure to develop mechanisms for efficient sharing of this resource. While the overload of any finite band may be inevitable, this project is addressing the increase in capacity of the available unlicensed bands as much as possible, and is developing approaches that can predict overloads and prevent sudden, unexpected failure modes. This multi-disciplinary project seeks efficient use of unlicensed spectrum by combining an engineering and technology perspective with insights from the literatures on regulation, property rights, and economic coordination. The team includes researchers with expertise in property rights, networking fairness, and wireless communications and network engineering. This team is developing a general framework for understanding cooperation in unlicensed band wireless networks by studying the following issues: Property rights as applied to spectrum management Protocols for collaboration between technology neutral wireless devices Pricing mechanisms for efficient and fair sharing of congested unlicensed spectrum Radio-level interference avoidance techniques The above problems are being studied with a combination of formal and conceptual analysis, simulation and experimental methods, including a dynamic spectrum management testbed which implements potential collaboration protocols and cooperation models. The thrust is to preserve the creative chaos of the unlicensed bands while creating a degree of long term stability and predictability that is appropriate to the size of the investments being made and the strategic importance of these uses to the nation. Results from the project are of value to both policy makers and emerging unlicensed band wireless Internet providers as well as wireless technologists doc20199 none Pnueli, Emerson, and Sistla , and Towards a Seamless Process for the Development of Embedded Systems Embedded systems are of vital economic importance and are literally becoming ubiquitous. They have already become an integral component of safety critical systems involving aviation, military, telecommunications, and process control applications. Interest in embedded systems is growing further due to the expectation that they will become a key component of many commonplace consumer appliances. Consumers will expect levels of reliability and predictability associated with the very best brands of cars, televisions, and refrigerators. Glitches, crashes, and general erratic behavior of the sort seen with prior generations of consumer PC software products will be unacceptable for these embedded applications. It thus becomes crucial that these embedded software systems satisfy high levels of correctness criteria, well above those of today s large software systems, which are often highly error-prone. Besides the requirement of a new standard of functional correctness, embedded systems pose additional challenges which were not fully addressed by previous validation and verification approaches. These include adequate guarantees of timeliness, low or controlled power consumption, and low or controlled memory utilization. With the spread of embedded systems, and the need to guarantee an acceptable level of functionality and reliability of the applications they are embedded in, the industry needs an effective and reliable development process. Due to market constraints, such a process should also support a fast turn-around time as well as enable the easy design of many customized variations of the same product. This project is developing the foundation for a seamless design process for embedded systems as described below. In particular, it is developing: A formal visual language for requirements, including behavioral, temporal, and TPM constraints; A methodology for the automatic synthesis of an executable specification from the requirement specification language; A methodology for the verification of the intermediate and distributed representation of the systems against requirements; A methododology for automatic code-distribution of specifications, possibly with some architectural constraints provided by the user; A model for representing hardware software co-design platforms that enables modeling of both loosely- and tightly-coupled components as well as compositional reasoning about them; Algorithms for automatically generating architecture-optimized code from executable specifications; Methods for translation validation of the generated code and run-time validation on the system using monitors; The Design of a profiler process which analyzes machine code, computes the resulting figures for time, power, and memory, and back-associate these figures with their executable specification sources, enabling early-stage analysis of these requirements. The impact of the project is to streamline and significantly accelerate the time to market of embedded applications of both new products and revisions and customizations of existing product lines. Another impact is to upgrade the level of dependability and predictability of embedded software to new standards, compatible and comparable to those expected from the best brands of consumer products doc20200 none Securing our nation s computing and networking infrastructure against damage due to malicious attacks or spontaneous faults is a problem of paramount importance. This project aims to contribute to this mission by developing novel techniques and tools based on model checking and program analysis for vulnerability analysis: the problem of identifying and monitoring weaknesses in computer systems that can be exploited to compromise system security. A major expected outcome of the project is a set of tools for determining the consistency and safety of computer system configurationss, such as those specified by firewall rules and domain type rules doc20201 none Screenscope, Inc. is producing three annual state of the environment reports. The reports will consist of a yearly, ninety-minute, prime-time public television program and an extensive outreach initiative to engage families and the public in a variety of educational activities. The television programs will: Present an up-to-date state of the environment assessment of ecosystem performance and human health. Feature the year s most important environmental incidents. Highlight the year s most cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs and research dealing with environmental issues. Focus on community programs that have helped improve the quality of the environment over the past year. The outreach initiative will include: A Citizen Science Project with strong emphasis on family participation Neighborhood workshops and coalitions organized by local PBS stations in association with the American Association for Advancement of Science and the World Resources Institute. An interactive web component including real-time environmental satellite data and visualizations. Local and national media events featuring the yearly release of a State of the Environment report. Partnerships will be developed with environmental organizations to help promote and implement the initiative s informal education activities. The project will be under the direction of Marilyn and Hal Weiner with the television programs being produced by their company, Screenscope. Anthony Janetos, Vice President and Chief of Programs at the World Resources Institute will have oversight responsibility for the science information presented in the Annual Report. Project advisors include: Bonnie Cohen, former Under Secretary of State for Management and Board member of CARE Chet Cooper, former Deputy Director, Emerging Technologies, Battelle Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Robert Fri, Senior Fellow Emeritus at Resources for the Future and former Director of the National Museum of Natural History Edward Frieman, Director Emeritus at of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Vice Chancellor of the University of California Nay Htun, Dean of the University of Peace and former Assistant Secretary-General, United Nations Development Programme. Thomas Lovejoy, Science Advisor to the World Bank and the UN Foundation Jessica Tuchman Mathews, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Per Pinstrup-Andersen, Director-General, International Food Policy Research Institute Maurice Strong, Chairman, Earth council and former Secretary-General of the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro There also will be science advisors for each of the individual episodes doc20202 none Paczynski The Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) has undergone a major upgrade from a x CCD camera (OGLE-II) to a mosaic x CCD camera (OGLE-III). The new system became operational in the summer , and it is expected to be fully streamlined, with a real time detection of microlensing events, by . The 1.3 meter OGLE telescope is located at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. With the OGLE-II, Dr. Paczynski and his colleagues were detecting about 170 microlensing events per year. With the OGLE-III and new software, they expect to detect up to 1,000 events per year. This high rate virtually guarantees a detection of Jupiter mass planets and stellar mass black holes. The same data will be searched for planetary transits. Almost all OGLE-II data ( - ) are now available on WWW and on DAT, in a highly compressed format: 1 Terra Byte of original CCD images has been reduced to less than 10 GB. The archive includes high signal-to-noise images of about 16 square degrees in the Galactic Bulge, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), and the photometry of about 30 million non-variable stars. The group expects to make the photometry of about one million variable stars detected by OGLE-III available on-line, first within 24 hours, and some time later within 10 minutes of taking CCD images. OGLE data will be used to study the structure of our Galaxy, the structure of the LMC and SMC, as well as to determine ever more accurate distance scale doc20169 none is conceptually possible, yet unavailable in closed form. It circumvents the difficulty in obtaining and closing such macroscopic models, while computationally extracting precisely the information that would be obtained by a macroscopic model, had the model been available in closed form. This provides the link between ITR and a spectrum of application areas. Impact: The impact of the research will be on establishing a powerful and general link between state-of-the-art microscopic-level simulations and fast systems level analysis capabilities. Although the research focuses on specific problems in heterogeneous hard materials and complex fluids, the computational framework is applicable to a broad range of complex systems, including biological systems, their processing and function. Since it has the potential to revolutionize engineering systems-level analysis, it could have educational impact as well as furthering advances in microelectronics, bioinformatics and nanotechnology doc20204 none Parallel machines with over a hundred thousand processors are now being built. NSF s widely accessible TeraScale facilities have already deployed a 3,000 processor machine. Algorithmic advances have made it possible to solve problems at a much faster rate. However, complexity of these algorithms and parallelizing them remain a hindrance to advances in scientific computing. This project will develop an object based methodology to simplify development of highly efficient parallel applications. A run-time system will be developed to automatically distribute the user s object based application among various processors. This novel system observes the running program to apply dynamically an intelligent suite of strategies to effect optimization. Parallel components can be plugged in and out of running computations and exchange data with each other in a flexible manner. The development of this infrastructure will provide a framework to allow easy building of particle-oriented parallel programs to be used to model galaxies, dark matter, stars, planets, and gas particles in computational astrophysics. The new framework will allow simulations to operate efficiently with billions of particles and tens of thousands of processors. These simulations will be able to make direct contact with satellite and ground-based astronomical data to obtain cosmological parameters with high precision and to study how planets form doc20205 none Harrold, Mary J GA Tech Res Corp - GIT TITLE: Collaborative Research: ITR: Acquiring Accurate Dynamic Field Data Using Lightweight Instrumentation Dynamic analyses, such as testing and profiling, play a key role in state-of-art approaches to software quality assurance (QA). With rare exception, these analyses are performed in-house, on developer platforms, using developer-provided input workloads. Shortcomings of this approach include that the results simply cannot be trusted to tell us how the software actually performs in the field. The project goal is to give developers unprecedented insight into the actual runtime behavior of their software, allowing developers (and ultimately the software itself) to change, optimize, and adapt the software based on highly accurate field data. Lightweight, collaborative dynamic analyses conducted around-the-world and around-the-clock form the new platform: (1) lightly instrument fielded software (i.e., each program copy performs a small part of the analysis) (2) collect the partial data from many instances of the software, fusing it to conduct the complete analysis, (3) change the running program instances based on the findings and (4) repeat the process. Seven critical research challenges form the core of the project: 1. Lightweight instrumentation--Develop instrumentation that is virtually transparent to individual users. 2. Compositional analysis techniques--Develop distributed analysis techniques that decompose traditional analyses into smaller steps, distribute the steps among multiple users, and then fuse each user s results into an accurate solution to the original problem. 3. Scalability--Develop storage and analysis techniques to deal with the high data volumes we expect to encounter. 4. Anomaly Detection--Define data-driven techniques to automatically identify anomalous behaviors of deployed software. 5. Privacy and Security--Incorporate privacy and security safeguards into our data collection and analysis approaches. 6. Dynamic updating mechanisms--Develop techniques to make runtime changes to the location and function of instrumentation, and to parts of the software itself. 7. Validate approach on industrial software doc20206 none The overall objective of this proposal is to study and implement provably information theoretic secure methods for encryption and derive applications to important security tasks such as message and user authentication and commitment protocols. The great interest in quantum cryptography demonstrates the need for absolutely secure encryption. The approach will use existing networks to transmit large streams of encrypted data. The proposed implementation can be widely deployed within the near future. Having a practical, provably secure against any attack, method for preserving secrecy of messages is of great importance for protection of personal privacy and commercial correspondence. In recent years a new paradigm for encryption, one that does not depend on as yet unproven computational intractability results, was proposed. The customary assumption that the would be code-breaker is computationally bounded,is replaced by an assumption that he is storage space bounded. The Sender and Receiver share a small private key and employ an unending intense stream of random bits readable by them and possibly by adversaries. The bandwidth and duration of the bit stream renders the permanent storage of a comparable number of bits by the adversary economically infeasible. Methods for generating and broadcasting or transmitting the bit stream, and the viability of the storage bound assumption, will be studied and implemented. In recent years, strong results concerning the information theoretic everlasting secrecy of a practical encryption algorithm (Hyper-Encryption) in the bounded storage model were proved. The project will comprise four interleaving lines of work. 1. System design: Satellite, web page, and fiber optics based systems for the distribution of the random bit streams will be specified and analyzed in consultation with experts in these technologies. 2. Protocols and applications: Innovation and development of Hyper-Encryption based protocols for e-commerce and network security. 3. Web page hopping based Hyper-Encryption: Detailed development of a complete Hyper-Encryption system employing random walk over pages of the World Wide Web as a pragmatic source of randomness and evaluation of its viability. 4. Theoretical foundations: Improving the Hyper-Encryption algorithm. Employing randomness extraction methods to enhance the safety of the WWW based system. Projected achievements: A usable detailed system for provably secure communications and protocols based on Hyper-Encryptions. Complete theoretical foundation for Hyper-Encryption and its applications doc20192 none Valuable information about the world around us is being lost. Every day we lose information of both current and historical significance, simply because it is too difficult to capture 3D models of our environment. Today, such models are primarily created by hand, making measurements with tape measures and entering the results manually. Even after models are constructed, we do not know the best ways to visualize them effectively. This research proposes to design and develop an end-to-end solution to the problem of documentation, dissemination, and display of real-world environments. To focus the research, two driving problems are targeted: forensic science and education. This research brings together an interdisciplinary team including the law enforcement community, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Additionally, one of our team members, from the New Orleans Museum of Art, is directing a major exhibition in which we propose to include a virtual environment of Monticello, President Jefferson s home. We will tackle the problems of acquiring, processing, representing, rendering and display of real- world data, focusing on the two target applications. Our goal is to design and build a complete end-to-end prototype system. The work includes: Acquisition. We will mount an accurate rangefinder on a motorized cart and tackle the problem of capturing as complete a model as possible. This requires accurate tracking and a solution to the next best view problem in a practical sense, including resolution, reflectance, and importance of the surfaces. Processing. A very difficult problem is the registration of color with depth data, and of scans from multiple locations. We will develop algorithms to robustly register the data, and filter to reduce outliers and noise. Representation. We will develop algorithms to process the massive amounts of data (100 MB per scan, tens of scans per room) into both efficient geometric and image-based representations. We will compare and contrast the representations in terms of quality and efficiency. Rendering. We will develop hierarchical and out-of-core algorithms to render the image- based and geometric models at interactive rates, and research perceptually driven rendering techniques to maximize rendering efficiency. Display. This is perhaps the most difficult part of the problem because it involves the way humans perceive the environment. We will develop a hybrid projector head-mounted-display system to provide stereo views to multiple viewers in a life-sized walking environment. The goal is to give the participants a sense of presence, of being in Mr. Jefferson s house doc20208 none PI Simon This is a program for measuring the masses of pre-main-sequence stars using millimeter wavelength interferometry. Accurate measurements of stellar masses are crucial data, and this work will provide answers to some fundamental astrophysical questions. In particular, it will provide observational constraints on two areas of astrophysical theory that are currently relatively poorly constrained: pre-main-sequence evolutionary tracks, and theories of binary star formation. The PI will also continue his program of the detection of faint secondary companions in single-lined spectroscopic binaries, both to measure the mass ratio distribution of binaries and to provide additional data to use for measuring masses when combined with resolved observations of binary star orbits doc20209 none , , , TITLE: Collaborative Research: ITR: Acquiring Accurate Dynamic Field Data Using Lightweight Instrumentation Dynamic analyses, such as testing and profiling, play a key role in state-of-art approaches to software quality assurance (QA). With rare exception, these analyses are performed in-house, on developer platforms, using developer-provided input workloads. Shortcomings of this approach include that the results simply cannot be rusted to tell us how the software actually performs in the field. The project goal is to give developers unprecedented insight into the actual runtime behavior of their software, allowing developers (and ultimately the software itself) to change, optimize, and adapt the software based on highly accurate field data. Lightweight, collaborative dynamic analyses conducted around-the-world and around-the-clock form the new platform: (1) lightly instrument fielded software (i.e., each program copy performs a small part of the analysis) (2) collect the partial data from many instances of the software, fusing it to conduct the complete analysis, (3) change the running program instances based on the findings and (4) repeat the process. Seven critical research challenges form the core of the project: 1. Lightweight instrumentation--Develop instrumentation that is virtually transparent to individual users. 2. Compositional analysis techniques--Develop distributed analysis techniques that decompose traditional analyses into smaller steps, distribute the steps among multiple users, and then fuse each user s results into an accurate solution to the original problem. 3. Scalability--Develop storage and analysis techniques to deal with the high data volumes we expect to encounter. 4. Anomaly Detection--Define data-driven techniques to automatically identify anomalous behaviors of deployed software. 5. Privacy and Security--Incorporate privacy and security safeguards into our data collection and analysis approaches. 6. Dynamic updating mechanisms--Develop techniques to make runtime changes to the location and function of instrumentation, and to parts of the software itself. 7. Validate approach on industrial software doc20198 none The establishment of unlicensed communication bands has successfully encouraged innovation, most recently in wireless devices and infrastructure that use unlicensed spectrum to provide connections to the Internet. A key aspect of Internet usage is an almost unlimited capacity for growth. For unlicensed wireless, the transition from 11 Mb s 802.11b to 54 Mb s 802.11a marks the start of an industry race toward ever-higher data rates. The combination of increasing data rates and a proliferation of devices could easily lead to inefficiency in the use of unlicensed spectrum due to a combination of overuse and failure to develop mechanisms for efficient sharing of this resource. While the overload of any finite band may be inevitable, this project is addressing the increase in capacity of the available unlicensed bands as much as possible, and is developing approaches that can predict overloads and prevent sudden, unexpected failure modes. This multi-disciplinary project seeks efficient use of unlicensed spectrum by combining an engineering and technology perspective with insights from the literatures on regulation, property rights, and economic coordination. The team includes researchers with expertise in property rights, networking fairness, and wireless communications and network engineering. This team is developing a general framework for understanding cooperation in unlicensed band wireless networks by studying the following issues: Property rights as applied to spectrum management Protocols for collaboration between technology neutral wireless devices Pricing mechanisms for efficient and fair sharing of congested unlicensed spectrum Radio-level interference avoidance techniques The above problems are being studied with a combination of formal and conceptual analysis, simulation and experimental methods, including a dynamic spectrum management testbed which implements potential collaboration protocols and cooperation models. The thrust is to preserve the creative chaos of the unlicensed bands while creating a degree of long term stability and predictability that is appropriate to the size of the investments being made and the strategic importance of these uses to the nation. Results from the project are of value to both policy makers and emerging unlicensed band wireless Internet providers as well as wireless technologists doc20211 none Today s global economy is characterized by changing market demands, short product lifecycles, and fine-grained customization. This context demands a capability to identify promising supply chain partners and adapt existing relationships in response to dynamic conditions. One major impediment is the multiplicity of considerations that bear on supply chain decisions. For example, a material supply contract might specify price, quantity, delivery time and mode, quality, warranty, and many other features. Most of today s auction systems support one-dimensional negotiations where price and quantity are the only features determined dynamically. This project aims to support negotiation over many attributes in dynamic, multilevel supply chains. To this end, it will develop flexible languages for expressing multiattribute offers, general two-sided matching mechanisms supporting both iterative and one-shot negotiation, and real-time decision support based on summarized assessments of production states. The new techniques will be validated using an agent-based supply chain simulation testbed, as well as analytical models. The resulting methods will enable a future where companies routinely form and adapt supply chain relationships for a broad range of productive activities. The systemic ability to respond dynamically to changing conditions can ultimately lower costs, while delivering greater value through increased customization and responsiveness to novel opportunities doc20212 none ITR: Beyond Polygons and Pixels: New Paradigms for Real-Time, Physically-Based Rendering The ultimate goal of this research proposal is to provide real-time, physically accurate synthetic images, delivering breakthrough realism at fully interactive rates. We will achieve this by combining new approaches for parallel graphics rendering with advanced, feature-level psychophysical models of human vision and new image representations. Currently, the two extremes of image synthesis are physically-based rendering, where accurate simulation of light reflection gives faithful predictions of the appearance of scenes, and real-time rendering, where crude approximations to accurate simulation are tolerated to provide dynamic imagery at interactive rates. High-quality, physically accurate images incorporating indirect lighting, inter-reflections between surfaces, and color bleeding can take hours or even days to compute on today s workstations, and incremental improvements to the speed of rendering will not be enough to bridge the gap. We estimate that real-time simulations of global illumination for complex scenes might require 10 7 times more processing power than we have on multi-processor workstations today. This can only be achieved by taking a radically different approach to how we generate, encode, and display synthetic images, an approach that separates computation by light reflection components and is based on advanced psychophysical models of human vision and new image representations. Low-cost, efficiently pipelined graphics accelerator boards have become extremely popular, but these architectures only process local illumination components, and thus cannot provide global illumination effects or guarantee physical accuracy. To address this shortcoming, we have developed new algorithms that exploit the speed of these accelerator boards for direct lighting while performing global illumination computations in parallel on clusters of off-the-shelf Intel microprocessors. We have reduced computation times from hours to minutes for complex environments, but for real-time image synthesis we need another four orders of magnitude speed-up. To reach this goal, we must develop more advanced models of human visual perception. Current perceptually-driven rendering methods are based on threshold models of human vision that predict the limits of our abilities to discriminate luminance contrasts, spatial patterns, motions, and colors, but provide no guidance for optimizing the order or precision of rendering operations. For our new perception oracles, we are developing higher-level visual models to monitor the importance of scene features such as shadows and reflections to perceived image quality. These new models will then drive the allocation of parallel computing resources as well as select appropriate algorithms to provide the steepest ascent solutions. New data structures for pictorial representation will incorporate illumination and contrast gradients as well as pixel-by-pixel intensities to ensure optimal display of physically accurate and perceptually indistinguishable solutions under all viewing conditions. These capabilities will extend the scientific, educational, and commercial application of graphical simulations into visually critical tasks where predictive reliability and speed are paramount doc20213 none This proposal describes SLAM, a scalable network architecture integrating millions of real-world sensors with actuators and distributed software applications. SLAM will enable a broad variety of novel monitoring and control applications including rapid disaster response, scalable crime detection and prevention, facilities maintenance, asset monitoring, and navigation. SLAM solves three problems: 1. Full exploitation of a sensor s data stream requires knowledge of contextual information, particularly location and time. 2. Fine-grained monitoring of millions of assets and facilities requires the physical deployment of sensors in the environment an intensive and cumbersome manual task. 3. Use of deployed sensors actuators by distributed software applications requires network infrastructure. The SLAM architecture has three main components that address these issues: 1. Cricket, a ubiquitous and precise location infrastructure. No current location-sensing technology works everywhere in all places and at all times. Cricket is a novel multi-sensor location architecture to solve this problem, using a combination of RF and ultrasound indoors and at building perimeters, and GPS outdoors. Cricket incorporates self-configuration algorithms and energy-efficient protocols for scalability and longevity. 2. An activated environment and efficient activation method. SLAM requires that the subject environment be activated with sensors and actuators. Without special attention, the activation process could become unmanageable due to the complexity of the environment. Therefore SLAM provides virtual location-based tagging, typically for immobile objects. The human installer affixes virtual tags to physical regions or objects by pointing at them with a Cricket-equipped handheld device, triggering an association of a unique identifier and the tagged entity s location and other attributes in a persistent store. This eases environment activation. 3. A scalable network infrastructure connects sensor information and events to software handlers. The network consists of fixed and mobile sensor proxies, physically co-located with the objects and events they monitor, to integrate location, identity, and temporal information to form an event stream. Sensors and their proxies communicate using sensor-specific low-energy communication protocols. Applications are written as event handlers distributed across the network. SLAM provides support for dynamically distributing handlers across proxies and compute servers, routing events to handlers, and performing query processing operations. The proposed SLAM architecture introduces three innovative ideas: ubiquitous, energy-efficient location infrastructure (drawing on ideas from beacon-based location systems, computational geometry, and wireless networking); virtual region and object tagging for environment activation and asset management (drawing on ideas from geometric modeling and database management systems); and distributed proxy-based event and response processing (drawing on ideas from networking and database systems). Starting with an existing environment (a building, campus, or town), the operational model to put SLAM in place is as follows. First, the location infrastructure is activated. Location beacons are placed in the environment, and a digital representation of the environment is constructed, enabling location inference anywhere within the environment. Second, the environment is activated. Sensors and virtual and physical tags are affixed to objects of interest within the environment (and environment representation). Third, the SLAM network is activated, connecting raw sensor data streams to sensor proxies. The proxies annotate sensor data streams with location and temporal information, and forward them to appropriate handlers via the event-processing network. Handlers produce further events, as well as actions and notifications to be forwarded to actuators or humans. As a challenging test case, we plan to deploy SLAM on a large university campus with millions of interesting entities. These include many sensors in offices, machine rooms, physical plant, and laboratories to monitor power, temperature, humidity, and pressure; smoke and fire detectors; burglar alarms and physical intrusion detection systems; motion detectors; monitors of leaks, floods, chemicals, and hazardous materials; large-scale theft- and crime-prevention apparatus, and navigation aids. The goal is to monitor the university s physical assets and improve the personal safety of over ten thousand individuals moving in and around thousands of offices, labs, and common spaces in hundreds of buildings. The target SLAM system will focus initially on three capabilities at MIT with a variety of interested partners: efficient facilities monitoring and maintenance (with MIT Physical Plant); scalable asset monitoring for inventory, crime prevention and detection (with the MIT Property Office, MIT Campus Police, and MIT Libraries); and navigation assistance, including both personal way-finding and pervasive active signage (with the MIT Schedules Office and the MIT Safety Office doc20214 none Proposal Numbers: and TITLE: ITR: Collaborative Research: Natural Language in the Development of High-Confidence Software PI: John Knight and Robyn Lutz Inadequate communication of domain knowledge in natural language (such as English textual descriptions) is a major source of requirements defects in high-confidence software. Such defects can threaten lives, property, and the dependability of critical infrastructures. This research develops innovative, multi-disciplinary techniques designed expressly to identify and cope with the properties of natural language that lead to these problems. It analyses the domain-knowledge communication problem from the perspective of current linguistic theory in order to generate models and techniques that reduce communication breakdowns between domain experts and software developers. On the basis of this analysis, techniques for the elicitation, recording, and propagation of domain knowledge in requirements activities will be designed. A set of tools will also be developed to support the practical use of these engineering techniques. Several case studies will be used to assess and refine the techniques and tools on actual, high-confidence software systems in the aviation and spacecraft application domains. The research effort is directed at the reduction of requirements defects through the application of techniques that take into account the linguistic difficulties particular to domain knowledge communication doc20215 none Joshi, Aravind University of Pennsylvania ITR: Mining the Bibliome -- Information Extraction from the Biomedical Literature The major goal is the development of qualitatively better methods for automatically extracting information from the biomedical literature, relying on recent research in high-accuracy parsing and shallow semantic analysis. The special focus will be on information relevant to drug development, in collaboration with researchers in the Knowledge Integration and Discovery Systems group at GlaxoSmithKline. This project will also address several database research problems, including methods for modeling complex, incomplete and changing information using semistructured data, and also ways to connect the text analysis process to an information integration environment that can deal with the wide variety of extant bioinformatic data models, formats, languages and interfaces. The engine of recent progress in language processing research has been linguistic data: text corpora, treebanks, lexicons, test corpora for information retrieval and information extraction, and so on. Much of this data has been created by Penn researchers and published by Penn s Linguistic Data Consortium. Hence, one of our major goals is to develop and publish new linguistic resources in three categories: a large corpus of biomedical text annotated with syntactic structures `Treebank and shallow semantic structures (proposition bank or `Propbank ; several large sets of biomedical abstracts and full-text articles annotated with entities and relations of interest to drug developers, such as enzyme inhibition by various compounds or genotype phenotype connections `Factbanks ; and broad-coverage lexicons and tools for the analysis of biomedical texts doc20216 none Computer networks have become more pervasive in scope and mission-critical to businesses, scientific endeavors and other computing applications. But at the same time, network instability and unreliability has become an increasing problem. This research tackles this issue by laying the groundwork for a new system infrastructure and an associated generation of algorithms capable of overcoming the unreliable nature of the network using probabilistic techniques for ensuring consistent cooperative behavior, coordination, and coherency. The central property of the infrastructure is that it uses probabilistic techniques (instead of absolute guarantees) but, by so doing, obtains outstanding stability under stress, scalability, and robustness to even extreme disruptions. This research will proceed in steps, starting with a quantitative study of existing distributed system architectures, especially focusing on (1) gossip-style data dissemination, (2) anonymous communication, and (3) peer-to-peer networks. The next step will explore the design of new and enhanced architectures for large-scale distributed analysis systems. It is the ultimate goal to implement new designs in ways compatible with prevailing platforms (Windows, Java, Unix), and release public-domain versions of these experimental solutions, and to measure their behavior on a large scale doc20217 none Joshi. Aravind K University of Pennsylvania ITR: Language, Learning, and Modeling Biological Sequences Recent significant advances in natural language processing such as the integration of grammatical and probabilistic machine-learning techniques have not been exploited for modeling biological sequences. These new techniques are highly relevant to the biological domain because they support the integration of sequence features at several scales, from dependencies between successive items through dependencies involving complex structures to overall sequence statistics. Hence, the major goals to be pursued are: (1) Development of new techniques for integrating grammatical and probabilistic information, in particular, integration and evaluation of grammatical, probabilistic, and approximate counting methods for fold prediction in secondary and tertiary structures of biomolecules. (2) Development and evaluation of probabilistic exponential models for gene finding, in particular genes for apicoplast-targeted proteins in eukaryotic human pathogens of the phylum `Apicomplexa . This research is highly interdisciplinary, involving the disciplines of computer science, biology and linguistics. It will have a significant impact on the modeling of biological sequences. It will also provide a wonderful opportunity to train new researchers to carry out this interdisciplinary research, thus contributing to science and mathematical education and human resource development. The proposed research arose out of many discussions that took place at a landmark workshop on `Language Modeling of Biological Data held at the University of Pennsylvania in February doc20218 none This project is a multidisciplinary, international collaborative research project aimed at developing a fully automated robotic system for on demand and batch scanning of print materials and an open-source software framework that will begin with a printed work and end with digital images, text and musical content suitable for digital libraries doc20219 none Inderjeet Mani Georgetown University ITR: Constructing Protein Ontologies Using Text Mining Given the vast amounts of genomic and molecular data being generated by scientific research, there is a pressing need to develop advanced bioinformatics infrastructures for biological knowledge management. An ontology is a semantic model that contains a shared vocabulary and classification of concepts in a domain. Ontologies for biology are crucial in data integration from multiple databases and in literature mining for knowledge extraction and evidence attribution. This project focuses on the development of an ontology of protein names, consisting of a data dictionary and links to more specific, more general and synonymous protein names. Ontology development, however, currently requires substantial human effort. This project will exploit statistical and computational linguistics methods to induce an ontology of protein names using text corpora from MEDLINE and a knowledge base developed at the Protein Information Resource (PIR); terms in the induced ontology will also be linked to the functional hierarchy of the Gene Ontology. The induced ontology can then be further edited by a human. This project aims at demonstrating that this domain-independent method of ontology induction is more cost-effective than having humans develop an ontology from scratch. The approach could therefore be of practical value in other domains where there is a need to develop ontologies linking text corpora and nomenclature in databases. Both the ontology and software system developed in this project will be freely distributed to the scientific community via the PIR web site in standard XML-based ontology interchange formats and for intelligent literature mining and PubMed searching doc20220 none Conventional computer architecture has been based on and dominated by the capacity poor systems we were forced to build 20 and 50 years ago. For over three decades, the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) has formed the basic architectural abstraction for scalability. As wonderful as the ISA abstraction has been, its range of utility is coming to an end. Our systems have grown orders of magnitude in size and speed, and many of the simplifying assumptions which underly the ISA are limiting forward scalability rather than enabling them. This effort explores a reformulation of our basic assumptions and machine abstractions to accommodate the large capacity computing systems we can now build. Whereas the sequence of primitive instructions was the core fixed point in ISA model, this effort proposes stream-connected graphs as the model fixed point for these Decentralized Streaming Architectures (DSA). This way communication is abstracted directly in the architecture facilitating parallelism and optimization for physical locality. DSA will give us a single, unifying system model for future computing systems which scales from modest, single-chip, single-processor systems, to multiprocessor ICs, to a wide range of heterogeneous System-on-a-Chip designs, to large-scale, heterogeneous, multi-component systems that evolve over decade long lifecycles doc20221 none The problems of 3D shape representation, analysis, manipulation, and estimation from unstructured sensor data are central not only to computer vision, but are also of key significance to geometric modeling, computer graphics, computational geometry, medical imaging, surveillance, among others. The goal of this proposal is to investigate approaches to these problems in the context of tackling certain key problems in archaeology. This area of application offers the following three distinct advantages: (i) it is a rich source of free-form shapes, e.g., pottery sherds, marble plates and reliefs, sculpture, column capitals, building facades, etc., which are easily accessible, in contrast to 3D free-form shapes obtained from medical images which require expert segmentation; this data is also richer and more variable than data available in a typical manufacturing environ-ment; (ii) the problems are of a generic nature and the proposed approaches can be applied to a variety of other domains; (iii) this application area forms a key bridge between the Physical Sciences and the Humanities doc20199 none Pnueli, Emerson, and Sistla , and Towards a Seamless Process for the Development of Embedded Systems Embedded systems are of vital economic importance and are literally becoming ubiquitous. They have already become an integral component of safety critical systems involving aviation, military, telecommunications, and process control applications. Interest in embedded systems is growing further due to the expectation that they will become a key component of many commonplace consumer appliances. Consumers will expect levels of reliability and predictability associated with the very best brands of cars, televisions, and refrigerators. Glitches, crashes, and general erratic behavior of the sort seen with prior generations of consumer PC software products will be unacceptable for these embedded applications. It thus becomes crucial that these embedded software systems satisfy high levels of correctness criteria, well above those of today s large software systems, which are often highly error-prone. Besides the requirement of a new standard of functional correctness, embedded systems pose additional challenges which were not fully addressed by previous validation and verification approaches. These include adequate guarantees of timeliness, low or controlled power consumption, and low or controlled memory utilization. With the spread of embedded systems, and the need to guarantee an acceptable level of functionality and reliability of the applications they are embedded in, the industry needs an effective and reliable development process. Due to market constraints, such a process should also support a fast turn-around time as well as enable the easy design of many customized variations of the same product. This project is developing the foundation for a seamless design process for embedded systems as described below. In particular, it is developing: A formal visual language for requirements, including behavioral, temporal, and TPM constraints; A methodology for the automatic synthesis of an executable specification from the requirement specification language; A methodology for the verification of the intermediate and distributed representation of the systems against requirements; A methododology for automatic code-distribution of specifications, possibly with some architectural constraints provided by the user; A model for representing hardware software co-design platforms that enables modeling of both loosely- and tightly-coupled components as well as compositional reasoning about them; Algorithms for automatically generating architecture-optimized code from executable specifications; Methods for translation validation of the generated code and run-time validation on the system using monitors; The Design of a profiler process which analyzes machine code, computes the resulting figures for time, power, and memory, and back-associate these figures with their executable specification sources, enabling early-stage analysis of these requirements. The impact of the project is to streamline and significantly accelerate the time to market of embedded applications of both new products and revisions and customizations of existing product lines. Another impact is to upgrade the level of dependability and predictability of embedded software to new standards, compatible and comparable to those expected from the best brands of consumer products doc20169 none is conceptually possible, yet unavailable in closed form. It circumvents the difficulty in obtaining and closing such macroscopic models, while computationally extracting precisely the information that would be obtained by a macroscopic model, had the model been available in closed form. This provides the link between ITR and a spectrum of application areas. Impact: The impact of the research will be on establishing a powerful and general link between state-of-the-art microscopic-level simulations and fast systems level analysis capabilities. Although the research focuses on specific problems in heterogeneous hard materials and complex fluids, the computational framework is applicable to a broad range of complex systems, including biological systems, their processing and function. Since it has the potential to revolutionize engineering systems-level analysis, it could have educational impact as well as furthering advances in microelectronics, bioinformatics and nanotechnology doc20224 none This project aims to develop a framework and tools for defining, describing and supporting the publication and dissemination requirements of community digital libraries. It also expects to package the tools and software to create a general solution for implementation and deployment of resources for diverse communities. The promise in the approach is that publishing and dissemination will become more sustainable and effective by moving responsibilities to the author. Four test deployments will be done involving the US Geological Survey, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Open Language Archives community and selected computer science departments already involved with NCSTRL-OAI. Monitoring usage will be a part of the overall effort doc20225 none Andresen This project is building sensor net infrastructure to support intelligent, mobile medical monitoring devices that continuously assess state of health in concentrated and distributed cattle herds. Research is conducted to develop and integrate the following areas of information technology: - Receiver systems that manage wireless traffic and prioritize overlapping signal streams. - Scheduling algorithms that adaptively determine where data analysis should occur and which areas require more in-depth analysis. - Algorithms that search for data patterns that may indicate problems. - Security mechanisms that maintain confidentiality of economic data and herd health information associated with individual farms, while providing epidemiological data of statistical validity. - Low cost system components (affordable by farmers and producers who may have tenuous financial stability). - Robust packaging and linking technology for biomedical sensors, GPS receivers, and Bluetooth-enabled devices for survival in difficult environments. The experimental component of the project uses durable, small sensors (e.g., to report animal identity, position, temperature, blood pressure, and other physiological data), with Bluetooth-compliant monitoring stations near cattle congregation points, such as feed bunks and watering troughs. These stations upload data from nearby environmental sensors, Bluetooth-enabled devices with global positioning capability that are worn by the animals, and wearable remote biomedical sensors. These results are integrated with previous sensor data, weather reports, weather forecasts, infrared camera images, and prior health assessments. The project is developing initial algorithms to perform rapid analysis on local data prior to uploading summary data for the ranch to regional databases so that these data can be correlated with data provided by other producers. Significant findings can then be immediately broadcast to appropriate medical personnel and producers. Monitoring systems will improve the ability of the animal sciences industry to react to and predict disease onset and its epidemiological spread (e.g., mad cow disease, hoof and mouth disease), whether from natural or terrorist events. Trend analysis, information storage, and health prediction lessons learned from this effort will have immediate application to distributed medical systems targeted at assessing and predicting human state of health and the spread of disease in human populations. These networked embedded sensor systems have implications for homeland security, veterinary medicine, the agriculture industry, and in the long term, human medicine and quality of life doc20226 none This research project will examine the technologies and models required to enable rapid response electronic markets for time-sensitive goods. The research will be carried out by a multidisciplinary team from Management Science, Economics and Computer Science at the University of Maryland, and will include collaborators from industry: Avendra, GE Global Exchange and IBM. Time sensitive goods have an associated time attribute. Examples include aircraft landing time slots, tickets to entertainment events, and hotel rooms on a particular day. The project methodology includes (1) empirical analysis of electronic markets to understand the current state-of-art of models and technology, (2) design of market structures and mechanisms, (3) design of data delivery systems, (4) design of market software agents, and (5) implementation of project results. Before time-sensitive goods can be extensively traded in eMarketplaces, new market mechanisms (with extensions of economic theory), and rapid response IT technologies (with associated efficient optimization algorithms) are needed to handle these goods in an online environment, and to enable market agents (buyers and sellers) to reach equilibrium quickly. Integrating time-sensitive goods in disparate electronic marketplaces will require new advances in the design of data delivery systems, and will require significant changes in the fundamental propositions governing online agent behavior doc20227 none Over the past decade, tremendous strides have been made in increasing the transmission capacity of fiber optic communications systems. One technique that has enabled this increase involves transmitting multiple streams of data simultaneously down a single fiber line in a process known at wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). In order for this technique to work, interaction between the different data streams must be minimized. Another important development has been the appearance of all optical devices, system components that exploit parametric processes in optical fiber to perform data manipulation at faster rates than more tradition opto-electronic components. In contrast to WDM systems, these devices depend on strong interaction between different frequency components in order to function. Proposed is a consideration of the problem of interchannel interaction (the interaction of data streams centered at different frequencies) in the two limits suggested by WDM systems (weak interaction) and all optical devices (strong interaction). To meet this goal, asymptotics, multiple scale and soliton perturbation theory, variational methods, and symmetry reduction techniques will be used to obtain reduced equations for the dynamics of optical pulses in the relevant limit. These equations will be studied analytically and numerically in order to identify the parameter regimes that support stable and efficient system operation. Numerical simulations will be used at each stage of the analysis to compare results with experimental data. This University-Industry Cooperative Research (U-ICR)Program project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc20228 none PI Stein There has been significant progress in recent years in our understanding of the physics of the Sun. In particular the structure of the sun is being revealed from detailed observations of the solar surface layers and their motions. In a sense the Sun is a giant echo chamber and careful analysis of all the solar resonant modes and wave propagation properties tells us what the interior is like. In this research realistic numerical simulations of the interaction between convection in the outer solar layers, magnetic fields, and the acoustic oscillations will be carried out to aid our understanding of the solar interior. The project will extend our knowledge by studying small scale magnetic fields produced locally and their role in the formation of supergranulation at the solar surface. The results will be applied to present solar observations and will provide guidance to the design of the next generation of high spatial and temporal resolution solar telescopes doc20229 none EIA- Peter Shane Carnegie Mellon U. ITR: Developing and Testing A High Telepresence Virtual Agora For Broad Citizen Participation: A Multi-Trait, Multi-Method Investigation This grant will support research related to citizen learning and participation in communities and government using Internet-based information technologies and tools. This is a multidisciplinary proposal with participants from Public Policy and Management, Philosophy, Political Science, Social Psychology and Computer Science. A variety of free software will be developed to foster collaborative information sharing, structured discussions and community decision-making through shared data, chat sessions, video conferencing and other information modes. The software is not an end in itself, but rather will serve to support research by the PIs addressing some of the well-known problems of computer-mediated communications, such as poor transmission of social cues, usability, accountability, and access inequalities. These problems will be studied within two larger contexts, Community Effects and Decisions Quality Effects, and two levels of physical community, on-campus, and off-campus (but still within the Pittsburgh local community). The software will be robustly built and intended for broad use beyond the project itself doc20187 none Albert Corbett Carnegie-Mellon University ITR: Collaborative Research: Putting a Face on Cognitive Tutors: Bringing Active Inquiry into Active Problem Solving Collaborative project with: Michelene Chi University of Pittsburgh This project builds on a growing body of research concerning effective learning and tutoring strategies. The project involves constructing and evaluating educational technology that emulates human tutors by integrating a state-of-the art educational technology called Cognitive Tutors with a innovative interactive questioning environment called Synthetic Interviews to produce an inactive learning environment that rivals the effectiveness of human tutors. Cognitive tutors are built around a cognitive model of problem solving knowledge and provide precisely the support students need to complete problems successfully. Used alone, cognitive tutors do not support the help-seeking and meta-cognitive skills that characterize active learners. By incorporating a novel interactive communication technology called Synthetic Interviews, an Active Learning Environment is offered that rivals the effectiveness of human tutors in supporting deep student learning. Synthetic Interviews allow learners to engage in active inquiry by providing the means for conversing in-depth with an individual. Synthetic Interviews permit knowledge capture in a new form providing utility similar to an expert system but a development effort approaching the simple video taping of a conversation. The Active Learning Environment serves as a research tool to examine both computational and pedagogical challenges and also as an educational environment in classrooms and homes. In particular, the domains of knowledge that are constructed around this learning environment are mathematics and biology courses. The project promises to make important contributions to cognitive science, computer science and educational practice including the following: 1) The analysis of student questions during synthetic interviews will contribute to basic cognitive models of the functional relationship between declarative conceptual knowledge and procedural problem solving knowledge, 2) This project will integrate cognitive models of student knowledge and tutorial dialogue structure. More generally, the project will help define a design and engineering process for intelligent learning environments, 3) The research will inform the design of more effective computer-based learning environments. 4) The research and the active learning environment can support improved professional development both for pre-service and in-service teachers. The Active Learning Environments for mathematics and biology that are developed in this project promise to directly improve educational practice nationally. Current generation cognitive mathematics tutors are already in use in about 2% of middle schools and high schools around the country. The demand for effective mathematics and science education continues to grow. States are increasing mathematics graduation requirements and instituting assessments that govern student graduation and school evaluations. If Active Learning Environments are more effective than current generation Cognitive Tutors, they promise to rapidly enter widespread classroom use doc20231 none We propose to develop a comprehensive framework for the joint analysis of audio-visual signals obtained from spatially distributed microphones and cameras. We desire solutions to the audio-visual sensing problem that will scale to an arbitrary number of cameras and microphones and can address challenging environments in which there are multiple speech and nonspeech sound sources and multiple moving people and objects. Recently it has become relatively inexpensive to deploy tens or even hundreds of cameras and microphones in an environment. Many applications could benefit from ability to sense in both modalities. There are two levels at which joint audio-visual analysis can take place. At the signal level, the challenge is to develop representations that capture the rich dependency structure in the joint signal and deal success-fully issues such as variable sampling rates and varying temporal delays between cues. At the spatial level the challenge is to compensate for the distortions introduced by the sensor location and pool information across sensors to recover 3-D information about the spatial environment. For many applications, it is highly desirable if the solution method is self-calibrating, and does not require an extensive manual calibration process every time a new sensor is added or an old sensor is moved or replaced. Removing the burden of manual calibration also makes it possible to exploit ad hoc sensor networks which could arise, for example, from wearable microphones and cameras. We propose to address the following four research topics: 1. Representations and learning methods for signal level fusion. 2. Volumetric techniques for fusing spatially distributed audio-visual data. 3. Self-calibration of distributed microphone-camera systems 4. Applications of audio-visual sensing. For example, this proposal includes considerable work on lip and facial analysis to improve voice communications doc20232 none The origin of eukaryotes, organisms with distinct subcellular structures isolated by membranes, is a significant discussion in evolutionary biology. If Bacteria and Archaea are prokaryotic domains of life, then a core of eukaryotic signature proteins, having no detectable homology to known prokaryotic proteins should exist. Using both sequence-and sequence structure based methods, this proposal will examine the phylogenetic origins of eukaryotic proteins. From initial students a preliminary candidate list of proteins has been assembled. Confirming or denying the membership of a protein or protein domain in the set is the goal of this work. Some of the required software, particularly Bayesian prior-based profiles and domain dissection tools have been begun. These will be refined for use in remote homology, where sequence similarity has virtually disappeared. The results of this study, which will be accessible in publication and web, will provide data to inform and constrain the theories about the origins of eukaryotes and the mechanisms of expansion of the eukaryotic proteome doc20233 none Lacy With previous NSF support, Dr. John Lacy, at the University of Texas, developed the Texas Echelon Cross Echelle Spectrograph (TEXES). TEXES can be used in several modes: high resolution cross-dispersed, low to medium resolution long-slit, and source-acquisition imaging. It operates in the 5-25 micrometer spectral region. TEXES s high resolution capabilities are unique. No other mid-infrared astronomical spectrograph has a comparable combination of resolution and sensitivity. TEXES is operated by the instrument team, but is available to all members of the astronomical community. Observational projects to be carried out by Dr. Lacy and colleagues with this award include studies of molecular gas in star-formation regions, ionized gas in ultracompact HII regions, molecules in protoplanetary disks, and molecules in planetary atmospheres. Infrared spectroscopy provides several unique probes of interstellar molecules, notably the ability to study molecules like C2H2 and CH4 without permanent dipole moments. Initial observations with TEXES of C2H2 and HCN in the KL star-formation region in Orion show the lines to consist of multiple narrow components indicative of fine-scale clumping of the gas. Further observations will provide information about the interaction of a protostellar wind with surrounding gas, as well as measurements of the abundances of several molecules showing the influence of star formation on molecular cloud chemistry. Six regions of high-mass star formation will be studied. Ultracompact HII regions are prominent sign-posts of young, very massive stars, but their structure and especially their longevity is not well understood. Infrared ionic fine-structure lines have significant advantages over other probes of such obscured ionized gas in that they provide information about abundances, physical conditions, and kinematics without the large thermal broadening of hydrogen lines. A survey of ultracompact H II regions of various morphologies will be carried out with the goal of distinguishing among different models of these objects. In contrast to near-infrared and millimeter observations, mid-infrared spectroscopy of gas disks around young stars probes the 1-10 AU planet-forming region. Lines of H2, H2O, and possibly C2H2 and NH3 should be observable with TEXES, although initial observations appear to contradict conclusions from spectra taken with the ISO satellite. If line Doppler profiles can be measured, they will provide information on the distribution of molecules with radius in the disks, perhaps showing the signature of forming planets. Mid-infrared spectroscopy is probably the most important probe of the atmospheres of the giant planets. Most of their emitted radiation is in the mid-infrared, and their molecular constituents have their spectral signatures in the mid-infrared. TEXES will be used for a variety of planetary studies, with current plans concentrating on stratospheric molecules and atmospheres of moons doc20234 none The Internet is large, decentralized, and heterogeneous in its technology, administration and capacity. The core of the Internet s success arises from its adherence to a number of architectural principles, central to which is the notion that the network should try to achieve a robust, very often works pretty well level of performance. One of the main techniques for achieving this across a wide range of conditions is making Internet protocols and mechanisms adaptive, so that they self-tune to work reasonably well in whatever circumstances they find themselves. This approach has been extremely successful. However, some of the mechanisms, designed to be good enough across a large range of conditions, must now or will soon operate in regimes beyond their effective dynamic range. For example, TCP congestion control mechanisms require revisiting for tomorrow s Internet, both the coming high speed paths, and the coming low speed paths (e.g., lossy wireless links). Similarly, the architecture s ability to gracefully tolerate failures does not extend to new forms of failures, such as misconfigured routing information or malfunctioning middle-boxes, nor to distributed stresses, such as flash crowds, rapidly-spreading worms, or denial-of-service (DoS) floods. If we view robustness as the ability of the network to function well over a wide spectrum of conditions particularly given a very large, ever-growing and ever-changing network then we argue that the robustness of the future Internet is clearly at risk. In this proposal, we emphasize a multifaceted approach to robustness: 1) Robust performance in the presence of extreme environments such as very high speed and highly variable delay, which requires rethinking today s congestion control mechanisms. 2) Robust performance in the presence of new forms of failure, both at the network layer, in terms of robust routing, and at the application layer, in terms of coping with the now widespread deployment of middleboxes that have elbowed their way into the architecture. This will require investigating broader notions of fault inference. 3) Robust performance in the presence of distributed stresses, both malicious (denial-of-service floods; congestion control cheaters) and merely teeming (flash crowds). This will require an understanding of the network s topology and the makeup of traffic aggregates, coupled with new control mechanisms deployed inside the network. Part of the approach to these is to refine existing protocols and mechanisms, and investigate new ones. But the researchers also emphasize achieving robust performance by detecting incipient failures, on both short time scales (via distributed operational monitoring) and long time scales (via diagnostic probing of deployed protocol implementations). While certainly these topics do not address the full range of challenges facing the Internet architecture, they do address some of the core issues in preserving and enhancing the Internet s robustness. In one sense, the proposed research is conservative, in that we frame it in terms of working within the current Internet architecture, rather than advocating a clean sheet approach. The researchers argue, however, that in some ways this conservative approach makes for research that is more fundamental rather than less. The clean sheet approach, while more tidy and much more conducive to easy exploration of basic principles, misses the crucial reality of how different mechanisms wind up interacting once integrated into a truly large-scale network doc20235 none The condensed matter physics project will develop a new laser light scattering technique to measure the elastic constants of materials up to mega-bar pressures achievable in a diamond anvil cell. The research is based on the detection of standing wave resonances that develop because of surface corrugation effects. The technique is particularly useful for studies of opaque materials and will be applied to key materials important in geophysics. Experiments are proposed that should provide insights into the physics of poorly understood deformation mechanisms and elastic properties associated with buried interfaces and embedded laminar structures. The frequency profile and spatial confinement of acoustic waves confined in these systems will yield new opportunities for acoustic wave device applications. In addition, the unusual mechanical properties of a new, photo-modified, state of glass that is stabilized at optimum connectivity in binary chalcogenide glasses will be investigated. Also of interest is the important interplay between mechanical stability and pronounced glass forming tendencies related to local connectivity between atoms. The project will train graduate and undergraduate students in challenging issues in contemporary solid state physics. They will gain valuable experience with modern laser spectroscopy techniques. This education will prepare them for productive careers in academia or industry. The project will support a laser spectroscopy study of the acoustic and mechanical properties of solids. The research involves the behavior of materials under extreme compression - approaching pressures at the Earth s interior. It will develop a new method to probe high-pressure behavior of materials and will yield critical parameters for theories of material structural properties. The study dealing with high frequency acoustic waves confined to buried layers should provide important information into the physics of localized excitations. The frequency profile and spatial confinement of the waves will yield new technological opportunities that will not suffer from bandwidth limitations of conventional surface wave devices. The proposed study of glasses addresses key aspects of their elastic and optical properties through creation of a new, photo-modified, state. Of interest is how the properties of this state relate to the formation of glasses and how glass properties depend on the specific local connectivity of atoms. Together with the freedom and flexibility associated with the non-crystalline nature of glasses, the unusual light-induced effects may yield results of technological value in these useful materials. This research will be conducted with the aid of graduate and undergraduate students. They will gain valuable experience through their involvement in contemporary forefront research in solid state physics and laser spectroscopy techniques. These experiences will be of great value in their further studies, or employment in industry, academia or government laboratories doc20236 none machine composed of tiles arranged on a 2-D grid. Each tile will contain four components: a finite state machine, a data path segment, a local memory, and a router. Tiles may be grouped together into a complete pipelined datapath. The tiles themselves will be implemented in nanoBlocks, the basic unit of the nanoFabric. Compilation: Compilation technology will be developed to map programs written in general-purpose programming languages, e.g. C or Java, to nanoFabrics. The research will focus on ensuring that the compiler will scale to nanoFabrics, which can have hundreds of millions of components. The compiler decomposes an application into a series of independent SAMs based on control flow and memory access patterns. They are developing a new intermediate representation with a precise semantics that turns all control flow into data flow. The IR unifies predication, speculation and static-single assignment and makes explicit data flow, control flow, and synchronization. This leads to an enormous simplification of many optimizations and provides the framework for formal translation and optimization validation of the compiler. This research has the potential to utilize, and guide the development of, electronic nanotechnology to inexpensively produce low-power circuits a million times more dense than conventional CMOS circuits doc20237 none Large-scale coordination tasks are becoming increasingly important in hazardous, uncertain, and time-stressed environments such as rescue operations and disaster response. In such environments, human rescuers must rapidly make decisions while under stress and with incomplete and dynamic information, that may save or put lives at risk. The proposed multidisciplinary research is founded on three key advances technical ideas. 1) Teams of Autonomous Agents: Cyber Agents, Robots and People (CARPs) are hybrid teams that consist of large number of these entities, distributed in space and time and varying in capability and role. (2) A cooperative control paradigm facilitates the sharing of a) common goals, b) initiatives for communication and action, c) responsibilities for coherent group activity, d) information on the environment, mission, and situation, and e) assistance to overcoming barriers for various members of CARP groups whether human, robot or cyber-agent. (3) The key challenges for team formation and coordination in large-scale, uncertain coordination domains include ad hoc interoperability across different agents, teams and organizations that are brought together as is , and co-adaptation to each other and to changing priorities and roles within the team. The impact of having CARP technology successfully deployed will allow robots to advance beyond niche roles in a handful of industries; instead they will be integrated into the larger society of humans and information systems in the workplace. Emergency response teams are an early high-payoff test domain as robots can go places normally dangerous to humans, thus saving rescuers and victims lives doc20238 none Taha, Walid ITR: A Framework for Rapid Development of Reliable Robotics Software Robots are entering daily life. Commercially available systems are delivering medication to patients in hospitals, mowing lawns, vacuuming floors, and finding wide applications in the entertainment industry. In the future, they will play a more substantial role in areas such as space exploration, health care, and search and rescue. But as these applications grow, so does the complexity of these robots, making the reliability of their software and the productivity of their programmers a priority. It is not clear that current techniques for programming robots are sufficient for building systems that are orders of magnitude more complex than the ones available today. The vast majority of programming methods in current use focus on high-level planning and task and behavioral aspects. By contrast, there are no widely-accepted specialized software processes or programming languages for the integrated development of robotics applications. This project explores the impact of state-of-the-art programming languages techniques in a small-scale robotics setting. The project applies domain-specific languages methods and automatic program generation techniques. The framework exploits core technologies such as multi-stage programming with simple, high-level annotations to avoid unnecessary runtime overheads yet provide a natural and algorithmic approach to program generation, where generation occurs in a first stage, and the execution of the synthesized program occurs in a second stage. Because (even when the final goal is embedded software) the first stage does not need to be resource-bounded, conventional programming techniques can be used. The challenge, then, becomes ensuring that the generated programs are suitable for execution on an embedded platform. Multi-stage languages already provide significant safety guarantees. For example, a program generator written in such a language not only is type-safe in the traditional sense, but we are guaranteed that any generated program will also be type safe. This provides a noteworthy degree of assurance about the quality of the generated code. But like most traditional high-level programming techniques, multi-stage programming was designed to satisfy functional requirements rather than operational ones, and existing multi-stage languages do not provide any guarantees about the behavior of programs in the presence of bounded resources. The focus of this project is ways to address this problem by strengthening ``traditional multi-stage type systems using a number of state-of-the-art techniques from type theory and functional reactive programming (FRP) to create resource-aware multi-stage programming. Linear and alias types (in conjunction with dependent typing) will be used to ensure space-boundedness, new typing techniques are used to ensure time-boundedness, and signals and behaviors from FRP allow for a natural style of reactive programming doc20239 none Databases are at the very heart of the information economy. Database performance is a driving factor that dictates what is possible through the use of information technology. While database management systems have evolved since they were invented several decades ago, their current design is unfortunately antiquated given the state-of-the-art computer memory hierarchies of today (and even more so tomorrow). This project seeks to alleviate this problem. While processor speeds double every year, memory access speeds follow a much shallower improvement curve. To bridge this speed gap, small, fast memories called caches are used to hold frequently accessed data and instructions close to the processor. When executing database workloads, accesses often miss in the (fast) cache and access the (slow) memory, thereby reducing performance significantly. Hardware approaches are typically limited by access time constraints and by applicability to a wide range of workloads. To keep the hardware design feasible, caches typically use simplistic data placement and replacement schemes, and are oblivious to the memory access behavior of the application. Cache-conscious software methods are, on the contrary, extremely promising. The proposed algorithms collect data statistics in order to correctly group data with similar usage patterns and optimize cache utilization. By carefully observing behavior, data is prefetched into the cache before it is used. Preliminary results demonstrate that these techniques (i) minimize the number of misses in the cache and (ii) significantly reduce the incurred penalties doc20240 none DMS - . A number of problems of elliptic and parabolic type in general relativity will be studied. The investigator will model rotating stars by a self-gravitating perfect fluid rigidly rotating on its own axis using a perturbation method. The perturbation parameter is the ratio of the angular velocity to the central density, allowing rapidly rotating solutions when the density is sufficiently high. The investigator will work on the uniqueness of the Kerr black holes, to rule out multiple black hole configurations, as conjectured by Roger Penrose. A new approach is proposed consisting of the investigation of the relation between uniqueness theorems for black holes in equilibrium and Penrose-type inequalities. The investigator will continue his work on the connectedness of the space of initial data for the Einstein vacuum equations, extending results obtained in the context of quasi-convex foliations, foliations with leaves of positive Gauss and mean curvature. The investigator will work, in collaboration with Y. Li and A. S. Tahvildar-Zadeh, on blow-up of wave maps, the dynamical counterparts of harmonic maps. These maps have attracted considerable attention by researchers in nonlinear hyperbolic equations mainly due to their similarity to the Einstein equations. The investigator will also work on the asymptotic behavior of harmonic maps with prescribed singularities into Hadamard manifolds. Mathematical general relativity overlaps three disciplines: physics, geometry, and nonlinear partial differential equations. As such, it is an ideal source of problems whose solutions have the potential to influence all three of these fields. The problems in this project fall in this category. For example, the study of Penrose-type inequalities is of interest both to mathematical relativists and to geometers studying spaces of dimension three. Developing a good mathematical model for dense rapidly rotating stars is an important goal in astrophysics, for example when trying to understand pulsars, and would also contribute new results in perturbation theory. Understanding wave maps should help the study of other nonlinear evolution equations governing various physical phenomena doc20199 none Pnueli, Emerson, and Sistla , and Towards a Seamless Process for the Development of Embedded Systems Embedded systems are of vital economic importance and are literally becoming ubiquitous. They have already become an integral component of safety critical systems involving aviation, military, telecommunications, and process control applications. Interest in embedded systems is growing further due to the expectation that they will become a key component of many commonplace consumer appliances. Consumers will expect levels of reliability and predictability associated with the very best brands of cars, televisions, and refrigerators. Glitches, crashes, and general erratic behavior of the sort seen with prior generations of consumer PC software products will be unacceptable for these embedded applications. It thus becomes crucial that these embedded software systems satisfy high levels of correctness criteria, well above those of today s large software systems, which are often highly error-prone. Besides the requirement of a new standard of functional correctness, embedded systems pose additional challenges which were not fully addressed by previous validation and verification approaches. These include adequate guarantees of timeliness, low or controlled power consumption, and low or controlled memory utilization. With the spread of embedded systems, and the need to guarantee an acceptable level of functionality and reliability of the applications they are embedded in, the industry needs an effective and reliable development process. Due to market constraints, such a process should also support a fast turn-around time as well as enable the easy design of many customized variations of the same product. This project is developing the foundation for a seamless design process for embedded systems as described below. In particular, it is developing: A formal visual language for requirements, including behavioral, temporal, and TPM constraints; A methodology for the automatic synthesis of an executable specification from the requirement specification language; A methodology for the verification of the intermediate and distributed representation of the systems against requirements; A methododology for automatic code-distribution of specifications, possibly with some architectural constraints provided by the user; A model for representing hardware software co-design platforms that enables modeling of both loosely- and tightly-coupled components as well as compositional reasoning about them; Algorithms for automatically generating architecture-optimized code from executable specifications; Methods for translation validation of the generated code and run-time validation on the system using monitors; The Design of a profiler process which analyzes machine code, computes the resulting figures for time, power, and memory, and back-associate these figures with their executable specification sources, enabling early-stage analysis of these requirements. The impact of the project is to streamline and significantly accelerate the time to market of embedded applications of both new products and revisions and customizations of existing product lines. Another impact is to upgrade the level of dependability and predictability of embedded software to new standards, compatible and comparable to those expected from the best brands of consumer products doc20242 none U of Mass, Amherst Leon J. Osterweil The internet has changed forever the way science is done. Collaborations such as NSF-sponsored Globus, and GriPhyN are beginning to employ internet access to facilitate data sharing and expedite collaboration among worldwide communities of geographically distributed researchers. This creates opportunities to do better science through the use of shared data and expertise, but it also creates risks arising from uncertainty about how internet-accessed data sets were produced and how they can be used. If scientists cannot determine how particular results were obtained, those results may be subsequently combined in ways that will lead to incorrect or misleading conclusions, possibly with devastating effects. Our project will develop, demonstrate, and evaluate technologies to facilitate the building of community consensus by supporting definition, validation, repeatability, and adaptability of scientific processes that integrate and combine web-based data sets and tools. Although there will always be debate about the most appropriate models, methodologies and conclusions used in scientific inquiry, our work should help scientists focus on areas of disagreement and resolve these disagreements more quickly, perhaps through further experimentation and inquiry. Thus, our work will also help policy makers in areas where scientific results are critical ingredients, such as economic policy, environmental management, and social initiatives doc20243 none This project addresses polymer interfaces commonly used in polymeric light emitting diodes and other devices such as thin film transistors (TFT), focussing on determination of the electronic structure, chemistry and morphology of interfaces. Experiments will be carried out using pho-toelectron spectroscopy (PES) and scanning probe microscopy (SPM). Results of in-situ studies will be compared with ex-situ photo-electrical measurements on devices. Additionally, simple polymer electronic devices will be designed and fabricated in vacuum and tested against conven-tionally ex-situ prepared structures. The project will be carried out collaboratively between Rudy Schlaf at the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of South Florida (USF), and George G. Malliaras at the Materials Science and Engineering Department of Cornell University. Schlaf s group will study and develop synthesis and processing capabilities enabling in-situ depo-sition of polymer thin films and will investigate them in-situ with photoemission spectroscopy (PES). Students from USF will visit Malliaras group during summer months where they will characterize macroscopic electronic properties of the prepared thin films devices by (photo-) electrical measurements. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in a topical area of electronic photonic materi-als science having technological relevance. An important feature of the project is the strong em-phasis on education, and the integration of research and education. The PI places emphasis on in-volving undergraduates in research to help increase the number of students pursuing advanced degrees. Results of the research will also be used in research modules presented in the PI s Elec-tronic Materials course and during the lab tours the PI organizes for undergraduate students. The project offers unique opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students involved in highly interdisciplinary forefront research doc20169 none is conceptually possible, yet unavailable in closed form. It circumvents the difficulty in obtaining and closing such macroscopic models, while computationally extracting precisely the information that would be obtained by a macroscopic model, had the model been available in closed form. This provides the link between ITR and a spectrum of application areas. Impact: The impact of the research will be on establishing a powerful and general link between state-of-the-art microscopic-level simulations and fast systems level analysis capabilities. Although the research focuses on specific problems in heterogeneous hard materials and complex fluids, the computational framework is applicable to a broad range of complex systems, including biological systems, their processing and function. Since it has the potential to revolutionize engineering systems-level analysis, it could have educational impact as well as furthering advances in microelectronics, bioinformatics and nanotechnology doc20245 none This proposal is concerned with developing of 3-D scanning methods to be applied to the imaging of cuneiform tablets. This process can make the tablets more readable by deepening the marks in tablets badly worn over centuries, thus sharpening the images. The panel gave this proposal a Highly Competitive rating, noting that it was an excellent proposal with innovative work in information technology and the humanities and social sciences. For IT, the impact is the development of a portable, very high resolution surface scanner and the multi-resolution algorithms. For the humanities, the project represents significant work with a potentially very wide application to other other objects with the result of opening up new fields of study to a larger group of scholars. The technology and techniques developed can be imported to other areas of study of ancient cultures and languages doc20246 none and TITLE: ITR: Collaborative Research: Natural Language in the Development of High-Confidence Software PI: John Knight and Robyn Lutz Inadequate communication of domain knowledge in natural language (such as English textual descriptions) is a major source of requirements defects in high-confidence software. Such defects can threaten lives, property, and the dependability of critical infrastructures. This research develops innovative, multi-disciplinary techniques designed expressly to identify and cope with the properties of natural language that lead to these problems. It analyses the domain-knowledge communication problem from the perspective of current linguistic theory in order to generate models and techniques that reduce communication breakdowns between domain experts and software developers. On the basis of this analysis, techniques for the elicitation, recording, and propagation of domain knowledge in requirements activities will be designed. A set of tools will also be developed to support the practical use of these engineering techniques. Several case studies will be used to assess and refine the techniques and tools on actual, high-confidence software systems in the aviation and spacecraft application domains. The research effort is directed at the reduction of requirements defects through the application of techniques that take into account the linguistic difficulties particular to domain knowledge communication doc20247 none Wunsch Automatic program compilation (and its related task of interpreted program execution) has been a vital ingredient in the creation of ever more complex software tools. Indeed, modern compilers and interpreters have been central to exploiting exponential advances in digital hardware capability. Without compilers and interpreters to automate the task of correctly transforming a high-level language description of an algorithm, modern computer systems could barely exist. With modern computational capabilities, workers in numerous fields use large-scale numerical simulation of complex interacting elements to understand physical, chemical, biological and economical phenomena. The Adjoint Compiler Technology 2. development of an open-source, freely available reference compiler and support material that is as easy and reliable to use as a traditional compiler and that will nurture widespread adoption of AD as an key element of all manner of numerical simulation; 3. establishment of clear and form connections between the mainstream compiler communities in computer science and the mathematics, physical science and engineering communities that have historically been at the forefront of AD tool development. For mathematical, scientific and engineering codes, the work proposed can have far reaching consequences. Just as conventional compiler developments have provided the foundation for new generations of simulation tools the project proposed here will also provide a foundation for new generations of mathematically rigorous and robustly manufactured analysis, diagnostic and forecast software doc20248 none New directions in clustering and learning Faced with ever-larger amounts of data, researchers, government institutions, corporations and even the general public seek tools that help them deal with large bodies of information, identify patterns in it, learn what these patterns mean, and act upon that information in a timely fashion. Developing such tools involves a novel and interesting blend of algorithms, statistics, AI, and machine learning. The project assembles a team of experts (four from academia and two from industry) in these areas to attack an interesting and meaningful subset of such problems which have the general flavor of clustering or learning. The defining philosophy of this proposal is that no clear boundary Separates the twin notions of clustering and learning. Clustering is usually driven by the end goal of learning, but can also be viewed as a learning task in itself since it results in a more compact description of the data. By the same token all learning involves clustering of some sort, and in fact this viewpoint is implicit in recent papers in the learning literature. The project takes an integrated view of the entire problem of learning patterns in data, starting from streaming computations that might produce representative sketches of the data as it streams by, to problems of clustering data into meaninful patterns (with attendant problems of outlier removal, multiobjective optimization etc.), to learning algorithms that fit sophisticated models (SVMs, bayesian nets, gaussian mixtures etc.) for inference and reasoning tasks. The investigators believe that all these disparate algorithmic efforts have unifying ideas. Furthermore, their synergistic approach throws up several interesting ideas of its own that could lead to significant advances. Examples: include using coding theoretic ideas in disparate applications such as Multiclass learning (a broad class of learning problems including text and speech categorization, part-of-speech tagging, gesture recognition etc.) and shape recognition in vision; the use of clustering ideas to do dimension reduction (offering an alternative to popular SVD based approaches), and using ideas from approximation algorithms and clustering to do near-optimal model fitting for models such as bayesian nets. The project also includes a management and educational plan that involves dissemination of the ideas of this research through development of new courses and also pieces of learning software that will be placed in the public domain. Algorithms developed in as part of this project will be tested on large datasets, including those obtained from Google Inc. Some algorithmic ideas will also be implemented in industry (including Google doc20249 none In a variety of disciplines large, numerical simulations have become a fundamental scientific tool. A key problem is how to inform or update such simulations in real time with large numbers of noisy observations, especially when many of the predicted variables are unobserved or the observed quantities bear a complex relation to the predicted variables. In principle, Bayesian methods provide a solution to this state-estimation problem, but evolving and updating the required probability distributions are problematic in practice, as the most straightforward approaches require computations of overwhelming size. These collaborative investigators will address these issues through the use of novel ensemble-based or Monte Carlo approaches and within the context of numerical weather prediction (NWP). Weather prediction is a challenging test of any approach to state-estimation, as operational models for the continental United States will soon have of the order of 108 degrees of freedom and ingest an observational data stream of more than a terabyte per day. The Principal Investigators application of ensemble state-estimation techniques to NWP is motivated by recent success in test problems with simulated observations, ranging from the prediction of isolated thunderstorms in a cloud model to global atmospheric flow in a general circulation model, and by potential advantages over existing operational data assimilation schemes. In particular, ensemble-based techniques directly estimate the uncertainty of the prior prediction and thereby avoid the assumption of stationary, isotropic forecast uncertainty made in most existing schemes. The benefits of this direct estimation will also likely increase as next-generation of NWP models reach resolutions of about 1 km and the use of remotely-sensed observations, such as from the operational network of Doppler radars, increases at those scales. Thus, this research will lay the foundation for a significant step forward in weather forecasting, especially at the scales where most severe and disruptive weather occurs. The proposed work will be carried out within the context of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, which is a next-generation NWP model designed for use at the horizontal resolutions of 1-10 km. The WRF model will be employed in operational weather forecasting and also will be supported for use by the research community. Use of WRF multiplies the educational benefits of this project beyond the direct involvement of students and postdoctoral researchers and provides a clear path to the implementation of results to improve routine weather forecasts. The team assembled within this group Information and Technology Research project includes leaders in ensemble assimilation techniques as well as members with expertise in numerical modeling, ensemble forecasting, and the interpretation of Doppler radar observations. The project will be coordinated through joint supervision of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, joint publications and annual workshops. In addition, common software will be used in all the research, thus facilitating the transfer of methodologies and expertise within the group. Successful completion of this research potentially will provide significantly improved capabilities in weather numerical models. These improvements will allow advances to be made in the forecasting of a variety of weather phenomena doc20250 none This project is advancing the state of art in both computational cosmology and parallel computing simultaneously and synergetically. Breakthroughs in cosmology, which improve our understanding of the formation of galaxies and planets, are enabled by advances in parallel computing being made in this project. Parallel machines with over hundred thousand powerful processors are now being built. NSF s widely accessible TeraScale facilities have already deployed a 3,000 processor machine in . At the same time algorithmic advances have made it possible to solve problems at a much faster rate. Yet the complexity of algorithms combined with the difficulty of parallelizing them on such large machines remains a hindrance to advances in Science and Engineering. This project explores an object based methodology that is simplifying the process of developing highly efficient parallel applications. This approach allows users to write applications at the level of natural entities in the application domain, without explicit regard to which processors will house such entities and carry out associated computations. To make this possible, the runtime system must be able to make fine-grained resource allocation decisions automatically. Advances in parallel computing are being sought to that end. Specifically, application developers may specify a program in terms of a collection of millions of objects that communicate with each other in several stylized patterns. In addition, parallel components can be plugged in and out of running computations, and exchange data with each other in a exible manner. Based on this infrastructure, this project is building a framework that makes it easy to build particle-oriented parallel programs. In addition to computational cosmology, which predomi-nately involves simulations that represent galaxies, dark matter, stars, planetary bodies and gas as particles, such programs are used in other fields as well. The framework contains highly efficient parallel algorithms that operate on collections of billions of particles, spread across machines with tens of thousands of processors. These advances are being used to carry out scientific studies in cosmology. Large, detailed simulations of structure formation powered by parallel computers are necessary to make quantitative predictions from cosmological theories. By calculating the non-linear gravitational and gas dynamics of the formation of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, we are creating galaxy catalogues, X-ray maps, and other observables that can be compared directly with new satellite and ground-based data, and thereby constrain the parameters of cosmological theories. These parameters include the amount and nature of the dark matter, the existence and equation of state of any dark energy, the total amount of baryons, and the nature of the initial uctuations in the Universe. Similar simulation studies are being used to study how planets form from a proto-solar disk in order to create an ab initio theory of planet formation. The software developed via this project is being made available to a wide community of researchers. Also, the research results of simulations can be downloaded or visualized via the web doc20249 none In a variety of disciplines large, numerical simulations have become a fundamental scientific tool. A key problem is how to inform or update such simulations in real time with large numbers of noisy observations, especially when many of the predicted variables are unobserved or the observed quantities bear a complex relation to the predicted variables. In principle, Bayesian methods provide a solution to this state-estimation problem, but evolving and updating the required probability distributions are problematic in practice, as the most straightforward approaches require computations of overwhelming size. These collaborative investigators will address these issues through the use of novel ensemble-based or Monte Carlo approaches and within the context of numerical weather prediction (NWP). Weather prediction is a challenging test of any approach to state-estimation, as operational models for the continental United States will soon have of the order of 108 degrees of freedom and ingest an observational data stream of more than a terabyte per day. The Principal Investigators application of ensemble state-estimation techniques to NWP is motivated by recent success in test problems with simulated observations, ranging from the prediction of isolated thunderstorms in a cloud model to global atmospheric flow in a general circulation model, and by potential advantages over existing operational data assimilation schemes. In particular, ensemble-based techniques directly estimate the uncertainty of the prior prediction and thereby avoid the assumption of stationary, isotropic forecast uncertainty made in most existing schemes. The benefits of this direct estimation will also likely increase as next-generation of NWP models reach resolutions of about 1 km and the use of remotely-sensed observations, such as from the operational network of Doppler radars, increases at those scales. Thus, this research will lay the foundation for a significant step forward in weather forecasting, especially at the scales where most severe and disruptive weather occurs. The proposed work will be carried out within the context of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, which is a next-generation NWP model designed for use at the horizontal resolutions of 1-10 km. The WRF model will be employed in operational weather forecasting and also will be supported for use by the research community. Use of WRF multiplies the educational benefits of this project beyond the direct involvement of students and postdoctoral researchers and provides a clear path to the implementation of results to improve routine weather forecasts. The team assembled within this group Information and Technology Research project includes leaders in ensemble assimilation techniques as well as members with expertise in numerical modeling, ensemble forecasting, and the interpretation of Doppler radar observations. The project will be coordinated through joint supervision of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, joint publications and annual workshops. In addition, common software will be used in all the research, thus facilitating the transfer of methodologies and expertise within the group. Successful completion of this research potentially will provide significantly improved capabilities in weather numerical models. These improvements will allow advances to be made in the forecasting of a variety of weather phenomena doc20252 none This project is a multidisciplinary, international collaborative research project aimed at developing a theoretical understanding of the records generated by the scientific, government and artistic sections. On this basis, the project will formulate and test various technology, metadata, and policy models, etc. to ensure that records created using these systems can be trusted as to content reliability and accuracy and for subsequent multipurpose use. The project will address issues related to how information technology is transforming functions of modern society, particularly in the areas of digital government, e-commerce and large-scale research efforts doc20253 none Christopher DiGiano SRI International, Menlo Park, CA Training and Resources for Assembling Interactive Learning Systems This project leverages research and development outcomes from prior NSF funding that focused on interactive mathematics education. The current project addresses three areas: 1) Research involving undergraduate education focused on investigating the training needed to produce practitioners capable of collaborative design of educational software, 2) Research into the processes used by collaborative software design teams, and 3) Research into K-12 educational impact because of the use of software produced by collaborative design teams. The project involves pre-college teachers and undergraduate and professional software developers in teams producing interactive software for K-12. In addition to primary goals of studying multidisciplinary collaborative teams and the impacts of the systems they develop on pre-college students, the project also looks at software re-use and collaborative tools needed for innovative applications of IT in education. Outcomes of this project will be insights into and understanding of: the kinds of course activities that are needed to enable effective teamwork between students with different backgrounds; course activities that will enable teams to discuss, share, and enact educational values in their software production process; the packaging of curricula into modules that are adaptable by a variety of institutions; the promotion of curricula that encourages enrollment by a broad spectrum of students in educational software development; and, the preparation of new teachers and developers for future work involving collaborative design. In addition, this project involves research into optimal design tools (the kinds of tools and resources such as design scenarios, national standards, bug lists, feature lists, and mailing lists that help teams achieve shared understanding), collaboration mechanisms and the design of tools and spaces to encourage a culture of reuse where team members borrow pedagogical ideas and technical modules from exemplary artifacts and in turn contribute useful products of their own, and a social network of human experts and coaches needed to produce educational software (i.e., best practices that can be identified for the ways experienced classroom teachers and software developers coach and support teams in developing good designs and encourage balanced participation by technical and non-technical team members). The overarching need that is addressed by the project is the shortage of standards-based, high-quality educational software for K-12 classrooms. The project aims to validate the premise that appropriate training and resources can enable a team to transform today s designs into improved designs that elicit and support higher-order mathematical thinking among the target K-12 students. Testing this hypothesis requires research in classroom impact including: exploring whether university student co-design teams can adapt and refine existing mathlet resources to produce new mathlets that engage higher-order mathematical thinking, identifying, refining, and disseminating to classrooms around the country the best mathlets from all participating institutions, expanding the adoption and utility of deployed mathlets be increased by enabling in-service teachers to configure the tools for their particular classroom needs. This project involves collaboration between several academic institutions, research organizations, and businesses doc20142 none , , , TITLE: Collaborative Research: ITR: Acquiring Accurate Dynamic Field Data Using Lightweight Instrumentation Dynamic analyses, such as testing and profiling, play a key role in state-of-art approaches to software quality assurance (QA). With rare exception, these analyses are performed in-house, on developer platforms, using developer-provided input workloads. Shortcomings of this approach include that the results simply cannot be trusted to tell us how the software actually performs in the field. The project goal is to give developers unprecedented insight into the actual runtime behavior of their software, allowing developers (and ultimately the software itself) to change, optimize, and adapt the software based on highly accurate field data. Lightweight, collaborative dynamic analyses conducted around-the-world and around-the-clock form the new platform: (1) lightly instrument fielded software (i.e., each program copy performs a small part of the analysis) (2) collect the partial data from many instances of the software, fusing it to conduct the complete analysis, (3) change the running program instances based on the findings and (4) repeat the process. Seven critical research challenges form the core of the project: 1. Lightweight instrumentation--Develop instrumentation that is virtually transparent to individual users. 2. Compositional analysis techniques--Develop distributed analysis techniques that decompose traditional analyses into smaller steps, distribute the steps among multiple users, and then fuse each user s results into an accurate solution to the original problem. 3. Scalability--Develop storage and analysis techniques to deal with the high data volumes we expect to encounter. 4. Anomaly Detection--Define data-driven techniques to automatically identify anomalous behaviors of deployed software. 5. Privacy and Security--Incorporate privacy and security safeguards into our data collection and analysis approaches. 6. Dynamic updating mechanisms--Develop techniques to make runtime changes to the location and function of instrumentation, and to parts of the software itself. 7. Validate approach on industrial software doc20255 none Theodore B. Trafalis University of Oklahoma ITR: A Real Time Mining of Integrated Weather Data The mission is to build systems and develop theory for extracting information and identifying patterns that are useful for making decision in real-time. Funding is being requested to build pattern recognition techniques that will exploit multisensor data in an integrated manner to provide information such as the presence or absence of tornados, supercells and mesocyclones; estimate precipitation; predict the occurrence of flash floods; assimilate and display large volumes of multisensor data and trigger the archive of selected data sets. These tasks will be accomplished by customizing and developing techniques for real-time data mining. The approaches used will include traditional data reduction methods such as PCA and clustering; Procrustes analysis; Kalman filters and non-linear time series analysis with regime switching; and, decomposition and robust optimization methods for training support vector machines doc20256 none This project brings together two disciplines, computer science and artificial intelligence on the one hand, and economics and game theory on the other, and by doing so addresses some fundamental problems of computing in the Internet era. Some of the problems addressed are rooted directly in today s Internet applications: How do you charge for network usage so as to smooth out peaks in the demand? How do you incent people to contribute personal information and recommendations in recommender systems and discretionary databases? While this project is motivated by its potential application to electronic commerce, the focus is on foundational matters. Computing in the Internet era means computing in the context of multiple self-interested entities, which in turn means that reasoning about computing must take the incentives of these entities into account. This, in turn, calls for a fundamental integration of ideas from computer science (such as fault tolerance, fairness, verification, algorithms, complexity, graphical models of uncertainty, machine learning) with elements of game theory (such as mechanism design, equilibrium analysis, game representations, learning, and agency theory). The outcome is expected to benefit electronic commerce, but also more fundamentally to help lay the foundations for a new area of research called non-cooperative computing doc20257 none This research seeks to create a new global-scale information facility on the Internet in which structured data, rather than raw text, is the key element supported. Currently, the information provided on the Internet consists of simple text-based documents (HTML), or other unstructured types such as images and streams. The new facility will allow data sources to be described by schemas and their content to be indexed and located. Sophisticated query-oriented database-style operations will be possible over simple or complex data sources, and new views of multiple data sources can be created and shared with other clients. A new class of data processing services will be possible to collect, manipulate, analyze, and store data. The first goal of project is to define the basic architecture of a client, allowing it to share its data with other peers, participate in distributed query processing, and cooperate with other clients. A specific data integration formalism will be designed that will allow clients to integrate their data with others using both global-as-view and local-as-view data integration paradigms. Building on this arthictecture, a new query processing technique will be developed that can adapt to both data integration paradigms. The project will then develop intelligent data placement techniques for storing query results on different clients, thus enabling dramatic performance improvments for subsequent queries. The data such placed on servers may become stale, when the source data gets updated: the project will develop specific update propagation techniques for publishing and disseminating updates. Finally, the project is developing novel data indexing techniques that allow clients to search data items globally doc20258 none The introduction of European infectious diseases to the Americas resulted in a catastrophic loss of life among the indigenous populations. While this tragedy was widespread throughout the Americas, it can be exemplified by the history of the Havasupai, a Yuman-speaking tribe of northern Arizona. The Havasupai inhabit a remote side canyon of the Grand Canyon and live in relative isolation. Between and , the Havasupai suffered serial epidemics of introduced influenza and measles; only one-quarter of the population survived. Previous research suggests that these epidemics resulted in selection for individuals who were heterozygous at two major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes, which are critical components of immunological defense against pathogens. To determine whether the pattern of variation at MHC genes in the Havasupai is the result of selection for pathogen resistance, we intend to perform a genome-wide survey of microsatellite loci, which are highly mutable markers that are not subject to natural selection. Because these markers are not subject to selection, their pattern of variation will reflect only the demographic history of the Havasupai. We will examine 106 loci spread over all 22 autosomes, three of which are linked to the MHC genes and 15 pairs are linked to one another. The patterns of inheritance, population variation, and association between linked pairs will determine conclusively if natural selection is responsible for the variation observed at the MHC genes of this representative population. This research promises to yield insight into the genetic consequences of the Native American population declines associated with colonization of the Americas by Europeans doc20259 none Mobile systems primarily processing multimedia data are expected to become a dominant computing platform for many application domains. The design of such systems imposes several new challenges, as it must consider demanding, dynamic, and multidimensional resource requirements and constraints, with energy becoming a first-class resource. At the same time, the ability of multimedia applications to trade off output quality for system resources and the difference between their peak and average demands offers a huge opportunity for optimization. A promising approach to meet the challenges of mobile multimedia systems, therefore, is to design all system layers with an ability to adapt in response to system or application changes. Further, to reap the full benefits of these adaptations, all system layers must cooperate to reach a system-wide globally-optimal configuration. This research seeks to develop and demonstrate an integrated cross-layer adaptive system where hardware and all software layers cooperatively adapt to changing system resources and application demands, seeking to maximize user satisfaction while meeting resource constraints of energy, time, and bandwidth. This work is expected to have a large impact because it will expose sources of substantial performance improvement not available before, for a platform of increasing importance to many application domains doc20260 none EIA - Whaley, Birgitta K. University of California-Berkeley TITLE: Exploration and Control of Condensed Matter Qubits The advent of new methods for controlling matter at nanometer length scales creates enormous opportunities for molecular and information processing. Looking beyond the present problem of how to extend Moore s law within the existing computational paradigm, we can see that the ability to fabricate and control at increasingly small dimension brings with it the potential to generate entirely new technologies for processing of information. This project explores the development of a new type of highly parallel processor that takes advantage of quantum degrees of freedom in solid state nanostructures to process information. The main focus of the project is the basic science required for realization of truly scalable quantum logic devices. We address this task with experiments that explore the physics of several potential solid state realizations of quantum bit states, and also with theoretical investigations of decoherence, of robust control, and of efficient schemes for quantum logic that are tailored to the underlying quantum physics of specific implementations. This project is carried out by an interdisciplinary group of scientists and engineers, drawn from computer and engineering science, chemical physics, and solid state physics. The broader impact of the work is to be disseminated together with educators and journalists in workshops and public lectures doc20261 none Proposal Number DMS - Investigator Emma Previato ep@math.bu.edu Moduli spaces and differential equations This project combines projective geometry and differential algebra. For a few decades now, moduli spaces of vector bundles over curves have been prominent in mathematical physics. A few interrelated open problems are the object of this research. In projective space, models of moduli of vector bundles still don t have explicit description, by equations or by classification. The generalized theta functions (sections of higher-rank vector bundles) are not developed to the point that one can describe flows of completely integrable hierarchies or perform the necessary calculations of quantum field theory (partition function, e.g.) Finally, flows of commutative rings of partial differential operators (generalized KP flows) have not been described explicitly. In the proposed work: on the projective-geometry side, equations for moduli spaces of higher-rank bundles and dimensions of Brill-Noether loci will be calculated by methods of representation theory and correspondences between Grassmannians. On the analytic side, differential equations for the Kleinian functions (which generalize the Weierstrass p-function) will be derived and applied to integrate new Hamiltonian systems and the generalized KP flows. A theme that runs through the proposed research is the classical problem of reduction: Weierstrass students Koenigsberger and Kowalevski, respectively, characterized the abelian integrals of genus 2, 3 respectively, that reduce with multiplicity 2 to an elliptic integral; since then, very little was found in general (e.g., higher genus or multiplicity). Progress on this problem is now under way, partly due to results that revisit the Kleinian functions, and partly to the aid of computer algebra. The problem of reduction is linked with the problem of curves with automorphisms, and the project includes applications of the results to differential Galois theory, monodromy of ordinary differential equations, and decoding algorithms for algebraic (Goppa) codes. Elliptic functions have an unreasonable effectiveness ,to borrow E.P. Wigner s phrase. They occur when modeling harmonic oscillators, shooting billiards, measuring the amplitude of ocean waves, computing the partition functions of quantum field theory. The word elliptic refers to the number of periods of the functions (one over the real, two over the complex numbers). Theta functions are the multi-periodic analog of elliptic functions. Although Old Masters such as Klein, H.F. Baker and O. Bolza, obtained equations for genus-2 (4 complex periods) theta functions, most properties of theta functions are still inexplicit, including their dependence on the period lattice. New impetus in the study of such functions came from the theory of integrable PDEs, such as the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili equation, and the attendant algebraically completely integrable systems that have been intensively studied since the s. This project will combine projective geometry and differential algebra to identify differential equations satisfied by the (Kleinian) theta functions, and apply them to find exact solutions of Hamiltonian systems and non-linear PDEs. At the same time the project will pursue the other major, non-abelian generalization of theta functions, by embedding moduli spaces into projective space. Theta functions that can be reduced to expressions in elliptic functions will be characterized geometrically and used in effective decoding algorithms doc20262 none When humans interact with each other and their environment, there are breakdowns that naturally result due to the mismatch in their understanding of the current situation. This is often exacerbated by computers because they only have a minimal understanding of human dialogue and interaction. The breakdowns can be smoothed out by making computers more aware of the physical and social contexts they are a part of. This project seeks to investigate user-centered methods and technologies to assist designers and developers in the design, prototyping, and evaluation of real-world context-aware applications, focusing on issues that have yet to be addressed, including usability, privacy, and scalability. This work focuses on (1) exploring new user-centered methods and tools for designing, prototyping, and evaluating context-aware applications, (2) understanding the nature of privacy concerns with respect to context-aware systems and developing mechanisms for addressing these concerns, and (3) providing an infrastructure to help programmers to build these applications for a large number of users and sensors. This work will be evaluated by developing two socially relevant applications: (1) emergency response support for coordinating, communicating, and allocating resources, and (2) an augmented wheelchair providing word prediction for individuals with motor impairments doc20263 none The volume of hypertext on the World Wide Web is dwarfed by the amount of data made available in networked databases, which has been estimated to be 400 to 550 times larger than the WWW hypertext. This proposal refers to this data as the Federated Facts and Figures on the Internet, or simply the FFF. The goal of this work is to explore the mechanisms for -- and consequences of -- aggressively leveraging this resource. The proposal has three aspects. First, it describes algorithms and systems for exploiting facts and figures on the Internet. In particular, it proposes adaptive query processing for the Telegraph system, to adjust to the volatility characteristic of the Internet. It also proposes extending Telegraph to ``trawl large amounts of data from the FFF, by running recursive queries over multiple data sources. The second goal of the proposal is to explore the ramifications of providing FFF tools to the broad Internet user base. This includes an investigation of policy -- both social and technical -- and the economic incentives and ramifications surrounding such policies. The third goal is to explore the design space of countermeasures that can prevent FFF technologies from being misused doc20249 none In a variety of disciplines large, numerical simulations have become a fundamental scientific tool. A key problem is how to inform or update such simulations in real time with large numbers of noisy observations, especially when many of the predicted variables are unobserved or the observed quantities bear a complex relation to the predicted variables. In principle, Bayesian methods provide a solution to this state-estimation problem, but evolving and updating the required probability distributions are problematic in practice, as the most straightforward approaches require computations of overwhelming size. These collaborative investigators will address these issues through the use of novel ensemble-based or Monte Carlo approaches and within the context of numerical weather prediction (NWP). Weather prediction is a challenging test of any approach to state-estimation, as operational models for the continental United States will soon have of the order of 108 degrees of freedom and ingest an observational data stream of more than a terabyte per day. The Principal Investigators application of ensemble state-estimation techniques to NWP is motivated by recent success in test problems with simulated observations, ranging from the prediction of isolated thunderstorms in a cloud model to global atmospheric flow in a general circulation model, and by potential advantages over existing operational data assimilation schemes. In particular, ensemble-based techniques directly estimate the uncertainty of the prior prediction and thereby avoid the assumption of stationary, isotropic forecast uncertainty made in most existing schemes. The benefits of this direct estimation will also likely increase as next-generation of NWP models reach resolutions of about 1 km and the use of remotely-sensed observations, such as from the operational network of Doppler radars, increases at those scales. Thus, this research will lay the foundation for a significant step forward in weather forecasting, especially at the scales where most severe and disruptive weather occurs. The proposed work will be carried out within the context of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, which is a next-generation NWP model designed for use at the horizontal resolutions of 1-10 km. The WRF model will be employed in operational weather forecasting and also will be supported for use by the research community. Use of WRF multiplies the educational benefits of this project beyond the direct involvement of students and postdoctoral researchers and provides a clear path to the implementation of results to improve routine weather forecasts. The team assembled within this group Information and Technology Research project includes leaders in ensemble assimilation techniques as well as members with expertise in numerical modeling, ensemble forecasting, and the interpretation of Doppler radar observations. The project will be coordinated through joint supervision of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, joint publications and annual workshops. In addition, common software will be used in all the research, thus facilitating the transfer of methodologies and expertise within the group. Successful completion of this research potentially will provide significantly improved capabilities in weather numerical models. These improvements will allow advances to be made in the forecasting of a variety of weather phenomena doc20265 none Loyola University has been awarded an ITR grant to educate students and contribute to the economic development of impoverished communities by means of collaborative projects with small community businesses and not-for-profit organizations in Chicago and surrounding areas that are heavily populated with groups that are under-represented in science and technology. The project will build a technology outreach program that brings together in a mentoring relationship, faculty, students and community members to create an IT entrepreneurship program which focuses on business software development Two academic goals of the project are to enhance the computer science education and experience of university students, and instill a sense of civic engagement in students and faculty. The research design will use data gathering and analysis techniques to measure outcomes related to these and other goals. The benefits to Loyola students will include hands-on experience in helping to develop real world software applications, as well as an understanding of the poor communities. The benefits to the Austin community include the learning of IT skills, a sense of entrepreneurship in IT and improvement in their environment coupled with financial gains doc20266 none Gurnis This is a project to develop a suite of tools to model multi-scale deformation for Earth Science problems. This effort is motivated by the need to understand interctions between the long-term evolution of plate tectonics and shorter term processes such as the evolution of faults during and between earthquakes. Several major data acquisition efforts within the Earth Sciences community are underway or at an advanced planning stage (EarthScope including PBO - Plate Boundary Observatory, InSAR - Satellite based Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar, USArray - a 400 element moveable seismic array, GPS - continuous Global Positioning System measurements). These observational programs will rapidly produce vast, high-quality data sets which record deformation of the Earth s surface on multiple time scales, from co-seismic and post-seismic to long term tectonic time scales, and on multiple spatial scales, from centimeters to thousands of kilometers. The Principal Investigators will produce a modeling package, usable by the entire Earth sciences community, that addresses the limitations of what is currently feasible and that is engineered with software evolution and growth as design requirements. Their efforts will extend the capabilities of the PYRE framework, an object-oriented environment capable of specifying and launching numerical simulations on multiple platforms, including Beowulf class parallel computers, that can function with grid-computing systems. Specifically, the community needs fexible modeling tools that incorporate complex rheologies, e.g., temperature-dependent, non-Newtonian, visco-elasto-plasticity with discrete failure planes and dynamic re-gridding to resolve evolving regions of high strain. From a computational perspective, this is an excellent time to pursue these objectives. Major advances in the PC industry enable scientists to build massively parallel PC cluster computers that facilitate realistic 3-D simulations at reasonable computational and monetary costs. Complimenting these hardware advances are major architectural solutions allowing more traditional codes to be bound together to solve complex, multi-scale, multi-physics problems. This will be a collaborative project between two Caltech units; The Center for Advanced Computer Research (CACR) and the Seismological Laboratory. After about eighteen months into the project, beta versions of the software will be made available to the community and final versions will be available without restrictions, installed on NSF PACI computing facilities, for example. The new geodynamics modeling framework will easily allow one to launch 2-D AND 3-D simulations on platforms ranging in scale from uniprocessors to the TerraGrid, making the code useful to a wide range of users from individual scientists and educators to inter disciplinary teams working on state of the art calculations posed within EarthScope doc20249 none In a variety of disciplines large, numerical simulations have become a fundamental scientific tool. A key problem is how to inform or update such simulations in real time with large numbers of noisy observations, especially when many of the predicted variables are unobserved or the observed quantities bear a complex relation to the predicted variables. In principle, Bayesian methods provide a solution to this state-estimation problem, but evolving and updating the required probability distributions are problematic in practice, as the most straightforward approaches require computations of overwhelming size. These collaborative investigators will address these issues through the use of novel ensemble-based or Monte Carlo approaches and within the context of numerical weather prediction (NWP). Weather prediction is a challenging test of any approach to state-estimation, as operational models for the continental United States will soon have of the order of 108 degrees of freedom and ingest an observational data stream of more than a terabyte per day. The Principal Investigators application of ensemble state-estimation techniques to NWP is motivated by recent success in test problems with simulated observations, ranging from the prediction of isolated thunderstorms in a cloud model to global atmospheric flow in a general circulation model, and by potential advantages over existing operational data assimilation schemes. In particular, ensemble-based techniques directly estimate the uncertainty of the prior prediction and thereby avoid the assumption of stationary, isotropic forecast uncertainty made in most existing schemes. The benefits of this direct estimation will also likely increase as next-generation of NWP models reach resolutions of about 1 km and the use of remotely-sensed observations, such as from the operational network of Doppler radars, increases at those scales. Thus, this research will lay the foundation for a significant step forward in weather forecasting, especially at the scales where most severe and disruptive weather occurs. The proposed work will be carried out within the context of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, which is a next-generation NWP model designed for use at the horizontal resolutions of 1-10 km. The WRF model will be employed in operational weather forecasting and also will be supported for use by the research community. Use of WRF multiplies the educational benefits of this project beyond the direct involvement of students and postdoctoral researchers and provides a clear path to the implementation of results to improve routine weather forecasts. The team assembled within this group Information and Technology Research project includes leaders in ensemble assimilation techniques as well as members with expertise in numerical modeling, ensemble forecasting, and the interpretation of Doppler radar observations. The project will be coordinated through joint supervision of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, joint publications and annual workshops. In addition, common software will be used in all the research, thus facilitating the transfer of methodologies and expertise within the group. Successful completion of this research potentially will provide significantly improved capabilities in weather numerical models. These improvements will allow advances to be made in the forecasting of a variety of weather phenomena doc20268 none University of Colorado Charbel Farhat ITR: A Data Driven Environment for Multiphysics Applications The objective of this project is to enable an efficient prediction capability for the response of multiscale interdisciplinary continuous interacting systems. This will be done by an effective union of information technologies, coupled multiphysics sciences, and automated massive experimentation for data gathering to steer adaptive modeling of the observed systemic behavior doc20269 none Robert J. Semper Exploratorium, San Francisco, CA The I-Guide Project: Extending Museum Experience Using Portable Devices, Wireless Networks, and Web Technology This multidisciplinary Information Technology Research project, involving a collaboration between the San Francisco Exploratorium and Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, addresses several areas of computing research, including ubiquitous or pervasive computing, context-aware computing, augmentation of the real world, human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work. The goal of this project is to gain a deeper understanding and to disseminate knowledge about how the use of a ubiquitous computing infrastructure may augment learning both during and after a visit to an interactive science center. The project focuses on three research domains: 1. The creation of a functional wireless nomadic computing infrastructure and on-line personalized delivery system to gain knowledge about how nomadic technologies can be configured to support learning in a complex setting in which there are multiple, competing constraints for a user s attention, 2. The development of an instructional design framework for creating learning, teaching and community-building resources capable of delivery on multiple devices using this system in order to explore which on-line information resources can better promote learner interests, sustain science learning, and improve science understanding and 3. Studies that explore the impact of these resources on the learner s use of the museum to determine the relationship between physical visit activities and post-visit on-line activities that can be supported by a personalized network experience. The project involves 1. The design and implementation of points of information (pi stations) and a data network for 10 museum exhibits, 2. The design and implementation of free standing kiosks for accessing Web-based content during the visit (for visitors who do not carry a wireless handheld device), 3. The design and implementation a dynamic, personalized Web-based server system for on-site (wireless) and remote (wired) access by visitors, 4. The develop of Web-based content for the exhibits as a group and for each exhibit, including a mixture of dynamically, customizable text, audio, and visual content and interactive discussion-group bulletin board functions, 5. Research on the utility of the system with 300 individual and small groups of learners, 6. The creation of a user-triggered method for capturing user experience for extending visitor engagement, and 7. The develop of a user model and instructional design framework for ubiquitous learning and guidance systems. The project is headquartered in the multimedia Exploratorium Learning Studio which includes facilities for project staff to engage in project design and implementation as well as research studies doc20270 none A highly dependable information infrastructure requires systems that are massively replicated, slow to fail, and resistant to attack. The LOCKSS system uses novel techniques for increasing dependability that show promise of wider applicability and increasing importance in this area, including: Building a fault-tolerant system from a large number of replicas that take part in opinion polls rather than a small number of replicas that take part in elections. Limiting the speed at which the system operates in order to limit the speed at which it can fail. Building a system that resists the activities of the bad guy without requiring that secrets be kept, in part by using public communication and a reputation system. Experience with this and other peer-to-peer systems shows that the real challenges of making systems work only become apparent at a realistic operational scale and running on real networks. The LOCKSS system is now running on the Internet with 60 peers worldwide. The project will exploit this LOCKSS test-bed to investigate areas in which further work is needed doc20271 none Deformable objects are ubiquitous in the physical world at all scales, from the molecular to the astrophysical. Many of life s basic functions, from protein folding and ligand binding at the micro level, to meiosis and mitosis at the cellular level, to the beating of a heart at the macro level, are best described as shape deformations in time. Flexible materials are finding increasing applications in engineering, across areas such as testing and manufacturing, and especially in biomedical applications, including prosthetic devices and minimally invasive imaging and surgical procedures. Special effects in the entertainment industry and haptics-based human-computer interfaces also require better models for flexible objects. Though deformation in nature can be based on a variety of underlying physical processes, we believe that there are a number of unifying principles common to understanding all deformations. Today, however, we lack a general computational theory of how to sense, represent, simulate, approximate, actuate, control, and render deformable objects. Research Goals and Methods The goal of this proposal is to undertake a foundational study of representations and algorithms for the computational modeling of deformable objects. Such modeling is challenging because deformations involve representations of shape and motion, and bring together continuous and discrete phenomena, as well as local and global constraints. Some of the specific challenges that have to be addressed are: 1. the behavior of deformable objects is defined by both geometry and physics and characterized by complex high-dimensional energy landscapes that need to be compactly encoded and efficiently interrogated for actuation, control, and planning; 2. physically accurate simulation of deformations is of-ten computationally expensive; we must find ways to approximate the full physics, while still guaranteeing the correctness, or at least appropriateness, of the solution that we compute in the parts of the system we care about; 3. discrete events, such as collisions and self-collisions, alter the continuous evolution law of the system; these events must be efficiently predicted or detected, and processed; 4. contact and self-contact must be modeled across rapid changes in the contact manifold, including its dimensionality (e.g., cloth draping over a rigid object); 5. deformations are often associated with changes in the shape topology (e.g., the surgeon s scalpel cutting the patient s skin tissue); such topology modifications must be smoothly accommodated in our models. Towards this goal we have put together a team of PIs and consultants advisors that combines expertise in scientific computing and physical simulation, geometric modeling and computation, motion planning and control, local and distributed sensing and actuation, model parameter estimation, as well as extensive experience in the computational modeling of specific deformable objects, from molecules to textiles, and in applications from medicine to entertainment doc20197 none This project will develop a new, integrative theory of software problem management by studying software problems in their ongoing sociotechnical contexts. The researchers willcomparatively analyze large bodies (gigabytes) of longitudinalproblem-report data from open-source software development projects such as networked computer games, Internet Web infrastructure, X-ray astronomy deep space imaging, and academic software research, using grounded-theory and automated concept, data, and text-mining methods. The project will analyze instances of (mis-)alignment between software artifacts, problem episodes, problem-management activities, problem-management infrastructure, and underlying social organization. Explanatory models will be built by linking patterns of (mis-)alignment among these elements to outcomes such as ease-of-repair, persistence of problems, amount of information exchanged, kinds of skills needed, and structure of social organization. The resulting models can guide the development of new tools, infrastructures, and organizational practices for software. They will also provide new perspectives on community-wide practices of capturing and managing knowledge. This research will provide a conceptual shift in understanding how system development and use are bound together with the richness, variety, and temporal evolution of the socio-technical contexts provided by the global software industry doc20273 none Because of the relentless march of the silicon-based electronics technology as predicted by Moore s Law, computation, storage, and communication are now woven into the fabrics of our lives. The emerging technology of flexible electronics, where electronics components such as transistors and wires are built on a thin flexible material, offers a similar opportunity to weave computation, storage, and communication into the fabric of the very clothing that we wear. The implications of seamlessly integrating a large number of communicating computation and storage resources, mated with sensors and actuators, in close proximity to the human body will transform many aspects of biomedical research and practice. For example, one can imagine biomedical applications where biometric and ambient sensors are woven into the garment of a patient or a person in a medically-critical or hazardous environment to trigger or modulate the delivery of a drug. To realize this vision outside the laboratory, radical innovation is required in the area of system-level information technology. These systems will not scale to widespread use if they are viewed simply as traditional chips or motherboards based on a different, flexible form factor. Rather, a rethinking of the architecture and the design methodology for all layers of these systems is needed. The reasons are two-fold. First, the underlying technology of electronics in flexible materials has characteristics and computation-communication cost trade-offs that are very different from that of silicon and PCB-based electronics. Second, the natural applications of these systems have environmental dynamics, physical coupling, resource constraints, infrastructure support, and robustness requirements that are very different from those faced by traditional systems. One of the challenges in developing the needed information technology architecture and design methodology for these systems is that one needs to both conduct experimental work and develop a conceptual understanding of the problem domain. This research studies: Application: Use as a driver application capability, reconfigurable fabric (R-Fabric) based on a combination of (i) the technology of flexible electronics using organic materials, and (ii) computing, communication, and sensing elements implemented as E-Buttons. Architecture: Develop the general architecture concepts and cost performance optimization techniques. The issues that we will focus on will include (i) appropriate primitives for composing the architecture, (ii) system interconnect network optimized for the electrical characteristics of the organic electronics, (iii) techniques to cope with the high ration of communication to computation cost, and (iv) architecture level self-configuration and re-configuration for robust operation. Programming: Develop techniques and primitives for programming a system composed of hundreds of computation, storage, sensing, and actuation elements that are individually resource constrained and are connected by a structured but fault-prone high-cost interconnect network. Processors: Develop domain-specific processor architecture optimized for these power-constrained, physically coupled applications. Design Methodology: Develop techniques and hybrid emulation platform for systematic architecture exploration, simulation, optimization, and reconfiguration of these systems doc20274 none Miller, Jon Dr. Miller is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He will study black hole accretion for a wide range of black hole masses and accretion rates, searching for common geometries and underlying physics. He will study inner accretion flows of stellar-mass black holes and active galactic nuclei at many wavelengths, and will search for radio, optical, and UV counterparts to the newly-accessible class of black holes of intermediate mass and or extremely high accretion rates. In education, he will develop a series of web-based video lectures on new and recent results in astronomy, whch may serve as a supplement to high school courses in earth science, physics, or astronomy doc20275 none Wets This research proposal is centered around approximation issues in stochastic programming, in particular as they arise in two quite challenging problems: equilibria problems in a stochastic environment and recourse problems involving partial differential equations. The stochastic equilibrium problem adds a new level of difficulty; rather than just optimizing one must find a mechanism to determine a price system under which the optimization takes place. Such equilibria have been derived by relying on fixed point theorems. Thirdly, because it is only possible to solve discretized versions of stochastic optimization problems, it is of paramount importance to investigate thoroughly approximation issues. Not only the question of approximating the stochastic process that describes the uncertainty but also how to improve the construction of this process from the available data and to analyze the effect this will have on the solution of the stochastic program. The field of stochastic programming provides mathematical tools for solving and analyzing models for decision making under uncertainty. This project will be concerned with two significant and difficult applications and with approximation issues: -- A problem in groundwater remediation which was selected because it requires both theoretical and computational developments. It is a stochastic optimization problem where the state of the system is obtained by solving a partial differential equation whose coefficients are rapidly oscillating (heterogeneous media) and stochastic (uncertainty about the media composition). The possibility of deriving a homogenized version of this problem will also be investigated. -- Walras equilibrium problem in an uncertain environment. This problem is selected because it adds a dimension to stochastic optimization in that one must also find price systems (setting up an equilibrium ) under which this stochastic optimization must take place. -- Approximation issues in stochastic programming. The question of having a reliable estimate for the parameters of a dynamic stochastic programming problem is raised. It is expected that a more comprehensive, approach which makes use of all the information available, rather than just the collected data will result in more reliable solutions for stochastic programming problems doc20276 none Over the last two years, we ve built a new type of experimental environment for research in distributed systems and networks: a highly configurable Internet emulator, known as Emulab. This time-and spaceshared facility has been used by numerous top institutions for research published in top venues. So successful is the project, that others are building their own Emulabs, centered around our software and design. While the individual power of such Emulabs in experimentation and teaching is great, connecting these into one large Research and Education Grid will offer unprecedented power and flexibility. We now propose, with dramatically expanded software and innovative algorithms, to establish the framework for a federated set of local Emulabs, each heterogeneous under local control and offering a unique set of hardware. Adding sites to the Grid will be easy and cheap, offering even small institutions a chance to contribute while gaining access to an immensely diverse and powerful resource. Individual sites users will have priority for local hardware, as well as control over local administrative, security, and resource allocation policies. Such autonomy will encourage organic growth, while intelligent allocation, scheduling, and swapping systems will provide abstraction. Researchers and students can be unconcerned with local complexities, instead seeing one large collection of a wide variety of hardware, including standard PCs, network processors, wireless nodes, and more. Even the links between Emulabs will be a useful resource for experiments wishing to operate on the real Internet, while controlled-bandwidth links will shield experiments that do not. Support for wireless, mobile nodes will open entirely new avenues for experimentation. Achieving this vision, however, involves daunting challenges. Creating the software to manage this will involve a dramatic extension of existing Emulab systems and the application of novel algorithms and techniques. Existing database systems will be augmented with failure-resistant peer-to-peer sharing of network information between Emulabs. Through these mechanisms, topology data will be shared for observation and experiment scheduling. Such scheduling on a non-static, wide-area system is a particularly challenging NP-complete problem which will require new algorithms to be designed and implemented. Automated systems to control experiment scheduling and allocation will be developed all the while facing the challenge of maintaining simple user interfaces. Emulab algorithms and software must also be extended to handle a wider variety of hardware, including wireless nodes. Aspect-oriented programming and component technology, developed at Utah, will manage software interfaces for complex and numerous inter-operating hardware systems. In addition, methods for sharing, saving, and restoring state between machines, as well as maintaining performance isolation while multiplexing multiple virtual nodes on a single computer, will be explored. The incorporation of multiple Emulabs into a single federated entity offers a rich opportunity to overcome a wide variety of network research and software engineering challenges, and allows for experimentation on an unprecedented scale. Users, ranging from individual students to large research groups, will benefit from a greatly expanded ability to controllably and faithfully emulate large real networks, coupled with the availability of diverse and cutting-edge network components. Unifying resources in a standard and consistent way will simplify experimentation, and make accurate emulation an integral part of systems and network instruction and research. The resulting loosely-coupled distributed system will enable experiments in a host of areas. As just one example, if Emulab is successful in one of its core goals, isolation, experiments too dangerous to conduct in the wild could be run. Realistic Internet War Games could be staged, in which attackers and defenders engage in a simulation of possible Internet attack scenarios, replete with destructive and contagious worms and dangerous automated counterattacks. Only in an Emulab Petri dish could they be safely evaluated at reasonable scale doc20277 none The proposal requests funding for partial travel support for the Electron-Electron Interactions at TeV Energies Workshop at Santa Cruz in December 7-9, . The funds will be used to support graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who might otherwise not be able to afford to attend the meeting doc20278 none Novel health monitoring strategies for Highway Bridges and Constructed Facilities are of primary significance to the vitality of our economy. Using latest enabling technologies, the objectives of health monitoring are to detect and assess the level of damage to the civil infrastructure due to severe loading events (caused by natural loads or man-made events) and or progressive environmental deterioration. Damage identification is performed based on changes in salient response features of the structure, as measured by deployed sensor arrays. Due to the challenging nature of the technical problems associated with this topic, substantial research efforts during the past thirty years were undertaken by many researchers in many areas related to this broad interdisciplinary topic. The proposed research will build on these developments, and address a number of fundamental and basic research challenges towards a next-generation, versatile, efficient, and practical health monitoring strategy. In such a strategy, data from thousands of sensors will be analyzed with long-term and real-time assessment decisionmaking implications. A flexible and scalable software architecture framework will be developed to integrate real-time heterogeneous sensor data, database and archiving systems, computer vision, data analysis and interpretation, numerical simulation of complex structural systems, visualization, probabilistic risk analysis, and rational statistical decision making procedures. This development will be undertaken in a concerted and focused comprehensive approach by an inter-disciplinary team of Computer Scientists (CS) and Structural Engineers (SE). It is believed that this inter-disciplinary approach will synergize the resolution of basic technical challenges and allow development of the framework for future applications in this field. The new framework will also speed up the discovery of new knowledge related to the progressive or sudden deterioration of civil infrastructure systems and the corresponding damage mechanisms. The planned research activities will not only culminate in the deployment of a robust, field-implementable monitoring system, but it will also advance the research frontiers in several active, cutting-edge research areas involving grid storage (curated databases, filesystems, database systems), knowledge-based data integration and advanced query processing, information extraction (data mining, modeling, analysis and visualization), knowledge extraction (reliability risk analysis, structural health assessment, physics-based model development), and decision support systems (e.g., emergency response, preventive maintenance, rehabilitation). The entire project will be developed around actual Bridge Testbeds in cooperation with the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), and Industry Partners. These Testbeds will be densely instrumented and continuously monitored, and the recorded response databases will be made available for maximum possible use by interested researchers and engineers worldwide. The actual recorded data streams from both laboratory models and bridge testbeds will be a major component for all phases of this research effort. An Internet Portal will integrate all elements and act as a Gateway for the Project. The proposed 5 year project duration will allow the opportunity for resolving key basic research issues of relevance to Structural Health Monitoring, and collaboration between CS and SE is simply a necessity. State-of-the-art data acquisition, transmission, and management, involvement of computer vision, refinement of nonlinear system identification and modeling, and practical implementation constitute the basic research framework. Applications include long-term condition assessment and emergency response after natural or man-made disasters and acts of terrorism for all types of large constructed facilities. From a broader perspective, the proposed effort will be a major boost in defining and shaping additional long-term interaction and collaboration opportunities between CS and SE, with wide national and international implications, as well as strongly benefiting from leveraging resources and ongoing monitoring activities doc20279 none Methods and technologies for effectively supporting application development have not kept pace with the changing character of applications and development groups. Applications increasingly span multiple organizations, involving thousands of interacting and heterogeneous computers. The creation and evolution of these inter-organizational systems typically involves many separate development organizations, who contribute to multiple software systems that must interact to support inter-organizational activities. This research project is focused on developing the knowledge for effectively building and evolving software for distributed inter-organizational systems and by distributed multi-organization teams. As the problem is intrinsically interdisciplinary, so is the approach. This project will create novel development methods and technologies based upon an integrated social and technological perspective. Insights come from many quarters. From a technical standpoint, the emergence of adaptive software architectures and event-based technologies suggest novel approaches to inter-organizational applications. On the social side, previous successes in coordination and awareness technologies must be brought to inter-organizational settings. An overarching concern is that inter-organizational settings provide no central authority - rather, social arrangements and interactions play dominant roles in shaping technology development and deployment. The project will be empirically grounded through research partnerships with four external organizations doc20280 none tags that specify, e.g., which words need emphasis, and phrasing (e.g., where to pause). (ii) Based on these tags, the system has to compute a fundamental frequency contour. (iii) Severe modification of the stored speech fragments ( acoustic units ) to obtain these contours. The central goal of the project is to address these research problems, and create a TTS system that will make the next generation of TTS based remedial systems viable doc20281 none One of the difficulties facing computer security systems is getting users and administrators to adopt them. The project studies a new approach to deploying security services called Deployment-Oriented Security. The first question is how to deploy security services in a viral-like fashion. The idea is that once a small set of users adopt a security system, they gradually get their friends to adopt the system and as a result the service propagates through the population. The project studies how this meme-like strategy applies to various security services such as secure e-mail, anonymity mechanisms, electronic voting, secure file systems, e-cash, etc. Another approach to promoting the deployment of security systems is to deploy the required infrastructure on the fly. For example, can one deploy an anonymizing server or a fair-exchange service on the fly to enable that service? How does one identify trusted hosts to deploy the service and how does one revoke corrupt or misbehaving hosts? The third topic studied in this project is how to deploy protection mechanisms in environments where information is being shared. The project will use new cryptographic tools to develop efficient key management techniques for broadcast data doc20282 none ed away from in the hope of increasing productivity and portability. Other difficulties occur as the result of complicated treatments of features such as concurrency and event handling, which again play a central role in many embedded applications. Significant bugs can occur if programmers do not adhere to a carefully worked out discipline of coding when they use such features, but there is very little that the underlying type system or semantics can do to help in detecting these problems. This project is working to bridge the gap between these two important fields, and to demonstrate how embedded systems development can benefit from and inform programming language research. In particular, the project is focusing on the ongoing development and use of a high-level language called Timber that supports an implicit notion of concurrency, asynchronous communication, and non-blocking, reactive programming. All of these features are directly relevant in the context of embedded systems design. In addition, the project is developing new analysis and compilation techniques that enable non-functional aspects of behavior to be specified using high-level constraints and policies for graceful degradation. Because they are specified at a high level, these constraints can continue to serve as meaningful descriptions of required behavior, even as programs evolve to accommodate new functionality or to support new platforms. The key to success is a declarative approach in which programmers focus on what is required, while compilers determine how it should be accomplished, using the results of analysis to guide the selection of an appropriate, low-level implementation strategy. With the transition from research to industry in mind, the project is focusing on tools for PC 104 systems, which is an industry standard and an important sector in today s embedded systems market. In the longer term, the project is contributing to shifts in attitude and beneficial changes in the role that programming language technology can plays in the delivery of more widespread, more flexible, more reliable, and more secure embedded systems doc20283 none Madau In currently popular cosmological scenarios at very early times, the gas within protogalactic halos with masses comparable to those of present-day dwarf ellipticals experienced rapid cooling and fragmentation. These fragments formed massive stars , which in turn synthesized heavy elements, and exploded as Type II supernovae, enriching the surrounding medium. These subgalactic stellar systems then generated the ultraviolet radiation and mechanical energy that reheated and reionized most of the hydrogen in the cosmos. The history of the Universe during and soon after these crucial formative stages is recorded in the thermal state, ionization degree, and chemical composition of the all-pervading intergalactic medium (IGM). Throughout the epoch of structure formation, the IGM becomes clumpy under the influence of gravity, and acts as a source for the gas that accretes, cools, and forms stars within subgalactic fragments, and as a sink for the metal enriched material, energy, and radiation which they eject. The study of the gaseous and stellar content of the high-redshift Universe thus provides invaluable insight into this era and the basic processes that govern the collapse, cooling, and evolution of some of the earliest formed cosmological structures. This theoretical project will study the epoch of .first light, the astrophysics of protogalactic systems, the intergalactic medium and quasar absorbers in the context of current theories of galaxy formation. It will focus on a series of critical questions in each of these interrelated areas: (1) cosmological reionization, (2) the epoch of first light, and (3) protogalaxy halos, SN-driven winds, and the metal enrichment of the IGM. A coordinated approach will be pursued involving theoretical studies of the controlling physical processes, and direct numerical simulation of their effects within the current paradigm for structure formation. The results of this program should aid in the planning for future large observational facilities such as the California Extremely Large Telescope, the Low Frequency Array, the Square Kilometer Array, and the Next Generation Space Telescope doc20284 none This project focuses on facilitating and augmenting social interaction in virtual environments, particularly immersive virtual environments. Virtual environment technology allows individuals to freely move about digital worlds in real time observing and interacting with the environment and virtual others within it. Increased sophistication of virtual environment technology and digital imaging of people promises a new age for technologically mediated social interaction of geographically separated individuals. However, in order to implement such interaction virtually in meaningful and productive ways, an understanding of the parameters of people s perceptions of each other s non-verbal signals (e.g., facial expressions, gestures, gaze) within virtual environments is necessary. Such an understanding will provide a hierarchical taxonomy of the necessary and sufficient non-verbal signals that are critical to social interaction within virtual environments and, therefore, must be tracked and rendered among interactions in virtual environments. Realizing the objectives of the proposed project will advance scientific understanding in the areas of social interaction and non-verbal behavior, human participation in collaborative virtual environments, and technological (e.g., computer vision) aspects of automated tracking and rendering of human on-verbal signals doc20285 none ITR AP: Simulation-Based Medical Planning for Cardiovascular Disease The current paradigm for interventional and surgery planning for the treatment of congenital and acquired cardiovascular disease relies exclusively on diagnostic imaging data to define the present state of the patient, empirical data to evaluate the efficacy of prior treatments for similar patients, and the judgement of the surgeon to decide on a preferred treatment. The individual variability and inherent complexity of human biological systems is such that diagnostic imaging and empirical data alone are insufficient to predict the outcome of a given treatment for an individual patient. The specific objectives described in the present proposal are to develop a Problem Solving Environment for Simulation-Based Medical Planning combining (i) the construction of patient-specific preoperative geometric models of the human vascular system directly from medical imaging data, (ii) the modification of these models to incorporate multiple potential interventional and surgical plans, (iii) the generation of finite element meshes of the treatment plans, (iv) the simulation of blood flow in these patient-specific models, and (v) the visualization and quantification of resulting physiologic information. Techniques for identifying vessel boundaries from computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data using two- and three-dimensional level set methods will be improved to enhance accuracy and efficiency. The ultimate result of the successful completion of the outlined tasks will be the development of an integrated Problem Solving Environment for Simulation-Based Medical Planning incorporating image segmentation, geometric modeling, mesh generation, computational mechanics, and scientific visualization techniques doc20286 none Fine-scale pelagic predator-prey interactions: Hawaiian spinner dolphins and the mesopelagic boundary Whitlow W. L. Au Doctoral Student: Kelly J. Benoit-Bird Spinner dolphins in Hawaii feed at night on small fish, shrimp, and squid. Their prey is very deep during the day but migrates close to the surface and near the coastline every night. Spinner dolphins follow the movements of their prey. They move inshore and offshore along with their prey s migration and they dive to the depths at which their prey is most abundant. Spinner dolphins also forage specifically on high-density prey patches, small areas that have more prey than those around them do. Other studies of pelagic predators, however, have not shown this type of overlap with prey. Data will be collected on both spinner dolphin predators and their prey simultaneously using scanning sonar, a device that will allow the location and abundance of predator and prey to be plotted in three-dimensions. Foraging dolphins will be tracked from a boat with the scanning sonar and the density and geometry of prey patches will be measured. Changes in these characteristics will be observed as the dolphins forage to observe how they affect the behavior of their prey. Dolphins probably use echolocation, a natural sonar system, to find their prey. How this system is used by animals in the wild to forage has however, not been studied. To begin to understand echolocation s role in foraging, the rate of echolocation clicks, individual sonar signals, will be measured while measuring the distance of the dolphins from their food. If spinner dolphins are using echolocation to find their food, the number of clicks and their production rate should increase as dolphins get closer to their prey. This work will determine if pelagic predators can overlap with their prey at small scales, which behaviors allow this to happen, and what role echolocation plays in dolphin s search for food doc20287 none Heacox Dr. William Heacox will analyze gravitational microlens survey data in the current literature in order to deduce the mass distributions of the objects causing the lensing, and thus help characterize their natures. Microlensing is a promising means of detecting otherwise undetectable planetary- to stellar-mass objects in such locations as the halo of our galaxy, where a large amount of dark matter of unknown nature is known to exist. In a typical microlens survey, a few million stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud are monitored periodically to detect the optical amplification caused by gravitational lensing when a Galactic halo object (the lens) passes nearly in front of a background star (the source). While the resulting amplification amplitude depends upon lens mass, it also depends upon such unknowable quantities as the relative velocity of lens and source, and the distance of closest encounter of the lens to the line-of-sight to the source. This complication has prevented accurate estimates of lens masses, so that the observation of a few tens of microlenses has not greatly aided in the identification of halo dark matter. Dr. Heacox research consists of the application of sophisticated statistical modeling techniques to the entire set of observed microlenses in a survey, in order to determine the statistical distribution of lens masses (rather than the masses of individual lenses). The method uses all that is knowable about the kinematics (velocities, distances) of lens and source populations, together with the set of observed microlens parameters, to infer all that can be deduced about the mass distribution of the underlying population causing the lensing. In application to the Galactic halo microlenses, the result should be the first credible estimate of the mass distribution of the halo dark matter, and a concomitant increase in our understanding of the nature of this material. The nature of dark matter in the Universe is one of the outstanding problems in modern astronomy; a better understanding of the component in our galaxy will be a useful first step in determining what most of the Universe is made of. This award is made under the auspices of the Research in Undergraduate Institutions (RUI) program at NSF doc20288 none Smith Collisions and close encounters between galaxies can cause major changes in the galaxies, dramatically altering both the morphology and star formation rate. A frequent consequence of such an interaction is the production of extended tails and bridges, which often contain massive young stars. These structures may fragment and or disperse, forming new dwarf galaxies and or enriching the intergalactic medium. At present, there are still many outstanding questions about the properties of the interstellar gas and star formation in these features. What are the rates and efficiencies of star formation in these features, and how do these depend on the interaction parameters and timescales? What are the properties of the interstellar gas in these structures? Are the properties of these features consistent with them being the precursors of dwarf galaxies? Is star formation in these features subject to a `threshold effect, only occurring above a `critical gas surface density? To address these questions, Dr. Beverly Smith, at East Tennessee State University, will carry out a comprehensive multi-wavelength study of a sample of two dozen tails and bridges and a similar size comparison sample of dwarf galaxies. Using multi-wavelength data, Dr. Smith will measure the atomic to molecular hydrogen ratios, metallicities, star formation rates, and efficiencies in these tails and bridges, and will determine how these depend upon the parameters of the interaction. She will determine how the properties of these tails and bridges compare with those of dwarf galaxies. These observations will be done in conjunction with hydrodynamical modeling of the systems in the sample, which will better define the interaction parameters and help determine the conditions needed to trigger star formation in tails and bridges. Using these results, Dr. Smith will search for a star formation `threshold in tails and bridges analogous to that found for galactic disks, and will investigate whether the efficiency of star formation is higher in tidal features than in features caused by ram pressure stripping, as predicted by theoretical models. This award is made under the auspices of the Research in Undergraduate Institutions program at NSF doc20289 none Mechanisms of Post-Copulatory Choice in a Coercive Mating System Dr. Karen S. Oberhauser Michelle J. Solensy When sexual coercion, sometimes called forced copulation, is prevalent in a species, females have limited control over the outcome of individual mating attempts. However, they may evolve other means of determining the males with which they mate, or the males that actually fertilize their eggs. Mating attempts in monarch butterflies typically involve a lengthy ground struggle during which males sometimes force females to mate. Females may use this struggle to assess male quality and adjust their level of resistance accordingly (precopulatory choice), or they may bias sperm use in favor of high quality males (postcopulatory choice). Postcopulatory mate choice by females could be an important selective force driving the evolution of male reproductive strategies, and should be especially important in species in which coercion is a common mating strategy. In a preliminary study, there was little evidence to support the existence of precopulatory female choice in monarch butterflies. Studies addressing this topic will be continued in both laboratory and wild populations. Studies of postcopulatory choice will address the hypothesis that females use spermatophore size as an indicator of male mating history, and bias sperm use in favor of males that have mated previously. Spermatophore size is a reliable, honest, and detectable signal of male mating success, and previous work has demonstrated that male mating success is heritable. Thus, females may benefit by selecting sperm based on this cue since mating success should be transmitted to their sons. The proposed experimental design separates the effect of biased sperm use from the potentially confounding effect of sperm competitiveness doc20290 none J. Wang, R. Gulliver, N. Leung University of Minnesota This award provides partial support for active research mathematicians with limited means of support to attend and participate in the Yamabe Memorial Symposium to be held at the University of Minnesota in the fall semester of . The main speakers will include Peter Li, Richard Hamilton, Fang-Hua Lin and Bennett Chow. These talks are expected to be comprehensible introductions to recent high-level research on aspects of geometry and analysis. Further information, including an updated list of main speakers, is available at http: www.math.umn.edu ~gulliver confs yamabe.html doc20291 none One of the major difficulties facing mathematics today is the fact that most people have no idea about what is happening in contemporary mathematics or why this field is important. Unfortunately, most contemporary research in this field is difficult, if not impossible, to explain to students. The problem is that much of today s mathematics builds upon years or even centuries of prior mathematical research. As a consequence, undergraduate students rarely have the background to experience what is new and exciting in this field. In this project, the PI and his collaborators are attempting to change this culture by creating a series on on-line activities that provide students with the background and the tools necessary to experience and investigate certain contemporary topics in mathematics. The activities are drawn from the areas of mathematics known as dynamical systems theory and fractal geometry. These are two relatively new areas of mathematics that have widespread applicability in all areas of science and engineering. In addition, much of the current research in this field involves a significant experimental component involving computer graphics. Most importantly, much of the PI s current research in these areas involves iteration of simple expressions (such as quadratic functions), and so many of the ideas in this field can be readily explained to students with only a high school background in mathematics. In this project, the PI is developing a series of ten stand-alone modules, each of which is designed to acquaint the user with a particular topic of interest in these fields. Each module includes streaming video introductions, online software (java applets), computer generated animations, and suggested areas for student investigation. The materials being developed can be woven into courses throughout the curriculum, ranging from introductory math courses for liberal arts students and precalculus to calculus and linear algebra courses, to give students an ongoing glimpse of the excitement of modern mathematics. Alternatively, the modules can be concatenated in a string of activities designed to bring the student to the forefront of active research in this area doc20292 none This project is using the twin themes of spectroscopy and photochemistry as a conceptual basis for developing chemistry lectures and chemistry laboratories in upper level undergraduate courses which are logical extensions of the materials presented in the lower level courses. This intergrated approach aims to provide students with a clearer connection between the concepts presented at different stages in their undergraduate education in chemistry. The project is also producing software modules which are Spectroscopy Tutors that aim to facilitate the learning of spectroscopy (IR, UV-VIS, NMR) and assist in the intergration of spectroscopy and photochemistry throughout the undergraduate curriculum including undergraduate research. These visions are being achieved through a collaboration with Professor Leonard Fine and students at Columbia University. In addition, partnerships have been established with faculty at two undergraduate institutions (Professor Tom Poon, Claremont Colleges and Professor Raymond Dominey, University of Richmond) and a community college (Professor Ron Rusay, Diablo State College). The project couples the undergraduate institutions by establishing an undergraduate exchange program in which students from the undergraduate institutions spend a summer at Columbia University under the mentorship of the PI, extending and enriching research projects, which are initiated in the academic year. The PI is also mentoring an undergraduate selected from Columbia Unversity s Minority Affairs summer research program for undergraduates. The PI is mentoring a postdoctoral associate who is involved in all aspects of the project and in particular the intergration of research and education of undergraduates. The postdctoral associate is assisting the PI in the development of course materials, the development of IT tools for courses and laboratories and in the development of course materials, the development of IT tools for course and laboratories, and the development of the photochemical experiments for the undergraduate laboratories and for undergraduate research. The outcomes of the project will be disseminated through presentations at professional meetings, publications in professional journals and an annual workshop led by the partnering faculty. As part of the dissemination effort, the Spectroscopy Tutors produced will be made available to undergraduates across the nation via the world wide web. In addition, the PI is producing a web based video course in which he teaches undergraduates spectroscopy and organic photochemistry. As part of the course, modules are being developed to assist the students in learning the fundamental principles of organic photochemistry. It is anticipated that the course and laboratory materials, as well as IT modules developed in the project, can also be profitably employed in the curriculum for the non-SMET education of undergraduates. In collaboration with the Associate Dean for Assessment at Columbia University, the PI is defining the desired educational objectives for the students experiences in the courses and laboratories and IT modules. This assessment process aims to measure student performance on course-specific tests and on the effectiveness of the Spectroscopy Tutors in the enhancing of learning by students doc20293 none Thuan Galaxy formation is one of the most fundamental problems in astrophysics. Most high-z objects observed thus far are found to be rich in heavy elements, thus not qualifying as bona fide primeval galaxies. An alternative approach is to search among nearby galaxies that may be actively forming stars for the first time at the present epoch. The best candidates for such a search are extremely metalpoor blue compact dwarfs (BCDs). They constitute excellent laboratories for pursuing the following cosmological problems. The standard hot big bang model of nucleosynthesis (SBBN) is one of the key quantitative tests of big bang cosmology. The primordial abundance Yp of 4He, together with that of Deuterium, is crucial for checking the consistency of SBBN. The relative insensitivity of 4He production to the baryonic matter density means that Yp needs to be determined to a precision of better than 1%. Dr. Trinh Thuan, at the University of Virginia, will evaluate systematic effects and correct Yp for them to attain that precision. He will search for more extremely metal-deficient BCDs in the newly released Sloan Digital Sky Survey spectral data base to improve the determination of Yp. The study of the BCD stellar populations will allow them to understand the properties of massive stellar populations in very low metallicity environments, like those prevailing in the era of galaxy formation. Moreover, Cold Dark Matter models predict that low-mass dwarf galaxies could still be forming at the present epoch because they originate from density fluctuations considerably smaller than those giving rise to the giant ones. Thus establishing the existence of young dwarf galaxies in the local universe will put strong constraints on the primordial density fluctuation spectrum. Dr. Thuan will apply age-dating techniques which he has developed and refined to a sample of very metal-deficient BCDs. There is a dichotomy in the way star formation proceeds in BCDs. In some, star formation occurs in a passive low-level diffuse fashion, with a low extinction. In others, active star formation occurs at a high level in Super Star Clusters, mixed with dense gas and a large amount of dust. Dr. Thuan will study the physical parameters which govern that dichotomy. Dr. Thuan will also study how the metallicity of the neutral gas compare with that of the ionized gas. Is the metallicity of the H ii region higher because of self-enrichment? Which constraints can be put on the time scale for the mixing of newly formed heavy elements in the H ii region with the HI gas? If the metallicity of the HI gas is very low, that would put constraints on the amount of metal pre-enrichment by the hypothetical Population III stars during the early pregalactic epoch. Such studies will shed new light on the study of abundances in high-redshift damped Lyman-alpha systems. Finally, Dr. Thuan will use these models to study correlations of the efficiency of mass exchange between the galaxy and its environment with global properties of BCDs such as their sizes, luminosities, metallicities, star formation rates, etc doc20294 none Terndrup Many outstanding issues concerning the formation and evolution of the Milky Way require improved knowledge of the kinematics and chemical enrichment patterns of local metal-poor subdwarfs in the Galaxy s halo and thick disk, and how these compare to globular cluster stars. Even after several recent efforts, current samples do not adequately cover the range of metallicities and kinematics seen in globular clusters, while observations of local metal-poor giants give tantalizing evidence of significant differences between local halo stars and those in globular clusters of the same metallicity. This project will improve the observational situation by obtaining accurate and self-consistent measures of temperature, reddening, and composition for a critically selected sample of approximately 150 subdwarfs identified in recent surveys for metal-poor stars. There will also be new theoretical efforts to explore the dependence of the main-sequence luminosity on detailed stellar chemical composition and on often-neglected physics such as helium diffusion and rotation. This project will also yield valuable information on the kinematics and star formation history of the halo and the metal-poor tail of the thick disk, identify samples of subdwarfs that are well matched in abundance patterns and kinematics to globular cluster stars, and improve the temperature and abundance scales of globular cluster main sequences for comparison to spectroscopic determinations on the giant branch. There will also be a systematic study of the relative and absolute ages of globular clusters, with a focus on reducing the errors in the theoretical plane. Importantly, this project will enable the community to take full advantage of the future FAME and SIM satellite missions, which will measure accurate parallaxes for the subdwarfs in the sample and thereby yield the absolute calibration of the main-sequence luminosity for globular clusters and hence their distances. Current distance estimates are only good to 10 - 15%, resulting in age errors of about 30%, insufficient to reliably explore the age spread in the globular cluster system or even set lower limits to the age of the Universe by comparison with the predictions of stellar evolution theory doc20295 none Olszewski Dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSph) are likely to be the smallest systems in the Universe which contain both dark matter and luminous matter. The dark matter content and distribution in dSph galaxies can be studied in detail if one can collect enough kinematic data to constrain models. Dr. Mario Mateo, at the University of Michigan, and Dr. Edward Olszewski, at the University of Arizona, will use three new technologies to make a factor of 10-30 advance in the number of stellar velocities measured per galaxy. The goal is no longer to weigh the dSph s, but to derive the distribution of mass, thus the distribution of the dark matter. While small steps have been taken towards that goal to date, with heroically collected samples of up to 200 stars, it is only with substantially larger samples that reasonable models will be distinguished from each other. Such mapping of the mass within dSph galaxies is required to critically compare their dark-matter halos with the many - sometimes contradictory - predictions of models of galaxy and large-scale structure formation in the Universe. These researchers will use a new telescope - the Magellan 6.5-meter telescope of Las Campanas Observatory in Chile - a new echelle spectrograph - the Magellan-Inamori-Kyocera Echelle (MIKE) spectrograph - and a new 256-fiber system to feed this spectrograph a large number of stars simultaneously. This instrumental combination will allow the collection of 750- kinematic samples per galaxy doc20296 none de la Pena In this project the Principal Investigator (PI) introduces three related problem areas of key importance in the study of the probabilistic and statistical properties of sums and functions of independent and dependent random variables. In particular, the PI proposes to develop sharp inequalities for the moments of self-normalized processes, as well as for sums of multilinear forms and U-statistics (unbiased statistics) in independent and dependent variables. In addition, the PI intends to further develop a novel approach to approximating the expected time it takes a process (with a general dependence structure) to hit a given boundary. The interest in the study of self-normalized processes stems from their use as key quantities in the development of non-parametric estimators, as well as for their use as pivotal quantities for the creation of confidence intervals and tests of hypothesis. For example, the t-statistic is a self-normalized and unit-less estimator commonly used in the testing of hypotheses about the mean of a distribution with unknown variance. The interest on sharp results for self-normalized estimators is based in part in the need for approximating p-values and the power of tests in situations when the assumptions on the variables need to be relaxed (e.g. independence, normality and or identical distribution). The study of results related to sums of multilinear forms and U-statistics is related to their use as building blocks in the development of certain stochastic integrals, as well as for their use as the typical unbiased estimators in statistics. Moreover, sums of multilinear forms in independent random variables are frequently used in approximating non-linear estimators of moving averages, which are of fundamental importance in econometric studies. The proposed work concerning the development of new and improved tools (under relaxed assumptions) for the study of statistical estimators is important for the assessment of hypotheses with direct implications in medical and social sciences as well as engineering through its connection to the comparison of competing treatments and technologies under a wider set of scenarios than is currently possible. The study on how long it takes for a random process to hit a boundary, on the basis of historical evidence, has potential important implications in the physical sciences and economics including in the study of how long it will take for 1) a tornado to hit a city, 2) a person to develop cancer, 3) an earthquake to occur or 4) the stock market to crash doc20297 none There is a keen interest in developing advanced ceramics and innovative composites for a wide variety of applications including structural components, energy-efficient environmental and thermal barriers, and high performance electronic and sensor materials. Structural ceramics have unique properties that can be used to great advantage in advanced high temperature applications (diesel engines, turbines). Innovative ceramic composites are also being developed for use in high-temperature applications, wear resistant materials, and novel sensor and smart structure applications. Smart ceramics and piezo ceramic patch sensors may be attached to the external surfaces of structures, or directly embedded within materials to provide in-situ measurements of structural behavior. Thin film oxide-based structures and ferroelectric perovskites, are needed for fabrication of electronic devices such as sensors, transducers, nanomagnetics, filters and non-volatile memories. This continuation proposal focuses on the basic science issues affecting both advanced structural ceramics and composites and electronic ceramic materials in a synergistic manner using innovative materials processing methods including nanoengineering. The subproject areas of particular interest to the Center for Advanced Materials and Smart Structures (CAMSS) include: o Nanoengineered and surface engineered coatings and materials (functionally gradient coatings, fuel cell materials,environmental and thermal barrier coatings, and metal-ceramic joining) o Nanocomposites and other innovative composites (nanostructured ceramic composite coatings, self-reinforced Si3N4 composites, nanomagnetics, and advanced oxide based fiber composites) and o Electronic and smart materials and structures (advanced electronic materials, novel sensor materials and health monitoring-smart structures) The proposed center continuation activity will develop strong research and education programs in the science and technology of nanostructured and other advanced materials. Nanoscale science and technology is expected to revolutionize next-generation technology ranging from structural materials to smart structures, microelectronics tomedicine. To position US industry strategically in a leadership role, we need to equip students with the multidisciplinary skills needed for nano and other innovative engineering fields. We seek to create a crossdisciplinary infrastructure that transcends departmental barriers and lends itself to the integration of research and education in this vital field of advanced materials and smart structures. The primary goals of this program are: (1) continue to promote advanced materials engineering as a unifying research and education discipline; (2) continue to develop multidisciplinary curricula for training the new generation of graduate students; and (3) continue to recruit talented undergraduate and graduate students from under-represented groups into this field of immense technological importance. All the subproject areas of this continuation proposal listed above will emphasize the following aspects of advanced and nanocrystalline materials in a coherent way, utilizing the complementary skills of the research teams at NC A 2) characterization (macro, micro and nano); 3) structure-property correlations; and 4) modeling. Research facilities associated with NSF CREST, NCSU-NSF Atomic Resolution Electron Microscope Facility, NSF ERC -University of Florida (connectivity) and the ORNL High Temperature Materials Laboratory facilities will play a pivotal role in the research based training of these students. The NSF Atomic Resolution TEM Facility at NCSU under the direction of NCSU Co-PI (JN) represents a unique research facility in the country, where students can be trained in atomic-level characterization techniques that are essential for nanoengineering of novel materialsand structures. The above research facilities (mechanical test equipment, innovative processing facilities and various characterization facilities) will provide a unique platform to foster multidisciplinary approaches for integrating graduate education and research, recruiting minority graduate and undergraduate students, and introducing new course curricula in this field of vital importance. The results of these fundamental studies will be used to develop models to explain novel advanced materials and unusual properties of the nanostructured materials.The eventual aim of these activities will be to develop predictive tools for designing advanced and novel nanostructured materials with unique properties so that a knowledge base for creating materials by design will be established. Strong outreach and technical transfer efforts targeted towards the local and global community will also continue as a part of the center activity doc20298 none Dissertation Research: Coercion and Reconciliation in a Socially Monogamous Species Robert G. Jaeger, Ph. D. Ethan D. Prosen, M.S. This research project examines the effects of aggression on socially monogamous behavior using the red-backed salamander (Plethodon cinereus) as a model organism. In laboratory studies, some males and females of this territorial species have shown a preference for associating with their partner relative to other individuals of the opposite sex (i.e., are socially monogamous). This preference is unknown in other amphibians. Preliminary evidence implies that both sexes direct aggressive behavior towards partners that associate with individuals of the opposite sex (i.e., are fickle ). This increased aggression, or sexual coercion , may be what drives some individuals toward social monogamy. Primate studies have shown that reconciliation, or making-up behavior, reduces the negative effects that result from aggression between individuals that often interact. There has been a call for research exploring the possibility of reconciliation in animals outside of the primates. Red-backed salamanders exhibit two of the three minimum requirements for reconciliation: long-term memory and individual recognition. Therefore, it is hypothesized that partners will display reconciliation behavior after aggression following a fickle event. These experiments look at how intimidation shapes the social behavior of red-backed salamanders. This research tests the general hypothesis that aggression can maintain socially monogamous partnerships. Parental investment theory predicts social monogamy to be rare, especially when males provide no direct resources to offspring. Because red-baked salamander males provide no direct resources to offspring, this species provides an ideal situation for the exploration of the maintenance of social monogamy. In addition, finding evidence of reconciliation in a lower vertebrate such as salamanders would open up a field dominated by primate studies doc20299 none Krolik Black holes are tremendously powerful sources of light. In aggregate, the total light power produced by black holes in the Universe is almost as much as that generated by stars. However, the mechanism by which black holes are able to radiate so much light has remained mysterious for many years. The fundamental reason for this mystery is that, without friction, matter in orbit around a massive object would go round and round forever, and no energy would be released at all. Except for the region immediately outside its edge, this rule is as true for a black hole as for an ordinary object. Because friction caused by ordinary viscosity is far too weak to account for the observed rate at which mass is swallowed by black holes; the source of this friction had been a mystery for decades. During the s, however, we gradually gained confidence in what was once the speculative suggestion that tangled magnetic fields would spontaneously grow in strength in accreting matter, and the forces they create would be strong enough to provide the necessary friction . Since calculations of tangled magnetic field forces are very complex they must be done with large computer simulations. This project will conduct a coherent program of large-scale numerical simulations with a pair of goals: a) to compute how the magnetic forces control the total amount of energy released in black hole accretion; and b) to show how the released energy finds its way into heat, and then the light that we see doc20300 none PI Kirshner This is a program of diligent observation and analysis of supernova explosions. The goals are to understand the mechanisms by which stars explode, to assess the supernova contribution to the heavy element enrichment of the Universe, and to use supernova explosions as tools for measuring the expansion history of the Universe. Many people have embarked on finding supernovae, but these discoveries only lead to increased understanding when they are followed up. This group has been one of the most effective teams in the world at following supernovae -- in part because of the ideal instrumentation at Mount Hopkins . In the coming years, the 6.5 meter MMT will become available along with the extraordinary opportunities at the two Magellan telescopes in the southern hemisphere. They are also refurbishing the 1.3 meter former 2MASS survey telescope at Mount Hopkins to augment the world s supply of infrared data. The group has made excellent progress in using Type Ia supernovae as accurate tools to measure extragalactic distances. This leads to a measurement of the expansion rate of the Universe, an estimate for the age of the Universe, demonstration of time dilation at high redshift, a way to detect large scale flows, and gives the only direct evidence for an accelerating Universe. Supernova observations have revealed that 2 3 of the Universe is dark energy, of an as-yet undetermined type, a finding with deep resonances with fundamental physics doc20301 none PI Crutcher The theoretical effort to understand star formation and the role of magnetic fields in the formation and evolution of interstellar clouds is extensive and accelerating. However, in spite of significant progress in recent years, there remain fundamental unanswered questions about the basic physics of star formation. If dense molecular clouds have lifetimes significantly longer than their free-fall collapse times, they must be supported against gravitational collapse. One view is that magnetic fields provide this support. This hypothesis can be tested by measurement of the mass to magnetic flux ratio in dense clouds. The other extreme is that magnetic fields are weak and that molecular clouds are intermittent phenomena, and that the problem of cloud support for long time periods is irrelevant. This project will measure, directly or indirectly, magnetic field strengths in a large, statistically meaningful sample of molecular clouds in order to help answer the above questions. Because the requisite measurements are of weakly polarized continuum and spectral-line emission from molecular clouds, measurements of interstellar magnetic fields remain among the most difficult of astronomical observations, and information about magnetic fields remains very sparse. It is crucial to our understanding of the fundamental physical process of star formation that measurements of interstellar magnetic fields continue to progress doc20302 none Smith RR Lyrae stars are among the oldest stars in the Galaxy, and have long been recognized as important probes of the processes by which the halo and thick disk formed. Nevertheless, our knowledge of the RR Lyrae population within several kiloparsecs of the Sun remains very incomplete. Dr. Horace Smith at Michigan State University will use observations obtained by the Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment (ROTSE) to identify and characterize RR Lyrae stars north of declination -30 degrees. RR Lyrae stars of Bailey types ab and c will be detected to a limiting magnitude of V = 15, corresponding to a distance of about 8 kpc. This survey is expected to include about RR Lyrae stars. Most of these variable stars will be newly discovered in this survey. The ROTSE survey will enable Dr. Smith to investigate how the density and properties of RR Lyrae stars change as a function of distance from the galactic center and distance from the galactic plane. He will test the hypothesis that field RR Lyrae reveal the presence of a dual halo: an inner flattened system, with RR Lyrae stars that have the characteristics of those in Oosterhoff type II globular clusters, and an outer, less flat, system with RR Lyrae stars that have the characteristics of those in Oosterhoff type I globular clusters. The RR Lyrae sample will also be used to make a new estimate of the local RR Lyrae density and of the scale height of the RR Lyrae of the thick disk. The ROTSE survey will make it possible to trace the distribution and properties of RR Lyrae stars throughout the Galaxy, from the bulge, through the solar vicinity, to the distant halo. It will also provide a database to be used in selecting stars for follow-up spectroscopic studies. Dr. Smith will begin this process with the determination of spectroscopic metal-abundances and radial velocities for the hitherto often neglected RR Lyrae of Bailey type c. These will be used to determine a statistical parallax solution and to study the motions of RRc variables. The ROTSE survey will also systematically identify multi-mode RR Lyrae stars in the solar vicinity, including double-mode stars and Blazhko effect variables doc20303 none PI Woodward The interstellar medium is enriched with chemical elements synthesized in the interiors of stars and dust grains formed in their atmospheres. Stars accomplish this enrichment through mass outflows ranging in character from slow winds in post-main sequence, luminous evolved stars that operate over long time scales, to explosive events such as novae. By observing these outflows the process of chemical enrichment can be investigated. In particular IR observations will be carried out to provide abundance estimates for elements in the ejecta, such as C, N, O, Ne, Mg, Al, and Si, that can be used to assess the contributions of stellar winds to the interstellar medium. For a nova event prompt observations of sudden, transient activity at many wavelengths are required. This study will provide information about the stages of stellar evolution that are associated with mass loss, characterize the physical properties of astrophysical dust grains in circumstellar outflows, and assess the contributions that novae and luminous IR variable stars make to the grains and gas that constitute the interstellar medium doc20304 none Beers, Timothy C. Dr. Beers is awarded funds at Michigan State University to work with collaborators at the University of Texas at Austin and Ohio State University. This team will lay the groundwork for a more detailed understanding of how our Milky Way galaxy formed and evolved. Models of galaxy formation and evolution depend on understanding the motions and chemical enrichment of local main-sequence stars that are far lower in heavy elements than ordinary stars, and how these stars compare to globular cluster stars. The known sample of these subdwarfs is very small. Dr. Beers and collaborators will study a new sample of these subdwarf stars in the Galaxy s halo and thick disk; this sample represents a huge increase over the number of subdwarfs previously studied. The investigators will obtain accurate and self-consistent measures of temperature, reddening, and composition for a critically selected sample of approximately 150 subdwarfs identified in recent surveys for metal-poor stars. They will also apply theoretical models to explore the dependence of the main-sequence luminosity on detailed stellar chemical composition. The results will be used to improve the temperature and abundance scales of globular cluster main sequences for comparison to spectroscopic determinations on the giant branch, and to thus determine the relative ages and distances of globular clusters doc20305 none The San Diego Society of Natural History (SDSNH) will design, fabricate and install a 9,000 square foot permanent exhibition exploring the fundamental scientific concepts of paleontology, geology, biology and ecology as they pertain to prehistoric southern California and the peninsula of Baja California. Playing the role of paleontologist, visitors will be invited to ponder a mystery, explore the setting, examine the evidence, and use scientific tools to discover answers. Carefully crafted settings will support exploration that engages learners of all ages at levels for both novice and experienced learners. Visitors will discover how natural patterns reveal natural processes, and examine the relationship between past, present and future. Focused activities will enable visitors to exercise their skills of observation and critical thinking, with exhibits that promote learning in a family context. The exhibits and activities focus on the Museum s collections and research, and are grounded in comprehensive visitor research supporting exhibit development. The exhibition and related science education materials will demonstrate how these fundamental concepts can be investigated in a regional setting. Visitors will extend their learning experience beyond the museum through a content-rich interactive website, a popular book on regional geology and paleontology, and related public programs and fossil displays at regional nature centers near the actual discovery sites. Exhibition planning, program evaluation and visitor research will be widely disseminated as contributions to the literature on best practices for interpretation of prehistoric life and landscapes doc20306 none This project involves research on new instructional technologies, for use in teaching astronomy to non-science majors. The central goal is to involve students in research-level astronomy data sets, so that they can understand the process of science by active exploration. Other goals are to use models and simulation to convey complex or abstract concepts, and to allow students to explore multimedia astronomy content in flexible ways. The major areas of focus for content development are (1) interactive Java applets that use real data to teach basic physics and astronomy concepts, (2) virtual worlds that allow a 3D exploration of the universe on various scales, (3) a natural language expert system to answer questions across the subject matter, with associated testing materials, and (4) a data architecture to allow the flexible delivery of this content over the Internet, via voice portals, and to a variety of devices on the wireless web. The overall goal is a rich learning environment that measures performance and can adapt to different student interests and learning styles. The tools developed in this project have an immediate application for distance learning, and the technologies and modes of delivery can readily be applied across other science subjects doc20307 none The proposed research is in the area of geometry and dynamics. The objective is to understand the asymptotic behavior of orbits of dynamical systems. One specific problem deals with surface laminations in hyperbolic three-manifolds. Rather than studying recurrence phenomena taking place in a compact space a global approach is taken. The geometry of hyperbolic space has a well defined visual boundary representing the many possible ways of diverging to infinity. Moreover, the ambient hyperbolic geometry affects the geometry of the leaves of the lamination under consideration. The basic problem is then to study how these geometries relate with respect to their approach to the visual boundaries, and to examine the influence that the ambient hyperbolic geometry exerts on the leaves. Within this program it is also natural to consider laminations whose leaves have stronger geometric or analytic properties, or both, as for example when they satisfy the minimal surface differential equation. Such hypothesis allows for the use of analytical and probabilistic tools, and more precise information can be obtained. Laminations whose leaves are minimal surfaces are also relevant to understand the geometry of other three-manifolds as well. They appear to play an important role in the topological hyperbolization conjecture for three-manifolds, as is known that non-hyperbolic three manifolds have a lamination by minimal surfaces. This proposal also includes problems in the area of rigidity of actions of semisimple groups. The main focus is in the so-called Gromov s centralizer theorem, a major tool in understanding the symmetries of geometric structures on manifolds. Other questions relating to the structure of pseudogroups of transformations are also proposed. Dynamical systems are used to model processes in many areas, for example the weather, physical or chemical processes, and the evolution of living organisms and their morphology. They are also used for modeling processes which evolve from a finite amount of data according to some set of rules, either specified before hand or of a random nature, as neural networks in the brain or systems of digital processors in a computer. The objective of the proposed research is to understand the qualitative structure and asymptotic behavior of certain dynamical systems. One of the topics in this proposal is to study the behavior of two-dimensional systems evolving in a three-dimensional space, and specifically the interaction of the features of the surrounding space and the geometry and asymptotic behavior of their trajectories. This can be approached in a variety of ways: by purely geometric means, by studying certain differential equations that define their orbits, or via a probabilistic approach. Understanding basic features of these dynamical systems and these spaces, while having intrinsic geometric interest and beauty, could be relevant, for example, in areas like partial differential equations, solid state physics, structure of crystals and quasi-crystals and their defects, statistical mechanics, computation and algorithms doc20308 none Pradhan The spectra of iron and iron-peak elements are of fundamental interest in astronomy. Although produced as the end-products of stellar life cycles in supernovae, these elements trace the chemical and physical history of the Universe even to high redshifts (z). Iron in particular is ubiquitous in most astronomical sources: stars, active galactic nuclei (AGN), supernova remnants (SNR s), and the interstellar and intergalactic media (ISM and IGM). Some of the basic questions are: How accurately can we analyze the spectra and determine abundances in various types of stars? Is the abundance of iron a `chronometer of the earliest epochs of stellar formation? Can the spectra of iron-peak elements be used for spectroscopic calibration of supernovae as `standard candles ? The spectra of iron-peak elements are complicated. A considerable effort by the new generation of telescopes and instruments will be directed towards their high-resolution spectroscopy. But high resolution in observations demands high precision in theory. Spectra obtained with great effort and expense remain inadequately analyzed owing to the absence or paucity of fundamental atomic parameters. This is especially true of iron and iron-group elements. However, large-scale computations with high precision are difficult and very time consuming. In spite of the progress made in the past decade, the requisite precision and quantity of the atomic parameters for iron-peak elements has not been attained to enable sufficiently accurate numerical models. Much of the progress in the recent past has been due to two major international projects in atomic astrophysics - the Opacity Project and the Iron Project. While most of the state-of-the-art theoretical tools were developed under these projects, the actual computations are yet to be carried out and require further developments. Dr. Anil Pradhan and colleagues at the Ohio State University will carry out a comprehensive effort based on recent advances in relativistic calculations for atomic processes for iron and iron-peak elements. These relate primarily to electron impact excitation, photoionization, recombination, and radiative transition probabilities. Dr. Pradhan s effort is aimed at some outstanding problems that entail numerical spectroscopy of: (I) iron spectra from AGN and strong Fe II emitting quasars, (II) Fe-peak elements (Cr, Mn, Fe, Zn) in the IGM, (III) Fe-Co-Ni spectra in SNR s, (IV) Non-LTE monochromatic opacities for stellar modeling and abundance determinations, (V) an exact treatment of radiative transfer in Non-LTE models, using the new atomic data, for important ions such as Fe I-IV and Ni II, and (VI) for studies of iron spectra in AGN, Fe II Mg II ratio vs. redshift, and Fe II Ni II abundance anomalies in SNR s and galaxies. Physical excitation mechanisms such as Lyman-alpha and UV fluorescence will be studied. The targeted atomic species are in low-ionization states observed mainly in the Optical and Near-IR from ground-based observatories. As massive computational resources are an a priori requirement for this undertaking, Dr. Pradhan has secured a large allocation of computation time at the Ohio Supercomputer Center in Columbus, Ohio doc20309 none Long-term effects of population reductions on genetic diversity are well understood, but few studies have examined short-term changes in genetic diversity in populations immediately after they have been founded. The goal of this project is to compare changes in genetic diversity in three species of the grazing zooplankter Daphnia that recolonized a lake from a small number of founding individuals with a fourth population that was founded by a large number of individuals. Long-lived dormant Daphnia eggs in sediments record annual changes in populations that can be reconstructed from sediment cores. Genetic diversity of each of the four populations at several time points following recolonization will be measured to assess changes as the populations recovered in size. Daphnia species are a key component of aquatic ecosystems, serving as a control on algae and a food source for fish. The ability of a population to respond to environmental changes depends on the level of genetic diversity present. This study will thus provide important insights into how Daphnia respond to environmental change and influence community and ecosystem processes. It will also provide empirical tests of theoretical models and contribute to our knowledge about how genetic diversity is maintained in natural populations, which in turn will foster more appropriate management or conservation plans doc20310 none This proposal requests support for a group at Bucknell University for a program of research and education in experimental elementary particle physics based on the MiniBooNE experiment at Fermilab. The experiment involves an investigation of the KARMEN timing anomaly and a search for neutral heavy leptons, sterile neutrinos and neutral supersymmetric and axion-like particles. The KARMEN anomaly is an excess of neutrino events detected in the KARMEN experiment at the ISIS spallation neutron facility at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and may be due to a rare non-Standard Model p+ decay mode: m+Q0 where Q0 denotes a massive, neutral, weakly interacting unstable particle. The study of the anomaly requires a comprehensive investigation of possible background contributions, the main component of the proposed work of the Bucknell group. The work will be performed in collaboration with a group of undergraduates doc20311 none Fitzgerald This U.S.-Mexico award will support Dr. Terrence Fitzgerald of SUNY at Cortland, in a research collaboration with Dr. Alfonso Rubio Pescador of the Universidad de Colima in Tecoman, Mexico. The researchers intend to describe and analyze the trail-based foraging system of the larva of Phelypera distigma, a beetle larva. Studies of social caterpillars conducted over the last two decades have shown that the caterpillars of some moths and butterflies use pheromones to define the limits of their foraging arenas and to facilitate en masse movements between resting and feeding sites. The communication systems allow successful foragers to direct siblings to food finds and they resemble the recruitment systems of ants and termites. Compared to the extensive knowledge of pheromone-based communication in other insects, very little is known of the extent to which caterpillars use pheromones to facilitate group living and cooperative foraging. The research proposed here will be the first study of trial marking and processionary behavior in these communal beetle larva. The collaborators will bring complementary skills to the project. The Mexican counterpart scientist has many years of field experience in the tropics and knowledge of the biology and ecology of tropical insects, particularly insect larvae. The US investigator brings to the project a broad background in the study of sociality in caterpillars and of the methods needed to study and analyze their communication systems. In addition, an undergraduate student will be involved in the research. The study will lead to a better understanding of the similarities between foraging systems of different insects and provide perspective on the role of ecological factors in the evolution of trail-based communicative systems doc20312 none Assessing the Impact of a Visit to a Zoo or Aquarium: A Multi-institutional Research Project will create a functional taxonomy of zoo aquarium visitors entering knowledge, attitudes and behaviors. This taxonomy, in conjunction with data about the specific experiences visitors have during their visit, will enable investigators to understand and predict the contribution of zoos and aquariums to the public understanding of animals and their conservation. The results will clarify the role of zoos and aquariums as centers of informal learning and point to ways to strengthen their educational impact. The AZA convened a national advisory committee that commissioned and completed a thorough review, confirming a critical need to conduct more research, particularly research that attempts to ask broad questions, collect data systematically, and includes sufficient number and types of institutions to permit community-wide generalizations. Twelve AZA institutions of various sizes, geographic regions and types will participate in the study. The net result of the study will be a descriptive model of zoo and aquarium visitor learning experiences and development of a set of diagnostic tools to help zoo and aquaria staff understand and enhance the nature and extent of their public impact doc20313 none Mathews Dr. John Mathews, at Penn State University, in collaboration with Dr. David Meisel, at State University of New York at Geneseo, will conduct a 3-year observational and analysis modeling study of small particles in the Solar System based on radar micrometeor observations performed at the Arecibo Observatory. Knowledge of the distribution, sources, and gravitational, electrodynamical evolution of interplanetary dust particles (IDPs) in the ~0.2-100 micron size range is critical to the planetary sciences and-as extrasolar and interstellar particles are also present-to local galactic science. The Arecibo Observatory (AO) UHF radar has proven to be uniquely suited for ground-based micrometeor observations that yield velocity, deceleration, and radiant information-and thus orbits-of large numbers of interplanetary and hyperbolic dust particles. Observational results now extend from through the present with a steadily evolving technique that now yields meteoroid Doppler speeds with instantaneous accuracies of as small as 10 m sec (with meteoroid speeds ranging over 10-90 km sec thus far). This combined with a sorting mechanism based on classical, in-atmosphere meteoroid dynamics, clearly distinguishes down-the-beam particles from those meteoroids with a significant across-the-beam velocity component. The new effort extends these studies to details of IDP distribution evolution in the solar system and considers the role of the interstellar particle flux to the solar system as well as local galactic processes features illuminated by this flux. The new observational analysis modeling study funded with this award will continue providing routine sampling of IDPs including the expected earth-crossing asteroidal-orbit particles, interstellar particles (ISPs), Jovian perturbed and or derived particles, and low-mass b particles ejected by radiation pressure from the inner solar system. As the database of ISPs grows, these researchers will continue theoretical modeling studies of the flux and origins of the largest of the interstellar particles. Thus far they can account for all AO ISPs as being products of the same supernova that produced the Geminga pulsar. This effort has involved and will continue to involve undergraduates from SUNY-Geneseo, Penn State, and other institutions and graduate students from Penn State as well as the staff of Arecibo Observatory and other organizations. Results from these efforts appear in several courses including electromagnetics, astrophysics, and plasmas at both Geneseo and Penn State doc20314 none PI Camilo With a number of upgrades coming to the Arecibo Observatory telescope of the National Astronomy and Ionospheric Center in the next year, the Observatory is poised to carry out a large-scale deep survey for new pulsars. Current estimates are that about new pulsars will be discovered. The system will have high sensitivity to the fastest pulsars and to compact binaries with orbital periods less than a few hours and with every possible kind of companion including black holes. There are implications for detailed modeling of the magnetic field and ionic distribution in our Galaxy, defining the Galaxy s spiral arms, and gravitational wave studies of compact binaries. This project will lay the groundwork for the survey through a survey design and pilot observations, developing data processing software, and investigating radio frequency interference mitigation techniques doc20315 none During the last several decades, the clock rate and the level of integration of VLSI chips have reached a level that distributing clocks has become an increasingly difficult task. The most recently released chips run at more than 2GHz-clock rate. The performance projection for future ULSI chips will be up to 20GHz in the next 5-10 years. This implies that the overall clock skew needs to be kept under 5ps across the chip in order to control the amount of clock skew to be within 10% of the total clock cycle. This problem will be further exacerbated by the steep increase in process variations in future processing technologies beyond 50nm generations. Furthermore, when chips contain more and more components (gates), the disparity of switching activities on chip will vary more widely resulting in greater on-chip variations of temperature and supply noise, which are time-variant. The research proposed here is intended to explore a dramatically different design paradigm for designing and distributing clock signals for the future where the clocking networks will be dynamically adapted to chip s operating environment to perform a deskewing function in real-time. Active deskewing uses on-chip active devices such as delay-locked loops (DLLs) to detect and reduce skews between any two points on the chip. The issues the proposed research addresses include: Given a chip architecture and the characteristics (switching, leakage, and density) of the blocks used on the chip, what is the optimal topology of the self-adjusting deskewing network that must be stable? Given the performance requirements for the chip, what is the maximum latency of the deskewing network the chip can tolerate? What is the resolution of deskewing circuits? And how does this affect the overall performance of the clock network? Research includes an extensive exploration theoretically to determine the practicality of such a deskewing approach. A mathematical model for the entire deskewing system is formulated as a multi-input, multi-output (MIMO) discrete-time dynamic system. A stability analysis based upon the model is being developed. This approach uses results from robust control theory that can guarantee stability even for perturbed systems doc20316 none This FRG project is a collaborative effort among five co-PIs, and additional collaborators with expertise in amorphous materials: preparation and analysis (Abelson, Bishop), FEM technique (Gibson, Voyles), TEM (Zuo), molecular dynamics and quantum mechanical simulations (Drabold), and statistical mechanics and topology of disordered networks (Goldbart). The project goals are to quantitatively determine the nanostructure in group IV and chalcogenide amorphous materials, and the relationship of this order with electronic properties and phase transformations. The approach is based on fluctuation electron microscopy (FEM)-a new analytical technique with the only purely structural view of MRO (medium range order) currently available. FEM in-volves a statistical analysis of the intensity scattered from nanometer-sized volumes of the sam-ple as a function of the volume, size, and scattering conditions. The project addresses nanoscale order in representative amorphous and glassy materials-amor-phous silicon and chalcogenides- which are without long range order. These materials are known to exhibit medium range order, but little is known about the nature of this ordering on the na-noscale. Medium-range order (MRO) is typically a structural correlation at length scales longer than the diameter of the third coordination shell but shorter than the scale at which ordering ap-pears as Bragg peaks in the structure factor. For amorphous silicon (a-Si), that translates to length scales of 1-4 nm. Structure at those length scales in the presence of disorder has historically been difficult to measure. Standard diffraction techniques yield little information at medium-range because of the isotropic nature of most disordered materials. The PIs have shown that strain affects small topologically crystalline regions in a-Si, rendering them not detectable in diffraction. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in areas of electronic materials science having technological relevance. An important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education. The combined resources, including experimental and theoretical methods, provide special opportunities for education and training of post doctoral associates, graduate and undergraduate students involved in highly interdisciplinary forefront research doc20317 none PI Martin This is a research project to discover and characterize very low-luminosity substellar objects. The search will take place in several nearby young stellar associations and open clusters with ages ranging from 1 to 120~Myr, and in high galactic latitude fields. Brown dwarf and free-floating planet candidates will be identified using deep multi-color CCD photometry. Near-infrared photometry and spectroscopy will provide crucial information on the nature of the objects. These observations will increase significantly the sample of known brown dwarfs. Hence, this new field of research will be put on a more firm statistical basis. The relative numbers of brown dwarfs and free planets in a given association, cluster and the field will allow the determination of luminosity functions and mass functions in the substellar regime for a variety of environmental conditions. Follow-up studies, such as disk accretion for very low-mass primaries, binarity, rotation, and weather-like variability will be carried out by Martin and others doc20318 none Binzel Unraveling the fundamental relationships between asteroids, comets, and meteorites is a first step toward important new insights into the early history of our own planetary system. Observational investigation of the near-Earth object (NEO) population provides the unique opportunity for studying all three of these classes of objects. The long-term interests of society also dictate that we achieve an understanding of the NEO population for assessing NEOs for their impact hazard and space resource potential. Dr. Richard Binzel, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will direct an observational program to measure the near infrared spectral properties for 40-60 NEOs per year, substantially increasing the quantity and quality of these types of observations of Earth s nearest neighbors. The near-infrared measurements will be made over the wavelength range 0.8-2.5Mm using the new state-of-the-art SpeX spectrograph at the Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) at Mauna Kea, Hawaii. The principal goal of the project is basic reconnaissance of the near-infrared spectral characteristics of the NEO population. The observations and data set will be a balance between measurements that push to the state-of-the-art limits of the technology for the smallest and faintest objects and measurements that provide high signal-to-noise-ratio spectra sufficient for detailed mineralogical analysis doc20319 none SGER: NOVEL DISK ARCHITECTURE FOR EXTREMELY HIGH MAGNETIC STORAGE DENSITIES Jeffrey L. Streator, Georgia Institute of Technology Yip-Wah Chung, Northwestern University To meet the demand for ever-increasing density of information storage, new recording technologies must be developed. For example, a stated goal of the National Storage Industry Consortium is to achieve a storage density of 1 terabyte per square inch (1 Tb in2) by . In this vein, researchers at Georgia Tech and Northwestern University propose a collaborative effort to investigate the viability of a new magnetic domain architecture for achieving ultrahigh recording densities. The novel architecture consists of a patterned perpendicular recording media with discrete, electrically insulated magnetic domains that are slightly recessed below the disk surface. The discrete nature of the domains prevents the thermal instabilities associated with continuous media and the superparamagnetic limit. Having the domains slightly recessed 1 to 2 nanometers--as opposed to protruding 10-12 nanometers as with conventional patterned media concepts--is expected to provide much better flying characteristics through reduction of spacing modulation. In addition, by having the domains electrically insulated, potential corrosion problems, which become increasingly likely with decreasing overcoat thickness, are virtually eliminated. Fabrication of the patterned media will be accomplished in two ways: (1) via nanosphere lithography and (2) via a focused ion beam (FIB) technique. The nanosphere lithography will employ an array of monodispersed nanospheres as a lithographic mask, while the FIB method will involve direct high-resolution mask-less etching. Characterization and evaluation in the proposed study will include topographical measurements, flyability studies and corrosion monitoring. In addition, the investigation will involve numerical simulation of slider flight as well as fabrication process modeling. Execution of this research plan will involve close collaboration between the two research groups. If successful, the study will provide a blueprint for developing a cost-effective and robust means of meeting the high-density storage demands of the information storage industry doc20320 none Gaustad Dr. John Gaustad, at Swarthmore College, recently completed a Southern H-Alpha Sky Survey Atlas (SHASSA). The images in this atlas have a resolution of 0.8 arcminutes and sensitivity of 2 rayleighs per pixel. Dr. Gaustad will now use the same robotic camera system to obtain comparable images of the brighter H-alpha regions in an emission line of ionized sulfur (SII). The SII H-alpha ratio is a useful discriminator between regions that are heated by the ultraviolet light of embedded stars and regions that are heated by supersonic shock waves produced by supernova remnants and stellar winds. These measurements will contribute to understanding the astrophysical nature of ionized regions in the interstellar medium of the Galaxy doc20321 none PI Hawley Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has demonstrated that it is an unsurpassed resource for finding low mass stars, brown dwarfs and close binaries such as cataclysmic variables. This project will use the ongoing SDSS photometric and spectroscopic data during the next 3 years to amass a large database on low mass stars, both single and in close binaries. Additional follow-up data will be obtained. Undergraduate and graduate students will participate in the observations and analysis of the data. An on-line database will be made available for scientists, the public, and outreach activities. Measurements of the magnitudes, colors, spectral types, magnetic activity levels, rotation rates and ages of the late type stars will be used to infer basic physical properties (temperature, luminosity, mass and strength of the magnetic dynamo), which then will be compared for objects at different evolutionary stages in both single and close binary environments to assess the dependence of magnetic activity on rotation rate, to discover and characterize close interacting binary systems with lower mass secondaries than have previously been found, study the influence of irradiation on the low mass secondaries in close binaries, to determine if this strongly affects the outbursts in cataclysmic variables, and to determine the space density and luminosity function of low mass single stars compared with their counterparts in binary systems doc20322 none PI Rettig To clarify the physical structure, gas and dust content, as well as the potential for planet formation around the poorly understood inner circumstellar disk regions of Herbig AeBe young emission line stars, the PI has begun a high resolution infrared (3-5mm) study of various molecules such as CO and H 3+ that are expected to be present. The near-infrared is a challenging spectral region to work, but this spectral region is optimal to explore CO as well as the symmetric hydrocarbons (e.g. CH 4 , C 2 H 6 , C 2 H 2 ) and H 3+ in material around hot young stars. For Herbig AeBe stars, it is not clear that primordial gas and dust can remain sufficiently long in the inner regions (1-50 AU) close to the star for planet formation to occur. The PI has already presented results for several such stars showing the detection of CO, CH 4 , and H3+ (the first detection of H 3+ emission outside the Solar System ever made). This research will use fundamental CO lines (4.7mm) to measure temperatures, column densities, and mass of CO in the inner disks around these stars. Observations of H 3+ may provide a more quantitative understanding of the chemical processing and the importance of energetic photo-processing in inner disks of these pre-main sequence stars. H 3+ is important as a direct probe of the ionization rate in preplanetary disks and is important in disk chemistry as nearly all ion-neutral reactions are initialized by this molecule. The detection of CO, CH 4 , and H 3+ are important to quantify the physical and chemical evolution of the inner disk and also constrain the gas dissipation rate and potential for planetary formation. Secondly, H 3+ is shown as a potential method to search for evidence of planet formation and or disk evolution that will provide theorists an additional avenue to constrain disk and extra-solar planet formation doc20323 none The Educational Develpoment Center (EDC) and National Institute on Out-of-School Time (NIOST), in collaboration with science centers in AZ, MA, TX, NY, NC and CA, will develop and implement a science curriculum for informal audiences targeting children ages 8-12. Each science center will work with six community centers that serve youth in after-school programs. Science center staff will train after-school program leaders from the 36 community centers at monthly sessions, in addition to holding monthly events for families. Curriculum development will use interesting topics aligned with national standards and structure investigations as games using simple materials. The units will enable children to work in teams, and include follow-up, discussion and extended investigations using websites. It is anticipated that each child will complete 4-6 related investigations. While the six science centers will provide the content expertise, EDC and NIOST will develop the training and assessment program and provide additional technical support for the community centers. The result will be a model to support out-of-school programs that combines science centers and community resource people, centered around an activity-based curriculum focused on inquiry. Up to 1,000 children will be involved in field tests each summer. This proposal builds on Design It! (ESI 98- ), which created an informal science curriculum focused on engineering principles doc20324 none The Newburgh ASCEND program will provide 220 students per year in grades 7-9 with an opportunity to engage in inquiry-based science activities using units called Workplace Simulations. The Simulations will focus on earth and life sciences in year 1 and physics and chemistry in year 2, and will emphasize career exploration in addition to the science content. All content is aligned with New York State Learning Standards and emphasizes topics of interest to youth such as ecology, botany, aquatic science, paleontology, ornithology, archaeology and forensic science. Students will also learn how to utilize GIS software and the use of a scanning electron microscope. Many activities will focus on problem-solving skills and research methodology. One Saturday per month participants will be engaged in field trips and field-based research. During the summer, half of the students will participate in two-week summer sessions that enable them to explore topics in more detail, engage in career explorations and meet face-to-face with scientists and engineers in a relaxed setting doc20325 none Chiang Extrasolar planets and the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt of trans-Neptunian bodies constitute two powerful drivers of planetary astronomy. Since the discovery of these objects less than a decade ago, theoretical understanding of their dynamical characteristics remains elusive. Why are the orbital eccentricities of extrasolar planets so large compared to those of Solar System gas giants? What is responsible for delineating an apparent edge to the Classical Kuiper Belt at a heliocentric distance of 47 AU? How did the orbital inclinations of Classical Belt objects become dramatically inflated? Dr. Eugene Chiang and colleagues, at the University of California at Berkeley, will investigate a series of theoretical dynamical problems that directly address these issues. He will examine how these two seemingly disparate classes of objects participate in many of the same dynamical processes, most notably orbital migration and resonant interaction. Planets can be remarkably mobile while embedded in their natal gaseous disks. Known extrasolar planets are sufficiently massive that they clear annular gaps in disk material about their orbits. A gap-opening planet is slaved to the viscous evolution of its host disk. Viscous diffusion times of magnetohydrodynamically turbulent disks shorten with decreasing distance from the star. Thus, two gap-opening planets migrate towards their parent star such that the ratio of the period of the outer planet to that of the inner planet grows. The divergence of this ratio implies that a series of mean motion resonances will be crossed. Each resonance crossing can generate substantial orbital eccentricities in the migrating bodies. Dr. Chiang and his collaborators will explore this mechanism for exciting eccentricities. The viscous, thermal, and mass profiles of protoplanetary disks will be computed to determine planetary migration timescales. The celestial mechanics of resonance crossings will be investigated through a series of analytic and numerical orbit integrations. Numerical hydrodynamic simulations of planet-disk interactions will be undertaken to test the effectiveness of resonance passages. The circularity of orbits of Solar System giants may be reconciled with the extreme elongations of extrasolar planetary orbits within the framework of protoplanetary disks whose viscosities decrease dramatically with distance; this framework indicates that the orbital architecture of the outer Solar System may indeed be commonplace. The extent to which Neptune s outermost, strongest 2:1 mean-motion resonance gravitationally sculpted the Classical Kuiper Belt will be ascertained. As Neptune migrated outwards during the era of late heavy bombardment, its resonances swept outward and captured Kuiper Belt Ob- jects into librating orbits. Dr. Chiang and his collaborators will account for, through analytic and numerical calculations, the finite masses of bodies librating within the 2:1 resonance. A massive, migrating 2:1 resonance may leak objects into the Classical Belt domain; imperfect efficiencies of resonant capture and of retainment determine the fraction of bodies that reside in the 2:1 and the fraction of bodies that comprise the non-resonant Classical Belt. The degree of dynamical heating by eccentric, inclined 2:1 perturbers on Classical Belt Objects will be gauged. This study will culminate in predictions for the mass within the 2:1 resonance that can be tested by dedicated observations in which Dr. Chiang is already actively involved doc20326 none dePater Dr. Imke dePater, of the University of California at Berkeley, will direct a program of ground-based high resolution imaging, spectroscopy, and modeling of Titan. The program will use some of the world s largest optical infrared telescopes, the 10-m Keck Observatory and the 8-m Gemini Telescope, to obtain diffraction-limited images of Titan in narrow band filters between 1 and 2.5 micron wavelength. To investigate Titan s atmosphere and surface in even greater detail, Dr. dePater and her team will obtain spectral image datacubes of Titan using the near-infrared spectrometer NIR-SPEC together with the Keck Adaptive Optics system. Spectra of Titan will not immediately reveal surface composition, since sunlight reflected from the surface will in part be absorbed by methane gas (as well as other absorbers) in Titan s atmosphere, and will undergo scattering by haze particles. Since Titan s surface albedo varies significantly across its surface, a single observation of Titan does not give the necessary constraints to determine the atmospheric haze and methane cloud distribution and properties. To better constrain Titan s atmosphere and surface, this team will observe the same surface features through multiple atmospheric paths. In parallel the team will develop advanced models of Titan s atmosphere, to simultaneously extract surface reflectance spectra and the vertical haze distribution as a function of location on Titan s disk. To better understand the formation and removal processes of the atmospheric haze particles, as well as their chemical and physical properties, this group will complement the data with observations at mid-infrared wavelengths, sensitive to Titan s high-altitude hazes and various hydrocarbon gases doc20327 none PI: Pilachowski Dr. Pilachowski is awarded funds at Indiana University to use the recently discovered falling evaporative bodies (FEBs) in young star systems to study the timescale for the formation of planets. FEBs are planetesimals whose orbits are perturbed by newly formed planets. The planetesimals are either ejected from the planetary system or sent inward on orbits that impact or graze the central star. Near the star, the planetesimals are heated and turned to gas, and can be detected by their transient spectral absorption features. The FEBs offer direct evidence of planets and planetesimals in the star system, and also provide information about the dynamics of the system and the composition of the planetesimals. Observations of FEBs in a sample of young stars with well-defined masses and ages may constrain the timescale of planet formation and or the mechanism of orbital migration. Dr. Pilachowski will examine late B and early A dwarf stars in young star clusters ranging in age from a few million years up to 30 million years to explore the timescales over which planetesimals may be cleared out of young solar systems by the formation of planets and by orbital migration. The stars will be monitored spectroscopically using the 3.5-m Wisconsin-Indiana-Yale-NOAO (WIYN) telescope and multi-object spectrograph. The PI will involve both graduate and undergraduate students in the work, and expects that this study of comets in extra-solar planetary systems is likely to attract broad public interest and to fire the imaginations of children doc20328 none This research concerns experimental studies of pressure-induced transformations and novel behavior of simple molecular systems to ultrahigh static pressures above 300 GPa (3 megabars) over a broad temperature range. The experiments will focus on transformations in representative solids formed from low-Z diatomic and triatomic systems, rare gases, and dense compounds and alloys containing these species. The project takes advantage of recent developments in diamond-anvil cell techniques, and a variety of theoretical predictions based on first-principles calculations. New synchrotron x-ray and neutron diffraction techniques will be used for crystal structure determination, including low temperature phases of oxygen and hydrogen isotopes. Recently developed high-pressure x-ray inelastic scattering techniques will be used to measure pressure effects and to understand the density dependence of electronic excitations, their bandwidths, and dispersion. Transport methods will be used to study superconductivity and possible transformations to novel states of in a range of materials, including oxygen and hydrogen-rich solids. There will be a systematic effort to extend the pressure range, accuracy, and sensitivity of static high-pressure techniques important for the high-pressure community, including those used at national user facilities. Numerous other fields, including chemistry, materials science, and planetary science should also benefit. A major goal of this project is the training of young scientists in physics and materials science. A graduate student and a post-doctoral fellow will be supported directly under this grant. Undergraduates and exceptional high-school students also participate. All are prepared for future positions in academia, national laboratories, and high-technology industries. The effect of ultrahigh pressures on simple molecules is a classic problem in physics and chemistry. Under the very high-pressures that can now be reached in the laboratory, molecules such as hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, water, and related substances transform to novel materials, including dense metals, unique superconductors, and unusual compounds. Many of these were unanticipated theoretically, and their discovery has greatly enhanced understanding of matter as a whole. In this project, new experiments on the novel behavior of simple molecules at ultrahigh static compressed to above 300 GPa (3 megabars) over a broad temperature range will be carried out using a powerful device known as the diamond anvil cell. The project takes advantage of recent developments in techniques that couple the diamond-anvil cell with sensitive analytical methods, and new theoretical predictions for these materials. A large portion of the experiments will take place at major national facilities such as synchrotron radiation and neutron sources, where new techniques will be developed and scientists trained. A variety of laser techniques as well as highly sensitive electrical and magnetic methods will be used, for example to study superconductivity from greatly compressing molecular materials. There will be a systematic effort to extend the pressure range, accuracy, and sensitivity of high-pressure techniques important for the high-pressure community, including major programs at national facilities. Numerous other fields, including chemistry, materials science, and planetary science should benefit. Finally, this project will train a number of young scientists, including graduate students and post-doctoral fellows as well as undergraduate interns and even exceptional high-school students. The research will prepare these students for positions in academia, national laboratories, and high-technology industries doc20329 none PI Wood The set of interacting binary star systems called cataclysmic variables serves as a marvelous laboratory to study how astrophysical accretion processes work. In that group of binaries are a number of broad categories of objects, each category further divided into classes of objects of different outburst and quiescence behaviors. Significant amounts of observational effort has been expended in an attempt to understand the underlying accretion physics in these systems Now once seemingly intractable computational problems are accessible via better algorithms and desktop supercomputing with 3-dimensional hydrodynamic codes, and progress has been made. This project will advance efforts to model a particular, and for a long-while puzzling, phenomenon observed in SU Ursa Majoris-type systems: so-called superhumps observed during especially bright outbursts. The PI has successfully modeled approximate superhump behavior using his smoothed particle hydrodynamic code in a fully 3-dimensional mode. The superhumps in light curves are true instabilities of tilted accretion disks. This project will expand the work by adding disk viscosity due to magnetic fields and creating a grid of light curves and modeled disks that will be delivered to the astronomy community as an atlas doc20330 none Goodman Quasars and X-ray binary stars are examples of astronomical objects that shine by converting the gravitational energy of gas orbiting a black hole into heat and radiation. The gas arranges itself into a flat disk centered on the black hole. Similar disks surround young stars and form planets. Astrophysicists postulate that turbulent friction between neighboring rings of these disks turns this orbital motion into heat. Most believe that this turbulence arises from a magnetic instability that has not yet been reproduced on earth except in computer simulations. The instability requires a gas or liquid of high electrical conductivity, a condition usually satisfied in space and in stars but not on earth. Air, water, and other common fluids are poor conductors of electricity while ionized plasmas created for fusion research are good conductors but too rigidly magnetized. This project will study astrophysical instability and turbulence in a small laboratory experiment using an alloy of gallium, a metal that is liquid at room temperature, less viscous than water, more conducting than mercury, and safer to handle. This will be set into rapid rotation between concentric cylinders in a strong magnetic field---a system dynamically similar to an astrophysical disk. The goals are to confirm previous computer predictions of the instability, to study its dependence on rotation, shear, and field strength, to validate computer simulations, and perhaps to demonstrate incipient turbulence. The results may confirm our understanding of astrophysical disk turbulence, which cannot yet be observed directly doc20331 none Diebold This award to Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in the City of New York provides instrumentation to significantly improve the geophysical survey capabilities of the research vessel Maurice Ewing, an NSF-owned ship operated by LDEO as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The navigation and quality control software and other instrumentation supported here will improve survey capabilities and upgrade reliability of R V Ewing for conducting geophysical research programs. These improvements will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists using the ship in their research during and future years doc20332 none The penetration of advanced technologies, and in particular information technologies, into every day life has proceeded at a breathtaking pace over the past decade. Such technologies will touch and transform the personal and working lives of current and future generations of students for many decades to come. This is true not only for students in the SMET disciplines who are developing this technology, but also for students in the many disciplines spanning the breadth of academia. A significant fraction of all students need to learn about such technologies in order to conduct their professional lives and to live as informed citizens in an age that will be defined by advancing technologies. Moreover, SMET students need to learn about the non-technical implications of technology in economics, politics, society, and business, and about the corresponding influences of such non-technical spheres of activity on technology. This project addresses these needs by developing pedagogy and pedagogical materials suitable for teaching advanced technological subject matter to undergraduate students across a broad spectrum of academic discliplines, not only within SMET isciplines, but also within the fine arts, humanities, and social sciences. This approach takes advantage of the greater computer and mathematical literacy of today s students to offer course material with technical substance, but also with a view toward the greater role of technologies in shaping society and commerce. The project focuses particularly on telecommunications technology, in order to exploit the Principal Investigator s experiences in teaching such material to Princeton undergraduates in his recently-developed course, The Wireless Revolution: Telecommunications for the 21st Century. This course, which covers the technical, social, economic, and political aspects of wireless, has been very successful in attracting a large and diverse audience from across the University. This holistic approach to the subject, and the teaching of both SMET and non-SMET students in the same classroom, has resulted in significant educational benefits for all of the students involved. Although telecommunications is, of course, widely taught worldwide, there is little available material for the teaching of the subject in a holistic manner, and particularly to a mixed audience at the undergraduate level. This makes it difficult to export the model of The Wireless Revolution to other institutions, or even to other instructors. This is due in part to the very dynamic nature of the field, which renders conventional textual materials inadequate because it needs to be updated very quickly. It is also partly due to the breadth of disciplines needed to adequately address the subject and to uniformly challenge students with very diverse interests. This difficulty has been addressed in the Wireless Revolution course thus far through the use of guest lecturers, a solution which is not necessarily portable to other universities or instructors. The principal goal of this project is to develop useful pedagogical materials that can address both the breadth an dynamism of this field. These materials combine the traditional textbook format, where the subject matter is relatively stable, with Web-based resources for the more dynamic subject matter. The objective of this development is to allow the successful format of this course to be used in a sustainable way by other instructors at Princeton, and to be exported to other institutions. The scope of these materials will reach beyond wireless communications to the field of telecommunications in general, so that the subject matter will fit the needs and interests of a greater number of students and institutions. The updateable and flexible nature of these pedagogical materials will allow for the content to shift from year to year as new telecommunications technologies wax and wane. This will further allow for the content to vary from institution to institution, as different instructors may wish to emphasize different aspects of the field. Finally, it is hoped that this development will provide a model for the holistic teaching of other advanced technologies to broad undergraduate audiences doc20333 none The goals of this project and the goals of my teaching goals are to instill as much understanding as possible of the way the earth works, and also to convey my own love of the beauty, excitement and rigor of the scientific endeavor. In recent years I have experimented with the creation of multi-media visualization products for the understanding and teaching of earth subjects. My initial animations and movies have met with great response, and are used in numerous classrooms at the University of California-Santa Barbara, across the nation and around the world. I believe a major portion of the human population learns best from imagery, especially moving images, and I am very excited about the new multi-media tools that make this form of communication so much more possible. Moving imagery is especially useful and helpful for the teaching of geology, since the subject is so visual and is often far outside ordinary human scales of time and space. I am presently refining regional geological animations and materials for southern California. Through the current project I am expanding the geographic reach of this work by creating an Educational Multimedia Visualization Center for visiting teacher-scholars. The center allows experts in the geology of their own regions disciplines to bring their traditional images and knowledge, and to transform them into animations and presentation packages. They return home with these products and also with a new array of skills to share around their own institutions. Their imagery products join my works that are already out in film, videotape, as freeware on the web and as materials in the NSF-funded digital libraries of ADEPT and DLESE. Indeed, the ADEPT group is based at U.C.S.B. and is interested in developing a streamlined process for transferring content generated at the Educational Multimedia Visualization Center into their online holdings. The Multimedia Visualization Center is building upon the long experience and excellent infra-structure of this organization, extending its services to off-campus visitors. Thus, visitors return home with their own projects and also with new ideas about instructional support possibilities. Likewise they share with us the innovations of their home institutions that we may learn from them and pass them along doc20334 none Cohn In modern cosmology, the basic building block of all cosmic structure is a halo, i.e., a condensed clump of matter. The Universe is constantly evolving, with these halos falling towards each other and merging under the influence of gravity. This theoretical project will study two aspects of these basic building blocks: The first part of the project involves haloes of individual galaxies. Numerical calculations will be used to model the patterns formed when distant light sources (such as distant galaxies) have their light bent by gravity when it passes close to a second galaxy which lies between the earth and the more distant one (gravitational lensing). The halo around the intervening galaxy can be studied using this method. Since the constant merging of halos implies that haloes of nearby galaxies will contain clumps and sub-clumps, these structures can be mapped-out using gravitational lensing. The numerical calculations will identify what lensing as a tool can discern about the shape of a galaxy halo. This knowledge will then be applied to the wealth of new observational data that is available and used to determine the actual structure of nearby galaxy haloes. The second part of this project focuses on major mergers of larger halos, which are associated with clusters of galaxies. Major mergers produce a severely disrupted halo. They can both create new observational signals and contaminate measurements which rely on models which assume undisturbed, idealized properties for the cluster haloes. Numerical calculations will be used to determine how often these mergers occur, how closely in space they are expected to occur and how these results depend upon the many different observational and numerical parameters which characterize a cluster halo. These numerical results will then be used to interpret observations of galaxy cluster halo lensing doc20335 none Blain, Andrew W. This program will develop new understanding of the nature of very-luminous dust-enshrouded high redshift galaxies recently discovered in the submillimeter waveband. These luminous distant SMGs generate a significant fraction of the energy emitted by all galaxies over the early history of the Universe, and yet are still poorly understood. This is largely because the angular resolution of even the most powerful submillimeter-wave survey telescopes is not sufficient to pin down the positions of SMGs with sufficient accuracy to confirm a single galaxy as their counterpart in an optical image. This program will determine accurate positions for the counterparts, and then determine their redshifts and astrophysical properties. Measuring the redshift distribution for the SMGs is a particularly important goal. This is the most important piece of information required to determine the evolution of the population of SMGs, and their relationship with the larger and better understood samples of high-redshift galaxies detected in optical galaxy surveys doc20336 none The project of Professor James Haw of the University of Southern California, supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, seeks to achieve a fundamental understanding of the catalytic reactions that occur on zeolites and solid acid catalysts. A special pulse quench catalytic reactor has been designed that allows the investigation of catalytic reactions by nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometry. Changes in chemical intermediates can be followed with this device with a time resolution of 0.2 s; reactions are quenched by rapid cooling or by the introduction of inhibiting reagents. Theoretical calculations are also used to model the experimental NMR results via calculated NMR chemical shifts and quadrupolar coupling constants. Two specific examples of catalytic systems to be studied in this project include the synthesis of pyridine and butene isomerization, both are processes which are catalyzed by zeolites. Nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometry is used to study the catalytic transformation of simple adsorbed gases into more complex molecules on zeolites and solid acids. Professor James Haw at the University of Southern California has developed a combination of chemical reaction system with quenching that allows complex catalytic systems to be studied. The new analytical method will be used to study the industrially important projects of pyridine synthesis and the isomerization of butene, a precursor to synthetic rubber doc20337 none The objective of this proposal is to study the thermodynamics and kinetics of supercooled bulk metallic glass forming liquids in conjunction with the glass transition as well as the thermal stability against crystallization. It focuses on the question why these liquids are superior glass formers compared to previous metallic glass formers. Together with the high viscosity, the Zr-Ti-Cu-Ni-Be alloys show small heats of fusion and a small Gibbs free energy difference between supercooled liquid and crystalline mixture. This indicates that at least this alloy group is a rather dense liquid with a small free volume. In the proposed research, a selection of different alloy groups will be examined with respect to their kinetics, thermodynamics and crystallization behavior. Three groups of alloys will be investigated. One group consists of early transition metal (ETM) based alloys that are free of Beryllium, in which the ETM(TM)s may serve as a rigid backbone. The second group includes bulk metallic glass forming metalloid containing liquids of the Pd-Cu-Ni-P type and the last group is based on simple metals such as Mg and Al. The goals of the study are to measure the viscosity of supercooled liquids as a function of temperature, alloy composition and shear rate, the specific heat capacities, heats of fusion and heats of crystallization to determine the thermodynamic functions of the alloys as well as the kinetics of the glass transition probed by viscosity and enthalpy relaxation experiments as well as the heating rate dependence of the glass transition temperature. In addition, the crystallization kinetics and microstructure for different degrees of undercooling will be investigated. Various models will be used and developed to analyze the results on viscosities. The thermodynamic functions are calculated as a function of temperature from the experimental data and the functional form of the entropy curve is compared with the viscosity via the Adam Gibbs theory. Nucleation and growth simulations will be applied to the kinetic and microstructural data and the measured viscosities and the thermodynamic driving forces are incorporated in these calculations. The educational outreach involves exposing undergraduate students as well as local high school seniors in various experimental aspects of the program. Bulk metallic glasses represent an exciting new class of structural materials, because of their properties like high strength, large elastic strain limit, corrosion resistance and formability. Furthermore, the high thermal stability of these alloys to resist crystallization allows investigation of supercooled metallic liquids from the melting point down to the glass transition. This region has not been experimentally accessible in the past for random closed packed liquids. The proposed work will have significance in the area of crystallization and glass formability of complex alloy systems, which can have technological underpinning, specifically in regard to the processing of bulk metallic glasses doc20338 none Primack The goals of this project are to improve the understanding of key issues in galaxy formation and evolution, especially the origin of the structure of dark matter halos and the evolution of their baryonic contents. It will address the questions that have arisen concerning cold dark matter (CDM) type models by developing analytic and semi-analytic treatments based on, and tested against, high-resolution simulations. These will provide detailed predictions of galaxy properties at both high and low redshifts, to be compared to space and ground based data especially from the Deep Extragalactic Evolutionary Probe (DEEP) program. These simulations feature use of the Adaptive Refinement Tree (ART) technique, which adjusts the resolution automatically to follow particles in dense regions, and can now use particles of different masses to improve mass and force resolution. This permits the identification of all dark matter halos that can harbor bright galaxies. In addition the project will use a second tool, Semi-Analytic Merging (SAM) to model the outcomes of various star formation and feedback scenarios in CDM galaxy formation. These SAM models will be used to study the structural and chemical evolution of galaxies, including gas cooling, star formation, supernova feedback, satellite merging, and the effects of dust. They model dust emission, and allow the prediction of galaxy counts and integrated backgrounds over wavelengths from the far-UV to the sub-mm. These predictions will be invaluable for interpreting data from previous and planned space missions such as COBE, SIRTF, GALEX, etc. The computer codes for the ART and SAM models will be made available to the public doc20339 none This project addresses three questions: 1) How can we transform introductory math and science courses to provide a more interactive experience for students within the financial constraints of a large state university? 2) In what ways can information technology be used effectively to improve undergraduate science education? and 3) How can research departments and schools of education work together effectively to recruit and train talented students into careers in K-12 math and science education? The author of this proposal has developed a transformed section of introductory undergraduate astronomy that emphasizes inquiry-based and collaborative learning with the aid of web-based information technology. Key elements of the transformed class include: a) Replacing lectures with content delivery through a web-based hypertext that is rich in multimedia simulations and links for exploration; b) Dividing a large (~200 students) class into learning teams of ~12 students each who meet once a week in a computer classroom to prepare answers to pre-posed discussion questions and so work collaboratively on team projects; c) Software and course design to facilitate synchronous and asynchronous communication among students in learning teams; d) Blocks of instruction for inquiry-based collaborative learning using Java-based simulations; and e) The employment of undergraduate learning assistants to supervise the learning teams. The author has also worked with faculty from other science and math research departments and faculty of the school of education in a collaboration with Sun Educational Systems to employ undergraduate and graduate students, programmers, and in-service teachers in summer internships at Sun to develop Java-based blocks of instruction intended for secondary school math and science education and to test these blocks in local school districts. The current project extends this work in the following directions: a) The author is continuing to improve and develop the transformed astronomy course, making the resources available and easy to use for other faculty members in the department; b) The author is working with the administration faculty in other math and science departments at the University of Colorado to help them adopt some of the methodology of the transformed course, including software and the employment of undergraduate learning assistants for their own introductory courses; c) The author is working with the administration, faculty in science and mathematics research departments, faculty in the School of Education, and with Sun Educational Systems to develop an attractive undergraduate curriculum to recruit and train talented students for careers in K-12 science and mathematics education doc20340 none This proposal describes a coherent, collaborative research project on the connections between the point defect chemistry and electronic structure of ferroelectric thin films and the fatigue and imprint processes that limit their reliability in non-volatile memory (FeRAM) devices. A key objective of the research program is to understand the relative contributions of field-induced electronic charge injection trapping and charged oxygen vacancy redistribution during fatigue and imprint of state-of-the-art Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 (PZT) films. Fatigue and imprint testing under optical illumination and DLTS measurements will be pursued in order to characterize both optically- and electrically-active carrier traps in the films. Atomic resolution STEM EELS studies will be performed on both undegraded and fatigued imprinted specimens in order to look for degradation-induced changes in bonding arrangements and local electronic structure at the electrode interfaces with PZT. Oxygen isotope depth profiling through ferroelectric capacitors subjected to various electrical biasing conditions will be used to characterize oxygen vacancy motion. Ab initio calculations of the local electronic structure at ferroelectric metal interfaces, the energies of carrier trap states associated with point defects, and defect formation and migration energies will be performed to properly interpret the experimental results. Ferroelectric materials exhibit a spontaneous polarization, which can be used in a variety of different applications in microelectronics and communications. For example, thin film ferroelectric materials are the key enabler for a new generation of non-volatile semiconductor memories which are currently being developed (and, increasingly, brought to market) by major microelectronics firms worldwide. The physics of switching the ferroelectric polarization state in small-dimension, thin film structures is also an important topic of fundamental scientific interest. Both the science and the technology of ferroelectric thin films provide motivation for better-understanding phenomena that interfere with reliable polarization switching in these materials. Such phenomena include ferroelectric fatigue, the loss of switchable polarization after repeated switching by applied voltage pulses, and imprint, a shift in coercive voltage resulting from repeated voltage pulses of one polarity. A host of experimental observations and theoretical models for ferroelectric fatigue and imprint have been reported over the years. However, the detailed mechanisms responsible for these reliability-limiting processes remain uncertain. This research program will investigate the underlying mechanisms of ferroelectric fatigue and imprint in state-of-the art ferroelectric films provided by our collaborators in the semiconductor industry. The research will be directed by three co-principal investigators based at Stanford University and the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). The program builds on our complimentary expertise in measurements of charged defect migration and polarization switching characteristics of ferroelectric thin films, atomic resolution imaging and spectroscopy using the electron microscope, and simulations of the electronic properties of solids. It will strengthen existing educational outreach activities to Chicago-area high school students, and will include summer research projects for UIC undergraduates at Stanford. These summer projects will be well-integrated with the research program objectives and will strengthen the collaboration between our two institutions doc20341 none The grant provides partial support for a 3-day workshop on real-time logistics with 40-50 participants meeting in Marina Del Rey, California, April 26-28, . The idea is to address the opportunities and research challenges posed by the recent emergence of practical and economic GPS and other real time information sources about the status of pick-up and delivery trucking. Real-time communication is revolutionizing the logistics world by making practical a host of new information and control possibilities. Several research presentations will be provided, along with breakout sessions to discuss research priorities. The workshop would be jointly hosted by the University of Southern California and the University of Arizona, and funded by Department of Transportation sources in addition to the NSF and the universities doc20342 none PI Cohen More than 20 years ago it was discovered that the tip of the giant branch in some galactic globular clusters is populated by stars which show wide variations in C, N, and O abundances. Subsequently less strong, but still real, variations in Na, Al and Mg were detected among the same stars. The goal of this project is to determine the variations of abundances of elements in metal poor stars, concentrating first on globular clusters, as a function of luminosity and evolutionary state. Our ability to explain and reproduce such variations is a stringent test of our understanding of many aspects of stellar evolution as well as of the early chemical history of the Galaxy. It is a test we sometimes fail. In previous work anticorrelated variations of O and Na were found in the globular cluster M71. Furthermore large anticorrelated variations in CH and CN also were found contrary to predictions by stellar evolution theory. The present project will continue and expand this work to more metal poor globular clusters, where the distinction between star-to-star abundance variations arising from dredge up versus primordial variations should be clearer. In addition, the study will extend to more metal poor clusters the work on the CH and CN bands to as low a luminosity as possible. In a related major program the abundance distributions and scatter among the most metal poor stars in the Galaxy, those with [Fe H] =.3.0 dex, are being studied doc20343 none PI Bildsten White dwarfs (WDs) are the most common collapsed objects produced as end points of stellar evolution. Their astrophysical behavior depends on their interior composition affecting both the rate at which these objects cool from birth and how they explode as supernovae if heated to high temperatures later in life by accreting material from a nearby companion star. Deep interior compositions may be probed by studying the properties of certain volumetric oscillations having periods of 100- seconds. This project is a theoretical investigation of these non-radial oscillations and it addresses certain frontier questions. The most abundant atomic nucleus in the WD interior after carbon and oxygen is an isotope of neon that tends to sink towards the WD center. Interpreting observations of these objects requires the theoretical modeling of this project to understand how the oscillations and the cooling times are affected by the neon sedimentation and consequent composition gradient. A second aspect of this project follows from the recent discovery of a pulsating WD in a mass transferring binary system. This finding has opened up a new field in astrophysics. Another set of theoretical calculations are required for such objects in this environment in order to convert observed pulsation periods that are comparable to the rotation periods of these stars into measurements of WD properties such as mass and the rotation rate doc20344 none This project will compare and contrast the magnetospheres of the Earth, Jupiter and its satellite, Ganymede. The study will provide a theoretical framework for understanding the roles that are played by the different sizes and rotation rates of the three objects. The project will involve analytic theory, data analysis and numerical simulations using a magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) code. One of the important issues to be addressed is the role of magnetic flux tube interchange, which has been observed in Jupiter s magnetosphere but may or may not play a role in the Earth s magnetosphere doc20345 none PROJECT SUMMARY Land-use change and alterations of plant diversity and composition have been shown to influence ecosystem processes. Until recently, however, there has been little evaluation of the role of microbial community changes in mediating process change. Shifts in land-use and plant diversity may alter the composition, and thus collective physiology, of soil microbial communities, leading to differences in process rates. To understand more fully the factors that influence microbial communities and their functioning, our research addresses the following questions: 1) Does plant diversity and or land-use influence soil microbial community composition? 2) Do these changes in microbial composition influence nutrient cycling rates? We are addressing these questions using an experiment in Costa Rica that manipulates plant community composition and diversity as well as a set of land-use sites, including forest and pasture. To address the first question, we are examining microbial community composition using phospholipid fatty acid analysis (PLFA) and terminal restriction fragment length polymorphisms (T-RFLP). PLFA data suggest that microbial communities differ significantly across plant diversity and land- use gradients. We request funds to proceed to the crucial second question and test, using controlled laboratory experiments, whether soils with distinct microbial communities differ in two critical ecosystem functions: nitrification and litter decomposition doc20346 none West Understanding the origin and evolution of galaxies is one of the major goals of modern astrophysics. It is generally believed that galaxies arose from small density fluctuations in the primordial matter distribution that were amplified over time by gravity. However, our knowledge of the details of the galaxy formation process is still far from complete, and many important questions remain unanswered. How and when did galaxies form? How have they evolved over time? How do their environs influence galaxy properties? Over the past few years, Dr. Michael West has been pursuing a number of original lines of research, both observational and theoretical, to address these questions. With this award he will build upon previous successes and explore new avenues that may lead to further insights about the genesis of galaxies. Specific goals of this project include the following: o One of the most promising ways to learn the secrets of galaxy formation is by studying their globular cluster populations. Globular clusters are dense aggregates of up to a million stars that are held together by their mutual gravitational attraction. Most galaxies are surrounded by systems of tens, hundreds, or thousands of globular clusters that swarm around them like bees around a hive. The present-day globular populations of galaxies reflect the cumulative effects of billions of years of ongoing galaxy formation and evolution via mergers and collisions, accretion, generations of star formation, and other processes. Careful analysis of a galaxy s globular cluster population can thus allow astronomers to reconstruct its history. A major goal of Dr. West s project is to undertake the most comprehensive study yet of the globular cluster systems of hundreds of galaxies in the Virgo and Coma clusters. o Dr. West and collaborators recently found evidence of the existence of a sizeable population of intergalactic globular clusters that are not gravitationally bound to individual galaxies but instead roam freely throughout the cores of galaxy clusters. The discovery of this new class of objects is an exciting result that invites further study, and searches for intergalactic globulars in several nearby galaxy clusters are currently underway. The colors, luminosity function, and spatial and velocity distributions of these intergalactic globulars will place strong constraints on their origin. o A growing body of evidence suggests that galaxy destruction might be a much more common occurrence than previously thought, and that the births and deaths of galaxies are intertwined. Rich galaxy clusters are especially harsh environments, where small galaxies can be cannibalized by larger ones, collisions between galaxies can strip material from their halos, ablation removes their interstellar gas, and galaxies may be partially or even completely torn apart by tidal fields as they travel through the cluster core. Yet the demise of some galaxies may also give rise to new ones, as material spilled into intergalactic space is eventually recycled into other galaxies. A goal of this research project is to conduct the first systematic survey to look for the faint remains of disrupted galaxies in galaxy clusters, in order to place quantitative constraints on the current rate of galaxy destruction in dense environments. This award is made under the auspices of the Research at Undergraduate Institutions (RUI) program at the NSF doc20347 none Peterson, B M This program will explore the very inner structure of active galactic nuclei, to determine masses of the central black holes using continuum and emission-line variability to probe the physical processes in the accretion-disk broad-line region environment. The current program in progress to measure the bulge velocity dispersions in the host galaxies of active galactic nuclei will be expanded to test whether the relationship between the black-hole mass and bulge velocity dispersion is the same for active galaxies and quiescent galaxies. This relationship will be used to estimate masses for local AGNs for which reverberation masses have not been measured, concentrating initially on radio-loud AGNs and narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies, objects that are not well represented in reverberation-mapped samples. Optical ground-based support for multiwavelength monitoring programs will be provided, in particular a long-standing program of optical spectrophotometry on the well-studied Seyfert 1 galaxy NGC doc20348 none COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: Evolutionary Success in Marine Invertebrates: Testing the Relationships between Eurytopy, Longevity, and Geographic Range in Carboniferous Crinoids This study will focus on the role of environmental and biogeographic factors in the evolutionary success of crinoids (echinoderms), one the most diverse and abundant groups of marine invertebrates during the Paleozoic. Lower Carboniferous (354 to 314 m.y. ago) rocks record the peak of crinoid generic diversity during their evolutionary history. Evolutionary success is measured by taxonomic longevity in the fossil record. Current understanding of reasons for evolutionary success is incomplete, but available evidence indicates a positive correlation with environmental breadth (eurytopy) and geographic range. Data supporting this correlation are limited for Paleozoic marine invertebrates. Thus, analysis of Early Carboniferous crinoids, where preliminary work supports such a correlation, will more rigorously test the correlation and broaden our understanding of the relationships between eurytopy, longevity, and geographic range in marine invertebrates. The research will compare the average stratigraphic (longevity), environmental (eurytopy), and geographic ranges of genera within crinoid groups (suborders) between North America and Europe, the two regions with the best fossil record. The study will include the Kinderhookian to early Meramecian epochs of the Mississippian Period (Early Carboniferous) of North America and the equivalent Tournaisian to middle Visean epochs of the Early Carboniferous of western Europe. Stratigraphic and geographic ranges of genera will be determined by evaluating all known species for correct generic assignment. Simultaneously, data on environmental distribution will be tabulated for genera on both continents to calculate a eurytopy index value for each genus, both intracontinental and intercontinental. Results of this investigation will bear directly on evolutionary theory as it endeavors to explain the history of life on Earth. The extensive data set derived from this study will help elucidate the roles of environment and geography in determining generic longevity and, ultimately, group longevity in defining evolutionary success doc20349 none Katz Over the past ten years, our basic ideas about how galaxies form has reached a consensus. This standard model has been able to explain numerous and varied observations of galaxies. However, four vexing problems remain. These problems arise from predictions made using computer simulations. This has led some researchers to significantly alter or abandon this otherwise very successful standard model. However, computer simulations are not perfect, and it has recently been shown that correctly simulating the dynamics of galaxies and their dark matter halos is much more difficult than previously realized. Hence the cause of these problems could be purely numerical in nature. Alternatively, the cause of these problems could be physical effects which are not properly included in the simulations. Dr Katz and his collaborators will study the origin of these problems and possible solutions to try and assess whether or not the standard model for galaxy formation should be changed or abandoned. They will use numerical simulations of ever increasing realism and novel numerical techniques to study these subtle dynamical processes and their impact on the above problems doc20350 none Ostriker Several lines of observational and theoretical evidence suggest that giant molecular clouds (GMCs) have short lifetimes, forming and dissociating within a few tens of millions of years. Prevailing theoretical arguments favor instability mechanisms in spiral arms to form GMCs, but existing work has suffered from technical limitations, and has not previously directly demonstrated that condensations with the properties of GMCs indeed form. Dr. Eve Ostriker, at the University of Maryland, will lead an investigation of a series of linear stability analyses, nonlinear numerical simulations, and supporting diagnostics to address outstanding questions concerning GMC formation in spiral galaxies. The modeling will include several important technical innovations. These researchers will, for the first time: o Use direct numerical simulations to study development of the Parker instability in 3D with realistic rotational shear self-consistent with large-scale density gradients through arm and interarm regions of galaxies, also incorporating self-gravity to study linear and nonlinear coupling of Parker and Jeans modes; o Comprehensively survey, using spectral methods, shearing-wavelet integrations, and magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) simulations, the potential effects of the magnetorotational instability in galactic disks, focusing on coupling to self-gravitating modes in both secular-growth and saturated-state regimes; o Incorporate a realistic multi-phase gaseous medium for the initial conditions in two and three- dimensional simulations of self-gravitating and magnetically-driven galactic disk instabilities; o Directly confront stochastic coagulation vs. collective instability mechanisms for forming GMC-scale condensations by performing controlled experiments of multiphase evolution with and without self-gravity and magnetic effects. As GMC formation is intimately coupled to star formation, and the cold ISM is the most dynamically-responsive component of a disk galaxy, the results of this project will have broad impacts on both Galactic and extragalactic astronomical research, with implications for understanding the global regulation of star formation and the structure and evolution of spiral galaxies across the Hubble sequence doc20351 none Meisel Dr. David Meisel, at State University of New York at Geneseo, in collaboration with Dr. John Mathews, at Penn State University, will conduct a 3-year observational and analysis modeling study of small particles in the Solar System based on radar micrometeor observations performed at the Arecibo Observatory. Knowledge of the distribution, sources, and gravitational, electrodynamical evolution of interplanetary dust particles (IDPs) in the ~0.2-100 micron size range is critical to the planetary sciences and-as extrasolar and interstellar particles are also present-to local galactic science. The Arecibo Observatory (AO) UHF radar has proven to be uniquely suited for ground-based micrometeor observations that yield velocity, deceleration, and radiant information-and thus orbits-of large numbers of interplanetary and hyperbolic dust particles. Observational results now extend from through the present with a steadily evolving technique that now yields meteoroid Doppler speeds with instantaneous accuracies of as small as 10 m sec (with meteoroid speeds ranging over 10-90 km sec thus far). This combined with a sorting mechanism based on classical, in-atmosphere meteoroid dynamics, clearly distinguishes down-the-beam particles from those meteoroids with a significant across-the-beam velocity component. The new effort extends these studies to details of IDP distribution evolution in the solar system and considers the role of the interstellar particle flux to the solar system as well as local galactic processes features illuminated by this flux. The new observational analysis modeling study funded with this award will continue providing routine sampling of IDPs including the expected earth-crossing asteroidal-orbit particles, interstellar particles (ISPs), Jovian perturbed and or derived particles, and low-mass b particles ejected by radiation pressure from the inner solar system. As the database of ISPs grows, these researchers will continue theoretical modeling studies of the flux and origins of the largest of the interstellar particles. Thus far they can account for all AO ISPs as being products of the same supernova that produced the Geminga pulsar. This effort has involved and will continue to involve undergraduates from SUNY-Geneseo, Penn State, and other institutions and graduate students from Penn State as well as the staff of Arecibo Observatory and other organizations. Results from these efforts appear in several courses including electromagnetics, astrophysics, and plasmas at both Geneseo and Penn State doc20352 none Magri Dr. Christopher Magri, at the University of Maine, will use the upgraded radar system at the Arecibo Observatory to study carbonaceous main-belt asteroids (MBAs). He will use radar-derived constraints on target shape, topography, rotation state, composition, and near-surface roughness to define similarities and differences between the various taxonomic classes containing dark objects and between carbonaceous MBAs and other asteroids. This project, a continuation of NSF-supported research carried out since , is a logical outgrowth of Dr. Magri s recent statistical analyses of MBAs detected prior to the facility upgrade. Carbonaceous asteroids are thought to be relatively unaltered from the primordial solids which condensed in the outer solar nebula; the outermost ones probably have complex organic molecules on their surfaces. This is the first time that large numbers of such objects have been detectable by radar. Hence, Dr. Magri s work represents a step toward understanding the origin and evolution of our solar system doc20353 none This proposal investigates recently discovered algebraic structures which enhance our understanding of quantum field theory and the renormalization group. Kreimer will investigate number theoretic aspects of quantum field theory and their interplay with Hopf algebra structures, with an emphasis on applications to non-perturbative results. Rosenberg will work on the connection between differential geometry and quantum field theory, as suggested by the Birkhoff decomposition in renormalization theory and their corresponding flat connections. Jaffe will extend the methods of constructive field theory in light of these recent developments. In general, this work investigates the mathematical structure of quantum field theory (QFT) and the renormalization group. These are theoretical concepts which underlie the study of matter in phase transitions (e.g. boiling, freezing) as well as physics at the highest energies. While the mathematics behind QFT is still not well understood after fifty years of research, the predicative power of QFT in the laboratory is remarkable for its accuracy. Kreimer and his collaborators have discovered algebraic and combinatorial mathematical structures underlying basic QFT computations, which substantially simplify these calculations. In this research, we will both further the theoretical understanding of these concepts as well as investigate new applications doc20354 none Croft Stars such as the Sun lie in galaxies that are collections of billions of stars, separated from other galaxies by vast distances. These galaxies can take many forms, from flat, spinning disks like our own Milky Way, to giant nearly spherical galaxies that lie at the center of galaxy clusters. We would like to know how these shapes arise, and where the spins came from. We know that galaxies probably formed from the gravitational collapse of clouds of gas in the early Universe. In principle, the patterns of galaxy shapes and spins that we see nowadays has preserved information about what happened at the very beginning. Enormous new surveys of millions of galaxies that are being carried out today will enable us to measure these patterns very precisely. This project will use computer models of galaxy formation to explore how the conditions at these very early times dictated what we see in the Universe around us today. In particular, it seeks to investigate how galaxies form, how they get their shapes and why they spin. It will also examine whether these calculations show correlations between the shapes and spins of neighboring galaxies. The possibility that galaxy shapes and spins are correlated has important implications for other projects that try to measure the bending of light by the gravitational fields of these galaxies (known as gravitational lensing doc20355 none Gnedin There is something magic about the beginnings of centuries: The beginning of the 21st century promises to become a real golden age for cosmology. Only twenty years ago cosmology was a semi-qualitative, highly theoretical collection of general ideas about the possible past and future of the universe. Today, cosmology is rapidly turning into a precision science, informed by a new generation of large, high quality, cosmological surveys carried out by observatories both in space and on the ground. The current task is to understand data already available, and to prepare the tools for precision analysis of forthcoming data. In this project Dr. Gnedin and his collaborators will develop techniques to model the distribution of galaxies using recent and future large-scale surveys. Current surveys have already compiled catalogs of three-dimensional positions of about 100,000 galaxies, and in the next several years this number will increase ten-fold. To mine these surveys for the cosmological information locked inside them, this project will use state-of-the-art numerical simulations to model the distribution of matter in the Universe doc20356 none Insects and other arthropods are being surveyed in Colombia, one of the most biologically diverse countries in the world, and one of the most poorly sampled for arthropods and other forms of life. The arthropod fauna of 10 of Colombia s National Parks and wildlife sanctuaries are sampled employing, at each site, a number of different collecting methods in order to capture organisms in all types of microhabitats from tree canopies to forest ground litter. Samples are sent to the Alexander von Humboldt Institute in Villa Leyva (Colombia), where they are sorted and prepared. PI Sharkey travels to Colombia to collect the samples twice per year. He then sends them to almost 100 scientific collaborators across the United States and to 15 other countries around the world. The timing is critical since Colombia is the third worst country in South America in terms of rate of forest loss and the second worst in terms of population growth. Combined with political instability, the high crime rate, and the illegal drug trade, the project might appear to be urgent but impractical; however, these handicaps have been surmounted. The von Humboldt Institute, which is a branch of the Federal Department of the Environment, and the Colombian Ministry of National Parks, is collaborating to overcome the potential logistic problems. Park naturalists are operating the sampling equipment, and send the samples to the Humboldt Institute on a quarterly (or more frequent) basis, thus avoiding dangerous travel in Colombia. Insects and other arthropods constitute more than half of the species level diversity of all life. That is, there are more species of insects and other arthropods like spiders than all other species of life combined! Therefore, the study of this group is fundamental to understanding the diversity of life, which is higher in Colombia than just about anywhere else in the world, due to its varied geography and tropical location. Despite this wealth, the international scientific community has not had access to it for more than 20 years. This project results in the distribution of tens of thousands of prepared specimens throughout the world each year. Collaborating scientists describe new species and higher-level taxa. Using our quantitative sampling data, they prepare estimates of the total number of species throughout Colombia, and compare the Colombian fauna with other areas of South America and the world to obtain a clear picture of the species that are restricted to Colombia doc20357 none PI Kawaler After decades of progress, many stages of stellar evolution remain only modestly understood. The investigators here will exploit a powerful tool that Nature provides for probing the interiors of stars, namely asteroseismology. At several points in their evolution, stars undergo self-excited nonradial pulsations, which are observable as multiperiodic brightness variations. By observing these variations as continuously as possible for as long as is practical, they resolve the multiple frequencies of variation in these stars. Since each frequency represents a normal-mode of oscillation of the star, by consulting theoretical models they will deduce details of the global and internal structure of these stars with striking detail. Among other things, using asteroseismology they will measure the mass of isolated pulsators to great accuracy, determine where there are structural or compositional changes in the interior of pulsators, and place limits on or actually measure the chemical composition of a pulsator as a function of radius. The success in this project results from the operation of a unique instrument known as the Whole Earth Telescope (WET). The WET is an international partnership of astronomers, distributed around the Earth, who gather continuous time-series brightness measurements of rapidly varying stars and analyze these data to extract the astrophysical insight contained therein doc20358 none The focus of this project is to provide a first-rate research experience to students who otherwise are extremely unlikely to get get it at their home institutions or elsewhere. The sequential research experiences focus on the applications of mathematics to the biological sciences. The Mathematical and Theoretical Biology Institute (MTBI) scientific undergraduate program is carried out primarily through consecutive summer research experiences that have been specifically designed to train, mentor, encourage and support Chicano, Latino, Native American and African American who have the potential to pursue careers in applied mathematics or in scientific field where serious quantitative training is fundamental. MTBI s main goal of increasing the pool of under-represented minorities getting advanced degrees in quantitative fields is best achieved through the selection of participants who come from non-selective universities. The effectiveness of this NSF funded project is being measured by the number of students who enroll in graduate school, the number who get advanced degrees and the ability of some MTBI alumni to gain access to selective graduate programs in these fields. MTBI promotes its goals and objectives through its intensive multiple-summer research training program, GRE preparation program and long-term mentorship and support programs for its alumni. Students receive four weeks of intensive training in mathematical and computational techniques before developing their own research project (10 technical reports per year have been generated, on the average, since ). MTBI summer research experiences opens the doors for under-represented minorities in fields of genomics, theoretical and computational biology, bio-statistics, applied mathematics and many others. The success of the consecutive summer research experiences is based on various factors that include unlimited student access to faculty and support personnel (12 to 16 hours a day) and a collaborative learning environment that enhances and nurtures the learning experiences of all participants. Explicit summer outcomes include: the completion a formal research paper (25-40 pages), a public oral presentation and the preparation of a poster. The typical activities of most MTBI alumni include the presentation of their MTBI work in poster sessions at two national conferences: the SACNAS annual meeting and the joint AMS MAA winter meeting doc20359 none Reynolds Black holes are responsible for some of the most dramatic phenomena seen in the current universe. Furthermore, the environment immediately around a black hole is a naturally occurring laboratory in which many exotic physical processes will occur and can be studied. Some of the most interesting phenomena are associated with the twisting and dragging of space and time due to the rotation of the black hole. This project will conduct a theoretical exploration of the effect that a spinning black hole will have on its astrophysical surroundings. This is an extremely timely study since modern X-ray telescopes are already starting to observe such effects. Theory suggests that magnetic fields will be crucial for the phenomena associated with black hole spin. Guided by past work, Dr. Reynolds and his collaborators will split the investigation into three parts. 1) Conducting computer simulations of the gaseous flows (including the magnetic fields) in the vicinity of a black hole. 2) Employing simplifying assumptions and approximations to study the complex behavior of magnetic loops in the region very close to the black hole. 3) Computing predictions that can be directly tested by current and future observations with the XMM-Newton X-ray observatory doc20360 none PI Lombardi Close interactions happen frequently in dense stellar systems, such as the cores of globular star clusters, where the density of stars can be so high that even physical collisions between stars can occur. They can also happen during the evolution of close binary stars, where they often lead to mergers of the two components. Close stellar interactions play a crucial role in determining the long-term dynamical evolution and final fate of dense star clusters. In addition, dynamical interactions in these clusters are thought to be responsible for the production of large numbers of exotic objects such as X-ray sources, binary radio pulsars, and blue stragglers. Understanding the long-term dynamical evolution of dense stellar systems and the formation mechanisms for the peculiar sources they contain are two long-standing problems in theoretical astrophysics. This project will focus on a number of theoretical and computational studies dealing with various aspects of these hydrodynamic stellar interactions in dense star clusters and in binary star systems. Large-scale numerical simulations of the hydrodynamic and stellar evolution processes will be performed on parallel supercomputers, providing quantitatively accurate theoretical predictions that can be compared directly to observations. Much of the work will be carried out by undergraduate students doc20361 none National Geographic Television, in Collaboration with Graphic Films, is producing a 40-minute, large-format, documentary film about the scientific quest to understand some of the most dramatic geological and meteorological events we experience -- volcanoes, earthquakes and violent storms. The goals of the film are to inform audiences about geological and meteorological forces which greatly impact our planet, present the scientific research being performed in an effort to understand and predict these forces, portray scientific role models and to stimulate a greater appreciation and interest in the Earth sciences. Informal education outreach will include: A Forces of Nature website that will include educational resources targeted to the general audience as well as to students and teachers. Museum and Family Activity Guides The National Geographic Society will support public programs at science-technology centers by providing access to scientists who work in the areas of science covered in the film. National Geographic s cable program Explorer (carried on MSNBC) will produce a themed show around Forces of Nature to coincide with the launch of the film. A companion book In addition, outreach materials for formal education will include: A Forces of Nature Teacher s Guide A teacher training seminar to be conducted at the first 20 theaters in the U.S. that lease the film Workshops at the national conferences of the National Science Teachers Association, the National Council for the Social Studies and the National Council for Geographic Education. Instructional information in National Geographic for Kids, the classroom magazine for elementary school students in grades 3-6. The Executive Producer for the film will be Lisa Truitt. George Casey will be the Producer Director. The Lead Science Advisors are Stephen Schneider, Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change, Stanford University; James Shymansky, Professor of Science Education, University of Missouri-St. Louis; and James Walker, Professor Emeritus, Space Physics Research Lab, Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Science, University of Michigan doc20362 none Schweizer The formation and evolution of galaxies is of central interest in present-day astrophysics. There is mounting evidence that many galaxies grew from smaller units, and that galactic mergers may have played a major role in determining the shapes and dynamics of certain remnants, and perhaps even of elliptical galaxies. However, the details of this assembly remain unclear, and there are several competing hypotheses for the formation of ellipticals. Fortunately, a few galactic mergers still occur in the local universe and o.er valuable clues to the past assembly process. The discovery that globular star clusters form in large numbers during mergers of gas-rich galaxies has opened new avenues to studying the formation and evolution of globular clusters and of their host galaxies. Questions of current interest are: Is there an evolutionary link between globular clusters formed in mergers and old globular clusters in giant elliptical galaxies? How do systems of globular clusters formed in mergers evolve? Specifically, how do their luminosity functions, metallicity distributions, and kinematics evolve? Do galactic mergers imprint cluster systems with kinematic signatures (e.g., fast outer rotation) that can be traced along a sequence of merger remnants of increasing age? The Principal Investigator, Francois Schweizer, proposes carefully designed observational studies to address these questions. He points out that-whereas the birth of young clusters in ongoing mergers and the properties of old globular clusters in ellipticals have been studied widely in recent years-there is a surprising lack of knowledge about globular-cluster systems of intermediate age. Yet, these systems hold great promise for directly addressing the above issues. Dr. Schweizer and collaborators were among the .rst to study globular clusters formed in mergers with the Hubble Space Telescope and to follow up with ground-based spectroscopic observations to determine their ages and chemical abundances. He will now search for globular clusters of intermediate age (1 - 7 Gyr) in about a dozen galaxies thought to be transition objects between ongoing mergers (e.g., NGC 39) and old ellipticals. He will use both the Baade 6.5-m telescope at Las Campanas Observatory and the Advanced Survey Camera on the Hubble Space Telescope to obtain some of the deepest images ever taken of these transition objects and their globular-cluster systems. Photometric analysis of these images, as well as of Hubble archival images, will yield the chronology of these cluster systems from their broad-band colors. The same deep images will also be used to study the evolution of the globular-cluster luminosity function with time. The luminosity functions of fresh-born cluster systems are power laws, while those of ancient systems are close to lognormal. Theory predicts that as globular-cluster systems age, their luminosity functions should evolve from the .rst to the second shape through preferential erosion of low-mass clusters. Deep luminosity functions reaching past the predicted turnover magnitudes will be measured from the images to subject this prediction to a critical test. A parallel program of multi-slit spectroscopy mainly with the Magellan 6.5-m telescopes, but also with the northern Gemini 8-m telescope, will yield metallicities and more accurate ages for some key globular-cluster systems of intermediate age. Measurements of radial velocities for typically 40 - 200 clusters per galaxy will permit comparative studies of the kinematics of metal-poor and metal-rich globulars within the same galaxy. This will yield valuable clues about the origins of what are thought to be .rst- and 2nd-generation cluster subpopulations. These observational studies will test all proposed formation mechanisms for ellipticals and will-specifically-focus on possible evidence for an evolutionary link between 2nd-generation globulars formed in mergers and metal-rich globulars in old ellipticals. The results from this project will help improve our understanding not only of globular-cluster formation and evolution, but also of galaxy formation and growth and, ultimately, of the origin of Hubble s morphological sequence of galaxy types doc20363 none Graham, J R Star formation in starburst galaxies is dominated by super star clusters (SSCs) whose sizes and masses are comparable to those of globular clusters, suggesting that SSCs may be young globular clusters. There are many outstanding questions in this field: What physical conditions lead to the formation of SSCs? How does this mode of star formation fit into our paradigm for Galactic star formation? What fraction of stars forms in SSCs? What is the connection between SSCs and globular clusters? The centerpiece of this work is an IR spectroscopic and imaging study of the SSC population in the nearest starburst merger, the Antennae Galaxies, using observing time which has been awarded on the Gemini and Keck telescopes. The youngest SSCs in the Antennae are concentrated in the dusty overlap region between the two nuclei where giant molecular cloud complexes reside and where the mid-IR intensity peaks. The infrared observations to be conducted here, which suffer an order of magnitude less extinction than previous Hubble Space Telescope data, are essential to reduce the systematic errors associated with reddening and to quantify the properties of SSCs over the full range of ages and extinctions doc20364 none Daly, Ruth A. Powerful radio sources play an important role in our understanding of galaxy evolution and the phenomenon of activity in the nuclei of galaxies. It is important to define, quantify, and understand the properties and structure of these radio sources. This will lead to a better understanding of the physics of the radio sources and the relationship of the radio sources to (1) the active galactic nuclei that power the large-scale radio emission, (2) their host galaxies, and (3) their gaseous and galactic environments. This work will involve studies that are aimed at improving and extending our knowledge and understanding of the radio sources in order to quantify, evaluate, and understand their properties. Powerful extended radio sources are observed to relatively high redshift, and the sample that will be used includes 28 sources out to redshifts of two. The studies will begin with an analysis of the radio bridge structure of each source at two or more radio frequencies. Results will be compared with predictions of numerical simulations run with a variety of input parameters, and with predictions from several different analytical models proposed to describe the properties of these sources. There will be substantial undergraduate student involvement in the work. Experience working with undergraduate students at the Berks-Lehigh Valley College of Penn State University indicates that students can contribute in a variety of ways doc20365 none PI Starrfield An improved understanding of nova explosions holds important implications for the creation of many chemical elements in the galaxy, the secular evolution of close binary systems, the sources of pre-solar grains, the distance scale of the universe, the nature of the progenitors of Type Ia Supernovae, and for gamma-ray sources. Thermonuclear runaways in hydrogen-rich envelopes on white dwarf stars in close binary stellar systems constitute the outburst mechanisms for classical and recurrent novae. Ongoing studies of the general characteristics of these explosions are informing us about binary stellar evolution, while studies of the evolution of nova binary systems are constraining models for the (unidentified) progenitors of the Type Ia supernovae. Further, the empirical relation between the peak luminosity of a nova and the rate of decline, not understood theoretically, allows novae to be utilized as standard candles for distance determinations as far away as some galaxy clusters. Extensive abundance determinations of nova ejecta have revealed the existence of massive oxygen-neon-magnesium white dwarfs in some systems and less massive carbon-oxygen white dwarfs in other systems. The high levels of enrichment of novae ejecta in elements ranging from carbon to sulfur confirm that there is significant dredge-up of matter from the core of the underlying white dwarf. Classical novae, therefore, must participate in the cycle of chemical enrichment of heavy elements in interstellar gas and dust. Once in the diffuse gas, this material is cycled through molecular clouds before being incorporated into young stars and planetary systems during star formation. It seems likely that grains from novae were injected into the pre-solar nebula and can be identified with some of the pre-solar grains found in meteorites. This research will help us (1) to understand and to reliably predict the observed behaviors described above, and (2) to understand the complicated interplay between nuclear physics and convection during the final stages of the thermonuclear runaway doc20366 none Quataert Black holes, a prediction of Einstein s Theory of General Relativity, represent the ultimate victory of gravity over all other forces in the Universe; so much mass is concentrated in such a small volume that nothing, not even light, can escape. In the past decade, astronomers have provided convincing evidence that most galaxies in the Universe have a massive black hole at their center; these are a million to a billion times more massive than our Sun. Such black holes can be detected by several techniques, including the radiation produced by hot gas falling into the black hole. In some cases this gas produces more light than all of the billions of stars in the host galaxy which harbors the black hole. Most of the time, however, massive black holes produce surprisingly little radiation from accreting gas. This research is aimed at understanding this impressive range in energy production. Dr. Quataert and collaborators will carry out theoretical calculations of the properties of hot gas in the vicinity of a black hole, both analytically ( pencil and paper ) and using computer simulations. They will focus on determining how much gas falls into a black hole and how much radiation this gas produces. They will then compare these results to observations from facilities such as the Very Large Array (VLA) Radio Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory doc20367 none Milwaukee Public Museum will provide under-represented, economically-disadvantaged, minority, urban girls in grades 6 to 8 an opportunity to participate in hands-on science learning activities and mentoring by scientists in botany, geology, zoology and biodiversity studies. The participants will have the opportunity to learn directly from the scientists, join them at field studies, conduct mini-research under their guidance and find out what inspired their career choices. In addition to the expertise of the scientists, Science Explorations program will utilize the exhibits, collections, live animals, scientific laboratories and computer distance learning laboratory during a series of 12-week after school sessions in the fall and spring semesters. A total of 141 girls will receive 96 hours of instruction over three years. Science Explorations activities will promote learning of biological and geological forces that have formed the present natural environment with a focus on the local area where the participants reside. Parental involvement in the Families and Friends event and a complimentary museum and Clue Crew membership will sustain, support and encourage future visits to the museum. Participants change in science knowledge and attitudes, performance in science subjects, career planning and support system to pursue interest in science will be monitored as part of the project evaluation. The evaluation design could serve as a model for studying informal science learning in a museum setting doc20368 none PI Pinsonneault There has been extensive recent observational and theoretical work on the angular momentum evolution of low mass stars. The initial distribution of protostellar rotation rates can provide clues about the star formation process and the interaction of T Tauri stars with their circumstellar accretion disks. Rotation is intimately connected with the generation of stellar magnetic fields, and the spindown of stars can be used to study angular momentum loss from a magnetized stellar wind. Internal transport of material and of angular momentum has several sources (hydrodynamic, magnetic, and induced by gravity waves); this transport produces mixing that can strongly modify the surface abundances of stars. The sheer variety of physical effects associated with stellar rotation makes the subject complex. Fortunately, there are numerous observational constraints on theoretical models of angular momentum evolution, and recent work has established a theoretical framework for interpreting these data. This study is a combined theoretical and observational program on stellar rotation. The goals of this work are to improve the physics in models of angular momentum evolution and to provide new calibrating data for the models doc20369 none Flower color is an important ecological trait because it is used by plants to attract pollinators. Differences in flower color between species of Ipomoea (morning glories) will often lead to the presence of different sets of pollinators and a lack of pollen exchange. In order to understand the genetic basis for differences in flower color, one can study the major biosynthetic genes that produce flower pigments. Differences in these genes should be manifest as differences in DNA sequence, expression level, or expression time. A combination of crossing studies, DNA sequencing, and gene expression assays will be used to identify the gene or genes responsible for flower differences between two closely related species of Ipomoea: the white-flowered I. lacunosa and the purple-flowered I. triloba. The number and type of mutations fixed during adaptive evolution is a long-standing question in biology. Recent work has suggested that, contrary to longstanding views, only a few mutations of large effect may be involved in adaptation. Furthermore, with increasing evidence of the conservation of most proteins over long time periods, it has been suggested that important mutations may occur primarily in regulatory sequences. In order to address these issues, the genetic basis of flower color differences between I. lacunosa and I. triloba will be examined doc20370 none Schechter, Paul L. In this project two distinct strategies will be used to search at optical wavelengths for gravitationally lensed quasars. First, conventional (but highly automated) pointed direct images will be obtained of known quasars with the Magellan I (Baade) telescope. Second, direct images in three filters will be obtained for square degrees with 0.24 arcsecond pixels and subarcsecond resolution with the MPIA 2.2-m telescope. A conservative estimate of the expected number of lenses is 32, exceeding the number of systems found separately in the past two decades by either optical or radio techniques. As 90% of quasars are radio quiet, these two searches will complement recent successful radio searches and furnish systems bright enough for extensive followup at optical wavelengths. Gravitationally lensed quasars select galaxies by mass, rather than light. Samples of lensing galaxies, typically at intermediate redshifts, complement intermediate redshift samples selected by apparent magnitude. They give mass functions rather than luminosity functions, an important component of galaxy evolution models. Lensed quasars also permit measurement of the Hubble constant, the cosmological parameter which sets the scale for the Universe. The Hubble constant is sufficiently important that it warrants a measurement completely independent of the traditional parallax and standard candle based methods doc20371 none Proposal # Leibold and Geddes. . Identifying factors that could stabilize or destabilize particular systems reflects the need to understand ecological processes because of concerns regarding how increased instability could yield loss of species and or ecosystem functioning. Evidence that spatial subsidies might be more common than previously thought led prior research to assess the generality of such inputs. Although theoretical models suggest that subsidies could stabilize food webs, no experimental evidence supports such claim. The proposed research goes beyond recognizing that subsidies are ubiquitous by addressing their role on the dynamic behavior and functioning of planktonic pond food webs. Specifically, it addresses how food webs with configurations that differ in species richness and identity respond to subsidies, and how multiple subsidies interact with predation to mediate stability and ecosystem functioning. Ideally, results from this research will determine the effects of subsidies on food webs and ecosystems by bridging current gaps among theoretical, empirical, and correlational studies doc20372 none Lowenthal, J D This work will investigate the evolution of starforming galaxies over cosmological lookback times by conducting deep, detailed studies of distant galaxies in the optical and near-IR wavebands. The primary scientific goals are to fill in the redshift gap for field galaxies between redshifts z = 1 and z = 2 (with lookback times of more than half the age of the Universe) and to establish detailed connections between star-forming galaxies in the early Universe and nearby galaxies today, especially by directly constraining the masses of distant systems. The project will build on an ongoing study of luminous, compact, star-forming galaxies at 2 z 5. The specific goal is to study Lyman break galaxies in detail, searching especially for clues to their masses, which are essential for placing the Lyman break galaxies in the proper context of galaxy formation and evolution doc20373 none The Louisville Science Center in collaboration with The Lincoln Foundation plans to: (1) establish WYSci s continuance as part of the Whitney M. Young Scholars Program, (2) extend the program to include 35 additional hours of instruction in a week-long summer program, (3) expand opportunities to involve parents and other caregivers, and (4) provide significant evaluation data. The evaluation component would be used to determine the program s effect on participating students and parents and to inform others as to what factors are important for melding informal and formal science education. The program is designed to positively affect the learning of young people in the seventh grade who are academically talented, but socio-economically disadvantaged. Over the three-year period, 150 students will receive over 50 hours of instruction by the staff doc20374 none Lichens are organisms that are composed of a fungus and an alga, in a symbiotic relationship that allows both to occupy habitats that would be inhospitable to the separate components. They include a significant percentage of all fungi. Lichens are critical components of many terrestrial ecosystems yet they remain largely understudied. There are immense gaps in our knowledge regarding lichen diversity, and these gaps impede efforts to devise and implement unified strategies for sustainable biodiversity conservation. In North America, the only comprehensive regional treatments of lichens are outdated and cover areas in the glaciated regions of the northern United States and Canada. It has been estimated that 10-20% of the North American lichen biota is unknown to science and preliminary work indicates that in the Ozarks alone about 75 species of lichens seem to be previously unknown. To help remedy this, Richard Harris (New York Botanical Garden) and Doug Ladd (The Nature Conservancy, Missouri Chapter) will prepare a comprehensive treatment of the lichens of the Ozark Highlands of central North America, known to be a center of biological richness for diverse groups of plants and animals. The area is primarily within southern Missouri and northern Arkansas, but also includes portions of Oklahoma, Illinois, and Kansas. The Ozarks include the oldest continuously exposed rock in North America, contain the largest contiguous woodland remaining in the midcontinent, and are the subject of increasing conservation interest and activity. Within the Ozarks, many habitats are dominated by lichens, and they have the potential to be effective for ecological monitoring and assessment. Building on initial work completed during the past 15 years, Harris and Ladd will produce a comprehensive, illustrated account of the Ozark lichen biodiversity. The results of the proposed work will be directly relevant to ongoing conservation planning and implementation, and will serve to increase the effectiveness of conservation efforts by multiple agencies and organizations. This would include updated proposals for rare and endangered lichens within Missouri and Arkansas for use by conservation agencies, both private and governmental. Additionally, two educational components will help increase the visibility of this very diverse, but little-studied group. These are an educational workshop primarily geared toward amateurs, and a graduate student opportunity in lichenology. The accessibility of this knowledge on lichens will be available to both academic and industrial scientists. Because of the antiquity of the Ozark lichens they are often of special interest to academic biologists because they help resolve phylogenetic relationships within the lichens as a whole. Because of the large and diverse assemblage of chemical compounds produced by lichens, including those with antibiotic properties, they are of special interest to industrial biologists doc20375 none Michael LaBarbara and Kristin Sherrard Unlike land animals, many marine animals are fully independent from the earliest juvenile stages, a tenth of a millimeter long. At this size there are unique challenges to feeding, growth, and survival. Water behaves like honey and is costly to move through, being stepped on by a shrimp is fatal, and the food itself, such as algal cells, is much larger in relation to your mouth. Little is known about how marine invertebrate juveniles face these challenges, although mortality rates are higher than at any subsequent stage, which suggests that early juvenile performance may be a crucial determinant of reproductive success. The researchers are investigating feeding performance, growth rates, and mortality in early juvenile ascidian, or sea squirts. Sea squirts function much like clams, filtering water to feed on microscopic particles. They have a variety of growth forms, and may be colonial, budding off small feeding units, or solitary, increasing greatly in size. Initial juvenile length varies tenfold, and some species have adults of up to 10 cm in length, with a thousand-fold length change in the course of growth. The researchers will compare suspension feeding performance between juvenile and adult sea squirts of the same species, and between juveniles of species with different growth patterns. They will determine whether filter feeding at small size is mechanically less efficient than at larger size, and evaluate the extent to which performance is optimized at different stages in the life cycle. Comparing feeding performance in six distantly related species of sea squirts will reveal whether there are multiple strategies to minimize the difficulties of feeding efficiencies and growth at small size stages doc20376 none During the last four years, Tennessee State University has established an interdisciplinary NSF CREST center, the Center for Systems Science Research (CSSR), which consists of components from mathematics, physics astronomy, and electrical mechanical engineering. Research niches have been firmly established in each of these areas and, at present, the existing research base has matured enough to permit continued significant contributions to the body of scientific knowledge. These science engineering niches form the four research thrust components of this renewal proposal: (1) optimal and robust control (electrical engineering), (2) modeling of complex astrophysical systems (physics astronomy), (3) large-scale stochastic dynamic systems (mathematics), and (4) modeling of complex flows (mechanical engineering). These four research components from diverse science engineering disciplines seek to understand the behavior of complex physical systems by utilizing mathematical models. CSSR researchers in each thrust component have worked independently and side by side for the last four years, and fruitful collaborative interactions have resulted in cross discipline approaches to problem solving. The Center for Systems Science Research has as its primary goals (1) the establishment of a permanent research base at Tennessee State University which produces new knowledge and quality, publishable, peer-reviewed research relevant to NSF research goals and (2) the enhancement of participation and substantial involvement of minority students and faculty in SMET research areas. In reference to Goal 1, the TSU CREST Center has published 171 articles, 139 of these in refereed journals or conference proceedings, during its first four years. Each thrust area has produced significant new knowledge, e.g. the control systems group introduced the concept of controller fragility which resulted in a special session at the American Control Conference, the astrophysics group confirmed the existence of extra solar planets by discovering the first planet in the star system HD ,the applied math group has expanded the probabilistic analysis and computational methods for large-scale stochastic dynamic systems, and the CFD groups collaboration with the NSF ERC at Mississippi State University has resulted in a model which predicts the effects of icing on the aerodynamics and structural characteristics of aircraft. During the same time period, the pursuit of Goal 2 has resulted in the support and participation of 35 undergraduate and 7 graduate African-American students on average per year. During the past four years, support for both graduates and undergraduates has averaged over $200,000 per year for various combinations of tuition, fees, room and board, and stipends, and this same level of support is requested for the renewal period. The CREST Student Program Coordinator matches student participants with CREST researchers. Students present their work at the TSU University Wide Research Symposium and at the NSF NASA TSU Student Research Symposium. Students have also been co-authors with CREST researchers on journal conference papers. Thus far eight under-represented minority students have received their MS degrees, five of whom are now pursuing a Ph.D. In the Fall Semester, the university began enrollment of students in the newly established Ph.D. program in Computer Information Systems Engineering which is housed in the College of Engineering, Technology, and Computer Science. The NSF HRD CREST program was the catalyst that fast-tracked this initiative through the university, the Tennessee Board of Regents, and the Tennessee Higher Education Commission doc20377 none PI Robinson The Soft X-Ray Transients are short-period, X-ray binary stars in which a compact star - either a neutron star or a black hole - is stripping matter from a relatively-normal companion star. The stripped matter spirals down to the compact star, releasing gravitational potential energy and forming a hot accretion disk. It is this superheated accretion disk that is the source of the X-ray emission. Such bursts of X-ray emission may last a few months and can reach extraordinary luminosities, 100,000 times the sun s luminosity. The bursts are caused by an increase in the flow of mass through the disk. The X-ray luminosity between outbursts is low, so the quiescent binary system is undistorted by strong X-ray irradiation, allowing reliable measurements of system properties. The high proportion of black holes among the short-period X-ray binaries, their variable accretion flows, and their low X-ray luminosity between outbursts make them superb laboratories for studying black holes and black hole accretion. Although they are generally discovered at X-ray wavelengths, disentangling their properties requires observations at optical as well as X-ray wavelengths. The known binaries are, however, all faint at optical wavelengths during quiescence and, thus, have been slow to yield their secrets. This project will measure the dynamical masses of the x-ray binary black holes, measure the structure and evolution of the accretion disk and other accretion flows by Doppler Tomography of the emission lines, and will take advantage of the queue-scheduled operating mode of the 8-meter Hobby-Eberly Telescope of McDonald Observatory to obtain synoptic measurements of the optical spectral energy distribution of any northern x-ray transient that goes into outburst, mapping their full outburst behavior for the first time doc20378 none Jimenez The field of Cosmology has had unprecedented development in the last 80 years. We now have an extremely successful and simple model: the universe was created during the Big Bang, expanded in an inflationary phase, and the galaxies were formed via gravitational instabilities from tiny initial quantum fluctuations. Furthermore, we now know that the universe is made up mostly of a mysterious dark energy (70%) with the remaining mass consisting of some kind of dark matter (25%) and ordinary matter (5%). This model has passed impressive tests at physical scales larger than that of galaxy clusters. However, at galaxy scales, the current paradigm is not as successful. There seems to be much less dark matter at the centers of galaxies than is predicted by computer simulations. This project will study an important ingredient, which has been missing from these computer simulations: supermassive black holes and other condensed forms of matter. Preliminary simulations by Dr Jimenez and his collaborators have shown that such objects can displace a significant amount of dark matter from the centers of galaxies. These preliminary calculations will be extended and refined with the aim of testing whether the standard paradigm can be reconciled with the observations. In addition, this project will investigate the nature of the elusive dark matter particles. This will be done by calculating the flux of gamma rays expected from the self-annihilation of dark matter particles at the galactic center. This flux depends both on the evolutionary history of the galaxy, and on the precise masses of the dark matter particles doc20379 none Pellmyr Seagraves This project will expand dissertation research on the circumstances leading to cheating in mutualistic interactions by testing explicit hypotheses on geographically structured coevolution and history. The obligate pollination mutualism between yuccas and yucca moths is one of the classical examples of coevolution, and an excellent model system to explore mutualism reversal as it includes derived non-pollinating cheater moths. Using this interaction, three specific predictions will be tested on how local adaptation drives variation in plant-moth interactions and coevolution. The project will specifically focus on phylogeography and floral morphology of the host plant Yucca filamentosa. Phylogeographic analysis based on AFLP data will be performed across the plant range, and the results used to test hypotheses that involve comparisons with existing data sets on floral trait variation and moth phylogeographic patterns. This study will provide one of the first data sets to extract both the historical and adaptive components of a mutualism doc20380 none PI Cordes With a number of upgrades coming to the Arecibo Observatory telescope of the National Astronomy and Ionospheric Center in the next year, the Observatory is poised to carry out a large-scale deep survey for new pulsars. Current estimates are that about new pulsars will be discovered. The system will have high sensitivity to the fastest pulsars and to compact binaries with orbital periods less than a few hours and with every possible kind of companion including black holes. There are implications for detailed modeling of the magnetic field and ionic distribution in our Galaxy, defining the Galaxy s spiral arms, and gravitational wave studies of compact binaries. This project will lay the groundwork for the survey through a survey design and pilot observations, developing data processing software, and investigating radio frequency interference mitigation techniques doc20381 none Cordes Dr. James Cordes of Cornell University will lead a multi-faceted project involving neutron stars, pulsar physics and populations, and probing of the interstellar and intergalactic media. The main areas of investigation are: Pulsar astrometry using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), the Arecibo Telescope, and the Green Bank Telescope (GBT). The intent is to obtain new proper motions and parallaxes of a few dozen pulsars. The ultimate goal is to use such measurements to understand Galactic structure in electron density and magnetic field, and also to use pulsar velocities to constrain the physics of core collapse and attendant asymmetries that give pulsars `kicks. Searches for new pulsars in the Galactic center and searches for individual dispersed pulses from the nearby galaxies M33 (using Arecibo) and M31 (using the GBT). Detection of multiple pulsars in these galaxies allows probing of the intergalactic medium once contributions to line-of-sight measures from our Galaxy and the host galaxy are removed. Improving Galactic electron density models and the pulsar distance scale is also a major activity in this project. Dr. Cordes will build upon an earlier model by using new astrometry results and multi-wavelength observations that allow more detailed modeling. Fluctuations in electron density are also to be modeled, based on radio scattering measurements and emission measures. The combined model for the mean and fluctuating electron density allows predictions to be made for a wide range of observables, including those that describe interstellar scintillations and scattering. The new models will have particular application to interpretations of observations of gamma-ray burst afterglows and intra-day variable active galactic nuclear sources. Through measurements of pulse broadening of distant pulsars, Dr. Cordes will explore detailed aspects of the microstructure in the electron density fluctuations. Evidence of `anomalous frequency scaling suggest that the microstructure is anisotropic and patchy. Analogous to interstellar scattering, propagation effects from the intergalactic medium and intervening galaxies looking toward high redshift active galactic nuclei (AGN) are within reach of VLBI observations. Dr. Cordes will model possible effects and test their presence in observations. In particular, enhanced scattering during the epoch of reionization from HII region shocks may be detectable. Dr. Cordes will study giant pulses and possibly other radio transients with both theoretical and observational components. A comprehensive survey of known pulsars for giant pulses like those seen from the Crab pulsar will be made. He will pursue a model that ties giant-pulse emission to the outer magnetospheres of certain pulsars where a cyclotron resonance condition can be satisfied and which links giant radio pulses to high energy emission in the X-and--ray bands doc20382 none Touma Over the last decade, thanks to high-resolution observations of galactic nuclei by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), supermassive black holes (SBHs) have been detected in two dozen or so galaxies (including the Milky Way). These detections rely on the measurement of the appreciable dynamical effects that a black hole exerts on nearby gas and stars. Dr. Touma will conduct a detailed study of stellar dynamics around SBHs in galactic nuclei. This study will bolster detection efforts through careful dynamical modeling of kinematic observations. It will also help to clarify the role that a SBHs play in shaping features found in the central regions of the host galaxy. Finally, it will shed some light on questions relating to the origin and evolution of SBHs. In particular, it will involve a thorough analysis of a violent instability that Dr. Touma has recently identified. This instability affects stellar disks which are dominated by a SBH in their center, and which harbor a small proportion of counter-rotating stars. The instability distorts the disk into a lopsided shape and promises to explain the lopsided nucleus of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), which harbors an SBH, and is suspected of supporting a small percentage of counter-rotating stars doc20383 none Shull This project will explore the effects of star formation in early galaxies. This study will aid our understanding of the formation of the heavy elements and their return to the intergalactic medium by supernovae in the first stars and the first galaxies. When such massive stars form, they produce large amounts of ionizing radiation, before ending their lives in prodigious explosions (supernovae). Dr. Shull and his collaborators will use supercomputer simulations together with studies of individual stars to explore the so-called feedback of star formation on remaining gas in the intergalactic medium. They will also explore the production of ionizing radiation and the first heavy elements (needed for the formation of planets, comets, and even life) from the earliest stars doc20384 none Many of the kinds of inquiry activities that have become increasingly prevalent as educational tools assume that certain basic understandings are in place, for example the understanding that multiple variables may act simultaneously to codetermine an outcome. Recent research, however, suggests instead that this and related forms of meta-level understanding are hard-won cognitive achievements that require support if they are to develop during the elementary and middle-school years and provide a needed foundation for more advanced inquiry learning. The goal of the proposed project is to better understand the basic cognitive skills that underlie inquiry learning and to examine how they develop. As part of their science curriculum, middle-school students will engage in a 10-week software-based inquiry curriculum under several different conditions offering different kinds of cognitive support. Employing a microgenetic method, researchers will closely observe development, maintenance and transfer of cognitive skills. The proposed work stands to inform both the design and use of educational technology to support inquiry learning, and in addition should help to provide a clearer conceptual base for teachers regarding the cognitive goals of inquiry curricula. The project is situated at the intersection of quadrant II and quadrant III in terms of the objectives identified in the ROLE RFP doc20385 none PI Backer Electromagnetic pulses from a distant clock traversing a gravitational wave experience a variable delay depending on the gravitational wave phase at the emitter and at the receiver. This effect allows the use of a spatial array of the most precise pulsars, which are precision celestial clocks, as a sensitive gravity-wave detector at very low, nHz, frequencies using a measurement interval extending over several years. It is expected there should be a low frequency random background of gravitational radiation as a relic from an early epoch of the formation of the Universe, but that an astrophysically significant foreground of gravity waves from the coalescence of massive black hole binaries in the nuclei of galaxies will be the dominant source at nHz frequencies. The global Pulsar Timing Array of selected pulsars is essential for positive detection of gravitational radiation and involves a continuation and improvement of the Arecibo experiments, the new Green Bank Telescope, and a collaboration with pulsar groups in Amsterdam, France, and Australia to assemble the best combined data sets for the multi-pulsar multi-frequency multi-telescope analysis. The project will also learn about the intrinsic properties of pulsars and the turbulence structure of the plasma in the line of sight to the pulsar doc20386 none Massachusetts General Hospital, representing Partners HealthCare System, Inc., is producing a large format film on the brain that is designed to increase the popular understanding of brain biology and recent advances in neuroscience. Framed within the larger question of the unique abilities of the human mind, the project will take an interdisciplinary look at brain science and raise questions about the nature and biological basis of diverse aspects of human experience including consciousness. By following a rider in the Tour de France, the film will illustrate how the brain functions in both normal and stressful situations. Major sequences will explore vision, memory and emotion. Slightly shorter sequences will delve into imagination and creativity, language, dreams and pain. Brief interludes will allow the film to reflect on the brain as it is represented in a range of human capabilities. Finally, the film turns it attention to consciousness, self-awareness and the totality of experiencing life as a human. Outreach components of the project include: A weeklong national symposium for museum educators, teachers, and community organizations from all regions of the country. Follow up regional Brain Workshops designed to provide more focused project support. The Brain: Exploratory Trips Into the Final Frontier -- An Educator Student Activity Guide Fun Facts Family Guide to The Brain An Educational Lobby Kiosk Head Trip: A Voyage Through the Young Human Mind -- An illustrated instructional brochure A Brain Website The film will be directed by Bayley Silleck whose prior large format films include Cosmic Voyage and Lost Worlds: Life in the Balance. The lead scientific advisors are Dr. Dennis Selkow, Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Anne Young, Julieanne Dorn Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. There also will be a seven-member advisory committee composed of neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers doc20387 none Crotts Supernova A, the closest SN seen in nearly four centuries, and the most intensely studied ever, is rapidly turning into a SN remnant as the ejecta from the explosion now strikes the circumstellar envelope shed by the star over the last million years. We propose to observe this process using a combination of optical, IR and UV programs, plus further space-based studies (supported by NASA). These will allow us to map the structure of the envelope, both in its unperturbed state and as it is destroyed by the ejecta. This will allow the first complete study of SN remnant formation evolution ever undertaken. Our previous observations of the 3-D structure, velocities, density and composition will establish the nature of the pre-explosion nebula and the mass loss processes that created it, while the excitation of this nebula by the X and EUV flux created in the collision will allow us to re-analyze it once more. In addition to these unprecedented studies of a SN remnant, will continue to use light echoes from the SN explosion to explore the interstellar medium in the 30 Doradus star-formation region, to study the echo of the UV pulse from SN shock breakout through the progenitor star s surface, and to accurately determine the distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud { a fundamental rung on the extragalactic distance ladder doc20388 none Halpern, Jules P. The successful program of discovering and characterizing the optical afterglows of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) using the two telescopes of the MDM Observatory will be continued and expanded to take advantage of the increased event rate and prompt positions expected from the HETE-2 and Swift space missions, and to incorporate infrared photometry. In the first year of this three-year program, target-of-opportunity observations will be continued based on approximately 6-8 bursts per year in the northern hemisphere that are located within hours by the BeppoSAX, RXTE, and or HETE-2 satellites. In the second and third years, beginning with the year launch of Swift, the expected localization rate will increase to the point at which it will become feasible to schedule specific, coordinated observing programs on both telescopes. It will become possible for this team to make optical identifications within minutes of a GRB event, which affords the opportunity to obtain multicolor optical light curves on the MDM 1.3m telescope, and either infrared light curves or time-dependent absorption-line studies on the MDM 2.4m. The investigators will be able to respond in a prompt, coordinated way to about a dozen such localizations per year. These data will be used to study the temporal decay and spectral evolution of GRB afterglows in order to diagnose the energetics of the fireball, and to diagnose the circumstellar environments in which these explosions occur, e.g., uniform ISM, stellar wind, or superbubble doc20389 none AST Helfand The majority of stellar births and stellar deaths in the Milky Way take place shrouded from the view of optical telescopes. Centimeter radio waves and hard X-rays can penetrate the gas and dust which obscure our vision, but the limited angular resolution and sensitivity of all previous searches has left us peering through the gas darkly in an attempt to construct a census of star formation and demise in the Galaxy. Drs. David Helfand, at Columbia University, and Robert Becker, at the University of California at Davis, will carry out a new survey of the Galactic Plane with the Very Large Array (VLA), as well as extensive optical and near-infrared follow up observations, to complement a new hard X-ray Galactic plane survey now underway using the XMM-Newton satellite. All of this group s observations (approved and proposed, at X-ray and radio wavelengths) are nonproprietary, and they intend to follow the FIRST survey model in creating a public website which will make available all reduced images as soon as they are constructed and verified. Thus, the survey will provide databases of use to any astronomer working in Galactic astronomy. However, these researchers have identified a number of specific problems on which they intend to focus: a complete census of Galactic supernova remnants, a census of massive star formation, and the definition of complete samples of accretion-powered binary systems. The surveys will open a new window on massive star formation in the Milky Way. All HII regions powered by stars more massive than B0 will be clearly visible to the solar circle on the opposite side of the Galaxy as radio sources coincident with infrared emission detected in the MSX satellite mid-infrared maps of the plane; in addition, many of these star formation complexes will be detectable in the XMM-Newton maps, providing a distance estimate from the X-ray absorption column density. This group will follow up all HII region candidates with a new infrared camera on the MDM 2.4m telescope. The result will be the most complete census yet of massive star formation in the Galaxy. Luminosity functions for several classes of X-ray transients and steady binaries, derived from extensive optical and near-infrared follow up of selected samples of X-ray point sources from the XMM Newton images, will extend 2-3 orders of magnitude fainter than existing data allow, providing important new constraints on close-binary evolution and models for accretion. With both X-ray and radio observing time already allocated, with a new 8K optical camera and a near-infrared imager spectrometer on the MDM 2.4m telescope and access to the Lick and Keck Observatories, these researchers have the resources in place to provide a striking new view of the Milky Way doc20390 none As tropical forests are cleared for agriculture, tropical trees become restricted to isolated islands of habitat. If pollen and seeds do not move effectively among these fragments, local mating occurs, increasing inbreeding and the erosion of genetic diversity. Inbreeding and reduced genetic diversity, in turn, can diminish seed production and seedling vigor, threatening population viability. This study uses genetic markers to study how fragmentation affects pollen movement and inbreeding in three animal-pollinated tropical tree species in Costa Rica. DNA fingerprinting will be used to determine pollen sources for seeds produced in forest fragments and how levels of inbreeding and genetic diversity are affected by pollen movement. Comparing patterns of gene flow and seedling vigor between fragments and a nearby continuous forest will allow assessments of genetic threats posed by fragmentation. Geographic analyses will show how patterns of gene flow are affected by fragment size and surrounding landscapes. Declines in biological diversity represent a profound global threat. This study will illuminate how habitat loss and fragmentation are affecting reproductive success, genetic diversity and inbreeding, all of which can reduce population viability. Because they depend so obviously on animals for pollination and seed dispersal, tropical trees in forest patches are at particular risk of extinction. As plants represent the foundation for biological productivity and diversity, such losses can result in cascades of extinctions. The data from this study are thus needed to identify both proximal threats to tropical trees and to guide longer-term management doc20391 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Joseph Mendelson and Mr. Daniel Mulcahy at Utah State University to conduct a comparative phylogeographic study among three reptile species in western North America. Phylogeographic studies estimate within-species relationships, generally based on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences. These population-level phylogenies-branching diagrams of relatedness-are then overlain on the geographic distribution of the species. Inferences can then be made on the origin, dispersal, and subsequent fragmentation of the species, along with estimates of gene flow, population level interactions, and genetic diversity. As a recently developed technique in biogeography, phylogeographic studies tend to focus on one species at a time. In this study, the authors compare individual phylogeographies among three widespread, distantly related reptile species (Night snake, Side-blotched lizard, and Desert Spiny Lizard). These reptiles occur throughout all the deserts and other major biogeographic regions of western North America. Phylogeographic hypotheses for each species are compared and tested for congruence across these biogeographic regions, with the hypothesis that the formation of these regions themselves influenced gene flow, genetic diversity and evolution within each independent group. Phylogeographic studies provide an evolutionary framework for studying life-history traits. A wealth of literature exists on the comparisons of body size, and clutch sizes in the lizard species of this study. Providing a phylogenetic hypothesis within these species allows for an evolutionary perspective of such traits. Comparative phylogeographic studies on widespread-common species also provide a framework for assessing patterns of genetic diversity within these species. The geographic range of the species in this study encompasses the entire western United States and northern Mexico, including virtually every National Park west of Colorado and south of the state of Washington. This study will provide data essential for directing conservation efforts across this region doc20392 none PROPOSAL NO: PI: Sargent, W L W The past few years have witnessed remarkable progress in understanding the origin and properties of the intergalactic medium, which gives rise to the absorption features known as the Lyman alpha forest in the spectra of distant quasars. Comparison of the results of high resolution spectroscopy with hydrodynamic cosmological simulations of the high redshift (z ~ 3) universe have shown that the Lyman alpha forest is the observational signature of an extended ionized gas arranged in the shape of filaments and sheets, the Cosmic web , from which galaxies condense. This main reservoir of baryons has properties which can be characterized by gas dynamics (temperature, pressure, ionization state) on a small scale; on larger scales the gas follows the distribution and peculiar motions of the dark matter which dominates the mass content of the universe. Observations of Lyman alpha absorption probe the ionization history and baryon density of the universe as well as the variations in the dark matter distribution which leads to the formation of structure in the universe. The funded work will continue and extend observations and analyses in a program of quasar absorption line studies and a program to detect emission from the Lyman alpha forest clouds using the HIRES and LRIS instruments on the Keck Telescopes doc20393 none PROXIMATE CAUSES AND ADAPTIVE SIGNIFICANCE OF INDIVIDUAL VARIATION IN THE BEHAVIOR OF KANGAROO RATS Dr. Stephen H. Jenkins Amy M. Barber Comparative studies of closely related species or different populations of the same species have contributed greatly to our understanding of the evolutionary significance of various kinds of behavior. More recently, researchers have begun to focus on variation among individuals in the same population, especially individuals belonging to the same age and sex class. Study of this kind of variation holds as much promise for advancing understanding of the evolution of behavior in the future as study of interspecific variation and geographic variation within species has contributed to such understanding in the past. There are several recent reports of intraspecific variation in diverse behavioral traits. Some of this variation is organized into syndromes that are correlated with differences in hormone levels; these syndromes have been described as different strategies that may be important for how individuals interact with one another or their environment. However, most of this work has been done in the laboratory and so is unable to address how these different behaviors function under natural conditions. This study of Merriam s kangaroo rats (Dipodomys merriami) builds upon the current evidence by using an experimental approach in the field. Corticosterone is a major stress hormone in kangaroo rats and other animals and is an important basis, or proximate mechanism, for a variety of behaviors. Levels of corticosterone will be altered within the natural range for kangaroo rats using hormone implants of corticosterone to increase levels and metyrapone implants to decrease the natural production of corticosterone. These manipulations will be used to examine how individual differences in behavior change in response to changes in hormone levels. A newly developed technique for sampling hormones in the feces of rodents will be used to non-invasively measure differences in hormone profiles among individuals. The foraging behavior, spatial memory ability, and response of focal individuals to novel situations will be measured to quantify behavioral differences both before and after manipulation of hormone levels. In addition, the consistency of behavior will be characterized for focal animals. Modification of typical laboratory methods for use in the field will allow focal animals to remain in their natural habitat for a longer-term study; most importantly, the survival of individuals will be monitored in relation to their corticosterone levels and behavior over the course of the study. Survival is one key measure of the adaptive significance of behavior for kangaroo rats. This study, using a population of kangaroo rats in the field as a model system, provides a unique opportunity to understand in detail how individual variation in hormones influences the survival of individuals through its effects on a suite of interrelated behaviors. The study will also provide both graduate and undergraduate training doc20394 none Investigators: Manuel T. Lerdau and Jennifer L. Funk Isoprene (2-methyl 1,3-butadiene) is the most abundant volatile organic compound emitted from many temperate and tropical forests. The production of isoprene in plants has important implications for both plant metabolism and the chemistry of the lower atmosphere. Predicting patterns of isoprene emission from individual plants, forest canopies and larger regions involves the integration of regulatory factors operating on both short- and long-time scales. While the regulation of isoprene production on very short-time scales is dominated by changes in light and temperature, our knowledge of the mechanisms by which physiological and environmental factors regulate isoprene emission over larger temporal and spatial scales is limited. It is believed that the carbon used in isoprene production is derived primarily from recently assimilated precursors via photosynthesis. However, it has been proposed that stored carbon (carbohydrate) can contribute to isoprene production when low photosynthetic rates limit the supply of recently assimilated precursors. This research will examine the importance of stored carbon in isoprene production. This will be accomplished by (1) exploring the role of stored carbon in isoprene production and its importance under specific environmental conditions and (2) evaluating existing leaf-level models based on these findings. Understanding the role of stored carbon in isoprene production will help to elucidate the fundamental environmental physiology of isoprene production and improve efforts to model emission to the atmosphere doc20395 none McGaugh Dr. Stacy McGaugh, at the University of Maryland, will carry out a two-pronged investigation of the low surface brightness (LSB) galaxy population which constitutes the frontier of our knowledge. One aspect is the analysis of a large, very deep survey for local ultra LSB galaxies. The data for this survey exist, and Dr. McGaugh will now process and analyze these data The second aspect of this project is the acquisition and analysis of high accuracy, high spatial resolution rotation curves of known LSB galaxies. This topic has become exciting and controversial because of its potentially pivotal role in testing cold dark matter structure formation simulations. Such simulations predict dark matter halos with cusps which are difficult to reconcile with the observations to date. A number of outstanding questions have been raised over this issue, creating an enormous demand for more and better data on this subject doc20396 none UPCLOSE is an after-school program designed to engage and develop the interest of underserved, inner city, middle school girls in the areas of science, engineering and technology. Working with an early adolescent population, the UPCLOSE program recognizes the developmental needs of this group and has structured its curriculum to provide a holistic approach to learning. Although the focus of the workshop inquiry activities is to increase knowledge and understanding of science, engineering and technology, the program goals include enhancement of self-esteem and self-confidence, development of teambuilding skills, refinement of communication and interpersonal skills, and enhancement of critical thinking skills. Each year 26 girls in grades 7 and 8 will be recruited to attend the fall and summer sessions of the three-year program. Fall sessions will be conducted two hours twice each week and one Saturday per month; summer sessions will operate five weeks. Participants will be required to make a commitment to attend the program for at least two years. Girls with satisfactory performance during the fall and summer sessions will be invited to join the Junior Discovery Leaders to assist in the summer camp. Six inquiry-based workshops that incorporate science, engineering and technology with training on workplace skills will be used. Professionals from the partner institutions and older students in the pre-engineering high school will teach the workshops. Partners institutions include the University of Toledo, Bowling Green State University, The Family Learning Center and the Toledo Technology Academy doc20397 none Mateo Dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSph) are likely to be the smallest systems in the Universe which contain both dark matter and luminous matter. The dark matter content and distribution in dSph galaxies can be studied in detail if one can collect enough kinematic data to constrain models. Dr. Mario Mateo, at the University of Michigan, and Dr. Edward Olszewski, at the University of Arizona, will use three new technologies to make a factor of 10-30 advance in the number of stellar velocities measured per galaxy. The goal is no longer to weigh the dSph s, but to derive the distribution of mass, thus the distribution of the dark matter. While small steps have been taken towards that goal to date, with heroically collected samples of up to 200 stars, it is only with substantially larger samples that reasonable models will be distinguished from each other. Such mapping of the mass within dSph galaxies is required to critically compare their dark-matter halos with the many - sometimes contradictory - predictions of models of galaxy and large-scale structure formation in the Universe. These researchers will use a new telescope - the Magellan 6.5-meter telescope of Las Campanas Observatory in Chile - a new echelle spectrograph - the Magellan-Inamori-Kyocera Echelle (MIKE) spectrograph - and a new 256-fiber system to feed this spectrograph a large number of stars simultaneously. This instrumental combination will allow the collection of 750- kinematic samples per galaxy doc20398 none Zabludoff, Ann I. Poor groups are common environments for galaxies in which the mechanisms thought to drive galaxy evolution (primarily galaxy-galaxy interactions) are fewer than in hotter, denser galaxy clusters. Therefore, any successful galaxy evolution model must, at the very least, reproduce the properties of galaxies in poor groups over a wide range of redshifts. This work will use the properties of gravitational lenses as a tool to explore galaxy evolution. It will constitute the first comprehensive spectroscopic observations of galaxies in the fields of the 56 known strong lenses, starting with those for which even the current, poorly-constrained lensing models require a contribution from additional mass at or near the lens redshift. Careful modeling suggests that the masses, concentrations, and redshifts of any groups identified in this manner are representative of the larger population of dynamically evolved groups. This survey will greatly improve lensing analyses not only by characterizing galaxies in the lens environment and along the line-of-sight, but also by constraining the velocity dispersion and centroid of individual groups and the velocity dispersion profiles of composite groups at different redshifts. As a result, new limits will be placed on the Hubble constant and dark energy that are complementary to those derived from more classical methods doc20399 none Every species survives and reproduces in a limited geographic area. Although distribution limits are universal, little is known about the evolutionary constraints that hinder range expansion. This study will examine range limits of monkey-flowers (Mimulus lewisii and M. cardinalis) across their elevation ranges in California s Sierra Nevada Mountains. Project goals are to identify life stages, traits, and environmental factors that decrease survival and reproduction at range limits and to conduct empirical tests of models of range limits. Range boundaries may arise because matings between central and edge populations create offspring unfit for the edge environment. To test this model, the survival and reproduction of central-edge versus edge-edge offspring will be compared in the edge environment. Alternatively, correlations among traits may constrain the direction of adaptation, creating range limits where a set of traits appropriate for the edge environment is not produced. This model will be tested by comparing optimum trait values at the range limit to species actual trait values. The origin and maintenance of geographic range limits are evolutionary riddles first discussed by Darwin, yet 150 years later experimental data are limited. Range limits are also a topic of importance to conservationists because species distributions are forecasted to shift towards the poles and to higher elevations in response to global climate change. However, without knowledge of the processes operating at range boundaries, accurate predictions about the magnitude of such distribution shifts are difficult doc20400 none Vernal pools are ephemeral wetlands that are home to many endemic plants and animals. At Travis Air Force Base in California, a restoration project is in progress to create new vernal pools that will have similar levels of biological diversity as natural pools. The proposed research focuses on the federally endangered vernal pool endemic annual plant called Contra Costa goldfields (Lasthenia conjugens; Asteraceae). The primary goals of the proposed study are to compare changes in levels and patterns of genetic variation over time in natural vs. artificial pools and to assess the relationship between insect-pollinator activity and genetic variation. To achieve those goals, a kind of genetic fingerprinting technique will be used to measure genetic variation and that information will be compared to information obtained by making detailed observations of pollinator activity. The results of this research will have broad scientific implications and will help guide applied, conservation management decisions. More broadly, this study will contribute to our understanding of the genetics and evolution of species endemic to the unique and rapidly disappearing vernal pools. Few detailed studies of any vernal pool species have ever been conducted. From a conservation management perspective, this study will assess the effectiveness of an ecological approach to habitat restoration in preserving the genetic integrity of a species and in preserving important plant-pollinator relationships doc20401 none Dissertation Research: Inducible Defenses and Plasticity in Tadpoles: Chracterization of Chemical Alarm Cues Dr. Thomas Eisner & Jacqualine Grant Many organisms go about their daily business unprepared for danger. However, some can anticipate hazards by cueing in on the environmental stimuli that presage peril. In the gray treefrog (Hyla versicolor) chemical alarm cues are released from the skin of injured tadpoles. These cues induce morphological and behavioral changes in conspecific tadpoles, changes that improve their ability to withstand future attacks. Specifically, the induction involves enlargement of the tailfin, and a simultaneous color change of the fin from nearly translucent to a mottled red and black. In its transformed state, the tadpole is said to be less vulnerable, because the gaudy tail deflects attacks away from the body itself. The transformed tadpole is also less active and, as a result, less conspicuous. The ecology of this phenomenon has received much attention, but so far the mediating chemicals remain unknown. This dissertation research is focused on characterizing those substances that trigger inducible defenses in gray treefrog tadpoles. The results will shed light on the evolution and ecology of morphological and behavioral plasticity doc20402 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Kevin Nixon and Mr. Damon Little at Cornell University to study the evolutionary relationships of the genus Cupressus (cypress) and closely related species such as arborvitae (Thuja) and junipers (Juniperus). These species are widely cultivated for their attractive evergreen foliage and pleasant cedar scent. Their wood is of some economic importance due to its durability and resistance to rot (used in e.g., pencils, cedar chests, siding, decks, and roofing shingles). Due to their narrow geographic distributions, one species of cypress is classified by the United States government as endangered and another is listed as threatened. DNA sequences and morphological characteristics of these species will be used to infer the evolutionary history and delimit the species of cypress (there is great controversy concerning the number of species). Other questions that will be investigated include the evolution specialized adaptations to extreme habitat types, evolution of seed dispersal mechanisms, and hybridization between cypress species. The result of this research will highlight diagnostic characteristics of these species and provide identification keys and other information so specialists and non-specialists (e.g., foresters, plant breeders, horticulturists, ecologists, etc.) can easily identify specimens. In addition a complete description of all cypress species will be provided. Other specialists will be able to the tools developed during the course of this research to study evolution in other conifers doc20403 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Bryan Danforth and Mr. Nico Franz of Cornell University to study the evolutionary history of derelomine flower weevils and their diverse interactions with palms and other related plants in the New World tropics. The principal objective of this research is to facilitate an understanding of the evolution of highly specialized behaviors in the weevils, including host plant use, pollination, and seed predation. It will be achieved by synthesizing evidence from a variety of sources in order to reconstruct the relationships among the major weevil groups within the association. The complex fighting behaviors among the males in one particular group of species will be filmed in the field and analyzed in the light of their previously studied structural adaptations for fighting. In addition to establishing the necessary framework for tests of various intriguing hypotheses about the evolutionary history of this insect-plant interaction, the proposed research has several practical implications. Derelomine flower weevils are the primary pollinators of hundreds of palms throughout the tropics, including the African oil palm and many other economically important species that are cultivated for fiber, food, medicine, oil, and ornament. Controlled introductions of specialized weevil pollinators have resulted in substantial increments in crop production in the past. By providing the first comprehensive classification and illustrated identification keys for these weevil groups, the present study constitutes the basis for subsequent field work by any researcher interested in the biology of their host plants doc20404 none Recruitment determines the initial density of populations, and may thereby critically influence their abundance. Little is known about recruitment of aquatic insects and its influence on the abundance of larvae. We combine surveys, mechanistic and large-scale experiments in natural streams to determine the patterns and mechanisms of recruitment of new individuals to populations of the mayfly Baetis bicaudatus, and how small and large scale variation in recruitment interact to influence abundance of larvae. Methods include observations of patterns of oviposition, and field experiments to understand the mechanisms and fitness consequences of oviposition behavior. Extensive surveys relate patterns of recruitment to temporal and spatial variation in mayfly larval abundance. A large-scale field experiment manipulating the availability of oviposition sites in 12 natural streams will test whether populations of Baetis larvae are recruitment limited. This proposal will make significant and unique contributions to the understanding of recruitment of aquatic insect populations, and its influence on subsequent insect abundance. Proposed research will also generate models for predicting how mechanisms (i.e. oviposition behavior) affect patterns of populations at local and regional scales. Furthermore, it will provide a foundation for understanding population dynamics of aquatic insects important to designing realistic and relevant conservation programs doc20405 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Bryan Danforth and Mr. Karl Magnacca of Cornell University for the study of native bees in Hawaii. The primitive, wasp-like bees in the genus Hylaeus are the only bees native to the Hawaiian Islands, and have a crucial role in perpetuating and regenerating native ecosystems by pollination of important trees and shrubs. Despite their remarkable radiation from a single ancestor into over 60 species - there are only 48 Hylaeus in North America - almost nothing is known about them. As a step toward a comprehensive understanding of the evolution of the bees in relation to their environment, the goal of this project is to reconstruct the relationships among species. Several genes from different regions will be sequenced, and shared changes in the sequence used to define pairs and groups of species. In this way, a tree will be built that reveals the process of diversification from the original colonist to the current fauna. By mapping the islands occupied by each species onto the tree, the history of dispersal among islands can also be determined; and because the islands are arrayed in a line from youngest to oldest, an estimate of the date of that first immigrant can be made. Like many insect groups in Hawaii, the native bees are a vital part of the ecosystem that have largely been overlooked. A quarter of the species have not been collected in eighty years or more; others are threatened by habitat destruction and invasive plants; the most abundant species at least through the s is now virtually extinct. An understanding of evolutionary relationships is a basic building block in the study of biology, ecological significance, and conservation. It allows information from studies of one species to be inferred about its close relatives, and opens the door to more direct questions with immediate impact, such as the history of interaction between the bees and their food plants doc20406 none Plants in small or sparse populations may receive insufficient pollinator visits to produce enough seeds to replace dying individuals. Thus, populations below some threshold size or density may be doomed to extinction. If a co-occurring plant species shares pollinators, its presence may increase both visitation and seed production of plants in sparse populations by increasing local flower density. This may lower the threshold density above which populations persist. Experiments proposed will determine conditions under which plant species can lower or raise threshold population densities of other plant species, using experimental arrays of plants at different densities, with and without co-occurring plants, and measuring pollinator visitation, pollen receipt by flowers, and the numbers of fruits and seeds produced. Experimental data, combined with data on growth and survival of individuals in natural populations, will be used in population models to determine whether populations of each density and species treatment persist. Plant populations will likely become smaller and sparser as the landscape becomes more fragmented and degraded. This project will inform ecologists and conservationists about whether small or sparse populations are more likely to persist in the presence of other species. Also, this project will inform land managers working to re-establish populations of native plants in restored areas doc20407 none Over three years, in consultation with high school personnel, QCC Tech-ASCEND will select seven groups of high school students judged to be likely candidates for high technology industries or science careers. The project begins with 25 students and expands to 75 students by the end of the third year. These students will attend weekly two-hour sessions for 30 weeks during the academic year in which they will participate in sustained experiences that explore fiber optics, lasers, CAD CNC machining and mathematics in a three-cycle program. Experiences will be in an informal setting designed to excite as well as educate. Participants will use a variety of high technology devices and instruments in both structured and non-structured activities. Nontraditional students will be encouraged to participate, and several strategies will be employed to help them succeed. In addition, there will be two mathematics anxiety workshops and twenty mathematics skills workshop sessions. Faculty and student role models will be present. Careful evaluation of attitudinal changes in participants and their parents, together with participant skill mastery, will occur throughout the project. A sourcebook for parents and one for high school counselors and college advisors will be prepared and distributed, as well as videotapes describing career opportunities and educational issues doc20408 none De Pree HII regions have revealed their nature slowly as observational techniques have improved and as subarcsecond radio frequency observations have become possible. Yet, these volumes of ionized gas that exist around the most massive young stars, at least in the early stages of their formation and evolution, are some of the least understood objects in the Galaxy. The diminutive cousins of HII regions called ultracompact (UC) HII regions are very different from the parsec-scale, optically-thin HII regions described in classic textbooks. The evidence is clear: UC HII regions are not simply small HII regions, they represent a unique class of object. The goal of Dr. Christopher De Pree s research project is to compare recent and proposed observations with hydrodynamic simulations to move toward a more complete understanding of the nature of UC HII regions and what their morphologies, temperatures, kinematics and evolution tell us about the earliest stages of massive star formation. UC HII regions have never been imaged and mapped spectroscopically on these small spatial scales. The sources to be studied are optically unobservable, and these will be the best data available until the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) is dedicated in the coming decade. These new data provide the best comparison data to constrain hydrodynamic simulations of UC HII region evolution. The Agnes Scott College program has a proven record of success in involving undergraduate women in astronomical research and preparing them for graduate work, and this project would continue and strengthen that effort by providing research involvement and exposure to scientists at two premiere national graduate programs (North Carolina State University and Harvard University). Early data from related projects have been shared informally with a number of investigators, and this project would make existing data and new data freely available. This award is made under the auspices of the Research in Undergraduate Institutions (RUI) program at NSF doc20409 none PI Woosley This project will continue research into nucleosynthesis and the end points of massive stellar evolution. This includes the evolution of stars eight times as massive as the sun and greater through all stages of their lives; modeling their explosions as supernovae, calculating the detailed production of the isotopes of all the elements; and examining the properties of the neutron stars and black holes they leave behind. The output from these calculations will be important input to other studies of the chemical evolution of our Galaxy and other galaxies. As a byproduct, the approximate distribution of neutron star and black hole masses throughout Galactic history will be determined. This project will result in a better understanding of the origin of the elements, the nature of supernovae, and the compositions of stars formed at various epochs in the past. Personnel with valuable computational and scientific skills will be trained. All model results will be made available to the community at the website, www.supersci.org doc20410 none Oswalt Dr. Terry Oswalt, at the Florida Institute of Technology, will carry out a spectroscopic study of wide binary star pairs that contain normal cool main sequence stars with distant non-interacting white dwarf companions. White dwarfs are the slowly cooling remnants of all previous generations of stars in the Galaxy. The wide binary sample contains white dwarfs whose cooling ages span the entire history of the Solar neighborhood (~10 billion years). Some may be members of the Galaxy s halo component. Dr. Oswalt s study has two main objectives: (1) How far beyond the Sun s age of ~4.6 billion years does the strong correlation between chromospheric activity and age in lower main sequence stars extend? What variables other than age (e.g. mass, metallicity) affect chromospheric activity? (2) What is the space density of cool white dwarfs stars, and how much does it contribute to the dark matter content of the Galaxy? What are the ages of the disk and or halo derived from the white dwarf cooling times? For several decades it has been known that stellar chromospheric activity strongly depends upon stellar age in Solar-type stars. Recently, it has been recognized that this relationship breaks down, or at least depends on additional variables, in cool M-type stars less massive than about one fourth that of the Sun. However, all this prior work has been calibrated using stars in several nearby clusters whose ages were estimated from stellar evolutionary models. None are much older than the Sun. Stellar ages are among the most difficult to determine fundamental properties of stars. Cooling times for the white dwarfs in wide binaries, corrected for their progenitors main sequence lifetimes, provide relatively robust estimates for the ages of their main sequence companions. In the course of a prior investigation Dr. Oswalt has determined cooling ages for several hundred white dwarfs in wide binaries. The uncertainty in age can be as small as 10-20% in pairs older than about 3-4 billion years, when the white dwarf mass is known. The recent discovery of a few halo white dwarfs has spurred intense interest because they are the remnants of the first generation of stars in the Solar neighborhood and may be a large component of the Galaxy s dark matter. Wide binaries may help to resolve the current dispute over the population membership of the candidates found to date. A main sequence companion provides a unique benchmark for the determination of the mass (via gravitational redshift), kinematics (via radial velocity) and chemical abundance (metallicity) that cannot be obtained from the near featureless spectra of single white dwarfs doc20411 none The Francis College of Engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, will provide 126 middle school students with a series of challenging learning opportunities at an after school DESIGNCAMP program. The students, particularly females, will be recruited from Lowell and Lawrence communities with large Hispanic and Southeast Asian populations. Three DESIGNCAMP modules will be used during the summer term and the following two trimesters at an after school program where students participate for two hours once a week. The three DESIGNCAMP modules are Electrical and Mechanical Gizmos, Flight School, and Building a Better Contraption. The activities in these modules will immerse the students in inquiry, design-based, and hands-on problem-solving environments. The Francis College of Engineering offers the facilities for instruction and the access and use of engineering tools, equipment and technology as integral to the learning experience. Parents will be organized into a Parents Council to provide continued support of students at home and to serve as an advisory body to the project. The project will utilize the existing partnership among U Mass Lowell College of Engineering, school districts, and business and industries. The results of this three-year project will be disseminated nationally through publications of youth and community-based organizations and presentations at science and engineering education conferences doc20412 none Lichens, colorful plant-like beings that commonly grow on rock, bark, and other surfaces, are perceived as individual organisms, but in fact comprise a symbiotic system, consisting of a fungal and an algal component. The lichen symbiosis is thus a particular nutritional association, just as mushrooms form underground root connections, called mycorrhizas, with trees, but lichens are much more complex in biological features. Most lichenized fungi belong to the Ascomycota, a large group that includes many economically important species. New scientific evidence shows that the lichenized life style significantly contributed to the evolution and diversification of Ascomycota. Some 15,000 species are currently accepted, but comparatively little is known about tropical lichens, which are considered key elements in the evolution of lichenized Ascomycota. TICOLICHEN is a major tropical lichen biodiversity inventory, forming part of the Costa Rican Sustainable Biodiversity Development Initiative, an international effort to unravel Costa Rica s organismic diversity. As a collaborative project between the Field Museum in Chicago, the National Institute of Biodiversity in Costa Rica, and the Botanical Museum in Berlin, TICOLICHEN combines well-developed local scientific infrastructure with international taxonomic expertise. Dr Robert Luecking has assembled a team of specialists, local taxonomists, and national and international students, to document the lichen flora of this biologically diverse country, suspected to comprise some species. Methods include field work to gather representative collections and measure ecologically relevant parameters, museum revisions of thousands of type specimens to clarify the names of known species and the relationships of the many new species to be expected, electronic databasing and image-based documentation, creation of publicly accessible websites, and field workshops to train students and local professionals in tropical lichen taxonomy and biology. One final outcome, a printed lichen flora of Costa Rica for species description and identification, shall endeavor to match the high standards set by floras covering temperate regions, such as the recently published Lichens of North America. The results of this project will serve as a model for lichenological survey work in other tropical countries, help to develop local scientific expertise, and greatly facilitate studies of tropical lichens beyond taxonomy and biodiversity, such as their evolution within the Ascomycota, their biogeography and ecology, their functional role in tropical ecosystems, their use as bioindicators of tropical forest degradation, land use change, and conservation, and their potential medical and industrial applications based on their rich secondary chemistry doc20413 none This effort focuses on the underlying physical causes of the Sun s radiative variability using helioseismic information as input to the equations of stellar structure. The tasks include, (1) the construction of solar models with differing magnetic field configurations, (2) the analysis of Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) and Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI) data to monitor helioseismic signatures of solar variability, (3) checking whether the models constructed under the first task satisfy these helioseismic constraints, (4) determining additional inputs necessary to improve the models which fare poorly in this comparison, and (5) developing two-dimensional stellar structure models capable of incorporating magnetic fields in a consistent, and non-perturbative fashion doc20414 none The New England Aquarium proposes to develop a traveling exhibition based on recent research implicating human activities in the worldwide increase in jellies. Humans are changing oceans so that they are becoming more suitable for jellies than for fish. The exhibition is expected to reach 12 million people -- primarily families with school-aged children -- across the nation. No jelly exhibit to date has shown jellies as important indicator species and ecosystem linchpins. Dissemination will include materials and programs for school and community outreach. A Sea Jelly Activity Kit and a community art science program will be developed. In each year of the project approximately 100 urban teens will intern in the jelly culturing facility, where they can learn about the science of culturing jellies and present their experiences to the public doc20415 none Brodie Globular clusters (GCs) are relatively simple stellar populations consisting of 10,000 to 1,000,000 stars and characterized, to first order, by a single age and chemical composition (metallicity). They are thought to be the oldest radiant objects in the universe, and they orbit, usually in large numbers, around galaxies of all morphological types. As fossil remnants of the early environments out of which galaxies formed they are powerful probes of the processes of galaxy formation and evolution. GCs appear to be good tracers of the major star forming episodes in their host galaxies and, unlike single stars, they can be observed far beyond our Local Group of galaxies, providing clues about the early histories of different types of galaxies. Because they are relatively simple stellar populations, GCs are more easily modeled and understood than the unknown mix of stars of different ages and metallicities that make up the diffuse stellar population of galaxies. In the last decade two results have had a major impact on the field of extragalactic GC research. First, young massive clusters (YMCs), perhaps GCs caught in the very process of forming, have been detected in interacting galaxies (two galaxies in the throes of merging together). This suggests that major galaxy interactions induce the formation of new star clusters. If these objects are really protoglobulars , two populations of GCs should be present after a merger event; the old population from the progenitor galaxies and the new population actually formed in the galaxy-galaxy interaction. Second, optical colors have revealed evidence for blue and red sub-populations in the GC systems of most, but not all galaxies. The color differences are due to metallicity and probably age differences, in combinations still to be determined. It is not yet clear whether one of the sub-populations was produced in a merger event or whether the sub-populations might be due to multiple epochs or mechanisms of formation. However, answering these questions is pivotal to understanding the formation history of galaxies. Building on a very successful current program, the objectives of this project, lead by Dr. Jean Brodie at the University of California at Santa Cruz, are now to understand GC sub-populations by determining exact properties such as ages, element abundances and kinematics for large samples of extragalactic GCs. These properties are the key to discriminating between various GC and galaxy formation scenarios. Observations of young clusters in star-forming galaxies offer an intriguing opportunity to gain first-hand insight into the processes by which GCs formed in the early universe but it is first necessary to establish whether YMCs will survive for long periods of time and can thus be rightly regarded as young globulars . Specifically, high signal-to-noise spectra of ~50 GCs in each of 12 to18 galaxies will yield accurate individual ages and metallicities. The sample covers a wide range of galaxy masses, morphologies and environments. Kinematic information will be obtained for larger numbers ( 100) of clusters and near-infrared (NIR) photometry will provide somewhat cruder, but essentially age-independent, metallicity estimates for up to GCs in each galaxy. High-dispersion spectroscopy for 10 to 15 YMCs in nearby star-forming galaxies will be used to determine their virial masses and explore the universality of the stellar initial mass function. A NIR imaging survey in 4 to 6 spirals will detect hundreds of YMCs in their earliest stages of formation. The data will be obtained from several ground-based facilities, including the Keck 10m telescopes equipped with new, powerful multiplexing spectrographs, and high-resolution optical and NIR spectrographs, and the MMT and Magellan telescopes with their wide-field NIR imagers. The data volumes will be large and students and post-docs will play a major role in all stages of the research from observations, data reduction and analysis, to publication doc20416 none PI: Mary Barsony An understanding of the processes by which stars and planets form remains one of the fundamental goals of astronomy and astrophysics. Although the broad outline of the process has become clear, much remains unexplained, particularly concerning rotational and orbital angular momentum evolution during the pre-main-sequence lifetime of young stellar objects. How and why do multiple systems form from a single infall envelope? What physical mechanisms regulate the rotation rates of young stellar objects? How do rotational velocities evolve with pre-main-sequence evolutionary state? The PI will carry out two major projects to address these questions: 1) a dedicated, comprehensive program for the determination of protostellar rotational periods via near-infrared photometric monitoring to obtain lightcurves, and 2) a systematic near-and mid-infrared, high angular resolution survey of embedded young stellar objects in a single star-forming cloud to discover and characterize the evolution of binary multiple systems over timescales of 100,000 to 1 million years doc20417 none PI Elitzur This project will continue a broad, ongoing program of theoretical studies of astronomical masers. Recent maser interferometric observations reveal in unprecedented detail the structure of various astronomical environments. Seizing the opportunities created by this progress, the topics targeted for research include (1) protostellar disks and outflows in high-mass star formation, as probed by water, SiO and methanol masers; (2) the circumstellar shells of evolved stars, traced by a variety of maser and thermal species; (3) the x-ray and shock impact of supernova remnants on their environment, deduced from OH masers; and (4) structure at the parsec and sub-parsec scales at the centers of starburst galaxies and active galactic nuclei as revealed by their OH and H2O mega-maser emission. In each case, a major ingredient of the theoretical research is the close collaboration with the teams conducting pertinent observations doc20418 none Verner, Ekaterina M. High-redshift quasars are currently the only objects that can give us information about nucleosynthesis in the very Early Universe. Many exhibit prominent FeII emission features in their spectra. Because the relative abundance of Fe is tightly correlated with Type-Ia supernovae, FeII becomes a very important chronological indicator of the age of star formation activity at the earliest epochs. The principal goal of this work is to develop diagnostic tools to interpret this FeII emission. These FeII diagnostics will be used as cosmological probes of star-formation and to determine the iron abundance in the quasars of the Early Universe. This project is designed to combine the efforts of the leading theoretical, observational and experimental groups working on FeII from the USA, Europe and Japan, and is therefore international in scope. It includes both space- and ground-based spectroscopic observations, theoretical and experimental input from atomic physics, and finally will culminate in theoretical modeling of the observed FeII doc20419 none Ellingson, Erica Galaxy clusters at redshift approximately one offer a unique opportunity to study evolution, ranging from individual galaxies to the largest cosmic structures. However, current samples of clusters at these high redshifts are still small. This work involves the Red Cluster Sequence (RCS) Survey, a new optical cluster survey which has been designed to discover clusters at high redshift while minimizing many of the contamination sources that have plagued earlier optical surveys for clusters. The spectroscopic and optical near-infrared imaging campaign represents the first detailed follow-up observations of the RCS sample. The primary goal is to confirm the cluster redshifts, evaluate success rates, and calibrate photometric estimates of cluster richness. Observations of this first subsample will calibrate the entire RCS survey, which is expected to contain 200 clusters at z 0.8. Further detailed measurements of cluster blue fractions, population gradients within clusters and the star formation histories of cluster galaxies will trace the infall of star forming field galaxies into clusters, and their eventual transformation into a red, passively-evolving cluster populations. Related programs using the Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra, XMM, and BIMA will provide additional information on cluster masses, the intra-cluster medium and galaxy morphologies. Together with previous results for lower redshift clusters, this program will trace in detail the evolution of clusters over a large fraction of the age of the universe doc20420 none Project PEERS builds on the PACTS program for minority middle school and high school students in the District of Philadelphia. It is designed to offer a citywide model for service learning in environmental research and public engagement that meets the promotion and graduation requirements of students at grades 8-12. The students will meet at the Franklin Institute for a maximum of six hours per week. During the summers students will attend a six-week intensive program (including five mornings per week for three and a half-hour sessions on environmental science workshops, laboratory and online research, and webspace video development). For two afternoons a week students will conduct research at the Centennial Lake Research site. This project has three components to service learning: science learning and research, community service, and public engagement. The project will engage approximately 300 students, 150 of whom will complete the district requirements for service learning. An additional 2,000 students and adults will participate in the activities doc20421 none Glenn This program is a millimeter-wave survey that will directly probe the formation of galaxies in the early universe by detecting thermal dust emission from more than one hundred ultraluminous galaxies at redshifts z 1. The survey will be uniquely efficient at finding galaxies at the highest redshifts, and is designed to detect extremely luminous galaxies. This will maximize the likelihood of identification with optical, infrared, and X-ray observations, and allow redshifts to be constrained for objects even without optical spectroscopic identifications. The key to the survey is Bolocam, a millimeter-wave bolometer camera with high mapping speed on the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory. The detected galaxies will be followed-up with 350 micron photometry with SHARC II on the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory. The Bolocam galaxy catalog generated by this survey will provide a rich source list for follow-up multi-band observations by many investigators. The science program will be integrated with an education and public outreach program that takes advantage of the unique Fiske Planetarium at the University of Colorado. A two-part, multi-media show suitable for public nights and introductory astronomy lectures will be written. They will showcase our rapidly evolving understanding of the Universe as revealed by microwave and sub millimeter observations: (I) Evidence for the Fiery Big Bang and (II) The Formation of Galaxies . The award will support a Ph.D. graduate student and provide partial summer salary for the Principle Investigator to carry out the science and outreach programs doc20422 none The NSF CREST Center for Mesoscopic Modeling and Simulation (CMMS) will be established at the City College of the City University of New York (CUNY), in partnership with Hunter College of CUNY. The center will be reinforced by the active participation of CUNY diversity partners, Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate and Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, and by key external scientific and educational outreach collaborations. The scientific focus of the proposed center will be devoted to physicochemical modeling, simulation and analysis at the mesoscale level of several distinct, but physically related, condensed matter and materials systems. The mission of CMMS will be to significantly advance scientific knowledge of complex mesoscopic condensed matter and materials systems and the capability for their simulation and to increase the numbers of persons from under-represented groups entering research careers in areas related to CMMS s scientific focus. CMMS will bring together researchers from chemistry, physics engineering and computer science departments into five highly interdisciplinary research groups (IRGs), with each IRG responsible for one of the Center s five research subprojects thrusts. All five IRGs will focus on mesoscale modeling and simulation of complex condensed matter without a crystal lattice structure. IRG I is concerned with polymeric materials interfaces. IRG II investigates soil as an unconsolidated granular material. IRG III concerns biomolecular electron transfer processes. IRG IV concerns large biomolecules in membranes. IRG V deals with superfluids. All of the IRG topics share the unifying and computationally challenging characteristics of multiscale phenomena, highly nonlinear behavior, nonequilibrium with the surroundings and complexity. The educational activities of CMMS for graduate students will include: specialized courses in mesoscopic modeling, interdisciplinary courses in computational science, seminars, internships and training in administration of the Beowulf cluster that will be the Center s primary student training machine. CMMS will also implement a multi-faceted diversity recruitment, retention and outreach plan doc20423 none Dissertation Research: Evolutions of Breathing Mechanisms in the Archosauria Dr. Farish Jenkins crocodilians have two-way flow and an accessory muscle that moves the lungs. The skeletal movements of the respiratory cycle (inhalation and exhalation) in birds and crocodilians have not been studied in detail. This work will represent the first attempt to correlate the mechanics of respiration with a detailed analysis of bony features, especially those that are indicators of specific movements and those that constrain movement. This combined approach represents the most promising basis on which to trace the evolution of diverse respiratory systems that is represented with the Archosauria. Specifically, this investigation will: 1. Analyze the respiratory kinematics of the trunk skeleton of birds and crocodilians through cineradiography (x-ray recording of living animals); 2. Identify and trace osteological (bony) characters and their functional implications within the archosaurian fossil record; 3. Assess the functional and structural data in a phylogenetic context (that is, in terms of evolutionary relationships inferred from other evidence) to understand evolutionary patterns doc20424 none Nitrogen is an essential nutrient to all plants and animals, yet it limits plant growth in many arctic lakes. The Arctic has warmed 2 degrees in the last 30 years. This warming causes frozen ground to melt and nitrogen inputs to lake increase. It is imperative to understand how nitrogen controls plant growth in order to predict how arctic lakes will respond to climate change. Even though the atmosphere is 80% nitrogen, it is unavailable to most plants. Only specialized bacteria can fix atmospheric nitrogen and convert it into forms that are available to plants. If these bacteria can fix nitrogen fast enough, plant growth will not be nitrogen limited. However, nitrogen-fixing bacteria do not alleviate the shortage of nitrogen in arctic lakes. The goal of this study is to examine how temperature, light, nutrients, and grazers interact to control nitrogen fixation in these arctic lakes doc20425 none Freeman Resonance rings are important in most SB type galaxies. In a simple analytic formulation or in simulation models, the rings result from a disk s turning bar perturbation. If the perturbation is not too strong, the disk gas clouds motions are reduced to a damped harmonic oscillation about the circular orbit. Rings of luminous young stars occur via gentle cloud collisions which occur near oscillation resonances with the turning bar. The projected ring morphology of a galaxy plus radial velocity data can give the galaxy s three dimensional orientation, bar strength and pattern speed. Formation of stellar associations is promoted in rings where gas clouds are crowded near the end of the bar. As these associations orbit, they age as they move along the periodic orbits making up the rings. Age determinations are important for checking star formation models in other galaxies. In this project, Drs. Tarsh Freeman and Gene Byrd will carefully model Hubble Space Telescope observations of the galaxy NGC s inner and also outer rings, and they will theoretically investigate NGC and NGC , the two nearest resonance ring galaxies. Byrd and Freeman have successfully simulated the self-gravitational aggregation of ring gas clouds into associations near the ends of the inner ring of NGC . Larger clumps can be made to form by increasing the contribution of the gas cloud disk to the total centripetal acceleration (i.e. increasing disk gas surface mass density). Freeman and Byrd will extend these studies of the outer ring of NGC and the rings of NGC and NGC to simulate formation of smaller associations, aging, and the importance of disk self-gravity relative to high velocity dispersion halo or disk components doc20426 none Project SUM is a new, community-based initiative intended to provide unique opportunities for 250 local middle and high school girls and boys to explore science, mathematics, engineering and technology through after-school, weekend and summer programs. The project is based on the A-MAN program located at their 7,500 square-foot international discovery and learning center. The program encourages young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to consider entering the fields of science, mathematics, engineering or technology. The program combines a multi-faceted informal science education experience with a strong link to the formal education programs in local schools. The program will operate Monday through Saturday with two 84-student cohorts (named, Mercury and Gemini) and one 82-student cohort (Apollo) each participating in Project SUM activities two days per week for 3.75 hours each day doc20427 none PI Rasio The first planetary systems outside our own Solar System were detected about six years ago. By now close to 100 extrasolar planets have been detected around nearby, solar-like stars. These discoveries of extrasolar planets will no doubt lead to significant improvements in our understanding of many processes related to planet formation, structure and evolution, as well as deeper questions such as the existence of extraterrestrial life in the Universe. The search for, and characterization of, extrasolar planets has nowbecome a top scientific priority both in Europe and in the United States. This project will address a number of theoretical questions concerning the formation and evolution of planetary systems around other stars, including those in drastically different environments than the Sun, such as planets in dense star clusters or in orbits around collapsed objects like neutron stars. In particular, the dynamical stability and final fate of extrasolar planetary systems will be studied using supercomputing simulations that combine the techniques of orbital dynamics and numerical hydrodynamics. The consequences of dynamical interactions between planetary systems and their central stars (such as tidal interactions with hot Jupiters , or metallicity enhancements through planet consumption ) will also be studied using a combination of stellar evolution and hydrodynamics calculations. All these questions are crucial to our theoretical interpretation of the new observational data on extrasolar planets doc20428 none Over three years, Science Central is producing 624 television segments that will present current, ongoing research through local newscasts on ABC and NBC stations nationwide. In addition to the regular research segments, ScienCentral will produce six sweeps series per year focusing on important new fields of research including: nanotechnology, genetics genomics, ocean science, global climate change and brain sciences. An advisory board of scientists, teachers, science journalists and public information officers help inform the producers about individual stories and evolving fields of research, and they provide access to scientists and field research. They also provide scientific input and check the stories for accuracy. To facilitate production and to assure that research is covered on an international basis, ScienCentral will establish a footage consortium to exchange science news video with major Canadian and European newscasters. They also will provide the news stories to science centers for use in their interactive exhibits and web sites doc20429 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. William Crepet and Ms. Elizabeth Hermsen of Cornell University to review the fossil history of the angiosperm (flowering plant) family Saxifragaceae (rockfoils and other ornamentals) and the related genera Ribes (currants and gooseberries) and Itea (Virginia willow). Today, these plants occur primarily in temperate, arctic, and alpine zones of the Northern Hemisphere. Published reports of fossil saxifrages will be reevaluated and new fossil saxifrages from New Jersey will be described. Some of these fossils possess details of floral structure that will allow them to be analyzed using cladistics, a mathematical technique for determining evolutionary relationships, which is of great significance as it allows for more precise analysis of these relationships than many other methods. This will aid in the attainment of the immediate goal of this project, compilation of an accurate record of fossil saxifrages. This record will be used to study questions such as when and where saxifrages originated, when they diversified, how their reproductive biology has changed over time, and how they have acheived their current geographical distribution. It will also affect our present understanding of saxifragoid relationships, especially in light of recent DNA evidence that indicates fewer plants are true saxifrages than previously thought. One of the greatest remaining evolutionary mysteries concerns the origin, relationships, and success of the angiosperms. The vital importance of this group, demonstrated by their numerical abundance and their economic, medicinal, and ecological significance, makes solving this mystery a significant priority. This project is important in the context of the overall mystery because 1) many of the processes targeted within can be generalized to historical aspects of the angiosperm proliferation and rise to dominance and 2) because the saxifrages have been considered by some earlier workers as ancestral to many more advanced flowering plant groups doc20430 none Bennett This award supports the investigations of Dr. David Bennett and Dr. Sun Hong Rhie, at Notre Dame University, into exotic gravitational microlensing events. Exotic events deviate from the standard gravitational microlensing light curve which assumes a point source, and single point lens, and constant velocities for the source, lens, and observer. These exotic events are particularly useful because they yield much more information about the distance and mass of the lens object than standard microlensing light curves. The study of these exotic microlensing events will address such issues as the possibility that a substantial fraction of the Milky Way s dark matter is composed of very old and cool white dwarfs, the abundance of isolated stellar mass black holes in the Milky Way disk, mass measurements of single stars at distances of kiloparsecs from Earth, and the abundance of low-mass giant planets in Jupiter-like orbits about stars in the Galactic disk and bulge. The work will have a significant impact on our understanding of the structure and composition of our Galaxy, the fundamental properties of stars and stellar remnants, and the basic mechanism of planet formation. This project will involve observations, data analysis, and some theoretical work. The observational effort will focus primarily on microlensing follow-up observations that will take advantage of the tremendous increase in real-time microlensing event discoveries expected from the OGLE-III and Super-MACHO projects which have just begun taking data. The observations will be done with the Boyden Observatory 1.5m telescope in South Africa, which has recently been refurbished for this observing program, as well as with the Mt. Stromlo 1.9m telescope, in Australia that has been used previously. The follow-up program will be done in cooperation with an Ohio State University group which will make a substantial contribution to the Mt. Stromlo 1.9m observations, and has near dedicated access to the CTIO 1.5m telescope in Chile. The combined resources of the Notre Dame and Ohio State groups will yield 24-hour coverage of microlensing events. This is necessary in order to mount a microlensing planet search program that will be sensitive to planets down to the mass of Neptune in Jupiter-like orbits. The observations will enable a stringent test of the core accretion model for planet formation. This microlensing follow-up program will also focus on the study of microlensing parallax events which can reveal isolated black holes. Follow-up observations of Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) microlensing events discovered primarily by the Super-MACHO Project will yield exotic microlensing event features which will allow the determination of the lens distances for a statistically significant subset of events. This will determine if most of the LMC microlensing events are due to a part of the Milky Way s dark matter, or whether they are due to lensing by ordinary stars in the LMC. This award will also support a theoretical effort to evaluate potential future microlensing programs which might study dark matter in distance galaxies or terrestrial planets in our own Galaxy doc20431 none RUI) Denn, G Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) are the most energetic regions of the universe and are associated with supermassive black holes. As tidal forces disrupt neighboring stars and clouds in these galaxies, some of this material, through currently unexplained magnetic collimation effects, is directed into two bipolar relativistic jets. This project will increase our understanding of the kinematic and magnetic field structure of these jets. The Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) will be used to create total intensity, polarized intensity, fractional polarization, spectral index, and rotation measure maps from data for four sources at a number of epochs. An attempt will be made to obtain qualitative circular polarization maps, a new aspect of parsec-scale imaging of AGN. These images will be used to model and determine physical quantities (e.g., shock compression in planar shocks associated with BL Lac objects.) The research will be performed at Sweet Briar College, an undergraduate women s college in central Virginia, and will involve a total of four students over two summers doc20432 none The Educational Broadcasting Corporation (WNET, New York) is producing 14 half-hour episodes of Cyberchase, with accompanying outreach, to extend the new animated television series into a second season. Cyberchase, which began airing on PBS in January, , engages children ages eight to eleven years old in the fun and challenge of mathematics. Its goal is to demonstrate the usefulness of mathematics and empower children to become mathematical problem-solvers by fostering a positive attitude toward mathematics, reinforcing basic mathematics concepts, modeling reasoning skills and motivating children to approach mathematics with confidence. The funds will also support the design and implementation of an outreach program, including materials for parents; a workshop activity kit for schools, libraries and museums; and ten pilot after-school programs. Specifically, outreach components include: A web component that provides mathematical activities and content for the target audience and their parents; A 12-page Cyberchase Magazine (50,000 copies); A 20-page Teacher s Guide (15,000 copies); Collector Cards (50,000 sets of six cards each); and a Poster Peer review, extensive evaluation and a national advisory board will inform all components doc20433 none Tropical forests include a diversity of habitats, which has lead to specialization in plants. Near Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, nutrient-poor white sand forests are found immediately adjacent to nutrient-rich clay forests, each harboring a unique composition of habitat specialist trees. Why does habitat specialization occur? Our hypothesis is that the combination of impoverished soils and herbivory creates strong selective pressure for plant defenses in white sand forest. Species that have not evolved high levels of antiherbivore defense are therefore at a disadvantage in white sand forests and excluded by herbivores. To test whether herbivores select for higher optimal antiherbivore defense in white sand plants, we are comparing defense investment in 33 species from 6 genera that include several phylogenetically independent pairs of closely-related white sand and clay specialists. In addition, we have established a reciprocal transplant experiment to manipulate the presence of herbivores and directly test to what degree herbivores maintain the low overlap in species composition between the two forest types. If herbivory has a significant effect on habitat specialization, it will suggest a new way that herbivores may influence plant evolution: by sharpening habitat boundaries due to abiotic factors and thereby increasing the potential for habitat specialization doc20434 none Kulkarni, V P The origin and evolution of galaxies and the production of chemical elements in the Uni- verse are fundamental issues in astrophysics. Abundance measurements for Galactic stars and interstellar gas are used to reconstruct the chemical and dynamical history of the Milky Way. Advances in ground-based and space-based technologies now enable astronomers to extend such studies to distant galaxies, to sample the epochs when only a few percent of the stars in galaxies had formed. The damped Lyman-alpha absorbers (DLAs) in the spectra of quasars allow us to study the stars and gas in galaxies for redshifts 0 z 5, i.e. back to 80-90% of the age of the Universe. The DLAs thus offer an excellent probe of the chemical history of galaxies. The investigator will conduct a study of the chemical and morphological evolution of DLAs, and their implications for galaxy evolution in general doc20435 none The CREST Center for Applied Ecology and Conservation is designed to create a research environment where multidisciplinary groups work together to solve the complex environmental problems facing the Neotropics. The major goal of the Center is to utilize our unique position within the Caribbean and strong ties with Central and South America to become a dominant research center in applied tropical ecology and conservation. To achieve this goal, we will promote research programs that synthesize multiple levels of biological organization, from genes to landscapes. Specifically, the Center will 1) increase the research productivity of our faculty in the field in applied ecology and conservation, 2) strengthen the participation of our undergraduate and graduate students in research activities, 3) expand the research infrastructure of the University, 4) foster long-term research collaborations among scientists within Puerto Rico and with national and international government and academic institutions, and 5) ensure that funding continues after the CREST funding period. The research activities of the Center will focus on four levels of biological organization: individuals and their genes, populations, ecosystems, and landscapes. Research in Molecular Ecology, Evolution, and Genetics (MEEG) group will integrate high-definition molecular markers with field ecological research to address key questions about the mating systems, reproductive success, and population biology of endangered or fragmented populations. The Species Population Management (SPM) group will focus on the impact of exotic species on the native flora and fauna of Caribbean islands. Initially the SPM group will concentrate research efforts on two key projects that focus on biological introductions of global relevance: introduced feral ungulates and Africanized bees. Research in the Landscape Ecology Group (LEG) will investigate the differential responses of species to landscape variation. The group will initially use two animal assemblages, Caribbean frogs and Andean birds, to examine how body size reflects spatial and temporal discontinuities in ecosystems at large-scales (textural discontinuity hypothesis). Finally, critical to the future development of the CREST Center is an Ecosystem Processes Group (EPG). This group will be established with the addition of new Center faculty members. Their research will initially be funded through University of Puerto Rico matching funds but in year 4 and 5 they will receive full funding through the CREST Center. The Center will take a series of concrete steps to foster cross-disciplinary collaborations and ensure research productivity. There will be bi-monthly scientific meetings and a yearly Center conference with invited and Center speakers. These meetings are designed to encourage group member productivity, and stimulate interactions and collaborations within the group and with researchers from other institutions. In addition, the Center director will create a research environment conducive to the production of high quality research and training. The director will hold quarterly meetings with the CoPIs, administrative assistant, and system administrator to discuss logistic, administrative and financial issues related to the Center. Participants are expected to meet project milestones, publish one to two peer-reviewed manuscripts per year, and incorporate at least two graduate and two undergraduate students during the period of the project. Funding for the initial group of CoPIs will be reduced in years 4 and 5, and shifted to new faculty members. An external scientific advisory panel will monitor progress of all Center researchers. The continuation of the Center, after CREST funding expires, is a key goal of this project. To realize this goal, the director and CoPIs will apply for external funding that builds on research and collaborations established during the initial funding cycle. The administration of the University of Puerto Rico has also demonstrated their commitment to the continuation of the Center by returning 18.75% of overhead on all grants submitted through the Center. The ultimate goal of the Center is to train a new generation of scientists with strong education and research experience in applied ecology and conservation, and to better integrate university research activities with societal needs doc20436 none study of symmetry patterns (of any object), and Galois Theory provides tools for applying Group Theory to algebra and arithmetic. Recent applications to data security (public key cryptography) are the topic of the workshop. Galois Theory and Group Theory have further applications to physics, chemistry and coding theory. The Year of Algebra provides an opportunity for young mathematicians, women and minorities to learn the latest advances. It was John G. Thompson who shaped finite group theory like no-one else, leading the way towards a major milestone of 20th century mathematics, the classification of finite simple groups. After the classification, it was again J. Thompson who led the way in exploring its implications for Galois Theory. For these contributions, Thompson has recently been awarded the National Medal of Science. He also won the Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics. For the Year of Algebra, University of Florida Graduate Research Professor John G. Thompson acts as an advisor. His powerful ideas continue to inspire the young. We want to use this opportunity in a special effort to integrate research and education during the Year of Algebra. While the two conferences emphasize latest advances in research, the workshop has a strong instructional component doc20437 none Deliyannis, Constantine Dr. Deliyannis is awarded funds at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana to study the abundance of lithium (Li) in the members of open star clusters. He will use the multi-object spectrograph on the Wisconsin-Indiana-Yale-NOAO (WIYN) 3.5m telescope to make spectroscopic observations of up to 100 stars simultaneously. Dr. Deliyannis is participating in the WIYN Open Cluster Study (WOCS), a collaboration already underway by WIYN Consortium members. This study will make detailed observations of the Li abundance of stars of different ages in an attempt to understand the failures of our current stellar structure and evolution models. Observations of 6 to 10 clusters of different ages will be made. Dr. Deliyannis will work to determine the metallicity dependence of Li depletion, the development of the Li gap with age, and the Li peak and plateau doc20438 none PI Nice Pulsars are strongly magnetized, rapidly spinning neutron stars, the collapsed remnants of supernova explosions. They are extraordinarily stable natural clocks, in some cases approaching or exceeding the long-term stabilities of the best man-made clocks. Well over pulsars are now known, and several dozen of them are gravitationally bound to another star, with orbital velocities up to a thousandth of the speed of light. For these and many other reasons, high-precision observations of pulsars offer unique opportunities for research in stellar evolution, gravitation physics, cosmology, fundamental astrometry, and even time-keeping metrology. This project will extend and improve a series of very-high precision timing measurements of binary and millisecond pulsars as refined tests of relativistic effects, and in the search for perturbations in pulse times series due to passing gravitational waves. They will also search the sky for new pulsars, particularly those with very short periods, and they will accumulate timing data for more than 100 slow pulsars, as a service to observers at other wavelengths and to study pulsar rotation irregularities doc20439 none Cole This Americas Program award will provide support for a cooperative research project between Drs. Ronald A. Cole and Bryan Pellom, University of Colorado, and Dr. Nestor B. Yoma at the University of Chile, in Santiago, Chile. Co-support is provided by the Digital Government Program and the NSF-CNPq Collaborative Research Opportunities Program. The goal of their project is to provide a foundation for collaborative research and development of advanced dialogue systems in the U.S. and Chile, resulting in the deployment of working systems as test beds for research. Advanced dialogue systems are human computer interfaces that support natural, unconstrained conversational interaction in specific task domains. Researchers from both sides will collaborate on topics such as dialogue engineering, large vocabulary continuous speech recognition systems and text-to-speech engines. The main idea is to set up the Colorado University Communicator system as test bed at LPTV for advanced joint research. This will be the basis for research that will enable people in the Americas to access online information over telephone networks, and will thus provide real data from real users to evaluate system components. Advanced dialogue systems will be developed and deployed in Santiago enabling access to useful information via telephones and cellular phones doc20440 none Kravtsov One of the greatest challenges of modern astrophysics is understanding how galaxies such as our own Milky Way form within the framework of the Big Bang cosmology. The current theory of structure formation (called the Cold Dark Matter (CDM) scenario) predicts that massive galaxies were built from smaller galaxies that collided and merged, inducing bursts of star formation and resulting in the different types of galaxies observed today. This entire sequence of events is thought to be seeded by quantum fluctuations in the very early Universe and governed by mysterious dark matter which constitutes about 85% of all matter in the universe. While the CDM theory is successful in explaining many observations, it faces an increasing number of problems which may lead us to revise or even abandon this paradigm. One of the fundamental, unanswered questions is whether realistic galaxies with properties similar to those of observed galaxies can be formed in the CDM model. This project will specifically focus on stellar feedback and heavy element enrichment and their role in the evolution of galaxies. Dr. Kravtsov and his collaborators will address this question by using very high-resolution, state-of-the-art computer simulations which include all the main processes thought to be important in galaxy. In particular, the simulations will account for the release of enormous amounts of energy and heavy elements into the surrounding gas by the explosions of young, massive stars. This energy release, or feedback , is thought to play a critical role in controlling the rate at which interstellar gas is turned into stars and in shaping the overall properties of galaxies doc20441 none Building on an institution-wide strategic initiative to interpret the process of science for informal learners of all ages, the Museum of Science will work over four years to develop, evaluate and implement a project to communicate the processes of science through weather forecasting. The project is based on the idea that processes involved in short-term weather forecasting are basic to the process of science. MOS proposes to create a 1,800 square foot exhibit, programs for students and teachers, an interactive website, and one-minute television spots aimed at helping people understand weather forecasting. The project is grounded in MOS strategic commitment to engaging people in the activity of science and the use of new technologies. The major component of the project is an exhibition of weather in which visitors will learn how to forecast the weather over the next few hours using different levels of technology, including naked eye observations, data from weather maps, and real-time images from space satellites and ground radar stations. Ancillary programs include educational materials for over 100 WeatherNet schools in New England, an interactive website that will reach several hundred thousand users, and television spots on the process of weather forecasting to be aired on WBZ-TV Channel 4. Over the course of its life the project will engage several million children and adults in the process of science doc20442 none The project proposes to target substantial numbers of African-American, low-income youth to provide opportunities for academic and career advancement in science, math, engineering and technology (SMET). The project has three phases: Phase 1) meet at the science center each week while engaging in 5 learn and teach project cycles involving the design and building of simple technological devices; Phase 2) uses experienced science educators to help teens with additional inquiry science investigations; Phase 3) teens will visit design clubs at preselected after-school program sites. EDC will regularly develop curriculum booklets for three levels: entry, coach and experienced teachers level (abstract). SLSC will develop workplace competency materials to assist other science centers in teaching career confidence and qualities to teens, etc. A total of 240 participants will participant in the program doc20443 none DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Pre-copulatory reproductive cannibalism: the ecology of an extreme reproductive conflict David F. Westneat James Chadwick Johnson Reproductive cannibalism, specifically female consumption of the male prior to, during, or immediately following copulation, occurs in several organisms and is a dramatic example of how ecology can shape behavior. Of particular interest are species exhibiting pre-copulatory reproductive cannibalism, or predation of the male by the female during courtship but prior to sperm transfer. In such cases, the costs of the behavior to males (death) and females (loss of a mate) are readily apparent. In contrast, the benefits of pre-copulatory reproductive cannibalism remain poorly understood. This research program is designed to uncover the functional significance of pre-copulatory reproductive cannibalism in the North American fishing spider (Dolomedes triton). Four hypotheses for pre-copulatory reproductive cannibalism will be tested. First, males may be a source of food for the predatory, adult female. Second, female attacks of males before mating may be an extreme form of mate rejection behavior. Third, pre-copulatory attacks may be the incidental by-product of selection for highly voracious predatory behavior in a multitude of other contexts. Finally, pre-copulatory attacks may occur because males simulate prey items in order to attract the female s attention. If these attacks fail sufficiently often, then such males may mate more often than males who court females in a less risky fashion. The study will thus enhance our understanding of how ecology influences the evolution of extreme behavior between the sexes doc20444 none The dwarf mistletoe, Arceuthobium divaricatum, is a parasitic plant that parastizes six species of pinon pines in the southwest. This project will examine the effects of host selection, historic geographic isolation and subsequent host migration on the patterns of genetic differences among populations of A. divaricatum. The goal of this study is to determine how these factors together have fostered the evolution of A. divaricatum. Chloroplast DNA sequences will be used to determine if host selection has played a role in the evolution of A. divaricatum. In addition, sequence variation will be analyzed to determine whether population differentiation due to historic geographic isolation can be detected. Few studies have simultaneously examined the influence of host selection and historic geographic isolation on the differentiation of populations within a species. Often, evolutionary biologists credit either one or the other of these factors in shaping these population differences. This study in A. divaricatum will enhance the understanding of how various factors influence the evolution of a species. Additionally, because very little is known about population structures of parasitic plants, this study will enhance the understanding of migration, gene flow and population differentiation in a parasitic plant species doc20445 none Gunderson, Joshua O. This program will build a new survey instrument to measure galactic polarization at wavelengths near two centimeters. The Ku-band Polarization Identifier (KUPID) will integrate a very low noise, correlation polarimeter onto the Crawford Hill seven meter, millimeter-wave antenna. The primary components of the polarimeter will be built at the University of Miami and other key components, including the microwave horn and data acquisition system will be built at the University of Chicago and Princeton University. This project will measure the Q and U Stokes parameters in regions near the north celestial pole, in regions of low galactic contamination, and in regions near the galactic plane. The goals of this survey are multifold and span the studies of the interstellar medium to cosmology. The primary goals are to: (1) Measure the structure of both high and low galactic latitude synchrotron radiation; (2) Identify the source of the anomalous emission that is predicted to peak near a wavelength of two centimeters; (3) Measure cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization in the event that the galactic foregrounds are subdominant; (4) Perform complementary, follow-up surveys of interesting regions identified by the Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) and other Cosmic Microwave Background polarization surveys doc20446 none Szapudi Current cosmological theories imply that the stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies that we can see represent only a relatively small fraction of the matter content of the universe. Most of the matter is in a form unknown to us, and can be detected only through its gravitational pull. The nature of this ``Dark Matter is the single most interesting problem in contemporary theoretical physics, and its study involves the amalgamation of information from different disciplines, such as particle physics, astronomy, and cosmology. The present project aims to constrain the properties of this elusive dark matter by looking at ``bias , the difference between the statistical properties of visible and dark matter. According to current theories of structure formation, small initial fluctuations in the early Universe grew under the influence of gravity until the large-scale structures which, we see at the present day, formed. It appears that galaxies formed where the underlying dark matter concentrated in clumps (called halos). Thus, the present distribution of galaxies depends both on the distribution of dark matter and on the efficiency with which dark matter halos turn into galaxies. Novel statistical measures developed by Dr. Szapudi and his collaborators will be used to characterize the present-day distribution of galaxies using data from on-going wide field surveys (e.g., the Sloan Digital Sky Survey) which encompass up to a million objects. Then the theory of bias will be applied to these measured distributions to constrain the distribution of the underlying dark matter. This distribution, in turn can be used to test predictions from the various phenomenological and fundamental theories which have been developed to describe the Dark Matter doc20447 none Heller Dr. Heller and his collaborator will conduct a broad based study of galactic disk formation and evolution, examining the role of non-axisymmetric instabilities in driving the formation and evolution of all components of disk galaxies, including the gaseous and stellar disk, bulge, and halo in a cosmologically relevant setting. Galaxy disks are believed to form over an extended period of time, growing from the inside out. Star formation in the disk will convert gas to stars, perhaps also forming a bulge. However, this simple picture will not be non- axisymmetric instabilities. Since even mild oval distortions can be efficient engines of structural change, these instabilities can drive gas toward the center of a forming galaxy produce profound changes in the structure and stability of all the galactic components. This mechanism can produce a rich assortment of possible evolutionary paths for a galaxy. This study will focus on the following aspects of the problem: 1) Disk formation in triaxial halos. 2) Analysis of the effects of star formation on the long-term stability of the disk and flow rates. 3) Analysis of the secular evolution of stellar bars, and their role in disk-halo coupling. 4) Analyses of the broader question of how the different cosmological parameters affect the formation and evolution of disk galaxies.. 5) Determination of the effects of a background UV radiation field on the formation and evolution of low mass disk galaxies. These analyses will be done using numerical simulations. The project will involve the active participation of a professor and his students at an undergraduate institution and will include the establishment of a state-of-the-art Linux computer at that institution, providing the undergraduates with hands-on computer systems experience. Technical support for this development will be provided by personnel at the University of Kentucky. This award is made under the auspices of the Research at Undergraduate Institutions program doc20448 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Linda Watson, Mr. Eric Tepe and Dr. Michael Vincent at Miami University to study the evolution of symbiotic interactions between ants and plants. This study focuses on several New World tropical species of Piper, the genus of black pepper and kava, and explores the mutualistically beneficial interactions these plant species have with certain ant species. The ants protect the plants against herbivores and fungal infection in exchange for plant-provided nesting space and nutrients. This relationship is important for both organisms because neither the ants nor the plants are able to survive in the absence of the other. In addition to specialized associations, some species of Piper have resident ants only sometimes, and still other species are never found with ants. An understanding of relationships between species in this continuum will allow insights into the evolutionary patterns that lead to the highly specialized relationships between ants and some species of Piper. To this end, this study integrates molecular phylogenetics with comparative anatomy of the plant structures involved in the ant associations. Mutualistic interactions are important in the evolution of a vast majority, if not all organisms, and are responsible for a large part of the biodiversity seen today. Despite this, surprisingly little is known about the properties and potential benefits of most tropical plants. As an example, species of Piper are used medicinally by a number of traditional cultures throughout the tropics against maladies ranging from tooth decay to internal parasites, but the biochemistry behind these benefits remains to be studied. To study the benefits of these plants accurately and effectively, a reliable classification is essential. This study will result in a classification of a large and poorly known genus, in addition to a better understanding of the evolutionary patterns of these unique organisms doc20449 none Phenotypic plasticity, the ability to adjust morphological traits in response to the environment, may enhance survival and reproduction in changing environments. Given this adaptive value of phenotypic plasticity, it is important to understand the mechanisms that may maintain genetic variation for plasticity. Despite the important theoretical role the cost of plasticity plays in maintaining this variation, relatively few empirical studies have focused on the role of cost of plasticity under natural conditions. This dissertation research will address this issue by examining the balance between the cost of plasticity and the benefit of plasticity under a variety of environmental conditions. Populations of the herbaceous plant Geranium carolinianum from both environmentally variable and uniform light environments are compared for the patterns of plasticity to natural variation in light availability. The genetic basis of plasticity will be assessed because the potential of phenotypic plasticity to evolve in response to future environmental change depends in part on its genetic basis. Finally, a field study will examine how selection may favor plasticity under environmentally variable conditions but favor non-plastic responses under uniform conditions. An increase in environmental variation is expected with global climate change. Understanding how plasticity is maintained is central to predicting population response to diverse environments doc20450 none Dr. Andrew Ernest, PI, Texas A Center for Environmental Analysis of the California State University, Los Angeles (Dr. Carlos Robles, Director); and San Diego Supercomputer Center, Dr. David Stockwell, Head of The Bioinformatics And Biodiversity Program. Dr. Felipe Rubio Castillo, Deputy Director, Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia (CONACyT), National Council of Science and Technology Research of Mexico, has agreed to serve on the centers External Advisory Group to advance binational research partnerships. The research subprojects and strategically aligned research partnerships will enable TAMUK to achieve national competitiveness in sustainability research and become a top producer nationally of Hispanics earning the PhD in environmental engineering. NSF support will allow the development of a critical core infrastructure at TAMUK and in South Texas that will foster fundamental research and development for promoting the concepts of sustainability of ecological and environmental systems in the semi-arid coastal areas of South Texas. These border research issues of sustainability of systems and the related technology development and transfer and knowledge transfer into the intersections of technical, economic, and social systems are of national importance. They provide a critical context in which NSF funding under CREST can serve as a dynamic catalyst to advance both our national research capacity and capacity to address the significant underrepresentation of Hispanics at the PhD level in these nationally important sustainability disciplines doc20451 none Wills, B J For low redshift quasars, the awardee and others have demonstrated clear relationships between black hole mass, the Eddington ratio, and spectroscopic properties, showing that copious dense, possibly metal- enriched, emission-line gas is present in the QSOs with highest Eddington ratio. The awardee will apply these relationships to QSOs at higher redshifts (1.2 -2.7), to explore the accretion history of the black hole. At these redshifts the important diagnostic lines of hydrogen H B, [OIII], He II ? , and blended Fe II emission are shifted into the 1 um -5 um atmospheric windows , and the UV emission and broad absorption lines shifted into the optical region. This program will involve near-infrared spectroscopy on national facilities as well as at 1 um -1.3 um with the Hobby-Eberly telescope. Existing UV rest-frame spectra will be used, with additional ground-based optical observations where needed (McDonald 2.7m and the HET). A pilot program by the awardee and student has demonstrated the feasibility of these observations, analysis, and interpretation doc20452 none Evans, Aaron Almost all nearby massive galaxies are believed to have quiescent supermassive nuclear black holes. These dense, dark objects are remnants of prior, energetic events which undoubtedly gave rise to periods of active galactic nuclei (AGN) activity similar to what is observed in nearby radio galaxies and quasi-stellar objects (QSOs). Further, recently measured correlations between the black hole mass and the stellar bulge mass in nearby galaxies indicates that circumnuclear star formation must accompany black hole mass accretion. This research will make use of optical, near-infrared, (sub)millimeter, and radio technology to study the star formation and AGN activity in a sample of infrared (IR) luminous radio galaxies with redshifts 0.02- 0.2. These galaxies are a subset of the infrared luminous galaxy class, most of which are observed to be closely interacting merging galaxies with clear evidence of both star formation and AGN activity; both phenomena are likely fueled by molecular gas. Single-dish and interferometric millimeter observations of carbon monoxide (CO), near-infrared imaging of recombination lines and H2, and VLA observations of the radio jets will be carried out. This program will elucidate the star formation rate, the amount of hot versus cold gas in the host galaxies, and the relation of jet emission to the stellar and molecular gas distributions. Studying these transitional objects offers one of the best opportunities to explore the connections between starbursts and active galactic nuclei doc20453 none This project will provide for a national tour of a 5,000 square-foot exhibit about the great Inca archaeological site of Machu Picchu, and will give a national public audience the opportunity to view one-of-a-kind and seldom exhibited Inca artifacts, while also learning about archaeological science through engaging interactive exhibits and displays. The exhibit demonstrates how understanding the past through science has made it possible to determine the purpose, activities and the nature of daily life on a royal Inca estate. Laboratory research is at the core of the visitor experience, which will include osteology, paleopathology, astronomy, stable carbon isotope analysis, faunal analysis of animal bones, compositional and structural analysis of metals and ecological analysis of the flora and fauna of the Machu Picchu National Researve in Peru. Project funding will also create a Website including a virtual exhibit tour, a self-guided tour of Machu Picchu and web-based archaeological science curriculum for classroom use. The larger project also includes an international scholarly symposium entitled The Archaeology of Inca Cuzco. The exhibit will open at the Yale Peabody Museum in January, , and after six months, will travel to Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Denver, Washington, DC and Chicago, before it returns to New Haven for long-term installation at the Peabody. The project will reach an audience estimated at well over 2,000,000 visitors, school children, and Website users doc20454 none Showman Observations from the Pioneer, Voyager, and Galileo spacecraft as well as ground-based measurements beginning in the s indicate that the four giant planets in our solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, have strong east-west jets in their atmospheres. The jets take different forms on each planet; Jupiter and Saturn have about twenty jets each (ten eastward and ten westward), whereas Uranus and Neptune have only about three jets each. The jets are correlated with spatial variations in the temperature and cloud abundance, suggesting that the full problem is a coupled one involving all the dynamical variables. The question of what causes these jets is one of the most important unsolved problems in planetary atmospheres. Dr. Adam Showman of the University of Arizona will investigate the dynamics and formation processes of the giant-planet jets using a fully nonlinear numerical model of atmospheric motion. Two distinct, yet related, numerical investigations will be conducted. Both are aimed at elucidating the role of small-scale convection in pumping the jets. The first problem uses a realistic parameterization of the convection and will focus predominantly on elucidating the dynamics near the cloud level. The second problem adopts a simpler representation of the convective forcing and investigates whether extremely deep jets can be driven from the upper regions where the moist convection is expected to occur. These studies are the first fully-nonlinear numerical simulations of Jupiter s cloud layer that address the problem of Jovian jet formation using a model with many vertical grid points. As a result, they will be groundbreaking in their ability to address the vertical structure that results from plausible jet-formation processes. The research will use established numerical codes that Dr. Showman is experienced in using doc20455 none Kalogerakis Isotopic ratios play an important role in the study of the origins and evolution of planetary atmospheres. Recent observations of the atmosphere of Jupiter indicate a significant depletion of 15NH3 at a pressure of approximately 400 mbar. Condensation of the ammonia and ammonium hydrosulfide clouds has been suggested as a possible origin for the observed isotopic depletion. Currently, no experimental results are available on the vapor pressure of solid NH3 NH4SH H2O mixtures and its temperature and isotopic composition dependence. The relevant isotopic fractionation coefficients during condensation are not known, and an interpretation of the observed 15NH3 depletion cannot be made with the current laboratory information. Dr. Konstantinos Kalogerakis at SRI International will conduct laboratory experiments to investigate the solid-gas equilibrium of solid NH3 NH4SH H2O mixtures and determine the relevant isotopic fractionation coefficients. The differential vapor pressures will be measured for a range of temperatures relevant to the Jovian troposphere. These results will elucidate whether the observed 15NH3 depletion is a local phenomenon or whether it could represent the global atmosphere of Jupiter. The fact that the Jovian nitrogen isotopic ratio is believed to reflect that of the presolar nebula makes the results of the proposed study significant for modeling not only the formation and evolution of the Jovian atmosphere, but potentially the evolution of the Solar System as well doc20278 none Novel health monitoring strategies for Highway Bridges and Constructed Facilities are of primary significance to the vitality of our economy. Using latest enabling technologies, the objectives of health monitoring are to detect and assess the level of damage to the civil infrastructure due to severe loading events (caused by natural loads or man-made events) and or progressive environmental deterioration. Damage identification is performed based on changes in salient response features of the structure, as measured by deployed sensor arrays. Due to the challenging nature of the technical problems associated with this topic, substantial research efforts during the past thirty years were undertaken by many researchers in many areas related to this broad interdisciplinary topic. The proposed research will build on these developments, and address a number of fundamental and basic research challenges towards a next-generation, versatile, efficient, and practical health monitoring strategy. In such a strategy, data from thousands of sensors will be analyzed with long-term and real-time assessment decisionmaking implications. A flexible and scalable software architecture framework will be developed to integrate real-time heterogeneous sensor data, database and archiving systems, computer vision, data analysis and interpretation, numerical simulation of complex structural systems, visualization, probabilistic risk analysis, and rational statistical decision making procedures. This development will be undertaken in a concerted and focused comprehensive approach by an inter-disciplinary team of Computer Scientists (CS) and Structural Engineers (SE). It is believed that this inter-disciplinary approach will synergize the resolution of basic technical challenges and allow development of the framework for future applications in this field. The new framework will also speed up the discovery of new knowledge related to the progressive or sudden deterioration of civil infrastructure systems and the corresponding damage mechanisms. The planned research activities will not only culminate in the deployment of a robust, field-implementable monitoring system, but it will also advance the research frontiers in several active, cutting-edge research areas involving grid storage (curated databases, filesystems, database systems), knowledge-based data integration and advanced query processing, information extraction (data mining, modeling, analysis and visualization), knowledge extraction (reliability risk analysis, structural health assessment, physics-based model development), and decision support systems (e.g., emergency response, preventive maintenance, rehabilitation). The entire project will be developed around actual Bridge Testbeds in cooperation with the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), and Industry Partners. These Testbeds will be densely instrumented and continuously monitored, and the recorded response databases will be made available for maximum possible use by interested researchers and engineers worldwide. The actual recorded data streams from both laboratory models and bridge testbeds will be a major component for all phases of this research effort. An Internet Portal will integrate all elements and act as a Gateway for the Project. The proposed 5 year project duration will allow the opportunity for resolving key basic research issues of relevance to Structural Health Monitoring, and collaboration between CS and SE is simply a necessity. State-of-the-art data acquisition, transmission, and management, involvement of computer vision, refinement of nonlinear system identification and modeling, and practical implementation constitute the basic research framework. Applications include long-term condition assessment and emergency response after natural or man-made disasters and acts of terrorism for all types of large constructed facilities. From a broader perspective, the proposed effort will be a major boost in defining and shaping additional long-term interaction and collaboration opportunities between CS and SE, with wide national and international implications, as well as strongly benefiting from leveraging resources and ongoing monitoring activities doc20457 none PI Rasio Close interactions happen frequently in dense stellar systems, such as the cores of globular star clusters, where the density of stars can be so high that even physical collisions between stars can occur. They can also happen during the evolution of close binary stars, where they often lead to mergers of the two components. Close stellar interactions play a crucial role in determining the long-term dynamical evolution and final fate of dense star clusters. In addition, dynamical interactions in these clusters are thought to be responsible for the production of large numbers of exotic objects such as X-ray sources, binary radio pulsars, and blue stragglers. Understanding the long-term dynamical evolution of dense stellar systems and the formation mechanisms for the peculiar sources they contain are two long-standing problems in theoretical astrophysics. This project will focus on a number of theoretical and computational studies dealing with various aspects of these hydrodynamic stellar interactions in dense star clusters and in binary star systems. Large-scale numerical simulations of the hydrodynamic and stellar evolution processes will be performed on parallel supercomputers, providing quantitatively accurate theoretical predictions that can be compared directly to observations. Much of the work will be carried out by undergraduate students doc20458 none McKay, Timothy A. Models of hierarchical structure formation based on N-body simulations now provide a relatively complete picture of the formation, evolution, and clustering properties of dark matter halos around galaxies. Unfortunately, experimental determination of structure relies on observations of luminous galaxies, whose formation involves gas dynamics, star formation, and the feedback of entropy into the interstellar medium. These processes are complex, hampering direct simulation. As a result, the detailed relationship between luminous galaxies and their dark matter environments (the bias ) is poorly determined. This uncertainty seriously limits our ability to compare cosmological observations of galaxies to theoretical models. This program will conduct a closely coordinated observational and theoretical study of the relationship between luminous galaxies and their dark matter environments. McKay and his students will pursue weak lensing measurements within the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, while Evrard and Wechsler will make parallel measurements within N-body simulations. This will allow direct comparison of theory and observation at the level of the fundamental observables, without recourse to intermediate model fitting. By comparing lensing measurements to parallel studies of simulations this work will probe bias in new ways doc20459 none PI Seager Planets orbiting other stars are too faint to be observed directly with current technology, but it is possible to detect them indirectly by observing their parent stars. Close to 80extrasolar planets are currently known, all of them detected via the radial velocity technique. These extrasolar planets are not seen directly, and thus even their most basic physical characteristics, such as radius and actual mass, cannot be measured. This project will carry out a planet transit search, an alternative and complementary approach to the radial velocity technique. The planet transit search method involves looking for the tiny drop in brightness of a star caused by a planet as it periodically passes directly in front of its parent star (i.e. transits). While most stars with planets will not show transits, stars with planets in short-period ( ?4 days)orbits are most likely to show transits. Considering the known population of short-period planets, approximately 1 in 10,000 stars will have a short-period planet that shows transits in 10 to 15 nights of observations. Looking at 10,000 stars one-by-one is far too time-consuming to be feasible. Instead the transit search method involves monitoring tens of thousands of stars simultaneously. Specifically, the PI will search for a periodic 1%drop in brightness every time the planet passes in front of the parent star. A successful planet transit search will have a huge impact on the field of extrasolar planets because every planet detected will have a measured radius providing a constraint on evolutionary and atmosphere models for these planets doc20460 none This study assesses the relative importance of ecological and genetic mechanisms that restrict natural hybridization in plants. Two closely related species of Ipomopsis plants grow in close proximity in several sites in the mountains of the western U.S. By comparing contact sites where hybrids are common with a contact site where the same two species do not hybridize successfully and instead form a bimodal distribution of morphologies, it is possible to investigate the importance of different isolating mechanisms to the rate of hybridization. Sites with low versus high frequencies of hybrids will be compared with respect to the degree of introgression of genes using molecular methods. Behavior of bird and insect pollinators will be examined at each site to test for differences in gene flow induced by behavioral choices or ability of pollinators to transfer pollen. Experimental pollinations will test for differences in the competitive ability of pollen from another species. Hybridization rates vary tremendously across different taxonomic groups. Understanding the reasons why will contribute to an understanding of the fundamental problem of how species differences and biological diversity are maintained. It could also help in predicting impacts of hybridization with genetically engineered crops or with invasive plant species doc20461 none Blandford There is now considerable evidence that at least eighty percent of the matter in the Universe is in a dark form that cannot be seen directly, using astronomical telescopes. This dark matter is found on scales spanning six decades, from the cores of galaxies to the size of the Universe. One of the best ways to probe the distribution of this dark matter is to use gravitational optics - the measurement of the small deflections of light rays induced by the gravitational force from the dark matter itself. By measuring these light deflections, we can infer the properties of the dark matter. Over the past two decades, Dr. Blandford and his collaborators have devised a suite of specialized techniques to detect dark matter over this wide range, from cores of galaxies to scales up to 106 times larger. This project will contribute to the development of several of these techniques and will implement them in three cases where data already exists that can be used for this purpose. These will be used to construct an integrated, observationally based description of the distribution of dark matter in the universe that can be used to compare with theoretical calculations doc20462 none The Great Lakes Science Center (GLSC), in collaboration with the Cleveland Municipal School District, corporations and universities, proposes a three-year After School Science Adventures program. To address the developmental needs of youth, the program will use multi-level mentoring and a learning cycle approach to engage participants in learning, doing and presenting science. Science content will center around six themes: (1) information technology, (2) environmental science, (3) polymers materials science, (4) engineering, (5) biotechnology and (6) biomedical research that are directly relevant to local scientific research and industry. Each year a team of 20 High School Science Ambassadors will facilitate science activities for at least 100 middle level students. Middle level students will participate in a series of eight weekly sessions for each theme. In year one there will be three themes, and an additional three themes in years two and three. Science experiments, team projects, youth mentoring, presentations by research and industry scientists, and fieldtrips are key program activities. Participants will present science to their families in family science events throughout the project doc20463 none Cen The formation and evolution of cosmic structures, including galaxies, clusters of galaxies and large-scale structure, are fundamental problems of modern cosmology. While the Big Bang picture of how the Universe began is generally accepted, the details of how and when structures developed and formed are in hot debate. On scales larger than clusters of galaxies ( 10 million light years across) it is generally believed that gravity is the dominant force and structures grow from small initial seeds planted in the very early universe ( 1 second since the Big Bang), because gravity is attractive and unstable. However, on smaller scales gas hydrodynamics, microphysics (i.e., forces on atomic scales) and star formation processes play progressively more important roles in shaping and determining when galaxies form and how they evolve; the picture at these smaller scales is much less clear. The radiation field, especially, the ultra-violet radiation that is capable of ionizing atomic hydrogen must play a very important role in these processes. In particular, it determines when atomic hydrogen is fully ionized and the universe is cleared of hydrogen fog and becomes transparent to distant sources. This epoch has been characterized as the end of the dark ages . Since radiation controls the evolution of the thermodynamic state of the gas, a fraction of which is subsequently incorporated into stars, it is essential to include radiation hydrodynamics in full detail in cosmological computer simulations in order to provide answers to many of the important questions in modern cosmology. This is a formidable task to tackle even with the fastest supercomputers today. Dr. Cen and his collaborators have developed an efficient way to compute this complicated situation and begun to carry out a program that should help provide some clues about how the radiation field and the matter evolve with time doc20464 none Insects face the challenge of locating hosts in a complex odor landscape. Plants face the challenge of trying to lure pollinators while, simultaneously, deterring herbivores. Although this predicament may be quite common, it has rarely been investigated. Through a combination of analytical chemistry and field research the components of the scent blend of Cirsium arvense, Canada thistle, important for insect attraction will be investigated, and mechanisms by which floral volatile emissions are modified to avoid attracting detrimental insects will be identified. C. arvense is in many ways well suited for this study. Because it is dioecious, scent, which can act as a long distance attractant for pollinators, becomes paramount to extending its distribution. Additionally there are distinct selection pressures on the two sexes by beneficial and detrimental floral visitors. Preliminary data demonstrates a difference in both insect visitation and scent between male and female plants doc20348 none COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: Evolutionary Success in Marine Invertebrates: Testing the Relationships between Eurytopy, Longevity, and Geographic Range in Carboniferous Crinoids This study will focus on the role of environmental and biogeographic factors in the evolutionary success of crinoids (echinoderms), one the most diverse and abundant groups of marine invertebrates during the Paleozoic. Lower Carboniferous (354 to 314 m.y. ago) rocks record the peak of crinoid generic diversity during their evolutionary history. Evolutionary success is measured by taxonomic longevity in the fossil record. Current understanding of reasons for evolutionary success is incomplete, but available evidence indicates a positive correlation with environmental breadth (eurytopy) and geographic range. Data supporting this correlation are limited for Paleozoic marine invertebrates. Thus, analysis of Early Carboniferous crinoids, where preliminary work supports such a correlation, will more rigorously test the correlation and broaden our understanding of the relationships between eurytopy, longevity, and geographic range in marine invertebrates. The research will compare the average stratigraphic (longevity), environmental (eurytopy), and geographic ranges of genera within crinoid groups (suborders) between North America and Europe, the two regions with the best fossil record. The study will include the Kinderhookian to early Meramecian epochs of the Mississippian Period (Early Carboniferous) of North America and the equivalent Tournaisian to middle Visean epochs of the Early Carboniferous of western Europe. Stratigraphic and geographic ranges of genera will be determined by evaluating all known species for correct generic assignment. Simultaneously, data on environmental distribution will be tabulated for genera on both continents to calculate a eurytopy index value for each genus, both intracontinental and intercontinental. Results of this investigation will bear directly on evolutionary theory as it endeavors to explain the history of life on Earth. The extensive data set derived from this study will help elucidate the roles of environment and geography in determining generic longevity and, ultimately, group longevity in defining evolutionary success doc20466 none Becker The majority of stellar births and stellar deaths in the Milky Way take place shrouded from the view of optical telescopes. Centimeter radio waves and hard X-rays can penetrate the gas and dust which obscure our vision, but the limited angular resolution and sensitivity of all previous searches has left us peering through the gas darkly in an attempt to construct a census of star formation and demise in the Galaxy. Drs. David Helfand, at Columbia University, and Robert Becker, at the University of California at Davis, will carry out a new survey of the Galactic Plane with the Very Large Array (VLA), as well as extensive optical and near-infrared follow up observations, to complement a new hard X-ray Galactic plane survey now underway using the XMM-Newton satellite. All of this group s observations (approved and proposed, at X-ray and radio wavelengths) are nonproprietary, and they intend to follow the FIRST survey model in creating a public website which will make available all reduced images as soon as they are constructed and verified. Thus, the survey will provide databases of use to any astronomer working in Galactic astronomy. However, these researchers have identified a number of specific problems on which they intend to focus: a complete census of Galactic supernova remnants, a census of massive star formation, and the definition of complete samples of accretion-powered binary systems. The surveys will open a new window on massive star formation in the Milky Way. All HII regions powered by stars more massive than B0 will be clearly visible to the solar circle on the opposite side of the Galaxy as radio sources coincident with infrared emission detected in the MSX satellite mid-infrared maps of the plane; in addition, many of these star formation complexes will be detectable in the XMM-Newton maps, providing a distance estimate from the X-ray absorption column density. This group will follow up all HII region candidates with a new infrared camera on the MDM 2.4m telescope. The result will be the most complete census yet of massive star formation in the Galaxy. Luminosity functions for several classes of X-ray transients and steady binaries, derived from extensive optical and near-infrared follow up of selected samples of X-ray point sources from the XMM Newton images, will extend 2-3 orders of magnitude fainter than existing data allow, providing important new constraints on close-binary evolution and models for accretion. With both X-ray and radio observing time already allocated, with a new 8K optical camera and a near-infrared imager spectrometer on the MDM 2.4m telescope and access to the Lick and Keck Observatories, these researchers have the resources in place to provide a striking new view of the Milky Way doc20467 none The long-running and highly successful National Public Radio series Science Friday is venturing in new directions. Given that basic research underlies all of the technological advances influencing our world and that tax dollars pay for that research, the public needs to be informed about the basics of research. To address this need for public education, Science Friday will examine the importance of research as a theme underlying all science and technology changes by: Finding the research roots at the bottom of each story; Exploring the cooperation among corporations, private institutions, and research foundations and illuminating how each plays a role in the research process; Following the research bumps along the road to illustrate that research success depends upon failures -- not all research produces positive results; Illuminating the barriers to successful research; Helping listeners understand the thought process of researchers; Scaling the ivory tower by enabling listeners to question and talk directly with researchers; and Helping listeners understand the role of basic research in policy-making. Ira Flatow, the host, will take Science Friday on the road and produce programs in Oklahoma, Iowa, Michigan, Massachusetts, Arizona and other locations. He also will visit schools and universities and will speak at public events. NPR also will reactivate the Science Friday Kids Connection which will take each week s program and its guest scientists directly into classrooms across the country doc20468 none Stubbs A recent convergence of observational results has led cosmologists to the surprising conclusion that not only is the Universe expanding, but that the rate of expansion is increasing. This can be thought of as anti-gravity between regions of the vacuum. It appears that the Universe at present is dominated by the gravitational effect of this mysterious Dark Energy. Distant supernovae (exploding stars) provide a means to map out the history of the expansion of the Universe, and can be used to distinguish between different scenarios for the physics that drives an accelerating expansion. This project will detect and monitor over 200 supernovae in order to test different hypotheses for the nature of the Dark Energy doc20469 none Sellgren Stellar abundances have been critical to understanding the formation and chemical evolution of the halo, disk, and bulge of the Galaxy. With the advent of infrared imaging and spectroscopy on large telescopes, it is now possible to explore the stellar population within 100 pc of the Galactic center in detail. The Galactic center contains many young, luminous, massive stars, which are concentrated in three separate clusters within the central 60 parsecs of the Galaxy. These are the Central Cluster, the Arches Cluster, and the Quintuplet Cluster, with respective ages for the youngest stars of 3-9 Myr, 1-4.5 Myr, and 3-4 Myr. The Central Cluster, located at the dynamical center of the Galaxy, has a striking excess of young, luminous stars compared to the bulge stellar population in Baade s window. These young stars co-exist in the Central Cluster with older stars whose ages range up to a few 100 Myr or more. The relatively young ages (1 - 100 Myr) of the brightest stars in the Galactic center support the idea that the Galaxy s central bar has driven disk gas into the Galactic center to fuel star formation throughout the Galaxy s history, continuously or in bursts of star formation. Previous work by Dr. Kristen Sellgren, at Ohio State University, on differential stellar abundance measurements of [Fe H] within the Central Cluster and the Quintuplet Cluster have found that the distribution and mean value of stellar [Fe H] in the central 60 parsec of the Galaxy is indistinguishable from the values they derive for stars of similar temperature and luminosity in the solar neighborhood. This result is surprising, because gas-phase abundance measurements of H II regions show a significant increase in the alpha-elements O and S between the solar neighborhood and the Galactic center. One explanation for this is that the alpha-capture elements compared to Fe, [alpha Fe], are enhanced in the Galactic center. The star formation conditions in the Galactic center are very different from those in the solar neighborhood, and are predicted to result in an initial mass function (IMF) weighted toward massive stars. Furthermore, models of supernova enrichment in an environment dominated by massive stars predict a high value of [alpha Fe]. The current project directed by Dr. Sellgren will test this hypothesis by obtaining spectra to determine [alpha H] in Galactic center stars for which [Fe H] has been already derived from previous work. A key part of this study will be to perform a differential analysis of Galactic center stars compared to solar-neighborhood stars with a similar range in effective temperature and surface gravity. The observation and analysis of comparison stars in the solar neighborhood is critically important in Galactic center abundance studies in order to reduce the effects of systematic errors. The abundance analysis itself involves the computation of the synthetic spectrum of each star, using the spectral synthesis program MOOG and model atmospheres for late type giants and supergiants. This project expects to obtain spectra and derive CNO abundances of more solar neighborhood M supergiants and more Galactic Center M supergiants to determine whether the anomalous CNO abundances in the source IRS 7 are due to the unique star-forming environment in the Galactic Center compared to the solar neighborhood, the presence of the black hole in the Central Cluster, or the initial CNO abundances from which solar neighborhood and Galactic center stars formed. The study of alpha-elements in a sample of Galactic center stars will answer fundamental questions about the nature of star formation, gas infall and outflow, and chemical evolution in the nucleus of the Galaxy doc20470 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Nancy Simmons, Rob DeSalle, and Liliana Davalos at the American Museum of Natural History to investigate the relationship between earth and faunal history in the Caribbean region, focusing on bats. The project will generate hypotheses about the evolutionary relationships of 5 different groups of bats, each containing at least one exclusively Antillean species. These evolutionary relationships will then be used to establish the timing and pattern of separation among bat species in the Antilles and their South and Central American relatives, and will also be compared with similar hypotheses about other terrestrial organisms. Drs. Nancy Simmons, Rob DeSalle, and Liliana Davalos will use standard methods for obtaining and analyzing morphological and molecular data from the study groups. Patterns of evolutionary relationships resulting from these data will be compared applying at least 5 different approaches. This project will be the first to explictly test longstanding assumptions about the evolution of the Caribbean land fauna. The knowledge generated by this project will be essential for future biological studies in ecology, morphology, behavior, and conservation of Caribbean bats. By characterizing patterns of species diversification, this study constitutes an essential step towards understanding the origin and evolution of the fauna of the Caribbean, and ensuring its conservation in unique and increasingly threatened Caribbean ecosystems doc20471 none Sneden, Christopher Dr. Sneden is awarded funds at the University of Texas at Austin to work with collaborators at Ohio State University and Michigan State University. This team will lay the groundwork for a more detailed understanding of how our Milky Way galaxy formed and evolved. Models of galaxy formation and evolution depend on understanding the motions and chemical enrichment of local main-sequence stars that are far lower in heavy elements than ordinary stars, and how these stars compare to globular cluster stars. The known sample of these subdwarfs is very small. Dr. Sneden and collaborators will study a new sample of these subdwarf stars in the Galaxy s halo and thick disk; this sample represents a huge increase over the number of subdwarfs previously studied. The investigators will obtain accurate and self-consistent measures of temperature, reddening, and composition for a critically selected sample of approximately 150 subdwarfs identified in recent surveys for metal-poor stars. They will also apply theoretical models to explore the dependence of the main-sequence luminosity on detailed stellar chemical composition. The results will be used to improve the temperature and abundance scales of globular cluster main sequences for comparison to spectroscopic determinations on the giant branch, and to thus determine the relative ages and distances of globular clusters doc20472 none Tufte High-Velocity Clouds (HVCs) are an important component of the Milky Way s interstellar medium, covering a significant fraction of the sky and containing considerable mass and kinetic energy. HVCs are by definition peculiar; they are the material with velocities not explainable by the differential rotation of the galaxy. Despite over thirty-five years of study, their origin and nature remain a mystery. Proposed explanations of HVCs span a broad range. One picture envisions a galactic fountain. In this model, powerful supernova explosions in the disk of the galaxy vent hot material into regions high above the plane. The gas then cools, condenses into clouds, and then rains back down upon the disk. Another prominent model purports that the HVCs are dispersed throughout the Local Group of galaxies, the remnants of its creation. It appears that some of the high-velocity material was tidally torn from the Magallenic clouds, and now streams behind them in their orbit around our galaxy. Recent evidence suggests that one major complex of high-velocity material has low metallicity and is accreting onto the disk from high in the halo. This is especially interesting because such fresh fuel for star formation has long been required by models of the chemical evolution of the Galaxy. Current observational efforts to distinguish between these models will enhance present understandings of the formation of the Milky Way galaxy and its subsequent chemical evolution, as well as illuminate long debated issues concerning the connection of processes in the disk of our Galaxy to the halo. The vast majority of previous investigations of HVCs have used radio telescopes to study the 21- cm line, and thus only probe the neutral hydrogen present in the clouds. Dr. Stephen Tufte, at Lewis and Clark College, will investigate ionized material associated with HVCs by making measurements of optical emission lines using the Wisconsin H-Alpha Mapper (WHAM) Observatory. WHAM is a Fabry-Perot based spectroscopic instrument that sits atop Kitt Peak in Arizona and is completely remote-operable. The observations will take place from the principal investigator s laboratory on the campus of Lewis & Clark College, by way of the Internet. This project will measure the intensities of emission lines of hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur, and oxygen from various HVCs. The observations will provide information on the locations and metal abundances of HVCs, will yield new insights into the nature of compact HVCs, and will reveal the physical conditions present in the clouds such as their temperature and ionization state. The principal investigator has already proven WHAM to be a uniquely powerful instrument for these studies. The new measurements have the ability to distinguish between the vastly different models that have been proposed to explain HVCs, and therefore significantly advance our understanding of their origin and nature. This award is made under the auspices of the Research in Undergraduate Institutions (RUI) program at NSF doc20473 none The Liberty Science Center, located across the Hudson River from the former World Trade Center, will develop, evaluate and install an 8,000 square foot, five-story permanent exhibition about the architectural design and engineering, physics, and urban-related environmental science of skyscrapers. The exhibit will use a vertical space that includes a view overlooking southern Manhatten, the former World Trade Center, and one of the most famous urban skylines in the world. The exhibition is organized around three basic theme areas and is balanced between the advantages and disadvantages of skyscrapers. Visitors enter the exhibit through SKYSCRAPER WORLD, an advance organizer that sets the stage for the exhibit and identifies possible wayfinding pathways through other areas. BUILDING THE BUILDING (second and third levels) addresses principles in the design and construction of skyscrapers, while HABITAT AND IMPACT (fourth level) describes patterns of adaptation in the ecosystems created by skyscrapers. An outdoor observation deck (fifth level) facing the Manhattan skyline and the former World Trade Center, provides the opportunity for skyline programming. What is a Rooftop, Rooftop Garden, and Skyline Clock, assisted by binocular telescopes for observing detail, are interactive programs that use the skyline as a teaching tool. Taking advantage of the dramatic skyline seen from the Science Center, the project will document changing public attitudes about skyscrapers and analyze patterns of visitor traffic and wayfinding in a five-story exhibition tower. The exhibit is supported by mediated public programs in LSC and by experiences for school audiences, both at LSC and in local schools. Although Skyscraper is primarily an informal learning experience, it has significant linkages to formal in-school programs doc20474 none PI Close Currently, the bulk of our understanding of dust in circumstellar disks comes indirectly through unresolved observations (i.e. observations that spatially confuse light from the disk and the star) where there is little or no information as to the morphological and physical processes that the disks are undergoing. The high contrast between the central starlight and the light scattered from the disk poses a difficult technical challenge, and, until now, this has prevented the efficient resolved detection of large numbers of disks. The investigators will take advantage of a novel high-dynamic range imaging technique (Adaptive Optics aided Wollaston polarimetry), highly sensitive to the polarized light scattered from a disk (eliminating the contaminating unpolarized thermal emission from the star), developed by the group, to create a database of 60 high angular resolution, high sensitivity polarimetric observations of circumstellar disks around young stars from a variety of nearby star forming regions equally sampled over the age range of 100,000 -100,000,000 years. This data will be expertly analyzed with help from the experienced and knowledgeable star formation group at the University of Arizona to extract physical disk parameters from the polarimetric data, such as the disk inclination, scale height, radial extent, density estimates, and dust size distribution. With this new wealth of information, questions regarding the relationship between circumstellar disks and their environment, for example the parent star mass, the effects of a companion star, and the initial conditions for planetary formation, may be answered. This project also includes the commissioning of a dual imaging polarimeter in the new University of Arizona near-infrared camera, to work in tandem with the adoptive optics system currently being developed for the 6.5 meter telescope on Mount Hopkins doc20475 none This award supports a new collaboration between Dr. Dianne K. Newman of the and Dr. Paula S. Suarez of the Universidad Simon Bolivar in Venezuela. These researchers share a long-standing interest in metal transformations by microorganisms and have both in recent years studied iron cycling in biofilm communities. Currently, very little is known about the diversity, genetics, and biochemistry of phototrophic iron-oxidizers, and even less is know about how these organisms interact with other bacteria in biofilms. These researchers will collaborate to isolate iron-oxidizers and iron-reducers from a biofilm forming on the surface of a corroding steel boat in San Esteban National Park, Venezuela. It is anticipated that this project will provide insights that will help launch a long-term collaboration to study the biochemistry and genetics of phototrophic iron-oxidation, and test the hypothesis that iron-oxidizing phototrophs can form biofilms that are sustained by iron-cycling in concert with iron-reducers doc20476 none PI Kulkarni Neutron stars are exotic remnants of stellar evolution. First identified as isolated radio pulsars and X-ray emitting binaries, the number and variety of such systems has grown enormously in the last two decades with the discovery of rapid (millisecond) radio and X-ray pulsars, soft gamma-ray pulse repeaters, relativistic binary systems, etc. Along with this diversity is mounting evidence of a tremendous range in magnetic field strength. This contributes to the interest in neutron stars as laboratories for physics under extreme conditions and as tracers of the evolution of massive stars. This project pursues three basic areas of research. The investigators in this team (including two graduate students) will carry out the first coherent census of all classes of neutrons stars within 5 kpc of the sun, perform a deep search toward globular clusters for sub-millisecond pulsars using the Parkes radio telescope (Australia), and the new Green Bank Telescope (West Virginia), and with improved instrumentation at Parkes determine distances and binary component masses for a sample of pulsars and contribute to placing new limits on long-period gravitational waves doc20477 none PI Lin There are direct and practical reasons for studying the Sun owing to its obvious relationship to climate and for the effects of solar activity on earth, such as the interruption of radio communications when we are bathed in particles from solar flares. Solar magnetism is key to understanding both global and local phenomena in the atmospheric layers of the Sun. This project will develop new infrared instrumentation capable of high spatial, temporal, and spectral resolution of solar magnetic features from the photosphere to the corona. At the solar surface they will study the generation and maintenance mechanisms for sunspots and small scale photospheric magnetic fields. In the atmosphere of the Sun, they will investigate coronal magnetic fields, filaments, and solar prominences. The observations will be used to construct magnetic field models for the photospheric features from which comparisons with theory may be made. In addition, an education and public outreach program, particularly to be used by science teachers, will be carried out to raise public awareness of solar research in Hawaii doc20478 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Jeffrey R. Johansen of John Carroll University to study a problematic genus of blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) called Leptolyngbya. This genus is difficult to understand because it has very few morphological characters, but occurs in a wide variety of habitat types. Morphologically similar forms have been found to be actually very different in terms of their 16S rRNA gene sequence. Dr. Johansen will use a polyphasic approach to characterize over 60 strains of this microbe from collections all over the world, including an extensive collection of desert soil forms isolated as part of a past NSF-supported project. Polyphasic characterization means that morphological, genetic, ecological, and physiological data will be collected on these strains, so that the genus can be revised. Preliminary evidence indicates that there are many new species in the genus, and probably even groups of species that merit creation of new genera. Unlike all other cyanobacterial taxonomic studies and most bacteriological systematic studies, this project will test the applicability of three modern species concepts for asexual species. Further precedents will be set in designating a suite of new kinds of type materials for new taxa. Phylogenetic analyses, which determine evolutionary relationships of taxa, will be run in ways unique to bacteria and uncommon in other groups. This work will help us to characterize biodiversity in the world. It may serve as an example for others wishing to use modern systematic approaches to describe new cyanobacterial species. Excellent systematics and taxonomy are necessary for development of the cyanobacteria for biotechnological, pharmacological, and reclamation purposes doc20479 none A grant has been awarded from the National Science Foundation to Dr. Jack Sites and Mrs. Alison Whiting at Brigham Young University to study the evolutionary patterns of limb loss in a group of Southern African lizards. Limb loss is a trend seen in many squamate groups, including snakes and various lizards. The lizard family Scincidae (skinks) is arguably the best system in which to study patterns and processes of limb loss because limb reduction (to some degree) is postulated to have occurred over 30 independent times. The southern African genus Scelotes contains species exhibiting the full range of limb reduction, from fully functional pentadactyl limbs (i.e., those with 5 digits) to complete lack thereof, with many intermediate forms. However, the evolutionary relationship among skinks is unknown. The objective of this research is to establish a robust hypothesis of phylogenetic (i.e., genealogical) relationships within southern African scincines, using both DNA sequence and skeletal data, and to evaluate the evolutionary pattern of limb loss within Scelotes in light of phylogeny. Preliminary results support multiple occurrences as well as reversals of limb loss in this group. The loss of limbs in snakes and multiple lizard groups has long been an area of intense interest. This study will lead to a greater understanding of the morphological changes associated with, and the ecological pressures that lead to limb loss, and indirectly may also help scientists understand details about the origin of snakes. In addition, studying limb loss in a group where it has occurred multiple times will lay the foundations for understanding the developmental genetic mechanisms involved in limb development doc20480 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Michael Whiting and Mr. Matthew Terry at Brigham Young University to study the relationships among a group of insects known as Polyneoptera. This large group includes many commonly known insects with substantial economic impact such as termites, preying mantises, cockroaches, stick insects, grasshoppers, stoneflies and earwigs; and lesser known orders including webspinners, rock crawlers and angel insects. Most of these insects have representatives from every region of the earth and exemplars representing the diversity of each group will be examined. This study will concentrate on generating DNA sequence data from multiple genes for each group using state of the art methods such as polymerase chain reactions (PCR) and automated sequencing, but will also incorporate data based on a morphological analysis of each group. This work will provide a context for the evaluation of a wide range of biological, behavioral and developmental data, both within and between the groups mentioned above. One example of this is the development of sub-social and social behavior in cockroaches and termites; two groups that preliminary analyses indicate to be closely related to one another. The study will also provide a foundation for future researchers to address a host of questions that deal both directly and indirectly with this fascinating group of insects doc20481 none PI Ward This program will target an important stage in solar system history, namely, the dispersal of the solar nebular disk out of which the planets formed, and the effects of this on the dynamical state of the remnant planetary system. Depending on how fast this disk material dissipates and the method by which it is removed, serious disturbances to the orbital properties of the planets may occur owing to their gravitational interactions. Orbits may evolve in size and shape to sweep throughout large regions of the disk especially effecting the terrestrial planets, asteroids, and cometary objects. New dynamical interactions may be found, and this work will likely provide new constraints on later stages of planet formation. The project will employ both analytical and numerical approaches taking into account extensive advances made over the last two decades in our understanding of planet-disk interactions doc20482 none PI Brown The study of stellar radio emission provides complementary and often unique insights into physical processes occurring in stellar coronae, winds, magnetospheres, and circumstellar environments. Radio observations are unique in their ability to reveal the presence of nonthermal processes in stellar atmospheres, as well as the magnetic field strength and structure at or close to the site of magnetic energy release. The investigations to be carried out here will allow significant advances in the study of the phenomenolgy and physical processes related to: the mass loss process from evolved giant and supergiant stars, including the wind acceleration process and the wind driving mechanism(s); the coronal structure of active binary stars and the physical processes occurring during the impulsive and cooling phases of the large are events in these systems; the thermal and nonthermal radio emission of main sequence stars of differing mass and how these properties change as such stars evolve; the fundamental processes controlling the level of radio emission and stellar activity in general as a function of basic stellar parameters and evolutionary state; and finally, the physical and geometrical relationship between thermal processes in stellar X-ray coronae and nonthermal coronal processes observed in the radio doc20483 none Speciation is the basic process that generates biodiversity. In the tropics, leaf-cutter ants and their sister species the lower attine ants comprise a significant proportion of tropical insects, but little is known about their diversification. Patterns of speciation by switching fungal cultivar types between ant species will be examined in three Central American species complexes of lower attine ants (Cyphomyrmex longiscapus, Mycocepurus smithi, and Apterostigma pilosum). The goals of this study are to: split each species complex into valid species using molecular genetic techniques; assess genetic diversity of each species; examine biogeographic patterns of each species complex in Central America; and differentiate between allopatric and sympatric modes of speciation. This research examines the fundamental process of forming new species. By investigating patterns of diversification in cryptic attine ant species, the attine-fungus mutualism may emerge as a new model system for speciation studies, thus contributing to our understanding of biodiversity. This research will provide training for a graduate student in molecular genetic, entomological, and field techniques, and the graduate student will train and supervise several undergraduate assistants. These results will add new information to the already astonishing level of complexity that has evolved within the attine system over the fifty million years that these ancient farming ants have been cultivating fungi doc20484 none This research focuses on a novel splicing system thought to be common among eukaryotic cells but for which only a single example of a defined mRNA substrate has thus far been identified. The primary goal in this work is to develop a systematic means for identifying additional substrates for this unique splicing system. This novel splicing mechanism was first identified as a component step in a stress-response signaling pathway in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. A key step in this pathway, termed the Unfolded Protein Response (UPR), is regulated splicing of the mRNA encoding a transcriptional activator (termed Hac1p). The result is to modulate levels of the Hac1p activator which, in turn, controls expression of the cognate stress response genes. This splicing event is not mediated by the conventional mRNA splicing apparatus. Instead, two distinct gene products, Ire1p and Trl1p, act as splicing endonuclease and RNA ligase, respectively, to carry out the splicing reaction. Remarkably, the Ire1p is a transmembrane receptor that responds to changes in ligand binding by modulating its own splicing activity. Thus, splicing is truly a component step in the signaling cascade that constitutes this stress response pathway. Extensive evidence exists for conservation of UPR function among eukaryotes including the observations that yeast Hac1 mRNA can be accurately spliced in mammalian cells and recombinant human Ire1p accurately cleaves yeast Hac1 RNA. Based on this conservation of function, it is hypothesized that: (1) Regulated splicing may be a component step in UPR signaling pathways in all eukaryotes. Thus, Hac1 homologues may be found in a wide variety of eukaryotic cells. (2) This splicing system may serve a variety of gene regulatory functions other than the UPR response. Thus, regulated splicing of a variety of mRNAs may be mediated by this system. These hypotheses can be tested by the systematic identification and characterization of splicing substrates from a variety of organisms. The use of Trl1p as an affinity ligand in a selection amplification approach will be tested as a means for conducting such a systematic analysis. The experimental goals are as follows. First, microarray analyses will be used as a comprehensive means for characterizing populations of Saccharomyces mRNAs enriched in a selection amplification procedure. Second, application of this approach to another organism and the utility of homologous versus heterologous Trl1 gene products as affinity reagents will be assessed. Candida albicans has been chosen for this purpose based on the availability of appropriate genomic resources, its medial phylogenetic relationship to Saccharomyces, and on evidence for conservation of the splicing machinery in this organism. The results of this exploratory research will make it possible to evaluate the significance of this splicing system as a fundamental stress response mechanism among eukaryotic cells and to assess the potential for additional gene regulatory functions for this novel splicing pathway doc20485 none Parasites draw nutrition directly from their hosts and adversely affect them in many ways. Major workers in the ant species Pheidole dentata are susceptible to parasitism by the phorid fly Apocephalus feeneri. Parasitism by the phorid is fatal for the parasitized ant and previous work has shown that foraging majors will try to conceal themselves when phorids are detected. In spite of this attempt to avoid parasitism, a small percentage of majors are successfully parasitized by phorids. The goal of this study is to examine changes of those parasitized majors by comparing their behavior to that of non-parasitized nestmates. Equal numbers of parasitized and non-parasitized majors will be marked in a colony and their behaviors observed using standard ethogram techniques for the duration of the phorid s larval development. Frequencies and sequences of behaviors in parasitized and non-parasitized majors will be compared. To highlight the effect of parasitism on the specialized defensive response of P. dentata, parasitized majors will be exposed to fire ants in the genus Solenopsis. The outcome of these experiments will affect future ecological studies with P. dentata and potentially bio-control efforts in other ant-phorid systems doc20486 none The University of California, Berkeley is developing Windows on Research, a two-year experimental exhibit project at the Lawrence Hall of Science focused on engaging and informing the public about current scientific research. The project will develop and evaluate different media to translate the leading edge of nanotechnology research for the science center audience by featuring live demonstrations and presentations, physical- and technology-based exhibits, and Internet-based exhibits. Formative evaluation of all products, including ongoing public focus groups and surveys, will be used to establish which of the several media, alone or combined, work best to communicate research content. The project team also is developing new assessment tools to test usability and effectiveness of the artificial intelligence and technology-based components in conveying content. The results of this prototype effort to present ongoing research in a museum setting will be disseminated to the informal science education field. The PI, Marco Molinaro, and the team from the Lawrence Hall of Science will work closely with scientists representing research in a number of nanotechnology fields. These scientists bring expertise in the areas of materials science, chemistry, education, bioengineering, mechanical engineering, molecular and cell biology, geochronology and isotope geochemistry, and psychology doc20487 none The Science Museum of Minnesota would like to create a network of partnerships between the museum and small community-based science organizations (CBSOs). CBSOs will receive professional development workshops to increase their capacity to produce high quality exhibits and publications and offer effective science programming. A team from each science organization will participate in a 12-hour skills development workshop to cover such topics as exhibit development, audience research, science communication and program development. A workshop tool kit will capture the essence of the training workshops and be made available to other museums. Each team will develop a small traveling exhibit and supporting materials. Annual Science Summit programs will showcase the CBSOs to the general public, museum visitors and students, while a CBSO Roundtable will invite the participants to explore collaborations and programming strategies. An online database will be created and a complimentary printed resource guide of all local CBSOs will be available to the public. The model will be tested at two small science centers, the Kirby Science Discovery Center in Sioux Falls, SD, and at the Headwaters Science Center in Bemidji, MN. It is anticipated that 72 organizations and 450 CBSO staff members will be served by this project, in addition to over 5,000 members of the general public doc20488 none Young The primary goal of Dr. Eliot Young s research project is to map Titan s evolving haze and methane distributions, a task for which the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of the past decade are well suited. A second goal is to determine the separate methane and haze distributions in Titan s atmosphere, for which Dr. Young will use a synergistic combination of CCD-wavelength HST and near-IR ground-based images. This goal addresses the questions of cloud formation and methane s apparent supersaturation in Titan s troposphere. In a similar vein, Dr. Young will also use microphysical models of ethane cloud formation to interpret the vertical haze and methane profiles that will be extracted from HST and Keck adaptive optics images. A long baseline of spatially resolved imaging will directly address the questions of how Titan s atmosphere undergoes seasonal changes. The results of this project will provide a valuable context for the upcoming Cassini and Huygens spacecraft missions; observational tests for existing models of cloud and haze formation and transport; and observational evidence for the evolving conditions in Titan s troposphere, especially with respect to the supersaturation of methane, the conditions for convection, and the conditions for cloud formation doc20489 none The Fresno Unified School District, in partnership with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, will build on the strengths of existing district and after-school partnerships and programs to create a model for an Urban Mathematics and Science Student Service Corp. High-school juniors and seniors, recruited from under-represented groups, will receive intensive, ongoing specialized training to serve as mentors of science, mathematics and technology for at-risk, middle-school students. Mentoring sessions will engage middle-grades students in problems drawn from existing curricula that are aligned with national standards. The goal of the program is to enable both mentors and mentees to improve and advance in their formal school setting, while maintaining an informal environment during the after-school mentoring sessions. Career education will be addressed throughout the program. Strategies are planned for involving parents in a substantive way, including workshops and events at the school sites. Middle- and high-school students will present examples of their work to the community. Evaluation will focus on the academic progress of mentors as well as mentees doc20490 none The Tech Museum of Innovation is producing a 3,000 square-foot permanent exhibition, complementary online acitivities, and a Design Challenge curriculum to engage visitors in the exploration of Internet techologies. The goals of the project are to enhance the technological literacy of middle school students, provide the general public with tools, experience, and confidence to participate in shaping the future of the internet, and advance the informal science education community through applied research in networked exhibit technology. Two distinct features of the exhibit are: 1) The Smart Museum, a computer network linking gallery and online expereinces, and 2) dynamic content, a set of strategies for rapid exhibit updates that will mirror the changing Internet for the life of the exhibition. The Design Challenge curriculum will be used at the museum, in outreach to classrooms and community centers, and in training sessions for science educators. The summative research will be shared with the science education community via The Tech s web site as well as professional seminars, publications and conferences doc20491 none The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) will design, develop, evaluate and install Technoquest, a permanent 6,000 square foot interactive technology exhibition for families, under-represented groups, school groups and OMSI s general audience. Technoquest will fill OMSI s Technology Hall with a suite of highly interactive, exciting and engaging hands-on educational exhibits, computer simulations, audio and video components, text, graphics and artifacts. The exhibition hall will be divided into five thematic areas: industrial technology (robotics), medical technology, transportation technology, computer technology and communications technology. Other experiences will include a quick-change area for rapidly exhibiting emerging technologies and a Technology Lab where activities conveying a deeper understanding of the general principles of technology will be presented. Ancillary educational materials will be disseminated to the general public and to educators via print, the exhibition website, teacher workshops and professional development workshops for informal science educators. Content of the exhibition and ancillary materials will focus on general educational principles established by the International Technology Education Association (ITEA) that emphasize the processes common to all forms of technology and that align with state and national science standards. Principal concepts include The Nature of Technology, Technology and Society, Design, Abilities in a Technological World, and The Designed World. These principles will be reinforced throughout the exhibition. Each thematic area will highlight all five key principles of technology as defined by the ITEA doc20492 none Sea Studios Foundation is developing a five-hour television-based project that will examine Earth System Science, which will be produced in association with the National Geographic Society (NGS). Geologists, biologists, oceanographers, climatologists, social scientists and others are joining forces to understand the planet s rapidly changing environment. The series will follow the on-going research of these scientists as they investigate the links between Earth s geosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere. These programs are planned as the first season of an annual series on the topic. Educational outreach will include a hands-on traveling exhibit to be developed and tested by the Maryland Science Center; an Educator s Guide for print and electronic distribution to informal science centers and community organizations; a resource toolkit to augment the Educator s Guide and an Internet site hosted by NGS that provides links to existing and new environmental resources. The series content also will be integrated into several NGS venues including: National Geographic Today, the daily news program on the National Geographic Channel; National Geographic Magazine, which will create a global report card as an annual feature; and National Geographic for Kids magazine, which is distributed to children in grades three through six. The project advisory board includes: Richard Barber, Professor of Biological Oceanography, Duke University Robert Costanza, Professor of Zoology, University of Maryland Gretchen Daily, Interdisciplinary Research Scientist, Stanford University Robert Dunbar, Specialist in Global Environmental Change, Stanford University Habiba Gitay, Senior Lecturer, National Centre for Development Studies, Asia Pacific School of Economics and Management, Canberra, Australia Michael Glantz, Senior Scientist, the Environmental and Societal Impacts Group, National Center for Atmospheric Research John Katzenberger, Executive Director of Aspen Global change Institute Jane Lubchenco, Professor of Marine Biology, Oregon State University J. R. McNeill, Professor of History, Georgetown University Harold Mooney, Professor of Environmental Biology, Stanford University Steven Schneider, Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change, Stanford University Brian Walker, Coordinator of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization s Biodiversity Sector, Adelaide, South Australia doc20493 none Students in grades 6-9 will be recruited to participate in the Corps of Rediscovery, conducted by the Portland State University in partnership with the Oregon Historical Society, the Center for Columbia River History, the Metro Regional Greenspaces & US Forest Service and the Jackson Bottom Wetland Preserve. Students will gain a cultural, historical and ecological understanding of the impact of the settlement of the lower Columbia River, beginning with the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Students will study the environment using past and current techniques and technologies. Activities include studies of plant and animal species, navigation and mapping using GPS, in addition to land use practices. It is anticipated that up to 72 students will participate in years 1-2 of the project meeting bi-weekly after school, supplemented by a monthly field day and a summer institute. During the final year of the project, Leadership Teams will be formed with a subset of 24 students who participate in advanced ecological studies and site planning while developing products for use in dissemination. A CD ROM showcasing student products and a website will be produced, as well as student posters and mapping data doc20494 none Readhead, Anthony The cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) is expected to be polarized at a level of about 10%, owing to Thomson scattering, but as yet this polarization has not been detected. The Cosmic Background Interferometer (CBI) has been measuring the total intensity of the CMBR for the past two years, and with minor modifications to the receivers and the observing strategy, the CBI should be able to detect the polarization within a year. It should also measure the angular power spectrum of polarized fluctuations, if the predictions of currently favored cosmological models are correct. Polarization observations of the microwave background radiation will provide a number of important tests of cosmological models. For example many cosmological models with non-standard primordial power spectra are degenerate with standard models having different values of key cosmological parameters. It is possible to further test the predictions of the models and to break these degeneracies by measuring the polarization power spectrum and the cross-correlation between polarization and total intensity. Polarization observations should also help to reduce the uncertainties in key cosmological parameters, such as the baryon density, the matter density and the cosmological constant, and to place stringent limits on the epoch of reionization. This award will allow use of the CBI to make high sensitivity ( 1 MK) polarization observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation over the angular multipole range l = 300- doc20495 none Collaborative Research: Biotic Inventory of the Reptiles and Amphibians of Sulawesi, Indonesia This project will document the biodiversity of the reptile and amphibian fauna of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The island is part of Wallacea, a region that is one of 25 biodiversity hotspots listed by Conservation International. The reptiles and amphibians remain poorly known because the area has received very little attention. A recent survey has doubled the known species of amphibians and there is reason to believe that the number of indigenous species will double again This project is a collaboration between the University of Texas, Louisiana State University, the Bandung Institute of Technology, the University of Indonesia and the Museum Zoologicum Bogoriense. The co-investigators and their Indonesian collaborators will survey selected forested regions of Sulawesi over three years. Sites were selected to allow thorough sampling of the four arms of Sulawesi as well as the island s central core, in both dry and wet seasons. By emphasizing elevational transects, the sites also maximize the diversity of sampled vegetational types. In addition to specimens, collections will include frog calls, tissue samples for DNA analysis, photographs, and extensive habitat and ecological data. Selected endoparasites and ectoparasites will be sampled also. This collaboration includes a training program that will introduce Indonesian students to methods of biodiversity study, including computer cataloguing, specimen preservation, and field inventory. The significance of Sulawesi s role in the history of biogeography cannot be overstated. The field of biogeography was born from Wallace s attempts to understand faunal breaks between Borneo and Sulawesi in the north and Bali and Lombok in the south. Recent knowledge about the region s geological history has begun to illuminate the complementary roles of vicariance and dispersal in shaping biogeographic patterns. The data collected during the course of this project will be the foundation for fine-scale biogeographical studies of the Southeast Asian herpetofauna and its diversification in one of the geologically most complex regions. This information is crucial for decisions about management and conservation of resources in this region doc20496 none Disseration Research: The Influences of Ecological Condtions on Maternal Antibody Transmission: Consequences for Offspring Immunity and Growth Dr. Ellen D. Ketterson & Jennifer Grindstaff The ability to resist disease is an important component of survival and reproductive success. Previous research has addressed the influences of genes and physiology on adult immune function. However, early in life, offspring immunity may be determined largely by antibodies transmitted by the mother during egg production, gestation, or lactation. The amount and types of antibodies transmitted to offspring may be determined by the mother s physiological condition. Through experimental manipulation of two ecological factors, resource availability and disease exposure, the effect of maternal physiological condition on offspring immunity and growth will be addressed. The PIs will examine the influence of resource limitation on immunity in adult females of a well-studied songbird species, the great tit (Parus major), by asking whether food supplementation enhances antibody transmission to offspring. In a second experiment, they will vary pathogen exposure in females prior to egg laying. They anticipate that food shortage will reduce the ability of females to protect their offspring and that exposure to specific diseases will render offspring better able to withstand infection. Both findings would suggest a larger role of the mother s environment in offspring development than has previously been appreciated doc20497 none The proposed work is a sequel to a long-term study of the influence of logging on populations of Euphydryas editha butterfly in Sequoia National Forest, California. Prior work showed that logging influenced the evolution of diet in the butterflies. They acquired a novel hostplant in habitat patches that had been logged, but retained their traditional diet in undisturbed patches. Population growth was faster in the disturbed patches, but insects emigrated disproportionately from those patches, partly because they retained a preference for their traditional habitat and hostplant. The proposed work will examine genetic differentiation both within this disturbed system and between this system and other populations of the same species within a distance of 50 km. The investigators will conduct an equivalent study on an unlogged system in Yosemite National Park and environs. These two studies will ask what genetic differentiation naturally existed among populations of this butterfly and how human activities might be affecting it. The work will also examine how much genetic differentiation among populations is associated with the distance between habitats, the nature of the landscape in the intervening terrain, and the adaptations of the insects to particular host plant species. Human intervention in the landscape affects herbivorous insects in dramatic ways. Introduction of exotic plants alters the range of plant species available as food. Ranching and logging techniques also change the relative qualities of existing native plants. For example, in the current study system logging removed the insects principal hostplant but incidentally provided a novel host by improving the quality (from the insects perspective) of a native plant species. Changes in the insects environment influence their patterns of movement among habitats and their likelihoods of successfully reproducing when they do move. These effects on movement will in turn affect the tendency for populations to differ from each other genetically. This genetic differentiation among populations is the focus of the proposed work, which will illuminate both the natural patterns that exist and the influence that human activities are having upon those patterns doc20498 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Robert Jansen and Mr. Michael Moore at the University of Texas to study how the differing soil tolerances of individual plant species have influenced plant evolution. Plant biologists have long known that boundaries between different soil types often promote the evolution of new species. However, they have rarely examined the importance of such shifts in soil tolerance on the evolutionary history of whole groups of related plant species. Jansen and Moore will specifically address this larger scale evolutionary question by assessing the influence of shifting soil tolerances during the evolution of the genus Tiquilia. The 27 species of small desert shrubs in Tiquilia are ideally suited for this study because they differ remarkably in soil preference despite occurring in the climatically similar deserts of North and South America. Individual species of Tiquilia grow in one of three substrate regimes: deep sand, gypsum, or both gypsum and limestone. To determine the evolutionary pattern of substrate shifts in this genus, DNA sequences of several genes will be collected for all species of Tiquilia. These sequences will be utilized to develop an evolutionary tree detailing the relationships among these species. This tree will then be used as a basis to infer the history of soil preference in the genus. This project represents one of the first studies to assess the significance of substrate shifts in patterning the evolutionary history of an entire plant group. Considering that soil type ranks second behind climate in determining the geographic distribution of plant species, it is surprising that only a handful of studies have addressed the relationship between evolutionary history and soil preference among closely related plant species. This study therefore promises to advance substantially our understanding of an underappreciated and potentially important influence on the evolution of plant groups doc20499 none Anthropogenic activities involving nitrogen (N) are contributing to eutrophication in marine and fresh waters. Because headwater streams are the primary interface between terrestrial and aquatic systems, they are an important link in the transport of N from enriched landscapes. However, N may be retained or removed through ecological processes occurring within streams. We will investigate the effects of enrichment on the ability of streams to retain N by comparing retention in study streams that span a gradient of N use and concentration. Retention will be measured by tracking the fate of N tracers experimentally released into study streams. We will quantify changes in ecosystem structure (biotic standing stocks) and function (metabolic activity) associated with enrichment and evaluate the influence of environmental factors (e.g., hydrology) on N retention. This approach to linking N enrichment and retentitive efficiency will increase understanding of theoretical and managerial aspects of N loading to lotic systems doc20500 none Futuyma The researchers will test the mechanisms by which herbivorous insects affect the cost of resistance to the herbicide triazine in pigweed Amaranthus hybridus (Amaranthaceae). The triazine-resistance mutation imposes a cost by slowing photosynthesis. Mutant plants are preferentially eaten by herbivores, are less tolerant of feeding damage, and suffer an increased fitness cost when exposed to herbivores. This work will address how the availability of light and nutrients affects a mutant plant s allocation to carbon-based defenses and its susceptibility to herbivores. The potential for herbivores to impose frequency-dependent selection will be tested. Additionally, the researchers will test if a mutant plant s increased allocation to carbon acquisition (i.e. leaves) at the expense of nutrient and water acquisition (i.e. roots) causes its reduced tolerance. This research will provide an independent test of how photosynthetic rate shapes patterns of defense and tolerance, and it will contribute to future strategies for managing resistance to herbicide. The researchers will test the mechanisms by which herbivorous insects affect the cost of resistance to the herbicide triazine in pigweed Amaranthus hybridus (Amaranthaceae). The triazine-resistance mutation imposes a cost by slowing photosynthesis. Mutant plants are preferentially eaten by herbivores, are less tolerant of feeding damage, and suffer an increased fitness cost when exposed to herbivores. This work will address how the availability of light and nutrients affects a mutant plant s allocation to carbon-based defenses and its susceptibility to herbivores. The potential for herbivores to impose frequency-dependent selection will be tested. Additionally, the researchers will test if a mutant plant s increased allocation to carbon acquisition (i.e. leaves) at the expense of nutrient and water acquisition (i.e. roots) causes its reduced tolerance. This research will provide an independent test of how photosynthetic rate shapes patterns of defense and tolerance, and it will contribute to future strategies for managing resistance to herbicide doc20501 none Dr. Virginia L. Roth however, how footpads function during locomotion is poorly understood. At each step, footpads are believed to cushion impact, stabilize the foot, and return elastic energy. To perform all these roles, the pad must have the paradoxical properties of being compliant and stiff, resilient and damped. This study proposes a solution to this apparent paradox- the footpad has mechanical anisotropy. This hypothesis has been supported by results on plantigrade footpads in the context of locomotion, and will be tested on two lineages that evolved digitigrady separately: cats and dogs. Furthermore, this study also proposes to identify the morphological determinants that explain footpads mechanical variation observed both intra- and interspecifically. Mechanical and morphological parameters measured on each species will be compared to examine whether footpad properties reflect locomotor habits as suggested in previous studies. The goals of this study will be achieved by three approaches: (1) Investigation of foot kinematics and mechanical roles of footpads in moving digitigrade mammals, (2) Measurement of compressive and shear properties of isolated footpads both statically and dynamically, and (3) Examination of the compositional and structural morphology of footpads. This study will provide the first experimental and comparative analysis of mechanisms of footpad function, especially in the context of locomotion. Such an integrative study will lay the framework for future work focused on structure and function of pads in animals less tolerant of laboratory conditions, and on scaling, adaptation, diversity, and evolution of mammalian feet and footpads doc20502 none Dr. Steven Vogel & Marney C. Pratt Colonies of bryozoans, widespread and abundant filter-feeding animals, encompass a great variety of shapes and sizes. But, since colonies of most bryozoans can grow in any direction, still more diverse colony shapes should be possible. That only a relatively small subset of the theoretically possible shapes occur suggests that certain shapes have significant advantages over others. Since bryozoans are filter feeders, hydrodynamic factors (particularly water velocity) could determine bryozoan colony form by affecting their ability to capture food. This study addresses the role of hydrodynamics by assessing how water velocity affects particle capture in the major colonial growth forms. It has four principal elements: (1) measurement of particle capture success for bryozoans with different colony growth forms over a range of flow velocities, (2) measurement of the effect of feeding structure location on feeding success, and the assessment of how that might influence colony shape, (3) the use of flow visualization to determine the effect of colony form on the water flow around and through colonies, and (4) measurement in the field of the abundance, growth, and survival of bryozoans living at different water velocities. By delineating the web of relationships linking colony form, habitat hydrodynamics, and feeding success, this study should contribute to our understanding of how an abiotic factor such as hydrodynamics can influence the evolution of colony form. Its findings should be applicable to many other kinds of colonial filter feeders, systems whose greater aggregate taxonomic differences cloud comparisons of analogous morphological diversity doc20503 none PROJECT SUMMARY Habitat fragmentation and its associated effects on the breeding and wintering grounds have been implicated as major factors contributing to the declines of many Nearctic-Neotropical migratory landbird populations. However, we know little about how fragmentation may affect the accessibility, use and quality of stopover habitats for birds during migration. We advance the hypothesis that fragmentation of stopover habitats imposes constraints on the ability of migrants to survive migration and to arrive at their destination in good nutritional condition. We will investigate the degree to which habitat fragmentation influences bird movement, choice of available stopover habitats, and the intrinsic suitability of stopover habitats when migrants stopover along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico during spring passage. Habitat availability will be characterized using remotely-sensed data, while habitat use by migrants during stopover will be studied by releasing radio-tagged Wood Thrushes (Hylocichla mustelina ) within habitat patches of different composition, size, and isolation. The results will improve our understanding of the stopover ecology of landbird migrants and the determinants of suitable stopover habitat. They will also further our ability to determine the relative importance of the migratory period for population limitation. Populations of intercontinental migrants will continue to decline unless habitat requirements during migration are factored into the conservation equation doc20504 none and the topology of singularities, and to investigate invariants of low dimensional manifolds that link topology with other fields doc20505 none PI(s): Howard Schuman University of Michigan, Ann Arbor The Small Grant for Exploratory Research will support the inclusion of key questions in December and January surveys done by the Survey Research Center Monthly at the University of Michigan. Surveys are administered each month to 300 new respondents and reinterviews are completed with 200 respondents who participated in surveys six months earlier (June and July surveys). This project builds on a recently completed study by adding post-September 11 data in order to assess the effects of the terrorist attacks on American collective memory. The previous project, , Collective Memory: Persistence and Change Over Fifteen Years, examined American collective memories by replicating in a study completed in . The primary hypothesis explored in this research is that each generation receives a distinctive imprint from the major political and social events that occur during its youth and the effects of this imprint persist throughout the life course. That is, past events and changes that people of all ages recall as especially important tend to be those that occurred during their adolescence or young adulthood. Open-ended questions were used to obtain information about significant events and responses were coded into event categories (e.g., World War II, the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam War, the Moon landing, Iran hostages). Results were analyzed to determine the extent to which memories of public events that were first discovered in persisted in . These new data will allow the PI to gauge the impact of the terrorist attacks, the subsequent economic impact, and the threat of anthrax and other omens of weapons of mass destruction on respondents answers to questions about events they consider important post-September 11th. These will be compared to responses collected in June and July doc20506 none Dissertation Research: Disentangeling the Effects of Female Choice, Contest Competition and Scamble Competition for Mates Drs. Nancy G. Solomon Mark D. Spritzer Sexual selection is differential mating success caused by variation among members of one sex in a trait that influences acquisition of mates. Although sexual selection is one of the most intensively studied areas in the field of behavioral ecology, surprisingly little is known about the relative importance of the different mechanisms of sexual selection. The main goal of the proposed research is to determine the relative importance of female choice, contest competition, and scramble competition for mates in determining the mating success of males. Female choice involves females choosing to mate with a male based on conspicuous ornaments or behaviors. Contest competition involves direct aggressive interactions between males and scramble competition, in contrast, involves a male s ability to rapidly and accurately locate mates. Meadow voles were used as the study species because past studies suggest that all three of these mechanisms of sexual selection occur among these rodents. Male navigation ability was chosen as a trait believed to be favored by scramble competition, and male dominance rank was chosen as a trait believed to be favored by contest competition. In addition, the influence of female choice upon both of these traits will be tested. The specific objectives are to determine: (1) the relationship between male navigation ability and male mating success, (2) the relationship between dominance and navigation ability among male voles, (3) the relative influence of dominance and navigation ability upon male mating success, and (4) female mating preferences for males with varying levels of navigation ability and dominance. A series of lab and field experiments will be used to achieve these objectives. Navigation ability will be measured by scoring each male s ability to complete a maze test, and male dominance will be tested by scoring aggression between pairs of males in arena trials. Male reproductive success will be determined using genetic paternity analyses. The results of this project will be an important next step in understanding how sexual selection shapes the evolution of a species doc20507 none Scalar Curvature, Geometric Flows, and the General Penrose Conjecture DMS - Hubert Bray, MIT The primary goal of this research is to prove the full Penrose conjecture in general relativity about the mass of black holes in a spacetime. In 3+1 dimensions, this conjecture states that the total mass of a spacetime with nonnegative energy density everywhere is greater than or equal to the square root of the total area of the event horizons of all of the black holes in the spacetime divided by 16 pi. This conjecture can be thought of as stating that the mass contributed by a collection of black holes is at least the square root of their surface areas divided 16 pi, so that nonnegative energy density everywhere else in the universe forces the total mass of the spacetime to be at least this amount. The Penrose conjecture is best thought of as a conjecture on arbitrary three dimensional space-like slices of the spacetime. In the special case that the space-like slice is assumed to have zero second fundamental form, the conjecture is known as the Riemannian Penrose conjecture. This conjecture was first proved for a single black hole by Huisken and Ilmanen in and then for any number of black holes by the author in . The author would also like to prove the Riemannian Penrose Conjecture in dimensions higher than three and is close to announcing this result for dimensions less than eight. Dimensions eight and higher present additional geometric and analytical challenges arising from the fact that the apparent horizons of black holes manifest themselves as minimal hypersurfaces which can have co-dimension seven singularities. The positive mass theorem is also still open in these dimensions for similar reasons, and is another very interesting related problem. The motivation for the above problems is to gain a better understanding of General Relativity. While Einstein s theory of General Relativity is experimentally the best known theory of gravity, their are many theoretical questions about the theory which are not well understood at all. For example, given the universe at some initial time, do the Einstein equations have unique well-behaved solutions in the future as one would hope, or do singularities typically occur which might radiate or consume energy for example? The theory also predicts the existence of black holes, and astronomers believe that they have been able to detect the location of many black holes including one which is 3 million times the mass of the sun at the center of our galaxy. Since doing experiments with black holes is currently not feasible, it makes since to understand this potentially very important phenomenon on a theoretical level for now. This research project hopes to lead to a better understanding of black holes as well as energy and mass in General Relativity doc20508 none Tomasz Mrowka Mrowka is engaged in number of projects centering around Floer homology. The first is a book project with Kronheimer giving a detailed and general account of the foundational aspects of Seiberg-Witten Floer homology using the Morse complex. It is hoped that this will provide both a route for graduate students into the field as well as be a jumping off point for more ambitious projects. The second project also joint with Kronheimer is to use some of the tools developed in the previous project to relate the Seiberg-Witten and Instanton Floer homologies. A consequence of this would be the Property P conjecture. The third project is to give a definition of Floer homology directly using infinite dimensional cycles. Mrowka will continue investigations into the study of mathematical models for space-time. These investigations center around understanding properties of solutions and spaces of solutions to the various equations of high energy physics, primarily the Yang-Mills and Sieberg-Witten equations. The beauty of these equations is that gross properties of the spaces of solutions reflect subtle properties the space-time that they live on. One application of Mrowka s previous work is to theoretical biology in particular the knotted properties of DNA. The mathematical question of estimating the unknotting number give estimates on the number of times topoisomerase needs to act on a given loop of DNA doc20509 none The 25th Informal Conference on Photochemistry will be held at the University of Miami, Miami, FL, from June 2-7, . The conference will address the following topics: atmospheric photochemistry, free radical kinetics, free radical spectroscopy, heterogeneous chemistry and photochemistry on surfaces, photophysics and energy transfer, reaction dynamics, and photodissociation dynamics. This conference serves to foster interactions between the atmospheric chemistry and physical chemistry laboratory communities. NSF support will be used to subsidize the travel and registration costs for graduate and postdoctoral scientists doc20510 none Plants that are pollinated by several different types of animal nevertheless often have features which appear to adapt them to one particular type. The proposed research explores how such specialized adaptations can arise in a generalized pollination environment , using several related plant species native to the southwestern US. Experiments in natural populations and in a flight cage will determine which pollinators (hummingbirds or bumblebees) are most important in selecting for particular features of flowers (flower length and width), and the degree to which flowers better adapted to one pollinator still can make use of the other. By exploring how floral adaptation arises, the research furthers our understanding of the evolution of distinct plant species, and thus the generation of biodiversity. An accelerating biodiversity crisis , caused by extinction of species from human activities, is central to the science of conservation biology. Conservation biologists must understand how to prevent extinctions, but equally must understand the conditions that allow new species to evolve to replace extinct ones. The proposed experiments with a model plant-pollinator system will help us understand how the great diversity of flowering plant species has evolved, and thus how to promote ongoing evolution of new species and maintenance of biodiversity doc20511 none Bleam Clays, which are ubiquitous in natural sediments, soils, and other geologic formations, affect the fate of such chemicals as pesticides, organic contaminants, heavy metals, and plant nutrients in the environment. This effect is strongly correlated with the surface chemistry of the clay minerals, which is influenced by the charge or oxidation state of iron (Fe) in their crystal structures. The long-range goal of our work is to understand the role of iron on these surface reactions, and the specific objective of this proposed study is to identify the underlying cause(s) for the effects of structural Fe oxidation state on clay surface properties, and to characterize the nature of the resulting interactions with surface species such as water, metals, and organic compounds. The central hypothesis for the proposed research is that reduction of structural Fe by either biotic (bacterial reduction) or abiotic (chemical reduction) means, not only yields a new redox potential and electrostatic charge at the clay surface, but invokes in situ changes in crystal site occupancy of structural Fe and introduces structural defects, which, in turn, further alter the clay surface chemistry. We plan to test our central hypothesis and accomplish the overall objective of this proposed study by pursuing the following four specific aims: (a) Determine the site occupancy of structural Fe in mixed Al-Fe-Mg dioctahedral smectite clay minerals before and after Fe reduction; (b) Identify the causal relationship between changes in Fe oxidation state and surface chemistry; (c) Determine the reversibility of redox processes; and (d) Characterize the relative effects of bacteria versus inorganic reducing agents on clay properties. The fundamental understanding to be gained during this study will provide a powerful tool for using redox behavior to predict and control chemical reactions at clay surfaces doc20512 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Douglas Soltis of University of Florida and Mr. Michael Zanis of Washington State University to investigate the genes governing flower development in primitive flowering plants. Much is known about the genetics of flower development in the higher flowering plants, Arabidopsis (thale cress) and Antirrhinum (snapdragon). In contrast, little is known about the genetics of flower development in primitive flowering plants. Dr. Soltis and Mr. Zanis are focusing on isolating and characterizing MADS-box genes, a family of development regulatory genes, from two primitive flowering plants, Nuphar (a member of the waterlily family) and Illicium (a member of the star anise family). They have developed a method for extracting RNA from Nuphar and Illicium flowers, and are using degenerate polymerase chain raction (PCR) to amplify and obtain DNA sequences of MADS-box genes. The relationships of the MADS-box genes isolated from Nuphar and Illicium are compared to MADS-box genes isolated from other flowering plants. Lastly, using RT-PCR Dr. Soltis and Mr. Zanis are characterizing the floral tissues in which the MADS-box genes are expressed. Understanding the genes involved in flower development in primitive flowering plants, such as Nuphar and Illicium, is critical because of the insights they may provide into the early angiosperm flower. Moreover, elucidating the genetics of floral development in these key flowering plants not only will help to answer questions regarding the origin and diversification of the flower, but will also provide the opportunity to link what is known about model flowering plant systems, such as Antirrhinum and Arabidopsis, with other flowering plants, providing a more comprehensive picture of floral development doc20513 none THE ROLE OF CHEMICAL SIGNALING IN THE EVOLUTION OF REPRODUCTIVE ISOLATION IN TERRESTRIAL SALAMANDERS Lynne D. Houck and Catherine A. Palmer Terrestrial salamanders communicate by using chemical odors, termed pheromones. Certain pheromones are used only during courtship. These courtship pheromones are produced by the male and delivered to the female during courtship. These male courtship pheromones typically function to increase female receptivity, as indicated by a more rapid completion of the courtship. These same pheromones may also be used by the female to identify incorrect mating partners (males from other species), and hence prevent hybridization between species. The male courtship pheromones are comprised of proteins. One protein in particular can act alone to substantially increase female receptivity. The gene for that protein was identified, and was found to be expressed in a series of closely-related terrestrial salamander species. This setting, for which the ancestry of the species is known, offers an opportunity to investigate the evolution of changes that occur from gene to protein to behavior. This study will focus on genetic and biochemical variation in courtship pheromones. This information will be compared with existing data on female behavioral response to courtships with males of her own and of different species. The results of this investigation will provide a novel perspective on the evolution of female response to a male chemical signal doc20514 none This grant provides partial support for an annual, two-week workshop held in Kansas City, Missouri, which introduces precollege teachers to fundamentals of weather observing, analysis, and forecasting, and equips them with modern instructional material for use in their own courses and in peer-training sessions at their home institutions. These workshops have been held for the past decade by the American Meteorological Society in collaboration with the National Weather Service. Typically, about 25 teachers participate, drawn from all parts of the United States. The objective is to improve the effectiveness of teachers in generating interest and understanding of science, technology, and mathematics among precollege students. The program is designed to promote working relations between teachers and scientists and to encourage the use in K-12 classrooms of recent research findings and the Web-delivered world meteorological data stream. This award supports the program for the five-year period beginning in doc20515 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Dennis Wm. Stevenson, W. John Kress, and Chelsea D. Specht at the New York Botanical Garden to study the systematics and evolution of Costaceae, a tropical plant family of approximately 130 species closely related to the economically important bananas and gingers as well as prominent ornamentals such as Heliconia and Strelitzia (Bird-of-Paradise). Also known for their ornamental appeal, Costaceae have showy flowers and floral structures with shapes and colors that are closely linked to the attraction of pollinators. The proposed research is designed to determine evolutionary relationships among species within the family and investigate the historical context in which Costaceae has achieved its current level of diversity. Approximately kb of DNA sequence data will be generated for 75 species chosen to represent floral and biogeographic diversity within the family. These data will be analyzed along with morphological character data using contemporary phylogenetic techniques. In addition, the development of the different floral shapes will be studied to determine potential mechanisms involved in the evolution of floral form. Certain species in the genus Costus are pollinated by hummingbirds, while others are bee-pollinated. The genus has thus been divided into two groups based on these overall floral characteristics, however recent evidence has shown that these groupings are not reflective of evolutionary history. Rather, it seems as though individuals can switch back and forth between hummingbird and bee pollination, possibly based on environmental conditions such as pollinator availability or efficacy. Since similar floral forms are found in South American and African species, it may be concluded that common types of pollination pressures occur in these geographically distant forest, yielding similar shapes and colors in distinct lineages of plants. This study will increase our understanding of the forces that promote speciation and diversity in tropical plants. In addition, floral development studies may help to indicate how genetic factors are involved in the evolution of diverse forms, leading to a clearer understanding of the genetic basis for biodiversity doc20516 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Michael Whiting and Mr. T. Ogden at Brigham Young University to study the relationships and specific adaptations of mayflies. The Ephemeroptera (mayflies) is a relatively small insect order of about species distributed throughout the world. These insects are considered by many to be the first organisms to have taken flight. Despite this interesting characteristic, relationships among this group and between other insect groups are virtually unknown. The three goals of this research are to (1) determine ordinal position with respect to the other insect orders, (2) estimate higher-level relationships of mayflies at the familial level, and (3) investigate hypotheses concerning adaptation of flight. This will be accomplished by: (a) Selecting numerous examples of mayfly and other related insects from throughout the world for morphological and molecular analysis; (b) Generating informative morphological and molecular characters from five independent genes in each these insects; (c) Subjecting these data to a rigorous analyses in order to establish a robust estimate of relationships (genealogies), which can be used to address questions concerning the adaptation of flight. The genealogical pattern produced through this study could be used for a variety of other purposes. For example, the results may also contribute to the sport of fly fishing, as mayfly larvae, which are aquatic, are the major trout food in river systems . In addition mayflies are one of the most important indicators of water quality. Results from this study could be used to improve project design and execution. Finally, this information will assist to make better and more informed decisions concerning biological diversity and conservation. Knowledge of the relationships of mayflies is important not only to science but also may be applied to a number of other areas of concern doc20517 none A central goal of biology is to understand how organisms adapt to their environment. This project seeks to clarify the constraints imposed on adaptation in plants by the alternation of morphologically distinct haploid and diploid generations in their life cycles. If traits in the two generations are controlled by the same suite of genes, as populations adapt, these traits should change in a correlated fashion. This project will utilize a bryophyte model system (Ceratodon purpureus) in which both generations are sufficiently large and morphologically complex to facilitate genotypic and phenotypic analysis. Multiple populations from throughout the distribution of the species will be grown in a common environment to assess the degree of correlation between the two generations. Genome mapping techniques will then be used to test whether the same genes are associated with changes in the two generations. This study will answer fundamental questions concerning the genetic basis of adaptation, in addition to providing a deeper understanding of life cycles that are common to all plants. It will be the most comprehensive examination of the whole plant life cycle using modern genetic tools. The Ceratodon experimental system is being utilized by many scientists working on applied as well as basic problems in biology, and the genetic insights generated by this study will further increase its utility for other research doc20518 none Herendeen and Clark The genus Alloplectus, a common shrub from the northwestern Andes, has flowers that may be viewed as an upside down version of those of the Florists Gloxinia. Alloplectus and the Florists Gloxinia both belong to the same group, but the flowers are resupinate (inverted) in some species of Alloplectus. This project will look at the pattern of diversification in Alloplectus and related members of the family Gesneriaceae and the evolution of flower resupination in this group. The Neotropical members of Gesneriaceae are problematic because morphological details are poorly documented, closely related taxa exhibit a wide range of flower forms, pollinators are poorly known, and molecular phylogenies have insufficient species sampling to clarify the wide range of morphological variation. One of the least understood groups of Neotropical gesneriads is the genus Alloplectus. This project will generate phylogenetic hypotheses to test competing theories of gesneriad evolution, to resolve phylogenetic relationships within the tribe Episcieae, and to complete a taxonomic revision of the genus. Field expeditions will be carried out in Bolivia and Panama to study the plants and their pollinators and collect material for study in the laboratory and herbarium. Visits to European herbaria will be conducted to study historical and recent plant collections. Molecular sequence data will be collected for the nuclear ITS region and the chloroplast trnL intron and spacer. Morphological characters will be studied and scored for phylogenetic analyses. Although tropical ecosystems are attracting increasing attention from biologists and conservationists interested in understanding and managing the earth s biological resources, there is much that is not understood about the diversity of plants and other organisms that make up these ecosystems. For example, there are at least five species of Alloplectus that are new to science and many members of this group are geographically restricted and live in forests that are threatened by logging and agricultural conversion. Results from this project will provide a robust phylogenetic hypothesis and data that may be used to address questions about plant diversity and conservation, morphological evolution, and pollination biology in this poorly known group of tropical plants doc20519 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Marianne Litvaitis and Mr. Richard Hochberg of the University of New Hampshire to conduct the first comparative anatomical analysis of gastrotrichs from Australia and North America. Gastrotrichs are a poorly known group of microscopic worms found throughout the world s oceans. Most knowledge of gastrotrich diversity is limited to species from the Northern Hemisphere, and much of this is exclusive to Europe. Anatomical knowledge of gastrotrichs from the United States and Australia remains in its infancy. Consequently, relationships between species from both continents are unknown. The principle objectives of this research are (1) to describe several new Australian gastrotrichs, (2) use characteristics of the body-wall and muscular system to determine relationships between Australian and American species, and (3) to place this information in an evolutionary context. Specimens will be analyzed using a combination of high-resolution light microscopy, scanning and transmission electron microscopy, and fluorescence microscopy. This research will highlight the use of novel characters to measure invertebrate biodiversity and determine evolutionary relationships among widely separated populations of gastrotrichs. As a study of the muscular system, it will also demonstrate how variation in muscle anatomy contributes to dispersal of microscopic fauna. Results from this research will provide much-needed taxonomic revisions of several new gastrotrichs and will yield insight into the biogeography and evolution of the Gastrotricha and the history of the Australian biota. With a greater anatomical knowledge of gastrotrichs, we will gain better insights into the ecological and evolutionary importance of this poorly known group of invertebrates doc20520 none Understanding Vanishing Endemism: Survey of the Invertebrates and Plants of Threatened Montane Habitats in Hispaniola This biological survey investigates insects, plants, and other organisms from mountain forests on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (Dominican Republic, Haiti), including some of the most threatened natural habitats on earth. A high percentage of animal and plant species in these habitats are endemic, found nowhere else. Destruction of montane habitats is occurring at an alarming rate and many species are threatened with extinction, including many which provide information essential for understanding biological aspects of related species elsewhere in the New World, especially circum-Caribbean regions such as the southeastern United States, Mexico, Central America, and northern South America. Plants of Hispaniola are the least known of any island in the Antilles. An estimated 80% of invertebrate species in mountainous regions is uncollected and unknown to the scientific community. Project goals are (1) to further an understanding of biological diversity in threatened Caribbean habitats, (2) to improve infrastructure in Hispaniola for research on biodiversity, (3) to rapidly provide recommendations for conservation of endangered Hispaniolan habitats, and (4) to foster creative research on diverse and ecologically significant groups of Caribbean animals and plants. The principal project accomplishment will be a comprehensive, multi-seasonal biotic inventory of great urgency starting Sept. , ending Aug. . Regions targeted for intensive sampling encompass all six fault-delimited mountain systems in Hispaniola (two in Haiti, four in DR). Sampling emphasizes insects and plants from terrestrial and freshwater systems, especially megadiverse lineages (Lepidoptera, Coleoptera, Diptera, angiosperms). More than 5,320 plants, 150,000 invertebrate specimens, and DNA samples of both will circulate to 170 cooperating specialists worldwide for identification, research, and publication on diverse Caribbean lineages. The project will (1) collect, prepare, and circulate specimens for research, (2) discover and publish on previously unknown organisms, (3) document spatial and temporal occurrence of species and their associates, (4) communicate biological information over the World Wide Web, and (5) apply survey findings to urgent problems in resource management. The findings from this project have significance for scientific research, including systematics, evolution, ecology, and conservation. This is a multi-institutional and international effort based at Carnegie Museum of Natural History (Pittsburgh) with collaborating co-PI s from Smithsonian Institution and Harvard University, staff from key institutions in DR and Haiti (Jardin Botaico Nacional, Museo Nacional de Historia Natural, State University of Haiti), government agencies (Direccion General de Vida Silvestre y Biodiversidad (DR), Ministere de L Environnement (Haiti)), and private foundations (Fundacion Moscoso Puello, Grupo Jaragua). The project will provide the most complete biotic documentation of Hispaniolan habitats available anywhere, will be essential to preservation and management of these endangered montane habitats, and will be a model for future multinational, multi-institutional biotic inventories in the Caribbean and beyond doc20521 none Working in the South Florida Everglades and Florida Bay, Dr. Jack Fell of the University of Miami seeks to: (1) assess the biodiversity of a phylogenetically diverse group of heterotrophic eukaryotes (the yeasts) in a changing and endangered environment, and (2) evaluate the effects of environmental parameters and limiting nutrients (e.g., temperature, salinity, nitrogen, phosphorous and dissolved organic carbon) on yeast community structure. The South Florida ecosystem initiates at Lake Okeechobee with a southward water flow through the Everglades into Florida Bay with an interchange that connects the coral reefs. This interactive system has been managed and mis-managed for over 100 years and is being crowded by development. Concern over the fate of the region has resulted in on-going multi-agency, institutional environmental studies. Dr. Fell s research program concentrates on study of phylogenetically diverse fungi sampled over several transects through the region, and using modern molecular and genomic techniques to characterize the yeasts, in conjunction with ongoing measures of physical and chemical features of the environment. The program will coordinate with two large environmental studies of the region, the Florida International University (FIU) LTER site (Long Term Ecological Research), sponsored by NSF, and NOAA s Florida Bay program. Yeasts, which are unicellular organisms, represent a phylogenetic diversity of fungi: two phyla, six classes, 29 orders or equivalent lineages, 90 genera and species. Despite these high numbers, the yeasts are an understudied group of organisms; estimates indicate that possibly only 1% of the yeasts in nature have been discovered. Yeasts have ecological, commercial and medical importance: fungi are primary drivers of the global carbon cycle and their use constitutes one of the world s largest industries. Consequently, species extinction with habitat loss can have considerable economic significance. Estimates indicate that a large number of new species will be discovered in the Everglades system. These new species will be evaluated with existing molecular phylogenetic schemes for incorporation into a revised monograph of all described yeast species, the planned fifth edition of The Yeasts, A Taxonomic Study . The revision will highlight a revolution in yeast systematics: conversion from phenotypic to molecular phylogeny. Specific attention in this project is directed to electronic availability of data. The monograph is designed for web based access: strain, collection and phenotypic data will be on-line; molecular sequence data will be on GenBank; and ecological data will be available on the FIU LTER web site, which is linked to the NOAA websites. Important strains of yeasts will be available at internationally recognized culture collections (the USDA collection in Peoria, Illinois; Centraalbureau voor Schimmelcultures in the Netherlands; and American Type Culture Collection in Maryland). Training will include undergraduate students and incorporate interactions with agency personnel and resource managers doc20522 none A key goal of ecology is to understand how ecosystems process materials and energy. In this proposal, we focus on the energetic importance of terrestrially-derived dissolved organic matter (DOM) for lake ecosystems. Using laboratory-based studies, we will assess how terrestrial DOM quantity and quality influence the production and growth efficiency of pelagic bacteria. These two processes ultimately dictate how much terrestrial DOM enters lake food webs. We will then incorporate the laboratory data into a simulation model that will predict conditions under which terrestrial DOM is likely to be energetically important for higher trophic levels. We are particularly interested in using the model to assess terrestrial carbon flow in lakes with contrasting food webs and trophic states. Finally, we will test model predictions by examining the stable isotopic signatures (delta 13 C) in zooplankton from a wide array of New England lakes. Results from this study will clarify the energetic importance of spatially linked ecosystems and broaden our understanding of how allochthonous inputs influence food web dynamics. In addition, our studies will aid in decision-making regarding land use activities that modify carbon export to lakes such as agriculture, shoreline development, forestry, and wetland delineation doc20523 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Maureen O Leary and Mr. Robert Hill at SUNY at Stony Brook to investigate the anatomy of the skin in amniotes, a large group of animals including modern birds, reptiles, and mammals. New information about the skin will be used to discover the evolutionary relationships of these animals. Information about the skin is available in both living and extinct forms because some amniotes have bones in the skin, called osteoderms, which are commonly found as fossils. The anatomy of different types of amniote skin, and all types of osteoderms, will be described and cataloged using digital photography, illustrations, and microscopic thin-sections. The new data will be combined with data from existing analyses on the skulls, skeletons, and soft tissues of amniotes to provide a more comprehensive picture of the evolution of these animals. The reconstruction of soft tissue features such as skin in dinosaurs and other extinct species depends largely on what is known about their genealogical relationships. It is therefore crucial to resolve any competing hypotheses before accurate reconstructions of extinct amniotes can be made. In recent years the evolutionary relationships between major groups of amniotes have been a point of considerable debate. The relationships of turtles are particularly controversial; turtles have been hypothesized to be the closest relatives of a number of extinct groups, and even modern crocodiles. The most remarkable feature of the turtle - its shell - may be a uniquely evolved structure, or may have formed from the fusion of bones in the skin of the turtle s ancestor. This study will be the first in which information about the skin is used to unravel the genealogical relationships of amniotes, contributing to a broader understanding of amniote evolution in general, and the origin of turtles in particular doc20524 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Keith Crandall and Ms. Megan Porter at Brigham Young University to study the visual pigment gene in mysid shrimp (Mysidacea:Mysidae). Visual pigments consist of an opsin protein and associated receptors responsible for the detection of light, making vision possible. The wavelengths of light that visual pigments can detect differ between species, where differences in wavelength detection are due to changes in the opsin gene. This provides an opportunity for organisms to tune visual pigments to the light present in the environment. Mysid shrimp, where species occur in different aquatic habitats with respect to light, are an appropriate model system to investigate this spectral tuning. The goal of this research is to evaluate the relationship among environment, the sequences of the opsin gene, and the wavelengths of light mysid species from different habitats are capable of detecting. This will be accomplished by constructing the phylogenetic relationships among the mysid species being studied, determining the sequence of the opsin gene found in each species, and measuring the wavelengths of light that each visual pigment absorbs. Visual pigments are proteins that belong to a large family of receptors that have been identified as critical in cellular communication systems, including the detection of hormones, neurotransmitters, odorants, and photons. However, very little is understood about invertebrate opsins. By elucidating the mechanisms controlling the tuning of visual pigments to different wavelengths in mysid shrimp, this study will provide a framework for testing opsin evolution in other organisms. Additionally, the mysid shrimps are an important crustacean group ecologically, providing a large food base for many species in both freshwater and marine ecosystems. Mysid species are also commonly used as aquatic bioindicators. This study will be the first to construct the phylogenetic relationships within a large group of mysid species and will provide the necessary framework for future studies in ecology, toxicology, and evolution doc20525 none Biological invasions are recognized to be one of the greatest threats to natural communities and biodiversity. A central question in the study of biological invasions is: Do invasive species have certain attributes in common that contribute to their success while others fail? Despite the importance of this issue, few empirical studies have systematically tested potentially important traits or trait combinations, especially in aquatic systems. To address variation in invasiveness, studying closely related and morphologically similar taxa should allow us to identify relevant traits. A good system is the poeciliid fish Gambusia, where the differences in geographic range and invasiveness are extreme. Differences in key ecological, life history, and behavioral traits might account for the observed variation in invasiveness among Gambusia species. We propose to examine how invasive and noninvasive Gambusia species might differ in their: (1) life history responses to abiotic stress, (2) population-level responses to biotic stress, (3) community function, (4) aggression levels, and (5) dispersal patterns. We expect that the proposed work in combination with our previous experiments will provide valuable insights into which key species-specific traits enhance the probability of success of species invading novel communities doc20526 none The dynamics and the stable isotope geochemistry of methane in wet, tropical forest soils are poorly understood, compromising our ability to predict rates of methane flux and 13 C exchange with the atmosphere. Quantifying the source sink strength and 13 C signature of methane flux is crucial if we hope to evaluate the role of the tropics in the global methane budget. In systems where redox fluctuates, such as wet tropical forest soils, variations in oxygen influence methane emissions by altering the balance between methanogenesis and methane oxidation. This study explores the effects of oxygen variations on methanogenesis, methane oxidation and 13 C exchange with the atmosphere. Patterns of methane flux and 13 C exchange will be documented across natural gradients of oxygen in the field. Sources and sinks of methane will be identified, both in soil and across the landscape, through gas concentrations and stable isotope analysis. A series of mechanistic laboratory experiments will be performed to explore the effects of oxygen variation on gross methanogenesis, methane oxidation and stable isotope fractionation. This study will advance our knowledge of the factors that regulate methane and 13 C flux from wet tropical forests to the atmosphere doc20527 none Large scale movement patterns can influence the spatio-temporal occurrence of size-structure within and between populations but few studies explicitly address how these patterns affect interactions such as cannibalism and intraguild predation (IGP). The dragonfly Anax junius is a species that migrates and often assumes the role of top- predator in fishless ponds. These attributes make A. junius an ideal species for addressing the influence of migration on population size structure and local population community dynamics. We outline experiments with A. junius and other co- occurring odonate larvae evaluating these effects. Section I tests: a) the effects of size variation on cannibalism in paired A. junius larvae and the likelihood of cannibalism within and between cohorts of A. junius; and b) the effects of size-structure and temperature, two seasonally variable factors, on cannibalism in populations of A. junius larvae. Section II tests the effects of population size-structure in a top predator (A. junius) on: a) the survival of intermediate predators and shared prey in a three species IGP system; and b) the relative contributions of density mediated interactions and trait mediated interactions on risk reduction in a three species IGP system doc20528 none The primary objective of the study is to directly measure seed dispersal distances and differential deposition patterns in a common, wind-dispersed, gap colonizing tropical tree, Jacaranda copaia. Dispersal will be measured by genotyping maternal tissue surrounding dispersed seeds captured in large seed trap arrays. These will be matched to adult genotypes within the mapped population. The data will be used to answer the following questions: (1) How frequent is long distance seed dispersal (here defined as dispersal at distances greater than 100m) in Jacaranda? How does long distance dispersal vary within and among years? (2) How well do current inverse and mechanistic dispersal models estimate and predict dispersal patterns measured above? (3) What biotic and abiotic factors determine dispersal distances? And (4) Are Jacaranda seeds disproportionately dispersed to tree fall gaps? As humans continue to alter and fragment tropical forest landscapes, knowledge of the processes that regulate populations and maintain diverse communities is critical for predicting how these populations will respond in the future. Dispersal is chief among the processes that will determine the ecological and population genetic response over time and space. There is a considerable void of data on the frequency, patterns, and mechanisms of seed dispersal within and among natural plant populations. This study is among the first and most comprehensive attempts to obtain direct measurements of seed dispersal distances using genetic techniques. It will directly inform conservationists and land managers about the appropriate size of habitat required to maintain populations of tropical trees in light of the spatial extent of seed movement doc20529 none Correlation, thermodynamics, dielectric response and collective mode behavior in strongly coupled plasmas will be investigated using a variety of theoretical methods. Physical effects such as dipole-dipole interactions and wake flows are in the models and these are essential to describe existing experiments doc20530 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Paul Chippindale and Mr. Brice Noonan of the University of Texas at Arlington to study relationships, genetic and morphological variation, and population fragmentation in the poison-dart frog Dendrobates tinctorius. This species occurs only in the northeastern corner of South America (Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, and Brazil). It is the largest species of poison-dart frog, and its biology is poorly understood. Dendrobates tinctorius exhibits a tremendous amount of variation in size and color pattern among populations. Although all of the morphologically diverse populations are currently considered a single species, the remarkable degree of variation among them may indicate major barriers to gene flow, and perhaps even the existence of multiple species. The investigators will use microsatellite and mitochondrial DNA to analyze geographic genetic structure of D. tinctorius from throughout its range. Dendrobates tinctorius is restricted to the Guianan Shield of South America. This region encompasses the largest undisturbed tract of tropical rainforest in the world. The distribution of D. tinctorius represents an extreme with respect to natural fragmentation; understanding how this pattern of isolation affects population dynamics and genetic diversity will help biologists predict effects of human-induced fragmentation on other, more continuously distributed species. Additionally, D. tinctorius may be in the early stages of speciation, and this study will provide insight into the degree of gene flow that is necessary for genetic cohesion within species. This work will involve collaboration with researchers in the countries in which D. tinctorius occurs, and will contribute to efforts to conserve biodiversity in the Guianan Shield in the face of increasing human pressure. The current decline of amphibians throughout the world makes an understanding of their biology, diversity, and distributional constraints vital to their continued survival, and this research will provide key insights in these respects doc20531 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. James Baldwin and Mr. Daniel Bumbarger at University of California, Riverside to study the structure and evolution of extracellular feeding appendages in the Cephalobinae, a group of microbial feeding nematodes. The project will describe the ultrastructural anatomy of these structures, classify processes responsible for their assembly and explore patterns in developmental character evolution that are relevant to understanding heterochrony and the evolution of novelty. As these structures are extremely complex on a sub-micrometer spatial scale, a unique application of electron tomography, a three dimensional electron microscopy method, will be utilized to describe the anatomy. Morphogenesis of these structures will be studied with more traditional light microscopy. Comparative work, based primarily on scanning electron micrographs of adult and juvenile morphologies, will be done in collaboration with a molecular phylogenetic lab. It is expected that this project will provide a foundation upon which to ask taxonomic, developmental and evolutionary questions of broad interest. This project will contribute to monographic work already in progress by providing strong hypotheses of character homology with which to re-define taxonomic groupings in a manner that reflects phylogenetic relationships. The proposed research represents novel application of electron tomography that may prove useful for assessing homology in other groups of small invertebrates. Nematodes make excellent models for understanding the evolution of development, particularly where a link between genotypic and phenotypic changes must be understood. Patterns in the complexity and diversity of anterior morphology suggest the presence of developmental modules that could evolve relatively independently from one another. Many mutations in these feeding appendages will likely be viable, which will facilitate identification of developmental regulatory genes responsible for evolutionary changes doc20532 none This project develops Web-based resources for first courses in statistics, called the Assessment Resource Tools for Improving Statistical Thinking (ARTIST). The Web ARTIST project produces the following products: + A collection of high quality assessment items and tasks, coded according to content (e.g., normal distribution, measures of center, bivariate data) and type of cognitive outcome (e.g., statistical literacy, reasoning, or thinking). + A Website that contains the assessment items and tasks, provides online testing, offers guidelines for using the assessment items tasks in various ways, and allows for the collection and compilation of data for research and evaluation purposes. + Faculty development workshops and mini-courses to encourage and assist statistics instructors in how to use the assessment resources to improve student learning, improve their courses, and evaluate course outcomes. + A comprehensive test that measures desired outcomes of a first course in statistics. The ARTIST Web site includes a variety of item formats and types of performance assessments. Instructors have a centralized resource to help them better evaluate student attainment of particular outcomes, rather than global measures of achievement. Specifically, outcomes to evaluate include statistical literacy (e.g., understanding words and symbols, being able to read and interpret graphs and terms), statistical reasoning (e.g., reasoning with statistical information, using statistics to make predictions or judgment), and statistical thinking (e.g., the type of thinking that statisticians use when solving problems that involve data, such as choosing appropriate procedures and checking assumptions doc20533 none Habitat fragmentation and small population size may lead to a decrease in genetic variation and, consequently, the long-term viability of populations. New molecular genetic techniques have been developed to identify changes in genetic variation over time from contemporary samples. However, these techniques have rarely been tested in species in which both historic and contemporary patterns of genetic variation are known. This research will examine the power of these techniques to reconstruct historic patterns of genetic variation in greater prairie chickens, a species of grouse that formerly occurred throughout the prairies of midwestern North America and is now found in fragmented populations, some of which are threatened with extinction. Historic patterns of genetic variation will be obtained from mitochondrial DNA sequences of museum specimens collected prior to habitat fragmentation and population decline ( - ). These will be compared to already analyzed sequences from contemporary populations. This analysis of both contemporary and historic populations will provide empirical support for several critical assumptions of new molecular techniques and an extraordinarily detailed picture of population processes during the decline of a threatened species. From a conservation perspective, this information will also be essential for delineating management units and identifying populations that may be suitable for translocation programs doc20534 none Kin Favoritism and Communal Nesting Dr. Warren Holmes Stephanie Jesseau This combined laboratory- and field-research project will investigate kin recognition and nepotism in a communally-nesting, South American rodent, the degu (Octodon degus). Field evidence suggests that female degus nest communally, which means that two or more females share a burrow in which both females rear their litters. Due to communal nesting and birth synchrony, degu mothers encounter and become familiar with pups that are not their own offspring. Similarly, pups interact with both their siblings and non-siblings from the time they are born. In general, if a mother and her offspring share an early rearing environment with others, thus contaminating the correlation between rearing association and kinship, simple familiarity is unlikely to explain discriminative maternal care or sibling nepotism. In prior work, captive degu mothers discriminated between the odors of their own young and those produced by their co-nesting partner despite having lived with both kinds of pups. Three follow-up laboratories studies are proposed to investigate how kinship and being reared together affect maternal care and sibling relationships. First, it will be determined whether co-nesting mothers preferentially nurse their own young. Observations will be made of mothers behavior toward their own vs other offspring. Differential milk transfer will also be determined by injecting mothers with small amounts of radiation (thus labeling their milk) and measuring the amount of radiation in the pups feces. Second, food quality will be manipulated to evaluate how nutrition affects nursing preferences. The same behavioral observations and milk-labeling techniques as the previous experiment will be used. Third, I will examine juveniles social preferences, specifically play-partner preferences, to determine how growing up together and kinship affect social development. Several field studies will also be conducted at Quebrada de la Plata, the field station of Universidad de Chile. It is not known whether degu mothers in the wild share the same natal chamber even though they occupy the same burrow system. Therefore, the first portion of the proposed field work will consist of monitoring co-nesting mothers using radio telemetry to determine if they share underground burrows before and or after they give birth. The genetic relationship of co-nesting females in the wild is also not known. Therefore, small tissue samples will be taken from free-living degus to perform genetic analyses of DNA to determine the kinship of females sharing the same burrow. Behavioral observations will also be made to examine how agonistic and amicable behaviors vary with relatedness in degus. This study will reveal how kin recognition and nepotism are mediated in a group-living species in which simple familiarity is an inadequate proxy for kinship doc20535 none Dissertation Research: Evolutionary Physiology of Heat-Shock Gene Experession Dr. Martin E. Feder e.g., Hsp70], which in turn should affect tolerance of environmental stress and fitness. This system has great promise as a model for investigating how large-scale differences in physiological traits arise from minor variation among individuals within populations. Prior research has discovered 3 independent instances in which, in natural populations of the fruit fly Drosophila, TE insertions disrupt the spacing between heat-shock response elements in the hsp70Ba proximal promoter; each such population exhibits distinctive Hsp70 protein levels. For each population, the proposed research will develop replicate lines with which to: (1) Quantify Hsp70 protein levels to test whether flies with TE-disrupted promoters express less Hsp70; (2) Determine whether TE-driven differences in Hsp70 expression affect inducible thermotolerance, a principle organism-level phenotype of Hsp70; (3) Determine, via specific ribonuclease protection assays, whether the TEs disrupt hsp70 transactivation [transcription of the Hsp70-encoding gene]; (4) Measure whether, as predicted, TE-disruption of the hsp70Ba promoter enhances fitness in Drosophila not undergoing heat stress. The proposed research will integrate molecular genetic, biochemical and physiological approaches, and be among the first to elucidate the link between intrapopulation regulatory sequence variation and phenotypic diversification doc20536 none Functional significance of elaborate plumage characters when expressed in both sexes: a case study of the turquoise-browed motmot (Eumomota superciliosa) Stephen T. Emlen - Professor Troy G. Murphy - Graduate Student Elaborate plumage is generally found in sexually dimorphic species of birds and is thought to be the product of sexual selection. When found in both males and females, this presents a paradox because females generally do not compete for access to males. Such elaborate, monomorphic characters may be products of natural selection acting equally on the sexes, or they may be products of mutual sexual selection acting equally on the sexes. The latter may occur in cases where both males and females compete for access to mates. This project is designed to test the adaptive function of extreme avian plumage elaboration when expressed equally in each sex. The focal species is the monomorphic and brilliantly plumed turquoise-browed motmot (Coraciiformes: Momotidae: Eumomota superciliosa) which breeds at colonial breeding grounds in Northern Yucatan, Mexico. Both males and females of this socially monogamous species have a number of equally exaggerated plumage characters, most notably of which is an elongate tail that terminates in large oval-shaped rackets that extend far below the body of the bird. This investigation will address whether the elaborate racket-tipped tail functions as a sexual signal used in competition for mates, or if it functions in a utilitarian context driven by natural selection. Five hypotheses for the function of the elaborate plumage will be tested using behavioral observations and experimental manipulations. Information gathered from this study will increase the scientific knowledge on the selective forces that maintain elaborate characters in monomorphic species doc20537 none This proposal requests funds for a Small Exploratory Research (SGER) proposal to support a rapid-response study to isolate and evaluate the sedimentologic and geomorphic impact of Hurricane Michelle on the coastal systems of Andros Island, Bahamas using ultra-high resolution remote sensing data calibrated by field observations. Pre-storm ultra-high resolution remote sensing data are available to the PI and serve as a baseline for comparison. Differences between the pre-storm data and the post-storm data acquired through this funding will serve as focal points for a week of field work that will characterize the geomorphic and sedimentologic attributes of the changes. By integrating the map patterns of change and their sedimentologic characteristics, we will develop models for the impact of major storms on the stability of coastal systems, including but not limited to the shoreline. These changes will also be compared with historical changes (~60 year) recently documented by the PI. Results of this study will have implications for the stability of shorelines and entire coastal systems landward of the shoreline, the parameters that control the evolution of these systems, and the interpretation of the geologic record of tidal flats. The need for rapid acquisition of the ultra-high resolution remote sensing data and the field validation to assess the hurricane s impact make this proposal appropriate for an SGER doc20538 none Nitrogen deposition has increased in several regions in the United States due to inadvertent emissions from agro-industrial activities. This project is designed to investigate three important fates for nitrogen inputs in temperate forests: microbial immobilization, incorporation into slowly decomposing soil organic matter, and denitrification gas emissions. The ability of these sinks to retain nitrogen inputs may determine the sustainability of forest ecosystems and may affect global warming and aquatic ecosystem health. For example, as nitrogen inputs increase, increased denitrification may result in increased emissions of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. This project will investigate the ability of soils to retain nitrogen through biotic (microbial) and abiotic (physiochemical) mechanisms, and the response of denitrification to changes in environmental conditions and changes in microbial biodiversity. The results of this study will be critical to predicting the response of forest ecosystems to increasing nitrogen deposition doc20539 none The open oceans cover 66% of the earth s surface, and the primary producers are primarily tiny coccoid organisms that are very abundant. At any one instant in time, these cells are so numerous that if they were arranged as a packed mass in the shape of a standard 1 x 12 board, this plank would stretch from the earth to the moon. Furthermore, these cells divide approximately once per day, thereby producing a new plank each day. Unlike forests, where dividing cells accumulate in the tree for 100 or more years, these tiny plants of the ocean are quickly eaten. That is, the phytoplankters directly or indirectly feed the fishes, shrimp, whales, etc., so that this amazing plank to the moon is produced and eaten daily. Consequently, the ocean waters appear transparent and no forest-like biomass accumulates. Of these tiny organisms, the eukaryotic algae are an important component. However, they have a very simple morphology and are nearly impossible to identify using either light or electron microscopy. Although very similar in appearance (little spherical cells), from DNA studies it is obvious that these organisms represent several very different evolutionary groups. It has only recently become apparent that molecular studies involving gene sequence analysis are needed to understand this biodiversity. Culture collections, especially the Provasoli-Guillard National Center for Culture of Marine Phytoplankton (CCMP) at the Bigelow Laboratory, hold numerous strains of unidentified tiny coccoid oceanic algae from the blue water regions of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. In this study by Dr. Robert Andersen, these cultures and additional samples will be examined to assess oceanic biodiversity. The proposed research will utilize nuclear ribosomal gene sequences to identify and classify these diverse organisms. Cryptic species complexes will be studied using additional gene sequences (for example, genes of photosynthetic enzymes). The species composition in different oceans, as well as for different regions of the same ocean, will be compared. At present, it is unknown whether the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans have similar or different species of these abundant tiny eukaryotic coccoid algae. The results of this study will contribute to our knowledge of ocean ecosystems and their productivity. Furthermore, preliminary studies have shown that some of these tiny algae produce compounds that are beneficial for human health. For example, the newly discovered oceanic pinguiophytes produce huge amounts of polyunsaturated fatty acids, which from medical research is known to reduce heart disease doc20540 none This project will investigate patterns of genetic variation across the geographic ranges of six Philippine fruit bat species, examining how distribution, geologic history, and ecology contribute to these patterns and how continued divergence is occurring in this group. These species represent the three major ways in which Philippine mammals are distributed: two are widespread in Southeast Asia, two are found throughout the Philippines, and two are found only in single subregions within the Philippines. The ancestral relationships among individuals and populations in each species will be determined using DNA sequences from two genes. Statistical methods based on these relationships and on population genetic theory will be used to infer and compare the demographic histories of these species. Comparative approaches have become powerful tools in the study of regional patterns of biodiversity. A study of six closely related species will allow the rigorous analysis of evolutionary processes in the Philippines, an archipelago with a complex history. It will help identify the processes generating species richness in this area, which has some of the world s highest levels of biodiversity. Studying the processes driving evolution in places like the Philippines is necessary in order to understand current biogeographic patterns worldwide. Understanding the particular ways in which evolution acts on islands and archipelagoes is also crucial for conserving species in increasingly fragmented, island-like habitats doc20541 none Spatial scale poses a fundamental problem in understanding species diversity because mechanisms creating variation in diversity change with scale. Ecological communities are structured over time as well as patterned across space. Community assembly, how species join communities over time, not only poses another problem, but also is responsible for observed spatial patterns. It is not well known how species diversity, community assembly, and spatial scale relate. This project examines three factors that may determine the degree to which assembly contributes to diversity at different spatial scales. The number of species in the regional species pool, the amount of nutrients available to communities, and the number of disturbance types imposed on communities may all play important roles. Hypotheses addressing these factors will be developed through computer simulations and tested through laboratory experiments using bacteria, protists, and rotifers. These approaches, unlike most field studies, ensure rigorous control over invasion sequence and environmental conditions and monitor community dynamics over many generations. Overall, this project will provide an assembly- based model explaining species diversity. Adding temporal dynamics of community assembly to our perspective will enable ecologists to better understand how and when spatial scale is critical in assessing the regulation of species diversity doc20542 none Dissertation Research: The Herbivore-medicated Indirect Effects of an Invasive Plant on a Co-occurring Native Plant Dr. Richard K. Grosberg however, little research has addressed the indirect effects of invasive species on co-occurring natives. Indirect effects are those effects that are mediated by additional organisms. The proposed research investigates the herbivore-mediated indirect effects of the invasive plant Medicago polymorpha on the native plant Lotus wrangelianus to discern how the presence of invasive plant species affects the ecological and evolutionary responses of native plants to their herbivores. Such studies that link community ecology and evolutionary biology can yield valuable insights into how novel community interactions influence both ecological and evolutionary processes doc20543 none I am researching how moisture influences a multi-predator trophic cascade in a soil system. At my research site on the California coast, the entomophagous fungus Beauveria bassiana is the most potent predator of root-feeding insects in dry summer soil. During the rainy winter and spring, however, soil moisture increases sharply and the entomopathogenic nematode Heterorhabditis marelatus becomes the primary predator as B. bassiana decreases in predatory efficiency. Both prey on ghost moth (Hepialus californicus) larvae, root-feeding herbivores that feed on the bush lupine Lupinus arboreus. The lupine shows increased growth, seed set, and survivorship in the presence of the nematode, which preys on H. californicus that would otherwise eat the lupine s roots. The wet-season interactions in this food chain are known as an important example of a terrestrial trophic cascade. My research seeks to develop a complete picture of this food web by understanding predation on the herbivore during the dry season, and the role that moisture plays in both predators activities. I also propose testing whether the two predators have equivalent impacts on the prey population, possibly leading to cascades due to different predators in the wet versus dry season doc20544 none Project Many aquatic communities have been shown to be under top-down control, while most systems dominated by vascular plants are assumed to be controlled by bottom-up forces. For nearly 50 years, the prevailing paradigm in salt marsh ecology has been that bottom-up forces, such as nutrient availability, are the primary determinants of marshgrass production. In this proposal, we show that the standing crop of the dominant plant in western Atlantic salt marshes is reduced wholesale and the substrate completely denuded when predators do not suppress densities of the most common grazing invertebrate in southeast marshes, the periwinkle Littoraria irrorata. Before these results can be generally accepted, however, the apparent contradiction between our observations that Littoraria graze extensively on live Spartina and the current paradigm which holds that Littoraria is the most important detritivore in the marsh system must be resolved. To do this, we present a detailed research plan to obtain a mechanistic understanding of the Littoraria - live Spartina interaction. Results from this study will likely force us to reevaluate our current understanding of marsh systems and add critical information to the ongoing debate as to whether or not vascular plant communities are susceptible to run-away consumer effects doc20545 none CHEMICAL DISCRIMINATION OF PREDATOR DIETS IN AMPHIBIANS Dr. Dale M. Madison Aaron M. Sullivan Essentially all animals must be wary of predators, but usually must perform daily tasks such as obtaining food. In many cases, animals measure the threat of a nearby predator, and take evasive action (and cease foraging) only when attack seems imminent. Some animals use chemical information not only to detect local predators, but also to assess threat by determining the diet of the predator. In this case, a diet consisting of other individuals of the same species would be most threatening and the most likely to evoke evasive action. Given the importance of predator-prey interactions in ecological communities, and the relative neglect of chemical defense mechanisms among terrestrial vertebrates, the proposed research focuses on chemical defense and assessment in an important prey-predator unit in the woodlands of northeastern USA, specifically that between a common salamander (Plethodon cinereus) and the predatory garter snake. The researchers have documented diet-based threat assessment by the salamander, and in the proposed study, will examine the degree to which salamanders use the ecological familiarity or genetic relatedness of alternative prey in the snake s diet to assess the threat imposed by the snake. Ecological familiarity will be assessed by using chemical cues from alternate salamander prey species occupying a variety of different niches in the same general P. cinereus habitat. Genetic relatedness will be examined by using cues from alternative prey of varying genetic relatedness to P. cinereus, ranging from individuals of the same subspecies to individuals of different species and higher taxonomic categories. These studies should reveal how some animals are able to decipher subtle chemical information in their environment that is important to individual survival and interpreting community-wide interactions doc20546 none Some of the most striking examples of community change appear to be driven by changes in the abundance of particular species with cascading effects on other members of an ecosystem. Seabirds exert substantial effects through predation and by modifying abiotic factors, thereby determining species richness of assemblages in both marine and terrestrial habitats. In New England, gulls have increased dramatically since the early s, and are likely transforming coastal terrestrial and intertidal communities through their activities. However, their impacts are virtually unknown. The goal of this research is to understand the mechanisms by which nesting gulls impact plant (terrestrial herbaceous and intertidal algae) assemblages. Gulls may have top-down effects on algal diversity in the intertidal through predation on secondary consumers (crabs) that forage on algal grazers (littorines). Birds transfer marine-derived nutrients and energy from intertidal to terrestrial habitats via guano, and as a consequence they may impact terrestrial plant diversity from the bottom-up. I propose a combination of experimental manipulations and comparative sampling methods to investigate these effects. Policies in aquatic ecosystems (e.g. seabird restoration) can affect both aquatic and terrestrial systems. Understanding gull impacts in marine and terrestrial habitats will contribute to informed management practices doc20547 none To understand the genetic and developmental bases of naturally-occurring organismal variation is to understand the raw material of evolution itself. Natural variation in seed coat morphology will be genetically and developmentally dissected in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. A thorough description of seed coat development for a reference strain (this is the most commonly-used among many available strains) of Arabidopsis will be completed and will serve as the standard to which the development and underlying genetics of both chemically-induced and naturally-occurring (field-collected) mutants will be compared. Both artificial and natural mutants will be developmentally characterized and genetically mapped. These data, in addition to traditional complementation tests (crossing individuals and analyzing their progeny), will be utilized to identify the number of loci affecting variation in this developmental pathway and the frequency and origins of natural seed coat variation. The seed coat serves as the interface between the plant embryo and its environment and its roles are many and varied. This relatively simple, yet highly differentiated structure provides a unique opportunity to investigate evolutionarily important issues and the potential to identify genes responsible for the development of a commercially important organ responsible for such crops as cotton fiber and mucilage, (e.g., Metamucil doc20548 none One of the primary goals of evolutionary research is to explain the mechanisms by which new species originate. One such mechanism that has received relatively little attention is the formation of new species due to interbreeding between previously established species (or, speciation via interspecific hybridization). In an effort to understand how new species originate due to hybridization, this project will trace the history of divergence between Heliconius pachinus, a tropical butterfly species that recently originated via hybridization, and one of its parental species, H. cydno. It is hypothesized that since the origin of the H. pachinus form, natural selection has led to the evolution of mechanisms by which species integrity is maintained. This project will determine how much overall genetic exchange is occurring between these two species by examining these mechanisms and by comparing the genetic makeup of both species throughout their range. Although the role of hybridization in animal evolution is receiving more attention than ever, there are few clear examples of speciation via hybridization in animals. Once finished, this study will provide one of the most complete explanations of speciation via hybridization. Furthermore, the mechanism of divergence proposed here is a novel and exciting process by which speciation may have occurred many times in this genus and others. The incredible correspondence of mimetic Heliconius species pairs has long amazed biologists and still lacks a mechanistic explanation. The hypothesis put forward here could well be the explanation for this entire phenomenon doc20549 none Dissertation Research: Thermal Acclimation as a Tool for the Investigation of Membrane Raft Structure and Function Dr. Jeffrey R. Hazel & John Zehmer Cells are bounded by an outer envelope, the plasma membrane, made up of lipid and protein molecules. Evidence has accumulated in the last ten years that specific lipids and proteins are organized into clusters, called rafts, which help organize the molecular machinery of cellular communication. The cells of cold-blooded animals make substantial lipid compositional changes to the plasma membrane during acclimation to a new temperature. These changes allow the cells to continue to function properly despite the temperature change. An increase in temperature should overcome the forces holding rafts together. Therefore, some of the compositional changes made in response to a change in temperature probably serve to strengthen rafts. Examining this acclimation response in trout liver cells should help elucidate the means by which rafts are held together and how rafts assist in cellular communication. This research will determine 1) if the clustering of raft molecules is maintained during thermal acclimation, 2) what lipid compositional changes account for this maintenance, 3) if membrane viscosity, an important membrane property, is conserved in rafts during acclimation, and 4) if cellular communication is dependent on raft clustering doc20550 none PROPOSAL NO: PI: Pina, R K It is widely accepted that the power source in the central engine of active galactic nuclei (AGN) arises from accretion of gas and dust onto a super massive black hole (SMBH). So-called Unified Schemes hold that the featureless continuum produced by the central engine is shrouded in a geometrically and optically thick torus of material, obscuring the central engine from some lines-of-sight. Unified models suggest that multiple classes of AGN result not from different physical characteristics, but rather arise from different lines-of-sight to the central engine, revealing varied physical conditions leading to the existing classification scheme. However, the idea that AGN classification depends solely on the line-of-sight to the central engine has been called into question by recent surveys of Seyfert (Sy) Types 1 and 2 galaxies. These surveys reveal that Sy-2 host galaxies typically have an increased level of star formation as compared to Sy-1. One hypothesis is that Seyfert central engines evolve over time from a Sy-2 to Sy-1. A key prediction of this theory is that Seyfert galaxies will display a decreasing amount of central star formation and or warm dust throughout the evolution from Sy-2 to Sy-1. In order to test this theory an unbiased sample of various Seyfert in the mid-IR will be observed using the twin Gemini 8-meter class telescopes located in Hawaii and Chile doc20551 none A fundamental question in population and conservation biology is the rate at which wildlife populations exchange individuals. In this study, the genetics of both a vertebrate host and an infecting virus will be used to infer movement of cougars among populations in the northern Rocky Mountains. Because viruses evolve a million times faster than do higher organisms, changes in host populations, such as population subdivision, should become manifest in the genetics of a virus long before they lead to genetic changes in the host. Estimates of host movement based on virus genetics will be compared to estimates derived from a more traditional host genetic marker, microsatellites. The use of a fast-evolving infectious organism as a genetic marker of animal movements offers an innovative perspective on population dynamics that can complement existing population genetics approaches. In addition, the proposed research is significant because it will increase our understanding of how infectious organisms like viruses are distributed and maintained on a landscape scale. Furthermore, the research proposed fosters productive collaborations with hunters, government agencies, and academics doc20552 none This study employs the southern grasshopper mouse (Onychomys torridus) and the bark scorpion (Centruroides exilicauda) as a model to test the hypothesis that interspecific interaction between a predator and a toxic prey will result in behavioral and physiological adaptations that mediate their interaction (i.e., coevolution). Intra- and interspecific patterns of variability in neurotoxin resistance in grasshopper mice will be compared with geographic variability in bark scorpion venoms. An enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) will be used to screen serum samples in wild populations of mice in order to detect and quantify antibodies that preferentially bind to the vertebrate neurotoxins in bark scorpion venom. Quantification of antibodies that bind neurotoxins would provide a tool for estimating the frequency and intensity of interaction between mice and scorpions in sympatric populations. This research represents the first attempt to understand, from an evolutionary perspective, the presence and complexity of vertebrate neurotoxins in the Centruroides complex doc20553 none This proposal is designed to investigate the elastic response and ultrasonic attenuation of a wide variety of glasslike crystals (materials that simultaneously reflect both crystalline and glasslike properties). The scientific issues that will be addressed include: (a) the relationship between inclusion compounds, quasicrystals, and structural glasses, (b) are tunneling states (which are typically found in glasses at low temperatures) intrinsic to inclusion compounds and or quasicrystals, and (c) structure-property relationships - to what extent can various structural features be used to predict the elastic properties of a given material? This research project will use Resonant Ultrasound Spectroscopy (RUS) to probe the elastic properties of the materials under investigation. RUS is a novel technique for determining the elastic moduli of solids, based on the measurement of the resonances of a freely vibrating body. The ultrasonic attenuation of the materials will be measured using a standard pulse-echo technique. This proposal will contribute toward the development of a strong solid-state program at The University of Mississippi. Both advanced undergraduate and graduate students will gain in-depth experience in ultrasound experiments and the techniques of low temperature physics. Ordinary materials are either crystals (with long-range order, i.e., the atoms are arranged in a periodic array) or glasses (with no long-range order). This proposal will investigate the properties of some extraordinary materials such as inclusion compounds and quasicrystals. These are materials that simultaneously display both crystalline and glasslike properties. The project will focus on the elastic properties of these remarkable solids, using a relatively new technique, Resonant Ultrasound Spectroscopy (RUS). A study of materials that display the unusual combination of glasslike and crystalline features is expected to have an impact on two fronts. First, the investigation of the glasslike properties found in these materials is expected to lead to a better understaanding of the origin of glassy behavior. Since these materials are of interest for technological (thermoelectric) applications, a better understanding of their properties is essential for the design of materials with superior properties. Secondly, this research will contribute to the training of young scientists at the undergraduate and graduate level in Mississippi, who will gain in-depth experience in the field of condensed-matter physics doc20554 none Xiao This grant will support a two-day symposium on New Trends in Nonlinear Dynamics and Control, and Their Applications, to be held at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California from September 19-20, . The conference will focus on new and innovative developments in nonlinear dynamics and its applications, such as nonlinear observer design, cooperative control, flow control, and bifurcation control. The symposium will include several invited 50-minute talks and a series of shorter contributed presentations of approximately 20 minutes each. The organizers plan to publish proceedings of this meeting in book form. The rapid pace of change in technology constantly presents new challenges and new opportunities to researchers in systems and control, especially those in nonlinear control. Advances in materials science, active actuators and sensors, and fluid mechanics challenge the community to develop controllers for complex nonlinear systems of both finite and infinite dimensions. Models of nonlinear systems that are especially interesting to researchers in nonlinear control include fluid dynamics, flow control, smart materials, and chemical reactions. The nonlinearity of these complex systems leads not just to instability but also to periodic solutions, bifurcations, and chaos. Recent research shows promise for controlling such systems to achieve stability or instability. Cooperative control is another research topic of nonlinear systems that is attracting increasing attention. Recent advances in computing and communications make it possible to operate a large number of autonomous or semi-autonomous agents simultaneously in a cooperative manner. Such systems involve nonlinearities that are far more complicated than those exhibited by a single system. Problems involving cooperative control of multiple nonlinear systems are found to have numerous applications. Several of the presentations and discussions during the symposium will address issues related to cooperative control and its applications (e.g., control of a satellite constellation, multiple munitions). The symposium will provide an opportunity for both well-established and young researchers to exchange ideas on new developments and directions for future research. These new challenges require a review of major developments in nonlinear control theory from the past and to discuss new research trends to meet the ever-increasing needs of industrial applications. Major topics to be addressed in the symposium include new developments in the theory of nonlinear systems and control such as nonlinear observers, bifurcations and control, and turbulence and control doc20555 none The goal of this project is to understand the evolution of complex genetic architectures and the role they play in the early stages of speciation. The study involves three phases: (1) Line crosses between flour beetles (Tribolium castaneum) collected from populations around the world to produce all 1st and 2nd generation hybrids. These crosses are then analyzed statistically to quantify the contribution of genetic interactions; (2) Population structure - for the line-cross populations, we will assay mtDNA sequence and microsatellite marker variation to quantify the genetic divergence among them; and, (3) Mapping - A microsatellite linkage map will be assembled to find regions of the genome responsible for hybrid incompatibility. Gene interactions are important to speciation because negative genetic interactions are necessary to lower hybrid fitness. On the other hand, a major reason for the success of commercial agriculture is increased hybrid productivity. This study will contribute to the understanding of gene interactions and the understanding of how geographic and genetic divergence among related populations leads to decreased fitness in some cases but increased fitness in others doc20556 none A team of multidisciplinary assessment researchers from several universities is adapting and enhancing a proven, validated methodology for assessing and developing student learning outcomes via feedback solicited from multiple sources. The project team is enhancing the Team Developer system to allow students the opportunity to select any number of feedback providers in support of their own learning and development. This newly enhanced system supports the assessment of a broader set of learning outcomes based on the full EC- criteria (A-K). The resultant system, designated as the Student Developer, allows students to build a more comprehensive set of competencies by soliciting feedback from multiple sources including peers, faculty, co-op and intern supervisors, family members, and others. It allows students to receive periodic assessments of their learning and professional development from various perspectives -- providing a 360-degree view of how their learning and development is being perceived by others within the educational environment . In addition, the Student Developer is web-based to facilitate its use. A comprehensive evaluation is a major activity throughout the project s life cycle. A series of project metrics helps monitor performance and overall impact on student learning, faculty, and academic programs. Defined metrics include student usage and satisfaction, student improvement actions taken based on collected data, and input from various feedback sources. Dissemination is an integral activity in this project and these efforts include workshops, presentations, and publications in major engineering education forums. Additionally, John Wiley Publishers is supportive of publishing the Student Developer, using the same model that has been successfully applied to the Team Developer. For the Student Developer, the PIs are writing a similar student workbook to complement the system being developed through this project. The team plans to distribute the Student Developer application to faculty for free and students would have the opportunity to learn more about EC related skills through an associated workbook published by Wiley doc20557 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Large Solutions to Systems of Nonlinear Equations Jenssen The object of this research is threefold. First, we seek a better understanding of solutions to systems of hyperbolic (inviscid) conservation laws that are large in either amplitude or variation. New examples of explosive behavior will be considered, as well as conditions preventing singular behavior. Next, we will consider the multi-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations for a compressible fluid and establish global existence of large solutions with spherical or cylindrical symmetry. Finally, we will consider flow describing combustion. This is modeled by the Navier-Stokes equations augmented by equations describing the chemical processes. In this case we are particularly interested in the stability of wave patterns. The work deals with mathematical analysis of solutions to nonlinear partial differential equations. The research will investigate systems of conservation laws, compressible fluid flow, and equations describing reactive flow. Much of the existing theory for such nonlinear equations applies only to small solutions. However, large solutions are of great interest in applications such as gas flow, combustion, and detonations, and study of these solutions requires new techniques that will be developed in this project doc20558 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Michael Hellberg and Mr. Michael Taylor at Louisiana State University to study whether the brilliant colors displayed by coral reef fishes are important for mate attraction and species recognition. Color perception by most vertebrate animals is conferred by proteins in the eyes called opsins. Color sensitivity of opsins can be altered by genetic changes to the genes coding for the proteins. The surrounding environment also affects color perception. The ecologically important cleaner gobies (genus Elacatinus) are brightly colored fishes that remove parasites from other fishes. Thus, coloration in cleaner gobies may be important both for mate recognition and for recognition by fishes that need cleaning. The investigators will determine whether changes in opsin proteins correspond with coloration changes of the cleaner gobies by comparing DNA sequences of opsin genes from two differently colored populations of a single species, and between two species with different colors. Additionally, the investigators will use an underwater spectroradiometer to quantify the color reflectivity of the corals occupied by these gobies to determine whether gobies choose coral colors that maximize the apparent intensity of their color display to other fishes. Coral reefs contain some of the greatest biodiversity on earth, and gobies are the largest family of marine fishes. This study will provide insight into the processes that lead to such diversity. Coloration differences between similar gobies can allow them to occupy different niches while advertising their cleaning services. An enhanced ability to distinguish potential mates by coloration could help to reduce genetic exchange between differently colored populations, leading to the formation of new species. Together, these concepts could provide clues about how environment and color vision interact to help generate the biodiversity observed on coral reefs doc20559 none Modulation of active learning behavior in the context of foraging Fred C. Dyer, Principal Investigator, Professor of Zoology Cynthia A. Wei, Doctoral Candidate in Zoology Honeybees possess the remarkable ability to repeatedly return to specific flower patches that they have discovered. Essential to this ability is a behavior known as a learning flight. These flights, which are performed upon departure from a food source, allow a bee to collect visual information about landmarks nearby the food, which then help the bee find her way back. The performance of these flights is a modulated behavior; bees typically perform longer flights during the first few visits, and in subsequent visits, the durations of the flights decline. This raises a fundamental question: How do bees determine when and for how long to perform these flights? Answers to this question will provide greater understanding of learning as an active decision making process. The dissertation work of Cynthia Wei, under the guidance of Fred Dyer, has so far documented precise ways in which various factors influence the modulation of learning flight duration. The work supported by this award will expand upon these prior findings by studying the modulation of learning flight duration in a more natural foraging context. The specific goals are 1) to characterize the occurrence of learning flights in response to a change in nectar quality availability in a natural flower patch, 2) to determine the influence of nectar volume and concentration on the induction of learning flights, and 3) to determine the effect of observed occurrences of learning flights on subsequent spatial patterns of foraging. This research will further illuminate the processes by which animals make decisions to learn in response to changing needs for spatial information. It will also lead to a better understanding of how learning affects changes in spatial foraging patterns and the resulting implications for foraging success. Collectively, this work will help develop a clearer picture of how mechanisms of learning have been shaped by an animal s foraging ecology doc20560 none Zeta and L-functions provide an extremely powerful method for studying difficult and fundamental problems in Number theory. Moreover, analogous functions are propping up in other parts of Mathematics as well as in Physics, for example to provide regularizations of seemingly divergent data. The dynamic field of Automorphic Forms is an excellent source of important zeta functions, and in fact a far-reaching conjecture of Langlands says that all zeta functions admitting an Euler product are modular, i.e., associated to automorphic forms on GL(n). This conference will review and examine the positive results and techniques which have come about in the past few years, with a special eye towards the L-function methods leading to various instances of transfer of automorphic forms from one group to another. This award partially supports a conference in number theory. Number theory is that branch of mathematics that studies properties of numbers, such as the distribution of prime numbers. This particular conference focuses on certain types of continuous functions, called automorphic functions, that encode deep symmetries which occur in nature, analogous to waveforms on a small pond. The discrete tones which occur have interesting number theoretic meanings. Instead of starting with the functions and looking for their discrete tones, mathematicians and physicists can start with discrete collections of numbers and from which they construct continuous functions. Then the central problem is to know if these functions admit hidden symmetries. When they do, then still more special properties must be present as well. Exploiting this kind of information is a pressing endeavor and there are many gold mines yet to be discovered doc20561 none In this project a working group of stakeholders are meeting several times over a twelve-month period to plan a scalable digitization and digital library project aimed at capturing the intellectual capital of Twenty Centuries of Mathematics . The Cornell University Library is serving as the coordinator of this group. Participants in this activity are considering the key issues and challenges and recommending strategies to inform a coordinated effort to perform a retrospective digitization of the literature of mathematical sciences. The resulting digital collection is to serve as an international resource for researchers, scientists, faculty, and students, providing access to a large body of historical materials that originally appeared in print form. This project facilitates cooperation and coordination among a number of currently uncorrelated digitization projects in mathematics that have emerged at separate institutions and organizations in the U.S. and several other countries. Coordination of these different efforts promises to promote a systematic approach to digital preservation of mathematical sciences materials, and provide users with an integrated means of accessing them. Given the deep connection of this project to the needs of the research community of mathematical scientists, the NSF Division of Mathematical Sciences is providing co-funding for this project doc20562 none The Compositae in the Flora of North America north of Mexico (CFNA) is a project to account for all members of the plant family Compositae (also called the Asteraceae) that occur outside of cultivation in North America north of Mexico. There are some 2,600 species distributed among 425 genera in North America north of Mexico, making it by far the largest family of plants in the region. The CFNA incorporates the work of some 70 contributing authors, who are recognized as experts in their groups. Their contributions are based on their own field studies, plus herbarium, laboratory, and library work. The CFNA is associated with the Flora of North America (FNA) program, whose goal is to account for all of the vascular plants and the bryophytes that occur in the continent north of Mexico. Curiously, no continent-wide consideration of the whole flora has ever been done. The products of the CFNA are being presented in three volumes in a style and format compatible with the FNA. The work is being published in hard copy by the Oxford University Press, but as sections are completed they are posted on the FNA website (www.fna.org). A future goal is to make all materials available in electronic format, so that the information can be both easily managed and revised, as needed. The CFNA is managed at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT) in Fort Worth, and the work is coordinated by the Compositae Editorial Committee (CompEd) consisting of T. Barkley at BRIT, L. Brouillet at the University of Montreal, and J. Strother at the Univeristy of California - Berkeley. In addition, there is a technical editor and assistants, plus the services of botanical artists. Members of the family Compositae are both abundant and conspicuous in North America, and among them are the sagebrushes, ragweeds, goldenrods, and of course, sunflowers. Many members of the family are serious weeds, some are toxic, and some are of positive economic significance. The family is of great concern to environmentalists, ecologists, agronomists, horticulturalists, weed scientists, and others, and ultimately to the general public. The traditional concepts of the family, i.e., the concepts employed in standard American and Canadian regional floristic works (e.g., The Jepson Manual of the Higher Plants of California) stem from the middle of the 19th century. Research of the past quarter century has shown that these concepts require extensive revision so as to depict natural affinities and lineages. This is not mere ivory-towerism, for it has been made abundantly clear that an accurate knowledge of interrelationships among organisms is essential to understanding both how to manage our environment and what kinds of things may happen in the future. The products of these sophisticated studies usually circulate only among other botanists, but it is the goal of floristic studies such as the CFNA to translate these findings into works that are useful to the consumers of botanical information. The contributing authors are obliged to make their treatments reflect current understanding. Respect is given to the 19th century botanists who created a useful understanding of the family, and it is hoped that the schemes being incorporated into the CFNA will be equally useful for years to come. The treatments include keys, botanical descriptions, and considerations of nomenclature for all entities, plus statements of range and habitat, small distribution maps, and information on legal status, toxicity, usefulness, weediness, etc. About a quarter of the species are illustrated by line drawings prepared for the CFNA. The goal is to present the three volumes treating the Compositae in North America north of Mexico at the end of doc20563 none James M. Turner An active area of research in commutative algebra since the s has involved the use of homological methods to characterize Noetherian rings and the homomorphisms between them. In the s, simplicial methods were used to enable homotopy theory to apply to commutative algebras and develop richer homological techniques. This project seeks to use homotopy theory to characterize (simplicial) commutative algebras with a Noetherian property. Part of this effort will seek to resolve a conjecture of Quillen on the rigidity of the homology of commutative algebras and draw deeper connections between simplicial methods and methods from differential homological algebra. This project will also study how the cohomology of algebras can serve as host for obstructions to realizing a topological space from given algebraic data that functions as the value of a suitable homotopy invariant of the putative space. Attention will be paid to developing methods for computing such obstructions. Homotopy theory is a method of studying certain mathematical objects and the relations between them from a global perspective. In the case of geometric objects, certain algebraic invariants can be assigned to study and distinguish between homotopy types. Understanding the properties of these algebraic structures and how they relate to the geometric objects they are associated to are therefore important parts of this theory. This project seeks to further the understanding of the homotopy theory of geometric objects from the algebraic perspective. There are two aims to this project. The first is to develop further the homotopy theory of algebras that parallels that of geometric objects. The second aim seeks to make use of the homotopy of algebras and their various properties to understand the homotopy of spaces. This would involve studying the extent to which algebraic structures and properties can be lifted to corresponding structures and properties for geometric objects doc20564 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Robert Jansen and Mr. Timothy Chumley at the University of Texas at Austin to research the biogeographic and evolutionary history of the plant genus Menodora in the olive family. It has an unusual distribution in the temperate arid regions of North America, South America and southern Africa, and is most closely related to the economically important jasmines, a group strictly of the Old World. There have been relatively few studies of the biotic connection between Africa and North America, and most of these have focused on tropical rather than temperate disjunctions. The small number of species and lack of ecological diversity make Menodora an excellent system for examining questions of the geographic spread, divergence, and radiation of species across continental scales. In attempting to determine the origins and geographic history of the genus, it is also necessary to understand the historical relationships of its species. This is complicated by the possibility that morphological similarity between species may be the result of ecological selection rather than shared ancestry. In some cases as well, species boundaries are by no means clear. The goals of this study are to: 1) examine relationships within Menodora using morphological and DNA sequence data, 2) explore hypotheses of its origin and biogeography, and 3) produce a new classification of its species and a monograph. This study will add substantially to the body of knowledge of an economically important plant family, and provide a base for future work in that group. The study of disjunction in Menodora will provide new insights into the relationship of the temperate floras of the New World and Africa. These insights may serve to identify biogeographic patterns that are shared with larger, more diverse groups or groups at higher taxonomic levels that present less tractable problems doc20565 none Project : Current global climate change models predict increases in the frequency and intensity of drought in the southwestern U.S. In pinyon-juniper woodlands, we hypothesize that drought stress leads to increased competition between pinyon and juniper, greater dependence of pinyon on facilitative nurse plants, and changes in pinyon ectomycorrhizal (EM) fungal abundance and community structure. Because EM fungi can alleviate environmental stress by increasing water and nutrient uptake by the host plant, it is important to understand factors that affect these mutualists. The goal of this project is to examine how competition and facilitation affect pinyon survival and growth, as well as their EM fungi. We will use a combination of field experiments, greenhouse studies, and molecular tools (RFLP analysis and DNA sequencing) to identify EM fungal species. The results of our study will 1) quantify EM fungal diversity and distribution in pinyon-juniper woodlands, 2) provide data on plant responses and EM fungal community shifts in response to competition and facilitation, and 3) contribute to the current library of EM fungal sequences. Because many of these fungi can only be identified with molecular tools, the latter objective is necessary to allow comparisons of ecological data on fungi from different locations to begin to understand the factors that affect their abundance and distribution doc20566 none This proposal is from the NYU group and requests funding for two distinct projects: a search for a rare symmetry violating process that has the prospect of discovering new physics beyond the Standard Model and a study of astronomical gamma rays and cosmic rays of 100 GeV to 10 TeV. Recognizing an opportunity to address new physics, a strong collaboration (MECO) representing 20 institutions, has formed and is proposing funding for the project entitled Rare Symmetry Violating Processes (RSVP). RSVP represents an opportunity to empower the university community to make discoveries of extraordinary importance. The current scope of RSVP includes 130 scientists, about 60% from the United States, and the others from Canada, Switzerland, Italy, Japan, and Russia, along with an expected 100 graduate students and post-docs. Observation of Muon to Electron COnversion by MECO would be the first evidence for a process that violates muon and electron type lepton number and that cannot be explained by the Standard Model of particle physics, extended to include massive neutrinos. It would be direct evidence for previously unknown physics processes involving new forces. This experiment is proposed to achieve a sensitivity 10,000 times that of current experiments. The second component of the request is work on the MILAGRO gamma ray observatory to study the highest energy gamma rays and cosmic rays at energies where the fluxes are sensitive to some of the most energetic processes occurring in the universe. MILAGRO is a large water Cherenkov counter and is the first detector capable of continuously monitoring the full overhead sky at these energies doc20567 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Claude dePamphilis and Mr. Joel McNeal at Pennsylvania State University to study how different species of a group of parasitic plants known as dodders are related to each other and how genes that produce proteins necessary for photosynthesis differ between species in the lineage. Dodders, which are vines that possess only tiny, useless leaves and no roots whatsoever, attach to the stems of other plants and are dependent on these hosts for all of their water, inorganic nutrients, and most, if not all, of their carbohydrate needs. Because of this habit, the parasites have a reduced need to photosynthesize for themselves. Genes located within chloroplasts, the photosynthetic compartments of plant cells, are highly conserved across flowering plants because most of these genes are necessary for carbohydrate production from sunlight and atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, a large degree of variation exists in these genes between different dodders, indicating that different species may demonstrate differing abilities to photosynthesize. By examining which genes are well conserved within chloroplasts of different dodder species and related non-parasitic plants, an understanding of which genes are most important for photosynthesis and which genes are more expendable will be gained. These data will be verified further by comparison with other parasitic plant lineages. Furthermore, knowledge of the relationships between dodder species may eventually prove to be valuable to the control of these parasitic weeds, many of which do serious agricultural damage and are federally designated noxious weeds. The transition from being nutritionally independent to being parasitic has occurred numerous times within plants and also within many other lineages of life. This parasitic plant group will serve as an excellent model to study the genetic changes that accompany this transition doc20568 none The sea urchin gene Endo16 will be used to examine molecular evolution in DNA sequences responsible for gene regulation, called promoters. The functional consequences of the observed evolutionary changes will be tested among several closely related species. These issues will be addressed using DNA sequence comparisons, gene expression localizations, and experimental tests of promoter function. The ability to perform analyses of promoter function in any sea urchin species will provide a detailed picture of how promoter sequence variation arises within populations and accumulates to create more extensive species-level differences in promoter sequence, organization, and regulatory mechanisms. The widespread conservation of protein products across the animal kingdom and the evolutionary correlation of changes in gene expression with changes in morphology suggest that change in gene regulatory sequences is an important basis for phenotypic evolution. Previous studies of molecular evolution in gene regulatory sequences have been limited by incomplete knowledge of the structure and function of the promoter region and the inability to perform the necessary functional experiments in more than one species. This project will provide one of the first detailed pictures of genetic variation in promoter sequences, furthering our understanding of the genetic differences underlying phenotypic evolution between species doc20569 none It is proposed to carry out experimental study to understand the processes of drop deformation, breakup, and coalescence in flows of highly viscous or viscoelastic liquids. More specifically, the role of high MW surfactant known as the compatibilizer on these processes will be examined. Experiments will be carried out in miniaturized computer controlled four-roll mills developed and constructed by the PI during the previous Grant period. Motions and deformations of small drops 10-100 microns in diameter will be observed and recorded by a microvideo system doc20570 none This project will use a 2.5-dimension parallel-particle-in-cell (PPIC) computer code to simulate the interaction of Alfven waves and plasma in the ionosphere. The simulations will be driven either by imposed current sheets or by imposed perpendicular electric fields as boundary conditions. Accelerated electrons and ions in the structure drive waves which in turn affect the charged particles. The waves and particles react back on the potential structure. The simulation thus provides a self-consistent feedback loop. The technique will be used to study (1) the electrodynamics of two-dimensional auroral mesoscale potential structures in the return current region, (2) the formation of double layers, (3) the processes which generate counter streaming electrons, (4) transverse ion acceleration, and (5) the role of electron phase-space density holes in magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling doc20571 none This project is an inventory of the macroinvertebrates (insects, mollusks, crustaceans and other animals) of the Selenge River and its tributaries in north central Mongolia. Occupying over 300,000 sq. km., the Selenge River basin lies in an active geologic zone, and connects Lake Hovsgol, one of the world s most pristine ancient lakes, with Lake Baikal, the world s oldest and most biologically diverse lake. In freshwater aquatic habitats, macroinvertebrates, particularly insects, comprise a large portion of biological diversity. Studies of their taxonomy (identification) and distribution provide important results for understanding the evolution, biogeography, and ecology of aquatic communities. Increasing economic development and population in the Selenge basin are stressing the aquatic community through mining, untreated wastes, agriculture, over-grazing, fires, and climate change. The project proposed here will generate not only basic scientific knowledge of the biodiversity of the Selenge basin, but will also provide the Mongolian government a yardstick for monitoring water quality. This project encompasses a comprehensive, three-year sampling program. Three month-long expeditions will be undertaken to sample a range of aquatic macroinvertebrates, assess habitats and measure physical characteristics of the waterways. The principal investigators are established insect scientists with a broad range of field experience around the world, including the completion of a major inventory project at Lake Hovsgol, Mongolia. The expeditions will be collaborative with Mongolian scientists and students, and other scientists, with a focus on training of Mongolian students to develop in-country scientific expertise. Goals for this project include surveying the major groups of aquatic insects and other invertebrate groups, collaborative publication of the survey results, and development of associated databases for literature, specimen-based distribution records, locality and habitat classification, and specimen images. Databases will be assembled by Mongolian and American scientists and will be available over the Internet. Based on the previous work in the Lake Hovsgol watershed by these investigators, this proposed field survey should increase by 85% the currently known 700 aquatic macroinvertebrate species in the groups to be studied. Among these additional species, we expect to find 100 or more species new to science and to add nearly 600 first records for species within Mongolia and the central Asian plateau. Beyond a strictly scientific research importance, this survey and resulting research will provide many associated benefits. Knowledge of species and their abundance is applied as an important measure of the health of aquatic habitats and is used routinely throughout the world to monitor water quality. Broad sampling of aquatic invertebrates along with the collection of water quality and riparian zone measurements will directly benefit efforts to establish a baseline for future water quality monitoring programs. The scientific knowledge will be useful in guiding Mongolia s government in its attempts to protect the environment and to develop eco-tourism. The proposed survey will allow these U.S. scientists to develop meaningful collaborations with current Mongolian scientists and to train Mongolian students in the field and laboratory doc20572 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Robert Wood and Mr. Andrew Kinziger of Saint Louis University to study the genus Cottus; a group of small benthic fishes with flattened heads and enlarged pectoral fins. Cottus is comprised of approximately 42 total species inhabiting both freshwater and marine environments in North America, Japan, and Eurasia. The genus is one of the most poorly studied components of the North American fish fauna. Major problems preventing a more complete understanding of Cottus evolutionary biology include: (1) lack of a hypothesis of relationships among members of the genus; (2) uncertainty concerning the exact number of species in the genus; and (3) questions as to whether the members of the genus form a cohesive or logical group. To address these problems the investigators propose to generate a hypothesis of relationships among Cottus species using bases of DNA sequence data. The hypothesis of relationships will provide a foundation to address the three major problems discussed above and allow for the evaluation of two interesting evolutionary questions. First, the hypothesis can be used to reconstruct the evolutionary history of transitions between marine and freshwater environments, a fascinating evolutionary phenomenon because it involves modification of several physiological mechanisms that allow organisms to cope with extremely different environments. Second, the phylogenetic hypothesis can be used to assess hypotheses responsible for the speciation and the distribution of members of the genus: (1) the break up of the supercontinent Pangea; (2) connections created by land bridges; and (3) dispersal between freshwater and marine environments. Further, the investigators proposed work will provide the framework for future research on Cottus evolutionary biology and furnish important information concerning those Cottus species of conservation concern doc20573 none Neuroendocrine mechanisms underlying rapid change in social behavior ( ) Principal Investigator: John Robert Godwin Doctoral Student: Katharine Anne Semsar Both environmental and internal physiological influences affect the expression of sexual and aggressive behavior by animals including humans. For species that live in unpredictable environments, the appropriateness of displaying sexual and or aggressive behavior can change quickly. A good deal of research has focused on adaptations to changes in the physical environment, but social environments can be equally unpredictable and it is therefore important that animals be able to adapt their behavior quickly in the face of social change as well. A large body of work over the past twenty years has documented important roles for neuropeptide hormones in mediating social behaviors ranging from mating and parental care to mate guarding and territorial defense. Two neuropeptide hormones found to play especially prominent roles are arginine vasotocin (AVT) in non-mammalian vertebrates and the very similar arginine vasopressin found in mammals (AVP). These hormones are released in the brain and act to alter neural function in areas known to be associated with social behavior. While many studies have shown effects of these hormones on behavior in the laboratory, there are still relatively few studies that have examined the detailed mechanisms by which AVT or AVP affect sexual and aggressive behavior in the full complexity of the natural environment. This study would explore mechanisms by which AVT affects sexual and aggressive behavior and the social and hormonal conditions that determine the nature of the effects of this hormone on these behaviors. The experimental model is the bluehead wrasse (Thalassoma bifasciatum), a well studied sex- and role-changing coral reef fish. Bluehead wrasses exhibit socially controlled female-to-male sex change in which females can become functional males within approximately ten days of becoming socially dominant. This model species has two principal advantages for the type of study proposed. First, the dependence of the sex change process on cues from the social environment makes it a very good system for understanding social influences on neural function and the interaction of environmental and internal hormonal cues in controlling behavior. Second, because of large populations in shallow, protected waters and extraordinary ease of capture for marking and experimental manipulations, bluehead wrasses allow the mechanisms underlying neuropeptide actions to be studied in nature. Previous work by John Godwin has shown that AVT expression increases in the hypothalamus as females begin to exhibit male behavior and their ovaries become testis during sex change. Studies by Katharine Semsar and John Godwin have shown that AVT can induce territorial aggression and courtship behavior in large males who do not hold territories while an AVT receptor blocker can reduce these behaviors in territory-holding males. The studies outlined in this proposal would determine: i) whether AVT is necessary for females to become males behaviorally and whether augmenting AVT can accelerate this process, ii) whether the ability to respond to AVT, as measured by receptors for this hormone, changes during sex change, and iii) what the effects of a potent androgenic hormone that rises during sex change (11-ketotestosterone) are on the expression of AVT and its receptor in the brain. This work should improve our understanding of behavioral adaptation and the role of neuropeptide hormones in these processes. These mechanisms are of strong basic interest, but also important more generally because of the societal costs of aggressive behavior doc20574 none DISSERTATION RESEAERCH: Effect of Body Size and Development on Gas Exchange Mechanisms in Insects: Diffusion vs. Convection Jon F. Harrison Kendra J. Greenlee Delivery of oxygen in organisms occurs by two basic mechanisms, convection and diffusion. Determining the relative importance of these mechanisms is fundamental to understanding gas exchange in any organism. Convection occurs when pressure generated by respiratory muscles causes bulk movement of air. Diffusion occurs by passive movement of oxygen molecules from areas of high concentration to areas of lower concentration. For insects, the relative role of convection and diffusion in gas exchange is highly controversial. Past evidence supports the notion that some insects can sustain their energy demands through diffusion of oxygen alone. However, many insects exhibit pressure-generating behaviors, such as abdominal pumping in grasshoppers. In particular, it is thought that the relative importance of convection may increase with insect body size. In this study, the relative importance of diffusion and convection to insect gas exchange will be quantified by manipulating the ability of oxygen to diffuse using different carrier gases. Generally, air contains 21% oxygen and 79% nitrogen. Substituting helium or sulfur hexaflouride for nitrogen alters the oxygen diffusion coefficient, making it easier or more difficult, respectively, for oxygen to move by diffusion. The grasshoppers metabolic response to lowered oxygen levels will be measured in all three carrier gases. If grasshoppers are breathing by diffusion, their metabolic responses should be strongly affected by these manipulations. Conversely, if grasshoppers breathe by convection, their metabolic responses to hypoxia will not be affected by variations in carrier gas. To test whether the relative importance of diffusion and convection varies with size, these experiments will be performed with juvenile (small) and adult (large) grasshoppers. To further test the importance of diffusion and convection in insects, grasshoppers will be anesthetized with ketamine to prevent abdominal pumping movements. If convection does become increasingly important in larger insects, ketamine is predicted to have a much stronger effect on metabolic responses to hypoxia in larger grasshoppers. Together, these experiments will provide the first empirical tests of the relative importance of diffusion and convection in insects of different sizes doc20575 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: Statistical modeling and predictability of nonlinear dispersive waves Cai The central theme of this research is the statistical predictability and the development of effective dynamics for spatially extended, multi-scale nonlinear systems in general, and nonlinear dispersive waves in particular. Modeling complex behavior exhibited by multi-scale nonlinear dynamics often entails an effective description of large scale, coarse-grained dynamics. Their resolution requires a precise mathematical characterization of all spatial and temporal excitations present in systems. The issue of quantification of statistical properties of long-time, large-scale dynamics of spatiotemporal chaos will be addressed in a near-integrable setting and in a system in which the separation of scales, as well as instability, can be precisely tuned and controlled. Once a good statistical characterization is obtained, it can provide not only guidance in modeling coarse-grained dynamics but also statistical calibrations of these effective models against the original full dynamics. With these statistical insights, the research further focuses on the study of coarse-grained dynamics and invariant measures for two possible situations --- namely, dynamics with and without separation of scales. The projects also address important aspects of dispersive wave turbulence: clarification of the derivation of kinetic equations and their validation; and detailed characterization of resonance conditions, flux dynamics, and spatially localized, coherent structures. A multitude of spatiotemporal scales may arise in modeling problems in modern science, ranging from molecular dynamics simulation of protein folding to short term climate prediction for coupled atmosphere-ocean dynamics --- the study of which has great impact on our daily world. This project investigates mathematical methods that can be used to understand and predict the complicated behavior of systems of this type doc20576 none This grant supports research and education at an undergraduate institution (RUI) and focuses on the novel aspects of the physics of strongly interacting electrons that are confined to bilayers or superlattices. A major emphasis is placed on mentoring undergraduate students by involving them directly in carrying out original research and publishing their work. The research is organized around three well-defined projects that have been chosen according to two criteria: (1) a project should address problems in the physics of confined electrons that are intrinsically interesting and novel, and (2) a project should make extensive use of undergraduate contributions to the research, primarily in carrying out computer-based physics calculations. Two of the projects involve calculating properties of interacting electrons in double quantum wells. The third project involves calculating the properties of broken-symmetry states in superlattices. The work proposed here includes the study: of partial pseudospin polarization in quantum Hall bilayers and an effective theory of the nT =1 3 bilayer quantum Hall state, of charge-order of broken-symmetry states of superlattices, and of the effects of interlayer correlation in bilayer hole systems. Parts of this research will be carried out in collaboration with experimentalists. Each project has computational aspects that are suitable for mentored undergraduates working with the PI. Calculations will emphasize experimentally measurable physical properties of these multilayer systems. This RUI award will have an impact on the education of undergraduates at Boise State; they will be exposed to problems at the frontiers of theoretical condensed matter physics research. Although the nature of the subject is technical, the PI has been successful in carrying out and publishing condensed-matter-physics research with undergraduate students, including students from groups that have been traditionally under-represented in physics. %%% This grant supports research and education at an undergraduate institution (RUI) and focuses on the novel aspects of the physics of strongly interacting electrons that are confined to two or more closely spaced two-dimensional layers. The PI will study new electronic phases in these high mobility semiconductor structures that are stabilized by a strong magnetic field applied perpendicular to the layers. A major emphasis is placed on mentoring and educating undergraduate students by involving them directly in carrying out original research and publishing their work. This RUI award will expose undergraduates at Boise State to areas of fundamental condensed matter physics that are at the forefront of current theoretical research and may shape future electronic device technologies. Although the nature of the subject is technical, the PI has been successful in carrying out and publishing condensed-matter-physics research with undergraduate students, including students from groups that have been traditionally under-represented in physics doc20577 none The goal of this project is to investigate the role played by diverse representational modes in the learning of physics and chemistry concepts. We will explore the relationship between the form of representation of complex concepts in physics and chemistry, and students ability to learn these concepts. We will determine the specific learning difficulties that arise as students struggle to master concepts posed in different representational forms, and we will apply our findings immediately to the development of improved curricular materials and instructional methods. We will then assess the effectiveness of these new materials and methods in bringing about greater student mastery of the targeted concepts. The issues we will investigate include the following: 1) What subject-specific learning difficulties may be identified with various forms of representation of particular concepts in the introductory physics and chemistry curriculum? 2) What generalizations may be possible regarding the relative degree of difficulty of various representational modes when compared with each other, in learning of particular concepts? 3) Do individual students do consistently well or poorly with particular forms of representation, with widely varying types of subject matter? 4) Are there any consistent correlations among students relative performance with different representational modes, and parameters such as major field, gender, age, learning style, etc.? 5) Does the overuse or under-use of certain types of representational forms in standard instruction have any potential impact on members of traditionally under-represented groups? Test instruments, consisting of sets of closely matched problems presented in several different forms of representation, will be administered simultaneously to all students in a class. Analysis of students responses will allow us to determine whether the learning difficulties are concept-related or representation-related, or both. We will develop and validate many of these closely matched problem sets, dealing with a wide variety of basic topics in the introductory curricula. These will be administered to students enrolled in both algebra-based and calculus-based courses, at Iowa State University and at other institutions. We will also conduct and record many clinical interviews with individual students in order to probe in more depth their understanding of multiple representations. As we identify widespread learning difficulties related to representational mode, we will develop and test curricular materials specifically designed to address and remedy these obstacles to learning doc20578 none Spatial heterogeneity and movement behavior can greatly influence predator-prey population dynamics. Much progress has been made in understanding the consequences of spatial structure and exploiter behavior using experiments and models. However, despite overwhelming experimental evidence that many prey modify their behavior in the face of predation risk, few models include this important feature. Monarch butterfly larvae exist in a system that is well suited to exploring the effects of both predator and prey behavior in a spatially heterogeneous landscape. Experiments will be performed involving monarch caterpillars and predatory wasps that will reveal the ability of predators to generate positive spatial covariance with prey. Similarly, the ability of prey to generate negative covariance with predators will be measured. Computer simulations and mathematical models will then be built that use this information in order to explore the consequences of incremental changes in spatial structure and predator and prey behavior (e.g., movement rate and distance). Because many species migrate (e.g., birds, fish, ungulates, and monarch butterflies) or immigrate (e.g., corn ear worms and other crop pests) into patchy habitats, the focus is on the consequences of these important components of biological systems to single season dynamics doc20579 none Nitrogen deposition, habitat fragmentation, and inbreeding can reduce the likelihood that a plant population may persist. While many studies explore the effect of a single disturbance, native plant populations are likely to experience multiple and simultaneous disturbances. The efficiency with which individuals acquire and use nitrogen (NUE) affects the response of populations to nitrogen deposition. This response is sensitive to inbreeding caused by fragmentation that can reduce NUE. It is therefore important to investigate these perturbations together. Greenhouse studies with experimentally inbred plants will address the quantitative effect of inbreeding on the acquisition and use of nitrogen. Field studies of fragmented populations will address the effect of fragmentation on inbreeding and NUE. The results of these empirical studies will be used to predict the response of plants in fragmented landscapes to increased nitrogen deposition. These studies will examine the mechanistic basis underlying previously documented responses of populations to perturbation. The work, involving quantitative genetic analysis of the ecologically specific attribute NUE will incorporate genetics into ecosystem and community ecological study. Population persistence is a product of individuals varied responses to the environment. Simultaneous consideration of genetic and environmental contributions to population dynamics is essential as conservation biologists and other scientists make predictions about future persistence doc20529 none Correlation, thermodynamics, dielectric response and collective mode behavior in strongly coupled plasmas will be investigated using a variety of theoretical methods. Physical effects such as dipole-dipole interactions and wake flows are in the models and these are essential to describe existing experiments doc20581 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Charles Mitter and Mr. Christopher Desjardins of the University of Maryland to study the classification and evolutionary history of a group of parasitoid wasps known as the pteromalids. Pteromalids belong to a biologically diverse and economically important parasitoid group known as the chalcidoids, which include over 20,000 described species. At present, however, evolutionary relationships are very poorly understood for parasitoid wasps generally and for pteromalids in particular. In this study we seek to advance the state of parasitoid classification by using both anatomical characteristics and DNA sequences to reconstruct evolutionary relationships in pteromalids and related chalcidoids. As previous attempts using other genes have not solved the problem, three nuclear genes not previously examined in these wasps, but potentially of great utility for wasp classification, will be studied. In addition, a previously enigmatic subset of pteromalids, known as the diparines, will be reclassified in more detail, enabling entomologists worldwide to identify these wasps. Parasitoid wasps are minute insects that prey on immature stages of other insects, including many pests. They are a dominant feature of terrestrial biodiversity, possibly numbering several hundred thousand species. They are also critical to environmentally sound agriculture, often providing control of agricultural pests that reduces or eliminates the need for insecticides. Hundreds of millions of dollars are saved annually by parasitoid wasps controlling pests of crops as varied as range grass in Texas and cassava in Africa. A phylogenetic classification of parasitoid wasps, in which species are grouped by their degree of evolutionary relatedness, will be essential for understanding how the great diversity of parasitoids has arisen; for organizing current knowledge of the varied ecology, physiology, and behavior of these wasps; and for allowing intelligent prediction of which species are the most promising biological control agents for a given pest doc20582 none Habitat loss and conversion are major contributors to biodiversity loss. This dissertation research project addresses how land use conversions may contribute to morphological changes in butterflies, ultimately changing dispersal capabilities and influencing evolutionary pathways. The objectives of the project are: 1) To evaluate the effectiveness of dispersal proxies for butterflies; 2) To determine the effects of urban growth patterns and habitat fragmentation on butterfly dispersal; and 3) To evaluate whether dispersal morphology in selected California butterfly species has changed in response to landscape changes. Butterflies exhibit a range of dispersal behavior from sedentary to mobile. These behavior differences contribute to a species success in spatially structured populations. Within a population there also exists a range of dispersal capabilities that are influenced by selective pressures from the environment. Thus, changes in the distribution of habitat can alter dispersal capability through selection, ultimately reflected in morphology. This project will use an urban growth model to analyze different landscape patterns using measures of connectivity for different disperser types. Museum specimens will be used to investigate morphological changes over time in six butterfly species. The results of this research will enhance our understanding of how land use changes and landscape patterns influence population processes that may lead to evolutionary changes or species extinctions doc20583 none Molecular markers (mitochondrial DNA sequences) are used to quantify population genetic structure in geographically widespread species of Anolis lizards (anoles) on each of four islands in the Greater Antilles. Caribbean anoles provide an outstanding opportunity for testing the impact of ecological specialization on genetic structures of otherwise similar species using replicated observations. Similar kinds of habitat specialists have evolved independently in anoles on each of the four islands in the Greater Antilles. These specialists differ ecologically but are similar with regard to other factors thought to affect population structure (i.e. life history, geographic distribution, age of origin, reproductive behavior). A species genetic structure has important consequences for many aspects of its biology, including its probability of giving rise to new species or going extinct. The results of this study assess the importance of habitat specialization for production and maintenance of biodiversity in ecological communities, and the priority of habitat specialization as a consideration in conservation practices doc20584 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Ferran Garcia-Pichel and Jean M. Schmidt at Arizona State University, in collaboration with Dr. Richard M. Keller at NASA Ames Research Center to conduct a survey of the microbial diversity present in biological soil crusts of North America. In arid lands, where plant cover is restricted, a half-inch thick live mantle of microbes develops in the topsoil that traps soil particles together and enriches the soils with organic carbon and nitrogen. Known as biological desert crusts, they cover spaces between plants, stabilizing the soil against wind erosion and preventing formation of blow-sands. There is presently a lack of knowledge regarding the microbial species inhabiting these important and widespread topsoil habitats. In a variety of sites of North American deserts and semi-deserts, the investigators will embark in an effort to detect and document local bacteria important in terms of abundance or novelty. For this, they will use modern DNA technology. They will also attempt to cultivate those microbes in the laboratory. Two repositories will be established. A DNA database will enable the future recognition of crust microbes by other investigators. Cultivated bacteria will be characterized with respect to their ecological role and properties, and will be deposited in public culture collections for the benefit of the scientific and biotechnology community at large. It is expected that these documentation and repositories will constitute the base for improved knowledge of desert bacterial communities, complementing our understanding of desert ecology, facilitating sound rangeland management, and enabling bioremediation attempts in heavily impacted arid areas doc20585 none Identifying the mechanisms that structure local communities is a fundamental goal of community ecology. Historically, ecologists invoked local processes to explain community structure, but equivocal evidence has broadened debate to include the potential importance of regional processes in structuring communities. Though experimentation has proven critical in resolving issues in ecology, theoretical and observational studies have, thus far, been the primary tools used to examine the effects of regional processes. I propose a series of novel experiments to test theories that span the range between local and regional control of diversity. Local process, metapopulation competition, and neutral community theories make predictions about the effects of immigration that are qualitatively different, mutually exclusive, and testable in the same immigration experiments. Using a laboratory system of Tribolium flour beetles and a field system of Cecropia petiole beetles, I will experimentally test these theories by simultaneously manipulating immigration regime and interaction strength (lab), and exposure to immigration and distance from colonization source (field). Though recently developed theory suggests regional processes can have a dominant effect on community structure, the theory must first be confirmed empirically if community ecology is to gain insight from the regional process perspective doc20586 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Frederick Sheldon and Mr. Christopher Witt at Louisiana State University to study the evolutionary origins of the exceptionally high species diversity of birds found in the Neotropics. Although biologists have known for centuries that the global distribution of biodiversity is skewed towards the tropics, little is understood about the phylogenetic relationships of tropical organisms and the historical events that may have led to their extensive diversification. This study will use museum collections to make DNA comparisons among every available species and population of two families of Neotropical birds, the puffbirds and jacamars. Trees of evolutionary lineages will be reconstructed using analyses that incorporate models of molecular evolution into measurements of DNA similarity. Patterns of new species formation and genetic differentiation will be compared among related groups that share common distributions. In this way, evolutionary trees will be used to infer the ages of evolutionary lineages and to identify the geological and climatic factors that have contributed to modern day diversity at all taxonomic levels. The results will have implications for the ongoing debate regarding relative contributions of long-term geological stability versus recent climatic tumult to the disparity in diversity between temperate and tropical bird faunas. This study will involve collection of DNA data from many related organisms across a broad geographic region. The results will have two primary benefits: (1) inference of evolutionary causes of species diversification; and (2) identification of conservation priorities. Current classifications almost certainly do not adequately represent true genetic diversity in tropical organisms. Genetic studies such as this one are needed to identify cryptic or overlooked species, to recognize areas that harbor significant genetic diversity, and to suggest strategies for protecting both the products and the process of evolution doc20495 none Collaborative Research: Biotic Inventory of the Reptiles and Amphibians of Sulawesi, Indonesia This project will document the biodiversity of the reptile and amphibian fauna of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The island is part of Wallacea, a region that is one of 25 biodiversity hotspots listed by Conservation International. The reptiles and amphibians remain poorly known because the area has received very little attention. A recent survey has doubled the known species of amphibians and there is reason to believe that the number of indigenous species will double again This project is a collaboration between the University of Texas, Louisiana State University, the Bandung Institute of Technology, the University of Indonesia and the Museum Zoologicum Bogoriense. The co-investigators and their Indonesian collaborators will survey selected forested regions of Sulawesi over three years. Sites were selected to allow thorough sampling of the four arms of Sulawesi as well as the island s central core, in both dry and wet seasons. By emphasizing elevational transects, the sites also maximize the diversity of sampled vegetational types. In addition to specimens, collections will include frog calls, tissue samples for DNA analysis, photographs, and extensive habitat and ecological data. Selected endoparasites and ectoparasites will be sampled also. This collaboration includes a training program that will introduce Indonesian students to methods of biodiversity study, including computer cataloguing, specimen preservation, and field inventory. The significance of Sulawesi s role in the history of biogeography cannot be overstated. The field of biogeography was born from Wallace s attempts to understand faunal breaks between Borneo and Sulawesi in the north and Bali and Lombok in the south. Recent knowledge about the region s geological history has begun to illuminate the complementary roles of vicariance and dispersal in shaping biogeographic patterns. The data collected during the course of this project will be the foundation for fine-scale biogeographical studies of the Southeast Asian herpetofauna and its diversification in one of the geologically most complex regions. This information is crucial for decisions about management and conservation of resources in this region doc20588 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Paul Chippindale and Mr. Ronald Bonett of the University of Texas at Arlington to examine phylogenetic relationships, genetic variation, and biogeographic and phylogeographic history of aquatic plethodontid salamanders of the Eurycea multiplicata Typhlotriton spelaeus complex. This group occurs only in the Interior Highlands of the south-central U.S. (Ouachita Mountains and Ozark Plateau), an area with high faunal diversity and many endemic species. Preliminary data indicate that the transforming surface-dwellers Eurycea m. multiplicata and E. m. griseogaster, the nontransforming species E. tynerensis, and the enigmatic cave-dweller Typhlotriton spelaeus share a recent common ancestor and have undergone a major radiation in the region. Numerous undescribed species appear to be present. Mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequences, allozymes, and morphology will be used to reconstruct relationships, and the diverse life history strategies and morphologies in the group will be examined in a phylogenetic context. In collaboration with the Joint Genome Institute, entire mitochondrial genomes will be sequenced for 19 members of the complex plus outgroups to further assess relationships and species diversity. This work will provide an understanding of the factors that have shaped biodiversity and species distributions in the Interior Highlands, and likely will result in recognition of several new species. Such an approach is fundamental for conservation of these salamanders and the sensitive stream and cave habitats in which they occur. This research will involve tests of biogeographic hypotheses regarding geological and climatic events that have structured the complex, and will provide a framework within which to trace life-history and morphological change. This represents one of the first applications of entire mitochondrial genome sequences to such problems, will have wide-ranging implications for studies of phylogeny and biodiversity, and will identify portions of the mitochondrial genome that are most informative at a variety of phylogenetic scales doc20589 none The proposed research explores the mathematical and physical aspects of particle transport in one-dimensional channels. Mean-field analysis of Asymmetric Exclusion Processes (ASEP) will be studied analytically and extended to include spatially varying pore-particle interactions and time-dependent behavior. A three-state ASEP will also be developed for modeling proton conduction along water wires. Mean-field and Monte Carlo simulations will be used to obtain steady-state proton currents as functions of both proton concentration and electric potential differences across the pore. Finally, an analysis of interacting particle transport across periodically structured pores will be performed. Analogies with commensurate-incommensurate phase transitions will be explored within Frenkel-Kontorowa type models. Pore transport is a general process vital for separations and catalysis technologies, electrochemical applications, and cell function. In the limit of small, molecular-sized pores connecting two particle reservoirs, the motions of the transported species can be restricted to one dimension. One-dimensional pores are reasonable models for an enormous number of systems including ion channels in cells (which mediate electrolyte balance) and zeolites (minerals that are used to separate hydrocarbon products and mediate chemical reactions). Therefore, theoretical models that can predict the rate at which molecules enter and react within structured one-dimensional channels will aid in the design of molecularly tailored pores in both the industrial and biological settings. Computational simulations will be used to validate the proposed theoretical models doc20590 none Professor Margaret Murnane of the University of Colorado is funded by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program to study femtosecond dynamics of well-characterized adsorbate surface systems using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) and x-ray radiation. New shorter wavelengths of light produced through high harmonic generation will be utilized to access adsorbate core levels. In particular, charge transfer dynamics will be studied when oxygen on single crystal platinum (111) is subjected to laser pulses five femtoseconds in length. Also, the oxidation of CO on this same crystal face is to be examined. The ability to measure dynamics of a surface reactant as it evolves between different equilibrium states by photoemission has been very restricted, because ultrafast x-ray sources with sufficient flux and short pulse duration have not been available until very recently. The femtosecond and picosecond timescales are appropriate to the basic atomic motions underlying surface reactions. The work will increase our understanding of charge transfer processes on surfaces. Charge transfer is a chemical phenomenon underlying diverse processes such as electrochemistry and biochemistry. The area of femtochemistry was recently recognized as a frontier by the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in doc20591 none For stream-associated organisms with limited dispersal abilities, the historical connections among streams generate predictions about genetic interactions among populations and routes of dispersal between drainage systems. We use the temporal and spatial variation present in mitochondrial gene lineages to investigate the relationship between the geological history of stream drainages and geographic genetic fragmentation in plethodontid salamanders of the Eurycea bislineata species complex. Plethodontid salamanders of the Eurycea bislineata species complex are common in streams throughout the Interior Lowland, Appalachian Highland, Piedmont and Coastal Plain physiographic provinces of eastern North America. Intensive research on the plethodontid salamander fauna of eastern North America has uncovered high levels of genetic structuring among populations and numerous cryptic species in this group, whose endemism and species diversity are greater in the southern Appalachian Mountains than any other region in the United States. Our research provides insight into the historical factors affecting diversification in this species-rich group of vertebrates. At a broader level, this research has implications for understanding factors that generate and maintain biodiversity in stream-associated organisms of eastern North America doc20592 none Pleistocene Impacts on the Evolution of Alpine Plant-Insect Interactions DeChaine, EG and AP Martin Communities may be ephemeral aggregations of species or may be stable, wherein members evolve in cohort over time. This study will infer the openness of alpine plant-insect communities and the relative impact of biotic and abiotic factors on the evolution of interacting species. The history of alpine plant-insect communities of the Rocky Mountains will be inferred by comparative phylogeography of two specialized plant-insect associations. Phylogenies for each species will be constructed from genetic polymorphisms. Phylogenies will be compared within specialized plant-insect pairs as well as between unassociated organisms to infer the relative influence of biotic and abiotic factors. Preliminary analysis suggests that specialized plant-insect pairs share a common history and that the geographic structure of genetic diversity is due to historic fragmentation of the alpine followed by post-glacial range expansion. This study will reveal the relative importance of historic abiotic and biotic interactions on the composition of alpine plant-insect communities doc20593 none Ecological processes are key to global efforts to maintain biological diversity. Pollination is an essential ecological process, but widespread habitat fragmentation is disrupting native plant-pollinator interactions worldwide and threatens long-term conservation of native communities. Habitat fragmentation reduces populations, and recent studies have revealed a positive correlation between population size and plant reproductive success. The major challenge is to understand the mechanisms underlying this correlation. In the proposed work, three possible causes of the above correlation will be examined: 1) reduced pollinator attraction could lower reproductive success in fragments, 2) lower pollinator diversity in fragments may increase pollinator limitation, and 3) smaller population sizes may result in greater inbreeding (and concomitant inbreeding depression). These mechanisms will explored for two species, Geranium viscosissimum and Asclepias speciosa, using both observational and experimental approaches doc20594 none Plants introduced into new ranges are often more vigorous and invasive than they are native ranges. To explain these differences, several hypotheses relating to new environments have been proposed. This research tests an alternative hypothesis: that differences in vigor and seed production may be due to genetic differences in the plants themselves. The annual cheatgrass was introduced into New Zealand and North America over 100 years ago with radically different results. In the southern part of New Zealand s South Island, it persists at low levels; in western North America, it dominates vast areas. In four greenhouse environments, 62 populations from native areas in Europe and the introduced regions were compared. North American populations were most vigorous (tallest, greatest vegetative and reproductive weights), followed by European, then New Zealand populations. This supports the hypothesis that invasive or non-invasive performance can be genetically based and differ from region to region. Seed germination trials are planned, as is DNA fingerprinting to directly compare introduced populations and their native relatives. The question of what makes a species invasive has been critical in agriculture and natural resource management for decades, but is still not well-understood. This research addresses that question and has important implications for screening potential invaders and controlling cheatgrass and other weeds doc20595 none This research aims to impart an evolutionary and ecological perspective on the study of a model organism, the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. In this nematode, hermaphrodites--individuals with male female reproductive organs--may reproduce alone or via fertilization from males. This research seeks to elucidate the role of males in this species and to explore general features involved in the evolution of outcrossing. In particular: what proximate and ultimate forces influence the ability of males to persist, and at what frequencies? These issues will be addressed by (1) using molecular methods to determine the frequency of males in large lab and natural populations, and (2) performing lab selection experiments to test hypotheses for the maintenance of outcrossing. This work will provide one of the first evolutionary ecological perspectives for C. elegans. This species has been subject to intensive study from genetics (the first animal genome sequenced) and developmental biology (all cell fates are mapped between zygote and adult), but disproportionately little information is available regarding its ecology and the processes underlying the evolution of its unusual breeding system. This research will integrate multiple complementary approaches to characterize a more resonant description of ecology and evolution in this model organism, and bear on general issues in the study of evolution relating to the evolution and maintenance of outcrossing doc20596 none This project involves research in computed tomography, advanced Shannon sampling theory, and applications of sampling theory in tomography. It combines theoretical investigations, numerical analysis, and computational experiments with real world data. Computed tomography is a technique which produces images of the interiors of opaque objects. It is widely used in applications ranging from diagnostic radiology to research in quantum optics. Mathematically it requires the reconstruction of a certain density function from its line integrals. Ordinary tomography is not local: reconstruction at a point requires integrals over lines far from that point. For a number of applications it is highly desirable if only integrals over lines intersecting some region of interest need to be used ( region-of-interest tomography or local tomography ). Shannon sampling theory plays a fundamental role in signal processing. In tomography sampling theorems are used to identify efficient data collection schemes allowing for maximum resolution in the reconstructed image, as well as for error analysis of reconstruction algorithms. The project s research in tomography involves interdisciplinary collaboration and is inspired by the question What features of the density function can be stably recovered from a given collection of its line integrals? . Specific goals include the identification and analysis of optimal sampling schemes in three-dimensional tomography; the analysis of reconstruction algorithms for three-dimensional local tomography with sources on a curve; further development and numerical analysis of high-resolution reconstruction algorithms in two dimensions, and development of a software package for region-of-interest tomography. The research in sampling theory is stimulated by applications in tomography and involves the development and application of new sampling theorems for non-equidistant data; estimates for the aliasing error in various settings; and further exploration of a generalization of the sampling concept in the framework of locally compact abelian groups which provides a unified view of a number of diverse applications doc20597 none Social and ecological influences on the anti-predator defenses of black-tailed prairie dogs: a role for behavior in conservation Donald H. Owings, Ph.D. and Debra M. Shier This project integrates the study of animal behavior and conservation biology by investigating how black-tailed prairie dogs become skillful at dealing with danger from predators. It has long been hypothesized that animals reared in captivity and released into the wild suffer exceptionally high mortality from predation, but to date little organized research has addressed this topic. If this hypothesis receives support, then the conditions that support development of skillful response to predators need to be provided to prairie dogs and other threatened species who are reared in captivity for release and re-establishment of wild populations. Research will test the hypothesis that experience with predators is needed for prairie dogs to learn to be effective in evading predation, and that other family members are an especially important source of that learning in this highly social species. Though an animal s social environment has been shown to affect the development of behaviors such as novel foraging strategies, the impact of social inputs on the development of defensive behavior has received little attention. Over the course of four field seasons, three experiments will be conducted to examine 1) whether animals trapped and moved in family groups show a higher survival rate following release to a new site than animals trapped and moved without regard to family composition; 2) if repeated exposure to predators during the first few weeks of life affects the development of effective antipredator behavior; and 3) how the presence of the mother, other experienced relatives, and or inexperienced siblings affect the development of defensive behavior doc20598 none Malaria is a major cause of illness and mortality in humans. Every year nearly 500 million people suffer from malaria and upward of 2 million people die from this tropical parasitic disease. Some human populations that have historically lived in regions with high levels of malaria infections carry genetic resistance factors to the disease. Among these genetic resistance factors are some variants (alleles) of the gene coding for glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD). Thus G6pd is subject to positive natural selection in some human populations in malarious areas. Few examples of positive natural selection are recognized at the molecular level in humans and the effect of selection on the genome is not yet well understood. To understand the effect of selection on DNA nucleotide variability and to identify a signature of positive natural selection at the molecular level, this research will describe patterns of nucleotide variability within and around the gene coding for G6PD in humans. Specifically, this research will describe patterns of nucleotide variability within G6pd, and at ten other neighboring genes spanning over 2 Mb around G6pd in two distinct human populations from Africa and Iraq that bear independently arisen polymorphisms at G6pd that confer resistance to malaria. A random sample of 50 individuals from the Luo of Kenya, and 50 Iraqi Jews will be used in the study to (i) characterize the signature of selection on G6pd, (ii) characterize variation at loci linked to G6pd, (iii) estimate the age of the selected alleles based on patterns of nucleotide variability, and (iv) compare G6pd systems in Africa and Iraq to distinguish between deterministic factors (e.g. natural selection) and stochastic factors (e.g. genetic drift) that are responsible for shaping the observed nucleotide patterns. Patterns of nucleotide variability found in this study at G6pd that are due to selection by malaria will shed light on the evolutionary history of the association between Plasmodium falciparum (the primary human malaria parasite) and humans, a topic that is still not clearly understood. Furthermore, the ability to recognize the signature of positive natural selection in general at the molecular level in humans will be useful to possibly identify additional human genes that are subject to selection by various infectious diseases and ecological factors doc20599 none Biogeochemical models are critical for our understanding of global net primary production (NPP), a key piece of the carbon cycle. Because such models require more input parameters than can be readily measured over large areas, a subset of those parameters are assigned according land surface vegetative type (landcover type). Because this simplification masks variability within landcover types, it leads to potential error in NPP output. The existing PhD project utilizes a probabilistic approach to examine the potential error, focusing on the BiomeBGC process model. The three parameters of interest are foliar carbon:nitrogen ratio, specific leaf area, and leaf retention time. The proposed study will use field sampling across a climatic gradient to examine possible links between these parameters and climate within the conifer landcover class in Oregon. Lack of correlation would support current modeling strategies, while existence of correlation would be used to construct improved maps of input parameters. NPP modeled using these maps will be compared against output derived using single values within the conifer class. These numerical experiments, in combination with a variety of on-going field NPP measurements, will significantly improve our ability to simulate NPP over a broad area of coniferous forest in the Pacific Northwest doc20600 none The investigators will conduct a survey of genetic variation for a set of fitness related genes (the Major Histocompatability Complex or Mhc) in a locally threatened endemic canid, the Island fox (Urocyon littoralis). The goal is to understand the role that natural selection has played in maintaining variation in small populations. This understanding will also allow for a more effective management of the endangered Island fox and other species that are declining or threatened. An initial survey of polymorphism at the Mhc has revealed an unprecedented level of genetic variation in Island foxes. The investigators will survey molecular variation of four Mhc genes in Island foxes using PCR (polymerase chain reaction) based techniques, and compare this to the null model of neutral genetic variation. Mhc genes are integral to vertebrate immune function, and variation in the Mhc affects individual fitness (e.g. resistance or susceptibility to pathogens). This study will attempt to illuminate, though direct observation and computer simulation, the strength of natural selection necessary to maintain genetic variation in a species with limited genetic variation. These results will have direct implications for conservation and management of the Island fox, as well as provide a greater understanding of the extent of natural selection operating upon an immunologically important set of genes doc20601 none PROJECT SUMMARY Recently, there has been growing interest in legume-rhizobia associations as model systems for studying mutualisms, but a central obstacle is that little is known about the genetic structure of native communities. We know that associations can be specific or promiscuous, but very few studies have described spatial or temporal variation in native rhizobia-legume communities. We intent to examine levels of spatial and temporal variation in communities of rhizobia and legumes in natural environments. We will compare associations at various geographic scales, from within nodules to between canyons. We will measure how associations change over time, considering variation between months, seasons, and years. By considering specificity of associations and the genetic structure of a native community, our goal is to better understand the potential for coevolution to shape this mutualism. The proposed work uses sequences from strains from 15 plant species to characterize the effect of plant taxa, microhabitat differences, and seasonal differences on rhizobial genetic variation and specificity of associations. We will contribute to the understanding of this imporant mutualism by seeking to describe natural systems in detail, characterizing rhizobial genetic diversity, and measuring the extent that specialization and generalization is achieved in naturally evolving populations doc20602 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Andre Wyss and Ms. Robin Whatley at the University of California, Santa Barbara to study the evolutionary history of a group of plant-eating reptiles that roamed the earth alongside the earliest dinosaurs and mammal ancestors. Commonly found in sediments spanning the Triassic Period (250 - 208 million years ago), these extinct reptiles, called rhynchosaurs, were long divided into three main sub-groups characterized by specific tooth types corresponding to the Early, Middle, and Late sub-divisions of the Triassic Period. Rhynchosaurs have thus been widely used to date Triassic fossil-bearing sediments, and to correlate faunas around the world. Recently, rhynchosaurs with dentitions and other skeletal features transitional between those assigned to Middle and Late Triassic ages have been found in Brazil, Argentina, and Madagascar. Several new features observed in the rhynchosaur from Madagascar have been noted in the literature, but never incorporated into studies of rhynchosaur relationships. Moreover, prior studies have not encompassed all rhynchosaurs, but instead have focused on representative Early, Middle, or Late forms. The primary goal of the proposed research is to construct a comprehensive evolutionary tree for rhynchosaurs from first-hand observation and measurement of all fossils belonging to this group, especially those from Brazil, Argentina, Africa and Madagascar. The rhynchosaur from Madagascar is of special interest, as it occurs in a recently discovered fauna with some of the earliest dinosaurs known worldwide. Whether this fauna is Middle or Late Triassic in age is very much open to question, an uncertainty stemming partly from the disputed identification of its rhynchosaur, Isalorhynchus. Comprehensive analysis of rhynchosaur relationships promises to clarify this ambiguity, and will lead to a better understanding of rhynchosaur evolutionary history. Results of this study will contribute to our understanding of Early Mesozoic vertebrate evolution, providing further biochronologic control for this important time of diversification in the fossil record doc20603 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Cristina Takacs-Vesbach (University of New Mexico) and Anna-Louise Reysenbach (Portland State University) to inventory the microbial diversity and geochemistry associated with the major geothermal features of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE: Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho). The GYE comprises the largest and most varied geothermal basin in the world, yet diversity assessments have been limited to only a handful of these thermal springs. The phylogenetic and physiological diversity of 100 thermal sites will be determined using molecular genetic techniques that identify DNA sequences of genes that are molecular signatures for microbial species and metabolic processes. These data, along with geochemical measurements, will be compiled into an Internet accessible database and will be used to develop DNA microarrays, a tool that will enable researchers and managers to rapidly assess the diversity of other thermal sites. The research community will have access to the DNA isolated by this study through the University of New Mexico Museum. The investigators will work with National Park Service personnel to develop on-site educational displays for the general public, in addition to training students, managers, and National Park Service interpretive rangers in microbial ecology through a field course and workshop. As the thermal microbiota of the GYE represents a wealth of untapped genetic potential, developing an inventory linked to an environmental database offers a means of accessing this diversity and will aid in the identification of organisms of potential technological and industrial importance. Furthermore, although the thermal sites occur within Yellowstone National Park and are thus protected, geological (earthquakes), climatological (low aquifer recharge), and anthropomorphic (intensive sampling or regional mining) perturbations have the potential to alter these ecosystems. Until an inventory of these resources is taken, some novel organisms will have incomplete protection simply because their existence is not known; the project will provide a baseline of microbial diversity in the GYE essential to monitoring and managing microbial resources doc20604 none Dissertation Research: Dynamics of Fertilizations: Ecoological Consequences of Flow on Sperm-egg Interactions Dr. Richard K. Zimmer & Jeffrey A. Riffell For marine animals that broadcast spawn, the turbulent nature of the ocean environment into which the gametes are released can drastically influence successful fertilization. Water motion can transport and mix the gametes together, facilitating commingling between sperm and eggs, or it can have a detrimental effect by causing rapid dilution and prevention of sperm-egg encounters. Although flow has long been recognized as a critical factor influencing fertilization, at the scale of the gametes, little is known about the influence of sperm behavior and fluid motion on mediating gamete encounters. To understand the importance of gamete behavior and fluid motion on fertilization, controlled laboratory studies under simulated natural environmental conditions are necessary and vital. Using the red abalone (Haliotis rufescens) as the model organism for exploring fertilization dynamics, this study will establish the influence of gamete behavior, concentration, and fluid motion on sperm-egg interactions. This will be accomplished through three phases of this project: (i) Subtidal surveys will census adult abalone populations and flow measurements will be taken to characterize aspects of the hydrodynamic environment within typical abalone habitat (subtidal kelp beds), allowing us to scale our laboratory flow-tank experiments, (ii) laboratory flow tank experiments will examine the influence of turbulence (shear) and gamete concentration on fertilization, and (iii) sperm chemosensory-mediated behavior will be examined under simulated natural flow conditions. Fertilization has been implicated as an important factor regulating population dynamics in many animals, particularly in marine organisms that broadcast their sperm and eggs into the sea. Along the western coast of the United States, abalones are commercially valuable but ecologically endangered resource. By providing new information on physical and behavioral mechanisms mediating fertilization success, this study should have significant implications for managing and restoring threatened abalone populations doc20605 none Colonies of the red harvester ant, Pogonomyrmex barbatus, consist of a single, multiply mated queen, and many sterile workers. Throughout her lifetime, the queen lays eggs that develop into workers, or reproductives, that is, males and virgin queens. In most social insects caste determination, whether an individual develops into a queen or a worker, is governed by environmental factors such as nutrition or incubation temperature of the eggs. However, our analyses of non-coding DNA regions called microsatellites revealed that in the red harvester ant, an individual s genotype predicts its caste. The proposed research will investigate how genetic caste determination affects a colony s development. The research will test whether queens that have mated with a single male, or multiple males of the same genotype, will have only males among their reproductives. Monitoring queens and genotyping their eggs will test whether eggs destined to become reproductives will not complete their development. This dissertation project will show how, under this unusual genetic system of caste determination, a colony can adjust the allocation of its resources to reproduction versus growth. This may reveal novel ways in which evolution by natural selection operates on colonies of social insects doc20606 none For the first out of four topics, the main goal is to understand the typical sphere, where sphere here means a two-dimensional Riemannian manifold that is topologically a sphere, and typical means chosen according to a canonical uniform probability measure. The approach is to consider a limit of measures on discrete structures, where the concept of uniformity is meaningful. The co-investigator intends to construct a limiting measure for the graph metric induced by uniformly chosen planar graphs on n vertices. Experimental and heuristic evidence suggests that the limiting measure will have the structure of a continuum tree. For the second topic, the co-investigator intends to study the implications of previous work on the relationship between random walks and geometry on graphs in the context of Brownian motion on Riemannian manifolds. The third topic concerns the stochastic Loewner evolution, introduced by Schramm as a conjectured scaling limit for percolation and loop-erased walk. These and several other conjectures concerning this process have been proved and yet others remain open. The fourth topic is probability in groups. The co-investigator intends to continue to work on automorphism groups of regular trees, which are fundamental objects of study in the theory of p-groups. All four parts of the project involve more than one area of mathematics, increasing understanding between fields. The common motivation is to understand better fundamental mathematical objects that are often of utilitarian use. In particular, the second part concerns random walks on graphs, a topic which has been applied in the design of efficient computer algorithms. The fourth part concerns randomness in groups, a topic which has been used successfully in the telecommunications industry for encryption and error-correction doc20607 none This proposal deals with the design and analysis of efficient algorithms for the class of hybrid systems called (discrete-time) piecewise linear (PL) systems. The area of hybrid systems concerns issues of modeling, computation and control for systems which combine discrete and continuous components. The subclass of PL systems, which we investigate in this project, provides one systematic approach to discrete-time hybrid systems, naturally blending switching mechanisms with classical linear components. PL systems are of interest as controllers as well as identification models, and they can be thought of as arbitrary interconnections of finite automata and linear systems. Tools from automata theory, logic and related areas of computer science and finite mathematics are used in the study of PL systems, in conjunction with linear algebra techniques, all in the context of a ``PL algebra formalism. In this project, we will study basic algorithmic and computational problems for these problems with applications to modelling of biological systems. More concretely, basic questions for any class of systems are those of equivalence, and, in particular, whether state spaces are equivalent under a change of variables. This project will address various algorithmic and computational challenges related to this state-space equivalence and isomorphism problem for PL systems, as well as questions of learnability and representability for such systems. The project also suggests the use of PL models for differential gene expression testing doc20608 none This project addresses the microscopic mechanism of a cation-exchange process for synthesis of highly volatile compounds, such as Hg-based high-Tc superconductors. These materials have desirable features for superconducting device technologies: Tc~130K and large current-carrying capability at temperatures above 77 K. Their highly volatile nature, however, limits the conven-tional thermal-reaction process since a delicate control of phase equilibrium required for synthesis of high-purity samples is difficult to achieve. The approach employs a cation-exchange proc-ess in an unconventional growth mechanism. A less-volatile precursor matrix is selected with a related crystalline structure and chemical composition to a desired volatile compound. Volatile compounds can then be formed by perturbing one or more cations on the precursor matrix and replacing them with volatile cations. Although the cation exchange process has been applied suc-cessfully to synthesis of high- quality Hg-HTS films and bulks, the mechanism of cation exchange is barely understood at the microscopic level. Understanding this mechanism is a central goal of this research as it is crucial not only to the ability to develop Hg-HTS electronic electrical devices, but also to generalization of the process for synthesizing other technological important materials that may not be achievable in conventional processes. The effect of growth defects, grain boundaries, and chemical doping on the cation exchange behavior at the microscopic level will be studied so as to achieve a thorough understanding of the macroscopic behavior of the ca-tion exchange as a function of processing parameters. Theoretical modeling of the cation ex-change process will also be carried out to gain a more thorough understanding of the fundamental physics involved. %%% The project addresses fundamental synthesis and processing research issues in a topical area of materials science having technological relevance. The project is collaborative with interactions among researchers at U. Kansas, U. WI, Stanford U., U. IL at Chicago, several government labo-ratories (AFRL, ORNL, Sandia, LANL, and ANL), and an industrial organization, Supercon-ducting Technologies, Inc. Graduate and undergraduate students play a primary role in the project and are exposed to research opportunities across several disciplines with access to a broad range of research equipment and facilities doc20607 none This proposal deals with the design and analysis of efficient algorithms for the class of hybrid systems called (discrete-time) piecewise linear (PL) systems. The area of hybrid systems concerns issues of modeling, computation and control for systems which combine discrete and continuous components. The subclass of PL systems, which we investigate in this project, provides one systematic approach to discrete-time hybrid systems, naturally blending switching mechanisms with classical linear components. PL systems are of interest as controllers as well as identification models, and they can be thought of as arbitrary interconnections of finite automata and linear systems. Tools from automata theory, logic and related areas of computer science and finite mathematics are used in the study of PL systems, in conjunction with linear algebra techniques, all in the context of a ``PL algebra formalism. In this project, we will study basic algorithmic and computational problems for these problems with applications to modelling of biological systems. More concretely, basic questions for any class of systems are those of equivalence, and, in particular, whether state spaces are equivalent under a change of variables. This project will address various algorithmic and computational challenges related to this state-space equivalence and isomorphism problem for PL systems, as well as questions of learnability and representability for such systems. The project also suggests the use of PL models for differential gene expression testing doc20610 none This grant provides funds to support an annual engineering design contest to be held in conjunction with the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) National Conference. All members of SHPE student chapters will be eligible. Students will work in teams of two to six to provide the design and a prototype of a commercially marketable product that is a benefit to mankind and improves quality of life. The design shall not be a duplicate of an existing product, but may be an enhancement of an existing product. About ten finalists will represent their student chapters in a formal presentation run-off, and a winner will be selected by a panel of four to six judges. The selected students will be funded to travel to and attend the National Conference, where the final competition will be held. It is expected that this activity will help to attract Hispanic students into engineering and to improve their retention rates. It also will provide an interesting and useful experience to those who participate doc20611 none Mathematics (21) Mathematics placement examinations are widely used in higher education because adequate preparation is extremely important for student success in mathematics courses. However, our survey indicates that most placement testing falls short of its potential value for assessment and learning due either to the tests themselves or the way in which they are (not) used. In this project, we are creating a testing system accessible on the Internet that includes placement tests, practice exams, and online explanations of concepts and solutions for students who require more assistance. One of the main aims of this project is to improve the curriculum through assessment. Therefore, we also plan to use this tool to assess the effectiveness of selected mathematics courses by administering exit exams. Such outcomes-based assessment is currently being encouraged by accreditation agencies. Our plan is to do this by linking placement exams in a given course to the exit exam in its prerequisite course. We are also making the system available to high school students and their advisors in order to assess readiness for college level math courses. Such Early Placement Tests have been given to high school sophomores and juniors in several states across the country for years. The integration of an early placement test into our system is simply one more piece in a comprehensive system of placement, assessment and learning to improve curriculum and instruction doc20612 none The overall objective of the proposed project is to understand the molecular interaction between solute and supercritical fluid (SCFs) solvents. Both experimental techniques and a theoretical approach will be applied to investigate the role of solvent density and solvation in enol-keto tautomerism. The objectives of this work are: 1) The enol-keto tautomeric equilibrium constant in supercritical carbon dioxide and ethane will be estimated by using Fourier Transform infrared spectroscopy. The density of solvent will be adjusted by varying the temperature and pressure to investigate the effect of density on enol-keto tautomerism. 2) The role of solvation will also be investigated by comparing the tautomeric equilibrium constants in supercritical carbon dioxide with those in supercritical ethane. The quadrapole moment for carbon dioxide may lead to a chemical interaction with solutes (mono- and bicarbonyl compounds). 3) Theoretical tautomeric equilibrium constants in SCF solvent will be determined by using the lattice fluid hydrogen bonding model. The modeling work will reflect the interactions between solute and solvent in a quantitative manner. The significance of this proposed research is that it is likely to produce an expansion of the potential uses of SCFs as a means of reaction and as extraction media. This is based on increasing our understanding of the molecular interactions between solute and solvent, which is critical for the application of SCF solvents towards biotechnology, nano-particle and composite materials, remediation of waste materials, and the design and synthesis of multi-functional polymers doc20613 none This research is an expansion on an existing atlas being maintained at the University of Denver of high resolution balloon-borne infrared solar absorption stratospheric spectra of trace species in the upper troposphere and stratosphere. The effort includes corresponding laboratory, ground-based and theoretical studies initiated under earlier NSF awards. This work contributes to the field of atmospheric chemistry by improving fundamental knowledge in the solar spectroscopy of molecules in the stratosphere doc20614 none The Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) will use $286,915, or 67% of a $430,373 total project budget, over three years to develop SkyTellers, a space science and astronomy resource for small informal (and formal) learning settings such as planetariums, museum classes, school and community libraries, youth groups and home school settings. LPI educators and science staff, in consultation with a Native American master story teller, evaluation consultants, and an advisory board, will develop 12 SkyTeller topics. Each SkyTeller topic pairs a myth or legend (primarily but not exclusively Native American) with a relevant science story (Sky Story Science Story) that explains our current understanding of the phenomenon that the ancient tale sought to explain. Ancillary materials (illustrations produced by LPI graphics staff, images from the latest in space science missions and research) will complete the 12 story sets to be used by informal and formal science educators at a variety of venues. Extensive formative and summative evaluation (alpha and beta testing) at multiple test venues is designed to insure high quality informal science education products doc20615 none This project is summarizing and synthesizing publications in education and engineering journals about peer assessment and student collaborative learning processes in undergraduate engineering courses. The project is stimulated by the requirements of ABET (The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) that undergraduate engineers engage in cooperative learning experiences and practice reviewing each other s work. Drawing on published research on the influence of peer assessment methods, this project is blending the perspectives of educational psychology, educational measurement, learning design, and engineering education into a review and synthesis of that literature. The practice of peer assessment in engineering classrooms is formative rather than summative assessment, and thus has the potential to improve the learning process of students doc20616 none The project is aimed at developing and optimizing a new process for making titanium aluminide sheet materials that find application where structures are required to be fabricated using strong and light-weight materials that maintain their strengths at elevated temperatures. Intermetallic compounds such as TiAl are difficult process using conventional methods and require specialized expensive techniques such as hot isostatic pressing with controlled inert atmospheres to minimize contamination. The goal of the project is to develop and optimize cold roll bonding process followed by reaction annealing of TiAl sheet samples. The study includes experimental investigation to determine the influence of surface preparation, rolling pressure, and annealing temperature on the microstructures and mechanical properties of the processed sheet. In addition to the tensile and hardness measurements, fracture toughness will be determined. Along with the experimental study, simulation of the cold roll bonding process will made using numerical modeling so that the effects of deformation on the rate of reaction during annealing can be assessed. The fundamental metallurgical investigations will lead to a better understanding of the factors controlling the microstructures and properties of materials processed by cold roll bonding. The funding of this research provides an opportunity for graduate and undergraduate students including under-represented minorities to develop understanding and experience in the metallurgical and process areas of research. %%% This research develops a new processing method to fabricate intermetallic metals and alloys that find application in several technologies with high temperature applications including aerospace. It is anticipated that this process on a commercial scale can produce relatively large intermetallic sheets measuring several meters. These materials preserve their mechanical strength at relatively high temperatures. The proposed processing eliminates expensive hot isostatic pressing in inert atmospheres making it relatively more cost-effective doc20617 none David Yarkony of Johns Hopkins University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to study electronically nonadiabatic processes, in which nuclear motion is not restricted to a single Born-Oppenheimer potential energy surface. The role played by conical intersections in nonadiabatic dynamics is a particular focus. The formal and computational tools to develop a fully adiabatic picture of a spin nonconserving, electronically nonadiabatic process for a system with an odd number of electrons will be developed. These tools will be extended to locate and characterize conical intersections with the spin-orbit interaction included in order to treat the most general situation. For the first time, the locus of this type of conical intersection seam will be determined. The reactions of molecular hydrogen with both ground and excited state OH and SH radicals will be investigated to address the effect of increasing spin-orbit coupling. As well, the predissociation of electronically excited OClO, OBrO, and ultimately OIO will be considered. A clearer picture of the relation between the local topography of a conical intersection and the outcome of the nonadiabatic event is expected to emerge from this research. Understanding molecular potential energy surface crossings is crucially important for describing chemical reactions that involve electronically excited states. The task of describing this topic in quantum chemistry its extremely difficult, and likely to be advanced significantly in this project. Successful outcomes will have a major impact on the characterization of chemical reactions initiated by light absorption doc20618 none DMS - . of the Project This project is centered around the study of the Ricci flow on complete, non-compact Kaehler manifolds of nonnegative holomorphic bisectional curvature. The main goal is to seek a complete understanding of singular behavior of the maximal solutions to the Kaehler-Ricci flow with nonnegative curvature, in particular the geometry, such as the rates of curvature decay and volume growth of geodesic balls, of complete Kaehler-Ricci solitons, which turn out to be the models for Type II singularities and can be considered as a natural extension of Calabi-Yau metrics on non-compact complex manifolds. Progress on the project will lead to new understanding of geometry, analysis, and complex structure and could have important application to solving a well-known conjecture in complex geometry. The research will be based on the effort of extending the dimension reduction method of Hamilton for the Ricci flow in the Riemannian case to the Kaehler case where one has weaker curvature assumption. The proposed project deals with singular behavior of the Kaehler-Ricci flow, or Parabolic-Einstein equations, and studies uniformization type problems for complete Kaehler manifolds. The Kaehler-Ricci flow is an important type of geometric evolution equations, which have profound importance and applications in science and geometry. Some of the examples include the motion of a surface by its mean curvature, the flow of gas in a porous mechanism, the motion of a liquid crystal, the diffusion of oil in shale, the reproduction of sparse species, and image sharpening. The knowledge gained in this project would not only have significant implications to our understanding of complex geometry which in turn could be very useful to the study of mathematical physics, but also may lead to new understanding of singularity formations in other geometric evolutions doc20619 none In this project, funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Zink will conduct research on the excited electronic states and reactivities of inorganic molecular precursors for photodeposition of metals and semiconductors. Absorption, emission and resonance Raman spectroscopies as well as gas phase action spectra and resonance enhanced multiphoton ionization experiments will be performed on a series of metal organic molecules. The basic spectroscopic and photochemical properties of these compounds will be used to establish optimum parameters for deposition processes and formation of nano-strutures. Thin film deposition and formation of nano-structures from gaseous metal organic compounds depend on the knowledge of the spectroscopic and photochemical properties of the molecules. This research is directed to bring about a better understanding of these properties in order to facilitate efficient fabrication of thin films, lithography and direct writing units, the production of three dimensional structures with potential use in making three-dimensional circuits and photonic crystals, and the production of nanoparticles in porous and templated materials. The research will be done with students who thereby will receive training in preparation for entering the scientific technological workforce doc20620 none Gurol This research is proposed to consider ozone technology as an alternative to combat bioterrorism through decontamination of enclosed spaces. As a Small Grant for Exploratory Research , the inactivation rate of simulants of anthrax spores exposed to gaseous ozone will be investigated under various possible scenarios. The results will enable the industry to ready the technology within a short period of time for full-scale applications doc20621 none Lu This Americas Program award will support a workshop on nonlinear dynamics to be held in conjunction with the fifth American Conference on Differential Equations and Nonlinear Dynamics at the University of Alberta, Canada, July 7-12, . The goals of the workshop are to nurture high quality scientific activity, to strengthen international scientific collaboration, and to stimulate students involvement in this area. The workshop, which is being organized by Drs. Kening Lu and Konstantin Mischaikow of Bringham Young University and Georgia Institute of Technology respectively, jointly with Drs. Michael Li and James Muldowney, both of the University of Alberta, will feature participants from several Latin American countries as well as a number of U.S. graduate students and junior researchers doc20622 none The human foraging niche is often interpreted as playing a central role in the evolution of human behavior and life history. This study seeks to systematically examine the development and senescence of the strength and skill components of specific food production activities in a traditional Amazonian society. Careful documentation of traditional lifeways is crucial for examining issues of human origins, especially given the rapid trend of acculturation of traditional societies into neighboring state-level societies. This project is the commencement of a long-term research program with approximately 287 Maku-Nadeb living in three villages in northwest Amazonas, Brazil. The objective of this research is to evaluate whether returns on high investments in foraging skill acquisition are an important selective force in the evolution of large brains, long lifespans and extended juvenile periods in humans. This will be accomplished by the following: 1) decomposing task-specific production ability into strength and skill components; 2) analyzing how these components vary across the lifespan, between the sexes, and among individuals; 3) establishing the level of investment, and potentially the critical learning period, needed to obtain proficiency in important subsistence activities; and 4) evaluating the costs to skill investment versus the benefits to elevated production later in life. The principal study questions of this research are the following: What are the skill components of hunting and gathering activities? How do foragers invest in skill acquisition? What are the benefits of skill acquisition on food returns later in life? What are the differences in investment between males and females, and are the payoffs to investments different? To test hypotheses concerning if and why human evolution is characterized by increases in skill investment, it will be necessary to measure both the costs and benefits of skill investment in the economy. The research will focus on patterns of resource acquisition, children s activities, and physical growth and performance. Proposed methods with the Maku-Nadeb are to weigh food returns, follow focal individuals, interview informants daily concerning their activities, and perform a battery of physical performance, skill, and production ability tests on individuals of all ages and both sexes. These data can facilitate cross-cultural comparisons with other foraging and or tribal horticultural groups where ages, anthropometrics and resource return rate data are available doc20623 none The 44th Annual Maize Genetics Conference will be held March 14-17, , at the Hyatt Orlando in Florida. The meeting offers members of the Maize Genetics community the opportunity to present and discuss their most recent research results. A wide range of topics will be covered including cytogenetics and chromosome mechanics, molecular genetics, biochemical genetics, cytoplasmic inheritance, genetic mapping and molecular markers, transposable element behavior and applications, gene identification and expression, plant development, tissue culture and genetic transformation, and new genomics approaches. In addition, two dedicated workshops will focus on grasses as a single genetic system and the promise of biotech foods. The Maize Genetics meeting provides an outstanding opportunity for graduate students to meet and interact with scientists in the field, to discuss their research ideas as talks or posters, and to begin to establish the scientific networks that will prove invaluable throughout their careers doc20624 none The project is adapting assessment material to improve the design of courses and to provide formative feedback to students. Using an existing course-based assessment system, the project is identifying students in need of remediation based on their performance on specific questions on exams in previous courses. Each of these questions is linked to specific learning outcomes so that the remediation becomes very specific. The projects is developing a remediation program for several Electrical Engineering courses to provide targeted instruction for these specific needs using approaches matched to the student s individual learning style. The team also is developing a secure web site to enable students and advisors to monitor the student s progress. In evaluating their program, the investigators will compare improvements in the performance of the students who use the remediation material to a matched control group who do not. They plan to evaluate the utilization of and the user s reaction to the web-base remedial material. They plan to describe their results of their study at appropriate engineering education conferences and to make the material available on a website and on a CD ROM doc20625 none Boudreau Igneous intrusions such as the Bushveld Complex of South Africa and the Stillwater Complex of Montana host much of the world s reserves of economically valuable elements such as chromium and the platinum-group elements. Although subject to numerous studies, there is still surprisingly little agreement on how they crystallized and differentiated. A significant part of the proposed study involves extending a numerical model that links an equilibrium crystallization routine (based on the MELTS algorithm of Ghiorso and coworkers) with one-dimensional heat and mass transport equations that include compaction equations of McKenzie. Examples of areas the work would be extended include the addition of spinels to the program and investigation of the formation of economically important chromite-rich layers that occur in layered intrusions. On a parallel track, we will look at details of mineral-mineral trace element partitioning to test if concentrations of temperature-dependent trace elements are affected by compaction-driven recrystallization. Specifically, laser ablation-ICP-MS and electron microprobe mineral mapping and bulk mineral analysis will test if mineral-mineral partitioning is correlated textural and or modal variations. Finally, we wish to test if one can infer concealed intrusion geometry from crystal size distribution (CSD) data. This will be tested by comparing existing data with new Lower and Critical zone samples to be collected where the Lower is both unusually thick over footwall embayments (i.e., the Burgersfort Bugle ) and where the Lower and Critical zone onlap the floor rocks in the eastern Bushveld. If successful, this will further demonstrate that texture is locally evolved and not necessarily a function of minerals transported from elsewhere doc20626 none Strong electrostatic double layers have been observed in the downward current region of the auroral zone. These double layers are found in close proximity to regions of intense plasma turbulence associated with electron phase-space holes. This project will develop a new two-dimensional Vlasov simulation code with open boundary conditions that will be suitable for studying the complex plasma processes that take place in the auroral downward current region. Among the topics that will be examined using the new code are: (a) the processes responsible for the structure of phase space holes in the direction perpendicular to the magnetic field, (b) the source mechanism for very low frequency (VLF) saucer emissions, (c) transverse ion acceleration, (d) the relation of double layers and phase space holes to large scales electrostatic shocks, and (e) the role of velocity shears in transverse. The results of the simulations will be compared with data from the FAST satellite doc20627 none The objective of the proposed 5-day international conference is to highlight the major trends in several areas of nonparametric statistics. Among the areas included are: smoothing methods, functional data analysis, data mining, nonparametric model building, nonparametric inference, resampling, spatial statistics, computation statistics, high dimensional data, dependent data, and censored data. The application areas feature medical research, bioinformatics, analysis of microarray data, analysis of evolutionary data, cancer research, AIDS and HIV research. To achieve this goal the members of the organizing committee were selected with the idea of having as complete a representation of the important trends in nonparametric statistics as possible. Indeed the committee consists of some top people in the field. More information can be found in http: www.psu.edu ~npconf . By bringing together researchers from the USA and Europe, the conference is expected to facilitate the exchange of research ideas, promote collaboration and contribute to further development of the field. New researchers have been encouraged to attend with preference being given to them-as well as members of the under-represented groups-for support. Six issues (one volume) of the Journal of Nonparametric Statistics have been made available to host papers that will be presented in the conference with the conference organizers serving as guest editors doc20628 none The Morehouse School of Medicine proposes to develop a unique framework for stimulating and increasing interest in science, mathematics, engineering and technology within the predominantly minority K-12 student population of Atlanta. The program provides a formal structure for coordinated science enrichment activities concentrated in the summer, and for year-round science outreach and partnership programs with schools in the Atlanta, Fulton and Dekalb school districts. The project builds on several well established programs at the medical school such as Elementary Science Education Partners (ESEP). Ten Saturday Academy sessions per year providing 22.5 contact hours per student combine with a four-week Summer Science Camp of six hours per day, five days per week providing an additional130 contact hours per student for 25 elementary and middle school students in grades 6-8. The program expands to include the high school student population by providing experiences in the laboratory with medical school faculty and research scientists. The Science Education Resource Center (SERC) will serve as a conduit for the delivery of inquiry-based educational experiences and hands-on science materials. A parental support group is involved via the Ben Carson Science Academy Parent Association doc20629 none Hutter The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Eliza Hutter to work with Dr. Marie-Paule Pileni at the University P. et M. Curie in Paris, France. This project will be supported by the Math and Physical Sciences Directorate s Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. The self-assembly of functionalized oligonucleotide (single stranded short chain DNA) films and their hybridized counterparts (double stranded short chain DNA), with controlled density and order is the primary objective of this project. This will be accomplished by (1) selecting relatively simple two complimentary pairs of thiol functionalized oligonucleotides, O12-OC12, and O25-OC25, (containing 12, and 25 base units, respectively) for self-assembly onto gold substrates and onto gold nanoparticles, as well as for the in situ generation of gold nanochains on their backbones; (2) application of an electric field to align the functionalized DNA perpendicularly to the substrate; and (3) the in-depth characterizations of the single and double stranded functionalized DNA in solution (water and reversed micelles) and on gold substrates by combined electrochemical, optical, electrical, spectroscopic, microscopic, X-ray diffraction and NMR measurements. This research provides a fresh approach to the construction of DNA based biosensors and biochips. Dr. Pileni has pioneered the use of reversed micelles for controlling the sizes and shapes of nanoparticles. The work in her lab is directed to the synthesis and characterization of reverse micelles and for the in situ generation and incorporation of nanoparticles in reverse micelles doc20630 none In this project, an interdisciplinary team of faculty from the College of Natural Science and the Lyman Briggs School at Michigan State University are working to develop and validate a new assessment tool for courses in biology, chemistry, physics and geology. The idea is for students to construct concept maps of their own. The Concept Connector, consists of a web-based, concept mapping Java applet with automatic scoring and feedback functionality. The tool enables students in large introductory science classes to visualize their thinking online and receive immediate formative feedback. The assessment tool and the methods of its application in the classroom are being designed to motivate students to reflect, revise and share their thinking with peers as an extension of the learning process. We predict (i) faculty becomes better able to identify their students areas of incomplete, vague or misunderstanding of science, and (ii) students confront their misconceptions and become better able to reflect on, organize, and integrate their learning. Three primary goals of this project are to: (1) develop and validate an online concept mapping tool that can be used to provide immediate feedback (computer automated) to both students and instructors about student understanding of conceptual relationships, (2) detect and document students misconceptions regarding relationships between concepts (e.g., interdisciplinary; relation between ecology and quantum physics, or discipline specific; structure and function of DNA), and (3) implement and sustain faculty development workshops to help faculty design curricula and instruction that can better assess student learning and enable students to use visual models to represent their understanding doc20631 none The legendary chiefdoms of Panama have loomed large in anthropological theories of political power within small-scale polities. First recorded by sixteenth-century Spanish conquistadores, Panamanian chiefs were noted for their keen, entrepreneurial interest in the acquisition and trade of exotic imports, particularly finely crafted gold ornaments. Despite pronounced anthropological interest in the early historical accounts of Spanish chroniclers, the physical on-the-ground reality of Panamanian chiefdoms, as well as their antiquity, has never been established-rendering this political form more apparent than real. Proposed research will remedy this situation by conducting archaeological research at one of the historically documented chiefly seats of power-Parita or Antatara-in the lower La Villa valley on the Azuero Peninsula of Panama. This research builds on a long-term program of investigation sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution and directed by archaeologist, Richard Cooke. Focusing on the hilltop site of Cerro Juan Diaz, Cooke has documented that the site was an important regional center from ca. 200 BC until the period immediately following the Spanish conquest. Current data suggest, however, that the site s function changed through time, from settlement, to ritual center, and then back to settlement. What is not clear is the total size of Cerro Juan Diaz, its relationships with other Pre-Columbian settlements in La Villa valley, and whether or not it was a seat of power within the historically described Parita chiefdom. In order to expand our base of knowledge beyond the hilltop center, Ms Isaza will conduct an archaeological investigation of the lower La Villa valley that will be pursued in three stages: (1) survey and surface collection, (2) remote sensing of subsurface deposits in selected areas, and (3) limited excavation. Within the first stage of survey, topographic maps and commercial-grade aerial photographs will help to guide the survey and to select tracts of land where artifacts will be collected. Archaeological sites, indicated by mounded architecture and the presence of artifacts (primarily sherds, lithics, and worked shell) will be mapped with a hand-held GPS receiver. This phase of field research will yield data relevant to the relative dating of sites (via ceramic style), the presence of site hierarchies (a pattern of one or more large sites surrounded by many small villages), and the presence of locales of specialized production. During the second phase, selected locales will be subjected to a resistivity and a magnetic survey using a GEOHM 3 Resistivity Meter and a Cecium-vapor Gradiometer. These instruments have the potential to detect subsurface anomalies-such as fire hearths, structure walls, and burial pits-which will then be targeted for excavation during the third and final stage of the investigation. Overall, these methods will permit the systematic documentation of the spatial distribution and temporal depth of archaeological remains in the lower La Villa valley. Preliminary reconnaissance and identification of scattered polychrome ceramics, marine shell, and polished manos and metates (grinding stones) suggest that most sites in the valley were occupied between AD 300 and . The observation of sites with dramatically different artifact inventories also suggests the possibility of specialized workshop locales for artisans working within the chiefly realm. This investigation will advance our knowledge of the deep history of Panama in two critical ways. First, this study will establish the first footprint of a historically known Panamanian chiefdom by providing a body of physical evidence to complement Colonial chronicles. Second, this investigation will provide seminal evidence with which to evaluate the antiquity of chiefdoms in Panama. That is, if a site hierarchy similar in structure to contact-period settlement patterns can be established for much earlier periods, then it is likely that chiefly governance enjoyed great antiquity in the Central American isthmus. On the other hand, if the distribution of earlier sites is one of dispersed small villages, then an earlier acephalous political organization is more likely. Either way, this investigation will have a profound impact on both anthropological and political theories of the integration of small polities and on the cultural heritage of Panama doc20632 none The goal of this project is to automatically classify emotion in speech. In addition to using standard acoustic parameters, this work use will also use syllabic patterns and speech formant contours within syllables. These features, along with pattern recognition techniques, will first be used to produce an optimal separation of presence or absence of selected emotions in single words and short phrases. The software will then be adapted to recognizing and classifying these emotions where they occur in longer speech samples. Experiments will also be conducted in applying the software to impoverished speech where the linguistic content has been obscured. If successful, this will be a major contribution to automatic recognition and classification of emotion in speech doc20633 none This project is based on the theme that assessment is most useful when it is closest to instruction, in both form and time. Summative assessments at the end of a program provide necessary feedback, but are often of limited value in guiding improved achievement. Such assessment takes place several years after instruction in basic concepts and changes in instructors and instruction during the intervening time may make the feedback appear irrelevant. In addition, faculty members are often distrustful of reports where the faculty members lack first hand knowledge of the assessment procedure. To be most effective in improving design and conduct of actual courses, the instructors in the course should use the assessment tools themselves, preferably during the conduct of the course. Because the main reason for STEM majors taking core engineering science courses is to prepare them for future courses, the most important aspect of assessment is the ability of students to transfer their learning to new contexts in later courses. Assessment should not only serve the purpose of the instructor or the institution it should also aid the students in recognizing their own achievements and in guiding the students to improve their understanding. The goal of this project is to design online assessment tools that can be easily integrated into core engineering science courses and that are capable of answering the following questions: What specific material have the students learned in core engineering science courses in mathematics and physics? What understanding do the students have of the material they have learned? Is it just disconnected facts and procedures, a broad conceptual picture informed by careful understanding of the details, or something in between? If it is something in between, can we describe more exactly what understanding they have gained? How much (and what type of) knowledge do the students retain after specific classes have ended. Can the students use the material they have learned in new situations in their professional courses? How consistently do they use the understanding developed in core engineering science courses when encountering these ideas in new contexts? In the best case, can we predict in advance whether students have gained the necessary understanding to successfully apply their knowledge in new contexts? Early versions of the sought after assessment tools have been developed under an earlier grant: Technology & Model- Based Conceptual Assessment: Research on Students Applications of Models in Physics and Mathematics funded by the NSF ROLE program ( ). Model Analysis is being used to develop and validate the tools. These tools are providing great insight into student conceptual understanding and learning styles, and this project is expanding their use to more core classes, and extending the focus from basic research on student learning to assessment of learning and conceptual understanding. The assessment tools we are developing are providing real-time feedback to both instructors and students, enabling both to adjust the teaching and learning process to improve student achievement in terms of conceptual understanding and the ability to transfer learning to new contexts doc20634 none In recent years, problems in American science education, from elementary schools to universities, have been widely publicized and have aroused great concern. It has been repeatedly established that students often fail to master key concepts under the lecture approach that is commonly used in high school and undergraduate science courses. Some progress has been made in developing alternative pedagogies based on more active forms of learning, which are more effective in producing student learning. However, such pedagogies are still not widespread. A number of strategies have been developed to improve the teaching of introductory science courses, several of which can be used in a variety of disciplines, and extensive assessment has demonstrated the effectiveness of these strategies. Over the past ten years, Peer Instruction has been established as one effective way to improve student learning in undergraduate science courses by including collaborative exercises within the context of traditional lectures. Peer Instruction is presently used by hundreds of instructors around the world, and the majority of those instructors testify to its effectiveness and ease of implementation. The goal of this project is to assess the effectiveness of Peer Instruction at a variety of institutions and to determine the implementation factors that contribute to its success. The results will improve understanding of what makes Peer Instruction work and, thus, allow for more effective implementation of Peer Instruction. In addition, the work serves to increase the body of research on collaborative learning and to stimulate additional faculty to begin using collaborative teaching methods such as Peer Instruction. Assessment tools are being developed and enhanced to efficiently assess student achievement on standard conceptual instruments. The project involves a number of collaborating faculty from across the country whose courses are participating in the focused study of Peer Instruction. The results will enable science faculty around the nation to teach more effectively with Peer Instruction. The results thus have the potential to impact not only the 50,000 students who are currently taught using Peer Instruction, but also the more than 150,000 students of faculty who have expressed interest in using Peer Instruction in their classes doc20635 none This research is focused on demonstrating novel ROOM TEMPERATURE infrared photodetectors based on electrochemically self assembled nanowire arrays. Photodetection is based on photoexcitation of electrons from subband states in the nanowire to trap states in the surrounding insulator. This leads to an inverse photodetection effect whereby the conductivity of the photodetector drops when irradiated with infrared radiation. Preliminary experiments [Appl. Phys. Lett., Vol. 79, ( )] have shown that these photodetectors can operate at room temperature with a signal to noise ratio of 45 dB. The purpose of the NER project will be to extend this result to create (1) multi-colored detectors using different sized nanowires self assembled on the same wafer, and (2) a complementary photodetector where a normal photodetector is synthesized in series with an inverse photodetector. The complementary photodetector will be able to detect a very narrow band. This research will involve significant work by undergraduate students. The samples that exhibited the novel photodetection effect were prepared by an undergraduate student in the PI s lab doc20636 none Rebarber This project will focus on developing techniques for sampled-data feedback for infinite dimensional systems. A discrete time controller can operator with only limited frequency response, and infinite dimensional systems often have high frequency effects which cannot be ignored, so there is not only interest in what can be done with sampled-data control design, but also in its limitations. The following question is basic: can a given continuous-time controller be replaced by a related sampled-data controller, while maintaining the desired response of the closed-loop system? Both idealized and generalized sample-and-hold will be considered. Generalized hold can be used as a design parameter, and generalized sampling can be used when the output is not sufficiently smooth to accommodate point evaluations in time. The PI will characterize as completely as possible those continuous-time feedback systems which do not lose their closed-loop stability when a sampled data scheme (with sufficiently small sampling time) is applied to the feedback, and will determine whether the performance of the sampled-data system can approximate the continuous time performance. The performance measures considered are closed-loop growth rate and stability radius. Tracking techniques for infinite dimensional systems will also be studied and developed. Suppose a system has an external disturbance term which is to be rejected, or an external reference term to be tracked. One common approach to doing this is by a low-gain controller suggested by the internal model principle. The effectiveness of such a controller for a wide class of systems will be studied, as well as its sensitivity to frequency variations in the external signal. Sampled-data versions of tracking controllers will also be considered. These sampled-data and tracking results will be applied to PDEs in more than one space variable, especially coupled PDE models with at least one hyperbolic component. Due to the fact that these models involve two different of PDEs, coupled via highly unbounded operators, the analysis has features which are distinct from the analysis for uncoupled systems. For this problem a central concern for output feedback design is the analysis of the input-output map, i.e. the map from the control to the observation. Advances in digital technology have led to an emphasis on sampled-data design in control engineering, but the development of sampled data control for infinite-dimensional systems such as PDEs has been limited. In many applications output data is available in discrete time rather than continuous time, and a feedback controller for such a system should be designed to take discrete data as its input, but act in continuous time. Since there is already an enormous literature on continuous time stabilization of PDEs, the project will involve the investigation of how to modify continuous time controllers to obtain sampled data controllers, while maintaining system performance. Also of interest are techniques for designing effective sampled-data controllers without reference to continuous time design. Another topic to be considered is the design of active feedback control tracking external signals and rejecting noise. As an application, these methods will be used to design a controller to reject noise in a PDE model which describes the interaction between sound waves in a cavity (for instance, an airplane cockpit) and the motion of a flexible wall of the cavity. Suppose that there is an external noise source, such as engine noise, which is to be rejected, and active feedback control is to be applied to smart material actuators on the cavity walls. Then a properly designed low-gain controller (either continuous time feedback or sampled-data) will attenuate the sound pressure at and near finitely many points of the cavity doc20637 none This project is examining students ability to transfer knowledge and skills within the engineering curriculum. It is focused on how much knowledge is transferred from Calculus, Differential Equations, and Physics to subsequent engineering courses. We are developing a series of diagnostic exams that measure the degree of transfer of basic skills and concepts from these areas into Engineering Dynamics, and Fields and Waves. These two courses were chosen because of their wide application in engineering and because of their extensive use of concepts from these earlier courses. We are also exploring the strength of relationship between high grades and a student s ability to transfer knowledge from Calculus, Differential Equations, and Physics. We are evaluating classroom practices that strengthen transfer of skills. Among the products of this project is the Transfer Environment and Student Readiness Instrument being developed at RPI s Anderson Center for Innovation in Undergraduate Education. This instrument assesses a range of environmental and affective variables known to correlate with improved transfer capability. It is meant to help students evaluate their own perception about their courses as being integrated or disconnected and fragmented doc20638 none Clarence W. Wilkerson James E. McClure Jeffrey H. Smith Wilkerson (in joint work with W. G. Dwyer of Notre Dame) studies the classifying spaces of Lie groups and p-compact groups with the goal of finishing the classification of 2-compact groups and their automorphisms. Wilkerson and Smith study actions of finite groups on arbitrary finite complexes. The goal is to construct a moduli space that classifies actions with given fixed point data. McClure and Smith will continue their work on chain operads and chain models for homotopy theories. Specifically, they propose to find a small chain model for the framed little-disks operad, to show that the category of unstable coalgebras over a certain chain operad is a model for HZ-local homotopy theory of spaces, to give a similar model for HZ-local spectra, and to create a chain model for the model category of K(n)-module spectra. They also propose to investigate the properties of a symmetric monoidal structure on the category of cosimplicial chain complexes. McClure uses the joint work with Smith to study the homotopy theoretic properties of the Snaith splitting. He hopes to find a simplified proof of the theorem of Goerss-Hopkins theorem which gives the spectrum E(n) a commutative multiplication. He also studies the rational homotopy theory of equivariant spectra when the group is the circle. Smith and Grodal are studying homotopy G-spheres. That is, spaces that are homotopy equivalent to a sphere and have an action of a finite group G. They hope to give a complete classification based on algebraic invariants of the group. They also study the moduli space of homotopy G-spheres. Homotopy theory is the most fundamental of all geometries. It studies those geometric properties which do not change no matter what continuous deformations are made. The equality of donuts and coffee cups is a well known example. Yet, surprisingly, geometry as studied by homotopy theory has an intrinsic algebraic nature. The PIs study the geometric properties of spaces using techniques that come from algebra, with homotopy theory providing the bridge between these different areas of mathematics. In fact, all homotopy information of a space can be described using algebra. The algebra is complicated but homotopy theory gives a correspondence between geometry and algebra that has many important applications doc20639 none This project focuses on the development of a new assessment instrument, applicable to multiple undergraduate engineering programs, to measure students understanding of statistics and its applications. The statistical understanding measure developed under this research, called the Statistical Concepts Inventory (SCI), provides score profiles that specifically describe students abilities to design and conduct experiments as well as to analyze and interpret data. This project is timely because an increasing number of post-secondary engineering programs are endorsing outcome requirements that depend on statistical thinking and problem-solving skills. Within engineering, these requirements are precipitating major changes in engineering education in general and engineering statistics education specifically. Engineering curricular objectives in many respects are being driven by the ABET EC criteria. Of special relevance to the proposed project are: - Criterion 3, Programs Outcomes and Assessment, which states that Engineering programs must demonstrate that their graduates have: (a) an ability to apply knowledge of mathematics, science, and engineering, and (b) an ability to design and conduct experiments, as well as to analyze and interpret data. and - Criterion 8, Program Criteria, in which 16 of the 24 listed programs directly indicate the need to demonstrate that students have acquired facility with statistics. Industrial Engineering has historically taught statistics as a service course to other engineering programs and continues to use statistics as a foundation for much of its own curriculum. Recently approved are the Criteria for Accrediting Computing Programs (Computing Accreditation Commission, December 30, ), which covers Computer Science programs and states in its curriculum standards that Course work in mathematics must include probability and statistics. This project is also exploring the links between cognitive and attitudinal aspects of introductory statistics courses. In its second phase, this project is gathering SCI profile scores from students in combination with an existing affective instrument, the Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics (SATS doc20640 none This project addresses the challenge of educating scientists and engineers in the professional and personal communication skills they need to meet career demands of the 21st century. The intention of the project is to address one of the nation s central concerns; the ability of scientists to engage in policy-critical communication about their work; work that is critical to the health and well being of U.S. society. Experts in communication, the rhetoric of science, instructional development, and training will work collaboratively with scientists and engineers in two areas of concern previously identified by the Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy as well as others in the science community ( ); 1. Scientists and engineers; ability to communicate among themselves interpersonally and in teams, and their ability to solve problems and work across scientific and other disciplines. 2. Scientists and engineers; ability to communicate about science to larger audiences with an emphasis on lay and public constituencies and non-scientists. The two challenges will be addressed by the accomplishment of two short term objectives and one long term goal: A first short term objective is producing curriculum recommendations for the communication training of scientists and engineers; A second short term objective is developing a proposal for the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Graduate Education to: 1. articulate a new set of priorities and approaches to address the most effective and appropriate ways of communicating about science; and, 2. produce and disseminate communication training resources for aspiring (graduate and post-doctoral) scientists and engineers. A long term and perhaps some intrinsic goal is forming critical partnerships and building a foundation for future relationships between the communication discipline and scientists and engineers to work collaboratively on challenges in communicating about science These activities will begin with a briefing meeting to be held in November at the NCA national convention. A facilitated workshop will follow in Winter Spring that will produce curriculum recommendations and a plan for a full grant proposal to explore possibilities for creating new communities of communication colleagues and scientists. Following the spring workshop and within the calendar year, the full grant proposal will be submitted to NSF. The proposal will focus on furthering the development of collaborative relationships between communication and science and developing training resources of various sorts to implement the curriculum recommendations. The proposal will also address the dissemination of the curriculum recommendations and training resources doc20641 none This project is developing a reliable and valid statics assessment instrument to evaluate student learning. In the first step we are working to define the core concepts in statics. Our second step is to create an appropriate instrument, a set of questions that tests students basic knowledge of statics as well as their depth of comprehension and application skills. This development process is based on the success of the widely accepted Force Concepts Inventory in Physics. In the third step we are undertaking extensive field-testing to assure the validity and reliability of this instrument. The fourth step, following the development and validation of the instrument, is to initiate national dissemination of the Statics Knowledge Inventory instrument. To help in this effort we have created a national board of mechanics faculty. This instrument will find wide application because many engineering programs require their majors to study statics. Our project is providing faculty with a validated instrument for formative assessing as they develop and refine their individual courses to enhance student learning. We are also working with a commercial publisher to disseminate and publish this work doc20642 none The 100m, Upper Cretaceous Dzharakuduk section (Kyzylkum Desert, Uzbekistan) includes river and marine sediments that yield over 100 species of vertebrates. Collecting microvertebrates at these sites was begun by the late Russian paleontologist Nessov and has been continued by an international consortium of Uzbek, Russian, British, American, and Canadian (URBAC) scientists. Large, new collections of marine invertebrate from the upper part of the section that can be correlated to type sections in Europe, indicate a Coniacian Santonian age (about 85 million years old). This reconfirms that the underlying terrestrial vertebrates are at least 85-90 million years old, thus older than the more famous Gobi Desert sites. Locally abundant vertebrate remains are fragmentary, but often preserve exquisite detail. Most fossils were rapidly buried, possibly by flash floods, with little reworking. Paleoecology is similar to the Late Cretaceous North American coastal plains. Postcranial and cranial elements of pterosaurs, mammals, and dinosaurs remain common from the newly screened 55 tons of matrix. Among amphibians, salamanders are much more common than frogs. Among reptiles, aquatic turtles, and hadrosaur and tyrannosaur dinosaur fragments are common, while lizards, small theropod, ankylosaur, ceratopsian, and sauropod dinosaurs are relatively rare. Birds are diverse, including both extinct groups, as well as species closer to living birds. The rodent-like multituberculate mammals and relatives of marsupial mammals are rare. Eutherian mammals, the group of mammals to which humans belong, are the most common mammalian species at Dzharakuduk, with some 11 species. These include the world s earliest relatives of the group that gave rise to rodents and rabbits, as well as the group that may have given rise to at least seven orders of hoofed mammals and whales. All indications show that previous work has only begun to uncover the fossil riches of Dzharakuduk. The next three years of work there will provide answers to many of the remaining questions regarding these 85-90 million-year-old vertebrate faunas doc20643 none An MPS Distinguished International Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (MPS-DRF) will be used to perform research with P. A. Madden and his group at Oxford University for a period of two years. The proposed research is molecular dynamics and polarizable MD simulations on ion materials. The following specific projects are proposed: (1) development of MD simulation techniques for highly polarizable systems, (2) development and refinement of transferable systems from first principle, and (3) study of ionic conduction and nuclear quadrupole coupling doc20644 none This GOALI award by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program in the Division of Chemistry, the Solid State Chemistry program in the Division of Materials Research and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Directorate of Mathematics and Physical Sciences supports research by a collaborative academic industrial group headed by Professor Richard Eisenberg at the University of Rochester and the Eastman Kodak Company to study the luminescence of heavy metal complexes and their incorporation as emitters into OLED devices. Dopant emitters are used in organic light-emitting diode (OLED) materials to make them more efficient and versatile for display applications. Luminescent heavy-metal complexes emit light through triplet excited states (exicitons) providing a route for higher efficiency than organic polymeric materials alone. Several classes of metal complexes including square planar iridium and platinum systems and polynuclear metal complexes will be prepared and their photophysical properties tuned through variations in their ligands. The emission quantum yields and lifetimes of these complexes will be studied in rigid media. Computational studies will suggest trends to support and direct the experimental work. Complexes with metal centered excited states include Au(I) and Cu(I) complexes as well as face-to-face square planar systems. New complexes will be examined by incorporation into prototype OLED devices and assayed for photoluminescence and stability under operating conditions. Selected dopant emitters will be investigated as to their excitation mechanisms and the factors limiting their efficiency in order to identify molecular property alterations that improve performance in OLED displays. This academic-industrial partnership will also involve a reciprocal seminar series in which personnel from the University of Rochester will present seminars at the Kodak Research Laboratories and industrial personnel will present their work at the University of Rochester. These researchers will also develop a demonstration and teaching unit on photochemistry and display devices for presentation to elementary and secondary schools. The unit will also be shared with the Rochester Museum and Science Center for public presentations. In collaboration with the Rochester Section of the American Chemical Society, a pilot program for an Industrial Mentor Partnership will be initiated in which undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Rochester will have a industrial mentor at the Kodak Company. New metal complexes will be studied to improve the efficiency of materials used as light emitting displays in electronic devices. Educational opportunities for students in an industrial setting are involved and educational demonstration units will be provided to local schools and museums doc20645 none of how polyhedra are glued together to form the object. The PI s work is about relating these invariants to metric quantities derived from the geometry of the underlying object. To this end, the PI shows that the space of states can be replaced by spaces of geometric measurements made on the object. The goal of the project is to see how the geometry and topology of the object are determined by its combinatorial description in terms of polyhedra doc20646 none Harris The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support an eighteen month research fellowship by Dr. Linda A. Harris to work with Dr. Tim G. St. Pierre at the University of Western Australia in Perth, Australia. Support for this project is from the Math and Physical Sciences Directorate s Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. The goal of this project is to prepare well-defined isolated magnetic nanoparticles encapsulated in an organic sheath, and to use these as models for understanding nanomagnetic behavior. The availability of magnetic nanoparticles with well-defined structural features is a major hurdle in understanding structure-magnetic behavior relationships. The Pis will synthesize a series of polymers that will serve as nanoreactors for the controlled formation of iron oxide nanoparticles. These well-defined materials will function as models to test the hypothesis that constrained polymer micelles can control the size and morphology of iron oxide nanoparticles. These methods will be used to synthesize iron oxide nanoparticles selectively labeled with 57 Fe at either the particle surface or core. Differentiating the surface vs. core will allow particle sub-structure characterization by Mossbauer spectroscopy to enable correlations between nanomagnetic behavior and structure. Professor St. Pierre has over a decade of experience in the study of synthetic and biogenic magnetic materials with a particular focus on iron oxides doc20647 none A new methodology for the imaging of the earth s reflectivity distribution by correlogram migration of scattered teleseismic body waves is being investigated. The correlation migration methods developed for applications in seismic exploration are being extended to the imaging of crustal and upper mantle structure beneath a dense receiver array using teleseismic body waves. These waves include P to SV and P to P surface reflected phases, in addition to other direct and surface scattered phases. The result is an image of the reflectivity distribution beneath the recording array for each of the scattered waves. The current imaging methods using receiver functions for laterally varying structure mostly use directly converted P to SV arrivals for subsurface illumination. Correlation imaging of ghost reflections provides complementary resolution to that of P to SV transmitted waves. Questions concerning the practicality of using correlogram migration of different phases for the imaging of laterally varying media using teleseismic array data are being addressed. Also, the limitations of correlogram migration as a function of data quality, receiver spacing and type of teleseismic data used are being investigated. Since for practical teleseismic array configurations, some aliasing effects will result, a new beam-like migration algorithm, call wavepath migration, which is less sensitive to these effects, is being tested for the imaging of teleseismic array data. The correlogram migration of teleseismic data is being tested using different teleseismic array configurations across the Wasatch Front. The significance of this research is the development of new imaging methods for laterally varying structure using teleseismic data, which generalizes receiver function imaging to include converted as well as ghost reflections. Correlogram imaging is most effective for dense seismic networks doc20648 none Smirnova The investigator and her colleague aim to develop theoretically a novel method, the DSM-dynamical system method, for solving a wide variety of linear and nonlinear ill-posed problems, to implement algorithms based on this method, and to demonstrate the advantages of this method in efficiency and accuracy. The DSM method is used as a general approach to the construction of regularizing algorithms for solving ill-posed problems, i.e. a stopping rule is developed: a rule for choosing that moment of time at which the value of the solution to the basic evolution equation stably approximates the solution to the original ill-posed equation in the case when the data are given with some error. Applications of different versions of the DSM are considered to classical ill-posed problems of computational mathematics, such as stable differentiation of noisy data, stable inversion of ill-conditioned matrices, and to nonlinear inverse problems arising in geophysics, quantum physics, medicine, remote sensing in technology, and other applied areas. The DSM with simultaneous updates of the inverse derivative operator without actual inverting of this operator is developed for solving nonlinear ill-posed problems. The DSM is used as a general method for constructing convergent iterative processes for solving ill-posed operator equations. Namely, convergent discretization schemes for solving the basic evolution equation of the DSM provide convergent iterative methods for solving the original equation. The DSM is developed for unbounded operators, which do not have continuous inverse operators, and also for a nonlinear operators whose derivative is a Fredholm operator with nontrivial null-space. The area of ill-posed (unstable) problems is extremely difficult, because solutions to ill-posed problems are very sensitive to small variation in input data. For that reason ill-posed problems cannot be solved by classical methods: the corresponding numerical procedures for them turn out to be divergent. However, ill-posed problems are frequently encountered in many branches of natural sciences and engineering: astrophysics, geophysics, spectroscopy, plasma diagnostics, computerized tomography, antenna design, optimal design of technical systems and engineering constructions, optimal planning, optimal control over various processes, and many other fields. Mathematical statements of these problems are given in the form of operator equations of the first kind, problems of functional minimization, problems of determining values of unbounded operators, variational inequalities, and so on. The project develops computational methods that provide more accurate solutions to a wide range of ill-posed problems. The investigator also uses the results in the graduate courses on ill-posed and inverse problems she teaches at Georgia State University. Finally, because ill-posed problems are of basic importance in applications, the results are of wide use in engineering and applied sciences doc20649 none Geomagnetically-Induced Currents (GICs) are generally produced by the rate-of-change of the local geomagnetic field caused by a geomagnetic storm. The GIC when large in magnitude and or geographically wide-spread can lead to severe power system problems. Failures of equipment can occur due to this interaction of the GIC with the power grid. It has been previously understood that electrojet-driven geomagnetic storm processes were responsible for local geomagnetic field disturbances and GICs affecting power girds, especially for power grids at high magnetic latitudes, which are in close proximity to the electrojet currents. However, a large number of reported power system problems did not fit the timing or location pattern as being associated with intensification of auroral electrojets. Rather, they were associated with the onset times of geomagnetic storm commencement (SC) events. A preliminary review of power system disturbance and storm climatology data reported in Solar Cycle 22 and to date in Solar Cycle 23 indicates that a number of severe power system impacts have been observed due to this SC process. Severe impacts to power system operations have been observed as far south as Los Angeles, Texas-New Mexico, and all across the southeastern US, as well as traditional mid and northern latitude locations. No rigorous study has been conducted in the US to do even a preliminary assessment of this risk potential. The PI will undertake a US-focused geomagnetic hazard study and assessment to further develop detailed understanding of this important storm process and how this storm process couples to important ground-based infrastructures such as power girds and communication cables doc20650 none This proposal pertains to a conference on Designs for Generalized Linear Models (GLMs) to be organized by the Department of Statistics, University of Florida, and the Statistical Engineering Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The meeting will be of a three-day duration (April 18-20, ) and will be held on the NIST campus in Gaithersburg, MD. The Conference will feature leading active researchers in the field of GLMs. One goal of the conference is to provide a forum for interaction among people working on diverse areas of GLMs. The second goal is to provide a stimulus to young researchers and graduate students working in the design area of GLMs. Funding from this proposal will provide travel grants for eight doctoral students and junior scientists to attend the Conference. Special efforts will be made to solicit applications from members of under-represented groups (persons with disabilities, minorities, and women). Priority will be given to Ph.D. students who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents. It is hoped that the grant awardees will benefit from the interaction with the invited speakers, who can provide mentoring and role modeling for the awardees doc20651 none Clark The objective of the research is to investigate the feasibility of new methods to degrade or destroy persistent chlorinated contaminants. This exploratory research will focus on the toxaphene, a pesticide banned in , which is toxic and very difficult to degrade. Toxaphene is a complex mixture of more than 200 polychlorinated terpenes. This research will examine the dechlorination of toxaphene by zero-valent iron and other bimetallic substrates as a means to initiate its degradation. Experiments are proposed to determine the degradation rates of toxaphene by iron substrates, potential pathways of toxaphene dechlorination, and the potential rate limiting factors for this process. These preliminary results would be used to seek variations in experimental procedures and optimization of the dechlorination experiments doc20652 none The research project applies modern methods in analysis, computation and probability to the modeling turbulent flows arising in geophysical fluid dynamics. Specifically, the projects investigates statistical theories of coherent structures in turbulence, which in a model atmosphere or ocean usually take the form of long-lived, large-scale jets and vortices. The approach builds on recent developments in the equilibrium statistical theory of such structures, which has now matured to the point that it can be justified mathematically, implemented computationally and applied succesfully to geophysical models. A prime example is the recent model of the zonal jets and vortical spots in the atmosphere of Jupiter, whose predictions agree remarkably well with observational data. In light of these developments, the goals of the project are two-fold. First, the equilibrium statistical theory of coherent structures is elaborated for increasingly realistic geophysical models, such as multi-layer quasi-geostrophic models and shallow-water models. The physical implications of the theory are investigated by computing families of equilibrium structures and deriving nonlinear stability theorems for them. Second, a novel approach to statistical closure is developed from the corresponding nonequilibrium theory. Unlike traditional closure schemes for fluid turbulence, this new methodology derives macroscopic equations for some specified resolved variables by conditioning random paths of microstates on the ensemble-averaged dynamics for those resolved variables. A combined theoretical and computational investigation of this approximation to nonequilibrium behavior is undertaken for some prototype problems. In the context of model geophysical systems with damping and driving, this approach is envisioned as a general procedure for deriving effective subgrid-scale parametrizations of unresolved eddies. Turbulent fluid flow remains one of the unsolved puzzles of physical science. A better theoretical understanding of turbulence is needed as a basis for the computational simulation of almost all natural fluid motions. This is especially true of geophysical fluid flows -- the motions of the Earth s oceans and atmosphere -- which involve complex motions over a wide range of scales, from meters up to the planetary size. Every modern computer code used in weather forecasting or climate prediction requires special, but often unreliable, assumptions about how the small-scale turbulent motions affect the computed large-scale behavior. The research conducted in this project addresses the general issue of modeling a complex fluid flow -- a mathematical prototype of an atmosphere or ocean -- in such a way that its predominant large-scale features can be captured reliably without resolving the full complexity of its small-scale motions. In particular, the work seeks to develop the mathematical and computational tools necessary to predict the behavior of modeled geophysical fluid systems which exhibit organized features on large scales but disordered and random motions on a range of small scales. To do so, the project draws on sophisticated techniques from statistical physics to construct theoretical models of complex systems of this kind, and thereby to provide efficient and reliable methods for computing their expected or most probable behavior. A recent example of this approach is the remarkably successful explanation of the persistent jetstreams and vortices, such as the Great Red Spot, in the atmosphere of the giant planet Jupiter, which for the first time shows quantitative and qualitative agreement between mathematical theory and NASA spacecraft observations. In the context of Earth s atmosphere and oceans, such theoretical models and computational methods can used as building blocks in predictions about the long-term trends in the ocean-atmosphere system doc20653 none This GOALI proposal is a continuation of the PI s work on electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) to characterize complex three phase flow in fluidization processes. The novel aspect of this proposal is the image reconstruction technique based on the unsupervised analog neural network multi-criteria optimization technique doc20654 none This is a low temperature physics research project. Liquid He-3 and liquid He-4 are paradigm systems that exhibit macroscopic quantum behavior, obeying respectively Fermi and Bose statistics. While a great deal has been learned about these quantum liquids in bulk, fascinating results are still being discovered in atomically thin films of He-3 and He-4 adsorbed on surfaces. Recent measurements found that He-3 atoms tend to float on top of a He-4 film and phase separate into 2-dimensional vapor and liquid phases. Heat capacity measurements are planned to elucidate the nature of this phase separation transition to determine whether this intrinsically quantum system is also a physical realization of the celebrated 2D Ising model of Onsager. Nuclear magnetic resonance and heat capacity measurements will study the properties of He-3 and He-4 adsorbed in MCM-41, a highly porous substrate with one dimensional pores of 2.5 to 5.0 nm in diameter and up to 500 nm in length. Results of these measurements will be tested against the theories of one dimensional quantum systems. Undergraduate and graduate students involved in these experiments receive rigorous training in cryogenic, high vacuum and ultrasensitive electronic measurements. They must integrate these skills to complete demanding experiments, a process that quickly and elegantly prepares them for careers in government, industry and academe. This is a low temperature physics project. All substances freeze into solid when the temperature is reduced. The exceptions being liquid He-3 and He-4, which remain liquid even at absolute zero. The reason for this is related to the quantum uncertainty principle. Although chemically identical, He-3 has one neutron and two protons in its nucleus and He-4 has two of each. All atoms are either Fermion or Boson depending on the total number of neutrons, protons and electrons they have. This rule makes He-3 a Fermion and He-4 a Boson, and as a consequence, liquid He-3 and liquid He-4 behave quite differently, particularly when these quantum fluids are forced into volumes where at least one dimension is nanoscopic . This project seeks to understand the properties of one and two-dimensional Fermion and Boson systems, namely He-3 and He-4 atoms confined in atomically thin films, or in tiny one-dimensional pores, with diameters in the range 2.5 to 5.0 nanometers. The knowledge we gain in studying these quantum liquids contributes to the understanding of superconductors and other electronic systems. Undergraduate and graduate students involved in these experiments receive rigorous training in cryogenic, high vacuum and ultrasensitive electronic measurements. They must integrate these skills to complete demanding experiments, a process that quickly and elegantly prepares them for careers in government, industry and academe doc20655 none Quarknet has been funded as a partnership among the ESIE program of EHR ; the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities and the Elementary Particle Physics Program (Division of Physics) , both within MPS; as well as the Division of High Energy Physics at DOE. QuarkNet is a national program that partners high school science teachers with particle physicists working in forefront experiments at the scientific frontier. These experiments are searching for answers to fundamental questions about the origin of mass and about the nature of symmetries that govern physical processes. QuarkNet provides valuable research experience to teachers enabling them to teach the basic concepts of introductory physics in a context that students find exciting. QuarkNet s goals are to establish a lasting national community of researchers that includes high school teachers and students as well as physicists, to attract young students to careers in science and technology, to help develop scientific literacy in society, and to develop links between the high school classroom and experiments and techniques used to explore the scientific frontier. QuarkNet is led by a group of teachers, educators and physicists with many years of experience in particle physics workshops and institutes, materials development and teacher research programs. Five staff teachers help design, coordinate and run the project. QuarkNet has been envisaged and designed as a multi-decade-long program with a growth phase of 5 years followed by an operational phase of at least twice that duration. In this schema, the growth phase admits twelve new centers per year until a maximum of 60 centers is reached; the operational phase oversees the maturation of the centers into an inclusive and engaging community of researchers. Currently completing its third year, QuarkNet comprises 36 centers located at universities and laboratories around the country. Under this five-year proposal, QuarkNet will complete the growth phase by the end of the second proposal year, with science education centers participating in a variety of experiments at Fermilab, CERN, SLAC, and in non-accelerator and astrophysics programs. In this two-year period 48 lead teachers, two from each new center, will hold 8-week research appointments and will work under the guidance of physicists from a university or laboratory near their homes. In the operational period to follow (proposal years 3-5), QuarkNet will revisit existing centers (again in groups of 12) to offer 8-week scientific appointments, and to strengthen ongoing research experiences and activities by engaging high school students directly in research projects under the direction of physicists and supervising teachers, for periods up to 8 weeks duration. Key features of QuarkNet are the establishment of mentor relationships between teachers and scientists, summer research experiences of up to 8-weeks for lead and supervising teachers and 1-3 weeks for associate teachers, the inclusion of high school students as researchers, and the development of scientific community within and among centers. Over the five years - , this proposal is expected to reach up to 720 teachers, more than 100 physicists, and eventually more than 50,000 students, approximately 300 of whom will have summer research experiences doc20656 none Allen The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program s awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Rhiannon Lynne Allen to work with Dr. Brett Gladman at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia. Support for this project is provided by the Mathematics and Physical Sciences Directorate s Office of Multidisciplinary Activities. The Kuiper Belt is the population of primitive bodies found between 30 and 100 AU from the Sun. As a large remnant planetesimal population, the Kuiper Belt provides a unique opportunity to study planet formation. A record of the history of the outer Solar System is written in the dynamical distribution of Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). Studying their physical characteristics, size distribution and volume density provides valuable constraints for planetesimal accretion and collision evolution models. The PI proposes a three part observing program to expand the present understanding of the Kuiper Belt: (1) a wide field, shallow survey to provide a large sample of KBO s, (2) a smaller scale, deep survey to place limits on the density of the smallest KBO s and the distant Kuiper Belt and (3) individual observations to obtain lightcurves and color photometry for a range of KBO s to explore physical properties of KBO s. Dr. Gladman has organized an international collaboration to conduct a wide field survey of the Kuiper Belt using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) and the Megaprime Camera, which has a 1 square degree field of view doc20657 none Hanson The principal investigator and his colleagues develop computational stochastic dynamic programming methods to find approximations to optimally control the expected objective value for a wide variety of applications. These applications include the optimal treatment of cancer by chemotherapy drugs, the optimal financial investment portfolio and parameter estimation, optimal control of stochastic manufacturing systems, and the optimal remediation of ground water pollution. The wide scope of testbed applications helps to increase the robustness of their advanced numerical methods by having to treat a variety of models and boundary conditions. Another characteristic of many of these applications is that the most severe changes happen as jumps of the system and many models utilize stochastic jump-diffusion processes. The computation of optimal approximations in jump environments is a unique feature of the models, where increased realism of the models more than compensates for the added burden of increased computational complexity over diffusions. The investigator is writing an applied book with a colleague on stochastic processes and control emphasizing jump-diffusion models to give broader impact to their more general results. The mathematical level is intermediate so that it is accessible and useful to those who actually work with real applications in science, engineering, and finance. The principal investigator and colleagues study models of systems in uncertain environments and seek optimal computational approximations to get the best performance from these systems. Many of the applications are national challenges. One application is the optimal management of cancer chemotherapy when cancer cells develop resistance to a cancer drug combination. The impact of finding optimal cancer treatment schedules would be significant because cancer is a leading cause of death. Another application is computational solutions for optimal investor portfolio and consumption problems in a market with crashes in value; the benefit is a better understanding of our nation s and the world s financial systems. A third application is the optimal scheduling of manufacturing systems subject to uncertain failures, repairs, and other disruptions. Here improved efficiencies are important for the national economic well-being. A fourth application is the optimal remediation of pollution in ground water, with important environmental consequences. Students are involved in these projects, providing them with significant experience in interdisciplinary research. Finally, the investigators are writing an intermediate level applied book on the optimal control of systems in uncertain environments with large changes, integrating their results over a wide variety of applications. The aim is to bring these ideas in a more accessible form to scientists and engineers doc20658 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Stephen Giovannoni and Michael Rappe to survey, inventory, grow and describe new species of marine bacteria from coastal waters of the Pacific Northwest. Previous studies of gene sequences from seawater DNA have provided compelling proof that many species of marine microorganisms are virtually unknown, probably because technologies in routine use in microbiological laboratories do not provide the conditions these cells need to replicate. This project will employ a new technology developed at Oregon State University that miniaturizes and automates the process of culturing microbial cells from nature. This new technology uses concentrations of cells and nutrients that are approximately 100,000 fold lower than those used by the culturing technologies now in routine use. Specifically, this survey will sample oceanic waters off coastal Oregon, within a rectangle described by the coordinates 44 degrees 12 to 45 deg. 02 N; 124 deg. 03 to 124 deg. 38 W. Samples will be taken from throughout the water column at depths ranging to 200 m. In addition to supporting research that isolates and identifies new strains of microorganisms, and inventories them, this project will support the maintenance of a culturing facility that will distribute cell cultures or genomic DNA to other laboratories for further study. Properties of the newly cultured species of cells such as their physical size, genome size, abundance and distribution in Oregon coastal seawater, the nutrients they use and the metabolic pathways that operate in them, will be studied to determine their relationship to other microorganisms, and those strains that are new to science will be named. This project will provide new knowledge about microbial biodiversity in the exceptionally productive coastal waters of the Pacific Northwest. The resulting cultures of microorganisms and information about them will fill gaps in basic knowledge about coastal ecological processes. The cultures themselves will also be a resource for academic and industrial scientists who seek to develop new agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals from microbial biodiversity doc20659 none An MPS Distinguished International Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (MPS-DRF) will be used to perform research at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Science (MPIP) in Mainz, Germany with the guidance of Prof. Dr. Klaus Mullen and additional collaborators for specialized techniques that are not available the MPIP, including Prof. Dr. Martin Moller at the University of Ulm. The iterative design, synthesis, and characterization of a morphological, composite mimic of spider dragline silk, an ultra-tough tensile fiber, is the subject of this work. The branching units of prototypical dendrimers will be modified with multiple, chemically-immiscible oligomeric side chains. One side chain phase of the dendrimer will be crosslinked, and length of the chain ends at the periphery of the dendrimer will be optimized in order to suppress bulk crosslinking in a columnar mesophase. Upon dissolution, conformationally-restricted, dendrimeric dimers should be afforded. The accessibility that the non-centrosymmetric, dendrimer conformation needs to reach before dimerization will be probed using atomic force microscopy with chemically-modified surfaces, in solution through the interaction with phospholipid vesicles using fluorescence correlation spectroscopy, and in the bulk using differential scanning calorimetry. A second dendrimer scaffold will be synthesized bearing similar, chemically-immiscible side chains and chain ends, but with an additional, latent functionality in the branching unit side chain which will not initially undergo crosslinking. After dimerization, the latent functionality will be unmasked and used to incorporate linear chains for bulk crosslinking or physical entanglement in a final composite. The mechanical properties of the resulting composite are expected to mimic those of spider dragline silk. While this work is not expected to produce materials amenable to commercial application, it is expected to assess the theoretical mechanism of spider dragline silk responsible for its remarkable mechanical toughness. It is the hope that such conclusions will be drawn about the future of advanced composite materials and that they will be invaluable to the development of more practical materials doc20660 none An MPS Distinguished International Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (MPS-DRF) will be used to develop an optobioelectronic switch by functionalizing gold nanoparticles with photoisomerizable thiols. There will be three stages in this project: (1) Synthesis and characterization of gold particles, (2) functionalization of nanoparticles with photoisomerizable molecules and characterization of the transduction of the optical signal using bulk measurement techniques, and (3) use of STM-SNOM to simultaneously provide the optical signal and measure the electrochemical transduction of that signal at a functionized nanoparticle. Most of the program will be hosted at Wolfgang Knoll s group at the Max Planck Institut fur Polymerforschung, where expertise will be provided in surface functionalization and characterization and the infrastructure necessary to achieve the objectives of this project. One month will be spent at Franz Aussenegg s group at the Institut fur Experimentalphysik at the Karl-Franzens-Universitat Graz, Austria, where there is expertise with nano-optics necessary to use the STM-SNOM system for these experiments. Another month will be spent with Itamar Willner in the Department of Organic Chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, where the thiols will be provided and also advice will be obtained on implementing them in building the proposed optobioelectronic switch doc20661 none Connor The goal of this project is to stimulate students from groups that are currently under-represented in the sciences to choose careers in environmental biology. This objective will be met by involving students in positive and productive research experiences and by providing close mentoring, group learning activities, and careful advising. Students will work with experienced and aspiring research scientists and environmental professionals in seminars and informal gatherings, thus providing a basis for students to imagine themselves in careers in environmental biology. Students will participate in research focused on understanding 1) the impact of urbanization and agriculture via habitat loss, fragmentation, and degradation, and 2) the effects of introduced species on native species and communities. Recruiting students from groups under-represented to careers in environmental biology will broaden participation of all parts of our society in learning how to preserve the natural environment. Focusing on the impact of habitat loss, fragmentation, and introduced species associated with urbanization and agriculture will provide valuable information that may enable us to preserve native species and communities within a human-dominated landscape doc20662 none White This research program addresses the study of carrier transport in advanced silicon carbide (SiC) devices. The research focuses on the modeling, fabrication and electrical characterization of advanced SiC devices, including n and p-channel MOSFETs, and novel surface and buried-channel DIMOS and IGBT devices with particular emphasis on their utilization for power switching applications. The research emphasizes the development of a low temperature fabrication sequence to reduce the detrimental effects of step bunching , while simultaneously achieving the required activation of the implanted species. A goal of the research is to increase carrier inversion and accumulation-layer mobility through a combination of low temperature processing with an optimized gate dielectric. The research focuses on the physical modeling of carrier mobility where electrons move in localized states at the SiC-SiO2 interface and are thermally activated into extended states in the conduction band. A combination of thermal activation, surface roughness and point Coulomb scattering all play a role in limiting the carrier mobility and hence the specific ON resistance of SiC power MOSFETs. The study of both electron and hole transport is important in planar SiC integrated circuit technology, particularly for smart power applications. The research employs novel test structures, fabrication techniques and instrumentation to study the influence of surface and bulk traps on carrier transport in inversion and layers over an extended temperature range, while contributing to the advancement of SiC devices, particularly power semiconductor devices doc20663 none A theoretical and numerical study will be made of several problems in numerical relativity and gravitational wave physics. A numerical method will be developed to allow the calculation of wave fields that propagate in the vicinity of black holes. This method will focus on directly computing the spacetime metric, which is the object that describes a gravitational field. Related to this effort, a study will be made to determine optimal non-reflecting boundary conditions, for use in the above-mentioned numerical method and for use in more general numerical relativity calculations. A study will also be made of matched-filter techniques that can be applied in analyzing data from the LIGO detectors to search for merging binary stars which involve significant levels of spin (rotation) of the two stars. The development of a numerical method for computing the spacetime metric on a black hole background is important for several reasons. Such a method might be applied to calculate the gradual merger of a small black hole that is orbiting around a larger, rotating black hole. Mergers like this are potentially detectable events in LIGO and the proposed NASA ESA LISA mission. Computation of waves on black hole backgrounds is also an important arena for testing the stability of numerical calculations, which is a considerable general concern in numerical relativity at present. Specification of non-reflective boundary conditions for such calculations is complicated by the curvature of space around black holes. Development of a more accurate non-reflecting condition is an important component to accurately computing gravitational waves and may be an important ingredient to stabilizing some numerical calculations. Existing techniques to search through LIGO data will not detect weak signals from some merging binaries which have significant individual stellar rotation rates. Including spin effects is straightforward but leads to a computationally prohibitive task. The goal will be to find a search technique that incorporates the essential aspects of spin while remaining computationally viable doc20664 none The intricacy and complexity of condensed matter systems are often succinctly expressed through effective theories valid in the limit of large length and time scales. Such theories, both in equilibrium and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, arise out of a coarse-graining process which relies on a separation of microscopic and macroscopic length and time scales. This separation of scales becomes suspect in systems where extended spatial structures lead to large scale heterogeneities. There is mounting evidence from experiments and simulations that such structures exist in granular systems, supercooled liquids and foams. It is also well established that the dynamical behavior of these systems set them apart from ordinary liquids and suggests that the complexity of dynamical behavior and response can be traced back to occurrence of extended spatial structures. One way of unraveling this complexity is to identify the extended structures responsible for the anomalous dynamics, and then construct effective equations of motion for these extended degrees of freedom. The objective of this theoretical research project is to formulate effective models at the mesoscopic scale of these heterogeneities; a scale intermediate between the microscopic one characteristic of molecular dynamics simulations and the macroscopic one entering hydrodynamic descriptions. Such a formulation should provide a direct interface between theory and experiments since the information at the mesoscopic scale is often directly available from experiments. Numerical simulations will be used as a stepping stone in the construction of effective dynamical theories. The techniques will be developed in the context of lattice models and then extended to continuum models. By focusing on geometrical structures at the mesoscopic scale, the project aims to explore the emergence of macroscopic physical properties from microscopic interactions. %%% This theoretical project investigates complex and disordered condensed matter systems, such as glasses, and attempts to determine how behavior at the microscopic scale affects behavior at the large scale. This is a fundamental problem in science whose solution would have wide impact doc20665 none Collaborative Research: Characterizing the Late Veneer ; PIs: Walker and Becker; Horan The object of this study is to more precisely and accurately characterize the concentrations, in particular the relative abundances, of the highly siderophile elements (Au, Re, Os, Ir, Ru, Rh, Pt, Pd; elements with very high affinities for iron) in the bulk silicate earth. The concentrations of these elements were likely set via continued accretion of the earth (0.1 to 0.5% of planetary mass) subsequent to the segregation of the metallic core. Questions we hope to answer are: 1) what is the dominant signature of this suite of elements in the bulk silicate earth, and can this signature be tied to precursor materials that experienced particular nebular or other early solar system processes? 2) does the upper mantle of the Earth exhibit heterogeneities in the relative abundances of these elements that cannot be attributed to indigenous processes? and 3) did the composition of the late accreted material change with time? To accomplish these goals, we will analyze materials from the terrestrial mantle and melt rocks and breccias from the surface of the Moon for Os isotope compositions and highly siderophile element abundances doc20666 none Experts continue to decry the poor performance of American children on standardized mathematics tests. Hundreds of studies have investigated mathematics learning in the formal setting of the school, including analyses of teacher-student interactions and best methods for teachers to use in instruction. In contrast, informal mathematics learning in the home has received little research attention, and direct analyses of parent-child interactions involving math problems have seldom been attempted. The primary purpose of the proposed research is to study mothers as they help their 5th and 7th grade children with math problems. The researchers developed a standardized mathematics task that can be administered in the home using a laptop computer. Mother-child interactions will be videotaped and coded. The approach is based on cognitive social learning theory and Vygotsky s premise that the child s intellectual development is heavily rooted in the child s social environment, or what Rogoff calls an apprenticeship in thinking doc20667 none Banks This research project is designed to accomplish two aims: Aim 1: To construct and array high-quality BAC libraries to provide a genomic resource on a wide range of species. Aim 2: To enable researchers working with green algae, non-seed land plants, and seed plants (including flowering plants) to identify genes critical for understanding plant form and function and how land plants arose and diversified. This project will enable progress toward an understanding of the genetic basis for the transitions that mark the most fundamentally important steps in green plant evolution. The Deep Green community (http: ucjeps.herb.berkeley.edu bryolab deepgene index.html) will help to provide an infrastructure for ongoing scientific exchange. Bioinformatics and a web site will be provided to the community to access these resources (http: www.genome.clemson.edu ). Selected Species: Desired coverage is given in parentheses. Where two coverage values are listed, two libraries using different restriction enzymes will be made. Green algae: Volvox carteri (5x, 5x) Caulerpa mexicana (8x) Mesostigma viride (8x) Coleochaete orbicularus (6.4x, 6.4x) Chara aspera (6x) Non-seed plants: Marchantia polymorpha (8x) Anthoceros sp. (6.3x, 6.3x) Lycopodium lucidulum (5.1x, 5.1x) Angiopteris erecta (6.2x, 6.2x) Ceratopteris richardii (4.8x, 4.8x) Marsilea quadrifolia (5.6x, 5.6x) Seeds plants: Amborella trichopoda (5.5x) Nuphar adventa (7x) Acorus gramineus (7x) Lirodendron tulipifera (7x) Mimulus guttatus (7x doc20668 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Julia Hendon will conduct two field seasons of archaeological research at the site of Cerro Palenque in the Ulua River Valley of north-central Honduras. This large and fertile valley was home to a number of Indian societies prior to Spanish contact with the earliest settlement dating back to BC. Cerro Palenque is a later site, occupied from AD 600- . During the Terminal Classic period, AD 850- , it became the largest community in the lower Ulua Valley, with over 500 structures and a large concentration of monumental architecture. Excavations and analyses will be used by Dr. Hendon to address how control of economic production and distribution contributed to the development of social inequality in the Ulua Valley. Three explanations for the relationship between economic control and social inequality will be examined: 1) control of exchange networks; 2) control of specialized production; and 3) manipulation of social networks through competitive generosity. The rapid development of Cerro Palenque as a dominant center during the Terminal Classic period and its relatively short period of occupation make it an ideal case study for testing these three explanations. The first season of research will be devoted to the excavation of the largest residential compound at the site. This compound is located next to the central public area where religious and administrative buildings made up the political core of the community during its peak occupation. The excavations will concentrate on recovering stratified deposits associated with the houses and other structures in the compound that will yield evidence for the location and intensity of specialized craft production and for the participation of Cerro Palenque s residents in long-distance trade in exotic resources such as the volcanic glass obsidian, used for blades and other cutting tools, and marine shell, used for religious offerings. The second season will draw on the expertise of specialists in archaeological chemistry, faunal analysis, and paleoethnobotany by concentrating on technical analyses and specialized study of the variety of materials recovered during the excavations. X-ray diffraction will be used to characterize the chemical composition of the obsidian tools, allowing identification of the source of the raw material. Fine-paste pottery, some of it manufactured at Cerro Palenque or at nearby sites in the Ulua Valley, will also undergo chemical characterization through the use of petrographic and neutron activation analyses to determine manufacturing locations more specifically. Carved marble vessels, a hallmark of the Terminal Classic period in the Ulua Valley, will also be studied to determine their source. The diet of the residents of Cerro Palenque will be studied through the identification of animal bones and plant remains. This research will contribute to the development of valid models of social change and the emergence of social complexity, a goal which lies at the heart of a scientifically informed archaeology. The research will also contribute to expanding our understanding of the history of ancient societies and the processes that shaped them doc20669 none The Altyn Tagh fault system, which delineates the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, is one of the largest and most striking, yet also most enigmatic features attributed to collision between India and Eurasia. In spite of a generally poor understanding of the structural geology and slip history of the Altyn Tagh fault, its tectonic significance has been the subject of much speculation, and the fault figures prominently in models of the Himalayan-Tibetan orogen. Recent attempts to gain better knowledge about the Altyn Tagh fault have primarily used indirect methods to interpret age of fault initiation and magnitude of displacement, or geodetic techniques to interpret slip rate. Direct investigation of fault displacement using geologic piercing points has not been widely attempted. As a result three critical questions remain concerning the offset history of the Altyn Tagh fault: (1) What is the age of initiation of the Altyn Tagh fault? (2) How has the slip-rate on the Altyn Tagh fault varied over geologic time? (3) How does the magnitude of slip vary along the length of the Altyn Tagh fault? In order to answer these three questions it is essential to identify pre-slip and multiple syn-slip piercing points on each segment of the fault. These piercing points will allow the history of offset on the fault to be determined for each segment of the fault (western, central, and eastern) and thus demonstrate slip magnitude, slip rate, and variation in these parameters along the length of the fault. The proposed study will directly address the Tertiary slip history of the Altyn Tagh fault and the distribution of slip on the fault, by identifying multiple Eocene-Upper Pliocene sediment-source matches across the fault for ten Tertiary basins that are truncated by the Altyn Tagh fault. By identifying multiple piercing points of various ages from a single basin, the slip history for that segment of the fault ca be reconstructed throughout the Tertiary. Furthermore, by examining a series of basins along the length of the fault, along-strike changes in displacement can be documented. These results will provide a robust and unambiguous data set from which the timing and rate of faulting can be directly determined, and that will also allow ideas about systematic changes in slip magnitude along the fault to be tested. The PI s prior work on the Altyn Tagh fault (Ritts, ; Yue and Liou, ; Ritts and Biffi, ; Sobel et al., ; Yue et al., in review) has demonstrated their ability to identify and document piercing points of a variety of ages and a variety of types on the Altyn Tagh fault. The proposed research includes documentation of lithostratigraphy and chronostratigraphy, physical sedimentology and lithofacies, provenance, and paleocurrents of ten Tertiary sedimentary basins that are truncated by the Altyn Tagh fault. Two major field seasons will focus on the characterization of sedimentary basins as well as potential sediment source terranes on the opposite side of the fault. Fieldwork in the Tertiary basins will include description of measured sections, collection of paleocurrent and conglomerate composition data, and geological mapping. Fieldwork in potential sediment source areas will focus on lithologic description and verification of Chinese mapping, as well as collection of potential source units for analytical work. Analytical techniques will be applied to conglomerate clasts and potential source units in order to test sediment-source correlations that are proposed based on field data. These techniques will include petrographic examination, trace and major element geochemistry, and U-Pb and 40 Ar 39 Ar geochronology. Biostratigraphic analysis of mudstones will be used to confirm the ages of the Tertiary units. This study will constrain the geology of Tertiary basins in order to construct a series of time- displacement curves to characterize the history and along-strike variability of the Altyn Tagh fault. The resulting data will better define the role that the Altyn Tagh fault plays in accommodating Cenozoic convergence between India and Asia, and thereby distinguish the relative importance of mechanisms such as extrusion tectonics in continental deformation doc20670 none Dr. Epstein is presently a professor in the Mathematics department at the University of Pennsylvania. He proposes to spend a year visiting the magnetic resonance research group in the Radiology Department of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where Dr. Felix Wehrli has agreed to be his host. While there he will study topics related to magnetic resonance imaging and gain hands on experience with imaging apparatus. His study will be directed toward determining the practical feasibility of magnetic resonance imaging using an inhomogeneous background field and non-linear gradient fields. The initial part of this problem involves the analysis of certain special solutions of Maxwell s equations. The next step is to study the practical invertibility of a class of integral transforms which are perturbations of the standard Fourier transform. Hopefully this will lead up to designs for magnets whose fields, though inhomogeneous, can still be used for magnetic resonance imaging. The ultimate goal is to build a working prototype. If inhomogeneous field imaging should prove feasible it could reduce the cost of the imaging apparatus and increase the flexibility and applicability of this technology. This IGMS project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc20671 none Peter Perry and Carolyn Gordon This award provides partial support for active research mathematicians with limited means of support to attend and participate in the Conference on Inverse Spectral geometry to be held at the University of Kentucky, June 20-28, . The conference will consist of two parts. The first (June 20-22) is a series of special lectures by Steven Zelditch (Johns Hopkins University), Richard Beals (Yale University), Peter Perry (University of Kentucky), and Tanya Christiansen (University of Missouri) covering inverse spectral problems, scattering theory, and analysis on the Heisenberg group. The second is a workshop on inverse spectral geometry (June 24-28) with three morning lectures and one afternoon lecture to allow maximum time for discussion and collaboration. Conference themes are: (1) Scattering theory for the Heisenberg group and Two-Step Nilpotent Lie Groups (2) Direct and inverse scattering problems for the Laplacian on exterior domains and non-compact Riemannian manifolds (3) Geometric invariants which are (are not) spectral invariants on compact Riemannian manifolds (4) Geometry of the Hodge Laplacian on p-forms on compact Riemannian manifolds Further information is available at http: www.ms.uky.edu ~isgconf or from the conference organizers: Peter A. Perry perry@ms.uky.edu Carolyn Gordon Carolyn.S.Gordon@Dartmouth.edu doc20672 none This grant supports an interdisciplinary research project in applied and computational seismology between the Physics and Mathematics Departments at North Carolina A (2) processing acquired seismic data using OMEGA Seismic Processing System and Seismic Unix software packages; (3) simulating seismic data through mathematical modeling and numerical solutions of appropriately formulated two- and three-dimensional point source acoustic wave equations for seismic waves, and writing interactive Fortran, C++, Labview, Matlab, OMEGA, and Seismic Unix programming scripts; and (4) studying mathematical methods, current research trend and open problems in seismic data analysis. It is anticipated that upon completion of his one-year residence in the Physics Department, the PI will not only enhance his own expertise and experience in applied and computational seismology, but also lay a foundation for a continuing collaboration between the PI and his two hosts in the Physics Department in developing a well-defined interdisciplinary geosciences research program which will engage other mathematics faculty members and students. The proposed project activities will also further collaborations and cooperation with the Allied Geophysical Laboratories of the University of Houston, Western Geophysical Baker Hughes Corporation, and Pyramid Environmental, Inc. as well as enhance and expand the geophysical and environmental science education and research training component of the Talent-21 project funded by the NSF HBCU-UP. This project will have immediate impact on three proposed program initiatives at the proposers institution: a computational science program, a geosciences program, and an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program, all of which aim at strengthening and upgrading the University s interdisciplinary research efforts. This IGMS project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc20673 none Saal The goals of this study are to provide additional constraints to improve our knowledge of the Galapagos plume and its interaction with the Galapagos Spreading Center. Two scientific issues pertaining to the geological evolution of the Galapagos will be addressed as part of this study. Firstly, in order to understand which processes are responsible for the geochemical variations of the Galapagos lavas and which current model is most suited to explain them, we propose a study that combines oxygen and radiogenic isotope analyses with major and trace elements compositions on the same sample set. Secondly, we propose to develop a geodynamic picture of the upwelling velocities and melting of the mantle beneath the Galapagos archipelago. Traditionally, geodynamic pictures of mantle upwelling and melting have been obtained through detailed geophysical studies. In the last 15 to 20 years, the study of U-series (238U-230Th, 230Th-226Ra, 235U-231Pa) has allowed scientists to image the mantle upwelling and melting using a geochemical tool. In contrast to other radiogenic isotope systems, the short half lives of the U-series will allow us to get a first look at the present-day mantle composition, the extent of melting represented by a suit of lavas and estimate the mantle upwelling at different points in the archipelago. The combination of U-series, oxygen and other radiogenic isotopes with major and trace elements contents measured in the same samples combined with ongoing geophysical studies, will provide our best opportunity to obtain a reliable geodynamic image of the Galapagos plume and the surrounding asthenosphere doc20674 none Aggressive research in magnetic materials science for information technology has been playing an essential role in rapid advancement of magnetic data storage systems for over a couple of decades. The PI proposes to engage rather extensively for a period of one year in study and research in this important area that makes use of the mathematical sciences in a significant way. Traditionally, this area of research belongs to researchers in physics, chemistry, electrical engineering, and metallurgical and materials engineering. It has been a relatively untouched frontier for applied mathematicians. The one-year project involves extensive study of basic physics of magnetism and magnetic recording, and subsequent development of several numerical models and methods to help solve two important but difficult problems in magnetic materials research: (1) identification of unknown magnetic parameters of ferromagnetic and anti-ferromagnetic coupled thin films that are used for future ultra-high density magnetic recording and nonvolatile magnetic random access memories, and (2) analysis of magnetic force microscope images of magnetic films for revealing useful information. In addition to the PI and at least one math student, this interdisciplinary project will involve two professors as hosts from department of physics. It also utilizes several instruments with assistance from at least another physics faculty and some physics students. The project provides the PI with rare opportunity to engage in effective collaboration with researchers in physics. The major component of mathematical methods will be on optimization. Optimization methods with or without gradient information of the objective function will be designed and implemented. Approximate mathematical models for representing the proposed physical systems are investigated. Integration of physics, mathematical models, and numerical methods will reveal new insights into those two difficult issues from a different perspective that would offer new ways to help solve the two proposed problems using currently available instruments. The project also helps promote research interests on magnetic materials in the mathematics community in general, enriches the educational experiences and broadens the career options for students majoring in mathematics as well as in physics. This IGMS project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc20675 none This project develops new statistical approaches for the analysis of ocean circulation data and prediction of the ocean s influence on weather. In the first part of the project, Bayesian hierarchical methods are devised for assimilating hydrographic data into ocean circulation models. In the second part of the project, Bayesian semiparametric regression models are used to produce improved forecasts of heating-degree day probability density functions doc20676 none This award provides partial support for a mini-symposium June 3-5, to commemorate the numerous contributions of Dr. Egon Balas on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Dr. Balas is a long time NSF grantee in the Operations Research program and one of the World s leading contributors to the field of combinatorial optimization. He has made many fundamental advances and has won most of the prestigious awards for distinguished achievement in mathematical programming and operations research. The meeting will include talks at Dr. Balas Carnegie-Mellon University from numerous distinguished speakers in the area of combinatorial optimization. NSF funding will help support participation by doctoral and postdoctoral students, and selected invited speakers doc20677 none This is a US-Bulgarian workshop on the use of information technologies in modeling the Bulgarian firm in transition from a planned to a free market economy. The workshop will be held in Bulgaria. The co-organizers of the workshop are Drs. Madeline Johnson and Richard Alo from the University of Houston-Downtown and Dr. Nikola Yankov from the Tsenov Academy of Economics in Bulgaria. The goal of the workshop is to bring together faculty, students and other experts from the U.S. and Bulgaria to discuss and develop joint research toward the development of a strategic and tactical decision-making simulation of a Bulgarian firm in transition from operating in a planned economy to a free market economy. The simulation will support research, training and education on the strategic and tactical processes that will speed the transformation required to operate successfully in a free market economy. The objectives of the workshop are (a) the identification of the constructs to be modeled in the simulation and (b) the identification of the relationships among the constructs to be modeled in the simulation. The outcomes of the workshop will include data collection, model building, and software engineering to explicate the simulation. This workshop in economics fulfills the program objectives of bringing together leading experts in the U.S. and Central Eastern Europe to combine complementary efforts and capabilities in areas of strong mutual interest and competence on the basis of equality, reciprocity, and mutuality of benefit doc20678 none Professor Jiri Janata of Georgia Institute of Technology is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry and Chemical Transport Systems Programs to lead a workshop entitled The New Challenges of Chemical and Biological Sensing. The workshop is held in response to events following Sept. 11, and will take place in Arlington VA January 9-10, doc20679 none There is a substantial demand for mathematical talent in the biomedical sciences. This IGMS grant will help meet this demand by providing training in physiology, which is one of the more mathematical areas of the biosciences, for Donald French. He will spend one year jointly hosted by two Professors in the College of Medicine at his home institution. In particular, they will investigate a system of self-organizing neurons that form a signaling network which undergoes synchronized intracellular calcium oscillations. French will also take courses in neuroscience and cell biology; attend conferences in Neuroscience; teach a course entitled ``Computational Neuroscience ; and mentor a mathematics graduate student. The planned research is interesting since it will involve the collaboration between a theoretician and experimentalists. The investigation will be on a network of neurons that can be viewed as a complex system and a focus of the work will be on emergent properties such as synchronized calcium oscillations. This in-depth experience will provide the appropriate training so French can develop his own research program. This research program will not necessarily be limited to neuroscience. For example, the type of neuronal modeling being done during the immersion year is similar to mathematical modeling used to describe cardiac function. This grant will extend knowledge in Physiology through research on neuronal networks and advance human resource development by training the PI in Physiology. It will also provide a highly interdisciplinary research experience in Mathematical Physiology for the PI s graduate student. After the term of the grant French will continue to provide leadership in Mathematical Physiology at his home Mathematics Department through his teaching and research. These activities will enrich the educational experience for students and broaden their career options. This IGMS project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc20680 none This project is concerned with systems of conservation laws (balance laws), a broad class of nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) arising from continuum mechanics. Of special interest are equations with partial dissipation, including hyperbolic-parabolic systems, hyperbolic systems with fading memory, and hyperbolic systems with relaxation. The purpose of the research is to obtain a better understanding of the underlying physical phenomena through the study of the qualitative behavior of the solutions of the PDEs. The first objective is to obtain the nonlinear stability of shock profiles for hyperbolic systems with relaxation, including fully dissipative systems and those containing one non-decaying wave in a linearly degenerate field (systems of composite type). The second objective is to obtain a similar stability result for initial boundary-value problems for hyperbolic-parabolic systems, especially to understand the effect of the boundary. The third objective is to extend the study to contact discontinuities and rarefaction waves. The research conducted under this award is relevant for the study of compressible viscous flows, the motion of viscoelastic materials, gas dynamics in thermal nonequilibrium, and magnetohydrodynamics. By including viscosity, heat conduction, electrical resistivity, excited internal structures of molecules, chemical reactions, and so on we focus on mathematical models that are closer to the real world than the traditional ideal ones. The project has three specific objectives. The first objective is to understand the stability properties of shock profiles in, for example, high-temperature gas flows when the internal structure of molecules and chemical reactions are no longer negligible. This problem arises, for example, at the reentry of a space shuttle into the atmosphere and is quite different from the traditional supersonic flight of an airplane. The second objective is to better understand gas flows near a solid surface. The third objective is to study more complete wave patterns in several cases doc20681 none This project will develop a self-consistent model of the near-Earth portion of the plasma sheet. It will specify the particle distributions, the effects of the plasma sheet on the magnetic field, and the effects of the plasma sheet on the formation of the ring current during magnetic storms. The approach will be to use test particle tracing techniques in conjunction with an MHD code. The technique will couple the particle tracing with the MHD modeling in a way that will produce a self-consistent model without using the basic MHD approximations that are invalid within the inner plasma sheet. This approach has already been used in modeling the quiet-time plasma sheet and the method will now be extended to conditions of enhanced convection, including the growth phase of substorms and convection bays (steady magnetospheric convection). During the later stages of the project the model will be extended beyond a 2-D plasma sheet model to include field-aligned currents within the plasma sheet doc20682 none Fein In the proposed research program, we will use x-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) of natural and laboratory-generated samples to determine the importance of metal-bacteria adsorption in affecting the distribution of metal in bacteria-water-rock systems. The overall objective of the research is to test whether surface complexation modeling can account for the observed metal distributions under a range of conditions and complexities. Quantifying the effects of bacteria on adsorption reactions in water-rock systems has direct applications not only to contaminant transport modeling, but also to bioremediation engineering and to the understanding of bacterial pathogen mobility. The proposed research will ultimately lead to more accurate predictions of the mobility of aqueous metals in contaminated groundwater systems. The proposed research will deliver three things: 1) an understanding, provided by both XAS and bulk adsorption measurements, of whether bacterial surface adsorption of aqueous metal cations plays an important role in metal speciation in bacteria-bearing water-rock systems; 2) a rigorous testing of whether surface complexation modeling can account for the metal distribution in those systems; and 3) a test of whether natural populations of bacteria exhibit identical metal adsorption properties, as was suggested by the data of Yee and Fein ( a,b). The experimental results from this research not only will further our understanding of metal-bacteria interactions, but they will also significantly improve our ability to accurately model the effects of bacterial adsorption on the fate and mobility of heavy metals in realistic geologic systems doc20683 none Significant increases in the number of engineering and related technology graduates from the Utah State System of Higher Education will be required over the next several years to advance the intellectual and economic well being of the state and its citizens. In response, the State Board of Regents has developed an Engineering and Computer Science Initiative within the state system of higher education with intentions to double the number of graduates in engineering and related technology majors by the year . The faculty within the College of Engineering believe that efforts to improve retention, and to increase enrollment opportunities for students from under-represented minorities, will contribute significantly toward that goal. Central to this effort is an increase in the number of scholarship opportunities available to engineering students within each of the 5 departments in the College of Engineering. For each year of the four year duration of this project, 30 need-based scholarships at $3,125 each are being awarded. The scholarships allow students to spend more time on academic pursuits, and less time employed outside the University. Scholarship recipients must: 1) be U.S. citizens, 2) enroll full time within the College of Engineering, 3) demonstrate financial need as defined by the U.S. Department of Education rules for Federal Financial aid, and 4) show academic potential or ability. Recruitment is done through the USU Office of High School College Relations, the Multicultural Student Center, and the College of Engineering. In addition to traditional recruiting methods, the college recruits through its annual Engineering State program, a four day event held each spring in which approximately 250 high school juniors from throughout the State of Utah are introduced to the opportunities available in the various fields of engineering. In addition to scholarship opportunities, the program also provides CSEMS scholars with: 1) a formal program through which they can receive academic assistance and advising, 2) a mechanism to promote interaction with upper-division students and faculty on a regular basis, 3) research opportunities with faculty mentors, and 4) early access to co-op internship opportunities and industry mentors. The CSEMS program is directed by faculty members from the College of Engineering and staff from High School College Relations, the Multicultural Student Center, and USU Career Services doc20684 none David A. Yuen The investigators propose a three-year collaborative investigation of the pressure (P), temperature (T), and compositional-structural (X) dependence of thermal conductivity (k) to shed light on possible feedback mechanisms and plume stabilization in the mantle. The current spectroscopic model of k(T,P,X), based on classical damped harmonic oscillators, reproduces the essential features of available measurements. The spectroscopic model will be improved as follows: (1) The theory for the radiative component of k will be made exact by including the dependence of the emitted light on frequency. Impurities (hydrous species, Fe2+ and Fe3+) will be focused on because their vibrational and electronic absorptions greatly modify the black-body curve. (2) IR and visible spectra at T and P will be acquired from mantle candidate phases. (3) The model will be benchmarked against k(T) obtained using the laser flash technique: this method circumvents previously encountered experimental difficulties. Geodynamical models incorporating k(T,P,X) will be independently constrained by analogy with convection experiments on colloids that have a strongly nonlinear diffusion coefficient, through collaboration with an Italian physics group performing these laboratory studies. The issues in geodynamic numerical modeling include (1) how the mechanics of the lithospheric and slab dynamics are affected by the interplay of k with rheology, and (2) whether variable k and phase transitions can induce layered convection, delay secular cooling of the core-mantle system, or stabilize mantle flows. The geodynamic modeling will reveal which variable (T, P, X) has the greatest influence on mantle convection, and thus will guide the mineral physics experiments. The team plans to disseminate findings on the effects of nonlinear diffusion, because of its far-reaching, fundamental nature, to educational institutions in disciplines other than geosciences doc20685 none Gorelick. Physical process simulation can be used as a too] to help reconstruct the spatial pattern of sediments comprising aquifers used for water supply. Sedimentary evolution is simulated using a process-imitating model, based on large-scale mathematics, that describes hydrologic, sedimentary, and tectonic events which have occurred over hundreds of thousands of years. The specific processes of interest are major floods, sedimentation, erosion, compaction, subsidence, sea-level variation, and regional-scale fault motion. The product is a quantitative too] to study aquifer stratigraphy and its evolutionary link to paleohydrology and tectonic conditions. This tool can be used in hydrogeologic investigations where the large-scale pattern of relative flow paths and flow barriers is important. The field area for application is the Santa Clara Valley in northern California, which is Approximately 240 mi2 Groundwater provides approximately half of the public water supply in Santa Clara Valley, yet pumping has caused a serious problem of land subsidence due to clay compaction. In most areas, the controls on groundwater flow and land subsidence imposed by aquifer heterogeneity and confining bed geometry are poorly understood. The Valley occupies a structural depression within a block bounded on the cast and west by the Hayward-Calaveras and San Andreas Fault systems. Respectively. The multiaquifer system consists of coalescing alluvial fans interfingered with estuarine deposits that have been formed over the past 600,000 years. The sedimentary process simulation model results will be compared to geologic and hydrogeologic data covering certain portions of the Valley. The goal is to use the model to interpret the roles played by various past hydrologic and geologic processes on the development of alluvial-bay aquifer architecture doc20686 none One of the most interesting data sets to emerge from recent studies of the Himalayan orogenic belt consists of U-Th-Pb ages reported by Harrison et al. ( ) and Catlos et al. ( a, b) from monazite inclusions within garnet crystals in the metamorphic rocks associated with the Main Central thrust (MCT) in central and eastern Nepal. Some of the monazite inclusions crystallized and were incorporated into the gamets during late Miocenc-Pliocene time. Geothen-nometry and geobarometry data indicate that metamorphic temperatures ranged from 500 -SOO C and pressures ranged from 8-12 kbar. Because detn tal monazite in pelitic sediments is destroyed during burial to the depths recorded by the mineral assemblages, the monazite ages most likely record the timing of garnet growth during Himalayan orogenesis (Harrison et al., ). Thus, the monazite ages contain infon-nation that is vital for kinematic reconstructions of Himalayan thrust systems, particularly the MCT and its proximal footwall rocks. The interpretation of the monazite ages offered in these previous studies suggests that the MCT was reactivated during late Miocene time, and that rocks in the footwall of the MCT were progressively incorporated into the hanging wall and raised to the surface. A number of independent lines of evidence suggest that this hypothesis may be correct, including o Ar Ar cooling ages (Copeland et al., ; Macfarlane et al., ; Copeland et al., ); (2) levelling and GPS studies (Jackson and Bilham, ; Bilham et al., ; Larsen et al., ); and (3) neotectonic and geomorphic studies of the MCT zone in central Nepal (e.g., Bilham et al., ). Although reasonable, the MCT reactivation hypothesis incorporates some surprising kinematic processes. Paramount among these is the requirement that approximately 40 km of slip on the MCT occurred during late Miocene-Pliocene time in order to convey the garnets and their monazite inclusions to the surface. If the MCT was indeed reactivated, it would be (by far) the largest out-of-sequence event on a thrust fault ever documented. Whereas out-of-sequence thrusting is now widely accepted in thrust belt models, it generally is restricted to relatively minor displacements (a few km). A reactivation event of the hypothesized magnitude would significantly alter current concepts of how the Himalayan fold-thrust belt operates, and how foldthrust belts in general operate. It is conceivable that the extreme rate of erosion along the MCT in Nepal has shifted the fold-thrust belt into a near terminal state of subcriticality, stalling its forward propagation and completely reorganizing the locus of major thrusting. Thus, the out-ofsequence MCT hypothesis is worthy of careful and critical examination. The key to understanding the young monazite ages lies in the structure of the rocks below the MCT from which the youngest monazite ages were obtained. Unfortunately, the stratigraphy and structure of the rocks below the MCT in central Nepal (where the monazite studies have been executed) are not well documented. Exact placement of the MCT in the field is still hotly debated, such that the tectonostratigraphic context of the samples remains in doubt. Alternatives to out-of-sequence reactivation of the MCT can explain equally well the young monazite ages. In this work, the PI s will implement a critical test of the out-of-sequence hypothesis in western Nepal. They will collect samples for U-Th-Pb monazite dating of gamet-bearing rocks and Ar Ar dating of micaceous lithologies along north-south transacts from the Main Boundary thrust in the south to the South Tibetan detachment in the north. They have already established the regional stratigraphy, structure, geochronology, and Nd isotope geochemistry of the Lesser Himalayan zone south of the MCT in western Nepal during the past six years (DeCelles et al., a, b, , ; Robinson et al., , ). They propose to obtain U-Th-Pb ages from monazite inclusions in garnets collected from rocks that span the MCT zone. They will also map the zone in detail and collect samples for U-Pb zircon and Nd-isotopic analysis in order to locate the MCT exactly in the field. The Ar Ar cooling ages should help to document the regional history of thrust sheet emplacement, which will be needed to support any interpretation of what occurred along the MCT. The proposed work should help to resolve whether the MCT experienced major (several tens of km) slip during late Miocene-Pliocene time. The result of the MCT question will have an impact on general models for orogenic wedges, in particular whether rapid erosion can relocate the locus of major thrusting on a scale required by large-scale reactivation of the MCT. In addition, the proposed Ar Ar dating should provide an unprecedented level of detail and precision for the timing of thrust sheet emplacement in the Himalaya. Because the Himalaya is intimately related to the growth of the Tibetan Plateau and changes in global ocean chemistry, the PI s results should have applications beyond Himalayan tectonics doc20687 none The PI will coordinate field work at the Pipe Creek Sinkhole, a recently discovered site in Grant County, Indiana, which preserves unconsolidated sediments containing a diverse late Tertiary assemblage of animals and plants. The study will be a collaborative effort between Indiana-Purdue University, Fort Wayne and the Indiana State Museum (the repository for specimens). Field work will comprise on-site wet-sieving and concentration of sediments (some sediment samples will be bagged for later sieving in the lab). Sieve concentrate will then be picked for small fossils in the lab. The PI will create a database in which each identifiable specimen will be associated with records about the sample and size fraction of sediment from which it came. This will eventually be used to analyze the paleoecology of the site. In addition, the PI will set up a lab for preparing thin sections of lower vertebrate bones from the assemblage for osteohistological skeletochronological analysis relevant to reconstructing the late Tertiary paleoclimate in the region of the Pipe Creek Sinkhole doc20665 none Collaborative Research: Characterizing the Late Veneer ; PIs: Walker and Becker; Horan The object of this study is to more precisely and accurately characterize the concentrations, in particular the relative abundances, of the highly siderophile elements (Au, Re, Os, Ir, Ru, Rh, Pt, Pd; elements with very high affinities for iron) in the bulk silicate earth. The concentrations of these elements were likely set via continued accretion of the earth (0.1 to 0.5% of planetary mass) subsequent to the segregation of the metallic core. Questions we hope to answer are: 1) what is the dominant signature of this suite of elements in the bulk silicate earth, and can this signature be tied to precursor materials that experienced particular nebular or other early solar system processes? 2) does the upper mantle of the Earth exhibit heterogeneities in the relative abundances of these elements that cannot be attributed to indigenous processes? and 3) did the composition of the late accreted material change with time? To accomplish these goals, we will analyze materials from the terrestrial mantle and melt rocks and breccias from the surface of the Moon for Os isotope compositions and highly siderophile element abundances doc20689 none Collaborative Research: Investigating the processes and timescales of andesite differentiation: a comprehensive petrological and geochemical study of Arenal Volcano, Costa Rica ; ; ; PIs: Gill; Reagan; Tepley; Gardner Arenal Volcano in Costa Rica is an excellent natural laboratory in which to test specific hypotheses regarding differentiation mechanisms and the timescales of magmatic processes and their relationship to eruptions. Our objective is to undertake a multi-pronged petrological and geochemical investigation to take advantage of existing data and models. The on-going eruption of Arenal volcano has undergone complex changes in eruptive behavior, and a crucial question is whether those changes relate to different magma storage conditions, such as varying depths and hence initial volatile contents, or to different degassing styles and rates. We will investigate this important issue through several techniques. We seek to determine the timescales of degassing, the residence times and ascent rate of degassed magmas, and the timescales of degassing-induced plagioclase crystallization. We will measure short-lived nuclides within the uranium decay series to constrain the timescales of magmatic processes as well as measure the long-lived isotopic compositions of whole rocks, and mineral separates and individual minerals in the case of Sr, to determine whether there is evidence for involvement of isotopically distinct components during differentiation processes. Lastly, we will measure a suite of major- and trace-element concentrations to evaluate the secular change in Arenal lava composition. The data from these tests will help answer questions such as whether rates of differentiation depend on the depth and degree of crystallization and on the extent and character of degassing; whether crystal and magma residence times can be as short as days to months during near steady-state eruptions of andesite; whether within-eruption changes of magma composition are caused by open-system processes of fractional crystallization plus recharge or assimilation or both; and whether eruption styles are related to degassing history and magma residence time doc20690 none Theoretical Morphology and Spatial Analysis of Trace Fossils Roy E. Plotnick University of Illinois at Chicago Trace fossils represent the preserved interactions of trace making organisms with their environment. The exact forms of traces result from complex interactions among the organism s morphology, the behavior being carried out, the organism s perception of the environment, and the heterogeneity of the environment. The study of trace fossils thus allows us to study the evolution of animal movement in deep time . Existing mathematical models for the biological formation of traces have tended to focus on a limited repertoire of behaviors, such as grazing. They do not include realistic patterns of environmental heterogeneity, differences in perception, or multiple behavioral responses. In addition, there have been almost no attempts to model three-dimensional traces, or traces that branch or anastomose. New models for grazing and crawling traces will be built based on current research by ecologists into animal perception and movement patterns and their relationship to environmental heterogeneity. These models will explore the interactions of alternative spatial patterns of environmental heterogeneity with different perceptions and behavioral responses to it. They will also incorporate recent concepts in the study of artificial life. The new models could suggest how behavioral patterns for a given trace-making organism might change as a function of environmental differences, such as resource distribution. This could be a useful tool for determining such patterns of spatial heterogeneity in ancient environments doc20691 none The activities of this proposal are aimed at exploiting the Forbush decrease , a region of suppressed cosmic ray density located downstream of coronal mass ejection (CME) shock fronts, for the purpose of predicting with a lead time of some 4-8 hours the arrival of a CME at Earth. Muon detectors and neutron monitors will be utilized to detect the loss-cone anisotropy of energetic particles which escape from the Forbush decrease plasma. From this information, it is possible to infer useful constraints on the orientation and extent of solar ejecta. The principal efforts will be to close a coverage gap by constructing a full-size muon detector at the Southern Space Observatory, in Sao Martinho, Brazil, and to add features to their website (www.bartol.udel.edu ~neutronm ) giving real-time graphical displays of cosmic ray density gradients, angular anisotropies, and bi-directional flows doc20692 none The optimal microstructural design of superplastic ceramics using finely dispersed second phases will be studied. Intergranular silicate phases and nanodispersed crystalline oxides will be used to create ceramic materials with improved properties for shape forming via superplastic deformation. The volume and distribution of second phases and their interfacial energy and solubility will be variables analyzed with respect to grain growth, grain boundary sliding, and fracture in polycrystalline oxides. Experimental analysis techniques will include analytical electron microscopy and impedance spectroscopy as well as mechanical deformation tests both at room temperature and at high temperatures. The goal of this research is to understand how chemically dissimilar dispersants can be used at the nanoscale to tailor the mechanical properties of oxide ceramics, so that highly deformable ceramics can be net shape formed at high temperatures while retaining a superior mechanical and electrical performance at lower temperatures. Superplastic forming has the potential to allow the production of shapes not easily attained by conventional ceramic processing techniques. Superplastic deformation of ceramics currently, however, is currently possible only in a few limited ceramic systems that retain a fine grain microstructure. In addition, the extremely high temperatures required for this process and slow strain rates attained limit the industrial applications of this technique. This research will focus on optimizing the microstructural design parameters that will result in lower temperatures for superplastic forming and increased deformation rates while expanding the range of ceramic materials that can be shaped by superplastic forming, thus making this technique a more economically viable method for net shape forming of ceramics doc20693 none Hofmeister Yuen The investigators propose a three-year collaborative investigation of the pressure (P), temperature (T), and compositional-structural (X) dependence of thermal conductivity (k) to shed light on possible feedback mechanisms and plume stabilization in the mantle. The current spectroscopic model of k(T,P,X), based on classical damped harmonic oscillators, reproduces the essential features of available measurements. The spectroscopic model will be improved as follows: (1) The theory for the radiative component of k will be made exact by including the dependence of the emitted light on frequency. Impurities (hydrous species, Fe2+ and Fe3+) will be focused on because their vibrational and electronic absorptions greatly modify the black-body curve. (2) IR and visible spectra at T and P will be acquired from mantle candidate phases. (3) The model will be benchmarked against k(T) obtained using the laser flash technique: this method circumvents previously encountered experimental difficulties. Geodynamical models incorporating k(T,P,X) will be independently constrained by analogy with convection experiments on colloids that have a strongly nonlinear diffusion coefficient, through collaboration with an Italian physics group performing these laboratory studies. The issues in geodynamic numerical modeling include (1) how the mechanics of the lithospheric and slab dynamics are affected by the interplay of k with rheology, and (2) whether variable k and phase transitions can induce layered convection, delay secular cooling of the core-mantle system, or stabilize mantle flows. The geodynamic modeling will reveal which variable (T, P, X) has the greatest influence on mantle convection, and thus will guide the mineral physics experiments. The team plans to disseminate findings on the effects of nonlinear diffusion, because of its far-reaching, fundamental nature, to educational institutions in disciplines other than geosciences doc20694 none Much of the current understanding of the geodynamics of the Indo-Asian collision has been based on two end-member models: the plane-stress viscous thin-sheet model based on continuum mechanics, and the plane-strain plasticine indentation model based on analog experiments. Both models have provided important frameworks for understanding the Tibetan tectonics, but the two-dimensionality and other simplifications of these models have left many important issues in uncertainty. For example, the plasticine indentation model predicts lateral extrusion of Tibet and SE Asia to be the dominant mechanism accommodating the km post-collisional crustal shortening, whereas the viscous thin-sheet model emphasizes the role of crustal thickening. These different predictions are biased by the model limitations: the plasticine indentation model does not allow vertical strain and hence crustal thickening, whereas the viscous thin-sheet model dose not includes the faults and the frictional (plastic) rheology necessary to simulate the escaping tectonics. Since these end-member models were introduced ~20 years ago, numerous improvements have been made, but the continued debate on the strain partitioning between crustal thickening and lateral extrusion and many other questions manifests the need for a new approach. The proposed work is to develop a fully three-dimensional (3-D) finite element model to investigate the rise and fall of the Himalayan-Tibetan plateau. The large volume of multidisciplinary observational data accumulated from decades of intensive studies is ready to be integrated and interpreted in more sophisticated geodynamic models. The 3-D finite element models are now feasible thanks to the advancement of computer technology and maturation of the finite element method. The PI has already built the prototype 3-D model and successful applied it to studies of active tectonics in the Tibetan plateau and the Andes. Major model developments in this project include implementing strike-slip faults in finite-strain calculations and incorporating more realistic rheology. The finite-strain model will include brittle deformation within the upper crust, often omitted in viscous thin-sheet models, by using a mixed viscous-elastic rheology. Transient stress and strain rates will be simulated in infinitesimal-strain models with viscoealstic and plasto-viscoelastic rheology. The finite-strain and infinitesimal-strain models will be combined to provide a more complete simulations of the collision history. Systematic numerical experiments will be conducted to explore the mechanics of the Indo-Asian collision. The results will lead to a better understanding of these questions: What are the major driving forces for crustal deformation in the Himalayan-Tibetan plateau? When and how did the Tibetan plateau uplift? What controlled the strain partitioning between crustal thickening and lateral extrusion? What caused the Tibetan extension? How is the upper crustal deformation related to that in the lower crust and the mantle lithosphere? The numerical modeling will be closely integrated with ongoing geological and geophysical studies in the Tibetan plateau through collaboration with US and Chinese scientists, including Yin (UCLA), Nabelek (Oregon State), and Flower (UIC). The proposed 3-D finite element models will be a major step forward in numerical modeling of large-scale continental deformation and can be used for other plate boundaries. The PI will document the computer codes and make them available to public. The multidisciplinary data sets compiled for this study will be organized into a GIS database and made available to the research community. This project will involve undergraduate and graduate students; the integration of cutting-edge computation with multidisciplinary studies provides a great opportunity for training a new generation of geoscience students doc20695 none The aim of the project is to advance the development of analytic tools to study various asymptotic and singularly perturbed problems, including the semiclassical (or zero dispersion) limit of the focusing nonlinear Schroedinger equation (NLS) and exponentially small effects in singularly perturbed dynamical systems. Numerical experiments for the focusing NLS reveal the formation of regions of violent and disorganized oscillations. This is in drastic contrast to the case of the defocusing NLS, which is reasonably well understood by now. The method of Riemann-Hilbert problems will be used to describe the complicated behavior of the focusing NLS. The second part of the project is connected with the phenomenon of breaking of homoclinic and heteroclinic connections in singularly perturbed and discretized systems. A number of aspects of nonlinear optics, such as the stationary profiles of beams propagating in nonlinear media and propagation of certain pulses in optical fibers, can be described by the NLS equation and its various asymptotic regimes. We will concentrate on one of the most difficult asymptotic problems for this equation. The second part of the project investigates the phenomenon of transition between integrability and chaos in dynamical systems doc20696 none de Pamphillis This research project is designed to accomplish two aims: Aim 1: To construct and array high-quality BAC libraries to provide a genomic resource on a wide range of species. Aim 2: To enable researchers working with green algae, non-seed land plants, and seed plants (including flowering plants) to identify genes critical for understanding plant form and function and how land plants arose and diversified. This project will enable progress toward an understanding of the genetic basis for the transitions that mark the most fundamentally important steps in green plant evolution. The Deep Green community (http: ucjeps.herb.berkeley.edu bryolab deepgene index.html) will help to provide an infrastructure for ongoing scientific exchange. Bioinformatics and a web site will be provided to the community to access these resources (http: www.genome.clemson.edu ). Selected Species: Desired coverage is given in parentheses. Where two coverage values are listed, two libraries using different restriction enzymes will be made. Green algae: Volvox carteri (5x, 5x) Caulerpa mexicana (8x) Mesostigma viride (8x) Coleochaete orbicularus (6.4x, 6.4x) Chara aspera (6x) Non-seed plants: Marchantia polymorpha (8x) Anthoceros sp. (6.3x, 6.3x) Lycopodium lucidulum (5.1x, 5.1x) Angiopteris erecta (6.2x, 6.2x) Ceratopteris richardii (4.8x, 4.8x) Marsilea quadrifolia (5.6x, 5.6x) Seed plants: Amborella trichopoda (5.5x) Nuphar adventa (7x) Acorus gramineus (7x) Lirodendron tulipifera (7x) Mimulus guttatus (7x doc20697 none Questions that ask respondents to choose all that apply from a set of items occur frequently in surveys. Categorical variables that summarize this type of survey data are called multiple response (or pick any c) categorical variables. It is often of interest to test for independence between two categorical variables. When categorical variables can have multiple responses, traditional Pearson chi-square tests for independence should not be used because of the within-subject dependence among responses. This research will provide methods to test for independence between two or more multiple-response categorical variables. A modified version of the Pearson statistic will perform the test, and bootstrap procedures will provide approximate sampling distributions. First and second-order corrections will allow for chi-square distribution approximations to the sampling distribution. Generalized log linear models and multivariate binomial logit-normal models will provide a model-based approach for the test of independence. Many survey questions are asked in a multiple-response manner. Examples include: What types of cars do you own? and For what criminal offenses have you been arrested? Other questions naturally fall into a multiple-response format, but some researchers avoid asking them in this format due to statistical analysis problems. For example, most survey questions dealing with ethnicity allow respondents to make only one choice, which is entirely inappropriate in today s highly multicultural population. Other researchers may analyze multiple-response questions as if they came from single-response categorical variables, which can lead to very conservative tests of independence. This research will allow researchers to incorporate these types of questions into surveys and use statistically correct methods of analysis. The research is supported by the Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics Program and a consortium of federal statistical agencies under the Research on Survey and Statistical Methodology Funding Opportunity doc20698 none Li EarthScope is a major earth science research initiative that will integrate scientific information derived from seismology (US Array), geodesy (Plate boundary Observatory), subsurface sampling and measurement (SAFOD), remote sensing (InSAR), and complementary geology and geophysics to understand continental scale plate deformation and evolution. Funding for the EarthScope initiative is currently being discussed in Congress as part of NSF s FY budget. The Division of Earth Sciences has made FY funds available for projects that qualify as pre-EarthScope activity, i.e. activities that will facilitate or enable the construction, fabrication, installation or operation of EarthScope once it is funded under the MREFC (Major Research Equipment Facilities and Construction) account. Such activities include meetings and workshops, prototype development, site selection or characterization. This award will provide funds to support the deployment of dense linear seismic arrays across and along the San Andreas fault (SAF) near the SAFOD drilling site at Parkfield, CA to record fault-zone trapped waves generated by explosions and microearthquakes. Since the features of fault-zone trapped waves strongly depend on the fault geometry and physical properties, these waves can be used to determine spatial and temporal variation in fault properties with high precision. This experiment will be a supplement to other seismic experiments at Parkfield scheduled in the Fall of doc20699 none Seawater Calcium Isotopes and Carbonate Deposition History Changes in the amount of carbonate precipitation and dissolution have significant effects on oceanic alkalinity, total CO2, and atmospheric CO2, thus climate. Knowledge of the carbonate depositional history is important for understanding the global calcium and carbon cycles and may lead to improved understanding of global biogeochemical cycles operation on Earth on various time scales and the potential feedback mechanisms in these cycles and their effect on climate. The calcium isotope ratio is seawater at any given time is largely controlled by biological precipitation of calcium carbonate, a process that discriminates against heavy isotopes. This fractionation causes seawater to be enriched in heavy calcium relative to the average isotopic ratio of input sources to the ocean. Therefore, reconstruction of seawater Ca isotope ratio could lead to an estimate of the fluctuations in the amount of calcium carbonate deposited in the oceans through time and to better understanding of the calcium and carbon cycles. Accordingly, the main objective of this SGER proposal is to explore the potential of the mineral barite separated from deep-sea sediments to trace the variations in seawater Ca isotope ratios, and to evaluate the use this proxy for reconstruction of the calcium carbonate deposition history. This work fits the criteria for a SGER proposal as it seeks partial support for conducting preliminary work of an untested and novel idea it is a high risk project and applies newly developed tools (so far only two labs in the USA measure Ca isotopes routinely). Results if encouraging will provide a basis to perform further more detailed research that will advance our understanding of the global biogeochemical cycle and its coupling with climate and contribute significantly to the field of paleoceanography and earth history doc20700 none Hitzman Iron oxide-(Cu-Au) deposits are currently a prime exploration target worldwide. Understanding of this class of deposits has been hindered by the scarcity of examples and by the large scale of the systems themselves. There are fundamental disagreements on several key features of this deposit class, particularly in regard to the source of the fluids responsible for alteration and mineralization and the role of specific magmas. Tied to these debates is how the iron oxide-Cu-Au class of deposits relates in time and space to other deposit types. Such linkages between deposit types are critical not only for mineral exploration but also for better understanding the geochemical and hydrodynamic aspects of large-scale mineralizing systems. The Late Proterozoic Ar Rayn terrane in central Saudi Arabia provides an ideal site to test the linkages between iron oxide systems and low-sulfidation epithermal gold deposits. The terrane contains a number of well exposed mineral deposits and prospects, including iron oxide-(Cu-Au) and epithermal precious metal deposits which appear to be genetically and temporally related based on geological relationships and limited geochronology. The deposits, though described in reports by the Saudi Arabian Deputy Ministry for Mineral Resources, are virtually unknown in the literature outside of Saudi Arabia. This project will document the geology and geochemistry of the deposits. Descriptive information from detailed outcrop mapping will be supplemented by mineralogic, fluid inclusion, and stable isotope geochemical studies designed to quantify physical and chemical conditions of the hydrothermal fluids across all parts of the zone of transition from apparently deep-seated, magnetite-rich, Fe-oxide-(Cu-Au) deposits to much shallower, low-sulfidation epithermal deposits. In addition, geochronological studies will allow determination of the temporal relationships of these mineralizing systems. These data will allow critical analysis of the possible linkage between iron oxide systems and low-sulfidation epithermal systems. The project will also aid in forging relationships between the Saudi Geological Survey and research groups in the United States doc20701 none setting, concentrating on the combinatorial and structural implications of the infinite. While the connections between set theory and analysis have always been acknowledged, too much of the work in these two areas has gone on largely unheeded by researchers in the other area. The chief purpose of the current proposal is to create an environment where leading set theorists and analysts can collaborate on problems which straddle the boundaries of their subjects doc20702 none The team, lead by Nolan, will purchase, validate, and distribute a new, high resolution Digital Elevation Model (DEM) of the Kuparuk River watershed in northern Alaska, for use by all NSF funded scientists who require such data for their research. In the Alaskan Arctic the only DEMs commonly available are those from the USGS, with pixel size of roughly 60 m x 90 m and vertical accuracy of about 15 m. These DEMs often have large errors at the sheet boundaries, making them difficult to mosaic accurately. In contrast, the Star3i X-band airborne-radar system operated by Intermap Technology Corporation, creates a topographically seamless DEM at 5 m pixel size with a mean vertical error of 1 to 3 m, depending on product purchased. Intermap acquired the Kuparuk watershed in August of , and this DEM is now available as an off-the-shelf product. The distribution package made available to NSF researchers will include more than the raw data. The team will validate the new DEMs for accuracy, principally through comparing hydrologic channel networks created from the DEMs with those found in the real world. They will also produce vector layers of these stream channels for use in many GIS applications, and calculate some basic hydrological information on the watershed. They will include a variety of shareware software to allow novice users to easily access the data, as well as include a number of still images and animations for use in analysis and outreach. Finally, they will include a number of references and technical specifications to help new users understand the limitations of the data. The DEM will be made available to all NSF researchers through JOSS doc20703 none The operation of the Bruny Island Radio Spectrometer will be secured for the next five years. This facility makes radio observations between 3 MHz and 47 MHz, and has pioneered the use of modern digital techniques to avoid and largely excise the very strong terrestrial radio interference that is normally prevalent in this frequency band. It is the only instrument in the world that bridges the gap between low frequency solar radio observations made from space and the higher frequency observations made from the Earth s surface. As such, it will continue to provide unique observations capable of tracking interplanetary shock accelerated particle events between where the space-based observatories cutoff and where the ground-based receivers begin. Ancillary activities will address how the observed type II and type III radio bursts are related to the generation of solar energetic particles doc20704 none King The investigators have documented a mode of convection in both 2D and 3D Cartesian convection calculations with mobile plates where the plate motion changes on a time scale comparable to the time scales of plate reorganizations observed on Earth. This proposal will further our understanding of coupled plate-mantle convection. Over the past few years, the field has developed a substantial understanding of the interaction of geometrically fixed plates and mantle convection; and it is appropriate to consider calculations where the plate boundaries evolve with time. It is proposed to use a yield-strength constitutive-law rheology in a series of calculations using the aspect ratio, Rayleigh number and internal heating values used in the plate reorganization studies by Lowman, King and Gable ( , submitted). There are two specific questions that this proposal will address: When plate boundaries are allowed to evolve dynamically in the yield-strength rheology calculations, are the rapid plate reorganizations that we have seen in previous calculations accompanied by changes in plate boundaries? Second, under what conditions (i.e., what activation energies and critical yield-strengths) are the constitutive-based plate methods able to produce plate-like surface velocities during and after a plate reorganization event doc20705 none The investigator attempts to classify square-integrable tamely ramified representations of split reductive p-adic groups G and their inner forms, by means of homomorphisms from the tame Weil-Deligne group into the dual group of G. This project is part of the local Langlands conjecture for such groups. The representations are partitioned into finite sets, called ``L-packets . The method is a p-adic analogue of Lusztig s Jordan decomposition for finite reductive groups. From a functorial point of view, the tame L-packets are bijective lifts of unipotent L-packets for quasi-split groups and their inner forms. Properties of the L-packets, such as formal degrees and Whittaker models, will also be investigated. Symmetry is an effective way to study mathematical and physical objects. A Group is a collection of symmetries, and Representation Theory is the study of how these symmetries manifest in different ways. As a simple example, there is a group of sixty symmetries consisting of permutations of five objects, and this group also manifests as the sixty symmetries of an icosohedron, and of the fullerene molecule. The investigator studies certain infinite groups of infinite dimensional symmetries. In the past forty years, mathematicians and physicists have guessed that there may be deep relations between such symmetries and fundamental, as yet undiscovered, properties of numbers. The investigator attempts to confirm part of these conjectures, and make them more explicit doc20706 none Dillard University will develop a strategic plan to guide the systemic reform of its science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) curriculum with the goal of preparing students for entry and success into the STEM workforce. Achievement of this goal will result in increased numbers of African-American students pursing advanced degrees, obtaining doctoral degrees, and entering the workforce and professoriate in STEM fields. Impacted disciplines include biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, physics, and pre-engineering. The proposed systemic reform plan includes the following objectives: - Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis of STEM programs, curricula, instruction, and research practices at Dillard University; - SWOT analysis of current and potential university partnerships and programs for student and faculty research collaborations; - SWOT analysis of current intervention and outreach programs that impact STEM educational programs; - Development of an implementation plan for the systemic reform of the STEM instructional and research enterprise at Dillard University doc20707 none This research is directed toward the general goal of developing some fundamental understanding of nonlinear processes in turbulent fluids, with particular attention to the development of effective equations which describe the dynamics of complex systems on a coarse-grained level. Two particular physical phenomena are examined: the mixing and transport of substances immersed in a turbulent fluid and the interaction between weakly nonlinear waves. The common mode of investigation is a precise analysis of simplified stochastic models. The main feature of the turbulent transport model is its inclusion of both a large-scale mean flow, which can depend on both space and time, and a small-scale fluctuating component of the velocity field. This allows a study of how the large and small scales of a turbulent fluid interact in determining the effective evolution of the passive scalar density. The work will be directed toward extending some rigorous homogenization theorems and investigating some physical phenomena which arise from the new features of the model. The second research area concerns the development of simplified equations to describe wave propagation under the influence of weak nonlinearity. A well-known weak turbulence theory has found some success in treating such systems in a number of contexts, but its foundations and limitations are still under active investigation. Some particular aspects of the weak turbulence theory will be scrutinized and illustrated on the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam model. The outcomes of this analysis will be used to suggest modifications of the standard kinetic equations of weak turbulence theory which may improve their accuracy and generalize their domain of applicability. Both of these studies are directed toward achieving a better understanding of how turbulent systems can be effectively described through simplified equations. A chief application of this research theme is in atmosphere-ocean models designed for climate and weather prediction. Limitations on both available data and supercomputing resources make fully detailed simulations impossible for the forseeable future, and the effects of turbulence must be represented by some managable set of parameters. The research described above will contribute toward a better understanding of how turbulence can be parameterized in atmosphere-ocean science models in a more rational and effective manner doc20708 none Plate circuit calculations indicate that motion of the Pacific plate relative to North American plate changed from westerly to NW at ~8 Ma. This observation corresponds extremely well with geologic data which indicates that motion of the Sierran-Great Valley block relative to the Colorado Plateau changed from westerly to NW at ~8-10 Ma. Geologic studies indicate that the rate of right lateral shear at ~8 Ma within the Eastern California Shear Zone north of the Garlock fault was ~15 mm yr accounting for ~30%of relative plate motion. Geodetic studies indicate a present-day dextral shear rate of 10-12 mm yr, providing clear evidence that the Eastern California Shear Zone is still an important component of deformation within the Pacific-North America plate boundary zone. In spite of its tectonic importance, the space-time evolution of much of the Eastern California Shear Zone is only broadly understood. This proposal requests support for investigating the kinematics of a system of intraplate dextral faults in the northern part of the Eastern California Shear Zone using an integrated approach of field mapping, tectonic geomorphology, paleoseismology, and geochronology. The proposed research is motivated by ongoing geodetic investigations on present-day magnitude of strain accumulation and spatial distribution across the Eastern California Shear Zone. In light of these geodetic constraints on strain accumulation, it is timely to improve the understanding of the spatial and temporal patterns of strain release during the late Neogene and Quaternary. The two data sets will provide important constraints on geodynamic hypotheses proposed for the evolution of the Eastern California Shear Zone. An accurate characterization of the spatial and temporal patterns of strain release within the Eastern California Shear Zone is crucial for understanding tectonic processes over a much broader area of intraplate deformation associated with the interaction of the Pacific and North American plates doc20709 none Meinert This project will renovate and upgrade the fluid inclusion laboratory at Washington State University, which serves as a regional research facility with the University of Idaho. This facility is heavily used by students and researchers at the two cooperating universities, including more than 45 M.S. and Ph.D. theses in the past 20 years. Fluid inclusions provide direct evidence of the hydrothermal characteristics of many past and present geological systems. Fluid inclusions have been instrumental in the study of many geologic processes and are a standard part of most studies of ore deposits. Use of the fluid inclusion laboratory at Washington State University ranges from studies of pollen spores, to geothermal systems, to structural geology, to economic geology, although the majority of studies have been of ore deposits. Meinert et al. ( ) is an example of a recently published fluid inclusion study that demonstrates the capabilities and use of the lab. The new equipment includes a Linkham heating freezing stage and supporting IR microscope video equipment. This equipment allows the routine measurement of heating and freezing temperatures of fluid inclusions in both transparent and semi-opaque materials doc20710 none This project will improve current models of the Earth s magnetic field at high latitudes and at larger distances from the Earth than current models. The new model will include a model of the location of the magnetopause that depends on solar wind pressure and the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF). The twisting of the cross-tail current sheet in response to the By-component of the IMF will be included in the model as will the deep depression of the magnetic field in the magnetospheric cusp due to the diamagnetic effect of magnetosheath plasma. The model will be distributed to the scientific community via the National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) web site doc20711 none Dynamics of Mush Column Magamtism: Experiments Involving Transport of Particle-Laden Fluids PI: Marsh The nature and behavior of the plumbing system that carries magma to large volcanic centers can be looked upon as a magmatic mush column. Mush columns are envisioned as a vertically extensive stack of horizontal sheets (or sills) and chambers of magma interconnected by a plexus of pipe-like and or dike-like conduits stretching downward for distances as great as 50 km. Because of their longevity and complexity, mush columns may play a central role in the evolution of magma and in the general geologic evolution of Earth-like planets. Mush column dynamics may be central to understanding the connections between magmatism and volcanism, between eruptive flux and magma composition, between chamber and conduit geometry and cumulate bed formation, between conduit clogging and volcanic tremor, and between magma transport and layered intrusions, among many other issues. This project will design and build a scale model of a mush column to study experimentally the dynamics of magma charged with crystals as it ascends through a series of interconnected magma chambers. Particle-laden fluid will be used to simulate magma carrying crystals, where the fluid and the sizes and densities of the particles are carefully chosen to achieve dynamic similarity with melt and crystals in a real system. The geometry of the plumbing of the scale model will be based on geophysical and geological studies of real volcanic systems. A primary goal of this project is to delineate in detail how the loss, gain, and deposition of crystals depends on local and large scale geometry of the system and on the magnitude and time history of flux of magma. A series of reconnaissance experiments using a simple scale model has shown the feasibility of this approach to study transport and emplacement of crystal-rich magma doc20712 none VanderVoo magnetic anomalies generated by ocean-floor rocks have led to sea-floor spreading models and plate tectonics. The magnetism resides in titanomagnetite in fresh basalts, but the titanomagnetite oxidizes to titanomaghemite over geological time. Whether this titanomaghemite carries a magnetization that faithfully reflects the ancient magnetic field, is still an unanswered question. The investigators plan to study the degradation of the magnetic signal as a function of age. In particular, the intensity of the magnetization of the basalts (and, concomitantly, the peak values of the anomalies) appears to show a gradual degradation up to some 20 million years ago, beyond which the intensity gradually increases for Early Tertiary and Cretaceous times. The researchers will be studying the rates and effects of oxidation, the magnetic intensity of unaltered and oxidized rocks, and the idea that perhaps older basalts may have a natural remanent magnetization that consists of two anti-parallel components, which were acquired during successive normal and reversed polarity intervals. The methods to be employed include paleomagnetic and rock magnetic techniques and electron microscopy of the oxides. This project will show whether the causes for magnetic degradation warrant a re-evaluation of the details of the global polarity time scale, or whether magnetic intensity variations are a function of the global geomagnetic field. The latter possibility would create new insights into the origins of the geomagnetic field that are currently the subject of much debate doc20713 none This project would study the issues and complexities involved in the implementation of six lesson study programs in diverse settings including one that is for pre-service teachers. The goals of the project are 1) to understand the implementation progress and challenges at each site; 2) to share information about lesson study models, progress and problems; 3) to investigate lesson study s impact on teachers and students; 4) to contribute to the basic research knowledge on instructional imporvement, professional development and systemic change; 5) to contribute to the methods for studying emerging reforms and 6) to develop video and print materials for practitioners and policmakers. The primary hypothesis is that lesson study will be adapted by US practitioners operatin gin unique local contexts, that the nature of these adaptations will influence the development of lesson study doc20714 none Broad-band extremely low frequency waves (BBELF) are correlated with the heating of the topside auroral ionosphere. This project will examine BBELF waves from a theoretical and computational standpoint to determine what role these waves play in the energization of ions. Results from previous research indicate that the BBELF waves are driven by plasma instabilities arising from the shear in the parallel electron currents in the ionosphere. Understanding the characteristics of the waves will lead to an understanding of the mechanism of transverse ion energization and the mechanisms that mediate the coupling of the ionosphere and magnetosphere doc20715 none The main aims of this project are in three directions. (a) To advance existing approaches and to develop new methods for the rigorous asymptotic solution of integrable nonlinear wave equations, primarily the nonlinear Schroedinger equation, in the small dispersion limit; also to understand how the structure of the solution, critically affected by the modulational instability, depends on the degree of smoothness of the initial data. (b) To develop methods within the theory of integrable and near-integrable wave equations to deal with wave reflection from boundaries and time dependent forcing. (c) To develop numerical and analytical tools for the study of electromagnetic resonant fields and surface wave phenomena in periodic and random photonic crystal slabs with as well as without the presence of nonlinearity. INTEGRABLE WAVE PROPAGATION is often a very good approximation to physical wave propagation in real materials (e.g. the nonlinear Schroedinger equation and its perturbations model transmission of light in fiber optics), and related mathematical aspects like the modulational instability play a crucial role in the optimal design of communications systems. PHOTONIC CRYSTALS, first developed in the eighties, allow light to be trapped in or guided through regions of dimensions comparable to its wavelength. They are already in use in microwave antennas, low threshold lasers and other devices. In most of their current applications they function as linear devices. We investigate nonlinear behavior and therefore pay particular attention to resonant behavior, which generates large fields for which the nonlinearity of the medium plays a central role doc20716 none Understanding of orogenesis and its relations to mantle convection and plate tectonics relies on integrated studies of the interrelations among processes of deformation, metamorphism and magmatism. A well preserved portion of the northern Appalachian orogen is providing an outstanding laboratory for a truly integrative study of the evolution of mid-crustal processes that strongly influence orogenesis. This project is employing structural, microstructural, petrologic and thermobarometric analyses, and chemical and isotopic dating, to temporally and spatially link deformation, metamorphism and magmatism during the progressive growth of this orogenic belt. This information is being used to set constraints and boundary conditions on coupled, 3-D thermal mechanical models that, in tandem with the geological observations, are being used used to gain insights into the orogen s evolution and associated plate dynamics doc20647 none A new methodology for the imaging of the earth s reflectivity distribution by correlogram migration of scattered teleseismic body waves is being investigated. The correlation migration methods developed for applications in seismic exploration are being extended to the imaging of crustal and upper mantle structure beneath a dense receiver array using teleseismic body waves. These waves include P to SV and P to P surface reflected phases, in addition to other direct and surface scattered phases. The result is an image of the reflectivity distribution beneath the recording array for each of the scattered waves. The current imaging methods using receiver functions for laterally varying structure mostly use directly converted P to SV arrivals for subsurface illumination. Correlation imaging of ghost reflections provides complementary resolution to that of P to SV transmitted waves. Questions concerning the practicality of using correlogram migration of different phases for the imaging of laterally varying media using teleseismic array data are being addressed. Also, the limitations of correlogram migration as a function of data quality, receiver spacing and type of teleseismic data used are being investigated. Since for practical teleseismic array configurations, some aliasing effects will result, a new beam-like migration algorithm, call wavepath migration, which is less sensitive to these effects, is being tested for the imaging of teleseismic array data. The correlogram migration of teleseismic data is being tested using different teleseismic array configurations across the Wasatch Front. The significance of this research is the development of new imaging methods for laterally varying structure using teleseismic data, which generalizes receiver function imaging to include converted as well as ghost reflections. Correlogram imaging is most effective for dense seismic networks doc20718 none The collapse of the WTC Towers and destruction of surrounding buildings were accompanied by damage to underground water distribution, electric power, natural gas, steam, wastewater conveyance, telecommunication, and transportation systems. This research aims to investigate and model complex system response, involving underground facilities that are often taken for granted or overlooked in comprehensive emergency planning. Understanding and documenting how underground infrastructure performs during extreme events is a necessary step for increasing the resilience of urban utility and transportation networks. This research will strive to extend the knowledge gained to understand the interdependencies of underground infrastructure and improve their security in future extreme events. In addition to investigating integrated system response in New York, the research will compare the effects of intense localized damage at WTC with infrastructure system performance affected by distributed damage during major California earthquakes. Response during extreme events will be compared with the effects of previous severe accidents in New York. Three activities are involved: 1) data collection and interviews with system managers; 2) comparative analysis; and 3) methodology for assessing interdependencies. Some of this work has already begun. Deliverables include recommendations for developing a methodology to evaluate the damage, areas of greatest vulnerability, and the possibilities of cascading damage. Eventually, a methodology will be sought that adapts risk management techniques used in industrial process control to decision support systems for civil infrastructure managers doc20719 none Kesler et al This proposal requests funding for a comprehensive study of the form of gold and its relation to the hydrothermal history of Carlin-type deposits. Most studies of these deposits have focused on macro-scale (geologic) observations with limited attention to micro-scale features. They have left a fragmented picture of the form of gold in Carlin-type deposits and how it relates to the origin and age of the deposits. The study will combine state-of-the-art high-resolution, transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) and xray absorption, near edge structure (XANES) with more traditional surface ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) analyses to provide comprehensive mineralogical information. Work will focus on the Twin Creeks, Betze-Post-Screamer, and Meikle Carlin-type deposits, all of which have been well studied geologically. By combining observations from the atomic scale to the deposit scale, we will provide better control on mechanisms of gold transport and deposition in these deposits and on their hydrothermal history and age. Our main objectives will be to determine whether structurally bound gold in arsenian pyrite, the main host for gold in these deposits, is present as interlayers of arsenopyrite marcasite in pyrite, and how they relate to nano-scale gold particles observed in reconnaissance studies of these deposits. This information is important because structurally bound gold might have been deposited from solutions that were not saturated with respect to native gold, thus allowing them to collect gold more efficiently during their formation. We will also evaluate whether arsenian pyrite-hosted gold and small particles of native gold are coeval or were deposited at different times. This information is needed to relate gold to the appropriate stage of mineralization and evaluate the possibility that Carlin-type deposits in Nevada were formed by several, spatially overlapping, gold-depositing events. Deposition from unsaturated solutions and formation by multiple events could also help explain why these deposits are so large. Finally, our work will relate the deposits to their geologic and tectonic setting, which is essential to exploration for ore to serve the next generation doc20720 none The team of S. Burges and P. De Vries (Univ. of Washington) and G. Parker (Univ. of Minnesota) plan collaborative research into the mechanics of coarse bedload transport at the particle scale. Gravel tracer particles are a convenient way to study the longitudinal travel and dispersion and vertical mixing of sediment in mountain rivers. Field observations of tracer displacement have not yet, however, been linked comprehensively into the formal framework of sediment transport in rivers. The study will use experiments as a bridge between theoretical numerical research and field-scale research to a) develop formulations for distance moved, dispersion and mixing of tracers for unsteady flow, b) link these formulations to mechanistic theories of bedload transport and c) test and validate the results against field data taken to the standards needed to test theory and numerical predictions. The field research will be conducted in several streams in western Washington State. The experimental research will be conducted at St. Anthony Falls Laboratory. The Washington and Minnesota teams will collaborate on both efforts, with both sides contributing to the development of a predictive numerical model doc20721 none The proposed work will investigate how the PI s recent magnetic anisotropy studies, showing that hematite-bearing red sedimentary rocks can suffer up to 30 degrees of inclination shallowing, impact the accuracy of the Late Paleozoic North American apparent polar wander path. Red bed paleopoles dominate and control the position of the Late Paleozoic to mid-Mesozoic portion of North America s apparent polar wander path, thus inaccuracies in red bed remanence would greatly affect any paleogeographies based on this part of the pole path. the PI s previous NSF-funded study has shown that a combination of isothermal remanence anisotropy and anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility can be used to identify and correct inclination shallowing in red, hematite-bearing sedimentary rocks. By using thermal demagnetization and chemical demagnetization, the magnetic fabric of the characteristic remanence-carrying grains can be isolated. This is critical for an accurate inclination correction. Though initial tests of the accuracy of these corrections support their validity, given the importance of red beds to the Late Paleozoic North American apparent polar wander path, the PI proposes to further test the accuracy of the corrected inclination he has determined for the Carboniferous Mauch Chunk Formation. Igneous paleopoles would be the best way to test the corrected inclination, but igneous results for Carboniferous North America are few and scattered. Therefore, his strategy is to collect and correct the inclinations of other red bed units, and magnetite-bearing sedimentary rocks, of the same age as the Mauch Chunk. If magnetic anisotropy does truly control the accuracy of remanence, the corrected paleopoles should agree with each other. The corrected magnetite-bearing inclinations from the Brush Creek Limestone and Buffalo Siltstone in Pennsylvania will be particularly important since the PI has established the accuracy of the magnetite correction from a comparison of corrected results from the Paleocene Nacimiento Formation to coeval igneous results. He will correct the inclinations of the Maringouin, Shepody, and Enrage Formation red beds from New Brunswick, Canada and the Deer Lake Group rocks from western Newfoundland for the red bed part of the comparison. These rocks have given excellent Carboniferous age paleomagnetic results for North America. Finally, although Carboniferous North American igneous results are scattered, the PI plans to restudy the remanence of the New Brunswick Volcanics, given their proximity to the other New Brunswick units he proposes to study. He wishes to check the accuracy and age of the New Brunswick Volcanics remanence to make sure they provide a reliable record of the Carboniferous field. The proposed work will be conducted over three years, including three field seasons, and will support a graduate student s PhD dissertation work at Lehigh University doc20689 none Collaborative Research: Investigating the processes and timescales of andesite differentiation: a comprehensive petrological and geochemical study of Arenal Volcano, Costa Rica ; ; ; PIs: Gill; Reagan; Tepley; Gardner Arenal Volcano in Costa Rica is an excellent natural laboratory in which to test specific hypotheses regarding differentiation mechanisms and the timescales of magmatic processes and their relationship to eruptions. Our objective is to undertake a multi-pronged petrological and geochemical investigation to take advantage of existing data and models. The on-going eruption of Arenal volcano has undergone complex changes in eruptive behavior, and a crucial question is whether those changes relate to different magma storage conditions, such as varying depths and hence initial volatile contents, or to different degassing styles and rates. We will investigate this important issue through several techniques. We seek to determine the timescales of degassing, the residence times and ascent rate of degassed magmas, and the timescales of degassing-induced plagioclase crystallization. We will measure short-lived nuclides within the uranium decay series to constrain the timescales of magmatic processes as well as measure the long-lived isotopic compositions of whole rocks, and mineral separates and individual minerals in the case of Sr, to determine whether there is evidence for involvement of isotopically distinct components during differentiation processes. Lastly, we will measure a suite of major- and trace-element concentrations to evaluate the secular change in Arenal lava composition. The data from these tests will help answer questions such as whether rates of differentiation depend on the depth and degree of crystallization and on the extent and character of degassing; whether crystal and magma residence times can be as short as days to months during near steady-state eruptions of andesite; whether within-eruption changes of magma composition are caused by open-system processes of fractional crystallization plus recharge or assimilation or both; and whether eruption styles are related to degassing history and magma residence time doc20723 none The objective of this proposal is to determine the elementary mechanisms and kinetics governing the non-thermal reactions of hyperthermal, gas-phase oxygen atoms with atoms adsorbed on single crystal silicon. A novel beam source of hyperthermal atomic oxygen will be used to stimulate reactions at the adsorbate-modified silicon surface. The desorbing reaction products will be monitored during the atom-adsorbate reactions using mass spectrometry. The reaction products that remain adsorbed on the surface and the chemical changes of the surface will be studied using thermal desorption, x-ray photoelectron and Auger electron spectroscopy. The reactions of hyperthermal, gas-phase oxygen atoms with adsorbed oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and deuterium atoms will be investigated with these techniques to determine the influence of adlayer structure and bonding energetics on the elementary mechanisms, kinetics, and selectivity of the reactions. Results of this project will advance the current understanding of elementary atom-adsorbate reactions. The educational component is the mentoring of graduate and undergraduate students. Graduate students will be trained in an area that will be of significant interest to industries interested in heterogeneous chemistry, especially in the semiconductor industry. The results of this work could have a significant impact on our understanding of processes in the semiconductor industry, including plasma processing doc20724 none PI will spend a month (August, ) in China studying primitive Middle Cambrian echinoderms from the Kaili Fauna at the Guizhou University of Technology in Guiyang as well as at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology in Nanjing. There are very good possibilities that primary symmetry in echinoderms (based on the symmetry of the ambulacral system), early evolutionary development of columnar structures and their holdfasts can be deduced from some of the material. Most specimens are preserved as molds and extensive latex casting will be an important part of the data gathering. At present there is good evidence that the sediments associated with the fossils are not extensively bioturbated, which makes the mode mechanism of attachment to the bottom very important: it will be extensively investigated. Study of this material may well open up a whole new understanding of the early evolution of this important biotic group and the collections are available at this time for joint investigation with Chinese colleagues doc20725 none This award provides partial support for the National Conference of Black Physics Students (NCBPS), which will be held at Alabama A & M University on March 13-17, . This will be the 16th of these national meetings. NCBPS seeks to increase the diversity of the United State community of researchers and educators in physics and related fields by providing student participants with the motivation and practical skills to further their education and assimilation into the scientific and technical professions. The NCBPS is annually attended by approximately 250 students, and is supported by a combination of gifts from foundations, national laboratories, industry, federal grants, and support from the host institution. This award will provide direct support for the attendance of approximately 50 students. Also meeting concurrently at A & M is the National Society of Black Physicists (NSBP). This format has proven to be highly effective and allows for joint meetings of the two groups, as well as separate meetings appropriate to the objectives of each group. This award provides partial support for the National Conference of Black Physics Students (NCBPS), which will be held at Alabama A & M University on March 13-17. The award will provide direct support for the attendance of approximately 50 students doc20726 none This project addresses epi-optic spectroscopy of surfaces -including nonlinear second har-monic and sum-frequency generation (SHG SFG) and linear reflectance-difference spectroscopy (RDS)-including quantitative comparison between experiment and theory. Prior work reached agreement between experiment and theory for SHG spectra of several semiconductor-adsorbate systems (H, Ge and B adsorbed on Si(001)-(2x1)) in ultrahigh vacuum within a limited spectral range, and theoretical treatment based on ab initio pseudopotential and full-potential approaches reproduced essential features of SHG spectra. This project has several aims: 1) widen the spectral range of SHG SFG by nearly one order of magnitude, thereby encompassing surface resonances from 0.5 to 4.5 eV, using a new femtosecond Ti:sapphire parametric amplifier system. 2) acquire SHG SFG spectra from Si(001), Si(111) and Ge Si(001) surfaces prepared with single-domain reconstructions and small unit cells, using polarization configurations in which only a single component of the nonlinear surface susceptibility tensor contributes. 3) acquire RDS in parallel with SHG SFG over a similar spectral range (1.5 to 5.0 eV) on the same anisotropic surfaces. Linear and nonlinear surface spectra will be calculated from a common theoretical basis, to link these two surface spectroscopies. 4) perform femtosecond-time-resolved SHG and RDS follow-ing resonant excitation of dimer-related surface bands. These experiments are designed to isolate and characterize the role played by surface dimer-related dipoles and electron-hole pair correla-tions in surface spectra to elucidate some of the most challenging theoretical issues. 5) extend SHG SFG spectroscopy to Si nano-crystals embedded in SiO2, with which they form sharply-curved, buried interfaces. Spectroscopic SHG SFG will characterize interface states that underlie light emission and charge trapping. Close contact will be maintained with theoretical collabora-tors who are improving methods for calculating surface SHG SFG spectra under separate fund-ing. The broad goal is to develop nonlinear surface spectroscopy into an exact, quantitative sci-ence applicable to many surface systems. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in a topical area of electronic photonic materi-als science having high technological relevance. Although the proposed work will focus on semi-conductor interfaces, anticipated outcomes will have broader implications because of the gener-ality and versatility of epi-optic spectroscopy. The results are expected to be useful for eventual applications to materials as diverse as metals, polymer films, and biological membranes, and could motivate the development of commercial epi-optic spectroscopy systems and computa-tional epi-optic software. An important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education involving graduate, and undergraduate students. Through direct involvement in research, students will have unique learning and discovery op-portunities in the areas of semiconductor and related materials, and advanced materials and inter-face characterization. This project is jointly supported by the CHE EPC and DMR EM programs doc20727 none Current intrusion detection systems (IDSs) usually generate many false alerts and often do not detect novel attacks or variations of known attacks. Moreover, most existing IDSs focus on low-level attacks or anomalies; none capture the logical steps or strategies behind these attacks. In situations where there are intensive intrusions, not only will actual alerts be mixed with false alerts, but the number of alerts will also become unmanageable. As a result, it is difficult for human users or intrusion response systems to understand the nature of the attack and to take appropriate actions. To address these issues, this project will investigate techniques to correlate intrusion alerts on the basis of the prerequisites and consequences of attacks. The research uses a formal and rigorous approach to study the fundamental issues involved in alert correlation, including representation of prerequisites and consequences of attacks, efficient algorithms to process alerts, expressiveness of the high-level representation mechanisms, effectiveness of the technique in reducing false alerts, impact of false alerts and undetected attacks on the technique, and methods to predict attacks in progress. Expected impacts of the proposed research include (1) a reduction in the number of false alerts, (2) identification of attackers high-level strategies, and (3) early configuration of effective defenses against attacks in progress. If successful, the research will lead to better tools for intrusion detection and thus to improved computer and network security doc20681 none This project will develop a self-consistent model of the near-Earth portion of the plasma sheet. It will specify the particle distributions, the effects of the plasma sheet on the magnetic field, and the effects of the plasma sheet on the formation of the ring current during magnetic storms. The approach will be to use test particle tracing techniques in conjunction with an MHD code. The technique will couple the particle tracing with the MHD modeling in a way that will produce a self-consistent model without using the basic MHD approximations that are invalid within the inner plasma sheet. This approach has already been used in modeling the quiet-time plasma sheet and the method will now be extended to conditions of enhanced convection, including the growth phase of substorms and convection bays (steady magnetospheric convection). During the later stages of the project the model will be extended beyond a 2-D plasma sheet model to include field-aligned currents within the plasma sheet doc20729 none Filaseta The investigator and his collaborator Douglas Meade develop and implement efficient algorithms for irreducibility testing and factorization of polynomials with small Euclidean norm. In addition, they classify through similar algorithms all cases where reducibility occurs with Euclidean norm bounded by some prescribed amount. Issues relating to the complexity and parallel implementation of such algorithms are considered. Both factoring and, more generally, computational mathematics have played a vital role in cryptography. The importance of algorithms in such applications continues to increase as technology advances. This project deals with factoring polynomials of high degree from both a theoretical and computational point of view. The work has application in cryptography and in complexity theory, which deals with the question of how much work is needed to solve certain kinds of problems doc20730 none The focus of the project is the observation of the dynamics of subaqueous volcaniclastic sedimentation from eruption-fed density currents, and the characteristics of the resulting deposits. Since the processes in question are almost impossible to observe in the field, an alternative approach will be employed here: the use of laboratory tanks to perform experiments that reproduce the deposits. The experiments have been designed to model as accurately as possible three settings: a) lacustrine turbidites of the Taupo volcano, New Zealand, b) submarine hyaloclastites consisting of limu shards and c) eruption-fed density currents of the style of Pahvant Butte. The results will be used to extend existing numerical models of turbidity currents to the case of 2-D and 3-D currents laden with vesiculated grains of variable size and density as well as hot water. The numerical models will provide new predictive tools for the study of volcaniclastic stratigraphy. This research represents a collaborative effort between Gary Parker of the University of Minnesota (turbidity currents) and James White of the University of Otago, New Zealand (subaqueous volcaniclastic deposits doc20731 none Blythe The San Andreas Fault zone Observatory at Depth (SAFOD) Pilot Hole will provide an excellent opportunity for exploring the relationship between fault slip and the thermal evolution of the crust by studying core samples from varying depths using two complementary thermochronologic methods. The Pilot Hole, located in Parkfield, CA less than two kilometers from the San Andreas fault will reach a depth of 2.1 km. The borehole will intersect Salinian granite rocks at a depth of less than 1 km and similar granitic rocks outcrop at the surface within a few kilometers of the Pilot Hole. The Principal Investigators will analyze samples from borehole cuttings at depth intervals of 100 - 200 m and from the surface outcrops. They will determine the thermal history of the samples using apatite fission track and U Th-He thermochronometers. This study will explore the complex interplay between uplift, erosion, and heat flow by using multiple thermochronologic systems on samples from a vertical profile. These data will allow the PIs to separate the effects of uplift from changes in the geothermal gradient, such as those resulting from the long-term frictional heat generated along the San Andreas fault. Because the uplift history at Parkfield is controlled, in part, by slip along the San Andreas fault, their work will also provide information about the kinematics of the fault doc20732 none The main objective of the research project is the study of the nonlinear dynamics of flames. One of the major directions is the study of free-interface problems related to combustion and exothermal phase transitions. Free interface problems correspond to sharp changes in physical characteristics describing the problem; they arise naturally in many models in physics. An important example of free-interface problem to be studied is the model of SHS (Self-propagating High-temperature Synthesis a.k.a. solid combustion) which exhibits a remarkable variety of dynamics scenarios. SHS is a potentially new method of manufacturing composite materials with qualities superior to those obtained through traditional methods. Frankel will show the compactness and finite dimensionality of the attractor for SHS model. Frankel will also study the free-interface model of premixed gas combustion. The second major direction of the project is the study of surface evolution equations modeling certain basic flame instabilities and spatio-temporal patterns associated with them. These equations are expressed in terms of instantaneous geometrical characteristics and normal velocity of the surface which allows a more natural representation of the basic nonlinearities that are of a purely geometric origin. Solutions of these equations exhibit wrinkling and self-fractalization similar to those observed in experiments. They are also capable of generating the so-called fingering of the surface that occurs in many processes in fluid dynamics. The proposed work will include rigorous study as well as asymptotic methods and direct numerical simulation. This project addresses mathematical modeling of the complex dynamics of flames. The investigator will study two major themes to enhance the modeling of flame dynamics: 1) free-interface problems, i.e. ones in which there are sharp changes in physical characteristics and 2) surface evolution problems, i.e. where the equation is associated with the flame front deformation and motion. These methods could extend our understanding of flame instabilities, wrinkling, fingering as well as a form of solid combustion which could have new applications in manufacturing of composite materials. Date: May 8th, doc20733 none Class Unusual unradiogenic 143Nd 144Nd and 206Pb 204Pb isotopic compositions of oceanic basalts from the South Atlantic and other ocean basins have been attributed to ancient subcontinental lithospheric mantle (SCLM), or, more recently, to lower continental crust, which is thought to have been introduced into the oceanic upper mantle at the time of the breakup of Gondwana. However, the isotopic composition of the actual SCLM and lower crust spatially associated with those unusual oceanic basalts is only poorly constrained. It is proposed to test the hypotheses of delaminated SCLM and or lower crust in the source of oceanic basalts by evaluating a direct relationship between the composition of enriched oceanic basalts in the South Atlantic and continental material potentially delaminated from the sub-Gondwana lithosphere. A series of mantle xenolith-bearing kimberlite fields in Namibia and South Africa provide a unique opportunity to directly sample the SCLM and lower crust in the critical area of the Proterozoic Namaqua-Natal Belt as well as the Kaapvaal Craton. Sr-Nd-Pb isotopic compositions as well as trace elements on mineral separates from mantle xenoliths, concentrates of mantle-derived clinopyroxenes, lower crustal xenoliths and host kimberlites from these locations will be used to constrain the composition of the SCLM and lower crust at the time of the opening of the South Atlantic. This project will be done in collaboration with Dr. Anton le Roex, University of Capetown, South Africa doc20734 none Funds are provided for a workshop to bring together the leading researchers and students on the Isu-Bonin-Marians arc system under the Subduction Factory Initiative of the MARGINS Program. The purpsose of the workshop is to coordinate international activities, discuss current and planned research, and present previous results. It will serve as a forum to discuss the remaining gaps in the IBM research and where the resources need to be forcused for a complete coverage and a successful experiment at this focus site of MARGINS. The workshop will be held in Hawaii to allow easier participation by Japanese scientists who are important collaborators in the IBM and other experiments in the region doc20689 none Collaborative Research: Investigating the processes and timescales of andesite differentiation: a comprehensive petrological and geochemical study of Arenal Volcano, Costa Rica ; ; ; PIs: Gill; Reagan; Tepley; Gardner Arenal Volcano in Costa Rica is an excellent natural laboratory in which to test specific hypotheses regarding differentiation mechanisms and the timescales of magmatic processes and their relationship to eruptions. Our objective is to undertake a multi-pronged petrological and geochemical investigation to take advantage of existing data and models. The on-going eruption of Arenal volcano has undergone complex changes in eruptive behavior, and a crucial question is whether those changes relate to different magma storage conditions, such as varying depths and hence initial volatile contents, or to different degassing styles and rates. We will investigate this important issue through several techniques. We seek to determine the timescales of degassing, the residence times and ascent rate of degassed magmas, and the timescales of degassing-induced plagioclase crystallization. We will measure short-lived nuclides within the uranium decay series to constrain the timescales of magmatic processes as well as measure the long-lived isotopic compositions of whole rocks, and mineral separates and individual minerals in the case of Sr, to determine whether there is evidence for involvement of isotopically distinct components during differentiation processes. Lastly, we will measure a suite of major- and trace-element concentrations to evaluate the secular change in Arenal lava composition. The data from these tests will help answer questions such as whether rates of differentiation depend on the depth and degree of crystallization and on the extent and character of degassing; whether crystal and magma residence times can be as short as days to months during near steady-state eruptions of andesite; whether within-eruption changes of magma composition are caused by open-system processes of fractional crystallization plus recharge or assimilation or both; and whether eruption styles are related to degassing history and magma residence time doc20736 none Most problems in science and engineering routinely require finite element analysis in the assembly of many incompatible sub-discretizations. Often, these sub-discretizations are independently modeled, or available from previously constructed meshes. Therefore, to support a flexible meshing procedure, it is crucial that an efficient method be employed to join these independently modeled sub-meshes. Recently, the principal investigator introduced, a non-conforming hp finite element technique to accomplish such coupling. The proposed research will systematically develop, improve and combine sophisticated non-conforming hp finite element methods with high performance computing, through the accomplishment of the following four objectives. First, the stability and convergence of these non-conforming techniques will be theoretically established and computationally validated in higher dimensions. Secondly, the robustness of such methods to concatenate domains of different dimensions will be investigated. Third, the performance of these methods will be analyzed for problems in fluid mechanics. Finally, the stability and convergence of a more general three-field technique will be investigated. Numerical results will be presented to validate the exponential convergence of these techniques both theoretically and computationally. An ultimate goal of this research is to develop a flexible problem solving methodology tuned to high performance computing that allows a rigorous coupling of different physical processes, mathematical models, or discretization methods in different parts of a simulation domain. The successful integration of the proposed objectives will contribute to a common infrastructure that provides efficient computational support and parallel data-management for solving a wide variety of problems in science and engineering. The solution methodology to be developed will provide efficient and accurate solutions that will not only benefit various engineering fields such as aerospace, materials science, and bioengineering, but also aid in the process of designing better processes and products from aircraft to prosthetic implants. Date: June 6, doc20737 none The PI s propose a multidisciplinary study of Cretaceous and Tertiary rocks along an east-west transect in the Wrangell - Petersburg - Prince of Wales Island area of SE Alaska (= Wrangell transect). Previous research demonstrates that integration of paleomagnetic studies with geochronologic, thennochronologic, barometric, and structural geologic observations can produce important insights into the tectonic evolution of the Insular superterrane and Coast Mountains orogen in western BC and SE Alaska. The PI s recent results from near Prince Rupert show that paleomagnetism is a key component of multidisciplinary efforts investigating exhumed shallow and mid-crustal sections. When accompanied by geologic observations resulting from a carefully coordinated multidisciplinary research program, palcomagnetic data on intrusive igneous rocks yield critical information on the tectonic development of defon-ned regions that cannot otherwise be obtained. For example, the PI s have documented that panels of crust containing the Paleocene Quottoon igneous complex east of the Coast shear zone have experienced east-side-up tilts ranging to 40 during Eocene extension. In addition, their geochronologic, paleomagnetic, barometric, and structural geologic data suggest that the midCretaceous Ecstall pluton was folded during west-directed thrusting. These discoveries are fundamental to understanding the crustal architecture and tectonic development of the continental margin in the northern Cordillera. Because igneous rocks were emplaced into this part of the magmatic arc during the Cretaceous, throughout the Paleogene, and into the Miocene, the Wrangell transect provides the opportunity to track defon-nation of an evolving convergent to strike-slip plate margin in space and time. Methods will include U Pb geochronology of zircon and spheric, Al-in-homblende barometry, 40 Ar 39 Ar thermochronology, (U-Th) He dating of zircon, metamorphic petrology, and structural geologic investigations in addition to paleomagnetic analysis. Preliminary investigations on the eastern portion of the transect indicate that this area experienced -17 ESEside-up tilt about an axis with azimuth 22 since 20 Ma. Observations from across the transect indicate that paleomagnetic directions from Cretaceous plutons are variable, with both concordant and discordant inclinations. Paleomagnetic study of the Cretaceous and Tertiary igneous rocks of the Wrangell transect, coupled with the geochronologic, then-nochronologic, and barometric analyses, can deten-nine: (1) when and where Cenozoic deformation occurred; and (2) whether regionally consistent tilting folding and or large-scale transport can account for discordant paleomagnetic directions from Cretaceous plutons. Combined with results from the Prince Rupert area, successful completion of the proposed research can provide a comprehensive model for the tectonic and paleogeographic evolution of the Coast Mountains and Insular superterrane for the past I 00 m.y doc20738 none Roberts, Fred Rutgers University TITLE: Satellite Reconnect Project This Satellite Reconnect Project is designed to reconnect to the computer science and mathematics research enterprise, two-year and four-year college faculty who have not had opportunities to keep up with new research developments. It aims to reinvigorate their careers and enhance their teaching by exposing them to current research topics in computer science and related mathematics that are relevant to the undergraduate classroom. This is being accomplished initially through a series of summer conferences at DIMACS, the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, at Rutgers University. As part of the conferences, participants prepare written classroom materials based on current research topics and have the opportunity to publish them in the DIMACS Educational Modules Series. Concurrently, the basic program conference structure is being replicated at six selected satellite locations around the country, generally with different research topics, but under DIMACS guidance and leadership. Through this mechanism, the project aims to establish a community of individuals and institutions with expertise in and commitment to this type of Reconnect project and concept. The satellite activities are supplemented with an effort to disseminate the model to the wider community so that this type of program can be copied at numerous other locations around the country doc20116 none The phenomenon of phase segregation is commonly observed in many multispecies thin films, where secondary-phase islands may nucleate and grow on the surface of a film and thus influence the properties of the film. The influence may be detrimental or beneficial. For example, barium-rich YBCO films may loose their superconducting properties but, on the other hand, islands on YBCO films may act as pinning centers for the magnetic field. Further applications of phase segregation and the formation of secondary-phase islands are found in quantum dots and wires in semiconductors. Understanding the mechanisms underlying phase segregation and the stability of secondary-phase islands is therefore crucial for the design and controllability of thin films. One objective of the present research project is to provide, in the context of deposition of multispecies thin films, a mathematically rigorous and thermodynamically consistent derivation of the equations governing the evolution, away from equilibrium, of interfacial triple junctions along which the film, vapor, and secondary phases intersect. Such a continuum model lends itself to a stability analysis and may thus shed light on the conditions under which surface precipitates can be expected to form and grow. When the film surface is a vicinal one, growth can occur via step flow---that is, lateral motion of atomic-high steps which separate several-unit-cell-wide terraces. In multicomponent films, the deposition of gas-phase atoms can be competitive---that is, adsorption of distinct species on individual terraces can occur on the same site. The second objective of this proposal is to develop a micromechanical model for multicomponent films that accounts for the combined effects of the terrace-and-ledge microstructure, adatom diffusion, and competitive adsorption-desorption kinetics. A third objective of this project is to link the nanoscale to the microscopic scale by incorporating averaged information obtained by homogenization of the micromechanical model of film growth discussed above into macroscopic models in the form of constitutive relations. Thin films constitute a fundamental component of numerous novel technologies. Examples include semiconductors in micro- and opto-electronic device applications, diamonds in industrial cutting tools, various anticorrosion and antiwear coats, shape-memory alloys as actuators in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and superconductors in wireless communication devices. In most industrial applications, multispecies films are more widely used than their single-component counterparts. The properties of these films and their performance under very stringent conditions depend on their chemical composition and the morphological details of the film surface. To better control the chemistry and microstructure of thin films during the growth process, a mathematically rigorous understanding of the fundamental physical and chemical mechanisms at play is necessary, especially as the atom-by-atom fabrication of materials is no longer a remote dream. Applied mathematicians can (and already do) make a significant contribution to such a global effort by developing physically sound predictive models which can be analyzed rigorously and implemented for numerical simulations. The concepts of modern continuum physics, when combined with the tools of modern mathematics (for example, homogenization and the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations), constitute a potent methodology with which to address many of the challenging issues related to the growth of multicomponent thin films doc20740 none Valley This project will investigate the magmatic history of the Earth s crust over the past 4.4 billion years. The mineral zircon will be analyzed for oxygen isotope ratio, U-Pb age, and rare earth element concentration. The high melting temperature, chemical inertness, and hardness of zircon creates a time capsule of geochemical information that lasts virtually forever in samples with low amounts of radiation damage. New ion microprobe and laser techniques for high precision and accuracy, and or high spatial resolution will be employed. Single domains within zoned zircons will be analyzed. Igneous minerals will be studied from selected terranes of early Archean, Proterozoic and Mesozoic through Cenozoic age. Archean samples will include detrital zircons from the Jack Hills, Western Australia, where we discovered the oldest known sample of the Earth in the past grant period. The younger samples will document processes of crustal reworking in the Idaho and Sierra Nevada batholiths of the western U.S. Analyses of zircon will be compared to new data for magmatic garnet, baddeleyite, titanite, epidote, rutile and quartz. In combination, these results will provide a record of evolving compositions including pre-magmatic xenocrysts, magmatic phenocrysts and a range of post magmatic alteration minerals. These studies of zircons and associated igneous minerals will have broad significance for understanding the origin and evolution of the Earth s crust. Studies of the Archean (4.0 to 4.4 Ga) zircons provide the only evidence of the earliest conditions on Earth. The recent hypothesis of a Cool early Earth will be tested, which has implications for the timing of the first oceans and the origin of life doc20741 none This award provides funds for the Social Science Research Council to conduct an inventory of existing linkages between U.S. and South African institutions. The goal of the inventory is to identify existing gaps in U.S.-South Africa collaborations in research and training, and to contribute to the development of priorities for future collaborative activities. The inventory will specifically survey collaborations in social science research and capacity building activities devoted to training in all fields. It will thus serve as an important resource for U.S. researchers and universities in identifying new potential partnerships with South African scientists and higher education institutions. In consultation with the National Science Foundation and relevant components of the South African research community, the SSRC will develop the scope and terms of reference for the inventory, identify a small team to carry out the study, and oversee data collection and the production of a report that will be completed in various stages. Preliminary results will be available in January with a final report completed in the summer of doc20742 none COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH-- LIFE HISTORY STRATEGIES, GROWTH RATES AND MICROSTRUCTURAL CHARACTEREVOLUTION ACROSS THE COELUROSAURIAN AVIALAN TRANSITION Gregory M. Erickson. Kristina Curry-Rogers, Mark Norell Birds (avialan dinosaurs) are unique among living animals in showing extremely rapid growth rates. How they attained this capacity is unknown. In our research we will reconstruct the growth of the earliest birds and their closest ancestors, the coelurosaurian dinosaurs. We will do this by coupling age estimates (garnered through growth line counts) with size estimates for a diversity of fossil species. From the results we will be able to quantitatively assess when and how avian growth rates were generated and determine whether the first birds were simply feathered dinosaurs or physiological equivalents to living species. Aside from helping us to understand how the most speciose group of animals living in our world came to came to be, broader impacts of this research include: 1) establishing a World Wide Web site from which the lay pubic and professions can learn about scientific research, 2) providing advanced scientific training to undergraduate and graduate students including those from under-represented groups, and 3) providing material for our public and non-major collegiate lectures in paleontology doc20743 none Collaborative Research: Tropical Vegetation during the Early Part of an Ice Age: An Intercontinental Comparison of Mid-Carboniferous Floras in their Geochronologic Setting Robert Gastaldo Earth history records major climatic intervals that can be generalized as either globally warm or cold. Transitions to a globally cold Earth, representing the onset of an ice age in the broadest sense, has happened only a few times since the establishment of terrestrial ecosystems, for instance in the Carboniferous and Late Tertiary (at the beginning of our current cold climate phase). At such times of transition, there are expected to be significant changes in the flora in all environments and at all scales. This project focuses on the changes in tropical terrestrial floras during the initial phases of the Carboniferous ice age, up to and immediately after the Mid-Carboniferous boundary (320 Ma). Fossil plant-bearing rocks from coal basins in the United States, Poland, and the Czech Republic provide remarkably stratigraphically complete macrofloral and microfloral data sets, which have been collected for decades from rocks overlying the coals (macroflora) and the coals themselves (microflora). Additionally, volcanogenic ash-fall tuffs have been identified within some sections, providing minerals that can provide isotopic ages, permitting control of biostratigraphic correlations within and between the basins and other parts of the world. From these unpublished data and the supporting collections, a standard reference profile of vegetational changes will be established that will document the rates of taxonomic turnover through time. These data will allow for a quantitative analysis of the geographical extent and dominance-diversity magnitude of vegetational community changes in the tropics. Results from this project can serve as a baseline for the study of similar intervals in our current ice age doc20744 none COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: Physical Properties of Bubble- and Crystal-bearing Melts and their Implications for Eruption Dynamics: Integrated Theoretical, Experimental and Field-based studies ; PIs: Cashman Manga Magma must ascend to the Earth s surface prior to erupting. Field and theoretical studies over the past decade have shown that the rate of magma ascent plays a critical role in determining the style, and violence, of the ensuing eruption. This dependence results from physical changes that the magma undergoes as it ascends (decompresses). Bubbles nucleate, grow, and coalesce during decompression; crystals may also nucleate and grow. The presence of bubbles and crystals, in turn, affects the magma s ability to flow (its rheology), and thus its continued ascent. For this reason, development of an accurate model of magma ascent and eruption requires that we understand both the distribution of bubbles and crystals as a function of depth below the Earth s surface and the effect of bubbles and crystals on magma rheology. We propose to address both of these questions through a combination of experimental, theoretical and field-based studies. Our specific goals are: (1) to determine the effect of suspended crystals on the rheology of bubble-bearing me (2) to use the bubble structure of volcanic samples to estimate shear (velocity) profiles across volcanic conduits; and (3) to examine the permeability (bubble-interconnectedness that permits gas escape) of volcanic clasts as a function of both their bubble and crystal content doc20745 none Professor Li first proposes to study the synthesis of C-glycosides in water. This group will first investigate the coupling of aryl halides with aldehydes in water then move to coupling reactions involving carbohydrates. This methodology will then be applied to the synthesis of several polyhydroxylated natural products. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Chao-Jun li of the Department of Chemistry at Tulane University. Dr. Li will work on the development new carbon-carbon bond forming reactions which can be used to prepare carbohydrates in water. When developed, Dr. Li s work could be applied to the environmentally friendly syntheses of a number of biologically active molecules which contain the carbohydrate framework. Students trained during the course of this work will gain skills needed by the pharmaceutical and speciality chemicals industries doc20746 none The Altyn Tagh fault system, which delineates the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, is one of the largest and most striking, yet also most enigmatic features attributed to collision between India and Eurasia. In spite of a generally poor understanding of the structural geology and slip history of the Altyn Tagh fault, its tectonic significance has been the subject of much speculation, and the fault figures prominently in models of the Himalayan-Tibetan orogen. Recent attempts to gain better knowledge about the Altyn Tagh fault have primarily used indirect methods to interpret age of fault initiation and magnitude of displacement, or geodetic techniques to interpret slip rate. Direct investigation of fault displacement using geologic piercing points has not been widely attempted. As a result three critical questions remain concerning the offset history of the Altyn Tagh fault: (1) What is the age of initiation of the Altyn Tagh fault? (2) How has the slip-rate on the Altyn Tagh fault varied over geologic time? (3) How does the magnitude of slip vary along the length of the Altyn Tagh fault? In order to answer these three questions it is essential to identify pre-slip and multiple syn-slip piercing points on each segment of the fault. These piercing points will allow the history of offset on the fault to be determined for each segment of the fault (western, central, and eastern) and thus demonstrate slip magnitude, slip rate, and variation in these parameters along the length of the fault. The proposed study will directly address the Tertiary slip history of the Altyn Tagh fault and the distribution of slip on the fault, by identifying multiple Eocene-Upper Pliocene sediment-source matches across the fault for ten Tertiary basins that are truncated by the Altyn Tagh fault. By identifying multiple piercing points of various ages from a single basin, the slip history for that segment of the fault ca be reconstructed throughout the Tertiary. Furthermore, by examining a series of basins along the length of the fault, along-strike changes in displacement can be documented. These results will provide a robust and unambiguous data set from which the timing and rate of faulting can be directly determined, and that will also allow ideas about systematic changes in slip magnitude along the fault to be tested. The PI s prior work on the Altyn Tagh fault (Ritts, ; Yue and Liou, ; Ritts and Biffi, ; Sobel et al., ; Yue et al., in review) has demonstrated their ability to identify and document piercing points of a variety of ages and a variety of types on the Altyn Tagh fault. The proposed research includes documentation of lithostratigraphy and chronostratigraphy, physical sedimentology and lithofacies, provenance, and paleocurrents of ten Tertiary sedimentary basins that are truncated by the Altyn Tagh fault. Two major field seasons will focus on the characterization of sedimentary basins as well as potential sediment source terranes on the opposite side of the fault. Fieldwork in the Tertiary basins will include description of measured sections, collection of paleocurrent and conglomerate composition data, and geological mapping. Fieldwork in potential sediment source areas will focus on lithologic description and verification of Chinese mapping, as well as collection of potential source units for analytical work. Analytical techniques will be applied to conglomerate clasts and potential source units in order to test sediment-source correlations that are proposed based on field data. These techniques will include petrographic examination, trace and major element geochemistry, and U-Pb and 40 Ar 39 Ar geochronology. Biostratigraphic analysis of mudstones will be used to confirm the ages of the Tertiary units. This study will constrain the geology of Tertiary basins in order to construct a series of time- displacement curves to characterize the history and along-strike variability of the Altyn Tagh fault. The resulting data will better define the role that the Altyn Tagh fault plays in accommodating Cenozoic convergence between India and Asia, and thereby distinguish the relative importance of mechanisms such as extrusion tectonics in continental deformation doc20708 none Plate circuit calculations indicate that motion of the Pacific plate relative to North American plate changed from westerly to NW at ~8 Ma. This observation corresponds extremely well with geologic data which indicates that motion of the Sierran-Great Valley block relative to the Colorado Plateau changed from westerly to NW at ~8-10 Ma. Geologic studies indicate that the rate of right lateral shear at ~8 Ma within the Eastern California Shear Zone north of the Garlock fault was ~15 mm yr accounting for ~30%of relative plate motion. Geodetic studies indicate a present-day dextral shear rate of 10-12 mm yr, providing clear evidence that the Eastern California Shear Zone is still an important component of deformation within the Pacific-North America plate boundary zone. In spite of its tectonic importance, the space-time evolution of much of the Eastern California Shear Zone is only broadly understood. This proposal requests support for investigating the kinematics of a system of intraplate dextral faults in the northern part of the Eastern California Shear Zone using an integrated approach of field mapping, tectonic geomorphology, paleoseismology, and geochronology. The proposed research is motivated by ongoing geodetic investigations on present-day magnitude of strain accumulation and spatial distribution across the Eastern California Shear Zone. In light of these geodetic constraints on strain accumulation, it is timely to improve the understanding of the spatial and temporal patterns of strain release during the late Neogene and Quaternary. The two data sets will provide important constraints on geodynamic hypotheses proposed for the evolution of the Eastern California Shear Zone. An accurate characterization of the spatial and temporal patterns of strain release within the Eastern California Shear Zone is crucial for understanding tectonic processes over a much broader area of intraplate deformation associated with the interaction of the Pacific and North American plates doc20748 none Evolution is the process that governs the entire diversity of living organisms on Earth. Evolutionary changes accumulate slowly, and, for most organisms, cannot be studied within the life span of one human observer. The most impressive evolutionary changes involve great modifications in all aspects of the design of an animal, its bodyplan. Such macroevolutionary changes become obvious only after they accumulate over a long time period. Actual examples are rare because the fossil record rarely grant researchers this level of detail. One of the best examples of macroevolutionary changes that are documented in the fossil record is the origin of whales, dolphins, and porpoises. All modern whales, dolphins, and porpoises (together constituting the Cetacea) are fully aquatic mammals, perfectly adapted to their watery environment and unable to survive on land. However, cetaceans have ancestors that lived on land, with a body plan that roughly resembled that of a wolf, and very unlike that of modern cetaceans. In less than 15 million years, this archaic body plan was modified into that of modern cetaceans. The present proposal aims to study these transformations from several points of view. First, PIs will collect cetacean fossils in India that document the land-water transition. Second, they will study the evolution of locomotor and sense organs, as cetaceans passed through this transition. Finally, they will study dolphin embryos in order to relate changes in cetacean embryology to evolutionary changes. The cetacean bodyplan is determined, to a large extent, by the unusual mode of swimming of cetaceans (swinging the horizontal tail fluke through the water). However, fossil cetacean had very different modes of swimming and these can be studied with fossils. The evolution of the cetacean bodyplan can also be studied indirectly, by determining its interaction with the sense organs. The most important sense organ with respect to this is the organ of balance and (associated with it) the organ of hearing. These will be studied using CT-scan methods. Finally, the modern cetacean bodyplan is also influenced, to an unknown degree, by its embryologic development, and this will be studied using embryos of modern dolphins doc20749 none SEISMIC TRENCHING FOR THE PULSE OF THE EARTHQUAKE ENGINE Ronald L. Bruhn and Gerard Schuster Department of Geology and Geophysics University of Utah Salt Lake City, UT -01 11 PROJECT The purpose of this research project is to study how earthquakes occur on normal faults. The patterns of earthquake recurrence in space and time provide the pulse of the earthquake engine. Investigating these patterns is revealing the complex processes that interact to generate earthquakes within the earth. Successfully understanding the nature of past heartbeats is the key to predicting the future behavior of large faults that generate earthquakes. Until now, trenching across fault scarps has been the primary tool for revealing the past history of earthquakes. By carefully logging the sedimentary deposits in trenches, geologists have been successful in deducing the sizes and recurrence intervals of past earthquakes. However, there are three shortcomings with the trenching method: it is expensive and environmentally intrusive, it is limited to depths no deeper than about 30 feet, and yields only a vei7tical cross-section of the fault. These limitations mean that the earthquake heartbeat is poorly sampled in both space and time, which can lead to erroneous conclusions about the nature of earthquakes. To overcome these problems, and to answer fundamental questions about the heartbeat of normal faulting, University of Utah earth scientists are conducting more than two dozen shallow seismic experiments over fault scarps in the Oquirrh, Stansbury and Wasatch faults. These are three large normal fault zones located in the Wasatch Front of Utah. The first arrival times of the recorded seismic waves yield velocity tomograms, or images, that delineate both the shallow and deep patterns of sedimentary colluvial wedges that formed in response to the offset of the earth s surface during past earthquakes. When identified, the colluvial wedges to a depth of 50 m or so are cored by a powerful Odex drill, and samples of the deposits surrounding and within the wedges are dated by a variety of dating methods. By this procedure the science team is extending our knowledge of earthquake behavior beyond 100,000 years, and significantly extending the history of earthquakes along the Wasatch Fault and other faults in the eastern Basin and Range Province. This combined use of seismic tomography, drilling and dating methods is referred to as seismic trenching. The extended earthquake history being determined during this study provides new information for predicting the future history of earthquakes in the region, and for creating a new generation of mechanical models of processes of faulting. The research has significant impact on the applied field of earthquake hazards and the basic science of earthquake mechanics doc20750 none Descriptive Complexity measures the richness of a language or sentence needed to describe a given property. The languages are variants of first-order logic and their targets are finite, ordered structures. There is a profound relationship between the traditional computational complexity of a problem and the descriptive complexity of the problem; indeed, all major complexity classes have been shown to have natural descriptive characterizations. This means that complexity can be understood entirely from a logical point of view. As a consequence, important new understandings about complexity have arisen from the descriptive point of view. The current research involves three major topics: (a) The theory of dynamic complexity, which is especially appropriate for database complexity, is being studied. Complete problems for dynamic complexity classes are being developed and the complexity of important dynamic problems such as graph reachability are being investigated; (b) Promising new methods for proving lower bounds techniques on the descriptive complexity of problems have been developed and are now being extended; and finally, (c) A Descriptive Programming environment is being developed in which the computational complexity of checking whether an input satisfies the properties being described can be read from the face of the description doc20751 none This dissertation research project will examine how contemporary academic bioethics in the U.S. balances the aspiration to guide biomedical research and practice with the need to become an institutionally legitimate force in society. Since its inception three decades ago, to what extent has bioethics made biomedicine more socially accountable? At the same time, to what extent has bioethics been made into a public-relations tool for academic and corporate biomedicine? This project will investigate the co-production of the legitimacy and intellectual content of the academic field of bioethics by examining theactivities of bioethicists in three professional arenas: the establishment and furtherance of an academic bioethics unit, the testimony of expert bioethics witnesses in the judicial forum, and the deliberations and recommendations of a federal bioethics commission. Bioethicists efforts to legitimize their field are viewed as competition and collaboration with other professionals to stake out an emblematic expertise, which is then tendered to various societal clients. A case study of an academic bioethics unit will be conducted to reveal how the unit s efforts to secure material resources and organizational legitimacy shapes the center s intellectual output, drawing on the unit s archival documents and interviews with the unit s director, faculty, staff, and graduate students. Discourse analysis will be used to explore how bioethicists and other professionals seek to legitimize and circumscribe their respective expertise, making use of courtroom proceedings in bioethics cases and the proceedings of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission related to the human stem cell research debate. The proposed research on the social aspects of the intellectual and organizational basis of recent bioethics shifts attention in the budding sociology of bioethics from clinical to academic bioethics, and highlights the institutional and power relationships between bioethics and public policy. This study will also contribute to the fields of higher education studies and science and technology studies, where ethics, and the relationship between legitimacy and knowledge content, have not been sufficiently explored. The findings of this project will provide useful insight into the challenges and opportunities bioethicists face in cultivating socially responsible biomedical science and technology doc20752 none The primary purpose of this project is to determine the effects of abiotic and biotic factors on the community structure and morphology of small mammals, especially rodents, during the past 5.0 million years in the Meade Basin of southwestern Kansas. The Meade Basin is a unique natural laboratory, as more than 100 fossiliferous localities (representing at least 40 superposed intervals) spanning the entire later Cenozoic are found within a small area of approximately 45 km2. Three radiometrically dated ashes at 2.1, 1.2-1.5, and 0.67 Ma provide calibration points for part of the sequence, and a magnetostratigraphic chronology will be developed that will add considerable refinement to the basic stratigraphic framework. Further field mapping will hopefully solve a few remaining thorny stratigraphic problems, especially in the upper part of the Rexroad Formation. Systematic studies at appropriate museums will refine the rodent database. A preliminary stable isotope study of paleosol carbonate nodules and caliche beds in Pliocene sediments has revealed significant habitat and climatic gradient changes, reflecting the expansion of tropical grasses throughout the Great Plains during this time. The isotopic studies will be extended to additional localities and to mammalian tooth apatite, to better refine the record of environmental change and to examine the response of small mammal diets to environmental gradients. Finally, appropriate analytical methods will be used with the rodent database to examine the dynamics of community assembly and anatomical change within lineages. The Meade Basin rodent database and stable isotopic record will generate one of the most detailed historical records of habitat, climatic, and faunal change in a terrestrial animal community anywhere in the world, and the stratigraphic model resulting from this project will provide the primary source of late Cenozoic stratigraphic information for the Great Plains region of North America doc20753 none Burgmann The San Andreas Fault zone Observatory at Depth (SAFOD) Pilot Hole will provide an excellent opportunity for exploring the relationship between fault slip and the thermal evolution of the crust by studying core samples from varying depths using two complementary thermochronologic methods. The Pilot Hole, located in Parkfield, CA less than two kilometers from the San Andreas fault will reach a depth of 2.1 km. The borehole will intersect Salinian granite rocks at a depth of less than 1 km and similar granitic rocks outcrop at the surface within a few kilometers of the Pilot Hole. The Principal Investigators will analyze samples from borehole cuttings at depth intervals of 100 - 200 m and from the surface outcrops. They will determine the thermal history of the samples using apatite fission track and U Th-He thermochronometers. This study will explore the complex interplay between uplift, erosion, and heat flow by using multiple thermochronologic systems on samples from a vertical profile. These data will allow the PIs to separate the effects of uplift from changes in the geothermal gradient, such as those resulting from the long-term frictional heat generated along the San Andreas fault. Because the uplift history at Parkfield is controlled, in part, by slip along the San Andreas fault, their work will also provide information about the kinematics of the fault doc20754 none Zhao The record of the intensity of Earth s magnetic field during the past (paleointensity) carries important information about the geodynamo and probably about the state of Earth s interior that is not contained in the record of paleodirection. Firm conclusions regarding long-term paleointensity variation and its role in mantle dynamics require averages of many more data than are currently available. For this reason, the investigators propose to carry out new determinations of Earth s field during Mesozoic and Tertiary time using dated rock materials from Siberia, Kazakhstan, China, the Faroe Islands, and Ontong Java and Kerguelen plateaus. The principal objectives of this study are focused on three important geophysical problems which are currently debated: (1) to obtain reliable paleointensities to test the hypothesis that there was an extended period of low field intensity in the Mesozoic and, if so, to better define its onset and termination; (2) to determine mid-Cretaceous paleointensities to test the recent suggestion that the field strength was unusually high during the Cretaceous Normal Superchron (CNS); and (3) to obtain mean paleointensity values during the Tertiary period of high reversal frequency for comparison with those for the mid-Cretaceous period of low reversal frequency to see whether there is a correlation between reversal rate and geomagnetic field strength. The rock units the investigators have targeted for sampling and those they currently have available have high potential of providing valuable paleointensity data to address these questions of fundamental importance in geophysics. The opportunity to compare paleointensity results from these different geologic materials is a strong secondary motivation for this research doc20755 none The PI s propose to employ recent advancements in geochronometric techniques to refine their understanding and models of the Proterozoic geology of the southern Lake Superior region. Their objectives are two-fold: 1) to use U-Pb monazite geochronometry (both ion probe and EMP) to document and directly date Penokean and subsequent metamorphic events (i.e., Yavapai, Mazatzal and Wolf River metamorphism) in an attempt to link these episodes to continued subduction after the Penokean orogeny; and 2) to use Ar-Ar laser microprobe grain-scale age mapping to evaluate the influence of multiple crustal events on the regional thermal record. Their results will be used ultimately to establish the Proterozoic geology of this historical region in the context of a long-lived convergent orogen model (Karlstrom et al., ). Metamorphic geochronometry. Results of recent NSF-supported research (Holm and Van Schmus) on the origin of post-Penokean granites show that magmatism long thought to be solely Ma, actually occurred in three separate, generally southeastward-migrating pulses at , , and Ma. Van Schmus, Holm and their co-authors have postulated that these magmatic pulses could correlate with northward-directed subduction associated with southward growth of the continent. In one possible scenario, geon 17 Yavapai-age slab rollback of a northward subducting oceanic plate caused continental arc magmatism to step generally southeastward between and Ma. As the slab steepened, it would have disengaged from the overlying, overthickened crust. The reduced compressional stresses and increased thermal input allowed for extensional collapse of the orogen and subsequent but short-lived crustal stabilization. The PI s propose to carry out a detailed metamorphic study to test the hypothesis that widespread metamorphism (and not simply widespread cooling) occurred with the migrating arc magmatism and might be linked spatially to tectonic extrusion (i.e., collapse) structures. Their preliminary SHRIMP and EMP dating of metamorphic monazites appear to support this. These data will provide the first direct timing constraints on both Penokean and post-Penokean metamorphism in the southern Lake Superior region. Metamorphic thermochronometry. In the s, NSF-funded (Holm) Ar-Ar mineral age data were used to document the timing and extent of orogenic cooling and later thermal reheating across the Penokean orogen. For instance, abundant - Ma plateau cooling ages are interpreted to be associated with a rapid crustal collapse stabilization period and - Ma plateau ages are interpreted to indicate reheating deformation associated with the Matzatal orogeny to the south. However, preliminary Ar-ion laser microprobe age data documents the presence of significant age gradients across muscovite crystals (500 m.y. in one case). These results merit further scrutiny of the existing thermochronologic data. Specifically, do the - Ma Ar-Ar plateau ages i) reflect the time of widespread deformation and mild reheating; ii) represent partial resetting associated with geon 14 magmatism; iii) or perhaps represent slow cooling? Ar-Ar muscovite laser probe age mapping will allow the PI s to better constrain the medium-temperature history of the region and, especially to relate it to younger overprinting events in the thermally reheated areas. The data collected in this study are critical to properly interpret the new igneous ages (obtained by Van Schmus, Holm, and others) and existing Ar-Ar ages and to evaluate the Proterozoic geology of southern Lake Superior region in the context of a long-lived convergent orogen model doc20756 none More than 23 million people in the United States have chronic, significant hearing losses. More than 4.5 million of those individuals acquired their hearing losses prior to 18 years of age. Recent evidence indicates that educational challenges associated with are largely due to the lack of effective communication between deaf students and their hearing parents and teachers. Previous studies have described the need for sign language interpreters in educational settings and the nature of the interpreting process, but little is known about the factors actually influencing the comprehension of interpreted material by deaf and hard-of-hearing learners. Such investigations are essential if deaf individuals, or others with communication challenges, are to have full access to available educational programs. The proposed research will (1) examine factors thought to influence comprehension of educational interpreting, (2) identify characteristics of students, teaching situations, and interpreters that can foster comprehension of material in postsecondary technical education, and (3) contribute to very limited knowledge about the education via sign language interpretation in technology and science-related classrooms. The project will take advantage of the unique setting of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, a college of Rochester Institute of Technology, which focuses on science, mathematics, and technical education. Participants will be drawn from more than deaf and hard-of-hearing students and more than 120 sign language interpreters. Eight experiments will examine the impact of learners language fluencies and content knowledge, interpreter skills and preparation, interpreter knowledge of technical content, interpreter-learner familiarity, and the effects of visual presentation formats on learning (e.g., distance learning). Of particular interest will be the impact of matching communication skills preferences and background knowledge of students and interpreters in technical education classrooms, where complex material taxes the impoverished background reading and educational levels typical of most deaf students. Such settings also are challenging for sign language interpreters, relatively few of whom have educational backgrounds in science and technology. Both the amount learned and students satisfaction comfort with classroom experiences will be considered in terms of the above factors. The findings will directly facilitate the access of deaf learners to educational programs, improve our understanding of ways to effectively communication technical material to deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals, and describe the impact of new visual technologies on access to educational programming by individuals with significant hearing loss. More generally, the research will provide valuable new information for optimizing technical education for students with language or communication challenges and help to expand the pool of individuals with training in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics doc20757 none This project includes the research activities to obtain theoretical and practical results on mechanisms that are incentive-compatible, scalable and distributed. Specifically, distributed algorithmic mechanism design with insights from game theory is proposed for three related problems in networking: interdomain routing, web caching and peer-to-peer file sharing. The research program on interdomain routing will develop a fundamentally new approach in which many of the routing-related incentive issues are handled by incentive-compatible protocols rather than bilateral contracts; such protocols can more effectively address the system-wide issues of efficient routing and conflicting policy requirements. Within this project also the recently developed techniques for digital-goods auctions will be applied to the peer-to-peer file sharing problem and to the design of incentive-compatible caching mechanisms. This project will help to understand better the behaviors of large-scale, distributed information systems formed by autonomous components such as Internet, and develop incentive-compatible algorithms for these systems accordingly doc20758 none This project concerns the development of efficient numerical methods for problems related to material science. The investigator studies computational issues concerning the numerical solution of continuum models for thin film growth. Many of these models include effects for surface diffusion, which is a nonlinear 4th order term. Consequently, these models are very stiff from a computational point of view. Because the surface diffusion term is nonlinear, it is difficult to use implicit methods. The investigator introduces a new semi-implicit level set method for solving motion by surface diffusion. He uses this new method to incorporate the effects of surface diffusion into models of polycrystalline thin films. He also develops a new approach for computing island dynamics, where the adatoms on the terraces are considered as a continuum field and the atoms on the edge of the island are treated discretely. This approach retains the potential advantage of continuum methods but at the same time preserves the discrete and stochastic effects present in island dynamics. The investigator includes effects of edge diffusion, surface tension, nucleation, and elasticity. An important computational aspect of this problem is the numerical solution of the diffusion equation in a complex domain. The investigator examines new methods for the efficient solution of this problem. Thin films occur in a large number of applications, from coatings on bearings to semi-conductor devices. In many cases these films are not single crystals but instead are polycrystalline and the quality of the film can depend on its texture. Films with good biaxial texture are close to being a single crystal and have applications in the manufacture of super-conducting tapes, for example. One important physical effect in determining the evolution of the texture is surface diffusion, but this is difficult to implement numerically and the investigator plans to develop a semi-implicit level set method to study the growth of polycrystalline thin films. The work here could help improve the fundamental understanding of these films. Another important process by which thin films are made is molecular beam epitaxy. The standard method for accurate simulation of this process is kinetic Monte Carlo. In many situations this method can be slow, and continuum models have the potential to greatly increase the speed of such computations. However, continuum models ignore discrete and stochastic effects. The investigator develops hybrid models that have good physical fidelity but offer considerable computational speed doc20759 none Archaeological research around the globe has long been focused on the grand monuments, fine artistic achievements and sweeping political dramas of ancient peoples. This emphasis has often been adopted at the expense of a smaller scale, more intimate understanding of the lives and experiences of the individual peoples comprising those cultures. A consideration of how ancient peoples perceived and identified themselves with respect to those within and without their communities will provide an important step in improving our anthropological understanding of personal and group identity in both the past and present. This research project addresses issues of co mmunity identity and its material expression on range of scales among the Late Classic (650-900 A.D.) peoples of Las Canoas, NW Honduras. Research includes the intensive excavation of both elite and non-elite houses and administrative ritual buildings at the archaeological site of Las Canoas, as well as analysis of artifacts recovered from those structures. This information will be studied with the aim of finding patterns in the use of built spaces and the production, trade, and use of material goods, such as pottery. The design of human settlements and the changes wrought on them over time lends insight into the ways people feel their environment should be organized and communities experienced. The types of possessions made, gathered, saved, displayed, hidden, and or discarded by individuals and families reveals much about what they value, what they are able to acquire and to what lengths they will go to access such items. Studies of both ancient architecture and artifact assemblages including pottery, stone tools, domestic refuse, burials, special caches and or ritual deposits provide a view into how a group of people shaped, lived in, and gave meaning to their world - in essence created their identities. The proposed research will consider the layout, orientation and relationships of buildings to one another, as well as the types and styles of artifacts (especially pottery), as indicators or expressions of individual and community identity. Information recovered from Las Canoas will be analyzed with these ideas in mind and then compared to that known from contemporaneous, similarly sized sites in the surrounding area. Understanding how the peoples living at Las Canoas related to the social, political, and economic hierarchy in Late Classic Mesoamerica are basic goals of this project. The broader aim of the research, however, is to test the hypothesis that much-debated anthropological concepts such as culture and ethnicity do not always play themselves out in the daily reality of human lives. Rather, it is proposed that peoples craft their identities to suit a variety of material and symbolic needs, shifting their alliances and affiliations in response to changing pressures and situations. This research is designed to question our often-untested assumptions about the nature of interaction between different peoples and communities in achieve a better understanding of human behavior doc20760 none The objective of this workshop is to bring together international researchers and practitioners dealing with localization in geomechanics. The focus of the workshop will be to collect and debate the applications that have taken place since the first workshop in . The scope of the workshop will include analytical solutions, numerical methods, experimental techniques, and case histories. Besides the presentation of fundamental research findings, applications in geotechnical, petroleum, mining, and bulk materials engineering will be emphasized. Failure of many geotechnical structures is characterized by the formation and propagation of zones of localized deformation. For example, a noticeable feature of slope and underground failures in soft rock and overconsolidated clay is the appearance of slip surfaces or shear bands, the characteristics of which are associated with deformation being concentrated in narrow zones and the surrounding material appearing intact. The appearance of localization or other bifurcation modes often manifests itself in specimen or system instability under specific loading conditions. The mathematical formulation of bifurcation phenomena and related instabilities constitutes the basis of a continuum theory of failure. This theory and its applications, as well as the methodology of analyzing instabilities in general, are crucial in adequate modeling and safe design of numerous geotechnical engineering problems. Five international workshops on bifurcation and localization in geomechanics have been held in Europe, Japan, and Australia: 1. Karlsruhe, Germany: . 2. Gdansk, Poland: . 3. Aussois, France: . 4. Gifu, Japan: . 5. Perth, Australia: . The University of Minnesota was selected as the site for the 6th Workshop to be held on June 2-5, doc20761 none Keller The International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) is funding the drilling of a 2km hole in the Chicxulub impact crater on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. NSF is funding US investigators to analyze core samples from the Chicxulub Scientific Drilling Project (CSDP). The Chicxulub crater is one of the world s largest impact craters and has been linked to the mass extnction event at the Cretaceous - Tertiary (K T) boundary ~65 million years ago. As part of the CSDP Science Team, the Principal Investigators will carry out a collaborative and multidisciplinary effort that addresses three main topics: 1) the age of the Chicxulub impact, 2) evidence of multiple impacts, and 3) environmental and biotic consequences of the impact(s). The research falls into two categories. The first is an investigation of CSDP core samples by the PI to determine the age, biostratigraphy, faunal turnover, and paleoenvironment of deposition based on planktic and benthic foraminifera, and the correlation of this data with sections throughout Central America. The second is a collaborative research effort with other team members involving analyses of CSDP core samples for impact glass, sedimentology, geochemistry, and mineralogy doc20762 none This dissertation will investigate the gentrification process in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. Women entrepreneurs engaged in retail business selling stylish goods (clothing, accessories) may be an important early stage of gentrification. Because of this, a consumer culture of aesthetics may be an important element of neighborhood change, not just a consequence of the resulting gentrification. The research combines archival administrative records and census data with interviews with 50 women entrepreneurs and 40 others including neighborhood real estate interests, long-term store owners, and citizen activists. The results should form a narrative account of the new dynamics of neighborhood reinvestment that reflects the city s transition from a small manufacturing to a service base doc20763 none Egerstedt, Magnus Communications in Embedded Control Systems - Project This project investigates how different embedded software and hardware components should communicate with each other in order for the overall, global system to behave in a satisfactory way. The main area of investigation is the information theoretic content of the transmitted signals, i.e. a study of how many bits of information need to be transmitted between the different components in order to make the physical system meet its specifications. For instance, autonomous robotic systems are normally relaying on a variety of heterogeneous sensors, and the question then becomes, which of the sensors are needed? And furthermore, is it possible to compress the data in a systematic way, e.g. using virtual sensors, so that information that is not essential to the current task, or mode of operation, can be discarded? Since the sensory data needed for accomplishing a certain task depends both on the control law, the dynamics of the system, and the complexity of the task, information theory provides a tool for treating questions concerning sensor and actuator selection and control mode design in a unified way. This project is focused on the following two enabling areas of research: 1. Modeling of the information theoretic content of the symbolic, computer generated inputs used for controlling continuous, mechanical devices. 2. Selection of embedded sensors and actuators for a multi-agent, robotic system. This selection is done so that the control system meets its specifications in the presence of bandwidth constraints, i.e. so the robots maintain formation while avoiding obstacles in the environment. In this project computer generated, or linguistic control commands are modeled as strings of mode descriptions that can be read by trigger based hybrid systems. In other words, models for software based control of physical, continuous devices are developed in such a way that the actual control signals have a clear information theoretic content in terms of code lengths, thus connecting the field of multi-modal control with that of information theory. This model enables the investigation of component integration issues. Since each sensor or actuator contributes to the total number of bits needed for coding the control signals, by minimizing the code lengths subject to the constraint that the system should behave in a satisfactory way, a natural measure of what components are needed in the current mode of operation is derived. Furthermore, the explicit focus on code lengths has immediate implication on coding theory, i.e. a theory for how the information shared between different embedded components should be represented is a direct consequence of this research. The information theoretic approach to control theory under investigation in this project has a number of potential applications outside the field of embedded control. For instance, in teleoperated robotics the control signals are transmitted over communication channels in which the presence of channel noise makes it preferable to transmit instructions that are as short as possible. A related problem arises in the area of minimum attention control, where an attention functional is defined as a measure of the control variability doc20764 none Harpp Floreana Island is the most distinctive volcano of the Galapagos hotspot system. Unlike other Galapagos Islands, Floreana experienced extensive explosive activity, and its alkalic lavas are anomalously enriched in incompatible trace elements, exhibit evidence of metasomatism, have unique isotopic compositions, and contain abundant mantle xenoliths. The fundamental goal of the proposed project is to use Floreana s unique features to elucidate the magmatic processes that construct and modify the lithosphere forming the Galapagos Platform, which will be accomplished through a detailed volcanologic, petrologic, and geochemical study. Determining the volcanic history and compositional evolution of Floreana volcano will permit estimation of variations in the depths and extents of melt production through analysis of major and trace element variations and how those change with time. These results will be applied to questions about Floreana s volcanic evolution, including: a) the relationship between the different eruptive sequences; b) apparent shallow depths of melting, which may contradict a deep plume origin; c) compositional variations within single eruptive episodes; d) the relationship between Floreana lavas and the giant volcanic terraces which underlie the southern Galapagos Platform; and e) the origins of the xenoliths and their relationship to Floreana lavas and other parts of the Galapagos lithosphere. The powerful combination of high precision geochemical and petrologic analysis coupled with detailed field observations will provide a rare opportunity to gain insight into elusive questions about plume-lithosphere interaction, ocean-island magmatism, and, ultimately, mantle evolution doc20765 none Collaborative Research: U-Series, Be, Sr, Nd and Pb Isotopic and Trace Element Constraints on Melting and Mass Transfer Processes in Arcs, Philippine Arc System ; ; PIs: Asmerom; Morris; Mukasa Net material cycling between the mantle and continental crust occurs primarily in arcs. Many processes related to melting and mass transfer in arcs, such as the relative contributions of melting and devolatilization in transferring elements from sediment and altered oceanic crust or the relative roles of dynamic, decompression or flux melting of the mantle wedge, however, remain enigmatic. This Collaborative proposal will focus on Luzon, located in the tectonically simpler part of the Philippines arc, to compare two different arc settings in close proximity that may have had dissimilar geochemical histories. The presumed difference in sediment contribution makes the proposed site an ideal setting for studying mass transfer processes and their possible effects on mantle melting. Combined U-series and Be isotopic data, in conjunction with long-lived radiogenic and trace element data will be used to study these rocks. The following goals are set forth: 1) to characterize lavas, using major, trace and Nd, Sr and Pb isotopic data, from four volcanic centers, two from each arc in order to delineate attributes of each subduction zone; 2) to determine the nature and composition of the sediment component and the mechanism by which it is added to the mantle; 3) to investigate the role of dynamic melting in arcs; and 4) to investigate the behavior of U-series nuclides during magma differentiation doc20766 none The PI s propose to employ recent advancements in geochronometric techniques to refine their understanding and models of the Proterozoic geology of the southern Lake Superior region. Their objectives are two-fold: 1) to use U-Pb monazite geochronometry (both ion probe and EMP) to document and directly date Penokean and subsequent metamorphic events (i.e., Yavapai, Mazatzal and Wolf River metamorphism) in an attempt to link these episodes to continued subduction after the Penokean orogeny; and 2) to use Ar-Ar laser microprobe grain-scale age mapping to evaluate the influence of multiple crustal events on the regional thermal record. Their results will be used ultimately to establish the Proterozoic geology of this historical region in the context of a long-lived convergent orogen model (Karlstrom et al., ). Metamorphic geochronometry. Results of recent NSF-supported research (Holm and Van Schmus) on the origin of post-Penokean granites show that magmatism long thought to be solely Ma, actually occurred in three separate, generally southeastward-migrating pulses at , , and Ma. Van Schmus, Holm and their co-authors have postulated that these magmatic pulses could correlate with northward-directed subduction associated with southward growth of the continent. In one possible scenario, geon 17 Yavapai-age slab rollback of a northward subducting oceanic plate caused continental arc magmatism to step generally southeastward between and Ma. As the slab steepened, it would have disengaged from the overlying, overthickened crust. The reduced compressional stresses and increased thermal input allowed for extensional collapse of the orogen and subsequent but short-lived crustal stabilization. The PI s propose to carry out a detailed metamorphic study to test the hypothesis that widespread metamorphism (and not simply widespread cooling) occurred with the migrating arc magmatism and might be linked spatially to tectonic extrusion (i.e., collapse) structures. Their preliminary SHRIMP and EMP dating of metamorphic monazites appear to support this. These data will provide the first direct timing constraints on both Penokean and post-Penokean metamorphism in the southern Lake Superior region. Metamorphic thermochronometry. In the s, NSF-funded (Holm) Ar-Ar mineral age data were used to document the timing and extent of orogenic cooling and later thermal reheating across the Penokean orogen. For instance, abundant - Ma plateau cooling ages are interpreted to be associated with a rapid crustal collapse stabilization period and - Ma plateau ages are interpreted to indicate reheating deformation associated with the Matzatal orogeny to the south. However, preliminary Ar-ion laser microprobe age data documents the presence of significant age gradients across muscovite crystals (500 m.y. in one case). These results merit further scrutiny of the existing thermochronologic data. Specifically, do the - Ma Ar-Ar plateau ages i) reflect the time of widespread deformation and mild reheating; ii) represent partial resetting associated with geon 14 magmatism; iii) or perhaps represent slow cooling? Ar-Ar muscovite laser probe age mapping will allow the PI s to better constrain the medium-temperature history of the region and, especially to relate it to younger overprinting events in the thermally reheated areas. The data collected in this study are critical to properly interpret the new igneous ages (obtained by Van Schmus, Holm, and others) and existing Ar-Ar ages and to evaluate the Proterozoic geology of southern Lake Superior region in the context of a long-lived convergent orogen model doc20767 none Monkey teeth are known to grow in an incremental manner like trees. Regular layers of enamel and dentine are formed which represent known time intervals in the life of the animal. There is some evidence to suggest that disturbances of this regular laying down of dental tissue may be directly related to specific life-events such as giving birth to an infant. These scientists are investigating the feasibility of developing a method, using monkeys as a model, to read fossil primate teeth for such information. Such a tool would provide invaluable information regarding how life-history events, such as the age of first reproduction in females, changed over the course of human evolution. This project aims to provide preliminary data to determine if further investigation of this phenomenon is warranted. Teeth from five adult female rhesus macaques will be sectioned and examined under both light and electron microscopes. Any disturbances in their teeth will be precisely aged and the results will be compared with the detailed records of their lives. All are known to have had at least one baby while their teeth were still forming. The macaques have been selected from a sample of primate skulls from individuals with known life-histories collected as part of an National Science Foundation planning grant. This work will support the research efforts of a female scientist and will also provide data of value to the broader scientific community, especially those concerned with the welfare or conservation of primate species doc20768 none This project is a set of randomized experiments aimed at systematically both producing and eliminating unit nonresponse error in survey estimates. Specifically, three attributes of the survey request (topic interest, survey sponsor, and monetary incentives) will be experimentally manipulated in concert with choice of target population. Sampling frames containing persons with known characteristics (e.g., occupational groups, interest groups, groups of consumers of specific products or services) will be used. Randomly identified subsamples of these groups will be asked to participate in self-administered surveys on topics of relevance to the frame and topics irrelevant to the frame. Crossed with this factor, the sponsorship of the survey will be experimentally varied, with one sponsor relevant to the frame and one irrelevant to the frame. Finally, the use of a monetary incentive will be crossed with both of the other factors to measure the effects of extrinsic benefits of participation. The key hypothesis is that topic interest and sponsorship act to produce nonignorable nonresponse when the surveys contain items relevant to the frame, and that monetary incentives act to reduce the magnitude of nonresponse error by bringing into the respondent pool sample persons with low topic interest and minimal affect toward the sponsor. The effects of sponsor affect and topic interest are expected to be additive; monetary incentives are expected to counteract the nonignorability influences of both factors. The practical importance of this work to statistics based on surveys is: a) to help agencies conducting surveys anticipate when different sponsors may obtain different results; b) to provide evidence about potentially harmful effects on nonresponse error of interviewers emphasizing single purposes of a survey; c) to produce evidence regarding the ameliorating effects on nonresponse error of monetary incentives; and d) to test a conceptual structure that will help survey sponsors anticipate when nonresponse rates will affect error and when they will not. This research is supported by the Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics Program and a consortium of federal statistical agencies under the Research on Survey and Statistical Methodology Funding Opportunity doc20769 none The PI s request funds to analyze the dynamics of fault interaction between the San Jacinto (SJFZ)and southernmost San Andreas (SAFZ) fault zones in southern California. They seek to address whether there has been a decrease in the slip rate along the Indio segment of the SAFZ related to the birth and continued maturation of the SJFZ, and or whether these two fault zones alternatively assume dominant roles in accommodating relative plate motion across the region over any time scales. These questions have proven difficult to address with any one geological geophysical technique or data type. They will therefore employ an integrated, cross-disciplinary approach to investigate the evolution, present-day behavior,and dynamics of these active faults. Specifically, the PI s propose to: - Investigate trade-offs between fault model parameter estimates derived from geodetic observations. They will use the SCEC and SCIGN data sets together with inverse elastic fault models and more realistic visco-elastic finite element forward models to perform resolution and covariance analyses to explore the trade-offs between slip rate, locking depth, creep, and seismic cycle effects on these faults. They will (1)determine marginal confidence bounds on the range of present-day boundary conditions on fault evolution models, and (2)determine what improvements in geodetic coverage (e.g.,PBO station locations and station density)will be necessary in order to further narrow the class of admissible fault evolution models. -Investigate the relative importance of, and feedbacks between, fault zone geometry, and lithospheric rheology by numerical simulations using a 3-D visco-elastic finite element modeling approach. Their investigations will include an assessment of how the presence of the restraining bend in the SAFZ affects partitioning of strain between the SJFZ and SAFZ, how the eastern California shear zone affects this partitioning, and whether there are resolvable differences in fault zone strength between the SAFZ and the SJFZ. - Determine the age of offset alluvial deposits using cosmogenic dating techniques which were not available ten years ago, at the present-day precision. The order-of-magnitude increase in precision of the offset alluvial fan ages will allow the PI s to discriminate between competing models for fault zone evolution over the 10 to 100 ka time scale. These new cosmogenic dating measurements will be made at no additional cost under this proposal. Rather, funds to cover the costs of this component of our research are anticipated from Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft (DFG proposal pending, Prof. Friedrich, P.I.). - Construct a model for the co-evolution of the SJFZ and SAFZ incorporating an aggregation of new and existing displacement history data sets across a broad range of time scales for both fault zones, as well as dynamical considerations. Our integrated approach will provide a more comprehensive test of fault slip dependence between these fault systems than any individual technique could possibly provide on its own. The strength of our proposal is that our multidisciplinary research will be coordinated by the over-riding goal of testing competing hypotheses for the evolution of this complex fault system doc20770 none Bennett The paradox of how horizontal contraction and extension can occur simultaneously in convergent mountain belts remains a fundamental and largely unresolved problem in continental dynamics. The Apennines represent one of the most accessible type locality areas of syn-convergent extension. Rollback - which describes the tendency of a subducting plate to retreat from the orogenic front - is commonly invoked as an explanation for syn-convergent extension, but this idea does not address how the retrograde motion of the subducting plate, which is a mantle-based process, causes horizontal extension in the overlying zone of crustal convergence, especially in light of the large accretionary fluxes typically associated with continental subduction. The goal of the project (project RETREAT) is to develop a self-consistent dynamic model of syn-convergent extension, using the Northern Apennines as a natural laboratory. This part of the Apennine orogen has been the site of relatively steady orthogonal convergence and 2D (plane strain) orogenic deformation since ~30 Ma. GPS measurements indicate that convergence is presently active, and tomography indicates that the full length of subducted slab is still intact to depths of 250 km. Syn-convergent extension has been active since at least 15 Ma. The Northern Apennines are well studied, and all important features of the orogen are onland and thus directly accessible for detailed geological and geophysical research. The specific objectives of project RETREAT are 1) to determine in detail the velocity field across the orogen, including deformation in the orogenic wedge, the motion of lithospheric plates, and the flow fields in the surrounding asthenospheric mantle, and 2) to use this kinematic information to develop and test specific dynamic models for deformation in the orogenic wedge and underlying mantle. The research techniques to be used include; geodesy, tectonic geomorphology, low-temperature thermochronometry, structural geology and tectonic syntheses, seismic studies, and geodynamic modeling. The RETREAT project links together a broad multidisciplinary group with eleven PIs from six institutions, plus some 27 foreign collaborators in Italy, Switzerland, Canada, and France doc20771 none Miller The Rio Pilcomayo heads on the Cerro Rico de Potosi precious metal-polymetallic tin deposits of Bolivia. Mining of the Potosi deposits was initiated by the Spanish in and has continued without interruption to the present. Our previous studies have demonstrated that the release of mining and milling wastes to the environment during the past 450 years has resulted in extensive contamination of water and sediments of the upper Pilcomayo valley. The primary objective of this investigation is to determine if Pb isotopes can be effectively used in a large river system to quantify the decadal scale transport and storage of contaminated debris from mining operations. Inherent in the study is an analysis of the linkages between geomorphic processes and the long-term dispersal of contaminated materials. To accomplish the project objectives several tasks will be completed: (1) Pb sources within the upper reaches of Rio Pilcomayo basin will be identified and characterized in terms of their geographical distribution and Pb isotopic signatures. This step will involve the collection and analysis of ore samples from Cerro Rico, the major bedrock units that underlie the watershed, mineralized zones within tributary basins, and channel bed sediments within major tributaries; (2) the alluvial stratigraphy and geomorphology of the tributary basins will be documented and linked to the existing geomorphic-stratigraphic data on the Rio Pilcomayo to (a) refine our understanding of the timing, magnitude, and nature of historic geomorphic events that have occurred along the Rio Pilcomayo, and (b) gain insights into the timing and magnitude of sediment influx to the Rio Pilcomayo from tributaries (both of which are believed to have had an impact on the downstream movement of contaminated sediment); (3) spatial variations in the total concentration of selected metals and Pb isotopic ratios will be documented perpendicular to flow, downstream, and vertically within age-constrained alluvial deposits. Emphasis will be placed on the analysis of 1.5-2 m long cores extracted from contaminated alluvial terraces composed of vertically accreted flood deposits; and (4) sediment mixing models will be used to quantify the relative proportion of Pb in alluvial deposits that is derived from each of the delineated Pb sources doc20772 none The topography of the Earth exerts an extremely important influence on atmospheric circulation patterns and both floral and faunal biogeography. However, the uplift history of many large tectonic structures, such as the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau, and the changes in paleo-topography of the Earth through time, remain among the least well-quantified, yet critical boundary conditions in the study of both climatic and biotic evolution. The proposed research aims to develop, validate and precisely quantify the associated errors of a novel paleo-altimeter, which will be based on the predictable changes in CO2 partial pressure (Pa) with altitude, as reflected in stomatal frequency (density and index) of fossil plant taxa. The reduction in CO2 Pa with altitude exerts a physiological limitation on plant photosynthesis, which is compensated for, in many species, by an increase in stomatal frequency and altered stomatal distribution. As the partial pressure of atmospheric CO2 decreases with altitude in a predictable manner, and stomatal frequency on plant leaves increases significantly with decreasing partial pressure, theoretically therefore, paleo-elevation can be estimated by calculating the difference in CO2 Pa (estimated from fossil leaf stomatal frequency) between coeval high elevation and sea-level fossil floras. It is projected based on preliminary modeling that this CO2 Pa based method will yield paleo-elevations within an estimated error of 500 m and yield results, based on temperature sensitivity analysis, which are independent of climate, therefore providing significant improvements on existing methodologies doc20773 none Shu The investigator and his colleague study high-order-accuracy computational methods for linear and nonlinear waves, with emphasis on shock wave calculations and simulation of electro-magnetics waves. The work includes the development and analysis of high-order finite difference, finite element, and spectral methods, as well as applications of these methods to computational fluid dynamics and computational electro-magnetics. In particular, the efforts include the following components: high-order methods for shock wave calculations, including finite difference WENO schemes, spectral methods for supersonic reactive flows, and finite element discontinuous Galerkin methods; high-order methods for Maxwell s equations; and perfectly matched absorbing layers. Computers are now used more extensively in engineering and other applied sciences. An important component to effectively use computers is the design and analysis of efficient numerical algorithms. Important applications such as computer-aided design of aircraft are to a large extent dependent on efficient and reliable algorithms designed by applied mathematicians. The high-order methods the investigators develop and analyze in this project should significantly increase the efficiency and reliability of algorithms used in crucial application areas such as aerospace industry, communications, and material science doc20774 none Germanoski The Rio Pilcomayo heads on the Cerro Rico de Potosi precious metal-polymetallic tin deposits of Bolivia. Mining of the Potosi deposits was initiated by the Spanish in and has continued without interruption to the present. Our previous studies have demonstrated that the release of mining and milling wastes to the environment during the past 450 years has resulted in extensive contamination of water and sediments of the upper Pilcomayo valley. The primary objective of this investigation is to determine if Pb isotopes can be effectively used in a large river system to quantify the decadal scale transport and storage of contaminated debris from mining operations. Inherent in the study is an analysis of the linkages between geomorphic processes and the long-term dispersal of contaminated materials. To accomplish the project objectives several tasks will be completed: (1) Pb sources within the upper reaches of Rio Pilcomayo basin will be identified and characterized in terms of their geographical distribution and Pb isotopic signatures. This step will involve the collection and analysis of ore samples from Cerro Rico, the major bedrock units that underlie the watershed, mineralized zones within tributary basins, and channel bed sediments within major tributaries; (2) the alluvial stratigraphy and geomorphology of the tributary basins will be documented and linked to the existing geomorphic-stratigraphic data on the Rio Pilcomayo to (a) refine our understanding of the timing, magnitude, and nature of historic geomorphic events that have occurred along the Rio Pilcomayo, and (b) gain insights into the timing and magnitude of sediment influx to the Rio Pilcomayo from tributaries (both of which are believed to have had an impact on the downstream movement of contaminated sediment); (3) spatial variations in the total concentration of selected metals and Pb isotopic ratios will be documented perpendicular to flow, downstream, and vertically within age-constrained alluvial deposits. Emphasis will be placed on the analysis of 1.5-2 m long cores extracted from contaminated alluvial terraces composed of vertically accreted flood deposits; and (4) sediment mixing models will be used to quantify the relative proportion of Pb in alluvial deposits that is derived from each of the delineated Pb sources doc20775 none Kelly Liu The investigators propose to perform a comprehensive search for lower mantle discontinuities by using tens of thousands seismograms recorded by about 450 broadband seismic stations worldwide in two global and one regional seismic networks, and two large portable seismic arrays. About 70,000 three-component, source-normalized seismograms with strong P (or P_diff) arrivals will be used to image the discontinuities by stacking P-to-S converted phases, and about 25,000 source-normalized seismograms with strong SS arrivals will be used to study discontinuities by stacking bottom-side reflected S waves at the mid-point of the source-receiver path. The same amount of synthetic seismograms will be stacked to verify the results. Preliminary work from stacking about 20,000 P-to-S receiver functions recorded by the Global Digital Seismic Network revealed several possible discontinuities at the depths of , , , , and km. The stacking amplitudes of those discontinuities are about 1 6 to 1 2 of that of P410S, implying that the velocity contrasts across those apparent discontinuities are in the order of 1 to 2%. The proposed work includes improving the preliminary observations by using three times more data, complementing and verifying the P-to-S results by stacking SS precursors and using synthetic seismograms, mapping spatial variation of lower mantle discontinuities by stacking P-to-S conversions and SS precursors in small caps, and finally, making the processed about 100,000 three-component, broadband seismograms public by establishing a web-based database doc20744 none COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: Physical Properties of Bubble- and Crystal-bearing Melts and their Implications for Eruption Dynamics: Integrated Theoretical, Experimental and Field-based studies ; PIs: Cashman Manga Magma must ascend to the Earth s surface prior to erupting. Field and theoretical studies over the past decade have shown that the rate of magma ascent plays a critical role in determining the style, and violence, of the ensuing eruption. This dependence results from physical changes that the magma undergoes as it ascends (decompresses). Bubbles nucleate, grow, and coalesce during decompression; crystals may also nucleate and grow. The presence of bubbles and crystals, in turn, affects the magma s ability to flow (its rheology), and thus its continued ascent. For this reason, development of an accurate model of magma ascent and eruption requires that we understand both the distribution of bubbles and crystals as a function of depth below the Earth s surface and the effect of bubbles and crystals on magma rheology. We propose to address both of these questions through a combination of experimental, theoretical and field-based studies. Our specific goals are: (1) to determine the effect of suspended crystals on the rheology of bubble-bearing me (2) to use the bubble structure of volcanic samples to estimate shear (velocity) profiles across volcanic conduits; and (3) to examine the permeability (bubble-interconnectedness that permits gas escape) of volcanic clasts as a function of both their bubble and crystal content doc20777 none Ghiorso and Evans University of Washington This project will use experimental phase equilibria combined with thermodynamic modeling to revise and extend the capabilities of the FeTi oxide thermobarometer. This thermobarometer is a primary tool used to infer conditions under which certain rocks form. It uses compositions of equilibrium pairs of Fe-Ti oxides (a rhombohedral oxide coexisting with a spinel) to derive estimates of temperature and oxygen fugacity (fO2) conditions under which a mineral assemblage last equilibrated. Recent experimental studies have demonstrated the failure of current formulations of the thermobarometer for conditions that exceed the nickel nickel-oxide oxygen buffer. In addition, subsequent to the formulation and calibration of the thermodynamic models that underlie the existing thermobarometer, new experimental work has been published revising estimates of long-range cation order and greatly clarifying the nature of short-range ordering as well as the character of the symmetry-driven phase transition in the rhombohedral phase. Together, these studies motivate a revision of the thermodynamic formulation of the thermobarometer to place it on sounder theoretical footing and to address the practical necessity of estimating T-fO2 in more oxidized parageneses, in particular orogenic arc magmas. The revised geothermometer will be distributed as a standalone and web-based software product doc20778 none The Southwestern Center for Arithmetical Algebraic Geometry was founded in with support from a Group Infrastructure Grant from the National Science Foundation. The organizing premise was that by creatively deploying the current concentration of research strength in Arithmetical Algebraic Geometry in the Southwest, we could recreate, outside of the traditional centers, some of the best aspects of the best programs for the benefit of our own research and that of students and post-docs, both locally and nationally. Our premise that it is possible to recreate in concentrated form the virtues of the traditional centers has been amply demonstrated to be correct. The current project will build on this base and will contribute to research and education in a wider area of mathematics and across the country. The principal goals of the project are: to spread our model of a concentrated, interactive, and highly collaborative center to other areas of mathematics and other areas of the country; to develop and distribute high-quality reusable components from the Arizona Winter School and our distinguished lecture series (such as lecture notes, project descriptions, and video footage of lectures); and to continue to serve our constituency of advanced graduate students and post-docs in arithmetical algebraic geometry doc20779 none The proposal is to establish a US-EU DELOS working group on Digital Archiving and Preservation . The working group will meet over the next year to discuss and evaluate fruitful joint activities and research paths for collaborative activities in this general topical area. The EU component of the effort is funded and managed by the DELOS Forum, a major organizer of digital libraries research and planning activities in Europe. DELOS receives support from the Information Societies Technologies (IST) 5th Framework Programme of the European Commission. This effort continues the planning and assessment activities begun by an earlier NSF-EU working groups process. In their final report An International Research Agenda for Digital Libraries , delivered in Brussels in October , increased levels of collaboration and interaction was seen as critical to building multi-lingual, multi-national digital libraries. The objective of the new working groups, of which this is one, is to define a research agenda on a specific topic and identify areas and activities for cooperation between EU and US researchers. The efforts of this particular group take the next step in the planning process by assessing future directions for research and resource development related to archiving and preservation of digital content doc20780 none Weathering of silicate minerals on continents is a major source of silicon (Si) for formation of secondary silicate minerals in soil, opal phytoliths in plants and ultimately for diatoms in the oceans. Even though Si is a significant element in the biogeochemistry of Earth, it does not have a well developed tracer to provide a clear understanding of how organic and inorganic processes affect Si behavior and the pathways that Si follows as it moves from rock to clay or water or organism. Germanium (Ge) and Si behave chemically in a similar fashion and have been treated as a pseudo-isotopic tracer of the behavior of Si in the surficial environment. We have conducted preliminary research that demonstrates clear and logical changes in the Ge Si ratio in response to soil and plant processes. Here we propose a systematic analysis of Ge fractionation from Si during: 1) incongruent weathering and the formation of secondary alumino-silicate clay minerals, 2) formation of iron oxides in soil, and 3) plant uptake and opal biosynthesis leading to formation of phytoliths. We propose a field-based project where we quantify the Ge Si ratios of rock minerals, soil minerals, soil water and plant phytoliths in soils forming on extrusive volcanic rock and on intrusive plutonic rocks in a humid tropical weathering environment. Ge Si ratios will be determined on fresh parent materials and soils from a series of well-studied tropical soil sites in Hawaii (basaltic substrate) and Luquillo, Puerto Rico (granitoid substrate). Pore waters and mineral separates (where applicable) from the same horizons as the soil samples will be analyzed. We will also analyze plant phytoliths from dominant vegetation. We will use the data to test specific hypotheses about processes that control Ge Si fractionation in the weathering environment. The proposed research will compare and contrast the behavior of the Ge Si system in aphanitic basaltic environments with plutonic granitoid environments, where we expect that the mechanisms of fractionation will differ because of the differences in chemical composition, mineralogy, and crystallinity. It will also specifically investigate the role of plant uptake of Si and the biogenic silica cycle in soil systems. The results of this study will provide the basic data needed to develop Ge Si ratios as a quantitative tracer of silica during weathering, plant cycling, and in surface waters doc20781 none PROJECT SUMMARY With prior support from NSF, we have shown that TIMS (Thermal Ionization Mass Spectrometry) U-series dating of pedogenic carbonate can provide a precise chronology of pedogenesis and reliable ages for appropriate Quaternary alluvial deposits (Sharp et al., accepted). Though the U Th ratios of pedogenic carbonate of carbonate-clast dominated alluvium at Kyle Canyon (Nevada) are too low for U-series dating, pedogenic carbonate in granitic-clast dominated gravels of the Wind River Basin (Wyoming) is highly suitable. Precise U-series ages (1-2 percent, 2) may be measured on a few cubic millimeters of pedogenic carbonate and require only very small corrections for detrital 230Th. Suites of ages may be screened for reliability using criteria inherent in the U-series results. The time lag between clast deposition and accumulation of datable carbonate.a critical parameter if U-series dates of innermost clast-rinds are to be used to date host Quaternary deposits. is estimated to be 5+ 5 kyr in the Wind River basin. O- and C-isotope analyses of a trial suite of pedogenic carbonate samples shows that a temporally resolved stable isotope paleoclimatic record can be constructed using pedogenic carbonate dated by U-series. Funds are requested to further develop U-series dating of pedogenic carbonate and its application to the refinement of a Rocky Mountain glacial chronology. Emphasis will be placed on resolving the timing of Bull Lake glacial advances (at their type locality) with respect to other regional and global climate records. Moreover, we propose to characterize the spatial and temporal accumulation of pedogenic carbonate in relict soils of Late- Middle to Late Pleistocene deposits, and measure the O- and C-isotopic compositions of carbonate samples dated by U-series. We will interpret these data to provide a comprehensive history of paleoenvironmental change in the Wind River Basin throughout much of the late Illinoian and Wisconsin glacial cycles. Ultimately, our goal is to correlate the soils-based paleoenvironmental record with the geomorphic expressions of paleoclimatic change.the well-preserved glacial moraines and glacio-fluvial terraces of the Basin.by establishing a common chronological framework based on precise U-series ages. This is a collaborative proposal. Warren Sharp and Ken Ludwig (Berkeley Geochronology Center) will be responsible for U-series analyses and age interpretations; Ron Amundson (U.C. Berkeley) will provide field and laboratory expertise in pedology and stable isotope analysis and interpretation; Oliver Chadwick (U.C. Santa Barbara) will provide expertise in Quaternary geology, geomorphology and soil stratigraphy as well as familiarity with the Wind River area doc20782 none Tian-Jun Li The focus of this project is to apply methods from differential topology, geometric analysis and algebraic geometry to study symplectic four manifolds. Symplectic four manifolds can be divided into four categories according to their Kodaira dimensions, which take values -1, 0, 1 and 2. The classification of those with Kodaira dimenision -1 has been achieved, to which the investigator has made essential contribution. Tian-Jun Li proposes to classify those with Kodaira dimension 0. Fiber sum is the most powerful construction of symplectic four manifolds, and one would like manifolds constructed this way to be minimal. Tian-Jun Li has shown that a large class of fiber sums are indeed minimal. The investigator believes that he can prove it for all fiber sums using his work on the minimal genus problem for rational surfaces. An n manifold is a space that locally looks like the Euclidean space of dimension n. For example, the space-time universe we live in is a four manifold. A symplectic four manifold is a four manifold with a symplectic structure, a very basic structure that underlies almost all the equations of classical and quantum physics. Thus symplectic four manifolds play a central role in mathematics and physics. The investigator aims to gain some understanding of the fundamental problem: classifying symplectic four manifolds doc20781 none PROJECT SUMMARY With prior support from NSF, we have shown that TIMS (Thermal Ionization Mass Spectrometry) U-series dating of pedogenic carbonate can provide a precise chronology of pedogenesis and reliable ages for appropriate Quaternary alluvial deposits (Sharp et al., accepted). Though the U Th ratios of pedogenic carbonate of carbonate-clast dominated alluvium at Kyle Canyon (Nevada) are too low for U-series dating, pedogenic carbonate in granitic-clast dominated gravels of the Wind River Basin (Wyoming) is highly suitable. Precise U-series ages (1-2 percent, 2) may be measured on a few cubic millimeters of pedogenic carbonate and require only very small corrections for detrital 230Th. Suites of ages may be screened for reliability using criteria inherent in the U-series results. The time lag between clast deposition and accumulation of datable carbonate.a critical parameter if U-series dates of innermost clast-rinds are to be used to date host Quaternary deposits. is estimated to be 5+ 5 kyr in the Wind River basin. O- and C-isotope analyses of a trial suite of pedogenic carbonate samples shows that a temporally resolved stable isotope paleoclimatic record can be constructed using pedogenic carbonate dated by U-series. Funds are requested to further develop U-series dating of pedogenic carbonate and its application to the refinement of a Rocky Mountain glacial chronology. Emphasis will be placed on resolving the timing of Bull Lake glacial advances (at their type locality) with respect to other regional and global climate records. Moreover, we propose to characterize the spatial and temporal accumulation of pedogenic carbonate in relict soils of Late- Middle to Late Pleistocene deposits, and measure the O- and C-isotopic compositions of carbonate samples dated by U-series. We will interpret these data to provide a comprehensive history of paleoenvironmental change in the Wind River Basin throughout much of the late Illinoian and Wisconsin glacial cycles. Ultimately, our goal is to correlate the soils-based paleoenvironmental record with the geomorphic expressions of paleoclimatic change.the well-preserved glacial moraines and glacio-fluvial terraces of the Basin.by establishing a common chronological framework based on precise U-series ages. This is a collaborative proposal. Warren Sharp and Ken Ludwig (Berkeley Geochronology Center) will be responsible for U-series analyses and age interpretations; Ron Amundson (U.C. Berkeley) will provide field and laboratory expertise in pedology and stable isotope analysis and interpretation; Oliver Chadwick (U.C. Santa Barbara) will provide expertise in Quaternary geology, geomorphology and soil stratigraphy as well as familiarity with the Wind River area doc20784 none Hearn This award provides partial support to upgrade the computational facilities for the solid-earth geophysics program at New Mexico State University. This upgrade enables the geophysics program to stay abreast of technological advances in computing, networking, security, and archiving. Purchasing a 16-node Beowulf cluster is central to our efforts. It will provide high-speed computational power for relatively low-cost. There are two major projects, mantle dynamics and microstructural evolution of rocks, which require three-dimensional parallel simulations. Most of these simulations are currently being done at off-campus sites using the TERRA mantle convection code developed at Los Alamos and a Monte Carlo code developed at Sandia National Laboratories. They will be implemented on the Beowulf. Support will also be used to replace our current system of older Sun workstations with more modern workstations. New storage with a RAID array and large-volume tape backup are needed for today s larger data volumes. These computer systems will support data storage and analysis from field seismology projects located in China, the southwest U.S., and Mexico, and to support projects in seismic tomography and geodynamics doc20785 none Lechler The Rio Pilcomayo heads on the Cerro Rico de Potosi precious metal-polymetallic tin deposits of Bolivia. Mining of the Potosi deposits was initiated by the Spanish in and has continued without interruption to the present. Our previous studies have demonstrated that the release of mining and milling wastes to the environment during the past 450 years has resulted in extensive contamination of water and sediments of the upper Pilcomayo valley. The primary objective of this investigation is to determine if Pb isotopes can be effectively used in a large river system to quantify the decadal scale transport and storage of contaminated debris from mining operations. Inherent in the study is an analysis of the linkages between geomorphic processes and the long-term dispersal of contaminated materials. To accomplish the project objectives several tasks will be completed: (1) Pb sources within the upper reaches of Rio Pilcomayo basin will be identified and characterized in terms of their geographical distribution and Pb isotopic signatures. This step will involve the collection and analysis of ore samples from Cerro Rico, the major bedrock units that underlie the watershed, mineralized zones within tributary basins, and channel bed sediments within major tributaries; (2) the alluvial stratigraphy and geomorphology of the tributary basins will be documented and linked to the existing geomorphic-stratigraphic data on the Rio Pilcomayo to (a) refine our understanding of the timing, magnitude, and nature of historic geomorphic events that have occurred along the Rio Pilcomayo, and (b) gain insights into the timing and magnitude of sediment influx to the Rio Pilcomayo from tributaries (both of which are believed to have had an impact on the downstream movement of contaminated sediment); (3) spatial variations in the total concentration of selected metals and Pb isotopic ratios will be documented perpendicular to flow, downstream, and vertically within age-constrained alluvial deposits. Emphasis will be placed on the analysis of 1.5-2 m long cores extracted from contaminated alluvial terraces composed of vertically accreted flood deposits; and (4) sediment mixing models will be used to quantify the relative proportion of Pb in alluvial deposits that is derived from each of the delineated Pb sources doc20786 none The objective of this research is to quantify the light from the overcast sky using spectroradiometry and digital imaging to measure the photometric, colorimetric, and polarimetric properties of the light with high spectral, spatial, and temporal resolution. These observations, taken under different meteorological conditions, will constitute a better description of the physical characteristics of skylight than hitherto available and thus provide a new standard for evaluating different atmospheric radiative transfer models. Broader impacts of the work include contributing not only to atmospheric optics, but also to the understanding of cloud effects on radiative transfer and climate and to the education of undergraduate students doc20787 none The PI s request funds to analyze the dynamics of fault interaction between the San Jacinto (SJFZ)and southernmost San Andreas (SAFZ) fault zones in southern California. They seek to address whether there has been a decrease in the slip rate along the Indio segment of the SAFZ related to the birth and continued maturation of the SJFZ, and or whether these two fault zones alternatively assume dominant roles in accommodating relative plate motion across the region over any time scales. These questions have proven difficult to address with any one geological geophysical technique or data type. They will therefore employ an integrated, cross-disciplinary approach to investigate the evolution, present-day behavior,and dynamics of these active faults. Specifically, the PI s propose to: - Investigate trade-offs between fault model parameter estimates derived from geodetic observations. They will use the SCEC and SCIGN data sets together with inverse elastic fault models and more realistic visco-elastic finite element forward models to perform resolution and covariance analyses to explore the trade-offs between slip rate, locking depth, creep, and seismic cycle effects on these faults. They will (1)determine marginal confidence bounds on the range of present-day boundary conditions on fault evolution models, and (2)determine what improvements in geodetic coverage (e.g.,PBO station locations and station density)will be necessary in order to further narrow the class of admissible fault evolution models. - Investigate the relative importance of, and feedbacks between, fault zone geometry, and lithospheric rheology by numerical simulations using a 3-D visco-elastic finite element modeling approach. Their investigations will include an assessment of how the presence of the restraining bend in the SAFZ affects partitioning of strain between the SJFZ and SAFZ, how the eastern California shear zone affects this partitioning, and whether there are resolvable differences in fault zone strength between the SAFZ and the SJFZ. - Determine the age of offset alluvial deposits using cosmogenic dating techniques which were not available ten years ago, at the present-day precision. The order-of-magnitude increase in precision of the offset alluvial fan ages will allow the PI s to discriminate between competing models for fault zone evolution over the 10 to 100 ka time scale. These new cosmogenic dating measurements will be made at no additional cost under this proposal. Rather, funds to cover the costs of this component of our research are anticipated from Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft (DFG proposal pending, Prof. Friedrich, P.I.). - Construct a model for the co-evolution of the SJFZ and SAFZ incorporating an aggregation of new and existing displacement history data sets across a broad range of time scales for both fault zones, as well as dynamical considerations. Our integrated approach will provide a more comprehensive test of fault slip dependence between these fault systems than any individual technique could possibly provide on its own. The strength of our proposal is that our multidisciplinary research will be coordinated by the over-riding goal of testing competing hypotheses for the evolution of this complex fault system doc20788 none In this research program the structural and mechanical properties of mixed transition metal carbide silicon carbide thin films will be studied. The strong chemical immiscibility between the metallic carbides and SiC, as well as the use of low-temperature deposition processes will promote the formation of heterophase nano-scale microstructures. Fundamental mechanisms of phase formation and microstructural evolution in these films, with particular emphasis on the structures formed near the percolation threshold of a-SiC on the grain boundaries of the metallic carbides, will be examined. Characterization methods will include high-resolution transmission electron microscopy and x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. In addition, models of surface vs. bulk diffusion processes will be used to rationalize the observed microstructures, including observations of phase separation. The mechanical properties of these films, particularly the deformation mechanisms operating in these films by observing the microscopic deformation structure present after indentation, will also be investigated. %%% Recent research reports on the mechanical properties of mixed metal nitride silicon nitride thin films with nano-scale heterophase structures have claimed dramatic property enhancements, including hardness levels exceeding that of diamond and high fracture toughness. The ability to create materials with hardness levels above that of diamond is a long-standing quest for materials scientists. If this objective can be achieved, it would allow significant advances in applications such as coatings for cutting tools and bearings. In this research program we will study transition metal carbide silicon carbide coatings that are analogous to the nitride systems that have been the subject of much recent research interest. Using advanced characterization and testing methods, along with thermodynamic and kinetic modeling, we hope to achieve an improved understanding of strengthening mechanisms in these materials, along with new candidate ceramic materials for improved industrial coatings doc20789 none Within the central-eastem sector of the Himalayan orogen the highest grade metamorphic rocks are exposed in the High Himalayan slab, a 20-30 km thick northward-dipping wedge of deep crustal rocks metamorphosed at 14-56 km depth at 35-15 Ma. The slab is bounded along the base by the south-vergent Main Central Thrust (MCT), and along the top by the South Tibetan Detachment System (STDS) of north-vergent normal faults which separate the metamorphic and anatectic core of the Himalaya from unmetamorphosed rocks of the Tibetan plateau. Beginning in Early Miocene time, southward extrusion of the High Himalayan slab has had a profound influence on the geologic and geomorphic evolution of the Himalaya, and the highest topography and deepest erosion corresponds with the upper part of the extruding wedge. The regional scale geometries of the thrust and non-nal faults bounding the slab are now reasonably well known, and much work has been done on documenting shear sense indicators along the upper and lower surfaces of the slab and constraining the early stage PTt paths of rocks within the slab. However, critically important gaps remain in our understanding of both the kinematics (vorticity) of flow and relationships between flow and progressive exhumation within the extruding wedge. Deten-nining the spatial and temporal relationships between timing and magnitude of displacement along the wedge-bounding faults and the kinematics of flow within the evolving wedge are crucial to understanding of the crustal thickening, exhumation, and erosional history of the orogen. For example, is the interior of the slab dominated by pure shear deformation and bounded by stretching faults as suggested in one recently published extrusion model, or is flow throughout the slab dominated by simple shear as suggested in other models. Identification of a pure shear component is critically important because operation of a significant pure shear component would result in: 1) thinning and dip-parallel extension of the slab itself, 2) relative to strict simple shear, an increase in both strain rates and extr-usion exhumation rates. Testing of extrusion models requires that spatial and temporal distributions of kinematic (vorticity) domains be mapped out across the slab, and also requires a close integration between kinematic and PTt analyses in order to constrain progressive deformation and exhumation paths. Only one published quantitative vorticity analysis has been made along a basal section of the High Himalayan slab, and no such studies exist for the upper-middle sections of the slab. The PI proposes to undertake an integrated study of the kinematic evolution and exhumation history of the High Himalayan slab along a N-S traverse across the slab, and has chosen the Everest region for this study. In the Everest region the N-S transect across the slab is some 60-80 km in length and, given the detailed fieldwork required for the study, it would be impossible to complete the entire transect across the slab in the 2-3 years of a standard NSF-funded project. The PI therefore proposes to break the transect into two separately funded stages starting in this Proposal at the northern end of the transect with rocks lying in the immediate footwall to the STDS that are exposed in the Rongbuk and Kangshung valleys on the north and east sides of Mt. Everest respectively. For the vorticity part of the project he will employ a range of different analytical techniques allowing him to cross-check between results. The reconnaissance studies in the Rongbuk area, using three different analytical techniques, demonstrate that mean kinematic vorticity numbers (Wm) range between 0.73-0.98. These data indicate that although a simple shear component is generally dominant, particularly in samples adjacent to the STDS, there is also a major component of pure shear in samples located at 400-600 in beneath the detachment (pure and simple shear make equal contributions to flow at Wk=0.75). Closely spaced sampling sites are essential, however, for identifying potential step functions in the kinematic vorticity number that may exist with depth beneath the STDS. The almost continuous exposure in the region is ideally suited for this work, and will allow the PI to sample to depths of 3- in beneath the STDS. Temporal variations in vorticity will be correlated with deformation temperatures using microstructural and petrofabric criteria, and these will in turn be linked to exhumation paths determined by then-nobarometry and excimer laser 4OAr 39Ar microprobe analyses doc20790 none title: Flexible Krylov methods and Schwarz preconditioners. Proposal Number: Krylov subspace methods are nowadays the premier iterative methods for the solution of linear algebraic systems of equations, especially for those which arise from the discretization of differential equations. The strength of these methods derives in part by the use of preconditioners, which are matrices (or operators) changing the spectral properties of the linear system. In recent years, several researchers (including the PI), have proposed and analyzed Krylov methods in which the preconditioner is allowed to change from one (outer) step to the next. In particular, the preconditioner can be a Krylov method itself. Some of these inner-outer methods have been shown experimentally to work well. As part of this project, it is proposed to undertake a detailed analysis of general inner-outer methods of this kind. This analysis should give us an understanding of these methods, and also indicate how to think of new inner-outer methods. Experiments will be conducted with all these methods together with comparison with restarted ones. Inexact Krylov subspace methods refer to the situation where the matrix-vector multiplication at each step is not performed exactly. This situation appears in numerous applications, including block matrices and the approximation of Schur complements at each step. It was shown experimentally by some researchers that the amount of inexactness can be allowed to grow as the iterations progress. We propose to study this phenomenon in detail, both to provide an understanding of this phenomenon, and to devise bounds on the amount of inexactness to be used computationally. During the last few years we have developed a new algebraic formulation of additive and multiplicative Schwarz methods. These methods, which are used as fixed) preconditioners for the (parallel) solution of differential equations, are extensively used in industry, science and engineering applications. This new formulation allow us to study these methods using the rich theory of linear algebra. This new theory complements the analytical theory usually used for these methods. For example, we have recently completed the analysis of the Restrictive Additive Schwarz (RAS) preconditioner, for which there is no analytical convergence results.In the second part of this project, it is proposed to further use this new formulation to analyze other Schwarz variants doc20791 none Magma Fractionation Processes and Timescales: Fogo, Furnas and Fuji Volcanoes EAR- PI: Widom This project is a combined volcanological, geochemical, isotopic and geochronologic study of recent, highly evolved and chemically zoned eruptive products of Fogo and Furnas volcanoes in the Azores (Portugal), and Fuji volcano in Japan. The project will involve petrographic and microprobe analysis, major and trace element and Sr-Nd-Pb isotope analysis, and U-series disequilibria studies of whole rock pumices and mineral and glass separates, as well as high precision Ar-Ar dating of feldspar separates. Specific questions that will be addressed include the role of open vs. closed system processes during magmatic differentiation, the timescales over which magma differentiation and chemical zonation occur, and the relationship between magma residence timescales and eruptive volumes. The combined studies of eruptions from the Azores and Fuji will allow comparisons of the processes and timescales operating in magmatic systems in distinct tectonic settings (intraplate vs. subduction zone), and in magmatic systems that are compositionally distinct (alkaline vs. calc-alkaline doc20792 none This grant provides funding to cosponsor a workshop focusing on rigorous optimization methods applied to radiology for the treatment of cancer. The workshop is a collaborative effort between the National Science Foundation and the Radiation Research Program (RRP) of the National Cancer Institute, NIH. The workshop brings together 25 to 30 experts in radiation physics, biology and radiation oncology, and operations research experts from optimization research and systems engineering to discuss significant problems of the treatment plan optimization in radiation biology. The workshop takes the form of presentations and panel discussions. This is a three day event on February 7-9, held in Washington, DC. A summary of the workshop will be posted on the Web doc20793 none At low temperatures and at high magnetic fields, electrons in quantum semiconductor heterostructures exhibit a wide variety of interesting phases (e.g., quantum Hall states), due to the combined effects of strong interactions, reduced dimensionality, disorder, and quantum fluctuations. Measurements of the electron spin magnetization and spin dynamics provide important insights into these novel states. This project will directly measure these quantities, on atomic length-scales, using optically pumped nuclear magnetic resonance (OPNMR) spectroscopy. The OPNMR measurements will move in new directions to address emerging questions, e.g., (1) what happens as skyrmions localize?, and (2) what are the electron stripe and bubble phases? The undergraduate and graduate students who carry out this research activity will receive training while working with advanced instruments, such as a unique NMR magnet (supported by NSF s MRI program). The proposed research is integrated into the PI s educational activities, through teaching and outreach. Today s computers use electronic circuits that process information using the electron s charge. As circuit dimensions are rapidly approaching their smallest possible size, the development of alternative technologies becomes even more important. One approach hopes to make use of the intrinsic magnetism of electrons known as spin , to build new kinds of devices ( spintronics ), or even a powerful new class of computers ( quantum computers ). To reach these long-term goals, it is imperative to develop local probes of electron spins located inside a semiconductor. This research project will greatly extend the capabilities of one such probe, called optically pumped nuclear magnetic resonance (OPNMR) spectroscopy. These extensions will be driven by the pursuit of fundamental research into the properties of novel phases of an interacting electron system, at low temperature and in strong magnetic fields. The undergraduate and graduate students who carry out this research will receive training while working with advanced instruments, such as a unique NMR magnet (supported by NSF s MRI). The research activity is integrated into the PI s educational activities, through teaching and outreach doc20794 none This project seeks to investigate State-to-State differences in National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) test items to determine how state policies have affected changes in NAEP scores. The study addresses the problem of assessing the contributions of State policies on student achievement. The purpose of the project is to develop empirical measures for the effects on student achievement of reform practices. It would analyze the content of individual items to better measure specific aspects of student learning that might have been affected by the policies of that State. Also, they would build a mathematical model of the value-added of state policies doc20795 none Walker The general aim of this project is to understand planetary differentiation by igneous processes. Laboratory experiments are used to simulate those processes. The major expression of planetary differentiation is the separation of core and mantle. The highly siderophile elements of the Pt group are a key suite of elements for understanding the formation and evolution of Earth s core. Their geochemical partitioning between silicate and metal has been poorly understood because of technical problems in the interpretation of the dispersed metal nuggets found in experimental silicates equilibrated with metal at the low pO2 relevant to the core formation process. New experiments show that for Pt the nuggets are not artificial contaminants but are Pt recovered from solution during the incomplete quenching process. This preliminary result makes many of the enigmas of the high abundance of Pt in the Earth s mantle less perplexing. Pt is orders of magnitude more soluble in silicate than conventionally thought. We will continue to explore this result with time and temperature series studies. If verified, we will extend the study of nugget formation to Re and Ir, two elements of the group also known to also have their geochemical behavior clouded by nugget formation in experimental work. Additional projects to be undertaken include the completion of studies of the volumes of garnets across the solid solution series grossular-pyrope at simultaneous high-P and T by synchrotron XRD. This study has shown some interesting anomalies compared to conventional practices used to make these measurements. The results are relevant to the mixing and melting properties of garnets in mantle peridotite. Garnet is one of the important repositories of fusible components that liberate basalt upon deep peridotite partial melting. A related study will use the NaCl-KCl system to model the behavior of a solvus in a binary solution at high-P,T. We will also measure the melting points of B1 and B2 RbCl to ~30 kbar to investigate the bond weakening which seems to take place on conversion of phases to higher density, higher coordination number polymorphs. This study is relevant to expected convective style changes across phase change boundaries in the Earth. Finally, we hope to complete the data reduction of epithermal neutron resonance pyrometry measurements of the effect of P on thermocouple emf. This subproject is relevant to the calibration of widely used thermocouple pyrometry in use at high pressure doc20796 none Wang, Xiaodong Columbia University Objectives and Significance: The turbo principle [27 ],namely,the strategy that exploits the iterated exchange of soft information between di .erent blocks in a communication receiver,has grown to be a powerful tool in attacking a diverse set of problems in communications.In particular,the turbo multiuser detection (MUD)paradigm [59 ]has attracted signi .cant recent attention as an e .ective technique for joint decoding in multiuser communication systems.However to date the performance of various turbo MUD schemes is largely demonstrated via simulations,and the impact of turbo MUD on the network performance (e.g., throughput and delay)has not been explored systematically.It also remains unclear at this time how the upper-layer functionalities (such as ARQ protocol,power control,and admission control)should be designed to exploit the physical-layer turbo MUD.The objective of the proposed project is to develop analytical tools to assess and optimize the performance of various turbo MUD methods,and to apply these esults to c oss-layer design in wireless networks. Recently a technique known as density evolution [66,67 ]has been developed in the coding community that permits analysis of iterative decoding algorithm for in .nite-length codewords.In this proposal,under the density evolution framework,we outline a research plan aimed at understanding of the design and analysis of turbo multiuser detection for a variety of channel conditions and receiver structures,and the design of some upper-layer functionalities which takes into account the physical layer turbo MUD.While in this study we focus on multiuser CDMA systems,the general principle is applicable to several systems,such as space-time coding systems,OFDM systems,and intersymbol interference systems doc20797 none The Planning Grant for Infrastructure in Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Sciences (ITEMS) will enable Lawson State Community College (LSCC) to assess the current status of its science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) infrastructure; provide the institution the opportunity to identify and describe the challenges and barriers to SMET infrastructure development; and, develop a plan of action to engage more community college students in STEM fields. This planning grant will lead the way for a more focused effort designed to fill the STEM infrastructure gaps at LSCC and help prepare proficient STEM professionals for the current and future workforce. Proposed efforts involve partnerships with business and industry doc20798 none Paleobiology of the Doushantuo Formation: Multiple Taphonomic Windows into the Late Neoproterozoic Biosphere This study will focus on the Neoproterozoic Doushantuo Formation (550 - 600 Ma) in South China. The Doushantuo Formation was deposited across the Yangtze Platform in South China during a critical geological time interval, - probably after the Neoproterozoic climatic crises but before the Ediacaran radiation of macroscopic animals. The Doushantuo Formation is also known to contain three extraordinarily clear taphonomic windows preserved in phosphorites, cherts, and carbonaceous shales. These complementary taphonomic windows allow us to understand the taphonomic bias associated with each taphonomic pathway and, in combination, they provide a more complete picture of the Neoproterozoic biosphere. The goals of this study is to improve our knowledge about the early evolution of multicellular organisms by further documenting phosphatized, silicified, and carbonaceous biotas in the Doushantuo Formation, to understand the constraints imposed by these different taphonomic pathways by comparing and contrast these taphonomic windows, and to expand the investigation of Doushantuo paleobiology into deep-water facies. The PI and his colleagues will conduct extensive fieldwork on the Doushantuo Formation in the next three years in order to understand its distribution, sedimentary environment, and paleobiology doc20799 none Foufoula Braided rivers are complex dynamical systems comprising multiple unstable alluvial channels that divide and rejoin around bars and islands and migrate frequently across the river s braidplain. Although not common in lowland areas, braided rivers are dominant at high latitudes and in areas with rapid sedimentation. They represent a major management challenge in areas such as Alaska and the Pacific Northwest where bridges and pipelines must be built across them. In addition, the alluvial deposits of braided rivers are important reservoirs of water, oil, gas, coal, sand, gravel and heavy minerals. Their instability and opportunistic flow patterns make prediction of braided rivers extremely difficult. Recent advances have suggested several new ways of analyzing these complex dynamical systems. It is now clear that braided rivers exhibit both spatial and dynamic (time-space) scaling; i.e. a small part of the river network is statistically similar to a larger part, in terms of planform geometry and evolution, under appropriate resealing. This observation opens up the possibility of statistical prediction of rare, high-magnitude channel shifts from readily obtainable records of lower magnitude but more frequent events occurring at smaller scales. It is also clear that at least some of these system-scaling or emergent properties of braided rivers can be predicted on the basis of simplified models of the stream dynamics. Finally, recent experimental work has illustrated that the planform pattern and dynamics of braided rivers can be dramatically affected by modest amounts of bank vegetation; it may even be possible to convert a braided to meandering river by vegetation effects alone. We propose to unite and build on these three lines of research, focusing on the following basic issues: (1) extension of scaling analysis in braided rivers to the third (vertical) dimension, i.e., scaling of flows, velocities, bed elevation and sediment flux, with implications for statistical prediction of floods, scour and mobility in modern rivers, and stratigraphic architecture in ancient deposits; (2) testing and refinement of existing braided-river models using hydrologic scaling results as a model metric; and (3) study of the effects of vegetation on braided rivers, focusing on how repeated cycles of flow and vegetation can lead to the regularization of braided-river flows into a small number of well defined channels, breaking the scaling and perhaps leading to the development of the first truly self-regenerating meanders doc20800 none The theme of this research is the development of a molecular and macromolecular basis for generating desired surface structure and function that avoids post-manufacturing processes such as plasma treatment. To this end, the synthesis and utilization of Dual Function Macromonomers (DFMs) will be carried out. DFMs are difunctional low molar mass copolymers having conventional end groups (e.g., alcohol) and containing (a) semifluorinated sidechains and (b) functional sidechains. It is proposed that semifluorinated nanoballoons will bring desired functionality to the surface in operations such as solvent casting or melt processing. Thus, the DFM concept leverages the well-known tendency of fluoropolymer groups to surface-concentrate. However, in so doing, copolymer structure causes functionality that would ordinarily be in the bulk to be brought to the surface. The DFM concept will be applied first to polyurethanes. The plan is to prepare (a) surface active DFMs, (b) PUs incorporating DFM soft blocks, and (c) blends using a conventional polyurethane as major component and DFM PU as minor component. The resulting material properties are controlled at the nanostructure and microstructural levels. The DFM PU is employed for controlling surface function while a conventional bulk PU provides independently controlled mechanical properties. The proposed work focuses on a new and potentially economical method for introducing chemical functionality specifically at the surface of polymeric materials. The proposed control of surface chemistry is anticipated to improve adhesion and durability of manufactured items, to facilitate long-term function of biomedical materials, and to bring into existence new materials for destroying dangerous pathogens on contact doc20801 none Carbonate-Associated Sulfate in Modern Sediments of South Florida: Diagenetic Relationships Biogeochemical cycling of sulfur at and near the earth.s surface is intimately linked.through a complex set of feedbacks.to ambient redox conditions, including the availability of atmospheric oxygen. Our ability to delineate and quantify these cycles and the associated biospheric impacts hinges on the strong preferential utilization of 32S relative to 34S during bacterial sulfate reduction. Historically, temporal trends in the relative magnitudes of critical redox pathways have been estimated by monitoring the 34S of the ocean as manifested in a limited sedimentary record of gypsum. Consequently, the models are only as good as the data, which fail to provide even minimal constraints for most of the Precambrian. During the earth.s early history, gypsum deposition was less abundant, and preservation is poor due to its vulnerability during weathering. In light of these complications, carbonate-associated sulfate or CAS, which is complementary to but generally not overlapping with a promising new barite approach, has emerged as a viable alternative. CAS, which often occurs at concentrations of hundreds to thousands of ppm, is a component of most limestones and dolostones and shows great promise for continuous, high-resolution records of ancient seawater sulfate. Interest in the method is peaking, yet applications greatly outnumber studies tracking even the basic systematics of CAS and the potential loss of seawater signals through diagenesis. Despite encouraging initial results for CAS in ancient sediments, no systematic attempt has been made to test the method in a modern setting where the controlling factors are more easily and independently constrained. Furthermore, any attempts at modern calibration have neglected the precursor of the most abundant carbonate component of the geologic record.carbonate mud. and the effects of diagenesis. The primary objective of the proposed study is to understand how CAS is incorporated, distributed and preserved in modern carbonate sediments in south Florida. Specifically, we will observe isotopic and concentration trends across a carefully chosen set of well-characterized depositional settings in Florida Bay and at lagoonal sites seaward of the Keys. The resulting diversity translates into spatial and temporal gradients in the parameters that control sulfur cycling, such as the availability of labile organic compounds, salinity and the physical and biological properties of the sediment. What is the overall fidelity of the seawater isotopic signal recorded in bulk mud samples that are undergoing carbonate dissolution, precipitation and mineral transformations on early diagenetic time scales within the confines of an evolving pore-water sulfate reservoir? Although we recognize the profound differences between modern and ancient settings, it is these bulk mud samples that will illuminate the conditions under which primary signals may or may not be preserved. Various coarser sketetal components will also be tracked from life through burial to depths up to several meters. These goals are facilitated by Lyons. experience working in modern settings, including south Florida, although many of the questions asked will stem from the ultimate goal of testing the robustness of a paleoenvironmental proxy. In particular, Lyons. past work with sediment diagenesis, carbonate sedimentology geochemistry and sulfur geochemistry will be most helpful. The tight focus of this study.as requested by the panel following review of an earlier version of this proposalwill allow us to track CAS within a rigorous organic and inorganic geochemical context. The multi-component approach, including rate measurements and concentration and isotopic determinations for a wide range of relevant species, is designed to provide the biogeochemical sulfur mass balance necessary for understanding ppm levels of sulfate within reactive carbonate grains. In the end, CAS may help fill the many gaps in the .Claypool curve. through use of continuous sections of shallow-water carbonates from even the oldest rocks. But as with all carbonate proxies for ancient seawater, our interpretations are only as good as our understanding of the multiple diagenetic pathways doc20802 none The proposed project is aimed at understanding the relationship between the evolution of large continental non-nal fault arrays and the development of drainage catchment-alluvial fan systems. Previous studies of non-nal fault growth, footwall denudation and catchment development have either ignored spatial and temporal changes in fault array geometry and slip rate, or have focused on portions of the fault array that are far from actively-propagating tips and relay zones between adjacent fault strands. In the proposed work, the PI s and a Tulane University graduate student will carry out a quantitative structural and geomorphological study of active faulting at extensional relay zones, i.e. areas of segment overlap and fault linkage, and at fault tips. The study area is located in the circum-Snake River Plain area of cast-central Idaho, southwestern Montana and western Wyoming. This area is well suited to the aims of the project because the Basin and Range non-nal faults show a wide range in scale; i.e., the faults show varying amounts of total displacement and rock uplift, and hence the footwalls exhibit varying degrees of drainage incision and denudation. Two tasks are proposed. The first task is an analysis of digital topographic data. This will measure a number of geomorphic parameters (catchment spacing, relief and area; and alluvial fan area) along fault strike and across a range of fault length scales. Results of this work will constitute the first quantitative assessment of relations between fault structure, slip rate and footwall morphology, as well as the first evaluation of the fan area catchment area ratio as proxy for fault slip rate, and thus as a potential neotectonic tool. The second task is a focused field investigation of 3 relay zones along 2 of the largest and most active faults. This work will map the distribution of active faulting through these segment linkage sites, and document the relationships between the spatial fault pattern and catchment-fan parameters (derived in Task 1) in relays. The 3 field sites chosen for the detailed structural and geomorphological work show varying amounts of fault segment separation and linkage development, which is hypothesized to control some of the patterns of catchment evolution. The proposed work is expected to establish predictable relationships between the growth, interaction and linkage of continental-scale normal faults and patterns of denudation and catchment-fan evolution. This research will also lead to an improved understanding of earthquake hazards, because the approach will address issues of fault segment connectivity over a time scale longer than that addressed by paleoseismology alone doc20803 none Much of what is now the North American Cordillera was near sea level in the Early Cretaceous. Knowing when uplift to its present elevation occurred is essential to understanding the large-scale tectonic processes that led to its formation. For the Sierra Nevada of California, it has been thought since the s that geomorphic and other evidence required middle Miocene and later uplift of the range, despite cessation of major magmatic activity in the Late Cretaceous. New geophysical, geochemical, and paleoaltimetric data have cast doubt on this concept of late uplift. We propose new paleobotanical studies to determine the Eocene elevation of the Sierra Nevada, which will allow us to decide between early and late uplift models. Analyses of the physical morphology of modern leaf assemblages are able to produce reasonably accurate estimates of present-day climate and altitude (750 m). The relationship is especially well calibrated in North America. Leaf morphology studies have indicated that western Nevada was higher at 16 Ma (middle Miocene) than at the present, and this conclusion is supported by other lines of evidence. The history of elevation of the Sierra Nevada - western Nevada region prior to 16 Ma, however, is very uncertain. We propose to collect and analyze numerous Eocene leaf assemblages that occur in this region with ages from 45 - 50 Ma. This is the probable age of the lower part of the auriferous gravels of the Sierra Nevada, the focus of so much of the California gold rush. Paleobotanical work will focus first on fossil leaves known as the Chalk Bluffs flora found in the lower part of the auriferous gravels. These gravels are probably of early and or middle Eocene age and were deposited by the ancestral Yuba River. Differences in inferred paleotemperature could result from global climatic change or from local climatic change due to altitudinal change. There are low-altitude leaf assemblages of the same age to the west that we will use as standards to control for regional climate change and estimate paleoaltitudes for the inland assemblages. The low altitude assemblages will also be compared to other low-altitude early to middle Eocene leaf assemblages in a range of 20 latitude along the Pacific Coast. Some of the localities we wish to sample are threatened by development; there is some urgency in making these collections and analyses before the opportunity to constrain the early Tertiary elevation of the north and central Sierra Nevada slips away doc20752 none The primary purpose of this project is to determine the effects of abiotic and biotic factors on the community structure and morphology of small mammals, especially rodents, during the past 5.0 million years in the Meade Basin of southwestern Kansas. The Meade Basin is a unique natural laboratory, as more than 100 fossiliferous localities (representing at least 40 superposed intervals) spanning the entire later Cenozoic are found within a small area of approximately 45 km2. Three radiometrically dated ashes at 2.1, 1.2-1.5, and 0.67 Ma provide calibration points for part of the sequence, and a magnetostratigraphic chronology will be developed that will add considerable refinement to the basic stratigraphic framework. Further field mapping will hopefully solve a few remaining thorny stratigraphic problems, especially in the upper part of the Rexroad Formation. Systematic studies at appropriate museums will refine the rodent database. A preliminary stable isotope study of paleosol carbonate nodules and caliche beds in Pliocene sediments has revealed significant habitat and climatic gradient changes, reflecting the expansion of tropical grasses throughout the Great Plains during this time. The isotopic studies will be extended to additional localities and to mammalian tooth apatite, to better refine the record of environmental change and to examine the response of small mammal diets to environmental gradients. Finally, appropriate analytical methods will be used with the rodent database to examine the dynamics of community assembly and anatomical change within lineages. The Meade Basin rodent database and stable isotopic record will generate one of the most detailed historical records of habitat, climatic, and faunal change in a terrestrial animal community anywhere in the world, and the stratigraphic model resulting from this project will provide the primary source of late Cenozoic stratigraphic information for the Great Plains region of North America doc20805 none The PI s propose a multidisciplinary study of Cretaceous and Tertiary rocks along an east-west transect in the Wrangell - Petersburg - Prince of Wales Island area of SE Alaska (= Wrangell transect). Previous research demonstrates that integration of paleomagnetic studies with geochronologic, thennochronologic, barometric, and structural geologic observations can produce important insights into the tectonic evolution of the Insular superterrane and Coast Mountains orogen in western BC and SE Alaska. The PI s recent results from near Prince Rupert show that paleomagnetism is a key component of multidisciplinary efforts investigating exhumed shallow and mid-crustal sections. When accompanied by geologic observations resulting from a carefully coordinated multidisciplinary research program, paleomagnetic data on intrusive igneous rocks yield critical infon-nation on the tectonic development of defon-ned regions that cannot otherwise be obtained. For example, the PI s have documented that panels of crust containing the Palcocene Quottoon igneous complex east of the Coast shear zone have experienced east-side-up tilts ranging to 40 during Eocene extension. In addition, their geochronologic, paleomagnetic, barometric, and structural geologic data suggest that the midCretaceous Ecstall pluton was folded during west-directed thrusting. These discoveries are fundamental to understanding the crustal architecture and tectonic development of the continental margin in the northern Cordillera. Because igneous rocks were emplaced into this part of the magmatic arc during the Cretaceous, throughout the Paleogene, and into the Miocene, the Wrangell transect provides the opportunity to track deformation of an evolving convergent to strike-slip plate margin in space and time. Methods will include U Pb geochronology of zircon and sphene, Al-in-homblende barometry, 40 Ar 39 Ar thennochronology, (U-Th) He dating of zircon, metamorphic petrology, and structural geologic investigations in addition to paleomagnetic analysis. Preliminary investigations on the eastern portion of the transect indicate that this area experienced - 1 7 ESEside-up tilt about an axis with azimuth 22 since 20 Ma. Observations from across the transect indicate that paleomagnetic directions from Cretaceous plutons are variable, with both concordant and discordant inclinations. Paleomagnetic study of the Cretaceous and Tertiary igneous rocks of the Wrangell transect, coupled with the geochronologic, thermochronologic, and barometric analyses, can determine: (1) when and where Cenozoic deformation occurred; and (2) whether regionally consistent tilting folding and or large-scale transport can account for discordant paleomagnetic directions from Cretaceous plutons. Combined with results from the Prince Rupert area, successful completion of the proposed research can provide a comprehensive model for the tectonic and paleogeographic evolution of the Coast Mountains and Insular superterrane for the past I 00 m.y doc20806 none This project involved the development and application of a proton-transfer-reaction mass spectrometry (PTR-MS) for on-line detection and identification of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) for the analysis of primary and secondary biogenic carbonyls in complex VOC mixtures released from vegetation. The new instrument, a proton-transfer ion trap mass spectrometry (PT-ITMS) instrument, will be developed for used in both field and airborne platforms for continuous, simultaneous analysis of important VOCs and their carbonyl oxidation products. VOCs released from vegetation may have a major impact on the oxidative capacity of the atmosphere and in the formation of ozone and aerosols doc20807 none An innovative, but relatively simple, model will be applied to solar Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) observations made with the LASCO instrument on board the SOHO spacecraft. Starting with data obtained in , some 150 Earth-directed, or so-called halo , CMEs will be analyzed using a conical model originally developed by Zhao, Plunkett and Liu. From this model one may, in principal, be able to deduce sizes and transit times of geoeffective CMEs. This information would be extremely useful to Space Weather Forecasters. If the method proves to be effective, a second component of this effort would involve working with Space Weather Forecasters at NOAA s Space Environment Center to develop efficient operational techniques to estimate CME travel times based on sequences of LASCO images doc20808 none Gupta The physical processes governing floods in river basins are highly variable in space and time. Spatial variability produces a very large number of values of the parameters governing production of runoff from hills and its transport through channels. Most of these parameters cannot be measured, and the number of different values that they can take increases with spatial scale. By contrast, the aggregated behavior of peak flows exhibits statistical scale invariance at successively larger spatial scales. The slopes and the intercepts of log-log linear relationships describing this invariance are called scaling parameters , which can be estimated empirically. Statistical scaling is an emergent property of a complex physical system, which is not built into the physical equations. Scaling theory provides a new mathematical framework for interpreting empirical scaling parameters in terms of numerical and analytical solutions of physical equations and thereby testing different hypotheses. Scaling theory unifies spatial scaling flood statistics with physical processes, which has been a long-standing, fundamental open problem. We propose to develop a numerical laboratory for testing different physical hypotheses regarding empirically observed statistical scaling for peak flows on real and simulated channel networks. The foundation of this laboratory is a new-generation Java-based software program called HidroSig that extracts river networks from digital elevation models and analyzes their topologic and geometric properties. It takes a geomorphologic approach, which consists of treating a river basin as a collection of hills that contribute runoff to links in a river network. Stream flows will be generated using an integral-balance hillslope model that includes Hortonian overland flow, saturated overland flow, ground-water recharge, and base flow. Stream flows will be routed using discrete link-based mass and momentum balance equations. Our simulation results will be compared against statistical scaling properties of peak flows that are based on sampled hydrographs at multiple spatial scales. We will test this central idea using peak flow data sets from two experimental basins in the United States, Walnut Gulch, AZ, and Goodwin Creek, MS doc20809 none Benzi The solution of large, sparse systems of linear equations continues to be one of the fundamental problems of computational mathematics. Recent years have seen significative advances in the performance and robustness of iterative methods, prompted by the need to solve increasingly large systems of equations. The linear systems (and eigenvalue problems) arising from the discretization of partial differential equations in three space dimensions are too large for direct solution methods, and the only viable option is to use preconditioned Krylov subspace methods or, if applicable, multigrid-type methods. While robust and effective iterative solvers are available in the case of systems involving symmetric positive definite matrices or M-matrices, much work remains to be done in the case of indefinite systems. A major part of the project consists in the development of algebraic preconditioners for symmetric indefinite matrices. The investigator develops both incomplete factorization methods and sparse approximate inverses. He makes use of techniques developed by the direct solvers community, like pivoting strategies of the Bunch-Kaufman and Bunch-Parlett type. Preliminary experiments on saddle-point and shifted linear systems are encouraging. He also explores multilevel variants of these preconditoners. Special methods targeted to so-called KKT-type systems are investigated. Other parts of the project deal with the construction of robust preconditioners for least-squares problems, and for singular linear systems arising from Markov chain calculations. The latter problem is currently of particular interest due to recent applications in data mining. Specifically, the largest matrix problems currently being solved are the so-called Google Problems , which amount to computing the stationary distribution vector of Markov chains with 2.7 billion states. Improvements in solution techniques have the potential of greatly affecting this important area. Advances in many important fields of science and technlogy depend on progress in mathematical algorithms used in computer simulations. A recent example is provided by the emerging field of data mining. The well-known search engine Google (see http: www.google.com) relies on the solution of an extremely large, sparse matrix model; in technical terms, a stochastic matrix, or Markov chain. This amounts to finding the solution to a very large set of simultaneous linear algebraic equations. Part of this project deals with finding improved solution methods for problems of this type. More generally, the project aims to solve challenging, large-scale problems in numerical linear algebra. The main goal is to develop efficient and robust algorithms, and related software, for solving difficult problems arising in various fields of engineering and physical sciences. Some other areas that would benefit from this work include computational fluid dynamics, structural analysis, acoustics, electromagnetics, and optimal control. In all of these areas, computer simulations are of paramount importance and there is a strong need for reliable and efficient solution algorithms and software doc20810 none Bernstein This award supports the participation of American scientists in a U.S.-Japan seminar on nuclear chiral dynamics to be held in Honolulu, Hawaii from February 17-20, . The co-organizers are Professor Aron Bernstein at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Professor Makoto Oka at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan. The seminar will focus of two general areas. The first is on the structure of the nucleon and its interactions with the Goldstone Bosons. Specific topics include: 1) the deviations of the nucleon and it s first excited state from spherical symmetry as measured in electromagnetic pion production experiments; 2) the polarizabilities of the nucleon as measured in Compton scattering; 3) the question of isospin breaking, caused by the difference of up and down quark masses, in pi N scattering and electromagnetic pion production with polarized targets; and 4) electromagnetic kaon and eta production and scattering from nucleons. Theoretically these are treated by Chiral Perturbation Theory (ChPT) and dynamical meson-exchange models. The second general area to be discussed is the use of effective field theories for the nucleon-nucleon interactions and for few-nucleon physics. Here the experimental basis is much further developed although there are still important new measurements, particularly involving spin degrees of freedom and neutron properties, that need to be further explored. Research topics to be discussed are being actively pursued by theorists and experimentalists in the U.S. and Japan. In the U.S. there are new electromagnetic apparatus and facilities at Bates, Jefferson Lab and LEGS. In Japan there are the new Spring-8 photon facility and the Tohuku University electron ring. The project advances international human resources through the participation of a postdoc and graduate student. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish proceedings of the seminar on their Web sites doc20811 none Varian, Hal University of California - Berkeley SGER- Mining the Deep Web for Economic Data This Small Grant for Exploratory Research will support exploration of the deep web; that is, data which is held in web-accessible databases, but which is generally not available via the use of standard web-crawlers. Data held in web databases may be several hundred times larger than the web we routinely access, and which is held in html and other tagged text files. The domain to be explored is economic information, to see whether these new data can help in economic forecasting doc20812 none Geist Floreana Island is the most distinctive volcano of the Galapagos hotspot system. Unlike other Galapagos Islands, Floreana experienced extensive explosive activity, and its alkalic lavas are anomalously enriched in incompatible trace elements, exhibit evidence of metasomatism, have unique isotopic compositions, and contain abundant mantle xenoliths. The fundamental goal of the proposed project is to use Floreana s unique features to elucidate the magmatic processes that construct and modify the lithosphere forming the Galapagos Platform, which will be accomplished through a detailed volcanologic, petrologic, and geochemical study. Determining the volcanic history and compositional evolution of Floreana volcano will permit estimation of variations in the depths and extents of melt production through analysis of major and trace element variations and how those change with time. These results will be applied to questions about Floreana s volcanic evolution, including: a) the relationship between the different eruptive sequences; b) apparent shallow depths of melting, which may contradict a deep plume origin; c) compositional variations within single eruptive episodes; d) the relationship between Floreana lavas and the giant volcanic terraces which underlie the southern Galapagos Platform; and e) the origins of the xenoliths and their relationship to Floreana lavas and other parts of the Galapagos lithosphere. The powerful combination of high precision geochemical and petrologic analysis coupled with detailed field observations will provide a rare opportunity to gain insight into elusive questions about plume-lithosphere interaction, ocean-island magmatism, and, ultimately, mantle evolution doc20813 none This grant is intended to support a workshop in the area of Computational Science and Information Technology (CSIT). The purpose of the workshop will be to develop preliminary plans for a CSIT component of EarthScope program that will address issues in three areas critical to the program s success: (1) data collection, archiving, and distribution, (2) modeling and simulating nonlinear geosystems, and (3) advanced information technologies for the EarthScope collaboratory. A major objective will be to cross-educate members of the geoscience and computer-science communities in the major research goals and capabilities of the two fields, and to discuss how these capabilities can be mobilized to enhance the success of the EarthScope program. The workshop will be open to about 70 participants from the geoscience and computer science. The organizing committee will produce a summary of results in the form of a preliminary CSIT plan, which will be widely circulated for review and comment. A final plan will be submitted to the National Science Foundation by August . The workshop is to be jointly supported by NSF and NASA doc20814 none Dziewonski The principal objectives of this project are the systematic investigation of global seismicity and the three-dimensional mapping of the Earth s interior. The earthquake studies are focused around the Harvard CMT project. All earthquakes with magnitudes greater than approximately 5.2 are analyzed for their source mechanisms using digital data from globally distributed seismographs. Unusual seismic phenomena, such as slow earthquakes, volcanic collapses, and unidentified seismic signals, are investigated in detail. Results are disseminated using electronic mail and the Harvard Seismology web page: http: www.seismology.harvard.edu. The imaging of the elastic properties of the Earth s interior is pursued by development of new data sets and the joint inversion of various existing data sets, such as absolute and differential travel times, surface-wave dispersion curves, full waveforms, and normal-mode spectra. Particular consideration is given to the inclusion of anisotropy (radial, azimuthal, and general) in the model parameterization and inversion. Models and derived data sets are available on the investigators web site doc20815 none The PI s propose a multidisciplinary study of Cretaceous and Tertiary rocks along an east-west transect in the Wrangell - Petersburg - Prince of Wales Island area of SE Alaska (= Wrangell transect). Previous research demonstrates that integration of paleomagnetic studies with geochronologic, therinochronologic, barometric, and structural geologic observations can produce important insights into the tectonic evolution of the Insular superterrane and Coast Mountains orogen in western BC and SE Alaska. The PI s recent results from near Prince Rupert show that paleomagnetism is a key component of multidisciplinary efforts investigating exhumed shallow and mid-crustal sections. When accompanied by geologic observations resulting from a carefully coordinated multidisciplinary research program, paleomagnetic data on intrusive igneous rocks eld critical information on the tectonic development of deformed yi regions that cannot otherwise be obtained. For example, the PI s have documented that panels of crust containing the Paleocene Quottoon igneous complex east of the Coast shear zone have experienced east-side-up tilts ranging to 40 during Eocene extension. In addition, their geochronologic, palcomagnetic, barometric, and structural geologic data suggest that the midCretaceous Ecstall pluton was folded during west-directed thrusting. These discoveries are fundamental to understanding the crustal architecture and tectonic development of the continental margin in the northern Cordillera. Because igneous rocks were emplaced into this part of the magmatic arc during the Cretaceous, throughout the Paleogene, and into the Miocene, the Wrangell transect provides the opportunity to track deformation of an evolving convergent to strike-slip plate margin in space and time. Methods will include U Pb geochronology of zircon and spheric, Al-in-homblende barometry, 40 Ar 39 Ar thennochronology, (U-Th) He dating of zircon, metamorphic petrology, and structural geologic investigations in addition to paleomagnetic analysis. Preliminary investigations on the eastern portion of the transect indicate that this area experienced - 1 7 ESEside-up tilt about an axis with azimuth 22 since 20 Ma. Observations from across the transect indicate that paleomagnetic directions from Cretaceous plutons are variable, with both concordant and discordant inclinations. Paleomagnetic study of the Cretaceous and Tertiary igneous rocks of the Wrangell transect, coupled with the geochronologic, thennochronologic, and barometric analyses, can determine: (1) when and where Cenozoic defontiation occurred; and (2) whether regionally consistent tilting folding and or large-scale transport can account for discordant paleomagnetic directions from Cretaceous plutons. Combined with results from the Prince Rupert area, successful completion of the proposed research can provide a comprehensive model for the tectonic and paleogeographic evolution of the Coast Mountains and Insular superterrane for the past I 00 m.y doc20816 none Through the QUEST program, Central State University (CSU) will enhance STEM access, student retention, curricula, undergraduate research, transition to graduate school and faculty development positively impacting its largely African - American student population. STEM student learning will be improved by the adoption of a hybrid combination of the Learning Communities and the Peer-Led Team-Learning systems. Student and faculty research opportunities and student internship opportunities will significantly increase through arrangements with partner institutions. Program activities will impact more than on-campus students and 150 pre-college students through bridge programs. QUEST efforts will result in a 60% increase in freshman STEM enrollment, an increase in freshman retention from 63% to 70%, and STEM graduation rates of at least 54 students per year above current rates, including an additional 22 students per year graduating with GPAs of 3.0 or higher. CSU STEM students in the graduate school pipeline will increase by a factor of 3 above current levels. The number of students engaged in research projects and internships will increase by at least 20% per year doc20817 none Roland Burgmann This project relies on observations of postseismic surface deformation following the Landers and Hector Mine earthquakes to infer the flow laws that characterize the apparent non-linear viscous rheology of the lithosphere beneath the Mojave Desert. Non-linear or power law behavior, in which strain rate is proportional to stress raised to a power and exponentially dependent on temperature, has been demonstrated in laboratory experiments and surmised from an inferred change in effective linear viscosity following the Mojave quakes. However, the specific non-linear flow laws that characterize the rheology of the Mojave lithosphere have not been determined. Non-linear rheology has been difficult to infer in the past due to a lack of sufficiently resolved observational constraints. The unprecedented GPS and InSAR coverage of postseismic deformation following the Mojave quakes, combined with the ability to numerically model complex slip distributions and non-linear rheology, allow for the determination of the appropriate flow law parameters governing continental lithospheric behavior in this region. The work consists of compiling the geodetic data sets in a form useful for constraining a numerical model and development of a 3-D viscoelastic finite element model of the Landers and Hector Mine ruptures. This constrained model is used to (1) partition postseismic deformation between viscous processes and other mechanisms such as afterslip, (2) determine the depth distribution of viscous flow, and (3) infer applicable non-linear flow laws. The results provide insight into how forces generated within the Earth s interior manifest themselves at the surface and how stresses induced by earthquakes are redistributed during interseismic periods. The latter of which is important to understanding seismic hazards. An additional byproduct of this research consists of guidelines for conducting future geodetic investigations of non-linear lithospheric rheology by noting the most useful locations for instrumentation relative to strike-slip earthquakes doc20818 none Under this grant, the researchers will create a detailed framework for designing teacher induction programs that emphasize learning about mathematics and science teaching. The framework will be derived from the profiling of 25 induction programs for middle and high school teachers. Based on this profile, seven to eight intensive case studies will be conducted, collecting data on context, content, effects on teacher behavior and on student outcomes. The set of programs selected for study will represent a variety of induction strategies, activities and providers doc20819 none A transient event in Guerrero, Mexico, propagated from east to west along-strike, near the locking transition on the megathrust, and it affected the entire length of the Guerrero seismic gap over a period of months during early . Campaign GPS data suggest the possibility that the Guerrero event is causally related to afterslip following the Mw=7.3 Copala earthquake. The Copala earthquake was located about 120 km east of the Guerrero gap, but afterslip appears to have propagated westward along-strike as much as 100 km during the first six months following the seismic rupture. Curiously, background seismic activity on the Guerrero megathrust unusually quiescent during the several months before, during and after the aseismic slip event, but returns to normal or above-normal levels several months after the transient ended. These observations raise several fundamental questions. First, did the Guerrero aseismic slip event really begin as afterslip following the Copala earthquake? Or is the occurrence of aseismic slip east of Acapulco in -96 and west of Acapulco in merely coincidental? Secondly, how did the stress changes generated by these aseismic slip events influence seismic activity on the megathrust? This research project is examining these questions using JERS-1 InSAR data collected during the years .2 to .3 to estimate coseismic slip of the Copala event and postseismic afterslip in the region east of Acapulco. Also, strong ground motion seismic data from the Guerrero accelerograph network and broadband data from the Mexican regional network are being used to estimate earthquake source parameters from events with magnitude Mw 7 that had never been examined previously. The events are being relocated using modern network differencing techniques, and the focal mechanisms, moment release, stress drops and other source parameters are also being characterized. The research team is combining the geodetic and seismic source to the slip history on the subduction megathrust during the past decade, and the associated change in Coulomb failure criteria as a function of time. The researchers are also assessing the space-time connection between Copala earthquake afterslip and the Guerrero slip transient, as well as the relationship between aseismic slip and seismic activity, using a model of nonlinear dynamic friction on the megathrust doc20820 none Large eddy simulation is widely considered to be the most promising approach to simulating turbulence and its mathematical validation and development are important to its further evolution. Current eddy-viscosity models are of limited usefulness in long time simulations because they can overly diffuse the large structures. They are of limited accuracy because their connection to the physics of turbulent fluctuations is tenuous. Layton will first test an improved eddy viscosity model which arises from a more careful mathematical description of the involved physical processes and which is less diffusive than the Smagorinsky model. A second idea of eddy viscosity acting only on the finest resolved scales will be investigated. Most present de-convolution models are limited by an incorrect under-attenuation of high frequencies and an incorrect global kinetic energy balance. The proposed research on de-convolution models will seek to correct both difficulties. The usefulness of LES in industrial applications is severely limited by the crude near wall models currently used. Layton has developed improved near wall models for channel flow with the correct double-asymptotics (Re - infinity and delta - 0). These will be extended to produce nonlinear near wall models suitable for recirculating flows. Layton will also investigate a new variational multiscale method based on a multiscale decomposition of the fluid stresses rather than fluid velocities. Layton proposes to continue the mathematical development of large eddy simulation. Large eddy simulation addresses the problem of predicting, using mathematical analysis, physical modeling and high performance computing, the large, energetic eddies (or swirls) in the flow of fluids at high Reynolds numbers. This problem is a core difficulty in many important applications such as global change studies, geophysics and the environment, aeronautics and aerospace applications and even in the design of artificial hearts. Large eddy simulation is widely considered to be the most promising approach to simulating turbulence and its mathematical validation and development is important to its further evolution. This proposal aims to improve eddy-viscosity models, de-convolution models, and near-wall models by a thorough mathematical analysis doc20821 none This investigation will address the question: Is the quiet solar chromosphere at the top always hot ( K), with small temperature variations (5%), or mainly cold ( K), with large temperature excursions (up to 25,000 K)? Two kinds of current empirical models, one a set of time-independent models of the steady emission, the other, a time-dependent simulation of the dynamics of the non-magnetic chromosphere, come to fundamentally different conclusions. To gain a resolution of this problem a two-pronged approach will be employed. On the one hand, space observations are to be analyzed to determine the temperature and the amplitude of oscillations in the actual solar chromosphere, and on the other, numerical and analytic tools will be developed for a theoretical assessment of chromospheric heating by magnetohydrodynamic waves doc20822 none Reid F. Cooper, Principal Investigator University of Wisconsin-Madison The measurement of the low-frequency attenuation behavior of polycrystalline olivine aggregates, of olivine-orthopyroxene aggregates and of olivine-based partial melts will be pursued. Specifically, the polycrystalline materials, which will have carefully engineered microstructures, will be subjected to dynamic ( sub-resonant , oscillatory loading) and quasistatic (constant loading, i.e., creep) so as to evaluate the attenuation behavior as functions of (i) temperature ( to degC), (ii) frequency (2x10e-4 to 1 Hz), (iii) phase volume fraction and morphology (phase percolation and phase separation layering in the solid state; melt segregation beyond the grain scale in partial melts), and (iv) dislocation-creep sub-microstructure. The study characterization of microstructural effects (engineered into these specimens so as to mimic deformation-induced microstructures) on seismic-frequency absorption is one key to applying seismic data to infer deformation behavior in active tectonic terranes doc20823 none This project addresses one-dimensional nanostructures on silicon surfaces extending prior re-search to the reactivity of 1-D templates with oxygen and atomic hydrogen, and the growth of various metals on Si. It is anticipated that fundamental studies of these nanostructures will enable possible applications in devices, diffraction gratings, or as growth templates. This proposed work includes the following: Reactivity studies of noble metal-induced 1-D nanostructures grown on high-index Si. Based on previous work, noble metal-induced 1-D arrays can be produced by de-positing Ag or Au on high-index Si surfaces oriented at or near Si(5 5 12). Using STM, the reac-tivity of these 1-D arrays to oxygen will be investigated for O2 exposure under both oxidation and etching conditions. The project also includes studies on preferential etching of 1-D arrays using atomic hydrogen to enhance vertical surface corrugation. Growth studies of other groups of metals on Si(5 5 12) includes the growth of metals such as Fe and the rare earths (Dy, Ho, Er), and will be studied as a function of coverage and temperature on high-index surfaces near (5 5 12). The rare earth metals have recently been found to form robust nanowires on Si(001) and may demonstrate interesting growth on the high-index templates as well. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in a topical area of electronic photonic materi-als science having technological relevance. An important feature of the project is the strong em-phasis on education, and the integration of research and education. This research will have a sub-stantial educational impact on VCU s relatively small physics department. The PI places empha-sis on involving undergraduates in research. A majority of the M.S. graduate students are trained in the PI s surface science group in order to gain skills necessary to either enter industry or to continue with a Ph.D. degree. It is anticipated that a number of students will be involved in this work over its duration, including a full-time Ph.D. student (Chemical Physics), three or four M.S. students, and a several undergraduates doc20824 none This work is a collaborative effort to study the transformation and removal of ozone and fine particles in the air due to multiphase atmospheric chemistry related to aerosol acidity. The chemical measurements made will augment the planned core measurements obtaining during the Atmospheric Investigation, Regional Modeling, Analysis and Prediction (AIRMAP) program field intensive scheduled for July and August . The objective of these additional measurements is to assess the significance of pH-dependent, gas-particle interactions with respect to the cycling of odd nitrogen, sulfur and other chemical species in the Gulf of Maine boundary layer. This work contributes to interagency collaboration in aerosol science between NSF and NOAA doc20825 none Despite repeated calls for improved scholarship and more empirically grounded policy recommendations, research into teacher learning has suffered from a number of chronic methodological difficulties. Most importantly, this research has been constrained by what scholars have been able to measure: the processes of teacher learning as they appear in in-services or study groups; teacher attitudes and beliefs which result from those processes; and, to some extent, teacher practices which emerge after such encounters. Left unmeasured, however, is a component which threads through all these observable outcomes and, ultimately, which proves the most significant target of interventions designed to improve teaching: teachers knowledge of content matter and content-specific teaching methods. Without direct measures of this knowledge, researchers have had few opportunities to learn which teacher education practices contribute to its development. In a recent review of teacher preparation, Wilson, Floden, and Ferrini-Mundy ( ) show the vast gaps in the field s knowledge of the content required for good teaching and of the ideal combination of pedagogical and content. The situation is equally weak with respect to knowledge about professional development (Wilson teachers ability to use mathematical knowledge to interpret students thinking; and teachers ability to make sound choices when faced with common problems of teaching mathematics. In all three cases, items are drawn from realistic dilemmas facing teachers of mathematics. The study will use these measures in a longitudinal study of programs designed to improve teachers knowledge of mathematics and its teaching, tracking a large number of teachers before, during, and after their involvement with professional development, teacher-supportive curriculum materials, and innovative site-based initiatives. We will also use this opportunity to conduct a small validation study of our measures of mathematical learning opportunities and teachers knowledge for teaching. Finally, we will interview and observe a small group of teachers before, during and after their participation in intensive mathematics professional development, hoping to better understand, from teachers perspectives, what and how one can learn mathematics content for teaching doc20826 none This three-year project explores the influence of two modes of investigation, 1st- and 2nd-hand, on student development of scientific knowledge and reasoning. In 1st-hand investigations students have direct experience with phenomena. In the 2nd-hand investigations students interact with informal text, either in a traditional format or an innovative format modeled after the notebook of a scientist. The project proposes to conduct a series of three studies in schools with diverse populations: rural, urban-poor, and urban bilingual. In Study 1 and 2, the instruction of the unit will be done by the investigators and will be conducted with groups of 12 students during the school day. In Study 3 the instruction will be done by the teachers and it will involve four whole classes. Study 1 is a mixed experimental design in which 48 students will participate. Students, matched for general achievement, will be randomly assigned to four sequences. Sequence varies mode of instruction (1st- and 2nd-hand investigations) and topic (force- and mass-motion). Instruction will be videotaped, and interviews will be conducted to a randomly selected sample of 4 students on each group. Study 2 includes a third variable: mode of 2nd-hand investigations, traditional or notebook. It is a five-condition study involving different sequences. During this study, a classroom observation instrument will be developed. Study 3 will involve the implementation of the conditions that proved to have the best outcomes in Study 2. The study will try to identify individual differences that may interact with the type of condition. Instruction will be documented (taped) twice during the course of each mode of investigation. The classroom observation instrument will be administered during each investigation. A random sample of 8 students within each class will be interviewed twice in each instructional phase. The study will advance understanding of how instruction can maximize student learning in different inquiry contexts. A new classroom observation tool will be developed doc20827 none With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Irina Panyushkina, Jeffrey Dean, and their colleagues will undertake a dendrochronological (tree-ring) analysis of wood from Iron Age archaeological sites in Central Asia focussing on the Scythian Pazyryk Culture (1,000 B.C.) in the Altai Mountains, which lies across Russia, Mongolia, China, and Kazakhstan states. Crossdated tree-ring sequences from living trees, dead trees in glacial valleys, and archaeological timbers will be used to build a 3,000-year continuous master tree-ring chronology, which will provide calendar dates for Scythian, Tagar, Hun-Sarmatian, and Turkic archaeological sites. This achievement will be a quantum advance like that of the s when dendrochronology precisely dated hundreds of Paleo-Indian sites in the U.S. Southwest. The Altai project is a scientific partnership between the United States and the Russian Federation to study the archaeology, dendrochronology, and paleogeography of Central Asia. The project integrates efforts of Russian, German, American, Kazakhstani, and French archaeological teams conducting multidisciplinary studies of Iron Age steppe nomads in the region. The project will directly address (1) the absolute chronology of the Siberian Scythians and of the Iron Age in Inner Asia, (2) the place of the Pazyryk people in the general cultural and historical context of the region, (3) the extent to which climatic variability and extremes during the last few thousands years (Late Holocene) impacted nomads of the Eurasian steppe. Although diagnostic Pazyryk artifacts and decorative styles commonly are used to establish connections among the pastoral and sedentary groups of Eurasia, the insecure dating of the Pazyryk expression impedes understanding the interactions among these Iron Age societies. Application of the 3,000-year master tree-ring chronology to dating wood objects from Scythian tombs will provide an absolute chronological framework for systematizing existing archeological data and future finds. An absolute chronology for the study region will clarify ideas about Indo-European origins, the prehistory of pastoral societies before Mongol expansion into Inner Eurasia, and Scythian influence on the cultures of Asia Minor and the Mediterranean Basin. Combining the dendroclimatic records with other indicators of environmental changes will produce high resolution (seasonal and annual) environmental reconstructions for the last 3,000 years. These data will be used to assess the degree of environmental stress on the pastoral steppe nomads whose animal herds, a vital component of their economy and social organization, where highly vulnerable to fluctuations in climate and vegetation. This, in turn will indicate the degree to which climatic variability forced the sequent waves of Scythian impact on the agrarian cultures to the west doc20828 none Kring The International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) is funding the drilling of a 2km hole in the Chicxulub impact crater on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. NSF is funding US investigators to analyze core samples from the Chicxulub Scientific Drilling Project (CSDP). The Chicxulub crater is one of the world s largest impact craters and has been linked to the mass extnction event at the Cretaceous - Tertiary (K T) boundary ~65 million years ago. As part of the CSDP Science Team, the PIs will provide a general description of the core for the broader scientific community, so that they can request appropriate samples for their studies. They will also provide an initial set of detailed analyses to characterize the impact lithologies in the core to better understand the formation of the Chicxulub crater, its thermal evolution as it cooled over a period of ~100,000 years, and the consequences it may have had for the environment. The project will include petrographic, chemical, and isotopic analyses of surviving target lithologies and shock-metamorphosed products of the impact event doc20829 none As an evolutionary event the transition from foraging to farming is one of the most important social and economic process in human prehistory. Supported by the National Science Foundation Dr. Kuijt and his colleagues will conduct three seasons of archaeological excavation at the early Neolithic village of Dhra , Jordan, to explore the social, economic, and demographic context of this transition. The early agricultural village of Dhra , dating to approximately 11,500 years ago and located next to the Dead Sea, provides an important means of reconstructing the earliest transition from foraging to farming, and developing an understanding of the social context in which food production and agriculture first emerged in the Old World. Archaeological excavations will be conducted in a series of broad continuous five by five meter excavation units documenting the internal organization of one of our earliest Neolithic villages. This will provide researchers with an understanding of the spatial organization of village life, including the location where food preparation occurred, how residential areas were organized, the location and nature of food storage systems, and where ritual and mortuary activities occurred. In exploring these important evolutionary and anthropological issues, Dr. Kuijt and his collaborators will use archaeological data to address three interrelated questions: 1) How was the development of new systems of food production linked to paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental changes? 2) How might the development of new forms of food production be linked to later population growth and pressure? and, 3) What was the social context early village life, and how did this change with the development of early food production? Guided by these questions, this research provides new insights into the social process and impact of the process of plant and animal domestication on small-scale foraging farming communities, including the emergence of social inequality, the development of ritual and civic elites, and the development of food surpluses. Bringing together specialists to conduct investigations into the social, demographic, and environmental context of food production at Dhra , this research contributes towards our understanding of the evolutionary transition from foraging to farming on three levels. First, it will help researchers to gain insight into how this transition impacted life at the scale of local village life. Second, this study will help archaeologists to understand how village social and economic changes are linked to regional and intra-regional changes. Finally, at the global scale this research will help anthropologists and archaeologists to better understand the evolutionary trajectory, and nature of, the transition from foraging to farming doc20742 none COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH-- LIFE HISTORY STRATEGIES, GROWTH RATES AND MICROSTRUCTURAL CHARACTEREVOLUTION ACROSS THE COELUROSAURIAN AVIALAN TRANSITION Gregory M. Erickson. Kristina Curry-Rogers, Mark Norell Birds (avialan dinosaurs) are unique among living animals in showing extremely rapid growth rates. How they attained this capacity is unknown. In our research we will reconstruct the growth of the earliest birds and their closest ancestors, the coelurosaurian dinosaurs. We will do this by coupling age estimates (garnered through growth line counts) with size estimates for a diversity of fossil species. From the results we will be able to quantitatively assess when and how avian growth rates were generated and determine whether the first birds were simply feathered dinosaurs or physiological equivalents to living species. Aside from helping us to understand how the most speciose group of animals living in our world came to came to be, broader impacts of this research include: 1) establishing a World Wide Web site from which the lay pubic and professions can learn about scientific research, 2) providing advanced scientific training to undergraduate and graduate students including those from under-represented groups, and 3) providing material for our public and non-major collegiate lectures in paleontology doc20831 none Bierman Sediment samples were collected from Namibian Rivers with a vision to answer several fundamental scientific questions and in order to make a significant societal contribution. NSF funding will provide for isotopic analyses of these samples. Overall, the data we collect will be used to test the relationship between nuclide activity (a proxy for basin-scale sediment generation rates) and drainage basin lithology, relief, climate, and area. Such relationships will allow us to predict sediment generation rates where landscape conditions are similar, an important tool for land management. Cosmogenic nuclides provide a window into the past behavior of landscapes. When measured in drainage basin sediments nuclides such as 10Be and 26Al allow estimation of basin-scale sediment generation rates over time scales determined by the speed at which the sampled landscape erodes; in Namibia, nuclide activities integrate erosion rates over ~105 years. Samples collected from headwater drainages and drainages with little sediment storage will allow rigorous comparison between landscape-scale erosion rates over the later Pleistocene using cosmogenic nuclides and rates integrated over the Cenozoic using fission tracks. Such comparisons provide the fundamental data that allow one to explain the behavior of Earth s surface over time and to test models of landscape evolution such as those proposed to explain the retreat of great escarpments over time. Namibian rivers have wet headwaters where most floods are generated; the rivers lose water as they cross the hyper-arid Namib Desert. Such loss means that most flood events are discontinuous with sediment in transport being stranded at varying distances along the 300 to 400 km long river courses. Only the largest and rarest floods move sediment to the ocean. We will compare our nuclide-based findings related to sediment virtual velocity and sediment source with sediment composition and the historical flood frequency magnitude records of the two rivers that we sampled in detail. Understanding long-term sediment fluxes down rivers is important for responsible management of water resources and river corridors. Dams have been placed on several Namibian Rivers and there are plans in the works for others such as a very controversial project in the Kunene River. Clearly, the life time and thus cost-benefit analysis for such massive hydraulic structures depends critically on knowing long-term sediment fluxes. Cosmogenic analysis of river sediments will provide such data. Land use in parts of Africa is intensive. In some places, desertification has been the result of overgrazing and population expansion. Cosmogenic data will determine background rates of sediment generation. Such rates can be compared to modern rates and thus provide the basis for responsible land use management decisions doc20832 none This research applies an innovative technique, microstructural analysis of faulted sediments, to evaluate more accurately the hazard associated with creeping faults. This project extends ongoing microstructural studies of faulted sediment texture from stick-slip faults (Cashman and Cashman, ; Baldwin et al., , in review) to a selected study site on the creeping portion of the San Andreas Fault. The research goal is to develop microstructural criteria that will allow paleoselsmologists to differentiate shear zones produced by aseismic creep from those formed by coselsmic fault rupture. Digital image acquisition and analysis enable researchers to quantify characteristics of rock fabrics such as grain dimensions and grain orientations in order to test hypotheses about processes governing the development of rock texture. For example, computer-based image analysis has been used to measure crystal size distribution (e.g. Cashman and Marsh, ) and vesicle size distribution (e.g. Cashman et al. ) in volcanic rocks with the goal of constraining dynamic rates of crystallization and vesiculation. This approach has also proved useful for measuring particle size distribution, grain shape, and grain orientation in shear zones in unconsolidated sand adjacent to the active McKinleyville fault, California, (Cashman and Cashman, ) and New Madrid North fault, Missouri, (Baldwin et al., , in review) with the goal of assessing the relative importance of compaction, grain breakage, and grain rotation in shear zone development. Fault zone sediments from these two stick-slip faults have several textural features in common, including compaction, pronounced grain size reduction, preferred grain orientation, and development of anastomosing micro-scale shear zones. Of particular interest is the high degree of grain breakage in the unconsolidated sand. This study is a microstructural analysis of fault zone sediments from a site on the creeping portion of the San Andreas Fault. Preliminary data indicate significant quantifiable differences in the degree of grain breakage between unconsolidated sand subjected to stick-slip faulting and that defon-ned by ascismic creep. Image analysis of fault zone sediment from a well-documented creeping fault site will provide data on grain breakage and other textural changes produced by creep. These data will be used to evaluate the relative importance of grain breakage, grain rotation, and compaction in sediment defon-ned by stable fault creep, and to determine if specific textural criteria are unique to stick-slip or to creeping faults doc20833 none The problem of computing patterns in sequences or strings of characters from a finite alphabet has important applications in numerous areas of computer science, notably in data compression, information theory, and pattern matching. This problem has also important applications in biology. The stimulus for such recent works is the study of biological sequences such as DNA and protein that play a central role in molecular biology. DNA sequences can be viewed as quite long but finite strings of nucleotides of 4 different types, while protein sequences can be viewed as finite strings of amino acids of 20 possible types. Patterns such as periodicities and repetitions make up a significant fraction of both DNA and protein sequences. Although the functions of these patterns are not well understood, they appear important for understanding the expression, regulation and evolution of a biological sequence. These patterns can be used to identify the sequence among other sequences, an application that plays a role in genetic fingerprinting. Repetitions in biological sequences have been associated with human genetic diseases. They also complicate multiple sequence alignment because matches may be present in numerous places. The literature has generally considered problems in which a period u of a repetition is invariant. It has been required that occurrences of u match each other exactly. Due to the action of evolutionary mutation, patterns in biological strings are seldom exact but rather approximate. It therefore becomes necessary to recognize u as an occurrence of u if the distance between u and u is bounded by a certain threshold. Several definitions of distance have been proposed like the Hamming distance which counts the minimum number of character substitutions required to transform u into u, and the edit distance which counts the minimum number of substitutions, insertions, and deletions of characters required to transform u into u. Although there is an enormous literature dealing with approximate pattern matching according to these and other definitions of distance, very little is known on approximate repetitions, a version of repetitions where errors are allowed, and much remains to be done. Given the importance of patterns in biological strings and the exponential growth in the DNA database, it is important to develop efficient algorithms for detecting these patterns. The investigators study patterns such as periodicities, repetitions, covers, and seeds and their approximate versions built upon various commonly used distance measures. Techniques include recent combinatorial techniques related to partial strings which are strings where a number of gap characters are allowed. They also include the cover array, the highest scoring paths in weighted grid graphs, the probabilistic models that have been proposed for repetitions, and the subtree max gap problem which is a poweful tool in parallel algorithm design doc20834 none R. Lawrence Edwards This study continues investigations of the paleoseismology and paleogeodesy of the Sumatran subduction zone in order to determine possible regularity of periods between fault ruptures, repeatability of pattern of slip on faults, influence of geologic structure on fault rupture, and variation of seismic aseismic coupling with time. The centerpiece of the study is the use of coral heads (Porites and other genera) that are sensitive to sea level changes with uncertainties of a few centimeters. Annual growth bands give time-series with relative errors of a few years and U-Th dating of the heads gives dates with errors of a decade. The magnitude of vertical deformation associated with earthquakes (paleoseismology) and deformation in intervals between earthquakes (paleogeodesy) are being determined from these data. Results are being modeled and historical earthquakes (seismograms from a variety of sources) are being used to determine if segment boundaries influenced dimensions of historical ruptures. The specific goals of this project are to: (1) better characterize source parameters of , , and events; (2) determine southern limit of these events; (3) extend record back to 14th century; (4) determine source characteristics of and quakes; (5) model historical seismograms of large quakes on Sumatran fau (6) characterize aseismic strain events in , , and regions doc20835 none University of California-Santa Cruz This study continues investigations of the paleoseismology and paleogeodesy of the Sumatran subduction zone in order to determine possible regularity of periods between fault ruptures, repeatability of pattern of slip on faults, influence of geologic structure on fault rupture, and variation of seismic aseismic coupling with time. The centerpiece of the study is the use of coral heads (Porites and other genera) that are sensitive to sea level changes with uncertainties of a few centimeters. Annual growth bands give time-series with relative errors of a few years and U-Th dating of the heads gives dates with errors of a decade. The magnitude of vertical deformation associated with earthquakes (paleoseismology) and deformation in intervals between earthquakes (paleogeodesy) are being determined from these data. Results are being modeled and historical earthquakes (seismograms from a variety of sources) are being used to determine if segment boundaries influenced dimensions of historical ruptures. The specific goals of this project are to: (1) better characterize source parameters of , , and events; (2) determine southern limit of these events; (3) extend record back to 14th century; (4) determine source characteristics of and quakes; (5) model historical seismograms of large quakes on Sumatran fau (6) characterize aseismic strain events in , , and regions doc20836 none An interdisciplinary research project is proposed to test the hypothesis that groundwater-fed wetlands may be used as paleoclimatic indicators in equatorial East Africa. The study will integrate geochemical, biological and sedimentological data from a large modern freshwater wetland (Loboi Wetland, near Lake Bogoria, Kenya) and compare these data to nearby Pleistocene Loboi Silts and Kapthurin Formation that may contain ancient wetland sediments. The link to paleoclimate will be made by locating repetitive alternations (cycles?) of lithofacies that record wet-dry cycles within a datable ancient stratigraphic sequence. The two Pleistocene sites that we have selected show great promise. The field work, laboratory analyses and preliminary integration of the results from modern and ancient environments will be carried out over a one year period doc20837 none Casey This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative NSF 01-157, category NER, and is co-funded by the GEO Directorate. The reactions that concern geochemists are often ligand exchange reactions, where one atom in the inner-coordination sphere of a metal is replaced with another. Even complicated processes like adsorption and mineral dissolution are really ligand-exchange reactions because the coordination number of the metal is unchanged by the process. The rates of these reactions vary enormously for different metals yet very little is known about the reaction rates at mineral surfaces, which are the key sites that affect natural water chemistry. Stated differently, the functional groups on clays and metal-hydroxide minerals are ligands too. Geochemists are coming to rely heavily on computational methods of predicting reaction properties because so many of the key reactions are difficult to probe experimentally. Unfortunately, the computational cost of predicting rates of ligand exchanges at the aqueous-mineral interface are enormous because so many atoms must be included in a realistic simulation. We pursue an alternative strategy where we attempt to establish a correlation between measured rate coefficients of water exchange ( ) in aluminum complexes and nanoparticles and structural parameters in the complexes that were calculated using ab initio methods. This correlation is novel because it is based on the easily calculated properties of the complexes instead of on the costly transition-state structures and provides a simple and computationally inexpensive way to predict rates of one of the most fundamental classes of geochemical reactions. By hypothesis, this simple approach can be extended to nanoparticles, colloids, and clays and is limited only by the feasibility of computer simulations. This research is risky because there is no guarantee that the important variables will scale with molecular size. Nevertheless, if successful, it promises an inexpensive method to predict rates of the most fundamental of reactions in aqueous media across an enormous range of molecular sizes. It is a novel and far-reaching approach because it is based on properties of ground-state structures rather than transition states doc20838 none Pasternack Hydraulic jumps in mountain rivers are turbulent mixtures of air and water that produce significant kinetic energy dissipation, air entertainment, surface waves, and spray. Despite their prevalence, the role of natural hydraulic jumps on river flow mechanics, sediment transport, channel change, and basin evolution is unknown primarily because of adverse site conditions that previously limited field data collection. The overall goal of this project is to overcome past constraints on investigating hydraulic jump fluid mechanics in the natural setting and its relevance to fluvial geomorphology with the aid of new technologies that enable precise in situ measurement for the first time. New technologies developed and tested at UC Davis include a River Truss, an air content sensor, and large-scale particle image velocimetry. The new technologies will be used to address three hypotheses that predict how systematic changes in the external controls of channel geometry and discharge directly affect the response variables of water surface topography, velocity, pressure, air content, air entertainment, and energy dissipation. The role of response variables in sediment transport, channel change, and basin evolution will follow from a thorough investigation of the response variables themselves, especially when addressing conditions near the bed. Observing 13 natural hydraulic jumps in the American River basin over a 3-year period will test hypotheses. Results will be compared between jumps and against results from engineering flume-based studies using theoretical and empirical equations. A better understanding of the role of natural jumps in channel change is very important to science because it would improve the physics of landscape evolution models, provide needed guidance for including in-stream features in river restoration and rehabilitation, and make interdisciplinary contributions to ecology and aquatic geochemistry. In future research, other scientists will be able to apply the newly proven field technologies and resulting models to better understand the complex flow mechanics and channels interactions occurring in mountain rivers doc20716 none Understanding of orogenesis and its relations to mantle convection and plate tectonics relies on integrated studies of the interrelations among processes of deformation, metamorphism and magmatism. A well preserved portion of the northern Appalachian orogen is providing an outstanding laboratory for a truly integrative study of the evolution of mid-crustal processes that strongly influence orogenesis. This project is employing structural, microstructural, petrologic and thermobarometric analyses, and chemical and isotopic dating, to temporally and spatially link deformation, metamorphism and magmatism during the progressive growth of this orogenic belt. This information is being used to set constraints and boundary conditions on coupled, 3-D thermal mechanical models that, in tandem with the geological observations, are being used used to gain insights into the orogen s evolution and associated plate dynamics doc20840 none Hilpert This collaborative research proposal aims to combine high-resolution tomographic datasets with state-of-the-art pore-scale modeling techniques to investigate the flow and entrapment of nonaqueous phase liquids (NAPLs). We will focus on mixed-wettability systems and the impact of geometric descriptors and anisotropy on multiphase flow. Synchrotron microtomography stations at Center for Advanced Microstructures and Devices at Louisiana State University and the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory will be used to capture highly resolved images from multiphase porous medium experiments. In addition to capturing the morphological structure of these systems, pore-scale properties (e.g., pore body throat distribution and correlation, tortuosity, connectivity, etc ... ) can be calculated from these images. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University will use the data and results from these experiments to extend their pore-morphological approaches to model imbibition. LB methods will be used to accurately model various aspects of multiphase flow including thick wetting phase films in strongly water-wet systems, heterogeneous wettability, and anisotropic spatial correlations of the pore space doc20841 none Becker It has long been hypothesized that ground water flows through bedrock fractures in a channelized manner, implying that contaminated ground water may be very difficult to detect or predict. To date, flow channeling at the field scale has been detected only in boreholes or tunnels. This research will yield, for the first time, map-view images of channeling in a fracture plane. Saline tracer will be injected into a single saturated sub-horizontal bedding-plane fracture, and its distribution will be mapped using high-resolution ground-penetrating radar. Experiments will be conducted in floor of a limestone quarry so that the water table is shallow and there is no overburden to obstruct the radar signal. Several forced gradient hydraulic configurations will be used to allow both low-resolution time-variant and high-resolution time-invariant imaging of saline tracer. Monitoring holes will simultaneously detect saline concentration, so that the efficacy of borehole monitoring in the presence of channeling can be evaluated. Finally, fluorescent dye will be injected into the fracture and the rock above the fracture removed so that flow channeling can be mapped directly. Ground penetrating radar, monitoring well concentrations, dye distribution, and hydraulic testing will be used to calibrate a finite difference ground-water flow and transport model. This model will be used to investigate errors associated with monitoring ground-water pollution and design hydraulic and tracer tests to characterize effective porosity in fractured bedrock. Although the geophysical techniques employed in this research are not practical for most contaminated sites, tracer and hydraulic methods developed from this project could have a significant impact on how contaminated sites in fractured bedrock are monitored, characterized, and remediated doc20842 none Collaborative Research: Biotic diversity and vertebrate evolution in Late Devonian non-marine ecosystems of North America Neil Shubin- Edward Daeschler- The Late Devonian (375-360 MYA) witnessed a burst of diversification of vertebrate life, including the origin of limbed vertebrates, and the elaboration of plants and invertebrates in terrestrial ecosystems. Accordingly, the description and analysis of Late Devonian vertebrates and ecosystems offers the ability to generate important data on the emergence of new taxa, new anatomical structures, new faunas, and new habitats during this critical moment of evolution. Our prior work ( to present) in the Late Devonian (Famennian Stage) Catskill Formation in Pennsylvania has produced well-preserved, highly diverse vertebrate assemblages from the same stratigraphic horizons as macrofossil plants, palynomorphs, arthropods, and bivalves. Exploratory work ( - ) in the Late Devonian (Frasnian Stage) Okse Bay Group in the Canadian Arctic has also revealed significantly fossiliferous units in this virtually unexplored region. This project will document and interpret the diversity of the non-marine parts of these Late Devonian systems in eastern North America. The temporal range will cover the Frasnian and Famennian Stages of the Late Devonian, a critical window in evolution. Fieldwork in the Famennian-age Catskill Formation has taken a significant step; the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation has given permission to remove a large wedge of overburden from the Red Hill locality, source of two early tetrapod taxa and a very diverse fauna and flora. Fieldwork in the Frasnian-age Okse Bay Group in the Canadian Arctic will focus on areas now recognized for their fossil productivity. The first major goal is the recovery, preparation and description of Late Devonian fossil material. Ensuing investigation of the phylogenetic affinities and stratigraphic position of fossil assemblages will allow both intraformational and global comparisons of biotic diversity. Assessment of intraformational stratigraphic relationships will enable an understanding of the biotic diversity in different portions of the fluvial systems. These analyses will inform: 1) higher level phylogenetic hypotheses of gnathostome vertebrates, 2) biostratigraphic and biogeographic analysis of the distribution of the Late Devonian tetrapods and fish, and 3) paleobiological investigation of the elaboration of terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems doc20720 none The team of S. Burges and P. De Vries (Univ. of Washington) and G. Parker (Univ. of Minnesota) plan collaborative research into the mechanics of coarse bedload transport at the particle scale. Gravel tracer particles are a convenient way to study the longitudinal travel and dispersion and vertical mixing of sediment in mountain rivers. Field observations of tracer displacement have not yet, however, been linked comprehensively into the formal framework of sediment transport in rivers. The study will use experiments as a bridge between theoretical numerical research and field-scale research to a) develop formulations for distance moved, dispersion and mixing of tracers for unsteady flow, b) link these formulations to mechanistic theories of bedload transport and c) test and validate the results against field data taken to the standards needed to test theory and numerical predictions. The field research will be conducted in several streams in western Washington State. The experimental research will be conducted at St. Anthony Falls Laboratory. The Washington and Minnesota teams will collaborate on both efforts, with both sides contributing to the development of a predictive numerical model doc20844 none The failure of large groups of students to perform to their potential.such as females in math, or African Americans across a variety of academic disciplines.is one of the great tragedies in our educational system. The significance of this problem has inspired numerous investigations of its scope, nature, and potential causes. A recent breakthrough points to the power that social context can have in creating, perpetuating, or eliminating the underperformance that has hindered these groups. Steele, Aronson, Spencer, and their colleagues have demonstrated the crucial role of stereotype threat, a situational phenomenon that occurs when individuals who are targets of stereotypes alleging intellectual inferiority are reminded of the possibility of confirming these stereotypes (e.g., Spencer, Steele, Steele, ). For example, Spencer et al. ( ) showed that high-achieving female college students performed significantly worse than males on a standardized math test when the stereotype about their math ability was made salient (.Males have performed better than females on this test in the past..). However, this gender gap was eliminated simply by changing the words used for introducing the test (.Males and females have performed equally well on this test in the past..). A counterintuitive finding is that only individuals who are highly identified with success and achievement in given stereotyped domains are the ones who show deficits under threat, in contrast to stigmatized individuals who are not achievement oriented in these domains (Steele, ). Thus, it is the people in the vanguard of their group who are the most vulnerable to situations in which stereotypes about their ability become salient. The detrimental effects of stereotype threat extend to African Americans (e.g., Steele (2) whether reasoning becomes more algorithmic and less meaningful under stereotype threat; and (3) ways in which the detrimental effects of stereotype threat can be mitigated or eliminated doc20845 none This collaborative project focuses on network-level solutions for exploiting the time-varying nature of the wireless environment to increase the overall performance of the system taking into account quality of service (QoS) and fairness for Multimedia Wireless Systems. The proposed algorithms are classified opportunistic since they consider channel conditions (and related definitions of per-user utility). The following research activities will be particularly pursued: opportunistic scheduling with and without explicit delay requirements as well as opportunistic scheduling in the frequency domain. The objective related to opportunistic scheduling without explicit delay requirements is to develop scheduling algorithms that exploit the time-varying nature of the wireless channel to optimize network performance under different fairness requirements. In particular, the channel estimation problem will be explored for which fast methodologies to effectively track the system parameters through stochastic approximation types of techniques will be developed. For opportunistic scheduling with explicit delay requirements, the goal will be to develop scheduling mechanisms for real-time applications such as voice and video where the objective is not only to schedule users based on their channel conditions and fairness constraints, but also based on their deadlines. In particular, the problems of opportunistic scheduling without individual QoS constraints and problems of opportunistic scheduling with individual QoS requirements will be studied. For that purpose, the off-line optimal scheduling solutions that provide benchmarks in evaluating other schemes will be developed. On the other hand, the on-line algorithms that take into account network traffic statistics will be developed and proven on practicability. Finally, the activities related to opportunistic scheduling in the frequency domain will consider taking advantage of both time-domain and frequency-domain diversity in wireless systems. In particular, the problems will be explored where the objective will be to maximize the system performance where power could be an explicit constraint or a penalty function. Other types of problems that will be explored here will deal with minimizing the transmitted power subject to performance constraints doc20846 none The project is on a novel surface nanocrystallization and hardening (SNH) process wherein metallic parts are impacted with high-energy balls under a controlled atmosphere. It will be suitable for both large and small engineering components and offer superior fatigue and wear properties derived from the synergy of the tailored microstructure, the smooth gradients of both composition and grain size, and the desired residual stress distribution. The University of Connecticut (UConn) and the University of Tennessee (UT) have joined together to investigate the key issues related to the SNH process. UConn will bring in expertise in the high-energy ball milling and SNH process, while UT will provide expertise in the area of fatigue mechanisms and modeling. A major goal of the study are to develop and construct a special SNH machine with independent control of a variety of the SNH process variables such as the surface grain size, grain-size gradient, composition gradient, formation of new compounds, residual stresses, and surface finishing. The objective of the project is to perform systematic and comprehensive experiments to establish the processing maps for surface nanocrystallization of the Ti-6-4 alloy including detailed microstructure and dislocation density studies using high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HREM). Based on the mechanisms established, analytical and numerical models will be developed to predict the general trend of surface nanocrystallization. Mechanical properties of the SNH-processed Ti-6-4 alloys will be quantified using nanoindentation, pin-on-disc wear, and high-cycle fatigue tests. The fatigue mechanisms established in these studies will be used as a basis to develop theoretic models for the prediction of fatigue crack initiation and propagation behavior in the material with surface nano-grains and a grain-size gradient. The work under this grant attempts to develop bulk nanocrystalline metallic components with superior mechanical properties through the development and testing of a new process known as surface nanocrystallization and hardening (SNH). The ultra fine grain size in the surface with appropriate grain size gradient into the bulk is expected to result in improved fatigue life of the structural components. The project plans include participation of undergraduate and high school students along with graduate researchers doc20847 none Collaborative research: Evaluating the contribution of Late Cretaceous biogeography to earliest Cenozoic biodiversity in North America Anne Weil, Thomas Williamson, Steven Semken In this project, the investigators will use a recently discovered, diverse, terrestrial microvertebrate fossil assemblage, found in the Naashoibito Member of the Kirtland Formation, in the San Juan Basin of New Mexico, to test the following hypotheses: (1) that there was mammalian faunal provinciality in the latest Cretaceous of North America, and; (2) that recovery faunas of earliest Cenozoic North America are derived at least in part from diverse provinces present in Late Cretaceous North America. Terrestrial ecosystem recovery following the end-Cretaceous mass extinction is best known from studies of the North American Western Interior. This recovery is typified by the appearance of mammals whose lineages are unknown from North America in the preceding Late Cretaceous period. That may be because knowledge of latest Cretaceous mammalian faunas has been geographically restricted to the northern region of the Western Interior. In collecting this new, southern fauna, better establishing the age of the Naashoibito Member, and incorporating this new fauna in analyses of existing phylogenetic and biogeographic data bases, the investigators will advance understanding of how biogeographic factors preceding the most recent mass extinction contributed to the subsequent recovery of terrestrial ecosystems. A secondary goal of this project is undergraduate education through involvement in original research, directed in part toward Native American students. The Kirtland Formation outcrops along the edge of the Navajo (Dine) Nation; this project offers an unique opportunity to educate Dine students in the geological history and vertebrate fossil resources of this part of their homeland, as well as in field and laboratory research methods. The findings of this project will be integrated into undergraduate geoscience curricula for science majors and pre-service K-12 teachers in the region doc20848 none Volcanic Conduit Processes and Strombolian Eruption Cycles PIs: Harris & Houghton Our aim in this project is to understand the driving forces behind volcanoes that display persistent, strombolian activity. Such activity is characterized by repeated, mildly explosive events. For such repetitive explosive activity to be maintained over hundreds-to-thousands of years, as it has been at Stromboli Volcano (Italy), a volcano must be fed by a stable supply of magma and gas. It has not yet been determined, however, whether this supply occurs by the repeated rise of discrete magma batches or by a continuous stream. Initial measurements by us at Stromboli during May indicated that the magma supply to the shallow system may indeed be variable over minutes-to-hour long periods (i.e. it may be batch-like). These supply variations may in turn drive observed variations in the style and frequency of explosive activity. This has led us to develop a working hypothesis that fresh, gas-rich magma batches do rise from depth as discrete pulses, causing fluctuating levels of degassing and hence explosive activity upon their arrival. Our current project builds on those initial measurements by adding new geophysical instrumentation together with more detailed examination of volcanic products. In particular, we will use thermal and infrasound measurements, plus studies of the textures of the erupted lava bombs to examine explosive activity at Stromboli and infer variations in magma level within the conduit. Thermal data acquired during the persistent degassing that occurs between strombolian explosions will be used to characterize periods of enhanced gas escape. Finally, we will use vesicle (gas bubble) and crystal size distributions in the bombs to constrain the extent of mixing between newly arrived magma batches and long-resident magma within the shallow system doc20849 none Wiens This grant supports the acquisition of new computational equipment to upgrade the facility available to the terrestrial geophysics research program at Washington University - St. Louis. Specific equipment to be purchased will include three Sun Fire 280R servers, three Sun Blade 2-processor workstations, 2 DLT-800 tape drives, a color printer, and a Xiotech Magnitude SAN 612 Gb disk array. Much of the current research conducted by the 2 faculty members and 6 Ph.D. research scientists post-doctoral scientists in this group has become either computationally intensive or storage intensive. Synthetic seismograms, tomographic inversions, and inversions for geomagnetic field variations require processor speeds that exceed current machines. Washington University is also currently involved with four IRIS PASSCAL seismometer deployments which will involve the processing and analysis of about 700 Gb of seismic data. Obtaining a system of fast and reliable machines will allow this program to carry out research in an optimal and productive manner doc20850 none Tackley In this project the investigators will use a thermochemical numerical convection code to investigate the trace and major element evolution of Earth s mantle. The model self-consistently integrates the processes of convection, plate tectonics, and melting-induced trace-and major-element defferentiation and mixing. The investigators will focus particularly on testing various hypotheses that have been proposed by members both of the geophysical and primordial reservoirs, the necessity or otherwise of having a deep, thick, enriched layer, and several other topics. The focus will be on high-resolution 2D calculations in order to minimize discretization noise when calculating isotope ratios, but complemented by a small number of 3D calculations. The results should be to closely constrain the viability of competing hypotheses for Earth s trace element structure and evolution doc20742 none COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH-- LIFE HISTORY STRATEGIES, GROWTH RATES AND MICROSTRUCTURAL CHARACTEREVOLUTION ACROSS THE COELUROSAURIAN AVIALAN TRANSITION Gregory M. Erickson. Kristina Curry-Rogers, Mark Norell Birds (avialan dinosaurs) are unique among living animals in showing extremely rapid growth rates. How they attained this capacity is unknown. In our research we will reconstruct the growth of the earliest birds and their closest ancestors, the coelurosaurian dinosaurs. We will do this by coupling age estimates (garnered through growth line counts) with size estimates for a diversity of fossil species. From the results we will be able to quantitatively assess when and how avian growth rates were generated and determine whether the first birds were simply feathered dinosaurs or physiological equivalents to living species. Aside from helping us to understand how the most speciose group of animals living in our world came to came to be, broader impacts of this research include: 1) establishing a World Wide Web site from which the lay pubic and professions can learn about scientific research, 2) providing advanced scientific training to undergraduate and graduate students including those from under-represented groups, and 3) providing material for our public and non-major collegiate lectures in paleontology doc20852 none WEN The PI proposes a study of seismic velocity and attenuation structures for both the Earth s inner and outer core and their implications for mineral physics and dynamics. The seismic structures will be studied based on the differential travel times and waveforms of various PKP branches collected from the global and regional seismic networks. Seismic studies will be performed for the eastern and western hemispheres respectively, and in two steps: 1) establish two one-dimensional seismic velocity and attenuation models of the Earth s inner and outer core for the PKP phases sampling equatorial paths; and, 2) constrain anisotropy magnitudes and transitions from a possible top isotropic layer to deep anisotropy in the inner core doc20853 none PROJECT SUMMARY Some of the best evidence for the effects of abrupt environmental change on the Earth s biosphere and geochemical cycles can be found in Cretaceous strata. These rocks contain clear evidence for drastically altered atmospheric composition and oceanic circulation that resulted in widespread, episodic, and geologically ephemeral (~0.5 to 1 m.y.) oceanic anoxic events (OAEs). The recent documentation of negative C isotope excursions at the base of some mid-Cretaceous OAE deposits, and a likely contemporaneous isotope anomaly of greater magnitude delineated by the d13C values of early Aptian terrestrial flora, suggest that environmental perturbation during the mid-Cretaceous may have been the result of greenhouse-gas-driven warming at rates comparable to those inferred for the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, and currently experienced by Earth over the last century. Thus detailed, integrative study of these mid-Cretaceous events, such as will be carried out by this study, holds potential for refining our understanding of abrupt climatic disturbance during greenhouse warming. This investigation is designed to establish the nature of changes in environmental boundary conditions during mid-Cretaceous OAEs, and to interpret the temporal and mechanistic relationship of these changes within the context of potential forcing mechanisms. Two oceanic anoxic events that represent the most extreme and widespread environmental change are being studied: (1) the early Aptian OAE1a (119.5 to 120.5 Ma), and (2) the late Aptian to early Albian OAE1b (~108.5 to 113 Ma). Shelf and slope sections in the Sierra Madre Oriental of Mexico that represent the most expanded sedimentary records available, and for which we have developed a detailed chronostratigraphic framework are the primary field area of study. These platform deposits have accumulation rates 3 to 15 times higher than those typical of deep-sea sequences that should provide clear lead-lag relationships between the different proxy records. We will also investigate select deep-sea records of the OAEs to define a more global signal and a wider paleo-depth perspective. One of the fundamental and previously unexplored aspects of this investigation is to unravel, where possible, on a 103 to105 yr time scale the precise phase relationship between proxy records and the interactions, responses, and feedbacks of their inferred environmental changes. The research will integrate a series of stratigraphic, paleontologic, geochemical and isotopic proxies of carbon and nutrient cycling, productivity, bottom-water oxygenation, and sea level. Detailed nannofossil, and planktic and benthic foraminiferal assemblage studies are being carried out to determine variation in surface- and deep-water environments including changes in nutrient budgets, productivity, water column structure, temperature gradients, and deep-water oxygenation. Geochemical and isotopic records (d13Ccarb, d13Corg, TOC, %CaCO3, and d34S) are being developed as proxies of carbon cycling, organic carbon burial, productivity and anoxia. In order to develop a more complete understanding of the environmental implications of our geochemical and isotopic proxy records, we will compare their rate phasing amplitude relationships to paleoecological trends inferred from microfossil assemblage data, and to the relative sea-level history. Isotopic analysis of terrestrial vascular plant matter in the Barremian through Albian interval of a deep-sea core (Site 398) will provide an independent and highly sensitive indicator of disruption to normal carbon cycling, as well as shifts in CO2 fluxes and carbon reservoirs. Finally, we will carry out numerical experiments using a box model for the carbon isotopic systematics of the ocean and a linked biogeochemistry- 3D global ocean model in order to assess how the proxy records and their inferred environmental conditions constrain a series of geological forcings relevant to the hypothesized mechanisms for the origin of the OAEs. The resulting set of high-resolution proxy records developed simultaneously from statigraphically expanded sections, coupled with numeric modeling and data-model comparisons should provide significant insight into the oceanographic and atmospheric conditions underlying oceanic anoxic events. Moreover, this study of abrupt environmental change associated with the classic Cretaceous OAEs should provide an end-member model for biogeochemical cycling during greenhouse warming of other geologic periods, including the current earth system doc20854 none Construction of three comprehensive web-based models of the ionosphere using data from eight incoherent scatter radars (ISRs) is proposed. These models will greatly extend recent models based on data from the Millstone Hill ISR. The model will include three main parts. The first two are North American and European regional models of basic and derived scalar parameters, including electron density (Ne), electron and ion temperature (Te and Ti), neutral meridional wind and exospheric temperature: the third is a model of the ExB plasma drifts and corresponding electrostatic potential patterns as obtained by the EISCAT mainland and VHF radars. The North American regional model will be based on data from the Sondrestromfjord, Millstone Hill and Arecibo ISRs. The European regional model will be based on data from the EISCAT Svalbard, EISCAT mainland UHF and VHF, Kharkov and St. Santin ISRs. The parameters to be modeled have been identified by the National Space Weather Program (NSWP) Implementation Plan as important ones which must be specified and forecast in response to customer operational support requirements. All of them have also been identified by the NSWP Metrics Panel as either first, second or third priority parameters which define the state and condition of the ionosphere-thermosphere (IT) system. The high-latitude electric field and its variability has also been identified by the Metrics Panel as one of two first priority driver parameters of the IT system doc20847 none Collaborative research: Evaluating the contribution of Late Cretaceous biogeography to earliest Cenozoic biodiversity in North America Anne Weil, Thomas Williamson, Steven Semken In this project, the investigators will use a recently discovered, diverse, terrestrial microvertebrate fossil assemblage, found in the Naashoibito Member of the Kirtland Formation, in the San Juan Basin of New Mexico, to test the following hypotheses: (1) that there was mammalian faunal provinciality in the latest Cretaceous of North America, and; (2) that recovery faunas of earliest Cenozoic North America are derived at least in part from diverse provinces present in Late Cretaceous North America. Terrestrial ecosystem recovery following the end-Cretaceous mass extinction is best known from studies of the North American Western Interior. This recovery is typified by the appearance of mammals whose lineages are unknown from North America in the preceding Late Cretaceous period. That may be because knowledge of latest Cretaceous mammalian faunas has been geographically restricted to the northern region of the Western Interior. In collecting this new, southern fauna, better establishing the age of the Naashoibito Member, and incorporating this new fauna in analyses of existing phylogenetic and biogeographic data bases, the investigators will advance understanding of how biogeographic factors preceding the most recent mass extinction contributed to the subsequent recovery of terrestrial ecosystems. A secondary goal of this project is undergraduate education through involvement in original research, directed in part toward Native American students. The Kirtland Formation outcrops along the edge of the Navajo (Dine) Nation; this project offers an unique opportunity to educate Dine students in the geological history and vertebrate fossil resources of this part of their homeland, as well as in field and laboratory research methods. The findings of this project will be integrated into undergraduate geoscience curricula for science majors and pre-service K-12 teachers in the region doc20856 none Wysession The aim of this project is to advance our understanding of the geophysics of the Core-mantle boundary (CMB) region through examination of small-scale regional variations in shear waves that interact with D , the base of the mantle. Specifically, the investigators will look for direct evidence of the foundations of mantle plumes, chemical boundary layers, and subducted slabs at the CMB with the increased resolution provided by the growing database of broadband array data. The CMB displays complexity and variability unequalled within the sub-lithospheric earth. As a major chemical and thermal boundary layer between the rocky mantle and liquid outer core, the CMB likely plays significant roles in the circulation of mass, as well as the transfer of heat both within and between the mantle and core. The investigators will specifically address the following questions: 1) Do mantle plumes form in D ? 2) Are there laterally discrete chemical boundary layers within D ? 3) Do slabs reach the CMB? One-dimensional models of D structure will be generated using reflectivity synthetics, but final models will also be tested with fully 3D synthetics using the spectral-element method of Komatitsch and Tromp ( ), which has been installed on Washington University s SGI parallel processing machine doc20857 none Ritzwoller, Mark The project initiates collaboration between scientists at UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico) and the University of Colorado at Boulder. The long-term purpose is to develop an improved seismic model of the crust and mantle beneath Mexico and the Cocos Plate. At present, there is no reference model for the region of study, which places limitations on the effectiveness of seismic hazard assessments. An improved higher resolution model is also motivated by a series of problems related to the structure and tectonics of Middle America, especially the enigmatic subduction characteristics of the Cocos Plate and the desire to understand the roots of the Mexican Volcanic Belt. The collaborative work will begin by (1) transferring three years of Mexican National Seismic Network (MNSN) data to CU-Boulder for future processing and analysis and (2) developing a thermal model of the Cocos Plate mantle wedge beneath Mexico from the current CU-Boulder 3-D seismic model doc20858 none This project aims at developing efficient algorithms for multicast communication within the optical networks based on Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM). The following research activities will be particularly pursued. First, the research team will work on the WDM simulators particularly suitable for multicast applications based on WDM. Effi-cient specific multicast tree construction problems will be formulated and their computa-tional complexity will be analyzed. Second, this project will include more general multi-cast problems and seek the appropriate solutions, such as when the set of senders and re-ceivers in the multicast group vary. Finally, a part of the research will be devoted to the problem of constructing multicast trees in heterogeneous networks with different optical node architectures as well as the fault-tolerance and Quality-of-Service (QoS) problems related to optical multicast built in existing Internet environment and with application-level requirements. This project will include undergraduate students in research and will thus have substantial impact on their preparation for graduate education as well as it will be conducted as means of creating awareness and interest among undergraduate students on the issues surrounding optical networks doc20859 none Reeder This research project will investigate the fundamental structural and coordinative aspects of metal sorption at the calcite-water interface. The experimental approach will combine laboratory experiments in model systems with spectroscopic techniques to characterize the detailed coordination geometry of selected metal and metalloid species adsorbed on calcite. Metals of interest include divalent lead and cadmium, selected trivalent rare-earth elements, and arsenate anions. These species are important contaminants in soils, sediments, aquifers, and other near-surface environments. One goal of the research is to determine the role of adsorption in controlling binding site preferences for minor element uptake by calcite during crystal growth. Observations that non-octahedral surface complexes for Zn(II) and Cu(II) adsorbed on calcite result in preferential uptake on the less constrained of two binding sites, suggests that site preferences for other metals should also correlate with surface complex geometry. The proposed research tests this hypothesis for selected metals (Pb and Cd) and provides structural information that can be used in predictive models. A further goal of the research is to evaluate how adsorption complexes control the coordination of rare-earth elements following incorporation into calcite, where observations have shown differences in coordination number between light and heavy lanthanides. The role of solution pH on the structure of surface complexes will also be evaluated in laboratory and spectroscopic studies. Another component of the research project will identify the mechanism of adsorption of arsenate ions on calcite. Arsenate, an important contaminant in some natural waters, shows similarities in behavior with phosphate. The latter is a strong inhibitor of calcite surface reactivity, and its presence may reduce the ability of calcite to sorb and incorporate other impurity species. The results of this aspect of the research will provide insight to the mechanism of surface inhibition as well as provide fundamental information about arsenate interactions with calcite. Results from this research project will contribute to a broader understanding of the molecular-scale processes that govern the distribution and behavior of geochemically and environmentally important elements in Earth s near-surface environment. The results of this work will also contribute to an understanding of ways in which the threat to society posed by metal contaminants can be reduced doc20689 none Collaborative Research: Investigating the processes and timescales of andesite differentiation: a comprehensive petrological and geochemical study of Arenal Volcano, Costa Rica ; ; ; PIs: Gill; Reagan; Tepley; Gardner Arenal Volcano in Costa Rica is an excellent natural laboratory in which to test specific hypotheses regarding differentiation mechanisms and the timescales of magmatic processes and their relationship to eruptions. Our objective is to undertake a multi-pronged petrological and geochemical investigation to take advantage of existing data and models. The on-going eruption of Arenal volcano has undergone complex changes in eruptive behavior, and a crucial question is whether those changes relate to different magma storage conditions, such as varying depths and hence initial volatile contents, or to different degassing styles and rates. We will investigate this important issue through several techniques. We seek to determine the timescales of degassing, the residence times and ascent rate of degassed magmas, and the timescales of degassing-induced plagioclase crystallization. We will measure short-lived nuclides within the uranium decay series to constrain the timescales of magmatic processes as well as measure the long-lived isotopic compositions of whole rocks, and mineral separates and individual minerals in the case of Sr, to determine whether there is evidence for involvement of isotopically distinct components during differentiation processes. Lastly, we will measure a suite of major- and trace-element concentrations to evaluate the secular change in Arenal lava composition. The data from these tests will help answer questions such as whether rates of differentiation depend on the depth and degree of crystallization and on the extent and character of degassing; whether crystal and magma residence times can be as short as days to months during near steady-state eruptions of andesite; whether within-eruption changes of magma composition are caused by open-system processes of fractional crystallization plus recharge or assimilation or both; and whether eruption styles are related to degassing history and magma residence time doc20861 none Furman The architecture of continental margins in terms of how they are created is not well understood because most of the previous work has been on successfully rifted margins after rifting is complete. Both continental (fault dominated) end-members and oceanic (magma dominated) rift end-members are well studied, but the transitional stage is not understood. This project will document this critical transition from continental to oceanic rifting. The PIs will carry out seismic experiments, integrated with geochemical, gravity and structural studies, to study lithospheric structure in one of the rare areas where the transition from continental rifting to incipient spreading is captured - the main Ethiopian Rift (MER). In the MER the along-axis transition to initial seafloor spreading provides a spatial proxy for temporal variability. Specific objectives are: 1) to determine detailed crust and mantle structure across and along a transitional rift segment and 2) to understand magmagenesis beneath and within the rift. The PIs will obtain crustal P-and S-velocity cross-sections that can be interpreted for lithology across the Ethiopian rift at 10 deg. N where active magmatic centers first appear, and along-strike to the north to study the transition into fully magmatic rifting. They will interpret existing and new gravity data in light of their new seismic data, and use geochemical data to constrain the physical state of the upper mantle and magmatic inputs to the crust. The project (US - EAGLE) is fully integrated with the already funded UK - EAGLE initiative. Scientists at Leicester, Leeds and London, have been awarded UK funds to carry out a single refraction profile across the Ethiopian rift in January , coupled with local seismicity studies and teleseismic recording. The US - EAGLE PIs will shoot and record a complementary orthogonal along-axis wide-angle profile; and will shoot fan shots into these linear arrays and the local seismic network to provide a measure of 3D coverage. Together, these seismological experiments form a nested, multi-scale seismic image of the Ethiopian rift and plume. The seismic studies will be coupled with geochemical and petrological and gravity studies (US), and structural, thermochronological, magnetotelluric and additional gravity studies (UK doc20862 none Tempo and mode of early animal evolution: estimating metazoan divergence times Kevin Peterson Accurate dating of when the first bilaterally-symmetrical animals (i.e., Bilateria) arose is crucial to our understanding of early animal evolution. The fossil record suggests that bilaterians arose about 555 Ma ago, whereas most previous molecular-clock analyses estimate they arose between 800- Ma ago. Because of this pronounced disparity, PI seeks to show that a molecular clock can accurately, and with precision, date deep divergences among metazoan taxa. Distance analysis of four concatenated proteins from nine invertebrate taxa gives the correct phylogenetic topology, and regression analysis using four calibration points shows that branch lengths are directly correlated with time. PI s clock estimates appear to be accurate, because a molecular estimate of the divergence between echinoderm subphyla (507 Ma) falls within the range established from the fossil record (485-520 Ma). His analyses estimate that bilaterians arose 570 Ma ago, and animals themselves arose almost 700 Ma ago. Intriguingly, these originations follow two of the most extreme environmental episodes in the history of life ( snowball earth ). The objective of this proposal is to further test these ideas by first calibrating the clock using the same methods as above, but from bivalve molluscs. Using both sets of calibration points the age of the origination of Bilateria will be more reliably ascertained. Furthermore, PI will test two hypotheses concerning the ecology of these early animals. First, did metazoans live in the plankton during snowball earth? Because of the putative global planktonic shut-down during snowball earth, food would be very scarce suggesting that metazoans could not be wholly planktonic during this geological interval. If metazoans were not planktonic, then they must have been benthic, but if they were they must have been very small in order to explain the absence of trace fossils during this interval of time. Hence, PI s second question concerns these benthic micrometazoans: are living animals like gastrotrichs, which are very similar to these purported early animals, basal bilaterians? Fulfillment of the goals of this proposal will give unique insight into the tempo and mode of animal evolution, and serve as the training ground for at least one undergraduate s intellectual foray into the Precambrian Cambrian transition doc20863 none Guggenheim The working hypothesis of this proposal is that clay methane-gas hydrate complexes will form under appropriate water-saturated conditions at low temperatures and high gas pressures. In a series of preliminary experiments, we obtained evidence that these complexes indeed can form at these conditions. In these experiments we used an environmental chamber, capable of temperatures from -100 to 200 oC and gas pressures to 75 bars. This chamber, which we developed in-house, allows X-ray scans from 0 to 70 degrees two theta. We propose to examine Na-exchanged and Ca-exchanged montmorillonite and methane under the appropriate conditions to form clay methane-gas hydrate complexes. In addition, we will examine possible interactions between methane and NH4-exchanged montmorillonite. Our intent is to determine the compositional range of clays that allow gas hydrates to intercalate into clay structures. We will then determine the P-T conditions where these clay gas-hydrate complexes form, as well as the amounts of gas hydrates that are incorporated in the clay. The discovery of clay gas-hydrate complexes introduces a new class of materials, which should be of interest in mineralogy, geochemistry, and materials science. As with gas hydrates, these new complexes: (1) may be expected to occur in deep ocean and polar regions (e.g., permafrost, Antarctic ice), (2) may be involved in submarine sediment stability, and (3) may be present on Mars. It is probable that the stability range of clay gas-hydrate complexes will extend the stability range of gas-hydrate compounds. Also, clay gas-hydrate complexes may store significant quantities of methane and other hydrocarbons, and thus, these complexes may play an important role in climate changes, much like what has been proposed for gas hydrates doc20864 none Collaborative activities with the Institute of Ionosphere and Terrestrial Magnetism (IZMARIN), and the Institute of Space Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IKI) will be carried out through joint projects and student exchanges. The joint activities will address, (1) the relationship between interplanetary shock parameters and their geoeffectiveness, (2) the effect of sharp solar wind pressure pulses upon the Earth s magnetosphere, (3) the refinement of a neural network prediction scheme to determine how well a solar wind monitor will predict plasma flux and velocity and magnetic fields at Earth, and (4) comparisons between the time integral of the z-component of the interplanetary magnetic field observed at the L1 Lagrange point and other spacecraft doc20865 none Proposed research will provide critical constraints on the nature of loading high pressure metamorphism in contractional magmatic arcs, and greatly enhance data available for deciphering the tectonic history of the North Cascades. Research will integrate new high precision geochronologic, thermobarometric, and metamorphic phase equilibria data from theWenatchee Block (WB), Cascades Crystalline Core (CCC) of Washington. Published thermobarometric, geochronologic, and structural data for the WB have been used to propose tectonic models; however, the metamorphic data are largely inadequate to resolve some of the important problems. For example, tectonic interpretations hinge on whether the entire WB experienced synchronous loading and high-pressure metamorphism, and the timing of high-pressure metamorphism with respect to igneous intrusions in the central WB. Yet, there are few reliable ages for peak metamorphism and few P-T-t path determinations for the central and northern WB. Available data comprise P-T estimates based on mineral rim chemistry, P-T estimates for growth of garnet cores based on zoning, and P estimates for pluton emplacement based on Al in hornblende (Ague Tinkham Tinkham in prep. 2). The PI s preliminary quantitative P-T-t paths for metamorphism indicate that regional garnet growth postdates the Mt. Stuart. Geochronologic and petrologic data are compatible with post intrusion metamorphism likely involving a small P increase. Research will integrate garnet Sm-Nd ages and garnet growth conditions north of the Mt. Stuart batholith. These data will be used to develop quantitative P-T-t paths that will complement existing data for the NE edge of the Batholith. Metamorphic P-T-t paths and new U-Pb zircon ages for orthogneisses at Pear Lake and within the Banded Gneiss on Wenatchee Ridge will be used to constrain the heat source for metamorphism. Ages for garnet will be estimated from garnet - rock Sm-Nd isochrons. P and T of initial garnet growth will be estimated from mineral compositions and pseudosections, supplemented with P and T from equilibrium thermobarometry. U-Pb zircon geochronology will provide critical ages for magmatic bodies in the Banded Gneiss and the Pear Lake orthogneiss that may have provided significant heat during metamorphism. Geochronologic and thermobarometric data will be interpreted in the context of structural data to place constraints on the conditions and timing of deformation. Integration of these data will help define the WB metamorphic history, and elucidate how metamorphism and subsequent cooling relates to magmatic arc plutonism and deformation. It will also document how detailed garnet thermobarometric and chronologic techniques can be used to extract complex tectonic histories. Tectonic models describing metamorphic orogenic processes in a magmatic arc can only be critically evaluated after details of metamorphic P-T-t paths have been described, and these paths spatially and temporally related to plutonism and deformation. The results of this study will help to distinguish between metamorphism resulting from advective heat transfer by plutons and conductive heat transfer after crustal thickening doc20866 none The application of CO2 to chemical processing continues to elicit significant interest, as CO2 generally poses fewer hazards than conventional organic solvents. At one time it was thought that CO2 could simply replace many organic solvents, but subsequent work showed that CO2 is a rather feeble solvent, and hence unrealistically high pressures are needed to dissolve compounds of interest. The discovery during the s of CO2-philes suddenly rendered a number of applications technically possible, greatly raising interest in CO2 as a solvent. These new CO2-philes, primarily fluoropolymers, allowed a host of new applications for CO2, from heterogeneous polymerization to homogeneous catalysis. Although fluorinated amphiphiles were technically successful, their high cost renders the economics of a process unfavorable unless the ihCO2-philelo can be recycled at greater than 99% efficiency. Complicating matters further, recycle of additives from a high-pressure process is neither easy nor inexpensive. The drawbacks inherent to the use of fluorinated precursors have greatly inhibited the commercialization of most new applications for CO2, and thus the full promise of CO2-based technology has yet to be realized. The PI has investigated the design of non-fluorous CO2-philes. To date, he has used a set of simple heuristics to design three types of non-fluorous CO2- phile; he expects that others will ultimately be found, greatly broadening the applicability of CO2 as a solvent. The number of possible design variables (copolymer composition and topology) creates an impractically large program if we continue to synthesize and test all potentially useful structures. Further, conventional thermodynamic models are incapable of predicting the behavior of all of the possible permutations. Consequently, The PI will conduct a coordinated program between the University of Pittsburgh and Auburn University whose ultimate aim is to fully understand the effect of composition and topology on the phase behavior of our new CO2-philes in carbon dioxide. He will to combine targeted synthesis, measurement of selected thermophysical properties, high pressure FT-IR, and development of an accurate potential function from first principles to mathematically describe the thermodynamics of mixing of his materials with CO2. Success will allow himto numerically optimize the structure of non-fluorous CO2-philes. The program described herein involves a fully integrated project at both the University of Pittsburgh (E.J. Beckman, R.M. Enick, J.K. Johnson) and Auburn University (C.B. Roberts). The tasks to be performed at Auburn University (C.B. Roberts) include both phase behavior and FTIR studies, where high pressure IR measurements will be employed to evaluate the strength of specific interactions of CO2 with the Lewis base groups incorporated into our model polymers. The high pressure IR work provides both input to the synthetic design and the construction of an accurate potential model for CO2-polymer interactions doc20867 none Schreiber It is well-known that arsenic, a toxic and carcinogenic element, is readily transported in natural waters and that its forms, speciation, and concentrations are affected by biogeochemical reactions. In this proposal, we address the transport, transformation and retention of arsenic in a stream-aquifer system impacted by past mining activities. Given our current understanding of the structure of stream-aquifer system in close contact with the mine, we developed a number of questions regarding the role of hydrologic, geochemical and biological processes controlling the speciation and concentration of arsenic. The proposed research will center on addressing two central questions: (1) what factors control spatial and temporal variations in arsenic fluxes to the stream? (2) How do hyporheic processes influence retention of arsenic in the stream? To address these questions, we will utilize a combination of field, laboratory, and modeling techniques to evaluate the controls on arsenic mobility within the stream, with specific emphasis on characterizing the role of the hyporheic zone in acting as a source or a sink for arsenic. The proposed research elements include employing hydrologic and geochemical monitoring to characterize groundwater and surface water end-members as well as to describe biogeochemical conditions within the hyporheic zone. In addition, transient storage models will be used to evaluate the hydrologic characteristics of the hyporheic zone and, through incorporation of reactive uptake terms, to address the role of the hyporheic zone in retarding or promoting arsenic transport to the stream. Results of this proposed research will have implications for our general understanding of the biogeochemical cycling of redox-sensitive trace elements such as arsenic. The recent tightening of the arsenic drinking water standard from 50 to 10 ug L will drive federal and state agencies to closely examine sources of both natural and human-introduced arsenic contamination. Improving the knowledge of the processes that control arsenic mobility will greatly aid these agencies in developing plans for protecting and treating drinking water supplies doc20868 none Microprocessor performance enhancements tend to be inefficient in terms of power, especially as new sources of performance become scarce. Yet, performance remains a key competitive factor in the microprocessor market and inefficiency is somewhat inevitable. Microprocessors that support multiple frequencies are strategic because they can manage inefficiency. Performance requirements of systems change over time. Microprocessors with variable frequency can be used to balance performance, power, and energy by adapting frequency to changing performance requirements. This project predicts that the need for variable frequency will have a profound impact on the way microprocessors are designed in the future. Current hardware support for variable frequency is predominantly circuit and technology oriented: dynamic voltage scaling accommodates higher or lower frequency by raising or lowering supply voltage, respectively. In the future, support for variable frequency should also be an integral part of microarchitecture design. To demonstrate this overall vision, this project puts forth a novel microarchitecture called dynamic superpipelining (DSP). DSP switches from low to high frequencies by dynamically doubling the number of pipeline stages. DSP combines the advantages of two very different pipeline design styles (shallow and deep pipelines) that are optimized for different frequency targets. A flexible pipeline delivers better performance across a wider range of frequencies, ultimately improving the energy efficiency of the microprocessor. To evaluate DSP, it will be used as a variable-frequency substrate for a speculative frequency reduction technique recently proposed by the PI doc20824 none This work is a collaborative effort to study the transformation and removal of ozone and fine particles in the air due to multiphase atmospheric chemistry related to aerosol acidity. The chemical measurements made will augment the planned core measurements obtaining during the Atmospheric Investigation, Regional Modeling, Analysis and Prediction (AIRMAP) program field intensive scheduled for July and August . The objective of these additional measurements is to assess the significance of pH-dependent, gas-particle interactions with respect to the cycling of odd nitrogen, sulfur and other chemical species in the Gulf of Maine boundary layer. This work contributes to interagency collaboration in aerosol science between NSF and NOAA doc20870 none Emilio Herrero-Bervera Paleomagnetic directions measured from 240 lava flows in 5 sequences on the island of O ahu (Hawaii) cover about 0.36 Ma of geomagnetic field changes and include detailed records of the successive Gilbert-Gauss (3.57 Ma), Lower Mammoth (3.33 Ma) and Upper Mammoth (3.22Ma) reversals. Thus, it is clear that proper analysis of these observations require to document the total field vector and thus to conduct an exhaustive study of absolute paleointensity. The objectives of the study are primarily related to the knowledge of the field variations during periods like reversals or excursions but also to the critical time intervals that precede and follow reversals that so far have been only documented from a few sedimentary sections with conflicting observations. The Wai anae sequences offer the first exceptional opportunity to document field variations over a time period that includes several polarity intervals and thus document the field vector over various time constants. This is a basic condition to extract and bring up significant constraints for theoretical and numerical modeling of the geodynamo. Multiple records offer the best approach to determine the suitability of the field values and the degree of confidence of the results doc20871 none Willson This collaborative research proposal aims to combine high-resolution tomographic datasets with state-of-the-art pore-scale modeling techniques to investigate the flow and entrapment of nonaqueous phase liquids (NAPLs). We will focus on mixed-wettability systems and the impact of geometric descriptors and anisotropy on multiphase flow. Synchrotron microtomography stations at Center for Advanced Microstructures and Devices at Louisiana State University and the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory will be used to capture highly resolved images from multiphase porous medium experiments. In addition to capturing the morphological structure of these systems, pore-scale properties (e.g., pore body throat distribution and correlation, tortuosity, connectivity, etc ... ) can be calculated from these images. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University will use the data and results from these experiments to extend their pore-morphological approaches to model imbibition. LB methods will be used to accurately model various aspects of multiphase flow including thick wetting phase films in strongly water-wet systems, heterogeneous wettability, and anisotropic spatial correlations of the pore space doc20872 none Lathrop This project seeks to better understand the generation mechanism for the Earth s magnetic field. This geophysics grant funds research in a new device designed to self-generate magnetic fields at parameters close to the Earth. This new device drives liquid sodium to flow in a three-meter spherical tank. The tank and the enclosed propellers rotate independently to drive a sodium flow to stretch and amplify magnetic fields. The goal is to better understand the saturation mechanism, which determines the strength of the Earth s field, as well as characterize the dynamics of a saturated self-generating dynamo state (such as reversals). New diagnostics are planned to better characterize the fluctuations in the magnetic field and the fluid velocity, including ultrasound velocimetry, spherical magnetic field sensors, and a magnetic field imaging array. The effects of rotation and Lorentz forces on the velocity and magnetic fields are specific issues these diagnostics will probe. This scientific exploration seeks to shed light on the dynamics of field self-generation on a wide variety of objects showing active fields (the Earth, the Sun, Jupiter, Saturn, Io) as well as those lacking self-generation such as Venus doc20873 none Davis Animal waste associated with the production of livestock (poultry, cattle and swine) contributes significantly to non-point source contamination of surface water and groundwater.by nutrients and bacteria. Water-quality data collected over storm hydrographs from several springs throughout the mantled karst aquifer in northwest Arkansas indicate that concentrations of fecal coliform bacteria, dominated by Escherichia coli (E. coli), rise significantly in the early portion of the storm hydrograph. Pork bacterial concentrations occur coincident with the peak in spring discharge. Bacteria and other pathogens may survive for extended periods within the open flow domain of mantled karst aquifers. However, the transport mechanism and specific storage reservoir for the bacteria within these mantled karst environments are poorly understood but critical to the development of effective management strategies to protect human health. This project is a multiple tracer experiment with a main goal of elucidating the fate (transport and storage) of bacteria within well-characterized, well-defined mantled karst basins. Specific questions addressed by this project include (1) the use of Eu-labeled bacteria and La-labeled clay, a visible technique to monitor injected tracer s breakthrough over time periods that include significant recharge events, and (2) what information we can infer about the bacterial fate in the subsurface from the breakthrough curves. Multiple tracers will be injected into a losing stream segment previously used during the pilot project at the Savoy Experimental Watershed (SEW) to provide more detailed breakthrough data needed to assess the project hypotheses, and to quantify tracer loads and capture. The SEW is a University of Arkansas property of approximately 1,250 hectares. Inputs and outputs in the mantled karst aquifer formed in the Mississippian Boone and St. Joe Formations are routinely monitored at SEW, and karst basin boundaries have been previously delineated. A second well-characterized injection site in northwest Arkansas will be used to assess the exportability of the methods. This project provides (1) minimum detection levels for the analytes injected, (2) estimated dilution factors for the tracers, (3) development of breakthrough curves to assess differences in tracer response, (4) verification of the presence of Eu-tag on variable injected bacteria at the sampling point, and (5) correlation of tracer loads to the hydrograph. If the environment in the springs is stable and conducive to the survival of fecal coliform bacteria, then it may also be conducive to supporting other potentially harmful pathogens. Results of this project will be beneficial for development of effective management strategies to minimize bacterial pathogen input into karst aquifers doc20874 none Miller This award provides continued funding for the CD-ROM (Continental Dynamics of the Rocky Mountains) collaborative investigation which is designed to understand the tectonic evolution of the lithosphere of the southern Rocky Mountains. A transect from Wyoming to New Mexico is providing an opportunity to evaluate the hypothesis that lithospheric architecture of the Southwest reflects a resolvable mixture of structures that formed during early Proterozoic assembly of the continent and modifications that took place during younger intracratonic tectonism that were themselves influenced by the Proterozoic compositional structure. Phase 1 ( - ) was successful in substantially verifying this hypothesis. The PIs imaged the Cheyenne Belt and Jemez lineament; both are interpreted to be Paleoproterozoic paleosubduction zones that also show long-lived and strong influence on younger intracratonic tectonism. Both are also associated with lateral changes in deep chemical lithosphere, such that the mantle provinces can be linked to crustal provinces, demonstrating the antiquity of the mantle transitions. With this bridge funding award, the Principal Investigators will conduct an annual workshop, complete the analysis of data sets generated in Phase 1, increase productivity in terms of published papers, and prepare for Phase 2 of the CD-ROM project doc20875 none Aster The Rio Grande Rift Seismic Transect (RISTRA) project is designed to study the crust and mantle beneath the southwestern U.S. utilizing an exceptional data set consisting of 18 months of broadband teleseismic IRIS PASSCAL data from 57 sites along a -km transect in TX, NM, AZ, and UT recorded during - . Under initial NSF funding extensive fieldwork was completed, data were processed and archived at the IRIS data management center, and preliminary analysis was performed and disseminated to the earth science and broader communities. This project continues the analysis of RISTRA to illuminate and interpret structure and processes associated with the Rio Grande Rift (RGR), Colorado Plateau (CP), and Great Plains (GP) at unprecedented resolution. Principal goals are to determine the: (1) nature the support of the present high elevation of the CP; (2) depth extent of mantle processes associated with surface morphology and tectonics; (3) connection between mantle and crustal strain beneath the RGR region; (4) location in the mantle of remnants of the Farallon plate and any possible detached continental lithosphere. Imaging of discontinuities using receiver function methods is being coupled with studies of shear wave splitting, 3-D seismic tomography, xenolith, and other geological geophysical constraints to reveal the structure of the region to depths of approximately 800 km. Seismic migration processing techniques that take full advantage of the quality, length, and dense (~18 km) station spacing of the RISTRA experiment are being applied. Elastic 2- and 3-D modeling efforts are being incorporated into the DOE SEG Next Generation Modeling (NGM) Project in association with Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of Houston doc20876 none The PI s have developed a method for deten-nining paleoelevations of highland areas on the basis of the vesicularity of lava flows. They demonstrated the validity of the approach by testing the method against recent lavas emplaced at known elevations, and recently applied the technique in an exploratory study on the Colorado Plateau to obtain a general constraint on the timing of uplift. This has been a subject of considerable concern and debate in the geological research community. The results of the exploratory study indicate that the Colorado Plateau experienced slow uplift from 25 to IO Ma, and rapid uplift after IO Ma. These results reconcile the longstanding controversy between interpretations of ancient vs. recent uplift by providing an uplift history curve for the Colorado Plateau. The PI s initial investigation did not resolve the nature of the slow-fast transition, nor the details of differential uplift between different parts of the plateau, but subsequent sampling of young flows ( 10 Ma) should reveal these details and the extent (if any) of internal plateau deformation. They now propose to conduct a detailed analysis of the uplift of the Colorado Plateau, building on the results of our exploratory project, and focusing on the last 10 m.y. The importance of establishing the uplift history for the Colorado Plateau and Rocky Mountains lies in its pivotal role in paleogeographic reconstructions and paleoclimatic changes, as well as its reflection of lithospheric then-nal structure and mantle processes. Various approaches for deten-nining timing of uplift have been tried in the past including geomorphologic, paleofloristic, sedimentary, and isotopic investigations, but each has had sources of uncertainty stemming from using proxies that depend on factors other than elevation alone. Because the PI s recently developed technique measures paleoatmospheric pressure, it is not subject to these uncertainties (although like all measurements, has its own potential sources of error). Using the proposed analysis, the PI s will be able to reconstruct the detailed uplift history of the Colorado Plateau and adjacent Rocky Mountains. Vesicular lavas preserve a record of paleopressure at the time and place of lava emplacement because the difference in internal pressure in bubbles at the base and top of a lava flow depends on atmospheric pressure and lava flow thickness. At the top of the flow, the pressure is simply atmospheric pressure, while at the base, there is an additional contribution of rgH lava overburden. Thus the modal size of the vesicle (bubble) population is larger at the top than at the bottom. Because the thickness of the flow can easily be measured in the field, and the vesicle sizes can be measured in the lab, this leads directly to paleoatmospheric pressure. Given that sea level pressure has not changed significantly in Cenozoic time, the difference between the paleoelevation preserved in the lavas and their present elevation reflects the amount of uplift. Lava can be well dated, therefore a suite of samples of various ages will constrain the timing of epeirogenic uplift independent of climate, erosion rates or any other envirom-nental factors. In their recent work, the PI s developed new tools for analysis of vesicular volcanic rocks. These tools most notably include methods for identifying appropriate field sampling locations, and the computational software which allows tomographic data to be manipulated to produce vesicle population statistics necessary for deten-nining size distributions. The proposed method is based on the modal size of the vesicle population, so it is critical to be able to accurately measure the size distribution in collected samples from the tops and bottoms of flows. The new analytical techniques involve Computed X-Ray Tomography to measure vesicle sizes. Based on our ability to measure vesicle size to within 1.6% (by volume), a factor analysis of the sensitivity of the technique to atmospheric pressure provides an elevation within +-300 in. As done in their preliminary project in conjunction with local field experts, the PI s propose to collect samples from various identified flows that are now at high elevations. They will prepare samples for Xray Tomographic scanning to be done at the facility at U. Texas. The resulting data will be analyzed with software they have developed previously. The size distributions will be used to reconstruct paleopressure and thus paleoelevation. This should provide an unambiguous documentation of the details of uplift history of the region, as well as elucidate any differential uplift within the Colorado Plateau doc20877 none With the dramatic increase in the amount of multimedia data, efficiency considerations make it important to consider ways to keep the data in the compressed form for as much as possible, even when it is searched. We propose to develop methodologies for searching directly on compressed text and images, when the compression is based on the family of compression algorithms that depend on sorted context. We also propose to develop search-aware data compression schemes for text and images based on sorted context that will support compressed-domain search directly on the compressed data. For text, we will explore the applicability of the classical linear exact pattern matching algorithms and binary search algorithms for text compressed with the Burrows-Wheeler transform. We will develop similar compression schemes for images based on sorted image contexts, called LICSIC (Lossless Image Compression by Sorted Image Contexts). The results of the proposed research will be important in environments that require the organization and management of huge collections of text or images. Internet search engines, digital libraries, satellite and space data , geographical information systems, bio-informatics and medical diagnostics are typical candidate applications doc20819 none A transient event in Guerrero, Mexico, propagated from east to west along-strike, near the locking transition on the megathrust, and it affected the entire length of the Guerrero seismic gap over a period of months during early . Campaign GPS data suggest the possibility that the Guerrero event is causally related to afterslip following the Mw=7.3 Copala earthquake. The Copala earthquake was located about 120 km east of the Guerrero gap, but afterslip appears to have propagated westward along-strike as much as 100 km during the first six months following the seismic rupture. Curiously, background seismic activity on the Guerrero megathrust unusually quiescent during the several months before, during and after the aseismic slip event, but returns to normal or above-normal levels several months after the transient ended. These observations raise several fundamental questions. First, did the Guerrero aseismic slip event really begin as afterslip following the Copala earthquake? Or is the occurrence of aseismic slip east of Acapulco in -96 and west of Acapulco in merely coincidental? Secondly, how did the stress changes generated by these aseismic slip events influence seismic activity on the megathrust? This research project is examining these questions using JERS-1 InSAR data collected during the years .2 to .3 to estimate coseismic slip of the Copala event and postseismic afterslip in the region east of Acapulco. Also, strong ground motion seismic data from the Guerrero accelerograph network and broadband data from the Mexican regional network are being used to estimate earthquake source parameters from events with magnitude Mw 7 that had never been examined previously. The events are being relocated using modern network differencing techniques, and the focal mechanisms, moment release, stress drops and other source parameters are also being characterized. The research team is combining the geodetic and seismic source to the slip history on the subduction megathrust during the past decade, and the associated change in Coulomb failure criteria as a function of time. The researchers are also assessing the space-time connection between Copala earthquake afterslip and the Guerrero slip transient, as well as the relationship between aseismic slip and seismic activity, using a model of nonlinear dynamic friction on the megathrust doc20879 none MODELING MAGMA DYNAMICS AND DEGASSING IN VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS PIs: Proussevitch & Sahagian The primary goal of this project is to develop a mathematical analysis and computer model of the movement of magma within volcanoes. Eruptions are normally driven by the growth of gas bubbles that come out of solution in the magma due to reductions in pressure before and during magma ascent within the volcano. The project consists of two parts. The first is a mathematical and computer analysis of volcanic eruption processes. The second is a sensitivity analysis to determine how the model system responds to variations in each of a number of attributes of the volcanic system. This should elucidate the roles and relative importance of all relevant factors in driving volcanic eruptions. The numerical model will enable us to explore the interaction of magma ascent, bubble growth, bubble size distribution, temperature change, and other specific volcanic processes. The proposed model is not intended to simulate specific natural eruptions. Rather, the results of the model and sensitivity study should lead to a better understanding of the mechanisms by which bubble growth drives eruptions, and an understanding of how magmatic conditions, properties, and conduit geometry affect the style of volcanic eruptions. This will set the stage for determining the conditions under which to expect explosive volcanic eruptions and their related volcanic hazards doc20765 none Collaborative Research: U-Series, Be, Sr, Nd and Pb Isotopic and Trace Element Constraints on Melting and Mass Transfer Processes in Arcs, Philippine Arc System ; ; PIs: Asmerom; Morris; Mukasa Net material cycling between the mantle and continental crust occurs primarily in arcs. Many processes related to melting and mass transfer in arcs, such as the relative contributions of melting and devolatilization in transferring elements from sediment and altered oceanic crust or the relative roles of dynamic, decompression or flux melting of the mantle wedge, however, remain enigmatic. This Collaborative proposal will focus on Luzon, located in the tectonically simpler part of the Philippines arc, to compare two different arc settings in close proximity that may have had dissimilar geochemical histories. The presumed difference in sediment contribution makes the proposed site an ideal setting for studying mass transfer processes and their possible effects on mantle melting. Combined U-series and Be isotopic data, in conjunction with long-lived radiogenic and trace element data will be used to study these rocks. The following goals are set forth: 1) to characterize lavas, using major, trace and Nd, Sr and Pb isotopic data, from four volcanic centers, two from each arc in order to delineate attributes of each subduction zone; 2) to determine the nature and composition of the sediment component and the mechanism by which it is added to the mantle; 3) to investigate the role of dynamic melting in arcs; and 4) to investigate the behavior of U-series nuclides during magma differentiation doc20881 none Collaborative Research:Paleometeorological Records from Sand Dunes and Eolian Sandstones This three-year proposal requests support for collaborative research on modern and ancient sand dunes by earth scientists at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and University of Nevada s Desert Research Institute. Field and laboratory work will concentrate on the 190-million-year-old Navajo Sandstone of the southwestern United States and on modern dunes in California and Nevada. The Navajo Sandstone accumulated in the subtropics, near the western edge of Pangea, the largest continental mass known from Earth history. The ancient rocks contain evidence for annual cycles in the direction and strength of the dominant wind, as well as evidence for heavy rainfall events, brief wind reversals, and a surprisingly high level of animal activity. Because we can recognize annual cycles of deposition, we can ascertain the migration rates of the sand dunes, and the seasonality and frequency of rainfall events. The rains may have occurred during long rainy episodes similar to conditions that prevailed in the Sahara desert between 14,000 and 5,000 years ago. A high water table between dunes may explain why abundant animal and plant life was present even while the dunes were actively migrating. The brief wind reversals may represent the passage of fronts. We will monitor modern sand dunes during frontal passages to see if they record these events with deposits similar to those we have seen in the rocks. Modern dune studies may also allow us to better estimate the height of ancient dunes. Although many features in the Navajo Sandstone can be interpreted to be similar to modern analogs, others indicate very different conditions. It appears that the Jurassic dunes were migrating more rapidly than most large modern dunes, indicating strong, persistent winds. Plants apparently could not stabilize these dunes, even during the rainy episodes. The dominant winds were out of the northwest, but nowhere do westerlies prevail in areas so far to the south today. High winds are commonly attributed to strong temperature gradients, and the thermal contrast between the poles and equator today causes strong atmospheric circulation. In the Jurassic, however, few, if any, glaciers existed and there is evidence that temperatures at high latitude positions were considerably milder than today. We hypothesize that in the southern summer, the supercontinent Pangea developed an effect similar to that over Asia today, and drew in air from the northwest across the equator. Our field studies of modern and ancient dunes will help us to develop a global climate model for the Jurassic. Experiments with the model will test several hypotheses relating to atmospheric circulation over Pangea. Ancient dune deposits record meteorological, hydrological, and biological events in amazing detail. Our study will attempt to mine this information with an eye toward better understanding atmospheric circulation under conditions different from those of today s Earth doc20882 none Pratt The International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) is funding the drilling of a 2km hole in the Chicxulub impact crater on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. NSF is funding US investigators to analyze core samples from the Chicxulub Scientific Drilling Project (CSDP). The Chicxulub crater is one of the world s largest impact craters and has been linked to the mass extnction event at the Cretaceous - Tertiary boundary ~65 million years ago. As part of the CSDP Science Team, the Principal Investigators will look at the Sulfur (S) isotopic systematics of the Chicxulub impact site. They will investigate the mixing between target rocks and the bolide at the drill site. This will be an important contribution to the complete characterization of the Chicxulub drill core samples doc20883 none This project involves the development and utilization of 3-dimensional photochemical models and their application to field data from the eastern U.S. The models will be used to elucidate the chemical mechanisms for the formation of ozone, odd hydrogen, peroxides, nitric acid, and secondary reaction products of biogenic hydrocarbons. This project will use data from recent field programs including the Texas Air Quality Study in Houston in , and the ongoing (since ) ozone Photochemistry and Climatology Experiment at a rural site in Pellston, Michigan doc20884 none This project targets the investigation of middle and secondary school students conceptions of variation and explores how those conceptions develop over time. The investigation proceeds as students explore data sets and sampling problems in their mathematics classes. Likewise, the investigation will shed light on teachers ideas about statistical variation, how those ideas change with experience, and how they affect teaching strategies. Attempts to understand teacher knowledge include an investigation of their pedagogical content knowledge-that is, knowledge specifically about how statistical variation can be taught effectively. These understandings-of student and teacher cognition-will in turn be used to help teachers design their own new approaches to teaching statistical variation. The effectiveness of these teacher-designed and research-based approaches will be tested against the performance of comparison groups of teachers and students doc20885 none Since very little research has examined the impact on surveys of the exploding growth of wireless communication devices, this study will assess the extent to which these devices are likely to change telephone surveys. This issue will be addressed by comparing the results of two national surveys, one using the usual list-assisted RDD sample and the other employing a sample of mobile telephone numbers. The questionnaire, which will be identical in both surveys, will include substantive items on important policy issues as well as inquiries about mobile telephone ownership and use. The analyses will search for significant differences between surveys along four dimensions-coverage, nonresponse, data quality, and relationships among variables. Methodological factors, such as the number of attempts, the percentage of sample numbers whose status as working or nonworking is indeterminate, and the effects of caller-id, will also be compared. The basic hypothesis underlying all analyses is that there are major differences between the two modes along each dimension. Given that wireless communication devices will only become more widely used and more sophisticated in the very near future, it is necessary to determine how they might enrich and supplement the survey process. This research will provide initial evidence. Contact through mobile telephones promises to make hard-to-reach respondents more accessible and to give voice to groups either poorly represented or not represented at all in current surveys. By gauging the reactions of respondents to survey contacts via a cellular telephone, the project also will provide practical guidance on incorporating wireless devices into the survey process. Since methodologists now predict that future surveys will be multi-modal, mixing present and future wireless communication devices with fixed line telephones and the web, this study will describe both the opportunities and the pitfalls involved. The end result will be an expanded definition of surveys and better and more valid data upon which to base public policy. This research is supported by the Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics Program and a consortium of federal statistical agencies under the Research on Survey and Statistical Methodology Funding Opportunity doc20886 none EROSION BENEATH THE LAURENTIDE ICE SHEET, AND ITS ROLE IN PLEISTOCENE ICE AGE DYNAMICS Subglacial erosion and sediment dynamics influence the size, stability, and climatic sensitivity of large ice sheets. These processes may regulate large-scale surging behavior, initiating rapid shifts in climate and sea level (MacAyeal, a,b), and perhaps dictate the periodicity of the Quaternary ice ages (Clark and Pollard, ). We intuitivly associate the scoured landscapes of the northern continents with subglacial erosion, yet estimates of the rates, timing and spatial pattern of erosion by the Pleistocene ice sheets are conflicting or ambiguous. Subglacial erosion is difficult to study because: (i) The processes involved take place beneath large ice sheets. (ii) As in all eroding landscapes, the record of change is continually effaced as the surface is removed, and (iii) Although thick deposits of Pleistocene glacial sediment, which contain information about erosional conditions, survive around the margins of former ice sheets, they are patchily preserved and difficult to date. We propose to study the history of erosion by the Laurentide ice sheet, using the cosmogenic isotopes 10 Be and 26 Al. First, we will date glacial sedimentary sequences at the southern margin of the former ice sheet using the technique of burial dating (Granger et al., ). Cosmogenic 10 Be and 26 Al are produced within the crystal structure of sedimentary quartz grains while the sediment is exposed to cosmic radiation near the Earth s surface. Once the sediment is buried, these isotopes decay at different rates and their ratio provides a measure of the burial time. We have used this technique in trial measurements on glaciofluvial sands interbedded with till, providing stratigraphically consistent mid-Pleistocene bracketing ages on previously undated glacial deposits. Second, we will use atmospherically-produced 10 Be, which accumulates in soils and is highly concentrated near the surface of deeply weathered terrains, to investigate the contribution of pre-glacial regolith to Laurentide tills. We presume the deep regolith that covered the Canadian Shield prior to the Quaternary must have contained an enormous inventory of 10 Be, far exceeding what could have accumulated on the craton during Quaternary interglacial periods. By measuring the 10 Be content of sediments eroded and deposited by the Laurentide ice sheet throughout the Pleistocene, we will track the removal of pre-glacial regolith and evaluate the ice sheet s response to the onset of hard-bed conditions. Our initial measurements show that mid-Pleistocene tills contain enormous concentrations of meteoric 10 Be. Concentrations in Wisconsin till are two orders of magnitude lower. It appears that the Laurentide ice sheet was mining a cover of heavily-weathered surficial material in the middle Pleistocene, but that this source has now been largely exhausted. We will apply these methods to well-studied sequences of till and interbedded glaciofluvial sediments in southwestern Minnesota, and early Pleistocene tills bracketed by well-dated ash layers in drill cores from South Dakota and Nebraska. This combination will provide samples of material eroded by the Laurentide Ice Sheet throughout the Pleistocene. The field area in southwestern Minnesota provides access to at least nine separate till units in outcrop and drill core. Extensive prior work in the area, and easy access to both surface and subsurface samples make it ideal for this study doc20887 none It is impossible to access the rupture zone of an earthquake at its focal depth, and thus the perception of earthquake rupture zones is inferred from indirect observations of surface rupture and exhumed fault-zones. A different approach is used here: direct observations in deep gold mines of South Africa where the PI recently mapped the rupture zones of three earthquakes. These mapped zones are associated with moderate earthquakes of magnitudes 3.7 to 5.1 that cut across the thick quartzite sequences of the western Witwatersrand basin. He found that a typical rupture zone of a single earthquake consists of 5-20 crosscutting gouge zones that were active during the earthquake. The gouge zones contain crushed, quartzitic powder, rock fragments or clay minerals; some of these zones are 15 cm thick. The PI proposes to analyze in detail the composition, microstructure and geochemical stability of the gouge found in these rupture zones. He plans to determine gouge mineralogy, high-pressure phases, gouge surface area and gouge solubility. He will examine the fragmentation processes at the microscopic scale and the transition from intact rock to gouge powder. The gouge material will be subjected to long term (1-3 months) cementation experiments at hydrothermal condition ( 500) to explore its stability and strengthening under mid-crust conditions. This study will resolve some central questions of earthquake processes and seismic hazard. 1. Is the slip during the earthquake localized along a single frictional surface or is it distributed along many fractures? 2. Do high-pressure and high-temperature mineralogical phases form during an earthquake (they could be unstable and not be found in exhumed faults)? 3. Could pseudotachylites form during shallow earthquakes? 4. How much gouge is formed during a single earthquake? 5. What portion of the mechanical energy of the earthquake is invested in gouge formation? 6. Is the formed gouge good starting material for fault-zone cementation during the interseismic stage? 7. Which properties of ERZ are indicators of the seismic activity and could be used for distinguishing between an exhumed seismic fault and an exhumed creeping? 8. How fast does gouge compact and cement (lithify), and how does that affect fault strength doc20888 none Collaborative Research: Tropical Vegetation during the Early Part of an Ice Age: An Intercontinental Comparison of Mid-Carboniferous Floras in their Geochronologic Setting Hermann Pfefferkorn Earth history records major climatic intervals that can be generalized as either globally warm or cold. Transitions to a globally cold Earth, representing the onset of an ice age in the broadest sense, has happened only a few times since the establishment of terrestrial ecosystems, for instance in the Carboniferous and Late Tertiary (at the beginning of our current cold climate phase). At such times of transition, there are expected to be significant changes in the flora in all environments and at all scales. This project focuses on the changes in tropical terrestrial floras during the initial phases of the Carboniferous ice age, up to and immediately after the Mid-Carboniferous boundary (320 Ma). Fossil plant-bearing rocks from coal basins in the United States, Poland, and the Czech Republic provide remarkably stratigraphically complete macrofloral and microfloral data sets, which have been collected for decades from rocks overlying the coals (macroflora) and the coals themselves (microflora). Additionally, volcanogenic ash-fall tuffs have been identified within some sections, providing minerals that can provide isotopic ages, permitting control of biostratigraphic correlations within and between the basins and other parts of the world. From these unpublished data and the supporting collections, a standard reference profile of vegetational changes will be established that will document the rates of taxonomic turnover through time. These data will allow for a quantitative analysis of the geographical extent and dominance-diversity magnitude of vegetational community changes in the tropics. Results from this project can serve as a baseline for the study of similar intervals in our current ice age doc20889 none There is perhaps no more visible a record of low-latitude shifts in climate than the hundreds of miles of tufa-encrusted shorelines and dissected diatomites laid down by an enormous (about the size of paleo-Lake Bonneville) paleolake that once occupied Uyuni Coipasa Poopo basin in southern Bolivia. Appropriately these deposits have been the focus of decades of research, including several major coring efforts by both American and French teams. These lake records are fuel for a heated debate over the relative role of regional tropical insolation versus global temperature in controlling moisture balance in lakes and glaciers in the past. For all the research effort expended on the lake deposits, the geochronology is still in disarray. In particular, dating of long cores from the Uyuni basin show poor agreement for the critical period 30-10 ka, with one chronology supporting the notion of regional summer insolation control on lake level, and the other flatly contradicting it. A key challenge in relating the lake-core records to such parameters as regional insolation and global temperature is that there is no direct physical evidence for lake depth. Such evidence, however, is available in the superb natural exposures of dissected lake deposits, which we surveyed for the first time two field seasons ago. The exposures are so impressive that we are confident that they will provide the key to reconstructing lake depths and lake chronology over the last ~120 ka. Our results so far show that the lake reached high elevations only twice in the last 120 ka, from 17 (?) to 14 ka, and from 108 to 94 ka. We request funds to continue our reconstruction of lake-level variations in the Uyuni Coipasa Poopo basin in southern Bolivia. Our intent is to establish a coherent stratigraphy and chronology of lake-level fluctuations using the natural exposures of lake sediments and shoreline tufas, and by both U-Th and 14 C dating of lacustrine tufas and mollusks. We also propose to employ 87Sr 86Sr and 234U 238U ratios in lake carbonates as tools for tracking changes in the proportions of runoff to ground-water inputs to the lake, and to infer lake depths from cores. Our revised lake-level chronology will in turn constitute an important test of the potential linkages between lake-level stages and variations in global temperature and low-latitude seasonal insolation over land and sea doc20890 none Spiegelman The distribution of melt and solid within partially molten regions of the Earth s mantle is one of the key parameters controlling the dynamics, properties and compositions of these regions. Field observations, experiments and theory all suggest that melt should be distributed in some form of channelized network at depth but the physical mechanisms for producing these networks are still not well understood. This project will develop new tools to investigate mechanical instabilities for flow localization based on fluid flow in deformable permeable media with strongly variable solid shear viscosity. These tools will complement existing models for flow localization due to reactive melt transport. Developing accurate flow solvers in heterogeneous media is numerically quite challenging, however, the investigation will be guided by recent experiments from David Kohlstedt s laboratory (U. Minnesota) on flow induced melt localization that provide clear and diagnostic tests for the theory. The opportunity to directly combine theory and experiment is rare and the investigators plan to work closely in consultation with the Kohlstedt group. However, the initial objective of this project is the development of the needed numerical tools. Once developed and validated with the experimental results, they will be used to extrapolate the experimental results to larger scales and investigate geologically relevant systems such as melt transport beneath mid-ocean ridges and island arcs doc20891 none ion, we must make major advances in both theory and engineering in operating system design and real-time scheduling theory. Of particular interest to this project are the issues of partition composition and the hierarchical decomposition of multiple real-time virtual resources doc20892 none The creation of the supercontinent of Gondwana is one of the most significant geologic events in the history of our planet yet the processes that led to its formation are poorly understood. In its predrift position near the dawn of the Cambrian, Madagascar was situated in the interior of Gondwana near the eastern edge of the East African Orogen (EAO). This orogen marks the join between East and West Gondwana, and it contains within it pieces of recycled continental crust, ophiolite, and island-arc and continental-arc terranes that formed within and marginal to the former Mozambique Ocean. Madagascar is thus critically positioned to reveal three key and currently enigmatic features of the EAO essential for understanding the transformation from Rodinia to Gondwana: (1) the nature of the volcanic terranes in the central part of the EAO and their possible extensions in Somalia, Ethiopia, and Rajasthan (India); (2) the chronology of terrane-suturing and continental collision events in the critical join between East and West Gondwana, and; (3) the structure of the eastern part of the EAO in the key transitional area from dominantly terrane-accreted geology (in the north) to continental collision and crustal overthickening (in the south). PI s Tucker and Kusky propose to undertake a two-year structural and geochronologic investigation of the polydeforrned and metamorphosed Precambrian rocks of central Madagascar (Itremo region). Work in this area holds great promise for resolving two first-order geologic questions in the eastern part of the East African Orogen: (1) What is the direction of early structural vergence (nappe emplacement) in the eastern part of the East African Orogen and what is the geometry of the superposed folds of central Madagascar? Is the structural vergence westerly or southwesterly, as has been recently proposed (Raeollson , Fernandez et al. in revision), or is it easterly or southeasterly as advocated by others (Tucker et al. and in revision; Collins et al. a,b)? Are other solutions possible9 (2) When did Pan-African defon-nation and metamorphism begin in the southern part of the EAO. Were the nappes of central Madagascar initially transported and metamorphosed prior to -800 Ma (Cox et al. ; Collins et al. a,b; Hulscher et al )? Alternatively, were they emplaced and metamorphosed after -800 Ma (Tucker et al. , and in revison; Fernandez et al. in revision; Cox et al. ). These questions are central to understanding the timing and geometry of plate convergence within the EAO. The Itremo region of central Madagascar is the best place to study and address these issues: it is situated within the region of Neoproterozoic overprinting, only - 1 50 km from the proposed suture with East Gondwana; bedrock exposure is superb and the contrasting rock types permit accurate mapping of folds and faults; stratigraphic facing directions are abundant and hence the inverted limbs of recumbent folds and thrust nappes can be readily identified, and; reliable cross-sections may be constructed owing to the consistent regional plunge of the youngest-generation folds. Research will proceed through an integrated program of geologic mapping, structural analysis, I I and U-Pb geochronology. Structural investigations and sample collections will be made in three key areas within the Itremo region, tentatively identified as comprising the inverted limbs of large-scale east-directed fold- or thrust-nappes (Tucker et al. in revision). Stratigraphic analysis, structural investigations and detailed mapping projects are designed to test our structural hypothesis and increase our knowledge of the regional geometry of the folds and faults. U-Pb geochronology of key samples will constrain the age of nappe emplacement and regional metamorphism, and provide a critical test of our collision model. This work will lead to a new understanding of the kinematics, age and overall structural vergence in the critical, eastern part of the EAO where strongly divergent views of its evolution arc emerging. Research will involve collaboration between professional colleagues in Madagascar and the U.S., and allow for the participation and training of American and Malagasy students in field- and laboratory-based research doc20893 none Agnew EarthScope is a major earth science research initiative that will integrate scientific information derived from seismology (US Array), geodesy (Plate boundary Observatory), subsurface sampling and measurement (SAFOD), remote sensing (InSAR), and complementary geology and geophysics to understand continental scale plate deformation and evolution. Funding for the EarthScope initiative is currently being discussed in Congress as part of NSF s FY budget. The Division of Earth Sciences has made FY funds available for projects that qualify as pre-EarthScope activity, i.e. activities that will facilitate or enable the construction, fabrication, installation or operation of EarthScope once it is funded under the MREFC (Major Research Equipment Facilities and Construction) account. Such activities include meetings and workshops, prototype development, site selection or characterization. This award provides funds to support activities which will make the data from the large number of strainmeters to be installed as part of the Plate Boundary Observatory (PBO) component of EarthScope more useful, and more widely used. At present, strainmeter data are used only by a small number of investigators, primarily those who install and operate the instruments; to the larger geophysical community these data seem somewhat mysterious, rather as GPS data originally did. The Principal Investigator will undertake several activities which should demystify strainmeter data for interested researchers, and thus make these data much more generally accessible. These activities include both didactic and research efforts, all drawing on the PIs recognized expertise in the area of strain measurement and interpretation. The specific work to be undertaken includes four activities: 1) the development of a strainmeter guide; 2) the development of processing software; 3) facilitating data availability; and 4) data characterization for array design doc20894 none This project aims at creating new knowledge on the design, analysis, and optimization of novel system architectures, network protocols, and software algorithms for building next generation optical Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) backbone networks. Particular research focus will include hierarchical optical switching, optical multicasting, and optimal topology reconfiguration. For hierarchical optical switching, the generalized optical switch architecture with multiple levels will be developed where the advantages of both optics and electronics will be exploited. For example, a hybrid switch architecture will include wavebands (bands of wavelengths) being switched all-optically, while wavelength and sub-wavelength connections may be switched with optical-electrical-optical (OEO) switches. Results from this investigation will provide guidelines on where to strategically place resources such as hierarchical optical switches. This project will also design optical multicasting switch architectures and develop mathematical models and efficient algorithms for supporting light-trees in a network with hierarchical optical switching. The research team will develop new efficient models for network operators as well as will design new algorithms for protecting light-trees using various schemes such as link protection and shared protection. In particular, the signaling protocols for set up, maintenance, and termination of light-tree based connections will be designed and studied by simulation. Finally, in the part of the research related to the virtual topology design, the reconfigurations of WDM networks will be studied so that the bandwidth upgrades are taken into account, e.g. instead of fully taking down a lightly-loaded lightpath or adding a maximum-capacity lightpath, an existing lightpath can be upgraded when a fraction of its free capacity is needed. In particular, traffic fluctuations, such as within the global optical network over the time zones, can create another dynamism, i.e., traffic intensity peak rates. In this context, the research team will study different virtual topology-design methods to obtain a better understanding of this and similar problems related to dynamic traffic fluctuations doc20895 none This small grant for exploratory research will support investigation of the use of media-rich instrumented environments in the performing and media arts. Using as the driver application a specific large-scale performance work, based on Homer s The Iliad, this project will begin development of a distributed control system. An important aspect of this system will be the ability of the audience to interact with the performance environment. Participants start their experience through a survey on a website, which populates a database used throughout the performance process. In the venue itself, which consists of a gallery as well as performance spaces, participants will be linked to their database records using standard radio frequency identification tags in their tickets, which are read by ubiquitous antennas. Media and story choices in the space will be adapted, based on the particular audience members attending on the particular day. As the experience progresses, the database will be updated with sensor data and images collected from the performance. The responsive environment is created by the interconnection of the database, sensors, and automated production equipment for the control of lighting, sound, motorized scenery, and video or image projection. In the information society of the twenty-first century, technologies to manage, enable, and advance cultural innovation will be among the most valuable assets of civilization. This project will explore an emerging area that could be of great commercial, social, and scientific importance in the coming decades doc20896 none Edwards Bacterial artificial chromosome libraries are collections of large (100, 000 - 200,000 DNA base pair) DNA fragments that are made retrievable and manipulatable by insertion into a specialized vector. As resources for easily obtaining large amounts of DNA sequences for comparative purposes, for understanding the structure of eukaryotic genomes, and for expressing and manipulating genes and their phenotypic effects in developing embryos, BAC libraries are unsurpassed. However, constructing BAC libraries is beyond the abilities of most laboratories not specifically tailored for this purpose. This project will consist of constructing, archiving and disseminating to the international community of scientists BAC libraries from five species of Reptilia, including a bird. The five focal species will be Painted Turtle (Chrysemys picta), Tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus), South American Worm Lizard (an amphisbaenian; Amphisbaea alba), American Alligator (Alligator mississippiensis), and the flightless Emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae). In the event that an appropriate Tuatara sample is not available (a distinct possibility given its endangered status and restricted range in New Zealand), a BAC library from a snake will be constructed. Reptilia, consisting of birds as well as species commonly referred to as reptiles, are poorly studied from genetic, developmental, genomic and phylogenetic perspectives; although Reptilia are much more diverse than their sister group, the mammals, mammals are much better studied as model biological species. The construction and arraying of BAC libraries from these species will open up many new avenues of research into reptile genomics that were previously unapproachable. There will be many scientific uses for these BAC libraries, including facilitating acquisition of comparative DNA data for phylogenetic and comparative genomic purposes, and a better understanding of the function of genes responsible for many features first appearing in the reptiles, such as feathers, temperature-dependent sex determination, limb reduction and loss, and large-scale genome reduction compared to mammals. Thus these libraries will fill a major gap in our understanding of vertebrate genomics, a rapidly progressing discipline spurred on by the recent sequencing of the complete human, mouse and pufferfish genomes doc20897 none Henyey EarthScope is a major earth science research initiative that will integrate scientific information derived from seismology (US Array), geodesy (Plate boundary Observatory), subsurface sampling and measurement (SAFOD), remote sensing (InSAR), and complementary geology and geophysics to understand continental scale plate deformation and evolution. Funding for the EarthScope initiative is currently being discussed in Congress as part of NSF s FY budget. The Division of Earth Sciences has made FY funds available for projects that qualify as pre-EarthScope activity, i.e. activities that will facilitate or enable the construction, fabrication, installation or operation of EarthScope once it is funded under the MREFC (Major Research Equipment Facilities and Construction) account. Such activities include meetings and workshops, prototype development, site selection or characterization. This award provides funds to hold a workshop on the role of complementary geophysics in the EarthScope program. By complementary geophysics is meant those geophysical techniques and data that are not at the core of the EarthScope facilities initiative, including gravity, magnetics, magnetotellurics, electromagnetics, petrophysics, heat flow, geophysical well logs, remote sensing data, TM images, DEM data and industry seismics. The principal focus will be on the value added aspect of the complementary geophysical data. It should be noted that a similar workshop to consider complementary geologic effors will be held at the GSA Annual Meeting in Denver in October, doc20898 none Ares J. Rosakis Highly instrumented, real-time, dynamic idealized experiments are being used to model earthquakes in the laboratory towards a comprehensive understanding of the basic physical phenomena governing earthquake rupture. Laboratory experiments are performed by creating idealized two-dimensional models made of Homalite-100 or polycarbonate. These materials are birefringent, enabling the use of the optical technique of dynamic photoelasticity. Photoelastic fringe patterns are captured and recorded throughout experimental events by high-speed photography (2 million frames per second), enabling the inference of real-time full-field stress field evolution. A custom high-speed infrared camera (1 million frames per second) is also being used to image thermal fields due to rupture. Dynamic specimen loading is accomplished by gas gun fired projectile impact or by an exploding wire system. Specific areas of study are: (1) nature of rupture propagation (crack-like vs. pulse-like); (2) experimental verification of the achievable range of rupture speed (limited to ~0.8 times the material s shear wave speed vs. supershear); (3) determination to what extent differences in properties (e.g., wave speeds) across inhomogeneous crustal faults promote directionality of rupture; (4) conditions of rupture across step-overs or jogs in en echelon faults (e.g., successive triggering, jumping, or slowing down of ruptures); (5) investigation of whether ruptures incident on fault bends or branches get transmitted, slow down, arrest, or bifurcate creating new fault surfaces; (6) nature of frictional heat dissipation, asperity heating, local melting, and lubrication along active faults doc20899 none The primary goal of this project is to test the idea that macroevolutionary parameters might be fairly general among larger groups. Bellerophontiform molluscs share numerous shell characters with contemporaneous gastropods even though bellerophonts are bilaterally symmetrical whereas early gastropods are asymmetrical. Workers consider many of these features to have similar biological implications for both bellerophonts and asymmetrical gastropods. If so, then PI expects to see similar rates of change in those characters as well as similar driven trends (i.e., biased productions of particular character states). He will evaluate alternative hypotheses using likelihood approaches designed by the author to simultaneously test phylogenetic and character evolution parameters. In doing so, tests will assess whether character parameters for bellerophonts are significantly different than for asymmetrical gastropods and, if so, in what ways. A secondary goal of the study is to test basic ideas about bellerophont relationships, such as whether they are monophyletic or polyphyletic, and ideas about how closely related bellerophonts are to asymmetrical snails doc20900 none Humphreys This award provides continued funding for the CD-ROM (Continental Dynamics of the Rocky Mountains) collaborative investigation which is designed to understand the tectonic evolution of the lithosphere of the southern Rocky Mountains. A transect from Wyoming to New Mexico is providing an opportunity to evaluate the hypothesis that lithospheric architecture of the Southwest reflects a resolvable mixture of structures that formed during early Proterozoic assembly of the continent and modifications that took place during younger intracratonic tectonism that were themselves influenced by the Proterozoic compositional structure. Phase 1 ( - ) was successful in substantially verifying this hypothesis. The PIs imaged the Cheyenne Belt and Jemez lineament; both are interpreted to be Paleoproterozoic paleosubduction zones that also show long-lived and strong influence on younger intracratonic tectonism. Both are also associated with lateral changes in deep chemical lithosphere, such that the mantle provinces can be linked to crustal provinces, demonstrating the antiquity of the mantle transitions. With this bridge funding award, the Principal Investigators will conduct an annual workshop, complete the analysis of data sets generated in Phase 1, increase productivity in terms of published papers, and prepare for Phase 2 of the CD-ROM project doc20901 none Keller The architecture of continental margins in terms of how they are created is not well understood because most of the previous work has been on successfully rifted margins after rifting is complete. Both continental (fault dominated) end-members and oceanic (magma dominated) rift end-members are well studied, but the transitional stage is not understood. This project will document this critical transition from continental to oceanic rifting. The PIs will carry out seismic experiments, integrated with geochemical, gravity and structural studies, to study lithospheric structure in one of the rare areas where the transition from continental rifting to incipient spreading is captured - the main Ethiopian Rift (MER). In the MER the along-axis transition to initial seafloor spreading provides a spatial proxy for temporal variability. Specific objectives are: 1) to determine detailed crust and mantle structure across and along a transitional rift segment and 2) to understand magmagenesis beneath and within the rift. The PIs will obtain crustal P-and S-velocity cross-sections that can be interpreted for lithology across the Ethiopian rift at 10 deg. N where active magmatic centers first appear, and along-strike to the north to study the transition into fully magmatic rifting. They will interpret existing and new gravity data in light of their new seismic data, and use geochemical data to constrain the physical state of the upper mantle and magmatic inputs to the crust. The project (US - EAGLE) is fully integrated with the already funded UK - EAGLE initiative. Scientists at Leicester, Leeds and London, have been awarded UK funds to carry out a single refraction profile across the Ethiopian rift in January , coupled with local seismicity studies and teleseismic recording. The US - EAGLE PIs will shoot and record a complementary orthogonal along-axis wide-angle profile; and will shoot fan shots into these linear arrays and the local seismic network to provide a measure of 3D coverage. Together, these seismological experiments form a nested, multi-scale seismic image of the Ethiopian rift and plume. The seismic studies will be coupled with geochemical and petrological and gravity studies (US), and structural, thermochronological, magnetotelluric and additional gravity studies (UK doc20902 none The Copper Mountain Conference Series, begun in , is held in early April at Copper Mountain, Colorado; the subject of these meetings alternates yearly between Multigrid Methods and Iterative Methods. The Series is an important forum for the exchange of ideas in these two closely related fields. The meetings are planned for five days, with sessions consisting of individual talks of approximately a half hour each. By tradition, these conferences will have an egalitarian style with no invited talks and student presentations put on equal footing with all others. One of the main goals is to enhance the participation in this meeting by students, women, and minority mathematicians. This is accomplished through a student paper competition, and a special fund to augment travel support for women and minority mathematicians. Several topics of emphasis have been selected for this Series: the coming conferences will emphasize advanced architectures (reflecting a heightened interest due to multiprocessor computing), algebraic methods (spurred by the recent advent of very large discrete problems arising from unstructured grids), eigenvalue problems (where recent trends include robust parallel implementations of classical methods), and preconditioning (where great improvements have come from domain decomposition or parallel approximate inverses). One important feature of the multigrid conference series is the use of tutorials. The series has featured half-day tutorials on basic multigrid, algebraic multigrid, multigrid for parallel computers, and cache-aware multigrid. Other important features of the conference proceedings include preliminary proceedings, given out upon registration, and special issues of major journals (SIAM SISC, ETNA, etc.) devoted to the conferences doc20903 none Understanding Archean crustal and mantle evolution hinges upon proper identification and characterization of oceanic lithosphere. The PI has discovered and reported a complete, albeit slightly dismembered and metamorphosed, Archean ophiolite sequence in the North China Craton. The top of the ophiolitic succession is marked by sulfide-rich chert and banded iron fon-nation overlying several tens-to one hundred meters of variably deformed pillow lavas. These grade down through a mixed dike pillow lava section into a 2 km thick I 00% sheeted dike complex mapped continuously for more than 5 km along strike; reconnaissance mapping suggests that the dike complex may extend for more than 20 km. The dikes consist of diabase, basalt and hb-pyx-gabbro. Most have chilled margins developed on their NE sides, but not their SW sides, indicating one-way chilling. The sheeted dike complex is underlain by several km of mixed isotropic and foliated gabbro, which develop compositional layering approximately 2 km below the sheeted dikes, and then over several hundred meters merge into strongly compositionally layered gabbro and olivine-gabbro. The layered gabbro becomes mixed with layered pyroxenite gabbro marking a transition zone that grades into cumulate ultramafic rocks including dunite, pyroxenite and wehrlite, and finally into strongly defon-fied and serpentinized olivine and orthopyroxene-bearing ultramafic rocks that may be depleted mantle harzburgite tectonites. The PI has obtained a U Pb zircon age of 2.505 Ga from gabbro of the Dongwanzi ophiolite, making it the world s oldest recognized, laterally- extensive complete ophiolite sequence. Study of this remarkable ophiolite may offer the best constraints yet on the nature of the Archean oceanic crust and mantle, and offer insights to the style of Archean plate tectonics and global heat loss mechanisms. The Dongwanzi ophiolite is one of the largest well-preserved greenstone belts in the Zunhua structural belt (part of the Central orogenic belt),that divides the North China craton into eastern and western blocks. More than I 000 other fragments of gabbro, pillow lava, sheeted dikes, harzburgite, and podifonn-chromite bearing dunite occur as tectonic blocks in a blotite- gneiss matrix in the Zunhua structural belt. The PI interprets these rocks as an Archean ophiolitic melange and recognize that some of the blocks preserve deeper levels of oceanic mantle than the Dongwanzi ophiolite. The PI and co-workers have designed a comprehensive series of studies to fully document the field, structural, geochronological, mineralogical, and chemical characteristics of this ophiolite and related melange. They will assess what these data mean in ten-ns of Archean crustal and mantle evolution, thermal state of the early Earth, and ideas about Precambrian plate tectonics. They regard this as an unsurpassed opportunity to evaluate fundamental properties of Archean crust and mantle, and to understand processes critical for evaluating Archean oceanic crustal and mantle evolution. Understanding Archean oceanic processes in the North China craton will provide a valuable contrast with similar processes recorded in younger ophiolites, indicating how mid-ocean ridge processes may have evolved from a period of high heat production to one of lower heat production. Detailed mapping will accurately delineate the extent, thickness, and relationships between individual units, which is important for understanding mechanisms of Archean sea floor spreading and heat loss. Structural analysis of mantle tectonites will reveal deformation conditions in the Archean oceanic mantle. U Pb geochronology will be used to establish the age and duration of magmatism represented in the ophiolite and document the structural chronology by dating igneous dikes and plutons that intruded between different events, as deten-nined by mapping. Geochemical analyses will be aimed at determining relationships between the crustal and depleted mantle components of the ophiolite, and comparing these data with younger ophiolites from different tectonic settings, and also from Archean greenstone belts, some of which may include severely dismembered Archean ophiolite fragments. Analyses will include major, minor, trace, REE, and several isotopic systems (in collaboration with geochemists from several cooperating institutions)and will be used to assess crustal and mantle evolution. Archean oceanic lithospheric structure is likely to have been as complex and variable as that in the present-day plate mosaic. Documentation of the characteristics of the Dongwanzi ophiolite and related rocks may serve as the first reference column for Archean oceanic lithosphere, since it is the most complete Archean ophiolite known on the planet doc20845 none This collaborative project focuses on network-level solutions for exploiting the time-varying nature of the wireless environment to increase the overall performance of the system taking into account quality of service (QoS) and fairness for Multimedia Wireless Systems. The proposed algorithms are classified opportunistic since they consider channel conditions (and related definitions of per-user utility). The following research activities will be particularly pursued: opportunistic scheduling with and without explicit delay requirements as well as opportunistic scheduling in the frequency domain. The objective related to opportunistic scheduling without explicit delay requirements is to develop scheduling algorithms that exploit the time-varying nature of the wireless channel to optimize network performance under different fairness requirements. In particular, the channel estimation problem will be explored for which fast methodologies to effectively track the system parameters through stochastic approximation types of techniques will be developed. For opportunistic scheduling with explicit delay requirements, the goal will be to develop scheduling mechanisms for real-time applications such as voice and video where the objective is not only to schedule users based on their channel conditions and fairness constraints, but also based on their deadlines. In particular, the problems of opportunistic scheduling without individual QoS constraints and problems of opportunistic scheduling with individual QoS requirements will be studied. For that purpose, the off-line optimal scheduling solutions that provide benchmarks in evaluating other schemes will be developed. On the other hand, the on-line algorithms that take into account network traffic statistics will be developed and proven on practicability. Finally, the activities related to opportunistic scheduling in the frequency domain will consider taking advantage of both time-domain and frequency-domain diversity in wireless systems. In particular, the problems will be explored where the objective will be to maximize the system performance where power could be an explicit constraint or a penalty function. Other types of problems that will be explored here will deal with minimizing the transmitted power subject to performance constraints doc20881 none Collaborative Research:Paleometeorological Records from Sand Dunes and Eolian Sandstones This three-year proposal requests support for collaborative research on modern and ancient sand dunes by earth scientists at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and University of Nevada s Desert Research Institute. Field and laboratory work will concentrate on the 190-million-year-old Navajo Sandstone of the southwestern United States and on modern dunes in California and Nevada. The Navajo Sandstone accumulated in the subtropics, near the western edge of Pangea, the largest continental mass known from Earth history. The ancient rocks contain evidence for annual cycles in the direction and strength of the dominant wind, as well as evidence for heavy rainfall events, brief wind reversals, and a surprisingly high level of animal activity. Because we can recognize annual cycles of deposition, we can ascertain the migration rates of the sand dunes, and the seasonality and frequency of rainfall events. The rains may have occurred during long rainy episodes similar to conditions that prevailed in the Sahara desert between 14,000 and 5,000 years ago. A high water table between dunes may explain why abundant animal and plant life was present even while the dunes were actively migrating. The brief wind reversals may represent the passage of fronts. We will monitor modern sand dunes during frontal passages to see if they record these events with deposits similar to those we have seen in the rocks. Modern dune studies may also allow us to better estimate the height of ancient dunes. Although many features in the Navajo Sandstone can be interpreted to be similar to modern analogs, others indicate very different conditions. It appears that the Jurassic dunes were migrating more rapidly than most large modern dunes, indicating strong, persistent winds. Plants apparently could not stabilize these dunes, even during the rainy episodes. The dominant winds were out of the northwest, but nowhere do westerlies prevail in areas so far to the south today. High winds are commonly attributed to strong temperature gradients, and the thermal contrast between the poles and equator today causes strong atmospheric circulation. In the Jurassic, however, few, if any, glaciers existed and there is evidence that temperatures at high latitude positions were considerably milder than today. We hypothesize that in the southern summer, the supercontinent Pangea developed an effect similar to that over Asia today, and drew in air from the northwest across the equator. Our field studies of modern and ancient dunes will help us to develop a global climate model for the Jurassic. Experiments with the model will test several hypotheses relating to atmospheric circulation over Pangea. Ancient dune deposits record meteorological, hydrological, and biological events in amazing detail. Our study will attempt to mine this information with an eye toward better understanding atmospheric circulation under conditions different from those of today s Earth doc20906 none Thermal and Rheological Controls on the Emplacement of Basaltic Lava Flows PIs: Cashman & Kauahikaua This is a renewal proposal that follows directly in theme and approach to the previous award. Recent studies of active pahoehoe and `a`a flows in Hawai`i, including those by the PIs, have shown that the explicit link between flow morphology and emplacement involves the relative rates of cooling, crystallization, and flow advance. Critical are conditions of lava transport from the vent to the flow front. Field observations of flow surface morphologies have led to rheological studies on yield strength development in crystal-liquid suspensions. Novel experiments using PEG wax suggest that solidification in uniform channelized flows may be described by a single dimensionless parameter and channel aspect ratio. Non-uniformities such as channel divergences, constrictions, and sinuosity also may stabilize or disrupt surface crust. Results from the previous award illustrate the success of these approaches. The current award will use high resolution satellite remote sensing to map basaltic flows, complete additional analog experiments to better define important material parameters and flow controls, and compare model predictions with detailed field observations of flows. This renewal award continues support for the collaboration between Cashman (Univ. of Oregon), Kauahikaua (U.S.G.S., Hawaiian Volcano Observatory), and Griffiths & Kerr (Australian National University). The research team brings together expertise on the field mapping and interpretation of Hawaiian lava flows and expertise on fluid mechanical analysis of solidifying flows doc20907 none Morozov The Principal Investigators will conduct high-resolution seismic imaging of the San Andreas Fault zone by analyzing data from a removable, multilevel and multi-sensor, 3-component seismic array in the borehole of the SAFOD Pilot Hole. Specifically, they will record the borehole seismometer string during the active source experiments that are funded through other awards. To these sensors, they will add two mutually orthogonal surface spreads to perform a high-resolution, 3D, direct reflection imaging of the SAF zone from the surface to the depth of about 2 km. For sources, they will use a downhole vibrator and surface Vibroseis from a reflection refraction line across the borehole site. The high-resolution seismic experiment will be an inexpensive alternative to a full surface 3D survey (very expensive!), with the advantages of direct and detailed imaging of the fault zone doc20908 none Xu, Zhengyuan U of California - Riverside The rapid evolution of the global information society has been fostered by the increasing demand for seamless wideband integrated services. The development of advanced communication technologies is becoming imperative to meet such a demand. Future desired services will range from the traditional voice and paging services to interactive multimedia, including high speed data communications. To support multiple bit-rate transmissions, direct sequence (DS) code division multiple access (CDMA) technology appears as an appealing solution due to the inherent merits of CDMA modulation. In DS spreading, the spreading sequence which will be adopted for next generation wireless systems will be aperiodic with period much longer than the bit duration. Employment of long codes bestows several benefits on the communication system. First, it increases the immunity of the system to multiuser interference (MUI) on the average because of less correlation of signature waveforms of different bits from different users. This leads to improved system performance. Secondly, spreading by long codes can uniformly distribute the signal bandwidth over the available spectrum, thus improving the bandwidth efficiency. In addition, long spreading codes provide end-users more secure communication and prevents interception by eavesdroppers doc20909 none Ahrens This award will fund a range of studies of the equations of state, sound velocity, thermochemical properties, and thermal conductivity of important model earth materials in the system MgO-SiO2 under conditions accessible only by shock loading of targets that are porous, pre-heated, or specially synthesized dense starting phases. The investigators multianvil method allows routine preparation of polycrystalline samples of mantle minerals of a size and shape suitable for high-quality shock compression studies. Experiments with majorite, ilmentite, wadsleyite, ringwoodite, and perovskite starting materials and completion of studies on MgSiO3 glass and gem quality enstatite, will yield data at multiple internal energy states, from which the Gruneisen parameter will be extracted under lower mantle conditions. This award will also fund construction of an optical line-imaging VISAR (Velocity Interferometer System For Any Reflector) that will allow measurement of longitudinal and bulk sound velocities under high shock pressure by the overtaking method. This method allows comparison of mineral sound velocities with the Earth itself as well as determination of melting temperatures at ultra-high pressure. Experiments on both porous and preheated MgO will determine its melting behavior above the range previously studied with diamond cell anvils, resolving the enormous discrepancy between theoretical high pressure melting models for MgO and present data to 40 GPa doc20910 none Bryce Continental basalts provide the broadest insights into the nature and origin of the continental lithosphere but, because they may represent a mixture of contributions acquired during melt formation, transport from the source region, evolution in a magma chamber, and eruption, the chemical identities and the relative roles of these processes are topics of debate. Isotopic and chemical studies of melt inclusions in phenocrysts of mafic lavas provide a means to examine and quantify contributions from these processes before exotic melts have been mixed away during melt aggregation and magma storage. The focus of the proposed work is to investigate these contributions in the 0-8 Ma alkali basalts of the Cima volcanic field of eastern California. Mantle xenoliths contained within the lavas demonstrate that the mantle at shallow levels beneath Cima is compositionally heterogeneous and that the lavas had a limited residence time in crustal chambers. Accordingly, the large variations in Pb isotopic compositions observed in magmas of the Cima suite most likely reflect signatures acquired during their formation and transport through the mantle, rather than from assimilation of continental crust. The proposed study will combine in situ techniques (e.g., electron and ion microprobe) to characterize the major, trace, and Pb isotopic compositions of melt and mineral inclusions in olivine and other phases from mafic (MgO 6 wt. %) Cima lavas. Our results will address whether the compositional and Pb isotopic variety of melt inclusions trapped in continental lavas is even greater than that observed in the suite of lavas that contain them, from which we can better delimit the nature and origin of compositional domains in the mantle at levels deeper than those sampled by xenoliths. The results from this project can be combined with ongoing studies of the isotopic and compositional variability of melt inclusions trapped in oceanic basaltic phenocrysts to improve our understanding of the processes significant in the generation of basaltic magmas doc20844 none The failure of large groups of students to perform to their potential.such as females in math, or African Americans across a variety of academic disciplines.is one of the great tragedies in our educational system. The significance of this problem has inspired numerous investigations of its scope, nature, and potential causes. A recent breakthrough points to the power that social context can have in creating, perpetuating, or eliminating the underperformance that has hindered these groups. Steele, Aronson, Spencer, and their colleagues have demonstrated the crucial role of stereotype threat, a situational phenomenon that occurs when individuals who are targets of stereotypes alleging intellectual inferiority are reminded of the possibility of confirming these stereotypes (e.g., Spencer, Steele, Steele, ). For example, Spencer et al. ( ) showed that high-achieving female college students performed significantly worse than males on a standardized math test when the stereotype about their math ability was made salient (.Males have performed better than females on this test in the past..). However, this gender gap was eliminated simply by changing the words used for introducing the test (.Males and females have performed equally well on this test in the past..). A counterintuitive finding is that only individuals who are highly identified with success and achievement in given stereotyped domains are the ones who show deficits under threat, in contrast to stigmatized individuals who are not achievement oriented in these domains (Steele, ). Thus, it is the people in the vanguard of their group who are the most vulnerable to situations in which stereotypes about their ability become salient. The detrimental effects of stereotype threat extend to African Americans (e.g., Steele (2) whether reasoning becomes more algorithmic and less meaningful under stereotype threat; and (3) ways in which the detrimental effects of stereotype threat can be mitigated or eliminated doc20912 none This grant supports theoretical research for the development of a rigorous microscopic approach to describe polymer dynamics in structurally homogeneous, but dynamically heterogeneous polymer melts and blends as a function of their chemical structure and of the thermodynamic conditions. The achievement of a molecular level understanding of the properties of polymer melts and blends is relevant for the development of new materials. This research is an extension of the original approach developed over the past few years of the prior grant, where the equations were formalized and the dynamics of unentangled polymer melts were investigated. For the first time, we were able to describe quantitatively the onset of anomalous dynamics observed in computer simulations and experiments of unentangled polyethylene dynamics. For the new research we focus on extending our approach to describe the motion of dynamically heterogeneous fluids in polymer melts, undercooled polymer melts and polymer blends. The presence of dynamical heterogeneities, increasing in size with decreasing temperature, appears to be the mechanism responsible for the onset of the glass transition. A study of the interplay between heterogeneous dynamics and concentration fluctuations is likely to explain the dynamical anomalies present in structurally homogeneous polymer blends, such as the breaking of time-temperature superposition. %%% This grant supports a theoretical investigation of the dynamical response of polymer systems. The theory developed will fill an important gap in the desciption of these materials and should have wide application doc20913 none Jeffrey Freymueller This project is measuring the absolute value of gravity, co-located with GPS measurements, in Alaska. Proposed explanations for the transient deformation after great earthquakes include viscoelastic response, aseismic creep and combinations of the two. Different models of postseismic viscoelastic relaxation predict observable gravity changes over km length scales, with a complex spatial pattern. To date, the viscosity profile is best determined by postglacial rebound studies. Gravity and GPS measurements offer the opportunity to obtain viscosity profile estimates for the Alaskan plate boundary. The area is especially interesting, as the viscosity of subduction zone materials may be very different from that beneath the centers of continental and oceanic plates. Aseismic creep is predicted to produce deformation of a more limited and markedly different spatial character than that of viscoelastic relaxation. Determining the contribution of aseismic creep in postseismic deformation is important in estimating recurrence intervals for great earthquakes. This project is establishing a baseline gravity network of fifteen stations in Alaska. The bulk of the network forms a transect perpendicular to the predicted contours of maximum gravity change in the far field. Additional points are located within the deformation near field. Gravity measurements are collocated with existing GPS stations. These initial measurements form the basis for testing different postseismic deformation models. Additional activities include collecting auxiliary data to correct the gravity data for signals such as water table variations. A portion of a - relative gravity survey is being repeated as well, in order to determine the total gravity change over the Kenai Peninsula since the earthquake. Data are distributed through traditional means and an Internet website doc20914 none The FAST proposal seeks to integrate developmental mappings of students understanding of science topics with formative assessment. The basic idea is that developmental maps can form the framework for assessing students knowledge of science concepts and for the design of follow-up student experiences. The project extends the Minstrell Diagnoser concept down to the elementary level. The project would involve generating mappings of two science concepts and then collecting data to validate student s classification. Later phases of the work would lead teachers to use the results of the formative assessment to improve student learning. To do this, they would employ hand-held computers to record individual students states within the facet map. This diagnostic placement would then become the basis of teacher reflection. The investigators are cognizant of the reality of limited time on the part of the teacher. The hand-held computers will display information about possible instructional strategies given the state of the learner s understanding. Data collection devices will be teacher journals, classroom observation, and student assessments doc20915 none Naumann The western Galapagos archipelago is one of the most active volcanic areas on Earth. This volcanologic, petrologic, and geochemical study of Darwin volcano is designed to test competing hypotheses for the growth of Galapagos-type shield volcanoes and their geochemical variations. The origin of their distinct overturned soup plate morphology is not merely a provincial issue: Galapagos-type shields may be characteristic of many seamounts and extraterrestrial volcanoes. Little is known of Darwin volcano, but several reconnaissance specimens from the lowermost flanks indicate that it is mostly made up of basalts with isotopic compositions are between those of lavas erupted from mid-oceanic ridges and those erupted from hotspots. Despite their isotopic character, the same lavas are rich in incompatible elements, more typical of ocean-island basalts. Darwin volcano was chosen for this study because although it remains virtually unstudied, it is situated between the two well-studied volcanoes of Alcedo and Wolf on Isabela Island. Alcedo and Wolf volcanoes represent two end members in the western Galapagos with respect to geochemical variation, elevation, shape, and caldera depth, and the study of Darwin volcano will allow for testing and refinement of models that predict the origin of these diverse geochemical systems and volcano morphologies. The goals of this project seek insights into the fundamental processes of ocean-island magmatism. These include: 1) documentation of the eruptive processes and the chronology, distribution and volume of eruptions that have constructed Darwin volcano; 2) determination of the petrologic and geochemical variation of Darwin s lavas in order to document the processes involved with the generation, storage, and eruption of magmas; and 3) a comparison of Darwin volcano with other well-studied western Galapagos volcanoes in order test the hypothesis that the magma supply rate to each volcano is the dominant control not only of the geochemical variation of lavas but also each volcanoes unique size, shape and caldera morphology doc20781 none PROJECT SUMMARY With prior support from NSF, we have shown that TIMS (Thermal Ionization Mass Spectrometry) U-series dating of pedogenic carbonate can provide a precise chronology of pedogenesis and reliable ages for appropriate Quaternary alluvial deposits (Sharp et al., accepted). Though the U Th ratios of pedogenic carbonate of carbonate-clast dominated alluvium at Kyle Canyon (Nevada) are too low for U-series dating, pedogenic carbonate in granitic-clast dominated gravels of the Wind River Basin (Wyoming) is highly suitable. Precise U-series ages (1-2 percent, 2) may be measured on a few cubic millimeters of pedogenic carbonate and require only very small corrections for detrital 230Th. Suites of ages may be screened for reliability using criteria inherent in the U-series results. The time lag between clast deposition and accumulation of datable carbonate.a critical parameter if U-series dates of innermost clast-rinds are to be used to date host Quaternary deposits. is estimated to be 5+ 5 kyr in the Wind River basin. O- and C-isotope analyses of a trial suite of pedogenic carbonate samples shows that a temporally resolved stable isotope paleoclimatic record can be constructed using pedogenic carbonate dated by U-series. Funds are requested to further develop U-series dating of pedogenic carbonate and its application to the refinement of a Rocky Mountain glacial chronology. Emphasis will be placed on resolving the timing of Bull Lake glacial advances (at their type locality) with respect to other regional and global climate records. Moreover, we propose to characterize the spatial and temporal accumulation of pedogenic carbonate in relict soils of Late- Middle to Late Pleistocene deposits, and measure the O- and C-isotopic compositions of carbonate samples dated by U-series. We will interpret these data to provide a comprehensive history of paleoenvironmental change in the Wind River Basin throughout much of the late Illinoian and Wisconsin glacial cycles. Ultimately, our goal is to correlate the soils-based paleoenvironmental record with the geomorphic expressions of paleoclimatic change.the well-preserved glacial moraines and glacio-fluvial terraces of the Basin.by establishing a common chronological framework based on precise U-series ages. This is a collaborative proposal. Warren Sharp and Ken Ludwig (Berkeley Geochronology Center) will be responsible for U-series analyses and age interpretations; Ron Amundson (U.C. Berkeley) will provide field and laboratory expertise in pedology and stable isotope analysis and interpretation; Oliver Chadwick (U.C. Santa Barbara) will provide expertise in Quaternary geology, geomorphology and soil stratigraphy as well as familiarity with the Wind River area doc20917 none The Talladega College Science and Mathematics Improvement Program addresses the problem of low levels of African American participation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines and workforce through enhanced STEM teaching and learning that will result from sustainable improvements of the institution s STEM instructional and research infrastructure. Infrastructure enhancements will address (1) student recruitment, enrollment, retention and graduation; (2) curriculum reform and improvement, infusion of technology to enhance instruction, undergraduate research; and, (3) faculty development. Curriculum reform efforts include revision and enhancement of STEM gate keeper courses, development of honors courses in biology, chemistry and computer science; and the establishment of an Environmental Science Program. Faculty will be provided professional development opportunities to enhance their competence and currency within STEM disciplines and to effectively incorporate technology and active learning techniques into the learning process. Students will be provided opportunities to engage in research activity on-campus and at research institutions under the tutelage of research scientists doc20918 none Norfolk State University will implement Science and Technology Academicians on the Road to Success (STARS), a robust program encompassing undergraduate recruitment, pre-entrance preparation, advising, mentorship, research, and curricula enhancement to address the low graduation rates of students of historically under-represented groups. Project activities are based on the hypothesis that providing students an environment that ties all the components of student success into a coherent path with a clear purpose will significantly increase success rates in STEM disciplines. STARS will first provide faculty training on advising, mentoring and teaching and learning best practices and opportunities to enhance and or initiate research endeavors; second, it will merge recruitment, pre-entrance preparation, advising, and mentorship efforts to create a seamless environment, and third, it will provide students superior advising, interdisciplinary research mentoring and exciting ways to learn. STARS will provide a coherent undergraduate student experience, which will result in a significant increase of the success rate of STEM students. STAR Objectives: double STEM graduates attending graduate school in 5 years; provide STEM students a seamless environment of recruitment, pre-entrance preparation, advising, mentorship, and research; provide experiential learning experiences to 90% of the STEM graduates where students develop independent research skills. implement teaching and learning approaches such as: Inquiry Based Learning, Peer Instruction, and Cooperative Learning to promote student learning doc20919 none Pazzaglia The paradox of how horizontal contraction and extension can occur simultaneously in convergent mountain belts remains a fundamental and largely unresolved problem in continental dynamics. The Apennines represent one of the most accessible type locality areas of syn-convergent extension. Rollback - which describes the tendency of a subducting plate to retreat from the orogenic front - is commonly invoked as an explanation for syn-convergent extension, but this idea does not address how the retrograde motion of the subducting plate, which is a mantle-based process, causes horizontal extension in the overlying zone of crustal convergence, especially in light of the large accretionary fluxes typically associated with continental subduction. The goal of the project (project RETREAT) is to develop a self-consistent dynamic model of syn-convergent extension, using the Northern Apennines as a natural laboratory. This part of the Apennine orogen has been the site of relatively steady orthogonal convergence and 2D (plane strain) orogenic deformation since ~30 Ma. GPS measurements indicate that convergence is presently active, and tomography indicates that the full length of subducted slab is still intact to depths of 250 km. Syn-convergent extension has been active since at least 15 Ma. The Northern Apennines are well studied, and all important features of the orogen are onland and thus directly accessible for detailed geological and geophysical research. The specific objectives of project RETREAT are 1) to determine in detail the velocity field across the orogen, including deformation in the orogenic wedge, the motion of lithospheric plates, and the flow fields in the surrounding asthenospheric mantle, and 2) to use this kinematic information to develop and test specific dynamic models for deformation in the orogenic wedge and underlying mantle. The research techniques to be used include; geodesy, tectonic geomorphology, low-temperature thermochronometry, structural geology and tectonic syntheses, seismic studies, and geodynamic modeling. The RETREAT project links together a broad multidisciplinary group with eleven PIs from six institutions, plus some 27 foreign collaborators in Italy, Switzerland, Canada, and France doc20920 none Hamburger EarthScope is a major earth science research initiative that will integrate scientific information derived from seismology (US Array), geodesy (Plate boundary Observatory), subsurface sampling and measurement (SAFOD), remote sensing (InSAR), and complementary geology and geophysics to understand continental scale plate deformation and evolution. Funding for the EarthScope initiative is currently being discussed in Congress as part of NSF s FY budget. The Division of Earth Sciences has made FY funds available for projects that qualify as pre-EarthScope activity, i.e. activities that will facilitate or enable the construction, fabrication, installation or operation of EarthScope once it is funded under the MREFC (Major Research Equipment Facilities and Construction) account. Such activities include meetings and workshops, prototype development, site selection or characterization. This award provides funds to support a focused workshop on active magmatic systems. The workshop will provide a forum for interdisciplinary discussion of magmatic systems and will result in a detailed, integrated deployment and operations plan for the magmatic systems component of EarthScope. Participants will be invited from a variety of disciplines related to geological, geophysical, and geochemical study of active magmatic systems. The meeting will be conducted in a setting of one of western North America s active volcanic systems (e.g. Cascades, Long Valley, Alaska), and will include a full-day field trip on active volcanic processes doc20921 none Sornette Transport in heterogeneous porous media poses formidable challenges to model and predict with good reliability. We propose to develop a microscopic physical basis for effective large scale models such as the continuous-time random walk (CTRW) method, which takes into account extreme fluctuations and anomalous transport paths in the contribution to the large scale transport properties. For this, we will use a combination of renormalization group and functional renormalization techniques to coarse-grain and extrapolate from the microscopic realm to the large-scale description. We also propose to generalize the CTRW model to a multi-scale hierarchical framework with standard local Poissonian-in-time and Gaussian diffusion-in-space describing microscopic processes, to investigate in what sense the coexistence of multiple scales is responsible for the effective anomalous power law properties, such as non-Gaussian distribution of trapping times and of jump sizes captured by the CTRW framework which are usually postulated at a phenomenological level doc20922 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY . The goal of the fellowship is to prepare minority scientists for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. This program is an effort by the NSF to increase the number of research scientists from under-represented minority groups, thereby contributing to the future vitality of the Nation s scientific enterprise. It is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Role of Chondroitin Sulfate Proteoglycans in Synapse Formation. The project examines the role of two chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans (CSPGs) in synaptogenesis: one unnamed CSPG, recognized by monoclonal antibody Cat-315, which delineates synaptic sites, and aggrecan, the main CSPG of cartilage. The unnamed CSPG is being identified using immunoprecipitation and mass spectrometry. Once identified, its function will be blocked to determine if it is essential to synapse formation. To determine if aggrecan is involved in synaptogenesis, the expression of synpatic markers is being studied in cultured cortices from embryonic CMD mice, a naturally occurring aggrecan knockout mouse doc20923 none This project addresses a new and unique technique for estimating the daytime, vertical ExB drift velocities in the equatorial ionospheric F region from ground-based magnetometer observations. It has recently been demonstrated, quantitatively, that the strength of the daytime upward ExB drift velocity is linearly related to the difference between the horizontal H component values measured by a magnetometer located on the magnetic equator and one 6 to 9 degrees away in latitude. This project plans to extend the results of this unique finding by asking the fundamental question: How does this delta H versus ExB relationship vary with season, geomagnetic activity and solar activity? An answer to this question provides answers in turn to a variety of space weather scientific questions as well as applying the technique, immediately, to Operational Real Time Ionospheric Specification and Forecast Models currently under development in support of civilian and military customers doc20924 none Claflin University, the oldest Historically Black College & University in the state of South Carolina will implement the project entitled: Programs for the Retention and Enrichment of Science, Engineering and Mathematics Students (PRESEMs). This five-year project consists of a comprehensive approach to strengthen Claflin University s undergraduate science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) instructional and research infrastructure with the goal of broadening the participation of under-represented minorities in the STEM disciplines and workforce. PRESEMs will focus on approaches that enhance student learning in STEM, such as peer-led instruction, problem-based learning, and a research-based curriculum. Aggressively recruiting students, offering effective pre-college outreach and summer enrichment programs, implementing programs to increase successful completion of gate-keeper courses, enhancing undergraduate STEM curricula by modernizing instrumentation, laboratories and classrooms, utilizing undergraduate research as a teaching tool - these are the strategies required to bring about institutional reform while preparing students for graduate study and successful careers in STEM fields doc20925 none The creation of the supercontinent of Gondwana is one of the most significant geologic events in the history of our planet yet the processes that led to its formation are poorly understood. In its predrift position near the dawn of the Cambrian, Madagascar was situated in the interior of Gondwana near the eastern edge of the East African Orogen (EAO). This orogen marks the join between East and West Gondwana, and it contains within it pieces of recycled continental crust, ophiolite, and island-arc and continental-arc terranes that formed within and marginal to the former Mozambique Ocean. Madagascar is thus critically positioned to reveal three key and currently enigmatic features of the EAO essential for understanding the transformation from Rodinia to Gondwana: (1) the nature of the volcanic terranes in the central part of the EAO and their possible extensions in Somalia, Ethiopia, and Rajasthan (India); (2) the chronology of terrane-suturing and continental collision events in the critical join between East and West Gondwana, and; (3) the structure of the eastern part of the EAO in the key transitional area from dominantly terrane-accreted geology (in the north) to continental collision and crustal overthickening (in the south). Pl s Tucker and Kusky propose to undertake a two-year structural and geochronologic investigation of the polydeformed and metamorphosed Precambrian rocks of central Madagascar (Itremo region). Work in this area holds great promise for resolving two first-order geologic questions in the eastern part of the East African Orogen: (1) What is the direction of early structural vergence (nappe emplacement) in the eastern part of the East African Orogen and what is the geometry of the superposed folds of central Madagascar? Is the structural vergence westerly or southwesterly, as has been recently proposed (Racolison , Fernandez et al. in revision), or is it easterly or southeasterly as advocated by others (Tucker et al. and in revision; Collins et al. a,b)? Are other solutions possible? (2) When did Pan-African defon-nation and metamorphism begin in the southern part of the EAO. Were the nappes of central Madagascar initially transported and metamorphosed prior to -800 Ma (Cox et al. ; Collins et al. a,b; Hulscher et al )? Alternatively, were they emplaced and metamorphosed after -800 Ma (Tucker et al. , and in revison; Fernandez et al. in revision; Cox et al. ). These questions are central to understanding the timing and geometry of plate convergence within the EAO. The Itremo region of central Madagascar is the best place to study and address these issues: it is situated within the region of Neoproterozoic overprinting, only - 1 50 km from the proposed suture with East Gondwana; bedrock exposure is superb and the contrasting rock types permit accurate mapping of folds and faults; stratigraphic facing directions are abundant and hence the inverted limbs of recumbent folds and thrust nappes can be readily identified, and; reliable cross-sections may be constructed owing to the consistent regional plunge of the youngest-generation folds. Research will proceed through an integrated program of geologic mapping, structural analysis, and U-Pb geochronology. Structural investigations and sample collections will be made in three key areas within the Itremo region, tentatively identified as comprising the inverted limbs of large-scale east-directed told- or thrust-nappes (Tucker et al. in revision). Stratigraphic analysis, structural investigations and detailed mapping projects are designed to test our structural hypothesis and increase our knowledge of the regional geometry of the folds and faults. U-Pb geochronology of key samples will constrain the age of nappe emplacement and regional metamorphism, and provide a critical test of our collision model. This work will lead to a new understanding of the kinematics, age and overall structural vergence in the critical, eastern part of the EAO where strongly divergent views of its evolution are emerging. Research will involve collaboration between professional colleagues in Madagascar and the U.S., and allow for the participation and training of American and Malagasy students in field- and laboratory-based research doc20926 none Optical communication, in particular, wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) technique, has become a promising networking choice to meet ever-increasing demands on bandwidth from many emerging bandwidth-intensive computing communication applications. As optics become a major networking media, optical interconnects will inevitably play an important role in interconnecting processors in parallel distributed computing systems. This research focuses on fundamental challenges and issues on using optics in two converging areas: parallel distributed computing and communications. The objective of this research is to design high-speed, cost-effective optical interconnects for current and future generation parallel distributed computing and communication systems. Due to the unique characteristics of optics, many important issues of optical interconnects, different from those of electronic interconnects, need to be addressed. Specially, this research focuses on (1) explore unique properties and classifications of WDM interconnects; (2) optimal and cost-effective designs; (3) study the effect of wavelength conversion; (4) performance modeling; (5) fault-tolerance issues. The proposed research combines architecture circuit design, algorithmic, probabilistic, combinatorial and simulation techniques to conduct comprehensive studies on the above issues. The research results will provide viable solutions for designing high-bandwidth, high-connectivity, low-latency and low-cost optical interconnects. The proposed research will have a significant impact on next generation arallel distributed computing and communication systems and future networking infrastructure doc20927 none Most thrust fault traces are arcuate in nature and are comprised of a series of salients and recesses suggesting that thrust faults are, in general, non-planar. Such three- dimensional complexities in the thrust surface geometry may be an important factor controlling the thrust fault kinematics. Consider the analogy of glacial ice flowing over an irregular substrate. The major resistance to movement is not due to the friction between the two materials (which is greatly reduced by pressure-melt water that coats the surface) but due to the distortion of the ice as it flows past surface irregularities. Thrust sheets may behave in a similar manner. Fault rocks are considerably weaker than the host rock and, therefore, the continued deformation of such rocks may not be the factor in large-scale thrust sheet emplacement. The PI suggests that three-dimension irregularities in thrust surface geometry play a major role in thrust sheet kinematics. If this is the case, one should expect that the strain patterns observed along strike of a given thrust fault will reflect the thrust fault geometry. Preliminary studies have shown that both c-axes patterns and relict grain shapes vary along the strike of the fault most likely due to the fault geometry effects. Initial data suggest that deformation is nearly plane strain within a prominent salient; but along the margins of the salient there is a stronger component of flattening strains. However, further examination of the strains in this region are needed to truly resolve this pattern. Three-dimensional finite strain geometries have been determined in this region by measuring relict quartz grain shapes and examining quartz c-axes fabrics. Moreover, it may also be useful to measure final stage incremental strains by determining three-dimensional recrystallized quartz grain shapes and three-dimensional quartz overgrowth geometries. It is only through examining incremental strain histories that the PI can fully understand the kinematics of thrust faults. Nevertheless, current mechanical models do not take into account the existence of non-plane strains and therefore only predict realistic fold-thrust belt behavior to a first- order. In order to make more realistic models for the evolution of fold-and-thrust belts we must start to incorporate the non-plane strain elements of geometrically complex thrust faults doc20928 none Several computationally di .cult optimization problems have a natural underlying discrete struc- ture:e.g.,design routing problems in networking have appropriate graph-theoretic formulations. Discrete combinatorial optimization is the study of how such combinatorial underpinnings can help us understand better and solve optimization problems. This project aims to develop improved algorithms for speci .c important problems in this .eld, and to develop general algorithmic paradigms for combinatorial optimization;one of the main gen- eral approaches will be probabilistic The powerful role played by randomness in the computational context has been among the major discoveries in the foundations of computer science.This project proposes to develop improved randomized algorithms for a family of hard combinatorial optimiza- tion problems,and to develop new probabilistic tools of independent nterest in the process.It also aims to conduct re .ned probabilistic (i.e.,average-case instead of worst-case)analyses of some of these problems where relevant.Two sub-themes of the proposed research are to study hard opti- mization problems that arise in the .eld of networking,and to approach di .cult problems through approximation algorithms where appropriate. The goal of this project is to study improved algorithmic approaches for fundamental problems (such as various design,routing,and scheduling problems in networks)as well as to develop improved probabilistic algorithmic paradigms in general.This endeavor will help develop new principles for the design,analysis,and engineering of randomized approximation algorithms in networking and combinatorial optimization doc20929 none PROJECT SUMMARY Across the interior American West,cattle ranches are being converted to subdivisions,in order to accommodate exurban population expansion.What are the biodiversity consequences of this profound land use change?That is the core question addressed by this proposed research. Conversion of rangelands to subdivisions may negatively impact native biodiversity through direct habitat loss.It has been argued that finding ways to keep ranchers from selling their lands to developers is vital to conservation.On the other hand,most western ranches include some public lands that cannot be sold,and even on private lands the developments usually are low density.Therefore,western exurban development often results in relatively little direct habitat loss.If a landscape is converted by scattered subdivisions,but simultaneously released from the controlling influence of livestock grazing,will this result in net gains or losses of regional biodiversity?So far,a volatile mixture of prediction and passion has fueled this debate,but rarely has it been informed by data. The purpose of this proposed study is to quantify components of native biodiversity in a grassland savanna in the Sonoita Valley of southeastern Arizona,where some cattle ranches are being converted into subdivisions.This study will compare flowering plant,grasshopper, butterfly,bird,and rodent populations in landscapes that are being grazed,or subdivided,or both,or neither.It also will quantify the demographics of three bird species known to be particularly responsive to the effects of livestock grazing and or landscape conversion through subdivision.The data will be used to test a series of hypotheses and predictions about the independent and interactive effects of exurban development and livestock grazing on 1)species richness and evenness of native biotic communities,2)invasions of exotic species into those communities,3)population and community stability,and 4)avian demographics. The centerpiece of this work will be the Appleton-Whittell Research Sanctuary,a ha preserve that has been ungrazed and otherwise undisturbed since ,and that has been the focus of extensive fieldwork since the early s.Unlike many land use studies in the West, this one will have a control,to the degree that 33 years protection have permitted patterns of native biodiversity to express themselves in the absence of either agriculture or exurban development. Results of this study will address basic and unanswered questions about the relative impacts of local forces (livestock grazing)versus landscape conversion (subdivision)on biodiversity in arid, non-forested western ecosystems,where 1)natural landscape heterogeneity is high,2) development is distant from the controlling influences of large urban centers,and 3)subdivision usually consists of scattered landscape intrusions rather than fragmentation of the grassland into isolated patches.The study will make societal contributions that are both timely and urgent, given present rates of development in the rural West,and the many uncertainties about its ecological consequences doc20930 none The objective of the investigation is to understand the fundamental aspects on the possible bonding mechanism between metals and ceramics. Since the ion-exchange reaction can substantially change several fundamental materials properties, it is important to understand this reaction at a quantitative level. The goal is to study model systems with a particularly simple interface geometry that will be more suitable for microanalysis and will allow to distinguish the influence of various parameters. The work involves fabrication of ideal aluminum-spinel interfaces by thin-film techniques. The atomistic structure of the resulting interfaces and the spatial distribution of aluminum, magnesium, and oxygen in their immediate environment will be analyzed by cross-sectional high-resolution analytical TEM. Quantitative analysis of the elemental distribution at different stages of the reaction will give fundamental insight in the kinetics of this technologically important process. Mechanical testing, employing the method of periodic cracking, will be used to assess the interface strength after different annealing treatments and to correlate it with the observed concentration profiles of the three elements across the aluminum-spinel interface. The experimentally obtained concentration profiles will be used for modeling the kinetics of the ion-exchange reaction as a function of a few key parameters such as temperature, diffusion and activity coefficients. The results of mechanical testing and their correlation with the concentration profiles will serve for modeling the influence of a space-charge layer on metal-ceramic adhesion and to investigate the hypothesis that the ion-exchange reaction causes the experimentally observed strong mechanical bonding between aluminum and spinel. The possibility of manipulating the interfacial bonding will be pursued by applying an external electric field during the ion-exchange reaction. The study involves fundamental research on aluminum-spinel interfaces via thin-film techniques. Along with microstructural characterization at the interface and quantitative analysis of elemental distribution for studying kinetics, mechanical testing is used to assess the interface strength. Synthesis and HRTEM work will be carried out at CWRU while the mechanical testing and modeling correlation of ion-exchange with strength will be performed at UCB. The project has a team-oriented approach to the involvement of undergraduates and minorities in research. The link between the mechanical strength and ion-exchange at the metal-ceramic interface involves fundamental materials science while will have major impact in the metal-ceramic bonding technology in many industries doc20931 none Kumar The goal of the proposed research is to develop a better understanding of the coupling between the atmospheric and terrestrial (land) branches of the hydrologic cycle and identifies the physical basis of their inter-annual variability. The underlying hypothesis of the proposed research is that the regional atmospheric moisture transport is governed by both the large scale forcing as well as local recycling, and their relative contributions have important implications in the inter-annual variability of the hydrologic cycle. The relative contributions of advected and recycled moisture may depend on the season, re-ion and the memory of the various reservoirs such as the atmosphere. near-surface and sub-surface storage. Two specific science objectives will be addressed in this project: Objective I: Identify the modes of the observed inter-annual variability of the hydrologic cycle and the underlying causal mechanism. Objective 2: Identify the roles of land surface and sub-surface storage (water and snow ice) in regulating the inter-annual variability of the hydrologic cycle. Climate variability, natural or human induced. Have the potential to alter the moisture fluxes, which can have significant societal impact. For example, it is speculated that C02-induced global warming would lead to an intensification of global water cycle (an increase in global water fluxes), leading to greater -global precipitation. faster evaporation and a general exacerbation of extreme weather and hydrological regimes including floods and droughts. In addition we may see a shift in the spatial patterns of transport, resulting from the feedback between the changes in the hydrologic cycle and general circulation patterns. Changes in hydrologic regimes have implications for water resource management as well as biogeochemical processes in ecosystems. A better understanding of the dynamics of the hydrologic cycle and the underlying causal mechanism will have significant impact in all areas of water-related processes doc20932 none This project address fundamental issues associated with surface structure and its relationship to the plasma environment in plasma-based processing of electronic materials. The approach is to use real-time, in-situ, synchrotron- based x-ray diffraction to investigate the surface and near-surface structure of silicon and compound semiconductors (GaAs and GaN) undergoing chlorine-based plasma processing. After gaining experience using real-time x-ray scattering to understand silicon surface structure during processing, compound semiconductors, GaAs(100) (110) and GaN( ) (i.e. polar surface vs. non-polar surfaces) will be addressed. The atomic structure of the surfaces will be examined during exposure to the plasma, including questions of the extent to which surface reconstruction remains in the compound semiconductors in this environment. The evolution of the surface morphology during plasma processing will be investigated using grazing-incidence small-angle x-ray scattering (GISAXS). The evolution of step structure (bunching vs. anti-bunching) on the compound semiconductor surfaces during exposure to the plasma will be studied as a function of substrate miscut size and direction. In addition, regimes of layer-by-layer removal vs. step retraction will be examined to better understand their relationship to the surface structure. The evolution of the GaAs surface stoichiometry will be followed in real time with x-ray fluorescence. In silicon, the density and depth of the damaged chlorinated surface layer will be studied and compared with existing simulations. The results of experiments performed in the x-ray portion of the proposed work will be correlated to independent characterization efforts performed at BU and NRL. Post- processing surface morphology will be examined with AFM. Surface damage will also be characterized ex-situ using C-V measurements, transmission line measurements of contact resistances to processed surfaces and photoreflectance spectroscopy. The proposed research program focuses on the fundamental questions of the relation between plasma processing conditions and atomic surface structure and is expected to serve as a stimulus for further development of theory and simulation. The new knowledge gained will be important for future rational development of new processing techniques, especially in novel materials. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in areas of electronic materials science having technological relevance. An important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education. The research program provides excellent opportunities for hands-on experience in the use of sophisticated scientific equipment. The broad resources, and collaborative aspects, provide special opportunities for education and training of graduate and undergraduate students involved in interdisciplinary forefront research doc20933 none Li Isotopic Investigations of the Crust and Mantle PIs: Rudnick, McDonough, Tomascak Lithium, the lightest lithophile element, is fluid mobile. The large mass difference between its two isotopes makes measurement of the Li isotopic ratio a powerful tool for tracing fluid processes in the Earth. This project will complete Li isotope investigations of peridotite and eclogite xenoliths from the mantle and sedimentary and granitic rocks from the continents. The goal is to understand the role that fluid processes play in the growth of the continental lithosphere and to evaluate the inventory of Li isotopes in major solid Earth reservoirs in order to constrain Li isotope mass balance in the Earth system. The Li isotopic measurements will be performed using MC-ICP-MS methodology on solutions of rocks and minerals. The PIs have established this technique at Maryland and are routinely able to measure 40 ng or smaller Li fractions to plus or minus1 per mil precision (2 sigma). The newly acquired data sets will provide insights into the processes that control the Li isotopic composition of the crust and mantle, define the d7Li of potential contributors to subduction zone magmas and, ultimately, the influence of crustal recycling on d7Li of the mantle over time doc20934 none This project is a study of computational complexity theory, in particular a study of structural complexity theory and some compelxity problems relating to lattice problems. Computational complexity theory is the study of the inherent hardness of computational problems, both in the worst-case measure as well as in the average-case measure. This theory is the underpinning of all computer security based on the hardness or insolvability of computational problems. The investigator will study the interrelationship between a number of complexity classes, especially those between determinisitic P and the second level of the polynomial time hierarchy, building on the recent breakthrough concerning the class S2, the symmetric second level class of the hierarchy. The investigator also explores a notion of persistent NP-hardness. This is to be an intermediate level of complexity measure between worst-case hardness and average-case complexity in the framework of Levin and others. In lattice problems, the investigator will search for moderately efficient algorithms for the shortest vector problem and the closest vector problem, both in the worst case measure as well as in the average case measure. The investigator will study their connections to random lattices, and potential applications to the design of secure public-key cryptosystems based on assumptions of hadness in the worst case complexity only doc20935 none This project concerns the development and analysis of efficient numerical algorithms for problems arising in computational modeling, with emphasis on two main topics: algorithms for systems of equations arising from the stochastic finite element method, and algorithms for algebraic systems arising in models of fluid dynamics. The first of these addresses the fact that models of physical phenomena often contain parameters or equation coefficients whose precise properties are not well understood. Examples include permeability properties of media in which quantities (e.g., pollutants in groundwater) are flowing or diffusing, and boundary conditions (e.g., along the ocean bottom). In the stochastic finite element method, the random aspects of problems are handled in a manner analogous to the introduction of new spatial dimensions. This methodology appears to have the potential to be more efficient than Monte-Carlo methods, provided efficient algorithms are available for the algebraic systems that are generated after discretization. Our aim is to study the algorithmic issues that arise from this approach. For the second project, we will develop and study efficient algorithms for solving systems of equations arising in models of incompressible flow, principally, methods for eigenvalue problems derived from linear stability analysis of steady solutions, and multigrid algorithms for the discrete convection-diffusion equation. These are fundamental problems arising throughout fluid dynamics, and their efficient solution is critical for development of effective computational models. The general aim of this project is to enhance the utility and effectiveness of mathematical modeling for understanding scientific and engineering phenomena. There are useful models for many disparate physical processes, including blood flows, dispersal of environmental pollutants, performance of aerospace vehicles, and atmospheric and oceanographic phenomena. Understanding such processes through purely experimental techniques is prohibitively expensive or impossible, whereas the use of modeling and together with algorithmic solution introduces a basic understanding of the physics by providing approximations to quantities such as flow rates and pressures. Accurate solutions are only available, however, if reliable and fast solution algorithms can be used. Moreover, it is often the case that certain aspects of models, such as the geologic properties of transporting media or the velocities of flows along boundaries, are not known with certainty. Our goal for this work is to develop fast solution algorithms for mathematical models and to ensure that the solution strategies are able to handle uncertainty and to produce reliable statistical information about solutions at low computational cost doc20936 none Verdonck In most models of Cascadia subduction, lithology and heat flow models constrain the downdip extent of coupling between the subducting and overriding plates. Recent seismological studies suggest that some of the previous assumptions made regarding lithology may be unjustified. A preliminary model suggests that active surface deformation can be the result of deep coupling in addition to the shallow region that is indicated by currently accepted models. An exploratory model is being developed that tests the hypothesis that the Cascadia subduction zone is locked deeper than currently thought. Traditional two dimensional dislocation modeling is being employed as a first step, possibly followed by more advanced models. Three seismic hazards pose a threat to western Oregon and Washington state: large megathrust earthquakes; moderate size earthquakes on crustal faults; and large intraplate earthquakes within the subducted slab. All three of these hazards may be influenced by the location and extent of coupling between the subducting Juan de Fuca and overriding North America plates. Reducing the uncertainty regarding the downdip limit of this locked region will allow for better assessment of the potential for damaging earthquakes near the highly populated urban areas of the Pacific Northwest doc20937 none Levander This award provides continued funding for the CD-ROM (Continental Dynamics of the Rocky Mountains) collaborative investigation which is designed to understand the tectonic evolution of the lithosphere of the southern Rocky Mountains. A transect from Wyoming to New Mexico is providing an opportunity to evaluate the hypothesis that lithospheric architecture of the Southwest reflects a resolvable mixture of structures that formed during early Proterozoic assembly of the continent and modifications that took place during younger intracratonic tectonism that were themselves influenced by the Proterozoic compositional structure. Phase 1 ( - ) was successful in substantially verifying this hypothesis. The PIs imaged the Cheyenne Belt and Jemez lineament; both are interpreted to be Paleoproterozoic paleosubduction zones that also show long-lived and strong influence on younger intracratonic tectonism. Both are also associated with lateral changes in deep chemical lithosphere, such that the mantle provinces can be linked to crustal provinces, demonstrating the antiquity of the mantle transitions. With this bridge funding award, the Principal Investigators will conduct an annual workshop, complete the analysis of data sets generated in Phase 1, increase productivity in terms of published papers, and prepare for Phase 2 of the CD-ROM project doc20938 none The general goal of this experimental research program is to design and synthesize organic receptor molecules with useful supramolecular functions, and to employ analytical, biochemical and physical chemistry methods to evaluate the success of the designs. The current proposal has three research objectives that build on discoveries made in the previous grant cycle. The structure and reactivity of ion-pairs has been a major chemical research topic for many decades, however, the majority of studies have been complicated by the inherent lability of the ion-pairs. The principal investigator has developed synthetic receptors that bind and solubilize isolated contact ion-pairs in non-polar solvents. These complexes provide a unique opportunity to characterize ion-pair structure and dynamics using NMR and X-ray crystallography. The major question to be addressed is how do biologically important, anisotropic anions with pi -electron density such as RCO2-, CN-, N3-, and NO3-, simultaneously interact with receptor NH residues and the bound metal cation. It is hypothesized that the receptor NH residues form hydrogen bonds with anion pi -electrons. Another objective is to develop synthetic membrane transport carriers for chloride salts. Biologically, anion transport is a ubiquitous process in nearly all cells and defective Cl- transport is related to a number of disease states. One example is cystic fibrosis, an inherited disease that afflicts 1 in Caucasians. Some researchers think that synthetic Cl- conductors have potential as therapeutic agents. As a first step towards testing this hypothesis, low-molecular-weight salt carriers will be synthesized and evaluated for their abilities to selectively transport sodium chloride or potassium chloride across vesicle membranes. And finally, Professor Smith will demonstrate how rotaxanes can be used in novel prodrug strategies. An anion template method will be employed to prepare interlocked molecules known as rotaxanes with crown ether-containing wheels and acetal-containing axles. The molecular design allows conjugation of the rotaxane wheels with molecular entities that improve tissue-selective targeting. Thus, the rotaxane wheel can be thought of as a novel drug carrier that is equipped with target recognition capability, as well as a reductively activated drug-release trigger. With this Award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program (OMC) will support the research of Professor Bradley Smith of the University of Notre Dame. Professor Smith s work in the supramolecular chemistry field has many potential applications in biochemistry, such as uses in membrane transport and control released prodrug systems. The research may offer benefits to society as potential therapeutic agents for cystic fibrosis and as control released prodrugs for curing tumors or cancers. An important human resources outcome of this program is that the project workers (students and postdoctoral associates) receive broad multidisciplinary training, which enables them to successfully pursue a range of scientific career choices doc20939 none Progress in the field of natural language processing (NLP) is currently limited, at least in part, by the speed with which new annotated corpora can be created. In addition, there is evidence that achieving the next level of performance in automated text understanding will require annotated training corpora that are orders of magnitude larger than those currently available. In short, there exists a corpus annotation bottleneck in building robust, accurate NLP system components. The PI proposes, therefore, to investigate machine learning paradigms that will significantly reduce human annotation costs while maintaining or improving the accuracy of the natural language learning algorithms that are trained on the acquired corpora. The project will (1) study the application of active learning (Cohn et al., ) and weakly supervised bootstrapping algorithms like co-training (Blum & Mitchell, ) on a set of representative problems in natural language processing, (2) identify the benefits and limitations of these approaches for reducing the manual annotation burden during the creation of large training corpora for natural language learning, and (3) develop a cooperative learning framework (Pierce & Cardie, ) that combines active and weakly supervised learning in an attempt to more effectively interleave manual and automated linguistic annotation efforts doc20940 none The research goals of this project are (1) to determine how the metacognitively-focused instructional tool called the Model-Observe-Reflect-Explain (MORE) Thinking Frame can be used in both high school and college chemistry laboratory courses to enhance metacognition, understanding, and problem solving, (2) to investigate how instructor professional development experiences can be designed to sustain the effective use of the MORE Thinking Frame, as well as specifically what instructors learn from such experiences, and (3) to augment and refine the model of how people use their metacognitive skills in the contexts of chemistry learning, problem solving, and instructor professional development. Design experiments will be employed to study the complex and dynamic interplay between instructor and student cognition (understanding, beliefs, metacognition); instructor professional development experiences; and classroom practices of communities of learners using the MORE Thinking Frame as instructional and professional development designs are simultaneously refined. Throughout the course of the project, a sequence of instructional and curricular developments that centrally involve the Model-Observe-Reflect-Explain (MORE) Thinking Frame will be implemented, studied, and refined. During the first year of the project, high school and college instructors will collaborate with the developers of the MORE Thinking Frame to learn about, adapt, and implement the MORE Frame in their own laboratory courses (without changing the experiments used in their existing curricula). In the second and third years of the project, the project team (including many of these instructors) will design problem-based laboratory modules to complement the use of the MORE Thinking Frame and to infuse more authentic inquiry into the chemistry laboratory courses. Throughout the professional development experiences and successive implementations of the MORE Frame in various instructors classrooms, data will be collected from a broad range of sources (both qualitative and quantitative) and analyzed to address the research questions and to inform future practice. In addition, a website will be constructed to provide information and support for implementing MORE curricula and instruction as well as to provide instructional materials for the problem-based modules developed. Finally, the project team will conduct workshops to disseminate information and materials. This project will generate new knowledge about how metacognitively-focused instructional tools can be used to enhance students science learning in various instructional contexts; how to structure effective professional development experiences and what instructors learn from such experiences; how laboratory teaching practices are linked to students chemistry learning; and the relationships among metacognition, chemistry teaching, and chemistry learning doc20941 none Jeffrey J. Park In the Red Sea region, a continental shield has rifted to form an incipient ocean basin. Several stages of the continental rifting process are evident in the region, ranging from the formation of genuine oceanic crust in central Red Sea to transcurrent pull-apart motion along the Dead Sea transform. Surface features of this rifting are well mapped, but the extent and geometry of ductile shear in the underlying lower crust and mantle lithosphere are unknown. The use of seismic anisotropy as a proxy for the deformation of the lower crust and upper mantle became widespread with the advent of broadband digital seismic data recording. However, only a small subset of data available from permanent seismic observatories in the Red Sea region has been explored with techniques that address anisotropic properties directly. The investigators will study the structure and the texture of the lower crust and the shallow mantle in the Red Sea region using seismic observables that diagnose elastic anisotropy - teleseismic shear wave splitting and receiver functions. These two techniques are largely complementary: shear-wave splitting integrates anisotropy along the path of a shear wave, while P-S converted waves are sensitive to velocity and anisotropy jumps at interfaces. Together they offer a way to constrain vertical variations in anisotropic properties, which should allow us to distinguish inherited rock textures within the Proterozoic-age lithosphere from textures associated with the ongoing continental break-up doc20942 none Sahai There is a growing appreciation of the need to understand organic-inorganic interactions at the molecular-level for processes relevant to biogeochemistry as exemplified by silica biomineralization, and to materials science as in the controlled synthesis of biomimetic mesoporous silica. I propose to investigate the nature of silica interactions with carbohydrates and amines in the aqueous phase combining theoretical and experimental approaches. We will (i) determine whether putative hypercoordinated Si-carbohydrate complexes can play a role in biological silicon uptake, and (ii) identify the role of amines in catalyzing the biopolymerization of dissolved silicon species. The carbohydrates examined will include polyalcohols, sugar-acids and polysaccharides. The amines will be examined for the most likely pathway of biogenic silica nucleation and polymerization. Specifically, we will attempt to determine whether the amines act to catalyze hydrolysis of a starting Si-organic compound via a SN2 mechanism or whether polyamines act to bring about aggregation of inorganically formed silica clusters from a starting compound of silicic acid. For the former mechanism, we will examine amines of different nucleophilicities including methylamine, dimethylamine, pyridine, guanidine, imidazole, lysine, arginine and histidine. The alternative mechanism will be studied using 1,2-diaminoethane, 1,2-diaminopropane, 1,3-diaminopropane, 1,2,3-triaminopropane, and analogous triamines on a butane backbone as the model polyamines. The effect of nitrogen hybridization will be determined by comparing 1,3-diaminopentane to imidazole. Further, the effect of 1,6-diaminohexane versus 1,4-diaminobenzene will permit examination of carbon hybridization effects. Experimental NMR and Attenuated Total Reflectance Fourier Transform Infra-Red (ATR FTIR) spectroscopy will provide independent measurements. Temperature dependence NMR will provide activation enthalpies. The computational method used will be ab initio MO theory to calculate the structure, energy, vibrational frequencies and 29Si Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) shifts to explain the experimental spectra, and to determine the electronic contributions to the overall nucleophilicities of the amines doc20943 none The current velocity field associated with plate tectonic motion in western California is well characterized by geodetic measurements using Global Positioning Systems (GPS). The exact nature of what geodetic measurements record in actively deforming zones remains a significant problem, as this technique records both recoverable (elastic) and permanent (quasi-plastic) strains in wrench borderlands (blocks adjacent to major strike-slip faults). The goal of this proposal is to evaluate the relative magnitudes of the recoverable and permanent components in the deformation of wrench borderlands, by simultaneously studying two different sections of the San Andreas fault system. Creeping segment, central California: Geodetic measurements alone are generally unable to distinguish between recoverable and permanent deformation, because of the long ( 50 yr) interval between slip episodes on faults. In contrast, intervals between slip episodes are short (weeks to months) in the creeping central section of the San Andreas fault. By collecting geodetic data throughout the short seismic cycle in the creeping segment, the PI s will be able to evaluate the relative sizes of the recoverable and permanent components of the displacement field in the vicinity of the fault. They propose to check the estimates of currently accumulating permanent measurements against long-term averages determined from geologic and paleogmagnetic data. Prior work suggests clockwise rotation of the paleomagnetic signal of Miocene and younger sediments in the wrench borderlands. Documenting the areal extent, regional distribution, and amount of rotation throughout this area will allow them to calculate a long-term average for permanent deformation. This part of the proposal involves permanent GPS stations and monitoring, campaign-style GPS, paleomagnetism, and geologic mapping. Durmid Hill, Salton Trough, southern California: In this area, previous work has determined the amount of permanent strain. The PI s propose to complete a step-wise, three-dimensional retro-deformation of deformed sedimentary rocks. In order to convert these incremental strain data into estimates of deformation rates, one must have precise knowledge of time of deformation. In this region of excellent exposure, one aspect of deformation timing is provided by the presence of an ash layer correlated with the 0.76 Ma Bishop tuff. Additional information will result from paleomagnetic techniques that record the magnetic field during deposition. Utilizing the variety of ages of the different sedimentary layers to provide differential vertical axis rotations, The PI s can determine the timing of minor structures (e.g., joints, fractures, and small folds) by determining which units are affected. By comparing geodetic rates (which include both recoverable and permanent strain components) with geologic rates (which record only a permanent strain component) they can assess the amount of recoverable strain accumulation in this area. This part of the proposal involves geologic mapping, paleomagnetism, and campaign-style GPS. By combining the results of geological, geodetic, and paleomagnetic investigations from our two field areas, the PI s will assess the relative contribution of recoverable (elastic) and permanent (quasi-plastic) strains in wrench borderlands. Resolution of this issue has fundamental implications for earthquake mechanics, geological implications of borderland deformation, and potential slip magnitudes on major faults doc20944 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY . The goal of the fellowship is to prepare minority scientists for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. This program is an effort by the NSF to increase the number of research scientists from under-represented minority groups, thereby contributing to the future vitality of the Nation s scientific enterprise. It is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Influence of Nutritional Cues on Reproduction in Nomadic Songbirds. The objectives of this project are to investigate the influence of nutritional cues on the neuroendocrine regulation of reproductive development in two closely related nomadic songbirds (pine siskin and lesser goldfinch) that depend heavily upon foods that vary widely in availability between years and across broad geographic ranges doc20945 none The science education community and the published American standards about science literacy call for students to learn important science concepts and the skills involved in scientific reasoning in ways that allow them to apply what they are learning in new situations. The science education literature has identified classroom practices that seem essential to such deep and transferable learning. Several approaches to inquiry-driven project-based science have been designed based on these recommendations, and results show that when carried out by masterful teachers, both science content and practices are well learned. But we don t know the developmental course of scientific reasoning skills when they are learned in a classroom context engineered for their transferable learning. Nor do we know the conditions that need to be in place to allow teachers and students to make best use of project-based learning s affordances. For the past five years, the Learning by Design group at Georgia Tech has been designing an inquiry-oriented project-based approach to middle-school science learning informed by research on how people learn. Our team has designed sequences of classroom practices that, as a system, promote deep understanding and lasting and reusable learning. The trends in our data suggest that science learning in our LBD classrooms is more comprehensive and more likely to transfer than the learning in more standard inquiry-oriented science classrooms. We propose to use the infrastructure of LBD, our local LBD classrooms, and our cross-disciplinary team to investigate issues with respect to promoting transfer using a project-based inquiry approach, focusing especially on the learning of scientific reasoning skills and practices. Our Quadrant 2 questions ask about the development of scientific reasoning skills in a project-based science classroom, aiming to provide a bridge from basic research in cognitive science on transfer, scientific reasoning, and learning to the pragmatics of transfer and learning in the real world of the classroom. Our Quadrant 3 questions ask about conditions that need to be in place in the classroom for learning and transfer of science practices to occur. Scientific reasoning skills are difficult to measure, but we have had some success in showing the acquisition of these skills by the students in our LBD classrooms. The challenge we take on here is to explore the development of this type of reasoning in middle school children at a fine-grained level. We will use a combination of design experiments and micro-genetic analysis. We are aiming to use our LBD classrooms to find out more about the cognitive and socio-cognitive processes involved in learning science practices with several goals in mind: (i) better understanding of the processes involved in learning to reason scientifically; (ii) better understanding of classroom practices that will promote transferable learning; and (iii) the generation of guidelines for project-based science classrooms, about how to promote transferable learning of science practices doc20946 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY . The goal of the fellowship is to prepare minority scientists for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. This program is an effort by the NSF to increase the number of research scientists from under-represented minority groups, thereby contributing to the future vitality of the Nation s scientific enterprise. It is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Structural studies on Cdc42Hs mutant proteins that may initiate cellular transformation. NMR spectroscopy is being used to characterize mutant forms of Cdc42Hs, an intracellular signal transduction protein cloned in E. coli. This protein binds GTP or GDP and acts as a molecular timing switch based on the nature of the bound ligand. The research will determine the structure and dynamics of two Cdc42Hs mutants to understand the role of Cdc42Hs in processes that lead to cell transformation doc20947 none The Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh will conduct a longitudinal study in which researchers will create a three-year sequence of model-centered instruction in the context of the Model-Assisted Reasoning in Science (MARS). MARS current topics will be extended from sixth through eighth grades. The project seeks to: (1) understand how working external models support content and process learning, (2) develop an evaluation model to tap strengths and weaknesses of different kinds of external models, and (3) identify pedagogical strategies that elicit and support model-assisted reasoning. Student content knowledge and process skills will be measured through different test formats that include paper-and-pencil (TIMSS, NAEP, and Test of Scientific Reasoning items), written tests, class work, and classroom computer exercises. Student motivation will be measured at the beginning of each year. A small sample of students will be interviewed and given some transfer tasks twice a year. Interviews will focus on two aspects: properties of the different model types and student s metacognitive understanding of the function of models in science. Information on classroom implementation will be collected by direct observation, videotapes, and interviews with teachers. Results of the study are expected to help extend theories of model-based reasoning and its applicability in classrooms doc20948 none The primary goal of this project is to determine the characteristics of the response of the ionospheric total electron content (TEC) to geomagnetic storms. The study will utilize the extensive ground-based, dual-frequency, Global Positioning System (GPS) measurements of TEC. A recent study has shown that by sorting F-region ionosonde data (NmF2) as a function of a new index of storm magnitude, a consistent repeatable picture begins to emerge in each season and latitude. The PIs will perform a similar analysis of total electron content, and compare and contrast the geophysical response with NmF2. This study will contribute to the understanding of the ionospheric response to geomagnetic storms. In the context of the National Space Weather Program, the work will provide the information to hopefully lead to an operational product for the benefit of a range of single frequency GPS users doc20949 none The overall objective of this program is to gain a better understanding of how aerosol particles impact climate and climate change by examining the chemical, physical, and optical properties of the major aerosol species over the tropical and subtropical North Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean to understand the processes that cause any significant temporal or spatial variations in those properties. Continuous measurements of aerosol properties will be made at three ground stations: Izana, Tenerife, Canary Islands; Ragged Point, Barbados; and Miami, Florida. These measurements will become part of a long-term database that began in with the establishment of an atmospheric sampling site at Ragged Point, Barbados and continued through the Atmosphere Ocean Chemistry Experiment (AEROCE). The tropical North Atlantic and Caribbean are particularly important and interesting because tropical oceans are thought to have a significant impact on weather and climate, and because these ocean regions underlay an atmosphere more impacted by airborne particles, especially mineral dust, than any other. During summer months, pollutants from North Africa and southern Europe are transported with mineral dust. During the winter, less frequent episodic transport of mineral dust from more southern regions in Africa are carried through the atmosphere often with biomass burning products doc20950 none Igneous Petrology of the New Skaergaard Stratigraphic Reference Column PI: Lesher The PI and his colleagues have established a new high-resolution reference column of the layered series of the Skaergaard intrusion from drill core from the Platinova exploration program in -90 and surface samples collected and located by GPS during the summer of . This was done as a collaboration between U.S. and Danish scientists, and students. Skaergaard differentiation has been highly controversial and the divergence of opinions is likely to remain unless new fundamental observations are brought to bear on the problems. The primary objective of this proposal is to document the petrology and geochemistry of this stratigraphically controlled suite of previously collected drill core and surface samples using well established petrographical and analytical tools. This composite stratigraphic column will provide a basis for rigorous hypothesis testing of the mechanisms of Skaergaard evolution that have eluded petrologists in the absence of good stratigraphic control. The main product will be a detailed mineralogical and chemical stratigraphy at a sampling interval of 10 m and less. Observations will be linked to the analysis of the physical factors that govern the behavior of the crystallizing magma and its liquid line of descent. This will provide the foundation for evaluating the roles of crystal sedimentation, in-situ crystallization, compaction, and infiltration metasomatism at Skaergaard and other layered igneous intrusions doc20951 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY . The goal of the fellowship is to prepare minority scientists for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. This program is an effort by the NSF to increase the number of research scientists from under-represented minority groups, thereby contributing to the future vitality of the Nation s scientific enterprise. It is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Understanding how the TAR binding protein (TDP43) regulates alternative splicing of messenger RNA. Alternative splicing during mRNA processing greatly contributes to generate the protein diversity necessary for development and function of complex organisms. TDP43 regulates exon inclusion of the CFTR gene presumably through inteaction with nuclear proteins and specific sequences of nucleic acid. This research investigates the molecular determinants and importance of TDP43 protein complex formation and nucleic acid binding doc20952 none Jeffrey J. Park Large amounts of water are carried into the upper mantle by subduction. It is generally assumed that water is released in near continuous fashion to depths of at least 150-200 km. However, it is unknown how water is transported from the slab to the volcanic front. Water in the mantle wedge strongly influences rheological and seismological properties and has a major impact on subduction zone thermal structure. The investigators propose to study the influence of water on mantle wedge dynamics in a collaborative and multi-disciplinary project. Recent rheological work has made it possible, for the first time, to quantify the influence of water on creep properties of olivine. The investigators will systematically study the rheological influence of water, with particular interest in how the observationally inferred water distribution influences the balance of subduction forces and the generation of the cornerflow. The models provide predictions on subduction zone temperature and composition that allow for critical tests using observational and experimental constraints from seismology and mineral physics doc20953 none Late Cenozoic deformation is broadly distributed across the North American plate margin of the conterminous western United States and stretches from the San Andreas fault system eastward across the Mojave Desert and into the Basin and Range. The eastern California shear zone and Walker Lane of the western Great Basin form an active belt of structures accommodating about 25% of the relative motion between North America and the Pacific plate. From the Mojave Desert, the displacement is carried north, east of the southern Sierra Nevada, in a narrow zone of deformation bound on the west and east by the Owens Valley and Furnace Creek fault systems. North from the latitude of the central Sierra Nevada, the zone of deformation broadens to include the Walker Lane and central Nevada seismic belt in the northwestern Great Basin. The Sierra Nevada behaves as a coherent tectonic block with a northwest-directed motion of 10-14 mm yr and forms the western boundary of the zone of distributed deformation in the Great Basin. A complex pattern of active structures underlies west-central Nevada where displacement is transferred from the eastern California shear zone to the Walker Lane and the central Nevada seismic belt. Integrated geologic, seismological, and GPS geodetic results indicate that the central Walker Lane (CWL) serves as an displacement transfer system linking stepped northwest-trending transcurrent faults. The displacement transfer system evolved over a period of ~13 Ma and carried at least 50 km right-lateral motion from the Furnace Creek fault system of eastern California to the right-lateral faults of the CWL. Ancient displacement transfer was accompanied by exhumation of mid-crustal rocks in the extensional stepover between transcurrent structures and was accompanied by vertical axis rotation and tilt of both upper- and lower-plate assemblages. The transfer system is still active and underlies a region 50 by 120 km immediately northwest of the ancient structures. Based on existing work, the comparison of a geodetically determined velocity field for the CWL is not easily reconciled with the current understanding of fault displacements in the region and points out the difficulty in comparing geodetic and geologic displacement fields. Furthermore, the continued activity of the displacement transfer system since inception at ~13 Ma offers presents the opportunity to assess ancient and active rates of deformation using geologic and geodetic techniques. The PI s propose an integrated geodetic and geologic investigation of the central Walker Lane to address two questions: (1) What is the three-dimensional geometry and displacement history of extensional transfer developed within a transcurrent fault system stepover?, and (2) Are displacement rate and kinematic estimates comparable between geodetic, seismological, and geologic investigation of ancient and active structures within the transfer system? The central Walker Lane is ideally suited for this study for several reasons: (1) the region is seismically active and well defined earthquake focal mechanisms exist for the displacement transfer fault system, (2) the faults are well exposed and have produced preliminary fault-slip estimates of deformation kinematics, (3) a complex present-day displacement field with ~10 mm yr of differential slip is recorded by a GPS geodetic network, (4) the geologic evolution of the displacement transfer system is preserved in the exhumation history of well-exposed extensional turtleback structures, (5) synorogenic volcanic and sedimentary rocks in the upper-plate assemblage of the extensional complex record a history of progressive tilt associated with fault displacement, (6) regionally extensive domains of differential tilt and vertical axis rotation associated with displacement transfer are recognized in preliminary paleomagnetic investigation, and (7) regional geologic compilation of the region is mature and provides excellent control for displacement-history reconstruction. These elements will allow characterization of the kinematics of displacement transfer and offer the opportunity to directly compare deformation kinematics and rates over geologic and geodetic time intervals. The PI s will address the tasks listed above with an integrated study utilizing detailed geologic mapping, structural analysis, GPS geodesy, paleomagnetic analysis, geochronology, and thermobarometric investigation. The research team (Oldow, Geissman, McClelland, McIntosh, and Selverstone) have the expertise to address the various research topics and two of the researchers (Oldow and Geissman) have substantial experience working in the area. By building on previous studies, this integrated investigation will establish the areal limits of the transtensional fault system, document variable geometric relations between major and secondary fault systems, define the kinematic history of fault block motion, and develop first-order estimates of recent and ancient displacement doc20954 none With National Science Foundation support, Xavier University of Louisiana will implement institutional self-assessments and develop an action plan to strengthen the institution s undergraduate science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) instructional and research infrastructure. The objective of the proposed effort is to better prepare STEM graduates for entry, successful careers and leadership positions in the STEM workforce. Project activities include (1) evaluation and improvement of student recruitment strategies with the goal of increasing enrollment in SMET programs; (2) identification of current impediments to successful completion of STEM gate-keeping courses and development of strategies to increase completion, retention and graduation; (3) evaluation of STEM curricula to discover methods to better prepare students for success in the STEM workforce; and, (4) development of strategies to integrate research and education doc20955 none Sauer The investigator studies computational aspects of nonlinear dynamical systems, emphasizing the role of chaotic dynamics in the interpretation of long-time simulation outcomes and data from complicated dynamical processes. The work on simulation is an ongoing study of subtle biases occurring in deterministic modeling that have macroscopic effects on outcomes. It is an open question whether it is possible in principle for long-term computer simulations of typical nonhyperbolic chaotic systems to approximately match true system behavior. The second major area is ongoing work on the interpretation of physical and biological experiments that generate aperiodic data. There is a long history of applying random modeling to time series and spike timing data collected from laaboratory and natural processes. The investigator syudies ways to use dynamical systems techniques, including embedding theory and spike train reconstruction, to extend the power of deterministic modeling for experimental data. Computer simulation is a critical ingredient of modern science. It is important to know whether solutions of a mathematical model used for simulation can be expected to be accurate qualitative and quantitative representations of the natural phenomena being modeled, in the face of small modeling errors, and whether computer solution of the model can represent solutions of the model, in the face of small floating point errors. This reseach builds a foundation for answering questions like this for physically relevant models. In particular the investigator is involved in isolating and quantifying the limitations of deterministic representations, especially for the purpose of long-term modeling. The second major focus of the project is the interpretation of data collected from experimental systems and nature when no first-principles mathematical or computer model is available. If time traces of physically relevant quantities can be measured from the process, techniques exist to attempt to reconstruct the dynamical behavior of the process, with potential to predict or control the process. Complex deterministic time series are being identified in physical, chemical, engineering and biological medical settings. The investigator has made previous progress on expanding these conceptual foundations and developing related computational implementations, and is working to increase their power for the study of complex systems in scientific and engineering-related contexts doc20765 none Collaborative Research: U-Series, Be, Sr, Nd and Pb Isotopic and Trace Element Constraints on Melting and Mass Transfer Processes in Arcs, Philippine Arc System ; ; PIs: Asmerom; Morris; Mukasa Net material cycling between the mantle and continental crust occurs primarily in arcs. Many processes related to melting and mass transfer in arcs, such as the relative contributions of melting and devolatilization in transferring elements from sediment and altered oceanic crust or the relative roles of dynamic, decompression or flux melting of the mantle wedge, however, remain enigmatic. This Collaborative proposal will focus on Luzon, located in the tectonically simpler part of the Philippines arc, to compare two different arc settings in close proximity that may have had dissimilar geochemical histories. The presumed difference in sediment contribution makes the proposed site an ideal setting for studying mass transfer processes and their possible effects on mantle melting. Combined U-series and Be isotopic data, in conjunction with long-lived radiogenic and trace element data will be used to study these rocks. The following goals are set forth: 1) to characterize lavas, using major, trace and Nd, Sr and Pb isotopic data, from four volcanic centers, two from each arc in order to delineate attributes of each subduction zone; 2) to determine the nature and composition of the sediment component and the mechanism by which it is added to the mantle; 3) to investigate the role of dynamic melting in arcs; and 4) to investigate the behavior of U-series nuclides during magma differentiation doc20957 none This post-doctoral research and training grant queries the emergence of tailored medicine as rationales of population-specific biological differences are varyingly taken up by professionals in the medical sciences, researchers in biotechnology, strategists in pharmaceutical planning and lay publics. The persistent confusion over the place of race in the sciences as well as its social, biological, genetic, and epidemiological validity, or invalidity, will be explored. Taking the example of African-American hypertension and heart failure, the research component of this postdoctoral grant will consist of an ethnographic, multi-sited study on the appearance of, and justification for, the first ethnically marked pharmaceutical drug called BiDil. This African-American drug is currently in its first year of a two-year medical trial at over 100 clinical sites in the U.S. and is produced by Bedford, MA based NitroMed, Inc. Relying on methods of multi-sited fieldwork (Heath et al. ; Rapp ), I will conduct participant observation at one or more trial sites in the New York area to learn how both doctors and patients understand African-American hypertension as a different disease than that of its Caucasian counterpart. This aspect of the fieldwork will be complemented by participant observation and interviews with geneticists researching SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) as markers of biological difference crucial to pharmacogenomics. The controversy over whether or not phenotypic traits can scientifically belie one genetic constitution regarding drug metabolizing enzymes has recently brought the usage of race in science to the fore in The New England Journal of Medicine (Exner et al. ; Yancy et al. ) where many of those working on BiDil have published key papers justifying their all Black study, The African-American Heart Failure Trial (Dries et al. ; Exner et al. ). Geneticists publishing in Nature Genetics have upped their criticism of race as a surrogate marker for genetic difference due to the NEJM debates (Editorial ). By interviewing spokespeople for biotechnology companies working on SNP mapping for pharmacogenomics purposes, scientific advisors on NitroMed, Inc. s BiDil trial, cardiologists, hypertension specialists, members of the Association of Black Cardiologists (ABC), patients, and patient advocate group members, I will chronicle the deployment of race and other markers (such as SNPs) as each potentially inflect new social understandings of difference, identity, and health in the post-genomic age. This Postdoctoral Research and Training Fellowship, to be carried out at New York University under the sponsorship of senior Professor of Anthropology Rayna Rapp for 18 months, and at the University of London, Goldsmith College with Professor of Sociology Nikolas Rose for 6 months, is both timely and pertinent. The field of pharmacogenomics is just emerging, while questions on the responsible use of the concept of race --selectively resisted in both the life and social sciences--demand more detailed interdisciplinary scholarship. This project will build upon the work of researchers in medical anthropology and sociology interested in the intersection of various social and biological markers of difference, such as ethnicity and disease genes. It will furthermore contribute to research in the social studies of science concerned with the co-production of disease, identity, technology, and market doc20958 none The proposed project is located in the second quadrant of the ROLE description with links to the third and fourth quadrants. It focuses on acquisition, representation, processing, learning and transfer of relational concepts. The study of relational concepts is important because relational concepts are ubiquitous in mathematics and science: ratio, proportion, and function, velocity, acceleration, and density, mutation, evolution and growth rate, probability and statistical interaction, and correlation and contingency are just a few examples. The study will be guided by our hypotheses about representation, processing, learning, and transfer of relational concepts across ages and knowledge domains. The proposed project aims to answer several fundamental questions. What are the basic cognitive mechanisms underlying acquisition of relational concepts, and how are relational concepts represented in the cognitive system? How do these mechanisms and representations change in the course of development? Do these mechanisms differ across knowledge domains? And how can we facilitate learning and transfer of relational concepts within and across domains of mathematics and science? To pursue these questions, we propose a three-year-long research project that will be conducted by a team of researchers collaborating through the Ohio State University Learning Research Initiative and interested in cognition, cognitive development, and the learning of biology, physics, and mathematics. The project would be a systematic empirical study of conceptual development across several knowledge domains. The team will use a wide variety of methods and tasks, ranging from simple tasks allowing participation of young children to relatively complex tasks requiring sophisticated knowledge. The project will generate new basic knowledge increasing our understanding of acquisition and processing of relations, as well as our understanding of learning and transfer of relational concepts in mathematics and science. The proposed project will be an important step towards better understanding of conceptual development and of learning of important concepts in mathematics, physics, and biology, and it will inform practice of teaching of mathematics and science doc20959 none This study investigates the mechanisms of solar chromospheric heating in relation to photospheric dynamics. The data available focus on NOAA Active Region , and feature observations from various satellites (Yohkoh, SoHO, and TRACE) as well as a unique balloon-borne experiment (Flare Genesis Experiment). Analysis should determine not only the photospheric magnetic and velocity fields, but also the electron temperature and emission measure in the overlying transition region. Particular emphasis will be placed on understanding small-scale transient phenomena like Ellerman bombs. At the final stage of the project, these events will be modeled by cellular automata models incorporating the self-organized critical behavior of the solar atmosphere, as well as by deterministic hydrodynamic and magneto-hydrodynamic calculations doc20960 none This project includes the research activities to obtain the stability and scalability of the inter-domain routing protocols. The proposed research will not only address issues on the current interdomain routing protocol, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), but also develop new interdomain routing protocols that can facilitate fast convergence and ensure reliability. In enhancing interdomain routing, robust configuration and traffic engineering capability are the integral part of the research. This includes fundamental understanding of BGP capability and investigating the minimum set of extensions to the current BGP. Robust configuration capability also requires high-level specification of the network configuration goal. The research team will perform systematic studies of fundamental issues on interdomain routing, including tradeoffs between traffic engineering capability and scalability of interdomain routing, routing policy guidelines to avoid persistent oscillation and the tradeoff between these guidelines and traffic engineering capability, reducing routing protocol convergence delay, and enhancing routing reliability by specifying high-level routing policy semantics. One component of this project is to educate graduate and undergraduate students on the management and configuration of the networks as well as to create awareness and interest among students on the issues surrounding interdomain routing doc20961 none This Post Doctoral Fellowship in the Social and Behavioral Sciences seeks to evaluate whether the basic literacy skills of African American children are enhanced through culture-specific instruction and computer technology. In an after school setting, students will receive reading instruction in one of four distinct instructional contexts that vary in culture-specific materials, software applications; and computer-based learning environments. This study will investigate whether the expected learning enhancement in the culturally congruent learning context for African American children occurs with other another minority group, Latino, and Anglo children. Moreover, students reading performance after receiving instruction in computer versus non-computer contexts will be determined. Finally, the relationship between all students engagement levels and reading performance in the four instructional contexts will be assessed. Results will contribute to the development of comprehensive culturally responsive learning strategies in other cognitive domains. The Fellow, Dr. Juanita Cole, received her doctorate in psychology from Howard University. During her two year NSF post-doctoral fellowship, she will be under the sponsorship of Dr. Michael Cole at the University of California, San Diego Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition doc20962 none Project Geologic evidence indicates that many periods of biotic and environmental crisis coincided with times when the world s oceans were highly stratified in their chemical and isotopic composition, with deep waters that were devoid of oxygen and likely strongly enriched in carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. The Late Permian, notable as the time of the largest mass extinction in the fossil record (251 million years ago), is thought to represent such an interval. Stagnation of ocean circulation has been invoked to explain extreme oceanic conditions of widespread anoxia during this time, and reinvigoration of circulation has been suggested as a mechanism to bring toxic waters to the ocean s surface in a global Lake Nyos-type event, leading to mass extinction. The project proposed here will explore the relationship between ocean stagnation and chemical stratification, and the mechanisms that sustain shallow-water anoxia in the face of wind-driven mixing, using numerical models to ensure that the scenarios proposed are consistent with fundamental principles of mass, energy, and isotopic balance. Model results will be compared with existing isotopic and lithologic data. In addition, new sulfur isotopic data will be obtained from one of the most continuous and well-studied Permian-Triassic boundary sections in the world, providing an important missing piece of biogeochemical information against which to evaluate the models. The modeling will also provide motivation and guidance for further data collection in specific locales. The model will have the unique ability to explore the chemistry of an anoxic ocean, and as such, its availability should be of great interest to the scientific community. The intuition developed should help to guide subsequent formulation of conceptual models concerning the relationship between climate, ocean circulation, ocean biogeochemistry, and biological response doc20963 none Avalos This project is concerned with studying exact boundary controllability properties of those systems of coupled partial differential equations (PDE s) which govern structural acoustic flow within a chamber. Exact and null boundary controllability problems for two-dimensional systems of thermoelasticity will also be studied. In part, the work will entail a study of the dual problem; namely, the attainment of related observability inequalities for solutions of homogeneous adjoint equations. In line with the intended engineering applications, the focus will be on situations which allow control of the structural acoustic dynamics on as small a (boundary) control region as possible. Moreover, this project is aimed at finding conditions on the geometry and prescribed controls so that, with control implemented on the flexible portion of the acoustic chamber only, one will have exact controllability of the acoustic flow, for arbitrary initial data of finite energy. It is anticipated that key ingredients in the work will include the following: (i) sharp trace regularity for the wave equation in the absence of the so-called Lopatinski condition (intrinsic to the wave equation under Neumann boundary conditions); (ii) microlocal analytical estimates which will allow the absorption of tangential wave traces by time derivatives on the boundary; and (iii) recent results involving Carleman s estimates for the wave equation with controlled Neumann part of the boundary. In addition, the project will focus on problems of linear and (globally) nonlinear exact controllability for thermoelastic systems. In particular, thermoelastic PDE s will be considered which have their associated (non-Lipschitz) nonlinearities in place; e.g., the von Karman bracket and the quasilinearities which appear in the modeling of extensible plates. This work will attempt to use, in an essential way, the now-known analyticity of linearized thermoelastic models and our recent stability work for uncontrolled (but fully nonlinear) thermoelastic systems. Examples of coupled partial differential equations (PDE s), such as those to be investigated, have long existed in the literature. However, recent innovations in smart material technology, and the potential applications of these innovations within the context of control engineering design, have greatly increased the interest in these PDE models. The project is aimed at obtaining information about certain qualitative properties of these equations, which in turn can be used to design effective control laws for the structures interactions that these equations govern. For example, structural acoustic PDE s are used to model the interaction of an aircraft cabin s interior acoustic field with the surrounding walls of the cabin. For the benefit of the passengers, it is desirable to negate or control pressure disturbances that act directly on the interior acoustic field. These disturbances typically emanate from outside the cabin environment; e.g., vibrations due to aircraft engine and propeller noise, or effects due to weather turbulence. In practice, engineers attempt to control this external noise by placing piezoelectric actuators sensors on a portion of the cabin wall, these devices to act in such a way so as to remove, or at least lessen, the harmful acoustic pressure effects. However, the efficacy of this technology is profoundly sensitive to the shape of the cabin, as well as to the particular region of the cabin walls where the actuators are placed. The goals of this project include: (i) the precise mathematical characterization of those cabin geometries for which active control design by piezoelectric actuation is indeed possible; and (ii) when such control design is practicable, the construction of a reliable method to prescribe the amount and region of control actuation which will be necessary to maintain a calm acoustic field within the cabin doc20964 none We propose to study the stable carbon and oxygen isotopes preserved in the tooth enamel of Australia s herbivorous mammals to reveal dietary shifts and environmental changes over the past 24 million years, especially in relation to the spread of the tropical grasses which employ the C4 photosynthetic pathway. As an island continent, Australia s physiographic and climatic histories are unique. Intercontinental biotic migration has been severely constrained by vast transoceanic dispersal distances, which isolated the continent to terrestrial faunal migration for most of the Cenozoic. Superimposed upon this is the fact that most of Australia s endemic mammals are marsupials. They diversified in situ and filled a broad spectrum of niches comparable with placental mammals on other continents. Australia thus presents us with an unparalleled experiment in mammal evolution: an isolated radiation of fundamentally different mammals, adapting to landscape and climatic changes in the absence of competing immigrants. Stable isotope analyses of Australian herbivore teeth will allow us to examine the relative strengths of hypotheses previously advanced for the expansion of C4 vegetation and faunal turnover in the over the past 24 million years. Does Australia fit the global model, and if not, why? The proposal seeks to address the following key issues. 1. Timing of the appearance and expansion of C4 vegetation in Australia compared with the rest of the world, as interpreted from d13C values in the tooth enamel of the three terrestrial herbivore lineages: kangaroos, wombats and diprotodontoids. 2. Relationships between evolutionary trends in Australian Neogene terrestrial herbivores and shifts in prevailing climate vegetation regimes inferred from enamel d13C and d18O values. 3. Development of seasonality in Australian climate since the Miocene deduced from isotopic fluctuations down the profile of ever-growing wombat molars, and relationship to occurrence of C4 plants. 4. Paleoecologies of late Cenozoic Australian herbivores and communities. Critical to tackling these issues is the need to establish modern Australian isotope baselines. We will ascertain diet-enamel enrichment factors for extant kangaroos and wombats, and dietary isotopic variation within species across different seasons and environments. There is no basis for assuming that isotopic offsets between diet and animal tissues established for herbivorous placental mammals will hold for marsupials, especially given their overt differences in developmental biology. Indeed, our pilot data do reveal marked ontogenetic variation along the molar row for several different kangaroo species. Our preliminary d13C data of fossil marsupials also indicate a diet containing C4 plants for animals from only the two youngest of 11 northern, central and eastern fossil localities so far sampled. Both are ~3.4 million years old and, if their C4 signatures can be attributed to grasses, are much younger than those sites in which the earliest appearances of C4 grass diets are observed in Asia, Africa and the Americas. We intend to extend this initial work to cover all of the significant Neogene fossil deposits in Australia to better outline the isotope changes recorded in the teeth of fossil marsupials through time doc20965 none Davis It is widely agreed that invasion ecology theory needs to become more mechanistic, quantitative, and predictive and that field experiments and better models are required to help accomplish this goal. The initial goal of the proposed project is to test a recent mechanistic hypothesis of invasibility and to develop a quantitative empirical model that can be used to predict the changing invasibility of an environment over time. The hypothesis tested proposes that a mechanistic relationship exists between invasibility and resource availability, and that changes in invasibility are often due to changes in the competition intensity from resident vegetation, which in turn result from fluctuations in resource availability. This project will be conducted in a native grass environment located on a Minnesota sand plain. Thus, a second goal of the project is to increase our understanding of the invasion dynamics associated with grasslands and woodland grassland ecotones in semi-arid environments. These goals will be accomplished in a study consisting of three parts. During the first stage, an empirical model of invasibility will be developed using data from a field experiment in which temporal patterns of resource availability (water) will be manipulated in plots being experimentally invaded. During this stage, data from the field experiments will also be used to directly test predictions of the fluctuating resource availability hypothesis. Water was selected as the resource to be manipulated because previous studies of seedling establishment at Cedar Creek have shown that establishment success of herbaceous and plants was most strongly correlated with soil water conditions. During the second stage, an existing mechanistic soil water model will be used to produce season-long soil water profiles at the study site under a variety of climatological (temperature and rainfall) data sets, including climatological data recorded at the study site during the project, historical climatological data for the region, and various hypothetical temperature and precipitation regimes that might occur in the future if the climate changes. During the third stage, the season-long water profiles produced by the mechanistic model will be used as input for the empirical model of invasibility. The invasibility predictions produced by the integration of the empirical and mechanistic models will compared to invasibility data obtained from a separate field experiment conducted during the study. If the integrated model is successful in its predictions, then it will be used with the historical and hypothetical climatological data to determine the extent of annual variability in invasibility of native grasslands in the past, and the extent to which invasibility may change in the future if temperature and or precipitation regimes change. The goals of the proposed study are both to advance ecological theory and the ecological understanding of specific environments. In addition to testing a recent mechanistic theory of invasibility, the study will develop a method to model and predict invasibility that is intended to be transferable to other environments. Recent evidence has shown that grasslands and old fields are more responsive to fluctuations in precipitation than other biomes and that water limited environments such as grasslands and savannas are likely to be some of the biomes most affected by future climate change. Thus, by testing a specific mechanistic theory of invasibility in the water limited grassland-forest ecotone at Cedar Creek with an experimental study culminating in the development of a model of invasibility, this study will contribute to the important pool of knowledge that will be necessary to predict and prepare for the possible ecological consequences of global environmental change in these environments doc20966 none Eiler Hydrogen is arguably the most important minor element in the solid earth: It dominates the melting behavior and rheology of mantle rocks; it is the principle solvent for metasomatic transport in the crust and mantle; its concentration in silicate minerals controls rates of diffusion of other elements; and its abundance in silicate melts strongly influences crystallization-differentiation. However, the geochemistry of hydrogen is less well described than that for virtually any other element (and certainly any of similar importance): Reasonable estimates of the total abundance of H in the earth span a range of nearly an order of magnitude; concentrations, residence times, and sources and sinks of hydrogen in major mantle reservoirs are poorly known or only guessed at; and partitioning of hydrogen between minerals and melts has yet to be described with the same experimental sophistication given to studies of other minor elements. We believe that our understanding of the global hydrogen cycle can be advanced by studying the hydrogen isotope composition (i.e., D H ratio) of well characterized suites of submarine basalts whose origin and evolution is influenced by mantle hydrogen. The potential for such studies has been recognized for many years, but has not been realized due to sparse data, the large proportion of isotopic measurements on samples that are not characterized for other important geochemical parameters, and lack of inter-laboratory standardization. We propose to characterize the variation in D H ratio among submarine basalts associated with the Mariana arc and its back arc basin, which are a key set of samples for our current understanding of the role of water in magma genesis at convergent margins. We will approach this study using a new analytical method for determining D H ratios and H contents of small quantities (10 s to hundreds of micrograms) of hydrous solids and glasses at a rate approximately 10x that of conventional analyses but with similar accuracy and precision. This method will let us produce relatively large, well standardized and well replicated data sets in a reasonable time frame doc20967 none The common association of thrust belts with the slopes of the great mountain belts has resulted in the common assumption that topographic relief and surface shortening are intrinsically linked. For example, many of the world s great mountain belts are doubly vergent, with well-developed thrust belts facing away from the interior of the orogen. However, in some key cases, significant topographic relief has developed in the absence of major faulting. These orogenic scale monoclines and their along-strike discontinuities have the potential to elucidate crustal mechanical and rheological controls on continental orogenesis. An exceptional example of an orogenic-scale monocline occurs along the western border of the Altiplano-Puna plateau of the central Andes. Although climate, and in particular precipitation, has a strong influence on the morphology of a mountain belt, in this region the climatic input is minimized because it is one of the driest places on Earth. The profound lack of precipitation causes the landscape to evolve extremely slowly and extend the preservation potential of landforms and surfaces from the thousands of years typical of mountain belts into millions of years. Therefore, the western edge of the plateau s morphology reflects a nearly pure tectonic signal, making it the most logical starting point for studies aimed at improving our understanding of continental plateau formation and orogenesis. A chronologic framework for the Miocene to present uplift of the Andean monocline will be derived from investigation of: 1) the geometric relationships between strata accumulating in sedimentary basins at the toe of the monocline, and 2) estimations of the degree of rotation of stream paleo-gradients in a set of drainages which are deeply incised into the monocline surface. Paleo-gradients will be determined by correlation and high accuracy surveying of terrace surfaces preserved in stream valleys. Extensive volcanism and large-volume ignimbrite eruptions are well distributed throughout the Neogene rock record, so that existing chronologic constraints can be improved upon by identification and collection of volcanic material for dating. The Atacama and Tamarugal Basins are ideal field areas in which to conduct the stratigraphic research in both outcrop and seismic. Both basins lie at the foot of the monocline and are hydrologically closed. Therefore, they preserve complete Neogene depositional histories. The Atacama Basin contains an especially valuable record because it lies within the largest along-strike anomaly in the monocline. Determining if a genetic link exists between the basin and the deflection of the monocline (temporally and spatially) will be an important research focus, as it may yield insight into processes fundamental to plateau uplift. This study is extremely timely and has the potential to be an excellent contribution to the understanding of surface processes, orogenesis and plateau uplift. The outcomes of this work will advance the present state of knowledge concerning the causes of plateau uplift by testing whether monocline warping is synchronous with deformation on the opposite side of the orogen, as expressed in the Sub-Andean belt and Eastern Cordillera. It will also test the significance of large topographic anomalies in otherwise continuous mountain-fronts. This study will explore the feasibility of plateau-derived groundwater as a substantial factor in landform genesis. The results of this study will contain many parallels to research on the Tibetan Plateau, where performing similar studies would be hampered by exposure problems. This research will have educational and human resource impacts. At Cornell University, results from this study will become components of undergraduate courses in geomorphology, geophysics and basin analysis. All results will be cataloged in GIS software and available to the public via the internet. This research will also serve as thesis components for two Cornell graduate students doc20968 none This project aims at developing a suite of multiuser diversity driven algorithms for packet scheduling and localized routing, and to obtain some overriding principles in multimedia wireless systems. In particular, the issues of hierarchical multiuser diversity (HMD) driven downlink and uplink access schemes for multimedia traffic will be studied. The objective related to HMD driven downlink access schemes is to devise efficient packet transmission schemes for the downlink, exploiting multiuser diversity gain in a multiuser wireless system. Specifically, the proposal addresses such an HMD scheme in which each user can choose either a direct transmission mode or a relay transmission mode. Treating delay tolerance as a network resource, the HMD-driven scheduling for both direct trans-mission and relay transmission is then explored for both single-cell setting and cellular networks. Also the localized routing algorithms will be developed for both slowly fading channels and fast fading channels, due to mobility. In the part of the project related to based on code division multiple access (CDMA HMD) uplink access schemes, the pro-ject will include studies of access schemes taking into account explicitly the delay con-straints of different multimedia traffic, with particular focus on the uplink. Since the up-link is a multi-access channel, the multiuser diversity will be explored in the context of CDMA. In particular, the number of simultaneous transmissions will be optimized, based on the channel conditions across the users. The project will also address the critical issues related to the buffering, jitter, fairness and possible loss due to switching to a new relay. Finally, the trade-off between HMD and CDMA will be studied, with the aim at develop-ing a hybrid scheme that achieves multiuser diversity gain and guarantee the user s minimal throughput requirement as the same time doc20969 none Large-insert libraries of genomic DNA are a valuable resource for comparative studies in development evolution and genetics for addressing such fundamental questions in biology as how genomes have evolved and how evolution of genomes has resulted in evolution of body plans. The goal of the proposed research is to construct 11 BAC libraries representative of the breadth of the Metazoa. The focus is on animals that occupy phylogenetic positions key to an understanding of animal evolution. Preference is given to organisms with demonstrated potential as developmental model organisms. Therefore, 2 deuterostomes have been chosen: lamprey, basal in the craniates and pivotal for understanding the pattern of gene and chromosomal duplications during vertebrate evolution, and the cephalochordate amphioxus, the closest living invertebrate relative of the vertebrates. On the basis of molecular phylogenetics, the protostomes have recently been divided into two groups, the Ecdysozoa and the Lophotrochozoa. However, branching patterns of the phyla within each of these groups are poorly resolved. Because representatives of the Ecdysozoa, Drosophila and Caenorhabditis have been well-studied, we have not chosen any Ecdysozoan. For the Lophotrochozoa, which have, in general, received little attention in regard to genes, development and evolution, seven organisms have been chosen. These include 2 annelids, one of which, the polychaete Platynereis dumerilii, is relatively basal within the annelids and the other of which, the leech Helobdella robusta, is more highly derived. Platynereis is rapidly becoming a lophotrochozoan model developmental organism, and while the leech is quite derived, it has been the object of developmental genetic studies for some years. Two molluscs are included-- one bivalve, (Spisula solidissima) and one gastropod (Ilyanassa obsoleta). The other Lophotrochozoans include 1 nemertean (Cerebratulus lacteus), 1 sipunculid (Temiste langiformis), and 1 acoel flatworm (Neochildea fusca). The phylogenetic position of the acoels is controversial. On the basis of morphology, they were considered basal Bilateria. However, most, but not all, molecular phylogenetic analyses place acoels within the protostomes. To address bilaterian origins, we have chosen a ctenophore (Mnemiopsis leidyi). Finally, to address the origin of the metazoa, a sponge, Callyspongia diffusa, a representative of the most basal Metazoa, was selected. BAC libraries will be constructed and distributed by P. de Jong (Children s Hospital Research Institute, Oakland), who has a long track-record in construction of BAC libraries, including making the BAC library for the human genome project. For organisms for which interest is high to sequence the entire genome, 15X coverage is proposed. For others, 10X coverage is proposed doc20970 none Liang During their migration towards the surface or subsurface storage areas, magmas generated deep in the Earth interior will inevitably react with the wallrocks and their host porous crystalline matrices. The proposed research is a combined laboratory and numerical study of the kinetic of crystal-melt and rock-melt reaction in the Earth upper mantle and lower crust. The laboratory part of the project involves dissolution studies of mantle rocks and minerals (olivine, pyroxenes and garnet) in molten silicates of andesitic to picritic compositions. Theoretical and numerical studies of crystal-melt interaction will focus on two length scales: grain scale and continuum scale. Once coupled with laboratory experiments, studies of grain scale processes will help us to identify crystal-melt reaction mechanisms, parameterize reaction rates, and improve experimental design. Continuum scale reactive flow models using laboratory calibrated reaction rates and thermodynamic phase relationships will allow us to better constrain melt transport and melt-rock reaction in the upper mantle and lower crust. A combined laboratory and theoretical study of crystal-melt interaction will also allow us to develop new methods that can be used to estimate magma ascent rate and diffusion coefficients in the crystals and melts. A database for chemical diffusion in silicate melts and crystals of mafic compositions will be constructed. This database will be integrated into the graduate and undergraduate geology courses that are taught by the PI at Brown University doc20971 none Determining the speeds of Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) is very important for determining when a CME on the solar disk will impact the Earth. The head-on speed of a CME is very difficult to measure directly and this project will investigate the possibility of using measurements of the associated filaments to determine the speed of the CME. Observations in the Helium I (HeI) emission at nm will be used for this purpose. The data will be obtained from the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory. The HeI nm data will then be compared with data from the Large Angle Spectrometric Coronagraph Experiment (LASCO) on the SOHO satellite. In addition, the project will use magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) simulations of the propagation of CMEs to help refine the predicted Earth impact times doc20972 none The objective of this project is to improve estimates of the high latitude electrodynamic forcing of the thermosphere through quantification of variable electric fields and auroral precipitation, and through analysis of their influences on the thermosphere and on ionospheric currents. The PIs propose to construct an empirical model of high-latitude electric fields and auroral precipitation that includes both average and variable components, and that quantifies magnitudes, coherences, and the correlation between the field and the precipitation. Data will come from the Dynamics Explorer-2 (DE-2) spacecraft and from incoherent scatter radars. The PIs will validate this new model by using it as input to the NCAR Thermosphere-Ionosphere-Electrodynamics General Circulation Model (TIE-GCM) and comparing their results with high-latitude observations of ground magnetic variations and neutral thermospheric winds and temperatures, including both mean values and standard deviations doc20973 none The researcher is concerned that the number of women who participate in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology (STEM) education is lower than that of young men. This study seeks to understand better how young African American women, who appear to be interested and engaged in science during high school years, remain under-represented in STEM courses in college. The project creates new data collection technologies to find unique gender subcultures of African American communities that contribute to their decision-making. It is hypothesized that factors that discourage young women involve interactions at the university that reflect gender and race bias. The study will first analyze a national data set (NELS) to obtain national estimates of rates of transition of women and men in the science pipeline. Then it will create a method to assess the perceptions of science experiences and factors involving interactions with other people that encourage, or discourage, women to enter science professions. She would develop measures of perceptions of science experiences that might help explain why trends in attitudes toward science observed with NELS data were found doc20974 none Jan Tullis Lower crustal and upper mantle rocks commonly show localized ductile shear zones, characterized by a finer grain size than the host rocks; such strain localization implies a strain weakening process. Dynamic recrystallization accompanying dislocation creep is a major process tending to reduce grain size, and several distinct mechanisms of dynamic recrystallization have been identified; for quartz these define three regimes of dislocation creep, with distinctly different microstructures as well as mechanical behavior. The low temperature, higher stress process of grain boundary bulging produces strain weakening and localization in both quartz and feldspar, whereas the higher temperature process of subgrain rotation does not. Previous work on olivine has focussed on high temperature, low stress creep, although there are indications of bulging recrystallization and strain localization at lower temperatures. The goals of this project are to quantify the constitutive behavior and piezometer relation for bulging recrystallization in quartz, and for olivine to verify the existence of this process, determine the conditions over which it operates, and quantify the strain weakening it produces. The results should allow more accurate modelling of lithospheric deformation doc20975 none The Evolution of Hierarchical Structure in Organisms: A Test for an Increasing Tendency Daniel McShea, Duke University One of the clearest trends in the history of life is the increase in the hierarchical structure of organisms, that is, in the degree to which they are nested, parts within wholes. Well-known cases of hierarchy increase include the so-called major transitions in evolution, such as the various origins of multicellular organisms (e.g., plants and animals) from aggregates of free-living cells, and also at a higher level, the origins of colonies (e.g., social-insect colonies) from clones of multicellular individuals. The trend is clear, but we know little about the mechanism, about what drives the trend. One possibility is that there has been a bias, a positive tendency for hierarchy to increase, perhaps because greater nestedness is favored by natural selection. But it could also be that there is no such tendency, that hierarchy decreases as often as it increases, and that the trend is the result of the passive spread of evolutionary lineages across the hierarchy spectrum. To see how this might work, suppose that the first organisms (presumably bacteria) were hierarchically as shallow as possible, so that initially hierarchy could only increase. Then, as life diversified, with both increases and decreases occurring in various groups, the outer envelope of hierarchical structure would be pushed toward ever-higher levels. Stephen Jay Gould argued forcefully for this mechanism in his book, Full House. The evidence on this question - whether any increasing tendency exists - is equivocal. We know that losses of hierarchical structure have occurred, especially at the colony level, in the transitions back to solitary life. But their frequency, relative to increases, is unknown. The study proposed here is a first-ever attempt to answer the question in a rigorous way. One barrier to investigation has been the fact that too few major transitions are known to estimate relative frequencies of increase and decrease in a statistically robust way. This study solves the problem by employing a recently developed high-resolution hierarchy scale. The scale identifies intermediate levels between the major levels (e.g., between multicellular individual and colony), in effect interpolating a series of minor transitions within the major transitions and thereby increasing the number of transitions available to be studied. To test for an increasing tendency, the study will examine minor transitions across the spectrum of hierarchical organization, from bacteria to supercolony. Modern phylogenetic methods will be used to reconstruct the history of hierarchy with each group studied, to count numbers of increases and decreases in hierarchy, and to assess their relative probabilities doc20976 none Williams This award provides continued funding for the CD-ROM (Continental Dynamics of the Rocky Mountains) collaborative investigation which is designed to understand the tectonic evolution of the lithosphere of the southern Rocky Mountains. A transect from Wyoming to New Mexico is providing an opportunity to evaluate the hypothesis that lithospheric architecture of the Southwest reflects a resolvable mixture of structures that formed during early Proterozoic assembly of the continent and modifications that took place during younger intracratonic tectonism that were themselves influenced by the Proterozoic compositional structure. Phase 1 ( - ) was successful in substantially verifying this hypothesis. The PIs imaged the Cheyenne Belt and Jemez lineament; both are interpreted to be Paleoproterozoic paleosubduction zones that also show long-lived and strong influence on younger intracratonic tectonism. Both are also associated with lateral changes in deep chemical lithosphere, such that the mantle provinces can be linked to crustal provinces, demonstrating the antiquity of the mantle transitions. With this bridge funding award, the Principal Investigators will conduct an annual workshop, complete the analysis of data sets generated in Phase 1, increase productivity in terms of published papers, and prepare for Phase 2 of the CD-ROM project doc20977 none Both the Greenland and Scandinavian Caledonides expose huge slabs of continental crust that have experienced high-pressure (HP) metamorphism during the collision between Laurentia and Baltica. An ultrahigh-pressure (UHP) terrane has been recognized in western Norway for the past fifteen years, while the first evidence for UHP metamorphism has just been found in Greenland a few months ago. Taken together, these two coherent continental eclogite terranes comprise the most extensive exposure of a deep, ancient mountain root on the planet - giving us a view of mountain belt anatomy that is generally hidden at the base of active orogens like the Himalayas. The ultimate goal of this project is to understand how this thick or deep orogenic root formed, and how it was brought back up to the earth s surface. Extensional collapse of overthickened crust, whereby HP and UHP rocks are unroofed along listric normal faults, is an oft-cited mechanism of exhumation; however, major extensional structures are not exposed in the Geenland eclogite province. Gilotti s earlier NSF supported research found that the peak pessure was attained approximately 410 to 370 Ma ago; whereas, workers in the Fjord Region, to the south of the eclogite province, are finding widespread evidence of synchronous melting, leucogranite generation and extensional faulting that is 10-70 Ma older. Either the observed extensional detachments in the south have nothing to do with eclogite exhumation, or the PI s previous ages are recording cooling at the end of the exhumation path instead of peak pressure conditions. The main objectives of the proposed research are: 1) to identify the extent and timing of UHP metamorphism; 2) to test the robustness of our previous ages for HP metamorphism by comparing zircon populations from the retrograde margins of eclogite pods to zircon populations from the well-preserved centers; 3) to establish the pressure-temperature-time history of this slab of eclogite-bearing crust as it returns to the earth s surface; and 4) to determine the geometry and timing of contractional and strike-slip fabrics that might be possible exhumation structures. The PI s data set is essential for formulating an orogen-wide model of eclogite formation and exhumation in this important continent-continent collision. Although the necessary studies are underway in Norway, their results cannot be put into context without the corresponding knowledge of HP and UHP metamorphism in Greenland. The preliminary results also have the potential to provide new insight on the behavior of U-Pb isotope systems during HP UHP metamorphism and subsequent decompression doc20978 none This project is investigating Mesoproterozoic ( - Ma) sedimentary rocks in the western U.S. to test aspects of the controversial Rodinia hypotheses. The hypothesis being tested is that the inboard record of sedimentation and tectonics in southwestern Laurentia, preserved in well-exposed sedimentary successions, can be used for understanding stresses at the surrounding plate margins, nature of drainage patterns and basins in southwestern Laurentia, and the age of possible outboard sources of detritus. The research involves structural, petrologic, and geochronologic study aimed at correlation of, and characterizing provenance for, several key areas and units. These areas represent preserved remnants of once more extensive sedimentary successions; they are well exposed, but widely separated, and correlations have been hampered by a lack of reliable geochronology. The study concentrates on the Apache Group (Arizona), Unkar Group (Grand Canyon), Crystal Spring Formation (Death Valley), and Lanora Formation (Texas). The researchers are reconstructing the regional intracratonic basinal and tectonic patterns and searching for a fingerprint of possible outboard sources of detritus. The geochronological studies involve: dating ash beds using precise U-Pb geochronology, U-Pb dating of detrital zircons, new in situ U-Pb microprobe dating of monazite grains, and Ar-Ar laser dating of mica grains. Sedimentary-tectonic studies are evaluating which faults were active during deposition by looking for facies changes across faults and relationships to syntectonic magmatism. Petrologic studies are emphasizing provenance of siliciclastic rocks using standard petrologic techniques. Detailed regional tests involving geochronology linked to sedimentary tectonics are providing better understanding of the tectonic setting of western Laurentia and hence the most likely adjacent outboard continental masses that collided with Laurentia from 1.3-1.0 Ga doc20979 none McClelland Modern examples of volcanic-hosted massive sulfide (VMS) deposits suggest that hydrothermal activity associated with formation of these deposits is a steady-state process. In contrast, ancient examples typically define distinct age groups and recent genetic models relate VMS mineralization to specific tectonic events such as incipient intra-arc rifting. Distinction between steady state and punctual models for VMS mineralization requires high precision geochronologic data to establish the duration of magmatism at the scale of individual deposits and to establish correlation, distinction, or migration of magmatism observed at the regional scale. The widespread occurrence of Devonian to Mississippian VMS deposits in the northern North American Cordillera provides an ideal setting to examine this issue. U-Pb geochronology and Nd-Sr isotope geochemistry combined with major, trace, and REE geochemistry of felsic and mafic rocks associated with mineralization and hydrothermal alteration will establish the age and tectonic setting of VMS mineralization in the Ambler district, southern Brooks Range, Alaska. The resulting database will serve as a basis for comparison with and evaluation of broadly age equivalent VMS deposits in the Yukon-Tanana terrane as well as sediment-hosted deposits within adjacent terranes and the Cordilleran miogeocline. The results of this project will provide valuable insight into the temporal and tectonic setting of VMS mineralization throughout the northern Cordillera. This insight will potentially lead to the generation of new genetic models for the evolution and preservation of VMS deposits in additional settings. The project will also address the long-standing question of the tectonic setting of mid-Paleozoic magmatism in the Cordillera doc20980 none Zumberge This project is measuring the absolute value of gravity, co-located with GPS measurements, in Alaska. Proposed explanations for the transient deformation after great earthquakes include viscoelastic response, aseismic creep and combinations of the two. Different models of postseismic viscoelastic relaxation predict observable gravity changes over km length scales, with a complex spatial pattern. To date, the viscosity profile is best determined by postglacial rebound studies. Gravity and GPS measurements offer the opportunity to obtain viscosity profile estimates for the Alaskan plate boundary. The area is especially interesting, as the viscosity of subduction zone materials may be very different from that beneath the centers of continental and oceanic plates. Aseismic creep is predicted to produce deformation of a more limited and markedly different spatial character than that of viscoelastic relaxation. Determining the contribution of aseismic creep in postseismic deformation is important in estimating recurrence intervals for great earthquakes. This project is establishing a baseline gravity network of fifteen stations in Alaska. The bulk of the network forms a transect perpendicular to the predicted contours of maximum gravity change in the far field. Additional points are located within the deformation near field. Gravity measurements are collocated with existing GPS stations. These initial measurements form the basis for testing different postseismic deformation models. Additional activities include collecting auxiliary data to correct the gravity data for signals such as water table variations. A portion of a - relative gravity survey is being repeated as well, in order to determine the total gravity change over the Kenai Peninsula since the earthquake. Data are distributed through traditional means and an Internet website doc20981 none Fialko The proposed models regarding characteristic spatiotemporal scales of formation of parental silicic magma bodies in the continental crust range from partial melting of the tectonically thickened fluid-rich lower crust to magmatic underplating, whereby the heat required to produce crustal melting is advected by intrusions of mafic sills (presumably, from the mantle source). These models predict very different time scales for the production of granitic magma. The pertologically-based model of slow equilibrium melting of the lower crust implies that granites are generated on orogenic time scales of the order of millions of years. In contrast, theoretical models of magmatic underplating predict that anatectic melts are produced on quite short timescales of the order of the crystallization time of typical mafic underplates (e.g., 100- years for sill intrusions that are a few tens to a few hundred meters thick). In principle, the intrusion of mafic underplates, the volume changes associated with in situ melting, and the subsequent evacuation of the resulting granitoid magmas can each generate geodetically observable deformation. Geodetic measurements in areas of contemporaneous large active magma bodies may therefore provide critical constraints on the timescales and dynamics of crustal anatexis. This project uses Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) observations in regions of the ongoing crustal magmatism to constrain typical rates of the large-scale melt generation and or migration, and to test the proposed models of the granitic melt production. The primary targets include large mid-crustal magma bodies imaged by seismic studies, in particular, the Socorro (New Mexico, USA), the Altiplano-Puna (South America), and the Southern Tibet (Asia) magma bodies. The observed spatial patterns and average rates of magma-induced deformation are combined with theoretical modeling that explicitly includes thermodynamics of melting freezing, realistic variations in the mechanical properties of the host rocks, and inelastic deformation, to develop a detailed quantitative understanding of the dynamics of crustal anatexis. Independent observables that are brought to bear on the model results include constraints on the lateral extent and thickness of the mid-crustal magma bodies from seismic imaging, inferences about the duration and total amplitude of the magma-induced uplift from geomorphologic studies, and structural and geochemical signatures of the exhumed ancient magma bodies. Results of this work are relevant to interpretations of seismic observations of bright spots in the mid-to-lower continental crust, field and theoretical studies of the crustal magmatism, and origin and evolution of the continental crust doc20982 none Granger The paradox of how horizontal contraction and extension can occur simultaneously in convergent mountain belts remains a fundamental and largely unresolved problem in continental dynamics. The Apennines represent one of the most accessible type locality areas of syn-convergent extension. Rollback - which describes the tendency of a subducting plate to retreat from the orogenic front - is commonly invoked as an explanation for syn-convergent extension, but this idea does not address how the retrograde motion of the subducting plate, which is a mantle-based process, causes horizontal extension in the overlying zone of crustal convergence, especially in light of the large accretionary fluxes typically associated with continental subduction. The goal of the project (project RETREAT) is to develop a self-consistent dynamic model of syn-convergent extension, using the Northern Apennines as a natural laboratory. This part of the Apennine orogen has been the site of relatively steady orthogonal convergence and 2D (plane strain) orogenic deformation since ~30 Ma. GPS measurements indicate that convergence is presently active, and tomography indicates that the full length of subducted slab is still intact to depths of 250 km. Syn-convergent extension has been active since at least 15 Ma. The Northern Apennines are well studied, and all important features of the orogen are onland and thus directly accessible for detailed geological and geophysical research. The specific objectives of project RETREAT are 1) to determine in detail the velocity field across the orogen, including deformation in the orogenic wedge, the motion of lithospheric plates, and the flow fields in the surrounding asthenospheric mantle, and 2) to use this kinematic information to develop and test specific dynamic models for deformation in the orogenic wedge and underlying mantle. The research techniques to be used include; geodesy, tectonic geomorphology, low-temperature thermochronometry, structural geology and tectonic syntheses, seismic studies, and geodynamic modeling. The RETREAT project links together a broad multidisciplinary group with eleven PIs from six institutions, plus some 27 foreign collaborators in Italy, Switzerland, Canada, and France doc20780 none Weathering of silicate minerals on continents is a major source of silicon (Si) for formation of secondary silicate minerals in soil, opal phytoliths in plants and ultimately for diatoms in the oceans. Even though Si is a significant element in the biogeochemistry of Earth, it does not have a well developed tracer to provide a clear understanding of how organic and inorganic processes affect Si behavior and the pathways that Si follows as it moves from rock to clay or water or organism. Germanium (Ge) and Si behave chemically in a similar fashion and have been treated as a pseudo-isotopic tracer of the behavior of Si in the surficial environment. We have conducted preliminary research that demonstrates clear and logical changes in the Ge Si ratio in response to soil and plant processes. Here we propose a systematic analysis of Ge fractionation from Si during: 1) incongruent weathering and the formation of secondary alumino-silicate clay minerals, 2) formation of iron oxides in soil, and 3) plant uptake and opal biosynthesis leading to formation of phytoliths. We propose a field-based project where we quantify the Ge Si ratios of rock minerals, soil minerals, soil water and plant phytoliths in soils forming on extrusive volcanic rock and on intrusive plutonic rocks in a humid tropical weathering environment. Ge Si ratios will be determined on fresh parent materials and soils from a series of well-studied tropical soil sites in Hawaii (basaltic substrate) and Luquillo, Puerto Rico (granitoid substrate). Pore waters and mineral separates (where applicable) from the same horizons as the soil samples will be analyzed. We will also analyze plant phytoliths from dominant vegetation. We will use the data to test specific hypotheses about processes that control Ge Si fractionation in the weathering environment. The proposed research will compare and contrast the behavior of the Ge Si system in aphanitic basaltic environments with plutonic granitoid environments, where we expect that the mechanisms of fractionation will differ because of the differences in chemical composition, mineralogy, and crystallinity. It will also specifically investigate the role of plant uptake of Si and the biogenic silica cycle in soil systems. The results of this study will provide the basic data needed to develop Ge Si ratios as a quantitative tracer of silica during weathering, plant cycling, and in surface waters doc20984 none Donnellan A workshop of the APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) Cooperation for Earthquake Simulation(ACES) group in is being held in May . The purpose of the workshop is to review recent progress in several key areas of science and technology related to earthquake simulations and to formulate goint plans for future progress. Issues being addressed by conferees include data storage, retrieval, assimilation, visualization, and manipulation, integrated with capabilities to instantiate knowledge acquisition and reasoning via models and simulations of nonlinear multi-scale dynamical earthquake processes. A peer-reviewed proceedings volume and a peer-reviewed special issue of a journal are being published doc20985 none The continuing emission of CO2 from fossil-fuel burning in the 21st century is, volumetrically, earth s most significant environmental pollutant. The dissolution of calcite and dolomite is very rapid and solubility is strongly CO2-dependent, which forges a close linkage between carbonate weathering and organic carbon respiration rates. This will be especially important in near surface groundwaters and streams, because these systems will be the first to respond to climatic and atmospheric changes due to the short residence time of water in these reservoirs. Thus, factors limiting dissolved inorganic carbon fluxes from watersheds will be very important in predicting the response of earth s surface reservoirs to anticipated changes in biomass and carbon budgets in the next few centuries, the timescale of most pressing human and environmental concern. For North America, nearly 90% of the HCO3- flux is derived from the mid-continent region, which has a high proportion of sedimentary bedrock mantled by carbonate-bearing glacial drift. Importantly, the low temperature of these temperate weathering environments maximizes carbonate mineral solubility. Indeed, Michigan watersheds have some of the highest area-normalized carbon fluxes in the world. This region thus provides an ideal field laboratory in which to assess controls on the HCO3- content of streams and the shallow groundwaters interacting with them on human timescales. Our proposed research program involves field study of the hydrogeochemistry of 6 endmember watersheds in the Great Lakes region, spanning the upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan. The specific field sites were selected on the basis of water chemistry, bedrock lithology, drainage basin type, land use and ecosystem type, mean annual temperature, and availability of real-time USGS gauging stations. Our goal is to produce a high quality analytic and theoretical characterization of the dissolved inorganic and organic carbon systematics of surface waters and groundwaters in the glaciated mid-continent region. Our initial studies demonstrate that surface and groundwater Mg concentrations are excellent conservative tracers of carbonate dissolution. As such, the Mg HCO3 ratio provides a sensitive indicator of mass balances of carbonate dissolution versus precipitation in the streams, wetlands and lakes present within the watershed boundaries. The new data set we produce will integrate physical factors (type of river basin drainage, discharge, annual cycles) and with measured inorganic and organic carbon fluxes. Identifying equilibrium versus kinetic controls on carbonate mass transfer will permit more accurate predictions to be made of how earth s landscapes and surface hydrogeochemical systems will respond to increasing rates of carbon metabolism and fluxes in an elevated CO2 world doc20986 none Under the mentorship of Dr. Ruth Peterson, the primary objective of this postdoctoral fellowship is to shed light on the differential consequences of incarceration at both the individual and community levels of analysis. At the individual level, the focus is on whether or not incarceration influences labor market outcomes for different racial and ethnic group members across contexts that vary in levels of segregation and social disadvantage. The interest in the impact of incarceration on the community is twofold: 1) to understand how the distribution of incarceration affects community organization and structure and 2) to examine the consequences of incarceration for communities with different race ethnic and class composition. The data selected for examining the consequences of incarceration at the individual level is the National Longitudinal Survey Youth - (NLSY). The basic modeling strategy will be to estimate three-level Hierarchical Linear Models (HLM) where level one is a person-year, level two is the person and level three is the spatial context of labor market conditions, disadvantage and segregation. The data for examining the consequences of incarceration at the neighborhood level will be drawn from the Ohio offender database maintained by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections and a neighborhood crime database for census tracts in Ohio cities being assembled by Professors Ruth Peterson and Lauren Krivo. The modeling strategy will be to estimate Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) Regressions for predominantly black, predominantly white and mixed census tracts doc20987 none The proposed research project builds on the previously demonstrated capability to retrieve O N2 column density ratios from Far Ultraviolet (FUV) images obtained from the DE 1 satellite and the resulting demonstration of the correlation between large clouds of reduced O N2 and reduced Nmax observed by ground based ionosondes. The proposed research will carry this program forward by making use of additional ionospheric data, specifically, topside soundings obtained from the ISIS 1 and 2 satellites, incoherent scatter radar (ISR) data, and satellite in situ data during and . By providing topside electron density profiles during negative ionospheric storms, these data will constrain ionospheric and thermospheric models and allow the estimation of neutral density profiles during these events. The ultimate goal of the research program is to improve and enhance the ability to model thermospheric and ionospheric behavior during geomagnetic storms, and to increase the understanding of the impact of geomagnetic storms on the midlatitude thermosphere and ionosphere doc20988 none There is much disagreement about the width of the actively deforming forearc wedge at the Cascadia subduction zone. The narrow wedge interpretation maintains that the continental shelf is underlain by a strong backstop that limits wedge deformation to the ~50 km wide continental slope. This view is compatible with the fact that the shelf is flat and appears to deform relatively slowly. The strength of the shelf backstop is usually attributed to the more lithified character of older accreted rocks within the back of the wedge. The alternative interpretation is that actively deforming wedge is some 150 to 225 km wide, and is delimited by a seaward-vergent deformation front at the Cascadia trench and a landward-vergent deformation front at the east flank of the Oregon-Washington Coast Ranges, the Olympics and the Vancouver Island Insular Range. The change in topographic slope at the crest of this forearc high represents a reversal in structural vergence in the wedge. In this model, the relatively strong lithospheric mantle of the overriding plate represents a deep-seated flat-lying backstop. The greater strength of the mantle backstop allows wedge deformation to involve both accreted sedimentary rocks and the older crustal lid of the subduction zone (e.g. Silitez and Crescent basalts). This model accounts for the development of the forearc high along the entire length of the Cascadia margin with remarkable uniformity irrespective of local crustal geology. Active permanent uplift is recognized everywhere along the forearc high, with the fastest rates (~0.8 km m.y.) occurring in the Olympic Mountains. The PI s propose a 2 year study that will use thermomechanical modeling to test the wide wedge hypothesis at Cascadia. The timing is ideal for this work given recent seismic and geodetic studies that provide detailed information about the structure and short-term deformation of the forearc, and recent thermochronologic, geomorphic, and geologic studies that provide local information about long-term deformation and uplift across the Olympics and Corvallis sectors of the margin. The proposed work will examine 3 issues where the PI s hypothesis is most likely to fail: 1) How is the shelf able to remain flat lying and relatively undeformed within an actively deformed wedge? In the Olympics, the trench slope, shelf, and forearc high are all underlain by accreted sedimentary rocks, so variations in wedge strength seems an unlikely explanation. The PI s will test the idea that the shelf part of the wedge is stabilized by deposition in shelf basins, which are 2 to 3 km thick. 2) What causes the thick structural lid of the subduction zone to uplift and fold into the forearc high observed today? Thermomechanical modeling will allow the PI s to determine the role of ductile flow in controlling the growth of the forearc high. They will also explore if uplift and folding of the lid can occur by frontal accretion alone, or if underplating is required. 3) How is the pattern of wedge deformation influenced by the distribution of rock strength? The Cascadia margin includes soft accreted sediments, older lithified accreted sediments, and a structural lid of older igneous rocks (e.g., Siletz, Crescent, Wrangellia terranes). Using realistic constitutive relationships, the PI s will determine how these units deform above and seaward of a much stronger mantle backstop. These process-oriented studies will provide the basis for building a full thermomechanical model to test if the long-term evolution of a wide forearc wedge is consistent with the known tectonic evolution of the Cascadia forearc. This will allow the PI s to test if the wedge will retain a steady evolution in the face of large changes in sediment fluxes. This research will contribute towards a more realistic understanding of the thermal structure and long-term velocity field within the Cascadia forearc. This information is essential for improving resolution of the width of the seismogenic zone for the Cascadia subduction zone doc20989 none Malin With this award, Duke s seismology group will participate in the collaborative analyses of the passive and active seismic data that will be collected in the SAFOD Pilot Hole. The group s research will include investigations of the near-borehole fault and velocity structure, improved earthquake locations using this structure, studies of earthquake-to-receiver path effects and earthquake source effects. The group s participation in this research is based on their previous work on the structure and seismology of the SAFOD site and their involvement in development of borehole instruments for the SAFOD program. The active seismic profiling portion of their proposal is linked to a complimentary proposal (recommended for funding) by the University of Wyoming. The Duke Univ. group will instrument the Pilot Hole with: 1) a multilevel string of 3-component 12 Hz seismometers; 2) a high sensitivity, large dynamic range, 3-component 2 Hz seismograph, installed at the bottom-of-casing. The seismic array string and 2 Hz seismograph have been developed in collaboration with oil-exploration instrumentation companies. The new casing-bottom seismograph, seismic array string, and pressure monitor system will provide unique 3rd and 4th dimension (depth and time), spectral content and volumetric strain information on the microearthquakes that are the targets of the main SAFOD hole doc20990 none This project aims at designing algorithms to infer 3-D models of the geometry (shape) and photometry (material) of objects from collections of images. Such algorithms are based on a representing visual scenes as dense surfaces, defined implicitly as functions of the measured images, and entail the numerical solution of partial differential equations. Our research aims at integrating in a unified analytical framework many ``shape from X algorithms for reconstructing spatial properties of a scene from images, including stereo, shape from shading, and shape from motion. Applications of the technology we plan to develop ranges from geology to medicine, manufacturing, security, to entertainment doc20991 none For the past three years, MIT, Cornell University, and their Moroccan partners have developed and observed a network comprising 3 continuous (CGPS) and 22 survey-mode (SGPS) GPS sites in Morocco to determine more precisely Africa plate motion, the interaction of the African and Eurasian plates in the western Mediterranean, and deformation associated with present-day tectonics of the NW part of the African plate (Morocco). This work is being facilitated by complementary GPS studies being pursued by the PI s partners in Spain and Portugal with whom they are collaborating within the framework of the AMIGO Project (Atlantic and Mediterranean Interdisciplinary GPS Observations). Their work in Morocco is providing new kinematic information on plate motions and interactions that promise to constrain dynamic models for continental collision processes as well as intra-plate deformation. In this proposal, they request support to continue to monitor the Morocco GPS network for an additional 3 years, and to densify station coverage to determine better strain patterns in the most actively deforming regions. Preliminary GPS site velocities derived from three surveys over a 2 year period (10 99 - 10 01) have been resolved to ~2 mm yr (1 sigma, or 5 mm yr 95%). These uncertainties are on the order of the entire Africa-Eurasia convergence rate (~4 - 5 mm yr in Morocco), and are not yet sufficient to provide reliable constraints on Africa plate motion or intra- plate deformation. However, the present velocity field does indicate overall WNW motion relative to Eurasia at about 6 +or- 2 mm yr (1 sigma) for sites located south of the Rif Mountains, consistent within uncertainties with our new GPS estimates of Africa plate motion derived from available GPS data for the entire African plate (~ 4.7 mm yr WNW). In contrast, sites located along the western Rif Mountains in NW Morocco indicate significantly slower northward motion, and possibly southward motion, suggesting present-day extension in the Alboran Sea. These two observations are consistent with the continuing NW motion of the African plate, active extension of the Alboran Sea (westernmost part of the Mediterranean between Morocco and Spain), and left-lateral, strike slip deformation between the western and eastern Rif. This overall, first-order pattern is consistent with deformation as estimated from earthquakes and neotectonic field studies. The PI s request continued support for 3 years to: 1) resolve better velocities on existing SGPS sites with surveys in , , , and (all field costs borne by the Morocco side), and integrate the Morocco velocity field with GPS observations from Iberia, 2) establish 10 new SGPS sites in the Rif Mountains to constrain better apparent intra- late deformation (shortening and left lateral, strike-slip), 3) develop and apply elastic block, and finite element models for active deformation in the western Mediterranean, and, 4) further develop Moroccan in-country capabilities in GPS-geodynamic applications. This last task will allow the Moroccan partners (retaining the equipment provided by our joint project) to carry out all future GPS observations on their own and with Moroccan support beyond the requested grant period. We expect that future requests for support from NSF for this work, if required, will be restricted to data integration, modeling, and interpretation doc20853 none PROJECT SUMMARY Some of the best evidence for the effects of abrupt environmental change on the Earth s biosphere and geochemical cycles can be found in Cretaceous strata. These rocks contain clear evidence for drastically altered atmospheric composition and oceanic circulation that resulted in widespread, episodic, and geologically ephemeral (~0.5 to 1 m.y.) oceanic anoxic events (OAEs). The recent documentation of negative C isotope excursions at the base of some mid-Cretaceous OAE deposits, and a likely contemporaneous isotope anomaly of greater magnitude delineated by the d13C values of early Aptian terrestrial flora, suggest that environmental perturbation during the mid-Cretaceous may have been the result of greenhouse-gas-driven warming at rates comparable to those inferred for the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, and currently experienced by Earth over the last century. Thus detailed, integrative study of these mid-Cretaceous events, such as will be carried out by this study, holds potential for refining our understanding of abrupt climatic disturbance during greenhouse warming. This investigation is designed to establish the nature of changes in environmental boundary conditions during mid-Cretaceous OAEs, and to interpret the temporal and mechanistic relationship of these changes within the context of potential forcing mechanisms. Two oceanic anoxic events that represent the most extreme and widespread environmental change are being studied: (1) the early Aptian OAE1a (119.5 to 120.5 Ma), and (2) the late Aptian to early Albian OAE1b (~108.5 to 113 Ma). Shelf and slope sections in the Sierra Madre Oriental of Mexico that represent the most expanded sedimentary records available, and for which we have developed a detailed chronostratigraphic framework are the primary field area of study. These platform deposits have accumulation rates 3 to 15 times higher than those typical of deep-sea sequences that should provide clear lead-lag relationships between the different proxy records. We will also investigate select deep-sea records of the OAEs to define a more global signal and a wider paleo-depth perspective. One of the fundamental and previously unexplored aspects of this investigation is to unravel, where possible, on a 103 to105 yr time scale the precise phase relationship between proxy records and the interactions, responses, and feedbacks of their inferred environmental changes. The research will integrate a series of stratigraphic, paleontologic, geochemical and isotopic proxies of carbon and nutrient cycling, productivity, bottom-water oxygenation, and sea level. Detailed nannofossil, and planktic and benthic foraminiferal assemblage studies are being carried out to determine variation in surface- and deep-water environments including changes in nutrient budgets, productivity, water column structure, temperature gradients, and deep-water oxygenation. Geochemical and isotopic records (d13Ccarb, d13Corg, TOC, %CaCO3, and d34S) are being developed as proxies of carbon cycling, organic carbon burial, productivity and anoxia. In order to develop a more complete understanding of the environmental implications of our geochemical and isotopic proxy records, we will compare their rate phasing amplitude relationships to paleoecological trends inferred from microfossil assemblage data, and to the relative sea-level history. Isotopic analysis of terrestrial vascular plant matter in the Barremian through Albian interval of a deep-sea core (Site 398) will provide an independent and highly sensitive indicator of disruption to normal carbon cycling, as well as shifts in CO2 fluxes and carbon reservoirs. Finally, we will carry out numerical experiments using a box model for the carbon isotopic systematics of the ocean and a linked biogeochemistry- 3D global ocean model in order to assess how the proxy records and their inferred environmental conditions constrain a series of geological forcings relevant to the hypothesized mechanisms for the origin of the OAEs. The resulting set of high-resolution proxy records developed simultaneously from statigraphically expanded sections, coupled with numeric modeling and data-model comparisons should provide significant insight into the oceanographic and atmospheric conditions underlying oceanic anoxic events. Moreover, this study of abrupt environmental change associated with the classic Cretaceous OAEs should provide an end-member model for biogeochemical cycling during greenhouse warming of other geologic periods, including the current earth system doc20993 none Continuous observations using Global Positioning System (GPS) geodesy yield high-precision determination of horizontal and vertical deformation rates and their variation in time and space. This project focuses on two aspects of the current GPS-determined four-dimensional deformation field along the Cascadia convergent margin in the Pacific Northwest. First, the spatial and temporal distribution of transient events on the Cascadia megathrust is being investigated. This part of the study is motivated by preliminary results that indicate at least 8 silent earthquakes (aseismic slip events lasting days to months) with Mw 6.0 (equivalent) occurred in the Pacific Northwest since based on analysis of the PANGA network. The data are being reanalyzed using principal component analysis the results of which are used for spatial inversion to determine the moment yield, spatial locations, and migration of each creep event across the plate interface. Second, the kinematics of the migrating continental fore-arc (western Washington) as it encounters a rigid buttress (Vancouver Island) are being examined by analysis of the velocity field from the PANGA array, and development of fault geometry and mechanical block models of the intraplate deformation of the Cascadia margin and Puget Lowlands doc20994 none Bowring This award provides continued funding for the CD-ROM (Continental Dynamics of the Rocky Mountains) collaborative investigation which is designed to understand the tectonic evolution of the lithosphere of the southern Rocky Mountains. A transect from Wyoming to New Mexico is providing an opportunity to evaluate the hypothesis that lithospheric architecture of the Southwest reflects a resolvable mixture of structures that formed during early Proterozoic assembly of the continent and modifications that took place during younger intracratonic tectonism that were themselves influenced by the Proterozoic compositional structure. Phase 1 ( - ) was successful in substantially verifying this hypothesis. The PIs imaged the Cheyenne Belt and Jemez lineament; both are interpreted to be Paleoproterozoic paleosubduction zones that also show long-lived and strong influence on younger intracratonic tectonism. Both are also associated with lateral changes in deep chemical lithosphere, such that the mantle provinces can be linked to crustal provinces, demonstrating the antiquity of the mantle transitions. With this bridge funding award, the Principal Investigators will conduct an annual workshop, complete the analysis of data sets generated in Phase 1, increase productivity in terms of published papers, and prepare for Phase 2 of the CD-ROM project doc20995 none The current velocity field associated with plate tectonic motion in western California is well characterized by geodetic measurements using Global Positioning Systems (GPS). The exact nature of what geodetic measurements record in actively defon-ning zones remains a significant problem, as this technique records both recoverable (elastic) and pen-nanent (quasi-plastic) strains in wrench borderlands (blocks adjacent to major strike-slip faults). The goal of this proposal is to evaluate the relative magnitudes of the recoverable and permanent components in the deformation of wrench borderlands, by simultaneously studying two different sections of the San Andreas fault system. Creeping segment, central California: Geodetic measurements alone are generally unable to distinguish between recoverable and permanent deformation, because of the long ( 50 yr) interval between slip episodes on faults. In contrast, intervals between slip episodes are short (weeks to months) in the creeping central section of the San Andreas fault. By collecting geodetic data throughout the short seismic cycle in the creeping segment, the PI s will be able to evaluate the relative sizes of the recoverable and permanent components of the displacement field in the vicinity of the fault. They propose to check the estimates of currently accumulating permanent measurements against long-ten-n averages detentiined from geologic and paleogmagnetic data. Prior work suggests clockwise rotation of the palcomagnetic signal of Miocene and younger sediments in the wrench borderlands. Documenting the areal extent, regional distribution, and amount of rotation throughout this area will allow them to calculate a long-ten-n average for pen-nanent deformation. This part of the proposal involves permanent GPS stations and monitoring, campaign-style GPS, paleomagnetism, and geologic mapping. Durmid Hill, Salton Trough, southern California: In this area, previous work has determined the amount of permanent strain. The PI s propose to complete a step-wise, three-dimensional retrodeformation of defon-ned sedimentary rocks. In order to convert these incremental strain data into estimates of defon-nation rates, one must have precise knowledge of time of defon-nation. In this region of excellent exposure, one aspect of deformation timing is provided by the presence of an ash layer correlated with the 0.76 Ma Bishop tuff. Additional information will result from paleomagnetic techniques that record the magnetic field during deposition. Utilizing the variety of ages of the different sedimentary layers to provide differential vertical axis rotations, The PI s can determine the timing of minor structures (e.g., joints, fractures, and small folds) by determining which units are affected. By comparing geodetic rates (which include both recoverable and pen-nanent strain components) with geologic rates (which record only a permanent strain component) they can assess the amount of recoverable strain accumulation in this area. This part of the proposal involves geologic mapping, paleomagnetism, and campaignstyle GPS. By combining the results of geological, geodetic, and paleomagnetic investigations from our two field areas, the PI s will assess the relative contribution of recoverable (elastic) and pen-nanent (quasi-plastic) strains in wrench borderlands. Resolution of this issue has fundamental implications for earthquake mechanics, geological implications of borderland deformation, and potential slip magnitudes on major faults doc20953 none Late Cenozoic deformation is broadly distributed across the North American plate margin of the conterminous western United States and stretches from the San Andreas fault system eastward across the Mojave Desert and into the Basin and Range. The eastern California shear zone and Walker Lane of the western Great Basin form an active belt of structures accommodating about 25% of the relative motion between North America and the Pacific plate. From the Mojave Desert, the displacement is carried north, east of the southern Sierra Nevada, in a narrow zone of deformation bound on the west and east by the Owens Valley and Furnace Creek fault systems. North from the latitude of the central Sierra Nevada, the zone of deformation broadens to include the Walker Lane and central Nevada seismic belt in the northwestern Great Basin. The Sierra Nevada behaves as a coherent tectonic block with a northwest-directed motion of 10-14 mm yr and forms the western boundary of the zone of distributed deformation in the Great Basin. A complex pattern of active structures underlies west-central Nevada where displacement is transferred from the eastern California shear zone to the Walker Lane and the central Nevada seismic belt. Integrated geologic, seismological, and GPS geodetic results indicate that the central Walker Lane (CWL) serves as an displacement transfer system linking stepped northwest-trending transcurrent faults. The displacement transfer system evolved over a period of ~13 Ma and carried at least 50 km right-lateral motion from the Furnace Creek fault system of eastern California to the right-lateral faults of the CWL. Ancient displacement transfer was accompanied by exhumation of mid-crustal rocks in the extensional stepover between transcurrent structures and was accompanied by vertical axis rotation and tilt of both upper- and lower-plate assemblages. The transfer system is still active and underlies a region 50 by 120 km immediately northwest of the ancient structures. Based on existing work, the comparison of a geodetically determined velocity field for the CWL is not easily reconciled with the current understanding of fault displacements in the region and points out the difficulty in comparing geodetic and geologic displacement fields. Furthermore, the continued activity of the displacement transfer system since inception at ~13 Ma offers presents the opportunity to assess ancient and active rates of deformation using geologic and geodetic techniques. The PI s propose an integrated geodetic and geologic investigation of the central Walker Lane to address two questions: (1) What is the three-dimensional geometry and displacement history of extensional transfer developed within a transcurrent fault system stepover?, and (2) Are displacement rate and kinematic estimates comparable between geodetic, seismological, and geologic investigation of ancient and active structures within the transfer system? The central Walker Lane is ideally suited for this study for several reasons: (1) the region is seismically active and well defined earthquake focal mechanisms exist for the displacement transfer fault system, (2) the faults are well exposed and have produced preliminary fault-slip estimates of deformation kinematics, (3) a complex present-day displacement field with ~10 mm yr of differential slip is recorded by a GPS geodetic network, (4) the geologic evolution of the displacement transfer system is preserved in the exhumation history of well-exposed extensional turtleback structures, (5) synorogenic volcanic and sedimentary rocks in the upper-plate assemblage of the extensional complex record a history of progressive tilt associated with fault displacement, (6) regionally extensive domains of differential tilt and vertical axis rotation associated with displacement transfer are recognized in preliminary paleomagnetic investigation, and (7) regional geologic compilation of the region is mature and provides excellent control for displacement-history reconstruction. These elements will allow characterization of the kinematics of displacement transfer and offer the opportunity to directly compare deformation kinematics and rates over geologic and geodetic time intervals. The PI s will address the tasks listed above with an integrated study utilizing detailed geologic mapping, structural analysis, GPS geodesy, paleomagnetic analysis, geochronology, and thermobarometric investigation. The research team (Oldow, Geissman, McClelland, McIntosh, and Selverstone) have the expertise to address the various research topics and two of the researchers (Oldow and Geissman) have substantial experience working in the area. By building on previous studies, this integrated investigation will establish the areal limits of the transtensional fault system, document variable geometric relations between major and secondary fault systems, define the kinematic history of fault block motion, and develop first-order estimates of recent and ancient displacement doc20997 none Miller The integrated hydrologic, hydraulic and hydrometeorological process that controls flooding in urbanizing drainage basins will be examined through analyses of flood response in the Baltimore metropolitan region. The science questions are: (1) How does the scale-dependent flood response of urban drainage basins depend on the space-time structure of rainfall for warm season systems of thunderstorms? (2) How does flood response vary with land-surface properties including impervious cover and structure of the urban drainage network? And (3) What is the relative role of changing channel floodplain morphology due to urbanization, as compared with geologic controls of channel floodplain morphology, in determining the attenuation of flood waves? Questions 1 and 2 will be examined through hydrologic and hydrometeorological analyses of flood events in 24 drainage basins smaller than 200 km2 for 25-30 flood events during the period - . Diagnostic analyses of rainfall and discharge observations for the flood events will be used in conjunction with model analyses to address questions 1 and 2. Hydrologic model analyses will be based on a distributed hydrologic model, the Network Model. Hydraulic analyses of flood wave propagation will be carried out for a subset of the 24 basins and will include 4 stream reaches, each with upstream-downstream pairs of stream gaging stations. The 2-d depth-averaged hydraulic model, TELEMAC, will be used for assessing hydraulic controls of flood response in urbanizing stream channels. The key observations used in this study are: (1) high-resolution (1 km, 5 minutes) radar rainfall estimates, (2) high-resolution (0.6 m contour interval) topographic data sets, (3) high-resolution (0.6 m grid, 0.15 m vertical resolution) topographic data sets derived from airborne radar, (4) high-resolution (1 m) representations of impervious cover, and (5) field-surveyed channel cross sections, longitudinal profiles and pebble counts doc20998 none This grant will host a two day workshop to investigate the current education programs and mission of Field Stations and Marine Laboratories and to develop recommendations on how this mission can be expanded. It is hoped that concerns on methods of increasing field biology in the undergraduate curriculum, increasing participation by under-represented groups, collaborations with traditionally minority institutions, community colleges, and museums, and enhancing programs at field stations to cover all areas of biology will be addressed by the participants. Prior to the workshop, a survey will be conducted to assess the range and diversity of educational programs at field stations and marine labs. The outcome will be an oral presentation and paper and electronic brochures of the findings and discussions doc20999 none Smithson This award provides continued funding for the CD-ROM (Continental Dynamics of the Rocky Mountains) collaborative investigation which is designed to understand the tectonic evolution of the lithosphere of the southern Rocky Mountains. A transect from Wyoming to New Mexico is providing an opportunity to evaluate the hypothesis that lithospheric architecture of the Southwest reflects a resolvable mixture of structures that formed during early Proterozoic assembly of the continent and modifications that took place during younger intracratonic tectonism that were themselves influenced by the Proterozoic compositional structure. Phase 1 ( - ) was successful in substantially verifying this hypothesis. The PIs imaged the Cheyenne Belt and Jemez lineament; both are interpreted to be Paleoproterozoic paleosubduction zones that also show long-lived and strong influence on younger intracratonic tectonism. Both are also associated with lateral changes in deep chemical lithosphere, such that the mantle provinces can be linked to crustal provinces, demonstrating the antiquity of the mantle transitions. With this bridge funding award, the Principal Investigators will conduct an annual workshop, complete the analysis of data sets generated in Phase 1, increase productivity in terms of published papers, and prepare for Phase 2 of the CD-ROM project doc20977 none Both the Greenland and Scandinavian Caledonides expose huge slabs of continental crust that have experienced high-pressure (HP) metamorphism during the collision between Laurentia and Baltica. An ultrahigh-pressure (UHP) terrane has been recognized in western Norway for the past fifteen years, while the first evidence for UHP metamorphism has just been found in Greenland a few months ago. Taken together, these two coherent continental eclogite terranes comprise the most extensive exposure of a deep, ancient mountain root on the planet - giving us a view of mountain belt anatomy that is generally hidden at the base of active orogens like the Himalayas. The ultimate goal of this project is to understand how this thick or deep orogenic root formed, and how it was brought back up to the earth s surface. Extensional collapse of overthickened crust, whereby HP and UHP rocks are unroofed along listric normal faults, is an oft-cited mechanism of exhumation; however, major extensional structures are not exposed in the Geenland eclogite province. Gilotti s earlier NSF supported research found that the peak pessure was attained approximately 410 to 370 Ma ago; whereas, workers in the Fjord Region, to the south of the eclogite province, are finding widespread evidence of synchronous melting, leucogranite generation and extensional faulting that is 10-70 Ma older. Either the observed extensional detachments in the south have nothing to do with eclogite exhumation, or the PI s previous ages are recording cooling at the end of the exhumation path instead of peak pressure conditions. The main objectives of the proposed research are: 1) to identify the extent and timing of UHP metamorphism; 2) to test the robustness of our previous ages for HP metamorphism by comparing zircon populations from the retrograde margins of eclogite pods to zircon populations from the well-preserved centers; 3) to establish the pressure-temperature-time history of this slab of eclogite-bearing crust as it returns to the earth s surface; and 4) to determine the geometry and timing of contractional and strike-slip fabrics that might be possible exhumation structures. The PI s data set is essential for formulating an orogen-wide model of eclogite formation and exhumation in this important continent-continent collision. Although the necessary studies are underway in Norway, their results cannot be put into context without the corresponding knowledge of HP and UHP metamorphism in Greenland. The preliminary results also have the potential to provide new insight on the behavior of U-Pb isotope systems during HP UHP metamorphism and subsequent decompression doc21001 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY . The goal of the fellowship is to prepare minority scientists for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. This program is an effort by the NSF to increase the number of research scientists from under-represented minority groups, thereby contributing to the future vitality of the Nation s scientific enterprise. It is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Control of a feeding neural circuit in an inscet by taste sensory input and hunger status. Manduca sexta larvae become host-specific when they feed on solanaceous plants due to changes in taste receptor responses to a host-specific recognition cue. Host-specific larvae often starve to death if given food lacking this cue. Electrophysiological studies are being conducted to examine the integration of taste receptor physiology and hunger on the feeding circuitry of host-specific and non-specific larvae doc21002 none Peacock Large amounts of water are carried into the upper mantle by subduction. It is generally assumed that water is released in near continuous fashion to depths of at least 150-200 km. However, it is unknown how water is transported from the slab to the volcanic front. Water in the mantle wedge strongly influences rheological and seismological properties and has a major impact on subduction zone thermal structure. The investigators propose to study the influence of water on mantle wedge dynamics in a collaborative and multi-disciplinary project. Recent rheological work has made it possible, for the first time, to quantify the influence of water on creep properties of olivine. The investigators will systematically study the rheological influence of water, with particular interest in how the observationally inferred water distribution influences the balance of subduction forces and the generation of the cornerflow. The models provide predictions on subduction zone temperature and composition that allow for critical tests using observational and experimental constraints from seismology and mineral physics doc21003 none RUI: Quaternary Vertebrate Paleontology and Biogeography of Southeast Alaska Timothy H. Heaton University of South Dakota Southeast Alaska occupies a critical position in understanding the human and animal history of North America. During glacial epochs of the recent Ice Age, central Alaska was connected to Asia by the Bering Land Bridge, and the barriers to intercontinental travel were the large ice sheets that covered most of Canada. Coastal Alaska was a logical route for travel between ice-free areas because the Pacific Ocean kept the region relatively warm and provided a constant source of food. Until recently Quaternary fossils were unknown from Southeast Alaska, and geologists and biologists believed that the coast had been completely overridden with ice. But a decade of research has demonstrated that Southeast Alaska was home to an arctic community of mammals and birds that thrived even during the coldest period of the Last Glacial Maximum. Beginning in , limestone caves containing Ice Age fossil remains were discovered on northern Prince of Wales Island. The most productive of these was On Your Knees Cave, which contained a nearly complete fossil record spanning the last 50,000 years as well as the most extensive archaeological record of Southeast Alaska (spanning the last 10,000 years). The next step is to excavate caves on multiple islands and on the mainland of Southeast Alaska to gain a complete biogeographic history of the region during and following the Last Glacial Maximum. Promising sites containing vertebrate fossils have been located on the outermost islands (Dall, Heceta, and Coronation Islands) and on the mainland near the town of Wrangell. Other regions being explored are karst areas of northern Chichagof Island and Glacier Bay National Park. The objectives of this project are to locate and conduct small-scale excavations at many sites in hopes of finding other fossil deposits of similar antiquity to On Your Knees Cave. It is also hoped that additional archaeological records can be located that will help determine the antiquity of humans in the region and assess the possibility that Southeast Alaska was a corridor for travel between Asia and North America during the Ice Age doc21004 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY . The goal of the fellowship is to prepare minority scientists for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. This program is an effort by the NSF to increase the number of research scientists from under-represented minority groups, thereby contributing to the future vitality of the Nation s scientific enterprise. It is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Transformation of neural signals across single neurons. This project addresses the physiological and biophysical mechanisms of individual neurons that underlie phase-coding in barn owls, specifically how they encode time. First, it will focus on verifying the presence of a subthreshold presynaptic code in postsynaptic cells. Second, morphological and physiological characteristics of the synapse will be determined doc21005 none Albertson The need to understand the coupling between forested landscapes and turbulent fluxes of energy, water, and carbon has become a national priority, as evidenced by both the USGCRP s Water and Carbon Cycle Science Plans. Here, a conceptual model is proposed to describe turbulent transport of mass and energy between forest canopies and the atmosphere in terms of two end-member flow types: mixing layer (over dense vegetation) and rough walled boundary layer. Regions with varying degrees of sparse vegetation are represented as a superposition of the two end member regimes. The overarching goal is the development of a similarity theory for canopy sublayer (CSL) transport, where vertical transport phenomena are described by coupling high resolution surface features (that are readily observed remotely) and coarse resolution atmospheric fields (as both observed and modeled). The project is structured to test three hypotheses regarding the underpinnings of the conceptual model. The focus is on the interplay between canopy morphology and organized turbulent transport. Analysis of Field data is combined with Large, Eddy Simulation (LES) - with the data providing observations of field conditions and the LES providing a full view of the evolving structure of turbulence under controlled boundary conditions. The LES results will be used to identify the essential dynamics and to formulate signatures of the coherent structures that will be used to guide subsequent analysis of the field data sets. Multi-scale decompositions of the turbulence fields are to be used in concert with nonlinear time series analysis tools to begin the development of the low-dimensional model. This approach will provide a unique training experience for a graduate student and post-doc. The PI s will continue recruiting training under-represented candidates doc21006 none The Wilberforce University Science, Technology, and Engineering Preeminent Undergraduate (STEP-UP) Program addresses the underrepresentation of minorities in Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) by enhancing minority access, retention, graduation and successful transition to graduate study in STEM fields. The program starts with a Pre-College Summer Institute addressing deficiencies in mathematical reasoning, problem solving, critical reading, verbal reasoning, technical writing and vocabulary building. During the freshman year, all STEM majors will be housed on the same floors of the men s and women s dormitories to foster a sense of community and shared goals as well as to enhance performance rates. Freshmen will enroll in a series of seminars focussing on careers in STEM and the importance of graduate school. During the summer between the freshmen and sophomore years, undergraduates will participate in an intensive Summer Program focusing on STEM content, study skills and problem solving. A series of activities will be put in place to ensure that undergraduates successfully matriculate through the STEM curricula and prepare for graduate school. These include a peer tutoring-mentor program in all gatekeeper courses including a mandatory two-hour drill session for each course each week, Summer research opportunities in collaboration with Florida A&M University, and a GRE-Preparation Course. A Science and Engineering Graduate School Fair will allow juniors and seniors to examine various graduate programs and to network with faculty at other universities. In addition, the biology program will be revised and restructured. A course in experimental biology will be developed with a focus on emerging techniques required in the biotechnology area doc21007 none Smith The integrated hydrologic, hydraulic and hydrometeorological process that controls flooding in urbanizing drainage basins will be examined through analyses of flood response in the Baltimore metropolitan region. The science questions are: (1) How does the scale-dependent flood response of urban drainage basins depend on the space-time structure of rainfall for warm season systems of thunderstorms? (2) How does flood response vary with land-surface properties including impervious cover and structure of the urban drainage network? And (3) What is the relative role of changing channel floodplain morphology due to urbanization, as compared with geologic controls of channel floodplain morphology, in determining the attenuation of flood waves? Questions 1 and 2 will be examined through hydrologic and hydrometeorological analyses of flood events in 24 drainage basins smaller than 200 km2 for 25-30 flood events during the period - . Diagnostic analyses of rainfall and discharge observations for the flood events will be used in conjunction with model analyses to address questions 1 and 2. Hydrologic model analyses will be based on a distributed hydrologic model, the Network Model. Hydraulic analyses of flood wave propagation will be carried out for a subset of the 24 basins and will include 4 stream reaches, each with upstream-downstream pairs of stream gaging stations. The 2-d depth-averaged hydraulic model, TELEMAC, will be used for assessing hydraulic controls of flood response in urbanizing stream channels. The key observations used in this study are: (1) high-resolution (1 km, 5 minutes) radar rainfall estimates, (2) high-resolution (0.6 m contour interval) topographic data sets, (3) high-resolution (0.6 m grid, 0.15 m vertical resolution) topographic data sets derived from airborne radar, (4) high-resolution (1 m) representations of impervious cover, and (5) field-surveyed channel cross sections, longitudinal profiles and pebble counts doc21008 none Romero-Severson Dr. Romero-Severson and colleagues propose the construction of BAC libraries for five insect taxa (Tribolium castaneum, Nassonia vitripennis, Oncopeltus fasciatus, Thermobia domestica and Schistocerca Americana) selected for their phylogenetic position, scientific importance and scarcity of existing genomic resources. These taxa represent the insect orders Coleoptera (beetles), Hymenoptera (wasps and bees), Hemiptera (true bugs), Thysanura (silverfish) and Orthoptera (grasshoppers and crickets). In combination with the whole genome sequences of the Dipteran insects Drosophila melanogaster and Anopheles gambiae, these libraries will enable the scientific community to test important hypotheses concerning insect genetics, genomics, development, ecology, systematics, and evolution. This effort will dovetail with the ongoing development of an insect genomics database at Purdue University. The Clemson University Genomics Institute (CUGI) is the subcontractor for the BAC library construction. Over the past five years, the CUGI BAC EST Resource Center has constructed most of the plant and fungal BAC libraries used in agricultural genomics. The CUGI BAC EST Resource Center will supply the insect libraries as high-density hybridization filters and clones on a cost recovery basis for academic programs doc21009 none Frontiers of Plant Cell Biology: Signals and Pathways, the 22nd Symposium in Plant Biology at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), will be held January 15-19, . The organizers are Natasha V. Raikhel and Zhenbiao Yang, Center for Plant Cell Biology in the Genomics Institute and the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences at UCR. Sequencing of the Arabidopsis and rice genomes has created new research directions, experimental approaches, and opportunities. Researchers are on the brink of elucidating the function of all the genes of Arabidopsis and other selected plant species. These exciting advances in plant biology are starting to reveal the molecular mechanisms underlying the functional properties of plant cells. Integrated genetic, genomic and biochemical approaches have led to the identification of signal transduction pathways, signal receptors, and biosynthetic pathways for inter- and intra-cellular communication; patch clamp studies have uncovered novel channels involved in cellular signaling; the structure and function of complex cell walls are being elucidated at an unprecedented pace; and more is being revealed about the machinery involved in targeting proteins to specific cellular locations. The aim of this symposium is to bring together students and scientists studying the plant cell from different perspectives genomic, bioinformatic, genetic, molecular, biochemical, and cell biological to highlight these recent advances and evaluate emerging approaches for the dissection of plant cell function at the molecular level. This is a rapidly developing area of plant science with abundant opportunity for young researchers to learn and contribute. The timing is ideal for a symposium that examines the functioning of the whole plant cell. This symposium will be distinct from others in the plant field because its small size is conducive to interaction among participants; such exchanges will likely lead to national and international collaborations. There will be approximately 200 attendees doc21010 none The Paleocene-Eocene boundary is marked by substantial global warming. The beginning of the Eocene (55 million years ago) in North America included the first immigration of many modern mammalian orders that dispersed during this warm interval. The objectives of this project are to collect and identify mammalian fossils from an earliest Eocene (Wa0) locality. A new Wa0 locality, Castle Gardens , was discovered by the PI in the southeastern Bighorn Basin of Wyoming. Preliminary fieldwork indicates that it is the richest North American fossil vertebrate site of this age; over 300 specimens have been found including at least two new species and twelve other taxa unknown from other earliest Eocene localities. The recovered specimens will be documented in a detailed and interactive electronic database. All diagnostic specimens and appropriate comparative material will be scanned using a 3-D laser digitizer. Three-dimensional images will be created and published. The images will be able to be rotated, quantified, and downloaded by any Web user. The broader significance of this study is threefold. Firstly, with this new collection of earliest Eocene mammals, it will then be possible to use this fauna to contribute to studies of community structure, biodiversity, biostratigraphy, and faunal succession during this critical time period. The documented global changes in climate and resultant faunal turnover can provide insights to the possible effects of rapid climatic change today. Recent studies have suggested that the great transient shift in the stable carbon-isotope ratio near the Paleocene Eocene boundary is similar to that currently being induced by humans today. Studies of the effects of ancient green-house warming can be used to model potential environmental outcomes of modern human activities. Secondly, the approach used to make the interactive database is unique. This database formation will serve as a model for other researchers and institutions that wish to make their collections easily and usefully accessible. Thirdly, this study will include substantial undergraduate participation (a minimum of 22 students). Students will be exposed to modern field methods and high-end state of the art technology and software doc21011 none Fischer The investigators propose to better image seismic velocity discontinuities in the mid-upper mantle using broadband Ps and other scattered teleseismic phases. They will focus on structure in the 150-400 km depth range, where a rich variety of discontinuity structures have been observed. Testable hypotheses for the origin of these features include: the transition from dislocation creep to diffusion creep, layers of rheological weakness due to volatile enrichment, layers of partial melt, mechanical boundaries within the continental lithosphere, and mineralogical phase transformations. The various mechanisms imply differences in discontinuity depth, polarity, strength and anisotropic properties, and some of these predictions vary between tectonic environments due to changes in mantle temperature. These predictions will be compared to observed discontinuity structure globally (using IRIS Global Seismic Network stations), and with focused regional studies in continental cratons, actively deforming continental regions, subduction zones, and beneath a mid-ocean ridge (using data from PASSCAL experiments and other arrays). Two types of migration will be employed: determination of receiver functions by simultaneous deconvolution of data from different geographic or back-azimuth bins, and formal 2D migration. Receiver function binning as a function of back-azimuth is particularly effective at resolving anisotropy, and the proposed 2D migration has great potential to constrain both P-wave and S-wave velocity contrasts at discontinuities. This work will help to characterize mid-upper mantle rheology, deformation mechanism, anisotropic fabric, and volatile and melt distributions doc21012 none Through the Accentuating the Integration of Mathematics and Science (AIMS) program, Fayetteville State University will evaluate variables that contribute to low graduation rates and the steady decline of under-represented minorities majoring in the mathematics and science fields. Comprehensive approaches will be developed to enhance student performance and progress in mathematics, computer science, chemistry, physics, and biology. The infrastructure enhancement plan will include the following components: (1) mathematics and science curriculum reform, improvement of gateway courses, and research training; (2) strengthening partnerships with industry, government, and other academic institutions to enhance the development of research programs on campus; (3) faculty development focusing on teaching learning models, instructional delivery and assessment; and, (3) evaluation and dissemination of project outcomes and best practices doc21013 none While multiple, and technological literacies have become the topic of considerable research, reading and writing literacy remain the basis of education, and the prerequisites to science, mathematics, and technology fluency. Reading and writing do not start in school, however. Children prepare themselves for later literacy long before first grade. And preparation for literacy consists of more than becoming aware of text. Children learn to treat language as an object (metalinguistic awareness), and to create and maintain cohesive text (decontextualized language) first in oral language. Many of these emergent literacy skills are acquired in language play and in storytelling among peers. In general, however, very few technologies are available for supporting children s storytelling and story writing in sociocultural context for later literacy, despite its importance in children s cognitive, communicative, and linguistic development as a whole. This project lays out a program of research designed to address a specific need of young children -- to learn how to write -- based on one specific ability of young children -- the ability to tell stories. Current views of the relationship between oral and written literacy hold that the development of children s written literacy is intertwined with the development of their oral literacy skills. We believe that technology, and particularly tangible non-screen-and-keyboard based technology, can play a unique role in supporting the emergence of writing literacy by building on one particular aspect of oral literacy, children s story telling. We propose that Story Listening Systems that actually listen to children s stories and interact with them about the stories not only support the development of emergent oral literacy skills but also foster writing skills and the transition from oral to written literacy. The model behind the Story Listening System embodies four essential traits that enable it to effectively scaffold written literacy. The four traits are to (a) depend on children s oral storytelling skills to bootstrap literacy, (b) introduce peers as playmates in the system or with the system, (c) invite the kind of embodied play away from the desktop that is most comfortable for young children, (d) allow children to construct their own personally meaningful content. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of these systems, children between the ages of 4 and 7 will engage with Story Listening Systems and we will assess changes in three crucial predictors of written literacy: (i) use of decontextualized language (language removed from its original context, and reworked for a new audience), (ii) metalinguistic awareness, (iii) collaboration with peers to make meaning. We will also evaluate an additional implication of the SLS: that support for emergent literacy can be made culture-inclusive and therefore can be used to invite more children into emergent writing literacy because the language forms with which they are familiar are embedded in the system. The outcome of the proposed work will be four-fold: (i) a suite of story listening literacy technologies, (ii) a substantive body of data evaluating the role of these technologies in children s writing, (iii) a fuller understanding of the general mechanisms underlying children s development of literacy skills, (iv) a generalized set of design principles that link features of technology with features of children s written literacy acquisition. The design principles will be for two audiences: the design community creating children s digital technologies (e.g. everyone from mainstream toy industries making physical artifacts to game designers to traditional educational learning software designers) and those actively studying and teaching written literacy (e.g. developmental psychologists, educators). This work has implications, then, for the communities of academics, educators, technologists, and policy organizations concerned with placing technology in school contexts doc21014 none Through the years, much work has been done on synchronization algorithms for shared-memory multiprocessors. In contrast, very little work has been done on time-complexity lower bounds that express fundamental limits to which such algorithms are subject. Given the vastness of the literature on synchronization, this may seem somewhat surprising. However, there is a simple explanation: while devising a useful time complexity measure for sequential algorithms is straightforward, it is not altogether obvious how to do this in a meaningful way for synchronization algorithms. Indeed, in most synchronization algorithms, processes may wait unboundedly; thus, if one merely applies the standard sequential measure of counting all operations to such an algorithm, then its time complexity is unbounded. This is not a very useful statistic. Recently, some progress has been made towards defining useful time complexity measures. One such measure is the the remote memory references (RMR) measure. Under the RMR measure, a distinction is made between local and remote accesses of shared memory. An access is local if it does not require a traversal of the global interconnect between processors and shared memory, and is remote otherwise. The RMR measure was motived by research on local-spin synchronization algorithms. In such algorithms, processes are structured so that all busy waiting is on variables cached locally or stored in a local memory module. When studying synchronization problems, the following key question arises: Using some class C of synchronization primitives, what is the most efficient possible algorithm for solving a given synchronization problem? It is this basic question to which this research project is directed, where efficiency is defined as time complexity under the RMR measure. The research agenda includes work on both algorithms and lower bounds. Based on such work, rankings of synchronization primitives are being developed that order synchronization primitives according to the time complexity (worst-case, average-case, amortized) with which various synchronization problems can be solved. Such rankings should be of value to computer architects. Indeed, preliminary research has shown that a variety of fetch-and-phi primitives are more powerful than comparison primitives for implementing blocking synchronization mechanisms. This stands in contrast to the fact that compare-and-swap and related comparison primitives are commonly regarded to be among the most powerful and useful of primitives, and are widely supported in modern machines doc21015 none The purpose of this project is to enhance African American parental involvement with high school student children by developing skills and strategies for effectively managing the educational careers of their children. It would create a capacity for collaborations with the schools that service African American children by developing the social and organizational infrastructure for continued parental involvement in educational careers. It seeks to increase enrollment and success of Black students in higher-level mathematics and science courses to diminish the race gap in math and science track placements. It uses a quasi-experimental design to implement a series of community workshops designed to enhance knowledge, skills, and strategies for managing placements of children in science and math tracks. The research would create an intervention designed to change the outcome of students. It would conduct ethnographic work to map successful pathways to enrollment in higher-level math courses. It would use findings from these studies to implement workships within the Black communities, and conduct statistical analysis of the growth in achievement as a result of the reduction in course taking doc21016 none Cowan The paradox of how horizontal contraction and extension can occur simultaneously in convergent mountain belts remains a fundamental and largely unresolved problem in continental dynamics. The Apennines represent one of the most accessible type locality areas of syn-convergent extension. Rollback - which describes the tendency of a subducting plate to retreat from the orogenic front - is commonly invoked as an explanation for syn-convergent extension, but this idea does not address how the retrograde motion of the subducting plate, which is a mantle-based process, causes horizontal extension in the overlying zone of crustal convergence, especially in light of the large accretionary fluxes typically associated with continental subduction. The goal of the project (project RETREAT) is to develop a self-consistent dynamic model of syn-convergent extension, using the Northern Apennines as a natural laboratory. This part of the Apennine orogen has been the site of relatively steady orthogonal convergence and 2D (plane strain) orogenic deformation since ~30 Ma. GPS measurements indicate that convergence is presently active, and tomography indicates that the full length of subducted slab is still intact to depths of 250 km. Syn-convergent extension has been active since at least 15 Ma. The Northern Apennines are well studied, and all important features of the orogen are onland and thus directly accessible for detailed geological and geophysical research. The specific objectives of project RETREAT are 1) to determine in detail the velocity field across the orogen, including deformation in the orogenic wedge, the motion of lithospheric plates, and the flow fields in the surrounding asthenospheric mantle, and 2) to use this kinematic information to develop and test specific dynamic models for deformation in the orogenic wedge and underlying mantle. The research techniques to be used include; geodesy, tectonic geomorphology, low-temperature thermochronometry, structural geology and tectonic syntheses, seismic studies, and geodynamic modeling. The RETREAT project links together a broad multidisciplinary group with eleven PIs from six institutions, plus some 27 foreign collaborators in Italy, Switzerland, Canada, and France doc21017 none This project will focus on developing methods for analysis and retrieval of human activities in video databases that also can facilitate efficient means for highly compressed storage. For this purpose, it is proposed to develop a novel representation method for human activities. Such a representation is termed as action script and it includes a detailed sequence of human actions that fully describe the 3D motions of all the major body parts. Action scripts can be extended to describe actions of multiple persons as well and could also become an innovative means for highly efficient summarization, retrieval and recognition of complex human activities in video databases. Another objective of this proposal is to develop innovative querying tools that facilitate efficient definition and retrieval of single multi person activities in video databases. The approach proposed is founded on an extension of an innovative method, recently developed by the PI, for Recognition of human activity by Indexing and Sequencing (RISq). The RISq requires only few video samples and provides fast and robust recognition even in conditions of partial occlusion and varying speeds. It is proposed to further extend the RISq method for the proposed generation and recognition of action scripts of individuals and groups. This is an entirely unexplored domain that could lead to significant scientific contributions in analysis and management of video databases doc21018 none Proposal ID International Conference in Reliability and Survival Analysis (PI: Edsel Pena, Ph.D.; Co-PIs: James Lynch, Ph.D., William Padgett, Ph. D.) The Department of Statistics, and its Center for Reliability and Quality Sciences, at the University of South Carolina in Columbia will organize the International Conference on Reliability and Survival Analysis (ICRSA ) to be held on the University s historic campus from May 21-24, . The objectives of this conference are to bring together senior and established researchers and young and promising researchers from around the world who are working in the theoretical and applied aspects of reliability, survival analysis, and related topics in order to share recent advances and current research, as well as future research trends, in these areas. Through this conference, it is expected that interaction and or collaborative work among reliability and survival analysis researchers will be fostered, which will enhance and accelerate developments in both areas. As it currently exists, the reliability and survival analysis disciplines have developed somewhat separately, but there is much to be gained by recognizing similarities between them since both deal with the stochastic modeling and statistical analysis of failure-time data, usually in the presence of incomplete information. This conference, which will be the first since to be held in the United States focused simultaneously on reliability and survival analysis, will enable many researchers in the United States to participate, especially new researchers and graduate students, as the cost and accessibility for participation is more viable. Plenary talks and invited talks will be given by leading researchers in reliability and survival analysis, and contributed talks and poster sessions will be solicited from advanced graduate students and new researchers, especially from under-represented groups. The funding provided by the National Science Foundation will enable partial financial support of the plenary speakers, new researchers, and graduate students. New researchers and graduate students from under-represented groups will be particularly encouraged to seek funding from this NSF support doc21019 none High quality results from a dense GPS network spanning the Central Tien Shan, from Kazakhstan, through Kyrgyzstan, and into China, reveal a relatively simple kinematic picture to the east of the Talas-Ferghana fault. GPS velocities from several independent studies agree that there is ~20 mm yr convergence between the Tarim Basin and the Kazakh platform, about half the total convergence between the Indian and Eurasian plates. GPS velocities from the PI s dense network show that convergence is localized on a handful of structures. Slip rates on these structures inferred from both geologic studies and geodetic studies agree remarkably well. The PI s have used this new geodetic data, in conjunction with a simple block model that accounts for elastic strain accumulation, to invert for the motions of crustal blocks in the region. Notable results include much less right-lateral motion on the Talas-Ferghana fault than the previous geological estimate, rotation of the Ferghana Valley at ~0.8 degree myr (a fraction of the long-term geologic rate from paleomag), and convergence across the Alay valley between the Pamir and Southern Tien Shan of ~20 mm yr, comparable to previous estimates. However, existing geodetic coverage in the west, across the Talas-Ferghana fault into the Ferghana basin, and south across the Alay valley and South Tien Shan and into the Pamir, is both more sparse and less accurate than that in the Central Tien Shan. These rates of strike-slip motion on the Talas Ferghana fault, rotation of the Ferghana basin,and convergence across the Alay valley are not well constrained. For example, the inferred rate of rotation of the Ferghana basin differs by a factor of two depending upon which GPS results are used to constrain the model. Clearly, more observations are needed to obtain results in this area comparable in usefulness to those obtained to the east. In addition, the proposed joint analysis of the PI s raw GPS data with that taken by others (GFZ and CSB) will provide a combined solution with improved accuracy. In collaboration with colleagues at the Russian Institute for High Temperature Physics (known as IVTRAN)in Kyrgyzstan, the PI s propose to install 20 new sites in western Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. The Chinese Seismological Bureau (CSB)in Wuhan, China, will work with us to install additional sites in northwestern Xinjiang Province in China (exact number and locations to be determined after a visit to the field). The PI s collaborators will survey these sites, as well as existing sites that GFZ, IVTRAN, and CSB previously installed in the region, in order to unravel the kinematics of the area where the Tien Shan, Ferghana Basin, Pamir, and Tarim Basin intersect. In addition to analyzing the GPS data, they will also use simple continuum mechanics-based models to interpret the GPS velocities that they obtain in terms of geologic motions doc21020 none One of the most interesting data sets to emerge from recent studies of the Himalayan orogenic belt consists of U-Th-Pb ages reported by Harrison et al. ( ) and Catlos et al. ( a, b) from monazite inclusions within gamet crystals in the metamorphic rocks associated with the Main Central thrust (MCT) in central and eastern Nepal. Some of the monazite inclusions crystallized and were incorporated into the garnets during late Miocene-Pliocene time. Geothen-nometry and geobarometry data indicate that metamorphic temperatures ranged from 500 -800 C and pressures ranged from 8-12 kbar. Because detn tal monazite in pelitic sediments is destroyed during burial to the depths recorded by the mineral assemblages, the monazite ages most likely record the timing of garnet growth during Himalayan orogenesis (Harrison et al., ). Thus, the monazite ages contain information that is vital for kinematic reconstructions of Himalayan thrust systems, particularly the MCT and its proximal footwall rocks. The interpretation of the monazite ages offered in these previous studies suggests that the MCT was reactivated during late Miocene time, and that rocks in the footwall of the MCT were progressively incorporated into the hanging wall and raised to the surface. A number of independent lines of evidence suggest that this hypothesis may be correct, including 40 Ar 39 Ar cooling ages (Copeland et al., ; Macfarlane et al., ; Copeland et al., ); (2) levelling and GPS studies (Jackson and Bilham, ; Bilham et al., ; Larsen et al., ); and (3) neotectonic and geomorphic studies of the MCT zone in central Nepal (e.g., Bilham et al., ). Although reasonable, the MCT reactivation hypothesis incorporates some surprising kinematic processes. Paramount among these is the requirement that approximately 40 km of slip on the MCT occurred during late Miocene-Pliocene time in order to convey the gamets and their monazite inclusions to the surface. If the MCT was indeed reactivated, it would be (by far) the largest out-of-sequence event on a thrust fault ever documented. Whereas out-of-sequence thrusting is now widely accepted in thrust belt models, it generally is restricted to relatively minor displacements (a few km). A reactivation event of the hypothesized magnitude would significantly alter current concepts of how the Himalayan fold-thrust belt operates, and how foldthrust belts in general operate. It is conceivable that the extreme rate of erosion along the MCT in Nepal has shifted the fold-thrust belt into a near ten-ninal state of subcriticality, stalling its forward propagation and completely reorganizing the locus of major thrusting. Thus, the out-ofsequence MCT hypothesis is worthy of careful and critical examination. The key to understanding the young monazite ages lies in the structure of the rocks below the MCT from which the youngest monazite ages were obtained. Unfortunately, the stratigraphy and structure of the rocks below the MCT in central Nepal (where the monazite studies have been executed) are not well documented. Exact placement of the MCT in the field is still hotly debated, such that the tectonostratigraphic context of the samples remains in doubt. Alternatives to out-of-sequence reactivation of the MCT can explain equally well the young monazite ages. In this work, the PI s will implement a critical test of the out-of-sequence hypothesis in western Nepal. They will collect samples for U-Th-Pb monazite dating of gamet-bearing rocks and Ar Ar dating of micaccous lithologies along north-south transacts from the Main Boundary thrust in the south to the South Tibetan detachment in the north. They have already established the regional stratigraphy, structure, geochronology, and Nd isotope geochemistry of the Lesser Himalayan zone south of the MCT in western Nepal during the past six years (DeCelles et al., a, b, , ; Robinson et al., , ). They propose to obtain U-Th-Pb ages from monazite inclusions in garnets collected from rocks that span the MCT zone. They will also map the zone in detail and collect samples for U-Pb zircon and Nd-isotopic analysis in order to locate the MCT exactly in the field. The 40 Ar 3 Ar cooling ages should help to document the regional history of thrust sheet emplacement, which will be needed to support any interpretation of what occurred along the MCT. The proposed work should help to resolve whether the MCT experienced major (several tens of km) slip during late Miocene-Pliocene time. The result of the MCT question will have an impact on general models for orogenic wedges, in particular whether d erosion can relocate the locus of major thrusting on a scale required by large-scale rapi I reactivation of the MCT. In addition, the proposed Ar 3 Ar dating should provide an unprecedented level of detail and precision for the timing of thrust sheet emplacement in the Himalaya. Because the Himalaya is intimately related to the growth of the Tibetan Plateau and changes in global ocean chemistry, the PI s results should have applications beyond Himalayan tectonics doc21021 none Peter E. van Keken Large amounts of water are carried into the upper mantle by subduction. It is generally assumed that water is released in near continuous fashion to depths of at least 150-200 km. However, it is unknown how water is transported from the slab to the volcanic front. Water in the mantle wedge strongly influences rheological and seismological properties and has a major impact on subduction zone thermal structure. The investigators propose to study the influence of water on mantle wedge dynamics in a collaborative and multi-disciplinary project. Recent rheological work has made it possible, for the first time, to quantify the influence of water on creep properties of olivine. The investigators will systematically study the rheological influence of water, with particular interest in how the observationally inferred water distribution influences the balance of subduction forces and the generation of the cornerflow. The models provide predictions on subduction zone temperature and composition that allow for critical tests using observational and experimental constraints from seismology and mineral physics doc21022 none Paterson BAC libraries for key branches of the flowering plant family tree will greatly accelerate progress in unraveling the 200-million year history of angiosperm evolution. Extensive prior investments in the Poales and Brassicales make them important nucleation points for the monocots and dicots, respectively, from which to reach out across plant diversity to further investigate evolution of genome size, gene repertoire and function, and plant morphology. We will make 5 libraries totaling 423,936 BACs from carefully-selected angiosperm genomes (see below) to empower new investigations of well-delineated questions in developmental, evolutionary, and comparative biology. Among these, two (Ananas, Opuntia) will be the first BAC libraries known in their taxonomic orders, and two will be the first for important genome types (A, F) within a species complex (Gossypium) that is especially facile for asking fundamental questions about morphological transformations, polyploid evolution, and genome organization These libraries will empower new investigations in monocots and dicots respectively, of general mechanisms associated with plant diversification, and the specific events that may account for major morphological-developmental transformations, by virtue of making possible important new comparisons to many taxa already well studied. These libraries will also offer opportunities to shed new light on the genomic consequences of polyploidy, and new insights into the developmental genetics of other scientifically important features that are inadequately studied at the molecular level. All of the taxa we will study are closely-related to economically-significant crops that exhibit features amplified by human selection, and as such comprise botanical models in their own right for various aspects of plant growth and development. This work will empower many scientific synergies to be realized by links with prior investments by the Arabidopsis and Rice Genome Initiatives, NSF Plant Genome Program (in the Poales and Malvales), USDA-IFAFS (in the Brassicales), and USDA-NRI genome programs (Malvales). Community involvement in decisions relating to this project has been substantial. Our research is closely-tied to strong training and outreach programs with a successful history of engaging undergraduates and groups under-represented in the sciences. Binomial Common name Family 1C value (Mbp) # of BACs Genome coverage Ananas comosus pineapple Bromeliaceae 531 55,296 10x Gossypium herbaceum A-genome cotton Malvaceae 92,160 5x Gossypium longicalyx F-genome cotton Malvaceae 92,160 6x Gossypioides kirkii Malvaceae 579 73,728 12x Opuntia cochellinifera prickly-pear cactus Cactaceae 869 110,592 10x TOTAL 423,936 doc21023 none Knickpoint migration has long been recognized as a primary mechanism of river response to sudden base-level fall. As base-level fall can be triggered by tectonic upheaval, climatic change, sea-level fall or river capture, knickpoint migration is an important aspect of channel incision and landscape evolution in a wide range of geological, tectonic, and climatic settings. Following a sudden base-level fall, the distribution of actively migrating knickpoints within a watershed sets the boundary between landforms that have adjusted to the new base level and those that have not, and therefore retain their relict, pre-incision form. Consequently, the time scale of landscape response and the timing of sediment deliver to basins following a change in tectonic or climatic conditions is strong influenced by the rate and style of upstream knickpoint migration. Despite the critical importance of knickpoints in landscape evolution, little is known quantitatively about the controls on the rates and styles of knickpoint migration. We propose to exploit a natural experiment in knickpoint migration that has been running for 18 ka in the Waipaoa drainage basin on the East Cape of New Zealand s North Island. Over on hundred knickpoints demarcate the headward advance of a wave of incision initiated along the Waipaoa trunk stream at about 18ka, as recorded in tephra stratigraphy in alluvial fills on abandoned strath terraces. Preliminary map and aerial photography investigation indicates that both knickpoint migration rate and form (diffuse, steep discrete, waterfall) show considerable variability within the drainage basin. Significant new data on the processes, rates, and styles of knickpoint migration as a function of upstream drainage area (discharge and sediment flux), substrate lithology, and distance of knickpoint migration will be gathered, analyzed, and disseminated. As the Waipaoa is a dramatic example of how dynamic the landscape we live in is, and how susceptible it can be to human disturbance, we are committed to the development of educational modules at all levels, including K-12 instruction doc20978 none This project is investigating Mesoproterozoic ( - Ma) sedimentary rocks in the western U.S. to test aspects of the controversial Rodinia hypotheses. The hypothesis being tested is that the inboard record of sedimentation and tectonics in southwestern Laurentia, preserved in well-exposed sedimentary successions, can be used for understanding stresses at the surrounding plate margins, nature of drainage patterns and basins in southwestern Laurentia, and the age of possible outboard sources of detritus. The research involves structural, petrologic, and geochronologic study aimed at correlation of, and characterizing provenance for, several key areas and units. These areas represent preserved remnants of once more extensive sedimentary successions; they are well exposed, but widely separated, and correlations have been hampered by a lack of reliable geochronology. The study concentrates on the Apache Group (Arizona), Unkar Group (Grand Canyon), Crystal Spring Formation (Death Valley), and Lanora Formation (Texas). The researchers are reconstructing the regional intracratonic basinal and tectonic patterns and searching for a fingerprint of possible outboard sources of detritus. The geochronological studies involve: dating ash beds using precise U-Pb geochronology, U-Pb dating of detrital zircons, new in situ U-Pb microprobe dating of monazite grains, and Ar-Ar laser dating of mica grains. Sedimentary-tectonic studies are evaluating which faults were active during deposition by looking for facies changes across faults and relationships to syntectonic magmatism. Petrologic studies are emphasizing provenance of siliciclastic rocks using standard petrologic techniques. Detailed regional tests involving geochronology linked to sedimentary tectonics are providing better understanding of the tectonic setting of western Laurentia and hence the most likely adjacent outboard continental masses that collided with Laurentia from 1.3-1.0 Ga doc21025 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY . The goal of the fellowship is to prepare minority scientists for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. This program is an effort by the NSF to increase the number of research scientists from under-represented minority groups, thereby contributing to the future vitality of the Nation s scientific enterprise. It is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Electron microscopy study of the structure of ATP Binding Cassette transporter protein MsbA. ATP Binding Cassette (ABC) transporter proteins couple ATP hydrolysis with translocation of various substrate molecules across biological membranes. This study is investigating the model that posits that large conformational changes in the transporter protein allows the substrate to move across the membrane. Electron microscopy and helical image analysis are being used to determine the structure and mechanism of the MsbA transporter doc21026 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY . The goal of the fellowship is to prepare minority scientists for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. This program is an effort by the NSF to increase the number of research scientists from under-represented minority groups, thereby contributing to the future vitality of the Nation s scientific enterprise. It is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Influence of mating system on patterns of parentage and fitness correlates in a garter snake model, Thamnophis sirtalis parietalis. This research explores the role of kin recognition in the mating system by asking whether parental relatedness influences paternal contribution and, in turn, maternal fitness in natural populations of the red-sided garter snake. This constitutes the first test for the presence of kin recognition and first rigorous study of inbreeding depression in any snake species doc21027 none Wing The long-term focus of our research is to develop and exploit the tools of genomics to make the Oryza genus the most advanced and tractable model system to study plant evolution, development, physiology and crop science in the world. The specific objectives of this proposal are to construct and distribute eleven high quality deepcoverage large insert BAC libraries for the ten genomes of Oryza (Table 1). With the complete sequence of the A genome of rice on the horizon, having convenient public access to the other nine genomes of rice in the form of BAC libraries, will permit rapid advances in both basic and applied research for the most important food crop in the world. The genus species, genome type and genome coverage are listed below: O. rufipogon - AA, 5X O. glaberrima - AA, 5X O. punctata - BB, 10X O. officinalis - CC, 10X O. minuta - BBCC, 10X O. australiensis - DD, 10X O. latifolia - CCDD, 10X O. schlechteri - HHKK, 10X O. ridleyi - HHJJ, 10X O. brachyantha - FF, 10X O. granulata - GG, 10X doc21028 none This project aims at developing a survivability framework called PROMISE, which includes procedures for fault recovery for mission critical applications. The idea behind this framework is to divide an active path into several, possibly overlapping active segments, and then protect each active segment with a detour called backup segment. Thus the basic survivability concept is to provide local protection against faults impacting localized segments of the active path. The following research activities will be particularly pursued. First, the project team will investigate how to find the optimal (e.g. most band-width-efficient) active path segments and how to reduce the time complexity of the new survivability algorithms within the framework. For that purpose, new ILP formulations for solving the problems will be used to provide reference data, and a comprehensive study comparing the proposed approaches with other existing protection restoration approaches will be conducted. Second, the proposed research will include the investigation of the methods to support differentiated services within the framework, such as partially survivable, unprotected or preemptable connections. Finally, the project will elaborate on survivability issues specific to optical networks based on WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplexing) and IP under the Generalized Multi-protocol Label Switched (G-MPLS) framework, where new algorithms and simulation tools PROMISE are expected to be developed. The project will bring together networking research and theoretic computer science research, and in addition, by incorporating research into educational and training activities will create awareness and interest among students on the issues related to survivability in next-generation communication networks doc21029 none The Woodlark Basin of southeastern Papua New Guinea is one of the world s most rapidly extending rifts and provides a natural laboratory to study how continental lithosphere ruptures during the transition from rifting to seafloor spreading. It is here that the active metamorphic core complexes of the D Entrecasteaux Islands were first discovered (e.g.,Hill et al., ). These islands preserve some of the youngest, most rapidly exhumed metamorphic and igneous rocks known on Earth (Baldwin et al., ).The exhumed lower plates of the D Entrecasteaux Island metamorphic core complexes provide a record of active continental extension and magmatism synchronous with the westward propagation of the Woodlark Basin seafloor spreading system. While the seafloor spreading history (e.g.,Taylor et al., ) and the transition from rifting to spreading in the vicinity of the Moresby Seamount (Taylor and Huchon, in review) is known, more onshore geologic research is required to fully understand the history and mechanisms of continental rifting in the Woodlark Basin. Rupturing of continental lithosphere imparts a thermal record of events that are preserved as isotopic variations within minerals. These events can be revealed using thermochronology, and when integrated with P-T-D constraints, can be used to determine the timing and rates of exhumation associated with continental extension and magmatism. The PI s propose to further investigate the relationship between continental rifting and seafloor spreading in the western Woodlark Basin by 1) documenting the P-T-t-D histories of rocks exposed on Normanby Island, the easternmost of the D Entrecasteaux Islands, located west of the active rift tip, 2) documenting the P-T-t-D histories of rocks exposed on Misima Island, part of the southern rifted continental margin and 3) determining the age of eclogite facies metamorphism in the exhumed lower plates of the D Entrecasteaux Islands core complexes. Results will be compared to previous P-T-t-D studies on the D Entrecasteaux Islands and Moresby Seamount. Longitudinal and latitudinal variations (or lack thereof) in the timing of continental extension and magmatism will be interpreted in relation to the history of seafloor spreading in the Woodlark Basin and recently proposed models for the evolution of the region doc21030 none Steele A complete description of the evolutionary history of multicellular animals will require detailed information on the content, organization, and regulatory mechanisms of the genomes of animals from phyla throughout the animal phylogenetic tree. Of particular importance for such studies are species that diverged early from the rest of the animals and unicellular organisms which are close relatives of animals. Features of the genomes of such organisms which are shared with more recently diverged animals would then be ones which were present in the ancestor of all modern animals. The goal of this project is to prepare and archive bacterial artificial chromosome libraries from Nematostella vectensis (a sea anemome which is a member of the early diverging animal phylum Cnidaria) and from the choanoflagellate Monosiga brevicollis, a unicellular organism closely related to multicellular animals. These libraries will provide important resources for addressing a variety of questions related to the origins, evolution, and development of multicellular animals. Such questions include: How did the Hox family of developmental regulatory genes evolve? When did various other developmental regulatory gene families appear during animal evolution? How closely related are choanoflagellates and multicellular animals, and what genes were necessary to make the transition from unicellularity to multicellularity? What happened at the genome level when nerves were added to multicellular animals? What cell adhesion and intercellular signaling molecules were present in the common ancestor of modern animals? Are cnidarian genes organized into operons, as suggested by the presence of spliced leader addition in this phylum? In addition to providing material for analysis of animal evolution, the libraries will facilitate the isolation of gene promoters, which will be essential for the development of functional assays in these organisms and for dissecting gene regulatory networks. The libraries generated by this project will be freely available to the research community. Information on the libraries and their availability will be provided through various means, including appropriate scientific newsgroups and web sites doc20780 none Weathering of silicate minerals on continents is a major source of silicon (Si) for formation of secondary silicate minerals in soil, opal phytoliths in plants and ultimately for diatoms in the oceans. Even though Si is a significant element in the biogeochemistry of Earth, it does not have a well developed tracer to provide a clear understanding of how organic and inorganic processes affect Si behavior and the pathways that Si follows as it moves from rock to clay or water or organism. Germanium (Ge) and Si behave chemically in a similar fashion and have been treated as a pseudo-isotopic tracer of the behavior of Si in the surficial environment. We have conducted preliminary research that demonstrates clear and logical changes in the Ge Si ratio in response to soil and plant processes. Here we propose a systematic analysis of Ge fractionation from Si during: 1) incongruent weathering and the formation of secondary alumino-silicate clay minerals, 2) formation of iron oxides in soil, and 3) plant uptake and opal biosynthesis leading to formation of phytoliths. We propose a field-based project where we quantify the Ge Si ratios of rock minerals, soil minerals, soil water and plant phytoliths in soils forming on extrusive volcanic rock and on intrusive plutonic rocks in a humid tropical weathering environment. Ge Si ratios will be determined on fresh parent materials and soils from a series of well-studied tropical soil sites in Hawaii (basaltic substrate) and Luquillo, Puerto Rico (granitoid substrate). Pore waters and mineral separates (where applicable) from the same horizons as the soil samples will be analyzed. We will also analyze plant phytoliths from dominant vegetation. We will use the data to test specific hypotheses about processes that control Ge Si fractionation in the weathering environment. The proposed research will compare and contrast the behavior of the Ge Si system in aphanitic basaltic environments with plutonic granitoid environments, where we expect that the mechanisms of fractionation will differ because of the differences in chemical composition, mineralogy, and crystallinity. It will also specifically investigate the role of plant uptake of Si and the biogenic silica cycle in soil systems. The results of this study will provide the basic data needed to develop Ge Si ratios as a quantitative tracer of silica during weathering, plant cycling, and in surface waters doc21032 none This project will use four-dimensional data assimilation to dynamically specify the condition of the Earth s electron radiation belts from very near the Earth s surface out to a distance of 10 Earth radii. It will utilize data from the Los Alamos geostationary satellites, the NOAA GOES satellites and the GPS satellites. Additional data will come from the SAMPEX and Polar satellites. Two empirical prediction techniques will be used. The first is an Auto-Regressive Moving Average model based on linear system identification theory. The second is a model based on the concept of historical analogs. The two techniques will be compared with one another in order to determine under what conditions each technique is most appropriate doc21033 none Kocher Teleost fishes are dominant components of aquatic ecosystems around the world, and are of tremendous commercial importance as a major source of animal protein. Teleosts have undergone a spectacular adaptive radiation over the last 200MY. The 25,000 species of teleost represent more than half of all living vertebrate taxa. Fishes are important model systems across the spectrum of biological research, from ecology, evolution and development to biomedicine. The genomic tools developed to sequence the human genome are now finding applications across many taxa. The genomes of three fish species (Danio, Fugu and Tetraodon) are being completely sequenced. Genetic maps have been constructed for a dozen other species, and physical maps are under construction for a few of these. BAC libraries for additional species will further research aimed at discovering the phylogenetic relationships among species, the genetic basis for adaptive differences among taxa, and the patterns and processes that regulate genome evolution. This project aims to further stimulate comparative genomic studies of fishes by constructing and distributing large-insert genomic DNA (BAC) libraries for two species representing major teleost lineages. They are the blind cavefish (Astyanax mexicanus), and the Lake Malawi zebra (Metriaclima zebra). These BAC libraries will permanently archived and distributed through the UNH Hubbard Center for Genome Studies, a new genome center focused on comparative and environmental genomics. Each library will be distributed as clones in 384-well plates and gridded filters suitable for hybridization screening. Extensive quality control measures will ensure that each derived product (replica plate or filter) can be traced back to the original clone. The Hubbard Center is committed to the development of comparative genomic resources for fishes. This proposal is the first step in a program to generate genomic and cDNA libraries, genetic and physical maps, and comparative mapping databases for fishes. The libraries proposed here will serve as a foundation for future research in phylogenetics, genome evolution, development, evolution, environmental biology and aquaculture doc21034 none This project will develop ad space weather analysis model for use in the preparation of space weather maps and space weather forecasting. The analysis model will be driven by data from spacecraft in geosynchronous, geosynchronous-transfer and polar low-Earth (LEO) orbits. Three components of space weather will be included in the analysis model: (1) the magnetic field, (2) fluxes of radiation-belt (high energy) particles, and (3) fluxes of keV electrons. For each of these components, the analysis model will include four elements: (a) an empirical model, (b) observational data, (c) the model error-covariance matrix, and (d) a physics based model checker corrector. The checker corrector component will ensure that the model is consistent with physical laws doc21035 none This proposal concerns the development of methods to allow a variety of uni-cast, multicast, geocast and location-based mobile ad-hoc routing protocols to adapt. It addresses specifically the ad-hoc routing protocol design related to quantification of the mobility by specific metrics, in particular mobility, which are used to solve various routing tasks. In this three-year project, the following research activities will be particularly pursued. The research team will address the development of local mobility metrics that are specific to individual nodes. For that purpose, a generic feedback agent that resides on a mobile node will be developed, which gathers the information required to compute the value of the mobility metrics, and present the information to an arbitrary type of protocol. The simulation studies under a wide variety of network conditions will be con-ducted to determine appropriate trade-offs between active and passive monitor-ing and optimal sampling times for estimating metrics such as node speed, link change rate, link duration, etc. The project activities will also include the devel-opment of example adaptive routing protocols utilizing the feedback agent. For example, the research team will explore a protocol that will combine location-based routing with localized flooding in an effort to enable successful packet delivery in times of extreme network mobility (low link duration times). Finally, the development of new mobility models that are more realistic will be consid-ered. For example, the networks in which node speeds vary among different parts of the network will be studied, e.g. for the case of regions where the mobil-ity dynamics vary widely throughout the network. In addition to the above ac-tivities the research team also plans to address a variety of other metrics such as link change rate and passive and active traffic monitoring metrics doc21036 none The behavior of a normal matrix (e.g., a real symmetric matrix or a complex Hermitian matrix) is governed by its eigenvalues; that is, the 2-norm of any analytic function of a normal matrix is just the maximum absolute value of that function on the spectrum of the matrix. The same holds for normal linear operators, except that now the spectrum may include more than just the eigenvalues. This statement does not hold for nonnormal matrices and linear operators, and there is considerable interest in identifying sets in the complex plane that can be associated with nonnormal operators to provide the sort of information that the spectrum provides in the normal case. The goal of this project is to identify such sets and determine their geometrical properties, to find efficient ways to compute or approximate these sets, and to apply them to some interesting problems in applied mathematics. Eigenvalues explain the asymptotic behavior of many different systems: from hydrodynamic stability to the behavior of finite difference chemes and iterative linear system solvers to the Markov chain modeling of probabilistic events. Eigenvalues do not explain the transient behavior of these systems, however, and it is this transient behavior that is often most important. In this work we attempt to provide the tools necessary to understand and predict this transient behavior. This will lead to better understanding of such diverse phenomena as transition to turbulence, controllability of mechanical or biological systems, and cutoff behavior in Markov chains modeling everything from card shuffling to statistical mechanics doc21037 none Papanicolaou Small-scale cluster bedforms are prevalent in gravel-bed rivers. An understanding of their mechanics is needed for better understanding of river processes, as well as the development of accurate predictions of bed roughness characteristics, stage-discharge relations, bedload transport, and implementation of restoration plans. Cluster microforms are one component of the nonlinear system of gravel-bed rivers. Flow structure and entrainable sediment produce clusters; once developed, they in turn influence sediment transport and the surrounding flow field. Clusters add to bed stability and delay of sediment motion. Self-organized clusters have been called a product of stochastic encounters among individual grains. In natural streams, cluster bedforms are thought to form during recession of flow events great enough to create selective mobilization of bed sediment. Some think that clusters form in quasi-stable equilibrium so as to maximize flow resistance, producing a wavelength to particle diameter ratio of 20. Still others suggest that clusters are a kinematic wave or migratory, rather than stable structure. The project entails extensive laboratory flume experiments to understand the evolution of cluster microforms. A major- goal is to define the near bed turbulence structure to improve the understanding of the coupling between near-bed turbulence and sediment transport when clusters are present. A series of experiments will be conducted for non-unisized spheres to examine the cluster geometry, the flow ranges under which clusters form, remain stable, and disintegrate, and the interaction between near-bed hydraulic parameters and clusters bedforms. The reduced number of variables in the laboratory experiments will allow specific relations between the hydraulic parameters, sediment supply, and resulting particle clusters to be isolated and quantified. Recent advances in high-resolution cameras and acoustic sensors for measuring turbulence around clusters, combined with the development of hardware for image analysis and bed scanning will allow simultaneous measurements of local sediment transport and adjacent near-bed flow at turbulence-resolving frequencies without disturbing the flow doc21038 none Thomas One of the fundamental goals of biology is to understand how genome structure and function evolves in response to environmental change and how genetic constraints limit the natural distribution, abundance, and adaptive evolution of species. Toward these goals, Dr. Thomas is proposing to develop Bacterial Artificial Chromosome (BAC) libraries for diverse crustacean taxa. These libraries are specifically intended to support both comparative developmental studies and investigations into how organisms respond to environmental change. The Crustacea are ideal for comparative developmental studies because of their extraordinary morphological diversity, and close relationship to the premier developmental model organism, Drosophila melanogaster. Crustacean taxa are also the focus of many ecological studies aimed at understanding the fundamental interactions between organisms and their environment. The proposed BAC library resources and their distribution will provide critical tools in support of developmental evolution and environmental genomics. Dr. Thomas is specifically proposing to develop BAC libraries for three taxa representing three crustacean classes. The Branchiopods are represented by the water flea, Daphnia pulex. The Maxillapoda are represented by a copepod Tigriopus californicus, and the class Malacostraca is represented by an amphipod, Parhyale hawaiensis. Daphnia and Parhyale are already the subjects of comparative developmental studies in numerous laboratories. This work will take place in collaboration with a set of primary users who are actively participating in this proposal by consulting on the appropriate taxa, supplying specimens for DNA extraction and helping to make these resources available and useful to their taxon- or discipline-specific communities. These collaborators represent disparate fields of biological research and represent a broad spectrum of the potential user community. The generation and distribution of each library will take place at the Hubbard Center for Genome Studies (HCGS) at the University of New Hampshire under the direction of the PI (co-director of the center). The HCGS has a primary focus of comparative and environmental genomics, and in conjunction with this proposal will be offering intensive summer workshops in genomic technologies to support the use of BAC libraries by students and postdocs. BAC library resources from each taxon will be made available to all academic and non-academic users in two ways: 1) as complete arrayed copies of the library; and 2) arrayed at high density on nylon filters. The BAC resources and associated information will be accessible via the WWW. The HCGS will maintain and distribute these resources for a minimum of five years after the end of the granting period doc21039 none There is much disagreement about the width of the actively deforming forearc wedge at the Cascadia subduction zone. The narrow wedge interpretation maintains that the continental shelf is underlain by a strong backstop that limits wedge deformation to the ~50 km wide continental slope. This view is compatible with the fact that the shelf is flat and appears to deform relatively slowly. The strength of the shelf backstop is usually attributed to the more lithified character of older accreted rocks within the back of the wedge. The alternative interpretation is that actively deforming wedge is some 150 to 225 km wide, and is delimited by a seaward-vergent deformation front at the Cascadia trench and a landward-vergent deformation front at the east flank of the Oregon-Washington Coast Ranges, the Olympics and the Vancouver Island Insular Range. The change in topographic slope at the crest of this forearc high represents a reversal in structural vergence in the wedge. In this model, the relatively strong lithospheric mantle of the overriding plate represents a deep-seated flat-lying backstop. The greater strength of the mantle backstop allows wedge deformation to involve both accreted sedimentary rocks and the older crustal lid of the subduction zone (e.g. Silitez and Crescent basalts). This model accounts for the development of the forearc high along the entire length of the Cascadia margin with remarkable uniformity irrespective of local crustal geology. Active permanent uplift is recognized everywhere along the forearc high, with the fastest rates (~0.8 km m.y.) occurring in the Olympic Mountains. The PI s propose a 2 year study that will use thermomechanical modeling to test the wide wedge hypothesis at Cascadia. The timing is ideal for this work given recent seismic and geodetic studies that provide detailed information about the structure and short-term deformation of the forearc, and recent thermochronologic, geomorphic, and geologic studies that provide local information about long-term deformation and uplift across the Olympics and Corvallis sectors of the margin. The proposed work will examine 3 issues where the PI s hypothesis is most likely to fail: 1) How is the shelf able to remain flat lying and relatively undeformed within an actively deformed wedge? In the Olympics, the trench slope, shelf, and forearc high are all underlain by accreted sedimentary rocks, so variations in wedge strength seems an unlikely explanation. The PI s will test the idea that the shelf part of the wedge is stabilized by deposition in shelf basins, which are 2 to 3 km thick. 2) What causes the thick structural lid of the subduction zone to uplift and fold into the forearc high observed today? Thermomechanical modeling will allow the PI s to determine the role of ductile flow in controlling the growth of the forearc high. They will also explore if uplift and folding of the lid can occur by frontal accretion alone, or if underplating is required. 3) How is the pattern of wedge deformation influenced by the distribution of rock strength? The Cascadia margin includes soft accreted sediments, older lithified accreted sediments, and a structural lid of older igneous rocks (e.g., Siletz, Crescent, Wrangellia terranes). Using realistic constitutive relationships, the PI s will determine how these units deform above and seaward of a much stronger mantle backstop. These process-oriented studies will provide the basis for building a full thermomechanical model to test if the long-term evolution of a wide forearc wedge is consistent with the known tectonic evolution of the Cascadia forearc. This will allow the PI s to test if the wedge will retain a steady evolution in the face of large changes in sediment fluxes. This research will contribute towards a more realistic understanding of the thermal structure and long-term velocity field within the Cascadia forearc. This information is essential for improving resolution of the width of the seismogenic zone for the Cascadia subduction zone doc20842 none Collaborative Research: Biotic diversity and vertebrate evolution in Late Devonian non-marine ecosystems of North America Neil Shubin- Edward Daeschler- The Late Devonian (375-360 MYA) witnessed a burst of diversification of vertebrate life, including the origin of limbed vertebrates, and the elaboration of plants and invertebrates in terrestrial ecosystems. Accordingly, the description and analysis of Late Devonian vertebrates and ecosystems offers the ability to generate important data on the emergence of new taxa, new anatomical structures, new faunas, and new habitats during this critical moment of evolution. Our prior work ( to present) in the Late Devonian (Famennian Stage) Catskill Formation in Pennsylvania has produced well-preserved, highly diverse vertebrate assemblages from the same stratigraphic horizons as macrofossil plants, palynomorphs, arthropods, and bivalves. Exploratory work ( - ) in the Late Devonian (Frasnian Stage) Okse Bay Group in the Canadian Arctic has also revealed significantly fossiliferous units in this virtually unexplored region. This project will document and interpret the diversity of the non-marine parts of these Late Devonian systems in eastern North America. The temporal range will cover the Frasnian and Famennian Stages of the Late Devonian, a critical window in evolution. Fieldwork in the Famennian-age Catskill Formation has taken a significant step; the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation has given permission to remove a large wedge of overburden from the Red Hill locality, source of two early tetrapod taxa and a very diverse fauna and flora. Fieldwork in the Frasnian-age Okse Bay Group in the Canadian Arctic will focus on areas now recognized for their fossil productivity. The first major goal is the recovery, preparation and description of Late Devonian fossil material. Ensuing investigation of the phylogenetic affinities and stratigraphic position of fossil assemblages will allow both intraformational and global comparisons of biotic diversity. Assessment of intraformational stratigraphic relationships will enable an understanding of the biotic diversity in different portions of the fluvial systems. These analyses will inform: 1) higher level phylogenetic hypotheses of gnathostome vertebrates, 2) biostratigraphic and biogeographic analysis of the distribution of the Late Devonian tetrapods and fish, and 3) paleobiological investigation of the elaboration of terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems doc21041 none Hubbard EarthScope is a major earth science research initiative that will integrate scientific information derived from seismology (US Array), geodesy (Plate boundary Observatory), subsurface sampling and measurement (SAFOD), remote sensing (InSAR), and complementary geology and geophysics to understand continental scale plate deformation and evolution. Funding for the EarthScope initiative is currently being discussed in Congress as part of NSF s FY budget. The Division of Earth Sciences has made FY funds available for projects that qualify as pre-EarthScope activity, i.e. activities that will facilitate or enable the construction, fabrication, installation or operation of EarthScope once it is funded under the MREFC (Major Research Equipment Facilities and Construction) account. Such activities include meetings and workshops, prototype development, site selection or characterization. This award will support a planning workshop to discuss scientific objectives related to the Great Plains coverage of the USArray component of EarthScope. The Great Plains region has had a geologic history that includes continental rifting, marine and non-marine sedimentation, localized basin formation and deformation, tilting and incision of Tertiary sedimentary units in the west, mantle activity resulting in contrasting seismic anisotropy between eastern and western regions, and earthquake activity. To date, much of the research has been done within disciplines and on individual aspects of the geologic history. Clearly there are relationships between past events, and bringing workers together will foster discussion about topics ranging from mantle activity to the Earth s surface and from the Precambrian to the present. The workshop participants will discuss possible multidisciplinary future collaborations to address identified questions and can interface these collaborations with the USArray coverage in the region. The goal of the workshop is to foster interdisciplinary discussion that is aimed at maximizing the scientific gain from the USArray initiative in the Great Plains region doc21042 none Vadose zone fractures are known to play a significant role in groundwater recharge in desert areas. This project will evaluate the hypothesis that evaporation from fracture surfaces in the upper vadose zone triggers capillary forces within the matrix that drive pore-water and solutes from the matrix toward the fracture faces. Evaporation results in salt crust formation on the fracture walls. Subsequent rain events move water through the fractures dissolving salt crusts and transporting them to the water table. Furthermore, under desert conditions, nighttime cold temperatures may result in the formation of thermal convection cells within fracture voids, dramatically enhancing evaporation rates. The project will: 1. Test the concept of accelerated night-time convection at a fractured-rock field study site. 2. Investigate salt crust formation rate in the laboratory for two rocks permeabilities to determine: (a) time rate of change and strength of the evaporation rate; (b) rate and extent of the salt crust formation; and (c) ratio of nighttime (convection driven) to daytime (diffusion driven) evaporation rates. 3. Develop a field scale numerical model to analyze the significance of this mechanism under a range of climatic, fracture and matrix conditions. Parameters will include fracture aperture, rock permeability and extent of thermal inversion. This study will provide a better understanding of the mechanism for salt accumulation and transport. It will provide a valuable tool for exploring the importance of this mechanism on a global scale as it relates to salt loading of groundwater resources and bypass toxic solutes in already contaminated sites doc21043 none Mills In field studies of groundwater in a range of hydrogeological settings, the rates of microbially mediated geochemical reactions have been shown to be far faster than hydrological transport rates. These relative rates lead to large changes in concentration of a variety of redox-sensitive chemical species over short distances within aquifers. In some systems, however, transient hydrological events (e.g., heavy precipitation on dry soil or floods in streams) can rapidly alter the geochemical environment in which the microbes exist. In that circumstance, the time constants associated with the physical events approach those of the microbially mediated processes. The proposed research addresses the question: How do hydrological processes and biogeochemical processes interact in the riparian-hyporheic zone of streams where time scales of the various processes are on the same order - hours to weeks? The proposed research will examine the effect of bank-storage events on reductive microbiological processes occurring in the riparian-hyporheic zone of a low-relief coastal plain stream. In particular, the concentration of nitrate-N in the groundwater feeding the stream is about 15 mg liter, but the stream-water concentrations average only 1.6 mg liter, suggesting high denitrification activity in the riparian- hyporheic zone. We envision the disruption of anaerobic processes during rain events in which rapid infiltration raises the water table and flushes chemicals (viz., nitrate) in the pore water out into the stream and perfuses the area with oxygenated water. We expect a similar disruption without flushing during storms in which a rapid rise in stream level pushes oxygenated water into the stream banks, thereby transiently extending the hyporheic zone. We will also examine the effect of flushing or bank-storage events on the denitrification and will document the rate of return of the functional abilities of the microbial communities to the pre-disturbance levels. Because these transient events have the potential to affect release of chemicals like nitrate from the groundwater into the surrounding surface waters, we will investigate how transient conditions in riparian soils affect the overall budget of biologically active chemicals. The proposed work includes detailed field observations, field manipulation experiments, laboratory batch and mesocosm experiments and mathematical modeling. We anticipate that we will learn how microbially mediated geochemical reactions and transient hydrological processes with time scales on the same order are linked. We will develop quantitative descriptions of these processes and investigate how frequently biogeochemical processes are reset by different hydrological events the synoptic data that we will examine how the transient effects of local processes influence regional nutrient fluxes doc21044 none Goldsmith The goal of this proposal is to build a public facility for distribution of BAC libraries for accelerated research in development and evolution for a set of well-established lepidopteran insect models in two key areas: 1) developmental and functional neurobiology and 2) the genetic and developmental basis of adaptation. Readily available BAC libraries for these species will accelerate research into the genetic mechanisms underlying lepidopteran development, behavior, morphology, and evolution. Specific objectives of the research and how they will be achieved are: 1. To produce 6 high-quality BAC libraries for three different experimentally important lepidopteran species. In order to achieve complementary overlaps and deep genome coverage, two BAC libraries equivalent to 10X genome coverage will be made for each species by partial digestion of high molecular weight DNA using one of two enzymes that recognizes different base composition restriction sites and arrayed in 384-well microplates. 2. To characterize each library for percentage of insert-empty clones, average insert size, insert size distribution, clone stability, and cytoplasmic contamination to ensure high library quality. 3. To assess true genome coverage and provide preliminary comparative genome data by screening each library with a set of well-conserved gene sequences. 4. To maintain, archive and disseminate the libraries to the public on a cost-recovery basis through the Texas A and M University GENEfinder Genomic Resources, one of the largest genomic resource centers in the world. The species were chosen primarily for their centrality as experimental models for a wide range of research problems. They are: 1. a Sphingid moth, the tobacco hornworm, Manduca sexta, which is a model for developmental mechanisms, neurobiology, cell biology, physiology, chemical communication, and hostplant selection studied by a large international community 2. a Noctuid moth, the tobacco budworm, Heliothis virescens, a genetically tractable member of a widespread group of largely agricultural pests used as a model for investigating genes that change under differential selection, such as resistance to chemical and biological pesticides 3. a Heliconid butterfly, Heliconius erato, which is a classic model for mullerian mimicry and convergent evolutionary change. The first fruits of the BAC libraries proposed here will be to provide a set of conserved anchor loci that will serve as a framework to unify genetic studies in the Lepidoptera and to investigate phylogenetic relationships, which are still largely unresolved for most of the clade. For the long term, the construction of a set of lepidopteran BAC libraries will provide critically important tools for every aspect of insect science, especially for comparative genomics and future sequencing of model genomes. It will also provide new insights into long-held questions such as 1) how development constrains evolution, 2) the extent to which patterning loci are reused in evolution, and 3) what kinds of developmental changes are preferred by evolution, as well as how they vary across diverse butterfly lineages and different selective landscapes doc21045 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY . The goal of the fellowship is to prepare minority scientists for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. This program is an effort by the NSF to increase the number of research scientists from under-represented minority groups, thereby contributing to the future vitality of the Nation s scientific enterprise. It is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Comparing urban and rural forests: using city environments to model long-term changes in forests under predicted changes in global climates. Forests are predicted to change their distributions in response to global changes in atmospheric nitrogen deposition, carbon dioxide, and temperature. Urban forests have experienced these conditions for decades and represent unique systems to look for novel changes in the dynamics of forests under predicted global change scenarios doc21046 none The PI, Dr. Ron Vernon, was recently appointed a Research Professor at the University of Southern California. This proposal would support research by the PI and USC graduate student, Luke Jensen. This proposal outlines a project designed to examine several hypotheses regarding the significance of inclusion trails preserved within porphyroblasts and the timing and structural setting of porphyroblast growth. It has been suggested that porphyroblast inclusion trails may preserve information about regional orogenic events and possibly past plate motions. If this hypothesis is correct, then porphyroblast studies provide a powerful method of unraveling orogeny and past plate motions. However, the PI s studies elsewhere suggest that structural and metamorphic heterogeneities are formed by various processes at all scales and can markedly affect inclusion trail patterns in porphyroblasts; that complex porphyroblast growth features and internal inclusion trail patterns can fon-n in potphyroblasts that grow during short time intervals in contact aureoles, indicating that local complexity in porphyroblasts does not imply regional comple xity, and that using microstructural information preserved only in porphyroblasts to infer orogenic processes and plate motions is generally unjustified. They hope to test these contradictory hypotheses by examining porphyroblasts in a prograde metamorphic sequence (chlorite to sillimanite zones),Cascades core, Washington in three settings: regional, contact aureoles, and in folds. They will combine modem techniques for studying poiphyroblast matrix relationships with cathode luminescence, neutron diffraction, and limited geochronologic studies doc21047 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY . The goal of the fellowship is to prepare minority scientists for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. This program is an effort by the NSF to increase the number of research scientists from under-represented minority groups, thereby contributing to the future vitality of the Nation s scientific enterprise. It is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled The role of the cerebellum in learning the proper timing and amplitude of skilled motor movements. The specific role of the cerebellum in learning motor movements is unclear. This research examines motor learning in the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR), or VOR adaptation, of normal mice and PKCg mutant mice, which have abnormal input to cerebellar Purkinje cells. It compares VOR adaptation, patterns of Purkinje cell activity during learning, and those sufficient for learning, in these mice doc21048 none The goal of this 25-month project is to provide a cross-national perspective on tracking practices in mathematics as they relate to opportunity to learn and achievement using data from TIMSS and TIMSS-R. More specifically, the questions to study are: Prevalence and Trends -- How prevalent is the practice of tracking in mathematics? What are the trends over time and across grades? Profiling Tracked and Untracked Math Classes - Within each country, what indicators are statistically associated with tracked and untracked mathematics classes? Tracking, Opportunity to Learn, and Achievement - Within each country, how does the use or non-use of tracking practices in mathematics relate to opportunity to learn and achievement, both overall and for particular student groups (e.g., gender, race)? Implications for the US - What are the implications of results for policy makers and educators in relation to OTL and issues on equity? School data files on tracking will be linked to the student data file. A classroom-tracking index will be created to identify within school tracking classrooms. The Mathematics Teachers Questionnaire will be used to explore issues on OTL. The number of mathematics topics listed in the questionnaire will be used to test OTL differences between tracked and non-tracked classes doc21049 none Microorganisms play a critical role in plant health. Depending on the organism, microbes can cause disease or prevent it. Despite their importance to our agricultural base and food security, we know little about them on a genomic level. To enable the scientific community to intervene in disease and to understand the basis of biocontrol, a concerted and well-coordinated genomic analysis of these microbes is essential. Members of the American Phytopathological Society (APS) have developed a prioritized list of plant-associated microbes for genome analysis, i.e. the structural and functional analysis of the microbial genes and the proteins encoded by those genes, with ultimate emphasis on those genes and proteins involved in plant associations. The APS prioritized list will serve as a foundation for a workshop with the goal of developing a strategy to obtain the genomic information needed to understand these important microbes and their interactions with host plants and the environment. The Workshop on Genomic Analysis of Plant-Associated Microorganisms will be held in Washington, D.C, April 9-11, . This award will help defray the travel expenses of about 20 experts from the genomics and microbial research communities. These experts will be challenged to (1) detail and prioritize the scientific and technical needs and (2) develop a plan for a coordinated and collaborative effort for genomic analysis of these plant-associated microbes. The results of this workshop will be disseminated to the wider APS membership via an emailed News Capsule and published in Phytopathology News. Additionally, a follow-up forum sponsored by the APS Policy Board will be held at the Society s Annual Meeting held in August to inform members and generate wider discussion about the issues doc21050 none This study will combine solar images derived from SOHO LASCO and EIT and in-situ solar wind observations of interplanetary shocks with magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the global characteristics of the shock. From this synthesis one may derive information on the shock source location with respect to the Earth, the size of the coronal mass ejection, the shock compression parameters and characteristics of the magnetized plasma flow at its in situ observation at 1 AU. This information will be used to identify the effect on the level of solar energetic particles at shock passage at 1 AU. As a result of this analysis, it should thus be possible to develop a better forecast capability for radiation levels at Earth than what is currently available through the NOAA space weather service doc21051 none Iowa State University $22,200 The proposed study is about collaboration and joint research in the area of particle physics, between the Korea Detector laboratory (KODEL) in Seoul, Korea and Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. The scientific goal of the collaboration is the understanding of the origin of mass. This fundamental property of matter is postulated to come about because all particles interact with a field, called the Higgs field, which permeates the universe doc20943 none The current velocity field associated with plate tectonic motion in western California is well characterized by geodetic measurements using Global Positioning Systems (GPS). The exact nature of what geodetic measurements record in actively deforming zones remains a significant problem, as this technique records both recoverable (elastic) and permanent (quasi-plastic) strains in wrench borderlands (blocks adjacent to major strike-slip faults). The goal of this proposal is to evaluate the relative magnitudes of the recoverable and permanent components in the deformation of wrench borderlands, by simultaneously studying two different sections of the San Andreas fault system. Creeping segment, central California: Geodetic measurements alone are generally unable to distinguish between recoverable and permanent deformation, because of the long ( 50 yr) interval between slip episodes on faults. In contrast, intervals between slip episodes are short (weeks to months) in the creeping central section of the San Andreas fault. By collecting geodetic data throughout the short seismic cycle in the creeping segment, the PI s will be able to evaluate the relative sizes of the recoverable and permanent components of the displacement field in the vicinity of the fault. They propose to check the estimates of currently accumulating permanent measurements against long-term averages determined from geologic and paleogmagnetic data. Prior work suggests clockwise rotation of the paleomagnetic signal of Miocene and younger sediments in the wrench borderlands. Documenting the areal extent, regional distribution, and amount of rotation throughout this area will allow them to calculate a long-term average for permanent deformation. This part of the proposal involves permanent GPS stations and monitoring, campaign-style GPS, paleomagnetism, and geologic mapping. Durmid Hill, Salton Trough, southern California: In this area, previous work has determined the amount of permanent strain. The PI s propose to complete a step-wise, three-dimensional retro-deformation of deformed sedimentary rocks. In order to convert these incremental strain data into estimates of deformation rates, one must have precise knowledge of time of deformation. In this region of excellent exposure, one aspect of deformation timing is provided by the presence of an ash layer correlated with the 0.76 Ma Bishop tuff. Additional information will result from paleomagnetic techniques that record the magnetic field during deposition. Utilizing the variety of ages of the different sedimentary layers to provide differential vertical axis rotations, The PI s can determine the timing of minor structures (e.g., joints, fractures, and small folds) by determining which units are affected. By comparing geodetic rates (which include both recoverable and permanent strain components) with geologic rates (which record only a permanent strain component) they can assess the amount of recoverable strain accumulation in this area. This part of the proposal involves geologic mapping, paleomagnetism, and campaign-style GPS. By combining the results of geological, geodetic, and paleomagnetic investigations from our two field areas, the PI s will assess the relative contribution of recoverable (elastic) and permanent (quasi-plastic) strains in wrench borderlands. Resolution of this issue has fundamental implications for earthquake mechanics, geological implications of borderland deformation, and potential slip magnitudes on major faults doc21053 none Sharp The high solubility of H2O in olivine and its high-pressure polymorphs, wadsleyite and ringwoodite has led to a great deal of interest in the effects of H2O in the upper mantle and transition zone. Recent interpretations of double seismic zones (Peacock, ) suggest that subducting oceanic lithosphere may also carry H2O into the mantle and possibly the transition zone. H2O in subducting lithosphere is likely to have profound effects on phase transformation mechanisms and kinetics as well as on deformation mechanism and resulting fabrics. It is likely that the presence of H2O, as hydrogen in olivine, will influence olivine-ringwoodite transformation mechanisms and enhance reaction rates. The investigators propose to perform kinetic transformation experiments in a multi-anvil apparatus using deuterated San Carlos olivine. They will use the widths of reaction rims to determine growth rates as a function of temperature, pressure and D2O content. TEM will be used to characterize transformation mechanisms in the deuterated olivine. D2O contents of the hot-pressed starting material and the transformed material will be determined with SIMS. H2O has also been shown to have a great influence on the plastic deformation of olivine. Jung and Karato ( ) show that the fabric produced in simple shear at high pressure changes with increasing H2O content. TEM will be used to characterize the dislocation microstructures, slip systems and deformation mechanisms in olivine, wadsleyite and ringwoodite deformed at high pressure under wet conditions doc21054 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY . The goal of the fellowship is to prepare minority scientists for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. This program is an effort by the NSF to increase the number of research scientists from under-represented minority groups, thereby contributing to the future vitality of the Nation s scientific enterprise. It is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Role of antagonistic coevolution in the rate of male accessory gland protein divergence. Within a mating system, males and females often have divergent reproductive strategies, creating an antagonistic coevolutionary relationship between the sexes. The objective of this research is to investigate the covariance between sexual conflict intensity and the expression of sexually selected traits, life history traits and the rate of protein divergence in closely related Drosophila species doc21055 none This project is to develop enabling techniques for a large-scale metasearch engine that aims at covering a much larger portion of the Web and at the same time retrieving more up-to-date and more useful documents than existing search engines and metasearch engines. A metasearch engine is a system that supports unified access to multiple existing search engines. It is estimated that there are hundreds of thousands of search engines on the Web (including deep Web). The proposed metasearch engine (WebScales) will attempt to connect to as many of these search engines as possible. The focus of the research is on advancing highly scalable distributed information retrieval technology and the research issues to be investigated in this project include (1) how to discover these search engines automatically, (2) how to incorporate them into the proposed metasearch engine automatically, (3) how to identify potentially useful search engines to use for any given user query submitted to the metasearch engine, and (4) how to achieve high retrieval effectiveness doc21056 none A tomographic technique will be used to map solar wind structures, determine the extent of their interactions with the Earth, and locate their origins in the solar corona. The basic input data are interplanetary radio scintillation measurements supplied by the Solar Terrestrial Environment Laboratory of the Nagoya University (Japan). These are combined with a sophisticated numerical magnetohydrodynamic model of the heliosphere in order to reconstruct the trajectories of propagating interplanetary disturbances. This technique will be applied in real-time to ground and space-based data, and the results will be made available to the international community through the NOAA web-site. This study will allow the visualization of the extensive region between the Sun and the Earth with a novel level of completeness doc21057 none Charles Rubin This project undertakes studies of two active fault systems in Taiwan, the Chelungpu and Longitudinal Valley faults, which ruptured during large earthquakes in and , in order to address recurrence fault behavior and the temporal variability of rupture modes. Acquisition of rupture time series on the Chelungpu and Longitudinal Valley faults provide constraints on physical models of serial fault rupture and fault interactions. These results bear on seismic hazard analysis, by considering the physical processes that lead to an earthquake, including the interaction of adjacent fault ruptures, the effect of prior ruptures on a fault, the influence of geologic structure and fault geometry on rupture termination and aseismic versus seismic behavior. Paleoseismic studies along the Chelungpu fault are characterizing its earthquake recurrence and displacement history. For example, if the recurrence of -like earthquakes is far less frequent, then other structures at the same latitude would have to play an important role in strain relief. Results from these investigations have implications for understanding the physical processes of strain relief on individual faults and of mountain building. End-member hypotheses, ranging from unpatterned or random recurrence to highly clustered behavior, are being tested using earthquake time histories obtained along the Chelungpu and adjacent reverse faults. The project also characterizes the active faults of the Longitudinal Valley faults. Determining the elevations of shoreline angles for a select handful of coastal marine terraces is constraining the millennial rates along the Longitudinal Valley. Geologic mapping and dating of the fluvial terraces along Shiouguluan River are providing the time-averaged uplift rates between the Longitudinal Valley and the eastern coastal region doc21058 none Newell Measurements of the magnetic properties of rocks can provide information on properties of magnetic minerals that reflect environmental changes and affect the reliability of paleointensity methods. Recent technology allows us to measure magnetic hysteresis rapidly and represent the full complexity of it using phenomenological models such as Preisach or FORC diagrams. To interpret these diagrams, we need a good physical model for the magnetic particles. The goals in this proposal are to develop a quantitative model for hysteresis in some well characterized synthetic magnetite samples, and to test it rigorously using hysteresis measurements at several temperatures combined with detailed particle size distributions. Recent micromagnetic models for the size dependence of hysteresis are much closer than previous models, but their predictions are still somewhat low. The investigator will test the hypothesis that stress anisotropy has an important effect on hysteresis even in the smallest particles. A numerical micromagnetic model will be used to calculate the magnetic hysteresis. Because magnetic properties depend strongly on the method of synthesis, the PI will concentrate on two sets of samples, aqueous precipitates and glass ceramics, with sizes below 0.4 microns. These samples have been intensively studied, are small enough for accurate micromagnetic modeling, and are analogues of natural systems. This work should either produce a realistic model for the magnetic properties or eliminate some models from consideration. A successful model could be used to interpret Preisach and FORC diagrams. It would also be the basis for future work on other magnetic phenomena such as thermoremanent magnetization doc21059 none The investigator and his colleagues focus on several fundamental computational issues involved in the parallel implicit solution of optimization problems with partial differential equation The goal of the research is to advance the state of the art in four fundamental topics: (1) the formulation and analysis of algorithms for large-scale optimization; (2) adaptive mesh generation for partial differential equations; (3) multilevel partial differential equation solvers; and (4) parallel computation. Although each of these topics can be investigated in isolation, the exploitation of their interactions is crucial for the creation of effective global algorithms. The investigators are members of a Scientific Computation Group that offers a program of instruction and research emphasizing the role of scientific computation in the formulation, modeling, and solution of problems from diverse and changing areas. A major part of the project involves the development of software and its dissemination within the manufacturing, engineering, and scientific community. Software developed as part of the project provides an effective method of technology transfer and extends the scope and effectiveness of the existing codes PLTMG, MC, and SNOPT developed by the investigators. Because partial differential equations conveniently characterize the physical laws of many complex systems occurring in science and engineering, they also lie at the heart of the mathematical models used to simulate and predict the behavior of these systems. The need to optimize the performance of such systems is the common feature of practical applications that range over such diverse areas as the optimal design of the hull of an America s Cup yacht, the cleanup of toxic waste sites, the construction of bioartificial arteries in tissue engineering, and the management of stock portfolios and hedge funds. Software developed in this project provides engineers and scientists with instant access to state-of-the-art methods for the modeling and optimization of complex systems involving partial differential equation constraints. The resulting improvements in the efficiency, accuracy and robustness of these models have a substantial impact in areas of manufacturing and engineering that are vital to US global competitiveness doc21060 none For computers and robots to live up to their full potential as human assistants, they must be able to reliably perceive humans and objects in their environment. This project addresses the recognition of objects in complex everyday scenes (e.g.\ office, household, or traffic scenes). Biological vision systems have successfully solved the vision problem and the philosophy of this project is to try to extract principles from the information processing in the primate visual system and to apply them in the design of object recognition algorithms. The goal is to understand how object recognition in complex environments can be achieved in a hierarchical architecture that mimics the layout of the object recognition pathway in the primate brain, and to build a demonstration system capable of recognizing a large number of objects in complex everyday scenes. In particular, this project will focus on three processing principles: hierarchical representations, massive feedback, and active scene analysis. If successful, the project will further our understanding of how objects can be recognized using hierarchical view based object representations, how these representations can be learned from unsegmented training images, and how feedback can aid recognition in this kind of hierarchical recognition architecture. This will potentially open a range of new application areas for computer vision systems and may also lead to a better understanding of object recognition in the brain doc21061 none Following the Water: H2O in Subducting Slabs and Mantle Wedges PI: Holloway H2O (water) greatly influences many processes in the Earth. It is the most important factor in determining if a volcanic eruption will be explosive or not. The presence of small amounts of water in the minerals making up the Earth s mantle can weaken normally rigid minerals allowing the mantle to flow at geologically high velocities. In this project, we will conduct experiments at high temperatures and pressures to determine which hydrous minerals, if any, can be present in subducting oceanic crust, and at what depths those minerals dehydrate. Such dehydration ultimately results in the formation of water-rich magmas that often erupt very explosively. We also will do experiments to determine how much water can dissolve in the crystal structure of the common minerals (olivine, pyroxene, garnet) in the Earth s upper mantle that do not contain specific structural sites for H2O. The presence of even small amounts of water in such minerals is important because the minerals are so abundant in the Earth s mantle that the aggregate water contained in them may equal one or more times the total volume contained in the world s oceans. Additionally, the effect of dissolved water in those minerals causes drastic changes in their strength (or viscosity) and the velocity of seismic waves travelling through the mantle. We will use a variety of modern very high-pressure devices and advanced techniques for chemical analysis to complete the objectives of this project doc21062 none EarthScope has the potential to change the way the public views Earth Science. The excitement of a continental scale experiment utilizing cutting-edge technology can change the image of geology from a descriptive discipline focusing on a static Earth to one driven by physical and chemical models, dynamic processss and advanced technology. Scientists envision real-time data streams, automated analyses that convert the real-time data into products useful for the broad Earth science community, and development of community models that represent the integrated thinking of geophysicists, geochemists and geologists. This technology and data rich initiative provides a spectacular opportunity to engage the public and students of all ages in exploring the dynamic Earth and its impact on our lives. EarthScope will revolutionize how we do science; with a corresponding education and outreach effort, EarthScope will change how we communicate with a diverse American public, and how Americans perceive and use Earth science information. We propose to develop and maintain web and traditional print resources that educate a broad audience about the activities, discoveries, and societal impact of EarthScope. These resources will include (l) public relations information such as news items, notes on program activities, fact sheets, and presentation materials; (2) educational resources about our dynamic continent and the tools we use to discover it. These will be appropriate for the classroom, newsroom and boardroom; and (3) access to real-time data seismic data streams and visualization tools for the public. Much of the material will be organized under a cascading web site. Print materials for public relations will include an EarthScope poster to be distributed to K-12 educators and scientists at national meetings. We may also develop EarthScope fact sheets, bookmarks and other promotional materials or print versions of key Did You Know and In the News articles. The proposed activities and resources will provide a seamless interface to the multiple components of EarthScope for audiences ranging from policy makers, public, K-16 educators and the Earth science community doc21063 none Okaya The paradox of how horizontal contraction and extension can occur simultaneously in convergent mountain belts remains a fundamental and largely unresolved problem in continental dynamics. The Apennines represent one of the most accessible type locality areas of syn-convergent extension. Rollback - which describes the tendency of a subducting plate to retreat from the orogenic front - is commonly invoked as an explanation for syn-convergent extension, but this idea does not address how the retrograde motion of the subducting plate, which is a mantle-based process, causes horizontal extension in the overlying zone of crustal convergence, especially in light of the large accretionary fluxes typically associated with continental subduction. The goal of the project (project RETREAT) is to develop a self-consistent dynamic model of syn-convergent extension, using the Northern Apennines as a natural laboratory. This part of the Apennine orogen has been the site of relatively steady orthogonal convergence and 2D (plane strain) orogenic deformation since ~30 Ma. GPS measurements indicate that convergence is presently active, and tomography indicates that the full length of subducted slab is still intact to depths of 250 km. Syn-convergent extension has been active since at least 15 Ma. The Northern Apennines are well studied, and all important features of the orogen are onland and thus directly accessible for detailed geological and geophysical research. The specific objectives of project RETREAT are 1) to determine in detail the velocity field across the orogen, including deformation in the orogenic wedge, the motion of lithospheric plates, and the flow fields in the surrounding asthenospheric mantle, and 2) to use this kinematic information to develop and test specific dynamic models for deformation in the orogenic wedge and underlying mantle. The research techniques to be used include; geodesy, tectonic geomorphology, low-temperature thermochronometry, structural geology and tectonic syntheses, seismic studies, and geodynamic modeling. The RETREAT project links together a broad multidisciplinary group with eleven PIs from six institutions, plus some 27 foreign collaborators in Italy, Switzerland, Canada, and France doc20978 none This project is investigating Mesoproterozoic ( - Ma) sedimentary rocks in the western U.S. to test aspects of the controversial Rodinia hypotheses. The hypothesis being tested is that the inboard record of sedimentation and tectonics in southwestern Laurentia, preserved in well-exposed sedimentary successions, can be used for understanding stresses at the surrounding plate margins, nature of drainage patterns and basins in southwestern Laurentia, and the age of possible outboard sources of detritus. The research involves structural, petrologic, and geochronologic study aimed at correlation of, and characterizing provenance for, several key areas and units. These areas represent preserved remnants of once more extensive sedimentary successions; they are well exposed, but widely separated, and correlations have been hampered by a lack of reliable geochronology. The study concentrates on the Apache Group (Arizona), Unkar Group (Grand Canyon), Crystal Spring Formation (Death Valley), and Lanora Formation (Texas). The researchers are reconstructing the regional intracratonic basinal and tectonic patterns and searching for a fingerprint of possible outboard sources of detritus. The geochronological studies involve: dating ash beds using precise U-Pb geochronology, U-Pb dating of detrital zircons, new in situ U-Pb microprobe dating of monazite grains, and Ar-Ar laser dating of mica grains. Sedimentary-tectonic studies are evaluating which faults were active during deposition by looking for facies changes across faults and relationships to syntectonic magmatism. Petrologic studies are emphasizing provenance of siliciclastic rocks using standard petrologic techniques. Detailed regional tests involving geochronology linked to sedimentary tectonics are providing better understanding of the tectonic setting of western Laurentia and hence the most likely adjacent outboard continental masses that collided with Laurentia from 1.3-1.0 Ga doc21065 none Integrating humans with their naturally developed control algorithm and robots with their extended capability of applying forces and torques into one system offers multiple opportunities for creating a new generation of assistance technology for both healthy and disabled people suffering from neuromuscular diseases and neuro-degenerative disorders. The exoskeleton is a wearable robotic arm. It is worn by the human as an orthotic device and acts as a human-amplifier allowing the operator natural control of the device as an extension of his her body while sharing an external load. One of the primary innovative ideas of this research is to set the human machine interface at the muscular level of the human physiological hierarchy using an expression of body s own control command (surface electromyography - sEMG) signals as one of the primary command signals of the exoskeleton for improving the synergy between the operator and the exoskeleton. The goals of this research are to design, build, and experimentally study the integration of a powered exoskeleton controlled by myosignals (sEMG) for the human arm with healthy people. It is anticipated that the scientific activity involved in this research will integrate and fuse multidisciplinary knowledge by promoting dialogues and collaborative work between students and faculty members from different disciplines with a long-term goal of improving the quality of life of the physically disabled community doc21066 none SoundVision Productions is developing and distributing a series of ten, hour-long public radio documentaries that will explore the turbulent boundary between science and the humanities, capturing the present moment of tremendous scientific and scholarly ferment with the unique and intimate power of radio. By introducing the radio audience to the thoughts and voices of some of the world s most accomplished scientists, in conversations with the counterparts in the humanities, the series will look at recent developments in science including physics, molecular and cell biology, environmental science, cognitive psychology and neuroscience, and the multiple disciplines of the life sciences reflecting the increasingly subtle and widespread application of evolutionary theory. In each program, a careful account of new scientific ideas and discoveries will be placed within the context of historical and contemporary thought about the human and natural worlds. Barinetta Scott, the Executive Producer, has most recently been the Executive Producer for the highly regarded NSF funded NPR series, The DNA Files. In developing this project, she will work closely with an advisory committee that includes: John Avise, Research Professor, Dept. of Genetics, University of Georgia Samuel Barondes, Professor and Director of the University of California San Francisco s Center for Neurobiology and Psychiatry Terrence Deacon, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Boston University Anne Foerst, Professor of Computer Science and Theology, St. Bonaventure University Ursula Goodenough, Dept. of Biology, Washington University, St. Louis William Irons, Professor of Anthropology, Northwestern University Gordon Kane, Professor of Physics, University of Michigan Jim Miller, Senior Program Associate for the AAAS Program of Dialogue Between Science and Religion W. Mark Richardson, Episcopal Priest, Associate Professor of Systematic Theology, General Theological Seminary Holmes Rolston, University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Colorado State University Michael Ruse, Professor of the Philosophy of Biology and Ethics, at Florida State University Mary Evelyn Tucker, Professor of Religion at Bucknell University Dorothy Wertz, Senior Scientist; Social Science, Ethics, and the Law; The Shriver Center doc21067 none Karlstrom This award provides continued funding for the CD-ROM (Continental Dynamics of the Rocky Mountains) collaborative investigation which is designed to understand the tectonic evolution of the lithosphere of the southern Rocky Mountains. A transect from Wyoming to New Mexico is providing an opportunity to evaluate the hypothesis that lithospheric architecture of the Southwest reflects a resolvable mixture of structures that formed during early Proterozoic assembly of the continent and modifications that took place during younger intracratonic tectonism that were themselves influenced by the Proterozoic compositional structure. Phase 1 ( - ) was successful in substantially verifying this hypothesis. The PIs imaged the Cheyenne Belt and Jemez lineament; both are interpreted to be Paleoproterozoic paleosubduction zones that also show long-lived and strong influence on younger intracratonic tectonism. Both are also associated with lateral changes in deep chemical lithosphere, such that the mantle provinces can be linked to crustal provinces, demonstrating the antiquity of the mantle transitions. With this bridge funding award, the Principal Investigators will conduct an annual workshop, complete the analysis of data sets generated in Phase 1, increase productivity in terms of published papers, and prepare for Phase 2 of the CD-ROM project doc21068 none Klemperer The architecture of continental margins in terms of how they are created is not well understood because most of the previous work has been on successfully rifted margins after rifting is complete. Both continental (fault dominated) end-members and oceanic (magma dominated) rift end-members are well studied, but the transitional stage is not understood. This project will document this critical transition from continental to oceanic rifting. The PIs will carry out seismic experiments, integrated with geochemical, gravity and structural studies, to study lithospheric structure in one of the rare areas where the transition from continental rifting to incipient spreading is captured - the main Ethiopian Rift (MER). In the MER the along-axis transition to initial seafloor spreading provides a spatial proxy for temporal variability. Specific objectives are: 1) to determine detailed crust and mantle structure across and along a transitional rift segment and 2) to understand magmagenesis beneath and within the rift. The PIs will obtain crustal P-and S-velocity cross-sections that can be interpreted for lithology across the Ethiopian rift at 10 deg. N where active magmatic centers first appear, and along-strike to the north to study the transition into fully magmatic rifting. They will interpret existing and new gravity data in light of their new seismic data, and use geochemical data to constrain the physical state of the upper mantle and magmatic inputs to the crust. The project (US - EAGLE) is fully integrated with the already funded UK - EAGLE initiative. Scientists at Leicester, Leeds and London, have been awarded UK funds to carry out a single refraction profile across the Ethiopian rift in January , coupled with local seismicity studies and teleseismic recording. The US - EAGLE PIs will shoot and record a complementary orthogonal along-axis wide-angle profile; and will shoot fan shots into these linear arrays and the local seismic network to provide a measure of 3D coverage. Together, these seismological experiments form a nested, multi-scale seismic image of the Ethiopian rift and plume. The seismic studies will be coupled with geochemical and petrological and gravity studies (US), and structural, thermochronological, magnetotelluric and additional gravity studies (UK doc21069 none As part of this project, densities and cross-track (quasi-zonal) winds at 400-450 km will be derived from accelerometer measurements by the STAR accelerometer experiment on the CHAMP and GRACE satellites from through . On a storm-by-storm basis, the magnitude of storm response, degree of equatorward penetration, time delays, and other characteristics of the density perturbations will be examined, interpreted and compared with predictions by empirical models. Wind patterns will also be derived and interpreted. The full data set will be deposited in the CEDAR database. Corrections will be made to the J70 model currently in use at NORAD, so as to better reproduce the observed density perturbations doc21070 none This Social and Behavioral Sciences Post-Doctoral Fellowship research program focuses on the relationship between information structure and prosodic structure in language. This work has two objectives. The first is to understand how the information status of words (e.g. their newness, oldness, or focus status) influences intonational phrasing in language production. The second goal is to understand how listeners interpret intonational phrase boundaries and pitch accents in on-line language comprehension. This research program also has two primarily methodological goals. The first goal is to test a new paradigm for eliciting spontaneous speech from participants in the lab. The second goal is to use an eye-tracking paradigm to explore the interpretation of prosodic information in language comprehension. The researcher will pursue a set of experiments will explore the relationship between information structure and prosodic structure. The experiments are as follows: Production Experiments: the first set of experiments explores the effects of discourse status on intonational boundary placement in reading. The second set of experiments explores the affects of discourse status on intonational boundary placement in spontaneous speech. Comprehension Experiments: the third set of experiments investigates the points at which intonational boundary information is used in the interpretation of an utterance. The fourth set of experiments use the eye-tracking paradigm to determine the point at which pitch accents are interpreted. Differences in the semantic interpretation of pitch accents are also investigated. The PI, Dr. Duane Watson, will be under the mentorship of Dr. Michael K. Tanenhaus at the University of Rochester Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences doc21071 none Characterizing an Active Magma Chamber at South Sister Volcano, Oregon: Constraints From Gravity and GPS Measurements PI: Johnson Modeling of InSAR data by the USGS has determined that an uplift of ~0.022 km 3 has developed since approximately due to an inflation source at 5-7 km depth. This uplift has not been accompanied by seismic activity. A goal of this project is to determine if this uplift is attributable to new magma injection, expansion of an existing magma body, or hydrothermal processes. If magma injection is producing the uplift, then an important second goal will be to characterize the magma chamber. Important questions to be addressed are: 1) does the magma chamber at 5-7 km depth contain only material added within the past few years? 2) what is the volume of the magma? 3) is the magma basic or silicic? 4) what is the gas content of the magma? These questions will be addressed by modeling the proposed gravity measurements. Three years of gravity observations on three radial profiles of the uplift will be completed. Vertical control with leveling and GPS surveys is planned by the USGS and will be available to this project. The siting of stations and survey schedule will be optimized for the characterization and removal of the annual groundwater and soil moisture signal from this data set. Central to modeling of the gravity changes is observing the ratio of gravity change to vertical uplift at monitored sites, which may be interpreted in terms of mass and density change at depth doc21072 none Fogg Groundwater age dates estimated using various environmental tracer methods is being increasingly called upon to address groundwater quality problems and to understand many other aspects of subsurface systems. However, systematic analysis of the meaning of groundwater age dates is lacking, which may limit the application, or result in serious misinterpretations. The PI s recent work indicates that common interpretations of estimated groundwater ages are dependent on assumptions about dispersion and mixing that are not appropriate in many, perhaps most, cases. The PI finds that, while most age dates are thought to be representative of all the water molecules in the water sample if the well screen is not too long, actual ages within that sample can vary significantly (from IO0 to 102+ yr.) in typically heterogeneous systems. Although some subsurface hydrologists already anticipated this, the scientific basis for evaluating groundwater age dates remains undeveloped and vague. This in turn has led to an extreme range of interpretations and assumptions by both water managers and researchers. Herein the PI proposes a theoretically accurate, tested simulation approach to provide the first ever quantitative evaluation of the roles of heterogeneity, well-bore mixing, well screen depth and length, aquifer parameters, and boundary conditions on groundwater age variations in space and time in geologically realistic alluvial aquifer systems. In particular, the research will investigate how ages of water particles can be expected to vary within individual water samples in space and time in subsurface with different degrees of heterogeneity. Through both modeling and field-testing the PI also proposes to explore a new hypothesis that variation in age dates during long-term pumping of a well provides a signal indicative of aquifer heterogeneity and vulnerability . Understanding of the main factors controlling groundwater ages and age distributions is a prerequisite for any application of tracer-based age-dating data. Fluctuations in groundwater age as a function of space and time may be used to explore subsurface hydrologic processes far beyond the traditional static groundwater age dating method. Proposed testing of the above hypothesis holds out the possibility that groundwater age dating approaches can be transformed from qualitiative procedures dependent on vague, untested assumptions to powerful characterization tools for quantitatively (or semiquantitatively) assessing groundwater conditions in previously unanticipated ways. The PI shows abundant preliminary simulation results to support this problem statement and to demonstrate feasibility of the general approach. Key words: groundwater, contamination, transport, aquifer vulnerability, modeling, age Date doc21073 none Zoback This is a project to provide management and support for selected scientific activities associated with a pilot hole to be drilled at the site of the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD). SAFOD is a component of EarthScope. The SAFOD pilot hole is a separate, 2 km deep scientific drilling experiment to be carried out at the same surface location as SAFOD. This site is ~1.8 km SW of the San Andreas fault near Parkfield, CA. The pilot hole project will be carried out as a collaborative effort between the International Continental Drilling Program (ICDP), NSF, and the US Geological Survey. The ICDP has made available $1.5M to pay the costs for drilling, coring, logging and other rig-related activities. NSF is providing support for science activities involving core and cuttings and measurements of various kinds in the hole doc21074 none Thomas H. Heaton This project is examining the effects of fault opacity (the tendency of reflected phases to be trapped in the hanging wall of the fault) on radiated energy by constructing models of P and SH body waves from shallow thrust fault earthquakes at teleseismic distances. Three-dimensional finite-element models are used to calculate rupture history assuming a variety of friction models. These slip histories are used to calculate the teleseismic body waves that results from the different friction models. Systematic differences are determined between these dynamic models and traditional dislocation models that are commonly used for determining seismic moments. The main goal is to quantify how teleseismic P and SH body waves from dipping faults are affected by near-source interactions between the seismic waves and a dynamically slipping fault. It has been common practice to estimate seismic moments by modeling these teleseismic waveforms using double-couple source representations. In these models, the medium is modeled as an elastic continuum with displacement jumps caused by distributions of double-couple body forces. While these models satisfy all boundary conditions within a continuous medium, they are not necessarily compatible with the frictional stress boundary conditions on the slipping fault (a discontinuous medium). In particular, shear waves that reflect off of the Earth s surface are generally allowed to propagate back through the slipping fault without reflection; this is sometimes referred to as a transparent fault. There is a long-standing question about whether or not systematic errors in determining earthquake sizes have been introduced by using transparent fault models. This study should provide quantitative estimates of the importance of this effect doc21075 none This project will analyze data from the Fast Auroral Snapshot Small Explorer (FAST) satellite in conjunction with solar wind data from the ACE and WIND spacecraft. It will examine the processes that control the outflow of ions from the polar ionosphere. In particular it will determine the relative importance of large scale Joule heating, Alfven wave heating and heating due to electron precipitation. The work will produce a set of empirical scaling laws that can be used to parameterize ion outflow rates as a function of the various inputs. It will also relate the outflow rates to the solar wind input parameters doc21076 none For short wavelengths, which carry the most information for very small earthquakes, the complexity of wave propagation in the Earth s crust makes it difficult to discern effects due to the earthquake source. Multiple empirical Green s function analysis, a method that uses extremely small earthquakes to correct for complicated wave propagation effects for somewhat larger earthquakes, when used for these very small events shows that unanticipated wave propagation effects are present even in deep borehole recordings. This may have led to incorrect conclusions about the energetics of very small (magnitude less than 2.0) earthquakes in past studies. This technique is being applied to an extensive data set in order to see if these conclusions generalize to earthquakes in diverse environments: viz. the San Andreas fault system in southern California and the deforming crust of Japan. This is a particularly timely study because propagation effects in borehole recordings may affect measurements obtained from ongoing and planned large-scale downhole experiments in Japan and in California. The technique developed by Satoshi Ide (University of Tokyo) is being used for large earthquakes, to determine the spatial distribution of radiated seismic energy from strong motion models of the earthquake. Studies of a set of three earthquakes, including the Kobe, Japan earthquake, shows that most of the seismic energy was radiated near the hypocenter, suggesting that the rest of the faulting process was largely dissipative. This method is being applied to a much larger available catalog of extended-source models in an attempt to improve understanding how the energy balance during faulting controls the size of an earthquake doc21077 none Global Oscillations Network Group (GONG+) magnetograms will be employed as the principal data set to study the evolution of the solar photospheric magnetic field, and its relationship with coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Potential-field source-surface (PFSS) coronal models will be constructed using the GONG+ data to specify the inner boundary condition. These will form the basis for the synthesis of specialized synoptic maps aimed at, (1) establishing the location of source surface magnetic neutral lines, (2) predicting solar wind characteristics based on the Wang-Sheeley model, and (3) delineating the evolution of open and close magnetic field regions. This information will be posted on a real time updated web site and delivered to the NOAA Space Environment Center website. This effort will be essential for understanding the impacts of active region emergence and fragmentation on the evolution of the large-scale coronal magnetic field doc21078 none This project will determine a well-defined set of rules for identifying periods of Steady Magnetospheric Convection (SMC). An automated procedure will be established to go through a large database of satellite and ground-based data to identify SMC periods. Once a database of SMC periods had been generated the project will then utilize that database to perform statistical analyses on the conditions under which SMCs arise. If a clear set of solar wind and magnetospheric conditions can be identified as the generators of SMCs, an expert system will then be developed for making for detailed nowcasts and forecasts of space weather doc21079 none Mandoli This research project is designed to accomplish two aims: Aim 1: To construct and array high-quality BAC libraries to provide a genomic resource on a wide range of species. Aim 2: To enable researchers working with green algae, non-seed land plants, and seed plants (including flowering plants) to identify genes critical for understanding plant form and function and how land plants arose and diversified. This project will enable progress toward an understanding of the genetic basis for the transitions that mark the most fundamentally important steps in green plant evolution. The Deep Green community (http: ucjeps.herb.berkeley.edu bryolab deepgene index.html) will help to provide an infrastructure for ongoing scientific exchange. Bioinformatics and a web site will be provided to the community to access these resources (http: www.genome.clemson.edu ). Selected Species: Desired coverage is given in parentheses. Where two coverage values are listed, two libraries using different restriction enzymes will be made. Green algae: Volvox carteri (5x, 5x) Caulerpa mexicana (8x) Mesostigma viride (8x) Coleochaete orbicularus (6.4x, 6.4x) Chara aspera (6x) Non-seed plants: Marchantia polymorpha (8x) Anthoceros sp. (6.3x, 6.3x) Lycopodium lucidulum (5.1x, 5.1x) Angiopteris erecta (6.2x, 6.2x) Ceratopteris richardii (4.8x, 4.8x) Marsilea quadrifolia (5.6x, 5.6x) Seed plants: Amborella trichopoda (5.5x) Nuphar adventa (7x) Acorus gramineus (7x) Lirodendron tulipifera (7x) Mimulus guttatus (7x doc21080 none This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY . The goal of the fellowship is to prepare minority scientists for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. This program is an effort by the NSF to increase the number of research scientists from under-represented minority groups, thereby contributing to the future vitality of the Nation s scientific enterprise. It is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled Natural hybridization and its consequences on the organization of genetic variation and population genetics of a crop and its wild relative. Hybridization between 2 genetically distinct natural populations can result in new genetic combinations through the reassortment of genes and multilocus genotypes. This study examines the evolutionary consequences of hybridization in co-occurring populations of maize (corn) and its wild relative teosinte by comparing genetic markers across the genome and among hybridizing and non-hybridizing populations doc21081 none Kerry Sieh This project undertakes studies of two active fault systems in Taiwan, the Chelungpu and Longitudinal Valley faults, which ruptured during large earthquakes in and , in order to address recurrence fault behavior and the temporal variability of rupture modes. Acquisition of rupture time series on the Chelungpu and Longitudinal Valley faults provide constraints on physical models of serial fault rupture and fault interactions. These results bear on seismic hazard analysis, by considering the physical processes that lead to an earthquake, including the interaction of adjacent fault ruptures, the effect of prior ruptures on a fault, the influence of geologic structure and fault geometry on rupture termination and aseismic versus seismic behavior. Paleoseismic studies along the Chelungpu fault are characterizing its earthquake recurrence and displacement history. For example, if the recurrence of -like earthquakes is far less frequent, then other structures at the same latitude would have to play an important role in strain relief. Results from these investigations have implications for understanding the physical processes of strain relief on individual faults and of mountain building. End-member hypotheses, ranging from unpatterned or random recurrence to highly clustered behavior, are being tested using earthquake time histories obtained along the Chelungpu and adjacent reverse faults. The project also characterizes the active faults of the Longitudinal Valley faults. Determining the elevations of shoreline angles for a select handful of coastal marine terraces is constraining the millennial rates along the Longitudinal Valley. Geologic mapping and dating of the fluvial terraces along Shiouguluan River are providing the time-averaged uplift rates between the Longitudinal Valley and the eastern coastal region doc21082 none This project will utilize magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations of the magnetosphere-ionosphere system to examine the sensitivity of MHD simulations to variability of the solar wind driver. The work will compare the variability induced by intrinsic, internal magnetospheric dynamics with the variability caused by both temporal and spatial variability in the solar wind. Case studies will be done with real events to allow for comparisons of the simulations with realistic conditions. This work will provide a mechanism for determining the accuracy with which MHD models might in the future be able to predict space weather conditions doc21083 none Kerry Sieh This study continues investigations of the paleoseismology and paleogeodesy of the Sumatran subduction zone in order to determine possible regularity of periods between fault ruptures, repeatability of pattern of slip on faults, influence of geologic structure on fault rupture, and variation of seismic aseismic coupling with time. The centerpiece of the study is the use of coral heads (Porites and other genera) that are sensitive to sea level changes with uncertainties of a few centimeters. Annual growth bands give time-series with relative errors of a few years and U-Th dating of the heads gives dates with errors of a decade. The magnitude of vertical deformation associated with earthquakes (paleoseismology) and deformation in intervals between earthquakes (paleogeodesy) are being determined from these data. Results are being modeled and historical earthquakes (seismograms from a variety of sources) are being used to determine if segment boundaries influenced dimensions of historical ruptures. The specific goals of this project are to: (1) better characterize source parameters of , , and events; (2) determine southern limit of these events; (3) extend record back to 14th century; (4) determine source characteristics of and quakes; (5) model historical seismograms of large quakes on Sumatran fau (6) characterize aseismic strain events in , , and regions doc21084 none The Research Integrating Molecular and Environmental Sciences (R.I.M.E.S.) Program is an international research and educational collaboration. It was created for highly motivated minority scholars who have completed two years of college and who are committed to research careers in marine or environmental sciences. As with Dr. Jackson s highly successful Biotechnology Program for nontraditional students at Massachusetts Bay Community College, the guiding philosophy of the R.I.M.E.S. Program is that continuous interdisciplinary research training coupled with intensive mentoring drive the success of nontraditional scholars in science. The goal is to produce an outstanding and numerically significant corps of minority researchers in the marine and environmental sciences who will bring distinction and much-needed diversity to their fields. The academic component of the R.I.M.E.S. Program occurs at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and prepares scholars for the scholastic rigor of a doctoral-degree program. This is achieved through intensive mentoring and rigorous tutorials designed to enhance the academic performance of scholars during their junior and senior years. Scholars are selected to the R.I.M.E.S. Program through a rigorous application process designed to identify and recruit only the most motivated individuals. Recruitment focuses on men and women whose personal circumstances made traditional college education difficult or impossible. Thus, recruitment is primarily from three categories of college sophomores: (1) young African-American and Hispanic males from single-parent families (the two most at-risk societal groups in the nation), (2) single mothers whose children are 12 years and older, and (3) married women who deferred their education to raise children. Scholars from these categories attend college in the face of overwhelming obstacles. Thus, they already possess the human qualities that drive the career of a successful scientist: persistence, focus, resourcefulness, guile and tenacity. The academic component of the R.I.M.E.S. Program promotes the utilization of these attributes so that scholars achieve and expect continuous scholastic excellence. The research component of the R.I.M.E.S. Program integrates marine and environmental science and molecular biology through molecular investigations at BUSM of organisms collected in summer field research on the volcanic island of Montserrat (Northern Antilles). A corps of research mentors, established marine and environmental scientists from several countries, is available to guide the scholars on Montserrat and (by e-mail, phone and fax) after they return to Dr. Jackson s lab at BUSM. The research projects converge on effects of the environmental stresses exerted on the ecosystem of Montserrat by the eruptions (in and ) and ongoing activity of the Soufriere Hills volcano. The abrupt environmental changes produced by this cataclysm provide a rare opportunity to study ecosystem development at the molecular level. The investigative focus is on molecular processes that have been modified in adaptive response of organisms to sudden environmental changes caused by the volcano doc21085 none The project will conduct research in the following topics: The design, implementation and testing of scalable method that uses self-similarity to cluster numerical data sets.The design, implementation and testing of a scalable method that uses entropy to cluster categorical data sets, based on the notion entropy.The design, implementation of testing of a scalable method of clustering mixed data sets.The research will have an impact on the following applications.Projective clustering: The project aim to use a combination of a clustering algorithms and singular value decomposition to discover the dimensions that are most relevant to each cluster in high dimensional data set.Tracking clusters in evolving data streams: The methods proposed are characterized by a concise representation of the clusters that have been found at a given point, and therefore allow the clustering of continuously incoming data streams. Labeling data through clustering: The incremental methods developed in the project to obtain new training data for classification algorithms doc21086 none This project is a collaborative study employing both experimental and theoretical methods to study fundamental questions about forces at surfaces and their implications for the structure and dynamics of thin films. Key problems to be addressed include when and why many adsorption systems exhibit low-coordination adsorption sites, and whether the existing theory adequately describes the ultra-weak adsorption of simple gases. These studies will extend the groups previous research, which has established a partial empirical and theoretical base for understanding weak adsorption phenomena. The techniques to be employed are low-energy electron diffraction, He-atom scattering, computer simulations and state-of-the-art theoretical methods. The importance of these studies is that they will provide a fundamental understanding of adsorption phenomena that will be applicable to many different fields, including nano-patterning, self-assembled monolayers, coatings technology, tribology and chip fabrication. Students and postdoctoral scholars will be trained in fundamental methods, which are applicable to the aforementioned technologies. Surface science is of importance as a subject of both fundamental interest and potential application to many technologies. This project addresses a number of basic scientific questions in this area. Principal problems that will be explored include the structure of films that are just one molecule thick. A focus of this research is the determination of where individual molecules sit in relation to the underlying supporting surface. A second major topic is the question of how strongly these films are bound to the surface as well as their dynamics. In some cases, such films are bound to the surface at high temperature, but not at low temperature. In other cases, the reverse situation is observed to be the case. These phenomena, and many others, will be explored with diverse experimental, theoretical and computational methods. The principal experimental techniques are electron and atom beam scattering from surfaces. Theory and simulation are to be carried out, using state-of-the-art modeling methods, some of which will be further improved as part of the research. The research will benefit from the combination of techniques being applied. Students will be trained in fundamental methods which are applicable to industrial concerns such as the development and fabrication of coatings, lubricants, and computer chips doc21087 none Security protocols are notoriously difficult to design and prove correct. The goal of this project is to design a logic that deals with a number of deficiencies in current logics. The focus will be on two issues: (1) Getting more realistic notions of knowledge: Informal arguments regarding the correctness of security protocols often involve statements about knowledge and belief. Assumptions such as The adversary does not know the key and The participants believe that k is a good session key are standard. The standard semantics for these operators has the problem that agents are able to deduce all logical tautologies and the logical consequences of their knowledge. Because agents know how to factor, for example, they can break RSA. (2) Modeling more general intruders: Current logics almost invariably use the Dolev-Yao intruder model, which assume that an intruder can compose messages, replay them, or decipher them if she knows the right keys, but cannot otherwise crack encrypted messages. While useful, this model is restrictive, in that it does not consider the knowledge that agents have of the protocol being run and cannot deal with probabilistic arguments, such as an adversary randomly guessing the right key to use. The research will take as its point of departure the standard models of knowledge and belief based on possible worlds, augmented with probability, so as to be able to reason about knowledge and probability. The notion of algorithmic knowledge, where an agent uses an algorithm to compute what it knows, will be used to deal with resource-bounded reasoning doc21088 none Innovative Programming Technology for Embedded Systems This is a proposal to provide innovative programming technology for designing and implementing reliable distributed embedded systems. The proposal addresses a critical generic problem and a major opportunity. The generic problem is that the research community does not know how to scale logical methods that are known to improve programs and small systems to the task of improving larger systems. The opportunity is that new methods of factoring are possible for embedded systems, and new kinds of specifications are important. This project approaches the problem opportunity by creating advanced logical methods and tools to structure embedded systems in a new way and to draw on relevant formal knowledge about them to accelerate both the design and coding process and to improve the quality of the system code and its documentation. The project will add extensive formal knowledge to a logical programming environment (LPE) and use it to generate system components that are correct by construction and to combine components based on semantic methods. The semantics supports formal classes and aspect-oriented programming. One test case for the new methods is a particular distributed embedded system called MediaNet -- a system for processing various media (audio, video, text) over a distributed computing network to adaptively respond to quality of service constraints. The project will use mathematical knowledge about media streams and transition systems to precisely formulate design requirements and component functionality. Quality of service constraints will be incrementally added to the functional specifications and used to automatically modify the proof and the extracted code so that these requirements are met. This is a very high level example of formal aspect-oriented programming and proof reuse. The library of formal knowledge about the system will be organized as a mathematical theory. That organization draws on concepts about stream transformers, the distributed network of machines, quality of service properties and communication services. An expressive logic will be used to state properties of the system and keep track of logical dependencies among system components. The project team has considerable experience working together building and supporting distributed communications systems by specifying and verifying communication protocols and optimizing them using formal methods doc21089 none Lemmon Michael Performance Based Soft Real-time Scheduling in Networked Control Systems This project is developing novel methods for the design of high performance networked control systems. The networked control system under consideration distributes controller functionality over a collection of micro-controllers that communicate over an ad-hoc communication network. The project uses a soft variation of the (m,k)-firm guarantee model to characterize task scheduling in networked control systems. The project consists of three tasks. The first task obtains upper bounds on dropout probabilities that assure robust performance of the closed loop system. These bounds define the soft (m,k)-model, which is one major emphasis of the research. The second emphasis is on the design of implementable schedulers that enforce the soft (m,k) model arising from the control design. The project s broader impact is achieved through the inclusion of methods and concepts developed in this project in undergraduate courses that introduce embedded system principles doc21090 none The goal of this research project is to develop a novel framework to support more effective and secure content-based video access over large-scale database. Specifically, the framework includes: (a) a hierarchical video database management and indexing structure to define the contextual and logical relationships among the related visual concepts and thus facilitate more efficient video access; (b) a probabilistic semantic video classifier to bridge the semantic gap between the low-level visual features and the high-level visual concepts; (c) a hierarchical visual summarization and presentation technique to enable fast video browsing over IP networks; (d) a multi-level video database access control scheme to serve different classes of users and maintain the video data integrity and security. A wide range of potential applications could benefit from this research, such as education and distance learning, health care and telemedicine, digital library, national security and defense, network-based media, and entertainment doc21091 none Miller, Eric Northeastern U The objective of this work is the creation of a unified approach to characterizing the internal structure of a medium given diffuse wavefield data collected at the boundaries. Diffusive inverse problems are found in a number of areas including (1) medical imaging for breast cancer detection using diffuse optical tomography (DOT); (2) non-destructive evaluation (NDE) in the steel and semi-conductor industries with photo-thermal methods; and (3) monitoring of environmental cleanup processes via electrical resistance tomography (ERT). Despite the ubiquity of these problems, researchers have typically treated them in application-specific ways due to differences in the physical scale, materials under consideration, and sensing systems. Here, a unified approach to solving this class of inverse problems is constructed by exploiting the underlying similarities in the physics and processing objectives of each of these problems. The investigators focus on three fundamental difficulties. First, they design regularization techniques to overcome the ill-posedness of these inverse problems. Specifically they explore the use of adaptive, geometric, low-order models for the unknown and reconstruct the relatively small number of descriptive parameters in these models. Second, they design inversion methods that, unlike traditional approaches, do not require precise knowledge of the background structure of the medium. Solving these nonlinear inverse problems is extremely computationally intensive, in part because a three-dimensional forward problem must be solved thousands of times. Therefore, a third focus of the research is the development of computationally efficient inversion techniques by exploiting the relationships among the forward problems. The resulting theory and algorithms will be validated using real sensor data from the three application areas described in the first paragraph: DOT, photo-thermal NDE, and ERT doc21092 none The objectives of the Cryptyc project are to develop a Cryptographic Protocol Type Checker, which allows secrecy and authenticity properties of cryptographic protocols to be specified as types. A formal type soundness proof shows that any protocol which passes the type checker is guaranteed to satisfy its secrecy and authenticity requirements. Prior work on the Cryptyc project has developed a theory and tool which deals with many, but not all, cryptographic techniques and attacker models. This project extends the Cryptyc system to include support for more advanced cryptographic primitives, more sophisticated attacker models, object-based component architectures, and applies the Cryptyc system to the development of secure component libraries for cryptographic protocols doc21093 none Under the direction of Robert J. Sharer, Greg Borgstede will conduct investigations on the archaeology of ethnicity in the western highlands of Guatemala among the Huista and Acateco Maya currently living in the area. The primary purpose of the research is to uncover the material remains of ethnic identity among groups with no written history. The Huista-Acateco Archaeological Project (HAAP) will focus on two distinct, homogenous ethnic groups, in a relatively small region, in order to ascertain how and when ethnic changes occurred in the two groups. This case is ideal for the study of the archeology of ethnicity since the Huista and Acateco Maya are today two distinct, homogenous ethnic groups. Their small population size and the relatively small area inhabited make archeological studies of both groups feasible. Two questions will be addressed: Can modern ethnic groups be identified in or correlated with the archaeological record? And what is the relation between an ethnic group s modern situation and its historical development, as shown through archaeology and its material traces? In an attempt to answer these questions, the HAAP will consist of: archaeological surveys, primarily locating and mapping archaeological sites in the previously unstudied region; archaeological excavations of the discovered sites; analysis of artifacts; and oral history collection. The changing nature of culture at the turn of the millennium, as many social scientists have pointed out, is toward increased globalization, normalization, and westernization. While this is undoubtedly true, it masks the increased regionalization and balkanization of many cultures of the world: processes that are often phrased in terms of ethnic groups and ethnic identity. These ethnic groups often base claims of political and cultural identity on long historical cultural continuity. Historians have addressed these claims in cases where historical records are available, but archaeologists have largely ignored the topic. The significance of the HAAP is that it will analyze the relevance of archaeology to conceptions of ethnic identity. The results will be directly applicable to these groups themselves, particularly in their claims to cultural and political representation in the Guatemalan society. These groups, marginalized because of decades of civil war, have only recently begun to develop a sense of cultural self-determination, and an interest in their own, unwritten history. The results will also provide a broader framework for understanding how ethnicity can be traced through the material remains available to archaeology doc21094 none PI: Jinho Baik, Princeton University This project is about the longest increasing subsequence problems in combinatorics, which can also be interpreted as last passage percolation problems in probability statistical mechanics. We consider a maximal passage time in a 2-dimensional lattice with a random time assigned at each lattice site. The basic interest is the probabilistic properties of the maximal passage time as the size of lattice becomes large. Other equivalent forms of questions include a card game, random growth models in 2-dimension, interacting particle systems, queuing theory, directed polymers and so-called ``vicious random walks. Recent progresses show that there are interesting connections of this field to the random matrix theory. Random matrix theory has been an active field of research in both mathematics and physics for last 50 years. We would like to understand more on this connection and also investigate further relations between these seemingly different fields. This project is a further work in this direction. From a greater framework, the subject of this project can be regarded as a work on the basic properties of a maximization process in a random environment when the size of system becomes large. Such process could be growth of crystal, shape of fire front of paper burning, or fastest passage in a computer or cellular network. These problems are also subjects in statistics, statistical physics, and engineering. One of the main goal of this project is an investigation of various universal properties, which are independent of the microstructure of the models, of a class of systems when the size of model becomes large doc21095 none Recent advances in microbiology such as cloning demonstrate that increasingly complex micromanipulation strategies for manipulating individual biological cells are required. From a robotics standpoint, the manipulation of biological cells presents several interesting research issues which extend well beyond biomanipulation. Biological cells are highly deformable objects, and the material properties of these objects are not well quantified, so developing strategies for manipulating deformable objects must be addressed. Most biological cells are between 1 and 100 microns in diameter, depending on the cell type, so micromanipulation issues must be explored, including the appropriate use of high resolution, low depth-of-field vision feedback and very low magnitude force feedback. Although multi-axis force sensing capabilities would be useful for handling cells by providing information on injection forces as well as tangential forces generated by improperly aligned cell probes, no sensors capable of multi-axis force sensing at the force scales required are available. Robotic devices capable of complex manipulation of biological cells do not exist, and robotic systems capable of integrating a variety of novel sensory information for cell manipulation have not been created. By pursing robotic manipulation of biological cells, many interesting robotics research avenues in micromanipulation, deformable object handling, multi-sensor integration, and force and vision feedback assimilation must be explored. In this project, an autonomous microrobotic system capable of manipulating individual biological cells using real-time vision and force feedback is being developed, and the micromanipulation of deformable biological cells are being investigated doc21096 none Current high-end microprocessors incorporate a variety of predictors to improve performance. Future CPUs will likely include even more predictors, in particular load-value predictors. Load-value predictors provide predicted values to instructions that need the result of a load, thereby allowing these instructions to proceed without waiting for the load s slow memory access to complete. Thus, the program execution time is reduced. Recent work on load-value prediction proposes sophisticated hybrid predictors with confidence estimators. While these predictors are quite effective, their complexity and size negatively affect performance parameters such as critical-path length, cycle time, chip area, power consumption, and heat dissipation. The goal of this research is to reduce the size of value predictors without decreasing performance, to improve the prediction accuracy and coverage, and to develop new predictors and confidence estimators. A systematic search will find novel predictors that exploit additional value locality and will identify better confidence estimators that reduce costly mispredictions. Moreover, techniques that repair malformed predictions and inhibit wrong predictions will be investigated. Finally, schemes to enhance the predictor utilization and approaches to speed up predictor accesses will be researched. While the proposed ideas are already beneficial in today s systems, they will become even more important as increasing numbers of CPU cycles are wasted due to growing load latencies doc21097 none The increasing requirements on data rate and quality of service for wireless communications systems call for new techniques to improve radio link reliability and to increase spectral efficiency. The three key technologies to achieve these goals are equalization, diversity, and channel coding. Mathematics is of fundamental importance to these technologies, providing the theoretical basis as well as the means for efficient numerical implementations. The investigator derives a theoretical and numerical framework for designing equalization techniques for time-varying channels. Using methods from pseudo-differential operator theory and time-frequency analysis, he develops a qualitative and quantitative theory for the approximate diagonalization of operators associated with time-varying systems. These theoretical results form a keystone in the construction of fast and reliable numerical equalization methods that are based on Krylov subspace techniques. The investigator also studies the use of frame theory in wireless communications. Using concepts from sphere packings and group theory, he analyzes theoretical properties of special frames such as Grassmannian frames. Furthermore, he develops theoretical and numerical schemes in connection with multi-carrier communication systems such as OFDM. This includes the design of transmission signals with specific properties using a generalization of the concept of prolate spheroidal wave functions. By taking recent tools from harmonic analysis into the wireless communications community, this project enables further advances and breakthroughs in wireless communications. At the same time it stimulates new research areas in applied mathematics and paves the road for further interactions between applied mathematicians and communication engineers. The goal of this project is to develop mathematical concepts and computational methods for wireless communications technology. The investigator combines modern tools from mathematics with methods from information theory and signal processing to develop new concepts and algorithms for key technologies in wireless communications, such as coding, transmission, and equalization. Mathematics is of fundamental importance to these technologies, because it provides the theoretical basis as well as the means for efficient numerical implementations. By providing tools to improve radio link reliability and increase data rates, this project is instrumental in meeting the increasing requirements on future wireless communications systems. The project produces conceptual deliverables in the form of new mathematical methods to analyze and construct wireless transmission systems. The project also produces concrete deliverables in the form of numerical algorithms for use in the scientific and industrial sector doc21098 none High-Performance Adaptive Receivers for Broadband Multi-User Communications High speed communications over wireless channels has emerged as a key feature of future communications systems due in part to the explosive interest in information technology applications, including wireless sensor networks, mobile wearable systems, mobile computing, wireless location (E911), high-speed mobile internet, and video transmission over wireless channels. The demand for higher information capacity in these applications has motivated the use of broadband wireless channels in order to provide wider bandwidth and higher data rates. This demand has also motivated the development of multi-user communication schemes in order to allow users to share the same physical channel; thereby contributing to even higher data rates. A key challenge that limits the performance of such multi-user communications systems is the distortion introduced by the coupled communication channels, by the interference among users and by the channel fading conditions. This research aims at studying and developing adaptive receivers that can combat such distortions by adapting their performance in accordance to the communications environment. The research studies and develops efficient adaptive receivers for broadband multi-user communications by exploiting spatial, data, and model structures in order to reduce computational complexity and increase performance level. In so doing, it is expected that the resulting schemes will help increase data rates, lower overhead due to training, lower bit-error-rate, improve signal-to-noise ratio, and help mitigate the ombined effects of inter-symbol interference, inter-user interference, and noise. Such schemes would increase the capacity of broadband wireless networks by allowing multiple users to share the same time slot and frequency band in an efficient manner. This study focuses on both time-domain and frequency-domain equalization techniques, with the latter receiving increasing attention since it has been accepted as IEEE 802.16 Standard for Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks. The research is also relevant to other wireless applications such as wireless location (E911), which has emerged as an essential public safety component of future cellular systems. This is because this work enables the development of enhanced adaptive techniques that are robust to fast channel fading, low signal-to-noise ratio conditions, and severe multipath propagation situations, all of which are characteristic of the E911 environment doc21055 none This project is to develop enabling techniques for a large-scale metasearch engine that aims at covering a much larger portion of the Web and at the same time retrieving more up-to-date and more useful documents than existing search engines and metasearch engines. A metasearch engine is a system that supports unified access to multiple existing search engines. It is estimated that there are hundreds of thousands of search engines on the Web (including deep Web). The proposed metasearch engine (WebScales) will attempt to connect to as many of these search engines as possible. The focus of the research is on advancing highly scalable distributed information retrieval technology and the research issues to be investigated in this project include (1) how to discover these search engines automatically, (2) how to incorporate them into the proposed metasearch engine automatically, (3) how to identify potentially useful search engines to use for any given user query submitted to the metasearch engine, and (4) how to achieve high retrieval effectiveness doc21100 none Computational information theory is concerned with techniques (such as channel coding) for achieving channel capacities. The field has achieved dramatic scientific breakthroughs in recent years, and codes that come close to theoretical limits have been discovered. Today, the development of coding and information theory is closely related to the explosion of information technology, with applications to the Internet and the next generation of networks technologies. The rapid development of a myriad of networked devices for computing and telecommunications presents new and exciting challenges for coding and information theory. This project will explore interconnections among coding theory, theoretical computer science, information theory, and related areas of computer science and mathematics in order to deal with research challenges arising from optical magnetic recording and optical transmission, the interface between information theory and symbolic dynamics, the development of network information theory, advances in high speed data transmission in wired channels, the connection between coding theory and related mathematical approaches (especially using discrete mathematics), the role of compression in all layers of data networks, and exploiting the connections between algorithmic complexity and notions of entropy and randomness. Research efforts will be carried out by ``working groups that will come together at DIMACS for several meetings aimed at catalyzing communications and collaborations. Subgroups will investigate problems of interest. The working groups will be concerned with Data Compression in Networks and Applications and with Optical Magnetic Recording and Optical Transmission. The project will integrate research and education through a series of workshops aimed at identifying areas for research, involving large groups of researchers in the field of computational information theory and coding, and introducing many people (including outstanding junior people and students) to the field. Workshops are planned on the topics of High Speed Data Transmission in Wired Channels, Network Information Theory, Complexity and Inference, Information Theory and Symbolic Dynamics, and Coding Theory and Discrete Mathematics doc21101 none Despite significant progress in the Belief-desire-intention theories of teamwork and their applications, existing multiagent teamwork research suffers from at least two serious shortcomings. First, there is no quantitative analysis of the optimality of its prescriptions for agent behavior in teamwork. Second, there is no analysis of the complexity of the general teamwork problem or specific team coordination decisions. To address these shortcomings, we propose a novel framework, the COMmunicative Multiagent Team Decision Problem (COM-MTDP). COM-MTDP is based on the decision-theoretic work in economic team theory, but with significant extensions to introduce dynamics and interagent communication. As a result, at its core, COM-MTDP is driven by communicating partially observable markov decision processes (POMDPs). The projected impact of the development of COM-MTDP will be a new, general framework for theoretical and empirical analysis of teamwork. Thus, rather than simply providing teamwork heuristics, researchers could analyze the computational complexities of the optimal team problem, and analyze the complexity-optimality tradeoffs in proposed team coordination heuristics and implementations. Such analysis would lead to improved, robust, general team coordination algorithms that explicitly reason about such tradeoffs. Finally, COM-MTDP ideas could potentially be more generally applicable (e.g., in analysis of multiagent contracting algorithms doc21102 none Mueller, Frank Reducing Frequency via Speculation and Fall-Back Recovery Conserving power is a key issue in embedded computing. At present, significant power is wasted because embedded system designers lack detailed knowledge of the processing speed needed by applications. Naive worst-case timing analysis exaggerates the required processor frequency, especially as software and hardware complexity increases. This work puts forth a two-tier approach to reduce the processor frequency of complex embedded systems. First, tight worst-case timing analysis reduces the perceived upper bound on the number of cycles consumed by tasks. This reduces the maximum frequency, saving power. Second, architecture simulation and processors with dual frequency voltage modes enable significant additional power savings. Architecture simulation produces an approximate worst-case timing estimate, which does not have to be safe and, consequently, is the basis for a very low speculative frequency. A higher recovery frequency is utilized as a fall-back mode to ensure safe operation bounded by tight worst-case timing analysis, as delivered in the first approach. These two approaches complement each other. They initially reduce the power requirements by a significant amount when compared with the naive approach. Additionally, they reduce power requirements further by exploiting simulation to accurately doc21103 none This project considers the construction and analysis of algorithms for the simulating fluid systems where microstructural properties influence the macroscopic flow. Liquid crystals are an important class of such fluids, and in this instance the microstructural properties reflecting the geometry of the molecules are usually incorporated into a continuum model. Another example is flows containing visco-elastic particles. If the passages through which the fluid flows are of comparable dimension to the particles, it is necessary to explicitly compute the motion of the particles in order to determine the stresses they experience. If the particles are small and numerous continuum models must account for their elasticity. The research proposed here was motivated by collaborative work with engineers who wish to determine the distribution of and damage to damage red blood cells in the small clearances within mechanical heart assist devices. This specific project considers the development and analysis of computer algorithms for the simulating fluid systems where microstructural properties influence the physical flow. The microstructural properties may be due the presence of elastic particles, (such as red blood cells) or molecular structure (such as long polymer chains). If the passages through which the fluid flows are of comparable dimension to the particles or molecules, it is necessary to explicitly compute their motion in order to determine the stresses they experience. If the particles are small and numerous continuum models must account for their elasticity doc21104 none This project sets out an agenda to study in detail three key operators designed for adaptivity in query processing: Eddies serve to do continuous, adaptive reordering of operators in query plans in the face of changing data statistics and system behavior. SteMs expose the state management inherent in query processing as a first class operator in a physical algebra, allowing for adaptive competition and hybridization among query processing alternatives. FLuXen provide adaptive load balancing and fault tolerance across parallel machines. Using the Telegraph system infrastructure, this proposal s agenda is to investigate mechanisms and policies for efficient, robust eddies, SteMs and FluXen in the context of traditional and new query processing challenges. The end goal is to provide a parallel query processing architecture that can run nearly as well in perfect circumstances as a traditiona architecture, and -- more importantly -- that can automatically adapt to run efficiently and robustly when faced with the kinds of imperfections and variations commonly seen in large-scale environments doc21105 none Mickus The architecture of continental margins in terms of how they are created is not well understood because most of the previous work has been on successfully rifted margins after rifting is complete. Both continental (fault dominated) end-members and oceanic (magma dominated) rift end-members are well studied, but the transitional stage is not understood. This project will document this critical transition from continental to oceanic rifting. The PIs will carry out seismic experiments, integrated with geochemical, gravity and structural studies, to study lithospheric structure in one of the rare areas where the transition from continental rifting to incipient spreading is captured - the main Ethiopian Rift (MER). In the MER the along-axis transition to initial seafloor spreading provides a spatial proxy for temporal variability. Specific objectives are: 1) to determine detailed crust and mantle structure across and along a transitional rift segment and 2) to understand magmagenesis beneath and within the rift. The PIs will obtain crustal P-and S-velocity cross-sections that can be interpreted for lithology across the Ethiopian rift at 10 deg. N where active magmatic centers first appear, and along-strike to the north to study the transition into fully magmatic rifting. They will interpret existing and new gravity data in light of their new seismic data, and use geochemical data to constrain the physical state of the upper mantle and magmatic inputs to the crust. The project (US - EAGLE) is fully integrated with the already funded UK - EAGLE initiative. Scientists at Leicester, Leeds and London, have been awarded UK funds to carry out a single refraction profile across the Ethiopian rift in January , coupled with local seismicity studies and teleseismic recording. The US - EAGLE PIs will shoot and record a complementary orthogonal along-axis wide-angle profile; and will shoot fan shots into these linear arrays and the local seismic network to provide a measure of 3D coverage. Together, these seismological experiments form a nested, multi-scale seismic image of the Ethiopian rift and plume. The seismic studies will be coupled with geochemical and petrological and gravity studies (US), and structural, thermochronological, magnetotelluric and additional gravity studies (UK doc21106 none Kolmogorov complexity is a modern theory of randomness and has many applications in computer science and other fields. The investigator is enriching this theory and its applications by doing research in two directions. Analyzing the average-case complexity of an algorithm is at the heart of practical algorithm analysis. It has been demonstrated over the past decade that Kolmogorov complexity is a powerful tool to help analyzing the average-case complexity and the lower bounds of algorithms. Examples are the average case analysis of Shellsort and Heapsort. The PI plans to continue this work to systematically develop the tool, the Incompressibility Method. This involves comparative studies to understand why, how, and when the incompressibility method works. In order to demonstrate, and to uncover, the power of this method, this method will be used to solve other open questions. Samples of some open questions include: improving Shellsort average-case lower bound analysis, average height of balanced trees, and Stack sorting lower bound. The modern information age and the post-genomic era raises a fundamental question: Given two sequences (genomes or English documents), how much information do they share? For example, given two genomes, can we measure their evolutionary distance? The goal of this second part of the proposal is to understand this fundamental question and develop tools. In the past, the PI and his coauthors have partially answered this question by defining the concept of Information Distance. Information Distance measures the absolute thermodynamic energy required to convert one sequence to another. However, it does not measure evolutionary distance because genomic evolution allows long segment deletion insertion, cheaply. A new theory suitable for such evolutionary distance will be developed. To demonstrate the feasibility of this research, some preliminary theory has been proposed and successfully applied to construct whole genome and chain letter phylogenies when no other method applies. More recently, this theory has also been applied to program plagiarism detection and language classification doc21107 none This research is focused on developing a new, symmetric framework for computer architecture prediction motivated by the signals approach to data analysis. This research uses styles of prediction in two dimensions: periodic vs. computational and local history vs. global history. This is built on top of the principles of discrete signal analysis. There has been a significant amount of work done on prediction mechanisms, especially for branch behavior. The initial focus of this new work will be on value prediction because it is the least well understood area. However, the framework and methodology are applicable to branch prediction, dependence prediction, etc. This research will investigate new prediction schemes using two techniques: analogy between local and global schemes, and data analysis techniques in the case of a computational predictor. Global predictors can lose accuracy due to pipeline delays. This research project will investigate methods for avoiding the delay penalty for global predictors. The detailed microarchitectural simulation involves a high number of tradeoffs. A detailed study of predictors in that context is a significant study that is included in this project. There is also considerable work to be performed on combining predictors in cost effective and practical ways doc21108 none As the recording technology further matures, more complex coding algorithms for recording channels are challenging integrated circuit manufacturing technology limits. The implementation of recent major conceptual advances in coding theory, including iterative decoding, codes on graphs as well as constrained codes, has been limited mainly by the speed and recording density requirements of modern recording systems. This research is developing coding schemes for ultra-fast high-density recording systems that can lend themselves to very low complexity implementations. The focus of the research is the idea that good codes can be constructed without using random interleavers or random sparse parity check matrices. The constructions are based on combinatorial designs and finite geometries. Such codes have a simple and well-defined structure, which means lower decoder complexity. This approach also offers a large flexibility in choosing code parameters. The fundamental code construction issues addressed in this research include understanding a structure of good codes and tradeoffs among code length, rate and structure as well as matching a code to a partial response channel. The second class of codes studied in this research are constrained codes and graph constrained codes doc21109 none The proposed research focuses on the design and implementation of new technologies for building high-confidence component software systems. The new technology is directly relevant to improving security of commercial virtual machines such as the Java virtual machine (JVM) and Microsoft s .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR). The work concentrates on three areas: 1. High-level specifications for low-level software. General and flexible logic-based type systems (LTS) are being designed. The type systems are derived from the Certified Binaries technology developed by the authors and extend the scope, expressiveness and precision of verification techniques used in current JVM and CLR implementations. 2. A high-assurance virtual machine. Using the authors Foundational Proof-Carrying Code technology, higher-assurance, validated implementations of the JVM or CLR infrastructure are being built. The authors are engaged in technology transfer of their ideas to a virtual machine being built at Intel. 3. Resource certification. New technologies for specifying, composing, and verifying advanced properties such as resource bounds on memory and network bandwidth are being developed. These properties are crucial for safe and secure interoperation between untrusted components in large-scale systems doc21110 none Conditional branches are expensive. Branches require a significant percentage of the execution cycles since they occur frequently and can cause pipeline stalls. In addition, branches result in forks in the control flow, which can prevent other code-improving transformations from being applied. We plan to develop path profile-based techniques for replacing the execution of a set of two or more branches with a single branch on a conventional scalar processor. We propose to improve performance by merging the conditions of two or more branches into a single condition. Previous approaches have accomplished such merging of conditions that have either only involved a single variable or have required special hardware to merge multiple conditions together. Techniques will be developed to produce a merged condition involving multiple variables that can be used to bypass the code testing the original set of conditions on a conventional processor. Merging conditions may be very good fit for run-time optimization systems, which optimize frequently executed paths during the execution of a program doc21111 none The proposed research contributes to the development of autonomous agents capable of operating in real world situations. Agents in multi-agent environments must often choose between maximizing their expected utility according to their current knowledge, and trying to learn more about the world and thereby increase their gains. A negotiator may try to obtain information about its options by asking outside sources, taking actions, or by making offers and counter offers. In order to find the best negotiation strategy, agents decision-making processes will be modeled. This research will lead the automated agent to reach more beneficial agreements when negotiating with bounded rational agents (human or automated). Strategies and decision-making procedures will be tested in the domains of e-commerce and international crises. The significance of the research lies first in the evaluation of alternate strategies for the acquisition of information by self-interested agents, from the perspective of a fully automated environment, and also by evaluating the behavior of automated agents interacting with human actors in simulated decision making environments. The dynamics of information acquisition in complex decision making structures will be better understood. The research will also contribute to the better understanding of decision making when automated negotiators interact with bounded rational agents doc21112 none This program was enacted by Congress and is administered by the Department of Energy, Office of Science, with participation from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Institutes of Health. It provides an opportunity for current public or private elementary and secondary mathematics, technology, and science classroom teachers with demonstrated excellence in teaching an opportunity to serve in the national public policy arena. Fellows provide practical insight in establishing and operating education programs. Albert Einstein Fellows bring to congress and appropriate branches of the federal government the extensive knowledge and experience of classroom teachers. They provide practical insights and real world perspectives to policy makers and program managers developing or managing educational programs doc21113 none Many results in computational learning are witnessed by self-referential classes. For example, one can show that restricting learning machines to output always conjectures consistent with their data lessens learning power | as witnessed by such a class. Various kinds of algorithmic transformations of witnessing classes (which can eliminate the self-reference) preserves some learn ability results and destroys others. It is proposed to investigate this phenomenon more thoroughly for greater insight into learning. Machine learning, which is concerned with practical empirical techniques, seeks robust learners, and, in some cases, provides consistent learners. The PI and collaborators recently showed that, if one considers a formal robustness requiring that all algorithmic transformations of learnable classes must be uniformly learnable as well, then all such resultantly difficult learning that s possible can be done by consistent machines. It is proposed to show this result does not extend to the not-necessarily-uniformly case (or that it does) with the hope of thereby gaining insight for machine learning. It is proposed to extend prior work of the PI and others to provide a theory of learning to coordinate goal-oriented tasks. U-shaped learning involves learning, unlearning, and re-learning. U-shaped learning occurs in many domains of human cognitive development (including language, understanding of temperature, understanding of weight conservation, the interaction between understanding of object tracking and object permanence, and face recognition). In the context of algorithmically learning grammars for (formal) languages from any stream of complete positive data about those languages, it has been shown by the PI and collaborators that, for some classes of learnable languages L, any machine M which learns L must exhibit, on some L in L, U-shaped learning. It is proposed to strengthen and extend this result and to characterize insightfully such classes L and with an eye to informing the cognitive scientist. Lastly, it is proposed to combine the use of type-2 feasible functional and feasible counting down from notations for constructive ordinals to obtain general concepts of feasible iterative learning. In general, the separate items proposed above are highly interconnected and mutually reinforcing toward obtaining important and unifying insights for complexity theory, machine learning, and cognitive science doc21109 none The proposed research focuses on the design and implementation of new technologies for building high-confidence component software systems. The new technology is directly relevant to improving security of commercial virtual machines such as the Java virtual machine (JVM) and Microsoft s .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR). The work concentrates on three areas: 1. High-level specifications for low-level software. General and flexible logic-based type systems (LTS) are being designed. The type systems are derived from the Certified Binaries technology developed by the authors and extend the scope, expressiveness and precision of verification techniques used in current JVM and CLR implementations. 2. A high-assurance virtual machine. Using the authors Foundational Proof-Carrying Code technology, higher-assurance, validated implementations of the JVM or CLR infrastructure are being built. The authors are engaged in technology transfer of their ideas to a virtual machine being built at Intel. 3. Resource certification. New technologies for specifying, composing, and verifying advanced properties such as resource bounds on memory and network bandwidth are being developed. These properties are crucial for safe and secure interoperation between untrusted components in large-scale systems doc21115 none ions to one another and to understand the fundamental principles of rate-based resource allocation such as the form and nature of timing guarantees and the algorithmic overhead. In addition, the existing theory of rate-based resource allocation is extended to deal with considerations such as preemption constraints. The implementation and use component of this research explores rate-based resource allocation in operating system kernels and applications. The objective is to assess the fit between the formal task model used to develop a particular allocation algorithm and implementation constraints that arise in practice. Three scheduling problems are considered: application-level scheduling (i.e., scheduling of user programs or application threads), scheduling the execution of system calls made by applications ( top-half operating system-level scheduling), and scheduling asynchronous events generated by devices ( bottom-half operating system-level scheduling). This reflects the logical structure of traditional, monolithic real-time (and general purpose) operating systems and kernels with hardware enforced protection boundaries. The research results will be distributed as an experimental version of FreeBSD that employs different forms of rate-based scheduling and resource allocation at different levels in the system doc21116 none With the enormous stream of electronic data being continually generated, it is imperative to use unsupervised methods to organize and explore the data. The enormous quantity of data precludes the use of supervised methods. The goal of this project is to develop unsupervised methods capable of organizing and annotating large datasets of unknown structure, facilitating further exploration and analysis of the data. With the recent advent of general purpose, scalable, unsupervised clustering methods such as Principal Direction Divisive Partitioning (PDDP), whole new vistas open up in the uses and applications of unsupervised methods. This particular method yields additional by-products for free: a hierarchical structure, and identification of the most distinctive attributes. These by-products are just the items needed to impose a structure on a dataset and annotate the computed structure at various levels of detail. This naturally leads to this project: to develop scalable general purpose clustering methods, to extract the information needed to annotate the datasets so users can effectively navigate through the data, and to perform the associated statistical and theoretical analyses. The methods will be validated on a wide variety of domains, including the WWW, specialized legal and or medical databases, astronomical catalogs, and genomics doc21117 none The research in this proposal aims to advance fundamental knowledge of routing methods that trade off optimality in return for space, time, locality, fault-tolerance, and adaptability to changing network topology. The study of multi-criteria routing problems is also commenced, where for even the most natural and simply-stated multi-criteria routing problems, there are typically only heuristics known. The goal is to produce methods that trade off some optimality of the solution in returned for lowered computational resurces, in a quantifiable way. Approximate shortest-paths, compact routing, and distance labeling problems will be studied, along with their extensions to directed networks, dynamic networks, and multi-criteria formulations incorporating different tradeoffs of time and space with measures of risk and reliability doc21118 none The integration of wearable and embedded devices into a pervasive computing environment requires significant attention to security and privacy issues. A system architecture with associated protocols for secure pervasive computing is investigated. The system architecture is based on the existence of a software proxy for each device. All objects in the system, e.g., appliances, wearable gadgets, software agents, and users have associated trusted software proxies that either run on an embedded processor on the appliance, or on a trusted computer. In the case where the device has minimal computational power, and communicates to its proxy through a wired or wireless network, the communication in the proposed system adheres to a proposed device-to-proxy protocol. It is also proposed that proxies communicate with each other using a secure proxy-to-proxy protocol based on SPKI SDSI (Simple Public Key Infrastructure Simple Distributed Security Infrastructure). Some devices, e.g., terminals or displays, may not be trusted or their security might be compromised, but users may still wish to use them, because they provide a large screen or large bandwidth resources. An untrusted computer protocol based on visual authentication is proposed such that users can use the untrusted computer and authenticate displayed information as well as communicate securely to a remote application. Using the architectural ideas described above, the design and implementation of a pervasive-computing environment which allows for secure, yet efficient, access to networked, mobile devices is proposed doc21119 none Snyder This award supports a pilot Korea-U.S. science and engineering summer camp for high school students. The camp is organized as a joint effort between the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Korea Science Foundation, with partial funding for U.S. participation from the Korea-U.S. Science Cooperation Center and the National Science Foundation. The pilot camp in July in Korea will involve 21 American students and 7 adult supervisors mentors. This program will provide an opportunity for American participants to join with Korean students and researchers in a hands-on science, technology, engineering and mathematics research experience. The outcome will be early exposure to research experiences, involvement in innovative projects developed by teams of student participants, learning about the research process and careers, improved awareness of international scientific and engineering cooperation, and increased understanding of how research is approached in a different society culture doc21120 none An increasingly promising and widespread topic of research in distributed computing is the mobile agent paradigm: code which travels in an autonomous or semi-autonomous fashion between hosts, carrying computation state with the agent and performing computations on the remote hosts. The objective of this project is to explore the problem of protecting agents from malicious hosts using multi-agent protocols. Potential advantages of the multi-agent approach over previous approaches, such as using a trusted third party, include reducing assumptions of trust; addition of fault tolerance and protection from denial of service and collusion; and reduction of communication and space overhead by distributed data and circuit re-encryption. The specific methods employed in this project will be both theoretical and experimental. In the theoretical realm, the project explores advanced multi-agent protocol design, with the goal of achieving provable security in the aggregate even though individual hosts may be untrustworthy. The experimental part of the project involves setting up a small cluster to simulate a setting of remote hosts, which can then be instrumented to test and measure communication and computational overhead for sample applications. The amount of work currently being done on topics related to mobile agents makes it likely that agents will play an important role in future technologies. The very nature of mobile agent computation makes security a prime concern, so the impact of the work in this proposed project could be great doc21121 none Providing assurance of security and privacy is becoming more difficult with current trends towards building computing infrastructure out of distributed components connected by networks, including untrusted client machines. Important to this assurance are the confidentiality and integrity properties of distributed systems that serve principals whose trust in each other is incomplete. This description encompasses, among others, clinical information systems, joint military information systems, and financial information systems. A new security mechanism, secure program partitioning, can provide stronger, end-to-end assurance that data remains confidential. In this approach, programs are transformed according to strong security policies, resulting in secure distributed systems. This is an attractive way to specify and enforce confidentiality and integrity in environments that include untrusted, possibly malicious host machines. Because the integrity of distributed computations and data is difficult to maintain in the presence of untrusted hosts, this research investigates an extension of secure program partitioning to use redundant computation to preserve integrity. In addition, new models of information flow in concurrent systems are being explored because the current theory and practice of security for concurrent systems is restrictive, yet also unsound. This is especially important because distributed systems are naturally concurrent. Solutions to these problems are being implemented as part of the Jif language system doc16716 none The International H20 Project (IHOP) is a multi-investigator, multi-agency program whose chief aim is improved characterization of the four-dimensional distribution of water vapor and its application to improving the understanding and prediction of convection. Program emphasis is on four important research areas: quantitative precipitation forecasting; convective initiation, atmospheric boundary layer processes; and instrumentation testing. Critical to the success of the IHOP is the measurement of wind and thermodynamic values spanning several scales of motion. This will be accomplished with unique and varied instrumentation. To contribute to achieving the goals of IHOP, the Principal Investigators have submitted collaborative proposals. As part of the required IHOP instrumentation suite, the Principal Investigators will deploy the University of Oklahoma Doppler on Wheels (DOW) radars. These radars provide the IHOP researchers with a high resolution instrument for obtaining detailed wind measurements. These measurements have applications to all four IHOP research components. The DOWs will coordinate with both fixed-site and mobile observing platforms to sample with unprecedented data density and resolution the pre-convective environment, including wind and thermodynamic properties within and along boundaries and convergence lines. For their research contribution to the IHOP, the Principal Investigators will analyze these data to elucidate the magnitude of gradients in the water vapor field and the role of the wind field in focusing these inhomogeneities. For example, the Principal Investigators will determine if locally convergent mesoscale circulations along boundaries or intersections between convergence zones, possibly associated with horizontal convective rolls (HCRs), create pockets of high water vapor content. They will further assess the orientation of water vapor gradients with respect to the HCRs. In addition to boundary studies, the Principal Investigators will perform analyses of data collected on days without obvious convergence zones to determine the degree of variability in the water vapor field in the absence of substantial focusing mechanisms. After understanding the nature and degree of water vapor variability in the pre-convective environment further analysis will focus on the relationship of these inhomogeneities to the convective initiation process based on current hypotheses. For example, if pockets of high water vapor content are found to exist, the Principal Investigators will then examine whether deep convection indeed is favored at these locations. They will examine in detail the depth of lifting associated with observed very small scale circulations and convergence zones to determine the transport of water vapor in the boundary layer. The goal is a better understanding of the mechanisms governing water vapor variability in the preconvective environment and the dynamical processes by which this variability is manifested in the convective initiation process doc21123 none Brandon The paradox of how horizontal contraction and extension can occur simultaneously in convergent mountain belts remains a fundamental and largely unresolved problem in continental dynamics. The Apennines represent one of the most accessible type locality areas of syn-convergent extension. Rollback - which describes the tendency of a subducting plate to retreat from the orogenic front - is commonly invoked as an explanation for syn-convergent extension, but this idea does not address how the retrograde motion of the subducting plate, which is a mantle-based process, causes horizontal extension in the overlying zone of crustal convergence, especially in light of the large accretionary fluxes typically associated with continental subduction. The goal of the project (project RETREAT) is to develop a self-consistent dynamic model of syn-convergent extension, using the Northern Apennines as a natural laboratory. This part of the Apennine orogen has been the site of relatively steady orthogonal convergence and 2D (plane strain) orogenic deformation since ~30 Ma. GPS measurements indicate that convergence is presently active, and tomography indicates that the full length of subducted slab is still intact to depths of 250 km. Syn-convergent extension has been active since at least 15 Ma. The Northern Apennines are well studied, and all important features of the orogen are onland and thus directly accessible for detailed geological and geophysical research. The specific objectives of project RETREAT are 1) to determine in detail the velocity field across the orogen, including deformation in the orogenic wedge, the motion of lithospheric plates, and the flow fields in the surrounding asthenospheric mantle, and 2) to use this kinematic information to develop and test specific dynamic models for deformation in the orogenic wedge and underlying mantle. The research techniques to be used include; geodesy, tectonic geomorphology, low-temperature thermochronometry, structural geology and tectonic syntheses, seismic studies, and geodynamic modeling. The RETREAT project links together a broad multidisciplinary group with eleven PIs from six institutions, plus some 27 foreign collaborators in Italy, Switzerland, Canada, and France doc21124 none As computers become pervasive, an increasing number of information rich applications are being deployed that create, store and access sensitive and critical information. An enabling service that can be used to store and access such information must meet both security and performance requirements even when some nodes that implement the service are compromised or when some clients behave maliciously. This research project focuses on a number of novel techniques for building an agile and secure store that can meet the needs of future applications. First, a flexible and agile architecture for a distributed store is investigated to allow applications to dynamically adapt their desired security and performance levels. Second, the agile nature of the store requires the detection of potential compromises and malicious activity. New protocols that adapt to such suspected attacks are explored. Finally, a variety of ubiquitous applications that need to access sensitive information are investigated. The characteristics of such applications can help quantify the overheads that are inherent when the conflicting goals of security and performance have to be reconciled doc21125 none Through this planning effort, Knoxville College will develop comprehensive approaches to increase the number of undergraduate students graduating in good standing in science, mathematics, and technology (SMT), as well as the number of non-SMT majors who develop basic science literacy as undergraduates. Specific objectives for this planning initiative include the development: o of strategies to improve the Knoxville College undergraduate SMT curriculum and its delivery including content, faculty development, equipment and facilities, and technology; o of a strategy to provide students with meaningful internship opportunities that complement their undergraduate SMT experience; o of entrepreneurial science and technology partnerships with industry; and o a comprehensive multi-year implementation plan outlining a vision, needs, resources, and outcomes for the objectives above. This initiative addresses the Nation s need of to broaden participation in science and technology, and to expand the scientific literacy of all citizens doc21126 none Dynamic maneuvers such as rapid starts, stops, and changes of directions are important behaviors for many mammals in high-speed pursuit or flight situations. In this project we will study these maneuvers by means of a combination of theoretical analysis, numerical simulation, and experiment using robotic galloping machines. The focus of the work will be on non-repetitive maneuvers, as opposed to the cyclic motions that occur when galloping or trotting. An impulse-momentum model, combined with ballistic trajectories, will be used as the basis for our theoretical analysis. Evolutionary robotics strategies, including genetic algorithms, will be used in combination with high-speed dynamic simulation to evolve the dynamic maneuvers. We will design and build a relatively small experimental galloping machine to further investigate the dynamics of such systems doc21127 none As modern memory architectures grow in complexity, it is becoming increasingly important to design algorithms with high data locality. Standard approaches parameterize algorithms by aspects of the memory hierarchy, such as the size and block size of each memory level. Unfortunately, this parameterization often leads to complex algorithms that are tuned to particular architectures. A promising new line of research is to develop memory-hierarchy-sensitive algorithms that avoid any memory-specific parameterization. Such platform-independent algorithms are said to be cache-oblivious. If a cache-oblivious algorithm works optimally on a two-level hierarchy, then it works optimally on all levels of a multilevel memory hierarchy; cache-oblivious algorithms automatically tune to arbitrary memory architectures. This research involves maintaining data locality in irregular and dynamic settings, where the data flow is continually changing and unpredictable. The investigator will design cache-oblivious solutions for a variety of fundamental algorithms and data-structures problems. New algorithmic models of aspects of the memory hierarchy will be proposed and integrated. The investigator will emphasize solutions that are simple and elegant enough to implement. Two verification tools under development at Stony Brook will provide testbeds for the project s empirical component doc21128 none DePaolo The proposed research involves using the isotope geochemistry of ancient igneous rocks to evaluate issues related to the early evolution of the earth - how long did it take for the Earth to form by accretion, how much chemical differentiation did the Earth experience in the first few hundred million years, and how did the Earth s continental crust grow and change through its history? The approach is to use the mineral zircon, which is common in old rocks and can be precisely dated by U-Pb geochronology, to probe the strontium isotopic composition of the Earth s mantle in Precambrian time. The Sr isotopic composition of the Precambrian mantle is highly uncertain because it is difficult to find materials that preserve their original isotopic composition through later episodes of metamorphism and weathering. Strontium isotopic measurements of zircon offer a possible resolution to this problem. Defining the Sr isotopic composition of the Archean and Proterozoic mantle would potentially provide clues about the accretion history for the Earth, whether early continental crust was mafic, and whether ocean floor weathering and subduction zone processes can decouple Sr isotopes from Hf and Nd isotopes in the mantle. The work to be done for this project includes collecting rock samples from appropriate localities, separating zircon and other minerals, and making measurements of the Rb-Sr, Sm-Nd, and O isotopic composition of the zircons. Parallel work must also be done to date the zircons where the age is not known, and to verify that zircon crystals in a particular rock sample have a single age. The analyses will be done by thermal ionization mass spectrometry, laser ablation (for O), and high-resolution ion microprobe (SHRIMP doc21129 none This project involves a combination of experimental research and numerical simulation with the objectives of understanding heteroepitaxial materials integration using oxide-supported compos-ite substrates, and of identifying novel routes for materials processing using the strain-fields of self-assembled nanostructures. The proposed work is motivated by recent results on the forma-tion of Ge quantum dot (QD) islands on ultrathin silicon-on-insulator (SOI) substrates. For growth of pyramidal hut islands, a previously unknown local strain relaxation process was found that involves the nanoscale stressor as well as the thin substrate, and results in a pro-nounced buckling of the Si substrate slab. This result suggests a novel route for comprehensive characterization of the incoherent c-Si a-SiO2 interface in SOI and related composite structures. These studies strive to determine the mechanism by which this interface responds to applied stress, and the temperature-dependent kinetic parameters that govern and limit the response. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in a topical area of electronic photonic materi-als science having technological relevance. An important feature of the project is the strong em-phasis on education, and the integration of research and education. The proposed project offers outstanding research and training opportunities for students at all levels. It will involve participa-tion of undergraduates, and promote the integration of minorities, particularly female students, into science and technology. Planned outreach activities focus on networking with local middle- and high schools and aim at sparking the interest of the younger generation doc21130 none The next generation of computers will be multi-threaded, allowing the simultaneous execution of several programs. Most computer workloads are difficult to recast into multi-threaded form, under-utilizing multi-threading capabilities. This research studies a new approach to program translation: Assist Threads. An assist thread is a specialized version of an application program that, when run as an independent thread, assists (and optimizes) the application. Roles for assist threads include program profiling, monitoring, pre-execution, and memory management. Experiments show that assist threads can effectively implement garbage collection. An assist thread mimics an application s execution, tracking memory accesses and recycling unused memory as it is recognized. The main application thread ignores memory management concerns, becoming simpler, faster and more reliable. Other varieties of assist threads execute slightly in advance of an application program, precomputing and preloading needed data values. This research makes both theoretical and practical contributions to compiler technology. It explores how to generate the computations necessary to implement assist threads. It also experiments with a variety of assist threads, evaluating their effectiveness and efficiency. In summary, this research opens new avenues of application for multi-threaded processors, making them more effective in supporting the needs of a wide variety of computer users doc21131 none Xiaolin Wu and Nasir Memon Polytechnic Univ of NY An Algorithmic Study of Optimal Multiresolution Quantization and Joint Source-Channel Coding In this research project the investigators will develop algorithms to improve service quality of video and audio streaming over switched networks, wired or wireless, in adverse network conditions such as congestion, delay, and packet loss. The idea is to have graceful degradation in quality of service rather than outright stoppage of audio and video playback, when the effective transmission rate drops. This will significantly enrich users experience with IP-based multimedia services. The research consists of two inter-connected studies: optimal multiresolution (progressively refinable) quantization (MRQ), and uneven error-protected packetization (UEPP) of scalable source code streams generated by MRQ. The investigators main objective is to develop efficient algorithms for optimal MRQ design, and for optimal bit allocation between scalable source codes of MRQ and forward error correction codes. Their approach differs from the existing rich body of literature on joint source-channel coding and on MRQ in that the problem is treated as one of combinatorial optimization, rather than resorting to continuous Lagrangian optimization. The investigators will classify various optimization problems related to MRQ design and joint source-channel coding by their innate computational tractability, and develop either globally optimal algorithms for those that are solvable in polynomial time, or heuristic algorithms for those that are NP-hard. In order to obtain efficient algorithms for MRQ and UEPP, discrete structures of the underlying objective functions of optimization will be explored, which in turn may offer new insights into these problems of increasing interest and immediate relevance to internet and wireless communications doc21132 none This award by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research by Professor Mahdi Abu-Omar of the University of California at Los Angeles to study the enzyme, phenylalanine hydroxylase from chromobacterium violaceum (cPAH). A genetic deficiency in the homologous human enzyme, hPAH, is responsible for the disease phenylketonuria. This research involves: 1) determining the rate-limiting step in the catalytic reaction of PAH by measuring 18O kinetic isotope effects; 2) trapping and characterizing intermediates involved in oxygen activation in PAH by kinetic and spectroscopic methods; 3) understanding the active site architecture and the origin of the substrate selectivity through site-specific mutants of the enzyme; and 4) establishing structure-function relationships by creating and exploring the reactivity of new PAH chimera composed of the regulatory domain of hPAH and the catalytic domain of cPAH. The function of an important enzyme, phenylalanine hydroxylase, which synthesizes an essential amino acid, tyrosine that is further metabolized to important neurotransmitters will be studied. The work will focus on how oxygen is activated at its iron-containing active site doc21133 none This project will develop techniques for trusted systems that can provide correct information and take correct actions when needed and where needed. The focus will be on peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, where computers or nodes operate autonomously, without any central control. In a P2P system, each node provides storage and compute resources. It connects to other neighbor nodes, and the community provides services like file sharing, document archiving, or data analysis. P2P systems are especially well suited as the backbone of a trusted system because nodes operate independently, without reliance on particular network connections or on nodes with a fixed functionality. Thus, a P2P system can adapt to a changing environment, and with the proper mechanisms, can isolate or ignore malicious nodes. As part of the project, several important problems will be addressed such as: Denial of Service (DoS): How does one protect against malicious sites that generate excess load to prevent others from receiving resources or service? Searching: How does one efficiently find information without using centralized index facilities, and in a dynamically changing environment? Information Authenticity: How does one verify the authenticity of documents or information? Preservation: How does one preserve information past the lifetime of the originating node? The proposed research is high risk, but there is also the potential for a large payoff. The research is high risk because the problems faced are difficult: Building a trusted community out of building blocks that may be transient and malicious, is not an easy task. However, the only way to build a trusted system is, as proposed, by making as few assumptions as possible about the trustworthiness of its components. The techniques to be developed, if successful, will provide a solid foundation for building truly reliable, secure, and trusted systems for electronic commerce, military applications, healthcare, and many other applications doc21134 none The field of Ichthyology (fishes) through previous NSF funding has accumulated a database of fish names and related information as the Catalog of Fishes (published in and on-line at http:www.calacademy.org research); it is the most comprehensive informational database for any animal group. This database summarizes the information known for about 50,000 described species of fishes (more than all other vertebrates combined), of which about 30,000 are valid species. However, there are still many described species for which we do not know the status (valid species or a synonym or duplicate name), and new species of fishes continue to be described at a rate of about 300 per year. Ichthyology is changing, and many of the scientists of the s- s are nearing the end of active careers. They have much information in files and accumulated unpublished data that can be published in annotated checklists - a summary of the knowledge for the groups of fishes that they have spent their career studying. Also, the naming of animal groups is directed by a Code to which all scientists worldwide use, and a new edition of the code taking effect in allows for the creation of a list of available names for a discipline and the purging of other names from further consideration. The present project has two goals: it will allow the Catalog of Fishes staff to work directly with specialists so that they can author annotated checklists for the groups for which they are the world specialist, and these will be published by the California Academy of Sciences and place on the www. Following this, the List of Available Names in Fishes will be assembled and placed on the www, and steps will be taken to have this list approved by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. The Catalog of Fishes staff will prepare the manuscripts for the specialists - the specialist s role will primarily be to edit and add information. The primary way information about animals and plants is organized is around scientific names provided by taxonomists. Traditional taxonomists, the monographers and revisers responsible for the major taxonomic advances over the past half-century are an aged group, many over 60 years of age. Many of them harbor a wealth of information in their heads and personal files on status of species, on type specimens (the original specimens used by the first author to describe the species), and related information. This project is therefore opportunistic. A preliminary survey of specialists revealed a strong and enthusiastic willingness to participate. The present project will be the first test cast of preparing a List of Available Names under provisions of the Code. Such lists will add stability to names. The checklists will consolidate our level of knowledge and at the same time reveal taxonomic and geographic areas in need of further investigation. This information on fishes is important for biodiversity studies, for molecular studies, for conservation needs, for commerce, and for a framework to house the accumulated knowledge about fishes doc21135 none This research is focused on developing circuits and architectures for asynchronous high-performance computers. Asynchronous organization has a number of significant advantages over the traditional globally synchronous approach that we plan to exploit. These advantages can be broken down into two general categories: those that relate to the circuit-level properties of asynchronous circuits, and those that relate to the higher-level sequential properties of this form of implementation. Circuit advantages, which are mostly directly related to the absence of the global clock signal, include lower electro-magnetic interference (EMI), lower power, and easier system integration due to the local and modular interconnection of asynchronous system pieces. Higher-level organizational advantages include the ability of an asynchronous system to adapt to data-dependent delays in system components, take advantage of early completion of system activities, and more naturally mediate sub-task concurrency during system operation doc21136 none Information theory has enjoyed over fifty years of rigorous research, development, and application. In spite of its relative maturity, new challenges arise due to novel applications and emerging theoretical developments (e.g., there is a resurgence of interest in source coding in multimedia applications, molecular biology, and security). In the Shannon Lecture Jacob Ziv presented compelling arguments for ``backing off to a certain extent from first-order asymptotic analysis of information systems in order to predict the behavior of real systems with finite (and often small) lengths (of sequences, files, codes, databases, etc.) One way of overcoming these difficulties is to increase accuracy of asymptotic analysis by replacing first-order analyses (e.g., a leading term of the average code length) by full asymptotic expansions and more accurate analyses (e.g., large deviations, central limit laws). This research primarily focuses on an important aspect of source coding, namely, the redundancy rate problem. Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in redundancy rates of lossless and lossy coding. We describe analytic, combinatorial and algorithmic methods that work hand in hand to solve this and other problems in information theory. The redundancy rate problem for a class of sources corresponds to determining the extent to which the actual code length exceeds the optimal code length. This problem is an ideal candidate for second-order asymptotics since one must look beyond the leading term of the code length, which is known to be the entropy of the source. Following Hadamard s precept we study these problems using techniques of complex analysis such as generating functions, Rice s formula, Mellin transform, Fourier series, sequence distributed modulo 1, saddle point methods, analytic poissonization and depoissonization, and singularity analysis. We present new results for well-studied problems (e.g., optimal codes for maximal redundancy, memoryless and Markovian sources) as well as novel formulations of old problems (e.g., redundancy of the class of mixing sources, redundancy of arithmetic coding and the Lemepl-Ziv codes). Furthermore, we apply the techniques developed as a part of this study to related problems such as prediction (based on pattern matching), random number generators, the average worst case probability of undetected error in channel coding, pattern matching approach to (exact and approximate) run length coding, and others doc21137 none Denis Pare Understanding memory, that is, how the brain stores information, is a major challenge of contemporary neuroscience. Indeed, the brain contains an astronomical number of nerve cells that communicate by specialized structures called synapses. Most neurons make synapses on hundreds to thousands of other neurons and reciprocally. Much evidence suggests that memory depends on changes in the strength or efficacy of individual synapses distributed across a large population of synapses. It was shown that when a neuron contributes to excite another nerve cell beyond a certain level, the synapse between these two cells becomes more efficient (or stronger). However, when synapses with such properties are introduced in computer models of neuronal networks, problems of stability develop because the reinforcement of synapses increases the likelihood that they will be further reinforced, leading the network into unchecked excitation. Thus, the question is how does the brain prevent runaway increases in the strength of synapses? This proposal tests the possibility that when particular synapses are strengthened, other synapses to the same cells are depressed. Thus, experience would modify the relative strength of synapses, but the total strength of synapses to any given neuron would remain stable. The proposed work will examine the intracellular mechanisms that allow the strength of individual synapses to change while keeping the total impact of synapses to target cells within normal bounds. This will be achieved by recording neurons in brain slices kept alive in a dish. Understanding how the brain keeps the weight of plastic synapses within normal bounds would have important implications for artificial intelligence and robotics where adaptable computer programs simulating neuronal networks constitute the most promising approach toward progress doc21138 none Generational garbage collection is a leading technology for automatic and efficient recycling of the computer storage occupied by a program s unreachable objects. This research seeks to develop a more quantitative theory of generational garbage collection, to be based on more realistic analytic models for the distribution of object lifetimes. These models will be derived by abstraction from the detailed heap storage profiles of real programs, and will be evaluated by comparing their predictions against the performance of actual garbage collectors. Insights from this research should lead to faster, more space-efficient, and less intrusive algorithms for generational garbage collection doc21139 none The InfiniBand Architecture (IBA) is envisioned to be the default communication infrastructure for future System Area Networks (SANs) or clusters. The first release of the IBA specification outlines the importance of QoS provisioning in IBA to support real-time applications. The proposed research addresses five intertwined issues for designing QoS-capable IBA fabrics. First, we will perform design and analysis of switches routers, network interface cards, and various network topologies to provide high and predictable performance in SANs. Second, we will propose efficient congestion avoidance techniques to handle network saturation. Next, efficient multicasting mechanisms for IBA switches will be investigated. Fourth, we will implement fault-tolerant techniques to make the QoS support robust to link and switch failures. Finally, a comprehensive simulation testbed for IBA SANs will be developed integrating these designs. The research, planned to be conducted in collaboration with Intel, will have the following contributions: (i) Efficient switched network architectures and NIC designs will be proposed to implement QoS-capable IBA fabrics; (ii) Research in the above five areas will provide novel solutions to satisfy end-to-end QoS requirements and will foster new ideas; and (iii) The simulation platform can be used as an effective tool for conducting future research on IBA doc21140 none How does a computer determine that user requests are authentic? Currently, users must prove their identity from time to time, and this authentication is assumed to hold for all user requests until it is either explicitly or implicitly revoked. This model is poorly matched to mobile devices, which are prone to loss or theft. An adversary, holding the device of a trusted user, has the full authority of that user for the remainder of the authentication period. Systems that require more frequent authentication are burdensome; users disable or work around such safeguards, forfeiting their protection. This problem is addressed by a technique called transient authentication. Rather than invest long-term authority with a mobile device---something easily set down or stolen---it is retained within a small authentication token worn by the user. This research explores the implications of making authentication, traditionally a persistent property, into a transient one. Transient authentication will be applied to process state and file system state. An application programming interface (API) will be designed, and a number of applications and services ported to it. The system will be evaluated through controlled benchmarking, establishing the claims of performance and usability. The resulting system will provide strong protection against loss or theft without inconveniencing authorized users doc21141 none This research investigates a new architecture designed to provide data to wireless users using a broadcast technique. The objective of this research is to develop schemes for implementing the concept ``DAta in your space (DAYS) which combines broadcasting (push) and traditional querying (pull) techniques into one global wireless approach. In this scheme the data broadcasters (special servers) will continuously broadcast (push) requested data to a set of ``dedicated wireless channels, which will be captured by clients (users of the data) at any time and at any place. The space will thus be used as persistent storage for all mobile as well as static devices. A universal wireless broadcast approach requires that mobile users be able to find and use the right broadcast information. Some of the questions to mbe addressed include: 1. How can the mobile user know which channel has the correct data? 2. How is data to be assigned to channels? 3. What techniques can be used to effectively determine the best contents of each channel given many mobile users? 4. Without explicit user queries, how can the mobile user be assured that the needed data is being broadcast? 5. How can the mobile user be assured that the needed data moves with him? These issues have to be examined on a global scale doc21142 none Mislove & Pavlovic -- This project focuses on mathematical foundations and design methodologies for embedded hybrid systems (EHS). The essential feature of such systems is that software components interact not only with each other, but also with the physical world, through sensors and actuators. The discrete dynamics of computation thus adds up with the continuous dynamics of physical systems. Hybrid systems are an attempt to capture this double dynamism in a unified framework. To limit the interference of the formidable complexities of dynamical systems of both types, the continuous trajectories are usually encapsulated into states, at the static points of the discrete computational paths. The methods of continuous mathematics are then simply combined with the methods of discrete mathematics to analyze such combined systems. The starting point of the planned research is a belief that the burgeoning field of coalgebra provides methods and techniques that will allow uniform representation and implementation methods for continuous and discrete objects and aspects. While algebraic methods allow specifying and programming of finite objects and inductive structures, such as expressions or well-founded trees, coalgebraic methods allow specifying and programming infinite objects, as coinductive structures: they include automata and various state machines on the one hand, as well as iterative function systems, analytic functions and operators, and real numbers on the other hand. In a real sense, coinduction permeates analysis just like induction permeates arithmetic. The difference is that the latter has been recognized as a fundamental logical principle a long time ago, whereas the the former has been recognized only recently, although it has appeared implicitly for some time (e.g. in most existence-of-the-solutions theorems, although it has been recognized as backwards induction in game theory). The task is now to make explicit and systematize the use of coinductive and coalgebraic methods, and to apply them in analysis and design of embedded hybrid systems doc21143 none The thrust of this collaborative project is to design, analyze and implement efficient algorithms for several tiling, packing and covering problems with rectangles in two or higher dimensions with applications in diverse areas such as: VLSI, computer graphics, image processing, database design, data mining and computational biology. Since computing exact solutions for almost all of these problems is provably hard, the goal is to use diverse unifying techniques of algorithm design such as local-ratio, multi-phase methods, and slice-and-dice methods, and linear programming with nontrivial rounding and primal-dual schema. They will develop novel data structures on grids for efficient approximation algorithms for these problems doc21144 none This project investigates the role of information encoding techniques for reducing energy consumed by various processor components including the fetch mechanism, on-chip instruction and data caches, functional units, instruction issue logic, and CPU I O pins. To address energy consumption by all of the above processor components, three distinct types of encodings will be investigated in this project. Data encoding will be used to reduce the activity in data caches where the data resides and external data bus I O pins over which data is transmitted. Instruction encodings in form of 32 bit ARM ISA and 16 bit Thumb ISA available in the XScale processor will be used to generate compact code which gives high performance. Finally, compiler or profiler generated hints will be encoded into the generated code to throttle the energy consumption of a processor doc21145 none The demand for real-time data services has been increasing recently, as many real-time applications are becoming sophisticated in their data needs. A real-time database, a core component of many information services for real-time applications, can be a main service bottleneck. Current databases are not time-cognizant, are poor in supporting temporal consistency of real-time data and real-time execution of transactions, and therefore they do not perform well in these applications. To address this problem, a scheme for QoS management for real-time data services is proposed that provides guarantees on transaction timeliness and data freshness, which are considered two key performance metrics for real-time data services. The fundamental premise motivating this research is the need for real-time data service systems that are autonomous, data-intensive, and operable in unpredictable environments. The novel idea of using feedback control based QoS management to provide robust performance guarantees against unpredictable workload, incomplete knowledge, and load disturbances will be pursued. The scheme will be evaluated to validate the contributions using simulation. Success of this research would benefit an ever increasing set of applications, including several national critical infrastructures, that require real-time data services doc21146 none Handheld computing devices with wireless network connections have a great potential to be powerful mobile tools to access information and software resources in the networked world. Unfortunately, the computing power and connection time of current handheld devices are severely constrained by the short battery life. Moreover, the battery issue also places constraints on various design aspects including program memory and secondary storage, CPU, and operating system. With connection to computing servers through wireless networks, there exist many opportunities for handheld devices to save battery by carefully utilizing the power of the servers. This project explores compiler and run-time techniques to assist the partitioning of application programs into server tasks and client tasks. The optimal partition depends on available network bandwidth and on the nature of applications. In order for handheld devices to optimally exploit servers for a wide range of applications, careful tradeoff is made between energy consumed by network communication versus computation. The proposed compiler techniques and run-time support include compile-time and run-time analysis of work and communication requirement, exploitation of low-power networking states on handhelds, run-time decision-making, and a light-weight software coherence mechanism doc21147 none Space-Time Coding for Optical MIMO ChannelsStephen G. Wilson and Maite Brandt-PearceDept. of Electrical and Computer EngineeringUniversity of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA Phone: (434) 924- , (sgw,mb-p)@virginia.edu : Free-space optical links are an emerging technology for wideband access to networks because of the tremendous bandwidth potential they offer. Outdoor atmospheric channels are hampered by signal fading effects due to particulate scattering in a line-of-sight path, clear-air turbulence, or merely static index-of-refraction inhomogeneities. Similarly, indoor IR systems are faced with fading arising from the intrinsic multipath environment. One powerful method of improving the performance of wireless communication systems is through the use of transmit and receive antennas, creating a so-called multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel. MIMO channel models, provided by transmit and receive antenna arrays, have attracted enormous attention for RF wireless systems in the past five years, owing to the very large potential throughput in bits second Hertz and increased protection against fading associated with single antenna designs. This research addresses the design and performance analysis of space-time codes that can be applied to MIMO channels for application to the wireless optical communications environment. The research focuses on several aspects of this problem: --development of relevant MIMO models for outdoor line-of-sight optical channels, with particular attention to modeling of source and detector physics; --examination of the information-theoretic potential of this channel, particularly in the context of growing array size, and the analysis of bounding techniques on error probability to aid in the development of code design rules; --formulation and evaluation of space-time coding approaches for the optical free-space regime that are efficient in the channel capacity sense; --block-coded, trellis-coded, and concatenated approaches. Also, the application of space-time codes to the indoor wireless infrared channel and the examination of their performance are addressed doc21148 none Doctorate Data Project The purpose of this acquisition is to procure a data collection, file maintenance, and analysis methodological research capability to collect information on persons receiving research doctorate awards from United States universities and to monitor their subsequent experiences in the labor force. The Federal agency with the lead responsibility for this contract is the National Science Foundation (NSF), which is authorized to identify and assess the numbers and characteristics of scientists and engineers in the United States. Other Federal agencies which have related responsibilities for collecting and reporting on persons in other disciplines participate jointly in aspects of this project, so that the total population of individuals of interest is all persons receiving research doctorates, in all fields, for the Survey of Earned Doctorates. Several interrelated activities address the purposes of this acquisition, which is intended to provide comprehensive services for a performance period of 5 years cycles. Central to the project is the conduct of two major ongoing survey systems, one of which supplies the universe from which the sample for the second survey is drawn. Data from these surveys will be merged with the historical, comprehensive data bases for each survey and also merged with other data bases to provide information on the nation s human resources. The annual census Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED) entails the collection of information on every individual receiving a research doctorate from a United States university. Results from the survey are added to the Doctorate Records File (DRF). The SED provides the universe from which a sample is drawn for the Survey of Doctorate Recipients (SDR), a biennial survey collecting information on the post-graduation employment related characteristics of doctorate-holders in science and engineering. Results from the SDR are combined with other component surveys of the SESTAT data system. The resulting data bases are actively used by the NSF and the other Federal sponsors and numerous other users inside and outside of government. The contractor will also support the dissemination activities of the restricted data files to academic researchers and other government agencies through a licensing agreement. The information collected and maintained through this project constitutes a major national resource, offering the only source of information on this important population. Its accessibility and dissemination are therefore critical. This project will be monitored by the Division of Science Resources Statistics (SRS) as the contract technical representative for NSF and the other Federal agencies that sponsor the SED and the SDR. For the SED, other Federal sponsors as of FY are the U.S. Department of Education (ED), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). For the SDR, the NIH is also a sponsor. In the past, SDR federal sponsors included the Department of Energy (DOE) and the NEH. During the course of the contract, the participation of Federal sponsors may change and necessitate modifications to the coverage of disciplines, distribution of communications, materials, or products related to the project doc21149 none Abdelzaher A Paradigm for Scalable Open Real-Time Computing Under Uncertainty A key challenge for embedded real-time computing is that of providing temporal performance guarantees. Unfortunately, the wealth of knowledge developed to date in the area of performance assurances in embedded systems has been confined to a somewhat restrictive application domain where detailed knowledge is assumed of both the available resource capacity in the system and the resource requirements of individual tasks. These restrictions prevent many previous research results from being applied to a wider scope of mainstream applications and services where QoS guarantees are required, yet load and resource models are unavailable. This research seeks a solution to the problem of providing performance guarantees in the absence of detailed load and resource knowledge. The goal is to establish that fine-grained guarantees are achievable with real-time system performance even in the absence of fine-grained models of system load and resource capacity. This is approached through new foundations for performance guarantees in embedded real-time systems operating under uncertainty. The research centers on a new calculus aimed to counter fundamental limitations on robustness and scalability in current approaches for performance guarantees. There are two main elements: 1) A theory for robust schedulability analysis based on feasible regions: A feasible region is a set of aggregate system states in which all timing constraints are guaranteed to be met. This research is developing methods for deriving multi-dimensional feasible regions in a continuous state space, where the dimensions represent aggregate measurable quantities such as the overall utilization of different system resources. Maintaining a system within feasible region boundaries guarantees temporal correctness based on aggregates only. These mechanisms will be more scalable and suitable for systems where detailed information about the load and resources is unavailable. 2) Middleware components that enforce conformance of a run-time system to its feasible region. The theoretical framework being developed is incorporated into a middleware framework based on control theory, which executes run-time performance monitoring and feedback control mechanisms to ensure that system state converges to a feasible region. This condition is enforced using admission control and QoS adaptation. These two elements maintain guarantees on real-time behavior by linking applications with the middleware, specifying desired QoS guarantees, and leveraging run-time feasible region enforcement mechanisms to provide correct temporal behavior in in open real-time systems. This increases the scope of embedded computing from predominantly closed custom-designed systems to large distributed open systems composed of commercial off-the-shelf components such as web servers, mainstream operating systems, and standard protocols such as TCP IP, where accurate load and resource knowledge is unavailable. High impact is expected through the ability to achieve predictable behavior in many important systems ranging from large Web server farms and Internet routers to ubiquitous computing systems, and smart spaces doc21150 none Knyazev In many application areas, there is a pressing and increasing need for novel numerical techniques for solving very large algebraic eigenvalue problems. They arise naturally as discretization of continuous models described by systems of partial differential equations and pose new numerical challenges. The problem matrix may be available only implicitly through a function that computes the corresponding vector-matrix product for a given vector, which thus calls for matrix-free eigenvalue solvers. The growth of the problem size often leads to badly conditioned problems, which require improved algorithm stability and new tools to estimate the accuracy of computed eigenvalues and eigenvectors. Classical eigenvalue solvers that do not scale linearly with the problem size are very expensive for modern practical problems. The focus of the present project is on an alternative technique, called preconditioning. While the mainstream research in the area introduces preconditioning for eigenvalue problems by using preconditioned inner iterations for solving linear systems with shift-and-invert matrices, the approach of the present project is to incorporate preconditioning directly into Krylov-based solvers such as the locally optimal block preconditioned conjugate gradient method. The preconditioned iterative methods of this kind are specially designed for large-scale ill-conditioned matrix-free problems and can be effective and parallelizable. The investigator studies preconditioning for singular values computations, an adaptation of the preconditioned eigensolvers to some problems with nonlinear dependence on the spectral parameter, and an efficient solution of eigenproblems resuling from partial differential equations with large jumps in coefficients. The investigator develops fast, reliable methods to solve very large eigenvalue problems. Numerical simulations are performed on modern parallel computing systems, e.g., on a Beowulf cluster. The targeted applications for a joint investigation with engineers include structural dynamics finite element models associated with re-entry vehicles and their complex aerospace and electronic systems, and evolution of the error covariances in Kalman filter equations for chemistry-transport atmospheric models doc21151 none Cyberlogic is a semantic foundation for implementing evidential transactions using the public key infrastructure (PKI). Evidential transactions form the basis of frameworks for authorization and authentication, electronic commerce, business workflow, and digital government. Such transactions involve the exchange of physical evidence in the form of identity cards, driver s licenses, money, checks, visas, airline tickets, traffic tickets, birth certificates, and stock certificates, as well as electronic evidence including PIN numbers, passwords, keys, certificates, and nonces. Cyberlogic is an enabling foundation for building and analyzing protocols that involve the exchange of electronic forms of evidence. Cyberlogic builds on evidence, public keys, and protocols. First, evidence is encoded by means of numbers using digital certificates and nonces. Second, public keys are predicates so that any information $i$ signed by a private key corresponding to the public key $P$ entails that $P$ holds of $i$. Indeed, the signed certificate is a proof for the assertion contained in the certificate. Third, protocols are distributed logic programs that gather evidence by using both ordinary predicates and digital certificates. These simple building blocks can be used to construct a rich variety of services in a variety of domains ranging from digital government to access control in computer systems. The public key infrastructure (PKI) provides basic services for encryption, authentication, trust, authorization, and digital certificates. Cyberlogic is a protocol layer over the PKI that serves as a reliable foundation for evidential transactions. It provides a standardized semantic and computational infrastructure for exchanging evidence in electronic form. With such a foundation, it is possible to design secure electronic versions of transactions that currently require physical forms of evidence doc21152 none Gupta This two-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research in embedded and hybrid computer systems involves Rajesh K. Gupta and Sandeep K. Shukla of the University of California, Irvine, Jean-Pierre Talpin and Paul Le Guernic of the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Engineering (INRIA) in Rennes (IRISA). The research is aimed at enabling C++ based design paradigms, a software programming language which can be used in object-oriented programming language IC systems and system on a chip (SOC) designs. The research addresses development of C++ usage, which is semantically clean and can be used in high-level hardware systems. This requires semantics that matches across compilers, high-level synthesis tools and simulated behavior of C++ design. The approach combines an unambiguous semantic framework named BDL (backbone description language) developed by researchers at IRISA and a split-level programming paradigm developed by the Irvine group. This award represents the U.S. side of a joint proposal to the NSF and INRIA. NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses of the U.S. investigators and graduate students. INRIA will support the French researchers visits to the United States. The U.S. and French teams represent expertise in software programming languages, hardware description languages, and formal semantics doc21153 none This project focuses on three areas important to the development of polymeric light-emitting di-odes (PLEDs), polymer based photovoltaic devices, and to elucidation of the structure property relationships that govern the performance of the active polymer layers in these devices. The ap-proach is to develop a new layer-by-layer deposition technique that is compatible with deposition of polymers or oligomers from organic solvents. This deposition technique combines the fine control of device structure now available in LEDs prepared via the evaporation of small organic molecules with the mechanical integrity and solution processability of polymers. The ability to engineer device structure via precise control of several polymeric layers is expected to improve the performance of PLEDs and photovoltaics, and aid in the investigation of the science that un-derpins their performance. Also, the approach includes synthesis of an array of novel polymers and oligomers that will be utilized to build PLEDs and photovoltaic devices with the new layer-by-layer deposition technique. Additionally, fundamental studies of the role that struc-ture property relationships, such as energetic disorder, play in device performance will be pur-sued. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in areas of electronic photonic materials sci-ence having technological relevance. An important feature of the project is the emphasis on edu-cation, and the integration of research and education. The available resources provide special op-portunities for education and training of graduate and undergraduate students in interdisciplinary forefront research doc21154 none Mixing in turbulent flows play an essential role in diverse engineering applications. Beneficial non-equilibrium dynamics impact on engine efficiency, durability, stability, and emissions, on reduced drag in aircrafts and in naval vessels. The unique focus of this research is on feedback regulation of active mixing control. Technical challenges are an outgrowth of the complexity and sensitivity of fluid dynamic systems, and require an integrated approach to modeling, information technology, control theory, algorithm development, and software and hardware implementation. Modeling will focus on dominant coherent structures, periodicity, and concepts of Hamiltonian energy. Those provide also possibilities for efficient parallel implementation on an embedded system. Intended models will range from lumped point vortex models, to purely phenomenologically derived I O correlations of main structures. Hybrid models arise naturally as a design framework, subject to (nearly) periodic vortex generation and elimination. On a finer time scale, hybrid models will be used as a means to parallelize spatially distributed control and observer implementation. This project includes collaborations with industry, government and academe. If successful, this high risk-high yield undertaking will include both technology transition in critical applications and developments of integrated embedded systems and control design methods for interesting classes of complex, nonlinear systems doc21155 none This project will use subjectivity analysis to improve the accuracy of information extraction (IE) systems. IE systems are designed to extract facts, but they are prone to false hits from subjective statements such as accusations, allegations, suspicions, and opinions. The first phase of the research will create a subjectivity classifier that uses learning algorithms to identify linguistic features associated with subjective language. The classifier will use several natural language representations, including extraction patterns, N-grams, and noun phrases. The classifier will be embedded in a bootstrapping architecture so that it can learn from unannotated corpora, requiring only a small amount of annotated data to jumpstart the bootstrapping. In the second phase, the classifier will be integrated into an IE system to measure the impact of subjectivity classification on IE performance. Information extracted from objective sentences will be treated as facts, but information extracted from subjective sentences will be labeled as uncertain or discarded. This research will produce a better understanding of how subjective language is expressed and the role that context plays in recognizing subjectivity. The potential impact of the research is to produce more accurate subjectivity classifiers and to demonstrate that subjectivity analysis can improve the performance of IE systems doc21156 none Biswas, Gautam Embedded systems, which include software components integrated into physical processes, are per-vading all aspects of our daily lives from home appliances to safety-critical systems, such as aircraft and nuclear plants. The widespread use necessitates the development of new engineering tech-niques that can ensure their timely and assured development, accurate monitoring during operation, and robust control, to ensure safety and reliability. This project develops an integrated model-based approach to embedded system development that includes the plant, its environment, and the embed-ded computing system. The models provide a common framework for design and run-time analyses of system stability, liveliness, safety, security, and real-time supervisory control. Models can also form the basis for generating the hardware and software components of the embedded systems, and de-fining their run-time configurations. This generative aspect of modeling is a very relevant and distin-guishing property of the model-based development process. Further, the ability to analyze system behavior at run-time forms the basis for methodologies designed to accommodate deviations caused by disturbances and unexpected changes in the environment. The goal is to ensure that the system and its surroundings are not harmed when aberrant situations occur. The project will develop technologies for run-time analysis of embedded systems that alleviate some of the complexities of modeling and analysis of systems with large mode spaces. Specifically, effec-tive methodologies that address run-time dynamic analysis issues are addressed. This includes three primary tasks: Developing a new concept called the dynamic hybrid automaton (DHA) for embedded sys-tems models with large mode spaces. A DHA is simply a hybrid automaton, which can be constructed incrementally, on-the-fly, at run-time, as system behavior evolves. It is based on formal compositional modeling techniques in the hybrid automata framework that ensure model construction grows linearly (as opposed to exponentially) as a function of the number of switching elements in the hybrid model. Tracking system behavior using hybrid observers developed from the hybrid automata mod-els. This involves techniques for updating the models of the observer on-line when a mode change is detected while tracking the plant behavior. Research challenges focus on model and tracking procedures that minimize mistracking at mode transition boundaries, and devel-oping code generation systems that allow for incremental recalculation of the observer mod-els while satisfying hard time bounds on the generation process, and Synthesizing supervisory controllers on-line in response to mode changes, some of which may be attributed to disturbances and unexpected changes in the environment. A new con-cept, the Active Controller Model (ACM), is proposed. The ACM is a dynamic data structure that explicitly represents the currently active supervisory controller (SVC), together with its generator and actuator. The SVC can be implemented as a generic procedure that uses the ACM as its knowledge base to compute what control actions to take. When the plant model changes, the ACM is updated to address the new situation. This will involve a number of in-novative research tasks, such as developing an expressive language to describe control ob-jectives, definition and incremental update procedures for the ACM models, and anytime re-source-bound algorithms for synthesizing supervisory controller code on-line. Robust super-visory controllers will extend the concept of adaptive control into the hybrid-systems domain, and adjust to configuration changes in the plant and environment. The success of all three components of this project is very heavily dependent on handling computa-tional complexity issues in incremental model generation, code generation for the hybrid observer, and on-line supervisory controller synthesis based on desired objectives for the plant. Therefore, complexity studies of the synthesis and code generation algorithms is an important component of the project. The goals are ambitious, but the success of these methods will offer new flexibility in embed-ded applications while addressing issues of reliability and safety during run-time operation doc21157 none The access control model plays a central role in most of computer security. It is pervasive, and provides a basis for secrecy and integrity security policies. Authentication and authorization are two of the fundamental components of this model. In a distributed system, authentication and authorization are harder, in particular because of the heterogeneity and the autonomy of subsystems. This project addresses problems and opportunities related to access control in distributed systems. It aims to further the design and analysis of models and mechanisms for authentication and authorization. In particular, it investigates the design and analysis of protocols for authentication and related purposes. It also investigates fine-grained authorization in extensible software systems. Some parts of this project are rather informal; others exploit ideas from programming-language research and rely on the development of formal calculi doc21158 none Moulin, Pierre U of Ill Urbana- Champaign The enormous growth in electronic commerce has led to an urgent need for the protection and authentication of information, which now is stored and transmitted in massive amounts. There is a multitude of applications where a signal (typically audio, image or video) is to be communicated to a receiver, along with information such as ownership identification or a timestamp authenticating the signal. The communication channel on which the signal is transmitted may be insecure, i.e., an adversary may modify the signal in such a way that it can no longer be reliably authenticated. In some applications (e.g., wireless video transmission) the channel is considered to be insecure not due to the presence of an adversary, but because of the significant degradations introduced by the transmission medium. A secret message necessary for authentication may be embedded in the signal (watermarking-based authentication) or transmitted on a separate channel (hashing- based authentication). In watermarking, the host data set is intentionally corrupted, but in a covert way, designed to be imperceptible to a casual analysis. Hashing does not require the signal to be modified, but requires the transmission of side information about the signal (authentication tag) on a separate channel. Signal authentication encompasses applications such as forgery detection and analysis, copyright protection for digital media, copy control, fingerprinting (traitor tracing), and database query and retrieval [1]|[30]. Watermarking and authentication are now major activities in audio, image, and video processing, and standardization efforts for JPEG- , MPEG-4, and Digital Video Disks are well underway. Commercial products are being developed. Annual International Workshops on information hiding have been held in , and every year since . Special issues of major technical journals have recently been recently devoted to information protection [31, 32, 33, 34], and comprehensive surveys of image and multimedia watermarking techniques are available from [35, 36 doc21159 none The investigators organize the Gordon Research Conference on Theoretical Biology and Biomathematics. The conference has nine formal sessions, each consisting of 2-3 oral presentations with an introduction by a leading scientist in the area, and two afternoon poster sessions. A wide variety of topics, ranging from global environmental models to mathematical neuroscience to genetic regulation networks, are represented. The unifying theme of the conference is quantitative modeling of complex biological networks. Invited speakers are selected on the basis of their expertise in the respective areas, at the same time emphasizing gender balance, minority representation, and incorporating promising junior researchers. The primary goal of this conference is to bring together established and young investigators from the field of quantitative biology to share their approaches and progress and to discuss the perspectives. Such a multidisciplinary conference is very important for identifying challenges in biology, biotechnology, and medicine that require quantitative modeling and computational approach. Moreover, the participation of students and postdocs helps to increase the number of people working in areas of quantitative biology doc21160 none The goal of this research is to elaborate an elegant and comprehensive specification language and semantics for interactive computational problems and explore the corresponding logic, --- the set of valid principles of interactive computability expressible in that language. Such a logic provides us with a powerful tool for systematically studying computational tasks and automatically generating solutions to new problems from known solutions to old problems. Other applications include the possibility to base on this logic knowledge- and resource- oriented automatic reasoning systems. The intuitive notion of interactive computational problem is formalized as a game between two players: the machine and the environment (user). Moves of the game represent actions choices by these agents, and positions represent states situations that emerge in the course of interaction. A game is considered winnable (and hence the corresponding problem solvable), if there is a computer program that wins it against any possible environment. The language of the logic of interactive computational problems suggested by the investigator is a non-disjoint union of the languages of classical, intuitionistic and linear logics, with logical operators interpreted as certain, --- most basic and natural, --- operations on games. Validity of a formula is understood as winnability for every game problem interpretation of its atoms. The restriction of winnability to the classical fragment of the language turns out to be equivalent to the classical concept of truth, which makes classical logic a natural syntactic fragment of the logic of interactive computational problems. The same is conjectured to be the case for the intuitionistic logic and (a version of) linear logic. This way, the logic of interactive computational problems can unify, within the framework of one general semantics, the classical, intuitionistic and linear logics, with their seemingly unrelated or even antagonistic philosophies. Verifying this conjecture, along with finding an axiomatization for the logic of interactive computational problems, is among the main technical objectives of this research doc21161 none Efforts are underway worldwide to create Web-accessible mathematical and scientific digital libraries. To leverage such resources, users should be able to search not only for text, but also for equations, formulas and other math constructs. This project will develop the theory and algorithms for indexing and searching of mathematical expressions, and implement a Web-accessible math search and retrieval system. Also, the project will define and implement a math query language that is intuitive and expressive. This will allow users to enter full or fragmentary mathematical expressions as queries, and retrieve all documents containing the symbolic entities that match the query, even if those entities are represented graphically (e.g., GIF images). The methodology is to build a math search engine on top of a text search engine, and to translate math contents and queries into textual queries by means of novel textualization and structure-linearization-&-normalization techniques. A more powerful but demanding alternative strategy, structural indexing, will be developed in a follow-up project. This unprecedented search capability will provide educators and students, from junior high schools to graduate schools, with an effective knowledge-discovery tool to enhance learning and problem-solving skills in mathematics and mathematical sciences. It will also be a valuable aid to researchers and practitioners in those fields doc21143 none The thrust of this collaborative project is to design, analyze and implement efficient algorithms for several tiling, packing and covering problems with rectangles in two or higher dimensions with applications in diverse areas such as: VLSI, computer graphics, image processing, database design, data mining and computational biology. Since computing exact solutions for almost all of these problems is provably hard, the goal is to use diverse unifying techniques of algorithm design such as local-ratio, multi-phase methods, and slice-and-dice methods, and linear programming with nontrivial rounding and primal-dual schema. They will develop novel data structures on grids for efficient approximation algorithms for these problems doc21163 none The proposed studies are aimed at developing a fundamental understanding of the way in which the self-assembly of fluoropolymers can be harnessed to form periodic nm-length scale polymer structures, controlled by a variety of thermal and optical methods. In the proposed research we will synthesize and study the surface and bulk properties of semifluorinated (SF) LC-coil block copolymers in which the SF group I a monodendron. The surface will be probed with a variety of techniques, but in particular scanning force microscopy (SFM) and near edge X-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS) measurements will be used to examine surface topography and composition. A particular focus of the proposed research derives from our recent observation that polymers with SF monodendron side groups are capable of forming not only low energy surfaces, but may spontaneously organize into arrays with periodic organization on the 20 nm length scale that can span regions approaching millimeter dimensions. The SF monodendrons will be produced with selected alkyl to fluorinated segment ratios, arm number and end group in order to test the model predicting surface curvature. A photoactive azobenzene group will also be used in mondendron synthesis to both alter the packing structure and take advantage of its photo-optical properties. By combining the known trans-cis isomerization behavior of the azobenzene chromophore, we also plan to use photoprocessing to direct long-range organization of these surface structures. In the production of small-scale patterns needed for nanotechnology, there is no convenient process for building structures or modifying surfaces in the 10 to 50 nm length regimes. Structures that appear homogeneous over micron length scales can be extremely heterogeneous at these smaller dimensions, thus making issues such as the control of surface energy and composition extremely important. Fluoropolymers are ideal materials for exploring many of these factors in surface and interface design. The low surface energy of fluoropolymers has attracted interest in such diverse surface control applications as the prevention of protein binding to biomedical surfaces, as environmentally friendly fouling resistant marine coatings and for self-cleaning architectural materials. The unusual transparency of fluoropolymers at short optical wavelengths has lead to their study as next generation photoresists for microelectronics manufacture while their low dielectric constant and refractive index has made their use in microelectronics and communications widespread. This program will harness self-pattern surfaces. There exist immense possibilities for applications in biotechnology, information science and advanced materials if patterning at these length scales can be harnessed while simultaneously controlling surface composition doc21164 none This research will develop advanced digital signal processing algorithms for specific coherent imaging systems where complex signals are spatially and temporally sampled, and subsequently processed by computers.Modeling of the physics of data acquisition will play a crucial role throughout the signal processing chain,from preprocessing at the sensor level to adaptive processing beamforming and final image formation.The focal research areas will involve ultra wide band medical ultrasound imaging,and electromagnetic wave imaging in millimeter spectral bands.Millimeter electromagnetic wave imaging could have important anti-terrorism applications such as detection of plastic guns and knives in human body scanning at airports,and surveillance of suspected safe houses,storage areas,and cargos by imaging through walls or crates. In the medical ultrasound area,the research will involve the following specific topics:(1) optimal transmit receive beam forming for near field dynamic focusing;(2)multiple foci B scan imaging for increasing scan rates;(3).theoretical performance bounds associated with combined random processes of random scatterers and noise.and (4),phase aberration correction algorithms for 3-D systems including new methods for dealing with dispersed aberrators such as fat lobules,membranes,etc.,that can diffract and refract the ultrasound beams.The research in electromagnetic coherent imaging will involve: synergistic adaptation of the statistical ultrasound autofocusing phase aberration correction concepts to the electromagnetic spectrum;development of millimeter wa e imaging algorithms for surveillance functions such as rapid body scanning and imaging through thin dry medium such as wood,plaster board or stone.The research in all the coherent modalities will involve:development of practical fast converging computer implementations of reconstruction algorithms;extensive simulations,and performance analyses of the new models and algorithms doc21165 none Feron, Eric MIT is developing ARETES, an Architecture for Efficient and Trusty Embedded Systems , which is a unified framework to design the critical control and communication infrastructure support for safe and efficient embedded systems. ARETES has four components to it: development of a mathematical framework for assessing safety and efficiency of the systems of interest, design of computationally efficient algorithms, development of the necessary software modules, and simulation case studies. To meet the safety and efficiency requirements, ARETES is adopting a control theoretic approach. The idea is to use and innovate upon the existing theory via three-faceted approach to account for the performance objective and resource constraints while safeguarding against uncertainty in the environment, component level imperfections, and faults in the inter-component communications. As the first facet, the existing multiplier theory will be extended to guarantee the worst case performance for resource constrained systems. To give some specific examples, the best fit integral quadratic constraint (IQC) characterization will be derived for the inherent uncertainties, and for the bandwidth saturation and delay constraints imposed by the inter-component coordination. As the second facet, a database of elementary blocks to approximate the hybrid models of such systems will be compiled. Links between the multiplier theory and hybrid systems analysis methods will be established via novel concepts such as a robust hybrid automaton . As the third key facet, a set of parameterized test problems will be developed to characterize the impact of task scheduling and the above mentioned imperfections on the online software complexity and the offline software verification process. ARETES aims at deriving analytical performance bounds for these canonical models and will develop a library of scalable software modules to facilitate the simulation studies. The theoretical advances being pursued in ARETES include robust control theory since the best fit IQC characterization facilitates the least conservative input-output stability analysis. ARETES will also develop links between the input-output hybrid system analysis approach and the multiplier theory approach. The canonical models and the associated library of algorithms will be directly useful in deriving analytical performance bounds for various scenarios of interest. Besides its relevance to research organizations and industry, this will have a significant technological value in academia. Technology being developed in ARETES has immense utility in providing the critical infrastructure support necessary in various applications involving coordinated agents that are either fully or partially autonomous. Examples of such applications include coordinated intrusion alert systems, monitoring of hazardous terrains, air traffic control systems, slowdown warning systems for intelligent vehicle highways, animation industry applications employing teams of coordinated intelligent inanimate objects, coordinated target tracking in scientific explorations, and educative projects such as the complex trajectory planning of a team of mini-helicopters in a laboratory setting doc21166 none This project investigates spoken language systems for the elderly and non-native speakers of English. Existing systems have been constructed for the average user and thus perform poorly for these nontraditional populations. The elderly have little access at present to computerized information, yet they have telephones that would enable them to access computers easily if the information were presented in a way that they could readily understand. Non-native speakers have difficulty being understood by the same dialogue systems, which need to be adapted to their speech and aid them in finding the correct way to express themselves. In order to improve the understandability of spoken output, Let s Go will investigate differences in lexical, prosodic and spectral content to enable elderly and non-native listeners to better understand the message. In order to improve spoken input, the project will explore adaptation of the statistical models of the lexical and acoustic information of the incoming speech signal for the target populations. Let s Go will assess the pertinence of its findings by creating a spoken language demonstrator that allows elderly and non-native users to access Port Authority Transit Bus information over the telephone doc21167 none The Year Technical Activities Program was formulated by the Federal Facilities Council in consultation with members of the FFC s seven standing committees and the senior representatives of the sponsor agencies (Attachment 3). The proposed program supports: Conducting a two-day workshop on Barriers and Incentives for Implementing Health-Protective Features and Practices in Indoor Workplaces in accordance with the procedures of the National Research Council. Formulating and publishing one information study on contracting and acquisition strategies and related issues. Convening a one-day conference on physical security issues. Convening a one-day forum focused on the future role of the federal government as an owner of facilities. Convening two, one half-day government industry forums on specific topics to be determined by the FFC. Providing administrative and technical support for the FFC and its standing committees. This includes support for up to 35 committee meetings with guest speakers, maintaining and enhancing networking activities through the FFC Web site, and participating in industry conferences and forums doc21168 none This research is about using the provable-security approach in the design and analysis of high-level cryptographic protocols. The aim is to gain assurance for practical cryptographic schemes by finding the right definitions, and then using modern techniques (reductions and their concrete-security analysis) to analyze selected schemes. Specific problems to be investigated include: (1) Storing a user s private information on an untrusted server. Here one wants to store user data in such a way that the user can recover it by presenting a password, but an adversary must invest an amount of interaction proportional to the guessing-complexity of the password. (2) The authenticated-encryption scheme in SSH. Though the method used by SSH is not, in general, correct, the situation for SSH itself is far from clear. (3) Delegation of authority to a secondary signature key by a primary one. A well-known approach in security practice, the problem that this solution aims to solve is without any provable-security treatment. (4) Relating the prescriptive approach to formalizing authenticated key exchange and the simulation-based approach. (5) Moving to an enriched model of computation, an envelope model, to investigate authenticated key exchange. (6) A systematic investigation of the game walking approach to analyzing cryptographic scenarios. Here two adversarial views are compared by writing out a sequence of pseudocode games each of which may set some Boolean flag. One bounds the difference in adversarial views by bounding the probability that the flag gets set doc21169 none The objective of the proposed research is to improve network security through an innovative approach to vulnerability and resiliency analysis. Even well administered networks are vulnerable to attacks due to the security ramifications of offering a variety of combined services. That is, services that are secure when offered in isolation nonetheless provide an attacker with combined vulnerabilities to exploit when offered simultaneously. Security tools such as COPS, System Scanner, and CyberCop, are excellent at identifying specific, known, individual host vulnerabilities in services, software packages, and configurations. What these methods do not address is the compound effect of multiple vulnerabilities. The result is a serious problem because interactions between vulnerabilities can easily cascade across a network. The risk posed by each vulnerability may be judged either necessary or acceptable in isolation, but the combination of these vulnerabilities can still turn out to compromise the network as a whole in an unacceptable way. A limited amount of existing work in vulnerability analysis addresses this problem, but the existing work falls short in three key areas, namely resiliency analysis, all-paths analysis, and inference engine analysis. The proposed work will improve network security by addressing systematically each of these three areas doc21170 none The Timber project addresses the construction of a database system to manage large volumes of extensible Markup Language (XML) data. The goal is to develop a native XML database, in which XML data is stored directly, retaining its natural tree structure. At the same time, without mapping the data into relational tables, the objective is to obtain all the benefits thereof, such as declarative querying and set-at-a-time processing. To accomplish this objective, the Timber project uses a bulk algebra for the manipulation of trees as a basis, and creates a principled implementation of a modular, algebraic framework for the optimization and evaluation of queries against XML data doc21171 none Modern distributed applications have sparked a growth of interest in publish-subscribe technologies, where the flow of information is determined by interest on the part of the receiver rather than by explicit addressing. While its rich communication model and dynamic addressing show great potential as a platform for selective information dissemination, the security aspects of publish-subscribe are not well understood. This work proposes to research and develop a security architecture for publish-subscribe systems, particularly to minimize the degree to which the publish-subscribe infrastructure must be trusted. The proposed research will also address the impact of security on system scalability, a typical goal of pub-sub systems. In addition to the design of a security architecture, this research will include a foundational characterization of security goals for such systems and simulations of security architectures that result from this study doc21172 none Optimization problems that arise in practice are often inherently online; that is, the input data is not available prior to computation but, instead, is given as a sequence of requests each of which must be served before the next one is received. A classical example is the caching problem in two-level memory systems. Modern computer architectures enhance memory performance by storing frequently accessed data items in a cache, which is a small buffer memory. Memory locations stored in the cache can be accessed quickly. Requests to memory locations that are not in the cache are called faults or misses, and take much more time. After each memory access, an online caching algorithm needs to decide whether to put the requested item in the cache, and if so, which item to evict from the cache. The objective is to minimize the number of cache faults. Due to incomplete information, online algorithms cannot, in general, compute optimal solutions. This brings up the issue of performance evaluation: how do we tell good algorithms from bad ones? One measure of the quality of online algorithms is their competitive ratio, defined as the maximum, over all request sequences, of the ratios between the solution computed by the online algorithm and the optimal (offline) solution. Thus, an algorithm with competitive ratio, say, 1.5, always computes a solution that is within 50% of the minimum. This research deals with the competitive analysis of online algorithms. Several research directions are being explored. The first direction is to study general techniques for the design and analysis of online algorithms. Here, the most promising ideas include the work-function algorithm (and its extensions) and the primal-dual method. Both of these techniques, as well as some other, have been successfully applied to specific online problems, but the mechanism behind their success is still poorly understood, and they still require an in-depth study to determine their applicability to other problems. Another direction is to study several extensions of the competitive analysis, including access graphs (for caching), diffuse adversaries, loose competitiveness and resource augmentation. This work focuses on some open problems related to these models, on adapting these models to other online problems, and on designing new problem-specific models. The investigator is also continuing his work on several classical problems in competitive analysis, including the k-server problem, several versions of caching and scheduling problems, the k-median problem, and other. The main goals of these efforts are to develop efficient competitive algorithms for these problems and to establish matching lower bounds on the competitive ratios doc21173 none Henzinger, Thomas Towards Predictability and Portability in Embedded Software This project develops, implements, and validates platform-independent programming models for embedded software with hard real-time constraints. For high-performance control applications, the time-triggered programming language Giotto is implemented by targeting the Embedded Machine. The Embedded Machine is a virtual machine that mediates in real time the interaction between software processes and physical environment processes. The Embedded Machine is ported to single-CPU and distributed platforms. Embedded Machine code is validated by schedulability analysis doc21174 none The main goal of this effort is to develop new algorithms for 3D articulated structure and motion estimation, from one or more uncalibrated video streams. Articulated motion is exhibited by jointed structures like the human body and hands, as well as linkages more generally. In this project, 3D articulated structure and motion estimation algorithms will be developed that can automatically initialize themselves, estimate multiple plausible interpretations along with their likelihood, and provide reliable performance over extended sequences. To achieve these objectives, concepts from machine learning, graphical models, multiple view geometry, and structure from motion will be employed. The proposed research effort will focus in two main areas: (1) 3D articulated pose estimation given video obtained from uncalibrated cameras, (2) statistical learning models that capture the dynamics of articulated motion, to provide top-down guidance that is needed to improve the pose estimation and to allow motion recognition. Effort will also be devoted to investigating improved features and image segmentation methods for use in the front-end system. The developed methods will be tested on videos depicting motion of the human body and the human hand, where ground truth is available for quantitative comparison doc21175 none Networked information systems play an increasingly important role in critical infrastructures such as power generation and distribution, transportation, commerce, and national security. The continuing spate of security incidents reported by organizations such as CERT Coordination Center demonstrates that in spite of best efforts in securing systems, hacker attacks will penetrate even the best defense mechanisms. To cope with such attacks, new techniques need to be developed that can detect and respond to such attacks. Unfortunately, existing approaches focus primarily on after-the-fact detection of such attacks. Moreover, intrusion response relies primarily on human involvement. These two factors mean that fast-progressing attacks (e.g., programmed attacks) can effect significant damage before any protective response is launched. Recovery from such damage is labor-intensive, and will render the target system unavailable for hours if not days. This project will develop new approach that automates intrusion responses so that the target system can defend itself from serious damage due to attacks. It will build on the proposer s successful research in specification-based intrusion detection. Key technical components of this project include: specification language enhancements to express response actions, techniques for isolating compromised processes so that they do not interfere with the rest of the system, and deception techniques that can provide an illusion of success to attacker while protecting the target the system doc21176 none complexity to quantum information theory, a universal semicomputable density matrix (``universal probability ) is taken as a starting point, and complexity (an operator) is defined as its negative logarithm. A number of properties of Kolmogorov complexity and von Neumann entropy extend naturally to the new domain, and the quantity reflects appropriately some of the peculiarities of quantum information (no cloning). The approach taken unifies other approaches made by several researchers in this direction doc21177 none Kannan Ramchandran University of California - Berkeley Communicating by message-hiding or steganography (derived from the Greek words steganos meaning \covered and graphein meaning \to write ) goes back over two thousand years ago to the ancient Greeks as a way of communicating secretly to send important espionage infor- mation during war 1 . The theoretical foundations for this powerful communications paradigm are derived from the elegant information-theoretical framework of channel coding with side information (CCSI). CCSI refers to the problem of communicating over a noisy channel with some partial knowledge about the transmission channel (in the form of side information) avail- able at the encoder but not at the decoder. For example, in the multimedia data-hiding or watermarking problem, the side information might refer to a multimedia \host signal such as an image or audio or video clip that is present only at the encoder, in which the message may be desired to be embedded. The rules of data-embedding are usually that (i) the host medium is minimally perturbed, implying that the embedded message be minimally intrusive; (ii) the embedded message can be reliably and robustly recovered by theintended decoder even in the presence of an intermediate \attacker who, within the bounds of not rendering the embedded host signal unusable, might attempt to corrupt or erase the message or watermark. While the field of information-hiding has its origins in covert communications, the scope of applicability ofthis paradigm is far more general, and extends to non-covert communication systems as well. Specifically, it turns out, rather surprisingly, that in general, the most e Ecient way to do digital broadcast is to follow the principles of data-hiding with users messages being embedded in one another s. Indeed, the theoretically best-known achievable broadcast rates from information-theory to this day date back to the (unreadable) work of Marton [1], whose codebook construction is intimately connected to the methodology for data-hiding. Related to this are the works of Gelfand and Pinsker [2] on CCSI, and by Costa [3] on the so-called problem of \writing on dirty paper where the punchline is to embed data by adapting to the host medium rather than by trying to \overpower it. These ideas lay the theoretical foundations for the problem of information-embedding and form the core of this proposal doc21178 none ion, and at the same time providing invariants which ensure that the physical state remains within some known bounds. The educational part of the project is implemented through new course and curriculum development, and student mentoring. The main educational objective is to provide both undergraduate and graduate students with the knowledge and the skills to understand the key issues and to ensure technical leadership in the current and future aerospace information technology arenas. Finally, an interactive web site is being developed, where it is possible to access information and software developed in the research project and for the courses doc21110 none Conditional branches are expensive. Branches require a significant percentage of the execution cycles since they occur frequently and can cause pipeline stalls. In addition, branches result in forks in the control flow, which can prevent other code-improving transformations from being applied. We plan to develop path profile-based techniques for replacing the execution of a set of two or more branches with a single branch on a conventional scalar processor. We propose to improve performance by merging the conditions of two or more branches into a single condition. Previous approaches have accomplished such merging of conditions that have either only involved a single variable or have required special hardware to merge multiple conditions together. Techniques will be developed to produce a merged condition involving multiple variables that can be used to bypass the code testing the original set of conditions on a conventional processor. Merging conditions may be very good fit for run-time optimization systems, which optimize frequently executed paths during the execution of a program doc21180 none This research investigates the ways geographic mobility and communications, including computer-mediated communication, influence the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of personal and work relationships and the ways these factors influence people s ability to extract social resources from them. Maintaining personal relationships requires significant investment in time and money. Physical proximity makes building personal relationships easier, while geographic mobility puts relationships at risk. Large numbers of Americans are now using the Internet, with electronic mail and other services for interpersonal communication. The Internet can potentially reduce the constraints that geography imposes on social relationships. It may also influence the quality of relationships conducted online. This research examines whether use of Internet communication changes the number and quality of social relationships and the social support derived from them. By examining the content of communication conducted over different modalities (visits, phone calls, email and instant messaging), it will help identify the mechanisms through which communication leads to social support. The research will simultaneously be of interest to social scientists concerned with the basic processes underlying social and work relationships and to more applied researchers and policy makers interested in the impact of the Internet on social life doc21181 none This project investigates gestural communication in collaborative physical tasks, tasks in which two or more individuals work together to perform actions on concrete objects in the three-dimensional world. For example, an expert might guide a worker s performance of emergency repairs to an aircraft, students might collaborate to build a science project, or a medical team might work together to save a patient s life. Observations of physical collaborations in face-to-face settings have suggested that gesture plays an important role in communication and task performance. To date, however, video systems for remote collaboration on physical tasks have rarely incorporated technologies to support gesture. The project has three aims: (a) to increase our understanding of the types and functions of gestures in collaborative physical tasks in face-to-face settings; (b) to systematically evaluate the impact of alternative methods for implementing gesture in systems for remote collaboration on physical tasks; and (c) to develop and test prototype gesture systems. A closely inter-related series of laboratory experiments, field studies, and technology development efforts will be used to meet these aims. Taken together, these research activities will improve the design of systems for remote collaboration in medical, educational, vehicular repair, and other physical domains doc21178 none ion, and at the same time providing invariants which ensure that the physical state remains within some known bounds. The educational part of the project is implemented through new course and curriculum development, and student mentoring. The main educational objective is to provide both undergraduate and graduate students with the knowledge and the skills to understand the key issues and to ensure technical leadership in the current and future aerospace information technology arenas. Finally, an interactive web site is being developed, where it is possible to access information and software developed in the research project and for the courses doc21183 none Energy is becoming the limiting resource for many applications, as processor performance and network bandwidth continue to rapidly advance. Devices such as wireless sensor networks, cell phones with integrated personal organizers (PDAs), laptops, and even Internet hosting centers are all concerned about power consumption either due to limited battery capacity or the high cost of operating and cooling large server farms. In many of these systems main memory can become a significant portion of the overall power budget, particularly with the advent of low-power, high-performance processors. This project investigates main memory power management research issues that span several levels of computer system design: from the operating system managing memory power states, to the design characteristics of platform architectures, and finally down to the details of internal DRAM organization. This project will investigate power management design decisions within each system level and explore interactions across levels doc21184 none ions to one another and to understand the fundamental principles of rate-based resource allocation such as the form and nature of timing guarantees and the algorithmic overhead. In addition, the existing theory of rate-based resource allocation is extended to deal with considerations such as preemption constraints. The implementation and use component of this research explores rate-based resource allocation in operating system kernels and applications. The objective is to assess the fit between the formal task model used to develop a particular allocation algorithm and implementation constraints that arise in practice. Three scheduling problems are considered: application-level scheduling (i.e., scheduling of user programs or application threads), scheduling the execution of system calls made by applications ( top-half operating system-level scheduling), and scheduling asynchronous events generated by devices ( bottom-half operating system-level scheduling). This reflects the logical structure of traditional, monolithic real-time (and general purpose) operating systems and kernels with hardware enforced protection boundaries. The research results will be distributed as an experimental version of FreeBSD that employs different forms of rate-based scheduling and resource allocation at different levels in the system. Rate-Based Resource Allocation Methods for Real-Time Embedded Systems doc21185 none Given a metric space, that is a finite set of points with distances between them, there are several classical minimization problems that are hard to solve exactly. A prime example is the traveling salesman problem (TSP), where we want to find a cyclic tour visiting all the points with minimum total distance. These problems arise in a wide range of applications such as manufacturing and communications network design. In the worst case it is NP-hard to solve these problems even approximately, that is with relative error better than some constant threshold. Recent results show that these problems are easier in metric spaces that often arise in practice. In particular if the distances are geometric, or if they are given by shortest paths in a simple graph (such as a planar graph), then the TSP and similar problems have approximation schemes. These schemes run in polynomial or quasi-polynomial time, with the exponent depending on the desired relative error. The main techniques include separators, spanners, and dynamic programming. In particular a spanner is a subgraph of a given graph, whose shortest path metric is a close approximation of the original. In various graph families we can find spanners with a useful tradeoff between the total weight and the relative error. This research continues the development of these techniques, in particular seeking better spanner constructions and possibly some useful lower bounds. One goal of the project is some progress on two unsolved variants: the geometric case in the presence of obstacles, and the graphical case in the presence of many extra ``Steiner points doc21186 none This joint award made to University of North Carolina Chapel Hill by the Advanced Materials Program in the Division of Chemistry (MPS) and the Kinetics, Catalysis and Molecular program in the Division of Chemical Transport System (ENG) is to design and synthesize porous chiral crystalline and non-crystalline zeolitic materials based on polymer-metal coordination networks. With this award, Professor Lin will prepare a variety of enantiopure rigid and bridging ligands with different functional groups and topologies from readily available 2,2 -dihydroxy-1,1 -binaphthalene. These chiral porous materials will have tailorable nanometer-sized chiral pockets and functionalities that can be exploited for potential applications in enantioselective separations and catalysis. These materials will have both the advantages offered by heterogeneous catalysts (including facile catalyst separation and recovery, high stability, and ease of handling), and those offered by their homogeneous counterparts (including homogeneity of active sites, high efficiency, reproducibility, selectivity, and controllability, and mild reaction conditions). In addition, training in materials chemistry will be provided to a diversity of students with this award. With this award, porous and non-crystalline zeolite like materials with tailorable nanometer-sized chiral pockets and functionalities will be synthesized from readily available chemicals, and these materials are expected to have applications in enantioselective separations and catalysis for the synthesis of chiral drugs and fine chemicals. In addition, these catalysts will have the advantages of both heterogeneous and homogeneous catalysts doc21187 none In concept learning, the learner is typically given a sample of instances labeled according to some unknown target concept. The learner?s task is to construct a hypothesis that is a good approximation of the target in a reasonable amount of time. Building concept learning systems has become an important research area due to the ever-increasing need for analyzing huge amounts of stored data. Although many efficient algorithms were constructed for learning various classes of concepts, these concept classes are extremely simple. Further, numerous hardness results seem to suggest that learning more expressive concept classes is extremely difficult. Two research directions have evolved in an effort to address the difficulty of learning more expressive concepts. One is to construct multiple classifier systems (MCS) and the other is to consider the possibility of actively interacting with the environment (a.k.a. active learning). Currently, due to the success of the Adaboost algorithm, theoretical research on MCS (and in fact machine learning in general) tends to focus rather narrowly on ensemble methods. Similarly, active learning research has been concentrated on the use of membership queries, and to some extent the teaching model. Other types of MCS and active learning that may lead to more intelligent learning systems have not been well studied. A good understanding of how to build more sophisticated MCS and exploit other possibilities of extracting information from the environment will move us one step closer to achieving the original intent of machine learning, which is to automate the knowledge acquisition process. This proposed research will investigate complex multiple classifier and active learning systems so that the learning of difficult concept classes becomes more tractable doc21188 none The project aims at developing an evaluation methodology for content-based image retrieval. The research involves: (1) Measurement of the complexity of image testbeds which can be used to quantitatively determine the degree of difficulty in retrieving images from the image testbeds, and (2) Comparison of the performance of different retrieval approaches which can quantitatively give an objective ranking of the performance of the retrieval approaches. The project designs a general framework of image feature representations which can be used as a vehicle to conduct statistical analysis on images and forms a basis for establishing the evaluation methodology. Using this framework, the evaluation method can measure the complexity of the image databases by their cross entropy and rank the retrieval approaches by their cross entropy with respect to a particular testbed. The image testbeds can thus be compared with each other on their complexity in supporting image querying. Furthermore, the retrieval techniques can be compared with each other without using queries so the human subjectivity is avoided. The algorithms developed in this project will be a valuable asset for the community to eventually establish a general theory of the evaluation methodology for content-based image retrieval research doc21189 none This project will create a sharable scientific infrastructure for experimental research on large-scale, large-grain multi-agent software systems (MAS). The research will extend the capabilities of an existing lightweight, flexible, integrative, and scalable experimental platform called MACE3J. Building on the current prototype, additional functionality will be designed into MACE3J, and several modeling analysis component libraries will be added. The resulting infrastructure will be tested for robustness and scalability on small-to-large-scale multicomputer platforms using a suite of example MAS problems. The tools and documentation produced by the research will be widely distributed as a community research base. Outcomes will include: 1) a facility for collaboration and model data integration within the MAS research community; 2) a technology that will begin unifying MAS community efforts with ongoing high-performance computing research in areas such as single-system-image clustering, very large, distributed computational grids, highly heterogeneous high-performance codes, and the use of Java for high-performance computing; 3) tools for education and demonstration of multi-agent systems research and results; and 4) foundations for common benchmark problems, to provide comparability of results and to help measure general progress in the field of MAS doc21190 none Denial of service attacks flood a web-site with so many requests that it can no longer respond. Computers connected to the Internet are vulnerable to being used unwittingly in mounting a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on a victim web-site. Past countermeasures based on software patches or re-compilation are often ignored by users, leaving many systems vulnerable. This research first proposes a classification of the various denial of service attacks and countermeasures, then defines architectural solutions in the core (non-optional) hardware and software of future machines. The vulnerabilities of computers, which allow DDoS attack networks to be set up, are studied. Low overhead architectural features in the core hardware of computers are investigated which hinder attack networks from being set up in the first place, or detect and prevent the execution of potentially hostile code. Malicious parties often employ buffer overflow attacks to gain entry to a computer by corrupting procedure return addresses. This research investigates features like a secure return address stack (SRAS) in the processor architecture as a new defense against such buffer overflow exploits. The proposed research approach is unique in providing defenses in the client platforms rather than only in the servers or routers, and in building more trusted architecture in the core hardware, rather than only in software layers. Since application code need not be changed nor re-compiled, both legacy and future software can enjoy the security benefits of hardware architectural solutions. Since DDoS attacks pose a serious threat to the availability of critical Internet services, this research can contribute to the overall security of the Internet while increasing the trust that owners may have in their interconnected information appliances doc21191 none What is the ``typical traffic of a link? What constitutes ``abnormal traffic, and therefore warrants an alert for suspicious behavior (intrusion)? How will the Internet look like next year? These are the questions that the project focuses on. It has two major thrusts: The first is to find patterns in the network traffic, and the second is to find trends in the Internet evolution. The technical merit is in the synergy of the networking and data mining fields, pushing the envelope in both: The networking field will enjoy novel insights and fast tools to predict the network performance. The data mining field will benefit from new problems and new tools (using fractals, power laws, large-graph algorithms), that will be stress-tested on multiple Gigabytes of real, network data. The broader impact of this work will be a novel insight of the network behavior at the micro and macro level. In addition, the work will explore our ability to predict the network behavior and its evolution. As a result, the work will provide new tools to identify abnormal behavior, that could be due to a security breach like a DDoS attack doc21192 none Schwan, Karsten InfoFabric: Adaptive Services in Distributed Embedded Systems This research is developing Infofabric services to manage multiple shared data streams and enable high performance sensing and communication in dynamically reconfigurable sensor nets. For example, in emergency response applications, the computing infrastructures employed are rapidly assembled conglomerates of portable and handheld end user devices. Multiple communication modes are used to interact across collaborating peers and also with local and remote command centers and or information repositories. A key problem is that such devices typically cannot access, display, and manipulate information with the quality needed by end users. An example is an observer `in the field trying to match visible cloud formations with the outputs produced by remotely running weather simulations, the latter using real-time radar data. Unless the handheld device can visualize data with high quality and in real-time, field observations cannot be used to refine or steer the remote weather prediction programs. Similarly, search and rescue operations can be aided by rich (multi-media), real-time communications between team members and by high fidelity graphical displays of terrain data available from remote servers. The basic technical problems to be solved for the resulting complex, distributed and embedded applications include (1) the provision of high levels of flexibility in how, where, and when necessary processing and communication actions are performed on the underlying distributed platforms, and (2) the ability to continuously meet end user needs despite runtime variations in service locations, platform capabilities (e.g., remaining power on end devices), and user requirements. The `InfoFabric approach supports data-intensive, embedded applications with lightweight publish subscribe middleware. An end user dynamically subscribes to information channels when needed, and the InfoFabric applies the processing specified by the user. Processing and communication actions are dynamically mapped to the underlying distributed devices and machines. To attain high performance and meet embedded systems requirements like such as power, new compiler and runtime binary code generation methods dynamically generate and install code on the InfoFabric s platform. Code is specialized to match current user needs to available platform resources. To meet dynamic needs and deal with runtime changes in resource availability, resource management mechanisms associated with middleware carry the performance, usage, and needs information required for runtime adaptation of processing and communication actions. Because the InfoFabric middleware has detailed knowledge of the ways in which information should be transported and manipulated before delivering it to end users, it can employ techniques like automatic redundancy and replication, and service (re)location and (re)partitioning to match changing user needs and platform availabilities doc21193 none The embedding of logic-based controllers in modern technological systems such as automobiles, air and spacecraft, oil refineries and chemical processes, power generation plants and distribution networks, etc., is ubiquitous. Such systems are characterized by a coupling between continuous state dynamics and the discrete state dynamics of the logic based controllers, which are simultaneously responsible for interlock, sequencing and safety functionality. As performance and safety demands on technological systems increase, the design of logic based controllers encompassing all these functionalities simultaneously is increasingly complex. Once a design has been proposed, it is highly desirable to verify formally that the design does indeed implement all the desired functionalities. Ideally this verification step should take into account the continuous dynamics of the underlying technological system. This project is developing formal verification technologies that can accommodate such hybrid systems. Formal verification problems for hybrid systems can in principle be formulated and solved as mixed-integer optimization problems. However, for formal verification purposes, it is essential to guarantee that the global solution of the optimization problem is found in a finite number of iterations. This project is developing novel deterministic global optimization algorithms for hybrid systems in the continuous time domain that can provide such guarantees doc21194 none The goal of this project is to develop novel electroencephalogram (EEG) classification methods that result in a practical, real-time brain-computer interfaces (BCI) system. BCIs are hardware and software systems that sample EEG signals from electrodes placed on the scalp and extract patterns from EEG that indicate the mental activity being performed by the person. The long-term goal of this line of research is a new mode of communication for victims of diseases and injuries resulting in the loss of voluntary muscle control, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), high-level spinal cord injuries or severe cerebral palsy. The autonomic and intellectual functions of such subjects continue to be active. This can result in a locked-in syndrome in which a person is unable to communicate to the outside world. The interpretation of information contained in EEG may lead to a new mode of communication with which subjects can communicate with their care givers or directly control devices such as televisions, wheel chairs, speech synthesizers and computers. The objectives of this project are the design and testing of an EEG system for experimentation in real-time EEG pattern analysis constructed of off-the-shelf components for under $5,000, development of new techniques for a novel approach to studying the cognitive components of mental tasks and how they vary in time and across subjects, demonstration that real-time feedback to the subject will produce a biofeedback situation in which the subject can learn to modify their EEG to increase classification accuracy, proof by demonstration that accuracy and classification time will be sufficient for two persons to interact over the net in a simple game controlled by two BCI systems. The evaluation of the results of this project in light of these objectives will be based on the accuracy of EEG classification, the speed with which the classification can be performed, and the expense of the EEG system and of its maintenance and extendibility. The most significant impact of this project to the disabled community will be an easier to use, affordable BCI system. The inclusion of a wide range of mental tasks will result in a better understanding of which mental tasks are easiest for subjects to consistently perform and for detection algorithms to reliably identify. Better BCI systems will also be significant for other classes of users who can benefit from augmented communication interfaces in applications that require extremely fast commands. The significance of this project to the BCI research community is the specification and testing of the inexpensive system for experimentation with EEG signal analysis. The system based on off-the-shelf components and software to be developed and made publicly available is expected to allow a number of additional research groups to enter the BCI field. Also, this project s results on the analysis of cognitive components in EEG measured during a wide range of mental tasks will broaden the set of mental activities available to users of BCI systems doc21195 none During the last decade, a revolutionary new computer paradigm has emerged that, unlike conventional ones such as the von Neumann model, is based on quantum mechanics rather than classical physics. Quantum computers can, in principle, solve some hitherto intractable problems including factorization of large numbers, a central issue in secure data encryption. The quantum unit of information is the qubit and n qubits can store 2^n binary numbers simultaneously thus facilitating a type of massive parallelism. Qubits support powerful forms of interaction such as entanglement that have no counterpart in classical computers. On the other hand, quantum states are fragile, nanoscale entities, whose measurement is inherently nondeterministic and does not retrieve all 2^n stored numbers simultaneously. As a result, quantum and classical computers pose fundamentally different design problems. Although several promising physical technologies for quantum computers have been demonstrated, they can handle only a small number of qubits and their scalabilty is severely limited. The logic circuits they employ are essentially combinational quantum circuits, which function as a kind of co-processor within an otherwise classical computer. Once quantum computers with 15 -20 qubits can be built, quantum architectures that fully exploit their computational capabilities and also meet practical design and implementation constraints will be needed. These issues motivate the research proposed here, as well as related problems in classical computers that are implemented using nanoscale technologies such as molecular architectures. The overall goal of this proposal is to develop practical methods to design sequential quantum circuits that require much less hardware than current quantum circuits and can be more easily interfaced with classical architectures. The time-space trade-off achievable in classical logic design by using sequential rather than combinational methods is well-known. In the quantum domain, however, it is not obvious that such a trade-off is even possible, since the act of measuring a register s state can destroy its contents. As a result, little or no research has been directed at sequential design methods. However, recent theoretical work on quantum automata by Ambianis et al. demonstrates the feasibility of such methods and points to the possibility of substantial cost savings over conventional approaches. We propose to study the design of quantum sequential circuits starting with exponentially more efficient counters and culminating with application-specific processor designs that realize important applications such as Grover s search algorithm. We will pursue multiobjective optimization, including minimization of the number of qubits, the number of gates, or the circuit depth. We will also take into account the constraints imposed by the most promising physical technologies. Moreover, we will study ways to combine small quantum circuits with large classical circuits to obtain scalable hybrid architectures. Both quantum performance speed-up and conventional scalability then become possible. Novel hybrid designs of this type are expected to play a central role in interfacing quantum processors with classical computers, both conventional and nanoscale. As in traditional computer architecture studies, simulation and other computer-aided design (CAD) methods will, along with the appropriate analytic methods, serve as our principal research tools doc21196 none Increased computing power allows for three dimensional models to be represented as digital images, which can be manipulated quite easily. Such advanced computer imaging affects many professions, and is expected to result in fundamental changes in the way those professions organize and conduct their work. This research will study the way that Frank O. Gehry and his firm of architects uses three-dimensional computer modeling in the design of buildings and the changes that it creates in his architectural practice and in the construction companies that participate with him in his building projects. It will study both the Frank Gehry firm, Gehry Partners, as well as key contractors, consultants and subcontractors involved in the construction of several of his most innovative building designs. The objective is to understand how innovation in work practices, technology use and organizational structures accompany the use of advanced three-dimensional computer imaging in both the Gehry Partners firm as well as the contractors, consultants and subcontractors associated with his projects. The objective is to determine whether or not his innovative designs serve as a path creating event for his firm and companies working on his projects. Path creating events are building projects that require a firm to break from the standard routines established in its industry and develop new approaches to doing its work. An hypothesis to be explored in this research is that the designs by Gehry Partners require innovation in work practices, technology use, and organization structures by those associated with his building projects. Another hypothesis is that the path-creating behaviors developed for work on his projects is carried over by the construction firms into other subsequent projects that they work on, including those designed by other architects. This is a different approach to the study of innovation, since most prior studies have either followed the invention and development of a particular technology over time, or have followed how a given technology is adopted by a population of firms. Here, innovation is conceptualized as a cascading wake that is initiated by path creating designs and is carried over in multiple forms to other aspects of an industry (in this case the construction industry). The benefit is a better understanding of how innovation takes place across firms and the network of innovation that is spawned by the adoption of advanced computer technologies in a profession such as architecture doc21197 none We propose a research program to develop vision algorithms that infer human form and action from video sequences. The main feature of the approach is the use of an animated humanoid avatar to provide strong expectations on body shape and motion. A temporal sequence of body silhouette images is collapsed using line projections into four two-dimensional patterns that can be analyzed using robust signal processing techniques. To identify activities, patterns generated from video of a person are matched against spatio-temporal prototypes generated from the humanoid avatar. A moment-based method for coarse temporal and spatial pattern alignment brings model and data patterns into registration, so that they can be compared to classify viewpoint and activity. The resulting coarse alignment predicts 2D body topology and occlusion in each video frame, which enables a 2D nonrigid shape matching method based on thin-plate splines to identify and delineate body parts in each image. The avatar data also predicts which body dimension measurements can be made most reliably in which image frames, leading to efficient and accurate recovery of 3D body shape, pose and motion. We initially plan to focus on observations of human gait. Gait analysis shares many of the same challenges as the general activity analysis problem, namely high degree of freedom articulated motion, occlusion of body parts from 2D viewpoints, and idiosyncratic performance by different individuals. At the same time, the periodic nature of the activity simplifies temporal alignment of model and data sequences, and improves overall resiliance to noisy data. Success in vision-based gait analysis would enable applications ranging from motion capture for orthopedics to computation of human biometrics for smart rooms and surveillance doc21198 none The GRIDLOCK hypothesis is that use of a globally specified and locally interpreted policy language for specification of access-control policy can provide a new, unified approach to securing network applications. In particular, this approach can be used to specify network access-control policies and host access-control policies in combination to provide virtual private services. GRIDLOCK simultaneously provides more security to applications, greater scalability, and unification of network access control and host access control. Policies are specified in a new policy-expression language, modeled on the KeyNote trust-management language. This design supports compliance checking, with which credentials provided by a client can be validated to provide access to a resource. The applicability of this layer-crossing approach to multiple virtual private services is investigated. The research focuses on the development of formal semantics for the unified access-control policy, as well as a rigorous experimental investigation, using multiple example applications. The expected results include both the new policy-expression language and the demonstration that a scalable access-control model for networked applications is practical doc21199 none The rise of ubiquitous computing has prompted the need for a change in the way we store and access information. It calls for the study of data storage systems that distribute information over wide area networks, enabling users to store and access critical data in a continuously available and highly trustable fashion. The problem of data distribution, i.e., storing data in networked storage systems while achieving data reliability, confidentiality and performance is studied. Data distribution schemes based on (n,k) error correcting codes are investigated. The research will focus on two key questions: 1) how to achieve strong and computationally efficient data encryption while storing data over a distributed networked environment? and 2) how to place encoded data segments in networked systems, while considering the structure of the network topology, to enable high performance and reliable data retrieval? Insights and results from this research program will provide guidelines for efficient, secure and reliable data distribution schemes for wired and wireless networks, as well as make significant contributions to related theory study, such as cryptography, coding theory, graph theory and combinatorics. In addition, efforts will be made to integrate this research program into educational activities doc21200 none Growing pressure to collect information on the Internet has created a need for more sophisticated ways to characterize privacy rights and balance them against legitimate commercial and law enforcement objectives. A wide range of businesses now rely on their ability to collect information about online customers as a foundation of their added value in the market place. The use or potential use of the Internet for purposes such as child pornography and planning of hate crimes and terrorism have heighted interest in (and loosened regulations on) network monitoring. Theft of intellectual property has led to the development of numerous protection mechanisms; these often involve registrations and involuntary monitoring of various kinds. In order to make security easier (and explore a lucrative business model), a number of companies seek to act as third-party caretakers of private information such as keys, authentication secrets, and credit card numbers. Arrayed against these trends are many citizens incensed by aggressive means used to collect information from them and a variety of groups that champion privacy rights. There have been many advances in technologies both to aid information gathering and limit it. One important trend is toward more advanced systems for creating and managing digital credentials and authorization databases. In current practice credentials are sometimes `pushed (like presenting a ticket to get into a movie theater) sometimes `pulled (like getting access to an airplane seat with a `paperless ticket) and sometimes both (like making a purchase at a store with a credit card whose validity is confirmed online). These approaches have Internet-based analogs, and technical advances have increased the range of options considerably in recent years. For example, work on public key systems has advanced techniques for delegation based on chains of `pushed credentials and increased the automation of credential collection. Another important trend is toward more advanced systems for protecting privacy using anonymizing techniques. Tools such as onion routers and anonymous web publication servers provide some support but other techniques directly aid fine-grained mechanisms for obtaining privileges without exposing information unnecessarily. This work aims to develop formal support for characterizing privacy in the context of these advances. Efforts to improve access control systems and credential distribution have paid little attention to privacy mechanisms so far, resulting in systems that are good at propagating credentials reliably, but not tuned to do so within well-understood privacy constraints. This collaboration will build on our work in credential distribution and anonymity to create an integrated architecture and protocols to provide advanced access control within the limitations of privacy constraints doc21201 none In modern computer systems, computation is distributed over many host machines. Mutually untrusted machines and users coexist, and software is built using plug-and-play components downloaded from remote hosts. Multiple users share resources so it is critical to ensure, e.g., that private information is not compromised. Languages like Java and C# are designed to provide such security by enforcing encapsulation boundaries that restrict interdependencies and information flows between program components. Such boundaries are undercut, however, by ubiquitous pointer aliasing which can be maliciously exploited to leak sensitive information. This project studies ways to confine pointers to their intended scopes. The focus is on the interplay between static analysis and dynamic access control to achieve confinement. The technical goal is to find confinement regimes that can be used to assure secure information flow in systems implemented using dynamic binding, multithreading, inheritance, class-based encapsulation, and access control. Analyses and transformations to minimize run-time performance costs for confinement and access control are also investigated. This work will lead to better programming methods and tools for development of web-based services and other distributed applications that require a high level of assurance. The work will contribute to technology for implementing programming languages and for checking for security flaws in application programs doc21155 none This project will use subjectivity analysis to improve the accuracy of information extraction (IE) systems. IE systems are designed to extract facts, but they are prone to false hits from subjective statements such as accusations, allegations, suspicions, and opinions. The first phase of the research will create a subjectivity classifier that uses learning algorithms to identify linguistic features associated with subjective language. The classifier will use several natural language representations, including extraction patterns, N-grams, and noun phrases. The classifier will be embedded in a bootstrapping architecture so that it can learn from unannotated corpora, requiring only a small amount of annotated data to jumpstart the bootstrapping. In the second phase, the classifier will be integrated into an IE system to measure the impact of subjectivity classification on IE performance. Information extracted from objective sentences will be treated as facts, but information extracted from subjective sentences will be labeled as uncertain or discarded. This research will produce a better understanding of how subjective language is expressed and the role that context plays in recognizing subjectivity. The potential impact of the research is to produce more accurate subjectivity classifiers and to demonstrate that subjectivity analysis can improve the performance of IE systems doc21203 none The general research goals will be to develop scheduling algorithms, to provide provable performance guarantees, and to explore lower bounds defining the limits of achievable performance. The performance of an algorithm on a given instance will be evaluated by comparing the algorithm s achieved benefit to the maximum possible benfit which could have been achieved on the same instance. The ratio between teh achievable benefit and the achieved benefit will be considered over an entire class of instances; the worst-case value of this ration is commonly called the competeitive ration of an algorithm. The specific research goals will be two-fold. The first direction of research will be to develop additional parameterization which can be used to describe the competitiveness of schedulers with finer granularity. The second goal is to better understand how subtle changes in the underlying modelaffect the achievable performance doc21204 none in Real-Time Embedded System Design Power-manageable hardware devices are essential for reducing system energy consumption. In order to benefit maximally from such devices, new and innovative approaches must be developed to fully exploit the dynamically adjustable power v.s. delay characteristics. The proposed research aims at developing techniques employed at the system level to reduce energy consumption in battery-powered real-time embedded systems composed of power-manageable hardware resources. This project strives to obtain a fundamental understanding on the effect of power-manageable resources on both performance and energy consumption during the execution of real-time tasks. Non-ideal features of real-world power-manageable devices will be considered. The major activities include i) devising high-level allocation and scheduling schemes for systems composed of power-manageable devices, ii) designing and analyzing voltage scheduling algorithms for variable-voltage processors, and iii) developing techniques to predict power energy consumed by hardware resources at the micro-architectural level. Training students to prepare them for energy-conscious design challenges is also a major component of the project, which will be achieved through course development and active involvements of both undergraduate and graduate students in the research doc21205 none Growing pressure to collect information on the Internet has created a need for more sophisticated ways to characterize privacy rights and balance them against legitimate commercial and law enforcement objectives. A wide range of businesses now rely on their ability to collect information about online customers as a foundation of their added value in the market place. The use or potential use of the Internet for purposes such as child pornography and planning of hate crimes and terrorism have heighted interest in (and loosened regulations on) network monitoring. Theft of intellectual property has led to the development of numerous protection mechanisms; these often involve registrations and involuntary monitoring of various kinds. In order to make security easier (and explore a lucrative business model), a number of companies seek to act as third-party caretakers of private information such as keys, authentication secrets, and credit card numbers. Arrayed against these trends are many citizens incensed by aggressive means used to collect information from them and a variety of groups that champion privacy rights. There have been many advances in technologies both to aid information gathering and limit it. One important trend is toward more advanced systems for creating and managing digital credentials and authorization databases. In current practice credentials are sometimes `pushed (like presenting a ticket to get into a movie theater) sometimes `pulled (like getting access to an airplane seat with a `paperless ticket) and sometimes both (like making a purchase at a store with a credit card whose validity is confirmed online). These approaches have Internet-based analogs, and technical advances have increased the range of options considerably in recent years. For example, work on public key systems has advanced techniques for delegation based on chains of `pushed credentials and increased the automation of credential collection. Another important trend is toward more advanced systems for protecting privacy using anonymizing techniques. Tools such as onion routers and anonymous web publication servers provide some support but other techniques directly aid fine-grained mechanisms for obtaining privileges without exposing information unnecessarily. This work aims to develop formal support for characterizing privacy in the context of these advances. Efforts to improve access control systems and credential distribution have paid little attention to privacy mechanisms so far, resulting in systems that are good at propagating credentials reliably, but not tuned to do so within well-understood privacy constraints. This collaboration will build on our work in credential distribution and anonymity to create an integrated architecture and protocols to provide advanced access control within the limitations of privacy constraints doc21206 none The constant enhancements in capabilities of palmtop, embedded and wearable devices, together with the advent of pervasive connectivity, represents a new paradigm for interaction among devices. A new vista is open for research in the area of mobile data management where mobile devices gather and exchange information from not just wired sources, but also their environment and one another. Each device is both a data source and a data consumer pursuing its individual and collective tasks. New ideas are proposed for a research program aimed at realizing ubiquitous computing systems based on the cooperation of autonomous, dynamic and adaptive components (hardware as well as software) which are located in vicinity of one another. This is significantly different from ``infrastructure-based mobile client server computing between PDAs and network services. The proposed research will enable a new class of applications that effectively exploit mobility and pervasive computing. New prototypes and applications will be built in the context of mobile information management within dynamic communities of ad-hoc services and devices. The research team is part of the eBiquity research group located at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and will closely interact with collaborators from industry including IBM, Fujitsu, and HP doc21142 none Mislove & Pavlovic -- This project focuses on mathematical foundations and design methodologies for embedded hybrid systems (EHS). The essential feature of such systems is that software components interact not only with each other, but also with the physical world, through sensors and actuators. The discrete dynamics of computation thus adds up with the continuous dynamics of physical systems. Hybrid systems are an attempt to capture this double dynamism in a unified framework. To limit the interference of the formidable complexities of dynamical systems of both types, the continuous trajectories are usually encapsulated into states, at the static points of the discrete computational paths. The methods of continuous mathematics are then simply combined with the methods of discrete mathematics to analyze such combined systems. The starting point of the planned research is a belief that the burgeoning field of coalgebra provides methods and techniques that will allow uniform representation and implementation methods for continuous and discrete objects and aspects. While algebraic methods allow specifying and programming of finite objects and inductive structures, such as expressions or well-founded trees, coalgebraic methods allow specifying and programming infinite objects, as coinductive structures: they include automata and various state machines on the one hand, as well as iterative function systems, analytic functions and operators, and real numbers on the other hand. In a real sense, coinduction permeates analysis just like induction permeates arithmetic. The difference is that the latter has been recognized as a fundamental logical principle a long time ago, whereas the the former has been recognized only recently, although it has appeared implicitly for some time (e.g. in most existence-of-the-solutions theorems, although it has been recognized as backwards induction in game theory). The task is now to make explicit and systematize the use of coinductive and coalgebraic methods, and to apply them in analysis and design of embedded hybrid systems doc21208 none The rapid accumulation of large collections of digital images has created the need for efficient and intelligent schemes for image retrieval. Since humans are the ultimate users of most retrieval systems, it is important to organize the contents semantically, according to meaningful categories. This requires an understandingof the important semantic categories that humans use for image classification, and the extraction of meaningful image features that can discriminate between these categories. Recent research efforts have addressed the first problem, but the second remains quite elusive. This research effort is aimed at addressing this second problem, that is, the extraction of low-level image features that can be correlated with high-level semantics and used to capture the semantic meaning of an image. The key to this research is the development of a new methodology for segmenting images, based on perceptual models and principles about the processing of texture and color information. This involves the identification of semantically important, spatially adaptive, low-level color and texture features that can be combined algorithmically to obtain image segmentations that convey semantic information. The same perceptual models and principles can be used to relate the features of the segmented regions (color and texture features, as well as segment location, size, and boundary shape) to semantic concepts that can be used for content-based image retrieval. An integral part of this research is the design and execution of subjective experiments in order to obtain some key parameters for the color and texture features, as well as for linking low-level image features to image semantics doc21209 none ion, test selection, test derivation, test application to concrete implementations, and the evaluation of test results. Tools are developed on top of the existing CHARON framework for creating hybrid system models. Case-study work based on real system specifications and benefit from interaction with practicing engineers working for Honeywell, a leader in the development of advanced avionics systems. One issue is how to integrate the techniques into development processes that conform to the DO-178B avionics certification process. Among the broader impacts that are anticipated from this work are (1) an increase in awareness of and actual use of formal methods by practicing developers, and (2) an acceleration of the safety-critical embedded system development process that will enable the creation of safer, more reliable systems with shorter development cycle times doc21210 none Embedded systems require maximum performance from a processor within significant constraints in power consumption and chip cost. Using software pipelining, high-performance digital signal processors can often exploit considerable instruction-level parallelism (ILP), and thus significantly improve performance. However, software pipelining sometimes fails to utilize the processor efficiently and may hinder the goals of low power consumption and chip cost. The problems with software pipelining can be ameliorated by using advanced compiler loop transformation techniques. However, current methods for applying loop transformations are lacking. Metrics for applying loop transformations do not model high-performance digital signal processing (DSP) architectures and the effects of software pipelining effectively. This research will address the above problems by developing and experimentally validating the following: 1) A performance metric that accurately models software-pipelined loop performance on high-performance DSP architectures. 2) A prediction of the register pressure of a software-pipelined loop before high-level loop transformations are applied. As a result of this research, more ILP will be exploited in DSP applications, resulting in an increase in performance and a savings in the overall energy required to execute an application. Improvements in performance and energy usage will allow better and more computationally expensive algorithms to be used in embedded systems doc21199 none The rise of ubiquitous computing has prompted the need for a change in the way we store and access information. It calls for the study of data storage systems that distribute information over wide area networks, enabling users to store and access critical data in a continuously available and highly trustable fashion. The problem of data distribution, i.e., storing data in networked storage systems while achieving data reliability, confidentiality and performance is studied. Data distribution schemes based on (n,k) error correcting codes are investigated. The research will focus on two key questions: 1) how to achieve strong and computationally efficient data encryption while storing data over a distributed networked environment? and 2) how to place encoded data segments in networked systems, while considering the structure of the network topology, to enable high performance and reliable data retrieval? Insights and results from this research program will provide guidelines for efficient, secure and reliable data distribution schemes for wired and wireless networks, as well as make significant contributions to related theory study, such as cryptography, coding theory, graph theory and combinatorics. In addition, efforts will be made to integrate this research program into educational activities doc21212 none Intrusion detection (ID) is an imperfect science. With state-of-the-art techniques, simple attacks with unambiguous signatures can be detected fairly easily, but trying to diagnose more complex attacks often results in a flurry of false positives and undetected attacks. This situation would be improved if ID systems could work together, so that the weaknesses of one would be covered by the strengths of another. However, most of the recent work in combining ID results has focused on the protocol and architecture of the systems. Even a process as simple as corroboration--attempting to agree on a single attack diagnosis--is not assured with only protocol and architecture. Without an underlying body of theory, efforts to combine the results of multiple ID systems will still fail. The LATTICE plan is to define a consistent and comprehensive way to combine the results of multiple ID systems. The research will employ a graph theory approach to representing the conclusions of individual ID systems. Operators can be defined to combine the graph representations of ID diagnoses in rigorous ways that can be comprehended and analyzed. The results generated by these methods can be understood as the conclusions of the multiple systems, taken as a whole. The outcome of this approach is a rigorous unifying of the abilities and strengths of all the involved ID systems doc21213 none Ad hoc wireless networks have the potential of supporting seamless anytime-anywhere access to communications and computing resources on a very large scale. Such networks, while extremely compelling for applications, pose profound problems of security and quality-of-service provisioning. Ad hoc networks rely on cooperative mechanisms that adapt to the dynamic changes in network topology due to the mobility of the nodes, which are often constrained by energy limitations. Consequently, these networks are difficult to secure and extremely vulnerable to attacks. The overall objective of the research is to develop a scalable and adaptive framework for integrating security and quality-of-service (QoS) into the critical components of routing and mobility management in ad hoc wireless networks for both commercial and military applications. A scalable computer simulation environment is developed to analyze the security strength of an ad hoc network with respect to its ability to maintain quality-of-service under a variety of attack scenarios, mobility patterns, and network traffic loadings. The research investigates the security limitations of existing routing and mobility management schemes and extends these schemes to incorporate security-inclusive QoS attributes. The focus of the research is on the critical tradeoffs among security and traditional QoS parameters such as performance, energy management, and availability. The research investigates security mechanisms that can prevent or mitigate the effects of hostile attacks without incurring excessive overhead doc21214 none Janusz Konrad Boston University This research is concerned with the processing of visual information captured by a video camera. To date, image sequences have been typically analyzed and processed in groups of two frames; by differentiating one frame from another, short-term image dynamics can be measured, such as changed areas (e.g., occlusions) or pixel displacements. Although the approach has been very successful to date (e.g., MPEG compression standards), further gains are difficult to attain based on two image frames only. This research project offers a different approach to the analysis of image sequences - one based on a joint processing of multiple image frames at a time. This joint treatment of, for example, 10 or 20 frames is expected to result in new gains in video compression, more reliable video database querying, and more accurate detection of innovations (occlusion and exposure areas) that are of interest in surveillance applications. The primary problem attacked in the project is the joint space-time segmentation of an image sequence into object tunnels , i.e., 3-D volumes carved out in the space of horizontal, vertical and temporal coordinates by a moving object. The estimation of object tunnels is approached as a volume competition problem, and solved using active-surface evolution equations embedded into the level-set solution framework. In order to model motion of points within each object tunnel, a new spatially-parametric, temporally-quadratic motion model is studied. Various cost functionals relating object-tunnel intensities to the underlying motion are investigated. Since the standard volume competition can only extract a single moving object from background, an extension to more objects by means of multiple repelling surfaces evolving simultaneously is studied as well doc21215 none This project will develop authorization mechanisms for secure information access by a large community of users in an open environment. The research problem is to formalize the trust that is associated with each user for granting privileges of access to data warehouse and the World Wide Web. Evidence is used to prove certain propertied of a user in order to build a trust model. Evidence is formalized and a computational model for the reliability of evidence is developed. This research combines the concepts of role-based access control, user behaviors and profiles, mathematical theory of evidence, and data mining. This research contributes to the design and develo0pment of a trust-enhanced role mapping server, For adaptive authorization, this server cooperates with existing role-based access control mechanisms. A series of experiments are planned to study the performance issues of the trust model prototype. Efficient and adaptive algorithms for role assignment will be developed as a result of these experimental studies. This research will provide a framework for secure authorization systems within applications in the semantic web, e-commerce, airport security procedures, intelligence gathering and policymaking in military, homeland security and database access in general doc21216 none The general area within which this research is performed is known as computational learning theory. The starting point for research in this area is typically the definition of mathematical models of what the term ``learning may mean in a variety of settings. The concept of learning captured by these models is then formally analyzed, frequently leading to algorithms for solving learning problems within the models as well as to proofs that certain problems cannot be solved. These learning-theoretic models and results lend support to more applied work in machine learning, which in turn has demonstrated utility in applications ranging from e-commerce to advanced research on vehicles that drive themselves. This project adds to the existing body of learning-theoretic knowledge in a number of ways, including analysis of a relatively new model called Probably Exactly Correct learning, development of an algorithm that learns arguably the broadest class of functions yet shown to be learnable (majority of AC0 functions), and work toward extending hardness results for learnability of a fundamental class, the class of parity functions. The key tool used in these and other project tasks is Fourier analysis of classes of functions. While the primary purpose of the Fourier analysis is to support research into learning questions, a side benefit is the enhancement of our understanding of several interesting classes of functions, such as majority of AC0. Furthermore, this project provides a stimulating research experience to undergraduate and master s students at a university that, from an NSF perspective, is largely an undergraduate institution doc21217 none ing the details of specific mobile agent technologies, and encompasses static and dynamic analysis techniques. Second, a prototype system that supports the security analyses in the framework will be designed and implemented. Third, experimental subjects will be collected and experimentation will be performed. The experiments performed will allow for evaluating the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed framework on real examples defined for existing mobile agent systems doc21218 none Recent progress by the investigators in the simulation of incompressible viscous flow modeled by the Navier-Stokes equations and their visco-elastic and visco-plastic generalizations in two and three dimensions has led to the proposed work in challenging three-dimensional problems. Specifically, the authors intend to study the direct simulation of pressure-driven particulate flow in three dimensional pipes and horizontal drilling wells, the fluid being either Newtonian or non-Newtonian with the number of particles ranging in the thousands. They will also study the direct numerical simulation of blood flow around three-leaflet prosthetic heart valves. These problems require methodological advances such as the numerical treatment of collisions, the motion of non-spherical objects in viscous fluids and the coupling of fictitious domain and Chimera type methods in order to improve the treatment of boundary layers. During the past six years, the investigators of this award have developed a methodology well suited to numerical simulation of flow in regions with moving boundaries. The resulting methodology has been successfully applied by the authors and other scientists and engineers to the solution of difficult problems from Sciences and Engineering. Among these problems are the direct simulation of sedimentation, fluidization and particle transport phenomena, which play an important role in various areas in Sciences and Engineering (Petroleum Engineering, Food Industry,...). The main goals of this project are to (1) improve the existing methodology so that it can address fluid particle interaction for particles of relatively complicated shape, (2) develop realistic models and efficient methods for the computational treatment of the collisions taking place in fluid particle interactions, (3) apply the resulting methodology to an important problem in cardio-vascular medicine namely, the simulation of blood flow heart valve interaction and (4) simulate slurry transportation in horizontal pipelines and wells, an important issue in enhanced oil recovery. In the heart valve project, the goal is to use the simulation tool to design artificial heart valves generating much less thrombin (a natural blood thickener causing artery clotting) than the ones currently used, which require the patient to take blood thinning drugs which have in general health damaging side effects. The hope is that with an improved design the need for blood thinners will be substantially reduced if not eliminated. This part of project will be done in collaboration with cardio-vascular specialists (including heart surgeons) in the USA and Europe doc21219 none Rinard, Martin The project will investigate a new program analysis, interaction analysis, and a new set of implementation techniques to support future generations of embedded systems. Instead of executing low-level code whose sole responsibility is to control a specific piece of hardware, these future systems will be built in a layered fashion, with the core control software surrounded by outer layers of software that integrate the core software and the device that it controls into a larger integrated, distributed system of devices and users. The key challenge associated with realizing this vision is the need to effectively apply implementation mechanisms that enable the outer layers to share the hardware device without disrupting the actions of the time and safety critical core code. The economics of developing large software systems will ensure that most of the outer layers will consist of standard, off-the-shelf software components from the world of laptop, desktop, and server computing. The outer layer software will therefore have been developed to use implementation mechanisms that are unsuited for use in time-critical control software. Nevertheless, the core software and the outer layer software will need to interact. With standard implementation mechanisms, interactions mediated by objects shared with outer layers could easily lead to unacceptable delays and a loss of real-time control in the core. The focus of this research is the development and investigation of new interaction analysis algorithms that extracts the interaction patterns between the core and outer layers, then uses these patterns to classify objects into several categories. Each category can then use an implementation mechanism appropriate for how it is used in the system. The end result is a system in which the outer layers and core software effectively cooperate without a loss of safety or predictability. The envisioned analysis has several properties that will make it suitable for this application. First, it is capable of extracting a meaningful result with an analysis of only part of the program. Second, it can effectively analyze the multithreaded programs that come from the integration of the outer layers and the core. Third, the partial analysis is goal-driven to extract the required information with an analysis of only those parts of the program required to obtain the result doc21220 none Traditional computer security assumes a paranoid model of the world resulting in a necessity for each transaction to be secured through encryption or similar techniques. However, a typical human transaction is not paranoid, specifically between trusted parties. A similar notion of trust exists for system level transactions such as an e-commerce application. Trust obviates the need for computationally expensive security techniques. Trust has traditionally been defined at system and or transaction level. The proposed research develops a much lower level definition of trust --specifically a program s self-assessment of its own trustworthiness. This definition of trust captures any deviations from the expected norm for the program flow behavior. Each point in program can be reached through a set of control paths, one of which is instantiated by a specific set of input. In a compromised program, however, an entirely new control path leads to the exploited program point. Such departures from the norm lower the program s trust value. An affirmation of a norm control path can raise the program s trust. When the trust value falls below a certain transaction defined threshold, the program can raise an exception to invoke a system level intrusion detection utility. The compiler is responsible to construct a set of valid, expected paths for each program point. The processor microarchitecture is responsible for interpreting and verifying the compiler generated set of valid control paths against the instantiated control paths. This research will develop compiler technology for the analysis and specification of valid control paths. The required microarchitecture support for this activity will also be explored. The expected impact of this research will be to provide a robust trust value from the program components of a transaction, which in turn makes the system level trust reflect the system state more accurately. This should allow for an easier integration of trust paradigm with the traditional security techniques doc21221 none This award by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research by Thomas C. Flood, Department of Chemistry, University of Southern California, in fundamental studies of alkane activation and functionalization. They are particularly interested in understanding the weak interactions of alkanes with electrophilic metal centers. These sigma complexed alkane intermediates may play a key role in many primary reactions involved in catalysis. One catalytic transformation Flood is concentrating on is the oxidation of methane to methanol using a rhodium or osmium catalyst. A flexible triamine ligand such as 1,4,7-triazacyclononane (tacn or Cn) complexes and stabilizes the catalyst and will not decompose under the reaction conditions New catalysts and processes may be designed as a result of detailed understanding of the way alkanes interact with metal centers,. The efficient conversion of alkanes to alcohols is a longstanding goal of the chemical industry. Students will be trained in the synthesis, characterization and mechanistic studies of these potential catalysts and catalyst precursors doc21222 none Assurance for distributed systems is based on constantly strengthening the protective boundaries that prevent and detect unauthorized access to computer systems. Accountability, ensuring that principals are liable for their actions, is an equally important issue. This project investigates a programming language approach to tracking accountability in distributed systems, specifically by extending the Java language to maintain a fine-grained audit trail for accountability purposes. The proposed approach is based on associating secrecy (access control) and integrity information with data as it is retrieved and copied over the network. Distributed access control is not just enforced at one point in the network where the data is accessed, but may be enforced wherever a copy of the data is accessed. Distributed information flow types enforce access rights and enforce a form of causality that supports tracking of tracking of accountability for principals. In recognition of the fact that communication may be over an insecure network, sensitive data is assumed to be virtually signed or encrypted, for integrity and secrecy guarantees, respectively. The computational burden of the ubiquitous application of cryptographic operations is avoided through the use of cryptographic types for static checking where possible doc21223 none This project is fundamental research to improve the performance of intelligent software agents, based on the observation that an agent s past experiences are a valuable and generally underutilized database. The goal is to produce algorithms that make stronger use of data than existing reinforcement learning algorithms, enabling a view of the agent s stored experiences as a repository that can be mined for performance-improving information. More generally, the agent may choose to use data obtained by observing other agents, or even from mining the web. The impact of this research may be felt in many areas. For example, software learning agents can be expected to learn in a much more human-like manner; noteworthy experiences will be remembered, and their influence on future performance will not attenuate. There will be no sampling requirements on the data, so it will be possible to learn from watching others and possible to use repositories of stored data to learn new behaviors. Among the likely practical applications of this work are network management and electronic commerce doc21224 none Models are the foundations of science and engineering. Well known examples of models can be found in physics, geology, economy, astronomy, weather forecasting, etc. It is important that for each application the correct model is used. Indeed, the progress of science relies on finding models that describe accurately the main features of the application. Frequently models must be radically adjusted to take into account new technological developments or to make the models more accurate. Most models used in trusted systems are over 20 years old, that is before the introduction of the internet, computer viruses, the World Wide Web, hacking, denial of service attacks, poorly tested operating systems, etc. Since computer systems changed dramatically during this period, the models used for computer security are outdated and often unrealistic. There is a need to start a process of analyzing whether some of the earlier models are still appropriate, and if not, adapt them. If one does not address this issue the gap between reality and research is going to widen, making research in this area irrelevant. The goals are: - to critically analyze existing models for trusted systems, - to propose new models using techniques from such disciplines as computational complexity, discrete mathematics, and economics. - to compare these models and evaluate them doc21225 none Oscar R. Gonzalez Hybrid Modeling and Analysis of Error Recovery in Safety Critical Flight Control Systems Embedded computer systems have become an essential component of technological products and systems. An example is the safety-critical real-time computer systems on board the Boeing 777, a digital fly-by-wire aircraft. To completely certify that safety-critical systems will operate as intended requires the validation and verification of both the software and the hardware. An additional challenge is the use of safety critical systems in harsh environments that produce electromagnetic interference (EMI) such as high intensity radiated fields (HIRF) or lightning. Under these harsh conditions, it is known that triple modular redundancy, error correcting codes, and other fault-tolerant computing techniques are of limited use, since multiple fault containment regions are near-simultaneously affected by correlated or common-mode faults. The project is developing enhanced models and analysis tools from the ground up, that is, it starts with models of the physical system, the controller, and the environment in order to study the stability of closed-loop systems and the safety properties of embedded software. To make sure that the theoretical foundations being developed are sound, a particular class of systems is considered: computer systems with error recovery, which control physical processes and mitigate the effects of common-mode faults. The external events are triggered with a certain probability by the presence of a harsh electromagnetic disturbance. The internal events are generated by the error recovery logic. This class of systems is hybrid since it includes the continuous-time dynamics of the process under control and of the electromagnetic environment, the discrete-time dynamics of the controller, and the models for the transitions. The models and tools being developed are enhancements of switched system models and analysis tools. Their capabilities are validated together and independently with a particular flight control system. The controller is being implemented using an architecture that has been evolving for the past 30 years: rollback recovery. This architecture has been widely used in digital process control systems and in real-time database transaction systems. In particular, a rollback error recovery architecture using dual-lock step processors is part of a prototype of a recoverable computer system (RCS) being investigated by a NASA-industry partnership to deal with transient or soft common-mode faults. The new models will be validated using data from NASA Langley Research Center s HIRF Laboratory via a Cooperative Research Agreement. The analytical tools developed in this project will allow system designers to quickly evaluate new recoverable computer architectures before doing the more expensive and time consuming physical tests doc21226 none The purpose of this research is to design and analyze discrete algorithms approximating solutions to combinatorial optimization problems.Because many of these problems are NP-hard,an exact solution is often not feasible; in such cases approximation algorithms are a viable alternative.In addition to attacking approximation problems that seem to require new strategies, another main goal is to investigate the applicability of design principles de- veloped successfully for traditional discrete optimization problems to com- parable tasks occurring in other areas.In any ase,a rigorous performance analysis is always intended. A .rst focus is the #P-complete permanent problem,which is of much importance in statistical physics and combinatorics.Rough approximations (up to an exponential factor)can be obtained in deterministic polynomial time and possibly even mu h faster on a parallel machine.Such a solution would allow to solve the outstanding bipartite matching problem of parallel computing.Even though the matching problem is easy for a sequential machine,it is very hallenging to coordinate the many processors of a parallel machine to worksimultaneously and e .ciently on the same matching.It is also proposed to attackthe parallel matching problem with a novel version of more traditional network .ow methods. Another theme of this proposal is the approximation of NP-hard opti- mization problems by traditional methods like lo al search,the comparison method,semide .nite optimization,or some combination of these.It is even proposed to investigate the approximation of some problems in P,as this could have interesting applications in parallel computing doc21191 none What is the ``typical traffic of a link? What constitutes ``abnormal traffic, and therefore warrants an alert for suspicious behavior (intrusion)? How will the Internet look like next year? These are the questions that the project focuses on. It has two major thrusts: The first is to find patterns in the network traffic, and the second is to find trends in the Internet evolution. The technical merit is in the synergy of the networking and data mining fields, pushing the envelope in both: The networking field will enjoy novel insights and fast tools to predict the network performance. The data mining field will benefit from new problems and new tools (using fractals, power laws, large-graph algorithms), that will be stress-tested on multiple Gigabytes of real, network data. The broader impact of this work will be a novel insight of the network behavior at the micro and macro level. In addition, the work will explore our ability to predict the network behavior and its evolution. As a result, the work will provide new tools to identify abnormal behavior, that could be due to a security breach like a DDoS attack doc21228 none Recently a new generation of P2P systems, offering distributed hash table (DHT) functionality, have been proposed. These systems greatly improve the scalability and exact-match accuracy of P2P systems, but offer only the exact-match query facility. This proposal outlines a research agenda for building complex query facilities on top of these DHT-based P2P systems. There are three defining directions of the proposed research agenda: Core Algebra: Explore the implementation of a core set of algebraic query operators that run over DHTs in a P2P network. DHT APIs: Identify the minimum set of primitives and functions that need to be implemented by a P2P network in order to efficiently support the query operators. Query Optimization: P2P networks are often distributed across slow network links, and may benefit from distributed database optimizations like the use of semi-joins. However, it is not clear how the various ideas in the query processing literature map into the P2P context, particularly when using DHTs for routing during query processing. This proposal intends to study the costs and tradeoffs of various alternatives for the query plan space in this context. Simulation of large networks will be used to study the proposed techniques at Internet scale doc21229 none Columbia U Yannis Tsividis This research explores the possibilities of performing linear analog signal processing using systems which are internally nonlinear. The context is fully integrated systems, fabricated on a single silicon chip, containing a digital signal processor or a computer plus an analog signal processor; the latter is often a necessary part of the interface to the physical world. Conventional linear techniques for implementing analog processors often result in very large energy consumption, which rules them out in many practical cases. We are investigating the use of internally nonlinear processors to bypass those limitations. The applications of this work extend from wireless communications and computer hardware to consumer products to biomedical intrumentation. The use of input-output linear signal processors which are permitted to be internally nonlinear allows the internal signals to have, for a large input signal range, a magnitude well above that of noise and interference, while at the same time remaining safely below overload levels. The result is an adequate signal-to-noise ratio over the entire input range, without requiring large power dissipation and chip area. A number of other related ideas are being investigated as well. One is the use of dynamic biasing, in which the bias levels of dynamical analog circuits, such as filters, are dynamically varied depending on the signal level; the other is the use of multiple signal processors, each being placed dynamically in the path of the signal as required. Since output disturbances would normally occur when the internal parameters of a dynamical system are varied, a key consideration in this research is how to eliminate such disturbances or prevent them from occurring doc21230 none The primary goal of this research is to produce practical codes that provide unequaled robustness, approaching the performance predicted by compound channel information theory for linear Gaussian channels. The resulting channel codes will find application in many scenarios including wired and wireless broadcast, wireless local area networks, asymmetric digital subscriber lines, military anti-jam communications, and frequency hopped communications. Results from compound channel information theory state that a single code exists that supports communication over every channel that has a mutual information above the information rate of the code. Thus, once the transmitter power spectrum is fixed, a code need not be specialized to a particular frequency selective channel in a single antenna system or a particular space-time path-gain matrix in a multiple antenna system. While this theoretical result is more that thirty years old, practical code design has focused to date on a weaker notion of robustness, that of average performance according to a statistical channel model, such as Rayleigh fading. The power of the code design approach taken in this research is that the code design is independent of statistical assumptions about the channel. The code simply works on every channel that it possibly could. A second goal of this research is to develop codes that support multiple rates to different users. Here again, information theory (this time information theory for degraded broadcast channels) lays out the limits of performance. Our research will closely approach these performance limits by applying turbo codes to the concept of superposition coding for the degraded broadcast channel doc21231 none This project will develop a comprehensive framework for security management using access control models for distributed applications in a heterogeneous multidomain environment. Such systems are expected to play a critical role in a broad range of Web-based applications. The proposed framework will be built upon role-based access control (RBAC) models. The use of roles for security management has several well-recognized advantages. Noted among them is their flexibility in representing key organizational functions while directly supporting the security policies of an organization. Due to the dynamic nature of distributed applications and the heterogeneity aspects of the underlying multidomain environment, development of the proposed framework poses several daunting challenges. The main challenges addressed in this proposal include: -the development of a Petri-net based dynamic RBAC model that incorporates time constraints. This task also includes modeling a variety of security policies and developing efficient analytical techniques for evaluating the correctness criteria for this model. -the development of an RBAC formalism that ensures secure interoperability in a heterogeneous multidomain environment for supporting distributed applications. This task also includes designing optimal mediation policies to manage conflicts among domain roles and tasks belonging to applications doc21232 none Data summarization and estimation can serve as a useful tool for a diverse set of applications ranging from traditional database query optimization to OLAP applications and the exploration of large data sets. During the course of this project, data estimation and summarization techniques will be developed for datasets with different modalities: point datasets, datasets containing objects with spatial extents, and stream datsets. The approach is specifically based on the use of histograms in different contexts. One of the main problems of applying estimation techniques in a database management system is the unknown characteristic of the distribution of the data that will populate a given DBMS. In fact, in order for such a technique to be useful, the estimation technique should be effective for different kinds of data distributions and query patterns. This is because a DBMS is used for a variety of applications resulting in a wide spectrum of data that populates the database. A new estimation technique called the golden estimator has been identified that employs cumulative probability distributions for creating histograms and captures the underlying data distribution. This technique can also be used to adapt to changes in the query patterns. For objects with spatial extents, this project will lead to histograms derived from Euler s formulation for graphs. For stream datasets, a variety of approaches will be explored that are amenable to maintain histograms dynamically. The research results will be evaluated in the context of the Alexandria Digital Library and the Digital Campus projects at UCSB doc21233 none ing video as a fundamental and fully functional database data type. Tools for video content analysis, feature extraction and high-dimensional indexing will be integrated into the test-bed facility, which will then be used to address several research challenges in the management of real-time streamed video data, including multi-feature nearest neighbor queries, feature-based query processing, video operators, buffer management for streaming video, and continuous video streaming with real-time constraints. The system will provide standardized methods for integrating components and measuring their performance, and will be furnished with a large collection of indexed videos. The underlying database management system, video-processing tools, and video data will form a complete environment for the video database research community, providing an effective platform for implementation, validation and evaluation of new video database technology doc21234 none Composing Data-Rich Embedded Systems the Easy Way ------------------------------------------------- Arvind Krishnamurthy and Henrik Nilsson Department of Computer Science, Yale University Embedded computing increasingly takes place in a sensor rich environment where the acquisition of raw information is much easier than its interpretation. In addition to building components to process this data, embedded systems programmers must also arrange the communication among potentially hundreds of components, distributing computation to the processing elements so as to minimize communication costs and maximize responsiveness, and scheduling of the processing elements to adapt to changing priorities and communication patterns. These challenges must be addressed at the system level rather than the processor level. This project develops a framework for composing distributed, data-rich embedded systems that automates many of the low-level process allocation and scheduling tasks. It takes place against a backdrop of a next generation humanoid robot currently being developed at Yale. The robot contains a significant number of processors connected in a heterogeneous fashion. The project addresses two fundamental research issues. The first is the use of modern programming language techniques to address critical embedded system concerns such as composability and dynamic configuration change. The second is improving overall system performance by exploiting high level system knowledge in the run-time system. The end result will be a design methodology that will enable rapid and reliable construction of complex data-rich interactive systems doc21235 none INTERDISCIPLINARY WORKSHOP ON REPUTATION MECHANISMS IN ONLINE COMMUNITIES This is an interdisciplinary academic symposium on Reputation Systems. The production of trust is an important requirement for forming and growing open online communities. Online reputation reporting systems, such as eBay s well-known feedback mechanism, have emerged as an important trust building mechanism in such settings. The rising practical importance of online reputation systems invites rigorous research in this largely virgin territory. Do these systems truly promote efficient market outcomes? To what extent can they be manipulated by strategic buyers and sellers? What is the best way to design them? How should buyers (and sellers) use the information provided by such mechanisms in their decision-making process? This is just a small subset of unanswered questions, which invite exciting and valuable research. This workshop will bring together scholars and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines whose research informs the analysis and design of reputation systems. The workshop chairs will prepare a report summarizing the conclusions of the symposium. The report will provide a snapshot of the current state of the field and an agenda for future research doc21236 none This research addresses an important set of questions arising in optimization of industrial systems for network design, data classification, facility location, and scheduling. A fundamental problem arising in all these areas is called set covering. Set covering problems range from easy to very difficult and it is the more difficult ones that form the focus of this research. The problems studied are approached through rigorous and mathematical methods. This research studies several approaches to the design of algorithms for set covering problems arising in the areas of network design, facility location and data classification, mostly based on mathematical programming techniques. The focus is on the study of complexity and approximability of set covering and its extensions in network design and classification, including the design of general algorithmic techniques and the analysis of mathematical programming formulations and relaxations. A special emphasis is made on set covering problems defined on directed graphs, which is an area where very few results are available in the literature doc21237 none This research will investigate the design of a peer-to-peer network built around secure coprocessors. The network, named Marianas, will be designed to have a level of resiliency in the event of cyberattack on the Internet infrastructure. The combination of secure coprocessing and peer-to-peer technologies will create a distributed survivable trustworthy backbone which enables functionality for critical infrastructure that hitherto did not exist. A Marianas node must be highly trustworthy for many applications. The secure coprocessor s kernel must ensure that applications do not interfere with each other. Marianas must remain connected during a network cyberattack on the routing infrastructure. Authentication infrastructure for diverse user, application, and trust requirements will be developed. The solutions to these problems will draw on technologies for secure execution, PKI, secure systems, and networking systems evaluation. To prove these concepts, middle-ware will be developed that encodes the candidate solutions and will be installed on a small scale Marianas system. Much larger Marianas systems, which could support critical infrastructure systems, will be simulated to evaluate their performance, and resiliency in the face of network attack doc21238 none Finding sequences similar to a given query sequence in a large data set is a fundamental problem in many database applications including computational genomics and proteomics, computational finance, audio, text and multimedia image processing. This proposal considers proximity search problems for strings and sequences in such applications where existing methods typically employ distance functions based on character edits only (commonly unweighted edit distance) and modify off-the shelf index structures to improve search efficiency. However, in many applications block edit operations such as translocations, deletions and copies, as well as linear transformations on strings are as common and important as character edits. Unfortunately, computation of distance measures that allow block edits are generally known to be NP-hard. Thus the investigators propose to work on practical methods for approximating the block edit distances and performing approximate searches under such measures. These measures are many times not symmetric (transforming a long sequence to a short one may be performed through a single deletion whereas transforming the short sequence to the long one may require many copy operations) or do not satisfy the triangular inequality (string space under edit operations is fundamentally different from Euclidean space) and thus do not provide a metric. However many of them can be proven to be almost-metrics, i.e., the symmetry and or the triangular inequalities may be satisfied within multiplicative constants. This property can be fundamental in sequence proximity search as it seems possible that known distance based indexing methods for metric spaces could be extended for use in almost-metric spaces. Thus a main component of the proposal is the investigation of the limitations and extendibility of distance based indexes for almost-metrics and other string sequence measures which may be non-symmetric or fail to satisfy the triangular inequality because they allow block edits. An alternative complementary approach to distance based indexing is based on approximate random mappings of the space of items to be searched to Euclidean spaces. This general strategy has received considerable attention in the context of vector spaces. The mappings used guarantee (with high probability) to reduce the number of comparisons during search from linear to poly-logarithmic, provided some error of approximation can be tolerated in the answers obtained. This approach was later generalized to sequence spaces through a mapping of sequences under block edit distance to binary strings under Hamming distance. The error tolerance is not very practical. Thus a second component of this proposal is to obtain novel mappings of sequence spaces to Euclidean spaces within smaller approximation errors. The goal is to generalize such mappings to both character and block based edit distances, especially those which assign weights to edit operations (that reflect the likeliness of that particular edit doc21239 none A comprehensive security architecture is proposed that uses language-based mechanisms to eliminate errors due to circumvention of type safety, be they intentional or erroneous, and that additionally uses security policy mechanisms to contain malicious behavior. This approach extends techniques previously applied to mobile code and is based on a combination of a) mechanically verifying the absence of such errors in any software before it is run, using code representations that can be checked for such errors or that rule out errors in the first place, and b) monitoring executing software for malicious activity. The proposed system consists of multiple layers, each of which is secured by the layer below it, the lowest of which can be provided in tamper-resistant hardware. Key to the solution is to provide a typed hardware abstraction layer (THAL) that enables the construction of a type-safe system from the ground up , all the way down to the tamper-proof hardware. Hence, the goal is to build a practical system about which we can make security guarantees from the hardware up, and not just from the operating system up doc21141 none This research investigates a new architecture designed to provide data to wireless users using a broadcast technique. The objective of this research is to develop schemes for implementing the concept ``DAta in your space (DAYS) which combines broadcasting (push) and traditional querying (pull) techniques into one global wireless approach. In this scheme the data broadcasters (special servers) will continuously broadcast (push) requested data to a set of ``dedicated wireless channels, which will be captured by clients (users of the data) at any time and at any place. The space will thus be used as persistent storage for all mobile as well as static devices. A universal wireless broadcast approach requires that mobile users be able to find and use the right broadcast information. Some of the questions to mbe addressed include: 1. How can the mobile user know which channel has the correct data? 2. How is data to be assigned to channels? 3. What techniques can be used to effectively determine the best contents of each channel given many mobile users? 4. Without explicit user queries, how can the mobile user be assured that the needed data is being broadcast? 5. How can the mobile user be assured that the needed data moves with him? These issues have to be examined on a global scale doc21241 none Networking server performance has improved substantially in recent years, due mostly to rapid developments in application and operating system level software and, to a lesser extent, improved hardware in the network interface. These developments have greatly reduced the CPU load of network servers, the amount of main memory used for networking, and the bandwidth requirements of data transfers between the CPU and its main memory. However, when the server prepares to send its data out onto the network, the network interface must still use DMA to fetch each piece of data to be transmitted from the main memory of the host processor, and this overhead increases work for both the local interconnect (for example, the PCI bus) and the main memory system. As network capacities increase, the bandwidth of these resources will become a performance bottleneck. While many network interfaces continue to use special-purpose hardware, several programmable network interfaces exist. These programmable network interfaces are currently used to offload computations such as TCP IP checksum calculation from the CPU. Such optimizations provide substantial benefits, but they underutilize the flexibility of programmable network processors by using them only for fixed functionality that is already implemented efficiently in special-purpose hardware. A key deficiency is that current network interfaces use storage primarily as buffer space for incoming and outgoing transmissions, thus retaining the logical semantics of a simple wire. In reality, however, a programmable network interface is a node in a heterogeneous multiprocessor system, where the CPU and main memory form one node and the network processor and its local memory form another. We propose to exploit the heterogeneous multiprocessing capability of a server with a programmable network interface through better utilization of both storage and computation. First, we intend to use some of the local memory on the network interface as a cache of frequently-served content. This will substantially reduce the load on the local interconnect, the system memory, and the CPU for setting up DMA transfers. Second, we intend to explore ways to utilize the flexible computation provided by network processors in the network interface. This will further improve server performance by offloading demanding networking tasks from the CPU and also enable additional services beyond those offered today by our richer use of storage on the interface. Finally, we will consider the impact of these proposals on network processor architectures. Network processors today have been designed primarily for routers and low-level packet processing. However, our proposals lead to substantially different workloads for programmable network interfaces in servers, requiring systems with flexibility akin to modern high-performance microprocessors along with the packet processing efficiency of network processors. We plan to investigate various hybrid designs, as well as tighter coupling between the CPU and network processor doc21242 none This workshop is for university faculty, department heads and deans as well as economists, nationally recognized experts from the electric power industry, and experts in adaptive systems to explore advanced research needs in the fields of Economics, Power Systems and Adaptive Systems. The workshop is intended to identify the basic theoretical problems now facing the electric, power industry in the United States and suggest research needs that can be addressed by NSF in the future. This is the second of a series of three NSF EPRI workshops, whose ultimate goal is to promote research leading to new solutions to existing problems facing the electric power industry doc21243 none Bonnie Heck Integrated System-Theorectic and Software-Enabled Strategies for Embedded Smart Sensors in Hybrid Systems This research addresses the efficient design and effective operation of smart sensor suites, which are to be embedded in complex hybrid systems with multiple modes of operation and multiple mission fault scenarios. An integrated approach is being pursued in which system-theoretic analysis is combined with real-time embedded software design techniques that focus on composition and dynamic reconfiguration issues. This integrative approach supports the design of the sensor suite, including its management software, which is capable of fusing information from heterogeneous sensors to develop estimates for physical parameters and detect diagnose faults, and of dynamically reconfiguring itself in the face of identified fault scenarios or mode changes. The research addresses system-theoretic issues and software-design issues on a concurrent basis so that the requirements and capabilities of the two sides can be understood and taken into account. Hence, issues such as synchronizing data from multiple distributed sources and managing transitions while reconfiguring continuous components, are being formalized and explicitly accounted for throughout the design, beginning with the sensor selection placement decision to the development of algorithms for sensor fusion and dynamic reconfiguration. This work is drawing upon existing results in the hybrid systems literature and developing some additional theories and tools as necessary. The topics studied in this research include: o Sensor placement in a distributed hybrid system: What types of sensors should be placed where so that important changes, both continuous and discrete, can be observed with required accuracies. o Sensor fusion: How the signals generated from a heterogeneous sensor array will be combined to generate useful information, such as physical states, parameter values, and fault status, under different modes of operation. o Dynamic reconfiguration: How to reconfigure on the fly the processing and fusing of signals from different sensors, in the face of an identified fault or a mode change, and how the information will be transitioned from one mode to another. The research is creating system-theoretic and software modeling tools for constructing smart sensor suites that can adapt to changes and faults that occur in a complex hybrid system. The research is also expected to improve the fundamental understanding into the observability property of hybrid systems and the design and analysis of a state estimator for such a system. The theoretical methodological development is being validated on sensor suites for real applications (e.g., a three tank process demonstrator) so that no important real issues are overlooked. On the educational front, cross-disciplinary course(s) and research programs are being developed that breed a unique set of students versed in both systems-control theories and real-time software design doc21244 none Lepreau, Jay Composable Execution Environments: A Foundation for Building Robust Embedded Systems Real-time and embedded systems are built using a wide variety of execution models ---collections of rules for sequencing actions and mediating access to shared resources. In general, systems developed using restricted execution models are easier to understand, debug, and test than are systems developed using powerful models. They are also more efficient and permit stronger properties to be proven about them with less effort, such as non-violation of timing constraints and freedom from deadlock, livelock, or race conditions. The instantiation of an execution model with a specific set of tasks and their associated timing and resource sharing requirements is called an execution environment. The central premise of this project is that it is feasible and useful to structure embedded systems as hierarchical compositions of execution environments. If successful, this research will result in a new way to develop embedded systems software that permits developers to make use of powerful compositions of execution environments without sacrificing the software engineering benefits of individual, more restricted environments. To accomplish this, the researchers must solve a number of research problems. First, compositions of execution environments must be analyzed and mapped to threads and schedulers in such a way that no real-time deadlines or other constraints of the individual environments are violated. This will be accomplished by leveraging the researchers experience with hierarchical real-time scheduling, with constraint checking for component systems, and with flexible execution models in operating systems. Second, compositions of execution environments must not suffer from undue or unexpected degrees of inefficiency and unpredictability. The researchers will accomplish this by leveraging their experience in developing and optimizing component-based operating systems doc21245 none Project The objective of the proposed activity is the development of a high-assurance function, called a classloader. This function carries out the static aspects associated with the execution of Java classfiles as it is defined by a concrete implementation of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The implementation being targeted is called the Sandia Secure Processor (SSP). To date, a prototype of the SSP has been developed in VHDL which synthesized to 40K gates and is capable of operating near 75MHz. The goal is to compose the classloader and the SSP to produce a Java-centric computational component capable of being used in embedded system development. Intended application areas for this technology encompass high to ultra-high consequence embedded systems. A primary application domain for which this technology is targeted has imposed the following constraints on the system: 1.There must be the option of building the processor using rad-hard technology. 2.An open source for the system must be available allowing detailed design analysis and testing of all aspects of the system (possibly down to the gate level). 3.Certification evidence should be provided by formal mathematical proofs of correctness to the extent possible, and strongly convincing evidence must be provided in all other cases where mathematical proofs have not been achieved. 4.A security policy must be strictly enforced ensuring that any program is either rejected as incorrect by compile-time or run-time checks, or its behavior must be understandable by reasoning based entirely on the language semantics, independent of the implementation. In particular, no security violation must be permitted to succeed regardless whether it is the result of an inadvertent error, or a malevolent well thought out attack. Correctness-preserving program transformation is the method that is being employed to implement a high-assurance classloader function. In this approach, the functionality of the classloader is realized via a lengthy sequence of small intellectually manageable rewrite steps. Here, a rewrite step is considered to be intellectually manageable if its correctness can be formally verified in practice. In order to achieve this goal, novel transformation techniques are being explored and developed. This project will significantly impact the computer science community by (1) advancing knowledge in the area of program transformation, (2) demonstrating to industry that formal methods (in this case program transformation) can be effectively applied to real-world problems, and (3) providing a computational infrastructure (i.e., the SSP) that is suitable for embedded high-consequence system development doc21246 none This project will study databases that are distributed among a set of sensors that communicate without a fixed network infrastructure. This architecture is motivated by new types of emerging wireless broadcast networks such as Mobile Ad-hoc Networks, smart dust , and sensor networks. Smart dust and sensor networks consist of processors that may be the size of a dust particle, and the processors may be sprayed or parachuted from an airplane. Two environments are considered. In the first one the sensors are static, and in the second one the nodes are mobile, and their locations are not always known. The project will explore the following paradigm, called geographic dissemination of data , for processing queries, triggers and updates. The paradigm calls for dividing the geographic area into cells. Each data item in the database is associated with a cell, and resides in that cell, i.e. in the set of processors that are currently located in the cell (note that this set may vary over time). Each cell is considered a node of the distributed database, and queries triggers updates are processed by sending them to the appropriate cells. Note that in contrast to the traditional cellular architecture, the proposed one is infrastructureless doc21247 none A. Project The objective of this research is to develop and demonstrate capabilities for analyzing complex interactions between heterogeneous embedded systems specification domains. Three research activities are being undertaken: (i) development of domain models for important embedded systems requirements domains; (ii) development of semantics for combining heterogeneous embedded systems specifications; and (iii) development of techniques for predictive analysis of composed specifications. The results of this research are being evaluated using problems from the Ambient Computing Environments (ACE) research center at The University of Kansas ITTC. The facet-based approach being investigated involves modeling and integrating heterogeneous specifications using domain specific semantic systems. Each system model, or facet, is defined by extending a domain. A domain provides a vocabulary and model of computation for describing a system from one perspective. Facets use domains as modeling semantics and are composed to describe components and systems. Specifically, individual models are composed to define: (i) multiple aspects of the same component; and (ii) heterogeneous, multi-component systems. Projection functions and morphisms support specification transformation and composition using category and institution theoretic semantics. Special projection functions, called interactions, model how and when models from one domain interact with models from another. Interactions support integrated component analysis and modeling communication between heterogeneous components. Developing domain models, domain interaction models, and prototype analysis tools demonstrates the effectiveness of the facet-based approach for modeling embedded systems. The first and second research tasks encompass the development of domain and domain interaction models for defining embedded components. Both functional and performance constraint models are being supported. Domain models are being developed to represent basic models of computation and vocabularies for specification. Interaction models consisting of projection functions and specification morphisms are being defined to move information between domains. The third research task is the development of software systems for analyzing specifications. Two complimentary approaches are being explored: (i) formal analysis; and (ii) simulation. Formal analysis is achieved by mapping domain definitions to existing formal analysis environments. Specification simulation is achieved by mapping domain definitions to communicating, heterogeneous simulation environments. Challenge problems from the NSF and DARPA sponsored Ambient Computing Environments (ACE) research infrastructure at ITTC are being used to evaluate ongoing research. ACE provides an environment where computing moves seamlessly with individuals within a physical environment. ACE is implemented as a collection of highly mobile, heterogeneous embedded systems that perform tasks including personal data management, control of robotic devices, and various sensor related tasks The results of this research have widespread impact on the research and industrial communities. The Rosetta systems level specification language is being used for domain models, interaction definitions and system specifications for embedded systems. Rosetta is being standardized by the Accellera CAD standards organization as a next-generation systems level design language. Successful results from this research activity are being disseminated as a part of the base Rosetta domain system and are being integrated into the collection of standard Rosetta domain models doc21248 none Paul Linden University of California San Diego This is a collaborative research effort between UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara to carry out experimental and computational study of gravity currents and two-layer bores in fluids of large density difference so that the usual Boussinesq approximation cannot be applied. The non-Boussinesq cases are found in many industrial flows and some chloride solutions for the low-density contrast experiments and sodium chloride solutions for the high-density contrast cases. Gross features of the flow will be recorded by shadowgraphs, and detailed velocity measurements will be made by particle tracing technique. Direct numerical simulations (DNS) willb e made for these cases at UCSB. From the understanding gained by the experimental and computational studies, models of propagation and the mixing of the currents will be formulated doc21249 none This research concerns the use of simultaneous multithreaded (SMT) processors for soft real-time applications such as multimedia applications. SMT processors have the potential to provide high throughput by running multiple threads at the same time, and soft real-time applications are an increasingly important workload. The use of SMT processors for real-time applications, however, has largely been unexplored. Most work on SMT has been driven by the goal of increasing throughput. Real-time applications additionally require high schedulability (i.e., the ability to meet deadlines) and predictability. Further, such applications often run in energy and thermal power constrained environments. This work seeks to develop co-schedule selection and resource sharing algorithms (and consequent admission tests) for SMT processors that will (1) maximize instruction throughput, (2) maximize schedulability, (3) maximize execution time predictability, (4) minimize energy, and (5) minimize thermal power, for soft real-time applications such as multimedia applications. This is the first work that considers the issues of temporal schedulability and predictability, and integrates them with energy and thermal considerations, for real-time applications and SMT. Without this research, an increasingly important class of workloads would be unable to exploit an architectural advance that has provided large benefits in other domains doc21250 none Mining sequential patterns and structured patterns (e.g., trees, lattices, and graphs) are important data mining tasks, with broad applications, such as the analysis of customer purchase sequences and Web page structures, understanding of disease treatments, scientific experiments, transportation and production processes, detection of anomaly and unusual patterns, discovery of bio-molecule sequences and structures, and so on. This project is to perform a systematic investigation of the principles, algorithms, and applications of scalable sequential and structured pattern mining, which covers the following issues: (1) development of highly scalable mining algorithms, including mining max-patterns, closed patterns and top-k patterns; (2) investigation of highly flexible mining methodologies, including mining of multi-dimensional multi-level sequential and structured patterns and constraint-based mining; (3) extension of the scope to cover sequential or structured pattern-based clustering; and (4) application of multi-dimensional, multi-level sequential or structured pattern mining for intrusion detection, Web mining, and other important applications. This will lead to a set of efficient, scalable, and flexible sequential and structured pattern mining methods for scientific and industrial applications doc21251 none ion will be used only for complex modules whose safety cannot be verified by compiler static analysis. The goal is a new generation of efficient and fault tolerant dynamic real time architectures that can capitalize on the integration between compiler static analysis, safety controller and runtime monitoring and recovery. Experimentation focuses on the next generation Telelab demonstration facility, based on the new framework, that can measure the following: 1) the size of the stability envelope and the reduction of safety controller energy under the theory of invariance control; 2) the runtime efficiency gain in storage and in CPU usage resulted from the integration of complier support and runtime; 3) the robustness against faults and attacks of this new framework doc21252 none Bresler, Yoram U of Ill Tomography, or the reconstruction of an object from a collection of its line integrals from various directions (known as its x-ray transform) is a well known problem. Perhaps most importantly, it is the principle underlying most of the key diagnostic imaging modalities including x-ray Computed Tomography (CT), PET and SPECT, certain forms of MRI, and emerging techniques such as electric impedance tomography (EIT) and optical tomography. Tomographic reconstruction is also widely used for nondestructive evaluation (NDE) in manufacturing, and has been recently proposed for safety screening of passenger luggage in airports. Tomography is also the fundamental principle in numerous other problems and applications in science and engineering from electron microscopy of subcellular structures through geophysical exploration and environmental monitoring, to remote sensing by synthetic aperture radar (SAR). In cone-beam tomography, projections are acquired by an area detector, using a source of divergent rays traveling on a one of several possible trajectories. It is already used in current PET and SPECT scanners and in NDE, and because it appears to be the only practical method for rapid volume acquisition, it will be the basis for the next generation of diagnostic CT scanners. This will allow to use CT as a dynamic imaging modality for cardiac imaging or for real-time surgical guidance in medicine, or as a high-throughput NDE system in manufacturing doc21253 none An ad hoc network is a group of mobile computers (or nodes) using wireless network interfaces, in which individual nodes cooperate by forwarding packets for each other to allow nodes to communicate beyond their direct wireless transmission ranges. This project is attempting to create a routing protocol for ad hoc networks that is highly robust against attacks, yet is able to perform close to the best existing non-secure ad hoc network routing protocols. The research focuses primarily on on-demand (or reactive) routing protocols, in which a node attempts to discover a route to some destination only when it has a packet to send to that destination, but also considers how the routing security techniques developed apply to other styles of ad hoc network routing protocols such as periodic (or proactive) and hybrid protocols. The research addresses passive and active attackers, including cooperating attacking nodes and compromised nodes. The types of attacks considered range from routing disruption attacks, in which an attacker attempts to cause legitimate data packets to be routed in dysfunctional ways, to resource consumption attacks, in which an attacker injects packets into the network in an attempt to consume valuable network resources such as bandwidth, or to consume node resources such as memory (storage) or computation power doc21201 none In modern computer systems, computation is distributed over many host machines. Mutually untrusted machines and users coexist, and software is built using plug-and-play components downloaded from remote hosts. Multiple users share resources so it is critical to ensure, e.g., that private information is not compromised. Languages like Java and C# are designed to provide such security by enforcing encapsulation boundaries that restrict interdependencies and information flows between program components. Such boundaries are undercut, however, by ubiquitous pointer aliasing which can be maliciously exploited to leak sensitive information. This project studies ways to confine pointers to their intended scopes. The focus is on the interplay between static analysis and dynamic access control to achieve confinement. The technical goal is to find confinement regimes that can be used to assure secure information flow in systems implemented using dynamic binding, multithreading, inheritance, class-based encapsulation, and access control. Analyses and transformations to minimize run-time performance costs for confinement and access control are also investigated. This work will lead to better programming methods and tools for development of web-based services and other distributed applications that require a high level of assurance. The work will contribute to technology for implementing programming languages and for checking for security flaws in application programs doc21255 none This project will investigate bidding strategies using agents which can buy goods and services from multiple auctions while satisfying user preferences and budgetary constraints. Of particular interest is the study and development of bundle bidding strategies, which will allow agents to put together preferred bundles of goods for users from online auctions selling only individual items. Automated bundle bidding procedures with well-understood performance expectations will allow users to form bundles with significantly less effort and much more success. The bundle bidding problem presents challenging and interesting research problems that involve asynchronous events, uncertainty about future auctions, and the widely varying valuations and bidding strategies of users and their proxies. Several variations of the bundle-bidding problem will be identified and studied. The project will also investigate the usage of auctions in conjunction with other forms of information processing within a broader context of coordination between self-interested autonomous agents representing individuals, organizations and supply chains doc21256 none ions such as patterns, and does not scale down far enough. Second, the software offers a point solution, with hard coded constraints on both the systems software infrastructure and the embedded device s characteristics. Third, different QoS levels are not offered or are very limited. Fourth, power conservation is not usually considered. The goal of this two-year research project is to develop a scientific foundation to overcome the limitations outlined above. This research addresses fundamental questions in four areas: baseline architectural constraints, QoS properties and their compositions, network-wide composition, and software engineering. As a byproduct, a new systems software framework with new and more configurable systems mechanisms is in development to quantify and validate the answers to these fundamental questions. The project s research on baseline architectural constraints ascertains necessary conditions to achieve small memory and constrained resource usage (ignoring QoS) at a fine granularity, exploring the fundamental tradeoffs in systems software mechanisms and functionality that enable this. This baseline is then extended for multiple QoS properties, including new combinations of lightweight QoS mechanisms, given the fundamental QoS costs, alternative composition strategies, and tradeoffs among them. Research on network-wide composition investigates the fundamental interactions in networks of devices, including techniques to predict and regulate the effect of a given node s behavior on global system properties. The work on software engineering investigates ways to utilize aspects, patterns, and tools in composing middleware for embedded systems. The long- range goal is that application code can be auto-generated in a fine-grained manner so that it does not contain overly general or unnecessary functionality. QoS mechanisms are being developed to address various issues. For example, computer security encompasses many concepts (e.g., confidentiality, integrity, authorization) each of which can be provided at multiple levels or strengths of service. Likewise, many fault tolerance mechanisms exist. This project extends the understanding of how multiple mechanisms from multiple QoS properties (e.g., security, fault tolerance, real-time behavior) can be composed. The impact of this research, if successful, is broad. First, it will enable embedded systems applications to be more easily programmed, more robust, and more easily verified. The multi-property QoS analysis and mechanisms from this project will be transitioned through integration into the GridStat research effort, led by the PI under NIST s Critical Infrastructure Protection research program. GridStat is middleware that must deliver status information to the power grid. Exploiting multiple QoS, properties, namely security, timeliness, and fault tolerance, can support in better control and monitoring of the electric power grid, a critical (and vulnerable) infrastructure doc21257 none This research is intended to develop technology that will allow motor-impaired disabled people to communicate with a computer most effectively, especially giving them access to the web. An important part of the work will be development of a tool that can model users with severe motor impairments and automatically make the adjustment necessary to provide access to the web. For example, a web page may be modified to show preview information about a selected link to user to avoid the cost of following a wrong link and then backing out again. Preliminary work has identified seven requirements for such a tool, ranging from navigation support to dealing with forms. These requirements will be augmented and refined as the work progresses. Two complementary systems will be built that meet these requirements. One is a dynamic browser interface and leaves the actual HTML unchanged. The other is a proxy server that modifies HTML to be more accessible. Neither requires the authors of web pages to make changes. The first approach will allow finer control over modifications and provide a platform for experimentation with different mappings between input signals and action based on errors and fatigue. The modified browser will be able to track errors and adjust its interface accordingly. It will also allow experimentation with different approaches to avoiding errors such as confirmation dialogs. The second approach will be platform independent, and available to any user without requiring that any special software be installed. It will allow the testing of modifications on a much wider scale. These automatic approaches are necessary because it is unrealistic to expect that web designers will handcode the necessary modifications into their websites. Additionally, the research will explore the feasibility of automatically generating user interface modifications based on a user model, something applicable to other common and important applications such as email and word processing. Both the web accessibility work and this larger goal have applications outside of assistive technology. For instance, they may be used to increase accessibility of the web to other users with limited input capabilities, for example, to mobile phone users with limited (9-key) keyboards. These systems will be developed and tested first with abled and then motor-impaired users. They will be deployed publicly, and their impact will be studied over time. Finally, the research will impact accessibility guidelines, so that more web pages and other applications can support low bandwidth accessibility. The contribution of this work will be a set of techniques for making the web more accessible in conditions where input is extremely limited and errors are likely. This system will be useful to people with motor disabilities, or any user with access to limited input devices, such as a wearable computer user doc21258 none This project focuses on system-level mapping of applications written in imperative programming languages such as C to multiple FPGA computing systems by the synergistic collaboration of program analysis, parallelizing compiler technology and behavioral synthesis tools. The proposed research addresses system-level partitioning and scheduling of the execution of tasks among computing cores based on high-level program analysis as well as managing the storage and movement of data between both internal and external memories and between tasks. This project is the first comprehensive, and automatic, integration of parallelizing compiler technology with EDA synthesis. It is also the first attempt to integrate in a compiler high-level loop transformations guided by estimates provided by commercially available synthesis tools. The end result is a realistic and accurate design space exploration strategy we believe is widely applicable to current and future multiple FPGA systems as well as future System-On-a-Chip (SoC) systems. An automated application mapping approach that addresses system-level issues as proposed in this research will ultimately allow designers to explore a wider range of application mapping strategies for SoC systems doc21259 none This project proposes to measure the rate coefficient for the collisional removal of O2 by oxygen atoms as a function of temperature in the range 300-800 K. This measurement is a key step in quantifying a new approach for interpreting the strong ionospheric emissions from O2 and thereby deriving altitude profiles of oxygen atom density and local temperature. Extensive data sets of these 750-780 nm emissions are already available from the Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) and the Arizona Airglow (GLO) studies and can provide global altitude-dependent O( 3 P) atom density maps, once the above rate coefficient has been determined. Simultaneously, the shape of the atmospheric O2 emission band envelopes can provide the local temperature. The proposed laboratory experiments will thus significantly improve the current unsatisfactory understanding of thermospheric emissions from O2 doc21260 none This research focuses on the development of a sound theoretical framework for the design of efficient network discovery and reconfiguration techniques that are deadlock-free and generically applicable to state-of-the-art interconnection networks used in future multiprocessor servers, network-based computing clusters and distributed storage systems. The theory should have wide applicability and serve as an authoritative basis on which deadlock freedom of reconfiguration processes for arbitrary networks can be formally proved. As part of the theoretical framework, a general methodology will be developed that will allow the power of the theory to be realized in the straightforward design of new and more efficient techniques. The techniques derived from the theory and methodology will provide alternative ways of increasing network reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) in the presence of unconstrained fault patterns as well as in the presence of voluntary changes to a network configuration due to resource re-partitioning, communication-aware algorithm process re-mapping, data migration, etc. The techniques will not impede the injection, transmission, or delivery of user packets during discovery and reconfiguration processes but, rather, will remain relatively transparent to the user and or system administrator. Proof of concepts will be pursued by simulating the developed techniques and applying them to state-of-the-art switch-based system-area and storage-area networks amenable to their implementation. This research ultimately could result in new opportunities for dependable network architectures to off-load some of the QoS handling to lower network layers while, at the same time, providing enriched RAS features and higher performance doc21261 none Certification of medical device software is a major concern for the Food and Drug Administration: it is costly and time-consuming for the companies involved, and there is a growing suspicion that the current certification requirements are becoming more and more inadequate with increasing system complexity. At present certification of medical device software is process-oriented. There is a strong desire to move to a more product-oriented approach, but it is as yet unclear what methods evidence should be required. The goal of this research is to show that existing formal methods can be adapted and augmented such that they can be used effectively in the certification process. The research to achieve this consists of the following three components: Automatic Generation of User Models: For many medical devices operability is an important concern, but it is not explicitly designed for. Automatic generation of user models (that is, what does the user need to know about the system to be able to operate it) allows evaluation of operability in early stages of the design and guarantees a correct correspondence between user model and machine model. The project is formalizing user model requirements and developing methods to construct these models automatically from the machine model. Run-time Verification: Run-time verification can complement design-time verification when the system is too complex to be realistically verified in full. Run-time analysis techniques can also be used for performance modeling and improvement of the system based on run-time characteristics. The project investigates the usefulness of run-time analysis in the certification process, both in the specification phase (to stress test the model generated from the specification), and in actual operation (to establish audit trails and catch unexpected behaviors). The research is directed at the development of adequate specification languages and logics for run-time verification, and efficient data structures for program instrumentation. Case study: At the request of the FDA, the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) has made available a requirements document for a medium-sized medical device. It is the intent to use this system as a basis to study the feasibility of product-oriented certification. The modeling of this device has already started and some preliminary analyses have been performed. The goal is to use formal methods to produce a fulll set of proof documents and evaluate, in cooperation with the FDA, whether these documents would be considered adequate evidence for certification doc21262 none This individual investigator award will support a project with the goal of providing insight into the intimate coupling of electron spin, electron transport and atomic structure in the manganite system, possibly leading to the development of more accurate models of systems with strong electron-lattice correlations. The long-range, nanoscale and local atomic structure will be determined in films ranging from the nanoscale to bulk-like to explore how magnetic and transport properties are influenced by substrate strain and film thickness. The structure will be determined via a variety of techniques including, x-ray diffraction, atomic force microscopy, and x-ray absorption spectroscopy. Direct comparisons will be made with corresponding bulk materials and correlations of the structure with resistivity and magnetization measurements will be performed. These materials may be of use in future magnetic read-head technologies. Graduate and undergraduate students will be involved in all levels of this work. To develop scientific literacy in students, a seven week summer research and teaching program on transition metal oxide preparation and characterization designed for Newark area high school students and teachers will be conducted during each year of this grant. The manganite system is a class of materials that exhibit large changes in resistivity with applied magnetic field. These changes are an order of magnitude larger than those in sensors currently used in computer hard drives and may enable significantly higher storage capacity. However, the sensitivity at low magnetic fields required for use in hard drives must be improved. From the basic scientific perspective, these materials provide an important testing ground for systems with large correlations between atomic structure and electron transport. This individual investigator award will support a study of a broad range of films relevant to both technological applications and basic science understanding. The goal is to understand how magnetic properties are influenced by substrate strain and film thickness. Graduate and undergraduate students will be involved in all levels of this work. A seven-week summer research and teaching program on transition metal oxide preparation and characterization, designed for Newark area high school students and teachers will be conducted during each year of this grant. This will serve to develop scientific literacy and may influence students to pursue careers in science doc21263 none Huang This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative NSF 01-157, category NER. Aquatic particulates, regardless of their chemical composition, have two very important properties that are closely related to water quality: particle size and surface charge. Chemical species, e.g., metal ions, are readily accumulated at the solid-water interface, which can affect the assessment (or determination) of soluble concentrations of chemical species in waters. Currently, the insoluble and soluble chemical species are determined by filtering water samples through 0.45-um filters; things that pass through the filter are soluble and things that are retained by the filter are considered insoluble . Accurate assessment of soluble or total chemical concentrations in waters requires an effective solid-water separation technique. As water quality standard becomes increasingly stringent, demand for effective separation of nano-sized particles from waters or wastewaters will increase. This will over-burden the current filtration practice of filtration with 0.45-um filters and render it ineffective. The proposed research project will test two hypotheses: (1) Electrically assisted tangential flow (EATF) filter can perform independently of membrane selection; (2) The distribution of metal ions in natural waters is affected not only by the particle size but also by the surface charge condition of naturally occurring particulates. The following specific objectives are to be achieved with carefully designed laboratory experiments: (1) design and evaluation of the performance of an electrically assisted tangential flow filtration system; (2) separation of selected nano-sized aquatic particulates both naturally occurring particles and pathogenic microorganisms, exemplified by Cryptosporidium, by EATF filtration, and (3) elucidation of the effect of surface charge and particle size of naturally occurring particulates on the distribution and speciation of selected meal ions. Success of this project will (1) contribute to theoretical development of EATF filtration process, (2) lead to the development of an innovative process for the separation of aquatic particles according to their size and surface charge conditions, (3) gain insight into the effect of particle size and surface charge conditions on the speciation of metals in natural waters, and (4) train two doctoral students with a multi-disciplinary program. The proposed research has the potential to eliminate or minimize membrane-fouling, promote reuse of electronic chip processing wastewater, and enable nano-scaled metal speciation doc21264 none This award supports theoretical and computational research and education in polymer physics. The PI will investigate (a) polymer crystallization, and (b) translocation of DNA and other polymer molecules through protein channels and nanopores. Crystallization of polymers from solutions and melts is an intriguing and longstanding research problem in polymer science. The PI will model the shapes and sizes of lamellar crystals and their kinetics using simulation and theory. The basic parameters of the study are (a) torsional energy along chain backbone and chain stiffness, (b) van der Waals energy between nonbonded atoms and solvent quality, (c) chain length, (d) polymer concentration, (e) temperature, and (f) strength and rate of flow. These parameters will be systematically explored in simulations of the sizes, shapes and symmetries of formed crystals, and details of their growth fronts under different conditions. Coarse-grained models of kinetics of polymer crystallization will be built. These will incorporate the essential molecular features revealed in these simulations. An aim of this work is to understand the early stages of how polymer molecules organize into crystals in solution. The proposed research will go beyond the models of Lauritzen and Hoffmen, and of Sadler and Gilmer. How polymer molecules are transported from one location to another under physiochemically imposed fields is also not well understood, although the very existence of life depends on polymer translocation. Research will address conceptual challenges associated with a fundamental understanding of translocation of a single polyelectrolyte such as DNA RNA through channels and nanopores. These challenges include: (a) how confinement free energy of a polymer is affected by interacting cavities and their connectivity, (b) how the polymer moves in this free energy landscape due to local free energy gradients and externally imposed fields, (c) role of hydrodynamics on polymer movement in confinement, (d) orientational coupling of the polymer backbone with the directionality of the pore, (e) interference from the secondary structures of the polymer on translocation, and (f) pattern-directed controlled release of polyelectrolyte molecules from confinement. This theoretical and computational work complements experimental investigations and may also be relevant to applied areas, such as polymer processing, fabrication of polymeric nanomaterials, separation techniques like chromatography and electrophoresis, signal transduction in biology, and high-speed sequencing of DNA and proteins. This award also has a broad impact on education at all levels. %%% This award supports theoretical and computational research and education in polymer physics. The PI will investigate (a) polymer crystallization, and (b) translocation of DNA and other polymer molecules through protein channels and nanopores. Crystallization of polymers from solutions and melts is a longstanding and intriguing research problem in polymer science. A fundamental understanding of how polymer chains organize into heirarchical structures remains elusive. Analogously, how polymer molecules are transported from one location to another under physiochemically imposed fields is not well understood, although the very existence of life depends on polymer translocation. The PI aims to build new conceptual models and discover new laws of polymer organization and motility. This theoretical and computational work complements experimental investigations and may also be relevant to applied areas such as polymer processing, fabrication of polymeric nanomaterials, separation techniques like chromatography and electrophoresis, signal transduction in biology, and high-speed sequencing of DNA and proteins. This award also has a broad impact on education at all levels doc21265 none This project is aimed at a greater understanding of fundamental aspects of the coarsening kinetics and evolution of morphology of disordered precipitates in Ni-al, Ni-Ga and Ni-Ge alloys using extensive electron microscopy coupled with image-analysis software. The Curie temperatures of the solid-solution precipitate phase will also be investigated to determine whether the compositions of the precipitate phases change during aging. This will be the first time any attempts made to investigate the changes in the composition of precipitates themselves during a precipitation reaction. An ultimate objective of the proposed research is better understanding of the detailed factors affecting coarsening kinetics, morphology and spatial correlation in Ni-base alloys that find applications in varied technologies that require high temperature materials for the structures. An objective of the study is to obtain quantitative experimental evidence for the slower kinetics of coarseing of Ni-Al and Ni-Ge precipitates believed to arise from more complex diffusion of these atomic species. In addition to the interfacial energy and lattice mismatch that were considered so far, the possible role of antiphase boundary energy in the evolution of precipitate morphology will be explored. The funding for this research provides graduate researchers a continued exposure to research in the forefront of materials science. This research develops new and better understanding of the underlying reasons and mechanisms of precipitate coarsening and morphologies. The research will make significant contribution to the development of Ni-base alloys with optimum properties doc21266 none This award provide partial support for the Gordon Research Conference on Laser Interactions with Materials to be held at Proctor Academy in Andover, New Hampshire on July 21-26, . The primary goal of the conference is to bring together investigators from diverse disciplines studying a wide variety of materials systems to share their approaches and progress in unraveling basic mechanisms and applications that arise from laser material interactions. The purpose of this conference is to focus on current state-of-the-art and necessary future directions for the field where interactions between all participants is facilitated by several key presentations by a leading scientist in the area. Topics of high current interest include applications to life sciences and medicine; laser processing applicable to nanotechnology, optoelectronics, and future electronics systems; and applications of ultrafast lasers. The program will emphasize participation of a diverse group of participants, including women, minorities, and young investigators doc21267 none The present proposal entails experimental and theoretical elucidation of (i) dynamics of hollow fiber (or nano-tube) formation during solidification of main chain liquid crystalline polymers (MCLCP) and or rigid-rod polymer solution, (ii) dynamics of nano-porous membranes of monomeric mesognes during pattern polymerization, (iii) dynamics of microfibril formation during dry-jet spinning, and (iv) hybrid-composites. The well-established time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau TDGL (Model C) will be applied in conjunction with the advection term for the tracking of solvent evaporation and flow. The physical significanace of all parameters pertaining to the governing non-linear reaction-diffusion equations will be clarified, and their predictive capabilitieis will be demonstrated. The dynamics of pattern formation will be investigated by comparison with the recent experimental observations made in dry-jet and or electro-spinning. Recognizing the possible control of domain morphology and improved understanding of mesogenic interactions, the proposed study will be extended to microporous membranes and nano-composites. The theoretical scheme proposed here demonstrates the spation-temporal evolution of the order parameters (such as density, concentration and orientation fluctuations) based on the local free energy and non-local gradient (diffusive) terms. The numerical simulation further illustrates the emergence of the local internal structures during solidification. Moreover, this methodology can applied to elucidating the microfibrillation dynamics in spinning of semicrystalline polymers and hydrogen bonding systems. It is encouraging to discern unique morphological features encompassing (i) nano-tube formation, (ii) concentric rings spiral-breakup leading to microfibrillation and (iii) viscous fingering patterns. The observed phenomenon of spiral breakup is one of the most debated topics in the no-linear dynamics of excitable media and biological systems. Furthermore, it clearly demonstrates a new approach to the decades-old problem of predicting morphology development in solution-spun fibers such as rough skin core structures, collapsed kidney shape morphology, and microfibrils. This methodology has potential for modern technological applications including electro-spinning of nano-fibers tubes, microporous membranes through pattern photopolymerization induced phase separation, and nano-hybrid composites. It is anticipated that these microporous membranes have widespread applications usch as fuel cell membranes, filtration, and drug delivery. Furthermore, some of the simutaion programs have been written in C++ and can be shown on live-mode with the aid of an LCD projector. Such interactive programs are proven to be useful for classroom teaching and demonstration to the public doc21268 none This proposal requests support for an international conference on Cretaceous climate-ocean dynamics. The conference will bring together a multidisciplinary group of established scientists and students to assess the state of knowledge of the nature and mechanics of Cretaceous atmospheric and oceanic circulation and identify critical research issues for the next decade doc21269 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Smith, William B. Proposer: American Statistical Association The unsolicited proposal from the American Statistical Association (ASA) to the Division of Science Resources Statistics (SRS) of the National Science Foundation involves establishing an ASA SRS-NSF Research Program. The Program would entail having an outstanding academic researcher fellow conduct interdisciplinary research using SRS data. The researcher fellow would be selected through a rigorous, competitive application process. The proposed program is similar to other that ASA has established with several other Federal statistical agencies including the Bureau of the Census, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the National Center for Health Statistics, the National Center for Education Statistics, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics doc21270 none This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 01-157, in the NER category. The overall effort focuses on direct detection of electron spin dynamics by sensing the emission of terahertz radiation mediated by the magnetic dipole of a population of electrons precessing in an applied magnetic field. The goal of this initial exploratory project is to determine if measurable terahertz radiation is produced from an optically excited population of spin-oriented electrons in n-doped GaAs and possibly semimagnetics such a CdMnTe. A superconducting split-coil magnet will be used to apply fields upto 6.5 Tesla. Detection of the radiated intensity of the terahertz will be done by using a liquid helium cooled bolometer to avoid the alignment difficulties presented by electrooptic or photoconductive detection. The population of spin-oriented electrons will be generated by optical excitation with circularly-polarized femtosecond pulses. To obtain populations that are sufficient large to generate a detectable signal, either amplified pulses, or spin amplification by excitation that is resonant with the spin precession will be used. Based on measurement of the intensity alone, the optimum configuration can be determined and saturation characteristics studied. These results will complement prior studies made using Faraday rotation and provide the background for using more sophisticated detection of the terahertz radiation to measure the emitted electric field, which reflects the spin dynamics. This will provide a direct probe of the electron spin dynamics without the ambiguities present in the currently used indirect optical probes such as Faraday or Kerr rotation. Such a direct probe will answer important basic questions about spin dynamics for larger spin densities than can be probed with current techniques. The results will provide important fundamental knowledge necessary for the development of nanotechnology devices based on the manipulation of electron spins. In addition, they could provide the basis for a source of terahertz radiation based on advances in spin manipulation using nanotechnology doc21271 none The funds requested in this proposal will support the PI s efforts in uniting productive research and excellence in teaching in the Chemistry Department at Mount Holyoke College. Over the next three years, a research program that involves the independent and simultaneous tailoring of surface topography and chemical structure for controlled wettability will be established and several teaching initiatives that aim to promote polymer chemistry at the undergraduate level will be implemented. The objectives of the proposed research are to nationally control wettability of surfaces by manipulating surface topography and surface chemical structure and to provide a fundamental understanding of the basis of wettability. The research involves: (1) the adsorption of charged polystyrene latex particles to oppositely charged poly(ethylene terephthalate) surfaces to form surfaces with different topographies roughness, (2) the introduction of discrete functional groups to first smooth and then rough surfaces through organic transformations. The two research stages combine to form a method for preparing robust stable surfaces of variable wettability. The combination of surface topography and density, location and identity of surface-chemical functionality should, in principle, control wettability. Holyoke College undergraduate students will be involved in all phases of this project, from latex particle adsorption, characterization o0f surface topography, organic chemistry transformations of surface functional groups, determination of surface composition, to measurement and interpretation of wettability. The introduction of polymer chemistry to chemical education at Mount Holyoke College is also proposed in order to respond to the new demand of the rapidly changing nature of chemical sciences. We need to get students excited about chemistry, and to reinforce the traditional disciplines of chemistry and show how they can be used. Over the next three years, the PI s efforts in this area will be focused on the following initiatives: mentoring undergraduates carrying out independent research in polymer surface chemistry, designing and teaching a polymer chemistry course, an integrated laboratory course, and a first-year honors tutorial on polymer chemistry, incorporating polymer chemistry into undergraduate introductory courses doc21272 none This award subsidizes expenses of student participants in the Student Research Workshop organized in conjunction with the Association for Computational Linguistics Conference, to be held July 7-12 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the primary international organization in the field of natural language processing and language engineering, with two regional chapters, Europe (EACL) and North America (NAACL), of approximately equal size. The Association s annual conference, which rotates between North America and Europe, is the major international meeting in the field. The workshop format allows students to present their research and receive feedback from a panel of established researchers in the field. It will provide students with invaluable exposure to outside perspectives on their work at a critical time in their professional development, through feedback from the panel and other student participants. The ACL Student Workshop is an inexpensive yet highly effective means of encouraging young and upcoming computational linguists. The intimate format encourages the student participants to begin building a rapport with established researchers. This nurturing effort should pay dividends by more effectively guiding students in this rapidly changing research field. In addition, by building a supportive environment for these students, it is more likely that down the road they will in turn lend a supporting hand to other students who follow. Computational lingustics is a multidisciplinary field of increasing importance to science, commerce, and society. This workshop contributes to the professional development of young scientists who will lead this growing field in the coming decades doc21273 none One of the goals of the U. S. Weather Research Program is to improve the prediction of heavy precipitation events that are often associated with frontal systems. The objective of this research is to improve understanding of the influence of the planetary boundary layer (PBL) on atmospheric fronts. Extensive research has been devoted to frontal dynamics and the influence of the underlying topography on them. However, the effect of the boundary layer on the development and modification of fronts as they move over various surfaces is not well understood. The goal of the current proposal is to improve understanding of the influence of the planetary boundary layer on atmospheric fronts. In his study, the Principal Investigator (PI) will utilize numerical models and data from three completed field programs. The PI lists four research thrusts, which are to investigate the role of the boundary layer (marine and land, including topography) on: 1. the evolution of fronts over topography; 2. the development of marine fronts; 3. the evolution of fronts that travel from the ocean to a coastal mountain range; 4. the evolution of unbalanced fronts. This study will enhance understanding of frontal development and variation that are crucial in mid-latitude weather prediction. If the research is successful, results could positively impact the forecasting of frontal related weather (e.g. precipitation) through better numerical forecasts and better conceptual models doc21274 none This project leverages advances in statistical learning theory, machine vision, and massively parallel very-large-scale-integration technology to develop a custom-trainable, versatile, self-contained, and mobile system for visually impaired users. The system will aid the user in interacting freely with other people and the environment, by rapidly detecting and localizing key visual environmental cues and rapidly recognizing and identifying familiar people and objects. At the core of the system is the Kerneltron , a massively parallel Support Vector Machine (SVM) in silicon. The SVM hardware will be trained on-line by the end user to accommodate a variety of visual detection and recognition tasks in everyday situations through presentation of examples. The recognition core will be embedded in a portable prototype visual aid, interfacing with a CCD camera front-end, and an audio synthesizer back-end. Menu-driven keypad control will allow direct input and feedback from the user in training and directing the system. The user interface will be based on OpenEyes , a wearable computer vision system for the blind. Proof of concept demonstration of the hardware system and evaluation of the training and test performance will be conducted with feedback from volunteer impaired users doc21275 none The objective of this project is to enable an efficient solution by a regularized Newton method of three-dimensional inverse acoustic and elastoacoustic scattering problems. The research will be based upon three cornerstones. The convergence analysis of the regularized Newton method will be performed to establish confidence in this approach and shed some light on the selection of the regularization parameter. In order to ensure the stability, fast convergence, and computational efficiency of this iterative solution strategy, the characterization of the Frechet derivatives of the scattered field with respect to the shape parameters and the Finite Element Tearing and Interconnecting Helmholtz (FETI-H) domain decomposition method will be extended to address coupled elastoacoustic problems. Since the far-field pattern is in general measured only in a limited aperture, two different approaches for reconstructing the full aperture data will also be investigated. The determination of the shape of an obstacle from its effects on known acoustic or electromagnetic waves is an important problem in many technologies such as sonar, radar, geophysical exploration, medical imaging and nondestructive testing. This project will develop an efficient computational method for the inverse acoustic scattering problem. The proposed methodologies also have a great potential for benefiting the infrastructure of computational sciences doc21276 none The oceanic thermohaline circulation is strongly affected by localized dense-water formation in high-latitude oceans. Such dense water masses are released into the large-scale circulation in the form of ocean bottom density currents mostly from localized regions (e.g., Denmark Strait, Strait of Gibraltar for the Mediterranean overflow, Bab el Mandep Strait for the Red Sea overflow). Because of the small space and time scales required to resolve their dynamics, such density currents form the ``bottle neck of the thermohaline circulation investigation. Despite their importance, we have a limited understanding of the dynamics of bottom density currents, and at present, the oceanic density currents are poorly represented in global climate simulations. The main goal of this proposal is to enhance the understanding of the dynamics of ocean bottom density currents from laboratory scale, to geophysical scale, through three-dimensional, nonhydrostatic numerical simulations. The investigators accomplish this in three stages. First, benchmark a parallel high-order spectral element Navier-Stokes solver, Nek , by reproducing existing laboratory results of bottom density currents by direct numerical simulations. Second, explore dynamics for which there are few or no laboratory results, in particular dynamics of bottom density currents protruding into a stratified fluid, and in a rotating environment. Third, bridge the gap between laboratory scale and geophysical scale by using large eddy simulations. Geophysical scale calculations are configured for the Red Sea overflow, and confirmed with data from the Red Sea Overflow Experiment. Various metrics are used to quantify density current dynamics. Variation of solar heating with latitude, and other factors, drive the so-called ``thermohaline circulation in the ocean, which is closely linked to the role that the ocean plays in climate dynamics. This complex geophysical problem, with its range of scales, physical, mathematical and computational constraints can only be approached through an orchestrated effort involving cross-disciplinary expertise. The investigators conduct physically-guided numerical simulations, quantify dynamical behavior of ocean density currents, and describe the impact of density currents on the climate. The investigators integrate this research project with education of three graduate students and contribute to the training of US technical workforce for the 21st century. This research project enhances the scientific understanding of oceanic density currents, and helps improve the representation of ocean density currents in global climate simulations and contribute to the climate change research doc21276 none The oceanic thermohaline circulation is strongly affected by localized dense-water formation in high-latitude oceans. Such dense water masses are released into the large-scale circulation in the form of ocean bottom density currents mostly from localized regions (e.g., Denmark Strait, Strait of Gibraltar for the Mediterranean overflow, Bab el Mandep Strait for the Red Sea overflow). Because of the small space and time scales required to resolve their dynamics, such density currents form the ``bottle neck of the thermohaline circulation investigation. Despite their importance, we have a limited understanding of the dynamics of bottom density currents, and at present, the oceanic density currents are poorly represented in global climate simulations. The main goal of this proposal is to enhance the understanding of the dynamics of ocean bottom density currents from laboratory scale, to geophysical scale, through three-dimensional, nonhydrostatic numerical simulations. The investigators accomplish this in three stages. First, benchmark a parallel high-order spectral element Navier-Stokes solver, Nek , by reproducing existing laboratory results of bottom density currents by direct numerical simulations. Second, explore dynamics for which there are few or no laboratory results, in particular dynamics of bottom density currents protruding into a stratified fluid, and in a rotating environment. Third, bridge the gap between laboratory scale and geophysical scale by using large eddy simulations. Geophysical scale calculations are configured for the Red Sea overflow, and confirmed with data from the Red Sea Overflow Experiment. Various metrics are used to quantify density current dynamics. Variation of solar heating with latitude, and other factors, drive the so-called ``thermohaline circulation in the ocean, which is closely linked to the role that the ocean plays in climate dynamics. This complex geophysical problem, with its range of scales, physical, mathematical and computational constraints can only be approached through an orchestrated effort involving cross-disciplinary expertise. The investigators conduct physically-guided numerical simulations, quantify dynamical behavior of ocean density currents, and describe the impact of density currents on the climate. The investigators integrate this research project with education of three graduate students and contribute to the training of US technical workforce for the 21st century. This research project enhances the scientific understanding of oceanic density currents, and helps improve the representation of ocean density currents in global climate simulations and contribute to the climate change research doc21278 none Knyazev The investigator and his colleagues organize a conference on iterative methods in scientific computing. Iterative methods for the solution of linear and nonlinear systems of equations play an increasingly important role in the numerical simulation of physical phenomena. Preconditioning is the key for significant improvement of the performance as it allows one to find a path between Scylla of expensive factorizations of direct methods and Charybdis of slow convergence. The recent surge of activity in computational biology creates new opportunities for iterative methods. As an example, the protein folding problem involves predicting the native state of a protein. This is accomplished by minimizing a complex energy function. Global optimization methods for solving this problem employ iterative methods, but computational limitations have restricted the application of such methods to small proteins (fewer than 100 amino acid residues). High performance computing is one avenue researchers are taking. The protein folding problem is only one of a great many applications that can use iterative methods to solve them. Some of the specific topics targeted at this meeting are: applications (with new emphasis on computational biology), domain decomposition, preconditioning, parallel methods, nonsymmetric solvers, nonlinear systems and eigenvalue solvers, multilevel methods, Krylov methods, interdisciplinary research, student papers, and open problems. The International Association for Mathematics and Computers in simulations (IMACS) International Symposiums on Iterative Methods in Scientific Computing are meetings that have been held regularly since . The investigator and colleagues organize the sixth such meeting. The conference is dedicated to providing an overview of the state of the art in the use of iterative methods with an eye to contributions of the past, present and future. The emphasis is placed upon identifying future research directions in the mainstream of modern scientific computing. Of particular interest are talks on interdisciplinary research, open problems, and applications, particularly in computational biology. A special issue of the IMACS Journal Applied Numerical Mathematics is devoted to the meeting doc21279 none With National Science Foundation support, Professor Marvin Rowe, his graduate student, Ph.D. candidate Karen Steelman, and their archaeological and accelerator mass spectrometry colleagues will conduct research attempting to demonstrate that plasma-chemical extraction (PCE) of organic carbon can be accomplished virtually non-destructively for many sorts of perishable archaeological artifacts. The team brings expertise developed over the past decade and a half, a time in which Dr. Rowe and his graduate students perfected the PCE technique for removal of minute amounts (about 0.1 milligrams of carbon) organic carbon from rock paintings to allow accelerator mass spectrometric radiocarbon dating of those images. That laboratory remains the sole laboratory capable of direct dates on pictographs independent of the pigments used. Advantages of non-destructive analysis of rare and valuable archaeological artifacts are noteworthy and are more or less obvious. Many archaeological samples are inherently rare and precious. For example, four notable examples are the Shroud of Turin, the Vinland map, the Kenewick man and the Iceman . Non-destructive dates and non-destructive stable isotopic determinations (d13C) would provide useful information on such artifacts without destroying even small portions of these objects. And archaeologists often find preserved perishable artifacts, e.g., textiles, baskets, wood carvings, seeds, or papyri, that need require study, especially dating. But because of their rarity, they should be conserved, curated and displayed. Their destruction presents both practical and ethical problems for archaeologists. In all these cases, non-destructive radiocarbon dates and stable carbon isotopic measurements would provide data without destruction of even a small part of the artifact under question. We have obtained various samples from the Fourth International Radiocarbon Intercomparison study to test the PCE radiocarbon and stable isotopic analyzes for accuracy and degree of non-destructiveness. Other samples have also been obtained for evaluating the accuracy of radiocarbon dates and stable carbon isotopic measurements with non-destructive PCE. There has already been some interest expressed by archaeologists about the possibility of non-destructive radiocarbon dates. With National Science Foundation support, we thus hope to demonstrate beyond question that we can produce accurate dates and d13C values utilizing plasma-chemical extraction of minute amounts of carbon doc21280 none A fundamental issue in the numerical solutions of partial differential equations (PDEs) is adaptive mesh refinement. Local refinements (the h-methods) and moving mesh methods (the r-methods) are two basic types of approaches. Each has its features. The h-methods are robust and reliable. The r-methods can be highly efficient and effective for time dependent problems. The goal of this project is to develop a comprehensive combined h- and r-refinement method to achieve the advantages of both approaches. This combined method is especially useful in solving advection-diffusion problems, with which the numerical diffusion and advection speed can be significantly reduced. Major issues to be addressed in this research include: the error estimates used to guide the hr-refinement, stable and accurate time integration methods used in conjunction with the spatial hr-refinement; the conservative numerical schemes based on the hr-refined meshes; the efficient solution of the linear algebraic equations arising from the discretization; the implementation and software development. While the analysis and algorithms will be established in the context of general time dependent advection-diffusion problems, we shall focus on two specific applications: the contamination and remediation of ground water systems in environmental science, and the motion and deformation of white blood cells in biophysics. With the advances of modern computer technology, numerical experiments have now become one of the two primary tools in science, industry, and engineering (the other is physical experiments). Numerical simulation of many important processes involves the solution of advection-diffusion problems. Examples include optimal design of aircrafts and automobiles, forecast of global weather change, remediation of surface and ground water contamination, and innovation of biomedical devices. This project aims to develop a robust, reliable, and highly efficient mesh refinement method used for solving the advection-diffusion problems. Major issues in the design, analysis, and implementation of this method will be addressed. In particular, it will be applied directly to solve environmental and biophysical problems. We anticipate that successful completion of this project will not only enrich the mathematical theory of adaptive solution of partial differential equations, but also generate highly efficient and accurate numerical algorithms, which will find applications in a variety of industrial and engineering areas that are essential to our national economy and security. Date: May 22nd, doc21281 none This research project will integrate experimental and modeling approaches to establish and understand the relationships between processing conditions, coating microstructure and coating properties thermal spray processing. Multi-institution, multidisciplinary collaborative research will expand the application of thermally sprayed polymer ceramic composite coatings by incorporating nanoscopic to microscopic scales of reinforcement. The high velocity oxy-fuel [HVOF] thermal spray process will be used to deposit mixed, layered and functionally gradient matrix composite coatings. Thermally sprayed nanoscale silica reinforced Nylon 11 and polycarbonate matrix composites have previously exhibited significant improvements in scratch and wear resistance, modulus and barrier properties. Multiple scales of ceramic reinforcement should produce further improvements in properties, bridging the nano-to-conventional material interfaces, and providing fundamental understanding of the effect of the reinforcement size scale on matrix structure and composite properties. Three graduate students will be cross-trained through research tasks in thermal spray processing, microstructural and mechanical characterization and transport phenomena modeling. Integration of the computational model of particle melting, impact, deformation and solidification with experimental process and microstructural characterization will guide development and optimization of the HVOF spraying process. This research should stimulate new and improved applications nylon 11 silica composite materials as protective coatings, and for thermally sprayed composite protective coatings in general. Industry interest in thermally sprayed coatings is growing, as indicated, for example, by participation in technical programming on thermally sprayed polymers. Thermal spray technology is well established for metals, ceramics and cermets. The current project should support future commercialization of sprayed polymer ceramic composites by characterizing the fundamental process structure property relationships of these materials doc21282 none The focus of this research is refinement of the Kulinkovich reaction which involves the titanium-mediated cyclopropanation of esters and the use of the resulting heteroatom-substituted cyclopropanes as synthetic intermediates for medium size ring formation. Methods for asymmetric cyclopropanation, cyclopropanol and cyclopropylamine-mediated syntheses, and the elaboration of vinylcyclobutanols will be pursued and a total synthesis of the natural product suberosenone will be used to highlight the methodology. With this renewal award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Jin K. Cha of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Alabama. Professor Cha will focus his work on the development of methods for the stereoselective construction of carbocycles by taking advantage of the release of ring strain present in readily available heteroatom-substituted cyclopropanes. The research has potential broader impact in the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries and presents an excellent vehicle for the training of students doc21217 none ing the details of specific mobile agent technologies, and encompasses static and dynamic analysis techniques. Second, a prototype system that supports the security analyses in the framework will be designed and implemented. Third, experimental subjects will be collected and experimentation will be performed. The experiments performed will allow for evaluating the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed framework on real examples defined for existing mobile agent systems doc21276 none The oceanic thermohaline circulation is strongly affected by localized dense-water formation in high-latitude oceans. Such dense water masses are released into the large-scale circulation in the form of ocean bottom density currents mostly from localized regions (e.g., Denmark Strait, Strait of Gibraltar for the Mediterranean overflow, Bab el Mandep Strait for the Red Sea overflow). Because of the small space and time scales required to resolve their dynamics, such density currents form the ``bottle neck of the thermohaline circulation investigation. Despite their importance, we have a limited understanding of the dynamics of bottom density currents, and at present, the oceanic density currents are poorly represented in global climate simulations. The main goal of this proposal is to enhance the understanding of the dynamics of ocean bottom density currents from laboratory scale, to geophysical scale, through three-dimensional, nonhydrostatic numerical simulations. The investigators accomplish this in three stages. First, benchmark a parallel high-order spectral element Navier-Stokes solver, Nek , by reproducing existing laboratory results of bottom density currents by direct numerical simulations. Second, explore dynamics for which there are few or no laboratory results, in particular dynamics of bottom density currents protruding into a stratified fluid, and in a rotating environment. Third, bridge the gap between laboratory scale and geophysical scale by using large eddy simulations. Geophysical scale calculations are configured for the Red Sea overflow, and confirmed with data from the Red Sea Overflow Experiment. Various metrics are used to quantify density current dynamics. Variation of solar heating with latitude, and other factors, drive the so-called ``thermohaline circulation in the ocean, which is closely linked to the role that the ocean plays in climate dynamics. This complex geophysical problem, with its range of scales, physical, mathematical and computational constraints can only be approached through an orchestrated effort involving cross-disciplinary expertise. The investigators conduct physically-guided numerical simulations, quantify dynamical behavior of ocean density currents, and describe the impact of density currents on the climate. The investigators integrate this research project with education of three graduate students and contribute to the training of US technical workforce for the 21st century. This research project enhances the scientific understanding of oceanic density currents, and helps improve the representation of ocean density currents in global climate simulations and contribute to the climate change research doc21285 none Dr. Robert W. Thacker of the University of Alabama at Birmingham has been awarded a grant to investigate evolutionary relationships between marine sponges in the family Dysideidae and the microbial symbionts [cyanobacteria ( blue-green algae )] and other bacteria] that live inside these sponges. Many species in the Family Dysideidae produce chemical compounds with anti-viral and anti-cancer properties. Although the porous bodies of these marine sponges can host diverse microbial communities, the role of microbial symbionts in the production of pharmaceutically active compounds remains unclear. A preliminary study by Dr. Thacker suggests that as sponges have evolved and split into distinct species, their microbial communities have evolved in tandem and are specific to each species of sponge. This study will examine several species of Dysidea and related genera from the Western Pacific, Caribbean, and Mediterranean regions. Sponge DNA sequences and microbial DNA sequences will be compared to test the hypothesis that sponges and their symbionts share parallel evolutionary histories. This study will also investigate the placement of the Family Dysideidae into either Order Dendroceratida or Order Dictyoceratida by comparing DNA sequences among members of the Dysideidae and selected sponges from the two orders. In addition, this study will test whether the production of pharmaceutically active compounds is associated with the presence or absence of specific symbionts. This research project will provide a rare, direct comparison of the evolutionary histories of sponges and their symbionts, with an immediate impact on the fields of sponge taxonomy, drug discovery, and host-symbiont coevolution. The project will also provide a greater understanding of the evolutionary histories of sponges and their symbionts, which will accelerate and enrich the search for new anti-viral and anti-cancer drugs. Increased knowledge of these host-microbe interactions will directly impact our understanding of all types of animal-microbe interactions, including those involving humans doc21286 none Proteins containing long coiled-coil domains have been found in animals and yeast to be involved in attaching signaling molecules to the large, solid-state components of the cell, such as membrane systems, centromeres, centrosomes, or the nuclear scaffold. There is growing evidence that they play an important role in the spatial and temporal regulation of protein positioning in the cell. In contrast, this group of proteins has been barely investigated in plants. The goal of this Arabidopsis project is to identify all Arabidopsis proteins that contain long stretches of coiled-coil domains, and to functionally characterize a subgroup that has been implicated in plant nuclear envelope targeting. Preliminary research has identified over predicted coiled-coil proteins in the Arabidopsis genome, almost 70% of which are unknown proteins . Examples of coiled-coil proteins with sorting signals for all major compartments of the plant cell have been identified. To begin a functional investigation of this large and uncharacterized protein class in Arabidopsis, a twofold approach will be taken: (1) An automated computational platform will be established on a multi-processor cluster that will allow: (a) to identify all long (50 amino acids or longer) coiled-coil proteins in Arabidopsis by structural prediction algorithms; (b) to integrate the output with a battery of sequence and structure analysis programs to establish predicted nuclear, organellar, and membrane localization, family relationships, functional domains, and other relevant features; and (c) to create a publicly available, searchable database of Arabidopsis coiled-coil proteins, to which experimental data such as subcellular location, protein-protein interactions, and mutant phenotypes will be added. (2) A group of 16 coiled-coil proteins of unknown function, which bind to Arabidopsis WPP-domain proteins, will be functionally investigated. The WPP domain is a nuclear envelope-targeting domain unique to plants, which is involved in positioning Ran GTPase activating protein (RanGAP) at the nuclear rim. A group of coiled-coil proteins has been experimentally identified, which specifically recognize the WPP domain. The hypothesis is that some of the identified proteins are specific subcellular anchors for WPP-domain proteins. This will be tested by investigating: (a) the in vitro and in vivo binding specificity of the full-length proteins; (b) their subcellular localization; (c) knockout or RNAi phenotypes; and (d) the effect of coiled-coil protein knockouts on the subcellular positioning of WPP-domain protein-GFP fusions. The first approach will provide an accessible bounty of information about features that can help build informed hypotheses about the function of individual proteins. The second approach will directly investigate the function of 16 coiled-coil unknown proteins on a molecular, cellular, and whole-plant level. A list of the accession numbers of the genes to be analyzed during this project can be found at http: www.arabidopsis.org info _projects index.html. Experimental data will be made available by publication and subsequently by incorporation into a publicly available database accessible as link from http: www.biosci.ohio-state.edu ~plantbio Faculty meier.html. Resources such as Arabidopsis lines and plasmids will be made available through the ABRC. This project will provide training opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students at the interface of molecular cell biology and bioinformatics. On a broader scope, the investigation of spatial organization of signaling in plant cells might lead to future approaches in developmental engineering of crop plants doc21287 none Dev Thirumalai is supported by a grant from the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program in the Chemistry Division and the Molecular Biophysics Program in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences to continue work on protein folding and protein dynamics. This work is characterized by the development of algorithms and theories to interpret various topics, such as the force-induced unfolding of proteins and the assembly of beta-hairpin structures. These concepts and methods are used to make precise predictions that can be tested in experiments. This current project focuses on three areas: 1) obtaining a greater understanding of elementary processes in protein folding, such as loop formation and beta-hairpin formation; 2) investigating the mechanism of urea-induced denaturation; and 3) studying the chaperone-assisted folding of proteins. Much of this work relies on statistical mechanics and simulations that have been used for the studies of glasses. In this project there is a close connection between Thirumalai s theoretical and computational studies and recent experimental work, a connection that is often missing in similar computational investigations. The theoretical approach used here will provide a basic understanding of the folding properties of proteins, such as why a particular amino acid sequence adopts a particular folded conformation. Such problems are currently at the frontier of protein research, and a basic understanding of the factors that influence protein folding could have an enormous impact on the biotechnology industry doc21288 none Allen University HBCU-UP supported planning efforts will focus on three aspects of the institution s science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) instructional and research infrastructure: (1) STEM teaching and learning; (2) undergraduate and faculty research opportunities; and, (3) partnerships with industry and other institutions of higher learning. The assessment plan includes evaluations of student performance and progress toward STEM degree completion. Impediments to student successful completion of core STEM courses and participation in research will be identified and remedied. Particular emphasis will be placed on (1) enhancing teaching strategies; (2) increasing undergraduate research opportunities; (3) faculty development; (4) curriculum reform; (5) infusion of technology to enhance instruction; and, (6) the adaptation of best practices to broaden the participation of under-represented minorities in STEM fields and the STEM workforce doc21289 none Mathews The objective of the research is to investigate the feasibility of a novel concept in ozone generator design that should enhance mass transfer by in-situ ozone production using porous electrodes. In addition, enhanced reaction efficiencies will be achieved through the use of highly reactive ozone isotopomer species. Ozone is a powerful oxidant that is more potent than chlorine in the destruction of microbiological contaminants, and in the oxidation of recalcitrant organic compounds in wastewaters. Also, relative to chlorine, ozone is a benign oxidant since it does not generate a large number of toxic compounds as byproducts. However, ozone has not found widespread use due to its relatively high cost per unit volume of water treated, because of poor ozone mass transfer and reaction efficiencies. This exploratory research could help to improve the cost effectiveness of ozone treatment of wastewaters doc21290 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor John Toscano, of the Department of Chemistry at Johns Hopkins University, is studying the structure and reactivity of short-lived organic intermediates. Professor Toscano will use the technique of time-resolved infrared spectroscopy, combined with experimental and calculational studies, to examine the chemistry of arylnitrenium ions, oxynitrenes, and oxynitrenium ions. The biologically important reaction of arylnitrenium ions with guanine will be examined to clarify mechanistic details. New photochemical precursors to oxynitrenes and oxynitrenium ions will be developed, and the chemistry and spectroscopy of these reactive intermediates will be elucidated. Organic chemical reactions frequently proceed via the formation of relatively unstable intermediate compounds of only fleeting existence. Such intermediates are also involved in many biochemical reactions and play key roles in numerous processes, including chemical carcinogenesis. By studying the formation, structure, and reaction chemistry of reactive intermediates, one may obtain fundamental information about the nature of chemical reactivity and potential leads for the prevention of chemically-induced hazards such as carcinogenicity. Professor John Toscano, of the Department of Chemistry at Johns Hopkins University, carries out studies of chemical reactions using the tool of time-resolved infrared spectroscopy, in which the powerful technique of infrared spectroscopy, which can provide key information about the structure of organic compounds, is used to follow the formation and disappearance of reactive intermediates during the course of a chemical reaction doc21291 none The project provides funds for a block travel grant for U.S. sociologists to attend the XVth World Congress of the International Sociological Association in Brisbane, Australia, July 7-13, . The major conference of the International Sociological Association, the World Congress occurs at four-year intervals and attracts approximately 5,000 participants. Support for travel of U.S. sociologists permits continued growth of international exchange and collaboration in sociology. An activity of this type is particularly timely given the necessity to promote international collaborations on challenges arising from global social processes and transformations, including those stemming from global interconnectedness, the new technolgies associated with the internet, and the growing hybridization of cultures. Evaluation of indiviudal requests for travel awards, selection of recipients, and the distriubtion of funds will be the responsibility of the American Sociological Association. Competitive criteria for an award include an iinvitation or acceptance of a paper, the scientific merit of the paper, and qualifications of the applicant. The selection process will seek to ensure a presence at the World Congress of junior scholars and sociologists under-represented in international scholarly meetings doc21292 none This project addresses electron spin properties and ballistic transport effects in InSb quantum wells, and aims to optimize such structures for applications that rely on these phenomena. Large spin effects such as the Rashba and Zeeman terms are correlated with narrow band gaps. Because InSb has the smallest band gap of any III-V semiconductor, spin effects are expected to be amongst the largest. The approach involves a range of experiments to study these effects in InSb heterostructures. First, energy splitting due to the Rashba effect will be probed using an electron spin resonance technique. By varying the structural parameters of the quantum well, factors that influence the Rashba effect will be identified. This is expected to contribute to a more complete understanding of the Rashba effect with the goal of optimizing structures for large Rashba split-ting. Second, point-contact techniques for studying spin splitting in 1D channels will be ex-plored. In these 1D channels the Rasbha effect has been predicted to lead to a much richer con-ductance spectra. InSb is well suited to this study due to both the large Rashba term and the small effective mass that leads to large confinement energies. Third, quantum Hall ferromagnets will be sought by exploiting the large Zeeman effect in InSb. Studies of ferromagnetism in quantum fluids may improve understanding of ferromagnetism in general. Lastly, a newly proposed spin filter that takes advantage of the large Zeeman effect will be developed. Experiments on the bal-listic transport properties of InSb quantum wells will be performed. The small effective mass of InSb leads to long mean free paths. Preliminary data suggests ballistic transport even at 185K. Although unrelated to spin, ballistic transport is required for some spin devices. It is planned to develop structures that exhibit ballistic transport at room temperature and structures that have low-temperature mean free paths sufficiently long for electron focusing experiments. Continued improvement in the quality of heterostructures will be aided by ongoing excitonic studies which provide values of materials parameters important for device design. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in areas of electronic materials science having technological relevance. An important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education. This research effort enlists contributions from un-dergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs. These experiences will contribute to the prepara-tion of students and staff for employment in areas of technologically importance. The combined resources of collaborations among the PI and two co-PIs provide special opportunities for educa-tion and training in highly interdisciplinary forefront research doc21293 none The objective of the proposed research is to identify and quantify the conditions that lead to carbide oxidation and to investigate the use of promoters and promoted supports to improve the stability of these catalysts. Because of its widespread use in other applications, the project will focus only on molybdenum carbide catalysts. Since it is likely that catalyst stability is highly dependent on redox chemistry, the first stage of the proposed research will focus on determining the effects of reactant product compositions on the oxidation kinetics of bulk molybdenum carbide catalysts synthesized by various methods to produce relatively high surface areas per unit mass. Since excess synthesis carbon can lead to subsequent coking problems, the catalyst synthesis protocol will be carried out so that excess carbon can be controlled or eliminated. The methodology will consist of dynamic x-ray diffraction and TGA MS experiments (at reforming conditions), combined with appropriate catalyst characterization techniques (FTIR, XPS, SEM TEM). In the second stage of the proposed work, the PI will investigate methods to increase the range of catalyst stability through the use of supported molybdenum carbide catalysts, promoted with an in oxygen buffer (curia). Parameters to be investigated in this phase of the project will include the characteristics of the support (surface area, acidity), the catalyst synthesis methodology and the catalyst promoter loading. This project has the potential to provide a more efficient route for making hydrogen for fuel cells doc21294 none CAM , a conference on applied mathematics, will be held on the University of Central Oklahoma campus on the weekend of October 25 - 27, . The conference will focus on two related areas within applied mathematics with applications to telecommunications, and electrical and computer engineering: wavelets signal processing and error-correcting codes. As a result, this conference will be of interest to engineers and physicists as well as to mathematicians. A major emphasis of the conference will be coding theory : Much of signal processing is about source coding while the theory of error-correcting codes is channel coding. Wavelets are now the most applicable tool in signal processing. For instance, wavelet filters were recently adopted as the JPEG- image compression standard. Wavelet packets, a mathematical shorthand for compressing and restoring virtually any image or sound, have been used by the FBI and Scotland Yard to compress their fingerprint files to a more manageable size. CAM will foster interdisciplinary communication between mathematicians, computer engineers, and signal processors; i.e., this conference will bring together theoreticians and practitioners. Moreover, the conference will provide an opportunity for students (undergraduate & graduate) and faculty from the region to share their research with each other and interact with world-class experts in the areas of wavelets signal processing and error-correcting codes. Error-correcting codes provide the means for the reliable transformation of speech, audio, images and video into digital content. Deep space communication, wireless phones, high speed data networks, the Internet, and products like compact disc players, hard drives, and high speed modems make essential use of coding and data compression to improve speed and reliability. The federal funds will be used primarily to provide travel support for students, recent doctoral recipients, junior faculty, women and other under-represented groups in mathematics, science and engineering. Date: May 14, doc21295 none This grant will support Pacific island scholars attendance at the joint meeting of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics (PME) and its North American Chapter (PMENA) to be held in Honolulu, Hawaii in July, . The Pacific island scholars will be selected mathematics specialists from the departments and ministries of education and college level mathematics instructors from the colleges and universities in Hawaii and on the U.S. affiliated Pacific island communities of American Samoa, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Guam, the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands and the Republic of Palau. NSF support will enable the Pacific island scholars to engage with the PME community for the first time, thereby enhancing national and international collaboration among mathematics educators. The Pacific island scholars and mathematics specialists will be introduced to the international mathematics education community at a reception to be held in conjunction with the opening of the conference. Following the delivery of the first plenary, which will be given by a Pacific islander, the Pacific scholars and mathematics specialists will present an overview of their islands culture and the challenges faced in teaching mathematics in their island communities. During the conference a special panel discussion will give the participates the opportunity to obtain feedback from the international community of mathematics educators concerning these challenges. Daily Theory to Practice sessions will provide opportunities for the Pacific scholars to actively contribute and receive professional development throughout the conference. The Principal Investigators will attempt to establish a Pacific Network of Mathematics Educators as a result of the conference activities doc21296 none Filament channels are the common denominator for the origin of coronal mass ejections, erupting filaments and associated flares. These events do not occur until the filament has reached a critical stage of development. This proposal consists of five observational projects and one theoretical project all aimed at the single goal of understanding the origin and evolution of filament channels as a physical basis to elements of space weather doc21297 none Prop #: PI: William Hahn This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessel Endeavor operated by the University of Rhode Island and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, William Hahn is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire a pilot computerized maintenance software package to be tested by URI and three other UNOLS institutions doc21298 none Genzer, Jan North Carolina State U The PI s propose a method for preparing gradient polymer brushes - structures with spatial variation of grafting density of polymers end-anchored on substrates. The PI s believe that the proposed set up is unique as it would allow one, for the first time, to explore the details of the transition between the brush and mushroom conformations. Moreover, they predict that this methodology could have a high impact on designing novel materials and structures with unique properties. For example, the ability to control the grafting density of macromolecules enables us to tailor the barrier properties of the materials, which would make them very attractive candidates for high quality filters or membranes. Additionally, assembling polymers in brush-like structures is believed to provide unprecedented means of generating nanostructured molecular templates that can be for example used as molecular seeds governing the ordering of non-polymeric materials (e.g.,nanoparticles, silicates, etc.) in polymeric matrices doc21299 none The Society for Research on Biological Rhythms is now the largest society in the world for those interested in biological rhythms, and this award supports their biannual meeting. Biological rhythms are an important feature of life on this planet, and so the topic has major importance, and there have been rapid recent advances in understanding underlying mechanisms of rhythmic biological activity. The conference is highly interdisciplinary in the approaches discussed, including molecular biology, physiology and behavior, computational neuroscience and neuroendocrinology, and in topics spanning subsecond oscillations in motor systems, intertidal rhythms in invertebrates, reproductive cycles, human sleep and shift-work schedules. The format is an excellent combination of lectures, workshops, and poster sessions, emphasizing interactions between workers from different fields, and women are well represented, along with the international community. The biannual timing allows a good perspective, and this year will cover some of the most exciting current issues, such as the recent discovery of a link between the circadian clock gene Per (from the fruitfly) and a genetically controlled sleep pattern in humans. The potential impact of this conference is high in the fields of neuroendocrinology and behavioral neuroscience, because of the focused discussions shaping future work, the potential to develop new cross-disciplinary collaborations, and the likely interactions and introductions essential to career development of young investigators. Funding from NSF will be important to help students, postdocs, and young researchers without access to other funding to attend the conference doc21300 none uscle insertion scars, or entheses, are easily observable but poorly understood features of bones and fossils. There is a long-standing assumption in the field of paleontology that large or obvious muscle scars are indicative of heavy muscle use. However, this assumption has never been thoroughly tested. This study will be the first to directly examine the relationship between known levels of muscle force and numerous aspects of enthesis morphology. The goal of this study is to examine if and how muscle use influences enthesis morphology so paleontologists may more confidently interpret these features on bones or fossils. This study will compare a variety of features of the entheses of sedentary and exercised adult sheep (Ovis aries). Preliminary work has indicated that moderate exercise induces no change in some aspects of enthesis morphology. Therefore the exercised sheep in this study will be run at a fast pace while carrying moderately heavy loads on their backs. This exercise regime is by design relatively intense, as one goal of the study is to determine whether intense muscle use is indeed related to large or obvious insertion marks. A variety of features will be measured on seven muscle insertion scars. Six of the scars are those of limb muscles that will be used in the running cycle. The seventh is that of the masseter muscle insertion on the mandible. This muscle should not be loaded differently in the two groups and thus its insertion will be studied as an internal control. The forces produced by each of the muscles will be quantified using force buckles and sonomicrometry. Thus this study will be the first to examine the morphology of entheses that had been subjected to known levels of muscle force in vivo. This study will develop the first objective, quantitative methods for describing the various features that are typically used to describe entheses. These methods will be used to test the hypotheses that increased muscle use significantly affects the size and rugosity of insertion scars. The first method is a previously tested latex molding method for measuring the three-dimensional surface area of insertion marks. The second method, to be heavily developed in this study, will measure enthesis rugosity, a feature that is often observed on bones and fossils but rarely quantified. The insertion scars will be scanned using a 3D-laser scanner and their topology will be analyzed using ArcView GIS 3.2, a Geographic Information System (GIS) software package. The rate of bone deposition under the insertions in both treatment groups will be measured using periodic administrations of fluorochrome labels. This information will provide insight into some of the physiological responses that occur in the bone beneath muscle insertions due to variations in muscle forces. It will also serve as a longitudinal measure of these responses and thus help control for pre-existing individual variation in enthesis morphology. In sum, the proposed study will provide much-needed insight into the relationship between muscle use and enthesis morphology. It is the first study to test the assumption that muscle use affects insertion scar morphology, and will demonstrate which aspects of this morphology are so affected. It will also provide the first method to objectively quantify the features of entheses. The results of this study should allow paleontologists to more confidently interpret the functional morphology of muscle insertion scars doc21301 none Proposal Number Principal Investigator Shinbrot, Glasser, and Storm Affiliation Rutgers U Title Gordon Research Conference on Granular and Granular-Fluid Flows The Proposal is seeking support for the first Gordon Research Conference on Granular and Granular-Fluid Flows, planned for June 30 - July 5, . Granular flow is an integral part of many industrial and technological processes including composites and pharmaceuticals to materials processing and semiconductor manufacturing. The conference is organized to focus on recent developments and emerging areas of research as well as discussion of the open questions in the field. Also, the conference promotes collaborations between various disciplines which overlap with the subject area of the conference doc21302 none The problem of better forecasting of the intensity of hurricanes has been identified by the U.S. Weather Research Program as a high priority research area. As hurricanes approach landfall, the horizontal distribution of intense winds in hurricanes often becomes highly asymmetrical, as does the intense convection in the eyewall and rainbands. Intense mesoscale vortices, as small as a few kilometers in scale, are believed to produce major damage in intense landfalling hurricanes. This project aims to analyze the physical mechanisms associated with interaction of a tropical cyclone with environmental vertical wind shear using a full-physics, high resolution advanced numerical modeling system. Previous studies have shown that persistent and predictable convective asymmetries develop in response to imposed environmental vertical wind shear. By better understanding the processes that produce asymmetries in tropical cyclone convection, and by understanding how those asymmetries feed back on the tropical cyclone intensity and structure, improved prediction of these events should be possible. Of particular interest is the development of asymmetries in the hurricane core convection during interaction with vertical wind shear caused by transient circulations. As the vertical wind shear is imposed on the hurricane core, asymmetries should develop that are well predicted by the constant-shear studies. However, as the wind shear recedes, the time-evolution of the core structural changes in the hurricane will be studied, particularly as they feed back on changes in the storm intensity. This study seeks to achieve knowledge of these processes through examination of a series of initial-value and time varying, full-physics simulations utilizing a very fine mesh and explicit moist physics. The results will be synthesized to establish a series of cause and effect relationships governing core intensity changes, and these relationships will be tested by examining real-data cases. Successful completion of this research potentially will lead to improvements in the forecasting of landfalling hurricanes doc21303 none This proposal was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NER. As frequency of modern processors approach a GHz domain, the search for an alternative interconnects has intensified. Thus, within the next ten years a new interconnects technology must be developed which can support the exponential growth of processor speed experienced over the last three decades. Several alternative interconnects technologies are being pursued including transmission lines and integrated, high speed opto-couplers. The indirect band structure and poor efficiency of radiative recombination in major semiconducting materials (Si, Ge, SiGe), have limited the last approach. Despite the fact that silicon and germanium are the most studied semiconductors, not one but several totally surprising discoveries have been recently reported. Examples include visible photoluminescence from Si nanocrystals and different forms of self-organization in Ge nanocrystals grown on a Si substrate. This project is aimed to find links between structural and optical properties in three-dimensional SiGe nanostructures, to better understand and enhance conditions leading to the domination of direct carrier recombination, and to explore feasibility of novel devices utilizing efficient light emission in these nanostructures. The project will be performed at New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, NJ in close collaboration with industrial partners (Hewlett-Packard and IBM). The educational part of this project includes development at NJIT, a public research institution, in a diverse major metropolitan area a comprehensive, multidisciplinary program focused on nanotechnology and nanoscience doc21304 none Truong-Thao Nguyen CUNY City College The fast growth of the applied area of analog-to-digital conversion has simultaneously hindered the solid establishment of its mathematical foundations. This has become particularly critical with the currently successful technique of modulation, as recent results of the principal investigator have shown the inaccuracy of the conversion error model universally adopted until now. The research proposed in this project is based on recent discoveries of fundamental algebraic properties of n th order modulators and aims at establishing the first general algebraic foundations to modulation. On going research has already proved effective in correcting the classical error model. Although new practical improved techniques may not be the immediate outcome to this small grant proposal, the establishments of solid foundations will enable the growth of powerful analytical tools, opening new directions of design not accessible by the currently empirical approach to modulation doc21305 none Shen Zheng-Kang Freymueller Scientist from the University of Alaska, University of California Los Angeles, and the China Seismological Bureau are carrying out a a rapid response to the November 14, Mw~7.9 Kunlun fault earthquake in Tibet. This earthquake provides a unique opportunity to measure the postseismic deformation of an M~8 earthquake that occurred within a pre-existing geodetic network in which relative site velocities are known to about 1 mm yr., Three continuously recording GPS sites near the rupture and a fourth about 150 km away were established one week after the event by the China Seismological Bureau. Also, 17 existing and new GPS sites along the Qinghai-Tibet highway were surveyed in December, . A second field campaign is extending GPS network westward from the Qinghai-Tibet highway, adding new sites along the fault on either side of surface rupture in the near field. This survey is repeating measurements at all of the sites surveyed in November-December, providing the initial postseismic results. These measurements will lead to a better understanding of the rheological structure of the exceptionally thick northern Tibetan crust as well as the postseismic processes triggered by such a large event doc21306 none Edelman The investigator, Marko Huhtanen, studies iterative methods and develops related matrix analysis for solving large-scale problems in linear algebra. The emphasis is on problems involving non-Hermitian matrices. Recently he has extended optimal methods for Hermitian matrices to problems with normal matrices. This gave rise to two fundamentally different families of algorithms. One is based on a direct extension of the classical Hermitian Lanczos algorithm and the other on using real analytic techniques. These methods can be employed, e.g., in solving linear systems and finding eigenvalues, as well as in multivariate least squares approximation problems and interpolation. Moreover, he has introduced a classification of normal matrices to measure complexity of the algorithms. In light of these methods the investigator aims at finding ways to extend these solution techniques to nonnormal problems. The matrix analytic part of the study deals with, e.g., matrix nearness problems and classes of matrices with which matrix-vector products can be performed inexpensively, typically with the FFT techniques. The motivation behind the project is to increase the speed of computations for solving real world problems. Modeling problems of science and engineering realistically leads invariably to large scale problems. Then the number of unknowns to be solved can be millions. To solve problems of this size within a reasonable time limit calls for new algorithms and solution techniques. A concrete example can be given with signal processing: a faster algorithm means faster signal processing and the fast Fourier transformation has revolutionized this particular field of engineering. The investigator studies methods at the most fundamental level of numerical analysis because linear systems need to be solved practically in every problem one can imagine. Consequently, the impact of the study can be very large. In addition to inventing fast solution methods, in this project mathematical tools are developed that are of interest from a pure matrix analytic point of view doc21307 none Howard University is hosting IARD , the third biennial conference of the International Association of Relativistic Dynamics. The overall goal of the conference is to facilitate the understanding of problems and the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge about relativistic dynamics at all levels. This award will enable increased participation of students and postdoctoral researchers in the conference activities. Their participation in this conference provides them with unique and extensive access to the leaders in their field, exposes them to new research opportunities and techniques and helps prepare them for leadership roles in the future doc21308 none This research focuses on understanding the principles of building responsive polymeric materials by means of self-assembly of polymers at surfaces. Applications of the multilayering technique to produce new materials for controlled delivery of chemicals have been recently proposed, yet there is presently no adequate understanding of the response properties of multilayered films. Multilayers will be built using various copolymers that contain centers for both electrostatic and hydrogen bonding; and the fraction of monomer units within a copolymer will be systematically varied to control pH ionic strength at which the films delaminate or swell. Novel modifications of the polymers will produce non-delaminating films with targeted response properties. The film growth and response properties will be determined by in situ ATR-FTIR spectroscopy, in situ ellipsometry in phase-modulated mode, and permeability ionizations and degree of hydrogen-bonding among the layered molecules. The second will enable measurements of the swelling of the films in different environmental measurements. The question of how they are translated into changes in film density and stability will be addressed. Finally, the knowledge of interlayer interactions, swelling and permeability of the films will be used to build polymeric containers with rationally designed response of the membrane. This research might enable the design of novel layered polymer films and capsules with targeted response characteristics. The potential applications of these materials include temporary protection layers, responsive coatings and controlled delivery of chemicals, such as pesticides, fragrances or drugs doc21309 none The aim of this project is to explore the role that developmental regulatory mechanisms play in producing variation in natural populations. To study this topic, the investigators are using Heliconius butterflies as a system for studying the evolution of gene regulation from a molecular perspective. Several of the color pattern genes in Heliconius that allow regional races to participate in adaptive mimicry behavior act as simple switches in a pigment biosynthesis pathway. The biosynthetic pathways that produce pigments in butterfly wings are well known, and this research will test how simple changes in the regulation of specific intermediate pigment synthesis and transport genes may result in wing pattern variation within and between species. Understanding evolution at the mechanistic level is critical for effective management of, for instance, the adaptive resistance in pathogen and pest species. It is of immediate benefit to develop a basic understanding of the genetic basis of how organisms develop new significant characteristics over short time spans. Butterfly wing patterns provide a tractable model system for studying adaptive genetic change at the population level doc21310 none Funding for computer scientists in quan um information processing has come from a variety of programs a NSF. While a new QuBIC program has been announced in he EIA division of CISE, there is arguably a need for a focused program on quantum information processing with a direct focus on he computer science aspects of he research. The C-CR division of CISE would be the natural location for such a program on Quantum Communications, Cryptography and Coding. To gauge the need and plan what migh be the scientific coverage and research agenda for such a potential program,we plan to bring several of he leading researchers together for a planning workshop.This workshop will lead to a five-to ten-page report that will give a detailed assessment of the need for a new C-CR program and give a descrip ion of he research areas ha such a program should focus on. By having a C-CR program on Quantum Communications, Cryptography and Coding, NSF would be able to focus its efforts on he computer science aspects of quanum information processing and greatly enhance its ability o make sure he United States keeps its leading role in his important area. This workshop and report will be the first important step in planning such a program doc21311 none Inhalational anthrax is nearly always fatal unless antibiotic treatment begins early in the course of the disease. There is therefore an urgent need for novel agents to treat the disease in the event of further terrorist use of anthrax. Fatality from anthrax is attributable to a toxin produced by the bacteria called lethal toxin. Much attention has turned to the development of agents which target lethal toxin as an adjunct to antibiotic therapy. The enzymatically active component of lethal toxin is a zinc-dependent metalloprotease called lethal factor (LF). LF causes the activation and lysis of macrophages as a consequence of the specific cleavage of proteins in the cell cytosol. Data on the cleavage site specificity of LF is at this point limited, and no specific inhibitors of LF have thus far been reported. The substrate specificity of LF will be determined using recently developed peptide library methodology. Data from peptide library screens will be used to prepare model substrates for monitoring LF activity both in vitro and in living cells. Peptide analogous inhibitors based on the optimal cleavage motif will be prepared. Improved inhibitors will be generated based on additional peptide library screens incorporating non-proteogenic unnatural amino acids, thus allowing a virtually unlimited source of chemical diversity to be tapped in an unprecedented manner. Such inhibitors can serve as lead compounds in the development of novel anthrax drugs. The technologies developed will be generally applicable to the design of substrates and inhibitors for proteases essential for the pathogenesis of other infectious diseases doc21312 none Todd In this project, the investigator and his students study improved interior-point algorithms for convex, especially second-order and semidefinite, programming problems. In particular, they investigate finding more accurate solutions to large-scale problems of this kind, interpreting the output of infeasible-interior-point methods as searching for infeasibility certificates when applied to infeasible problems, using ideas of Riemannian geomentry to develop new interior-point methods for possibly infeasible problems, and studying new barrier functions to be used in highly asymmetric problems, where usual primal-only or primal-dual methods would be inefficient. All these ideas are tested out by implementing them in the software package SDPT3, developed by the investigator and two of his collaborators, which is a competitive primal-dual code available over the internet (e.g., at http: www.math.cmu.edu ~reha sdpt3.html) and within the NEOS system (http: www-neos.mcs.anl.gov neos server-solvers.html) for distributed computing. Interior-point algorithms are a new and exciting computational method for solving large-scale resource allocation and other optimization problems. For example, they have been used to develop better designs for truss structures, such as bridges, that are better able to resist a wide range of external loads. Another application is the design of antenna arrays to highlight the receptivity in certain directions while muting that in all other directions. In finance, they are used to develop optimal portfolios to balance an acceptable rate of return with low volatility (unfortunately, these methods are only as good as the data they employ, and past history often does not give a good indication of future performance). In this and other contexts, the idea of robust optimization, to find solutions to problems that satisfy all constraints even when the data are perturbed a little, and that give good performance measures even when the data are slightly changed, is very attractive, and this class of methods is successful in treating some problems of this kind also. A last application mentioned here is currently being studied by the investigator and a statistics colleague: trying to find a good way to classify new data into one of two classes (e.g., with or without a cancerous tumour) on the basis of some training data (with known classification). This problem is of interest in data mining and biomedical fields. In all these problems, there is a desire to solve larger and larger instances (involving tens of thousands of variables and constraints) more and more accurately. The investigator and his collaborators study theoretically and practically ways to improve existing algorithms to extend their capabilities in these directions doc21313 none This project, which is supported by the Division of Materials Research and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, aims to investigate the life limiting thermal cycling, creep and microstructural instability of lead-free solders for electronic packaging with special reference to flip-chip (FC) and ball-grid array (BGA) packages. The project is a highly leveraged collaborative program of research between Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) and Intel (Chandler, AZ). The objectives of this GOALI proposal are to (1) devise a methodology for rapid creep characterization of FC and BGA solder balls with minimal sample preparation, based on the impression creep approach; (2) develop a unified creep model incorporating the effect of phase coarsening applicable to lead-free solders of 2 representative microstructural types; (3) generate comprehensive creep and coarsening kinetics data for solder joints of 2 selected lead-free alloys belonging to these microstructural types; and (4) provide fundamental mechanistic insight into the roles of microstructural scale and compositional artifacts (associated with attaching tiny volumes of solder to other materials) on the evolution of creep behavior during thermo-mechanical cycling (TMC). A major goal of the project is to directly measure the creep response of individual solder balls joined to a substrate, in lieu of the standard tests on bump arrays and bulk materials. The study will lead to an understanding of the fundamental phenomenological dependence of creep kinetics on the (a) microstructural scale, and (b) process-history dependent compositional variations of the joints. These goals are achieved by a systematic variation of material and process parameters. The work constitutes developing closed-form unified creep laws including microstructural coarsening effects, which may be incorporated into finite element models for solder-joint reliability assessment. The impression creep of single solder bumps is a challenging scientific effort and the successful completion of the project will have direct impact on semiconductor electronic packaging technology in predictive engineering processes. The work is multidisciplinary with impact on experimental aspects in materials sciences and mechanics, as well as predictive modeling efforts involving microstructural as well as finite element aspects. The project takes advantage of the expertise and experimental facilities available at the academic institution (NPS) as well as industrial counterpart (Intel Chandler). In addition, collaboration with experts at Motorola is pursued. The unique aspect of this GOALI program includes the time spent by the Intel PI at the academic institution. The personnel (PI, post-doctoral fellow and graduate students) from the academic institute (NPS) plan to perform studies at the industrial laboratory (Intel Chandler) while Intel supports the post-doctoral fellow during that time. The educational and technological impacts of the program are rated superior. The program is a close collaboration between NPS and Intel with secondary interactions with personnel at Motorola with implications to developing a thorough understanding of the life-limiting aspects of lead-free solders in microelectronic packaging. The project has practical importance to the microelectronic industry while addresses basic scientific issues. The study will (a) develop testing methodologies and models for improving current reliability engineering practices, and (b) generate kinetics data for two lead-free solders of strategic importance to the industry. The collaboration of the university personnel with industrial counterparts provides a significant opportunity for students doc21314 none A whole array of questions in different mathematical areas seem to be converge to questions having to do with the set of alcoves in a fixed Weyl chamber of a semisimple Lie group. The areas include Kac-Moody theory, homology of loop groups, quantum cohomology, the Verlinde algebra, MacDonald identities, Schubert calculus, ideals in the Borel subalgebra, symmetric space theory and the Cartan-Weyl representation theory of compact Lie groups. In effect our proposal is to sort out what is going on to unify what seems to us to be unifiable in the subjects listed above. Group theory, and especially Lie group theory, lies at the heart of mathematics and the application of mathematics to problems in the real world. Included in the latter are applications to both classical and quantum mechanics, control theory, string theory, chemistry and crystallography. Lie group theory is extremely intricate and the extent to which it is applicable depends highly on a knowledge of its intricacies. The proposed project expects to discover highly exciting new structures in the subject and would unify many existing structures. The effect that would be to greatly increase our understanding and our ability to use these powerful structures. This award is jointly funded by the programs in Geometric Analysis and Algebra, Number Theory, & Combinatorics doc21315 none This award by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research by Professor Charles P. Casey at the University of Wisconsin to develop an understanding of industrially-important metallocene polymerization catalysis and to pursue new synthetic paths to enediyne complexes that may facilitate the preparation of enediyne anticancer drugs. Metallocene catalysts have revolutionized the polymer industry and now account for the production of over 2 billion poinds of polyethylene a year. This research will look at a key step in the polymer chain-lengthening process by exploring the detailed structural dependence of alkene insertion into metallocene alkyls. A new synthetic reaction involving alkynyl carbene complexes, which juxtapose a metal-carbon double bond with a carbon-carbon triple bond, will be used to generate regioselective dimerization of the organic portion to yield enediyne complexes through a coupling of the terminal alkyne carbons. The initial focus will be on manganese compounds, which are more economical and more amenable to release of the metal ion. Since reactions of the alkynylcarbene complexes suggest a carbene-like reactivity at the remote alkynyl carbon, experiments will be undertaken to determine whether such complexes can react as if they were dicarbenes. The details of how catalysts add carbon groups in important industrial polymerization processes will be determined. A novel class of reagents that offers new routes to the preparation of an important class of anticancer drugs will be developed doc21316 none The principal investigator intends primarily to pursue the goal of attacking some of the fundamental problems of the Langlands program by means of analytic methods. He is most interested in the case of base change for holomorphic forms on GL(2) where a non-soluble base change is involved, but the proposed methods should work much more generally. At present the intention is to permit the use of the Riemann Hypothesis (in an appropriate setting) to achieve this goal. A second goal of the proposal is to study some of the fundamental analytic questions on L-functions. This proposal is ultimately concerned with finding methods to solve equations. Since the nineteenth century it has been known that certain equations have formulas (like the quadratic equation and the cubic equation) but that most do not. The cases that interest me are the equations with ordinary integer coefficients. It has become apparent in the last fifty years that there should be a completely different way of studying these general equations by using methods from analysis (i.e. derived from calculus) rather than by using methods from algebra. The idea is to describe and prove many properties of the solutions (which still exist even though there may be no formulas for them doc21317 none This award supports several aspects of the second phase of the EDGE Program, Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education. Core funding for the first phase of the program was provided by the National Science Foundation from to , with additional support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Security Agency. The goal of the program is to increase the number of women and minority students who successfully complete graduate programs in the mathematical sciences, by strengthening the ability of the targeted student population to successfully negotiate the transition from undergraduate to graduate education in mathematics, and to succeed in their respective graduate programs. The EDGE Program has two basic components: an intensive summer program prior to graduate school enrollment, and a follow-up mentoring program. In the first phase of the program, the summer component alternated between Bryn Mawr and Spelman Colleges. The second phase of the EDGE Program will consist of three major components: [1] a centrally administered program with a core staff consisting of the Co-Directors Rhonda Hughes of Bryn Mawr College and Sylvia Bozeman of Spelman College, as well as an Administrative Assistant. The core staff would maintain data on all EDGE participants, manage advertising and selection of participants, select host sites for the summer program, and coordinate the follow-up mentoring program; [2] a portable design for the EDGE Summer Program. By involving a core group of select institutions as EDGE sites, the program will be made more visible, it will reach a wider audience of students, and the number of undergraduate and graduate programs aware of the goals of the program would necessarily expand. [3] a biennial EDGE Symposium. This event would include an EDGE Reunion of past participants, as well as a forum to promote the advancement of women, and in particular minority women, involving a broader segment of the mathematics community. The first symposium will be hosted by Spelman College in . This award will specifically support several aspects of the proposed activities: travel funds for prospective Local Coordinators, who will participate in the expansion of the program to other sites; support of the EDGE Symposium, as well as smaller reunions for past participants who have strongly expressed the need to return to the program in the year following their participation; participant support costs for two returning women who have interrupted their academic careers for a variety of reasons and wish to attend a graduate program in mathematics; and consultant support for an improved and expanded web site doc11753 none The investigators will work to understand the physical origins of solar radiative variability. The main effort is to utilize semi-empirical models of the solar atmosphere to represent features on the solar surface and, where discrepancies are discovered, redefine the models. The investigators will then determine the effect of the distribution of surface features on irradiance and combine the information with spectral synthesis lines and broad spectral bands so as to compute spectral and total irradiance for a particular state of the Sun. Ultimately, the investigators seek to determine the most efficient measurements to make in the future in order to take advantage of the basic redundancy in the solar spectrum. The aim of the RISE program is to improve physical understanding of present, past, and future radiative output variations in the extreme ultraviolet (EUV), ultraviolet (UV), visible and infrared. In a practical sense, spectrum synthesis gives insight into the reliability of the use of surrogates (also known as proxies) to estimate total and spectral irradiance in the absence of direct measurements of appropriate accuracy. This exploitation of the natural redundancy and coherence in the solar spectrum can lead to more efficient measurement and analysis programs. Previous work of the investigators illustrated the importance of the evolution and spatial distribution of both plage and network (i.e. magnetic flux emergence) in determining the detailed time variability of irradiance. This work also revealed the sensitivity of the continuum intensity variation to structures deeper in the photosphere. The continuing speculation of a link between solar and climate variability on timescales longer than a decade raises the important issue of changes in the color of the solar spectrum due to variability of lines and continuum. An accurate theoretical estimate of the total solar irradiance and the shape of the solar radiation spectrum are essential to climate studies doc21319 none This research project is designed to increase our understanding of when price-fixing cartels form and how cartels price. The primary modeling innovation is to take account of a key goal of any illegal cartel - to avoid the appearance that there is a cartel. Existing models of collusion will be adapted by introducing a detection technology - whereby the level of prices and the change in prices influence the likelihood of creating suspicions - and antitrust penalties in the form of damages and fines. The analysis is then substantively dynamic in that past prices influence detection and also the level of penalties (as damages are calculated using the prices set by the cartel). Deploying dynamic programming and using both analytical and numerical methods, the properties of cartel pricing dynamics will be characterized. Results will be developed showing how cartel formation and the cartel price path depend on the form of antitrust policy, the method of detection, and industry traits such as market structure, cost and demand variability, demand seasonality, and buyer concentration. As recent cases such as lysine, graphite electrodes, fine arts auction houses, and vitamins exemplify, price-fixing remains a serious antitrust problem. The ultimate implications of this project are in providing the necessary knowledge to more effectively deter the formation of cartels and, in the event they do form, to better detect their presence. Thus far, the antitrust authorities have been largely reactive with respect to price-fixing; responding to customer complaints, internal whistleblowers, and the like. By identifying the properties of cartel pricing dynamics - what to look for - this project will help lay the foundation for a more pro-active antitrust policy that seeks to investigate industries which may be colluding. Furthermore, a more developed understanding of how antitrust policy influences the profitability of collusion will provide the basis for new innovative policies that are more effective at deterring the formation of cartels doc21320 none The focus of this work is on the development and applications of a two-scale discretization technique, namely the finite element method based on partition of unity. One main application is on the design of efficient discretization for nonmatching (either overlapping or nonoverlapping) grids. The main idea of nonmatching grids is to divide a physical domain into a set of overlapping or nonoverlapping subregions which can accommodate smooth, simple, easily generated grids. In this approach, a grid generation for complex geometries can be made simple, refinement grids can be added or removed without changing other grids, different equations numerical methods may be used on different grids, efficient structured grid solvers may be used. Furthermore, overlapping grids are well suited for parallelization and vectorization. The proposed generalized finite element method based on partition of unity provides a general and powerful discretization framework for this type of grids. Another major task is the development of a multigrid iterative method for solving the resulting algebraic systems for these new discretization schemes. As divide and conquer techniques, the proposed multiscale algorithms are suitable for parallel and high-performance computers. A class of new multiscale techniques are proposed to study for efficient numerical solution of partial differential equations. Multiscale methods in general are proven to be among the most powerful mathematical tools for the investigation of a broad range of models that are described by partial differential equations. Their pivotal role in the design of fast, reliable, and robust numerical methods for the solution of various problems places them among the most important research areas in the applied mathematics in the recent years. Since these methods are in some sense problem-independent, they are expected to have many important applications in science and engineering such as composite materials and subsurface flows in environmental applications. Date: May 28, doc21321 none PI: S.-Y. Alice Chang and Fengbo Hang, Princeton University : Some impact of topology on variational problems In this project, we will focus on variational problems involving vector- valued maps. In particular, we will study upper and lower bounds of the energy functional for maps with suitable topological information, the weak sequential approximation of Sobolev maps by smooth maps and the structure of singular sets for solutions of some variational problems. Various tools from geometric measure theory and differential and algebraic topology are used in handling these issues. On the other hand, our approach to the problems sheds light on new relations among these topics. Variational problems involving vector-valued maps appear naturally in analysis, geometry and physics. Besides their mathematical interests and importance, they are crucial to various models in mathematical physics. Typical examples include models for superconductivity, magnetic material and liquid crystals. The research in this area will lead to better understanding of certain type of physics phenomenon as well as new impetus in mathematics in this direction doc21322 none Bellaachia Description: This project supports a U.S.-Morocco workshop on information technology to be held in Rabat, Morocco June . The U.S. organizer is Dr. Abdelghani Bellaachia, Professor in the Department of Computer Science, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. The Moroccan co-organizer is Dr. Said Belcadi, Director, Scientific Research and Cooperation (CNCPRST), Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, Rabat, Morocco. The workshop will cover topics in the following areas: bioinformatics, e-commerce, internet networking, software engineering, telecomputing telemedicine, and wireless communications. It is hoped that the presentations and discussions will lead to identifications of areas of cooperative research of mutual interest to the two countries. Scope: This project will likely open avenues for collaboration in information technology research, an important area for the United States and for many of the developing countries, such as Morocco, where there is a need to accelerate the development in that area and to reap benefits in many applications such as in education, communications and in industrialization. The U.S. team that Dr. Bellaachia has assembled is composed of eminent and experienced scientists. The Government of Morocco has strongly endorsed the workshop. Funding for the project is provided by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Advanced Networking Infrastructure and Research doc21323 none Nonlinear equations depending on parameters are the basis for many scientific and engineering problems. The principal approach of numerical bifurcation analysis is based on continuation of solutions to well-defined operator equations. Such computational results give a deeper understanding of the solution behavior, stability, multiplicity, and bifurcations. This project is concerned with development of new algorithms and software for bifurcation analysis in large nonlinear systems and applications to MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS). Typical MEMS devices lead to multiscale-multiphysics problems. These devices include coupled mechanical, electrical, thermal and other parts. In addition to the bifurcations like beam buckling which involve a single type of physics, MEMS also exhibit bifurcations due to interactions between different energy domains. Bifurcations in MEMS play a variety of roles: (i) bifurcation as a failure mode (lead systems to fail), (ii) bifurcation as a design feature (i.e. bistable systems), (iii) bifurcations to extract material properties. From the engine of an automobile to a hospital operating room, MicroElectroMechanical (MEMS) products are finding applications in every aspect of our lives at an increasing rate. SUGAR is a new system level simulation program in MATLAB for three-dimenisonal MEMS developed at the University of California Berkeley. It is already widely used in academia and industry and is currently under active development, which is a part of the revolution in the MEMS design. SUGAR will be made freely available in source and as a web service. New algorithms for bifurcation analysis in MEMS will be implemented in MATLAB, and then the resulting new code will be incorporated into a MATLAB continuation toolbox, developed at Universiteit Utrecht, to enhance its capabilities for bifurcation analysis of large systems. The upgraded MATLAB continuation toolbox will be integrated into SUGAR and will become a part of the MEMS design loop which includes design, simulation, fabrication, laboratory measurements, and comparison of simulation with measurements doc21324 none This project, to be conducted by a doctoral student in anthropology from Rutgers University, investigates how two processes, public health discourse and TV consumer culture, are reshaping adolescent values surrounding gender relations on Nevis, a small English-speaking island in the Eastern Caribbean. While social and economic life throughout the Caribbean has historically been built upon a complex and dynamic interchange between local and global forces, new forces are rapidly changing Caribbean societies. At the present time, Nevis is experiencing an influx of returning nationals as well as immigrants who arrive to work in the growing tourist industry. In addition to this demographic influence, mass media (cable television) brings more global influence. The growing Caribbean AIDS epidemic, in tandem with the other global forces, is transforming the economic and social milieu in which Nevis adolescents come of age. Relying on surveys, focus groups, in-depth interviews, and participant observation to collect data, this project investigates how adolescent gender role identity is produced within the emerging complex and changing social context of Nevis life. The majority of the research will be conducted in two communities, Charlestown, the capital of Nevis and Gingerland, a small rural agricultural community located inland. The results of this project will contribute to knowledge on gender identity, globalization, and cultural change. In terms of wider impacts, this project will inform policy makers in their effort to work with adolescents so as to limit the spread of HIV doc21325 none This is a Focused Research Group award between the University of California in San Diego, Northern Illinois University, and Yale University. Its aim is to carry out detailed structural and dynamical studies of polymer films, using the non-invasive proves of x-ray and neutron scattering at national synchrotron radiation and neutron scattering facilities, in order to achieve a better scientific understanding at the microscopic level of the static and dynamic behavior of macromolecules at solid liquid interfaces and at free (liquid vapor) surfaces in the fluid state and around the glass transition. This scientific understanding is needed because at present there is a considerable divergence of results from experiments and also of theoretical views regarding the nature of the fluctuations at polymeric surfaces and of the glass transition in thin polymer films. The roles of confinement (e.g. when the film thickness is comparable to the radius of gyration of the polymer chains) and of the polymer-substrate interactions need to be elucidated in more detail to achieve such an understanding. The techniques to be brought to bear on these problems include x-ray and neutron reflectivity, diffuse x-ray scattering, small-angle neutron scattering and x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy. The scientific interest driving this project stems from our present limited knowledge of how the conformation and mobility of polymer molecules are affected by confinement to a thin film and by interactions with the substrate and how these materials transform into the glassy state. It s technological importance is related to the important role played by polymer films in industry and technology in the form of coatings, adhesives, filters for chemical separations, packaging materials, lithographic masks for microelectronic devices, etc. Further, it will provide an opportunity for students and postdoctoral researchers at three different educational institutions to be trained in this important area of materials science and in the use of advanced research methods utilizing the nation s premier national facilities for research using synchrotron x-ray and neutron beams doc21326 none This research project, supported in the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, addresses the question of the effect of the spatial and temporal organization of adsorbed reactants and reactive intermediates on the kinetics of surface reactions. Using scanning tunneling microscopy, Professor Madix and his coworkers in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University, examine the spatial distribution of adsorbed species in static and time dependent measurements. Studies of oxidation reactions on silver, auto-catalytic surface explosions on nickel and palladium, and poisoning and promotion by selected surface reaction modifiers are examined. In addition, the steady state distribution of adsorbed intermediates in surface oxidation reactions are studied. Information from this experimental project provides input into the development of detailed models of surface reaction kinetics, as well as fundamental insight into the nature of the dynamic catalytic surface. Understanding the effect of the organization of reactive intermediates in two dimensions on the overall kinetics of surface reactions is the goal of this research project carried out by Professor Madix at Stanford University. Using tools that allow the atomic level imaging of the reacting surface, detailed information about the role of adsorbate structure on the surface reaction kinetics is obtained. This information is crucial to our detailed understanding of a range of important catalytic reaction systems, and extends to the understanding of surface reactions in a variety of technologically important contexts doc21327 none This project was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NER. The objective of this project is to develop a novel low cost nano-lithography technique. Conventional nano-manufacturing equipment, using electron beams or other radiation sources and operating in vacuum, costs well above $1,000,000. In contrary, this technique is based on a laser device and its accessories; its total cost will be less than $100,000. The key component in this nano-lithography system is a nanometric optical antenna capable of transmitting an incoming micrometer size laser beam into a nanometer size domain with high transmissivity (efficiency). This nano-lithography system can be further developed into a parallel manufacturing system, so that the time needed for the manufacturing process can be significantly reduced compared with other techniques. With the rapid progress in nano-technology, it is crucial to develop low cost manufacturing techniques with high throughput. Only with rapid and low cost manufacturing techniques could the nano-technology translate itself from research to industry, and to impact the society. The success of this work will provide a low cost nano-lithography technique for nano-manufacturing. This research will also provide training to undergraduate and graduate students, including under-represented groups. The results of this research will be broadly disseminated doc21328 none This work investigates the numerical and analytic solution of inverse spectral problems in one and two dimensions. In one dimension, the appearance of an eigenparameter in the boundary condition of a Sturm-Liouville problem causes a loss of self-adjointness. Although uniqueness of the inverse problem has been established, there are no constructive schemes available that lend themselves to numerical computation. This work (with William Rundell) develops and analyzes two constructive schemes involving to recover the potential in this type of problem. In two dimensions, the eigenvalues of particular membranes are used to find an approximation to a function representing the nonhomogeneity in the boundary value problem governing the elastic membrane. Projection of the boundary value problem and its coefficients onto appropriate vector spaces leads to a matrix inverse problem, which is solved using optimization techniques. This work will consider various domains and investigate the recovery of multiple coefficients. Theoretical questions regarding circular domains will also be investigated. In particular, the recovery of a radial density using techniques from differential geometry and the properties of the radial spectrum of a vibrating circular membrane will be investigated. There are many situations in which it is not practical to measure an object s properties directly. Doctors do not perform surgery to determine the size of a brain tumor prior to a patient s treatment. An engineer does not dismantle an airplane to determine the level of corrosion in its wing. Instead external measurements of an object are made and used to determine the internal properties of the object. This research focuses on the use of vibrational information to determine physical parameters of an object. If these parameters are known, the vibration is modeled mathematically by a boundary value problem. If the parameters are not known, but the vibration is known, then the problem to be solved is an inverse boundary value problem - also known as an inverse spectral problem. This project develops several constructive algorithms for the solution of this type of problem. It is important to realize that while mathematical inverse problems often have multiple solutions, their physical counterpart may not. Choosing the correct solution is also addressed in this work doc21329 none Malik Description: This award is for support of a joint research project by Dr. F. Bary Malik, Department of Physics, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois and Drs. Mahmoud Hasan and Zuhair Shehadeh, both of the Physics Department at the Applied Science University, Amman, Jordan. Many large angle elastic scattering pion-nucleus data have remained unexplained for decades. Preliminary calculations done using Klein-Gordon equation (KG) indicate that these data could probably be explained provided one uses KG, rather than Schrodinger equation. The investigators will attempt to analyze many of these unexplained anomalous data using full KG equation. To facilitate such analyses, they propose to determine some of these potentials using an inverse scattering theory at a fixed energy developed by Shehadeh, Malik and others for cases where phase shift analyses are available. A detailed study of the solution of the KG equation in the presence of an external Coulomb potential will also be done. Additionally the underlying cause for the difference in p +- cross section and some inelastic scattering cross sections will be investigated. Concurrent to this investigation actual and virtual -excitation possibilities will be investigated. The inverse scattering theory at a fixed energy will also be applied to determine some alpha-nucleus potentials, which will then be used to analyze relevant data. Scope: This project will bring two senior and well-established scientists and a young scientist (Shehadeh) to collaborate on the problem of large angle anomalies of pion-nucleous and alpha-nucleus scattering. Each of these investigators have special expertise and analytical skill, thus the collaboration is likely to be beneficial for the scientific research and to the United States and to Jordan doc21330 none Malik Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Professor F. Bary Malik, Department of Physics at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois, Dr. Arun Basak, Physics Department at Rajshahi University, Rajshahi, Bangladesh and Dr. Susanta Das, Physics Department, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet, Bangladesh. They plan to study the global alpha-nucleus potential for light and medium light nuclei by extending the investigations carried out by the PI and his collaborators, under the sponsorship of NSF, to other reactions and nuclei. In particular, the study will be extended to reactions with polarized projectiles, proton and deuteron, and with carbon, oxygen, sulfur, calcium and nickel targets. In addition, the investigation will be extended to a-silicon case at lower energies. The relations of the alpha-nucleus potential, determined herein, to two nucleon potentials will be investigated within the context of an energy-density functional theory and folding model. The study will be extended to alpha-transfer reactions involving lithium projectile. Finally, the phase equivalencies for a shallow and deep complex potential with the context of the super symmetric transformation will be investigated. Scope: The US and Bangladesh collaborators have complementary qualifications. They have access to the necessary computer codes for the research. The project deals with an important point in theoretical physics that may have applications for shielding space vehicles. The collaboration will also benefit the educational and research capabilities of two universities in Bangladesh. Dr. Das, who completed his doctorate research in this area through past collaboration between Dr. Malik and Dr. Basak, has coauthored a series of papers. The project is funded by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Physics doc21331 none The investigator continues work on the Kneser-Poulsen Conjecture that was started with Professor Karoly Bezdek. This conjecture says that if any finite collection of disks in the Euclidean plane is rearranged so that the distance between any pair of centers does not increase, then the area of the union does not increase and the area of the interesection does not decrease. They have solved the conjecture in the plane, but many higher-dimensional questions remain. For example, there is a candidate for a configuration that might be a counterexample for the analogous statement in three-space, and there are some interesting possible differences between the case for a union of disks and the intersection of disks. Another major topic is the study of linkages in the plane that are locked in the sense that they can only move a small amount without crossing. The theory of frameworks and tensegrities plays an important role here and can be applied to give reasonable criteria to detect when such a linkage is locked. This is continuing work of the investigator, Erik Demaine, and Gunter Rote, who originally solved the carpenter s rule problem, which states that any polygonal arc can be opened without creating any self-intersection. The investigator works on certain basic, fundamental questions about the geometry of discrete objects. Just as physics asks fundamental questions about the nature of matter, space, and the universe, and the physical laws they must obey, geometry asks fundamental questions about how geometric objects interact and the implicit constraints they satisfy. How does the area of the union of round disks change as the centers are moved apart? The investigator (with Karoly Bezdek) has shown that the area behaves (it increases or stays the same) as expected in the plane, but the situation in space is not so clear. When is a robot arm in the plane rigid, and when can it be opened? The investigator (with Erik Demaine and Gunter Rote) has shown that arms open as expected in the plane, but what about more complicated linkages? What can be said about the rigidity of packings of round balls as a granular material? The investigator is an expert in such matters, but there are delicate questions about the rigidity in a container with a small number of disks. The volume enclosed by a flexible surface is constant, but what about other geometric invariants? These are concrete tangible objects, but accessible to the appropriate geometric insight. These questions are both relevant and potentially quite useful for subjects as wide-ranging as cell biology, protein folding, kinematics, and granular materials. For example, it is widely believed that the geometric structure of a cell has a great deal to do with its function. So the rigidity of appropriate discrete objects is relevant. As has been shown over and over again in physics and mathematics, if the questions are to the point, applications follow doc21332 none This award supports partially the participation by 15 American researchers in the 7th International Conference on Inorganic Membranes to be held in Dalien, China, 23-26 June, . This conference provides a unique forum for dialog among international researchers in the field. It will bring together about 300 researchers from 35 countries. Both academic and industrial researchers will participate in sessions on synthesis and characterization of membranes and applications relating to separation processes, membrane reactors, and environmental protection. Inorganic membranes offer unique advantages in separation processes and reactors because of their stability and durability, and the current research activity is dynamic, stimulated by new developments in materials synthesis, molecular modeling, and specific applications. Much of the important new work is being done abroad, so it is vital that U.S. researchers maintain contact and collaboration with their foreign counterparts. This conference provides an opportunity to promote such contact doc21333 none This project explores prehistoric human adaptations on the North American Plains. More specifically, it focuses on the mode of exploitation of the resources of the Black Hills of South Dakota, a prominent land feature on the northern plains. The richness and diversity of the food resources provided by the Black Hills contrast sharply with the surrounding barren landscape, so much so that they have been labeled an island in the plains . In order to investigate how prehistoric groups of hunter-gatherers exploited such contrasting environments, Dr. F. Sellet from the Journey Museum, and M. Fosha from the South Dakota Archaeological Research Center, will conduct the excavation of a rich and important archaeological site, the Movie Draw site, located in Custer State Park. The multidisciplinary project, funded by the National Science Foundation, will establish a chronological framework for linking paleo-environmental data to significant changes in subsistence strategies at the site. The Movie Draw site is a medium size rock shelter that has yielded the most extensive sequence of Late Woodland-Late Prehistoric occupations known to date in the Black Hills. These were times of increased social complexity and demographic changes, created by, or associated with, the intensification of food production. Concomitant with the major social reorganization that took place on the northern plains during this period was the emergence of new technologies. Chief among them was the adoption of the bow and arrow. The Movie Draw project will test the hypothesis that the shift from the atlatl (spear thrower) to the bow and arrow had a significant impact on strategies of exploitation of the Black Hills. The project will scrutinize changes in site function, or visible shifts in hunting strategies for instance, and explore how these changes relate to paleo-environmental circumstances or to advancements in technology. Ultimately, the greater understanding of strategies of exploitation of marginal ecozones, such as the Black Hills, should help refine current archaeological models of prehistoric adaptations to the Plains. The Great Plains are often described as a monotonous landscape. This perception has affected models of human adaptation in a similar manner and resulted in the emphasis of a single dimension of the diet: the reliance on bison. The Movie Draw project will test the limitations of such an approach doc21334 none This is an RUI award for research at a predominantly undergraduate institution. Numerical and analytical approaches will be used to study spin transport in paramagnetic quantum fluids and solids. The research consists of three projects: analysis of transverse relaxation in NMR experiments with highly polarized Fermi liquids; computer simulation of spin waves and spin diffusion in Heisenberg paramagnets; and, calculation of the damping rates of slosh modes in trapped Fermi gases. Undergraduate research is an integral part of the Computational Physics program at Wisconsin - La Crosse. Hence, students play an important role in this research, including the presentation of results at national conferences and undergraduate research forums. %%% This is an RUI award for research at a predominantly undergraduate institution. Numerical and analytical approaches will be used to study spin transport in paramagnetic quantum fluids and solids. The research consists of three projects: analysis of transverse relaxation in NMR experiments with highly polarized Fermi liquids; computer simulation of spin waves and spin diffusion in Heisenberg paramagnets; and, calculation of the damping rates of slosh modes in trapped Fermi gases. Undergraduate research is an integral part of the Computational Physics program at Wisconsin - La Crosse. Hence, students play an important role in this research, including the presentation of results at national conferences and undergraduate research forums doc21335 none This project explores how local newspapers covered members of the House of Representatives during a two-year period. The project involves searching all editions of the chosen newspapers for any articles, editorials, columns, or letters that mention the selected representatives, coding the items for their content, and analyzing the coded data. The project is designed to determine whether newspapers report the kinds of information that citizens need to hold representatives accountable for their actions in office. The assumption is that unbiased and readily available information enhances the prospects for accountability, while incomplete or biased information thwarts it. The study explores the regularity with which local newspapers report roll-call votes, the extent to which newspapers cover representatives other activities, including introducing bills, holding hearings, and building coalitions, and the types of policy issues that attract journalists attention. The project involves collecting four data sets to answer questions about the volume, content, causes, and consequences of newspaper coverage. It includes: (1) a systematic account of how 25 newspapers covered 25 representatives between January 1, , and November 8, , in 8,003 articles, editorials, columns, and letters; (2) a comparative analysis of how six pairs of newspapers covered six representatives from Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Tucson, and Washington during and ; (3) an analysis of the factors that affected how extensively 67 local newspapers covered 187 representatives during a two-year period, with a data set of 61 ,084 citations; and (4) an analysis of how the volume of coverage in local newspapers affected how much citizens knew about their local representatives, achieved by linking the data set of 61 ,084 citations with the survey conducted by the National Election Studies. The current proposal is for a project to clean and document these four data sets and prepare them for permanent archiving and public use. The project is the fIrst systematic study of how newspapers cover individual legislators outside the campaign period. It is also the first study to examine press coverage for a period longer than a few weeks. Most previous studies estimated the extent of press coverage for representatives without analyzing the content of coverage. The project demonstrates the utility of computers for identifying and retrieving articles about representatives from newspaper archives. All previous studies of how the press covered legislators have required that researchers browse through newspapers searching for articles that mention individual legislators. This study employs computers to do the browsing. Computers have the advantage of being more efficient and less error-prone than ordinary labor. Thus, they permit a vast increase in sample size. A better understanding of how the press covers representatives actions should provide the foundation for a better understanding of citizens electoral decisions, representatives policy decisions, and the nature of political accountability in a large polity with separated powers and weak political parties doc21336 none This award supports travel and living expenses for 8 to 10 US advanced students to participate in a near-surface volcano-geophysics field camp on Montserrat. The purpose of the field camp is to train these students in the use of advanced geophysical equipment in the study of active volcanic terrains. The request for student training takes advantage of an existing US0-NSF and UK-NERC sponsored effort to understand the science and hazards of the relatively silisic volcanic system on Montserrat. The student training is further being organized so as to take advantage of the advanced volcano-geophysics and near-surface enivornmental-geophysics field camp that will be run on Montserrat by J. Neuberg (Leeds University, the UK). As a result, there will be no costs for renting or transporting heavy geophysical equipment to this island volcano. It is also anticipated that the results of the field camp will be used in planning the installation of the geophysical observatories that are part of the NSF NERC sponsored science program on Montserrat. The educational purpose of the field camp will be two fold: (1) to demonstrate the techniques and value of 3D geophysical surveying and data in active volcanic geology, and (2) acquaint a large group of students with the scientific objectives and research possibilities of the Montserrat progrm. The student fieldwork and data analysis include advanced training in modern geophysical investigation methods and extensive interactions between industry, government, and the universities involved in the Montserrat science program doc21337 none The dynamics and structure of high permeability polymeric systems will be studied to develop a molecular to morphological level of understanding of transport. Transport in high permeability systems will be tailored through the use of structural modification of repeat units, blending, crystallization, sample preparation and sample history. The tailoring procedures will be used to make the materials inhomogeneous to produce rapid diffusion through regions of poor packing, low density, and high free volume. Disordered high permeability glasses will be produced by increasing the fraction of high free volume regions by for instance having bulky, slowly rearranging backbone units that are unable to pack well as the glass is formed. In blends, high free volume regions will be produced by combining a low glass transition polymer with a high glass transition polymer. The molecular level characteristics of the defect or high free volume regions will be determined and the longer length scale organization of the regions will be characterized. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy will be used as the primary experimental method since NMR is well established as a tool for the study of materials on the length scale of molecular structure. Sorption sites of penetrants will be examined using xenon-129 NMR and the short range aspects of translational motion will be observed as exchange between sites in xenon-129 spectra. Local segmental motion in high free volume regions in a blend will be studied using spin-lattice relaxation and solid state line shapes. These experiments will look at properties on the nanometer scale while longer length scale, morphological properties on a scale of 100 s nanometers to microns will be studied by pulse field gradient (PFG) diffusion experiments. This method will be shown to detect structure associated with the longer range organization or connectivity of the nanometer sized defect regions. We will attempt to show that these regions lead to rapid diffusion in high permeability systems and to the observation of the signature of tortuous and restricted diffusion in high permeability systems where the apparent diffusion constant slows as the time scale over which diffusion is observed increases in the PFG experiment. Computer simulation will be used to aid in understanding such behavior and to clarify the role of sample preparation, sample history and aging in high permeability polymers. PFG NMR experiments will be used to provide a unique view of aging and conditioning effects on the long length scale associated with the organization of defects. NMR will be used to quantify the changes in side chain crystalline systems upon crystallization when the side chains lock the backbone into a rigid though poorly packed state. The investigators will combine the results of the NMR experiments with information from traditional permeability and solubility experiments, mechanical experiments, scattering experiments and dielectric experiments through interaction with a network of collaborators. These polymer systems are of fundamental interest but also serve as the basis for separation membranes, controlled delivery systems and solid electrolytes in batteries. Membrane separation systems are an energy efficient form of separation of permanent gases such as nitrogen and oxygen. Separation membranes can be used in environmental applications to collect organic gases while releasing water and carbon dioxide. The side chain crystalline polymers are used as controlled delivery systems which will allow the passage of small molecules above the melting point of the side chain and will contain the small molecules above the melting point. The low glass transition component in two of the blends to be studied is polyethylene oxide which acts as a solvent for lithium salts in battery applications. The understanding developed from the proposed research will aid in improving such applications doc21338 none In this project, funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Sharp will develop techniques to measure electron spin-related properties of transition metal ions with total spin greater than one. The electron spin physics will be probed indirectly by NMR spectroscopy. New methods of orienting paramagnetic molecules in flow-stretched hydrogels will be developed. Proof of concept experiments will be performed on paramagnetic complexes with spin S = 1, 3 2 and 5 2 and used to test the underlying theory. Biological and biochemical systems often contain ions that are characterized by electron spin. The total electron spin of these units plays an important role in the behavior of these systems. While the theory for systems with just one unbalanced electron spin is well developed, this is usually not the case when transition metal ions are present. The goals of the present project are to perform proof of concept experiments and thereby aid in the development of a satisfactory theory. Students will participate in this research. They will gain experience in one of the forefront areas of contemporary physical chemistry and thereby prepare them for entry into the scientific technological workforce doc21339 none Strain Robust global implicit representations of curves and surfaces simplify geometric operations such as evolving, offsetting and intersecting, while requiring accurate contouring and efficient implicitization techniques. The investigator focuses on fast new algorithms for the three key issues of implicit representations: 1. Fast accurate multiresolution methods that extract piecewise-smooth contours with tightly controlled geometry. These methods alternate between global topology resolution and local differential-algebraic boundary value problems, and solve industrial problems ranging from machine tooling to horizon finding. 2. Efficient implicitization methods that build a distributed implicit representation from given curves or surfaces. These methods, which invert contouring, are essential to modeling moving material interfaces such as the solid-liquid interface in melt growth of silicon crystals. 3. Fast stable deferred correction methods for the accurate solution of ordinary and partial differential-algebraic initial and boundary value problems that control local geometry. Differential-algebraic problems occur widely in engineering, and challenge existing numerical methods. For example, automated vehicle piloting requires real-time solution of differential systems with constraints that keep the tires on the road. Computer models of complex interlocking physical objects dominate technological processes ranging from semiconductor etching to surgery planning, from computer animation to computer-controlled machine tooling. Key steps in these processes involve operations such as evolving, navigating, intersecting and blending on these objects. The investigator and his students are developing efficient new computational tools for simulating these operations in robust user-friendly ways. This highly interdisciplinary enterprise combines mathematics and computer science to benefit scientific endeavors ranging from cartography to crystallography. The research objectives intertwine with an interdisciplinary educational program, training future scientists and engineers through web-enabled courses, math science engineering seminars, and individual student research mentoring doc21340 none The objective of this research is to develop a thermodynamic description for the free energy of each phase as a function of composition and temperature in ternary aluminum and nickel base alloys. The heats of formation are determined using a custom built high temperature reaction calorimeter with a typical accuracy of + - 1kJ mole. In addition, differential thermal analysis will be used to determine melting points and other phase transitions and differential scanning calorimetry will be used to determine heat capacity of selected alloys as a function of temperature. The DTA and DSC experiments will be performed in a new SETARAM C calorimeter. The data determined from the experiments will be used to develop an improved, self-consistent thermodynamic database for Aluminum-Nickel-base alloys that find application in technologies requiring high temperature structural alloys. Such data on Al and Ni-base alloy systems are scarce or non-existent. The experimental results will be used to compute the minimum in free energy for a particular composition at a given temperature. Such thermodynamic modeling of phase diagrams provides an opportunity to approach the phase equilibria aspects of alloy development in a more efficient manner. The improved database will be used to compute several isothermal sections in each of the ternary alloy systems using THERMOCALC. The data will also be used to validate various extrapolation models from the literature for the prediction of heats of formation of ternary compounds from binary data. The work finds application in the design of multi-component nickel and aluminum based alloys that are used in many technologies as structural materials. The experimental results of the study will provide the needed data for phase diagram calculations using CALPHAD methodology that is far more efficient than the currently available techniques. These experimental data are not available and this will be the only facility in USA that has the expertise to fill the need. From a fundamental viewpoint, the project will advance a largely uncharted area of research that is concerned with multi-component, multi-phase systems with varied phases. These systems find application in many technologies that require high temperature structural materials doc21341 none This award supports computational and theoretical research on classical and quantum complex systems. The PI will study quantum complex systems and their classical analogs with an aim to elucidate the relationship between them. Research will focus on understanding how the low energy states of the two-dimensional +J -J Edwards-Anderson spin glass model change when quantum-mechanical tunneling is introduced. The PI will exploit a computational algorithm developed to find all the ground states of the classical model to enable the calculation of exact quantum eigenstates of much larger system sizes than can be computed by other methods, in the limit of small tunneling amplitudes. Preliminary results reveal that the quantum ground states have a complex and rich structure that will be elucidated further in the proposed research. The method is also being used to compare the effects of quantum tunneling to other (classical) physical perturbations, such as coupling to a deformable lattice. %%% This award supports computational and theoretical research and education on classical and quantum complex systems. The PI will use a model of a spin glass to study the relationship between quantum complex systems and their classical analogs. This work is of fundamental importance to the fields of statistical mechanics and condensed matter physics. It also contributes to efforts to control and manipulate quantum mechanical states; such a capability may have long term impact on information and communication technologies doc21342 none Benfey The purpose of the workshop on Genomics approaches to cis-element TF interactions , to be held in Arlington Virginia on January 16-17, , is to bring together scientists working on computational approaches with those who have taken more traditional approaches to the identification of cis-element transcription factor interactions. In the last twenty years, investigators have discovered regulatory sequences by studying the DNA binding characteristics of single proteins, or the cis elements that control the expression patterns of single genes. This has led to the identification of binding sites for around 100 transcription factors. These studies have greatly increased our knowledge of the nature of regulatory sequences, however, the analysis of recently completed genome sequences suggest that there are upwards of a thousand transcription factors in most eukaryotic organisms. Thus, it is probable that whole families of DNA-binding proteins exist that have not yet been discovered. This workshop will focus on advances being made in combining computational approaches with genome-wide sampling techniques to identify functional regulatory sequences. The goal is to exchange information on existing methodologies, with the hope that cross-disciplinary collaborations will be established and the seeds of new approaches will be sown doc21343 none A one-year study of computer-assisted instruction in the third grade classroom at two urban schools is proposed. This project will use advanced technology to enhance mathematics and science instruction in elementary classrooms with computer activities that allow students to use the information problem-solving process. The Benjamin Banneker Project, named for a famous African American mathematician and scientist, involves the design and use of computer software that allows students the opportunity to engage in culturally relevant simulations, and an intelligent tutoring system will monitor their progress. The main objectives are to design and field-test culturally relevant computer simulations and to provide professional development to support computer usage in the classroom. To accomplish this goal, the Temple University PI Co-PI team of mathematics, science, early childhood, and social policy teacher researchers will collaborate with software developers and elementary teachers to carry out this one-year project. During Phase I two engineers will design the software which will be pilot-tested with third graders. The software will provide students with grade-level specific simulations and intelligent tutoring. During Phase II the PI Co-PI team will provide professional development activities for teachers participating in this study to help them learn how to use software to solve and integrate technology into culturally relevant lessons. The project will be conducted in two urban, predominantly African American, charter schools. In Phase III research (classroom observations) and project evaluation will occur to measure the effectiveness of the project. Findings will be reported to refereed journals and presented at conferences. This project has the potential to hook the interest of African American students by contextualizing mathematics and science computer tasks with the culture of the community doc21344 none Dong-Ping Wang $19,140 The proposal requests support for 6 U.S. participants to a 3-day workshop to be held in Seoul, Korea. This U.S.-Korea Joint Workshop is about the coastal ocean prediction forcasting for the Korea Strait and the East Japan Sea (KSES). The workshop will review the current knowledge of the oceanography of the KSES, formulate recommendations for developing coastal model(s) with real-time capacity, and explore opportunities for new collaboration between the US and Korea scientists doc21345 none A radically new class of organic materials, the protected oligoacenes and polyacenes are proposed. Unlike the much-explored conjugated polymers, these unsaturated macromolecules will be electrical conductors without the need of a dopant; they will be they first of the oligocenes, the cyclacenes may exhibit even more exotic properties, such as superconductivity at higher temperatures. The proposed syntheses are relatively short, so that large amounts of materials will be available for the evaluation of physical properties and device (FET, LED, photodiode, etc.) fabrication. Organic electronic materials have just entered the commercial engineering mainstream in the form of light-emitting diodes (LEDs), photodiodes (plastic solar cells) and thin film transistors (TFTs). The LEDs produce brighter and cooler light than standard incandescent lamps wand will have a large impact on society in terms of energy savings both in manufacturing and in use. The manufacture of organic TFTs will also be much more energy-efficient than the equivalent, current, silicon-based devices. Another important societal benefit of the research proposed here will be the considerably advance in the education of the graduate and undergraduate students supported by these funds. Development of these organic electronic devices will provide a truly interdisciplinary educational foundation for our future workforce doc14832 none The Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research (SOARS) program of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), was established in and provides summer internship experiences to minorities and women to enhance the professional development of students from under-represented groups in atmospheric and related sciences. Participants complete a research project and report their findings to the UCAR community. SOARS also provides up to two years of support for graduate education at UCAR-affiliated universities. Since , SOARS has included 61 student participants, of whom 70.5% are female, 29.5% are male; the under-represented ethnic groups include African-American (38%,), Chicano Hispanic Latino (34%), and American Indian (16%), with additional participants who are Euro-American (8%) and Asian-American (3%). The program provides mentoring and support of students during critical transitions - from 11th and 12th grades through graduate degrees and has achieved a retention rate of 80%. SOARS attributes its success to a highly structured mentoring program. During the summer program, SOARS participants work with mentors in well-defined and well-documented relationships that include support in selecting and engaging in a research program, attending scientific seminars at the National Corporation for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and local research institutions, a program in science writing, and presenting the outcomes of their research at a colloquium. During the academic year, mentoring continues through advisory contact and through financial support. Advisors provide guidance on academic and personal development, graduate school applications, and education and career opportunities. Financial support includes up to 50% of costs for two years of graduate school and for travel to professional society meetings to give presentations. SOARS demonstrates long institutional commitment with broad-based participation from more than 40 UCAR universities doc21347 none Keiji Morukuma of Emory University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to study the structure and reactions of transition metal clusters and complexes using ab initio, density functional, and ONIOM (hybrid molecular orbital plus molecular orbital or molecular mechanics) methods. The ONIOM method, which allows inclusion of complex real ligands into computations, will be developed and calibrated for large transition metal complexes. As well, the ONIOM-PCM (polarized continuum model) method will be tested and employed to study organometallic reactions in solutions. Close contact with experimental chemists will be maintained, while experimentally relevant problems are explored. Gas phase reactions of dihydrogen, alkynes, and alkenes with bare transition metal clusters and C-C, C-H and molecular nitrogen bond activation, along with skeletal rearrangement, on trinuclear ruthenium complexes will be studied, with the goal of examining metal clusters that can catalyze reactions not possible on a single transition metal center. As well, the mechanisms of several important reactions in organometallic chemistry will be elucidated, encompassing a wide variety of reactions of mononuclear transition metal complexes and full homogeneous catalytic cycles including (a) olefin copolymerization, (b) element-element addition to unsaturated hydrocarbons, (c) utilization of metal-ligand multiple bonds, (d) transition metal catalyzed cycloisomerizations, (e) reaction of allylic compounds with formic acid or metal-hydride, and olefin metathesis. The knowledge of structure, spectroscopic properties, and energies of reaction intermediates and transition states that will be gained from this research is expected to promote fundamental understanding as well as aid logical design of new catalysts for better control of complicated chemical reactions. This computational research project complements efforts in experimental chemistry, and is expected to promote the fundamental understanding of complex chemical reactions. Although many industrial catalytic processes have been developed in the past, the chemical industry is trying hard to switch to catalysts using clean homogeneous processes. Designing efficient catalysts is one of the areas where computational chemistry can make a substantial impact in the chemical industry doc21348 none This research project is funded in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative, NSF 01-157, category NIRT. Nanorobotics is concerned with (1) manipulation of nanoscale objects by using micro or macro devices, and (2) construction, control and programming of robots with overall dimensions at the nanoscale (or with microscopic dimensions but nanoscopic components). This project covers both of these aspects, because both are important: nanomanipulation is the most effective process developed until now for prototyping of nanosystems, and nanorobots with dimensions comparable to those of biological cells are expected to have revolutionary applications in environmental monitoring and health care-for example, in the early detection and destruction of pathogens. The initial research will be biased towards manipulation, with a focus on the automation of techniques developed in previous NSF grants for reliable and accurate nanomanipulation by using the tip of a Scanning Probe Microscope (SPM) as a sensory robot. Work on nanorobot construction will begin at a low level but increase as the project evolves. It will integrate research on sensors, actuators, control, power, communications, and interfacing across spatial scales and between organic inorganic as well as biotic abiotic systems. The theoretical and experimental results of this work will contribute to the understanding of robotics in domains with large spatial uncertainties, and to the development of NEMS (Nanoelectromechanical Systems). The software will be widely distributed and will be very useful to scientists and engineers working in nanomanipulation and nanolithography. The project will involve students at all levels, from postdocs to minority high-school students, who will be exposed to this new and interdisciplinary field. The research will be further coupled to education through conference tutorials and new, regular university courses. For example, a graduate course in nanorobotics offered in the Spring semester of will evolve by incorporating the research findings of the project, and a tutorial based on the course will be offered at the IEEE conference on nanotechnology doc21349 none Glass beads have been found at innumerable archaeological sites in sub-Saharan Africa. However, obtaining information from glass beads found on sites that date to before European contact has proven difficult. Since glass was not manufactured from raw materials in sub-Saharan Africa (with one possible exception), archaeologists know that glass beads were trade items that linked large parts of the Old World in an early version of the global economy. If archaeologists could establish where the glasses used to make particular beads were manufactured, then they could study patterns of trade that linked Africa to the wider world over the last two millennia. Experience has shown that the only way to discover the sources of the glass is through chemical analysis. This was tried thirty years ago but without much success because of imprecise analytical techniques and a lack of comparative data from glass-making centers outside Africa. However, much has now changed: accurate chemical analyses have been undertaken of ancient European and Asian glasses, including material found at glass factories, while a new technique, laser-ablation inductively-coupled-plasma mass-spectrometry, has been developed that permits quantitative analysis of numerous chemical elements found in glass beads without damage to the beads themselves. With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Peter Robertshaw, with the assistance of scientists at the federally funded University of Missouri Research Reactor Center, will analyze about glass beads from sites throughout sub-Saharan Africa to answer two sets of questions of central importance in understanding the African past. First, they will examine beads found at sites along the coast of eastern Africa and in the southern African interior to answer several questions: Where did the glass come from - north Africa, southwest Asia, India, China, or southeast Asia? What changes in patterns of Indian Ocean trade occurred in the millennium preceding the arrival of the Portuguese in East Africa? Did different African ports obtain their glass from different sources? Did sites in the interior of Africa, such as Great Zimbabwe, receive beads from many ports and many sources? Did patterns of trade between the interior and the coast change through time? Second, Robertshaw and colleagues will seek to discover the trade routes that connected Igbo-Ukwu in southeastern Nigeria to the wider world. Igbo-Ukwu is famous for its ninth-century bronze vessels of local manufacture. Here too were discovered 160,000 glass beads. Nobody knows how this wealth was amassed and in which direction lay the trade route that connected Igbo-Ukwu with the likely glass manufacturing centers. Some scholars think that the beads came across the Sahara from the north African coast (Islamic Ifriqiya) or even Spain, others argue for an origin in Cairo via the Christian kingdoms of the Sudan, or perhaps India. This research will investigate these competing hypotheses and also explore whether some of the glass was manufactured by an indigenous African glass industry, possibly in northern Nigeria. The results of the research will permit historians to place Africa more firmly within the context of a global economy that existed prior to European expansion doc21350 none An enhanced understanding of protein-protein interactions is important to the successful elucidation of multiprotein pathways, which mediate such vital processes as the response of cells to their environment, metabolic regulation, and development. Alpha-helical scaffolding domains form extended surfaces for protein interactions by stacking together multiple small repeat units. In this project, computer-assisted bioinformatic techniques will be used to predict alpha helical scaffold domains encoded by the fully sequenced genome of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Lines of mutant plants will then be obtained where these genes have been knocked out, and the effects of this change upon the function of the plants will be assessed by testing their growth, gene expression, and biochemical activity. Proteins, which interact with these candidate scaffold domains, will be detected by their ability to bind to them in a yeast or bacterial protein interaction assay system. The identified interaction proteins will then be analyzed by a similar series of computational and plant functional tests. The goal of the Project is to discover the function of every encoded protein of Arabidopsis by that target date. This project will provide the plant research community with an inventory of Arabidopsis scaffolding proteins, their protein interaction partners, functional hypotheses, and a set of characterized mutant seed stocks. This project will be executed primarily by undergraduate students, who will receive hands on training in cutting edge research techniques. More information can be obtained at the project web site: http: www.ptloma.edu Biology Grants NSF Project.htm , where data will be posted as the project progresses doc21351 none NER: Oligonucleotide-directed alignment of cytoskeletal filaments for nanoscale assembly There is currently great interest in nanoscience and nanotechnology for manipulating material at submicron scales. In cells, however, this is a routine task -- the transport of intracellular cargo is carried out by motor proteins that move along cytoskeletal filaments called microtubules. Directional movement is achieved because microtubules have a structural polarity and motors move unidirectionally along them, with different motors moving in different directions. We seek to: (i) reconstruct the intracellular transport system in vitro using purified kinesin motor proteins and microtubules, and (ii) use it to transport defined cargo (biological or synthetic nanoscale objects) to specific sites on a two-dimensional substrate. To lay down microtubule tracks with desired orientations, we will take advantage of the specificity and reversibility of DNA hybridization as a molecular glue . Single-stranded DNA oligonucleotides will be attached to defined sites on glass surfaces and complementary oligonucleotides will be covalently attached to microtubules. By making microtubules whose ends are functionalized with different DNA sequences and spatially patterning their sequence complements, a variety of microtubule geometries will be investigated. These tracks will be used to direct the motion of cargo-laden kinesin motors as a step towards building systems for biomolecular separations or directed assembly applications doc21352 none The Advanced Materials Program in the Chemistry Division makes this award to Connecticut College to develop non-aqueous routes for the synthesis of microporous manganese oxides with layered and tunneled structures using sol-gel and colloid precursors. With this award, Professor Ching will prepare manganese oxide thin films and aerogels using non-aqueous sol-gel reactions between tetraalkylammonium permanganates and methanol. High surface area aerogels will be prepared without the solvent exchange steps needed with aqueous gels. In addition, these layered and tunneled materials will accommodate a wide range of interstitial cations. The growth of manganese oxide particles in colloidal and sol-gel environments will be studied in terms of their size distribution using dynamic light scattering under a number of reaction conditions such as time, temperature, concentration, reactant ratio, and mechanical agitation. These studies in concert with other proposed characterization techniques will be used to establish procedures to prepare manganese oxides with predetermined properties such as crystallinity, particle size, and morphology. Manganese oxide thin films and aerogels that will be prepared in this study are expected to have high surface area, and will accommodate a wide range of interstitial cations for potential applications in catalysis and lithium ion rechargeable batteries. The proposed studies, in addition, will provide undergraduate students with comprehensive hands-on experience in research, and the project has the potential to attract more students to careers in science doc21353 none This grant provides support for the Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on CO2 FIXATION postdoctoral research associates; and unfunded, beginning PIs. The participation of these junior US scientists will not only be of immense professional benefit and encouragement to them, but also to the dynamic, cutting-edge nature of a GRC, the success of Session 7, and to future exciting advances in this active field of experimental plant biology doc21354 none The main objective of the Gordon Research Photonuclear Conference is to provide the international community of nuclear scientists with a unique forum in which the newest developments at the forefront of this science can be presented and subjected to detailed and extended discussions and criticism. The purpose of the conference is to encourage communication and the discussions to be conducted in an atmosphere conducive to open interactions between the scientists, provoking new and even speculative ideas for future research. To accomplish these goals requires the participation in all of the conference activities of a significant number of leaders in the field. The participation of younger scientists is essential to address the future manpower needs of this rapidly changing field. Therefore, bright and promising postdoctoral researchers and graduate students have been specially selected for participation in this conference and encouraged to present their ideas. Their participation in this conference provides them with unique and extensive access to the leaders in their field, exposes them to new research opportunities and techniques and helps prepare them for the leadership roles they will assume in the future. This award will facilitate participation from these junior scientists doc21355 none Under the direction of Dr. Tom Dillehay, Ms. Kary L. Stackelbeck will collect archeological and paleoecological data for her doctoral dissertation. She will continue archaeological survey and excavation in the lower Jequetepeque Valley on the north coast of Peru, which began during the Proyecto Pacasmayo ( - ; co-directed by Drs. Tom Dillehay and Alan Kolata). The Central Andes, particularly Peru and Ecuador, is known as an area where pristine civilization and monumental architecture developed early. But unlike other parts of the world where the earlier Neolithic and Archaic periods are fairly well known, relatively little is known about the preceding cultures and practices of the Middle Preceramic Period (ca. - BP) that set the stage for these later independent developments in Peru. It has generally been assumed that simple coastal fisherfolk and gatherers of the Middle Preceramic suddenly established complex polities with sophisticated social hierarchies and monumental architecture of the Late Preceramic period without any transitional socio-economic formations. But there are indications that some social, economic, and technological changes had their roots in the preceding Middle Preceramic. It is the purpose of the proposed research to examine the processes of emerging social and economic complexity as evidenced by Middle Preceramic occupations of the lower Jequetepeque Valley on the North coast of Peru and to compare these processes with those in other regions of the world. The student applicant has spent two field seasons conducting survey in the lower Jequetepeque Valley as part of the Proyecto Pacasmayo. During this survey, tight clusters of a wide variety of Early and Middle Preceramic sites were identified in parts of Quebrada del Batan and Quebrada Talambo. The Q. Talambo sites in particular exhibit the remains of Middle Preceramic and later domestic architecture defined by earlier circular and later semi-rectangular stone-lined structures, dense concentrations of chipped-stone lithics (including unifaces), and or grinding stones. The presence of permanent architecture in the form of two to eight circular stone-lined huts at single sites signals important early steps toward settlement permanency, social aggregation, and increased localization in preferred ecological zones along the lower western slopes of the Andes in this area. The Q. Talambo area lies within an ecological setting consisting of multiple, closely-juxtaposed microenvironmental zones along the lower western flanks of the Andes. The pattern of Early and Middle Preceramic sites is different from the Late Preceramic pyramids and settlements, which are located closer to the valley floor, presumably for the purpose of exploiting fertile agricultural lands. The proposed research project will be the first opportunity on the north coast of Peru to systematically examine tight clusters of Middle Preceramic sites in this kind of ecological setting in order to understand the socio-economic processes that set in motion social aggregation, subsistence settlement localization, and technological change, and to relate this understanding to other areas of the world. The research methodology will involve the completion of survey within the Q. Talambo drainage and excavation of selected, intact Middle Preceramic sites. In addition, various lithic analyses, paleoecological studies, and intrasite spatial analysis will be performed. Although the proposed study is specifically focused on local evidence for emergent complexity, it is understood that this research will have implications for our understanding of long-term culture change within the Jequetepeque Valley, the north coast region, and the Central Andes in broader perspective. In addition, the results of this research will add to a growing body of research aimed at understanding how the organizational principles of early hunter-gatherers in many parts of the world ultimately set the stage for later, complex societies doc21356 none The main objective of the Gordon Research Conference on Nuclear Chemistry is to provide the international community of nuclear scientists with a unique forum in which the newest developments at the forefront of this science can be presented and subjected to detailed and extended discussions and criticism. The purpose of the conference is to encourage communication and the discussions to be conducted in an atmosphere conducive to open interactions between the scientists, provoking new and even speculative ideas for future research. To accomplish these goals requires the participation in all of the conference activities of a significant number of leaders in the field. The participation of younger scientists is essential to address the future manpower needs of this rapidly changing field. Therefore, bright and promising postdoctoral researchers and graduate students have been specially selected for participation in this conference and encouraged to present their ideas. Their participation in this conference provides them with unique and extensive access to the leaders in their field, exposes them to new research opportunities and techniques and helps prepare them for the leadership roles they will assume in the future. This award will facilitate participation from these junior scientists doc21357 none Heterotrimeric G proteins couple multiple and diverse signals (e.g. light, pathogens, hormones) recognized by receptors to downstream effectors in a cell-specific manner. In Arabidopsis, hypothesized G-protein involvement in multiple signal transduction and developmental processes can be assessed using the tools developed by this project. The gene set comprises 16 heptahelical membrane proteins (candidate G protein-coupled receptors), one canonical Ga subunit, one Gb, and two Gg subunits (of the heterotrimeric complex), and three extralarge Ga-related proteins (XLGs). The resources tools that will be developed are: 1) GUS constructs allowing localization of expression for the gene set and; 2) constructs allowing visualization of physical interactions between members of the gene set in vivo in real time and with spatial dimensions using fluorescence energy transfer (FRET) between cyan fluorescent protein (CFP)-tagged and yellow fluorescent protein (YFP)-tagged proteins. The GUS constructs will be available at the conclusion of the first year of funding, and the YFP and CFP translational fusion constructs will be available at the conclusion of the second year of funding. Vector maps, images of expression levels and patterns, protocol updates, and instructions for obtaining material will be posted weekly at the following URL, which will be TAIR-linked: www.plantbiology.unc.edu Constructs will be available for order via the webpage. For each translational fusion, three stable transgenic lines will be deposited in the stock center following validation. The significance of the proposed work in relation to the overall project objectives is twofold. Function of the members of the gene family that is the target of this project will be determined as follows. Expression patterns of the genes will be evaluated in plants. The role the gene projects have in root cell proliferation and guard cell signaling will be evaluated, and novel small molecules that modulate plant G protein signaling pathways, as assessed by the FRET readout , will be identified. Tools developed by the project will allow the community to perform direct in vivo tests of hypothesized G protein involvement in any signal transduction or developmental context. As insights are gained into use of plant cell in vivo FRET analysis for monitoring the interaction between G protein complexes and G protein-coupled receptors, this tool will be made available to other plant research groups for evaluation of in vivo protein:protein interactions in other systems. In addition, the YFP constructs and lines will be compatible with BRET analysis being developed by the von Arnheim Johnson project (Univ. Tennessee). The broader impact of the proposed research includes pre- and postdoctoral training by direct mentorship of the two Principal investigators, and a hands-on tutorial on FRET measurements during a G protein workshop organized by the PIs. The workshop will be advertised in particular at small liberal arts colleges and minority institutions and undergraduate students will be eligible to apply for travel grants doc21358 none NSF Proposal PIs: Ipsen, Campbell, Kelley, and Meyer The proposed research concerns the numerical solution of sparse optimal control problems. The research issues originate from the Boeing Company s software project SOCS (Sparse Optimal Control Software). The constraints in the control problems are represented by systems of differential algebraic equations (DAEs), a class of differential equations whose solution poses serious challenges. The PIs propose to advance the state-of-the-art in high-index DAE technology to solve realistic, large-scale applications; to increase software scalability through the use of interior point methods for non-linear solvers and Krylov-space methods for linear solvers; and to develop prototyping software to test accuracy and performance of new algorithms. Research will be conducted on improving software for difficult, complex problems in aerospace and mechanical engineering applications, such as design of flight control systems, robot arms, and information retrieval systems. The use of computation to explore new science and engineering concepts is central to the project. This multi-disciplinary project is driven by collaboration with the Boeing company on its industrial software project SOCS which solves many large-scale optimal control problems that occur in chemical reactions, and a large variety of aerospace problems doc21359 none The completed genome sequence of Arabidopsis thaliana codes for at least 1,533 transcriptional regulators, of which the majority are predicted to bind DNA. Interactions between these DNA-binding proteins and cognate promoter sequences are primary determinants in establishing spatial and temporal expression patterns of batteries of genes that effect homeostasis, development and adaptation. However, our present knowledge of target genes and regulatory networks for all but a few plant transcription factors remains rudimentary at best. Considering the challenge ahead, efforts to assign gene-regulatory functions to the relatively large number of uncharacterized transcription factors of this higher plant by will strongly benefit from more global and high-throughput approaches. In this regard, this Project award will make use of a complementary and integrated strategy, involving high-throughput plant chromatin immunoprecipitation (pChIP) and gene expression analysis, for mapping transcriptional regulatory networks of Arabidopsis. Additional parallel experiments are planned to assess the functional validity of findings. The focus of study is the TGA family of basic leucine-zipper proteins, which comprise a complex transcriptional system with important regulatory functions in development and defense. A key question to be answered here is the identity of primary target genes and their associated networks. Data from this project will be posted periodically under links to be established on TIGR (http: www.tigr.org tdb e2k1 ath1 ) and CAB (http: www.umbi.umd.edu ~cab ) websites. Methodologies and tools to be developed under this award will include a high-throughput pChIP technology and partial genome array of intergenic sequences, which will be made publicly available as they come on line during the 3 year time-line of this project. In addition to developing a new paradigm for understanding transcriptional control mechanisms in Arabidopsis, this project will promote education and training missions that are encouraged by NSF. The goal of this project award is to identify and categorize gene-regulatory interactions that occur between a subset of DNA-binding proteins and the genes that they govern in the living plant. Expression of these genes is implicated in defense responses by plants to infection and toxins. Thus, this work will not only provide important new information on the mechanistic basis of how genes are regulated, but also may benefit agriculture by leading to new environmentally-friendly strategies for genetically enhancing natural protective genes of crop plants doc21360 none This research project, with the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, addresses questions of fundamental importance in the dynamics of adsorption and reaction on surfaces driven by photon and electron excitation. Professors Petek and Yates, at the University of Pittsburgh, combine femtosecond time resolved two photon photoemission with electron stimulated desorption ion angular distribution studies to probe the effects of substrate electronic structure on the detailed photochemistry of simple adsorbates on well characterized metal surfaces. Sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide adsorbed on silver and platinum surfaces are the model systems of interest. Time resolved photoemission microscopy provides information about the effect of specific defect sites on the surface photochemical process. Information from these studies provides fundamental insight into the operation of nanoscale structures and devices. A detailed understanding of the effect of substrate electronic structure on the dynamics of photon initiated chemistry at surfaces is the focus of this research project. With the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, Professors Petek and Yates at the University of Pittsburgh are probing these questions. Using time resolved photoemission methods, combined with structural information obtained from desorbed ion angular distributions, fundamental understanding of the dynamics of photon and electron initiated surface processes is obtained doc21361 none Professor Joseph Wang of New Mexico State University is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program to study nanoparticle-biopolymer assemblies for use as sensors. In particular, DNA hybridization events will be detected electrically on gold nanoparticles, with eventual applications in biodiagnostics and biodetection. New assays that couple multiple amplification pathways and an effective magnetic separation will allow for increased selectivity and sensitivity in the sensors. A new electrochemical coding technology will be developed for the simultaneous detection of multiple DNA targets. These projects will be combined on microfluidic device platforms. The ability to miniaturize complex chemical functions to achieve lab-on-a-chip is a goal of nanotechnology. In addition, this work can be related to biowarfare detection and thus has implications for national security doc21357 none Heterotrimeric G proteins couple multiple and diverse signals (e.g. light, pathogens, hormones) recognized by receptors to downstream effectors in a cell-specific manner. In Arabidopsis, hypothesized G-protein involvement in multiple signal transduction and developmental processes can be assessed using the tools developed by this project. The gene set comprises 16 heptahelical membrane proteins (candidate G protein-coupled receptors), one canonical Ga subunit, one Gb, and two Gg subunits (of the heterotrimeric complex), and three extralarge Ga-related proteins (XLGs). The resources tools that will be developed are: 1) GUS constructs allowing localization of expression for the gene set and; 2) constructs allowing visualization of physical interactions between members of the gene set in vivo in real time and with spatial dimensions using fluorescence energy transfer (FRET) between cyan fluorescent protein (CFP)-tagged and yellow fluorescent protein (YFP)-tagged proteins. The GUS constructs will be available at the conclusion of the first year of funding, and the YFP and CFP translational fusion constructs will be available at the conclusion of the second year of funding. Vector maps, images of expression levels and patterns, protocol updates, and instructions for obtaining material will be posted weekly at the following URL, which will be TAIR-linked: www.plantbiology.unc.edu Constructs will be available for order via the webpage. For each translational fusion, three stable transgenic lines will be deposited in the stock center following validation. The significance of the proposed work in relation to the overall project objectives is twofold. Function of the members of the gene family that is the target of this project will be determined as follows. Expression patterns of the genes will be evaluated in plants. The role the gene projects have in root cell proliferation and guard cell signaling will be evaluated, and novel small molecules that modulate plant G protein signaling pathways, as assessed by the FRET readout , will be identified. Tools developed by the project will allow the community to perform direct in vivo tests of hypothesized G protein involvement in any signal transduction or developmental context. As insights are gained into use of plant cell in vivo FRET analysis for monitoring the interaction between G protein complexes and G protein-coupled receptors, this tool will be made available to other plant research groups for evaluation of in vivo protein:protein interactions in other systems. In addition, the YFP constructs and lines will be compatible with BRET analysis being developed by the von Arnheim Johnson project (Univ. Tennessee). The broader impact of the proposed research includes pre- and postdoctoral training by direct mentorship of the two Principal investigators, and a hands-on tutorial on FRET measurements during a G protein workshop organized by the PIs. The workshop will be advertised in particular at small liberal arts colleges and minority institutions and undergraduate students will be eligible to apply for travel grants doc21363 none Barbara J. Finlayson-Pitts, Donald Dabdub, R. Benny Gerber, John. C. Hemminger and Douglas J. Tobias of UC Irvine are jointly supported by the Division of Chemistry, the International Programs Office and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate for their interdisciplinary collaboration aimed at significantly advancing our understanding of chemistry at the air-water interface. More specifically, they will be looking at the interaction of gases such as SO2, oxides of nitrogen (NO2, N2O4, HNO3), CO2 and HCl with water in films of varying thickness. In addition, interactions of these thin films with surfactant layers will be studied. Both theory and experiments will be applied to understand the chemical and physical interactions at the air-water interface in these systems. The potential importance of such processes at interfaces involving particles and other surfaces in the troposphere will be probed using a comprehensive airshed model. This award includes international collaborations with Pavel Jungwirth, Czech Academy of Sciences, and Leon Phillips, University of Canterbury, New Zealand, that will include international training opportunities for the students and postdoctoral researchers involved with this work. Collaborative Research in Chemistry (CRC) awards are given to interdisciplinary teams of scientists working on problems of broad chemical interest. The emphasis in these awards is on new collaborative modes of research and training doc21364 none COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: MAINTAINING HIGH SPECIES DIVERSITY IN COMMUNITIES Ecosystems frequently contain species that are evolutionarily and ecologically similar. However, whether this diversity is actually maintained by mechanisms that directly promote coexistence or rather is lost very slowly from systems is unclear. Many mechanisms have been proposed that could promote the indefinite coexistence of species on both local and regional scales. These mechanisms of coexistence are only present when vital rates (survival, growth, reproduction) vary with the environment and when individual species have different responses to the same environment change. The alternative is that species do not differ in their responses to the environment and are slowly being lost through a random process called ecological drift in which the population size of one species relative to another is determined by the unpredictability inherent in survival, growth, and reproduction. This process is akin to random genetic drift in which random evolutionary changes among the relative abundances of so-called neutral genes occur due to unpredictability in the process of inheritance. This project will elaborate recent models of ecological drift by incorporating mechanisms of coexistence into these neutral ecological models. Like the neutral models, development of the new theory will take advantage of analogies between the ecological mechanisms that determine species diversity patterns and the evolutionary processes that determine genetic diversity. The goal of the research is to develop a set of predictions that incorporates both ecological drift and various coexistence mechanisms that operate on local and regional scales. These predictions will be statistically compared with existing data on community diversity across local and regional scales. The research will provide indirect but highly practical tests for mechanisms that shape community diversity doc21365 none Romanowicz This grant supports an upgrade to the computational equipment in the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory and within the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC-Berkeley. Equipment to be purchased will include a multi-CPU SunFire server with expanded RAM, a multi-CPU Beowulf cluster of Intel PCs, a RAID system, tape backup system, multiple SunBlade workstations, a large format printer, and various network switches and Ethernet cards. UC-Berkeley will share equally in the cost of this upgrade. Multiple investigators including Romanowicz (global tomography), Burgmann (geodesy tectonics), Dreger (earthquake seismology), Manga and Richards (geodynamics), and their students, will immediately benefit from these upgrades doc21366 none Transcription factor networks are the genetic blueprint by which plants and other organisms orchestrate the proper activation and timing of gene expression. A first step in deciphering transcriptional networks is to determine the expression pattern of all genes at cell-type resolution. To accomplish this goal, this research project will develop a new genomics approach, which involves sorting cells from transgenic lines in which a fluorescent protein is used as a cell-specific marker. The sorted cell populations will then be used as a source of RNA that is hybridized to microarrays. The project focuses on genes expressed in the Arabidopsis root, which is a tractable model because of its simple and highly organized structure. The gene networks in question will be primarily those that involve DNA-binding transcription factors. The regulatory regions of these genes will be fused to fluorescent proteins to determine the ability of these sequences to confer tissue-specific expression. In addition, translational fusions of the same DNA binding factors will be made, enabling an analysis of post-transcriptional events that affect protein localization. Bioinformatics tools will be developed that refine expression patterns based on multiple sources of data. These analysis tools will be made available through links at the Benfey lab website (http: www.biology.duke.edu benfeylab at .html) at Duke University. The list of all transcription factors with their root cell-type specific expression profiles will be made available in regular updates of this site. Thus, the research will determine the specific expression domains of a vast number of genes, which is an important first step in determining gene function. The research will also provide the input for emerging analysis tools that can decipher the controls of gene regulation based on detailed expression patterns. This will help establish the function of transcription factors in terms of how they affect the transcription of other genes. To harness the power of gene function discoveries, it is critical to find ways to gain greater control over the expression of genes. Targeted modification of gene expression is likely to be one of the most important ways to improve plant performance. This research will identify a large number of genes with highly specific expression patterns whose specific regulatory code will be of significant use in many areas of plant research and improvement. The detailed information on where and when many genes are expressed and the proteins that control their expression will help advance the understanding of how all plants control their growth and development. Another important part of the project will be to train the next generation of scientists to integrate computational approaches into plant biology. Graduate and undergraduate students will participate actively in the research. Duke and NYU have very diverse student populations with excellent representation of minority and women students. The PIs also will participate actively in outreach efforts such as programs for local high school teachers doc21367 none The PI will undertake a computational study of scalar transport (e.g., contaminants or thermal energy) in wall turbulence and the influence of Prandtl (or Schmidt) number on near-wall and dispersion behavior. Central to this study will be the development of Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) in conjunction with Langrangian Scalar Tracking (LST) for the generation of numerical data and the development of descriptive models. The program will incorporate advances in High Performance Computing to allow the detailed investigation of heat and mass transfer in turbulent flow for a variety of fluid systems. Central concerns are the prediction of the spatial variation of turbulent transport properties, the effect of molecular Prandtl number on turbulent transport and the effect of boundary conditions on the scalar property transport. The innovations of the present work are (a) the use of hydrodynamics generated by a Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) to generate Lagrangian data for turbulent dispersion; (b) the development of plane Couette flow simulations for the study of transport in the constant stress region; and (c) the study of chemical reaction in turbulence in the Lagrangian framework. The results, if successful, will have impact on a variety of practical heat and mass transfer problems (heat exchange, mixing, reactor flows, turbine blade cooling, pollutant dispersion in the atmosphere). The work will also foster the application of HPC technology in ways that will make DNS more assessable and cost effective, and potentially will lead to the ability to study scalar transport in other important physical problems, such as transport in very small-scale flows. Specific plans have been laid out to introduce HPC to undergraduate students who will participate in the research at different stages of the work and through the introduction of HPC into the curriculum of Chemical Engineering at the University of Oklahoma doc21368 none Roberts, Fred S Rutgers University Special Projects: Mathematical Sciences Methods for the Study of Deliberate Release of Biological Agents and their Consequences This effort will fund an interdisciplinary workshop to investigate the potential uses of methods of the mathematical sciences (math, computer sciences, statistics, operations research) to fight bioterrorism. The group will identify the challenges posed by bioterrorism, will identify potential uses of mathematical sciences methods to fight it, then will focus on specific areas of emphasis. The group will examine alternative preventative measures such as vaccination, vaccine dilution and antibiotic and vaccine stockpiling or responsive strategies such as the isolation of individuals, buildings, populations and regions, the rapid control of mass transportation systems, and the systematic surveillance of the food and water supply. Topics of interest will include multiple outbreaks, the impact of bioterriorism on agricultural systems and food supply, and the spread of pathogens through buildings, in water systems, and in communications systems doc21369 none Raindrops fall with speeds that depend on their size, and can collide with each other as the larger drops overtake smaller ones. The collisions create still larger drops by coalescence but can also generate smaller droplets as a result of collision-induced breakup. To understand the evolution of the sizes of a population of drops as they fall and interact requires knowing the numbers and sizes of the droplet fragments produced by every drop collision, as a function of the sizes of the colliding pair. There is no theory that predicts the fragment sizes, and all such information is based on laboratory experiments. The most comprehensive of these are the experiments of Thomas Low and Roland List, who investigated the fragment size distributions produced by ten drop-pair combinations over the diameter range from 0.395 to 4.6 mm. For each of the ten combinations, the experiment was repeated many times (on the average, 140) and the fragments analyzed. Low and List combined the results of the repeated trials to give the average fragment size distribution for each of the drop-pair combinations. Other researchers have worked with these average distributions, seeking ways to use the results for modeling raindrop evolution by collisions and coalescence. A challenging problem is to interpolate the results to drop pairs of arbitrary size. This project reanalyzes the original Low and List data - the individual fragment distributions from all experiments, not just the ten average distributions - in an attempt to provide a parameterization of drop breakup for use in numerical cloud microphysical models. The approach is to create a much larger data set synthetically by sampling and resampling the data for each of the drop pairs. This enables an estimate of not only the average fragment distribution but also the statistical confidence of the average - a quantity lacking in earlier studies. The average distributions for each pair will be modeled as combinations of Gaussian, lognormal, and delta-function distributions. The parameters of these distributions, and their uncertainty, will be quantified using the synthetic approach. Numerical studies using the new information on fragment distributions will determine whether the Low and List data, with their attendant uncertainty, are capable of producing meaningful estimates of drop-spectrum evolution and, if so, the form of the equilibrium distribution that is eventually achieved by a balance between coalescence and breakup. This work is important for understanding the development of rain and for interpreting remotely-sensed observations of rain doc21370 none This multidisciplinary collaborative research is aimed at determining how and why plants synthesize diverse triterpenoids. This project will integrate reverse genetics in Arabidopsis, heterologous expression of cDNAs in yeast, spectroscopic and chromatographic structural determination, and gene expression analysis to elucidate the function of Arabidopsis triterpenoid biosynthetic genes and thereby triterpenoid biosynthetic pathways, control mechanisms, and biological function. Three of the characterized triterpenoid biosynthetic enzymes convert a shared substrate to different compounds; other enzymes to be studied may similarly provide structural diversity, metabolize different substrates, or provide means to spatially or temporally control expression and thus product formation. The effects of the mutations on plant growth, development, and triterpenoid composition will facilitate linking each triterpenoid biosynthetic gene with an enzyme of known catalytic activity and a specific biological role. Genes to be studied include apparent oxidosqualene cyclases, farnesyl pyrophosphate synthases, squalene synthases, squalene epoxidases, and cycloeucalenol isomerase. This work will provide a comprehensive accounting of triterpenoid skeletons synthesized by Arabidopsis, establish which compounds are derived from each gene product, and determine the spatial and temporal expression patterns of the various biosynthetic genes. These experiments will not only elucidate the biological importance of triterpenoid diversity, facilitating future modifications for agricultural benefit, but will provide students with broad interdisciplinary training that bridges modern chemistry and biology. The data from these studies will be publicly available on the project web site (http: www.bioc.rice.edu ~bartel At_triterpenoids.html), and the knockout seeds will be deposited in the ABRC at Ohio State University for distribution to the community doc21371 none Plant growth, development, and survival depend on the uptake, translocation, and sorting of 15 essential nutrients and countless metabolites to specific organs, cells and intracellular compartments. However, it is not known how plants regulate and coordinate the complex network of long-distance and cellular transport patterns. The first complete genome sequence of a plant, large mutant collections, and extensive databases provide opportunities to generate new resources and tools to discover the functions of ~800 transporters in Arabidopsis. The bulk of unknown transporters are secondary active transporters. The major objectives of this project are to determine the ion specificity, the tissue and subcellular distribution, and the biological roles of 56 H+-coupled cation transporters, including the CaCA, CPA1, and CPA2 families. With the availability of genomic sequence and the identification of transport homologs through bioinformatic analyses, heterologous expression in yeast will be used to quickly delineate the function of the entire complement of H+-coupled cation transporters. Regulatory mechanisms will be determined by mutation of putative autoinhibitory domains. Transport in isolated membranes will be used to verify ion specificity of representative transporters. Tissue and subcellular distribution will be determined using promoter-reporter proteins expression in transgenic plants, and GFP-tagged transporters in a protoplast model. Biological and physiological functions of transporters will be analyzed using insertional knockout mutants. New methods and information resulting from the study will be distributed through a site at http: www.cbs.umn.edu with several updates each year. To assure that results and resources are available to the community, data will be depositied at TAIR and mutant Arabidopsis lines will be available through the ABRC after results are confirmed. Transporters impact all life processes, including reproduction, metabolism, movement, and responses to hormonal and environmental stimuli, thus resources and information generated from this project will directly facilitate progress towards the goals of the project. Programs are in place to attract and provide opportunities for students, including under-represented minorities, to solve problems in health, agriculture, and the environment using experimental and bioinformatic approaches doc21372 none Amasino The initiation of flowering is a critical developmental decision in the plant life cycle. A common environmental cue used by many plant species to initiate flowering during the proper season is the change of day-length (photoperiod). The perception of photoperiod relies upon the circadian clock. Genetical studies over the past two decades indicate that a significant fraction of the genome is involved in flowering-time control. Our project goal is to screen the collections of T-DNA insertion lines we have created for mutants that are early flowering in non-inductive photoperiods. These mutants will identify a set of genes involved in the biological function of daylength perception and the circadian rhythm network. Our preliminary results indicate that many of these genes will be unique to the plant genome (i.e., no obvious homologs in animals or fungi) and that large-scale forward genetic screens are the most efficient way to identify these plant-specific genes. This area of research holds much promise for the discovery of novel plant genes and gene families, and in the long term will contribute to understanding the intimate link between the circadian clock and photoperiod perception at a molecular level. Given the central role of the timing of flowering in crop productivity, our work may also provide strategies to manipulate flowering to enhance crop yields. Current information on the phenotypes, map location and gene identities of the mutants that we characterize will be available at http: www.biochem.wisc.edu flowering (this site will be available in December ) and we will notify The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) (http: www.arabidopsis.org home.html) of gene identities so that they can update their annotation. All mutants will be deposited with the Ohio State University Arabidopsis stock center (http: www.biosci.ohiostate.edu ~plantbio Facilities abrc ABRCHOME.HTM doc21371 none Plant growth, development, and survival depend on the uptake, translocation, and sorting of 15 essential nutrients and countless metabolites to specific organs, cells and intracellular compartments. However, it is not known how plants regulate and coordinate the complex network of long-distance and cellular transport patterns. The first complete genome sequence of a plant, large mutant collections, and extensive databases provide opportunities to generate new resources and tools to discover the functions of ~800 transporters in Arabidopsis. The bulk of unknown transporters are secondary active transporters. The major objectives of this project are to determine the ion specificity, the tissue and subcellular distribution, and the biological roles of 56 H+-coupled cation transporters, including the CaCA, CPA1, and CPA2 families. With the availability of genomic sequence and the identification of transport homologs through bioinformatic analyses, heterologous expression in yeast will be used to quickly delineate the function of the entire complement of H+-coupled cation transporters. Regulatory mechanisms will be determined by mutation of putative autoinhibitory domains. Transport in isolated membranes will be used to verify ion specificity of representative transporters. Tissue and subcellular distribution will be determined using promoter-reporter proteins expression in transgenic plants, and GFP-tagged transporters in a protoplast model. Biological and physiological functions of transporters will be analyzed using insertional knockout mutants. New methods and information resulting from the study will be distributed through a site at http: www.cbs.umn.edu with several updates each year. To assure that results and resources are available to the community, data will be depositied at TAIR and mutant Arabidopsis lines will be available through the ABRC after results are confirmed. Transporters impact all life processes, including reproduction, metabolism, movement, and responses to hormonal and environmental stimuli, thus resources and information generated from this project will directly facilitate progress towards the goals of the project. Programs are in place to attract and provide opportunities for students, including under-represented minorities, to solve problems in health, agriculture, and the environment using experimental and bioinformatic approaches doc21374 none The molecular and physiological functions of the Arabidopsis starch metabolism gene network will be determined. The glucose polymers that make up starch, despite their simple chemical structures, display a complex molecular architecture that is essential for starch function. The Arabidopsis genome sequence allows identification of all the genes involved in starch biosynthesis or mobilization, and determination of the function of each gene product individually and within the metabolic network. This aspect of metabolism is a distinguishing feature of all plant life, by which the metabolic gains of photosynthesis are stored and used later when light is not available as the energy source. Understanding starch assembly and disassembly as a comprehensive chemical system, therefore, is required for a complete functional description of how the sequence information in the Arabidopsis genome is translated into the plant life form. In this project, determination of function implies that the role of each protein in the assembly or disassembly of starch polymers will be understood at the level of specific molecular interactions. The project focuses on 28 genes that are likely to be involved in starch metabolism after the production of the glucosyl unit donor. The gene set includes starch synthases, branching enzymes, debranching enzymes, a-amylases, b-amylases, disproportionating enzymes, and starch phosphorylases. In each instance the genome sequence predicts multiple isoforms. The two organizing hypotheses of the project are that most isoforms have specific, non-overlapping roles in creating or dismantling the molecular architecture of starch, and that many components of the network act via direct functional interactions rather than in a series of independent enzymatic steps. Results will be shared through scientific publication, regular web postings (www.starchmetnet.com), and via scientific conferences. Resources that will be developed and made available to the scientific community include mutant lines, isoform-specific antibodies, and purified recombinant enzymes. The project will have broader impacts in the training of scientists at all levels in areas such as mRNA profiling, biochemistry, and bioinformatics. The project will strive to involve members of under-represented groups in this activity at the undergraduate level, through established partnerships with universities that traditionally serve such students. Starch provides the majority of calories in the human diet, and is also a renewable resource for energy production and industrial raw materials. Comprehensive understanding of this energy storage system will provide a greater ability to exploit renewable plant resources to meet the continually increasing demands of our changing society and environment doc21375 none Post-transcriptional processing of mRNA is an important mechanism of gene regulation. This project is concerned with 3 -processing of mRNA, a process that includes cleavage of the precursor RNA sequence and subsequent polyadenylation. 3 -processing sites are determined by cis-acting signal elements, short control sequences within the immature precursor mRNA. The signals in yeast have been well characterized, but those in Arabidopsis have only begun to identify the precise sequence and positioning characteristics of the required cis-elements. Alternative 3 -processing of a specific mRNA, similar to alternative splicing, is a mechanism for regulating the sequence of the mature mRNA. Unlike alternative splicing, however, alternative 3 -processing typically changes only the 3 -untranslated region (3 -UTR) of the mRNA, leaving the protein coding sequence unaltered. Variation of the 3 -UTR sequence results in altered regulatory elements specific to the 3 -UTR, such as mRNA stability, translation, or localization elements. The specific goals of this are project are: (1) establishment of a curated database of experimentally determined 3 -processing sites for Arabidopsis, (2) construction of a discrete state-space model (DSM) based predictive tool for Arabidopsis mRNA 3 -processing sites, and (3) creation of a freely accessible web server interface to both the database and the predictive tools. DSM models are a form of Hidden Markov Models (HMM), in which the model structure is manually, rather than automatically, designed. DSM based models have previously been used to predict 3 -processing sites in the yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which has 3 -processing control elements similar to those found in plants. Public access to predictive tools will make it possible for external researchers to analyze any gene or group of genes of interest, even in the absence of experimentally determined sites in the curated database. Prediction of 3 -processing sites can also be coupled with gene prediction software to make the prediction more complete, including probable 3 -UTR sequences. The web site is: http: bmerc-www.bu.edu polyA doc21371 none Plant growth, development, and survival depend on the uptake, translocation, and sorting of 15 essential nutrients and countless metabolites to specific organs, cells and intracellular compartments. However, it is not known how plants regulate and coordinate the complex network of long-distance and cellular transport patterns. The first complete genome sequence of a plant, large mutant collections, and extensive databases provide opportunities to generate new resources and tools to discover the functions of ~800 transporters in Arabidopsis. The bulk of unknown transporters are secondary active transporters. The major objectives of this project are to determine the ion specificity, the tissue and subcellular distribution, and the biological roles of 56 H+-coupled cation transporters, including the CaCA, CPA1, and CPA2 families. With the availability of genomic sequence and the identification of transport homologs through bioinformatic analyses, heterologous expression in yeast will be used to quickly delineate the function of the entire complement of H+-coupled cation transporters. Regulatory mechanisms will be determined by mutation of putative autoinhibitory domains. Transport in isolated membranes will be used to verify ion specificity of representative transporters. Tissue and subcellular distribution will be determined using promoter-reporter proteins expression in transgenic plants, and GFP-tagged transporters in a protoplast model. Biological and physiological functions of transporters will be analyzed using insertional knockout mutants. New methods and information resulting from the study will be distributed through a site at http: www.cbs.umn.edu with several updates each year. To assure that results and resources are available to the community, data will be depositied at TAIR and mutant Arabidopsis lines will be available through the ABRC after results are confirmed. Transporters impact all life processes, including reproduction, metabolism, movement, and responses to hormonal and environmental stimuli, thus resources and information generated from this project will directly facilitate progress towards the goals of the project. Programs are in place to attract and provide opportunities for students, including under-represented minorities, to solve problems in health, agriculture, and the environment using experimental and bioinformatic approaches doc21377 none Reversible protein phosphorylation is the most common mechanism for cellular regulation in eukaryotic systems. Studies have demonstrated that serine threonine phosphorylation plays a key role in the regulation of plant physiology and development. However, tyrosine phosphorylation, despite its overwhelming importance in animals, was largely neglected in higher plants. Recently the first protein tyrosine phosphatase (PTP) has been characterized from higher plants. Furthermore, a diverse group of 21 genes encoding putative PTPs have been identified from the Arabidopsis genome. Genetic analyses of 4 PTPs have demonstrated that they serve critical functions in plant development, hormone signaling, and stress responses. These studies have broken new ground in the understanding of tyrosine phosphorylation in plants and opened up a new area of signal transduction research. In this project, a multifaceted approach is taken that combines most advanced technology in proteomics and genomics with existing procedures in biochemistry, molecular and cellular biology, and genetics to address the function of tyrosine phosphatases in Arabidopsis. The cDNAs for all PTPs will isolated, enzymatic properties of these putative PTPs will be characterized, their expression pattern and subcellular localization will be determined, and genetic models will be produced and characterized. To understand the molecular mechanism underlying PTP function, the in vivo substrates of PTPs will be identified using mass spectrometry. A useful database on phosphoproteome of Arabidopsis will be built and will be publicly accessible through PlantP website (http: plantsp.sdsc.edu ). The goal of this project is to understand the function and interplay of all tyrosine phosphatases in plant growth and developmental processes at both whole plant and molecular levels. Such information will contribute to the overall goal of program: to understand the function of all Arabidopsis genes. This project will also integrate educational activities into the research program by establishing a summer workshop for high school biology teachers doc21378 none Lower This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative NSF 01-157, category NER, and is co-funded by the GEO and ENG Directorates. The collaborative team states that while it is generally held that inter- and intra-molecular forces ultimately govern the interactions between biomolecules and inorganic surfaces, it is difficult to gain an appreciation of these forces because they exist at a seemingly infinitesimal magnitude. The central aim of this proposal is to begin to bridge this gap by using force microscopy to discover and explore the nanoscale forces at the interface between bacterially produced proteins and mineral surfaces or other inorganic phases. Force measurements will provide a quantitative measure of the natural affinity between nanoscale biomolecules and inorganic surfaces. These force data will be used to design a soft-lithographic technique in which a bacterium is used as a living pen that produces and secretes various proteins as nanoscale patterns onto a solid surface doc21379 none The PI proposes to carry out systematic investigations for obtaining precursors to the enigmatic occurrence of the Equatorial Spread-F (ESF) using daytime thermospheric optical emission measurements from the South American longitude using high-resolution optical spectrographs built at Boston University. ESF refers to the presence of irregularities in the nighttime equatorial ionosphere. Unlike substorms and geomagnetic storms, ESF is a form of space weather not controlled exclusively by the Interplanetary Magnetic Field (IMF). ESF irregularities have a severe impact on radio communications and navigational systems at a wide range of frequencies that adversely affect commercial and defense applications. The development of these irregularities is highly unpredictable. Even during the ESF season when various onset parameters are nearly identical, ESF occurs on one night and is completely absent on the other. Scientifically, this is a missing element in our understanding of plasma instabilities at low latitudes. Hence, it is very important to study and attempt to predict ESF and its adverse effects doc21380 none Emerging molecular technologies are enabling the collection of massive data sets that contain information about the full complement of mRNAs, proteins and metabolites in an organism. These data sets detail the fluctuations in levels of mRNAs, proteins, and metabolites in different organs, tissues and cell types, over time, and as the organism is subjected to environmental stresses. The development of Arabidopsis as a model plant system, and the ensuing emphasis on functional genomics in the Arabidopsis program, is leading to the generation of a multitude of such data sets. These data sets can compare wild-type and genetically modified Arabidopsis to understand how a change in a single gene can affect the function of the entire genome. The overall goal is to understand the interactions occurring between all the genes in a simple plant system, as the basis for developing a logical framework to improve the composition and yield of agronomically important plant species. Computational technologies are essential to integrate and interpret these large data sets. The goal is to develop and implement powerful software tools for analysis of genome-wide expression data. The software tools will consist of three modules that will integrate the visualization of the mRNA, protein, and metabolite data sets with our current understanding of the Arabidopsis metabolic and regulatory network. These are: 1) A metabolic and regulatory network mapping capability with an interactive graph display. 2) A data integration capability, wherein global profiling data can be clustered, visualized, superimposed on the metabolic and regulatory map. 3) A modeling capability in which the metabolic or regulatory flow in the network is modeled using fuzzy cognitive maps. These tools will be used by the biological community to generate and test hypotheses about the regulation of metabolic pathways that contribute to the final composition and yield of the plant. The 24-month deliverable will provide a proof-of-concept for the software, using test data sets from Arabidopsis. The proposed multidisciplinary research will provide invaluable opportunities for the integration of genomics and bioinformatics education into undergraduate and graduate curricula. Three-five undergraduate students and two graduate students will be involved over the course of two years. In addition, interations with local high school teachers are planned to enable motivated high school students to participate in this research. There is also a plan to integrate students from under-represented groups into the research project. The ability to reach young, computer savvy students even in high school will be further enhanced by the high power computer graphics used in the project. Development of this software will lead directly to its use as a teaching tool in secondary education. This coordinated approach to displaying multiple views of metabolic networks, cellular functions, and datasets will put abstract data in the context in which it arises, and facilitate studies of uncertainty and variation in metabolic networks. Although the software will be directed specifically towards the biology of Arabidopsis, it can be modified for use in any species. These tools, and the database will be freely available to the scientific community for academic purposes http: www.botany.iastate.edu ~mash metnetex metabolicnetex.html. They will provide a novel framework to formulate testable hypotheses regarding the function of specific genes and expand our holistic understanding of metabolism doc21381 none Mississippi State University (MSU), an NSA Center of Excellence in Information Assurance Education (COE IAE), will work with Jackson State University (JSU) and the University of Kansas (KU) though a collaborative and cooperative effort to increase these two institutions capacity in information assurance and to strengthen the COE IAE program at MSU. The faculty from all three institutions will work to develop an IA curriculum at JSU and KU with an expectation that both schools will apply for COE IAE status during academic year - . These collaboration efforts are intended to be beneficial to all three parties in not only developing an IA program at two universities that currently do not have one but also in strengthening the program at MSU by broadening its research effort, increasing minority representation in its PhD program, and by enhancing its instructional course content. MSU will additionally expand its IA offerings by involving the College of Business and the College of Arts and Sciences in our research. This proposal initiates an innovative programs that will promote student research and publication in this area doc21382 none The production of surface nanofeatures has many important applications in critical emerging technology fields, including the heterogeneous integration of nanoscale components and devices in microelectronics, information storage and optoelectronic systems. The ultra-fast temporal scale of femtosecond pulsed laser radiation will be combined with the high spatial resolution of near-field optical microscope for nanomachining. This hybrid single-step experimental methodology offers superior flexibility and control over the nanofabrication process. The project will encompass both basic investigation of the extremely rapid transport phenomena in nanometer length scales as well as the design and demonstration of novel practical processes for nanomachining and nanofabrication. The main objectives of the proposed research are given below: 1) Development of experimental procedures for nanomachining by coupling femtosecond laser radiation with near-field optical microscopes. 2) Detailed study of the fundamental mechanisms of the ultra-fast laser energy deposition and the ensuing nanoscale phase transformations by in-situ time-resolved optical spectroscopy. 3) Investigation of the ultra-fast transport phenomena in the machining, cutting and joining of nanostructures. In addition to the impact of the work in many nanotechnology applications, fundamental insight will be gained into the complex thermophysical phenomena in ultra-fast laser-induced nanoscale surface modification processes. Funding is being provided by the Thermal Transport and Thermal Processing Program of the Chemical and Transport Systems Division and by the Nanomanufacturing Program of the Design, Manufacturing and Industrial Innovation Division doc21383 none The goal of this project is to develop a method for efficient homology-dependent site-specific recombination (SSR) in Arabidopsis. The approach used is based on the recombination-inducing properties of transposable elements, coupled with alternative methods of delivering recombination substrates to plant cells. In previous research, the PI and co-PI have shown that DNA and RNA transposable elements can stimulate recombination. First, excision of maize Ac Ds DNA transposons greatly induces homologous recombination in plants, including Arabidopsis. Second, retrotransposons can generate high levels of cDNA that recombine readily with genomic sequences. This project will develop two-component (recipient and donor) transgene constructs that contain partially-overlapping visible and selectable marker gene fragments. The recipient component contains, in addition, a maize Ds element inserted between the marker genes. The recipient construct is integrated into the Arabidopsis genome; upon expression of Ac Ds transposase, Ds excision generates a recombination hotspot in the recipient construct. The donor construct sequences are delivered into the plant cells via several alternative methods, including Agrobacterium T-DNA transformation, particle bombardment, ectopic chromosomal position, and retrotransposon-generated cDNA. Recombination of recipient and donor sequences can be detected in somatic cells by the visible marker, and events transmitted to progeny can be genetically selected. Heritable recombination events will be characterized by molecular and genetic analysis to gain a greater understanding of SSR mechanisms in plant cells. Project results will be available at the following web site: http: www.public.iastate.edu ~voytas rec_arab.html . All reagents (seeds of transformed lines, plasmid vectors) will be made available upon request. Homology-dependent recombination is a powerful tool for genetic modification in many organisms; however, methods for routine SSR are not yet available for higher plants. An explicit goal of the Arabidopsis project is the development of methods for directed mutations and SSR. Successful completion of this project will provide an important new means for making precise changes in plant genomes for both fundamental research and practical applications doc21384 none Sequence-specific DNA-binding proteins containing the novel WRKY zinc finger motifs are a recently identified superfamily of transcription factors found only in plants. The few cases where functional studies are conducted indicate that WRKY proteins play important roles in various biological processes unique to plants, including disease resistance, senescence, seed germination and trichome development. This project is aimed at determining the functions of 72 identified Arabidopsis WRKY genes at three different levels. First, the expression patterns of the Arabidopsis WRKY genes will be determined during plant growth, development and responses to biotic and abiotic stress conditions. Secondly, both loss-of-function mutants (RNAi and knockout mutants) and constitutive expressing gain-of-function mutants for the WRKY genes will be produced and analyzed for altered phenotypes in growth, development and responses to environmental conditions. Thirdly, interacting proteins for all expressed Arabidopsis WRKY proteins will be identified in order to understand the molecular mechanisms by which individual WRKY proteins achieve their in vivo regulatory specificity. Progress in these studies will lead to a comprehensive understanding of the biological functions and molecular activities of plant WRKY proteins. These studies will also provide general tools and approaches useful for functional analysis of large gene families, particularly those encoding DNA-binding transcription factors. Sequence and expression information of the WRKY gene family will be made immediately available through Genbank, publications and the project website (http: homepage.mac.com zchen_ ). The website will also be updated with experimental data on functional analysis of each WRKY gene as it becomes available. The knowledge obtained from the project will enhance our understanding of the molecular basis for various important plant biological processes in which WRKY proteins are involved and provide potential targets for improving important agronomic traits in crop plants doc21377 none Reversible protein phosphorylation is the most common mechanism for cellular regulation in eukaryotic systems. Studies have demonstrated that serine threonine phosphorylation plays a key role in the regulation of plant physiology and development. However, tyrosine phosphorylation, despite its overwhelming importance in animals, was largely neglected in higher plants. Recently the first protein tyrosine phosphatase (PTP) has been characterized from higher plants. Furthermore, a diverse group of 21 genes encoding putative PTPs have been identified from the Arabidopsis genome. Genetic analyses of 4 PTPs have demonstrated that they serve critical functions in plant development, hormone signaling, and stress responses. These studies have broken new ground in the understanding of tyrosine phosphorylation in plants and opened up a new area of signal transduction research. In this project, a multifaceted approach is taken that combines most advanced technology in proteomics and genomics with existing procedures in biochemistry, molecular and cellular biology, and genetics to address the function of tyrosine phosphatases in Arabidopsis. The cDNAs for all PTPs will isolated, enzymatic properties of these putative PTPs will be characterized, their expression pattern and subcellular localization will be determined, and genetic models will be produced and characterized. To understand the molecular mechanism underlying PTP function, the in vivo substrates of PTPs will be identified using mass spectrometry. A useful database on phosphoproteome of Arabidopsis will be built and will be publicly accessible through PlantP website (http: plantsp.sdsc.edu ). The goal of this project is to understand the function and interplay of all tyrosine phosphatases in plant growth and developmental processes at both whole plant and molecular levels. Such information will contribute to the overall goal of program: to understand the function of all Arabidopsis genes. This project will also integrate educational activities into the research program by establishing a summer workshop for high school biology teachers doc21386 none The long term goal of this project is to develop a dynamical theory of how neurons in primary visual cortex (V1) generate a tuned response to multiple (rather than single) features of a visual stimulus, and how these responses are spatially integrated across the cortex to generate more global information about a visual scene. A primary focus of the work is to extend current network models of orientation tuning to incorporate the fact that V1 cells are also selective for spatial frequency. This is motivated by the considerable physiological and psychophysical evidence suggesting that cortical circuits carry out a localized two-dimensional Fourier decomposition of a stimulus rather than simply performing local edge detection. Optical imaging of the surface of cortex has revealed an intricate relationship between the distribution of orientation and spatial frequency preferences across cortex. How correlations between these two feature preference maps is manifested by the local and long-range circuitry of V1, and the consequences for the large-scale dynamics of V1 is also investigated. The primary visual cortex (V1) located at the back of the brain is the first cortical area to process visual information received from the eyes. One of the classical results regarding the function of neurons (brain cells) in V1 is that they analyze very local features of a visual image, that is, they carry out image decomposition. (For example, V1 cells are sensitive to the orientation of an edge representing the boundary between a light and dark region of the image. This discovery by Hubel and Wiesel led to the Nobel prize in medicine). A very important question that follows from this is how our coherent perception of the world is reconstructed. Until recently, it was thought that the local information from cells in V1 was passed through higher order processing stages in the brain where cognition occurs. However, it is becoming clear that long-range circuitry within V1 could itself contribute to the process of reconstruction. The basic aim of the proposal is to investigate this process by developing a large-scale mathematical model of primary visual cortex that incorporates the latest anatomical data regarding its internal circuitry. Understanding how early stages in the visual brain encode images has important applications to information technology (such as the development of artificial vision systems) and biotechnology (such as the development of an artificial prosthesis for the visually impaired). In the latter case it might be possible one day to artificially stimulate primary visual cortex to induce a visual sensation, rather like a controlled visual hallucination doc21387 none This award will support a week-long summer program in polymer for undergraduates. Participants will be selected from applicants from across the nation. The purpose of PolyCamp is to expose undergraduate students to the fascinating field of polymer science with the ultimate goal of getting them to consider graduate school and eventual employment in the field. A second key purpose is to expose the students to the various exciting career opportunities in polymer science. The week-long program consists of a number of introductory lectures on polymer chemistry; industrial plant tours; industrial and academic lab tours; three laboratory experiments; and group and individual discussions of career pathways and opportunities in the polymer field. Although PolyCamp has is only one week in duration, it will especially appeal to students who, for whatever reason, cannot commit to a full summer. It is proposed that programs such as PolyCamp are an excellent way to increase the number of students who are interested in polymer science, which will benefit the entire polymer community. Long-term assessment data will be collected and used to determine to what extent the PolyCamp experience stimulated the students interest in polymer science and how it has helped them develop and execute their career plans. The program has the strong backing of industrial affiliates, who eager to give plant tours and lead discussions of career opportunities doc21388 none The goal of this project is to determine the biological functions of a newly recognized class of Arabidopsis regulatory molecules - the small RNAs. The small RNAs typically contain 20-25 nucleotides and are likely generated by a dsRNA-specific, RNaseIII-like mechanism. Recently, 125 small RNAs were identified in Arabidopsis. Several arise from sequences in known or predicted protein-coding genes and transposons. The vast majority, however, arise from intergenic sequences between conventional genes. The Arabidopsis small RNAs resemble small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) associated with RNA silencing and small temporal RNAs (stRNAs) associated with translational control in C. elegans. These Arabidopsis RNAs are proposed to function in posttranscriptional regulation of gene and mRNA activity by several mechanisms, including RNA silencing, translational interference and epigenetic mechanisms in the nucleus. New libraries of small RNAs will be prepared using different tissues, a database of small RNA information will be assembled, and the small RNA sequences will be deposited into GenBank (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov). The function of small RNAs from protein-coding genes in posttranscriptional RNA silencing, and the function of small RNAs from intergenic regions in translational control and modification of nuclear DNA will be determined. Finally, the roles of each of nine RNaseIII-like proteins in small RNA biosynthesis will be analyzed. Results will be shared in peer-reviewed journals, at the International Conference on Arabidopsis Research, and on a database of small RNA information. The database, which will include capabilities for searching small RNA map positions, information about nearest genes, whether or not a given gene is near a small RNA, and other interactive features and results, will be made web-accessible to the scientific community (www.cgrb.orst.edu carrington smallRNAs). The publicly accessible database of small RNA information will have broad impact by providing researchers with information about small RNAs near or within genes of interest and allowing subsequent experiments on the roles of small RNA-based regulation of the Arabidopsis genome. Genes are controlled by many different mechanisms. Recently, a new type of regulatory system involving an unusual class of small RNA molecules was discovered. The small RNAs are proposed to function by binding to messenger RNA from specific gene targets. The small RNA would then trigger either cleavage of messenger RNA or inhibit the function of the messenger RNA to which it is bound. This project will result in discovery of new types of small RNA molecules and determine how these regulators affect gene expression in the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana doc21389 none Nearly axisymmetric systems occur in many physical problems, including the motion of charged dust grains in planetary magnetospheres, plasma fusion devices, ion motion in Paul traps, and the complex orbits of asteroidal moons. In all these examples the motion is well described by an autonomous Hamiltonian with an approximately conserved canonical momentum, for which an averaged effective potential exists. For small deviations from axisymmetry the motion remains essentially two-dimensional, simply averaging over nonaxisymmetric perturbations. This effect has major consequences for the long time confinement of orbits, such as pairs of ions in a Paul trap. In this research we will develop new analytic methods for describing this transition from two- to three-dimensional behavior using canonical perturbation theory, Morse theory, and Birkhoff normal forms. Global bifurcations of critical points and Arnold diffusion will also be investigated. The results are expected to have immediate impact on several fields under active investigation, such as high-performance computers utilizing quantum computation and the confinement of charged dust grains under the influence of solar radiation pressure. Axisymmetric systems have circular symmetry about an axis; a communication satellite in geosynchronous orbit about Earth is an example. In reality the Earth has small longitudinal deviations from sphericity, causing a geosynchronous satellite to wander in the sky rather than remain directly overhead, unless it is carefully placed at a stable longitude. Nevertheless, its orbit remains very nearly circular. This simple example illustrates a nearly axisymmetric system with quasi-two-dimensional behavior. This project investigates the detailed dynamics of such nearly axisymmetric systems. The resulting increased quantitative understanding will greatly aid in design, numerical simulation, and operation of such systems. Other (much more complex) examples include two-ion motion in ion traps, which are often constructed to be slightly elliptical rather than circular, and the orbits of small moonlets that have been recently discovered about many asteroids doc21390 none Gregory H. Robinson, Robert B. King, Henry F. Schaefer, III, Paul von Rague Schleyer and Peter R. Schreiner of The University of Georgia are supported by the Division of Chemistry and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate for their interdisciplinary collaboration aimed at significantly advancing our understanding of the concepts of aromaticity and metalloaromaticity. Aromatic compounds have electronic structures containing closed circuits of mobile electrons that lead to enhanced stabilities. Their geometries tend to be more regular and the magnetic as well as spectroscopic properties have special characteristics. To study next generation aromatic species, these researchers will explore the possibilities of extending the aromatic M2(GaR)3 chemistry to other elements. These compounds of lead, tin, thallium and indium, including the initial target, Li2(InH)3, will be studied from both synthetic, and theoretical perspectives. A prominent goal will be the synthesis of a truly metallic 6 pi-electron analog of benzene-a Ga6 6- moiety. The role of aromaticity in superconductivity, in transition metal derivatives, on curved surfaces such as Mobius aromatics and in new cyclization reactions will also be studied. Finally, this investigation will explore theoretical methods for evaluating aromaticity in molecular species. Collaborative Research in Chemistry (CRC) awards are given to interdisciplinary teams of scientists working on problems of broad chemical interest. The emphasis in these awards is on new collaborative modes of research and training doc21391 none Dr. Martha Reynolds, Department of Chemistry, Colgate University, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division for a study of the oxidation of halide ions by metal-bound peroxides. A series of new molybdenum(VI), vanadium(V), and tungsten(VI) peroxo complexes with ligands that vary systematically in their electron-donating properties will be synthesized and the reactivity toward bromide oxidation will be measured spectrophotometrically. These experiments will test the hypothesis that the electronic structure of a chelating ligand controls the strength of the peroxo bond in predictable ways, which in turn governs the reactivity of the complex as an oxidant. The reactivity of complexes that contain both peroxide and bromide or chloride directly bound to the metal will be examined. Such species represent possible intermediates in the peroxometal-mediated oxidation of halide ion. Because of the sensitivity of peroxo and metal-oxo vibrational frequencies to chemical changes, infrared spectroscopy will be used to obtain more detailed information on the mechanism of bromide oxidation and infrared-spectroelectrochemistry will be employed to compare the molecular details of the one- and two-electron oxidation chemistry of peroxometal complexes. Peroxide-containing metal complexes find application as catalysts for the oxidation or bromination of a variety of organic compounds. A biological example of such a catalyst is vanadium bromoperoxidase, an enzyme found in seaweed that produces oxidized bromine for the purpose of protecting the seaweed against predators or microorganisms. This project will provide an increased understanding of peroxometal complexes - and thereby of vanadium haloperoxidase enzymes - and holds promise for the development of new oxidation and bromination catalysts that may prove useful in the synthesis of anticancer, antimicrobial, and insulin-mimetic pharmaceuticals, and of oxidized or brominated organic compounds more generally. Students undertaking this research will gain facility in chemical synthesis, spectroscopic and electrochemical techniques, and chemical kinetics doc21381 none Mississippi State University (MSU), an NSA Center of Excellence in Information Assurance Education (COE IAE), will work with Jackson State University (JSU) and the University of Kansas (KU) though a collaborative and cooperative effort to increase these two institutions capacity in information assurance and to strengthen the COE IAE program at MSU. The faculty from all three institutions will work to develop an IA curriculum at JSU and KU with an expectation that both schools will apply for COE IAE status during academic year - . These collaboration efforts are intended to be beneficial to all three parties in not only developing an IA program at two universities that currently do not have one but also in strengthening the program at MSU by broadening its research effort, increasing minority representation in its PhD program, and by enhancing its instructional course content. MSU will additionally expand its IA offerings by involving the College of Business and the College of Arts and Sciences in our research. This proposal initiates an innovative programs that will promote student research and publication in this area doc21393 none This collaborative proposal offers a multiyear build-up designed to increase the number of graduates for Federal employment at Mississippi State and Jackson State Universities. At MSU we will extend information assurance (IA) course offerings outside the current Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering student base to other departments and students across campus. We will initiate this scholarship program during the first year at MSU and extend it to JSU, located approximately 120 miles from the MSU main campus, in the second year. We will offer a joint security course of study electronically between the two institutions during the second year of the program. The program coordinator at JSU will participate in the MSU scholarship selection process during year 1. During the succeeding years, those students enrolled in the security course from JSU will also be entitled to scholarship consideration doc21394 none This international field camp will bring together students from the United States, European Union and Central Asia to learn geologic mapping skills. The principal investigators are Dr. Ray J. Weldon from the University of Oregon Eugene and Dr. Kanatbek Abdrahkmatov from the Kyrgyz Institute of Seismology. The Tien Shan Mountains offer superb exposure and complex geology where the students will be able to address some of the most fundamental questions on mountain building and interactions of older and younger deformational events. The Tien Shan will introduce the students to a completely new class of structures that are not well exposed in the US. The mapping projects are designed to answer specific scientific questions about the active deformation in the Tien Shan, as well as to provide excellent learning situations for the students. This project will also further understanding of the geology and geodynamics of the Tien Shan orogen, that currently absorbs half of the shortening caused by the collision of Eurasia and the Indian subcontinent. This project in earth sciences research will train students in field mapping and will enhance the development of ties between the next generation of geoscientists. This project also fulfills the program objectives of bringing together leading experts in the U.S. and Central Eastern Europe to combine complementary efforts and capabilities in areas of strong mutual interest and competence on the basis of equality, reciprocity, and mutuality of benefit doc21395 none Gobran Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Dr. Riad Gobran, Department of Materials Engineering, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Dr. Houssni El-Saied, Cellulose and Paper Department, The National Research Center, Cairo, Egypt. Production of cellulose from bacteria (Acetobacter xylinum) is considered as one of the most beneficial developments in meeting environment regulations. The objective of this proposed project is to investigate the potential of the bacteria for the production of cellulose products, on both laboratory and pilot plant scale. This project is also to explore the production of cellulose derivatives by using bacteria from the nascent stage of cellulose production. Further reduction of the production cost and pollutant materials will be also investigated by applying certain agro-industrial wastes, including molasses by-product and black liquors of rice straw and sugar cane bagasse pulping, as cultivation medium for production of bacterial cellulose (BC). The applications of the produced BC in preparation of cellulose derivatives, high quality paper, and in health food industries will be studied. Scope: There is a great amount of pollution caused by paper and cellulose industry effluents, especially those produced from non-wood fibrous materials, e.g. rice straw and sugar cane bagasse. Using new technologies or redesign of products will help meet new environmental criteria and reduce this pollution. This project is funded by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Bioengineering and Environmental Systems doc21396 none Charles Stewart, III MIT Digital Government: Workshop on Election Systems Standards This workshop is a logical successor to a Presidentially-mandated workshop on on-line voting, held in October . The extremely close national election in November of elicited great interest in the voting process within the research community. An outgrowth of that interest was a joint effort by Cal Tech and MIT to develop a prototype voting system, in the process surfacing many technical, legal, and social issues. This proposed workshop will build on that joint effort, to examine current voting systems standards, and develop possible research topics related to those standards doc21397 none This award provides partial funding to support the Gordon Research Conference on Environmental Endocrine Disruptors to be held July 14 to July 19, , at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. This conference, more than any other, will bring together a diverse group of scientists to share their approaches and progress in this most interdisciplinary of subjects spanning many levels of biological organization. Humans and wildlife are exposed to a large number of widely used environmental chemicals known or suspected to have hormonal activity or to interfere with hormone action. Wildlife studies strongly suggest that populations are severely affected by these environmental endocrine disruptors (EEDs) in a number of ways (altered endocrine and reproductive systems, altered behavior, reduced reproduction and population numbers). EEDs are also thought to cause malformations of the human genital tract as well as testicular and breast cancers. These findings have alerted the scientific community, governments worldwide and the general public to the harm likely to be caused by EEDs. The objectives of the Environmental Endocrine Disruptors Gordon Conference are to: 1) present state-of-the-art research at all levels of complexity (molecular to population), 2) emphasize mechanistic approaches to the understanding of endocrine disruption, 3) work at integrating data emerging from these different fields of inquiry and levels of biological complexity, 4) identify gaps in knowledge and emerging areas of inquiry for exploration, and 5) enhance effective communication between scientists and foster new collaborative research efforts at national and international levels. The potential scientific impact of the conference will be to foster research in the area, prioritize common goals and generate new collaborative efforts to solve the identified gaps in knowledge, and to generate a synthesis of the problem across all the levels of complexity. In addition, by facilitating the interaction between established leaders in the field with young scientists, women and minorities, it will enable these young scientists to foster their education, training and career advancement. The conference will consist of nine formal sessions, each containing an introduction by a leading scientist, followed by 2-4 oral presentations, and two afternoon poster sessions. Speakers will be selected on the basis of their relevant expertise, while emphasizing a program with gender balance, minority representation and participation of young investigators that show promise as future scientific leaders. Funds from NSF will be used to reimburse the conference fees and travel expenses of some junior speakers (2 or 3), and to provide travel fellowships to allow the participation of young scientists (preference will be given to women and minorities who are graduate students and postdoctoral fellows doc21398 none Ellwood Description: This award is to support a collaborative project between Dr. Brooks Ellwood, Department of Geology and Geophysics at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Dr. Aziz Kafafy, Geology Department, Tanta University, Tanta, Egypt. The investigators plan to study the correlation of Cretaceous rock sequences exposed along the Gulf of Suez margin in Egypt and in the North American mid continent. Using the magnetosusceptibility event and cyclostratigraphy (MSEC) method, they will use samples collected from both regions to build a composite MSEC standard that may be used for correlation between the two regions. Recent published MSEC data sets have been shown to be useful for global correlation and correlation between wells when applied to cutting samples. Scope: The Cretaceous Period, especially in the Middle East, is a significant geologic period in terms of applied geology. MSEC correlation in cretaceous Rocks from Egypt and the United States is a logical progression from Paleozoic studies. This will advance knowledge and refine stratigraphic correlation of Cretaceous strata in northern Africa and the western United States, complementing and giving independent evidence for correlations within biozones and polar reversal intervals. The research has direct application to studies of Cretaceous strata, which hold petroleum resources in the United States and elsewhere, and the results may have direct application in oil exploration. Ellwood and Kafafy have experience in MSEC techniques and in applications in the field. The project includes undergraduate students who will benefit from taking part in an international cooperative research. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc21399 none In this project, funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Reisler will undertake a detailed study of binary intermolecular interactions that range from weak covalent to van der Waals couplings. Systems to be studied include weakly bound dimers of free radicals, hydrogen-bonded dimers of ammonia with weak pi-acids, and adducts of strong Lewis acids and bases. Several techniques will be used: pair-correlated velocity and angular distributions of dissociation fragments and IR-UV excitation detection; recently developed resolution and detection sensitivity schemes will be employed for images of the velocity and angular distributions of dissociation fragment; and REMPI and photoelectron spectroscopies will be applied to study the fragment properties. This project deals with the question of how molecules interact with one another. The results of such interactions depend on the strength of forces between the interaction partners. This research uses several experimental techniques to investigate the reaction dynamics for several select systems that exhibit different strengths of interactions. The research is directed to obtain detailed quantitative information of the behavior of interacting molecules and the results will bring about a better understanding of gas phase chemical reactions. The work will be conducted with students and postdoctoral research associates. An effective outreach program is part of this project doc21305 none Shen Zheng-Kang Freymueller Scientist from the University of Alaska, University of California Los Angeles, and the China Seismological Bureau are carrying out a a rapid response to the November 14, Mw~7.9 Kunlun fault earthquake in Tibet. This earthquake provides a unique opportunity to measure the postseismic deformation of an M~8 earthquake that occurred within a pre-existing geodetic network in which relative site velocities are known to about 1 mm yr., Three continuously recording GPS sites near the rupture and a fourth about 150 km away were established one week after the event by the China Seismological Bureau. Also, 17 existing and new GPS sites along the Qinghai-Tibet highway were surveyed in December, . A second field campaign is extending GPS network westward from the Qinghai-Tibet highway, adding new sites along the fault on either side of surface rupture in the near field. This survey is repeating measurements at all of the sites surveyed in November-December, providing the initial postseismic results. These measurements will lead to a better understanding of the rheological structure of the exceptionally thick northern Tibetan crust as well as the postseismic processes triggered by such a large event doc21401 none In this project funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Clouthier will conduct research on the electronic spectra of main group intermediates. These intermediates are based on Si, Ge, and Sn atoms, whose chemistry is significantly different from that of carbon atom-based molecules. Information about the electronically excited states is very sparse but is of great importance to the reaction chemistry of these species. The results of these investigations will be of importance to the physics of interstellar clouds and circumstellar atmospheres, as well for CVD fabrication of industrially important thin films. Our basic understanding of the behavior of the chemical vapor deposition process for the fabrication of industrially important thin films, as well as for the molecular modeling of interstellar clouds and circumstellar atmospheres is not well developed. While the chemistry of molecules based on the carbon atom is well understood, this is not the case for molecules in which silicon, germanium, or tin atoms take the place of carbon atoms. This research is directed to provide information on the properties of such molecules. The studies will be conducted with the assistance of students, postdoctoral research associates and collaborators from other institutions. Students will gain experience in modern techniques of molecular spectroscopy in preparation for advanced studies or entry into the scientific technical workforce doc21402 none Daniel G. Nocera and Moungi G. Bawendi of MIT and Manoochehr M. Koochesfahani of Michigan State University are jointly supported by the Division of Chemistry, the Division of Chemical Transport Systems and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate for their interdisciplinary collaboration on new molecule-based optical diagnostic techniques to measure flow on small spatial scales. They will use newly synthesized fluorescent tracers based on caged laser dye molecules and nanocrystalline quantum dots to image flows at speeds of less than 1 mm s. New optical techniques will be developed for the quantitative measurement of multivariable flow properties (e.g., flow velocity field, temperature, concentration) and transport in small dimensions. The diagnostics will interrogate important fundamental principles of flows in microchannels including transport to within 50-150 nm of surfaces. Understanding the flow behavior in microchannels is a key step in the development of active flow and mixing control on small spatial length scales. These principles defined from these flow studies will be incorporated in microchannels that contain Distributed Feedback (DFB) lasers as optical sensor elements. The integration of flow control and mixing with DFB architectures may lead to unprecedented analytical sensitivity on exquisitely small length scales. These principles are the underpinning of many emerging microdevice technologies, especially microsensors and microreactors. Collaborative Research in Chemistry (CRC) awards are given to interdisciplinary teams of scientists working on problems of broad chemical interest. The emphasis in these awards is on new collaborative modes of research and training doc21403 none Microscopic Modeling of the Surfactant Mediated Reactive Assembly of Nanostructured Materials Sanat K. Kumar Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Department of Chemical Engineering, Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park, PA. Evangelos Manias Department of Materials Science and Engineering Pennsylvania State Univ. University Park, PA. Executive We propose to develop highly integrated multiscale simulation tools to model the surfactant-mediated synthesis of nanomaterials. The proposed research will focus on a prototypical example of this methodology, the synthesis of ordered arrays of metal nanodots. The development of the proposed multiscale simulation approach is essential for two reasons. First, these synthesis methods involve reactions and self-assembly which span a variety of length [and hence time] scales, from the molecular [A and fs] to the macroscopic [m and s]. Second, since current synthesis routes were developed by empirical methods, predictive strategies for creating materials with desired structures are missing. This is, perhaps, the biggest bottleneck to the broad-based use of these novel materials. As a first step towards providing a predictive understanding of these syntheses, in this NER we shall model molecules as catenated strings of structureless beads so as to examine (a) if multiscale methods can be developed to successfully span from local, nanoscopic length and time scales to the macroscopic and (b) more importantly, if these coarse grained models can qualitatively capture the essential physics in these situations and identify the rate limiting mechanisms in each synthetic method. If this exploratory research is successful, then, the long term goal will be to include the critical molecular-level details so as to gain quantitative insights into synthesis strategies. These will directly aid in the development of new, generally applicable paradigms for synthesizing nanostructured materials which are relevant to a variety of interdisciplinary contexts that cross the boundaries of physics, chemistry, biology, and materials science doc21364 none COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: MAINTAINING HIGH SPECIES DIVERSITY IN COMMUNITIES Ecosystems frequently contain species that are evolutionarily and ecologically similar. However, whether this diversity is actually maintained by mechanisms that directly promote coexistence or rather is lost very slowly from systems is unclear. Many mechanisms have been proposed that could promote the indefinite coexistence of species on both local and regional scales. These mechanisms of coexistence are only present when vital rates (survival, growth, reproduction) vary with the environment and when individual species have different responses to the same environment change. The alternative is that species do not differ in their responses to the environment and are slowly being lost through a random process called ecological drift in which the population size of one species relative to another is determined by the unpredictability inherent in survival, growth, and reproduction. This process is akin to random genetic drift in which random evolutionary changes among the relative abundances of so-called neutral genes occur due to unpredictability in the process of inheritance. This project will elaborate recent models of ecological drift by incorporating mechanisms of coexistence into these neutral ecological models. Like the neutral models, development of the new theory will take advantage of analogies between the ecological mechanisms that determine species diversity patterns and the evolutionary processes that determine genetic diversity. The goal of the research is to develop a set of predictions that incorporates both ecological drift and various coexistence mechanisms that operate on local and regional scales. These predictions will be statistically compared with existing data on community diversity across local and regional scales. The research will provide indirect but highly practical tests for mechanisms that shape community diversity doc21405 none The effect of fiber geometry and mass fraction on gas holdup in gas-liquid-fiber slurries will be investigated by the PI at Iowa State University and the PI at Kimberly-Clark Corporation. The most direct application of the results is to fiber de-inking and fiber bleaching in fiber floatation columns used in many pulp and paper producing companies. Previous results from independent investigation of the PIs have shown interesting behavior when fiber is added to a gas-liquid column. The gas holdup in the slurry can be significantly different with the presence of fiber. The proposal study will investigate the various aspects of this problem including the effect of fiber entanglement on gas holdup doc21406 none Lee The investigator and his colleagues develop numerical methods for eigenvalue problems in infinite-dimensional spaces. At the heart of the effort is the recently developed hybrid diagonalization Monte Carlo approach, which they feel has led to significant advances in the computational treatment of the general low energy eigenvalue problem. They study the many unresolved mathematical issues related to approximate methods for low energy eigenvalues and eigenvectors in infinite-dimensional spaces. Among other things, the collaborators rigorously analyze the accuracy of the diagonalization Monte Carlo approach, study the relation between eigenvalue distribution and eigenvector structure, generalize the approach to non-Hermitian matrices, and improve the computational treatment of clustered eigenvalues. In addition to studying the underlying mathematics, the investigators also begin production on a public domain library for infinite-dimensional eigenvalue problems. Eigenvalue problems play a crucial role in many diverse branches of 21st-century science and engineering. This includes for example the electronic properties of nanoscale structures and new materials; the interactions of protons and neutrons in heavy nuclei; and gene similarity database studies in bioinformatics. The eigenvalue problem consists of finding certain attributes of a given square matrix, M. Specifically one is seeking column vectors, v, such that M times v is again proportional to v. The proportionality constant is called an eigenvalue of M and v is the corresponding eigenvector. In this project computational experts in computer science, applied mathematics, and physics collaborate to investigate large-dimensional matrix eigenvalue problems. The collaborators study the underlying mathematical issues related to this problem and develop a public domain library that can be applied to matrices of infinite dimension. The extension to infinite dimensions is crucial for many applications, particularly those in quantum physics and chemistry, but the existence of this library will impact many other areas that feature large-dimensional eigenvalue problems and are currently intractable with existing methods doc21407 none Stephen Lee and Francis J. DiSalvo of Cornell University and Dhandapani Venkataraman of the University of Massachusetts are supported by the Division of Chemistry and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate for their interdisciplinary collaboration aimed developing crystal design strategies for molecular metals. They will study ways to control the transition from the insulating state to the metallic state in organic systems. Because the superconducting critical temperature, Tc, is highest in metals containing light elements, (ie., the carbon and oxygen in fullerides and copper oxides) this study will focus on a number of distinctly different multi-dimensional organic metals. Important multi-dimensional crystal design parameters, such as packing efficiencies, local dipole-dipole interactions, hydrophobic-hydrophilic interactions, hydrogen bonding and coordination bonding, will be delineated. In these systems, which will include multidimensional pi coordinated molecular networks, pthalocyanines and inorganic clusters coupled to pi organics, effects of electronic structure on Tc- will be investigated, and connections made to the problem of hole and electron mobility in organic semiconductors. Collaborative Research in Chemistry (CRC) awards are given to interdisciplinary teams of scientists working on problems of broad chemical interest. The emphasis in these awards is on new collaborative modes of research and training doc21408 none Cook Partial support is provided for the biannual Gordon Research Conference on Thin Film Mechanical Behavior. The conference will be held July 14-19 at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. Session topics include global and local film behavior, stress effects, time dependent behavior, adhesion, contact mechanics, electromigration, and magnetic and electrical effects. The Gordon Conference format will assure that cutting edge research is discussed extensively in an informal atmosphere. NSF support will be used primarily to support the attendance of graduate students and junior researchers. The outcomes of the conference will be advances in basic science and follow-on impact on industrial applications in this critical area as results transfer to industry doc21409 none Understanding how interactions, microstructure and microscopic mechanics determine the macroscopic properties and responses of complex fluids is a fundamental problem that impacts materials processing and development, biology and medicine. For particulate gels that occur in the manufacture of ceramic parts, coatings, mineral recovery and lubricant degradation, we seek to understand the microscopic origins of viscoelastic, yield, and non- linear behavior that ultimately affects processing and final properties, such as the thermal and mass transport characteristics. The goal of this research is to explore the use of direct microscopic manipulation and imaging to understand the relationship between microscopic and macroscopic properties in particulate gels. The PI will develop and employ new experimental tools based on optical micromanipulation and visualization, including optical trapping in combination with video, fluorescence, and confocal microscopies. Because the techniques will allow investigation of the basic, microscopic mechanisms of rheological and mechanical behavior by quantifying struc- tural rearrangements, stresses and interactions in situ, they are powerful complements to scattering and rheological methods used by other groups. Specific research aims are: 1. Directly measure the micromechanical properties of models of the gel back- bone. To understand fundamental mechanisms of gel elasticity, shear and compressive yield behavior in particulate gels, the PI will develop optical trapping and microscopy tech- niques to measure the bending stiffness, frequency response, and relaxation timescales of model aggregates of the gel backbone. With videomicroscopy, the PI will characterize particle rearrangement mechanisms that are relevant to creep, yield and non-linear be- havior. The PI will systematically vary interparticle interactions, particle concentration, and polydispersity, and characterize surface heterogeneity. 2. Measure the mechanical properties of flocs and floc- floc interfaces. Using the experimental techniques designed for measuring gel backbone properties, the PI will measure the frequency response and rupturing mechanics of flocs formed during the aggregation process. Concurrent videomicroscopy and optical trapping will enable the PI to characterize and correlate mechanics and structural rearrangements in flocs that give rise to strain-hardening in fractal colloidal gels. The PI will measure mechanics between flocs to distinguish the contribution of internal and floc- floc mechanics in the rheology of gels. 3. Develop optical trapping and microscopy for dense, gelling suspensions. Establishing the relationship between individual aggregate mechanics, microrheology and rheology of particulate gels will require micromechanical measurements in bulk suspensions. The PI will develop the appropriate core-shell particles and experimental techniques to take advantage of simultaneous optical trapping and confocal microscopy in dense suspensions. This will enable the PI to directly visualize structure while inducing local deformation and stresses in the concentrated, bulk gel, ultimately providing a means of characterizing mechanisms of stress relaxation doc21410 none The objective of this project is to establish a QM MM methodology for the prediction and interpretation of protein pKa s that have unusual values and or are difficult to model with current methodologies. The methodology will be applied to three proteins (turkey ovomucoid third domain, ubiquitin, and xylanase) for which detailed experimental studies of the factors that influence pKa s have been performed. A three-layered computational (QM MM LPBE) methodology for protein pKa prediction will be developed. The ionizable residue and its immediate environment will be treated by ab initio electronic structure (QM) methods (including energy minimization and harmonic vibrational analysis). The rest of the protein will be treated with a polarizable, multipole-based electrostatic model (MM) derived specifically for each protein by separate ab initio calculations. The bulk solvent will be treated by a very accurate solution of the linearized Poisson-Boltzmann equation (LPBE). The combined use of this new method with current methods will contribute significantly to the experimental design of proteins with greater stability or new functions. This research is at the intersection of molecular physics, quantum chemistry, and structural biology, and will therefore offer important cross-disciplinary training to the postdoctoral associate, graduate student, and undergraduate students involved. Their training is further enhanced by tight collaboration with experimental research groups. The resulting scientists will be well versed in both the mathematical foundations and practical aspects of quantum chemistry (including algorithm development and parallelization) and macromolecular modeling within the context of an interdisciplinary research environment. Furthermore, all algorithmic developments will be implemented in the quantum chemistry program GAMESS, which is distributed free of charge to the scientific community. This work is funded jointly by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program in the Chemistry Division and the Molecular Biophysics Program in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences doc21411 none The investigator studies the dynamics of certain classes of integro-differential equations that arise in models of cortex. He examines how recurrent activity terminates due to any of several effects such as synaptic depression, depolarization block, and after-hyperpolarization. He also considers how recurrent connections lead to bistability and under what conditions this is sufficient to produce localized spatial states, wave fronts, and pulses. He uses methods of averaging and bifurcation theory to derive and analyse simplified dynamics from these models. The mathematical results explain a variety of experimental findings in both normal and pharmacologically manipulated neural tissue. These methods are applied to the Limax procerebral lobe, the turtle olfactory bulb, and various cortical slice preparations. Neurons, the main cells in the brain, are responsible for processing inputs from the outside world and converting this to motor actions. They communicate by producing spikes that are propagated to different regions of the brain by chemicals called transmitters. The nvestigator is interested in how this electrical and chemical information moves from one part of the brain to others. He uses simulations and mathematics to derive equations and general principles about how this is done. Experiments have shown that during some cognitive tasks, certain groups of neurons fire synchronously. He is interested in the conditions that are necessary to attain precise timing between different groups of neurons. In order to study these, he has developed mathematical software for the study of complex biological and physical systems. As part of this project, he continues to develop this software and to make it widely available. The project also provides interdisciplinary training opportunities for students and postdocs doc21412 none French This three-year award supports US-UK cooperative research and undergraduate research experiences in organic chemistry. The investigators are Andrew N. French at Albion College and Thomas Wirth at Cardiff University in Wales. The project involves the synthesis of chiral hypervalent iodine compounds. The goals are to design new chiral hypervalent iodine reagents, to determine their scope and limitations, and to investigate the possibility of catalysis. Undergraduate students will perform both synthesis and evaluation of the compounds, first during a semester in the US laboratory, then followed by a summer in Wales with the Wirth group. The US researcher brings to this project expertise in synthesis and evaluation of chiral hypervalent iodine compounds. This is complemented by the similar UK s expertise in organoselenium chemistry and reagents. This research partnership will advance the chemistry of new reagents and their possible uses. It will also integrate education and research in an international environment. The US undergraduates will have an opportunity to conduct research in a laboratory at a major graduate institution and university in the United Kingdom doc21413 none Dr. Philip J. Stephens of the University of Southern California is funded for his research on chemical applications of vibrational circular dichroism spectroscopy by a grant in the Physical Chemistry program of the Chemistry Division. Dr. Stephens will develop instrumental and theoretical methods for the measurement and prediction of the vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) spectra of chiral molecules and will apply VCD spectroscopy to the elucidation of the stereochemistries of chiral molecules. A dual-modulation methodology will be implemented for the reduction of polarization artefacts and the enhancement of the sensitivity of VCD instrumentation. The ab initio DFT GIAO methodology for predicting vibrational rotational strengths will be improved by inclusion of anharmonicity and solvent effects. Applications will focus on the determination of absolute configuration and conformational analysis. Chiral molecules exist in two forms - enantiomers - which are mirror images. The different biochemical behavior of enantiomers of a pharmaceutical molecule is leading to increasing development of single enantiomer, chiral drugs. Methods for efficiently characterizing the structures of chiral molecules are therefore of increasing importance. Dr. Stephens will develop the methodology of vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) spectroscopy, a technique for studying chiral molecules. New methods will be developed for measuring and predicting VCD spectra with much greater accuracy than heretofore possible, which in turn will greatly enhance the application of VCD spectrosopy to the structural characterization of chiral molecules, including chiral drugs. Graduate students and postdoctoral associates will be trained in these techniques doc21414 none This proposal is a three-part research program aimed at a better understanding of stochastic dynamical systems. In the first part, entitled Stochastic Equations in Infinite Dimensions, I propose to study some prototype stochastic partial differential equations which arise in connection with hydrodynamic turbulence and other problems in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. The emphasis is on going beyond the more standard existence uniqueness statements for these equations and considering harder questions like: What does a typical solution look like? What are the properties of its probability density function? In the second part of the proposal, entitled Effective Stochastic Modeling, I consider large systems where the variables can be separated into two groups evolving on different time scales. Effective equations for the slow variables alone are derived by elimination of the fast variables using techniques which borrow from singular perturbations techniques for Markov processes. Finally, in the third part of the proposal, entitled Transition Pathways -- String Method, I consider systems where, due to the disparity between typical energy barriers in the system and the thermal energy available, the dynamics proceed by long waiting periods around the metastable states followed by sudden jumps from one state to the other. The effective dynamics in these systems is determined by the transition pathways between the metastable states and the rates at which these transitions occur. The objective here is to develop and implement efficient numerical algorithms which compute these paths and rates. Despite the rapid improvement of computer performance, many problems of scientific and engineering interest will not be amenable to direct numerical simulations in the foreseeable future. Typical problems arising, for example, in hydrodynamic turbulence, dynamical critical phenomena, climate modeling, molecular dynamics, phase transition in spatially extended systems, involve such a large number of variables interacting on so many different space-time scales that they vastly overwhelm direct numerical computations. On the other hand, while a complete description of the dynamics in these examples is impossible, it is also not necessarily useful. Indeed one is typically interested only in some coarse-grained variables, suitably defined by means of averaging over appropriate ensembles (time, space, ...), which evolve in a more regular fashion and thereby provide the most useful information about the system. The main objective of the present proposal is to improve the techniques for such a statistical analysis of these large systems -- including the identification of the coarse-grained variables and the equations they satisfy. The common emphasis is on techniques which are truly computational tools -- either analytical or numerical -- and allow for concrete and explicit investigation of the properties of the solutions doc21415 none Funds are transferred to NOAA to support one NOAA Knauss Sea Grant Fellow within the NSFDivision of Ocean Sciences. The Fellow will work with OCE program staff for one year and participate in various activities related to ocean science research, policy, and marine education. The Fellow will gain valuable first-hand experience by working on diverse activities related to ocean science research policy and administration. The Fellow will work with the Ocean Section and the Oceanographic Technology & Interdisciplinary Coordination Program. The National Sea Grant Federal Fellowship Program is administrated through NOAA s Office of Oceanic Research Programs doc21416 none This project involves laboratory and field studies to help elucidate the chemical mechanisms underlying ozone production and hydroxyl radical reactivity in the atmosphere. This research includes intercomparison and development of instrumentation for measuring atmospheric free radicals, and studying the mixing ratios, loss rates and kinetics in urban, rural, and remote sites of the hydroxyl and the hydroperoxyl radicals. The project will investigate the source of observed and evening and nighttime signals of these radicals, as well as develop and deploy detection capabilities for atmospheric free radicals doc21417 none Christopher C. Cummins of MIT, Carl Hoff of the University of Miami and Elena V. Rybak-Akimova of Tufts University are supported by the Division of Chemistry and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate for their interdisciplinary collaboration aimed at obtaining a complete mechanistic description of several atom and group transfer reactions. These model reactions are rapid and quantitative, making them amenable to study by stopped-flow kinetics and solution calorimetry. The controlled transfer of a single atom (oxygen, sulfur, phosphorus, nitrogen) or a small group such as NCN offers great possibilities for environmentally benign synthesis of commodity chemicals, pharmaceuticals, plastics additives and other specialty chemicals. This focused study of this important class of reactions should provide increased understanding of the driving force and kinetic barriers to atom transfer reactions as well as how to incorporate this knowledge into design of new catalytic systems. Collaborative Research in Chemistry (CRC) awards are given to interdisciplinary teams of scientists working on problems of broad chemical interest. The emphasis in these awards is on new collaborative modes of research and training doc21418 none Tourism is a major industry in the world, and poorer countries have invested resources in developing tourist attractions to showcase their natural environment to wealthy tourists. This dissertation research proposal by a cultural anthropology student investigates the impact of one such project in Huatulco, Oaxaca, Mexico, on the lives of local residents. The study will investigate three broad questions: how the direction of public resources to the tourist infrastructure affects local residents perceptions of the resources available to them; how the redirection of resources towards tourism development and the growing tourist presence has changed the actual and expected standard of living for local residents; and how emigration is perceived by local residents as a strategy to accommodate expectations of higher living standards that may have been thwarted by tourism development. The methods include participant observation, semi-structured interviews, the analysis of social networks, and the collection of household histories. Aside from contributing to the education of a young social scientists, this research will advance our understanding of the sources of Mexican migration to the US, and the social as well as economic costs and benefits of tourism development doc21419 none Munroe This is a proposal submitted by Dr. Jeffrey Munroe, Middlebury College, to request a planning visit to the Qinghai and Tibetan Plateau, China, to collect information for developing a cooperative study with Lanzhou University on late Pleistocene glaciation. This is an important topic for understanding the amount of water tied up in glacial ice. This visit can also provide a unique opportunity to two American investigators early in their career to visit the plateau and to enrich their knowledge of Asian continental glaciation with first-hand observations doc21420 none With National Science Foundation support Ms. Veronica Perez Rodriguez will conduct archaeological and ethnohistorical research in the Mixteca Alta region, Oaxaca, Mexico. The Mixteca Alta is a mountainous region in southern Mexico, known for its late prehispanic cacicazgos or kingdoms. This project will study economy, social stratification, and agricultural intensification in Postclassic Mixtec society (AD 800- ). The ancient Mixtec adapted to their mountainous environment by building terraces and intensifying agricultural production in ways that were sustainable over many centuries; historical accounts suggest that the commoners worked these terraces, but little else is known about their lives or roles in intensive agricultural production. Scholars usually explain agricultural intensification as a response to population growth, or the demands of elites and the state. Ms. Perez Rodriguez s study takes a bottom up perspective by looking at the food-producing commoner households and their role in the system of intensive agricultural production. Mixtec dynastic history contains accounts of political rises and falls. But what actually supported Mixtec society over the long term was the stable agricultural production of commoner households. How was Mixtec agricultural production organized and sustained over centuries? How did food-producing commoner households contribute to the system of intensive agricultural production? What lessons are there for today s issues of population growth and environmental degradation? This study will investigate the proposition that food-producing commoner households could have self-directed the Mixtec system of intensive agricultural production. Ms. Perez Rodriguez will map, survey, and excavate a Postclassic Mixtec site-Nicayuhu-a densely populated hilltop terraced site surrounded by still-standing prehispanic agricultural terraces. Mapping and survey data will be used to identify commoner residential occupations and other areas for excavation. Excavations in residential and agricultural terraces will provide information on terrace construction and will determine whether commoners lived on or had usufruct rights over these terraces. Continuity of occupation in the excavated residential area would support the hypothesis that commoner households could have created and self-directed intensive agricultural production. Agricultural terrace construction that was consistent with gradual accretion by household labor (i.e., households secured their tenure rights through occupation and use of agricultural terraces and associated residential areas) would lend further support. Ms. Perez Rodriguez will study Colonial documents at State and National archives in Mexico City to derive an ethnohistorical model of prehispanic agricultural production, land use, and land tenure that will be used to interpret the excavation results. This research is important because it will provide data on the role of the state in the creation and implementation of intensive agricultural production. It will explore the possibility that sustainable intensive agricultural systems may have originated from household-level initiatives and decision-making that can only come from very intimate knowledge of the local environment. This study would be the first systematic excavation of Postclassic commoner households and nearby agricultural terraces in the state of Oaxaca. The results will provide a time-depth perspective to measure terracing sustainability and erosion control; and will generate data on the social organization of agricultural intensification and the food-producing class doc21421 none With this Small Grant for Exploratory Research, researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Boston will investigate the environmental impact of the World Trade Center terrorist attack on September 11, , by studying the chemistry and mineralogy of sediments of New York Harbor. The studies will determine whether atmospheric and storm-water inputs of dust, debris, and contaminants can be used with radiotracers to identify and characterize an event-related stratigraphic imprint, assess impacts on sediment quality, and characterize spatial aspects of sedimentation doc21422 none A conference on Ontological, Epistemological, Linguistic and Pedagogical Considerations of Language and Science Literacy: Empowering Research and Informing Instruction is proposed. The emphases of the conference are (1) the development of theoretical framework for understanding and developing language-science literacy connections and (2) establishing a group of researchers interested in classroom-based research projects focused on critical, practice-derived issues language and science literacy issues. A premise is that research needs to focus on determining what science literacy practices work in the classroom and build explanations of why these work. The conference will address (1) clarification of the roles of speaking, reading, writing, and listening in authentic science learning communities in elementary, middle, secondary, post-secondary, and post-graduate settings, (2) exploration of the influences of information technologies on language and science literacy, (3) the establishment of a contemporary theoretical framework involving language, information technology, science and science literacy, and (4) the consolidation and extension of international, interdisciplinary and intergenerational network of professional scientists, applied cognitive scientists, language and science researchers, graduate students, and teacher educators. The conference will begin by exploring the nature of science, the linguistic components of doing science, the ontological and epistemological considerations in science literacy, the influence of information technology on language production and processing, and the critical relationships between language, science, and science learning. It will continue by summarizing the results of recent explorations of oral and written discourse on science literacy. The conference will conclude by outlining some avenues for future research, some implications for classroom practice, and some applications for teacher education doc21423 none Davidson- Adsorption of inorganic carbon on mineral phases has been of interest to researchers in many different fields of study, but little is known about the role that adsorption on rock-forming minerals may play in global CO2 sink, or how it may affect 14C dating in groundwater. Preliminary results suggest that adsorption of CO2 could account for a small but significant percentage of the terrestrial CO2 sink, and exchange between the aqueous and adsorbed phase could influence 14C dating in groundwater. The preliminary data comes from experiments with tuff (felsic volcanic rock). Core samples were isolated from the atmosphere at the time of drilling, and were later opened and heated under vacuum to extract inorganic dissolved carbon (DIC) from water in the rock pores. Carbon recoveries in excess of available DIC suggest that a sizeable reservoir of adsorbed carbon exists in these rocks. A pilot project is proposed to investigate CO2 adsorption and associated isotopic fractionation on five volcanic rock materials representing suites of felsic and mafic minerals under dry, wetted, and saturated conditions. Samples will be characterized for surface area, porosymmetry and mineralogy before use. For dry and wetted experiments, crushed rock will be preheated at C to generating adsorption isotherms, and again at C in order to quatify the effect of trace organic coatings that may be present. Adsorption isotherms will be measured under drying conditions and in the presence of a mono-layer of adsorbed water. Isotopic fractionation will be evaluated by collecting head space gases after equilibration and measuring the d 13C of initial and equilibrated CO2. Isotopic exchange will be evaluated by reintroducing CO2 with a unique d13 C signature and measuring head space gases again after equilibration. Adsorption in saturated systems will be measured by introducing CO2 into the head space of a saturated slurry and monitoring the head space CO2 concentration and the pH to calculate the mass partitioned into the aqueous and adsorbed phases. Isotopic fractionation and exchange will be measured in the same fashion as for dry and wetted experiments. Results from this work will be used as a first step in estimating the magnitude of CO2 adsorption as a terrestrial sink of atmospheric CO2, and the extent to which adsoption and exchange may alter 14C activities in groundwater. The results will also be used to formulate a more targeted study of adsorption sites and mechanisms. Educational impacts of the study include student training at both the graduate and undergraduate level doc21424 none Biomimetics allows one to tap into the ingenious designs of nature to inspire new technologies. Recent developments in the advanced materials sciences have given researchers unparalleled access to biological systems at all levels of structural organization, including nanoscale organization under nearly in-vivo conditions. In the framework of this general approach, The PI will focus on testing basic principles governing the function, structure, and operation of specially designed free-suspended polymer inorganic, multi-nanolayered membranes that can act as highly sensitive photothermal elements. The design proposed is based on principles learned from recent studies of biological infrared receptors highly sensitive to thermal flux. The main focus will be on the application of these fundamental principles to the development of nano-structured materials based on bio-inspired principles. The PI will determine if bio-inspired, compliant nanostructures can be designed with unique nanothermal properties and sensing capabilities comparable to biological receptors. He will fabricate and test multi-layered, free-suspended compliant membranes with nanolayered structural organizations composed of regularly alternating nanolayers of inorganic nanoparticles and polymer interlayers. The membrane is designed to be capable of significant reversible deformations, while providing the transduction of mechanical stresses to an external detection scheme. He will identify, test, and optimize assembly technologies (e.g., layer-by-layer self-assembly on sacrificial supports or Langmuir-Blodgett transfer) for depositing compliant membranes on micromachined, microelectronic surfaces, while preserving their micromechanical and microthermal properties in a manner compatible with prospective photothermal cell design. Perforated solid substrates will be selected for membrane deposition. A critical issue addressed by this project is the manner in which structural and chemical design principles employed by biological receptors may be transferred efficiently to generate organized nano-structured materials with enhanced thermal responsive properties doc21425 none This award by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research by Professor Stephen G. Boxer of Stanford University to continue studies on the development of spectroscopic methods that probe interactions between molecular fragments separated by relatively long spacer groups. Stark effect spectroscopy is used to provide quantitative information on the magnitude and direction of charge displacement associated with a spectroscopic transition. The effect of an applied electric field on an electronic or vibrational transition is used to generate a deeper understanding of bonding, especially in coordination complexes, and the concept that the vibrational frequency shifts can be a quantitative probe for electrostatic effects in complex systems such as proteins. Initial results indicate that vibrational Stark spectroscopy can be a powerful and minimally invasive approach for obtaining information on how protein electrostatic fields change in modified proteins and during catalysis. This work begins to outline how electric fields can be used to manipulate the rates of electron and proton transfer as biochemical reactions create, consume or displace electric dipoles. Unusual and characteristic non-classical Stark effects are expected to occur in mixed-valence complexes that exhibit multiple states whose energy difference is affected by the applied field. Analyses of the resulting unusual line shapes will give quantitative information on the energetics, electronic coupling and charge displacement in these molecules. A new form of spectroscopy will be used to study how electric fields affect electron, proton and dipole movements in chemical, photochemical and biochemical processes doc21426 none This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 01-157, in the NER category. The proposal focuses on innovative materials synthesis strategies to create both passive, and magnetically-driven mechanically active precision separation membranes. Of particular interest is the development and characterization of well-controlled, stable, and uniform nano-dimensional membranes capable of the separation of viruses and or proteins during the blood fractionation processes and the blocking of antibodies and complement molecules from encapsulated xenogeneic cells. It is hypothesized that high surface area cylindrical capsules the walls of which are comprised of nanoporous membranes, created via a two-step process of electric-field driven anodization of aluminum or titanium, can be used for the absolute filtration or exclusion of biomolecules in the nanometer range. For a given capsule, a windowpane structure is used with anodized nanoporous windows, and un-anodized aluminum struts for structural support. The aluminum anodization process enables precise control of pore size, with a controllable pore diameter of approximately 10 nm to 100 nm depending upon anodizing voltage. Beyond making passive membranes, the investigators propose fabrication of cylindrical nanoporous biocapsules incorporating magnetoelastic elements. Incorporation of the magnetoelastic elements enable the biocapsule to be mechanically vibrated, remotely from a distance, by application of a time-varying magnetic field that should enable controlled transport through the membrane. A magnetoelastic thick film layer will be electroplated onto the aluminum structural supports of the capsule. Such capsules could possibly find application as in-vivo drug delivery devices, where needed medicine is delivered in precise amounts by external application of a magnetic field. As a further aspect of the proposed research, the investigators seek to build upon their expertise in fabrication of nanoporous alumina films of high uniformity to fabricate surface coatings comprised of perpendicularly oriented gold-coated magnetostrictive nanowire arrays. The utility of these arrays will be investigated for their utility in prevention of biofouling. It is hypothesized that the needle-like shape of the nanowire array elements, and the wave-like movement of the magnetostrictive nanowire array in response to a time-varying non-uniform magnetic field, will help prevent protein attachment to the surface, and could ultimately be used to move or transfer cells across the surface. The proposed research will determine optimal routes for fabrication of the nanoporous capsules with attention to membrane functionality as biological filters. The application of passive nanoporous biocapsules for cellular encapsulation and immunoisolation, and mechanically active biocapsules for controlled transport and delivery through the nanoporous membranes will be investigated. In addition, the use of magnetostrictive nanowire arrays will be investigated for their use in the prevention of biofouling. The proposed outcomes are: (1) Determining a path for in-situ or in-vivo controlled drug delivery by application of an external time varying magnetic field. (2) Determination of a surface that would prevent biofouling, facilitating the introduction of medical devices into the human body doc21427 none The feasibility of synthesizing carbon nanotubes and other high-value forms of carbon will be studied using a lab-scale, nominally atmospheric pressure, induction-coupled plasma [ICP] reactor. The rationale for this work was the discovery of nanotubes in carbonaceous residues produced during the gasification of polymers for monomer recovery from waste, but under conditions minimizing solids formation. In this work, the ICP will be used to decompose solid polymeric and low molecular weight gaseous hydrocarbon precursors [methane, propane and ethylene] under conditions maximizing carbon recovery. Organometallic catalysts [Fe, Ni and Co-bearing], previously shown to nucleate and enhance nanotube formation and growth, will be injected into the feed stream prior to injection into the hot [~10,000 k] plasma region to produce conditions favoring nanotube formation. Several hydrocarbon precursors and catalysts will be studied in an experimental matrix determining the influence of key process variables such as plasma power, process gas flows, precursor feed rate, quenching gas flows and reactor pressure on product yield and composition. Solid products will be analyzed by electron microscopy and chemical solubility techniques to determine the yield of nanotubes, their type(s) and any associated by-products. ICP s are flexible, capable of operating under neutral, oxidizing or reducing conditions, and of accepting gaseous, liquid or solid feeds. Furthermore, ICP reactors are readily scalable. While the lab-scale system to be used in this work will feed solids at ~ 5 gm min, potentially yielding up to 5.8 kg of solids day, industrial systems rated in the 600 kW to 1MW power range have already been developed. If successful, this work offers the possibility of large-scale production of carbon nanotubes at significantly lower cost than existing furnace, arc and laser-ablation techniques. This would enable more of the applications proposed for C-nanotubeshydrogen storage, composite reinforcement, therapeutics delivery etc., to be developed doc21428 none An effective computational approach has been developed by the PI for direct simulation of finite size particles suspended in incompressible fluid. The proposed project investigates the feasibility of using this method for direct simulation of many finite size particles in homogeneous turbulent flow. If successful, this approach would provide a powerful tool to analyze the challenging problems associated with the impact of particulate turbulent flow doc21429 none Nanowires tubes have the potential to contribute significantly to the continued size reduction of micro nano-mechanical systems. Knowledge of the thermal characteristics of nanowires tubes is the basis for predicting, controlling, and achieving desired thermal performance of micro- and nanosized devices. This one-year exploratory research is to develop a novel experimental characterization tool to characterize the thermal transport along nanowires tubes. The proposed experiment involves modulated laser beam heating on one side of a substrate while nanowires tubes have been grown perpendicularly on the other side. Variation of the thermal radiation from the laser-heated side is detected and related to the thermophysical properties of nanowires tubes. The unique thermal depth profiling capability of the experiment makes it possible to identify and characterize the thermal conductivity of nanowires tubes and the thermal contact resistance between nanowires tubes and the substrate. The quantitative investigation of this thermal contact resistance is a first step, also an essential step, toward the thermal design of joints between nanowires tubes and micro- and nanodevices doc21430 none This project, submitted under the Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) program, will examine public attitudes and behavior following the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In particular, this study will explore alternative accounts for why people become increasingly politically intolerant during periods of real or perceived threats to national security. Although fear is often suggested as an explanation for the link between threats to national security and increased political intolerance, the fear hypothesis does not seem to capture the full complexity of the citizens reactions to perceived threat. For example, people responded to the September 11 terrorist attacks not only with increased political intolerance, but also with a paralleling need for vengeance, and a heightened need to engage in prosocial behaviors like donating blood - reactions that are less clearly rooted in fear. The researcher will test the theory of deonance, which maintains that a motivated state of aversive arousal creates a psychological pressure for the individual citizen to engage in thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that will be designed to restore a sense of moral balance. The most emphatic ways people can restore a perception of restored balance will be by expressing moral outrage (a composite psychological reaction that includes the need to punish and ostracize those who violated the moral order, using whatever means possible) and to engage in moral cleansing (acting in ways to shore up those aspects of the moral order that have been undercut by the transgression). Among other things, deonance theory predicts that people who do engage in prosocial behavior following the terrorist attack may have successfully restored a perception of moral order, and therefore will be more politically tolerant than those who did not. This and other hypotheses will be tested by re-contacting a national random sample of people who completed measures of aversive arousal within the first 10 days after the terrorist attack. The proposed survey will include measures of moral outrage, moral cleansing, fear of future terrorist attacks, and political intolerance, and should provide increased understanding of the psychological origin and function of political intolerance doc21431 none This project was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NER. Nanoscale materials are now fabricated by a variety of means, but the dominant methods rely on self-assembly or advanced lithography. These and other fabrication schemes, especially self-assembly, can create structures in which the molecular orientation perpendicular to the surface is controlled by the chemistry, conferring the functionality. This project will take control of orientation one step further - so that the molecules can also be locally oriented in the plane of the surface. Variations of the orientation on a 100 nm length scale permits nanoscale functionality based on the relative orientation of molecules to be obtained. This is a powerful concept for high performance molecular devices, since the properties of molecules are highly anisotropic. The nanopoling scheme should be much more effective at orienting molecules than current poling methods due to the larger electric field that can be generated locally. The central task of this project is to demonstrate the attachment of oriented molecules to a surface. Major tasks will be the identification of the best method for each of a few classes of molecules (conjugated polymers, porphyrins, DNA), to model the orientation and attachment processes, and to study the dependence of these processes on field strength and electrode geometry. The latter will require the facile scanning probe microscope. Topography and orientation of the molecules is characterized with polarization-sensitive near-field optical microscopy (NSOM) utilizing the same probe as deposited the oriented molecules, and the electrical properties are obtained via lithographically-defined contacts. The novelty and importance of this project evolves from the breaking of the in-plane symmetry within the nanostructures. It will result in new types of nanostructures with novel properties and functionality. This will lead to new devices. In this project we will focus on the science of the growth process with a scanning probe microscope. Ultimate usage for fabrication of the novel devices engendered by this deposition technique will require much faster fabrication methods. The prospects for large-scale fabrication once the processes are understood are good, and we have defined a possible route to a mask-based technology resulting from these studies doc21432 none This is a fundamental molecular analysis of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) growth processes in combustion systems involving cyclopentadiene (CPD) and indene, which contains the CPD moiety. These compounds, which are present in combustion effluents, are of interest because of their roles as intermediates in the formation of potentially mutagenic PAH which contain five-membered rings, as well as in the formation of fullerenes and soot. Cyclopentadiene and indene are important in growth of PAH from combustion processes because they form resonance-stabilized radicals that are reactive at multiple sites. Study of reactions involving these compounds in well-designed molecular systems leads to better understanding of the underlying chemistry of PAH growth from combustion and of conditions that control the formation of toxic air pollutants and soot. Previous work indicates that cyclopentadienyl and indenyl radicals add to the pi bonds of the parent molecules (CPD and indene) that contain external CPD moieties. Subsequent reactions lead to the formation of ortho-fused PAH via one of two pathways: one involving expansion of both five-membered rings to form PAH with only six-membered rings by a route similar to that for cyclopentadienyl radical combination to form naphthalene; the other involving formation of a norbornenyl-type bridged intermediate followed by ring opening and loss of a C1 species to form PAH that retain one CPD moiety. This second pathway is a route of PAH formation not previously proposed. Experiments at Georgia Tech extend work on CPD and indene chemistry to thermal reactions of these compounds with three other species: styrene, acenaphthylene, and phenanthrene. Formation of PAH and growth by addition of cyclopentadienyl and indenyl radicals to other types of pi?bonds is studied. Styrene is the simplest aromatic molecule that contains a vinyl substituent; these species are common in combustion systems due to the abundance of acetylene. Acenaphthylene is representative of fully conjugated PAH containing external five-membered rings; other examples found in combustion systems include acephenanthrylene and aceanthrylene. Phenanthrene is a PAH that contains a pi?bond that is less conjugated than other aromatic pi?bonds; another combustion-generated PAH with this feature is pyrene. Thus, the proposed study will significantly expand the understanding of the growth of carbon moieties in combustion systems from addition of cyclopentadienyl and indenyl radicals and subsequent PAH fusion. Semi-empirical molecular modeling has been performed on the CPD indene system to study alternative PAH formation pathways. Qualitative agreement was obtained between experimentally observed and computed partitioning between PAH product channels. Quantum mechanical theory has been applied to the study of carbon growth processes involving acenaphthylene. This study includes ab initio modeling at Utah of the CPD indene system to refine computational methods and verify semi-empirical modeling results. A computational study of the new cyclopentadienyl and indenyl addition pathways being investigated experimentally is conducted. Broader impact This research will improve chemical mechanisms of PAH and soot formation in combustion systems, using a tight coordination of experimental and computational approaches. The project combines experimental and computational expertise of investigators at two institutions. This collaboration will require a close interaction and will broaden the research capabilities of each group doc21433 none This grant will be used to develop non-photochemical laser-induced nucleation as a method for providing nucleation-on-demand, for controlling crystal structure, and for improving the current understanding of nucleation from solution. The basis of this technique is the discovery, made by the PIs several years ago, that intense near-infrared laser pulses could induce crystallization in aged supersaturated solutions of small organic molecules. In cases studied so far, laser-induced nucleation enhances the rate of nucleation by a factor of 10 13 . Even more intriguing is the case of aqueous glycine, which crystallizes into two different polymorphs depending on the laser polarization state (linear vs. circular), which implicates the optical electric field as being responsible for the phenomenon. This polarization switching of polymorphs represents a clean method for controlling crystal structure. It is hypothesized that the oscillating electric field of the light is aligning solute molecules in a pre-nucleating cluster, aiding its organization into a particular crystal structure. The method also has the potential of creating new polymorphs of some substances. New polymorphs constitute novel materials that may have important industrial applications. Over the next three years the PIs propose to gain a better understanding of the mechanism of non-photochemical laser-induced nucleation, by systematically studying its dependence on illumination parameters such as intensity, wavelength, laser pulse width and polarization state. With the same goal, they will also explore the effect of a strong static electric field on supersaturated solutions. Other experiments would focus on screening a large number of solvent solute systems, as well as melts, to correlate the form of the inducing electric field to the crystal structure that is induced. Such screening would also include a search for new polymorphs doc21434 none Information provision is increasingly used as a regulatory tool. The Environmental Protection Agency s Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) program requires manufacturing facilities that handle threshold amounts of specific chemicals to report yearly their releases and transfers of these toxic substances. This project investigates how accurate TRI data are and what factors give rise to errors or evasion in self-reporting. The proposed research uses two different methods to assess the accuracy of TRI data. For 12 of the chemicals covered by TRI reporting, the EPA samples air concentrations of these chemicals using a network of monitors across the country. Geographic information systems (GIS) software allow one to determine which polluting facilities are within range of the EPA s monitors. The researchers can thus compare how measured trends in pollution from monitoring data match self-reported trends on air releases by the polluting facilities. To investigate potential divergences between the monitoring data and TRI figures, the analysis will also explore how the nature of the surrounding community, state environmental enforcement, and company and facility-level characteristics affect the apparent accuracy of the reported TRI air emissions. The comparison of reported TRI figures with expected distributions of emissions digits offers a second way to assess the accuracy of pollution data. The key insight is that if facilities are estimating emissions with a downward bias, the overall distribution of digits will not follow the same pattern as the actual digits in the monitor data. This research will demonstrate the degree that selected physical monitoring and analysis of data patterns for statistical bias can help determine the accuracy of self-reported data doc21435 none This program will graduate 30 graduate students specializing in Information Assurance (IA) over a period of four years. The program will be accomplished through the close collaboration of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC Charlotte) and North Carolina A require creative design and or research that are appropriate for a Master s level student; and has clearly defined deliverables, which typically would include documents and or prototype software doc21436 none Charge depletion at semiconductor interfaces forms the foundation for modern microelectronic devices. This award seeks to explore the analogy between charge depletion in inorganic semiconductor devices and those based on conjugated polymers. The central theme of the proposed work is the use of internally compensated doped conjugated polymers to engineer charge depletion layers at interfaces. Internally compensated polymers, unlike traditionally doped conjugated polymers, do not contain any mobile counter-ions. In the presence of mobile counter-ions, charge depletion layers cannot be supported and the interfaces where they are most likely to be generated are not stable with respect to redox reactions. The proposed work centers on polyacetylene ionomers with a controlled density of functional groups and prepared by the ring-opening metathesis copolymerization of functionalized cyclooctatetraenes. These materials are to be used to conduct the first comprehensive study of charge depletion at conjugated polymer interfaces as a function of dopant density and to explore the possibility of all polymeric pn junctions. These studies will lay the fundamental foundation for the design of a variety of devices based on doped conjugated polymers. As in the initial term of the project, new educational initiatives are proposed to keep pace with the continued convergence of basic science and engineering. In particular, continuing work on the development of summer undergraduate camps is proposed. These camps continuing work on the development of summer undergraduate camps is proposed. These camps (Chip Camp and Poly Camp) introduce chemistry students to highly relevant topics in materials science that are often overlooked in a traditional chemistry education doc21437 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Jingguang Chen Institution: Gordon Research Conferences The Gordon Conference on Catalysis (GCC) in will be held on June 23-28 Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire. The conference will focus on several areas that are key to the fundamental understanding of catalytic systems: molecular level characterization of catalysts, quantitative descriptions of reaction pathways, novel materials, fuel cell catalysis, chiral catalysis, and the conversion of nitrogen oxides in combustion products. The themes and speakers are of interest to both academic and industrial communities. Current and future trends in heterogeneous catalysis will be the general theme. This grant will provide partial support for speakers, graduate students, post-doctoral students, and younger faculty doc21438 none The purpose of this study is to capitalize on several mature technologies to obtain regional and global maps of ionospheric irregularities and some of their statistical properties (e.g., second moment) by use of diffraction tomography. In utilizing the GPS signals for 3D mapping of ionospheric irregularities, we are taking advantage of (1) the growing number of space receivers recording GPS phase and amplitude data while occulting behind the ionosphere, (2) the very dense regional networks and large global networks of GPS ground receivers providing over 30 million links per day through the ionosphere, (3) advances made in ionospheric tomography and data assimilation techniques, (4) advances made in diffraction tomography doc21432 none This is a fundamental molecular analysis of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) growth processes in combustion systems involving cyclopentadiene (CPD) and indene, which contains the CPD moiety. These compounds, which are present in combustion effluents, are of interest because of their roles as intermediates in the formation of potentially mutagenic PAH which contain five-membered rings, as well as in the formation of fullerenes and soot. Cyclopentadiene and indene are important in growth of PAH from combustion processes because they form resonance-stabilized radicals that are reactive at multiple sites. Study of reactions involving these compounds in well-designed molecular systems leads to better understanding of the underlying chemistry of PAH growth from combustion and of conditions that control the formation of toxic air pollutants and soot. Previous work indicates that cyclopentadienyl and indenyl radicals add to the pi bonds of the parent molecules (CPD and indene) that contain external CPD moieties. Subsequent reactions lead to the formation of ortho-fused PAH via one of two pathways: one involving expansion of both five-membered rings to form PAH with only six-membered rings by a route similar to that for cyclopentadienyl radical combination to form naphthalene; the other involving formation of a norbornenyl-type bridged intermediate followed by ring opening and loss of a C1 species to form PAH that retain one CPD moiety. This second pathway is a route of PAH formation not previously proposed. Experiments at Georgia Tech extend work on CPD and indene chemistry to thermal reactions of these compounds with three other species: styrene, acenaphthylene, and phenanthrene. Formation of PAH and growth by addition of cyclopentadienyl and indenyl radicals to other types of pi?bonds is studied. Styrene is the simplest aromatic molecule that contains a vinyl substituent; these species are common in combustion systems due to the abundance of acetylene. Acenaphthylene is representative of fully conjugated PAH containing external five-membered rings; other examples found in combustion systems include acephenanthrylene and aceanthrylene. Phenanthrene is a PAH that contains a pi?bond that is less conjugated than other aromatic pi?bonds; another combustion-generated PAH with this feature is pyrene. Thus, the proposed study will significantly expand the understanding of the growth of carbon moieties in combustion systems from addition of cyclopentadienyl and indenyl radicals and subsequent PAH fusion. Semi-empirical molecular modeling has been performed on the CPD indene system to study alternative PAH formation pathways. Qualitative agreement was obtained between experimentally observed and computed partitioning between PAH product channels. Quantum mechanical theory has been applied to the study of carbon growth processes involving acenaphthylene. This study includes ab initio modeling at Utah of the CPD indene system to refine computational methods and verify semi-empirical modeling results. A computational study of the new cyclopentadienyl and indenyl addition pathways being investigated experimentally is conducted. Broader impact This research will improve chemical mechanisms of PAH and soot formation in combustion systems, using a tight coordination of experimental and computational approaches. The project combines experimental and computational expertise of investigators at two institutions. This collaboration will require a close interaction and will broaden the research capabilities of each group doc21440 none This study will synthesize findings of the portfolio of research projects funded by the ROLE program. Research methods include the analysis of survey findings, document analysis, and interviews with appropriate elite informants. Dissemination plans include presentations at conferences (including the ROLE PI meeting) and scholarly publication doc21441 none MacLennan, Bruce NER: NER: Universally Programmable Intelligent Matter Intelligent matter is any material in which individual molecules or supra-molecular clusters function as agents to accomplish some purpose. Intelligent matter may be solid, liquid or gaseous, although liquids and membranes are perhaps most typical. Universally programmable intelligent matter is made from a small set of molecular building blocks that are universal in the sense that they can be rearranged to accomplish any purpose that can be described by a computer program. In effect, a computer program controls the behavior of the material at the molecular level. In some applications the molecules self-assemble a desired nanostructure by computing the structure and then becoming inactive. In other applications the material remains active so that it can respond, at the molecular level, to its environment or to other external conditions. An extreme case is when programmable supra-molecular clusters act as autonomous agents to achieve some end. Accomplishing the goals of universally programmable intelligent matter will require the identification of a small set of molecular building blocks that is computationally universal. The SK calculus (a kind of combinatory logic) is a formal system that demonstrates that such sets exist. It is capable of universal computation, but makes use of only two simple operations on graphs, which are suggestive of molecular processes. Computer scientists have investigated the SK calculus extensively for several decades as a basis for massively parallel computer architectures, and the translation of high-level functional computer programs into SK structures is well understood. However, the SK calculus may not be the best choice for programmable intelligent matter. This exploratory research project has four principal objectives: (1) to develop a model of computation compatible with the constraints of molecular processes; (2) to identify at least two universal sets of building blocks for programmable intelligent matter; (3) to develop methods for interfacing with additional molecular building blocks for sensing conditions and causing effects in the external environment; (4) to develop prototype simulation software to investigate characteristics peculiar to molecular computation. Some of the methods are theoretical: (1) the construction of a mathematical model of computation compatible with the constraints of molecular processes, and (2) a mathematical investigation of the properties (such as computational universality) of some simple graph operations resulting in at least two universal sets of building blocks. The theoretical investigation will be supplemented by (3) the development of simulation software to investigate stochastic and other novel factors affecting computation in a molecular context, and (4) the use of the simulator to demonstrate the use of programmable intelligent matter to implement several useful nanostructures, such as nanotubes and membranes with active channels and cilia. Since the resulting building blocks for universal programmable matter are expected to be individually simple and few in number, this project will provide the information needed by chemists to identify or synthesize the substances sufficient to implement universally programmable intelligent matter. This will open the way toward the ability to produce materials with a desired nanostructure and behavior as easily as we program computers today. This project will take a first step toward a systematic approach to nanotechnology that will failitate its rapid development doc21442 none Self-assembled surface nanostructures hold the promise for manufacture of microelectronic devices with unprecedented performances characteristics. Potential applications include field effect transistors, quantum memory devices and solid-state lasers. Strain-driven nucleation, growth and coarsening of epitaxial islands during MBE growth, possibly with self-assembly of islands with regular arrays, offer a particularly versatile and cost-effective approach to manufacturing nanoscale devices. Recent experimental and analytical studies have revealed that appropriately controlling mismatch strain and processing conditions may influence island shapes, sizes and distributions. To exploit this phenomenon in manufacturing self-organized quantum dot arrays will require a fundamental understanding of the role of strain, surface energies, and kinetics of transport and deposition on the formation and evolution of material structures. A particular challenge is that island morphology is determined both by atomic scale pheno mena, such as surface step interactions and alloy dispersion, and by long-range elastic interaction between geometric features. We propose to address this issue by developing multiple-scale models of the growth of strained semiconductor thin films. Our approach will be to use discrete-step and Monte Carlo simulations, supplemented by appropriate atomistic or continuum calculations, to model the mesoscopic processes that determine the surface energies and transport kinetics during growth. The long-range elastic interactions between surface features will be modeled rigorously using continuum finite element computations. The model will be used to predict the nucleation, evolution in shape and organization of islands, and will provide the understanding required to control and optimize processing. Modeling will be informed and guided by experimental observations of stress relaxation and surface evolution in InGaAs GaAs and SiGe Si. The participation of undergraduate students will be integrated into the program in two ways. First of all, the budget allows for the appointment of several undergraduate students, which will provide firsthand experience with concepts of nanotechnology for qualified students. In addition, team members will design a new course, intended for undergraduate students in materials science and mechanical engineering, to introduce students to concepts and methods in nanotechnology doc21443 none This is a NER proposal for a specific one-year trial to (1) characterize single ZnO nanowire laser structures using spatially-resolved confocal microscopy detection, and (2) to introduce pump - stimulated emission dump probing to study stimulated emission processes of single nanowire laser configurations. The requisite morphologies of ZnO nanowires have been produced and synthetic refinement will be performed to obtain the best quality crystalline patterns of multiple nanowires. Laser and confocal optical microscopy tools that are available in this laboratory will be used to optically excite ZnO single nanowire laser media and to detect spectrally and spatially resolved stimulated emission. These include novel ultrafast pump-dump experiments with a Ti:sapphire femtosecond laser. The fundamental science of the exciton-exciton scattering mechanism to produce stimulated emission in crystalline nanowires and the transition to an electron-hole plasma stimulated emission mechanism will be explored. These studies are designed to develop new confocal microscopy methods to interrogate nanowire laser devices, with the specific ability to explore a single device at a time. Single molecule spectroscopy experiments have revealed a number of intriguing aspects of individual molecular environments over the last few years. These studies are intended to transfer this remarkable type of investigation to the study of single nanowire lasers and stimulated emission doc21444 none This four-year Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) project at Washington University, with Professor William E. Buhro as principal investigator, pursues a new family of one-dimensional nanostructures form elemental boron and metal-borides. These nanomaterials are expected to posses mechanical strengths, chemical and thermal stabilities, and electrical (metallic) conductivities comparable to or even surpassing those of carbon nanotubes. Boron and metal-boride nanostructures will be ideal candidates for nanoscale electrical interconnects and semi-conducting components in nanoelectronic and nano-electrochemical devices. Synthetic methods to be employed include catalyzed chemical vapor deposition (CVD), and plasma techniques. Mechanical properties of nanotubes and nanowhiskers will be measured on mechanical-testing stages of scanning transmission electron microscope. Electrical-transport properties will be studied using the nanoelectronic-testing stage developed at Washington University doc21445 none This project investigates the potential for augmenting damping in composite structures by taking advantage of the energy dissipation between densely packed, highly interconnected networks of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (nano-films) . The novel, nano-engineered damping films developed in this project are expected to offer several advantages: 1) Nano-films show no degradation in structure properties upto 600 deg C and are expected to offer superior performance and reliability for high temperature applications. 2) Nano-films do not exhibit resin penetration when co-cured within composite structures and could potentially be seamlessly integrated into heterogeneous systems. 3) Nano-films offer multi-functionality in terms of enhanced stiffness in addition to damping augmentation. The specific stiffness of nano-films are expected to be an order of magnitude greater than commercially available viscoelastic polymer films. This research project is directed towards further exploring and developing these concepts so as to enable the efficient synthesis of these novel multifunctional materials into multi-scale structural systems. The project involves strong interdisciplinary collaboration between material science (patterning and assembly of nanostructures) and mechanical engineering (damping and stiffness increase in composites). The project will contribute to the training of 1 Ph.D student and several undergraduate students (under the Undergraduate Research Projects - URP Program) at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute doc21446 none This is a Nanoscale Exploratory Research award on a proposal submitted through the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Solicitation and is jointly funded by the Division of Materials Research and the Division of Civil and Mechanical Systems. The research has an interdisciplinary flavor. It involves the application of mathematical methods first developed for use in robotics to create a new computational method to make a tight-binding electronic structure method computationally tractable for nanoscale materials problems in which coupled electronic and mechanical properties are of interest. This award supports research to develop a new tight-binding atomistic method, based on the classical Cyrot-Lackmann moments theorem and recent developments in conformational statistics. The computational effort scales linearly with the number of atoms in the system and takes advantage of fast numerical techniques for computing convolutions on lattices. These numerical techniques, which are based on recent developments in group theory and harmonic analysis, are not widely known to the computational materials and physics communities. Most recently, these conformational statistics methods have been used to delineate configurations of highly articulated robot-arms and, separately, long-chain polymer molecules. The well-known moments based tight-binding technique is based on delineating the local topology surrounding individual atoms in a structure. The conformational statistics method dramatically reduces the computational cost of brute-force enumeration of the random-walk type paths around each atom, which are interpreted as moments of the local density of states. The number of operations per atom can be reduced from order K M , where K is the number of near neighbors per atom (usually 3 or 4), and M is the number of moments (of order 50), to order Md logMd , where d is the number of spatial dimensions. Existing numerical methods enable the use of these computed moments to approximate the local density of states, from which the total energy of the system and any electronic or mechanical properties of interest can be obtained. The method will be applied to the study of pure, doped, regular, strained, and defective carbon nanotubes. In each of these cases chiral and nonchiral geometries can be handled. The study of semiconductor quantum dots is another application. Several atomic scale problems, including surface steps, quantum effects in the wetting layer, and material intermixing, will be attacked. This award also contributes to the training of graduate level students and the development of a new advanced graduate level course. %%% This is a Nanoscale Exploratory Research award on a proposal submitted to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering solicitation and is jointly funded by the Division of Materials Research and the Division of Civil and Mechanical Systems. This award supports research with an interdisciplinary flavor. It involves the use of mathematical methods first developed for use in robotics to develop an efficient computational method for approximate electronic structure calculations. The method will be applied to nanoscale materials problems with a focus on coupled electronic and mechanical properties. Specific applications involve carbon nanotubes: pure, doped, regular, strained, and defective and semiconductor quantum dots. In the latter, the focus will be on atomic scale problems, including surface steps, quantum effects in the wetting layer, and material intermixing. New accurate and efficient computational methods enable the prediction of electronic and structural properties of nanoscale atomic and molecular structures and have broader applications to other materials. This award contributes to the training of graduate level students and the development of a new advanced graduate level course doc21447 none This plan integrates research and education in the area of combustion, specifically focusing on self-propagating high-temperature synthesis (SHS) of new materials from nanocomposite reactants. The research objective is to understand the influence of reactant characteristics on the combustion synthesis process, and on the microstructure of the final product. The work has five primary phases: (1) development of techniques to process reactants, both in random media and multi-layered foils; (2) development of integrated MEMS-based sensing; (3) determination of the controlling mechanisms of reaction wave propagation; (4) characterization of the initial and final products; and (5) demonstration of a commercial application of a combustion-synthesized material. Temperature and pressure measurements of the reacting wave are made using micro-fabricated test structures with integrated sensors. Measurements of combustion behaviors are obtained using high-speed diagnostic techniques to allow imaging of combustion waves (i.e., to determine flame speeds and to observe spinning combustion or pulsating waves). Reactants and products are characterized using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) analyses. A synthesized product material is tested experimentally on a commercial application with our industrial partner, Solar Turbines, Inc. The experimental effort is complemented by theoretical analysis and software development using a commercial simulation package that contains modules to numerically solve problems in heat transfer, multi-phase flow and reacting flows. The materials developed in this plan are applied as coatings on gas turbine components to improve the performance and durability of the system. The newly developed material coatings act as a protective barrier against high-temperature oxidation and corrosion, which are the main degradation mechanisms that occur in the turbine sections. When subjected to the hot gas streams of a typical combustion environment, the newly developed coatings will resist surface attack and maintain the component s mechanical properties. The study incorporates a project-based instruction component. Students will work in teams on projects relating to this research. They learn about fabricating nano-scale systems, perform combustion studies on the reacting samples, and characterize the final products. The project also includes a mentoring program, linking graduate with undergraduate engineers in a supportive work environment. This experience guides students in making career choices, demonstrates the relevance of their coursework to solving real problems, and contributes to their overall preparedness doc21448 none The westward emigration of Albanians, including a substantial number of educated professionals, is the highest rate found among post-socialist eastern European countries. Most have settled in Greece and Italy as undocumented immigrant manual laborers. After a decade of emigration, there are no signs of return migration despite the increasing identification of post-socialist Albania s economic, political, and legal systems with those of the West. Nor have these changes lessened the desire of still-resident Albanians to emigrate. This dissertation research by a cultural anthropologist from the University of California, Irvine, explores the social and spatial transformations involved in these migrations. The project will attempt to understand the decisions of professionals to leave Albania and high-skilled jobs to emigrate and commit to remain abroad, even as undocumented low-skill laborers. Fieldwork in Athens, Greece, and Tirana, Albania, will compare the social worlds of Albanian immigrants and would-be emigrants. Participant observation in key urban nodes, interviewing, photographic documentation, and comparisons using correspondence analysis, are used to assess the proposition that despite immigrants observable demotion in legal and social status, international labor migration is undertaken and experienced as a social advancement. Rather than taking financial gain as a given, this study examines the desire to work in the West as an identity change that is part of international migration. The research will contribute to theoretical issues in anthropology concerning development as well as further the education of a young scholar. The broader significance of the project includes the utility of the information for managing and serving the rapidly growing global population of international immigrants, and for understanding the generation and maintenance of disparities in global wealth doc21449 none This proposal develops the curriculum and laboratory facilities that are required to train the students of the three participating colleges (Clark Atlanta, Spelman and Morehouse) in the area of Information Assurance and Security. This plan: _ 1) Builds the core curriculum and create necessary laboratory facilities for student education and training in the area of IAS including three core courses and a laboratory course). The CIS department at Clark Atlanta University will offer two courses. The CS department at Spelman College will offer one course. The CS department at Morehouse College will enhance some of its existing courses to include IAS related topics. Students from Georgia Tech, CAU, Spelman, and Morehouse colleges can take courses from any of the four colleges, through the University system in Georgia, without incurring any additional charges. _ 2) Creates three computer laboratories, one at each of the participating, with the required facilities for student training in the area of Information Assurance and Security. The laboratories will be equipped with a network of computing systems and students will be able to experiment with the security related software in a controlled environment. The impact of the proposed program includes: _ 1) Enhanced curriculum, laboratory facilities and research activities in the area of IAS in all the three participating colleges. _ 2) More opportunities for CS students of CAU, Spelman College, Morehouse College and Georgia Tech to register for IAS related courses. _ 3) Increased awareness of information security related issues in the community. The results are measured using evaluations from students, professors and faculty members outside the consortium with expertise in the area of curriculum development. We anticipate that the students who graduate from the three colleges with concentration in IAS will pursue higher studies at other Universities or take up jobs as security professionals doc21450 none Kogge, Peter This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NIRT. Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) is a revolutionary computing paradigm that is well suited to nanoelectronic implementation and scaling to molecular dimensions. The central feature of QCA is that binary information is encoded in the position of single electrons among a group of dots forming a cell. This represents a significant break with the transistor-based paradigm in which information is encoded by the state of the transistor current switch. In QCA, electrons switch between quantum dots within a cell, but no current flows between cells. This leads to extremely low power dissipation, avoiding the problem of heat generation that will ultimately limit the integration density of transistor circuits. Clocking of QCA circuits has proven to be extremely important from the standpoint of both architectures and devices. It allows arrays of QCA cells to be broken into sub-arrays for pipelined processing, and it enables cells to produce signal power gain to replace signal energy lost to the environment. Functioning QCA devices have already been demonstrated in an aluminum oxide tunnel junction scheme, confirming the operation of QCA cells, shift registers, logic gates, and memory elements. Power gain in a QCA shift register has also been achieved. This project will advance the architectural development of QCA, investigate questions of switching speed in nanoelectronic devices, and develop advanced fabrication techniques to implement the architectural and circuit theory concepts. Since QCA represents a dramatic break from conventional devices, significant changes in architecture are needed to fully exploit the capabilities of QCA. In QCA layout, timing, and architecture are intimately related, requiring a unified design approach. This is analogous to the approach begun by Mead and Conway which revolutionized VLSI design by making a connection between architecture and layout and building on that connection to enable designers to quickly synthesize large and complex functional blocks. Likewise, QCA system designers will be able to exploit timing in addition to layout to produce highdensity functional designs. In particular we will investigate the development of simple, yet complete, QCA based Field Programmable Gate Arrays , where 2D arrays of identical cells are tiled together, with programmable interconnect and function. Timing plays a pivotal role in QCA designs, so it is vital to achieve a complete understanding of switching and switching dynamics in arrays of coupled electrons. Some recent theoretical results indicate that electron switching speeds would be orders of magnitude lower than that expected from the capacitances and resistances of the dots and tunnel junctions, contrary to theoretical work done at Notre Dame. To resolve this issue we will apply high frequency measurement techniques to the study of switching in QCA cells and in arrays of cells. At present, experimental demonstrations of QCA devices are limited to a small number of cells by the large capacitances produced by the aluminum tunnel junctions. To support and experimentally confirm the advances made in architecture and circuit theory, we will employ advanced fabrication techniques based on AFM lithography to produce QCA with greatly enhanced operating characteristics. This will allow us to fabricate and measure arrays of cells with significant extent and complexity. QCA presents a unique opportunity for a broad impact on the educational experience of students, and on research in the field of electronic devices. We will develop instructional modules based on QCA simulation tools to teach the concepts of QCA architecture to undergraduate and graduate students. These modules will benefit students by introducing them to alternative architectural concepts. In addition, by broadening their horizons, it will strengthen their understanding of conventional architectures by emphasizing the foundational concepts of architectural concepts doc21451 none A new theoretical model of resonant cyclotron interaction of ions with Alfven waves in the divergent solar wind plasma will be constructed. It is based on a scale separation between the characteristic scales of wave-particle interaction (microscopic scale) and the scales of nonhomogeneity (macroscopic scale). The latter is five to six orders of magnitude larger than the former. The overarching goal of the study is to explain recent observations of the solar wind which have revealed that (1) the bulk speed of the particles considerably exceeds that of the protons, (2) the differential motion of the ions is aligned along the magnetic field, and (3) the differential speed follows the local Alfven speed doc21452 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Charles Stanish and his colleagues will continue their work studying the role of trade in the development of the first complex societies in the high Andes. Over the past 15 years, this American and Peruvian research team led by Stanish has uncovered a circuit of over major 80 prehistoric settlements, some dating back more than 4,000 years, along a trade route that is still in use today. The systematic, scientific analysis of these ancient sites reveals the role of trade in the origins of state societies and urban life in this part of the world. Using theories developed in anthropology and economics, this work will assess the degree to which trade between the high plains in the Andes and the Amazon basin was a primary factor in the rise of the first state society in the area, known as Pucara. Pucara flourished from ca. 400 BC to AD 300. For years, archeologists have debated why people stopped the very successful hunting and gathering lifeways of biologically modern humans that lasted for over 100,000 years and, in a very short period of time, developed agriculture, towns, and cities, the hallmarks of human civilization as we know it. This phenomenon occurred independently in only a handful places on the earth, including the Andes where this project is based. This comparative scientific research provides some clues as to how human urban societies, in the past and today, evolved and thrived in environmentally and politically challenging conditions. This archaeological work not only helps us recover the lost cultural heritage of the earth and illustrates the great achievements of native Americans, but it provides guideposts for modern economic development. From agricultural systems to modern transportation networks, these archaeological data define the successful adaptations of people in the past, adaptations that represent optimal land use strategies that evolved over millennia. Combined with independent paleoclimate research also supported by NSF, these data provide a rich view of environmental change and human adaptation at a macroregional level. Such data can, and are, used to guide future development in the region. Stanish uses regional archaeological methodologies to define the prehistoric patterns of land use. Using GPS technologies, low altitude photography, and intensive ground-truthing, the entire range of prehistoric settlements can be discovered in the region. With private support from the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, Stanish and his team use a variety of analytical techniques, such as obsidian sourcing, neutron activation analyses, and enhanced GIS mapping to define the cultural adaptations in the region over several millennia. This work brings together US and Peruvian specialists in archaeology and geography to conduct an integrated, systematic, and long-term research program. It will directly deal with the origins of complex society in this part of the world while contributing to our global data base on the political and economic structure of archaic states. These data, in turn, will be used to create, test, and refine models of early state development, maintenance, and collapse doc21453 none This award supports an international collaborative research project between the University of Missouri and the Palacky University Olomouc, Czech Republic that focuses on aspects of plant physiology related to the enzymology of cytokinin oxidase dehydrogenase (ZMCKX1) reactions. This new research partnership combines complementary research expertise of the two laboratories. The research will examine the role of electron flux within specific compartments of plant cells in an effort to understand features of metabolic control of cytokinin degradation and regeneration of active cytokinin oxidase dehydrogenase. The main hypothesis of this proposal is that plants contain specific bioactive cofactors that are capable of regenerating active cytokinin oxidase dehydrogenase enzymes by accepting electrons during catalysis of cytokinins. We will determine the subcellular location of the enzyme, precisely characterize the redox potential of the enzyme for comparison to the properties of putative bioactive cofactors, and perform depletion experiments to initially identify the reaction-enhancing bioactive cofactor used in plants. This research directly addresses the question of specificity for the ZmCKX1 bioactive cofactor and defines the range of electrochemical redox potentials for bioactive cofactor candidates. Subcellular localization of ZmCKX1 and redox characterization will independently contribute to our understanding of the biochemical and physiological properties of the enzyme and processes that occur during plant development. The partnership also provides unique and valuable opportunities for reciprocal exchange of undergraduate and graduate students who will gain educational and technical training, and research experience at the international level doc21454 none This is an RUI collaborative research project among three physics programs at neighboring state universities: Angelo State University, Tarleton State University, and Southwest Texas State Uni-versity. The project focuses on three main topics: (1) correlation between electrical and optical properties and stress in ZnO and nitrogen-doped ZnO fabricated at reduced temperatures using radical atomic beam processing, (2) feasibility of fabricating predicted ZnO-Mn and Zn-Co room temperature transparent magnetic semiconductors, and (3) dielectric properties of select amor-phous or potentially epitaxial insulator oxide alloys consisting of Pr-Al-O, Gd-Ga-O, Hf-Al-O, Pr-Zr-O and La- Hf-O (most with possible oxynitridation and alloy-dependent band gap variabil-ity) relevant for magnetic spin tunneling structures and next-generation CMOS gate applications. A study towards the stabilization and characterization of metastable Ni-incorporated Cu-Ge and Co- Ge thin film crystalline phases will also be included. Thin film materials fabrication will be conducted using ion beam sputter processing strategies. The approach is to implement mono-energetic Ar + or Xe + ions ( 1 keV) to control incident film adatom energy (between ~ 6 eV to ~ 20 eV), and vary the substrate angle of incidence to promote kinetic film growth at reduced temperatures with and without reflected energetic Ar Xe atom bombardment. Low energy ( 100 eV) reactive (O2 + N2 + ) assist ion beams will be compared with neutral thermal atomic radi-cals to promote optimal oxidation (and dopant nitridation) at reduced substrate temperatures. The implementation of in-situ low energy and or neutral atomic radical species to promote reactive sputtering is relatively unique for ion beam sputtering and is not possible with magnetron sput-tering due to its higher operating pressure regime. The group also has the capability of processing sputtered films with rapid thermal annealing and high-energy ( 1 MeV) inert ion mixing to study germanide formation in amorphous deposited metal-Ge films. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in a topical area of materials science having technological relevance. An important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education. Undergraduates from all three universities will be involved in multiple phases of the research, with strong participation from under-represented groups. In addition to ion beam sputtering, students will be involved with rapid thermal process-ing, electrical transport studies, ion beam analysis, scanning electron microscopy with EDS, ad-vanced x-ray diffraction and fluorescence analysis, magnetometry, and optical characterization (reflectivity, FTIR, photoluminescence). In addition, students will have a chance to collabora-tively interact with Central Texas microelectronics industry scientists and doctoral institution re-search teams interested in the project. All three collaborating universities are close enough to permit an active degree of inter-university group visits and student exchanges to support the re-search. The research will encourage students to consider pursuing research at various materials-related doctoral programs, or consider further education in a professional masters program. In addition, the broad thin film materials experience gained from the project will be useful prepara-tion for student internships in the microelectronics industry and strengthening the workforce pool of educated BS MS graduates for this critical industry doc21455 none A workshop on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control was held at Stanford University, March 25-27, . The importance of hybrid discrete and continuous control has emerged over the last several years, as hardware and software technology provide ever more applications, ranging from everyday life to mission-critical situations. At the same time, the lack of a satisfactory, cost-effective design methodology for reliable and efficient hybrid controllers has become apparent. This workshop, emphasizing issues in computation and control, was one in a series dedicated to developing a scientific community and a body of knowledge that synthesizes discrete and continuous technologies. The purpose of the workshop series is to provide a regular, annual forum for novel results, methodologies, and tools in the emerging area of hybrid systems. The proceedings of the workshop are published in the Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science series doc21456 none Knight Description: This award is to support a collaborative project between Dr. Kevin Knight, Information Sciences Institute (ISI), University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California and Dr. Ahmed Rafea, Computer Science Department, The American University in Cairo(AUC), Cairo, Egypt. They plan to explore a new method for automatic translation between Arabic and English. The so-called statistical machine translation method exploits both fast computers and the existence of large human-translated documents. The investigators plan to develop new models based on bilingual texts that they will manually annotate. These annotations will show how the translation process should move from Arabic into syntactic semantic structures and from there into English. In the first stage, a substantial collection of United Nations documents translated into Arabic will be manually annotated with morphological, syntactic and semantic information by graduate students at the AUC. In the second stage, the annotated corpus will be used to train morphological analyzers and parsers of Arabic, in order to automate annotation in the second year of the project and to study the annotations of parallel Arabic and English sentences for the development of syntactic and semantic translation models. In the third and fourth stages of the proposed research, existing learning algorithms will be investigated for their suitability to integrate the developed models with statistical machine translation systems developed at ISI. Scope: Reliable automatic translation between Arabic and English may have major impact on international commerce, technology, and science, but this requires that translation quality be improved significantly. With the proposed method, computers may gather vast amounts of translation knowledge automatically from text, and apply that knowledge to translate new documents. This research will require significant expertise in computer science, Arabic and English linguistics, and statistical inference, which are available in the two collaborating groups at USC and AUC. Dr. Knight is well known for his research in the area of statistical machine translation and he will provide supervision for the research performed by graduate students at ISI and AUC. Dr. Rafea has excellent credentials in Arabic natural language processing and in conducting collaborative research with U.S. universities. The task of addressing weaknesses in current translation models will make higher translation quality possible and will make practical use of machine translation more widespread. The research will involve U.S. and Egyptian graduate students and will promote collaboration between researchers in the US and Egypt. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc21381 none Mississippi State University (MSU), an NSA Center of Excellence in Information Assurance Education (COE IAE), will work with Jackson State University (JSU) and the University of Kansas (KU) though a collaborative and cooperative effort to increase these two institutions capacity in information assurance and to strengthen the COE IAE program at MSU. The faculty from all three institutions will work to develop an IA curriculum at JSU and KU with an expectation that both schools will apply for COE IAE status during academic year - . These collaboration efforts are intended to be beneficial to all three parties in not only developing an IA program at two universities that currently do not have one but also in strengthening the program at MSU by broadening its research effort, increasing minority representation in its PhD program, and by enhancing its instructional course content. MSU will additionally expand its IA offerings by involving the College of Business and the College of Arts and Sciences in our research. This proposal initiates an innovative programs that will promote student research and publication in this area doc21393 none This collaborative proposal offers a multiyear build-up designed to increase the number of graduates for Federal employment at Mississippi State and Jackson State Universities. At MSU we will extend information assurance (IA) course offerings outside the current Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering student base to other departments and students across campus. We will initiate this scholarship program during the first year at MSU and extend it to JSU, located approximately 120 miles from the MSU main campus, in the second year. We will offer a joint security course of study electronically between the two institutions during the second year of the program. The program coordinator at JSU will participate in the MSU scholarship selection process during year 1. During the succeeding years, those students enrolled in the security course from JSU will also be entitled to scholarship consideration doc21459 none Culinary and other aromatic herbs make a significant contribution to improving the appeal of foodstuff and play increasingly important roles in our society as components of the herbal remedies and supplements industry. However, the biosynthesis of almost all bioactive secondary compounds or natural products is still poorly understood. The plant family Lamiaceae (e.g., sweet basil and mint) includes many species that are rich in such natural products. Natural product production by the plant is believed to be associated with defense against herbivores and pathogens, and Lamiaceae species have evolved elaborate structures on the surface of their leaves, known as peltate glands, where these chemicals are synthesized and stored. Basil is a particularly noteworthy herb because it synthesizes relatively high amounts of both terpenoids and phenylpropanoids, two large classes of compounds that include many plant defense and medicinally important natural products, including paclitaxel (Taxol) and podophyllotoxin (derivatized to form Etoposide and Teniposide) that are used to treat cancer. Aside from some focused efforts to delineate the pathways to specific compounds, such as paclitaxel and podophyllotoxin, very little is known about the biochemical reactions that produce the great diversity of compounds that result from these two biosynthetic pathways. Even less is known about the genes and enzymes that control or regulate these pathways. This research project aims to identify how secondary compounds are produced in basil peltate glands and to begin to identify and define the mechanisms that control their production. Specifically, this research will: 1) use metabolic profiling to characterize levels of known metabolites and potential intermediates in the phenylpropanoid pathway in peltate glands of select basil lines; and 2) use a functional genomics approach to determine what roles specific enzymes and other regulatory factors play in controlling the flux into and through the phenylpropanoid pathway in basil peltate glands. The research results and developed tools will form a foundation that should facilitate research of other plant secondary metabolic pathways. In addition to the intrinsic scientific value of understanding how plants produce natural products, such knowledge is essential for rational design of breeding strategies to produce plants with targeted natural product profiles. This knowledge will also help in the application of genetic engineering to improve and develop new aromatic plants, which could then serve as feed stocks for the pharmaceutical and other industries doc21460 none This proposal aims to gain fundamental understanding of the deformation mechanisms that operate in nanostructured metals and alloys, in particular in those produced by severe plastic deformation (SPD) methods. Based on this knowledge it further aims to develop full capability to manufacture these materials in high quality bulk forms. The extremely attractive (and rare) combination of mechanical properties (high strength, ductility, fatigue resistance) and manufacturability of these materials leads to a new class of high performance alloys for structural uses. It is understood that this combination of properties is due to the formation of nano-scale grain sizes in these materials, but the mechanisms responsible for the high strength combined with high ductility are not well understood. This presents a fundamental obstacle to the optimization of these materials, or to predictions of the performance of these materials in applications. An integrated approach with strong emphasis on manufacturing is proposed. On the theoretical side, deformation mechanisms will be simulated with crystal-plasticity aggregate models and with detailed models of the grains and grain boundaries. The experimental program covers a wide a range of strain rates and temperatures, texture development, and in situ transmission electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy to directly verify deformation mechanisms. The experimental results will provide validation to the theoretical modeling and manufacturing process simulations. Finally, simulations of the manufacturing processes will enable process parameter optimization. A complete, miniature, yet fully scalable, manufacturing facility will be designed and implemented. The significant impacts of the proposed research are made possible by the acquired fundamental understanding of the deformation mechanisms, and include advances in manufacturing techniques to produce these highly desirable materials in bulk. The miniature manufacturing facility will become a source of significant quantities of nano-structured alloys. Finally, the proposal will provide students at the UCSD and at local K-12 schools with interdisciplinary education in a cutting-edge area of research doc21461 none With this award Professor Moeller will continue his work on the use of intramolecular anodic olefin coupling reactions in synthetic organic electrochemistry. This work involves the development of stereocontrolled synthetic methods based on radical cation chemistry and then the utilization of these chemical reactions in the synthesis of natural products. Proposed new method development on asymmetric electrochemical cyclizations utilizing chiral ketene acetals as substrates could lead to a new enantioselective carbon-carbon bond forming reaction. Reactions discovered with prior NSF support will be applied to several total syntheses in the new support period. The first two total syntheses involve key tandem cyclizations, the first of which are initiated by electrochemically generated enol ether radical cations, whereas the last two syntheses utilize highly functionalized furans as the initiating group. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Kevin D. Moeller of the Department of Chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Moeller will work on the use of electrolysis to generate chemical species which react with predictable patterns and selectivities. Use of electrolysis to generate reactive intermediates may prove to be a new green synthetic method with potential industrial applications. If large quantities of oxidants and reductants currently used in organic synthesis could be replaced by reliable electrochemical methods then many redox synthetic methods could be made more environmentally friendly. This group will also explore stereoselective oxidative cyclization reactions. These reactions produce molecules which are chiral (have two nonsuperimposable mirror images) and make only one of the two possible forms (a single enantiomer). Development of this family of reactions is one of the most important problems facing the pharmaceutical industry today. When developed, Dr. Moeller s work could be applied to the environmentally friendly syntheses of a number of biologically active molecules. Students trained during the course of this work will gain skills needed by the pharmaceutical industry which now produces a number of single enantiomer compounds doc21462 none Crommie, Michael This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NIRT. The main objective of this project is to develop and characterize mechanical devices at the nanoscale. This will be performed through the creation of new, synthetic molecular machines purposefully designed in a molecule-by-molecule fashion. In order to achieve this goal an interdisciplinary team of researchers has been gathered that will engage in the following activities: 1) chemically synthesize new molecules having tailored properties to be used as nano-machine components, 2) adhere newly synthesized molecules to prepared surfaces and demonstrate mechanical functionality, 3) combine photolithographic MEMS technology with carbon growth techniques to create electro-mechanically actuated molecular motors from carbon nanotubes. Two new categories of functional molecular assemblies are expected to result from this research. The first involves chemically engineered molecules designed with specific mechanical functions in mind. This research thrust will be supported by a strong chemical synthesis effort aimed at the development of new classes of molecules able to undergo conformational changes when triggered by an outside stimulus. The second category involves the engineering of multi-wall carbon nanotubes to form the basis of a new mechano-molecular technology. This effort is expected to culminate in the demonstration of the first functional nanotube motor doc21463 none Since the economic reforms of the late s, industries located in rural areas (township and village enterprises, TVEs) have accounted for a growing percentage of China s Gross Domestic Product. However, because of a lack of appropriate technology, proper pollution monitoring and sufficient capital, TVEs emit 60% of China s carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and suspended particulates. These pollutants lead to increased levels of emphysema, asthma, bronchitis and lung cancer in China s rural areas. At the same time that TVE laborers and community residents are faced with relatively increased environmental risk, including harmful effects on soil, water, air, plants and animals, they are also experiencing a marked improvement in their material standard of living. This research project, conducted by a Ph.D. student in anthropology at the University of Washington, will be conducted in Futian Township, a small industrial community located in China s Sichuan province. The student will perform basic tests for air and water quality, and collect data on community perceptions of quality of life and environmental risk based on survey questionnaires and ethnographic data. Drawing upon the theoretical approaches of political ecology and environmental risk perception, these data will be used to test hypotheses regarding perceptions of environmental risk. The study will allow general extrapolations to be made about similar rural industrial communities throughout China and in other countries where rapid development coincides with environmental degradation, and will contribute to understanding those factors that may mitigate or exacerbate environmental degradation doc21464 none The ubiquitin 26S proteasome system is the major process by which proteins are selectively degraded in eukaryotic cells. Little is currently understood about how the ubiquitin system selects substrates, and the polyubiquitinating mechanism is not understood clearly. A small number of viral proteins have been shown to be substrates for ubiquitin-mediated destruction. These include the 3C proteases of the encephalomyocarditis virus (EMCV) and hepatitis A virus (HAV) and the 3D RNA polymerase of HAV. These viral substrates for ubiquitin 26S proteasome system offer the opportunity to study the mechanistic details by which proteins are selected and ubiquitinated by the ubiquitin-conjugating machinery, as well as to examine the potential role of selective protein destruction in picornavirus replication. A major goal of this project is to employ the EMCV and HAV 3C proteases as substrates for measurements of binding affinities to ubiquitin system enzymes and for addressing the fundamental questions of whether polyubiquitin chain synthesis occurs via a processive mechanism and whether it can involve more than one ubiquitinating enzyme complex. This research will also initiate a characterization of the ubiquitin-conjugating system that targets the HAV 3D polymerase for degradation, in preparation for future studies of how this substrate is selected and what function its destruction serves in HAV replication. This project includes an endeavor to develop an inducible expression system for 3C protease genes cloned into mammalian cells, and this system will be used to evaluate the cytotoxicity of the EMCV 3C protease and to determine whether a failure to ubiquitinate the 3C protease effects the efficiency with which EMCV is replicated. These studies will involve undergraduate students in research on the mechanism of some of the crucial steps in protein degradation doc21465 none PROPOSAL NO.: PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS: HENRY DU INSTITUTION: STEVENS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY : 3D porous materials with highly ordered interconnecting pores and carbon nanotubes are at the frontier of science and engineering. This Nanoscale Exploratory Research (NER) proposal aims to integrate these two areas by exploring aligned growth of carbon nanotubes on the pore walls of high-surface-area microporous silica. Several tasks are being pursued to achieve the proposed goal. Specifically, equilibrium-driven colloidal self-assembly processes as well as colloidal epitaxy on ultra-fine TEM grids is being used to obtain opals of polystyrene spheres as structural templates. A sol-gel route is being employed for effective infiltration of the templates to produce inverted silica opals upon subsequent thermal decomposition of the template opals. A synthesis strategy is also being developed for deposition of uniform, nanometer-sized, catalytic cobalt particles on the pore walls. The approach is being used to grow aligned carbon nanotubes on the pore walls throughout the volume of the macroporous silica using plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition. This project represents the first known attempt to fabricate an integrated structure composed of 3D macroporous materials and carbon nanotubes. Critical challenges are being addressed related to the deposition of cobalt particles and the controlled growth of aligned carbon nanotubes on pore walls. The integration of the two aspects of this work will yield potentially robust structures for applications where an abundance of nanotube arrays is needed for system efficiency. Such applications include entrapment of DNA and proteins, catalytic supports, desalination of seawater, and hydrogen storage for fuel cells. Knowledge generated in this investigation can be extended to the fabrication of other 3D macroporous materials, such as semiconductors. The success of the project thus offers exciting prospects for the exploration of carbon nanotubes for applications in the nanotechnology arena and across science and engineering doc21466 none ion for constructing reliable finite state machines for use in molecular computer systems. The reliability and error characteristics of molecular nanodevices are substantially different from the corresponding characteristics of traditional silicon-based CMOS transistors. These nanodevice characteristics present new challenges to computer designers which will require an entirely new approach for designing finite state machines. The techniques we develop eventually could be used to build entire computer systems out of molecular nanodevices. This is a high-risk high-reward project. The risk is that we need to develop new approaches for designing computers out of a large collection of devices which are still under development themselves. By observing common trends in newly developed molecular devices, we make assumptions about their weak drive capabilities and their unstable nature. While we expect that we can adapt and extend traditional space, time, and information redundancy techniques for fault-tolerance into this new domain of molecular computers, new ideas will be necessary to develop appropriate solutions. This project is high-reward, however, since by conducting computer architecture research in tandem with research on the nanodevices themselves, we will be streamlining the development process to be able to have fully-functional molecular computers more quickly than if we wait for the nanodevice research to solidify. Furthermore, while we are tailoring our techniques for molecular nanodevices, our techniques also will be applicable to error detection and correction in quantum nanodevices and in nanometer-scale conventional CMOS devices, which are becoming more fault-prone as transistor sizes shrink. This project will make substantial contributions to educational and human resource development. It will initiate the dissertation research of a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering to focus their research in this new area. We also expect to involve a few M.S. students in this work and possibly provide research opportunities for undergraduate students through existing internship programs at the University of Minnesota doc21467 none This award supports a U.S.-South Africa planning meeting for an international social science workshop to foster collaborative research and education. The planning meeting will take place in Pretoria, South Africa in January . Seven U.S. participants in the planning group wish to establish a more coherent and better coordinated international social science agenda, including a focus on research, education, and training. If successful, the goal is to expand the collaboration to include other countries in Africa, the Caribbean, and South America. The organizer of the planning meeting, Willie Pearson, Jr. of Georgia Tech, will work with his counterpart in South Africa, Tyron Pretorius of the University of the Western Cape. An organizing committee will be comprised of an equal number of representatives from the U.S. and South Africa. Over the course of five days, the group will determine appropriate location, time, and topics for a workshop to be held in late or early .. While in South Africa, the group plans to meet with members of the academic (primarily social science faculty), business, and government funding communities. This will allow for the discussion to be placed in a broader societal context as it relates to policies and practices that address issues of innovation, economic development, social welfare and workforce development. These discussions will serve a vital function by permitting the committee members to gain a deeper understanding of the most significant social science related issues in South Africa. The planning meeting will serve as the beginning of a dialogue (both electronic and verbal) among the organizing committee members. The end product of the planning meeting will be a workshop. The resulting collaboration and partnerships will enhance discovery and understanding between the U.S. and South Africa while promoting teaching, training, access to higher education, and curriculum reform doc21468 none Biosensors are becoming increasingly important for genomic analysis, detection of warfare agents, and medical diagnostics. To optimize the performance of these devices, new tools must be developed to characterize the molecular-level phenomena that underlie their function. This exploratory nanotechnology proposal aims to develop a new method to measure nanoscopic properties of biosensor surfaces, utilizing the ultrafine resolution of atomic force microscopy (AFM) in dynamic mode. Biosensors must perform two functions at once. They must encourage the binding of specific analytes while discouraging the binding of adventitious material. Typically, these goals are achieved by building heterogeneous surfaces with antifouling polymers together with receptors specific for desired analytes. To maximize yield without sacrificing selectivity, an optimal density and thickness of polymer must be applied to the surface. In this work, the PI hopes to measure the nanoscopic energy landscape that a biomolecule traverses near the sensor surface in an attempt to guide the rational design of biosensors. For a realistic measurement, both polymer steric interactions and specific ligand-receptor interactions must be measured simultaneously. The dynamic AFM method involves oscillating the AFM cantilever and measuring the amplitude attenuation as the sample approaches the AFM tip. Amplitude attenuation is more sensitive to polymer steric forces than deflection, so the sharp tips required for specific ligand-receptor measurements can be used. Here, the PI will measure dynamic and conventional AFM force curves in a model biosensor system. Using a theoretical description of cantilever oscillation, we hope to demonstrate the sensitivity and accuracy of the dynamic method. If successful, the project will have an impact on many fronts. First, the technique will provide a unique nanoscopic probe of heterogeneous surfaces pertinent to biosensors. It will also be able to measure polymer steric forces with nanometer lateral resolution, with implications for lubrication and colloidal processing. Finally, since epithelial and bacterial cell surfaces also contain specific adhesion receptors together in a polymeric environment, the dynamic AFM force method may emerge as a powerful tool in the study of cell-cell and cell-surface adhesion doc21469 none This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 01-157). This research project aims to demonstrate the feasibility of using carbon nanotubes for nanodimensional optoelectronic devices. Preliminary results have shown that optical activity in the visible spectrum is induced with additions of ruthenium to multiwall carbon nanotubes (MWNTs). This project will focus on in-situ doping MWNTs with other optically active materials, in particular rare earth elements, by introducing proper organic precursors during the chemical-vapor-deposition growth. Through this chemical vapor deposition process, rare-earth elements will be introduced into the nanotube architectures, leading to luminescent behavior in the visible spectrum. The advantage of using a nanotube host is that the luminescent particles can be confined to dimensions of a few nanometers. Since the deposition temperatures are low (~600 degrees C) it will also be possible to directly deposit the materials directly onto display glass and other device substrates. The research program will support the involvement of an undergraduate and graduate student, who will have a unique opportunity to pursue research at the cutting edge of nanoscience and nanotechnology. Since nanotubes can be patterned on various device substrates such as silicon and glass, revolutionary advances in nanodimensional optoelectronic devices, such as high-resolution information displays are now possible. The research program will educate both undergraduate and graduate students from the Pennsylvania State University in the emerging, interdisciplinary field of nanoscience and nanotechnology. Since these areas are high priority ones in the academic, industrial, and government laboratory sectors, these students will be highly competitive in these and related job markets doc21470 none This project was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NER. The purpose of this research is to develop the technology to deliver regulated torques to nanosystems; such torques would be on the order of piconewton-nanometers. Helicallv structured light possessing angular momentum will be used in an optical trapping arrangement to deliver angular momentum to trapped particles thereby applying a torque to the trapped object. Position and orientation of a trapped object will be achieved with a trapping beam constructed from the interference of a helical wave front and a plane wave. This research focuses on developing an optical trap using a conventional single-beam trap architecture; constructing the requisite helically-structured laser beam modes as Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) beam modes and constructing an interference pattern between LG beam modes and plane-wave beam modes. Torque spectroscopy experiments of biomolecules will be performed. Candidate molecules are coiled-coil proteins like myosin, modular matrix proteins like fibronectin and tenascin, and the DNA double helix. This research program will have a broad impact in the advancement of knowledge, education, industry and technology. An optical torque-trap is an enabling technology for the comprehensive development of nanoscience and engineering, and will have wide application in nanotechnology from characterization to fabrication. In nanoscale biosystems it would be used to provide an understanding of the behavior of single molecules. For nanoscale structures, it would enable the characterization of novel nanoscale structures and phenomena which depend upon rotary motion . Finally for nanoscale manufacturing processes it would enable new nanofabrication processes which would depend upon the manipulation of particles in six-dimensions Other applications include measuring the torque and power output of rotary nanomotors, measuring the bending strength of molecules, measuring the drag on nanobearings, and driving nanosystems by photonic components. This program will also have impacts in new curriculum for graduate students, combining elements of engineering and physics for nanoscience and engineering; the study of nanosystems and nanobiosystems; training opportunities for undergraduate students in nanotechnology through participation in research projects; and industrial collaboration providing technology transfer and training opportunities for faculty, research associates, and students doc21471 none Schneider A grant available through the Instrumentation and Facilities program of NSF s Division of Earth Sciences will allow Ohio University s Department of Geological Sciences to acquire rock and mineral sample preparation equipment and to upgrade existing petrographic laboratory facilities. These facilities are to be used for both instructional and research proposes in an effort to efficiently characterize and prepare samples prior to, and with the purpose of, geochemical and isotopic analyses. Students and faculty alike will benefit from the technology upgrade. Projects that take advantage of these facilities reflect understanding active geologic processes and how ancient examples are preserved in the rock record in order to advance our geological understanding of planet earth doc21472 none This project is a collaborative inter-disciplinary research to elucidate and model the deformation and fracture mechanisms of nanostructured materials. These studies are important for the reliability of next-generation MEMS, NEMS, magnetic and ultra-hard films, and micro nano devices, in general, that are closely tied to their mechanical performance. A major objective is to obtain a thorough and solid understanding of operative deformation mechanisms operative in nanoscale materials. The study is specifically designed to probe the mechanical response of materials at nano-scales. Novel designs for in situ TEM observations and microsample tensile and transient experiments will be used to uncover and characterize the dominant deformation and fracture mechanisms in high purity vapor and electro-deposited nanostructured thin films. Multi-scale finite element calculations containing physical models will be developed based on the experimental findings. These models along with adaptive meshing and cohesive elements with atomistic descriptions of grain boundaries in nanocrystalline materials will be used to develop models to predict the collective macroscopic response of a compilation of nanocrystalline grains. The undergraduate and graduate students and post-doctoral fellows engaged in this project would be co- advised. Two parallel teams, each including a post-doc, graduate student and an undergraduate research assistant, will be formed and mentoring skills will be developed at all levels. The overriding intellectual challenge of the proposed study is to develop a science based methodology for measuring, describing and modeling deformation and fracture processes at or near nanometer length scales. The results will have application in MEMS, NEMS and other technologies where magnetic and ultra-hard films are used. This project brings together a synergistic combination of expertise on the synthesis of nanocrystalline materials, the electron microscopy, microsample testing, and adaptive meshing and cohesive element modeling. The importance of teamwork is emphasized and all participants will be educated to work in an inter-disciplinary multi-scale environment at the nano scale doc21473 none This proposal was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NER. The objective of the proposed work is to explore new methods for wet chemical preparation of GaN and AlGaN quantum dots. While extensive research has been conducted on metal chalcogenide quantum dots in recent years, comparatively little research activity has been directed toward studying III-nitride quantum dots. The primary reason for this neglect has been the relative difficulty of preparing III-nitride quantum dots that are isolated, monodisperse, and manipulable. The proposed new synthetic method is based on a simple exchange reaction carried out in a coordinating solvent or in a non-coordinating solvent containing an adsorbate that stabilizes growing nanoparticles and protects them from flocculation. The advantages of this method over previous routes to GaN are inexpensive starting materials, mild reaction conditions, extension to other III-nitrides and their alloys, and facile processing of the product material. This ease of processing is key to eventually incorporating these quantum dots into thin film electronic and optical devices. The specific aims of this project are to investigate the effects of different reaction parameters (temperature, solvent, and other additives) on the rate and yield of the reaction and to discover the optimal methods for isolation of the desired product. The successful completion of this work is expected to enable research and development of new composite materials and devices containing III-nitride quantum dots as integral, functional components. The experimental work will be performed by an undergraduate research assistant and two graduate research assistants under the guidance of the PI and one of the co-PIs. These students will benefit from the highly interdisciplinary nature of the research and exposure to a wide variety of techniques both synthetic and analytical. These include dry box, vacuum line, and soxhlet techniques as well as a variety of electronic, structural, and particle size characterization methods. The two students will initially focus on different aspects of the project (synthesis vs. characterization), but by the end of the year, both will have gained experience with the full range of techniques being used doc21474 none Proposal No. Title NER: Biotemplate Directed Assembly of Nanocrystal Arrays Principal Investigator: Yu, Michael, Johns Hopkins U The assembly of well defined 2D nanocrystal arrays of semiconducting and metallic materials using biologically assembled nanoscale template is the major goal in the proposed project. The PI will explore the purple membrane, a naturally occurring membrane protein crystal patch from halobacteria as a precisely structured nanoscale template. The key is to develop genetically engineered purple membranes that display unique functional groups on the membrane surfaces with well defined nanoscale symmetry. These reactive functional groups are used as specific anchoring sites for nanocrystals immobilization doc21475 none This Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Team (NIRT), co-funded by the Divisions of Materials Research (DMR), Chemical and Transport Systems (CTS) and Design, Manufacturing and Industrial Innovation (DMII) will use genetically directed synthetic methods to permit exact control of the placement (at intervals of .6 nm, 1.0 nm, and or 1.6 nm) of reactive chemical groups along a polypeptide backbone. These reactive groups will be both biologically active and electroactive providing novel materials for processing into fibers via electrospinning techniques. The fiber morphology, which will be varied by a judicious choice of processing conditions, will be characterized by electron microscopy, small angle neutron scattering and Raman spectroscopy. Mechanical properties of individual fibers will be evaluated using MEMS and NEMS devices while the biological activity of the electrospun fiber mats will be investigated by cell incubation studies. %%% The results of these investigations will provide molecular design rules for future biomaterial constructs and will lead to a new generation of tissue scaffold materials for wound repair. The hybrid bio-electronic materials that result will address some of the lifetime and brightness issues for next generation flat panel computer displays that are critical for future industrial manufacturing. The integration of this research and education through externship experiences at DuPont and the development of new courses on nanomaterials design and processing will provide knowledge and an experience base that will equip students with the work-force ready skills critically needed by industry doc21476 none NER Proposal Exploring the Computational Limits Imposed by Nanotechnologies John E. Savage This project has four goals: a) to develop realistic models for chips with nanometer-size dimensions, b) to explore the computational limits that apply under the physical constraints imposed by nanotechnologies, c) to develop architectures and algorithms reflecting these constraints, and d) to incorporate the knowledge acquired in advanced and early graduate instruction. While computational nanotechnologies exist only in the most primitive forms today, we have an opportunity to influence their use akin to that which arose when the VLSI model was developed in the late s. In this model gates are so small that the area of wires is significant. Efficient use of this technology required new algorithms whose efficacy was demonstrated through the development of new complexity-theoretic lower bounds involving chip area and computation time. Our approach will be a) to model technologies such as orthogonal arrays (crossbars) of nanowires and nanotubes and masses of nearly uniform self-assembled elements, b) to extend existing VLSI theory by incorporating the new constraints that emerge, c) to explore new architectures that cope with the complexity-theoretic constraints exhibited by the proposed highly regular architectures and ways of programming them, and d) to devise lectures and or courses to bring nanocomputation to the attention of students doc21477 none This proposal was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NIRT. The Penn State team proposes a new nanomanufacturing technology that utilizes carefully designed nanoreactor systems to align, bond, and assemble oriented nanomaterials as they are produced, rather than trying to manipulate them afterwards. This approach to manufacturing with nanoscale control is based on the combined use of (1) nano-fabricated chemical reactors and (2) nanoscale material assemblers. An integral part of this approach will be the use of high resolution probes to guide, test, and confirm the product and structure development. With the attainment of controlled alignment, nanomaterials with novel properties and functions can be assembled into usable materials that will play a critical role in advancing future technologies. These include wires, tapes, sheets, composites, and circuits with tailored characteristics. The production of these materials requires innovative architectural methods to position, stitch, weave, coil, or connect nanomaterials with precise control of alignment, composition, and phase on the nanoscale. The principal tasks to be carried out during this NIRT grant period are as follows: (a) fabrication of integrated nanochannel reactor processing systems that perform polymerization, transport, alignment, and assembly, (b) production of aligned composite polymer fibers, tapes, and bundles using initiator-based polymerization reactor systems, (c) production of polymeric nanofibers and hollow tubes using anchored-catalyst systems, and (d) conversion of oriented polyacetylene nanomaterials into carbon tubes, conducting wires, and electronic devices. To realize the full potential of nanoscience, nanostructured materials must be produced in requisite quantities with reproducible orientations, dimensions and properties by cost effective means. They must be produced in a manner conducive to them being further manufactured into usable, macroscale materials. Although the pace of nanoscientific discoveries continues to increase, nanomaterials process and manufacturing engineering - a key enabling science - have received little attention. If this situation persists, nanoscience will remain a laboratory curiosity and will not be transferred into a real technology benefiting society. To address this problem, the Penn State team will try to develop nanomanufacturing methodologies that can quickly be converted to mass-production technologies. The realization of this approach will lead to mass production of ordered polymeric nano-composite materials that cannot be made in any other way, and fast, reproducible fabrication of nano-electronics devices. Cross-training of students in the diverse fields required to carry out this research will expand our nation s future capabilities in nano-science and engineering doc21478 none Materials with controlled nanoporous structures will be developed for potential applications in the areas of microelectronics and biosensors. The goal is to couple a nanotemplating methodology for creating nanophase separated materials with supercritical CO2 extraction of one of the phases. The advancement of the proposed methodology over the current state of the art includes increased flexibility in the types of matrix materials which can be used, as well as processing advantages over methods in which the porogen is removed from the matrix by thermal degradation. The scientific challenge of the proposed work lies in understanding the polymer physics associated with extraction of the CO2 soluble component without collapse of the matrix. In essence, this is related to the glass transition, plasticization effects, the viscoelastic properties of the matrix and the stresses incurred due to extraction. We will prepare spin-on films at Texas Tech, as well as working with collaborators at IBM, to prepare nanophase separated morphologies. The films will contain a component which is insoluble in supercritical CO2 and will also contain a soluble component which can be extracted. Characterization of the properties of the films before and after exposure to supercritical CO2 extraction will be performed, including measurement of the dielectric properties, thickness and refractive index. In addition, films will be studied by Fourier transform infrared spectrometry, transmission electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy. Two graduate students and one undergraduate researcher will perform the research under the direct supervision of the PIs doc21479 none P. Kumta, L. Walker, L. Weiss, P. Campbell and J. Hollinger Carnegie Mellon University A novel techniques based on modification of ink jet printing technology for controlled Gene delivery and development of a new technology for tissue engineering is proposed. The PIs seek to create a biomimetic extracellular matrix with controlled temporal-spatial patterns of NanoCaPs that contains DNAs or plasmid growth factor. The controlled patterns will be created with the ink-jet technology and the performance will be evaluated in-vitro doc21480 none This project was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NER. This project is to develop a nanofabrication technique based on near-field optics to manipulate, modify and process matter at the nanoscale. This approach exploits the interaction of matter with the evanescent electromagnetic field of a laser exiting from a sub-wavelength aperture probe placed in close proximity (at a distance an order of magnitude smaller than the laser wavelength) to a substrate. This approach integrates techniques of microfabrication and MEMS, sub-wavelength photonics and near-field optics to produce structures in the sub-100 nm regime. The research consists of five tasks: 1) Near-field optics modeling and analysis, 2) Design and fabrication of the near-field optical probe, 3) Development of a high precision positioning stage for the optical probe, 4) Nanoscale laser materials processing and characterization, and 5) Fundamental studies on nanoscale transport phenomena and light-matter interaction. Together, these tasks will establish the scientific and technical basis for a near-field nano-optical laser processing technique. This research will have the following impact on nanoscale science: 1) A scientific foundation for understanding the fundamental physical mechanisms governing transport phenomena in near-field nanoscale laser-matter interaction. 2) A scientific basis for systematic design of apparatus for near-field nano-optical laser materials processing. When successfully completed, this research will result in the following impact on nanotechnology: 1) New techniques for very rapid fabrication of two-dimensional and three-dimensional nanostructures. Applications include massively parallel maskless nano-lithography, massively parallel ultrahigh density magneto-optic phase change data storage, maskless nanoscale patterning of optical and photonic bandgap structures, polymeric and biological materials, and nanoscale laser-assisted chemical vapor deposition. 2) New techniques for massively parallel in-situ material characterization, process monitoring and manipulation at the nanometer length Applications include massively parallel nanoscale temperature measurement, flow control and valving in massively parallel micro- and nano-fluidics, and manipulation of biological molecules in vivo. Several industrial interactions are anticipated as a result of successful technological developments from this research. This project will train undergraduate and graduate students in the exciting fields of MEMS microfabrication, photonics and near-field optics. Research results will be disseminated in national and international conferences and journal publications. Scientific fundamentals of near-field laser-matter interactions will be incorporated into an existing graduate course in Laser Materials Processing doc21481 none Proposal No. Title NER: Exploring the Limits of Nanoparticle removal by Pulsed Lasers Principal Investigator: Cetinkaya, Cetin Clarkson U. A method for removal of nanoscale particles based on pulsed laser particle removal technology is being proposed. The novelty of the method is based on the removal process based on rotation and removal of the particle instead of the translation and removal. It is well established that removal through particle rotation would require a fraction of the force compared to removal by axial force. The PI proposes to develop a fundamental understanding for modeling the dry removal process of nanoparticles with pulsed lasers, to study the potential damage mechanisms and to determine techniques for avoiding damage in required fluences, to perform experiments to improve and confirm analytical models, and to determine a parameter space for an efficient, practical dry cleaning technique doc21482 none This Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) project, co-funded by the National Science Foundation Divisions of Materials Research, Chemistry, and Chemical and Transport Systems, will develop synthetic strategies and characterization protocols for the production and study of one-, two- and three-dimensional superstructures composed of stabilized nanoparticle assemblies. The synthetic approach involves the systematic ordering, in solution and on substrates, of crosslinked assemblies of copolymers, as robust core-shell building blocks, to manufacture 1-dimensional meso-scale (~100 nm to ~1 mm), 2-dimensional micro-scale (~1 mm to ~100 mm) and 3-dimensional macro-scale ( 100 mm) objects, each comprised of nanoscopic building blocks. The result will be the creation of entirely unique composite morphologies that are not accessible in the phase diagrams of the copolymers directly. This strategy mimics the control of chemistry at the nanometer scale that is currently the exclusive province of living systems. Utilization of the nanoscale organic-based superstructures as scaffolds for the initiation of nanocrystalline growth of inorganic materials and biomacromolecules will be a key goal of the investigation. The mechanisms by which the organic superstructures promote crystallization and co-crystallization will be studied in detail. The hypotheses to be tested include: (1) organic nanoparticles will be assembled into well defined one-, two- and three-dimensional superstructures, suitable for fabrication into useful device applications; (2) such superstructures will present interfacial contacts that template the crystallization events to produce unique and controllable nanocrystalline phases, initiated from a surface or via co-crystallization; (3) the nature of the organic superstructures and the nanocrystalline materials will result in unique physical, optical, magnetic, and mechanical properties. The educational and research aspects of the proposed activities will cross several disciplines (organic chemistry, biology, physical chemistry, polymer physics, chemical and mechanical engineering, and materials science) to address effectively the study of one-, two-, and three-dimensional superstructures, composed of two or more nanoscale constructs, and of templated inorganic organic nanocrystalline materials. The proposed research is rich with opportunities to impact education. Students will benefit through interdisciplinary, multi-site research activities. An outreach course developed (Fall ) at Washington University for K-8 teachers will be enhanced and implemented at the participating institutions. The focus of this NIRT also creates an effective platform for societal education of the benefits of nanoscience and nanotechnology. For example, the proposed nanostructured solids may represent new advanced materials for medicine, such as smart hydrogel-like coatings for controlled release of drugs, and scaffolds for tissue engineering. These materials may also be the next generation of advanced separation media, tough optically clear solids, catalysts or nanocomposites used in the fabrication of nano- or micro-mechanical devices. Thermally-responsive memory devices and complex nanoscopic coatings for cantilever-based sensor devices are particular applications that will be investigated for the 1-, 2-, and 3-dimensional superstructures. Additionally, the proposed materials will be evaluated as nanoscopic surfaces from which the crystallization of inorganic salts or biomacromolecules can initiate. The controlled co-crystallization of the superstructures will be investigated, as a model system for the nanocrystalline phases found in bone growth doc21483 none This project was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NER. The goal of the research is to develop the methodology of localized atomic-level structural and chemical interfacial characterization of carbon nanotube-metal junctions using high resolution transmission electron microscopy (TEM), electron energy loss spectroscopy and energy filtered TEM. The Focused Ion Beam micromachining will be used to fabricate platinum metal contacts onto carbon nanotubes (CNTs), and also for localized specimen cross-sectioning for further TEM analysis. The objectives of the study are threefold: (1) advancement of nanoscale characterization techniques to achieve an understanding of the effects of FIB-assisted metal deposition on the CNT Pt interfacial structure and chemistry at atomic level; (2) development of a specimen preparation technique for selective (localized) high-resolution TEM and electron energy loss spectroscopy of CNT-metal junctions; (3) development of reproducible metal contact fabrication technique with atomic-level control of inter-diffusion and morphology. The research will advance the nanoobject metal junction studies to the atomic-level of understanding of the interfacial structure and chemistry. Development of optimized methodology of CNT metal localized cross-sectioning technique for high-resolution chemical and structural analysis of the junction will be useful for studies of the majority of nanoscale objects and future nano-devices. Controlled nano-fabrication of CNT metal junctions with known properties will facilitate the reliable electrical testing of the nanosized materials and structures for variety of applications ranging from chemical sensors to field effect transistors, thus enabling fabrication of new devices to serve people in their everyday life. Two graduate student will be directly involved in the program gaining knowledge in such advanced characterization techniques as transmission electron microscopy, electron energy loss spectroscopy, and FIB micromashining. The expertise generated by this program will be utilized directly in the educational process to teach the current and future scientists technologists. The PI will organize and carry out scientific seminars, will incorporate new data into the graduate level courses to facilitate the dissemination of knowledge and the developed methodology doc21484 none Mosquitoes are responsible for the transmission of agents of disease to hundreds of millions of people each year. Their large populations are the result of an efficient reproductive system that converts the protein contained in the blood that the female mosquito ingests into eggs. When they mate with females, male mosquitoes transfer sperm as well as substances from their accessory reproductive glands and these substances alter the female s physiology. Among their many effects, the male accessory gland substances prevent the females of most species from ever mating again. After the first mating, sperm are stored in a special sac, the spermatheca, for the rest of her life and these are released to fertilize each batch of eggs as it is laid. Recent work in this laboratory has demonstrated that in the most important mosquito vector of malaria, Anopheles gambiae, male accessory glands do not control mating behavior as they do in other mosquito species. Mating does, however, somehow alter the female s behavior and the hydrocarbon composition of her cuticle, which may be the cue that males of this species use to distinguish unmated or previously mated females. Preliminary experiments suggest that sperm contained in the spermatheca of the female may prevent her from remating. Another interesting difference that emerged from this work was the demonstration of a sperm polymorphism in male An. gambiae; unlike most other mosquito species, male gambiae produce sperm of considerably variable lengths, but only the longer sperm end up in the female s spermatheca. The goals of this project are to examine the mechanism of cuticular alteration in An. gambiae, its role in mating, and the possible reasons for the varying types of sperm produced by the male. The change in cuticular hydrocarbons of female mosquitoes will be assessed by gas chromatography after various experimental treatments and the degree to which mating is prevented will be determined. Sperm that are produced by males after various treatments such as hormone administration will be examined microscopically and measured for length and presence of a nucleus, both within the genital tracts of the male and female. The long-term importance of this project is that it will provide much needed information about the mating systems of the most important mosquito vector in the world. If, using tools of genetic engineering, new genes are to be introduced into mosquito populations to prevent them from transmitting infectious agents, the basic mechanisms of mating by which those genes are to be introduced must be better understood doc21485 none Fernandez The Bear Brook Watershed in Maine (BBWM) is a long-term paired, forested watershed research site with each watershed drained by a first order stream through a v-notch weir. One watershed (West Bear) has been treated bimonthly for 12 years with N and S by aerial helicopter applications, with the second watershed (East Bear) serving as the reference watershed. The objectives of this LTREB proposal are to: 1. Study the response of the calibrated East Bear Watershed to long-term patterns of ambient S, N, and base cation deposition. This will be accomplished by maintaining high quality deposition and stream export data from the reference watershed in support of research on ecosystem processes and change over time funded by this project and others. 2. Study the temporal progression of N saturation at the West Bear Watershed. This will be accomplished by continuing the decadal-scale whole ecosystem N & S addition experiment ongoing at the West Bear Watershed. 3. Determine if a definable relationship exists between short and longer-term climate and the biogeochemical and hydrologic processes currently under study at both watersheds. This will be accomplished by establishing an air and soil temperature measurement program across major ecosystem compartments at BBWM. Studies will focus on the relationships between temperature, N dynamics (mineralization, nitrification), and surface water N export in both the reference and treated watersheds, and we will evaluate the efficacy of using heat units to predict ecosystem behavior with respect to these processes. 4. Provide support to strengthen the data management efforts at the BBWM, thereby making this long-term record more accessible to the scientific community with an interpretive interface to be used by educators and policy makers through an expansive web presence. A major emphasis of this LTREB proposal is the development of a layered web presence on the BBWM project that provides access to data and highlights for policy makers, educators and researchers. 5. Provide support for graduate student training and undergraduate student experiences in research. Findings from this research have proven to be turnkey to date in regional and national debates on the effects of acid deposition and the risk of N saturation to forests and surface waters of New England. The compelling justification for supporting the long-term program of research at BBWM is that changes in response to changing ambient deposition of N and S (East Bear), long- term chemical manipulations (West Bear), and seasonal and inter-annual climate variation after 11+ years are showing mechanisms of response that were not discernable within the first 2-3 years of the study. These long-term mechanisms of response are frequently overlooked when research is conducted on short-term funding cycles. The long-term and unique responses being investigated at BBWM will be critical for adequately assessing policy and management options regarding air pollution and climate change in the 21 st century doc21486 none This grant is made under the Nanoscale Sciences and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NIRT, to address the growing interest in developing manufacturing processes and systems that involve fluids at the nanoscale. There also is continuing evidence that fluid phenomena that occur at the nanoscale are unlike macroscopic behavior. For example, some hydrophobic channels will permit liquid water to exist, while only slightly narrower channels will only permit water vapor to exist. Similar phenomena are expected to manifest when evaluating fluids other than water. The proposed experimental, theoretical and computational investigations will focus on the confinement and transport of water, alcohols, amines, and other interesting organic compounds in nanochannels. We will investigate both rectangular and cylindrical geometries with length scales from 1 nm to nm, and diameters, or widths, from 0.1 nm to 15 nm (or even larger). Surface materials will span the regime from hydrophobic to hydrophilic, considering amorphous and crystalline inorganic materials, and polymeric materials. Additionally, transport rates of fluids through nanochannels will be evaluated. It is anticipated that fluid flow properties and transport rates will be governed by fluid-surface interactions to a far greater extent than observed in macroscopic channels. The investigations at WPI will be complemented by research on flow behavior of nanoparticles in conventional, rotating and circulating fluidized beds performed by the NIRT group at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). The generic geometry of the nanofluidic system and fluids to be considered are representative of important manufacturing systems and processes. The outcomes of the research have significance to nano-rheology, nano-lubrication, control of nanosurface properties, modeling and simulation at the nanoscale, lab-on-a-chip technologies, and other nanofluidic devices. Biosystems and environmental processes that involve nanofluidic transport through membranes and channels will also benefit from the expected outcomes. The research will be performed by an interdisciplinary team of PIs and graduate students at WPI that will collaborate with the NIRT group at NJIT. Additionally, we have collaborations with researchers in Taiwan, Germany, and Canada that will be of benefit to this effort. This investigation also has a strong educational component and will take advantage of WPI s project-based educational system that requires each undergraduate to conduct a technical team-project (called the Major Qualifying Project, or MQP) and a team-project involving Society Technology interactions (called the Interactive Qualifying Project, or IQP). Each MQP or IQP is equivalent to a three-course workload. The integration of undergraduate education and research will be pursued with MQPs to be conducted by teams of undergraduates from the three departments where the three PIs reside. In addition, the societal impacts of nanosciences and nanotechnologies will be pursued by a team of undergraduates conducting IQPs. These undergraduate projects will provide means for educating young scientists and engineers in new emerging technologies in interaction with an interdisciplinary research team doc21487 none This award will support an international conference organized by the American Quaternary Association (AMQUA) in Anchorage, Alaska on August 5-7, entitled Paleoclimate, Environmental Change, and Human Migrations in the North Pacific Basin. The purpose of the conference is to bring together international experts, practitioners, and students to share the latest developments in North Pacific paleoclimatology. Specifically, funds will provide an undergraduate assistant to help with organizational logistics, travel support for 15 students who will present posters on their research projects, and travel support for 7 experienced professionals who will be invited to provide presentations that synthesize the latest research in their area of expertise. The scientific themes of the various conference sessions are compatible and relevant to research projects supported by the Paleoclimate Program and include Late Holocene high-resolution climate studies, Quaternary paleoecology, and paleoclimatic teleconnections between high and low latitudes. A final report synthesizing and summarizing the conference findings will be posted on public websites for reading by the wider scientific community doc21488 none Engineering of InAs Quantum Dot Ensembles Using Interference of Optical Surface Waves This project addresses the problem of inhomogeneous broadening of the size distribution of quantum dot (QD) epitaxial semiconductor ensembles formed via a stress-driven Volmer-Weber or Stranski-Krastanov growth mechanism. The uniformity and narrow size distribution of the QDs are the major challenges for the utilization of QD structures in optoelectronic devices. The primary goal of this proposal is to evaluate the feasibility of nanoscale control of the nucleation process of InAs QDs on a GaAs surface using the interference of the optical surface waves. The interference pattern will be generated on the surface of the substrate using a pulsed UV laser during the growth of QDs by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). The pattern, with a typical period of few hundred nm, will be created using two different optical schemes based on: (i) the interference of the incident wave with the scattered coherent surface wave; and (ii) the interference of the incident waves with two surface waves coupled to the split laser beams. The optical interference pattern will modulate periodically the surface properties of the substrate at 100-200 nm level. The nucleation of QDs will be controlled through either substrate temperature modulation, thereby destroying the nucleation clusters in the antinode of the standing wave pattern, or through undulation of the surface by laser ablation to control the surface energy. The 100-nm modulation scale is expected to form a template for initial QD nucleation, and the subsequent evolution of the QD ensemble will be driven thermodynamically towards higher density of dots, (3-10)e10 cm-2. The important features of the in-situ optical impact are that it does not leave any residues on the surface, can be conducted during the growth process, and can be adjusted to introduce the minimum defect density. We will systematically investigate the factors (growth temperature, As flux, growth rate, laser power, etc.) that provide uniform and narrow QD distribution and efficient luminescence. The samples grown using optically controlled nucleation will be studied by the in-situ RHEED, as well as STM, TEM and photoluminescence methods to reveal the correlations between growth parameters, and the structure and properties of the QD systems. The laboratories at the Institute have all the necessary equipment for the QD characterization. This includes state-of-the-art field-emission ultra-high resolution TEM, focused ion beam station, surface analysis tools, five STM tools configured for different imaging modes and environment including ultra-high vacuum, and unique ultrasonic force microscope. The successful completion of the proposed work would have a significant impact on the performance of various optoelectronic components. The method will allow the growth of QD structures with sharp size distribution and high radiative recombination efficiency. For example, the QD structures will be used as active media for laser diodes with superior performance characteristics, such as higher efficiency, higher thermal stability, higher modulation frequency and increased reliability doc21489 none This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 01-157, in the NER category. The proposal focuses on testing the feasibility of using self-assembly of organic monolayers onto inorganic substrates to control spin phenomena, namely magnetism. The work is a collaboration between the Gwinn group at UCSB, which has expertise in semiconductor physics, and the Naaman group at the Weizmann Institute, which has expertise in the assembly of organized, organic thin films (QOTF) onto inorganic substrates. In these hybrid devices, organic molecules with large electric dipole moments chemisorb onto an inorganic substrate, forming an organized, close-packed dipole sheet. The energetics of forming the adsorbate favors transfer of electrons between the organic molecules and the substrate, somewhat similar to the effect of gates in field-effect devices, but without the need for a gate or gate insulator. This chemically-induced charge transfer modifies the electronic properties of both adsorbate and substrate. The proposed feasibility experiments will test for spin-related phenomena in hybrid devices of organized organic adsorbates on inorganics. The advantages of using organic material is the large versatility in properties that can be tailored relatively easily, its low cost, and the ease of production due to self-assembling processes that can replace expensive high resolution lithography. The enormous variety of organic molecules that self-assemble provides a chemical ~knob that may make possible new classes of organic inorganic spintronic devices. Two lines of investigation will be pursued during this year-long project: studies of chemical manipulation of the magnetic properties of GaAs-based semiconductor devices via the organic adsorbate; and studies of the magnetic properties of organic inonolayers of chiral molecules on non-magnetic substrates. Ferromagnetic GaAs heterostructures with near-surface Mn-doped layers will be covered with OOTF to test the feasibility of chemically controlling magnetism in ferromagnetic semiconductors. The effects of the OOTF will be investigated by magnetometry and by magnetotransport measurements. Adsorption of OOTF onto the sidewalls of non-magnetic GaAs A1GaAs superlattices will be used to attempt to modify the sheath of edge states that appears in the quantum Hall regime. Signatures of the effects of the OOTF would appear in low-temperature magnetotransport experiments. Studies of chiral OOTF will investigate further their previously observed magnetic properties, when adsorbed onto Au; and whether the chiral QQTF retain their magnetic properties when adsorbed onto GaAs doc21490 none This proposal was received in response to the National Science and Engineering Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 01-157, in the NER category. The proposal focuses on a new approache to enhancement of the thermoelectric figure of merit ZT of semiconductor materials via tuning of electron-phonon interaction in multiple arrays of semiconductor quantum dots. Quantum dot arrays are potential candidates for the thermoelectric electron transmitting - phonon blocking material. At the same time, in order to achieve a significant ZT improvement and compete with conventional thermoelectrics one has to design and fabricate quantum dot superlattice where carrier transport is facilitated by the formation of carrier mini-bands. Indeed, hopping conductivity typical for lateral carrier transport in random quantum dot arrays has very low carrier mobility while mini-band transport may lead to very high mobility values, particularly if one manages to suppress at least partially the carrier scattering via smart mini-band engineering. The important task addressed in this proposal is theoretical proof-of-concept investigation of requirements for achieving mini-band transport regime and carrier scattering suppression in quantum dot superlattices. Modification of acoustic phonon modes in quantum dot arrays due to spatial confinement and boundary scattering leads to a change in the phonon density of states, a decrease of the phonon group velocity, and corresponding drop of the in-plane lattice thermal conductivity. Acoustic phonon confinement, e.g. modification of phonon dispersion due to nanostructure boundaries, is much less researched phenomenon than carrier confinement effect. At the same time, it can serve as an additional tool to decrease the lattice thermal conductivity value and increase the effectiveness of the thermoelectric device. Thus, another task of this project is a study of the required structure parameters, e.g. dot size, shape, acoustic mismatch, etc., for achieving desirable acoustic phonon transport features such as low group velocity along direction of interest; resonant phonon scattering conditions; decoupling of phonon bath from electrons; etc. New efficient thermoelectric devices based on nanostructured materials may have a tremendous impact on a wide range of energy needs due to their inherent advantages such as high reliability, light weight, compactness, quit operation, and environmental safety doc21491 none Singh This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 01-157, in the NER category. The primary objective of this research is to develop a fundamental understanding for synthesizing manufacturing boron nitride nanotubes (BN-NTs) predictably and reproducibly by Electron Cyclotron Resonance Microwave Plasma Chemical Vapor Deposition (ECR-MPCVD). Pure BN nanotubes present an attractive opportunity for practical applications. They offer a unique combination of electrical and mechanical properties. Their predicted wide band-gap is independent of tube structure, which reveals BN-NTs potential for new generations of nanoelectronic devices based on field emission and cold cathode characteristics. This exploratory NER project will use ECR-MPECVD to synthesize BN-NTs. The unique features of this study will be to select novel metal-organic precursors, incorporate appropriate catalysts, and provide special surface pre-treatments to enhance formation and growth of single and multi-walled BN-NTs. In addition, in situ monitoring of plasma chemistry and processing parameters will be performed to relate to BN-NTs formation and growth. The proposed research will investigate two unique aspects: (1) Roles of the precursor chemistry on the synthesis of BN-NTs, and (2) Effects of substrate pretreatment such as surface modification by seeding and ion implantation on the BN-NTs formation and growth. In addition, influence of special catalysts such as Li3N and Mg3N2 on the synthesis of BN-NTs will be investigated. HRTEM, EELS, SEM, TED and possibly other analytical techniques will characterize the nanotubes. In addition, selected electrical properties of BN-NTs will be measured for applications in electronics. On a broader scale, a successful completion of this research will lead to a knowledge base for synthesizing BN-NTs with exceptional electrical, thermal, and mechanical properties for applications in electronics. It is expected that future generations of nanostructure electronic devices can be based on BN-NTs. For example, BN-NTs may serve as a perfect nano-insulating tubular shield for any conducting material encapsulated within. This offers the possibility of nanotube electrical transport tailored over a wide range. Unique field emission and cold cathode characteristics of BN-NTs have applications in flat panel display devices. Another important goal of this project is to train graduate student and research associate post doc through participation on this research project and their MS and Ph.D. theses. In addition, minority women high school and undergraduate students will also be mentored and exposed to this research doc21492 none This proposal describes a systematic study of the synthesis, characterization, and application of TiO2 nanoparticles as photocatalyst. The potential of the nanoparticles to absorb in the visible range by tailoring the surface, structural and compositional properties will be studied. Specifically, the multifold objectives of this proposal include the utilization of a unique physical vapor deposition process to obtain TiO2 nanoparticles with particle sizes ranging between 1 and 20 nm, and to reproducibly dope the nanoparticles with various dopants. These nanoparticles will be characterized for structural, chemical and optoelectronic properties. Of particular interest is the characterization of the valence band and conduction band structure by XPS, UPS, and EXAFS. We will also utilize first-principles calculations to acquire an atomistic understanding of nanoparticle properties. The theoretical models will be used to develop an understanding of the chemical and photochemical properties of pure and modified TiO2 nanoparticles. Modification involves the selective decoration of nanoparticle surfaces with noble metal particles including Ag, Au, Pt, etc. Titanium dioxide (TiO2) is used as a photocatalyst for environmental cleanup. Upon absorption of light, it helps break down toxic chemicals in air and in water. TiO2, however absorbs only UV light. It would be more useful if its absorption of the visible light can be enhanced since most of the sunlight is in the visible range. This proposal describes a systematic methodology to increase visible range absorption by changing the particle size, composition and surface chemistry. This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 01-157). The award is jointly supported through two directorates at NSF: (i) Mathematical and Physical Sciences (Division of Materials Research in the Ceramics program) and (ii) Engineering (Division of Chemical & Transport Systems doc21493 none This work seeks to describe the thermalization of electrons at a silicon silicon dioxide interface representative of a power MOSFET device. The interface is characterized in one case by hydrogen passivated silicon bonds, and in the other case without the hydrogen. It has been shown experimentally that the hydrogen improves device performance, but that the longevity of the hydrogen is limited. Therefore, the reliability of a device with hydrogen is uncertain. Through modeling and simulation, the physical processes governing the device behavior will be examined. The analysis will be performed using Monte Carlo techniques that follow single electrons. The scattering will be determined from cross-sections of the important scatterers in the problem. In the present case, the cross-sections for silicon and hydrogen can be obtained from the literature. However, the hydrogen-silicon bonds represent a modified phonon distribution. This distribution has been measured experimentally, and can be incorporated into the simulation through a modified cross-section at the interface. Careful description of the physical process will lead to an evaluation of device performance. Parametric studies can then lead to enhanced device designs doc21494 none This Nanoscale Exploratory Research (NER) award to Ohio State University is supported by Divisions of Chemistry (MPS) and Physics (MPS), and this proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 01-157). With this award, Professors Subramaniam and Lempert will synthesize, separate and manipulate single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) using Coulomb crystals in plasmas. Coulomb crystals will be formed with SWNTs (or aggregates thereof) at the lattice centers either by introducing these into a striated DC glow discharge plasma or by synthesizing them in-situ, the latter being accomplished using carbon monoxide and a nickel catalyst. Because of the large aspect ratios, Coulomb crystals formed with SWNTs are expected to have unusual structure and properties, and they will provide a unique environment in which fundamental understanding of nanotube formation and growth processes may be studied non-intrusively using spectroscopic methods. The SWNTs suspended in the Coulomb crystal will be separated and manipulated depending on their electrical characteristics and size using Scanning Tunneling Microscope conducting tips. With this award, students will be trained in the synthesis and modification of carbon nanotubes. Single-walled carbon nanotubes suspended in Coulomb crystals will be prepared using an electric glow discharge plasma or by chemical methods from carbon monoxide in the presence of a nickel catalyst. Carbon nanotubes formed will be separated and manipulated based on their electrical properties and size using Scanning Tunneling Microscope conducting tips doc21495 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the City University of New York - City College Campus will acquire a 500 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on (i) studies of chemically modified nucleosides and DNA; (ii) synthesis of unusual nucleosides and studies on DNA containing them; (iii) synthesis of high energy-density N-nitramino and geminal difluoramino solid propellants; (iv) studies of the structure and dynamics of selected isolated protein fragments to learn about the unfolded state of proteins; (v) novel pharmacophores against opportunistic infections related to AIDS; (vi) studies of the S-layer protein of Lactobacillus brevis; and (vii) synthesis of enediyne glycofuranosides. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including synthetic chemistry, pharmaceutical chemistry and biology doc21496 none Lvov This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative, NSF 01-157, category NIRT. This project targets the synthesis of nanoscale functional materials and their potential for applications in medical and biological areas. The research team has been assembled to develop methods for fabrication of useful composite materials based on principles of self-assembly and includes researchers in chemistry, physics, engineering, biomaterials, and pharmacology. The nano-encapsulation method to be elaborated involves the formation of a colloidal core with defined composition and size, and the preparation of an outer shell providing the required stability, permeability, compatibility, release of core material, and catalytic or affinity properties doc21497 none Professor Cynthia Zoski of Georgia State University and Dr. Peixin He of CH Instruments are funded through a GOALI grant in the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program. The project is to develop microelectrode arrays as multicomponent sensors for the study of complex samples. Each element of the array consists of a cluster of parallel-connected nano- to micro-sized electrodes. Each cluster can be individually addressed by a multichannel potentiostat. The development of the arrays, including chemical modification of the electrode surfaces and characterization, will be performed at the University, and the instrumentation, circuitry and software will be developed in collaboration with CH Instruments. Array characterization will be carried out, in part, by the novel application of scanning electrochemical microscopy. Target applications include bacterial detection and heavy metal screening. This research is aimed at developing an instrument that is capable of many applications, including chemical and biological sensing for environmental and homeland security monitoring doc21498 none This project will develop a class of methods known as templated self-assembly that control the growth and self-assembly of nanostructures on surfaces. This will enable formation of monodisperse nanoscale features in precise positions on a substrate. This work will be an enabling technology in the design of new devices that utilize the properties of quantum dots and other nanoscale objects, in which the control of the sizes and spatial positions of the features is paramount in optimizing performance. The objective is to use lithography to modulate substrate surfaces with features of periodicity of order 100 nm, to form templates for the growth and self-assembly of nanostructures. In this process, lithography is not used to form the nanostructures themselves, but instead is used to form a template that will seed the formation of nanostructures in particular locations. The nanostructures will be considerably smaller in size than the period of the template. The goal of the project is to develop the templated self-assembly of arrays of nanoscale semiconductor and metal islands controlled by epitaxial strain, surface chemistry or topography. The island formation will be achieved using both the deposition from the vapor phase and by the spontaneous agglomeration of metastable coninuous sold films. This work will be carried out by an interdisciplinary team of researchers from MIT in collaboration with IBM and Sandia National Laboratories working with a group of students and a postdoctoral researcher. The outreach involves a communication effort designed to inform the general public about nanotechnology through development of a web site and other scientific communication avenues, including the involvement of undergraduate students as well as other activities such as school visits. %%% The research will be focussed on the templated self-assembly of arrays of nanoscale semiconductor and metal islands controlled by epitaxial strain, surface chemistry or topography. The resulting well-ordered nanoscale island arrays will have technological relevance in devices that include optically active structures involving plasmon wires, and patterned magnetic recording media. A range of other applications will also benefit from the methods developed in this proposal; for instance optical devices based on arrays of semiconductor quantum dots. The educational goals of this work are to contribute to the public understanding of nanotechnology and to the training of skilled researchers doc21499 none This proposal was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NIRT. We propose a project to develop nanoscale biological sensors with single molecule detection capability and, more importantly, a novel technique for nanoscale functionalization and assembly of these sensors. The devices will consist of several nanoscale building blocks: 1) ultra-sensitive semiconductor Hall gradiometer capable of detecting a single 5-nm diameter magnetic nanoparticle (magnetic detection); 2) nanoscale field effect transistor (FET) based on newly developed semiconducting metal oxide nanobelts (electrical detection). We will employ dip-pen nanolithography (DPN) to functionalize individual solid state devices to detect specific biological substances. Furthermore, DPN-decorated solid substrates will be utilized to assemble nanoscale building blocks onto specific patterns from solution. The practicality of any biological sensor is governed by its: 1) selectivity, 2) sensitivity, and 3) environmental compatibility. We have recently demonstrated that sub-micrometer Hall gradiometers, made out of GaAs AlGaAs two-dimensional electron gas, can detect a single 10-nm-diameter magnetic particle. They are ideally suited for detecting the presence of adsorbed biomolecules tagged with magnetic nanoparticles. We will fabricate gradiometers out of InAs heterostructures for the optimal performance under ambient conditions. For electrical detection of biological molecules, we intend to fabricate nanoscale FET s from a group of metal oxide nanobelts. In this case, charged molecules adsorbed on the functionalized nanobelt surfaces can be detected by measuring the conductivity change of the nanobelt junctions. Utilizing DPN, the nanoscale Hall gradiometer surface and nanobelt FET channel can be functionalized to create specific affinity for desired biomolecules, which allows us to build highly selective sensing devices. Furthermore, multiple nano-FET s can be assembled onto specific locations on a substrate or in a circuit via surface-templated nano-assembly strategy. In this method, the solid substrate will be first functionalized with chemical binding groups with specific affinity to the nanobelts, and then the substrates will be used to capture the nanobelts from their solution. Successful execution of the proposed program will not only produce several highly sensitive novel biosensors with immediate application values, but also create a new paradigm for biosensor fabrication and assembly that may be widely applicable in many other systems. To accomplish the stated goals, we have assembled a team of six researchers in biology, physics, materials science, and electrical engineering from three institutions. This team provides a unique interdisciplinary combination and possesses all the necessary expertise and tools for the project. In addition, this interdisciplinary research project will provide many students a valuable opportunity to collaborate with researchers in other disciplines doc21500 none Utica College (UC), Syracuse University (SU), and the State University of New York-Institute of Technology at Utica-Rome (SUNYIT), Herkimer County Community College (HCCC) and Mohawk Valley Community College (MVCC) are improving institutional and regional capabilities in Information Assurance education and training via: 1) a Center of Excellence in Information Assurance physically located at the Griffiss Business and Technology Park adjacent to the Air Force Research Laboratory and other technology organizations engaged in information assurance research and technologies. The Center will focus on the development and placement of interns from undergraduate and graduate programs affiliated with the Center, for Federal Cyber Service; 2) multidisciplinary undergraduate degree programs in Information Assurance designed to draw upon the strengths of each institution; UC in cyber crime investigations and computer forensics, SUNYIT in software and product development and telecommunications, and SU s as a Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education; 3) multidisciplinary graduate degree programs in Information Assurance that parallel the undergraduate programs of study; and 4) articulated agreements with MVCC and HCCC to support their developing programs of study in Information Assurance, including Associates degree programs doc21501 none This project was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NER. The project will explore electron stimulated deposition and etching as a alternative technique to selectively deposit and etch nanoscopic features. The mechanisms and reaction kinetics for the electron beam stimulated growth and etch processes will be elucidated using standard precursor materials. Beam energy and current density measurements will be performed and the energy flow will be modeled at the near surface region to determine the contribution of thermal Joule heating versus electron dissociation of the precursor molecules. The effect of gas phase electron scattering, specimen charging, and secondary electron emission will be investigated to understand the minimum pixel size that can be realized for this nanoscale process. This project is a collaborative effort between scientists at the University of Tennessee (Philip D. Rack and David C. Joy) and North Carolina State University (Phillip Russell) and will investigate nanoscale materials manipulation with focused electron beams. The ability to manipulate materials at the nanoscale is critical for the nanotechnology revolution that is occurring. To intelligently design and or repair nanoscale devices requires techniques to selectively and nanoscopically deposit and remove material in a controllable fashion. Current techniques to selectively deposit or etch microscopic features utilize ion beam deposition and etching, laser ablative etching using far field and near field optics, and mechanical abrasion using a fine microtip. Of these techniques, focused ion beam techniques are probably the most mature technology that has been extended into the nanoscale. When using an ion beam to stimulate a deposition or etch process, the gallium ions get implanted into the substrate, which can significantly change the optical, electrical, or mechanical properties of the substrate. Charging inherent to the ion-solid interaction also causes proximity effects and can also lead to so-called riverbed effects which erodes nearby features when the heavy ion beam is scattered and induces sputtering. Electron beam stimulated deposition and etching is conceptually similar to the existing focused ion beam approach and has been shown to be a viable technique for depositing nanoscopic materials. The main advantages of using an electron beams versus ion beams are reduced contamination and smaller spot sizes doc21502 none Blatchley The objective of the research is to investigate the feasibility and limitations of Bacillus anthracis decontamination processes which utilize the physical disinfectants ultraviolet (UV) and gamma (g) irradiation. The specific tasks of this exploratory research include: (1) the development of a database of the behavior for B. anthracis spores in response to UV and g irradiation, noting the spore inactivation, repair, and mutation, (2) the development of systems to quantify dose delivery in decontamination systems based on physical disinfectants using Bacillus cereus as a surrogate for B. anthracis spores, and (3) examination of spore inactivation in continuous applications to surfaces and aqueous liquids over a range of operating conditions, together with dosimetric data. The use of B. cereus as a surrogate is logical and useful, since B. cereus is virtually indistinguishable from B. anthracis in terms of physiology and responses to disinfectants, but is essentially non-pathogenic to humans. As a check of the validity of the use of B. cereus, a limited number of experiments will be performed with the Sterne strain of B. anthracis (the vaccine strain of the organism) to verify the results of the research doc21503 none Singh The primary objectives of the proposed NIRT (Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team) research addressing the theme on manufacturing processes at the nanoscale are to: (1) develop processing methods to manufacture novel superhard thin films of controlled nano-structures and properties in the ternary (C-B-N) system, (2) develop advanced techniques to characterize the nano-structures of selected new superhard materials, and (3) relate the scale of the nano-structure (1-50 nm) to their unusual properties such as hardness. With this vision in mind, the premise of the proposed NIRT is that the functionality property of nano-structured materials in the form of thin films and coatings can be designed by employing a suitable nanoscale architecture and distribution of the basic structural building blocks to control the properties at a scale of 1-50 nm. In this proposal we seek to address the design of superhard and nano-structured thin films not by just refining the polycrystalline microstructural scale, but rather by exploring the novel routes for processing manufacturing, characterizing, and controlling the nano-structure of new materials in order to achieve unusual mechanical, physical, thermal, and possibly other properties. Thus, materials will be first designed and processed manufactured to have only short-range order and then nano-structured thin films will be created by clever modifications of the non-equilibrium processing methods, and or kinetic thermal manipulation of the networks nanostructues to create nano-crystalline thin films. The eventual aim of these activities will be to develop predictive tools for designing and synthesizing materials with unusual properties hardness so that a knowledge base for creating materials by design will be obtained. To accomplish these goals of the NIRT, a truly interdisciplinary and complementary research team has been assembled. On a broader scale, a successful completion of this research will lead to a knowledge base for designing and manufacturing nano-structured superhard materials in the ternary C-B-N system with unusual mechanical and physical properties for applications in machining, electronic devices, MEMS, and functional protective coatings. Graduate and undergraduate students and research associate post doc will be trained through participation on this research project and their MS and Ph.D. theses. In addition, minority women high school and undergraduate students will also be mentored and exposed to this research doc21504 none This Nanoscale Exploratory Research (NER) award to Illinois Institute of Technology is supported by Divisions of Chemistry (MPS) and Chemical Transport Systems (ENG), and this proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 01-157). With this award, Professor Khan in collaboration with Drs. Chris Marshall (Argonne National Laboratory) and Robert Doedens (Univ. California Irvine) will design and develop novel nanostructured zeolite like materials based on nanometer-sized transition metal oxide clusters. Porous nanocomposites will be prepared from clusters of polyoxometalates such as polyoxovanadate and their derivatives with linker groups such as pyrazine, 1,4-dicyanobenzene and related organic ligands. The composites prepared will be characterized by a number of physicochemical techniques including spectroscopy (infrared, UV-visible, and x-ray absorption spectroscopy), single crystal structure analysis, thermal methods, and surface area measurements. Detoxification of oxides of nitrogen will also be carried out using the catalysts prepared. Training undergraduate and graduate students in this interdisciplinary program is part of the project. Zeolite-type porous catalytic materials based on transition metal oxides will be synthesized and characterized for the eventual application in the detoxification of oxides of nitrogen. These nanocomposite catalysts will be based on nanometer sized clusters of polyoxometalates and their derivatives linked by organic ligands. With this award, both graduate and undergraduate students will be trained in this interdisciplinary research program doc21505 none This proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF 01-157. The project focuses on the development of a new approach to structured atomic deposition and lithography. Lithography using neutral atom beams focused by standing wave light fields shows great promise for nanoscale fabrication. However, the method has so far been limited to the production of spatially periodic patterns, which greatly limits the versatility of the technique. In this new approach a new method of synthesizing light induced lenses which permit the creation of a single localized spot at an arbitrary position in the plane will be used. The spot can be scanned without mechanical motion using spatial light modulators, such that arbitrary two-dimensional patterns can be generated. The project is jointly funded by the Divisions of Physics and Materials Research in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate doc21506 none This project was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative NSF 01-157, category NER. Exploratory research will be conducted on the laser chemical vapor deposition (LCVD) of nanostructures. Experiments will be carried out utilizing near filed scanning optical probes (NSOMs) in order to confine the effects of the laser irradiation to lateral dimensions of only a few tens of nanometers. The main objective of the research is to accomplish deposition and writing of nanofeatures at specified locations via NSOM-LCVD processes. Different deposition substrate systems will be investigated. This approach will lead to controlled crystal growth and fabrication of complex nanostructures in three dimensions. Insight will be gained on the fundamental mechanisms of the complex thermo-chemo-physical phenomena during the nanoscale deposition, nucleation and crystal growth processes. The production of surface nanofeatures has many important applications in critical emerging technology fields, including the fabrication of nano-electro-photo-mechanical integrated circuits. The goal of the research is to develop novel processes for nanostructuring surfaces with tailor-made texture, optical and electromechanical properties. These processes will be of ubiquitous use in the fabrication and heterogeneous integration of functional nanoscale devices. Several existing programs at UC Berkeley will be leveraged in order to broaden the impact of the research on education and outreach and utilized to identify, recruit and attract graduate student researchers from under-represented groups and minorities. It is expected that the research will form a major part of a doctoral dissertation, while undergraduate students will also participate in the research as laboratory assistants. The research results, procedures and expertise developed in this project will be communicated to both graduate and undergraduate students through coursework and seminars (including a freshman seminar doc21507 none Jun This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative NSF 01-157, category NER. The main objective of this research is the optical and mechanical characterization of the nanoengineered collagen tissues produced by a novel electrospinning technique developed at the Virginia Commonwealth University. The prospect of using a person s own cells (keratocytes) as a vehicle for development of a new cornea will also be investigated by culturing corneal cells in the engineered collagen matrix doc21508 none The proposal was submitted under Solicitation NSF 01-157 Nanoscale Science and Engineering, under the Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) category. The research examines a novel concept for direct thermal-to-electrical power generation. The concept involves electron emission from arrays of carbon-based nanostructured emitters, such as carbon nanofibers and diamond nanotips. With characteristic dimensions of one to ten nanometers, these materials enable highly efficient electron emission and the possibility of quantum confinement effects that enhance the energy conversion process. However, the conversion of thermal energy to electrical energy using such structures has not been previously explored in detail. Specific research tasks include development of synthesis processes, material characterization and analysis, experimental and theoretical analyses of electron energy distributions, and characterization of energy conversion under practical conditions. In addition, the program will support trans-institutional education and training initiatives through a graduate student exchange program and a joint seminar series on nanotechnology to be held in conjunction with the MBA programs of the participating institutions, which include Vanderbilt, Purdue, and Michigan State. NSF support is being provided by the Chemical and Transport Systems Division and the Design, Manufacturing and Industrial Innovation Division in the Engineering Directorate, and by the Division of Materials Research in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate doc21509 none This Nanoscale Exploratory Research (NER) award to University of Texas Austin is supported by Divisions of Chemistry (MPS) and Chemical Transport Systems (ENG), and this proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 01-157). With this award, Professors Krische and Anslyn will design and synthesize a family of oligomers to serve as synthetic programmable codons to mimic the templating by DNA to embody information storage properties. Oligomers with programmable codons will be synthesized using different chemistries such as: neopentyl amino alcohol-linked to amino-dichlorotriazines; guanidinium-phosphates; guanidinium-carboxylates; and dihydrophalazine diones-diaminophthalazins. These oligomers with dye-labeled strands will be evaluated for self-assembly and templating binding affinities using NMR dilution experiments, isothermal titration calorimetry, vapor pressure osmometry and cross-hybridization by thin layer chromatography. Training and research of undergraduate and graduate students in this interdisciplinary program in physical and synthetic organic chemistry are integral parts of the project. A group of oligomers with dye-labeled groups and with programmable ultra high-affinity specificity building blocks in nanoscale will be designed and synthesized to serve as codons with information storage capabilities mimicking some of the properties of DNA. These oligomers will enable surface-patterning schemes wherein multiple, predetermined optical constellations representing memory-bits are generated via spontaneous self-assembly. Owing to the interdisciplinary nature of this project, the proposed program of research will facilitate education and training of both graduate and undergraduate students in fields ranging from organic chemistry to molecular recognition and materials patterning doc21510 none Mark Oskin University of Washington Quantum computers seem the subject of science fiction, but their tremendous computational potential is closer than we may think. Despite significant practical difficulties, small quantum devices of 5 to 7 bits have been built in the laboratory. Silicon technologies promise even greater scalability. To use these technologies effectively, and help guide quantum device research, computer architects need to start designing and reasoning about quantum processors now. However, two major hurdles stand in the way. First, compactly describable rules that characterize silicon-based quantum computing technologies are not known. Second, there does not exist an infrastructure to design, test, and evaluate architectural alternatives. This grant addresses both of these items. First, we will formalize the design rules of a widely discussed and likely quantum device technology. Second, we have already begun to develop architectural abstractions for this technology that can be composed together to form general-purpose quantum information processors. Third, using these abstractions we will develop an automated computer aided design tool that takes a description of a quantum computing architecture and compiles it to a device library of quantum cells. Finally, we will develop a simulator that quickly estimates the cost-performance of quantum systems. These research goals, once accomplished, will serve as foundational resources for the development of quantum computer architectures. In addition, by reasoning about architectures we can begin to find the limits of current quantum device proposals. These limits can be turned into research goals, items that further quantum device research needs to overcome doc21511 none Under the supervision of Dr. Wattenmaker, Mr. Trella will conduct archaeological excavations at the Early Bronze Age ( - B.C.) city of Kazane Hoyuk, in southeastern Turkey. Previous archaeological investigations have indicated that by B.C., Kazane was the center of an early city-state, incorporating many thousands of citizens including surrounding towns and villages. However, around B.C., the city itself shrank by roughly 60% in size. The changes evident at Kazane are representative of changes in settlement patterns in other parts of Upper Mesopotamia (southeastern Turkey, Northern Syria and Northern Iraq), where many larger towns and urban centers either contracted to a small portion of their previous size or were abandoned completely at the end of the third millennium. These excavations are intended to provide a better understanding of both the social and environmental processes leading up to these dramatic changes. At its apex, Kazane was over 100 hectares (about 250 acres) in size with a surrounding city wall and a 20-meter high mound at the center. Due to the fact that the city was completely abandoned by around BC, the architectural phases dating to the period of the site s contraction are just beneath the present-day surface and are easily reached, making Kazane an ideal site for this study. The goal of the excavations is to uncover a total of 400 m2 of occupation, split evenly between an elite, or upper-class domestic area and a non-elite domestic area. Pre and post-contraction household data from these areas will allow for the monitoring of change throughout a range of socio-economic levels within the urban center. The data collected during these excavations will consist of architectural plans, domestic refuse such as discarded animal bones, broken pottery and stone tools and environmental data in the form of paleobotanical and phytolith samples. Although some researchers suggest that the collapse of city-states at the end of the third millennium was entirely the result of an abrupt change in climate, local factors such as the intensification of food production and an increased emphasis on the consumption of craft goods may have also played a role in pushing large cities like Kazane to their environmental limits, leaving them prone to collapse. In an effort to untangle these connections, shifts in food production over time will be monitored through detailed analyses of faunal remains and paleobotanical samples. Changes in craft production and consumption will be detected by comparing densities of pottery and other craft goods from successive phases of occupation. Finally, paleobotanical and phytolith analyses will detect shifts in the frequencies of drought resistant crops and weeds, which will speak to changes in climatic conditions. This research, while certainly shedding light on the collapse of city-states in the third millennium B.C., will also speak to larger issues such as the long-term effects of agricultural intensification and resource extraction. It will also provide for the continued training of Mr. Trella in both excavation and artifact analysis and continue the spirit of collaboration between American archaeologists and Turkish museum officials doc21512 none This project will advance the practice of information security and computer networking forensics in the public sector, and build the national capacity to deal with threats in this area. The target audience is public sector professionals and managers, including law enforcement officials. Starting with existing materials and the expertise of CERIAS at Purdue University (a NSA Center of Excellence in Information Assurance Education), the University at Albany SUNY is developing competency-based distance-deliverable courseware in two key Information Security content areas, aimed primarily at professional needs in the public-sector. These curricula and materials are designed to be flexible, and able to be used in a variety of settings including undergraduate and graduate degree programs, certificate programs, and professional education. We use these materials in a variety of outlets, including degree and certificate programs at the University at Albany and Purdue University, as well as public-sector training programs and workshops in New York and Indiana. We are using the universities close relationships with the New York and Indiana State Police, and the New York State Office for Technology in a partnership to develop and test these modules. In engaging these organizations as partners on the project, we bring the resources of the University to bear on critical public needs. In doing so, we are developing a mutually beneficial relationship that enable the university educational programs to be more responsive to both public and private sector needs. The results of this project will be disseminated through a number of national outlets, including distance education learning communities, and consortia for information security education and training doc21513 none A fundamental competition between order and disorder lies at the heart of materials science and technology. Interactions between atoms or electrons spaced sub nanometer apart can lead to collective organization into states with long-range order. Order in electronic states gives rise to physical consequences such as magnetism, ferroelectricity and superconductivity. In bulk materials, the collective electronic properties exhibit a characteristic length scale called the coherence length, which corresponds to the minimum grain size in superconductors, and in ferromagnets the domain wall width. These length scales generally exceed or are comparable to geometrical parameters of nanostructured materials. For these reasons nanostructured materials represent an important new frontier for the study of collective electronic behavior. This interdisciplinary research team will study the physical consequences of nanometer-size dimensions on collective and independent electron properties in individual nanocrystals and in controlled nanocrystal arrays. It is unique in the combination of expertise in materials synthesis, materials characterizations and theory that has been brought together at a single institution. It also forges a close partnership with one leading company in information technology and two foreign institutions. Educationally, this NIRT will help lead the campus-wide initiative at UT Austin for training the next generation of scientists in nanoscience through the integration of research and education and a strong partnership with the newly established Center of Nano- and Molecular Science and Techology. It integrates diversity by actively recruiting graduate students in minority groups. It further reaches out to K-12 education in the Austin area. This interdisciplinary program brings together expertise in advanced synthesis of metal and semiconductor nanostructures, expertise in nanoscale characterizations of structural, electronic, transport, optical and magnetic properties, and expertise in mesoscopic and many-body condensed matter theory, working together in a single institution to explore the physical consequences of nanometer-size dimensions on collective and independent electron properties in individual nanocrystals and in controlled nanocrystal arrays. Of particular interests are ferromagnetic, superconducting, and normal metal nanocrystals, and ferromagnetic, semimagnetic, and normal semiconductor quantum dots. In ferromagnetic and superconducting systems the emphasis to date has been on the collective properties that underlie, for example, the use of ferromagnets for information storage and the potential use of small superconductors as quantum-bits. As these particles become smaller, the physics of the magnetic anisotropy barriers essential for information storage will be altered, and superconductivity will be destroyed, respectively. This regime is a frontier for fundamental physics and for materials physics and chemistry, and will be the focus of this research program. This research team also forges a close partnership with one leading company in information technology and two foreign institutions. It will strengthen educational and training efforts at UT Austin in nanoscience and nanotechnology by designing a new curriculum that removes barriers between current disciplinary specialization in different majors and provides an excellent training ground for the future generation of scientists in nanoscale science and technology doc21514 none This proposal was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NER. This exploratory proposal embraces two themes of the NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Program, including 1) Biosystems at Nanoscale, 2) Manufacturing Processes at the Nanoscale. The overall goal of this proposed research is to demonstrate the feasibility of a process for biosynthesis of germanium oxide nanoparticles. The PIs specific objectives are to: 1) Establish cultures of photosynthetic marine diatoms known to co-assimilate soluble silicon (Si) and germanium (Ge), including Cylindrotheca fusimormis, Cyclotella nana,and Phaeodactylum tricornutum; 2) Develop a two-stage photobioreactor for biological manufacture Ge-oxide nanoparticles by marine diatoms, and identify soluble Si Ge feeding strategies that sustain Ge- oxide nanoparticle formation; 3) Characterize the composition and size of nanoparticles by TEM EDAX; and 4) characterize photonic properties of extracted nanoparticles by photoluminescence spectroscopy before and after thermal annealing or H2 reduction. The PI proposes that the biomineralization capacity of marine diatoms can be harnessed to manufacture germanium oxide nanoparticles that ultimately could be processed into photonic materials. The synthesis of quantum dots by the atomic assembly of Ge atoms or Ge-oxide nanocrystals on silicon substrates is an emerging area of nanotechnology, as these light-emitting nanomaterials have novel optical electronic properties. Current technology for manufacture of Ge-oxide nanocrystals involves exotic and cumbersome processes at extreme conditions, such as laser ablation, cluster beam deposition, or DC magnetron sputtering. In contrast, diatoms could manufacture monodisperse Ge-oxide nanoparticles at the atomic scale by biologically-mediated processes at ambient conditions, using the nanobiochemical machinery of the cell itself. He proposes that Ge-oxide nanoparticle production by diatoms can be accomplished in two stages. In Stage 1, diatoms are grown to high cell density on a soluble Si substrate (e.g. silicic acid) to the point of Si depletion in the liquid medium. In Stage 2, soluble germanium (e.g. germanic acid) is continuously added to the dense diatom suspension at sub-lethal concentration. Diatoms assimilate soluble Ge, and then biologically polymerize soluble Ge to Ge-oxide nanospheres, which accumulate within the cell since they cannot be readily assimilated into the silica cell wall. If this proposed research is successful, then a biotechnology-derived route to synthesis of nanoparticles or nanocomposite materials with optoelectronic properties would be demonstrated and the impact will be significant. The research plan will be co-directed two chemical engineers with respective expertise in cell culture of marine organisms and semiconductor materials synthesis. Graduate students working with the PIs would be uniquely cross trained in two high-technology areas: biotechnology and electronic materials doc21515 none The project examines how social environments at the family, neighborhood, and school levels affect individuals achievement of their genetic potential in late adolescence and young adulthood. When genetic predispositions influence a particular human behavior, the expression of such predispositions are moderated by environmental influences. At birth, each child has a genetic potential, but the chances of achieving the potential are conditioned by environmental factors. Thus, advantaged family environments generally boost the realization of youth s genetic potential for educational achievement. Social contexts such as neighborhoods and schools also moderate the expression of the genetic propensity for educational achievement and early work success. Educational success will be measured using data on college plans, grade point average, grade retention, intellectual development, and high school graduation. Data will be drawn from genetically informative sibling data from four waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The project will develop statistical methods that permit analysis of the heritability - environment interaction for binary outcomes such as college plans and event history outcomes such as grade retention doc21516 none This Nanoscale Exploratory Research (NER) award to Virginia Polytechnic Institute is supported by Divisions of Chemistry (MPS) and Electrical and Communications Systems (ENG), and this proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 01-157). With this award, Professor Yee will design and synthesize single molecule magnets based on radical ion bridged transition-metal networks from vanadium tetracyanoethylene complexes in solvents, and these compounds function at critical temperatures from 100K to room temperatures. Single molecule magnets are well-defined spin-containing molecules that exhibit slow relaxation when they are spin aligned by external magnetic fields, and as such they have potential capacity for storage of information at near the theoretical minimum size limit. Multidentate ligands, such as cyclopentadienyl, hydrotris(pyrazoyl)borate, triazacyclononane or tris(2-pyridylmethyl)amine and their derivatives will be used to block three or more coordination sites to construct monodisperse high spin molecular squares and boxes and related structures. Other ligand candidates, such as 7,7,8,8- tetracyanoquinodimethane, that are known to serve in a bridging capacity, but do not mediate in magnetic coupling reactions with vanadium carbonyls, will also be evaluated to determine the bridging capacity and magnetic coupling. This award is for the rational synthesis of families of nanoscopic single molecule magnets, which have potential applications in information storage at near the theoretical minimum size limit. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of this project, the proposed research activities will provide education and research opportunities to both graduate and undergraduate students in fields ranging from organic and material chemistry to molecular magnetism doc21517 none This grant is funded in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NIRT. Fluidization and transport of micron-sized powder materials are routine unit operations for large-scale manufacturing and processing of a variety of particulate products in many industries, such as petroleum, chemical, agricultural, food, pharmaceutical and ceramics. While many of these industries can benefit from the unique properties of nanostructured materials, little attention has been paid to the fluidization and transport of nanoparticles. In this proposal, the challenging problem of understanding the physics of fluidization and transport of nanoparticles, in order to be able to process them to manufacture nanocomposites with tailored properties, is addressed. Normally, nanoparticles cannot be fluidized because of the very large interparticle forces that exist between them. Recent research, however, indicates that nanoparticles can be fluidized at gas velocities well above the minimum fluidization velocity of the primary particles without being elutriated, because they form large stable agglomerates. These agglomerates are very porous, allowing for a variety of physical and chemical surface treatments that take advantage of the extremely large surface area of the nanoparticles. The NJIT IIT research program includes experiments to study the flow behavior of nanoparticles in conventional, rotating and circulating fluidized beds. Theoretical modeling and computer simulations, using kinetic theory at various length scales, are also proposed. These models will be used to predict the size and structure of agglomerates of nanoparticles and the flow behavior of nanoparticles in risers. Experiments will also be performed to manufacture nanocomposites with tailored properties by coating fluidized nanoparticles with polymer or by mixing two different species of nanoparticles. The modeling and computer simulations will provide predictive capabilities that will also help in optimization and scale-up. The investigations at NJIT IIT will be complemented by research on the flow of fluids in nanoscale channels cavities, performed by the NIRT group at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Another positive outcome of the research will be the education and training of undergraduate and graduate students in the area of particle technology, a relatively neglected area in engineering education but of extreme technological, economic and environmental importance. This will be accomplished in part by a new course in nanotechnology incorporating the results of the research which will also help in disseminating the results. Moreover, because of the large diversity of NJIT s and IIT s student body, many of the students in the particle technology programs at both institutions, and who will be involved with the proposed research, are women and under-represented minorities. Research and education collaborations and partnerships will also be initiated with academic institutions, industry and government agencies involved with the flow and processing of nanoparticles. Academic collaborations, in addition to that with (WPI) include the Ecole des Mines in Albi, France and Osaka Prefecture University in Japan doc21518 none Carnegie Mellon University is developing an intensive faculty development and capacity building program in the critical area of Information Assurance (IA). The goals of the program are: Help build new capacity or expand existing capacity to offer IA courses and programs at institutions not currently designated as Centers of Academic Excellence by -Enabling participating faculty members from non-CAE institutions to develop expand their knowledge and expertise in the area of Information Assurance - Providing the opportunity for participants to develop the curriculum and course materials to return to their home institutions and teach an introductory, upper-level, undergraduate course in Information Assurance - Enabling participants to integrate security topic and issues into courses already offered. Expand the number of PhD-level researchers in the IA area by - Enabling participants to identify links between their current areas of research and IA - Provide expert guidance and mentoring to help participants begin research projects in IA that are related to their areas of expertise and active research. Carnegie Mellon is a partner with three institutions serving under-represented minorities, and the first cohort to go through the program is comprised eight faculty members from Howard University, Morgan State University (both HBCUs), and the University of Texas at El Paso (an HSI). This program results in the creation or expansion of IA programs at these three institutions, and thereby significantly increase the national capacity for research and education in IA. It also enables partnering institutions to increase participation of under-represented minorities in this critical area doc21519 none Most fundamental cellular processes are controlled at the level of transcription. The extensive knowledge that has been acquired over the past years on the in vivo properties of the trans-acting regulators is contrasted by how little is still known about the in vivo organization, evolution and function of cis-acting regulatory elements. Insertions of transposons have played a crucial role in the evolution of eukaryotic promoters, but the fundaments on how this has impacted gene expression is not known. Previous studies on the control of maize flavonoid biosynthesis have provided the PI with unique tools to investigate the structure and function of cis-acting regulatory elements in their normal in vivo environment. As a model to understand promoter function in vivo, the regulatory region of a structural gene of the pathway (A1) that has been extensively dissected in vitro, and that is a target of at least two well-defined regulatory systems, will be studied. The cis-acting regulatory sequences that are important for the regulation of A1 in vivo will be established, by determining the effect of mutations and deletions of these elements on the expression of A1 in planta, and by exploiting the natural A1 allelic diversity in the Zea. In at least two well-characterized cases, the regulation of A1 becomes under the control of different transposable elements, albeit in exactly opposite ways. The unique understanding of the regulation of A1 makes it ideal to interpret transposable element gene control systems by providing important insights into the molecular bases of epigenetic phenomena. The PI will investigate whether the transposon insertions override the normal regulation of A1, and also determine whether the transposons provide novel cis-regulatory elements. Finally, the PI will examine which components of the corresponding transposases participate in the novel regulatory patterns displayed by the A1 alleles containing the transposon insertions. Taken together, these studies should provide one of the most comprehensive in vivo studies done on the regulatory region of a plant gene. Because of the uniqueness of the genetic and molecular tools available, the findings derived from these studies could be fundamental to the general field of regulation of gene expression doc21520 none Degertekin The capability of operating in liquid environments has been one of the key reasons for the atomic force microscope s (AFM) indisputable role in the recent advances in nanoscience and nanotechnology. This capability has not only enabled imaging biological samples and observation of biological and chemical processes at the nanoscale, but also led to the development of many microcantilever-based devices in the area of biosensing and proteomics. The liquid environment presents significant challenges to the operation of the AFM, especially in dynamic imaging modes such as tapping mode, and fast imaging applications. As compared to air, the liquids provide a more efficient coupling medium for mechanical perturbations. Hence regular piezoelectric actuation of the AFM cantilever results in spurious resonant signals due to the liquid filled cavity surrounding the sample and the actuator structure. Several novel actuators, based on magnetic, electrostatic, and thin-film piezoelectric techniques have been developed to solve this problem, but these methods severely limit the type of cantilevers and liquids that can be used for experiments. Furthermore, these methods are not suitable for actuation of individual cantilevers in an array, an important capability required for biosensing applications. This exploratory research proposal aims to remove these important obstacles in the implementation of a versatile AFM for applications in liquids using a novel microcantilever actuation technique. The technique uses the acoustic radiation force generated by collimated high frequency (100-400MHz) acoustic waves directed to the AFM cantilever to actuate the cantilever in the DC-MHz frequency range. Promising initial results using the technique have been recently obtained and presented in the proposal. Based on these results, the following objectives are proposed: -Design and microfabrication of individual and arrays of acoustic radiation pressure (ARP) actuators: The actuators will be fabricated on silicon substrates using a thin Zinc Oxide film to generate acoustic waves around 250MHz and silicon micromachining techniques will be used to fabricate acoustic Fresnel lenses to direct the acoustic beams to AFM cantilevers. -Integration of the actuator to a widely available commercial AFM system: A fluid-cell including an ARP actuator will be manufactured and used on a commercial AFM system with appropriate electronics. -Evaluation of the capabilities and limitations of the integrated actuator: The performance of the ARP actuator for fast imaging, as well as array operation will be tested and compared with conventional methods. -Study of possible adverse effects of the ARP actuator: Interaction of high frequency acoustic waves with biological processes will be explored on several important samples and the actuator design will be improved accordingly. Successful implementation of this project will impact numerous areas of nanoscience and engineering, because it will help researchers in the testing and implementation of innovative ideas and in probing a wider variety of biological and chemical processes at the nanoscale doc21521 none Wolfgang Porod and Gary H. Bernstein NER: Computing Architectures for Coupled Nanomagnets We explore the feasibility of developing computing architectures implemented in magnetically-coupled arrays of nanometer-sized dots and pillars. Similar to the electronic Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata (QCA) scheme, which was previously developed by the Notre Dame group, information is encoded in the magnetization of single-domain permanent-magnet structures, and the physical interaction between neighboring magnets provides the local connectivity. The main goal of this project is to investigate how logic functions can be realized in structured arrays of coupled nanomagnets. We propose a joint theoretical and experimental approach to explore the feasibility of such magnetic QCA-like architectures for computing and signal processing. Once feasibility of elementary logic functions is established, one may envision special-purpose cellular processor cells composed of coupled nanoscale magnetic sensors and memories. The robustness of such magnetic systems opens the potential for applications where nanometer-sized, yet rugged, systems are required with a wide range of operating temperatures doc21522 none Advanced composite materials are widely utilized because of their low weight and relatively high strength and stiffness. Traditional composites rely on the use of macro or micro-scale reinforcements to increase their properties and performance. Through the use of nano-scale reinforcements and structures, either alone or in conjunction with macro-scale structures, composites with superior mechanical, transport, and environmental properties and performance characteristics can be developed. It is necessary however, to understand the fundamental phenomena behind nano-reinforcement in the form of a phase as well as scaling issues if this technology is to be effectively applied. Modeling analyses that focus on viscoelasticity and molecular-level anisotropy and heterogeneity will support this investigation and the scaling of material properties on a nano micro macro level. Therefore, the proposed research will investigate the trinity of nanoscale structures, nanoscale processes in the environment, and manufacturing processes at the nanoscale. The development of nanotechnology represents a fundamental change in the way materials are designed, manufactured, and envisioned. The realization of the above research objectives will be accomplished through the development of a diverse and global team that will incorporate experts from both industry and academia, with diverse areas of expertise (polymer chemistry, polymer physics, interfacial and surface science, advanced composite materials, and environmental science) and age groups varying from scientists with many years of experience down to graduate and undergraduate students. The team will consist of three nodes, in the US, Korea and Switzerland. The diverse nature of this team will allow for a global investigation of this project on many levels and from many angles in an unprecedented fashion. Furthermore, it will provide unique opportunities to students and young researchers in the rapidly developing field of nanotechnology. Interdisciplinary teams are needed to study nanotechnology and are also needed to educate people about the advancements and varying disciplines in this field doc21523 none Park This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 01-157, in the NIRT category. The proposal focuses on a convergent multi-investigator experimental and theoretical program to investigate fundamental electronic and magnetic properties of molecular inorganic clusters and to explore their device applications. This proposal represents the synergistic collaboration between (i) the synthesis of novel inorganic clusters with diverse electronic and magnetic properties engineered via judicious control of synthetic parameters, (ii) the fabrication and characterization of prototype electronic devices built from individual clusters and low-dimensional cluster arrays, (iii) the electronic and magnetic characterization of cluster arrays using state-of-the-art measurements, and finally (iv) the development of detailed understanding of cluster properties using high-level theoretical calculations, which will, in turn, guide the design of molecules and molecular electronic devices. The proposed research is firmly grounded upon the expertise and strengths of participating PIs that have already been demonstrated. The synergy between their efforts is expected to result in a fundamental understanding of the electronic and magnetic properties of molecular magnetic clusters, which, in turn, may lead to the applications toward novel molecular electronic and magnetic devices. The proposed collaboration between synthesis and characterization efforts will provide detailed experimental information on the electronic and magnetic properties of new molecular magnetic clusters, which can then be fed back into the cluster synthesis efforts to engineer desired characteristics. Moreover, the interplay between theory and experiment will allow for the development of a fundamental understanding of electron and spin motion in these clusters and will therefore aid the design of clusters with novel properties and devices with new functionalities. The PI s expect that a synergy between synthesis, characterization, device fabrication, and theoretical calculations will ultimately provide important insight into the viability of single-cluster memory devices and spin-electronic (spintronic) devices using ordered inorganic cluster arrays. The proposed research effort will provide powerful educational opportunities for students at Harvard and Berkeley by exposing them to a broad collaboration that encompasses synthesis, characterization, device fabrication, as well as theoretical calculations. The collaboration between Harvard, Berkeley, and IBM will also provide a unique setting in which undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate students can participate in a collaborative interdisciplinary research effort in nanoscience and technology, while also being exposed to research at world-class academic and industrial research institutions. This unique opportunity, which won t be available to students without this collaboration, will surely broaden their vista and be of aid in their career decisions. This Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) project is co-funded by the National Science Foundation Divisions of Electrical and Communications Systems (ENG), Chemistry (MPS), Materials Research (MPS), and Grant Opportunity for Academic Liaison with Industry (ENG doc21524 none NER Proposal # PI: Faquir Jain Nanochannel FETs and Quantum Dot based Nonvolatile Memory Cells using Site-Specific and Layer-by-Layer Self-Assembly Techniques This proposal aims at forming nanochannels (10-30 nm length with ~100nm width), using SiOx-Si nanomasks deposited via site-specific self-assembly, to fabricate FETs with enhanced performance. In addition, it seeks to develop quantum dot based nonvolatile memory cell structures in floating gate and floating trap configurations. These nonvolatile memory cells are proposed to be grown using layer-by-layer self-assembly of ZnS-cladded CdSe or ZnCdSe quantum dots (with core diameter ~3-5nm). The final goal is the integration of FETs with nonvolatile memory cells to design programmable circuits doc21525 none With support of the National Science foundation, Dr. Ronald Towner and his colleagues will conduct archaeological tree-ring research at prehistoric cliff dwellings in the remote Sierra Madre of northern Sonora, Mexico. These spectacular structures rival the more famous cliff dwellings of US Southwest in size and construction techniques, but have received virtually no attention from scientists. Our team of US and Mexican dendrochronologists and archaeologists will collect tree-ring samples and archaeological data from these enigmatic structures in order to (a) develop an absolutely dated annual tree-ring sequence for northern Mexico and (b) generate baseline archaeological information, such as detailed site maps, for the previously undocumented cliff dwellings. The development of absolutely dated tree-ring sequences in the area will be a major advance toward providing Christian calendar dates for many archaeological sites in northern Mexico. Such a breakthrough will help historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists delineate important aspects of the development and decline of complex societies in Mexico, such as Casas Grandes, and illuminate aspects of the interaction between prehistoric societies in the US Southwest and northern Mexico. By dating the rooms and structures, it will be possible to study the behaviors and social organization of the site inhabitants and, on a larger scale, examine issues such as migration, trade, and the transfer of technologies and ideas between prehistoric groups in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. In addition, the baseline archaeological data will provide important information relevant to current and future research questions and management decisions by the Mexican government regarding these irreplaceable pieces of their national patrimony. The project will also help Mexican scientists learn tree-ring sample collection techniques, thus enabling them to conduct future research at sites in northern Sonora and Chihuahua. Finally, the project tree-ring samples themselves contain important environmental information. The many tree species used in the cliff dwellings are different than those found in the United states and exhibit different growth patterns. These patterns are a result of somewhat different climatic regimes in northern Mexico and will help in identifying climatic relationships between the US Southwest and northern Mexico. The absolutely dated ring sequences, therefore, will contribute significantly to future studies of past hemispheric climatic variability and models of short- and long-term weather phenomena such as the southwestern monsoons, El Nino, and La Nina doc21526 none This proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF 01-157. The research team will develop a broadly applicable conceptual framework to describe how tension on a DNA polymer can produce both the tuning and switching phenomena observed in DNA polymerase motors. This work entails developing theoretical models for the interaction of external forces with the conformational dynamics of the motor. It is also necessary to understand how molecular anisotropy in combination with the energy from a non-equilibrium chemical reaction biases Brownian fluctuations to drive the motor in a preferred direction. Like any nanoscale device, Brownian motors derive great benefit by working with rather than against thermal noise. In addition to constructing an appropriate theoretical framework and demonstrating its utility for the interpretation of single molecule experiments, the team hopes to translate insight gained from the study of biological motors to the design and control of engineered motors that perform specific functions at the nanoscale. The broad impact of this work is that it may not only shed new light on the mechanism by which DNA replication is controlled in cells but also lead to novel strategies for controlling molecular scale processes and the function of nanodevices. The project is jointly funded by the Divisions of Physics and Chemistry in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate and the Division of Electrical and Communications Systems in the Engineering Directorate doc21527 none of the effect and its possible applications. We propose to expand these experiments to study single-photon tunneling effect in well-controlled geometries, by making use of ion-beam milling fabrication techniques. Based on this research we are going to explore a number of novel device ideas in the areas of optical communications and quantum optics doc21528 none This proposal was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NIRT. This project is aimed at developing new classes of metal-dielectric nanostructured materials and their applications in photonics, spectroscopy and optoelectronics. Metal nanostructures are capable of supporting various plasmon modes, which can result in high local fields and thus in dramatic enhancement of optical responses. Such plasmonic nanostructures act like nanoantennas accumulating and building up the electromagnetic energy in small nanometer scale areas. The dramatic enhancement of optical cross-sections resulting from such energy concentration opens new avenues for numerous applications of metal nanostructures. A number of new phenomena and their applications in photonics and optoelectronics will be studied in this project. Those include negative refraction in left-handed materials based on metal nanowires, photonic band-gap materials using metal nanostructures, plasmon-enhanced nonlinear photodetectors, disorder-induced localization of plasmons and fractal sensors for detecting molecules, light-gated optical transmitters, photonic nano-circuits and nano-chips. This interdisciplinary research brings together experts in the physics of plasmonic nanomaterials (Prof. Shalaev), femtosecond pulse-shaping spectroscopy and ultafast photonics (Prof. Weiner), and fabrication of plasmonic (Prof. Wei) and optoelectronic (Prof. Melloch) nanomaterials. A successful program in plasmonic nanomaterials, supported by synergistic activities with the Birck Nanotechnology Center and Center for Sensing Science and Technology at Purdue, will accelerate the development of a multidisciplinary Nano-photonics Program. The proposed research will integrate and infuse cutting-edge research in the emerging areas of photonics and nanotechnology with top-flight education and training doc21529 none This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 01-157, in the NER category. The proposal focuses on a novel, scanned probe approach to the growth of superconducting MgB2 wires and quantum dots. Superconductive electronics has immense appeal since it can be extremely fast and possesses inherently low power dissipation. The 39 K transition temperature of MgB2 in concert with its negligible grain boundary scattering (the central limitation of the copper oxide superconductors) make it the most ideal material known for high temperature superconductive nanoelectronics. MgB2 electronic devices with a minimum feature size of 100 nm have already been made using conventional fabrication techniques. Our approach will use a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to directly react Mg with B in the presence of an intense tip-induced electric field. This approach has been used to locally oxide metals with features as small as 5 nm. Our project will attempt to apply this technique to the growth of MgB2. The project will require the growth of very pure, thin boron films, the identificationof efficient chemical precursors for scanned probe growth, the use of an ultrahigh vacuum STM for scanned growth, photolithography to produce submicron scale contact pads and low noise, low current cryogenic measurements of resulting devices. In addition to its very small ultimate feature size, the STM approach permits the direct fabrication of arbitrary shaped structures without the complications of conventional lithography. Several important physical problems will be explored. In extremely narrow wires, thermal and quantum fluctuations will play a crucial role in the conduction process. In a quantum dot geometry the discreteness of electrical charge becomes paramount. In a device made from a complex superconductor like MgB2 these processes are only partially understood but will have a direct bearing on the operation of future nanoscale devices. A frontier scientific question that will be explored here is how the mechanism for superconductivity itself can be altered at in sufficiently small devices. There is growing evidence that MgB2 is an admixture of two interpenetrating superconductors. How this unique two gap behavior is affected by shrinking the size of the system, and what new possibilities it holds for device operation and for designing new superconductors will all be questions that we hope to initiate with this project doc21530 none Eom This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 01-157, in the NIRT category. The proposal focuses on understanding intrinsic phenomena governing spin transport at the nanoscale, and the development of new methods for its manipulation for future spin-controlled, magneto-electronic, devices. It addresses one of the most exciting aspects of current research on next-generation electronic devices: the manipulation of spin, rather than only electrical charge. The advantages of these magnetoelectronic devices include nonvolatility, faster switching in static memory elements, and higher density due to a simpler device structure. These issues become even more important as technology drives device sizes toward the nanoscale, where new fundamental physical effects emerge that alter spin transport, as well as high-frequency dynamics and switching times. An understanding of these issues at the nanoscale requires single-crystal magnetic heterostructures with atomically-sharp interfaces, patterned to nanometer dimensions. This proposal probes nanoscale spin transport phenomena in epitaxial magnetic oxide nanostructures grown with atomic-layer control, whose magnetic, electronic, and interfacial properties are tuned at will. Layers with defined electronic, magnetic, and morphological characteristics positioned with atomic-layer control in epitaxial systems are used to address crucial fundamental questions in magnetic nanostructures. This research program consists of 1) design, growth, and characterization of epitaxial magnetic oxide heterostructures with atomic layer control by pulsed laser deposition with in-situ real-time structural analysis 2) high-resolution and analytical TEM to determine atomic structure and electronic properties of the interfaces; 3) nanoscale patterning of novel magnetic heterostructures below 50 nm; 4) scanning probe measurements of topography and local electronic properties; 5) education and outreach efforts with a focus on introducing young people to modern, multidisciplinary science and technology, using the research direction as a vehicle. The multidisciplinary, multiuniversity industry team consists of members working in Materials Science, Physics, Electrical Engineering, and device development. Research, education, and outreach all follow the theme of nanoscale structures, novel phenomena, and spin transport control. This work will build a scientific foundation for the understanding of new phenomena in nanoscale spin-controlled devices. The PIs industrial and multidisciplinary interactions will be very beneficial in advancing research as well as in educating students. This study will also provide fundamental guidelines in the atomic-scale control of nanoscale systems such as ferroelectrics and oxide-semiconductor integration that are important for next-generation technology doc21531 none NER: Social and Ethical Dimensions of Nanotechnology Project # Michael Gorman, University of Virginia The best time to make certain a technological revolution will be beneficial to society is in the beginning. Progress in nanotechnology requires cooperation among engineers, scientists, ethicists and social scientists focused on advancing the field in a way that promises the maximum benefit to society. This exploratory-type award amounts to proof of concept effort concerning the ability of the interdisciplinary team at the University of Virginia to work together on a NIRT project to develop new directions in the understanding of societal implications of nanotechnology. Two specific elements are involved. The first step is initiation of a new research project in the MRSEC. This project is defined by interaction among the co-PIs and involves a new graduate student who is interested in societal dimensions of nanotechnology. She is conducting a new project in the MRSEC and the work reflects on her own process of enculturation into the laboratory environment--particularly the social and ethical dimensions of her project choices and research. An outside consultant is assisting in the training of student in participant observation techniques and methodologies.. This shared supervision is a model for what we hope to accomplish with a NIRT award. The second element involves the development of case studies related to the societal implications of new nano-technologies within the MRSEC. To engage current graduate students, the project provides $ awards for 4 students. They are to develop case-studies for presentation in Rosalyne Berne s section of TCC 401 to about 60 engineering undergraduates in their fourth year, and also in Mike Gorman s first-year honors course for entering engineers. The objective is production of two case-studies, each prepared by a team consisting of one MRSEC graduate student and one student with an appropriate STS background, either in our systems engineering ethics option or from the Institute for Practical Ethics. The case-studies cover social and ethical dilemmas in nanotechnology research that are extrapolations from current research. This pairing process is a first step towards the kind of longer-term pairing of MRSEC and STS students called for in our proposal. The end result of all of these efforts will be a demonstration that a focus on societal dimensions can enhance the value of the scientific research produced by a MRSEC. Ethics are not just overhead, i.e., an important activity that diverts scientists and engineers from their real work. Nanotechnology will fail to realize its full promise if social dimensions are not built into the research program. GMOs are an example: a technology designed to feed the world that is being rejected by much of the world on ethical grounds. Nanotechnology risks mistaking technological possibility for social opportunity. Research into societal dimensions is therefore critical to the success of nanotechnology doc21532 none It is proposed to conduct experimental research to investigate the relationship between Brownian motion and shear induced migration in biomedical microdevices. And to use the Brownian motion to characterize the temperature of the system. It is also planned to develop an interdiscidplinary course with the co-PI who is a faculty member of the English Department to help educate non-science students on nanoscale technologies doc21533 none This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NER. Nanoparticle-supported (10-100 nm in diameter) catalysts that can be removed by the application of a magnetic force will be developed. The magnetic capability of the nanoparticles provides a way for simple and efficient recovery of the catalysts by using a magnetic field. The required features of magnetic nanoparticles for use as effective catalyst supports include chemical inertness, weak inter-particle interaction, large magnetic permeability, high saturation magnetization, and flexibility for surface chemical modification. Spinel ferrite nanoparticles offer an excellent platform for design and control of magnetic properties to satisfy these criteria. These materials derive their unique magnetic properties from their nanoscopic size, which prevents the formation of multiple domains within a nanoparticle, allowing each nanoparticle to behave like a single paramagnetic atom with a giant magnetic moment. Furthermore, it is possible to control the magnetic properties of these materials by adjusting their composition at the atomic level. Therefore, it is possible to tailor the magnetic properties of the nanoparticles for specific applications. Each nanoparticle will have a thin silica coat, which is functionalizable and chemically inert. If successful, this research would lay the groundwork for an entirely new class of highly active polymerization catalysts that could allow for the recovery and reuse of these organometallic catalysts doc21534 none Cushing The project entails a theoretical and experimental study that examines nonlinear population dynamics phenomena in the context of stochasticity and that addresses fundamental concepts of how stochastic and nonlinear forces combine to produce observed population phenomena. The methodology involves an interdisciplinary effort that features a thorough integration of biologically based modeling (deterministic and stochastic), mathematical and numerical analyses of model dynamics, and the derivation and application of statistical techniques for connecting models with data (including parameter estimation and model evaluation). The investigators study the fundamental question about how (demographic) stochasticity at the individual level propagates to the population level. A promising class of models that incorporates both demographic and environmental stochasticity is pursued. A variety of statistical and mathematical questions that arise from these studies are investigated. The validity of this modeling methodology and accuracy of a priori model predictions is directly testable by experiments. The project study includes an experimental test of this modeling approach to demographic and environmental stochasticity, using a laboratory model that the investigators have successfully used in a wide variety of population dynamics and modeling studies during the last decade. The modeling methodology is also applicable to field populations and the investigators pursue the development of field studies with several researchers who have expressed interest in such a collaboration. These collaborators include colleagues at (1) the Center for Environmental Analysis at California State University, Los Angeles in a project modeling the spatially structured dynamics of seashore species, (2) the University of California, Davis in a project to model a lupine-caterpillar-nematode system, (3) Andrews University on mathematical statistical models of the distribution of marine birds and mammals on Protection Island National Wildlife Refuge in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and (4) the Virginia Institute of Marine Science on nonlinear models of the blue crab in the Exuma Cays. An understanding of the dynamics of biological populations is fundamental to the understanding of ecological and environmental problems. Mathematical models can be a valuable tool that provides this understanding. They can also provide the means to predict the future of ecosystems and the species that they include. An accurate descriptive and predictive capability gained through mathematical models provides not only a basic understanding of ecological problems, but also the ability to design programs for the assessment, management, and control of ecosystems and for the solution of environmental problems. A fundamental difficulty in the application of mathematical models to ecological problems has been the lack of a close connection of models with biological data. A key problem is the ability of models to incorporate random effects and disturbances. The investigators extend, analyze, and apply a modeling methodology they have developed during a decade of experimental studies, in a controlled laboratory setting, that addresses these difficulties. The methods are not restricted to laboratory populations, however, and the project also includes collaborations with new colleagues for the purpose of applying the methods to field studies of natural populations doc21535 none Seif Description: This award is for support of a joint research project by Dr. Mohamed A. Seif, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Northern Illinois University (NIU), Dekalb, Illinois, and Dr. Usama Khashaba, Department of Mechanical Design and Production Engineering, and Dr. Gamal Nawara, Research and Graduate Studies, both at Zagazig University, Zagazig, Egypt. With the wide use of composite materials in structural components, it has become necessary to drill holes into laminates to facilitate bolting or riveting to the main load-bearing structures. Stress concentration, delamination and microcracking are the main problems associated with drilled holes, which significantly reduce the composites performance. The PIs will investigate the effect of the drilling parameters on the mechanical properties of composites. This includes the effect of different cutting conditions (feeds and speeds), machining operations (CNC, laser, and water jet), and the size and shape of the drills. The influence of the quality of the hole on the notched strength, pin bearing strength and bolted joint strength under uniaxial static and fatigue loading conditions will also be examined. Special interest will also be given to study the joint performance under various assembly conditions such as the bolt tightening torque, the washer size, the bolt clearance, and the diameter width ratio. Optical microscopes, SEM, and laser measurement techniques will be used in this investigation. Scope: This project will help in establishing a better understanding of the behavior of bolted joints in composite materials. In addition, the development of engineering models will contribute to improve basic studies of composite materials under various operational conditions. The collaboration involves an established and experienced U.S. scientist in the field and two researchers in a relatively small university in Egypt as well as a number of industrial organizations in that country doc21536 none Thin films can become unstable at thicknesses below 100 nm, due to attractive van der Waals (VDW) interactions. This problem is particularly severe in conducting and semiconducting polymers, which have large Hamaker constants. VDW instability results in dewetting and must be avoided in nanoscale film processing. Yet, robust methods for preventing VDW instability in these systems have not emerged. A failure to develop strategies to control instability places severe limits on the use of conducting polymer thin films at nanoscale dimensions. To address this critical limitation, this research will explore an innovative method to stabilize nanoscale conducting insulating film bilayers. Research Plan and Significance. Nanoscale conducting polymer devices require multilayered junctions of conducting insulating interfaces. VDW instability is likely to occur at these junctions due to Hamaker constant mismatch. This research will develop an exploratory method to prevent VDW instability at polymer bilayer conductor insulator interfaces. The lack of previous research and theory on nanoscale conductive polymer wetting stability leads to the exploratory, high-risk nature of this project. The risk is increased by the experimental difficulty in maintaining consistent substrate chemistry over the many samples needed to test hypotheses. To overcome this limitation in experimental efficiency, a high-throughput measurement method will be used for feasibility studies of bilayer stability. Specific Aims: 1) The parameters required to prevent VDW instability will be determined for a model bilayer thin film system: poly(3-undecybithiophene) (PUBT) polystyrene (PS), and 2) Stability measurements will be compared to a Hamaker constant model to ascertain its effectiveness in predicting stability of nanoscale bilayers. Outcomes. The proposal work will provide the first systematic measurements of VDW stability of insulator semiconductor and insulator conductor thin film bilayers. This exploration will set important limitations and demonstrate the feasibility of incorporating nanoscale conductor insulator junctions in device architectures. Educational Plan and Significance. The educational goal of the PI is to increase the content, breadth, and inclusiveness of the instructional process for surface and colloid science at Georgia Tech. To meet these needs this research will supplement the PI s continuing educational thrusts: Development of a graduate course in surface and colloid science chemical engineering Internet-available surface lecture examples for undergraduate engineering courses Active recruitment of the local community, minority, and under-represented students in engineering research doc21537 none Nanoscale materials offer many potential technological applications due to the unusual properties inherent in these materials compared to their traditional macroscale analogues. Conducting polymers are prime targets for nanoscale synthesis as their conductivity is greatly enhanced by highly oriented morphologies. In this proposal, The PI s show for the first time that oriented polyaniline (PANI) nanowires, with almost uniform radii, have been oxidatively synthesized on highly ordered pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) and on mica using an adsorbed surfactant template. They have also synthesized similar structures, but not as ordered, using polypyrrole. The dimensions of the synthesized structure vary depending on the substrate. If a way can be determined to produce conducting nanowires with almost uniform radii so that their center-to-center distances are regular and controllable, then this would have substantial impact in many areas, particularly in the microelectronics industry. The important technological discovery that has allowed them to make these advances is the fact that adsorbed monolayers of surfactant can form very unique structures at the solid-liquid interface. The type of structures range from cylinders, spheres and flat bilayers on hydrophilic surfaces, to half cylinders, half spheres and monolayers on hydrophobic surfaces. Using the results of work done by others, they were able to choose a specific surfactant structure as a patterning template. Their experiments have been successful, in the specific case of adsorbed half-cylinders the resulting film also has what appears to be a half-cylinder morphology for certain polymers and surfaces. The dimensions of the fillers have been measured to be between 50 and 100 nm in diameter, and as long as 150 microns. This exciting new discovery and the work described in this grant have all been completed over the last 4 months. Although AFM micrographs clearly support their claims, their understanding of some critical issues is not complete. For example, the structures vary significantly in dimension (height and width) depending on the substrate and monomer that is used. The wires coalesce; one of the most important issues is to understand why these wires coalesce, and determine, if possible, a way to reduce or arrest coalescence. They know almost nothing about the properties of these nanowires, including their conductivity, and clearly the properties of the wires is extremely important. This grant will enable them to explore all of these issues and help them to achieve the ultimate goal, the synthesis of fully dispersed nanowires oriented in one direction over very large length scales doc21538 none The self-assembly of nanostructures on surfaces and in porous media has been studied extensively by experiment, and is of interest in a wide range of applications, including optical and biological sensors, lithography, fabrication of nano-scale devices, and biomimetic materials. Despite this wide interest, the few attempts to develop theories and simulation methods for these systems give a poor account of the formation of the nano-structures and the effects of major variables (surfactant architecture, nature of surface, temperature, concentration, etc.) on them; some trends (e.g. temperature dependence) are predicted to be the opposite of those found experimentally. The aim of this project is to carry out a one year feasibility study to develop and evaluate a new multi-scale molecular simulation strategy to predict the equilibrium behavior of nano-structures formed from non-ionic surfactants on planar surfaces and in nano-pores. The simulations will cover size ranges from sub-Angstrom to hundreds of nanometers by using a combination of ab initio, atomistic simulation, and discretized lattice Monte Carlo simulation methods. By optimizing the lattice discretization and intermolecular potentials, the PI hopes to develop an approach that can predict not only the nanostructures that form, but the influence of temperature, composition, solvent, surfactant architecture, nature of the solid surface, and morphology of the pore structure, on the self-assembled structures. The challenge will be to include a sufficient level of molecular detail and sophistication in the model, while preserving sufficient simplicity that calculations can be made in a reasonable time on current computers. The feasibility of the method will be evaluated by comparison with experimental data. Criteria for success will include (a) correct prediction of qualitative trends of property behavior (adsorption, structures, aggregate size, heats) with variation in temperature, concentration, type of surface, etc., (b) quantitative agreement with experiment, and (c) computational burden of the calculations doc21539 none of the nanotube will facilitate analysis of the structure in an optical field. This will enhance their understanding of the results of optical measurements and will also point to uses of nanotubes as components of a nano-optical system. Near-field microscopy is one application of particular interest here and will be investigated in some depth. Practical applications of the theory will cover a great breadth of fields ranging from near-field microscopy to integrated optics doc21540 none With the support of the Organic Dynamics Program in the Chemistry Division, Kathleen Morgan of the Department of Chemistry at Xavier has begun a study of the Cope Rearrangement, which is a reaction where new carbon-carbon bonds are made with high regio- and stereo selectivity, via the reorganization of a 1,5-hexadiene. The goal of this study is to determine whether the reaction rate can be accelerated with the attachment of cationic substituents on the reactive core of the system. The formation of carbon-carbon bonds is at the heart of organic chemistry, yet there are a limited number of ways to construct them. The creation of the carbon-based skeleton often represents much of the challenge in synthesis. The Cope Rearrangement has been much studied and heavily exploited in synthesis and yet we are still not able to claim that it is fully understood or that it has reached its full potential in synthetic applications. The experimental and theoretical study of the Cope rearrangement of 1,5 hexadienes bearing electron-withdrawing groups at the 3 position is a well-defined project that has the potential to yield fundamental insights into this rearrangement and extend the full synthetic utility of this reaction. Because of the importance of carbon-carbon bond making, this project creatively blends literature, theory, and wet chemistry in order to increase understanding of the chemistry and produce novel methodology. . Professor Kathleen Morgan, of the Department of Chemistry at Xavier University, with the support of the Organic Dynamics Program, will conducted her research at an historically black undergraduate university (HBCU). Undergraduates are capable of performing the majority of the proposed research. The preliminary results were obtained by more than a dozen undergraduates at Professor Morgan s previous institution. Underrepresented students will have the opportunity to participate in all aspects of this fundamental research including the synthesis of organic compounds using a series of known procedures, development of new reactions, purification and characterization of products, determination of reaction rates by spectroscopy, and computational studies doc21541 none Guo This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 01-157, in the NER category. The focus of this proposal is to study the electrical properties of a special class of molecules, namely, conjugated polymer wires, and to implement transistor structures based on the field effect. Devices based on organic materials have been identified as one alternative for future electronics. The attractive features of molecular electronics are that it provides an opportunity to study a new group of materials on the molecular level, while offering us a whole new micro- and nanoelectronics technology. Currently there are two areas of research in organic electronics, one is molecular electronics, and the other is organic thin film transistor. In the molecular electronics area, there have been several successful demonstrations of experimental working devices. One of the biggest challenges, however, in the application of molecular electronic device is the difficult in connecting individual molecules to form functional circuits. As a result, practical applications of molecular devices have been primarily aimed at memory circuits, where the circuit s layout is relatively simple. In another area, researches on organic thin film transistors (TFTs) based on conjugated polymers and oligomers have been conducted for over a decade, and have been envisioned as an alternative to the more traditional a-Si TFTs. However the extremely low mobility of these organic films has presented an immense challenge, and placed serious limitation to its practical application. Recognizing the technical difficulty in these two ends, we propose to use three types of conjugated macromolecules to implement transistor structures. These molecules are semiconducting conjugated polymers that are in the form of long rigid wires. The PIs will synthesize and fabricate the device such that the two ends of the molecule will covalently bond to the source drain electrodes. Through a systematic study of this type of molecular transistor, they would like to address both the device performance issues such as whether these semiconducting wires can offer sufficient conductance and drive capability for practical applications, as well as their extendibility to implement simple molecular circuits based on the operation principle of field effect transistor. In comparison with conventional semiconductor devices, a remarkable aspect of molecular wires is that their response may be dominated by quantum coherence effect, possibly even at high temperature. So the proposed molecular wire transistor can also help to understand many outstanding questions on transport phenomenon in such structures. They believe that with advanced nanofabrication technologies and the organic synthesis expertise of this NER team, they are in a unique position to realize the proposed molecular wire transistor, and to study various transport properties in this new class of molecular electronics doc21542 none This Nanoscale Exploratory Research (NER) proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 01-157). The goal of the project is to form superlattice nanostructures using electrochemical atomic layer epitaxy (EC-ALE). EC-ALE is based on surface limited electrochemical reactions, and is complementary to traditional techniques such as MBE and VPE, with the possibility of deposition on odd-shaped surfaces such as tubes, and strongly reduced diffusion, since the process takes place at room temperature. Specific research objectives are: 1. Growth of compound semiconductor superlattices. 2. Electrodeposition of compounds on nano array electrodes. 3. Growth of superlattice nanocrystals. 4. Studies of delta doping. The impact and significance of this project may be summarized as follows. There is a strong demand for increased package density of electronic structures, combined with a trend to electrochemical processes for production in the chip industry. The search for improved optoelectronic materials, like photovoltaic cells and infrared detectors is actively pursued in both the private and government sector. On the scientific front, the interest in nanostructured materials continues to rise, based on the large parameter-space available to engineer novel materials. EC-ALE offers unique approaches to the deposition of nanoscale structures, and access to materials that cannot readily be produced by MBE or VPE. The proposed project relies on both the deposition and characterization of nanostructured semiconductors. A cross-disciplinary approach is taken, combining aspects of Chemistry and Physics. %%% The project addresses basic exploratory research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area. The project is co-supported by the MPS DMR and MPS CHE Divisions doc21543 none In this Nanoscale Exploratory Research (NER), co-supported by the Divisions of Materials Research and of Bioengineering and Environmental Systems, a new nanofabrication is proposed for developing nano-composite polymer materials for biomedical sensing. These materials will be produced by controlled radical polymerization copolymerizaiton using cross-linkable self-assembled monolayers on gold colloidal nanoparticles as templates. The resulting shell-crosslinked core-shell nanoparticles are designed for making long-term implantable biosensors that may be used as tattoo dyes for noninvasive repetitive or real-time optical readout. The objective of this proposal is to create nano-sized, affinity sensing interfaces for glucose that are capsulated within biocompatible polymer hydrogel shells. The polymer shells will minimize nonspecific bindings at the molecular recognition site and improve the longevity and biocompatibility of the glucose sensor. The small size of the capsules and the large effective sensing surface should allow for improvements in the selectivity, dynamic range, and mass transport (speed) of affinity-based biosensing interfaces in general. This method will also greatly improve the structural homogeneity of the sensing interfaces by pre-organizing the sensing elements on nanoparticle surfaces. The nanophotonic properties of the template gold nanoparticles will be utilized as optical detection methods and for selective structural characterization of the proposed encapsulated molecular recognition interfaces doc21544 none The project is a collaborative theoretical and experimental study of self-assembled oxide poly-domain architectures in film substrate heterostructures. The polydomain structures of thin films on substrates are strongly determined by their mechanical constraints: the misfit between the film and substrate, the orientation and local structure of the film substrate interface, and the geometri-cal configuration of the film. The goal of this research is to design controlled polydomain struc-tures through constraint engineering to obtain enhanced functional properties of ferroelectric and ferromagnetic film materials. Different techniques of constraint engineering (modification of film substrate misfit, patterning of films and film substrate interfaces) will be employed to achieve this goal. These techniques will be developed and tested on PbTiO3-Pb(Zn,Ti)O3 (PZT) tetragonal films, which demonstrate strong piezoeffects. Subsequently, the techniques will be ap-plied to films of highly adaptive ferroelectrics with compositions near the morphotropic phase boundary in the PZT system. Polydomain engineering will also be applied to ferromagnetic oxides of the La1-xSrxMnO3 system, which exhibit colossal magneto-resistance and promising mag-netostrictive properties. The research objectives are sought through a combination of theory, modeling and experimental verification of theoretically obtained domain design principles. Theo-retical work will include analysis of internal stresses and energetics of polydomain structures, phase field modeling for non-patterned films, and finite element analysis (FEM) for local stress effects and patterned films. The experimental work will consist of thin-film processing, engi-neering of patterned films, design of polydomain structures and their characterization by X-ray diffraction, electron microscopy, scanning force microscopy and magneto-optical imaging tech-nique. Measurement of electric, magnetic and mechanical properties of films will also be per-formed. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in areas of electronic materials science having technological relevance. An important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education. The combined resources, including experimental and theoretical methods, provide special opportunities for education and training of graduate stu-dents involved in highly interdisciplinary forefront research doc21545 none This project develops the graduate level education and research program in information assurance at Polytechnic University by building on an NSF DUE CCLI project for establishment of an undergraduate laboratory in information systems security. The principal long term goals of this project are to assist in meeting the national demand for a cadre of professionals with expertise in information assurance; to create prototype curricular material in graduate information assurance education that will serve as a widely adopted national model; and to establish an information assurance laboratory that becomes a national model for an experimentation environment providing hands-on experiences in topics related to information assurance. Activities include: revising existing graduate level courses in information assurance to incorporate hands-on practical laboratory based experiences that supplement the theory and principles currently being taught in the classroom; developing new graduate level courses that complement the existing courses and result in a comprehensive curriculum in information assurance; establishing a laboratory consisting of heterogeneous platforms and multiple interconnected networks to facilitate hands-on experimentation and project work in issues related to information assurance; and developing a graduate level certication program in information assurance that focuses both on principles and practice needed to build and maintain a secure information systems infrastructure. The project also includes a detailed evaluation and dissemination plan doc21546 none This interdisciplinary research team will address using a new class of structure directing agents, fluorinated surfactants, for the design of ordered nanoporous metal oxides and organic-inorganic hybrid materials. Fluorinated surfactants provide a novel platform for both templating of and recovery from ordered porous materials because they assemble more readily than hydrocarbon surfactants, form stable phases of low interfacial curvature, and are both hydrophobic and lipophobic. Departing from a traditional technique based on hydrocarbon surfactants we will first systematically explore the effects of fluorinated surfactant structure on the templating of porous silica. With a goal of designing surfactant-templated nanostructures with more tightly controlled pore architecture, this project will integrate molecular simulations, fluorinated surfactant synthesis, phase characterization, and materials synthesis techniques. We also will exploit the selective solubility of fluorinated species in low surface tension fluids (such as supercritical carbon dioxide) to enhance template recovery from nanoporous ceramics. Because fluorinated surfactants can be extracted under mild conditions, their use is expected to improve methods of synthesizing organic-inorganic hybrid materials with nanostructured pores. The co-assembly of molecular precursors allows the synthesis of nanostructured ceramics that approach the functionality and efficiency of biological materials. Functionalizing the pore walls with selected molecular fragments further enhances the potential of these inorganic materials for catalysts, separation materials, sensors and miniaturized diagnostic devices. The synergistic approach to the research and educational activities of this project will advance the fluorosurfactant-based design of new nanosystems by molecular templating and organic functionalization. This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 01-157). The award is jointly supported through two directorates at NSF: (i) Mathematical and Physical Sciences (Division of Materials Research in the Ceramics and Solid-State Chemistry programs) and (ii) Engineering (Division of Design, Manufacture and Industrial Innovation in the Nanomanufacturing program doc21547 none This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering solicitation, NSF 01-157, category NIRT. The goal of this project is to explore the issues of confining spin-polarized charges on the nano-scale, in zero-dimensional (quantum-dot-like) semiconductor geometries. The approach is to do this in III-V- and II-VI-based magnetic semiconductors (such as GaMnAs or ZnMnSe) subjected to a magnetic field that is modulated on the nano-scale. The giant Zeeman splitting characteristic of these materials is expected to exhibit nano-scale modulation resulting in tight localization of spin-polarized states. The idea is to produce such nano-scale field modulation in a magnetic semiconductor (MS) in three ways: (1) by lithographically-patterned ferromagnetic (FM) layers deposited on the MS surface (e.g., sub-micron Co Pt multilayer discs); by depositing and patterning superconducting (SC) overlayers on the MSs, where the magnetic field modulation is achieved as the magnetic flux by-passes the nano-scale SC obstacles due to the Meissner effect; and by using unpatterned SC films, where the field modulation at the MS SC interface is achieved via the Abrikosov vortex lattice, whose lattice constant -and thus the Zeeman-induced quantum dots separation-can be controlled by an external magnetic field. Prior to patterning, the SC films will either be deposited epitaxially, in the same molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) chamber as the MS layers; or ex-situ, by sputtering. Key aspects of the project are: theory, materials growth, lithography, characterization, and development of spintronic concepts. The project is highly collaborative involving researchers at Notre Dame, Purdue, and U. IL at Chicago. Additionally, the Superconductivity and Magnetism Group at Argonne National Laboratory, led by Dr. George Crabtree, will collaborate by providing magneto-transport, near-field magneto-optical mapping, as well as STM and (eventually) spin-polarized STS mapping of the SC-MS hybrid structures. %%% The project addresses basic research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area. In addition to training graduate students in nano-science, undergraduates will also participate in research through senior projects and the NSF REU program. It is also expected that a regular for-credit course on nano-science at the senior and first-year-graduate level will be developed. The project combines experiment and theory, and brings together researchers from physics, electrical engineering, and material science. Activities are designed to develop strong technical, communication, and organizational management skills in undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctorals through unique educational experiences made possible by a forefront research environment. Cross-disciplinary research and site visits between organizations will enhance the education and training process. The project is co-supported by the DMR CMP, DMR EM, and ECS EPDT Divisions Programs doc21548 none This award supports a research project aimed at exploring novel process strategies to develop closed-cell polymer foams that have cell sizes in the range of nanometers. The idea of creating nano-scaled cells in polymeric materials is exciting and largely unexplored. Due to the unique structures, nanofoams are expected to have many properties that are superior to those of existing materials, such as a much higher strength-to-weight ratio. In addition, nanofoams would provide novel functional materials that could be tailored for the needed properties, for example, thermal conductivity, dielectric constant, acoustic and damping coefficients. Nanofoams have the potential to be used for any applications where foamed polymers are currently used, with the benefit of further material savings and improved performance. These novel materials will find a wide range of applications in construction, packaging, motor vehicle, microelectronics, and household products. This research will explore the creation of nanofoams from the PMMA-CO2 system using a solid-state foaming method. The retrograde vitrification phenomenon will be employed to increase the gas diffusivity and solubility. Both conventional solid-state foaming techniques and the stress induced bubble nucleation method will be explored to develop the nanofoaming process. A low temperature and high pressure vessel will be designed and instrumented. Gas solubility and diffusivity will be measured. Properties of the new nanofoam materials, such as the morphology, mechanical properties, and dielectric properties, will be characterized in this research doc21549 none This proposal was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NIRT. It focuses on innovative approaches to nanoscale subsurface spin imaging, including three MRFM (magnetic resonance force microscopy) schemes and one novel non-mechanical spin sensing scheme using giant magnetoresistance (GMR) detection. A research team composed of a condensed matter physicist, a physical chemist, a materials scientist and a theoretical physicist will design and develop nanoscale probes for MRFM as well as MFM (magnetic force microcopy). Carbon nanotube and multi-photon absorption (MPA) fabricated polymer cantilevers, in linear and various forked geometries, will be employed for piezoresistive, optical waveguide and RF impedance detection of specimen spins, with anticipated sensitivities to the single spin level. Novel attogram-sized ferromagnetic nanorods will be synthesized and attached to the cantilevers for use as gradient generators spin probes. In addition to individual magnetic spin sensors, arrays of MRFM sensors will be made, with each sensor having an integrated three-dimensional radio frequency microcoil fabricated via MPA, facilitating spatial and temporal spin correlation measurements toward nanoscale functional MRI. There is much to be gained by advancing spin-detection technology toward the single-spin level, with potential applications in information technology, medicine and scientific exploration. MRFM, which is developing into a most highly sensitive measurement technique, stands to play a major role in this goal. Molecular-scale devices, such as carbon and other types of nanotubes, will play an increasingly important role as well. To reach this goal, several impediments must be obviated, such as thermal noise, the spectral function of which defines a set of parameters to be optimized in the quest for single spin detection, 3-D molecular imaging, dynamic visualization and beyond. Another impediment is the traditional optical detection using visible light, the wavelength of which is larger than the required physical dimensions of the resonating magnetic sensor. The approaches of this program are designed to overcome these obstacles. In addition to the four senior personnel, this interdisciplinary research program will involve numerous graduate students, undergraduates, and select high school students during summer months, covering a broad range of topics such as nanoscale magnetometry, micro and nanofabrication, carbon nanotube synthesis, multi-photon absorption, nanomagnet synthesis, and theoretical aspects of magnetism, nanotubes and semiconductors doc21550 none Proposal No. Principal Investigator: Rajiv K. Singh U Florida, Gainesville Traditional methods of particle classification such as ultrasonic sieves and cyclones do not operate in the submicron range. The PI proposes deelopment of a novel method for particle size classification in the nanoscale range. The method is based on simultaneous application of pulsed and continuous DC electric fields on charged metallic particles in non-acqueous suspensions. In this setup, continuous DC fields are applied in the vertical direction, while pulsed DC field is applied in the horizontal direction. because of the difference in the electrophoretic response of charged particles to pulsed and continuous fields, the particle velocity field will be dependent on the particle size. This principle is used to classify submicron size particles doc21551 none Behavioral analysis of a group decision-making process Thomas D. Seeley One of the most spectacular examples of an animal group functioning as a collective decision-making agent is a swarm of honeybees choosing its future home. This phenomenon occurs in the late spring and early summer when a colony outgrows its hive and proceeds to divide itself by swarming. The swarm bees leave en masse, quickly forming a cloud of bees just outside the parental hive; they then coalesce into a beard-like cluster on a nearby tree branch where they choose their future dwelling place. The nest-site selection process starts with several hundred scout bees flying from the swarm cluster to search for tree cavities that meet the bees real-estate preferences. The scouts then return to the cluster, report their findings by means of waggle dances, and work together to decide which one of the dozen or more possible nest sites that they have discovered should be the swarm s new home. The PI will determine (1) how the scouts in a honey bee swarm work together to make the decision regarding their future nest site, and (2) how they sense when they have finished making this decision. Such group decision making, or social choice, occurs in many species of group-living animals. Unraveling the mechanisms of social choice is essential to understanding how animal groups function and may even lead to novel methods of social choice by humans. A swarm of honey bees choosing its nest site is a striking and accessible form of social choice by animals doc21552 none This proposal was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NIRT. Nano-scale positioning and control technology will be essential both for nanotechnology research instrumentation and for tools dedicated to fabrication and testing of nano-devices, but few, if any, robust and reproducible solutions exist. To realize manufacture of macroscopically useful systems, it is necessary to have mechanisms with geometric precision and accuracy to facilitate the transition from nano-science to productive nanotechnology. This will be particularly important for multi-process manufacture and assembly of complexly shaped mechanisms. The objective of this project is to produce a portable and accurate instrument for sample probe motion that is capable of performing at nanometer levels over protracted time periods. The output of this work will be a compact and highly integrated instrument, capable of reproducibly positioning a macro-sized object such as a silicon wafer over the complete scan area of 50 mm x 50 mm and return to a specified position thereby enabling observations of processes containing nanometer-sized objects as well as the ability to pick and place for multi-component assembly. The instrument would enable nanometer resolution tools to focus on a nano-device placed anywhere over the instruments operating range for applications such as imprint lithography, lithographic self assembly, nanowire circuitry and complex multi-process and multi-scale assemblies. This development will provide a facility for nanotechnology studies in all fields for which fundamental measurements at the limits of current technological capability are an issue, in particular, in the fields of bio-mechanics, nano-electronics and nano-mechanics. Training of future engineers in the emerging field of instrument and machine design for nanotechnology applications will take place both during the development of the instrumentation systems and through subsequent projects and graduate instruction based around the developed facility. It is also envisaged that knowledge of architectures for nanometer mechanism design will be incorporated into graduate precision machine design courses. A new graduate course titled Mechanical systems for nanotechnology is currently being developed and will be offered in the fall semester. Additionally, a project web-site will be developed that will include links to logistical and technical discussion pages specific to this project as well as links to related sites. As part of our outreach to the k-12 community there will be a section providing an overview of this work aimed towards high school level readership doc21553 none This Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) award to University of Nevada Reno is supported by Divisions of Chemistry (MPS), Physics (MPS) and Electronic and Communications Systems (ENG), and this proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 01-157). With this award, Professor Frederick and his team will synthesize a molecular motor that exhibits unidirectional rotary motion upon light absorption. The motor consists of a rotor chromophore geared into a chiral ratchet base. The base and rotor can be functionalized for incorporation into a variety of nanostructures. Motor operation will be modeled by molecular dynamics calculations, and its actuation and positional control will be measured experimentally using polarized light when the motor is immobilized on a surface. The motor also will be incorporated into biopolymers, such as DNA, and measuring light-induced conformational changes will test motor functions. The results of modeling and experimental testing will be used to optimize the molecular design. This motor potentially offers unprecedented positional and temporal control, as well as high rotary speed. Students will learn and do research in molecular design and synthesis, surface immobilization and characterization, polarized laser excitation and fluorescence microscopy, biopolymer techniques, and large molecule dynamics calculations. With this award, a team of research scientists with expertise in organic synthesis, molecular spectroscopy, biophysics, and molecular modeling and dynamics will design, construct, and test a molecule-sized motor, capable of converting light energy into directed mechanical energy. Polarized laser light will be used to drive the motor, potentially offering precise positional control and extremely high rotary speeds. The motor will also be incorporated into large biomolecules, such as DNA, to control their shape and function. Students working on the project will receive advanced training in molecular design and synthesis, laser spectroscopy and microscopy, computer modeling, and molecular biology. Potential applications of these molecular motors include light-controllable drugs, molecule-sized switches and pumps, and friction-free materials, as well as engines and propellers for nano-machines doc21554 none The Principal Investigator will develop a simulation strategy that can be used to elucidate the fundamental principles by which functionalized nanoscale building blocks (NBBs) are assembled into ordered structures using biomolecules as linkers or connectors between the NBBs. Recent pioneering experimental work has demonstrated that suitably functionalized NBBs can be assembled into rather simple ordered structures with specific properties and functionalities using biological or synthetic macromolecules as linkers. For example, nanoscopic gold particles ranging in size from 2 nm to 30 nm and functionalized by DNA, biotin, or synthetic polymers have been shown to assemble into three-dimensional hexatic close-packed structures and spheres extending over hundreds to thousands of nanometers. DNA, in essence a digitally programmable biomolecule, is especially intriguing as an assembler of NBBs because specific linker-linker interactions can be programmed by inserting purposely tailored complementary nucleotide sequences into different DNA strands. Aside from these exciting proof-of-concept studies, however, no systematic knowledge with regard to possible synthesis and processing strategies, nor the range of structures possible, for NBB macromolecule assemblies has been obtained - not even the principal axes of the vast parameter space of these complex systems have been identified. Computer simulations will be instrumental in the effort to define and efficiently map out parameter space and provide fundamental insight to the assembly process. Despite advances in computational power and simulation algorithms, however, the disparate time and length scales that govern the staged, hierarchical ordering processes of NBBs and macromolecules in solution prohibit the immediate application of any one off-the-shelf simulation technique. In this project, the PI will explore several ideas for combining different well-known molecular and or particle-based simulation methodologies with the specific aim of overcoming the disparate time scales on which the NBBs and macromolecule linkers move. She will consider the individual and combined use of several classical molecular or so-called particle-based simulation methods, including molecular dynamics, Brownian dynamics, and off-lattice Monte Carlo, in order to develop an overall simulation strategy capable of simulating NBB biomolecule assemblies with as much chemical fidelity as possible given computational limitations. The focus will be on using DNA as assemblers, but the strategy will generally apply to other macromolecular linkers as well. NBB geometries that the simulation approach will be capable of modeling include spheres and polyhedra (e.g. gold nanoparticles, colloidal silica, Buckyballs, nanoprisms, CdSe quantum dots), nanorods, nanosheets (e.g. clays) and nanoaggregates (e.g. linear chain aggregates). The PI expects the proposed research to provide an important and necessary advance in the ability to model programmed macromolecular assembly of NBBs in general and DNA NBB assemblies in particular. At the end of this one-year project, she will have tested several strategies for simulating DNA-assembled nanoparticle structures, and designed a comprehensive simulation methodology capable of modeling assemblies of NBBs of arbitrary composition and geometry joined by biomolecules or macromolecules of arbitrary chemical structure with classical simulation techniques. This methodology will provide researchers in the field of computational nanoscience with simulation strategies to support detailed investigations in nanoscale systems. Without these strategies, simulation science will likely be unable to contribute significantly to the quest for fundamental understanding and design principles for the self- and guided-assembly of nanoscale building blocks doc21555 none NIRT: Philosophical and Social Dimensions of Nanoscale Research -Developing a Rational Approach to a Newly Emerging Science and Technology Nanoscale science and engineering presents new challenges and opportunities not only to the scientific research community but also to all those who shape its public understanding. As nanoscale researchers claim a middle ground between nano-visionaries and nano-skeptics, the public also seeks a middle ground between overreaching hype and irrational fear. This award is on an exploratory scale and is designed to enable the interdisciplinary research team to develop approaches to two main objectives. First it will develop activities that establish a broad interdisciplinary dialog on nanoscale science and technology that includes the public as well as interested social and natural scientists and engineers. This activity will be built around the NanoCenter of the University of South Carolina. Second, interdisciplinary teams of researchers will begin work on four specific research projects ( task areas ) aimed at elucidating the rational middle ground for understanding nanoscale science and technology. Activities to be pursued as part of the interdisciplinary include: a Summer Workshop on Reading Nano-science and -technology; a Fall Symposium on Nano-science and -technology and the Environment; a Spring Conference Discovering the Nanoscale, that focuses on a science studies audience with the hope of follow-up conference six months later in Darmstadt Germany; a regular series of Nano Lunches on the Columbia campus in fall ; and a website and archive for the project. The pursuit of this first objective allows for the achievement of the second objective, namely to rationally understand nanoscale research at the appropriate middle ground between visionary hype and skeptical or irrational fear. The research team focuses on the concepts of understanding and control, concepts that are central to the rational comprehension of opportunities and risks. Four specific topics will be developed: 1) Stability and Control of Nano-science and -technology (How experimental, theoretical and technological work on the nanoscale produces stable phenomena over which we have significant control); 2) Imagining and Imaging the Nanoscale (How our abilities to imagine the nanoscale (both in words and in drawings) and our abilities to image the nanoscale (specifically with various nanoscale microscopes) interact, and how the pictures of the nanoscale that result effect scientific, technological and public understanding of the nanoscale); 3) Risk and Problems of Self-replication and Cascading Effects with Nanoscale Technology (How to consider and control the special issues of risk posed by nanoscale interventions, specifically the use of self-replication and its potential for cascading effects. Analogies with work in genetic engineering will be developed); and 4) The Public Face of Nano-science and -technology (How nano-science and -technology is presented to the public and how the public has reacted to it. Connections with legal and democratic infrastructure will be developed doc21556 none This project was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NER. This exploratory research effort will attempt to achieve a convergence of two frontier areas of Electrohydrodynamics (EHD) (the sub-discipline of plasma physics that is concerned with the behavior of electrically charged fluids in electric fields): electrospinning of nanofabrics; and applications of the One Atmosphere Uniform Glow Discharge Plasma (OAUGDP). Electrospinning is an EHD method for producing nanofibers and nanofabrics that has been under active development at UT s Textiles and Nonwovens Development Center (TANDEC). The OAUGDP, recently developed at the UT Plasma Sciences Laboratory, allows glow discharges to be generated at one atmosphere in air rather than at low pressure in vacuum systems. Nonwoven nanofabrics made of elecrospun polymeric fibers with diameters less than 500 nanometers have a very soft hand, softer than eiderdown; their polymeric materials are recyclable; and such fabrics are permeable to air and water vapor, but not to microorganisms or fine particulates because of their small fiber diameter. Polymeric nanofabrics have an enormous potential for quality garments, filter media, and protective clothing that is impervious to microorganisms and toxic particulates. Nanofabrics would make excellent garments were it not for their relatively low strength, and a low surface energy that gives them an uncomfortably low wettability and wickability. We plan to explore potential applications of the OAUGDP to nanofabrics, including increasing the strength of electrospun nanofabrics to useful levels; increasing the surface energy of nanofabrics; making nanofabrics wettable; and making nanofabrics more comfortable as garments by increasing their wickability. The activity will take place at the University of Tennessee s Plasma Sciences Laboratory (http: plasma.ece.utk.edu), which has established a reputation for going beyond the technological water s edge to develop new technologies and introduce them into industrial practice. The Plasma Sciences Laboratory has spun off one company, Atmospheric Glow Technologies (www.a-gtech.com) to market technologies based on the OAUGDP; the Plasma Lab has been visited by at least 20 Fortune 500 companies for technological assessment; it has obtained 9 patents on the OAUGDP and its uses; and it normally has at least two company presidents address the Plasma Science Seminar each semester to acquaint GRAs and other associates with entrepreneurship. One of the PIs (P. Tsai) has long-standing contacts with the Army, and has done work on the effects of plasma exposure of camouflage and filter fabrics in the past. This relationship should assure visibility of any results of this work that are of significance to the Department of Defense or homeland security. With respect to the work in this project, we expect to publish potentially useful results in the conferences and journals that serve the textile industry. Particularly interesting or classic data will appear in a future edition of the PIs three-volume book, Industrial Plasma Engineering. The subject of this work is by nature interdisciplinary, and will involve students from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the School of Human Ecology where TANDEC is located. Award of this grant comes at a particularly good time because when it starts, we will be joined by a NSF-NATO Postdoctoral Associate, Dr. Jozef Rahel from Prof. M. Cernak s laboratory at Comenius University in the Slovak Republic. Dr. Rahel will be doing a plasma-textile project that will be synergistic with the current project. It is anticipated that he will take the OAUGDP technology back to central Europe, helping his country recover from the effects of the Cold War. We normally send our GRAs to at least one professional society meeting a year to present a poster paper on their work. We have women and minority GRAs on the staff of the Plasma Lab, and some of our best work of the past ten years was done by women GRAs or postdoctoral associates. Indeed, one of the latter, Dr. Kimberly Kelly-Wintenberg, is now the CEO of our spin-off company. We have attempted to make plasma science and our contributions to it visible by presenting invited papers both internationally and within the USA, with 13 such presentations in the past year. We also maintain an extensive website from which complete texts of our 9 patents and archival conference and journal papers can be downloaded doc21557 none This proposal was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative, NSF 01-157, category NIRT. Our interdisciplinary team is investigating a new process for nanoscale machining employing field emission of electrons from carbon nanotubes. High-precision nanomachining will be obtained by the concentrated thermal power transmitted by electron beams to a thin-film workpiece. In order to investigate the nanomachining process, we will develop a staggered probe that integrates multiple carbon nanotubes on a single probe for integrated nanometrology by scanning probe microscopy and nanomachining by field emission. Such probes will enable the experimental demonstration and investigation of nanomachining with field emission from nanotubes. This research will demonstrate a new high-precision manufacturing process for producing nano-scale patterns that will impact many disciplines such as nanoelectronics, nanoscience, biology, and energy. The research will foster a multi-university, interdisciplinary partnership in the areas of precision manufacturing, nanoscale thermal sciences, solid-state physics, and material science. A broad set of educational and outreach activities will include nanotechnology workshops chemistry and pre-engineering students at Kentucky State University (KSU) and a summer microscopy fellowship for KSU minority students at the University of Kentucky s microscopy facility doc21558 none This proposal was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NER. This program will explore the feasibility of using field effect induced charge injection into semiconducting, single wall carbon nanotubes to modulate the intensity of the optical absorption in thin, optically uniform films of nanotubes. The approach combines and extends recent results showing that 1) nanotube absorption bands can be modulated by chemically and electrochemically induced shifts of the nanotube Fermi levels and 2) recent successes in nanotube based field effect transistors which rely on field gating to similarly shift the nanotube Fermi level. For bulk nanotube samples possessing typical diameters ranging from ~1.1 - 1.6 nm the absorption band of interest (the V1 to C1 transition for the semiconducting nanotubes) straddles the 1.55 mm wavelength having technological relevance in fiber optic communications. Use of the field effect for modulation will result in an all electrically addressable device, with high anticipated switching speeds. The research will involve development of electrically coupled nanotube films having good optical clarity, the integration of these films into transparent electrode, field-gated devices, and the exploration of chemical doping and nanotube-nanotube screening effects on the function of the devices. The proposal identifies a fundamentally new mechanism for effecting optical modulation and, if successful, should encourage further work both in optimizing the nanotube based implementation as well as the development of alternative materials and devices. In keeping with the University of Florida and the NSF mission of training future generations of scientists the program will fund the research of both graduate and undergraduate students. Historically under-represented groups in science will be particularly encouraged to participate doc21559 none This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative, NSF-01-157, Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Teams (NIRT). The award is funded jointly by the NSF Divisions of Materials Research, Mathematical Sciences and Physics. The design, development and control of nanoscale electronics raises many challenging questions, particularly in the area of quantum systems far from equilibrium. Such mesoscopic devices are often weakly coupled to their environment, so that equilibration is difficult. Common issues are shared by diverse problems including quantum dots, driven Josephson junctions and finite-size quantum glasses. There now exist controllable quantum systems far from equilibrium that are accessible to both theory and experiment. In this research, a team of theorists from Rutgers, Princeton and NEC will address global issues in this area through a series of specific studies, using the conceptual links between nonequilibrium spin systems and disordered interacting electrons. It is emphasized that nonequilibrium sources of electron decoherence must be better understood in order to optimize performance of nanoscale circuitry, especially that which involves quantum dynamics. The problem of nonequilibrium quantum dynamics can be approached using localization theory. The dynamics of a quantum glass can be described by particle motion in a random potential on a high-dimensional sphere. Such systems display diffusive behavior not expected from a localization perspective. This discrepancy will be reconciled. Charge transport in a low-density disordered insulator displays slow relaxation, indicative of the system s inability to find its ground-state. Its complex free energy is due to competition between Coulomb interactions and a random potential. Taking an approach analogous to that in spin glasses, the team will identify and solve a model describing the localization-delocalization transition in an isolated electronic system. Sources of electron dephasing must be better understood in order to control phase coherence. This issue is crucial for the construction of quantum circuitry; even if each element is designed optimally, there is the possibility of collective dephasing. A related problem is the identification of a single qubit where decoherence is minimized. A spin liquid with a doubly degenerate ground-state and a gap may be an attractive candidate, since its absence of long-range order effectively decouples it from the external environment. %%% This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative, NSF-01-157, Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Teams (NIRT). The award is funded jointly by the NSF Divisions of Materials Research, Mathematical Sciences and Physics. This complementary team of theorists from Rutgers, Princeton and NEC will combine their talents to study fundamental issues relating to quantum electron dynamics at the nanoscale. As electrical circuitry approaches the nanoscale these issues become more critical, particularly as they relate to problems of phase coherence in nanodevices and its possible application in quantum computers doc21560 none The proposal was submitted under Solicitation NSF 01-157 Nanoscale Science and Engineering, under the Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) category. Carbon nanotubes (nanopipes) offer a unique opportunity for fundamental studies of fluid transport in the spatial regime between molecular and continuum behavior. This research includes: (a) fabrication, characterization, and modification of carbon nanopipes, (b) performance of chemical and fluidic experiments, and (c) fabrication of experimental setups that would allow transport and measurements of various liquid flows in a controlled fashion. Both actuation and imaging of the fluid are done in a transmission electron microscope, and offer a unique opportunity for studying the behavior of fluids in nanosize channels at conditions corresponding to sub-, near- or super-critical regions of the thermodynamic diagram. The hydrothermal growth technique will be optimized to produce desired tube structure and geometry (internal external diameter, length, and shape) for incorporation into experimental devices that allow the transmission of liquids through nanotubes. Fluid behavior in channels ranging from 5 to 100 nm in diameter will be investigated, both by following the dynamic response of visualized fluid interfaces to external thermal stimuli and by well controlled experiments, in which pure liquids and liquids laden with macromolecules will be transmitted through the tubes. The chemistry of high-temperature interactions between carbon nanopipes and aqueous fluids will be studied. Chemical modification, metallization, and opening of nanopipes will be done using bipolar electrochemistry. The experimental work will be supplemented by modeling based on parallel molecular dynamics simulations. It is believed that the proposed research will advance the fundamental understanding needed for the design and fabrication of a new generation of nanofluidic devices, such as nano-pumps, chemical factories on a chip, biochips, and nano-analytical systems. The research team will also coordinate and expand the existing education and outreach activities of the individual investigators into a cohesive and wide-ranging program. The work involves investigators at Drexel, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. NSF support is being provided by the Chemical and Transport Systems Division and the Design, Manufacturing and Industrial Innovation Division in the Engineering Directorate, and by the Chemistry Division in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate doc21561 none This four-year Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) project at the University of Florida with ProfessorCharles R. Martin as principal investigator, conducts a broad-based and systematic investigation of the development of smart nanotubes that are bioengineered and tailor-designed so as to accomplish specific biomedical biochemical functions. Silica asn polymeric nanotubes will be extensively used in this research effort. Functionalized biodegradable and biocompatible poly( (lactide) nanotubes will be prepared. The objective of the research program include: (1) to show that the chemical microenvironment within biochemically-functionalized nanotubes can be fine-tuned so as promote specific desired biochemical processes; (2) to show that such nanotubes can be capped via self-assembly chemistry with nanoparticle caps; (3) to demonstrate that these nanoparticle caps can be attached via chemical bond that dissociate when a specific intercellular chemical signal is detected; (4) to show that such nanotubes can be tagged on their outer surfaces with antibodies that recognize specific cell types; and (5) to prove that all of these concepts can be used in concert to design new nanotube-based DNA transfection vechicles that deliver genetic material to specific desired cell types doc21562 none This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 01-157, in the NER category. The proposal focuses on the development and characterization of one unique class of metal-semiconductor heterostructures, which potentially will result in production of a spin injector. Specifically, problems exist in characterizing the nature of spin transport and scattering through the interfaces of nanomagnetic and spintronic materials. As one considers various potential hybrid structures, the need to be able to probe the spin-dependent transmission properties of the interfaces between semiconductors, ferromagnets, non-magnetic metals, and insulators becomes critical. Our objective is to fabricate and characterize a structure that will allow one to interrogate the spin-dependent transmission properties by providing an easily-controlled source of spin-polarized electrons. The device uses circularly-polarized light to excite spin-dependent carriers within GaAs, and incorporates a Ag thin-film quantum-well spin-filter to energy select the hot electrons. This source of energy-selectable spin-polarized electrons then forms the substrate for the subsequent growth of magnetic structures. We will characterize the degree of spin-polarization by using the empty minority states of a Co film grown on this spin injector as an analyzer. While changing the doping of the GaAs provides a coarse energy selection, judicious choice of the Ag thickness provides a fine-tuning of the energy of these electrons via the energetics of the relevant Ag quantum-well state. Our plan to demonstrate, refine, and calibrate this device involves the growth of quantum-stabilized Ag films on cleaved GaAs(110) and on GaAs(100) wafers. We have already shown that these Ag films exhibit quantum-well states and they will be used to further energy-filter the spin-polarized electrons. To analyze the spin-polarization of these electrons, we will epitaxially grow Co on the Ag GaAs structure and calibrate the spin-dependent transport into the empty minority-state bands, both as a function of the polarization of the electrons from GaAs as well as the magnetization of the Co. Future extensions include the incorporation of an Al2O3 insulating barrier to test the operation in practical spin-tunneling devices. Throughout the research plan, emphasis will be placed on correlating atomic morphological and electronic properties of nanophase heterostructures with ensuing spin-dependent conductance. This project impacts the field of magnetics in several ways. This structure provides an inexpensive tool to interrogate spin transport properties and provides an alternative to spin-polarized photoemission and inverse photoemission. Once calibrated, it can be used to quickly evaluate the spin-dependent transport properties of advanced materials such as half-metallic thin-films. Furthermore, it can be used in a direct manner to provide valuable data on the spin-dependent scattering processes that occur at the interfaces of spintronic structures doc21563 none This proposal was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NIRT. This program addresses the issues of fabrication and integration of molecular devices with conventional electronic technology. The research team will address nanoelectronics from a comprehensive viewpoint by considering how nano-devices and nano-circuits can be assembled, modeled and designed with the requirements of large-scale integration and manufacturability in mind. For one, we will examine new combinations of electrode and active materials that are more compatible with conventional device and processing technologies. Modern integrated circuits use a variety of metals (Al, Cu, Ta, W, Ti, etc.) and insulators (SiO2, SiN, etc.) in multilevel metalization schemes that result in a complex 2.5 dimensional arrangement of contacts and wires. In contrast, most molecular devices use planar arrangements of Au electrodes that are not compatible with MOS-based electronics. This problem might be overcome by designing organic molecules with end groups engineered to attach only to Cu electrodes. These would ultimately be mated with metal electrode structures formed using state-of-the-art film deposition growth techniques and electron beam lithography. These structures would incorporate sacrificial insulating spacer layers. Near the end of the process sequence, the insulating layers would be etched away leaving pockets that by their shape, size and Cu endpoints, provide an ideal home for the target molecule. The completed template could then be rinsed in a solution containing these molecules, adding them to the structure. Since the volatile organics would not be subject to high temperature processing, this would provide a viable means of adding molecular electronic devices to underling microelectronic circuits. We will also develop black-box models of molecular devices. These models are essential if one is to anticipate novel computing architectures where molecular devices may function far differently from modern transistors, and where optimized circuit design my entail radically different patterns of device interconnection. Presently, such models do not exist but are absolutely required to allow design with nanodevices at higher levels of abstraction. A major part of our effort will be dedicated to education and outreach. The subject of nano-electronics is highly interdisciplinary and does not fall within the normal pedagogical bounds of engineering and scientific disciplines. We will thus offer a compelling 3D animation-based website (building on our existing expertise) and a graduate level web-published Frontiers of Nanoscience course emphasizing the fundamentals of nano-device operation and their giga-scale integration doc21564 none The grant explores a an experimental study of the mechanical and thermoelectric properties of a novel class of nanostructures that have been developed recently using the grazing angle deposition (GLAD) technique. The structures are in the form of nanorods and nanosprings grown perpendicular or at an angle to the substrate and aligned with each other. The aspect ratio, spacing and symmetry of the rods may be selected at will. The structures can be made from a large variety of materials in the elemental, alloy and multilayered form. These conditions are ideal for material characterization. Mechanically, the nanorods are the nanoscale equivalent of the cylindrical macroscopic specimens used for material characterization at the macroscale. A major objective is to load the nano-rods with an AFM or a nanoindenter tip both in axial compression and in bending. This technique offers tremendous advantages over the standard measurements made at the nanoscale by nanoindentation. The thermoelectric figure of merit of a single nanorod will be obtained from the measured Seebeck voltage by passing a current from a conductive AFM tip through the nanorod to the bottom conducting substrate. Along with the experimental study, several theoretical issues will be addressed that include the scaling of material properties with specimen size and the validity of constitutive equations of the gradient non-local type material behavior at the nanoscale. This is an exploratory research that will test the limit of the scaling concept in materials properties thereby providing guidance to the design and discovery of new nanoscale material combinations for various applications in future NEMS and energy conversion devices. The proposed multidisciplinary approach with Physics, Materials Science, and Mechanical Engineering components, if successful, will significantly advance the field of mechanical and thermoelectric measurements of nanostructures doc21565 none Recent work has established that the mass transport and glass transition behavior of polymeric materials can be significantly different in nanoscopic structures than in the bulk. A structure in this case is defined as a physical construct (e.g. a film, a line, or a post). The origin of these differences is not well understood, and it is a subject of considerable debate. Less is known about the mechanical properties of nanoscopic structures, although it is precisely these properties that pose the most immediate and significant challenges to the success of future nanofabrication processes. The PI will conduct a comprehensive study of the thermophysical properties, including transport and mechanical behavior, of polymeric materials in nanoscopic structures. The work seeks to elucidate and establish the general principles that govern the physical and thermal behavior of polymers in such structures. To that end, advanced lithographic techniques capable of mass-producing nanoscopic patterns with dimensions on the scale of tens of nanometers will be developed and refined. The resulting experimental structures will permit the large-scale characterization effort envisaged in this work. Novel experimental strategies will be developed to measure mechanical properties and characterize mechanical behavior. Single-molecule, photobleaching and other spectroscopic experiments will be pursued to establish the connections between dynamics and mechanics. Molecular modeling methods will be developed and implemented for molecular and multi-scale simulations of nanoscopic polymeric structures; these will be used to interpret and rationalize the results of our experimental work. The results generated by this NIRT will fill a serious gap in nanoscience. There will be considerable scientific value in that it will provide much of the data and insights required to understand soft-matter advanced materials at a fundamental level. It will be of considerable technological impact in that it will help the semiconductor and nanofabrication industries target materials, processes, and strategies to manufacture deep sub-100 nm structures for integrated circuits, photonics, sensors, nanoelectromechanical systems, and nanobiotechnology. The research activities will be leveraged considerably by the existence on campus of a Center for Nanotechnology and a Materials Research Science and Engineering Center. These centers will provide access to state-of-the-art nanofabrication and characterization facilities, which are essential for the proposed experiments. A vigorous education and outreach program will be aggressively pursued to bring nanotechnology to pre-college students, teachers and the general public. Through a collaboration with existing, nationally-renowned educational programs at the University of Wisconsin, it will be possible to disseminate the activities and results of the NIRT grant in lectures, exchange programs and internships (for both students and teachers), instructional material development, a web site, and participation in science and technology museums doc21566 none This four-year Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) project at Duke University, with Professor Robert L. Clark as principal investigator, addresses both scientific and engineering aspects of nanopatterning of surfaces and in-situ nanofabrication that will directly impact biotechnology, biologically inspired engineering, transducers and electronics at nanoscale. Instrumentation based on scanning probe lithography and dip-pen lithography will be developed for use in specially designed nanolithography. New fabrication methods will be developed for nanometer length structures with biomolecules and stimulus-responsive macromolecules doc21567 none Safari Description: This award is to support a collaborative project between Dr. Ahmad Safari, Department of Ceramics and Materials Engineering, Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey and Dr. Emad Ewais, Central Metallurgical Research and Development Institute, Helwan, Cairo, Egypt. The investigators plan to study the manufacture of self-bonded Silicon Carbide (SBSiC) parts from silicon carbide powder via solid free form fabrication technique (SFF). The same material will also be produced by hot isostatic pressing (HIP) for comparative studies to benchmark the effectiveness of the SFF process. The investigators will examine the application of these forming techniques to the manufacture of complex shape objects, near-net shape, fully or near fully dense components. The quality of the products will be evaluated through studies of microstructure, physical, mechanical, thermal and electrical properties. The results of this investigation will be analyzed and reported. There will be a synergy between the research efforts of the U.S. and Egyptian teams. Scope: In the manufacturing of advanced ceramics the desired product performance specifications are difficult to achieve because of the need for strict control of all steps during processing. Also, the manufacturing of new ceramic parts by conventional processing requires lengthy and costly design and building of molds. The advent of SFF technology in the last decade has created an opportunity to drastically reduce prototyping time and cost. SFF also lends itself to manufacturing of small quantities of tailor-made specialty products. This project will examine the parameters of this special technique, which gives the ability to obtain cost effective, iterative design and control of the properties of ceramic parts. The results of this work will be of benefit in educating engineers, students and researchers in this field in the United States and in Egypt. Dr. Safari is an expert in the manufacturing technique, while Dr. Ewais is expert in SiC. A postdoctorate at Rutgers will participate in the research. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc21568 none The objective of this project is to develop a nanoscale strain-gauge to measure flow-induced stresses at an interface. This molecular probe will be developed from a flexible macromolecule such as a single-strand DNA with fluorophores conjugated to each end. One end will be tethered to the phase interface and the other will extend freely into the deforming phase. In the presence of fluid flow, the molecule will change configuration, based on the local hydrodynamic forces. This change will be measured by fluorescent resonance energy transfer (FRET), which provides a nanoscale ruler for measuring the distance between two fluorophores. FRET provides a sensitive means to measure distances between fluorophores that are 1-9 nm apart. This technique will initially be developed to map the flow field immediately adjacent to an interface as a means to study the effect of flow and or deformation on interfacial properties. However, the technique will also be useful in studying the effects of flow in self-assembled monolayers and tethered macromolecules. It will also help verify multiscale modeling techniques by providing accurate measurements of molecular-scale response to macroscopic forces. Both undergraduate and graduate students will be directly involved in the development of the technique and will be trained in material science applications of fluorescent microscopy and in bioconjugate techniques. Results from the this study will also enhance the classroom experience for students in courses such as fluid mechanics by providing a visual example of flow boundary interaction doc21569 none Several recent meetings have highlighted the growing interest in the biological, ecological, environmental, and other research communities in the development and deployment of large distributed systems for information collection, aggregation, analysis, simulation, predictive modeling and realtime analysis within their respective disciplines. Likewise, recent events have caused concern and raised interest in the need for similar systems in the context of homeland security. It seems apparent that a structured discussion of the needs for these systems could create opportunities for synergistic efficiencies between the various user communities. To date, however, no such discussions have been held among these differing user communities, nor among these communities and the groups providing and developing technologies to support their needs. It is with the possibility of identifying such potential synergies that the Multi-Sector Crisis Management Consortium (MSCMC) is organizing a series of workshops to discuss the design, development and deployment of such systems From Sensor to Supercomputer and Back: Systems for Information Collection, Aggregation, Analysis, Assessment and Realtime Simulation. To begin exploring these synergies, MSCMC is proposing the following workshop. The purpose of this workshop is to summarize the current and projected states of sensor, communication and power technologies for collection and communication of information from distributed sensor systems with large numbers of nodes, and to survey the present and expected needs for such systems in environmental, facility, medical, crisis management, public safety and national security arenas. A succinct summary of the current and projected technologies mapped to current and projected user requirements is envisioned to result from this workshop. This workshop will bring together experts in field sensor, processing, wireless, field power source technologies, to structure solutions for the common problem of collecting and communicating data, including from remote field locations, by cost-effective, scalable, integrated devices and networks. The workshop will examine the user needs and technologies involved in field deployable systems for information gathering including sensors, wireless communications and power supplies, up to the local aggregation point. While the integration of locally gathered information into larger infrastructures for purposes of analysis is also required, such integration is beyond the specific focus of this workshop. It is intended that this two day workshop will produce: (1) understanding by participants of the current state of the art and availability of technologies of sensors, power, integrated circuits, and wireless, and how they may be employed in our society. (2) determination of current and future needs for better capabilities (3) suggested courses of action to integrate available technologies into scalable, reliable, cost-effective devices and networks of value to meet those needs, including for both the general scientific and research community and to government agencies seeking better ways to protect the public from chemical and biological incidents (4) proposed design and production of devices not now available or suitable for the above purposes (5) recommendations for regulatory relief, especially for design, manufacture, and use of workshop-proposed wireless technologies for the above purposes (6) recommendation for further work in these ares, and identification of potential collaborations and partners doc21570 none NER: Massively Parallel Electron Photoemitter Micro-arrays for Nanoscale Lithography, Imaging and Inspection Applications Present electron-beam lithography, imaging and inspection systems are limited to serial scanning of patterns with only one beam. As a result the ability of such systems to scan substantial areas at nanoscale resolution with practical throughput is not possible. However if such machines were to scan using a massively parallel array of independently modulated beams, the resultant parallelism would make possible not only significantly improved throughput for conventional applications in the nanoscale environment but also enable faster device development by software changeable patterns. However at this time there is no practical multiple-beam electron emitter source available that will meet system-level performance and reliability requirements. The goal of the proposed research is to prove feasibility of photocathode microarrays for massively parallel and independently modulated electron sources. A key deliverable of the research will be a fabricated individually gated array of sources with sufficient emission current density to expose a line of electron sensitive resist 5 to 100nm in width. The successful demonstration of feasibility for photocathode massively parallel microarrays will require a stable, low noise and reproducible photocathode and a viable scheme for fabrication and independently modulating the current in each beam. As a result the work will focus on two key aspects. First the extension of our previous work to develop a thin film stack photocathode and pretreatments that will provide the emission stability and intensity necessary and second to examine schemes for producing microarrays using such photoemitters. Photoelectron source arrays will make nanoscale lithography and rapid e-beam review testing possible. Lithography and testing on the nanoscale are necessary if the manufacturing at this scale for microelectronic devices, sensors and electrical- mechanical systems is to become as high in yield and rapid as sub-micron fabrication is today doc21571 none This scholarship for service proposal supports three 2-year cohorts of 14 students each, with an estimated distribution of eight undergraduate and graduate students at Georgia Tech, and six undergraduates at the three HBCU institutions, Clark-Atlanta University, Morehouse College, and Spelman College, which are partners in this proposal. The project is directed by the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC), an NSA designated Center of Excellence for Information Assurance Education (CAE IAE). The GTISC educational program includes a comprehensive curriculum that serves a broad range of students and covers both technology and policy. Six carefully considered courses dedicated to IA IS have been developed and offered in the past year, and these help provide a basis for IA IS concentrations at all degree levels. The faculty at Georgia Tech are working with the faculty at the three partner institutions to introduce IA IS courses and topics into their curricula, to take their students into our advanced classes, and to support prospective IA IS scholars at these schools. IA IS educational programs at Georgia Tech and current and planned efforts at the HBCU institutions offer us the opportunity to recruit, train and graduate a diverse and well prepared group of professionals who will be able to help protect the computational and communication infrastructure of the country doc21572 none This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 01-157, in the NER category. The proposal focuses on the fabrication of nanoscale silicide quantum dots. Silicide dots are potentially useful for fabrication of quantum cellular automata and other quantum dot devices. Quantum cellular automata are assemblies of quantum dots which can perform the basic information-processing functions of interconnect, digital logic, and memory. A major motivation for the exploration of silicide quantum dots in particular is the fact that they will be compatible with silicon devices which will probably remain useful as an interface between nanoelectronics and the outside world. This research will explore novel nanoscale fabrication processes and will develop improved understanding of surface chemical reactions and phase transitions on the nanoscale. We wish to demonstrate the integration of in situ lithography, selective deposition of metals, silicide formation, and epitaxial layer overgrowth. In particular, lithography will be performed by exposing thin silicon dioxide layers with an electron beam, thereby enhancing thermal desorption of oxide from the exposed regions. Subsequently the quantum dots will be formed by chemical vapor deposition and reaction to form a metallic silicide. One particularly attractive approach is selective deposition of the silicide-forming metal from an organometallic source, although other approaches may also be explored. This research will be performed using a recently constructed apparatus which combines electron beam patterning with the deposition and characterization of quantum dots. All process steps, including epitaxial overgrowth of the quantum dots, can be performed without exposing the substrates to atmosphere. Characterization tools to be used in the work include reflection high energy electron diffraction, thermal desorption mass spectrometry, and atomic force microscopy. Within this one-year exploratory program, we expect to fabricate patterned silicide quantum dots in the 20-40 nm size range. We will also obtain improved scientific understanding of selective growth which will be broadly useful in the fabrication of nanoscale devices doc21573 none With National Science Foundation support Alexia Smith and Dr. Julie Hansen will investigate the impact of climate change on agricultural practices in the Near East during the Bronze and Iron Ages ( -535 B.C.). A region-wide drying event is thought to have occurred at the end of the third millennium B.C., and this study examines its impact on food production strategies. Palaeoethnobotany, the study of human uses of plants in antiquity, is a prime tool for investigating ancient agriculture. Carbonized plant remains can be preserved on archaeological sites for thousands of years and may be systematically recovered by placing a soil sample in a large tank of water, whereby the botanical remains float to the surface for collection. The presence of crop plants, together with their associated weed assemblages, allow for the reconstruction of ancient agricultural practices. Palaeoethnobotanical remains collected from Tell Qarqur, a multi-period site on the Orontes River in NW Syria, will be analyzed to determine how crop production changed over time. Tell Qarqur lies just north of the Ghab Valley, where a number of pollen cores have been examined, making Qarqur a prime location for considering the effect of local environment upon food production. The questions asked include: 1) What crops were grown and do cropping patterns change over time? 2) What types of ecosystems were exploited for wild plants? 3) If the habitats exploited change over time, does this reflect a changing environment? Examination of the flora currently surrounding the site and collection of modern botanical samples will greatly assist in identifying the ancient remains. This data will then be placed into a regional context and evidence for agricultural and environmental change from sites in Syria, Israel, Lebanon, and Jordan will be examined based on published palaeoethnobotanical, zooarchaeological, and palaeoenvironmental reports. Together these countries provide a promising opportunity to examine the ways people modify agriculture in relation to their environment, since steep precipitation gradients exist and food productions strategies are likely to change over relatively short distances. The questions asked include: 1) Within a given time period, do the major crops vary with increasing distance from the coast, or along a north-south axis? 2) If so, is this reflected in the faunal remains? 3) Can distinct food production zones be identified from the data, and if so, do the boundaries of these zones change with time? This research is important for several reasons. First, it provides information on Bronze and Iron Age agriculture in Syria, of which little is known. Second, this study synthesizes a large body of published data from the Near East, thereby providing a firm basis for examining environmental change and shifting agricultural patterns. Finally, recent climatic data suggest that many semi-arid regions will become drier over the next few decades due to global warming. This study will yield a deeper understanding of how people have adapted their farming practices in response to past climatic shifts, knowledge that would greatly aid modern-day developers to enhance production within current low-technology or subsistence agriculture doc21574 none Bioelectronic interfacing of living cells via self-assembled microwires We propose to develop a new method for creating bioelectronic circuits that will allow targeting and electrically interfacing specific molecules on the membrane of living cells, incorporating the cells into larger electrical circuits. This method is based on a new technique reported recently by one of the PIs (Science, 294, , ) that allows the assembly of long, electrically conductive microwires directly from suspensions of metallic nanoparticles. The microwires are assembled via dielectrophoresis, the particle mobility and interactions in alternating electric field. We will devise techniques for controlled growth of microwires in thin chambers and microfluidic channels, and will develop experimental and theoretical tools for cell and wire manipulation in the electrical field leading to cell interfacing. Bioelectronic interfacing is one of the promising, yet underdeveloped, areas of nanoscience research. The success of this project could lead to development of new sensors, where the response of living cells to different toxins, biological or chemical agents is detected with greater precision and sensitivity. It can also help in developing tools for in situ interfacing of cells in living tissues (such as neurons). Current techniques either let the cells sit on top of electrode arrays or impale them via microelectrodes. In contrast, we will complete the connection between the cells and the electrical circuits via nanoparticle self-assembly, a potentially much more flexible and powerful approach doc21575 none Proposal No. Principal Investigator: Alan W Weimer U Colorado The objective of this proposal is to examine a novel method for production of large amount of ultra fine particles having controlled surface chemistry. A novel method to achieve the controlled surface chemistry is based on nanocoating using atomic layer deposition. The proposed work is to examine the fluidization behavior of ultrafine spherical silica particles to avoid coating aggregates rather than individual particles doc21576 none Drzal This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative NSF 01-157, category NER. Green nanocomposites are the wave of the future and are considered as the next generation of materials. The lofty goals set by U.S. Government for the creation of bio-based economy present significant challenges to Industry, Academia and Agriculture. This proposal seeks to replace substitute existing petroleum derived polypropylene TPO (thermoplastic olefin) based nanocomposites from compatibilized clay reinforced cellulosic bio-plastic through a novel approach for automotive applications. A new bio-based product derived through nano-science approach from renewable resources; having recycling capability and triggered biodegradability (i.e. stable in their intended lifetime and would biodegrade after disposal under compost conditions) with commercial viability and environmental acceptability is termed as sustainable green nanocomposites under this high-risk exploratory research (NER) proposal. The main objective of this proposal is to replace such petro-derived nonbiodegradable polymers with renewable resource-based biodegradable polymers. Compatibilization between the nanoclay and bioplastic is the key to achieving success. A new maleated compatibilizer is targeted to effectively bind both the clay and cellulosic bio-plastic in the compatibilized green nanocomposites. Expected Results Our research has proved the proof of concept on promising potentiality of cellulosic bio-plastic in designing green nanocomposites for high impact and high strength applications. From our preliminary data we find encouraging results where the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) decreased by ~ 50% and water absorption decreased by ~ 14% on reinforcement of cellulosic plastic with 5 wt.% as received commercial clay. However with the presence of compatibilizer we expect to get much improved properties of our targeted nanocomposites. The synergy to be gained by maleated compatibilizer, bio-plastic development and novel processing will result in making sustainable eco-friendly green nanocomposites of industrial attractions. This intended research program through University-Industry interactions is expected to create a consciousness among young graduate undergraduate students in adding knowledge of materials and process engineering of new green nanocomposites and to create the growing importance of unique nano-technology to generate eco-friendly affordable green materials for 21st century automotive industries. Expected Results Our research has proved the proof of concept on promising potentiality of cellulosic bio-plastic in designing green nanocomposites for high impact and high strength applications. From our preliminary data we find encouraging results where the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) decreased by ~ 50% and water absorption decreased by ~ 14% on reinforcement of cellulosic plastic with 5 wt.% as received commercial clay. However with the presence of compatibilizer we expect to get much improved properties of our targeted nanocomposites. The synergy to be gained by maleated compatibilizer, bio-plastic development and novel processing will result in making sustainable eco-friendly green nanocomposites of industrial attractions. This intended research program through University-Industry interactions is expected to create a consciousness among young graduate undergraduate students in adding knowledge of materials and process engineering of new green nanocomposites and to create the growing importance of unique nano-technology to generate eco-friendly affordable green materials for 21st century automotive industries doc21577 none This project was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NER, and it addresses the manipulation and organization of nanoparticles. The organization of colloidal particles into one-, two- and three-dimensional ordered structures represents the first step towards the fabrication of a large number of miniaturized products of great technological importance. Structural attributes such as long-range order, high packing density, high surface-to-volume ratio, and reproducible shape and dimensions are highly desirable. Force microscopy and optical tweezers have been used for the manipulation of a small number of individual particles, while colloidal crystallization and templating have been used for particle organization; however, big challenges remain. Our goal is to develop a methodology that utilizes nonuniform electric fields (dielectrophoresis, DEP) to direct the organization of nanoparticles into well-defined two- and three-dimensional ordered structures (e.g., pyramids, parallelepipeds) with prescribed length scales and composition. Such methodology is scalable and readily automated, and would allow the manufacturing of functional materials with nanometer-scale order that can be used for their structural properties, e.g., photonic materials or high density data recording devices, and or their structure, e.g., prefabricated blocks towards more complicated devices ( bottom up strategy). We will follow a systematic approach, from 2D to 3D order and from microparticles to nanoparticles. This research is exploratory and high risk since forces developed during the organization process may nullify the DEP effect, and the dimensions of the electrodes required for the efficient organization of nanoparticles may be challenging to fabricate. This research should lead to significant advancements in the field of nanotechnology by the (a) fabrication of nanostructures having hierarchical-order using DEP, and (b) development of process design tools for efficient implementation of DEP in large-scale manufacturing. The graduate and undergraduate students who will be involved in the project will gain valuable experience, while industry (and the community) will benefit from the expertise on nanostructures and nanomanufacturing developed at the university through this research doc21578 none This Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) project is designed to develop a flexible, targetable nanocapsule by exploiting a naturally occurring nanoscale structure, the vault. Vaults are large (13 MDa) ribonucleoprotein particles composed of multiple copies of three proteins and an RNA, found in nearly all eucaryotic cells. The vault particle is a nanocapsule honed by millions of years of evolution with incredible potential for compound encapsulation, protection, and delivery. The vault nanocapsule can assemble from multiple copies of a few subunits into a stable structure that adheres to and is transported along skeletal networks in the cell, and is likely to open and close in response to cellular signals. Understanding how such a capsule can be manipulated will allow encapsulation of small molecules (drugs, sensors, enzymes, toxins etc.) and targeting the engineered nanostructures to specific tissues, cells, or organelles. This team plans to modify the vault using a cell-based protein production system and test the concept that vaults can have a broad nanosystems application as malleable nanocapsules. Seven research groups at the University of California, Los Angeles, and other locations ( ; Vanderbilt University), organized by Dr. Leonard Rome, will direct their attention to engineered vault nanocapsules produced in a core production laboratory. Modified vaults will be examined with molecular imaging techniques including negative-stain, cryo-EM single particle reconstruction, atomic force microscopy, and X-ray crystallography. This structural characterization of the vault is an essential first step in designing new vault-based nanocapsules. Vault nanocapsules will be produced with sequestered metal binding sites and assessed for functional consequences of metal sequestration; for example, cells expressing the engineered particle will be examined to determine whether they have increased resistance to metal toxicity. In other studies, particles will be imbued with functional properties of light emission and magnetic properties to allow the particles to be manipulated in a magnetic field and to probe physiological properties of the vault, i.e., the inflow and outflow of large and small molecules. The ability to manipulate biological nanoparticles in these and other ways offers an opportunity to assemble these particles into structures that may have significant future applications. Spectroscopic techniques will be applied to the engineered particles to allow assessment of the interconversion of opened and closed forms. These studies will lay the groundwork to enable the control of entrapment and release of specific encapsulated materials. The participants of this team are founding members of the California Nanosystems Institute (CNSI), established to bring together scientists and engineers across disciplines and across institutional boundaries in order to push forward in the area of nanotechnologies. In partnership with the CNSI, the team will establish an educational program designed to advance the field of nanosystems research and technology. This will include training of future researchers and decision-makers and creation of multidisciplinary courses, to enrich school and community resources and influence the technical capabilities of industrial scientists and engineers. In addition, the PI and co-PIs will be involved in research mentoring of undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral students, curriculum planning, and lecturing. A vault website (www.vaults.arc.ucla.edu) will be maintained and expanded to disseminate information about vaults and vault nanocapsule development. This centralized source of information will include links to published materials and lists of materials and reagents available for sharing. Funding for this interdisciplinary project is provided through collaborative contributions from the Directorate for Biological Sciences (Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences), the Directorate for Engineering (Divisions of Bioengineering & Environmental Systems and Chemical & Transport Systems), and the Directorate for Mathematics & Physical Sciences (Divisions of Physics and Chemistry doc21579 none This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 01-157, in the NIRT category. The proposal focuses on developing novel chemical approaches to forming well-behaved and robust interfaces between small organic molecules and both conducting and insulating inorganic ultrathin films for applications in molecular scale electronics. Much of the success of present day microelectronics is due to the ability to integrate a variety of (mostly) inorganic materials into structures useful for devices. For example, silicon dominates the field not because of its intrinsic electrical properties, but because of the quality of the interfaces it forms (e.g., the Si-Si02 interface). The work to be conducted here seeks to develop organic-inorganic interfaces possessing equivalent or superior properties, where small organic molecules form the active layers. The solution lies in the development of chemically based approaches to the formation of the critical interface between the inorganic layers (both metallic and dielectric) and the organic layers. Success in this venture will require the application of sophisticated synthetic organometallic chemistry, surface and interface science, self-assembly and nanofabrication, and chemically accurate computer simulation. The team that has been assembled at Cornell possesses expertise and significant experience in all of these areas. The organic layers will typically be formed by a process of self-assembly (in solution or in vacuo) on substrates that have been patterned to expose selected areas comprised of metal (e.g., Au), oxide (e.g., Si02), or nitride where the self-assembled monolayer will bind. Study of patterned substrates is vital for the investigation of a number of issues, from the fundamental to those related to device design and performance. Ultimately the team seeks as a final set of goals: (i) development of novel organometallic precursors for the formation of both conducting and insulting layers that will interface seamlessly with the organic layer; (ii) development of a fundamental understanding of the interface formation process, including the effects of process variables such as temperature on the molecular scale structure of the interface; (iii) demonstration of controllable device properties for molecular scale electronics, given enhanced knowledge of the interfacial chemistry and physics; and (iv) development of computer models that can both predict the atomic scale structure of the interface, and the resulting electronic properties. A final significant challenge put forward by the Cornell team will be the development of a workshop on research ethics. From the experience of working to develop this workshop the participants hope to build a better understanding and recognition of responsible research conduct, and to know the relevant philosophical underpinnings of ethics sufficiently well to be able to make ethical choices in both the development and practice of their research doc21580 none This proposal was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NIRT. It focuses on organic semiconductor based nanoscale transistors, a particularly important area of activity where much remains to be understood and discovered. Organic nanoscale transistors make use of fabrication approaches ranging from molecular self-assembly to advanced nanolithography. This, together with the considerable flexibility in designing and synthesizing a range of semiconducting materials offers hope that such devices may one day be components in a new generation of electronic circuits. The ability to confine and manipulate electric charges on the spatial scale of a molecule is an important advantage for molecular electronics. The proposed project aims at combining self-assembly and advanced nanolithography to realize two families of nanoscale transistor devices that will enable the systematic evaluation of these devices as components in electronic circuits. Crucial to the study is the use of advanced high k dielectrics in organic nano-transistors. This will lower the operating voltage of the devices as well as permit the induction of very large densities of charge, which in turn has been shown to open up new domains in charge transport with associated applications. The project will involve device characterization by conventional methods as well as by scanning probe methods. Additionally, it will involve extensive characterization of interfaces between organic semiconductors and gate insulators, and morphological characterization of self-assembled organic layers with a lateral resolution down to 1 nm. Large-area organic transistors have been shown in the recent past to have unique properties such as chemical sensing and light-emission. The chemical sensing aspects of nanotransistors will be examined in detail for the first time This study will combine chemical design of semiconductors with receptor groups to bind specific analytes with detailed characterization of the chemical nature of the interaction between semiconductor and analyte. Among other properties of nanoscale transistors that will be explored is superconductivity. Superconductivity has been observed recently in large-area polymer transistors and among the suggested applications of such transistors includes quantum information processing. Finally, a new approach to fabricate circuits is proposed in which the organic nano-transistor circuitry is compatible with Si-circuitry. This architecture permits (in principle) the sharing of functionality between the Si circuitry and the organic circuitry. The key aspect of the fabrication scheme is the use of an up-side down approach to fabricate organic circuitry, in which the interconnects are defined first followed by the gate level and finally the source-drain level. Thus the fragile molecular materials are not exposed to harsh processing environments doc21581 none This Nanoscale Exploratory Research (NER) proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 01-157). The project will explore the role of elastic anisotropy in the self-patterning of semiconductor nanostructures, possibly catalyzing a new class of high performance nanostructure devices. The project aims to venture into an emerging concept in nanoscale science and engineering using a fundamentally new and interdisciplinary approach, which combines the complementary expertise of the investigators. During the exploratory phase, the role of elastic anisotropy in three-dimensional semiconductor nanopatterning will be established. To this end, ternary alloy films with varying alloy composition, lattice misfit, and thickness will be grown by molecular beam epitaxy; their elastic anisotropies will be measured using Brillouin scattering and interpreted using atomic-scale simulations. Using these alloy films as the spacer material in quantum dot superlattices, the relationship between the elastic anisotropies and the long-range order of the resulting quantum dot arrays will then be established. The work accomplished in this NER project may lay the foundation for a larger effort to develop three-dimensional nanopatterning methods for use in a wide variety of innovative nanostructure devices. %%% The project addresses basic exploratory research issues in a topical area of materials science with high technological relevance. An important feature of the program is the integration of research and education through the training of students in a fundamentally and technologically significant area. Graduate, undergraduate, and high school students will participate in this project, and will be involved with growth and characterization of semiconductor nanostructures, elastic property measurements, and computer simulations doc21582 none This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative, NSF 01-157, category Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT). The award is funded jointly by the Division of Materials Research and the International Division, and involves researchers at Georgetown University and IBM-Almaden. The objective of this research project is to develop and apply computational methods to help optimize spintronic devices and to investigate novel proposals for thermoelectric coolers. Both types of devices to be considered consist of ultrathin layers of different materials stacked together, forming a heterogeneous system in which bulk properties are strongly modified on the nanoscale by the presence of interfaces. Density-functional methods and many-body techniques will be combined to study both equilibrium and nonequilibrium properties of such systems. The spintronics project is aimed at developing a better understanding of how to efficiently inject spins from metals into semiconductors. This issue is key for the design of improved spin transistors and spin filters. Computer algorithms will be developed to self-consistently calculate the nonequilibrium steady-state transport in nanoscale multilayer devices composed of ferromagnets, semiconductors, insulators, and materials close to the metal-insulator transition. The rearrangement of charge and spin near each interface will be treated self-consistently. Density-functional methods will be employed to evaluate materials-specific interface properties such as fermi-level mismatch and charge and spin scattering lengths, which will then be used as input parameters for the Keldysh nonequilibrium transport codes. In the thermoelectric project, nanoscale heterostructures composed of metals, semiconductors, and heavy-fermion, and other strongly-correlated, materials will be investigated as potential thermoelectric devices. This is an extension of ongoing work on thermoelectricity in bulk materials and on modeling many-body effects in Josephson junctions. The numerical renormalization group will be used to examine equilibrium properties of systems described by the periodic Anderson model and its combination with the Falicov-Kimball model. Transport properties will be calculated using a linear response formalism. Density-functional calculations will be used to determine properties of relevant interfaces and to estimate parameter regimes for the lattice models. To date, experimental difficulties have thwarted a sytematic study of nanoscale devices constructed from heavy-fermion materials. The proposed computational modeling will help guide the search for novel heavy-fermion-based-low-tempreature thermoelectric devices. This university-industry collaboration will provide valuable educational opportunities for postdoctoral researchers and graduate students. The Georgetown graduate student will spend one year at the IBM site as part of his her training in Georgetown s Industrial Leadership in Physics program. Postdoctoral researchers will also gain experience in both the academic and industrial research environments. In addition, the project involves international collaborations, particularly with Croatia, in which both senior and junior personnel will participate. %%% This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative, NSF 01-157, category Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT). The award is funded jointly by the Division of Materials Research and the International Division, and involves researchers at Georgetown University and IBM-Almaden. The objective of this research project is to develop and apply computational methods to help optimize spintronic devices and to investigate novel proposals for thermoelectric coolers. Both types of devices to be considered consist of ultrathin layers of different materials stacked together, forming a heterogeneous system in which bulk properties are strongly modified on the nanoscale by the presence of interfaces. This university-industry collaboration will provide valuable educational opportunities for postdoctoral researchers and graduate students. The Georgetown graduate student will spend one year at the IBM site as part of his her training in Georgetown s Industrial Leadership in Physics program. Postdoctoral researchers will also gain experience in both the academic and industrial research environments. In addition, the project involves international collaborations, particularly with Croatia, in which both senior and junior personnel will participate doc21583 none This proposal was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NIRT. The PI s are planning to use novel techniques based on the modification of an AFM tip to measure the affinity of a single cell surface receptor to its ligand. The approach is quite innovative and would result in significant new developments in this area doc21584 none Watson, Susan K Middlebury College NIRT: Nanotube and Nanowire Based Quantum Computation A team research effort has been organized to implement a simple one-dimensional quantum computer using carbon nanotubes and Si nanowires as the substrate, and to in-vestigate issues of synthesis, nanofabrication, theoretical physics, and computer science surrounding this focused goal. The device on which the proposed effort will concentrate consists of a one-dimensional string of islands of charge-quantum dots-with coupling between the dots controlled by the application of gate voltages. The intrinsic magnetic moments ( spins ) of the dots are used to form the quantum bits ( qubits ) of a quantum computer. The strength of the scheme lies in its simplicity; in contrast to other proposed schemes, only changes to the coupling between neighboring quantum dots along the nanotube or nanowire are necessary. The research project is complemented by an educational program that brings to-gether students from several disciplines, encouraging them to develop intellectually and interact as part of a single collective effort. The educational goals of the Nanoscale Sci-ence and Engineering program will be explicitly advanced through the creation of courses and lab modules focused on nanoscience. A number of basic physics questions are raised by this project, relating to active spin manipulation in this simple 1D system and to the ways in which coupling beyond nearest neighbors can correct for problems of quantum decoherence and timing errors. If the device ultimately operates as intended, it will function as a general-purpose quantum computer, a goal towards which much current research is focused doc21585 none In this project, we propose to investigate the feasibility of developing biosensor nano-microarrays based on a novel type of surface plasmon resonance device. In our approach, U.S. provisional patent 601,283,051 Field Emission Electron Beam Biosensor , nanoscale field emission electrodes will be used as electron sources to excite surface plasmons in a thin metal film. Antibodies will be immobilized onto the opposing side of the metal film and data on molecular binding events will be extracted obtained via the collection of spectral data associated with the surface plasmon resonance. We will refer to the device as the eSPR for electron-interrogated SPR. As the bias voltage on the field emission electrode of the vacuum nano-electronic device is swept through its range, the energy of the electron beam impinging on the metal film is also swept and the amplitude of the reflected current represents a spectral interrogation of the plasmon resonance. As is the case with commercial systems that utilize optical excitation sources, such as the Biacore , the nature of the plasmon resonance is perturbed by the biomolecular interaction occurring in the vicinity of the metal film. The overarching goal of our efforts will be to produce small, portable or embedded biosensor micro-arrays with the capability to detect a multiplicity, of biochemical targets simultaneously. The objectives of our project will be as follows: Understand the physical principles of electron-beam induced surface plasmon resonance biosensors Develop design strategies and processing methods to transfer knowledge from the vacuum microelectronic domain to eSPR sensors that have nanoscale dimensions. Commercially available emitter arrays currently being developed for flat panel display devices will be reviewed and characterized to determine suitability for use in this eSPR application. Additional eSPR device characterization will be done with software model tools such as CFD- ACE from CFD Research Corporation. It has been known for approximately fifty years 1 that an electron beam can excite a surface plasmon resonance in a metal-dielectric structure. In practice the use of an electron beam to induce a surface plasmon resonance as a sensing device has remained largely an unexploited area because of the equipment needed and the complications of volatile organic materials in a vacuum. A review of the literature has revealed no studies of this type for eSPR. The reward is significant advancement in biosensing capabilities with the eSPR device. The development of micro-emitter arrays produced by standard microelectronics processing methods now brings the possibility of very small sizes, throw away costs and custom configurations which mitigate the vacuum-biological mixing problems. The advent of a low cost, high sensitivity, hand-held or smaller, multi-detector would undoubtedly find wide spread applications in both the consumer and industrial markets. The realization of such a biosensing device would be a significant advancement over current sensors which neither small in size nor inexpensive to produce and operate. The risk is due to the fact that the field of biosensing utilizing electron beam emitters is unexplored. Without relevant research having been previously conducted knowledge gained from optical SPR devices must be selectively transferred to an electron beam device. The very nature of a device that contains both vacuum microelectronics and biological material presents difficulties but contains large rewards in size and cost reduction if successfully combined doc21586 none This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NIRT. The work focuses on the exploration of a new paradigm for a quantum information and storage device, the atom chip. In this paradigm, neutral atoms are suspended above nanofabricated current carrying structures. This work will advance the atom chip concept by investigating two important new technologies for introduction into atom chips: (1) to use superconducting materials in atom chip devices and (2) to investigate means and methods for the creation and control of Rydberg atoms confined on atom chips. In this component of the research the atom chips will be used to study the nano-science of the atom-surface interaction and to explore how they may be used for nano-technology. For application to quantum information, the work on atom chips will address two strategies: First, the use of atomic ensembles and collective atomic states, such as a BEC and, secondly, the use of single atom quantum control. In order to accomplish the goals of the project a three-member interdisciplinary team spanning three academic departments at the University of Rochester has been assembled. This award is jointly funded by the Divisions of Physics and Materials Research in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate and the Division of Computer-Communications Research in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering doc21587 none Novel Applications Based on Attractive and Repulsive Electrostatic Forces in Nanoscale The focus of the proposed NER research is to establish an electrostatic interface between nanoelectronics and the biological molecular systems in the micron and nanometer scales. The main research actions include: 1. To seek concept demonstration for nanometer-to-micron-scale manipulation of the electrostatic attractive and repulsive forces through nonvolatile static charges controlled by CMOS EEPROM (electrically erasable programmable read-only memory) devices. 2. To establish the spatial and energy resolution limits of the electrostatic forces between CMOS and biological systems 3. To establish the electrostatic interface between CMOS devices and the ambient electrolyte solution without chemical contamination in Si and dielectrics. 4. To formulate realistic goals and implementation methods in the follow-on NIRT effort for building molecular recognition and actuation capabilities derived from nanoscale CMOS technology, if the NER efforts give promising results. This proposed NER investigation is unique in the sense that the nonvolatile static charges in CMOS EEPROM devices are employed at the interface, and hence the interaction electrostatic forces can be both attractive and repulsive. For molecular recognition and actuation, availability of both attractive and repulsive forces at interface is crucial for high selectivity and sensitivity. Two technology demonstrations will be established in the NER effort to investigate the scale and resolution of the electrostatic attractive and repulsive forces derivable from the CMOS EEPROM devices. The first one is the micron-scale electrostatic tweezers. For electrostatic tweezers actions of pickup and drop, an electrostatic repulsive force is needed. This can be accomplished by forces induced from nonvolatile static charges. The second one is the nano-scale molecular recognition from surface attractive and repulsive forces. Nanometer-scale molecular recognition by complementary nonvolatile static charges can be achieved in floating nanocrystal EEPROM structures. The peripheral source drain structures have alternative dopant types to facilitate complementary static charge injection. The control gate is partially implemented by the ground-plane back gate to expose the nanocrystals for electrostatic interaction with the ambient. Preliminary concepts for the micron-scale [1,2] and nano-scale [3-6] nonvolatile static charge control have already been experimentally demonstrated in the PI s group. The micron-scale control currently offers much faster charge reconfiguration (in milliseconds) than the nanoscale one (achieved by floating Si and metal nanocrystals with pixel accessibility inversely proportional to resolution due to peripheral contact constraints). Present efforts by the PI in funded research programs will be discussed in view of the relations with this NER proposal. A small addition to the existing educational outreach program will be presented. Rationale has been made to fit the proposed effort to the one-year span of the NER program. If the concept demonstration is successful, a NIRT proposal will be composed next year based on the preliminary modeling and experimental results doc21588 none his proposal was received in response to NSE, NSF01-157. Quantum computing offers the prospect of computational power far beyond that which could be obtained merely by scaling current technologies to ever-smaller scales. However, recent proof-of-principle realizations of quantum computers do not appear to be amenable to large-scale integration, like current solid-state technology. One of the outstanding unsolved problems in materials theory is understanding the feasibility of a solid-state quantum bit (qubit), the fundamental building block of a quantum computer. The proposed research will study the possibility to use a pair of extremely small semiconducting islands (with diameters less than 20 nanometers) as a solid-state qubit. The dynamics of quantum control in this system will be investigated theoretically, including the coupling to the environment, which tends to collapse the wavefunction of the qubit. This problem is an example of a very general problem in quantum mechanics, that of tunneling in the presence of a dissipative environment. It is closely related to an analogous problem in nuclear physics, the decay of a superdeformed nucleus. Progress in understanding the proposed mathematical model is thus likely to impact not only nanoscience and quantum computing, but also nuclear physics (femtoscience). As a testbed for the solid-state qubit, it is proposed that such a double quantum dot can be operated as an electron pump with a quantized electrical current. Because the operating frequency of the proposed electron pump would be much greater than that of previous quantized current sources, it could be significant for metrology. The accuracy of the current quantization in this set-up is a measure of the fidelity of the qubit under repeated logical manipulations. This research is cofunded by the Divisions of Materials Research and Physics doc21589 none This proposal was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NIRT. Recent advances have made it possible to assemble materials and components atom by atom, or molecule by molecule allowing for controlled fabrication of nanostructures with dimensions of from 3 to 100 nm. Compared to the behavior of isolated molecules or bulk materials, the behavior of nanostructures exhibit important physical properties not necessarily predictable from observations of either individual constituents or large ensembles. Predominant at the nanoscale are size confinement and quantum mechanical behavior observed in optical and electronic properties, as well as distinct elastic and or mechanical features. The possibility of utilizing nanoscale behavior to enhance material properties and device functions beyond those that we currently consider feasible is widely anticipated. These new materials and devices herald a revolutionary age for science and technology, provided we can observe the detailed operation and discover and utilize the underlying principles. The developments in nanotechnology present an outstanding challenge to characterization (measurement) technology by requiring nm-scale 3-D measurement capabilities. While the technology for synthesis has rapidly advanced, optical characterization of nanostructures is still in its infancy. We will build on existing expertise and infrastructure at Boston University and University of Rochester and develop a toolbox of novel nano-optical characterization techniques to discover and understand the novel properties of nanostructures. The Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) program in Advanced Characterization Techniques in Optics for Nanostructures (ACTION) will develop measurement methods to study and understand nanostructures. Solid immersion microscopy techniques combined with metal-tips will provide unprecedented resolution for spectroscopy of quantum dots and other semiconductor systems. The ultimate goal of the proposed program is to develop robust and efficient optical techniques at a spatial resolution on the order of 10 nm. Beyond building the required tools to investigate novel properties of nanostructures, we will apply these tools to help answer fundamental questions facing nanoscale researchers today. In the area of quantum information processing, we will investigate the experimentally inaccessible regime of closely coupled quantum dots, the coherence of excited states, and quantum dots in tunable microcavities; in the area nanomechanical systems, we will explore the detailed mechanisms of energy dissipation and phase noise in resonant nanostructures; in the area of nanophotonics, we will directly determine the local modal volumes of defect states in photonics bandgap structures and investigate the nanoscale origins of mode leakage; and in the area of ultrasonics, we will measure the elastic properties of solids at the nanoscale, exploring the high frequency regime of nanoscale stresses for the first time doc21590 none We will increase the capacity of the United States higher education enterprise to produce professionals in the fields of Information Assurance (IA) and computer security by hosting a two-year series of workshops for education in Information Assurance. The target audience of the workshops is college-level educators who have responsibility for teaching curricula that are, or could be, related to Information Assurance issues. The format for each workshop is three sequential sessions: a tutorial session, a refereed paper session, and a working session. This sequence allows newer practitioners to become knowledgeable about the basics of IA, provides an opportunity for experienced practitioners to present new ideas for discussion, and allows both groups to interact in a problem solving context to develop solutions for point issues presented by the workshop. The tutorial sessions educate faculty about the fundamentals of information assurance and computer security and improves their instructional capability in these areas. The paper session provides a forum for presentation and discussion of recent pedagogical and technical advances in the field. Activities in the working session encourage creative interaction regarding current issues for education in Information Assurance. A significant effect of the periodic gathering and commingling of experienced and inexperienced practitioners is to enhance the sense of community for IA educators, fostering collaboration and dialogue among institutions offering courses and programs in Information Assurance. The multi-year format allows faculty to spend time in their own environment and return to the workshop with experiential questions and insight. The output of the workshops will include model materials for classroom presentation and demonstration, as well as example materials for laboratory experimentation. A particular emphasis is ensuring participation of demographic groups currently under-represented in the IA education community. The net effect of the proposed activities is to directly increase the national capacity for education in Information Assurance as well as to extend the knowledge and expertise of IA to a range of participants that is more representative of the national profile doc21591 none This proposal was received in response to the announcement NSF 01-157. The overall objectives of this proposal are to: a) develop novel methods and tools for design and engineering of membrane proteins and protein assemblies based upon the integration of sophisticated computational chemistry techniques with in vitro directed molecular evolution; b) engineer novel membrane pores based upon the bacterial porin OmpF for controlling membrane vesicle permeability; c) engineer novel membrane fusion machines based upon influenza virus hemagglutinin for regulating bilayer fusion and membrane protein display; d) further the understanding of the physical and chemical properties underlying membrane protein structure and activity; e) train science and engineering students in these interdisciplinary nanoscience research methods. To incorporate stable proteins that span the ~4nm thickness of the lipid bilayer and that can mediate enzymatic functions or changes in conformation requires control of protein structure at the nanometer (and sub-nanometer) scale. In their proposal, novel membrane proteins will be constructed by combining rational design, partially random design via combinatorial libraries, and directed evolution. Two different systems will be focused on as starting points: bacterial porins, which are large permeability membrane pores, and the influenza virus protein hemagglutinin, which is a pH inducible membrane fusogen. A great deal of structural and functional data has been accumulated for both of these systems, and enormous potential exists for using them to build useful membrane based devices. Channels with altered and regulated permeability could be used to selectively deliver compounds to the ambient environment or selectively internalize and process external substrates. Similarly, gated fusogens could be used to control mixing between vesicles containing two different reactants and could also be engineered to act as switches that regulate the display of protein domains. Both gated pores and fusogens could also be incorporated into synthetic lipid assemblies in order to construct new smart materials, whose bulk elasticity and or permeability are modulated in response to environmental signals. Beyond the specific utility of the proteins that they will engineer, the tools that they will develop and the new membrane proteins that emerge will provide valuable insight into the relatively primitive field of membrane protein design. The engineering of soluble proteins has burgeoned into an enormous field that is moving rapidly and is far ahead of the corresponding field for membrane proteins. In particular, the powerful tool of directed evolution, which has given rise to a wide range of new soluble proteins, has not been applied to the design of membrane-active proteins doc21592 none This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 01-157). This research project aims to explore: 1) the nature of structure-property changes or phase transitions that occur in solid materials in response to temperature, pressure, electromagnetic fields or mechanical strain; 2) the size dependence of phase transitions in oxide nanocrystals, focusing on electronic and lattice dynamics during the phase transition; 3) the effects of interfacial energy and strain; and 4) the influence of pressure, temperature, impurity doping and defect density on phase stability. These studies will produce a multi-dimensional phase diagrams for nanoscale oxide materials. In addition to training graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in advanced research techniques relevant both to science and technology, the combination of chemistry, materials science and physics research issues will provide an intellectually rich educational environment. The project brings together a multi-institutional team of faculty, postdoctoral scholars and graduate students from chemistry, materials science and physics to explore nanoscale materials and their possible uses in technology. Outreach through Vanderbilt University s Explorations Web site will showcase this NSF project for the general public. Connections to the Owen Graduate School of Management will couple into the rapidly growing business interests in nanoscience and nanotechnology. Understanding structural phase transformations in oxide nanocrystals is important to the development of a number of important materials technology areas that include catalysis, separation technologies, phosphor materials, thin-film electronics, photonics, and environmental remediation. Students trained in these areas will compete very favorably for jobs in high priority areas of interest to the academic, industrial, and government laboratory sectors. This project is co-supported by the Division of Materials Research, the Chemistry Division, the Physics Division, and the Chemical and Transport Systems Division doc21593 none New growth and fabrication techniques, together with chemical and electrostatic doping, are enabling an unprecedented control and manipulation of electrons in solids. Examples range from chemically synthesized semiconductor nanowires to doped buckeyball crystals. In many cases of interest the motion of itinerant electrons is intentionally restricted by sample geometry or by strong lattice commensurability effects. Under these conditions, correlation effects are strongly enhanced and transitions into localized Mott or Wigner crystal states are possible. Itinerant electrons proximate to such localized phases often exhibit unusual behavior, in apparent conflict with standard Fermi liquid theory. Disentangling the subtle correlation effects and identifying the underlying physics in such technologically important systems presents a formidable challenge. In this theoretical award, the quantum physics of correlated electrons will be explored by focusing on the behavior near, or even in, the localized regime. Specifically, the following will be studied: Transport in carbon nanotubes proximate to superconductors, studying the interplay between Luttinger liquid correlations and superconducting proximity effects; Studying unidirectional charge density waves (stripe phases) in single- and bi-layer quantum Hall systems at higher Landau levels. The goal is to describe the interstripe quasi-particle dynamics in such phases by exploiting the connections between chiral Luttinger liquid and composite Fermion approaches; Continuing to develop a theoretical framework for describing the pseudogap regime of the cuprates - and Mott insulators more generally - by quantum disordering a superconductor via a proliferation of vortices. In particular, the physics and implications of the 2D Bose metal, a normal (non-super) fluid of 2D quantum bosons, will be explored; Obtaining and analyzing microscopic models of 2D electrons with large ring exchange interactions which exhibit fractionalized quantum phases. O finterest are the statistics of the particles and the experimental implications of the topological order. %%% New growth and fabrication techniques, together with chemical and electrostatic doping, are enabling an unprecedented control and manipulation of electrons in solids. Examples range from chemically synthesized semiconductor nanowires to doped buckeyball crystals. In many cases of interest the motion of itinerant electrons is intentionally restricted by sample geometry or by strong lattice commensurability effects. Under these conditions, correlation effects are strongly enhanced and transitions into localized Mott or Wigner crystal states are possible. Itinerant electrons proximate to such localized phases often exhibit unusual behavior, in apparent conflict with standard Fermi liquid theory. Disentangling the subtle correlation effects and identifying the underlying physics in such technologically important systems presents a formidable challenge. In this theoretical award, the quantum physics of correlated electrons will be explored by focusing on the behavior near, or even in, the localized regime. The results will be of great fundamental interest and will also influence the development of devices based on these phenomena doc21594 none Energy is vital for both the propagation and maintenance of organisms. Thus, the use of metabolic energy and the heat that is produced as its byproduct is a major theme in modern biology. Animal energy usage is usually measured by indirect calorimetry that relies upon the exchange of respiratory gases by the organism (e.g., oxygen consumption or carbon dioxide production). An important complication in such analyses is that the relationship between respiratory gas exchange at the lungs and metabolic heat production is variable. These variations could have important consequences for our understanding of energy use by animals by producing substantial (e.g., 30%) errors in energetic analyses. This project will quantify the relationships between metabolic heat production in animals and their respiratory gas exchange, and determine the sensitivity of these relations to variables most likely to importantly affect energy metabolism. Critical variables to be explored include diet composition, intensity of metabolism, time of day relative to the animal s physiological cycles, and extent of time spent feeding or fasting. The most likely physiological bases of currently unexplainable variation in the relations between respiratory gas exchange and metabolic heat production will be explored. This portion of the research will focus on quantifying the various fates of the carbon dioxide that is produced by animal metabolism (e.g., exhaled through the lungs, stored in the body). This research will be conducted using a broad range of animals (insects, reptiles, birds) in order to evaluate the extent of biological variation in these basic energy relations doc21595 none This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 01-157). The aim of this project is the development and use of biologically modified nanotubes and nanowires as electrical probes of biological activity. Researchers will develop a new type of nanoscale probe, the nano-coax , that can serve as a molecular probe only nanometers in dimensions. This new probe involves attaching biomolecules specifically to the end of silicon nanowires and carbon nanotubes, providing a very highly localized sensing region. The electrical response of the nanoprobe will be measured over a wide frequency range from kilo-Hertz to Giga-Hertz. The researchers will also explore the use of the nanoprobe as a molecular-scale actuator, using an applied electrical control signal to induce a change in activity of biological molecules tethered to the end. The research involves an interdisciplinary team of chemists, molecular biologists, and electrical engineers. The outcome of the research will be the development of a new set of bioanalytical tools able to rapidly detect biological species with unprecedented selectivity and sensitivity approaching the single-molecule limit. Successful use of nanoprobes as biological actuators would permit the direct manipulation of biological processes at the nanometer scale. The research involves a large component of graduate and undergraduate education and training. Graduate students will work together with faculty and undergraduate students as part of an interdisciplinary team. Faculty researchers will train graduate students and undergraduate students in state-of-the-art methods of materials fabrication and biological analysis, providing a workforce well-trained for industrial and academic research. This project is aimed at the development of a revolutionary kind of biological sensor. Recent advances have led to the development of tiny wires ( nanowires ) only a few nanometers in diameter. In this research project, an interdisciplinary team of scientists will fabricate nanowires and then attach biological molecules, such as DNA and proteins, to them. The researchers will then investigate the electrical signals generated when these nanoprobes interact with other biological molecules. The research has the potential to lead to major advances in the development of highly sensitive detectors able to identify minute quantities (perhaps as little as a single molecule) of biological molecules. The researchers will also explore the use of nanometer-sized probes to induce changes in biological activity, with long-term potential for biomedical applications. This project is co-supported by the Division of Materials Research, the Chemistry Division, the Division of Bioengineering and Environmental Systems, and the Chemical and Transport Systems Division doc21596 none This Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) award to University of California Davis is supported by Divisions of Chemistry (MPS), Biological Infrastructure (BIO) and International Office (SBE), and this proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 01-157). With this award, Professor Gervay-Hague and her team will study viral adhesion and infection that are mediated through the binding of viral proteins to cellular ligands. In many cases, the ligands are presented in a multimeric form, which gives rise to polyvalent interactions with viral proteins, and much less is understood about the molecular basis these polyvalent interactions. Nanotechnology and bioimaging spectroscopies will be used to study protein-ligand interactions systematically at a molecular level with this award. Using a combination of nanofabrication, lipid bilayer engineering and nanoparticle functionalization, carefully designed ligand arrays and local bio-environments will be constructed. Protein recognition of these molecular architectures will be investigated to determine the binding strength, stoichiometry, cooperativity, and kinetics of adhesion to develop an understanding of the mechanism of viral adhesion to host-cells. A knowledge developed from these studies has larger applications toward the detection and deactivation of viruses in the environment. In addition, these studies at the interface of chemistry, nanotechnology and biology will provide students with opportunities in research and training in many interdisciplinary fields. With this award, a team of research scientists with expertise in organic, inorganic, and analytical chemistry, as well as chemical engineering and immunology will study the mechanism of viral adhesion to host-cells. These adhesion interactions have the dimensions of nanometers and it may be possible to regulate viral adhesion to surfaces that have been engineered to mimic the native state of host cells. Introduction of viral proteins to these nanoplatforms and monitoring of the binding process using microscopy and spectroscopy will help elucidate the mechanism of viral adhesion to surfaces, which may ultimately lead to novel strategies for detecting and deactivating viruses in the environment. Students, postdoctoral associates, and co-workers will greatly benefit from this multidisciplinary approaches to problem solving in the area of nanoscale biosystems doc21597 none O Day NER- This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative NSF 01-157, category NER, and is co-funded by the GEO and BIO Directorates. A significant challenge to integrating the study of microbiological and geochemical systems lies in visualizing, identifying, and measuring chemical reactions and feedbacks at appropriate length and time scales within their natural environments. This proposal seeks to explore a novel combination of molecular biological probes and synchrotron X-ray micro-computed tomography (m-CT) and fluorescence to obtain complementary information about physical and chemical microhabitats and microbial distribution in natural systems in two and three dimensions. Microbial communities are found in pore spaces and on mineral surfaces at length scales corresponding to individual bacteria and bacterial communities (~1-100 mm). Chemical reactions involving microorganisms and aqueous solutions, colloids, and minerals take place at the molecular level, but the interaction volumes of microbial communities may range from ~5- mm3 or more. Conventional examination techniques such as electron or fluorescence microscopy require destructive sample preparation methods that can severely alter biological and physical structures. The aim of this exploratory study is to investigate a method for examining the distribution of microbial communities in situ and in three dimensions, and to develop complementary techniques for coupling element-specific spectroscopic probes and molecular biological probes. We propose to use nucleic acid biological probes directed against rRNA targets and tagged with heavy elements (iodine, gold, and silver) to map the spatial distribution of microbial communities within natural porous material using density-contrast synchrotron m-CT. In addition, we will investigate the ability of fluorescence m-CT measurements to map specific element distribution in two dimensions using these target elements and those of the mineral substrates. Based on density contrast and fluorescence mapping, we will explore the spatial distribution of microbial communities and mineral substrates, and attempt XANES spectroscopy of specific elements to gain chemical information. The coupling of physical and chemical data in two and three dimensions, with information content ranging from molecular to micron scale, will enable innovative future studies of fundamental processes involving element cycling among geologic fluids, minerals, and microbes doc21598 none Xu and (2) to determine the rates of aqueous species diffusion in nano-scale channels to test the assumption that these channels can provide passages for mass transport during chemical reactions. To isolate the effect of nano-scale pore space confinement, we will conduct parallel sorption experiments on non-mesoporous materials, and the measured sorption capabilities will be compared between mesoporous vs. non-mesoporous materials. Particular attention will be paid to the possible effect of electric double layer (EDL) overlap in mesopores on ion sorption and diffusion. Based on the experimental data, a new surface complexation model will be proposed to explicitly include the effect of EDL overlap. The issues to be addressed in this proposal are fundamental, and the proposed work will highly impact many aspects of geochemical research. The proposed research will establish a theoretical foundation for the development of high-performance functional materials for solving challenging environmental issues we are facing today doc21599 none Dennis P. Sullivan One of the effective techniques of mathematics for dealing with problems of several parameters or dimensions is combinatorial, or algebraic, topology. In that field, geometric objects, called cycles, associated to constraints are grouped into deformation or homology classes which then combine and decompose in various combinations to define algebraic structures of such richness to provoke a theoretical study in the own right of a variety of algebraic structures. Recently some of these structures have appeared in theoretical physics in the attempted formalism to describe term by term models for quantum phenomena. In collaboration, the principal investigator has recently discovered related algebraic topology structures in the space of strings (open and closed) filling up a space (time) model. This award will sponsor investigations to conceptually clarify the occurance of algebraic topology in theoretical quantum physics and to relate the results of these investigations to new string algebra doc21600 none This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 01-157), category NIRT. Novel electrodeposited nanostructured multilayered alloys for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) will be developed. High sensitivity magnetic sensors and hard materials for micro-cutting tools and molds will be fabricated. Compositionally modulated multilayered alloys offer a variety of improved properties including enhanced giant magnetoresistance for thin film magnetic sensors, and superior hardness for high aspect ratio microdevice components, compared to their coarser microstructural counterparts. It is expected that the nanometric feature of the layers will contribute to a change in the physical properties and microstructure. Electrochemical processing will be used to fabricate both thin and thick nanomaterials with pulsed waveforms. Magnetic, electronic and mechanical properties will be examined, including electrical resistivity, magnetoresistivity, DC AC magnetization and susceptibility, and hardness. Investigators at LSU CAMD, Argonne and Brookhaven National Labs will work together towards characterization of the electrodeposited nanolayered alloys with student involvement at the national labs. Student outreach will be conducted through PI participation in the Society of Women Engineers and the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers. The proposed electrodeposition techniques have the potential to significantly improve the quality of multilayered nanostructures, especially those with curved and recessed substrates doc21601 none This four-year Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) project at the University of New Mexico, with Professor Timothy Ward as principal investigator, will investigate the potential to spatially engineer the structure and composition of porous composite nanoparticles with functionalities not previously achieved. The research will focus on particles whose basic scaffolding is a precisely organized inorganic (oxide) nanostructure created by self-assembly of amphiphilic molecules and hydrophilic precursors. The synthesis of silica surfactant self-assembly will rely on evaporation-induced self-assembly (EISA) within confined environment of an evaporating droplet as opposed to nucleated self-assembly conducted in bulk solution. Using the EISA technique, four general classes of particle architecture, some containing functional components positioned within or at the surfaces of particles, will be investigated. The resultant functionalized nanoparticles and composites could provide a reservoir for sensing or therapeutic agents whose action or delivery is coupled to molecular recognition functionality at the particle surface and is mediated by controlled transfer through nanoporous channels doc21602 none Nanny This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative NSF 01-157, category NIRT. The project will identify key physical, chemical and biological conditions at the nano-scale that govern the bioavailability of aromatic hydrocarbons associated with NOM isolated from soils, sediments, and landfills. After NOM characterization and quantitation, the impact of the localized molecular scale interactions, % hydrocarbon residue, and activation energy of interactions will be assessed with respect to bioavailability. Naphthalene dioxygenase activity will be characterized as a function of NOM type and concentration and NOM-aromatic aging. Coupling to microbial bioavailability will be made using bioluminescence reporting. An outcome from the research will be the development of NMR based characterizations that will correlate with an enzymatic assay and a microbial bioassay doc21603 none Proposal No. Principal Investigator: Chengzhi Cai, U Huston By placing a single functional molecule at the tip of an atomic force microscopy, it will become possible to study the inter- and intramolecular interactions of single molecules by force spectroscopy in a wide range of chemical and biological systems. The goal of the project is to provide the preliminary information for preparation of many forms of AFMS with single molecule tips doc21604 none Timp, Gregory This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NIRT. As research in nanotechnology extends its tools for miniaturization and integration to nanometer dimensions (the scale of the secondary structure in a protein or a DNA molecule), new vistas in biology and information science are revealed, which require new multi-disciplinary approaches to both research and education. One new question that emerges is: Can biology be directly integrated with electronics to provide information on physiology? Nature has provided an electrical interface between biology and the environment through ion channels that can now be mimicked using nanotechnology. The main objective of this project is to develop a revolutionary type of silicon integrated circuit that incorporates Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor technology with an on-chip nanopore mechanism for probing the electrical activity of DNA molecules. Ultimately, this biosensor might enable fast, inexpensive characterization of the minimum volume of genetic material, a single strand of DNA. A key constraint is to achieve the required sensitivity. To accomplish these goals, an artificial ion channel (AIC) or nanopore, will be used in conjunction with an amplifier built within one micron from the nanopore, in order to process high-frequency electrical signals occurring when single molecules diffuse through the channel. A membrane having an AIC will be immersed into a buffer solution, and DNA molecules will be pushed through the nanopore by the applied voltage bias a principle that has been tested in a number of recent experiments. Preliminary tests have already successfully demonstrated that ~2-nm diameter nanopores can be reproducibly etched through a ~2-5-nm-thick SiO2 membrane, using a high energy focused electron beam. High-quality, pinhole-free membranes are being used in these experiments. The project will develop artificial ion channels for ultrafast sequencing of single DNA strands. The AIC devices will also be applied for direct measurements of electronic transport properties of DNA molecules. This subject is important since the charge migration in DNA has been linked to the DNA ability to develop and repair defects while being exposed to ionizing radiation. Also, the desire of using single DNA molecules as building blocks for electronic circuits motivates the quest for understanding its transport properties. So far transport properties of DNA have been tested either indirectly or when the molecule is removed from the buffer solution and dried. The AIC device proposed here will be applied to measure directly the long-range charge transfer along DNA, while the molecule is kept in its natural environment in solution. The measurements will be compared with first-principle atomistic simulations. The objective is to understand basic mechanisms that control the charge transport in DNA this controversial topic continues to be strongly debated in the community doc21605 none This proposal was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NIRT. An interdisciplinary team will investigate the use of DNA as a programmable scaffolding upon which nanocomponents precisely self-assemble as a possible basis for an electronic circuit manufacturing technology. Rather than using the techniques of current semiconductor chip manufacturing, in which features are written onto the structure by a lithographic process, this approach will exploit programmed Watson-Crick base-pairing for precision assembly limited only by the 0.34 nanometer nucleotide separation. The research activities in this proposal are focused on 1) Design, synthesis, and assembly of 2D DNA crystal scaffolding for the self-assembly of arrays of closely spaced Au-nanoparticles, 2) Design and synthesis of Au-DNA conjugates optimized for electron tunneling properties and for high-yield assembly to 2D DNA crystals, 3) Characterization of electronic transport properties of the DNA-assembled Au-nanoparticle arrays to establish the suitability of the DNA scaffolding, tethers, and other structural elements for use as passive host scaffolding for electronic nanocomponents. This study will address basic scientific and engineering challenges in the development of DNA nanotechnology for the precise assembly of components for nanoelectronics and other applications, such as nanorobotics and nanomaterials. It will systematically explore basic chemical, physical, and electronic issues related to nanoparticle DNA design, chemical compatibility, assembly methods, electrostatic interactions, electronic transport, and interactions with surfaces, among others. The study will stimulate interactions among a highly interdisciplinary team of experts representing the fields of Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Electrical & Computer Engineering. This project will contribute to educational and human resource development by supporting three Ph.D. students. We also expect to involve several M.S. level students in this work and provide research opportunities for undergraduate students through existing directed studies and internship programs at the University of Minnesota. It will help to establish relationships between the University of Minnesota and New York University, as well as with industry through the interactions with Nanoprobes Inc. Finally, this project will enhance the infrastructure for nanoscience research at the University of Minnesota by providing funding for the unique nanoscale electronic characterization system to be used in these studies doc21606 none This proposal was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NIRT. Nanostructured materials (NSMs) with unusual and extreme properties will play a key role in many emerging technologies. However, manufacturing of NSMs with the desired properties is highly complex and currently is over-reliant on empirical data. In this proposal, a novel manufacturing process producing a new class of ceramic materials, i.e. continuous ceramic nanofibers, will be addressed. The novel sol-gel electrospinning technique (U.S. patent pending), invented recently by two of the PI s (Dzenis and Larsen), produces ceramic fibers of submicron diameters with potentially extreme thermomechanical properties. This technique will be analyzed and optimized for the production of nanocrystalline ceramic nanofibers with superior mechanical properties, based on a comprehensive, multidisciplinary research effort. The research team will develop an efficient and robust computational methodology for simulating realistic nanocrystalline nanofibers and their mechanical response at finite temperatures. A novel atomistic-continuum modeling approach based on a hybrid Monte-Carlo finite element technique will be developed and used. The models will be applied to design strong nanofibers by predicting the effects of the chemical composition and atomic structures of grain boundaries and defects on mechanical properties. The results will be used to develop chemistry and to direct manufacturing of strong nanocrystalline nanofibers. The achievement of the enhanced mechanical properties of the resulting nanofibers will be demonstrated experimentally utilizing novel mechanical characterization techniques based on scanning probe microscopy. As a result of this research, the new nanomanufacturing method will be further developed based on the atomistic-continuum modeling. New nanocrystalline ceramic nanofibers with superior mechanical properties will be produced. The combined manufacturing and model-based optimization will allow the mechanical properties of the nanofibers to be tailored to specific needs of the end user. This general, modeling-driven approach will be applicable to other nanomanufacturing processes and nanomaterials. This technology will be a significant part of future nanotechnology efforts. This research program will impact other key areas of nanotechnology where radical improvement of mechanical properties is critical, e.g., nanostructured membranes for ultrafiltration and other separation processes, nanoreinforcing elements for nanocomposites, supports for nanostructured catalysts, and many others. A multidisciplinary education plan will include development of interdisciplinary graduate courses on materials synthesis technology, computational materials science, and nanoscale materials characterization. Graduate and undergraduate research assistants will work within the various research groups on computational and experimental aspects of the research. Planned interactions with researchers at national laboratories will provide graduate and undergraduate students with additional educational exposure doc21607 none This is a Nanoscale Exploratory Research award. The general idea is to understand the mechanism by which bacterial flagella switch between rotating clockwise and rotating counterclockwise, with the longer-term goal of using this information to develop nanoscale switches that can be used in practical or commercial applications. Bacterial flagella are remarkable structures, nanometers in diameter, that possess mechanical and dynamical properties unlike any known material on the macroscale. Composed of eleven filaments self-assembled from the protein flagellin, they may interconvert between multiple helical morphologies of both left-and right-handedness as a consequence of monomer conformational transitions that change packing properties on the subnanometer scale. These minute molecular rearrangements have important consequences for cellular dynamics on a range of larger scales, especially so in cellular motility. During chemotaxis, the multiple rotating flagella that provide thrust to the cells bundle and unbundle as their rotary motors, embedded in the membrane, episodically change rotational direction. When bundled, the bacterium moves linearly; disintegration of the bundle upon motor reversal creates a tumbling event that randomizes the cell s orientation. These motions of run and tumble produce the random walks that underlie chemotaxis. The motor reversal also initiates a propagating chirality reversal, turning a left-handed helix that had been rotated counterclockwise into a right-handed helix rotated clockwise. These interconversions occur not only from the torques of rotary motors, but may also be triggered by fluid flow past flagella. Little is known experimentally about the nanomechanical properties of flagella and especially of dynamic polymorphism. Very recently, Dr. Goldstein and his collaborators developed the first theoretical model that explains the early, mostly qualitative, experiments on chirality transitions produced by external flows. This continuum model incorporates monomer packing multistability into a novel nonlinear extension of elasticity theory, coupled via slender-body hydrodynamics to fluid flow. In this way, it connects conformational transitions at the nanoscale to dynamics at the cellular scale, and captures many of the key features of those experiments. It also makes a number of sharp predictions regarding the initiation, frequency, and velocity of chirality transformations, to date untested. This project will use recent, important developments in fluorescent imaging methods for flagella, coupled with optical trapping methods, to conduct the first experiments on flagella under well-defined and controllable conditions of fluid stress or external forces, creating a low Reynolds number wind tunnel for flagellar dynamics. Concurrently, Drs. Goldstein and Kessler will extend the theoretical approach to make quantitative contact with these experiments, using the latest techniques they have developed for the study of the coupled partial differential equations that describe overdamped bending and twisting of elastic filaments. These studies will yield important information about the stress-induced conformational transitions underlying polymorphism at the nanoscale, and perhaps open the way toward the use of these molecular switches in microfluidics or MEMS applications doc21608 none Santschi The aim of this proposal is to investigate the structural dynamics of aggregates of nano-scale colloidal particles and the role of the nano-scale fibrillar biopolymers in inorganic colloid aggregation. The proposal addresses the role that these structures play in the transport of trace metals and pollutants in natural environmental and engineered systems. The combination of experimental studies encompassing microscopic methods (AFM and EM), synchrotron-based methods (SAXS, XAS), and multi-scale modeling will aid in elucidating the significance of particulate material in aquatic systems. This project is collaborative and multi-disciplinary, combining expertise from chemistry, biology, and modeling to investigate the role of fibrils and macromolecules in inorganic colloid aggregation. Results of this work should help in the understanding the self-cleansing capacity of fresh, estuarine and marine waters through transport and sedimentation. Of special interest is the understanding of the similarities and differences between freshwater and seawater. This proposal was received in response to the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative, NSF 01-157, category NIRT doc21609 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Christopher Beekman and his colleagues will conduct archaeological field and laboratory research at the ancient settlement of Navajas in the highland lake district of western Mexico. The project brings together specialists in archaeology, palynology, phytolith, and macrobotanical remains to carry out a coordinated investigation of a stratified society in ancient Mesoamerica. This is part of a continuing program of NSF funded research directed towards a better understanding of cooperation and competition among elites in West Mexican society from around A.D. 100-900. These issues are being addressed in the Tequila valleys of highland central Jalisco, where a series of transitions back and forth between intensive factional competition, and its apparent suppression in a consolidated polity, offer an opportunity to study the mechanisms by which elite competition and individual aggrandizement are being harnessed and redirected in a way that promotes cooperation and the formation of a state. This is particularly significant because these changes in local strategy relate to larger economic changes in the region, as the increased use of imported goods that accompanies local competition appears to coincide with the formation of long distance trade networks to obtain those goods. Specifically, field research will focus on wide area excavations across multiple structures and open spaces in public architecture at the late settlement of Navajas, which will be used to complement prior NSF funded research at the earlier settlement of Llano Grande. The excavations will provide data regarding labor organization and the construction of the public architecture, and the activities taking place both in public spaces and within the more restricted structures. Laboratory analyses of artifacts and soil samples conducted at several different universities will follow up with three important tasks: to determine the origins of artifacts recovered, to develop a refined chronology, and to test existing proposals that activities within the public architecture may have related to agricultural ritual. Dr. Beekman and his collaborators will focus on the following questions: 1) What changes occurred in the organization of labor and the association of descent groups with sections of the architecture? 2) What activities took place in these public spaces and how did this change between the periods of consolidation and decline of this society? 3) To what degree may these very local strategies by elites have corresponded to regional changes in economic or political networks doc21610 none Huber Nanomagnetic devices for applications such as quantum computing and high-capacity memory cannot be developed without faster, more sensitive characterization tools to directly probe phenomena and material structures at the nanoscale. The objective of the proposed work is to advance the capability of a non-invasive, high-sensitivity technique-scanning superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) susceptometry for the dynamic characterization of nanomagnetic systems and phenomena. The principal investigator will achieve this objective through two innovations. First, spin sensitivity will be improved from the current state of the art, a few thousand electron spins per Hz1 2, to a few tens of spins per Hz1 2. This improvement will be accomplished by reduction of pickup loop dimensions in a combined optical and electron-beam lithography process and by utilizing an ultra-low-noise dc SQUID process. Second, bandwidth will be increased from the current state of the art, tens of kHz, to tens of MHz by the use of dc SQUID series array amplifiers as preamplifiers for the dc SQUID susceptometer. The devices will be characterized for flux sensitivity and bandwidth at 4 K and 20 mK. The devices will have many applications at 4 K, although operation at 20 mK will be essential for the study of quantum decoherence mechanisms in electronic systems. Undergraduates, working with graduate students in the collaborator s laboratory, will characterize the spin sensitivity of the devices and their performance under realistic scanning conditions by imaging individual cobalt nanomagnetic spheres of controlled diameters ranging from 3 nm to 10 nm and magnetic moments ranging from tens to tens of thousands of electron spins. Further, one SQUID susceptometer will be used to image a second, identical device to quantitatively characterize the noise generated by the devices. The scientific emphasis of this project is to produce sensors that will have applications in the area of nanoscale structures, novel phenomena, and quantum control and to use these sensors image both static and dynamic properties of individual cobalt nanomagnets. Integration of a high-sensitivity, high-bandwidth SQUID susceptometer into a scanning platform will significantly increase the number and kind of systems that can be studied, decrease turn-around time, and increase the number of samples that can be studied in an single experiment. Thus, the successful realization of this project will contribute to advances in nanoscale devices and system architecture. An added benefit of this project will be the educational benefits at both CU-Denver (PI s institution) and Stanford University (collaborator s institution) resulting from the collaboration between CU-Denver undergraduate students and Stanford graduate students doc21611 none Studies of nanoscale phenomena relevant to environmental preservation and verification of new express and nonintrusive methods to control pollution on the nanoscale are of tremendous importance to improve quality of life and help in the creation of more efficient and clean manufacturing processes. Water purification and quality control techniques can be significantly refined if interactions at the interfaces of colloidal particles can be investigated at the molecular scale. The objective of this research is to exploit and extend the capabilities of the non-linear optical method of second harmonic generation (SHG) to study model nanoscale interactions at the interface of micron-size colloidal particles. More specifically, the adsorption of cationic and anionic surfactants at micron-size charged silica and alumina particles in water will be investigated by SHG. SHG is a second-order nonlinear optical process and has been proven to be highly surface-specific probe of interfacial structure and surfactant adsorption at surfaces in particular. Its application to study nanoscale structures at the surfaces of micron-size particles has not been developed to its full potential due to some methodological problems and lack of extensive knowledge about the nature of the particle-surfactant interactions. It is expected that this research will bring new understanding of the adsorption processes at the particle surfaces, which will help to further promote the application of the SHG method to study surfactant nanoscale structures on colloidal particles. A SHG spectrometer will be built based on an available femtosecond laser and will be employed for these studies. It will be built in collaboration with Prof. John Conboy, Department of Chemistry, who has rich experience in vibrational sum frequency generation spectroscopy and is also a senior member of the research team. He and Dr. Zhorro Nickolov, who is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Metallurgical Engineering, will be closely collaborating with the PI on all research issues. SHG of water molecules oriented by the charged particle interfaces will be monitored as a function of surfactant concentration in the solution. The adsorption of the surfactant is expected to reduce the polarization of the interfacial water molecules by screening the surface charge of the microparticles. This would lead to a corresponding decrease in the SHG signal which can than be measured and quantified. Alternatively, dyes resonantly absorbing at the fundamental infrared wavelength and therefore having a strong SHG signal, will be adsorbed at the particle surfaces and used to establish a constant high level of SHG signal. Then the surfactant will be added and as a result of displacing the dye from the particle surfaces the SHG signal will decrease. Consequently surfactant adsorption free energy and surface coverage can be evaluated in both cases. The risk elements in the proposal are connected with the necessity to discriminate between the SHG signals characterizing the particle interface and SHG signals which may be generated by the bulk of the particles, and by bulk water. Also, the competition between the surfactant and the dye for adsorption at the particle surfaces should be accounted for. The project will have a significant impact on advancing of the research in nanoscale phenomena in colloidal systems and on creating capabilities to perform high-level in-situ nonintrusive studies on particle interfaces doc21612 none This proposal was received in response to Nanoscale Science and Engineering initiative, NSF 01-157, category NIRT. Because of their extraordinary properties, carbon nanotubes (CNT) in general have been extensively studied. Local deformations of CNT s appear to exhibit combined electrical, mechanical, thermal and even optical properties that offer particularly intriguing promise for studying physical effects at the nm scale and for novel sensors and other devices. A team with the requisite diverse backgrounds and capabilities has been formed to exploit these new opportunities. One core proposed activity is the modeling of deformed carbon nanotubes and other nanostructures (e.g. silicon nanowires) using atomic-scale simulation methods ranging from classical interatomic potential to tight-binding, ab-initio quantum simulation, and electronic and thermal conductance analysis. Quasi-static and molecular-dynamics methods will be used to study deformation processes as well as the indenting of polymer films using a CNT. The electronic conductance of deformed nanotubes will be investigated using Kubo and Landauer methods with self-consistent quantum simulations. Complementing the modeling activity will be experimental verification of the modeling results with two eventual applications in mind: 1) Nanoscale force and thermal sensors based on a nanotube bent in the shape of a hairpin. Such a device might allow temperature distributions to be mapped with a spatial resolution as fine as 10nm and also be able to respond to fast molecular dynamic force signals, and 2) A turnstile electron emitter that employs the deformity in the shank of a nanotube to produce local band bending to control the transport of single electrons to the tip for field-assisted photoemission. Such a device would have significant impact on electron beam nanolithography through the elimination of shot noise and also on ultrahigh speed (100GHz) analog-to-digital conversion doc21613 none This proposal was submitted in response to the solicitation Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSF 01-157). The project aims to establish an interdisciplinary research and training team to:1) synthesize and characterize mono-disperse particles ranging in size from 5 to 24 nanometers prepared by biomineralization within protein cages; 2) to assemble the magnetic particles in two-dimensional arrays of micron size and characterize the physical structure and magnetic properties of the assemblies; 3) assemble and characterize random and ordered two-dimensional arrays formed from binary mixtures of magnetically distinct nanoparticles; 4) fine tune the magnetic properties of these assemblies by incorporating chemical cross-links and spin-coupling modulators to control inter-particle magnetic interactions. The precise control of both particulate properties and inter-particulate interactions will provide for immediate applications in important areas such as superior performance magnetic memory, sensors, and ultra-high speed device architectures. The broader impacts on education resulting from an interdisciplinary research program using state-of-the-art synthesis and multi-facetted characterization will be significant. Continued advances in ultra-high speed electronics and super dense memory requires the synthesis, development and use of new magnetic materials as superior performance magnetic memory, sensors, and devices. The interdisciplinary nature of this research, containing elements of virology, microbiology, physics, and chemistry, will not only provide new magnetic materials for significant advances in the information technologies, it will also provide a superb training environment for future scientists and engineers in many other nanotechnology areas of high priority to industry and national security. The project is jointly supported by the Division of Materials Research, the Chemistry Division, and the Division of Biological Infrastructure doc21614 none Professor Taylor s group has successfully used molecules containing homoallylic alcohol and allylsilane functional groups to prepare enantiomerically pure cyclopropanes and oligocyclopropanes. In the current award period, they will study the mechanisms of these cyclopropane forming reactions and use that understanding to control future reactivity and selectivity studies. In the current project period, this group will be extending their cyclopropane forming methodology to the use of silyl enol ethers as cation traps in addition to the allyl silane traps used previously. This change will provide access to cyclopropyl aldehydes which can be further functionalized. Vinyl cyclopropyl alcohols will also be prepared and elaborated into oxepene core structures found in marine natural products. Lastly, vinyl cyclopropanes will be studied as substrates for olefin cross metathesis. This methodology will be used to prepare oligocyclopropanes and cyclopropane containing fatty acids. The fatty acids can be used to study membrane and monolayer stabilities. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Richard E. Taylor of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Taylor will work on the development of chemical reactions which can be used to prepare organic molecules containing a cyclopropane ring. Cyclopropanes are three membered rings containing three carbon atoms. This functional group is found in a number of molecules with pharmaceutical and agrochemical uses. The cyclopropane ring forming reactions developed by Professor Taylor and his research group produce cyclopropanes which are chiral (have two nonsuperimposable mirror images) and make only one of the two possible forms (a single enantiomer). Development of this family of reactions is one of the most important problems facing the pharmaceutical and agrochemicals industries today. Students trained during the course of this work will gain skills needed by the pharmaceutical and speciality chemicals industries which now produce a number of single enantiomer compounds doc21615 none With National Science Foundation support, William McFarlane will conduct an eight-month field season of archaeological research at the site of El Coyote located in the Cacaulapa Valley of northwestern Honduras. Founded during the Late Formative Period (200 BC - AD 200), El Coyote remained a regional center into the Early Postclassic (AD 900 - ). This is noteworthy as the Early Postclassic has been viewed as a transitional period in the prehistory of southeastern Mesoamerica, characterized by socio-political decentralization and an end of nucleated settlement. Data in hand suggest the Early Postclassic community at El Coyote was a centralized village boasting a large ceremonial center, a well defined set of ritual practices, organized production locales, and long-distance trade connections to greater Mesoamerica. Current models of the Early Postclassic cannot account for the existence of such a site. It is clear an individual or group at El Coyote was able to maintain community solidarity when other sites in the region were abandoned. It is therefore imperative to refine current models of Honduran prehistory by documenting the social, political, and economic organization of El Coyote and charting the trajectory of the community through time. Early Postclassic investigations directed by William McFarlane, including excavation of ceremonial, administrative, and residential structures, mapping of archaeological materials throughout the immediate area, and artifact analysis will compliment on-going research by the parent project, Proyecto Valle de Cacaulapa. In addition to refining current models of Early Postclassic northwestern Honduras, the research design will address broader issues of human interaction. The central question: how do individuals and groups use diverse resources to seize and maintain positions of power within and between communities, is considered from three different perspectives. The first perspective emphasizes the use of ideological resources, such as religious practices, foreign symbols, and imported concepts of statecraft by individuals or groups to create social distance between the leaders and the community. The second perspective considers resource allocation strategies that impact the economy. Control over the importation, production, and distribution of raw materials and commodities is frequently cited as a central feature of complex societies. The final perspective focuses upon attempts to develop and promote activities that reinforce community solidarity, thus, tying polity members together. It is expected that during the 3 centuries investigated by this project various power strategies were implemented with diverse success rates thus providing an index from which to rate the viability of successive leader s social, economic, and political policies. The Early Postclassic research project stands to contribute to our understanding of a little researched and poorly understood period of Honduran prehistory. Further, investigations of El Coyote provide an opportunity to examine how actions rooted in diverse sources of power can have dramatic consequences relative to long-term regional developments. It is hoped that a better understanding of the power struggles within and between political groups in the past and present may be achieved doc21616 none The purpose of this project is to describe an exploratory research project that focuses on technology and learning. The research addresses critical issues related to improving how technology is utilized in underserved populations to improve its pedagogical impact. This is accomplished by studying how self-directed learning communities (SDLC) are formed and sustained, as well as the motivational issues related to technology access and implementation. These issues are vital to maximizing the potential benefits of current efforts to bridge the digital divide, which have primarily focused on providing access to hardware, software, and content. Self-directed learning communities are defined as a vibrant, participative, and culturally aware human environment that promotes learning opportunities to enhance the potential of its members. This definition has been adapted from learning cities definition of the European Lifelong Learning Initiative (ELLI). Through this exploratory research, I will be able to begin to establish an empirically based repository for research and practices related to the digital divide and the impact of self-directed learning communities. For this SGER research project, I will focus on a single learning community for a year in and effort to develop concrete data and techniques that may be used in future research. To this end, I will seek to answer the following research questions: 1. What are the essential factors of a self-directed learning community? 2. How should we assess student progress? 3. What kinds of implementation models are valid and replicable? Because self-directed learning communities emerge spontaneously instead of being created formally, I will observe and document their formation. Investigating the formation to these self-directed learning communities is crucial and requires the analysis of the roles, relationships, attitudes, and needs of the stakeholders involved. In an effort to establish a benchmark, extant data, which may include standardized test scores, will be used. As the self-directed learning community emerges, the factors effecting its formation will be identified and analyzed. Once the factors are investigated, the researcher will work with the stakeholders of the learning community to create assessment measures. The assessment measures will be used to validate the factors and test for their generalizeability to multiple self-directed learning communities. Because self-directed learning communities are innovative in the way that I am applying them, some of the research effort will be spent identifying and analyzing what these constructs are and how they impact learning doc21617 none Malek Description: This award is for support of a joint research project by Dr. R. I. Malek, Materials Research Laboratory, Pennsylvania State University (PSU), University Park, Pennsylvania and Dr. Gamal Kamh, Geology Department, Menoufia University, Shebeen El-Kom, Egypt. The objective of this research is to provide database on compositions of new restoration mortars and preservation procedure for old structures. The two scientists plan to investigate deterioration mechanisms. They will determine the compositions of new mortars that are relevant to the causes of deterioration and that are compatible with host structures as well as the use of new binders. They will diagnose the causes of damage using chemical analysis, ultrasonic spectroscopy, x-ray and Magic Angle Spinning NMR, color hue, porosity, and elasticity moduli at PSU. They will try several new binders including cement grout, geopolymers, cement organic polymer blends, and phosphate-based binders. They will perform characterization of the binders to ensure their longevity and compatibility with the host structure. They will include geopolymers, which have an advantage as repair material in trapping salts due to the difference in charge between Aluminum and Silicates in the framework. They will test phosphate binders, which have the advantage of trapping salts and being color adjustable and are dimensionally stable. Scope: The two collaborating investigators have complementary research background experiences. Dr. Malek has considerable experience in cementitious materials and their degradation and repair. Dr. Kamh has experience in modes of deterioration of historic buildings under natural weathering conditions and due to human activity causes. They will combine their experiences and using the laboratory resources at PSU for the study of the practical aspects of restoration and preservation of ancient buildings and monuments. The two will exchange visits PI will visit, first to Egypt for the field study and then to PSU for the laboratory analysis. Graduate students at both institutes will be involved in the field and laboratory research. The experience these students gain in the restoration and preservation science may help them further their career goals. Relevant educational materials will be prepared and used as a seed for a new curriculum on science and technology of restoration and preservation to further students education. This project is funded by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Civil and Mechanical Systems doc21618 none This award in the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program provides continued support to Dr. Kenneth G. Caulton of the Chemistry Department, Indiana University, for the synthesis and study of complexes of an unusually electron-rich amide ligand, (RNPR2)2N (-), and a carbene ligand, (RNPR2)2C:, that is exceptionally electron withdrawing. Together these two ligand classes are at opposite extremes in terms on electron donating ability. Both ligands will be used to form complexes of mid-transition metals (largely, but not exclusively, Re) and the ability of these complexes to cleave normally unreactive C-H, C-C, and C-F bonds will be evaluated. The underlying hypothesis is that the frontier orbital occupancy and energy of a metal complex can be tailored by varying the electron donor acceptor ability of the ligand. Thus, the ability of a metal to effect various reactions can be tuned by proper ligand choice. The chemistry to be studied in this proposal is important to obtaining a basic understanding of the behavior of homogeneous catalysts. The goal of this work is to provide a basis for the rational development of new and useful metal-mediated chemical processes. The discovery of new bonding patterns and reactivity modes will be followed by attempts to use this information in the design of new reagents and catalysts for significant chemical processes doc21619 none Grodzicker In the last few years the fields of evolution and molecular developmental genetics have intersected to produce new results and insights which have generated much current excitement. It is now clear that the very few primary model organisms that are currently utilized in biomedical research are not sufficient to let us understand the tremendous diversity of animal and plant life on earth. Understanding the generation of this diversity, honed over eons of evolution, will most likely provide important insights into the mechanisms that cause organ variation and the evolution of species. The goal of the proposed Cold Spring Harbor Conference on Evolution of Developmental Diversity to be held April 17 to April 21, is to bring together a broad range of scientists studying various molecular and genetic aspects of animal and plant biology with a strong emphasis on morphological and functional comparisons of organismal diversity and evolution. This conference is expected to attract approximately 250 scientists from around the world. This biannual meeting will provide a format for the exchange of ideas and information among both junior and senior scientists for the discussion of the latest research findings and technical advances towards the study of the evolution of developmental mechanisms that diversify animals and plants, and fosters scientific collaboration. Eight topics (eight sessions) have been selected for detailed discussion as a reflection of the most advanced and interesting areas of study in the evolution and development field (Evolution of Gene Regulation, Genetics I and II, Genomics, Axial Pattern, Segmentation and Regionalization, Organogenesis: Morphological Innovation, Speciation). Three established scientists per session are invited to present a relatively global perspective of their work (one of which will also act as the chairperson for that session), while the remainder of the talks will be selected from the submitted abstracts. Other participants are able to present their research in poster sessions to be held during the conference. This format allows the participation of many junior scientists, giving them a format to present their latest work doc21620 none Bisson This award supports a collaborative research project between Professor Mary Bisson of SUNY-Buffalo and Professors Mary Beilby and Norman Walker of the University of New South Wales, Australia. Research on osmotic regulation in the marine alga Venticaria will focus on measuring potassium ion fluxes during osmotic stress, and on the effect of light, inhibitors and changing ion concentrations on flux rates. Dr. Bisson s expertise in working with turgor probes and with cultures of Ventricaria will be complemented by the experience of her Australian colleagues in the use of ion-selective electrodes to determine potassium ion fluxes and in the mathematical analysis of current-voltage curves. This study will provide baseline information about the generation and control of membrane potential in a typical marine algae, enhancing our knowledge of marine algae in general and providing valuable information for mariculture systems. In addition, the project will strengthen the collaboration between the U.S. and Australian laboratories doc21454 none This is an RUI collaborative research project among three physics programs at neighboring state universities: Angelo State University, Tarleton State University, and Southwest Texas State Uni-versity. The project focuses on three main topics: (1) correlation between electrical and optical properties and stress in ZnO and nitrogen-doped ZnO fabricated at reduced temperatures using radical atomic beam processing, (2) feasibility of fabricating predicted ZnO-Mn and Zn-Co room temperature transparent magnetic semiconductors, and (3) dielectric properties of select amor-phous or potentially epitaxial insulator oxide alloys consisting of Pr-Al-O, Gd-Ga-O, Hf-Al-O, Pr-Zr-O and La- Hf-O (most with possible oxynitridation and alloy-dependent band gap variabil-ity) relevant for magnetic spin tunneling structures and next-generation CMOS gate applications. A study towards the stabilization and characterization of metastable Ni-incorporated Cu-Ge and Co- Ge thin film crystalline phases will also be included. Thin film materials fabrication will be conducted using ion beam sputter processing strategies. The approach is to implement mono-energetic Ar + or Xe + ions ( 1 keV) to control incident film adatom energy (between ~ 6 eV to ~ 20 eV), and vary the substrate angle of incidence to promote kinetic film growth at reduced temperatures with and without reflected energetic Ar Xe atom bombardment. Low energy ( 100 eV) reactive (O2 + N2 + ) assist ion beams will be compared with neutral thermal atomic radi-cals to promote optimal oxidation (and dopant nitridation) at reduced substrate temperatures. The implementation of in-situ low energy and or neutral atomic radical species to promote reactive sputtering is relatively unique for ion beam sputtering and is not possible with magnetron sput-tering due to its higher operating pressure regime. The group also has the capability of processing sputtered films with rapid thermal annealing and high-energy ( 1 MeV) inert ion mixing to study germanide formation in amorphous deposited metal-Ge films. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in a topical area of materials science having technological relevance. An important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education. Undergraduates from all three universities will be involved in multiple phases of the research, with strong participation from under-represented groups. In addition to ion beam sputtering, students will be involved with rapid thermal process-ing, electrical transport studies, ion beam analysis, scanning electron microscopy with EDS, ad-vanced x-ray diffraction and fluorescence analysis, magnetometry, and optical characterization (reflectivity, FTIR, photoluminescence). In addition, students will have a chance to collabora-tively interact with Central Texas microelectronics industry scientists and doctoral institution re-search teams interested in the project. All three collaborating universities are close enough to permit an active degree of inter-university group visits and student exchanges to support the re-search. The research will encourage students to consider pursuing research at various materials-related doctoral programs, or consider further education in a professional masters program. In addition, the broad thin film materials experience gained from the project will be useful prepara-tion for student internships in the microelectronics industry and strengthening the workforce pool of educated BS MS graduates for this critical industry doc21622 none This research will investigate the changing gender and power relations occurring among urban Senegalese Muslim women by systematically analyzing ritual and non-ritual dance performances in Wolof-speaking communities in Dakar. The project, to be conducted by a doctoral student in cultural anthropology at Rutgers University, compares two dance events (tours and sabars) with ritual dances (baptisms and marriages) based upon informal and semi-structured interviews of performers and observers, oral histories, methodic coding of videotaped danced events, participant observation, and archival data. In a society where men s roles and activities typically overshadow those of women, performance provides a socially sanctioned context in which women may affect the constraints of social differences based on gender, age and caste. The investigator of this project hypothesizes that women s tour associations (neighborhood dance groups) are innovative forms of community building in response to widespread urbanization and social change. Testing this hypothesis and studying the functioning of this mode of social networking will contribute to theories on social transformation as well as those on gender dynamics. Of broader significance is the proposal s focus on an activity central to women s strategies to build solidarity and change gender and power relations. Understanding this process is a valuable contribution to the widely acknowledged need for a more comprehensive knowledge of the variations in Muslim cultures and of the ways by which women negotiate their roles in these cultures doc21623 none The PIs propose an experimental study to examine how the catalysis of organic molecules may be influenced by the conversion of smectite to illite via the I S (illite smectite) transitional structural states. Basically, simple organic molecules may be held in interlayer smectite sites while the smectite converts to illite. This mineralogic change could catalyze the formation of more complex organic products in present day hydrothermal systems and the early earth, with implications for the origin of life. The idea is that the polymerized organics would be protected by being in interlayer positions. Experiments will be conducted at 300 degrees C, 250 degrees C, and 200 degrees C, and 250 bars, an appropriate pressure for seafloor hydrothermal systems. Experiments will explore the effects of different starting concentrations, Eh, pH, and salinity conditions on catalysis of polymerized organic molecules. Some experiments will be in sealed capsules, whereas others will be in large vessels that can be sampled from time to time as the smectite changes to illite, with interlayer organics presumably also changing in interesting ways. The experimental materials will be analyzed with XRF, GCMS, HPLC, IC, and FTIR plus MALDI-TOF, a new technique for analyzing small amounts of organics on solids in situ doc21624 none Professor Fleming and his coworkers have discovered that cyclic nitrile anions generated in tetrahydrofuran or toluene can be selectively alkylated intramolecularly to generate trans- and cis-decalins, respectively. They will apply this discovery to the syntheses of two decalin containing clerodane natural products. With the help of his collaborator, Professor Madura, computational modelling of the structures of the metallated nitriles which participate in these reactions will be investigated. Lastly, the PI will generate chiral metallated nitriles and investigate their enantioselective intramolecular alkylation. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Fraser F. Fleming of the Department of Chemistry at Duquesne University. Professor Fleming along with his collaborator, Professor Jeffrey D. Madura, and their students will study the structures and reaction chemistry of a class of molecules known as nitrile anions. Intramolecular carbon-carbon bond forming reactions of these nitrile anions will be used to construct two naturally occurring diterpenes, strigillanoic acid and epi-strigillanoic acid. Nitriles which can be metallated on the carbon next to the nitrile functional group will then be used in enantioselective carbon-carbon bond forming reactions called intramolecular alkylation reactions. These alkylation reactions produce cyclic molecules which are chiral (have two nonsuperimposable mirror images) and make only one of the two possible forms (a single enantiomer). Development of this family of reactions is one of the most important problems facing the pharmaceutical industry today. Students trained during the course of this work will gain skills in computational chemistry and organic synthesis. These skills are needed by the pharmaceutical and speciality chemicals industries doc21625 none This SGER grant is awarded to Professors Omowunmi Sadik and Walker Land of SUNY Binghamton by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program (MPS) to apply Support Vector Machines (a computational intelligence technique) to analytical data on chemical warfare simulants. The analytical data originates from a hybrid sensor based on gas chromatography coupled with microarrays of conducting polymer sensing elements, a so-called electronic nose. The data from these arrays is complex and is appropriately studied using advanced pattern recognition techniques. This collaboration connects an analytical chemist with a computer scientist. The exploratory aspect is the opportunity for analytical chemists to take advantage of the advent of the new computational intelligence method, which has been successfully applied by the coPI to breast cancer detection. So called electronic nose devices have the potential to serve as sensitive and selective detectors of mixtures of chemicals. There are many applications of sensors, including homeland security, ascertaining food quality, environmental monitoring, and production process and transportation engineering. More sophisticated data analysis is required to bring next generation sensors into fruition. The application of computer intelligence methods is promising in this regard doc21626 none The focus of the SGER grant is on a new processing technique based on mechanical milling that involves chemical reaction during milling process. The method eliminates the traditional leaching process that is usually required to isolate the metal from by-product salts. The process involves introducing aluminum as a reducing agent, in place of Mg, Ca or Na. The starting material is metal chloride and the by-product aluminum chloride can be separated by vacuum distillation in lieu of leaching thereby eliminating the usually noted surface oxidation. The proof-of-concept will be checked in processing nickel aluminide starting from nickel chloride with aluminum. The resulting powder is consolidated by pressing at slightly high temperatures that will result in fine-grained alloy. The production of NiAl by this new method will be very cost-effective because of the low processing temperature and the valuable by-product. The technique once proven and established will be applicable for other aluminides that find extensive application as high-temperature structural material. The new technique of using Al as a reducing agent during mechanochemical reaction eliminates the usually required second step of leaching that in general results in surface oxidation. This process once proven effective can be adopted for processing of many other metal alloys with superior purity along with substantial cost reduction doc21627 none Differences between the sexes are pervasive in both animals and plants. Such dimorphism can result from selection directly on a trait or it can be a result of genetic correlations between traits. The investigators will test the hypothesis that multiple characters exhibit sex differences in the dioecious plant Silene latifolia, because of genetic correlations between traits. This hypothesis will be investigated with two quantitative-genetic experiments. The first incorporates a set of controlled crosses and subsequent measures of progeny, to determine the pattern and magnitude of genetic covariances among traits. The second experiment will involve artificial selection to investigate how labile the genetic correlations are between flower traits and physiological traits. They will select on the combination of traits rather than on individual traits to alter the correlation between traits, the most powerful way of breaking correlations. These experiments are centered on measuring and altering genetic correlations. These correlations can occur because of pleiotropy, in which one gene affects more than one trait, or because of linkage, in which the genes affecting traits are inherited together. The first of these, pleiotropy, leads to long-term correlations between traits, whereas linkage can be easily broken by selection. If the investigators are unable to break the correlation between traits, then this will lend credence to the hypothesis that pleiotropy contributes to patterns of genetic correlation and differences between the sexes doc21628 none Williamson The objective of the proposed research is to understand how temperature and colored dissolved organic matter (CDOM) influence the impact of UV on food webs in lakes. We hypothesize that climate change will regulate UV damage at both the molecular level (by altering temperature), and at the ecosystem level (by altering CDOM). We hypothesize that high UV, low temperature conditions will favor plant-based food webs while lower UV: temperature ratios conditions will favor bacteria-based food webs, with important consequences for zooplankton, fish, and ecosystem structure and function. A carefully focused set of analytical and experimental approaches will test these hypotheses in the lab, and in the field at different elevations with different UV and CDOM conditions. It is widely recognized that environmental UV is damaging, but little is known about how molecular repair of UV damage varies with temperature or how these effects propagate up to the ecosystem level. The proposed research will advance our understanding of how lakes are likely to respond to future changes in temperature and UV related to alteration of climate and ozone. Students will be closely integrated into the research to provide them with the diverse range of quantitative skills necessary to tackle some of the complex issues that environmental biologists face in this period of human-accelerated environmental change doc21629 none Under the direction of Dr. Fred Myers and Dr. Bambi B. Schieffelin, Mr. Daniel Fisher will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. His field work will include participant-observation research on Aboriginal media production and reception, audio recording of conversational interaction and broadcast speech genres in Aboriginal English, and archival research on Australian multicultural and media policies. He will investigate correlations among emergent practices and institutions of Aboriginal media with ways of speaking, poetic and aesthetic strategies, and changes in the political and economic circumstances of Indigenous people. Three questions organize the project: (1) Why have indigenous media and art achieved great success where other state-sponsored social initiatives are assessed as failures? (2) How are new relationships to the past and to place mediated through speech and music on the radio, both within and across diverse Aboriginal communities? (3) How do particular linguistic, poetic, and aesthetic strategies relate to state policies on multi-cultural participation and Aboriginal self-determination? This research is significant in several domains. Mr. Fisher s studies inform the anthropology of both Australian Aboriginal cultural practices and the appropriation of electronic audio and visual media by Indigenous and 4th world peoples. These developments have received increasing interdisciplinary attention as Indigenous communities around the world pursue engagements with media production to ensure their material survival and cultural futures. This project also contributes to anthropological and sociolinguistic research on electronically mediated speech practices, the strategic mobilization of register, dialect stylization, and code-switching in multilingual and or socially stratified language contact zones. Finally, this work will interest scholars of pidgins and creoles by contributing to our general understanding of the social and linguistic specificity of Aboriginal English doc21630 none In this project funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Berg will undertake researches in condensed matter chemistry, namely fast time scale dynamics of supercooled and high viscosity liquids. New non-linear spectroscopies are to be developed and existing methods to be extended. Heterogeneity and non-exponential decays in high viscosity liquids and other complex materials are to be investigated, and rotation and solvation measurements are to be made and internal diffusive transitions invetigated. A Fifth Order Rotational Spectroscopy (FORS) is to be developed. A new viscoelastic (VE) theory is to be developed, one that includes both inertial and diffusive dynamics in a unified formalism. This project deals with important issues in the behavior of fluids, such as the relationship between the dynamics of single molecules and that of the collective behavior of fluids. Existing theories have been partially successful in accounting for the dynamical properties of fluids and the present work addresses fundamental issues that have in the past been treated only slightly. New experimental techniques, coupled with theory will be developed. This research will be conducted with the aid of graduate and undergraduate students, and postdoctoral research associates. They will gain valuable experience through their involvement in contemporary forefront research in physical chemistry. These experiences will of great advantage in their further studies, or employment in industry, government laboratories, or academia doc21631 none s of the protein expression pattern and intracellular localization, and protocols and standard operation procedures in experimentation, analysis, and interpretation. Also, a Reference Protein Subcellular Localization Map will be constructed using fluorescently-tagged proteins with known intracellular targeting. These resources will be available to the public through two unrestricted venues: DNA constructs and transgenic seeds will be distributed through the Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center (ABRC) whereas gene sequences and expression and subcellular localization data, including fluorescence microscopy images, will be disseminated via the project website integrated into The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR). Importantly, this sharing of the resources and results of this project through ABRC and TAIR, respectively, will take place on a continuous basis as the deliverables become available. Announcements on the availability of new resources will be made through such electronic media as the Bionet USENET newsgroups and parallel e-mail lists. This project significantly advances the overall objectives of the Project by characterizing on a large scale the expression and subcellular localization of unknown Arabidopsis genes. Our understanding of Arabidopsis biology will be glaringly incomplete without such knowledge. In addition, this project has a broader impact on the society and science. Once this pilot project demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed approach, it will serve a basis for developing a laboratory curriculum for use in cell biology training of high school students and teachers as well as beginning investigators at the CSHL DNA Learning Center and the annual Arabidopsis Molecular Genetics Course, and at the biannual UCR Plant Cell Biology course. Finally, a teaching outreach program with community colleges will involve undergraduates in summer research. Thus, our program will bridge genomic approaches with cell biology in the laboratory and classroom, and generate important novel information and tools to characterize the Arabidopsis proteome doc9980 none The award is to conduct the annual National Science Foundation Design, Service and Manufacturing Research Conference. The conference will involve researchers in all program areas within the Division of Design, Manufacture and Industrial Innovation (DMII), the manufacturing researchers in the Divisions of Engineering Education and Centers (EEC), Electrical and Communication Systems (ECS), Civil and Mechanical Structures (CMS), located within the Directorate for Engineering, Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS), located within the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, Materials Research (DMR), located within the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, International Programs (INT), Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research, specifically the Innovation and Organizational Change Program (IOC), located in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences who are in manufacturing related research will present ongoing activities in their current research and attend sessions which will extend beyond their immediate area of research. Ongoing research in manufacturing related research activities are presented by the grantees from the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia (CONACyT), from locations within Mexico, and grantees from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the National Research Council (NRC), from locations within Canada. The conference ensures that the individual researchers are informed about the ongoing activities of their colleagues. An elimination of duplication of their efforts may be achieved and a degree of cooperation may result from this activity. An overall improvement of efficiency of the research activity could be expected. In addition, the conference program organization allows for ample time to discuss manufacturing research in detail with the collective research community at the meeting, with feedback to and input from the National Science Foundation. Finally, personal contacts between the grantees and program directors in the Divisions should contribute to clarify many current issues in their work. The aims of the conference are: (1) to broaden the outlook of all participants; (2) promote transfer of ideas and technology from one area of research to another; (3) to allow those working in a related area of research to get to know their peers so as to avoid duplication of research and to encourage cooperation, and (4) to allow personal contacts from the collective research community, the NSF, CONACyT, NSERC, and NRC program staff to discuss manufacturing research in detail (this should contribute to clarifying many current problems in ongoing projects). Attendees to the conference gain an early access to the information disseminated doc21633 none The 24th Midwest Probability Colloquium will be held at Northwestern University, on October 18-19, . This is a regional meeting with a limited number of talks and plenty of opportunity for interaction among the researchers. It has a strong tradition of encouraging graduate students and other young investigators to attend and interact with specialists doc21634 none Under the direction of Dr. Richard Burger, Mr. Robert Rosenswig will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will continue his archaeological settlement survey in the Cuauhtemoc zone of the Soconusco, located on the southern Pacific coast of Chiapas, Mexico. The region is particularly significant as it includes some of the first sedentary communities in Mesoamerica and the earliest evidence of emergent social complexity and political hierarchy between approximately and 650 BC. The Soconusco also has the best evidence in Mesoamerica of direct interaction with the Gulf Coast Olmec - the first civilization the region. A pedestrian survey will systematically cover 50 sq km and map changing political organization across the landscape. This survey will take advantage of existing trenches dug for banana irrigation to provide accurate subsurface information over a large area. With reliable surface-subsurface correspondence, the distribution of settlements will be documented with a degree of confidence not often possible with regional surface survey. Power and hierarchy are arguably the most fundamental issues addressed by anthropology and most other social sciences. Explaining the emergence of sociopolitical hierarchy over centuries and millennia is a job ideally suited to archaeology. Social scientists study the structure and dynamics of unequal power relations in contemporary contexts. However, these scholars are generally limited to a temporal breadth of decades, or with the help of historical documents a few centuries. Archaeologists are in a unique position to explore the origins of the institutionalized hierarchy that permeates every aspect of modern life. Mr. Rosenswig s research will track the development of sociopolitical complexity in the Cuauhtemoc survey zone over nearly a millennia and will help to determine the nature of relations between local elites and their Olmec counterparts who resided in Mexico s Gulf Coast. Did sociopolitical complexity in the Soconusco coalesce as a result of contact with the Gulf Coast Olmec of Tabasco and Veracruz? Did the Gulf Coast Olmec actually make incursions into the Soconusco? Alternatively, is the impact of the Gulf Coast over-emphasized in models of Formative Mesoamerican society? These competing hypotheses revolve around the nature of an Olmec Horizon and strive to understand Early and Middle Formative society and the nature of relations between distant regions of Mesoamerica. Taking advantage of modern irrigation ditches and lack of later period occupation, the proposed survey will provide reliable demographic changes at a regional scale. The results of this study will further our understanding of the relationship between local and interregional processes during the emergence of sociopolitical complexity in the Soconusco. This research is also significant cross-culturally as Mesoamerica is one of only a handful of areas in the world where sociopolitical complexity emerged independently and the Soconusco contains some of the earliest societies where this occurred. Mr. Rosenswig s research will document the manner in which incipient sociopolitical complexity emerged and will also assist in training a promising young scientist doc21635 none Despite current interest in tropical forests as key components of the global carbon cycle and as centers of biodiversity,we remain largely ignorant of the inter-relationships among forest attributes (e.g.,dynamics,diversity,structure),and the physical properties of the environments in which these forests grow.In recent years datasets have become available describing growth,mortality and recruitment of approximately 10%of the global diversity of tropical tree species.These data result from the development of a network of large-scale forest dynamics plots coordinated by the Center for Tropical Forest Science (CTFS),and established using methods identical to those used to survey and census the 50-ha Forest Dynamics Plot on Barro Colorado Island (BCI),Panama. Just as data from the BCI plot have played a prominent role in our understanding of the community-level consequences of ecological processes played out at local scales,we will show how these plots now provide an unprecedented opportunity to examine a venerable question in tropical ecology:How do soil-borne resources influence the variation in forest structure and demographic turnover rates observed among plots,and among habitat types within plots? To achieve this objective we propose three sets of measurements.At nine plot sites we will characterize variation in soil-moisture availability through the year and throughout the plots using a hydrological model (TOPMODEL).This model predicts soil-moisture saturation deficit based on rainfall,stream-flow data and local topography. Second,at five plots currently lacking soils data we will sample soil-chemical properties within standardized,topographically-defined habitat types.Third,at the same plots we will perform seedling growth experiments using mycorrhizal and non-mycorrhizal pioneer species to assess plant-availability of soil nutrients for each habitat type.These measurements will allow us to address questions at two spatial scales.At the among-plot scale we will be able to ask how stem density and basal area,as well as community-wide patterns of growth,mortality and recruitment,correlate with moisture availability and soil fertility.At the within-plot scale we will ask whether species exhibit specialization to particular hydrological niches,and whether habitat types differ in soil fertility,in turnover rates,and in local species richness.Resolution of these broad questions concerning correlations among soil-borne resources and characteristics of the vegetation will in turn permit us to refine future hypotheses aimed at understanding the mechanistic basis for interspecific variation in demographics and distribution. This study will provide the first standardized large-scale measurements of the environmental context within which tropical forests grow.Our trans-continental approach to testing questions of ecosystem function and community organization has rarely been attempted,but it will be essential if we are to improve our understanding of the biogeographic and biophysical limits to our ecological generalizations.Understanding how variation in water and nutrient availability determines forest structure,composition and dynamics,and potentially influences local diversity through niche partitioning,will be essential to predicting future vegetation responses to climate change and will also provide a first step in guiding management to protect forest diversity.Wide dissemination and application of the results of this project is ensured by the active participation of in- country collaborators,and by data sharing through CTFS doc21636 none Individuals typically choose to mate with others of the same species by using several genetically based behavioral or chemical cues. The investigators seek to identify the parts of the genome that are associated with these behaviors and chemicals to test various evolutionary hypotheses of species formation. They propose to execute this research in populations of the fruit fly species Drosophila mojavensis, a member of the cactus-yeast-Drosophila model system, because of its association with and infestation of cactus rots. Previous studies in this and other Drosophila species have shown that olfactory cues (pheromones) and auditory cues (courtship wing vibrations) are the cues that individuals use to select mates. The investigators will use DNA-based markers to identify the locations of genes influencing these traits. This approach will ensure that these genetic analyses will be performed on individuals reared on their natural host plants, as recent studies have shown a dramatic effect of rearing substrates on these traits. The results of this research will begin to reveal the number and locations of genes that are responsible for the beginnings of species formation. Thus, this work will provide insights into the fundamental evolutionary processes that regulate biodiversity on Earth doc21637 none The principal investigator (PI) of this proposal is seeking support for an event in early March that is a combination of a principal investigator s meeting for ITR awardees and a workshop for senior researchers and young investigators in learning technologies. The purpose of the event is to reflect upon the experiences, culture, and community of research in the learning technologies to develop ideas that would inform a CISE-focused learning technology initiative in FY . Conversations with and observations of many recent ITR, CRLT, LIS, and KDI awardees have revealed that there is a kind of tacit knowledge involved in building communities of researchers and practitioners in the emerging learning technology field. Often, such tacit knowledge becomes apparent as a project matures and thus its study and capture may be unjustified at the time of proposal submission. Since learning technology has such strong practical threads, tacit knowledge gained from theory building and research should inform practice to reduce the time required for research and theories to find their way into real-world learning environments. There is reason to believe that the event as proposed will offer a much needed venue to discuss this tacit knowledge and the role CISE should have in expanding research and practice in learning technology. Collaboration, reflection and introspection, diversity of stakeholders, and long-term sustainability are some of the topics expected to be explored within the contexts of simulation, visualization, and modeling; distance and online learning; embedding learning assessment and analyzing learner data; cultural, cognitive, and social dynamics; and virtual laboratories and remote instrumentation. I strongly recommend that the proposal be funded the level of $125,000 doc21638 none Species that are believed to play the same functional role in ecosystems are often placed in functional groups, types or guilds, and redundancy of ecological function is predicted to be highest within such groups. The concept of functional groups composed of interchangeable, redundant species is appealing because it simplifies the study and management of ecological systems. However, there are problems limiting the applicability of this concept. The degree of redundancy among species assigned to many functional groups or guilds is unknown and we do not understand the degree to which the functional roles of species change with environmental context. The vast majority of our knowledge of species roles and how they are influenced by the environment comes from studies of short-lived, terrestrial plants. We now need to broaden our understanding of species roles in other equally important systems. Freshwater systems, and streams in particular, are losing biodiversity at a higher rate than terrestrial or marine systems, but few studies have examined functional redundancy in these systems. Freshwater mussels are a functional group of long-lived, benthic, burrowing filter-feeders that are thought to play an important role in stream ecosystem function. Within this functional group, the potential for redundancy in ecological roles should be high because species have similar life histories, typically occur as speciose assemblages, and there is little evidence for differences in microhabitat or resource preferences between species. However, we have almost no quantitative information on either the overall importance of mussel assemblages to stream function or the roles of individual species. In recent years, many mussel populations have undergone a drastic decline. In order to predict how this loss of both species and overall mussel biomass will impact stream ecosystems, we must quantify the effects of both overall mussel abundance and individual species on ecosystem processes, and we must understand how these relationships may change with environmental conditions. The proposed research will address the following questions: (1) What is the overall importance of the mussel functional group to stream ecosystems? What ecological processes do mussels perform in streams? How do these processes relate to overall mussel abundance biomass? (2) Are species within the mussel functional group ecologically redundant? Do mussel species vary in their performance of ecological processes? Do ecological effects of mussel species within an assemblage vary based on species composition and or abundance? (3) How are the overall importance of the mussel functional group and effects of species roles within the group influenced by environmental context? Are the ecological effects of the overall mussel assemblage and of individual species constant or do they change with environmental conditions? A series of complementary laboratory stream and field enclosure experiments will measure the ecological function of single and multi-species assemblages of mussels under varying abundance and environmental conditions. Laboratory stream experiments will focus on ecological processes performed by mussels (eg. filtering rates, nutrient excretion) and field enclosure experiments will examine the effects of mussels on the rest of the benthic community. Small-scale laboratory experiments and analyses will quantify the potential contributions (eg. nutrient excretion and biodeposition rates) of different mussel species to streams under differing conditions, and mechanisms underlying differences in ecological function between species (eg. gill morphology, behavior). Finally, experimental results will be combined with quantitative information from an NSF-funded mussel biodiversity inventory to make predictions about mussel functional role and redundancy in different stream systems doc21639 none The Many Foundations of Newtonian Dynamics Lawrence Sklar, University of Michigan From its earliest days Newtonian dynamics has been formulated in terms of a variety of foundational principles. The initial varied foundations proliferated in the 18th and 19th centuries, and this variety of possible foundational versions of the theory was augmented by a number of important additional reconstructions of the theory s first principles in the 20th century. Some of these alternative foundations of the theory were motivated by considerations of mathematical simplicity or elegance, or were generated primarily out of the desire to find versions of the theory particularly suitable for problem solving in novel ranges of applications of the theory. But a number of the alternative foundations were strongly motivated by the desire to provide resources that would help resolve long-standing interpretive issues with the theory. This project provides some discussion of the historical development of the panoply of alternative foundations for the theory. The primary goal of the research, however, is to explore a number of philosophical, methodological and interpretive issues that reveal how the possibility of alternative reconstructions of the theory plays its role in ongoing interpretive debates. The PI focuses on a number of foundational structures for the theory, including contemporary axiomatizations, contemporary Machian versions of the theory, and versions of the theory that rely on using spacetime concepts from relativistic theories, to reconstruct Newtonian dynamics and gravitational theory, and contemporary foundations based on extremal principles. Three specific issues are to be treated. First, exponents of alternative axiomatizations of Newtonian dynamics have taken deeply opposed attitudes toward the concept of force in the theory. Is force an uneliminable component of the ontology required by the theory, or can its place be given a completely representationalist account? How do the new axiomatic reconstructions play into the (very old) debate? Second, three separate foundational reconstructions can play important roles in the famous debates about the nature of space and time, debates reaching back to the controversy between Leibniz and Newton at the very beginnings of the theory. Structuralist axiomatizations provide a newly coherent approach to a representationalist version of the theory that can be used both by substantivalists and relationists to back up their claims. Third, the spacetime versions of the theory relying on apparatus retro-fitted to the theory from special and general relativity provide a new context in which the old ontological debate can gain new insights. Contemporary Machianism provides, perhaps, the version of the theory most suited to the relationist. But its nature and its relation to the orthodox theory opens up many interesting questions about what it is to iointerpretli a foundational theory. Contemporary formalizations of the theory that ground it in an extremal principle allow us new insights into the question of the legitimacy of such modes of explanation as fundamental to a theory, rather than as mere derivatives from a causal mode of explanation doc21640 none This award supports the third DLESE Annual Meeting. This meeting will be held at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York from June 29 to July 2, . The annual meeting will be preceded by a two-day preparation and planning meeting. This Annual Meeting will provide DLESE the opportunity to both demonstrate advances in the library s development and develop and strengthen ties between current and new collaborators in collections building, tool development, resource discovery, metadata and controlled vocabulary development efforts. The meeting will establish a platform where both the developers and library users will have opportunities to discuss a variety of issues. The developers will be able to demonstrate their new library functions, the users will be able to provide important feed back to the developers, and both developers and users will learn from their peers about potential uses, and make suggestions for critical improvements needed to make the library a stronger and more attractive learning teaching environment for students teachers from all levels of educational activities. The meeting will incorporate efforts to address issues such as diversity under-represented populations, academic recognition, pedagogical assessment and evaluation, sociological effects of electronic community collaboration and the development of mechanisms to provide guidance and support in designing new instructional materials that support teaching learning about the Earth system. The Annual Meeting provides an opportunity for leaders representing these diverse interests in Earth system education to meet as a community and to work together to shape DLESE as a resource that serves our needs. The conveners will invite 115 people to the meeting. The invited people will represent a broader community including teachers from K-12 schools, college and university professors, and researchers in both earth and information technology sciences. The maximum number of participants will be limited to 200 for both logistical and practical concerns doc21641 none The present project represents the first phase of a planned long-term investigation into the very beginnings of civilization in the Western Hemisphere. In an area on the north-central coast of Peru, known as the Norte Chico ( Little North ) a remarkable culture arose in the 3rd millennium B.C. In three small adjoining valleys, Supe, Pativilca and Fortaleza, a complex of more than 20 major archaeological ruins have been recently discovered, all dating roughly to the time between and B.C. With enormous platform mounds, round ceremonial plazas and extensive areas of socially stratified residences, these sites appear to be the earliest florescence of centralized, hierarchical, complex societies anywhere in the Americas. The research on this project will explore sites in two of the valleys, Fortaleza and Pativilca with two primary goals: 1. Determine the specific chronology of occupation and monument construction at each of the major sites. All of the sites identified for testing share one significant characteristic: they all lack ceramics. While there are interesting implications to the absence of ceramics in terms of technology, it has more immediate importance in terms of dating these sites. Since ceramics were introduced to Peru in the century between and B.C., sites without ceramics can be inferred to generally date prior to B.C. While this provides a useful tool in the basic identification of the early sites, it is insufficient to make assessments about whether the sites were occupied all at the same time or sequentially over the span of a thousand years. Precise dates are needed to determine whether the monumental platform mounds were constructed in a single massive building event or numerous smaller events over a long period of time. In order to answer these central questions about chronology a specific effort will be made to obtain materials for Carbon 14 dating from different parts of each site and from within the monuments. 2. A second subsidiary goal is to obtain samples of artifacts and tools as well as plant and animal remains in order to begin reconstructing the economy, technology and lifeways of the people who belonged to this precocious early civilization. In the absence of ceramics, the analysis of stone tools assumes central importance. Yet, to date, there has been no work done on the myriad stone tools that litter the surface of these sites - scrapers, blades, knives, drills, pounders, grinders, hoes and picks. An attempt will also be made to reconstruct diet. While all later civilizations in the Americas had staple diets based largely on maize (corn), this New World crop was not introduced in Peru until well after all the Norte Chico sites were abandoned. Inhabitants appear to have survived on a wide mix of fruits and vegetables with a heavy dose of anchovies, sardines and shellfish thrown in for protein. Because there is excellent preservation on the Peruvian coastal desert, plant and animal remains are found in abundance in the trash midden areas. To obtain collections of stone tools and the plant and animal remains test pits test pits will be excavated in different parts of each site associated with various kinds of residential architecture and reflecting the full extent of the site area. The ultimate goal of the project is to provide an archaeological window into the past to examine the very beginnings of an early culture that ultimately gave rise to the Inca and their predecessors in Peru doc21641 none The present project represents the first phase of a planned long-term investigation into the very beginnings of civilization in the Western Hemisphere. In an area on the north-central coast of Peru, known as the Norte Chico ( Little North ) a remarkable culture arose in the 3rd millennium B.C. In three small adjoining valleys, Supe, Pativilca and Fortaleza, a complex of more than 20 major archaeological ruins have been recently discovered, all dating roughly to the time between and B.C. With enormous platform mounds, round ceremonial plazas and extensive areas of socially stratified residences, these sites appear to be the earliest florescence of centralized, hierarchical, complex societies anywhere in the Americas. The research on this project will explore sites in two of the valleys, Fortaleza and Pativilca with two primary goals: 1. Determine the specific chronology of occupation and monument construction at each of the major sites. All of the sites identified for testing share one significant characteristic: they all lack ceramics. While there are interesting implications to the absence of ceramics in terms of technology, it has more immediate importance in terms of dating these sites. Since ceramics were introduced to Peru in the century between and B.C., sites without ceramics can be inferred to generally date prior to B.C. While this provides a useful tool in the basic identification of the early sites, it is insufficient to make assessments about whether the sites were occupied all at the same time or sequentially over the span of a thousand years. Precise dates are needed to determine whether the monumental platform mounds were constructed in a single massive building event or numerous smaller events over a long period of time. In order to answer these central questions about chronology a specific effort will be made to obtain materials for Carbon 14 dating from different parts of each site and from within the monuments. 2. A second subsidiary goal is to obtain samples of artifacts and tools as well as plant and animal remains in order to begin reconstructing the economy, technology and lifeways of the people who belonged to this precocious early civilization. In the absence of ceramics, the analysis of stone tools assumes central importance. Yet, to date, there has been no work done on the myriad stone tools that litter the surface of these sites - scrapers, blades, knives, drills, pounders, grinders, hoes and picks. An attempt will also be made to reconstruct diet. While all later civilizations in the Americas had staple diets based largely on maize (corn), this New World crop was not introduced in Peru until well after all the Norte Chico sites were abandoned. Inhabitants appear to have survived on a wide mix of fruits and vegetables with a heavy dose of anchovies, sardines and shellfish thrown in for protein. Because there is excellent preservation on the Peruvian coastal desert, plant and animal remains are found in abundance in the trash midden areas. To obtain collections of stone tools and the plant and animal remains test pits test pits will be excavated in different parts of each site associated with various kinds of residential architecture and reflecting the full extent of the site area. The ultimate goal of the project is to provide an archaeological window into the past to examine the very beginnings of an early culture that ultimately gave rise to the Inca and their predecessors in Peru doc21643 none Harte This LTREB project will continue an 11-year climate manipulation experiment and a 6-year climate-gradient study, thereby providing longer-term data sets to be used to test two hypotheses concerning the linkages between climate and ecosystems. The first hypothesis relates to the effect of climate warming on carbon sequestration, the second to climate controls on plant species richness. Climate change can alter carbon stocks in plants, litter, and soil, resulting in feedback which could either enhance or retard the anthropogenic buildup of atmospheric CO2. Such feedback could be especially strong in montane and high-latitude ecosystems where soils are carbon-rich, vegetation is sensitive to climatic variables such as length of growing season, and climate change is expected to be large due to snow-albedo feedback. The complexity of whole ecosystems renders prediction of the magnitude of this carbon-balance feedback a major challenge in ecology today doc21644 none This renewal team award made to Michigan State University by the Advanced Materials Program in the Division of Chemistry is to study oxide and non-oxide mesoporous structured materials. With this award, Professor Pinnavaia and a team of other senior scientists with expertise in complementary research activities in synthetic inorganic chemistry, theoretical and experimental condensed matter physics, structural modeling and electronic structure calculations, and charge transport and thermal transport characterization will study the following: the oxide mesostructured materials; aluminosilicate mesostructure assembly from zeolite seeds and fragments with intrinsic acidic and hydrothermal stabilities; preparation of organofunctional mesostructures, wherein more than half of the framework metal atom centers are linked to accessible and reactive organic groups; mesostructure carbon replication for optically active monoliths using phase transfer assembly techniques with mesostructured silica as templates; and related experimental and theoretical studies for the assembly mechanisms and to elucidate the fundamental relationships between structure and performance properties of disordered oxidic mesostructures. This team will also study different chalcogenide mesoporous materials that act as the inside-out versions of array of quantum dots, narrow-gap semiconductors, biological iron sulfide clusters; and other electronically active, mesoporous chalcogenide solids with highly ordered pores yielding a variety of new materials with novel shape-selective redox, optical and electrical properties. The synthetic approaches will be complemented by characterization, modeling and theoretical calculations. With this award, a team of scientists with expertise in synthetic inorganic chemistry, theoretical and experimental condensed matter physics, structural modeling and electronic structure calculations, and charge transport and thermal transport characterization will study oxide and non-oxide mesoporous materials. Active industrial collaborations for potential applications of these materials as catalysts will be part of these research activities. In addition, this highly collaborative effort will bring together materials scientists, chemists, condensed matter physicists and structural and theoretical scientists, and will provide educational and research opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students, postdoctoral associates and visiting scientists doc21645 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Barbara Mills and her colleagues will conduct one year of laboratory analyses to investigate the effects of European colonization at Zuni Pueblo. Zuni was the first Pueblo area reached during the Spanish entradas of the 16th century and is an excellent example of a Native American community lying on the frontier of colonialism. Like other Pueblo areas, population decline, settlement coalescence, religious repression, economic oppression, and the adoption of new foods and technologies all took place at Zuni while under Spanish, Mexican, and American governance. Although the Zuni area has enormous potential for looking at the processes of colonialism from an archaeological perspective, past work was conducted prior to modern systematic methods of excavations and analysis. A recent excavation project conducted by the Pueblo of Zuni has resulted in the first systematic collection of materials from one of the contact period Zuni Pueblos - Zuni Pueblo itself. Zuni Pueblo (Halona:wa) has been continuously occupied since the late 13th century and it provides a unique context to investigate the processes of colonialism in a Native American community. This project will support analyses of the large collection of ceramics, supplemental funding for botanical analyses, and travel for the faunal and botanical analysts to come to Arizona to participate in an advanced seminar on the project. Dr. Mills s research will include the analysis of ceramic assemblages from over six centuries of occupation at Zuni Pueblo, focusing on the following research objectives: (1) establishing a baseline chronology for the project; (2) investigating the timing and rate of change in Zuni diet and cuisine; (3) evaluating the impact of colonialism on the organization of household labor; and (4) exploring how Zuni identity was constructed and maintained through material culture. Intensive ceramic analyses will be conducted over one year, including analyses of production technology, changes in vessel forms, chemical analyses of food residues, and design analyses. The ceramic data will be compared to the results of pollen, macrobotanical, and faunal analyses for a comprehensive analysis of how diet and food preparation changed through time. This research is important for several reasons. It will provide the Zuni people with information about their past that is only accessible through archaeological research. It will also provide important insights into how cultures in contact interact, including changes in diet and cuisine, labor, and identity doc21646 none Elzarki Description: This award is for support of a joint research project by Dr. Magda El Zarki, Department of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Irvine, Irvine, California and Dr. Hussein Eissa, Computer and Systems Department at the Electronics Research Institute (ERI), Cairo, Egypt. The project addresses videoconferencing over the Internet. The two investigators plan to develop a particular model for a differentiated services (diffserv) architecture and to evaluate this model through simulation. They will explore the implementation of the diffserv architecture in the OPNET simulator, and study the performance of the architecture with both real-time and non-real-time traffic. They plan to analyze the video audio characteristics by using videoconferencing applications & capturing the generated packets to draw the packet PDF curves (packet size and packet interarrival time). The new proposed model is to guarantee the required quality by using some of the Diffserv simple blocks at edge devices. It also uses the IP Multicast mechanism where possible, to save more network resources. The new model is to rely on shaping the out-of-profile streams, dropping packets in case of real-time marked packets, and re-marking packets in case of non real-time marked packets. By implementing these simple blocks in the edge devices, the overload on the core routers will be minimized. Scope: This project will provide better understanding of video audio streams over the Internet. and should advance the state of art in multimedia networking. The project will lead to a strong collaboration between the U.S. and Egyptian institutions. The collaboration between the two PIs is likely to be productive since they have had prior interaction, while Dr. Eissa was carrying out his doctorate research in the year in the United States. The visits by the staff from UC at Irvine and the ERI will be beneficial to the two institutions, and will help graduate students in Egypt, especially with the experimental and simulation component tasks doc21647 none The terrorist attacks of September 11, were unprecedented in their scope and traumatic impact. For this reason, little is known about the variety of responses that can be expected among residents of the United States. As the effects of the trauma spread through the country, scientists and mental health professionals have little information to use in predicting adjustment over time. This project will provide such data. The research examines some of the psychological consequences of the terrorist attacks by continuing to follow and interview a sample of respondents who were initially questioned soon after September 11 and again in November, . It is expected that information collected in this effort will illuminate coping processes so that future intervention efforts can be better informed, more cost-effective and more sensitive to the needs of the United States populace doc21648 none A natural language-based system will be built to answer queries based on a 200 million-word body of literature consisting of all the articles from the ASM journals for the last five years. The study consists of proof-of-concept research, so it is experimental in nature. There are two ideas that are key to the analysis, which has the potential to revolutionize the use of electronic literature in biology. The first idea is that biology should be viewed as a collection of natural language structures, containers, which have a standardized form and occur with high frequency in the literature. The second idea is that there is a simple but systematic relation between questions that users ask and the data in the containers found in the text. This will allow the system to answer queries without deep analysis. New technologies, especially visualization tools, will be developed in a uniform environment using Java doc21649 none Bar-Yam There is a new and growing effort to understand complex systems and complexity that has stimulated widespread interest in the scientific community. This grant will enable the participation of students, postdoctoral fellows and and other junior scientists in the International Conference on Complex Systems (ICCS). Sessions will focus on unified conceptual and mathematical strategies and their applications to physical, biological and social systems. The conference includes pedagogical sessions for students and topics of interest and concern to the public that will serve as vehicles of education and communication for a broader audience. A special topical day will address recent advances in the study of evolution and several sessions will focus on biocomplexity, ecology and multiscale patterns coupling biological, physical and social systems. Various conferences and workshops have addressed aspects of these growing efforts to understand complex systems. However, the ICCS is the only major international conference series to bring the wide diversity of research together, demonstrating the interdisciplinary yet integrative and coherent nature of these efforts. This conference series is organized by the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI doc21650 none The proposal is for a Minority Research Planning Grant to initiate an investigation to apply heat exchanger design principles to improve fuel cell design practices. Topics to be pursued include the allocation of electroactive area over which charge transport occurs, the use of cathode fins to reduce charge transfer resistance, thermodynamic optimization via a modern Second Law analysis of the fuel cell transport processes, and the application of thermoeconomics analysis for cost-effective cell stack design. The planning grant should serve to guide the PI in the development of more extensive research proposals in this technically important area. The research activity will be coupled to an existing educational outreach program that will help to promote science and engineering graduate education to under-represented minority students doc21651 none Ballard and Tucker Generic distinctions and major subdivisions within many angiosperm families commonly hinge on characteristics of floral symmetry or architecture, and morphology of the reproductive structures themselves. This is true in the violet family (Violaceae), a moderate-sized family of angiosperms with a broad range of growth forms from large tropical forest canopy trees to fingernail-sized Andean puna rosettes. Predominately insect-pollinated, the family nevertheless boasts a wide range of floral and fruit morphologies on par with that in whole orders of other angiosperms. An apparently simple trend from actinomorphy to extreme zygomorphy, coupled with increasing elaboration of staminal nectaries in floral spurs, has figured heavily in generic concepts as well as in assignments to tribes and subtribes. Recent studies of generic relationships based on sequences of the trnL-F and rbcL chloroplast regions, however, reject the simplistic trend in floral symmetry and nectary development, as well as the current traditional classification based on this trend, revealing instead several independent origins of bilaterally symmetrical floral types with spurs from different radially symmetrical spurless lineages. Furthermore, pantropical Hybanthus, the third largest genus in the family, splinters into 7 separate groups distributed across the family, suggesting that its distinctive landing platform flower is a recurrent evolutionary syndrome. The second largest pantropical genus, Rinorea, is also substantially heterogeneous and non-monophyletic. The proposed research program will integrate comprehensive floral developmental investigations to clarify floral evolution; systematic studies of macro- and micromorphological characters, chromosome numbers, xylem anatomy and pollen morphology to reevaluate circumscriptions and distinctions of genera and diagnosable segregates; and inferences of generic relationships from chloroplast trnL-F spacer and rbcL gene regions to provide a robust molecular phylogenetic foundation on which to test relationships and develop a predictive classification. Complete generic circumscriptions using the new and pre-existing traits, and a new intrafamilial classification, will then be developed using examinations of key herbarium collections at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, Missouri; Royal Botanic Garden at Kew, England; and the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France. Field work in Latin America by the investigator and his students and herbarium and laboratory training for graduate students add to the broader impacts of the work, as does collaboration with a leading plant morphologist, Dr. Shirley Tucker at UC-Santa Barbara doc21652 none The first objective of this effort is a quantitative investigation of crystallization and structure formation in model polymer blends directly at the lamellar level, using tapping mode atomic force microscopy. A number of questions that are key to developing a complete understanding of polymer crystallization, in the neat state and in melt-miscible blends, will be addressed. For example, does lamellar growth proceed uniformly, or are local growth rates time-dependent and variable from lamella to lamella? How are the answers to this and other fundamental questions influenced by the presence of a high Tg, amorphous polymer diluent? To supplement the experimental work, findings will be compared with predictions of a finite element model. The second objective of the project is to develop insight into the dynamics of miscible polymer blends exhibiting intermolecular hydrogen bonding, as probed by dielectric spectroscopy. There has been little research in this area, particularly with respect to the influence of intermolecular interactions on the fragility of the glassy state and the dynamics of hydrogen bonding. The motivation for this work was partly shaped by current interest in thermoreversible networks and hydrogen-bonded, self-assembling supramolecular structures. The focus of the dielectric experiments will be on model binary blends of copolymers in which the number of intermolecular hydrogen bonds can be systematically varied by changing copolymer composition. Certain blends in this study will satisfy the assumptions of the LRC model for the dynamics of reversible networks, and will provide a good test of the model. Finally, with the support of an NSF - MRI grant, a hybrid instrument is under development that will be capable of performing simultaneous dielectric and two-dimensional infrared spectroscopic measurements. This new instrument will undoubtedly have an important impact on the research described above. The results of this research will have broad impact on our understanding of both crystalline polymers and polymer blends, areas of great importance in the industrial sector. In addition to the direct educational impact on graduate and undergraduate students involved in the research activity, research results will be incorporated into graduate level courses taught by the PI. Research findings will be disseminated through publication in peer-reviewed journals, as well as through presentations by the PI and group members at major scientific meetings doc21653 none The objective of this research by Professor Terrence J. Collins at Carnegie-Mellon University, which is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Oganometallic Chemistry Program, is to develop tetraamidomacrocyclic iron(III) complexes (TAML activators) in conjunction with hydrogen peroxide to destroy chemical and biological warfare agents on contaminated surfaces. These agents include organophosphorous ester nerve gases such as, such as Sarin and VX, mustard (alkylating) compounds and biological agents including bacteria, virus, and toxins. This Small Grant for Exploratory Research supports the development of a widely-applicable decontaminating process to eliminate various chemical and biological warfare agents including viruses and bacteria, such as anthrax, that have been or may be used in terrorism doc21654 none This project investigates the long life fatigue behavior of cast aluminum and magnesium structural alloys that find application in automotive and other technologies where lightweight materials are required. An objective of the study is to develop accurate models of crack initiation and short crack growth that can be used for predicting fatigue life. Very long lifetimes will be achieved in a practical timeframe using ultrasonic fatigue in which cyclic loading is applied at frequencies of approximately 20 kHz. The proposed method is far more cost effective than the conventional techniques that are extremely time consuming. The proposed program will examine the fundamental mechanisms responsible for the presence or absence of endurance limits in this important set of alloys. A significant effort will be focused on the potential use of ultrasonic fatigue techniques as a viable alternative or replacement for more conventional testing methods, especially where critical fatigue lives are in the very long life regime. This proposed GOALI program would continue a successful collaboration between the University of Michigan and the Ford Research Laboratories (FRL) of Ford Motor Company. The co-PI will co-advise a PhD student on this project. The educational impact of this work lies in close contact of the graduate students with the industrial counterpart through summer internships as well as the research direction by the co-investigator from Ford. This project provides an opportunity to graduate research students and university personnel to work with industrial counterparts at the Ford Motor Company in developing cast aluminum and magnesium alloys with very long fatigue life. The results of the study will benefit not only automotive industry but also technologies that require lightweight fatigue resistant metallic alloys. The research will establish new techniques of characterizing very long fatigue lifetimes that find many practical applications by taking advantage of the expertise and facilities at the academia and industry doc21655 none In this project supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, Professor Richard Crooks and coworkers at Texas A&M University will synthesize and characterize dendrimer-encapsulated metal particles. The potential advantage of these materials is convenient access to nanometer-sized metal particles, on the order of 1-3 nanometers, having both high monodispersity and good stability. These nanomaterials are to be prepared by a two step process. First, the dendrimer is exposed to a metal ion-containing solution. This results in complexation between the metal ions and ligands within the dendrimer. The second step involves chemical reduction of the organic inorganic composite, which results in formation of an intradendrimer metal nanoparticle. Each dendrimer acts as a discreet nanoreactor, and only those metal ions within the dendrimer coalesce into the resulting nanoparticle. This means that in principle every nanoparticle will contain the same number of metal atoms. This is significant because at the present time there are few methods available for preparing monodisperse metallic metal clusters in the 1-3 nm size range that are both surface active and soluble in many solvents. This size range is interesting for a number of reasons, but mainly because it is the range over which metal atoms undergo a transition from atomic to metallic properties. Monodispersed metal nanoparticles have many applications to the technology sector. Applications include electronics, biomedical applications, fundamental studies of catalysis, and chemical and biological sensors. In addition to these broader impacts, this work invites many collaborative research projects. Catalytic properties of the dendrimer-encapsulated metal particles will be evaluated by colleagues at Trinity University. Commercial applications will be evaluated with colleagues at the Michigan Molecular Institute. Additional characterization of the nanoparticles is to be done with synchrotron experiments to be performed in South Korea. Finally, this proposal will support local high school students and undergraduates to work on the project during the summers doc16314 none The PIs request LTREB support to continue experimental studies in the Chihuahuan Desert near Portal, Arizona. The 20-ha study site contains 24 fenced plots, each 0.25 ha in area. They have maintained the removal of some or all species of rodents and or ants from 10 plots continuously since and from an additional 4 plots since . Standardized censuses of rodents, ants, and plants provide invaluable data on responses of individuals, populations, and communities both to experimental perturbations and to background temporal and spatial variation in the environment. Results to date demonstrate: 1) complex interannual and seasonal dynamics of rodent, ant, and plant populations; 2) direct effects of seed predation by rodents, birds, and ants on winter annual plants; 3) direct effects of competition by kangaroo rats on population densities and species diversity of other seed-eating rodent species; 4) indirect effects of kangaroo rats on vegetation, other rodents, birds, and lizards; 5) reorganization of the entire ecosystem, including large increases in woody vegetation and extinctions, colonizations, or shifts in abundance of many animal species, apparently caused by a change in climate since the late s; 6) regulation of emergent properties, such as species diversity, biomass, and energy use of rodents and plants, within narrow bounds despite large shifts in species composition in response to environmental change. The proposed research for the next five years includes: 1) continuation of experimental manipulations and standardized censuses of rodents, ants, and plants; 2) focus on spatial patterns and processes over a wide range of scales; 3) investigation of the experimental manipulations and functional groups of organisms on ecosystem processes; 4) examination of the dynamics of the ant community; and 5) assessment of the interacting influences of climate, livestock grazing, and fire on the transition between desert shrubland and arid grassland doc21657 none This project consists of an in-depth investigation into the mechanisms behind a novel method for generating a pristine sapphire surface. The process is named AGOG, representing the three processing steps: Al thin film deposition on sapphire, Growth of an aluminum Oxide layer, and grain Growth to produce a single crystal surface. Processing conditions at each step in the AGOG process will be varied systematically and correlated to the resulting changes in surface structure. The effect of Al film microstructure and thickness on oxidation behavior will be determined. Sapphire of ( ), (11-20), and (01-12) orientation will be used to identify the effect of interface conditions on the Al to alumina phase transformation. Studies of phase transition behavior will be carried out concurrently with oxidation heating rate experiments. Once a polycrystalline alumina layer has been created, solid-state conversion processing conditions will be examined. Finally, strategies for eliminating hillock growth during the initial oxidation step will be explored. Sapphire, the single crystal form of alumina, is utilized in many important commercial applications where the quality of the final surface finish is critical. One example is the recent use as a substrate material for high-power blue light emitting diodes (LED s) and laser diodes. These devices are required for a large number of applications including full color electroluminescent displays, and read-write laser sources for high-density information storage on magnetic and optical media. The successful commercial production of blue LED s also offers the potential for bright, white light sources derived from solid state devices. Advantages over conventional incandescent and fluorescent sources include far higher energy efficiency and increased reliability. Sapphire is also widely used for visible and midwave infrared (IR) airborne windows and radomes for guidance systems. Currently, the surfaces of sapphire components are finished by a combination of mechanical and chemical polishing. The final polishing steps are time-consuming, and typically make up a significant fraction of the total cost. The AGOG process is a potentially more cost-effective method for achieving a high quality surface finish in sapphire doc21658 none This dissertation research project--to be conducted in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, by a cultural anthropology student from the University of Texas (Austin)--tests hypotheses regarding the roles of women in neighborhood political movements, and how the forms of participation affect the relative success of their activities. The project examines the efforts of emerging neighborhood movements to block or change the course of urban renewal projects that are intended to enhance leisure tourism but do so at the expense of black residential communities. As a theoretical foundation, the researcher draws from feminist theory, critical race theory, and recent work in urban politics. The research focuses on the participation of black women as major actors in these social movements and their role in grassroots mobilization. Data collection strategies include ethnographic interviews, surveys, participant observation, GIS-based mapping and archival research. The results of this study will contribute to the body of theory regarding black women s organizing, race relations in Brazil, and urban space. The student has established a collaborative affiliation with the Department of Human Sciences at the Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana, thus enhancing cooperation in the international scientific community. Additional broader impacts of the project include its direct responsiveness to concerns expressed by the World Bank and Inter-American Bank about the status of Afro-Latinos in economic and political development doc21659 none Grodzicker Dramatic progress has been made in the fields of cell and developmental biology in recent years, largely due to the application of new technical approaches to classical problems. This has led to the need for advanced courses to train new investigators to study those animal models, such as Xenopus, that have been important in making new discoveries. Funds are being sought to continue the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory course on Cell and Developmental Biology of Xenopus which has been taught for eleven years as part of an integrated set of courses in a number of areas of modern biology. This course provides extensive laboratory exposure to the biology and manipulation of embryos from the frogs Xenopus laevis and Xenopus tropicalis. Xenopus is a vertebrate uniquely suited for studies of early development since large numbers of embryos, from fertilization onward, can readily be obtained. Development is rapid and the large size of the embryos facilitates their micromanipulation. This allows analysis (at the single cell level if necessary) of such important issues as maternal regulation and embryonic inductions that are not feasible in mammalian, avian or fish embryos. The course is suited both for those who have a knowledge of molecular biology and developmental biology, but have had no experience with Xenopus, as well as those with some Xenopus experience who wish to learn newly developed, advanced techniques. The specific areas that will be covered are (1) Care and handling of Xenopus adults, removal of oocytes, induction of ovulation, egg collection, testis isolation, and in vitro and natural fertilization; (2) Stages of embryonic development and anatomy; (3) Whole mount in situ hybridization and immunohistochemistry, including double probe staining; (4) Microinjection of eggs and oocytes with lineage tracers, antisense morpholino oligonucleotides, mRNA and DNA constructions; (5) Use of oocytes to make conditioned medium containing growth factors; (6) Micromanipulation of embryos, including induction and transplantation assays; (7) Oligonucleotide antisense techniques for knock-out of maternal molecules; (8) Preparation and use of cell cycle extracts for construction of transgenic embryos; and (9) Use of Xenopus tropicalis as a genetic model. It is anticipated that the basic organization of the course and much of the course material will remain unchanged during the proposed period of support. However, fast-developing topics, such as new promoter sequences for use in transgenesis and the availability of transgenic and mutant lines, will be discussed and integrated into the course as the field progresses doc21660 none Wiegel Description: This award is for support of a joint research project by Dr. Juergen Wiegel, Department of Microbiology, the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia and Dr. Osama Sobieh, Biotechnology Institute, Mubarak City for Scientific Research and Technological Application, Alexandria, Egypt. This project has two main goals: first, elucidation of the biodiversity of the multifaceted (elevated temperatures, alkaline pH, and (partly) high salt at the same time) extremophiles from Wadi el Natron and hot springs in Egypt and the characterization of the novel bacteria and second, production of industrial enzymes from these extremophiles at the bench scale, i.e., screening for the desired industrially important enzymes, optimization of production yields and expression of the target genes in a mesophilic host to aid in the purification of the thermophilic stable proteins. Several of these harsh environments have been only superficially studied and only very few microorganisms have been isolated from them so far. This is especially true for the Natron Lakes of Wadi el Natron between Cairo and Alexandria and hot springs close to the Red Sea, both expected to harbor unique microorganisms. Only recently a novel group of extremophiles, the anaerobic alkalithermophiles, has been established by one of the PIs and not much is known about these bacteria Scope: Many biotechnological and industrial applications (e.g., laundry detergents) require enzymes, which are stable at elevated temperatures in a highly alkaline milieu. This research will identify organisms from a natural source in a foreign country that can produce enzymes at these extreme environments. This collaborative project will foster scientific and educational exchanges between US and Egypt scientists in the area of biodiversity and industrial enzymes, and will support the participation of a U.S. graduate student in this international cooperative effort doc21661 none The Educational Broadcasting Corporation (WNET) is researching and testing an experimental, short-format television broadcast and Web project entitled Science InSight. The goal of this experimental research is to determine if short-format television segments can successfully increase Americans understanding of -- and interest in -- new research in science and technology and, if they can, which of several possible formats is likely to be most successful. During this research and development phase, WNET will test the viability of the project model and develop and refine the model for use in a selected group of media venues such as the forthcoming PBS weekly public affairs program, Public Square. The specific activities to be undertaken in the research phase include: -assembling an expert board of up to six advisors with expertise in science, science journalism and media; -producing three, experimental, short-format, program concept video segments of varying lengths for use as science information pieces in other media programs; -conducting formal and informal testing and evaluation of these test formats for appeal, credibility, clarity and comprehensibility of style and content; and -identifying additional key potential distribution partners from television media, print, Web and science centers outlets doc21662 none Dorceta E. Taylor University of Michigan Environmental justice advocates oppose locating facilities (like incinerators, landfills, waste-treatment plants, and chemical factories) in minority communities in the U.S. They maintain that such facilities expose minorities to disproportionate environmental risks, hazards, and dangerous working and living conditions that, in turn, lead to impaired health. Economic conditions are important too because activists frequently operate in low-income, minority communities with high unemployment. The environmental justice movement has been opposing corporations for two decades, very little is known about the dynamics of the movement or its potential for social change. Hence, this study will examine (a) the relationship between the environmental justice movement and their main targets of influence or opponents - mainstream environmental groups, the government and corporations; (b) the range and effectiveness of movement tactics used by environmental justice activists; (c) how movement opponents adapt and respond to the tactical innovations of activists; and (d) the relationship between resource mobilization and movement insurgency. This study will examine environmental justice activism and government and corporate responses to it from - . This time frame captures the full period of American environmental justice activism allowing the PI to track the rise of the environmental justice movement. The study will use a multi-method approach to data collection and analysis. The study has three basic components: (a) a newspaper event history analysis of environmental justice issues, (b) an analysis of environmental justice organizations accounting of the activities they have been engaged in, and (c) an examination of the amount of funds organizations receive from foundations and government (environmental) agencies. The researcher will use Lexis Nexis, OCLC Firstsearch and Proquest to find relevant articles that appear in local, regional and national newspapers, journals and magazines. Newspapers will be the primary source of the event history analysis. However, other sources -- like published case studies -- will be used for contextual information on particular issues. . A database will be established to record the structure, ideology, and actions in which organizations report they have been engaged. This database will be compiled from surveys organizations listed in the People of Color Environmental Groups Directory ( , ), from websites and information gathered from funders. The unit of analysis is the environmental justice movement. Though organizational-level data is being collected, analysis will be made at movement level. This study will provide valuable information on institutional and tactical interactions between the environmental justice movement, its opponents and supporters. It will also provide valuable data that will help us better understand how environmental justice organizations and corporations frame issues, develop mobilizing strategies and cope with conflicts. The study uses social movement theory to examine environmental justice movement dynamics. It expands the boundaries of prior environmental justice research by seeking to examine both activist and corporate claims and government actions. The study has the potential to answer questions of significant import as the researcher examines the relationship between environmental justice, corporate and government actors doc21663 none This project will produce new information about climatic changes and human impacts along the Northern Frontier of Mesoamerica, A.D. 500-900, a period when civilization touched areas previously populated by small farming villages and bands of hunter-gatherers. In Guanajuato, Jalisco, Zacatecas, and Durango, Mexico, large ceremonial centers sprang up, surrounded by clusters of population. One such population cluster around the site of La Quemada, Zacatecas, is the scene for this study. Between A.D. 500-900, a large community dominated the valley and its tributaries with a monumental ceremonial center, roadways, extensive terrace systems, and over 200 villages along the Malpaso River. Professor Ben Nelson and doctoral candidate Michelle Elliott of Arizona State University, along with Professor Christopher Fisher of Kent State University, will collaborate with geologist Roberto Molina of the National Autonomous University, to collect plant remains, sediments, magnetic samples, and charcoal for radiocarbon dating and to create a geological map of the area. They and other scientists will analyze the samples to test hypotheses about changes in vegetation, erosion, floodplain characteristics, and fires that occurred before, during, and after a period of intensive human settlement around La Quemada. They will recover this information by cutting trenches in the floodplain as well as by surveying the landscape to record landforms and parent materials that may have contributed to the accumulation of sediments and soils in the floodplain. Their goal is to reconstruct the history of that accumulation and its relationship to human occupation. Archaeologists have long suspected that the changes in the environment played a role in civilization s fluctuations in this region. They hypothesize that colonists settled the frontier during a period of increased rainfall and that several centuries later, a climatic reversal led to the region s abandonment. Since Pedro Armillas formulated this arid margin hypothesis, archaeologists have learned a great deal the settlements centered on La Quemada. Recent research has clarified many aspects of this occupation, but the information is inadequate to address the arid margin hypothesis. The collected materials will allow systematic evaluation of this hypothesis with several independent classes of data, including pollen, phytoliths, macrobotanical remains, magnetic susceptibility, sediment characterization, and radiocarbon assays. Archaeologists have not investigated ancient environmental change in any part of the Northern Frontier in such a comprehensive way. To the north of the study area, studies of desert streams in the American Southwest indicate precipitation flux for this period; to the south, lake deposits contain evidence for potentially related events. Experience shows, however, that events in one valley or lake cannot be readily predicted from those in another. This study will provide information that will ultimately allow evaluation of human-environmental interactions on a long time scale over a wide region. The investigators plan to communicate their findings not only to people in their own profession, but to a range of ecologists, geologists, geographers, government officials, and interested community members doc21664 none Recognizing the pivotal role that glass as a material has played in development of the field of photonics, a workshop entitled Glass and the Photonics Revolution will be convened in Bad Soden, Germany, in May . Held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the German Society of Glass Technology, the workshop will be sponsored jointly by the Industry University Cooperative Research Center for Glass Research, The New York State Center for Advanced Ceramic Technology, both located at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, and the Research Association of the German Glass Industry, Germany. Held over a two-day period, the workshop will conclude with a panel discussion of important recent developments in the field of photonics and optical glasses. A major goal of the workshop is to convene glassmakers and glass users engaged in research, development or manufacture of photonic devices and to provide a forum in which both groups can learn the needs and capabilities of each other doc21635 none Despite current interest in tropical forests as key components of the global carbon cycle and as centers of biodiversity,we remain largely ignorant of the inter-relationships among forest attributes (e.g.,dynamics,diversity,structure),and the physical properties of the environments in which these forests grow.In recent years datasets have become available describing growth,mortality and recruitment of approximately 10%of the global diversity of tropical tree species.These data result from the development of a network of large-scale forest dynamics plots coordinated by the Center for Tropical Forest Science (CTFS),and established using methods identical to those used to survey and census the 50-ha Forest Dynamics Plot on Barro Colorado Island (BCI),Panama. Just as data from the BCI plot have played a prominent role in our understanding of the community-level consequences of ecological processes played out at local scales,we will show how these plots now provide an unprecedented opportunity to examine a venerable question in tropical ecology:How do soil-borne resources influence the variation in forest structure and demographic turnover rates observed among plots,and among habitat types within plots? To achieve this objective we propose three sets of measurements.At nine plot sites we will characterize variation in soil-moisture availability through the year and throughout the plots using a hydrological model (TOPMODEL).This model predicts soil-moisture saturation deficit based on rainfall,stream-flow data and local topography. Second,at five plots currently lacking soils data we will sample soil-chemical properties within standardized,topographically-defined habitat types.Third,at the same plots we will perform seedling growth experiments using mycorrhizal and non-mycorrhizal pioneer species to assess plant-availability of soil nutrients for each habitat type.These measurements will allow us to address questions at two spatial scales.At the among-plot scale we will be able to ask how stem density and basal area,as well as community-wide patterns of growth,mortality and recruitment,correlate with moisture availability and soil fertility.At the within-plot scale we will ask whether species exhibit specialization to particular hydrological niches,and whether habitat types differ in soil fertility,in turnover rates,and in local species richness.Resolution of these broad questions concerning correlations among soil-borne resources and characteristics of the vegetation will in turn permit us to refine future hypotheses aimed at understanding the mechanistic basis for interspecific variation in demographics and distribution. This study will provide the first standardized large-scale measurements of the environmental context within which tropical forests grow.Our trans-continental approach to testing questions of ecosystem function and community organization has rarely been attempted,but it will be essential if we are to improve our understanding of the biogeographic and biophysical limits to our ecological generalizations.Understanding how variation in water and nutrient availability determines forest structure,composition and dynamics,and potentially influences local diversity through niche partitioning,will be essential to predicting future vegetation responses to climate change and will also provide a first step in guiding management to protect forest diversity.Wide dissemination and application of the results of this project is ensured by the active participation of in- country collaborators,and by data sharing through CTFS doc21666 none This award from the MRI program supports the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities with the acquisition of a reactive sputtering system for magnetic oxide thin film research and education. The ultra high vacuum system will incorporate d.c. and r.f. sputtering methods at high substrate temperatures, with controlled oxygen partial pressures. A novel gas injection mechanism will be employed to yield the largest possible control over the ratio of inert gas pressure to oxygen pressure, amenable to the deposition of a wide variety of epitaxial oxides. This, along with a load locked sample introduction chamber and multi-sample access will provide a highly flexible system with relatively high throughput as well as the capability to grow conventional metallic and insulating samples. The system allows growing novel magnetic oxide materials of current and future interest. Possibilities include the deposition of heterostructured samples involving combinations of non-magnetic metals, ferromagnetic metals and magnetic oxides and tunnel barriers. Thin film cobaltites, LaFeO3 exchange, and antiferromagnet ferromagnet superlattices will be studied. In addition to the research opportunities the instrument will also support a unique educational tool for the training and education of graduate and undergraduate research students. %%% This award from the MRI program supports the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities with the acquisition of a reactive sputtering system for magnetic oxide thin film research and education. The system allows growing novel magnetic oxide materials of current and future interest. Possibilities include the deposition of heterostructured samples involving combinations of non-magnetic metals, ferromagnetic metals and magnetic oxides and tunnel barriers. Thin film cobaltites, LaFeO3 exchange, and antiferromagnet ferromagnet superlattices will be studied. In addition to the research opportunities the instrument will also support a unique educational tool for the training and education of graduate and undergraduate research students doc21667 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor John E. Baldwin, of the Department of Chemistry at Syracuse University, is studying isomerization reactions of isotopically labeled hydrocarbons. Professor Baldwin is establishing the relative importance of one-center and two-center epimerizations in spiropentanes and cyclopropanes and obtaining the first experimental measures of secondary deuterium kinetic isotope effects on these stereomutations. In addition, he is exploring a number of other fundamental hydrocarbon isomerizations, including the conversion of cyclopropane to propylene via 1-propylidene, [1,3]-carbon shifts, [1,5]-hydrogen shifts, interconversion of bicyclo[5.1.0]octa-2,4-dienes via intermediate bicyclo[4.1.1]octa-2,4-dienes, and carbo-Claisen rearrangements. Thermal reactions of small hydrocarbon molecules play key roles both in fundamental organic reaction chemistry and in large-scale petrochemical processes such as hydrocarbon reforming. Professor John E. Baldwin, of the Department of Chemistry at Syracuse University, is studying the thermal transformations of a variety of small molecules. By incorporating stable isotopes, Professor Baldwin is able to obtain a comprehensive view of these transformations, obtaining insights into the reaction mechanisms which will ultimately lead to a fundamental understanding of how thermal reactions characteristic of simple organic chemicals occur doc21668 none Singer A workshop on Feynman Integrals and related Topics will be held at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley, California from December 9-12, . The workshop will coincide with the end of a program on quantum computing at MSRI in order to explore the possibility that the Feynman integral approach to quantum mechanics might be useful for quantum computing applications. This award will partially support the travel and local expenses of young scientists, principally graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, who can then participate in the workshop doc21636 none Individuals typically choose to mate with others of the same species by using several genetically based behavioral or chemical cues. The investigators seek to identify the parts of the genome that are associated with these behaviors and chemicals to test various evolutionary hypotheses of species formation. They propose to execute this research in populations of the fruit fly species Drosophila mojavensis, a member of the cactus-yeast-Drosophila model system, because of its association with and infestation of cactus rots. Previous studies in this and other Drosophila species have shown that olfactory cues (pheromones) and auditory cues (courtship wing vibrations) are the cues that individuals use to select mates. The investigators will use DNA-based markers to identify the locations of genes influencing these traits. This approach will ensure that these genetic analyses will be performed on individuals reared on their natural host plants, as recent studies have shown a dramatic effect of rearing substrates on these traits. The results of this research will begin to reveal the number and locations of genes that are responsible for the beginnings of species formation. Thus, this work will provide insights into the fundamental evolutionary processes that regulate biodiversity on Earth doc21670 none This study, to be conducted by a doctoral candidate of cultural anthropology at New York University, will examine the relationship between religiosity and emerging notions of citizenship among Mexicans in New York City. It will investigate the ways in which members of this population challenge dominant notions of citizenship and translate devotional practices into political activism. Specifically, this investigation examines Mexican immigrant involvement in non-profit organizations that have emerged from Catholic confraternities and subsequently converged into a citywide migrant association. The modes of social organization and discourses of participants in two parish-based confraternities and a city-wide non-profit umbrella organization are analyzed to test the hypothesis that members of these organizations are redefining rights, citizenship and identity by renegotiating the symbols of faith and nation, mobilizing the space of the church, and participating in activities normally reserved for citizens with typically material aims such as immigration rights, social services and political economic equity. This study will contribute to anthropological theories on religion and transnational citizenship, and to an understanding of immigrant integration generally and Mexican-American integration specifically doc21671 none The theory of automorphic forms is a wide and deep subject touching many areas of mathematics, such as number theory, harmonic analysis and geometry. Langlands program is an ambitious plan to develop the theory of automorphic forms in a systematic way. It opened a new frontier in Mathematics, and has given new insights and techniques in solving old problems. In fact, the solution of Fermat s last theorem by Andrew Wiles is one of the achievements of the Langlands program. There have been many exciting new developments in the theory recently: the global Langlands correspondence for GL(n) over a functiona field by L. Lafforgue, using the ideas of Drinfeld; the local Langlands correspondence for GL(n) over a p-adic field by M. Harris and R. Taylor, using Shimura varieties, and by G. Henniart, using L-functions; Langlands functoriality for symmetric cube of cusp form of GL(2) by H. Kim and F. Shahidi, and symmetric fourth of cusp form of GL(2) by H. Kim, using The Langlands-Shahidi method and the converse theorem of Cogdell-Piatetski-Shapiro. It is an ideal time to have a special program in automorphic forms to review these new developments. These have far-reaching applications in classical number theory. Especially, Langlands functoriality of symmetric cube and symmetric fourth have direct applications to analytic number theory. In fact, one of the goals of the program is to bring experts in automorphic forms and analytic number theory to find applications of automorphic forms in analytic number theory, vice versa. One of the most important mathematical ideas of the second half of the 19th century is that an analytic formula often encodes discrete information. For example, one might want to count the number of solutions of a particular equation, but discover that the solutions are very hard to find. On the other hand, one might want to count the number of solutions to a sequence of equations and have the answers as a sequence. Mathematicians call these kinds of problems discrete . The functions that appear in calculus, and for which calculus works so well, are not discrete , but analytic. Amazingly, the right kinds of analytic functions often provide the answers to the discrete problems. An L-function is a type of generating function formed out of data associated with either a geometric object that is related to number theory or with a kind of analytic function, called an automorphic form, which are determined by groups of linear transformations. These L-functions provide the right kinds of analytic functions. In the past thirty years, the study of these examples of L-functions has been systematized into a branch of number theory. In recent years many people have found new ways that L-functions encode discrete information, though there is still much to be discovered. The chief purpose of this program is to bring together experts in analytic number theory, automorphic forms, and geometry so that we may find more of the ways that arithmetic information is encoded by L-functions doc21672 none A compact, thermal-image furnace has been developed in conjunction with synchrotron radiation to collect in situ high-temperature powder diffraction data on selected oxide ceramics in air up to C. The experimental data is analysed and compared with theoretical predictions by the Rietveld crystallographic, profile fitting technique. The ultimate aim of this research project is to investigate detailed mechanisms of crystal structure changes involved in ferroelastic phase transformations in selected materials, using in situ synchrotron XRD, hot stage optical microscopy and TEM techniques. Specifically, phase transformations involving negligible or zero volume changes, but possibly some unit cell shape changes will be focused upon. Phase transformations in tantalum oxide (Ta2O5) and lanthanide tantalates (LnTaO4), as well as lanthanide aluminates will be studied. In this manner, the structure-property relationships of the materials could be better understood and tailored for application, e.g., in toughening mechanisms, large force actuation and shape memory ceramics. Preliminary studies will be made on some of the mechanical properties of key ferroelastic materials This objective of this project is to undertake in-situ high-temperature studies of phase transformations in oxide ceramics, using our newly-invented, thermal-image furnace, capable of C in air, in conjunction with synchrotron radiation. The emphasis is on oxide materials exhibiting polymorphic phase transformations, especially of a ferroelastic nature, at elevated temperatures. This is inline with our on-going research efforts in identifying potential materials with new, energy absorbing mechanisms, which have applications in the design of tough, high-temperature composites. Furthermore, as a result of domain rearrangement by ferroelastic mechanisms, potential applications are possible in large force actuation and shape memory behavior doc21663 none This project will produce new information about climatic changes and human impacts along the Northern Frontier of Mesoamerica, A.D. 500-900, a period when civilization touched areas previously populated by small farming villages and bands of hunter-gatherers. In Guanajuato, Jalisco, Zacatecas, and Durango, Mexico, large ceremonial centers sprang up, surrounded by clusters of population. One such population cluster around the site of La Quemada, Zacatecas, is the scene for this study. Between A.D. 500-900, a large community dominated the valley and its tributaries with a monumental ceremonial center, roadways, extensive terrace systems, and over 200 villages along the Malpaso River. Professor Ben Nelson and doctoral candidate Michelle Elliott of Arizona State University, along with Professor Christopher Fisher of Kent State University, will collaborate with geologist Roberto Molina of the National Autonomous University, to collect plant remains, sediments, magnetic samples, and charcoal for radiocarbon dating and to create a geological map of the area. They and other scientists will analyze the samples to test hypotheses about changes in vegetation, erosion, floodplain characteristics, and fires that occurred before, during, and after a period of intensive human settlement around La Quemada. They will recover this information by cutting trenches in the floodplain as well as by surveying the landscape to record landforms and parent materials that may have contributed to the accumulation of sediments and soils in the floodplain. Their goal is to reconstruct the history of that accumulation and its relationship to human occupation. Archaeologists have long suspected that the changes in the environment played a role in civilization s fluctuations in this region. They hypothesize that colonists settled the frontier during a period of increased rainfall and that several centuries later, a climatic reversal led to the region s abandonment. Since Pedro Armillas formulated this arid margin hypothesis, archaeologists have learned a great deal the settlements centered on La Quemada. Recent research has clarified many aspects of this occupation, but the information is inadequate to address the arid margin hypothesis. The collected materials will allow systematic evaluation of this hypothesis with several independent classes of data, including pollen, phytoliths, macrobotanical remains, magnetic susceptibility, sediment characterization, and radiocarbon assays. Archaeologists have not investigated ancient environmental change in any part of the Northern Frontier in such a comprehensive way. To the north of the study area, studies of desert streams in the American Southwest indicate precipitation flux for this period; to the south, lake deposits contain evidence for potentially related events. Experience shows, however, that events in one valley or lake cannot be readily predicted from those in another. This study will provide information that will ultimately allow evaluation of human-environmental interactions on a long time scale over a wide region. The investigators plan to communicate their findings not only to people in their own profession, but to a range of ecologists, geologists, geographers, government officials, and interested community members doc21674 none This research program targets the design, preparation and characterization of novel conductive polymer cuprate superconductor nano-composite assemblies. These hybrid structures will be generated in such a manner that the electrical communication between the two component conductors is maximized with the goal of fostering the flow of supercurrent into the polymer over macroscopically large distances. Novel low temperature transport measurements completed with superconductor polymer superconductor nano-bridges will allow for the exploration of the low temperature electron-transfer phenomena and proximity effects that occur in such hybrid systems. This new program will target experiments in the following four areas: a) molecular engineering of conductive polymer compounds for cryogenic applications; b) direct observation of polymeric proximity effects using scanning probe methods; c) supercurrent flow through polymer superconductor nano-bridges; and d) suppression of superconductivity in conductive polymer coated ultra-thin high-Tc films. Through this highly interdisciplinary program, a series of scientists will be trained in the important emerging area of hybrid electronic materials. The integration of electronically conductive polymers into functional superconductor-based structures is leading to a variety of new sensors and devices which may exhibit enhanced sensitivity and selectivity that is not currently available with the conventional devices. This interdisciplinary program targets the preparation and characterization of a new class of conductive polymer high-Tc superconductor nano-composite assemblies. In addition to the important knowledge base that will be derived from these studies, it should be emphasized that this program possesses an important educational component. Indeed, through this highly interdisciplinary program a series of scientists will be trained in the important emerging area of hybrid electronic materials with enhanced processibility, molecular tunability and interesting sensor display capabilities available with such polymeric compounds doc21454 none This is an RUI collaborative research project among three physics programs at neighboring state universities: Angelo State University, Tarleton State University, and Southwest Texas State Uni-versity. The project focuses on three main topics: (1) correlation between electrical and optical properties and stress in ZnO and nitrogen-doped ZnO fabricated at reduced temperatures using radical atomic beam processing, (2) feasibility of fabricating predicted ZnO-Mn and Zn-Co room temperature transparent magnetic semiconductors, and (3) dielectric properties of select amor-phous or potentially epitaxial insulator oxide alloys consisting of Pr-Al-O, Gd-Ga-O, Hf-Al-O, Pr-Zr-O and La- Hf-O (most with possible oxynitridation and alloy-dependent band gap variabil-ity) relevant for magnetic spin tunneling structures and next-generation CMOS gate applications. A study towards the stabilization and characterization of metastable Ni-incorporated Cu-Ge and Co- Ge thin film crystalline phases will also be included. Thin film materials fabrication will be conducted using ion beam sputter processing strategies. The approach is to implement mono-energetic Ar + or Xe + ions ( 1 keV) to control incident film adatom energy (between ~ 6 eV to ~ 20 eV), and vary the substrate angle of incidence to promote kinetic film growth at reduced temperatures with and without reflected energetic Ar Xe atom bombardment. Low energy ( 100 eV) reactive (O2 + N2 + ) assist ion beams will be compared with neutral thermal atomic radi-cals to promote optimal oxidation (and dopant nitridation) at reduced substrate temperatures. The implementation of in-situ low energy and or neutral atomic radical species to promote reactive sputtering is relatively unique for ion beam sputtering and is not possible with magnetron sput-tering due to its higher operating pressure regime. The group also has the capability of processing sputtered films with rapid thermal annealing and high-energy ( 1 MeV) inert ion mixing to study germanide formation in amorphous deposited metal-Ge films. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in a topical area of materials science having technological relevance. An important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education. Undergraduates from all three universities will be involved in multiple phases of the research, with strong participation from under-represented groups. In addition to ion beam sputtering, students will be involved with rapid thermal process-ing, electrical transport studies, ion beam analysis, scanning electron microscopy with EDS, ad-vanced x-ray diffraction and fluorescence analysis, magnetometry, and optical characterization (reflectivity, FTIR, photoluminescence). In addition, students will have a chance to collabora-tively interact with Central Texas microelectronics industry scientists and doctoral institution re-search teams interested in the project. All three collaborating universities are close enough to permit an active degree of inter-university group visits and student exchanges to support the re-search. The research will encourage students to consider pursuing research at various materials-related doctoral programs, or consider further education in a professional masters program. In addition, the broad thin film materials experience gained from the project will be useful prepara-tion for student internships in the microelectronics industry and strengthening the workforce pool of educated BS MS graduates for this critical industry doc21676 none Haider The investigator is developing multiphasic models for mechanical interactions between the cells and extracellular matrix in articular cartilage. A combination of analytical and numerical methods are used to solve: (1) contact problems that model experiments used to determine mechanical properties of isolated cell (chondrocyte) and cell-matrix (chondron) units, (2) interface problems that model local cell-matrix mechanics of the chondron in vivo, and (3) fast boundary integral models for transmission of mechanical signals in a tissue layer populated with many cells. Through collaboration with an orthopaedic research lab, the models developed by the investigator are being applied to: (a) the determination of material properties of cell and tissue explants using in-vitro micropipette testing and video microscopy, and (b) the simulation of local cell-matrix mechanics and comparison to confocal microscopy of dynamic loading in a tissue layer. A fundamental goal of this project is to quantify the dependence of local cell mechanics on external loading. By correlating experimental measurements of cell metabolic activity to mechanical components of the local cell environment, the complex relationship between tissue metabolism and cell mechanics is analyzed. Variations in chondron material and geometric properties, within and across a variety of tissue populations, are also incorporated into the models. This project contributes to understanding of the role of mechanics in maintenance of the extracellular matrix, and associated matrix degeneration with aging due to osteoarthritis. Articular cartilage is the primary load-bearing tissue in joints such as the knee, shoulder and hip. Degeneration of cartilage leads to osteoarthritis, a painful condition that affects millions of Americans and is predominantly associated with aging. Under repeated loading, the structural matrix of cartilage is in a continual state of turnover that is regulated by specialized cells called chondrocytes. These cells synthesize matrix components yet, remarkably, have no neural connection to the brain. As a result, cell metabolic activities directed at repairing the structural matrix are highly dependent on the local cell environment. In this project, a mathematical modeler collaborates with an orthopaedic research lab to understand the role of mechanical forces in the maintenance of cartilage. At the cellular level, forces in cartilage result from a complex coupling of solid and fluid mechanics with energy dissipation. Results of this work predict the dependence of local forces at the cellular scale on external loading. Local force predictions facilitate a quantitative description of the complex relationship between cell metabolic activity and cell mechanics. In conjunction with associated experiments for a variety of tissue populations, the models lead to an understanding of how these remarkable cells can maintain cartilage over the course of a lifetime, and how structural degeneration of cartilage is initiated in osteoarthritis doc21677 none This award by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research by Russell P Hughes, Department of Chemistry, Dartmouth College, in fluorocarbon bond activation by transition metals. Hughes is developing novel catalytic routes to convert chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and perfluorocarbons (PFCs) to hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). Aliphatic C-F bonds in fluoroalkyl groups bonded to a cationic iridium center undergo facile reaction with hydrogen gas under ambient conditions, resulting in the substitution of a C-H bond for the C-F bond. The fluoroalkyl groups may also react with methane to make a new carbon-carbon bond. By further study, the scope of these important reactions will be expanded to new substrates and catalysts. Perfluorocarbons and chlorofluorocarbons are industrially important chemicals used as refrigerants, foaming agents and solvents. However these compounds also are implicated in ozone depletion and global warming. Hydrofluorocarbons have many of the same useful properties, yet are more environmentally friendly. This research may lead to new useful HFCs as well as provide a new way to deactivate and recycle PFCs and CFCs doc21678 none Exothermic reactions are used in the chemical, petrochemical, and pharmaceutical industries. Control of these reactions is important because the loss of control can lead to thermal runaways, which can cause accidents with environmental damage, injuries, and sometimes fatalities. A way for dealing with runaway reactions is inhibition which involves injecting small quantities of an inhibitor into a reactor or storage vessel at the earliest stage of a runaway. This project will focus on the study of reaction rates, temperatures, and pressures under adverse conditions, such as loss of cooling, loss of agitation, and unusual kinetics. The studies will use (1) a new simulation model with three mixing zones to characterize runaway reactions with perfect mixing versus imperfect mixing, (2) computational fluid dynamics models to copmater the effects of agitation under turbulent and micromixing conditions, and (3) design of experiment (DOE) methods to effectively identify methods to inhibit runaways. The results will ultimately also be used to highlight future problems and limitations when reactions are faster and reactors are smaller. Impact: Knowledge created by this project could ultimately improve the chemical industry s safety performance and image. In addition, the PIs plan to develop chemical process safety educational material for use in undergraduate chemical engineering courses, a mechanism for introducing safety related issues into the curriculum doc21679 none The goal of this project is to employ microemulsion-based protein extraction (MPE) systems for the rapid, selective, and scalable recovery and purification of proteins. The research plan consists of first investigating the physical chemistry and hydrolysis kinetics of the mixed surfactant systems, to determine difference between this mixed surfactant system with comparable ionic nonionic mixed systems, and to identify operating conditions for MPE. In addition, the mixed surfactant system will be applied to the MPE of single- and multiple protein systems, the latter systems related to the fractionation of blood plasma proteins. The success of MPE will be evaluated based on productivity (i.e., speed and protein capacity), selectivity, applicability to a wide-range of operating conditions and protein purification challenges, and non-inactivation of protein products. Furthermore, pH-degradable ionic and bioaffinity water-in-oil microemulsions forming surfactants will be synthesized and employed doc21680 none This grant supports theoretical research aimed at calculating and understanding the physical properties of strongly interacting, many-electron materials. Numerical, as well as phenomenological analytic calculations for basic models such as the Heisenberg, Hubbard, t-J, and the electron-phonon Holstein model are proposed. The goal of this research is to understand the properties of specific systems. In particular, what type of order or competing orders, such as antiferromagnetism, charge density wave, superconductivity, stripe domain wall formation, or hidden topological order with quantum number fractionalization does a given system exhibit. In addition, what are the basic mechanisms responsible for these phenomena and what limits the energy scales or temperatures, where these various orders appear. This group is one of the world leaders in computational studies of strongly interacting many-body physics. %%% This grant supports theoretical research aimed at calculating and understanding the physical properties of strongly interacting, many-electron materials. The problems addressed are at the forefront of of the field and the numerical methods used are state-of-the-art. The PI has also been very successful working with students and postdoctoral associates doc21681 none Before the time of Columbus in , maize was the grain that civilized the New World. Prehistoric maize farming societies were found throughout much of the vast continental areas of North and South America except in the most extreme environmental zones, and truly advanced social systems occurred in a number of areas. With National Science Foundation support, Dr. J. Stephen Athens seeks to contribute to an understanding of how and why maize rose to such importance during prehistoric times by analyzing lake sediment cores from northern highland Ecuador. This northern South American study region, situated in a temperate valley surrounded by presently and previously active volcanoes, is known for its high agricultural productivity and the traditional dependence on maize by its past and present indigenous populace. The study cores are expected to contain long Holocene records of maize pollen preserved in the sediments. The deepest appearance of distinctive maize pollen grains in the cores will indicate, along with radiocarbon dating, when it was first introduced to the region. Combined with other regional studies, this information will help signal not only the timing, but the path of the spread of maize south from Colombia and, ultimately, southwestern Mexico, its apparent place of origin to years ago. In addition, the study of diatoms, which are the microscopic remains of certain types of unicellular algae having silica shells, will serve to document the rise and fall of lake levels, in effect providing a long term proxy record of regional rainfall. This will help to determine the specific environmental conditions under which the introduction and adoption of maize agriculture occurred in the mountains of northern highland Ecuador, as well as changing climatic conditions that prehistoric agriculturalists may have had to confront through time. Related questions of interest this study will seek to address include 1) whether or not the appearance of maize coincides with the earliest appearance of agriculture in the northern highland region of Ecuador, or if maize actually post-dates initial agriculture; 2) the trajectory of the prehistoric intensification of maize cultivation over time; 3) the change of the natural landscape of the highland valley to a virtually entirely man-made landscape; and 4) an evaluation of the possible effect of major volcanic ash falls on the ecology and environment of the inter-Andean valley and the time required for recovery (e.g., is there evidence that humans abandoned the valley for a significant period following major eruptions?). The significance of the research is that it will advance our understanding of the history of the single most important New World agricultural domesticate, contributing to a baseline of information for the spread of maize from Mesoamerica and its adoption by indigenous prehistoric societies in the northern Andes. Information on the history of maize in the northern Andes heretofore has been sketchy at best, and there have been very few detailed studies of its history of use at any single location. In addition, the study will provide a long term perspective on climatic fluctuations, the natural environment, and human ecology in a region that is presently densely populated. Such information may contribute to the development and guidance of a variety of public policy issues besides being of scientific interest to several disciplines doc21682 none Argon dating is extremely important to paleoanthropologists because it can be used over almost the entire last 6 million years; this is the period when hominids emerged and developed. Many significant archaeological and paleontological sites are located in volcanic regions such as Eastern Africa and contain strata which can be dated by this technique. With National Science Foundation support the Berkeley Geochronology Center (BGC) will continue to develop the technique of 40Ar 39Ar dating and apply this technique to a series of significant paleoanthropological sites. The BGC has collaborated with researchers at a number of sites in Africa, Europe and Asia, and with NSF support such projects will be continued and expanded. The 40Ar 39Ar dating method is based on the radiometric decay of a fraction of natural potassium in geologic materials over time. The products of the decay include 40Ar, which remains trapped in certain types of geologic materials, such as crystals within volcanic rocks. Measurement of the amount of 40Ar that has accumulated in a rock or mineral, combined with knowledge of the material s potassium content, yields the age of crystallization. In 40Ar 39Ar dating, the material to be dated is irradiated in the core of a nuclear reactor for minutes to days, in order to transmute some of the potassium to an artificial isotope of argon. Then, both the artificial isotope, which stands in for potassium, and the radiogenically produced argon, can be measured at the same time in a highly sensitive and accurate mass spectrometer. The facilities at BGC include three fully automated dating systems, each of which is capable of dating anywhere from a single small crystal of geological material weighing less than a milligram, to hundreds of milligrams, by the 40Ar 39Ar method. As in the past, Archaeometry support will be vital both to maintaining routine availability of 40Ar 39Ar dating for the archeological and paleoanthropological communities, as well as advancing the capabilities of 40Ar 39Ar dating methods. Though routine in many regards, evolving technology permits continued improvements in the method s capabilities,. Such improvements pay large scientific dividends by expanding the scope of problems that can be solved. The principal motivations for this development effort are to: 1) sustain routine access to high-quality 40Ar 39Ar data for archeological and paleoanthropological research worldwide; 2) continue refinement of 40Ar 39Ar methods to improve precision and accuracy, particularly in dating younger, smaller, or less potassic materials, and 3) replace or augment old equipment to maintain high levels of productivity and scientific excellence. Grant funding will be focused primarily in three areas: 1) replacement of a Nd-YAG with a CO2 laser for heating geological materials on one of our Argon extraction lines, 2) installation of a robust UPS power supply that will permit uninterrupted lab operation in the face of increasingly frequent power outages, and 3) modernization of the computer control systems on our automated extraction line mass spectrometer combinations. The benefits of converting to a CO2-laser based heating system are derived primarily from an ability to incrementally heat large amounts of feldspar with a broad laser beam with uniform energy profile, while accruing the benefits of extraction-line blanks that are many times lower than the conventional resistance-furnace heating device currently in use. Enabling the laboratory to weather short power outages ( 1hr in duration) will provide for continued efficient operation of three extraction lines while protecting equipment from the occasionally devastating effects of sudden power loss. Modernization of the computer control systems is necessitated by obsolescence of software and hardware components, and is essential if innovation is to continue doc21683 none Trowbridge This three-year award for cooperative research on the invasive alga, Codium fragile ssp. Tomentosoides, involves field surveys and experiments at Lough Hyne, Ireland, the Channel Islands, the English Channel Coast and Atlantic French Coast. Cynthia D. Trowbridge of Oregon State University, Colin Little of Bristol University, William F. Farnham of University of Portsmouth, and Alan Critchley of Degussa, Texturan Systems Research Centre, will conduct research on ecological mechanisms inhibiting or facilitating invasion of Codium fragile. This macroalga is a widely distributed temperate seaweed that has spread across geographic regions and international boundaries. The investigators propose to conduct field surveys of invaded regions and field experiments testing causal mechanisms. They will document community attributes of the French and English shores to determine whether the invasive agla establishes itself primarily in disturbed communities. In the intertidal community of Lough Hyne, they will explore inhibiting and facilitating mechanisms, such as high cover of intertidal seaweed, high densities of fauna grazers, and low nutrient levels. The U.S. investigator brings to this collaboration expertise in the genus C. fragile and marine zoology. This is complemented by Dr. Farnham s expertise on introduced macroalgae, Dr. Critchley s expertise macroalgae biology, and Dr. Little s experience in intertidal communities. Insights into causes and conditions conducive to seaweed invasions could prevent future spread and impact coastal management practice doc21684 none A symposium entitled Recent Advances and New Directions in Mechanics, Continuum Thermodynamics, and Kinetic Theory will be held at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, in conjunction with the 14th U.S. National Congress on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, June 23-28, . The symposium will focus on current problems in three areas: rational mechanics, continuum thermodynamics, and kinetic theory, as they are practiced today in the spirit of the late Clifford Truesdell. The objectives of the symposium are (1) highlight recent advances in the three topic areas; (2) provide the opportunity for communication and collaboration between senior and junior investigators; (3) educate young researchers and advanced graduate students and expose them to the forefronts of current research; and (4) shape new directions of research among investigators who value an emphasis on foundations, structure, and logical implications. The Journal of Elasticity and the Physical Science of Solids has dedicated a special volume to the papers of the symposium. The publication of a hard-cover book is also planned. Details about the symposium can be found on the web at http: www.ms.uky.edu ~mcsxyh ctsymp.htm doc21685 none This dissertation project examines the relationship between the rights of citizenship and the politics of race in Britain between and . It will address three questions. First, how were the unstable boundaries between state and society demarcated along the lines of race after , when advocates of minority concerns increasingly defined civil rights in terms of the state s responsibility to prevent discrimination in the private sector? Second, how did members of both anti-racist organizations and the legal profession assess the efficacy of working within liberal and egalitarian framework to advance minority concerns? Third, what criteria were employed to legally define classes of people deserving state protection against discrimination, particularly in the drafting and enactment of the Race Relations Acts of and ? To answer these questions, the Co-Principal Investigator will engage in archival research to examine the specific processes and debates through which egalitarian arguments and the codification of citizenship became linked most explicitly with the politics of race doc21686 none Elgizawy Description: This award is to support a collaborative project between Dr. A. Sherif El-Gizawy, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri and Dr. Maher Younan, Department of Mechanical Engineering, the American University of Cairo, Cairo, Egypt. The main goal of the work is to develop an understanding of the interactions between sheet-forming process variables and resulting properties, based on characterization and space-time evolution of process-induced damage. The investigators plan to develop an effective method for characterization and management of process-induced distortion in sheet forming. The nonlinear finite element method (FEM) is combined with an optimization scheme based on Genetic Algorithm (GA) for defining the process condition for global minimization of distortion in sheet metal products. The developed numerical model will be verified experimentally using high strength sheet materials. Implementation of the proposed approach in the stamping industry will increase the robustness of forming processes and improve the quality and consistency of stampings. Scope: Process-induced distortions due to spring-back, wrinkles, and excessive localized thinning alter the product geometry from the designed one, and cause difficulties in joining and assembly of sheet products as in the cases of auto-body and airframe assemblies. The work is expected to yield models that can be used for design, control, and optimization of processes for fabrication sheet metal products. The PI s novel approach is based on a combination of FEA and genetic algorithms. The successful demonstration of the results could lead to commercial solutions for one of the major outstanding problem in design of sheet forming dies: predicting and avoiding springback problems. This collaborative research will integrate modeling with experimental observations to determine the effects of different process parameters to characterize and manage process-induced distortions, and will provide unique training for conducting engineering research for graduate and undergraduate students in both Egypt and the United States. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc21687 none rights. Methods include participant observation with corporate personnel and local Sumbawans, structured observation of corporate meetings with community leaders and other intermediaries, archival research, and structured household interviews. The student will examine the relationship between development workers and villagers understandings of and support for four projects dealing with housing, farming, environmental rehabilitation, and health. The research will advance our understanding of traditional Moslem culture s relation to development, will shed light on a major phenomenon of global capitalism - corporate social responsibility, as well as contribute to the training of a young social scientist doc21688 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)Phase I project will develop a novel way to measure charge trapping in dielectrics. The feasibility of our method by applying it to the characterization of plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) nitride and oxide will be demonstrated. The deposition chemistry of these materials leaves trap sites that capture charge when subjected to large electric fields. Trapped charge affects the stability and performance of micro-electro-mechanical (MEM) devices that employ these dielectrics. A novel technique that uses a resonant, electro-statically actuated mechanical structure to measure charge trapped in a suspended dielectric layer is proposed. The real part of the device impedance, measured using a network analyzer, can be correlated to changes in electric field in the dielectric resulting from trapped charge.. PECVD dielectrics are critical constituents in MEM devices that enable $3.5 Billion in annualized sales (optical components, RF components, and medical imaging components). Although the technique itself is not a commercial product, it is broadly applicable to the engineering of MEMs devices utilizing suspended PECVD dielectric layers, such as radio frequency (RF) switches and micro-mirrors. This control of charge trapping in highly process sensitive PECVD dielectrics will allow us to realize the full commercial potential of our ultrasound devices in medical imaging applications doc21689 none This research is partially supported by the Office of International Science and Engineering of NSF. Under the direction of Dr. Barbara Fox and Dr. Jule Gomez de Garcia, Ms. Kristine Stenzel will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. She will conduct linguistic research on Wanano, a language of the Tucano language family spoken by approximately people living in the northwest region of the Amazon rainforest. Wanano is an endangered language that has yet to be fully described. Ms. Stenzel s fieldwork with the Wanano will involve direct elicitation of linguistic data, transcriptions of oral histories and folktales, as well as the recording of everyday conversations. She will produce a reference grammar of Wanano including features of Wanano phonology, morphology, and syntax. The grammar will take into account recent research in each of these areas and place Wanano in a cross-linguistic context. It will also overview the current sociolinguistic situation of the Wanano people. The grammar will be written within the framework of Basic Linguistic Theory with the overall goal of providing accurate information about the language so that researchers working within a variety of theoretical frameworks may find it accessible. This research is significant to three inter-related areas of linguistics: language description, linguistic theory, and language preservation. First, Ms. Stenzel s research will provide a detailed description of an endangered and underdescribed language. As the language family to which Wanano belongs is also underdescribed, this research will shed light on some of the poorly understood structures of the family, including tone, evidential marking, and word order. Second, Ms. Stenzel s analyses of textual and conversational data will be of use to linguists working on cross-linguistic comparisons. It is especially significant that most of the analyses will be based on conversational data, since some current grammatical theory suggests that conversational syntax provides a new window on the organization of grammar. Finally, this project will provide the community of Wanano speakers with a version of the grammar translated into Portuguese and modified for non-linguists. This grammar will enhance the Wananos efforts to preserve their language and cultural heritage doc21690 none A sophomore-level course will be designed that introduces computer engineering fundamentals to pre-service science and math teachers in a highly interactive, hands-on environment, using active, cooperative learning methods. In cooperation with existing efforts, it will also be adapted to appeal to in-service teachers seeking a Masters degree in science or math education. It will illustrate how to use microprocessor based, mini-data acquisition systems, and robotics to create projects demonstrating physics and math concepts satisfying the Maine Learning Results and other national education standards. These materials will be distributed over the web. A unique aspect of this effort will be the recruitment and engagement of honors-level first-year Electrical and Computer Engineering and pre-service College of Education students to help develop curricular content that will interest middle and high school students. In-service teachers will be included in the development of pedagogy that efficiently conveys the engineering material to future science and math teachers. This project will introduce the engineering application of science and math, as well as providing a bridge between such informal science innovations as First Robotics, First Lego League, Bot Ball, etc. and the classroom environment. The major benefit, however, to the engineering establishment will be the application of and emphasis on engineering concepts to the science math K-12 infrastructure. Through this course, pre-service and in-service teachers will be equipped with the tools to illustrate engineering principles and how they relate to concepts normally taught in conventional science and math courses doc21691 none This project is developing a number of improved simulated moving-bed (SMB) systems for both binary and ternary separation problems. Selective partial withdrawal (removal of product during only part of the cycle) and dual product withdrawal (use of two product lines for the same product) are analyzed for both the raffinate and extract streams for 3 and 4-zone SMB systems. Detailed computer simulations are used to optimize flow rates. A number of additional new SMB cascades are being devised in the course of the research. These new cascades are designed to result in better separations while using less or the same amount of desorbent. This research uses detailed simulations to delineate binary separation problems for which the new SMB cascades have lower desorbent use and or higher productivity than a standard 4-zone SMB while obtaining the same product purities. The most promising candidates are selected for experimental confirmation. Since ternary SMB separations are becoming increasingly important, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, a number of new ternary SMB cascades are also being examined for both complete separation of the ternary system and for the case where only one product is desired from the ternary feed. SMB cascades for quaternary feeds will also be analyzed. Adsorption simulators are being introduced into graduate-level chemical-engineering courses. Simulated Moving Bed (SMB) adsorption systems have proven to be the most cost effective method for doing large-scale chromatography for binary separations and have been commercialized for a number of separations such as p-xylene purification, separation of fructose and glucose, and, most recently, optical isomer separations. SMB systems are considered to be expensive separation techniques, with costs dominated by desorbent use and productivity. If successful, this research will conclusively prove that desorbent use and productivity can be significantly improved compared to current 4-zone SMB technology. The new cascades being developed for binary separations will significantly increase the productivity without increasing desorbent use, while the new cascades being developed for ternary separations will significantly increase the productivity and decrease desorbent use. These new designs will have a significant impact on the design of SMB systems for industrial separations and hence on product cost doc21692 none The Sixth International Conference on the Electrical Transport and Optical Properties of Inhomogeneous Media (ETOPIM 6) will be held in Snowbird, Utah, July 15-19, . The conference will mark the 25th anniversary of the first ETOPIM conference, which was held in Columbus, Ohio, in , and will be the second ETOPIM conference held in the US. The electrical transport and optical properties of composites and inhomogeneous media are of fundamental importance to a broad range of highly interdisciplinary problems throughout science and engineering. Photonic crystals and band-gap structures, semiconductors, porous media and rocks, conducting polymers, electrical activity in the heart and brain, composites with negative index of refraction, electrorheological fluids, optical networking, smart slime molds, optimal design of composite microstructures, imaging in geophysical, medical and industrial applications, transport in nanostructures, and the role of sea ice microstrucural and optical properties in polar biology and climate, are all examples of such problems. ETOPIM 6 will address a broad array of active areas in the physics and engineering of inhomogeneous materials and expand the coverage of previous ETOPIM conferences to include problems of current interest in the biological, geophysical and mathematical sciences. The conference is expected to have over 100 participant, representing 22 countries throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Oceania, as well as North and Latin America. Within the USA, 21 states will be represented. The program will consist of more than 30 invited lectures, about 60 contributed papers, and 20 posters. Most of the talks, invited and contributed, will be in series. Parallel minisymposia have been scheduled to focus on mathematical methods in homogenization, porous media and percolation problems in hydrology, and experimental results on random lasers and conducting polymers. Through planned activities at the conference as well as recruiting, the conference organizers will try to maximize the participation of younger researchers, from postdoctoral associates to graduate and undergraduate students, provide career development opportunities for them, and encourage interactions between junior and senior researchers doc21693 none Farrah Description: This award is to support a collaborative project between Dr. Samuel Farrah, Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Cell Science and in the Engineering Research Center for Particle Science and Technology (ERC PS&T) at the University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida and Dr. Nagui Abdel-Khalek, Central Metallurgical Research and Development Institute, Helwan, Cairo, Egypt. The two scientists plan to investigate mechanisms involved in the application of biologically active species to achieve better solid solid and solid liquid separations, with the specific aim of separation of phosphate from its associated carbonates during flotation process and the dewatering of slimes of extremely fine particles. The final objective is to develop a predictive methodology that can be used to optimize the process by determining the performance of various bacteria, their adsorption behaviors on the mineral surfaces, and the surface properties of the bacteria and the minerals. The tasks of the project include microbial sample collection, growing and characterization of microorganisms, fundamental study of the adsorption of microorganisms onto apatite and dolomite minerals and clay sample, flotation of phosphate samples of different composition from the U.S. and from Egypt, and economic evaluation of the processes. The two teams will share responsibilities in these tasks. Scope: This project aims to advance new processes for solid-liquid separation and also for solid-solid separation, particularly for those minerals of similar surface properties such as separation of apatite from dolomite and or calcite. Flotation of dolomitic phosphates in both countries is not yet commercialized. The United States and Egypt are both major producers of phosphate, which generates huge amounts of slime as waste from different industries. Advancing new technologies that depend on surface modification of minerals through application of microorganisms during flotation or flocculation of fine and ultrafine particles will enhance their separation with high selectivity, with reduced adverse environmental impacts. The ERC PS&T and the CMRDI have the necessary facilities and resources to conduct this research. The results of this study are expected to benefit both countries, especially if the developed processes are be applied to other materials. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc21694 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Douglas Kennett and his colleagues will conduct two field seasons of archaeological and paleoenvironmental research on the Pacific coast of Mexico. The primary scientific aim of this work is to study the transition to maize agriculture in two different coastal settings-one in the state of Chiapas and the other in Guerrero-between 7,500 and 2,700 years ago (BP). and the impacts that the emergence of intensive agriculture had on local environments in each area. The most recent biogeographical and genetic studies indicate that maize evolved from a wild grass (teosinte) in the Balsas River Valley, which runs from the central highlands of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. A domesticated form of maize appears to have spread out of the Balsas River Valley as early as 7,500 BP. One of the hallmarks of Middle American civilizations, maize agriculture was well established in a variety of different environments by 2,500 BP. Recent work in Middle America indicates that the processes involved in this transition were complex and spatially variable. At a minimum the sequence of events included: 1) initial domestication of maize; 2) adoption of maize by foragers living in a wide range of habitats; 3) subsequent experimentation leading to agricultural development or stability of mixed subsistence strategies; 4) ultimate emergence of more intensive agricultural strategies in certain locations; and finally 5) spread of agricultural economies via adoption or population movement replacement. In an evolutionary sense, the initial adoption and use of key domesticates by foraging populations living in different environments was a crucial part of the ultimate development of agrarian life in Middle America. To study the process of adoption and development this multidisciplinary project employs: 1) archaeological survey and excavation of sites dating to this transitional interval, 2) off-site sediment coring, and associated geomorphological pollen studies, to detect the initial introduction of maize into each area and to track vegetation changes and impacts to the landscape associated with intensified agriculture. The emergence of agriculture is one of the most significant transitions in the cultural evolution of our species. Its spread around the world was, and continues to be, a complex process and archaeological evidence from different parts of the world indicates that the details of this transformation varied greatly, particularly the types of domesticates adopted and the resistance of foraging populations to use them. Reconstructing the foraging strategies that were in use in a variety of habitats prior to the spread of key domesticates, like maize, will provide us with a better understanding of the primary mechanisms underlying this fundamental economic transition doc21695 none Satellite measures indicate an overall greening of northern forest ecosystems between the early s and the late s. This greening, which indicates higher rates of tree growth, is consistent with rising temperatures, which may be caused by atmospheric increases in greenhouse gases. To validate these findings, this research project will compare satellite-based estimates of increasing growth and greening to tree-ring records from selected sites across the circumpolar zone of northern forests. Satellite data will be summarized using a standard measure of greenness in vegetation: the Normalized-Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). The following questions will be investigated: 1. How are tree rings related to NDVI? 2. Can tree rings be used to validate intra and interannual variability in NDVI? 3. Can tree rings be used to validate trends in NDVI? 4. Do tree-ring and NDVI indices provide distinct information which, when combined, improve our understanding of biospheric activity? 5. Is there any evidence that increases in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide have directly enhanced the growth of forests north of 40oN? This project will increase understanding of the complex links between global change and ecosystem function and process. Satellite and other observations of the earth system are accumulating rapidly, but the interrelations are exceedingly complex and it is essential that their interpretation include a ground data perspective. The validation of NDVI estimates of forest biomass sinks using ground measurements from tree rings can eventually aid nations concerned with meeting commitments for the Kyoto Protocol. This project will be multidisciplinary in that it will bring together members of the ecosystems paleoclimate community, involved in ground measurement analysis of vegetation, and the remote sensing community, involved in the processing and interpretation of satellite measurements. It is anticipated that the synergy of this integrated approach will significantly improve understanding of terrestrial biospheric activity for northern latitudes and for the globe doc21696 none Mislove, NSF supported a Special Session on Hybrid Systems as part of the Eighteenth Workshop on the Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics (MFPS 18), March 20-25, at Tulane University. This meeting was also held concurrently with the Clifford Lectures of the Mathematics Department at Tulane University, which focused on mathematical logic and computer science. Research in areas relevant to MFPS focus in theoretical computer science, programming semantics, including domain theory, logics such as temporal logic and linear logic, applications of category theory to semantics, and non-standard set theories. The Special Session on Hybrid Systems included an invited address and talks on special topics in hybrid systems. NSF funds supported this session, which enabled the participation of the keynote and invited speakers, and enabled widened opportunity for participation and inclusion of graduate students doc21697 none This study, conducted by a doctoral student in anthropology from Brown University, examines the role of Islam in the adaptation and assimilation of Lebanese migrants in Senegal and investigates how and why the beliefs and practices of two Muslim peoples in contact with each other for a century (Lebanese Shi ites and Senegalese Sunnis) have recently been transformed. Religious similarities between Lebanese and Senegalese have not previously been a cause for integration, and racial boundaries have remained strong. This began to change with the founding of the Lebanese Islamic Institute in by a Shi ite sheikh from Lebanon. The specific objectives of this study are to: 1) explore how Lebanese religious practices change in the process of migration and assimilation; 2) evaluate ties to Lebanon among the Lebanese community in Senegal and how these ties influence cultural and religious identity; 3) reformulate theories of migration, immigrant assimilation and transnationalism. In addition to contributing to these theoretical arenas, the findings are directly relevant to policy concerns regarding the impacts of migrant populations on receiving countries doc21698 none The Gordon Research Conference on the Molecular Basis of Microbial One-Carbon Metabolism will be held this coming summer. This will be the third such meeting to be held as a Gordon Research Conference, but it is the eleventh in a twenty-seven year old tradition. This meeting brings together a diverse group of researchers who study a wide variety of microbes from the Eucarya, Archaea and the Bacteria that are unified by their metabolism of one-carbon compounds, and thus often use common genes and enzymes. The C-1 compounds metabolized by these organisms are of global environmental impact and many are of industrial interest. The pathways studied have implications for studies in evolution, structural biology, enzyme mechanism, gene regulation, ecology, and applied biology. With recent advances in the biochemical, molecular biological, genetic, and genomic techniques used to examine C-1 utilizing microbes that have greatly augmented recent fundamental discoveries, the field is robust, and this vigor is reflected in the diverse selection of speakers representing different disciplines interested in microbial C-1 metabolism. Previous year s conferences have been resounding successes, and have provided impetus and inspiration to both the established scientist and to those who are still in training. The dedicated nature of the conference to microbial C-1 metabolism provides a otherwise unavailable opportunity for the attendees to meet and interact with those sharing similar interests from around the globe. The auspices of the GRC provide an excellent environment in which the interaction of younger and more established scientists is fostered, and concerted efforts have been made by the organizers to have junior scientists share the main speaking platform with more seasoned workers. Partial funding for the conference is sought which will be used to establish a fellowship fund for those younger scientists who otherwise might lack the means to attend the conference. In addition, support is needed to in part defray the registration costs of speakers and discussion leaders doc21699 none Atmospheric models used to predict precipitation and the effects of clouds on solar and terrestrial radiation are sensitive to variations in the types of ice crystals in clouds and their concentration, yet the processes by which drops freeze in clouds are not understood well enough to make reliable estimates of the ice content. This project is an investigation of the atmospheric relevance of several droplet freezing mechanisms that have been suggested on the basis of laboratory observations or theory. These include homogeneous freezing of solution drops and heterogeneous freezing as a result of evaporation that creates either organic surface films or solid phase inclusions within drops. Numerical modeling of these processes will be compared with existing data from several field programs to determine the extent to which the modeling results can be brought into accord with observations. One of the objectives is to study the conditions under which evaporation at the edges of clouds can promote freezing by heterogeneous nucleation. Another is to attempt to explain recent observations indicating that the homogeneous freezing temperature of solution drops depends only on the water activity, a measure of the reduction in equilibrium vapor pressure of the drop compared to pure water. Results of this research will contribute fundamentally to understanding ice formation in the atmosphere, and thus enable the improvement of weather and climate models in which the details of cloud composition are important doc21700 none This award by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research by Professor Kirk S. Schanze of the University of Florida to pursue studies on the Photophysics of Metal-Organic and Organometallic pi-Conjugated Oligomers . Pi-conjugated polymers and oligomers comprise a new generation of molecular materials with technologically useful optical, electronic, and opto-electronic properties. Research is underway to investigate the excited state properties of mono-disperse pi-conjugated oligomers that contain transition metal chromophores to gain a molecular level understanding of their excited state properties. Objectives include an understanding of how transition metal chromophores modify the excited state properties of the pi-conjugated organic systems and how the pi-conjugated molecules modify the excited state properties of the metal complexes, particularly the properties of the triplet-pi, pi manifold of the conjugated oligomer. Metal ion complexes involved in metal-to-ligand charge transfer (MLCT) excited states include Ru(II), Os(II) and Rh(III) with alpha-thiophene oligomers that modulate the energy gap between the MLCT and triplet-pi,pi manifolds in both mono- and polynuclear complexes. The excited state properties of platinum-acetylide oligomers will be examined to provide clear information concerning the spatial extent of the singlet-pi,pi and triplet-pi,pi excitons and to understand how inter-chain interactions modify the excited state properties of the pi-conjugated Pt-acetylides. The photochemistry of pi-conjugated molecules attached to transition metal ions are being investigated as to their basic photophysical properties with applications that include novel electronic light-emitting devices, light-to electrical energy conversion, laser light protection, and plastic electronic circuits doc21701 none Elshall Description: This award is to support a collaborative project between Dr. Hassan El-Shall and Dr. Charles Beatty, both at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida and Dr. Mervat Hassan, the Central Metallurgical Research and Development Institute, Cairo, Egypt. The three investigators plan to perform a systematic study of the factors and conditions that will lead to a significant improvement in the mechanical, thermal and solvent resistant properties of epoxy clay nanocomposite used to manufacture tubesheet for high temperatures and chemically aggressive environments. Clay nanolayers are more effective in improving mechanical properties, thermal stability, dimensional stability and solvent resistance of the epoxy glassy matrix. Basic understanding of the mechanisms involved and role of clay properties are relatively unexplored. Scope: The results of this research will benefit researchers in academic and industrial organizations in both countries. Polymers reinforced by low weight percentages (1-10 wt.%) of nanoscopically dispersed organically modified layered silicates are attracting the attention of researchers because of the unprecedented suite of new and enhanced properties relative to the unfilled resin. The PIs have considerable experience in studying minerals and have the appropriate background to carry out this research. The subject is of particular interest to Egypt where high value added products derived from inexpensive starting materials are in great demand. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc21702 none The goals of this project are to obtain quantitative information on the intrachain dynamics of single-stranded polynucleotides, and to determine how these dynamics influence the kinetics of secondary structure formation. The kinetics will be monitored using transient absorbance measurements with ~ 10 nanosecond time-resolution after a laser temperature-jump. The experiments are designed to fill a big gap in the folding studies of RNA molecules, namely the time-scales and pathways associated with the collapse of a single-stranded chain and the formation of nucleating hairpins, which occur on time-scales of several nanoseconds-to-microseconds. Previous measurements on hairpin formation have been limited to microsecond time-resolution and have failed to provide a complete picture. In particular, this work will test the hypothesis that transient trapping in misfolded conformations is responsible for reducing the effective diffusion coefficient for intrachain dynamics and for the observed non-Arrhenius temperature dependence of the closing times. Kinetics of hairpin formation will be measured for varying stem sequences designed to significantly enhance the probability of mis-matched stems; the kinetics will also be measured for varying solvent viscosity. A recent statistical mechanical study of the folding unfolding of a 21-nucleotide RNA hairpin, which included misfolded states in the statistical ensemble, predicted biphasic kinetics with a rapid phase occurring on sub-microseconds. This prediction will be tested. Finally, direct measurements of the first contact time between the two ends of a single-stranded chain will be measured using triplet-triplet energy transfer between a donor and an acceptor attached to the two ends of the chain. To verify the predicted contact times expected for an ideal chain, the measurements will be done under conditions where the self-interactions of the chain are minimized. The contact times relevant for hairpin formation will be measured under solvent conditions that enhance self-interactions and induce local secondary structure. The significance of this study is to develop a quantitative understanding of how a single-stranded polynucleotide organizes itself into simple stable structures and to extend the insights gained from these simple structures to a deeper understanding of the intrachain dynamics and interactions that lead to successively more complex RNA structures. Close comparison between kinetics measurements and statistical mechanical studies of the folding of RNA will provide an ideal ground to test, not only the details of the statistical mechanical models, but also the thermodynamic parameters used for predicting secondary structures in single-stranded DNA and RNA. The primary educational goals are to implement an undergraduate program in Biophysics. A new course for undergraduates Introduction to Biophysics will be developed as a way of attracting students into the Biophysics major. A higher level course Molecule and Cell Biophysics intended for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students was developed two years ago and is now offered each year doc21703 none Oliver Steinbock of Florida State University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to examine pattern information in homogeneous and micro-structured chemical systems, and to develop novel experimental methodologies for control of the underlying spatial coupling. The chemical origins of the anomalous dispersion in the 1,4-cyclohexanedione Belousov-Zhabotinsky (CHD-BZ) reaction will be investigated, and the results utilize to formulate a reaction model capable of reproducing experimental observations from stirred reaction systems. Combined numerical and experimental approaches will be used to distill the characteristic features of spatially extended media, and also to analyze the interplay of attractive and repulsive interactions between traveling oxidation pulses and the resulting shock-like front dynamics. In other studies, the CHD-BZ reaction will serve as a model for chemical self-organization in large arrays of coupled micro-reactors. Recently developed methodologies, such as soft photolithography, will be applied for construction of custom-made arrays in which each reactor will hold a polymer-bound CHD-BZ volume of less than 100 picoliters. These reactor arrays will be employed to examine a broad spectrum of chemical instabilities that give rise to novel wave structures and Turing-like patterns. Results are expected to lead to experimental strategies to control reactions on micro-patterned reactor chips and a thorough understanding of the rules that govern spatial coupling of localized lab-on-a-chip processes. Ultimately, the outcomes will contribute valuable information for systematic exploration of compartmentalized reaction-transport systems of the sort that are successfully exploited by living matter for a variety of complex syntheses and sensors. This research project is highly interdisciplinary because its fundamental results will aid in the analysis of complex systems in biology and elsewhere. In particular, the outcomes will impact the diverse fields of neurophysiology, engineering, and statistical physics. Moreover, the development and fabrication of spatially coupled micro-reactor arrays is expected to have promise for future applications in advanced combinatorial chemistry. The manufactured reactor arrays will be made broadly available to other research groups for their use doc21704 none Hashsham Description: This award is for support of a joint research project by Dr. Syed Hashsham, Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan and Dr. Essam Zaki, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology Research Institute (GEBRI), Mubarak City of Scientific Research, Alexandria, Egypt. They plan to develop a microbial diversity microarray that will encompass the key elements of microbial biodiversity in both functional and phylogenetic sense. There is a need for such a comprehensive microarray in areas such as diagnostics, air, water, food, animal, and plant safety, soil and root ecology, and waste treatment. Approximately 1,000 oligonucleotide probes will be designed using available sequences in existing phylogenetic and structural gene databases. For selected organisms and functions, probes will also be designed to detect single nucleotide polymorphisms and to differentiate among strains relevant to human health. Additional probes targeting large phylogenetic and functional groups in a nested manner will also be included. This latter set of probes will be helpful in exploring the extant of the uncultured microbial world. Specificity and sensitivity of gene probes, and quantification of molecular data will be the three key aspects of this work. The potential of the array will be evaluated in describing and differentiating biodiversity of water bodies of different level of perturbation such as the Nile River, Lake Michigan and remote springs at Yellowstone National Park. Hypotheses related to stability of microbial communities in response to perturbations will be tested, and links between stability and biodiversity will be evaluated. Scope: Studies of the genetic composition and ecology of native bacterial populations have been constrained by their dependence on culture-based methods. Several mixed microbial communities have been analyzed by various molecular methods. These methods are generally non- quantitative, may differentiate only 20-30 populations, may only give a coarse pattern of fingerprint (instead of diversity), and may not give any functional information. The proposed development may lead to the broader application of the microarray technology in the future. It is expected that a transfer of microarray technology to Egypt will be accomplished, leading to potential use in local applications. Dr. Hashsham s work in sites in Egypt will expand the environments for testing of the microbial diversity array. The project will give graduate students of Dr. Hashsham, who are supported from other sources, an opportunity to engage in international research collaboration. This collaborative project will help the career of Dr. Hashsham, who is a recent Ph.D. graduate, and will help enhance Egypt s research in the area of biodiversity doc21705 none This project will explore the chemistry of unusual organosulfur compounds of natural origin. Initially, new organosulfur compounds from a variety of plants in the allium (garlic and onion) genus from Africa, South America and the Middle East will be isolated, identified and characterized. Synthesis and study of the organic reaction chemistry of these new organosulfur compounds will then be investigated. Thermal decomposition of the natural products will also be studied since this study will be relevant to the fate of the plant constituents upon cooking. With this Minority Research Planning Grant award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Rabi A. Musah of the Department of Chemistry at the State University of New York at Albany. Dr. Musah will work on the isolation, identification, and characterization of new organosulfur compounds from a variety of plants in the allium (garlic and onion) genus from Africa, South America and the Middle East. The synthesis and study of the organic reaction chemistry of these new organosulfur compounds will then be investigated. Thermal decomposition of the natural products will also be studied since this study will be relevant to the fate of the plant constituents upon cooking. Other plants within the allium genus are known to contain compounds with a host of biomedical science applications so there is a high probability that new compounds with biological activities will be discovered as a result of this work. Students trained during the course of this work will gain skills needed by the speciality chemicals and pharmaceutical industries doc21706 none In his project, funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Miller will conduct spectroscopic detection and characterization experiments on reactive chemical intermediates. The methods used are medium resolution, vibronically resolved and high resolution, rotationally resolved spectroscopy, based on laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) and cavity ringdown spectroscopy (CRDS) techniques. The systems under investigation are alkyl peroxy radicals discovered by the principal investigator during the previous grant cycle. Chemical reactions proceed from initial reactants to the reaction products usually along one of several possible reaction pathways. The reaction intermediates are generally characterized by different short lifetimes. Knowledge of these reaction intermediates, the relative likelihood of their occurrence and their lifetimes plays an important role in predicting the flow of chemical reactions. The systems chosen for investigation are important to the chemistry of the atmosphere, some industrial process, and to our general understanding of reactive molecules. This research is designed to detect and characterize such intermediates. Students and postdoctoral research associates participate in this research. They thereby acquire important knowledge and skills in preparation for entry into the scientific technological workforce. In his project, funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Miller will conduct spectroscopic detection and characterization experiments on reactive chemical intermediates. The methods used are medium resolution, vibronically resolved and high resolution, rotationally resolved spectroscopy, based on laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) and cavity ringdown spectroscopy (CRDS) techniques. The systems under investigation are alkyl peroxy radicals discovered by the principal investigator during the previous grant cycle. Chemical reactions proceed from initial reactants to the reaction products usually along one of several possible reaction pathways. The reaction intermediates are generally characterized by different short lifetimes. Knowledge of these reaction intermediates, the relative likelihood of their occurrence and their lifetimes plays an important role in predicting the flow of chemical reactions. This research is designed to detect and characterize such intermediates. Students and postdoctoral research associates participate in this research. They thereby acquire important knowledge and skills in preparation for entry into the scientific technological workforce doc21707 none During the past twenty years, the field of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) has developed remarkable capabilities and the possible applications are only beginning to be grasped. The combination of micro technology with optics to form micro-optical-electro-mechanical systems, or MOEMS, has already borne a considerable number of applications, projection technology being the most prominent. Recently, these devices have proved invaluable for switching in optical networks. The MOEMS technology that we are most concerned with here is the digital micromirror array. These devices consist of a chip covered with an array of small mirrors, each of whose orientation may be separately controlled. We propose to use this type of technology for the purposes of imaging, rather than projection. By using mathematical tools developed for omnidirectional sensor design in computer vision, these arrays may be dynamically configured to mimic the behavior of curved mirrors. Additionally, due to their small size, micromirror arrays can change state very rapidly. The potential applications of such a technology are numerous, including as omnidirectional sensing, high resolution image acquisition and surveillance. This IGMS project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc21708 none Public sentiment toward private use of federal lands has become increasingly contentious in the United States, particularly in the West where agriculturists rely heavily on both private and federal lands to maintain viable operations. This research focuses on understanding how ranchers use of private and federal lands affects the strategies they choose in the face of external economic, political, and cultural threats. In so doing, it asks how land tenure affects environmental use patterns, the social structure of ranching communities, and economic decisions made by agriculturists. Research will be conducted on Point Reyes National Seashore (PRNS) and in a nearby portion of private land in Marin County, California. The student will examine the ways in which land tenure and landscape valuation variously promote and discourage ranch longevity and environmental integrity. Free listing, structured surveys, in-depth interviews, and daily work diaries will be used to elicit information on the land use practices, economic circumstances, and perceptions and values regarding the land for two matched sets of ranchers in Northern California: 1) ranchers using primarily the federal lands of PRNS, with 2) a matched set of ranchers across Tomales Bay, who primarily use private lands east of Tomales Bay. Network analysis will be used to contrast social interactions within each community. Historical analysis of ranch boundaries, former neighbor interviews, and personal and county economic data and tax records will be used to examine economic strategies. The research will test the hypothesis that land tenure shapes productive strategies; in so doing, it contributes to property theory by exploring the effects of private and federal tenure on resource management. The research also shows the relevance of a developing body of theory on cooperation to a complex, market-integrated agricultural society doc21709 none The effects of high pressure on reaction rates of enzyme-catalyzed reactions will be measured as a function of substrate and inhibitor concentrations. These reactants will be mixed, placed in a steel pressure bomb, and the progress of their reaction will be monitored spectrophotometrically while being subjected to hyperbaric conditions up to 3,000 atmospheres of pressure. Initial velocities of the enzyme-catalyzed reactions will be extracted from the progress curves and fit to original rate equations in order to quantify pressure-sensitive kinetic parameters and to perform model discriminations between reaction mechanisms. The results will be compared to similar effects with isotopically-labeled substrates to determine the effect of pressure on isotope effects. These measured quantities will document the presence, sign and magnitude of volume changes associated with: (1) binding of substrates and inhibitors, (2) rates of chemical transformations including the expression of isotope effects, (3) rates of product dissociation, and (4) rates of protein conformational changes. This is a wholly innovative technological approach to enzymology that will deliver new information regarding the fundamental secret of life: how these modest proteins called enzymes bring billions of orders of magnitude of rate acceleration to the complex biochemical reactions that make up metabolism. For example, this is the first technology to return an exact measurement of a physical parameter associated with a transition-state, namely the activation volume. How activation volumes change with changing conditions will provide a new window of insight into the transition-state chemistry of enzymes. The ultimate goal of this research is to test and challenge the dominant theories of enzymatic catalysis, namely that enzymes accelerate reaction rates by stabilizing transition-states and by binding substrates more tightly in those transition-states doc21710 none Sider This research project focuses on changes that have occurred over the last two decades concerning the social organization of labor in agricultural communities of Greece. Since the early s Greek agriculture has become increasingly dependent on immigrant labor. At the same time women, who were traditionally an important source of labor in the subsistence economies of Greek villages, have been increasingly incorporated into the formal economy. Both these developments reflect the growing integration of Greece into transnational and global networks of exchange, particularly since its entry into the European Union, and have often been represented as the modernization and democratization of the Greek countryside. However, these developments also represent a fundamental transformation in the reproduction of social inequality from an older discursive framework centered on gender and kinship to a newer discourse centered on ethnicity and citizenship. This research project will examine shifting discourses of inequality in a rural Greek community as it has changed from a dependence on gendered, kin-organized labor to immigrant labor. Using methods of participant-observation and discourse analysis, the student will map out the relationship between the construction of gender and national ideologies and the mobilization of agricultural labor. The student will collect data both on how people think about inequality and on how social stratification is organized in order to uncover the processes by which social inequality is being reproduced at the local level. The project will advance our understanding of contemporary processes of globalization and their implications for local social organization. It will also advance our understanding of the roles of gender and ethnicity in Mediterranean social organization doc21711 none With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Kevin Vaughn will conduct three seasons of archaeological research in the Southern Nasca Region (SNR) of the south coast of Peru. The focus of the project will be understanding the production, distribution, and use of one of the most finely made classes of pottery in the Precolumbian Americas associated with the Nasca culture (ca. A.D. 1-750). For nearly a century archaeologists have studied Nasca polychrome pottery from museum collections, however relatively little work has focused on how the pottery fit into the wider sociopolitical and economic contexts of Nasca society. In short, research into what can be referred to as the craft economy of Nasca has been limited. Based upon preliminary evidence from recent fieldwork it appears that the pottery, although a craft in archaeological terms, is not one that fits easily into traditional models of craft specialization proposed by archaeologists. Although polychromes appear to have been reserved for individuals of high status in some contexts, recent work suggests that much of the pottery was available to all members of society regardless of their status. Despite this recent research, fundamental questions remain about this craft economy. Specifically, where was the pottery produced and in what contexts, how was it distributed and or exchanged, to what extent was it used regionally, and how was this craft economy related to emerging leadership in Early Nasca society? This project is designed to address these questions in three seasons of fieldwork in the SNR. In order to determine the regional availablity of raw materials useful to ancient potters, the first season will consist of a material survey in the SNR to locate clays and mineral pigments used for the production of Nasca pottery. The elemental composition of these materials will then be determined through instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) and matched with compositional data generated from previous analysis to determine if the production of pottery was restricted to a certain area of the region and controlled by emerging elites, or if production was dispersed and not controlled. Focus in the remaining two seasons will turn to evaluating polychrome distribution and use. This will consist of evaluating seven Early Nasca habitation sites through mapping and excavations. The data collected in these seasons will determine how widely polychromes were circulated from the production zones that are delineated in Season #1. Data will also be collected to assess the quantities of polychromes used at residential sites, whether this was limited to elites, or if polychromes were available to everyone, and how this varied across the region. It is hypothesized that the farther away from the regional core of Nasca society, the greater the importance that polychromes had in tying local elites to increasingly exotic goods. The proposed research will add to our understanding of why crafts are important in pre-industrial societies, and how craft economies articulate with emerging leadership in these societies. This research will also increase our understanding of how Nasca polychromes fit into the wider sociopolitical and economic domains of Nasca society doc21712 none This theoretical research is funded jointly by the Divisions of Materials Research and Molecular and Cellular Biology. Rapid advances in genomic and molecular technology have led to much excitement and opportunities in molecular biology. A hugh amount of data have already been collected on genomic sequences, gene expression profiles, and protein-protein interactions. System-level issues involving gene, protein, and cellular networks have emerged as the new challenges in quantitative understanding of molecular and cellular biology. This research will study system-level issues in the context of gene regulation. An explicit model will be used to describe the combinatoric control of gene expression, and using simple generic interactions of transciption factors with each other and with their DNA building sites. The model will be used to investigate how the molecular components may be put together to implement regulatory functions of increasing complexity, and how these regulatory systems can in turn be coupled to each other to form genetic networks exhibiting robust patterns of gene expression. A key feature of this model is the identification of a subset of interactions that can be tuned by simple manipulation of DNA sequences in the regulatory regions. They are referred to as programmable parameters and can be individually adjusted by the system in order to implement the imposed functional requirements. The model can be cast in the form of an interacting spin system, and shares striking similarities with the recurrent networks studied in neural networks. It can also be reduced to a more versatile Boolean description in some cases. Analytical and numerical studies will be done to characterize the properties of the networks, e.g., the complexity of the regulatory functions the system can implement, and the capacity of the stable expression patterns the network can maintain. In particular, a stochastic supervised learning rule resembling the evolutionary dynamics of regulatory sequences will be studied to search for the programmable parameters of the system that best achieve the desired functional responses. This dynamics can therefore be used also to study the evolvability of the regulatory control systems and the gene networks. The evolution of the stability and complexity of these regulatory and interactive gene systems will also be studied. %%% This theoretical research is funded jointly by the Divisions of Materials Research and Molecular and Cellular Biology. Rapid advances in genomic and molecular technology have led to much excitement and opportunities in molecular biology. A hugh amount of data have already been collected on genomic sequences, gene expression profiles, and protein-protein interactions. System-level issues involving gene, protein, and cellular networks have emerged as the new challenges in quantitative understanding of molecular and cellular biology. This research will study system-level issues in the context of gene regulation doc21713 none This award by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research by Professor Jack R. Norton in the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University to facilitate the synthesis and manufacture of compounds of interest to the pharmaceutical industry. The rates at which zirconaziridine enantiomers interconvert will be measured and reactions of metallaaziridines with epoxides and aziridines will be developed. In addition, the one-electron chemistry of alkyl complexes similar to those that serve as precursors for olefin polymerization catalysts will be investigated. The electrochemistry of boranes and related alumoxanes will be explored in order to determine whether single-electron transfer is involved in catalyst activation by these compounds. The effects of small amounts of reducing agents on catalytic olefin polymerization will be determined. New reagents and methods will be developed to better understand and improve the synthesis of pharmaceuticals and polymers doc21714 none The goal of this Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship in the Behavioral and Social Sciences is to determine the developmental processes involved in White children s knowledge and use of the stereotype that alleges Black Americans have low academic ability. Four experiments will be conducted to determine how the stereotype influences White children s perceptions and attributions of their Black peer s academic ability. Experiment 1 will test whether White children over 9 years of age judge a Black student as lower in ability than a White student with the same performance. However, to allow us to tease apart whether participants judgments are due to stereotyping or due to ingroup bias, the participants will also make judgments of basketball shooting ability of Black, Asian, and White American children. Experiment 2 will determine whether White children of all ages may attribute Black students academic failures and White students academic successes to internal factors such as ability. It will also investigate whether White children over 9 years of age explain away Black students academic successes and White students academic failures by attributing these performances to external factors such as task difficulty or internal unstable factors such as effort. As in experiment, participants will make the same kinds of judgments of Black, Asian, and White Americans basketball shooting ability. Experiments 3 and 4, were designed to determine whether White children over 9 years of age incorporate teacher feedback that suggests that a Black student has lower ability than a White student, but ignore teacher feedback that suggests that a Black student has higher ability than a White student doc21715 none The purpose of this project is to conduct a comprehensive summative evaluation of the results and impact of the Collaborative for Excellence in Teacher Preparation in New Mexico (NMCETP) for a period of three years. Accountability & Development Associates, Inc. (ADA), a private consulting firm in Albuquerque that has been assisting this CETP with evaluation expertise since , is continuing to provide their expertise in this phase of NMCETP operations. The project is focusing on the impact of NMCETP on teacher quality and student learning in K-12 classrooms with the assistance of facilitators at New Mexico State University and the University of New Mexico. The New Mexico teacher induction mentoring programs are in place, but locating, observing, and longitudinally tracking NMCETP graduates will be very labor intensive because they are located in dispersed, often rural, areas across the fifth largest state in the US. For purposes of this evaluation an NMCETP student will be defined as any who has 1) completed a degree at one of the NMCETP-participating four-year institutions, 2) been certified to teach, 3) secured a teaching position in New Mexico, and 4) taken at least one NMCETP new or reformed course as a part of pre-service education. These graduates will serve as the NMCETP treatment group. Data analysis will be structured to allow for comparisons across groups as well as those students who completed more than one NMCETP reformed courses. Control group participants will be matched demographically as closely as possible to treatment group participants, but will not have experienced NMCETP teacher preparation programs. A reformed course is defined for NMCETP as a course that has been changed or developed in mathematics, science, and education designed to strengthen the backgrounds of pre-service teachers by modeling best instructional practices and teaching pedagogies. Inquiry-based, hands-on methodologies were touchstones of these reformed and or new courses. Two fundamental areas of inquiry will be the basis of the continuation evaluation: 1) post- preparation mathematics and science teacher quality, and 2) mathematics and science teacher preparation program sustainability. ADA will use instruments developed by the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement at the University of Minnesota for the Core Evaluation. ADA has participated in evaluation meetings in Minneapolis hosted by the Core Evaluation staff, and piloted some of the Core instruments with modifications to capture the complexities of NMCETP, which has met the needs of each participating campus in different ways doc21716 none The proposal seeks to disseminate the Systemic Initiatives (SI) study results via hosting two distinctive activities: an Invitational SI Workshop and an SI Study Forum. The SI Invitational Workshop of urban school data managers, internal evaluators, and project directors as well as selected urban study members will be held March 14 - 16, in Orlando, Florida. The proposed SI Study Forum website will further disseminate results of more than 30 studies supported by the National Science Foundation. The website will be ongoing past the end of the grant period. The proposed work is to be funded by The Division of Educational System Reform (ESR) in collaboration with the Division of Research, Evaluation and Communication REC doc21717 none Assisted reproduction practices- laboratory and clinical techniques that enable genetic human reproduction- are becoming increasingly prominent in Latin America as viable and preferred options for creating a family of one s own. Significantly, Latin America is not the only Third World region where the research and development of reproductive technologies are proliferating. Yet biotechnologies are often assumed to be culturally neutral, bringing a standard form of scientific modernity to any setting in which they appear. This dissertation project, conducted by a student of cultural anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will focus on the community of reproductive medicine specialists in Buenos Aires so to examine the social processes and motivations guiding the acceptance and production of assisted reproduction practices in Argentina. Through ethnographic methods of participant observation, semi-structured interviews and archival research, this project will investigate the local specificities of assisted reproduction: how do these procedures engage and respond to particular ideas about science, modernity and religion, values of genetic inheritance and parenthood, and economic and political pressures. Because reproductive medicine is a fast-growing field with far-reaching social and ethical consequences, it is important to understand the processes by which reproductive technologies are enacted locally according to social, political, and economic circumstances. This project will contribute a culturally-nuanced analysis that will inform both academic and policy discussions on the ethical, legal and social implications of assisted reproduction doc21718 none Each year over 1.5 million US students cross the boundary between elementary and middle school, a crucial developmental period when students are often permitted and encouraged to take greater responsibility for their choice of affiliations and activities. This dissertation research project by a cultural anthropology student studies what role family and peers play in students formulation of agendas during this social transition. The student will follow a cohort of children during their first year of middle school in a peri-urban Atlanta community. Combining participant observation, a series of semi-structured interviews with a sample of 40 students and their parents, and a sequence of broad school-based surveys, the researcher will examine how students prioritize short-term agendas, how family and peer networks influence these agendas, and how students, by choosing who influences them, act as agents in their own socialization. This study will improve our understanding of how local networks of social relations serve as mediators of cultural influence and change. The new knowledge to be created will also be valuable for policymakers to understand how families and peers serve as informal sources of cultural education during the middle school transition doc21719 none RConflicts over natural resources and land allocation issues are intensifying worldwide. Such conflicts present obstacles to both environmental conservation efforts and to political stability. In the Hawaiian Archipelago, conflicts over the use and management of wetland areas have reached an all-time high. While decades of agricultural, commercial, and residential development have threatened critical wetlands, biologists have found that endangered waterbirds are attracted to wetland areas that have traditionally been farmed for taro. The co-investigator, an environmental anthropology doctoral student from the University of Washington, will work with 52 taro farmers on the Hawaiian Island of Kaua i, investigating the connection between taro farming and endangered waterbirds. The research focuses specifically on the economics of taro farming, the value of taro farming as a wetlands management alternative, and the value of environmental knowledge developed over generations by taro farmers. The research will involve household interviews, weekly data collection on farm statistics and waterbird counts, a traditional environmental knowledge survey, focus group discussions, and participant observation. These research methods are designed to document traditional environmental knowledge employed in watershed management and the economic profitability of taro farming. This will provide an estimate of the per-unit cost for taro farmers managing wetlands for endangered waterbird protection. If taro farming is indeed as environmentally valuable as is claimed, it may provide the state of Hawaii, and other regions throughout the moist tropics, with a means of promoting both human and environmental well-being doc21720 none Recent political science literature reflects a growing controversy regarding the formation of political parties and party systems in post-Soviet societies. The eventual outcome of the controversy holds implications for a basic understanding of how party systems form and the role parties play in developing democracies. The substantive debate is focused on the question of whether or not the political parties that have emerged in the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union exhibit the types of political characteristics that allow us to conclude that they constitute a competitive multi-party system. Two distinct camps have emerged on either side of this query. One set of scholars, drawing upon traditional theories of party formation, argues that the formation of institutionalized party systems in post- Communist states will be a long and arduous process because these societies lack previous multi-party socialization. They see the current post-Soviet parties as ephemeral, lacking a firm foundation in policy differences, thus reflecting nothing more substantial than a fan club for the party s leader. On the opposite side of the argument, research from the early to mid-90s reveals a rapid rise in the proportion of post-Soviet citizens who identify with a political party and who vote for the party with which they identify. Other work also shows the development of party factions within the parliaments of the newly independent states. Collectively this research supports theories of endogenous party formation which suggest that parties, partisan support and possibly even party systems can form relatively quickly in response to contemporary political events and issue or ideological polarization. The proposed study provides the first comparative data on Russia and Ukraine that incorporates directly comparable evidence on the level of institutionalization currently attained by party organizations, parties in the electorate and the parties in government. What this proposal seeks is funding for cleaning, documenting, analyzing and releasing four recently collected data sets that deal with political parties as organizations (based on surveys with party activists) and as parties in the electorate (based on comparable surveys with ordinary citizens). These data, once they are cleaned and documented, would provide the very first comprehensive examination of party organizations in post-Soviet societies. The data will provide a benchmark for any future studies of party development in these new democracies. In addition, when combined with the survey data on ordinary citizens and parliamentary members this study promises to provide the most defmitive answer to the party formation debate outlined above. Moreover, the study promises to shed new light on the question of whether or not political parties function in a manner that provides a link between ordinary citizens and their elected representatives. Many other substantive questions could also be addressed with these data when they are released to the general academic community for secondary analysis doc21721 none This project is aimed at the development and application of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and Molecular Dynamics simulations as tools that will permit a more rational design of materials with improved ionic conductivities. For example, NMR will be used to investigate the role that local structure plays in controlling the physical properties of solid state ionic conductors and battery materials such as calcium-doped yttrium titanium oxide. A combination of fluorine-19 NMR and molecular dynamics simulations will be used to predict and then test experimentally the effect of different modifications and structural features on fluoride-ion conduction in fluorite-related phases such as lead tin fluoride and barium tin fluoride. Molecular dynamic simulations will be used to examine the effect of doping such cations as sodium, potassium, aluminum, and zirconium into these structures and then test the molecular dynamics simulations by NMR. This project has a very strong educational component for under-represented groups in that the PI participates in a number of university-wide efforts to encourage young women to remain in the physical sciences. Also, there is a unique educational dimension due to international collaborative activities with groups in the United Kingdom on MD simulations and Estonia on the development of NMR instrumentation. Moderate to fast ionic conduction is critical for a wide range of devices and applications such as fuel cells, sensors, and solid state electrolytes and cathode materials in batteries. Training students in the areas of mechanisms of conduction and the search for new, improved, and more environmentally friendly materials for energy related applications makes them very competitive in the industrial sector doc21722 none Landscape heterogeneity, patch connectivity, and host-parasitoid population dynamics NSF Ecological Studies Grant ( ) September 1, - August 31, The fragmentation and loss of natural habitats is a dire world-wide problem. Ecologists have made significant in-roads toward understanding the impact that increased habitat fragmentation or spatial patchiness might have on the long-term persistence of predator-prey populations. However, most fragmentation studies have disregarded the vegetational cover that exists between patches (known as the matrix), generally assuming that the matrix is featureless and neutral to the movements and population fluctuations of both predator and prey species. In reality, the matrix is complex and ever-changing. Any alteration in matrix composition may significantly impact how predators interact with their prey. This proposal outlines a course of study designed to address how different matrix types influence the movement and population fluctuations of an herbivore and its predator. The planthopper, Prokelisia crocea, and the parasitoid wasp, Anagrus columbi, which are distributed among discrete patches of prairie cordgrass in the Great Plains of the United States form an ideal system for this type of study. The crux of this proposal is a relatively large-scale field experiment that is designed to alter the ability of planthoppers and wasps to move among patches (i.e., patch connectivity) by embedding cordgrass patches in either of two dominant matrix types (mudflat or the exotic grass species brome). Emigration, immigration, the pattern of spatial spread, and the within-patch distribution of insects will be assessed from the recapture of fluorescent-marked individuals. The experiment also will be carried out over 3 spatial scales and 6 generations to provide information on the effect of the matrix manipulation on parasitism and density fluctuations among patches and over time. Never before has the patch structure and matrix been manipulated in predator-prey population studies in the field. As a complement to this field experiment, trials will also be conducted to determine the behavioral basis for matrix-dependent movement patterns of the planthopper and wasp. Finally, based on information derived in the above studies, a simulation model will be developed with the goal of evaluating the impact of habitat fragmentation and degradation (e.g., changes in the landscape matrix) on the long-term persistence of predator-prey interactions. Results from this renewal of NSF grant should provide critical and much needed information on the effects of heterogeneous landscapes on predator-prey interactions, and hopefully catalyze a broader approach to studies of predator-prey interactions. This research also has broad ramifications for conservation programs that are interested in the connectivity of reserves: a matrix that facilitates dispersal (i.e., a high-quality matrix) may serve a function identical to that of stepping stones or corridors. Finally, this research may have a direct bearing on the success of pest management programs that employ strategies that purposely modify the matrix (e.g., through inter-cropping, terracing, or leaving some fields fallow). Knowledge of the effect of these changes on pest and natural enemy movement and interactions may be critical to developing a successful pest-control program doc21723 none Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Reconstructing Fuel Use from Archaeological Charcoal from the Middle Sican Period, Lambayeque, Peru (C.E. 950- ). Under the direction of Drs. Lee Newsom and Izumi Shimada, Mr. David J. Goldstein will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will continue his participation with the Sican Archaeological Project, a 23-year effort headed by Dr. Shimada to reconstruct the prehistory of the Lambayeque and La Leche River Valleys. Mr. Goldstein will be the first scientist-in-residence at the newly constructed National Sican Museum in Lambayeque, Peru, to complete the analysis of 3 seasons of excavation at Huaca Sialupe a Middle Sican period metal and ceramics workshop. In particular, he will be investigating the charcoal remains from metal furnaces, ceramic kilns, and domestic hearths to reconstruct the use of fuel resources during the period. In conjunction, he will conduct two-months of systematic forest resource surveys, in the spring and fall, to collect comparative botanical materials to complete his analysis. The present state of forest preservation in the area is dire. The area is sparsely covered by dry tropical forests that presently face destruction in light of agricultural clearance and fuel wood harvesting. This clearance is problematic as the local forests enhance soil fertility and raise the groundwater level. It is thought based on experiments carried out by Mr. Goldstein and Dr. Shimada s interdisciplinary team, that Middle Sican metal production severely impacted forest resources in a similar manner in the past. This threat, due to the fuel intensive nature of ceramic and metal production, may have lead to forest conservation measures during the Middle Sican, including measured fuel apportioning between different industries. Through a comparison between the different fuel-use contexts at Huaca Sialupe, and other sites in the area, he aims to pattern how and which fuels were used in each context during this period. At the same time he will utilize a methodology that will investigate the ancient forest ecology in the area. Mr. Goldstein will employ an approach developed by Dr. Newsom based on traditional wood anatomy methods to look at the functional growth anatomy of woody plants to identify the plants used as fuel and interpret the growth ecology of these plants. To date, no studies of the ancient environment adequately describe the stature, extent, and composition of forests present in the area in antiquity. This research will permit the reconstruction of the forest materials available to ancient artisans through comparisons with modern specimens and anatomical wood keys. Ideally, the study will yield information on the manner in which humans extracted fuel resources from an ecosystem that is viewed as fragile in the present day. Mr. Goldstein s research is a foundation work for the development of regional forest resource history, and will demonstrate how people used their available resources to provide fuel to satisfy their economic and subsistence needs in light of marginal resources. Potentially, this investigation will allow local development projects to argue for patterned conservation measures in the area in an effort to preserve the few remaining areas still covered by forest today doc21724 none Keener The investigator uses mathematical models and analysis to study the dynamics of several physiological systems in which excitability is a common and fundamental feature. The three broad problem areas to be investigated are 1) The initiation and dynamics of cardiac arrhythmias; 2) The dynamics of defibrillation; 3) The dynamics of autoimmune disease. The study of these problems involves the development and use of sophisticated mathematical models and tools, including advanced numerical methods such as immersed boundary methods, bifurcation theory and dynamical systems theory, and asymptotic analysis. These tools are used to give theoretical understanding to problems of border zone and ischemia related cardiac arrhythmias, APD instabilities and their relationship to the onset and development of reentrant arrhythmias, mechanical alternans deriving from instabilities of the calcium handling system or crossbridge dynamics, the success or failure of defibrillation, and oscillatory autoimmune responses. Serious attention is given to obtaining agreement between theoretical results and experimental findings. To that end collaborations with experimentalists examine gap junction coupling of rabbit myocytes, the effect of hypertrophy on excitation-contraction coupling through the sodium-calcium exchanger, the effect of mutations on the delayed rectifier potassium channel that lead to increased proclivity for fatal arrhythmias, and the role of mimicry in oscillatory dynamics of cystic fibrosis in mice. Excitability is one of the most important features enabling signalling in physiological systems. It is crucial to the operation of nerves, muscle, the heart, the immune system, and blood clotting as well as numerous gene regulatory networks. The specific goal of this project is to gain an improved theoretical understanding of how the normal function of systems that rely on excitability can go awry, exhibiting pathological behaviors, and how these pathological behaviors might be controlled or prevented. The behaviors that are studied here are the result of interwoven interactions of simpler behaviors, resulting in complex behaviors that defy understanding through intuition or simple means. The investigation therefore focuses on the development and analysis of mathematical models of these behaviors in the belief that substantial new and important insights can be gained, and new hypotheses formulated that are not apparent from phenomenological descriptions. While this project has as its main focus several problems relating to abnormalities of the cardiac cycle, it extends far beyond to many areas of physiology where common principles are involved. The project includes a significant training component for students doc21725 none Cosner The investigators derive and analyze mathematical models that describe how spatial aspects of the environment and the ways that organisms utilize space and disperse through it influence the dynamics of populations and the structure of ecological communities. The underlying motivation for the project is to gain a better understanding of how spatial effects can threaten or maintain biodiversity or affect interactions between important types of organisms such as crops, pests, and biological control agents. The project is focused primarily on edge-mediated effects in habitat fragments and on the effects of nonrandom dispersal. The main goal is to gain insight into the ways that edge-mediated effects and dispersal behavior influence the persistence or extinction of species. Understanding edge-mediated effects is important because one of the most significant ways in which humans alter natural environments is by fragmenting habitats and thus creating edges. The investigators study many spatial effects, including edge-mediated effects, via reaction-diffusion models. However, reaction-diffusion models assume random dispersal, and the dispersal patterns of some organisms are affected by behavioral responses to the presence of prey, predators, or conspecifics. Reaction-diffusion equations cannot capture those effects, so the investigators model them with more general forms of quasilinear parabolic partial differential equations. The investigators use methods and results from the theory of partial differential equations, dynamical systems, and nonlinear functional analysis to develop the mathematical framework needed to analyze the models. The investigators study mathematical models for the ways that plant and animal populations are affected by the size and spatial structure of the environment they inhabit and by the way they move or spread through the environment. The goal of the project is to gain a better theoretical understanding of how spatial effects influence the persistence or extinction of populations. The underlying motivation is to provide insights into the impact of spatial effects on biodiversity and on economically important organisms such as crops and pests. The potential practical benefits of the project are improvements in decision making in areas such as land management, conservation, and urban planning. Much of the project is focused on the effects of habitat edges, because one of the main effects of human activity on the environment is to divide it into fragments and create edges, for example by building roads. Different organisms respond to edges in different ways; for example, a new road may isolate a population of one species of animals that refuse to cross it but may add to the mortality of another species of animals that do attempt to cross. When population interactions such as predation by one species upon another are combined with spatial effects, the results can be complex and sometimes counterintuitive. To understand them the investigators derive mathematical equations that incorporate spatial effects and population interactions and analyze those equations to determine when they predict persistence of populations versus when they predict extinction. To conduct the analysis the investigators use and develop various mathematical methods doc21726 none This dissertation research by an anthropology student will study how professional identity is established and negotiated by clinical bioethicists in medical settings in the US and Canada. Using methods of participant observation, structured and informal interviews, the student will study bioethicists at a teaching hospital in Houston Texas, members of the National Rural Bioethics Project in Missoula Montana, the Joint Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto, Canada, and in rural teaching hospitals in Regina and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. The student will test hypotheses dealing with differences in the roles of knowledge, skills, and character in credentialing professionals in the US and Canada; the different role of stakeholders and resource managers in the credentialing process in the two countries; the contextual and interpersonal nature of authority negotiation of these non-medical specialists in medical settings; and the multiple roles bioethicists will play in resolving problems of daily practice. In addition to contributing to the training of a young social scientist, this research will advance our understanding of how the ethical dimensions of medical care are worked out in real life, and how non-medical authorities gain legitimacy when they act as patient advocates in a medical setting doc21727 none The focus of this research is to create new synthetic routes for the preparation of resorcinol and phloroglucinol from glucose. A pathway using the intermediacy of gallic acid pyrogallol, 2-deoxy-scyllo-inosose hydroxyhydroquinone or myo-2-inosose 1,2,3,4-tetrahydroxybenzene will be explored as will a pathway involving the intermediacy of hexahydroxybenzene and pentahydroxybenzene derived from myo-inositol and myo-2-inosose. Microbes will be constructed that are capable of high-yielding, high-titer conversions of glucose into gallic acid, myo-inositol, 2-deoxy-scyllo-inosose and myo-2-inosose. Also, experiments will be conducted to compare the microbial synthesis and reaction in near-critical water of 3-dehydroquinic, 3-dehydroshikimic and protocatechuic acids as routes for the synthesis of catechol from glucose. With this renewal award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. John W. Frost of the Department of Chemistry at Michigan State University. Professor Frost will focus his work on devising methodology to prepare aromatic chemicals from carbohydrate precursors. These methods will allow for the replacement of toxic starting materials such as benzene. The research has broad and important potential impact for the chemical industry and for the environment in general. The research also provides an excellent training ground for graduate students and postdoctorals doc21728 none Genes transformed back into the organism of origin often cause silencing of dispersed homologous copies, including the endogenous gene. Two types of silencing occur. One is transcriptional and involves changes in chromatin structure as evidenced by the accumulation of Polycomb Group proteins on the silenced transgene insertion sites. The other involves post-transcriptional RNA turnover in a similar manner to RNA interference. Emerging evidence has indicated potential connections among RNA interference, post-transcriptional silencing and transcriptional transgene silencing. In this project, a genetic and molecular approach will be undertaken to determine any relationship among these types of silencing. Transgenes of the Alcohol dehydrogenase (Adh) and white (w) eye color genes in Drosophila will be used as a model system. First, a series of constructs will be transformed that do or do not exhibit gene expression to determine whether transcriptional silencing requires the expression of the silencing gene to occur. If silencing can only occur when the homologous sequences are expressed, an RNA mediated process would be implicated in causing the chromatin changes that are associated with the cases of transcriptional silencing. Secondly, the interrelationship between RNAi-like mechanisms and transcriptional silencing will be examined. A construct predicted to induce post-transcriptional silencing of Adh will be tested for its ability to produce either type of silencing. Next, mutations that block post-transcriptional silencing will be tested for their influence on pairing sensitive silencing. Further, a transgene predicted to generate double stranded RNA homologous to Adh promoter regions will be produced and tested for its ability to induce transcriptional silencing. Studies of gene silencing are likely to reveal new information about gene expression and nuclear dynamics in multicellular eukaryotes. One role of these silencing mechanisms is as a protection against viruses and transposons, although many of the genes that have been identified in the process are also known to affect developmental mechanisms. Understanding the basic processes of gene silencing has the potential to lead to virus protection and to have applications in gene therapy doc21729 none Fire is a powerful resource management tool, perhaps the oldest to be used by humans. Through the use of fire to open up forests and woodlands, establish grasslands and encourage the establishment of species beneficial to human survival, humans have modified ecosystems such that they have become dependent upon anthropogenic fire for maintenance. This dissertation research project studies the socio-natural system of fire that has resulted from the repeated actions and reactions of both social and natural processes in Western Australia. The student, a human ecologist from University of California, Davis, will explore the relationship between Australian Aboriginal management practices and the distribution and abundance of vegetation communities and kangaroo populations in the Kimberley region of tropical Australia. Analysis of the Aboriginal human-nature interaction will focus on the interactions between three components of the socio-natural system: resource use, management practice and reproductive biology. A two-fold approach to analyzing Aboriginal ecosystem management with fire will be carried out, using both ethnographic and ecological research methodologies. This research will document indigenous land management in a contemporary context while situating that context historically. Fire encapsulates the Aboriginal relationship with land, yet Western settlers and land management agencies heavily circumscribe fire practice. Improving fire management is a priority both within and beyond Australia, and this research contributes to that need doc21730 none Knowledge of tropical biota and ecosystems has expanded greatly in recent years. At the same time, the scope of tropical biology has also broadened to include social and economic dimensions of land use change and habitat loss. Tropical biologists have also started to make policy inputs to conservation and management of ecosystems. The Association for Tropical Biology (ATB), in collaboration with other organizations, has planned a process to articulate and prioritize research in tropical biology. The goals of the process are to review recent developments in tropical biology and to define priorities for future research. This workshop award will support participation of U.S. scientists, including graduate students, to attend a major international conference, the Annual Meeting of the ATB in Panama in July, . This conference will be attended by natural and social scientists as well as policy makers. The participation of U.S. scientists will benefit U.S. scientists and those from tropical countries to promote scientific collaboration in the short- and long-term doc21731 none Iron-sulfur clusters are small inorganic entities necessary for the activities of enzymes whose activities are essential to the life-sustaining processes of respiration, nitrogen fixation and photosynthesis. One of the most important roles of iron-sulfur clusters is to serve as agents of the electron transfer reactions necessary for many biological processes. Several proteins required for formation of iron-sulfur clusters have recently been identified and they are among the most conserved proteins found in living cells. These proteins have been designated IscU, IscS, IscA, HscB, HscA, and Fdx. This project is designed to determine how these proteins work together to combine inorganic iron and sulfur to create the clusters. Purified proteins will be used to duplicate the cellular process in vitro and the physiological and biochemical consequences of impairing the function of each protein in vivo will be assessed. In nitrogen-fixing cells there is also a specialized set of homologous proteins that specifically target iron-sulfur cluster formation for the activation of nitrogenase. This project will also involve analysis of these proteins to determine how they target iron and sulfur for the support of biological nitrogen fixation. How iron-sulfur clusters are formed biologically is important because free inorganic iron and free sulfur are metabolic poisons. Furthermore, cellular defects in an ability to properly form iron-sulfur clusters is known to have a profound effect on the metabolism of iron, which can be manifested in a variety of debilitating genetic disorders. Finally, the controlled manipulation of metabolic pathways by altering or increasing the cellular capacity for iron-sulfur cluster formation could have practical application in increasing crop yield, the prevention or treatment of microbial pathogenesis, as well as improving the capacity for certain microoganism to serve as agents of bioremediation doc21732 none West Nile virus (WNV) is a flavivirus that is native to Europe, Asia and eastern Africa. It appeared in New York City in and has since spread to much of the eastern USA. Models of WNV spread in the New World are clarifying the relative roles of both the mosquito host and other vectors, especially migratory birds. Recent reports place WNV in the Caribbean, which has serious consequence for endemic bird species in the region, many of which are endanger. This project will support more detailed models and a program of sampling will further document the arrival of WNV in the Caribbean and help predict its spread and possible containment doc21733 none Bell LTREB Integrating pattern and process has always been a crucial but frustrating objective for evolutionary biology. Analysis of rapid evolution in extant populations provides a unique means to integrate evolutionary pattern and process. To that end, annual samples from the Loberg Lake, Alaska population of threespine stickleback fish, Gasterosteus aculeatus, will be used to study rapid evolution. This population was founded by a natural invasion of anadromous (i.e., sea run) stickleback after the native stickleback population was exterminated in . It has been sampled annually since , and lateral plate phenotypes have been scored in all samples. Lateral plates are modified scales that form a single row of armor on each side of the body. Lateral plate morphs (i.e., complete, partial, low) and low morph-plate number are heritable, subject to strong natural selection, and exhibit extensive adaptive geographic variation in western North America. This study will document maximum evolutionary rates, the trajectory of evolutionary change, and patterns of transient polymorphism. These patterns can be integrated with known evolutionary mechanisms. The increasing frequency of low morphs and their declining mean plate number can be explained by natural selection in many similar populations. Based on the plate phenotypes of the original Loberg Lake stickleback population before it was exterminated and comparison to other lake stickleback populations, lateral plate divergence should continue in the Loberg Lake population until the low morph is fixed and mean plate number declines to about five per side. This LTREB award will support continued annual sampling of the Loberg Lake population. This study will provide an unusually detailed account of rapid phenotypic evolution with implications for divergence during speciation and post-glacial adaptive radiation of threespine stickleback. It will complement ongoing research in paleontology, functional morphology, natural selection, genetics, phylogeogaphy, and developmental evolutionary biology of G. aculeatus. It will prolong a long series of annual samples in which rapid evolution of plates and other traits and trait correlations can be studied doc21734 none This dissertation enhancement grant supports Bradley Taylor under the direction of Robert O. Hall of the University of Wyoming to study the impacts of a migratory detrivorous fish on nitrogen cycling in a tropical stream in Venezuela. This award supports research that is novel in integrating the impacts of a single fish species on multiple components of the nitrogen cycle. Ecologists are fundamentally interested in the degree to which organisms influence ecosystem structure and function. Although much attention has focused on the relationship between species diversity and ecosystem function for plant taxa, our understanding of how animals influence ecosystem function is still in its infancy. This proposal focuses on migratory fish (Prochilodus mariae) that is a potentially strong interactor in tropical Andean streams and builds on previous work to test whether this single species affects the stream nitrogen cycle, a fundamental component of ecosystem function doc21735 none A kinetic theory of the electron heat flux instability in low-beta solar coronal holes will be developed and its role in the heating and acceleration of the fast solar wind will be investigated. A new paradigm is advanced, wherein the electron heat flux coming from the sun is produced by nanoflares and then generates ion cyclotron waves, which subsequently heat the overlying corona. Thus the solar wind driven by ion cyclotron waves is directly coupled to the nanoflare activity. A new wave damping mechanism, involving the parametric resonance of particles with a pump wave which drives a cross-field current instability, and the waves generated by the instability, will be modeled analytically and numerically. Finally, a kinetic theory of ion heating in the fast solar wind as a result of this cross-field current instability will be investigated doc17790 none The principal objective of this research is to advance understanding of the significance of early childhood nutrition for education and health and for economic productivity of adults in developing countries. Previous empirical studies on these important topics are limited because they do not have data that follows individuals from infancy and early childhood to adulthood and because they do not deal persuasively with estimation problems that arise because nutrition reflects past behaviors and because some characteristics, such as innate healthiness and ability, are not observed. This study is examining rich data collected by the Nutrition Institute for Central America and Panama (INCAP) in rural Guatemala to investigate the impact of childhood nutrition for individuals who are 25-40 years old when data are collected in 3, but who were 0-7 years old during the initial longitudinal data collection in - . These special data and appropriate estimation techniques are used to test three groups of hypotheses: (1) Controlling for relevant community, household, parental, and individual characteristics, better nutritional status in young children is causally and positively associated with: (i) school achievement and intellectual functioning; (ii) adult migration, health, and labor productivity; and (iii) spouse characteristics and assets acquired through marriage. (2) Through its effects on accumulated physical and intellectual capital, better nutrition during early childhood is causally and positively related to: (i) higher occupational mobility; (ii) higher productivity in agricultural and non-agricultural employment; (iii) greater consumption; and (iv) higher levels of material well being. (3) The economic rate of return to resources used to improve childhood nutrition, incorporating costs in addition to impacts and their respective time patterns, is high in such a context. The overall significance of the project is very substantial. Malnutrition is pervasive in developing countries, currently affecting about a billion people and is thought of have major negative effects on education, health and economic productivities. But there have been no previous economic analysis of effects of early childhood nutrition on adult education, health and economic productivities using data that follow individuals from early childhood into adulthood. Therefore the project estimates are very informative about the magnitudes of effects of early childhood nutrition and of a range of health and educational policies on adult health, education and productivity. They, thus, strengthen the knowledge basis for policy formulation that might improve significantly the welfare and the productivity of many of the poorest people in developing countries doc21737 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project features as the main goal, the development of a simulator of nanoscale electronic devices, and circuits. Emphasis will be placed on devices and circuits that are based on carbon nanotubes, or tunneling in lithographically defined junctions. The simulator will be based partly on the extensive collection of theoretical and numerical techniques that have been developed by the firm to describe charge transport in single electron devices. A diagrammatic technique and non-interacting Green s functions were used to obtain the tunneling rates in such junctions. Those techniques will be extended to describe the nanotubes. A graphical user interface will be developed, as well as a module that provides movies of the dynamics of charge flow. A package that enables the visualization of charge transport in these ultrasmall devices is expected to be a stimulating teaching and learning tool. with the standard SPICE package. Powerful simulation tools are essential for the evaluation and development of nanoelectronic devices and systems. The primary customers of the proposed nanosystems simulator is expected to be chip manufacturers, manufacturers of high sensitivity electrical measuring instruments and academic researchers doc21738 none The investigators consider a general system of nonlinear nonlocal hyperbolic equations describing the dynamics of several interacting populations. The goal of the project is to develop theories on the existence-uniqueness, long-time behavior, and numerical approximation of solutions to the hyperbolic system. A combination of analytical and numerical methods is used to understand the dynamics of the complex proposed model. To study existence and uniqueness of solutions to this system, two major approaches are adopted. The first approach to study the well-posedness of solutions is via the finite difference method used for classical conservation laws. The second approach to investigate the well-posedness and long-time behavior of solutions is based on the monotone approximation and comparison results that have been successfully established for the semilinear case by the investigators. Although similar approaches have been used in studying other nonlinear partial differential equation models, their applications to special cases of the general nonlinear and nonlocal model considered in this project have only been carried out by the investigators. In addition, a numerical methodology is developed for an inverse problem governed by the proposed nonlinear nonlocal system of equations. It uses a connection between real data and the model to estimate unknown parameters. Meanwhile, a numerical package is developed for simulating the proposed model. Many populations and their interactions with the environment have been modeled using the structured population approach, where the structures of interest are induced by internal characteristics such as age or size. For example, size-structured population models with distributed rates have been successfully used to describe the dynamics of mosquitofish in California rice fields. The structured population approach has also been used to model the dynamics of hierarchically structured populations in which the differences between individuals have a direct effect on the availability of resources. Another application is the predator-prey interaction between zooplankton and phytoplankton within the context of algal aggregation. Generally speaking, in order to analyze, manage, and control the dynamics of a population, it is necessary to understand the interactions between the population evolution and its environment. In this project, the investigators study a general structured population model. Due to its complexity, a combination of analytical and numerical methods is developed to investigate the dynamics of such a population. In particular, a numerical package to simulate the proposed model is provided. Furthermore, certain techniques are introduced to estimate the growth and mortality for individuals within the population from field data. Because of the generality of the proposed model, the results help to answer questions about nonlinear phenomena in population dynamics. In addition, the resulting numerical method can be used by population biologists to investigate the dynamical behavior of general population models doc21739 none This project contains three areas of research: the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) with an infinity of moment conditions; Nonparametric estimation of a density when data are observed with measurement error; Parameter stability and unit-root tests against nonlinear alternatives. First, the project extends GMM with a continuum of moments to account for time-series and correlated moment conditions. An important application is the estimation of continuous-time models used in finance. While in such cases the likelihood does not have a closed-form expression, the characteristic function is often known or can be estimated via simulations. The characteristic function gives rise to a continuum of moment conditions which, if fully exploited, permit efficient estimation of the model. Special attention is devoted to the characterization of the moment conditions, which allow efficiency to be obtained in Markovian models. These results will also improve our understanding of how well efficiency can be approached in non-markovian cases. The second part of this project proposes a new nonparametric estimator of the density when data are measured with an additive error. The method consists in inverting an integral operator. It is shown that by imposing weak restrictions on the model, the estimator can achieve much faster rates of convergence than the usual estimators. The first two parts of this project draw from the statistical literature on integral operators and inverse problems. This research will highlight the usefulness of operator theory and contribute to make it popular in econometrics. Third, new methods are developed for testing when a nuisance parameter is not identified under the null hypothesis. This problem arises frequently in macro or financial econometrics. For example, in the presence of transaction costs, the real exchange rate is expected to behave in a nonlinear fashion. A natural specification is then a threshold model. In this context, testing whether the purchasing power parity holds consists in testing the null hypothesis of a unit root versus a stationary threshold alternative. The project proposes a test and derives its asymptotic distribution. This test should positively impact empirical work, as it is more powerful than existing tests doc21740 none Professor Robert D. Grober of Yale University and Dr. James Cameron of Shipley Corporation are funded in this GOALI project by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program. The work is focused on single molecule spectroscopy as a way of probing photoresists. The team is using pH-sensitive fluorescent dye molecules to probe photogenerated acids on the nanoscale in chemically-amplified photoresists. Diffusion of acids and fluors through the resists will be measured, providing insight into the transport and kinetics of these systems. Single molecule spectroscopy is a relatively new laser method made possible in the past decade by extremely sensitive detectors. It allows optical characterization of phenomena at the nanoscale. It has not yet found much industrial use. Precise control of the spatial distribution of photoacid during lithographic processing is paramount for maximizing lithographic resolution. The results of the study are significant for nanotechnology and will be of benefit to the semiconducting industry doc21741 none Smouse Changes to natural landscapes can have profound effects on population densities and spatial distributions of organisms, greatly modifying natural breeding patterns. Two novel genetic analyses will examine spatial and temporal variation in the breeding patterns of natural and human-modified populations of the tropical dry-forest tree, Enterolobium cyclocarpum, located in Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica. The availability of seed collections dating from provides a unique temporal dimension to these analyses. Studies of the pollination ecology of this species will supplement the genetic analyses allowing more informed interpretations of the genetic data. This research has several broader impacts. First, it will determine if human-induced habitat modifications significantly modify breeding patterns of tropical trees to such an extent that natural levels of genetic diversity can t be maintained. Second, temporal analyses will demonstrate whether studies of a few reproductive events adequately describe breeding patterns of a long-lived tree. These comprehensive studies should also assist the development of effective landscape management plans that consider the spatial extent of natural breeding populations. Finally, comparisons of the two genetic analyses should determine whether the less resource-demanding approach dependably estimates breeding parameters. If so, this could provide a major breakthrough for landscape-level studies of pollen movement patterns in a wide variety of plant species doc21742 none Under the direction of Dr. Fredrik Hiebert at the University of Pennsylvania, Michael Frachetti will conduct comprehensive archaeological survey and archaeological excavations in the Koksu River Valley of Eastern Kazakhstan. This work will serve as the basis for his doctoral dissertation, in which he is developing new models to explain the emergence of pastoral nomadism during the Bronze Age in Central Asia. Humans have inhabited the steppe regions of Eurasia for more than 10,000 years. In the Western Eurasian steppes, sheep, goats, cattle, and horses were domesticated by the 4th millennium BC, and nomadic pastoralism (as a distinct way of life) is thought to have emerged from settled agricultural contexts in western Eurasia during the 1st millennium BC. In contrast, the nature and evolution of mobile pastoralism during the Eneolithic and Bronze Age in the Eastern Eurasian Steppe Zone remains generally unexplained. More specifically, the ambiguity in identifying the factors that distinguish a nomadic adaptation from any other pastoral lifestyle in this region has resulted in a scholarly assumption that some form of nomadic pastoralism characterized the ancient political economy of the steppes, without a clear archaeological definition of nomadism in a prehistoric context. Thus, the primary objective of Mr. Frachetti s project is to understand the ecological and social conditions that affected the strategies of Bronze Age groups in prehistory, by formalizing a new landscape methodology for studying mobile societies. Frachetti suggests that the main stumbling block in accurately understanding prehistoric nomadism (as substantially different from ethnographic cases) is that site-based archaeological studies of nomadic camps have been unable to provide a useful framework for discerning the patterned lifeway of mobile pastoralists. The Koksu River Valley is particularly well suited for new studies of Bronze Age nomadic lifeways since it contains a rich archaeological record, as well as sharp contrasts in seasonal climate and resources. Frachetti proposes an archaeological approach that considers the habitation ecology, the geography of ritual and ideological features, and the associations between archaeological monuments, landscape manipulation, and marking of group or individual identity, as aspects of life by which nomadic pastoralism fundamentally differs from other political economies. Through detailed archaeological survey and excavation, environmental sampling, spatial analysis, and GIS simulation, landscape archaeology parses mobile pastoralism into various defining elements that are systemically related, though temporally and culturally contingent and unique. He suggests that ground-up modeling of various kinds of landscapes (ecological, ideological, political etc.) will more accurately depict the complex factors that conditioned pastoral strategies during prehistory. Conceived in this way, the landscape approach serves as the vital link between theoretical questions concerning nomadic strategies at different places and times, and the analytical techniques available to archaeologists for discerning mobile pastoralism in prehistory. The proposed Djungar Mountains Archaeology Project will make broad contributions to archaeological theory and method, as well as provide new data. Most importantly, it will provide a grounded model of the development of pastoral nomadism in Eastern Central Asia during the Bronze Age. At the broader level, Frachetti s collaborative project will foster international relationships between American and Kazakh archaeologists, and open the door for future relationships between scientists from the United States and other Central Asian republics doc21743 none The International Conference on Questionnaire Development, Evaluation, and Testing Methods (QDET) will be held in Charleston, South Carolina from November 14-17, . The conference is the ninth international conference in a series devoted to survey methodology. The QDET conference will foster scientific research and critical commentary on questionnaire evaluation methods that can lead to improved methods, better understanding of the error properties of survey questions, and improvements in survey measurements. The conference will also serve to document and communicate recent advances in the field and increase their use by survey practitioners, in the U.S. and abroad. There will be 22 invited papers and approximately 65 contributed papers with presenters coming from Italy, Finland, New Zealand, Sweden, Israel, France, Germany, Canada, Slovenia, the Netherlands, and the United States. An edited volume of 22 invited papers is expected to be published by John Wiley & Sons. It will be advantageous to the survey research field to have a single volume that includes contributions from those researchers who have been instrumental in developing, applying and or evaluating the new questionnaire development and evaluation techniques. This volume will be valuable in university settings to train future survey methodologists and survey practitioners and in organizational settings to provide a reference volume that describes and provides guidance on current best practices in questionnaire development, evaluation, and testing doc21744 none Ralph D. Kopperman Topology, which grew from Geometry, is the study of shapes and their behavior under deformation, and of limits. It is an important field in its own right and has applications in other fields of Mathematics, and also in a wide range of other sciences including Computer Science, Chemistry, Physics and Biology. The Summer Conference on Topology and its Applications was first held in New York in ; it has been held each summer since then, except . For most of its existence this series of conferences has been an important part of the international topological landscape. Most of the participants have been Americans, but an increasing number come from across the world. Until , all these conferences were held in the United States, but to encourage and support worldwide participation, that year the Conference was held in Amsterdam, and it has since been held in Mexico City and North Bay (Ontario); about half of the future Summer Conferences are expected to be held in the United States. The holding of the conference in the southern hemisphere for the first time, in New Zealand, recognises the topological strength of that country. It is also expected that this will lead to increased participation in the conference series by topologists from south-east Asia and Australia. This year the conference will be held at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, July 1 to 4. More details about the conference may be found at the conference website http: www.math.auckland.ac.nz Topology- doc21745 none Kney The objective of the research is to investigate the combined effects of ion exchange and magnetic fields in the treatment of synthetic waste streams containing heavy metals. Specifically, column chromatography will be used to examine the magnetic field effect on the kinetics and selectivity of selected ion exchange materials in electrolyte solutions containing multiple cations. The electrolyte solutions will contain the five cations, lead (II), nickel (II), cadmium (II), copper (II), and zinc (II). The effects of ion concentration, ion-exchange material, magnetic field intensity, and the method of magnetic exposure will be examined. This research could provide information to advance the fields of water and wastewater treatment doc21738 none The investigators consider a general system of nonlinear nonlocal hyperbolic equations describing the dynamics of several interacting populations. The goal of the project is to develop theories on the existence-uniqueness, long-time behavior, and numerical approximation of solutions to the hyperbolic system. A combination of analytical and numerical methods is used to understand the dynamics of the complex proposed model. To study existence and uniqueness of solutions to this system, two major approaches are adopted. The first approach to study the well-posedness of solutions is via the finite difference method used for classical conservation laws. The second approach to investigate the well-posedness and long-time behavior of solutions is based on the monotone approximation and comparison results that have been successfully established for the semilinear case by the investigators. Although similar approaches have been used in studying other nonlinear partial differential equation models, their applications to special cases of the general nonlinear and nonlocal model considered in this project have only been carried out by the investigators. In addition, a numerical methodology is developed for an inverse problem governed by the proposed nonlinear nonlocal system of equations. It uses a connection between real data and the model to estimate unknown parameters. Meanwhile, a numerical package is developed for simulating the proposed model. Many populations and their interactions with the environment have been modeled using the structured population approach, where the structures of interest are induced by internal characteristics such as age or size. For example, size-structured population models with distributed rates have been successfully used to describe the dynamics of mosquitofish in California rice fields. The structured population approach has also been used to model the dynamics of hierarchically structured populations in which the differences between individuals have a direct effect on the availability of resources. Another application is the predator-prey interaction between zooplankton and phytoplankton within the context of algal aggregation. Generally speaking, in order to analyze, manage, and control the dynamics of a population, it is necessary to understand the interactions between the population evolution and its environment. In this project, the investigators study a general structured population model. Due to its complexity, a combination of analytical and numerical methods is developed to investigate the dynamics of such a population. In particular, a numerical package to simulate the proposed model is provided. Furthermore, certain techniques are introduced to estimate the growth and mortality for individuals within the population from field data. Because of the generality of the proposed model, the results help to answer questions about nonlinear phenomena in population dynamics. In addition, the resulting numerical method can be used by population biologists to investigate the dynamical behavior of general population models doc21747 none The investigator aims to complete the nascent theory of output-sensitive algorithms in real algebraic geometry. Output-sensitive in this context means that the complexity of the underlying algorithm depends mainly on intrinsic geometric parameters, e.g., the number of connected components of the underlying solution set, as opposed to extrinsic parameters like the degrees of the input polynomials. Such algorithms are faster than the traditional methods of computational algebra by a factor exponential in the dimension, but have so far been discovered only in various isolated contexts. So a unified algorithmic approach has a broad impact. Furthermore, the underlying approach takes numerical conditioning into account from the outset, thus providing algorithms that are certifiably precise even when applied to approximate data. Another novelty is that the underlying theory applies in the even broader arena of real and p-adic analytic functions. The algorithmic aspects of p-adic analytic functions are almost completely unexplored, so a secondary focus of this project is to elaborate and apply this new theory to equation-solving over finite fields and motivic integration. The investigator combines advanced techniques from numerical analysis and algebraic geometry to provide a new approach to a fundamental problem occuring in many applications: solving analytic inequalities. For example, finding the optimal allocation of resources in a large organization (e.g., an army, an airline, or a large business) has long been known to reduce to solving linear inequalities. From a different direction, it is known that the complexity of certain neural net architectures (which are useful in training automated bomb-sniffers and pattern recognition systems) depends critically on understanding the solutions of nonlinear polynomial inequalities. Both these examples are special cases of analytic inequalities, and this project provides new algorithms for their solution that are magnitudes faster than current algorithms. Furthermore, these new algorithms provide certifiably precise solutions --- a feature which is especially important when facing uncertain physical data. Another novel aspect is the principal investigator s recent discovery that the underlying techniques apply to an even broader context, which can provide new solutions to many problems in the design of cryptosystems doc21748 none New scientists and students will be strongly encouraged to attend the Fourth International Conference on Borate Glasses, Crystals, and Melts. This meeting will take place at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, IA from July 14-18, . In particular, women and minority members will be actively sought out and invited to participate in the meeting. There are many recent developments within the field that will be addressed including: new variations of spectroscopic techniques that are capable of probing the intermediate range order in borate glasses, novel preparation techniques, reports of new non-oxide boron-containing glasses and crystals, industrial uses of borates, improvements in computer modeling of atomic structure, and recent advances in out knowledge of related crystalline compounds. %%% The most important aspect of this project will be the very strong student participation in this meeting, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. We think our approach is justified because it will result in: a much stronger than usual involvement of students at a professional meeting, more scientific interactions between students from different research groups, and feedback to those who make presentations from an excellent cross-section of experienced scientists in the field. A critical mass of 50 to 75 students will encourage their full participation in the conference. Several discussion sessions targeting students and new scientists will be scheduled. We believe this approach may serve as a model for student and new scientist participation in scientific conferences in the future doc21749 none Swackhamer The Gordon Research Conference on Environmental Sciences: Water will be held at the Holderness School in New Hampshire from June 23-28, . The primary objective of this conference is to present, discuss, and to kindle new research approaches and directions at the interfaces between chemistry, toxicology, and environmental engineering. The conference is unique in the field of environmental engineering, due to its informal and intimate setting, cutting- edge science, interdisciplinary nature, and small number of participants. This particular Conference has been a forum for the consideration of critical or even controversial ideas that have frequently led to the development of new research agendas. In general, the Conference has a long record of stimulating advanced research in industrial laboratories, colleges and universities, research foundations, and government laboratories, and establishing linkages amongst these communities of scientists and engineers. The conference consists of nine formal sessions having 2-3 speakers each, with discussions in each session led by a leading scientist engineer in the field. Speakers include established experts as well as promising younger investigators, and are from the United States, Canada, and Europe. Several poster sessions are also offered to maximize exchange and interactions among participants. At the last session of the conference, two exceptional posters are selected and the authors are invited to give short oral summaries. Graduate student attendance and participation in the poster sessions is strongly encouraged. The session topics include: Bioavailability and Reactivity, Reaction Mechanisms, Heterogeneous Particles, Arsenic and Selenium Cycling, Mercury Cycling, Frontiers in Biogeochemistry, PAH Exposure and Effects, Emerging Contaminants of Concern, and Environmental Modeling doc21750 none Lay : Robert Olberg Multi-neuronal encoding of visual target information to direct flight in the dragonfly A remarkable example of visually guided interception flight is the capture of flying insect prey by dragonflies. Prey interception flights are highly accurate, with capture success rates as high as 97%. Using a combination of techniques, including multi-neuronal recordings with nanofabricated electrode arrays and high speed video analysis of wing movements, this project is aimed at understanding the neural guidance system used to direct this rapid, precise, visually-guided behavior. Because prey pursuit is directed by a small number of easily accessible neurons, the dragonfly experimental preparation is ideally suited for answering a fundamental question in neurobiology: does the correlation of firing patterns among neurons communicate more information than could be communicated by the neurons individually? An understanding of prey interception by dragonflies, from neurons to behavior, could lead to the development of effective biomimetic guidance mechanisms. In addition, this project will give undergraduate students a cutting-edge, cross-disciplinary, research experience, providing a vehicle for recruiting talented, enthusiastic students from both biology and engineering into the field of neuroscience doc21751 none This award supports the Gordon Research Conference on Biogenic Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) scheduled to take place at Queens College, Oxford, UK, September 1-6, . The meeting has been organized to bring together plant physiologists, ecophysiologists, and atmospheric chemists to discuss plant emissions of hydrocarbons. A significant fraction of the VOCs emitted to the atmosphere in the U.S. are derived from plants. The most abundant of these, isoprene, can play an important role in the formation of ozone and other air pollutants and is therefore of general concern to the public. The study of oxidation processes in the atmosphere and ozone formation is of central relevance to the atmospheric chemistry. This meeting will bring together an interdisciplinary team of scientists to assess research issues of common interest to both atmospheric scientists and plant physiologists doc21752 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project addresses the fundamental issues limiting the applications of Cadmium-Zinc-Telluride Cadmium Telluride radiation detectors. Currently, x-ray and gamma ray equipment industry producing medical imaging, manufacturing, and security inspection instrument is a multi-billion dollar business. Room temperature Cadmium-Zinc-Telluride Cadmium Telluride detectors and arrays appear to be the obvious choice as the sensing elements. However, after forty years of research, many problems remain. It was not clear why the yield in producing Cadmium-Zinc-Telluride Cadmium Telluride detectors is still so low. Based on semiconductor physics, two parameters are most crucial in determining the detector performance: the need of the deep level of donor or acceptors to pin the Fermi level near the middle of the bandgap and the necessity to avoid defects which trap the carriers. Potential commercial applications of the research can be used by researchers at accelerator laboratories for particle analysis, by scientists for crystallography, by security personnel for inspection, by engineers for the control of packaging such as bottling, and for numerous medical applications doc21753 none ADLER - In natural systems, organisms face simultaneous direct and indirect interactions with mutualists and antagonists, yet our understanding of the relative importance of these competing pressures in shaping the evolution of phenotypic traits is still rudimentary. For example, flowering plants may face the dilemma of attracting pollinators while discouraging floral enemies, such as nectar robbers. Because robbers are competing with pollinators for the same resource (e.g., nectar), it may be particularly difficult for plants to evolve defensive mechanisms that are effective against antagonists without also deterring mutualists. The goal of the proposed research is to determine how a ubiquitous but poorly understood floral trait, toxic nectar, influences interactions with both nectar robbers and pollinators, and how these simultaneous interactions shape selection on this phenotypic trait. Toxic nectar, or nectar that contains secondary compounds, is a widespread trait that may confer resistance to floral robbers, but at a potential cost to pollinator attraction. Currently, the costs and benefits of toxic nectar are unknown. In addition to resistance traits, plants may cope with antagonists via tolerance. The concepts of resistance and tolerance have traditionally been used in reference to herbivores; however, nectar robbers, like herbivores, have profound effects on plant fitness and plants are likely to use resistance and tolerance as defensive mechanisms against robbers. The proposed research will extend resistance and tolerance concepts to a wider range of plant-animal interactions through an examination of the role of nectar traits, such as nectar toxicity and production, as mechanisms of resistance and tolerance to nectar robbing. The aim of this work is to understand the ecological role of toxic nectar within the context of interactions between mutualists (pollinators) and antagonists (nectar robbers), and to determine the extent to which resistance and tolerance mediate the impact of nectar robbers on plant genotypes. The research proposed will experimentally manipulate nectar toxicity in Gelsemium sempervirens, a perennial vine with documented alkaloids in its nectar, to determine the impact of toxic nectar on the community of insect pollinators and robbers as well as on male and female plant reproduction and offspring success. In addition, this study will manipulate nectar robbing and pollination in genotypes of G. sempervirens with known variability in nectar toxicity to determine the direct and indirect effects of nectar robbing on plant fitness, genetic variation in resistance and tolerance to nectar robbing, and costs of toxic nectar in the absence of nectar robbing. The research combines manipulative field experiments with observations to address four main questions: 1) Is there genetic variation in nectar toxicity? 2) Does toxic nectar benefit plants by increasing resistance to nectar robbing without reducing pollinator attraction? 3) Does nectar robbing reduce plant fitness directly or indirectly, and do plant genotypes vary in their resistance or tolerance of nectar robbing? and 4) Is there a cost of toxic nectar in the absence of robbing? The work proposed here is novel in that it integrates the costs and benefits of resistance associated with a ubiquitous but poorly understood floral trait, toxic nectar, in the context of joint forces of selection exerted by both mutualistic and antagonistic floral visitors. This work extends an existing conceptual framework and provides empirical insight into the diversity of roles a single floral trait can serve, from attraction to defense. Consideration of the broader context in which organisms evolve is fundamental to our understanding of how multiple-species interactions shape genetic and biological diversity at ecological, microevolutionary, and macroevolutionary scales doc21754 none In the future, communications systems are expected to be characterized as ubiquitous, pervasive, very mobile, and highly distributed, among other at- tributes. In contrast to current systems, such as cellular systems or the current Internet, the reliance on central network components will be much reduced and ad hoc methods for forming networks will become more preva- lent. Additionally, the number of connected devices, including both sensors and actuators as well as processors, will increase dramatically and many network devices will operate autonomously. Massive quantities of data of various highly structured formats will need to be accessed and distributed across these networks. Wireless and wireline systems will interconnect with optical fiber and free space communications media. This workshop is intended to bring together a distinguished group of research scientists educators and industry and government experts to discuss and identify critical research in communications to support this vision. The workshop will provide an opportunity to interact with experts from related fields, primarily computer science, working on different aspects of future communication systems. A list of invitees for this workshop is provided in the appendix. The workshop aims to identify research challenges and opportunities as- sociated with the emerging vision for future communications systems. We expect a report to come out of the workshop reflecting the themes discussed doc21755 none With the support of the National Science Foundation, Dr Joy McCorriston (The Ohio State University), Dr. Eric Oches (University of South Florida), and their colleagues and students will conduct three seasons of field research in the Hadramawt region of southern Yemen in order to investigate environmental and cultural impacts of the middle-Holocene (ca. 5,000 years ago) monsoon decline and accompanying aridification. Changing middle-Holocene climatic patterns in southern Arabia forced people in the early stages of developing agricultural subsistence economies to adapt their cultivation technologies, water management practices, and herding strategies to an increasingly arid landscape. Specific research objectives include: (1) reconstruct human economic behaviors in the southern Arabian uplands during the wetter early- to middle-Holocene, (2) provide wider regional context for high-resolution archaeological and palaeoecological records by comparing sequences from different highland areas (Wadi Sana and Wadi Idim), and (3) develop high-resolution chronology for the archaeological and sedimentary record of environmental changes associated with the middle-Holocene climatological shift in precipitation. The interdisciplinary team headed by an archaeologist (McCorriston), geologist (Oches), and Yemeni ethnographer (Bin .Aqil) will reconstruct the archaeological record of human behavior in the context of sedimentary and fossil records of vegetation, hydrology, and climate. Archaeological excavations will focus on rock-shelters, pit-house dwellings, and water management structures that have been identified in previous fieldwork and are dated by radiocarbon and artifact typology between ca. 9,000 - 5,000 (calendar) years ago. The team will conduct research and train interdisciplinary students through archaeological survey and excavation, ethnoarchaeology, artifact analysis, paleovegetation studies, sedimentological analysis, and paleohydrological reconstruction. Efforts will be made to include Yemeni researchers and students in field studies in order to provide archaeological and geological training. Results of the study will be used to develop conceptual and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) models to explain the cultural and environmental factors involved in the adoption of agriculture in the changing middle-Holocene paleoenvironments of southern Arabia and to contribute toward paleoenvironmental knowledge of a little-known region. The research areas in southern Yemen, with their good preservation of all-but abandoned landscapes once shaped by early Holocene human and environmental processes, provide an unparalleled context to resolve Arabia s role in the spread of early agriculture and its record of past climate and environmental changes doc21756 none The Molecular Genetics of Bacteria and Phages Conference, traditionally held at Cold Spring Harbor and now being held in alternate years at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, is a central forum for the presentation of new results in prokaryotic molecular genetics. On the order of 200-400 participants attend, representing laboratories throughout the world, and most present either short talks or posters. Its breadth makes it an important focus for the exchange of information in this era of scientific specialization. Topics covered include fundamental work on bacterial replication, recombination, repair, transposition, transcription, control of gene expression, translation, signalling, heat shock, protein folding and secretion, cell development and division, and pathogenesis. For many graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, this is the first large meeting at which they have an opportunity to speak. Due to its highly interactive nature, the meeting provides an important opportunity for these young scientists to meet and talk to the senior scientists they know from the literature. In response to the large numbers of students who attend the meeting and the diversity of topics covered, established and distinguished scientists are invited to chair each session. This strengthens the meeting because each chairperson gives a short introduction in which he or she summarizes some of the key facets of the field to be covered and provides a conceptual framework for the major questions that the talks will address. As an additional benefit, publicizing the judiciously chosen chairpeople and session topics in announcements of the meeting, encourages the submission of abstracts in exciting new areas and stimulates attendance by a larger constituency doc21757 none The proposed research focuses on developing a better understanding of the nature of the active sites on sulfated- and tungstated zirconias for the isomerization of light n-alkanes (n-butane, n-pentane, and n-hexane). To date, zirconia-based catalysts have offered more potential for utilization than has been able to be realized, in large part due to their tendency towards fast deactivation. The reaction induction period, lasting only a few minutes for n-butane isomerization, largely determines the future behavior of sulfated zirconia. The proposed research will make use of an in-situ reaction technique, isotopic transient kinetic analysis (ITKA), to determine the evolution of the concentration and residence time(s) of the surface reaction intermediates during the initial reaction period. Addition of trace amounts of olefins (1-butene, 1-pentene, and 1-hexene) during initial reaction will help to define the nature of the active sites, and in particular olefin-modified sites that have recently been identified. In-situ DRIFTS as well as other more traditional ex-situ techniques will be used to characterize adsorbed species and the catalysts studied. The educational component will be the traditional mentoring of graduate and undergraduate students. A better understanding of the similarities and differences of the sites on these catalysts for the isomerization of the different n-alkanes may guide the design of more stable catalysts. Processes built around the use of such solid acid catalysts offer possibilities for replacing less environmentally friendly processes with liquid acids or solid acid catalysts requiring the co-feed of corrosive compounds doc21758 none In this project, funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Sinha will conduct research on unimolecular reactions that deviate from the traditional description by the RRKM statistical theory. Gas phase molecules are prepared in selected ro-vibrational states above the dissociation limit of the ground electronic state by double resonance excitation. These excited molecules revert to lower energies, dissociate at a given rate, and present a final product state distribution. The resonance energy and the line widths provide information about the potential energy surface, whereas the final product state distribution reflects the dynamics of the system as it evolves from the transition state to the products. Systems to be investigated include hypochlorous acid, pernitric acid, and methyliodide, as these are believed to exhibit non-statistical reaction dynamics. This research deals with fundamental aspects of chemical reactions in the gas phase. Whereas many reactions can be described by a statistical theory, there are some for which a statistical theory of reactions does not apply. This research is focused on the reaction dynamics of several molecular species for which non-statistical behavior is suspected. The results of this work will add to the fundamental understanding of reaction chemistry, and may be applicable to problems of atmospheric and combustion chemistry. Students will participate in this research and thereby acquire knowledge and skills in preparation for entry into the scientific technical workforce doc21755 none With the support of the National Science Foundation, Dr Joy McCorriston (The Ohio State University), Dr. Eric Oches (University of South Florida), and their colleagues and students will conduct three seasons of field research in the Hadramawt region of southern Yemen in order to investigate environmental and cultural impacts of the middle-Holocene (ca. 5,000 years ago) monsoon decline and accompanying aridification. Changing middle-Holocene climatic patterns in southern Arabia forced people in the early stages of developing agricultural subsistence economies to adapt their cultivation technologies, water management practices, and herding strategies to an increasingly arid landscape. Specific research objectives include: (1) reconstruct human economic behaviors in the southern Arabian uplands during the wetter early- to middle-Holocene, (2) provide wider regional context for high-resolution archaeological and palaeoecological records by comparing sequences from different highland areas (Wadi Sana and Wadi Idim), and (3) develop high-resolution chronology for the archaeological and sedimentary record of environmental changes associated with the middle-Holocene climatological shift in precipitation. The interdisciplinary team headed by an archaeologist (McCorriston), geologist (Oches), and Yemeni ethnographer (Bin .Aqil) will reconstruct the archaeological record of human behavior in the context of sedimentary and fossil records of vegetation, hydrology, and climate. Archaeological excavations will focus on rock-shelters, pit-house dwellings, and water management structures that have been identified in previous fieldwork and are dated by radiocarbon and artifact typology between ca. 9,000 - 5,000 (calendar) years ago. The team will conduct research and train interdisciplinary students through archaeological survey and excavation, ethnoarchaeology, artifact analysis, paleovegetation studies, sedimentological analysis, and paleohydrological reconstruction. Efforts will be made to include Yemeni researchers and students in field studies in order to provide archaeological and geological training. Results of the study will be used to develop conceptual and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) models to explain the cultural and environmental factors involved in the adoption of agriculture in the changing middle-Holocene paleoenvironments of southern Arabia and to contribute toward paleoenvironmental knowledge of a little-known region. The research areas in southern Yemen, with their good preservation of all-but abandoned landscapes once shaped by early Holocene human and environmental processes, provide an unparalleled context to resolve Arabia s role in the spread of early agriculture and its record of past climate and environmental changes doc21760 none Transportation is a critical facet of contemporary life. Transportation is essential for the conduct of economic activities and for the facilitation of the movement of people, goods, and services that affect the activities of people and institutions in myriad ways. Transportation also is a major source or pollution, however, and the search for new transportation systems and approaches is a major priority for the development of more environmentally friendly, sustainable is a major goal in developed nations. This award will continue support for the STAR (Sustainable Transport Analysis and Research) thematic network that involves geographers, transportation engineers, and other transport-related researchers from the U.S. in an evolving network of counterpart researchers from European nations who are active in the emerging STELLA (Sustainable Transport in Europe and Links and Liaisons with America) network. STELLA has received major support from the European Community. STAR is designed to enable U.S.-based researchers to actively engage in discussions, development of white papers, and other activities to stimulate collaborative international research on transportation and related themes in Europe, North America, and other developed nations. The cooperative work between STELLA and STAR has three primary objectives: (1) to create an institutionalized platform of exchange of scientific information, for pooling experience, and for facilitating research cooperation among European and North American transportation researchers; (2) to foster increased understandings of causes and backgrounds of mobility behavior in the two continents, with special emphasis on policy impacts; and (3) to foster and created conditions for comparative research in Europe and North America regarding behavioral motives, innovative strategies, and policy analyses associated with efforts to develop more sustainable transport. STELLA and STAR will focus their efforts over the next three years on five functional focus areas: (1) Globalization, E-Economy, and Trade; (2) ICT (Information and Communication Technology), Innovation, and the Transport System; (3) Society, Behavior, and Private Public Transport; (4) Environment, Safety, Health, Land Use, and Congestion; and (5) Institutions, Regulations, and Markets in Transportation. The majority of the funds provided through this award will support the participation of U.S. scientists in annual working group meetings associated with each of these five focus areas as well as overall cooperative linkages between STELLA and STAR leaders. This award complements a substantial award made by the European Community to support comparable activities engaging European transport researchers. This award renews support for activities undertaken with support from NSF Award . The STAR network will facilitate communication and collaboration among transportation researchers in the U.S. and Europe. The cooperation of researchers in the STAR and STELLA networks will help to identify major research problems that need attention, and the workshops, seminars, exchanges, and other activities undertaken by these networks will help build research teams and foster development of research designs to make substantial progress in addressing critical questions of national significance. In addition to advancing scholarly research on sustainable transportation, STAR and STELLA will promote research that has great practical utility doc21761 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project focuses on the implementation of a Terahertz (THz) module that can emit coherent and tunable Terahertz waves. This project naturally follows the recent result obtained by the Project Investigator. Recently, coherent Terahertz radiation was generated at room temperature, which could be continuously tunable from 56.8 mm to beyond mm (5.27 to 0.18 THz), in Gallium Selenide, based on difference-frequency generation. The peak Terahertz power can be as high as 69.4 W at 196 mm. The corresponding photon conversion efficiency reaches 3.3%. This value has been greatly improved owing to the combination of extremely low absorption coefficients in the Terahertz domain and a large second-order nonlinear coefficient for Gallium Selenide. On the other hand, it has been demonstrated that optical parametric oscillator in Lithium Niobate can be used to generate a Terahertz wave tunable in the range of 110-460 m (2.7-0.7 THz) with a peak power of 300 W. However, Lithium Niobate suffers from photorefractive damage. One needs a much higher laser intensity to achieve parametric oscillation. The Terahertz source will dramatically impact molecular spectroscopy. Such an instrument can be eventually used to control pollution and to identify toxic chemicals, for remote sensing, bio- medical imaging, and security screening doc21762 none The investigator studies systems with multiple interacting components that together create rhythms. The systems come from neural, chemical, and gene regulatory contexts. There are two main themes. The first is reduction of dimensions, investigating the circumstances under which large-dimensional models behave like much lower-dimensional differential equations or maps. Some of that work uses geometric singular perturbation theory to investigate how systems with multiple degrees of freedom condense to essentially lower-dimensional systems, at least locally in phase space. Another set of issues related to reduction of dimension concerns fast partial synchronization. The second theme concerns how interaction of many components in a system can lead to the suppression of activity in some of the components. Two examples of this to be studied come from a chemical pattern formation and neural systems, each with some type of global inhibitory feedback. Systems with many separate but interacting components arise in a large variety of applications, including biotechnology, chemical engineering, and neurobiology. In general, such systems have a large number of degrees of freedom, and are usually investigated by numerical simulation. However, simulations alone do not provide a deep understanding of why the systems behave the way they do, or how they can be manipulated. Reductions of equations to smaller systems can be very useful. But without a principled way to do the reductions, one does not know how much of the behavior of the large system is lost. This project concerns methods to find such principled reductions, using mathematical tools that enable one to investigate circumstances under which parts of the dynamics behave like that of systems with a much smaller number of degrees of freedom. Other tools to be used allow one to understand how only some subset of the components can be involved at a given time, even though all components are coupled. The methods are applied to problems from neural, chemical and gene regulation systems. The project also provides interdisciplinary training opportunities for students and postdocs doc21763 none The objective of this research is to study protein dynamics by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and computational approaches. NMR relaxation parameters are now routinely measured for the protein backbone, but less so for protein side chains. While side-chain relaxation studies have mainly focused on methyl group relaxation, the majority of side-chain carbon atoms belong to methylene moieties. If not partially deuterated, dipole-dipole cross correlations generally make their relaxation behavior and their interpretation difficult. New relaxation experiments are developed that efficiently suppress dipole-dipole cross-correlated relaxation in fully carbon-labeled proteins. The relaxation data will be interpreted in terms of reorientational eigenmode dynamics (RED) analysis that integrates NMR relaxation data with molecular dynamics simulations for studying motional correlation effects in the ns and sub-ns time scale range. Until recently, slower time-scale dynamics of proteins in the hundreds of ns to ms range have been very hard to assess for spins that do not show exchange broadening. The advent of residual dipolar couplings is now opening up this time window for comprehensive experimental investigations. By applying and improving the recently introduced model-free approach that uses dipolar coupling data in a variety of alignment media with different alignment tensors, protein dynamics on these slower time scales will be investigated for the protein backbone as well as for the side chains. The dynamics information will be retrieved in the form of averaged spherical harmonics that define an order parameter as well as the anisotropy of motion. Realistic analytical motional models will be developed to characterize motions of local protein fragments as well as collective motions involving amino-acid groups and whole secondary structural elements. Structural dynamics of proteins play an important role in biochemical processes. Detailed information on protein dynamics at an atomic level is of fundamental importance for understanding their function. The overall goal of this research is the exploration and development of new experimental and computational methods for a comprehensive description of complex protein dynamics on widely different time scales and to demonstrate their applicability to biologically relevant systems doc21764 none In this project, funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Bowen will use negative ion photoelectron spectroscopy to investigate the stabilization of otherwise unstable anions by solvation and by counter ions, gas-phase double Rydberg anions, excess electron states in clusters including dipole-bound cluster anions and cluster analogs, and bio-molecular anions and their complexes. This project deals with several issues of contemporary physical chemistry, which impact on related fields and on biochemistry. The work will provide molecular level description of important condensed phase phenomena, including those in biological entities. The work will be assisted by graduate and undergraduate students and by postdoctoral research associates. In an active outreach program the work is also presented to middle school students to give them a feel of ongoing forefront scientific research doc21765 none Hamrick Changes to natural landscapes can have profound effects on population densities and spatial distributions of organisms, greatly modifying natural breeding patterns. Two novel genetic analyses will examine spatial and temporal variation in the breeding patterns of natural and human-modified populations of the tropical dry-forest tree, Enterolobium cyclocarpum, located in Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica. The availability of seed collections dating from provides a unique temporal dimension to these analyses. Studies of the pollination ecology of this species will supplement the genetic analyses allowing more informed interpretations of the genetic data. This research has several broader impacts. First, it will determine if human-induced habitat modifications significantly modify breeding patterns of tropical trees to such an extent that natural levels of genetic diversity can t be maintained. Second, temporal analyses will demonstrate whether studies of a few reproductive events adequately describe breeding patterns of a long-lived tree. These comprehensive studies should also assist the development of effective landscape management plans that consider the spatial extent of natural breeding populations. Finally, comparisons of the two genetic analyses should determine whether the less resource-demanding approach dependably estimates breeding parameters. If so, this could provide a major breakthrough for landscape-level studies of pollen movement patterns in a wide variety of plant species doc21766 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Robert West, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is exploring mulitply-bonded and low-coordinate compounds of silicon and germanium. Professor West synthesizes new types of organosilicon and organogermanium compounds containing multiple bonds, including silynes (RSiCR ), germynes (RGeCR ), 1,3-disilaallenes (R2Si=C=SiR2), 1,3-digermaallenes (R2Ge=C=GeR2), polysilyne polymers [(RSi=CR )n], and silafullerenes such as C58Si2. He then studies the chemical reactions of these unusual molecules, including their activity as polymerization catalysts and as precursors to stable silylenium ions, and their halophilic reactions. Although our understanding of the chemistry of compounds containing carbon has become quite sophisticated, the chemistry of carbon s closely related relatives, silicon and germanium, is comparatively undeveloped. Professor Robert West, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is studying the synthesis and reaction chemistry of a series of compounds in which one or more carbon atoms are replaced by silicon or germanium. These studies are of fundamental importance in developing our understanding of the chemistry of the other elements in the periodic table. In addition, the unusual structures of Professor West s target compounds promise potential advances in practical reaction chemistry, including polymerization reactions doc21767 none The goals of this NSF Plant Genome project are to demonstrate that the transposon Ac (Activator) can be used as a gene identification and isolation tool, as well as a mutagen, in the complex maize genome, and to develop the necessary tools to facilitate that use. The first goal was met in the initial phase of this project where Ac was shown to insert exclusively in or close to genes and to be, therefore, an excellent gene-searching engine in the highly repetitive maize genome. A highly embryogenic bz wx inbred line was developed and transformed with Ac and Ds constructs that had been modified to facilitate the PCR isolation of the transposon-adjacent sequence. The main goal of the second phase of this project is to create a comprehensive set of transgenic lines that will serve as starting points for the production of future insertion libraries. This phase will occur in two well-defined stages. The first will be to demonstrate the germinal transposition of an engineered Ac or Ds element and the ready isolation of DNA adjacent to the transposon. The second will be to identify a method of maize transformation that will enable the production of a useful set of transposon lines for localized mutagenesis. Once the above two objectives have been met, the last stage of the project to produce a set of 124 transgenic lines with a uniquely marked element at evenly spaced locations in the genome will be initiated. In that set, most genes in the maize genome will be within 7 cM of a launching platform and will be, therefore, realistic targets in a localized transposon mutagenesis experiment. These lines will be deposited in the Maize Stock Center and will serve as starting materials for the generation of future insertion libraries by interested scientists doc21768 none Proposal Number Principal Investigator Niels Jensen Affiliation U. of California, Davis Title International Conference on Computational Nanoscience (ICCN) Computational analysis of the nanoscale structures, systems, and processes play a critical role to provide insight into different approaches in nano science and engineering. However, this field is in the early stages of development. The Computational Nanoscience Conference will provide a forum for broad discussion of methods and ideas that will otherwise be limited to a relatively small group of investigators. It will furthermore encourage the participation of students and faculty early in their career to engage in this important field. The international participation will allow the most advanced methods and ideas to be discussed and evaluated doc21769 none Gupta This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I Project proposes to apply cavity-enhanced spectroscopy to Capillary Electrophoresis (CE). CE typically relies on absorption spectroscopy to detect analytes eluting from a separation column. Although this detection method is very useful, the capillary s short absorption pathlength has limited its sensitivity, forcing the development of more complex detection schemes. Preliminary results suggest that an optical cavity can be used to enhance this absorption sensitivity by a factor of hundred to over ten thousand. The aim of this proposal is to interface a CE column to an optical cavity and demonstrate the enhanced detection of various biological samples. Due to the increasing popularity of CE in biochemical research, the commercial applications of this technology continue to grow. It is currently used to analyze DNA fragments, proteins, and various drugs. Moreover, it is also being considered as an alternate to gel electrophoresis for DNA sequencing and is a leading prospect for lab-on-a-chip technologies. The commercial applications of this project are in genomic sequencing, medical diagnostics, and drug screening doc21770 none This project will incorporate a sophisticated aerosol model within an existing general circulation model (GCM) with the goal of improving the ability of GCMs to predict the indirect effects of aerosols on climate change. The aerosol model will include size-resolved representation of all major aerosol types (sulfate, sea salt, carbonaceous, and mineral aerosols) and their microphysics. The model will be nudged towards NCEP reanalysis of meteorological fields. Model results will be compared with data from field campaigns, such as ACE-2 (Aerosol Characterization Experiment). The broader impacts of this project will be to help reduce discrepancies between current global aerosol model predictions and observations. This grant will provide for the training of a graduate student doc21771 none Understanding of the dynamics of the magnetosphere-ionosphere system, the coupling between the two regions, and its dependence on interplanetary conditions in particular, is of fundamental importance to almost every aspect of magnetospheric and ionospheric physics. In this project, electric and magnetic field and precipitating particle data from polar orbiting satellites such as DMSP F12, F13, F14 and F15, are used while the Polar UVI instrument provides measurements of auroral emissions. The SuperDARN radar array provides ionospheric convection maps. Ace, Wind, and IMP-8 provide solar wind velocity, density and interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) measurements. Time periods are utilized when Polar UVI provides a global view of the auroral distribution and at least two DMSP satellites measure particle properties, electric fields, and field-aligned currents in the upper ionosphere. Utilizing these data the understanding will be improved of the occurrence of trans-polar arcs (TPAs) and theta aurora in both hemispheres and the detailed plasma flows associated with them. In particular, the existence of high latitude TPAs is one of the most unusual features seen in the ionosphere and implies an unusual magnetospheric topology. The electrodynamics of TPAs is directly related to how coupling occurs between the solar wind-magnetosphere-ionosphere system during northward IMF. Analysis of the unique data set described will provide insight into simultaneous behavior and or existence of TPA in both hemispheres and thus also into the topology of the magnetosphere doc21772 none This award provides partial support of the Gordon Conference on the Science, which will be held at Tilton School (NH) during the period August 11-16, . This conference is held every two years in summer, which to the true spirit of Gordon Conference, creates a lively environment to bring up cutting edge ideas and iron out controversial issues pertaining to adhesion science. The conference will composed of nine sessions, with two to three speakers in each session. In tune with the tradition of this conference, promising junior scientists have been invited along with established scientists from academia, government labs and industries as oral presenters and discussion leaders. The conference will consist of 21 oral presentations that will deal with the interfacial, rheological and mechanics aspects of adhesion by highlighting the relevance of fundamental adhesion science in solving technologically important problems in coatings, structures, electronic, biological and MEMs devices. The organizers intend to invite more junior faculty members, graduate students and postdocs to participate in the conference by presenting their research results in the poster session that will run throughout the conference. In order to facilitate quality discussion quality discussions attendance to the conference will be restricted to 120 attendees, aiming to attain broad representation across the diverse participants in the field of adhesion science and engineering doc21773 none The PI s group will first synthesize a number of ten-membered ring enediynes where alkene is part of an aromatic ring or heterocycle. Thermal reaction conditions will then be used to induce Bergman cyclizations of these molecules and the rates and activation energies of these reactions will be measured. The alkene containing components of the endiynes will be varied so that tautomerization, charge dependence, etc (ie electronic effects) on the rates of these reactions can be studied experimentally. The co-PI s group will perform high level calculations to theoretically determine how the electronic character of the ene is related to the experimentally determined rates of these reactions. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. K.C. Russell of the Department of Chemistry at Northern Kentucky University and Dr. Carol A. Parish of the Department of Chemistry at Hobart William Smith College. Drs. Russell and Parish will study a chemical reaction known as the Bergman cyclization. The Bergman cyclization is a chemical reaction which is central to the mechanism of action of a number of anticancer antibiotics. Understanding the electronic effects of changing the structures of the molecules which participates in this type of reaction may one day have revelance in understanding clinical chemistry. Students trained during the course of this work will gain experience in experimental and theoretical and organic chemistry and be aquiring skills needed by the pharmaceutical and speciality chemical industries doc21774 none Dr. David Webster will use National Science Foundation funding to investigate the largest known set of ancient fortifications in the Maya Lowlands of Mesoamerica. When these fortifications were discovered at Tikal, Guatemala, in , the Classic Maya were widely regarded unique among ancient civilizations for their apparent lack of intense warfare. The earthworks reported at Tikal were interpreted as defenses that protected not only the monumental architecture at the site core, but also a larger region of about 120 sq km where the bulk of the sustaining population lived. Because Classic Maya inscriptions could not be read in the mid- s, these earthworks constituted early convincing evidence contradicting the peaceful Maya conception. They also intrigued archaeologists who faced a vexing problem: how can the boundaries of ancient Maya settlements or polities be detected where ruins extend more or less continuously over vast regions? At Tikal the Maya themselves provided us with just such boundaries. Subsequent evidence for warfare soon appeared at other Classic sites, such as the earthworks at Becan, excavated by Webster in . Even more important was an avalanche of deciphered inscriptions after , which are full of references to war between Maya kingdoms. Historical chronicles from many centers now reveal great geopolitical struggles between Maya superpowers (Tikal among them) and their associated coalitions. Ironically, the Tikal earthworks have been entirely neglected by archaeologists since they were first reported. Such neglect is particularly serious because they were initially described and mapped only in a very superficial way, and we have only the poorest grasp of when they were first constructed or when they were used. No one has even confirmed the existence of the southern earthwork, which might be better called a rumor. Despite this paucity of information, the earthworks loom large in reconstructions of Tikal s military struggles and the demographic and territorial character of the polity. Our project, slated for the dry season of , represents the first phase of a larger effort to better document these intriguing features. We plan to map the entire northern earthwork (about 9 km long) determine how it connects (or not) with large swamps on the east and west, and also record all associated settlement remains. We also hope to locate the more distant and elusive southern earthwork, and at least verify its basic features. Results will set the stage for future excavations to better reveal how the earthworks were constructed, and how and when they were used. We especially hope to eventually associate use of the fortifications with recorded episodes of warfare. Our research will provide Mayanists with an important test of the congruence between historical and archaeological data, and the implications of these data for conflict, demography, and political organization. It will also interest all archaeologists concerned with how to detect warfare in prehistoric contexts. Most importantly, it will help us to better understand how war and conflict among the ancient Maya fits into our larger comparative perspectives about the role of warfare in the evolution of all ancient civilizations doc21775 none This award is to support research that will develop new and extend existing tree ring records from the North American Arctic treeline. Since the northern limit of treeline coincides with the southern limit of the Arctic Front, this work will provide a spatial and temporal constraints on the Arctic Front over the last millennium. Field work will be undertaken to collect samples from northern Canada and Alaska. Analyses will include cross-dating, ring width, and measurement of maximum latewood density. All data will be standardized to maximize extraction of low frequency climatic variability. Finally, tree-ring chronologies will be incorporated into dendroclimatic reconstructions of past temperature. The broader impacts of this proposed research are that it will lead to information about the variation and nature of the forest tundra ecotone during a time of rapid environmental and climatic change doc21776 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)Phase Iproject proposes to develop a urea sensor using enzyme polyurethane polymers. The product concept is inexpensive, very easy to use and requires no additional analytical equipment or electricity. The strict specificity of the enzymes used in its formulation will provide the sensor with high precision in detecting urea and should limit false positive and negative signals. Sampling of surfaces and solutions will require only 1 simple step, limiting the potential for user error. Finally, rapid response times, on the order of a few minutes, will correspond well with the target applications of the sensor. The commercial applications of this project will be in the area of regulatory testing linked to the food service industry and health care establishments. Because improper cleaning practices of restrooms can lead to bacterial contamination, the use of urea-detecting sensors in hospital bathroom facilities may aid in reducing patient infection rates doc21777 none Differences in species composition among insect communities at different sites (i.e. species turnover, or beta-diversity) are poorly known in tropical rainforest. This is unfortunate as the patterns of beta-diversity are important for setting conservation priorities, as well as for our understanding ecological and evolutionary factors, which generate extraordinary species diversity, found in tropical ecosystems. This study investigates the beta-diversity of insect herbivores in lowland rainforests as a product of changes in vegetation and changes in insect communities feeding on particular host plants. Beta-diversity will be examined using caterpillars (Lepidoptera) feeding on selected host plants in New Guinea. Herbivores feeding on rare and wide spread plants will be compared to test the significance of host plant distribution and specificity for beta diversity. This project represents one of the most comprehensive studies of insect beta-diversity in the tropics and one of the first attempts to quantify beta-diversity of species-rich rainforest communities on a regional scale. In contrast to previous, largely descriptive studies, it separates and tests the effects of key factors, viz. host plant distribution and host specificity, in generating beta-diversity patterns of tropical herbivores. The project also promotes graduate student training and involves under-represented Pacific Islanders in scientific research through parataxonomist training. The proposal also builds capacity for New Guinean entomology through training of local students, strengthens a local research station and develops the national insect collection. Furthermore, results can be applied to developing conservation strategies for NG and parataxonomists will have additional impacts through landowner education doc21778 none An essential determinant of fungal growth and development is the fungal cell wall. Little, however, is known about the mechanisms by which the wall is constructed or developmentally modified. The goal of this research is to characterize a newly identified set of genes (Cal genes) in the model filamentous fungus Aspergillus nidulans, whose primary phenotype (hypersensitivity to the wall-compromising agent Calcofluor) has been correlated with the presence of structural defects in cell walls. Presumably, the functional alleles of these genes play roles in synthesizing or transporting wall constituents, in wall maturation and modification, or in signal transduction pathways that regulate wall metabolism. The work will proceed in three phases. In Phase I the number of available cal mutants will be increased by standard genetic methodology (six cal mutants have been identified to date, but the screening shows no signs of saturation), and extensive phenotypic profiles will be established for all mutants with regard to effects on cell wall chemistry, timing and morphology of spore germination, hyphal morphology, cytokinesis (septal placement), and the mitotic cycle. The objective of Phase II is to identify each of several Cal genes by 1) transforming cal mutants with cosmid or plasmid vectors carrying genomic (wild type) DNA and sequencing those inserts that cause phenotypic rescue, 2) identifying the complementing genes through transposon-mediated inactivation of each candidate open reading frame, and 3) determining the phenotypic effect of null mutations via targeted gene replacement. In Phase III, Cal gene products will be localized within the cell, either by construction of fusions between Cal genes and a green fluorescent protein gene or by epitope tagging and immunocytochemistry (EM and LM). Many fungi play important roles as producers of commercial products or as pathogens of plants and animals, and our ability to manipulate fungi to our advantage is limited by how well we understand the basic mechanisms of their growth and development. This research will increase our knowledge of fungal growth and development by identifying novel genes that affect cell wall integrity. Because undergraduate college students will play active, central roles in all aspects of this research, the project will also advance undergraduate education in the sciences and provide talented young people with experience relevant to making a choice to pursue research careers doc21779 none Fast hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen atoms in the energy range 1-100 eV and higher are produced in the earth s upper atmosphere through phenomena such as photodissociation, radiative recombination, dissociative recombination, dissociative attachment, charge exchange, and superelastic (quenching) collisions. Many of these phenomena are induced by lightning discharges, which are responsible for emissions known as elves, red sprites, and blue jets. The fast atoms collide with species such as N2, O2, NO, H2O, CO2, etc. to produce, either through chemical reaction or direct excitation of the target, emissions in the upper atmosphere and thermosphere such as the hydrogen nighttime and polar-cusp aurora, and the hot oxygen corona and geocorona. Using a unique experimental facility at JPL, constructed with prior NSF support, fast ground-state hydrogen and oxygen atoms will be generated in the laboratory energy range 2-100 eV. The fast atoms will be used to study two classes of atmospheric reactions with the important species N2, O2, and NO. These classes are (a) infrared (vibrational) excitation and emission, where cross sections are measured using an integrating sphere coupled to a HgCdTe infrared detector; and (b) electron-capture and stripping, where cross-section and mass charge ratio measurements are made using a Penning ion trap doc21780 none This award provides funding to Silver Buffalo Consulting, under the direction of Ms. Rose Von Thater-Braan, for the support of a workshop entitled, Dialog on Diversity in Education: A Transcultural Learning Experience. The Dialog on Diversity in Education will bring together Indigenous, Native American, scholars, educators, elders and language speakers and staff from various NSF Directorates in a shared inquiry on diversity. A goal of this dialog is to encourage the transformation of theory into practicce in developing culturally relevant educational environments that support and encourage Indian participation in science and engineering doc21781 none The phototropins (phot1 and phot2) are a unique family of plant photoreceptors that bind two molecules of flavin mononucleotide (FMN) as their chromophores. Blue and UV-A light cause rapid autophosphorylation of these photoreceptors. In all plans thus far investigated, phot1 is associated with the plasma membrane and preliminary evidence indicates that phot2 is as well. The phototropins participate in phototropism (growth toward a blue or UV-A light source), light perception for chloroplast movement (avoidance by mutual shading in high light, moving to maximize light interception in low light), stomatal opening, rapid inhibition of growth of dark-grown seedlings, and likely solar tracking in those species that have that response. The FMN chromophores are bound tightly in specialized domains designated LOV1 and LOV2 (domains found in signaling proteins that respond to Light, Oxygen, or Voltage). The phototropin LOV domains undergo a unique photochemistry involving light-activated formation of a flavin triplet state that decays within microseconds to a metastable signaling state, a cysteinyl adduct at the C94a) carbon of the FMN. This signaling state decays to the dark state in a few seconds or minutes depending on which LOV domain is involved. The project will explore how this identical initial photochemistry (adduct formation) and biochemistry (autophosphorylation) can activate such different processes, some requiring cell-cell communication and other entirely cell autonomous. It will also explore the roles of the individual LOV domains in these various processes. We already know that only LOV2 is required for full autophosphorylation in phot1, but that either LOV1 or LOV2 can mediate phosphorylation of phot2. We also know that LOV2 is sufficient to restore the phototropic response in a null phot1 mutant but do not know for any of the other responses. Sorting out the roles of the two phototropins and of the individual LOV domains in each of the responses is the first major goal of the project. A second major goal is to determine the cellular and subcellular distribution of phot2 (we already have this information for phot1), information basic to an understanding of its function. Finally we hope to identify downstream reacting partners in one or more of the responses and determine where the signaling pathways diverge for the different responses. The phototropins are vital to normal plant growth and development for several reasons: first, phototropism is a mechanism to insure maximal harvest of light energy for photosynthesis, clearly of importance in maximizing plant growth for whatever purpose-food, structural materials, fiber, production of medicinal drugs, etc. Second, for plants like cotton that have leaves that track the sun and remain at right angles to the direction of the incident sunlight the sun s angle changes, solar tracking of mature leaves serves the same function: maximizing photosynthesis and hence plant growth. Third, leaf expansion is an absolute requisite for photosynthesis. In the absence of the phototropins, leaves are dwarfed and curled, and severely impaired in their function. Fourth, the capacity to regulate the position of the chloroplasts in the leaf cells is essential a) to maximize photosynthesis by minimizing mutual shading in dim light, and b) to prevent photodamage to the chloroplasts by maximizing mutual shading in very bright light. Finally, light regulation of stomatal opening controls the rate at which carbon dioxide is taken in for photosynthesis balanced against loss of water. Without this regulation, normal photosynthetic function would be severely impaired. Thus along with the other known plant photoreceptors, the phytochromes and cryptochromes, the phototropins play a vital role in plant development and homeostasis. Their role in human welfare is clearly a major one doc21782 none This workshop proposal addresses data management research for the semantic web. Semantic web is mainly about technology for machine understandable and machine readable web pages. To date, much of the research on the semantic web has focussed on developing ontologies and languages such as the Resource Description Framework. There is a lot of research that needs to be done on querying and indexing the web pages. The participants of this workshop will be those who are actively conducting research in data management and the semantic web from academia and industrial research laboratories. The workshop will include short presentations by the experts as well as extensive discussions on research directions and challenges. The outcome of this workshop will be a list of recommendations for further research on data management support for the semantic web doc21783 none Project This proposal seeks $ 15,000 from NSF to support fifteen $ 1,000 graduate student and postdoctoral travel stipends for participation in the Society for Conservation Biology annual meeting at the University of Kent in Canterbury, U.K., July 14-19, . Participants will be selected based on the conceptual significance of the conservation biology issue addressed including: quality of the research design and analysis; applicability of the research to environmental problem solving; written organization and data presentation; merit and feasibility of the applicant s rationale for why her (his) research will be substantially enhanced through participation in the U.K. meeting, as well as how (s)he will disseminate results from the experience upon return to the U.S. (e.g., through networks developed at the meeting or through local chapters of the SCB). Participants will co-author an article about the meeting for the November, , SCB Newsletter doc21784 none National Musical Arts is requesting a planning grant of $50,000 to conduct initial planning and research toward the development of a traveling exhibition and related educational programming on the subject of biomusic -- the musical sounds produced by living things. The work will be performed by the BioMusic project, a program of National Musical Arts, in collaboration with the Association of Science Technology Centers and a national team of informal science educators. The goal of the project is to develop a 2,500 square-foot traveling exhibit and related programs targeted to md-sized science centers, zoos and aquaria across the country. During the proposed one-year planning phase, the Biomusic Project and ASTC will work with an interdisciplinary team of scientists, musicians, exhibit developers and educators to understand the current state of biomusic research; to identify concepts and phenomena that could make strong visitor experiences; and to develop initial plans for the exhibit and programs. The result of the work of the planning phase will include a Biomusic Groundwork Report, a Biomusic Program presented at the annual ASTC Conference and a detailed Exhibition Prospectus doc21785 none It is proposed to carry out theoretical research on the solutocapillary driven convection in spherical shells. The problem arises from the accurate manufacturing of laser targets in inertial confinement fusion (ICF) and future inertial fusion energy (IFE) targets. To initate fusion, these targets must be very smooth, otherwise Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities may be triggered thus degrades the efficiency of fusion ignition. It has been demonstrated that the bumpiness of the target surface is caused by Marangoni instabilities driven by surface tension dependence on the solute concentration during the manufacturing process. Linear stability analysis will be used to establish the critical condition and to suggest initial conditions for nonlinear analysis. The surface defortmation will be calculated by the nonlinear calculations. Results of the calculations will be compared with the experimental results obtained by General Atomics doc21786 none Li The goal of this project is to develop mathematical theory regarding biodiversity in the context of resource competition. Recent numerical work suggests that competition for multiple resources can generate periodic oscillations or even chaotic oscillations, and a large number of species can coexist on very few limiting resources. However, both mathematicians and ecologists still lack analytic understanding of mechanisms that generate diversity in ecological communities. The investigator studies several resource competition models, including standard competition models with multiple resources and competition models within food webs; he gives rigorous analysis for the models and provides insight into diversity of competing species. Theory of differential equations and theory of dynamical systems are used to determine the long-term behavior of solutions of the models in the form of attracting steady states, limiting cycles or strange attractors. Important issues are what causes competing species to coexist, and locating parameter ranges in which coexistence occurs. The question of the maintenance of species diversity in natural systems has intrigued mathematicians and ecologists for a very long time. This work provides a general understanding of factors affecting abundance and biodiversity. The results have important implications for determining the patterns of species composition in aquatic and terrestrial systems, and for managing natural resources such as forests and lakes doc21787 none This project extends the Expanded U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Database to include variables pertaining to the relisted cases of the Burger Court. During the Burger Court, any justice could have a case relisted - held over until the next scheduled conference, typically seven days later - to delay the certiorari decision. Relisting is one of the only features of the Court s decision-making process not included in any of the NSF databases. Closing this gap is important, not only for the sake of completeness, but also because it will shed light on the justices employment of strategic behavior. Scholars do not know which of the justices engage in the practice, with what effect, in cases concerning what legal provisions and issues, and at what cost to the Court s productive process. In contrast, scholars do know a great deal about other stages and aspects, but without relevant and systematic information about relisting, we omit consideration of an aspect of agenda setting that may well affect not only the behavior of individual justices, but also the adequacy of hypotheses and theories aimed at explaining the agenda setting behavior of the Court as a policy-making institution. Implementation of this proposal requires systematic examination of all of the several thousand docket sheets of Justices William Brennan and Lewis Powell that identify the occurrence of relisting and the entry of the pertinent data into the existing Burger Court database. This further expanded Burger Court database, like all of the others, will be archived on the World Wide Web doc21788 none Bayoumi Description: This award is to support a collaborative project by Dr. Magdy Bayoumi, Director, The Center for Advanced Computer Studies (CAS) at University of Louisiana, Lafayette, Louisiana and Dr. Samia Mashali, Professor of Computer Engineering at the Electronics Research Institute (ERI), Cairo, Egypt. They plan to focus on the development of novel algorithms, methods, and a hardware software prototype for compressed-domain feature extraction using an existing wavelet coder infrastructure. Specifically, these investigators will develop algorithms and techniques for calculating texture and shape attributes from images and videos compressed with the JPEG and motion-JPEG compression standards. The novelty of the proposed method lies in its employment of a wavelet-based approach as opposed to the standard DCT methods, the addressing of texture and shape features which have received limited attention in the literature, and the emphasis on hardware solutions to further enhance the computation and memory reductions achieved with compressed-domain techniques. Scope: The necessity of compression for storage coupled with the need to efficiently process the compacted data has led to a great need for compressed-domain methods in which data can be processed without decoding. The U.S. PI is well known in the area of VLSI Signal processing and has done work in architectures wavelet and other transforms. He and his students have demonstrated how to extract textual features for wavelet-compressed images. The project will involve training of students at the University of Louisiana and ERI. It will help ERI develop a video compression laboratory that will benefit industrial sectors in Egypt and other countries in the Middle East. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc21789 none Parlange The purpose of the research is to address questions on the particle transport from the World Trade Center (WTC) Site through the deployment of state-of-the-art instrumentation to measure the emission and resuspension of particles into the atmosphere It is planned to conduct the study over a ten-day intensive field observation period at the WTC site and the surrounding region of the greater New York City area to measure the flux of particles from the site and the vertical and horizontal extent of the aerosol plume. At the site, a combination of turbulence sensors, including Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV), Holographic PIV and sonic anemometers mounted on a telescopic profiling tower to continually measure the shear stress and the concentration and flux profiles of p[articles from the surface up to 10 m. above the site. A scanning elastic lidar system will be deployed to measure at high resolution (1.5 m.) the relative concentration of particles in the lower atmosphere (range up to 7 km.). The lidar will be deployed both near the site and at sites to be identified in the greater NYC area. The lidar system will be calibrated using the concentration measurements obtained from the PIV systems. An analysis of the field data collected will be conducted to identify relationships between weather conditions (e.g., wind shear stress, sensible heat flux) and the magnitude of the surface flux of particles and the extent of the transport into the atmosphere doc21790 none Alenka Luzar of the University of California, San Francisco, is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program for theoretical research directed toward assessing time scales of water dynamics in restricted environments on different length scales ranging from molecular events of hydrogen bond dynamics to kinetics of surface-induced evaporation on a mesoscopic scale. On the molecular scale, a new methodology to analyze hydrogen bond kinetics will be developed and applied to solutions of selected amino acids and alanine-based oligopeptides with varying chain length. This effort will utilize a combination of formal theory and molecular dynamics simulations, and will involve direct collaboration with neutron scattering experimentalists. On mesoscopic scales, the development of powerful umbrella sampling Monte Carlo algorithms, in conjunction with a coarse-grained model of confined aqueous systems, will enable calculations of activation barriers for capillary evaporation at increased surface separations. This effort aims to extract a scaling law for the barrier height in order to bridge the gap between macroscopic measurements and limited-size model systems. Finally, in a related project, the occurrence of spontaneous liquid-vapor microphase transitions in a hydrophobic pocket will be explored in molecular dynamics simulations. Outcomes from this research are expected to impact disciplines concerned with dynamic aspects of interfacial water and hydrophobicity, ranging from colloids and materials science to biophysics. Understanding the molecular aspects of water dynamics in restricted geometries is central to variety of problems in biophysics and cell biology. This research is expected to impact a number of fields where the effects of water are important, from the development of new bioactive compounds and improved optical fibers to research into biological structures such as proteins and self-assembling materials studied in nanotechnology. As well, research outcomes will assist in the design of surfaces that have optimized dewetting ability. Such surfaces are promising for practical applications such as rain-repellent coatings doc21791 none The Advanced Materials Program in the Chemistry Division and the Polymers Program in the Division of Materials Research make this award to Pennsylvania State University to design and synthesize four different types of hybrid polymers containing poly (organophosphazenes). With this award, Professor Allcock will synthesize poly phosphazene containing hybrid block polymers, and polymers with poly phosphazene linear or cyclic side chains and phosphazene rings connected by organic chains. Different reaction chemistries such as ROMP and ADMET polymerizations will be used to prepare these multifunctional polymers, and they are expected to exhibit a combination of properties not amenable by each class of polymers separately. Functional properties of these polymer hybrids may find applications in drug delivery systems, fuel cells, and solid-state energy storage and electro-optical devices. Strengthened education and outreach programs in polymer sciences will be another outcome of this award. With this award, hybrid materials containing polyphosphazenes will be designed and synthesized, and these polymers are expected to find applications in drug delivery systems, fuel cells, and solid-state energy storage and electro-optical devices. A number of polymerization chemistries will be used to prepare these multifunctional hybrid materials with improved performance and functionalities. In addition, research and educational opportunities in polymer sciences will be provided to students with this award doc21792 none The overall goal of this project is to use modern quantum chemistry to provide accurate and unique insights into inter and intramolecular interactions in biomolecular systems, using a continuum representation for the solvent. The linear-scaling semi empirical divide and conquer algorithm coupled with standard Poisson-Boltzmann theory will be applied to biologically relevant problems to study inter and intramolecular interactions in proteins. Classical MD simulations and single point QM calculations will be carried out to estimate the value of the dielectric constant of a protein. The Poisson-Boltzmann charge transfer approach for the incorporation of charge transfer effects will be further developed. Experimental information generated on coiled-coil and salt bridge interactions in proteins and peptides will be used to validate the approach. Given the advances in computer hardware and in numerical algorithms for the solution of the Schrodinger equation, quantum chemistry can now realistically contribute at the all-atom level to our understanding of macromolecular structure and function. Modern quantum chemical approaches offer several advantages over classically based methods: (1)The electrostatic representation is more accurate because environmental, conformational, polarization and charge transfer effects are explicitly included unlike classical models. (2) There is no need to define the dielectric constant because dielectric relaxation is explicitly included in QM models. (3) The ways in which quantum chemical methods can be improved have been thoroughly documented (i.e., inclusion of correlation and improvements in the basis set). This project will have a broad impact on the development of novel quantum mechanical approaches that can be applied to important biological problems. The research project will train students in formal theory, computer programming, biological structure and manuscript preparation publication. The students will also have the opportunity to interact with other biological group at Penn State and at other universities in the USA and abroad. Indeed, each student will be required to attend at least one national or international meeting per year to present his her results in either a poster or oral format. A quantum bioinformatics database (QDB: http: qbiodb.chem.psu.edu ) has been created, which will aid in the dissemination and analysis of results from this work. This work is funded jointly by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program in the Chemistry Division and the Molecular Biophysics Program in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences doc21793 none The focus of this research is to develop a methodology for conferring regioselectivity in organic syntheses through specific binding of substrates to biological macromolecules. To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, two projects with strong application potential will be undertaken. First, bovine serum albumin (BSA) will be used to guide the regioselective reduction of steroids. Second, a lectin (e.g., concanavalin A) will be used to guide the regioselective modification of disaccharides such as lactose and melibiose. These regioselectivities are based on the proteins specific and unique binding properties. This new method may be useful in the development of new modified steroids and carbohydrates of commercial importance. Undergraduate students will be involved at all stages of this research in a team environment, from experimental design, synthesis, instrumental operation, to data collection and analysis. This not only trains them technical skills in biochemistry and organic chemistry, but also boosts their interest in pursuing research careers in these fields doc21794 none McLaughlin The investigator and colleagues have been developing a biologically constrained large-scale computational model of the front-end of the cortical visual system -- the primary visual cortex (V1). To date, their work has focused upon local properties of individual cells within the large-scale network -- properties such as orientation selectivity and simple vs complex cellular dynamics. In this project, they scale up to a more global model of V1, reaching scales large enough to study some elementary optical illusions of psychology and psychophysics. This involves several square millimeters of lateral cortical area, together with a multi-layered architecture -- with emphasis given to cortical dynamics. First, a coarse-grained mixed representation is derived mathematically and tested numerically -- a representation that combines spatially coarse-grained (local) mean firing rates, representing local background cortical operating points, with an idealized representation of a sub-network of individual point neurons embedded within this background and retaining the detailed firing patterns of individual neurons. These two components interact with each other -- with the coarse-grained local operating points influencing the responses of the individual neurons, and vice versa. Second, the global mixed representation is used to study specific dynamical phenomena in visual cortical processing: (i) the layer-specific dynamics of orientation selectivity (as measured by reverse time correlation methods); and later (ii) bistability in figure-ground assignments (as detected in psychology and psychophysics experiments). In both cases, the phenomena involve extensive lateral regions of V1, its layered structure, and (likely in the case of figure-ground assignment) other cortical regions. And in both cases the work involves close interaction with the experimental work of neural scientist Robert Shapley. Today, through new biological experiments combined with the power of modern scientific computation, scientists and applied mathematicians are making significant strides toward understanding the human brain. Visual perception and the cortical processing of visual information provide important starting points. By focusing upon the front end of the cortical visual system, McLaughlin and his colleagues develop computational models of the visual cortex that are strongly constrained by biological experiments. In this project the investigators develop computationally efficient numerical methods that permit scale-up of the models to global representations of the primary visual cortex -- reaching cortical scales large enough to study some elementary optical illusions of psychology. This work requires the direct interaction of applied mathematicians, computational scientists, and neural scientists -- and involves theoretical, computational, and experimental components doc21795 none Plant pathogenic microbes have the remarkable ability to manipulate biochemical, physiologc al and morphological processes in their host plants. These manipulations are achieved through a diverse array of virulence and avirulence factors that an either promote infection or trigger defense responses. Oomycetes, such as Phytophthora, downy-mildews and Pythium, form a unique branch of eukaryotic plant pathogens with an independent evolutionary history. Among the oomy etes, Phytophthora spp. cause some of the most destructive plant diseases in the world, and are arguably the most devastating pathogens of dicot plants. or example, Phytophthora infestans, the Irish potato famine pathogen, causes late blight, a disease that results in multibillion-dollar losses in potato and tomato production and is considered a significant threat to global food security. Structural genomics studies of Phytophthora are well under way within the framework of the Phytophthora Genome Consortium. However, despite their economic impact and singular phylogeny, oomycetes remain relatively understudied at a molecular level and key molecular events modulating basc pathogenicity and plant response remain poorly understood. The overall obje tive of this project is to use the technology of virus-mediated gene expression to carry out high throughput fun tional screening of P. infestans genes in plants. The specific objectives are to: 1. Perform high throughput functional expression screening of P. infestans DNAs in tomato and tobacco using a potato virus X (PVX)-based vector to identify DNAs that indu e resistance responses, disease-like symptoms and or altered disease susceptibility. 2. Characterize the selected P. infestans DNAs and the encoded proteins with regards to primary sequence, gene expression, biological activity, and cellular localization during infection. 3. Characterize the molecular and cellular responses of tomato and tobacco to the sele ted P. infestans DNAs. The transient nature of the PVX expression system and the use of a recently developed Agrobacterium binary PVX vector will allow functional analysis of pathogen genes at an unprecedented high throughput rate. The functional screening will unravel a battery of novel Phytophthora genes that trigger a variety of cellular and molecular responses in plant cells and will firmly establish functional connections between pathogen genes and plant processes. The knowledge gained from these studies will provide significant insight into key molecular processes regulating an economically important pathosystem and will provide novel tools for improvement of disease resistan e in crop plants. Information and material generated from this project will be made freely available to the s ientific community through an interactive website that will include an annotated database of the selected DNAs and corresponding phenotype and expression data. The project will also offer outstanding opportunities for interdis iplinary training and outreach activities in functional genomics and bioinformatics revolving around the use of spectacular functional assays, historically and economically important disease pathosystems, and challenging concepts on the interaction between plants and microbes. Deliverables: 1. Libraries of P. infestans cDNAs in virus vectors, including collection of Phytophthora genes that trigger various cellular and molecular responses in plant cells 2. Phenotypic and expression analyses of tomato and tobacco treated with Phytophthora effectors. 3. Phytophthora Functional Genomics Database (PFGD). Contact Information for Deliverables: 1. S. Kamoun (kamoun.1@osu.edu) 2. Mark Waugh (mew@ncgr.org doc21796 none Wing This research project is designed to accomplish two aims: Aim 1: To construct and array high-quality BAC libraries to provide a genomic resource on a wide range of species. Aim 2: To enable researchers working with green algae, non-seed land plants, and seed plants (including flowering plants) to identify genes critical for understanding plant form and function and how land plants arose and diversified. This project will enable progress toward an understanding of the genetic basis for the transitions that mark the most fundamentally important steps in green plant evolution. The Deep Green community (http: ucjeps.herb.berkeley.edu bryolab deepgene index.html) will help to provide an infrastructure for ongoing scientific exchange. Bioinformatics and a web site will be provided to the community to access these resources (http: www.genome.clemson.edu ). Selected Species: Desired coverage is given in parentheses. Where two coverage values are listed, two libraries using different restriction enzymes will be made. Green algae: Volvox carteri (5x, 5x) Caulerpa mexicana (8x) Mesostigma viride (8x) Coleochaete orbicularus (6.4x, 6.4x) Chara aspera (6x) Non-seed plants: Marchantia polymorpha (8x) Anthoceros sp. (6.3x, 6.3x) Lycopodium lucidulum (5.1x, 5.1x) Angiopteris erecta (6.2x, 6.2x) Ceratopteris richardii (4.8x, 4.8x) Marsilea quadrifolia (5.6x, 5.6x) Seed plants: Amborella trichopoda (5.5x) Nuphar adventa (7x) Acorus gramineus (7x) Lirodendron tulipifera (7x) Mimulus guttatus (7x doc21797 none The overall goal of this proposal is to develop a prototype for a new type of collaborative education that meets broad and expanding needs in the areas of nanoscience and nanotechnology that will build on the research and educational strengths of the University of Washington (UW) and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and their newly formed UW-PNNL Joint Institute for Nanoscience. This project is primarily targeted to speed up undergraduate and graduate entry into the nanotechnology field and enhance education and research by developing a new series of interdisciplinary nanotechnology courses taught via a combination of local and remote instruction. These courses will be taught by faculty at the University of Washington and by researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and be taken by students at both locations, as well as other locations around the state, region, and country. Some of the course offerings will be specifically oriented to making introductory interdisciplinary nanotechnology courses available to students at smaller undergraduate institutions. . Additional nanotechnology offerings will attract undergraduates into the nanotechnology program and train future leaders for industry by providing hands-on research experience and contact with faculty and researchers both within and outside of the UW. They will broaden the nanotechnology curriculum and provide opportunities for students to explore individual research projects and to collaborate with each other and with faculty and researchers at both locations. The program will contribute to the interdisciplinary PhD program in nanotechnology and other relevant sciences. The courses to be developed will increase distance learning curriculum offerings, while also providing a new model of teaching learning that can be adopted in other disciplines and across other geographies to enhance research, education, and faculty student collaboration doc21798 none Meyerowitz A major research program is proposed, with the goal of understanding in detail how shoot apical meristems of plants control their patterns and numbers of cell divisions. Two sets of genetic experiments are proposed, each with its own aims. The first set includes careful analyses of cell type and cell divisions in mutant and wild type shoot apical meristems (SAMs), and time course analysis of the dynamic changes induced in SAMs by changes in expression of the genes that control meristem behavior. Among these genes are CLAVATA1, CLAVATA3, WUSCHEL, and SHOOT MERISTEMLESS. These experiments should result in a newly detailed view of cell division and cell differentiation control in meristems, and will provide a toolkit for detailed analysis of new mutant phenotypes and new gene functions. The second set of experiments are developmental-genetic analyses of newly discovered meristem control genes such as HANABA TARANU and KANADI4, and mutagenic screens of types not used so far with plants, to find more meristem control genes. These experiments will fill in some of the missing players in meristem control, and will lead directly to new hypotheses of cellular communication and behavior in meristems. The overall result is expected to be a newly detailed and dynamic description of meristem cell activity, and following from this, and from genetic analysis of the genes that control meristem behavior, a new functional understanding of shoot apical meristems, and thus of plant growth and development doc21799 none McFall The light organ symbiosis between the squid Euprymna scolopes and the luminous bacterium Vibrio fischeri represents the most common type of animal-bacterial interaction; i.e., an association of extracellular bacteria with polarized epithelial cells that begins anew each generation. In this two-partner model both the host and symbiont can be raised in the laboratory, and genetic approaches in V. fischeri have been developed to study not only bacterial differentiation, but also how the normal program of host gene expression is affected by genetically altered symbionts. Many of the developmental effects of symbiosis on the host and symbiont, as well as the reciprocal signals that trigger development of the partners, have already been defined. We propose to characterize the individual stages of the signaling process, and to begin to generate ways to model the process of bacteria-induced host development as a whole. The proposal will address the following specific objectives and questions: I. Describe the signals, signaling targets and pathways that control the bacteria-induced development of two tissues critical in the specific initiation of symbiosis - What is the role of nitric oxide in the specificity and development of the light organ? - Is the NF-kB Rel family involved in symbiont-induced signaling and, if so, how? II. Determine the role of stage-specific bacterial structures and activities in development - Are activities of the symbiont s flagellar apparatus essential for host signaling? - What changes in symbiont gene expression are a response to interaction with the host? III. Understand why bacterial bioluminescence is essential to host tissue development - Is a host cryptochrome the photoreceptor in luminescence-induced crypt-cell swelling? To understand the dynamics of animal-bacterial associations, experimental approaches must be interwoven and coordinated. The two research groups collaborating in this proposal strive to achieve this integration. Execution of most of the experiments outlined in the proposal will rely on microscopic, molecular genetic, and biochemical techniques that have been developed for the study of this system. The proposal builds on past results within productive areas, such as studies of the role of nitric oxide in symbiotic development. In addition, questions of a more exploratory nature will be asked with the aim of opening new experimental paradigms, such as how host NF-kB functions in both tissue development and response to bacterial colonization doc21800 none This recommendation memo provides support and justification for funding of . The proposal requests support for convening a workshop to explore possibilities for collaborative research and demonstration projects involving libraries as access and service providers for Internet2 applications. Workshop participants will include experts in advanced networking, librarians from the academic, and public sectors and international experts in the area. The goal will be to collect perspectives, examine feasible alternatives and produce an action plan for deploying advanced networking and digital services through libraries and other community access providers doc21801 none This grant supports the Physical Metallurgy Gordon Research Conference (GRC), to be held July 21-26, , at Holderness School in Plymouth, NH. The primary goal of this conference is to bring together new and established researchers to generate an understanding of the most important emerging research directions related to the role of interfaces in physical metallurgy. Like most Gordon Conferences, the Physical Metallurgy GRC assembles a 80 - 100 scientists and engineers for five days in a casual setting that is isolated from outside distractions with ample time for discussion and interaction. The conference will consist of eight sessions with two or three speakers per session. One session is reserved for late-breaking topics and posters. The speakers and chairs represent a diverse group of experts from leading institutions around the world. All of the NSF funds are used to pay for registration and travel expenses for graduate students and post-doctoral researchers to attend the conference. The last few years have seen an explosion of new experimental and simulation techniques that provide novel atomic-scale resolution descriptions of interfaces, quantification of microstructure, and observation of interfacial phenomena heretofore unknown. Perhaps most exciting are recent developments that have led to materials processing to achieve desired distributions of interfaces and to exploit unique interfacial characteristics to synthesize materials designed to match particular property profiles. The Physical Metallurgy GRC examines the latest advances in this multidisciplinary field within the context of selected research presentations and ample open discussion doc21802 none This award supports a conference on Environmental and Physiological Integration of Long-Distance Transport Processes in Plants, to be held at the Harvard Forest, Petersham, MA in October . The goal of this conference will be to review and synthesize new ideas and insights in the area of long distance transport in plants, emphasizing both the biophysics of transport through the xylem and phloem and the emerging area exploring interactions between the two. In the past, xylem transport has been viewed largely in terms of physical processes, while movement in the phloem has been studied primarily with reference to membrane transport and osmotic regulation. There is now greater appreciation for the role of living cells and biochemical processes in the xylem, as well as the need to understand the hydraulic components involved in carbohydrate movement. Thus, the time is ripe for a conference that brings together these two converging areas and explores the ways in which these two pathways influence each other. The funds provided by this award will support the participation (travel and housing) of a diverse group of scientists, including women and scientists early in their research careers. Vascular transport plays an important role in understanding both how plants respond to drought and the mechanisms by which they control patterns of carbon allocation required for growth. By bringing together individuals with expertise in long-distance transport processes, we believe that this conference and the resulting proceedings (to be published as a book by Academic Press) will have lasting value by virtue of stimulating new insights, revealing new research opportunities and opening the door for new collaborative efforts doc21803 none Quorum Sensing (QS) is a conserved mechanism of population density-dependent gene regulation. In Gram-negative bacteria, this generally involves the release and perception of self-produced acyl-homoserine lactone (AHL) signals. A grant has been awarded to study the mechanism of quorum sensing control of capsular polysaccharide (CPS) synthesis in the Stewart s wilt pathogen, Pantoea stewartii. subsp. stewartii. The critical regulatory components of quorum sensing in P. stewartii are the EsaI acyl-homoserine lactone synthase and the cognate EsaR response regulator. Disruption of the esaI gene leads to CPS deficiency, while the inactivation of the esaR gene leads to CPS overproduction, or hypermucoidy. Both conditions disrupt the normal development of Stewart s wilt disease in maize. EsaR, a LuxR homologue, functions by gene repression and AHL-dependent derepression in the control of its own expression. Presumably, quorum sensing by repression plays a role also in the control of CPS synthesis. The current model predicts that EsaR represses CPS synthesis by direct repression of genes encoded by the cps regulon or other biosynthetic functions that may contribute to the hypermucoid phenotype. Alternatively, EsaR may govern CPS synthesis indirectly through intermediary transcription factors. The first objective of this project is to define relevant transcript start sites upstream and within the cps gene system to identify potential EsaR contact sites. A consensus EsaR binding sequence will be established to aid the localization of such sites in absence of defined lux box-like DNA targets. Second, a comparative analysis of the fatty acid and exopolymer composition of the wild type and hypermucoid strains will be used to determine whether deregulated CPS synthesis is primarily a function of the cps gene system and or alternate biosynthetic pathways. Third, exhaustive transposon mutagenesis of the hypermucoid mutant strain using a Tn5-based transposon with a promoterless green fluorescent protein reporter function will be used to isolate nonmucoid, fluorescent strains. Strains showing enhanced or depressed fluorescence after introduction of a functional esaR gene will be analyzed and characterized by reverse genetics to identify structural and or regulatory genes critical for capsule synthesis and control by EsaR. Finally, two-dimensional gel electrophoresis will be employed to profile EsaR-controlled protein products. The expected results will generate a comprehensive understanding of a seemingly unconventional quorum sensing control mechanism and contribute to a novel perspective on the role of surface polymers in plant and animal pathogenesis doc21804 none Populations of plants and animals typically undergo regular oscillations or boom-and-bust cycles in nature. Ecologists have long been interested in the causes of these oscillations. Ecological theory predicts that any delay in a population will cause it to oscillate. Most of the processes that have been proposed as causes of delays are purely population processes, such as delays in birth rate. But if the recycling of limiting nutrients between decaying plant material (litter) and live plants is delayed, this could also cause a population to oscillate. Wild rice is an interesting wetland plant species whose populations have long been known to oscillate. Wild rice is an annual plant and so the population must meet all its nutrients requirements for growth from the release of nutrients in decaying litter from previous years. Almost all the nutrients wild rice needs for growth are taken up in a brief window in spring-early summer of the year. But litter from the previous year decomposes so slowly that it does not even begin to release nutrients until at least the end of summer or not even until the second year of decay. We hypothesize that this delay in the recycling of nutrients through decaying litter causes wild rice populations to oscillate. Besides being ecologically interesting, wild rice is an important staple food for members of Minnesota s Ojibway (Chippewa) tribe. Wild rice harvesting is a defining feature of Ojibway society. Ojibway culture includes legends of wild rice spiritual ceremonies conducted during harvest time. Wild rice approaches sacred food status and band members identify wild rice as a symbol of what it means to be Ojibway. The Ojibway tribe manages over a dozen wild rice lakes in northeastern Minnesota for wild rice production in as natural a manner as possible. Therefore, what causes oscillations in wild rice production is of interest, culturally and scientifically, to tribal members as well as to a wider scientific community. This research will involve close collaboration with members of the Fond du Lac band of Ojibway. The effect of delays in nutrient release on wild rice population dynamics will be tested by the following three-pronged approach: (1) making long-term observations of wild rice productivity, seed production, and nutrient availability in sediments in a series of wild rice lakes; (2) manipulating litter, nutrient inputs, and seed vs. seedling establishment in large mesocosms (stock tanks) and measuring total productivity and nutrient uptake, mean plant weight and nutrient uptake, seedling emergence, and nutrient availability; and (3) constructing and testing a computer model of wild rice nutrient uptake, productivity, litter decay, and seed production and emergence. Students will be recruited from the tribal community college to assist in this work. This project will assist tribal biologists in addressing problems of natural resource management of significance to Ojibway values and show tribal students the potentials of a career in the environmental sciences. The tribe is anticipating that the results of this study will provide critical information for its development of nutrient criteria specifically for wild rice waters, and for improving management decisions from a better understanding of nutrient cycling in wild rice ecosystems doc21805 none Professor Richard McCreery of Ohio State University is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program to study the structure and mechanisms of molecular tunneling junction systems. Monomolecular films of a compound tethered to a graphite surface are probed as a mercury drop approaches the surface. Raman spectroscopy is employed in an in-situ manner. Molecules such as nitroazobenzene are utilized as adsorbates. The mechanism of conduction and conductive switching of this system is being investigated. How does the molecular structure of the organic layer affect the electronic properties of carbon based junctions? The work is relevant to the development of molecular electronics for applications such as high density data storage, molecular transistors, photodetectors, display technology and chemical sensors. Using molecules as electronic elements is a goal of nanotechnology doc21806 none This dissertation investigates how gender-based asylum policies have developed and been administered by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). In the INS created a category of gender-specific types of persecution. Examples of gender-based persecution are rape, sexual abuse, genital mutilation, forced marriage, forced sterilization, and domestic violence. The United States is one of only three nations to implement a United Nations call to recognize gender-based persecution. The history and administration of this policy will be investigated by interviews with INS officials, administrative hearing officers, immigration attorneys, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), human rights activists, and asylum seekers. Observation of hearings and NGO meetings will also provide information on how the policy is being implemented. In addition, archival materials such as INS and UN documents, attorney case files, and NGO reports will provide background information on the history of the policy and its administration doc21807 none David Rohrabacher of Wayne State University and Michael Taschner of the University of Akron are supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program for research on effects of coordination site geometry on rates of electron transfer reactions of cuprous (Cu(I)) and cupric (Cu(II)) complexes. The main focus of the research will be to explore how ligands that constrain geometry about one or both copper centers influence the kinetics and mechanism of electron transfer (ET) between the two copper atoms. Main interest will be on the influence of solvent molecules on the ET rates of complexes involving macrocyclic and tripodal ligands, effects of trigonal and trigonal-pyramidal ligands that mimic coordination sites in specific copper proteins, and reorganization barriers in metastable intermediate species in reactions that involve macrocyclic ligands. Electron transfer reactions in related complexes containing both ruthenium and copper will also be investigated. New ligands to be used in each of these research areas will be synthesized at The University of Akron. Kinetic, electrochemical and spectroscopic studies will be performed at Wayne State University. Electron transfer reactions involving transition metal ions are of central importance in many areas of industrial chemistry and biochemistry and also in the emerging field of molecular electronics. This study focuses on rate processes that are known to be controlled, in greater or less degree, by conformational changes in the first coordination shells of the metal ions. This type of process has also been identified (sometimes quite tentatively) as playing a major role in many more-complex systems of practical interest. The relatively uncomplicated cases that are studied in this project are exceptionally suitable for developing and testing understandings that can then be applied to the more complicated cases that are of central importance in biological and technological applications doc21808 none Arabidopsis thaliana is the most important plant model organism, and the sequence of its entire complement of genes is now known. Although it is generally believed that A. thaliana flowers mostly self-pollinate, we have discovered that the flowers emit scent volatiles of the terpene class of compounds, and previous reports do suggest that an undetermined level of cross-pollination does occur in nature. The A. thaliana genome has 33 genes with homology to known terpene synthases (TPSs), and we have shown that under normal conditions, five of these genes are expressed exclusively in flowers, and 14 more are expressed in flowers as well as in some other tissues. In this project, Dr. Pichersky s lab will characterize the floral scent of A. thaliana plants from different environments, characterize the activity of the enzymes encoded by all the flower-expressed TPS genes, perform a detailed examination of the tissue-specific expression of these TPS genes throughout the plant, identify insect visitors to A. thaliana flowers, and estimate the level of cross-pollination caused by such visits. Related species that are more noticeably scented will also be compared. This project is an interdisciplinary investigation of the biosynthesis of floral scent and its effect on the success of cross-pollination, encompassing methods from molecular biology to biochemistry to ecology. The results will provide detailed understanding of an important plant life trait that has hitherto been little understood. This new knowledge will also be highly applicable to crop plants, many of which depend on cross-pollination for seed and fruit set. Knowing how scent genes are activated in the A. thaliana model system will facilitate the discovery and manipulation of scent genes in important crop plants to enhance scent production and attract beneficial pollinators. Finally, the project will provide excellent interdisciplinary training and education for graduate and undergraduate students both in the PI s lab and in formal courses, and the PI will continue to disseminate the results to the general public in addition to reports in scientific journals doc21809 none The convergence of modern genomic approaches with other areas of biology holds great promise for insights into central problems in development and evolution. One of the more vexing challenges has been to unravel the complex relationship between morphological and developmental change and evolutionary processes at the molecular level. In this project morphological, evolutionary, and genomic approaches will be integrated in an analysis of the genetic basis of the developmental transformations that occurred during cotton fiber evolution. By dissecting distinct stages in this morphological series, unparalleled insight will be gained into the genes involved in evolutionary transformations of cotton fiber during: (a) divergence among wild species; (b) early stages of domestication; (c) modern crop improvement; and (d) chromosome doubling. Cotton is unique in that four different species were independently domesticated from different wild ancestors, two each in the Old World and New Worlds. The former have two sets of chromosomes (they are diploid ) whereas this number is doubled (they are polyploid ) in the latter. By including all of these species, the research will detail the comparative genetics of plant domestication and the extent to which parallel selection has led to convergent or parallel patterns of gene expression change. In addition, the experiments will shed new light on the intriguing hypothesis that genome doubling has led to novel avenues for crop improvement. Additional experiments will reveal the patterns of genome size change among species that vary several-fold in genome size, and lead to insights regarding the molecular mechanisms responsible for this evolutionary change. In addition this project will contribute significantly to enhancement of the world s leading textile fiber through the development of important tools and resources necessary for long-term sustainability. These include an expanded set of expressed sequence tagged genes ( ESTs ); a fingerprint map for the cotton genome; an improved resource of bacterial artificial chromosomes ( BACs ) for ready cloning of important cotton genes and other uses; and detailed information on gene expression for key stages in cotton fiber development. Human resources will also be developed, with special emphasis given to members of historically under-represented groups, through myriad connections to undergraduate and graduate education, K-12 and outreach efforts, and scientific exchanges doc21810 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Bryan N. Danforth of Cornell University and Dr. Sedonia D. Sipes of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale to investigate the systematic relationships among bees, and the history of interactions between bees and flowering plants. Bees are a large group of insects ( ~20,000 species) whose history is intertwined with that of flowering plants. Today, bees are the most important pollinators of many of the world s food crops. Additionally, many wild plants depend upon bee pollinators for reproduction; thus bees play an important role in maintaining plant biodiversity. Yet, little is known about the earliest bees, or about the early flowering plants they may have pollinated, because all known bee fossils are either relatively recent in age, or are of highly advanced rather than primitive species. Moreover, the relationships among the seven families of bees are unclear from the study of their morphology alone. Danforth and Sipes propose to 1) reconstruct the relationships among the bees, with emphasis on the most primitive taxa (the short-tongued bees), using DNA sequences from three genes combined with morphological data. Additionally the investigators will use the DNA data in a model-based approach to estimate dates of key events in the history of the bees, and relate these dates to angiosperm history as recorded in the fossil record. This project will expand our understanding of the relationships and classification of the most important pollinators of flowering plants (bees), and will have implications for crop pollination, biodiversity, and conservation. This project will provide educational and research training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students at both SIUC and Cornell University. Students involved with the project will gain broadly applicable experience in basic molecular biology as well as training in the specific fields of insect systematics and pollination ecology. Additionally, the award will provide professional-level training for a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell doc21811 none The purpose of this Dissertation is to determine why different communities respond with varying levels and types of activism when faced with an identical environmental grievance. The project also helps to explain how activism relates to environmental policy outcomes. The first phase of this project is a quantitative study of the twenty-two communities that faced a low- level radioactive waste disposal site proposal. This phase provides for a statistical test of a wide range of factors for the entire population of cases. The design considers independent variables such as the different legal and policy arrangements across the range of cases, various demographic characteristics (including race and income), as well as key elements of social movement theory (mobilizing structures, framing processes, and political opportunity structures). The quantitative study also provides an inductive context for the case selection in the subsequent qualitative phase. This second phase consists of carefully selected cases that are used to gain insight into the social mechanisms and processes that connect the objective conditions identified in the first phase. This project speaks to the policy process of siting dangerous waste disposal facilities. For the past twenty years the US has largely failed to implement disposal solutions for the increasing production of dangerous waste products. The findings of this project will address key questions about the implementation progress of siting efforts and the role that community responses may have played in this process. This information will be relevant for policymakers at all levels of government as well as the local communities and activist groups that face siting decisions. Second, this project provides a detailed environmental justice analysis. Rather than focusing merely on the distribution of environmental outcomes, the findings of this project will speak to the role that race and income play in the process that precedes site construction. Finally, this project is a comprehensive application of the political process approach to social movement activity. The research design operationalizes and tests the key concepts of social movement theory including: framing, mobilizing structures, and political opportunity structures. The qualitative study will add to social movement research by examining the mechanisms and processes that make these traditional elements of social movement theory work doc21812 none The grant provides support for the acquisition of a nano-indentation system, consisting of a nano-hardness tester (NHT) and an atomic force microscope. Many diverse research groups that are involved in the characterization of materials and in nanomechanical stress analysis will benefit from the acquisition of the NHT. The nano-indentation system will be devoted to the study of micromechanical behavior of MEMS materials on both the micrometer and the nanometer scale. It allows a wide variety of tests, including submicron-sized hardness tests, micro-scratch tests, contact fatigue during cyclic indentation, and constant load creep tests. The instrument will be used in several research projects: (1) the measurement of micromechanical properties of MEMS materials as a function of microfabrication processes and temperature to provide both the micromechanical properties for modeling and the understanding of processing-properties relationships of MEMS microcomponents, (2) the investigation of the contact fatigue of silicon wafers and surface crack initiation associated with cyclic contact between two silicon surfaces or accumulated damage to identify the key variables responsible for contact damage and failure in MEMS devices, and (3) the study of adhesion phenomena between two surfaces of MEMS microcomponents due to interfacial forces, such as capillary, van der Waals, and electrostatic forces to understand the dominant mechanisms controlling the bonding between solid contact surfaces on the microscale. %%% This nano-hardness tester is the first of its kind at the University of Kentucky. It will have a large impact on research dealing with micromechanics of MEMS structure and characterization of MEMS materials and nanomaterials. For example, it is clear that surface and interface stresses play an important role in determining the deformation characteristics of MEMS microcomponents due to the high surface area to volume ratio. The micromechanical properties determined via nanoindentation tests will allow for consideration of surface effects, such as surface stresses. The long-term research goal is to develop an understanding of the material properties (including elasticity, plasticity, adhesion, and fracture) of advanced materials relevant to micro-electromechanical systems doc21813 none The advent of forensic DNA testing has helped establish the fact that mistaken eyewitness identification is the largest factor contributing to jury convictions of innocent people. As a result, the system-variable approach to eyewitness identification research, which is designed to reduce mistaken identifications without harming accurate identification rates, has started to have considerable impact in the legal system. In spite of considerable progress in recent years, little is known about how the paths through which innocent people become suspects in lineups can bias identifications toward the suspect and how to debias these situations (reduce mistaken identifications) without lowering the chances that the witnesses will identify the actual culprit. Two important paths through which innocent people become suspects are the use of composite drawings and the use of surveillance images. Both paths guarantee some propensity for eyewitnesses to identify an innocent suspect if that person became a suspect based in part on the image. It is hypothesized that the dominant recommendation of eyewitness researchers for selecting lineup fillers is not sufficient to debias lineups when either the image-similarity or the composite-similarity paths are operating. This research will test various debiasing techniques. The methodology will use films depicting a terrorist event (12 versions involving 12 different culprits) that will be shown to over people individually who will then be asked to identify the terrorist from a lineup and state their certainty. Innocent suspects will substitute for the terrorist in half of the lineups. Innocent suspects will be selected based on verbal descriptions, composite drawings, or surveillance images. Debiasing techniques will include methods of selecting lineup fillers, the use of the sequential lineup, and the use of a new technique called the phantom lineup. In addition to traditional analyses, Bayesian information-gain analyses, which assess both the incriminating and exonerating value of a give lineup procedure, will be used to assess the effectiveness of the debiasing procedures. The results of this work will help clarify eyewitness scientists basic understanding of the processes of false recognition and false certainty. In addition, the results will inform law enforcement about procedures that can be used to create unbiased and informative lineups under conditions in which surveillance images and composite drawings could otherwise bias those results doc21814 none This is a Research at Undergraduate Institution (RUI) project. It is funded by the Ceramics Program and the Condensed Matter Physics Program. The glass science research focuses on the existence and effects of, intermediate-range-order in oxide glasses. It will involve undergraduates in a variety of projects: (1) Development of new solution chemistry for glass formation that avoids carbon dioxide retention and allows fabrication of glasses with high homogeneity and with extraordinarily high alkali concentrations. (2) Development of novel glasses in binary vanadates, borates, bismuthates, and various ternary systems through rapid cooling. (3) Determination of the relation between elasticity and other physical properties and the intermediate-range-order present. (4) Exploration of packing as a universal measure of glass structure using computer simulation or experiments to achieve random mixing of constructed clusters of atoms in shapes hypothesized for glass. (5) Neutron scattering, NMR, FT-Raman, FTIR, ultrasonic velocity of sound, and Brillouin light scattering will be used to detect intermediate-range-order. In particular, high-field NMR will be used for the first time to determine the intermediate site origins of tetrahedral boron atom in selected borate glasses and crystals. (6) Finally, students will help optimize a state-of-the-art twin roller-quenching system for glass fabrication. High school students and teachers will also participate in this work as a way of motivating these students to pursue careers in science. This is a Research at Undergraduate Institution (RUI) project. It is funded by the Ceramics Program and the Condensed Matter Physics Program. At least 12 undergraduates and several high school students and teachers will participate in significant, publishable glass science research projects. The determination of intermediate range order (clusters of atoms) and the impact of this order on a variety of physical properties are the main scientific goals. Novel glasses will be formed using rapid cooling and new chemical methods. The atomic structure will be determined using various spectroscopies. Properties such as density, optical absorption, and thermal effects will be measured and compared to structure. Students will be involved in instrument enhancement as well. All participants will receive training and encouragement to pursue careers as scientists: In the past 15 years, more than 100 students have been trained to do high level research at a school of ca. students. In support of these goals, the project includes active collaborations with major research centers in the US, Europe, and Japan: Rutherford-Appleton lab near Oxford, England and the Institute Laue Langevin, Grenoble, France (Neutron scattering); Indiana University and Iowa State University (NMR); Iowa State University and NHRF, Athens, Greece (Raman and infrared spectroscopy); Fudan University (Shanghai) second harmonic generation; Sojo University, Japan (ultrasound); Tsukuba University, Japan, (Brillouin and Raman Light Scattering); Rostock University, Germany, (x-ray diffraction doc21815 none This study looks at a genus of microbes, Desulfitobacteria, that can detoxify halogenated organic pollutants such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). PCBs are listed as a dirty dozen persistent organic pollutant (POP) that, although banned, remain in the environment and cause lasting damage to animal health and the environment. The long-term goal is to help achieve the aim of a United Nations treaty to phase out and eventually eliminate these POPs. Thus a better understanding of how to accelerate the natural biodegradation of such compounds would be of significant value to society. Through a process known as dehalorespiration, these microbes biodegrade halogenated compounds while gaining metabolic energy. When Desulfitobacteria sense the presence of a halogenated compound, they produce a host of proteins that enable them to remove the chlorine substituent, which is the first step in its detoxification. A manifold of techniques are used to study dehalorespiration, including enzymology, molecular biology and genetics, spectroscopy, and electrochemistry. The first objective of this project is to elucidate the catalytic mechanism of the dehalogenase enzyme, which removes the chlorine substituent. To achieve this aim, each of the steps in the dehalogenase catalytic cycle will be elucidated and the role of the metal cofactors (vitamin B12 and the iron-sulfur clusters) will be determined. The second objective is to study the transcriptional regulatory protein (CprK) that controls when and how much of the dehalorespiration proteins are produced. When CprK binds dilute solutions of the halogenated compound, it attaches to a specific DNA regulatory sequence and accelerates the rate of production of the components of the dehalorespiration system. Interactions between the transcriptional regulatory protein (CprK) and the xenobiotic and between CprK and the DNA sequence will be studied. This project also includes plans to promoting teaching, training and learning; to enhance the University of Nebraska research infrastructure; and to broadly disseminate the research results doc21816 none There exist numerous genome-scale methods for obtaining mutations useful for functional analysis. In traditional genetics, random mutagenesis is followed by phenotypic analysis. However, the availability of large-scale genomic and cDNA sequence data encourages reverse genetic approaches. In plants, reverse genetics based on transposon mutagenesis or directed anti-sense inhibition have succeeded in some cases, but the methods can be labor-intensive and unreliable. TILLING is a new reverse genetic strategy that combines random chemical mutagenesis with PCR-based screening of gene regions of interest. This provides a range of allele types, including missense and knock-out mutations, which are potentially useful in a variety of gene function and interaction studies. TILLING is especially suitable for plants, even for those that lack well-developed genetic tools. A low-cost high-throughput TILLING method has been developed and applied to screening mutagenized Arabidopsis populations. This effort has resulted in the Arabidopsis TILLING Project, which provides allelic series of point mutations in genes of interest to members of the general Arabidopsis community. Concomitantly, the TILLING team also introduced interactive web-based tools needed to identify gene regions most suitable for TILLING, to design optimal PCR primers for mutational screening, and to analyze the resulting mutations. The successful delivery of several hundred sequenced mutations in Arabidopsis genes encourages the application of TILLING technology to crop plants. One goal of this proposal is to establish a high-throughput rice TILLING service utilizing mutagenized rice populations from the International Rice Research Institute and others. A second goal is to utilize the TILLING facility and resources for dissemination of TILLING technology to the broader plant biology community. Accomplishment of these goals should contribute to the understanding of gene functions for both crop plants and model organisms, and to the improvement of the plant genomics infrastructure for research and education. TILLING technology has potential benefits for agriculture, where methods are needed for crop improvement that avoid the expensive regulatory process required for transgenics and that are widely acceptable to consumers doc21817 none Wakimoto Fertilization begins with the initial contact of the sperm and the egg and ends with the joining of the paternal and maternal chromosomes in the embryo. The normal development of all sexually reproducing organisms requires the exquisite coordination of the activities of the sperm and egg during fertilization. Current knowledge of the mechanisms underlying fertilization has been obtained largely from morphological and biochemical studies of marine invertebrates and mammals. These studies have led to the discovery of a handful of molecules with confirmed roles in sperm-egg interactions in these organisms. The aim of the proposed project is to exploit advantages of a genetic system to identify functionally important fertilization molecules and pathways. A collection of male sterile lines of Drosophila melanogaster will be used to identify molecules expressed in sperm and essential for successful fertilization. Mutations that disrupt the sperm-egg binding or sperm activation after entry into the egg will be the focus of more extensive phenotypic and genetic mapping studies. These studies will define the types of genes that disrupt fertilization and their specificity during development.The proposed project will also involve the continued characterization two members of the earliest developmental arrest class of paternal effect genes. Mutations sneaky and space needle produce identical paternal effect defects, with mutant sperm failing to undergo the changes associated with activation after entry into the egg. The function of the Sneaky protein, a member of a newly discovered class of plasma membrane proteins, will be studied by localizing the wild type, tagged and mutated versions of the protein fusions. The effects of other paternal effect mutations, including space needle, on Sneaky function and localization will be analyzed to identify interacting molecules. Genetic and molecular mapping studies of the space needle gene will be performed to identify the gene and begin studies the function of its protein product. These studies work toward developing Drosophila into a powerful experimental system to investigate sperm-egg interactions. The results should be informative for assessing the degree to which the molecular pathways of fertilization are conserved among animals and used to mediate other cell-cell interactions during development. The overall aim of the proposed research is to understand the molecular mechanisms of sperm-egg interactions during fertilization. Dr. Wakimoto s strategy takes advantage of a collection of mutant strains of Drosophila in which males produce motile sperm that fail in the fertilization response. These mutants will be used to identify the molecular pathways that lead to successful sperm-egg binding and sperm activation. 1) To assess the number and types of mutants that are defective in sperm-egg interactions, they will: a) complete the phenotypic classification of putative fertilization defective and paternal effect mutants, b) determine the number of genes represented by the mutations through genetic complementation analysis and recombination mapping,. 2) To determine the molecular function of two genes, sneaky (snky) and space needle (spnl), which are required for sperm activation after entry into the egg, they will: a) define the subcellular localization and the functional domains of the Sneaky protein, the best characterized member of this class, b) assay the effects of another snky-like mutation, space needle (spnl) on the localization, modification and function of the Sneaky protein, c) complete the phenotypic characterization and mapping of spnl mutations toward identifying its protein product doc21818 none In higher plants, each pollen grain contains two sperm cells that are delivered to the embryo sac. One sperm fertilizes the egg and this fusion gives rise to the embryo that eventually grows into the plant. The other sperm fertilizes another cell in the embryo sac and this second fusion gives rise to the endosperm, a nutritive tissue in the seed that is required for the development of the embryo. Double fertilization is arguably the developmental process of most economic value in crop plants, because most foods are seeds or arise from seeds. Double fertilization was discovered over 100 years ago. But because of the relative inaccessibility of plant gametes, the molecular biology and mechanistics of this unique feature of the higher plant life cycle are barely understood. In order to exploit gametes for crop improvement, it is necessary to know more about them. To facilitate a more global understanding of plant gamete gene expression, cDNA libraries will be constructed from isolated sperm, eggs, and embryo sacs of maize. More than cDNAs from each library will be sequenced. Expression profiles for about 200 diverse cDNAs from each library will be determined. Plants with fluorescently-tagged gametes will be constructed to facilitate analysis of gamete function in gene disruption lines, and to facilitate imaging of fertilization. Functional analyses will focus on genes predicted to encode surface-localized proteins that might mediate critical cellular interactions during double fertilization. All sequences and stocks from this project will be available to the research community. With this information about maize gamete gene expression, comparative genomics can be used to identify and manipulate gamete-expressed genes in diverse plant species doc21819 none The nature of international trade has been changing. Historically, trade has consisted largely of an exchange of raw materials and finished goods. But now, international production sharing is becoming more the norm. Improvements in technology have made possible the division of the production process into an ever finer set of activities, so that specialized components and business services can be produced in various locations before being combined into a final product. Meanwhile, falling trade barriers, declining communication and transportation costs, and improvements in the legal conditions in many countries have made the internationalization of economic activity increasingly viable. Indeed, the process of international production sharing may well be the essential feature of modern globalization. Globalization encompasses a variety of organizational arrangements, including the outsourcing of various components and business services in arms-length relations, the establishment of foreign subsidiaries to undertake activities such as assembly and marketing, the entry into long-term and possibly exclusive licensing agreements, and the establishment of joint ventures for production and marketing. In this project, the principal investigators are developing theoretical models of foreign investment and trade that incorporate decisions about organizational form. They are studying firms choices about whether to obtain a component or service by self-provision or subcontracting together with their choices about where might be the best place to source or manufacture components. As the project progresses, the authors also will consider hybrid organizational forms, such as relational contracts (self-enforcing long-term agreements) and joint ventures (where decision-making authority may reside with one party or the other depending on the contingencies that arise). After developing their new models of trade and foreign investment, the authors will use them to address important policy issues, such as whether international production sharing has contributed to the adverse trends in income distribution in the United States and Europe and whether globalization hinders the ability of governments to regulate industry. Further, they will investigate whether the internationalization of economic activity necessitates greater intergovernmental cooperation in the WTO (or elsewhere) in non-traditional areas such as standards and regulation doc21820 none Substantial empirical evidence indicates that pathogenic bacteria express virulence genes at high levels only when they infect a host. Indeed, it is likely that pathogens that can exist in various alternative ecological niches express unique gene sets in all of them. Using microarray and in vivo expression technique (IVET), the gene expression pattern of a plant pathogenic bacterium, Erwinia chrysanthemi, grown in its leaf host as compared to growth in laboratory culture medium was studied. These results have offered powerful insights into new pathogen genes that are important for virulence. In particular, a substantial number of class III virulence genes were upregulated in planta. The class III genes do not appear to be directly involved in damaging the host, as is the case with class I and II virulence genes, but are probably important in adapting the pathogen to survive and grow in the host environment. Mutations in several of the plant upregulated E. chrysanthemi genes were constructed. Mutations in a putative class I virulence gene encoding a previously unidentified peptide synthase, and two novel class III virulence genes, all greatly reduced virulence of the bacteria on host African violet leaves. The objectives of this project are to: (i) continue screening of host upregulated genes by IVET; (ii) perform systematic mutation and virulence assays of host upregulated genes obtained from IVET and previous microarray assays; and (iii) identify virulence genes regulated by the pathogenicity gene cluster hrp of E. chrysanthemi by functional cloning in E. coli cells carrying the cloned E. chrysanthemi hrp gene cluster. These cross-complementary approaches are expected to identify new genes important for bacterial virulence on plant hosts doc21821 none The objective of this project is to explore the relationship between sequence and structure for very long coiled coils, such as found in myosin, using both protein folding and design approaches. Three-pronged approach will be used to accomplish the goal. First, synthetic genes that encode copolymers of 14-amino acid blocks will be constructed, whose sequences are based on de novo, minimalist-design principles. These genes will be cloned into expression vectors to make dimeric coiled coils that range from 70 residues to greater than 1,000 residues per helix. Specifically, this system will be used to test the role of intermediates in the assembly of long coiled coils, such as monomeric helix formation and nucleation of specific helix pairing interactions to dictate proper phasing of helices. After expressing and purifying these designed proteins, their structures will be characterized using circular dichroism, analytical ultracentrifugation, and single molecule techniques such as atomic force microscopy and laser tweezing. Second, to complement these design studies, a myosin coiled-coil rod domain will be used as a model system for folding studies involving segment swapping between designed and natural sequences. In addition, the myosin coiled coil will be used to help develop biophysical protocols for studying designed coiled coils, using the instruments described above. Finally, these synthetic peptide blocks will be used to make long copolymers for the study of other coiled coil topologies and higher order assembly to form fibrils. Long copolymers are generated by forming staggered helical structures that act as templates for their own head-to-tail self-assembly. Peptides will be synthesized and purified in the laboratory and then characterized using the same biophysical techniques described above. The overall goal of this research is to understand the basic relationship between protein sequence and structure. It is still not possible to predict protein structure and function from first principles, mainly because it is still not understood how proteins balance the major chemical forces in attaining their three dimensional shape. Two approaches have been applied to study this problem, defining the fields of protein folding and design. The two questions are the inverse of one another: scientists in the field of protein folding ask, Can we predict the structure of a protein given its amino acid sequence? and those who work on protein design ask, Can we predict what sequence of a protein will result in a target structure? Both of these strategies will be used in the study of coiled coils. These structural motifs, predicted to be in 1 3 of all proteins, involve the interaction between two or more alpha-helices. The modular design of the experiments will allow students to make significant achievements over the course of a summer experience and an academic year working towards a senior thesis project. This cohesive program in design, along with a strong modular component, should provide a rewarding experience for students interested generally in interdisciplinary sciences, including elements of biochemistry and biophysics doc21822 none Muratov Shvartsman In this collaborative project the investigators combine mechanistic modeling, computational analysis, and experimental techniques of developmental genetics to analyze cell communication networks in the development of the Drosophila egg (oogenesis). They focus on the patterning events mediated by the Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor (EGFR), during which a localized source of the EGFR ligand is modulated in space and time by a distributed network of autocrine loops to produce a biochemical blueprint specifying the formation of a pair organ. The investigators develop mechanistic models of EGFR signaling in Drosophila oogenesis. These models are necessary to directly test consistency of the proposed regulatory mechanisms, to make the experimentally verifiable predictions, and to guide the design of future experiments. The models should explicitly account for the key components of the EGFR system: the receptor, four of its ligands, ligand processing proteins, and intracellular signaling cascades. The nonlinear reaction-transport models of spatially distributed EGFR signaling networks are analyzed using a combination of numerical simulations, asymptotic techniques, and bifurcation analysis. The tests of model-based predictions rely on experimental advantages of Drosophila genetics. Signaling through the Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor EGFR is essential in a number of developmental processes across species, from fruitflies to humans, and is extensively studied at the molecular level. The main goal of the project is to develop modeling and computational tools necessary to describe reaction-transport processes in developing epithelial layers. In the context of Drosophila, the investigators aim to capture a large number of phenotypic transitions in eggshell morphology that have been observed following quantitative manipulations in the doses of the regulatory genes. This leads to a class of mathematical problems that are also relevant in other biological and physico-chemical settings. Given the highly conserved nature of EGFR systems, it is possible that the proposed analysis of patterning events in Drosophila oogenesis may be used to understand the role of EGFR in the formation of branched epithelial structures in the development of higher organisms. The project has a significant educational component: it brings together and trains students and postdocs in biology, engineering and mathematics doc21823 none Lay Hoy ( ) The functional organization and evolution of a novel insect visual system. The eyes of insects, which are called compound eyes, are generally constructed from thousands of tiny lenses, each of which captures a single image point in space. Compound eyes are organized following a blueprint that is evolutionarily conserved throughout insects and even most crustaceans (shrimp, crabs etc.). Surprisingly, the twisted-wing insect (Strepsiptera), does not follow this blueprint but instead has an eye that represents an intermediate form between an image forming lens eye, such as found in vertebrates, and the typical insect eye. In this highly specialized, parasitic group of insects, several large lenses each capture a small image or chunk of the visual environment. These lens-based building blocks together form a small eye that samples a wide visual field. This project focuses on the functional organization of this unique eye. This intermediate organization escapes some of the classical limitations of both the compound eye and the single lens eye. A deeper understanding of the strepsipteran eye type could contribute to the growing field of biomimicry, where it could lead to new technologies for small sensors that sample wide visual fields. Much of this project will be devoted to investigating the neural substrate that integrates the partial images supplied by individual lenses. In Strepsiptera the visual information from neighboring eyelets has to be integrated into one large coherent image. Understanding the design that performs such integration may reveal novel neural mechanisms in vision research. Because this eye is so different from that of all other insects, we will also investigate specific aspects of its development and use a comparative approach to investigate its evolutionary origin. There are two major aspects in which this project will have a broader impact on our society: (1) it will reveal the organization, development and evolution of unique neural and optical structures which are interesting as adaptations to a specific life style, and may have the potential to become the basis for future technologies, and (2) it will provide considerable educational benefits, both in terms of training students and in terms of educating the greater public. Several undergraduate students will be involved at any given time throughout the project. These students will have the opportunity to become members of an active research laboratory where they will be exposed to many different techniques andcross-disciplinary training. Also, various forms of outreach and public education, ranging from a web-page in lay language to the design of a museum exhibit will be pursued. Interest of the public already has been expressed after initial publication on those eyes in Science, which lead to articles in National Geographic, Time Magazine, New York Times, Scientific American, Discovery, and others doc21824 none Sit, William Y. CUNY City College The proposers will organize the East Coast Computer Algebra Day (ECCAD), which is a one-day regional conference on computer algebra, its applications and related technological developments. ECCAD has been held annually at a variety of North American locations on the East Coast since . The ninth meeting in the series will be held on Saturday, May 18, , at LaGuardia Community College, Long Island City, New York. The proposers will invite three speakers for featured presentations, and organize contributed poster software demo sessions, covering the various aspects of computer algebra: algorithms, software imple-mentation, and applications. They expect about 70 to 100 researchers, post graduate and graduate students to participate, with most of the attendees coming from the North East, but also many from all over North America and even Europe. In addition to invitations to the many universities and institutions along the East Coast where significant research in symbolic computation is going on, the ECCAD will be made a (separately funded) part of the Faculty Development Program of The City University of New York (a minority institution), and the proposers will specifically encourage faculty and students from all campuses of CUNY to participate doc21825 none The instructional development program of the University of Washington provides a rich context for learning about the challenges that faculty face in efforts to enhance their teaching, and how to help faculty face these challenges. This project will: 1. Document the unique instruction-related concerns questions of engineering faculty and the types of responses that fulfill these concerns. 2. Document the complexities associated with designing and executing instructional development services in the context of engineering. 3. Document cultural factors important for engineering instructional development. 4. Share this information with others interested in supporting faculty efforts to enhance modify their teaching (including campus level instructional developers, workshop designers, national reform groups, and even faculty themselves). We propose to take advantage of these opportunities through a combination of research and website development activities. Specifically, we propose to conduct research on successful instructional development efforts through a combination of debriefing interviews and case study observations. The results of this study will be available to engineering educators and other programs through an innovative user-centered website - the Engineering Teaching Source. The content of the website will be derived from the insights gained from the debriefing interviews and case study observations. The design of the website will emphasize multiple paths by which faculty instructional developers can find information. Our proposed research will provide insight into the needs of faculty as they change their teaching practices and provides the engineering education community with this insight through the design and publication of the Engineering Teaching Source. This work will benefit all who are interested in helping engineering faculty address teaching challenges, including instructional developers in campus-wide centers, those who create workshops for engineering faculty, those funding and running systematic reform efforts, and faculty themselves. This work will complement the spectrum of efforts to enhance the teaching of engineering by focusing on the people most pivotal to the teaching - the faculty themselves doc21826 none This study examines narratives about domestically violent family men within three civil courtrooms situated in three geographically, racially, and economically diverse counties in Northern Kentucky. This research explores comparative narratives about domestic violence, family, and fatherhood in order to determine the ways in which the domestically violent family man may be differentially constituted by geographic location, race, and class. This study pays particular attention to the role of the legal institution in producing and reproducing these narratives through an examination of the power that legal institutional discourses have in shaping definitions of gendered identities, such as domestically violent father. More specifically this study asks: What are people within and who encounter the legal arena saying about the intersections of domestic violence, family, and fatherhood? What are the processes by which visitation decisions are given to or denied from domestically violent fathers during protective order hearings, and what does this say about how the legal institution and society conceive of the intersections of domestic violence, family, and fatherhood? This research is comparative and will utilize a multi-method ethnographic approach to data collection including participant observation, content analysis of courtroom hearings, and open-ended interviews. The broader impacts of this research include informing the training and teaching received by those working with domestic violence in the legal arena about child witnesses to domestic violence and domestically violent fathers doc21827 none The TCR beta chain constant (TCRBC) regions of both channel catfish and bicolor damselfish are encoded by two substantially different genes in contrast to the situation in mammals where these two genes are extremely similar. The objective of this project is to test the hypothesis that these major differences in fish TCRBC are important for immune functions. Determination of V region usage and expression of the two TCRBC in catfish will indicate whether the two genes use the same V region repertoire and whether cells expressing these genes are compartmentalized within host tissues. Development of monoclonal antibodies directed toward the two TCRBC gene products as well as antibodies to catfish CD3 epsilon and zeta family members (zeta and Fc-gamma) will be used in immunoprecipitation and Western blot analyses to differentiate members of the TCR receptor complex. Cloning of catfish lymphoid cells lines expressing different TCRBC region genes will allow in vitro comparisons of antigen-binding and receptor signaling processes using uniform cell populations. To identify the membrane associated accessory molecules used by cells bearing the different TCR receptors and to determine the initial signaling events following ligation of the TCR, two types of experiments will be done. First, the composition of immune synapses will be defined following receptor ligation using antibody reactive with TCR complex members or cholera toxin. Secondly, the generation of intracellular signals including tyrosine phosphorylation and calcium mobilization will be measured. If differences in accessory molecules or signaling capacities are observed, hybrid genes formed from C region exons of both TCRB will be used to distinguish which portion of the C region influences the observed differences. Thus, these experiments will determine whether divergent TCRBC segments have the ability to recruit or activate different signaling peptides. Regardless of the outcome, these experiments will define the TCR complex used in catfish. The phylogenetic significance of two very divergent TCRBC genes is unknown, but is potentially important for understanding the evolution of immune reactivity in all vertebrates. This project will determine whether the C regions of the two TCRB proteins have different regulatory functions or merely serve as scaffolds for assembly of TCR alpha CD3 zeta and for holding the variable region distal to the membrane. Two substantially different T cell receptors are used by lymphocytes from certain fish species whereas those used by mammalian cells are essentially identical. The goal of this research is to understand the impact of these fish T cell receptor differences on immune and host defense functions. This project will determine whether or not the different T cell receptors are capable of using the same antigen-binding segments, and thus directing immune function toward similar pathogens. The research will also determine whether the two different T cell receptors use the same mechanisms to communicate with the inside of the cell, thus influencing the type or magnitude of ensuing response. At present, the significance of these fish T cell receptor differences is not known, but may be important for understanding changes in host defense capabilities during evolution doc21828 none All cells arise from existing cells. The doubling of contents and partitioning of those contents to daughter cells must be carefully controlled in all organisms. The septin family of proteins plays a central role in organizing proper growth and division of the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and likely plays a similar role in many other eukaryotes. Septin complexes appear to function as scaffolds, recruiting and tethering other proteins to appropriate sites. Among the proteins that localize to the yeast division plane in a septin-dependent manner are enzymes responsible for cross-wall synthesis and cell cycle regulators that appear to coordinate growth with nuclear division. While most knowledge of septin function comes from elegant work in the unicellular fungus S. cerevisiae, septins have also been found in multicellular fungi and in animals. Five septin genes, aspA-aspE, have been identified in the filamentous fungus Aspergillus nidulans. In this multicellular fungus a single septin, AspBp, localizes to several different structures (septa, branches, and conidiophores). AspBp localization is post-mitotic at septa where the localization pattern changes from a single ring to a double ring back to a single ring during septal development. AspBp localization is pre-mitotic at branches where the localization pattern changes from a compact patch to a diffuse collar as branches emerge. The central hypothesis for this research is that complexes at septa, nascent branches, and conidiophores in A. nidulans contain different combinations of both septin and non-septin proteins and that membership within the same complex will vary over time as development proceeds. This hypothesis will be tested using a variety of approaches. Mutant phenotypes and localization will be examined for all five septins. Interactions among septins and between septins and other proteins will be identified using genetic and biochemical methods. Selected non-septin proteins that interact with septin complexes at septa will be localized. These studies will exploit the ability to predict and manipulate the development of septa, and to a lesser extent other structures, in A. nidulans. The proposed studies will likely lead to a better understanding of septin function in multicellular organisms and of basic processes in the development of filamentous fungi doc21829 none Keith E. Gubbins - North Carolina State University GOALI: Molecular Modeling of Confined Nano-Phases and Nano-Porous Materials The aim of this project is to use novel molecular simulation methodologies to obtain realistic molecular models of nanoporous materials, and to use these to derive new and more accurate characterization methods and to predict the behavior of adsorbed nano-phases. The emphasis will be on activated carbons and carbon nanotubes. Impact: Activated carbons are the most widely used industrial adsorbents, but are among the most difficult nano-structured materials to characterize experimentally. Carbon nanotubes have potential applications in many new technologies, including use as nano-reactors and for fabrication of nano-structured materials (nano-composites, nano-wires, one dimensional crystals, etc.). Broader aspects of the project include the training of two graduate students in modern, multi-scale molecular simulation methods, the inclusion of new methods and applications in an interdisciplinary graduate course taught at NC State University, and dissemination of the results via publication in scientific journals and the group web-site. The methods to be developed could benefit society by providing basic understanding for development of new nano-structured materials, nano-devices, sensors and nano-reactors. This is a GOALI project involving university-industry collaboration between researchers at North Carolina State University and at Westvaco s Charleston Technical Center. Westvaco will provide samples and characterization data for a series of industrial carbons prepared under different activation conditions and from different precursors, as well as advice on the direction of the research. Studies will be in three areas: 1. Molecular simulation protocols are developed for the construction of realistic molecular models of carbon nanotubes and of activated carbons prepared from a range of precursors and with a variety of activation methods. For activated carbons, methods based on a hybrid Monte Carlo method that matches the model to experimental structural data, subject to constraints imposed by the multi-body intermolecular potential, will be used. 2. Existing materials characterization methods for the pore size distribution, surface area, and micropore volume are tested using simulated nitrogen adsorption and heat of adsorption in these model materials. Improved characterization methods that incorporate network effects (connectivity) are developed. 3. Freezing and melting phenomena of host nano-phases in these materials are studied, with particular emphasis on the effect of confinement on freezing temperature, new surface- and confinement-driven phases, and the detailed structure of the phases. An understanding of such phenomena is central to the fabrication of many new nano-structured materials doc21830 none Plant cell walls play crucial roles in the development of plants, their resistance to diseases, and communication between cells. A fundamental understanding of cell wall biosynthesis has potential practical applications, including the development of crops plants better able to fend off pathogens and of plants that provide enhanced nutritional attributes or new polymer products for various industrial uses. This project is aimed at understanding how hemicellulosic polysaccharides, a particular class of polymers found in plant cell walls, are synthesized. Cell wall biosynthesis requires hundreds of enzymes, but only a few of these proteins and the genes that encode them have been identified and characterized. Through strategies employing the tools of genomics, proteomics and bioinformatics, the principal investigators will identify candidate genes involved in the synthesis of plant cell walls and evaluate their function. The studies will be conducted in three plant systems: cotton fiber cells during a period of development in which large quantities of primary cell wall components are manufactured; developing nasturtium seeds that store large quantities of xyloglucan, a major cell wall component; and rice tissues undergoing rapid growth. Rice is chosen as one of the plant systems because the recent completion of the rice genome sequence will aid in matching the proteins linked to cell wall biosynthesis with their respective gene sequences. The principal investigators expect to identify genes involved in many aspects of cell wall biosynthesis and will make their results and resources freely available to researchers in the plant biology community. The project will provide valuable training for undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral research associates. It will also provide summer laboratory experiences for under-represented students doc21831 none This project is concerned with the mechanism whereby a cell divides into two. In general, cell division in animal cells ( cytokinesis ) results in the production of two daughter cells that are nearly identical to each other. The process of cytokinesis ensures that the newly duplicated nuclei, along with half of the cytoplasm, are equally partitioned into the resulting daughter cells. This process occurs at a very specific time in the cell cycle, and at a very specific location, usually the equator. However, how the timing and location of cytokinesis are regulated at the molecular level has remained largely unknown. Dr. Larochelle has generated mutant Dictyostelium discoideum vegetative cells and screened these cells for defects in cytokinesis. This approach had been used successfully in the past to identify racE and lvsA, two unique genes that are required for normal cytokinesis. Dr. Larochelle has now isolated a new cell line that is defective in cytokinesis due to a disruption in a novel gene, which is the focus of this research project. The specific aims of this research are to characterize the specific cytokinesis defect that results from the disruption of this novel gene, determine the location and mechanism of how the encoded protein functions in cytokinesis by conducting a careful analysis of the various domains that compose this protein, identify and characterize proteins that interact with this novel protein, and provide training for graduate and undergraduate students, as well as high school students and teachers, in the areas of cell biology and molecular biology. By making use of the ease with which one can manipulate the Dictyostelium genome, coupled with the Dictyostelium genome sequencing project, the experiments will combine molecular genetics with cell biology to dissect the exact nature through which this newly identified gene regulates cytokinesis. The potential to identify additional proteins that participate in the control if this important cellular event is suggested through the presence of multiple signaling domains (a phosphatase domain, a rho-related domain, two kinase domains, and eight WD-40 repeats) in the newly identified protein. These domains will be examined in isolation and coupled with neighboring domains, as well as through deletion analysis, to dissect their role in cytokinesis regulation. Preliminary results, in which one of the kinase domains was over-expressed in wild-type cells, resulting in a cytokinesis defect, is a promising indicator that this approach will be successful. Because Dictyostelium is easily cultured and is highly amenable to molecular genetic manipulation, while at the same time exhibiting the same cellular behaviors observed in cells from higher eukaryotic organisms, it is ideally suited for the training of budding scientists in the areas of cell and molecular biology. The development of a strong research program, in an atmosphere where high school, undergraduate, and graduate students interact with each other and faculty on a daily basis, will provide unique training opportunities for all participants doc21832 none Wood accounts for 25% of the value of all industrial materials produced in the U.S., and on an annual basis, the value of wood-derived products equals or exceeds that of virtually every other agricultural crop. However, losses in production forest acreage, coupled with increasing demands for paper and cheap fiber supplies from overseas, have put intense pressure on U.S. companies to increase wood yields per acre, particularly in southeastern forests. Unfortunately, our limited understanding of tree biology constitutes a significant barrier to attaining the productivity gains necessary to keep pace with the rising consumer demand for wood products. Efforts are underway to catalog genes expressed in the wood-forming tissues of loblolly pine (Pinus taeda), the predominant commercial tree species in the southeastern U.S. Although this collection of wood-specific genes provides an excellent step toward improved understanding of the basic genetic units governing wood formation, it will be incomplete with respect to many genes that will prove critical for increasing the productivity of tomorrow s forests. This project will develop a collection of several thousand new genes derived primarily from other pine tissues of commercial and biological significance, in particular roots undergoing a variety of biotic and abiotic stresses. To the greatest extent possible, data from this project will be integrated with that from other projects focused on genomic studies of pine so as to create a seamless set of resources, such as a comprehensive unigene set, for the research community. Such comprehensive unigene sets will form the basis of DNA microarrays that will be used to identify genes whose expression varies in response to various environmental and developmental cues, particularly those responding to stresses that trees would likely experience when subjected to intensive management regimes. Identification of such genes will provide for better understanding of the molecular mechanisms trees use to respond to environmental and biological stresses, and will enable the development of techniques and tools, such as targeted microarrays, that could be used to monitor in near real-time the effects of silvicultural practices on tree growth and development. For example, microarrays of root genes that respond to specific mineral or nutrient deficiencies could allow silviculturalists to judge whether or not a new fertilization regimen was likely improve growth rates or wood quality well before the phenotypic responses could be detected. Such new techniques will provide the means for addressing current biological constraints that limit forest productivity in the southeastern U.S doc21833 none The objectives of this research are to achieve a better understanding of the optical properties of biological molecules, both in and out of equilibrium, and to apply this knowledge to elucidate their mechanism of action. Resonance Raman scattering and its time domain analog, femtosecond coherence spectroscopy (FCS) will be used to probe the electronic and nuclear structure function relationships in heme proteins like myoglobin, hemoglobin and cytochrome c. Related techniques such as electronic absorption, pump-probe kinetics, fluorescence, infrared, nuclear resonance vibrational (NRVS) spectroscopy, and magnetic field perturbations will also be used to characterize samples and aid in the assignment of the low frequency motions revealed using novel FCS techniques developed in the prior award period. Picosecond methodology will be developed using synchronized self-modelocked Ti:sapphire lasers to carry out both time resolved resonance Raman scattering and to extend the range of kinetic studies into the ns regime. Dynamic absorption lineshapes will be measured using broad-band continuum techniques so that time dependent resonance conditions can be properly incorporated into the analysis of vibrational relaxation obtained from the Stokes and anti-Stokes Raman scattering. Theoretical advances in understanding the absolute magnitude and phase of the resonant FCS signals will be exploited to eliminate non-oscillatory background signals and allow improved detection of low frequency modes. Phase and amplitude excitation profiles will be carried out to reveal inhomogeneities and anharmonicities associated with the low frequency motions. Low temperature measurement techniques will be developed so that FCS experiments can be carried out as a function of the sample glass transition. This project has a broad impact that underlies the field of protein dynamics that is crucial to our basic understanding of living systems. This work involves the development of state-of-the-art laser based spectroscopy that is applied to biomolecular systems. Instrumentation and theoretical development will enhance the infrastructure for doing time-resolved protein dynamics research by producing an effective FCS system that expands the use of this experimental technique by making it routinely accessible. These studies are significant not only in their relationship to the biological sciences, but also in their connection to our understanding of basic light-matter interaction associated with complex systems in the condensed phase. Graduate and undergraduate students will be trained in cutting edge optical and biological techniques that benefit society through the enhancement of the human resource infrastructure. This project is supported by the Molecular Biophysics Program in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences in the Directorate for Biological Sciences and the Division of Physics in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate doc21834 none This proposal focuses on the ecological and genetic impacts of the introduction of non-native rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) on native gene pools of threatened Yellowstone cutthroat trout (O. clarki bouvieri). In addition to competition, predation and the introduction of disease organisms by introduced species, for some native fish species, a major threat is that of hybridization with the introduced species. Hybrids, if fertile, can spread and cause the complete replacement of parental genes with those of the introduced species. This study is designed to determine the extent of hybridization between Yellowstone cutthroat trout and rainbow trout as well as the degree of genetic dilution that has occurred in native gene pools. In addition, the study will also test whether particular features of the environment (temperature, elevation, stream flow, etc.) are correlated with the presence or absence of pure species or hybrids. In this manner, the study will determine if particular environments favor the spread of hybrid fishes, or provide an advantage to the remaining pure populations of Yellowstone cutthroat trout. This study will provide the first documentation of the pattern of genetic invasion of rainbow trout and begin to explore the ecological mechanisms that are responsible for this pattern. If environmental correlates are found which predict the success of native Yellowstone cutthroat trout over hybrids, such habitats can be given top priority for conservation. Only through a combined approach of understanding both the ecological and genetic factors that influence the success of invasive species, can we ever hope to deter their spread and save native gene pools doc21835 none The NSF-EC workshop in Grenoble entitled Workshop on Tools and Instrumentation for Nanoscale Research and Manufacturing is one of four joint events between the NSF and the European Commission (EC) held in . The emphasis in this workshop is on tools and instrumentation for nanoscale research and manufacturing. The workshop will explore the synergy between instrumentation for nanoscale research, and its role in the areas of advanced materials and manufacturing in the U.S. and Europe. Information about the workshops are on http: www.nsf.gov home crssprgm nano start.htm. In addition, two of the other workshops in this series are The Puerto Rico Workshop on Nanomanufacturing and Processing, which is on the web at http: www1.eng.iastate.edu nsf nsf-ec.html and The Workshop on Societal and Educational Impacts of Nanotechnology which is posted at http: www.nsf.gov home crssprgm nano start.htm. %%% Materials research is a huge driving force for innovations that serve to educate and train future scientists and engineers, while advancing economic growth and social progress. Frontier areas of nanoscience and technology are generating scientific breakthroughs that revolutionize existing technologies as well a create new ones in areas that include health and medical services, transportation, environmental protection, energy efficiency, civil infrastructure, information technology, and homeland security doc21810 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Bryan N. Danforth of Cornell University and Dr. Sedonia D. Sipes of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale to investigate the systematic relationships among bees, and the history of interactions between bees and flowering plants. Bees are a large group of insects ( ~20,000 species) whose history is intertwined with that of flowering plants. Today, bees are the most important pollinators of many of the world s food crops. Additionally, many wild plants depend upon bee pollinators for reproduction; thus bees play an important role in maintaining plant biodiversity. Yet, little is known about the earliest bees, or about the early flowering plants they may have pollinated, because all known bee fossils are either relatively recent in age, or are of highly advanced rather than primitive species. Moreover, the relationships among the seven families of bees are unclear from the study of their morphology alone. Danforth and Sipes propose to 1) reconstruct the relationships among the bees, with emphasis on the most primitive taxa (the short-tongued bees), using DNA sequences from three genes combined with morphological data. Additionally the investigators will use the DNA data in a model-based approach to estimate dates of key events in the history of the bees, and relate these dates to angiosperm history as recorded in the fossil record. This project will expand our understanding of the relationships and classification of the most important pollinators of flowering plants (bees), and will have implications for crop pollination, biodiversity, and conservation. This project will provide educational and research training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students at both SIUC and Cornell University. Students involved with the project will gain broadly applicable experience in basic molecular biology as well as training in the specific fields of insect systematics and pollination ecology. Additionally, the award will provide professional-level training for a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell doc21837 none Henry T. Nguyen NguyenHenry@missouri.edu (Principal Investigator current) Julia Gross (Co-Principal Investigator current) Hans J. Bohnert (Co-Principal Investigator current) Robert E. Sharp (Co-Principal Investigator current) Gordon K. Springer (Co-Principal Investigator current) Daniel P. Schachtman (Co-Principal Investigator current) Georgia Davis (Co-Principal Investigator current) The roots of plants play vital roles in water and mineral acquisition which are essential for plant growth and development. Under conditions of drought, roots can adapt to continue growth while at the same time producing and sending early warning signals to shoots which inhibit the plant growth above ground. A Plant Root Genomics Consortium has been formed and is dedicated to root genetics and physiology. The broad aim is to develop an understanding of the molecular mechanisms used by plant roots to acquire water and minerals from the soil, to elucidate the role roots play in adaptation to drought conditions, and to transfer this knowledge to crop improvement through biotechnology. This project focuses mechanisms of root growth maintenance and root to shoot signaling under water deficits. The research approach is interdisciplinary encompassing whole plant physiology, genetics, genomics, and proteomics. The specific aims are to identify the genes and biochemical networks: controlling the mechanisms of root growth and root to shoot communication under drought through four specific objectives: (1) Characterization of the transcript profiles in elongating and non-elongating regions of roots under water deficit in sensitive and tolerant maize lines, an abscisic acid (ABA)-deficient mutant and near-isogenic lines differing in ABA accumulation. (2) Characterization of the changes in protein profiles, especially cell wall proteins, in the different root regions to identify factors associated with root growth maintenance and tolerance to water deficit. (3) Investigation of the production and transport of root signals to provide a better understanding of root to shoot signaling under drought. (4) Development of genetic and genomic resources for further investigations of root growth and signaling in the field. This knowledge will lead to novel approaches for improving drought tolerance in maize through genetic and metabolic engineering of root functions. All materials will be made publicly available. A Plant Root Genomics Web site will be maintained and integrated with the maize genome database (MaizeDB) at the University of Missouri-Columbia doc21838 none Integrated studies of interactions among plants, microbes, and the soils they inhabit are critical to our understanding of ecosystem function. We propose to use a combination of biochemical and molecular-genetic methods to determine effects of artificial defoliation of Pinus contorta (lodgepole pine) on structure and function of ectomycorrhizal (EM) communities in pure P. contorta and mixed P. contorta Picea engelmannii (Engelmann spruce) stands. We will defoliate only the pine in both pure P. contorta and mixed P. contorta P. engelmannii patches formed within mixed stands by small-scale disturbance. We will then determine how defoliation affects EM fungal community structure, activities of enzymes that break down litter, and enzymatic function of soil fungal communities. We will sample across a soil fertility gradient created by a transition from relatively nutrient-rich andesite, through a transition zone created by glacial activity, to nutrient-poor rhyolite. By doing so, we will determine how interactions among carbon flow to roots, tree species diversity, and soil fertility influence ectomycorrhizal fungal diversity and function, for the first time. Our preliminary data from this system indicate that defoliation of pine only in a patch of mixed pine spruce can 1) significantly affect the EM community of mixed P. contorta P. engelmannii stands, and 2) affect the EM of non-defoliated spruce. Our data also show that soil fertility plays a pivotal role in influencing EM community structure, and the work of others demonstrates that soil fertility can moderate effects of defoliation and insect herbivory. We will be the first to investigate how alteration of carbon flow to roots affects EM community structure, EM enzymatic function, and below-ground function in a mixed tree species forest, and the first to combine these factors with soil fertility. We will conduct this study in Yellowstone National Park, the centerpiece of the 11-million acre Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, which includes several National Forests in three states. By using a combination of biochemical and molecular methods, we will provide the most comprehensive picture of these aspects of ecosystem function to date. Thus, we will add greatly to our understanding of a pristine, economically important, and geographically dominant ecosystem. Our education outreach and broader impacts will be far-reaching. For example, Cullings is adjunct at a Hispanic-Serving Institution and will teach classes and seminars there, and students from that institution will be invited to participate in the study. In addition, Cullings is a member of the Ames Native American Advisory Council, an education outreach organization within NASA dedicated to bringing science education to reservations. Henson has volunteered for 12 years as an ASM minority educator lecturer, and has been a preceptor for NIH (Institutional Student Minority Development) and NSF (Minority Access Program, Science and Engineering for All) minority education grants. In addition, and for the past 10 years her lab has hosted Native American high school students and teachers through the American Indian Research Opportunities (AIRO) program on campus. Her group also assists YNP park personnel with their microbiology brochures and videotapes for the general public, and maintains a Web site about their work in Yellowstone (www.montana.edu.hotfungi). Henson also participates in ASMs on- line science mentoring project. Students from all programs will be recruited to participate in this project doc21839 none One plant genome, Arabidopsis, has been sequenced, and a second one, rice, is nearing completion. These plant species represent the major taxonomic division of the plant kingdom and include the first major crop. Rice is also a member of the cereals that include crops like wheat and maize, which are much larger in genome size, 35-times and 5-times, respectively, and, therefore, more difficult to sequence. However, since maize is a major crop in agriculture and a significant factor to the economy of the United States, sequencing its genome will provide a critical infrastructure to advance food supply, quality, and safety, with simultaneous reduction of risk to health by chemical pollution. To enable sequencing the larger maize genome, this project seeks to provide sets of overlapping cloned DNA fragments, about 150 kb in size that are placed on the genetic map of maize. This placement will be greatly facilitated by zip code-like sequences of these cloned DNA fragments. These zip codes are in particular valuable since a certain percentage is conserved in sequence and order between maize and the closely related rice genome (synteny). Since the rice genome sequence is aligned to the rice genetic map, ordering the sets of overlapping maize DNA fragments will be greatly enhanced in regions of synteny. The resulting map of DNA fragments will be used to generate contiguous genomic sequence. This will show whether the larger size of the maize genome, largely due to non-genic, repeat sequences, will require a different method for obtaining the gene content of maize. A few examples of long stretches of maize genomic DNA provide biologists for the first time information about the variability in gene density and a correlation of the genetic and physical map over several centiMorgans. Such genetic distances are already long enough to demonstrate to breeders how genes are discovered based on linkage of traits to DNA doc21840 none This project will develop novel techniques for measurement of global gene expression within eukaryotic organisms which will permit analysis of the individual contributions of the different cell types contained within complex tissues. The project comprises a series of proof-of-concept experiments primarily using Arabidopsis thaliana. Two strategies will be employed. The first is to label nuclei in a cell type-specific manner using the Green Fluorescent Protein of Aequorea victoria translationally fused to proteins that accumulate within the nucleus. This will be done by producing transgenic plants in which the production of a nuclear targeted form of GFP is under the control of cell type specific promoters. The presence of specifically labeled nuclei will be verified by fluorescence microscopy, and the individual fluorescent nuclei purified from cellular homogenates using fluorescence activated sorting. RNA will then be extracted from the nuclei and will be hybridized to DNA microarrays. Proof-of-concept will first involve validation of the different technical steps of the strategy, using promoters that are constitutively active, and then will involve analysis of global gene expression within the cell types defined using promoters of known cellular specificities. The second strategy is to label polyribosomes in an analogous cell-type specific manner. This will be done through epitope tagging of individual ribosomal proteins whose expression is regulated by promoters having cell type-specific patterns of expression. Polyribosomes will then be prepared and the associated mRNA employed for microarray hybridization. Proof-of-concept experiments, as before, will involve validation of the technical aspects of this strategy with constitutive promoters, followed by use of promoters having defined cellular specificities to chart global gene expression patterns within these cells. The expected outcomes of this project are three-fold: a molecular toolkit (reagents, recombinant DNA molecules, plant lines), the associated descriptions of how to use this toolkit for examination of gene expression within living organisms, and the results of the experiments that are done to validate the methodology. All outcomes will be freely disseminated to the scientific community in a timely manner. The molecular toolkits will be provided to interested individuals on request. The descriptions of the methods and the results from the experiments will be posted to the project website and, as appropriate, will be published in the scientific literature. The methods are designed to be entirely general in scope, and should be transferable to other eukaryotic organisms, including those of other than the plant kingdom. Deliverables: We propose to distribute all recombinant clones to the academic community free of charge. Clone recipients would be expected to pay transportation charges for express carriers. Should specific clones prove inordinately popular, we reserve the right to institute nominal fees for their distribution. Intellectual Property issues will be handled according to the requirements of the two institutions. Negotiations are currently underway between the relevant technology transfer officers to establish an appropriate mechanism for development of intellectual property which might develop from the research. It is expected that UA and UCR will enter into an interinstitutional agreement (IIA) at the appropriate time for the commercialization of IP. As UA is the lead institution on the NSF grant, it is also expected that UA should be the managing institution for purposes of commercialization. An IAA template is being developed based on an existing UC document. Relevant features are a 50:50 split of inventions (to simplify procedures), and a minimal time for delay of publications to permit patent protection to be sought (currently envisaged to be 60 days). We shall employ common standards for acquiring and archiving all microarray data as described at: http: plantgenome.sdsc.edu AwardeesMeeting Bioinformatics_and_Databases doc21841 none Short contact time chemical reactors have great promise for conversion of light alkanes into useful chemicals with greater efficiency, lower cost, and less pollution. Important applications of this technology are conversion of natural gas to liquid fuels and reforming of alkane fuels to hydrogen for fuel cells. Implementation of this technology requires characterization of the processes and mechanisms. Steady state behavior is fairly well understood, and the previous grant characterized performance and mechanisms of these processes. However, transients must be characterized to develop lightoff protocols and to further understand the mechanisms of alkane oxidation in short contact time chemical reactors. We have a systematic program to examine the transient behavior of short contact time chemical reactors. This research has two major objectives: (1) use of transient experiments to further characterize the mechanisms of these processes and (2) the development of methods for fast lightoff and transients in applications such as fuel processing for small fuel cells. Experiments will involve mass spectrometric and temperature measurement of responses to step changes in feeds and isotope switching. We will examine carbon and oxygen formation and removal on the catalyst by titration with flowing gases. Startup transients will also be examined by ignition with different gas mixtures that react either catalytically or homogeneously to attain rapid heating to ignition temperatures. Other experiments will involve periodic forcing of composition at different frequencies, gas-liquid reactions at short contact time, and reactions involving flash vaporization of fuel using fuel injectors. We will also develop capabilities to examine time dependences and bifurcation behavior in startup and extinction of fast coupled exothermic and endothermic processes in the catalytic wall reactor. These experiments will be analyzed by computational fluid dynamics using elementary step models to simulate temperatures and coverages in startup and with transients. This will lead to more fundamental elementary step models and characterization of bifurcation behavior in these systems that will be essential in developing new short contact time chemical processes. Fuel cells will not be practical unit fuel reforming methods and fast lightoff strategies are developed, and this research will be a key ingredient in these tasks doc21842 none Some plant disease resistance genes (major resistance genes) confer high levels of resistance against particular pathogens. These genes have been well studied over the past decade. Major resistance genes, however, are generally effective only against specific strains of a pathogen, and so become ineffective in the field when new pathogens strains appear. In contrast, partial or quantitative resistance is effective against all strains of a pathogen, albeit providing a lower level of protection. Multiple genes confer partial resistance, each making minor contributions, complicating the study of these genes. As a result, less is known about how they operate. The goal of this project is to understand the mechanisms of quantitative resistance of soybean against the oomycete pathogen Phytophthora sojae, which is one of the most damaging soybean diseases. Oomycetes are fungus-like organisms that are actually most closely related to brown algae such as kelp and diatoms. Phytophthora pathogens attack thousands of plant species, including many important crops. Two approaches will be combined to identify and characterize quantitative resistance genes. First, genetic crosses between soybean cultivars differing in their quantitative resistance to Phytophthora will be analyzed to identify genetic loci (called quantitative trait loci or QTL) in soybean that contribute to resistance. Second, the expression levels of thousands of soybean and Phytophthora genes during infection will be assayed using hybridization microarrays to determine the mechanisms of resistance contributed by different quantitative resistance loci. Pathogen gene expression patterns will be analyzed to determine the impact of plant defense mechanisms on the pathogen. Overall, it is anticipated that this research will result in new insights into plant defense mechanisms, new genetic and genomic resources for soybean researchers and breeders, and new statistical tools for analysis of gene expression data doc21822 none Muratov Shvartsman In this collaborative project the investigators combine mechanistic modeling, computational analysis, and experimental techniques of developmental genetics to analyze cell communication networks in the development of the Drosophila egg (oogenesis). They focus on the patterning events mediated by the Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor (EGFR), during which a localized source of the EGFR ligand is modulated in space and time by a distributed network of autocrine loops to produce a biochemical blueprint specifying the formation of a pair organ. The investigators develop mechanistic models of EGFR signaling in Drosophila oogenesis. These models are necessary to directly test consistency of the proposed regulatory mechanisms, to make the experimentally verifiable predictions, and to guide the design of future experiments. The models should explicitly account for the key components of the EGFR system: the receptor, four of its ligands, ligand processing proteins, and intracellular signaling cascades. The nonlinear reaction-transport models of spatially distributed EGFR signaling networks are analyzed using a combination of numerical simulations, asymptotic techniques, and bifurcation analysis. The tests of model-based predictions rely on experimental advantages of Drosophila genetics. Signaling through the Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor EGFR is essential in a number of developmental processes across species, from fruitflies to humans, and is extensively studied at the molecular level. The main goal of the project is to develop modeling and computational tools necessary to describe reaction-transport processes in developing epithelial layers. In the context of Drosophila, the investigators aim to capture a large number of phenotypic transitions in eggshell morphology that have been observed following quantitative manipulations in the doses of the regulatory genes. This leads to a class of mathematical problems that are also relevant in other biological and physico-chemical settings. Given the highly conserved nature of EGFR systems, it is possible that the proposed analysis of patterning events in Drosophila oogenesis may be used to understand the role of EGFR in the formation of branched epithelial structures in the development of higher organisms. The project has a significant educational component: it brings together and trains students and postdocs in biology, engineering and mathematics doc21844 none The relationship between eukaryotic viruses and their hosts are characteristic of most host-pathogen relationships that have co-evolved. The outcomes of virus-host interactions are genetically pre-determined. To produce disease, viruses must enter the host, multiply locally in host tissues, spread from the site of entry, and overcome or evade host immune responses. Plants have evolved various anti-viral defense strategies to clear viral infection. On the other hand, viruses have evolved counter-defense strategies. Therefore, it is important to understand molecular mechanisms of how viruses evade the host s antiviral defenses. A Tobacco Rattle Virus-based virus induced gene silencing (VIGS) system will be used to identify suppressors of viral resistance and susceptibility factors. In addition, a functional proteomics approach will be used to study virus-host interactions. The knowledge gained from these studies will help to combat infectious plant diseases. Protection of crops from disease can significantly improve agricultural production. Application of a plant s own defense mechanism can lead to more effective protection against plant pathogens. Control of pathogen-induced diseases using cellular genes that function in the disease resistance signaling pathway may provide tremendous agricultural benefits and serve the environment by offering an alternative to pesticide use to prevent disease. Tools and information developed in this project will be made available to the scientific community. These resources will assist in the efforts to improve economically important plants like tomato, potato and pepper. Deliverables Available now: pTRV1, pTRV2, pTRV2-GATEWAY, pTRV-NbPDS, pTRV-tomPDS VIGS system. Contact savithramma.dinesh-kumar@yale.edu Available by 9 03: 250-300 sequence verified pTRV2-tomato EST clones - sequence verified pTRV2-Nb-cDNA Agrobacterium TMV-TAP vector doc21845 none Fruits are major components of the human diet contributing a large portion of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and fiber. While flavor and nutrition composition have clear potential for positive human benefit, they have proven to be difficult traits to modify via traditional breeding due to their generally complex biosynthetic and regulatory pathways. Flavor in many fruits is the product of a complex interaction among sugars, acids and multiple volatile compounds. Synthesis and accumulation of these compounds is the result of coordinated activity of many genes. In many cases, the pathways for synthesis of these compounds have yet to be established. This program will focus on the expression of the genes critical for metabolism of these compounds so that key regulators of fruit flavor and nutrient composition can be identified and eventually manipulated via the many possible routes available. Specifically, the program will apply gene expression profiling to an extensive set of germplasm to 1) map regulatory circuits controlling the levels of important components of flavor and nutrition, and 2) identify genes encoding enzymes involved in metabolism of these components. Levels of expression of most of the genes expressed during tomato fruit ripening will be correlated with the abundances of specific metabolites in a diverse set of germplasm consisting of mutants, transgenic and recombinant inbred lines. Bioinformatics will be used to identify genes whose expression is linked to appearance of target compounds. The value of these markers as predictors of chemical composition will be tested by genetic mapping and transgenic manipulation. These experiments will have broad impact by 1) mapping critical steps controlling flavor and nutrition metabolic pathways, 2) identifying specific genes involved in either regulation or metabolism of critical components of flavor and nutrition, 3) providing useful tools for breeding and engineering improved fruit quality, and 4) establishing a correlative public database of metabolites and global gene expression that will be accessible for a broad array of ripening-related studies doc21846 none Todd Martinez is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to continue development and application of ab initio molecular dynamics, specifically the multiple spawning method. Methodological improvements include addition of tunneling effects, extension to larger molecules, and expansion to coupled cluster electronic structure theory. Specific application areas include the photodynamics and isomerization of butadiene, hexatriene, and stilbene, for direct comparison to ultrafast experiments. The most fundamental and ubiquitous process in organic photochemistry is photoinduced isomerization of molecules. This research can provide the detailed understanding of the electronic mechanism of this process that will be necessary in designing molecular optoelectronic devices doc21847 none In this project funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, David Blank will develop and apply novel experimental methods designed to address the role of intermolecular and low frequency intramolecular nuclear motions in condensed-phase reactive and nonreactive chemical dynamics. The experiments utilize multidimensional femtosecond spectroscopic techniques, and can be divided into two types, based on the complementary information each will provide. First, the response of low frequency motions in response to the progress of a dynamic event in solution will be probed by photo-initiating that event with an ultrafast laser pulse, and monitoring the response using third-order time domain Raman spectroscopy. Second, the coupling between low frequency motions in condensed systems will be directly measured using a new resonance enhanced version of coherent two-dimensional time domain Raman spectroscopy. These studies are expected to enable new insights into low frequency motions in solution phase chemical reactions. The significant proportion of chemistry, from industrial reactions to the chemistry of biology, takes place in the solution phase. This project aims at providing a microscopic description of chemical reactivity in solution, one of the central issues in physical chemistry today. The proposed methods are direct and generally applicable techniques that will aid in understanding the scientific issues involved. This work has applications ranging from modern optics and metrology to advanced materials characterization and fundamental research in condensed matter. As part of this research effort, students from the undergraduate through the postdoctoral level are trained with state-of-the-art instrumentation in ultrafast laser technology, an emerging field in the physical sciences doc21848 none Professor Neal Armstrong of the University of Arizona is funded by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program to prepare and characterize ordered thin films of organic materials for electronic applications. Interface-induced disorder in layers lowers carrier mobility and therefore could limit organic materials use in molecular electronics. The PI proposes to modify phthalocyanine-based discotic materials to facilitate polymerization and alignment by self-organization. Two surface modifications will be used to enable the alignment: chemically modified substrates and capillary channels. The materials will be characterized by atomic force microscopy (AFM), including conductive tip AFM, and photoemission spectroscopy. This technologically relevant class of organic materials has potential uses in electronic devices such as field effect transistors and photovoltaics. Molecular electronics for miniaturization is one of the goals of nanotechnology doc21849 none Pathogens and parasites are a major component of biological diversity, and have important impacts on natural populations. A central question in host-parasite ecology concerns what features of host behavior, life history, and environment best explain the diversity and evolution of infectious diseases. Significant theoretical progress has advanced our understanding of factors that influence infectious disease dynamics within populations, yet relatively few studies have analyzed ecological variables that underlie observed variation in pathogen diversity and characteristics. This project will examine patterns of parasite diversity across three mammalian orders to explicitly test predictions derived from both epidemiological models and island biogeography theory. Major questions this project will address include (1) What are the key ecological variables that determine variation in the types and diversity of parasites in wild mammal populations? (2) How do parasite transmission mode and the degree of specificity depend on host ecology? (3) Does evolutionary diversification of hosts correlate with patterns of parasite species richness? (4) Does knowledge of parasite diversity have important implications for wildlife conservation? Establishing a large database on the pathogens and parasites infecting wild mammals is critical to conducting comprehensive analyses and represents a major goal of this project. The investigators have recently assembled a large database on the pathogens and parasites of primates and will extend this effort to two other well-studied groups - carnivores and ungulates. These databases capture (i) ecological, behavioral and life history traits relevant to theoretical models of disease spread, (ii) records of parasites and pathogens recovered from wild populations, (iii) data on parasite transmission mode and degree of host specificity, and (iv) phylogenetic information on the hosts. Database development requires an immense effort and following this study all data will be made freely available over the World Wide Web so that other scientists can access the fruits of this labor. Understanding factors that underlie parasite diversity and characteristics is vital to managing vulnerable wildlife populations and mitigating threats to human health. This study extends the scope of previous host-parasite comparative work by examining a rich diversity of both micro- and macroparasites, including information on parasite characteristics, and by assessing phylogenetic information involving tree topology, branch lengths and rates of host diversification. Analytical comparative methods will control for sampling effort, test multiple variables simultaneously, and will assess whether host and parasite traits are correlated with phylogeny. A synthetic approach that links ecology, parasitology, epidemiology, and phylogenetic comparative methods is crucial for developing a broad conceptual framework to explain parasite diversity and characteristics in relation to host features. To advance these goals, the investigators will organize three annual workshops composed of experts from each of these disciplines to refine predictions for comparative research, explore methods for examining ecological and evolutionary interactions in host-parasite assemblages, and chart future directions for both theoretical and empirical work doc21850 none The goal of this research project is to use disaggregated data and theoretical models to study the behavior of bank balance sheet variables like loans and equity and their importance for real activity. The motivating factor is that the additional variation observed across the disaggregated elements of the data provides an enormously rich source of new empirical information that can be used not only to learn about the behavior of the disaggregated variables but also to understand the behavior of aggregate variables. The contribution of this project consists of constructing and disseminating consistently defined disaggregated data sets of bank loans. Bank loans are disaggregated into three bank loan components: Commercial and industrial (C&I) loans, real estate, and consumer loans. Empirical as well as theoretical studies typically focus on total bank loans, even though the observed time series behavior of the three components clearly differs. Bank loans are also disaggregated by region. The advantage of disaggregating bank loans by region is that one can match regional financial measures like bank loans with corresponding regional real activity measures. Several studies have documented that this link is quite strong for business loans. This is because these loans are not standardized products and the relationship between firms and banks is clearly an important element in the market for business loans. The data are also disaggregated by bank size. This is important because the balance sheets of small banks are quite different than those of large banks and because of, for example, informational asymmetries, small banks are more likely to suffer from financial frictions in obtaining time deposits. The data are posted on the investigator s website doc21851 none Ethylene is an unique plant signaling molecule. The hydrocarbon gas, known as the fruit ripening hormone, controls many aspects of plant growth and development. It is biosynthesized from methionine via a three-step enzymatic process: SAM ACC ACC Methionine SAM ACC C2H4. Synthase synthase oxidase Its synthesis is highly regulated. Experimental evidence accumulated over the last 10 years indicates that one of the key enzymes in the ethylene biosynthetic pathway, 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylic acid (ACC) synthase (ACS), is encoded by a highly divergent multigene family in various mono- and dicotyledonous plants. The completion of the Arabidopsis genome sequence reveals the presence of 10 putative ACS genes (ACS2, 4-12) and two pseudogenes (ACS1, ACS3). Expression studies reveal that the family members are differentially regulated by various inducers and developmental stages Studies on the regulation of the ACS genes in Arabidopsis are proposed here to gain insight into the details of the signaling machinery involved primarily in the regulation of the ACS gene by auxin and ethylene. Further studies are proposed to obtain knowledge regarding the structure and the biochemical properties of the ACS isoenzymes. The proposed molecular and biochemical experimental approaches attempt to answer the following question: why are there 10 ACC synthase isoenzymes in Arabidopsis for the synthesis of the ethylene precursor ACC? While all of them have the same biochemical function, the question arises whether they have distinct or redundant biological function. The findings have the potential to allow a fundamental understanding of the role of multigene families in plants, a hallmark finding of the Arabidopsis Genome Sequencing project doc21852 none We will utilize a comparative genomics approach to understand the evolutionary forces and genetic events that have determined the outcome of the interactions between a major group of bacterial pathogens and diverse crop species. A broad range of genetic mechanisms has been shown to influence the evolution of disease resistance in plants. It is becoming apparent that different mechanisms may have been important at different stages and influence different parts of the resistance protein and that resistance genes may exhibit different rates of evolution. These different rates of evolution may be indicative of different characteristics of the pathogen ligands detected and suggest different efficacies in disease control strategies. We will characterize related series of bacterial proteins involved in pathogenicity, the plant targets they interact with, and the plant resistance genes that detect these genes. This will be done by: 1) identifying the majority of the so-called Type III effector genes in four strains of strains and species of the bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas; 2) determining the genetic variation in the plants ability to detect these effector proteins by analysis of diverse germplasm of lettuce, tomato, and Arabidopsis as well as a less detailed analysis of at least five other crop species; 3) isolating a subset of the plant targets of these effectors from Arabidopsis and the crop species; 4) characterizing the rates and evolution of known and novel resistance genes as well as the genes encoding the target proteins and to correlate the rates of evolution with the prevalence and fitness contribution of the ligands detected. This will provide a related series of these three interacting determinants of resistance and a matrix of the interactions between them. This will also provide insights into the basis of non-resistance and the potential durability of resistance genes. Understanding the molecular determinants of disease resistance has practical as well as fundamental importance. Lettuce and tomato are two of the top ten most valuable crops in the US and disease resistance is one of the most agriculturally important traits targeted in crop improvement programs. Understanding the molecular basis of specificity in plant-pathogen interactions and the events resulting in resistance will provide new possibilities for developing more durable disease resistance in pants and decrease the use of chemical protectants doc21853 none Award Rice, the second plant genome to be completely sequenced, has a relatively small genome of about 430 million base pairs. While rice is also amenable to genetic studies and transformation and is a model system for genome studies of the cereals, it is also an important crop. Currently, there are few tools for identifying the functions of sequenced genes for rice that are readily available to the research community. One of the most effective approaches to deciphering gene functions is through gene disruption by DNA insertions. In this project, we will develop efficient transposon tagging strategies for large-scale insertion mutagenesis in rice. Stable insertion lines will be generated containing random insertions of the maize En Spm transposons in japonica rice cv. Nipponbare, which is the cultivar selected for the International Rice Genome Sequencing Project. A publicly accessible database for reverse genetics containing sequences of DNA flanking insertions will be established, and the sequences will be linked to the rice genome database and the rice genome physical map. Overall, this project should develop a valuable resource for functional genomics in rice, as well as other cereals doc21854 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to use novel polymer processing techniques to fabricate high quality, inexpensive polymer (plastic) optical fiber image guides and other highly customized endoscopic devices. Polymer based imaging guides have several distinct advantages over their glass counterparts. The key advantages include reduced cost, a smaller bend radius, and increased ruggedness. Additional benefits include the ability to dope the polymer matrix with molecules that can be used as environmental probes or indicators, to tailor the imaging guide for specialized applications, and to impart diverse functionality into a single imaging guide. The cost of the polymer imaging guide is expected to be significantly lower than those currently in use. This will allow the polymer guides to be used as disposables if desired. Disposable endoscopes for one-time use will eliminate the need for sterilization, which is costly, often unreliable and time-consuming. The commercial applications of this project will be in the area of medical devices and instrumentation doc21855 none Although best known for their role in photosynthesis, plastids perform several essential functions, which include synthesis of hormones, amino acids, fatty acids, lipids, vitamins, nucleotides and secondary metabolites. Despite their essential role, little is known of the developmental signals that help drive the process of plastid differentiation.. To address this important agricultural and biological problem, we will take advantage of new tools that have been developed for genomic and proteomic studies. The availability of extensive plant genome sequences has enabled us to identify a set of approximately maize EST sequences that encode chloroplast targeted proteins. Through array profiling, we will examine the expression of these genes in the two photosynthetic cell types in maize, the bundle sheath and mesophyll. In parallel, we will initiate a broad survey of the estimated 3,000 proteins predicted to accumulate in plastids using highly sensitive mass spectroscopy techniques. The bioinformatic integration of proteomic and expression profiling data will provide a detailed picture of transcription and translational control mechanisms utilized by the maize photosynthetic plastids. Finally, transgenic plants carrying bundle sheath and mesophyll cell-specific markers will be constructed to help monitor the differentiation process. These GFP constructs will permit a detailed analysis of bundle sheath and mesophyll cell biology and facilitate the analysis of a series of maize plastid mutants. Several results are expected from this project, such as an improved understanding of the biochemical functions of the different plastid types and novel insights into the differentiation process. As several chloroplast functions are directly related to the agronomic performance of the maize plant, these studies will greatly improve our understanding and ability to engineer this important crop plant doc21856 none A grant has been Sharon Jansa at the University of Minnesota and Dr. Robert S. Voss at the American Museum of Natural History, New York to study the evolutionary history of South American didelphid marsupials (Didelphimorphia: Didelphiadae), commoly known as New World opossums. The16 extant genera of didelphid marsupials comprise 75 species and represent the most diverse surviving lineage of the old endemic mammalian fauna in South America; today these species constitute the only substantially intact radiation of marsupial mammals outside Australasia. While didelphids have long been of interest to biogeographers and comparative biologists, their evolutionary history remains poorly understood. The principal goal of this project is to infer the historical relationships among didelphid marsupials in order to provide a secure framework for interpreting their evolution and historical biogeography. We will collect and analyze DNA sequence data from five, slowly-evolving nuclear genes with a wide range of biochemical functions for a core group of 42 species representing all 16 genera of didelphid marsupial. The resulting 8 kilobase dataset will be the largest comparative molecular dataset for these species and will provide critical data for reconstructing their evolutionary history. Among other applications, the results of this study will contribute to historical biogeographic research in South America, provide a framework for understanding the morphological evolution of marsupials, and inform the future use of didelphid exemplars in comparative biology and palaeontology. In addition, the resulting database of DNA sequences will provide materials for understanding gene function and the dynamics of molecular evolution in mammalian radiations. Didelphid marsupials have long been overlooked in studies of mammalian systematics and molecular evolution. The results of this study will fill a conspicuous gap in our understanding of mammalian evolutionary biology.awarded to Dr doc21857 none Moran, Mickel, and Motley The fern genus Elaphoglossum contains about 650 species and is one of the world s largest fern genera. Most species occur in the American tropics, particularly in Central America and the Andean countries. This three-year grant will enable scientists at The New York Botanical Garden to continue their collaborative taxonomic study of the genus. Using evidence from DNA sequences and morphology, they will produce an evolutionary tree to the species and use this tree as a framework for addressing questions about evolution and biogeography. Examples of some evolutionary questions they will pose are: What are the main evolutionary groups within Elaphoglossum? How does the evolutionary tree obtained from DNA studies compare to a previous classification system based on morphology? Did certain critical morphological characters evolve once within the genus, or did they arise several times? Examples of biogeographic questions are: How many different introductions of Elaphoglossum species have occurred onto the Hawaiian Islands, and what were their geographic source areas? What are the evolutionary relationships between the species in the American tropics and Africa-Madagascar? To answer these questions, it is necessary to collect samples of the species in various parts of the world. Field trips will be taken to species-rich countries in Latin America, such as Ecuador and Bolivia, and several colleagues will be collecting plants in the tropics of Africa, Madagascar, and Asia. The samples will be used to study morphological characteristics and to extract and sequence DNA, all aimed at providing data to construct an evolutionary tree. This research will address major evolutionary and biogeographic questions about one of the world s largest groups of ferns. The results should provide a useful basis for comparison to other groups of plants. One spin-off of this project is that many new species will be discovered and provided with scientific names. The study will have educational benefits to the post-doctoral scientist and graduate students involved in the project, including training in both laboratory methods for studying DNA and fieldwork in the American tropics. Dr. Moran teaches the Tropical Plant Systematics course (both English and Spanish versions) in Costa Rica for the Organization for Tropical Studies, and will involve students in this course in field projects relating to the proposed research. Several members of the New York Chapter of the American Fern Society will grow spores to study the characteristics of the gametophytes (the sexual phase of the life cycle) and will thus be involved in the project. The public and scientists will be informed about activities and results on the project s web site, the Elaphoglossum homepage maintained at the New York Botanical Garden doc21858 none The goal of this research is to elucidate the structure of a detergent-like molecule, SapB, required for morphological differentiation in the bacterium Streptomyces coelicolor. The developmental cycle of this microbe begins with the germination of exospores resulting in the extension of multinucleate vegetative hyphae into a solid substrate. These form a dense network of filaments until signaled to differentiate into upwardly growing hydrophobic aerial hyphae, which then septate into spores to begin the cycle anew. Aerial hyphae formation is dependent on the products of the bald (bld) genes, which in turn regulate the production of SapB; bld mutants produce smooth colonies consisting only of vegetative substrate hyphae and are blocked in SapB biosynthesis. Extracellular complementation is observed when purified SapB is added to any bld mutant during growth on rich medium. SapB has a structural role in differentiation, functioning as a surfactant to facilitate upward growth of aerial filaments by releasing the surface tension at the colony air interface. The gene(s) for SapB and its structure remain elusive. This program of research will use a biochemical approach to purify and elucidate the structure of SapB. Structural studies will begin with SapB purification. Its structure will then be determined by mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance studies to be performed in the laboratories of Drs. Charles Iden and Francis Picard, respectively at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. The resolution of the structure of SapB will advance the understanding of the role of extracellular communication in the morphological differentiation in this filamentous bacterium. In addition, this research will increase our appreciation of the role of intercellular communication in developmental processes in general. Undergraduate students will be involved in the project and trained in Molecular and Cell Biology doc21859 none Perhaps our greatest remaining scientific challenge is to understand the biological basis for human consciousness. To approach this we need knowledge of neurophysiology, systems neurobiology and the emergent properties of the human brain as a whole. However, an important component is also to understand neural development, which involves the progressive unfolding of genetic information during development, through systems of signals between cells. This investigator uses a simple system which is technologically accessible to model the development of the nervous system: the developing eye of the fruit-fly Drosophila melanogaster. The fly eye is comprised of about 800 similar facets. Four days after fertilization, patterning begins when an indentation (called the morphogenetic furrow) begins at the back of the future eye and sweeps forward to the front edge. A new column of precisely spaced cell clusters is laid down every two hours, and these found the eye facets. This investigator, and others, have found that the furrow involves the interaction of a small number of molecular signals. One positive and one negative signaling protein act together, ultimately to control the activity of a crucial, central enzyme in the target cells: MAPK. A simplified view is that the instruction of a cell to be a neuron is the activation of MAPK. Recently, this investigator has used NSF funding to show that the two signals can integrate at the point of MAPK activity, through negative feedback via an enzyme that inactivates MAPK. Four questions will now be pursued: 1) How does the negative signal control the inactivating enzyme? 2) Does this enzyme act on MAPK alone? 3) Does this enzyme act in other developmental processes? 4) Does the new enzyme interact with other pathways? Beyond his scientific work, this investigator makes service contributions to his field (organizing conferences, peer review for NSF, NIH and twenty different journals) and trains PhD students and post-doctoral fellows. His wider contributions include mentoring high-school and undergraduate students and a high-school teacher. He also participates in a program to co-train post-doctoral researchers in teaching as well as research, in partnership with local historically black colleges doc21860 none Osteology and Phylogeny of Early Tertiary Perissodactyls (Mammalia) of Eurasia A grant has been awarded to Dr. Holbrook at Rowan University to study how different groups of perissodactyls are related to one another. Perissodactyls are a group of mammals that includes the living horses, rhinoceroses, and tapirs, as well as a host of fossils that date back to as early as about 55 million years ago. Although perissodactyls are well known, their origins and the pattern of their evolution is not well understood. One reason for this is that fossil perissodactyls are known from many parts of the globe, and few studies have even attempted to cover this broad geographic distribution in their investigations. Another reason is that, for many years, teeth were the only specimens known for most fossil perissodactyls, so most analyses limited themselves to studying tooth characteristics. This study will therefore accomplish two goals. First, it will provide the most extensive combination of data from North American and Eurasian perissodactyls, covering the two most important areas of early perissodactyl diversification. Second, it will include data from previous neglected areas of perissodactyl anatomy, specifically the skull and the postcranial skeleton. During the course of this study, Dr. Holbrook and his students will examine specimens of fossil and living perissodactyls found in museums throughout North America and Eurasia, including collections in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Germany, Russia, and China. They will examine teeth, skulls, and other elements of the skeletons of these specimens looking for features shared by different perissodactyls that will help elucidate their relationships. Ultimately, these data will be analyzed by computer in order to determine the best supported hypothesis of relationships. Once the pattern of perissodactyl evolution has been investigated, Dr. Holbrook and his colleagues will use this information to investigate other questions regarding perissodactyl evolution, in particular how perissodactyls came to be distributed on the various continents through geologic time. Throughout the course of this study, undergraduate students will be working with Dr. Holbrook and learning a great deal about the process of science and the techniques of vertebrate paleontology. This background will prepare the students for postgraduate study, including academic training as scientists. The results of this work will ultimately be presented at national and international scientific meetings and published in scientific journals doc21861 none Three mechanisms that promote the persistence of populations in uncertain environments are: 1) a variable age at maturation, 2) repeated reproduction, and 3) dispersal between populations. The project will study 18 amphibian species that breed in a complex of 32 natural sinkhole ponds. All individuals of 7 species are photographed whenever they are captured. Computer-assisted matching of these images yields data for capture-recapture models to estimate population sizes and vital rates. These estimates will allow direct evaluation of population dynamics and persistence in uncertain environments under realistic assumptions. The detailed model for the most common focal species, Ambystoma opacum, will guide construction of an individual-based model for Ambystoma tigrinum, a species listed as endangered in several states. Population dynamics in spatially and temporally varying environments comprise an important area of population biology because they determine the context of life history adaptation and population differentiation. This study is also important because population ecology is the foundation for community ecology and for the development of plans for managing populations for harvest, pest control, or conservation action. The request for imaging equipment is supported within this award as part of NSF s Facilitation Awards for Scientists and Engineers with Disabilities, a funding mechanism that enables scientists with disabilities to more fully engage in the research process. The project will support doctoral and post-doctoral research. Undergraduates will be employed as field assistants during the summer doc21862 none The investigators organize an international conference on mathematics in biology. The theme of the conference is Interdisciplinary Connections and Living Systems. The goals of the meeting are to highlight current top-level research, to provide a perspective on future research areas, to provide opportunities for career development to junior researchers, and to foster interactions between established researchers and junior researchers. The conference is linked with a short course on the mathematics of biological complexity designed for biologists, in order to provide opportunities as well for new collaborations to develop between empirical researchers and theoreticians. Quantitative approaches are becoming central to all components of research in the life sciences. With the rapid expansion of bioinformatics, computational biology, and proteomics, the underlying mathematical approaches that are essential to these fields are recognized as critical to further developments. Applications of mathematics to many areas that directly affect humans allows us to better evaluate the impacts of alternative management of natural systems, develop new techniques useful in biotechnology, and design more appropriate responses to health problems. The rapid developments in these areas require opportunities in particular for young researchers to gain perspective on the broad range of subjects that now define mathematical biology. The conference provides a method to carry this out as well as allowing younger researchers to participate in a formal mentoring program designed to enhance their ability to pursue a successful scientific career doc21863 none Replication and transcription from RNA templates are required for RNA viruses to cause diseases. These processes are also mechanistically interesting since the viral replication enzymes are the only class of template-dependent polymerases that naturally initiate and terminate RNA synthesis from the termini of the templates. Viral replication enzymes, hereafter called the replicase, are generally composed of a virally encoded RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp), and additional viral and host subunits. The replicase from Brome mosaic virus (BMV) can be enriched and solubilized from infected plants, thus permitting biochemical characterization. The BMV replicase can specifically recognize BMV RNAs and then precede through a number of biochemical steps, including de novo initiation, elongation, termination, and RNA recombination. Requirements for these steps in vitro nicely mimic the requirements for replication and recombination in vivo, thus providing insight into the least understood class of template-dependent polymerases. The goal of this project is to better define how the BMV replicase recognizes specific RNA sequences and goes through different steps of RNA synthesis. This research has four specific aims: 1) to examine the interaction between the replicase and core promoter RNAs; 2) to identify and characterize RNA sequences that cause pausing of the elongating replicase complex during RNA synthesis; 3) to examine the mechanism of RNA recombination in vitro; and 4) to further purify and characterize the components in the BMV replicase. Knowledge gained from the execution of these objectives will contribute to the basic understanding of virus replication. The use of BMV as a model system will directly benefit less well-studied systems that can cause diseases such as encephalitis, measles, and hepatitis. The detailed understanding of the different steps in viral RNA replication should uncover targets for the design of highly specific antiviral drugs doc21864 none Microtubules (MTs) are dynamic intracellular structural polymers that play critical roles in many cellular functions, including intracellular transport, the specification and establishment of cellular and developmental polarity, and cell division. Microtubule dynamics are modulated by a diverse group of proteins collectively referred to as microtubule-associated proteins (MAPs). XMAP215, a MAP first identified by Dr. Gard and isolated from eggs of the African frog Xenopus laevis, promotes the assembly of long, dynamic MTs by increasing the rates of both MT elongation and shortening in an end-specific manner. Recently, related proteins have been identified in taxonomically diverse organisms, including plants (Arabidopsis), yeast (S. cerevisiae and S. pombe), invertebrates (Drosophila and C. elegans), and humans, indicating that XMAP215 is a member of an ancient family of MAPs. The research to be performed under this award focuses on the relationship between XMAP215 structure and function. Specific questions to be addressed include: What is the relationship between XMAP215 structure and function? A. Do the domains identified by sequence alignment correspond to MT binding domains? B. Are HEAT repeats critical for XMAP215 function? Sequence analysis suggests that XMAP215 (and homologues in other organisms) contain four domains, each composed of multiple HEAT repeats, a protein motif thought to form a flexible scaffold for protein-protein interactions. A combination of in vitro and in vivo assays will be used to examine the relationship between XMAP215 structure and function, addressing the roles of XMAP215 domains and HEAT repeats in XMAP215 function. How does phosphorylation by the cell cycle kinase CDK1 and MARK kinase regulate XMAP215 function? Phosphorylation of XMAP215 by CDK1 in vitro reduces assembly promotion without reducing MT binding, suggesting that multiple binding sites for tubulin might be independently regulated by phosphorylation. To address the mechanism by which CDK1-dependent phosphorylation regulates XMAP215 function, site-directed mutagenesis will be used to replace threonine residues in the two predicted CDK1 target sequences in XMAP215 with aspartate (mimicking phosphorylation) or alanine (a non-phosphorylatable amino acid). The effects of these substitutions on XMAP215 function will be assayed in vitro and in vivo by expressing constructs bearing the mutations in transfected cells. Similar studies will target the three predicted target sequences for MARK, a MT-associated kinase known to regulate MAP-MT interactions in other cells. Are multiple homologs isoforms of XMAP215 expressed during mammalian (mouse) development? Transcripts encoding two isoforms of XMAP215 are differentially expressed during Xenopus development, and evidence for multiple transcripts in humans exists in the form of two cDNAs related to XMAP215 (KIAA and ch-TOG). However, little is known of the spatial and temporal patterns of expression or role(s) of XMAP215 homologues during mammalian development. XMAP215 homologs (MAP215) expressed during mouse development will be characterized at both RNA and protein levels using a variety of techniques, including Northern blots and reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) to identify and characterize mRNA transcripts, in situ hybridization to localize mRNA expression, and immunoblots to characterize protein expression. Finally, cloning and characterization of the gene encoding MAP215 in mice will lay the groundwork for future genetic studies of the role of MAP215 in mouse development. Results from this project will provide new insight into the structure and function of XMAP215 and its regulation by phosphorylation, which may also shed light on the function and regulation of other members of this ancient family of microtubule-associated proteins. The project will also support the training of undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral students doc21865 none Zedler Ecosystem degradation often involves the loss of topographic heterogeneity, a critical ecosystem property that declines as sediments fill in depressions, flatten surfaces and raise elevations. In southern California, coastal habitat that is highly valued for its support of endangered plants and animals has suffered catastrophic sedimentation, followed by altered species distributions and lowered biodiversity. When recovery is attempted, topographic complexity is typically ignored as sediments are excavated and restoration sites contoured by bulldozer. Insufficient vertical and horizontal heterogeneity might be a key constraint on the restoration of wetlands toward structural and functional equivalency with undisturbed sites. In this project, we will investigate how adding topographic heterogeneity might accelerate the progress of ecosystem restoration. The principal hypothesis is that adding vertical and horizontal pattern at to will facilitate the restoration of wetland structure and function. To test this hypothesis, an entire 8-ha tidal wetland restoration site within the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve (San Diego County, CA) was designed to support the large-scale, ecological experiment. The $3.1-million excavation was completed in February with the connection of the site to a main tidal channel, and we have monitored several attributes over the 22 months since tidal flushing was reinstated. We propose to take full advantage of the experimental treatments and examine the influence of (1) a vertical pattern of topographic heterogeneity, in the form of complex tidal creek networks, and (2) a horizontal pattern furnished by varying densities of planted salt marsh halophytes, on the diversity, abundance and composition of multiple response variables and trophic levels: geomorphology, algae, vascular plants, invertebrates, and fish. In addition to testing methods for recovering wetlands, the integrative work proposed herein will demonstrate the power of restoration experiments and contribute fundamental new insights into the relationship between topographic heterogeneity and the development of ecosystem structure (species composition and abundance) and function (e.g., foraging by fish). Conservation and Restoration Biology (CRB doc21866 none Mainelis The control of airborne microorganisms that are capable of causing serious health problems or even death has become a serious concern since the recent anthrax spore episode in the United States. Electric fields have been used to kill various bacteria, yeasts and spores in liquids, but have not been used to inactivate airborne microorganisms. This research will result in the development of a laboratory test facility for exposure and determination of the inactivation efficiency of airborne microorganisms by electrical fields of different magnitudes and polarity for different periods of time. Three different microorganisms will be used, one of which is a surrogate for anthrax spores i.e. Bacillus subtilis var. niger doc21867 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I Project proposes to functionalize TNT-metallofullerenes with highly water-soluble, steric-stabilizing ligands and to evaluate these materials as general MRI(Magnetic Resonance Imaging) contrast agents. Classical endohedral metallofullerenes are produced in exceedingly low yields and are unstable in air. In contrast, the development of trimetallic-nitride-template (TNT) process by the investigators has allowed the production of a new class of extremely stable endohedral metallofullerenes in sufficient research quantities. Biomedical applications in diagnostic and therapeutic areas offer a near-term opportunity to utilize these materials because the quantities required for such applications are relatively small, and these nanomaterials offer unique advantages over current systems. The TNT process allows the encapsulation of 1-3 paramagnetic lanthanides, isolating the metals from the body. Preliminary data indicates that hydroxylated, gadolinium-containing TNT-metallofullerenes increase the proton relaxation rate of surrounding water molecules significantly over currently used gadolinium chelates. However, aggregation of typical hydroxylated fullerenes prevents their maximum efficiency and utility. Addition of large, highly soluble ligands is expected to promote enhanced water solubility, deter aggregation, and deliver an even larger enhancement over current gadolinium MRI contrast agents. The commercial applications of this project are in the area of Biomedical Imaging doc21868 none Plant cells store a diverse variety of molecules in vacuoles. Storage is the central reason why plants are so important to humankind. The wars against cocaine and heroin result from the harvest of products in storage vacuoles, the morning coffee is brewed to release products stored in vacuoles, the flowers in our garden are there because of pigments stored in vacuoles, and the nutrition of domestic animals and humans ultimately depends upon proteins stored in plant vacuoles. Many molecules that are targets in plant biotechnology are stored in vacuoles. Only by understanding the different compartments, their internal contents and environment, and how proteins and membrane are directed to each, will we be able to program a cell to make and accumulate a desired product. The need to separate a digestive compartment similar to the yeast vacuole or mammalian lysosome from the storage compartments has resulted in a complex plant vacuolar system. Of the storage compartments, protein storage vacuoles have been best studied because proteins are relatively easy to track in a cell. In many plant cells, separate protein storage and lytic vacuoles coexist. Proteins are delivered to each from the Golgi complex by separate vesicular trafficking pathways, clathrin coated vesicles for the lytic pathway, and dense vesicles (or their equivalents)for the protein storage vacuole pathway. However,in developing seeds and certain other cells, the two pathways converge on the same vacuole. In this instance, for example in protein storage vacuoles in seeds, the resultant organelle is a multivesicular body, where the storage products are partitioned in the soup and lytic functions are partitioned into the internal vesicles. Thus the seed protein storage vacuole is a compound organelle,where two functionally distinct compartments exist within the limiting membrane. How proteins are delivered by the two separate vesicular pathways to the two compartments within the organelle is an important unsolved question in cell biology. This project focuses on mechanisms by which proteins are sorted into the protein storage vacuole pathway in the Golgi complex. Results from recent ligand binding experiments indicate that the lumenal domain of a plant RMR protein specifically interacts with the targeting determinants that sort proteins into the protein storage vacuole pathway. RMR proteins are integral membrane proteins that traffic from Golgi to the protein storage vacuole where they are incorporated into a membrane-containing crystalloid within the storage compartment.Thus it is likely they serve as a unique type of sorting receptor.RMR proteins are also expressed in avian and mammalian cells. The association and dissociation constants, and stoichiometry, for binding of RMR protein lumenal domains for a model ligand will be determined. The function of RMR proteins in plants will be assessed by generating antisense knockouts in tobacco and by identifying transposon T DNA insertions in individual RMR protein genes in Arabidopsis. Motifs in the RMR proteins cytoplasmic tails responsible for traffic from Golgi to the storage compartment will be identified. A separate experimental strategy will address mechanisms by which the storage compartment crystalloid is formed. Dr. Rogers laboratory has purified protein storage vacuole crystalloids away from other membranes in the vacuole. Using a proteomics approach, the integral membrane proteins specifically incorporated into PSV crystalloids, and then tonoplast and globoids in B. napus seeds will be identified. The mechanisms by which a tomato storage protein related to 11S globulins that appears to have transmembrane helices is incorporated into crystalloid membranes will be defined. Although protein storage compartments were thought initially to be unique to plant cells, evidence now emerging indicates that animal cells also have a dense vesicle pathway, and that multivesicular body endosomes in animal cells may partition two separate functions within the same organelle. Thus,an understanding of fundamental processes of compartmentation in plant cells may have broader impact in cell biology. The ability to visualize the two compartments easily in protein storage vacuoles and to track proteins in each of the vesicular pathways provides great advantages for use of a plant system in these studies doc21869 none Rohlf Ordinary statistical methods cannot be used to study variation or correlations among species because the fundamental assumption of independence of observations is violated due to the pattern of similarity expected as a result of their common evolutionary history. This project is concerned with the development and evaluation of special statistical methods that can be used to take this dependence into account. Work is proposed on generalized least-squares models, mixed effects models, generalized linear models (using extensions for non-independent data), and generalizations for the analysis of multivariate data (especially for suites of shape variables obtained from geometric morphometric studies). Generalizations to models of reticulated evolution and geographic sampling will also be investigated. These methods will be applied to several data sets in order to evaluate their usefulness in practice. Support for a graduate student is included in the project, along with enhancements to software programs that the Principal Investigator has made available for many years to the science community doc21870 none Viviparity-live-bearing modes of reproduction, rather than egg-laying-has evolved independently in lineages of many animals. It therefore is a consequence of convergent evolution, with the same feature occurring in taxa that do not share a common ancestor that bears the trait (homoplasy). Viviparity in amphibians has many different expressions of these independent evolutions including retention of the internally fertilized ova in the oviducts with our without maternal nutrition after yolk is resorbed, intraoviductal cannibalism, retention of externally fertilized ova in the skin of the mother s back, and others. This research program will investigate the mechanisms by which viviparity has arisen by comparing 1) features of parental ovaries, oviducts, and skin with those of related species that are egg-layers to elucidate the effects of pregnancy maintenance; 2) patterns of development of embryos of taxa with different modes of viviparity and with related egg-laying species; 3) modes of retention of the developing embryos, including the hormonal substrate as measured morphologically; 4) modes of nutrition of the developing young; 5) the features of metamorphosis of the young of viviparous species as compared with those of related egg-layers; and 6) length of pregnancy and the environmental and physiological cues for birth. The study will be one of the first to consider mechanisms by which homoplasy has evolved, rather than simply documenting instances of such patterns of evolution doc21871 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will fabricate a nanostructured, palm-size gas chromatography (GC) for the in-situ, and low cost analysis of volatile chemicals. Gas chromatography has been widely used as an analytical instrument for volatile organic compounds. The existing GC instruments, including the portable ones, have inherent limitations that make them unsuitable for the continuous, on-line in-situ monitoring applications. The proposed program will design and demonstrate a nanotechnology-based miniature GC to detect, identify, and quantify chemical pollutants. The proof of principle demonstration is based on an EPA furnished test matrix. The miniature GC is expected to be pocket sized, low power (1-5 W), low cost ( $500 unit) and low maintenance. In addition to the EPA environmental monitoring applications, the miniature GC has a variety of other applications for DOD, NASA, and other government agencies involve in chemical warning medicine, homeland security, and demilitarization and treaty verification doc21872 none The goal of the proposed Project ACCESS is to increase the number of associate s and Bachelor s degrees in Engineering granted to residents of South Central Texas. The following activities will be implemented in order to achieve the project s goal and outcomes: 1) Establishing dual credit engineering courses in at least five area high schools; 2) Training faculty at community college in distance education and or infusion of state-of-the-art technology into engineering curricula; 3) Supplementing community college curriculum with state-of-the-art engineering education materials and software; 4) Converting at least 75% of San Antonio College Engineering Courses and Engineering Math will be converted into Internet format; 5) developing a new engineering course, Engineering Mathematics, for San Antonio College Engineering and Dual Credit students; 6) SAC will obtain new articulation agreements for 2 + 2 transfers with at least two additional 4-year Engineering programs in the South and Central Texas area; and 7) other Alamo Community College District and area engineering faculty will be made aware of the availability of new curricula. San Antonio College will work closely with the University of Texas at San Antonio, Texas A 2) at least 30 students each semester will be enrolled in one or more Web-based Engineering course; 3) the number of minority Engineering majors at San Antonio College who transfer to Engineering programs at four-year institutions will be increased by at least 200%; and 4) the numbers of minority students graduating from San Antonio College with an Associate s Degree in Engineering will be increased by at least 200 doc21873 none The PI seeks to continue his work in the use of zeolites to help effect diastereoselective and enantioselective photochemical reactions. The PI proposes that the cations which are present in the zeolite cage, along with the photoreactive molecule and chiral auxiliary, are critical to the success or failure of the asymmetric photoreactions. Cations present, hydronium ion concentrations present, and chiral inductors or auxiliaries present will be systematically varied. The main goal of the project period is to use this information to develop a model to help one predict and plan enantioselective photoreactions within zeolites. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. V. Ramamurthy of the Department of Chemistry at Tulane University. Dr. Ramamurthy will work on using zeolites to facilitate asymmetric photochemical reactions. The photochemical reactions to be studied produce molecules which are chiral (have two nonsuperimposable mirror images) and make only one of the two possible forms (a single enantiomer). Development of this family of reactions is one of the most important problems facing the pharmaceutical industry today. When developed, Dr. Ramamurthy s work could be applied to the syntheses of a number of biologically active molecules. Students trained during the course of this work will gain skills needed by the pharmaceutical industry which now produces a number of single enantiomer compounds doc21874 none The primary goal of the creation of the Robotics Academy is to form a new multi-disciplinary, project-based teaching and learning environment for undergraduate students, involving students from different disciplines in the discovery process and exposing them to the joy of research and design through hands-on experience with real world problems. The Academy will include students (and teachers) from multiple universities (Tufts University and University of Nevada, Reno), giving the students and teachers the opportunity to benefit from specialties at other universities, as well as to collaborate with others remotely over the Internet. Under the proposed system, junior students from multiple disciplines (i.e., mechanical engineering, electrical engineering computer science, human factors, biochemistry chemistry, and child development education) will join the Robotics Academy, completing their major program of studies through a pre-defined robotics thread . The robotics thread in each discipline consists of a set of courses that introduces the students to robotics and how it applies to their chosen fields. During their two years in the Academy, they will work in a team, composed of four students from different disciplines, on a common robotics project. This project will constitute their undergraduate honors thesis. Each multi-disciplinary Academy team will work on a robotic project in one of 4 areas: Medical Robotics, Tele-robotics, Nanorobotics, and Robotic Toys. Medical robotic projects will be led by the responsible faculty in the Academy, in conjunction with surgeons (Tufts School of Medicine and the New England Medical Centre), veterinarians (with Tufts Veterinary School), or occupational therapists (Tufts University Boston School of Occupational Therapy). Through their robotics solution, students in these projects will aim to improve the quality of life of the patient, or improve the safety and productivity for a particular medical application. Tele-robotics projects will introduce students to concepts and applications of remote control and manipulation. This work will be done in conjunction with NASA scientists and will teach students about remote exploration. The Nanorobotics project will put students at the forefront of modern robotics, involving them in the cutting edge of nano-fabrication and control techniques. The final project area will be in the design of educational robotic toys. This project will build on the highly successful collaboration with the LEGO Corporation and the development of ROBOLAB at Tufts. As a team, each team member will learn from and contribute to the process in the life cycle of the robotic solution. For instance, the mechanical engineering student will work on robot design and fabrication; the computer science electrical engineering student will design the circuitry and program the intelligence of the robot. The human factors student will design the user interface to ensure safe and effective use, while the pre-service teacher on the team will implement the engineering education outreach efforts. In addition, senior students in the Academy will act as mentors to junior students from another discipline. This arrangement allows for the students to receive individual attention, while encouraging communication across the disciplines. Each senior will also be responsible for teaching one Academy Hands-On Seminar, an afternoon class in some practical aspect of robotics that will be useful to all students in the academy. For instance, a mechanical engineering senior might offer a course in ProEngineer and CAD, whereas a child development student might offer a class in cognition and learning strategies. Five robotics projects are planned for the first year, with two new projects being introduced in each subsequent year. Progress of the proposed program will be assessed throughout the three years of proposed funding. Results of the robotics projects will be documented on the Academy website and disseminated at conferences. The Academy is expected to be self-sustaining after three years, through industrial support for individual projects doc21875 none Multicellular development depends on cell-cell signaling and the consequences of this dialogue between cells, which are often large-scale changes in gene expression. Hence, a fundamental goal of developmental biologists is to determine how cell-cell signals orchestrate global changes in gene transcription. The multicellular nature of the Myxococcus xanthus developmental cycle makes it an excellent model system for studying this basic problem in developmental biology. During M. xanthus development, large groups of cells migrate to focal points and begin constructing a multicellular structure called a fruiting body. Once the fruiting body is molded into its final form, cells inside this structure differentiate into dormant, stress-resistant spores. Many M. xanthus genes are developmentally regulated, and cell-cell signaling is required for the temporal expression of these genes. However, what happens between production of these cell-cell signals and transcription of developmental genes has remained relatively uncharted territory. This project focuses on a family of proteins that play a prominent role in regulating these coordinated changes in gene expression, the NtrC family of transcriptional activators. It has been proposed that M. xanthus uses a series of NtrC-like proteins to activate expression of specific sets of genes at specific times in development; seven different NtrC-like activators that are required for development have been uncovered. Using genetic and biochemical approaches, this research project will examine the role that NtrC-like activators play in orchestrating developmental gene expression in M. xanthus doc21876 none Carson LTREB We have underway a long-term, large-scale experiment that is addressing one of the primary hypotheses proposed to explain the maintenance of tree species diversity in tropical forests, namely, that mammals acting as herbivores, seed predators, and dispersers, are critical determinants of tropical tree diversity and abundance. This experiment is essentially a community-level test of the Janzen-Connell Hypothesis that predicts that the removal of ground-dwelling mammals will ultimately cause a decline in tropical tree diversity. Under this scenario, mammals preferentially prey on the juveniles of tree species that are abundant and ultimately keep these tree species in check. The study system is mature-phase tropical moist forest in central Panama on Barro Colorado Island (BCI) and the adjacent mainland (Gigante Peninsula). Since , we have monitored the consequences of excluding ground-dwelling mammals in 8 large ( m 2 ) fenced exclosures and adjacent unfenced control plots. Four pairs of treatment and control plots were established on BCI and 4 pairs were located on Gigante in similar mature forest. Prior to initiating any treatments, we censused, measured, identified, and tagged all woody plants 50 cm in height in all plots. In addition, we quantified newly recruited seedlings in 28 smaller subplots in each large plot. In total, we have now followed the fate of more than 60,000 individual seedlings and saplings. Overall, the exclusion of mammals led to a substantial and sustained increase in seedling density. The results of this experiment to date suggest that excluding mammals may significantly increase woody species diversity of the seedling layer at least in the short-term (~10 yrs). Thus, our results contrast sharply with the community-level predictions of the Janzen-Connell hypothesis. We propose a new conceptual model that suggests that the consequences of the short term removal of mammals (2-25 yrs) from tropical forests, whether by experimental exclusion or more broadly via over hunting, will cause first an increase in woody species diversity and thereafter potentially a decrease (see Fig. 1). This result will first appear in the seedling layer (1-50 cm in height) and then move as a wave through larger size classes. The data to date, however, even after 7-years, remain equivocal. The short term increase in diversity clearly documented inside exclosure plots may be a transient effect of the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event. Specifically, the ENSO event caused a severe and extended dry season that increased seedling mortality. Because there was a higher seedling density inside the exclosures, these sites may have been buffered from the drought. We believe that it is imperative that we continue this experiment and monitor the next phase as the seedling layer moves into the small sapling size class. The conservation implications of this work are clear; the overexploitation of the mammalian fauna in many tropical forest reserves, parks, and fragments may have long-term negative consequences for forest diversity that may not become apparent for decades. It is only through long-term experiments that we can unequivocally separate out short-term dynamics from long-term forest trajectories doc21877 none Evidence for arms-race coevolution between predator and prey will be evaluated in a unique natural interaction between toxic newts and their resistant snake predators. Newts possess the neurotoxin tetrodotoxin (TTX), which blocks sodium channels in nerves and muscles. No known predator can ingest TTX and survive except for garter snakes of the genus Thamnophis. Previous work demonstrated that predator and prey have matched levels of defensive and exploitative abilities, but the source of newt toxicity is still unknown. High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) will be used to assay levels of toxin in laboratory bred and reared newts to determine whether the requisite individual, genetic and population variation exists for newts to evolve in response to predators, allowing an evaluation of whether observed patterns of matching are consistent with an arms race view of coevolution. Understanding the interactions between species that drive coevolution is a major goal of evolutionary biology. Coevolution, in which one species evolves in response to another species, is thought to be one of the major engines of biodiversity. Although coevolution is thought to be a common outcome of many ecological interaction, there are strong theoretical and empirical reasons to suspect that predator-prey interactions might be different. This research will shed important light on natural variation in an important neurotoxin, TTX, which is used widely in studies of nerve function and development, by identifying the sources of TTX in amphibians doc21878 none When a body is threatened by foreign pathogens, expression of a variety of immune system genes allows cells to react to this threat and initiate an immune response. Central to inducing this immune response is the activation of the master regulator factor, the class II transactivator (CIITA). CIITA acts in the nucleus of cells to induce the expression of genes necessary for the presentation of foreign peptides on the cell surface. The CIITA protein is know to be present in both the cytoplasmic and nuclear compartments of cells, although the significance for this bimodal distribution and the factors that regulate it are unclear. It has been well established that the addition or subtraction of phosphate group moieties to a cellular protein can modify the activity and localization of that particular protein. Preliminary data indicates that CIITA is indeed subject to phosphorylation; however, the effect this phosphorylation has on regulating the function of the CIITA protein is unknown. One hypothesis is that phosphorylation of CIITA specifically present in the nucleus shuts down CIITA-regulated gene expression and subsequently induces the export of CIITA from the nucleus out to the cytoplasm. This may allow the organism to rapidly and precisely control the timing and extent of CIITA activity, and therefore mediate the magnitude of the immune response. This project will examine this hypothesis by: 1) identifying the cellular mechanisms and factors that mediate phosphorylation of CIITA; 2) determining the effect phosphorylation has on CIITA activity; and 3) identifying the protein domains that mediate the export of CIITA from the nucleus. Understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms that control CIITA activity will be crucial to devising strategies to manipulate the immune system and alter immune responses. This project will identify the cellular mechanisms by which the immune system is regulated and signaled to respond to the presence of foreign pathogens. Laboratory experiments will determine how the central control protein, CIITA, is structurally modified and regulated and what effect these modifications have on the function of the protein within cells. This research will provide a basis for generating therapeutic strategies to modify and enhance the therapeutic abilities of the immune system at the molecular and cellular level. Additionally, during the three-year timeframe of this project, undergraduate students will participate in the program as summer or academic year interns, establishing the foundation for further curricular development and strengthening undergraduate scientific training at Sarah Lawrence College doc21879 none Champlin Analysis of the development of adult-specific tissues during insect metamorphosis is providing a wealth of information regarding mechanisms used to coordinate growth, patterning and differentiation in animals. Adult development begins in the larva and precursors for adult-specific structures such as the wing and compound eye are typically present at the time of pupation in the form of discrete packets of cells called imaginal discs. The familiar and well-characterized example provided by the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, in which the imaginal discs are present through the entire larval stage, appears to be a derived condition. In contrast, imaginal discs in apparently the majority of holometabolous species are not created until the final larval instar. Little is known about the development of these late-forming imaginal discs. The current studies focus on the late-forming imaginal eye disc of the moth, Manduca sexta. Prior to forming the imaginal eye disc early in the final larval instar, the adult eye precursor cells in Manduca function as fully-differentiated larval epidermal cells. Members of the Pax-6 and Six gene families are thought to play essential early roles in eye development of all animals. Portions of these genes have been isolated and their expression will be characterized as the eye disc is being formed. A combination of in vivo and in vitro studies will be done to follow gene expression as the larval epidermal program is turned off and the adult eye developmental program is activated. A central goal of these studies will be to establish the regulation of these events by the hormones that control insect metamorphosis, juvenile hormone and ecdysteroid. Scientists and nonscientists of all ages and backgrounds find insect metamorphosis a particularly appealing issue. This attracts undergraduates from a variety of backgrounds to participate in the research program. Undergraduates as well as graduate students will be integral participants and it is anticipated that they will be coauthors on primary research papers. The proposed studies are expected to significantly broaden our understanding of the regulation of insect metamorphosis and the findings will be communicated to the general public as well as the scientific community doc21880 none Fire ant colony fitness and worker polymorphism Walter R. Tschinkel Project Darwin considered the existence of a sterile worker caste in social insects to be a challenge to his theory of evolution by natural selection. After all, how could the traits of an individual that did not reproduce be passed on to the next generation? The answer that Darwin and his followers have generally accepted is that the colony is the reproductive unit on which natural selection acts. Thus, whatever worker traits allowed the colony to place more new colonies in the next generation would be favored by natural selection. The great majority of ant species have only two physical castes: reproductive individuals (queens), and more-or-less sterile workers of a single size and shape. In about 15% of ant species, the workers are present in a great range of sizes (up to -fold difference in weight) and shapes. Such worker polymorphism, as it is called, is always associated with further division of labor within the worker caste. It has long been assumed that worker polymorphism benefits the colony by increasing colony efficiency, so that the savings can be invested in additional reproductives, enhancing colony fitness (sexual production). Several tests of surrogates for fitness (foraging, brood-rearing, etc.) have yielded equivocal results, but none of these surrogates are tightly linked to sexual production. There has never been a direct test of the effects of worker polymorphism on colony fitness, that is, on the production of sexuals. The proposed experiments will be the first direct test of the value of worker polymorphism to colony fitness. In a large, 2-yr field experiment on the fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, worker pupae of selected sizes will be transferred among colonies such that one set of colonies will be enhanced in large workers, another in small workers, a third will serve as unaltered control, and a fourth as undisturbed control. The colony fitness of these experimental colonies will be measured by collecting the total annual sexual production using tent-traps. Effects (if any) of altering the worker polymorphism might be either direct through involvement of large workers in sexual production, or indirect through altered territorial defense or foraging. Therefore, the food quantity and quality, as well as territory size will also be monitored and compared to controls. The results of these field experiments will be supplemented with a series of laboratory experiments that will test each possible link (direct, food, territory) between worker polymorphism and colony sexual production. The results will address a fundamental issue of great interest to evolutionary biology and social insect biology doc21881 none This award provides partial support for the Gordon Research Conference on Correlated Electrons to be held June 29 - July 3 on the Campus of Colby College in Waterville Maine. NSF funds will be used to partially defray the registration costs of advanced graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and young faculty with no other support. The physics of correlated electrons is both rich in basic science challenges and pregnant with possibilities for technological impact. The conference will cover a broad range of topics that are among the most active in this field including, superconductivity and related properties of two-dimensional electrons in organic-molecule field-effect-transistor systems, ferromagnetism in diluted magnetic semiconductors and other low-electron-density systems, and new advances in experimental and theoretical studies of oxide superconductivity. %%% This award provides partial support for the Gordon Research Conference on Correlated Electrons to be held June 29 - July 3 on the Campus of Colby College in Waterville Maine. NSF funds will be used to partially defray the registration costs of advanced graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and young faculty with no other means of support. The physics of correlated electrons is both rich in basic science challenges and pregnant with possibilities for technological impact. The conference will cover a broad range of topics that are among the most active in this field. Conference highlights include reports on the latest advances of efforts to understand ferromagnetism in semiconductors, a phenomenon that could enable long-term information storage and information processing to occur in the same semiconductor device, and reports on superconductivity controlled by gate voltages in organic materials, a phenomenon that could lead to room temperature superconductivity doc21882 none Title of Proposal: Skin lipids and cutaneous water loss among larks along an aridity gradient. Principal Investigator: Dr. Joseph B. Williams, Dept Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH . A major evolutionary event that shaped current vertebrate life was the transition from water to land. During this transition, animals evolved skin that reduced water loss. With the later development of the ability of maintain high body temperature, called endothermy, problems of water loss were exacerbated because high metabolic rates are associated with increased water losses from respiratory passages and by excretion. With high rates of energy expenditure and water loss, endotherms make poor candidates for living in deserts, regions of high ambient temperature, low rainfall, and low plant growth. Yet despite this, birds occupy the driest deserts in the world. Recent work has indicated that arid-adapted larks have a reduced total evaporative water loss, the sum of respiratory water loss and water loss through the skin, compared with mesic relatives within the same family. Desert birds could reduce their total evaporative water loss by decreasing their water loss through their skin. Research suggests that the barrier to water vapor diffusion in vertebrates resides in the non-living outer layer of the epidermis. This proposal outlines an integrated study designed to advance our understanding of the interplay between environment, water loss through the skin, skin structure, lipid composition of the outer layer of the epidermis, and the effect that increased cutaneous water loss has on behavior and or survival in a natural setting. The comparative method and controlled experiments varying temperature, water vapor content of the air, and hydration state will be used to examine adaptation of the avian skin to desert conditions and the role of reversible phenotypic plasticity on water loss through the skin. Variation in physiological phenotype may also result from differences in environment during development. Experiments are planned that shed light on how variation in the water content of the air during development influences cutaneous water loss in adults. Characterization of the potential for both short-term and evolutionary change within populations will be of crucial importance in predicting changes in distribution and the probability of extinction with the rise in temperature of the earth as a result of global warming doc21883 none Aquatic photosynthetic organisms account for almost 50% of the Earth s CO2 fixation and O2 evolution. The fixation of CO2 by algae plays an important role in the global carbon cycle, and most photosynthesis in the ocean is accomplished by phytoplankton, single-celled photosynthetic organisms. Carbon dioxide diffusion is almost 10,000 times faster in air than in water and almost all phytoplankton and macroalgae have a mechanism that concentrates CO2 from the environment for photosynthesis. The CO2 concentrating mechanism is essential for photosynthesis at atmospheric levels of CO2 and for the survival of phytoplankton. In this study, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii will be used to identify components of the CO2 concentrating mechanism. C. reinhardtii will be used as the experimental organism since it is a simple unicellular green alga with a single chloroplast. C. reinhardtii also possesses a robust CO2 concentrating system and can be grown photoautophically using CO2 as the carbon source or heterotrophically using acetate as the carbon source. The CO2 concentrating mechanism of C. reinahrdtii will be studied using an insertional mutagenesis approach. Insertional mutagenesis allows for the direct isolation of genes associated with a mutant phenotype, thus permitting a genetic and biochemical analysis of function. In previous work from our laboratory, a large number of mutants that cannot grow on low concentrations of CO2 were generated by transforming C. reinhardtii cells with BleR, a gene encoding resistance to the antibiotic Zeocin. In these mutants that cannot grow on low CO2 concentrations, we hypothesize that the inserted BleR gene has disrupted a gene essential to the CO2 concentrating mechanism. We now propose to characterize these mutants physiologically and genetically and identify the interrupted genes. Mutants exhibiting linkage of the BleR insert to poor growth on low CO2 will be tested for CO2 fixation and inorganic carbon accumulation. Once inserted into the C. reinhardtii genome, BleR offers unique sequences allowing the use of inverse PCR or TAIL-PCR and these methods will be used to identify the interrupted gene. It is expected that some of the insertions will be in genes encoding transport proteins or carbonic anhydrases required for the delivery of CO2 to the enzyme that fixes CO2, ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase oxygenase. It is also expected that genes encoding proteins involved in photorespiration and the low CO2 signal transduction pathway will be disrupted. The characterization of the proteins of the CO2 concentrating mechanism will add to our understanding of how algae have increased their efficiency of CO2 fixation. An understanding of this process will also help scientists predict how marine organisms might respond to increasing global CO2 concentrations. This research will also contribute to the training of students at the undergraduate and graduate level. Graduate students will learn molecular biology methods and apply these methods to the ecophysiological question of how algae acquire CO2 for photosynthesis. Undergraduates researchers will also contribute to this project, gaining valuable research experience. Our research program has attracted a number of undergraduates from under-represented groups and we will continue to recruit from these groups doc21849 none Pathogens and parasites are a major component of biological diversity, and have important impacts on natural populations. A central question in host-parasite ecology concerns what features of host behavior, life history, and environment best explain the diversity and evolution of infectious diseases. Significant theoretical progress has advanced our understanding of factors that influence infectious disease dynamics within populations, yet relatively few studies have analyzed ecological variables that underlie observed variation in pathogen diversity and characteristics. This project will examine patterns of parasite diversity across three mammalian orders to explicitly test predictions derived from both epidemiological models and island biogeography theory. Major questions this project will address include (1) What are the key ecological variables that determine variation in the types and diversity of parasites in wild mammal populations? (2) How do parasite transmission mode and the degree of specificity depend on host ecology? (3) Does evolutionary diversification of hosts correlate with patterns of parasite species richness? (4) Does knowledge of parasite diversity have important implications for wildlife conservation? Establishing a large database on the pathogens and parasites infecting wild mammals is critical to conducting comprehensive analyses and represents a major goal of this project. The investigators have recently assembled a large database on the pathogens and parasites of primates and will extend this effort to two other well-studied groups - carnivores and ungulates. These databases capture (i) ecological, behavioral and life history traits relevant to theoretical models of disease spread, (ii) records of parasites and pathogens recovered from wild populations, (iii) data on parasite transmission mode and degree of host specificity, and (iv) phylogenetic information on the hosts. Database development requires an immense effort and following this study all data will be made freely available over the World Wide Web so that other scientists can access the fruits of this labor. Understanding factors that underlie parasite diversity and characteristics is vital to managing vulnerable wildlife populations and mitigating threats to human health. This study extends the scope of previous host-parasite comparative work by examining a rich diversity of both micro- and macroparasites, including information on parasite characteristics, and by assessing phylogenetic information involving tree topology, branch lengths and rates of host diversification. Analytical comparative methods will control for sampling effort, test multiple variables simultaneously, and will assess whether host and parasite traits are correlated with phylogeny. A synthetic approach that links ecology, parasitology, epidemiology, and phylogenetic comparative methods is crucial for developing a broad conceptual framework to explain parasite diversity and characteristics in relation to host features. To advance these goals, the investigators will organize three annual workshops composed of experts from each of these disciplines to refine predictions for comparative research, explore methods for examining ecological and evolutionary interactions in host-parasite assemblages, and chart future directions for both theoretical and empirical work doc21885 none PI: Gilroy, Simon PROJECT Gravity is a fundamental signal that regulates plant growth and form. Despite its importance to plant success, the cellular and molecular events whereby higher plants sense and respond to this most pervasive and constant of environmental signals are essentially unknown. In the root, gravity is perceived in the columella cells of the root cap and this signal is converted to oriented growth in the elongation zone through a mechanism likely involving asymmetrical auxin redistribution. The goal of this research project is to define the cell and molecular nature of the initial gravity-related signaling events generated in the columella cells, using the roots of Arabidopsis thaliana as a model system. Previous research has identified changes in cytoplasmic and cell wall pH as important initial events in gravity signaling in the root cap columella cells. In addition, recent evidence suggests highly localized changes in Ca2+, likely close to membrane surfaces, also accompany some of the earliest events of gravity perception in these cells. Research will therefore concentrate on characterizing how these gravity-related H+ and Ca2+ fluxes are generated and how they are modulated by putative components of the gravity signal transduction system such as the actomyosin cytoskeleton. In addition, transgenic Ca2+ sensors based on the Cameleon green fluorescent protein Ca2+ sensor will be constructed and targeted to the vacuolar, endoplasmic reticulum and plasma membranes. These novel sensors will be used to assess whether membrane-associated Ca2+ microdomains are indeed associated with gravity signaling. The final goal of the research program is to develop single cell mRNA profiling for the columella cells in order to catalog gene expression patterns within the different regions of the root cap. Initial analysis will be targeted at profiling the actin and myosin gene families as these represent strong candidates for encoding parts of the force transmissive network that generates the biochemical signaling events of gravity perception. Plant growth and form are inextricably linked to the developmental impacts of gravity. Yet, despite its fundamental role in regulating development, the precise mechanism whereby plants sense and respond to gravity remains unknown. Results from this research program will therefore seek to define the molecular machinery of the root that allows it to sense gravitational forces. The project will focus on developing microscope-based imaging approaches to visualize the dynamic changes in the levels of ions that are thought to signal the gravity stimulus to the sensitive cells of the root. An understanding of these signaling events should not only help provide a more complete understanding of how plants sense and respond to their environment, but also holds the potential to uncover strategies to regulate plant development through manipulating the responsiveness of defined components of this plant gravity sensing system doc21886 none The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) will address the need to increase both the awareness of and interest in career opportunities in engineering by developing algebra curricula that use engineering applications to build students mathematical skills and understanding. UMBC, in collaboration with Baltimore County Public Schools, Anne Arundel County Public Schools, the Maryland State Department of Education, Northrop Grumman, The Whiting-Turner Contracting Company, Meade Middle and High Schools, Sollers Point Southeastern High School, the Baltimore Museum of Industry, The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and UMBC s Center for Women and Information Technology, will work to achieve the following objectives: 1. Develop curriculum kits, each one targeting a different aspect of engineering (chemical, electrical, civil, and mechanical) that can be used in both middle and high school algebra classes. 2. Provide a five-day summer workshop annually for 30 in-service mathematics teachers and 10 undergraduate engineering Teaching Fellows. This workshop will give an introduction to engineering career opportunities, and an overview of the curricula on the kits prior to classroom use. 3. Develop an undergraduate engineering Teaching Fellows program targeting women and other under-represented minorities to provide hands-on instructional classroom support for middle and high school algebra teachers to help them integrate the curricula into their courses. The Fellows program will also support the long-term retention of current engineering students, particularly under-represented groups. 4. Maintain student interest in engineering at eight schools through the development and institutionalization of an after-school engineering program that culminates in a series of collaborative and competitive activities. 5. Increase the involvement of females and other under-represented groups in engineering by providing female and minority engineering role models in the classroom and developing curricula that encourage interest and participation by all groups. The Introducing Engineering Through Mathematics project will benefit UMBC, the State of Maryland, and a nation in great need of a larger and more diverse technology workforce. The engineering program at UMBC will improve its retention rate through the project s Fellows program. Also, students and teachers throughout Maryland will become familiar with engineering through the standard algebra curriculum. Further, increased numbers of diverse students will understand and be able to apply higher mathematics concepts and be more likely to pursue further training in science and mathematics. Finally, greater numbers of diverse students will develop an interest in and select engineering as a career doc21887 none Jeffery Little is known about the origins of vertebrate features in the Phylum Chordata. Here, the focus is on aspects of urochordate development that are expected to shed new light on this important problem in evolution and development. The overall goal is to assess the origins of two key vertebrate features in the ascidian urochordates: (1) migratory neural crest cells and (2) larval musculature specified by inductive processes. The ascidian species used in contemporary developmental biology (e. g., Ciona, Molgula, Styela, and Halocynthia) exhibit rapidly developing, highly streamlined tadpole larvae. These derived larva appear to lack migratory neural crest cells and contain only about 40 tail muscle cells, which are primarily specified by localized cytoplasmic determinants. The streamlined tadpoles, which have evolved for rapid dispersal, are not representative of most ascidian larvae. Most ascidian species have larger, slowly developing tadpoles with more complex heads and robust tails, which are likely to represent the true ancestral state. Accordingly, Dr. Jeffery will introduce here the ascidian Ecteinascidia turbinata as an experimental system to study the origin of key vertebrate features in the urochordates. Ecteinascidia, a close relative of Ciona, has a giant tadpole larva exhibiting a head with preformed siphon rudiments, enlarged sensory organs, and pharyngeal gill slits, and a robust tail with muscle cells. The development of ascidians with highly differentiated tadpoles has been virtually ignored and is ripe for analysis using modern technologies. The Ecteinascidia system will permit him to combine a variety of experimental embryological and molecular approaches, including use of ongoing Ciona genomic and EST databases, to study the evolution of development. This proposal specifically addresses neural crest and muscle development in Ecteinascidia embryos. First, he will determine whether Ecteinascidia embryos have migratory cells homologous to vertebrate neural crest cells using a combination of vital dye and gene marking studies. He already has strong evidence from DiI marking experiments that migratory neural crest-like cells are present. He will determine the embryonic sources, regional migration patterns, and developmental fates of the neural crest-like cells, and compare their properties to vertebrate neural crest cells. Second, he will determine whether the development of tail muscle cells in Ecteinascidia is controlled by cytoplasmic determinants, the predominant means of tail muscle specification in ascidians with streamlined larvae, or by inductive processes, the method of muscle specification characteristic of vertebrates. These studies will be carried out by a combination of cell lineage tracing, in situ mRNA and protein localization, and blastomere isolation and recombination. The intellectual merit of these studies is that they will provide new information on the evolutionary history of neural crest cells and the mechanisms of tail muscle development in the urochordates. The broader impacts of the proposed activity is that it will address the origin of key vertebrate features in the Phylum Chordata and focus our future attention on particular chordate or non-chordate groups in order to chart the evolutionary beginnings of the complex vertebrate body plan. Finally, the research is planned to foster general education in research by incorporating undergraduate students into the investigative process doc21888 none The Nevada Desert FACE Facility (NDFF) is a long-term research project examining the responses of an intact Mojave Desert ecosystem to elevated CO2. In the first four years of NDFF operation, we found that primary production increased substantially at elevated CO2, but only in wet years, and that an exotic annual grass responded more strongly than did native shrubs and annuals. Therefore, our initial results suggest that an ecosystem type (drylands) that represents 30% of the earth s terrestrial surface area may not respond to elevated CO2 in a simple manner, as predicted by existing models of global change. In the context of these results and the long-term nature of our desert FACE experiment, we propose to address three overarching questions in this study: 1. Will elevated CO2 alter community composition and structure in the Mojave Desert by continuing to stimulate a disproportionate increase in an exotic annual species? 2. Will the increases in production and changes in nutrient dynamics that we have observed in response to a step-change increase in CO2 be sustained over time? 3. Can we adapt proven models of desert ecosystem function to predict how this Mojave Desert ecosystem will respond to elevated CO2 in the future? The intellectual merit of this proposal lies in our conceptual approach in which we are focusing on the functional interactions between species composition and ecosystem function, tied together by an explicit modeling component. The model will be an adaptation of an established, validated desert model (PALS, the Patch Arid Lands Simulator) that will be used to develop a synthetic understanding of biotic and abiotic controls on carbon, nitrogen, and water fluxes to elevated CO2 in this arid ecosystem. The broader impact of this proposed study will be an examination of the potential invasion of an exotic species in response to elevated CO2, and how this process may impact ecosystem function, and therefore ecosystem services, in a desert environment. Through this research program, we are also forging a cohesive network between five research campuses. To date, our research group has an excellent record of training undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral scholars at the NDFF, including members of under-represented groups. This study will similarly train a wide spectrum of students and postdocs, both at the NDFF and in our support laboratories doc21889 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Lawrence Barsalou will conduct three years of basic research. The funded project will examine the knowledge that underlies typical high-level cognitive activities such as human discourse, reasoning, or perception. The hypotheses that guide this research are quite new. The key assumption is that high level, abstract, cognitive activities are actually grounded in the situated everyday workings of the body-thus the terms situated cognition or embodied cognition. For example, our knowledge of cars reflects how we interact with cars, what it is like to actually drive a car; to see, hear, touch, and smell a real car; or to feel an emotional response to a car. This view contrasts with a tradition in psychology, whereby our knowledge of the world is assumed to be fully abstract and detached-something like the centralized one-kind-of-knowledge-structure-fits-all way in which a computer program can be written. The funded research will test predictions derived from the new alternative. Human participants will perform classic knowledge tasks, responding to questions such as What are the properties of a car? or Is a tire a property of a car? . Carefully-controlled laboratory experiments have been designed around such questions and tasks to assess whether situated and embodied forms of knowledge are used to perform them. This research has broad implications. First, support for its working hypotheses would motivate big changes in basic scientific theories of human knowledge; this work could contribute to a fundamental shift in how we think about ourselves. Second, the outcomes of this research could have broad applied impact in education (i.e., how best to teach a knowledge domain) or cognitive engineering (i.e., how machines should be designed to best interact with human beings). Finally, this work may suggest new forms of artificial intelligence. Intelligent machines that use situated knowledge, shaped around their peripheral devices, are more robust than traditional centralized intelligent machines. Possible new machines could resemble the robots used in exploration of Mars, for example, a second-generation of robots that better situate themselves in their environments doc21890 none Dr. Ziling B. Xue, Chemistry Department, University of Tennessee, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division for studies of early transition metal-silane chemistry. The reactions of silanes with d0 imides and dn amides will be compared with those of d0 amides to determine how the pi character of the metal-imide bond and the d electron count in the metal-amides influence sigma bond metathesis. To explore the generality of the results obtained with the imides and amides, the study will be extended to reactions between silanes and early transition metal alkoxides. Reactions of the alkoxides with silanes and of metal silyl complexes with oxygen will be developed as new routes to metal-silicon-oxygen phases. In collaboration with scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the compounds prepared in this investigation will be used as precursors to prepare silicon based microelectronic materials by chemical vapor deposition. During all stages of the project theoretical calculations will be carried out in order to understand the emerging chemistry. The objective of the research is to develop the new precursors and routes to silicon-based microelectronic materials. The first portion of this study will develop fundamental chemistry that is relevant to the preparation of silicon based microelectronic materials. Then chemical processes to yield these advanced microelectronic materials will be developed. These materials include those used as diffusion barriers and high dielectric constant gate materials in very-large-scale-integration (VLSI) devices doc21891 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Robert Andersen at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences to investigate the systematic biology of golden algae. The Chrysophyceae (golden algae) contain many common freshwater and marine algal species. Most species are microscopic and were described about 100 years ago using only a light microscope. Recent studies revealed that older studies were too simplistic and inaccurate. This study will examine the largest taxonomic order of the Chrysophyceae, the order Ochromonadales, with emphasis on the largest genus, Ochromonas. These are biflagellate microorganisms that are able to conduct photosynthesis. Preliminary results showed that the small subunit ribosomal RNA and the ribulose bis-phosphate carboxylase oxygenase genes are appropriate for the DNA portion of the study. Additionally, the electron microscope will be used to study flagella and special vesicles of keystone species, i.e., those especially important for understanding evolution of these algae. We anticipate the discovery and description of several new species, as well as new genera, that have heretofore been unknown to science. The completed project will provide a modern taxonomic revision for this large and important group of algae. Chrysophyte algae help form the base of the food chain in aquatic ecosystems, and freshwater and marine animals depend directly, or indirectly, on these algae. Those in drinking water treatment plants or environmental science companies, who work in aquatic ecosystems, depend upon systematic biologists, like myself, for accurate and thorough descriptions of species. Also, biochemists, molecular biologists, and biotechnologists depend upon systematic biologists for accurate identifications of cultures and precise descriptions for species. Our previous research discovered a new group of algae that produce large amounts of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), especially EPA, which is very beneficial for human health (reduces heart disease). These new PUFA algae are related to the Chrysophyceae, and perhaps additional organisms, which are beneficial to human health, will be discovered and described in this study doc21892 none Vertebrate biologists have often studied the axial and appendicular musculoskeletal systems as though they were independent entities. Increasingly, however, evidence is emerging that provides a clear illustration that an atomistic approach to the musculoskeletal system can be misleading. For example, recent attempts to 1) document and understand a possible mechanical constraint on simultaneous running and breathing in ectothermic tetrapods; 2) document the extent to which locomotion interferes with venous return to the heart; 3) unravel the nature and causes of back injury and pain in humans; and 4) identify and test possible locomotor and ventilatory functions of the epaxial and hypaxial muscles have been limited by our understanding of how the extrinsic appendicular muscles load the trunk. If we seek to understand the function and evolution of the vertebrate musculoskeletal system, it is clear that we cannot examine the axial and appendicular systems separately. The work outlined in this proposal will monitor muscle activity under controlled manipulations of locomotor forces to determine: 1) how the extrinsic muscles of the pectoral and pelvic limbs load the axial musculoskeletal system during steady state locomotion, and 2) how the axial muscles stabilize the trunk against the locomotor loads imposed by the extrinsic appendicular muscles. The rationale of the method is that changes in a particular aspect of the locomotor forces must be met by correlated changes in the recruitment of the muscles responsible for the locomotor force. Hence, correlated changes in locomotor force and muscle recruitment are interpreted to reflect a functional role for the muscle being examined. At a fundamental level, the information we gain from this work on dogs will be applicable to tetrapods in general and to mammals. First, the basal running gait of tetrapods was a trot. Although there is much variation in body configuration, level of work produced by the axial musculoskeletal system, and integration of running and breathing, the basic mechanics of trotting appear to be largely uniform across tetrapods. Hence, an understanding of the interaction and function of the axial and appendicular muscles of trotting dogs should also provide insight to that of other groups of tetrapods as well. Second, bounding gaits such as the gallop characterize the locomotion of mammals. Improving our understanding of how locomotor forces are transferred between the limbs and trunk and how the trunk is stabilized during galloping in dogs can be expected to provide insight to mammalian body design and locomotion doc21893 none Page Partial support is provided for the biannual Gordon Research Conference on Ttibology. The conference will be held August 4-9 at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Islans. Session topics are focused on a general physics theme of paths of least resistance . Topics include friction, lubrication and wear mechanisms, as well as the role of surface science and advanced modelling. The Gordon Conference format will assure that cutting edge research is discussed extensively in an informal atmosphere. NSF support will be used primarily to support the attendance of graduate students and junior researchers. The outcomes of the conference will be advances in basic science and follow-on impact on industrial applications in this important area as results transfer to industry doc21894 none This award by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research by Peter T. Wolczanski of Cornell University to study the mechanism and thermodynamics of olefin-alkylidine rearrangements catalyzed by niobium and tantalum complexes with tris-tertbutyl silicon oxide (silox) ligands. The sulfur analog of silox will be used to explore the secondary structures of linked manganese, iron, cobalt and nickel tetrahedra to explore bio-inspired organometallic chemistry. Electronic factors involving oxygen-atom transfer are to be explored with silox-rhenium-oxo derivatives. The fundamental coordination and organometallic chemistry of square planar tungsten(IV) silox derivatives will be investigated for reactivity parallels with d8 complexes in oxidative addition reactions. Reactions of organometallic complexes with silicon-based ligands will be studied to address fundamental questions as to how these reactions proceed doc21895 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Barry K. Carpenter, of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University, is studying the intramolecular dynamics of organic reactions. Through a combination of ab initio electronic structure theory, molecular dynamics simulations, and experimental organic chemistry, Professor Carpenter addresses the question of what factors control the behavior of reactive intermediates, including radical ions, carbenes, and biradicals, generated in thermal and photochemical reactions. Specific questions under investigation include what controls the behavior of molecules that encounter bifurcation points on their reaction paths; what controls the potential energy well depth in which an intermediate finds itself, and how does the reaction dynamics depend on the well depth; what theoretical methods can be developed to allow nonexperts to explore the dynamic issues of an organic reaction mechanism; and what kinds of experimental evidence provide the clearest distinction between traditional transition state theory (TST) behavior and behavior governed by non-TST dynamics. Development of a detailed, fundamental understanding of how organic reactions occur requires a combination of experimental and theoretical calculational approaches, with theory suggesting important molecules for synthesis and study and with the study of various organic reactions in turn suggesting theoretical approaches and or advances necessary to understand them. Professor Barry K. Carpenter, of the Deparment of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University, carries out both synthetic and theoretical studies designed to address the reactivity of highly reactive intermediates, of only fleeting existence, generated in the course of chemical reactions. Through these studies, Professor Carpenter contributes to our fundamental understanding of how molecules react and provides calculational tools applicable by others in the continuing advancement of knowledge about organic chemical reactions doc21896 none Faculty and administrators in engineering programs across the country will readily admit to being puzzled by a shared national phenomenon: while the number of engineering jobs continues to increase, the retention rate of freshman engineering students remains disturbingly low (43%). In a positive national context for employment in engineering, there is an urgent need for research to examine the institutional, pedagogical, and personal reasons for students to give up their pursuit of a career in engineering. Our study proposes to investigate this phenomenon in ways that can help to inform and reform undergraduate education in engineering. The central question guiding the proposed research project is what can be done to help engineering students to be successful in college and in their profession given the fact that the teaching culture can t be changed instantly? Grounded in existing research on student achievement in engineering, the present proposal seeks to investigate those skills and attributes that create successful and personally motivated undergraduate engineering students. We propose a five-year longitudinal, multi-phased study with following components: Phase 1) Learning strategies, attitudes, and success of engineering freshmen; Phase 2) Effectiveness of Coached Integrated Cognitive Empowerment of Engineering Freshmen; 3) Longitudinal Effect of Cognitive Empowerment Beyond Freshmen Year. The goal of Phase 1 is to establish a thorough understanding of what freshmen do when it comes to college-study and how or whether their behavior changes during the first year. We propose to use a combination of previously validated instruments and personal interviews to generate a bank of relevant data from approximately engineering freshmen starting in August , as well as from engineering students at higher levels. This data will provide baseline information for the design of a series of interventions targeted to students rather than the teaching environment; that is, rather than proposing new courses, teaching methods, or instructional delivery systems, we will focus on the identifying and providing cognitive and learning strategies that foster healthy habits and coach students to remove weaknesses in the context of the existing culture in engineering education into which first-year students are immersed, both at NC State and at many other engineering programs. Based on the experience gained from Phase 2, the project will embark on sustained monitoring of student successes as they matriculate in different engineering disciplines (e.g., mechanical) and possibly continuing its interventions support geared towards the different learning environments faced by the students. Based on the experience gained from Phase 2, the project will embark on sustained monitoring of student successes as they matriculate in different engineering disciplines (e.g., mechanical), and possibly continuing appropriate interventions support judged to be effective in increasing student success within the different learning environments encountered in the engineering curriculum. The impact of this study is expected to be universal: engineering colleges nationally and internationally have established a similar teaching culture and face similar educational problems. We hope to demonstrate how empowering engineering freshmen to become effective and skilled learners can increase their level of success and with it their retention and lifelong interest in the pursuit of the intellectual and work-related goals of engineering doc21897 none A new concept is advanced for the miniaturization of direct-injection liquid-fueled combustors wherein the fuel is flowed in a wall film that reduces heat losses, optimizes vaporization rate, and inhibits quenching. The new alternative for high surface volume combustors is the delivery of the liquid fuel as a film on the combustor surfaces. This delivery simultaneously cools the combustor walls and exposes the fuel for vaporization. A simple analysis indicates that if the combustor were part of a miniature engine, power levels from ten watts to ten kilowatts would be achievable with combustor volumes varying from a few hundred cubic millimeters to a few cubic centimeters and fuel flow rates varying from about a milligram per second to a gram per second. The liquid-film burning concept extends beyond compact power devices and applies to any combustor where high surface-to-volume ratio is imposed or desired. Studies analyze the combustor over a range of laminar and turbulent conditions using both experimental and computational methods. The goals are to maximize the combustor efficiency and stability while minimizing size and emissions. Although proof-of-concept studies are promising, a substantial amount of research is needed to bring the film-combustion strategy forward. This includes fundamental issues regarding swirl flows interacting with filming surfaces, heat transfer and vaporization under these conditions, fuel air mixing in the chamber, and minimizing reaction times. A range of technical issues are also examined, including fuel filming approaches (e.g., porous cylinders or wall sprays), moving to high pressure conditions, flame stability, ignition strategies, and tolerance of different fuel types. Small combustors are quite sensitive to operating conditions, so it is likely that control of the system will be important. Control of the fuel and air flow rates, heat flux control through wall cooling, and swirl control are examples of potentially important system inputs needed to maintain optimal combustor performance. The growing market of ideas that require personal power ranges from electronic and telecommunication equipment (e.g., cellular telephones and laptop computers) to small, mobile reconnaissance robots that can safely explore potentially hazardous environments. Many of these lightweight devices demand tens of watts of power for durations on the order of tens of hours, thereby driving the power source considerations towards those with highest energy density. Because internal combustion has the potential to simultaneously provide high power density and high energy density, it is natural to explore this method of power generation. The micro-gas turbine (combustor volume 0.04cc), the mini (0.078 cc displacement) and micro (0. cc displacement) rotary engine , the microrocket (0.1 cc combustion chamber) , and the micro Swiss roll burner are examples of such exploration. These devices are not yet performing at efficiencies that make them competitive with the best available batteries, but they have demonstrated the plausibility of internal combustion as a personal power source doc21898 none The proposed research has two goals: (1) to measure the interactive effects of naturally-occurring near-ground enriched carbon dioxide (NEC) and fluctuating light on photosynthesis by six herbaceous and woody plant species in a temperate forest ecosystem; and (2) to model daily leaf-level photosynthesis across a wide range of CO2 light combinations in order to determine the potential for NEC sunfleck interactions to affect survival, growth, and species composition within and across forest stands. The widespread occurrence of naturally enriched CO2 in the herbaceous zone (due to respiration by plant roots and soil microorganisms) and its likely impacts on photosynthesis have been noted for many decades, but no comprehensive effort has been made to measure or model NEC variation or quantify its effects on photosynthesis, especially under the fluctuating light levels (especially sunflecks) typical of the forest environment. Previous research by the principal investigator and his colleagues has shown that the impacts of enriched CO2 on leaf-level photosynthesis are substantial during both background shade and sunflecks. However, it is necessary to measure NEC light regimes and photosynthesis more extensively in order to accurately predict NEC variation and its effects on plants over longer time periods (days to weeks). The results of this project will increase our understanding of temperate forest ecology in several important ways. First, the data on spatial and temporal NEC light variation will help fill a major gap in our knowledge of forest resource environments. Second, empirical models of NEC regulation generated during the project should apply in broad outline to other forested systems. Third, the accuracy with which a recently developed dynamic photosynthesis model can predict daily net carbon gain under a range of CO2 levels in the field will be determined. Finally, the data will have implications for estimating the effects of human-caused global CO2 rise on plant species in the herbaceous stratum, including forest regeneration processes. Undergraduate students will play critical roles in all phases of the proposed project, including research planning, field measurements, data processing, data analysis, presentation of results at professional meetings, and publication. A total of nine students will each spend twenty months on the project, including an academic year of preparation for twelve weeks of intensive summer research at the Harvard Forest research site (Petersham, MA), followed by one to two semesters of formal independent study focused on data analysis, presentation at professional meetings, honors thesis preparation, and co-authorship on publications doc21899 none Nerve cells, or neurons, extend complex branches that communicate with many other neurons by sending and capturing signals at functional contacts called synapses, specialized small sites where membranes of two nerve cells are very close together. When the presynaptic cell is active, chemical neurotransmitters are released to act on the post-synaptic cell membrane, to excite or inhibit activity in the postsynaptic cell. A single neuron can have thousands of synapses with hundreds or thousands of other neurons in the brain, and each synapse is potentially capable of changing its efficacy in transmitting signals. It is believed that a fundamental mechanism underlying neural functions such as memory formation is a strengthening of synapses through repeated activity. That strengthening requires synthesis of new proteins, which probably remodel the synapse. Recently a subcellular neuronal organelle called an RNA granule has been suggested to harbor messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules that provide templates for such remodeling proteins, with translocation and release of this mRNA locally at activated synapses in response to neural depolarization. This project uses molecular biological techniques on cultured neurons to define the functional roles of specific RNA granule proteins in a novel conceptual framework. First, the new RNAi (RNA-interference) technique allows selective inactivation or knock-down of specific gene expression, and is used to investigate the role of a particular granule protein called Staufen, to see how it is involved in granule assembly. Second, micro-RNAs (miRNA) are a type of short RNA that can regulate gene expression post-transcriptionally, so miRNAs in the granule will be identified to see how they might modify the local protein synthesis. This project has some technological risks, but potentially very high impact, because results will be important for understanding molecular mechanisms of modifying neural functions, and so of networks involved in memory and learning. The impact is likely to extend beyond neuroscience to cell biology and physiology in general. The project also continues active involvement of this highly regarded PI with training a postdoctoral researcher, with international collaborations, and with public outreach doc21900 none The fungus Neurospora crassa serves as a model system for studying the genetics and molecular biology of biological clocks. In this fungus the clock is expressed as areas of asexual spore formation (conidiation) alternating with areas of hyphal extension that show no conidiation. There is evidence that this clock has two oscillator loops. The products of the frq wc loci are components of the first oscillator loop, but no components of the second have yet been described. The objectives of this project are to isolate new mutations affecting the clock and to classify the existing clock mutants according to their site of action. Both objectives are steps toward identifying components of the second oscillator. The study of the second oscillator can now be advanced by employing a new culture technique developed by the investigator. It allows the expression of the second oscillator in the absence of the first. The clock null strains (frq10, wc-1, wc-2) lack the first oscillator. When these strains are provided low (10-5M) concentrations of farnesol or geraniol (compounds related to intermediates in the steroid pathway), a clear, reproducible, and synchronous conidiation rhythm can be seen on Petri plates or growth tubes (normal length). New mutants in the clock system will be sought by screening for mutations that alter or abolish the rhythmicity of frq10 mutants grown on farnesol. If successful, these experiments will reveal new genes that affect the biological clock of this micro-organism. The insights gained from these genes and their products should lead to significant advances in our understanding of the functioning of biological clocks. The investigator is very active in training undergraduates, both through teaching their courses and mentoring their research projects in his laboratory doc21901 none The objective of this proposal is the meaningful integration of advanced computing knowledge and techniques into the undergraduate mechanical engineering curriculum. The vehicle for this integration is the creation of an innovative and engaging advanced computing track or specialization for mechanical engineering students. The first implementation will be at the University of Illinois at Chicago; however, the project will be developed for portability, so that deliverables, especially a new capstone course, will greatly aid other schools in implementing curricular changes tailored to their particular needs. It will thus impact students well beyond the UIC campus. The project is motivated by the lasting roles that computing and information technologies have claimed in mechanical engineering: embedded microprocessors have become commonplace in engineered systems, and the enterprise of engineering design and testing have been migrating to virtual and simulated environments. These trends underscore the fact that good computing practice is becoming as important to engineers as good laboratory practice and sound mathematics. The proposal addresses the fact that the undergraduate engineer s training in programming has evolved little over the last few decades. And, while students are being exposed to powerful commercial software tools at an increasing rate, the underlying fundamental computational principles are generally overlooked. The proposed project may be summarized by the following list of outcomes, which will be assessed by an independent evaluator to determine if the activity is a success: Outcome # 1: Instill advanced computing and programming skills. Mechanical engineering students will learn skills and concepts that are normally only taught to computer scientists: object-oriented programming, data structures, algorithm design, graphical interfaces, large scale scientific computing, and more. A capstone course, which constitutes the centerpiece of the proposal, will integrate the computer science topics with mechanical engineering science and mechanical engineering design. Outcome # 2: Develop better engineers. Although students will be learning computer science, the goal is to make them better engineers. Since engineers can only use what they know, the investigators hypothesize that these students will be better equipped for the information age, recognizing how IT tools and concepts can be used and exploited in the design of mechanical and thermal fluid devices and systems. Outcome #3: Engage minority middle school students. The investigators capitalize on great opportunities for middle school students to participate in the project in a meaningful way: as pilots of virtual aircraft the undergraduates design. The students are exposed to the exciting world of engineering, learning the important roles of high-level mathematics and physics. Outcome #4: Create a portable product. The final objective of the project is to create a deliverable: the foundation for an advanced computing track that mechanical engineering departments at other institutions may adopt and adapt to suit their own purposes with relative ease and little cost. The capstone course, in particular, can be used for this purpose. We shall produce a considerable amount of software infrastructure and educational materials to distribute freely over the web and we have a strategy to publicize it. The investigators areas of expertise span much of the broad discipline of mechanical engineering. The team is complemented by a computer scientist, a specialist in software engineering. They are well-positioned to create the valuable educational experience for mechanical engineering undergraduates at UIC and beyond. 0 doc21902 none Isoprene is emitted from many plants, especially trees. Isoprene emission has large effects on atmospheric chemistry and so its emission has been extensively studied but mechanisms of regulation of the rate of emission have not yet been determined. Isoprene emission from plants varies substantially with temperature and light. Experiments are proposed to test several hypotheses about how the rate of isoprene emission from plants is regulated. Short term regulation will be studied by measuring metabolites before, during, and after a change in light or temperature. The factors that control the instantaneous rate of isoprene emission will be assessed by analyzing (1) changes in metabolite levels during transients and (2) responses to feeding intermediates of the isoprene synthesis pathway. To keep track of isoprene coming from endogenous photosynthesis metabolites and that coming from exogenous intermediates, a laser-based photoacoustic system for detecting deuterium labeled isoprene from deuterated intermediates will be used by colleagues at the University of Bonn. Longer term induction phenomena will be studied in (1) leaves that have never made isoprene and in (2) leaves where the isoprene emission capacity has been reduced by moving the plants into low temperature and low light. Changes in precursor metabolite levels, enzyme activity, and transcript abundance for selected enzymes of the isoprene synthesis pathway will be included in the analysis. Finally, the steps required for the evolution of the capacity for isoprene emission will be studied. This will involve two approaches. First, isoprene synthase from the legume kudzu will be transformed into Arabidopsis on a constitutive promoter, on its own promoter, and on a heat-shock promoter. The regulation of the expression and activity of isoprene synthase and other selected genes in the isoprene synthesis pathway will be assessed to determine if non-emitting plants normally have the regulatory mechanisms needed for light and heat-dependent isoprene emission. Second, the differences between isoprene synthase and a similar sesquiterpene synthase will be determined by analyzing the crystal structure of isoprene synthase. These studies will provide basic information on regulation of isoprene synthesis to allow for altering isoprene synthesis by plants. It may be desirable to engineer plants or bacteria to make economically useful amounts of isoprene or it might be useful to engineer trees used in tree farming so that they do not produce isoprene. These studies will also be used to help predict isoprene emission from plants, which will improve our ability to predict atmospheric ozone production doc21903 none Triclosan is a broad spectrum antimicrobial agent that is currently found in many consumer goods. Triclosan inhibits the bacterial enzyme enoyl acyl carrier protein (ACP) reductase. This enzyme catalyzes the last step in fatty acid biosynthesis in microorganisms. Several studies have indicated that decreased susceptibility to triclosan correlates with quinolone antibiotic resistance. The quinolones inhibit the bacterial DNA metabolic enzymes, DNA gyrase and topoisomerase IV. Resistance to the quinolone antibiotics maps to the genes encoding DNA gyrase, topoisomerase IV, or to genes encoding multi-drug efflux pumps. Triclosan resistance also maps to genes encoding multi-drug efflux pumps or to genes encoding regulatory proteins that control the expression of these pumps. The primary focus of this project is to determine whether triclosan resistance contributes to antibiotic resistance in Staphylococcus aureus. S. aureus is a human pathogen for which therapeutic options for the treatment of infections caused by this organism have become limited. Preliminary studies by this laboratory have demonstrated the triclosan susceptibility profiles of 12 S. aureus clinical and laboratory strains. Triclosan resistance was detected in 10 of these strains. Among the 10 triclosan resistant strains, 4 are also resistant to the quinolone antibiotics. This project will use molecular biological and biochemical experiments to further characterize the nature of these triclosan resistant strains. The emergence of antibiotic resistance is a growing problem among pathogenic bacteria. The results of this project will lead to a deeper understanding of the impact of antimicrobial product usage by consumers on the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria doc21904 none This award by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research by Professor Richard F. Jordan of the University of Chicago to develop efficient methods for the stereoselective synthesis of chiral ansa-metallocenes and to expand the fundamental understanding of the properties of d0 metal olefin complexes that are models for transient intermediates in olefin polymerization reactions. Metallocene complexes of early transition metals, such as Ti, Zr and Hf, are important in organic synthesis and closely related cationic complexes are the active species in olefin polymerizations. Chiral ansa-metallocenes, in which the two cyclopentadienyl rings are linked, are important stereoselective olefin polymerization catalysts and have been employed as enantioselective catalysts or reagents for other olefin reactions. Metallocene compounds with ligands that can control the face-selectivity of cyclopentadienyl ligands will be prepared involving 6-membered chelate rings in bis-amide complexes that adopt twist conformations, which complement 2-fold symmetric rac-metallocenes and strongly disfavor meso-metallocene structures. This first part of this research will: 1) develop streamlined ansa-metallocene syntheses based on chelate-controlled salt-elimination and amine-elimination reactions, 2) establish the generality of this approach for group 4 and group 3 lanthanide ansa-metallocenes with diverse structures, 3) understand the stereocontrol mechanisms in chelate-controlled ansa-metallocenes with synthesis through studies of the conformational and dynamic properties of group 4 metal bis-amide complexes, and 4) design chiral group-4 metal bis-amide precursors for the enantioselective synthesis of ansa-metallocenes. The second part of this research is to use alkoxy metallocene olefin complexes as models for the similar alkyl metallocene olefin cation complexes that are involved in olefin polymerization. The alkoxide model systems exhibit enhanced thermal stability and do not undergo olefin insertion, which enables studies of the metal-olefin bonding. Models are designed to provide a detailed picture of how d0 metal species bind and activate olefins. This project will provide rigorous and broad training for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in challenging organometallic synthesis, modern spectroscopic methods and mechanistic studies, and facilitate the application of the targeted compounds in economically important catalytic syntheses. Synthetic routes to enantioselective catalytic reagents will be devised and models of complexes that catalyze the polymerization of olefins will be used to gain insight as to how these catalysts operate doc21905 none The regulation of glycerophospholipid metabolism is fundamental to cell homeostasis as these molecules have important roles in both membrane structure and cell signaling. Recent studies indicate that the 80 kDa calcium-independent phospholipase A2 (iPLA2) plays a fundamental role in the regulation of phospholipid metabolism. This study is intended to further elucidate the mechanisms of regulation of the expression and catalytic activity of this essential enzyme. Experiments are designed to determine if iPLA2 activity is regulated by the accumulation of truncated forms of the protein that are encoded by alternatively spliced iPLA2 messages. These studies will focus on the cell cycle dependence of iPLA2 activity, as this is likely to have important implications for the accumulation of phospholipid mass for daughter cell membranes and potentially for the regulation of cell cycle progression. Among the studies to be performed are the quantification of full length and splice variant mRNAs and proteins at each phase of the cell cycle and the over expression of the splice variants to determine if this reduces the catalytic activity of endogenous iPLA2. Other experiments are focused on the potential regulation of iPLA2 expression by Sterol Response Element Binding Proteins (SREBP) and sterol metabolism. Several recent reports suggest that glycerophospholipid and sterol metabolism are coordinately regulated and preliminary experiments suggest that iPLA2 expression may be modulated by changes in sterol mass. To address this question, a putative Sterol Response Element (SRE) in the iPLA2 promoter will be characterized. In addition, experiments will be performed to determine if iPLA2 expression is induced in cells with low sterol content and if this is can be attributed to SREBP. Together these studies should provide important insights into the regulation of iPLA2 in mammalian cells. Given the essential role that iPLA2 plays in glycerophospholipid metabolism, these studies should provide information that is fundamental to our understanding of cell homeostasis. Cell membranes are largely composed of lipid molecules that until recently were thought to play a simple structural role in cell physiology. However, recent studies indicate that lipids have information content and can be broken down into other molecules that can regulate cell behavior. This research is intended to further our understanding of a critical enzyme, iPLA2, which regulates a subclass of lipids, the phospholipid molecules. As this enzyme controls the phospholipid content of cell membranes, it can have dramatic effects on both the integrity of a cell and its ability to respond to changes in its environment. These studies are designed to further elucidate mechanisms controlling both the amount of iPLA2 in cells (expression) and the functioning of the enzyme (activity). Together, these studies should provide insights into the regulation of an enzyme that plays a critical role in phospholipid metabolism. Given the importance of these molecules in controlling cell integrity and responsiveness, this information will be crucial to further our knowledge of how cells function doc21906 none Of Moths and Mice: The Influence of Dispersal Distance and Local Predation Risk on Persistence of a Sparse Prey Clive G. Jones, Brett J. Goodwin, Richard S. Ostfeld and Eric M. Schauber. Predators can potentially exterminate populations of their prey. Understanding how prey populations persist in the face of predation can help us sustain populations of endangered species and control pest populations. For example, gypsy moths are introduced insect pests that cause much damage in hardwood forests of eastern North America. White-footed mice, which are abundant in these forests, are voracious predators on gypsy moth pupae and are capable of driving moths locally to extinction. Since moth extinction has not actually happened over larger areas, how do moths persist in the face of intense predation by mice? The combined effects of two factors are important: (1) the likelihood of a gypsy moth pupa being attacked varies from place to place and (2) gypsy moth caterpillars do not disperse very far during their lifetimes. Computer simulations indicate that combining these two factors can substantially increase the chances that moth populations will persist. During this project, data will be collected in oak forests in New York State that will allow the development, refinement and testing of these simulation models. The dispersal distances of gypsy moth caterpillars and the predation risk for gypsy moth pupae at several sites will be measured. These measurements will be incorporated into the computer simulation to predict how changing the spatial pattern of predation risk would affect gypsy moth populations. Finally, predictions will be tested in areas where there are different numbers of dispersing moth caterpillars by putting out feeding stations to manipulate the patterns of mouse foraging. This procedure will alter the risk of predation for gypsy moth pupae and should change the likelihood of local moth population persistence in a predictable way doc21907 none The objective of this proposal is to use electrochemical nuclear magnetic resonance (EC-NMR) to study the influence of various platinum alloys on the electronic properties of Pt surfaces. Candidate electrocatalyst materials for fuel-cell applications will be synthesized through the spontaneous deposition of monolayer quantities of Pt and other noble metal (Ru, Ir, Os, and Re) nanoparticles. EC-NMR studies will probe the metal surfaces and poisoning adsorbates. Carbon monoxide tolerance on Pd Pt electrodes will also be studied. Electronic-level information, obtained from EC-NMR, will be correlated with the results of electrochemical measurements in an effort to better understand the mechanisms of CO-poisoning. Such correlations are expected to help guide the preparation of anodes for methanol electro-oxidation. Reviewers recognized the PIs as pioneers in the development of EC-NMR for examining changes in the electronic state of the substrate and adsorbate-structure bonding. A correlation of the surface work function changes as a function of adsorption and overpotential is important in the fundamental understanding of the thermodynamics and kinetics of an electrode process. The broader impacts of this project will be to train graduate and undergraduate students in the methods of electrocatalysis. This research could help guide the development of improved fuel-cell catalysts for applications in transportation and mobile applications doc21908 none This award provides funding to Johns Hopkins University, Center for Computer Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology (CISST) for the support of a collaboration getween the Center, the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation (MPTN), The American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC), New Mexico State University (NMSU), The Center for American Indian and Alaskan Native Health (CAIANH), and Howard Communitiy College (HCC). The purpose of this collaboration is to develop an innovative pilot program modeled in part after both the REU and RET programs to attract and retain the future scholars, role models, educators and leaders from American Indian communities doc21909 none The disciplines of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) play a critical role in the development and maintenance of physical infrastructure and hence in any strategy for improving planetary habitability and sustainable use of resources. The breadth of topics covered by these disciplines and the need to understand their interactions in a physical, chemical, ecological, social and economic context pose challenges for the design of an undergraduate curriculum. The traditional, sequential, skill based undergraduate curriculum has successfully trained a cadre of engineers who have designed and built reliable physical infrastructure that society takes almost for granted. However, engineer bashing is not uncommon in many segments of society as this infrastructure ages, needs replacement, and unanticipated environmental and social problems created as a byproduct come to the fore. Re-engineering the $20 trillion US physical infrastructure is now recognized as a major challenge. At the same time, undergraduate CEE enrollments have been declining, and retention of women and other minorities lag expectations. A prevailing response to this situation is that an undergraduate engineering program cannot adequately provide the breadth and depth of coverage needed, particularly given the humanities, liberal arts and basic science requirements. Consequently, the MS is being proposed as the entry level professional degree and various mechanisms for combined BS-MS degrees, coursework only MS degrees and the like are being explored and implemented. While this conclusion and the resulting direction may be inevitable in the traditional education model, it is unclear that they constitute the best response for educating engineers as analysts and as master integrator , or leaders in providing solutions for meeting the needs of managing a complex and changing system. Interviews with students reveal: (1) a strong interest in the CEE subject matter, but a lack of knowledge at the college entrance level of the engineer s role; (2) little exposure to engineering in the first two years; and (3) a sense of ill-preparedness for the work force on graduation that is often ascribed to instructional methods that are abstract, focused on general principles related to unit processes, with limited integrative application. The second item contributes negatively to undergraduate retention at schools where the student has a choice of major through the second year. An institutional response is to emphasize design content, and introduce capstone or synthesis classes in the curriculum. However, these measures are typically adopted only in junior senior classes. Through a partnership between Columbia University s Departments of Civil Engineering & Engineering Mechanics and Earth & Environmental Engineering and the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning the development of a new instructional approach and curriculum to systematically address the issues raised above is proposed here. The new curriculum is anchored by a sequence of classes in the first three years that progressively expose the students to a variety of CEE problems of regional and national interest in a case study mode. These classes, designed to provide technological literacy to all majors, will use a issystems approachli. The proposed curriculum will be progressively specialized as one moves to the higher grades, offering a student the opportunity to explore a subsystem given an understanding of the larger context of the problem. The goal is to present a data driven, problem focused approach to learning that integrates material from concurrent science and humanities classes and emphasizes the interconnection between most classes in the curriculum. Spatial interactions between subsystems over different time frames will be made explicit and used to motivate the application of empirical as well as theoretical approaches to design, analysis and management of the pieces and the whole. Information and computer technology will be used extensively to develop a virtual reality platform that will be used throughout the curriculum. Beyond the redeveloped curriculum, the development of this open simulation platform and working prototype scenarios for classroom introduction represents the major deliverable of this proposal. Spatially explicit simulators that bring together a variety of interacting infrastructure and environmental components (as in the game SimCity) will be used as a vehicle to introduce the broad problem context, and to bring case studies to life. Student teams will use it to explore historical data, as well as the effects of both policy and structural measures for a range of problems (e.g., natural and environmental hazards) on the long term functioning of the infrastructure, the environment and interacting social systems. In addition to exercising the system with different problems and settings, students will develop and add functional modules to the system using a high-level programming language. The inner workings of key subsystem components or processes will be accessible for stand-alone instruction. Interaction with existing numerical models, Geographical Information Systems, and statistical analysis packages will be considered as part of the design. Case studies introduced in the first year may continue to be building blocks for more detailed analyses in subsequent years. NSF Support is sought for the development of CEE case studies and the educational simulation gaming platform. Materials for three classes offered in the first two years will be developed using the proposed grant and matching funds. Industrial collaborators who have experience developing SIMgames have been recruited as consultants to help design and implement the open modeling platform. The materials developed under the grant will be made available to the engineering education community, and formal evaluations of changes in material, skills and knowledge imparted to and retained by students will be performed doc21910 none Irish, V.F. Floral organs arise as lateral outgrowths from the florally determined meristem, and differentiate with distinct identities. The specification of these organs as sepals, petals, stamens or carpels depends on the action of several floral homeotic genes which act as master regulators of these developmental pathways. Two such genes, APETALA3 (AP3) and PISTILLATA (PI), encode MADS domain-containing transcription factors that regulate the specification of petal and stamen identity in Arabidopsis. The proposed work will focus on identifying other genes involved in petal and stamen development, with a particular emphasis on identifying several candidate target genes regulated by AP3 and PI. The analysis of such genes can serve as a model for dissecting the genetic hierarchies by which particular organs and tissue types are specified during plant development. In order to identify a set of target genes regulated in vivo by these transcription factors, Dr. Irish proposes three complementary approaches. Microarray analyses comparing the expression of a set of Arabidopsis ESTs in various mutant backgrounds will be carried out in order to define those genes that are up- or down-regulated in response to AP3 and PI action. This should define a set of reasonably highly expressed petal and or stamen specific genes that are directly or indirectly regulated by these floral homeotic gene products. Second, chromatin immunoprecipitation will be employed to identify DNA sequences that are bound in vivo by AP3 PI proteins. Sequences identified by this approach are good candidates for being direct targets of AP3 PI regulation. Third, a gain-of-function genetic approach will be employed, using activation tagging, to mutationally identify genes that are involved in the floral developmental pathway. This approach has the advantage that it can result in the recovery of downstream target genes that act in a redundant fashion, which would preclude their recovery by traditional forward genetic screens. Potentially hundreds of candidate target genes may be recovered by these three approaches. These approaches are not meant to be exhaustive, as it is likely that only abundantly expressed genes are likely to be recovered. Dr. Irish plans to initially focus further analyses on a limited number of candidates, focussingon those recovered by more than one method. Such genes will be examined to determine whether their transcription is directly dependent on AP3 PI function. This will define a set of direct targets that will in turn be valuable in beginning to assess the spectrum of developmental processes controlled by AP3 PI. In turn these analyses will shed light on the question of whether the floral homeotic gene products act at the top of a long regulatory cascade, or whether these gene products act directly to regulate a wide array of downstream targets responsible for various aspects of morphogenesis. Characterizing how such master regulatory genes effect their functions will be crucial for a detailed understanding of how organogenesis and morphogenesis ensue, and should serve as a model for these processes in other plant systems doc21911 none The objective of the proposed project is to develop and deliver several internet-based freshman and sophomore level engineering courses through a partnership between The University of Tennessee (UT), The University of Oklahoma (OU) and area community colleges. The proposed project will provide new opportunities for engineering students who wish to transfer to a four-year institution after completing a pre-engineering program in a Community College, Junior College or Liberal Arts College that offers most, but not all, of the freshman and sophomore requirements for an engineering degree. The development and delivery of asynchronous, open entry open exit, self-paced courses via the Internet will enable these students to transfer into a university engineering program as a junior with all prerequisite requirements satisfied. The major impacts will be increasing student opportunities for timely completion of engineering degrees and serving the country s engineering workforce needs. Approximately fifteen classes have been identified as typical prerequisites for junior level study in an engineering field that are not offered in pre-engineering programs. The reason that these courses are not offered is that they are commonly fairly specialized classes that do not draw substantial enrollments that make the offerings cost effective. We propose to develop web-based versions of the seven classes that provide the greatest impact to the engineering field. Of these seven classes, two (Static s and Dynamics) have been previously developed at OU for asynchronous web delivery and will be implemented with improvements for this project. The model identified for course development merges several technologies to meet the course delivery objectives. It integrates a phased development methodology to produce highly interactive animated modules designed to engage the student in an active learning process. The University of Tennessee s Innovative Technology Center, Outreach and Continuing Education Division, Center for Advanced Educational Technology, and College of Engineering faculty have significant experience in developing interactive web-based courses. At the University of Oklahoma, the College of Engineering Media Laboratory is headed by the CO-PI of this grant proposal, who has been involved in web-based, asynchronous course delivery and training for close to ten years. The synergistic combination of these two institutions produces a team of educational professionals with the resources, experience, and desire to successfully attain the goals and objectives outlined in the proposal. The long-term goal of this project is to facilitate the articulation of engineering students by developing and offering the entire set of prerequisite classes to engineering students enrolled in pre-engineering and engineering programs throughout the United States. The funding of this grant will result in the national availability of web-delivered courses to meet a majority the prerequisite needs and provide a significant step toward meeting the long-term goal. To provide project guidance and assist with information dissemination, a national advisory board composed of leaders in the field of education has been assembled doc21912 none This proposal describes a collaborative program between East Tennessee Community Colleges and the University of Tennessee (UT) College of Engineering (UT_COE called engage1st to widen the pipeline of incoming first year engineering students from under-represented populations and to provide an intervention program that supports success for these students. The participating community colleges are Northeast State Technical Community College, Pelissippi State Technical Community College, Roane Community College, and Walters State Community College. Engage1st has the goal of attracting and graduating students with merit but not opportunity to engineering from those groups under-represented in the UT-COE. Data shows that students in engineering at UT are from families having an engineer in the immediate family or from locations where engineers live and work - overwhelmingly suburban locations and specific high schools. These students enter engineering having a model and an expectation of being an engineer and being successful at UT. Under-represented students are those from high schools in the institutional service area where there has not been a supply of engineering freshmen. Students in this target audience come from rural, urban, and inner-city settings and include Caucasians, African-American, and Hispanic men and women. Engage1st has four components: 1) recruiting of students while in high school, 2) academic preparation of students at community colleges for engineering school, 3) adaptation of students into the University academic and social setting, and 4) industry support for these students from their home counties thru summer internships and scholarships. The aim of the program is to provide a model for being an engineer and to foster the expectation of success in engineering at the University to create new first generation engineers. Students will be recruited as high school juniors and encouraged to take SMET preparatory courses as seniors. After high school, the students will attend a local community college for one year where they will take English and Chemistry, Trigonometry, Pre-Calculus and computer programming toward their BS in Engineering. Students will intern in their home county the following summer. Students will begin at UT in the engage freshman-engineering program and will live together and be taught as cohorts of 20 in Calculus and engineering classes. Students return to their home counties to intern the summer after their freshman year. In year 3, students enter their sophomore classes as mainstream engineering students. Affiliated programming and scholarships support the students throughout the program. The intellectual merit of this program lies in the redefinition of the engineering education entry problems and combination of existing expert resources as a solution. Engage1st combines the expertise of the community colleges in remediation of fundamental skills with the innovation of teaching freshman engineering in engage to academically deliver mainstream engineering sophomores at the conclusion of two years. These students must be taught to problem solve, and they need encouragement and the confidence from the community college year to move to UT. The broader impacts of the program are in workforce development of technical expertise in a manner that will, in time, increase the number of engineering graduates. This program develops first generation engineers (implying a new source of engineers in future generations) and does it by creating a pipeline into engineering in populations where there are not existing role models. Economically, this program starts to create that technical staff and to develop a technical career track for a future workforce doc21913 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Kenneth E. Sassaman and colleagues will investigate the circumstances surrounding abandonment of the middle Savannah River valley (Georgia and South Carolina) by the fourth millennium BC Stallings Culture. As part of the Shell Mound Archaic, Stallings Culture developed over several centuries to include stationary riverine settlements, an intensive, aquatic-based subsistence economy, and numerous technological innovations, including the first pottery in the North America. Around years ago, major habitation sites were abandoned as groups dispersed into the adjacent uplands to resume a mobile lifestyle. Archaeological research on foragers shows how local resource abundance contributes to sociopolitical complexity, but we know comparatively little about the sustainability of such institutions relative to the ecological conditions that enabled them. The proposed work is designed to ascertain the local environmental impacts attending increasingly intensive land-use and the extent to which such impacts contributed to regional abandonment. Over the past decade, excavations at four Stallings habitation sites in the middle Savannah region have yielded a large inventory of paleoecological and artifactual data spanning the rise, florescence, and demise of local Stallings communities. Analyses of the animal and plant remains, wood charcoal, land snails, and material culture from these sites are designed to test five hypotheses: (1) subsistence economies over the course of Stallings prehistory diversified; (2) diversification resulted from diminishing returns on high-ranking resources; (3) diminishing returns on high-ranking resources resulted from overexploitation by Stallings communities; (4) overexploitation resulted from permanent use of local environments; (5) technological innovations contributed to, rather than alleviated, economic stress. All analyses will be conducted by graduate research assistants under the supervision of faculty consultants in archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, malecology, and prehistoric technology. The relevance of the proposed work is manifold. Stallings prehistory represents one of the few cases worldwide of a truncated historical sequence of increasing sociopolitical complexity. Whereas archaeologists have devoted much attention to the transition from foraging to farming, and thence the rise of the state, virtually no studies have been conducted to examine the failure of increasingly intensified forager economies and societies to evolve. A related issue is changing perceptions of human ecology. Ethnographic foragers have long been conscripted as evolutionary ideals whose patterns of mobility, food-sharing, and simple technology were a keen adaptation to preagricultural conditions. A growing body of evidence shows that some ancient forgers engaged in land-use practices that irrevocably changed entire ecosystems and historical trajectories. This, in turn, bears relevance on modern environmental restoration policy. Just as there are arguably no pristine foragers in the ethnographic present to model pre-Western society, there are arguably no pristine ecosystems over the course of human history for which to model environmental restoration efforts. Accurate portrayal of both ecosystem and cultural diversity requires deep historical context, and the Stallings archaeological record offers an unparalleled opportunity to assemble a detailed ecological history for comparative uses in anthropology, conservation, and environmental policy doc21914 none Accurate potential energy functions for polypeptide chains have two important uses. For spectroscopy, they provide the means to calculate reliable normal mode frequencies of peptides and proteins for fundamental analyses of structure and interactions from infrared and Raman spectra. For molecular mechanics (MM) and dynamics (MD) studies, they provide the physical accuracy needed for reliable predictions of structures, energies, and dynamics of proteins. Current standard functions do not meet such standards since they give spectroscopically poor reproduction of vibrational frequencies. Using a method developed in his laboratory, called a spectroscopically determined force field (SDFF), such deficiencies have been overcome. The goal of this project is to determine and incorporate into an SDFF for the polypeptide chain those components of an MM energy function that will give it the needed accuracy for reliable simulations of proteins. Polarizability will be fully included in the SDFF, based on a recently developed electrostatic model for this property of polar groups. Structural features of the peptide group that depend on pyramidalization at the nitrogen atom will be further elucidated and parameterized. These include the explicit incorporation of charge fluxes, i.e., the dependence of charge on conformation, which are also essential to computing reliable infrared band intensities. Previous studies of typical N-H...O hydrogen bonds will be extended to include C-H...O hydrogen bonds, which have recently been found to be important in protein structures. SDFF descriptions of O-H...O hydrogen bonding in water and alcohols will be developed. The results of this research will have broad scientific and educational impacts. The ability to more reliably calculate structural and energetic, as well as spectroscopic, characteristics of proteins will lead to more accurate predictions of their properties. This will lead to deeper insights into functions of these biologically important molecules. The developments from this research will be disseminated to the scientific community, will result in the advanced training of graduate students and postdocs, and will be reflected in curricular themes in undergraduate courses, thus contributing to the integration of research and education. This project is supported by the Molecular Biophysics Program in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences in the Directorate for Biological Sciences and the Division of Physics in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate doc21915 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Thomas Demere at the San Diego Natural History Museum (SDNHM) to study the fossil record of baleen whales and to document the dramatic anatomical modifications that members of this group have undergone over the past 35 million years. Given the popular interest in living baleen whales, it is surprising that we still lack a clear understanding of the genealogical relationships of the modern species. It is also surprising that the baleen whale family tree is so poorly resolved, with many fossil branches based on rather sketchy evidence or, even worse, currently unknown. Dr. Demere s study will include descriptions of critical new fossil specimens, a re-analysis of named fossil baleen whale specimens housed at foreign and domestic museums, and determination of specific anatomical features that document the evolutionary changes that have occurred to the baleen whale skull, lower jaw, arm, and body. This study will be conducted within the context of a broader collaborative study of baleen whale evolution. The broader study will include analysis of genealogical relationships of all living species of baleen whales using data derived from molecular studies, soft anatomical studies, and osteological studies. When these results are combined with those based on the fossil record, the outcome will provide the most comprehensive view yet realized of the evolutionary history of baleen whales. A final aspect of this collaborative research will be to utilize the vastly improved genealogical history of baleen whales to track the anatomical and functional changes that occurred during the development of the diverse feeding styles exhibited by the modern species (i.e., surface skimming right whales, engulfment feeding fin whales, and suction feeding gray whales). Highlights of this research will be incorporated into public education efforts at SDNHM including website pages (www.sdnhm.org) and exhibit galleries doc21916 none The vast majority of caterpillars feed on a narrow range of plants, often within only a single family. Among the distinguishing characteristics of such specialized feeders are enzymatic detoxification systems, including cytochrome P450 monooxygenases, that are ideally configured for metabolizing the toxins that typify their hostplants. The tiger swallowtail (Papilio glaucus) and its relatives, however, are exceptional among caterpillars in that they can feed on a much broader range of plant families. In doing so they encounter a substantially greater diversity of plant toxins, which differ in their biosynthetic origin and structure. This project is aimed at determining how the biochemistry and molecular biology of the cytochrome P450 monooxygenases of the tiger swallowtail and its generalist relatives differ from the P450 systems in their specialized relatives in the genus Papilio. Most Papilio species are specialized for feeding on plants containing toxins called furanocoumarins, and these species rely on P450s in the CYP6B family for detoxification. Although they rarely encounter them, tiger swallowtails can metabolize these compounds too, albeit at lower rates. In this project, differences in the structure and regulation of the CYP6B genes will be mapped within the genus Papilio (1) in order to understand how generalized habits can arise within specialized lineages and (2) to determine how P450 evolution can contribute to changes in detoxification capabilities doc21917 none Objectives and Methods: The objectives of this project are to develop and to critically assess a novel Research Communications Studio model that is designed to improve learning, retention, and diversity of undergraduate engineering students. The project will provide much-needed data on how student learning is enhanced via hands-on research and interactions that take place within the studio group. In the Research Communications Studio (RCS), small groups of three to five undergraduate students, who are working on research with an engineering faculty, will meet under the mentorship of communications faculty and engineering graduate students. To ensure full integration of the model into the colleges program of research and instruction, the project will provide orientation for faculty research directors and training for graduate student mentors. The RCS model focuses strongly on the students communications tasks, as assigned by their research directors. The RCS project emphasizes student participation in professional meetings where results of their undergraduate projects are presented. The studio enhances inquiry-based learning by making principles of research and communications explicit and by engaging students in reflection on those experiences. Assessment of the methodologies, results, and significance will be done by the South Carolina Office of Program Assessment. Assessment data will include measures of enrollment, persistence to graduation, interviews with faculty and students. Data will be collected for project participants as well as for a control group of non-participating undergraduate students. Intellectual Merit. The RCS project is predicated upon Vygotskian theories of guided participation and distributed cognition, i.e. cognitive development of the engineering novice within groups or communities. The project explores three hypotheses related to the effect of studio methods of instruction on 1) quality of learning 2) retention and enrollment and 3) cognitive development and self-directed learning. The program evaluation component will furnish data to test the three hypotheses and the overall effectiveness of the RCS model, especially the use of communications, in cognitive development through research-based learning. The interdisciplinary project team includes engineering, communications, and education professionals. Their expertise spans chemical, electrical, and mechanical engineering, rhetoric, educational psychology, and interactive methods of teaching professional communications. Broader impacts. In an effort to recruit and retain more, and more diverse, undergraduate students, engineering colleges in research-intensive universities are expanding opportunities for undergraduates to conduct research with a faculty members group. However, better understanding of student cognitive development from this project is urgently needed to identify modes of mentoring and instruction that are effective in improving student learning, retention, and performance. Collaboration with the South Carolina Alliance for Minority Participation is designed to promote research participation by under-represented minorities, and to provide data on whether minority performance and retention is improved via the RCS. The proposed RCS implementation plan conforms to the situations and constraints typical of a state-supported, research intensive engineering college. It should therefore be widely adaptable. Dissemination of results from the RCS project will occur in a variety of methods, most notably through two national workshops planned for years three and five doc21918 none Atmospheric deposition of nitrogen to temperate forests has increased in recent decades as a result of increased combustion of fossil fuels. Knowing how nitrogen in air pollution is retained within forests will improve the ability of scientists to anticipate interactions among efforts to mitigate human alterations of regional and global cycles of carbon and nitrogen. For example, the way that forests retain nitrogen affects the ability of forests to help mitigate expected global warming due to increased carbon gases in the atmosphere. Because nitrogen often limits rates of plant growth, increased nitrogen inputs could affect forest growth and health. Most of the additional nitrogen deposited onto the forest from air pollution is retained in the soil rather than being taken up by plants. The biological and chemical processes whereby this incoming nitrogen, dominantly in the form of nitrate, is converted to organically-bound forms that stay in the soil remains unknown. Recent evidence suggests that abiotic reactions (chemical reactions without participation of living organisms) convert nitrate into organic nitrogen in soil. This suggestion challenges a widely held view that microorganisms living in the soils are the dominant agents for nitrogen uptake in soil. This abiotic reaction of nitrate is particularly perplexing because the energetics of nitrate reduction in soils are not favorable under normal conditions of well-drained soils. The fate of the organically bound nitrogen once it gets into the soils is also largely unknown. For example, it is not known how much organic nitrogen is eventually converted back into an inorganic form that plants can use. The proposed studies will be among the first to investigate the fate of dissolved organic nitrogen, which is increasingly recognized as central to the nitrogen cycle of many forests. The experiments use two ongoing nitrogen addition experiments in the Harvard Forest of central Massachusetts and the Howland Forest of central Maine. The first objective is to measure reactions of nitrate in these forest soils that have received nitrogen additions experimentally. The PI s seek to determine whether nitrogen addition has changed the capacity of soils to react with nitrate, either biotically or abiotically. The PI s also present in this proposal the ferrous wheel hypothesis, that reduced forms of iron in tiny pockets of poorly aerated soil can reduce nitrate to another form of nitrogen, nitrite, which can then react with dissolved organic carbon in the soils to form dissolved organic nitrogen. The second objective is to test this hypothesis in several laboratory experiments, where the concentrations and combinations of hypothesized reactants are varied systematically in a laboratory instrument, called a redox-pH-stat reactor, which controls the acidity and aeration of the soil sample during the incubation. As a result of its interdisciplinary nature, the research requires the collaborative efforts of an ecologist (Davidson), a chemist (Chorover) and a microbiologist (Dail), all of whom specialize in the study of soils doc21919 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Annalisa Berta at San Diego State University to support a collaborative project involving museum and university scientists in the reconstruction of evolutionary relationships among fossil and living species of baleen whales. Both anatomical and molecular data sets will be employed and the results of separate and combined analyses of these data sets explored. This study will add considerable new anatomical information from fossil baleen whales (especially characters from the skull and jaws) examined in various museum collections in the US, Europe, Australasia, and Japan. This framework will then be used to interpret the development of the unique filter feeding specializations of baleen whales, especially the evolutionary transition in feeding from tooth-bearing fossil species to baleen-bearing modern species. Few studies have investigated the interrelationships of baleen whales and the results are conflicting. This study will place modern baleen whale diversity in a historical context. Study of the past diversity of baleen whales in relation to times of global climate change may suggest conservation strategies for endangered modern species that may not have otherwise been considered. This project will provide training for both undergraduate and graduate students. Results of the study will be incorporated into exhibits about whale evolution planned at the San Diego Museum of Natural History doc21920 none The goal of this study is to determine the morphological transformations and inductive signaling functions of Zebrafish Organizer Endoderm during embryonic axis formation. The zebrafish Nieuwkoop Center (inducer of dorsal cell fate in the Organizer Region), as well as a putative signaling center involved in head induction, are thought to reside in the dorsal Yolk Syncytial Layer (YSL) (i.e. the dorsal cortex) of the zebrafish embryo s giant endodermal yolk cell. During blastulation and gastrulation, several hundred YSL nuclei within the zebrafish syncytial yolk cell undergo highly-organized morphogenetic movements. These movements may serve to spatially transform and translocate early-acting inductive signaling centers located within the dorsal YSL. Laser photoablation will be used to selectively inactivate specific domains of fluorescently-labeled dorsal YSL nuclei, to determine whether putative signaling centers in the dorsal YSL actually induce and or maintain gene expression in the overlying zebrafish blastoderm Actomyosin-based contractility within the YSL may serve to drive directional flows of (i) YSL nuclei, (ii) the YSL plasma membrane, as well as (iii) mesendodermal cells that are directly attached to the YSL plasma membrane. Cytoskeletal inhibitors will be applied to the YSL to test for these putative mechanical interactions. In separate experiments, the blastoderm will be mechanically removed from the yolk cell to determine whether the yolk cell is capable of expressing its characteristic morphogenetic domains without inductive or mechanical influences from the blastoderm. These combined experiments will determine the extent to which the morphogenesis of the endodermal yolk cell is coupled to the overlying blastoderm. The morphogenesis of the zebrafish yolk cell will also be examined in double mutant embryos that are deficient in cellular endoderm and dorsal mesoderm. By studying YSL morphogenesis in mutants with these specific genetic deficiencies, altered morphogenetic movements of YSL nuclei may be identified and linked to failed gene expression. NEM forerunner cells, a small endocytic cellular domain derived from the putative zebrafish Nieuwkoop Center, have recently been implicated in the establishment of right-left asymmetry in the zebrafish embryo. Experiments will be performed to determine whether secreted signals from the dorsal YSL and or Eph ephrin interactions are involved in the endocytic and morphogenetic behaviors of the endodermal NEM forerunner cell cluster. The results of the above project should reveal (1) the sequence of endodermal cell behaviors that are involved in the morphological transformation the zebrafish dorsal axis, and (2) whether the signaling activities of the dorsal YSL and associated NEM forerunner cells play roles in organizing zebrafish morphogenesis. Resolving these issues will contribute to a fundamental understanding of the sequence of endodermal cell behaviors involved in the construction of a vertebrate Organizer Region, as well as the restructuring of germ layers that lie near the Organizer Region during the course of gastrulation and segmentation doc21921 none We will investigate the causes of high versus low rates of respiration (CO2 loss) by soil microorganisms (fungi and bacteria) in a subalpine forest ecosystem in Colorado. Soil respiration is one of the dominant processes affecting ecosystem carbon balance, and thus affecting the capacity for ecosystems to absorb carbon dioxide that is emitted to the atmosphere from fossil fuel and biomass burning. In the subalpine forest ecosystem of Colorado, soil respiration is responsible for returning 40-60% of the CO2 that is absorbed by the photosynthetic trees of the forest, to the atmosphere each year. It is likely that this value changes significantly from wet to dry years and in response to long-term climate warming. We will seek to understand why it changes so much by studying changes in the soil microorganisms that release the CO2 in response to spatial and temporal variation. We will combine modern DNA fingerprinting techniques to determine which, and how many, microorganisms are present at any point in time and at any point in space, and the magnitude of soil respiration associated with those organisms. We will also study the influences of simulated treatments for long-term climate change in the form of warming lamps and altered snow pack to determine the response of soil respiration rate to climate change, and the causes of such responses due to changes in the diversity and amounts of microorganisms. overall, the research will provide us with an improved understanding of soil microorganism dynamics and their relationship to soil respiration, one of the critical components of the global carbon cycle. The studies will provide for the training of two graduate students through Research Assistant support, and they will significantly advance the development of techniques to probe soil samples for the presence of microorganisms. This latter capability may turn out to be very useful to future efforts in Homeland Security, especially with regard to detecting trace amounts of potentially dangerous microorganisms. The grant will also support the career of a beginning faculty member (David Lipson) at San Diego State University doc21922 none Benkman One of the central problems in evolutionary biology is to understand the processes that lead to new species. This project will determine whether and how the coevolutionary arms race between red crossbills and lodgepole pine is leading to new species of red crossbills (finch-like birds). First, mark-and-recapture methods will be used to determine whether natural selection as a result of coevolution has caused the observed morphological divergence between crossbill populations. Second, aviary experiments and field studies will address how reproductive isolation (i.e., speciation) might have occurred as a by-product of divergent selection. Finally, genetic studies using AFLP primers will be used to determine the extent of genetic differentiation between different crossbill populations and to develop a phylogeny of all North American red crossbills. This work aims to link two of the most important evolutionary processes, coevolutionary arms races and speciation, to patterns of biodiversity and to how geographic patterns of diversity arise. Being able to document such coevolutionary interactions, with the real possibility that they are now contributing to the origin of new species, is not only exciting, but may also provide insights that will help prevent undesirable extinctions. Such interactions have rarely been well documented for any taxa, let alone for birds, which capture the attention of many citizens doc21923 none Sox-domain and Homeodomain proteins: Coordinate Regulation of DV patterning of the Drosophila Nervous System. The elucidation of the molecular pathways that regulate the development of the central nervous system is critical to our understanding of nervous system formation and function. In humans, defects in neuronal development and function lead to a wide variety of congenital as well as inherited neurological diseases. The genetic and molecular events that regulate CNS development are just now being explored in vertebrate and invertebrate model systems. Initial insights from this work demonstrate a remarkable conservation of structure, expression and function between Drosophila genes expressed in the developing CNS and their vertebrate mammalian homologs. These studies support the idea that the fundamental architecture of many biological processes are conserved between flies and humans. The focus of this grant is to elucidate the molecular basis of CNS patterning in the early Drosophila embryo. Specifically, the expression and function of a set of evolutionarily conserved transcription factors, collectively referred to as the columnar genes proteins, subdivides the early Drosophila CNS into three longitudinal domains from which distinct neuronal populations arise. In order to understand how these proteins partition the developing CNS into distinct domains it is essential to identify regulatory targets of the columnar proteins and to elucidate how the columnar proteins act at the molecular level to regulate the regions specific expression of these genes. However to date, no such target genes have been identified. This proposal focuses on the identification of direct regulatory targets of the columnar genes and on the dissection of the regulatory regions of these genes in order to provide an initial glimpse into the molecular mechanisms that pattern the early CNS in the Drosophila embryo. Of note, the Drosophila columnar genes and their mammalian counterparts perform nearly identical roles during the initial patterning of the Drosophila and mammalian early CNS, respectively. Thus, it is likely that the clarification of the molecular mechanisms through which these transcription factors regulate pattern in the Drosophila CNS will have far reaching implications for our understanding of CNS development in mammals doc21635 none Despite current interest in tropical forests as key components of the global carbon cycle and as centers of biodiversity,we remain largely ignorant of the inter-relationships among forest attributes (e.g.,dynamics,diversity,structure),and the physical properties of the environments in which these forests grow.In recent years datasets have become available describing growth,mortality and recruitment of approximately 10%of the global diversity of tropical tree species.These data result from the development of a network of large-scale forest dynamics plots coordinated by the Center for Tropical Forest Science (CTFS),and established using methods identical to those used to survey and census the 50-ha Forest Dynamics Plot on Barro Colorado Island (BCI),Panama. Just as data from the BCI plot have played a prominent role in our understanding of the community-level consequences of ecological processes played out at local scales,we will show how these plots now provide an unprecedented opportunity to examine a venerable question in tropical ecology:How do soil-borne resources influence the variation in forest structure and demographic turnover rates observed among plots,and among habitat types within plots? To achieve this objective we propose three sets of measurements.At nine plot sites we will characterize variation in soil-moisture availability through the year and throughout the plots using a hydrological model (TOPMODEL).This model predicts soil-moisture saturation deficit based on rainfall,stream-flow data and local topography. Second,at five plots currently lacking soils data we will sample soil-chemical properties within standardized,topographically-defined habitat types.Third,at the same plots we will perform seedling growth experiments using mycorrhizal and non-mycorrhizal pioneer species to assess plant-availability of soil nutrients for each habitat type.These measurements will allow us to address questions at two spatial scales.At the among-plot scale we will be able to ask how stem density and basal area,as well as community-wide patterns of growth,mortality and recruitment,correlate with moisture availability and soil fertility.At the within-plot scale we will ask whether species exhibit specialization to particular hydrological niches,and whether habitat types differ in soil fertility,in turnover rates,and in local species richness.Resolution of these broad questions concerning correlations among soil-borne resources and characteristics of the vegetation will in turn permit us to refine future hypotheses aimed at understanding the mechanistic basis for interspecific variation in demographics and distribution. This study will provide the first standardized large-scale measurements of the environmental context within which tropical forests grow.Our trans-continental approach to testing questions of ecosystem function and community organization has rarely been attempted,but it will be essential if we are to improve our understanding of the biogeographic and biophysical limits to our ecological generalizations.Understanding how variation in water and nutrient availability determines forest structure,composition and dynamics,and potentially influences local diversity through niche partitioning,will be essential to predicting future vegetation responses to climate change and will also provide a first step in guiding management to protect forest diversity.Wide dissemination and application of the results of this project is ensured by the active participation of in- country collaborators,and by data sharing through CTFS doc21925 none The proposed work seeks to create a new way to educate prospective engineers. This idea is founded on the concepts of an enriched learning environment, which is a system of education that provides an interconnected focus on the learner, on the teaching process, on discipline knowledge and on the community. Specific aims are to 1. Create a change process that leads faculty towards the ideas embodied in the enriched learning environment model. This task will involve a set of ongoing workshops (2-4 per year) facilitated by specialists in faculty development. Workshops will be interdisciplinary with participation from disciplines such as engineering, education, mathematics, and English. 2. Create a mentor program, organized in tiers. A professor mentors a limited number of experienced mentors, each an undergraduate. Experienced mentors supervise beginning mentors, and the mentors guide students in engineering classes. 3. Design and build a creativity incubator, the Idaho Mind Works. Patterned after the highly successful Idaho Engineering Works (IEWorks), the Idaho Mind Works will be located in a physical space that promotes social, cultural and experiential learning. 4. Implement the enriched learning environment model in engineering science, lab and design classes. 5. Gather validated evidence that informs the relevant scientific and educational communities of the results of this research. This project will create a prototype of a new engineering education system-one that is based on new assumptions and foundations. Knowledge will be documented and disseminated, including transfer to an innovative company that specializes in faculty development. Intellectual Merit. While ideas of the enriched learning environment have been achieved in some classrooms, this proposal seeks change across a community of educators. The proposed objectives are each an extension of significant ongoing work, and the project team contains engineering educators, assessment specialists and personnel from the College of Education. Through commitment from faculty and students across disciplines, the proposed work will create an environment based on inquiry, investigation, and discovery, where faculty and students learn and research together. In addition, the proposal team seeks to reduce the cost of education and to develop a method for transferring the enriched learning environment model to other universities. To improve quality while decreasing costs is the way of the engineer--this proposal is founded on the belief that this is possible doc21926 none The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at the University of Minnesota supports an interdisciplinary research program with over twenty faculty participants from the departments of chemical engineering and materials science, electrical and computer engineering, physics, and chemistry. TheCenter s research is organized into three interdisciplinary research groups (IRGs). IRG1, Microstructured Polymers, investigates the use of block copolymers to direct the structure and function of microstructured molecular materials. IRG 2, Crystalline Organic Semiconductors, is a new effort whose goals are to elucidate structure-property relationships and to apply that knowledge to the synthesis of new organic semiconductors with enhanced performance in field-effect transistors. IRG3, Magnetic Heterostructures, aims to understand interfacial spin transport, magnetization dynamics, and exchange coupling in magnetic heterostructures with well characterized interfaces. The Center s research benefits from extensive materials synthesis and characterization facilities that include microscopy, X-ray scattering, polymer synthesis, rheology, molecular characterization and tissue mechanics. The MRSEC operates a broad education and outreach program that includes summer research fellowships for faculty-student teams from four-year colleges, fellowships for individual Native American students, research experiences for undergraduates and for teachers. The Center also has an extensive industrial partnership program by which member companies participate in collaborative research and education efforts with MRSEC faculty participants. Participants in the Center currently include 23 senior investigators, 6 postdoctoral associates, 27 graduate students, and 2 technicians and other support personnel. Professor Michael D. Ward directs the MRSEC doc21927 none Carroll Funds are requested for partial support of the 61th Annual Meeting of the Society for Developmental Biology, to be held July 21-25, at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The Society has held this meeting since its founding in , missing only two years during World War II. This is an indication of its commitment and success in holding meetings of the highest scientific quality, as well as a reflection of the community s interest on the field of developmental biology. The scientific sessions encompass work on diverse organisms including plants, invertebrates and vertebrates. Fifty-one speakers have already accepted the invitation to tell the attendees about some of their latest findings in the following areas: Development of Cell, Organ, and Organismal Size, Making Boundaries, Developmental Timing, Extracellular Matrix and Cell Signaling, Signaling into the Cytoskeleton, Making and Connecting the Brain, Development of Sensory Systems, Organogenesis, Evolution of Morphological Diversity, Control of Gene Expression, Germ Cells, Dealing with Complexity in Development, and Imaging Cells and Molecules. An additional 24-32 speakers will be chosen from submitted abstracts for platform presentations, allowing the inclusion of the latest results and providing an opportunity for postdoctoral fellows and graduate students to talk about their works. The Education Symposium will center on the very current topic of Teaching Evolution and it will include a discussion period with audience participation. An attendance of about 700 people is expected, and most of them will present their new data in the two dedicated poster sessions each day, one after lunch and the other in the evening. The organizers are certain that this format allows them to continue to emphasize the best science and to provide a forum to bring together junior and senior investigators, and to allow them to exchange ideas on science, education and the role of science in today s society. Merit-based travel awards will be available to students and junior postdoctoral fellows, as well as Latin American faculty and students to attend the meeting doc21928 none Term limits are the most significant innovation in state legislatures since the legislative modernization movement of the s and s. Currently, term limits have taken effect in 11 states; they will go into effect in seven more between and . By now, hundreds of legislators have been prevented from running for re-election. New legislators, in turn, will be forced from office after as few as six years. Legislative organization has also been affected, as term limited legislatures can no longer rely heavily on seniority to pick their leaders. Because term limits are new, there is little evidence about their effects. There has been one comprehensive, 50-state study, but it was carried out in , before any legislators were actually turned out of office. Other studies have now begun to appear, but they have typically been based on one or two legislatures. Now that term limits are in effect in 11 states, with others shortly joining the list, the effects can be gauged more fully. This project draws on a new, 50-state survey of legislators along with election data and demographic data about the legislators. It examines electoral effects (e.g., competition), influence patterns (e.g., executive-legislative relations), and procedural effects (e.g., constituent service). The methodology includes over-time comparisons (using the earlier survey as a base) as well as comparisons between term limited and non-term limited states. Multivariate statistical methods allow the investigators to control for possible confounding factors, including characteristics of the legislators themselves, of states and chambers, and of legislative districts. The research is part of a cooperative venture between academic political scientists and the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Council of State Governments, and the State Legislative Leaders Foundation. Through this cooperation, it is anticipated that there will be considerable feedback to the legislatures. In particular, team members will identify and evaluate ways in which various states have adapted to term limits and disseminate this information to all term limited states. Non-term limited states will also benefit from learning about and possibly adopting newly implemented training, professional development, and procedural changes doc21929 none This project will examine the importance of leaf detritus with differing decay characteristics on ecosystem properties in headwater streams that receive most of their energy from the surrounding forest as autumn-shed leaves. By manipulating the quality and complexity (i.e., number of leaf types) of detrital resources, the investigators will test the hypothesis that quality and complexity of detritus in a detritus-based ecosystem regulates ecosystem structure and function. This will be accomplished by controlling detritus persistence and availability to stream-dwelling consumer organisms. Increasing the complexity of leaf detritus should reduce temporal variation in key ecosystem characteristics and processes such as standing crop of organic matter, organic matter export, fungal reproduction, nutrient retention, ecosystem metabolism, and invertebrate abundance, biomass and production. Anthropogenic reductions in global biodiversity require an improved understanding of the impacts of biodiversity on ecosystem processes, such as the consequences of different riparian replanting schemes for stream ecosystems doc21930 none Circadian rhythms are cyclic biological activities that recur at the same time every day. In mammals, a part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) is important for these rhythms, and constitutes part of the biological clock mechanism. These rhythms continue to run under constant conditions, but environmental cues such as timing of daylight can set, or entrain, the timing or phase-shifting of the cycles. Sex differences have been described in the entrained circadian rhythms of most mammals that have been examined, and recent data suggest that steroid hormones can influence the function of the circadian clock biochemistry in the SCN. Most animals used for circadian research are nocturnal rodents, but there are some data on two diurnal species, the human and a rodent called the degu. In the degu, sexually dimorphic circadian effects are seen in responses to free-running periods, light stimuli, and modulation by hormones, among other factors. The sexual dimorphism develops just after puberty, and appears to require changes in both sexes. This project uses biochemical, molecular and behavioral approaches to determine whether sexual differentiation occurs when molecular receptors for estrogen and or androgen are up-regulated in the SCN, and whether sexual differentiation of circadian rhythms is reflected in changed cycles of the gene expression of key cellular proteins (PER and CRY) that generate the cycles. Results from this project will be important for general biology and psychology as well as neuroendocrinology, for understanding hormonal and genetic mechanisms of circadian rhythms in mammals, for evolutionary comparisons with nocturnal mammals, and potentially for better understanding of how human circadian rhythms develop during adolescence. This project is also in a laboratory with an excellent record of research mentoring doc21931 none The continuance of life through cell division requires that each daughter cell receive one and only one chromosome set from the parent cell. High fidelity DNA replication and chromosome segregation are fundamental components to this process. During DNA replication, each parental chromosome is exactly duplicated. At the same time, the resulting chromosomes (called sister chromatids) become tightly paired along their length. This pairing between chromatids identifies the sisters over time. Upon cell division, the pairing mechanism is inactivated and the sisters segregate away from each other into the newly forming daughter cells. This is the hallmark of proper cell division. Defects in sister chromatid pairing have dire consequences for the organism, causing severe abnormalities of many kinds. This project will help characterize the mechanism by which sister chromatid pairing is established. CTF7 (also called ECO1) is an essential component of the sister chromatid pairing pathway in yeast and Ctf7p is highly conserved throughout evolution. The goals of this research are to 1) map Ctf7p protein interaction domains required for sister chromatid pairing, 2) test molecular models of how sister chromatids are paired, and 3) identify new components that are required for sister chromatid pairing. These goals will be accomplished using biochemical, molecular, genetic and high-resolution light microscopy approaches in yeast cells. The successful completion of these goals will enable the investigator to build a testable physical model of how sister chromatids become paired and elucidate the regulatory mechanisms involved. In addition to advancing the understanding of chromosome segregation, this research program will strengthen the scientific infrastructure at Lehigh University, an institution with a high percentage of undergraduate students. Students and post-doctoral fellows will acquire new intellectual and technical skills from this project doc21932 none Tosney Axon Guidance & Neural Plasticity Oral preferred, Poster is OK THREE FUNCTIONALLY DISTINCT ADHESIONS IN FILOPODIA Tosney, K.W., K. Balazovich and M. Steketee, MCDB Department and Neuroscience Program, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI Filopodia are sensory and motile structures, vital for the motility and guidance of growth cones. Growth cones can advance but cannot respond to guidance cues if bereft of filopodia, the tips of their filopodia are specialized for signal reception, and adhesion of just a single filopodial tip to a cue can alter discrete elements of motility as well as axonal trajectory. Individual filopodia were analyzed with correlated optical recording, electron microscopy and immunolabeling, to elucidate the role of filopodial adhesions in motility and guidance. We report that, contrary to common belief, all substrate adhesions are not created equal. Individual filopodia develop adhesions at three sites, and these adhesions differ distinctively in function. Tip adhesions suffice to signal. Basal adhesions lie at filopodial bases and along internal actin bundles, associate with a novel organelle, the focal ring, and function in filopodial emergence and dynamics. Shaft adhesions lie along filopodial shafts, lack a focal ring, and control the extent of lamellar ( veil ) advance. When present, shaft adhesions inhibit veil advance. Veils are unaffected by basal adhesions, but stop advancing as they encountered shaft adhesions. Veils readily advance along filopodia lacking shaft adhesions, but not along filopodia displaying shaft adhesions. This relationship is not due to veils removing adhesions as they advance. Reducing adhesion with antibodies decreases the proportion of filopodia with shaft adhesions and coordinately increases veil advance. Of particular interest, guidance cues can act by targeting shaft adhesions. When a filopodial tip contacts an inhibitory cue, the signal induces shaft adhesions and coordinately abolishes veil advance, whereas contact with a permissive cue prohibits shaft adhesions and coordinately promotes veil advance. Cues that target shaft adhesions produce systematic changes in veil advance and thereby modulate axonal trajectory. Individual growth cone filopodia thus develop three functionally distinct adhesions that can help regulate both motility and navigation. These adhesions also have structural and compositional distinctions. For instance, basal and shaft adhesions differentially associate with Rho GTPases, basal adhesions with Rac1 and shaft adhesions with Cdc42. We are currently testing the hypothesis that one way in which Rac1 and Cdc42 control motility is by selectively inducing adhesions that differ in function. Supported by NIH- and doc21933 none Undisturbed peatland ecosystems are believed to represent a net sink for atmospheric carbon (C). This research focuses on C balance in western Canadian peatlands of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, a region where disturbances, especially fire, diminish the regional C sink strength. In addition to direct C losses via combustion, peatlands continue to release C after fire, as peat decomposition continues with greatly diminished post-fire net primary production of vegetation. The investigators will examine the effects of wildfire on the C balance of peatlands across western Canada. The research is structured around three questions: how do post-fire C fluxes vary spatially and temporally across western Canadian peatlands; to what extent is regional variation in post-fire C-balance recovery attributable to variation in post-fire plant successional pathways; and to what extent is regional variation in post-fire C-balance recovery attributable to variation in post-fire plant nutrient and moisture conditions in the burned peat substrate doc21934 none Eukaryotic development depends on three carefully orchestrated processes: differentiation, morphogenesis, and growth. The coordination of these processes is most clearly demonstrated during embryological development of newly fertilized eggs, when a single cell gives rise to thousands of differentiated and morphologically distinct cell types. During this process, and throughout its life cycle, the developing organism is responsible for regulating the spatial and temporal expression of genes. The helix-loop-helix (HLH) family of transcriptional regulators regulate a wide array of developmental processes. Members of this transcription factor family have been identified in most eukaryotic systems and are required for a variety of critical developmental processes, including normal pancreatic functioning, brain and eye morphogenesis, macrophage differentiation, and skeletal muscle development. Because HLH proteins are involved in so many diverse processes, they have been the focus of intense study by molecular geneticists and biochemists. General rules for DNA binding and protein dimerization activities by HLH proteins have been determined, and the HLH proteins are classified according to these properties. During a previously funded pilot study, a new class of HLH proteins was identified in the soil nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans. The five proteins identified each contained two intact HLH domains. Because HLH proteins have been extensively characterized, finding two domains was surprising. The identification of HLH proteins containing more than one HLH domain implies that these proteins may regulate transcription in more ways than previously described. The long-term goal of this project is to perform an in vivo and in vitro characterization of HLH regulators containing multiple HLH domains. To meet this goal, the following specific aims have been formulated: (1) determine expression patterns of five C. elegans proteins, each containing two HLH domains; (2) characterize phenotypes associated with aberrant expression of dual HLH domain proteins; and (3) determine the DNA binding properties of two dual HLH domain proteins. The intellectual merit of the work described here is the beginning of a long-term project that focuses on the transcriptional regulation of eukaryotic development by HLH proteins. Once completed, this project will help determine if proteins containing more than one HLH domain are widely expressed in C. elegans, and if these proteins exhibit the same DNA binding properties as those with single HLH domains. Future experiments can then focus on in vitro studies of transcriptional regulation by these proteins. On the broader scale, the work described here will be performed at Morgan State University, an HBCU that is also an urban, predominantly undergraduate university. With the goal of exposing more students to research careers, undergraduate students are involved in all aspects of the research described. These students will present their research activities at local undergraduate and at National Research Symposia. As designed, this project will also allow the Department of Biology to integrate an active research project into a required upper-level undergraduate course. The integration of the research into this course will ensure that every Biology Major at Morgan State University will have at least one semester of exposure to basic research in molecular genetics. This project is supported by the Biochemistry of Gene Expression Program in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences and the Multi-User Equipment Program in the Division of Biological Infrastructure in the Directorate for Biological Sciences, and by the Historically Black College and University Undergraduate Initiative Program in the Division of Human Resource Development in the Education and Human Resources Directorate doc21935 none Prieve, Dennis C. Gordon Research Conference The purpose of this grant is for partial support of the Gordon Research Conference on Chemistry at Interfaces to be held 7-12 July at Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut. The funds requested will be used to encourage wider participation in the conference by young chemical engineering faculty and promising graduate students by providing partial support for travel expenses and conference fees. The program for the conference has four sub-themes: 1) Biomolecules at Interfaces, 2) Self-Assembly at Interfaces, 3) Consequences of Colloid Forces and 4) Charge Effects in Nonaqueous Media. 22 speakers and 20 discussion leaders have been invited and agreed to participate in the oral program. In addition to the invited talks, posters are encouraged to be submitted from all conference participants, especially from those not invited to speak. A 30-minute time slot is included in the morning program each day for oral overviews. The Vice-Chair will select between 3 and 6 posters to be summarized orally each day in this time slot. Full examination of all posters will be conducted in each afternoon s poster session. A final report will be prepared and submitted to the National Science Foundation doc21936 none Osmotic stress caused by drought and salinity has been a major selective force in plant evolution and an important factor limiting crop productivity. Understanding the mechanisms by which plants detect and respond to osmotic stress is important for basic plant biology and for crop improvement. Previous studies suggested that plant adaptation to osmotic stress is governed by a complex network of regulatory pathways, but most of the key components in these pathways remain to be identified. This project continues previous effort in using Arabidopsis mutants to identify such regulatory components. Several Arabidopsis mutants impaired in osmotic stress-responsive gene expression were recovered from a genetic screen by luciferase imaging using plants that express the RD29A-LUC (firefly luciferase under control of the stress-inducible RD29A promoter) transgene. Some of the mutations have been isolated through map-based cloning, which provided significant new insights into osmotic stress responses in plants. For example, cloning of SAD1 revealed the involvement of RNA metabolism in osmotic stress signaling. This research is based on such findings and is aimed at identifying new regulatory components in osmotic stress signal transduction. Specific aims include the cloning and characterization of two new genetic loci involved in osmotic stress signaling, and the identification of genetic suppressors of existing mutants such as sad1 doc21937 none The focus of this project is the development of numerical procedures for calculating the physical basis of the association of peptides with the membrane interface, the electrostatic forces involved in lateral redistribution of lipids, and detailed electrostatic properties of membrane systems based on more realistic models than have been used in the past. This project is based on two main hypotheses: 1) Physical forces-electrostatics and hydrophobicity-mediate the membrane association of amphipathic peptides: the electrostatic interactions occur between basic residues and acidic phospholipids, and the hydrophobic interactions are mediated via aromatic residues which partition into the polar headgroup region of the membrane. 2) Nonspecific electrostatic interactions provide the driving force for the observed lateral sequestration of multivalent acidic phospholipids by clusters of basic residues on membrane-adsorbed peptides corresponding to these basic domains. The finite difference Poisson-Boltzmann (FDPB) method, which is based on a continuum description of the aqueous solvent and a more detailed, atomic-level description of the macromolecules, has been remarkably successful in its ability to reproduce experimental measurements of the binding free energies of simple basic peptides that do not penetrate the membrane interface. Here, the continuum approach will be extended to peptides containing basic and aromatic residues that do penetrate the membrane interface. In addition, more realistic structural and theoretical models of peptide membrane systems will be developed by incorporating snapshots from molecular dynamics simulations of membranes into FDPB calculations. Comparison with experiments at all levels will allow refinement of the theoretical methodology and provide valuable input to the experimental studies. The research described here is based on computational approaches and aims ultimately to provide a detailed theoretical description of the interactions between peripheral proteins and membranes. This research is important both because of the significance of the general area of peptide membrane interactions and because many of the questions posed can only be approached with computational methods. This project involves the combined development and application of biophysical tools to describe problems that have not previously been studied with computational techniques and close collaborative interactions between computational and experimental work. The principal investigator is involved in a number of graduate programs such as the Program for Chemical Biology, the Biochemistry and Structural Biology Graduate Program, and the Keck Program in Cellular and Molecular Biophysics of Signal Transduction. The computational and research infrastructure being developed through projects such as this one is contributing to the enrichment of the graduate training environment doc21938 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Philip Silverman of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation to elucidate the structural biology of conjugal (lateral) DNA transfer between F+ and F- strains of Escherichia coli. This research seeks to define how the 30 or so DNA transfer (Tra) proteins encoded by the F plasmid are organized at the bacterial cell surface and tests the hypothesis that these proteins constitute a molecular machine that mediates conjugal DNA transfer. The first specific aim is to characterize the interactions among the Tra proteins with the goal of understanding what the Tra protein machine looks like from a biochemical perspective. The second specific aim of the research is to apply indirect immunofluorescence microscopy to determine how many Tra machines there are on each bacterial cell and how they are related spatially to each other, to F DNA, and to the bacterial cell surface as a whole. This research is the first step towards a detailed structure function analysis of conjugal DNA transfer mediated by the F plasmid. To broaden the impact of our research to science education in Oklahoma s underserved rural schools, a third specific aim of the project is to survey antibiotic resistance plasmids in bacteria from the intestinal flora of livestock throughout Oklahoma. These R plasmids will be isolated and partially characterized by rural high school science students in conjunction with The Oklahoma Science Project, which Dr. Silverman founded and directs. Several considerations make this project both timely and important. First, conjugal DNA transfer is connected to the dissemination of antibiotic resistance, an increasingly alarming public health problem. Second, it is one of several mechanisms by which bacterial cells secrete macromolecules across their surface barriers; these mechanisms are responsible for the pathogenicity of many bacteria. Third, conjugal DNA transfer has applications in biotechnology; a better understanding of the process will increase the number and scope of such applications. Finally, the project will create more opportunities for Oklahoma s rural students, including its sizable Native American cohort, to enter technology career paths doc21939 none In this project, funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Adams will develop an independent technique to determine dissociative electron-ion recombination rates and product distributions. The method is designed to circumvent difficulties that have caused contradictory results from previous studies with flowing-afterglow and storage ring experiments. After initial tests on well understood systems, the technique will be applied to those for which controversial results have been reported in the literature. New systems where dissociative recombination plays a major role will be investigated. The molecules of interstellar and cometary gases, and of the earth s upper as well as lower atmosphere, continually undergo dissociative ionization followed by recombination. The rates of recombination as well distributions of the dissociation products are experimentally determined and provide the basis for theoretical modeling. Conventional methods for determining these parameters have often given disparate results. This project is designed to develop a new method to generate reliable data for testing of existing theories and the development of new ones. The work will be performed with the assistance of graduate and undergraduate students and postdoctoral research associates. In this project, funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Adams will develop an independent technique to determine dissociative electron-ion recombination rates and product distributions. The method is designed to circumvent difficulties that have caused contradictory results from previous studies with flowing-afterglow and storage ring experiments. After initial tests on well understood systems, the technique will be applied to those for which controversial results have been reported in the literature. New systems where dissociative recombination plays a major role will be investigated. The molecules of interstellar and cometary gases, of the earth s upper as well as lower atmosphere, continually undergo dissociative ionization followed by recombination. The rates of recombination as well distributions of the dissociation products are experimentally determined and provide the basis for theoretical modeling. Conventional methods for determining these parameters have often given disparate results. This project is designed to develop a new method to generate reliable data for testing of existing theories and the development of new ones. The work will be performed with the assistance of graduate and undergraduate students, and postdoctoral research associates doc21940 none Ecology and evolution of nodule symbiosis for invasive legumes As a result of both deliberate and accidental transport across regions, many species of legumes have become invasive weeds that have greatly altered the ecology of plant communities throughout the world. The disproportionate ecological impact of legumes is strongly related to their symbiosis with root nodule bacteria (rhizobia). This symbiosis provides legumes with an abundant supply of usable nitrogen, an essential nutrient that is often a primary limiting factor for plant growth. However, the influence of this symbiosis on invasion by legumes is poorly understood. Legumes must acquire rhizobia from their immediate environment following seed germination, because bacteria are not carried internally within seeds. As a result, introduced legumes will often arrive at new habitats where well-adapted mutualist partners from their ancestral range are nonexistent. Even if legume colonists have sufficiently unspecialized nodulation behavior to allow them to use bacterial strains obtained from other legume taxa indigenous to a site, there is no reason to expect that such strains will be optimally adapted to the novel host. Invasion success may thus depend on whether colonist plants can select for more beneficial symbiotic partners over time. To date, there has been no research to test whether evolutionary changes in symbiotic compatibility are an important factor in legume range expansion. This project will use the highly invasive legume Scotch broom (Cytisus scoparius) as a model system to answer several fundamental questions about demographic and evolutionary processes affecting biological invasion by legumes. Scotch broom is native to Europe, but is an aggressive invader on four other continents. The specific objectives of the project are: 1) to use DNA sequencing of ribosomal genes to identify the geographic origin of rhizobial symbionts for invasive Scotch broom plants in two separate regions of the U.S. These bacteria will be compared to samples from a broad range of other legumes species native to both Europe and North America. 2) to test whether adaptation of nodule bacteria to invading legumes has involved horizontal transfer of bacterial genes encoding symbiotic traits. DNA sequencing will also be performed on two bacterial genes essential to the nitrogen-fixation symbiosis, to test whether the genealogical relationships of different DNA regions have been altered by transfer of genetic material between bacterial strains; 3) to use field inoculation experiments to determine whether the demographic performance of legume colonists is limited by a scarcity of compatible rhizobia. The growth of plants in natural environments with and without exposure to supplemental root-nodule bacteria will be compared; and 4) to evaluate whether the rhizobia available to legume invaders are of inferior quality, by comparing how plants grow when inoculated with bacteria from the plant s ancestral range (Europe) vs. bacteria from newly colonized North American sites. One of the most serious types of human environmental impact on natural ecosystems involves activities that have caused species to invade new geographic regions. By providing insights about the role of microbial symbionts in legume range expansion, this project will contribute to a better understanding of biological invasions, and will also generate concepts and methods relevant to specific programs for managing a variety of invasive legume weeds doc21941 none Smith This research investigates the evolutionary response of woodrats to temperature change over the late Quaternary. The project involves work at cave sites in the southwestern United States, using fossilized woodrat middens or debris piles. Middens consist of plant fragments, fecal pellets and other materials embedded in crystalized urine ( amberat ); when sheltered in caves they persist for thousands of years. Measurements of radiocarbon-dated fecal pellets are used to estimate body size; for most mammals, size is sensitive to environmental temperature. Over the next year, we will investigate a number of potentially problematic sampling and statistical dimensions of our study system, including conducting studies with modern animals to examine midden deposition and composition. Organisms may respond to anthropogenic climate change by adapting or going locally extinct. However, the timing, magnitude and nature of such responses remains unclear. The past ten thousand years are arguably the best proxy we have for understanding the likely effects of anthropogenic climate change. By examining different species of small rodents at different locations within their range over the late Quaternary, and estimating the thermal thresholds at which different types of evolutionary responses occur, we may be able to better understand how future climate change will impact mammalian populations doc21942 none Organization of behavioral plasticity by neurochemicals Gene E. Robinson, Principal Investigator Many animals show profound changes in behavior as they grow up, and these changes are based on maturational changes in the structure and functioning of the brain. Like other forms of behavioral plasticity, behavioral maturation involves coordinated change in many different aspects of behavior and is accompanied by extensive changes in neurochemistry. Previous NSF funding led to the discovery that octopamine influences the behavioral maturation of the honey bee, specifically the age at which honey bees shift from working in the hive to foraging. Octopamine is a biogenic amine, which is a prominent class of neurochemicals that regulate behavior in many organisms, vertebrate and invertebrate, including humans. This proposal seeks to use octopamine to explore precisely which behavioral mechanisms need to be affected to orchestrate complex behavioral maturation. Research will determine whether octopamine acts to increase responsiveness towards specific environmental stimuli so that a bee with the occupation of foraging continues in that occupation because of the way that it reacts to certain stimuli. Other possibilities that will be tested is to determine whether octopamine promotes foraging behavior by increasing overall activity or improving the cognitive abilities that are essential for successful foraging. The research will involve detailed measurements of biogenic amines in the brains of individual bees, treatments of biogenic amines, and quantitative behavioral analyses. The honey bee has become an important model system for studies at the interface of neurobiology, behavior genetics. This research will provide useful insights into the neurochemical basis of complex behavioral changes experienced by many social animals, including man, and provide a demonstration of how brain chemicals influence the development of cognitively demanding tasks doc21943 none Moss Developmental timing is fundamental to all multicellular organisms. For tissues and organs to form properly, developmental events must occur in the proper succession with the appropriate synchrony. The mechanisms that explicitly govern the timing of these events are not well understood in any organism. Valuable insights, however, have come from the investigation of heterochronic genes of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Dr. Moss will investigate an new and important heterochronic gene, lin-46, which helps specify the stage-appropriate fates of cells during the animal s larval development. The LIN-46 protein acts early in the developmental timing pathway, downstream of the key regulators LIN-14 and LIN-28. Proteins related to LIN-46 in plants and animals are known to mediate protein-protein interactions. Therefore, to control developmental timing LIN-46 is likely to interact with proteins that coordinate the behaviors of cells and may be regulated by LIN-14 and LIN-28. The work outlined in this proposal will address how LIN-46 governs developmental timing from two aspects. First, Dr. Moss will elucidate the molecular relationship between the lin-46 and other heterochronic genes by determining whether lin-46 expression is regulated by lin-28 and lin-14, whether they act in the same cells, and whether they are in a linear genetic pathway. Second he will characterize the interaction of LIN-46 with other proteins. He predicts that at least one other protein encoded in the C. elegans genome interacts physically with LIN-46 and is necessary for its function. He will search for other proteins that interact with LIN-46 using molecular and genetic approaches. The long-range impact of this work will be an understanding of the molecular basis of developmental timing regulation by LIN-46 and how it has evolved. What is learned about developmental timing in C. elegans may be widely applicable to other animals. The process of developmental timing is of broad biological interest because its importance in the evolution of animal form doc21944 none In this project, funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division and the Solid State Chemistry Program of the Division of Materials Research, Nelson will conduct research in time resolved optical spectroscopy and coherent optical control of condensed matter systems. The complex dynamics of disordered and partially disordered materials will be studied over time scales ranging from femtoseconds to milliseconds. Supercooled glass-forming liquids and ferroelectric crystals, both of which exhibit complex dynamical behavior that changes sharply as a function of temperature, will be investigated. Novel methods for far-infrared, or terahertz (THz) frequency spectroscopy, as well as automated methods for spatiotemporal femtosecond pulse shaping will be exploited for generating intense, focused THz beams with field levels exceeding 2 MV cm. This research is concerned with the complex dynamical behavior of condensed matter, mainly solids, ferroelectric media and supercooled liquids. Novel high frequency infrared methods, including terahertz echoes will be developed. The work has the potential of leading to practical devices. Students and postdoctoral research associates participate in this research. Nelson will also conduct an ambitious outreach program to bring research experiences in physical chemistry chemical physics to secondary school students doc21945 none A basic goal of ecology is to understand the processes that generate the vast variation in abundance and biomass among taxa in time and space. Food webs summarize the flow of elements and energy in ecological systems. One basic type of web groups taxa into trophic levels based on shared prey and predators. A significant and attainable goal for Ecology is to predict the biomass across these trophic levels in time and space. Three ecological theories, knit together, should help us achieve this goal: Are resources limiting? OFAN How strong is selection for defense? Defense theory How do prey allocate between growth and defense? Ecological stoichiometry Which elements are potential resources? 1. OFAN (an acronym for its architects) proposes that the balance of resource and predator imitation varies with the amount of resources available at the base of the web. 2. Ecological stoichiometry posits that resources limiting biomass reflect the balance of chemical elements needed for growth and defense relative to their availability in the environment. What available elements can build defenses? How do defenses shape elemental composition? 3. Defense theory posits that the optimal allocation between growth and defense is determined by the intensity of predation and the time it takes for the prey to grow to reproductive age. These theories will be used to explore the dynamics of tropical litter food webs in the Republic of Panama s Barro Colorado National Monument (BCNM). Most of what we know about the structure and function of food webs comes from plant-based, or green webs. However, over 80% of the carbon fixed in photosynthesis in the tropical canopy falls as litter where it is decomposed in the brown food web of microbes, microbivores, and their predators. The taxa in these webs may represent 60% of the forest s invertebrates and their abundance can vary 100-fold at small spatial scales. Yet, despite its importance in releasing carbon into the atmosphere, recycling ecosystem nutrients, and sustaining much of the forest s biodiversity, we are profoundly ignorant of the factors shaping abundance in these webs. Like the green forest canopy above it, the tropical litter represents one of the last ecological frontiers on the planet. BCNM, with its extensive infrastructure, its century-long stewardship by Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and its ongoing large-scale experimental and demographic studies, is the best place to undertake this project. Ecological stoichiometry will be used to identify which elements (among C, N, Ca, P, S, Mg, K, Cu, Fe, Zn) limit biomass in the trophic levels and common taxa of BCNM s brown food webs. Its 50 ha tree plot will be used to map this biomass onto the chemical signatures of 10 common tree species at three stages of litter decomposition. These patterns will be further tested experimentally with long-term 40 x 40 m fertilization plots, and pulses of nutrients in 1-m 2 plots. OFAN s prediction of a stairstep accumulation of biomass along nutrient gradients will be evaluated with the above data. Its mechanism--that the impact of predator limitation varies along resource gradients--will be tested using fences that keep out predacious ants and by supplementing plots with litter ant nests. Defense theory s life history tradeoffs will be evaluated in microcosms by measuring growth rates of common litter taxa and evaluating their palatability to predators. If defenses by fungi and microbivores significantly curtail predation then life history tradeoffs that play out along resource gradients are a key phenomenon shaping the balance of predation and resource limitation in this system doc21946 none The use of transition metals in organic synthesis forms the rationale and unifying concept for this project. The foci of this research are threefold. First, the regioselective reactions of pi-allyl Pd complexes will be studied; second, the template-enhanced asymmetric synthesis of the natural product ophiobolin-C will be carried out and third, the asymmetric synthesis of magellanine will be accomplished using Pauson-Khand cycloaddition methodology. With this proposal, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research efforts of Dr. Marie E. Krafft of the Department of Chemistry at Florida State University. Professor Krafft will focus her work on developing new organometallic reactions which can be used to carry out selective carbon-carbon bond forming reactions and to apply the methodology towards the synthesis of natural properties having interesting biological properties. The work has broader impact on the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries and the project provides an excellent training ground for undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral collaborators doc21947 none RUI: Developmental and Cognitive Constraints on Birdsong Learning Richard F. Braaten, Colgate University, PI Animals are constrained in the kinds of things that they are most likely to learn. For example, humans and other primates easily learn to fear snakes and other predators of their evolutionary ancestors, but do not so easily learn to fear some other objects, even when they are clearly associated with danger. As another example, rodents and other mammals are more likely to learn about the association between the taste of food and subsequent illness than about other characteristics of the feeding experience. Birdsong learning is a particularly interesting example of constrained learning because it is constrained in two ways. First, songbirds are more likely to learn the song of their species than the songs of other species, even under experimental conditions in which the amount of song exposure is equated. Second, like human language learning, in which languages are learned more effectively early in life, birdsong learning is also temporally constrained. Songbirds are much more likely to learn songs presented during a specialized early period of development, the sensitive period. This project attempts to better understand the role that cognitive processes such as attention, perception, and memory may play in constraints on song learning in birds, and also how the role of these cognitive processes may change with development. For example, do birds learn the songs of their own species because those songs are particularly memorable? Are they especially memorable during the sensitive period of song learning? To answer these questions, zebra finches will learn to make responses to particular songs to receive food reward. Birds will later be tested for their memory of both their own and other species songs. In order to study possible developmental changes in memory, zebra finches will be tested during and after the sensitive period for song learning, at 30 and 90 days. Effects of early experience will also be evaluated by testing 30-day-old birds raised in acoustic isolation from zebra finch song. Similar experiments will be done that will assess developmental changes in attention, perception, and categorization of the songs of zebra finches and other species. The broader impacts of this research are two-fold. An understanding of the cognitive processes involved in constraints on song learning may help to better understand constraints on learning in general. Song learning in birds has many parallels with human speech development, including the existence of sensitive periods, and the presumed involvement of attentional, perceptual, and memory processes in human speech learning. The second broader impact of this work derives from it being carried out in an undergraduate institution. Concepts and experiments from this proposal will be integrated into all levels of the undergraduate curriculum. Undergraduates will be involved in the research both during the academic year, and as part of a special summer research program at Colgate University doc21948 none This Small Business Phase I Project is to develop a bioremediation technology for treating groundwater contaminated with N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA). NDMA is a potent carcinogen and an emerging groundwater contaminant in the United States. Accordingly, the State of California has established an acceptable level in drinking water for NDMA of only 20 ng L. Current technologies for treating NDMA, such as ultraviolet irradiation and carbon adsorption, are expensive and or ineffective for removing the contaminant to required levels. Envirogen scientists have recently discovered a bacterial strain that is capable of metabolizing NDMA during growth on a second substrate (i.e., by co-metabolism). This bacterium is one of only a few strains that are known to degrade NDMA. In the course of this Phase I project, the biodegradation of NDMA by this organism andby other bacterial strains possessing similar broad specificity oxidase enzymes will be examined. The most effective culture(s) will be seeded into bioreactors and the abilities of these strains to remediate NDMA in groundwater will be quantified. In addition, the potential to stimulate specific microorganisms in contaminated aquifers to degrade NDMA by cosubstrate application will be tested. The commercial application of this project is in the area of wastewater treatment linked to municipal drinking water supplies. Additional industrial and military uses of the core technology are also expected doc21949 none This research project will examine the processes that underlie the assembly and disassembly of myofibrils. Myofibrils are composed of sarcomeres, which are repeating units of thin and thick filaments. Thin filaments composed largely of actin filaments are linked to the Z-line, a structure that resembles cell adhesions in protein composition. Among the proteins found in both focal adhesions and Z-line structures are the barbed ends of the actin filaments, focal adhesion kinase, p130 Cas , alpha-actinin, and AFAP-110. AFAP-110, which is the focus of this project, associates with the nonreceptor tyrosine kinase, Src. Recent evidence demonstrates that AFAP-110 recruits Src to the actin cytoskeleton in response either to elevated protein kinase C (PKC) activity or to mechanical stress. Evidence also suggests that AFAP-110 activates Src directly, resulting in elevated phosphotyrosine levels in the cell. One downstream effect of wide- spread activation of Src substrates is the reorganization of the cytoskeleton brought about by the disassembly of cytoskeletal linkages at focal adhesions and Z-lines. Mature myofibrils disappear from myotubes expressing high Src or PKC activity. Conversely, the generation of force across cell adhesions has been shown to cause the formation of actin filament linkages and to stimulate Src activity restricted to the vicinity of the mechanical strain. The properties that make AFAP-110 a candidate for participating in the formation of cytoskeletal linkages include the ability to bind and crosslink actin filaments, the ability to recruit Src to the cytoskeleton, and the ability to activate Src tyrosine kinase. AFAP-110 could be important in the formation of myofibrils during muscle development. To examine the role of AFAP-110 in muscle development, primary cultures of myotubes will be stained for AFAP-110 and the Z-line marker alpha-actinin. The two proteins should colocalize throughout all developmental stages if AFAP-110 plays a role in the formation of cytoskeletal linkages during myofibrillogenesis. Specific inhibitors of Src will be used to test the hypothesis that the myofibril formation requires activation of Src. To examine the disassembly mechanism, myoblasts will be transfected with a mutant form of AFAP-110, AFAP.lzip , which has been shown to activate Src and disrupt actin cytoskeleton of cultured fibroblasts. Preliminary results show that PKC phosphorylation of AFAP-110 results in the activation of Src tyrosine kinase activity and stress fiber disruption in fibroblasts. Transfection with mutants of AFAP-110 that cannot bind PKC or that cannot interact with Src protect fibroblasts from PKC induced stress fiber disruption. Parallel experiments will be carried out to test whether AFAP-110 serves a similar role in muscle cells. The results of these studies will elucidate the mechanisms by which mature myofibrils turn over and new myofibrils form. The work is to be carried out in large part by undergraduate students, who will carry their training onward to careers in science doc21950 none Climatic variability is a key driver of ecosystem structure and function in grasslands, and climate models suggest that variability in rainfall, temperature, and other climatic parameters will increase because of global climate change. However, there is uncertainty about future rainfall patterns, with some models predicting increased, others decreased growing season rainfall and soil moisture. Any shifts in rainfall quantity or frequency will change rainfall variability, and several lines of evidence suggest that variability may as important as the total quantity of rainfall in regulating tallgrass prairie net primary productivity. Indeed, increases in rainfall variability, even with no change in rainfall quantity, have the capacity to reduce plant performance and productivity and may cause shifts in tallgrass prairie community composition, because of unavoidable physiological and morphological limitations on plant abilities to track and adjust to varying resources. The objective of the research described in this proposal is to experimentally determine the impact of variability in rainfall patterns on above- and belowground grassland productivity, using tallgrass prairie as a model system. We will impose decreases and increases in variability in rainfall inputs on microcosms containing common tallgrass prairie grasses and forbs, by experimental watering at sixteen different quantity and frequency combinations. Measurements will focus on soil moisture dynamics, photosynthetic performance, canopy development, root growth dynamics, plant reproduction, and above and belowground net primary productivity. The overarching hypothesis tested by this experiment is that variability is a key driver of tallgrass prairie productivity, and the experiment will examine several specific hypotheses about the relationships between rainfall quantity and frequency and productivity in grasses and forbs. This knowledge will broaden our understanding of the regulation of grassland productivity, and will have implications for research on productivity diversity relationships, fire grazer interactions, terrestrial carbon dynamics, atmosphere vegetation feedbacks, and interactions among climatic elements in global change scenarios (rainfall, temperature, and elevated CO2). An accurate understanding of these issues is crucial to predicting climate change impacts on grasslands and developing proactive conservation and management plans for these endangered systems doc21951 none McGraw American ginseng an uncommon perennial plant native to the eastern deciduous forest. Harvest of natural populations occurs in response to demand for roots of this slow-growing, medicinally active plant from the Asian market. Its harvest by rural, often poor, Appalachian people serves several economic, social and cultural functions. Multiple lines of evidence suggest ginseng as a natural resource of our forests has declined in both abundance and stature over the past two centuries. Ginseng is potentially a victim of a dual problem - one caused by competition among harvesters for the root, and a second caused by collateral effects of too many white-tailed deer. The federal government, in cooperation with states, is required to certify the sustainability of harvest since ginseng is listed on Appendix II of CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species). However, no standardized monitoring procedure, demographic statistics, or population viability estimates are available for ginseng in the U.S. The primary goal of this research is to fill this gap by assessing population growth rates, diagnosing causes of low population growth rates where they occur (focusing on harvest and browsing as possible factors), and evaluating possible prescriptions for reversing population decline. This study will also provide a prognosis for ginseng in terms of extinction probabilities as they may vary with management schemes. Natural ginseng populations from a four-state area (Indiana, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia) will be studied over a four-year period ( - ), continuing a data collection process begun in . Using the analysis and modeling tools of population biology, the research goals described above will be addressed. This research will be the most extensive, in-depth effort to evaluate the status and potential conservation strategies for ginseng to date. The research has the potential to impact tens of thousands of ginseng harvesters as well as numerous local, state, and federal land managers and regulatory agencies. In the science of conservation biology and population biology, the example of ginseng could become a model for how knowledge of population biology can be applied to preserve both a native plant species and the cultural traditions that have developed around that species. Undergraduate and graduate student involvement with research on this charismatic native plant will develop further expertise and interest in conservation biology doc21952 none The goals of this research program are to further understanding of electrostatic contributions to the stability and function of proteins. Electrostatics is the most useful correlator of structure and function in biological macromolecules, especially in proteins. Without deep understanding of the contributions of electrostatics, the computational methods that are needed to bridge the gap between structure and energy of proteins cannot be improved, nor can the structural basis of stability and function of proteins be established. To accomplish these goals, two sets of experimental studies will be carried out. One set will address the relationship between the dynamic character of proteins and their electrostatic properties. To understand how local structural fluctuations modulate pKa values, the pKa of Asp and Glu residues in staphylococcal nuclease will be measured by NMR spectroscopy. The pKa values will also be used to analyze the acid unfolding of nuclease with an ensemble-based computational method that has the potential to describe a ligand-linked structural transition at unprecedented level of detail. Global conformational changes will be studied by measurement of the Stokes radii of the native and denatured ensemble with size-exclusion chromatography. The goal of the second set of studies is to elucidate the determinants of the energetics of short-range electrostatic interactions. A cluster of ionizable and polar residues in staphylococcal nuclease will be studied systematically. The approach entails perturbation of interactions with mutagenesis, crystallography to obtain structures, NMR to measure pKa values, and measurements of stability by chemical and temperature denaturation. A central goal of this research is to develop computational tools for structure-based calculation of electrostatic energy and pKa values. The experimental studies will contribute the physical insight needed to guide the improvement of computational models, and provide the data needed to test these methods. To the extent that the concepts and computational tools that emerge from these studies have a direct bearing on problems in protein engineering, in rational, structure-driven design, and in biotechnology, they will have a deep and broad impact on society doc21953 none Using in vivo molecular evolution the P.I. is studying how an organism mutates an essential gene as a response to changes in its environment. The model organism is a genetically modified strain of B. stearothermophilus (a thermophile) that has had the wild type copy of the essential adenylate kinase gene (adk) replaced by the mesophilic B. subtilis gene. The grant focuses on two key attributes of molecular evolution; firstly, what are the characteristics of bacterial populations as they adapt to environmental extremes, and secondly, what are the physicochemical properties of the proteins generated from these selections. The experiments follow populations of mutant bacteria as they compete for survival and will use x-ray crystallography to examine the stereochemical basis for increases in thermostability. Sequence and structure based comparisons of mesophilic and thermophilic homologs have suggested that numerous changes in amino acid sequence can increase thermostability, whereas in vitro directed evolution has shown that a smaller number of changes can frequently bring about the required changes in activity thermostability. One conclusion frequently drawn from these observations is that many of the differences seen in sequence are the result of evolutionary drift, rather than evolutionary necessity. To determine the principles that guide evolution of a protein, the mutational path(s) taken by a population of bacteria as they evolve an essential protein to higher thermostability is being determined. Together with atomic analysis of the protein intermediates along this path, the complex sequence surface that constitutes the mutational path to thermostability for the model protein will be explored. Altering conditions of the evolution experiment can also change the mutational path used by the bacterial populations and allow further insights into evolution. Thus the primary goal of the work is to elucidate the pathway(s) used in vivo and to apply biophysical methods to understand the physical basis for the elaborated mutational pathway(s doc21954 none This Doctoral Dissertation provides an explanation of the extension of suffrage rights in a federal system. The ultimate question is: what does it take for a previously excluded group to successfully lobby for the right of electoral inclusion? While other scholars have treated the behavioral explanation of mass activism for suffrage rights and the institutional explanation of policy enactment as separate endeavors, the Principal Investigator argues that the two are too highly interconnected to be understood independently. Understanding when and how movements for political incorporation succeed requires understanding how the processes of activism and institutional constraints interact. The project will explicitly endeavor to combine theoretical frameworks from the literature on social movements that seek to explain the development and maintenance of activism, with the literatures in political science that seek to explain processes of policy enactment (e.g., political parties, legislative institutions, and policy innovation) to offer a new and more complete explanation of the process of enfranchisement. To answer this fundamental question about the American political system, the Principal Investigator studies the struggle for adoption of woman suffrage. Woman suffrage measures were considered and adopted by states through legislative enactment, constitutional convention, and popular referendum. Some of these measures provided for only presidential suffrage, some only primary suffrage, some full suffrage. Thirty years passed between the earliest and latest state-level adopters of woman suffrage. It is through investigation of this variance that we can discover the institutional and socio-political factors that make expansion of the right of electoral participation more or less possible for previously excluded groups. The research design combines an event history approach to analysis of in all forty-eight states with in-depth archival research on the consideration of woman suffrage (in a sample of six states). The national data analysis models the time to adoption of woman suffrage in the states as a function of social and institutional conditions, including: partisan competition, electoral strength of third parties, racial and sex composition of the population, economic conditions, organization of woman suffrage interests, and the difficulty of the state initiative and constitutional amendment processes. The archival work is conducted in states chosen explicitly for their variance on these conditions. This allows the Principal Investigator the ability to trace the processes through which each of these factors comes to matter in the struggle by disenfranchised groups for their political inclusion doc21955 none This doctoral dissertation research project examines the ways in which racial animosity, economic disparity, and institutions shape relations between Native American tribal governments and neighboring local governments. More broadly, this project speaks to the ways that social disadvantage shapes local intergovernmental relations, and how institutional arrangements can subsequently alter those relations. With tribal-local relations, historical circumstances have produced institutions that can offset social disadvantage. This project assesses the bargaining resources that tribal governments gain through those institutions. Political science has long been concerned with the ways that social disadvantage translates into political marginalization in local government-usually, strong voices are amplified, weak voices are diminished in local politics. Scholars have been equally interested in the ways that institutions and federal interventions structure local politics, and have often documented how these arrangements can attenuate social disadvantage in a region. This study addresses both literatures by examining how institutions and federal interventions, in special circumstances, can counteract social disadvantage in local politics. While there is much to be learned from the scholarship that has documented how those with power become even more powerful, it is also important to understand how politically weak groups marshal and deploy those resources that they have at hand. Through the intensive study of six tribal governments and their neighboring authorities, this project identifies how the differing circumstances of tribal governments cause tribal-local relations to vary. Specifically, this analysis examines how differences in federal interventions, tribal governing institutions, and tribal resources affect tribal-local interactions. These findings illuminate how tribal activists can parlay their institutional circumstances into a more powerful Native American voice in local politics doc21956 none Several million U.S. workers were exposed to asbestos, which causes a variety of diseases that range from non-disabling to fatal. At least 500,000 individuals have filed tort claims related to asbestos exposure and, because a typical claimant files claims against 20 defendants, as many as 10 million claims may have been filed. Liability costs have caused about 75 large firms to file for bankruptcy. The eventual cost of asbestos liability is estimated to be as high as $200 billion. Because the large volume of asbestos lawsuits has clogged the dockets of many courts, judges have tried new legal procedures to encourage quick resolution of claims-including consolidation of multiple lawsuits for trial, bifurcation of trials into multiple phases, and bouquet trials. Part of the project involves collecting a dataset of asbestos trials and using regression analysis to examine how these new legal procedures affect trial outcomes and incentives for additional plaintiffs to file lawsuits. Also, a large fraction of asbestos trials result in punitive damages compared to other types of trials. The project will estimate the frequency of punitive damage awards in asbestos trials, the degree of concentration of punitive damage awards on a few firms and whether punitive damage awards have been a significant factor in asbestos firms bankruptcies. Other parts of the project will examine how asbestos settlements are influenced by trial outcomes, how firms with large asbestos liabilities decide whether to file for bankruptcy, and how insurers affect asbestos firms litigation strategies. A final part of the research involves comparing compensation of asbestos victims to compensation of victims of a different mass tort. The comparison will show whether the asbestos mass tort is qualitatively different from other mass torts or merely larger. The project will advance scientific knowledge of mass torts and how the court system and the bankruptcy system deal with them. In particular it will determine the extent to which asbestos liabilities and bankruptcies have increased as a result of procedural innovations that were developed to deal with congested court dockets. The research will provide information and analysis to inform the policy debate concerning how asbestos and other mass torts should be handled and whether a new approach, such as an administrative compensation scheme, is needed doc21834 none This proposal focuses on the ecological and genetic impacts of the introduction of non-native rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) on native gene pools of threatened Yellowstone cutthroat trout (O. clarki bouvieri). In addition to competition, predation and the introduction of disease organisms by introduced species, for some native fish species, a major threat is that of hybridization with the introduced species. Hybrids, if fertile, can spread and cause the complete replacement of parental genes with those of the introduced species. This study is designed to determine the extent of hybridization between Yellowstone cutthroat trout and rainbow trout as well as the degree of genetic dilution that has occurred in native gene pools. In addition, the study will also test whether particular features of the environment (temperature, elevation, stream flow, etc.) are correlated with the presence or absence of pure species or hybrids. In this manner, the study will determine if particular environments favor the spread of hybrid fishes, or provide an advantage to the remaining pure populations of Yellowstone cutthroat trout. This study will provide the first documentation of the pattern of genetic invasion of rainbow trout and begin to explore the ecological mechanisms that are responsible for this pattern. If environmental correlates are found which predict the success of native Yellowstone cutthroat trout over hybrids, such habitats can be given top priority for conservation. Only through a combined approach of understanding both the ecological and genetic factors that influence the success of invasive species, can we ever hope to deter their spread and save native gene pools doc21958 none Differences between male and female brains and behavior result primarily from differences in the timing, level and location of gene expression. Even in species where sex is determined chromosomally and the gonads play central roles in the differentiation process, the exact nature of gene expression is influenced by a host of environmental influences ranging from nutrition to social interactions. Although we are building a solid understanding of how gonadal steroids influence the sexual differentiation of brain and behavior, the mechanisms by which social interactions affect this process remain poorly understood. This project develops an integrative approach to how gene expression in the brain changes during sexual differentiation, in a model system where it is possible to experimentally dissect gonadal and social influences that regulate behavior. A well-studied reef fish species, the bluehead wrasse, exhibits socially-controlled functional sex change. When local dominant males are removed, a large female changes into a male, and even gonadectomized females change to male behavioral phenotypes. The challenge is to identify those neural genes from the brain relevant to the behavior that are differentially expressed, between females that do not change sex and those that are induced to change sex in their natural environment. This project has a focus on developing the molecular technology to successfully approach that question, to first identify some of the relevant genes that then can be targeted to look for changes in expression during the behavioral change. Results will be important for further developing this system as a good genetic model to understand the neural basis of sexually dimorphic behavior. The impact of this work will extend beyond neuroscience to animal behavior, to psychology, and to potential use in aquaculture and fish breeding. In addition, the project continues excellent field and laboratory training for students in an interesting project integrating animal behavior, endocrinology and molecular biology doc21959 none This award is to support research that will develop a continuous record of glaciation over the last two to three glacial cycles in mid latitude South America that can be compared to nearby ice core records and glaciomarine sequences. Field work will be undertaken to map moraines and outwash terraces in detail. Surface exposure dating will be carried out to provide a high-resolution chronostratigraphic framework within which paleoclimate data can be placed. Soil analyses will be performed to provide soil-moisture history for the region. Other analyses that will be performed to fine-tune exposure surface dating include better estimates of boulder erosion rates, and refinement of local production rates for cosmogenic nuclides. The broader impacts of this proposed research center on the development of a continuous high resolution record of southern hemisphere glaciation. Successful development of this record holds the potential for answering fundamental questions regarding synchrony of climate change in the northern and southern hemispheres doc21960 none Transposable elements have played a major role in determining the size, structure and expression of eukaryotic genomes. R1 and R2 are two site-specific non-LTR retrotransposable elements that insert in the 28S ribosomal RNA genes of arthropods. The specificity of these elements has enabled them to serve as a convenient model system, such that R1 and R2 are now among the best characterized transposable elements. Taking advantage of the diverse array of 5 truncations that frequently result from non-LTR retrotransposition, preliminary experiments have shown that individual R1 and R2 insertions and deletions can be scored among members of the same population as well as among 19 Harwich mutation collection lines of Drosophila melanogaster. Therefore new copies are continually being inserted into and old elements eliminated from the rDNA loci. In this project, experiments are described to address a) the recombinational forces that bring about the concerted evolution of this locus, b) how R1 and R2 elements are affected by these recombinations, and c) how often and when R1 and R2 retrotranspose. Attempts to answer these questions will focus on the following specific aims. The rDNA loci from one Harwich line will be cloned as a series of overlapping bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs). While the cloning of rDNA loci are avoided in genome projects, it should be achievable in this project because nearly 80 uniquely marked R1 and R2 insertions have been identified to serve as reference points for the assembly of overlapping clones. Based on this physical map, as well as the 18 examples of how that locus has changed over a period of 350 generations, it can be determined where R1 and R2 insert into the loci and whether they are uniformly removed. Second, by scoring changes in the variable intergenic spacer region between the rRNA genes, a detailed view can be obtained of the recombinational processes responsible for the concerted evolution of the rDNA locus. Third, a study will be conducted of the differential replication of rDNA units in larval tissues. This latter experiment is of interest because Drosophila larvae grow normally even when large fractions of their rDNA units are inserted by under-replicating in polyploid tissues those units that have R1 and R2 insertions. Finally, to determine the tempo and developmental timing of retrotransposition, R1 and R2 activity will be monitored from one generation to the next. R1 retrotransposition is sufficiently high in the Harwich lines that new events can be monitored per generation. A search will be made for a lab strain that will allow similar studies with the R2 elements. These studies should provide an unprecedented understanding of the life cycle of two retrotransposable elements. Because the target site for R1 and R2, the rDNA locus and the nucleolus that forms from it, plays a key role in all cellular metabolism, these studies will also provide insights into the evolution, replication and function of this critical cellular component doc21961 none In this project supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, Professor Robert Kennedy and co-workers at the University of Florida will develop novel analytical methods that allow proteins to be detected and quantified based on their affinity for natural binding partners. In the methods, fluorescently-labeled ligands for classes of proteins will be added to samples and the resulting complexes will be separated by capillary electrophoresis and detected with laser-induced fluorescence. Binding systems that will be investigated include labeled GTP to detect G-proteins, NADH to detect dehydrogenases, labeled phosphopeptides to detect proteins containing src homology 2 domains, and src homology 2 domains to detect phosphorylated proteins. The method is expected to provide high sensitivity (attomole detection limits are expected), high speed (analysis on the second to minute time scale are possible) and facile automation. The methods are expected to be useful for tracking the expression level of proteins or for discovery of novel proteins and binding partners of proteins. As signal transduction in biological systems relies extensively on molecular recognition, these affinity methods are expected to be especially useful in experiments aimed at uncovering the regulation of receptor-mediated changes in cells. The methods will be tested on pancreatic beta-cells where they may ultimately be useful in developing a better understanding of insulin secretion The sequencing of the genome has provided a blueprint for life. The blueprint is actually the code for all of the proteins that are made in a cell. Cells are not readily defined however even by all of the proteins that they make. What are the functions of the proteins? How do they interact with each other? How are the interactions and functions controlled? A short answer to these questions is that proteins are controlled by their affinity i.e., ability to bind selected targets or partners within the cell. In this project, a method is sought that allows proteins to be rapidly and sensitively detected based on their affinity for a particular molecule. Importantly, the method will allow all the proteins with a given affinity to be separated and detected. The new method will be at least times as sensitive as existing methods and can be performed in seconds or minutes rather than hours. This new method will allow new proteins or protein mixtures to be rapidly screened for certain binding properties or functions. It will also allow classes of known proteins to be rapidly assayed. The speed and sensitivity of the assays will enable applications in diverse fields such as drug discovery, signal transduction (i.e., understanding intracellular chemical communication), and biotechnology doc21962 none This project involves a three-year laboratory study on the nature of organic aerosol surfaces in the presence of water vapor. Laboratory studies will be used to quantify uptake parameters for several species at the gas liquid interface. The techniques to be used include: a) a droplet train fast flow reactor, b) a bubble train reactor, and c) an aerosol mass spectrometer kinetics apparatus. These techniques make it possible to extract basic quantitative information necessary for modeling heterogeneous multiphase interactions of gas phase species with atmospheric droplets and aerosols. This effort will improve understanding of heterogeneous chemical processes that take place on the surface of atmospheric aerosols and contribute to understanding the influence of atmospheric aerosols on human health and climate. Through REU supplements to this award, undergraduate students will have opportunities to participate in the research doc21963 none The long-term goal of the research is to expand our knowledge regarding the physiology, metabolism and evolutionary adaptation of the methane-producing Methanosarcina species. Although the primary emphasis of these studies will be the identification and characterization of genes that directly and indirectly effect the utilization of methanol as a growth substrate (methylotrophic methanogenesis), the results are expected to have broad implications with respect to Methanosarcina and other methanogenic organisms. In particular, it is expected that these studies will reveal not only novel aspects of the methylotrophic pathway, but also how methanogenesis is integrated into the overall metabolism of the organism. Further, it is expected that a clearer understanding of archaeal transcriptional control will result from examination of the highly regulated methylotrophic genes. The experiments will be primarily based on recently developed methods for genetic analysis of Methanosarcina species; however, physiological, biochemical and molecular approaches will also be utilized to complement the genetic studies. This approach is expected to generate data that are both novel and complementary to the results of preceding studies. To achieve these aims Methanosarcina strains with mutations in a number of genes believed to be involved in methylotrophic methanogenesis will be constructed. These mutant strains will then be characterized with respect to a variety of physiological and biochemical traits. Random mutagenesis and proteomics approaches will be used to identify new genes that are specifically required for growth on methylotrophic substrates. Separate studies will examine the regulation of genes known to be involved and attempt to identify the genes that mediate this regulation. Finally, during the course of this work additional methods will be developed for genetic analysis of Methanosarcina species doc21964 none Procellariiform seabirds (the petrels, albatrosses and shearwaters) make their living foraging over vast expanses of open ocean hunting patchily distributed prey such as fish, squid and krill. The secret to their success is an ability to locate prey by smell. Over the past decade, much headway has been made in understanding olfactory foraging of Antarctic species, both at large ( 100s of miles) and small ( 10 miles) scales. Augmenting early work by leading scientists, the Principal Investigator s (PI) broadly integrative approach to studying olfactory foraging has expanded the picture of how seabirds see the world with their noses. Now many questions arise. For example, how do olfactory foraging behaviors develop in chicks? While other pelagic seabirds spend months teaching offspring how and where to forage, procellariiform chicks fledge and survive the open seas weeks after their parents have dispersed. These birds appear to hatch knowing how and where to forage without aid or instruction from a parent. How is this possible? Drawing from disciplines as diverse as atmospheric chemistry and developmental neurobiology, this proposal explores the hypothesis that, during development, chicks become tuned to odors used in foraging by being exposed to them by their parents. This pre-tuning or imprinting provides birds with information about the olfactory landscape they will encounter after fledging, and, specifically, offers them clues about where foraging is likely to be productive. This proposal investigates the development of olfactory sensitivity in the Leach s storm petrel (Oceanodroma leucorhoa). There are two primary objectives. First, chicks behavioral responses to three prey-related odors (DMS - plankton scent, pyrazine - krill scent, and trimethyl amine - fish scent) and to one control odor (phenyl ethyl alcohol - rose scent) will be characterized. The second objective will determine whether chicks learn odor cues by pre-exposing chicks to a non-prey related odor during the egg stage, and then testing whether this early exposure increases sensitivity to that odor later in life. Results from the proposed research will be among the first to address the development of olfaction in an ecologically important context. In addition to her seabird work, the PI has been a key player in developing new and highly integrative approaches to studying salmon imprinting, so extending these ideas to birds is a logical progression of her work. Overall, the results will greatly extend our knowledge of the sensory biology of these fascinating birds. Such knowledge not only is useful to basic science, but also may help bolster efforts to ensure the conservation of procellariiforms, given the threatened or endangered status of many species. Moreover, by establishing a study site at a University-sponsored field laboratory, student involvement in the work will be much more easily fostered. Relative to the remote sub-Antarctic, where virtually all of the PI s previous work has been conducted, Kent Island (New Brunswick, Canada) is easily and economically accessible. The location also provides access to lab facilities (not typically available on isolated islands where procellariiforms breed) and collaborators from around the world, as well as the ability to mentor graduate and undergraduate students in the field doc21965 none Berry Under the direction of Prof. Paul Berry at University of Wisconsin-Madison, this project will study the species and relationships of Croton, one of the world s largest plant genera, with about 1,300 described species worldwide. This group was selected because it represents a significant segment of plant diversity (0.5% of all flowering plants), it is ecologically and medicinally important (especially in the tropics), yet the species are notoriously difficult to identify, and nobody has applied modern techniques to understand the genealogical relationships within the group. The project will conduct a broad molecular-based phylogenetic study of the genus, targeting about a fifth of the total species to determine how they relate in an evolutionary and geographical context. It will systematize a huge body of descriptive literature and specimens and provide an online database to names, distributions, and images of crotons. This should facilitate species identification and generation of regional checklists of the genus for any region of the world. There is a strong collaborative element in the project, as it will form a research network drawing upon scores of botanists worldwide who have worked on Croton, as well as training new students in molecular systematics, database management, and field work. This project is significant to biology because it will provide a much better understanding of the species and relationships of one of the largest and least well understood groups of flowering plants. Croton is used medicinally, and this project could pinpoint promising groups in the genus for more intensive pharmacological research. In a broader context, the project seeks to provide an effective model on how to deal with other large and difficult groups of organisms - using Internet resources to display images, databases, and identification aids; forming a research network of investigators worldwide, including training of graduate and undergraduate students in the U.S. and other countries; and utilizing cutting-edge molecular tools to establish a solid scientific framework for naming species and establishing their genealogical relationships. In this way, the Croton project should contribute significantly towards the societal goal of cataloging and understanding global biodiversity and presenting it to the public in a timely fashion and in a readily accessible format doc21966 none Although a tremendous amount of information is available on physiological, biochemical, and molecular aspects of endocrinology, very little is known about the evolution of endocrine regulation. Genetically-based variations in endocrine traits provide the raw material upon which natural selection acts during the initial stages of adaptive evolution. Thus, a key step in understanding the evolution of hormonal control is the characterization of genetically-based variation in endocrine regulators within species. The goal of the present multi-disciplinary study is to identify the variable molecular and physiological factors that cause genetically-based variation in the enzyme juvenile hormone esterase (JHE) in a cricket species. JHE degrades and regulates the key insect hormone, juvenile hormone, and has been the subject of intensive study in the Principal Investigator s laboratory during the past 15 years. This proposal has three primary research objectives. First, using both in vivo and in vitro approaches, the following hypothesis will be tested: genetic variation in the concentration of or tissue sensitivity to neurohormones causes genetically based variation in JHE activity and tissue distribution. Experiments will largely involve assessing the effect of extracts or implants of neural tissue derived from high- or low- JHE activity genetic stocks on JHE activity and related endocrine traits in the same vs alternate lines. Second, the role of variation in JHE messenger RNA abundance as the cause of genetically-based variation in JHE activity will be tested. JHE mRNA abundance will be compared between high and low activity lines using Northern blots employing a probe derived from a recently obtained, nearly full-length JHE cDNA. Third, the high and low JHE activity lines will be crossed and backcrossed to determine the degree of co-segregation among (1) JHE activity and associated endocrine traits, (2) molecular correlates of these traits (JHE mRNA level), and (3) potential regulators of these traits. This research will simultaneously provide important new information for several different areas of biology. This will be the first study to identify the molecular and physiological causes of genetically-based variation in an endocrine regulator in natural populations. This project will result in the first detailed synthesis of endocrine physiology, molecular biology, and quantitative genetics. Finally, these studies will constitute the first investigations of genetic variation in neuroendocrine regulation in natural populations and will set the stage for subsequent identification of these regulators and the genes that encode them doc21967 none Pfrender Contemporary natural populations are faced with a challenging suite of changing environmental conditions. The ability of populations to adapt to new conditions depends, in large part, on the patterns of genetic variation underlying adaptive characters. A well-developed theoretical framework exists for analyzing the rate and trajectory of adaptation. However, there is a lack of sufficient empirical data to extend this framework to make predictions about the potential for populations to adapt to changing conditions. This research will make direct comparisons of freshwater invertebrate populations before and after a rapid change in the environment, focusing on a suite of alpine lakes in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California that have known histories of fish introductions. Estimates of the rate and trajectory of adaptation will be obtained by hatching eggs from lake-bottom sediments prior to the introduction of fish and comparing the historical and contemporary populations. Given the current level of anthropogenic influences on the environment, understanding the limits to the process of adaptation in natural populations is critically important. The results of this research will provide important insights into the ecological and genetic processes in natural populations and will be directly applicable to the conservation and management of natural resources and biodiversity, particularly when these are challenged by phenomena such as climate change and invasive species. Sediment cores obtained in these studies will document historical changes in abiotic and biotic lake structure and will be a valuable resource for researchers across a wide range of disciplines. Research and education will be integrated through the training of graduate and undergraduate students. The results of this work will be disseminated widely through peer-reviewed journals and direct contact with federal agencies doc21968 none A detailed description of the mechanisms plants use to sense and respond to their light environment is necessary for a complete understanding of plant development, which is important to those concerned with the practical uses of plants in agriculture and biotechnology as well as to academic researchers. The processes that control the growth of seedlings exposed to blue light do not function properly in Arabidopsis thaliana mutants that lack the cryptochrome photoreceptors. Understanding the molecular-level differences responsible for the differences in growth rates between the wild-type and cryptochrome mutant seedlings will lead to a better understanding of what controls the fundamental process of plant growth. The funding provided by this award will enable measurements of the expression levels of thousands of genes at once using DNA microarray technology at a point during the seedling s response to light that previous work has shown to be critical. Those genes found to differ in expression will be manipulated to test the hypothesis that they function in growth control. Finding genes that affect the rate of seedling growth in specific light conditions could provide plant breeders and biotechnologists with promising targets for their studies. In addition to such a genomic approach, specific hypotheses about the role of the hormone gibberellic acid in the phenomenon of blue-light controlled growth will be tested. Also, the role of calcium in the earliest phase of the response, which is mediated by the phototropin 1 photoreceptor, will be investigated using cell biological techniques. A central theme in the experimental design is that a detailed understanding of the biology under study should guide the genomics experiments, the results of which should be brought back to the biological system for validation. The cycle can then be repeated. In this iterative fashion, a very detailed, molecular-level description of how light controls growth can be obtained during the next funding cycle. In the process, undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students will receive training in modern biological research, which adds to the country s scientific infrastructure doc21969 none The objective of this project is to study protein and enzyme dynamics and function using optical single-molecule detection and spectroscopy with in vitro and in vivo techniques. The central goals of this research are to utilize diffraction-limited confocal, total internal reflection, and wide-field epifluorescence optical microscopy and spectroscopy to attack three primary thrust areas: (a) characterization and understanding of the photophysical behavior of several red-emitting autofluorescent proteins at the single-molecule level, proteins which are key elements in a wide array of in vivo cellular labeling and gene expression studies, (b) development of reliable and reproducible methods for specific surface attachment of functional proteins to transparent surfaces, so that unwanted proteins do not stick to the surface in single-molecule studies, and (c) extension of recent success in observing single transmembrane proteins in living cells to establish new methods and protocols for observing single molecules in vivo. In all of these studies, the fact that individual copies of proteins will be studied, one at a time, provides an additional critical source of information about the presence and extent of heterogeneity in these complex systems. To accomplish these ends, physical, chemical, and optical expertise will be combined with the molecular biological and biochemical expertise of several collaborators. Owing to its multidisciplinary organization, the fundamental research in this program will not only generate new knowledge about the biophysical properties of important protein systems, but, in addition the advances in instrumentation will provide novel groundwork for technology transfer to other relevant disciplines. Furthermore, the increased knowledge about both optically driven and spontaneous changes in the emissive state of fluorescent proteins may lead to design of mutants with improved properties for application in biology and other fields. At the same time, the broadly-based multidisciplinary environment which has been assembled to perform this research will provide excellent training and education opportunities for the next generation of biophysical scientists. This project is supported by the Molecular Biophysics Program in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences in the Directorate for Biological Sciences and the Divisions of Physics and Chemistry in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate doc21918 none Atmospheric deposition of nitrogen to temperate forests has increased in recent decades as a result of increased combustion of fossil fuels. Knowing how nitrogen in air pollution is retained within forests will improve the ability of scientists to anticipate interactions among efforts to mitigate human alterations of regional and global cycles of carbon and nitrogen. For example, the way that forests retain nitrogen affects the ability of forests to help mitigate expected global warming due to increased carbon gases in the atmosphere. Because nitrogen often limits rates of plant growth, increased nitrogen inputs could affect forest growth and health. Most of the additional nitrogen deposited onto the forest from air pollution is retained in the soil rather than being taken up by plants. The biological and chemical processes whereby this incoming nitrogen, dominantly in the form of nitrate, is converted to organically-bound forms that stay in the soil remains unknown. Recent evidence suggests that abiotic reactions (chemical reactions without participation of living organisms) convert nitrate into organic nitrogen in soil. This suggestion challenges a widely held view that microorganisms living in the soils are the dominant agents for nitrogen uptake in soil. This abiotic reaction of nitrate is particularly perplexing because the energetics of nitrate reduction in soils are not favorable under normal conditions of well-drained soils. The fate of the organically bound nitrogen once it gets into the soils is also largely unknown. For example, it is not known how much organic nitrogen is eventually converted back into an inorganic form that plants can use. The proposed studies will be among the first to investigate the fate of dissolved organic nitrogen, which is increasingly recognized as central to the nitrogen cycle of many forests. The experiments use two ongoing nitrogen addition experiments in the Harvard Forest of central Massachusetts and the Howland Forest of central Maine. The first objective is to measure reactions of nitrate in these forest soils that have received nitrogen additions experimentally. The PI s seek to determine whether nitrogen addition has changed the capacity of soils to react with nitrate, either biotically or abiotically. The PI s also present in this proposal the ferrous wheel hypothesis, that reduced forms of iron in tiny pockets of poorly aerated soil can reduce nitrate to another form of nitrogen, nitrite, which can then react with dissolved organic carbon in the soils to form dissolved organic nitrogen. The second objective is to test this hypothesis in several laboratory experiments, where the concentrations and combinations of hypothesized reactants are varied systematically in a laboratory instrument, called a redox-pH-stat reactor, which controls the acidity and aeration of the soil sample during the incubation. As a result of its interdisciplinary nature, the research requires the collaborative efforts of an ecologist (Davidson), a chemist (Chorover) and a microbiologist (Dail), all of whom specialize in the study of soils doc21971 none Insects use olfactory systems to gather information about their external environment, information critical for locating mates, host plants and animals, sites for overwintering and egg deposition, and for social interaction. Insects discriminate odors using hundreds to thousands of sensory organs, called sensilla, which differ with respect to which odors each can detect. Sensilla express ensembles of proteins, including Odorant Binding Proteins (OBPs), Olfactory Receptors (ORs), Odor Degrading Enzymes (ODEs) and Sensory Neuron Membrane Proteins (SNMPs). These proteins belong to multigene families which express in specific combinations, and these combinations determine what odors a sensillum can detect. Each sensillum is hollow and contains 2-3 neurons. Odor molecules pass through holes in the cuticle walls of a sensillum, entering an aqueous space where they are transported to neuronal ORs by soluble OBPs and finally degraded by ODEs. These are the first biochemical processes in odor detection; these proteins are a genetic interface between the animal and its environment. The genome of Drosophila melanogaster contains about 30 OBP and 60 OR genes which differentially express among about olfactory sensilla. While the functions of OBPs, ORs and ODEs are generally understood, the function of SNMPs is not. Nevertheless, the properties of SNMPs suggest they play a central role in odor detection. The proposed studies characterize the expression of SNMPs in the moth Manduca sexta (Lepidoptera) and SNMP homologues in the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster (Diptera). We have identified 5 SNMPs from 4 moth species; these genes only express in olfactory neurons, and their proteins (around 525 amino acids) are localized to the receptor membranes where odors are detected. SNMPs are related to the CD36 family of receptor proteins which have roles in fatty acid transport, lysosomal transport and cell death in animals ranging from humans to nematodes. SNMPs are the only CD36 family members known in neurons. In this project, 13 identified SNMP-related genes of Drosophila will be characterized with respect to when and where they express and with which other genes they associate, and two identified SNMPs of Manduca will be characterized to further understand their interactions and roles in odor detection. Manduca and Drosophila belong to insect Orders that include nearly 250,000 named species, about 25% of the animal group insects that includes about 2 3 of all known eukaryotic species. Moths such as Manduca have long been among the most important model systems for understanding the behavioral, physiological and biochemical processes involved in pheromone detection in insects, and are an important comparative model for understanding pheromone detection in mammals and other vertebrates. Drosophila has recently emerged as an important olfactory model system, due in part to the identification of complete families of olfactory genes from the fully sequenced genome and in part to the experimental genetic manipulations possible in Drosophila. Manduca and Drosophila are highly complementary and provide a comparison to identify both similarities and differences between insect olfactory systems. This study will enhance understanding of the SNMP CD36 gene family in several physiological systems, especially olfaction and the nervous system. The study introduces new technologies to the PI s lab, the genetic tools of Drosophila, empowering the PI and his students to integrate Drosophila data into studies of other insects and systems. The studies offer training opportunities for students, including those of under-represented groups who are members of the PI s laboratory. The project will enrich understanding of basic regulatory processes underlying odor detection, providing insight for designing new strategies for insect control in olfactory-based predation of crop plants and host and mate seeking behaviors. Improved understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying odor detection contributes to many disciplines including agricultural and chemical ecology, entomology, neurobiology, neuroethology, sensory biology, signal transduction and remote sensing doc21972 none An understanding of the evolutionary relationships of flowering plants, or angiosperms, has been greatly improved in recent years, and water lilies (Nymphaeales) and Amborella have been identified as the earliest diverging lineages. Water lilies have a cosmopolitan distribution, comprise two families and eight genera, and have interested botanists for many years in part because they have characteristics of both major classes of flowering plants (dicots and monocots). Amborella includes a single species and is an understory shrub that is limited in geographic distribution to montane tropical rain forests in central New Caledonia. Comparative studies of pollen development in angiosperms are relatively rare, but make significant contributions to understanding the evolution of key characters, as well as evolutionary relationships, or phylogeny, when conducted. Relatively few pollen studies of water lilies and Amborella have been carried out, however. Historically, the pollen wall of water lilies has been reported as granular, a character state thought to be primitive among angiosperms, whereas that of Amborella has an unusual structure that does not appear to occur in other extant flowering plants. A recent study by the PI indicates that the mature pollen of all eight genera of water lilies is columellar, and that the developmental pattern and structure of these pollen wall elements makes them superficially resemble granules. The developmental pattern of these elements and that of other pollen characters in Nymphaeales and Amborella, however, are not well understood. Given the evolutionary importance of these two primitive groups, the overall focus of the PI s research is to study pollen developmental evolution in Nymphaeales and Amborella. The principal objectives of the proposed project are to (1) provide a comprehensive investigation of pollen development in two key water lily genera (Cabomba and Nuphar) and (2) obtain preliminary results on other genera. The proposed research will build on new data from the PI s laboratory about mature pollen structure in all eight water lily genera, as well as pollen development in three (Cabomba, Nuphar, and Euryale). The research will use combined microscopical techniques, and it will yield data at a level of resolution that has not been documented before. The new data will provide the foundation to examine the patterns of pollen developmental evolution within a phylogenetic context and determine functional correlations between pollen developmental characters and pollination biology doc21973 none All habitats rely on the bacterial fixation of atmospheric nitrogen or on the synthetic production of nitrogen fertilizers for providing a supply of fixed nitrogen. Some plants have established symbiosis with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and therefore can obtain much of their nitrogen from the atmosphere. One prime example of this relationship is the alfalfa Sinorhizobium meliloti symbiosis. It is increasingly evident that exopolysaccharides produced by S. meliloti play specific roles in the development of the root nodule symbiosis between the bacteria and legumes, particularly at the level of nodule invasion. The structural specificity and the small amounts of exogenous exopolysaccharide necessary to successfully rescue the invasion deficiency of S. meliloti exopolysaccharide mutants, suggest that low molecular weight exopolysaccharides act as signaling molecules during the invasion process. This work aims to understand the signaling mechanisms that lead to the plant s response to exopolysaccharides, and the identification and characterization of the putative plant receptors that detect or recognize the presence of the exopolysaccharide signals. The answers to these and related questions will lead to a greater understanding of the signaling mechanisms between symbiotic partners and may also provide insights into the possible uses of oligosaccharides as signaling molecules in other biological systems doc21974 none Biogenic amines are compounds that can act as modulators of nervous system function and behavior in vertebrates and invertebrates. Octopamine is one of these, and one of the most widely studied neuromodulators in arthropods. In honeybees, octopamine plays a role in controlling behavioral plasticity. Levels of octopamine are higher in the brains of forager bees that leave the hive to get food compared to levels in nurse bees that work inside the hive, and treatment with octopamine causes bees to forage precociously. A particular enzyme, tyramine beta-hydoxylase (TbH) is critical for biosynthesis of octopamine, so brain levels of octopamine depend at least in part on the activity of TbH. This collaborative project uses molecular, biochemcial and behavioral approaches to determine how TbH is regulated by both social and endocrine factors. Enzyme activity, gene expression, and metabolic biochemistry clarify how octopamine is synthesized and released in the antennal lobes of the brain of honeybees during development of the behavioral change. Results will be important to understanding how an important neuromodulator is regulated in the context of behavioral plastiticty and in socially regulated gene expression. This work will have impact beyond neuroendocrinology to animal behavior and to agricultural applications. There is also an important component of student training at the predominantly undergraduate institution involved in the collaboration doc21975 none Natural and sexual selection act on complex, highly integrated phenotypes, but theories of how evolutionary response will occur across multiple levels of biological organization are non-comprehensive, and existing empirical tests are both fragmentary and inconclusive. Previous NSF support allowed development of a novel model system to study multi-level evolutionary responses to selection for high locomotor activity. Selective breeding for high voluntary wheel running was implemented with outbred laboratory mice. By generation 16, mice in the 4 replicate selection (S) lines ran 170% more than in the 4 randombred control (C) lines (for females, 15 vs. 5.5 km day). This difference continued for generations 17-29, indicating a selection limit. Increased activity has occurred primarily by higher running speed. S mice run more at weaning and for at least 18 months. Proposed research will test the nature of the physiological limit to selection, elucidate the mechanisms of locomotor adaptation, and explore the neurobiology of increased activity. Research will emphasize training of graduate and undergraduate students, as well as a postdoctoral researcher. A lack of evolutionary plasticity in maximal aerobic speed is hypothesized to limit further increase in wheel running. Effects of both increased and decreased oxygen on wheel running and on maximal oxygen consumption will be studied. The energetic cost of locomotion will be measured during both wheel and treadmill running. Lung diffusing capacity will be estimated morphometrically. Components of the skeleton will be examined for differences in size, shape, symmetry, and amount of secondary remodeling. Myosin heavy-chain isoform expression will be quantified in hindlimb muscle, and the mighty mini-muscles that occur in two of the selected lines will be characterized biochemically and by electron microscopy. For many of the above-mentioned traits, both genetic and phenotypic plasticity, and potential interactions, will be examined by measuring S and C mice that have been housed chronically with or without wheel access. Immunocytochemistry with cFos as an indicator of neuronal activity will be used to compare key brain regions in S and C mice at rest and during peak wheel running (motivation, reward, voluntary control of movement; spatial memory & learning). Results will lead to a comprehensive understanding of how increased activity levels evolve in a model mammalian system. Mice will be made available to other researchers and they will be an important model for studying effects of exercise on physical fitness, health, and aging doc21976 none Under the direction of Dr. Judith Kroll, Ms. Ana Schwartz will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. Her research will examine reading in a second language. For many bilinguals, reading proficiency in a second language does not reach the same level of fluency as in the first language. One reason for this might be that word recognition processes are not as automatic in the second language as they are in the first language. Further, when reading in a second language, bilinguals are unable to turn off some information from their first language. The competition between the two languages makes it difficult for the second language reader to ignore first language influences. Ms. Schwartz will investigate how bilingual readers use sentence context to negotiate the competition between their two languages. One set of experiments uses response time measures to ask what type of information is available during reading in the second language. A second set of experiments uses eye movement measures to ask when that information is available. These experiments will involve English-Spanish and Spanish-English bilinguals, as well as a monolingual comparison group. An additional set of measures will assess the degree to which the answers to these research questions are affected by individual differences in the ability to allocate cognitive resources during reading. This research contributes to the development of more comprehensive models of the reading process. It also has important implications for how reading is taught in multi-lingual classrooms. Given the increasing number of students in American schools whose first language is not English, and the central importance that reading holds for academic success, it is critical to understand the cognitive characteristics of second language reading doc21977 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. John Gatesy at the University of California, Riverside to study the evolutionary history of Mysticeti (baleen whales), the largest animals on earth. Evolutionary relationships among baleen whale are, at present, unresolved. The proposed study combines the detailed analysis of poorly understood fossil whale species, many of which were found in southern California, with comprehensive genetic characterization of living mysticetes. The diverse paleontological and molecular data will be used to examine how these giant animals have evolved over the past thirty million years of earth history. Whales have long captured the interest and attention of the public. Therefore, an important objective of this study is education and public outreach. Results from this grant will be used as a framework to interpret the radical transformation from ancestral toothed whales to the more derived baleen-bearing whales. This remarkable example of evolution will be incorporated into a new exhibit planned at the San Diego Natural History Museum. In addition, undergraduate and graduate students will be involved in all phases of the research and will receive broad training in modern biological techniques. Finally, most mysticetes are highly endangered, and several are on the brink of extinction. The data collected in this study will offer critical information for the conservation of baleen whales doc21978 none This research investigates the contribution of gene interactions to inbreeding depression, the decline in viability and reproduction that affects the offspring of close genetic relatives. Over many generations, inbreeding depression can be mitigated or purged as natural selection removes deleterious genes and gene combinations from inbreeding populations. Using a combination of theory and experiment, with flour beetles as the model system, this research investigates the rate of inbreeding depression and the rate of purging for single genes and gene combinations. Conservation strategies for managing the genetics of endangered species use elaborate pedigrees designed to minimize inbreeding depression. Because they mitigate inbreeding, they necessarily mitigate purging. These management strategies are based upon single-gene theory. When inbreeding depression is caused by gene interactions, it can accumulate faster or slower than expected from single-gene theory. Thus, current conservation practice might be either overly elaborate or hopelessly inadequate for its goal of minimizing inbreeding depression. In addition, a balance between inbreeding and purging might represent the best strategy in the long run. With gene interactions, purging by selection removes groups of deleterious interacting genes and be much faster than the rate predicted by single-gene theory, where genes are removed independently, one at a time doc21979 none In this project, funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Hales will conduct theoretical and experimental research on the properties of boron-halide clusters. Candidate species include B2F5(+), B2Br5(+), B2Br3(+) and others. The structures of these complexes are predicted to be similar to those of BnHn(2-) and BnXn, where X = Cl, Br, or I. The goal of this research is to verify these predictions. This research will be conducted with the assistance of undergraduate students. Ion-molecule chemistry is one of the core areas of contemporary chemical research. This project deals with the structure of clusters of boron halides and other species related to plasma processing of semiconductors. Computational modeling of the observed ions complements the experimental work. These cast light on the structures of the cluster ions and on ion-molecule processes that lead to those structures. This research is conducted with the assistance of undergraduate students. They will receive training in one of the contemporary forefront areas of physical chemistry in preparation for advanced studies or entry into the scientific technological workforce doc21980 none This project brings together a team of ecologists and physiologists to investigate how physiological mechanisms constrain the evolution of parental investment and self-maintenance in tropical and temperate environments. Life-history theory predicts that long-lived organisms should allocate more resources to enhancing survival, thereby protecting future reproduction, at the expense of current reproduction. Many of the predicted responses of physiology and behavior are controlled by endocrine and immune system mechanisms that establish incompatible physiological states and limit individual responses of organisms and evolved responses of populations. This collaborative study will compare related species of birds living in contrasting tropical and temperate environments to determine population parameters (adult survival and reproductive rate) and physiological and behavioral responses. Incorporating a strongly developed student-training component in the project, measurements will include activity, metabolism, health status, and endocrine profiles in the field, and metabolism, hormonal stress response, and immune system response in the laboratory. Analysis and interpretation of these data will relate variation in life-history attributes to phylogenetic relationship, region, and ecological measures of habitat, diet, and predator environment. This project is unique in that it integrates studies in ecology, physiology, and demography to focus on major patterns of diversification of life histories doc21981 none Nature has designed a broad array of protein-based molecular switches that direct and control the flow of information, energy, and molecular cargo through living cells. One of the most important questions regarding functional switching of proteins is how the covalent attachment of a phosphate group so dramatically alters activity. The overall goal of this research is to elucidate biophysical mechanisms by which specific proteins are regulated by phosphorylation. Two model systems will be investigated, moesin and the c-Src SH3 domain. Moesin is a member of the ERM family of proteins that are involved in dynamic interactions with the actin cytoskeleton and the plasma membrane. SH3 domains are small, modular binding domains that mediate protein-protein interactions through binding to proline-rich sequence motifs. The moesin model system employed in this research consists of two interacting domains, N-FERM and C-ERMAD that comprise the N C complex. Formation of the N C complex prevents interactions between moesin and its cellular binding partners, and is regulated by phopshorylation of residue T558 in C-ERMAD and by PIP2 binding to N-FERM. This model system represents a regulatory rheostat where phosphorylation is coupled with additional regulatory factors to elicit variable activation. In a second model system, the ligand binding function of the c-Src SH3 domain is regulated by phosphorylation of residue Y57. This represents a prototype molecular switch where phosphorylation of a residue in or near the binding surface alters specificity and affinity of a modular binding domain. For each of the two model systems, multidimensional NMR spectroscopy will be used to observe phosphorylation-induced changes in structure, stability and dynamics, and isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC) for quantifying phosphorylation-induced changes in function. The biophysical mechanism by which each protein is regulated will be determined through amide exchange measurements, backbone and side chain dynamics studies, and determination of macroscopic and site-specific pKas. These investigations will provide a structural, dynamic and thermodynamic framework for understanding molecular switching mechanisms that have not yet been elucidated. Reversible protein phosphorylation is a ubiquitous mechanism utilized by all cells to switch protein function on and off. In order to visualize how protein phosphorylation regulates function, the structure, dynamics and thermodynamics of proteins in both phosphorylated and unphosphorylated states must be examined. Although a few detailed mechanisms are now characterized, our understanding of the varied mechanisms by which regulation by phosphorylation is accomplished is far from complete. This project aims to determine the biophysical mechanisms by which two particular proteins are regulated by phosphorylation. Coupling of the thermodynamic and site-specific perspectives obtained from ITC and NMR, respectively, will yield valuable insights into potential origins of binding energy, and the mechanisms used to alter this energy in biological molecular switches. These studies will advance our understanding of how biological processes are regulated by phosphorylation, and will impact important areas of research such as signal transduction, intracellular trafficking, and regulation of membrane structure. The research objectives will be accomplished primarily through the participation of graduate and undergraduate students who will receive education and training in molecular biology, protein chemistry, physical chemistry, computer technology, and multidimensional NMR spectroscopy doc21982 none These studies focus on aromatic compound degradation by the soil bacterium Acinetobacter sp. strain ADP1. Catabolic pathways, which serve as model systems for understanding many aspects of biology, can be manipulated for bioremediation and for the generation of useful chemicals. The success of such ventures rests on a thorough understanding of microbial metabolic and genetic regulation. The first objective of this project is to determine the molecular basis for a recently discovered novel type of transcriptional activation. BenM, a transcriptional regulator involved in the degradation of benzoate by strain ADP1, was found to respond synergistically to two different metabolites. The synergistic modulation of transcriptional regulation in response to more than one inducer can significantly alter gene expression and may be a common biological regulatory feature. These studies will determine the specific nucleotide and amino acid sequences that control how BenM interacts with different effectors and DNA regions to regulate the expression of multiple genes and operons involved in aromatic compound catabolism. The second objective is to investigate preferential carbon source consumption by Acinetobacter strains when multiple growth substrates are available. Many soil bacteria degrade the components of a mixture of aromatic compounds in a sequential fashion. However, the method by which aromatic-compound degrading bacteria control the preferential consumption of carbon sources is unclear. In ADP1, regulation may occur at the transcriptional level, the post-transcriptional level, and or at the level of substrate uptake into the cell. This research project will address how CatM and BenM repress genes needed for 4-hydroxybenzoate catabolism doc21983 none Nerve cells, or neurons, communicate and relay signals by the regulated release of chemicals called neurotransmitters. This extremely complex process is tightly regulated and is required for all movement as well as higher brain functions such as learning and memory. One method to study such a complicated process is to carefully dissect the problem into smaller units and gain a better understanding of the component parts. The final step in the release of neurotransmitter is the merger of the membrane bound sac that contains these chemicals with the cell membrane, the barrier that separates the nerve cell from its environment. The consequence of this membrane fusion event is the release of neurotransmitter to the space between neurons, resulting in communication between these cells. We seek to understand the structural and functional basis of this membrane fusion event. The process of membrane fusion can be further subdivided into discrete steps. Many of the molecular components that drive the fusion process have been identified, but the precise way they interact to perform their role is not well understood. The objectives of this work are to identify the specific interactions that determine the spatial and temporal coordination of neurotransmission in a defined system. We will develop a synthetic fusion system to model neurosecretion using only the minimal components, specifically pure phospholipids and fusion proteins from the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster. Neuronal fusion proteins, called SNAREs, will be produced in bacteria and incorporated into synthetic phospholipid vesicles. A detailed molecular analysis of the protein-protein interaction affect SNARE function will be studied. In addition, the role of regulatory factors will be analyzed. This assay will provide a unique window into the way in which cells fuse biological membranes. The ability to study these proteins in their native context of a phospholipid bilayer will be a major step toward a better understanding of their critical physiological role doc21984 none The control of reproduction is fundamental to the structure and evolution of animal societies. This project will examine the causes and consequences of variation in the breeding structure of colonies of the termite Nasutitermes corniger, focusing on the number of reproductive males and females (kings and queens) and their apportionment of reproduction. The wide range of colony genetic structures present within natural populations provides opportunities to test hypotheses arising from the rapidly growing body of theory on reproductive partitioning in social groups. Nest dissections, behavioral assays, and analysis of a highly informative set of genetic markers will determine (1) how reproduction is partitioned among co-occurring queens and kings, (2) how colony genetic structure affects interactions within and between groups, and (3) how colony reproductive characteristics change through time. Despite their ecological and economic importance, termites are understudied relative to other social insects. Nasutitermes corniger is particularly well suited to the proposed research due to its abundance and to the comparative ease with which the queens and kings can be collected from mature colonies. Besides adding to knowledge of fundamental aspects of termite biology, this research will contribute to the broader understanding of social behavior, reproductive competition, and the genetic structure of populations doc21985 none Nigam Description: This award supports a US-India cooperative research project entitled Diagnosis of India s Weather Prediction Model s Forecast and Simulation Deficiencies. US PI Sumant Nigam, University of Maryland will collaborate with Indian meteorologists, Shyam Singh, Sarat Kar, and Gopal Iyengar of the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF), in New Delhi. They will test the physics of India s numerical weather prediction model by producing multi-year simulations of the past climate, using observed lower-boundary conditions. Analysis of the ensemble-mean climate simulation, particularly comparison with the corresponding period observations, will allow one to determine the deficiencies of the model s physics. Improvement in the model s physics will have a beneficial impact on climate simulation and on short-to-medium range weather forecasts developed by the NCMRWF. Scope: The research goal is to diagnose the reasons for deficient weather forecasts produced at the NCMRWF by India s only operational numerical weather prediction model. Consequently, successful completion of the research will lead to improved weather forecasts in India and better understanding of the observed modes of recurrent seasonal-to-interannual variability, particularly during the Indian summer monsoon. There is immense research interest in this topic among monsoon meteorologists worldwide. Beyond the immediate objective of facilitating NCMRWF s participation in the international Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP), this research will help benchmark the model s performance, foster additional analysis of the NCMRWF model integration s, and accelerate model development by drawing on the experience of the international meteorological community. This award is jointly supported by the Division of International Programs and the Division of Atmospheric Sciences doc21986 none Almost all biological traits have the potential to evolve in response to selection. Some traits may not respond to selection as might be expected, however, because they are negatively correlated with other traits. Such phenomena generate the tradeoffs that are the basis of life history evolution. Typically in studies of life history evolution, one focal trait is allowed to experience selection, and correlations between it and other traits are used to estimate the tradeoffs. However, selection tends to act on multiple traits simultaneously, necessitating studies of simultaneous selection on multiple traits rather than on correlations with one focal trait. Few studies have examined how the physiological or developmental mechanisms that underlie life history traits respond to selection on the focal traits and no study to date has examined the physiological regulation of simultaneous selection on multiple life history traits. This study will address these issues with studies of the well-known tobacco hornworm, Manduca sexta (Lepidoptera: Sphingidae). This is one of very few species in which the physiological mechanisms regulating two important life history traits, body size and development time, are known, providing essential background for this study. A series of six directional selection experiments will be run for ten generations. These will include all four possible combinations of simultaneous selection for increased and decreased development time and body size as well as selection to increase body size and selection to decrease development time. The three physiological factors that determine these traits (critical weight, PTTH delay time, and growth rate) will be measured before and after selection. This will be the first study to examine how the regulating physiological factors, constrain or engender, the evolution of multiple life history traits in response to simultaneous selection doc21987 none Aquatic ecosystems are threatened by over enrichment with nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P). For unclear reasons, P enrichment generally has the greatest impact in freshwater while N enrichment has the greatest impact in saltwater. The goal of this study is to understand how the biogeochemistry of N and P change along the transition from freshwater to saltwater in an estuary. The project will measure inputs and removals of N and P along the salinity transition of the Patuxent River estuary, investigate the importance of watershed-derived particulate P, and test hypotheses about interactions of N, P, iron and sulfur cycles. Transformations and releases of N and P will be measured by incubating sediment cores from along the salinity gradient. The mechanisms of salinity effects will be investigated by experimentally altering concentrations of seawater, sea salts, sulfate, and nitrate over incubated cores. The results will help guide nutrient management in coastal ecosystems. This is a collaborative project with Thomas Jordan doc21988 none Simcox The Drosophila wing is an important model for analyzing how signaling pathways are coordinated to organize development of a cell field and link patterning with growth. Discovering all the players will be key to a full understanding of the processes involved. Additional genes with wing-enriched expression patterns have been discovered by microarray analysis, here a functional-genomics approach will be taken to probe the roles of these genes in wing development. Oligonucleotide microarrays were used to identify thirty transcripts with four-fold or greater enrichment in the wing versus the body wall. These include genes known to be specifically expressed in the wing (for example, nubbin, Distal-less, knot, and bifid). Here it is proposed to test whether uncharacterized transcripts with similar enrichment have functional roles in wing development and to analyze how they are regulated by major signaling pathways. The first three objectives relate to this goal. In the first, the functional roles of the wing-enriched genes will be investigated by examining phenotypes resulting from ectopic expression and following gene silencing. In the second, the role of the morphogens, Wingless, Hedgehog and Decapentaplegic, in controlling the expression of these novel genes will be assayed. In the third, targets of Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor (EGFR) signaling will be identified by comparing EGFR mutant wings with wild type wings in microarray experiments. The function of novel targets will be investigated. In the fourth objective, a workshop will be offered for high school students to investigate the expression pattern of genes that have the potential to encode posterior-specific transcripts doc21989 none Nancy Makri at University of Illinois has submitted a renewal proposal to develop and apply forward-backward semiclassical dynamics methods for large-scale simulations of polyatomic systems. She proposes to integrate these methods with a rigorous path integral description of the Boltzmann density, state-of-the-art molecular dynamics techniques for optimal sampling of phase space, and on-the-fly ab initio calculations of forces to produce a powerful tool suitable for including quantum mechanical effects in simulations with hundreds of particles. Extension to treat exchange effects in bosonic fluids is also planned. Applications will focus on vibrational relaxation in liquids and the dynamics of doped helium clusters. Energy transfer in and out of molecular vibrational modes plays an important role in many topics of current interest, such as chemical reaction pathways and laser control. It is clear that understanding the mechanism of energy relaxation phenomena in large molecules, clusters, or in solution requires a delicate treatment of nonlinear many-body interactions and quantum effects, which will be pursued in this research effort doc21990 none A grant has been awarded to Merrill Peterson, Western Washington University, to study the evolution of premating barriers between two hybridizing beetle species. The research combines lab and field studies to determine the costs of hybridizing across a 75km-wide zone of hybridization. In measuring these costs, the research will take into account the degree to which multiply-mating females preferentially use sperm from same-species males, and measure material benefits females may gain from hybrid matings. This study will also determine the balance between selection against hybridization and the rate of genetic exchange with populations outside of the zone of hybridization, a process that will tend to counter the effects of selection. This research program will address long-standing questions regarding the evolution of reproductive barriers between species, using a novel geographic perspective. In so doing, it will provide answers to fundamental questions in speciation research. The grant will also support the training and mentorship of under-represented undergraduates through a summer internship program, Minority Opportunities for Research on Evolution (MORE). Participants in MORE will get hands-on experience and training for careers in biological research doc21991 none The regulation of proteolysis is an emerging paradigm in cellular and organismal regulation. Multiple pathways have been demonstrated to be regulated through the specific and controlled degradation of both regulatory and downstream proteins. In higher plants, multiple aspects of plant growth and development require auxin, of which indole-3-acetic acid (IAA) is the most abundant naturally occurring biologically active member. Auxin regulates cell division, cell elongation, cell differentiation, and it plays an important role in multiple organismal processes such as lateral root initiation, apical dominance, and tropic responses. Molecular and biochemical studies have identified the family of Aux IAA proteins as essential players in the auxin signal transduction pathway that alters gene expression in plants. In addition to the activity of the Aux IAA proteins (which remains poorly characterized), their rapid degradation has emerged as an integral part of their biological function. The mechanism and role of this rapid proteolysis is the focus of this study. Based on work in other systems demonstrating that the cis-acting requirement for proteolysis is represented by a small region that can target other proteins for degradation, the rapid degradation of a fusion of Aux IAA amino acids to the marker enzyme firefly luciferase was demonstrated directly in transgenic Arabidopsis plants. The nature of absolutely required Aux IAA amino acids were defined, however, flanking sequences appear to affect proteolysis in a way that was not completely understood. Experiments proposed here will define the role of these sequences. Point mutations and deletions of Aux IAA sequences will be made, fused to LUC and the fusion protein half-life determined in transgenic plants. To determine whether all Aux IAA proteins have the same half-life, the ability of additional Aux IAA proteins to target LUC for degradation will be determined. An Aux IAA protein lacking the required conserved amino acids will tested for in vivo degradation as a LUC fusion. If not rapidly degraded, this protein will serve as the starting point to determine the sufficiency of the Aux IAA degradation signal. Application of exogenous auxin alters the rate of Aux IAA proteolysis, providing for the first time experimental evidence for a proposed mechanism for auxin-regulated gene expression. Increased loss of Aux IAA proteins by faster proteolysis correlated with induction of transcription of genes containing auxin-response elements in their regulatory regions. Experiments will be performed to test whether alterations in endogenous auxin alter Aux IAA proteolysis through the construction of transgenic plants with inducible expression of enzymes that alter IAA steady state levels. The above studies will be complemented by a genetic approach to isolate mutants defective in Aux IAA::LUC degradation. Additional screens, including an activation tagging screen, will be initiated. The effect on Aux IAA::LUC proteolysis of previously described mutants altered in auxin responses will also be determined to identify genes important for Aux IAA proteolysis. The results from the proposed work will be highly significant given the importance of the regulation of Aux IAA proteolysis in auxin signaling and the importance of auxin in regulating plant growth and development. Aux IAA proteolysis will serve as a model by which other cellular pathways may be regulated, providing methodogy, reagents, and experimental approaches useful in other systems. Sequences defined in these studies may be used in other contexts to control the intracellular level of a protein doc21992 none Ion transport across the surrounding membrane of the central vacuole of a plant cell plays an essential role in turgor-driven movements, in intracellular signal transduction, and in plant growth and nutrition. The PI has recently identified the first vacuolar ion channel, the two-pore-domain K+ channel KCO1 of Arabidopsis thaliana. An Arabidopsis insertion mutant (kco1) lacking KCO1 was used for patch clamp analysis. Currents mediated by slow-vacuolar (SV) channels of mesophyll cell vacuoles were significantly smaller in kco1 plants compared tot the wild-type, indicating that KCO1 might be involved in the formation of SV channels. By quantitative RT-PCR it was shown that transcripts of KCO1 and KCO6 dominate in Arabidopsis mesophyll and guard cells. By a combination of reverse genetic, biophysical, and physiological approaches, the function of KCO1 and KCO6 in mesophyll and guard cells of Arabidopsis will be explored. The specific objectives are (1) to establish whether KCO6--Like KCO1--is targeted to the vacuolar membrane, (2) to identify which vacuolar ion channel is formed by KCB1 and KCO6 -- determine whether it is the SV channel or another vacuolar ion channel, and (3) to relate physiological function(s) to KCO channels. To pursue these aims, plants lacking or overexpressing KCO1 and or KCO6 will be used. These studies will give insight into the molecular nature and physiological function of vacuolar potassium channels. This will have a major impact on plant physiology in general and on the understanding of plant growth in particular. For a systematic improvement of plant growth and nutritional composition (e.g. fortified foods ) insight onto the molecular mechanisms of vacuolar ion transport is of vital importance. Undergraduate students, graduate students, and post-doctoral associates will be trained, and the new insights into vacuolar potassium ion transport resulting from this project will be integrated into the plant mineral nutrition and plant physiology classes given by the PI doc21993 none A central goal of evolutionary biology is to understand the ways in which species become reproductively isolated from one another. One powerful approach to this problem involves the study of naturally occurring hybrid populations. In particular, inferences about the genetics of reproductive isolation can be made through the study of differential movement of genes across a hybrid zone between two species. Genes contributing to reproductive isolation are expected to move less freely across a hybrid zone than genes that do not contribute to reproductive isolation. The primary objective of the proposed research is to assess the number and relative contribution of genes to reproductive isolation between two European house mouse species, Mus musculus and M. domesticus, that naturally hybridize in central Europe. Approximately 900 mice from two transects across this hybrid zone in Germany will be genotyped for 68 genetic markers of known chromosomal location and a statistical analysis of the relative movement of these markers across the zone will be made. Because the complete sequence of the mouse genome will be available soon, this research will lay the groundwork for identifying specific genes involved in reproductive isolation. The study is both significant and unique in its utilization of a vast amount of genetic information to address a fundamental problem in biology, that is, the genetic basis of speciation doc21994 none Cell adhesion is responsible for the formation of tissues and organs. Cadherins are proteins that confer specificity to cells such that they adhere only to specific cell types. They are membrane-bound calcium-binding proteins with independently folded extracellular domains that participate in the cell-cell interactions. Calcium binds at the interface between the extracellular domains and changes their relative disposition. Calcium is required for cell adhesion. Studies of cadherins fall into two main categories, cellular level studies and high-resolution structural studies. Results from these approaches have not yielded a paradigm for the structural basis of the intermolecular interactions. At this point there is little understanding of the energetics of the molecular interactions involving cadherins. This project includes the study of the stability and calcium-binding properties of the extracellular domains of epithelial cadherin. In addition, the project will address how the calcium-binding properties depend on dimerization. These studies will elucidate the energetic origins of the calcium-linked interactions of cadherin that are critical for cell adhesion. The specific aims of this research are: characterization of the stability of the extracellular domains of epithelial-cadherin (ECAD12), determination of affinity and cooperative interactions for calcium binding to the sites between ECAD12, and establishing conditions under which cis-dimerization occurs for ECAD12. This project will have a broad positive impact on undergraduate and graduate education in physical biochemistry doc21995 none The importance of legume plants to nitrogen budgets of many natural and agricultural ecosystems depends largely on their interactions with rhizobia, soil bacteria that can live inside root nodules and convert nitrogen gas into fixed nitrogen that their plant host can use. Rhizobia vary in costs and benefits to their hosts. Why do many, but not all, rhizobia use plant photosynthate (carbohydrates) to fix nitrogen that mainly benefits their hosts, rather than hoarding that photosynthate to support their own future survival and reproduction? This is especially puzzling since each plant typically hosts several competing strains of rhizobia. Strains that fix nitrogen may increase host photosynthesis, thereby increasing the pool of available photosynthate, but if all strains share in this collective benefit then selfish strains that hoard photosynthate should displace those that fix more nitrogen. Why hasn t this happened? Preliminary data appear to show that plants can monitor individual root nodules and cut off resources (including oxygen) to those that fix little or no nitrogen. Mathematical models show that such plant sanctions would be an effective deterrent to rhizobial cheating, but additional research is needed on the mechanisms of plant sanctions and on their effects on survival and reproduction of rhizobia. Various experiments will expose some nodules to a nitrogen-free atmosphere, while allowing other nodules on the same plant to fix nitrogen. Noninvasive monitoring of nodule physiology and methods to count rhizobia are working well, and we also plan to measure resource levels in rhizobia. The importance to soil populations of rhizobial release from nodules, relative to increased reproduction of rhizobia already in the soil, will be determined using rhizobia expressing two different fluorescence genes. DNA fingerprinting of rhizobia collected from nodules in the field will test the key hypothesis that mixed nodules (containing two or more strains) are rare. Although details will differ, our research may be relevant to any system in which cooperation can break down, such as expulsion of algae by bleaching corals doc21918 none Atmospheric deposition of nitrogen to temperate forests has increased in recent decades as a result of increased combustion of fossil fuels. Knowing how nitrogen in air pollution is retained within forests will improve the ability of scientists to anticipate interactions among efforts to mitigate human alterations of regional and global cycles of carbon and nitrogen. For example, the way that forests retain nitrogen affects the ability of forests to help mitigate expected global warming due to increased carbon gases in the atmosphere. Because nitrogen often limits rates of plant growth, increased nitrogen inputs could affect forest growth and health. Most of the additional nitrogen deposited onto the forest from air pollution is retained in the soil rather than being taken up by plants. The biological and chemical processes whereby this incoming nitrogen, dominantly in the form of nitrate, is converted to organically-bound forms that stay in the soil remains unknown. Recent evidence suggests that abiotic reactions (chemical reactions without participation of living organisms) convert nitrate into organic nitrogen in soil. This suggestion challenges a widely held view that microorganisms living in the soils are the dominant agents for nitrogen uptake in soil. This abiotic reaction of nitrate is particularly perplexing because the energetics of nitrate reduction in soils are not favorable under normal conditions of well-drained soils. The fate of the organically bound nitrogen once it gets into the soils is also largely unknown. For example, it is not known how much organic nitrogen is eventually converted back into an inorganic form that plants can use. The proposed studies will be among the first to investigate the fate of dissolved organic nitrogen, which is increasingly recognized as central to the nitrogen cycle of many forests. The experiments use two ongoing nitrogen addition experiments in the Harvard Forest of central Massachusetts and the Howland Forest of central Maine. The first objective is to measure reactions of nitrate in these forest soils that have received nitrogen additions experimentally. The PI s seek to determine whether nitrogen addition has changed the capacity of soils to react with nitrate, either biotically or abiotically. The PI s also present in this proposal the ferrous wheel hypothesis, that reduced forms of iron in tiny pockets of poorly aerated soil can reduce nitrate to another form of nitrogen, nitrite, which can then react with dissolved organic carbon in the soils to form dissolved organic nitrogen. The second objective is to test this hypothesis in several laboratory experiments, where the concentrations and combinations of hypothesized reactants are varied systematically in a laboratory instrument, called a redox-pH-stat reactor, which controls the acidity and aeration of the soil sample during the incubation. As a result of its interdisciplinary nature, the research requires the collaborative efforts of an ecologist (Davidson), a chemist (Chorover) and a microbiologist (Dail), all of whom specialize in the study of soils doc21997 none This award provides partial support for the Gordon Research Conference: Research at High Pressure, June 23-28, Kimball Union Academy, Meriden, NH. This interdisciplinary Conference addresses new developments in fields such as physics, chemistry, earth and planetary science, materials science, and biology. Recent advances in high-pressure methods have led to the creation of new materials, and to opportunities to study physical, chemical and biological processes under high-pressure conditions. The Conference will feature invited talks in exciting new areas such as shock wave techniques, materials syntheses, high pressure liquids, nanomaterials, high pressure biochemistry, sampling the deep Earth, new synchrotron and neutron experiments, high-pressure superconductivity, and new metallic behavior at high pressure. Opening and closing sessions will feature provocative talks to provide challenges and opportunities for theory and experiment in high pressure research. The NSF funding will facilitate participation by students and junior scientists, as well as newcomers to the high-pressure field. The Conference is supported by the Condensed Matter Physics Program, the Solid State Chemistry Program, and the Petrology and Geochemistry Program doc21998 none The project will advance the understanding and modeling of Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) variability in the tropics from numerical experiments with a regional model and coordinated diagnostic studies. The experiments are designed to test various hypotheses for MJO genesis, particularly those related to internal mechanisms and specific boundary forcing. The focus will be on initiation and development of intra-seasonal convection over the equatorial Indian and western Pacific ocean basins. Drs. Weare and Chen (University of California, Davis) will conduct a suite of numerical experiments with regional models (MM5, WRF) in which boundary conditions can be manipulated to selectively suppress one or more of the hypothesized mechanisms. The PIs expect comparisons of control and perturbed simulations of 20-70 day variability to reveal the dominant mechanism of MJO development in both normal and ENSO climate conditions. Simulation of MJO variability poses a great challenge: The state-of-the-art atmospheric GCMs and coupled climate models (e.g., NCAR s Community Atmospheric Model and Community Climate System Model) are presently unable to simulate this phenomenon and its tropical and midlatitude impacts. The project will thus lead to greater understanding and, potentially, more accurate modeling of MJO variability, and its influence on long-term weather and seasonal-to-interannual climate variability doc21999 none Currently, there is not enough good data on what types of genetic changes occur when organisms evolve an adaptation. This data can only come from high-resolution genetic analyses of natural adaptations. The fruitfly, Drosophila sechellia, is uniquely suited for such an analysis as it can be manipulated genetically and has an indisputable adaptation. A close relative of D. melanogaster, a genetic model species, D. sechellia has adapted to consuming the fruit of Morinda citrifolia, a fruit that is toxic to other fruitflies. The first two experiments in this grant are in-depth genetic analyses of D. sechellia s adaptation. The genes involved in this adaptation will be precisely mapped and their effects estimated. This data is a necessary first step towards the identification and cloning of the adaptive alleles. The final experiment will determine the relative importance of standing genetic variation versus new mutations in the evolution of an adaptation by artificially evolving resistance in related species of fruitflies. The proposed research will help us understand how organisms genetically change in response to environmental change. Specifically, this grant will impact our understanding of how insects evolve resistance to plant produced pesticides and will give insight into how insects choose the plants upon which they feed doc22000 none The ribosome is a large (2.5 MDa) macromolecular complex made of RNA and protein that is responsible for translation of the genetic code in all living organisms. Recent progress on the three-dimensional structure of the ribosome has given many new insights regarding the molecular mechanism of action of the ribosome in protein synthesis, including specific models that explain how specific structural features give rise to specific functions. This project is aimed at testing models for four functions: (a) discrimination of initiator tRNA; (b) the role of protein S7 in E-site function; (c) the role of intersubunit bridges in translocation of tRNA; and (d) the mechanism of unwinding of mRNA secondary structure by the ribosome. These models will be tested by introducing mutations in critical elements of ribosomal proteins and or ribosomal RNA that are proposed to be involved in these functions, followed by in vitro and or in vivo functional assays doc22001 none A central problem in structural biology is to connect the structure of a protein to its function. To accomplish this, photosynthetic reaction centers of photosystem I and bacterial type II, the intramembrane F0 ATPase, and dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR) will be studied. These are electron, proton, or hydride transfer proteins where residues, cofactors and or substrates change charge or position during reaction. The primary tool for analysis will be MCCE (Multi Conformation Continuum Electrostatics). This program, written with prior NSF support, combines continuum electrostatics and molecular mechanics for calculation of reaction free energy changes, residue pKa s and electrochemical midpoints (Em s). MCCE will provide the ionization state of residues and changes in protein conformation or ionization state that modify the reaction. This information will establish the structural determinates of function for each protein. The photosynthetic and ATPase proteins will be embedded in different membrane models to see how membrane structure and charge affect the proteins. The role of loop motions on catalysis will be studied in DHFR. Where possible, calculated pKa s and Em s for side chains and cofactors will be compared with experiment. Molecular dynamics will be used to generate modified structures and QM MM simulations will be used to obtain new cofactor and substrate charge distributions. In addition, the protein structural data bank will be surveyed to identify motifs that stabilize buried charges. A data set of buried charges in 300 proteins will be used to characterize the distribution of buried ionizable residues. Ionization states at physiological pH will be calculated and the aspects of the protein structure that control ionization will be identified. Motifs identified in the detailed structure function analysis of specific proteins will be placed in context by comparison with data-bank statistics. Lastly, MCCE will be made easier for non-expert users by enhancing error reporting and analysis of the output. The structural database is growing rapidly. The next challenge would be to fully analyze this information to connect structure to function. It will be necessary to calculate functional properties of proteins, with known structures, to identify most important aspects of the structure for a given property. The overall objective of this project is to accomplish this goal. The work will be carried out at City College of New York, a school with a significant population of under-represented groups. Initial protein data bank analysis was carried out exclusively by undergraduates. The aim is to continue to integrate undergraduate training into these projects. Detailed information about buried acidic and basic residues and their predicted in situ pKa s will be distributed on the internet doc22002 none The research in this project will focus on the preparation and study of azoles, primarily pyrazoles and isoxazoles, and pyranones. For the syntheses, some emphasis is placed on multiple anion-type syntheses coupled with standard preparative methodology as exemplified by Claisen-type reactions, aldol-type reactions and alkylations. Starting materials will consist of readily available ketones, hydrazones and carboxylic acid hydrazides. Each of the projects will be organized into smaller component investigations thereby allowing each undergraduate participant to be involved in at least two investigations. With this Research in Undergraduate Institutions (RUI) award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research efforts of Dr. Charles F. Beam and Dr. Jason S. Overby of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the College University of Charleston. The principal investigators will focus their work on the preparation of heterocycles that have interesting biological activity, that have interesting ligand properties and compounds that are viable ligands for the construction of new metallocene derivatives. The students working in the project will have the opportunity to gain from the experience of both an organic and an inorganic chemist doc22003 none Chemokines (chemotactic cytokines) function in immune response and are often found to be dimers. The goal of this research is to investigate the protein-protein interactions involved in dimerization of the chemokine family of proteins. The chemokine family has two main subfamilies, the CC subfamily and the CXC subfamily. However, despite sharing the same overall fold and having moderate sequence identity, the proteins in each subfamily dimerize quite differently, using different amino acids in different regions of the protein. This structural situation is nearly unique and provides an excellent opportunity to study the details of dimer formation. Previous work supported by an NSF CAREER award has allowed the successful design and study of folded monomeric variants derived from chemokine dimers. This funding has also led to the development of several strategies designed to switch the dimer type of a chemokine variant. Experiments in the current project are designed to study the protein-protein interactions leading to dimerization. First, a screening system has been established that allows for rapid screening of randomly mutated chemokines to select for those having an alternate dimer interface. Second, the new chemokine dimers will be characterized biochemically to confirm the dimer dissociation constant and stability of the variant. Finally, nuclear magnetic resonance will be used to determine the structure of the altered dimer(s), thereby elucidating the specific amino acid contacts that allow dimerization. This work will exploit the characteristics of chemokines (having identical folds but two different dimer types) to reveal details of amino acid interactions necessary for protein dimerization that is not obtainable from simply observing known structures of dimers or from destabilizing known dimers. The work will allow a greater understanding of protein-protein interactions at a molecular level and will also provide an excellent educational experience for undergraduates, as such students, including a participant in a minority student summer program, have contributed significantly to the preliminary results that lay the groundwork for these experiments doc22004 none The oligosaccharides and polysaccharides of the cell surface have complex structures encoding information which controls cellular interactions. The information is decoded by binding to proteins such as lectins which is often complex and multivalent and may also involve cooperative interactions between protein and carbohydrate binding sites. The solution conformation and the dynamics of the oligosaccharide ligands, which can have a significant influence on the free energy of binding, is poorly understood and will be studied in this project by physical methods including computational molecular modeling and NMR spectroscopy. The model proposed for flexibility in complex oligosaccharides and polysaccharides will be useful for interpretation of protein-carbohydrate binding equilibria and will serve as a basis for interpretation of the dynamic properties of high molecular weight polysaccharides. The glycosidic linkages joining the comparatively rigid pyranoside chairs in complex, branched oligosaccharides have highly varied stereochemistry with some linkages being relatively rigid and others highly flexible. In this research, examples of relatively rigid oligosaccharides will be selected from the Lewis and blood group oligosaccharides while oligosaccharides and polysaccharides isolated from the cell walls of the viridans streptococci, S. mitis and S. oralis will be models for more flexible oligosaccharides. In addition to traditional nuclear Overhauser methods, NMR experiments involving heteronuclear scalar coupling across the glycosidic linkages will be studied both in natural abundance samples and in samples prepared with biosynthetic incorporation of stable isotopes. The recently introduced method of residual dipolar coupling of oligosaccharides partially oriented in dilute liquid crystal solutions is capable of giving abundant and very precise experimental information on the conformation of rigid oligosaccharide epitopes and new methods for treating flexible oligosaccharides will be used which will lead to greatly improved models for conformation and dynamics of the hinges which join more rigid domains. The experimental results will be interpreted with computer molecular modeling calculations including molecular dynamics simulations and Monte Carlo methods. This project will support training in structural biochemistry for graduate and undergraduate students who will learn modern nuclear magnetic resonance experiments and computer molecular modeling methods along with aspects of the analytical and physical biochemistry of complex carbohydrates. The PI s department has an especially strong tradition in training of under represented minority students, both at the graduate and undergraduate level doc22005 none Exposure to solar ultraviolet radiation (UVR) is a fact of life for organisms living in the photic zone of aquatic environments. It is increasingly evident that zooplankton, phytoplankton, protozoa, and bacterioplankton exhibit taxon-specific differences in physiological and behavioral responses to UVR exposure. Although competition for nutrients is recognized as a critical factor in structuring plankton community composition, nothing is known of the significance of UVR under natural conditions for the intensity of competition among plankton for limiting mineral nutrients. The proposed research will help to fill this gap in knowledge. We will examine the main and interaction effects of the nutrient and UVR regime on the growth rates and competition for phosphorus of naturally occurring phytoplankton and bacterioplankton. A model is presented and predictions made regarding the severity of nutrient competition under a range in conditions of nutrient (organic carbon and phosphorus) ratios and UVR exposure. We predict that, because of differential effects on bacterioplankton and phytoplankton growth rates, UVR will modify the severity of competition between phytoplankton and bacterioplankton for phosphorus. Using samples collected from a low-altitude reservoir in north Mississippi, experiments will be conducted to test the model predictions. This study fulfills two needs. It will be the first to evaluate by experimentation using natural sunlight the interaction effects of UVR and the nutrient regime on growth rates of autotrophic and heterotrophic plankton under various degrees of nutrient limitation. Second, it will provide knowledge of the influence of the UVR regime on the relative importance of autotrophic and bacterial heterotrophic production in a southern U.S. aquatic ecosystem, where, compared to higher latitudes, there has been very little research on the ecological significance of UVR. Students will be involved in all aspects of the project, from planning to sampling to data analysis to presentation. With anticipated continued increases of UVR in temperate regions due to ozone depletion, the effect of UVR on plankton trophic-level relationships constitutes a timely and important problem doc22006 none Hodge Few studies have been conducted to test species limits in fungi used in insect biocontrol programs. One such group of ascomycete fungi is the Hypocrella and Aschersonia group, the former with sexual, ascospore producing phases and the latter with only or usually asexual spore forming phases, but shown with recent DNA sequence data to be likely close relatives of various sexual Hypocrella species. These fungi mostly infect Homoptera insects, usually scale insects and whiteflies, and some were used early in the s to control pests of citrus groves in Florida. The taxonomic boundaries between species and the linkages between sexual and asexual forms remain poorly studied, which in turn has limited the development of improved biocontrol agents. Dr. Kathie Hodge of Cornell University will work with graduate students there to analyze species relationships in the critical Aschersonia aleyrodis and A. goldiana complex, with a focus on integrating data from morphology, mating trials, and multi-gene sequences to establish species circumscriptions that reflect biological properties of the organisms while providing practical tools for rapid identification from observable phenotypic features. Taxonomic data will be gathered from existing herbarium specimens and laboratory cultures, and from material newly collected during field work in Florida and elsewhere, augmented with material provided by colleagues around the world. New taxonomic identification resources and keys will be generated. Evolutionary relationships will be assessed through phylogenetic analyses of morphological characters and of DNA sequence data obtained from several nuclear ribosomal and protein-coding genes. A graduate student will be trained in collecting techniques and in modern phylogenetic systematics. Publications and Internet-based resources will be generated to transmit the results of the work to other biologists and to the public doc22007 none Smith As in all other eukaryotes and prokaryotes, diversification of form and function during plant development depends on cell polarity. Relatively little is known in molecular terms about how cells translate polarizing cues into localized cytoskeletal assemblies that direct the polarization of other cell components or of the cell growth machinery. With the support of a prior NSF award, a genetic approach was taken to analyze mechanisms by which maize leaf epidermal cells become polarized, focusing on three Brick (Brk) genes required for the polarized growth and division of epidermal cells. Building on this work, studies are proposed here to further advance our understanding of plant cell polarity, with the following specific objectives: 1. Complementary approaches will be taken to localize BRK1 protein in polarizing subsidiary mother cells and expanding epidermal pavement cells. 2. Complementary approaches will be taken to identify candidate BRK1-interacting proteins and investigate their in vivo interactions with BRK1. 3. As shown for the Brk genes, two Pangloss (Pan) genes promote the polarization of subsidiary mother cells, but are not required for polarized cell expansion. The functions of Pan genes and how they relate to those of Brk genes will be further elucidated through phenotypic analysis of single and double mutants. 4. To help build a bigger picture of how maize leaf epidermal cells become polarized, one additional epidermal cell polarity gene (Pan1, Brk2, or Brk3) will be cloned and molecularly characterized by means of transposon tagging. The intellectual merit of the work proposed is augmented by the central importance of cell polarity in the development of all eukaryotes and prokaryotes, and the fact that BRK1 (and probably the entire pathway in which all 3 Brk genes were shown to function) is conserved among eukaryotes. Therefore, our findings will most likely have an impact outside the boundaries of plant cell biology. The broader impact of the work proposed will mainly be the education and training of young scientists participating in the research, including one postdoc, one Ph.D. student, and a series of undergraduates doc22008 none This project concerns how cells regulate intracellular membrane trafficking, including the formation of intracellular vesicles by budding from larger intracellular membrane compartments, movement of vesicles from one region of the cell to another, and the fusion of intracellular membrane compartments with one another. Rab GTPases play a multitude of roles in vesicular transport, including regulation of vesicle formation, vesicle motility, vesicle tethering, membrane fusion and membrane remodeling. Rab GDP dissociation inhibitor (GDI) is a protein that binds to rabs, keeping rab in the GDP-bound state, as well as delivering and placing rabs in the correct membrane compartment. The mechanism for releasing rab from GDI and delivering the rab to the correct membrane is unknown and is likely to involve proteins that bind and interact with GDI. Dr. Cheney s laboratory and collaborators have previously cloned the Drosophila GDI gene, determined the Drosophila GDI crystal structure, isolated and characterized Drosophila GDI mutations and located the GDI mutations within the GDI crystal structure (Ricard et al., ). Prior work supported by NSF (# , RUI: Proteins that control interaction of rab GTPases and GDIls ) resulted in the discovery of candidate proteins that interact with GDI and potentially could regulate the release of rab from GDI. The research that will be conducted under this award will extend this project by further characterizing the interacting proteins and investigating the nature of their interaction with GDI and role in rab delivery. The prior work has isolated a 30 kD protein that bound to mutant, but not wild-type, GDI in a GST-GDI pulldown assay. This protein could be GDI displacement factor (GDF) or a rab. The prior work has also discovered 14 genomic regions that interact genetically with a GDI null allele. These regions include Myosin V, Myosin VIIa, rab26, Mp20 Calponin, and commissureless. Finally, this prior work has isolated 6 mutations that interact with GDI. The aims of the current project are: 1, to identify the 30 kD protein and determine whether it triggers rab release from GDI to membranes; 2, to find the candidate gene in ech of 4 interacting genomic regions and determine if the candidate gene product binds to GDI, affecting rab release from GDI; and 3, to clone the genes for one mutation that interacts with GDI and determine if the protein encoded by this gene binds directly to GDI, affecting in rab release. This research will investigate proteins that interact with GDI and will shed light on how rab is released from GDI and delivered correctly to membrane compartments. Further, this project will integrally and actively involve undergraduates in an exciting area of research doc22009 none Bawa Breeding systems, a keystone feature of the life history of plants, are known to be diverse and mutable. Two breeding systems of particular note are distyly and dioecy. Distyly, with self-incompatible hermaphroditic individuals of two types, has evolved multiple times in flowering plants. Mating of the two types of individuals, (those with long styles and short stamens (pin) and those with short styles and long stamens (thrum)), is generally restricted to crosses between types. Dioecious species, on the other hand, have separate male and female (unisexual) individuals. There are many examples of closely related species (Cordia spp. is one) that possess these alternative breeding strategies and it has been repeatedly suggested that dioecy has evolved from distyly. Yet no genetic tests nor ecological studies have been made to confirm or refute the likelihood of this evolutionary pathway. The first objective of this research is to use molecular phylogenetic techniques to reconstruct the phylogeny of Cordia spp. and to map changes in breeding system onto it. The second objective is to use DNA markers to identify regions linked to sex-determining genes in dioecious species and to flower morphology (pin and thrum) in distylous species. These markers will be utilized to characterize the genetic basis of each breeding system, the likelihood of a common origin, and the specific steps that lead to changes. These studies will provide information about the direction of evolutionary change in breeding systems in a tropical tree. This work will lay the foundation for future studies on how breeding system evolution occurs within the context of rapidly changing environments (e.g., changes in the pollinator community brought on by landscape-level disturbance), a topic of considerable importance for conservation biology. The research will also impact human resource development because of PIs strong commitment to provide research opportunities for female students and for students from groups under-represented in science (e.g., through our summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) programs, McNair fellowships and Undergraduate Mentoring in Environmental Biology (UMEB)). In addition the project will train graduate students and post doctoral associates doc22010 none This proposal requests travel funds from the National Science Foundation to help fund a focused workshop, to take place in part at the Louisiana State University (LSU), and in part at the LIGO Livingston Observatory, to aid in the creation of source working groups for interferometric gravitational wave detectors doc22011 none Long-chain fatty acids are important substrates for energy production and macromolecular biosynthesis and are important regulatory molecules. The transport of fatty acids into the cell represents an important metabolic process common to most bacterial and animal systems. The most well understood fatty acid transport process is found in the gram-negative bacterium bacteria, Escherichia coli. In E. coli, long-chain fatty acids are taken up by a process that is linked to utilization and fatty acid-dependent gene expression. This process requires the fatty acid transport protein FadL and the enzyme fatty acyl CoA synthetase (FACS). FadL functions to move fatty acids across the outer membrane while FACS activates these compounds for further metabolism rendering this process unidirectional. The technical and scientific significance of this work is several-fold. First, it will define how the transport protein FadL is positioned within the membrane. This research will involve modifying the protein for detection and the introduction of amino acid substitutions to assess function. Second, this work will use fluorescent techniques to define the activity of FadL using artificial membranes. More specifically, this will involve monitoring the movement of fatty acids across membranes containing FadL so that the fundamental properties guiding activity can be determined. Third, this work will investigate how FACS moves into the membrane, where it activates fatty acids as they are transported. And fourth, we expect to define the structure of FACS to further understand how this protein functions in fatty acid transport. This work is designed to provide fundamental insights into the molecular mechanisms underpinning the movement of fatty acids across the membrane and how they subsequently function as effecter molecules regulating fatty acid responsive gene expression. This experimental system serves as a paradigm for understanding this process in other systems, including mammals. In addition, this research program will provide a training environment in molecular genetics, molecular biology and biochemistry for graduate, undergraduate and high school students doc22012 none The objective of this project is to understand the relationship of dynamics to structural features and fold stability in a small model protein, the B1 domain of Streptococcal protein G. This will be accomplished by using NMR relaxation data to compare the backbone NH and side chain methyl group dynamics in various mutants of the B1 domain. First, for a series of 10 single-site mutants, the dynamics at the mutation site and remote sites will be correlated with the properties (volume, branching, and polarity) of the amino acid at the mutation site. Second, the backbone and side chain conformational entropy of each of the 10 mutants will be estimated from the dynamics data and correlated with the fold stabilities of the mutants. This section will incorporate dynamics studies of the folded as well as unfolded forms of the mutants. Third, the extent of correlated motions in the B1 domain will be investigated by analysis of the covariation of internal dynamics parameters. Correlation data will be obtained both for the family of 10 mutants and for the dynamics of the B1 domain measured at several temperatures. Fourth, the mechanism by which dynamic information is propagated from a mutation site to a remote site in the B1 domain will be investigated using double-mutant experiments. Finally, the influence of secondary structural environment on amino acid dynamics will be investigated using two B1 domain variants, in which the same 11-amino acid sequence exists in alpha-helical or beta-hairpin structures, respectively. The chemical properties of proteins such as structural stability, binding to other molecules, and ability to catalyze reactions can often not be adequately understood from the static protein structure because these properties are influenced by the dynamics of the protein. The broad goal of this study is to understand the relationship of dynamics to structural features and fold stability in proteins. The study will provide insights that will aid in our understanding of protein stability and function and may be useful in the design of proteins with novel properties. The major educational goal of this project is the training of a graduate student and a postdoctoral research associate. Activities in the project range from site-directed mutagenesis and protein expression and purification to NMR spectroscopy, other physical biochemistry experiments and extensive computational data analysis. The project will involve development of skills and knowledge in all of these practical areas as well as in theoretical aspects of protein stability and in experimental design doc22013 none Human activities are increasingly affecting earth s environment and ecosystems not only through direct impacts on climate and element cycling, but also by increasing the pace of introductions and extinctions of species. Because carbon and nutrients are cycled through the biosphere and plant species differ in traits that affect the rates of cycling of these elements, the abundance and diversity of species must affect ecosystem function. However, the extent to which individual plant species affect ecosystem function and the relationship between species diversity and ecosystem response to perturbation are still largely unknown. To what extent can plant species substitute for each other in ecosystem function? What key traits determine whether a plant species effect on nutrient cycling can be substituted by other species? A field experiment in Alaskan tussock tundra will examine these questions by removing different combinations of plant species in the presence and absence of fertilization. The investigators will obtain a detailed picture of how interactions between plant species control how nutrients are redistributed under fertilization, because nutrients are a primary control over carbon storage in this highly nutrient-limited ecosystem. They will also track potential introductions of new species as plant community composition shifts because of the removals or fertilization. The results will help reveal how human-induced environmental perturbations may change the mechanisms controlling ecosystem carbon storage and plant species abundance and diversity. This is a collaborative project with Syndonia Bret-Harte doc22014 none A grant has been awarded to Jill Bargonetti at Hunter College (part of the City University of New York) to carry out the project Growth Control Regulated by p53 and MDM2 . The Bargonetti laboratory has evidence that a dysfunctional p53-MDM2 feedback loop may exist in some cells and when this occurs p53 is not targeted for degradation despite the formation of a nuclear p53-MDM2 complex. In cells with such a dysfunctional p53-MDM2 complex, p53 does not activate some target genes (for example p21) that promote growth arrest, but does activate other gene targets (like mdm2) that aid in cell survival. The aims of this grant are to identify if a specific p53 protein complex that correlates with dysfunctional wild-type p53 is, in fact, a p53-MDM2 complex; and if this protein complex causes p53 to constitutively interact with the mdm2 gene in nuclear chromatin. Aim one is to identify the amino acid sequences of the MDM2 immuno-reactive proteins that specifically co-immunoprecipitate with dysfunctional wild-type p53 and functional p53 from human cell lines. The Bargonetti laboratory has found a potentially novel form of MDM2 associated with dysfunctional wild-type p53. Aim two is to determine if a p53:MDM2 protein complex can interact with the mdm2 p53-binding site in nuclear chromatin. Chromatin immuno-precipitation-PCR (CHIP-PCR), utilizing both p53 specific and MDM2 specific monoclonal antibodies, is used to investigate the nuclear in vivo interaction of p53 and MDM2 with the mdm2 promoter regions (P1 and P2). Aim three is to determine the mRNA sequences and phosphorylation states of p53 and MDM2 in cell lines that have a functional feedback loop versus those that are dysfunctional as described above. The RT-PCR mdm2 products from a cell line with dysfunctional wild-type p53 as well as products from a cell line with properly functioning p53 are being sequenced. Nested PCR is being used to compare the spliced mdm2 transcripts in the cell line with dysfunctional wild-type p53 to normally functioning p53 to see if there is a difference. Phospho-specific antibodies are used to investigate the phosphorylation state of p53. Hunter College is an undergraduate minority institution. Undergraduates are recruited into and mentored in the laboratory and graduate students from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York are active members of the Bargonetti research team. The studies being carried out concern the regulation of p53, a cellular protein that acts as a central controller receiving signals from many different routes and controlling numerous downstream pathways. Signal transduction pathways must utilize p53 as a major connection point in much the same way as travelers from many different destinations cross paths at major stations before embarking to different destinations. The p53-MDM2 feedback loop, whereby p53 turns on mdm2 and the MDM2 protein inactivates p53, is a key signaling pathway to p53. The studies being carried out are to examine a dysfunction p53-MDM2 feedback loop. The two proteins interact but the signal after interaction does not inhibit cell growth. The mechanism for this dysfunctional loop is being examined. Scientific excellence is stressed in the Bargonetti laboratory and the students are instructed in professional presentation of their data, scientific collaboration, collegiality and ethics. This project has the potential to identify a novel form of regulation of p53 by MDM2, while producing a new generation of scientists doc22015 none The Convolvulaceae (morning glory family) is a moderate-size family (50-60 genera, species worldwide) of mostly tropical plants, which has received only sporadic attention from taxonomists. Consequently, the identity of species and the classification of these into reliably identifiable genera are problematic. A specialist on the group, Dr. George Staples of the Bishop Museum in Hawaii, is studying the mostly Asian members of the family, focusing especially on the genera Operculina, Rivea, and Blinkworthia. If this process of verifying purportedly new taxa could be streamlined then the completion of a global biodiversity inventory could be expedited through greater efficiency of research effort. The activities include the compilation of an Internet-accessible and authenticated nomenclator for all described taxa of Convolvulaceae in tropical and subtropical Asia (Pakistan east to the Philippines and China south to Queensland, Australia). Where a genus has an accepted classification and the taxonomy has been reconciled with recently collected specimens housed in the major museum collections, those species and infraspecific taxon names will be incorporated into the nomenclator. Where no accepted classification exists (the genera Argyreia, Merremia, and Jacquemontia), revisionary work will commence on the Asian taxa, as a basis for worldwide treatments later. Special research attention will be paid to early scientific names (usually by European taxonomists) that have not been taken into account in contemporary classifications. The nomenclator will endeavor to trace all scientific names and provide their current disposition, with documentation via literature and selected specimen citations. This research will be carried out primarily in European and British herbaria and libraries, with recourse to specimen loans for more detailed study at the PI s home institution. The products will be a series of taxonomic revisions that provide better methods of taxonomic identification, improve classification at the specific, generic, and tribal levels, and contribute to nomenclatural reform. The nomenclator itself will provide the first inventory of Asian taxa of Convolvulaceae. And the process for creating the nomenclator will shed light onto how the process for taxonomic verification of new, undescribed species can be made more efficient and thereby enhance the taxonomic enterprise doc22016 none The objectives of this work are to develop DNA base-pair analogs which can self assemble (using hydrogen bonding) into oligomers and polymers that adopt defined three dimensional structures. They will start this investigation by preparing new base-pair analogs and study the structural factors that determine base-pair stability. They will also work to develop a model to predict analog base-pair stability. Oligomers and polymers of these base pair analogs will then be synthesized with the goal being the preparation of self assembled polymers which can equilibrate between folded and sheet-like structures. Molecules which can use light to accomplish this equilibration are particularly desirable and will be studied in detail. These self assembling polymeric materials may have properties, such as self healing, which are not currently available with traditional covalently bonded polymers. The incorporation of these small molecules with defined hydrogen bonding capabilities into bulk commerical polymers may one day lead to higher performance materials. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Steven C. Zimmerman of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois. Dr. Zimmerman and his students will work on the development of DNA base-pair analogs which can self assemble into oligomers and polymers that adopt defined three dimensional structures. Polymers of these base-pair analogs will then be prepared with the goal being the preparation of self assembled polymers which can equilibrate between folded and sheet-like structures. Molecules which can use light to accomplish this equilibration are particularly desirable and will be studied in detail. These self assembling polymeric materials may have properties, such as self healing, which are not currently available with traditional covalently bonded polymers. The incorporation of these small molecules with defined hydrogen bonding capabilities into bulk commerical polymers may one day lead to higher performance materials. Students trained during the course of this interdisciplinary work will gain skills needed by the pharmaceutical, polymer and speciality chemicals industries doc22017 none Finerty Every person that has ever walked the earth developed from an embryo. However, many animals such as sea anemones can develop by three alternate developmental pathways: from an embryo (embryogenesis), from a piece of an adult that has been fragmented by injury (regeneration), or from an autonomously produced offshoot of an adult (asexual reproduction). How are three alternate developmental pathways encoded in the genomes of animals such as sea anemones? Why is this kind of developmental flexibility lacking in animals such as humans? Answers to these fundamental questions will come from understanding the similarities and differences between embryogenesis, regeneration, and asexual reproduction at the molecular level. Towards this end, the Finnerty lab will compare the roles of specific axial patterning genes in sea anemones during embryogenesis, regeneration, and asexual reproduction. Axial patterning is the process whereby an animal s body is divided into distinct regions along its primary axis. For example, the relatively simple body of a sea anemone has three main regions: a head, a central body column, and a foot. Importantly, axial patterning is a process that must be performed during embryogenesis, regeneration, and asexual reproduction. This study seeks to reveal whether conserved molecular mechanisms are used to accomplish axial patterning in these alternate pathways. The following specific questions will be addressed. (1) Are the same genes used to accomplish axial patterning in each developmental pathway? (2) Are the temporal and spatial patterns of gene expression consistent between pathways? (3) What are the consequences for embryogenesis of turning off a given gene by experimental means? To address questions one and two, the expression of several homeobox transcription factors will be assayed using the techniques of in situ hybridization and quantitative RT-PCR. To address question three, gene expression will be silenced using the technique of RNA interference doc22018 none Matter This research examines the effects of dispersal on the population dynamics of the alpine butterfly, Parnassius smintheus. Within a network of 17 populations of the butterfly, two populations were removed. Based on previous data, populations near the removals are predicted to receive fewer immigrants (a 2% to 56% reduction in immigration), while more distant populations should be unaffected. If immigration is an important component of population size and persistence, populations near the removals should have reduced population sizes and an increased risk of extinction in comparison to more distant populations. Mark-recapture methods will be used to examine dispersal and population size. Experimental methods will lead to unambiguous conclusions regarding the role of dispersal for the population dynamics of this species. Due to anthropogenic habitat fragmentation and natural heterogeneity, many species exist as networks of small, potentially extinction-prone populations. In such situations dispersal can be particularly important. Immigrants arriving to populations may bolster population size, preventing extinction. In cases where extinction has occurred, immigrants may act as colonists. Understanding the effects of dispersal is crucial for the management of these threatened species. This research will address the role of dispersal for one species that can serve as a model for threatened species. This RUI research project will train and support many undergraduate students doc22019 none Proposal number: The Gordon Research on Membranes: Materials and Processes This award supports partially the participation by invited speakers and discussion leaders from academic institutions at the Gordon Conference on Membranes to be held in New London, NH, from August 4 to August 9, . The sessions scheduled for this year s conference include polymer membranes, inorganic membranes, fuel-cell membranes, mixed-media membranes, and biomedical applications as well as industry-university-government and international collaborations in the field. In each session there will be two or three invited speakers. Poster sessions are also planned. The Gordon Conferences are kept small and are structured to give the participants considerable time for discussion and interaction. They provide a vehicle for communication between research groups, which will be represented here by researchers not only from U.S. universities but also from industry and universities in Europe and Japan. This grant is specifically targeted to permit attendance by twenty advanced-level graduate students and post-docs at the conference doc22020 none Hahn and Noblick Dr. William Hahn of Columbia University and Dr. Larry Noblick of the Montgomery Botanical Center are combining their molecular and morphological expertise to study the systematics and evolution of the coconut, Cocos nucifera, and its taxonomic relatives. The coconut is one of the three most economically important species of palms, yet its origins and relationships are poorly understood. The palm tribe Cocoeae consists of 22 genera (including the coconut) with two genera in Madagascar, one genus in South Africa, the coconut in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, and the remaining 18 genera in the New World. Available taxonomies for the tribe are in need of critical reevaluation as several different taxonomies have been proposed over the past few decades. An estimate of evolutionary relationships is needed to resolve these taxonomic debates as well as controversy over the geographic origin of the coconut. The species appears to be native to Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, but all of its close relatives are found in Africa, Madagascar, or the New World. Because of its remarkable ability to disperse by floating, both natural and human-mediated dispersal have been suggested to explain its origins and current distribution. Two primary geographic scenarios have been proposed: from Madagascar Africa across the Indian Ocean or from the Americas across the Pacific Ocean. An explicit examination of the coconut s relationships to other palms is necessary to choose between these competing biogeographic hypotheses. Dr. Hahn and Dr. Noblicks s research uses modern molecular and morphological phylogenetic methods to reconstruct the evolutionary history of the coconut and related species and to develop a molecular clock framework for the evaluation of rates of diversification. Morphological and molecular data will be accumulated to estimate evolutionary relationships among the 22 genera that form tribe Cocoeae, with anticipated improvements to genus-level circumscription and classification. Molecular clocks (based on multiple nuclear and plastid genes) will be used to date divergence events among the taxa in this tribe and to estimate the time of origin for the coconut. Based on these results, tests of alternative taxonomic and biogeographic hypotheses can be conducted, leading to a better understanding of the evolutionary process in an economically important crop species. Both graduate and undergraduate students will be supported in this project and will be instructed in field, botanical garden, herbarium, computer, and molecular evolutionary techniques. Results of these studies will also be presented in the public education programs of the Montgomery Botanical Center in Miami, Florida doc22021 none Venable This LTREB proposal is to extend the continuous record of population and community dynamics of desert winter annual plants on permanent plots at a Sonoran Desert site at the Desert Laboratory near Tucson, AZ, USA. It will clarify and extend the understanding of demographic variation and covariation and its role in population and community processes. Data on germination, survival and reproduction of desert annual plants will be continuously monitored on long-term plots established from 10 to 19 years ago at locations both under shrub canopies and in the open at this field station. Delayed germination and between year seed carry over are thought to be important for the persistence of desert annuals, so the magnitude of the soil seed reserves will be monitored and determine what fraction germinate in each year for each species under shrubs and in the open. Seeds will be separated from standardized soil samples and tested for viability. The results of this research will be analyzed together with weather data to determine how climatic variation determines population variation for these annual plant species. The investigators will then construct population and community models of this desert annual system. These models will be used to explore the role of soil seed banks in buffering populations in the face of environmental variation. They will also be used to investigate how life history differences among species promote their coexistence and species diversity. Desert annual plants have played an important role as model organisms in the development of our understanding of how organisms adapt to variable and unpredictable environments. They have also been used to exemplify ideas about non-equilibrium community dynamics in variable environments. Yet their dynamics are not well known empirically, especially the behavior of seeds. This project will provide the best available long-term data for evaluating these ideas. There has been considerable theoretical and experimental work carried out on the evolutionary ecology, population ecology and community ecology of this system. Such combinations of theoretical and experimental work with long-term observations are proving to be a powerful approach to yield new insights and syntheses in plant ecology. This research will further the goal of combining research and education by virtue of occurring in the academic environment of a major research university. Graduate and undergraduate students will be involved in capacities that fosters hands-on training and research experience that complements formal coursework. Ph.D., Masters, and undergraduate honors projects will be facilitated as part of or offshoots of this research. REU support will be sought for related undergraduate projects. In the first phase of this research more than half of the undergraduate and graduate participants in this project were women and an attempt will be made to include a high percentage of women in the proposed research. The PI will endeavor to include under-represented ethnic and cultural groups in this research by working with minority access programs on campus doc22022 none Homologous meiotic recombination is an important process for sexually reproducing organisms: it creates new genotypes by shuffling chromosomal segments that otherwise would be inherited as a unit and promotes fertility by ensuring that chromosomes segregate properly at meiosis. For close to a century, geneticists have been using recombination as a tool to construct genetic maps, which now find practical applications ranging from risk prediction for inherited deleterious alleles to marker-assisted selection of desirable genotypes in agriculture and map-based cloning of valuable genes in plants and animals. Yet, in spite of its importance, our knowledge of the process of homologous meiotic recombination in higher plants is rudimentary compared to other organisms, like yeast. This project will increase our understanding of this basic biological process in maize, a plant that is both an excellent model organism for studies of recombination, and an economically important crop in American agriculture and industry. The genetic system being used in the project is the bz locus, which affects seed pigmentation and is uniquely advantageous for studies of recombination. This project will continue the analysis of meiotic recombination in maize by combining the power of the genetics of the bz region with that of modern molecular tools. It is greatly influenced by the recent finding that the organization of genes and retrotransposons in the bz genomic region is polymorphic in different maize lines. There are five specific objectives of the project: 1. To analyze conversion tract lengths within the bz gene island in heterozygotes lacking heterologies and extend the analysis to adjacent retrotransposon blocks. 2. To determine if the apparent conversion polarity at bz, detected with small insertion mutations at the 5 and 3 ends of the gene, but not with more centrally located point mutations, is due to the nature or the position of the mutations. 3. To test whether the presence of a highly methylated retrotransposon block affects recombination in adjacent genes. 4. To determine if all recombination junctions in an interval made up of genes and retrotransposons fall in genes. 5. To test if recombination between two sites in the genome separated by a different number of genes in different lines is a function of the number of common genes in the intervening segment doc22023 none This study addresses the degree to which the water transport capacity of plants limits their productivity. Specifically, we focus on the hydraulic properties of tree stems and branches (the xylem ) in relation to the photosynthetic capacity of the leaves. Our goal is to understand the physiological linkages between vascular and photosynthetic capacity. We have chosen to address this fundamental question by examining seasonally dry forest trees. Our rationale for this reflects the important role that seasonal precipitation patterns play in determining the longevity and productivity of leaves in these forests. We will monitor the extent to which vascular tissues become damaged during periods of low water availability (drought) and the effects that this has on the productivity of leaves. Our study will be one of the first to examine directly the link between vascular and photosynthetic capacity in trees. The results of this work will increase our understanding of how plants copy with dramatic changes in soil water availability, and will contribute to our knowledge of factors influencing the productivity and ecology of seasonally dry tropical forests doc22024 none Understanding quantitatively how environmental changes cause selection and evolution is a fundamental challenge for evolutionary biology. We are now in a position to address a variety of fundamental questions about how changes in weather and climate determine selection and evolution. Is selection in the field primarily due to infrequent exposures to extreme (hot or cold) temperatures, or is the frequency of average temperature conditions more important? How does geographic variation in the thermal environment generate differences in selection and evolutionary divergence in traits of organisms that depend on temperature? Can we predict quantitatively how alterations in the thermal environment, such as those due to climate warming, will alter selection and evolutionary responses? To address these questions, the proposed studies will use laboratory and field experiments to test predictions of a quantitative, mathematical model describing selection and evolution. Our studies use temperature effects on growth rate in Pieris rapae (Imported Cabbageworm) caterpillars as a model system; this species has experienced a world-wide expansion of its geographic range during the past 200 years, and is now an important agricultural pest in some regions doc22025 none Floral scent plays a vital role in the reproductive cycle of higher plants by attracting pollinators to flowers. The long-term goal of this research is to fill important gaps in our knowledge of biochemical pathways leading to the formation of floral volatiles and the molecular mechanisms controlling their accumulation and release in plants. Although monoterpenes, the C10 members of the terpenoid family of natural products, are very common constituents of floral scent, little is known about how floral tissues regulate their developmental and rhythmic emission. This project will focus on investigation of the role of geranyl pyrophosphate (GPP), the key precursor of monoterpene biosynthesis, in the regulation of developmental and rhythmic emission of trans-b-ocimene and myrcene, the two major scent components of snapdragon scent. GPP, the starting point leading to the synthesis of many monoterpene end products, is the result of condensation of dimethylallyl diphosphate and isopentenyl diphosphate (IPP) in a reaction catalyzed by GPP synthase (GPPS). Plant cells have two different IPP biosynthetic pathways located in two different compartments. Biochemical pathway(s) leading to GPP biosynthesis in snapdragon petal tissue will be elucidated and the possibility of compensation of one pathway by the other one through the exchange between cytosolic and plastidic IPP pools will be examined. In contrast to other homodimeric short-chain prenyltransferases, GPPS is a functional heterodimer in which small and large subunits are absolutely required for enzymatic activity. In this project, the complexity of the GPPS gene family in snapdragon will be characterized, the role of both subunits of GPPS in the regulation of the amount of GPP in cells will be analyzed and the involvement of subcellular localization in the regulation of GPPS activity will be determined. Floral scent plays an important role in the crop economy since one-third of our total diet depends upon insect-pollinated plants including most fruit trees, berries, nuts, oilseeds, and vegetables. Pollination not only affects crop yield but also quality and efficiency of crop production. This research will result in new insights into the regulation of floral scent production in higher plants and also provide the knowledge for engineering plants with improved scent quality. This could increase the attraction of flowers to certain pollinators and lead to the more efficient pollination of crop plants cultivated for their seed, forage, or food value doc21888 none The Nevada Desert FACE Facility (NDFF) is a long-term research project examining the responses of an intact Mojave Desert ecosystem to elevated CO2. In the first four years of NDFF operation, we found that primary production increased substantially at elevated CO2, but only in wet years, and that an exotic annual grass responded more strongly than did native shrubs and annuals. Therefore, our initial results suggest that an ecosystem type (drylands) that represents 30% of the earth s terrestrial surface area may not respond to elevated CO2 in a simple manner, as predicted by existing models of global change. In the context of these results and the long-term nature of our desert FACE experiment, we propose to address three overarching questions in this study: 1. Will elevated CO2 alter community composition and structure in the Mojave Desert by continuing to stimulate a disproportionate increase in an exotic annual species? 2. Will the increases in production and changes in nutrient dynamics that we have observed in response to a step-change increase in CO2 be sustained over time? 3. Can we adapt proven models of desert ecosystem function to predict how this Mojave Desert ecosystem will respond to elevated CO2 in the future? The intellectual merit of this proposal lies in our conceptual approach in which we are focusing on the functional interactions between species composition and ecosystem function, tied together by an explicit modeling component. The model will be an adaptation of an established, validated desert model (PALS, the Patch Arid Lands Simulator) that will be used to develop a synthetic understanding of biotic and abiotic controls on carbon, nitrogen, and water fluxes to elevated CO2 in this arid ecosystem. The broader impact of this proposed study will be an examination of the potential invasion of an exotic species in response to elevated CO2, and how this process may impact ecosystem function, and therefore ecosystem services, in a desert environment. Through this research program, we are also forging a cohesive network between five research campuses. To date, our research group has an excellent record of training undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral scholars at the NDFF, including members of under-represented groups. This study will similarly train a wide spectrum of students and postdocs, both at the NDFF and in our support laboratories doc22027 none Schneider, Henning Studies on locomotion concern the mechanisms and systems associated with initiation and generation of movement in animals. The nervous system controls locomotion through neural networks that can be compared to computer circuits. Unlike computer circuits, neural networks exhibit a plasticity to adjust functionally so they can speed up or slow down in different behavioral situations. It is believed that movements would look robot-like without such plasticity. Neuromodulators such as the biogenic amine serotonin (5-HT) participate in maintaining the plasticity of neural networks. The specificity of 5-HT actions is based on the expression of seven 5-HT receptor subtypes in the cell membrane of individual neurons throughout the nervous system. A zebrafish 5-HT2-like receptor was cloned and its role in the locomotion of zebrafish larvae will be explored. The zebrafish, Danio rerio, has become an attractive animal model for studies on locomotion because this fish exhibits simple motor patterns and has a simple nervous system. Activity of multiple neurons can be monitored in intact animals using optical recording techniques. Moreover, mutants can be generated and molecular tools such a genome map and database are available. However, the 5-HT system in the zebrafish is not well understood. As outlined in this proposal, mapping of the expression of the new zebrafish 5-HT receptor in the brain and spinal cord, pharmacological characterization of the zebrafish 5-HT receptor, and identification of 5-HT receptor expressing neurons in the pectoral fin motor pathway of zebrafish larvae will allow the construction of a model for the function of 5-HT receptors on the generation of pectoral fin movements. These studies will contribute to a better understanding of mechanisms underlying the orchestration of neuronal activity in a simple vertebrate brain doc21635 none Despite current interest in tropical forests as key components of the global carbon cycle and as centers of biodiversity,we remain largely ignorant of the inter-relationships among forest attributes (e.g.,dynamics,diversity,structure),and the physical properties of the environments in which these forests grow.In recent years datasets have become available describing growth,mortality and recruitment of approximately 10%of the global diversity of tropical tree species.These data result from the development of a network of large-scale forest dynamics plots coordinated by the Center for Tropical Forest Science (CTFS),and established using methods identical to those used to survey and census the 50-ha Forest Dynamics Plot on Barro Colorado Island (BCI),Panama. Just as data from the BCI plot have played a prominent role in our understanding of the community-level consequences of ecological processes played out at local scales,we will show how these plots now provide an unprecedented opportunity to examine a venerable question in tropical ecology:How do soil-borne resources influence the variation in forest structure and demographic turnover rates observed among plots,and among habitat types within plots? To achieve this objective we propose three sets of measurements.At nine plot sites we will characterize variation in soil-moisture availability through the year and throughout the plots using a hydrological model (TOPMODEL).This model predicts soil-moisture saturation deficit based on rainfall,stream-flow data and local topography. Second,at five plots currently lacking soils data we will sample soil-chemical properties within standardized,topographically-defined habitat types.Third,at the same plots we will perform seedling growth experiments using mycorrhizal and non-mycorrhizal pioneer species to assess plant-availability of soil nutrients for each habitat type.These measurements will allow us to address questions at two spatial scales.At the among-plot scale we will be able to ask how stem density and basal area,as well as community-wide patterns of growth,mortality and recruitment,correlate with moisture availability and soil fertility.At the within-plot scale we will ask whether species exhibit specialization to particular hydrological niches,and whether habitat types differ in soil fertility,in turnover rates,and in local species richness.Resolution of these broad questions concerning correlations among soil-borne resources and characteristics of the vegetation will in turn permit us to refine future hypotheses aimed at understanding the mechanistic basis for interspecific variation in demographics and distribution. This study will provide the first standardized large-scale measurements of the environmental context within which tropical forests grow.Our trans-continental approach to testing questions of ecosystem function and community organization has rarely been attempted,but it will be essential if we are to improve our understanding of the biogeographic and biophysical limits to our ecological generalizations.Understanding how variation in water and nutrient availability determines forest structure,composition and dynamics,and potentially influences local diversity through niche partitioning,will be essential to predicting future vegetation responses to climate change and will also provide a first step in guiding management to protect forest diversity.Wide dissemination and application of the results of this project is ensured by the active participation of in- country collaborators,and by data sharing through CTFS doc21888 none The Nevada Desert FACE Facility (NDFF) is a long-term research project examining the responses of an intact Mojave Desert ecosystem to elevated CO2. In the first four years of NDFF operation, we found that primary production increased substantially at elevated CO2, but only in wet years, and that an exotic annual grass responded more strongly than did native shrubs and annuals. Therefore, our initial results suggest that an ecosystem type (drylands) that represents 30% of the earth s terrestrial surface area may not respond to elevated CO2 in a simple manner, as predicted by existing models of global change. In the context of these results and the long-term nature of our desert FACE experiment, we propose to address three overarching questions in this study: 1. Will elevated CO2 alter community composition and structure in the Mojave Desert by continuing to stimulate a disproportionate increase in an exotic annual species? 2. Will the increases in production and changes in nutrient dynamics that we have observed in response to a step-change increase in CO2 be sustained over time? 3. Can we adapt proven models of desert ecosystem function to predict how this Mojave Desert ecosystem will respond to elevated CO2 in the future? The intellectual merit of this proposal lies in our conceptual approach in which we are focusing on the functional interactions between species composition and ecosystem function, tied together by an explicit modeling component. The model will be an adaptation of an established, validated desert model (PALS, the Patch Arid Lands Simulator) that will be used to develop a synthetic understanding of biotic and abiotic controls on carbon, nitrogen, and water fluxes to elevated CO2 in this arid ecosystem. The broader impact of this proposed study will be an examination of the potential invasion of an exotic species in response to elevated CO2, and how this process may impact ecosystem function, and therefore ecosystem services, in a desert environment. Through this research program, we are also forging a cohesive network between five research campuses. To date, our research group has an excellent record of training undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral scholars at the NDFF, including members of under-represented groups. This study will similarly train a wide spectrum of students and postdocs, both at the NDFF and in our support laboratories doc22030 none Richard Stratt of Brown University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to develop methods employing the instantaneous normal mode (INM) approach to explore intramolecular vibrational energy flow within polyatomic molecules in liquids, and the intermolecular liquid dynamics revealed by fifth order two-dimensional Raman spectroscopy. Recent progress in incorporating dynamical anharmonicities and nonlinear interactions into the INM formalism are expected to help reveal the ways in which molecules choose between competing pathways for intramolecular vibrational energy relaxation, and help to identify the amount of dephasing to be expected from different intermolecular motions. Insights are also expected into the events that lead to homogeneous broadening in a variety of spectroscopic venues. Chemical processes in liquids take place over a tremendously wide range of time scales, but many of the key triggering events seem to occur in times well under a trillionth of a second. This dichotomy is especially evident when one examines how energy flows in liquids at a molecular level. It can take anywhere from a trillionth of a second to seconds to release the energy buried within the vibrations of a molecule into the surrounding solution, but such processes are driven by a solvent friction whose lifetime is invariably less than a trillionth of a second. Only relatively recently, experimental techniques have been able to examine vibrations in liquids at these ultrafast time scales and with sufficient sophistication to learn about underlying molecular mechanisms in the dynamics of liquids. This project aims to develop a framework to interpret the results from these challenging new experiments that study vibrational energy relaxation pathways in molecules dissolved in liquids doc22031 none This is the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) portion of a collaborative research project on the connections between the point defect chemistry and electronic structure of ferroelectric thin films and the fatigue and imprint processes that limit their reliability in non-volatile memory devices. A key objective of the research program is to understand the relative contributions of field-induced electronic charge injection carrier trapping and charged oxygen vacancy redistribution during fatigue and imprint of state-of-the-art Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 (PZT) films. We will use atomic resolution STEM and EELS to study the changes in atomic arrangements and local electronic structure that result from ferroelectric fatigue and imprint electrical testing. Examples of such changes might include development of locally-high oxygen non-stoichiometry near electrode interfaces and grain boundaries, and changes in bonding arrangements and the local density of states at these interfaces. Atomic structure determinations will be made using the Z-contrast imaging technique. Simultaneous acquisition of electron energy loss spectra will allow electronic structure information in the spectrum to be correlated with individual atomic columns in PZT thin film specimens. Electrical testing of the PZT capacitors prior to STEM EELS studies will be performed by our collaborators at Stanford. Quantitative interpretation of EELS features will be facilitated by ab initio calculations (also performed at Stanford) of the local electronic structure at ferroelectric electrode interfaces and the energies of carrier trap states associated with point defects. Ferroelectric materials exhibit a spontaneous polarization which can be used in a variety of different applications in microelectronics and communications. For example, thin film ferroelectric materials are the key enabler for a new generation of non-volatile semiconductor memories which are currently being developed (and, increasingly, brought to market) by major microelectronics firms worldwide. The physics of switching the ferroelectric polarization state in small-dimension, thin film structures is also an important topic of fundamental scientific interest. Both the science and the technology of ferroelectric thin films provide motivation for better-understanding phenomena that interfere with reliable polarization switching in these materials. Such phenomena include ferroelectric fatigue, the loss of switchable polarization after repeated switching by applied voltage pulses, and imprint, a shift in coercive voltage resulting from repeated voltage pulses of one polarity. A host of experimental observations and theoretical models for ferroelectric fatigue and imprint have been reported over the years. However, the detailed mechanisms responsible for these reliability-limiting processes remain uncertain. This research program will investigate the underlying mechanisms of ferroelectric fatigue and imprint in state-of-the art ferroelectric films provided by our collaborators in the semiconductor industry. The research will be directed by three co-principal investigators based at Stanford University and UIC with complimentary expertise in measurements of charged defect migration and polarization switching of ferroelectric thin films, atomic resolution imaging and spectroscopy using the electron microscope, and simulations of the electronic properties of solids. The UIC portion of the research will focus on direct examination of local bonding and electronic structure changes induced by fatigue and imprint electrical testing of PZT thin films. This research program will also strengthen our existing educational outreach activities to Chicago-area high school students, an effort that has, over the last 4 years, provided research positions for 32 students from groups typically under-represented in engineering and the natural sciences doc22032 none Robert M. Zink and Sievert A. Rohwer of the University of Minnesota have been awarded a grant to use DNA sequencing technology to analyze patterns of genetic variation within 25 bird species that have been sampled across Russia. DNA studies clarify whether each species is actually a single species, or whether genetic discontinuities exist. For example, the PIs have already shown that what was thought to be a common Eurasian species is in fact three species. Such findings have important implications for documenting biodiversity. By comparing a large number of species, it is possible to determine if genetic discontinuities are congruent, which, if so, can be related to the climatic and geological history of this region over the last million years. The PIs sampling design allows assessment of whether geographical barriers such as the Ural Mountains played a role in the evolution of diversity within these bird species. Using estimates of rates of molecular evolution, dates of origin of genetic discontinuities can be compared to those in North American birds. Essentially nothing is known about the evolutionary history of bird species across Eurasia, because, until recently, some important study sites were not easily accessible. The available samples provide the first opportunity for broad-scale analyses of genetic variation and species limits across Eurasia. This provides a firmer base for interpreting the significance of patterns of genetic variation in North America, the other large temperate land mass. That is, the PIs will be able to compare units of biodiversity on a common DNA scale on the two great north temperate landmasses, North America and Eurasia. The effects of climatic change, including glaciation, on the origin of species will also be revealed. The PIs collaboration with Russian scientists through exchange of personnel and joint fieldwork further enriches this research program doc22033 none Capsid proteins play many functional roles during the life cycle of viruses, including host cell recognition, specific encapsidation of genomic nucleic acid, and the formation of the essential interactions required for progeny virus capsid assembly and release. For the ssDNA Parvoviridae, the exact role of their capsid proteins in these processes requires further elucidation. Genetics studies have shown that interaction of the major parvoviral capsid protein, VP2, with host cell factors play a crucial role in tissue tropism and entry into the host cell. The methodologies of X-ray crystallography, biochemistry and virology will be utilized to study two closely related strains of minute virus of mice, MVMi (immunosuppressive strain) and MVMp (prototype strain) and their interactions with sialic acid, a component of their infectious receptor, to gain insights into mechanisms of specificity of capsid interactions in virulence determination. In addition, the X-ray structure of MVMi, in which approximately 30% of the ssDNA genome is ordered provides a unique model for defining molecular interactions between a viral capsid and its genome that ensure selective recognition and packaging. The aim is to identify a possible genomic signature that drives parvoviral DNA recognition and encapsidation. Research developments and achievements will be integrated with educational training of senior undergraduate and graduate students in the use of a multidisciplinary approach to study macromolecular interactions doc22034 none Liu The long-term objective is to reveal the mechanisms determining how cells in a multicellular organism assume their developmental fates. Using Arabidopsis flower as a model, the focus of this proposal is to reveal the regulatory mechanism for the spatial and temporal-specific expression of AGAMOUS (AG), a gene for stamen and carpel identity specification. AG mRNA is normally expressed in the inner two whorls of a flower and is absent from the outer two whorls. LEUNIG (LUG), a putative transcriptional co-repressor with sequence similarity to the yeast co-repressor TUP, was previously shown to play a crucial role in repressing AG expression in the outer two whorls. Since LUG does not encode a DNA binding domain, how LUG is recruited to the AG cis-regulatory element is unknown. The newly identified LARSON (LSN) gene is an excellent candidate for being a DNA-binding partner of LUG. lsn-1 mutation enhances the defects of lug mutation in AG regulation. Further, preliminary data indicated that LSN encodes a homeobox protein, can bind to the AG cis-regulatory elements, and can interact with LUG in yeast. In addition, as LUG mRNA is expressed in all floral whorls, the outer whorl-specific repression activity of LUG could be conferred by interaction with an outer-whorl-specific factor. Could LSN hold the crucial role in providing the spatial and temporal specificity to the LUG co-repressor? The proposed experiments are aimed at testing these hypotheses. First, the molecular identity of LSN will be confirmed by transformation rescue of the lsn-1 mutant phenotype. Several reverse genetic methods will be employed to identify additional alleles of lsn. Second, the RNA and protein expression profile of LSN will be determined by in situ hybridization and immuno-localization or LSN-GFP. Third, by expressing LSN cDNA in ectopic whorls (where LUG is expressed), the ectopic co-repressor activity will be tested. Fourth, to establish that LSN directly regulates AG, the electrophoretic mobility shift assay will be used to identify the binding sites of LSN within AG cis-regulatory elements. Further, LSN-VP16 chimeric protein expressed in transgenic plants will be used to establish the functional relevance of LSN binding to AG in vivo. Finally, physical interactions between LSN and LUG proteins will be tested using a co-immunoprecipitation assay. Other LSN-interacting proteins will be identified by a yeast two-hybrid screen. The proposed study will elucidate the basic mechanism of transcriptional repression in higher plant development and provide excellent training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students doc22035 none Tropical rainforests in the Amazon Basin and elsewhere are experiencing stronger droughts as El Nino episodes become more frequent and more severe. How will this drying trend affect these species-rich tropical ecosystems? We initiated the world s first large-scale rainfall manipulation experiment in a tropical rainforest in , partially excluding rainfall from a one-hectare forest area in central Amazonia. We discovered that the growth of tree trunks is very sensitive to drought, as is forest flammability. During the next five years, we will determine the level of drought stress that this rainforest can tolerate before tree flowering and fruiting begin to fail, and large trees begin to die. We will then release the forest from experimental drought to document the mechanisms and rates of forest recovery. It is already clear that drought effects on tree growth and tree mortality may contribute substantially to the carbon dioxide concentration of the atmosphere doc22036 none Cameron Understanding the details of how individual cis-regulatory elements function and how the gene regulatory networks they form control developmental process is crucial to understanding how the genome works, how development works, and how evolution works. An effective method of locating individual cis-regulatory elements is comparative sequence analysis conducted at appropriate divergence times to reveal conserved elements. Current results show that this approach may yield a more than 10-fold increase in rate of experimental cis-regulatory element discovery, compared to the most efficient blind search methods. However, general rules for carrying out such analyses are not yet known, and initial work has shown very different degrees of similarity between genomic regions surrounding different genes in a single pair of sea urchin species. These investigators propose to determine the rules for efficient cis-regulatory sequence prediction by interspecific sequence analysis. To this end they will analyze and then test by gene transfer putative cis-regulatory elements identified in the vicinity of about 20 different genes, using several different echinoderm species that display a range of phylogenetic relatedness. The sea urchin embryo is a model system of choice in which this method can be quickly and effectively explored: species separated by various known evolutionary distances are available; they have already established methods for comparative prediction of conserved cis-regulatory sequence for one sea urchin species pair and shown that the methods work; and there is a practical high throughput gene transfer technology available. These investigators will construct BAC libraries for 6-8 species including sea urchins, and for more distant comparisons, a sea star and a hemichordate. Sequence of BACs containing the set of genes to be studied will be obtained, and they will then identify putative cis-regulatory regions for the candidate genes selected, as indicated by interspecific sequence comparison at diverse distances. These DNA fragments will be tested for cis-regulatory capability by gene transfer. Not only will this approach reveal rules for computational cis-regulatory analysis, but it will also support the extension of the current repertoire of BAC libraries, improve computational tools, and generate more efficient laboratory methods for this essential research area doc22037 none Phylogenetic Structure of Woody-Plant Communities Webb, Ackerly, NSF proposal The ecological communities of organisms found in nature have usually been treated as collections of independent species. However, the great advances made recently by phylogenetic biologists in understanding the tree of life mean that ecologists can now examine the evolutionary relationships among the species in their communities. Knowing this phylogenetic structure also enables ecologists to detect the processes organizing species membership in the communities, and thus provides a powerful new tool to understand species-rich systems. In the proposed research software tools will be developed for assembling and analyzing community phylogenetic structure, and will be applied to an endangered, rain forest tree community in Borneo, and to the Californian flora. A comparative survey of the phylogenetic structure of other plant communities around the world will also be performed. The proposed research will promote a closer integration of evolutionary biology and community ecology doc22038 none Brian Gibney of Columbia University is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry program for research on de novo design and synthesis of metallo-proteins. Metal-ion binding will be used to initiate a flip of protein configuration between alternative configurations. Detailed study of the characteristics of such synthetic systems will be used to increase understanding of factors that control allostery and cooperativity in enzymes, hemoglobins, and other important biologically occurring systems. An already-characterized four-helix bundle scaffold will be used to develop a protein that binds two metal centers (a heme and a Zn(II) center) in a cooperative fashion. Completion of this phase of the work will confirm that allostery can be used to design and synthesize functional proteins. Chromatographic and spectroscopic techniques will be used for separations and characterization of products. Fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) experiments, as well as X-ray crystallography, will be used to determine such structural information as distances between protein loop regions. Kinetic studies and ligand-binding investigations will be carried out to support the main research effort. Understanding gained in this project has potential utility in design and fabrication of ultra-small mechanical switches that would be highly useful in biological and or information-processing applications doc21974 none Biogenic amines are compounds that can act as modulators of nervous system function and behavior in vertebrates and invertebrates. Octopamine is one of these, and one of the most widely studied neuromodulators in arthropods. In honeybees, octopamine plays a role in controlling behavioral plasticity. Levels of octopamine are higher in the brains of forager bees that leave the hive to get food compared to levels in nurse bees that work inside the hive, and treatment with octopamine causes bees to forage precociously. A particular enzyme, tyramine beta-hydoxylase (TbH) is critical for biosynthesis of octopamine, so brain levels of octopamine depend at least in part on the activity of TbH. This collaborative project uses molecular, biochemcial and behavioral approaches to determine how TbH is regulated by both social and endocrine factors. Enzyme activity, gene expression, and metabolic biochemistry clarify how octopamine is synthesized and released in the antennal lobes of the brain of honeybees during development of the behavioral change. Results will be important to understanding how an important neuromodulator is regulated in the context of behavioral plastiticty and in socially regulated gene expression. This work will have impact beyond neuroendocrinology to animal behavior and to agricultural applications. There is also an important component of student training at the predominantly undergraduate institution involved in the collaboration doc22040 none The biotic and abiotic interactions that occur between roots and the soil rhizosphere environment are easily the most complex and least understood interactions in plants. Roots of many trees, in particular pines, are usually colonized by a large number of mycorrhizal species that are generally regarded as beneficial to both the host and fungus. Mycorrhizas generally improve access to limiting soil nutrient and water resources, and offer protective benefits against root pathogens, in exchange for the tree s carbon. However, the association can become less beneficial and even parasitic when tree development or environmental conditions results in carbon costs becoming greater than benefits, or when fungal genotypes do not form beneficial associations with the host genotype. Loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.), the most widely-planted tree species in the Atlantic Coastal Plain, has co-evolved a high dependency on ectomycorrhizal associations because its natural range includes dry soils that are P- and or N-deficient. However, rates of colonization by individual fungal species are dynamic, mediated by a hierarchy of biotic and abiotic factors at the rhizosphere, community and ecosystem levels, with some fungal species more beneficial to the tree than others. Since roots of an individual tree can be colonized by 20-35 different ectomycorrhizal species, it is the tree genotype + fungal community interaction with its soil environment that determines the potential functioning of mycorrhizal roots along this mutualism-parasitism continuum. Elucidating the roles that mycorrhizal biodiversity plays in tree physiology and growth, and in the carbon nutrient cycles of forested ecosystems are essential for predicting soil carbon sequestration under various global climate change scenarios. Our experiments are designed to test the hypothesis that there is a wide variation in how roots respond to their environment because tree origin (i.e. ecotype) and growth traits influence fungal diversity and mycorrhizal community structure. We are using molecular identification techniques to characterize mycorrhizal species diversity and community structure in ten families of loblolly pine, and to determine whether specific mycorrhizal communities are associated with faster tree growth. The proposed research represents a mid-career training opportunity for the PI in an exciting new methodology and area of root research, and will also train a postdoctoral associate. In addition, Dr. Topa s lab will participate in a local outreach program (New Visions: Explorations in the Biological Sciences) that is designed for college-bound high school seniors who have a strong interest in research and experimentation in the biological sciences doc22041 none The International Symbiosis Society based at Boston University requests support for the planning and convening of its next scientific research Congress set for August 17 - 23, at Saint Mary s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Five hundred participants are expected, most working in specific symbiotic systems such as mycorrhizae-plant interactions, endophytic fungi and grasses, nitrogen fixing bacteria cyanobacteria and their hosts, hermatypic corals and dinoflagellates, lichens, insect and rumen gut microfauna, Azolla Oryza sativa growth enhancement, and orchid ecology. Keynote speakers leaders for the symposia include David Read, U. of Sussex, UK; Birgitta Bergman, Stockholm U.; Margaret McFall-Ngai, U. of Hawaii; Angela Douglas,York U., UK; Jan Sapp, U. of Montreal; Lynn Margulis, U. of Massachusetts; and Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Queensland U., Australia, among others. Congress organizers are Society President Douglas Zook biologist and science educator at Boston University and who is the P.I., and David Richardson, Dean of Science and lichenologist at Saint Mary s University, Halifax. The Society is particularly unique in that it by its very nature it builds bridges among biologists ecologists who would otherwise remain separated. Therefore, the main objective of the Congress is to provide a special world forum where symbiologists can optimally exchange knowledge and ideas. Also, its dialogue and outcomes will contribute to a greater understanding of global ecology, regional ecosystem function, and cell biology; encourage involvement in ecology in general and symbiosis in particular by students; and, actively promote content and curriculum enhancement in symbiosis for both pre-college and university teachers. A focus theme of the Congress will be global threats to keystone symbionts, such as bleaching of zooxanthellae, lichen susceptibility to sulfur dioxide and related emissions, and the demise of larger symbiont-containing foraminifera. This theme further emphasizes the deep but often ignored role symbiosis plays in earth systems and human society. Agriculture, forestry, biome establishment, restoration ecology, coral reef existence, and fundamental understandings of the eukarya cell are all substantiually dependent on symbiosis. More then fifty per cent of the funds for the Congress will be covered by registrant fees and some projected private corporate support. The ISS seeks additional support from the NSF to help defray travel costs for graduate students; to provide travel and related support for featured speakers; to assist teacher attendance and support a symbiosis teacher workshop at the Congress; and to cover costs of key publications, such as special editions of the ISS newsletter, Symbiosis International, which will highlight Congress announcements, conference schedule booklet, and the Congress abstract book. Ongoing post-Congress contact will be mainained through a web exchange network on the ISS web sites (Congress web site is http: people.bu.edu dzook ), and selected papers from the Congress will be published during in a special issue of the ISS affiliated journal, Symbiosis, published out of Tel Aviv doc22042 none Ticks are vectors of a number of important diseases, and with mechanisms for controlling ticks often less effective than those for controlling insects, these arachnids may be more of a health problem for humans and wildlife than insects. The long term goals of the these studies are to aid in the development of mechanisms for preventing transmission of disease-causing microbes from the tick to its next host, and to exploit differences between tick genera to develop control measures for the spread of infectious diseases or to control the microorganisms themselves. This study addresses the fundamental issue of the tick response to bacterial infection and also addresses the question of why some microbes have been able to successfully colonize blood-feeding arthropods and become the agents of vector-borne diseases. Specifically the proposal examines the hypothesis that Dermacentor variabilis (American dog tick) expresses a robust antimicrobial response following bacterial challenge. In contrast Ixodes scapularis (deer tick) and Amblyomma americanum (Lone Star tick) do not appear to express this response, at least to the same microbes. The proposed studies will provide information on how and why these ticks respond differently to assorted microbes. This project will concentrate on one fundamental mechanism by which blood-feeding arthropods resist infection by invading microbes. This is the use of antimicrobial peptides, in particular the defensins, a key component of an organism s innate immune response. The project will use ticks because they harbor and transmit a greater variety of microbes than any other arthropod group. Many arthropods possess a well-developed immune system that rejects most invading microbes, however, little is known about the immune system in ticks. More precise knowledge is needed to understand the limitations in the tick s immune system that have encouraged the ability to harbor such a variety of microorganisms. Ticks of the genus Ixodes tolerate a greater diversity of microbial species than other tick genera. Other genera, including Dermacentor and Amblyomma are noted for their association with one, or at most two specific types of microbe. Most Ixodes spp. that are microbe-tolerant are generalists, feeding on a diverse array of hosts ranging from cold-blooded vertebrates to almost any type of bird or mammal. It is proposed that these tick generalists have a less efficient immune system that facilitates colonization by a diverse array of invading microbes. It is hypothesized that differences in the tick innate immune mechanisms are important determinants of their ability to function as vectors of pathogenic agents. By using the Lyme disease-causing spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi, and a non-pathogenic bacterium, Rickettsia montana, and comparing the response to these microbes in Ixodes scapularis (the vector for B. burgdorferi), Dermacentor variabilis (host for R. montana) and Amblyomma americanum (vector for Ehrlichia), the role of defensin will be examined. The hypothesis will be explored within four aims, concentrating on the tick defensin, varisin. The aims are: (1) Characterize the tick defensin gene (vsnD) from D. variabilis. (2) Determine in which tissues of the adult tick the varisin gene is expressed, and whether the defensin is expressed by nymphs, perhaps giving an indication that defensin is important throughout the various life stages of the tick. (3) Determine whether other tick genera (Ixodes and Amblyomma) have and selectively express a defensin gene in response to different bacteria. (4) Compare the response of the different ticks to Rickettsia montana, an intracellular organism normally found in D. variabilis. Results of these studies will improve our understanding of the role of defensin in the innate immune response of ticks following challenge with various microbes. Elucidation of this critically important defensive system will provide information regarding the reason some of these ticks transmit disease-causing microorganisms doc22043 none The proposed research continues an ongoing exploration of self-incompatibility and the evolution of self-fertilization in Linanthus (Polemoniaceae). Self-incompatibility (SI), a genetic mechanism that allows plants to recognize and reject self-pollen, is a common feature of higher plants. The breakdown of SI, resulting in self-fertilization, is known to have occurred frequently throughout the evolutionary history of flowering plants. The proposed series of experiments will explore a newly discovered transient form of SI that may represent a snapshot in the breakdown of SI and evolution toward self-fertilization. In L. jepsonii, self-fertilization is prevented for a few hours or days, after which flowers become fully capable of self-fertilization. The proposed experiments will characterize this phenomenon, its genetic basis, and its effect on the rate of self-fertilization. Molecular methods will be used to explore evolutionary relationships among populations that differ in the extent of transient SI. The proposed research will contribute basic knowledge about SI, a phenomenon that has important implications for crop plant breeding. The genetic and physiological bases of this mechanism have received considerable study, yet we know little about the process by which SI breaks down. The project has been designed to foster training of undergraduate students. The modular nature of the research, comprising a series of discrete experiments, will allow undergraduates gain experience in a range of methodologies, including field studies, fluorescence microscopy, pollination experiments, and molecular techniques doc22044 none The most active antifreeze proteins (AFPs) are found in certain insects, such as larvae of the beetle Dendroides canadensis where they function to prevent inoculative freezing initiated by external ice across the cuticle and to promote supercooling by inhibiting potential ice nucleators in hemolymph and gut fluid. Overwintering D. canadensis produce 12 AFPs which consist of 12- and 13- mer repeat sequences which differ somewhat in sequence and number of repeats. Certain of these AFPs are produced in the fat body (analogous to the vertebrate liver) and secreted into the hemolymph, while others are produced in the midgut epithelium and secreted into the gut fluid. The single layer of epidermal cells, which lie under the cuticle and help to prevent inoculative freezing, also produces a unique combination of AFPs, as does the Malpighian tubule epithelium which produces the urine. The latter AFPs are presumable secreted into the tubule lumen to promote supercooling of the urine. The unique combinations of the different DAFPs present in these different sites suggest that certain D. canadensis AFPs (DAFPs) have evolved specifically to function in these tissues. This study will continue earlier work attempting to better understand the functions and mechanisms of the DAFPs in relation to those sites. In addition, this work will clarify the reasons for seasonal and yearly variations in antifreeze protein activity. Recent studies have shown that to achieve optimal levels of DAFP activity (freezing point depression, inhibition of ice nucleators, prevention of inoculative freezing) requires the presence of certain enhancers, protein enhancers and or low molecular mass enhancers such as glycerol. While glycerol and certain protein enhancers have been identified in hemolymph, other unidentified protein enhancers are also present there, and the nature of the enhancers in other sites (midgut fluid, etc.) is unknown. This study will identify these enhancers. Because of their high specific activities, insect AFPs have tremendous potential for applications, such as agriculture and the cryopreservation of biomedical materials. Transgenic Arabidopsis plants have been produced which express DAFPs that lower the freezing temperatures of the plants. Improved understanding of the factors which control AFP activity in D. canadensis larvae has the potential to greatly improve the performance of the insect AFPs in these applications doc22045 none The F1-ATPase is a tiny molecular rotary motor driven by binding and hydrolysis of ATP in one direction and by trans-membrane proton flux in the other direction. Preliminary studies using single molecule fluorescence microspectroscopy demonstrate that a hybrid ATPase assembled from recombinant F1 subunits from photosynthetic organisms is capable of generating sufficient torque to propel large (1-2 micrometer) actin filaments through solution in a manner similar in most respects to its bacterial counterpart. Remarkably, rotation can be driven either by hydrolysis of CaATP or MgATP yet calcium, unlike magnesium, is known to be an ineffective co-substrate for proton coupled ATP hydrolysis or ATP synthesis. The fact that CaATP hydrolysis can drive the fully cooperative catalytic process without being coupled to proton movement has suggested a new catalytic model in which MgATP ADP binding to the enzyme induces a special conformation of the enzyme which is required for proton coupling but not ATP hydrolysis. This project has the following two specific aims to test the new model and to identify the dynamic events leading to torque generation: 1. To identify the specific interactions between the gamma and epsilon subunits and the core hexameric alpha3 beta3 structure of the F1-ATPase that define the intermediate states of the catalytic sites involved in the catalytic cycle and its regulation. This will be addressed using a combination of site-directed mutagenesis and biochemical approaches; 2. To determine the magnitude and direction of relative movements of the gamma and epsilon subunits during catalysis and regulation of the F1-ATPase using real-time single molecule fluorescence microspectroscopy. The photosynthetic ATP synthase has several unique properties which separate it from its mitochondrial and bacterial counterparts and that offer new inroads to examine the remarkable rotary mechanism of the enzyme. One such property is the presence of a special regulatory segment located in the gamma subunit that has evolved in higher plant species to provide a molecular switch mechanism that tightly controls the catalytic activity of the enzyme. The switch is designed to block futile energy loss during photosynthesis. A major goal of this research is to identify the productive binding interactions between the gamma subunit and other subunits within the enzyme structure that are involved in the molecular switch mechanism. The information to be gained from this work is likely to prove seminal in understanding natural processes that have evolved to regulate the rotary motor, identifying different intermediate structural states that occur during rotation and the molecular steps involved in achieving these structural states. This in turn will provide the template to design gated nanomachines for a wide variety of important future practical applications. The research will also provide training in critical research skills for two doctoral students and at least two semesters of laboratory research experience for a minimum of eight undergraduate students, most of whom are likely to pursue graduate studies and to develop into independent scientists doc22046 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Charles Mitter and Jerome Regier of the University of Maryland, Dr. Richard Peigler of the University of the Incarnate Word, and Dr. Ian Kitching of the Natural History Museum (London) to study the evolution of moths in the superfamily Bombycoidea, the silkmoths, hornworms, and relatives. A relatively new source of evidence, DNA sequences in the cell nucleus that encode proteins, will be used to reconstruct the major branches of the phylogeny (= evolutionary tree) of these moths. The phylogeny will then be used in two kinds of evolutionary studies. The first will test hypotheses about the evolution of food plant use, including the postulate that in species evolving a short-lived, non-feeding adult moth, unlike the typical habit of drinking nectar with a long proboscis, the caterpillars are likely to feed on large, easy-to-find plant species, or on many different plant species, or both. The second study will address the genetic and developmental basis of anatomical innovations during evolution, using a novel surface structure on the eggshell of some wild silkmoth species as a model. This work is part of long-term effort to reconstruct the phylogeny of the mega-diverse insect order Lepidoptera (~160,000 known species). Lepidoptera play a major role in terrestrial ecosystems, as herbivores, pollinators, and food for birds and many other animals. They include innumerable crop pest species, and provide model systems for fundamental studies of ecology, genetics, and physiology. A reliable phylogeny will be an essential tool for organizing and guiding research on Lepidoptera, including the search for environmentally sound pest management strategies. A phylogeny is also prerequisite for understanding the spectacular diversification of lepidopteran species and their key ecological features such as specialization on different food plants doc22047 none Hu The main objectives of the proposed research are to determine Holocene migration lags of western hemlock and western redcedar in the interior Pacific Northwest and to examine the relative importance of climatic change,dispersal limitation,and stand-level invasibility as controls of migration. These two species currently co-dominate late-successional forests in a coastal distributional range and an interior distributional range separated by a 160-km wide dispersal barrier of semi-arid grassland and pine forest. Preliminary data suggests that invasion of these species into the interior range lagged behind the establishment of suitable climatic conditions by years, longer than any migration lag hypothesized by previous studies. This possibility stands in sharp contrast to the inference from several decades of paleoecological studies in the coastal range that migration lags were generally unimportant in the heterogeneous landscapes of the Pacific Northwest where most species arrived shortly after deglaciation. Because of the dearth of paleoecologic and paleoclimatic data from the interior range, however, it remains uncertain to what extent the range expansion of hemlock and cedar into the interior lagged behind climatic change to suitable conditions and how climatic constraints, dispersal limitation, and stand-level invasibility affected their expansion. To address the research objectives, this study will employ a suite of paleoecologic tools and state-of-the-art paleoclimatic methods to reconstruct vegetation, fire disturbance, and climate at three pairs of sites across a latitudinal gradient in the interior range. Specifically, sediment cores from these sites will be analyzed for pollen,lignified stomata,wood fibers,and plant macrofossils to detect range expansion of hemlock and cedar at three spatial scales (between the coastal and interior ranges, within the interior range, and arrival adjacent to lakes).Macroscopic-charcoal analysis of these sediment cores will be used to identify fire events and assess the effect of fire on stand invasibility.Reconstructions of effective moisture and growing-season temperature will be made from oxygen-isotope and trace-element analyses as well as diatom and midget ransfer-functions.Chronological controls will be based on AMS 14 C dates of plant macrofossils,ages of tephra layers,and 210 Pb dates of bulk sediments.These results will be integrated to quantify migration lags of hemlock and cedar and assess various scale-dependent migration controls. To our knowledge,this is the first comprehensive paleoecological study using independent measures of vegetation,disturbance,and climate to address the relative roles of dispersal limitation,stand-scale invasibility,and climatic constraints during range expansion.This project will result in a large multi-proxy data set relevant for understanding future range shifts on the fragmented landscapes of the northern temperate regions.Evidence of a large migration lag at the inter-range scale would suggest that long-distance dispersal events occur infrequently,and thus range shifts at similar scales during anticipated climatic change may be constrained by limited long-distance dispersal.In contrast,evidence of climatic limitation (i.e.,no migration lag)would imply that the relatively small-magnitude changes toward cooler and wetter climatic conditions in the last - years were necessary for the invasion of hemlock and cedar into the interior range,and thus these forests will be vulnerable to future warming. Contrasting migration lags across the coastal and interior ranges and within the interior range should offer insights into the patterns of plant migration in highly fragmented landscapes versus in the absence of a dispersal barrier.At the local scale,evidence for fire-mediated invasion would show that stand-scale invasibility is an additional important mechanism controlling the range expansion of these species.This multiple-proxy multiple-scale approach represents a significant advance in interpreting Holocene records of plant migration doc22048 none Like their terrestrial counterparts, most marine organisms require oxygen to live. In recent years the levels of dissolved oxygen in waters along the world s coastlines has been decreasing. This decline in water oxygen (hypoxia) has been attributed to many factors stemming from intensive agriculture and urbanization in the coastal zone. In aquatic environments, hypoxia is often accompanied by changes in other aspects of water quality, including dissolved carbon dioxide and acidity or pH. Laboratory and field investigations support the idea that this suite of changes in water quality, referred to as hypercapnic hypoxia, can increase the risk of resident organisms to infection and disease following exposure to a disease-causing microbe, or pathogen. Coastal zones are critical breeding grounds for major groups of commercially important fin and shellfish. Penaeids, including the white, brown, Pacific and tiger shrimps, are such an important group of crustaceans that live and breed in coastal estuaries. Preliminary studies have shown that hypercapnic hypoxia increases the rate of infection and death in the Pacific shrimp, Litopenaeus vannamei, following exposure to the bacterial pathogen, Vibrio parahaemolyticus. Hypercapnic hypoxia may directly enhance the distribution, survival, or growth of the bacterium itself, or suppress immune defenses of the shrimp host. The objectives of the proposed studies are to examine three factors of the interaction between the host L. vannamei and its pathogen, V. parahaemolyticus, that might be sensitive to hypercapnic hypoxia. Hemocytes, those cells principally responsible for immune defense in crustaceans, may be sensitive to levels of dissolved oxygen and carbon dioxide, or to pH. To examine this possibility, the first objective of this study is determine whether tissue-level changes in dissolved gasses and acidity that accompany sublethal hypercapnic hypoxia can suppress the ability of isolated hemocytes to kill or inhibit the growth of bacteria. Several lines of evidence also suggest that physiological responses to hypercapnic hypoxia, such as increases in ventilation rate, hemolymph circulation and cell-cell aggregation, might alter the normal distribution of hemocytes in the shrimp and reduce the efficiency of clearing an infectious pathogen. To address this possibility, the second objective of this study is to examine whether hypercapnic hypoxia alters the normal pattern of hemocyte movement to the gill or to other major tissue compartments following an injection of live bacteria. These movements will be monitored using both molecular and immunological probes specific for hemocyte-associated molecules that are involved in immune defense. A third set of experiments will examine whether changes in oxygen, carbon dioxide and pH can alter the efficiency with which the shrimp clears a bacterial infection. In these studies, L. vannamei will be injected with a genetically-modified V. parahaemolyticus that produces green fluorescent protein. The genetic modification will allow investigators to track where the bacteria goes, where it is killed, and how it is ultimately eliminated from the shrimp. The results of these studies are expected to provide basic information that can be used toward protecting a key natural resource, the Penaeid shrimp, while increasing our understanding of interactions between the functions of respiration, ion regulation and disease resistance in crustaceans doc22049 none A grant has been awarded to explore the transmission of information through the EnvZ OmpR two-component regulatory system in Escherichia coli. The osmo-regulation of porin expression by the sensor kinase EnvZ and response regulator OmpR is one of the simplest and best characterized two-component systems and is thus ideal for studying quantitative and mechanistic aspects of intracellular signaling. The goals of this project are oriented towards addressing the following questions: 1) Can models of EnvZ OmpR signaling describe qualitative and quantitative aspects of porin osmoregulation in vivo? 2) What is the signal that stimulates the sensor kinase EnvZ? A quantitative model of the EnvZ OmpR circuit has been formulated which predicts that the cycle of phosphorylation and dephosphorylation renders the system insensitive (robust) with respect to variations in a number of parameters. Fluorescent reporter strains have also been developed that permit rapid and sensitive quantitative measurements of transcriptional activity. These reporters will be used to test the predictions regarding robustness, quantify the variability in signaling behavior among single cells, characterize the kinetics of EnvZ OmpR signal transduction, and determine whether EnvZ responds to mechanical stress. Quantitative models will be further developed and analyzed in order to explore the organization and structure of the EnvZ OmpR circuit and to explore the extent to which variants of the models can be applied to other systems. This project combines quantitative measurements and mathematical modeling in order to understand a relatively simple example of a biological circuit. Progress in this area will provide important steps towards developing an integrative view of the complex networks of interacting biomolecules within cells. This will ultimately make it possible to reengineer many of the adaptive signaling systems in bacteria, plants and fungi and will impact a wide range of fields such as biotechnology, drug development, and cell signaling doc22050 none In several major groups of vertebrate animals, offspring sex is determined permanently by environmental temperatures experienced during embryonic development. Little is understood about the importance of many aspects of this phenomenon (known as TSD). The roles of genetic and nongenetic maternal effects, like reproductive physiology and behavior under natural conditions, are particularly in need of critical evaluation. The proposed research will investigate several significant maternal aspects of the biology of TSD in a natural population of long-lived vertebrates that has been studied in detail since : (1) the impact of maternally-derived yolk hormones and how such hormones might vary with maternal age, (2) the genetically inherited component of nesting behavior of females with TSD, and (3) the genetically inherited component of offspring sex determination under TSD. These questions will be addressed with a series of multi-year field and laboratory projects. A team of postdoctoral and student researchers will gather crucial new physiological, behavioral, and genetic data. The research team will study animals from a natural population during nesting events. Vegetation cover over nests, which accurately predicts offspring sex ratio, and nesting date will be recorded. Data will then be obtained for offspring sex ratio for each nest, and incubation temperature, yolk hormone levels in eggs, and offspring paternity for a focal subset of nests. The findings of this research will have important implications for the impacts of climate change and human habitat use on the biology and conservation of species with TSD. This research program will also provide extensive educational opportunities for numerous students (including under-represented minorities, persons with disabilities, and women) and the public doc22051 none The inside of a cell is a crowded place where macromolecular solutes, mostly proteins, reach concentrations of hundreds of grams per liter. However, almost all in vitro studies of protein biophysics are conducted at solute concentrations that rarely exceed a fraction of a gram per liter. This discrepancy poses an important question: do the observations made in dilute solution always coincide with what happens inside cells? Preliminary data show that the answer is no. Specifically, NMR data show that FlgM, a protein that is unfolded in dilute solution, gains structure inside living Escherichia coli cells. Additional data show that FlgM gains structure in vitro on adding high concentrations (400 g L) of glucose, bovine serum albumin, or ovalbumin. Given these data proving the biological significance of crowding, the objective of the research is to understand the effects of physiologically relevant crowded environments on protein equilibria, particularly direct studies in living cells. The proteins to be studied are FlgM, alpha -synuclein, and cytochrome c. Like FlgM, alpha -synuclein is unfolded in dilute solution. The first hypothesis is that there are two classes of natively unfolded proteins. Class 1 (FlgM) collapses and folds under physiologically relevant crowded conditions. Class 2 (alpha -synuclein) collapses but does not fold under these conditions. The second hypothesis is that macromolecular crowding stabilizes globular proteins in cells. The globular protein cytochrome c will be used to test this hypothesis. The methods to be used include, heteronuclear multidimensional NMR, especially NMR detected amide proton exchange experiments, circular dichroism spectropolarimetry, and directed mutagenesis doc22052 none Shaul Mukamel of U. Rochester and Rudy Marcus of Caltech are supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program for a Summer School for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, where instructors will lecture on many-body techniques in chemical physics. The 12-day school will be administered through the Gordon Research Conference office. Lectures will emphasize physically motivated approximations, connections to current experiments, and transferability of mathematical methods to other, quite different problems. The main goals of the school are to expose students to tutorials in targeted subdisciplines of chemical physics, familiarize them with state-of-the-art techniques in greater depth than normal course work, and allow them to become acquainted with peers at other institutions at the early stages of their careers doc22053 none This study will utilize high-resolution analysis of cores from closed-basin lakes in the northern Great Plains to determine the frequency, intensity, duration, periodicity, and synchrony of droughts during the Holocene and to examine how vegetation and fire responded to drought. Since vegetation and lakes in the Northern Great Plains are highly sensitive to drought, this region offers an extraordinary opportunity to document decadal- to-century scale climate cycles in the mid-continental United States. The working hypothesis is that the signal of drought from a single site is regional and that droughts were synchronous across the region. To test this hypothesis, the study will utilize lake-sediment mineralogy, fossil pollen, carbon isotopes of charcoal, and charcoal abundance to develop detailed reconstruction of drought cycles from the Northern Great Plains at a decadal scale. This will facilitate evaluation of the teleconnections between mid-continental climate and the North Atlantic region, where recent investigations have linked century to millennial scale climate oscillations to variations in solar irradiance. This research has the potential for broad impact in range of physical and social sciences. Assessment of drought impacts forecast by atmospheric models for the Northern Great Plains requires understanding of natural drought variability. Evidence from paleoscience suggests that 20th century droughts (e.g., the Dust Bowl) do not provide perspective on the range of severe droughts that have occurred in even the recent past. Historical evidence is incomplete and paleoscience data have not yet been assembled at appropriate temporal and spatial scales to assess the intensity, periodicity, and impacts of past droughts doc22054 none This is a Small Grant for Exploratory Research. Dr. Lawrence will pursue recent preliminary evidence of a novel nuclear domain or body, which typically positions immediately adjacent to PML bodies and appears to form a doublet structure with the PML body. In recent years, there has been increasing appreciation for the complexity and importance of internal nuclear structures and growing evidence of their fundamental roles in diverse nuclear functions. At the forefront has been intense interest in PML bodies (also called ND10, PODs, or PML domains), because these structures are enriched for a collection of important gene regulatory proteins. Dr. Lawrence s laboratory has been studying the characterization of distinct nuclear compartments and their structural and functional relationship to gene expression. In the course of her very recent work she fortuitously uncovered evidence that there exists an essentially unknown and uncharacterized nuclear body that is structurally linked to PML bodies. The evidence for this is at a very preliminary state, and there are major questions to be sorted out in order to establish conclusively the existence of this as a bona fide nuclear body containing multiple nuclear factors and having defined structure. The potential significance of the work is that it may demonstrate a previously unknown part of cell structure, the equivalent of a nuclear organelle with an unexplored role in basic nuclear function. In addition, these bodies are structurally coupled with a body that is clearly implicated in cell cycle regulation. Dr. Lawrence and her colleagues initially discovered a regularly spaced pattern of ~10-20 very bright nuclear dots (immediately abutting but not overlapping PML bodies) using an antibody to the FLAG-epitope in cells engineered to express flag-tagged c-myc oncoprotein at physiological levels. However, recent evidence suggests that the antigen detected is probably not the myc oncoprotein but rather an endogenous protein, possibly induced as part of a cellular reaction to MuLV virus (murine leukemia virus). The first aim is to investigate the hypothesis that PML-associated bodies indeed exist and are found in a variety of cells, using both ultrastructural analysis and immunofluorescence to several other specific proteins that prior evidence suggests may co-localize to these bodies. Second, she will investigate the relationship between MuLV vectors or MuLV expression and the induction of the relevant protein and or body. Depending on results, it would also be feasible to identify an unknown cellular protein detected by the anti-flag antibodies and localized to these structures doc22055 none Harris The long-term goal of this project is to understand how nitrogen-fixing nodules develop on the roots of legumes. Since nodule formation is a plant developmental program, and is a normal part of the development of most legumes, this process should be studied within the context of normal root development. Why is it that only legumes form nitrogen-fixing nodules with rhizobia? Perhaps a difference in development lies at the root of their ability to interact with rhizobia. In particular, lateral roots have been proposed as a potential evolutionary precursor of nitrogen-fixing nodules, based on their developmental similarities. The immediate goal of this project is to examine the relationship between root development and nodulation. The specific aims of this project are: 1. Determine the role of root development genes in the process of nodulation. This problem will be addressed using a combined genetic and molecular approach. The mutant screen for genes required both for nodule and root development will be continued. In parallel, the expression of known root development genes will be examined in the developing nodule. Finally, the phenotype of the lat1-1 mutant, identified in above screen, will be characterized in more detail. 2. Map LAT1, a gene required for both nodule and root development and identify genomic BAC clones that span this genetic interval. LAT1 is one of the few genes currently identified that links lateral root development and nodule formation. Thus this gene provides a tool to examine the intersection between the genetic programs for nodulation and root development. During the period of this project, the LAT1 gene will be finely mapped and genomic BAC clones spanning this interval identified, laying the groundwork for the future cloning of the LAT1 gene. 3. Characterize lateral root development in a legume using morphological and molecular markers: Are there any unique features? To address this question, molecular markers will be generated that label lateral roots at a very early stage and allow the observation of the marked cells through lateral root development. In this way, stages of lateral root development in M. truncatula will be identified, and can be used as a framework to examine lateral root development in mutants identified in response Specific Aim 1 doc22056 none The PI and his students will undertake a theoretical and experimental study of active control of thermally induced convective flows. Because such flows are nonlinear with many degrees of freedom, effective control is quite difficult. The research will extend previous work to develop means by which all sensors can interact with all the actuators simultaneously. Numerical simulations will be carried out to study the dynamics of the controlled system, and experiments will be conducted in upright circular cylinders with different aspect ratios, using different liquids having a wide range of Prandtl numbers, while employing arrays of micro-fabricated sensors and actuators. This is a fundamental study that has the potential of enabling control strategies for modifying transport phenomena in significant industrial processes. The research should also facilitate the integration of active control strategies with thermal transport into new educational materials doc22057 none Doctoral Dissertation Research: Effect of Attention on Memory for Negative and Neutral Words. With National Science Foundation support, Elizabeth Kensinger and Dr. Suzanne Corkin will conduct a one-year neuroimaging study as part of Ms. Kensinger s doctoral dissertation. The study is aimed at uniting two areas of research: the detrimental effects that divided attention has on a person s ability to learn information, and the memory enhancing effects of emotion. When our attention is divided as we attempt to learn information, memory suffers. Ample behavioral data support this conclusion, yet the changes that occur in the brain have not been fully explored. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) the proposed studies will investigate what network of brain regions is recruited as a person attempts to learn information while performing a difficult distractor task. The studies will also examine the neural cirtuitry involved in later retrieval the information that was learned under that attention demanding condition. It is also not known how divided attention affects memory for information that we typically remember very well, for example, emotional information. Daily experiences are often infused with an emotional richness that has typically been absent, and even actively avoided, in experimental studies of learning and memory. Although behavioral studies have shown that individuals remember emotional stimuli better than neutral, it is unclear how manipulating the attentional resources available at the time of learning affects memory for emotional stimuli. The proposed studies will examine the behavioral effect of divided attention on memory for emotional as compared to neutral stimuli. The proposed behavioral and fMRI studies together will advance knowledge about the effects of attention on memory for neutral and emotional verbal stimuli doc22058 none A central question in community ecology is how species diversity will typically respond to the removal of a one or a few species. Are species highly redundant so that the loss of one species is easily compensated for by other, functionally equivalent species? Or, do species tend to play unique functional roles so that the loss of one species can propagate out to cause a catastrophic loss of diversity. These questions assume ever greater practical importance as the global wave of extinctions accelerates. And, although some progress has been made in simple model systems, we still have a vague understanding of more complex communities with dynamics that evolve over large temporal and spatial scales. It is not clear whether anthropogenically induced extinction of individual species will generally cascade across these communities. Most notably, we have little ability to predict how the mounting loss of the largest mammals to hunting is likely to affect diversity in tropical forests, which are home to a large proportion of the world s species. The primary focus of this study will be the collection of empirical data linking the ranging behavior of terrestrial mammals to tree species diversity in a Congo forest. The study site typifies tropical forests worldwide in that its mammals act both as seed dispersers for a species rich guild of spatially rare trees and seed predators of a species poor guild of spatially aggregated trees. Even though mammals of many body sizes disperse and predate the same tree species, they may not be functionally redundant because mammalian body size is highly correlated with ranging scale. Thus, large mammals are particularly mobile seed predators that are drawn to dense stands of the species poor guild from great distances. Large mammals also tend to disperse seeds over a great area, which provides a number of benefits to mutualists in the species rich tree guild, including escape from predators & pathogens. Consequently, local extinction of large mammals may well tip the competitive balance between guilds, triggering a loss of diversity in the species rich tree guild that propagates out through a myriad of dependent plants and animals, including smaller mammalian seed dispersers. This project will include both animal and vegetation studies and use a combination of ground and remote sensing methods. Aerial video and satellite imagery at several resolutions will be used to develop detailed maps of the distribution of the two tree guilds over a large scale. Line transect methods will then be used to quantify how the spatial grain of mixing between the two tree guilds influences both fruit availability and the spatial distribution of mammals varying in body size from mice to elephants. Trapping studies on rodents, the first GPS telemetry study on several duiker species, and the first telemetry study of any kind on red river hogs will quantify how body size influences the spatio-temporal pattern of fruit availability within an animal s home range. And an attempt will be made to identify a set of individual tree species using high-resolution digital photography and aerial videography. If this proves successful, it will allow the first large- scale scale study of tropical tree distribution and phenology. The empirical data collected in the study will be used to parameterize coupled, spatially explicit models of animal ranging and vegetation dynamics with the goal of predicting how large mammal extirpation is likely to affect tree species diversity. In addition to addressing basic theoretical issues, data collected in this project will be of direct value to wildlife management, both guiding management at the study site and informing park planning and sustainable hunting programs across the region. Remote sensing methodologies developed in this project will also provide the tools for studying how the wave of logging currently sweeping Central Africa is likely to affect tree species diversity. And African personnel trained and employed in the study will bolster feeble research and management capacity in the region doc22059 none The foci of this research are twofold. First, a structurally new class of air stable, recyclable, efficient and selective chiral Ru catalysts for asymmetric olefin metathesis will be developed. The new chiral Ru complexes will allow for specific steric and electronic modifications that can shed light on the general mechanism of Ru-catalyzed olefin metathesis. Further, the corresponding glass-supported chiral catalysts will be prepared and examined as easily used and highly recyclable chiral catalysts that can directly afford libraries of a range of functionalizable organic molecules of high chemical and optical purity. Second, a wide range of Ru-catalyzed olefin metathesis reactions will be developed to afford optically enriched organic molecules that are not accessible via Mo-catalyzed reactions nor by other available enzymatic or non-enzymatic catalytic methods. The methodology will be demonstrated by the total synthesis of the natural product (+)-africanol. With this renewal award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Amir H. Hoveyda of the Department of Chemistry at Boston College. Professor Hoveyda will focus his work on the development of new Ru-based chiral catalysts for various olefin metathesis processes and he will develop a wide range of Ru-catalyzed olefin metathesis reactions that will afford optically enriched or pure organic molecules. The work has broader implications for the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries and the project is an excellent venue for the training of graduate students and postdoctorals doc22035 none Tropical rainforests in the Amazon Basin and elsewhere are experiencing stronger droughts as El Nino episodes become more frequent and more severe. How will this drying trend affect these species-rich tropical ecosystems? We initiated the world s first large-scale rainfall manipulation experiment in a tropical rainforest in , partially excluding rainfall from a one-hectare forest area in central Amazonia. We discovered that the growth of tree trunks is very sensitive to drought, as is forest flammability. During the next five years, we will determine the level of drought stress that this rainforest can tolerate before tree flowering and fruiting begin to fail, and large trees begin to die. We will then release the forest from experimental drought to document the mechanisms and rates of forest recovery. It is already clear that drought effects on tree growth and tree mortality may contribute substantially to the carbon dioxide concentration of the atmosphere doc21993 none A central goal of evolutionary biology is to understand the ways in which species become reproductively isolated from one another. One powerful approach to this problem involves the study of naturally occurring hybrid populations. In particular, inferences about the genetics of reproductive isolation can be made through the study of differential movement of genes across a hybrid zone between two species. Genes contributing to reproductive isolation are expected to move less freely across a hybrid zone than genes that do not contribute to reproductive isolation. The primary objective of the proposed research is to assess the number and relative contribution of genes to reproductive isolation between two European house mouse species, Mus musculus and M. domesticus, that naturally hybridize in central Europe. Approximately 900 mice from two transects across this hybrid zone in Germany will be genotyped for 68 genetic markers of known chromosomal location and a statistical analysis of the relative movement of these markers across the zone will be made. Because the complete sequence of the mouse genome will be available soon, this research will lay the groundwork for identifying specific genes involved in reproductive isolation. The study is both significant and unique in its utilization of a vast amount of genetic information to address a fundamental problem in biology, that is, the genetic basis of speciation doc22062 none Scanlon Leaves are the fundamental organ of plant shoots, and develop via the morphogenetic activity of shoot apical meristems. Previous studies suggest that the precisely regulated balance of hormone concentration and hormone transport are key components in leaf organogenesis. Three mutations disrupting early events in maize leaf pattern formation will be exploited in biochemical and molecular genetic investigations probing the role of the plant hormone auxin during early stages in leaf development. The mutations narrow sheath1, narrow sheath2 (ns1, ns2) and ragged seedling2 (rgd2) all disrupt development of maize lateral organs, leading to narrow leaf and shortened stem phenotypes. Maize leaves contain at least two lateral compartments, the central and marginal domains. NS function is essential for recruitment of the marginal compartment, but is not required for the development of the central leaf domain. The ns mutant phenotype, which mimics IAA-overexpressing mutants, is controlled by the non-homologous, duplicate factor mutations ns1 and ns2. Narrow sheath 2 has been cloned, and encodes a NITRILASE that has been shown to function in the production of auxin. Transcripts of ns2 accumulate in an alternating pattern subtending the marginal compartment of maize leaf primordia. Mutations in the ragged seedling2 gene condition more extreme narrow leaf phenotypes, and may disturb development of both the central and the marginal domains. Four specific aims are proposed. 1) The NS2 RNA and protein accumulation patterns will be analyzed in all developing maize tissues by in situ hybridization and immunolocalization. NS2-specific polyclonal antibodies will be prepared. Of particular interest is the NS2 accumulation patterns in developing embryos and in tissues unaffected by the ns mutations. 2) The expression patterns of the auxin responsive Aux IAA genes of maize will be analyzed by in situ hybridization in ns and nonmutant samples. Non-mutant apices will be treated with xogenous auxin transport inhibitors, and ns apices will be treated with auxin. These assays will test the hypothesis that the ns mutant phenotype is the result of defective auxin-mediated signalling in the ns margin domain. 3) The ns1-R mutation is linked to a genomic polymorphism at the aldehyde oxidase (ao) locus, which encodes an enzyme involved in IAA biosynthesis, and ns mutants aberrantly express AO transcripts. Reverse genetic mutagenesis of ao loci, transposon mutagenesis of new ns1 alleles, and cloning of ao genes from ns mutant plants will determine whether ns1 encodes an AO in maize. 4) Genetic and molecular analyses will test the hypothesis that RGD2 functions during early stages of maize leaf development. Double mutant analyses of rgd2 with ns and leafbladeless1, and the expression profiles of genes involved in early leaf development (ns2, terminal ear1) will be analyzed by in situ hybridization. Additional alleles of rgd2 will be obtained by transposon tagging, for use in attempts to clone the rgd2 gene doc22063 none The development of a multicellular organism requires careful regulation of protein activity and localization. As genome projects are beginning to reveal the complement of genes required to build a plant, scientists now face the complex issue of where and when genes are expressed and where proteins are localized. Imposed on this complexity is the fact that specific plant gene products traffic between cells through specialized channels called plasmodesmata, so their final location may be distant from the cell where they are made. Specifically, some developmental transcription factors are known to traffic between cells, though little is known of the developmental significance and regulation of this process. This project aims to understand the developmental regulation of cell to cell trafficking of plant proteins, using the KNOTTED1 (KN1) gene as a model system. Dominant Kn1 mutants have non-autonomous effects on cell fate in the maize leaf, and using microinjection assays it was shown that KN1 protein and mRNA can traffic between leaf cells, through plasmodesmata. These assays were constrained by the type of tissue that could be targeted, limiting the ability to ask developmentally relevant questions pertaining to the role of KN1 trafficking in its function for stem cell maintenance. Protein fusions of KN1 to the green fluorescent protein were therefore developed and used to visualize trafficking in vivo in intact plant tissues. In the future research, these studies will be extended to ask significant questions about control of plasmodesmal trafficking in the meristem. Specifically, the size exclusion limit of plasmodesmata in the meristem will be estimated, and the experiments will test if symplasmic domains for protein transport exist. Trafficking signal sequences in KN1 will also be localized. The study will contribute to the understanding of cell to cell communication in plants. It will also increase basic knowledge of plasmodesmata, which are poorly characterized at the molecular level. Plasmodesmata are important for the allocation of photosynthetic products, for plant morphogenesis and for defense against pathogens. Therefore these studies of protein trafficking could have significant implications for improving agricultural productivity doc22064 none Population density cycles that appear synchronous, or irin-phasel, over large geographic areas are some of the most striking phenomena in population biology. In theory, such synchrony is caused either by widespread meteorological factors, or by movement of individuals between populations. Theory for predator-prey metapopulationsl that extend over groups of patches also links synchrony to regional persistence. The study of these phenomena in nature has been hampered by difficulty in identifying both the cause of population cycles and the roles of environmental factors and interpatch movement in modifying population fluctuations and synchrony. The environmental forcing of metapopulations which is explored here is relevant to biological control of pest species and conservation. Additionally, extreme weather events caused by global warming have the potential to synchronize regional populations, which might cut short regional persistence. The proposed work uses mathematical techniques focused on phase dynamics to analyze synchrony and build precise links among environmental variability, population dynamics and extinction. Phase dynamics have been widely used in neurobiology, but their potential in ecology is only just beginning to be realized. This project develops new analytic tools for an ecological audience and uses a model experimental system, bacteria and protozoa in laboratory microcosms, to bridge the gap between populations and metapopulation theory. The work starts with a classic model and then develops more precise and biologically realistic models, which in turn will fuel further, more precise, experimental tests. Two-patch predator-prey systems coupled by random dispersal will provide a link with analytical solutions, which numerical simulations and experiments can build on to consider more complex and realistic situations. Two patch models will be used to derive equations which relate phase, the point in a predator-prey cycle, to population dynamic processes. The dynamics of phase difference between two patches will be derived and used as a measure of synchrony, which can be related to regional persistence and within-patch predator-prey dynamics. Phase dynamics can also distinguish whether persistence is controlled not by deterministic equilibrium dynamics (the focus of most theoretical studies), but instead by long-lived transient dynamics which may dominate during ecologically relevant time scales; specifically regression of phase difference through time will be used to calculate the duration of transient dynamics, when phase difference becomes zero. Experimentally, the initial phase difference of predator-prey oscillations in two linked patches will be manipulated by starting microcosms with different predator and prey densities in each patch. Statistics will then quantify the phase difference between patches and test its correlation with regional persistence time. Repeating this procedure in microcosms with different movement rates between patches (lengths of corridors) will test the prediction that increased movement rate between patches will reduce phase differences and regional persistence time. Experiments with 1-8 patches will manipulate environmental variability through temperature fluctuations and control whether this operates uniformly across a region or just in a single patch. Quantification of regional persistence time and phase differences between patches will then test the predictions that local variability enhances regional persistence, but regional variability and increased movement reduce regional variability. This project will demonstrate how and why environmental variability influences dynamics and extinction in regionally-distributed predator and prey systems. The techniques of phase dynamics will be brought to a broader ecological audience, and two graduate students will be trained with the necessary mathematical, modeling, statistical and experimental techniques that are required to understand the links between the environment and populations. This work will provide a paradigm on which future combined experimental and theoretical studies of population synchrony and persistence can build doc22065 none The carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by the respiration of most organisms is a fundamental constituent of their odor. Many insects can sense the concentration of CO2 in the air around them, and they are thought to use that information in vital tasks such as locating food sources (e.g., appropriate plants) and possibly identifying desirable sites for oviposition (egg laying). Whereas considerable research has focused on how the sensory information about CO2 is acquired, little is known about how that information is processed in the central nervous system (CNS). In order to address this issue, this project will take advantage of an experimentally favorable and extensively studied model plant-eating insect, the moth Manduca sexta, using methods already developed and in practice in this laboratory. Pilot studies that led to this project suggested that a particular group of sensory receptor cells, situated in a sensory organ (the labial-palp pit organ, LPO) recessed in a deep invagination on each labial palp (a mouthpart) of the adult moth, are specialized to detect and quantitatively assess CO2 in the air around that organ. Anatomical evidence shows that although the LPO receptor cells are located in that mouthpart, they send their axons to the antennal lobe (AL), the primary-olfactory center resembling the vertebrate olfactory bulb, in the insect s brain. Furthermore, our pilot work clearly shows that some of the central neurons in the AL receive and process synaptic inputs, and thus information about CO2, from the LPO receptor cells. Thus, the project centers on recording of the electrical signals (coded sensory information about CO2) generated by LPO receptor cells and the responding neurons in the AL that receive inputs from the LPO sensory cells. In addition, the morphology of those AL neurons is studied by means of intracellular staining in order to reveal the types and patterns of branching of neurons contributing to processing of CO2 information. This research is the first study of central processing of environmental-CO2 information, and it promises to add significantly to our understanding of CNS olfactory mechanisms in insects. CO2, temperature, and humidity are environmental variables of importance to insects, and the sensory systems for those three kinds of stimuli share certain physiological properties. Therefore it may be that the processing of CO2 information has aspects in common with the processing of information about temperature and or humidity, such that general principles of information processing in the brain could emerge from the proposed project. These studies are expected to lead to understanding of how information about environmental CO2 is first processed in the AL of the insect brain. Manduca sexta is an excellent experimental animal for this research because it: (a) possesses a highly developed CO2-detecting organ; (b) is large and hence ideal for neurophysiological studies, easily reared in the laboratory, and favorable for experimentation at the molecular, physiological, and organismal levels; (c) has yielded a wealth of information about the neurobiology of insect olfaction and the neuroethology of odor-guided behavior, much of it through previous research done in this laboratory; and (d) is an agricultural pest which, although not very important economically, exhibits behavior and sensory mechanisms that are similar to those of important, herbivorous pest insects. Thus, the findings from this project, complementing other research under way in this laboratory, will benefit ongoing basic research aimed at understanding how nervous systems analyze, recognize, and respond to odors, and should also yield insights that will be useful in the agricultural arena for designing new strategies for protection of crop plants from insect predation. Finally, in addition to its scientific impact and potential benefit to agriculture, this project will contribute to the research training of a postdoctoral associate (the key investigator) and also involve one or more undergraduate students in aspects of the studies doc22066 none A long-range goal of the research is to understand the mechanisms by which hormones control growth and development in crustaceans. The crustacean carapace (exoskeleton) restricts growth. Therefore, as crustaceans grow and develop the exoskeleton is periodically shed (molted) and replaced by a new and larger version. These cycles of growth and molting, and associated developmental processes including regeneration, are controlled by the crustacean endocrine system. The cellular events that lead to molting are stimulated by steroid hormones termed ecdysteroids. Ecdysteroids are secreted by paired endocrine glands, the Y-organs. The production of ecdysteroids by Y-organs is negatively regulated (inhibited) by a peptide hormone, molt-inhibiting hormone (MIH), produced by neurosecretory cells in the eyestalks. Thus, it is hypothesized that MIH inhibits Y-organs during much of the molting cycle, and that a molting sequence is initiated when MIH secretion diminishes. Recent progress has been made in understanding the structure of the MIH peptide and gene. Progress has likewise been made in understanding cell signaling pathways in Y-organs. However, a major gap in current understanding of the regulation of crustacean molting is lack of information on the MIH receptor. It is hypothesized that the effect of MIH on Y-organs is mediated by a cell surface receptor, but the MIH receptor has not been isolated or thoroughly characterized for any crustacean species. The specific aims of the current research are to (1) isolate a cDNA encoding the MIH receptor of the blue crab (Callinectes sapidus), (2) determine the tissue distribution of MIH receptor mRNA, (3) determine whether there occur changes in the level of receptor mRNA during a molt cycle, and (4) begin characterizing the native MIH receptor in Y-organ cell membranes. The aims will be achieved using methods of modern cellular and molecular biology and biochemistry, including recombinant DNA technology, nucleic acid blotting and hybridization, and protein cross-linking. The research will answer fundamental questions about the neuroendocrine regulation of growth and development in this abundant and economically important group of animals. In addition, study of the crustacean model system may provide conceptual insights into general questions about the regulation of steroidogenesis and the structure and function of neurosecretory cells. Finally, it is anticipated that the research will provide information that will enable development of methods for specifically manipulating growth and molting in crustaceans, a benefit to fisheries managers, the aquaculture industry, and consumers of shellfish doc22067 none Goodman Soil microorganisms impact biogeochemical structuring and nutrient cycling on a global level. It has been estimated that a gram of soil can contain as many as 5 x 10 11 bacterial cells and over 13,000 distinct phylotypes. However, only a small fraction of the microorganisms from most soil samples can be readily cultured. The fraction that has been cultured rarely includes the most abundant species and frequently is biased towards or against particular taxonomic or physiological types. Since most of what is known about soil microbes has come from studies of cultured species, we still know very little about soil microbial ecology. Therefore, culture-independent methods are an important tool in soil microbiology and promise major new insights into the roles of soil microflora in ecosystem function. Culture-independent methods have revealed that diverse members of two bacterial divisions, Acidobacterium and Verrucomicrobia, are abundant in soils. While they have a cosmopolitan distribution and can be numerically dominant, we know very little about their ecology and activity within the soil community. Using information derived from the application of newly developed genomic approaches, we will test hypotheses about the distribution and functions of these uncultured taxa in response to soil environmental gradients. First, we will sequence, annotate, and analyze large insert genomic DNA clones derived from bacterial taxa in these two divisions (Acidobacterium and Verrucomicrobia taxa). Each of these genomic DNA clones contains rRNA genes as well as functional information derived from sequence analysis and annotation. These data will be integrated into a publicly available and searchable database. We will next use the phylogenetic information contained within these clones to develop taxa-specific primers and probes. We will then use these molecular primers and probes to test hypotheses concerning the ecological niches inhabited by these taxa, shedding light on their distribution within various soil fractions, their size and membrane charge distributions, their relative abundance within plant rhizospheres, and their distribution along soil environmental gradients. The results of this research will provide hitherto unavailable information on specific uncultured soil microorganisms, including genomic organization, gene content, and environmental distributions. The knowledge gained from these studies will lead to further ecological hypotheses, and provide new approaches, tools and a database that will significantly advance microbial ecological studies of one of the most important microbial habitats on Earth-the soil. The long-term goal is to contribute to a platform of technologies and results that can be used to elucidate the variability, activity and significant ecological roles of uncultured soil microorganisms in their natural habitats doc21888 none The Nevada Desert FACE Facility (NDFF) is a long-term research project examining the responses of an intact Mojave Desert ecosystem to elevated CO2. In the first four years of NDFF operation, we found that primary production increased substantially at elevated CO2, but only in wet years, and that an exotic annual grass responded more strongly than did native shrubs and annuals. Therefore, our initial results suggest that an ecosystem type (drylands) that represents 30% of the earth s terrestrial surface area may not respond to elevated CO2 in a simple manner, as predicted by existing models of global change. In the context of these results and the long-term nature of our desert FACE experiment, we propose to address three overarching questions in this study: 1. Will elevated CO2 alter community composition and structure in the Mojave Desert by continuing to stimulate a disproportionate increase in an exotic annual species? 2. Will the increases in production and changes in nutrient dynamics that we have observed in response to a step-change increase in CO2 be sustained over time? 3. Can we adapt proven models of desert ecosystem function to predict how this Mojave Desert ecosystem will respond to elevated CO2 in the future? The intellectual merit of this proposal lies in our conceptual approach in which we are focusing on the functional interactions between species composition and ecosystem function, tied together by an explicit modeling component. The model will be an adaptation of an established, validated desert model (PALS, the Patch Arid Lands Simulator) that will be used to develop a synthetic understanding of biotic and abiotic controls on carbon, nitrogen, and water fluxes to elevated CO2 in this arid ecosystem. The broader impact of this proposed study will be an examination of the potential invasion of an exotic species in response to elevated CO2, and how this process may impact ecosystem function, and therefore ecosystem services, in a desert environment. Through this research program, we are also forging a cohesive network between five research campuses. To date, our research group has an excellent record of training undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral scholars at the NDFF, including members of under-represented groups. This study will similarly train a wide spectrum of students and postdocs, both at the NDFF and in our support laboratories doc22069 none The investigators would host a two-day workshop of 20 leaders in geoscience education, learning sciences, and the application of learning science to STEM disciplines. The goals of the workshop are to define the compelling research issues about learning in the geosciences, discuss avenues for disseminating existing research on learning, and initiate broad-based planning and coordination of activities. The participants in the workshop will discuss classroom experiences that are believed to be critical barriers to learning, define existing research that is applicable to learning geosciences, define new work on learning in the geosciences, and agree on specific steps. The meeting will produce a report with recommendations for disseminating research on learning. This workshop is believed to be the first step in a series of activities to integrate research on learning into undergraduate geoscience education doc22070 none While there is a general consensus among scientists that the projected rise in the concentration of atmospheric CO2 will have a profound impact on productivity and composition of terrestrial ecosystems, our capacity to reliably predict the exact nature of these changes remain tenuous. The unknown effects of other environmental factors such as nitrogen (N) and water are major sources of this uncertainty. N is an essential mineral nutrient whose availability and utilization regulates plant responses to high CO2. This high leverage by N is fortuitous when one considers the intricate connection between carbon (C) and N in plant biology. It is well recognized that in the short term, plants exposed to high CO2 will enhance their C uptake. Theoretically, however, only those species that can maintain a balance between N and C demand will sustain a long-term positive effect. The few available data indicate that plant species vary widely in their N uptake responses to high CO2. However, observations from a few empirical studies can not be extrapolated to cover a wide range of species around the globe and we currently lack a mechanistic understanding to develop such a roadmap. Here we propose to elucidate the major mechanism(s) that control plant N uptake when CO2 concentration is elevated using species from contrasting ecosystems. We propose to develop physiological and biochemical markers that could be used to gauge the extent to which a target species can maintain its N and C balance. The physiological and biochemical markers targeted here are known to control plant N uptake under natural conditions and therefore are likely to control N uptake responses under high CO2 as well. The findings are equally important for basic research and management policy issues that must deal with increasing pressure to cope with the future climate. The proposed research will be conducted at six nationally funded Free Air Carbon dioxide Enrichment (FACE) experiments, two CO2 natural springs in Italy and New Zealand, and a number of open-top chambers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The results generated here will be critical for the development of predictive models designed to forecast the fate of terrestrial ecosystems in a future climate doc22071 none PI: Michael S. Webster Co-PI: Hubert Schwabl and Jordan Karubian One primary goal of evolutionary biology is to explain biological diversity, both within and among species. Many species show pronounced phenotypic variation in both behavior and morphology, with individuals of one phenotype looking and behaving very differently from individuals of another phenotype. For example, males of the Australian red-backed fairy-wren (Malurus melanocephalus) are of two different types: some males breed in bright plumage, provide relatively little parental care, and seek extrapair copulations, whereas other males are cryptically colored, provide much parental care, and do not appear to seek extrapair copulations. An understanding of this sort of phenotypic polymorphism requires an understanding of both the mechanisms that produce it and the evolutionary forces that create and maintain it. In this project, Webster et al. will examine the hormonal physiological mechanisms and also the evolutionary forces responsible for polymorphism in the red-backed fairy-wren. Correlational analyses of changes in hormone levels will be combined with a hormone manipulation experiment to determine the mechanisms that cause a male to adopt one plumage type or the other. In addition, experiments with wild and captive birds will be used to thoroughly test whether males change plumage type in response to social cues. At a functional level, observations of wild birds, combined with field experiments and genetic analyses of parentage, will be used to determine the total reproductive success of males with different phenotypes. This project will be among the first to examine a complex intraspecific polymorphism in an endothermic vertebrate from both mechanistic and functional perspectives. As such, the study will serve as a model for understanding polymorphism in other endothermic organisms, and also as a model for a pluralistic approach to the study of natural phenomena. In doing so, this project will directly address several current controversies in behavioral and evolutionary biology. Specifically, this study will: (1) lead to a better understanding of the function of conspicuous and polymorphic traits; (2) help clarify the role of hormones in the development of plumage color; and (3) elucidate the mechanistic connections between social behavior and morphology doc22072 none Hudspeth Phylogenetic relationships within the Peronosporomycetes, a diverse group of economically important fungal-like protists often referred to as oomycetes, are poorly understood. In this study the primary goal is to establish an extensive DNA database derived from mitochondrial and nuclear genes of a diverse selection of these organisms. The resultant database is then to be used to infer evolutionary relationships of major, understudied, and newly identified genera. With the development of peronosporomycete specific DNA primers this study emphasizes both obligate and opportunistic parasites of plants, algae, and terrestrial and marine animals. The resulting inferred phylogeny is expected to provide new insight into evolutionary relationships and trends within the Peronosporomycetes, and to identify anomalously placed taxa for reevaluation using morphological and biochemical data. The broader impact of this study stems from the inclusion in the Peronosporomycetes of a significant number of pathogenic organisms. Hosts include representatives from all eukaryotic kingdoms. Plant pathogens encompass a spectrum of cereal and leguminous crops, rosaceous fruit trees, forest trees, and ornamental plants as hosts. The societal impact of the downy mildews Plasmopara and Peronospora (responsible for the decimation of the French wine and Cuban tobacco industries) and of Phytophthora infestans, the causative agent of late blight of potato (famines in Ireland in the mid- s and World War I Germany), is part of the historical record. Currently, the worldwide economic impact of these and other peronosporomycete genera amounts to tens of billions of dollars in crop losses and disease control. The newly identified Phytophthora ramorum (causative agent for sudden oak death) with its broad host range currently threatens large stands of trees in the western U.S., and aggressive hybrid variants of other phytophthoras with their expanding host ranges are emerging as additional threats. In the rapidly expanding area of aquaculture, peronosporomycete animal mycoses affecting roe, fingerlings, molluscans, and crustaceans are currently being identified. Even the incidence of mammalian pythiosis (Pythium isidiosum) in an increasing number of hosts, including man, is being recognized. Establishing a molecular database for this group provides both a resource for the early and rapid molecular identification of pathogens, and a significant step in understanding the evolutionary history and trends of the Peronosporomycetes doc22073 none Chi-Bin Chien Lay ------------------------- To form the correct circuitry in the developing nervous system, billions of nerve cells must send their axons (individual nerve fibers) over long distances to find their specific target cells. How these axons find their targest is one of the fundamental questions of developmental neuroscience. When many axons take similar pathways and form a nerve bundle or axon tract, individual axons are often highly organized within the larger tract. How such sorting within axon tracts is achieved is a basic question of axon guidance that has been studied very little. In the visual system, retinal axons exit the eye and form the optic nerve, where they are organized in a very precise array according to their point of origin. Shortly after passing through the optic chiasm, these retinal axons reorganize in a characteristic way, so that they are sorted out according to a different order as they grow through the optic tract on their way to visual centers in the brain. This sorting of retinal axons in the optic tract allow the proper formation of normal visual connections, and is therefore critical for normal vision. This project will study the mechanisms of axon sorting in the visual system of the zebrafish, Danio rerio. The zebrafish visual system has many fundamental similarities (both genetic and anatomical) to humans and other vertebrates, and so the principles discovered here are likely to have wide applicability. In a particular zebrafish mutant strain, called boxer, a subset of the retinal axons fail to reorganize normally within the optic tract. Thus, normal function of the boxer gene is critical for normal development of the visual system. The proposed experiments will analyze whether boxer function is required in the eye or in the brain, and will clone boxer to determine which mutated gene is responsible for the visual system defect. These experiments will shed light on a critical aspect of how the brain is properly wired during development doc22074 none Despite a large literature on insect eggshell morphology, little is known about the relationship between eggshell morphology and gas transport. This award will support the development of a mathematical model that explicitly connects gas flux to eggshell morphology. The equations will incorporate 6 - 8 of what appear a priori to be important eggshell morphological parameters. The model will then be solved numerically and used in two primary ways. (i) Sensitivity analyses will identify which morphological parameters have the strongest influence on gas flux. Subsequent morphological work on a common North American moth, Manduca sexta, will concentrate on getting the best measures of the most important parameters. (ii) Once the morphological parameters have been obtained, they will be used in conjunction with the model to predict total eggshell permeability to each of the three gases. These predictions will then be compared with direct measures of the permeability from other experimental work currently in progress. A good match will indicate that all significant factors affecting eggshell permeability have been accounted for and understood. A poor match will lead to additional mathematical and experimental work to identify the source of error (and in the process an important component of eggshell function). Thus, by design the mathematical and experimental progress will be iterative and co-dependent. The outcome will be a robust model that captures the essential elements of eggshell function. Such a model will be useful in a number of ways. (i) Many species, including Manduca sexta, have geographic ranges that span a variety of temperature and humidity conditions. The model will provide a tool for predicting how eggshell structure may vary intra-specifically across abiotic environmental gradients. (ii) Insects as a group exhibit spectacular diversity in eggshell form. The model will provide a way to predict how this morphological diversity affects permeability characteristics. (iii) An important methodology for controlling some crop pests, especially pests of stored-grains, is atmosphere manipulation. In conjunction with morphological data on eggs of pests species, the model will provide a way of evaluating atmosphere-based control strategies. (iv) Student training in mathematics and modeling is increasingly important in biology. The project provides an ideal vehicle for training students to think about the relationship between models and experimental work. The award will support a graduate student to participate in model development and parameterization, and it is highly likely that additional undergraduates will also participate doc22075 none Why has output volatility in the post- period been so much lower than in earlier periods? Is it just good luck, better monetary policy, or structural change in the economy? Understanding the source the decline in output volatility not only helps forecast future volatility patterns, but also sheds light on potential improvements in monetary policy and firm behavior. The proposed research seeks to shed light on the source of the decline in volatility by conducting a case study of changes in output and sales volatility in the U.S. automobile industry. The U.S. automobile industry represents an ideal case study of the decline in volatility because it exhibits patterns similar to, but more dramatic than, the aggregate data. Previous work by Kahn, McConnell and Perez-Quiros presents evidence that changes in production and inventory behavior are a key source of the decline in volatility. In the post- period, the variance of production fell much more than the variance of sales. Furthermore, the covariance of inventory investment and sales has changed from being positive (which adds to volatility) to being negative. These facts represent circumstantial evidence that the key to the decline in volatility is structural change in production and inventory management. More specificially, this research explores the alternative hypothesis that these observed changes stem mostly from changes in the sales process rather than structural changes in firms production and inventory scheduling. The U.S. automobile industry, as well as many other industries, face nonconvex costs and lumpy production margins that can lead to a very nonlinear relationship between the variance of production and the variance of sales. Thus, a change in the dynamics of the sales process can lead to radical changes in the way production is scheduled. The first part of the project demonstrates the complex relationship between sales dynamics and output dynamics using simulations. Employing a cost function similar to the one faced by automobile assembly plants, optimal production schedules in response to various sales processes will be derived. The second part of the project gathers and analyzes detailed weekly automobile assembly plant data to investigate how much of the change in production behavior is due to structural changes at the plant level versus changes in the nature of the sales process. Since the sales process can be affected by changes in monetary policy rules or by firms pricing behavior, identifying how much of the change in production behavior is simply a response to changes in the dynamics of sales is key to tracking the source of the decline in volatility doc22076 none In recent years, green fluorescent protein (GFP) technology has revolutionized molecular and cellular biology. GFP has proven extremely useful as a fusion tag for detection of gene products, and as a biosensor for monitoring specific cellular events. Yet, the level of understanding of the underlying mechanism of fluorophore generation is lagging behind the development of novel applications. This project is designed to learn more about the structural and catalytic requirements for chromophore formation in GFP. When the protein folds into its native three-dimensional structure, a spontaneous, autocatalytic peptide backbone cyclization occurs in the protein s interior, initiating a series of chemical events that lead to the generation of the fluorophore. This highly unusual backbone cross-link has been identified only in GFP and in histidine ammonia lyase, though it might be present in a number of other, less well-characterized proteins. In this project, structural and catalytic requirements for GFP chromophore formation will be explored, using techniques such as site-directed mutagenesis, kinetics, and x-ray crystallography. Crystal structures of GFPs without chromophore will be analyzed with respect to preorganization towards chromophore formation. A detailed kinetic investigation of the individual steps leading to fluorescence will be carried out, with the aim of clarifying how backbone cyclization is coupled to protein folding and oxidation. Improved understanding of the factors leading to chromophore formation in GFP will aid in predicting similar unusual post-translational modifications and chemistries in unrelated proteins doc22077 none The amount of investment that females place in their offspring (maternal investment), whether it is behavioral (such as protection from predators) or material (such as milk), must be balanced against future efforts at reproducing. Understanding how females of different species balance current and future investment in offspring provides insight on the evolution of alternative reproductive strategies. In mammals, quantifying maternal investment can be difficult. This occurs for several reasons: 1) it is difficult to assign value to maternal behaviors; 2) offspring may stay with their mothers for many years making observation periods unrealistically long; and, 3) the material directly transferred from mother to offspring through gestation and lactation may be hard to determine. Northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris) provide a unique system within which to study maternal investment. The investment period for elephant seals is limited to the period of lactation. This period is brief (~ 25 days) and almost all investment is given in the form of milk making it more feasible to quantify maternal investment. Furthermore, elephant seal females do not eat or drink during lactation. This combination of fasting and lactation constrains the ability of females to invest in their pups because the nutrients (fat and protein) used to meet their own energy needs are also used to produce milk for the pup. Material and energy investment in elephant seal pups has been previously determined but its relationship to the energetic costs of the mother has not been characterized. The study proposed here will investigate how lactating elephant seals utilize nutrient reserves to support their metabolism, identify and quantify physiological mechanisms that protect maternal nutrients for milk production, and characterize the strategy for nutrient use that contributes to maximizing investment in pups. Isotopically labeled compounds will be used to study biochemical paths important to supplying energy to lactating female seals. Specifically, changes in the importance of glucose and fat as fuel sources over the time course of lactation will be estimated and the contribution of glycerol, a byproduct of fat breakdown, to the production of glucose (gluconeogenesis) will be determined. Insulin and glucagon, two hormones important in regulating how the body uses sugar and fat, will be manipulated to determine whether these hormones interact in a manner unique to this system. This information will provide insight on how elephant seals optimize investment in their offspring under fasting constraints, and thus, will provide insight on ultimate strategies that contribute to future reproductive effort. As part of the NSF-RUI initiative, undergraduates will be actively involved in field research and data analysis. A graduate student, who will derive a research question for a thesis from the proposed work, will also be financially supported through this program. Integration of undergraduate and graduate students into the research will insure that students experience an innovative and dynamic curriculum with an emphasis on integrative approaches to organismal biology doc22078 none The proposed research is a series of experiments that directly examine the causes of adaptive radiation and its effects on populations and communities of organisms over short and long time scales. Populations of the bacterium Escherichia coli will be used as a model system. The rapid generation time and the ability to viably store bacterial cells at -80C allow direct observation of adaptive radiation and direct comparison of ancestral and descendent individuals. Previous research has already demonstrated that adaptive radiation can occur in experimental populations of bacteria, our studies will be the first to systematically determine the effects of multiple factors (environmental and genetic) on replicated populations. Adaptive radiation is a fundamental process in the evolution of biodiversity. Many of the well-known examples of evolution are of adaptive radiation, including Darwin s Finches, Hawaiian Honeycreepers, and African cichlids. However, the factors causing and shaping adaptive radiation are only partially understood, primarily since the history of life can only be investigated indirectly. Because of this, essential information on phylogenetic history and environmental conditions is often imprecise. Species interactions are particularly difficult to study as they are neither prone to fossilization nor do they appear to have systematic effects on diversity doc22079 none Gene targeting is a powerful tool for the studies of in vivo gene functions. However, the null mutants produced by currently available targeting techniques are frequently accompanied by either developmental deficit from subtle to embryonic death or non-phenotypes since the deficits associated with the missing gene are functionally or genetically compensated. All these concerns have dramatically complicated the interpretation of the results or even misled the conclusion in terms of gene functions. Therefore, to develop a novel technique that is able to solve these concerns is of most importance in the studies of in vivo gene functions, especially for behavioral genomics. Based on the principles that both trans-acting and cis-acting are the essential mechanisms for gene transcription in eukaryotic cells, we have development a novel transposon system that is able to tag any gene of interest and produce inducible reversible mRNA knockout in the mouse. The novelty of Dr. Tang s system is to change the strategy of deletion of a crucial part of a targeted gene, which is the principle for traditional knockout techniques including conventional or the currently available conditional gene knockout techniques, such as Cre loxP recombination system, to the strategy of inactivation of (inducible knockout) or reactivation of (reversible to normal) mRNA transcription. The most striking promise of this system is to allow one to temporally associate mRNA transcription with a given biological or behavioral process. Therefore, it will be particularly useful for the studies of gene function in relation to complicated biological and behavioral processes. There are 20,000-25,000 genes in the mouse genome. With 30% genes expressed in the brain, at least 7,500 genes are necessary to tag and further study for a comprehensive understanding of behavioral genomics. Based on the feasibility of this novel system and the progress in the mouse genome project, it is reasonable to establish a small library for gene targeted transposon tagged ES cell lines. At the first stage, the PI will produce presenilin-1 (PS-1) and BDNF transposon tagged ES cell lines and then the knockout mice to validate this system and later on, 20-60 ES lines are expected to be established. Due to the fact that to maintain colonies of mutant mouse lines requires extensive husbandry space as well as labor, it will be eventually required to establish a large or complete tagged ES cell library in our whole research community. Thus, the development of this novel technology will significantly contribute to other efforts on the functional (behavioral) genomics in this post-genome era doc22080 none B. Patrick Sullivan of the University of Wyoming is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program for research on synthesis of linear oligomeric rhenium complexes, and investigation of their photoexcitation and electron-transfer properties. Both diphosphines and cyano groups will be used as bridging ligands, in order to favor directional electron or energy transfer through restriction of conformational flexibility. New synthetic procedures will be developed in order to build oligomeric rhenium complexes with specific lengths, and having properties that will facilitate directional energy and electron transfer. Studies of the dynamics of selected processes will also be carried out to optimize efficiency of energy transfer down the oligomeric chain. Later stages of the work will deal with rectification at semiconductor (titania) interfaces, and use of Mn-based chromophores as surrogates for Re complexes. This research addresses factors that facilitate directional electron and energy transport, an important problem with wide potential applicability. Substantial preliminary results indicate that the proposed research has a good likelihood of success. The results may well be important in development of practical methods for solar energy collection. The proposed research will also provide excellent training for students and post-doctoral associates doc22081 none This project addresses a fundamental question of brain evolution: how well conserved is the main brain circuit diagram across the vertebrates? Specifically, this project aims to resolve contradicting predictions arising from two recent lines of research into a structure called the basal ganglia, which is important in initiating and learning complex behaviors. One set of work, primarily on traditionally studied bird species such as pigeons and chickens, has shown close similarities between birds and mammals. Another line of work, using the specific brain structures of songbirds, which learn their vocalizations, has found some key differences in how the basal ganglia circuits are organized. Work proposed here will determine how portions of the chicken basal ganglia are wired, and how individual nerve cells in those structures work. Emphasis will be on how similar or different the structure and function of these brain regions are between birds and mammals. Data gathered through this sort of comparative research has two major beneficial effects: they shed light on how brains have evolved; and they provide information on how different species have solved problems in similar or different ways doc22082 none Bacterial chromosomes and plasmids are usually circular. Borrelia burgdorferi, the Lyme disease agent, has linear chromosomes and harbor linear as well as circular plasmids. These linear replicons have closed hairpin ends (one DNA strand turns around and continues but becomes the complementary strand to form a linear duplex without free ends). In the temperate lambda-like phages N15 of E. coli and KO2 of Klebsiella oxytoca, upon lysogeny the prophage DNA s are not integrated into the circular bacterial chromosome, but exist as linear plasmids with closed hairpin ends. Occurrences of this type of DNA ends, though not common, have recently been recognized in different branches of the bacterial kingdom. The goal of this research is to study the mechanism with which these closed hairpin ends are generated using both genetic and molecular biological approaches. Both the phage encoded as well as the Borrelia bacterial encoded systems will be investigated. An integrase recombinase-like protein called protelomerase has been identified as the enzyme that acts in a sequence-specific manner via a cleavage-rejoining mechanism to generate the closed hairpin ends. The specific interaction between the protein and the target site, as well as the pathway of hairpin end generation will be investigated in detail. A saturation mutagenesis will be conducted to identify critical amino acids needed for function. This project can also lead to the design of new linear cloning vehicles especially for cloning lethal genes. The study of linear hairpin-ended replicons will provide new insight into chromosome maintenance. Since all pathogenic Borrelias have linear chromosomes with hairpin ends, this research will also contribute to the understanding of the biology of Borrelia diseases doc22083 none The long term goal of the proposed research is to define plant small heat shock protein (sHsp) function at both physiological and mechanistic levels. sHsps are a ubiquitous group of stress proteins that are believed to act as molecular chaperones to prevent irreversible denaturation aggregation of other proteins. sHsp chaperone function is potentially critical to plant survival of many different kinds of stress and to specific stages of plant growth and development. Plants are characterized by an unusual complexity of proteins belonging to the sHsp family; plants express both multiple cytosolic sHsps and specific sHsp isoforms targeted to intracellular organelles. The evolutionary expansion of the sHsp family in plants indicates that sHsps have provided a selective advantage over time in many contexts. The complete definition of the sHsp family from Arabidopsis, along with the biochemical framework from our studies of sHsp structure and chaperone action in vitro, provide a new starting point for investigations of sHsp function. Using a combination of molecular genetic and biochemical approaches in Arabidopsis thaliana we will define the physiological role of specific sHsps in stress tolerance, growth and development, and identify specific sHsp substrates. The proposed research has three specific aims. Aim 1: To determine the growth and stress tolerance phenotypes of sHsp loss- and gain-of-function plants. RNA interference transgenics and or T-DNA insertional mutants for genes representing the class I & II cytosolic sHsps, as well as plants constitutively expressing class I and or II sHsps, will be characterized for growth and stress tolerance. Aim 2: To identify potential sHsp substrates. We will test the hypothesis that sHsps bind a wide range of protein substrates and that each sHsp class interacts with unique substrates. Aim 3: To define other biochemical phenotypes of sHsp loss-of-function mutants. With these experiments it will finally be possible to test long-standing hypotheses about the importance of sHsps to plant stress tolerance and development and to uncover new functions for these unique chaperones doc22084 none Human activities are increasingly affecting earth s environment and ecosystems not only through direct impacts on climate and element cycling, but also by increasing the pace of introductions and extinctions of species. Because carbon and nutrients are cycled through the biosphere and plant species differ in traits that affect the rates of cycling of these elements, the abundance and diversity of species must affect ecosystem function. However, the extent to which individual plant species affect ecosystem function and the relationship between species diversity and ecosystem response to perturbation are still largely unknown. To what extent can plant species substitute for each other in ecosystem function? What key traits determine whether a plant species effect on nutrient cycling can be substituted by other species? A field experiment in Alaskan tussock tundra will examine these questions by removing different combinations of plant species in the presence and absence of fertilization. The investigators will obtain a detailed picture of how interactions between plant species control how nutrients are redistributed under fertilization, because nutrients are a primary control over carbon storage in this highly nutrient-limited ecosystem. They will also track potential introductions of new species as plant community composition shifts because of the removals or fertilization. The results will help reveal how human-induced environmental perturbations may change the mechanisms controlling ecosystem carbon storage and plant species abundance and diversity. This is a collaborative project with Michelle Mack doc22085 none The symposium (scheduled for the SICB meeting in Toronto, January 4-8, ) has a number of related goals. It shall honor Peter W. Hochachka for his numerous, pioneering and decades-long contributions to the study of biochemical adaptation to the environment. The symposium shall feature historical perspectives and the latest developments in areas encompassed by the field of biochemical adaptation to the environment. It shall provide zoologists an overview of how, over the past 30 years, the field of adaptational biochemistry has grown from an infant, highly speculative field into one that continues to be fascinating and dynamic, but is now mature, sophisticated, and highly influential. The symposium shall demonstrate that the August Krogh Principle (choosing the species best suited to the scientific question of interest) is alive and well and illustrate the broad range of techniques including nmr spectroscopy, molecular biology, and comparative phylogenetic approaches, used in studies of biochemical adaptation. The symposium shall illustrate how tightly interwoven this discipline has become with various subdisciplines in ecology and evolutionary biology, i.e., that it has become one with the rest of the biological sciences. The symposium shall have 10 speakers who will each give 30 minute presentations. Their lectures shall be written up for publication in American Zoologist doc22086 none In this project, funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Janda will study IVR processes in molecules and clusters embedded in liquid helium droplets at a temperature of 0.4 K. Appropriate pico-second pump-probe techniques and pulsed valve technology will be developed for both reactant preparation and monitoring the chemical dynamics inside the clusters. When gases are cooled to very low temperatures they usually condense into a liquid or solid form. When trapped into ultra-cold droplets of liquid helium, molecules and clusters largely retain their rotational and vibrational degrees of freedom. Their properties apparent at ordinary temperatures are only slightly modified owing to the weak interaction that couples them to the surrounding bath of liquid helium. The studies of these modifications are of intrinsic interest as they provide fundamental data about the properties of liquid helium and may be relevant to eventual chemical reactions that take place in the ultra-cold environment of the droplets. This research will be conducted with graduate and undergraduate students and postdoctoral research associates. They will acquire knowledge and training in one of the forefront areas of physical chemistry in preparation for entry into the scientific technical workforce doc22087 none How plants perceive and transduce hormone signals is a fundamental question in biology that also has important practical applications. The response to ethylene gas serves as a paradigm for understanding of plant hormone signal transduction. Ethylene plays critical roles in development (such as in the ripening of fruits) and in responses to a variety of physical and biological stresses (such as pathogen attack). Understanding of these various roles of ethylene are being addressed using genetic, molecular and biochemical approaches in Arabidopsis. In particular, the goal of this project is to characterize the functions of the EIN3 EIL family of plant specific DNA-binding proteins in ethylene-mediated transcriptional regulation. EIN3 encodes a DNA-binding transcriptional activator protein and is a member of a small gene family of EIN3-LIKE (EIL1, EIL2, EIL3, EIL4, EIL5) proteins. Along with another transcription activator called ERF1, the EIN3 EIL proteins participate in a little understood transcriptional regulatory cascade. This project will investigate how the activities of the EIN3 EIL proteins are modulated by ethylene and also explore the roles of these proteins in mediating ethylene signaling to the various downstream responses. In particular, the possibility of posttranslational modification(s), changes in protein stability or alterations in the subcellular localization of EIN3 EIL proteins in response to ethylene will be examined. In addition, biochemical and genetic approaches will be employed to identify EIN3 EIL interacting proteins. Analysis of individual EIL1,EIL2, EIL3, EIL4, and EIL5 loss-of-function mutants, various multiple mutant combinations and ectopic expression of these genes will provide significant new insight into the possible functions of these genes in downstream responses to ethylene. In addition, genome-wide studies of EIN3 EIL gene expression and in vivo target identification will be conducted using custom gene expression and whole genome tiling arrays, respectively. Identification and characterization of the EIN3 EIL ethylene signaling pathway genes and analysis of their interactions with other signaling pathway components will provide new insights into tremendous diversity of biological affects of the simple hydrocarbon, ethylene. Moreover, understanding of the functions of these proteins will allow the ability to modify the beneficial and or detrimental effects of ethylene in any plant, in particular, crops with important economic or social value doc22088 none Shaffer One of the most important goals in environmental biology is understanding how changing, variable climates effect the distribution of plants and animals. In the U.S., it is known that the end of the last major glaciation about 20,000 years ago was a period of extreme climate change, with mile-thick ice sheets extending south of Chicago and New York City. It is suspected that these ice sheets had other climatological effects, including a period of extreme dryness that extended over much of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. Research is proposed that seeks to understand the effects of this drying period by sampling the DNA of multiple vertebrate species with different ecological tolerances, and analyzing them for characteristic patterns of variation that are associated with range contraction followed by range expansion. Thus, the animals that currently live in the Great Plains will provide information, via their DNA, how climatological events affected them 20,000 years ago. This work will be conducted on National Wildlife Refuges and Long Term Ecological Research sites, employing and training local high school and college students from across the country. This research will allow us to better understand why some parts of our country have very high species diversity while others are low, as well as how future climate changes will affect patterns of animal diversity doc22089 none The class of microbes known as the macronuclear ciliates are instrumental in telomere research because its members have macronuclei that contain hundreds of thousands of linear gene-sized mini-chromosomes that have telomeres at both their ends. Electron microscopy of macronuclear chromatin has shown that these chromosomes are organized into rosette structures in which the telomere ends are anchored in a central core structure while the DNA of the macronuclear chromosomes form large loops. The X-ray crystal structures of two different macronuclear telomere complexes from Oxytricha nova show that its two-subunit telomere end binding protein (OnTEBP) can form two distinct macromolecular assemblies with telomeric single-stranded DNA. One is a protective a:b:ssDNA end-capping complex involving both the a and b subunits of the protein and the other is a dimeric (a:ssDNA)2 complex that can link telomeres together. These structures have led to a model of how the two OnTEBP complexes can mediate the condensation and decondensation of macronuclear chromatin through the formation of telomere anchored rosette structures. This project examines the role of the (a:ssDNA)2 dimer in the formation of higher-order telomere complexes. The experiments will use a multi-disciplinary approach to measure the kinetics and thermodynamics of DNA binding to OnTEBP complexes, elucidate the structural basis for the DNA dependent dimerization of the OnTEBP a subunit, and determine the role of (a:ssDNA)2 dimers in the formation of the a:b:ssDNA end capping complex. The results will increase our understanding of the structure and dynamics of macromolecular complexes at telomeres. Telomeres are the protein-DNA complexes that protect the ends of linear eukaryotic chromosomes from recombination and degradation. Telomeres are required for proper cell growth and viability. This research project focuses on the protein-DNA and protein-protein interactions found at telomeres and the manner in which larger complexes formed via telomere-telomere interactions are assembled. The results will provide insights into how the genetic integrity of chromosomes is maintained in cells doc22090 none The chromosomes of most higher organisms show two cytologically distinct domains known as euchromatin and heterochromatin. These domains differ in biases in DNA sequence composition and chromosomal protein distributions along the length of the chromosome. They also differ in gene expression, as first revealed by studies of chromosome rearrangements in Drosophila. Rearrangements that create novel junctions between euchromatin and heterochromatin result in the mosaic inactivation of genes near the breakpoint, a phenomenon known as Position Effect Variegation (PEV). The most popular models of PEV propose that it results from the invasion of one chromatin state into the other across the rearrangement breakpoint. These models view heterochromatin as a highly condensed chromatin state that represses gene expression. This project is aimed at critically evaluating existing models of heterochromatin to account for its activating influence on transcription of heterochromatic sequences. The studies will focus on a block of heterochromatin located on the left arm of Chromosome 2 (2Lh) of Drosophila melanogaster. The transcription of specific 2Lh sequences will be examined in individual flies with structurally normal chromosomes and in mutant strains carrying chromosome rearrangements that induce PEV on heterochromatic genes. Studies of transcription will involve comparing promoters of the 2Lh genes to determine if they differ in structure from euchromatic gene promoters. The effects on 2Lh transcription of reducing the nuclear concentrations of three proteins, HP1, ORC, and HOAP, which modify and bind heterochromatin, will be assayed genetically and molecularly. The chromatin immunoprecipitation technique will be used to determine if these proteins associate directly, as a complex or individually, with 2Lh sequences in vivo. These studies should identify cis- and trans-regulators of heterochromatin. The findings should help reveal the molecular determinants of heterochromatin and the role of its binding proteins in activating transcription. In her position as Director of Biology Programs at the University of Washington, the PI helps guide the education of all undergraduate biology students there. Each year in her own laboratory she typically mentors several undergraduates carrying out research projects doc22091 none Dr. Richard Kemp, Department of Chemistry, University of New Mexico, is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division for research into the rapid fixation of carbon dioxide into organic molecules. There is a need for C-11 containing compounds for several applications, including positron emission tomography (PET). Due to the short half-life of C-11 rapid incorporation of C-11 carbon dioxide is required if these species are to be obtained. The objective of this research is to develop routes to incorporate C-11 carbon dioxide into organic products in less than one hour. Carbon dioxide is known to slowly insert into subvalent group 14 amides to produce isocyanate and or carbodiimide. Building on the observation that changes in ligand structure and main group metal can dramatically affect CO2 incorporation rates, low-valent Ge, Sn, and Pb reagents will be prepared with a variety of ligands. Their reaction with carbon dioxide will be studied in order to determine the factors that influence the reaction rate. Group 14 compounds will then be developed into catalysts by using various silylated organic amines as substrates. Finally, related compounds not based on Group 14 bis(amides), which should also react with CO2 to produce isocyanates, will be studied. In this project, methods will be developed to rapidly incorporate radioactive C-11 into organic molecules. These species are required for several applications including PET. This is a GOALI project that involves collaborative efforts between the University of New Mexico and General Electric Corp. The research includes developing the basic science behind rapid carbon dioxide incorporation. The eventual goal is new industrial preparations of valuable radioactive products. Both graduate and postdoctoral students will gain experience in multitask interdisciplinary objectives as part of a collaboration with industry. It is likely that students from traditionally under-represented groups will participate in this research doc22092 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. John Gatesy at the University of California, Riverside to study the evolution of reproductive protein genes in mammals. Recently, reproductive proteins that are important for fertilization have been characterized in several mammalian species. Preliminary studies suggest that many of these proteins, both egg and sperm-specific, have evolved at a rapid rate. In this proposed research, modern molecular techniques will be used to survey reproductive protein gene sequences from several species of even-toed hoofed mammals. These data will be used to better characterize the pattern of molecular evolution in mammalian reproductive proteins, to determine which regions of these molecules are prone to mutation, and to test whether reproductive proteins are useful for reconstructing the evolutionary history of mammals. Dr. Gatesy will mentor teams of undergraduate students at the University of California, Riverside within the context of this multidisciplinary project. In addition to getting first-hand experience in a wet lab, the students will integrate their laboratory work with library research and computer analysis. The combined research group will produce basic data that are relevant to diverse biological sub-disciplines by exploring reproduction, a foundation of evolutionary biology, at the genetic level. A detailed understanding of reproductive proteins also is important for studies of human fertility and infertility. Some of the species utilized in this study (cow, sheep, goat) are standard model organisms for fertility research. Comparative analyses of reproductive molecules from these species and close relatives will facilitate experimental research on reproduction doc22093 none Both reproduction and whole-organism performance are influenced by the endocrine system, and all of these traits have heritable, genetic components. Elucidating links among genetics, reproductive function, performance, and the endocrine and immune systems is essential to understanding how evolution has shaped reproductive strategies and physiology. Systems with discrete polymorphisms provide good models for examining the relationships among these traits since variation both within and among morphs can be examined. Male side-blotched lizards (Uta stansburiana) have three different color morphs (orange, blue, or yellow throat), which arise from a gene of major effect. Each of the types exhibits a different physiological and mating strategy (defense of a large territory with multiple females, defense of an individual female, or sneaking into another male s territory). In particular, territorial orange-throated males have high stamina and high levels of plasma testosterone, relative to the other two types. However, these males also have higher mortality rates than the other morphs. Testosterone may decrease the capability of the immune system to cope with infectious agents. In laboratory breeding studies, sprint speed, endurance, and standard metabolic rate of parents and progeny with known throat color genotypes will be measured. In the field, variation in plasma hormones (testosterone and corticosterone) and their effects on sprint speed, endurance, and field metabolic rate will be studied. DNA paternity analysis will provide field pedigrees to complement genetic studies in the laboratory. These experiments will allow the investigators to evaluate the links among hormones, physiology, and reproduction. Currently no data are available to address relations between genetics, physiology, performance, and reproduction; this research accomplishes this major goal and establishes a database for future work. Our work addresses the fundamental forces that shape the joint evolution of endocrine function, physiology and immune function doc22094 none Drs. David A. Stahl and Jesse G. Dillon of the University of Washington have been awarded a grant to study the evolutionary histories of certain microorganisms, and how they develop new metabolic capabilities. Stahl and Dillon will focus their research on microbes that respire ( breathe ) sulfate rather than oxygen, asking how they acquired this ability. Earlier studies have shown that exchange of genetic information between phylogenetically widely separated microbial groups has contributed to the evolution of sulfate-respiring microbes. However, the role this process (horizontal gene transfer) has played in their speciation and diversification is unknown. These investigators will use molecular and culture-based techniques, in combination with high-speed sorting of single cells using flow cytometry technology, to better resolve the contribution of horizontal gene transfer to the speciation process. It is known that organisms that live by sulfate respiration were present on earth at least as early as 3.5 billion years ago. Thus, they represent one of the earliest types of life on earth. Today they play a central role in the sulfur cycle, a key biogeochemical process on our planet. They are widely distributed in the environment and contribute to the biodegradation of organic matter in virtually all habitats lacking oxygen. For example, they can be responsible for one half of the total carbon degradation occurring in near-shore marine sediments. Although sulfate respiring microorganisms are central participants in global sulfur and carbon cycles, little is known about how this mode of living originated and how it has diversified within and among different earth habitats. The study of how horizontal gene transfer has influenced the distribution of sulfate respiring organisms will contribute to a better understanding of the microbial speciation process, and also address a more fundamental question of the origin of our planet s biogeochemical cycles doc22095 none Hooper The search for patterns of community assembly has occupied the last 25 years in community ecology and remains controversial today. A commonly sought assembly rule is that species coexistence in communities will be enhanced by differences in traits related to competition for limiting resources (i.e., that niche overlap is minimized). Put another way, do species from complementary guilds or functional groups have a better chance of persisting than those with strong overlap in resource use characteristics? Evidence for the role of complementarity among plant groups in structuring communities is sporadic. The balance between rates of external stochastic processes (such as disturbance or priority effects of colonization) compared to internal community dynamics (such as competition or facilitation) may be critical in determining the degree to which internal assembly dynamics are manifested. Gaining further insight into this question is critical for understanding how communities might be structured, and for the implications of that structure for ecosystem dynamics. We propose a five-year experiment to assess the roles of initial plant composition and functional complementarity in structuring communities of serpentine annual grasslands. We seek to test several hypotheses centered on the following questions, generally grouped into two themes: 1) Does the initial composition of a community shape its subsequent development? If so, for how long? Are there different stable endpoints? 2) To what extent does complementary resource use (i.e., niche differentiation) versus dominance among plant species govern patterns of community development? Are other factors, such as seed input or climatic conditions more important in determining community composition? Our goal is not to prove or disprove the predominance of assembly rules, but rather to better understand the conditions under which they might strongly influence community composition versus be overwhelmed by other factors. We will use as our experimental system a series of California serpentine grassland communities that vary in functional group composition and richness. Functional composition has been maintained since the plots were established in . In fall and , seeds of six additional species (3 species each from two groups) were added to test the effects of functional characteristics and diversity on invasibility of ecosystems. Thus we now have a system with treatments that differ in initial functional composition, that have had common seed sources for a number of additional species, and that will be subject to continuing seed rain from surrounding grasslands. Our plan is to track changes in community composition over the next five years as the communities develop from their initially different starting points. Monitoring of vegetation changes in these experimental communities through the next several years provides a unique opportunity to gain insight into interactions among a variety of processes that help shape ecological communities doc22096 none Hormonal control of behavior extends to physically complex courtship displays in many bird species, but is not well understood. In a tropical bird of Panama, the golden-collared manakin, the males execute characteristic loud wingsnaps as part of a courtship dance. The males have three wing muscles that differ from those in females in size and or biochemical composition, and there are motor neurons in the spinal cord that show more molecular receptors for androgenic sex steroid hormones than in females, suggesting that manakins are useful models for evaluating steroid control of complex peripheral neuromuscular systems. This project integrates molecular biology, biochemistry, anatomy and behavioral work to determine how hormones seasonally regulate this behavior in this sexually dimorphic system. Gene expression and metabolic enzyme activity provide data on distributions of steroid hormones and their receptors, and for comparisons between male and female spinal cords. Determining which particular muscles are involved in the wingsnap allows determining how sexual dimorphism of the muscles and the androgen-sensitive motoneurons in the spinal cord are relevant to the behavior. Use of androgen-blocking agents tests whether seasonally fluctuating androgens may cause changes across the breeding and non-breeding seasons in the anatomy and physiology of the spinal cord and muscles. Results from this work will provide important information on how steroid hormones act on this peripheral neuromuscular system to control behavior. The impact of this work extends beyond neuroendocrinology to reproductive physiology and evolutionary biology, and may have use in bird breeding. This project also involves excellent opportunities for student training and an important international component with Panama doc22097 none Ecologists have long recognized that spatial heterogeneity can be crucial for the generation and maintenance of biological diversity. For example, a diverse array of species can be maintained if environmental conditions vary from place to place, and if each species has a distinct set of conditions under which it can exclude other species. Recently, theoretical studies have also shown that diversity can be maintained even if conditions do not vary from place to place; this can occur through a process called self-organization. Self-organization is the emergence of large scale patterns of coexisting species due only to local interactions among different species. Whether self-organized spatial heterogeneity is generated by actual ecological communities (as opposed to communities simulated by a computer) is controversial. This research project will use laboratory communities of microorganisms to study whether localized interactions can result in self-organized spatial heterogeneity, whether self-organized heterogeneity is sufficient to promote the coexistence of populations, and how self-organized communities change through evolution. Among the most critical challenges facing humanity are the conservation, restoration and wise management of the Earth s diverse living resources. To meet these challenges, society requires basic information concerning how these resources are generated and maintained. This research project will generate such information doc22098 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project addresses the development of Innovative Ultra-Broadband Ferrite Circulators Isolators providing a transmission bandwidth broader than a 10:1 frequency ratio. A traditional circulator junction utilizing a single ferrite material results in a 3:1 bandwidth. A non-traditional stripline junction circulator for which the transmission band extends from 1.6 to 16 GHz has been designed and fabricated. This circulator design involves 3 different kinds of ferrite materials to be packed as tiles to form a composite junction. Even broader bandwidth has also been theoretically predicted, if more ferrite materials are used to compose the junction, rendering a bandwidth covering from 1 to 20 GHz. Researches on broadband transformer circuits are thus proposed, allowing for 50 S impedance to be realized with the input output ports accompanying the operation of the broadband circulator isolator junctions. The proposed innovative circulators isolators can be used as universal instruments under broadband considerations. For example, it can be used in measurements requiring interband operation, such as encountered in a Network Analyzer performing scattering parameter measurements. In radiometry applications it allows for narrow-width electromagnetic pulses to be used with monostatic radars. Multiple radars operating at distinctive frequency bands can be combined to share a common antenna aperture so as to reduce overall radar cross section doc22099 none The research is focused in two connected directions. First, new carbonylative carbotricyclizations and related reactions will be developed. The method provides an efficient method for the production of fused polycyclic systems. Second, enantioselective and regioselective hydrocarbonylation reactions will be carried out with fluorous catalysis using fluorinated solvents and with fluorous catalysis using supercritical carbon dioxide. The prospects are high for developing methodology wherein catalyst recovery and reuse are possible, thereby leading to practical green chemistry. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research efforts of Dr. Iwao Ojima of the Department of Chemistry at SUNY, Stony Brook. Professor Ojima will focus his work on developing methodology to affect carbocyclization and carbonylation reactions. He will also develop green chemistry in catalytic organic synthesis promoted by transition metal catalysts. The research has broader impact for the training of students and for use in the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries. Collaboration between academia and industry are already in place doc22100 none Neotyphodium and Epichloe species, known as fungal endophytes of grasses, are systemic, maternally transmitted symbionts that protect their host plants from herbivory, and can enhance drought tolerance, disease resistance, nutrient acquisition, biomass production, and competitiveness. The endophytes produce bioprotective alkaloids of four distinct chemical classes. This project concerns one such class, the saturated 1-aminopyrrolizidine alkaloids (loline and related compounds), which are highly insecticidal, complex heterocyclic molecules, and can reach levels of 2% total biomass in plant-endophyte symbioses. It is conceivable that these abundant alkaloids are also involved in drought tolerance or any of several other host fitness enhancements, but genetic and molecular genetic investigations are needed to address their true ecological and physiological roles. Thus, the goals of this project are to elucidate the genetics and biosynthetic pathways of the loline alkaloids, and to develop background information and tools to study the roles of these alkaloids in plant fitness. Two gene clusters (lol) have been identified that are associated with loline alkaloid production by the endophyte species, Neotyphodium uncinatum. In addition metabolic precursors of loline alkaloids have been determined. The first objective in this project is to complete DNA sequence determinations for the two lol gene clusters. The next objective is to utilize molecular genetic techniques to seek confirmation that the lol cluster genes are involved in loline alkaloid biosynthesis. The third objective is to test possible biosynthetic pathways for lolines by synthesizing putative intermediates labeled with stable isotopes, feeding these to loline alkaloid-producing cultures, and employing mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance to detect and identify the labeled atoms incorporated in the lolines. The information and mutants developed in this project will be a resource for future studies detailing the natural roles of lolines in grass-endophyte symbioses. Symbioses of grasses with fungal endophytes are protective mutualisms, whereby the endophytes ward off a variety plant pests and parasites. Among the fungal products involved in protecting host plants are the loline alkaloids, which are highly insecticidal, abundant in the symbiotic plant, and chemically complex. The pathway of loline production is unknown, and elucidating this pathway will provide new insights into enzyme mechanisms and evolution of symbiotic microorganisms. This project will employ a combination of modern techniques in molecular biology and chemistry to identify the steps in the loline production. Fungal mutants that are produced in the study will be a resource for future research to determine the specific roles and activities of lolines in endophyte-grass symbioses. The research topic is relevant to the ecological interactions of plants, fungi and herbivores, and also to the potential use of natural products for environmentally friendly biological protection of plants doc22101 none Rigoberto Hernandez of the Georgia Institute of Technology is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to develop models that describe nonstationary dynamics in chemical reactivity. The major objectives of this research are (1) to develop non-phenomenological formulations of existing irreversible generalized Langevin equation (iGLE) models and direct isomorphisms between the latter and nontrivial chemical systems; (2) to explore nonstationary models that do not have the multiplicative structure of the iGLE; and (3) to explore chemical applications to polymerization and protein folding dynamics of the nonstationary models with new chemical insights and techniques. The expected outcome of this research is an improved understanding of the chemistry that takes place under heterogeneous nonequilibrium conditions. For example, the reaction conditions in solid-state polymerization strongly determine the final polymer distribution. Similarly, the time-dependent viscosity of a thermosetting polymer is an important characteristic in the reaction injection mold processing of encapsulants doc22102 none The focus of this research is the development of synthetic methodology using the allenic Pauson-Khand reaction to prepare cross-conjugated trienes via a formal Alder-ene reaction. The scope of the reaction will be determined and the resulting information will be used to guide the synthesis of complex molecules having interesting biological properties. The research will also lead to a better understanding of transition metal catalyzed carbon-carbon bond forming reactions. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Kay M. Brummond of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh. Professor Brummond will focus her efforts on the use of transition metals for the development of new strategies for the construction of molecularly complex and biologically relevant compounds. Carbon-carbon bond forming reactions with an emphasis on the allene functional group will be emphasized. The methodology has potential impact for the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries and the project is an excellent vehicle for the training of graduate students doc22103 none Feigenson The Department of Geological Sciences at Rutgers University will purchase a new multicollector mass spectrometer with funds provided jointly by the National Science Foundation and Rutgers University. This instrumentation is crucial for isotopic analyses required in three major projects currently supported by NSF: Central American volcanism (Continental Dynamics MARGINS Subduction Factory), New Jersey drilling (Continental Dynamics and ODP), and Biocomplexity (Ocean Sciences). The new facility for radiogenic isotope analysis will complement recently acquired stable isotope and noble gas mass spectrometers in the department. It will also replace the currently operating, aging TIMS, a VG Sector single collector, which was put into operation in and has served its purpose well over the past 15 years. The ongoing research projects in Central American volcanism and Late Cretaceous to Holocene sea-level and global climate change will be greatly augmented by the new instrumentation, and will allow a significant increase in the number of samples analyzed. The Central American studies will enhance our understanding of volcanic processes in an active arc system, and in the future may increase our ability to predict volcanic eruptions. The New Jersey drilling program and the biocomplexity research focus significantly on global climate change, and thus have direct impact on an important scientific, social and political problem doc22053 none This study will utilize high-resolution analysis of cores from closed-basin lakes in the northern Great Plains to determine the frequency, intensity, duration, periodicity, and synchrony of droughts during the Holocene and to examine how vegetation and fire responded to drought. Since vegetation and lakes in the Northern Great Plains are highly sensitive to drought, this region offers an extraordinary opportunity to document decadal- to-century scale climate cycles in the mid-continental United States. The working hypothesis is that the signal of drought from a single site is regional and that droughts were synchronous across the region. To test this hypothesis, the study will utilize lake-sediment mineralogy, fossil pollen, carbon isotopes of charcoal, and charcoal abundance to develop detailed reconstruction of drought cycles from the Northern Great Plains at a decadal scale. This will facilitate evaluation of the teleconnections between mid-continental climate and the North Atlantic region, where recent investigations have linked century to millennial scale climate oscillations to variations in solar irradiance. This research has the potential for broad impact in range of physical and social sciences. Assessment of drought impacts forecast by atmospheric models for the Northern Great Plains requires understanding of natural drought variability. Evidence from paleoscience suggests that 20th century droughts (e.g., the Dust Bowl) do not provide perspective on the range of severe droughts that have occurred in even the recent past. Historical evidence is incomplete and paleoscience data have not yet been assembled at appropriate temporal and spatial scales to assess the intensity, periodicity, and impacts of past droughts doc22105 none The Research in Undergraduate Institutions (RUI) project will investigate interaction of the stratosphere and troposphere in context of the stratospheric sudden warming phenomenon. Interest in the stratospheric circulation, including sudden warming, has recently been rekindled by observational analysis that suggests that a primary mode of tropospheric variability in polar latitudes - the Northern Hemisphere Annular Mode - is influenced by the downward migration of annular anomalies from the stratosphere. Variations in stratospheric polar vortex have been linked to seasonal anomalies in the tropospheric zonal-mean zonal winds and circulation patterns such as the Arctic Oscillation North Atlantic Oscillation. These patterns have profound impact on European and North American climate and weather. Dr. Limpasuvan will conduct a dynamically oriented objective analysis of the mechanisms coupling the troposphere and stratosphere, including wave propagation. Diagnosis of heat and momentum fluxes associated with sudden warming will also be undertaken. The project will advance the understanding of mechanisms responsible for stratosphere s influence on surface weather and climate. The project will involve undergraduate students at Coastal Carolina University in an effort to integrate research into the school s science education, and strengthen the institution s new Applied Physics program. It will provide valuable and unique research experience to undergraduates in South Carolina and the greater southeastern region doc22106 none This research will investigate the residential and occupational integration of European immigrants and migrant Southern blacks in New York and Chicago between and . Previous research has analyzed these questions using samples from individual Census data in and . The availability of a 100% sample of the Census makes possible linkages back to an era when immigration from West Europe was at its height and immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe was just beginning. The data will enable answers to such questions as whether the greater integration in of the first immigrant groups (e.g., Germans and Irish) over more recent immigrants (e.g., Italians and Russians) was because of their longer history of assimilation or because they were never as segregated in the first place. Matching individuals and families back to greatly enhances the ability to study inter-generational mobility and to distinguish 3rd and 4+ generation Americans who have been previously classified together as native whites doc22107 none Dr. Charles G. Riordan, Chemistry Department, University of Delaware is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Program to develop develop homogeneous, coordination complexes of nickel that activate dioxygen under mild conditions. A series of monovalent nickel complexes supported by poly(thioether)borato ligands will be allowed to react with O2 to generate thermally-sensitive, reduced oxygen intermediates. The molecular and electronic structure of these intermediates will be studied using low temperature spectroscopic techniques including UV-visible, resonance Raman, X-ray absorption and X-ray diffraction analyses. These results will be interpreted using density functional theory to define the reaction landscape of the nickel-oxygen species to establish geometric- and electronic-structure function correlations. Concomitant experiments will explore nickel-based activation of relatedsubstrates, e.g. elemental sulfur, phosphorous and diazenes, RN=NR. Selective oxidation of organic substrates generally increases their utility in the chemical and pharmaceutical arenas. Oxidations employing O2 represent attractive and environmentally responsible approaches. The approach is inspired by an appreciation of the activity and chemical selectivity with which metalloproteins utilize dioxygen to synthesize new molecules. Outcomes from the studies will have broad implications to industrial and biological oxidation processes. The breadth of the research experience will provide excellent intellectual and technical training for students in organic and inorganic synthesis, physical measurements and kinetic and mechanistic aspects of inorganic chemistry. The experience will prepare students for careers in either industry or academia doc22108 none In this project, the PI proposes to (i) develop and test new inverse algorithms for assessing particle size and size distribution in monodisperse, binary, and polydisperse suspensions from experimental multi-wavelength FDPM data, (ii) assess changes in FDPM measured scattering properties arising from depletion force, electrostatic interactions, and colloids functionalized with ligand receptor systems of biological significance; and (iii) evaluate those changes in the context of first principles models of partial structure factor. The final objective of the GOALI project is to develop a low cost, simple diagnostics tool in characterize the interaction between colloidal particles in dense suspensions. Extension of the system to on-line characterization of intermediate and final colloidal products is planned for chemical, pharmaceutical, and biotechnology industries doc22109 none The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology supports a broad-based interdisciplinary research program. The research is conducted in five interdisciplinary research groups (IRGs). These include Microphotonic Materials and Structures (IRG 1) where new physical phenomena in materials are discovered for which relevant length scales are comparable to a photon wavelength. Such photonic crystals can exhibit new phenomena that can be formulated by theory and applied in novel optical devices. IRG 2 on Nanostructured Polymer Assemblies seeks to gain understanding of how polymer nanocomposites organize at the molecular level and how to enhance or control the performance of electronic, magnetic, biosensor and optical devices based on these materials. Electronic Transport in Mesoscopic Semiconductor and Magnetic Structures (IRG 3) explores charge and spin transport in solid-state electronic structures. Both chemically produced as well as lithographically defined nanostructures are investigated. IRG 4 on the Science and Engineering of Solid-State Portable Power Sources focuses on the fundamental science and engineering of materials for solid-state electro-chemical power sources. The ultimate goal of the IRG is to apply this fundamental knowledge to develop ultra-high performance batteries. Quantum Magnetism, Correlated Electrons and Superconductivity in Transition Metal Oxides (IRG 5) investigates the effects of carrier doping, temperature and magnetic fields on materials with strongly correlated electron systems. Such materials exhibit unusual electronic, magnetic and superconducting properties which are currently not understood. Future activities in this IRG are expected to be reduced. The Center has a strong education program directed toward graduate students, undergraduates, middle and high school students and K-12 teachers. Emphasis is placed on including under-represented minorities in these programs. The education activities enjoy the broad participation of MIT students and faculty and are closely linked to complementary programs in other MIT administrative units, such as the MIT museum and MIT s Council on Primary and Secondary Education. The Center operates shared facilities and has an effective industrial outreach program. Participants in the Center currently include 35 senior investigators, 2 postdoctoral associates, 28 graduate students, 33 undergraduates, and 2 technicians and other support personnel. Professor Michael F. Rubner directs the MRSEC doc22110 none Many economic problems are naturally modeled as coordination problems. Speculators in financial markets may have an incentive to attack a currency only if they believe that others will do so. Depositors in a bank may have an incentive to withdraw their money only if they think that others will do so. In such settings, informal commentary points to confidence and self-fulfilling expectations as determinants of the outcome, but there is still no consensus on the corresponding theory to flesh out these explanations. The purpose of this project is to fund the participation of U.S. researchers in an international conference that brings together theorists and experimental economists who have been studying these issues. The conference will be held in Barcelona, Spain on August 17-19, in the campus of Pompeu Fabra University. The time is ripe is for such a conference. There has been rapid theoretical progress in the modeling of coordination with incomplete information. However, there is no consensus on whether the predictions of the new theories are of practical relevance. There is a well-developed experimental literature on coordination games. These literatures have developed independently and the two groups of researchers have much to learn from each other doc22111 none Michael J Shaw of the Southern Illinois University (a primarily undergraduate institution) is supported the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program for investigation of the factors that influence metal-mediated reactions that produce heterocyclic aromatic compounds from alkynes. A variety of d6-metal complexes involving acetylenic ketones and esters (including a variety of spectroscopic labels) will be synthesized. These will be used to probe a number of aspects of the reactions of interest. The main part of the research will be spectro-electrochemical investigations and surface normalized incident Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. (SNIFTIRS). These powerful techniques will be used to detect and characterize reaction intermediates with life-times of a few seconds or less. The type of process that is of principal interest in this program is widely used for practical purposes, but the detailed course of the reaction is not well understood. The powerful combination of experimental techniques that this study will bring to bear on the process will greatly facilitate understanding the intermediate steps in the reaction sequence, leading to improved effectiveness of the transformation. This project will also provide an exceptional vehicle for introducing undergraduate students to research, using a variety of sophisticated, but well-tested and experimentally tractable methodologies. Success in this project will have impact both on the technological use of organometallic transformations, but also on the educational development of a number of students, some training to be future science teachers doc22112 none This exploratory research examines economic incentives for alternative racial identity norms among Hispanic Americans, with a special focus on persons of Mexican descent. The theoretical model has two pure norms: an acculturationist norm and a racial identity norm. If an acculturationist norm prevails Hispanics will acculturate into American society as Non-Hispanic whites and will not face persistent racial discrimination in the labor market. If a racial identity norm prevails Hispanic will develop a unique race identity, i.e., neither black nor white, and face persistent racial discrimination in the labor market. Empirical evaluation suggests that an acculturationist norm will likely prevail among Mexican and Cuban Americans. Accordingly, Hispanic Americans, especially persons of Mexican and Cuban descent but less so Puerto Ricans, are able to increase income annual income and hourly wages by abandoning a unique Hispanic racial identity and acculturating into a Non-Hispanic white racial identity. However, neither the abandonment of Spanish nor the abandonment of a specifically Hispanic racial self-identity is sufficient to overcome the penalties associated with having a dark complexion and Non-European phenotype. This is a unique study. Many economic studies have examined the impact on race on economic outcomes but no previous study has examined the formation of racial identity as an economic variable, i.e., to explore the thesis that racial identity is endogenous doc22113 none This grant is for the development of computational tools for simulating very large-scale problems involving granular flow. Rather than use a continuum model of a granular material (which involves a large number of assumptions and approximations about the way they behave), rather we look at the computational challenges in discrete element models. These are challenging large-scale problems with thousands to millions of grains that have to be simulated. Direct interactions are usually between touching grains. However, one grain can not only affect the others that it touches, but those will affect their neighbors, and so on. Further, the network of interactions is dynamic. Indeed, the overall pattern of interactions can become very different depending on the circumstances: if a sand table is shaken, then most of the sand grains will be independent; when the grains settle, each grain will be touching many others. In order to efficiently organize the computational tasks, we need to use techniques from graph or network theory. These tools include graph partitioning techniques, graph coloring techniques, and new techniques for handling the collisions of grains. Since the problems are very large scale, currently available techniques often have to be adapted from dealing with small-scale problems to deal with large-scale problems. Furthermore, since the network of interactions is dynamic, these techniques have to be adapted to use information about the previous network in order to efficiently obtain the corresponding information about the new network. In this project, we will be developing these tools and drawing techniques from graph theory, continuous optimization, complementarity theory, and computational geometry. Granular materials are materials made of small, relatively hard objects that collide off each other. Sand, breakfast cereals, talcum powder, and a box of marbles are all examples of granular materials. Understanding these materials and simulating their behavior directly is difficult because the position and velocity of each of the ``grains in the material needs to be tracked and updated as they move and collide. In order to do this well, we need high-performance computers, and we need to use them well. The crucial problem is to understand the nature of the interactions between the grains, and to develop automatic tools that can determine how to divide the computational tasks so that they can be tackled efficiently on high-performance and parallel computers doc22114 none The Advanced Materials Program in the Chemistry Division makes this award to University of California Riverside to develop novel open framework chalcogenide materials to advance new synthetic and structural concepts, and to better understand self-assembly processes and host-guest interactions. With this award, Professor Feng will study interactions between organic molecules and the semiconductor nanocrystal precursors to generate larger clusters, and to organize these clusters with controlled surface properties into 3-dimensional ordered frameworks. Properties of these clusters and their 3-D assemblies will be controlled by changing the composition and interactions between their inorganic and organic components. The synthesis of larger nanocrystals may lead to better understanding of material transition between molecules and colloidal nanocrystals, which in turn will help to control nucleation and growth processes in the synthesis of semiconductor materials. Research studies will be carried out in the synthesis and characterization of semiconductor nanoclusters and 3-dimensional ordered frameworks to enhance the understanding of nanocrystal synthesis and assembly of semiconductor materials, which will have potential applications in magnetic and electrooptic devices. Instructional and research training in solid state and materials chemistry will be provided to graduate and undergraduate students with this award doc22115 none The design or reform of electoral rules has been a subject of intense debate in many countries all over the world. Moreover, the choice of an electoral system may have important economic consequences, because of the induced difference in terms of the elected policy-making body. In this project I compare proportional representation systems and majoritarian systems in terms of: (1) the number of effective parties; (2) the expected policies, policy variance and welfare; (3) corruption; (4) strategic versus sincere voting; (5) affirmative action and gender equality. These objectives are pursued theoretically as well as empirically: the representative democracy model has to allow for strategic party behavior, strategic voting, free entry of candidates and new parties, and incumbency advantages, and politicians must be allowed to have both policy preferences and private objectives. With all these ingredients the model suggests that majoritarian systems induce more policy variance, less corruption, and less gender equality: these and many other predictions will be tested on international data and on the basis of some detailed country studies. The theoretical and empirical conclusions of the project can be important for electoral design in new democracies as well as for electoral reforms in established democracies. Beside the consequences of electoral formulas, the policy relevant conclusions of the project will involve the comparison of closed versus open list systems, the effectiveness and desirability of gender quotas, the optimal legal thresholds in proportional systems, and the optimal mix of public and private campaign financing. Moreover, the theoretical framework will probably be very useful for future researchers interested in other aspects of democratic policymaking doc22116 none In this project, funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Heaven will conduct research in the field of elementary reaction dynamics to investigate how long-range interaction forces between reactants influence the reaction probability and the partitioning of the energy between the products. High-resolution spectroscopy will be used to map out the long-range potentials for select reaction pairs and associated van der Waals complexes. The project includes a study of the effects of reactant orientation on the unimolecular decay dynamics and the solvation of open-shell species. This project deals with fundamental issues of molecular reaction dynamics, i.e., how molecules react with one another in time and as function of separation. Experiments will be performed on select prototype systems to obtain data that will assist in the development of advanced theoretical models that describe reaction chemistry. The work is done in collaboration with theorists. Students and postdoctoral research associates participate in this research and thereby obtain knowledge and skills that prepare them for employment in industry, government laboratories or academia doc22117 none Dana L. Haynie Ohio State University Residential Mobility and Adolescent Risk Behavior This research seeks to explain why a family s residential mobility tends to have a negative impact on their adolescent children. Changing schools is correlated with a variety of risky adolescent behaviors and negative outcomes such as delinquency, sexual activity, suicide, and poor academic achievement. This study attempts to identify the mechanisms that explain these outcomes. Peer social networks may be especially important since low status, often deviant, peer groups may be more receptive to new, entering students. The analysis will use new longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) that include measures of both outcomes and peer networks. The project holds promise for developing theories of social control and social networks, and for informing parents and school officials as they deal with the stresses experienced by adolescents when they move to new communities and schools doc22118 none Professor Marjorie Langell of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is funded by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program to study adsorbates on transition metal oxide surfaces. Professor Langell proposes to utilize well-characterized stepped surfaces to extend her previous work. The effects of cation valence and coordination on surface composition and reactivity will be probed. Xenon and water adsorption on stepped NiO surfaces are probed, for example, utilizing high resolution electron energy loss, x-ray photoemission, auger electron and thermal desorption spectroscopy. Oxides are important industrial materials whose chemical properties are governed by the presence of defects. For example, iron oxides are important as catalysts in remediation of chlorocarbons and remediation in the environment. It is a challenge to prepare well-defined defect properties in order to correlate electronic and geometric structure with reactivity. Understanding these surface reactions will aid in the development of more efficient and environmentally friendly catalysis for industrial processes doc22119 none With the support of the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program, Professor Jay S. Siegel, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Calfornia, San Diego, is studying the stereochemistry of nanoscale molecules. Professor Siegel is carrying out the synthesis of molecules representing unusual topological stereoisomers, including chiral catenanes, enantiopure D3 trefoil knots, and Borromean links. As these molecules are prepared, properties arising from their unusual structures, including highly efficient fluorescence emission, are studied. The synthesis of bowl-shaped polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons similar to corranulene and the dynamics of their bowl-to-bowl inversion are also under investigation. Chiral derivatives of these structures will be prepared and their chiroptical and molecular recognition properties, including affinities for ions, gases, and polar molecules, will be studied. Liquid crystalline and dendrimeric corranulene-based structures will also be prepared. Molecular design, coupled with chemical synthesis, offers the best approach to the development of truly new molecular materials. Nanoscale molecules represent a relatively unexplored family of synthetically designed chemical structures, intermediate between classical natural products and biomolecules and polymers. Design principles for this area are still in their infancy, and the three-dimensional structures (stereochemistry) of these compounds remain fascinating. Professor Jay S. Siegel, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of California at San Diego, applies experimental, theoretical, and computational techniques to the synthesis and stereochemical elucidation of nanoscale molecules representing a variety of classical stereochemistries which are unrepresented by synthetic organic chemical systems, including trefoil knots and Borromean links doc22120 none Does political structure affect political culture? To be more specific, does a long period of authoritarian rule transform the attitudes, orientations and feelings citizens have about their political system, in particular their support of its constituent units? What are the factors that can explain variations in mass system support, and is their relative predictive power the same in both the periods? What can comparisons between the political cultures of newly democratizing nations tell us about the impact of authoritarianism and about the consolidation of democracy. This Doctoral Dissertation Research Support project examines the evolution of mass political attitudes, in particular system support, in Chile for the periods leading up to, and following, 16 years of authoritarian rule ( - ). The Chilean political system presents an ideal case for studying the link between political regime and political culture because of its generalizability and because the data are available. Longitudinal and cross-sectional comparisons are possible because of the presence of an extraordinary collection of survey data, particularly those from Chile, archived at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. The data also include cross-national surveys carried out in the post-authoritarian period: the Latinobarometro surveys , ; the World Values Survey , ; and the Hewlett Survey. These measure citizens opinions on a broad spectrum of social, economic and political subjects. This projects uses the available data to test, across regimes, a wide-range of hypotheses that focus on factors such as ideology, party identification, trust, participation, live satisfaction, economic conditions, class and religion to explain variations in mass support for democracy doc22121 none The allosteric regulation of enzyme activity is one of the most direct mechanisms for a cell to respond to fluctuations in its environment. While the allosteric properties and mechanism of a number of enzymes have been studied in great detail, there is relatively little known about the solution dynamics of these systems. E. coli methylglyoxal synthase, an allosterically regulated homohexameric enzyme, will be used to understand the role of protein dynamics in the allosteric regulation of a multisubunit enzyme. The 1H-15N backbone amide NMR resonances will be assigned using TROSY pulse-sequence technology, and the dynamics of each resonance will be measured on the picosecond to millisecond timescale in both the T-state and the R-state. Isothermal microcalorimetry will be used to determine the heat associated with the conformational change and to independently determine if a pre-existing equilibrium exists between the two allosteric conformations. In a reaction reminiscent of that catalyzed by triosephosphate isomerase, MGS catalyzes the elimination of phosphate from dihydroxyacetone phosphate to form the enol of methylglyoxal via an enediolic intermediate. Both the mechanism of proton transfer from oxygen to oxygen and the mechanism of phosphoryl elimination will be studied by a combination of site directed mutagenesis, mechanistic enzymology, computational analyses, and X-ray crystallography. The extent and importance of phosphoryl polarization to catalysis will be determined both by examining the structure of methylglyoxal synthase complexes of novel sulfur analogues of known inhibitors and by the kinetics of corresponding sulfur analogues of the substrate, dihydroxyacetone phosphate. The catalytic surfaces of methylglyoxal synthase and triosephosphate isomerase will be compared to understand how each enzyme controls its corresponding reaction pathway doc22122 none The University of Alaska has a collection of oral history recordings, made over several decades, of Native American (Inuit and Athabaskan) individuals. Although prototypes of Web access to such collections exist, research is needed to explore the opinions and preferences of the native communities to the wider distribution of these materials. This project will explore how they would like to see the Web used to benefit them, what use they can make of online access to the materials, and what kinds of improvements in interfaces and in policy would best suit the communities. The project involves both design of computer systems and travel and interviewing the communities. It will result in knowledge that may help ameliorate the digital divide between the majority US society and the generally poorer Native American communities, as well as presenting challenges to computer science research to learn how to build systems that support the policies needed by these communities doc22123 none Professor Rotello and co-workers will initially study the effects of redox switching on the molecular recognition properties of a number of small molecules (imide-diaminopyridine dyads). They will use EPR, NMR, and density functional computational methods to determine the factors that control the efficiency of redox modulated molecular recognition processes. They will then apply redox modulated recognition process to the controlled formation of supramolecular polymers and polymer networks. This polymer work will involve development of redox active cross linkers for use in electronically controlled cross linking processes and redox controlled polymerization, both at surfaces and in solution. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Vincent M. Rotello of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Dr. Rotello and his students will work on the development of small molecules which can be electrically induced to change their recognition and polymerization properties. The goal is to prepare materials which can be manipulated to change binding partners electronically or change oligomerization polymerization state electronically. The organic based molecular devices developed will have the potential to function as information storage switching systems in computers or sensors. Students trained during the course of this interdisciplinary work will gain skills needed by the pharmaceutical, polymer and speciality chemicals industries doc22124 none In this collaborative research project, funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, O Brien will conduct research on the electronic spectroscopy of metal containing diatomic radicals CuO, NiH, NiCl, and NiF. The goal of the work is to provide new or improved molecular constants for a series of electronic states and to construct the energy level scheme and potential curves of these species. These species are characterized by their open shell structure, which give rise to a host of interactions between nuclear, electronic, vibrational, and rotational degrees of freedom. Besides being of intrinsic interest, the results of this research will also have bearing on other fields such as astrophysics. Experimental techniques are based on intracavity laser absorption spectroscopy, the equipment for which is located at the University of Missouri at Saint Louis. This research will be conducted with undergraduate and MS level graduate students who will receive knowledge and training in the techniques of contemporary experimental and theoretical spectroscopy. This project consists of a collaboration between researchers at a primarily undergraduate institution and a major research university. The research program is designed to provide new information about the energies of a set of metal containing diatomic molecules, the results of which will be useful to other fields such as astrophysics. The project provides training in research to undergraduate and intermediate level graduate students in advanced contemporary techniques of laser spectroscopy. The project also contains an outreach program that will allow gifted high school students to participate in the research doc22125 none Outcrossing sexual reproduction has intrigued evolutionary biologists for decades, for the individual that can produce offspring by self-fertilization or asexually has an immediate advantage over outcrossers. Mixed mating systems (with both self-fertilization and outcrossing) provide an excellent way to identify the selective advantage of both modes of reproduction. One form of mixed mating, androdioecy (males + hermaphrodites), is particularly interesting because theoretical treatments suggest such a mixture should be evolutionarily unstable. A recently discovered crustacean (Eulimnadia texana) exhibits a persistent form of androdioecy. In a previous grant, we implemented an integrative approach to the study of androdioecy, using genetic, cellular, physiological, behavioral, and ecological studies to quantify the parameters of a model in two populations. Although these projects proved quite fruitful, many questions remain. The current proposal will address those questions with two integrated projects. (a) Laboratory tests that combine behavioral and genetic studies will be used to further explore two of the model s parameters. (b) Field Collections, that estimate relative male to hermaphrodite survival, inbreeding depression and male mating success to estimate three of the four parameters of a model in natural habitats. Two sets of field data will be collected (data from naturally-filled ponds and from artificially-filled) at the Jornada LTER site in New Mexico. Data collected from both the field and laboratory studies will be used to estimate the four model parameters, which will in turn be used to test the ability of the model to predict the proportions of sex types found in each pond. The results of these tests will provide a thoroughly integrative understanding of the maintenance of outcrossing in this system, which will further our understanding of mating system evolution in general. Broader Impacts: Both PIs have strong commitments to student training and are on projects designed to bring inquiry-based science experiences to high school and undergraduate students in the Akron area. The proposed research will mentor graduate and undergraduate students who will gain training in modern genetic techniques, and be enriched by field experiences doc22124 none In this collaborative research project, funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, O Brien will conduct research on the electronic spectroscopy of metal containing diatomic radicals CuO, NiH, NiCl, and NiF. The goal of the work is to provide new or improved molecular constants for a series of electronic states and to construct the energy level scheme and potential curves of these species. These species are characterized by their open shell structure, which give rise to a host of interactions between nuclear, electronic, vibrational, and rotational degrees of freedom. Besides being of intrinsic interest, the results of this research will also have bearing on other fields such as astrophysics. Experimental techniques are based on intracavity laser absorption spectroscopy, the equipment for which is located at the University of Missouri at Saint Louis. This research will be conducted with undergraduate and MS level graduate students who will receive knowledge and training in the techniques of contemporary experimental and theoretical spectroscopy. This project consists of a collaboration between researchers at a primarily undergraduate institution and a major research university. The research program is designed to provide new information about the energies of a set of metal containing diatomic molecules, the results of which will be useful to other fields such as astrophysics. The project provides training in research to undergraduate and intermediate level graduate students in advanced contemporary techniques of laser spectroscopy. The project also contains an outreach program that will allow gifted high school students to participate in the research doc22127 none This research will undertake comparative ethnographic investigations of the homeless in Los Angeles, Paris, Sao Paulo, and Tokyo using local research teams. The long range goal is to explore why homelessness emerged in each of these global cities at similar times in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Descriptions of street life will look for similarities and differences across the four cities: Who constitute the homeless: how do their age, gender, racial-ethnic, educational, disability, and work statuses distinguish them from the domiciled? What are the survival strategies of the homeless? How do they account for their homelessness? What have been the political responses to the emergence of homelessness? The research teams will each explore these questions in their own cities and meet for comparative analyses in Sao Paulo doc22128 none This project involves a combined experimental and theoretical study of the effects of nonhy-drostatic stress on the kinetic processes of epitaxial crystal growth and diffusion. The impact of stress-dependent activation barrier heights for crystal growth and surface diffusion on growth morphology evolution will be studied. The effect of simple, uniform stress states on atomic dif-fusion in thin films, both parallel and perpendicular to the surface, will be measured. The theory of diffusion under nonhydrostatic stress states will be further developed. This research is ex-pected to establish methods by which the measurement of the stress-dependence of a kinetic pro-cess under a few simple, uniform stress states permits the prediction of the effect of an arbitrary, nonuniform stress state-deemed important for the design of future semiconductor devices. It also permits the determination of processes going on in the interior of solids, where they cannot be observed directly, from the results of atomistic theoretical calculations and experimental ob-servations of the response to imposed external stresses. It is anticipated that success in this en-deavor will facilitate the creation of new, interesting, and potentially useful materials. The project addresses fundamental research issues in areas of electronic materials science having strong technological relevance. An important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education. The research program provides excel-lent opportunities for hands-on experience in the use of sophisticated scientific equipment. The resources available provide special opportunities for education and training of students involved in interdisciplinary forefront materials science research doc22129 none Professor Lewis and his collaborators have successfully studied thermal isomerization and dissociation reaction mechanisms for cyclic hydrocarbons such as cyclopropanes and cyclohexenes. This work provides important mechanistic information about organic reactions where two or more bonds are broken and or formed simultanteously. In the new grant period, compounds which are specifically deuterium and carbon-13 labelled will be used to investigate details of cyclopropane isomerizations and rearrangements and labelled cyclohexenes will be used for the study of retro Diels-Alder reactions. Some related four-center elimination reactions will also be examined. Careful experimental measurements of reaction rates, energy and entropy barriers and branching ratios of competing reactions will be performed and compared with the results of computational studies. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. David K. Lewis of the Department of Chemistry at Connecticut College. Dr. Lewis and his collaborators will work on understanding the mechanisms of fundamental chemical reactions involving small hydrocarbon molecules. These molecules come primarily from petroleum feedstocks and a careful understanding of their reaction chemistry may have relevance to chemcial processes whereby petroleum feedstocks are converted into speciality chemicals. Undergraduate research students who work on this project will gain interdisciplinary training in aspects of synthesis, kinetics, and molecular modelling, all of which are skills needed by the pharmaceutical and speciality chemicals industries doc22130 none This proposal describes experimental work involving photochemically initiated deoxygenation, alpha-cleavage and stereomutation of sulfoxides as well as the potential photogeneration of nitrenes and carbenes from sulfilimines and sulfonium ylides. A collaboration with Miguel Garcia-Garibay at UCLA will be used to investigate the possible involvement of heavy atom tunneling in the photoinduced oxygen atom transfer experiments. Irradiation of sulfoxides generates extremely reactive oxidizing agents and the Jenks group will be determining whether these oxidations occur by oxygen atom transfer or generation of oxygen atoms followed by their reaction with the molecules which are oxidized. Similar irradiations of sufilimines and sulfonium ylides should also provide organic chemists with access to other reactive intermediates such as nitrenes and carbenes. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. William S. Jenks of the Department of Chemistry at Iowa State University. Dr. Jenks and his collaborator will work on understanding the mechanisms of photochemically initiated oxidation reactions and other photochemical reactions which generate reactive intermediates. Oxidation reactions are some of the most ubiquitous reactions in nature and oxygen atom transfer reactions occur widely in plants and animals and are used in the synthesis of speciality chemicals. Research students who work on this project will gain interdisciplinary training in aspects of synthesis and theoretical organic chemistry, both of which are skills needed by the pharmaceutical and speciality chemicals industries doc22131 none The objective of this project is to explore the vapor-phase oxidesulfurization (ODS) of various organosulfur compounds found in petroleum feedstocks and to upgrade those compounds to valuable chemical products. Simultaneously, a basic understanding of ODS catalysis will be investigated. Preliminary studies have revealed that such organosulfur compounds can be selectively oxidized to valuable chemical intermediates (e.g., phenol, maleic anhydride, and formaldehyde). The objectives of the fundamental scientific ODS studies are to determine the: (1) molecular nature of the active surface sites present in model supported metal oxide catalysts, (2) number of surface sites required for the various reactions, (3) role of surface redox, acidic and basic sites, (4) role of the specific oxide support (ligand effect), (5) fundamental kinetics and mechanisms and (6) molecular structure-reactivity selectivity relationships for ODS. In terms of broader impacts, the advantages offered by an ODS process are: (1) the use of free oxygen, rather than expensive hydrogen, (2) eliminates the need for costly reactor units for methane steam reforming, water-gas shift and Claus reactions, (3) production of significantly lower amounts of global warming carbon dioxide due to the minor unselective oxidation reaction pathways, (4) direct production of sulfuric acid that can be used in the alkylation processes in the petroleum refinery and (5) a supply of relatively inexpensive sulfur-containing feedstocks for the production of valuable chemical intermediates. The educational aspect will be the mentoring of graduate and undergraduate students. Thus, an ODS process to remove sulfur from fuels is a potentially attractive pollution control strategy. It is environmentally benign with low emissions doc22132 none Alkali metal (Li, Na, K and Cs) and a very few additional cationic (B, Zn, and Ti) stabilized reagents are among the most widely utilized organometallic reagents in organic synthesis. However, many questions remain unanswered concerning their solution and solid-state structures and their reactions. A better understanding of the aggregation state, the coordination number, the geometry of the attached ligands, and the intimate structural features have begun to provide a more thorough model for use in predicting the stereoselectivity in reactions utilizing these reagents. Professor Williard proposes a research program designed to obtain structural information by diffraction analyses for many commonly utilized carbanionic reagents. Specific to this proposal is a focus on the Aldol reaction. The long-range goal is to fit the structural information that is obtained into a more coherent pattern of models utilized to control and to predict mechanism and stereoselectivity. Controlling stereoselectivity in organic synthesis is especially important to the design of new reagents. An emphasis will be placed on the solid-state structural studies of highly reactive and synthetically important carbanionic intermediates. This project will target specific reactive intermediates, which are the basis of almost all of our synthetic mechanistic models. A well-known example is the often-cited Zimmerman-Traxler transition state model for enolate aldol reactions. Although this particular structural model is applied with reasonable success to the correlation of stereoselectivity of many enolate reactions, very little experimental evidence exists to establish the validity of this model. Hence, a major goal of this project is to provide structural information and specific mechanistic details that can be directly related to established models such as the popular Zimmerman-Traxler model. With this Award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the research of Professor Paul G. Williard of Brown University. Professor Williard is a leading x-ray crystallographer and an organic chemist who is interested in correlating the structure of enolate salts with their reactivity using aldol chemistry, which is the key to carbon-carbon bond formation in organic synthesis. His work will involve undergraduate students as researchers and the results will be of significant practical importance to the chemical manufacturing industry doc22133 none The objectives of this work are two fold. Professor Holt first proposes to investigate the transition metal catalyzed rearrangement of 2H-azirines into pyrroles and indoles. This initial work will produce vinyl pyrroles which will be used in the synthesis of beta- lactams containing pyrrole ring substituents. Vinyl and aryl-2H-azirines will be prepared initially and a nickel mediated rearrangement of these substrates into vinyl pyrroles and indoles will be effected. The vinyl pyrrole products of this first work will be aziridinated and the aziridine products will be carbonylated to produce the beta-lactams. With this Minority Research Planning Grant award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Herman L. Holt, Jr. of the Department of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. Dr. Holt will work on the preparation of a class of chemical compounds known as vinyl pyrroles and indoles and then work on the conversion of these compounds into beta lactams. New methods for the production of beta lactams could have future practical applications since this functional group is found in some antibiotics and antitumor agents. Students trained during the course of this work will gain skills needed by the speciality chemicals and pharmaceutical industries doc22134 none In this project supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, Professor Joern Ilja Siepmann and at the University of Minnesota and Dr. Mark Schure at Rohm it is the difference in retention times that allows chromatography to separate one compound or protein from another. The predictions will be made with computer simulations of the compounds and proteins absorption into the chromatographic media. In addition, the flow of the compounds and proteins in the mobile phase will be computed. The particle-based computer simulations will provide a molecular-level understanding of the factors contributing to chromatrographic separations, a knowledge that is required for the next-generation of industrial-scale separations and for microfluidic separations. The close university-industry collaboration affords unique training for the undergraduate and graduate students participating in this project doc22135 none This project will start the work of archiving the data from the Beginning School Study, a panel study of 790 Baltimore children who began first grade in . Their educational and personal development have now been studied through their early twenties. A majority of the sample (55%) is African American and two thirds were classified as low income in the initial wave. These data are one of the only data sets of young adults that has thorough information back to first grade, thus permitting tests of the effects of early childhood situations on subsequent educational, work, and family outcomes. The data have been collected in several waves with various target samples (e.g., parents, schools) over the last twenty years, each with its own computer technology and analysis systems. The archiving work will begin to establish more standardized variable and codebook systems that will permit ready access by new users. Problems of data confidentiality will also be analyzed and solutions developed so that public access does not compromise respondent anonymity doc22136 none Professor Cynthia Larive of the University of Kansas is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry program for development of capillary isotachophoresis (cITP) in combination with microcoil NMR spectroscopy. The development of solenoidal microcoils with nanoliter to microliter detection volumes has greatly enhanced the mass limits of detection of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Recently, this technology has been advanced further through the coupling of capillary isotachophoresis (cITP) for sample concentration and analyte separation with nanoliter microcoil NMR probes for on-line detection. This new methodology shows considerable promise as a versatile tool for the analysis of mass limited samples. The proposed research will advance the instrumentation for online cITP-NMR and explore the application of this methodology to chemical analysis. A capacitively coupled conductivity detector for use in conjunction with NMR detection will be developed and evaluated. The implementation of dual conductivity and NMR detection for cITP will advance this technology by facilitating the use of signal averaging to detect dilute analytes with NMR and monitor NMR transparent cITP bands. This technology will be critically evaluated as a tool for the analysis and structure elucidation of mass limited samples through the examination of several antibiotic compounds both as simple mixtures and in the presence of more complex sample matrices. Finally, this approach will be used to characterize the structure, chemical and physical properties of humic substances through cITP fractionation as a function of pH and borate complexation as well as with one and two-dimensional NMR experiments. These experiments will examine functional group composition of the fractionated materials allowing interpretation of both common and unique structural elements of the bands separated by cITP. The development of new measurement techniques has facilitated understanding of many complex chemical phenomena. This has been particularly true in the field of environmental chemistry, where scientists face the problem of analyzing very complex samples containing species at low concentrations. The proposed experiments will develop new analytical methods that will allow NMR characterization of molecules at low concentrations in complex samples. NMR is one of the most informative methods of chemical analysis, capable of revealing minute details of molecular structure. Initial experiments will focus on relatively simple samples of antibiotics, compounds of environmental interest due to their wide spread use in large scale agriculture and problems related to the development of antibiotic resistance. In addition, cITP-NMR technology will be used to study a class of environmentally important compounds, humic substances (humic and fulvic acids). Humic substances are environmentally important because they affect the bioavailability and transport of organic pollutants and toxic metal ions. These naturally occurring organic acids are formed in the environment by the breakdown of animal and plant material to form very complex mixtures, which makes the determination of molecular level structure information very difficult. These experiments will advance the knowledge of the chemistry of humic substances and in turn increase the understanding of their behavior in the environment doc22137 none Various fallacies in thinking interfere with judgment about matters of tax. In particular, people may oppose or inconsistently support optimizing reforms --- or favor reforms that are less than optimal --- because of three clusters of cognitive biases. One, the status-quo effect, leads people to resist beneficial change: they are apt to weigh perceived losses more than foregone gains. Two, manipulation of the point of comparison affects how people perceive the advantages and disadvantages of reform proposals. Three, people underestimate or ignore various unseen elements of fiscal policy, such as imputed income and the incentive effects or opportunity costs of various tax and transfer programs. We shall explore these effects in a series of experiments, some conducted on the World Wide Web and others conducted with other samples. We shall examine these effects in a wide range of realistic tax reform proposals, e.g., those concerned with taxes on married couples, hidden taxes, payroll taxes, consumption taxes, taxes on imputed income, pollution taxes, and taxes that substitute for private expenditures (such as those that pay for health care). Finally, we shall attempt to debias the effects of interest, and explore the transfer of training from one domain to another (in part by using samples of people who have already been trained in the economic theory of taxes doc22138 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Elena Benedicto will conduct six months of linguistic research on Ken Hale s Misumalpan files. Hale - a linguist particularly productive in his work on indigenous languages - died recently. He had been working with Benedicto on these languages for several years. She and her consultants will complete Hale s contribution to this research by recovering and incorporating his notes. This project is significant for two main reasons: (1) It will complete the only systematic work on the Misumalpan languages, an isolate group with unique morpho-phonological and sytactico-semantic properties. (2) It will enhance the already-established collaboration between Benedicto and the Intercultural Bilingual Program in Nicaragua doc22139 none This study will use a combination of numerical and laboratory (analog) models to investigate the dispersal and interaction between plume heads and the overlying lithospheric plates upon which they impinge. Models will include the effects of melting, on and off-axis cases, and the influence of ridge segmentation and plate rheology on along-axis flow. Models include both 2D and 3D numerical models and 3D scaled analog ones. The modeling will include both plume heads (LIPs), and their more steady-state tails. In general, the experiments will explore the thermal, compositional, and dynamic evolution of plume heads for a range of conditions. More specific models will examine the case of the Ontong-Java plateau system- the earth s largest known plume head. The modeling efforts are part of a cycle of observations, theory, predictions, more observation which is expected to lead to specific ODP drilling proposals doc22140 none The proposal is to establish a US-EU DELOS working group on Digital Imagery for Significant Cultural and Historical Materials . The working group will meet over the next year to discuss and evaluate fruitful joint activities and research paths for collaborative activities in this general topical area. The EU component of the effort is funded and managed by the DELOS Forum, a major organizer of digital libraries research and planning activities in Europe. DELOS receives support from the Information Societies Technologies (IST) 5th Framework Programme of the European Commission. This effort continues the planning and assessment activities begun by an earlier NSF-EU working groups process. In their final report An International Research Agenda for Digital Libraries , delivered in Brussels in October , increased levels of collaboration and interaction was seen as critical to building multi-lingual, multi-national digital libraries. The objective of the new working groups, of which this is one, is to define a research agenda on a specific topic and identify areas and activities for cooperation between EU and US researchers. The efforts of this particular group take the next step in the planning process by assessing fruitful research activities and resource development related to digital imagery collections doc22141 none The plant cell wall is a dynamic structure that can be modified in response to developmental and environmental signals. In this manner, the cell wall provides structural information that helps maintain cellular form and function during plant growth. The structure of the cell wall also changes in response to pathogen infection and stresses, such as drought, high salt and cold temperature, in a manner that helps protect plants from biotic and abiotic stresses when grown in natural environments. Expression of many of the structural proteins in the wall have been shown to be cell-type specific, suggesting that these proteins play novel roles in modifying cell wall structure in order to provide mechanical strength and assist in proper wall assembly. Proline-rich proteins (PRPs) represent an integral family of structural cell wall proteins whose expression has been linked to active growth in a number of plant systems. We have used a combination of PRP promoter GUS fusions and epitope-tagging to characterize the expression of these genes in arabidopsis and their localization to the walls of specific cell types. Two of these proteins, AtPRP1 and AtPRP3, are expressed during the early stages of root hair outgrowth but are localized within different regions of the root hair cell wall. These results suggest that individual PRP gene family members may play distinct roles in helping to establish root hair cell wall structure during wall assembly. In addition, we have shown that AtPRP4 is expressed in guard cells and localizes to the inner shelf of the guard cell wall. We have isolated several T-DNA insertion alleles for these three proteins and we propose to characterize the loss-of-function phenotypes in these mutants associated with root hair and guard cell function. In addition, we will examine the ability of epitope-tagged PRP sequences to become cross-linked within the wall in wild type and mutant PRP backgrounds. In combination, these experimental approaches should provide new insight into the nature of the amino acid sequences encoded within individual AtPRPs that are sufficient for their targeted localization within the cell wall and their insolubilization within the extracellular matrix. Identification of the function of structural cell wall proteins in defining cell-type specific matrix structures is an important first step in our ability to modify the cell walls of plants in a manner that will let them grow in adverse environments. We have shown that the AtPRP proteins participate in determining cell wall structure in guard cells and root hairs, two cell types that are crucial for nutrient uptake and maintenance of water balance during growth. Further analysis of the function of these proteins may allow us to devise novel mechanisms for enhancing plant growth under conditions of water and or nutrient limitation doc22142 none Herrero-Bervera Funding from this grant supports the acquisition of equipment to measure fundamental magnetic properties of rocks. Specifically, a Variable Field Translation Balance will be purchased to allow for the determination of magnetic grain sizes and thermal parameters (Curie points) to help screen desirable and undesirable magnetic materials in paleomagnetic projects conducted at the University of Hawaii, Paleomagnetics and Petrofabrics laboratory. Research that will benefit from the new instrument centers on high-resolution examination of records of the earth s magnetic field behavior including records of secular variation, polarity transitions and intensity variations doc22143 none ion from the sugar backbone. Oxidation of DNA leads to reactive intermediate species. Exploration of the fundamental reaction chemistry of these reactive intermediates will lead to a more detailed understanding of oxidative processes which are of central importance in DNA chemistry and biochemistry. By developing unique reagents allowing the efficient formation of oxidized DNA species, Professor Ian Gould, of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Arizona State University, is exploring the reaction chemistry of these important but only transiently existent reactive intermediates doc22144 none Professor Drueckhammer proposes to develop a general computer-based design method for molecular recognition using the software CAVEAT. CAVEAT will first be used to identify structures on which to position functional groups in a precise relative orientation for the desired molecular recognition. Sialic acid receptors, PNA mimics for DNA recognition, and zinc and copper ion receptors will be designed and prepared during the course of this work. A collaboration with the CAVEAT developer will also enable the design of new CAVEAT databases which have host scaffoldings which are more easily synthesized. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Dale G. Drueckhammer of the Department of Chemistry at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. Dr. Drueckhammer and his students will work on the development of computer based methods to design and synthesize small molecule receptors. They will be designing and preparing molecules capable of carbohydrate recognition, DNA recognition and metal ion binding. The work also has potential broader implications in being able to rationally design and synthesize a variety of sensing devices. Students trained during the course of this interdisciplinary work will be learning both computational and synthetic organic chemistry and, as such, gaining skills needed by the pharmaceutical and speciality chemicals industries doc22145 none Burrell, Brian Sensitization is a simple form of learning in which an animal s responses to environmental stimuli are enhanced. This form of behavioral plasticity is important because it contributes to processes of attention and arousal, as well as to more complex forms of learning such as classical (i.e. Pavlovian) conditioning. Typically, sensitization is induced by the delivery of a particularly strong or salient stimulus. This stimulus activates neurons that release modulatory neurotranmitters, which alter the neural circuit mediating the test behavior. Because the modulatory neurons are distinct from the neurons that mediate the test behavior, this process is referred to as extrinsic sensitization. However, there are many examples where sensitization is induced by a stimulus that is similar or identical to the stimulus that elicits the test behavior. In such situations, modulatory neurotransmitters are released by neurons within the circuit that mediates the test behavior. This is referred to as intrinsic or wind-up sensitization. Using the medicinal leech, the distinct physiological and cellular mechanisms of intrinsic and extrinsic sensitization will be examined. These experiments will combine electrophysiological recordings from single neurons with simultaneous monitoring of sensitization-induced changes in a defensive withdrawal reflex (shortening). Both forms of sensitization are observed in the leech shortening reflex and the leech nervous system is extremely well characterized, making it possible to record from single, identifiable neurons that are known to mediate this behavior doc22146 none The public debate on the merits and perils of trade liberalization often centers on the question of how trade reforms affect labor markets. But despite the prominence of this question in public policy, empirical research to date has offered no conclusive evidence on the effects of trade liberalization on employment and wages. This reflects two main difficulties associated with empirical work in the area. The first one is a measurement issue: in recent years, trade protection in developed countries has taken the form of non-tariff barriers that are inherently hard, if not impossible, to measure. A second limitation is that the political economy of trade protection, while having made inroads in trade theory and empirical studies of import penetration, has remained a second-order concern in studies of the effects of trade reform on wages. This study makes progress on these issues by exploiting the Colombian trade liberalization between and . The Colombian trade reforms consisted primarily of multiple tariff reduction episodes that not only drastically lowered the average tariff, but also affected the structure of protection across industries. The advantage of focusing on tariffs is that they are both well measured, and -- contrary to NTB measures -- comparable across time. The basic idea in this project is to link tariff changes, which varied substantially across industries, to wages and employment in each industry, in order to investigate whether trade liberalization leads to lower wages in sectors that experienced larger tariff reductions, and or labor reallocation across sectors. The adopted framework explicitly accounts for the political economy of trade protection. The focus on industry-level adjustment differs from the previous literature that has concentrated on the effects of trade policy changes on the returns to particular worker characteristics (most prominently, returns to skill and education). These studies focus on the consequences of trade reforms in the long run, when worker industry affiliation does not matter. However, industry affiliation is crucial in predicting the impact of trade reforms in short- and medium-run models of trade. These models seem particularly relevant in developing economies (like Colombia) where labor market rigidities obstruct labor mobility across sectors. Because Colombia, like many other developing countries, is characterized by a large informal sector, a significant part of this research is devoted to the analysis of the adjustment process in this sector. In particular, the study examines whether trade liberalization has contributed to the increase in informality of the workforce documented in the s, and whether wages and employment were affected differentially in the formal and the informal sectors. The analysis utilizes information on industry tariffs from the Colombian Department of National Planning and detailed worker level data from the National Household Survey (that include information on workplace characteristics and informality) over the period - . While this work does not attempt a general analysis of income inequality, it has implications for the current debate on the effects of trade reform on wage dispersion. The question is of particular importance in developing countries that are characterized by substantial inequalities. The work identifies a source of disparity beyond the well-documented increase in the economy-wide skill premium: to the extent that tariff reductions in developing countries are larger in sectors with lower initial wages, employing a larger fraction of less-skilled workers, a decrease in the industry wages of these sectors will affect such workers disproportionately. Similarly, a trade liberalization-induced expansion of the informal sector, which is typically associated with lower wages and zero benefits, may increase inequality. While such considerations do not imply that trade liberalization is undesirable, they point to the need to identify sectors and worker groups that may need adjustment assistance in the short and medium run. More generally, an analysis of the adjustment process following trade liberalization may help understand and address the resistance of particular groups to trade reforms we often observed in practice doc22147 none How diverse are the channels through which monetary policy actions impact on the economy? Can the overall stance of monetary policy be summarized simply by examining the behavior of the short-term nominal interest rate? Or do changes in the money stock matter as well? These questions--the ones to be addressed in this research project--have implications, not just for the specification of popular macroeconomic models, but also for the way in which US macroeconomic policy may have to be conducted in the not-too-distant future. The starting point for addressing these questions is a benchmark model of the monetary transmission mechanism, variants of which appear throughout the recent literature on monetary policy and its effects on the economy. This benchmark model assumes that the impact of monetary policy on output comes exclusively through the effects that policy has on the short-term nominal interest rate. Changes in the money stock can matter for the behavior of output, but only to the extent that those changes in money affect the interest rate first. The project considers two sets of modifications to this benchmark model, both of which imply that changes in the money stock play a more important, direct role in the transmission mechanism. The first modifications introduce direct effects of money through nonseparabilities in a representative household s utility function. The second--and more extensive--modifications permit money to become a component of private-sector wealth in a way that the benchmark model does not. In this second modified model, a Pigouvian real balance effect arises, allowing monetary policy to influence the economy even after the nominal interest rate hits its zero lower bound. A distinguishing feature of this research project is that each of the models considered will be estimated with formal econometric techniques; statistical hypothesis tests will then be used to discriminate between competing views of the monetary transmission mechanism doc22148 none The Advanced Materials Program in the Chemistry Division makes this RUI award to Spelman College to fabricate photonic bandgap crystals of ZnGeP2 that exhibit substantial birefringence, and thus will have well-established applications in the form of conventional phase-matched NLO devices. With this award, Professor McCall will be using following approaches to study the photonic bandgap crystals: 1) optimize liquid phase epitaxy of ZnSiP2-ZnGeP2 GaP heterostructures, guided by theoretical modeling and simulations of homogeneous chemical kinetics, coupled to convective and diffusive transport of reactive precursors to surface reactions that feed epitaxial growth; 2) fabricate ZnSiP2-ZnGeP2 GaP photonic bandgap crystals by selective chemical soft solution machining and digital vapor etching, including electrochemical and photochemical approaches, and to develop the theoretical basis for the understanding of these fabrication processes; and 3) study the structural, electrical and optical properties of ZnSiP2-ZnGeP2 photonic bandgap crystals with optimum interfacial refractive index offsets of the fabricated materials. With this award, photonic bandgap crystals will be fabricated, and their structural, electrical and optical properties will be determined including theoretical modeling and simulations. These crystals would be useful for the integration of NLO waveguides and tunable sources of coherent infrared radiation into compact and robust systems for the detection and classification of infrared spectroscopic signatures of chemical and biochemical agents. The proposed studies will provide undergraduate students with comprehensive hands on experience in research, supplemented by computational solutions to problems of physical chemistry and materials science with practical applications. In addition, the project has the potential to attract more under-represented minority students to careers in science doc22149 none Over the last two decades, there has been an upsurge in research in social psychology on the relationships among gender, cognition, and social behavior. Over the same period, studies of gender in negotiation have declined. In contrast to the movement in social psychology from tests of gender as a personality variable to investigations of gender in context, the negotiation field has largely abandoned the gender variable as an inconsistent predictor of negotiator behavior or performance. In this research program, we argue that gender has mostly been treated as a static, decontextualized demographic variable in the negotiation literature, and that we have yet to understand the complex nature of gender as a labile yet influential psychological construct in negotiation. Our focus is on the situational factors and psychological processes that mediate the relationship between gender and negotiation. We thus begin to answer the questions under what conditions and why does gender matter in negotiation? We take as a central proposition in this research that gender effects are not invariant across situations; rather we emphasize that gender is a context-dependent phenomenon. We investigate how contextual factors, such as the strength of the situation and the relevance and salience of gender to negotiator s roles or the type of resource being distributed, activate distinct gender-based expectations, cognitions, and behavior. In the first set of studies, we present preliminary laboratory evidence about the role the situational factors play in moderating gender differences in negotiation outcomes. We propose a series of new experiments to further explore these contextual moderators and importantly, to develop interventions that eliminate gender differences. Our goals in this research are to further illuminate the psychological mechanisms that cause gender to matter in negotiations and develop practical advice that can help women improve their negotiated outcomes. In the second set of studies, we turn our attention to a greatly understudied area - the initiation of negotiations. We develop a two-stage model of the decision to initiate a negotiation. Using data from a preliminary field study, we find that women are less likely to initiate negotiations and that the psychological process in our model help to explain the overall individual differences as well as gender differences in initiating negotiations. We propose a new field study and a series of laboratory experiments to further investigate the contextual moderators of gender differences in the initiation of negotiations doc22150 none This project investigates loss aversion, which is one of the central concepts in the decision making and behavioral economics literatures. Loss aversion is said to occur when a loss of a given magnitude has more influence on choices than does a gain of the same magnitude (for example, most people will refuse a gamble with equal chances to gain or lose $100). Numerous studies have shown that loss aversion plays a key role in important real-world phenomena, such as the endowment effect, the status quo bias, the equity-premium puzzle in financial economics, the tendency to hold on to losing stocks while selling winners , the discrepancy between valuations of public (especially environmental) goods by willingness-to-pay for them or by the compensation demanded to give them up, legal principles of compensation for damage, failures of negotiations, and many others. This project investigates whether a positive-negative asymmetry analogous to loss aversion occurs in the experience of decision outcomes (i.e., is loss aversion a mistake?). Preliminary evidence reported in the project description suggests that experiences of decision outcomes do not always show the good-bad asymmetry that would be expected from loss aversion. If loss aversion turns out to be a mistake, this work would require a major rethinking of the nature of loss aversion, a concept that is currently taught to almost every business student in the United States, and which plays an important role in many other social science curricula, including economics, public policy, law, and psychology. In addition, the possibility that loss aversion in choices could in some cases be a mistake, in the sense that it does not reflect an asymmetry in experience, would require a wide-ranging reanalysis of the many practical decisions where loss aversion has been found to play a significant role doc22151 none In this project, funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Levis will investigate the behavior of molecules in the presence of intense laser pulses. A long-range goal of these studies is the control of chemical reactions in the gaseous and eventually the solution phase. Special experimental and theoretical tools will be developed towards the realization of these goals. Chemical reactions most often occur along reaction paths that are determined by the intrinsic properties of the reactants. Reactions that lead to desirable reaction products are then not realized unless means are found to control the reactions by means of external intervention. One hopeful method to achieve such control is through modification of the intrinsic molecular properties in the presence of very intense laser fields. The goal of this project is to devise experimental and theoretical techniques that lead to the control of chemical reactions. Students and postdoctoral research associates participate in this research doc22152 none In this project funded by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division and the Molecular Biophysics Program in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, Steven Rick of the University of New Orleans will study water interactions using computer simulation techniques. As part of this project Rick and his co-workers will use polarizable molecular mechanics force fields (TIP4P-FQ models) to simulate the melting behavior of water, the ice-water interface, and water in the interior of protein structures. The results will be used to compare, improve, and develop new methods and intermolecular potentials. Despite the fact that water is a key element of many computer simulations of biological systems, most potentials used for water are flawed. Information obtained in this project can be used to improve such potentials. The results of this work are potentially very important in a wide variety of applications, such as to biological systems, cryobiology, extra-terrestrial environments, and crystallization processes for pharmaceuticals. Furthermore, what can be learned about water can be applied to other systems that are less well characterized. In the course of this work Rick will provide a meaningful research experience for minority students from a four-year historically black, primarily undergraduate institution at which he has a joint appointment doc22153 none With their ability to sustain an outstanding dielectric response in the microwave region and accommodate extensive chemical substitution, oxide perovskites (ABO3) are the most widely studied and technologically important family of microwave dielectrics. For mixed-metal perovskites, where the A or B (or both) positions in the structure contain mixtures of different cations, a correlation between a high quality factor (low dielectric loss) and improved cation order has been clearly established. However, only a limited sub-set of ordered perovskite-forming stoichiometries has been examined, and many new systems are still to be explored. This proposal uses new approaches based on non-integer valence A-site chemistries to stabilize several completely new families of B-site ordered perovskites suitable for application as low-loss dielectrics in microwave communications. Many of the new materials lie in systems known to exhibit low melting points and high reactivity at low temperature, which also make them potentially useful for applications in low temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) technology. The unique electrical properties of ceramic microwave dielectric oxides have revolutionized microwave-based communications by reducing the size and cost of resonators, filters, and oscillators in systems ranging from cellular telephones to global positioning technologies. Although the existing materials are adequate for current applications the next generation of systems requires new materials with an enhanced dielectric response. The research in this proposal is aimed toward identifying these materials by using a novel design strategy to prepare new families of ceramic microwave dielectrics based on the perovskite structure doc22154 none Mark Schell of Southern Methodist University is supported by the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to study the electrochemical oxidation of oxygenated organics, using experimental and theoretical approaches to explore these processes and the nonlinear behavior that they exhibit. Most of the effort will focus on formic acid oxidation. Objectives are to characterize the different ways that anions affect the oxidation process, to find the origin of these effects, and to investigate whether these effects can be used to probe electrochemical mechanisms. Substantial new understanding is expected to be gained by studying anion interactions with surrounding stationary and transient neighbors. Research outcomes are expected to enhance the understanding of oxidation reactions that are important in fuel cell applications. This project will provide valuable introductory research opportunities to undergraduate students in both theoretical and experimental chemistry. The electrocatalyzed oxidations of oxygenated organic compounds are important because of their applications in fuel cells. It is a goal of many academic and industrial researchers to improve the viability of commercial ambient methanol-air fuel cells to replace conventional fossil fuel sources. This goal is important because greenhouse gases are increasing in the environment, and as well because future fossil fuel energy shortages are probable. A practical objective of this research is to enhance methanol oxidation by methods similar to those used to enhance formic acid oxidation. Enhancing methanol oxidation translates into more efficient fuel cells doc22155 none ion from the Ln-H-B bridge will be evaluated. Inorganic complexes that contain transition metals display a great variety of interesting and useful properties. Many such compounds have the ability to catalyze important chemical transformations used in industrial processes and in the synthesis of new organic compounds, including pharmaceuticals. Compounds that contain both transition metal atoms and also lanthanide ( rare earth elements such as ytterbium or gadolinium) atoms have heretofore been rare. There are good reasons to expect that such compounds will have novel, interesting and important properties, such as the ability to catalyze important chemical reactions. Building on experiences gained in successful research supported by NSF in the past, Shore and his colleagues will devise methods to prepare compounds containing both lanthanide and transition-metal atoms, characterize those compounds, and explore their properties. In addition, new types of compounds containing groups of two interlinked boron atoms will also be prepared and their properties explored. Graduate students involved in this work will acquire expertise in several aspects of metal and main group chemistry, as well as in related areas of engineering doc22156 none The PI proposes to use functionalized, fluorinated allenes to develop new fluorinated ring construction methodologies. They will first prepare a number of mono and difluoroallenes. The metallation, alkylation and substitution reactions of these compounds will be investigated followed by a study of their use in cyclization reactions to prepare both fluorinated heterocycles and carbocycles. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Gerald B. Hammond of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. Dr. Hammond and his student co-workers will study the preparation and reaction chemistry of a number of organofluorine molecules known as fluorinated allenes. Many pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals are organofluorine containing molecules and this group will be devloping new synthetic groutes to these types of molecules. Students trained during the course of this work will gain experience in synthetic organofluorine chemistry and be acquiring skills needed by the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries doc22157 none James McCusker of Michigan State University is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program for research on the chemistry of excited states of transition metal complexes, particularly on ultra fast reactions of Cr(III) species that contain paramagnetic ligands. Interest in this research is centered on characterizing and explaining effects that arise from coupling between two or more unpaired electrons in the photochemically important excited states of transition metal complexes. Ultrafast process will be studied by spectroscopic techniques, accompanied by extensive computations. Although the energies involved in coupling between several unpaired electrons in transition-metal complexes are often small on an absolute scale, such effects often determine the chemical and photophysical properties of such compounds. There has been relatively little prior study of the influence of electronic and magnetic coupling on photochemical and photophysical properties of transition metal complexes. The research proposed under this proposal has the potential greatly to expand scientific understanding of profound effects that electron-electron coupling exerts on phochemical reactivity of transition metal species. There are many potential applications of such understanding in important technological areas, such as the design and fabrication of electronic devices using novel molecular based magneto-optical materials doc22158 none The proposal describes the development of guided-wave depolarized light scattering, a novel technique for characterizing the structure of ordered block copolymer thin films. This technique will enable cost-effective, nondestructive, real-time quantification of order formation and defect density in these two-dimensional systems. A planar optical waveguide will be fabricated by depositing the polymer film on a low refractive index substrate (fused silica). Standard optical waveguide elements such as prism couplers will be used to couple the laser beam into the film and the scattered light out of the film. The depolarized scattered beam will be guided through the film and detected using a CCD camera. Considerable effort will be devoted to the development of tractable models for relating the detected optical signal to the grain structure within the film. The models that have been established for the optical properties of bulk block copolymer samples will serve as a starting point for this development. Preliminary predictions indicate that the guided-wave geometry will lead to fundamental differences in the nature of the detected signal. The grain structure determined in reciprocal space by the guided-wave depolarized light scattering studies will compared with position space data obtained by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) experiments on the same samples. The proposed work builds on earlier work by the co-PIs on optical characterization of grain structure in three-dimensional block copolymer samples. This information is crucial for a number of recently proposed applications for block copolymer thin films such as information storage and photonics. The proposed research will also answer fundamental questions regarding the influence of substrates and interfaces on order formation and defect annihilation in thin block copolymer films doc22159 none This award by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research by Guy Bertrand, University of California at Riverside, on the synthesis and characterization of boron-phosphorus compounds with unusual bonding and electronic states. This class of compounds consist of a four-membered ring with alternating boron and phosphorus atoms. By judicious substitution on the boron and phosphorus atoms, the electronic ground state can be tuned along a continuum from a sigma-bonded system to singlet or triplet diradicals. The structure, bonding and reactivity of these unusual boron-phosphorus molecules will be studied. Related classes of compounds such as aluminum-phosphorus or aluminum-nitrogen systems will also be explored. Fundamental questions of bonding and electronic structure will be addresssed by this study. Possible long-term applications include polymers with unique magnetic properties. This research will also promote collaborative research and the exchange of undergraduates, graduates and postdoctoral fellows between UC Riverside and several French universities doc22160 none A long-term problem in bioinformatics is the need to access, analyze, and publish information. Since both central and distributed solutions have been tried, the problem is now how to integrate the information across different platforms. This proposal will provide a general architecture for achieving the integration, using a combined client server, peer-to-peer implementation of the web service broker model. This centralizes information about where data and services are located while allowing distributed data acquisition and service invocation. A core of model organism database developers already supports the architecture. The project will deliver a graphical implementation and annotation source as well as an application programming interface and proof of principle for four model organisms. This integration of data can change the way research and education occur using the Internet and the distributed expertise of the community doc22161 none This research project deals with fundamental studies in radical pair dynamics with applications in photobiology and polymer chemistry. Professor Forbes will develop methodology for the observation and analysis of spin polarization phenomena in single amino acids, short peptides and proteins. Using a new dye sensitization reaction, he will characterize several amino acid radical cations and neutral radicals and investigate their conformational and chemical dynamics. In the polymer area, a major issue will be to determine the degree of influence of long range macromolecular motion on the locally measured dynamic effects in the time-resolved electron paramagnetic resonance (TREPR) spectra. New molecular dynamic simulations of interesting micelles will be carried at the North Carolina Supercomputing Center and new photochemically active surfactants will be synthesized to learn if control can be exerted over the starting point for diffusion of the ensuing free radicals. Further work will be done on the photochemical degradation of beer using sensitizers and visible light. This work has the potential to impact the entire multi-million dollar per year beverage industry. With this Award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program and the Central and Eastern Europe Program in the Office of International Science and Engineering continues support for the research of Professor Malcolm D. E. Forbes of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Professor Forbes work is at the forefront of photochemical research. He is developing sophisticated magnetic resonance methods along with computer modeling to obtain valuable information on several important chemical systems doc22162 none The main theme of this work is the use of copper (I) complexes to catalyze a variety of asymmetric organic reactions. Most of the proposed chemistry involves the catalytic use of asymmetrically ligated copper hydride or alkyl complexes. The copper hydrides will be used for asymmetric hydrosilylation of ketones and a 1,4-reducation-transmetallation protocol for converting alpha, beta unsaturated ketones into Z-boron enolates. The copper alkyl complexes will be used primarily for asymmetric 1,2 additions to aldehydes and to effect alkylative kinetic resolution of racemic epoxides. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Bruce H. Lipshutz of the Department of Chemistry at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Dr. Lipshutz will work on the development of copper complexes capable of catalyzing a number of chemical reactions. Most of these copper catalyzed carbon-hydrogen and carbon-carbon bond forming reactions produce molecules which are chiral (have two nonsuperimposable mirror images) and make only one of the two possible forms (a single enantiomer). Development of this family of reactions is one of the most important problems facing the pharmaceutical industry today. These transformations which are catalytic in copper may be amenable to large scale production of fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Students trained during the course of this work will gain skills needed by the pharmaceutical and speciality chemicals industries which now produce a number of single enantiomer compounds doc22163 none This award by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research by Alison Butler, University of California Santa Barbara Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Butler is studying haloperoxidase enzymes, more specifically the vanadium bromoperoxidases found in several types of marine algae. The mechanisms of these enzymes and the biogenesis of halogenated terpene and acetogenin marine natural products will be explored. Using site-directed mutagenesis, Butler will determine the functional role of selected amino acid residues in the enzymes and prepare mutants suitable for in vitro reactivity. These mutants may eventually be used for the industrial synthesis of halogenated compounds suitable for medical applications. In addition to the fundamental bioinorganic chemistry and enzymology proposed, the work has broad implications for marine biology and pharmaceutical chemistry. Butler also trains a diverse group of students in an emerging interdisciplinary field doc22164 none Professor Carlier and his students will first study the structures of lithiated nitriles in solution. They will use a variety of NMR spectroscopic techniques in these studies. Computational studies will be used to compliment and direct experimental work and have led the PI to propose the study of these lithiation reactions in noncoordinating hydrocarbon solvents. Carbon metallated nitriles discovered in these studies will then be used in an enantioselective deprotonation alkylation reaction sequence which will be applied to enantioselective syntheses of alpha, alpha-disubstituted-alpha-amino acids. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Paul R. Carlier of the Department of Chemistry at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Professor Carlier and his students will study the structures and reaction chemistry of a class of molecules known as lithiated nitriles. The structures will be predicted using computational chemistry and modelling techniques then studied spectroscopically using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Nitriles which can be lithiated on the carbon next to the nitrile functional group will then be used in enantioselective carbon-carbon bond forming reactions called alkylation reactions. These alkylation reactions produce molecules which are chiral (have two nonsuperimposable mirror images) and make only one of the two possible forms (a single enantiomer). Development of this family of reactions is one of the most important problems facing the pharmaceutical industry today. Students trained during the course of this work will gain skills in computational chemistry, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and organic synthesis. These skills are needed by the pharmaceutical and speciality chemicals industries doc22165 none The proposal is to establish a US-EU DELOS working group study panel on Reference Models for Digital Libraries . The working group will meet over the next year to discuss and evaluate fruitful joint activities and research paths for collaborative activities in this general topical area. The EU component of the effort is funded and managed by the DELOS Forum, a major organizer of digital libraries research and planning activities in Europe. DELOS receives support from the Information Societies Technologies (IST) 5th Framework Programme of the European Commission. This effort continues the planning and assessment activities begun by an earlier NSF-EU working groups process. In their final report An International Research Agenda for Digital Libraries , delivered in Brussels in October , increased levels of collaboration and interaction was seen as critical to building multi-lingual, multi-national digital libraries. The objective of the new working groups, of which this is one, is to define a research agenda on a specific topic and identify areas and activities for cooperation between EU and US researchers. The efforts of this particular group take the next step in the planning process by assessing future directions for research and resource development related to modeling the nature of actors and roles in digital libraries doc22166 none The project of Professor Susan Olesik of Ohio State University, supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry program, is to develop chromatographic media capable of separating compounds that differ minimally in their structure. Recent studies on the mechanisms of retention on glassy carbon (GC) have shown that glassy carbon is capable of interacting strongly with both polar and nonpolar analytes through different retention mechanisms. Accordingly the chromatographic applications of glassy carbon have expanded substantially. Also, solid adsorbents are typically very good candidates for the separation of compounds that differ minimally in structure. Due to the polymer precursor and the method of production, there is presently only one commercially-available glassy carbon material for the separation of compounds and it is limited to the configuration of porous particles. New precursor polymers, diacetylenic polymers, allow the production of glassy carbon at low temperatures with minimal weight loss. These precursor polymers are also readily soluble in organic solvents allowing the production of continuous low temperature glassy carbon films. In addition, the microcrystallite size and the extent of graphitization can be varied with film processing temperatures. Furthermore, low temperature glassy carbon (LTGC) surfaces can be made that include noncarbon atoms covalently bound in its structure. Fabricated chromatographic media such as these have potential applications to the separation and purification of a large number of chemicals, including pharmaceuticals. This work will study the surface chemistry of the low temperature glassy carbons (LTGC) produced using select diacetylenic polymers and will develop new selective chromatographic media based on the surface chemistry. LTGCs are expected to be distinctive and should provide unique chromatographic selectivity and extensive applications. Pure carbon LTGC, perfluorinated LTGC, and nitrogen-containing LTGC films will be characterized for use in liquid chromatography. New configurations of GC, specifically nonporous LTGC particles, will be compared to the thin film media doc22167 none This proposal aims to elucidate factors involved in edge-to-edge interactions between beta- sheets and to learn how to control this important mode of protein interaction, which is involved in protein dimerization, protein-protein recognition, and protein aggregation. The proposal builds upon an exciting discovery by the Principal Investigator under NSF award ( Molecular Templates for Creating Artificial Protein Structures ) of a molecular template that induces beta-sheet folding and interactions when incorporated into peptides. This molecular template is constructed as a composite of two amino acids. One of these, Orn, is natural although not routinely found in proteins; the other, Hao, was invented by the Principal Investigator and his students under the prior NSF support. The Orn-Hao composite is easily incorporated into peptides using standard peptide synthesis techniques. Peptides containing the Orn-Hao composite dimerize in a fashion similar to that of certain beta-sheet proteins. The current proposal will study the dimerization of peptides containing the Orn-Hao composite and learn how to control the dimerization process through a series of experiments. The earlier experiments will focus upon optimizing the structure and folding of peptides containing the Orn-Hao composite, while the later experiments will focus upon learning how to use specific interactions to control the dimerization. All of these studies will rely heavily upon organic synthesis, peptide synthesis, NMR titration, and NMR NOE methods. The intellectual merit of this work is that interactions between beta-sheets are widespread and important, yet the molecular basis for these interactions is not well understood. The proposed work explores creative and original concepts, by using small chemical model systems to address this fundamental and important biological problem. One special merit of using these small chemical model systems, instead of larger proteins, is that these systems can be prepared easily and used to evaluate hypotheses very rapidly. Another special merit of these model systems is that they will be able to be prepared in other laboratories, thus enabling other researchers to use them to test their own ideas about protein folding and interactions. With this Award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program (OMC) will support the research of Professor James Nowick of the University of California- Irvine. Professor Nowick s work is expected to generate valuable basic scientific knowledge with important biomedical implications. In addition, this proposal will have broader impacts through the training of students and the development of human resources. Undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students working on this project will be trained to perform cutting-edge research in the laboratory and will also learn to effectively communicate their results to others by presenting their work in seminars, at meetings, and through publications. Many of these well-trained students will contribute to the US scientific endeavor and the economy as researchers in the pharmaceutical industry doc22168 none Professor McGrath and his group will work on developing new methodology for the controlled degradation of dendritic materials. The acid lability of the benzyl aryl ether subunit found in many dendrimers will be used as a trigger for degradation. Dendrimers with depolymerizable backbones will also be prepared and degraded. Release of degradation fragments which have been covalently incorporated into the dendrimer will be monitored so that the process can be understood and modified as necessary. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. Dominic V. McGrath of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Arizona. Dr. McGrath and his students will work on the controlled degradation of dendritic materials. Controlled degradation of dendritic materials could have potential applications in controlled release of pharmaceuticals for drug delivery and as precursors for photoresists for microlithography. The students trained during the course of this interdisciplinary work will gain skills needed by the pharmaceutical, polymer and speciality chemicals industries doc22169 none Casey This award will permit the purchase of a new 500 MHz NMR spectrometer to complement the existing spectrometer in the Keck Solid-State NMR Facility at the University of California at Davis. This new instrument is a wide-bore 500 MHz spectrometer with all of the features necessary for state-of-the-art multi-resonance, multi-dimensional studies of solid samples. The new spectrometer will be used for studies in Chemistry, Materials Science and Earth Science, although the principal investigators (PIs) of this proposal are earth scientists with immediate research needs. The PIs have integrated research that examines the earliest stages of mineral growth from solution and the controls on reaction rates. The PIs research groups rely heavily on NMR spectroscopy because it provides structural and kinetic information on X-ray amorphous materials in situ, including information about rates of chemical exchange over a large range in timescales. Purchase of this new spectrometer is supported by the University of California because it is also key to campus initiatives for growth of interdisciplinary research and faculty recruitment in the Earth and Environmental Sciences. Environmental materials are commonly poorly crystalline oxides or biomolecules where NMR spectroscopy is often the only suitable method for determining structure doc22170 none Time-Series-cross-section (TSCS) models have become popular in political science, since they allow students of comparative politics (broadly defined) to use powerful statistical methods that have been the province of students of American politics (typically studying voting behavior via large surveys). While there are many applications, the prototypical application is the study of political economy, and in particular the impact of political arrangements on economic performance in advanced industrial societies. TSCS data has also become of interest in International Relations (IR). Many quantitative IR researchers use a dyad-year design, where pairs of nations are observed annually for long periods of time (ranging from 40 to over 100 years). The dependent variable of interest in these studies is often the binary indicator of whether a dyad was in conflict in a given year. Binary dependent variables cause special problems. Most studies either ignored TSCS issues or treated those issues as a nuisance, using a Feasible Generalized Least Squares (FGLS) estimation method to treat those nuisances. These FGLS procedures either have poor statistical properties (in finite samples) or seem dangerous on other grounds. One reason that TSCS data is of interest is that the richness of the data allows researchers to do many things; but many of those things should not be done. By now most political science scholarly publications appear to use the methodology developed by the researchers in earlier research where they recommended the use of Ordinary Least Squares estimates coupled with panel correct standard errors, with dynamics modeled via a lagged dependent variable. However, this still treats TSCS issues as problems of estimation and not specification. The researchers will develop the next generation TSCS methodology that focuses on specification. They are interested in studying the best way to model unit heterogeneity directly as well as to account for spatial correlation that is typically seen in these data. In addition, for binary TSCS data they explore how best to model temporal dynamics. The research entails developing appropriate estimators and testing them on both actual and simulated data. In addition, the investigators develop practical advice and software for the applied researcher using TSCS data that implements this methodology. In addition to developing the next generation TSCS methodology they gather and catalog a set of reference datasets for use in evaluating TSCS models. By developing a reference set of datasets that will be made freely available, the researchers will make it easier to evaluate future proposed estimators for TSCS data in political science and therefore improve the field of political methodology doc22171 none This proposal builds off Professor Hutchison s recent discovery of a new class of chelating bicyclic diamide ligands that exhibit dramatic enhancements in binding affinity for the f-block elements compared to the large class of ligands based upon the malonamide substructure. The new ligand class, the 3,9-diaza-3,9- dialkylbicyclo[ 4.4.0]decane-2, 10-diones, were identified using a rational approach utilizing molecular mechanics modeling. The preorganized bicyclic structure ideally positions the two carbonyl groups for optimal metal-ligand interaction. A highly efficient and versatile synthesis of this ligand class has been developed and ion extraction experiments have shown a 3 to 5 million-fold enhancement in affmity for f- block ions when compared to several analogous acyclic diamides. This initial discovery suggests a rich class of ligands can be prepared wherein the binding affinity for f- block elements can be widely tuned. The overall goal of this proposal is to identify methods by which the new ligands can be rationally designed and rapidly optimized through an integrated theory, synthesis and testing program. The three primary objectives in this proposal are designed to help elucidate the design criteria that dictate the properties of this new class of ligands. These objectives are (i) developing synthetic methods that permit wide variation of the ligand structure (ranging from the nature and position of alkyl and aryl substituents to the ring sizes within the bicyclic structure), (ii) investigating the solution and solid-state coordination chemistry of the new ligands and relating this chemistry back to the ligand design and (iii) incorporating these ligands into functional materials (polymers, organic thin films). With this Award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the research of Professor James Hutchison of the University of Oregon whose work involves ligand design, synthetic chemistry, spectroscopy methods, coordination chemistry, crystallography, solvent extraction, and materials chemistry. This work will enhance student training through exposure to a wide range of research. It will also contribute to society by targeting such applications as nuclear fuel reprocessing and high-level waste management, and sensitizers for lanthanide luminesence in fluorescent probes and sensors doc22172 none The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at Columbia University investigates ways of forming films containing complex metal oxide nanoparticles and the properties of these films through an interdisciplinary and collaborative effort. The Center is composed of a single interdisciplinary research group (IRG). The focus of the IRG research is the materials chemistry of oxide nanoparticle systems, and includes nanoparticle synthesis, assembly, and diagnostics. The Columbia MRSEC links thirteen faculty members from five departments on campus with other faculty at City College of New York, and with fourteen collaborators in industry and at national laboratories. The MRSEC maintains shared experimental facilities that meet the needs of the Center research and serve for the training of students. Education outreach efforts of the MRSEC include a summer research experience for undergraduates and for high school teachers, and an extensive visitation program to high and middle schools in New York City that brings materials demonstrations to teachers and students. Participants in the Center currently include 13 senior investigators, 3 postdoctoral associates, 8 graduate students, 10 undergraduate students and 1 support personnel. Professor Irving P. Herman directs the MRSEC doc22173 none Professor Benner will lead a project that combines organic synthesis, biological chemistry, in vitro evolution (lVE) and univariate statistical analysis that will develop the physical organic chemical tools needed to quantitate the impact of adding chemical functionality (amino, thiol, imidazole, peptides, and metal chelating groups) via covalent attachment to catalytic DNA molecules. This work will first address the paradox that arises from the observation that endowing DNA and RNA libraries with additional functionality evidently improves the catalytic potential of nucleic acids by only a factor of two to ten, not by the orders of magnitude expected from standard Structure Theory in Organic Chemistry. A set of five hypotheses that account for the orders-of-magnitude discrepancy between expectation and observation will be tested, including models that hold (a) that our view of the role of functionality in catalysis is naive, (b) that the functional endowment of natural DNA (phosphates and hydrogen bond donating and accepting groups) are sufficient for catalysis in general, (c) that the functionality recruited non-covalently by nucleic acids from solution (in particular, divalent cations such as Mg++) overwhelms the contribution of covalently linked functionality, (d) that lVE experiments lose the best catalysts, and (e) that more than one type of functional group is needed before the expected large benefit from functionality is seen. This will require careful assessment of the kinetic order of the reaction being effected by the selected DNA molecules (first order, unimolecular, with the catalytic step rate determining?). With this Award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program (OMC) and the Molecular Biochemistry Program in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences (MCB) will support the research of Professor Steven A. Benner of the University of Florida. Professor Benner s work is expected to have broad impact. From a practical perspective, we may learn how to truly get catalysis on demand from IVE experiments, useful for everything from biomedicine to environmental remediation. From a scientific perspective, we will understand in greater depth the possibilities of single biopolymer systems playing a role in the origin of life. From a methodological perspective, he will develop tools that permit IVE to explore the distribution of chemical properties in structure space defined by a DNA sequence. And, from a theoretical perspective, the work may end up altering, perhaps dramatically, our global view of the relationship between functionality and reactivity in nucleic acids doc22174 none The First U.S.-Italy Workshop on Frontiers in Materials Research, Nanoscience and Nanotechnology will be held on March 14-15, at the National Science Foundation, Arlington, Virginia. In addition to key note talks that will address the core topics of the workshop, six breakout groups will meet in parallel sessions to hold discussions and write a report that outlines issues and identifies opportunities for collaborative research in each of the respective fields. Three major areas will be explored, each having two sub-areas. (1) Frontiers in Characterization of Nanoscale Systems: Low dimensional systems, nanostructures and devices; Studies of single-molecule and few electron systems and devices. (2) Advances in Self-assembly and Novel Materials: self-assembled systems and devices; synthesis of novel organic and inorganic systems and their devices. (3) Interfaces between Materials Research and Biology: self-assembly of biomolecular materials; novel biomolecular devices. A goal of the workshop is to foster bilateral collaborations between leading groups in materials research, nanoscience, and nanotechnology in the U.S. and Italy. The research initiated through these direct bilateral collaborations will complement research that is presently sponsored under the U.S. National Science Foundation - European Commission implementation agreements. Materials research is a huge driving force for innovations that serve to educate and train future scientists and engineers, while advancing economic growth and social progress. Frontier areas of nanoscience and technology are generating scientific breakthroughs that revolutionize existing technologies as well a create new ones in areas that include health and medical services, transportation, environmental protection, energy efficiency, civil infrastructure, information technology, and homeland security doc22175 none This research project addresses the effect of atomic scale structure and composition on the reactivity of bimetallic alloy surfaces for catalytic processes. With the support of the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program, Professor Koel and his co-workers in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Southern California, use scanning tunneling microscopy, X-ray photoelectron diffraction, and ion scattering spectroscopy to examine the structure, composition and morphology of Pt-Sn, Pt-Ge, and Pt-Ti alloy surfaces. This information is correlated with small molecule catalytic activity on these surfaces, using temperature programmed desorption and infrared spectroscopy to monitor the surface reaction kinetics. Information obtained from these studies improves our fundamental understanding of catalysis on complex heterogeneous surfaces. Atomic scale structural and compositional information is correlated with surface reaction kinetics in these studies, carried out in the laboratory of Professor Bruce Koel at USC. The identification of the reactive site for catalytic processes on alloy surfaces is the goal of this work. Fundamental insight into the operation of catalytic surfaces is obtained from these studies doc22176 none Determining the fate of CO2 has important consequences to the environment. Forests, particularly in the wet tropics may be very large carbon sinks. Recent evidence suggests that the Amazon may be a net sink of atmospheric CO2, storing 1-9 Mg C ha yr. This project seeks to understand the role of CO2 outgassing, or evasion, from the Amazon River system in the carbon cycle of this important mosit tropical forest ecosystem. The working hypothesis of this research is that CO2 evasion returns as much carbon to the atmosphere as is sequestered in upland forests on an interannual basis. Export of organic material from upland forests to fluvial environments is the primary source of carbon that is eventually respired in rivers and evaded as CO2. The field work associated with this project will samplecharacteristic sub-basins of the Amazon to determine the spatial and temporal variation in CO emission. The 3-year project will be a joint effort between researchers at the University of Washington and the Centro de Energia Nuclear na Agricultura and will model whole ecosystem carbon flux of the Amazon River system doc22177 none Professor Nathan Lewis of the is funded by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program for studies leading to better control of the electrical and physical properties of silicon-based materials and devices through an emphasis on silicon surface chemistry. The projects include chemical and electrical passivation reactions on single crystal silicon surfaces, charge transport behavior of structures obtained from mesoporous silicon photoelectrodes, as well as characterization of silicon-based nanotubes and nanospheres, and formation of organic inorganic composites. Chemical modification of silicon surfaces is important in interfacing molecular electronics to semiconductor-based circuitry and developing chemical sensors, optoelectronic devices and photovoltaic and photoelectrochemical cells. Perhaps surface modification can fool inexpensive polycrystalline silicon samples into having electrical and physical properties of the more expensive large single crystals currently used doc22178 none This award by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports research by Professor Stephen P. Cramer in the Department of Chemistry and Uwe Bergmann, Assistant Research Scientist in the Department of Applied Sciences, at the University of California at Davis to develop x-ray resonance Raman spectroscopy (XRRS) as a tool to probe low-energy excitations. The low energy transitions will involve charge transfer and d-d bands as well as molecular vibrations involving metal ions in protein systems. In nickel enzymes, with either Fe or Ni, metal 3d to ligand (CO) pi transitions are obscured by sulfur to iron excitations in Fe-S clusters. In photosystem-II, Mn d-d bands can only be seen over a narrow spectroscopic window above the chlorophyl cutoff and below water near infrared bands. The development of XRRS as applied to protein systems will enable the observation of metal-centered transitions that are obscured by other chromophores, which could help to characterize some of the poorly understood, but important, intermediates in Fe-Ni dehydrogenase, carbon monoxide dehydrogenase, photosystem-II and other important Mn and Ni enzymes that are essential to understanding fundamental biological processes. A new x-ray spectroscopic technique will be developed to probe active sites in important protein centers doc22179 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop a novel low-voltage periodic poling technique for creating highly efficient quasi-phase matched waveguides in nonlinear optical materials. The key innovation of the proposed technology is the use of co-planar micro-comb electrodes to periodically pole waveguides embedded in a nonlinear optical material such as potassium titanyl phosphate (KTP). Periodically poled waveguides will enable highly efficient, quasi-phase matched (QPM), nonlinear optical frequency conversion of continuous wave and low peak power quasi-continuous radiation. The proposed technique will allow multiple waveguides with different QPM gratings to be fabricated onto a single device, thereby building in wavelength flexibility as well as reducing cost. The anticipated benefits of low-voltage poling are waveguides with significantly improved conversion efficiency, low scattering loss, and increased manufacturing yields. The commercial applications of this project are in the areas of bioanalytical instrumentation (such as medical diagnostics, flow cytometers and medical imagers) and telecommunications doc22180 none The objectives of this work involve several aspects of organoboron chemistry. Professor Soderquist and his group will first prepare a number of chiral allyl, crotyl, allenyl, and alkynyl boron reagents which contain the 9-borabicyclo[3.3.2]decane framework. The allyl, crotyl, and allenyl reagents will be utilized in asymmetric addition reactions to prochiral aldehydes and ketones. The chiral alkynyl organoboron reagents will be used in asymmetric conjugate addition reactions to enones. Boron NMR will be used to assess the stereoselectivities of these addition reactions. With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research of Dr. John A. Soderquist of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Puerto Rico. Dr. Stewart will work on the development of organoboron reagents capable of effecting a number of chemical reactions. This group will explore stereoselective addition reactions using molecules containing ketones and aldehydes as substrates. These addition reactions produce molecules which are chiral (have two nonsuperimposable mirror images) and make only one of the two possible forms (a single enantiomer). Development of this family of reactions is one of the most important problems facing the pharmaceutical industry today. Students trained during the course of this work will gain skills needed by the pharmaceutical and speciality chemicals industries which now produces a number of single enantiomer compounds doc22181 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project concerns the novel application of cavity-enhanced absorption spectroscopy to determine the carbon isotope ratio of carbon dioxide emitting from deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Although, this isotope ratio has recently been identified as an indicator of biological activity, the currently used analytical methods are expensive and inaccurate. The aim of this Phase I proposal is to design a portable cavity-enhanced absorption spectroscopy system to accurately determine isotope ratios of deep-sea samples in situ. Preliminary results suggest that the system can determine isotope ratios to better than 0.1 percent, which is sufficient to determine the presence of biological activity. This effort will provide an accurate determination of carbon isotope ratios in an inexpensive, portable device. It will also have significant commercial impact in medical diagnostics, the petroleum industry, and environmental monitoring. Projected sales of the ratiometer in the former two areas alone are expected to exceed $65M over the next five years. Moreover, the proposed prototype can be readily modified to monitor various industrial gases, further increasing its commercial impact doc22182 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project proposes to develop an innovative intelligent optical sensor for semiconductor back-end processes control and inspection by using our matrix-addressable laser detector array chip. The sensor will be incorporated into the fine pitch component placement machines, to ensure accurate component placement, and co-planarity of component leads and to inspect components immediately before placement. Identification of defective or damage lead tips that lie within the same plane will be. Additional inspection capabilities include solder bump volume and height, bump position and quality, ball height and diameter of ball grit array, ball coplanarity and foreign materials. The sensor actually is a miniature confocal scanning laser microscope without any moving parts. Since there are no moving parts or bulky optics, we are able obtain image rate at least 60 frames per second, and sensor can be made a very small dimension. This sensor will enable semiconductor packaging manufactures to increase operating efficiency, increase product yield, and add to their quality control doc22183 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project s objective is to overcome the drawbacks of existing imaging sensor designs, and to demonstrate a novel video camera design concept. Named the Super-Eye, this camera is able to provide simultaneously both large depth of field the dynamic scene and selective high-resolution video images for the object of interest. The unique advantages of the proposed Super-Eye concept include: (a) achieving simultaneous high image resolution and large depth of field; (b) Intelligent guidance of the high-resolution image channel; and (c) 3D Modeling Capability. The requirements for high image resolution, large depth of field, and wide field of view are applicable to both the commercial and military markets. The security surveillance market has experience near double-digit growth and is expected to maintain this growth in light of the events of 9 11. Security cameras are roughly 30 percent of the $100 billion global security industry doc22184 none The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at Stanford University supports an interdisciplinary program in the area of polymeric materials. The Center is entitled Center on Polymer Interfaces and Macromolecular Assemblies . The MRSEC is a partnership between Stanford University, UC Davis, UC Berkeley and the IBM Almaden Research Laboratory. The research is organized into three interdisciplinary research groups (IRGs). Synthesis and Application of Nanostructured Materials (IRG 1) has as its mission to develop new methods to prepare functional macromolecules followed by self- and directed assembly of these molecules into nanoscopic structures. Potential applications are in nanotemplating, photovoltaic devices and novel catalytic systems. The techniques and materials developed in IRG1 have direct applications for single molecule studies in IRG 2 and polymer bilayer assemblies in IRG 3. Structure and Dynamics of Confined Systems (IRG 2) is concerned with the effect of confinement due to interfaces, entanglements, branching etc, on the structure and dynamics of molecules and macromolecular assemblies. IRG 3 on Functional Biomolecular Membranes investigates the fabrication of the interfaces between lipid membrane-countering surfaces and biological systems and the study of the dynamical properties of these interfaces. The ultimate goal of the IRG is to develop interfaces between hard and soft (functional) surfaces. The Center support undergraduate summer research activities in academic and industrial settings as well as in science museum projects. Plans are to increase the participation of physically disabled students. The REU activities will be extended to UC Berkeley and to the Institute of Polymers in Dresden, Germany. The K-12 programs for teachers and students includes partnerships with area schools in collaboration with the East Palo Alto Unified School District. New activities are planned together with the San Francisco Exploratorium and its Teacher Institute. The Center operates shared facilities at Stanford and UC Davis. These are accessible by CPIMA members as well as non-members. In addition, CPIMA members have access to a wide range of facilities at the IMB Almaden Research Center. The Center s participants include 26 faculty, 8 postdoctoral associates, 7 graduate students, and support for undergraduates and K-12 teachers. Professor Curtis W. Frank directs the MRSEC doc22185 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will develop a novel positron source based on the generation of free 13 N produced via the 12 C(d,n) 13 N reaction. In a major advance over existing technologies, the 13 N will be extracted as nitrogen gas from a porous carbon target, fed to a remote location, and condensed onto a small diameter spot. A layer of solid Ne will moderate the 13 N beta-particles to produce a beam of slow positrons. This approach will yield an unrivaled brightness and two orders of magnitude higher intensity than current 22 Na sources, thus opening the door to many valuable uses of positron probes for science and industry. The high intensity, high brightness positron source to be developed will have many applications to high-data-rate, positron micro-beam instruments for use in determining such things as: (1) the effects of radiation damage due to ion implantation on the conduction characteristics of IC semiconductors; (2) the effects of electro-migration on the failure of current carrying leads in ICs; (3) the properties of low-k dielectrics used in high speed ICs; and (4) the aging of the mechanical properties of plastic films doc22186 none This exploratory research is comprised of two distinct parts. The first and main part considers estimation of a binary choice model. This is a statistical model where the dependent variable (the one researchers are trying to explain or predict using observed explanatory variables) can take only two values. For this model, there are three values applied researchers are interested in estimating. One is the set of the parameters of the prediction function, which can be used to predict outcomes. The other values of interest are choice probabilities and marginal effects. The former provides researchers with the probability of observing a value of the dependent variable as a function of observed explanatory variables, and the latter determines the effect of a change in the value of the explanatory variable on this probability. Existing estimation either cannot simultaneously estimate all values of interest, or they require very strict assumptions on the relationship between the dependent and explanatory variables. In contrast, the procedures developed in this research project do not impose strict assumptions, yet enable joint estimation of the three values of interest. The second part of this research involves the estimation of a censored regression model, which is a statistical model where the dependent variable is never observed to take a value exceeding a fixed constant, referred to here as the censoring point. Many data sets encountered in applied work exhibit this model s features. This research project develops a new procedure which enables estimation of the prediction function in the region beyond the censoring point. This cannot be done using existing methods without stronger assumptions doc22187 none The process industry (chemical, petroleum and pharmaceutical) in the United States has been one of the strongest industrial sectors of the economy, producing a consistent positive balance of trade. This has been due to the cost effectiveness of its processes as well as to its technological innovations. In the 21st century the process industry faces three major challenges: increased competition in the global marketplace, pressure for keeping operating costs and product prices low, and pressure to reduce environmental, safety and security risks. Given these competitive concerns, there is an increasing focus for optimizing and integrating the supply chain in order to achieve reduced costs and a tighter level of coordination in the operations of manufacturing facilities. One component for accomplishing these objectives is new process operations methodologies and tools. This grant is to provide support for the conference on Foundations of Computer Aided Process Operations (FOCAPO) that will take place on January 12-15, , in Coral Springs, Florida. The meeting will focus on the areas of supply chain management, R&D for pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, methodologies for process operations (hybrid systems, data reconciliation, safety), and optimization models and algorithms (discrete, stochastic and dynamic). It will also provide a forum to discuss supply chain software from vendors, and industrial and academic collaborations in the area of process operations. FOCAPO aims to attract about 150 participants, with roughly equal representation from academia and industry. There will also be substantial international participation. One important goal is to ensure the participation of 20 graduate students. The grant will support invited academic speakers and panelists and the graduate students doc22188 none This MRSEC at Pennsylvania State University is entitled Center for Nanomolecular Structures and supports three interdisciplinary research groups (IRGs). Molecular Nanofabrication (IRG 1) combines self-assembly to advance nanolithography along several areas of emphasis. The aim is to bridge the gap between the scale of single molecules and the much larger scale defined by conventional lithography. Molecular Motors (IRG 2) has as its goal to advance the understanding of fundamental issues of molecular motion and to develop techniques to exploit such motors in nanoassembly and nanoscale motion. Both synthetic and hybrid biological motors are investigated. IRG 3 entitled Collective Phenomena in Restricted Geometries explores the collective molecular, photonic and electronic effects in systems with reduced dimensionalitiy. In addition to obtaining fundamental insights into the effects of reduced dimensionalities the work has potential applications for novel photonic and ferroelectric devices. The Center will partner with the Penn State node of the National Nanofabrication Users Network to create a national resource in the extension of nanolithography in the areas of chemical self-assembly. The Center s has education activities ranging from the graduate to the undergraduate and to K-12 teachers and students. The Center will also acquaint the general public with the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia and the Exploratorium in San Francisco. An interactive exhibit in the area of nanotechnology is planned with each museum. The Center s participants include 34 faculty, 6 postdoctoral associates, 12 graduate students, and support for undergraduates and K-12 teachers. Professor Moses Chan directs the MRSEC doc22189 none Over the past 6 years the principal investigators have developed a methodology for assessing the risk associated with maritime transportation. The methodology utilizes dynamic simulation of the maritime transportation system, expert judgment elicitation models and probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) techniques. The approach has proven useful in three major maritime ports in the United States i.e. Port of New Orleans (Mississippi River in Louisiana), Port Valdez (Prince William Sound in Alaska) and Port Seattle (Puget Sound in Washington State). Two of these studies focused on passenger safety, while the other focused on oil transportation risk. The National Research Council in assessed the methodology and concluded that representation of uncertainty in the maritime risk assessment method is lacking. The Prince William Sound Risk Assessment is an important step forward in using probabilistic risk assessment methods to assess the safety of transporting oil in large tankers in PWS. Because the data were very limited, the analysis results and the resulting conclusions are not robust and are necessarily uncertain [National Research Council, ]. This NSF project will allow the maritime risk assessment method to live up to its promise by developing a coherent theoretical framework to address uncertainty. The truth is that we are uncertain. Therefore, speaking the truth implies that we express our analysis results in terms of probability curves rather than fixed points estimates. [See, e.g., Kaplan, ]. The intellectual merit of the research stems from the development of an overarching Bayesian framework for addressing uncertainty when simulation of systems states is combined with available data and expert judgment to assess risk and risk intervention effectiveness. The broader impact of the proposed work is primarily drawn from its applicability to areas other than maritime accident risk such as e.g. maritime security risk (intentional events as opposed to accidents). The framework and methodologies to be developed will be applicable to other transportation modes, such as aviation or road safety. Aside from aviation security and accident risk, the technique will be directly transferable to the ever-increasing problem of runway incursions as a result of increased traffic congestion at our national airports doc22190 none This project will evaluate a class based approach to the explanation of the growth in earnings inequality over the last two decades. It adopts a class schema derived from the work of Erikson, Goldthorpe, and Portacarero (EGP) to describe the relationships between class and growing inequality. It will utilize data from the Survey of Consumer Finances to evaluate the role of capital income in explaining the variable relationship between class position and income. And it will analyze inter-industry wage differentials by class to examine a rent-based explanation to growing inequality: whether some of the growing inequality may be attributed to declines in rent payments to working-class wage earners in industries that have historically paid higher wages doc22191 none This investigation is part of a larger project involving a survey of a random sample of contributors to each of the nine candidates who raised over five million dollars before July 31, and who sought either of the two major party nominations. This survey is the first of its kind to include both large ($200 and more) and small (under $200) donors. The main theses being investigated involve the representativeness of the contributor pool as a subsample of the public, the impacts of candidate and contributor attitudes on the contribution decision, and the motivations for contributor political activism. The central theoretical claims of the research promise to enhance substantially our understanding of this topic. These funds allow the investigators to ensure that the completed questionnaires that they have received can be coded promptly, facilitating timely analysis of the data. The dataset to be produced will be of significant interest to numerous scholars interested in this topic doc22192 none It is proposed to purchase a rheometer for the purpose of research and research training in the dynamics of non-Newtonian fluids. More specifically, research will be performed on polymer melts, multiphase systems, and biomedical materials. This equipment will be used by six faculty members in Chemical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering Departments of CUNY City College, and one faculty member of Columbia University doc22193 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase 1 Project is to develop microarrays for analyzing thousands of sequences of DNA for genomic and diagnostic applications. The microarrays would be made from sol-gel coatings with specific microstructures. These substrates will allow higher density arrays and higher signal noise ratio from each of the array elements. This will result in increasing analytical throughput with an improved accuracy in detection and reproducibility of the data. The commercial applications of this project will be in the areas of healthcare and agriculture doc22194 none This research project is concerned with social and spatial change in large cities in developing nations. The research will examine trends of social and spatial polarization in residential areas of Accra (Ghana) and Mumbai (India). This will involve extensive fieldwork in both cities, with support from local universities, and employ site reconnaissance, interviews, census data analysis and residential mapping, residential surveys and focus groups. The main hypothesis in this study is that policies of economic liberalization in both cities have encouraged fundamental changes in urban land use and in urban labor markets. We expect to find increasing spatial differentiation of residential areas with greater contrasts in terms of types of residential developments and in terms of the socio-economic status of their residents. The choice of Accra and Mumbai as case studies is based on a number of critical elements that they have in common: their location in poor regions; their role as gateway cities; their colonial histories; their post-colonial experiences in terms of national and global phases in their countries political economy. This project builds on a previous NSF-funded study of the changing corporate geographies of Accra and Mumbai. This study is important theoretically because it helps to correct a bias in urban studies toward cities in the West and in more developed regions of the world economy. It will promote understanding of the social and spatial effects of liberalization and of corresponding trends of globalization in major urban centers in the developing world. As such, the study will contribute to more general theories of economic globalization. From a practical point of view, the research is significant because it will provide information about the changing geography of inequality in these cities. While rapid urban growth in the less developed world is a well-known phenomenon, little is known about the emerging human geographies of these cities. Trends of social and spatial polarization affect community development and local politics and also have ramifications for urban sustainable development and for urban planning and management. The results of the research will help illuminate the possible social and political risks of current trends and will make recommendations regarding sustainable social and spatial development of cities in developing nations doc22195 none Lin Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Professor Feng Lin, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan and Dr. Nejib Ben Hadj-Alouane, Department of Applied Computer Sciences at the Ecole Nationale d Sciences Informatique (ENSI) in Tunis, Tunisia. This project is to investigate the interrupt latency problem in software design. Most microprocessor microcontroller systems contain sources of interrupt and interrupt service routines, which are software components executing in response to the assertion of an interrupt in hardware. Because the interrupt service routines execute on the same Central Processing Unit (CPU), they compete for the CPU and interfere with each other s latency requirements. Latency is defined as the delay between the assertion of the interrupt in hardware and the start of execution of the associated interrupt service routine. An important problem is whether a specific set of sources of interrupt and interrupt service routines can coexist in the same microprocessor microcontroller software load without causing interrupt latency violations. The investigators plan to use a recently developed framework of hybrid machines to solve this problem. They will model sources of interrupt and interrupt service routines as hybrid machines. The main task of this project is to develop models for common microprocessor microcontroller systems, efficient algorithms to check co-reachability in hybrid machines, efficient ways to represent hybrid machine models in programming languages such as C, and software tools that will help engineers to check interrupt latency violations in software and the how to eliminate the violations. Scope: The two scientists have collaborated and published jointly in and in while Dr. Hadj-Alouane was employed at Dow Chemicals Company and at the University of Michigan respectively. The model they propose in this project may result in important changes in practice for software design. The project will allow for visits by Dr. Lin to Tunisia and will encourage a mutually beneficial international collaboration between the Wayne State University and the ENSI in Tunisia. Funds for this project are provided by the Office of International Science and Engineering, the Division of Computer-Communications Research and Division of Experimental and Integrative Activities doc22196 none This exploratory research attempts to make at least three contributions to the literature on the political economy of development, using original data collection, microeconometric analysis, and formal theory. First, the research estimates the impact of ethnic diversity on local public goods provision in two countries, Kenya and Tanzania. Data is being collected on local public goods, including school funding, maintenance of wells, and community participation in village meetings. The resulting dataset provides information on the impact of ethnic divisions on public good provision across a variety of settings and outcomes. Preliminary empirical results indicate that higher local ethnic diversity is associated with sharply lower local funding and worse facilities across ninety rural Kenyan primary schools. The drop in funding associated with the change from complete ethnic homogeneity to median school ethnic diversity is approximately 25 percent of average local school funding, and this relationship is robust to the inclusion of geographic, socioeconomic, demographic and teacher quality controls. Ethnically diverse areas also have lower community participation in school committee meetings, as well as substantially worse water well maintenance in rural western Kenya. Second, the research examines how central government policies toward ethnicity affect inter-ethnic relations and public goods provision, by comparing outcomes across two nearby rural districts: one in western Kenya and one in western Tanzania. Despite their shared geography, history, and colonial legacy, central governments in Kenya and Tanzania have followed radically different ethnic policies since independence. Finally, the research explores the impact of a recent local government decentralization reform in Tanzania - which was gradually phased-in across villages - on local public good outcomes. The unique dataset collected in this project allows the author to test the hypothesis that decentralization reforms improve public good outcomes, and to explore whether such reforms are less effective in ethnically diverse areas due to local collective action failures. Understanding the impacts of decentralization in diverse communities has important policy implications given the current movement toward decentralization in many African and other less developed countries. The field data collection in Tanzania is being conducted in collaboration with a capable local non-governmental organization that has a well-trained research field staff and data entry group. The author has been involved in field data collection projects in East Africa since doc22197 none Movements of daily living, such as reaching for a glass of water or pushing an elevator button, are motor acts that most of us perform easily and without conscious consideration of how they are executed. However, it takes considerable time for children to learn to reach and aim accurately for objects. Also, these movements, which seem to be so easy for young and healthy individuals, can become difficult for older adults and patients with motor disorders. This suggests that the organization of aiming movements is not a simple task for the central nervous system. One of the observations that supports this assumption is that the final stage of aiming movements when performed by elderly individuals and Parkinson s patients usually includes submovements represented by a number of small inflections in movement profile that are hardly noticeable in movements of young adults. These submovements have always been interpreted as corrections performed to achieve required accuracy at the target. This research is based on the hypothesis that another factor, which emerges from mechanical properties of the arm, might also contribute to the submovement phenomenon. In this view, to terminate hand motion at the target, energy developed for movement production has to be dissipated, and this might require a specific control strategy that causes submovements. To investigate the role of this factor, the structure of aiming movements that require termination at the target will be compared to the structure of continuous point-to-point movements. The continuous movements will be from the initial point to the target and back to the initial point, and therefore they will not require termination of motion at the target. The effect of the motion termination factor will be enhanced by using a solid target that helps to terminate motion passively and a flexible target that requires active termination of motion. The study will be useful both for understanding basic principles of human movement control and for investigation of factors underlying dysfunction caused by age and motor disorders doc22198 none This project seeks to use fossil wetland deposits and fossil rodent middens from the Atacama Dessert in the Central Andes as a means to estimate precipitation and seasonality for the region as a aid to reconstructing Quaternary climate. The fossil data and paleoclimatic reconstructions will be guided, in part, by consideration of the modalities of the modern climate. The goal of the research is to use the fossil data to understand the steep transition between two seasonal rainfall regimes linked to the South American Summer Monsoon and the southern westerlies. The chosen research sites underlie this transition zone and are along a 300-km stretch of Atacama Desert highlands and the southern edge of the Altiplano. Broadly speaking, the research will support international scientific collaboration and undergraduate student training. It has the potential to link important paleoclimate proxy records with modern climatology in order to interpret past climate processes in a region with little existing paleoclimate data doc22199 none Cooperation may be in everyone s long-term interest, but in any single social interaction each individual may have an incentive to defect from cooperative behavior. This is the essence of social dilemmas. When individuals are paired in an indefinitely long-term relationship, the threat of triggering non-cooperative responses by others to a non-cooperative act may be sufficient to sustain cooperative behavior. However, individuals may live in a community for a long time, frequently interact with various members of that community, but have only short-term, intermittent, relationships with any particular member of that community. In such circumstances, it is not be possible for the victim of an opportunistic act to directly punish the defector. Nevertheless, Kandori has shown that, under certain conditions, a social norm of cooperative behavior can be sustained by the same kind of history-dependent strategies that can sustain cooperative behavior in long-term relationships between fixed pairs of individuals. Kandori s theorem is an extension of the Folk Theorem for infinitely repeated games. Like the Folk Theorem, it only proves that cooperation can be sustained by history-dependent trigger strategies. Whether, and under what conditions a group will develop a social norm of cooperative behavior are the questions this study addresses. Specifically, a behavioral experiment has been designed to investigate the degree to which cooperative behavior in an indefinitely repeated prisoners dilemma stage game is influenced by both the nature of the matching technology and the character of the information transmitted about the play of one stage game to the players of the next stage game. The study will compare the extent of cooperative behavior observed when fixed pairs play an indefinitely repeated Prisoners Dilemma stage game with that observed in a fixed group that is anonymously and randomly matched after each stage game. In the random matching condition, the amount of information that players have concerning their opponent s past behavior will also be varied so as to determine whether more information leads to increases in the frequency of cooperative behavior. The question of what kinds of social interaction promote or inhibit cooperative (competitive) behavior in environments where agents have both incentives to cooperate over time and incentives to opportunistically compete at any particular moment of time is of obvious importance in many settings where cooperative arrangements must be self-enforcing. These include such diverse settings as the design of test-ban treaties, the design of relative performance pay systems, and the administration of anti-trust laws to deal with implicit collusion. Beyond these matters of practical importance, the results of this experiment are also of methodological importance for experimental economists who often use random matching protocols to study learning behavior in strategic situations that are meant to represent one time encounters doc22200 none Large columnar cacti, such as the saguaro (Carnegiea gigantea), are prominent features of many ecosystems. Because of their extensive distribution and abundant production of large succulent fruit they play an important role in structuring food webs and ecosystems. Up until now, however, researchers studying the ecological and evolutionary aspects of plant-frugivore mutualisms have largely ignored this important group of plants. These succulent fruit may be particularly important in hot deserts where high air temperatures and water scarcity may constrain animal behavior as well as the timing and investment in reproduction. The saguaro s fruit are available during the driest and hottest period (June-July) of the summer in the Sonoran Desert, before the onset of monsoon rains. In this research, I use a two-faceted approach to assessing the importance of a unique resource, the saguaro, to a community of avian consumers. The proposed research has several features that set it apart from earlier studies examining plant -animal interactions: 1) it combines observational data of resource use by individual consumers with direct measurements nutrient transfer between the plant resource and a community of consumers using stable isotopes as tracers; 2) it quantifies both temporal changes in fruit availability and changes in avian abundance, diversity, and productivity and 3) it directly manipulates resource availability, through fruit removal, while quantifying changes in consumer abundance, diversity, and productivity. Taken in concert, these studies provide a unique approach to assessing the importance of presumed irkeystonely or irfoundationlr resources by: 1) directly quantifying the flux of nutrients between a primary producer and individual consumers and 2) through a fruit removal experiment, examining the effects of the fruit resource on consumer abundance, biodiversity, and productivity. I expect this research to produce an extensive array of new insights into: 1) the water and energy balance of desert birds; 2) the role of cacti as consumer resources in arid and semi-arid ecosystems; 3) frugivory and nutrient transfer rates between plant-consumer interactions and 4) community dynamics as it relates to changes in resource levels. This work will also quantify how different consumer groups (seed predators versus seed dispersers) interact with the plant to affect the plant s reproductive potential. It will provide the first comparative analysis of traditional methods of studying resource use to the newer techniques using stable isotopes. At the same time, it will be among the first studies to quantify the effects of removal of a presumed irKeystone Plant Resourcele on the abundance, diversity and reproductive output of an entire animal community. This research will also be the first to quantify the importance of a single resource to the nutrient and water balance of multiple species of different body sizes, foraging modes and dietary guilds in any ecosystem. This work should also provide important new empirical evidence on how home range size and foraging mode affect individual exploitation of a resource system. Finally, this research will bring all facets of the scientific process to a large number of graduate and undergraduate students. Twenty undergraduate students and 1 graduate student will obtain extensive research experience working on this project and it is likely that many more will be trained through the REU program. This research is bound to have a major inpact with the public as well, because of my association with the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. Research results from this project will be the basis of a centerpiece display at the museum that explores the scientific process and the interactions of saguaros with the other inhabitants of the Sonoran Desert doc22201 none Prejudice creates barriers for the learning and development of children from all racial and ethnic groups. With the increasing diversity of youth in North America, it is particularly timely and important to make progress toward understanding and reducing racial prejudice. Recent social and developmental research clarifies the multifaceted nature of prejudice and the need for an inter-disciplinary approach to addressing prejudice. This program of research integrates and expands advances in social psychological research on attitude change with advances in developmental research on children s cognitive capacities and limitations into the Social-Cognitive-Developmental Model of mechanisms underlying racial attitude change. This integrative model will be examined via multiple methods including observations, social-cognitive skill training, longitudinal assessments, and meta-analyses. The project will make theoretical and empirical contributions to social and developmental research on mechanisms underlying racial attitude change and will produce concrete recommendations for age-specific prejudice reduction interventions that benefit children who live and learn in a diverse society doc22202 none This ITR- and ITWF-sponsored research project seeks to understand the institutional, contextual constraints and opportunities that affect under-represented minority students decisions to study (or not study) computer science at the high school level. The researchers will investigate how the computer science pipeline gets constructed. Technological portraits for three Los Angeles public high schools will be developed and in-depth interviews will be conducted with approximately forty district-level technology administrators, principals, counselors, computer science and math teachers, and technology and magnet coordinators at these three schools. Each of these three schools has a high numbers of African-American and Latino a students. The researchers will study the perceptions and thinking of those who help to construct the pipeline-namely, state, district, and local educators. In particular, they will focus on 1) educators perceptions of what a computer science curriculum should be for their students; 2) the courses and curriculum sequences that these educators shape; 3) the criteria they use to judge which students should study computer science and which are not capable of success ; and 4) how these norms and structures that influence the construction of the pipeline translate into educators role in shaping students course-taking choices. Dissemination of findings is an important part of this proposal and the investigators will hold on-going discussions with school educators about these issues. Printed materials will be produced for distribution in the three schools, and meetings discussions will be held with the teachers about the research findings. The findings will be disseminated nationally doc22203 none The child s cry that wakes you in night is not hard to identify. The footfalls and hoof beats in a western movie supply crucial realism to the moviegoer. Things that make noise are tightly woven into the fabric of human experience. Nevertheless, we know very little about the actual perception of auditory events. This is true despite our extensive knowledge of how ears work, for example, and our extensive knowledge about the basic auditory capabilities of ourselves and other animals. The specialized area of speech perception has made some advances, but the perception of our environment involves sounds other than speech, and the study of human speech has provided few insights into how we perceive complex acoustic events. The impact of a shoe on a wooden floor will sound differently than the same shoe on a metal floor. Acoustic properties of auditory events reflect physical and biomechanical properties of their sources. To understand auditory event perception, the funded project will identify the physical and biomechanical properties of source events and then identify relations between these source properties and the acoustic properties of the resulting sound. With this database in hand, Dr. Pastore and his colleagues will next conduct experiments to identify the sound attributes that listeners correctly (or incorrectly) associate with source properties. Specifically, the funded project employs this source-sound-perception approach to investigate human gait as a class of auditory events. Although the proposed research focuses on human gait as a source of sounds, the overarching goal is to develop research procedures to study perception of almost any auditory event. This basic research has broad implications. For example, virtual-reality technology has fostered interests in the development of auditory virtual-reality capabilities. The funded basic research will accomplish the crucial first step to make such applications possible. This research could also contribute to the development of effective surveillance systems for research, commercial, and military use. Moreover, it will identify how listening skills may be improved with training and which attributes of sounds are most important to aid the hearing impaired doc22204 none With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Shobhana Chelliah and Willem de Reuse will conduct three years of linguistic research on Western Apache, a Native American language spoken by approximately 13,000 people in central and eastern Arizona. Tribal members, educators, and linguists have been concerned about the loss of Western Apache, a language that has played a major role in the culture and history of the American Southwest. At present, less than 3% of Apache children are acquiring Western Apache as a first language, and thus the language may no longer be spoken by the end of this century. This project will result in the first comprehensive dictionary of the language. This dictionary will provide reliable and consistent spellings, attestations of words no longer used, grammatical analyses, full conjugations for the verbs, and example sentences for each word. This project is significant for several reasons. The Western Apache Dictionary will be used for the design and implementation of language revitalization and teaching programs. It will be made available in paper and electronic format, allowing for the generation of supplementary children s and learners dictionaries. The dictionary will also be a reference for linguists interested in the structure of non-western languages or in comparing Apache with related languages such as Navajo. Anthropologists and ethnohistorians may also use these materials doc22205 none Across the world, there appears to be significant opposition to policies aimed at further liberalization of international trade, immigration, and foreign direct investment (FDI). A large number of political events in recent years suggest a marked turn away from liberalization, and many prominent observers have raised alarms about this globalization backlash. There is a growing body of research examining what political-economy forces underlie this backlash. Although this research has identified some of the key sources of political conflict over international economic liberalization, a number of central questions remain unanswered. Most importantly, debates about globalization frequently involve claims about the impact of integration on individual economic insecurity. The argument most often made is that globalization increases insecurity. Although this claim is central to both political and academic debates about international economic integration, there is no empirical research that has directly tested the relationship. In fact, in many accounts, it is not even clear on what theoretical grounds the claim is made. The primary objective of this research project is to evaluate theoretically and empirically whether and how globalization increases individual economic insecurity in advanced industrial democracies. The Principal Investigators propose to develop a theoretical argument that FDI by multinational enterprises (MNEs) is the critical mechanism through which globalization generates economic insecurity in advanced economies and to directly test this connection using individual-level survey data. No existing research has made a direct empirical test of the hypothesized relationship between the multinationalization of production and the economic insecurity of individual workers. The Principal Investigators contend that rising economic insecurity among workers may relate to deteriorating employment and or wage interactions with their employers. These ideas can be formalized in standard frameworks of labor economics in terms of either rising elasticities of demand for labor and or declining profit risk- sharing opportunities. Greater cross-border flows of FDI by MNEs are key forces that are likely both to raise elasticities and lower profit risk sharing. Our research will further develop these theoretical connections between rising MNE activity and economic insecurity. Our overall empirical approach will be to examine how individual self-assessments of economic insecurity correlate with the role of FDI and MNEs in the industries and or regions in which these individuals reside and work. Initially, the Principal Investigators will study Great Britain by combining two data sets: the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the Annual Respondents Database (ARD). The BHPS is a nationally-representative panel of more than 5,000 households and over 9,000 individuals surveyed annually from to the present. It records detailed information about each respondent s employment, wages, and perceptions of economic security. The ARD tracks U.K. manufacturing activity and, importantly, the nationality of ownership for each firm. By industry and region, the Principal Investigators can then calculate the share of manufacturing activity accounted for by foreign-owned firms, British-headquartered MNEs, and purely domestic firms. With similar data for non-manufacturing activity from other data files of the same form as the ARD, the Principal Investigators can then merge MNE information into the BHPS and thereby see how individual responses relate to MNE activity. Together these data will allow us to evaluate the extent and way in which FDI activity affects labor market outcomes and perceptions of economic security across individuals in the UK and whether these relationships have changed over the last decade. The Principal Investigators will extend their UK study to at least 14 other advanced economies using similar datasets. The comparative and temporal dimension of the project is critical for evaluating how the relationship between globalization and insecurity is affected by variation in the extent of FDI activity, economic performance, labor market institutions, and characteristics of welfare states doc22206 none , Harry Yeh, U. of Washington International Travel Grant to Support U.S. Involvement in HAZARDS- This action provides support for U.S. participation in the international symposium HAZARD- , to be held in Antalya, Turkey, October . The symposium is organized biennially by the Natural Hazards Society, and presents a wide range of state-of-the-art natural hazards mitigation strategies, from fundamental understanding of the phenomena to evacuation planning. The topics include meteorological hazards such as hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones, tornadoes, fires, droughts; geological hazards, including earthquakes, landslides, and volcanic eruptions; hydrological and marine hazards, for example tsunamis, storm surges, floods, sea-level rise, and marine biological hazards; and technological hazards, including air and water pollution. The participants supported by this award include key persons as well as junior members of the U.S. natural hazards research community. Their participation at this symposium is critical for fostering cooperative research efforts. Research in natural hazards, and in particular tsunami research, has become increasingly international in its focus. Strong international cooperation is necessary since tsunamis, for example, can affect not only the region near the source but also distant regions through propagation across oceans. Findings from this symposium will be disseminated to U.S. researchers in natural hazards doc22207 none Stereotyping and prejudice continue to be predominant social problems in modern society. The attacks of September 11, illustrate this in a variety of ways, from the prejudice of terrorists seeking to destroy the Western way of life, to the reactions of Americans who turned violent against Arab-appearing individuals in the United States. These phenomena raise an important question for understanding the nature of stereotyping and its consequences for prejudice and discrimination: How do individuals keep their stereotypes from influencing judgment and behavior? Recent two-stage models of stereotyping suggest that people can do this in two distinct ways: (1) By preventing stereotypic knowledge from coming to mind so it is never relevant to judgment; or (2) by removing the stereotype from one s responses after the stereotype has been activated. Both approaches can be better understood by a more general consideration of how goals determine reactions to members of a stereotyped group. This research focuses specifically on how stereotype activation can be controlled, examining the mechanisms that produce such control. It is posited that stereotype activation is controllable through preconsciously activated goals, and a series of experiments examine this hypothesis. The long-term goal is to better understand the dynamics of social stereotypes and prejudice doc22208 none The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst supports an interdisciplinary program in the area of polymeric materials. The Center is entitled Materials Research Science and Engineering Center on Polymers . The research is organized into three interdisciplinary research groups (IRGs). Tailored Interfaces (IRG 1) focuses on controlling the lateral order in thin polymer films using a variety of chemical, surface structural, and applied field techniques. IRG 2 on Structured Materials in Supercritical Fluids is concerned with the incorporation of supercritical CO2 in polymers with emphasis on gaining a fundamental understanding (diffusion, thermodynamics, interfacial interactions) of the process. Aqueous Polymer Assembly (IRG 3) investigates the assembly of polymers in aqueous solutions. The goal is to understand the contributions of various forces (electrostatic, hydrophobic, hydrodynamic, etc) in order to predict the final nano structured material. The Center has active education and outreach programs with special emphasis on undergraduate and K-12 teacher education. Effective links to the liberal arts colleges for women (Smith and Mount Holyoke) have been established. A total of 8 undergraduates will be sponsored at Smith and Mount Holyoke. Other ties to undergraduates are developed through faculty links at Howard U. and Harvey Mudd College. The Center s outreach to colleges is leveraged by a NSF Research Site on Education in Chemistry award (RSEC) with Smith, Mount Holyoke and Amherst Colleges. The MRSEC operates eleven shared experimental facilities which are also an effective tool in the education outreach program. The Center has a well developed industrial oureach program. The Center for UMass-Industry Research on Polymers (CUMIRP) leverages the MRSEC s outreach efforts by linking industrial sponsors with UMass research programs, faculty, and students. CUMIRP also fosters education links to industry in the form of the industrial visitors program (several week visits by industrial scientists at UMass), industrial scientist speaker program, and participation of industrial scientists on dissertation committees. Participants in the Center include 34 senior investigators, 2 postdoctoral associates, 30 graduate students and support for undergraduates and K-12 teachers. Professor Thomas P. Russell directs the MRSEC doc22209 none The goal of this award is to develop a high-resolution portrait of the Late Glacial-Early Holocene transition in middle North America using data from tree-rings. In this study, the environmental changes in middle North America will be investigated over several millennia (ca. 10,000 to 14,000 years ago) during the Late Glacial-Early Holocene transition, including the Younger Dryas (YD) interval. The warming from the Late Glacial to the Early Holocene was interrupted by an abrupt, millennial-length, cold climate excursion known as the YD event. The environmental effects of this climatic event seem to be widespread, but knowledge of the character of the YD in Europe far exceeds that of North America. North America has potential links with the physical mechanisms likely to have triggered the event in the middle North Atlantic Ocean such as shifting glacial meltwater outlets from the land to the ocean. The environmental changes during the YD (i.e., those related to temperature, water-use efficiency, and hydrologic cycle-related parameters of precipitation, relative humidity, and soil saturation) will be measured against those of the time periods immediately before and after, and with modern conditions. The results will improve our understanding of the environmental and faunal changes and responses in middle North America. This will help place such changes in the context of global environmental change during deglaciation doc22210 none Numbers of nonindigenous species--species introduced from elsewhere - are increasing rapidly worldwide. They are a major cause of biodiversity loss and environmental change, and are estimated to cost the US $137 billion yr. The National Invasive Species Management Plan (www.invasivespecies.gov) highlighted the urgent need for more rigorous and comprehensive risk analysis frameworks for nonindigenous species so that prevention and control strategies can be targeted appropriately. The central public policy consideration is how much of society s resources should be expended in response to nonindigenous species, and how, for example, should it be allocated between prevention and control? These considerations, though, include a nexus of interacting ecological and economic factors that require interdisciplinary effort. Species invasions are caused by economic activities, and in turn affect economic activities. This ecological and economic linkage and feedback means that the assessment of risk interacts with the management of risk, which contradicts the common notion that risk assessment and risk management are independent. Social welfare and risk assessment are both determined jointly by ecological and economic processes. In response to the need for interdisciplinary risk analysis, this project brings together experts from invasion biology, mathematical modeling, and economics. The main goal is to develop and apply a bio-economic modeling framework for nonindigenous species that integrates risk assessment and risk management, includes uncertainty distributions, and optimizes prevention and control strategies in a landscape context. The overall bio-economic model uses Stochastic Dynamic Programming, which allows the investigators to incorporate ecological-economic feedbacks in such a way to optimize combinations of prevention and control strategies to maximize social welfare. This framework will be extended to the landscape scale with Neural Network models. The applications will focus on freshwater nonindigenous species in the Great Lakes region. A preliminary application to zebra mussels suggested, for example, that society should be spending about $240,000 yr to keep zebra mussels from invading each lake with a power plant (to prevent fouling of pipes). This is in sharp contrast to the $825,000 that the Fish & Wildlife Service spent in FY for prevention and control efforts for all aquatic nuisance species for all lakes. Our analyses will be directly relevant to policymakers and natural resource managers. Broader impacts. The investigators will partner with the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago to educate schoolchildren and the public about the general problem of nonindigenous species, about what individuals can do to reduce the problem, and about the role that science plays in public policy decisions. By partnering with an educational software firm, they will convert research models into user-friendly formats for use by schoolchildren, the public, policymakers, resource managers, and stakeholders. In partnership with the Great Lakes Commission, research methods, results, and user-friendly products will be disseminated in workshops to policymakers, managers, and stakeholders. Finally, they will develop international collaborations and a reciprocal exchange of information and techniques with top researchers in Australia, where NIS research is advanced relative to North America doc22189 none Over the past 6 years the principal investigators have developed a methodology for assessing the risk associated with maritime transportation. The methodology utilizes dynamic simulation of the maritime transportation system, expert judgment elicitation models and probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) techniques. The approach has proven useful in three major maritime ports in the United States i.e. Port of New Orleans (Mississippi River in Louisiana), Port Valdez (Prince William Sound in Alaska) and Port Seattle (Puget Sound in Washington State). Two of these studies focused on passenger safety, while the other focused on oil transportation risk. The National Research Council in assessed the methodology and concluded that representation of uncertainty in the maritime risk assessment method is lacking. The Prince William Sound Risk Assessment is an important step forward in using probabilistic risk assessment methods to assess the safety of transporting oil in large tankers in PWS. Because the data were very limited, the analysis results and the resulting conclusions are not robust and are necessarily uncertain [National Research Council, ]. This NSF project will allow the maritime risk assessment method to live up to its promise by developing a coherent theoretical framework to address uncertainty. The truth is that we are uncertain. Therefore, speaking the truth implies that we express our analysis results in terms of probability curves rather than fixed points estimates. [See, e.g., Kaplan, ]. The intellectual merit of the research stems from the development of an overarching Bayesian framework for addressing uncertainty when simulation of systems states is combined with available data and expert judgment to assess risk and risk intervention effectiveness. The broader impact of the proposed work is primarily drawn from its applicability to areas other than maritime accident risk such as e.g. maritime security risk (intentional events as opposed to accidents). The framework and methodologies to be developed will be applicable to other transportation modes, such as aviation or road safety. Aside from aviation security and accident risk, the technique will be directly transferable to the ever-increasing problem of runway incursions as a result of increased traffic congestion at our national airports doc22212 none The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at Princeton University supports a broad based interdisciplinary research program in the area of complex materials, including polymers and soft materials, electronic materials, and biomaterials. The Center also supports a wide range of education activities, including science curriculum support for middle and high school teachers, a summer outreach program for high school students, and an African outreach program. The Center supports well-maintained and accessible shared experimental facilities and interacts with industry and other sectors at local, regional, national and international levels. The Center s research is organized into three interdisciplinary research groups (IRGs). IRG 1, Interplay of Magnetism and Transport in Correlated Electronic Materials, focuses on charge and spin transport in complex, correlated electronic materials. IRG 2 on Guided Self-Assembly investigates new methods for fabricating large-scale assemblies of patterned structures with features on the nano and micrometer scale. Potential applications are in the areas of nanomagnetics, manipulating biomolecules on a nanoscale, as well as photonics. Adhesion, Deformation, and Transport at Contacts in Small Structures (IRG 3) is an entirely new effort with focus on small scale contacts that are of importance in microelectronic, photonic, and micro-electromechanical devices. Two large seed projects are devoted to patterned assemblies of functional cell-based biomaterials, which propose to combine protein design with the design of novel interfaces between synthetic materials and living cells, and to heteroepitaxy and electronic structure of high dielectric constant oxides. Participants in the Center currently include 38 senior investigators, 7 postdoctoral associates, 24 graduate students, and support for undergraduates and K-12 teachers. Professor Ravindra N. Bhatt directs the MRSEC doc22213 none EUGene is a software program that scholars use to build quantitative data sets in order to analyze international conflict. The software routinizes a set of data preparation tasks that are cumbersome and difficult, merging data from input data sets with differing formats into output data sets according to easily specified user choices. EUGene also generates data for variables concerned with an important expected utility theory of conflict initiation and escalation. EUGene was initially developed under a prior National Science Foundation grant and released publicly in . It was expanded, with other additions made without NSF funding. EUGene is available for free download to the research community from http: www.eugenesoftware.org. The current project further develops the EUGene software. To this point, key analyses have been accomplished using the expected utility data generated by EUGene; continued program development will remain focused on expanding the program s data management aspects. In this next phase, the Principal Investigator adds additional user data sets to the program and deals with problematic user data, adds another unit of analysis to create datasets to better analyze processes of dispute escalation and conflict joining behavior, adds additional conflict data, tracks data sets for easier replication, makes additional alliance data available, and implements various other small improvements. Other expansion items may be added over the next two years in response to user requests. Continued development of EUGene provides the community of quantitative international relations researchers with a tool that facilitates new research and expands ongoing research agendas doc22214 none Democratic politics, for the purpose of theoretical analysis, might be divided into electoral politics, in which voters determine representatives, and post-electoral politics, in which representatives determine public policy. Whereas the study of electoral politics focuses on the candidate entry decision, the conduct of campaigns, and the incentives of voters, the study of post-electoral politics abstracts from these details and focuses on the process of negotiation and coalition formation among representatives, within a parliament or legislature, or across different branches of government. This project studies post-electoral politics from a game-theoretic perspective, where one specifies a mathematical model of the institutional setting in which public policy is made, and where one employs concepts of equilibrium to predict the outcomes of rational strategic behavior. In technical terms, the project analyzes post-electoral politics as a bargaining game among elected representatives. The objective is a theory of post-electoral politics that can yield sharp predictions in highly structured situations, as when debate revolves around one issue and positions of representatives are clear, and that is general enough to describe broad properties of policy outcomes, such as Pareto efficiency or the stability of the status quo, in less transparent contexts. The project is divided into four parts: the first part proves that, in one-dimensional problems, the unique outcome of strategic bargaining is the ideal outcome of the middle (or median ) voter; the second part assumes less structure on the problem and considers issues of equilibrium existence, the stability of the status quo, etc.; the third part considers the strategic aspects of agenda formation in legislatures; and the fourth part examines the dynamics of policy outcomes over time. Because it applies advanced methods from theoretical economics to the analysis of political issues, the results of the project will contribute both to the political science literature on legislative, parliamentary, and committee decision-making, and to the literature in economics on bargaining and game theory. From an academic standpoint, the project will improve our understanding of post-electoral politics and is a step toward a general theory that integrates the analyses of both electoral and post-electoral politics. And this, from a long-range perspective, is a necessary step in the full understanding of existing political systems, the impact of political reforms, and the design of better political institutions doc22215 none The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at the University of Chicago focuses on two overarching, intertwined issues: the manipulation of structural properties connected through hierarchies of length scales, and the feedback between structural properties and dynamical response. The understanding and control of these issues provides a foundation for the design of the next generation of functional materials, from cooperative spin systems, self-assembled nanostructures, or microfluidic systems, to bio-inorganic hybrid materials. The Center s research is organized into four interdisciplinary groups (IRGs). IRG1 investigates the Dynamical Formation of Structures in Liquids and Elastic Solids that emerge as one follows coarse, macroscopic features to finer and finer length scales, including phenomena such as droplet break-up, crumpling and mesoscale flows. IRG2 aims to design and implement Hierarchically Assembled Molecular Materials composed of molecular assemblies on surfaces that express novel function. IRG3, Jamming and Slow Relaxation in Materials Far from Equilibrium, develops a unifying framework to understand the complex behavior of large classes of materials, from spin systems to supercooled liquids to granular matter, that become stuck in states far from equilibrium and defy description by conventional statistical mechanics. IRG4, Bio-Interfacial Science, develops new routes for designing and controlling the interface between biological entities and man-made materials, including development of biochips for quantitative characterization of biological activities and the assembly of protein units for novel nanostructured materials. The Center s research benefits from extensive shared experimental facilities that provide research support and training of students. The MRSEC operates a comprehensive program that integrates research with education that includes a seminar and workshop series, a shared student and postdoctoral associates program, a long-term visitors program, as well as outreach programs such as summer research experiences for undergraduates and links with the K-12 level that emphasize attracting and keeping women and minorities in science. The Center also has an industrial partnership program that includes research collaborations, joint workshops, and joint student training activities, as well as a close collaboration with researchers at Argonne National Laboratory. Participants in the Center currently include 27 senior investigators, 9 postdoctoral associates, 29 graduate students, and 9 technicians and other support personnel. Professor Heinrich Jaeger directs the MRSEC doc16202 none Natural ecosystems are dynamic, not static. For instance, plants themselves alter properties of soils and ecosystems. Thus, the characteristics of different plant species influence important ecosystem functions such as soil fertility, soil development and plant productivity, and thus in part control ecosystem functioning. The specifics of these controls, however, are very poorly understood due to difficulties in separating effects of climate or soils from those of vegetation. To explore the way in which plants can influence their own environment, we will utilize a unique common-garden experiment of 32-year old monoculture stands with 14 temperate tree species in Poland. This is the only such experiment in the world. The proposed research will compare and contrast leaf and fine root traits and their effects on ecosystem by examining: above- and belowground tissue physiology, structure and productivity, litter decomposition and soil chemistry and development doc22217 none This research uses household data to study how technical change in agriculture affects rates of tropical deforestation. Data come from surveys conducted in the Philippines over the period - . The timing and coverage of the data provide an opportunity to study the direct and indirect effects of irrigation on agricultural production and labor allocation, while controlling for a number of agronomic features of the sample farms and important social factors such as tenure security. It is also possible to trace the causal chain of impacts leading from technology changes to changes in employment, incomes, and activities undertaken by households living along the forest margin. The analysis links three bodies of economic theory regarding agricultural development, labor market dynamics, and environmental management. Specific objectives include (1) assessing labor hiring and labor selling decisions in a dynamic context and their implications for capital formation, subsequent factor use, labor market participation, and forest pressure; (2) identifying the importance of transaction and supervision costs, as well as tenure security and site-specific factor productivity, for labor hiring and selling decisions; and (3) testing and correcting for attrition bias in the sample, especially as influenced by tenure security and factor productivity. Results will provide an empirical foundation for assessing competing theories regarding poverty and the environment, and will also inform broader debates regarding the distributional effects of growth and development and their implications for important aspects of household behavior. Results should have implications for a range of social and environmental outcomes including economic development, poverty reduction, biodiversity protection and carbon sequestration doc22218 none Droughts are widely cited in both contemporary and historical accounts of African growth. The now massive empirical literature on economic growth has grappled with the puzzle of low and volatile African growth, but has had very little to say about the impact of climate shocks. This study develops empirical bounds on the impact of rainfall fluctuations on African growth and on the main channels of this impact. The project brings a widely useful rainfall dataset to the attention of researchers focusing on economic growth in developing countries, on African development in particular, and on macroeconomic performance in individual African countries. The project uses an historical dataset on national African precipitation patterns constructed for the purposes of the project by the principal investigators. The underlying data are historical monthly weather-station observations that have been geographically gridded by climatologists for use in large-scale climatology models. The data are rich enough to allow the construction of climate norms predating the period of analysis, which coincides with the availability of economic growth data beginning in the s. The investigators use estimated rainfall norms to calculate annual country-level rainfall shocks, which they then use in country-by-country time-series regressions that relate economic growth, investment, and agricultural output to these shocks. Alternative transformations of the rainfall variable allow a sequence of readily-interpreted specifications to be implemented, including nonlinear specifications that allow for threshold effects, wet and dry outliers, and cumulative effects doc22219 none The study of political institutions has recently experienced a renaissance in political economy and comparative politics. An interesting class of political institutions are multi-party parliamentary democracies, where the executive derives its mandate from and is politically responsible to the legislature. Parliamentary democracies differ with respect to the specific rules in their constitutions that prescribe how their governments form and terminate. Parliamentary democracies also differ systematically with respect to the observed duration of their government formation processes, the type (i.e., minority, minimum winning, or surplus) and size of the government coalitions that result from these processes, and the relative durability of their governments. These observations raise the following important questions: Can constitutional features account for these observed differences? And, if so, which institutions are quantitatively most important for the type and the stability of coalition governments? Providing answers to these questions is very important for the design (or redesign) of constitutions in modern parliamentary democracies and has significant economic implications. The goal of our research is to develop a unified theoretical and empirical framework to investigate the effects of a large class of institutions on the behavior of coalition governments in parliamentary democracies. Our approach consists of specifying a bargaining model of government formation and dissolution, estimating the model s parameters, assessing the ability of the model to account for key features of the data, and then using the estimated structural model to conduct experiments of comparative constitutional design. In particular, our proposed research will focus on the structure of parliament and, in particular, bicameralism and on government policy and, in particular, the budget process doc22205 none Across the world, there appears to be significant opposition to policies aimed at further liberalization of international trade, immigration, and foreign direct investment (FDI). A large number of political events in recent years suggest a marked turn away from liberalization, and many prominent observers have raised alarms about this globalization backlash. There is a growing body of research examining what political-economy forces underlie this backlash. Although this research has identified some of the key sources of political conflict over international economic liberalization, a number of central questions remain unanswered. Most importantly, debates about globalization frequently involve claims about the impact of integration on individual economic insecurity. The argument most often made is that globalization increases insecurity. Although this claim is central to both political and academic debates about international economic integration, there is no empirical research that has directly tested the relationship. In fact, in many accounts, it is not even clear on what theoretical grounds the claim is made. The primary objective of this research project is to evaluate theoretically and empirically whether and how globalization increases individual economic insecurity in advanced industrial democracies. The Principal Investigators propose to develop a theoretical argument that FDI by multinational enterprises (MNEs) is the critical mechanism through which globalization generates economic insecurity in advanced economies and to directly test this connection using individual-level survey data. No existing research has made a direct empirical test of the hypothesized relationship between the multinationalization of production and the economic insecurity of individual workers. The Principal Investigators contend that rising economic insecurity among workers may relate to deteriorating employment and or wage interactions with their employers. These ideas can be formalized in standard frameworks of labor economics in terms of either rising elasticities of demand for labor and or declining profit risk- sharing opportunities. Greater cross-border flows of FDI by MNEs are key forces that are likely both to raise elasticities and lower profit risk sharing. Our research will further develop these theoretical connections between rising MNE activity and economic insecurity. Our overall empirical approach will be to examine how individual self-assessments of economic insecurity correlate with the role of FDI and MNEs in the industries and or regions in which these individuals reside and work. Initially, the Principal Investigators will study Great Britain by combining two data sets: the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the Annual Respondents Database (ARD). The BHPS is a nationally-representative panel of more than 5,000 households and over 9,000 individuals surveyed annually from to the present. It records detailed information about each respondent s employment, wages, and perceptions of economic security. The ARD tracks U.K. manufacturing activity and, importantly, the nationality of ownership for each firm. By industry and region, the Principal Investigators can then calculate the share of manufacturing activity accounted for by foreign-owned firms, British-headquartered MNEs, and purely domestic firms. With similar data for non-manufacturing activity from other data files of the same form as the ARD, the Principal Investigators can then merge MNE information into the BHPS and thereby see how individual responses relate to MNE activity. Together these data will allow us to evaluate the extent and way in which FDI activity affects labor market outcomes and perceptions of economic security across individuals in the UK and whether these relationships have changed over the last decade. The Principal Investigators will extend their UK study to at least 14 other advanced economies using similar datasets. The comparative and temporal dimension of the project is critical for evaluating how the relationship between globalization and insecurity is affected by variation in the extent of FDI activity, economic performance, labor market institutions, and characteristics of welfare states doc22221 none FPC (FingerPrinted Contigs) is a software package to aid scientists in building a physical map of a region, chromosome or whole genome. Along with many smaller projects, it has been used for building sequence-ready maps for human, plants, and fruit flies. A recent function has been added to evaluate and add electronic markers to the map. A second function is the ability to do a simulated digestion of a sequenced clone so that the theoretic fingerprint can be incorporated for completeness. Trait data for microarray experiments is also being added. In the current activity, a new interface will be designed to enable users to mine and control the data. The implementation of a new algorithm for finding the minimal tiling path for make a sequence-ready map is also planned. Since many plant genomes will have only draft sequence, it is important to have tools that can use this data to develop a minimal tiling path. This and the ability to assign clones and genetic markers to a map will help to anchor contigs based on any give framework map. The tools are available online. Students and research professionals are responsible for the development doc22222 none Human activity is changing local and global environments at unprecedented rates. Some of the most significant changes involve widespread nutrient enrichment and changes in species composition as well as global warming and sea level rise. Predicting the effects of these multiple stresses is particularly important in coastal salt marshes because they are among the most biologically productive areas in the world and are heavily used by humans for a variety of purposes. Coastal areas are now experiencing changes in nutrient loading, species composition and sea level rise 5-10 fold higher than measured over the last century. This project addresses the question: Over the long run, how will an increase in nutrients interact with changes in species composition to alter coastal ecosystem structure and function? We will conduct field experiments in which salt marsh ecosystems are altered by addition of nutrients and by removal of an abundant and important fish, the mummichog. We will follow the effects of these manipulations on the food web and nutrient cycles for four years. The experiments will be linked to a model that can be used to predict the saltmarsh response over decades. The results of this research will be useful to managers who are faced daily with resolving the conflicts among the many ways that humans use coastal regions doc22223 none Consider a researcher who must choose between two rival models, based on how well those models explain the behavior in a given set of data. Suppose one is a strategic choice model and the other is a nonstrategic model -that is, the models have different functional forms. How would the researcher discriminate between these models? In other words, how would she determine which of the models is better? In this project, Principal Investigators answer this question by merging two promising areas of methodological research, and then use those methods to analyze international conflict. The first line of research, by Signorino and various coauthors, has demonstrated that traditional specifications of statistical models are generally inconsistent with strategic theories of political behavior. The main message of this research has been that the functional form of one s statistical model must be consistent with the relationships implied by the behavior under analysis, or the statistical inferences will be invalid. However, aside from comparisons of likelihood values and percent correctly predicted, Signorino has not provided a more rigorous framework for comparing (nonnested) strategic models against one another, or against nonstrategic models. Clarke, on the other hand, has engaged in a second line of research, addressing comparative model testing for nonnested models. The main message of his research has been that nonnested model testing requires special techniques that are unknown to most political scientists. New and existing nonnested testing methods have been developed and adapted in prior research to deal with competing limited dependent variable models. The competing models in this literature, however, have only been nonnested in terms of their covanates. Testing strategic choice models against each other or against nonstrategic models requires discriminating between models that are nonnested in terms of their functional forms. The research conducted by Signorino and by Clarke is clearly complimentary. By developing nonnested tests for strategic choice models, Signorino and Clarke will provide the necessary tools for assessing whether strategic models outperform their nonstrategic rivals, or whether certain strategic specifications outperform other strategic specifications. By addressing strategic choice models, Signorino and Clarke will expand the set of functional forms beyond that currently available in the nonnested testing literature. As in previous work on nonnested model testing, the proposed research will make use of classical, Bayesian, and nonparametric statistical techniques. The project goals include: Adapting absolute discrimination tests (such as the Cox test) for strategic models Adapting and developing relative discrimination tests (such as the Vuong test, Clarke s non- parametric test, and Bayes factors) for strategic models. Refining current Bayesian techniques for use with strategic models, and conducting Bayesian estimation of strategic models (to conduct tests based on Bayes factors). Applying these methods to models of deterrence, alliance politics, and the effect of domestic politics on militarized interstate disputes. Incorporating these techniques into currently available software (e.g. STRAT and WinBUGS). By combining these lines of research, future scholars will be able not only to develop statistical models that are truly consistent with their theories, but also to test those theories against each other. The attainment of these goals will allow the scientific study of international relations to move significantly beyond its current state doc22224 none This Major Research Instrumentation award to Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts provides funds for acquisition of oceanographic research instrumentation for use on the SEA vessel SSV Corwith Cramer. Instruments supported here will be used in the SEA Semester and related seagoing programs, involving undergraduates, K-12 students and teachers in hands-on marine research and seamanship. Specific instruments supported here include an acoustic current profiler, sonars for sounding and sub-bottom profiling, sensors for analysis of physical, chemical and biological properties of surface and subsurface waters, a computer network for data acquisition and analysis, and other instruments for research and training. The project is supported by the Division of Ocean Sciences at NSF. Sea Education Association will provide cost-share support from non-federal funds for a portion of total project costs doc22225 none Every day, people face decisions in domains as diverse as the choice of shampoos, stocks, medical treatments, and friends. When people have not learned what to do through trial and error, they need a general ability to make effective decisions. The attendant skills include extracting relevant information from the world, applying general values in specific settings, and integrating these pieces with a coherent decision rule. Research has often found deficiencies in such skills. While interest in general cognitive processes has diverted attention from individual differences, people do differ substantially in these skills. Parker and Fischhoff ( ) used this performance variability to develop a measure of decision-making competence (DMC). Seven tasks, tapping into the above skills, were administered to respondents from an ongoing longitudinal study. Performance correlated positively across the seven DMC tasks, suggesting a common central competency. A single DMC score correlated strongly with measures of intelligence, cognitive style, risk behavior, and social family influences. Although the CEDAR study demonstrates the potential of DMC, it is limited by problems with some of the instruments and special properties of the sample used. The current research includes four studies that will further refine the seven DMC tasks. Each study addresses individual decision-making skills in light of recent theoretical developments and improving overall scale properties. In addition, these studies provide opportunities for addressing scientific questions within the individual task domains. This connection of laboratory results with real world behavior is an exercise itself that has not been widely pursued. It provides the opportunity to clarify the validity of decision-making research findings, as well as shed light on the underlying theory. This work has applications to the training of individuals to make better decisions, competence in making legal and medical decisions, as well as relative performance in competitive environments doc22226 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a diagnostic instrument to detect molecular species, such as nitric oxide, in exhaled breath as a biomarker of airway inflammation to assess the effectiveness and compliance of asthma therapies. This project will result in the fabrication of a biosensor suitable for clinical use. Pre-clinical studies will be performed during the Phase I research to ensure that a proper protocol has been established. The follow on Phase II project will incorporate clinical trials in preparation for FDA approval. The commercial applications of this project will be in the area of biomedical diagnostic devices and instrumentation. It is hoped that the instrument developed in the course of this project will acquire a good share of the $1 billion a year asthma diagnosis and treatment monitoring market doc22227 none This Doctoral Dissertation addresses the following question: What factors explain the popularity of political parties that promise an Islamic solution to social ills? Since the s, the importance of Islam in social and political life visibly increased not only in authoritarian Middle Eastern states but also in the secular state of Turkey and in immigrant Muslim communities in the Western World. At a time when liberal-democracy has achieved victory over socialism, Islam stands as an alternative to liberal-democratic values. The project relies on three different data sets. First, it uses the information obtained from World Values Surveys conducted in eight predominantly Muslim countries. These countries are Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, and Turkey. These surveys contain valuable information about the value-systems, political behavior, and attitudes towards public issues of the respondents. The Principal Investigator will also conduct a comparative analysis of two districts of Istanbul to see how they differ in their popular bases for political Islam. Although, these regions have very similar socioeconomic and demographic conditions, Islamist parties managed to establish a popular base in only one of the districts. These natural settings provide an excellent opportunity to discern the factors that explain the popularity and the limits of political Islam. Finally, it uses data generated from open-ended interviews from Islamist politicians in Turkey. This third data set serves two goals. On the one hand, it helps the Principal Investigator to identify what political Islam offers to the people. On the other hand, it illuminates how the elites of the Islamist movements think about politics along with spotting their perceptions of liberal-democracy and West. In summary, this project aims to contribute to the scholarly knowledge in the following realms: the relationship between secularization and liberal-democracy; the prospects of democracy in the Muslim world; the implications of Islamic revival for liberalism; and the reasons for the rise of Islam as a major political force doc22228 none This Doctoral Dissertation addresses the issue of how voters learn about politics during elections in a complex electoral environment (CEE). A CEE is includes the following: voters weakly identify with parties, there are several parties, more than one seat is in dispute by district, and many candidates run for the same office. An environment with at least a few such characteristics does not correspond to Sniderman, Brady, and Tetlock s ( ) description of the political system in the United States (an extremely well-studied case) where voters are able to pick up effective cues during electoral campaigns because the world of politics is so organized (p. 29). There are, however, systems where the complexity of the electoral process is much greater. In several Latin American countries, for example, political parties are weaker than in the US (Stokes , Mainwaring and Scully ) and more than one representative is elected per district (Nicolau ). This research extends the studies of information diffusion during electoral campaigns to political systems with CEEs, such as those of Latin America. The impact of several distinct sources of information diffusion is analyzed using a multiplicity of research techniques -including survey data, media content analysis data, and in-depth interviews with political and social activists. Two Brazilian cities during the Chamber of Deputies election are the locus of the study. These cities provide enough variation in electoral complexity to test hypotheses about voters learning process in milieus with distinct levels of electoral competition and strength of party cues doc22229 none Vegetation classification is critical for resource mapping, conservation planning and ecological monitoring. This project will provide the information infrastructure, VegBank, that will include field plot data, the plant taxa used, the community classification, and mechanisms for proposing changes. Vegetation plot records support not only classification, but also most research in plant community ecology. A working prototype of a system for acquiring, searching and disseminating field plot records for classifying North American vegetation has been developed and is available on the web. VegBank is a collaboration of four institutions that represent major data sources and users. VegBank will be expanded and tested as a robust, public system for use by the broader plant ecology community. The plant and community classification modules will provide a technical solution for taxonomic ambiguities. The module will be populated with data from collaborating groups. Sharing and replication of data will enable several databases by allowing for linkages that would make an international network supporting distributed queries. A plug-in tool will foster future development by the user community. All of the data will be web accessible doc22230 none The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at Harvard University supports an interdisciplinary research program that includes faculty participants from the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Physics, Earth and Planetary Sciences, and the Medical School. The MRSEC research is organized into four interdisciplinary research groups (IRGs). IRG1, Multiscale Mechanics of Films and Interfaces, investigates the mechanical properties of thin films at scales intermediate between atomistic and continuum. IRG2, Engineering Materials and Techniques for Biological Studies at Cellular Scales, focuses on understanding the mechanical properties of the cell and its structural components. IRG3, Interface-Mediated Assembly of Soft Materials, explores innovative ways to make self-assembly of soft materials by using interfaces as template for growth. The Center also supports seed research projects in potentially high-risk areas. The Center s research benefits from extensive shared experimental facilities that provide research support and training of students. The MRSEC operates a broad education and outreach research program that includes summer research experiences for undergraduates and teachers, activities for K-12 students, and a new program to enhance the participation of members of under-represented groups in science and engineering at the graduate and postgraduate level. The Center also has research collaborations with industrial and national laboratories, and runs research workshops that include participants from industry and teaching colleges in the New England area. Participants in the Center currently include 30 senior investigators, 7 postdoctoral associates, 14 graduate students, 2 undergraduate students and 6 support personnel. Professor David Weitz directs the MRSEC doc22231 none The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at the University of Nebraska supports an interdisciplinary research program on Quantum and Spin Phenomena in Nanomagnetic Structures. The MRSEC includes faculty participants representing the departments of physics, mechanical engineering, chemistry, and the school of biological sciences The Center s research is organized into two interdisciplinary research groups (IRGs). IRG1, Nanomagnetism: Fundamental Interactions and Applications, is concerned with the study of exchange and magnetostatic interactions between particles or grains in nanostructures. IRG 2, Spin Polarization and Transmission at Nanocontacts and Interfaces, investigates spin polarization and transport through nanoscale magnetic contacts and at ferromagnetic ferroelectric structures. The Center s research is aided by extensive collaborations with other universities, government and industrial laboratories that bring in over fifteen additional participants. The Center also maintains shared experimental facilities in support of its research efforts. Education outreach efforts include research experiences for teachers and for faculty-student teams from predominantly undergraduate institutions. Participants in the Center currently include 16 senior investigators, 2 postdoctoral associates, 14 graduate students, 10 undergraduate students, and 2 support personnel. Professor David J. Sellmyer directs the MRSEC doc22232 none Sophisticated experimental studies of several classes of layered materials, as well as recent advances in the fabrication and characterization of nanostructures such as quantum dots and wires, require a deeper theoretical understanding of strongly correlated electronic systems. Realistic descriptions of aqueous actinide complexes also require the treatment of strong corelations in ways that go beyond the usual methods of quantum chemistry. This theoretical research will employ a combination of systematic analytical and numerical methods to establish phase diagrams, to study far-from-eqilibrium dynamics, and to study charge-transfer in complex materials. The role of strong electronic correlations will be investigated in three different electronic systems: layered materials such as the cuprate high temperature and organic superconductors, and quantum antiferromagnets; quantum many-body theory far-from-equilibrium as seen recently in the Kondo effect in quantum dots and Luttinger liquid behavior in quantum wires; and, aqueous plutonium complexes as found in nuclear waste. %%% This is a broad-based theoretical program with the common thread that all critically involve electrons which interact strongly. This calls for new and powerful techniques. The problems chosen are diverse and range from the physics of high temperature superconductors to the chemistry of nuclear waste materials doc22233 none A major challenge in structural genomics is the elucidation of enzyme active sites from molecular structure. The characterization of the ligand substrate binding site provides the basis for a number of applications, including the design of inhibitors for the analysis of biochemical and signal transduction pathways, drug design, and protein engineering aimed at altered specificity or catalytic activity. The primary sources of information on specific molecular interactions are the structures of the enzyme (or its homologues) co-crystallized with various ligands (substrates, cofactors, inhibitors, products, and transition state analogs). Although such structures are available for over 70% of the enzymes currently in the Protein Data Bank, collecting all binding site information for a particular protein requires substantial efforts. The goal of this proposal is to develop a computational resource and database, called Predicted and Consensus Interaction Sites in Enzymes (PRECISE), which will provide query and visualization tools for the comparative analyses of the interactions extracted from all relevant structures. For each enzyme, the web-based analysis tool will determine the consensus binding site, obtained by aligning all homologous sequences, identifying the residue positions that are important for the binding of any ligand, and assessing the roles of amino acids at these positions. A dynamic retrieval system will help to examine individual interactions, and to generate various statistics. In addition to the interaction extracted from enzyme structures, the database will also store putative interactions, based on mutation studies or theoretical predictions. Such interactions can be submitted to the website and checked for consistency with all the interactions extracted from structural data. The submissions will be stored in a separate table, adding a predicted interaction component to the database. The database will also house the results of applying computational solvent mapping, a novel binding site prediction method, to a large set of well-characterized enzymes. The method moves molecular probes - small organic molecules or functional groups - on the protein surface in order to identify the positions that bind the highest number of different probes. It was shown that such consensus binding occurs at major subsites of the enzyme binding site, and the amino acid residues that interact with the probes also bind the specific ligands of the enzyme. Thus, computational solvent mapping can be used for the identification and characterization of enzyme binding sites. In addition to providing solvent mapping results for a set of well-characterized enzymes, an e-mail server will be set up, so that solvent mapping calculations can be requested for any enzyme. It is expected that the PRECISE website will become a central depository of enzyme binding site information, will have a major impact on enzymology research due to the solvent mapping web-server, as well as provide an important educational resource for studies in biochemistry and molecular biology doc22234 none This project aims for a comprehensive understanding of microstructures of mixed group III-nitride layers, intending to advance understanding of the occurrence of phase separation and atomic ordering in these materials. Experiments to discern whether or not phase separation oc-curs in the bulk or on the surface will be conducted. The approach is to examine the effects of growth rates and growth temperatures on phase-separated microstructures. In-diffusion experi-ments to evaluate whether or not these microstructures represent the equilibrium state in the bulk will be carried out. The origins of atomic ordering will be studied through growth of mixed lay-ers on [ 1 1 10 ] microfaceted GaN layers to ascertain the role of these facets in atomic ordering. Interfaces between differently ordered regions and distribution of ordered domains in layers that have been grown at different growth rates will be examined. Additionally, the influence of phase separation and atomic ordering on carrier mobility by Hall measurements will be evaluated. These studies will utilize InGaN and AlGaN layers, and may also include AlInN and AlInGaN films. Film growth will be done using metalorganic chemical vapor deposition and molecular beam epitaxy. Microstructures will be studied by X-ray diffraction and transmission electron mi-croscopy, both conventional and high resolution. Energy loss spectroscopy, coupled with energy filtered imaging, will be utilized to study the distribution of atomic species in layers. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in areas of electronic materials science having technological relevance. It is envisaged that this research could have a significant impact on sci-ence and technology of group III-nitride materials and devices. An important feature of the proj-ect is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education. The avail-able resources provide special opportunities for education and training of graduate students in-volved in interdisciplinary forefront research doc22235 none This project extends the knowledge of economists regarding black-white wage differentials by examining two hypotheses for why the racial wage gap might be larger for some groups of black workers. First, we postulate that as an economically subaltern group acquires more competitive labor market attributes they will face a greater intensity of labor market discrimination so as to maintain the social hierarchy in favor of the dominant group. We refer to this hypothesis as the Functionality of Discrimination. We will perform a variety of tests in which we compare levels of unexplained wage differences, a standard measure of discrimination, across black workers that have alternative amounts of desirable labor market attributes. Second, we propose that blacks with lighter skin shade benefit more from coworker cooperation than darker skinned blacks who are otherwise comparable, which will lead to a smaller racial wage gap for lighter skinned blacks. We advance the notion that there is a link between skin shade and productivity since the work setting is a social environment where personal interaction influences job performance. In our view, coworkers have skills they may share with one another that enhance personal productivity and wages. However, cooperation between coworkers (including the sharing of skills) is likely to depend on commonalities and we envision phenotype similarity as a commonality that workers may form coalitions around. Thus, we expect white workers, who generally are in better jobs than black workers, to be more cooperative with lighter skinned blacks. If this is the case then lighter skinned blacks will be more productive than otherwise comparable darker skinned blacks from working with white coworkers, which will translate into greater wages for lighter skinned blacks. Data from the National Survey of Black Americans (NSBA) collected in and data from the National Survey of American Life (NSAL), which resembles the National Survey of Black Americans but were collected in , are used in this study to estimate wage equations. The estimated equations will reveal the contribution of skin shade to wages and the estimates will reveal if unexplained wage differences between blacks and whites are greater for those blacks considered highly competitive in the work place. Since the surveys are two decades apart how the relationship between skin shade and wages has changed over time can be explored. The data sets used in the study are unique in that they provide data on a person s skin shade and information on whether an individual works in a group. For work team members there is information on the size and on the racial composition of their workgroup. These data sets also provide information on an individual s cognitive ability and accumulated skills, which can be used to gauge their competitiveness in the work place. The findings generated by these studies will shed light on whether the extent of racial wage discrimination varies with workplace context and with phenotypical attributes. Thus, new insights will be gained on the appropriate form of policies to redress wage discrimination and on the likely feasibility of implementing such policy initiatives. Undergraduate students at Washington and Lee University, who are members of a minority group and who plan to attend graduate school in the social sciences or humanities, will be part of the research team conducting these studies. These students will participate in the Minority Undergraduate Research Assistant Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill during the summer doc22236 none Protein-protein interactions are at the heart of biological activities. They constitute the basic components of many biological processes such as signal transduction, cell-cycle control, metabolism, and general cellular machines. Characterization of protein-protein interactions in protein complexes in a cell, in a systematic manner, represents a highly challenging and important problem to functional genomics and proteomics in the post-genome sequencing era. An integrated computational capability for characterization of protein complexes in a cell will be developed, through (a) analyzing mass spectrometry data and chemical cross-linking information and (b) protein docking prediction under geometric constraints derived from these experimental data. Initially this capability will be tested and validated on a selected set of protein complexes from yeast, as a proof of principle. When fully developed, this capability will be used for genome-scale cataloging of protein complexes in yeast (and other genomes in general). The specific aims of this proposed project are: (i) development of improved computational methods for locating and identifying cross-links, particularly inter-molecular ones, from mass spectrometry data; (ii) development of new computational methods for identification of protein complexes and their component proteins, through analysis of cross-linking and other experimental data; (iii) development of new computational methods for data-constrained docking of two proteins that will significantly improve the existing docking methods in both prediction accuracy and application generality; (iv) development of new computational methods for data-constrained multi-party protein docking; and (v) applications of the developed methods to a selected set of protein complexes for their complex structure characterization. The proposed computational capability will significantly improve the ability to interrogate protein-protein interactions in a way not possible before, and open new doors for the emerging fields of functional genomics and proteomics. Investigation of these computational capabilities for characterization of protein complexes will provide a number of opportunities for graduate students and postdoctoral trainees who are interested in moving into the emerging field of computational biology bioinformatics from other disciplines. A number of postdoctoral trainees will be hired to implement some of the key components of this research, and Ph.D. students will be recruited to work on this project as part of their thesis projects. In addition, a computational biology course will be offered to the graduate students of the joint ORNL UTK Graduate Program in Genome Science and Technology, in the Fall semester of . Some well-defined but challenging issues encountered in this project will be used as student term projects through this course. The challenging scientific problems to be solved in this project will expose the graduate students and postdoctoral trainees to the core issues of bioinformatics, i.e., intelligent and meaningful interpretation of massive amount of biological data and computational modeling of biological structures processes, providing an excellent opportunity for hands-on training. New scientific findings through the implementation of this project will be made publicly accessible through journal publications and conference presentations. Computer software to be developed in this project will be made freely available to the academic and government organizations through the Internet. All the biological data generated in this project will be organized as databases, and also be made freely and publicly available through the Internet doc22237 none This project studies how, and to what extent, property relations in contemporary rural China have been and are being restructured through the examination of land litigation, an arena in which the ownership of agricultural property has been redefined, negotiated, and contested among interest groups including the socialist state, the village collective, and individual households. This research combines an analysis of power mechanism with consideration of the cultural dimensions of property and law in China. Fieldwork will be conducted in Huangnihe, a rural township in southwestern China. The social histories of local land cases will be traced through participant observation and discourse analysis. This project will be conducted at a time in China when rural households and collectives are enjoying the widest latitude in land management since the s. By exploring land ownership from the specific perspective of legal disputes, this project will add new dimensions to the current research on China s rapidly changing property relations in the post-Mao era. Moreover, this project will be the first anthropological study of local legal functioning the mainland China and it will be conducted at a time when nationwide concern with legal reform in most pronounced. Unlike most of the recent work on China s law, which overwhelmingly focuses on the urban area, this research will focus on the rural area where almost 80% of China s population lives doc22238 none Policy-makers and policy entrepreneurs across the political spectrum tout community-based environmental protection (CBEP) as the future in environmental policy. Locally implemented and enforced environmental policies should produce more democratic, more civic-oriented, less contentious, more inclusive, and more efficient environmental decisions compared to traditional federal command-and-control environmental regulation. The community -- not federal bureaucrats -- makes the core decisions in implementing policy and evaluating policy tradeoffs. At the same time, these procedural innovations should yield superior environmental outcomes because decisions are informed by local knowledge, involve local stakeholders, and are sensitive to local conditions. In short, CBEP is supposed to produce better law, better policy, better politics, and better environmental outcomes. Enthusiasm notwithstanding, the CBEP model raises a number of serious questions: Are local environmental policymakers able to access and use the latest and most relevant scientific, engineering, and economic knowledge in decision-making? Is CBEP actually more inclusive, or do locally-based environmental decisions become captive of narrow economic and development interests? Is CBEP really a universal model for American communities, or do disparities in community wealth and capacity portend uneven (inequitable) levels of environmental protection across communities? More broadly: Do communities with substantial control over environmental protection actually attain better environmental outcomes compared to traditional command and control regulation. To address these questions, this project analyzes the implementation of Massachusetts Wetlands Protection Act (MWPA), which has existed as a natural experiment in community-based efforts to protect the environment for over 20 years. We examine two contrasting forms of CBEP: (non-bylaw) communities versus (bylaw) communities. The non-bylaw approach is a weak form of CBEP in which town (volunteer) conservation commissions act as an implementing agents for the state Department of Environmental Protection, where state regulations and oversight strongly proscribe local environmental decision-making (189 towns) in protecting wetlands. In contrast the bylaw approach is a strong form of CBEP where town (volunteer) conservation commissions act to protect wetlands under their own locally-produced bylaws and rules, independent of state regulations and oversight (161 towns). It is the comparison of these two forms that interests us. In a broad-based statistical analysis we are examining the record of wetlands protection across all 351 Massachusetts towns. Combining graphic information system (GIS) data, site-specific wetlands permitting data, and community socio-economic data we address the questions posed above in the specific context of wetlands protection. Our analytic approach involves four innovations over existing studies. First and foremost we devise a set of consistent, reliable, and substantively meaningful measures of environmental performance across communities. Second, we set up a design that controls for the many confounding influences and characteristics that have plagued the analytic utility of prior scholarship on CBEP. Third, and derived from the above, we devise consistent and rigorous measures for categorizing communities most directly relevant to evaluating environmental decision-making. Fourth we study a single environmental domain - wetlands - that is broadly salient to community development policy and politics doc22239 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I addresses the development of a remote-telemetry compatible sensor for measuring reductions in methyl tertiary butyl ether levels in soil at underground storage tank cleanup sites. At present, there are over 160,000 sites with petroleum and methyl tertiary butyl ether contaminated soil, which poses a significant threat to the environment as well as human health and safety. In addition, there are approximately 286,000 underground storage tanks that pose a significant risk to the environment because they are not in compliance with federally mandated leak detection requirements. This sensor would enable the development of a new and improved chemical detection system for identifying methyl tertiary butyl ether levels in soil and to accurately determine the risks of underground storage tanks in cleanup sites doc22240 none This project will address theoretical and computational methodology for massively large, approximate optimization problems in network design and routing, encompassing both static and online problems. A central component of the work will be the implementation of the PI s algorithms on architectures such as IBM s forthcoming BG L. The work will be directed at problem instances arising in networking and telecommunications, that are far larger than those currently studied by the mathematical programming community. While metropolitan area networks, at an appropriate level of aggregation, involve a few hundred nodes, computer networks can be far larger. Looking toward next-generation networking, especially wireless and adhoc networking, the need for optimization tools that can handle much larger networks becomes pressing. The PI s previous work built upon methodologies on potential function methods for linear programming, developed during the last decade primarily by the theoretical computer science community. His work further developed the methodology and produced an effective implementation. This implementation is fast (more efficient than competing special-purpose algorithms and much faster than commercial software), it is quite accurate for engineering purposes, and it is general: it handles network design problems, static throughput routing problems, multicommodity flow problems, and in fact, a much more general class of linear programming problems, all with a common interface and no user-selected parameters. It successfully handles problems involving networks with hundreds and up to a few thousand nodes. The resulting linear programs, with tens of millions of variables and constraints, are at the limit of what can be considered approachable with state-of-the-art linear programming software. When considering larger networks, however, the dimensions of the optimization problems increase by several orders of magnitude, placing them well beyond the capabilities of current methods and implementations - these problems are large enough that the idea of optimization becomes rather daunting. At the same time, the complexity, economics, and fast-changing nature of networking applications provides a stringent need for cost-effective, survivable designs and high throughput routing schemes. This work will seek to build on new, concrete methodological ideas so as to develop algorithms with provably stronger convergence properties; further, it will also develop high-performance implementations that can tackle massively large problems. A parallel effort will concern online routing problems. Many online routing methods (for example, dynamic routing schemes that seek to minimize congestion, or to achieve fair routings) can be viewed as single iterations of potential function methods for corresponding static problems. This project will use this idea, together with the PI s work on static problems, with the aim of developing effective routing algorithms; again, a significant part of this work will be computational. In both cases, this project will use previously established industrial research partnerships to validate methodologies and to obtain realistic data doc22241 none Frogs and salamanders are key contributors to many ecosystem functions. It is a concern, therefore, that amphibian species are declining worldwide, some to extinction. Among the suspected causes of amphibian declines is the emergence of infectious diseases. The proposed research will answer a series of questions designed to test how extinction, disease, and environmental change are linked. Do novel, highly virulent pathogens increase the chance of extinction? Does the health of the host change the risk of infection? Are there environmental conditions that increase the likelihood animals become ill? Why do emerging diseases drive some populations or species to extinction but not others? An international team of molecular biologists, immunologists, pathologists, population ecologists, and epidemiologists will use experiments and observations in the field and laboratory to answer these and related questions. The number of species on Earth is diminishing, and these losses affect the capacity of ecosystems to deliver the goods and services required to sustain life. Infectious diseases are likely responsible for species losses in some ecosystems, but relatively little is known about how pathogens increase the risk of extinction. From time to time the decline of a key species, for example the American eagle, signals a degrading environment that also threatens many other organisms. It is important to understand how infectious diseases and amphibian declines are linked if we are to ensure a high quality environment for our generation and those that follow doc22242 none East Asia marks one of the key areas for understanding the origin and prehistoric migrations of modern humans. In particular, the relative continuity of hominid fossils found in China has challenged the well-known Out of Africa hypothesis which states that the modern humans originated only once in Africa, subsequently migrated out of Africa and replaced all the archaic forms of human in the rest part of the world. The aforementioned observation suggests an independent origin of modern humans in East Asia and it contradicts the results obtained from genetic studies. Unfortunately, no systematic genetic study has been conducted to describe the spectrum of genetic diversity in East Asian populations. This project aims to describe the genetic profile of East Asian populations, to trace the ancient migratory routes in East Asia, and to study the origin of modern humans in this region by analyzing a battery of mtDNA, Y chromosomal, and autosomal markers. This project will evaluate the genetic diversity of a group of linguistically and geographically diverse but ethnically defined populations in East Asia using a set of mtDNA, Y chromosomal, and autosomal polymorphisms. It will investigate the prehistoric migrations of modern humans in this area and study the genesis of the significant genetic differences between northern and southern Mongoloids using both Y and mtDNA haplotypes. Then, it will examine the competing hypotheses of origin of anatomically modern humans in East Asia. Finally, it will characterize the relationship between linguistically versus geographically affiliated populations, and study the origin and dispersal of major language families in East Asia doc22243 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project objective is to research and develop the next generation of ultrasound real-time volumetric imagers, with enhanced spatial resolution and picture definition. The innovation is based on LEEOAT Company s patented micromachining technology and its expertise in parallel high-density electronic interconnections to innovate the Ultrasound-on-a-Chip (UOC) device. In phase I of the SBIR program, LEEOAT Company will design the device and demonstrate the fabrication feasibility of the crucial components, thus demonstrating the proof-of-concept of the UOC imaging system. Additionally, LEEOAT Company will theoretically simulate the UOC device and the support electronics for performance optimization and to predict the anticipated final performance of the imager. Finally, the cost effort will be estimated for the final development, fabrication and testing of the UOC imaging system prototype for medical applications. The major commercial application involves ultrasonic noninvasive medical imaging. Industrial applications include non-destructive evaluations such as defect identification in integrated circuits doc22244 none This project is related to the digitization of the Television News Archive at Vanderbilt University. The issues to be addressed during the project include: 1. Evaluation of alternate delivery technologies (streaming video methods and different kinds of video servers). 2. Technology for identifying program segments, and labeling the results of the segmentation. 3. Acquisition methods for future content acquisition. 4. Time stamp technology and uses. 5. Algorithms and processes for signal conditioning for increasing quality of the data archive. The Vanderbilt archive is crucial for historians: it contains the only records of TV news for some years starting in . However, it is currently stored on obsolete analog technology. This proposal takes advantage of the need to digitize the material to explore techniques that could be applied to many other kinds of video digitization projects doc22245 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project proposes to refine the novel Gene Engine Technology foruse in effective and inexpensive genomic analysis. The specific objectives of this project are to experimentally determine the actual limits of applicability of the Gene Engine TM technology and to develop all components needed for its use in high-resolution genomic mapping. To accomplish this, fluorescent sequence-specific tags will be designed and methodsdeveloped for their attachment to DNA targets. Microfluidic system will be improved to reliably stretch long DNA fragments. Algorithms needed for data processing and DNA map building will be developed. During the Phase I study, mixture of DNA fragments up to 200 kilobases long will be analyzed. Further development will lead to design and commercialization of an instrument capable of analyzing genomes up to 10 megabases in length. The commercial applications of this project will be for rapid screening of populations as well as for personalized genetic analysis in clinical settings in the form of routine laboratory tests doc22246 none The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at the University of Southern Mississippi supports an interdisciplinary research program in the area of polymer coatings and films. The Center also supports a wide range of educational activities, including the establishment of advanced degrees in polymer education and a new course leading to an advanced degree in Distance Leaming. The Center is entitled the Response-Driven Polymeric Films Center. The Center supports well maintained and accessible shared experimental facilities and interacts with industry and other sectors at local, regional, national and international levels. The Center s research is organized into two interdisciplinary research groups (IRGS). IRG 1, Design and Synthesis ofresponse -Driven Poymers, focuses on the the design and synthesis of molecular processes in biomaterials, liquid crystals, and environmentally fismart molecules. IRG 2, Response-Driven Film Formation, conducts molecular level investigations of films and coatings that exhibit response-driven properties. Potential application of the Center s research are in diveres areas such as water treatment, controlled drug release, and formulation of water-based coatings.. In addition, seed support is provided for emerging research opportunities which are within the general scope of the Center. Participants in the Center currently include 19 senior investigators, 2 postdoctoral associates, 30 graduate students, 12 undergraduates, and 6 technicians and other support personnel. Professor Marek W. Urban directs the MRSEC doc22247 none Records from the 20th century indicate considerable variations in coastal hurricane activity along the Gulf and Atlantic coastlines of North America. A decade of strong hurricanes on the Gulf coast is followed by a decade of severe hurricanes on the East coast. Preliminary research suggests that these cycles are related to the location and strength of the subtropical Atlantic high-pressure cell (Bermuda High), perhaps controlled by the strength of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). To explore the dynamics of these relationships, it is necessary to consider records of past hurricane activity that predate the 20th century. This research project will examine the role of the Bermuda High and the North Atlantic Oscillation in modulating major U.S. coastal hurricane activity on time scales ranging from the inter-annual to the millennial. Lakes and marshes along the Atlantic coast and Gulf of Mexico coast will be cored, and the overwash sand deposits preserved in these coastal sediments will be studied to produce proxy records of past hurricane activity. These geological records and evidence from historical documents will be collated with the modern instrumental records using geographic information systems (GIS) and statistics. Past climate patterns will be inferred from measured and proxy indices. The objectives of this project are to better understand climate patterns associated with variations in coastal hurricane activity and to improve return-period estimates of catastrophic events. GIS will be used to collate the disparate historical archives into an electronic document. Statistical models will be used to distinguish periods of activity from inactivity locally and regionally. A probabilistic framework will be adopted to capture the varying levels of uncertainty in the data. Strong hurricanes have enormous societal impact. High winds, heavy rain, and storm surge combine to create a catastrophic threat to life and property. Coastal populations are growing faster than the population at large, thereby continually accentuating problem associated with strong hurricanes. Careful examination of historical documents and fresh geological evidence gathered from Cape Cod and the Gulf coast through this project will provide valuable clues about the regularity of hurricanes in the distant past. A careful study of these records will result in new knowledge about the relationship between climate variability and hurricane frequency, which will lead to a better understanding of the future threat of a hurricane disaster in the United States and nearby nations doc22248 none With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program, Prof. Andrey F. Vilesov of the University of Southern California will develop a state-of-the-art pulsed helium droplet spectrometer. He will develop and optimize experimental methods for the generation of pulsed (50-100 microseconds) helium droplet beams in order to achieve a factor of 100 - 10,000 higher intensity as compared to contemporary continuous-wave beams. To fully exploit this advantage, he will mate the developed source with other modern pulsed experimental techniques such as infrared depletion spectroscopy, laser-induced fluorescence, laser photolysis, laser ablation, and time-of-flight (TOF) mass spectroscopy. This will facilitate new experiments involving helium droplets, such as (i) studies of large bio-molecules; (ii) assembly and interrogation of large metal and molecular clusters; (iii) pump-probe experiments; (iv) studies of photochemical reactions; and (v) generation and use of very large droplets containing over 100 million atoms. This development will help to establish He droplet spectroscopy as a versatile new tool, will make it cost-effective, and will make the technique immediately accessible to mainstream scientists. The ultimate goal is the development of a pulsed helium droplet beam apparatus based on a closed-cycle refrigerator, equipped with pulsed infrared laser and a TOF mass spectrometer. Graduate students will be involved in all phases, and will use the instrument as a training ground prior to integrating the pulsed nozzle in their own experiments. This system will enable advances to be achieved that are not presently possible. Other chemists interested in spectroscopy, analytics and low temperature chemical reactivity and dynamics can also benefit greatly from this user-friendly and cost-effective source. Utilization to more applied areas such as interrogation of large biomolecules or development of new nano-materials is anticipated doc22249 none This Small Business Technology Transfer Phase I Project will examine the feasibility of long-term preservation of shrimp embryos using gene transfer technology. Encysted embryos of the brine shrimp, Artemia franciscana, are resistant to extreme environmental stress including temperature, salt, anoxia and desiccation. A small heat shock crystallin protein (p26) gene identified from A. franciscana has been shown to play a major role in the brine shrimp s ability to tolerate environmental stress. This Phase I Project proposes to introduce the p26 gene into the commercially important marine shrimp, Litopenaeus vannamei, through micro-injection and electroporation techniques, and to use the shrimp -actin promoter (that has previously been isolated from L. vannamei) to drive the expression of the p26 gene, resulting in the production of transgenic shrimp capable of surviving harsh environmental conditions. The commercial application of this project will be in the marine shrimp industry doc22250 none Biologists are interested in having the ability to deal with large amounts of sequence data. One of the common questions asked is to detect regions of high similarity, under the assumption that similarity in sequence will reflect not only similar function and structure but also a level of relatedness. When comparing very large sequences, it is necessary to have wide bandwidth for data that is distributed or access the data many times, if the data can be managed locally. An index structure of the data rather than the data itself can be stored in much less space and accessed much more rapidly. The new structure uses a measure that corresponds to the differences or number of changes necessary to change one sequence into another. It is called a Multi-Resolution String Index Structure. It has been implemented in a prototype. The expanded effort will result in scalable searching tools that will bring in a number of students for the proposed effort in the basic data structure research. A number of biological scientists are involved in using the software. The results of the work will be made available on the Internet doc22251 none Wayne The domestic dog is without question the most diverse species with regard to size and conformation. Further, many conformation traits are fixed in breeds and it is argued that these traits may often have a simple genetic basis. Therefore, the dog is a good model for identification of genes that have a consequential effect on skeletal development. A novel experimental design is presented that aims to uncover specific genes that influence conformation, coat color and behavior. The design utilizes a case controlled approach in which breed that share similar traits are scanned with 540 framework markers. Regions of the genome that have low variability in a subset of markers are likely to contain genes that have been the object of selection in breeds. Statistical and molecular tools are defined that will allow fine-scale mapping and eventual identification of major genes influencing traits. To demonstrate the viability of the approach, three small studies are proposed: 1) a genomic scan of 20 breeds thought to be inbred to demonstrate they have sufficient variation for our experimental design; 2) a genomic scan of three breeds sharing the achondroplasia phenotype (short legged dogs) to show that the gene for this trait can be identified; and 3) determination of the extent of homozygosity signal in regions flanking a gene known to cause a coat color phenotype in one breed. This project will test the feasibility of a new approach to discover genes that have consequential effects on size and conformation. Further, the footprint that intense selection leaves in the genome will be determined. This may enable new approaches for gene mapping and provide a better understanding of skeletal development and evolution doc22252 none An imaging system is assembled based on a very fast (18,000-40,000 frames per second) video camera and an arc lamp producing a large-area, collimated, high-intensity beam. The equipment will be used in studies of arc-anode attachment instabilities, the mechanism of droplet formation in wire arc spraying, a reacting countercurrent shear layer in a combustor configuration, and cathode erosion mechanisms for very-high-current plasma torches doc22253 none Since its inception in , the Conference on Econometrics and Mathematical Economics (CEME) has sponsored a number of annual meetings on a variety of topics in economic theory and econometric methodology. There are currently six seminars, in Bayesian Inference, Time Series, Forecasting, Microeconometrics, Decentralization, and General Equilibrium, which meet annually. The purpose of this ongoing conference series is to stimulate discussion and research on the frontiers of econometric and economic theory, and to investigate the application of mathematical, statistical, and computational techniques to empirical economic studies. It is intended to both encourage research on new topics and speed the dissemination of the latest findings by leading scholars. To this end, these meetings have been exceptionally successful, providing forums for the exchange of ideas in economic theory and methods that are not constrained by more formal frameworks of journal publications. The channels of communication are informal and regular, allowing specialists in selected topic areas to meet regularly, at widely dispersed institutions and for longer periods than is generally possible at meetings of professional societies. CEME has been especially fruitful, particularly for young scholars at the beginning of their professional careers. Recently, a number of structural changes to the CEME organization were made to ensure continuing diversity in the participants and research topics. These changes include regular appointments of new co-organizers and seminar leaders. New appointments have been made in most positions since the last funding period doc22254 none Despite a growing interest among academics in both the microeconomics of banking and the micro-macro links, there has been very little work on why the institutional form of the bank - the financing of illiquid loans with demandable demand deposits -makes sense. But this issue is at the center of almost all questions about banking: It is central to recent work on the transmission of monetary policy. If the lending channel shuts down because demandable deposits become prohibitively costly, we have to understand why it is critical that loans be financed with demand deposits. It is central to issues of crisis management. What kinds of interventions will help revive a failing banking system? It is central to the design of a financial system. Do we really need banks -can other institutions substitute? In a sense, many of the recent models addressing these issues are incomplete because they address important issues without a fully specified rationale for the form of the banking firm. In a project funded by the NSF that is about to end, the investigators develop a model of the bank that rationalizes its institutional form. They argue that through demand deposits, banks provide more value to depositors than the market value of the illiquid loans they hold. Moreover, banks ability to issue demand deposits helps them shield borrowers from sudden demands for liquidity from investors. Taken together, the bank s institutional structure enables it to create liquidity on both sides of the balance sheet. In the proposed project, the investigators want to embed the rich, albeit partial equilibrium, analysis of optimal bank and borrower contracting that they developed over the course of the previous project in a general equilibrium setting to understand the consequences of various shocks, regulations, and government interventions on the state of the banking system in particular, and the economy in general. The objective is to obtain a better understanding of the relationship between the various tools of regulatory or macroeconomic policy, banking, and aggregate economic activity doc22255 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I study is aimed toward development of an efficient procedure for predicting growth of ternary III-V semiconductor materials grown by Metal Organic Vapor Phase Epitaxy (MOVPE). These techniques are now used extensively in the semiconductor industry to model growth of materials on substrates by chemical vapor deposition. The success of such modeling depends largely on the complexity of the gas phase and surface reaction mechanisms used to predict the growth process. While multi-step finite-rate reaction mechanisms involving approximately ten to twenty species are adequate for modeling growth of binary alloys, accurate modeling of ternary alloy growth necessitates many more reactions and species. This renders the calculations for such scenarios extremely expensive and prohibitive. This technology can improve a wide variety of electronic and opto-electronic are devices. Optimization and characterization of their growth is crucial to the success of the opto-electronic and semiconductor industry. While commercial these codes have been used with great success for modeling growth of pure and binary semiconductor materials, their success has been limited (if not non-existent) for ternary materials due to the lack of knowledge of the chemistry and the extreme computational efforts required o perform such calculations doc22256 none The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at the University of Colorado, The Ferroelectric Liquid Crystal Materoals Reserach Center, focuses on basic liquid crystal and soft materials science that may result in enhanced capabilities for electro-optic, nonlinear optic, chemical and other applications. The Center consists of a single interdisciplinary research group (IRG) working on three major themes: molecularstructure macroscopic properties, interfaces, and polymers gels. Each theme integrates molecular modeling and design, synthesis, physical characterization, and applications development. The MRSEC maintains shared facilities in support of its research and for the training of students. The Center carries out a comprehensive education and outreach program that includes outreach to K-12 students and teachers by bringing materials topics to the classroom, summer research experiences for undergraduates, and a graduate program in liquid crystal science and technology. The MRSEC has strong interactions with the industrial sector through research collaborations involving faculty and students. Participants in the Center currently include 9 senior investigators, 1 postdoctoral associate, 12 graduate students, and 4 support personnel. Professor Noel A. Clark directs the MRSEC doc22257 none Both inherited and environmental factors influence central nervous system (CNS) development, behavior, and gene activity throughout the lifetimes of animals. Sensory enrichment generally has a positive effect on CNS development, although the behavioral consequences of sensory enrichment are still in question. Alternatively, stress exposure typically disrupts CNS development, with known detrimental effects on behavioral and cognitive abilities. The proposed research focuses on the Drosophila mushroom body, a conserved structure in the insect brain necessary for olfactory learning. Normal mushroom body development has been demonstrated in genetic, transgenic and tissue ablation studies to be critical for cognitive functions in flies. Environmental conditions greatly affect Drosophila mushroom bodies in several ways. Artificially enriched visual and olfactory conditions enhance its development, while exposure to stressful temperatures and chemicals disrupt its anatomy. Hence, the opposite effects of enrichment and stress on CNS development should be counteractive and mirror behavioral and cognitive abilities as well as gene activity in the CNS. Specifically, the proposed research will establish the consequences of ecologically relevant variation in olfactory enrichment and thermal stress during development on (1) mushroom body and general anatomy, (2) behavior, and (3) gene expression in Drosophila. This study will identify fundamental relationships between environment, brain development, behavior, and gene expression through the integration of molecular, genetic, structural and functional perspectives doc22258 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project addresses the development of Innovative Phase Shifter Utilizing Nonreciprocal Resonator. In a nonreciprocal resonator, such as a ferrite disk, wave propagation is non-degenerate, and the resonant modes all assume at differently frequencies. Thus, for a given resonant mode its phase is unambiguous, allows it to be coupled out providing the function of a phase shifter. Phase shift obtained in this manner is uniform, and the operation is independent of the phase angle obtained. The phase shifter for this project will be compact in size, providing 360 degrees phase angle with low insertion loss. Furthermore, it allows for circuit minimization facilitating fabrication as a large array. Potential commercial applications include Low-cost, small-volume collision avoidance radar capable of beam steering doc22259 none A diagnostic laser system including a Nd: YAG pulsed laser with injection seeder, a pumped dye laser a spectrometer, and an ICCD camera is acquired. The system will be used for Raman spectroscopy, laser-induced fluorescence (LIF), laser-induced incandescence (LII), and molecular filtered Rayleigh scattering (FRS). These diagnostics will be employed in an investigation of the use of external electric fields during flame synthesis of nonagglomerated nanopowders and fullesrenic nanostructures. The equipment will also be incorporated into new curricula on nanomaterials and advanced equipmental methods doc22260 none The interaction of the solar wind with the Earth s magnetosphere produces a shock front. The upstream region, referred to as the foreshock, has been found to have very complicated spatial and temporal structures. Similarly within the sheath region between the magnetopause and the bow shock there can be complex structures that are believed to cause various transient events in the magnetosphere. The kinetic effects of the ions play an important role in the interactions of the solar wind with the bow shock and magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations, which treat the plasma a single component fluid, are not adequate for understanding the physics of this region. This project will utilize 2-D and 3-D simulations using a high-resolution hybrid code to study the interactions. The primary topics to be investigated are: (1) the structure of the curved bow shock, including quasi-parallel and quasi-perpendicular shocks, the spatial and temporal variations in the foreshock and shock-particle interactions, and (2) the interaction of interplanetary discontinuities with the bow shock, with particular emphasis on hot flow anomalies (HFAs doc22261 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Erik Thomas will conduct two years of linguistic research on the phonetic cues that differentiate African American and European American English. The project has two components, one examining differences in the production of African American and European American speech and the other examining differences in their perception - i.e., how listeners distinguish the two. Past research on African American English has focused largely on grammatical variants (such as copula deletion: He happy ; and habitual BE: He be working ), and consonantal variants (such as R-lessness: HEAH for HERE; and consonant cluster simplification: PAS for PAST). Research on vocalic and intonational variation in African American English has been scarce, and research on variation in rhythm and voice quality even rarer. This project will examine these lesser-known variables. The production component will include acoustic analyses of recordings of African Americans and European Americans from the same communities in North Carolina, examining vowel, intonational, rhythm, and voice quality variables. The perception component will include a series of speech identification experiments in which the effects on ethnic identification of the variables investigated in the production component are compared. It is important to study variables involving vowels, intonation, rhythm, and voice quality because they are the factors that give speakers accents and thus are critical for African American and European American identity. These variables are likely to appear in running speech before the better-studied grammatical variables and usually before the consonantal variables. Unlike those variables, variables involving vowels, intonation, rhythm, and voice quality seem to persist in standard African American speech. African Americans can use them to project their ethnic identity even in situations in which they have to avoid the more stigmatized grammatical and consonantal variants. In situations such as telephone conversations and radio broadcasts, listeners can distinguish a speaker s ethnicity using these variables. This ability is involved in both racial profiling and discrimination. More information about these variables, including their distribution within the two ethnic groups and how they are used by listeners, can provide insights as to how racial profiling occurs. This information could be useful in legal cases doc22262 none Two interrelated trends in comparative political research address issues that are pertinent to the Arab world but very much under-studied in that region. One is the resurgence of interest in culture in general and political culture in particular. The other concerns the attitudes and values of ordinary citizens in countries undergoing or seeking to initiate democratic transitions. Against this background, the proposed research will carry out public opinion research in three Arab countries in order to examine the nature and determinants of attitudes and values pertaining to governance, including democratic governance. The first goal of the investigation is to shed light on what has often been called the missing dimension in the study of Arab politics: how, why, and with what implications do ordinary citizens think about the way their societies are and should be governed. The second goal is to connect findings from the study of these Arab societies to efforts in Political Science to construct generalizable insights about governance, democratization, and political culture in developing countries. Information about political attitudes and values will be collected through public opinion research in Jordan, Palestine (West Bank and Gaza), and Kuwait. These countries have been selected for both practical and analytical reasons. Practical reasons include the availability of local scholars and institutions that will participate in the project, and also a political climate that permits the conduct of opinion research. Analytical considerations include system-level similarities and differences that make cross-national comparison instructive, and also the availability of data from prior research in each country, thereby permitting longitudinal as well as cross-sectional comparison. The project s explanatory contribution will be enhanced through the incorporation of both a cross-national and a longitudinal comparative dimension. The three countries will be examined at two different points in time. Similar findings across space and or time will suggest relationships that are likely to be generalizable, at least to the Arab world and perhaps to non-democratic polities in other developing areas. Alternatively, different findings will permit informed speculation about the conditionalities associated with particular patterns and variable relationships. In addition, further extending the project s comparative dimension, findings from the Arab Middle East will be compared to findings from political attitude research in other developing countries. The goal in this connection is to reduce exclusion of the Arab experience from efforts in comparative politics to develop theoretical insights of broad applicability doc22263 none Under the direction of Dr. Jeff Connor-Linton, Ms. Budsaba Kanoksilapatham will compile and analyze a corpus of 60 biochemistry research articles. These articles will be randomly selected from five core journals in biochemistry published in the United States. Previous studies of discourse structure and language use in scientific articles have emphasized the communicative functions of rhetorical moves (like Summarizing previous research, and Identifying a research niche ) and of a few lexical and grammatical features (like past tense and passive voice). Ms. Kanoksilapatham will address both levels of analysis to determine how they are connected. She will analyze rhetorical moves to determine the rhetorical organization conventionally used in each of the four sections of biochemistry research articles (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) and to assess the reliability of move identification. She will then analyze the use of dozens of lexical and grammatical features to identify the sets of features that are most typically used to construct each type of move. The importance of this research is threefold. Empirically, the study will offer the most representative review of the rhetorical structure of research articles to date. Theoretically, it is the first study to assess the validity of subjective interpretive constructs like rhetorical moves by analyzing the use of concrete linguistic features within and across those moves and revealing the connection between two ways that meaning is communicated in written texts. Pedagogically, this study may guide language teachers and materials designers in selecting texts and developing learning activities for English as a second or foreign language instruction. Insights from these analyses will help scientists who speak English as a second language to better understand and contribute to reports of scientific discoveries around the world doc22264 none While it is well known that women have received lower wages than men throughout history, there is no agreement about how to interpret this fact. Economists who believe that markets work generally assume that the difference in wages is a measure of the difference in productivity between men and women. Historians are often more skeptical of markets, and many assume that these wage differences indicate that women were underpaid. Unfortunately, little work has been done to test which of these hypotheses is closest to the truth. This project tests which interpretation is correct by comparing wages to measures of productivity derived from an estimated production function. Using farm accounts from English archives, this project creates a data set containing measures of outputs and inputs from a number of farms in early nineteenth-century England and uses this data set to estimate a production function, and thus the marginal productivity of male and female workers. Once the relative productivity of female workers has been determined, comparison with their relative wages will show whether women were paid appropriate market wages or were underpaid. The results of this study have implications for how we understand labor markets. At issue is the question of whether wages are determined by social custom or by productivity. It is clear that women were paid lower wages than men throughout most of history, but why they were paid lower wages is still an open question that this project will attempt to answer. This project will leave other questions unanswered. The production function can determine women s productivity relative to men s, but it cannot determine the reasons why women s productivity differed from men s. This project tests for wage discrimination, which occurs if wages do not match the workers productivity, but it does not test for discrimination in general. Discrimination comes in many forms, including limited access to some occupations, and may exist even if women were not underpaid in farm labor doc22265 none Over twenty years ago, Fenno ( ) called attention to what he called the key problem facing students of the representative-constituency relationship.. .the problem of perception. More specifically, Fenno noted the importance of viewing the constituency as the legislator does. In other words, what does an elected representative see when he or she sees a constituency. (Fenno ). This Doctoral Dissertation Research project addresses this question and employs theories from cognitive and social psychology to develop a more complete theory of congressional representation. The project centers on the ways in which legislators conceptions of their constituents are constrained by the availability heuristic (Tversky and Kahneman ). While political scientists have frequently invoked psychological theories in the study of public opinion, such theories have rarely been examined in the context of political elites. Part of the task of representation requires legislators to decide who in the district is interested in a given issue. The student argues that the availability heuristic offers important insight into legislators perceptions of their districts. When making judgments about the interests of their district, legislators do not use all the relevant information, but rather rely on a subset of relevant information. Those interests (whether organized or unorganized) that are more easily accessible are more likely to be included in the legislator s perception of the district s interests on a given issue. In this dissertation the student examines selective perception and argues that the answer to this question requires the consideration of the availability heuristic. The central question investigated is what explains perceptual variations across legislators? The student offers that any answer to this question must take into account numerous hypotheses from the political science literature in combination with theories from cognitive psychology. It is this latter question that constitutes the majority of the empirical focus of this project. The student approaches the question of who legislators perceive as being part of the interested constituency on a given issue by focusing on current members of the U.S. House of Representatives and their legislative staff. Since the research is issue-specific, he focuses on two policies within each of two issue areas: the Patients Bill of Rights and Medicare reform (health policy), and bankruptcy reform and the Internet tax moratorium (financial services policy). She uses in-person interviews with legislative staff and legislators to answer the question of how legislators see their constituents. The dependent variable of legislators perceptions of who in their district is interested in a given issue is measured by two instruments included in the interviews with legislative staff and legislators. The combination of interviews and a dataset comprised of economic, political, and demographic variables allows both descriptive and qualitative analysis as well as a more conventional statistical analysis doc22266 none This award is to support research that will develop a network of tree-ring records covering the past 3,000 years from the western United States. These data will be used to understand the temporal and geographic variability of Holocene climate in western North America. Field work will be undertaken to obtain tree-ring records of appropriate length from regions currently lacking high resolution time series. Existing tree-ring archives will be carefully analyzed to select the best + year records of climate. These records will be integrated into a network with sufficient geographic coverage to be useful for ocean-atmosphere modeling studies. The resulting network of records will be used to produce a variety of climate reconstructions ranging from long regional reconstructions to synoptic reconstructions of the western United States. The broader impacts of this proposed research center on the development of a network of high resolution climate records from the western United States that can be used to fully explore the range and frequency of climate change. This tool is presently not available and will have a wide range of applications for paleoclimatology, oceanography and other subdisciplines of climate change doc22267 none The severe economic crisis in Japan, associated with the collapse of the Japanese stock and real estate markets and the dramatic deterioration in the health of the Japanese banking sector, represents one of the major economic events of the late twentieth century. It is even more striking because the second largest economy in the world remained stagnant for more than a decade, and even today shows no evidence of returning to the robust health that characterized most of its postwar history. Why this economic weakness has persisted for so long is an important public policy issue and has been the source of substantial speculation and debate, with problems in the financial sector likely being a key contributor. In particular, the misallocation of credit by troubled Japanese banks associated with pressures emanating from their historical ties to troubled firms may be a key contributor to the continuing stagnation of the Japanese economy. Two forms of corporate affiliations are the focus of this study: bank-centered financial (horizontal) keiretsus and the main bank system. A concern is that these corporate affiliations have subverted corporate governance, insulating firms from the discipline that otherwise would come from outside directors, shareholders, and creditors, resulting in suboptimal business and financial decisions. While previous studies have examined how these corporate affiliations affect investment decisions, stock returns, and corporate governance decisions, they have not directly examined how such affiliations impact the availability of credit. This study will utilize a unique firm-level database that enables an examination of loans to firms to determine the extent to which such finance is affected by corporate affiliations, as well as the implications for macroeconomic activity and the effectiveness of monetary policy of any such misallocation of credit. The study has three main objectives. The first, and primary, objective is to investigate the impact of main bank and keiretsu affiliations on credit allocation during periods of firm and or bank distress. Preliminary evidence suggests that credit has been misallocated due to pressures from keiretsu and main bank ties, and that this misallocation has been allowed, and even encouraged, by government policies. The second objective is to investigate the macroeconomic implications of this credit misallocation, in particular focusing on its contribution to the continuing stagnation of economic activity in Japan. The third objective is to investigate the contribution of the troubled banking sector to the breakdown of the monetary policy transmission mechanism, and thus to the inability of monetary policy to restart the Japanese economy. This study has important implications for appropriate policies to deal with banking crises, as well as the costs of inappropriate policies. If scarce credit is allocated to uncompetitive and troubled firms, Japan will not experience the natural cleansing which results from the major restructuring that typically occurs in an economic downturn, with the consequence that longer-run economic growth may be reduced. In that instance, it may not be that economic growth is stifled from too little overall credit, but rather from scarce credit being allocated to firms with the least productive investment opportunities. When this misallocation of credit is combined with declining total domestic bank loans due to pressures on banks having difficulties achieving their capital requirements, the transmission of monetary policy can be short-circuited. Furthermore, given that the Japanese economy remains the second largest in the world, resolving the crisis is important for the economic prospects for other countries, especially those in East Asia doc22268 none Many studies of individual decision-making have shown that people rely on heuristics that lead to systematic biases. Many economists belief that market forces decrease the prevalence of such biases. This research consists of a series of experiments that add an insurance market to tests of decision-making under uncertainty. We address the question of whether insurance markets create a byproduct - information - that helps people to better understand risk and therefore make better decisions. For example, if a smoker finds out that the price for purchasing life insurance is higher than for a non-smoker, this might convey more easily understood information about the increased risk of smoking than would statistical tables. Our hope is that this research will help increase the understanding of how individuals process and use information from insurance markets, and therefore how information about risks might be presented in a more easily understood manner doc22269 none The distinctive feature of storable goods is that they can be purchased for inventory. Consumers can stockpile during sales. Numerous products like groceries, and intermediate goods are storable. The goal of this project is to develop a tractable model for demand estimation that handles inventories, as well as multiple brand purchases, and purchases of different quantities (sizes). We propose a three-step estimation procedure. The first step, consist of maximizing the likelihood of the observed brand choice conditional on the size (quantity) bought in order to recover those parameters that do not directly affect the dynamic behavior. As shown, we do not need to solve the dynamic programming problem to recover them. We estimate a discrete choice model, restricting the choice set to available options of the same size (quantity) actually bought in each period. In the second step, using the estimates from the first stage, we compute the inclusive values for each size (quantity), namely, the expected utility to the consumer from purchasing each container size. The inclusive values aggregate all the relevant information about a size into a scalar. Finally, we apply the standard nested algorithm for dynamic estimation to the simplified dynamic problem to estimate the rest of the parameters by maximizing the likelihood of the observed sequence of sizes (quantities) purchased. The advantage of the framework is that breaks the estimation into three steps. Estimates from the first two stages help substantially reduce the computational burden of the latter. The dynamic programming problem is solved only in the third stage. Intuitively, the model enables the decomposition of the individual choices into two different components that can be separately identified. First, at any specific point in time, when the consumer purchases a product of a given size, we can estimate her preferences for the different brands. Second, we can estimate the key parameters that determine the dynamic (storing) behavior of the consumer by looking at a simplified version of the problem. The simplified problem treats each size of purchase as a single choice whose expected utility (appeal) is determined by the inclusive values (estimated in the first stage). There are several reasons why we care about sales and demand for storable goods. First, when a good is storable, there is a distinction between the short run and long run reaction to price changes. This distinction has implications for demand estimation. We study how market demand should be treated and how short run and long run price responses can be distinguished. The distinction is important for any study that relies on demand estimation, be it merger analysis, computation of welfare gains from new goods, or building price indices. Conclusions based on estimates that disregard demand dynamics are likely to be misleading. Second, the rich scanner data on storable products presents an interesting opportunity to study whether household behavior fits a model with dynamic forward-looking behavior. Third, understanding demand allows us to study sellers incentives to intertemporally price discriminate. The estimates will help identify the key factors to be considered in modeling sellers behavior doc22270 none Geissman This award will support an important upgrade to the superconducting rock magnetometer (2G Enterprises 760R three axis system) and will support the addition of a high sensitivity Kappabridge for the Paleomagnetism Laboratory at the University of New Mexico. The upgrade and equipment acquisition will considerably enhance the capability of our laboratory in paleomagnetic and rock magnetic research, which is and has been utilized by a range of University of New Mexico (UNM) and outside researchers. The magnetometer upgrade will greatly improve the overall operation of the laboratory and will involve (1) replacing the Rf-driven SQuIDs with DC SQuIDS, affording at least an order of magnitude greater moment sensitivity over the existing Rf-driven SQuIDS, (2) reducing the specimen access region from 7.6 cm diameter to 4.2 cm, (3) retrofitting the magnetometer with improved superinsulation, allowing for a considerably decreased liquid helium boil-off rate, and (4) replacing part of the liquid helium fill line with an enlarged access line, to prevent the nagging development of major freezing (and blockage) of the line. These upgrades to the magnetometer will improve our ability to measure very weakly magnetized rocks that typically defy our best attempts to extract useful information near the current threshold of the magnetometer. The requested new susceptibility system, will be used to measure bulk and anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility of a range of geologic materials doc22247 none Records from the 20th century indicate considerable variations in coastal hurricane activity along the Gulf and Atlantic coastlines of North America. A decade of strong hurricanes on the Gulf coast is followed by a decade of severe hurricanes on the East coast. Preliminary research suggests that these cycles are related to the location and strength of the subtropical Atlantic high-pressure cell (Bermuda High), perhaps controlled by the strength of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). To explore the dynamics of these relationships, it is necessary to consider records of past hurricane activity that predate the 20th century. This research project will examine the role of the Bermuda High and the North Atlantic Oscillation in modulating major U.S. coastal hurricane activity on time scales ranging from the inter-annual to the millennial. Lakes and marshes along the Atlantic coast and Gulf of Mexico coast will be cored, and the overwash sand deposits preserved in these coastal sediments will be studied to produce proxy records of past hurricane activity. These geological records and evidence from historical documents will be collated with the modern instrumental records using geographic information systems (GIS) and statistics. Past climate patterns will be inferred from measured and proxy indices. The objectives of this project are to better understand climate patterns associated with variations in coastal hurricane activity and to improve return-period estimates of catastrophic events. GIS will be used to collate the disparate historical archives into an electronic document. Statistical models will be used to distinguish periods of activity from inactivity locally and regionally. A probabilistic framework will be adopted to capture the varying levels of uncertainty in the data. Strong hurricanes have enormous societal impact. High winds, heavy rain, and storm surge combine to create a catastrophic threat to life and property. Coastal populations are growing faster than the population at large, thereby continually accentuating problem associated with strong hurricanes. Careful examination of historical documents and fresh geological evidence gathered from Cape Cod and the Gulf coast through this project will provide valuable clues about the regularity of hurricanes in the distant past. A careful study of these records will result in new knowledge about the relationship between climate variability and hurricane frequency, which will lead to a better understanding of the future threat of a hurricane disaster in the United States and nearby nations doc22272 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will result in an innovative, technologically advanced, imaging system-with the potential of counting of individual photons. The imaging system will be a compact avalanche-gain, charge-coupled device, and digital camera. The innovation will offer high photo-response from the deep ultraviolet to the near infrared in very Low Light Level, as well as photonic light conditions. In addition, the Photon Counting Camera will present solid-state reliability without typical intensifier imaging tube limitations, such as, image burn-in and blooming. A possible research, military, law enforcement, or home land security application for the Photon Counting Camera will be black-on-black detection that is when faint objects are difficult to discriminate from the background. This far-reaching technology will also be beneficial for many non-military applications, such as astronomy, bio- and chemical-luminescence, microscopy, and beam imaging. Furthermore, the innovation will offer significant cost savings and enhance multi-spectral imaging performance, compared to conventional intensifier imaging systems. In short, the Photon Counting Camera will have the most impact where MHz readout speeds (real-time or TV speeds) and lowest possible noise are required doc22273 none The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at the University of Alabama investigates new materials that may lead to future information technologies. The Center involves interdisciplinary research by faculty participants from the Departments of Physics, Chemistry, Materials and Metallurgical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering. The MRSEC research is organized into two interdisciplinary research groups (IRGs). IRG1, Dynamics and Transport in Nanostructured Magnetic Materials, focuses on the synthesis, characterization, modeling and optimization of films of ordered, self-assembled, monodisperse, magnetic nanoparticles that may serve as future extremely high density magnetic recording media. IRG2, Dendrimer-Based Materials for Information Technology, investigates new dendrimer-based materials for information technology and evolves from a seed project that demonstrated long-term charge storage in special redox gradient dendrimer molecules. The Center maintains shared experimental facilities in support of its research and for student training. The MRSEC also supports education and outreach efforts that include development of instructional materials for middle school students by teachers and MRSEC faculty, a summer research experience for teachers and undergraduates, and a summer research program for faculty and students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The Center has strong interactions with the magnetic recording industry that inform the fundamental research done by the MRSEC participants of real wotld contraints and needs. Participants in the Center currently include 16 senior investigators, 5 postdoctoral associates, 13 graduate students, 1 undergraduate student and 1 support personnel. Professor William H. Butler directs the MRSEC doc22274 none Dental remains are the most common, well-preserved type of fossil evidence for extinct species of primates. Many researchers have studied aspects of tooth shape, wear, and developmental timing in an attempt to understand the evolution of humans and their closest relatives. Teeth are made up of several hard tissues: enamel, dentine, and cementum. One recent area of research is based on enamel microstructure, which is the internal microscopic structure of a tooth crown. Enamel forms in an incremental manner similar to the growth pattern of tree rings, regular lines that record the number of years a tree has been growing. During tooth growth, a series of near-weekly and daily lines are formed that record the position of the developing front and the daily growth of the enamel-forming cells. Counts and measurements of these features provide information on the rate, pattern, and total time required to form the tooth crown. The first aim of this study is to refine our current understanding of enamel development by establishing the periodicity, or frequency, of incremental features in a large sample of newborn and juvenile pigtailed macaques. This will be accomplished by relating these incremental features to known interval fluorescent labels, which were injected during a previous study of bone growth. The growth lines will be counted between specific labels, which will allow us to determine how much time it takes to form each type of feature. The second aim of this study is to document the degree of variation of these features in orangutan and chimpanzee dentitions. Comparisons of incremental features will be made among individuals, between subspecies of orangutans, and between chimpanzees and orangutans. This project will provide additional support for studies of tooth growth by allowing standard methods to be tested, and will allow better assessment of results based on small sample sizes. Information collected on tooth growth in chimpanzees and orangutans will also serve as the largest comparative sample for the interpretation of fossil material. Ultimately, these results may allow researchers to better understand the relationships between humans and our closest relatives, including living and fossil apes doc22275 none This project will digitize historic records and briefs of the United States Supreme Court, and make them available to the public through the Project s web site and database, at http: curiae.law.yale.edu. The Project web site will provide public access to electronic versions of more than 2,000 records and briefs from the 300 most important U.S. Supreme Court cases in American history. Over 150,000 pages of materials will be provided through a user-friendly interface, supported by what will be the most complete, publicly accessible database of historic U.S. Supreme Court records and briefs to date. Briefs and oral arguments presented to the Supreme Court provide crucial information to scholars, to legal practitioners, and to the public at large as they seek to understand America s historic constitutional battles and Supreme Court decisions. Unfortunately, the public has highly inadequate access to these valuable materials. Bound print versions of these materials are rare, difficult to locate, and continue to be subject to significant damage through use; on-line versions do not provide access to the bulk of the most significant case materials and are often costly to use. The web site and documents will be searchable both full-text and by individually-indexed fields at the project site, in addition to through public search engines. All documents will be freely available to all users. Initial case selection will be made based on citation information in historical studies of the Supreme Court and constitutional law casebooks. Copies of the briefs, oral arguments, and related materials will then be transferred to electronic format by a data conversion service. The files produced by the service will be located on the Yale University institutional web server. The accessibility of these materials will not only save researchers time, but will encourage and allow research and analysis that would not otherwise have been undertaken doc22276 none The existing urban politics literature has classified development policies into three types: location incentives that subsidize development; progressive development policies that provide incentives but with strings attached; and growth management restrictions. Unlike most of this extant work which has examined one or at most two of the policy types in isolation, the researchers treat growth policy as a continuum across these types, based on the distribution of the costs and benefits of development among pubic and private actors. The specific deals that cities negotiated with private actors can fall at any point on this continuum, based on the combination of policy instruments used, the concessions and extractions negotiated. Use of the bargaining perspective allows them to unite these separate approaches to city growth issues by focusing on the factors that increase a city s relative bargaining power -- enabling it to make extract benefits from firms or forcing it to provide concessions to attract growth. Applying the Nash bargaining model to development deals also can incorporate insights from previous development research within a more rigorous theoretical framework that leads to a very specific empirical specification. City competition for development is captured by the relative values of the city s and the firm s outside options -- the alternatives each would get if the negotiated deal fell through. City bargaining power will depend on its inherent attractiveness to different businesses, which determines the minimum value it should accept in a deal; its need to reduce economic or fiscal problems, which determines its time preference, and the risk aversion of the political actors negotiating the deal. Identifying the sources of the city s bargaining power will also lead to policy recommendations on how government institutions and general development policies can be structured to improve the city s ability to pursue both short term and long term development goals. The investigators also extend this approach to address repeated play of the bargaining game with different firms over time. This extension permits evaluation of the possibility that cities can develop a reputation as a tough or soft agent, equivalent in development policy to slow- or pro-growth areas. This bargaining approach is investigated through empirical analysis and theoretical modeling. Predictions of the model are tested with data collected from a national survey of development officials in all incorporated places over 10,000 within 12 selected metropolitan areas. The survey gathers information on the two most recent negotiated location incentives deals. This facilitates the measurement of the outcome of the bargaining model-the value of the negotiated agreements. Information on specific firms is collected from archival sources, and matched to bargaining outcomes in the data set. Additional information on city political, fiscal and economic characteristics are merged into the final data set. Fieldwork in the 12 metropolitan areas add details about the negotiation process in practice and data from city records. In addition, interviews with officials involved in formulating development policy and carrying out development negotiations provides the basis for case analyses of development negotiation. The anticipated products of this research represent significant theoretical and methodological advances in the urban politics field, as well as an applied framework for city officials to improve pursuit of their development goals. Given that formal modeling approaches to questions in the urban politics and public policy fields have been limited, the work resulting from this research has the potential to be groundbreaking in its extension of new methodological approaches to these fields doc22277 none The inability of majority voting to account for the intensity of voters preferences leads to many practical problems. Where majority voting is the rule, minorities may be inadequately protected. In addition, the obvious opportunity for mutual gain existing whenever two voters have strong preferences over different issues inevitably results in vote trading, compromising transparency and penalizing less experienced outsiders. In international organizations, in particular, the recognition that sovereign countries should not be forced to accept decisions to which they strongly object, typically leads to national vetoes, risking paralysis and increasing bargaining. Ideally these vetoes should be costly, allowing member countries to express the intensity of their preferences but only at some cost. This project studies a simple scheme that appears potentially able to reconcile the advantages of majority voting with the protection of more intensely felt interests. Consider a committee meeting regularly over time to take decisions that affect all of its members. Decisions are taken by majority vote. However, each committee member is given a stock of votes at the beginning of the year, with the proviso that these are all the votes at his disposal for the year, but he is free to cast any number of them at any one meeting. Committee members can then choose to increase their weight over more strongly felt decisions, at the cost of reducing their influence over other choices. The idea of using more resources, here more votes, when a decision is valued more is very natural, but storable votes have no precedent in the literature. Initial results suggest that votes that can be stored over time have better welfare properties than non-storable votes; perform well even if voters are not fully rational, are fairer to minorities, and are both more transparent and welfare superior to tradable votes. In addition, the mechanism is very simple, does not violate any ethical prior and could realistically be implemented. The theoretical results have been confirmed in initial experiments. The research project will analyze the theoretical properties of storable votes, moving from simple if plausible examples to more general situations, and using experiments as check on the accuracy and practical relevance of the theoretical analysis doc22278 none The goal of this project is to correlate degradation rates to strain rates in a fashion that creates general guidelines by which bioprocessing systems can be modified to minimize plasmid DNA degradation and maintain biological activity. To this end, specific hypotheses regarding mechanisms to minimize the impact of shear, and how to scale behaviors based on molecular characteristics, will be tested. This knowledge will then be applied to the maintenance of supercoil structure and biologic activity. These hypotheses include: (1) altering molecular diffusion times by increasing solution viscosity to protect DNA from shear induced degradation, (2) reducing shear stresses arising from velocity gradients by reducing the lengths of DNA particles, (3) increasing the level of turbulence which intuitively should promote conformational alterations that enhance covalent bond breakage, and (4) using the knowledge gained after testing in 1-3 toward protecting plasmids during atomization. Different aerosolisation strategies (e.g., turbulence, temperature, and particle size) will be analyzed with the help of computational analysis to optimize the atomization process. The success of an atomization strategy will be judged based on the molecular stability and biological activity of the plasmid DNA after aerosolisation doc22279 none Understanding trade negotiations from an economic perspective is not an easy task. Within a terms-of-trade driven Prisoner s dilemma framework, the fundamental international inefficiency that a trade agreement can solve relates to the cost-shifting that arises through terms-of-trade movements when governments protect import competing sectors unilaterally. By shifting some of the costs of this protection on to foreign exporters, each government over-protects its import competing sectors relative to what would be internationally efficient in light of its underlying preferences and the preferences of other governments. The result is that there is too little market access in the world in the absence of a trade agreement. From this perspective, the purpose of a trade agreement is to expand market access to efficient levels. In our proposed research, we focus on three distinct aspects of GATT WTO bargaining: bilateral tariff bargaining in the presence of multiparty externalities; bargaining over tariffs while maintaining unilateral control over national competition policies; and the broader choice of a rules-based versus power-based negotiating forum.This characterization of the role of trade agreements is quite simple, yet it is also quite general, applying to a wide variety of political-economy settings. But even given this characterization, there is still the question of how trade negotiations might be structured most effectively. As it happens, the World Trade Organization (WTO) - and GATT, its predecessor organization created in - is not simply an agreement to implement a particular point on the efficiency frontier. Rather the GATT WTO is a negotiating forum that is shaped by a set of rules, and subject to these rules member governments are then left to negotiate when, what and with whom they please. These rules may have important implications for the bargaining outcomes, and they may play important efficiency-enhancing roles. In our proposed research, we focus on three distinct aspects of GATT WTO bargaining: bilateral tariff bargaining in the presence of multiparty externalities; bargaining over tariffs while maintaining unilateral control over national competition policies; and the broader choice of a rules-based versus power-based negotiating forum doc22280 none Two well-established theories, both developed some fifty years ago, explain why organisms age. However, these models omit ecological and behavioral forces that could influence the evolution of aging. Using mathematical models and computer simulations, this project will develop new models of aging that include ecological and behavior forces. The ultimate goal is to understand currently unexplained aging phenomena, such as why females typically outlive males in most mammals or why some species escape the aging process, and to help predict what sorts of genes should be associated with aging. When complete, these models should give us a much broader understanding of why and how aging occurs in humans and other species, and aid the search for genes that influence aging. In addition to the basic scientific advances that will result from this project, this work will also increase the quality of math science education. This project facilitates a collaboration between the principal investigator-a laboratory researcher who works on aging--and three mathematically-oriented theoreticians. As such, it will greatly enhance opportunities for mathematical training not only for the PI, but also for graduate students and undergraduates at the PI s home institution doc22170 none Time-Series-cross-section (TSCS) models have become popular in political science, since they allow students of comparative politics (broadly defined) to use powerful statistical methods that have been the province of students of American politics (typically studying voting behavior via large surveys). While there are many applications, the prototypical application is the study of political economy, and in particular the impact of political arrangements on economic performance in advanced industrial societies. TSCS data has also become of interest in International Relations (IR). Many quantitative IR researchers use a dyad-year design, where pairs of nations are observed annually for long periods of time (ranging from 40 to over 100 years). The dependent variable of interest in these studies is often the binary indicator of whether a dyad was in conflict in a given year. Binary dependent variables cause special problems. Most studies either ignored TSCS issues or treated those issues as a nuisance, using a Feasible Generalized Least Squares (FGLS) estimation method to treat those nuisances. These FGLS procedures either have poor statistical properties (in finite samples) or seem dangerous on other grounds. One reason that TSCS data is of interest is that the richness of the data allows researchers to do many things; but many of those things should not be done. By now most political science scholarly publications appear to use the methodology developed by the researchers in earlier research where they recommended the use of Ordinary Least Squares estimates coupled with panel correct standard errors, with dynamics modeled via a lagged dependent variable. However, this still treats TSCS issues as problems of estimation and not specification. The researchers will develop the next generation TSCS methodology that focuses on specification. They are interested in studying the best way to model unit heterogeneity directly as well as to account for spatial correlation that is typically seen in these data. In addition, for binary TSCS data they explore how best to model temporal dynamics. The research entails developing appropriate estimators and testing them on both actual and simulated data. In addition, the investigators develop practical advice and software for the applied researcher using TSCS data that implements this methodology. In addition to developing the next generation TSCS methodology they gather and catalog a set of reference datasets for use in evaluating TSCS models. By developing a reference set of datasets that will be made freely available, the researchers will make it easier to evaluate future proposed estimators for TSCS data in political science and therefore improve the field of political methodology doc22282 none Purvis (collaborative with , Werner) This collaborative research by an anthropologist at Texas A& M University, a chemist at Claremont McKenna College, and a physician at the East-Kazakhstan Oblast State Agency for Health Care will examine perceived risk from radiation exposure at a former Soviet nuclear test site near Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. Some persons engage in high-risk activities such as mining copper at the former test site, and some individuals continue to live near it. The project will study how three social groups, Kazakh villagers, local research scientists, and local health care workers, perceive the risk from radiation exposure. Using participant observation, a survey of 30 research scientists, 100 health care workers and 400 villagers in two villages (a test village close to, and a control village distant from the site), the project will assess the perceived risk in the past, the perceived risk at present, and the understanding of health risks due to radiation exposure. The study will contribute to the understanding of cultural differences in how people react to perceived risk in a situation where the radiation exposure is actual, not hypothetical, where mistrust of the government is pervasive, and where informants use traditional as well as modern ways of dealing with their situation. The study will advance our understanding of how local culture affects risk perception and political activity relevant to the understanding of risk doc22283 none The award supports the acquisition of high-resolution, absolute-dated speleothem records of the Asian Monsoon. Such records will lead to an understanding of the mechanisms that control the Asian Monsoon during all portions of glacial-interglacial cycles over the last 200,000 years. They will also constrain the relative timing of change in the Monsoon and the climate in other regions. This important new research effort builds upon previous work by the investigators that demonstrates a link between North Atlantic climate and the East Asian Monsoon, which originates from the warmest portion of the tropical oceans (the West Pacific Warm Pool). This research explores the links between tropical and high northern latitude climate and abrupt climatic shifts. For example, the end of the Younger Dryas is marked by a large and rapid change in East Asian Monsoon intensity. The change occurred in less than 10 years and is synchronous, within an error of approximately 100 years, with a similarly rapid rise in Greenland temperature. The assembled research team represents a strong international collaboration among American and Chinese researchers and institutions. Both the United States and China are partners in the research as both supply research funds and expertise to help the research succeed doc22284 none The globalization of innovation is an issue of central importance to economic geography and to the economic and social sciences in general. Numerous theoretic and empirical studies have been conducted to investigate the globalization of research and development (R and it will examine the challenges and opportunities that foreign R&D offer for parent and host countries. This project will provide a better understanding of how developing countries are integrated into global innovation networks through the R&D investment of MNCs. It will lead to a more comprehensive theoretical and empirical framework for studies on the globalization of innovation and R&D organization in MNCs. The study of economic geography of foreign R&D activities in China will advance understanding of how global and local forces interact with each other and shape local, national, and global innovation landscapes. The studyalso will shed new light on the ongoing discussion regarding the roles of global, national, and local forces in the new stage of world development, particularly in the cross-scale production of technologies doc22285 none Although the rational-choice model used by economists has yielded an array of insights across a broad range of human activities, research from psychology suggests that it is inaccurate in some systematic and important ways. This project will continue an agenda of integrating psychologically more realistic assumptions about human behavior into formal economic models. Much of the research will focus on intertemporal choice, and in particular on two specific more realistic assumptions. First, whereas the rational-choice model assumes that people do not change their willingness to delay gratification over time, evidence suggests that, from a prior perspective, people would like to behave patiently, while at the moment of action, people behave impatiently. Second, whereas the rational-choice model assumes that people correctly predict future tastes, evidence suggests people tend to exaggerate the degree to which their future tastes will resemble their current tastes. This project will investigate the implications of these errors in three distinct environments. First, the project will study procrastination, both patterns of procrastinatory behavior and policies designed to combat procrastination. Second, the project will study distortions in consumption behavior when the pleasure generated by consumption depends on one s accustomed or habitual consumption level. Third, the project will study the consumption of harmful addictive substances, and in particular whether and how these errors can cause people to hurt themselves by developing harmful addictions (the rational-choice model can attribute harmful addictions only to bad luck). The project will also investigate additional more realistic assumptions. This research, and the broader agenda of which it is a part, will dramatically improve economic analysis, and promote a more realistic analysis of policies designed to address savings behavior, addiction, procrastination, obesity, and similar phenomena. For many questions, the standard rational-choice model provides a satisfactory apparatus. But for other questions, such as why do people procrastinate, develop harmful addictions, or are overweight, the rational-choice model is importantly flawed, requiring implausible explanations for observed behavior and leading to harmful policy recommendations. The research demonstrates how economists can derive alternative more realistic assumptions from research in psychology, and how these alternative assumptions can provide better explanations for behavior, and yield more sensible policy recommendations doc22286 none This proposal contains two related research projects on dynamic choice. Both of these projects will be undertaken jointly with Wolfgang Pesendorfer of Princeton University. Often, observed choice behavior will not be consistent with a single, deterministic choice criterion (i.e., utility function). That is, the decision-maker will make different choices in virtually identical situations. Such behavior is best modeled as random choice. The first project entitled Random Utility, Uncertain Moods and Bounded Rationality, addresses the following question: when can a random choice be interpreted as the consequence of maximizing a randomly chosen criterion for ranking the alternatives. Hence, we investigate the consequences of behavior that is derived from a fixed, probabilistic rule for selecting a utility function. After the utility function is selected, the agent chooses the alternative that maximizes it among the available options. This way of interpreting behavior is important for the analysis of aggregate data, boundedly rational behavior and situations with asymmetric information. In our work, we study choice over risk prospects and randomly selected expected utility functions. The second project entitled The Revealed Preference Theory of Changing Tastes studies dynamic inconsistency. Dynamic inconsistency refers to the tendency of agents to make different choices from the same set of alternatives depending on when they are asked to choose. For example, an individual who prefers a larger later reward to a smaller earlier reward may reverse his preference as the date of the smaller earlier reward gets closer. Many decision problems require the agent to make choices at various moments in time. In such problems, the key is how the decision-maker forms expectations about his own future behavior. This research takes the position that the agent s beliefs regarding his future behavior can best be analyzed through his current behavior and seeks to identify these beliefs through choice experiments. That is, we wish to identify methods for determining the agent s expectations about his future behavior from actual choices made in the current period. The advantage of the revealed preference approach is that preferences over choice problems are - at least in principal - observable doc22287 none This award will help develop an accurate chronology of Icelandic glacier fluctuations in order to understand the nature and timing of climate variability in the North Atlantic region since the Last Glacial Maximum. The investigators will apply cosmogenic 3Helium and 36Clorine surface exposure dating to well-reserved glacial features in Iceland. This effort represents a significant effort to apply surface exposure dating to glacial deposits and landforms in Iceland. The primary goal of the research effort is to establish a well-dated record of ice cap fluctuations during the early to-mid-Holocene. Prior research by the investigators and others has shown that cosmogenic surface exposure dating can achieve 500 to 1,000 year resolution, which is sufficient to allow the use of glacial geologic records as indicators of climate forcing at millennial time scales. Preliminary field and laboratory studies suggest that dating efforts in Iceland will yield results of similar resolution and have the potential to establish a terrestrial record of glaciation in the central North Atlantic of unprecedented resolution. An improved chronology of glaciation in Iceland will provide a new perspective on the terrestrial consequences of abrupt North Atlantic climate change and, when integrated with other well-established climate proxies from marine sediment and ice cores, will contribute significantly to further understanding these environmental changes doc22288 none Macroeconomists in business and government operate in a data-rich environment. For example, in the United States data on thousands of economic time series are available monthly. Recently, there has been theoretical and applied interest in developing forecasting methods that exploit this wealth of information in a way that is systematic, replicable, and subject to scientific analysis. The results have been encouraging: the first few estimated factors from large dynamic factor models (hundreds of predictors) appear to have predictive content for the main economic aggregates -real activity and inflation - that is unavailable in smaller systems. Within the past year, two Central Banks (the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Bank of Italy CEPR) have started releasing real-time many-variable activity indexes. Research to date on many-predictor macroeconomic forecasts has centered on approximate factor structures that, while useful as data reduction methods, constitute only one way to approach large data sets; moreover, the models investigated so far are essentially time-invariant. The objective of the research outlined in this proposal is to move beyond the first few estimated factors from time-invariant systems and thereby to investigate many-predictor time series forecasts in potentially time-varying systems. This proposal contains four specific projects within this broader research agenda. The objective of the first project is to develop empirical Bayes methods for linear time- invariant models that exploit information in the many predictors, beyond what is contained in their first few estimated dynamic factors. The purpose of the second project is to estimate linear prediction bounds, that is, upper bounds on the population of forecasts made using linear time-invariant equations with many predictors. There is substantial evidence that low-dimensional macroeconomic forecasting relations are unstable over time. The next two projects extend the work on many-predictor forecasting to models with time variation. The objective of the third project is to develop tests for time variation in models with many predictors and to develop and to implement estimators that exploit this time variation. The objective of the fourth project is to provide a coherent resolution of the forecasting combining puzzle (the result that simple means or trimmed means of panels of macroeconomic forecasts outperform individual forecasts and typically are stable even when the individual forecasts are not); it is hoped that this will lead to many-predictor forecasting methods that are robust to time variation. Finally, it is proposed to apply some of the methods developed in this research to a different problem, instrumental variables regression with many weak instruments, and to continue other ongoing work in the area of weak instruments. It is hoped that the proposed research will have broader impacts on practical forecasting. For example, the ongoing real-time projects at U.S. and European central banks builds on previous work by the Principal Investigators and others on high-dimensional systems, and it is hoped that the tools developed in the proposed research will be useful in those and related projects doc22289 none One of the most difficult aspects of the empirical testing of economic models is the presence of variables that influence the behavior of the economic system under study but that are not observed by researchers. A considerable number of innovations in applied and theoretical economics have consisted of uncovering specific sets of assumptions that permit the determination of the parameters of interest, despite the presence of these unobservable, or latent, variables. The proposed research project devises a general methodology to handle such situations by combining two areas of research that have received a considerable attention in the statistics and economics literature over the past decade, namely, simulation-based and generalized empirical likelihood approaches. Simulation-based approaches offer the advantage of replacing tedious algebraic manipulations by a large number of simple calculations that can easily be handled by today s computers. Unfortunately, these approaches typically require researchers to make assumptions regarding the distribution of the unobservable variables. The present project avoids this limitation by employing techniques related to generalized empirical likelihood estimators which have been specifically aimed at replacing assumptions regarding the distribution of a variable by less restrictive assumptions regarding the moments of a variable, such as its mean or its variance. The approach is general, in the sense that it applies to any model that can be expressed in terms of (potentially nonlinear) moments, conditional mean or independence assumptions, in both identified and set-identified settings. The asymptotic, or large sample, properties of this new estimator for latent variable models are investigated. Also, the construction of the estimator has implications even in the absence of unobservable variables, as it suggests the use of an estimator closely related to, but not a member of, the widely studied generalized empirical likelihood family. In particular, the estimator combines the two most popular generalized empirical likelihoods, namely Empirical Likelihood and Exponential Tilting. The research project compares this new estimator, called exponentially tilted empirical likelihood, to existing estimators. The goal of this project is to enable researchers to employ more realistic economic models without being hindered by the complexity of the resulting equations, through the use of general-purpose numerical methods. It also furthers the ongoing search for statistical methods that make the best possible use of available data doc22290 none Ekstrom This grant provides support to upgrade the Harvard Seismology computing facility in order to facilitate a broad range of research in seismology and geophysics. The upgrade will include a fast multiprocessor server with large shared memory and a large-volume fast-access disk array. The activities supported by the new infrastructure include earthquake studies focused around the Harvard CMT project. An important component of this project is the systematic analysis of all earthquakes with magnitudes greater than approximately 5.2 around the world, using digital data from globally distributed seismographs. A second component of the supported activities involves imaging of the elastic properties of the Earth s interior. This research is pursued by development of new data sets and the joint inversion of various existing data sets, such as absolute and differential travel times, surface-wave dispersion curves, full waveforms, and normal-mode spectra. The upgraded computer facilities will allow a more detailed parameterization of Earth structure and a higher fidelity imaging of the Earth s interior doc22291 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to synthesize and test lubricious antimicrobial coatings to prevent biofilm formation in dental water lines. Microbial contamination of water delivered by dental-unit water systems continues to be a significant problem. The most common cause of dental-unit contamination is believed to be the formation and subsequent sloughing off of microbial biofilm from the surfaces of tubing within dental-unit water systems. Persons who are immunocompromised may be at risk due to some opportunistic microorganisms present in most biofilm. Contaminated water may be ingested by the patient or be aerosolized and inhaled by the patient or dental worker. During the Phase I research, antimicrobial monomers will be incorporated into copolymers with additional monomers, that upon wetting, cause the coating to become quite lubricious. The coatings will be tested in order to evaluate their effectiveness in preventing biofilm formation. The lubricious component will help prevent microbial attachment while the antimicrobial constituent will eradicate microorganisms on contact. The antimicrobial and lubricious parts of the coating are expected to perform synergistically when used in combination in order to significantly inhibit biofilm formation. The commercial applications of this project will be in a number of areas, including medical, industrial, marine and consumer products. Specific examples include the following: medical coatings for catheters, stents, endoscopes, implants and endotracheal tubes; various industrial coatings; food beverage packaging; coatings for ship hulls; and coatings for various consumer products doc22292 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to develop a miniature electrochemically operated antimicrobial agents generator for suppression of dental plaque and halitosis control. Plaque, oral malodor, gingivitis, periodontal disease, and discoloration of the teeth are all undesirable conditions that affect many people. It is broadly estimated that 25-85 million Americans have halitosis, especially due to gram-negative anaerobic bacteria. While good oral hygiene, as achieved by brushing the teeth with a cleansing dentifrice, reduces the above-mentioned conditions, it does not necessarily prevent or eliminate their occurrence. Microorganisms contribute to both the initiation and progression of these conditions. Thus, suppressing microorganisms is the key to good oral hygiene. In this Phase I project, optimization of the electrocatalyst (to improve current and energy efficiencies as well as long term stability) and biocidal properties of the dual disinfectants will be conducted. In the follow on Phase II project, the miniature device will be constructed. This miniature mouthwash generator, simultaneously producing two FDA approved antimicrobial agents, has a significant potential for commercialization. The device is expected to be robust and maintenance free, and will require only the replacement of penlight batteries and inexpensive consumables. The commercial application of this project is in the area of dental hygiene for general household use doc22293 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project concerns the development of an electrochemical-based array nondestructive testing and evaluation (NDE) system for the detection of corrosion at the microscale level. Formation of small flaws of a destructive nature results during corrosion of a number of engineering metals and alloys used in transportation, microelectronics, electrical power production, and hazardous waste containment. The stability of these materials is determined by the extent to which a high integrity passive oxide film forms and is retained during continuous exposure to the ambient environment. Localized corrosion due to breakdown in these oxide films is responsible for limiting the lifetime of components made from these materials. The key to avoid flaw formation in engineering metals and alloys is the detection of early stages of corrosion. The proposed technology will provide spatially resolved information on the corrosion process at the microscale level as well as information on corrosion rates. The fabrication and test of a lab-scale electrochemical array-based corrosion sensor will be carried out during the Phase I project. There are large potential commercial applications for this technology in various industries, such as aerospace (defense and commercial), marine and automotive industries, electric utility plants, chemical processing plants, refineries, microelectronics, electrical power production, and hazardous waste containment doc22294 none When estimating or testing economic relationships, economists often discover that the data they plan to use is not drawn randomly from the target population for which they wish to draw an inference. Instead, the observations are found to be sampled from a related but different distribution. If this feature is not taken into account when doing statistical analysis, subsequent inference can be seriously off the mark. This phenomenon is commonly called selection bias. An important class of models in microeconometrics is characterized in terms of conditional moment restrictions. Thhis develops a new efficient semiparametric approach for conducting inference in models with conditional moment restrictions when the target population is stratified doc22295 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project is to develop a method of fabricating integrated optical circuits (IOCs) using alternate waveguide materials (AWMs). Currently, IOCs comprise silica glass waveguides, and are patterned using an expensive, multi-step photolithography process in conjunction with high temperature deposition techniques. However, AWMs are associated with lower glass transition temperatures, and have the potential of patterning optical circuits through alternate printing methods, bypassing the photolithography process. This will dramatically reduce the complexity and hence the cost of photonic device manufacture. Another important advantage of AWMs is lower minimum attenuation levels, possibly one to two orders of magnitude lower than that of silica glass. This is critical for long waveguide applications such as integrated optic delay lines for telecommunications, integrated optic gyroscopes, and more sensitive chemical sensors. In addition, because some alternate materials can host rare earth elements, the development of AWMs has further applications for improved optical switches, amplifiers, and solid-state blue lasers. This project will establish the feasibility of fabricating optical circuits comprising AWMs. Improved fabrication of optical waveguide circuits has the immediate potential for integrated optic amplifiers, lossless splitters, and up conversion blue fiber lasers, essential to numerous commercial applications in optical storage, color printing, and projection, up converters, isolators and fluorescent coolers, as well as convenient, low-cost solid-state laser sources for the laboratory doc22296 none Juries have the implicit power to acquit defendants despite evidence and judicial instructions to the contrary. The jury s right to decide a criminal case by its own lights without fear of outside coercion and pressure has been a hallmark of Anglo-American jurisprudence. To some observers of criminal cases where juries nullified the evidence or instructions, jury acquittals in the face of ostensibly strong prosecution cases were tantamount to racially-based jury nullification. Others suggest that it is both possible and perhaps even probable that such acquittals were really not jury nullifications of the law, but simply instances of the prosecution failing to meet its burden of proof. This research tests a model of jury nullification and involves four experiments that examine the influence of judicial instructions and various fact and legal situations that may provoke juries to nullify. The mock jury experiments, as guided by the model, involve juror-participants using videotaped trials presented in a realistic setting. The first experiment is an exploration of the effects of jurors emotional biases in reaching a nullification verdict. Jurors will view a trial that has elicited nullification verdicts or a trial that has not. Jurors will either be given standard (pattern) or nullification instructions by the trial judge. Emotional biases will be primed by varying the attributes of the victim who will be presented either in a neutral light or will be very unsympathetic. A second battery of experiments will delineate three nullification-relevant legal situations (i.e., unfair laws, unfair application of law to the defendant, and violation of due process). While commentators have argued that these situations tend to evoke the jury s nullification tendencies, there is no extant empirical evidence that this is so. The studies also investigate the impact of providing juries with nullification instructions as compared to standard (pattern) judicial instructions. The researchers examine the impact of these instructions on both the verdicts and dynamics of jury deliberations within the context of the three categories of nullification. The third proposed experiment explores the impact on a nullification decision of a juror who argues that the jury should focus on a just outcome rather than solely on an outcome that complies with the law (a trigger). The researchers experimentally manipulate the presence or absence of a trigger in two trials and analyze the effects on the jury s deliberations and verdicts. The research proposed will provide empirical evidence as to when, why, and how juries nullify and inform the debate as to whether juries should be informed of their power doc22297 none This Doctoral Dissertation Research Support project moves beyond the existing literature on the politics of economic reform and specifically trade policy by focusing on the recent aggressive use of antidumping (AD) policy in the developing world. Evidence suggests that governments have been simultaneously reforming trade on the level of macroeconomic policy by slashing tariffs while adopting backdoor mechanisms to reverse trade liberalization at the less visible level of regulatory policy. There are not, however, adequate explanations for variation in nations sudden use of these policies, nor have the determinants of the decision to provide protection been clearly identified. The research combines an in-depth qualitative and quantitative comparison of AD policy in three major developing countries-Argentina, Mexico, and South Africa-with a large-n, cross-national statistical analysis of the political and economic determinants of trade protection across the developing world. Focusing upon variation in the decision to create a national AD agency and agencies subsequent general propensity to protect, the research sheds light upon the ways in which interest group pressure and institutional context shape policy adoption and implementation. In particular, the study fleshes out how characteristics of the executive and the AD agency interact with other variables to affect the policy process. The study draws upon a mixture of types of evidence, including interviews with agency commissioners, industry leaders, organized labor officials, and the lawyers who usually guide the AD petition and complaint process; examination of AD agency records and statistics; and measures of institutional factors including executive power, agency autonomy, and business strength. Using these types of information, the study examines the variables that influence trade protection policy on the basis of a comparative analysis of national-level AD agencies across developing nations, and in-depth analyses of national and sub-national factors-particularly characteristics of industries and sectors. The research is designed to contribute to the literature on the political economy of trade policy in developing nations by examining the trade protection policy process through the complex interactions of state and societal actors. Moreover, the study enriches the endogenous protection theoretical framework, which focuses on domestic interest groups demands for protection and governments responses, by employing an integrated theoretical approach that links interest group pressures to the institutions that potentially modify the policy process doc22298 none This dissertation investigates whether environmental regulation entails different marginal costs for internationally-oriented firms than for domestically-oriented firms. Two explanatory models generate competing expectations about the relationship between globalization and environmental regulation. One posits a positive relationship between the two, and the other offers a negative prediction of a race to the bottom. Hypotheses from these models are tested using an across-industry, cross-national research design to determine the relation of an industry s international economic ties to the degree of regulatory stringency for that industry. This project also explores the role of comparative institutional factors, including divided government and party discipline, in shaping incentives for politicians to either pursue the public good of environmental protection or shelter particular interest groups from the burden of environmental regulation Data will be collected from nine industries in four Latin American countries, as well as on the environmental policymaking institutions of those states. This research will contribute to the debate about globalization and domestic regulation by providing empirical data on environmental regulatory stringency across industries and by systematically testing the relationship between economic internationalization and regulatory strength. More broadly, this project may inform the study not only of environmental standards in developing countries, but of other social regulation and economic policies as well doc22299 none A considerable literature has developed that employs vector autoregression (VAR) methods to attempt to identify the effects of monetary policy innovations on various macroeconomic variables. These methods generally deliver empirically plausible assessments of the dynamic responses of variables such as output and prices to policy shocks, and they have been widely used both for assessing the fit of structural models and in policy applications. However, the various VAR-based approaches have certainly not escaped criticism. Several of the criticisms of the VAR approach to monetary policy identification center around the relatively small amount of information used by low-dimensional VARs. The sparse information sets used in typical VAR analyses create at least two potential problems. First, to the extent that central banks and the private sector have information not reflected in the VAR system, the measurement of policy innovations is likely to be contaminated. A standard illustration of this potential problem is the perverse response of prices to monetary policy shocks in some VARs. It is argued that this price puzzle results from imperfectly controlling for information that the central bank may have about future inflation. A second problem arising from the use of sparse information sets in VAR analyses is that impulse responses can be observed only for variables included in the VAR, which generally constitute only a small fraction of the variables that we care about. This project develops an econometric approach that addresses both of these issues while retaining the benefits of small-dimension VAR analyses. Specifically, it combines the standard VAR analyses with factor analysis. Recent research in dynamic factor models suggests that the information from large numbers of time series can be usefully summarized by a small number of indexes, or factors. The investigators add estimated factors to otherwise standard VARs, obtaining factor-augmented VARs (or FAVARs). FAVARs can be estimated by two-step methods or by maximum likelihood methods that account for uncertainty in the factor estimation in second-stage VAR analysis. Preliminary work shows that FAVARs can help solve both problems alluded to above: First, FAVAR analyses of monetary policy yield plausible and tightly estimated impulse response functions; in particular, the price puzzle is greatly ameliorated. Second, FAVARs allow estimates of the responses of a wide variety of macro variables to policy shocks within a single unified approach. This project pursues a number of extensions to the basic analysis, both econometric and substantive. Econometric extensions include the development of empirical weighting schemes to provide for more precise measurement of the underlying factors in the economy. Substantive extensions include developing methods for real-time measurement of latent variables such as the output gap; factor-based analysis of data revisions and their forecast ability; and characterization of the effects of monetary policy on stock prices doc22300 none This proposal requests funds to purchase a GC-MS system for use on research projects directed by Professors Phillip Savage and three co-PIs at the University of Michigan. These investigators share common interests in kinetics and catalysis. A gas chromatograph (GC) equipped with a mass spectrometric (MS) detector is an extremely powerful analytical instrument. The GC can separate individual sample constituents in a complex mixture of reaction products, and the MS provides both universal and specific detection of the eluting compounds. The combination of separation by GC and detection by MS allows the complete resolution, qualitative identification, and quantitative analysis of even complex reaction product spectra. This feature renders GC-MS invaluable for experimental research in kinetics, catalysis, and reaction engineering. The ongoing projects have broader impacts in industrial applications. The research projects for which the GC-MS would be used include exploring the use of high-temperature water as an environmentally benign reaction medium for different industrial chemistries, reducing the formation of chlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins during the production of pentachlorophenol, developing high-activity catalysts and novel strategies for selective catalytic reduction of NOx, elucidating the aging mechanism for petroleum asphaltenes, and preventing wax deposition in sub-sea oil pipelines. The proposed activities are expected to advance discovery and understanding while promoting teaching, training, and learning doc22053 none This study will utilize high-resolution analysis of cores from closed-basin lakes in the northern Great Plains to determine the frequency, intensity, duration, periodicity, and synchrony of droughts during the Holocene and to examine how vegetation and fire responded to drought. Since vegetation and lakes in the Northern Great Plains are highly sensitive to drought, this region offers an extraordinary opportunity to document decadal- to-century scale climate cycles in the mid-continental United States. The working hypothesis is that the signal of drought from a single site is regional and that droughts were synchronous across the region. To test this hypothesis, the study will utilize lake-sediment mineralogy, fossil pollen, carbon isotopes of charcoal, and charcoal abundance to develop detailed reconstruction of drought cycles from the Northern Great Plains at a decadal scale. This will facilitate evaluation of the teleconnections between mid-continental climate and the North Atlantic region, where recent investigations have linked century to millennial scale climate oscillations to variations in solar irradiance. This research has the potential for broad impact in range of physical and social sciences. Assessment of drought impacts forecast by atmospheric models for the Northern Great Plains requires understanding of natural drought variability. Evidence from paleoscience suggests that 20th century droughts (e.g., the Dust Bowl) do not provide perspective on the range of severe droughts that have occurred in even the recent past. Historical evidence is incomplete and paleoscience data have not yet been assembled at appropriate temporal and spatial scales to assess the intensity, periodicity, and impacts of past droughts doc22302 none We propose to investigate a new type of tunable THz oscillators based on a bulk GaSe crystal, a bulk GaAs crystal, and bonded multiple GaAs plates, each of which is synchronously pumped by subpicosecond laser pulses. The mechanism for this type of the THz oscillators lies in phase-matched or quasi-phase-matched optical parametric oscillation in these structures. By using ultrashort laser pulses, we can take advantage of high peak laser intensities. Besides the conventional OPO in which the idler is resonant in a cavity, we will also use a configuration in which both pump and idler waves resonant the cavity. Such a configuration is very stable, unlike a doubly-resonant OPO. To accomplish our objectives, we propose to investigate THz parametric processes including phase-matched optical rectification, difference-frequency generation, parametric oscillation and amplification. For GaSe crystals, we can achieve phase-matching based on birefringence of the crystals. On the other hand, for a bulk GaAs material in order to achieve phase matching, the pump wavelength should be less than that corresponding to the onset of two-photon absorption. Therefore, two-photon absorption (TPA) can be an important issue. Our estimate shows that TPA may increase the threshold intensity for the oscillation. However, it would not cause the optical damage or sizeable thermal effect. We plan to investigate how TPA affects the proposed THz oscillator. We also plan to theoretically explore performance of OPOs in the presence of TPA in addition to our proposed experimental activities. This theoretical component will be used to predict how TPA affects OPOs and to support our experimental findings. We will also implement all these parametric devices in alternatively-rotated diffusion-bonded GaAs plates. In this case, however, by properly choosing the thicknesses of the GaAs plates, we can use the pump photon energy below the half of the bandgap to completely avoid TPA. Following our recent success in efficient THz generation in GaSe, we will attempt to implement our new idea on an integrated, efficient, and compact pulsed THz system based on intracavity difference-frequency generation inside a near-degenerate optical parametric oscillator, pumped by a frequency-doubled Nd:YAG or Nd:YVO4 laser. Our tunable THz oscillator can be used for remote sensing, chemical identification, biomedical imaging, target recognition, and security screening. It has temporal and spatial coherence far more superior than the THz sources from THz antennas and other similar techniques doc22303 none The scientific strategy for this research exploits recent breakthroughs in stable isotope dendro-ecology, mass spectrometry, and analytical chemistry to develop chronological and climate proxy data in tropical trees that lack rings. Tree-ring records have shown great potential for long term observations ( 500 years before present or longer) but are limited in extent because many tropical tree species form rings intermittently or not at all. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop annually resolved proxy estimates of rainfall variability from Indonesia for the past several centuries. These data are expected to directly contribute to observations of past changes in frequency and strength of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) by complementing the existing proxy data network composed of tropical reef corals and extratropical trees. The tropics are an important component of the global climate system, possessing the dynamics and energetics to organize global-scale climatic anomalies on seasonal to interannual time scales. Evidence from models suggests the tropics may be a persistent influence of global climate variability on long time scales. Long-term variability in the tropical climate has the potential to affect the lives of fully a quarter of the world s population primarily through the interruption of seasonally normal precipitation and agricultural patterns. To date the most important archives for seasonal to annual resolution proxy records in the tropics have been derived from measurements from coral reefs and ice cores. They have their limitations, however, as few coral records predate the existing 100-150 year long historical observational record and ice core records, while older, are limited to a few rapidly disappearing tropical ice fields. Prospects for obtaining replicated 300-500 year long records remain challenging but isotope dendroclimatology offers great promise in closing the data gap and, in this manner, offers the potential for broad impact to many scientific fields doc22304 none Macroeconomists in business and government operate in a data-rich environment. For example, in the United States data on thousands of economic time series are available monthly. Recently, there has been theoretical and applied interest in developing forecasting methods that exploit this wealth of information in a way that is systematic, replicable, and subject to scientific analysis. The results have been encouraging: the first few estimated factors from large dynamic factor models (hundreds of predictors) appear to have predictive content for the main economic aggregates -real activity and inflation - that is unavailable in smaller systems. Within the past year, two Central Banks (the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Bank of Italy CEPR) have started releasing real-time many-variable activity indexes. Research to date on many-predictor macroeconomic forecasts has centered on approximate factor structures that, while useful as data reduction methods, constitute only one way to approach large data sets; moreover, the models investigated so far are essentially time-invariant. The objective of the research outlined in this proposal is to move beyond the first few estimated factors from time-invariant systems and thereby to investigate many-predictor time series forecasts in potentially time-varying systems. This proposal contains four specific projects within this broader research agenda. The objective of the first project is to develop empirical Bayes methods for linear time- invariant models that exploit information in the many predictors, beyond what is contained in their first few estimated dynamic factors. The purpose of the second project is to estimate linear prediction bounds, that is, upper bounds on the population of forecasts made using linear time-invariant equations with many predictors. There is substantial evidence that low-dimensional macroeconomic forecasting relations are unstable over time. The next two projects extend the work on many-predictor forecasting to models with time variation. The objective of the third project is to develop tests for time variation in models with many predictors and to develop and to implement estimators that exploit this time variation. The objective of the fourth project is to provide a coherent resolution of the forecasting combining puzzle (the result that simple means or trimmed means of panels of macroeconomic forecasts outperform individual forecasts and typically are stable even when the individual forecasts are not); it is hoped that this will lead to many-predictor forecasting methods that are robust to time variation. Finally, it is proposed to apply some of the methods developed in this research to a different problem, instrumental variables regression with many weak instruments, and to continue other ongoing work in the area of weak instruments. It is hoped that the proposed research will have broader impacts on practical forecasting. For example, the ongoing real-time projects at U.S. and European central banks builds on previous work by the Principal Investigators and others on high-dimensional systems, and it is hoped that the tools developed in the proposed research will be useful in those and related projects doc22305 none This project investigates the sources of the different experiences with regard to unemployment rates of the various countries of Western Europe over the past three decades. Its goal is to extend previous work in three directions: The first is to extend previous reduced form estimation of the relation between unemployment shocks, and institutions, across European countries by looking separately at the effects on flows and on duration and unemployment and on vacancies. The second is to look at the role of collective bargaining and union attitudes in explaining both the general rise and later decline in unemployment as well as differences across European countries. The third is to explore further the role of labor market institutions by looking at the links between institutions, average unemployment duration and the dynamic effects of shocks on unemployment and to characterize the optimal set of labor market institutions in the presence of incomplete insurance and ex-post wage bargaining doc22306 none This study will employ a national survey to explore the implications of the September 11, terrorist attacks for civil liberties. Previous NSF support, in the form of a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER), enabled the researchers to examine some short-term implications of the terrorist attacks on public anxiety, support for civil liberties, political tolerance, patriotism, and perceptions of the root causes of terrorism. With the first-wave data collection nearly complete and the results contributing to our understanding of political tolerance and the support for civil liberties, the researchers will examine the durability of civil liberties concessions over time. They will conduct a second wave of the Civil Liberties Trade-Offs survey, consisting of: (1) reinterviews of the initial first-wave respondents, which included African American and Hispanic over-samples, and (2) a survey of new respondents to assess testing effects doc22307 none Science : This study will obtain and analyze sediment cores recovered in the subtropical western North Atlantic off Cape Hatteras. Multiproxy study of the cores will be done to determine gradients in sea surface temperature and depth gradients in temperature and nutrient content. Surface water proxies will include oxygen isotope and Mg Ca measurements of planktic foraminifers. Bottom water proxies will include oxygen and carbon isotope, Mg Ca, Cd Ca, and Ba Ca of benthic foraminifers. Sample resolution of selected time-series studies for the entire Holocene will resolve millennial scale variability. More detailed sampling of the last 3,000 years will be done in several cores to study century scale variability of the late Holocene. Age models will be based on AMS 14C dates space at about 500 yr intervals doc22308 none The PI proposes to study interactions between surfaces and interfaces to which well-characterized distributions of adhesion molecules have been added. The molecules are based on block copolymers consisting of hydrophobic and hydrophilic portions that are localized at a solid liquid or liquid liquid interface. Experiments are designed to study a variety of attractive interactions between two such interfaces in aqueous media. These attractive interactions are reversible, and result from specific interactions between functional groups attached to the hydrophilic portions of the block copolymers. Proposed experiments include studies of hydrophobic interactions between functional groups that are attached to the ends of the polymer chains, hydrogen-bonding interactions between functional groups that are attached to the ends of the polymer chains, and strong hydrogen-bonding interactions between a model receptor ligand pair that has been well-characterized by the biophysics community. The experiments will determine the ways that collective forces from individual adhesion molecules result in quantifiable attractive interactions between surfaces bearing multiple adhesive groups. The proposed research will define the role of the surface, the effects of spatial distribution of adhesive molecules (uniformly distributed or clustered) and the lateral mobility of the adhesive molecules in the plane interface. A series of contact experiments have been designed that are sensitive to interfacial interaction energies spanning several orders to magnitude. The research provides a necessary link between the molecular-level information that is becoming increasingly available as a result of recent advances in nanoscience and nanotechnology, and the information that is needed for the appropriate design of biomaterials or self-assembling systems, where the relevant length scales are often in the micron range. Development of experimental methods and theoretical models that can be utilized to make this connection between nanoscopic and microscopic properties will be an important outcome of this research. A micromechanics laboratory with enhanced capabilities for studies of soft materials will also be available to scientists throughout Northwestern University and the their collaborators. In addition, graduate and undergraduate students will be trained in aspects of surface science and mechanics, and in both physical and chemical aspects of polymer science doc22285 none Although the rational-choice model used by economists has yielded an array of insights across a broad range of human activities, research from psychology suggests that it is inaccurate in some systematic and important ways. This project will continue an agenda of integrating psychologically more realistic assumptions about human behavior into formal economic models. Much of the research will focus on intertemporal choice, and in particular on two specific more realistic assumptions. First, whereas the rational-choice model assumes that people do not change their willingness to delay gratification over time, evidence suggests that, from a prior perspective, people would like to behave patiently, while at the moment of action, people behave impatiently. Second, whereas the rational-choice model assumes that people correctly predict future tastes, evidence suggests people tend to exaggerate the degree to which their future tastes will resemble their current tastes. This project will investigate the implications of these errors in three distinct environments. First, the project will study procrastination, both patterns of procrastinatory behavior and policies designed to combat procrastination. Second, the project will study distortions in consumption behavior when the pleasure generated by consumption depends on one s accustomed or habitual consumption level. Third, the project will study the consumption of harmful addictive substances, and in particular whether and how these errors can cause people to hurt themselves by developing harmful addictions (the rational-choice model can attribute harmful addictions only to bad luck). The project will also investigate additional more realistic assumptions. This research, and the broader agenda of which it is a part, will dramatically improve economic analysis, and promote a more realistic analysis of policies designed to address savings behavior, addiction, procrastination, obesity, and similar phenomena. For many questions, the standard rational-choice model provides a satisfactory apparatus. But for other questions, such as why do people procrastinate, develop harmful addictions, or are overweight, the rational-choice model is importantly flawed, requiring implausible explanations for observed behavior and leading to harmful policy recommendations. The research demonstrates how economists can derive alternative more realistic assumptions from research in psychology, and how these alternative assumptions can provide better explanations for behavior, and yield more sensible policy recommendations doc22310 none This is a theoretical project in the area of mesoscopic physics. The electronic properties of nanoscale structures will be investigated including: Superconductivity in thin wires. When the cross-section of a wire is as small as a few square nanometers, the wire is expected to lose its superconducting properties. The critical Josephson current in such wires will be studied, as well as the dependence of the current on the applied phase difference. The research will then be extended to study other properties of superconducting nanowires, including their current-voltage characteristics. Comparisons will be made to experiments. Propagation of interacting one-dimensional electrons in quantum point contacts. Unlike conventional Luttinger liquid theories, this work will involve scattering off a smooth potential barrier. Both conventional perturbation theory and bosonization techniques will be used. This work is expected to advance our understanding of electron transport in mesoscopic systems, especially semiconductor heterostructures, and provide theoretical understanding of recent experimental results. Decay of metastable states in double barrier resonant tunneling structures and superlattices. The understanding of the decay time is important for potential applications of the bistability features of these devices. This work will involve conventional kinetic theory techniques, such as Fokker-Planck equations, as well as modern approaches developed for quantum field theory problems. %%% This is a theoretical project in the area of mesoscopic physics. The electronic properties of nanoscale structures will be investigated. This is very important from a fundamental perspective in order to understand th ebehavior of electrons in very small structures. It is also at the very foundation of applications of nanoelectronics to devices affecting our everyday life doc22311 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I Project will describe a new way to use specially designed low loss dielectric ribbons (with attenuation as much as 100 times less than that of a conventional circular polymer rod at Ka band), made with either alumina, silicon, InP or GaAs as fundamental building blocks for electronic integrated circuits or interconnects. The absence of metallic structures in the ribbon approach provides the possibility of high power carrying capability. This technology offers the possibility of directly incorporating active devices with a low-loss transmission medium, provides the foundation for ultra-high-speed integrated circuits. Major commercial markets include the automobile, semiconductor, computer, and satellite industries doc22312 none The Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology (SBN) is fairly young (founded ), and expects attendance of around 300 at this sixth Annual Meeting. The SBN, in its meetings and its journal (Hormones & Behavior) uniquely emphasizes multidisciplinary integration of cellular and molecular concepts into a functional framework involving the brain, behavior, development, evolution and the ecology of social behavior. This concentration linking hormones to many areas of behavior, including both field and laboratory approaches, makes this focal meeting different from other meetings in the field. The conference organizers are highly regarded and experienced, the topics are timely, and in addition to scientific talks there are particular sessions planned for students and trainees on survival skills , meet-the-professor lunches, alternative careers and poster sessions with awards expanded to include undergraduate work. Dissemination of the conference findings will be through a special supplemental issue of Hormones & Behavior. The SBN meetings strongly emphasize bringing in students (graduate and undergraduate, representing 1 3 of the total membership) and postdocs for interdisciplinary interactions with established investigators. The potential impact of this conference is high in the fields of neuroendocrinology and behavioral neuroscience, because of the focused discussions shaping future work, the potential to develop new cross-disciplinary collaborations, and the likely interactions and introductions essential to career development of young investigators. Funding from NSF is important to help students, postdocs, and young researchers attend, and for some career development workshop speakers who are not currently society members doc22313 none While there is evidence that consumers would be willing to pay a premium for items produced using environmentally friendly techniques, they are often unable to express these tastes because an asymmetric information problem. Consumers cannot typically tell the type of production process the firm has used, so they can t determine when it is environmentally friendly. Since the environmentally friendly technique is generally more costly, firms would be disinclined to choose such a technique, with larger pollution flows resulting. In response to this problem of asymmetric information, eco-labeling programs have emerged in a wide range of countries over the last decade or so. The research in this project models eco-labeling as an imperfect and costly test of product quality, where quality is interpreted as environmental friendliness. The study determines the set of possible equilibria, the welfare implications of the introduction of an eco-labeling option, and the potential for eco-labeling to provide a regulatory alternative to more traditional methods. This project has important implications for public policy towards environmental regulation. When firms are privately informed about production and abatement costs, as in the context of this project, environmental regulation is notoriously difficult. Whether society opts for a traditional regulatory approach, using pollution taxes or abatement standards, or a market-based approach, for example using tradable permits, there will be costs to society associated with the informational advantage that firms have over regulatory agencies. Appealing to outside interests, as with eco-labeling, can allow environmental regulators to overcome their informational disadvantage at relatively low cost. On the other hand, the certification process is costly to firms, costs that must ultimately be paid by consumers. This project outlines conditions under which eco-labeling is preferable to a more traditional regulatory approach doc22314 none Virtually all of the work in continuous-time finance assumes that the prices of securities follow an exogenously specified process. However, the prices of securities are in fact determined day-by-day and minute-by-minute by the balancing of supply and demand. A complete economic model of continuous-time trading requires the derivation of the pricing process as an equilibrium determined by more primitive data of the economy, in particular the agents information, utility functions, and endowments. The known results on existence of equilibrium in multi-agent continuous-time financial markets are limited to the case in which markets are dynamically complete, i.e. the available securities either include a complete set of Arrow-Debreu contingent claims, or it is possible to construct a complete set of Arrow-Debreu contingent claims from the available securities. The assumption that the available securities include a complete set of Arrow-Debreu contingent claims is highly implausible; the assumption that one can construct a complete set of Arrow-Debreu contingent claims from the available securities is highly endogenous, since dynamic completeness is a property of the prices of the securities, not the underlying data of the economy. Without equilibrium underpinnings, the economic foundations of finance models are seriously in question. The main goal of the project is to prove the existence of equilibrium prices in continuous-time finance models with dynamically incomplete markets. The second goal is to explore the implications of equilibrium for the nature of securities price processes. This research is intended to provide solid economic foundations for continuous-time finance. In particular, it will provide alternative pricing processes to those which are currently studied in continuous-time finance; these alternative pricing processes may provide a better fit to actual stock market data than those currently in use. This research has the potential to benefit society by improving the accuracy of pricing in securities markets. First, because the research leads to specific predictions about the interaction of prices for different types of assets, it should lead to more accurate pricing across markets, such as housing, mortgages, stocks and bonds, which currently function largely independently. Second, it should lead to more accurate pricing of options in the situation where the exercise price of the option differs significantly the current price of the underlying stock doc22315 none This project develops a world-level, longitudinal measure of global organizations and discourse devoted to human rights. Time series analyses of the expected growth in this measure focus on international conflicts and the rise of international organizations as principal causes. Another series of analyses would focus on the consequences of the rise of this global human rights regime for the policies and for the actual practices of individual nations. While national-level factors such as economic development also affect national human rights policies and practices, the growth of the global human rights regime and a nation s connections with the global system are also major explanations for nation-level changes in human rights doc22225 none Every day, people face decisions in domains as diverse as the choice of shampoos, stocks, medical treatments, and friends. When people have not learned what to do through trial and error, they need a general ability to make effective decisions. The attendant skills include extracting relevant information from the world, applying general values in specific settings, and integrating these pieces with a coherent decision rule. Research has often found deficiencies in such skills. While interest in general cognitive processes has diverted attention from individual differences, people do differ substantially in these skills. Parker and Fischhoff ( ) used this performance variability to develop a measure of decision-making competence (DMC). Seven tasks, tapping into the above skills, were administered to respondents from an ongoing longitudinal study. Performance correlated positively across the seven DMC tasks, suggesting a common central competency. A single DMC score correlated strongly with measures of intelligence, cognitive style, risk behavior, and social family influences. Although the CEDAR study demonstrates the potential of DMC, it is limited by problems with some of the instruments and special properties of the sample used. The current research includes four studies that will further refine the seven DMC tasks. Each study addresses individual decision-making skills in light of recent theoretical developments and improving overall scale properties. In addition, these studies provide opportunities for addressing scientific questions within the individual task domains. This connection of laboratory results with real world behavior is an exercise itself that has not been widely pursued. It provides the opportunity to clarify the validity of decision-making research findings, as well as shed light on the underlying theory. This work has applications to the training of individuals to make better decisions, competence in making legal and medical decisions, as well as relative performance in competitive environments doc22317 none The Department of Statistics at the University of Michigan will purchase computing equipment which will be dedicated to the support of research in the mathematical sciences. The equipment will be used for computational and visualization aspects of the research in the following projects: 1) Functional Data Analysis for Modeling Human Motion; 2) Spatial Modeling with Applications to Integrated Circuit Fabrication and Reconstruction of Color Images; 3) Bioinformatics; 4) Inference in Dynamic Treatment Regimes; and 5) Design of Experiments. The high-speed equipment will consist of a 16-node Linux cluster connected with a high-throughput Ethernet switch and two high-end workstations with advanced graphics capabilities doc22276 none The existing urban politics literature has classified development policies into three types: location incentives that subsidize development; progressive development policies that provide incentives but with strings attached; and growth management restrictions. Unlike most of this extant work which has examined one or at most two of the policy types in isolation, the researchers treat growth policy as a continuum across these types, based on the distribution of the costs and benefits of development among pubic and private actors. The specific deals that cities negotiated with private actors can fall at any point on this continuum, based on the combination of policy instruments used, the concessions and extractions negotiated. Use of the bargaining perspective allows them to unite these separate approaches to city growth issues by focusing on the factors that increase a city s relative bargaining power -- enabling it to make extract benefits from firms or forcing it to provide concessions to attract growth. Applying the Nash bargaining model to development deals also can incorporate insights from previous development research within a more rigorous theoretical framework that leads to a very specific empirical specification. City competition for development is captured by the relative values of the city s and the firm s outside options -- the alternatives each would get if the negotiated deal fell through. City bargaining power will depend on its inherent attractiveness to different businesses, which determines the minimum value it should accept in a deal; its need to reduce economic or fiscal problems, which determines its time preference, and the risk aversion of the political actors negotiating the deal. Identifying the sources of the city s bargaining power will also lead to policy recommendations on how government institutions and general development policies can be structured to improve the city s ability to pursue both short term and long term development goals. The investigators also extend this approach to address repeated play of the bargaining game with different firms over time. This extension permits evaluation of the possibility that cities can develop a reputation as a tough or soft agent, equivalent in development policy to slow- or pro-growth areas. This bargaining approach is investigated through empirical analysis and theoretical modeling. Predictions of the model are tested with data collected from a national survey of development officials in all incorporated places over 10,000 within 12 selected metropolitan areas. The survey gathers information on the two most recent negotiated location incentives deals. This facilitates the measurement of the outcome of the bargaining model-the value of the negotiated agreements. Information on specific firms is collected from archival sources, and matched to bargaining outcomes in the data set. Additional information on city political, fiscal and economic characteristics are merged into the final data set. Fieldwork in the 12 metropolitan areas add details about the negotiation process in practice and data from city records. In addition, interviews with officials involved in formulating development policy and carrying out development negotiations provides the basis for case analyses of development negotiation. The anticipated products of this research represent significant theoretical and methodological advances in the urban politics field, as well as an applied framework for city officials to improve pursuit of their development goals. Given that formal modeling approaches to questions in the urban politics and public policy fields have been limited, the work resulting from this research has the potential to be groundbreaking in its extension of new methodological approaches to these fields doc22319 none The political economy of economic reform has been a fertile topic for comparative research, emphasizing the difficulties of reform given immediate, concentrated costs and long-term, diffuse benefits (Haggard and Kaufman ; Nelson, ; Williamson ). Entrenched interests are expected to pressure politicians and impede reforms, particularly in states with weak institutions, poorly insulated policy makers, and a diffuse concentration of power (Nelson ; Przeworski ; Waterbury ). However, the empirical evidence suggests that previous research has been theoretically misspecified; countries have introduced and sustained economic reforms despite expected opposition. What accounts for the variation in the introduction and implementation of reforms? The proposed research examine this question by exploring the variation in one element of the neoliberal reform package: privatization. To understand why countries have such varied experiences, individual elements of reform packages (e.g., tax reform, trade policy, fiscal policy) must be examined as distinct policies, and then reassembled to gain a complete understanding of the political economy of reform. The proposed research project builds on the theoretical work in the field of economic reform to develop a multi-causal theoretical model to be tested empirically. The objectives of the project are threefold: first, to determine how international factors are interacting with domestic characteristics to affect the creation of privatization agencies; second, to analyze the domestic environment in which privatizations are sought and realized to identify those factors that most significantly impact the transfer of public enterprises; and third, to examine the domestic environment in-depth to unearth the causal processes identified in the statistical analyses. To complete these objectives, data are gathered on the creation of privatization agencies from - in the 183 IMF-member countries, on individual privatizations and on state-owned enterprises in Mexico and Brazil. Two statistical models are created and tested using survival analysis, a statistical technique appropriate for questions concerning the causes of events occurring through time. The first model examines how long countries take to create privatization agencies; the second examines when state-owned enterprises are sold to private interests. A qualitative analysis of the domestic environment surrounding privatization in Mexico and Brazil is nested within the study to provide greater insight into the privatization event. The broader uses of this project include the collected data. It could be used to examine how international pressures and norms are interacting with domestic characteristics to affect the occurrence of privatization agencies in any country, N, and then what factors affect the transfer of interests from the public to the private sector. Together, these components of the proposed research provide a clearer understanding of why privatization is sought by states and what factors affect its implementation, further elucidating our understanding of the political economy of economic reform doc22320 none The project will reconstruct Holocene millennial-scale changes in upper NADW properties in three cores on the Laurentian Slope that form a transect between and m water depth. Oxygen isotope, Mg Ca, Cd Ca and Zn Ca measurements will be done on benthic foraminifers to characterize deep water properties including temperature and salinity estimates. Chronology will be constrained by AMS 14C dates. Preliminary data indicate the cores have accumulation rates of 20-50cm kyr. Sampling intervals will range from 40-60 years. Oxygen isotope and Mg Ca measurements of the planktic foraminifer G. bulloides in the Holocene section of a core near the mouth of the Labrador sea to relate the deep water changes to surface water changes doc22321 none The objective of this project is the development of a quantitative tool that can be used to predict chromatographic performance as a function of adsorbed protein structure for given protein mixture media mobile phase combinations and to select design hydrophobic media and mobile phase conditions. This tool will promote the process-scale use of hydrophobic media, resulting in simpler, more robust processes that reduce cost-of-goods and time-to-market for new and off-patent protein drugs. This project will advance the state of the art of hydrophobic chromatographic systems by addressing the following specific aims: (1) validate generic mechanisms for protein unfolding on adsorption to hydrophobic chromatographic media, (2) correlate linear and nonlinear protein-media interaction behavior using quantitative structure retention relationships (QSRRs) to connect protein retention to descriptors of native protein, perturbed protein, surface and solution physical properties, (3) develop a fundamental theory for protein-media interactions using a Langevin dipole approach to calculate protein-surface preferential interaction coefficients (PICs), and (4) predict chromatographic performance for complex mixtures by coupling QSRR correlations and or PIC theory for protein-media interactions with a macroscopic engineering description of chromatographic operation. This project is a collaborative effort among researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Virginia with expertise in biochemical engineering, applied biophysics, chromatographic separations, and thermodynamic modeling and computational chemistry. This collaboration, with the proposed regular program of team colloquia, laboratory rotations and industrial internships, is expected to provide a rich research and educational environment for the students and faculty alike doc22322 none Under the direction of Dr. Alison Mackey, Ms. Takako Egi will collect data for her doctoral dissertation on second language learning. She will study recasts, a type of feedback where teachers or native speakers reformulate learners problematic utterances without changing the original meanings (e.g., Learner: I have a three key ; Teacher: three keys ). Ms. Egi will focus on the question of whether learners perceive recasts as responses to the content or to both the content and grammatical form of their utterances. Her experimental research will involve 70 learners of Japanese whose knowledge of the language will be tested before and after communicating with a native speaker of Japanese. The native speaker will provide recasts following learners problematic utterances in those conversations. The learners will also be interviewed about their perceptions of the feedback that they receive. Their perceptions of recasts will be analyzed in relationship to their improvement in Japanese as measured by comparing pre-test and post-test results. This research is significant both for theories of language learning and for the practice of second language teaching. It will advance theory of second language acquisition by providing a finely-grained analysis of the developmental benefits of recasts. The project will also provide classroom teachers with guidelines about effective feedback in the second language classroom doc22323 none Enforcement of environmental regulations takes three forms: inspection, detection, and finally the accessing of penalties. While the first two aspects have been extensively studied, the final stage has received little attention. Accessing penalties for violations of environmental statutes and regulations is a crucial part of regulatory policy. Most penalty assessment at the federal level is done through litigation; most of that litigation results in a mutually agreed-upon settlement between the Department of Justice (acting at the behest of the Environmental Protection Agency) and the defendant in the case. This research explores a simple game-theoretic model of the process that leads to settlement in civil environmental litigation. The researchers then test an econometrically tractable model of the attributes of the settlement process. Understanding the settlement process in civil environmental litigation is particularly important. The litigation process has been extensively studied in civil matters between private parties, and in criminal litigation where one branch of the government acts as prosecutor and another as judge. In contrast, very little has been done on civil environmental actions, which share the charter of criminal prosecutions in that the government is the plaintiff, but where the possibility of incarceration is remote. There are important reasons to believe that the government behaves differently when it is a plaintiff in civil litigation. First, the government has different incentives than do private litigants. Because the government is a repeat player in the courts it is likely to be more concerned with its reputation than most private litigants. Second, the government is interested not only in the money received from the litigation but also in the political return. This research advances the relevant literature in three separate ways. First, it represents an investigation into an area of environmental policy that has not yet been previously studied. Second, the project fills the void relating to empirical work on bargaining problems. Finally, this project investigates the differences in how the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Justice view the enforcement of cases against violators of the environmental laws doc22324 none A growing body of scholarship suggests that policies adopted by legislatures, executives, and public bureaucracies are revised, even transformed, through the discretionary actions of front-line public officials such as social workers, tax auditors, and police officers. The PIs will examine the transformation of the policy of the traffic stop and citation by front-line law enforcement officers. Traffic stops and citations are widespread, and there is growing evidence that they disproportionately affect racial minorities. Thus, traffic stops offer a direct and focused opportunity to assess the effects of citizens personal characteristics on street-level law enforcement. The PIs will test several hypotheses concerning how drivers race, sex, socioeconomic status, and other characteristics influence the likelihood that police officers will stop and ticket them. They will also examine whether oversight policies-namely, that police officers must record and report the race of drivers whom they stop-result in lower racial disparities in jurisdictions with such policies. Lastly, the investigators will test several hypotheses that address whether discretionary actions of street-level bureaucrats are significantly influenced by the value of equal enforcement of the law. . The research had the potential to contribute to literatures on bureaucratic discretion, political oversight, policing, and urban politics and policy and to the policy debate over racial profiling and police practices. The research team will conduct a telephone survey of a stratified random sample of African-American and white adult driers who are residents of the Kansas City metro area (in both Kansas and Missouri), with an over-sampling of African-Americans and of drivers who have been stooped in the last years. This sampling frame offers substantial variation to on key variables. For example, residents of Kansas City vary on key personal characteristics and driving habits, and the level of personal-agent oversight varies in the two states. That is, the state of Missouri and two Kansas metro municipalities require officers to record and report the race of the driver in all stopped vehicles; other Kansas City jurisdictions do not have this requirement doc22325 none Withers This grant provides support for an upgrade of the computational facilities at the Center for Earthquake Research and Information (CERI), University of Memphis. Equipment to be purchased will include two SUN multi-CPU severs, a RAID system, a tape backup system, two color printers, and several individual workstations. This equipment will facilitate a multitude of CERI functions including, a role as an information center for state and local governments interested in mitigating seismic hazards surrounding the New Madrid Fault Zone, maintenance of a public outreach program on earthquake hazards, maintenance of the central and eastern U.S. seismicity database in collaboration with the USGS, and basic seismological and geodetic research and education. Several researchers at CERI including Mitch Withers, Arch Johnston, Michael Ellis, Robert Smalley and Chuck Langston will employ this equipment for research in earthquake seismology, mantle tomography and active margin plate kinematics doc22326 none A gas chromatograph coupled to a mass spectrometer (GC-MS) will be used in most of the research as well as for a module in a new chemical engineering laboratory course supporting improvement of the curriculum. In research, the system provides a substantial enhancement to the existing studies into chemical mechanisms in high-temperature hydrocarbon reaction systems and the development of novel diagnostics and reaction processes for these systems. Current projects that will use this equipment include catalytic combustion of methane and large hydrocarbons, higher hydrocarbon and soot production in flames, mechanisms for oxidation of aromatic hydrocarbons, fuel processing reactions, structure-reactivity relationships for nanoporous materials and more recently growth of carbon nanotubes in flames and using catalytic template reactors. In all of these systems the complex product mix with multiple species at each mass requires a multidimensional analysis technique-a task for which the requested GC-MS system is well suited. Enhanced capabilities will include high scan rate for transient coupling studies, faster throughput, larger mass range and the ability to export data for analysis, plus dual MS detectors including both electron impact and chemical ionization. With the majority of students going on to graduate and professional schools, a large portion of the mission is exposing undergraduates to research. As part of the departmental development a new research laboratory course that will include modules in the laboratories of individual PIs is planned. The experiments using the proposed GC-MS would be appropriate for this course providing training in separation techniques, chemical kinetic analysis, quantitative methods and data analysis. The GC-MS would facilitate the incorporation of undergraduates into our research projects due to the ease of operation of the requested system and reasonably straightforward analysis doc22327 none Capo This award provides three years of Phase I research laboratory technician support in the Department of Geology and Planetary Science Geochemistry Facility at the University of Pittsburgh. The University is providing 50% of the salary and fringe benefits for this position. The facilities comprise sample preparation, clean chemistry, and instrumentation laboratories. Major instruments include an inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectrometer (ICP-AES) and an NSF-funded multicollector thermal ionization mass spectrometer (TIMS). The research technician is responsible for day-to-day operation of the labs, maintenance of equipment, training of collaborators and students, and assistance with method development. In addition to facilitating hands-on class and outreach activities, this position will provide vital support for research projects focused on Quaternary soil development and paleoclimatology, modeling of weathering in watersheds, development of acid mine drainage, Precambrian paleoenvironments, and igneous geochemistry doc22328 none With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Jack Sidnell and James Walker will conduct three years of sociolinguistic research on an ethnolinguistic boundary on Bequia, a Caribbean island in the territory of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Over 90% of Bequia s approximately residents are descended from Africans brought to the Caribbean during the 17th and 18th centuries. The rest of its population consists primarily of the descendants of Scottish, Irish, and English indentured laborers also brought to the Caribbean during that period and relocated to Bequia in the mid-19th century. Most Afro-Bequarians speak a variety of English-influenced creole similar in many respects to the creole varieties spoken elsewhere in the Eastern Caribbean (St. Kitts, Nevis, St. Vincent) and in Guyana. Anglo-Bequarians speak a variety of English that is structurally similar to varieties of English spoken in Ireland, Scotland, and the Southwest of England. This research emphasizes the tense-aspect system in these varieties of English and English-based creole. This area of grammar is prominent in descriptions of creoles and in theories of their origin and transmission. Researchers will also examine social factors that constrain variation in the creole- and English-speaking communities, especially the nature of contact between these communities and the extent to which ethnic boundaries maintain distinct varieties of speech. The analysis of social factors and linguistic variation will be used to address central issues of sociolinguistic theory. This research will shed light on problems of language contact and change, especially on the way that such linguistic processes are shaped by their social and cultural context. It will also document two language varieties that remain almost completely undescribed. Researchers will produce a booklet for local circulation that will explain the project and its findings. This will include a description of the language varieties, an account of their social history, and a discussion of their place in the daily lives of Bequia s residents. These materials will be made available for use in schools in Bequia and in the English-speaking Caribbean more generally. This research and the publications derived from it will help to dispel groundless but widely held stereotypes about the inadequacy of creole languages. The research will thus contribute to the legitmization of these varieties and promote a better appreciation of their importance in the communities in which they are spoken doc22329 none Managing a supply chain has been shown to be prone to systematic errors that often lead to spectacularly dysfunctional outcomes. For example, the drilling for oil and gas fluctuates three times more than the actual petroleum production, the demand for machine tools is at least twice as variable as automobile sales (the auto industry being the main consumer of machine tools), and the production of semiconductors is much more variable than industrial production as a whole (reported in Sterman , pp. 666-667). This pattern of oscillation, amplification, and phase lag, known collectively as the bullwhip effect, has been also noted in individual firms supply chains (see Lee et al. ), as well as in the laboratory Sterman ( ). Sterman s results demonstrated that individuals do not act optimally even in the relatively simple laboratory setting, but significantly underweight inventory they already ordered that has not yet arrived (called the supply line). He concluded, the key to improved performance lies within the policy individuals use to manage the system and not in the external environment. Even a perfect forecast will not prevent a manager who ignores the supply line from over ordering. (Sterman , p. 336). The bullwhip effect is costly because it causes excessive inventories, poor customer service, and unnecessary capital investment. We separate explanations of the causes of the bullwhip effect into those that rely on participants own cognitive limitations, their inability to determine the optimal way to adjust their inventory position, and those that rely on coordination, participants beliefs about others abilities or actions. The experiments we propose to conduct will be using both traditional supply chains with four participants and supply chains where a human participant plays one of the roles, and the other three roles are played by computerized agents programmed (and known) to act optimally. If deviations from optimal behavior are caused by an individual s cognitions, behavior should be the same in the treatments with all human subjects as with one human subject. If instead, behavior is being caused by an individual s beliefs about the decisions his supply chain partners make, behavior should be worse in treatments with all human subjects. The results from our study can have potentially broad implications on the type of decision support tools that should be included in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. If behavioral causes of the bullwhip effect are important than the recent focus on reducing operational causes provides at best an incomplete solution. The question of what information or tools can be effective in mitigating behavioral causes of the bullwhip effect has not been addressed in the literature, and it is our hope that this study will open the door to this new research agenda doc22330 none This study will help us understand the exchange of carbon dioxide and water vapor between the biosphere and the atmosphere. We will explore factors affecting the rates of gas exchange (photosynthesis and respiration) for representative ecosystems in the southwestern US. We will determine if remote sensing (optical and thermal measurement from a distance) can detect subtle alterations in the rates of photosynthesis and respiration. This breathing of the planet helps regulate our atmosphere and influences our climate, and is further being affected by human impacts on the atmosphere and climate in ways that are not yet fully understood. In addition to the science goals of understanding terrestrial gas exchange, we will provide training opportunities for undergraduate and master s students. Findings from the project will be made available to the larger community using the internet, and can be used to help validate data products emerging from new aircraft and satellite sensors doc22331 none This study will use multiproxy study of cores from the Soledad Basin off Baja CA to determine if bottom water oxygen changes over the last 10,000 years are caused primarily by productivity changes in surface waters or changes in ventilation of subsurface waters. Proxies to be measured include planktic foraminifer assemblages, oxygen isotope ratio of Globigerina bulloides and N. pachyderma, sediment Mo abundance, and Mg Ca in benthic foraminifers. Chronology will be provided by AMS 14C and 210Pb. Sample resolution for most proxies will be 100 years. Mo measurements and sea surface temperature estimates will be done at multidecadal sampling resolution doc22332 none The research studies identification and estimation in simultaneous multi-unit first-price auctions with and without combination bidding. The following issues are pursued: First, theoretical properties of bidding equilibria are examined. Conditions under which combination bidding may arise even in the absence of cost synergies are explored. It is shown that combination bidding may also serve as a tool to leverage market power across the different units. As a result, the welfare consequences of allowing combination bidding in the first price auction are ambiguous, and depend on the importance of the cost synergies. Second, it is investigated under what conditions bidders private information can be identified from observed bid data under the assumption that bidders behave optimally. It is shown that synergistic effects are not identified if bidders are restricted to submit bids for stand-alone units only. A necessary condition for identification of synergies is that bidders are permitted to submit a full set of combination bids. Third, an estimation method is investigated that enables to quantify private information and synergistic effects in multi-unit auctions from observed bid data. The estimation method extends the single object method by Guerre, Perrigne and Vuong ( ) which is based on the first order condition of optimally chosen bids to a multi-object setting. Parametric estimation methods are considered. Fourth, data on auctions held by the London Transportation authority to award contracts to service bus routes have been collected. Two special features of these auctions are that several bus routes are auctioned at the same time, and that bidders may submit combination bids in addition to stand-alone bids. In other words, the London bus routes market is an example of a combinatorial auction. Fifth, the research develops numerical methods to calculate equilibrium outcomes in multi-unit first-price auctions under alternative auction rules. Specifically, equilibrium outcomes for auctions with and without combination bids will be compared. This research complements recent theoretical advances in the design of multi-unit auctions by studying the identification and estimation problem and providing empirical evidence on a specific multi-unit auction market. The research is one of the first attempts to study identification and estimation in multi-unit auctions in general. It will advance empirical methods for multi-unit auctions. In addition, the analysis will develop tools to assess properties of multi-unit auction markets. Welfare gains (or losses) of permitting combination bidding in the London bus routes market will be determined. The magnitude of cost synergies and their effects on the efficiency of multi-unit auctions will be investigated. The adequacy of the current awarding scheme will be investigated. It will provide general guidance for markets in which multi-units are sold simultaneously doc22333 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Lynne E. Bernstein will conduct two years of research into the underlying brain mechanisms responsible for the human ability to combine speech information that is heard and speech information that is observed by watching a talker s face. The focus will be to explain the fact that being able to see a talker under noisy conditions dramatically improves the ability to hear that talker s speech. When measured, this effect is equivalent to almost quadrupling the loudness of the speech signal. A fundamental question is whether this effect occurs because listeners correlate speech information from the talker s lips and face with speech sounds, or whether the effect occurs whenever a visual object is paired with speech. Two main experiments will be done. The first will measure speech detectability levels in noise. It will compare perception of speech in noise with the same speech in noise paired with three types of stimuli: (1) a talking face, (2) a static but temporally aligned ellipse, (3) a dynamic ellipse whose vertical extent is controlled by the loudness of the speech signal. If the mere overlap between heard speech and a visual object results in improved perception, then the brain appears to turn up the gain when events overlap, regardless of whether they have similar significance. If the static ellipse is not effective but the dynamic one is, then the brain appears to depend on a correlation between stimuli but one that does not require the visual stimuli to be speech. But if only the talking face is effective, it is likely that the brain solves the noise problem by using processes that are specialized for speech. In the second experiment, electrophysiological recordings of brain activity will be made during a task like that in the first experiment. This experiment asks whether seeing a talker is the same as turning up the gain in the sound, as far as the brain is concerned. The event-related potentials to be obtained will be analyzed to find when brain events occurred and where in the brain they occurred. Other analyses will be used to investigate how the visual and auditory processing areas of the brain synchronize their activity during the detection of speech sounds. How the brain combines information from different sensory-perceptual modalities is one of the great mysteries of human perception, along with whether speech is processed by the brain in the same or a different manner than it processes other types of stimuli. This project is among the first to use both brain and behavioral methods to investigate how the brain combines auditory and visual speech under noisy conditions. Until recently, the techniques to study two senses at once were not available, and so little research investigated how the brain creates a coherent perception of the world from the diverse information it gets. Knowledge to be obtained will have practical implications. For example, it can suggest how visual stimuli can help listeners to get critical information under noisy conditions such as an airplane cockpit. It can help explain why people with hearing impairments benefit from being able to communicate face-to-face. The knowledge can also be extended to developmental research to determine why children have more difficulty than adults when listening to speech under noisy conditions, such as a noisy classroom doc22334 none This research presents a systematic, theoretical, and applied examination of factors that should be considered when determining whether a computer-generated animation is more prejudicial or probative than other traditional forms of presentation media (e.g., oral testimony and diagrams). Although some experimenters have specifically examined the effects of computer displays on subjects decision-making, only a few have used theory to inform their research, and no scientist to date has examined differences between all three channels of communication (computer display, still visual graphics, and an oral presentation without visual aids) in a single study. The main purpose of this research is to determine the theoretical rigor of Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM). Two key hypotheses underlying this model are the elaboration-enhancement hypothesis and the elaboration-disruption hypothesis. Specifically, the elaboration-enhancement hypothesis would provide information regarding the possible probative effects of a computer display while support for the elaboration-disruption hypothesis would provide information regarding the possible prejudicial effects of such a presentation mode. The proposed experimental design will serve as a critical test of both these hypotheses in that it will test whether or not a slip-and-fall computer display enhances or disrupts elaboration of the message s arguments. Additionally, the effects of mode of presentation on one s memory, comprehension, and decision-making will be assessed. Thus, this project appeals not only to social science, communication, and education scholars, but also has broader implications for the applied communities of law, science, and technology doc22335 none Epstein The project is exploratory research on microbial diversity of Arctic sediments at two specific locations in Greenland. The effort will go to the field and work in the laboratory to - Investigate molecular diversity of marine sediment prokaryotes. Using total DNA extracts and 16S rRNA approach the PIs will characterize the Archaea and Bacteria found in the sediments at the experimental sites. - Examine molecular diversity of marine sediment Protista. They will characterize the genetic (18S rRNA and other genes) diversity of psychrophilic and psychrotolerant microeukaryotes at the experimental sites. - Explore in detail morphological and genetic diversity of one specific group of marine sediment protists, ciliated Protozoa. They will be looking for cryptic psychrophilic species that may remain un- or misudentified because of their morphological similarity to their relatives from the temperate areas. This exploratory project will lay the ground for the future large-scale research on ecology, evolution, genomics, and biotechnological potential of microorganisms from Arctic sediments doc22336 none This study will extend a survey of prehistoric diet in the Mississippi Valley of west-central Illinois using stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen. West-central Illinois has been the subject of much research into prehistoric biology, the result of sizeable skeletal collections and well-described archaeology. Most of this research, however, has focused on the lower Illinois River valley while the prehistory of the neighboring Mississippi River valley is much less well known. This project has already successfully produced new dietary data for the archaeological sites of Joe Gay, Lawrence Gay, Yokem, and Shild, spanning a period of over years from the Middle Woodland to Mississippian cultural eras, and provided interesting and unexpected findings. This study will further investigate these initial results, and also extend the geographical coverage of the survey to include a new site, Knight, further south in the Mississippi Valley. The innovative bone chemistry techniques used provide a new type of information to archaeologists. Previously researchers could only study the ephemeral remains of meals or tools used to produce food, and from these try to infer what prehistoric people were eating. Since food remains are poorly preserved, archaeologist s conclusions were only educated guesses . Bone chemistry allows us to directly study individuals who lived in the past, and state whether they were eating native plants or the new corn introduced from tropical regions to the south, and also compare the amount of protein in people s diets. This ability to look at individuals also allows us for the first time to look at variation within communities - for example discrimination in who had access to precious meat or fish - rather than the general statements about group diet to which archaeologists were previously confined. The new data from the Mississippi Valley show that the pattern of corn introduction seems to have been similar to the Illinois Valley, but apparently with considerable variability in maize consumption when it became popular during the Late Woodland period. This variability in bone isotope values is such that they encompass a dietary corn component varying from near zero, to a very high percentage, within the same population. These intra-population differences are an enigma. Neither sex nor age explains them. This study will establish relative dates for the burials using fluoride dating, to establish if this is true contemporary variation in corn consumption within the population, or instead the result of minor temporal variation, indicating that corn was introduced very quickly. Either conclusion would be of great relevance to our knowledge of how maize was introduced and established in prehistoric populations. This study will also further investigate geographical variation, both within the Mississippi Valley itself, and between the two valleys. Initial results show that protein consumption was in the Mississippi Valley at almost every period higher than in the Illinois Valley, possibly the result of different access to protein in diverse riverside environments. The Mississippi Valley sites already analyzed are, however, close together, and this study will extend the geographical coverage of the survey to include the Knight site, further south, and closer to the Illinois Valley doc22337 none This project explores the economics of the term structure of interest rates, and how it relates to monetary policy. The questions addressed include: Can the Federal Reserve affect long-term interest rates? Why does Fed tightening not lower long-term interest rates? Does the Fed respond to interest rates, or do interest rates simply forecast Fed moves? How are Fed actions related to changes in interest rate risk premia? What are the macroeconomic risks that drive risk premia in the term structure? Are risks in the term structure primarily real or inflation? Has this changed over time? In their previous work, the investigators document even stronger predictability of bond expected excess returns than previously thought. They show strong, recession-related time-variation in bond risk premia. The investigators examine which kinds of interest rate shocks explain this fact, and find that covariance with a level shock to interest rates drives the risk premium. Inflation shocks and shocks to expected returns fail. The level shock can be interpreted as a monetary policy shock. The investigators also look at very high frequency data to isolate Fed policy shocks and find surprising output and price responses, and a surprisingly strong ability of the Fed to influence long-term interest rates. This work is extended in a number of ways. Short-term bonds as well as long-term bonds are included. The investigators have developed an underlying exactly identified affine term structure model, incidentally resolving the long standing puzzle whether such models exist that can capture term premia. This model is used to investigate a variety of reduced state variable representations. It is clear that bond data have measurement error, so the investigators develop a model that takes measurement error seriously. Over the longer term, the investigators plan to incorporate macroeconomic variables into the analysis and tie what they are learning about Fed policy from the high frequency identification to these term structure results doc22338 none This collaborative project examines the impact of judicial review on distributive choices by legislatures. More specifically, it examines the ability of a judiciary composed solely of narrowly partisan judges to protect minority interests in the legislative process. The project is expected to show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, judicial review can still work well to protect minority interests even when judges are narrowly partisan. The principal investigators research strategy begins by assuming a worst-case context for judicial review. First, the investigators assume that judges seek singularly to advance the narrow interests of the respective group, or faction, to which they belong. Secondly, the behavior of legislators and judges is considered in the context most likely to invite nakedly partisan outcomes - the purely distributive context of a constant-sum game in which resources allocated to one faction are necessarily taken away from the other factions. To study the impact of judicial review on distributive outcomes, the principal investigators develop an infinite-horizon game of judicial-legislative interaction in which a legislature distributes a given sum of revenue across legislative factions, subject to judicial review. The investigators extend the extant model of legislative bargaining by adding a judicial review stage in which a judge, who belongs to one of the factions and seeks only its interests, reviews allocations enacted by the legislature. With the baseline provided by the extant model, differences in legislative outcomes between the models can be attributed directly to the impact of judicial review on legislative behavior. The investigators expect that the model will show, even under these worst-case conditions, that judicial review still works in two important ways. First, they expect to show that distributive legislation is more equitably distributed in a system with judicial review than without it, even when judges are narrowly partisan. Secondly, they expect to show in the remaining cases - when the legislative allocation excludes some minority groups from receiving a share - that judicial review reduces the amount of the inequitable legislation that is actually implemented. The expected significance of the proposed project is threefold. First, the results of the project will have implications for the on-going international interest in constitutional design, specifically regarding the inclusion of judicial review in constitutional systems. Secondly, the project will have implications for evaluating judicial selection procedures in American states. Finally, the model is expected to generate hypotheses capable of being empirically tested in subsequent work doc22339 none The Center for Engineering Logistics and Distribution (CELDi) is a new multi-university, multi-disciplinary Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC). The vision for the center is to provide integrated solutions to logistics problems, through modeling, analysis and intelligent-systems technologies. The four universities involved in this proposal, the University of Arkansas, serving as the lead institution, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Louisville, and Oklahoma State University are assuming a leadership role in engineering logistics research and education. The scope of CELDi will address (1) value-adding processes that create time and place utility (transportation, material handling, and distribution), (2) value-sustaining processes that prolong useful life (maintenance, repair, and rework), and (3) value-recovering processes that conserve scarce resources and enhance societal goodwill (returns, refurbishment, and recycling doc22340 none Koper This grant provides partial support for an upgrade of the high-performance computing environment for geophysicists at Saint Louis University. Research carried out by the group is wide-ranging and includes Earth structure studies, seismic source studies, seismic hazard analysis, application of space-based remote sensing data to tectonic problems, and development of freely distributed software. The grant will especially benefit three recently hired assistant professors (Koper, Kusky and Zhu) in establishing research programs doc22341 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Neil Berthier will conduct three years of research to examine how infants develop a capacity for dexterous manual reaching. How experience improves dexterity is of particular interest. Adults possess a remarkable capacity to use their hands to manipulate objects in the world. Almost no other animals exhibit such dexterity. Remarkably, manual dexterity involves the coordination of a vast number of muscles of the trunk, arm, and hand-a control problem that is well beyond what we can do with control artificial devices such as robot arms. Dexterity does not appear fully-formed in adults, however, it requires a protracted period of development that starts soon after birth. The funded project uses mathematical models of neural and muscular systems to describe how one generates arm movements. Behavioral experiments will test the model s predictions against the actual abilities of human infants. Other behavioral experiments will focus on the role of attentive vision for control of reaching. This research will lead to a better understanding of how reaching and manual dexterity develop, and may also shed light on more general processes of human development. Furthermore, the models used are closely related to current schemes for control of reaching by robots. Thus the funded research may suggest novel approaches to the problem of robot control doc22342 none Schimmelmann This grant supports the acquisition of a gas source stable isotope ratio mass spectrometer configured for continuous flow operation (CF-irmMS) and with associated sample introduction peripherals that will allow for the analysis of multiple stable isotopic ratios in a wide range of natural materials including, organic matter, carbonates, hydrous minerals and water. Specific sample inlet devices will include an elemental analyzer (EA), a gas chromatograph (GC), and an automated carbonate preparation device. The new CF-irmMS will complement two existing stable isotope ratio mass spectrometers(both late model Finnegan MAT 252s) in the Geological Sciences department at Indiana University. One was recently funded by the EAR IF program ( ) to co-PI Ed Ripley and is dedicated to the analysis of the isotopic composition of sulfide ores and the other is somewhat older (vintage ) and is dedicated to analysis of carbonate carbon. The new instrument will greatly expand the current isotopic capabilities of this already well equipped department by adding the ability to make high precision isotopic analyses of hydrogen deuterium (H D) ratios in extremely small samples of organic matter and natural waters with high throughput. The requested peripheral devices will also allow for investigation of the stable isotopic signatures of individual compounds of organic materials. The instrument will support the research efforts of numerous IU faculty including Arndt Schimmelmann, Lisa Pratt, Ed Ripley, Peter Sauer and Jeff White and their students for research spanning the fields of paleoclimatology, oceanography, ecology and hydrology. The addition of a CF-irmMS to this lab will undoubtedly serve to further the attraction of this facility to a number of active geoscientists and will likely lead to future productive collaborations with these IU scientists and their students doc22343 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Kathryn Bock will conduct three years of psycholinguistic research on the cognitive processes involved in producing number and gender agreement in normal spontaneous speech. The project will compare agreement in English, Dutch, and Russian using laboratory tasks that measure the accuracy, timing, locus of attention, and cognitive demands associated with the production of agreement in verbs and pronouns. The research addresses how speakers tacitly identify the conceptual and perceptual precursors of number and gender and tests competing views about how number and gender information are used when producing agreement under the typical time-pressures associated with speaking. The devices of number and gender agreement are linguistic flags to the parts of sentences that belong together mentally, serving to bridge meaning and the grammatical form of the utterances that speakers use to express their thoughts. The bridge is well travelled: Even in English, a language with relatively simple agreement requirements, speakers call on the operations that implement agreement more than once in every five seconds of running speech. Also, despite intuitions to the contrary, agreement is surprisingly reliable. By the age of 4, the normal, spontaneous use of number agreement is almost 95% correct. The implication is that an explanation of the workings of agreement can enhance our currently negligible scientific understanding of how human perceptions and conceptions are transformed into a medium that allows them to be communicated with precision to other people doc22344 none This Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) Phase I Project will develop a methodology for improved diagnosis and treatment of cancer by combining therapy and imaging in the same drug. Specifically, this study proposes to bind polyethylene glycol (PEG) coated magnetic nanopheres to a cancer targeting therapeutic agent (doxorubicin encapsulated temperature sensitive liposomes and hydrogels) and chelated to Tc-99m for imaging. After administration, the drug will be concentrated at the site of action by external magnetic guidance, verified by gamma camera imaging and released to the tumor using herperthermia treatment. A tumor specific marker bound to the complex will improve drug transport into the tumor. Once inside the tumor, therapeutic agents will be released to kill the cancer cells. Specific Goals of this Phase I Project are: (1) to develop the necessary chemistry and conjugation, (2) to examine the magnetic susceptibility of the complex using an in vitro flow model, and (3) to conduct tests in an in vitro cell culture model. The commercial applications of this project are in the treatment of cancer. The proposed method will enhance the efficacy of cancer treatment by ensuring that the drug reaches the target tissue while minimizing non-target tissue uptake doc22345 none This award uses funds to develop a multiproxy record of the paleohydrology and paleolimnology of Flathead Lake, Montana utilizing the discharge record into the lake from winter snowpack. This record will be used to determine the natural variability of extreme hydrologic events in the region and correlated to the position of the Alleutian Low, jet stream, and several climatic indices. Field work will be undertaken to obtain long cores from the lake and proxy indicators of discharge (grain size) and hydroclimate (diatoms and ostracodes) will be developed in the laboratory. Proxy indicators will be calibrated using existing short cores covering historic intervals before being applied to the longer down-core sequences. The broader impacts of this proposed research center on providing important information on the nature of abrupt climate change as well as the frequency, duration and magnitude of major hydrologic events in the region. These in turn are directly applicable to management of water resources and prediction of how anthropogenic changes will effect hydrology of the region doc22346 none Farquharson This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I Project proposes to develop a real-time anthrax (Bacillus anthracis) detector for mail-sorting systems. The proposed analyzer would allow detecting, identifying and removing anthrax laden letters in a mail-sorting machine prior to distribution. The Phase I Project will focus on improving sensitivity so that spores can be detected in 10 seconds. The folow on Phase II Project will develop a prototype anthrax detector for testing in mail sorting facilities. Successful completion of the proposed project will result in a tool that will decrease the threat of widespread anthrax infection and increase homeland security. The commercial applications of this project are self evident. The proposed analyzer wil be of immediate use at the US Military Postal Service Agency, at the US postal office, at private postal services, as well as in large office buildings and corporations that employ their own internal mailing office centers. Modifications to the system would also allow rapid detection of chemical agents in glass or plastic containers at ports of entry (e.g. at airports doc22198 none This project seeks to use fossil wetland deposits and fossil rodent middens from the Atacama Dessert in the Central Andes as a means to estimate precipitation and seasonality for the region as a aid to reconstructing Quaternary climate. The fossil data and paleoclimatic reconstructions will be guided, in part, by consideration of the modalities of the modern climate. The goal of the research is to use the fossil data to understand the steep transition between two seasonal rainfall regimes linked to the South American Summer Monsoon and the southern westerlies. The chosen research sites underlie this transition zone and are along a 300-km stretch of Atacama Desert highlands and the southern edge of the Altiplano. Broadly speaking, the research will support international scientific collaboration and undergraduate student training. It has the potential to link important paleoclimate proxy records with modern climatology in order to interpret past climate processes in a region with little existing paleoclimate data doc22348 none This dissertation investigates whether repression encourages or deters dissent. The current literature lacks one single, coherent, theoretical, and empirically corroborated model of the interactive relationship between dissent and repression. The Principal Investigator posits a theory that accounts for the escalatory and deterrent effects of repression on dissent and dissent on repression. The Principal Investigator argues that political survival motives drive state and dissident leaders to retain power and control over their respective supporters. This motive leads them to examine one another s actions, their own previous actions, and the outcome of previous interactions, estimate the costs of those interactions, and react in ways that ensure their tenure. Assuming that leaders choose from a strategy set that contains both cooperative and hostile means, the Principal Investigator proposes the conditions under which state and dissident leaders choose to act violently and to act cooperatively. Controlling for the state of the domestic economy, international economic forces, third party intervention, and the effects of regime change, the Principal Investigator specifies a system of equations that models state and dissident leaders choices in response to one another, while engaged in a sequential series of interactions. Using event data and time series econometric techniques, empirical tests of the theoretical model are performed in the countries of Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, Afghanistan, and South Korea. The design allows for both within-region comparison and across region comparisons doc22268 none Many studies of individual decision-making have shown that people rely on heuristics that lead to systematic biases. Many economists belief that market forces decrease the prevalence of such biases. This research consists of a series of experiments that add an insurance market to tests of decision-making under uncertainty. We address the question of whether insurance markets create a byproduct - information - that helps people to better understand risk and therefore make better decisions. For example, if a smoker finds out that the price for purchasing life insurance is higher than for a non-smoker, this might convey more easily understood information about the increased risk of smoking than would statistical tables. Our hope is that this research will help increase the understanding of how individuals process and use information from insurance markets, and therefore how information about risks might be presented in a more easily understood manner doc22350 none PI (s) Jay Teachman Lucky Tedrow Western Washington University The military is the single largest employer of young men in the United States, and military recruitment is an often hotly debated topic centering on issues such as access, equality of representation by race and gender, and transferability of training to the civilian labor market. This project examines the determinants and consequences of military service by studying varied interrelationships between military service and numerous life-course outcomes. The PIs will investigate several possible explanations for observed effects of military services. First, men who serve in the military may be a select group who would otherwise be expected to vary in their life-course transitions. Second, military service alters the roles and responsibilities of young men for extended periods of time, often subjecting them to stressful and unfamiliar environments. Such may lead to lasting differences in life-course patterns. Third, military service ma have an impact on subsequent life-course events by interrupting other events in the life course. Three nationally representative databases: The National Longitudinal Study of Mature Men, The National Longitudinal Study of Young Men, and the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, will be analyzed. These will allow the investigators to identify differential characteristics of young men, who enter the military, to untangle and model the life course processes by which military service affects subsequent life-course evens, and to determine how these processes might have changed from World War II through the Vietnam era and AVF. The project will contribute to our understanding of the processes by which military service affects the fluid, and often disorderly, life-course experiences of young men doc22351 none PI (s) Russell Menard Joseph T. Alexander Jason Digman J. Hacker University of Minnesota- Twin Cities The project will create nationally representative datasets for the study of slavery and slaveholding in the mid-nineteenth century United States. New samples will be added to the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), a census database spanning the period from through . Using the Census of Slave Inhabitants, the project will construct (1) a random sample of the slave population with all available slave and holding characteristics, (2) a smaller sample of the slave population obtained by linking slaveholders in the existing free sample to the slaves they held in the Census of Slave Inhabitants, and (3) a new version of the IPUMS freed population sample that identifies slaveholders in the existing dataset and includes a representative sample of slaves. These samples will complement similar samples of the slave population currently being created by the PIs. Large-scale nationally representative samples of the population censuses have transformed our understanding of American social, economic, and demographic history. The samples of the slave population will provide the earliest representative body of individual-level data on U.S. slaves and slaveholders. When used in conjunction with samples from the slave schedules this project will allow the analysis of change over time in the critical decade preceding the Civil War. Since and slave schedules were the only national individual-level censuses of the slave population, a sample of the slave census will provide a baseline for the study of the African-American population doc22352 none This project provides an empirically-based theoretical interpretation of ways that powerful global institutions, whose internal and cooperative actions are usually invisible, set the global norms for business insolvencies. The researchers seek to understand how the rules of the game are set by financial and professional institutions in global centers and subsequently are negotiated in law-making by players in the peripheral national economies. This project extends prior work in several new directions: the social and network structuration of national markets to regional and global levels, the interplay among professionals, the state and financial institutions in struggles over property and jurisdictional rights in law-making, and lawyers and globalization. These themes are unified around developing a socio-legal theory of law-making that extends a theory of the recursivity of law to focus closely on the shift from law-in-action to law-on-the books. The researchers employ a research design with three elements: (1) they will contextualize present developments with a cross-sectional time-series data on political, social and economic change and bankruptcy reforms world-wide from - ; (2) they will continue interviews and observations of the key participants in global institutions; and (3) they will undertake six case studies which combine primary documentary sources, consultations with country specialists, sources from international financial institutions, secondary analysis, and interviews in each country. Through this approach, the researchers seek to stimulate the nascent literature on the globalization of law and to inject law into cross-disciplinary debates and research on globalization of markets doc22353 none Bayesian statistical methods are applied in situations of decision making with limited information in diverse fields including economics, law, medicine, psychology, and meteorology. The objective of the Bayesian Analysis, Computation and Communication (BACC) project is to provide the wider social science community with rapid, convenient access to state-of-the-art simulation methods for Bayesian analysis, computation and communication. To meet its objectives, the project will develop software incorporating recent innovations in mathematical statistics and computer science. A unique and important feature of the BACC software is that it implements its tools as extensions to the popular mathematical applications programs Matlab, Gauss, S-plus, and R. The architecture that makes this feature possible is unique within the domain of Bayesian software, combining core code, model-specific code, application code, and a specialized mathematical routine library. This project will expand the suite of models provided to users, provide a set of high-level commands for users developing new models, and incorporate structured procedures to cross-check the validity of algorithms. It also will emphasize outreach and dissemination of the software to the social science research community and its incorporation in graduate and postdoctoral education doc22354 none Educational vouchers are one of the most hotly contested policies for improving the educational opportunities of disadvantaged students. The research presents new evidence on the effects of educational vouchers on recipients. Data for this research come from the Children s Scholarship Fund (CSF) of Toledo, Ohio. CSF offers 4-year renewable, private school scholarships to low income, K-8th grade students in Northwest Ohio. Between and , almost 4,000 families applied for CSF scholarships, and CSF awarded more than 1,500 scholarships by lottery. The study improves on existing research in two distinct ways. First, since CSF administered the scholarships randomly, unsuccessful applicants provide an unbiased control group for voucher recipients. Second, whereas most voucher research relies strongly on test scores to measure educational outcomes, this study develops means to assess both academic proficiency and behavioral characteristics that schools may influence. Some of the outcome measures (e.g. test scores, school attendance, disciplinary problems, grade retention, parental involvement and educational attitudes) in the study are similar to other previous research on educational vouchers. This study introduces also decision-making experiments as a means of measuring voucher and private schooling effects on personal characteristics, including overconfidence, generosity altruism, patience and trust. The inclusion of non-cognitive behavioral outcomes moves research beyond test scores to measure the effect of schooling on the development of behavioral and personality traits. Recent literature argues that these behavioral characteristics influence economic development and prosperity. If the study finds that voucher recipients are less overconfident, more generous, more patient and or more trusting, then it may suggest that vouchers and private schooling help students to become less overconfident, more generous, more and or more patient. If this study finds that private schools and vouchers affect these behaviors in students, then researchers and policymakers may have to reevaluate cost benefit analyses of private schools and vouchers based on test scores alone doc22355 none For decades, organizational change has been a topic of interest for scholars in economics and management. A particularly difficult and important sort of change occurs when under performing firms attempt to reinvent themselves. For such firms, executing a successful turnaround can determine whether the firm survives with both shareholder profits and employee security riding on the outcome. Understanding how to most efficiently turn around failing companies is therefore a topic of great economic import. Complicating such turnarounds, a need for coordinated changes in behavior and expectations often exists across widely diverse groups of managers and employees. Intuitively, this is like revamping a football team s passing game - signing the greatest wide receivers in the history of the NFL won t help if the quarterback keeps throwing the ball ten yards over their heads. To quote one well-known case study of a corporate turnaround, efforts to change the firm need to be right-away and all at once (Knez and Simester, in press). In this study we examine how such coordinated changes across a firm can be made most effectively, and how the resulting improvements can be made permanent. To examine these questions, we plan to use controlled laboratory experiments to study corporate turnarounds. Such experiments serve as a valuable complement to field studies of corporate turnarounds because they allow us to look at a tightly controlled environment where we can easily observe all the possible causes of change. Our experiments look at the performance of a small simulated firm. Using a simple environment, we first push the experimental firm into a situation where it is performing poorly. Firm employees are coordinated on low effort levels, causing low productivity and producing low payoffs for both the firm and the employees. Critically, there exist alternative situations in which employees coordinate on higher effort levels, productivity is dramatically increased, and both firm and employees earn higher payoffs. Our study then focuses on two issues. First, how can the firm most efficiently be extricated from its bad situation and moved to a good situation? Possible tools we plan to examine include changes in the firm s incentive system for employees, improved communication within the firm, and the provision of high performing external examples. Second, does behavior by agents within the firm display sufficiently strong history dependence that a shift to a better situation can be maintained even after the mechanisms used to affect the change are removed? For example, suppose a good outcome is affected through a large increase in incentive pay. Can the firm increase the incentive pay without employees sliding back to their old unproductive ways doc22356 none This Doctoral Dissertation addresses the issue of party longevity (in government) in parliamentary democracies. Some political parties come into power and control government for less than a month, while others maintain power for decades. This project conducts cross-national quantitative analyses of party government duration and change in eighteen parliamentary democracies over fifty years. It examines party government in Japan, Norway, and Sweden more closely to better understand factors that may be imperfectly captured in the cross-national quantitative data. NSF support will be used to go to Japan, collect and code the necessary data and conduct elite interviews and archival work for further evidence on party government duration and change in Japan. The duration of party government has significant implications for policymaking and governance, for the very nature of democracy, yet it has not been rigorously studied -only cabinet duration has been carefully examined. This project uses a theoretic framework based on understanding party government as an equilibrium outcome of the strategic interaction among political actors. Party government duration is a function of the stability of the equilibrium and changes in the preferences and beliefs of parties, parliamentarians and voters. Hypotheses derived from a model of party government and the existing literature on parliamentary democracies, electoral systems, and voting behavior are tested using cross-national quantitative analyses and more in- depth case studies of three countries. Both existing data and newly collected and operationalized variables will be included in the analyses. The dissertation research made possible by this grant allows the co-Principal Investigator to collect and code data on party government in Japan in a manner that is standardized with other large cross-national databases of parliamentary democracies. The data collected will be made publicly available and will be useful for scholarship of Japanese politics that seeks to compare Japan to other parliamentary democracies as well as for cross-national quantitative scholarship on parliamentary and coalition government. The research helps promote the study of Japanese politics in the context of broader comparative study of parliamentary democracies and helps develop a better understanding the nature of democracy in parliamentary democracies and the dynamics of party government and political party systems doc22357 none This research develops a class of econometric estimation procedures, called quasi-bayesian estimators, which are computationally and practically attractive. The estimator is simply defined as the mean or median (or other quantity alike) of the quasi-posterior distribution of economic parameter interest. Unlike in the conventional bayesian approach, the quasi-posterior distribution is generated by transforming a criterion or objective function (such as that in GMM) which may not have any likelihood interpretation. The approach is useful and new for a class of ``semi-parametric problems that do not impose rigid parametric structure on the economic model of interest. The main application of this estimation consists of nonlinear generalized method-of-moments and various other structural econometric models, such as instrumental median regression, in which the conventional estimates are very hard or practically infeasible to compute . All of these models allow, in principle, to answer very interesting economic questions in the context of microeconomic models and economic policy evaluation. However, the practical estimation and use of such models faces very severe implementation challenges. Quasi-bayesian estimation overcomes this problem by relying on the markov chain monte carlo methods. This allows us to form a class of estimators that are practical, easy to use, and that have excellent statistical properties. The project develops the formal statistical and computational properties of quasi-bayesian estimators for a class of semi-parametric models that fall outside the conventional bayesian inference. Asymptotic normality and consistency of the estimates are proven, and it is shown that the quasi-posterior quantiles can be used for making inferential statements about parameters of interest. The project also implements computer programs and demonstrates the usefulness of the entire approach through simulations. An empirical application is also presented. It deals with estimation of dynamic market risk forecasts using the recursive nonlinear quantile (value-at-risk) models. This application is of great interest to the financial firms and banks who are required by law to asses value-at-risk on a daily and a weekly basis doc22303 none The scientific strategy for this research exploits recent breakthroughs in stable isotope dendro-ecology, mass spectrometry, and analytical chemistry to develop chronological and climate proxy data in tropical trees that lack rings. Tree-ring records have shown great potential for long term observations ( 500 years before present or longer) but are limited in extent because many tropical tree species form rings intermittently or not at all. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop annually resolved proxy estimates of rainfall variability from Indonesia for the past several centuries. These data are expected to directly contribute to observations of past changes in frequency and strength of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) by complementing the existing proxy data network composed of tropical reef corals and extratropical trees. The tropics are an important component of the global climate system, possessing the dynamics and energetics to organize global-scale climatic anomalies on seasonal to interannual time scales. Evidence from models suggests the tropics may be a persistent influence of global climate variability on long time scales. Long-term variability in the tropical climate has the potential to affect the lives of fully a quarter of the world s population primarily through the interruption of seasonally normal precipitation and agricultural patterns. To date the most important archives for seasonal to annual resolution proxy records in the tropics have been derived from measurements from coral reefs and ice cores. They have their limitations, however, as few coral records predate the existing 100-150 year long historical observational record and ice core records, while older, are limited to a few rapidly disappearing tropical ice fields. Prospects for obtaining replicated 300-500 year long records remain challenging but isotope dendroclimatology offers great promise in closing the data gap and, in this manner, offers the potential for broad impact to many scientific fields doc22359 none This award is for research that will acquire high-resolution Holocene climate records for the southwestern USA using isotopic (i.e., oxygen-18 and carbon-13) and mineralogical (i.e., microprobe studies of strontium and magnesium) analyses of stalagmites formed in caves in Carlsbad Cavern and other caves of the Guadalupe Mountains in southeastern New Mexico. Stalagmites hold the potential for possessing a windfall of high-resolution records of paleoclimate because of recent advances in dating speleothems (i.e., cave deposits that include stalagmites) using thermal ionization mass spectrometry Uranium-series method. For example, in many cases, banding in speleothems is sufficiently uniform and distinct to allow frequency analyses to examine El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) scale variability. In the southwestern region of the United States, compelling evidence exists that changes in precipitation are related to changes in El Nino intensity. The broader impacts of this proposed research center on the development of a new archive of paleoclimatic data from terrestrial sites. Success in demonstrating the fidelity of speleothems for recording climatic events will dramatically improve our understanding of climate doc22360 none This project will investigate the role that the quality and depth of in-school technology access plays in shaping disadvantaged children s broader understanding of and engagement with technology, as expressed in their technology use at home and in other out-of-school settings. In particular, the research will examine how school choices about educational computing affect disadvantaged children s use of technology at home, in their peer groups, and in community settings. This research begins from a premise that how young people are invited to make use of technology shapes their conceptions of themselves as users of technology. This work will follow 36 young people from two middle schools during their seventh- and eighth-grade years of school. Surveys, interviews and structured observations will track participants use of, engagement with, and knowledge about technology as it develops and changes over the course of the two years of the project. This project will explore concerns raised by researchers who have demonstrated that children from different family backgrounds are using computers for very different activities in school, with children from disadvantaged families facing greater barriers to meaningful use of the technology. Drill-and-practice software is used more widely in schools serving large numbers of impoverished students than in other schools, and teachers in these schools are more likely than others to report that they use computers to reinforce basic skills for their students than to encourage creativity, self-expression, or communication. Even in schools serving a diverse student population, poor students and students of color are likely to be using computers for drill-and-practice work or to learn office skills, while Caucasian students and students with high socioeconomic status are likely to use computers to conduct original research, create original work products, and communicate with others. This prior research demonstrates that effectively addressing the digital divide will mean doing more than providing more points of access to technology. Ensuring that all children have opportunities to make full use of the range of technological tools available for communication, information-gathering, and self-expression, will require attending to the interplay of multiple social settings on children s learning and development. Little is yet known about how they are using these technologies outside of school, and even less about when and how those uses intersect with school or family goals for young people s learning and development. This project will describe how a range of social settings influence young people s understandings of and uses of digital technologies. This study will also describe how young people s use of technology in multiple settings develops over time, and how experiences in various settings shape expectations and interests brought into other settings. Finally, findings from this study will demonstrate specifically whether and how different kinds of in-school technology use shape young people s perceptions of themselves as users of technology across multiple settings doc22329 none Managing a supply chain has been shown to be prone to systematic errors that often lead to spectacularly dysfunctional outcomes. For example, the drilling for oil and gas fluctuates three times more than the actual petroleum production, the demand for machine tools is at least twice as variable as automobile sales (the auto industry being the main consumer of machine tools), and the production of semiconductors is much more variable than industrial production as a whole (reported in Sterman , pp. 666-667). This pattern of oscillation, amplification, and phase lag, known collectively as the bullwhip effect, has been also noted in individual firms supply chains (see Lee et al. ), as well as in the laboratory Sterman ( ). Sterman s results demonstrated that individuals do not act optimally even in the relatively simple laboratory setting, but significantly underweight inventory they already ordered that has not yet arrived (called the supply line). He concluded, the key to improved performance lies within the policy individuals use to manage the system and not in the external environment. Even a perfect forecast will not prevent a manager who ignores the supply line from over ordering. (Sterman , p. 336). The bullwhip effect is costly because it causes excessive inventories, poor customer service, and unnecessary capital investment. We separate explanations of the causes of the bullwhip effect into those that rely on participants own cognitive limitations, their inability to determine the optimal way to adjust their inventory position, and those that rely on coordination, participants beliefs about others abilities or actions. The experiments we propose to conduct will be using both traditional supply chains with four participants and supply chains where a human participant plays one of the roles, and the other three roles are played by computerized agents programmed (and known) to act optimally. If deviations from optimal behavior are caused by an individual s cognitions, behavior should be the same in the treatments with all human subjects as with one human subject. If instead, behavior is being caused by an individual s beliefs about the decisions his supply chain partners make, behavior should be worse in treatments with all human subjects. The results from our study can have potentially broad implications on the type of decision support tools that should be included in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. If behavioral causes of the bullwhip effect are important than the recent focus on reducing operational causes provides at best an incomplete solution. The question of what information or tools can be effective in mitigating behavioral causes of the bullwhip effect has not been addressed in the literature, and it is our hope that this study will open the door to this new research agenda doc22362 none This award is to support research that will determine whether tree rings in the tropical hardwood species Hymenaea courbaril represent annual growth rings. Field work will be undertaken to collect samples of Hymenaea courbaril from localities where short instrumental records are available for calibration. Isotopic analyses and and visual and computer assisted methods of cross dating will be used to determine the growth history of this species. The broader impacts of this proposed research are that, if the growth rings are determined to be annual, a pan-tropic taxon will be available for dendrochronology and climatologic studies of tropical terrestrial environments doc22363 none An important implication of virtually every economic theory of political competition in a representative democracy is that the actions of elected political leaders are somewhat constrained by the desires of the electorate. Many of these theories suggest that even if politicians and their political parties would like to implement diametrically opposed policies, they would nonetheless be compelled to seek more moderate positions because to adopt extreme policies would risk being voted out of office. In this way, political competition is thought to bring opposing parties positions closer to the median voter . But to what extent is this notion empirically relevant for the political economy of the United States? Do voters implicitly moderate parties positions? Can we quantify the extent to which they do or do not, and does it depend on characteristics of the voting populace, such as education levels? Providing credible answers to these questions is hindered by two fundamental problems: 1) it is difficult to measure the closeness of two opposing candidates positions since only the policy decisions of the winner of the election is observed, and 2) a candidate s probability of winning an election - which depends on voters - may cause candidates to adopt certain positions; but those positions influence how voters vote, which in turn impacts the candidates likelihood of winning the election, making it difficult to disentangle cause and effect from real-world data. Using data on the legislative voting patterns of members of the U.S. House of Representatives and election returns data, this project addresses these two problems by utilizing a quasi-experiment inherent in the U.S. electoral system. The approach of this project is to examine the roll call voting behavior of U.S. House members that were elected by a slim margin (say, by less than 1 percent). Under certain assumptions, this generates virtually random assignment of which party wins the Congressional District, among the elections that turned out to be close. The average roll call voting behavior of barely-elected Democratic Representatives should represent how the opponents of the barely-elected Republicans would have voted in roll call votes if they had not lost. This so-called regression discontinuity design strategy is also used to examine if Representatives respond to sharp changes in the probability of being re-elected - in other words, to assess whether or not the risk of not being elected compels politicians moderate their positions. The empirical analysis indicates very little evidence of strong or weak forms of this kind of responsiveness, suggesting that the diverging forces of partisanship seem to outweigh the converging forces of voters. The extent to which the political and electoral system in the U.S. operates to reflect the will of the people is of great concern to the public at large and motivates those who advocate political reform in areas ranging from campaign finance laws to term limits to the Congressional re-districting process. One way to evaluate how well the U.S. federal system functions is to assess whether or not voters, via the electoral process, compel partisan politicians and their parties to seek a middle ground, and moderate their policy choices. Indeed, much of the theoretical literature on this issue attempts to describe mechanisms by which voters can implicitly discipline politicians decisions. However, the evidence on whether this notion is empirically relevant is far from conclusive, mostly due to the standard problem faced by social scientists, that of disentangling cause and effect in non-experimental settings. The findings of this research project can lead to two important advancements in our understanding of the operation of the U.S. political and electoral system: 1) a quantification of the relative importance of the convergent (the will of the electorate) and divergent (partisanship) forces that lead to public policy outcomes, and 2) a demonstration of how a natural experiment inherent in the electoral system can be used by researchers to learn about causal relationships in political and electoral contexts doc22364 none Johns This grant supports a major upgrade to the NSF research community s Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver pool, critical for high-precision GPS campaign measurements to support Earth sciences related research. Thirty new generation GPS receivers will be purchased over three years, maintaining a state-of-the-art receiver pool that ensures the UNAVCO Facility s continued leadership in geodetic GPS technology for campaign applications. The new GPS receivers will benefit the research community with improved features including better data quality, reduced power consumption, smaller size, and increased memory. The main use of the UNAVCO equipment pool continues to be traditional millimeter-level precision crustal deformation GPS campaigns involving data collection for several days per survey point, and 24 new receivers are dedicated to such support. An additional six receivers with added capability will also support kinematic, rapid static, and real-time kinematic applications that require centimeter-level precision. As new equipment becomes available for pool use, the current pool receivers will be phased out of the pool and into NSF funded research projects for use in permanent GPS installations doc22365 none The proposed program of research centers on the molecular design and fabrication of exciting new bioactive polymeric coatings that actively promote a desired biological response. The fundamental approach adopted for creating boinductive surface coatings is the delivery of precise doses of cell adhesion ligands, growth factors and other cell signaling motifs onto the surface of a polymeric biomaterial that is resistant to protein adsorption. Two novel polymer systems are proposed for fabricating bioinductive polymer surfaces: surface-active beta-functional block copolymers and functional hydrogels prepared by end-linking end-functional macromonomers. The synthesis of both complex materials systems takes advantage of the exceptional capability of the recently developed technique of atom transfer radical polymerization to prepare functional materials with high precision and efficiency. In addition to providing for precise control of surface composition, the proposed materials have been selected to allow for photo-patterning of bioactive functionality, an exciting tool that will be applied to create materials that can direct the spatial growth of cells into two- and three-dimensional patterns. Finally, a new method for applying these bioactive coatings to polymer surfaces is described that is based upon environmentally friendly supercritical fluids. The focus on supercritical coating technologies illustrates illustrates how considerations of the commercial applicability of the methods and materials selected have been factored into the overall research program. The success of this research program would have a positive influence on a broad range of biomaterial technologies relating to tissue regeneration and repair, medical implants and devices, and consumer products doc22366 none This is a pilot study to determine whether a reliable chronology can be developed via alkenone dating and magnetic paleointensity for sediment cores from the Peru margin. If so, then follow on studies will investigate the denitrification zone of the Peru margin, its possible links with productivity and El Nino La Nina cycles, and the extent to which suboxic conditions in the water column, leadng to denitification, are correlated with rapid climate change events on decadal to orbital time scales for the last 60 k years. The study will utilize scores drilled on ODP Leg 112, and eventually will be a multiproxy study of several cores in a variety of water depths. Most of the cores contain only a small carbonate fraction and some of the cores are laminated. For cores containing forms, high resolution chronologies will be established with foram 14 C and S 18 O and for those without forams a combination of geomagnetic paleointensity, alkenone 14C, and optical methods will be used. In this pilot study, two cores, one with limited foram abundances and one with no forams, will be studied to establish chronologies doc22367 none Large scale utility electrical power transmission systems such as the power system of the Western United States can and do suffer cascading events leading to widespread blackouts. These blackouts severely impact the public, commerce, and government and are a vulnerability in the nation s infrastructure. Rather than focusing on the detailed causes of individual blackouts, this project addresses the global, complex system dynamics of a long series of blackouts. New models, simulation and analysis methods will be developed to capture the essentials of criticality, self-organization and cascading failure. Particular attention will be given to the power tails of probability distributions of blackout sizes that occur in North American blackout data and generally in systems at criticality. These power tails imply that large, catastrophic blackouts are much more likely than predicted by conventional risk analyses. The project will develop new risk analysis methods and explore operating techniques to mitigate the risks of major blackouts. Communication networks such as the Internet also develop major cascading disruptions and work will also be pursued in this application to maintain some focus on universal features of disruptions in large, engineered networks of societal importance. The expected outcomes are the ability to understand, statistically analyze and to some extent mitigate major cascading disruptions in power transmission and communication networks. The scientific outcomes are an improved understanding and new application of complex system dynamics to the engineering and analysis of stressed networks. Educational outcomes include the training of undergraduate and graduate students in a multidisciplinary team doc22368 none Our understanding of eyewitness identification has increased considerably in the last 20 years. There is now a long list of empirical results that have been shown to be both reliable and illuminating with respect to the underlying psychological mechanisms. This research builds upon this foundation to develop a unified theory of the memory and decision processes that witnesses use when they are presented with a lineup and must make an identification decision, including the decision to not make an identification. This research will use a computer simulation program, Witness, where the model s fundamental assumptions are formalized mathematically. This model will be used to motivate and interpret the results of several experiments that are designed to address the fundamental question: How do witnesses make identification decisions? The experiments specifically test the decision rule presently incorporated in the model. The model will be fit to data from experiments that carefully covary suspect and foil similarity; examine the relationship between suspect-matched and description-matched lineups; compare showups to sequential and simultaneous lineups; and examine how more specific witness instructions affect identification doc22369 none This project implements for the first time on world trade data a model that appropriately predicts bilateral trade in both homogeneous and differentiated goods according to the distinct logic of trade in each. This study examines bilateral exports for 30 industries and 61 countries. This study takes as a maintained assumption that there are two types of goods: the differentiated goods contemplated in the conventional gravity framework and a set of homogeneous goods. The methodological contribution in this study will be the development of a procedure to identify each of the two types of goods and to predict the trade patterns in each. This is undertaken in the context of maximum likelihood estimation. The results will provide a better understanding of the determinants of bilateral trade patterns and balances. An improved model of bilateral trade may also be important for consideration of many problems for which the gravity framework has been a key input. Finally, one output of this project will be the program used to compute the bilateral trade patterns, so that others can easily apply the methodology doc22370 none Consider how you find your way to the grocery store or learn the layout of a new mall, or how scientists might build a robot that can be dropped on Mars to navigate its surface. People, animals, and robots must navigate complex environments, but different strategies are applied in different situations. One may get to the grocery store by dead reckoning like ants, following landmarks like honeybees, or one can use a precise memory map of the environment. Moreover, clever combinations of strategies can make it easier to find the way. The present research effort specifically explores how these strategies are integrated to allow robust visual navigation. With NSF support, Dr. Michael Tarr and Dr. William Warren study how people learn the layout of new environments, the geometry of the resulting spatial knowledge, and how it is used to navigate. The uniqueness of their approach is to study actual navigation behavior, as people actively walk through a computer-generated virtual environment (the VENLab - see http: www.cog.brown.edu Research ven_lab ). Participants wear a head-mounted virtual reality display and walk freely in a 40 x 40 ft area. Their movements are recorded by a tracking system in the ceiling. After participants learn the layout, the environment can be surreptitiously changed, and they must, in effect, find a new route to the grocery store. By distorting the virtual world or changing the properties of landmarks, these scientists determine the navigational strategies people use and how they rely on routes, landmarks, and the geometry of space doc22371 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Lisa Green will conduct three years of research on children s development of African American English (AAE). AAE differs from mainstream English in its syntax and semantics (e.g., tense aspect and negation). For instance, AAE can indicate habitual meaning with the aspectual marker BE (e.g., These printers be printing ten pages per minute meaning that the printers usually print ten pages per minute). This project aims to: (1) identify such patterns in 3-5 year-old AAE-speakers; (2) analyze the patterns; and (3) compare them to those characterizing the speech of adolescents and adults in the same geographical area. The project will rely on several types of data. Naturalistic speech, elicited utterances, and grammaticality judgments will be used to test children s development of AAE grammar, with particular focus on tense aspect, negation, existential marking, and question systems. In addition, children will show their understanding of relevant constructions by acting out the meanings of sentences. This research is significant because it identifies developmental patterns and the stages at which child AAE speakers make the subtle meaning distinctions that are associated with the adult grammar. The project s findings may apply to both communication disorders and education. Researchers in communication disorders have realized the importance of accurate descriptions of AAE as they design tools to assess language development. The descriptions in this research will be accessible to them. This research may also help in developing curricula in programs such as Head Start. It might also affect methods of language and literacy instruction in grade school. The data description and analyses resulting from this research will also be useful in devising psycholinguistic tests relating the use of AAE patterns and reading achievement doc22372 none This award will provide partial support of an international conference at the International Pacific Research Center, Honolulu, Hawaii on November 11-14, entitled The Hadley Circulation: Past, Present, and Future. The intent of the conference is to bring together an international group of climatologists, modelers, and paleoclimatologists to share the latest ideas on Hadley Circulation, paleoclimatic records that describe past dynamics of the Hadley Circulation, and ideas as to potential future changes in Hadley Circulation as a result of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. The participants will include seasoned researchers, new investigators, and students. A conference volume synthesizing and summarizing the conference proceedings and findings will be published doc22373 none Faced with an economy in recession, policy-makers today have proposed a variety of federal programs and projects that they believe will stimulate the sluggish economy. An underlying premise of the recent stimulus proposals is that the federal government can successfully use fiscal policy to grow the economy. The objective of this research is to better understand the economic impact of such fiscal stimulus. Perhaps the greatest example of federal peace-time fiscal intervention was the New Deal in which President Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced a myriad of programs designed to aid in the relief, recovery, and reform of the depressed economy. Despite the great importance of this remarkable episode of U.S. economic history, there has been very little attempt to quantitatively analyze the economic effects of the New Deal. To help fill this gap this project will provide a series of studies on the impact of the New Deal on a variety of measures of economic activity, including real estate wealth, housing values and construction, retail sales, manufacturing activity, agricultural development, criminal behavior, as well as demographic changes attributable to the New Deal. Since most of the research focuses on the impact of the New Deal at the county level, it is important to control for spillover effects from New Deal spending in neighboring counties and economic activity in neighboring areas. In addition, there may be unmeasurable economic shocks in one county that might spillover into neighboring counties. Measuring the impact of the New Deal on local economies is complicated further because in most cases we probably cannot treat New Deal spending as purely exogenous. New Deal expenditures might have been related to economic activity in conflicting ways. Given the stated goals of the New Deal, we might anticipate that the New Dealers distributed more resources to areas with lower incomes or to areas with higher unemployment or slower growth. On the other hand, many of the New Deal programs required that the state or local government have the resources to seek help for projects from the federal government or go even further by providing matching funds to help finance the projects. Thus, New Deal spending might have been positively related to measures of economic activity. To deal with the geographic spillover effects and simultaneity issues, we have adopted an econometric model that incorporates both the simultaneous relationship between New Deal spending and economic activity and the spatial correlation inherent in the deterministic and random components of the empirical model. This research program takes advantage of the new developments in spatial econometric theory that enable researchers to better understand the impact of public policy, while controlling for the geographic spillovers and simultaneity problems that inevitably undermine precise measurement. Providing a better understanding of the economic impact of the New Deal is highly valuable on at least two general levels. First, despite the significance of the Great Depression and the New Deal to U.S. economic history, very little is known about the economic consequences of President Roosevelt s experiment. Therefore, this research will add significantly to the history of the Great Depression. Second, the usefulness of government spending to stimulate a stagnant economy remains a deeply controversial modern public policy debate. Thus, one of the central goals of this research project is to shed light on this question by looking to a time when government intervention was likely to have the greatest impact - the Great Depression doc22374 none Morozova This grant provides support to University of Wyoming seismologists to reformat, place on modern media and make accessible via the internet, common depth point (CDP) and vertical seismic profiles (VSP) collected within the Kola borehole drilled in Russia (the deepest borehole in the world). All of this data will be made freely available to the broader scientific community through the IRIS Data Management System (DMS doc22362 none This award is to support research that will determine whether tree rings in the tropical hardwood species Hymenaea courbaril represent annual growth rings. Field work will be undertaken to collect samples of Hymenaea courbaril from localities where short instrumental records are available for calibration. Isotopic analyses and and visual and computer assisted methods of cross dating will be used to determine the growth history of this species. The broader impacts of this proposed research are that, if the growth rings are determined to be annual, a pan-tropic taxon will be available for dendrochronology and climatologic studies of tropical terrestrial environments doc22376 none This award support the model simulations of middle Pliocene climate using paleoclimatic data derived from the time period. The researcher will use Pliocene age terrestrial and marine data from the Pliocene Research, Interpretation, and Synoptic Mapping (PRISM) project as input to a coupled ocean-atmosphere General Circulation Model (GCM). The rationale for the research is that the middle Pliocene was a time when the Earth experienced global temperatures that are comparable to recent projections of future climate due to increases in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. Specifically, high latitude warming (relative to the present) and a reduced equator-to-pole temperature gradient dominated the middle Pliocene. The broader impacts of this proposed research center on addressing a critical question regarding greenhouse gases (GHG) concentrations and ocean temperatures. There is a desire on the part of the scientific community to determine if there are any oceanic surprises in terms of heat transport or ocean circulation that track the increasing concentrations of GHG in the atmosphere. Using data from a period of greater warmth on Earth, in which geophysical boundary conditions are similar to the modern world, this proposed research may help identify if there are any surprises in basic function of the heat carrying or circulatory properties of the ocean. When completed, the data generated by this research will be made available to the wider scientific community through publicly accessible databases doc22377 none This project investigates whether investor behavior in stock markets is influenced by social interaction. One channel through which social interaction might influence investors is that they spread information and ideas about stocks to one another directly, through word-of-mouth communication. However, in spite of their familiarity, such hypotheses about social interaction have received little direct support in stock-market data. In an effort to bring large-sample evidence to bear on these questions, this project conducts two studies of social interaction and investor behavior in stock markets. The first study investigates the idea that stock-market participation by households is influenced by social interaction. A simple model is built in which any given social investor finds it more attractive to invest in the market when the participation rate among his peers is higher. The model predicts higher participation rates among social investors than among non-socials . The theory is tested using data from the Health and Retirement Study. Social households are defined as those who interact with their neighbors, or who attend church. The investigators test whether the social investors are indeed substantially more likely to invest in the stock market than non-social households, controlling for other factors like wealth, race, education and risk tolerance. The investigators also test an auxiliary prediction of their model that the impact of sociability is stronger in states where stock-market participation rates are higher. A second study investigates word-of-mouth effects on the holdings and trades of money managers. The idea is a very simple one, premised on the assumption that fund managers who work in the same city are more likely to come into direct contact with one another, and hence to exchange ideas by word-of-mouth. Consider for example a fund manager working for the Fidelity fund family, which is located in Boston, and her decision of whether or not to buy, say, shares of Intel in a given quarter. Our basic prediction is that this decision will be more heavily influenced by the decisions of fund managers working for the Putnam family, which is also located in Boston, than by the decisions of fund managers located in other cities. Using a large database of mutual fund holdings, the investigators look to see whether a mutual-fund manager is more likely to hold (or buy, or sell) a particular stock in any quarter if other managers from different fund families located in the same city are holding (or buying, or selling) that same stock. In these regressions, we are able to control for the distance between the fund manager and the stock in question and for heterogeneity in investment styles. Finally, in a model in which investors spread information and ideas about stocks directly to one another by word of mouth, it takes time for ideas about stocks to travel over large distances, much as with a contagious disease. The investigators can test for such trading dynamics by checking whether a given fund manager s trades responds to the trades of other fund managers with more of a lag when these other managers are located in more distant cities doc22378 none Under the direction of Dr. Reiko Mazuka, Ms. Youngon Choi will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. Her research on language development will involve 5-10 year-old Korean children. Previous research suggests that, unlike adults, young children do not use prosodic information to disambiguate syntactically ambiguous sentences (such as Tap the frog with the flower ). Ms. Choi asks whether children can use prosodic cues to resolve syntactic ambiguity when the cognitive demands of the task are not too great. Children will be asked to listen to a sentence and judge whether it matches with a picture. In the first study, prosodic cues will be presented along with other cues (such as morphological cues) to test whether children are better able to use prosodic cues when they are combined with other cues. In the second study, ambiguous noun phrases (rather than full sentences) will be used to test if syntactically less complex structures allow children to use prosodic cues more easily. This research is significant to the fields of language acquisition and language comprehension. In particular, since little is known about the interaction between prosody and syntax in young children s sentence processing, this research will contribute to our understanding of how children develop language processing strategies. As most of the existing research has emphasized English, the use of Korean will also provide an important contrast for future studies doc22379 none Werner (collaborative with , Purvis) This collaborative research by an anthropologist at Texas A& M University, a chemist at Claremont McKenna College, and a physician at the East-Kazakhstan Oblast State Agency for Health Care will examine perceived risk from radiation exposure at a former Soviet nuclear test site near Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. Some persons engage in high-risk activities such as mining copper at the former test site, and some individuals continue to live near it. The project will study how three social groups, Kazakh villagers, local research scientists, and local health care workers, perceive the risk from radiation exposure. Using participant observation, a survey of 30 research scientists, 100 health care workers and 400 villagers in two villages (a test village close to, and a control village distant from the site), the project will assess the perceived risk in the past, the perceived risk at present, and the understanding of health risks due to radiation exposure. The study will contribute to the understanding of cultural differences in how people react to perceived risk in a situation where the radiation exposure is actual, not hypothetical, where mistrust of the government is pervasive, and where informants use traditional as well as modern ways of dealing with their situation. The study will advance our understanding of how local culture affects risk perception and political activity relevant to the understanding of risk doc22380 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will develop sensing instrumentation containing bioengineered surfaces that are compatible with relevant, disease-associated proteins. Of particular interest in the fields of pharmaceutical design and cell biology is the seven-transmembrane segment, G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). GPCRs represent a class of bioactive proteins that encompass 1-2 percent of all encoded protein within the human genome and have been the focus of extensive study in signal recognition and propagation within the human body. These receptors, it is estimated, comprise up to 70 percent of potential drug candidates. However, a valid measurement of protein-protein interactions has been elusive due to the technical reliance upon cell extracts or live cellular systems, both of which can convolute data. Luna Innovations along with their partners at the University of Pennsylvania propose a novel, cell-free system to measure the biophysical association between hydrophobic GPCRs and their ligands. The proposed optical fiber-based system, based on a lipid bilayer deposition, is essential not only to understand the important components of biological systems but also to vastly improve the accuracy of contemporary biochip measurements. The commercial applications of this project are in the area of biosensor instrumentation. An instrument capable of detecting and characterizing protein interactions is expected to have a good market in the pharmaceutical industry doc22381 none In recent years, air traffic delays have become prevalent and are expected to increase in frequency and magnitude. This research will examine three principal issues: 1) What are the economic underpinnings of air traffic congestion? 2) Why do airlines choose not to adapt their schedules to fully account for predictable congestion? 3) What is the impact of expected travel time and scheduled travel time on fares? Since air traffic congestion is the proximate cause of longer travel times, the research begins by investigating its determinants. Two factors are possibly involved. One is the hub and spoke system used by most major carriers. Hubs enable passengers to connect to many destinations, creating network benefits that increase in the number of markets served from the hub. Congestion occurs when hub airlines bunch flights together in a short time period at hub airports, accepting longer average travel times in order to serve more cities and have shorter scheduled connections. The second factor in congestion is that airlines may not fully account for the fact that adding their own flights will lead to increased delays for other air carriers. Thus all airlines will have too many flights relative to what is socially optimal. Next, the project examines four reasons as to why airlines do not fully adjust their schedules for predictable increases in travel time, especially at hub airports, where hub airlines have especially poor on-time performance: i) competition with other carriers to report the shortest scheduled travel time may encourage obfuscation about accurate arrival times; ii) the uncertain nature of aircraft arrival times, combined with the constraint that an airline cannot schedule a departure until after the aircraft has been scheduled to arrive, makes it costly for an airline to add a large layover on the ground to buffer against delays; iii) hub airlines face additional incentives to have departure delays given that the hub carrier wants to retain the option to have flights that arrive earlier also depart earlier; iv) required minimum connection times at hubs encourage airlines to choose unrealistic schedules. The last stage of the research will examine how public policy could best address air traffic delays. This analysis will involve using fare data to determine how consumers value avoiding delays and the extent to which airlines are correctly taking the cost to consumers of delays into account when setting their schedules. This research will help design improved government policies with regard to air travel. The US Government can choose to tax additional flights and or improve the transportation infrastructure. The results will help develop a tax that reduces inefficient congestion caused by airlines over-scheduling airports with fixed runway capacity while not discouraging the network benefits from operating a hub. At many airports, an ideal congestion tax might have a small impact on air traffic congestion since hub carriers may already internalize most of the costs of hubbing through a high local market share. Also, a careful examination of airline pricing and scheduling patterns allows for a more complete understanding of how competition affects the quality of private information and the economic value of consumer time. Such estimates provide a crucial, but often crudely estimated input in determining the optimal public investment in costly technology and infrastructure doc22150 none This project investigates loss aversion, which is one of the central concepts in the decision making and behavioral economics literatures. Loss aversion is said to occur when a loss of a given magnitude has more influence on choices than does a gain of the same magnitude (for example, most people will refuse a gamble with equal chances to gain or lose $100). Numerous studies have shown that loss aversion plays a key role in important real-world phenomena, such as the endowment effect, the status quo bias, the equity-premium puzzle in financial economics, the tendency to hold on to losing stocks while selling winners , the discrepancy between valuations of public (especially environmental) goods by willingness-to-pay for them or by the compensation demanded to give them up, legal principles of compensation for damage, failures of negotiations, and many others. This project investigates whether a positive-negative asymmetry analogous to loss aversion occurs in the experience of decision outcomes (i.e., is loss aversion a mistake?). Preliminary evidence reported in the project description suggests that experiences of decision outcomes do not always show the good-bad asymmetry that would be expected from loss aversion. If loss aversion turns out to be a mistake, this work would require a major rethinking of the nature of loss aversion, a concept that is currently taught to almost every business student in the United States, and which plays an important role in many other social science curricula, including economics, public policy, law, and psychology. In addition, the possibility that loss aversion in choices could in some cases be a mistake, in the sense that it does not reflect an asymmetry in experience, would require a wide-ranging reanalysis of the many practical decisions where loss aversion has been found to play a significant role doc22339 none The Center for Engineering Logistics and Distribution (CELDi) is a new multi-university, multi-disciplinary Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC). The vision for the center is to provide integrated solutions to logistics problems, through modeling, analysis and intelligent-systems technologies. The four universities involved in this proposal, the University of Arkansas, serving as the lead institution, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Louisville, and Oklahoma State University are assuming a leadership role in engineering logistics research and education. The scope of CELDi will address (1) value-adding processes that create time and place utility (transportation, material handling, and distribution), (2) value-sustaining processes that prolong useful life (maintenance, repair, and rework), and (3) value-recovering processes that conserve scarce resources and enhance societal goodwill (returns, refurbishment, and recycling doc22384 none Consider a researcher who must choose between two rival models, based on how well those models explain the behavior in a given set of data. Suppose one is a strategic choice model and the other is a nonstrategic model -that is, the models have different functional forms. How would the researcher discriminate between these models? In other words, how would she determine which of the models is better? In this project, Principal Investigators answer this question by merging two promising areas of methodological research, and then use those methods to analyze international conflict. The first line of research, by Signorino and various coauthors, has demonstrated that traditional specifications of statistical models are generally inconsistent with strategic theories of political behavior. The main message of this research has been that the functional form of one s statistical model must be consistent with the relationships implied by the behavior under analysis, or the statistical inferences will be invalid. However, aside from comparisons of likelihood values and percent correctly predicted, Signorino has not provided a more rigorous framework for comparing (nonnested) strategic models against one another, or against nonstrategic models. Clarke, on the other hand, has engaged in a second line of research, addressing comparative model testing for nonnested models. The main message of his research has been that nonnested model testing requires special techniques that are unknown to most political scientists. New and existing nonnested testing methods have been developed and adapted in prior research to deal with competing limited dependent variable models. The competing models in this literature, however, have only been nonnested in terms of their covanates. Testing strategic choice models against each other or against nonstrategic models requires discriminating between models that are nonnested in terms of their functional forms. The research conducted by Signorino and by Clarke is clearly complimentary. By developing nonnested tests for strategic choice models, Signorino and Clarke will provide the necessary tools for assessing whether strategic models outperform their nonstrategic rivals, or whether certain strategic specifications outperform other strategic specifications. By addressing strategic choice models, Signorino and Clarke will expand the set of functional forms beyond that currently available in the nonnested testing literature. As in previous work on nonnested model testing, the proposed research will make use of classical, Bayesian, and nonparametric statistical techniques. The project goals include: Adapting absolute discrimination tests (such as the Cox test) for strategic models Adapting and developing relative discrimination tests (such as the Vuong test, Clarke s non- parametric test, and Bayes factors) for strategic models. Refining current Bayesian techniques for use with strategic models, and conducting Bayesian estimation of strategic models (to conduct tests based on Bayes factors). Applying these methods to models of deterrence, alliance politics, and the effect of domestic politics on militarized interstate disputes. Incorporating these techniques into currently available software (e.g. STRAT and WinBUGS). By combining these lines of research, future scholars will be able not only to develop statistical models that are truly consistent with their theories, but also to test those theories against each other. The attainment of these goals will allow the scientific study of international relations to move significantly beyond its current state doc22385 none This research seeks to understand whether large markets (i.e., markets consisting of many buyers and many sellers) can effectively aggregate the disparate pieces of information that each individual acting in the market possesses. It is often said that prices convey information. How, exactly, is this achieved? Under what conditions is it achieved? Stock markets are a prime example of markets in which information plays a crucial role. When information is freely available to all, it is well understood that markets operate efficiently. But in reality each investor possesses a small amount of information, which, on its own, might convey little about the value of the stock in question. However, if the information possessed by all traders could somehow be pooled, it would serve as a much better forecaster of the value of the stock. We seek to understand whether market prices alone are capable of conveying the information possessed by individual traders. When this occurs, the market achieves a high level of efficiency. When this fails to occur, one can begin to explore ways in which the market s design might be responsible for the failure. Corrective measures might then be called for doc22386 none Rementer & Pearson With National Science Foundation support, Mr. James Rementer and Dr. Bruce Pearson will review and convert to digital format some 1,000 hours of tape-recorded material in the Delaware Indian language dating back to the mid-20th century. Although this language has been studied in the past and belongs to the widely studied Algonquian family, little information about the structure of the language is available in a form that is readily usable by contemporary English-speaking members of the tribe or the general public. The project will result in the digitized preservation of the old analog recordings, many now growing brittle, and will lead to permanent storage of the material in a format that will bring together phonetic renditions of words and phrases, sound files of the words and phrases pronounced by the last generation of native speakers, and in many cases, pictures of cultural items being named. A reference CD that will teach some of the language basics will also be produced and made available to Delaware Tribal members as well as the general public. In addition to the importance of the project to the 11,000 members of the Oklahoma-based Delaware tribe, the language is historically important. It was once spoken over an area of almost 25,000 square miles, including all of New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, northern Delaware. and southeastern New York. It was also significant as the language used between the Lenape and the early Dutch, Swedish, and English settlers in the area. It was the medium used to deal with William Penn when he established the Pennsylvania colony in the 17th century. The importance of Lenape continued through the period of American independence and westward expansion to the end of the 19th century. The language remained in use in Oklahoma through the 20th century and survived until August, , in the memory of a 98-year-old man. Some middle-aged tribal members have a limited command of the language, as do a few scholars. The storage format developed for preservation of the materials will facilitate efforts of the Delaware tribe to create language-teaching materials. This documentation will also support the work of linguists, folklorists, and historians in researching narratives contained in the material and in preparing English translations and or bilingual editions of Delaware texts of interest to a wider public doc22296 none Juries have the implicit power to acquit defendants despite evidence and judicial instructions to the contrary. The jury s right to decide a criminal case by its own lights without fear of outside coercion and pressure has been a hallmark of Anglo-American jurisprudence. To some observers of criminal cases where juries nullified the evidence or instructions, jury acquittals in the face of ostensibly strong prosecution cases were tantamount to racially-based jury nullification. Others suggest that it is both possible and perhaps even probable that such acquittals were really not jury nullifications of the law, but simply instances of the prosecution failing to meet its burden of proof. This research tests a model of jury nullification and involves four experiments that examine the influence of judicial instructions and various fact and legal situations that may provoke juries to nullify. The mock jury experiments, as guided by the model, involve juror-participants using videotaped trials presented in a realistic setting. The first experiment is an exploration of the effects of jurors emotional biases in reaching a nullification verdict. Jurors will view a trial that has elicited nullification verdicts or a trial that has not. Jurors will either be given standard (pattern) or nullification instructions by the trial judge. Emotional biases will be primed by varying the attributes of the victim who will be presented either in a neutral light or will be very unsympathetic. A second battery of experiments will delineate three nullification-relevant legal situations (i.e., unfair laws, unfair application of law to the defendant, and violation of due process). While commentators have argued that these situations tend to evoke the jury s nullification tendencies, there is no extant empirical evidence that this is so. The studies also investigate the impact of providing juries with nullification instructions as compared to standard (pattern) judicial instructions. The researchers examine the impact of these instructions on both the verdicts and dynamics of jury deliberations within the context of the three categories of nullification. The third proposed experiment explores the impact on a nullification decision of a juror who argues that the jury should focus on a just outcome rather than solely on an outcome that complies with the law (a trigger). The researchers experimentally manipulate the presence or absence of a trigger in two trials and analyze the effects on the jury s deliberations and verdicts. The research proposed will provide empirical evidence as to when, why, and how juries nullify and inform the debate as to whether juries should be informed of their power doc22388 none This award is to study a paired sand-silt eolian system on the Columbia Plateau, in order to better understand the sensitivity of mineral-dust aerosol emissions to changes in vegetation, soil moisture and topography. This information will be used to improve global dust model routines in general circulation models (GCM). Field work will be undertaken to characterize the history and variability of mineral-aerosol sources and chronology of dune and loess formation for the Columbia Plateau since the last glacial maximum (LGM). Information will be obtained on vegetation area and type, soil texture, soil moisture and topographic features that resulted in the observed downwind accumulations. Modeling will be used to improve the sensitivity of a global transport model used in general circulation models (GCM) of the Earth climate system. Atmospheric mineral aerosols are increasingly recognized as playing an important role in radiative and biogeochemical forcing of climate. The broader impacts of this proposed research center on documenting the evolution of an important eolian sequence within a well-constrained chronologic framework to better understand the processes responsible for and factors that effect mineral-aerosol emissions doc22389 none Committees play critical roles in collective decision-making such as in Congress and in many other situations (e.g., board of directors, universities, jury, sports judging): they gather and report information, propose and choose policies. Severe incentive problems may arise in the committee decision-making process when committee members have different policy preferences and or different information. In such circumstances, what are the important factors affecting effective committee decision-making and how should committees be structured to facilitate it? This research project will develop several mathematical models of committee decisions to investigate various aspects of these questions. The first model focuses on the informational role of committees, in an environment where committee members may shirk in gathering information and may distort reports of their findings to manipulate collective decisions. Questions to study include how much information can be incorporated in the decisions and what is the optimal decision rule and optimal committee size. A second model is concerned with optimal voting rules for committees who vote on policy proposals developed by an agent, focusing on trade-offs among several effects: (1) information requirement for changing policies; (2) distortions by the agent; and (3) the agent s incentives to gather good information. In a third model, the bargaining approach is used to formulate the idea that efficiency of the committee s decision-making deteriorates with heterogeneity of its members interests, because heterogeneity makes compromises among members more difficult. The research project will also investigate why monetary transfers are rarely observed in real world committee decisions, while theoretically they can be quite useful because they can reduce distribution effects of committee decisions by having winners compensate losers, thus enabling the committee to focus solely on the efficiency aspects of its decisions. Understanding committee decision-making is important for understanding real world institutions and policies, and may provide suggestions to make committee decision-making more effective. In recent years, research on committee decisions has broadened its scope to examine organizational features of committee decisions. This research project builds on the existing literature and tries to shed new light on several aspects of committee organizational structure. The results of the project may generate theoretical and practical implications on committee size, decision rules, voting rules, restrictions on transfers, etc doc22390 none s resulting from this research will provide information that is relevant for teaching applications of this type. The project will also result in computer programs and a grammatically coded (or tagged ) corpus of Spanish. The computer program and tagged corpus will be made available for on-site research projects at the NAU Corpus Linguistic Research Program. The tagged corpus will also be available as part of an existing NEH-sponsored web site. This corpus will be the first large tagged corpus of Spanish (or any of the Romance languages) that is freely available online for use by other researchers doc22391 none Northwestern University supports a Research Experiences for Science Teachers activity that hosts 15 teachers for each summer in - . The goals of the activity are to facilitate meaningful interactions between college professors and pre-college teachers, to translate those interactions into practical classroom tools, and to develop a resource network for disseminating the insight and tools that teachers acquire. The RET activity, which continues throughout the school year and involves pre-college teachers as well as community college faculty, includes development by the teachers of toolkits or teaching tools that draw from the teachers research experience and that relate to classroom curricula. The toolkits are made available online doc22392 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop a novel, electrostatic based metrology solution that has the potential of being developed into a rapid and quantitative test of interfacial adhesion for the semiconductor industry. The portion of a semiconductor device that carries logic signals between the transistors on a chip is commonly known as the Back-End-of-the-Line (BEOL). The BEOL typically consists of, among other components, current carrying metal lines surrounded by an insulating or low-dielectric constant (low-k) material. To keep increasing chip performance at the current pace, it will be necessary to replace the current dense insulators with a porous low-k material. Interface adhesion between porous low-k and the various other layers in the BEOL is known to be poor and extremely problematic during integration. The semiconductor industry faces a significant barrier to further progress, because a rapid and quantifiable test to assess interfacial adhesion does not currently exist. The principle of the technique is to use a normal tensile force created by an electrostatic field to delaminate thin films from their underlying layers. This is a unique undertaking with regards to adhesion testing and reflects a revolutionary shift in how adhesion tests will be conducted if successful. The economic benefit to the industry will be achieved by reducing the time to market and improving yield. If interfacial adhesion can be monitored rapidly and quantifiably, the effects of varying process parameters (deposition, etch, pre-treatments) on film-adhesion can be quantified in a greatly shortened time reducing the length of the process development and R&D phase. This would lead to shorter times to market, increased productivity, and may increase market share for early adopters of the technology in the US doc22393 none This research contributes to the two central tenets of behavioral finance: limits to arbitrage by professional traders, and cognitive biases of individual investors. It consists of three projects. The first project provides an innovative explanation for the persistence of mispricing by highlighting the difficulty professional traders face in synchronizing their corrective trading activity. Price correction is delayed because no individual trader wants to trade early if others decide to postpone their trade. In this setting, behavioral traders (whose trading is driven by psychological factors) will have an effect on the price process because their actions are not immediately undone by professional traders. The second project looks at a special form of mispricing: a growing bubble. It is an experimental study that tests the prediction that rational arbitrageurs would rather ride a bubble than trade against it. This project also attempts to analyze the extent to which market transparency of order flow and trading volume affects the persistence of mispricing. The novelty of this laboratory experiment is that, in contrast to the previous literature, we expect that bubbles will not die away even after subjects have become more familiar with the game. The third project explicitly models some behavioral biases. The study provides a new microfoundations based explanation for the disposition effect which states that individual investors are reluctant to realize losses. The study will show that this reluctance follows naturally for individuals with time-inconsistent preferences over capital gains and losses. The advantage of our approach is that it is more parsimonious and hence is easier to test. This research has significant normative implications. Mispricing in general, and bubbles in particular, are not only responsible for the redistribution of billions of dollars, but their bursting causes market uncertainty and can even lead to recessions. The recent technology bubble on the NASDAQ market is a vivid reminder of these risks. The proposed projects will enhance the state of our knowledge by scrutinizing rational and psychological forces that drive financial markets and by highlighting the importance of transparency of trades doc22394 none The proper processing of light signals is crucial for the success of all plants. Thus, photoreceptors play a critical role in plant development, serving as informational molecules that allow plants to determine where they are in space and time and to synchronize growth and development to a changing light regime. The control of plant form by ambient light conditions, a process known as photomorphogenesis, is mediated by phytochromes, which absorb red light and far-red light, along with distinct blue and ultra-violet absorbing photoreceptors. Phytochrome evolution in land plants is marked by a series of gene duplications that have led to independently evolving and functionally distinct lines. Flowering plants have the highest number of phytochromes and also are the most successful group of land plants. They total approximately 250,000 species, outnumbering all other plant groups combined, and dominate all but two of the earth s terrestrial vegetation zones. Their origin was followed by the decline of plant groups that had dominated since the Triassic, but their mode of origin and the factors that underlie their spectacular success remain unknown. This project integrates DNA sequence analyses with physiological characterization of seedlings from early-diverging flowering plants to test the hypothesis that evolution in light-sensing mechanisms was important for the early success of flowering plants. Specifically, it tests the hypothesis that the evolution of phytochrome A, a phytochrome unique to flowering plants, enhanced the ability of early angiosperms to survive in dense shade. Sequence analyses will determine whether functional divergence of phytochrome A occurred by positive selection or by relaxation of selective constraints, and will identify sites of functional divergence that distinguish it from its sister gene, which encodes phytochrome C. Physiological experiments will determine whether seedlings of early-diverging flowering plant species exhibit the responses to dense shade that have been characterized in more derived species such as Arabidopsis, and will determine whether any of these responses are found in seedlings of related seed plants. Together these analyses will test the hypothesis that phytochrome A function was an adaptive innovation that helped flowering plants gain a foothold under the forest canopy once dominated by ferns and gymnosperms. Comparative molecular analyses are an efficient mechanism for evaluating functional diversification in nonmodel species. Thus, the analyses undertaken in this project will further one goal of plant genomics, to move beyond model systems toward understanding the molecular basis of diversity. The sequence database that will be generated will be useful for determining whether other seed plants might have independently attained complex but parallel physiological responses to multiple facets of the light environment. This database also will be useful for identifying sites of functional specification in genes whose function has been difficult to characterize using traditional genetics approaches. The function of sites identified this way can be further tested in mutagenesis experiments. The physiological experiments in the field and greenhouse will characterize light optima for seedling regeneration of individual species. Thus, they will provide insight into how the composition of plant communities might change in response to ecosystem-wide disturbance or change doc22395 none Dealing with consequences of historical land dispossessions associated with colonialism, racism, and capitalist expansion dogs a variety of countries throughout the world. Nowhere is the issue of land reconciliation more important than in South Africa. That country today confronts a variety of land issues flowing from the country s history of land dispossessions, ranging from land grabs by the urban landless, to efforts by farm workers to achieve rights of ownership to their land, to claims by surplus people to land from which they were removed by government actions under apartheid. Land reconciliation raises and illustrates many significant theoretical issues related to the emerging interdisciplinary fields of transitional justice and justice psychology. Generally speaking, justice research argues that people judge law and politics by whether they comport with their standards of fairness. Such judgments are important since legal and political institutions perceived to be unjust are unlikely to be accorded legitimacy, and without legitimacy, compliance becomes problematical (i.e., it may become more closely related to calculations of costs and benefits) -- perhaps thereby exacerbating behaviors such as illegal land invasions. At the level of the political system, this project will examine land reconciliation, which is hypothesized to be most effective when law and elite and mass preferences coincide. At the micro-level (the level of this research), this study examines preferences on land reconciliation policies. These preferences are hypothesized to flow from (1) how issues land get framed in terms of the four sub-dimensions of justice (distributive, procedural, retributive, and restorative); (2) instrumental interests, especially as reflected in experiences with various forms of land dispossession; and (3) basic cultural values, in particular individualism (expected to be most common among those of European ancestry) versus collectivism (which may predominate among Africans). In addition, the principal investigator will investigate (4) whether South Africans approve of land invasions and are likely to join such movements in the future. The principal component of the research design is a survey of samples of both South African elites and members of the mass public. The survey incorporate a variety of innovative techniques, including persuasibility experiments, the use of experimental vignettes designed to assess the role of competing dimensions of justice on preferences for land reconciliation, and follow-up in-depth interviews with especially knowledgeable respondents doc22339 none The Center for Engineering Logistics and Distribution (CELDi) is a new multi-university, multi-disciplinary Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC). The vision for the center is to provide integrated solutions to logistics problems, through modeling, analysis and intelligent-systems technologies. The four universities involved in this proposal, the University of Arkansas, serving as the lead institution, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Louisville, and Oklahoma State University are assuming a leadership role in engineering logistics research and education. The scope of CELDi will address (1) value-adding processes that create time and place utility (transportation, material handling, and distribution), (2) value-sustaining processes that prolong useful life (maintenance, repair, and rework), and (3) value-recovering processes that conserve scarce resources and enhance societal goodwill (returns, refurbishment, and recycling doc22299 none A considerable literature has developed that employs vector autoregression (VAR) methods to attempt to identify the effects of monetary policy innovations on various macroeconomic variables. These methods generally deliver empirically plausible assessments of the dynamic responses of variables such as output and prices to policy shocks, and they have been widely used both for assessing the fit of structural models and in policy applications. However, the various VAR-based approaches have certainly not escaped criticism. Several of the criticisms of the VAR approach to monetary policy identification center around the relatively small amount of information used by low-dimensional VARs. The sparse information sets used in typical VAR analyses create at least two potential problems. First, to the extent that central banks and the private sector have information not reflected in the VAR system, the measurement of policy innovations is likely to be contaminated. A standard illustration of this potential problem is the perverse response of prices to monetary policy shocks in some VARs. It is argued that this price puzzle results from imperfectly controlling for information that the central bank may have about future inflation. A second problem arising from the use of sparse information sets in VAR analyses is that impulse responses can be observed only for variables included in the VAR, which generally constitute only a small fraction of the variables that we care about. This project develops an econometric approach that addresses both of these issues while retaining the benefits of small-dimension VAR analyses. Specifically, it combines the standard VAR analyses with factor analysis. Recent research in dynamic factor models suggests that the information from large numbers of time series can be usefully summarized by a small number of indexes, or factors. The investigators add estimated factors to otherwise standard VARs, obtaining factor-augmented VARs (or FAVARs). FAVARs can be estimated by two-step methods or by maximum likelihood methods that account for uncertainty in the factor estimation in second-stage VAR analysis. Preliminary work shows that FAVARs can help solve both problems alluded to above: First, FAVAR analyses of monetary policy yield plausible and tightly estimated impulse response functions; in particular, the price puzzle is greatly ameliorated. Second, FAVARs allow estimates of the responses of a wide variety of macro variables to policy shocks within a single unified approach. This project pursues a number of extensions to the basic analysis, both econometric and substantive. Econometric extensions include the development of empirical weighting schemes to provide for more precise measurement of the underlying factors in the economy. Substantive extensions include developing methods for real-time measurement of latent variables such as the output gap; factor-based analysis of data revisions and their forecast ability; and characterization of the effects of monetary policy on stock prices doc22398 none This Doctoral Dissertation takes advantage of innovations in brain imaging technology to investigate the neural substrates of political thinking. Studies of expertise in other fields have demonstrated that novices and sophisticates do not use the same mechanisms when thinking about problems (See Lieberman et al. ). Do political novices and sophisticates engage different parts of their brain in thinking about political issues? More generally, what is the nature of political thought? What are the regions of the brain that determine it? What differences in regional activation correspond to thinking about hot button issues (e.g. race and abortion) or humdrum issues (e.g. the size of national parks)? In this study, the principal investigator uses functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to study political cognition and affect during three experiments. The subject population consists of undergraduate political sophisticates and novices. In the first experiment, the principal investigator shows subjects the faces of white and black, famous and not famous, political and nonpolitical persons. In the second experiment, subjects view images of whites and blacks who are either value violators or value exemplars. The third experiment asks subjects to answer a series of questions that are either political or nonpolitical, and threatening, non-threatening, or racial. Using fMRI to measure cerebral blood flow will allow us to infer the variety of cognitive and affective processes that subjects use when they answer political questions The functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) method in this dissertation should allow us to discriminate neural roots of political behaviors that appear identical and connect distinct behaviors that share cognitive underpinnings. Doing so will shed light on the debate about the nature of political sophistication as well as increase our understanding of specific issues like race doc22399 none This research project will test the impact of scale on the spatial theory of heterolocalism in a metropolitan area in the Pacific Northwest. This new theory suggests that, to a degree unknown in the past, new migrants in U.S. cities may choose to settle in widely dispersed places rather than in more concentrated ethnic enclaves while still maintaining their ethnic identities. The research will test this theory by comparing the settlement patterns and maintenance of identity of the two largest groups of recent refugees now residing in the central city, suburbs, and small towns located within the metropolitan region centered on the city of Portland, Oregon. The two groups are migrants from Vietnam and from the former Soviet Union. Vietnamese began settling in the region in the mid- s and are now well established while the majority of migrants born in the former USSR have arrived only within the past decade. The selection of these two comparative groups, therefore, is based on differences in the dates of their settlement, as well as on their internal diversity and comparative racial, religious, and linguistic characteristics. Methodologies to be employed in this research include cartographic analysis, survey questionnaires, structured and unstructured interviews, and participant observation. Outcomes will include improved knowledge of immigration and refugee settlement in the U.S., and a set of comparative geographic data showing the settlement patterns of the two largest refugee groups in the study area for the years , , , and . This analysis will be based on census data, demographic information listed in Immigration and Naturalization Service reports, school district enrollment data, and information provided by the close collaboration of the project team with the Director and staff of the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization headquartered in Portland. Globally, the study of refugee resettlement is critically important with more than 23 million displaced people on earth as a result of recent political, environmental, and economic crises. At least 2.3 million of these migrants have relocated to the U.S. in the past quarter century to seek new lives. Many choose to settle in traditional nodes of immigrant concentrations in East Coast cities, Chicago, or urban California. However, ever increasing numbers of refugee newcomers to the U.S. during the past decade have relocated to smaller cities. In northern New England, the upper Great Lakes, and the Pacific Northwest, for example (places long dominated by homogeneous Euro-American populations) unexpected increases in the number of foreign-born residents were recently documented in census reports. This research project will focus on one of these newly emerging nodes of diversity to investigate the geographic and social patterns of settlement of recent migrants doc22362 none This award is to support research that will determine whether tree rings in the tropical hardwood species Hymenaea courbaril represent annual growth rings. Field work will be undertaken to collect samples of Hymenaea courbaril from localities where short instrumental records are available for calibration. Isotopic analyses and and visual and computer assisted methods of cross dating will be used to determine the growth history of this species. The broader impacts of this proposed research are that, if the growth rings are determined to be annual, a pan-tropic taxon will be available for dendrochronology and climatologic studies of tropical terrestrial environments doc22401 none Auctions are widely used mechanisms for the allocation of resources, and resale after auctions is a practical possibility. However, this possibility is usually not considered in auction theory. This project is to re-examine auction theory when resale among bidders is possible. The project is based on two preliminary results obtained by the investigator: (a) with the possibility of resale, the optimal auction in the literature may fail to be optimal; (b) the investigator has designed a new mechanism that achieves optimality despite resale. The project consists of three parts. First, develop a general method to characterize incentive-feasible mechanisms when resale is possible. Second, analyze the impact of resale on multiple-object auctions, with the FCC radio frequencies spectrum auctions constituting the motivating example. Third, examine the relationship between the formation of middlemen and the pricing scheme in multiunit auctions, with the Treasury-bill auctions constituting the motivating example. The project will help to provide a better understanding about auctions, especially on their relation with resale and other re-contracting activities. Such better understanding has the potential of providing policy implications for major privatization auctions. Theoretically, the project will help to extend the framework of mechanism design beyond static isolated environments. Such extension will make the framework more applicable to industrial organization, market design, and political economy. More broadly speaking, auction theory has produced explicit predictions on how commodities change hands and hence the theory is a building block for a future precise science of markets. Extending the theory to the more realistic resale settings, this project will enhance the knowledge of how competitive markets actually operate doc22338 none This collaborative project examines the impact of judicial review on distributive choices by legislatures. More specifically, it examines the ability of a judiciary composed solely of narrowly partisan judges to protect minority interests in the legislative process. The project is expected to show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, judicial review can still work well to protect minority interests even when judges are narrowly partisan. The principal investigators research strategy begins by assuming a worst-case context for judicial review. First, the investigators assume that judges seek singularly to advance the narrow interests of the respective group, or faction, to which they belong. Secondly, the behavior of legislators and judges is considered in the context most likely to invite nakedly partisan outcomes - the purely distributive context of a constant-sum game in which resources allocated to one faction are necessarily taken away from the other factions. To study the impact of judicial review on distributive outcomes, the principal investigators develop an infinite-horizon game of judicial-legislative interaction in which a legislature distributes a given sum of revenue across legislative factions, subject to judicial review. The investigators extend the extant model of legislative bargaining by adding a judicial review stage in which a judge, who belongs to one of the factions and seeks only its interests, reviews allocations enacted by the legislature. With the baseline provided by the extant model, differences in legislative outcomes between the models can be attributed directly to the impact of judicial review on legislative behavior. The investigators expect that the model will show, even under these worst-case conditions, that judicial review still works in two important ways. First, they expect to show that distributive legislation is more equitably distributed in a system with judicial review than without it, even when judges are narrowly partisan. Secondly, they expect to show in the remaining cases - when the legislative allocation excludes some minority groups from receiving a share - that judicial review reduces the amount of the inequitable legislation that is actually implemented. The expected significance of the proposed project is threefold. First, the results of the project will have implications for the on-going international interest in constitutional design, specifically regarding the inclusion of judicial review in constitutional systems. Secondly, the project will have implications for evaluating judicial selection procedures in American states. Finally, the model is expected to generate hypotheses capable of being empirically tested in subsequent work doc22339 none The Center for Engineering Logistics and Distribution (CELDi) is a new multi-university, multi-disciplinary Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC). The vision for the center is to provide integrated solutions to logistics problems, through modeling, analysis and intelligent-systems technologies. The four universities involved in this proposal, the University of Arkansas, serving as the lead institution, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Louisville, and Oklahoma State University are assuming a leadership role in engineering logistics research and education. The scope of CELDi will address (1) value-adding processes that create time and place utility (transportation, material handling, and distribution), (2) value-sustaining processes that prolong useful life (maintenance, repair, and rework), and (3) value-recovering processes that conserve scarce resources and enhance societal goodwill (returns, refurbishment, and recycling doc22404 none Haushalter This Small Business Innovation Research Project proposes to use silicon microfabrication techniques to produce new silicon spotting pins that will be used for the preparation of microarrays. Microarray technology has rapidly spread into many diverse areas of biological research. The preparation of a large portion of these arrays is accomplished by direct contact printing using high precision metal spotting pins, which are individually machined at costs up to $400 each. Using straightforward silicon microfabrication techniques,this company has prepared prototype silicon spotting pins, holders and transfer devices for the preparation of microarrays whose performance characteristics are expected to far exceed those of current state-of-the-art devices. Advantages of silicon spotting pins over machined metal components include 10-100 fold higher dimensional tolerances, less than 1% of the weight (lighter pressure gives more uniform spots), tip hardness, the ability to chemically modify the SiO2 surface of the pins to control wetting and liquid uptake release, higher pin density in array (higher spot density in microarray), more precise volumetric uptake into pin, lower surface friction (ease of sliding movement in holder), resistance of tip to bending damage and the ability to fabricate complex features not obtainable by traditional machine shop fabrication. Since the parts will be mass produced, it is estimated that a hundred to a thousand fold reduction in cost per pin would result. The commercial applications of this project are in the area of DNA microarrays doc22405 none This research project will investigate the environmental and socioeconomic effects of population change in southwestern Burkina Faso, a region of widespread immigration. It examines an on-going debate in African studies literature about the role of population growth in causing environmental degradation. The investigator argues that the scale of investigation is important in determining conclusions. In the cotton-growing zone of southwestern Burkina Faso, population growth has led to large reductions in forest cover and fallow periods. Yet analyses at the macro-level may ignore other types of population-induced landscape changes, such as the micro-level adaptive responses of farmers. Although the research in this project counters dominant neo-Malthusian portrayals of the relationship between people and their environments in this region, population growth has led to several important socioeconomic and institutional dislocations, particularly in the arena of wealth distribution, land rights, community relations, and government policy. Among the questions that the research will ask are: How have demographic and socioeconomic changes affected the environment at multiple spatial scales? How are norms about land tenure changing with population influx by migrants, particularly regarding rights, agricultural investment, tenure security, conflict, and conflict resolution? How do international environment, land, and population policies interact with other government policies to affect changes on the local level, and how do local farmers react to new policies? The research project will be a one-year pilot project in three villages using different methodological frameworks. Principal methods will include structured and unstructured interviews, aerial photographic interpretation, soil and vegetation sampling, and collection of national level data and policy reports. This research project will have important outcomes for the advancement of scientific knowledge. It will contribute to a growing literature on how African environments are changing, on how population growth is affecting local resource use, and on land tenure relations and agrarian change. This research also will contribute to development of more effective policies dealing with land rights in sub-Saharan Africa at a time when many governments, through pressure from international institutions, are rethinking land policy in ways that have serious implications for the welfare of villagers doc22406 none Workers compensation is one of the main forms of social insurance in the United States, establishing the extent of compensation received by the families of workers killed or injured in accidents arising from employment. The programs were established and continue to be administered by state governments. The central feature of all of the workers compensation programs is the level of benefits legislated by each state for the various types of injuries. The benefit levels are key components in the employment conditions for workers and play a central role in determining the incentives for preventing accidents for both workers and employers. The benefit schedules are complex and at times difficult to compare across states and time; therefore, the first phase of the research is devoted to developing easily comparable measures of the benefit levels across states and over time. The second phase of the research examines the impact of changes in benefit levels on wages and earnings of workers to assess the extent to which the well-being of workers is enhanced by increases in benefit levels. In a variety of settings, it has been shown that the costs of improvements in employment benefits have often been passed on to workers in the form of lower wages. Estimates of these wage offsets will offer a more accurate picture of the changes in the standard of living for American workers over the past 60 years. The final phase of the research is devoted to analyzing the political and economic factors that influence the various state governments choices concerning workers compensation benefits. The goal is to document the extent to which changes in benefits are driven by economic factors like long-term increases in wage rates and cyclical changes in the economy or political factors, like the relative power of political parties, interest groups, and reform groups. The end result of the research will be a comprehensive examination of the historical path that has led to the array of workers compensation programs that are in place in the various states today. Workers Compensation programs play a crucial role in the United States economy by establishing the levels of benefits for families of workers injured or killed in workplace accidents. By the late s, employers were spending 1.5 to 2.5 percent of their payrolls on workers compensation insurance. Although workers compensation was a popular program with workers and employers when it was first introduced in the early s, employers and workers have expressed increasing dissatisfaction with the operation of the program over the past 50 years. Employers are troubled by the rising costs of insurance, insurers have faced increasing problems in underwriting workers compensation risk, and workers have expressed dissatisfaction with the level of benefits they have been receiving. The benefit levels chosen by the various state governments play a central role in determining the scale of the problems in the workers compensation system. The research program is designed to follow three phases: first, develop easily comparable measures of benefits across states and time from the complex benefit schedules in the state laws; second, establish more accurate measures of the gains workers receive when benefits are raised by documenting the extent to which wages are reduced when benefit levels increased; and third, analyze the political and economic influences that determine the various states choices of benefit levels. This comprehensive analysis of workers compensation benefits over the past 60 years illuminate the process that has led to workers compensation programs that we see today. An understanding of the process should help guide policy makers in improving the systems without returning to the same problems that led to changes in the systems in the first place doc22407 none Everyday human action is strikingly complex. In the course of accomplishing our everyday goals and intentions, we move rapidly about the world contacting an enormous array of diverse objects for different purposes, with few pauses to demarcate where one action ends and the next begins. Despite such complexity, when we observe others in action, we readily process the complex motion stream with little conscious effort. As yet, much remains mysterious about the cognitive mechanisms that enable such skilled processing of dynamic human action. One intriguing developmental question is how infants even make a start at identifying distinct acts within the continuous motion stream. This research will pursue two primary goals. The first is to investigate whether infants possess skills for identifying individual actions within the continuous motion stream, and the second is to discover how they might do so. The research will advance knowledge on several fronts. For one, the research will provide new information about basic action-processing skills that are fundamental to children s social and cognitive development. As well, the research will lead to the development of new methods that may ultimately assist in understanding and detecting deficits in action processing; for example, such deficits may be a factor in autism and certain forms of brain damage acquired later in life. Improved understanding of the nature of such deficits may make it possible to design more effective interventions for such individuals, hence improving social and cognitive outcomes doc22408 none The main objective of this research proposal is to study the changes in the distribution of household consumption in the US over the - period. This is an interesting period to study due to the dramatic increase in income inequality widely analyzed in the labor economics literature. There is an open debate on the welfare implications of increasing income inequality. One view is that the increase in income inequality is worrying because it implies declining living standards. Another view is that one should rather focus on consumption inequality because consumption is a better measure of welfare than income. The theory suggests that household consumption depends on permanent, not current income, which differs from the former due to temporary fluctuations. The theory s main insight is that absent formal markets for insuring against income losses, individuals use personal savings to self-insure against temporary shocks. Thus, if the increase in income inequality is mostly due to temporary factors, the welfare effects of increasing income inequality are less serious than originally thought. The extensive research on the evolution of income inequality in recent years has not been paralleled by comparable research on consumption inequality. The existing research has reached contrasting conclusions (some papers find an increase in consumption inequality, while others find little or no change), or made little attempt to interpret the empirical findings using theory. The project consists of three parts. First, it uses a variety of microeconomic data sets to analyze trends in consumption inequality and contrast them with trends in income inequality in order to explain why different papers reach different conclusions about the main facts of the consumption distribution, focusing on definitional issues and sample selection. Second, it provides evidence (already available in preliminary work) that consumption inequality increases at a slower pace than income inequality over the period of study. One possible interpretation is that most of the increase in income inequality is indeed of temporary nature (income instability). However, labor economics studies have reached the conclusion that income instability and permanent income inequality have increased at similar rates over the period of interest. If anything, permanent inequality outpaces transitory uncertainty. Third, it investigates the empirical validity of an alternative interpretation, that the increase in income inequality is (at least partly) due to permanent factors but there exists partial insurance against income shocks over and above personal savings. This form of insurance is provided informally through a variety of channels: social and financial institutions, family network, and rational use of other family choice variables. The investigator provides estimates of the extent of partial insurance against income shocks and assesses how the availability of insurance opportunities changes over time and across skill groups. The empirical analysis will be conducted on two data sets, the Consumer Expenditure Survey and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics doc22409 none A key function of an economic system is to acquire and disseminate the information necessary for consumers and firms to make socially desirable consumption and production choices. This function is often performed by market prices, which convey to individuals the relevant information, and motivating them to act in a socially efficient way. However, free markets may fail due to economies of scale, externalities, or the inability to price a large number of potential goods. In such situations, the invisible hand of the market is often substituted with the visible hand of managers in firms or with the visible hammers of auctioneers. This project will examine the design of such alternative economic institutions. One hypothetical economic mechanism would ask all participants to reveal their preferences and technology, and then implement an efficient outcome (the incentives to communicate truthfully can be provided with appropriately designed monetary compensation). The problem is that this mechanism would require a prohibitive amount of communication. The study will examine the design of economic mechanisms that economize on communication costs, using the models of communication costs developed in economics and computer science. One important application is the design of combinatorial auctions, which allocate heterogeneous objects among bidders (recent examples include auctions of spectrum licenses and online procurement). Since every bidder has a valuation for each subset of the items, and the number of such subsets is exponential in the number of objects, full communication of preferences would require prohibitive communication (e.g., with 30 objects, it would involve the announcement of more than one billion numbers). The study (joint with Noam Nisan, a computer scientist) will identify the communication burden of realizing socially efficient or approximately efficient allocations. In particular, it will examine how much communication is required to improve upon selling all objects as a bundle to the highest bidder, and how the answer depends on the designer s a priori knowledge of the structure of bidders preferences. Another application is to the organization of firms. As noted by Ronald Coase in , firms arise when the cost of discovering what the relevant prices are would be prohibitive. This idea can be examined in a complex coordination problem, in which pooling all agents information to obtain an ideal decision may be practically impossible, but coordination may be achieved by authority of one of the agents. This model could explain why the managerial task of information processing and decision-making is concentrated in the hands of few, rather than being spread evenly among organization members. It can also identify the properties of the optimal management hierarchy, such as its height, spans of control, and the staff operators ratio. It may also explain why higher-skilled individuals are often placed in higher positions, illuminating the role of organizational structure in determining the substitutability between workers of different skills, and consequently the market skill premium. Finally, it can be used to understand the organizational effects of information technology, which can reduce communication costs, changing the organizational structure and affecting the skill premium doc22410 none and maintained. In the most diverse habitats on Earth, the tropical rainforests, primates and other frugivores (fruit-eaters) play important roles by dispersing the seeds of many trees. In this symposium we will make a global comparison of tropical frugivores and plant communities. We will bring together for the first time researchers studying birds, bats, primates, elephants, and other animals with plant ecologists to identify and compare the keystone plant species that sustain a diversity of animals in different regions. By bringing together some of the world s finest tropical biologists to compare their knowledge, this symposium will try to create a tool for rapidly identifying the most important species for maintaining biodiversity. We will also study the ways that the loss of such species can affect ecosystems. There are three aims of the symposium: first, to identify and compare the key plants which sustain rainforest animal diversity; second, to identify those animals which are of greatest significance to these plant communities; and third, to study the importance of these interactions to conservation. The information collected in this forum will advance the field of ecology and aid the scientific management of endangered species and habitats. It will also bring students together with renowned scholars in the field, and build international collaboration on conservation strategies doc22388 none This award is to study a paired sand-silt eolian system on the Columbia Plateau, in order to better understand the sensitivity of mineral-dust aerosol emissions to changes in vegetation, soil moisture and topography. This information will be used to improve global dust model routines in general circulation models (GCM). Field work will be undertaken to characterize the history and variability of mineral-aerosol sources and chronology of dune and loess formation for the Columbia Plateau since the last glacial maximum (LGM). Information will be obtained on vegetation area and type, soil texture, soil moisture and topographic features that resulted in the observed downwind accumulations. Modeling will be used to improve the sensitivity of a global transport model used in general circulation models (GCM) of the Earth climate system. Atmospheric mineral aerosols are increasingly recognized as playing an important role in radiative and biogeochemical forcing of climate. The broader impacts of this proposed research center on documenting the evolution of an important eolian sequence within a well-constrained chronologic framework to better understand the processes responsible for and factors that effect mineral-aerosol emissions doc22412 none The Doctoral Dissertation student produces a computerized database of all roll-call votes cast in the California Assembly since . Using a Poole-Rosenthal method of analyzing the ideological composition of the US has greatly increased the understanding of the Congress. By employing roll data from every Congressional session and assuming that each member s ideological position is relatively fixed from one session to the next, Poole and Rosenthal are able to locate all members of Congress throughout its history in a common ideological space. Given this cross-temporally comparable space, they are able to address questions of how, for example, partisan divergence, regional alignment, and the dimensionality of political conflict have changed over time. While the leverage of this approach clearly extends beyond the US Congress, there are few such applications in the literature. In this grant, the student brings the power of Poole and Rosenthal s method to the study of party and ideology within California s state legislature. The dissertation will unravel the dynamics of partisanship in the California legislature and, in particular, how these dynamics are affected by electoral institutions, such as rules governing primary elections, which have varied considerably across California s history. In this case, the data generated are used to measure the degree of partisan alignment and polarization through California s history. Application of these data to other central questions of legislative scholarship such as the effects of term limits, legislative professionalization, or the presence of the ballot initiative come quickly to mind. The researcher has already completed collection of these data for - , - , - , - , and - sessions. This is a dataset that will be used by other scholars interested in these questions doc22413 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop a carbon isotope ratio analyzer based on Off-Axis Integrated Cavity Output Spectroscopy to measure the ratio of C13 to C12 in exhaled breath in real time. The analyzer will serve as a medical diagnostic instrument that will operate in a point-of-care setting and reference labs. The instrument will be inexpensive, portable, easy-to-use and report C13 C12 measurements with sufficient sensitivity and precision to replace mass spectrometry in C13-labeled breath tests for diagnosis of a number of conditions, including exposure to chemical and biological warfare agents, sepsis, assessment of liver and pancreatic function, delayed gastric emptying, bacterial overgrowth, irritable bowel syndrome and viral infection. The Phase I Project will develop an instrument to determine infection due to Helicobacter pylori, a Class-1 carcinogen, using the C13-urea breath test. The follow on Phase II Project will develop a prototype commercial instrument for clinical trials. The commercial application of this project is in the area of medical diagnostics doc22414 none Bevis This grant supports the acquisition of eight global positioning system (GPS) receivers for active tectonic research in the central Andes of South America. Four of the proposed receivers will be permanently deployed in continuous mode operation (CGPS) while the other four will be used in campaign or survey mode (SGPS). The receivers will augment and or act as replacements for aging receivers used by the University of Hawaii Geodesy group (hereafter named the Pacific Geoscience Facility - PGF) for the on-going collection of GPS data surrounding the active fore arc region of the central Andes. The Central Andes Project (CAP) has been funded by NSF EAR since ( ). Temporal and spatial densification of GPS measurements in this region will contribute to a better understanding of two fundamental questions in geophysics including: 1) what is the contribution of viscoelastic relaxation to crustal deformation following a great subduction zone earthquake?, and 2) what is the viscosity of the mantle? A densification of CGPS measurements surrounding the epicenter of the Chilean earthquake will help to resolve the former question while CGPS vertical positioning in Chilean Patagonia will further constrain the rate of post-glacial rebound which can then be used to calculate lower crustal and mantle viscosity. An understanding of the long term seismic cycle following a great subduction zone earthquake has significant implications for mitigating seismic hazards for population centers along the Andean Cordillera. These receivers will also support collaborations between the PGF and Chilean and Argentinean geoscientists. In-country scientists will collect campaign GPS data at frequencies that are logistically unrealistic for the PGF group, improving the output of the CAPS project for a marginal cost to the NSF doc22415 none This award is to analyze sediments from Lake Bosumtwi to generate a record of tropical West African hydrologic variability back to years with decadal resolution. In addition, the first tropical record of atmospheric radiocarbon change between 10,000 and 25,000 years will be produced. Previous field work has secured laminated core material back to about 25,000 years at Lake Bosumtwi. A variety of proxy indicators of climate will be analyzed from these sediments to produce a paleohydrologic time series. Charcoal from terrestrial plants will be dated from the varved layers to generate a D14C calibration curve for radiometric dating. The timing of droughts and the natural variability of droughts to this region (West Africa) are important. Better understanding of how the hydrologic history of the region relates to similar records from other regions will advance our overall knowledge of the climate system and allow us to answer many questions regarding interrelationships between low and high latitude and marine and terrestrial climate interactions. The true shape of the atmospheric radiocarbon variation during glacial to deglacial times will be an important advancement for radiocarbon dating doc22416 none The objective of this project is to produce a plant virus based expression system combined with plant cell culture as a means for producing human therapeutic proteins. In particular, this project will genetically engineer host plant cells so that recombinant plant virus amplicons (self-replicating viral RNA containing a foreign gene) can be produced intracellularly, under the control of a chemically or metabolically-inducible promoter. The major goals of this project include: (1) the design of the recombinant viral gene constructs which contain all of the necessary components for high level production of viral mRNA, efficient viral replication, efficient foreign gene expression and extracellular targeting, 2) the design and creation of transgenic plant cell lines utilizing tightly regulated, chemically and or metabolically inducible promoters which restrict viral production under non-induced conditions and allow high level transcription of the recombinant viral RNA under induction conditions, and 3) optimization of plant cell bioreactor conditions and operating strategies during growth and induction to maximize volumetric productivity of the product and minimize recovery purification costs. This project will focus on the production of two model proteins (green fluorescent protein (GFP) and human a1-antitrypsin (AAT)) in tobacco cell cultures utilizing a cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) amplicon under the control of specific chemical and metabolically regulated promoters in a membrane bioreactor. This project involves a multidisciplinary approach combining molecular biology and virology strategies with quantitative process engineering. In addition, an integrated training program consisting of a collaborative, multidisciplinary team approach to research, combined with coursework, a focused study group, seminars, retreats and an industrial internship to provide breadth in biotechnology, is part of this project. Graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and undergraduates will participate in this training program doc22417 none Kress In August, , the Department of Geology acquired a number of valuable pieces of experimental equipment from Stanford University. Equipment includes: 1) A high-capacity 1.4 GPa Harwood two-stage gas compressor and smaller third stage vernier pump. 2) Two 5 cm bore internally heated pressure vessels and a smaller 4.1 cm bore vessel, all with a design pressure of 1 GPa. 3) A large collection of valves gauges and tubing. Building on funds already provided by the University of Washington, the investigators will assemble this equipment into a working state-of the-art high-pressure high-temperature experimental facility. This facility will be used for experimental exploration of geological problems under conditions ranging from ambient to 1 GPa (10,000 bars) pressure and temperatures up to 1,500 degrees centigrade under controlled or monitored fugacities of hydrogen, oxygen and sulfur. This PT range is not accurately accessible by any other commonly used experimental method. This facility will be capable of exploring conditions found over most of Earth s continental crust and down to upper oceanic mantle. This pressure and temperature range also includes the probable source region for Martian shergottites (Ghosal et al., ). The large volume of this experimental apparatus and the ability to incorporate numerous electrical feedthroughs into the high pressure environment allows tremendous flexibility in experimental design. Furthermore, because the pressure medium is a gas, pressures can be measured accurately, and one can be assured that the pressure experienced by the sample is entirely isotropic. Ultrasonic experiments are proposed that can only be done in this type of device doc22418 none Mathematics, diagrams, and other formal representations help scientists discover and organize complex relations. This research will test whether this is also true for the developing child. The studies will examine how explicit, culturally developed symbol systems propel the development of higher-order cognition in pre-adolescent and adolescent children in the domains of proportions, fractions, hypothesis testing, and game playing. The studies will alter the characteristics of symbolic tools and children s interactions with them to uncover specific properties of symbol systems and their social environments that support development and transfer. The research will evaluate conceptual maturity not only by the problems children can solve but also by the problems they are prepared to learn to solve in a transfer setting, a potentially much more sensitive measure of development. For example, some children will be encouraged to invent mathematics to explain how weight and distance compensate on a balance scale, whereas others will simply use words to explain. Afterwards, to assess the immediate effects of explanations using mathematics versus words, children in both groups will solve new balance scale problems. Most importantly, they will also attempt to learn to solve new compensation problems, for example, involving gears of different sizes. The leading hypothesis is that children who have opportunities to work with symbolic tools to learn to solve benchmark developmental tasks will be more prepared to learn to solve analogous transfer tasks compared to students who do not receive opportunities to use symbolic tools. The findings and methodologies of this research will integrate work in cultural, cognitive, and developmental psychology and will have a direct bearing on instructional theory. The use of symbols is something that instruction can control, and preparation for future learning is what instructors care about. The work will set the stage for specific methods and classroom technologies designed to propel development and prepare children to learn in science and mathematics doc22419 none This Doctoral Dissertation Research Support project explains persistent policy differences between presidents and congresses, independent of party. The prevalent view is that the President represents the public interest and the Congress the special interests. The investigator asserts that presidents are likelier than Members of Congress (MC s) to act upon their convictions, which will reflect any dominant view among elites, unless a dissenting lobby is bound to their party by the issue in question. Presidents are only constrained by lobbies linked to their parties by an issue, while MC s are sensitive to both the secondary demands of party-linked groups and those of no-party lobbies. The President is more apt to act on principle than is an MC (and hence Congress generally) since his actions are more influential and he is less vulnerable than the atomostic Congress to lobbies tactics of Divide and conquer and targeting recalcitrants. Persistent interbranch differences emerge when unified elite opinion influences presidents of both parties but lobbies constrain Congress. Unlike extant work the student s theory explains how the same issue can be partisan in one era and marked by inter-branch conflict in another. It is also free from normative assumptions. The student will undertake two two-week trips to the Library of Congress (LOC) and these allow him to fully operationalize a key variable in his theory, elite opinion. By coding and tabulating the editorial positions of a sample of papers stratified by region and partisan tendency on three issues, trade, gun control and veterans programs from - he will be able to show the degree to which an issue is contested or consensual among elite opinion. This enables him to test his theory in a timely manner. The database assembled should prove useful to scholars pursuing other questions in this area of inquiry doc22420 none Modern economies exhibit a broad diversity of organizational forms: from small owner-operated firms to employee-owned partnerships, cooperatives, non-profits, and finally investor-owned corporations. A fundamental problem in economics is to understand the forces that lead to these different forms of organization and thus determine the structure of productive enterprise in the economy. This project proposes an economic framework for studying the economics of partnerships and their role in the professional services. The approach highlights three ingredients that favor the formation of partnerships: (1) the importance of human capital in production; (2) a lack of information on the part of clients that leads them potentially to be concerned about the quality of the service they will obtain; and (3) the differing incentives of partnerships and corporations in the hiring and selection of senior employees. The theoretical model developed will explain why partnerships are typical in the professional services, where human capital is primary input to production and the nature of the service provided may be quite difficult for consumers to accurately assess, but rarely observed in manufacturing, technology, or lower-skill service industries. Associated with this project is a rich set of broad impact policy questions concerning which forms of organization the law and regulatory policy should accommodate. One of the most striking empirical regularities in this area is that throughout manufacturing, technology, and many service industries, the great majority of enterprises are either small owner-operated firms or larger investor-owned corporations. However, in the professional services -- law, medicine, consulting, accounting, architecture, advertising-the traditional form of organization has been the professional partnership. There is no single coherent framework for understanding the differences between partnerships and corporations, or for understanding the specific economics of professional services that have led to this particular form of organization. This project will offer a starting point for a broader investigation of market structure in the professional services, for examining legal and regulatory issues in these industries, and for interpreting empirical evidence about the structure of professional organizations doc22421 none Thyrotropin (TSH) is a pituitary-secreted glycoprotein hormone that is related to the gonadotropins (follicle-stimulating hormone, FSH and luteinizing hormone, LH). TSH interacts with its thyroidal receptors to induce the synthesis and secretion of thyroid hormones (T3 and T4). TSH receptors were originally thought to be solely expressed in the thyroid, however recently, TSH receptors have been found in extra-thyroidal tissues (e.g., adipose tissue (lipolysis), lymphocytes (immunoregulation), brain and pituitary) and convincing functional significance has been ascribed to their activation. The principal investigators recently cloned the first non-mammalian TSH receptor from the striped bass, a marine bony fish. This cDNA was isolated from the gonads of the fish (as opposed to the thyroid where they are expected to be expressed). Although this was the first report of the expression of TSH receptors in the gonads of any vertebrate, these findings have since been confirmed in other species of fish. Visualization of the striped bass TSH receptor mRNA in the cytoplasm of both developing oocytes and spermatocytes suggest that TSH may play a direct role in the development of sperm and egg rather than merely being maternal mRNA stored for use during embryo development. This results of this research will determine if TSH plays a direct role in gametogenesis or embryogenesis, or both. Although it has been established that thyroid hormones (as regulated by TSH) regulate gonadal physiology both in mammals and fish, this study could provide the first evidence of a direct role of TSH at the level of the gonad. An essential requirement for the action of a hormone is the timely expression of its receptor in the target tissue. Even though the expression of the TSH receptor gene in fish gametes has been confirmed, a test of the hypothesis that TSH plays a direct role in gametogenesis will be conducted by correlating gamete development with seasonal changes in gene expression, production of receptor protein, and localization of the protein within the gametes. In addition, TSH receptor transcripts will be detected and quantified, and receptor protein will be localized in embryos and larvae in order to test the alternate hypothesis that the TSH-receptor transcripts are stored maternal mRNA required for embryogenesis. Proof of active TSH receptor in gametes will strongly suggest i) a direct role of TSH in gamete development, ii) a putative role of TSH receptor in the disruption of gametogenesis as a causative factor of failure of fish spawning, and iii) a basis for the re-evaluation of gonadal expression of TSH receptor in higher vertebrates. Although studies of ligand-induced activation of the TSH receptor on the processes of gamete development and maturation would be invaluable to conclusively demonstrate the direct role of TSH in gametogenesis, sufficient quantities of homologous striped bass TSH are not available at this time doc22422 none This research will develop accurate and powerful Bayesian modeling and computational methods for the problem of response time (RT) analysis. Although Bayesian techniques are well established in other fields, social scientists very rarely use them because they require a considerable investment in computational resources as well as additional statistical training. The project will develop a number of strategies that will improve the analysis of RT data, including analyses that consider theories about how RTs are produced and new procedures that can help untrained practitioners use Bayesian methods without too much inconvenience. The study also undertakes a program of education and dissemination to improve the overall quality of statistical analyses of RT data. Thus, this research will result in new and better statistical procedures specific for RT (and similar chronometric) data. The importance of this project is considerable. How well a person performs a task is often evaluated by way of how quickly he or she can respond during the task. Measurements of RTs are important for both theoretical and pragmatic reasons. Theoretically, RTs are used to test hypotheses about cognitive structure, the ways in which people use and process information, and how changes in the environment influence human behavior. Pragmatically, RTs are important for evaluating human performance in many areas. They assist machine interface design decisions, such as the optimal way to present information to a pilot or the best place where to put a turn signal lever. They are also used in medicine; diagnoses of some organic brain disorders such as Alzheimer s disease or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder can be informed by a patient s RTs on certain kinds of tests. Many of the statistical procedures used to test hypotheses based on RTs are suboptimal. They depend on oversimplifying assumptions about RT data that are usually incorrect, and consequently the inferences that are made about RTs collected in different environments can be faulty. This project will result in more accurate characterization of RT data and therefore improved decision making about human capabilities and disease doc22423 none Drew The investigator derives and studies mathematical models for several different processes involved with cell division, focusing on E. coli cells because of the wealth of data available. A mature cell replicates its DNA. The daughter DNA strands must move into the halves of the mature cell, and finally, the cell divides. The relative timing of these events is crucial for the division into viable daughter cells, and placement of the septum must divide the cell and its DNA into relatively equal halves. Once replication begins,the cell then must become unable to start replication again until the cell is sufficiently mature. Sequestration is responsible for this eclipse period, where the new DNA strand binds to sites in the membrane, thereby blocking the oriC site and dnaA transcription regulation site, keeping the replication initiation from occurring too soon. This process of sequestration and de-sequestration is therefore (at least partially) responsible for the timing of cell division events. The mathematical model predicts the probability of each of the sequestration sites being sequestered, as a function of time. The replicated DNA strands are moved apart in the longitudinal direction (towards the cell poles) in order to assure exactly one set of chromosomes in each daughter cell. The process by which this occurs is unknown, but the timing of this event is crucial to viability. The project studies viable models for this seqregation. The site for septation is marked by formation of a Z-ring at the center of the rod-shaped cell, halfway between the poles. This Z-ring is involved in causing the cell to form a septum between the daughter halves. Placement of the Z-ring at the center is a result of the cooperative actions of three proteins from the min locus of the DNA. Three proteins behave in an oscillatory manner, with MinD alternately forming a layer on the cell membrane near one pole, then disassembling and re-forming at the other pole. The investigator studies a model for the dynamics of the Min system. The investigaor develops mathematical models to improve the understanding of the biology of cell division in E. coli. The basic philosophy is to determine mechanisms that can describe observed events, and to evaluate whether these mechanisms can operate for reasonable parameter values, that is, whether the kinetic rates, diffusivities, and concentrations are within reasonable ranges of observed values. Location and timing of cellular events is an important aspect of molecular biology. Moreover, mathematical models that incorporate intracellular transport and reactions, including reactions with organelles, should prove to be of general applicability to cellular biology. Such models can focus biological research on aspects of molecular dynamics that otherwise seem unconnected doc22424 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop highly proton conductive, water insoluble and thermally stable electrolytes for proton exchange membrane fuel cells, based on a hybrid membrane of a functionalized polyoxometalate (POM) cluster in a sol-gel matrix. Phase I will focus on developing the technology of fabrication of cathode electrolyte and anode electrolyte membranes. The procured cathode electrolyte and anode electrolyte membranes can then be pressed together and thermally cured to form a cathode electrolyte anode membrane assembly. The development of small fuel cell systems for residential may provide the householder with electricity and heat at a significant saving over conventional services. Fuel cells make distributed cogeneration a competitive alternative as they provide a unique combination of advantages. Being small, clean and quiet, they can be sited wherever electricity is needed, even in the most congested urban location. Fuel cell generators can be used in hospitals and computer centers where there is a need for uninterruptible, high quality power. Micro fuel cells as portable generators and to replace batteries since they are quick and easy to refuel, have longer operating times and lower operating costs. Systems are suitable for a number of applications, including portable computers and telephones, video cameras and generators for camping, boating and emergency power doc22425 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will synthesize will demonstrate that a hybrid system combining the attributes of Jet Vapor Deposition and Rotating Disk Reactors solves existing Silicon Carbide film deposition problems and can be developed to create a superior film production tool. The high speed jet convectively transports precursors directly to the surface, overcoming diffusion-limited transport rates, and largely avoiding unwanted pre-reactions in the gas phase; the rotation allows the jets to uniformly paint the surface with precursor. Our Phase I efforts will focus on proving that the hybrid tool will be a superior tool for Silicon Carbide epitaxy--highly desired for microelectronic devices such as high-power, high-temperature, high frequency devices. Potential commercial applications of the research are expected in reliable, micro-fabrication process. The successful development of Silicon Carbide film deposition would represent an important advancement in metal thin film deposition process doc22426 none This research focuses on how functionally illiterate consumers make decisions and cope in the information age. Estimates suggest a high rate of functional illiteracy, about a fifth of the US population or higher. Estimates of functional illiteracy in most other countries, particularly developing countries, are much higher. Surprisingly, very little research has been done examining functionally illiterate consumers in the global marketplace. The first phase of the study will provide an in-depth view of functionally illiterate consumers. The functionally literate poor will be studied, along with non-native speakers with very limited experience with English and the US marketplace, as well as functionally illiterate consumers in India. Issues of interest include (i) use of health-related information and consumption of unhealthy products; (ii) use of credit and money management; (iii) responses to advertising, selling and promotional appeals; (iv) use of product-related instructions; and (v) the use of computer-related media including the internet. Results from the first phase of the research program will serve as the basis for the second phase in which a large-scale survey will be developed and administered. The second phase will be designed to identify and assess possible solutions to help functionally illiterate consumers negotiate the marketing environment. The proposed research has important practical implications for adult education, business and government doc22427 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop a programmable motionless optical attenuator that over performs commercial electro-mechanical attenuators and state-of-the-art MEMs attenuator. Made from a revolutionary liquid crystal and polymer composite material, i.e., polymer stabilized liquid crystal material, the new technology ultimately promises to achieve the following performance specifications, (a) over 10,000:1 contrast ratio, (b) less than 5 ms response time, and (c) less than 2dB insertion loss. In Phase I, the demo device will be constructed to show the technological feasibility. The Phase II effort is to develop the prototype attenuator that meets all the projected performance specifications followed by a full commercialization in the later phase. The technology, once successfully developed, will be used in liquid crystal display, photonics instrument, telecommunication, and military systems doc22428 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project will investigate three key components necessary to incorporate Dimension Technologies Inc s (DTI s) proprietary ultra high resolution display technology into head mounted systems for virtual reality applications. To be commercially viable, the technology must provide additional resolution without tradeoffs in key areas such as visual performance, size, weight and field of view. The objective of this Phase I will be to assess the feasibility of applying DTI s increased resolution technique to leading edge HMD products. Three main areas will be investigated. The first is the design of an array of compact, bright, rapidly flashing colored light sources. The second is the optical design to efficiently direct light from the light sources to a light valve and then to the user s eye with maximum brightness and even light distribution. The third area will be means of configuring and fabricating flat, precisely formed microlens arrays. . If successful, virtual reality displays will be capable of generating images with near eye limited resolution across a wide, immersive field of view. Products resulting from this research will expand markets for virtual reality systems in many markets. This technology could find initial use in small scale, moderate budget, or tight quarters simulation or public exhibit applications where high end VR systems are now used. In the longer term, as the capabilities of PCs increase, consumer products for games and other recreational activities will incorporate the technology doc22429 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project proposes to create state-of-the-art proximity correction software, which will ultimately be merged with the Nanometer Pattern Generation System, which is an advanced SEM lithography system that is already commercially successful. In recent years, SEM lithography has become an increasingly popular tool in university and government research labs, as well as at industrial R&D labs. The interest in SEM lithography comes from both its low cost and versatile nature when compared to the dedicated e-beam writing systems that are designed primarily for writing full wafers in industrial settings. The purpose of this project is to create an advanced proximity correction system that matches the inherent versatility of a well-designed SEM lithography system such as NPGS. To achieve this goal, this project will investigate the development of two advanced proximity correction techniques that are currently not commercially available. Specifically, the techniques are grayscale proximity corrections for manufacturing multi-level (grayscale) structures and binary proximity corrections for non-rectangular pattern elements. Potential commercial applications, if successful, will give researchers worldwide a much more advanced e-beam lithography capability than is presently available doc22430 none The environmental, economic and political costs of our reliance on oil are becoming increasingly clear to many people. One of the main obstacles to widespread use of alternative fuels in cars and trucks is the limited range of these vehicles and the scarcity of refueling facilities in convenient locations. Traditional approaches to the question of where gas stations should sited define the problem in terms of minimizing some measure of the distance users need to travel to get to the fueling site. Beginning with Hodgson ( ), several researchers have been developing a new approach to the siting of fuel stations that attempts to maximize the flow of traffic past a site. This project extend flow-capturing models to apply to the location of refueling facilities for alternative-fuel vehicles, such as hydrogen fuel cells. The range of alternatively-fueled vehicles is typically much smaller than the range conventional vehicles. Thus, the difficult and expensive task of developing an adequate infrastructure is even more challenging than usual. A model for optimally locating refueling stations to capture as much traffic as possible with a fixed number of stations could help overcome the barriers to alternative fuel. Thus, this project has significance both to the location-modeling field and to national energy policy doc22431 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop formulations of natural fatty and organic acids as alternatives to traditional fungicides for the control of diseases in fruits such as grapes, blueberries, strawberries and raspberries. In the course of this project, the efficacy of these formulations as pre-harvest and post-harvest treatments for disease control in a number of fruits will be determined. Replicated trials will be conducted in the laboratory and on commercial and university farms. The follow on Phase II project will incorporate more extensive field testing to determine efficacy against a wider range of pathogens under various climatic conditions. The commercial application of this project is in the area of agriculture doc22432 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will fill a critical need for accurate location and depth measurement of undersea fiberoptic cables. This program will builds on prior expertise in ultra-sensitive magnetic susceptibility detection in the human body. The susceptometry technique provides the high signal-to-noise ratios, and then ability to suppress the background response of bottom sediments, that are needed for accurate depth measurements. At the same time, this program will require significant high-risk developments to maximize the accuracy of depth determination, localize fiberoptic cables 2 m or more below the sea floor, and adapt the measurement system to the deep ocean environment. This program has strong support from industry leaders. These experts emphasize that no existing cable location system provides adequate depth information, and that accurate cable depths are crucial to avoid damage that can cost millions of dollars per second. With more than 680,000 kilometers of fiberoptic cables in the ocean, and the cable inspection market growing at an estimated 30% per year, this new fiberoptic locator system has excellent commercial potential doc22331 none This study will use multiproxy study of cores from the Soledad Basin off Baja CA to determine if bottom water oxygen changes over the last 10,000 years are caused primarily by productivity changes in surface waters or changes in ventilation of subsurface waters. Proxies to be measured include planktic foraminifer assemblages, oxygen isotope ratio of Globigerina bulloides and N. pachyderma, sediment Mo abundance, and Mg Ca in benthic foraminifers. Chronology will be provided by AMS 14C and 210Pb. Sample resolution for most proxies will be 100 years. Mo measurements and sea surface temperature estimates will be done at multidecadal sampling resolution doc22434 none Effective pinning of magnetic fluxes is imperative of sustaining critical current. Otherwise a voltage drop is induced by moving magnetic flux lines and resistance develops. It is now recognized that flux-pinning by twin boundaries in YBa2Cu3O7-d (YBCO) exists but is highly dependent on the direction of flux-line motion. Their presence has helped the YBCO to exhibit higher critical current densities at high temperatures and high magnetic fields than those of the Bi, Hg and Tl cuprates despite their higher critical temperatures. It follows that a higher twin density leads to a larger flux-pinning force and a higher critical current density in magnetic fields and temperatures that are more attractive for applications. Yet very few efforts have been in engineering fine twins and twin domains to exploit their flux-pinning properties. Our project is to come up with methods to engineer fine twin structure. To identify these methods, we first need to know the value of the twin boundary energy and its dependence on a number of materials processing parameters. Information on twin boundary energy and its dependence on processing parameters allows the optimization of twin structure by controlling these processing conditions. This information can be exploited to produce the best twin morphology, which leads to maximum flux pinning and high critical current density. Specifically, equipped with the information, we can refine the twin structure in YBCO systematically. This allows the systematic investigation of critical current density (Jc) by magnetization and twin microstructure by microscopy in search for optimal twin structure for enhanced critical current density. Our proposed work will address the twin contribution to flux pinning and critical current density with the goal to obtain the optimal composition, additive, oxygenation and processing conditions for maximum flux pinning and highest Jc. This area of microstructure research is much ignored and can also provide excellent research training for graduate students. Impact: The major problem, for industrial applications of high temperature superconductors, is their low critical-current density (a measure of current that can be transmitted without electrical resistance) caused by poor current transmission at the grain boundaries and insufficient flux-pinning centers at application temperatures and magnetic fields. Twin boundaries in the high temperature superconductor YBa2Cu3O7-d (YBCO) are ubiquitous and have been proved to be effective pinning centers of magnetic fluxes in YBCO for (i) the practical range of operation at temperature ranging from -230 C to -190C and (ii) magnetic fields of the order of 20,000 times of the earth s magnetic field. New methods for engineering twin morphology will emerge from this proposed work that can be applied to YBCO coated tapes which can help to solve the long standing problem of low critical current density of the high temperature superconductors and allow board applications. Twinning as a material phenomenon affects important material properties in ferroelectrics, ferromagnetics, ferroelastics and intermetallic compounds with martensitic-transformation. As such, what we learn from twinning in YBCO, can be directly applied to these technologically important materials to optimize their properties doc22435 none The Department of Statistics at the University of Connecticut will purchase a Compaq Professional XP EV6 667MHz UNIX systems, ten DELL 1.70GHz dual processors power workstations, and an HP Color LaserJet printer, which will be dedicated to the support of research in mathematical statistics, statistical methodology, statistical computing, complex statistical modeling, and statistical software development. The equipment will be used for several research projects, including, Bayesian analysis of multivariate categorical data and missing covariate data, methodology for analyzing spatial data, statistical inferences for contingency tables, cDNA microarrays, the American travel survey, statistical analyses for infinite variance stable processes, multivariate survival data and highway accidents data, and wavelet modeling of high-frequency data. Additionally, the machines will greatly enhance departmental research and education infrastructure at all levels. They will be made available to all departmental faculty, graduate students doc22436 none A gas chromatograph with a mass-selective detector (GC MSFD) is acquired in order to improve the chemical analysis capability in the combustion and fuels research group. The equipment will be used to support development of models of fundamental processes controlling hydrocarbon combustion, and explore new engine designs to improve efficiency and reduce emissions doc22437 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop a new method for fabricating lensed fibers used in optical interconnects. An inkjet printing technique will be used to print optical polymers onto the tips of optical fibers, directly or via collets, to form microlenses. The output beam characteristics of these monolithic devices will be collimated or focused, depending on the specific designs. The low material part cost and the self-aligning feature will result in lower cost than current collimation focusing methods that use ball lens and GRIN lens assemblies. The performance will be similar. Inkjet printing is precise, data-driven, and direct-write. This technique will be suitable for low cost high volume production doc22438 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop chitosan-derivatives through proprietary chemistries for use as additives in oil and gas drilling fluids. For this specific application, it is important to tailor the viscoelastic properties of the chitosan derivatives. Since little is known about how polymer structure affects polymer properties, a combinatorial approach will be used on this project to screen for the viscoelastic properties of the derivatives. Specifically, a high throughput mechanical screen will be adapted and examined, with the results from the screen correlated with more extensive viscoelastic measurements. The commercial application of this project will be in the additives market for oil and gas exploration doc22439 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to demonstrate the feasibility of utilizing surface plasma resonance phenomena to obtain significant improvements in magneto-optical imaging. Improved sensors and systems are needed for non-destructive, non-contact testing and evaluation (NDE) in many areas, including security, structural, medical, research and industrial manufacturing and quality control applications. Magnetic detectors and imagers play a major and growing role in these applications. In Phase I, the research objectives include improvements in spatial and magnetic field resolutions and imaging bandwidth over existing methods. Magneto-optical materials quality and sensor design will be improved. Prototype sensors measuring 1cm2 will be fabricated by combining surface plasma structures with materials exhibiting high Verdet constants. The compositional, magnetic and optical properties of the starting sensor materials will be measured, and the magnetic imaging capabilities of the prototype sensor structures will be evaluated in terms of magnetic field and spatial resolution. Imaging tests will be made on electrical current patterns, magnetic inks, magnetostrictive structural composites and magnetic medical cell-tagging particles, among others. Commercial applications include magnetic character reading, magnetic code reading for security, superconductor research, spin valve and magnetic RAM research and manufacturing, integrated circuit electrical current imaging, structural composite stress imaging using magnetic and magnetostrictive materials, flaw detection in metals, biomedical tagging and identification of cancer and other cells, and research and testing of MEMs actuators and devices doc22440 none The act of voting is one of the most sacred acts in a democracy. It is in the voting booth where citizens register their preferences over who should lead their nation. In some ways it seems a clear and simple act.: one should vote for the candidate they most prefer. However, in the presence of third parties, the evidence shows that many third party supporters abandon their fIrst preference to vote for their second preference. The mechanism behind this choice usually lies in the situation in which a voter s fIrst preference has no chance of winning so that voters do not want to cast a wasted vote. Political scientists have formalized this logic in mathematical terms, taking into account the probability of a voter being decisive between pairs of candidates and their difference in utility between these pairs. While many studies have found that this model performs well in accounting for levels of strategic voting in different elections, one problem plagues these studies, namely most do not use a measure of the probability term that accounts for whether the voter will be decisive between pairs of candidates. While the logic behind strategic voting makes sense intuitively, the probability that one will cast a decisive vote will always be close to zero in a large electorate, such as the United States. If voters know that the probability of their vote being decisive is essentially zero, then why would they not just vote for their first preference? Riker and Ordeshook themselves acknowledged this problem and argued that people will systematically inflate the probability of being decisive, thus the p term will not be zero ( ). They argue that people might inflate the probability on their own accord or because of messages sent by elites indicating that p is much higher than it objectively is. Though this justification seems credible, few studies have examined whether people do inflate probabilities in the context of multicandidate elections (Blais, ) and whether elites play a role in influencing the variables in the voter s calculus (Hsieh et al, ). This research proposal address this question in the literature by examining elite cues in multicandidate elections. The primary purpose of this research is to show that one solution to the puzzle of why we even see strategic voting lies in the efforts by elites to influence the probability and utility terms in the individual s calculus. There are three key questions that the research seeks to answer. First of all, do elites try to send signals to convince voters to abandon their first preference and vote for their second preference? Second, are these signals effective? Finally, are there individual and contextual factors that account for who will accept such messages and who will not? The first hypothesis is that third party voters respond to persuasive cues by elites to abandon their first preference and vote for their second preference. Thus, the individual s perception of the variables in the individual calculus will be a function of the messages sent at the elite level. The results should show that individuals who receive messages encouraging them to vote strategically exhibit higher levels of such voting than individuals who do not receive these messages. Second, the effectiveness of such messages will be contingent on contextual factors, such as the source and type of message, as well as individual factors, such as one s level of political sophistication, external and internal political efficacy, and past voting behavior. An experimental design can clearly test these hypotheses by randomly assigning subjects to control and treated groups. This project makes several important contributions to political science. First of all, the project builds on the literature on strategic voting by filling in a missing part of the puzzle, the efforts by elites to influence the variables in the voter s calculus. The project also speaks to the literature on political persuasion. Most studies of persuasion look at the effect of messages on respondent s opinions on various issues. This study examines whether such messages can actually change the behavior of voters. Finally, this project contributes to the campaign and election literature, where the main fmding has been one of minimal effects for campaign messages. There might in fact be a stronger effect of campaign messages once we examine voters who have an incentive to switch their vote doc22441 none Light activates a series of specific photoreceptors and initiates a complex series of signal transduction events that result in dramatic developmental, physiological, and biochemical changes in the plant. At least three classes of light receptors (cryptochromes, phototropins, phytochromes) are involved in sensing the ambient light conditions. While phytochromes absorb in the red and far red regions, cryptochromes and phototropins absorb in the blue and UV-A regions. Although Ca2+ has been identified as a key second messenger in many signaling pathways, its role in photoreceptor signaling in a single plant cell has not been established. In a previous study, calcium ratio imaging using Fura 2 was used to measure cytoplasmic calcium in dark-growing caulonemal cells of the moss Physcomitrella patens. Fortuitously, the UV-A light needed to quantify calcium stimulated the photoreceptor system, making this approach an important means to study the role that calcium plays in photoreceptor signaling. P. patens mutants that are without cryptochrome genes have been made available to us. Calcium signaling and side branch formation will be examined in these plants to determine the role of calcium as a second messenger in cryptochrome signal transduction doc22442 none Margaret L. Hedstrom University of Michigan Digital Government: Proposal for a Workshop to Develop a Research Agenda on Digital Archiving and Preservation Archiving of digital records in the Federal government is rapidly outstripping the need for archiving of physical objects - for example, it is expected that in the next year or so, the National Archive and Records Administration (NARA) must be prepared to accept, index, and make searchable over 20 million Federal emails. Few agencies are thinking beyond the next 2-3 years, though many, such as NARA, will be required to maintain electronic records in perpetuity. Many issues arise, such as the natural 3-5 year obsolescence cycle of computintg systems, and the perhaps longer cycle of operating systems and applications and associated file formats. Research in this area is clearly needed - the question is one of identifying topic areas in detail, and assigning some priority. That is what this workshop is intended to accomplish. Several other agencies will actively participate in this workshop: the National Library of Medicine, the Library of Congress and the National Agricultural Library doc22443 none The aim of this project is the identification and the construction of allocation rules enjoying properties of fairness and non-manipulability. Central to the study are the following: all agents benefit from an enlargement of resources held in common, more generally of opportunities open to society as a whole; each agent benefits from an enlargement of his endowment, or of his productivity; the welfare of all agents is affected in the same direction by changes in the environment over which no one in particular has control (they all gain or they all lose as a result of the change); the arrival of additional agents, when it is socially costly, implies a welfare loss for all agents initially present; the desirability of an allocation is not affected by the departure of some agents with their assignments; finally, if for two economies having a group of agents in common, two allocations are chosen at which these agents receive the same aggregate resource, then each of them individually receives the same thing in both. The strategic component of the program focuses on the requirement that agents should never gain by misrepresenting the information they control, and it includes related properties of implementability in the face of incomplete information. The possible applications of our allocation problem are the following: dividing a resource as a function of claims agents have on it (equivalently, assessing tax liabilities as a function of individual resources agents control); allocating the cost of a public facility when agents needs are nested and when the facility has to be built so as to accommodate the agents with the greatest need (exemplified by the so-called ``airport problem); allocating the cost of a public facility when agents needs overlap, such as when they are distributed in space (businesses along a road) or time (overlapping generations); allocating the cost of a network, such as a road network or an electrical network; allocating a service over time (sequencing and scheduling); allocating private goods in standard economies doc22444 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses the requirement of high-density microvias, which are critical in a variety of microelectronic modules, such as Flat-Panel Displays (FPDs), Multi-Chip Modules (MCMs), and Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs). As these modules become ever faster, more compact, and more capable, their density of interconnects has been increasing dramatically and new packaging technologies such as Chip-Scale Packages (CSPs) and Ball-Grid Arrays (BGAs) have been developed to accommodate all the required input and output (I Os) connections. Such dense interconnects are realized by the generation of hundreds of thousands of microvias in the substrate layers on which the electronic modules are built. These microvias are also both difficult and expensive to produce because of their small sizes and large numbers. Current technologies for microvia generation are not optimized for the varied cost considerations of different manufacturing requirements direct-write tools address low-volume needs, whereas mask projection systems are designed for very high via-density products. The system technology described in this proposal offers several desirable features, including: high-speed microvia generation for different via densities, full microvia pattern programmability, capability to drill high-threshold photo-ablation substrates, and full and efficient utilization of available high-power excimer lasers. A variety of microelectronic modules, such as flat panel displays, multi-chip modules, and printed circuit boards play an important role in numerous advanced technology applications in both commercial and military systems. Results from this project could result in substantial cost reductions in a wide range of electronic modules doc22445 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will demonstrate the use of a highly sensitive technology to measure the amount of trace metal ions presented in water or other liquid samples and the eventual development of portable instrumentation. This novel approach to detection is effective, sensitive, selective, inexpensive, hazard-free, and truly portable. The system uses an innovative high-resolution bi-cell surface plasmon resonance (SPR) detector combined with anodic stripping voltammetry to achieve detection of ultra-low concentrations of trace metal ions in water. The device based on this technology can be used as a laboratory instrument as well as a portable device for field evaluation of water quality. Further, it could be used as a clinical diagnostic tool for detection of toxic metal ions in blood or saliva samples. This effort will provide an accurate determination of trace metal ions in water. This technology could have a significant impact for protection of the environment. The ability to determine what is hazardous in the environment is very important doc22446 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to develop an efficient and reliable enhanced Raman spectroscopy probe by integrating a microspherical resonator with nanoparticles providing Surface Enhanced Raman scattering. This spectral information provides a chemical fingerprint and analyte identification. However, broader application of this technology is hindered by the powerful laser sources and sensitive optical detection equipment that the inherently weak Raman scattering requires. The proposed probe addresses these limitations by (1) locally increasing the light intensity at the probe head with an optical resonator to permit the use of lower power sources and (2) improving the Raman scattering efficiency with metallic nanoparticles to permit the use of less sensitive detection equipment. Raman spectroscopy has wide commercial application in chemical process monitoring, pharmaceutical analysis, and environmental site monitoring because it provides rich spectra arising from the chemical structure of the analyte. In addition to expanded use in the above-mentioned industries, reducing the cost and size of Raman spectroscopy equipment will enable point-of-care systems for medical diagnostics and field portable systems for rapid identification of chemical unknowns from accidental or intentional releases doc22447 none This project studies the economics and demographics of religious radicalism, particularly in Islam. Radical Islam is an ascendant geopolitical force. Like the Christian Anabaptist sects and the Jewish Ultra-Orthodox, Radical Islam is a relatively recent religious innovation. It arose in the mid 20th century in what historians describe as a reaction to the incursion of secular, market driven, Western culture into traditional society. Like those Christian and Jewish sects its growth represents a paradox to economists. As markets increase the shadow value of time price theory predicts the evolution of time-efficient forms of religious practice. Yet a religious sect evolves which insists on an increasingly time-intensive version of practice, and paradoxically it flourishes. Like radical Christian and Jewish sects, radical Islam owes part of its remarkable growth to high fertility, especially in contrast to the fertility decline of the mainstream Muslim majority. This research makes and explores the consequences of four arguments: First, the formation of radical religious groups has an economic explanation derived from the theory of clubs, which rationalizse both the increased stringency of practice and high (or even rising) fertility. Second, there is strong evidence that radical religious groups can raise fertility rates. At least three groups have experienced protracted episodes of fertility increases over the past 20 years: Iranians, Palestinians and Ultra-Orthodox Jews. High fertility among the radical religious, against a background of fertility transition among traditional and secularizing groups could undermine political stability and economic development in the Muslim world. Third, I propose estimating the size of differential fertility rates of radical religious groups by linking indicators of religious affiliation to micro data from household surveys which report on economic variables and fertility. This allows a test of the hypothesis that subsidies to radical religious groups are strongly pronatalist. The feasibility of these procedures is illustrated in four cases, Israeli Ultra-Orthodox Jews, the Muslim Brothers in Israel, Muslim religious community schools in Indonesia and the Muslim Brothers in Palestine. In the first case results from completed work are reported and in the next two preliminary results are given. Finally, fertility is an easily quantified way that radical religious groups affect behavior, but not the only way. I also examine the advantage of religious sects such as the Taliban and Hamas in operating militias and in dispatching suicide bombers. This advantage can explain why radical religious sects so often turn to violent action doc22448 none In transitional and developing economies, examples abound of ways in which existing institutions and norms either hinder or promote the widening of markets. By reforming institutions that distort individual and firm decisions, informed policymakers usually hope to increase responsiveness to market signals, facilitate more efficient allocation of resources, and promote long-term growth. At the same time, important reforms can be politically difficult to implement if the institutions involved provide security to individuals who are not able to benefit from opportunities provided by greater access to markets. This research examines the trade-off between responsiveness and security from the perspective of villages in rural China. Since the beginning of China s reform period over twenty years ago, local village leader control over decisions about land allocation has helped to insure that all rural residents have access to farm income. Insecurity of land tenure, however, distorts incentives of farmers and may limit household response to opportunities provided by access to off-farm markets doc22449 none Timmermans Organogenesis in higher plants is primarily post-embryonic in that lateral organs of the shoot, such as leaves and flowers, develop progressively from the shoot apical meristem (SAM). The mechanism that distinguishes organ founder cells from stem cells or their derivatives in the SAM is largely unknown, but the regulation of knotted1-like homeobox (KNOX) genes appears to be a key determinant. The rough sheath2 (rs2), ASYMMETRIC LEAVES1 (AS1), and PHANTASTICA (PHAN) genes from maize, Arabidopsis, and Antirrhinum, respectively, encode highly conserved MYB domain proteins that are required to repress KNOX genes during leaf development. Furthermore, the Arabidopsis KNOX gene SHOOT MERISTEMLESS (STM) negatively regulates AS1. The regulatory hierarchy between the KNOX and PHAN-related genes may thus provide a simple mechanism for distinguishing founder cells from stem cells and their derivatives in the SAM, simply by regulating the expression domain of the PHAN-related genes. The mechanism by which the PHAN proteins regulate KNOX genes is not currently understood. The variegated knox expression pattern in rs2 null-mutant leaves suggests that other factors in the meristematic cells of the SAM are required to control knox gene expression. Several RS2 interacting proteins have previously been identified using the yeast two-hybrid system. Based on their homology with known proteins from yeast and mammals, these interacting proteins can be reconciled with a model in which rs2 is required for the assembly of a transcriptional repressor complex that maintains knox genes silenced during leaf development. In order to dissect the mechanisms that control knox gene expression, the RS2 and AS1 complex as well as the origin of the variegated KNOX phenotype in rs2 mutants will be analyzed. The specific aims are: 1) To analyze the basis underlying the variegated knox expression pattern in rs2 mutants. 2) To characterize the RS2 complex from maize. 3) To begin analysis of the AS1 complex from Arabidopsis. The proposed research will broaden our understanding of the process that distinguishes founder cells from stem cells and their derivatives in the SAM. It will also contribute to our understanding of the role of gene silencing mechanisms in development. The preliminary data indicates that an as of yet unknown silencing mechanism in plants that involves the transcriptional co-repressor HIRA may play a central role doc22450 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will integrate a new free-space low frequency electric field (E) sensor with a miniaturized magnetic induction (B) sensor to form a compact six channel sensor package. The proposed new E and B sensor offers a completely new instrumentation capability for geosciences, providing for the first time measurement of the full electromagnetic field vector in a compact package without contact to the ground or any other physical object. The Phase I objectives are to study the trade-offs involved in reducing the overall sensor volume to allow airborne operation, and the use of multiple baseline methods for cancellation of local noise. The application of the new sensor to a variety of geosciences applications ranging from the measurement of ULF atmospheric phenomena and lightning characterization, to magnetotellurics from a mobile platform will be studied. In Phase II a full prototype will be built and tested for the most promising applications. Commercial applications include general research instrumentation for low frequency electromagnetic fields, atmospheric electromagnetic phenomena, military sensors, and complete systems for potential new applications in lighting characterization and airborne magnetotellurics doc22451 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)Phase I proposal is directed at the fabrication of photonic band gap structures in lithium niobate optical waveguide substrate. Lithium niobate, with well-understood material properties, is currently the preferred material for electro-optic modulators and switches. The addition of photonic band gap structures in and around channel waveguides endows this material with further functionality. The enabling technology developed in this proposed development effort can be further extended to other electro-optic and ferroelectric materials. This proposal addresses the development of novel Photonic Band Gap technology that will benefit next generation photonic waveguide devices. Applying Photonic Band Gap technology to electro-optic materials such as lithium niobate crystals paves the way for a new class of innovative, compact, electro-optic devices with enhanced sensitivity, particularly for phase and intensity modulation, spatial and wavelength switching, second harmonic generation, frequency conversion and optical mixing. Electro-optic modulators using this design principle would be able to achieve switching voltage of less than 100 milliVolts. These passive optical devices could be used for the electrical to optical signal conversion from very sensitive Radio-Frequency antennas with a bandwidth of many gigahertz. In addition, Photonic Band Gap technology would allow for improved bandwidth in electro-optical devices. Photonic Band Gap technology would offer significant performance improvements in the next generation of photonic devices. Applications in the Ultra low switching voltage for intensity and phase modulators, compact and highly sensitive sensors, low noise figure optical front-end for antennas is targeted. Compact integrated optics; all optical switching and efficient generation of light sources are needed in billion-dollar telecom industry doc22452 none This Small Business Technology Transfer Phase I Program will demonstrate the feasibility of model-guided approach for developing spin dependent tunnel junctions in magnetoelectronic devices. Spin dependent tunnel junctions are at the forefront of nanotechnology that is under intensive research and development worldwide. Spin dependent tunnel devices are expected to be commercialized in about two years in sensor, isolator, and memory. Due to the unique requirements of the tunnel barrier with a nominal thickness of ~1nm and its interfaces with two ferromagnetic layers, an experimental approach by itself is inefficient in developing new junctions. There is a critical need for guidance from a realistic modeling in the fabrication processing, and this project is specifically designed to fulfill this need. Realistic atomistic modeling will be established and experiments will be judicially chosen to demonstrate the feasibility of this integrated approach. Magneto-random access memories are used in reprogrammable logic, read heads, generic magnetic field sensors, and galvanic isolators and are important components for the electronic storage industry. They have the potential to be applied in other microelectronic devices where thin layers and interfaces are critical doc22453 none Huang This Small Business Innovative Research Phase I project proposesto develop a new approach to protein x-ray crystallography using convergent beams. This new technology is based on the development of convergent beam x-ray optics and of protein diffraction theory with 2-dimensional convergent x-ray beams. Compared with conventional collimating optics, convergent beam optics can provide x-ray beams with orders of magnitude higher flux density, which is crucial for structure measurements with small protein crystals (less than 100 um) using low-power laboratory-based x-ray sources. In this Phase I project, simulation diffraction patterns for different protein crystals will be generated by a new software package CBMPRO to theoretically evaluate the feasibility for determination of protein crystal quality, unit cell, space group, and structure. The commercial application of this project is in the area of proteomics doc22454 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will determine the feasibility of developing a highly innovative, low-cost, high-speed opto-electronic sensor capable of continuously monitoring molten metal alloy compositions during casting and melting operations. Development of this sensor is among the highest priority technology needs identified by both the metal casting industry and the aluminum industry in their industry roadmaps of the future. In order to effectively compete, U.S. metal industries must increase their use of low cost scrap and must also find ways to increase production efficiency. The proposed sensor will acquire critical compositional data thousands of times faster than current commercial methods and will operate on a real time basis without the need to place the sensor in contact with the molten metal. At these speeds, a melt shop could produce one extra metal production batch (i.e. heat) per day, amounting to a 15% increase in productivity. The $30 Billion aluminum smelting industry translates to a potential $4.5 Billion increase in production output for little or no additional capital investment other than the sensor system itself. Improved product quality, reduced emissions, energy savings, and increased product yield will result from the shorter melting times. Similar improvements would be possible for zinc, copper, brass, bronze, iron, ceramics and glass industries that also have need for a similar continuous sensor system to monitor composition and quality doc22455 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop novel flexible, transparent and photocurable nanocomposite barrier coatings to prevent the degradation of conducting polymers by oxygen and water vapor. Conducting polymer electronic devices can be made rapidly, low-cost, flexible, lightweight and mechanically more robust than inorganic electronics; the main limitation to their wide-scale commercialization is the problem with degradation. The solution to this problem is to use a barrier layer to prevent oxygen and water vapor from reaching the conducting polymer. Current barrier coatings do not block oxygen and water permeation well enough to make long lifetime conducting polymer devices possible, and the need is especially great for flexible products such as roll-up displays. Nanocomposites, polymeric materials that contain inorganic particles smaller than 100 nm, have exceptional barrier properties and are ideally suited for display applications because the small size of the nanoparticles allows the composite to be transparent. This project will utilize nanoparticles in a photocurable urethane-acrylate coating system to prevent oxygen and water vapor from reaching the underlying conducting polymer. Coatings are needed to extend the lifetime of conducting polymer electronic devices including: flexible OLED (organic light emitting diode) displays, thin film transistors, new rapid scan chips used as bar-code replacements, printed electronic circuits and lightweight electronics doc22456 none This application seeks support for a basic research symposium designed to stimulate a thorough discussion of areas of controversy in the field of vestibular physiology and related movement control. Over the course of 2 and 1 2 days, there will be six workshops concerning active research areas. We will bring together scientists interested in psychophysics, systems level neuroscience, and cellular and molecular mechanisms to facilitate discussions that incorporate a broad perspective. This format will provide basic information to the field at large, help resolve issues by direct confrontation of scientists with disparate views and inform younger investigators about the important issues in the field that they are entering. Indeed, the principal objective of this grant is to generate funds so that junior investigators and women and minority participants who are making exciting contributions to the field but who have limited travel funds may attend the meeting. An airing of the issues raised in this symposium will ultimately guide the clinical application of our knowledge in persons with balance and orientation problems, as well as a variety of motion-induced visual disorders doc22457 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses the manufacturing of very-large-area flexible displays. It is critical to develop a low-cost manufacturing process that enables very-large-area flexible displays to be manufactured for the military as well as the consumer. Recent technical innovations in the area of very-large-area lithography and fluidic self-assembly offer a unique process for low-cost high-volume flexible display manufacturing. Anvik Corporation has developed a breakthrough lithography technology that enables high-throughput, cost-effective production of very large displays (20 to 120 inches diagonal) on flexible substrates, which may be either loaded as discrete sheets or fed continuously in a roll-to-roll configuration. Anvil s very-large-area lithography technology represents a significant breakthrough in display manufacturing. In this proposal, we present a program for developing a production-worthy lithography system for high-throughput, low-cost fabrication of flexible, high-resolution displays of sizes up to 60-inch diagonal. This lithography process are that it is compatible with fluidic self-assembly manufacturing techniques will potentially result in higher performance and lower cost displays doc22458 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project will prove that laser annealing can crystallize thin films of SrBi2Ta2O9 (SBT) to a device ready quality, while keeping the substrate temperature at a level compatible with CMOS components. SBT films are strong candidates for use in non-volatile ferroelectric memory applications (FeRAM), due to their fatigue-free read write performance and low voltage operation. However, SBT films typically require a post deposition-annealing step ( 700 C in oxygen) to crystallize the films and achieve optimum performance. This high temperature-annealing step is incompatible with current IC fabrication schemes, particularly designs that use tungsten for the first level contacts. This laser-annealing tool will prevent thermal damage to the underlying CMOS structures, and enable SBT film acceptance in FeRAM device applications. The project will show proof of concept by annealing films and demonstrating device performance. Ferroelectrics are poised to rapidly expand into the several billion-dollar non-volatile memory markets. This tool will accelerate this market penetration and thereby become a key component of a multiple hundreds of million dollars per year tool market doc22459 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project proposes to develop novel approaches for the synthesis of carcinogen-modified oligodeoxynucleotides (ODNs) and carcinogen deoxynucleoside monomer adducts that can be used in physical, chemical, conformational, and biological studies, and as reference standards in both academic and commercial work. These reagents are difficult to acquire and they are available to only a few large laboratories with sufficient resources to synthesize them. The proposed methodology will reduce the cost of synthesizing these types of materials substantially, resulting in the widespread availability of these important biological components on a cost-effective commercial scale. One of the attractive features of the proposed methodology is that it will be applicable not only to carcinogen-modified ODNs, but will also be employed for the construction of ODNs modified with other types of agents, such as, tethers and dyes. Tethered ODNs can be attached to arrays and used as targets for gene sequence analysis. The commercial applications of this project are straightforward and involve direct sales of the modified ODNs and carcinogen adduct monomers to the academic community for fundamental research investigations and to industrial firms for environmental monitoring doc22460 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop a novel Resonant-Enhanced Crystallization (REC) Process. REC technology is similar to conventional impeller stirring crystallization but with enhanced mass and heat transfer, low shear or reduced crystal breakage, and improved crystal size distribution. Purification and separation by crystallization is a multicomponent mass transfer phenomenon of the crystallizing solute and impurity solutes. Mass and heat transfer in crystallization process are key factors affecting crystal growth rate, size distribution and habit. However, in conventional crystallizers, the mass transfer coefficient is maximized when crystals are in their terminal velocity and increased agitation results in significant crystal breakage. The proposed technology will further increase mass transfer even in cases where crystals are in suspended status. Due to the low shear associated with the acoustic agitation, crystal breakage will be minimal. The second nucleation will also be reduced and therefore, crystal size distribution will be improved. The objective of this proposed research is to incorporate low-frequency acoustic agitation to the crystallization process to greatly enhance mass and heat transfer. This is expected to improve crystal growth rate, size distribution and quality. The commercial applications of this project are in the area of pharmaceutical separation and purification doc22461 none McGrath This Small Business Innovative Research Project proposes to combine a novel low-frequency acoustic energy technology with an airlift bioreactor. This is expected to provide a dramatic increase in bioreactor productivity by greatly increasing mass transport. The proposed technology will meet contemporary industry needs for a high productivity, low-shear bioreactor that can be used to economically produce a broad range of traditional and newly emerging biochemicals and bioproducts. The commercial applications of this project include the culturing of pharmaceuticals and other biochemicals from a broad range of organisms including plant cells, mammalian cells, fungi, bacteria and yeast doc22462 none This project will investigate the processes controlling mercury (Hg) fluxes between the atmosphere and soils and vegetation. Plant exposure chambers will be used to develop data for modeling the role of forest stand interactions with atmospheric Hg in the biogeochemical cycle of Hg. Mesocosm studies will be used to study soil flux on multiple scales. This effort is important for understanding the role of plants in the biogeochemical exchange of Hg between the atmosphere and terrestrial systems doc22463 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to study the feasibility of a simple and practical narrow-bandwidth vacuum ultraviolet (VUV)laser light source,tunable around 157 nm.This work will combine recent advances in laser technology and nonlinear- optical techniques with previously-studied frequency-conversion schemes.A doubly-resonant four-wave mixing in a guided-wave geometry will be used to convert UV light into the VUV. Extrapolation from previously observed conversion efficiencies shows that the overall conversion efficiency of this process may be increased by 100- x,from ~10 -4 to near-unity efficiency.The laser system that will be developed to drive this process will be small-scale and all solid-state. The commercial potential for such a device promises to radically-improve the practicality of VUV light sources over current laser systems,and will find immediate application as a tool for development of 157nm lithography for manufacturing of integrated circuits,and well as in a variety of other basic science and technological applications doc22464 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project will develop plasticized poly(lactic acid) (PLA) nanocomposites. PLA is a biopolymer derived from corn that is stiff at room temperature, but that can be made more flexible by adding significant amounts of plasticizers. Plasticizers are small, often volatile molecules that are incorporated, but not bound, into polymers to make them softer. These plasticizers can migrate out of PLA, forming a sticky layer on the surface and leaving the plastic hard and brittle. Technology that could both reduce the amount of plasticizer necessary to lower the glass transition temperature and to prevent the plasticizer from leaching out of the polymer would create large new market opportunities for PLA. This Phase I project proposes to increase the permanence of plasticizers by incorporating nanoparticle-anchored plasticizers into PLA. Anchored plasticizers would not be volatile, and extraction and migration should be significantly lower. The anchored plasticizer will still affect the glassy to rubbery transition of the host material, and yet the permanence of the plasticizer will be substantially increased. The commercial applications of this project will be in a number of consumer use markets that rely on petroleum as the starting material. They include flexible plastic films, bags, and toys. Flexible PLA also has the potential to replace commodity thermoplastics like polyolefins and PVC in specific applications doc22465 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project involves the exploitation of nano-materials as optical based chemical sensors. This innovative approach to chemical sensing will take advantage of the material s quantum size effects, such as enhanced absorption and photoluminescence properties (sensitivity), high surface areas for analyze sensing (miniaturization), and ease of synthetic preparation (specificity). The use of optical based sensors provides additional advantages, such as no electrical noise, fast response, ease of miniaturization, safe near flammables, more durable than electronics, and applications to remote sensing. The characterization of the optical and electronic properties of the nanomaterials is critical to their development into the proposed optical sensor arrays. This research will also contribute to the increasing information database of nanomaterials as they pertain to advanced electronic materials. The research will lay the groundwork for fabricating multi-analyze optical sensors. The technology, once successfully developed, will be used the semiconductor manufacturing industry doc22466 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project focuses on providing ambient power for wireless smart sensor units used for condition-based monitoring. Specifically, this project is to develop a Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS)-based power-scavenging module. Current research in the area of ambient power has established a strong foundation from which future solutions in the area of condition-based maintenance will take shape. Research will also be performed on rare earth magnets to custom design thin permanent magnets that will produce a high-flux density in the compactly designed system. The proposed component will provide power through the conversion of ambient machine vibration using electromagnetic induction. Design objectives include the optimization of energy-scavenging efficiency in varying environmental conditions, operating conditions, and system types. The proposed system uses MEMS technology to realize small dimensions (one-inch square and less than 0.5 cm. thick) and energy storage capabilities. Commercial applications include industrial machinery, vehicles, air conditioners, and refrigerators. Additional options are large markets such as building controls and manufacturing doc22467 none This project will install a nitrate sensor and a set of optical sensors on two moorings that will be deployed along the Chukchi shelf during the Shelf-Basins Interactions (SBI) field program in . The currently funded SBI mooring program does not include any biochemical or optical sensors in its instrumentation array and the SBI Scientific Steering Committee has strongly recommended that such types of sensors be added to provide a better understanding of the variability of physical and biological processes that influence the exchange of energy and material between the shelf and the deep basin. The SBI mooring PI s have agreed to accommodate these instruments on their array. This project will attempt to increase the operational time and capability of these instruments and will provide a record of a primary nutrient and the optical properties of the upper water column during the first year of the SBI field program doc22468 none Chinn This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I Project proposes to develop an optical tomography imaging system for in vivo small animal imaging. This system will support both active exogenous imaging of oxy deoxy-hemoglobin using near-infrared laser sources and endogenous light sources from bio-luminescent or fluorescent probes .With the goal of developing a state-of-the-art small animal scanner, this Phase I project will investigate source detector configurations to determine the optimum geometry to maximize image resolution and to minimize cost. This will be followed by the development of novel image reconstruction algorithms and of innovative methods to achieve quantitative imaging for bioluminescent and fluorescent optical probes. The commercial application of this project is in the area of animal imaging. Animal imaging methods are important in the evaluation of new drugs and in basic biomedical research doc22469 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop a fast density functional (DFT) program for accurate electronic structure calculations on medium-sized molecules (30-200+ atoms). The proposed method will have the same accuracy as traditional integral-based DFT codes, but will be an order of magnitude faster, with the speed-up increasing with system size. The increased efficiency is particularly important for molecular dynamics applications. In the Phase I project, the accuracy and speed of the method for single-point DFT energies will be demonstrated. In a follow on Phase II project, a fully functioning program will be developed, including gradients (for geometry optimization and dynamics), second derivatives (for vibrational frequencies), NMR chemical shifts and other important molecular properties. The code will be parallelized, integrated into our PQS program and supplied with our QuantumStation, a combined hardware-software package for running parallel implementations of the most important methods of quantum chemistry. The commercial application of this project is in the area of software development for academic and business community involved in biological and biomedical research doc22470 none algebraic objects, arising in theoretical physics and chemistry for instance, in terms of linear motions of suitable spaces, to render their structure more transparent. In the meantime, the scope of objects studied along this line has been dramatically enlarged, and a big arsenal of methods to analyze such representations has been assembled. Tools which have proved particularly effective include geometrical and combinatorial setups, and variations of a general theme which can be outlined as follows: One starts by establishing optimal situations, which can be completely analyzed, and then measures the deviation of a more challenging situation from the optimal ones to make headway in steps dealing with progressive increases in complexity. Applications extend to almost all parts of mathematics and provide the theoretical frames for models in theoretical physics. In fact, some of the recent initiatives were prompted by physicists and feed back into quantum physics doc22471 none This Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) Phase 1 Project proposes to develop transgenic maize (Zea mays L.) with increased tolerance to heat stress. It has recently discovered that a gene encoding the maize chloroplast protein synthesis elongation factor, EF-Tu, plays a role in the development of heat tolerance. EF-Tu protects other proteins from heat-induced inactivation and aggregation. The overall goal of this project is to genetically engineer maize that overproduces EF-Tu under high temperature conditions and to exploit the protective role that EF-Tu plays in heat tolerance. The key objectives of the Phase 1 research include (a) the creation of EF-Tu transgenic maize protoplasts, Arabidopsis and maize whole-plants and (b) the assessment of their heat tolerance in the laboratory. The results of the Phase 1 project will lay the groundwork for the follow-on Phase 2 and Phase 3 projects. They will include the testing the performance of EF-Tu transgenic maize in the field (Phase 2) and its commercialization (Phase 3). The commercial applications of this project will be in the area of agriculture. High-temperature is a major limiting factor to plant productivity, often causing significant economic losses to both domestic and international agricultural markets. The development and commercialization of transgenic maize with greater ability to tolerate heat stress is expected to have enormous economic benefits for the United States and the world doc22472 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop oral vaccines for controlling white spot syndrome virus (WSSV)in marine shrimp using transgenic algae. In recent years shrimp production on Latin American shrimp farms has been reduced by up to 50 percent by WSSV outbreaks. Current technologies for controlling WSSV have had limited effectiveness. This Phase I Project will test the hypothesis that transgenic algae expressing WSSV capsid proteins can function as ideal vaccine delivery vectors for nearly all life-stages of shrimp. Larval shrimp feed on microalgae and adult shrimp consume dried microalgae in their diet. Recent work by the investigators has demonstrated that both live and freeze-dried microalgae expressing foreign antigens can induce an antigen-specific immune response in fish. It is therefore likely that microalgae can deliver functional antigens via oral delivery. The commercial application of this project is in the area of shrimp farming doc22473 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase 1 Project is to investigate the technical feasibility for harvesting natural carotenoids from the marine algae, Dunaliella salina . Due to the high capital and operating costs associated with existing technologies, the current price of natural beta-carotene is about twice that of the synthetic variety. By enabling the commercial production of natural beta-carotene at a cost closer to that of the synthetic product, this research is expected to lead to a significant growth of the natural beta-carotene market. The specific objective of the Phase I research is to determine the feasibility of a low-cost method to harvest the above mentioned marine algae from the growth medium and to extract the beta-carotene from this algae. The technology to be developed in this project could also be used to harvest and to purify other carotenoids from the algae. The commercial application of this project will be in the beta-carotene market. Beta-carotene is currently used for a wide range of applications : as a nutritional supplement, as an agent for food fortification, as an animal feed, and as a food colorant doc22474 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project describes the development of a high sensitivity, large dynamic range force transducer capable of measuring transient force changes in tension and compression. The operating principal is based on the change in optical properties at the molecular level with loading of a pre-stressed polymer material. The polymer acts as a linkage to which a force would be applied either in compression or tension. The molecular deformation of the polymer linkage will be analyzed using miniature optical components arranged as a phase-modulated polarimeter capable of birefringence measurements on the order of 10^-9. Calibration of the measured birefringence with known loads will provide the necessary calibration parameters. Potential commercial instrument would be capable of directional force, pressure and acceleration measurements and would be extremely accurate for measuring low-level forces. Since the force transducer is based on optical techniques, it would be immune to electronic noise, and would allow measurement of rapidly changing loads doc22475 none Pegg This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I Project proposes to develop novel biomaterial-based microparticles called Sphericules. These microparticles are self-contained micrometer-scale reactors capable of performing genetic analysis without expensive instruments. The new composite beads, with temperature stability, solvent resistance, controlled buoyancy and other properties, will find applications in many diverse markets. The Sphericule methodology combines layers of natural and synthetic polymers, metals, ceramics and other chemicals to produce new composite beads, fibers and coatings. In contrast, multifunctional latex beads using a surface coating of antibody on a micron sized fluorescent particle are labor intensive to produce. Particle batch processing results in aggregation, uneven surface treatment, and loss of signal molecules. This Phase I project proposes a novel method for synthesizing uniform particles using micro-scale systems in a continuous process. In this process, the chemistries of bead formation, optical reagent incorporation and surface modifications are expected to be straightforward, stoichiometric and predictable. The commercial applications of this project are in the areas of biomedicalresearch, diagnostics, electronics, and defense doc22476 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project proposes a highly innovative technique for using nanomaterials of high strength in fabrication of microgears with end applications in medical instrumentation. The demand for precision instruments required for medical diagnosis and microsurgical tools are increasing continuously over the past decade to provide better service. Endoscopes and microsurgical instruments have decreased in size from 25 mm to 10 mm over the past six years. The decrease in size of these instruments has become possible due to the reduction in size of the drive systems employed. Electric motor drives currently in use have evolved from a size of 10 mm to 2 mm. The tiny gears used in these motors for torque transmission fail due to friction and wear. Thus, there is a need for increased performance of the microgear components in the micromotors. The mechanical properties of strength and hardness are increased by fabrication of these microscale components using nanocrystalline particles. This Phase I Project proposes a novel approach for fabrication of the microgears with nanocrystalline copper. The feasibility of the technique will be evaluated by fabrication of microgears (100 microns diameter) and by the characterization of their physical and mechanical properties. The commercial applications of this project will primarily be in the area of biomedical devices and instrumentation. Other applications would include disk drives, toxic-gas monitors, camera-lens drives and pagers doc22477 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will meet the need for advanced optical instrumentation to support scientific research in the area of X-ray radiation in the upper atmosphere. It is proposed to develop a Lobster-eye X-ray Imaging Sensor as a low-cost, all-plastic, X-ray focusing optical device for real-time, remote sensing of X-rays in auroras in the polar regions. Lobster-eye X-ray Imaging Sensor will be light enough to be carried by stratospheric balloons for use in remote observation and mapping of the precipitation of energetic electrons from solar eruptions. It is designed to collect spatial, temporal, and spectral information both by day and by night. Its low-cost, plastic, potentially disposable X-ray focusing collimating optics, which are lobster-eye-like fiber elements with specially treated cladding to reflect X-rays, will be based on the company s advanced precision replication of plastic, single-fiber, optical components. Conditions in near space and the upper layers of the atmosphere affect telecommunications, weather monitoring, and sea transportation in the Polar Regions. Current state-of-the-art visible aurora studies are limited to the dark hemisphere, and X-ray mapping now uses single-detector sensors that are expensive, heavy, and complex. Commercial applications are in astronomy, meteorology, nuclear power stations, crystallography, and related areas. An even broader spectrum of applications exists for the LEXIS systems plastic, X-ray focusing optics, which can easily and completely replaces the capillary Kumakov optics and metal anti-scattering grids used in medical radiology, security, X-ray lithography, and many other X-ray applications doc22478 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a compact source for lithography. As a synchrotron equivalent, this proposal presents a single-stepper, XUV or soft-x-ray source, which offers high brightness, high collimation, modest operating vacuum, excellent spectrum and moderate cost. The x-rays are generated inside a compact betatron by the electrons passing through thin radiators made of thin metal foils, crystals or multi-layers producing a forward-directed beam of x-rays whose photon energies can be XUV, soft and hard x-ray depending upon choice of radiator. As a synchrotron mimic, the source can have many applications. For lithography the x-ray wavelength can be optimized for highest photo-resist sensitivity, e.g.1.4 nm. In a proof of principal experiments, tunable monochromatic x-rays from thin crystal and multi-layer radiators mounted inside a betatron have been observed. Pulse-height spectra were obtained and tuned by rocking the crystal or multi-layer relative to the electron-beam direction. We will use our existing experimental apparatus to demonstrate high x-ray flux at soft x-ray wavelengths. Potential commercial applications effort will demonstrate the capability of generating XUV and x-rays for lithography and crystallography. It can also function also as a medical source for imaging and as a laboratory source for scientific purposes now relegated exclusively to synchrotrons doc22479 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop a software platform, GeneRx for depression. This platform will incorporate pharmacogenetics and nonlinear adaptive algorithms toward optimizing anti-depressant treatment on a patient-specific basis. In this Phase I project, a predictive algorithm will be developed using genetic and medical chart information from patients diagnosed with major depressive disorders who have taken the anti-depressant citalopram. Genetic data will be acquired by genotyping DNA from blood samples for selected single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in genes that have been directly affected by citalopram. Prediction of response to citalopram is important in order to avoid delays in receiving adequate treatment and to avoid exposure to unnecessary side effects. The commercial applications of this project are in the area of healthcare management and delivery doc22480 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop a novel, electro-optical sensor capable of capturing single airborne particles and analyzing their compositions on a time scale of a few minutes. The sensor concept is based on a previously developed innovative technology for single-particle electrodynamic capture and Raman spectroscopy. The electrodynamic trap is capable of capturing and suspending single airborne particles of sizes 1 to 100 m. Analysis of the trapped particle by Raman spectroscopy provides a fingerprint of the vibrational structures of the particle s chemical components, analogous to that obtained by infrared absorption spectroscopy, but with single-particle sensitivity. This in turn leads to identification of the particle as bacterial or otherwise, as well as to preliminary identification of the bacterial species. In this Phase I project, a compact sensor that can continually screen ambient habitat air and analyze each trapped particle on a time scale of minutes will be devised. The commercial application of this project is in defense and health-related industries doc22481 none Drukier This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project proposes to examine Multi Photon Detection (MPD) of biological warfare agents using a panel of MPD enhanced immunoassays. MPD based techniques promise to deliver: (1) parallel detection of all biological warfare agents, (2) improved sensitivity of biotoxin detection, leading to fewer false positives and negatives, (3) more rapid results, (4) lower cost per assay, and (5) greater ease of use. This Phase I project has the following specific objectives : (1) production of recombinant fragments of biotoxins and development of antibodies, (2) development and characterization of antibodies for biotoxins, including botulism, tetanus and anthrax, (3) development of IA MPD (MPD enhanced immunoassay) for these three biotoxins and comparison of sensitivity with the prior art, mainly ELISA, and (4) further assay optimization. The commercial application of this project is in the area of homeland security doc22482 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to apply Multi Photon Detection technique (MPD) to quantify proteins bound to a microarray of antibodies. The first arrays will target cytokines, the important secreted proteins that regulate the immune system. The goals of this project are to create an immunoassay based protein-chip for the concurrent measurment of all the cytokines down to the level of a few zeptomole sample, to implement improved P-chip designs using peptide nucleic acid linkers, and to study the levels of cytokines in cell cultures and human samples. By analyzing patterns of protein expression and their post-translational modifications, correlations of functions and or of disease states with specific protein expression patterns are expected to be established. The commercial applications of this project are in the area of medical diagnostics doc22483 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop a sensitive and rapid method for detecting rare cells infected with viruses. Although PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) has revolutionized nucleic acid detection, leakage of amplicons from cells during thermocycling, an inherent problem in conventional procedures, limits its use for in situ PCR applications. Furthermore, microscopic visualization after in situ PCR is tedious and not amenable to rare cell detection. Development of a rapid method to identify and quantify activation of genes involved in viral infection and tumorigenesis in single rare cells would significantly benefit both research as well as clinical applications such as diagnosis and therapeutic staging. The Phase I research will develop the assay using model cell lines infected with the human T-cell leukemia virus type I. The commercial applications of this project will be in the area of diagnostics linked to the managemement of genetically based diseases doc22484 none Thompson This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I Project proposes to demonstrate the feasibility of developing a label-free biochip for applications in genomics, proteomics, life sciences, and pharmaceutical research. Biochips are intended to enable rapid, massively parallel analyses for such applications. However, the typical biochip relies on the use of labels to detect the binding event. Labels are expensive, especially for high-throughput screening (HTS), and can change the chemistry of the ligand. The binding of a low-molecular weight ligand is particularly difficult to detect by any current (or emerging) biochip technology. During the Phase I project, experiments are planned to show(1) that the proposed technology can be used to detect hormones, drugs, metabolites, carbohydrates, and signal transduction molecules in the 100-500 Da size range binding to enzymes, lectins, and DNA; (2) that this technology can differentiate among cross-reactive ligands that bind to a given biomolecule; (3) that the signal is specific to ligand binding and is not affected by artifacts that affect other biochips; (4) that protein denaturation caused by carrier solvents can be detected, and (5) that chip read-out will be exceptionally sensitive and rapid. The commercial applications of this project are likely to be in a number of different areas. They include the markets for medical diagnostics, environmental monitoring, food and beverage safety, proteomics, drug discovery and development, biomolecule development, and ultra high-throughput screening doc22485 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will research passive components in electronic circuits increases, new interconnect technologies, such as embedded passives, are under development to optimize utilization of board real estate. For embedded passives, dimensional accuracy translates into control over component values, and so there is a need for high-precision fabrication processes. TPL has developed soft lithography micro-contact printing, an additive process that can fabricate near-net-shape structures with features between 100 microns and the sub-micron scale. The innovation exploits the compositional flexibility of sol-gel chemistry to synthesize powder-free inks with a wide range of materials properties that can be patterned with high resolution using the novel micro-contact printing technology. Potential commercial applications effort will demonstrate the feasibility of micro-contact printing for application to high-density interconnects solutions, and could be an enabling technology for high-precision embedded passives. The PI has pioneered the use of micro-contact printing as a novel interconnect technology while TPL has extensive experience in developing packaging solutions for the electronics industry doc22486 none The goals of this three-year research project include investigation of the operation of devices based on alternate device technologies, including p-channel strained SixGe1-x and narrow-width SOI device structures. The simulation tools that will be developed for this purpose will begin at the semi-classical Boltzmann equation level in the hierarchy of approximations, and extend to direct simulation of quantum transport within various approximation schemes at the most fundamental level. The main goals are to develop tools based on direct solution of the semiclassical Boltzman equation using either full-band or non-parabolic energy band models. These techniques will be combined with robust, multi-processor field solvers based on multi-grid and Bi-CGSTAB methods including non-uniform grids for arbitrary device geometries. Discrete impurity effects will be included through a quantum molecular dynamics scheme to assess the fluctuation in device operating characteristics based on random impurity distributions. Collaboration with industrial partners will be undertaken for comparison and calibration with state of the art device technologies. Due to the computational demands of both 3D semi-classical and quantum device modeling, the proposed research will be supported by high-performance computing environments based on distributed workstation clusters. In addition to research, there will be significant educational enhancements that will accompany this research project. These include introduction of new classes in the area of Computational Electronics, Web-based activities and inclusion of minorities and undergraduates in research. As such, they will help introduce our graduate students to the challenging world of Computational Electronics in both Industry and Academia doc22487 none Brantingham This is a 36-month AWARE project submitted by Dr. Jeffery Brantingham, Santa Fe Institute with Professor MA Haizhou, Qinghai Institute of Salt Lakes, Xinning, China, to study the Pleistocene hunter-gatherers of the Tibetan Plateau, and to provide an REU training opportunity for six exceptional U.S. undergraduate students. This is an excellent proposal to understand late Pleistocene human colonization and adaptation to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau region. This study nicely integrates archeological, paleo-environmental, and geochronological research strategies to answer questions of broad importance in the study of evolution of behaviorally modern humans. This project provides excellent opportunities for U.S. undergraduate students to be trained in archeology and to learn to carry out field research in the western part of China. It also develops paleoclimatic proxy records that can be integrated into regional and global models of climate variability and change. The NSF and the Chinese Academy of Sciences jointly support this project doc22488 none Sasaki This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I projectproposes to develop a novel technology for Laser-Enabled Analysis and Processing (LEAP ) of living cells. The ability to load cells with compounds is critical in many areas of research and medicine such as drug discovery and gene therapy. Current methods have limitations with respect to specificity, efficiency, toxicity, and or throughput. Optoinjection is a novel and versatile procedure for cell loading that has been demonstrated in a few laboratories. Unfortunately, it is a slow and laborious procedure carried out on specialized microscopes. Oncosis is developing a LEAP platform for high-speed cell scanning and purification via lethal laser effects on unwanted cells. The LEAP platform could be used to implement optoinjection in a high-throughput, cell-specific manner that would enable the commercialization of this novel form of cell loading. In this Phase I Project, feasibility studies are proposed to modify a LEAP instrument, and then to evaluate conditions of optoinjection for different cells and compounds. Phase I Research will yield a model database providing greater understanding of optoinjection, and will define the scope of feasibility. Phase II Research will optimize and implement optoinjection in biologically relevant experimental systems, resulting in data supporting this powerful new tool for the analysis and manipulation of living cells within a physiological environment. The commercial applications of this project will be in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries doc22489 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop a new intraoperative imaging probe based on a solid-state, compact readout sensor coupled to a high resolution, high light output converter. Nuclear Medicine imaging has been widely used to preoperatively image structures of interest for excisional biopsy. Radio-guided intraoperative procedures utilizing non-imaging gamma detector probes and radiotracers have facilitated a cost-effective, highly specific means to locate suspect tissue and access it for pathologic analysis. The result of radio-guided surgery is increased tissue specificity obtained for biopsy, minimally accessed incisions, and the reduction of inpatient hospital utilization with an improved patient recovery. The main drawback of non- imaging gamma guidance is the lack of ancillary information of the surveyed area, such as distinction between two neighboring radioactive regions, which can be overcome with an intraoperative imaging probe. Also, the highly penetrating gamma radiation from other parts of the body increases the background, and limits the practical use of current probes. This Phase i project seeks to address these limitations by designing a new-generation intraoperative probe intended to image the tumor bed with short-range beta rays. When developed, this detector will allow accurate delineation of the tumor, thus facilitating precise resection. The commercial application of this project is in the area of biomedical devices and instrumentation doc22490 none Blackwell This Americas Program award will support a workshop on Asomycota (Fungi) to be held before the IV Congreso Latinoamericano de Micologia at the Universidad Veracruzana, in Xalapa, Mexico. The workshop, which is being organized by Dr. Meredith Blackwell of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, and Dr. Rosario Mendel Ortiz of the Instituto de Ecologia, in Xalapa, Mexico aims to train thirty U.S. and Latin American students in culture, identification, and systematics techniques for ascomycetes, a group of fungi that numbers over 32,000 species. Throughout the world, about 32,000 species of ascomycetes have been described. It is, however, estimated that the number could in reality be double that number and many of the anticipated new species are believed to occupy Neotropical habitats. Indeed, mycologists who work in the region have discovered well over 100 undescribed ascomycetes in the past year alone. It is important, therefore, to have a new generation of well-trained mycologists from both the U .S. and Latin America to work with these ecologically important organisms and contribute to biodiversity assessment and monitoring. The proposed workshop, with its focus on the latest techniques, training, and students, will promote an exchange of ideas, knowledge, and cooperative interactions among an upcoming generation of Western Hemisphere mycologists doc22491 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project intends to fabricate, and test a condensation nucleus counter (CNC) of the turbulent-mixing type, with a detection limit below 2 nm particle diameter, and able to measure the size distribution of aerosol nanoparticles. A novelty of this apparatus is that its super-saturation level can be adjusted quickly and accurately along a wide range. This ability, along with the dependence between critical super-saturation and embryo diameter, will make it possible to measure in real time the size distribution of the nanometric fraction of the aerosol. It will be shown that the design of this CNC effectively delays the onset of homogeneous nucleation; uncharged particles smaller than 3 nm in diameter are readily activated; a detection limit below 2 nm for uncharged particles can be achieved by using the appropriate condensing vapor; and charged nanoparticles of arbitrary small size are detected. Note that this demonstrated detection limit is substantially smaller than that of the best CNC commercially available (TSI model A, 3 nm detection limit). Three tasks have been identified to materialize the goals of this proposal: design and fabrication of a CNC prototype; experimental demonstration of the performance of the CNC; and execution of fundamental research on heterogeneous nucleation. The overall work will eventually lead to the commercialization of an improved CNC. The main fields of application include: bio-aerosol detection, air quality testing, environmental studies, particle emission testing, and materials, pharmaceutical and basic aerosol research. This turbulent-mixing CNC will enable the analysis of macromolecules via liquid chromatography with a very significant gain of sensitivity with respect to more common schemes. This analytical application has considerable commercial potential doc22492 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to develop encapsulation layers for organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays. Cost-effective thin film encapsulation is widely recognized as a crucial key technology needed to capitalize on the full potential of OLED technology. Transparent thin film encapsulation layers deposited at low temperatures and moisture-free ambient are needed for lightweight and low cost OLED displays and microdisplays. This project is focused on novel atomic layer deposition (ALD) techniques that are especially designed for cost-effective encapsulation of OLED devices at process temperatures below 100 C. Traditional ALD techniques are impractically slow at this temperature range and make inefficient usage of chemicals. These problems are circumvented by a combination of efficient ALD process and equipment. Objectives include evaluation of encapsulated OLED device performance and reliability, with corresponding cost analysis. A successful project can mark a breakthrough in the market of portable display devices since adequate thin film encapsulation technologies for OLED devices have not been developed successfully so far. The OLED market is projected to grow to over $1.6 billion in revenues annually, attributed mostly to microdisplay applications, within the next five years. It is expected that OLED will play a bigger role in the $50 billion Flat Panel Display (FPD) market in subsequent years. Currently the missing piece in OLED device processing equipment, vacuum-deposition encapsulation technology will provide a substantial competitive edge to process equipment vendors. It can thus signify an entry point for the U.S. to regain a substantial market share in the FPD market doc22493 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to develop temperature-sensitive nanoparticles to protect drugs from degradation in a targeted drug delivery system. Several important pharmaceutical compounds have low solubility and short half-life in the aqueous phase. As a result, significant portions of the therapeutic agents hydrolyze during formulation or in the blood before reaching the required site. Nanotechnology and microemulsion technology provide a novel approach to overcome these limitations. In this project, a model therapeutic agent, an anticancer drug, has been chosen for the development of an effective formulation. Microemulsion will eliminate hydrolysis of the therapeutic agent and also provide thermodynamically stable nano-size encapsulates for further development of the temperature-sensitive release characteristics of the end product. These nanoencapsulates will circulate in the blood for the long time and therapeutic agent can be delivered at the site of interest (tumor cells) by increasing temperature of that site with the help of a laser. The commercial applications of this project are in the area of pharmaceutical drug delivery doc22494 none Kane This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I Project proposes to develop an enhanced spectral interferometry method for biological and biomedical applications. This method will provide rapid, high resolution optical imaging and can be easily coupled with fiber optics for in-vivo applications using endoscopes, catheters and similar devices. The Phase I Project will demontrate the utility of enhance spectral interferometry for cross-sectional imaging in biological tissues. In the follow on Phase II Project, a fiber optic imaging spectral interferometer capable of high speed will be developed. The commercial applications of this project are in the area of biomedical devices and instrumentation. This technology will be applied to a variety of biomedical research and clinical needs including monitoring of tissue response to drugs or radiation exposure, detection of cancerous and pre-cancerous tissues, and the imaging of venous and arterial structures and ocular pathologies doc22495 none Delamination fracture is a major design concern for load bearing structural components manufactured from composite materials. Current standard test methods describe procedures for the determination of inter-laminar fracture toughness or the number of fatigue cycles for the onset of delamination growth using Linear Elastic Fracture Mechanics (LEFM) theories. These methods carry severe limitations resulting in an inadequate characterization of the fundamental design parameters of the materials. A fundamental approach, which has so far been ignored, is the correlation of these material design properties with Non Destructive Inspection (NDI) parameters such as those detected by Thermal Wave Imaging (TWI) or other methods. If such relationships exist, the prediction capability of the standard test methods in evaluating design and durability related parameters of materials and structures, should be considerably enhanced. The Thermal Wave Imaging System to be used in conjunction with the existing state of the art mechanical properties characterization equipment will enable the researchers to conduct fundamental research on the delamination fracture behavior of composite materials as well as damage tolerance studies on other metallic and nonmetallic structures. The aim is to develop guidelines to establish delamination behavior of composite structures and damage tolerance of materials and relate them to structural performance, as determined by standard test methods. This will enhance the prediction capability of the current standard test methods and reduce the premature failure of structures in service. Thermal Wave Imaging system will not only enhance the quality of many research projects at TU, but strongly help in training graduate and undergraduate students at a historically black institution. At least two graduate and two undergraduate students will be trained in this area of research every year. The PI and two of his research associates, with a strong background in materials characterization, will guide and advise the students research, which will be in the form of graduate M.Sc. thesis and senior research projects. Some of the PI s and the research associates time will be devoted to maintaining the equipment doc22496 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop enabling technology for construction of a small, low cost fiber optic switch. The switch will be based upon vertical cavity surface emitting laser arrays and PIN photodiode arrays, both coupled directly to a silicon switching interfacing integrated circuit. The switch design and fabrication processes will be enabled by new interconnect technologies using direct-write of both organic materials and liquid metals using ink jet printing technology. Collimating or focusing polymer microlenses will be printed directly onto the vertical cavity surface emitting laser arrays with photolithographic accuracy, coupling the output of the vertical cavity surface emitting lasers directly into arrays of multimode optical fibers. The same will be true for coupling into detector arrays. Solder-Jet technology will be used to electrically interconnect the active optical elements to the silicon integrated circuit with practically zero interconnect distance, drastically decreasing parasitic effects The optical and electrical interconnect methods developed in this project will have commercial applications far broader than the fiber optic switch. Some of the other applications include: fiber optic transceivers, imaging sensors, read write heads, laser sources for printers, optical sensors for medical diagnostics, micro-assembly, micro-electromechanical machines packaging and 3D-packaging doc22497 none Ariola, Zena University of Oregon Special Projects: Proofs as Programs The University of Oregon at Eugene has been provided with support to organize a summer school on the increasingly important paradigm of proofs-as-programs. According to this paradigm a typing assertion M: A has several isomorphic interpretations. In the computational interpretation, M is a (functional) program and the type A is its specification. In the logical interpretation M is a proof of the proposition A. The discovery of the connection between the two interpretations is due to Curry, Howard, and DeBruijn. Fifty years later, this connection between proofs and programs is now established as the foundation of many formal systems and automated techniques for reasoning about programs. The aim of the school is to prepare interested graduate students, academics, and software engineers for conducting research in the area. The curriculum will include basic foundational material for all attendees; advanced material for those interested in new research directions; and a review of various tools together with experience in using them for various tasks for those interested in practical applications. In more detail, the curriculum will include the following three major categories of lectures: 1. Background: This material consists of well-established results developed in the late 80 s and early 90 s. This background information will provide an introduction to the essential concepts and methodologies of the paradigm. 2. Advanced Topics: This material consists of more recent results that extend and generalize the earlier work. This will provide students with insights into research and open questions. 3. Applications: This material will demonstrate how theoretical results can be used by practitioners in various fields of computer science. This will provide students with skills in the use of formal methods to reason about and generate solutions to practical problems, such as verification of hardware protocols and Java specifications doc22498 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will investigate the feasibility of employing novel conducting polymers (e.g. poly 3,4-diphenylpyrrole) to prepare solid state gas sensors. The proposed sensor will be low cost and selective to a specific class of chemical compounds, namely chlorinated hydrocarbons. The proposed sensor will also be capable of operating at room temperature, thus eliminating the need for significant power consumption and making the development of small, selective, low-cost, and portable detectors feasible. This project will demonstrate the feasibility of preparing solid-state gas sensors based upon this material. Variations in materials chemistry, including monomer composition and dopant ion, will be used to develop sensors that are highly stable, sensitive, and selective to chlorinated hydrocarbons. This sensor technology will complement Nanomaterials Research s existing product line by continuing the development of low cost sensor technologies that provide unique commercial advantages. The proposed sensor will be marketed to companies who manufacture instrumentation for health and safety, environmental monitoring and process control applications doc22499 none Coleman Understanding many soil processes, including the accumulation of organic matter and the formation of soil aggregates, requires research that is conducted over decadal time periods. The dynamics of soil organic matter and soil fauna at the Horseshoe Bend (HSB) agroecosystem site in Georgia have been studied in replicated experimental plots since . Analyses indicate that the experimental treatments (no-tillage and conventional-tillage regimes) are continuing to diverge. It is essential to continue the experiments for an additional six years, to enable prediction of what the long-term consequences of our manipulations will be. Consequently, a continuation of ongoing LTREB research on soil processes in no-till and conventional till plots at HSB is proposed, with some significant changes. The new research focuses on two related areas: 1) long-term measurements of the gradually-increasing base of soil organic matter from C3-pathway plants, in crop rotations that have been in effect since . 2) following the production, accumulation, fate and ecological effects of the Bt proteins from the summer planting of Bt (and non-Bt) cotton in subplots within our main plots. The relationship between these focal areas is simple. The variation in the size of soil aggregates may influence the sequestration of Bt toxins, and their breakdown products, within soils. It has already been shown that no-tillage management systems at HSB generate an increasing representation of soil macroaggregates in comparison to the markedly reduced macroaggregates in our conventional tillage plots. Therefore, it is hypothesized that no-tillage systems will sequester more Bt-related products than will conventional-tillage plots. Several short-term studies (see references in Project Description) have failed to detect deleterious changes in non-target soil fauna as a result of Bt in crop residues. There are three possible explanations for this: a) that no deleterious effects exist, b) that short- term experiments do not adequately predict the long-term consequences of repeated exposure to Bt residues, and c) that effects are contingent upon properties of the soil such as aggregate size. It would seem prudent to be able to distinguish among these possibilities and the long-term plantings at HSB will allow that to occur doc22500 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop a new type of nanoengineered surface to epitaxially nucleate protein crystals. These surfaces should greatly accelerate most high throughput Structural Genomics efforts. The basic concept for the epitaxial surfaces is to prepare a surface that possesses chemical modulations commensurate in size and periodicity to protein unit cells. It is speculated that exposure of the protein growth solution to certain compositional periodicities (5-100 nm) on the surface of the heterogeneous nucleants induces an ordered layer of sorbed protein molecules which form the incipient nucleus of the protein crystal. Since for a given unknown protein the unit cell is not known in advance, the heterogeneous nucleants are prepared as a combinatorial library in a chip based format, with a wide variety of modulations per unit chip area. In this Phase I proposal, methods and techniques will be developed to allow a more efficient survey of surfaces and proteins with the goal of better defining the role of the surfaces in inducing nucleation. The commercial applications of this project are in the area of biological research and in drug discovery and development doc22501 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will demonstrate the feasibility of a miniaturized fast-response oxygen sensor. Fuel efficiency of automotive engines and power generating systems improve when operated under lean-burn conditions. Oxygen monitoring in industrial processes promise higher productivity while effective fire fighting requires information regarding local combustion conditions. These applications all require in-situ oxygen sensors that combine rapid response, sensitivity, selectivity, resistance to fouling, and thermal and chemical robustness. The firm proposes to develop an Oxygen Sensor by combining key innovations including (1) unique thin-film semiconducting metal-oxides (SMO) sensitive to oxygen concentration in the 0.001-21 percent range, with rapid (10-100 ms) response time, and temperature insensitivity in the 700- ....C range, and (2) refractory SiC microhotplate gas sensor platform capable of operating to ....C, with only 20 mW power consumption. Commercial application of the proposed oxygen sensors includes automotive and aeronautic propulsion systems, power generation, incineration, food packaging technology, and fire fighting doc22502 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)Phase I project is aimed towards the development of comprehensive engineering equipment capable of measuring droplet sizes, velocities and temperature simultaneously in a manufacturing environment. The innovation of the project is multifold, as the proposed equipment will be capable of measuring diameter sizes, velocities, and temperatures simultaneously using a novel concept referred as Laser Induced Fluorescence Thermometry (LIFT). Under LIFT molecules are excited in the electronic levels by a light source emitting a secondary emission (excited state) that is sensitive to temperature. The commercial application will initially be in the powder production industry and the ink-jet industry. These industries require the full characterization of in-flight droplets doc22503 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project develops novel spin-dependent-tunneling (SDT) magnetic-field sensor devices based on innovative methods of flux modulation. The program identifies two modes of flux gating as a means of chopping or sweeping the magnetic field which is sensed by the SDT transducers. The flux gating methods are proposed as enhancements to the functionality of the already promising SDT magnetic sensor. The first method offers a low-power solution for increasing the SDT signal-to-noise ratio especially at low frequencies where 1 f noise is present. The second method enables the determination of absolute field magnitudes. Successful development of these novel ideas will lead to the advancement of small, solid-state, inexpensive, low-power, high resolution magnetic-field sensors. These sensors can be used discretely or in compact arrays for diverse applications including non-destructive evaluation of metallic structure flaws. The commercial applications of the research include non-destructive evaluation of flaws in metallic structures; detection, surveillance and tracking of magnetic or metallic objects; security systems; and magnetic media sensing-which includes currency evaluation and discrimination, and magnetic card readers doc22504 none Recent analysis of National Election Studies (NES) data has produced surprisingly strong evidence of the existence of a large-scale noncooperative equilibrium among eligible voters (i.e., electors) in American presidential and House elections, with the equilibrium being supported by all electors having rational expectations about the election outcome (Mebane a; Mebane and Sekhon ). Mebane and Sekhon refer to such a noncooperative equilibrium that is supported by all electors having rational expectations as coordination. The analysis using survey data extends and refines the evidence in favor of such strategic coordination previously produced using aggregate district-level and time series data in connection with models of the American political economy (Alesina and Rosenthal ; ; Alesina, Londregan and Rosenthal ). The models of coordination purport to explain important political phenomena such as policy moderation, divided government and midterm loss. The emphasis on rational expectations and noncooperative equilibrium represents a substantial departure from the large related literature on ticket splitting. Mebane ( a) and Mebane and Sekhon ( ) demonstrate that models of strategic coordination fit presidential year and midterm individual-level survey data significantly better than do nonstrategic models. Notwithstanding the results that strongly suggest the existence of strategic coordination, important questions remain concerning the validity of the models of coordination that have been tested so far. Mebane and Sekhon propose to extend the research they have already completed to explore and hopefully resolve some of these concerns. The theoretical and empirical models use common knowledge assumptions about individual voters that are unrealistic and unbelievable. In reality a coordinating voting equilibrium must depend on in- stitutions such as public opinion polls to aggregate and broadcast information. Mebane and Sekhon propose to weaken the information assumptions of the current models, especially by bringing in adaptive learning. Regarding the treatment of policy positions in current empirical models of coordination, questions arise regarding the models assumption that all candidates of the same political party have the same positions and regarding the way the models treat the dimensionality of the policy space. Mebane and Sekhon propose to estimate models that use more flexible assumptions about policy positions. The policymaking institution assumed in Mebane ( a) and Mebane and Sekhon ( ) ignores many features of the presidency and Congress that might affect electors beliefs, strategies and behavior. Mebane and Sekhon propose to investigate the consequences of shifting from the current emphasis on the national share of the legislative votes (in particular House votes) each party receives to the share of seats, and in particular to the threshold of having a majority of seats. Another set of concerns center on the question: are the effects of coordination large enough to be important? Mebane and Sekhon ( ) supply an answer for the effect coordination may have on midterm cycles. They propose more generally to investigate the consequences of voters having equilibrium as opposed to unstructured beliefs about expected election outcomes. Mebane and Sekhon propose to address these concerns by completing two kinds of tasks: (a) develop- ing a suite of new coordinating model specifications that will be, as in Mebane ( a) and Mebane and Sekhon ( ), at once equilibrium theoretical models and structural econometric models to be estimated using NES data; and (b) constructing simulation models that use NES data to let the simulations as closely as possible match the distributions of choices, preferences and information that exist in recent American electorates. Mebane and Sekhon propose to write software that will be freely available and easy to use, so that other researchers will be able to use the estimation technology of Mebane ( a) and Mebane and Sekhon ( ). They also plan to make freely available the proposed simulation software doc22505 none Recently, a number of researchers have emphasized the impact that beliefs about mental processes can have on the legal process. Research on metamemory (e.g. people s understanding of and control over memory) is therefore critical for understanding how jurors might incorrectly weigh evidence. Particularly important are situations where beliefs about mental functioning diverge from people s actual capabilities. Recent research has demonstrated that people are unaware of visual information that they do not attend to, and that they typically attend to a very small proportion of visual information in a given scene. One particularly striking manifestation of this failure occurs when subjects have difficulty detecting large between-view visual changes. This finding is referred to as change blindness (CB), and it occurs regardless of whether the subject is actively searching for changes, and even when the changing object is the current focus of the subject s attention. In part, interest in these findings is based on the degree to which they conflict with intuition - many people are incredulous when they discover that seemingly obvious changes are missed by subjects. Three sets of experiments in this proposal explore visual metacognition, documenting the scope of incorrect beliefs about visual information processing. A first set of experiments tests the degree to which beliefs about visual organization and intention underlie this metacognitive errors in vision. In these experiments, subjects will make estimates about changes to well organized natural scenes, jumbled scenes, and object arrays. A second set of experiments compares predictions about picture memory with predictions about on-line visual processes such as change detection to determine why subjects underestimate their performance in the former case, while they overestimate their performance in the latter case. The final experiments in this proposal explore the possibility that inaccurate visual metacognition can lead jurors to misevaluate evidence in criminal and civil cases. Just as incorrect beliefs about the confidence-accuracy correlation can lead jurors to misjudge eyewitness evidence, inaccurate beliefs about vision may lead them to misunderstand what someone should have seen doc22506 none A National Science Foundation grant has been awarded to King s College for microbiology laboratory equipment that will be used in undergraduate research at three local colleges. David Glick, Ph.D. and Brian Mangan, Ph.D. of King s College will share a new gas chromatography system installed at King s with Michael Sulzinski, Ph.D. of the University of Scranton and Kenneth Pidcock, Ph.D. of Wilkes University. The grant will demonstrate that shared use of equipment can foster the integration of research and education among undergraduate microbiology students and four highly skilled faculty investigators at three institutions of higher education. Two gas chromatographs configured with a computer and special software will facilitate new research in two areas. Separate, but related, research will identify and analyze lipids (fats) in bacteria, fungi, and fish through laboratory studies at the three institutions. Additional research will focus on Susquehanna River ecology, analyzing the effect of the environmental contaminant, polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB), on fish, and the effect of acid mine drainage on the abundance and diversity of river bacteria and fungi. One of the gas chromatographs will be dedicated to analyzing lipids (fats) extracted from bacteria and fungi. Once the lipid analysis has been done, the computer software supplied will allow the identification of the particular bacteria or fungus. The other gas chromatograph will be dedicated to the analysis of an important environmental contaminant known as PCB (Polychlorinated Biphenyl). This second instrument will also be used to examine which chemicals, in a mix, bacteria degrade. Prior to this NSF grant award, no institution of higher education in northeastern Pennsylvania possessed a gas chromatography system configured for research to identify and analyze microbes by their fatty acid profile. The research also has basic scientific importance. It will provide new insights into the ecology of soil and river bacteria and fungi as well as increasing our knowledge of the impact of PCB contamination on the life cycles of fish. The acquisition of this important equipment will strengthen the integration of undergraduate education, research and research training at all three institutions of higher education doc22507 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project will explore a fundamentally different approach to digital magnetic sensors. The traditional approach combines a sensor having an analog output with an electronic analog-to-digital converter. In the proposed magnetic field sensor, the analog-to-digital conversion occurs in the physical mechanism of the sensor itself. With this approach only inexpensive digital electronic circuits are needed to complete the sensor system, resulting in a robust, and economically manufacturable design. Being based on standard integrated circuit processing techniques, the new digital magnetometer will be easily mass-produced. The new products will be smaller, cheaper and use less power than existing sensors in a range of applications including: digital compasses, geomaganetic surveying equipment, and vehicle sensors for traffic control and intrusion detection. The very small size of the sensor will also enable new applications using high-density sensor arrays for example in currency and document validation or portable biomedical assay devices doc22508 none Heyduk This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop a new general platform for preparing biosensors for a large number of target molecules. The target molecules for these biosensors will be the compounds (ligands) which regulate DNA binding activity of sequence-specific DNA binding proteins. A large number of such highly-selective ligand-dependent DNA binding proteins has evolved in nature to regulate gene expression. Many of the ligands for these proteins are compounds of interest in environmental, forensic, toxicological and biomedical analysis. This project proposes a general strategy to prepare biosensors that can detect these ligands and that take advantage of the outstanding specificity of DNA binding proteins. The presence of the target molecule will be reported by a change of fluorescence intensity of the sensor. The overall objective of the Phase I project is to provide experimental verification of the biosensor design. The commercial applications of this project are expected to span a number of different markets requiring detection of many target molecules. The new biosensors to be developed in this project will find commercial use as detectors of environmental pollutants, of toxic compounds in food and of regulatory molecules in biological and biomedical research doc22509 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop an entire new class of LC materials consisting of unique mixtures of polar and nonpolar nematic LCs that form an induced smectic-A phase with bilayer or multilayer microstructures. The proposed Induced Smetic-A LCs (ISALCs) are intrinsically low in viscosity, and therefore their optical properties can be electrically switched at low voltages without power pulse heating. ISALC materials will significantly improve the performance of flat panel displays, electro-optic devices, and storage media with infinitely long-term intrinsic memory. In contrast, current monolayer smectic-A LCs are highly viscous, and thus require either very high voltage for electrical driving or complicated thermal addressing. Other LC materials such as ferroelectric smectic-C and cholesteric require careful treatment of substrate surfaces and precise thickness of LC layers, which has limited their widespread commercial use. The commercial applications of these materials include scientific and industrial instrumentation ranging from microelectronics manufacturing, telecommunications, computers, and training and simulation systems, and extending to security control systems doc22510 none The initiation of protein synthesis in all eukaryotes is an intricate process requiring at least 8-10 known initiation factors. The long term goal of the PI s laboratory is to elucidate a detailed molecular description of this process in plants. Towards this end they have isolated and cloned plant initiation factors to determine their biochemical properties and structures, and ultimately to map their physical and functional interactions with each other, mRNA and ribosomes. The overall objective of this research is to obtain an understanding of the function of two forms of eIF4F in plant translation initiation. Three specific questions will be explored. First, how does the molecular composition of eIF4F and eIF(iso)4F complexes affect specificity of mRNA translation, and what features of a mRNA (5 UTR, 3 UTR or coding region) affect discrimination by eIF4F and eIF(iso)4F? Plants have a second novel form of eIF4F, eIF(iso)4F. Some mRNAs are translated poorly in vitro by eIF(iso)4F, whereas others do not show a preference for eIF4F or eIF(iso)4F. The subunit(s) of eIF4F and eIF(iso)4F that confer specificity of mRNA translation will be determined using mixed subunit complexes (eIF4G eIF(iso)4E and eIF(iso)4G eIF4E). In addition, the portions of the mRNA (5 UTR, 3 UTR and or coding region) that are necessary for discrimination by eIF4F and eIF(iso)4F will be determined using chimeric mRNAs. Second, is eIF(iso)4F redundant or necessary for plant survival? Genetic methods will be used to determine whether knockouts or gene silenced eIF(iso)4F subunits, eIF(iso)4E, and eIF(iso)4G produce any obvious phenotypes and or are necessary for viable plants. Finally, how does the binding of eIF4G affect eIF4E structure and affinity for mRNA? A peptide derived from eIF4G that contains the eIF4E binding site will be used to make a complex to study the changes in eIF4E structure upon its binding. Further studies will be carried out to measure changes in mRNA affinity for the complex compared to eIF4E. Protein synthesis is an essential molecular process for all cells. An understanding of the interactions of the factors, ribosomes and mRNA is necessary to integrate this process and its regulation with other cellular processes. It is clear that some aspects of the initiation of protein synthesis are very similar among all higher organisms, but that there are some fundamental differences. The presence of the isozyme form of eIF4F suggests that plants may have retained a more ancient form of the eIF4F complex or evolved a second complex for some specific purpose or function in plants. A clear understanding of how plants manufacture their proteins will help in the development of plants with higher nutritive value or as living factories for the production of protein pharmaceuticals. This project is supported by the Biochemistry of Gene Expression Program and the Molecular Biochemistry Program in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences in the Directorate for Biological Sciences doc22511 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to establish metabolic engineering approaches to increase the production of commercially relevant terpenoids in mint. This program will be directed toward high priority areas that will allow U.S. mint growers and processors to become more competitive in the production of existing products such as menthol, as well as the ability to produce novel high value compounds. The specific objectives include biochemical profiling of terpenoids in 150 different mint varieties, production of tissue-specific cDNA libraries and generation of 15,000 Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs), development of a mint DNA microarray and the use of this array to investigate gene expression patterns during trichome development, determination of protein function for one putative terpenoid biosynthetic enzyme, and improvement of mint transformation efficiency to the range of 50-100 percent. Completion of these objectives will provide a basis for the development of a robust system for metabolic engineering in mint that will allow the creation of improved lines that have enhanced production of commercially relevant terpenoids. This endeavor will create new products for U.S. mint producers and enhance their competitiveness in the world market. The commercial application of this project is in the area of high value, plant derived compounds doc22512 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to establish the technical and economic feasibility of a novel photocatalytic technology to inactivate air-borne surrogate bacterial spores representative of Bacillus anthracis (anthrax bacteria). The technology is to be incorporated into circulating air ducts of buildings, providing protection against introduction of anthrax into central air systems by a terrorist act. The investigators have previously developed a new class of photocatalysts that are orders of magnitude more active for organic compound oxidation than the traditional titania. This new class of photocatalysts will be adapted for use in anthrax spore destruction. The program will utilize photocatalyst composition studies to tailor a superior photocatalyst for this application, to be followed by reactor studies of the bactericidal efficacy of the new photocatalysts, and a competitive cost analysis of the technology relative to other alternatives for maintenance of indoor air quality. The immediate commercial application of this project is in the area of homeland security. The proposed technology will protect against the threat of introduction of lethal anthrax spores into central air systems doc22513 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I Project proposes to develop a geminivirus-derived gene expression system, based on cabbage leaf curl virus, to test the effect of agronomically important genes in a transient, high throughput model. While the genomics revolution is a major step toward understanding gene function, the foremost challenge is correlating bioinformatics data with actual functional responses. Paradigm Genetics, Inc., currently uses the plant model species, Arbidopsis thaliana in a pipeline developed specifically to address the bottleneck between sequence and functional data. Arabidopsis plants genetically engineered to over or underexpress single genes are analyzed in developmental, biochemical and molecular platforms. While this pipeline has been successful in many ways, two disadvantages remain : (1) the amount of time required to generate stable Arabidopsis transformants, and (2) the ability to test only one gene at a time. To address these issues, this proposal initiates the development of an additional platform using geminivirus vectors. First, a genetic screen of Arabidopsis ecotypes and a mutagenized population will be carried out. This screen is designed to isolate symptomless Arabidopsis lines supporting viral replication and spread. Second, based on the hypothesis that lower viral levels can decrease symptom development in the plant, the viral vector will be modified to replicate at lower levels. Results from this research will be used to start a high throughput assay to determine functions of agronomically important genes. Additionally, these results will lead to important agronomic understandings of virus host interactions. The commercial applications of this project are in crop plant improvement doc22514 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will lead to the development of a new type of widely tunable external cavity diode laser for use in next generation optical networks. These networks, parts of which are being deployed now, will rely on a high degree of network flexibility, especially on the ability to dynamically provision wavelengths throughout the communication grid upon demand. Key to deployment of such networks will be the availability of widely tunable source lasers at price points that are competitive with present fixed-wavelength telecommunications lasers. The result of this multiphase R&D effort will be production and marketing of a widely tunable transmitter module for long-haul telecommunications doc22515 none The National Plant Genome Initiative was launched in FY as a long-term project to explore the structure and function of plant genomes. Its goals are to ensure that useful properties of plants can be understood, improved, and ultimately harnessed to address national needs, including agriculture, nutrition, energy, environment, and health. A five-year plan was developed to guide the program during its inauguration. The program has made significant progress to date, and the NPGI must begin to develop objectives for its next phase. To provide input to this planning process, the National Research Council will form a study group consisting of experts in genomics, plant biology, informatics, and other relevant fields of science. The study group will organize a 3 day workshop to: (1) identify key scientific questions that might be answered in the next five years; (2) consider the relative priorities of additional sequencing, functional genomics and proteomics within the initiative; (3) examine the potential to use bioinformatics and biological tools that are available or emerging, and; (4) describe the tools, infrastructure, and human resources that are needed to successfully address key scientific questions identified by the workshop participants. Following the workshop, the study group will write a report summarizing its assessment of the key scientific directions and recommending priorities for the plant genome initiative for the next five years. The report will be published and made available on the web. The report will be delivered by the end of August doc22516 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I Project proposes to develop and validate augmentation strategies for micrometer scale laboratory tasks by using a prototype Augmented Micro-manipulation System (AMS) based on a cooperative robot. The AMS is applicable to a vast range of micrometer scale laboratory tasks including biomedical research ranging from tissue manipulation, to cell injection and other engineering laboratory tasks such as MEMS assembly. The AMS uses the cooperative paradigm (where the robot shares the control of the tool with the user) to allow easy integration of human intelligence, superior analytical abilities of a computer, and the precision of the robot to achieve better accuracy, and success in performing the selected task. The AMS complements the basic compliant motion of the robot with appropriate sensor-based augmentation strategies for efficiently performing different portions of the selected task. The AMS is a compact, flexible, and cost-effective system for performing common micrometer scale laboratory tasks. The commercial application of this project is in the area of laboratory instrumentation linked to biomedical research doc22517 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is designed to demonstrate the feasibility of developing a magnetic microscopy technique for real-time imaging of electrical current densities with sub-micron resolution for the analysis of electromigration (EM) processes. EM failure remains one of the most challenging problems facing the semiconductor industry. The microscopy technique uses specially designed magnetic sensors called magnetic tunneling junctions. By non-invasively measuring and analyzing the magnetic fields generated by current-carrying elements, one can image EM processes in real-time, with high sensitivity and resolution under ambient conditions. The Phase I research will focus on two critical issues for the commercial viability of this technique: 1) the design and fabrication of sensors with low noise and high-temperature tolerance for real-time operation; 2) optimization of electronics and algorithms for application to multi-level and deep sub-micron ICs. EM-induced failure analysis remains one of the most active fields of study in the semiconductor industry. It is important to any chip manufacturer that it be able to characterize EM in real-time and on-site. The research results will have numerous potential applications in electronics-related fields including semi conductor integrated circuits and data storage doc22518 none Keshab K. Parhi Institue of Electrical & Electronics Engineers, Inc. The IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Systems (SIPS02) will be held at the Catamaran Resort Hotel from October 16-18, . SIPS02 focuses on topics at the convergence of signal processing theory, VLSI architectures, and integrated circuit implementation of multimedia communications. The conference theme this year reflects the critical role played by signal processing microsystems in the deployment of next generation communications infrastructure including wireless, optical and wireline systems. SIPS02 is requesting the National Science Foundation to provide a travel grant to provide travel funds to U.S. students who would otherwise not be able to attend this workshop doc22519 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project proposes to investigate the application of an automatic inference engine called Discovery Machine to the domain of gene mapping. Discovery Machine is a set of knowledge acquisition tools that aid experts in solving problems over large amounts data. The proposed enhancements to the Discovery Machine will allow genetics experts to model their own strategies for interpreting the information needed to map genes. The development of bioinformatics tools is aimed at researchers who wish to better leverage computing power to solve problems across large sets of data but cannot easily write software to enable their efforts. The commercial application of this project is in the area of bioinformatics doc22520 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a pulse measurement device intended to fully characterize optical pulses used in fiber optic telecommunication systems. Next generation optical networks will use 40 Gbit s rates requiring pulse widths of less than ~25 picoseconds. At this pulse width, dispersion compensation is required to obtain transmission distances of greater than 25 km. In addition, nonlinear optical effects will complicate system development by adding intensity-dependent dispersion. Optical network designers are anticipating these problems by developing active dispersion compensation. However, a requirement of active dispersion compensation is accurate measurements of pulse intensity and phase within an optical network. Then, corrections to the dispersion compensation can be determined exactly. A pulse characterization device is proposed that will be self-contained, have only one fiberized input, be rugged and easy to use. This technology has commercial potential as a diagnostic for telecommunications research and as a diagnostic for optical network design. As optical networks move beyond the OC-192 standard, active dispersion compensation will be required. This technology can used in research applications and can be part of a feedback mechanism to actively control dispersion in functioning optical networks doc22521 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop the Liquid Phase Epitaxy (LPE) of potassium tantalum niobate (KTN) on a cubic perovskite substrate. This film material will have much higher electrooptic coefficients than current generation lithium niobate waveguides. This project proposes to develop new, low dielectric constant substrate materials that will enable better matching of the effective microwave dielectric constant to the optical dielectric constant of the film material and lower bias fields. In Phase I, the researchers will identify congruently melting substrate materials with suitable lattice parameter match to KTN that can be grown by the Czochralski method. Various flux systems and growth conditions will be tested to find those most conducive to LPE growth of good quality films. Electrooptic devices are used in communications, analog and digital signal processing, information processing, optical computing and sensing. Devices include phase and amplitude modulators, multiplexers, switch arrays, couplers, polarization controllers, deflectors, correlators and sensors. The proposed work will enable electrooptic modulators and innovative new device applications with lower costs, smaller footprints and lower power budgets. All this contributes to improvements of the infrastructure of the Internet and more rapid, lower cost deployment, especially in the local loop doc22522 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will develop the technology necessary to produce low-power, low-noise VLSI amplifiers for large-scale neural recording applications. Although there are many emerging multi-electrode arrays for neuroscience and neuroprosthetic recording applications, these arrays are practically limited by wiring densities and percutaneous connections. In order for chonic neural recording applications to achieve electrode densities in the 100 to electrode range, implantable amplifier, signal processing, and multiplexing circuitry will be required. The existing VLSI technology available for microelectrode recording is inadequate to create implantable amplifier systems with this number of channels. These types of implantable amplifier systems will also be necessary for emerging clinical neuroprosthetic applications that will require chronic recording from large numbers of neurons in the brain. In this Phase I project, novel CMOS techniques will be developed for producing the necessary high-density, low-power amplifier elements. In the follow on Phase II project, these techniques will be integrated and fully developed into implantable amplifier systems for neuroscience and neuroprosthetic research. The commercial application of this project is in the area of biomedical device and instrumentation. The implantable biopotential amplifier systems produced in this project will be directly marketed to neuroscience researchers for use with high-density microelectrode arrays. The technology will also be used in the development of clinical neuroprosthetic applications doc22523 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses the accurate measurement of the composition and microphysics of atmospheric aerosols that have significant implications for global and regulatory environmental issues. This project would replace the quadrupole mass-spectrometer (QMS) with a compact time-of-flight mass spectrometer (TOFMS). This would enable the measurement of complete chemical composition on a particle by particle basis. Key to this is the electronic and data acquisition system, which will make semi-continuous TOFMS practical computationally. The Phase I project will lead to the construction of a prototype instrument that will have unique capabilities for real time monitoring of ambient aerosol chemistry and microphysics. Moreover, the coupling of high efficiency EI to the compact TOFMS will have many other potential mass spectrometric applications. The commercial market for the existing aerosol mass spectrometer includes government and educational research labs, and may expand to include regulatory monitoring efforts and process industrial laboratories doc22524 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a surface coating technology that will be used to create improved materials for regulating cell behavior for research, tissue engineering and cell therapy applications. For these applications, advanced materials are needed that display multiple types of active proteins, while preventing nonspecific protein adsorption. Current methods of protein immobilization do not meet these requirements. This project will use a previously developed technology, based on an end group activated Pluronic (EGAP), that tethers proteins to materials while preserving protein activity. In the proposed Phase I research, this technology will be further developed to facilitate coimmobilization of multiple proteins in predetermined proportions. The specific objectives of this project are (1) to develop a new form of EGAP that contains a versatile protein binding tag, (2) to evaluate the feasibility of using this new coating to coimmobilize multiple biomolecules on a substrate, in controlled ratios, and (3)to create materials that display two important regulators of cell growth and differentiation, namely fibronectin and epidermal growth factor. The commercial applications of this project are in a number of areas, including proteomics, drug development, toxicology, environmental testing, tissue engineered devices and medical implants doc22525 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will synthesize semiconductor interconnects by using a novel chemical vapor deposition technique for deposition of silver and copper films on high aspect ratio patterned substrates for sub 100 nm CMOS devices. This technique called hybrid chemical vapor deposition combines the advantages of conventional Chemical Vapor Deposition to achieve integrated circuit super filling, of trenches and vias under low temperature processing conditions. This technique utilizes precursors made with metallic nanoparticles (size of metallic particles: 35 nm) that can be uniformly dispersed inorganic solutions using appropriate surfactants. The liquid precursor can be transported to the patterned wafer surface in the form of mist and under appropriate low temperature thermal conditions can form a conformal film of metal on the surface, which further aggregates inside the pores to achieve super filling. Initial work conducted on copper films has shown very promising results. Application of the research is expected in microelectronics industry. The important are of reliable interconnects will help signal integrity. The successful development of hybrid chemical vapor deposition process has not yet been reported in the literature and would represent an important advancement in metal thin film deposition process doc22526 none Funding from the National Science Foundation will support Dr. Geoffrey E. Braswell, Dr. Jennifer B.Braswell, and their colleagues for three seasons of archaeological research at Pusilha, a prehistoric Classic period(A.D. 250-800) Maya population and political center located in southwestern Belize, Central America. Their investigations will test current models of the political and economic integration of archaic states through the conjunctive study of hieroglyphic monuments, ceramic and lithic artifacts, and settlement patterns. Phase 1 research will consist of block coverage survey of the 9 km2 that constitute the ancient urban, residential, and agricultural zones of the site. Data from this phase will allow the mapping team to build a geographic data base to examine how natural resources influenced settlement patterns, and how different segments of the population were situated in regard to those resources. Phase 2 investigations will consist of test-pitting operations in residential and special function groups that crosscut all periods of occupation and social status. Artifacts gathered during Phase 2 will be used to study the level of economic integration of elites and commoners from a diachronic perspective, as well as interaction with much larger and more powerful polities - particularly Copan and Caracol - located to the southwest and northeast. Phase 3 excavations will consist of horizontal stripping operations in areas thought to have been production zones. Data gathered from these intensive excavations will enable the researchers to: (1) obtain fine-grain temporal information linked to architectural strata; (2) test models regarding production loci developed through the test-pitting research; and (3) more fully answer questions about the economic integration of elite and commoner households. Current with all three phases, project members will document and analyze the large corpus of hieroglyphic monuments from Pusilha. These monuments describe in great detail the founding of the site and its dynastic history, and hint that Pusilha -- for a time -- may have been absorbed by the expanding Copan state or hegemony. Analyses of settlement patterns and artifact distribution, therefore, will afford the study of the economic effects of the political events discussed in the ancient texts. This research will contribute most immediately to the understanding of local and regional political and economic processes in a largely unknown region of the southeastern Maya periphery. More broadly, it will contribute new and refine existing models of organization, stability, and change in Maya society, and - by extension - will be of relevance to the study of archaic states throughout the world doc22527 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is directed towards making devices that take advantage of ferroelectric s properties and overcome the current roadblocks in the way of commercializing ferroelectric devices. MicroCoating Technologies (MCT) proposes a novel concept that would enable ferroelectric based capacitors to be integrated with transistor technology. Ferroelectric devices have potential for applications such as tunable capacitors, phase shifters, and others. If MCT succeeds in its product plan, it would enable a smaller, low-noise, high transmission rate microwave devices and components and successfully commercialize ferroelectric devices. The market for tunable microwave devices continues to grow as the world untethers itself from telephone lines, that is the increasing use of cell phones. An industry leader in wireless technology has expressed significant interest in ferroelectric materials, and has identified a number of areas in a cell phone that would benefit from variable capacitor, for example doc22528 none Singh This Small Business Innovation Research project proposes to develop novel fluidization systems that are needed for synthesis of nano-encapsulated insulin particles for pulmonary drug delivery applications. By coating the insulin particle with very thin (10-50 nm) layer of biodegradable polymers such as polylactic acid (PLA), the sustained release characteristics of insulin can be significantly altered. The unique method has several advantages over conventional methods including low polymer loading, and impurity-free processing. The nano-encapsulation method involves using laser ablation thin film deposition technique to coat drug particles which are fluidized in the gas phase. This Phase I project will develop batch scale fluidization systems which are capable of fluidizing up to 1 kg of particles at a time. The commercial applications of this project are in the area of pharmaceutical drug delivery doc22529 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project involves the development of photoluminescent phosphors and coating materials for ultraviolet light emitting diodes that will make possible a white light emitting diode having high color purity, efficiency and lifetime far exceeding those of current state of the art. The white light emitting diode light will be produced by down-converting the ultraviolet amplitude emission from light emitting diodes using an efficient mixture of several photo-luminescent phosphors. The materials will be optically coupled to light emitting diode dies using a newly developed selective deposition process (electrophoretic) that is currently being patented jointly by PhosphorTech and Agilent Technologies. Improved solid state & phosphor material technologies are expected to result in dramatic changes in the lighting industry over the next several years. This new white light source would change the way we live, and the way we consume energy. The worldwide amount of electricity consumed by lighting would decrease by more than 50%, and total worldwide consumption of electricity would decrease by more than 10%. The global savings would be more than 1,000TWh yr of electricity at a value of about US$100B year, along with the approximately 200 million tons of carbon emissions created during the generation of that electricity. Moreover, more than 125GW of electrical generating capacity would be freed for other uses or would not need to be created, a savings of over US$50B of construction cost. Finally, the impact on the environment will be dramatic, resulting in the elimination of one of the main sources of mercury pollution doc22530 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims at developing a novel low-cost method for the preparation of Multi-Walled Carbon Nanotubes (MWCNT) for Field Emission Displays (FED) applications. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are characterized by high aspect ratio and small radius of curvature at their tips. This structural property, together with high electrical conduction, chemical inertness and mechanical strength makes them promising emitters for field emission flat panel displays. CNTs have been conventionally prepared by high-pressure, chemical-vapor-deposition processes, but these approaches have serious limitations owing to high cost of production. Recently suggested alternative methods of CNT preparation include plasma activation and catalytic growth, but they are limited by low yields or metal contaminations. In this Phase I effort, Materials Modification, Inc. proposes to synthesize carbon nanotubes from readily available raw materials by combining a pyrolysis and chemical process. The CNT thus produced will be chemically pure since no metal catalyst is used in the process and any side-products formed are in vapor state and will not contaminate it. Potential commercial applications include display aided flat bedded control panels, all types of touch screen facilities, flat panel monitors for both professional and entertainment displays, and naval and air surveillance systems doc22531 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a novel method of interrogating the structural condition and cure state of composite materials. It works by propagating a sub-nanosecond voltage pulse along an intrinsic microwave transmission-line fabricated directly in the laminate. The transmission-line is formed using graphite-reinforcing fibers as the conducting path. Changes in pulse propagation are used to monitor changes in cure state, and detect various structural failures such as microcracking, delamination, disbonding, marcelling, and moisture absorption. The fibers are native to the material and constitute zero structural defect, and negligible cost. Applications include graphite composites, glass composites, composite joints, and metal-adhesive joints.The commercial potential will be an inexpensive and spatially continuous structural-health and cure monitoring system with minimal invasiveness doc22532 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses the development of a miniaturized and inexpensive solid-state electrochemical carbon dioxide gas sensor for environmental air quality control, based on a novel-sensing concept, utilizing solid polymer electrolytes and thick film device miniaturization techniques. Carbon dioxide emissions are a global issue. In addition, CO2 monitoring and control in offices, homes, indoor sport arenas, enclosed parking garages and schools are of growing importance. The method of infrared spectroscopy is predominantly used in commercially available carbon dioxide monitors. Although the infrared spectroscopic system offers acceptable precision, it is large and relatively expensive. To the best of our knowledge no solid state, room temperature electrochemical carbon dioxide sensor is commercially available for environmental air quality control applications. The proposed novel electrochemical sensor, which could be configured as a handheld or a panel mount room device or for surface mounting on air ducts, will be reliable, inexpensive and compact and will yield an enhanced response signal at room temperature, utilizing miniaturized thick film sensors for CO2 monitoring in environmental applications. The feasibility of the proposed novel concept will be demonstrated and the best catalyst material and thick film sensor design parameters will be identified. The potential commercial applications for the proposed solid state, room temperature electrochemical carbon dioxide sensor include: A) Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) control applications where demand control ventilation based on CO2 concentration of residential, commercial and industrial spaces occupied by people, could improve energy efficiency while simultaneously improving the indoor environment. B) Agricultural and bio-related process applications. The growth rate and development of plants can be improved by controlling the concentration of carbon dioxide. C) Food packaging industry. In the meat packaging industry, a high concentration of CO2 in the packaging inhibits bacterial growth and retains the natural color of the meat. D) Medical applications where an inexpensive electrochemical sensor could be used to measure the concentration of carbon dioxide in an exhaled breathe and could be incorporated in breathing systems doc22533 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a cost-effective, fast-acting sensor for detecting the presence of nitroaromatic explosives. It involves a unique chemical detection technology in which colorimetric changes in an array of dyes constitute a signal much like that generated by the mammalian olfaction system; each dye is a cross-responsive sensor. This technology has been dubbed Smell-Seeing . The program is designed to evaluate the sensitivity, specificity and reproducibility of the electronic nose when used to detect nitroaromatic explosives and to integrate the smell-seeing technology into an inexpensive, portable monitor for real-time detection of explosive substances. This work will result in a hand-held, battery-powered device for preventative surveillance and early detection of these compounds, thereby reducing risk to the general public, public servants and military personnel here and around the world doc22534 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)Phase I Project proposes to develop novel diagnostic and therapeutic approaches for management of infectious pathogens in finfish such as the hybrid striped bass (HSB). HSB aquaculture has become the fourth largest form of U.S. fish production. Prior research by the investigators on the molecules involved in the innate, non specific immunity of HSB has led to the discovery, cloning, and characterization of a novel, cysteine-rich, antimicrobial peptide (AMP) that has been named bass-hepcidin. Hepcidin homologs are present in many finfish species. Bass-hepcidin is strongly expressed in the liver upon experimental challenge with the devastating aquaculture pathogen Streptococcus iniae. Phase I research objectives include: 1) synthesis and purification of the peptide, 2) development of a polyclonal antibody and ELISA assay), 3) testing of the minimum inhibitory concentration of the peptide against important aquaculture, agriculture, and human pathogens, and 4) measurement of gene expression in finfish tissues in experimental challenges with pathogenic bacteria using Northern blots rtPCR. If successful, this project will allow development of cost-effective test kits for rapid diagnosis of bacterial and fungal infections in several species of cultured finfish. The commercial application of this project is in the area of aquaculture. On a worldwide basis, disease costs aquaculture producers more than $3 billion annually. The development of a cost-effective immunoassay will allow rapid diagnosis of bacterial and fungal infections in HSB and other commercially important cultured finfish doc22535 none For collaborative proposals: Rutgers University, Univ. of Maryland, Stephen s Inst. of Technology, VIMS, William & Mary, This collaborative award establishes the Mid-Atlantic Center for Ocean Science Education Excellence to serve 4 states (Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey and New York). Using a matrix model , the Center will scale-up successful individual programs at the partner institutions and establish strong linkages between partners. A primary thematic focus is on the visualization and K-12 classroom use of data from ocean observatories and monitoring buoys (Rutgers, UMCES, VIMS). Stephens Institute of Technology will contribute expertise in K-12 educational technology and delivery. Hampton University will serve as a conduit to under-represented minority groups and provide financial support for both undergraduates and graduate students doc22536 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)Phase I proposed innovation is an optically addressable, dynamically reconfigurable, bi-directional, high-density, optical interconnect micro-array based on the phenomenon of grating-coupled surface plasmon resonance). The proposed device addresses the need for dense, fast, low power dissipation interconnect technology created by highly parallel, next generation computationalsystems. These systems will require highly dense connection networks containing many long-distance connections. In such highly connected, highly parallel systems, the module-to-module and long distance chip-to-chip connections are responsible for the majority of the power dissipation, time delay and surface area. Thus, it has become critically important to minimize the area, power and time delay of the chip-to-chip and module-to-module interconnects while, at the same time, increasing density and bandwidth. Potential commercial applications effort will find applicability in a number of commercial markets. These include emerging interconnect devices in electronics, generalMEMs fabrication and in photolithography, where it would save time and eliminate expensive photomasking processes. Other potential markets include optical processing, certain applications in telecommunications and other miscellaneous applications for spatial light modulators doc22537 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to develop a rapid, heat sink mounting technology that produces a metallic bond between the heat sink and the microelectronic device. The metallic bond is far superior to current mounting technologies in its thermal conduction and its mechanical strength. The proposed technology for mounting heat sinks onto substrates and chips is a reactive joining process that uses reactive multilayer foils as local heat sources for melting solders or brazes. The foils are a new class of nano-engineered materials, in which self- propagating exothermic reactions can be ignited at room temperature with a spark. By inserting a multilayer foil between two solder (or braze) layers and two components, heat generated by the reaction in the foil melts the solder and consequently bonds the components. This new method of soldering eliminates the need for a furnace and, with very localized heating, avoids thermal damage to the microelectronic device. The resulting metallic joints are stronger and far more thermally conductive than common, commercial mounting technologies (greases, pads and epoxies). The reactive bonding process is also far more rapid than most of these technologies, offering substantial savings in processing time and convenience. Phase I research will (1) demonstrate the feasibility of this mounting process, (2) characterize the thermal and mechanical properties of the resulting interfaces, and (3) develop a model that predicts thermal exposure of devices during the reactive mounting process. Successful development of this reactive mounting technology will advance the thermal management of microelectronic devices, and it will help accelerate future improvements in the performance of these devices. The world wide market for thermal management solutions is about $3.7 billion, with most of this market being outsourced. The trends in the computer industry are towards smaller devices with higher power dissipation, increasing the need for superior thermal management doc22538 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)Phase I project will investigate a biotechnological approach to rapidly detect two notorious toxin-producing fungi. Indoor fungal growth related to water leaks and floods can induce a variety of disease symptoms. The presence of some fungi, like Stachybotrys chartarum , can cause severe morbidity. Unfortunately, the detection of harmful fungi, like Stachybotrys, has been hampered by inadequate methods. The proposed research will determine the feasibility of developing a rapid detection method for toxigenic fungi that could be used at any test site. The primary objective of this research is to isolate a diffusible spore molecule from S. chartarum spores and one from A. fumigatus spores for the development of an antibody-based detection kit. The molecules will be extracted in saline solution to mimic diffusion into lung linings and used for polyclonal antibody development. If successful, the antigens will be used for monoclonal antibody development in a Phase II project. This will allow for the development of a rapid, on-site testing kit to detect potentially dangerous fungal organisms quickly and inexpensively. The commercial application of this project will be in the area of diagnostics linked to human health and animal health doc22539 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project concerns the development of a multi-channel fluorescence lifetime measuring instrument using a novel low-cost digitizer. The key to bringing the well-known utility of fluorescence lifetime measurements to the masses is to have a low-cost instrument with excellent speed and accuracy. This work will pioneer a measuring technique that, by taking advantage of recent developments in lasers, goes a long way toward meeting the needs of such an instrument. However, there is one vital component, the digitizer that presently accounts for more than half of the cost. Commercially available digitizers do not match the needs of the application and are therefore too expensive or lack essential capabilities. However, This work has found a unique custom ASIC that appears to be a good match. This ASIC is a waveform digitizer developed at Berkeley National Laboratory for the AMANDA neutrino telescope. This work will prototype and characterizes a multi-channel fluorescence lifetime measuring instrument that uses this ASIC as the digitizer. If the phase I objectives are achieved, this work will be able to build exceptionally affordable instruments that can enable and greatly expand the use of fluorescence lifetime measurements in a vast range of applications doc22540 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to demonstrate the feasibility of a miniaturized MEMS-based, reagent-less biological agent detector, capable of performing rapid assays for tens (or even hundreds) of analytes simultaneously, for detection of whole bacteria (or spores) with single bacteria spore resolution. National defense against biological warfare agents and naturally occurring pathogens, such as drug resistant tuberculosis or food and water contaminates, requires low cost, robust, and easy to use technologies for rapid detection and identification of biological agents. Rapid detection is needed to provide early warning to minimize the numbers of exposed personnel, and to provide timely and effective medical treatment of those exposed. Current identification technologies depend on time-consuming amplification, which also adds appreciably to the cost, complexity, power requirements and size of the detector as it must perform multiple sample treatment steps and provide the necessary reagents. In this Phase I Project, Boston MicroSystems, with the assistance of the US Naval Research Laboratory, will quantify the performance of the proposed biological agent detector by fabricating prototype single channel detectors, immobilizing antibodies for bacillus globigii onto the detectors, expose them to samples of bacillus globigii, and quantify the response and detection limits. The prinicipal commercial application of this project is in homeland defense. However, the proposed biological agent detector may have significant additional applications in the areas of medical diagnostics, agribusiness, and environmental monitoring doc22541 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to establish the feasibility of engineering broad-spectrum disease resistance in crops. Pathogens cause enormous world-wide annual losses in crop yield. Prior research has shown that constitutive activation of the transcription factor AtERF1 confers resistance to several fungal pathogens in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. This Phase I project has three major goals : (1) To test additional Arabidopsis lines constitutively expressing AtERF1 and correlate AtERF1 expression levels with resistance to fungal and bacterial pathogens ; (2) To determine if constitutive expression of AtERF1 is detrimental to Arabidopsis plants, and (3) to identify transcription factors that are functionally analogous to AtERF1 in a number of crop species, including canola, tomato, rice and maize. The results of Phase I research are expected to indicate the technical feasibility of using AtERF1 to engineer enhanced pathogen resistance without adversely affecting other important agronomic properties of plants. The commercial application of this project is in the field of agriculture doc22542 none Wohl This award supports a collaborative research project between Professor Ellen Wohl of Colorado State University and Professor Timothy Davies of Lincoln University in Canterbury, New Zealand. While mountainous regions provide the major water source for many regions and produce a disproportionately large amount of the global sediment budget, we know relatively little about the basic processes operating along mountain river channels. This project will investigate mountain rivers to understand relationships between potential control variables (valley gradient, discharge, bedrock substrate resistance, and local sediment supply) and response variables (channel geometry and flow hydraulics). The study will be conducted on the northwest side of the South Island of New Zealand where mountainous catchments remain largely unimpacted by human activities. Knowledge gained should help in developing effective management schemes for mountain drainage basins. This project will benefit from the expertise and facilities of both the U.S. and Australian institutions, and will include the active participation of American students in the international collaboration doc22543 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project is focused on the development of highly stable and sensitive metal oxide semiconductor sensors for high-temperature applications. Currently available semiconductor sensors are typically restricted to the 200 C to 500 C range in order to have adequate response times and the necessary selectivity. In order to operate in the 600 C to 900 C range, stability of the porous sensing materials has to be enhanced in order to have a fast responding, sensitive sensor. In the project, the unique nanocomposite sensor materials will be developed first, followed by preparation of the substrate with high temperature electrodes, on to which the sensor film is deposited and then evaluated for sensitivity, response time and stability. The sensors to be developed will be applicable to high temperature engine control and monitoring, combustion system control for fossil-fueled power plants and incinerators, and monitoring of product gases from chemical process reactors doc22544 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project proposes to develop an integrated software package for the design and optimization of novel Simulated Moving Bed processes for multi-component separation and purification. Innovative design methods, simulation software and equipment have been developed and tested at the laboratory-scale for a number of biological separations, including amino acids, sugars, a peptide drug, an antibiotic, an anticancer drug and an antiviral drug. Laboratory data show that the new technology can produce high purity ( 99%) chemicals at high yield ( 99%). When compared to conventional batch chromatography, this technology can increase product yield by 5% to 15%, increase throughput per bed volume and reduce solvent consumption by an order of magnitude. During this Phase I Project, new tools for parameter estimation and cost optimization will be developed and integrated with existing design and simulation tools. This will result in a user-friendly interface for the integrated package. The commercial applications of this project are in the area of recovery and purification of pharmaceuticals and other biochemicals. The proposed technology is expected to impact purification costs in a major way, resulting in annual savings of several million dollars per product doc22545 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to develop a compact and autonomous, high precision monitor for the potent greenhouse gases, methane and nitrous oxide. This proposal is submitted under the Geoscience Instrumentation subtopic (subtopic E) of the Electronics topic. The target molecules are currently detected with cw lead salt diode lasers. These lasers require cryogenic cooling and, due to their lack of long term stability, a highly trained operator. Quantum cascade (QC) lasers are spectroscopically stable and can be operated near room temperature when they are pulsed. This allows the design of compact, rugged, inexpensive and autonomous molecular monitors. This system is further simplified by detecting both methane and nitrous with a single QC laser using nearly coincident transitions near mm . The Phase I research objectives will be to demonstrate that the required sensitivity and specificity can be obtained in this spectral region using a pulsed QC laser and non-cryogenic infrared detectors. The Phase I research will produce a preliminary design for an instrument to be constructed during Phase II. The resulting turn-key monitor will address the widespread need to monitor these important species in a sensitive and cost-effective manner. Potential commercial applications for this research include 1) the research market attempting to quantify the worldwide sources and sinks of greenhouse gases, 2) the market for trading credits for greenhouse gas emission reductions which requires quantitative documentation of these reductions, 3) the market for goods and services able to identify and locate leaks in natural gas distribution systems and 4) various research markets needing to quantify methane and or nitrous oxide concentrations or emissions in both laboratory and field settings doc22546 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop a new biopolymer for primary metal removal and a poly-g-glutamic acid (g-PGA)diafiltration system for recovery of metals from dilute solutions. Preliminary results obtained to date indicate that this process holds considerable promise in effectively removing metals from dilute aqueous streams to within EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) acceptable limits. The research planned in Phase I is expected to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed g-PGA-PEDF(polymer enhanced diafiltration) system. It is also expected to show that g-PGA will achieve satisfactory metal uptake, that it will reduce representative metal concentrations to EPA mandated levels, and that it is amenable to suitable regeneration cycles. Finally, it is expected that the proposed process will satisfactorily treat the representative industrial wastewaters. These results will set the stage for the development efforts in Phase II that will further consolidate the efficacy of the process, and address scale-up and commercialization issues. The commercial applications of this project are in the processing of industrial wastewaters within established EPA guidelines doc22547 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project proposes to develop grafted tomato transplants for greenhouse and field applications in the USA. Genetic-based sources of resistance to soil-borne pathogens and pests are currently being used as the rootstocks for grafted tomatoes in Southern Europe, Asia and Australia. In these countries, vegetable production is being impacted by the elimination of methyl bromide. Biological control strategies, such as grafting, will have increasing value in the USA as disease profiles and chemical pesticide regulations change. This research will demonstrate the production of high quality greenhouse bench grafts using rootstocks with disease resistance. The commercial applications of this project are in the field of agriculture doc22548 none Hresko This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project proposes to identify potential targets for the development of therapeutic agents to treat infections by parasitic nematodes. Nematode infections represent a serious heath concern for both humans and domesticated animals and, as such, represent a significant market for anthelmintic drugs. This project proposes to test a new approach to the discovery of anthelmintic agents. Divergence, LLC has identified a class of essential nematode-specific genes in Caenorhabditis elegans, representing a rich pool of potential targets for the control of human, animal and plant parsitic nematodes. Antibodies will be produced against a subset of proteins that are predicted to be gut-localized. The antibodies will be used to confirm localization of the protein and to challenge cultures of nematodes. Based on hidden antigen vaccine theory, it is anticipated that the antibodies against one or more of the gene-products proposed in this project may disrupt or impair the life cycle of the nematode. Completion of this Phase I project will allow a swift transition into the investigation of parasite genes. Expression of parasite genes introduced into C. elegans, which can be grown in large scale, will allow production of protein for the in vitro screening of peptide or small molecule libraries and for potential vaccine antigens. The commercial application of this project is in the area of therapeutics aimed at both human and animal health doc22549 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop remote radio frequency (RF) measurements for critical monitoring of fuel pipelines for failures. This novel application of RF measurements uses the pipe as a RF transmission line, and antennas launch radar pulses that travel inside the pipe, without disturbing the transported fluid. Pulses reflect-off obstructions breaches in the pipe and are measured by distributed low-cost GPS receivers to locate the fault. The outcome of this research will lead to a marketable product, which when implemented by pipeline corporations, can save millions of dollars annually in pipeline spills and advert potential loss of life and property. Further, the development of this technology supports the current US homeland security initiative to protect valuable assets against overt acts of vandalism and or terrorism doc22550 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project will demonstrate the feasibility of producing flexible displays that can be used to make radio frequency identification (RFID) electronic labels. These labels will be electronic analogs of paper labels. The innovation will be to combine known flexible RFID circuitry with flexible displays to create an electronic paper-like label that can be wirelessly updated. . The Phase I activities will involve active matrix backplane fabrication on polyimide substrates followed by display construction using a polymerized liquid crystal mixture. The commercial applications include retail electronic shelf labels, airline security luggage identification, and employee identification tags. The use of these tags for airline security luggage tags and employee identification represent applications that address issues in homeland security doc22551 none Methanogens are microorganisms that produce methane gas as the end product of their metabolism, and they are critical to a wide range of anaerobic microbiological decomposition processes. Such processes include digestion in ruminants and other animals, decay in natural aquatic environments, and man-made processes such as those used for municipal and industrial waste treatment. For our society, methane, on one-hand poses potential problems as a greenhouse gas, while at the same time it also serves as an extremely useful, clean-burning fuel. Nearly two-thirds of the methane produced in Nature is derived from decomposition of acetate by methanogens, and this project is contributing new molecular details of how these organisms carry out cleavage of the carbon-carbon bond in acetate. Acetogenic and methanogenic microorganisms carry out synthesis and breakdown of large quantities of acetic acid from one-carbon precursors products under anaerobic conditions using a highly unusual enzymatic process in which the carbon-carbon bond of acetic acid is activated. Nickel plays an indispensable role in this process, serving as a component of a unique Ni-Fe S cluster at the active site of a 5-subunit-containing multienzyme complex (designated ACDS for acetyl-CoA decarbonylase synthase) responsible for acetate cleavage in species of Methanosarcina. The Ni-Fe cluster is bound to the beta subunit of the complex, which also is the site for binding of substrates CoA and acetyl-CoA. Although it is now clear that Ni is an essential element for carbon-carbon bond activation, structural information on the Ni-Fe center is lacking, and little is known about the steps involved in formation and assembly of the Ni-Fe cluster. Such information is critical to develop a clear understanding of how Ni functions in the activation of acetate. The goal of this project is to identify steps in the pathway of assembly of the ACDS beta-subunit active site metal cluster by characterizing the role of the accessory protein ACDS-ORF in the process of Ni insertion into the Fe-containing apoenzyme. Incorporation of nickel is monitored by spectroscopic methods and enzymatic functional assays. Additional proteins that participate in the assembly of the beta-subunit Ni-Fe center are being sought by a combination of molecular biological two-hybrid assays and standard biochemical methods of fractionation and analysis. Detailed knowledge of how nickel functions as part of the Ni-Fe active center in the ACDS beta subunit will be obtained from experiments to characterize the coordination environment of nickel. X-ray absorption spectroscopic methods (Ni EXAFS and Ni L-edge spectroscopy) are providing the geometry, number of ligands to Ni, their chemical nature, and average bond distances. Site-directed mutagenesis experiments are being used to identify amino acid residues serving as potential ligands to Ni, and mutants will be characterized for their ability to bind Ni, undergo changes in coordination environment and to function in acetate activation. The results from this project will provide new information on the structure, function and formation of an unusual Ni-Fe S cluster, leading to a better understanding of its biochemistry and its unique physiological role in catalyzing the activation of acetate doc22552 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project was motivated by the need for rapid in-line inspection of quality of nanometer-scale devices in a production environment. An efficient diagnostics instrument, like the proposed product, is a rudimentary requirement for improved business operation in related industries minimizing possibilities for loss of revenue. The proposed innovative approach aims at developing an integrated technology using both electron and ion beams. Unique to this work is the idea of incorporating very special merits of high-brightness negative ion beams in a critical technology for device inspection. A novel system will be built to (i) deliver high yield in device inspection, (ii) achieve nm-level resolution and (iii) insure device integrity. This research will identify the characteristics of appropriate ion species from proof-of-principles experiments. Application of this work would be the design and development of an optimized ion beam column for the microelectronics industry. The end product would be an integrated product with improved optical characteristics doc22553 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop innovative visible blind UV detectors based on a novel metal-oxide system that is analogous to Gallium Aluminum Nitride (GaN). It is based on a wide band gap oxide system that is realized by alloying two primary oxide compounds, exhibiting a wider and tunable band gap, creating semiconductor materials which have energy gaps from 3.3 eV to 7.9 eV with high radiation hardness. The project investigator has already patented the concept of making and applying tailorable band gap oxide materials. The goal of this proposal is to study the feasibility of growing wide band gap metal-oxides and ultraviolet detectors on low cost substrates such as glass, polyimide, and silicon for commercialization of cost effective products. This technology can be extended to produce large format detector arrays and which can improve their reliability. Other areas where GaN detectors can be used are in telecommunications, chemical sensing, and homeland security doc22554 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will refine the polymer matrix of glass fiber composites with ion exchangers in order to enhance their longevity in the alkaline environment of concrete. Glass fiber composites offer a desirable balance of performance and cost for replacement of corrosion-prone steel reinforcement in concrete; their rapid deterioration in the alkaline environment of concrete is, however, a major setback. Ion exchangers are insoluble solids carrying cations (or anions) which can be exchanged with ions of the same sign. Cation exchangers of hydrogen form replace alkali metal cations (e.g., K + in alkaline solutions diffusing into the polymer matrix) with H + . This exchange of cations neutralizes aggressive alkaline solutions by converting K + OH - (and Na + OH - , etc.) into H2O. Through laboratory investigations and industrial-scale pultrusion efforts, the Phase I research demonstrated that introduction of selected ion exchangers into the polymer matrix (or a surface layer of matrix) does not interfere with the pultrusion process, and yields significant gains in alkali resistance of glass fiber composites. The Phase I effort also established a theoretical context for selection of the dosage of cation exchanger in the polymer matrix of glass fiber composites, and verified the economic viability of our approach. The proposed Phase II project will: (1) develop refined theoretical principles and design procedures for formulation of polymer matrices with ion exchangers; (2) develop and experimentally verify optimum polymer matrix formulations incorporating ion exchangers; (3) optimize the pultrusion process of glass fiber composites with the refined polymer system, and fully characterize the end products; and (4) evaluate the structural performance and durability of concrete systems reinforced with refined glass fiber composite bars through comprehensive laboratory studies complemented with a field investigation involving design, construction and monitoring of a reinforced concrete bridge deck. The Phase II effort will receive critical support from major manufacturers of composite rebars (including Hughes Brothers, the world leader in this field), the leading supplier of ion exchangers (Dow Chemical), Michigan Department of Transportation, and Michigan Economic Development Corporation. Michigan State University (Composite Materials domestic sales of steel for reinforcement of these concrete structures is about $2 billion yr. Glass fiber composites embodying our technology are resistant to both corrosive effects and the alkaline environment of concrete; they offer a desirable balance of performance and cost to replace steel reinforcement in corrosive environments. Major savings in life-cycle cost can be realized at competitive initial cost through replacement of steel reinforcement with alkali-resistant glass fiber composites in concrete structures exposed to corrosive environments. Glass fiber composite jackets and sheets applied onto concrete surfaces for repair rehabilitation purposes are also prone to attack by the alkaline pore solution of concrete, representing another market opportunity for our technology. We have filed a patent application, and have reached agreements with Dow Chemical (leading supplier of ion exchangers) and Hughes Brothers (world s leading manufacturer of composite bars for concrete reinforcement) towards transfer of the technology to marketplace doc22555 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop a flexible platform for nano-formulations of water insoluble drugs. As the practice of medicine progresses towards complete cure for diseases , delivering new drugs to specific areas to target specific tissues becomes an important objective of overall pharmaceutical research. Unfortunately many new drugs have poor water solubility that reduces their bioavailability. Carefully formulated nanoparticles and nanospheres are reported to have therapeutic advantages such as bioavailability, ability to avoid reticuloendothelial system (RES) removal, and direct tumor targeting. This project will develop the Supercritical Anti-Solvent with Enhanced Mass Transfer (SAS-EM) Process for producing nanoparticles of water insoluble drugs and encapsulating them in biodegradable polymers as nanospheres. The three key steps in the Phase I study include : (1) Phase behavior studies to identify the suitable solvent and experimental conditions, (2) Particle formation studies where nanoparticles of said drugs are produced using supercritical antisolvent process with enhanced mass transfer, and (3) Characterization of the nanoparticles nanospheres for particle size, size distribution, and crystallinity. Light scattering techniques will be used to measure the size distribution complemented with Scanning electron microscopic visualization. X-ray diffraction measurements will be used to describe the crystallinity. The commercial applications of this project are in the area of pharmaceutical drug delivery doc22556 none Nguyen This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project proposes to improve delivery of clinically used drugs through formulation of a non-toxic, tissue-specific drug delivery vehicle. A number of drugs and drug delivery vehicles cause toxic side effects,thereby limiting the drug dose that can be administered. This Phase I Project proposes to solve these problems by using a proprietary mixture of non-phospholipid lipids for drug delivery. Suspensions of lipid-coated microbubbles (LCM), made with this lipid mixture, have been found to be highly tumor selective. Paclitaxel, delivered in LCM, has been shown to reduce tumors in rats more effectively when compared to paclitaxel delivered in the traditional vehicle, and produced less systemic toxicity. However, there are no methods currently available to generate LCM on a commercial scale. In the course of this Phase I Project, lipid nanoparticles from the proprietary lipid mixture will be developed using a high pressure homogenizer. This will be followed by the formulation of a number of clinically used drugs in lipid and trsting of these formulations in cultured tumor cells. The commercial application of this project will be in the area of pharmaceutical drug delivery doc22557 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is intended to demonstrate the fabrication of multiple, unconventionally small diameter, and foundry incompatible wafers on a single, large-area 8-inch substrate. The success of this effort will bring the benefits offered by devices made from such wafers to the global community at affordable cost. The superior thermo-mechanical properties of silicon carbide have made it a material of choice for use as sensors in harsh environments. However, the lack of profit incentive due to high substrate cost, small diameter (implying high production cost per unit volume), and high capital equipment cost have combined to inhibit industry interest in its global commercialization. A recently patented wafer platform technology offers four immediate crucial benefits: 1) It significantly reduces the high production cost by an order of magnitude to make silicon carbide based sensors economically viable and competitive; 2) It utilizes semiconductor-on-insulator technology to improve silicon carbide sensor functionality at 600oC over pn-junction based silicon carbide sensors, which suffer from leakage current as it approaches 500C; 3) A large-area (8-inch) platform technology will significantly increase industry confidence toward global commercialization; and 4) It opens a new technology growth path toward integrated micro-systems packaging. Potential commercial applications a wide variety of electronic and opto-electronic sensors. The domestic sensors and instrumentation market in was $49 billion at an annual growth rate of 13.5%, Worldwide Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems (MEMs) market was $14.2 billion, expected to reach $30.4 billion with at a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 21% in , of which the Silicon Carbide MEMs; worldwide market is expected to reach $6 billion by (Sensors magazine, July doc22558 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project proposes to further improve an assistive device for reading that is currently under development at the company. The device, an electromechanical page turner, allows people with upper extremity impairment to conveniently and easily turn pages of a book in either direction. With the touch of a button, the page turner can automatically grab the next page, turn it, and keep the book opened flat during the entire process. If necessary, an alternate activation method can be employed, such as a sip-and-puff switch, chin switch, or foot pedal. There are three key phases of the page turning process : page engagement, page restraint, and page transport. In its current form, the page turner prototype offers superior solutions to each of these phases and addresses the limitations of commercially available systems. Several key research problems must now be addressed in order to improve the reliability of the apparatus. The problems center on the unit s turnstile element which serves two principle functions: page restraint and page transport. The turnstile is necessary to hold the book open flat, as well as to move a page from one side of the book to the other. The turnstile-on-paper and paper-on-paper frictional properties are important considerations for successful operation of the page turner. The goal of the Phase I Project is to investigate optimal contact pressure between the turnstile and the book page, as well as to exxamine the bending stiffness, coefficient of friction, and the mechanical characteristics of paper. To achieve the stated goals, experiments are proposed to test a variety of paper materials and book sizes, and to develop computer models that will help in parametric studies of the design. The experimental and computational results will be validated with the standard test methods recommended by the U.S. Trade Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry (TAPPI) and Japan Industrial Standards (JIS). The results of this investigation will allow the company to optimize the design and thereby improve the performance and reliability of the page turner. The commercial applications of this project are in the area of assistive home-care technology for the elderly and disabled. A page turner would be particularly beneficial to people with limited bilateral upper extremity function caused by neurological impairment, musculoskeletal problems, and generalized weakness. The proposed device would serve to enhance their quality of life by improving their independence in this activity of daily living doc22559 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)Phase I Project proposes to develop a microarray-based biosensor for on-site, real-time identification and enumeration of multiple environmental microorganisms from aqueous and or aerosol samples with high sensitivity and specificity. The operation of the biosensor will be based on a recently developed novel technology involving grating-coupled surface plasmon resonance (GCSPR). The proposed biosensor system, with the capability for continuous on-line monitoring, would have numerous applications where rapid assessment of a contaminated environment would be needed. The specific objectives of the Phase I project are (a) to engineer the manner in which aerosol and aqueous samples will be delivered to the GC-SPR biosensor flow cell, and (b) to assess and optimize the performance of the biosensor in the detection of a prototype microbial target. In the follow-on Phase II project, specific target pathogens will be selected and specific chips will be constructed to detect these pathogens. The commercial applications of this project are expected to be in a large number of locations. They include (1) hospitals, where nosocomial infections may arise; (2) office buildings, where accidental contamination with mold spores, Legionella and other pathogens may create health hazards; (3) natural bodies of water or commercial water supplies, where Cryptosporidium, coliform bacteria and several other waterborne pathogens are of great concern ; and (4) the food industry, where there is a need for sensitive methods for on-line and real-time detection of pathogens. Finally, the proposed technology will provide for rapid, on-site detection of biological agents, such as spores of Bacillus anthracis, that may be intentionally introduced into the environment doc22560 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project is to study the feasibility of a phytoremediation process to remove lead, a model metal, from the soil. The approach is to increase the efficiency of chelate-assisted phytoremediation of environmental contaminants by using transgenic technology to provide plants with the ability to exude significant amounts of a specific chelating agent from their roots. Isolated from the DNA of the organism pseudomonas stutzeri, this chelating agent, pyridine-2,6-bis (thiocarboxylic acid) (ptdc), has the ability to degrade carbon tetrachloride and to attain high stability constants for most heavy metals, thereby assisting preferential plant uptake of these metals into harvestable leaves and stems. In this Phase I project, the pdtc transgene will be placed under the control of plant promoters to overexpress the gene in roots. ptdc excretion will be explored in two model plants, tobacco and canola. The commercial application of this project is in the area of environmental phytoremediation doc22561 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project is structured around the design, synthesis of new organic electroluminescent (OEL) materials, and their innovative applications in fabricating frozen-junction polymer light-emitting electrochemical cells (LECs) - an alternative to organic light-emitting diodes (LEDs) displays. Reveo has identified the OEL display as the most promising display technology of the future and the solution that best meets the new demands for bright, portable displays. These bright, thin displays will eventually replace expensive flat panel liquid crystal displays (LCDs), but they have not yet seen huge commercial success because of the poor OEL materials and non-optimized device fabrication techniques. The mission of this program is therefore to develop, optimize, and commercialize new OEL materials and devices that will make OEL displays the new market standard in the multi-billion dollar display market. LECs fabricated with these new materials are predicted to have high luminescence efficiency, high brightness, and longer lifetime compared with current OEL displays. The new materials thus have excellent commercial potential as the enabling technology behind the next generation of full-color, low-cost, flat panel OEL displays doc22562 none Prolactin has well over 300 known functions in vertebrates. It regulates virtually every aspect of physiology including osmoregulation, behavior, growth and metabolism, reproduction and immune function. The diversity and number of actions of prolactin is paralleled by the complexity with which the hormone is regulated. The investigators will address the novel mechanisms by which the steroid, cortisol, rapidly inhibits prolactin release from the pituitary gland of an important euryhaline food fish, the tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus). Previously, they showed cortisol acts within minutes to inhibit prolactin release in tilapia. This discovery as well as others have altered the prevailing consensus that the effects of steroid hormones are mediated solely through their ability to alter the expression of genes, a process that typically requires hours or days to occur. Over the past decade it has become increasingly apparent that all classes of steroids rapidly regulate various organ systems. Cortisol and other glucocorticoids modulate hormone secretion, neuronal excitability, behavior, cell morphology, and carbohydrate metabolism in various vertebrates within seconds or minutes. Unlike other classes of steroids, however, most rapid glucocorticoid actions produce inhibitory responses. Despite abundant evidence for rapid glucocorticoid effects, the cell-signaling mechanisms mediating their actions are poorly understood. This is due, in part, to the inherent difficulty of studying inhibitory rather than stimulatory responses and the lack of suitable, native model systems to address the cell biology underlying rapid glucocorticoid actions. Over mammals and other vertebrates, fishes present an important advantage for the study of prolactin cell function--prolactin cells are segregated as a nearly homogenous mass that is easily separated for study. Prolactin baseline secretory activity can be easily manipulated to study potentially important stimulators and inhibitors of prolactin cell function and the cell-signaling pathways that mediate their action. The investigators show cortisol acts at the membrane, independent of gene expression to rapidly inhibit prolactin release by reducing two cellular messengers, cAMP and calcium. These actions may occur through a specific high-affinity pituitary membrane receptor, and involve reductions in voltage-gated calcium channel activity and influx of extracellular calcium. Studies also demonstrate the steroid may directly act at the membrane to suppress phospholipase C, an enzyme critical to regulating cellular calcium in vertebrates. In the present proposal, four specific objectives will address in further detail the mechanisms mediating rapid, nongenomic effects of cortisol, including several components never previously explored in vertebrates. The first objective will address the type of receptor that cortisol may bind to rapidly modulate prolactin secretion. The second will examine whether the steroid acts to rapidly alter the membrane electrical properties of prolactin cells to reduce voltage-sensitive calcium channels either directly or through increasing potassium ion conductances across the cell membrane. The third aim will test whether cortisol inhibits phospholipase C activity, inositol triphosphate production, calcium release from intracellular-sensitive pools, and activity of protein kinases in events that lead to rapid reductions in prolactin release. The fourth objective will explore whether the steroid might rapidly modify growth factor signaling to regulate prolactin release. These studies will employ a combination of methods to study cell-signaling, including both cell and tissue culture, pharmacological manipulations, bioimaging, hormone receptor-binding, immunoassays and electrophysiology. Completion of the proposed studies will advance the knowledge of rapid, nongenomic actions of steroids. This is a new and growing discipline in the field of endocrinology, regulatory biology and medicine. Specifically, the research should lead to development of a comprehensive model describing the signaling pathways mediating rapid actions of a stress hormone known to influence, and possibly impair, several physiological processes including memory, behavior, reproduction, and immune function. As cortisol and prolactin exert opposing actions on hydromineral balance in fish, the detailed workings underlying osmoregulation, an ancient and universal process critical to physiological adaptation, will also be advanced doc22563 none This Small Business Innovative Research Phase I objective of this project is to develop an integrated wafer-scale, high-speed tunable filter technology for high-bit-rate fiber optic networks. Specifically, the feasibility of developing a wafer-scale array of innovative Fabry-Perot tunable filters for use in either the transmitter or the receiver of a communications system is explored. The operating voltage of the filters is designed to be in the range of 0 - 40 volts, the scanning times are less than 0.1 milliseconds and the filtering wavelength region between 2.5 and 5 m. In Phase I, the innovative tunable filter will first be prototyped in a small array (88 pixels), and in Phase II it will be scaled to a module that will be driven by an active matrix high voltage VLSI chip. In the Phase II work these filter arrays will be integrated directly onto the surface of VCSEL arrays and detector arrays (to be supplied by one of our corporate partners) to form a pre-aligned rugged and compact package. This novel MEMS-based tunable filter array will find applications in fiber-optic telecommunication systems, and in low-cost, high-performance remote sensing instruments and spectrometers doc22564 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project proposes to design and construct a novel cell-based microfluidic platform for the discovery and development of therapeutic drugs. Utilizing state-of-the-art microfabrication techniques, micro-sensor and controller design, fluid handling and cell culturing techniques, the project seeks to address the shortcomings and bottlenecks of current biopharmaceutical drug discovery and development processes. The specific project objectives include the design and fabrication of micro-scale bioreactors for microbial and mammalian systems as well as the design and construction of a microfluidic cell culture media and gas handling system. These components will be integrated into a highly parallel and completely automated platform of cell culturing devices. These devices have the potential to introduce a new paradigm that would streamline the development of new cellular products for therapeutic applications. The commercial applications of this project will be in the area of drug discovery and development. Automation and parallelization of the drug discovery process will allow for increased efficiency in drug time to market as well as offer the opportunity to extend research efforts to areas that had previously been limited by manpower constraints doc22565 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project will demonstrate the potential of new sources of laser radiation based on ytterbium (Yb) doped stoichiometric lithium niobate (SLN) crystals. The Yb-doped SLN crystal will serve as both the laser and nonlinear frequency converter to enable the production of a broad range of wavelengths in a simple, compact device. As an active lasing ion, Yb has the advantages of efficient diode pumping, low thermal loading, and minimal reabsorption of laser radiation. This laser radiation can be converted to various wavelengths of interest via nonlinear optical effects that are intrinsic to lithium niobate. Recent developments in quasi-phase matching techniques in lithium niobate have increased both the efficiency and range of wavelengths that can be generated by nonlinear optical frequency conversion. The use of stoichiometric lithium niobate over conventional congruent lithium niobate leads to greater ease in fabrication of quasi-phase matched structures via electric field poling, and higher power handling capabilities. The combined advantages of Yb lasing, quasi-phase matched frequency conversion, and fabrication and power handling of SLN in one single crystal will enable the realization of new sources of laser radiation at wavelengths not currently available. This will make possible new lasers characterized by lightweight, compact construction, efficient operation, and spectral versatility. Commercial applications include the development of eye safe lasers for non-laboratory environments such as range finders, laser surveying and mapping, and pollution monitoring. Significant medical applications also may exist doc22566 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes the development of integrated optoelectronic circuits through a novel integration process. These devices will be hybrid electronic optical elements embedded in an integrated platform comparable in size to existing electronic integrated circuits, and will permit the monolithic integration of microelectronic and photonic elements. This project will fabricate a test chip to demonstrate controllable phase modulation on the sub-micron scale while contemplating the integration of multiple devices onto a single platform to confirm dense integration densities. This approach to integrated optoelectronic circuits to act as an enabling technology for tomorrow s dense optical networks, significantly improve processing speed and computational precision for multiple applications including intra-computer and inter-computer communications, image processing, and increasingly more dense processing platforms. This potential suggests that integrated optoelectronic circuits will have applications in the telecomm industry, the medical imaging device market, and the computing equipment market including, but not limited to, Digital Signal Processors and CPUs for digital communications networks doc22567 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project will investigate the feasibility of incorporating diamond powder in epoxy molding compounds at high packing densities using optimized multi-modal distributions of diamond powder. The resulting thermalconductivities of these composite encapsulants are expected to be higher than 100 W mK. Selection of semiconductor molding compounds that exhibit high thermal conductivity are crucial in dissipating heat generated by high-power electronic components, particularly as feature sizes of future chips decrease in size. Most epoxy molding compounds used to encapsulate semiconductors contain fused silica (55-70% by volume) to maintain a compatible thermal expansion coefficient and impart moisture resistance. However, the resulting thermal conductivities of the composite compounds are very low ( 3 W mK). By loading commercial molding epoxies with optimized diamond powder distributions, diamond volume fractions above 65% may be obtained in the epoxy molding liquid with a viscosity compatible with commercial molding processes. The diamond epoxy molding compound will serve as a upper-limit benchmark material for thermal conductivity and will be used in high-performance microelectronic packaging applications where heat dissipation is critical doc22568 none This award provides support to establish a COSEE Center in California with three distributed complementary partners: the Lawrence Hall of Science on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley (informal science partner), Scripps Institution-University of California San Diego (research partner) and Monterey Peninsula College (a public community college and formal education partner) in Monterey. The activities of the proposed COSEE will be organized around four primary initiatives: 1) an outreach effort based at Scripps to engage ocean scientists in K-14 education and the interpretation of their research, 2) the development of an undergraduate course Communicating Ocean Science designed to increase the involvement of undergraduates, graduate students and scientists in educational outreach, 3) the development of an Ocean Careers web site and 4) developing and testing an Ocean Immersion Site for K-12 education based at Scripps to serve the large and culturally diverse population of the San Diego area. The work of this COSEE will enhance the integration of research and education in California by linking some of the best ocean science researchers in the world to science education in both formal and informal settings. The California COSEE s focus on working with schools and school districts in the diverse San Diego area will provide additional resources to strengthen science education and increase access to knowledge and careers among under-represented populations. Several of the initiatives in this proposal will add diversity and balance to the mosaic of approaches and activities to be implemented by the COSEE network. In particular, the extension model is a unique user-centered approach to getting more scientists involved that clearly needs to be developed and its effectiveness assessed. The undergraduate course in communicating science has potential as a professional development vehicle for college faculty, graduate students and undergraduate majors; this component is being co-funded by NSF s Division of Undergraduate Education. The DUE s Advanced Technology Education program is also providing co-funding for the Careers website at Monterey Peninsula College doc22569 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will evaluate a technology capable of meeting the demands of future mobile wireless information systems. The fundamental challenge facing designers of the physical layer of mobile networking solutions is to improve speed, precision, and power efficiency. Athena s proprietary arithmetic technology, which enables engineers to rapidly develop high performance semiconductors, can provide up to 10 times higher performance or up to 10 times less power compared to existing technologies. The Phase I study will evaluate opportunities to apply this arithmetic technology to mobile wireless systems by developing an infrastructure technology targeted for placement between the antenna and the back-end digital processor. The goal of the project is to demonstrate that this infrastructure technology can meet or exceed the industry performance standards in a 250mW, low-power package. The company will be able to rapidly develop high performance, high accuracy, low power solutions for the wireless communications market. Specific applications include use in automobiles where information, audio, navigation, and other services will be linked doc22570 none The Departments of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Colorado will conduct research efforts that will purchase two compute engines , one for each of two departments, that incorporate these advances. Among advances in computing capacity two are crucial for the problems of interest here: (i) increased size of memory now allows for realistic computations of some physical phenomena that evolve in time in three spatial dimensions; and (ii) increased computational precision makes feasible a new class of fast algorithms that were infeasible otherwise. 1) A goal of one project is the development of fast and accurate algorithms for solving practical problems in dimensions three and higher. The two main tools in this development are representations with a low separation rank (a numerical version of separation of variables). 2) A goal of a second project is prototyping new algorithms and developing new models for moderate to high Reynolds number flows. 3) A third research project, on the behavior of a granular medium in two and three dimensions, draws on the classical kinetic theory, extending it to the case of inelastic collisions, and gives explicit expression for macroscopic quantities such as stress and granular energy. Scientific problems of immediate interest include: (a) geophysical and astrophysical fluid flows, driven by the competing influences of planetary rotation, variable gravity, and magnetic forces; (b) granular flows, such as occur in avalanches or sand-piles or landslides; and (c) electromagnetic wave propagation near irregularly shaped bodies. Aside from these immediate applications, a longer-term goal is to train students to use these new machines well. The University of Colorado recently created two new graduate programs, designed to train scientists and engineers in advanced computational methods. These two machines will help to make these new programs more effective doc22571 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to develop commercial uses for conjugates capable of exploiting cloned gene expression in transformed plant cells to control their growth and physiology. The specific goal of this project is to synthesize a series of new beta-glucuronide conjugates of plant regulatory substances and to test these conjugates for their ability to modify the growth and protein expression of specific tissues and cells expressing the beta-glucuronidase (GUS) marker gene. Conjugates will be assayed in tissue culture and in whole plants for the ability to cause localized cell death in a promoter dependent manner. Such compounds will be of general use for plant research on the control of development and gene expression and have the potential to produce agriculturally important plant species in a reversible manner, through the use of selective application of substrate and choice of reporter gene and promoter elements. The commercial application of this project is in the area of agricultural biotechnology doc22568 none This award provides support to establish a COSEE Center in California with three distributed complementary partners: the Lawrence Hall of Science on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley (informal science partner), Scripps Institution-University of California San Diego (research partner) and Monterey Peninsula College (a public community college and formal education partner) in Monterey. The activities of the proposed COSEE will be organized around four primary initiatives: 1) an outreach effort based at Scripps to engage ocean scientists in K-14 education and the interpretation of their research, 2) the development of an undergraduate course Communicating Ocean Science designed to increase the involvement of undergraduates, graduate students and scientists in educational outreach, 3) the development of an Ocean Careers web site and 4) developing and testing an Ocean Immersion Site for K-12 education based at Scripps to serve the large and culturally diverse population of the San Diego area. The work of this COSEE will enhance the integration of research and education in California by linking some of the best ocean science researchers in the world to science education in both formal and informal settings. The California COSEE s focus on working with schools and school districts in the diverse San Diego area will provide additional resources to strengthen science education and increase access to knowledge and careers among under-represented populations. Several of the initiatives in this proposal will add diversity and balance to the mosaic of approaches and activities to be implemented by the COSEE network. In particular, the extension model is a unique user-centered approach to getting more scientists involved that clearly needs to be developed and its effectiveness assessed. The undergraduate course in communicating science has potential as a professional development vehicle for college faculty, graduate students and undergraduate majors; this component is being co-funded by NSF s Division of Undergraduate Education. The DUE s Advanced Technology Education program is also providing co-funding for the Careers website at Monterey Peninsula College doc22573 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is directed toward the development of highly sensitive, solid-state, solar-blind photodiodes based on the group III-nitride material system, aluminum gallium nitride. Ultraviolet detectors are used in water treatment plants, automated arc-welding systems, and the monitoring of atmospheric ozone depletion. The objective of the proposed project is to develop tunable, high efficiency, Gallium Arsenide Nitride aluminum gallium nitride multiple quantum well UV photodiodes utilizing sequential resonant tunneling to enhance carrier collection efficiency and detector response time. The multiple quantum well detectors will improve the characteristics of nitride detectors specifically in the solar blind wavelength region. Significant commercial interest has been expressed in this wavelength region for flame detection, ultraviolet photolithography, space and military applications include missile detection doc22574 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will utilize an innovative high output ultraviolet (UV) lithography 0.25 mm T-gate fabrication process to develop high yield and high throughput manufacturing of millimeter-wave monolithic integrated circuit (MMIC) transceivers on 6 substrates. This effort will focus on (1) developing high quality 6 metamorphic wafers for high circuit yield; (2) demonstrate a metamorphic field-effect transistor (FET) using a 0.25 mm T-gate (non-E beam) process, (3) select the key MMIC to combine for high performance transceiver functionality. Successful completing of these objectives will serve as the basis for combining proven MMICs for the design and fabrication of Ka-band and E-Band transceivers. The MMIC technology market has shown great potential for applications in telecommunications (including radar-based systems). Single function MMIC designs require expensive machining and packaging. This effort should to a lower-cost transceiver for the $10 billion MMIC market doc22575 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Projectproposes to develop methods for producing fullerene radioisotope carriers using the nuclear recoil implantation method. A persistent problem in the safe delivery of radioisotopes to cancer tissue is the premature leakage of the radioisotope and the damage it causes to healthy tissues such as bone marrow. Currently, when radioactive metals are used in the body for diagnostic or therapeutic applications, organic chelates must be employed as carriers for the metal atom. However, current chelates do not bind with 100% efficiency, and potentially toxic radioactive metal atoms can be lost in vivo. Because of their unique cage structure, fullerenes do not suffer this deficiency and offer a novel alternative method for entrapping radioisotopes and producing labeled compounds useful for medical imaging and therapy. The commercial applications of this project are in the area of cancer radioimmunotherapy. Given the recent advances in the design of monoclonal antibodies for targeting cancer and in the clinical successes of several new radioimmunotherapy treatments, the field of radioimmunotherapy is currently poised for rapid growth and commercialization. A superior radioisotope carrier would be a welcome addition to the current arsenal of radiopharmaceuticals doc22576 none The project aims to improve the capabilities of the Jicamarca incoherent scatter radar for equatorial F-region observations via the development of a new observing signal-processing mode based on spectral fitting and magneto-ionic differential-phase measurements: With radar beams pointed perpendicular to B, self- and cross-spectra of O- and X-mode incoherent scatter returns collected with orthogonal dipole pairs and a pair of north-south displayed dipole arrays will be fitted to a forward theory model to infer F-region plasma drifts, densities, and electron and ion temperatures with 5 min and 15 km time and height resolutions. The inversion procedure will also make use of simultaneously collected ionosonde data and furthermore will be capable of F-region plasma density measurements during equatorial spread F conditions. The project will constitute an excellent training ground for graduate students on ionospheric propagation and incoherent scatter theories and will furthermore provide an opportunity for stringent tests of the F-region incoherent scatter theory in a relatively unexplored parameter regime (small aspect angles doc22577 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project will address the critical need for a commercial rheo-meter that can be used to measure all three shear flow properties of a molten thermoplastic. Currently available commercial rheo-meters can measure at best only two of the three independent shear flow properties, which are the viscosity, first normal stress difference (N1), and second normal stress difference (N2). The objective of the proposed project is to demonstrate proof-of-principle for a novel rheo-meter plate with monolithically integrated miniature pressure sensors fabricated using micro-electro-mechanical systems technology. It will be shown that this novel rheo-meter plate can be used to extend the capabilities of conventional rheo-meters, enabling measurement of all three shear flow properties with greater accuracy than previously possible. The innovative rheo-meter plate will allow smaller sample sizes to be used, with greater control over sample thickness during testing and should lead to better design and control of manufacturing processes with polymeric materials and spectrometers doc22578 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will explore high efficient, long lifetime and inexpensive light emitting diodes (LEDs) based on semiconductor nanocrystals. The fabrication technology of the semiconductor nanocrystal LEDs is very much similar to the one used for the fabrication of polymer LEDs for commercial purposes. As a result, the commercial potential of the nanocrystal LEDs relays mainly on the optical quality of the nanocrystals. This project design adopts two recent technologies, which yields semiconductor nanocrystals with extremely high emission efficiency and exceptional chemical and thermal stability. The dendron ligand technology provides nanocrystals with exceptional stability against the chemical processing and the thermal effect in the operation of the devices. The nanocrystals synthesized using the bright point concept produces unprecedented optical quality, about 80 percent photoluminescence quantum yield, 23-27 nm emission full peak width at half maximum, and tunable emission window from 450-700 nm. With those high optical quality and highly processable semiconductor nanocrystals, it is possible that a new generation of semiconductor nanocrystal LEDs, which have at least compatible performance to the polymer LEDs, but with low cost and continuous tunable and narrow emission profile. The commercial potential of the polymer LEDs and nanocrystal LEDs will highly depend on the lifetime and the cost of the devices. Nanocrystal LEDs possess nearly all of the advantages of polymer LEDs, but with significantly more tunable and narrow emission profile. At this stage, the commercial standard for the lifetime of the polymer LEDs is around several thousand hours. The commercial goal this project is to boost the performance of the nanocrystal LEDs to at least the level of that of polymer LEDs. The usage of those devices is on portable electronic devices, such as portable computer and cellular telephone doc22579 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project intends to develop a new technology for the industrial production of high quality semiconductor nanocrystals. Semiconductor nanocrystals are nanometer sized fragments of the corresponding bulk crystals, which have shown great potential for a variety of electronic and optoelectronic applications. At present, all of those commercial applications rely on the availability of high quality semiconductor nanocrystals on a large scale with an affordable price. The new design maximizes the power of the existing batch synthetic schemes developed in academic institutions, although it possesses a continuous production nature. In this way, the quality and the quantity of the resulting nanocrystals are both guaranteed and the optimization of the production is minimized. The proposed technology should be extendable to the industrial production of other types of colloidal nanocrystals as long as the related batch synthesis is available. The commercial value of colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals in the field of electronic and optoelectronic applications lies on large area display, portable electronic devices, imprinting of integrated circuits, solar cells, etc. A multi-billion dollar market for the production of those electronic devices is in rapid development. For all of those devices, colloidal nanocrystals with an affordable price play a vital role, and will have a significant share of the market. It can be predicted that the success of any of those active commercial developments will open an economically significant market for the production of high quality semiconductor nanocrystals. It is also true that the existence of a commercial production technology with an affordable price will promote all of those commercial efforts on electronic and optoelectronic applications of nanocrystals doc22580 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will test a novel method for Vacuum Ultraviolet (VUV) spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE) measurements for process control and monitoring in semiconductor lithography applications. It builds on the demonstrated success of employing planar grating diffraction to achieve SE measurements in the visible wavelengths. For SE measurements in the VUV, it is necessary to employ conical diffraction geometries which do not require sheet-type polarizing elements in the detection system. This permits the construction of a Conical Diffraction- Grating Division of Amplitude Photopolarimeter (CD-GDOAP) that is the analyzer detection system in the VUV-SE. By intercepting four or more dispersed orders of the cone of diffraction, a CD-GDOAP can measure the polarization state of light over the full spectrum in the VUV with no moving parts. The VUV-SE will: (i) operate in the 140-280 nm spectral range, (ii) have no moving parts, and (iii) provide high temporal resolution. In Phase I, we propose to characterize the performance of a laboratory breadboard CD-GDOAP by investigating (i) conical diffraction geometries, (ii) robustness of polarization detection, and (iii) performance of optical components in the VUV. If successful, it will lead to a compact, high-speed VUV-SE for use in semiconductor processing. Potential Commercial Applications of the Research The proposed SE based on CD-GDOAP will permit real-time measurements for VUV lithography applications at 157, 193, and 248 nm in a single instrument. Presently there are no commercially available instruments (used in production facilities) that can access all of these wavelengths. Successful completion of this project will ensure rapid entry into the marketplace, through the business relationship that CRI is developing with major semiconductor metrology equipment companies doc22581 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project is to develop a high volume manufacturing technology for the production of InnovaLight s highly advanced silicon nanocrystal technology. InnovaLight has discovered a highly controlled way to make high quality, uniform, and stable silicon nanocrystals with novel properties based on original research at The University of Texas. This is a very important discovery, as the unique properties of these nanocrystals will enable a host of large commercial applications. However, in order to capture this value, a high-volume manufacturing scheme will need to be developed from the current low-volume, batch process. The ability to produce high volumes of crystals that are favorably characterized for use in electronic components will enable their cost-effective use in a host of electronics applications. Potential commercial markets include use as pixels for use in high-resolution, low-power flat panel displays on computers and electronic instrumentation panels. The crystals can also be made to emit a tightly confined, coherent stream of light. This opens them up to use as lasers for short reach optical communications, terahertz-speed optical chips, smart cards, etc. The crystals also have extremely unique charging behavior that enables their usage in advanced, multi-level memory chips. Such chips would have an order of magnitude increase in capacity over existing chips. Lastly, the non-toxic nature of silicon, coupled with the highly controlled surface chemistry of InnovaLight s process, opens these crystals up to many biotech uses such as in vivo cancer cell detection and oblation doc22582 none Tunas are well known for the exceptional physiological and morphological adaptations that set this group (Thunnini, Scombridae) apart from other teleost fishes. These specializations include unique swimming kinematics, high metabolic rates, high cardiac outputs, and regional endothermy. A number of studies have demonstrated the exceptional performance of the tuna heart at the organ and tissue levels, however little is known about tuna cardiac function at the cellular level. Experiments in this project will test the hypothesis that tuna hearts have specializations in excitation-contraction (EC) coupling that underlie the enhanced performance. Cardiac performance will be examined at the molecular, cellular and organismal levels in endothermic tunas (bluefin and yellowfin) and their ectothermic relatives (mackerel and bonito). Cardiac contraction depends on the precise delivery of Ca2+ to the myofilaments, while relaxation depends on removal of Ca2+ from the cytoplasm. In heart cells of mammals and birds, the intracellular Ca2+ stores of the sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) reduce diffusion distances and shorten the time course of Ca2+ cycling, permitting higher heart rates than in lower tetrapods. In fish, the contribution of internal and external Ca2+ stores varies with species and temperature, but no cellular studies of tuna heart performance exist. This project will address the hypothesis that the high maximal heart rates of tunas are achieved in part by increased reliance on intracellular SR stores and increased calcium-induced Ca2+ release during EC coupling. In addition, experimental comparisons will be made of cardiovascular function in cold and warm temperate tuna and their ectothermic sister taxa in response to acute temperature change. Such comparisons will test the hypothesis that Ca2+ cycling in yellowfin tunas, which are confined to tropical and warm temperate waters, is more temperature sensitive than in bluefin tunas. Thus, an integrative approach utilizing molecular, biochemical, structural and whole organismal physiological techniques will be employed. Whole-cell voltage-clamp techniques will be used to characterize sarcolemma Ca2+ entry via the L-type Ca 2+ current, and assess its temperature sensitivity in tunas and mackerel. Confocal microscopy will be used to visualize whole cell Ca2+ transients at different temperatures in fluo-4 loaded myocytes isolated from different species Whole organism performance as a function of temperature will be examined by measuring in situ cardiovascular performance of perfused bluefin tuna and bonito hearts. Overall this study will provide comparative data on cardiac function in fishes of the family Scombridae, and will characterize specifically the thermal relationships of voltage-sensitive Ca2+ channels, SR Ca2+ release channels, and the Ca2+ ATPase pump in heart cells from endothermic and ectothermic sister taxa. The results will increase our understanding of how teleost hearts achieve high metabolic rate and maintain function during acute temperature changes. The long-term objective is to understand the evolution of endothermy and high metabolic rate in the scombrid lineage. The proposed research also will yield insights about the role played by cardiac specializations in increasing niche breath of bluefin tuna. The research will contribute to basic knowledge about a small group of fishes that are among the most economically valuable animals on Earth. Dissemination of information from this project will occur by publications, popular articles, a website and public exhibits at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The Tuna Research and Conservation faculty and students will provide public lectures throughout the year and contribute to efforts at the Monterey Bay Aquarium to educate the public about tuna biology and conservation doc22583 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will test the feasibility of new drug delivery applications arising from Advanced Encapsulation s patented method of lipid membrane encapsulation. This passive method has demonstrated the ability to encapsulate nearly any object of colloidal dimensions at relatively high yield under gentle conditions. Specifically, no other technique has been reported which encapsulates interior vesicles intact and having a composition distinct from the outer membrane. Cationic vesicles and iron oxide nanoparticles are all known to have poor compatibility with blood environments resulting in rapid aggregation and or clearance. However, these materials have shown great promise in vitro for various biomedical applications including medical imaging, controlled release, and localized delivery via magnetic fields. This project will test the encapsulation and separation efficiency as well as the stability of these materials in bovine serum and or plasma. Based on the successes of liposomes in intravenous drug delivery, and on the physics of macromolecular interactions, liposomal encapsulation should engender biocompatibility to both classes of materials in question. The commercial applications of this project are in the area of pharmaceutical drug delivery doc22584 none Barton This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I Project proposes to develop alternative biofilm control products for preventing biofilm accumulation on a wide range of household, industrial, and medically relevant surfaces. Biofilm formation in industrial water systems leads to poor system performance, to accelerated biocorrosion, and to increased maintenance expense. Microbial colonization of food processing equipment and medical devices poses a serious health threat when biofilms harbor pathogenic organisms. Toxic biocides, even at high concentrations, often fail to control problematic biofilms. The efficacy of traditional antimicrobial agents would be greatly improved if used in conjunction with biofilm degrading enzymes. This Phase I project will identify promising biofilm matrix- hydrolyzing enzyme candidates. The follow on Phase II project will develop enzyme products that are stable in the presence of chemical biocides and a variety of adverse reaction conditions. These enzyme formulations will eventually be tested against mixed-species biofilms. The commercial applications of this project are in a number of areas, including water distribution systems, food processing equipment, industrial machinery and medical devices doc22585 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project will seek to achieve a quantum leap in sensitivity of gamma ray astronomy in the 100 keV to 10 MeV region through development of a novel high pressure xenon (HPXe) detector element for imaging the region of interest. This development will incorporate (1) a cost-effective means of containing HPXe safely up to pressures of psig, (2) innovative means of measuring the spatial coordinates of gamma ray interactions within the HPXe detecting element for high quality spatial and angular measurements, and (3) novel methods of realizing the optimal spectroscopic properties of HPXe at a density of 0.55 g cm3 to achieve an energy resolution approaching 0.45% at 1 MeV. A large array of such detecting elements could provide the ideal detector for a next generation HPXe Compton gamma ray telescope, having an angular resolution of a few tenths of a degree and providing a hundred-fold increase in sensitivity over that predicted for the upcoming Integral (SPI) satellite gamma observatory. A scaled down version of such a telescope could also be used for regional neutron activation analysis of the Martian surface, remote detection applications, or an excellent alternative to HPGe detectors currently used in laboratory settings. The anticipated outcome of this project is a new basic detector element, which can be used for a variety of space physics, field detection, and laboratory applications. The physical characteristics of such a detector combined with an order of magnitude improvement in energy resolution make it well suited for gamma detection in the 100 keV to 5 MeV band aboard satellite or balloon-borne instruments. Another very exciting application of this technology is a spectrometer for detection of radiation emitted as a result of neutron activation of the Martian surface. Such research could provide important data regarding planetary soil composition. In addition to astrophysics applications, a high energy resolution detector element based on high pressure xenon cylindrical detectors has significant commercial potential as a replacement for HPGe because the requirement of cryogenic cooling is eliminated, resulting in greater convenience and broader applicability. HPGe is currently employed in many laboratory settings, and the proposed technology could offer a cheaper and much more convenient alternative doc22586 none Large floods on alluvial rivers produce geomorphic changes that create and renew fish habitat and help regenerate riparian vegetation. Floods renew spawning gravels, scour and deepen pools, and create side channels and other off-channel features. In addition, cottonwoods and other streamside trees important to stream ecology depend on floods for regeneration. All of these features are created during moderate to large flood events. Over a period of years after the flood event they infill, stabilize, or otherwise evolve to a less favorable condition. The goal of this research project is to use evidence from historic large floods to understand the spatial pattern and controls of these geomorphic changes and to determine whether human response to historic floods has limited the ability of rivers to regenerate fish habitat. Many Columbia River tributaries experienced a large flood (a flood the recurs on average once every 50 years or longer) in or when flood protection structures (levees, bank stabilization and channelization) were less extensive. They also experienced another large flood in the when more flood protection structures were in place. Using aerial photos, documentary evidence, and government agency records, spatial patterns of geomorphic change will be analyzed on long continuous river reaches that represent a range of variation in geomorphic controls and flood protection. Geographic information system-based analyses of pre-flood and post-flood conditions will be used to create change maps. Geomorphic change is expected to vary spatially in relation to controls such as valley width, flood power, sediment inputs, inputs of large woody debris. Geomorphic change during the flood will be examined to determine whether and where habitat creation was reduced by flood protection structures. In addition, historic development of flood protection structures will be reconstructed to see whether or not flood protection structures were built where the greatest flood impacts occurred. If flood protection structures correspond to sites with the highest potential for geomorphic change, the ability of a river to regenerate fish habitat may be severely limited. This project will advance understanding of the spatial controls of flood impacts and understanding of human response to flood damage. The project will also contribute to development of ecologically sensitive flood protection policies. The conflict between flood protection and restoration of aquatic habitat for endangered fish has become acute in the study region. In a large and damaging flood occurred, and in more than 20 stocks of salmon in the Columbia River were listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Existing flood protection policies are not compatible with the ESA and are currently being revised. Scientific findings like those that will result from this project will inform the debate and decision making by many local authorities throughout the region as they seek to adopt and implement new fish-friendly policies. This project will develop ways to identify geomorphic hotspots for fish habitat and evaluate whether or not past human response to floods have limited fish habitat. Results of the project will be disseminated through presentations at regional river management workshops and conferences, web pages, and publication in refereed scientific journals doc22587 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will provide an inexpensive, highly-scaleable process technology to create high-brightness, short wavelength, silicon-based LEDs (light emitting diodes) and laser diodes. We will utilize a biological template technology, developed at the University of Colorado, combined with proprietary Astralux expertise to prepare an array of silicon nanoparticles (quantum dots) that will emit visible light. In Phase I, we will demonstrate the feasibility of creating the device structure . This device will have the advantage of being compatible with on-chip silicon processing. These devices can be used in optical storage (such as read write compact disks), printing applications (laser printers), full-color displays (laptop computer screens) and indicators (traffic lights), medical applications, and white light emitting diodes for replacing incandescent light bulbs doc22588 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project will investigate self-imaging in fiber structures, and determine feasibility of developing two classes of novel device: highly efficient, near diffraction-limited rare earth ion-doped glass lasers and amplifiers, and high power energy fibers for transport, routing and coupling of diffraction-limited beams. Conventional single mode fiber lasers can deliver similar performance at low power energy, but higher power systems require larger fiber apertures, leading to multi spatial mode propagation. Self-imaging accesses a new operating regime for guided wave devices, enabling diffraction-limited power scaling of lasers and beam-transport fibers. In comparison, bulk lasers are less efficient, and more susceptible to thermo-optic distortions. The self-imaging proof-of-concept has been demonstrated in a 16W planar waveguide laser fabricated from diffusion-bonded crystals. However, that approach is not well suited to fabricating 2-dimensional waveguides where 4 separate polishing bonding steps are needed. Application of this work would be the design and development of optimized waveguides for the telecommunications industry. The end product would be an integrated product with improved optical characteristics doc22589 none Ravizza This award provides support to the University of Hawaii s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) for acquisition of a high resolution, sector field, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (HR-SF-ICPMS) and laser ablation system. The mass spectrometer is a versatile instrument for trace analysis in a wide variety of natural materials including seawater, sediments and rocks. The laser ablation unit allows direct trace analysis of many solid materials, eliminating the need for time consuming and expensive chemical dissolution procedures. At SOEST this instrumentation will be used to advance research efforts in chemical oceanography, paleoceanography, geochemistry and volcanology. Analyses of trace metals in seawater will be used to better quantify the rate of supply of dust to the surface ocean and it solubility. This information is required to test current hypotheses that trace metal availability limits biological productivity in large portions of the open ocean. Trace element analyses of biogenic calcium carbonate precipitated by marine organisms will be used to improve our ability to reconstruct the history of ocean temperature changes and fluctuations in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Paleoceangraphic data of this sort are used to establish the magnitude and rate of climate variability prior to significant human impact. Data of this type is an essential component of efforts to discern between natural climate variability and human-induced climate perturbations. Trace element and isotope analyses of marine sediments will be performed in order to elucidate the geologic history of chemical weathering. A better understanding of chemical weathering is a necessary part of the geologic community s effort to understand those natural processes that have maintained an atmosphere capable of sustaining macroscopic life for hundreds of millions of years. Sediment geochemistry studies that document concentrations of platinum group elements in the environment will also be conducted. Available data indicated these metals are released from automobile catalytic converters and are enriched in widely distributed areas of the globe. These, and related efforts in environmental geochemistry, are part of the research community s contribution to assessing the importance of emerging human impacts on the global environment. The mass spectrometer and laser ablation system will also contribute to the research program of several volcanologists and petrologists at SOEST. These investigators use trace element data in conjunction with other data sets to understand melting in the deep earth, and the magmatic differentiation processes. These processes are responsible for producing volcanic activity at the surface of the Earth. Research efforts include studies of seafloor volcanism, explosive volcanoes in island arc settings, as well as the unique natural laboratory provided by active volcanism on the big island of Hawaii doc22590 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop an autonomous method for curing voltage collapse and blackout in a power system that may occur when a loadflow has no solution. This method will identify over 100 different voltage collapse problems in a system when current methods may only detect two or three. It can find or more double equipment outages that have no loadflow solution that are unknown due to the overwhelming computation required to find them. For each such equipment outage that has no loadflow solution, the method will determine (a) if the lack of solution is due to loadflow algorithm convergence problems or not; (b) which of the over 100 voltage collapse problems is producing the blackout; (c) whether the lack of solution is due to insufficient sufficient reactive supply and the corrective or preventive control that would enable a loadflow solution to be found; (d) whether the lack of solution is due to network reactive losses that require reduction in load(emergency control) to enable a loadflow solution to be found; (e) the corrective and or emergency controls that require very few control changes because it depends on the structure of the subsystem that initiates the blackout. the method would be used in design, scheduling, and in on-line control of power systems. Currently, it takes an average of 15 hours of engineering manpower computation time to obtain a solution and in many cases no solution can be found. The proposed method can be expected to obtain a preventive, corrective or emergency control solution for every equipment outage that has no solution in seconds and without human intervention. It accomplishes the task because it learns and acquires knowledge of the structure of the system that produces cascading instability that is voltage collapse and that produces blackout. This project has substantial commercial potential by reducing blackouts and the economic and societal costs associated with power interruption doc22591 none Syage This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I Project proposes to test a method for conducting high-throughput, automated analysis of the protein content of cell lines using a novel mass analyzed 2D liquid-phase separation technique. The conventional method of 2D PAGE (Polyacrylamide Gel Electrophoresis) has several limitations. It is labor intensive, time consuming, difficult to automate and often not readily reproducible. In addition, quantitation, especially in differential expression experiments, is often difficult and limited in dynamic range. The proposed technology provides automated, faster, and more accurate 2D protein maps, and can be used to purify specific proteins and enact protein peptide digest and sequencing information. These capabilities will prove valuable for studying drug-protein interactions for detecting early signs of cancer. Studies of cancer cell lines can reveal signatures of cancerous cells that can serve as markers for actual diagnosis. The proposed system is based on 2D liquid-phase protein separation using chromatofocusing (CF) in one dimension and non-porous silica, reverse-phase, high-performance liquid chromatography (NPS-RP HPLC) in the second dimension. The HPLC eluent is monitored in real-time by on-line electrospray ionization (ESI) mass spectrometry (MS) to provide molecular weight and intensity information. The commercial application of this project is in the area of proteomics. This market is forecasted to grow from $0.7 billion to $5.8 billion over the next 5 years. There is a tremendous need to develop automated methods of protein analysis of cell lines to better understand whole system biological function for improved drug therapy and early detection of disease, such as cancer doc22592 none This Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project is directed to the development of a novel planar excimer lamp. This lamp design offers numerous potential advantages over conventional cylindrical coaxial lamps which includes high irradiance ( 100 mW cm2), uniform area illumination, compact size, improves cooling, longer life, and lower cost. This lamp will be designed to be easily integrated able in tools used in the manufacture of electronic devices. Excimer lamp applications include in-situ reticule cleaning, in-situ pre-deposition cleaning, photochemical vapor deposition, and UV curing. Conventional UV lamps are inadequate for these tasks. Excimer lasers, which can easily illuminate a large field size, are often inadequate at integrating into a production tool, and have a very high cost of ownership. Three goals has been established to guide this work in: 1) design and fabricate a planar excimer lamp with novel electrode structure and lamp cell design, 2) evaluate the area uniformity of the narrow band excimer emission, and 3) measure the UV spectra, radiant power output, and efficiency of the lamp filled with KrCl (222 nm) or XeCl (308 nm). The technology, once successfully developed, will be used the semiconductor manufacturing industry doc22593 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a novel membrane protein expression system using hyperthermophilic bacteria that are capable of synthesizing a vast amount of membrane proteins and supporting extensive internal membrane structures. Membrane proteins are of significant medicinal value. However, efforts to study membrane proteins are often hampered by their low level of biosynthesis. An efficient membrane protein overexpression system will facilitate the biochemical and biophysical characterization of such proteins. In this project, self-replicating expression vectors, genome integrative vectors and mini-viral genome vectors will be constructed and explored for the expression of hyperthermophilic membrane proteins. To establish the general applicability of the system, the expression of various membrane proteins of different size, structure, and function will be examined. The system, once properly developed, will allow the economical mass production of hyperthermophilic membrane proteins essential for large-scale structural genomics effort as well as for specific industrial applications. The commercial applications of this project are in the area of Structural Genomics Research doc22594 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)Phase I project seeks to develop and commercialize novel types of 3D microphotonic materials and devices for the visible spectrum. Despite the significant amount of research performed on photonic bandgap materials in the past decade, an approach to create full 3D photonic crystals in the visible region that could combine high performance with low cost manufacturability has remained a largely unobtainable goal. This breakthrough approach is enabled by an unique ability to precisely modulate the vertical pore structure in highly ordered nanoporous alumina, which can allow the confinement of light not just in-plane, but in 3 dimensions. The process will allow tuning of the photonic characteristics of the material, in particular the bandgap, to the desired levels. Several innovative techniques to deposit materials inside the nanoporous lattice will afford both lateral and vertical modification of the refractive index of the structure. This, combined with the ability to micromachine the resulting structures, will enable the creation of advanced microphotonic and optoelectronic devices and components for optical communications and computing. The techniques proposed could lead to the creation of dense monolithic photonic and optoelectronic components and circuits for very high speed optical computing and communication doc22595 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is aimed at developing a micro optical switch array that implements the principle of electro-wetting-on-dielectric, a liquid micro-actuation mechanism based on the electrical control of surface tension on dielectric surfaces, for use in optical telecommunications and optical computing. While MOEMS devices move solid micro-mirrors, liquid actuation is attractive because of the compactness of the device and absence of the stiction problem inherent in solid-solid surface contact. Currently, a couple of companies use liquids for their optical devices. Compared with their liquid-based optical MEMS under development, which use thermal energy to move liquid, electrical control of surface tension (i.e., electro-wetting) is especially promising because of its unprecedented energy efficiency (estimated ~10 W during switching with 30 V) and reliability. Unlike other electro-wetting principles the proposed electro-wetting-on-dielectric driving promises high speed and long-term reliability, which are critical for commercial success. The electro-wetting-on-dielectric micro optical switch arrays will find use within any system requiring optical signal routing such as optical computers, optical instrumentation, distributed sensors, and medical monitoring doc22596 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will enable a 2-fold increase in conductivity for products without sacrificing power or capability. Recently, a new high thermal conductivity material has been produced using CVD fluid bed coating process and low cost consolidation techniques. The realization of improved electronic substrates is dependent on the increases in thermal conductivity over standard materials. Though high conductivity materials have been identified, consolidating these materials in a cost effective and durable manner has remained illusive. The encapsulation of materials prior to consolidation has aided the durability and low cost processing. The innovation in this program is to improve the encapsulated materials being produced, and potentially develop even greater and distinctly different physical properties additional development of the encapsulated powder consolidation process is necessary. This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will enable a 2-fold increase in conductivity for products without sacrificing power or capability. Recently, a new high thermal conductivity material has been produced using CVD fluid bed coating process and low cost consolidation techniques. The realization of improved electronic substrates is dependent on the increases in thermal conductivity over standard materials. Though high conductivity materials have been identified, consolidating these materials in a cost effective and durable manner has remained illusive. The encapsulation of materials prior to consolidation has aided the durability and low cost processing. The innovation in this program is to improve the encapsulated materials being produced, and potentially develop even greater and distinctly different physical properties additional development of the encapsulated powder consolidation process is necessary doc22597 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to define methodology to facilitate the growth of engineered cartilage tissue. Recent studies have demonstrated that the alginate recovered chondrocyte (ARC) method can be used to stimulate isolated adult articular chondrocytes in vitro to form viable cartilaginous tissue with good physicochemical properties. The innovation of this work is that it describes for the first time a method in which the cells from articular cartilage from skeletally mature animals can be used to form engineered tissues in vitro. The overall hypothesis of the proposed project is that tissue, engineered using the ARC method, can be used for long-term repair of full thickness cartilage defects. Initial experiments have shown promise in producing ARC tissue as both an allograft (from a donor) and an autograft (from self). The purpose of this proposal is to advance current ARC technology for use as an autograft procedure to repair full thickness cartilage defects in swine. At various times before and after transplantation, the biochemical composition, histological appearance and functional properties will be assessed and related to one another. The data will help determine the feasibility of using the ARC method for the repair of injured or diseased cartilage tissue. The commercial application of this project is in the area of articular cartilage repair The incidence of articular cartilage injury is estimated to be approximately 27,200 cases per year. The proposed research will lead to a commercial method for production of tissue for surgical implantation to repair articular cartilage defects doc22598 none This award provides funding for a Regional Center for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence with administrative offices located at the University of Southern Mississippi s Marine Education Center and Aquarium in Biloxi, Ms. The proposal would establish satellite centers in Louisiana, and Alabama and expand existing USM teacher professional development efforts into these states. This Center would make extensive use of the expertise of regional marine educators as interpreters of ocean and coastal marine science research in professional development institutes for formal and informal educators. This center will be one of seven regional centers that represent the initiation of the COSEE network. The initial set of centers covers most of the East Coast, Florida, the Gulf Coast, and California. A central coordinating office for the seven centers will also be funded doc22599 none It is expected that the introduction of conjugated cross-links between conjugated macromolecules can lead to macromolecular networks with most interesting optic and electronic characteristics. However, the knowledge base regarding the synthesis and processing of well-defined materials with this structural motif is very limited. Thus, a research program is proposed, which is focused on the design, synthesis and exploration of well-defined conjugated polymer networks. The proposed research addresses the synthesis and investigation of different classes of polymeric materials, including poly(p-phenylene ethynylene) (PPE_ and poly(thiophene) (PT) deriavatives, and various fields of potential applications. The envisioned activities will be focused on organometallic hybrid materials in which metal-ligand interactions between the conjugated macromolecules and metals allow the controlled formation of conjugated cross-links. This general framework is particularly attractive, since it readily permits synthetic access to the desired target materials through ligand-exchange reactions and also allows for adequated processing schemes. On the one hand, it is intended to directly utilize functionalities that are integral part of the polymer backbones as binding sites, such as the ethynylene moieties comprised in the PPE. The latter form stable complexes with a variety of metal centers, including Pt(0) and Pt(0), which will form the conjugated cross-links. On the other hand, it is envisioned to also integrate specific ligand sites into the conjugated polymer. Bipyridine moieties, which are readily integrated into the polymers under consideration and from stable complexes with a variety of metal centers, represent an illustrative example. Initially focusing on charge-transport characteristics, electrical conductivity and nonlinear optic response, it is planned to systematically investigate the influence which the cross-links exert on the electronic and photophysical properties of the novel materials. The research in this proposal contributes new and original ideas to the current international effort in the fields of chemistry, materials science, and physics of conjugated polymers. It is anticipated that it will provide firm answers to the fundamental questions how conjugated cross-links can be conveniently introduced into these materials without compromising their processability, and how this structural motif can be employed to influence the material s optic and electronic characteristics in a beneficial way. Because of the exemplary and fundamental character, the research is expected to provide a broad intellectual basis for the future design, synthesis and application of functional materials with unusual and unique optic and electronic properties. With the aim to develop innovative and stimulating curricula at undergraduate and graduate level and in an attempt to integrate research and education, the proposed research is complemented with a number of educational elements. The latter are intimately related to the research activities of the PI and include the creation of undergraduate research opportunities, the development of a new cutting-edge course on photo- and electrofunctional polymers, and the development of a pioneering outreach program - the Polymer Science Days - which is implemented in collaboration with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. The proposed initiatives complement routine teaching assignments and address the development of innovative and stimulating curricula doc22600 none The Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) system is needed to further ongoing funded projects on dynamics and transport in unsteady flows, sedimentation processes, and complex interfaces. The aim of these studies is to understand the fundamental mechanisms of mixing, fate, transport, and sedimentation. This is of importance not only from the viewpoint of basic research but also to develop predictive tools (for example, for environmental processes) for practical applications. The PIV system is capable of tracking both phases (particles or passive tracers and fluid) in real time by the use of non-intrusive optical methods to generate 2D or 3D mappings. Data analysis and quantification of the processes can be easily performed using MATLAB software linked to the instrumentation software. This feature makes the interface use friendly for undergraduate students. Furthermore, the PIV system will also be able to track the motion of particles in externally driven fluids as function of the driving frequencies. With this unique feature it will be possible to investigate chaotic advection of particles in real time. The instrumentation will provide a unique opportunity to advance the ongoing research of multiphase flow at both the experimental and theoretical levels. In addition, as Xavier University, an historically black university, prides itself of being the number one producer in the nation of excellent African-American graduates in physics and physical sciences, more students will be directly involved in research in a very important area and will have the opportunity of using state-of-the art equipment, that will better prepare them for graduate school and research careers. This equipment will also have a direct educational impact as it will be used in connection with laboratory classes and research results will be used in curricula materials in upper level courses. Furthermore, in the future this system can also expand the horizon of the research embraced by faculty in areas of technological relevance for multiphase flows. Other researchers and collaborators in the New Orleans area will benefit from this system as well doc22601 none Ikhlas Abdel-Qader Bradley Bazuin Karlis Kaugars Abhay Sharma Li Yang Western Michigan University MRI RUI Acquisition of Computing and Peripheral Hardware to Support Collaborative Research and Research Education in Imaging and Information Visualization This proposal from a RUI institution, developing an Ethernet-Based imaging and visualization infrastructure, supports interdisciplinary research projects that span a variety of application areas such as Information Visualization, Imaging Science, Color Analysis, Time-Varying Images, and Real-Time Image Processing. The laboratory, consisting of one server, multiple workstations, associated cameras, frame grabbers, output devices, and selected network and image processing software, will be bridged to existing departmental, college, and campus networks, and will be used to accomplish the following goals: Expand research investigations advancing image processing and information visualization, Encourage interdisciplinary research, research training, and educational activities, Increase industrial collaboration adding a real world problem environment, Support graduate and undergraduate instruction in related courses such as Pattern Recognition, Computer Graphics, and Digital Imaging, and Attract women and minority groups at both graduate and undergraduate levels to pursue research projects. The infrastructure will service the following projects within three research groups: 1. Information Visualization and Data Mining Group A. Visual Exploration and Mining of Large Relational Datasets B. Algorithm Visualization C. Interactive Document Management D. Visualization of Association Rules 2. Image Visualization, Color Measurement, and Color Analysis Group A. Color Reproduction in Digital Imaging B. Fundamental Analysis of CCD Imaging Systems Using Fourier Theory 3. Real-Time Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Group A. Utilizing Wavelets for Target Tracking B. An Integrated Image Analysis Algorithm from Dynamic Scenes C. Confocal Microscopy and Image Analysis in Gamma-Ray Astronomy D. Wireless Vision for Intelligent Transportation System E. Pavement Surface Image Analysis System doc22602 none The objective of this project is to improve understanding of the heterogeneous chemical kinetics of atmospheric particles. The P.I.s will study laboratory-generated atmospheric particles composed of cores of elemental carbon coated with organic layers and determine the chemical kinetics of reactions in the layers with ozone. The specific goals of the research are: (1) to generate particles composed of cores of elemental carbon with organic, (2) to determine the chemical kinetics of reactions in the layers with ozone, as dependent on the qualitative layering characteristics, such as thickness and chemical type, (3) to quantify interactions of the layers and the ozone reaction kinetics with relative humidity, and (4) to investigate the response of the aerosol mass spectrometer as a qualitative and quantitative analytical instrument for these types of organic particles. The broader impacts of this work will be an improved understanding of heterogeneous processes in the atmosphere that are important for human health, climate change, and air quality. This project will also foster international collaborations and provide opportunities for graduate training doc22603 none A theoretical investigation of atmospheric adjustment to generalized forcings will be carried out by the Principal Investigator. Atmospheric adjustment is defined as the response of a moist compressible atmosphere to a prescribed forcing. Immediately after an instantaneous forcing of arbitrary shape, the atmosphere will, in general, be in a state of geostrophic and hydrostatic imbalance. The study of atmospheric adjustment describes the subsequent tendency of the air to achieve a state of geostrophic and hydrostatic balance. It is an extension of the classic problem of geostrophic adjustment to include the effects of compressibility and to allow for nonhydrostatic and moist processes. The forcings studied will be completely general and include momentum, mass, thermal, and moisture forcings. The impact of the time scale of the forcing will also be assessed. Thus, the research will provide insight into the fundamental workings of the atmosphere. The solutions also will shed light on the dynamics of clouds, mesoscale convective systems, and other nonhydrostatic circulations driven by moist convection. Although both heating and moistening correspond to an addition of buoyancy to the air mass, there is a fundamental difference. An addition of heat can be transformed to other forms of energy that can be propagated away; an addition of water must be conserved and cannot be transformed (in the absence of phase changes) and propagated out of the system. A suite of linear problems will be used to examine the full effects of compressibility in the adjustment to generalized forcings. Initial value and Fourier transform techniques will be used to solve for the linear time-dependent problems analytically. The energetics will be examined and the partitioning of the energy between the acoustic, gravity, and Lamb modes and the balanced final state will be assessed. These solutions provide a benchmark to test the dynamical cores of mesoscale, cloud, and forecasting models. These analytic solutions of the linearized adjustment problem will be supplemented by numerical investigations. These numerical studies will address the effect of nonlinearities on the atmospheric response and enable solutions with a more realistic base-state atmosphere. The research also will develop an anelastic model that eliminates the acoustic and Lamb waves. This new model will be an advance over existing models in that it will conserve mass, moisture, and energy. Numerical experiments will document the merits of these anelastic equations in comparison to the fully compressible equations. Thus in addition to providing insight into the dynamics of the atmosphere the research will help to benchmark and develop nonhydrostatic models, which are the foundation for numerical weather forecast models doc22604 none Photosystem II, a membrane protein complex in cyanobacteria and chloroplasts, mediates a unique reaction in the biosphere, oxidation of water to molecular oxygen. Although the exact molecular mechanism of photosynthetic oxygen evolution remains elusive, it is known that a cluster of manganese, calcium and chloride ions is essential for this activity. The long-term goal of this project is to define the roles of various protein components of photosystem II in the mechanism of water oxidation. Proteomic analysis of a highly active PSII preparation from the cyanobacterium Synechocystis has identified four novel proteins, Sll , Sll , Sll , Sll , as well as the PsbP and PsbQ proteins, which were previously thought to be present only in higher plant and green algal chloroplasts. This project includes detailed biochemical and genetic studies to determine the cellular localization, and functions of the above proteins in cyanobacterial and plant photosystem II. By harvesting solar radiation, the photosystem II complex contributes to half of the biomass production on our planet. During the past year, X-ray crystal structure of a cyanobacterial photosystem II complex has been described at a 3.8A resolution. However, a more detailed understanding of the organization and functions of the protein components of photosystem II are necessary to fully comprehend the mechanism of photosynthetic O2-evolution. The proposed experiments are expected to complement anticipated higher resolution X-ray crystallographic analysis of photosystem II to gain such a level of understanding. These experiments will also shed new light on the evolution of the form and function of photosystem II from cyanobacteria to higher plants. In addition, this project will provide state-of-the-art research opportunities to a number of undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral trainees doc22605 none PI (s) Don Grant II University of Arizona The project addresses two questions concerning the environmental performance of absentee owned plants: (1) Do plants with out-of-state or foreign headquarters emit more toxins than locally owned plants?, and (2) Do plants with remote headquarters pollute more depending on the social capital of their host communities. Critics of globalization and capitalist expansion suggest that absentee owned plants have no long-term interest in local communities as places to live. Rather they are very willing to plunder their natural surroundings if it will maximize their parent firm s profits. Meanwhile literature on structural embeddedness suggest that this organizational model is too simplistic, that regardless of where a plant s headquarters is located, a plant s performance is conditioned by the local institutional culture in which it is situated. The research will test several hypothesis-(1) chemical plants with out-of-state or foreign headquarters have higher emission rates (i.e., release a larger percent of chemicals they use on-site to the environment), (2) chemical plants with out-of-state or foreign headquarters have higher emission rates when located in civically disengaged communities, and (3) chemical plants with out-of-state ore foreign headquarters have particularly high emission rates when located in communities that are both civically disengaged and comprised of poor minorities. To test these hypotheses, a data file consisting of roughly chemical plants will be used. The file includes information on each plant s toxic releases from the EPA s Toxics Release Inventory, its ownership status, and the social and institutional features of its surrounding community. A cross-section design will be used to determine the direct and conditional effects of absentee ownership on emission rates in . To assess how these effects have changed a lagged panel design will be employed. Findings will provide new insights into what is rapidly becoming the modal type of business organization: absentee ownership. Prior research has demonstrated that absentee ownership has economic and social effects; this study will be the first to specify some of the conditions under which absentee ownership also has environmental consequences. Results could potentially guide regulators in deciding whether to monitor plants owned by foreign firms more closely, and the business community in its efforts at self-regulation doc22606 none This is a modeling-based investigation of the interactions of clouds and aerosols and the effects of these interactions on cloud dynamics, precipitation, and radiative transfer. It is an extension of a recent study of the cloudy boundary layer, based on what is called the assumed probability density function (PDF) method. Within every computational grid box of the cloud model, it is assumed that the joint probability of vertical velocity, potential temperature, and liquid water content satisfies a parametric form such as the multivariate Gaussian. Large-eddy simulation (LES) provides information on the small-scale variability of these quantities, enabling the estimation of the parameters of the distribution. The cloud model predicts the development in time of the mean values of the quantities in the grid boxes and the PDF model characterizes the subgrid-scale variability. In this project, the previous work will be extended to include precipitation processes and the estimation of the effects of variable concentrations of cloud condensation nuclei and ice forming nuclei on the microphysical, dynamic, and radiative properties of clouds. The feasibility of applying the technique to large cumulonimbus clouds (deep convection) will be investigated. Sensitivity studies will determine the extent to which changes in aerosol characteristics can affect the clouds and influence regional climate doc22607 none Protein folding is a multifaceted poorly understood phenomenon of great biological significance. Most of the published literature on the subject deals with the in vitro refolding of purified full-length denatured polypeptides. In contrast, this project addresses cotranslational protein folding and misfolding, as it occurs within the ribosomal machinery. The main goal of this research is to develop a novel methodology to study the mechanistic and conformational aspects of protein folding within the prokaryotic translation apparatus. The folding kinetics of nascent polypeptide chains will be investigated in the context of the Escherichia coli translation machinery. These studies will be performed by hydrogen deuterium exchange pulse labeling in cell-free systems. Liquid chromatography-coupled time-of-flight electrospray mass spectrometry and time-of-flight MALDI mass spectrometry will be employed for detection. Apomyoglobin (apoMb) serves as a good model system for these studies since it is a well-characterized cytoplasmic protein with single domain containing all alpha-helical segments. An apoMb gene with E. coli-optimized codon usage will be employed. Control experiments will also be performed in parallel on chloramphenicol acetyltransferase. The methodology developed in this project will set the stage to enable future investigations addressing important aspects of biologically relevant protein folding questions. These include (a) studying whether cotranslational folding takes place during expression of small single domain proteins; and (b) mapping nascent polypeptide conformation, and identifying which specific amino acids become folded or misfolded at different stages of chain elongation. Very little is known about the structural aspects of how proteins fold or misfold in the cell. This project aims at devising initial steps towards filling this gap doc22608 none Research shows that people usually act to maintain their image of themselves in social identities that they occupy- identities like father or son, boss or employee, friend or adversary. Current theories of identity assume that people only see themselves in one identity in each social situation, and that their behavior is guided by attempts to support that identity. Recently, the PIs have begun to consider more complex situations where people see themselves in two or more identities at the same time. For example, a policeman who stops a speeder who turns out to be his uncle is in a situation where he is simultaneously a law enforcement officer and a nephew. In this research the investigators will extend their research to examine what kinds of social systems make people more or less likely to have many identities. They will develop a theory to answer this question using computer simulations and principles about how groups and networks are related in social systems. They also investigate what kinds of situations lead people to enact more than one identity at a time, and how these situations affect how they feel. A data set that samples the situations in which University of Arizona students, faculty and staff found themselves will be used to test predictions that multiple-identity occupancy causes stress and the experience of mixed emotions doc22609 none The Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) will purchase a distributed memory parallel computer which will be dedicated to the support of departmental research in the mathematical sciences. The principal investigators intend to purchase a 64-processor Linux cluster consisting of 32 dual-processor computational nodes connected with a high-speed Myrinet network and equipped with a significant amount of fast central disk storage using a RAID controller. All researchers plan to use the Message Passing Interface (MPI) to provide reliable portability. The equipment will be used for multiple research projects, including, in particular, the areas of applications in semiconductor manufacturing, quantum chemistry, bioinformatics, computational neurobiology, and constrained mechanical systems. The research projects are unified by the need to use efficient parallel computing to enable the solution of practically relevant problems. The research areas addressed are of current national interest and involve solution methodologies that cut across these disciplines and will lead to more efficient simulation techniques in other areas. The computer will also play a role in the department s education mission, the university s MARC U STAR (Minority Access to Research Careers) program, and in the principal investigators Research Experiences for Undergraduates activities, by involving students at various levels in contemporary methods in scientific computing doc22610 none to proposal No. , entitled Acquisition of an electron paramagnetic resonance spectrometer for use in research, undergraduate and graduate curricula at Brooklyn College A grant has been awarded to the Department of Chemistry at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. The grant will be used toward the purchase of a new EPR spectrometer to replace a nearly thirty-year old instrument whose function has seriously deteriorated in the recent past. EPR spectroscopy is a basic analytical and research tool used to study the properties of systems containing unpaired electrons. Specifically, the method of EPR spectroscopy will be used to study 1) the structure and mechanism of a new class of bacterial heme enzyme, catalase-peroxidase. This enzyme is of key importance in the mechanism of action of a first-line antibiotic used to treat tuberculosis infection; 2) the mechanism of a radical enzyme, pyruvate formate-lyase, which provides a simple model system for analysis of unusual enzymatic reactions; 3) the action and toxicity in mitochondria of methamphetamine-related compounds; 4) the mechanism of action of a DNA-cleaving molecule; 5) the molecular structure of materials used in batteries and also the structure of chemical compounds important in radioactive waste management; 6) the structure of metalloprotein active sites. Several biochemical projects supervised by Prof. Richard S. Magliozzo, research by auxiliary users from other universities, as well as chemistry laboratory course curricula in undergraduate and graduate programs at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York will derive benefit from a new EPR instrument purchased with support from the NSF. New scientific knowledge that will be produced during the period of funding will advance the field of biochemical reaction mechanisms, and will provide insights into the structure and function of biological and environmental chemicals. Undergraduate and graduate education at Brooklyn College (the latter consisting of local Master s Programs in Chemistry and Biochemistry, as well as Ph. D. Programs in the same two areas coordinated at The Graduate Center of CUNY, New York, NY) will also derive benefits from this grant. Moreover, the education and training of undergraduate students from under-represented minority groups in the sciences, who participate in local, state and federally funded programs, will be directly improved by the availability of a new instrument for their research projects at Brooklyn College doc22611 none A grant has been awarded to University of New Mexico to develop a prototype sensor to detect hantavirus infections in field. It will be a rapid, hand held, automated device, which gives a quantitative determination of viral infections in small mammals. As a result of this development several functioning devices will be tested in field conditions. Currently samples from wild populations must be collected in the field and returned to the laboratory for testing, often taking days or weeks. The work initially will be focused on the optimization of a sensor for fast (10-20 min) determination of viral infections in the field and will be extended towards the development of an automated portable system to be used in field stations or other remote sites. The next stage of the research will include miniaturization of a portable system and developed for rapid on-site determination of the viral infection in mammal samples in field research environments anywhere rapid viral detection is needed. The work will include the evaluation of the disposable sensing element, optimization of sensor column assembly and flow-injection system, engineering of the prototype of the sensor, optimization of the assay procedure and determination of optimal time for incubation, flow rates and temperature, development of fast assay for hantavirus infections in blood samples, characterization and validation of the assay procedure and comparing it with the conventional techniques. Further work would include the miniaturization of the existing manually operated device and make it automated. To accomplish this task a micro-controller, micro pump, disposable sensing element and a battery system will be used. This project brings together a multidisciplinary team from the University of New Mexico s (UNM) Department of Biology, Department of Chemical and Nuclear Engineering and Department of Microbiology to develop the proposed instrumentation. Conventional techniques for determination of viral infections (immunoblot) are qualitative, require relatively long process times (24 hours) and must be conducted under laboratory conditions. The awarded research will result in a sensor, which can be used in cases when the application of conventional immunoassay techniques is limited or impossible. The sensor will be developed using disposable flow electrodes and is a means to conduct fast assay for hantavirus infection with an electrochemical detection. Therefore, while employing different available immunochemicals, a variety of disposable elements can be designed for different kind of infections. The resulting device from this project can be used for fast analyses of other viruses or metabolites under field conditions, in mobile units and may be applicable to detection of certain biological weapons. The sensors can also be used for rapid analyses in conventional conditions of biological, physiological and analytical practices. The University of New Mexico is a Hispanic serving institution. A summer NIH NSF workshop to attract minority and under-represented students will be applied doc22612 none Albert and Crampton Amazonian floodplains are among the most species-rich aquatic ecosystems on earth, and contain a large proportion of specialized and endemic species. This three-year project will survey and document the aquatic fauna of a poorly known, megadiverse and vulnerable region in the Peruvian Amazon. The project represents a unique combination of expertise in Neotropical aquatic zoology, involving international collaboration among scientists in the USA, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Spain, and Venezuela. The personnel will conduct a detailed inventory of the aquatic animals, including fishes and numerous invertebrate groups, of the Pacaya Samiria National Reserve in Peru. This reserve is the largest contiguous area of protected floodplain in the Neotropics (21,500 square kilometers). The project will survey the principal aquatic floodplain habitats: floating meadows, open waters, lakes and river channels. These surveys will embrace seasonal and annual changes in the fauna in order to sample all habitats. Collecting efforts will emphasize habitats that provide critical low water refuge and or reproductive substrate for most aquatic floodplain animals. The project will provide specimens and data to taxonomic experts in several institutions worldwide. This Project was prompted by an invitation from leading Peruvian governmental and university scientists to conduct the first intensive aquatic survey of the Pacaya Samiria National Reserve. The proposed survey matches the goals and priorities of the National Science Foundation s Biotic Surveys and Inventories program and Peruvian Ministry of the Environment, in terms of focus, scale, and urgency. The aquatic fauna of the Pacaya Samiria Reserve is almost completely unknown, and there are no extensive systematic collections or electronic databases of aquatic animals from anywhere in the Peruvian Amazon floodplains. The Pacaya Samiria Reserve also retains a relatively intact forest and aquatic ecosystem in comparison to unprotected sites closer to urban centers. This Project will provide training to local and U.S. students and faculty colleagues and thus benefit the conservation, scientific, and education communities doc22613 none The Center for Subsurface Modeling (CSM), part of the Texas Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics at The University of Texas at Austin, will purchase 64 PCs, a control workstation, as well as a storage device, in order to constuct a parallel computing platform capable of 100 Gflops. The network for the cluster (high speed Myrinet network (1Gbit) and a 100Mb ethernet network) is already in place. This platform will be dedicated to research in the mathematical sciences being led by CSM. Projects that will use this platform include large-scale multiphysics modeling of subsurface processes, multiscale modeling of flow in extremely heterogeneous rocks, finite element coastal and ocean modeling, parallel terascale iterative solvers, and Discontinuous Galerkin discretization methods. A substantial component of each of these projects is the development of new scalable parallel algorithms as well as implementation and testing of both proof-of-concept as well as of production-quality codes for simulation of cases driven by energy and environment applications. A dedicated limited-access resource greatly expedites such development. The Center for Subsurface Modeling, part of the Texas Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics at The University of Texas at Austin, will purchase equipment needed to construct a medium size parallel computer capable of 100 billion arithmetic operations per second. This computer will be dedicated to research in the mathematical and computational sciences being led by CSM. Researchers involved in the project have decades of experience in development of robust, accurate and fast computational techniques. The new cluster will allow for large-scale computational modeling and testing of such techniques which promise to improve ability to understand, predict, monitor, and control natural and engineered processes occuring in surface and subsurface. Significant examples include optimization of oil and gas recovery, analysis of contamination and remediation scenarios in subsurface and surface waters like aquifer and coastal environments. The access to a dedicated computing resource will greatly expedite such development doc22614 none NSF proposal PIs: Xu, Belmonte, Du, Li and Zikatanov The Department of Mathematics at the Pennsylvania State University will purchase a 64-node parallel PC cluster to be dedicated to the support of research and teaching in the mathematical sciences. In particular, the PC cluster will be used to support the research projects of faculty members in the areas of the numerical solution of partial differential equations in fluid dynamics and material sciences, and computational finance and in the studies of general numerical techniques such as parallel multigrid algorithms and quasi-Monte Carlo methods. In particular, the projects include studies of important issues concerning modeling and simulations of non-Newtonian flows, liquid crystals, quantized vortices, water waves and fuel cells. Much of the research efforts rely critically on the establishment of the proposed PC cluster. The proposal involves an integrated collaboration between the numerical work to be performed in the PC cluster and the experimental work to be performed in the W. G. Pritchard Laboratories of the Department of Mathematics. The new equipment will make it possible to numerically simulate the various complex physical phenomena observed in the fluid lab and will greatly enhance collaborations among researchers in computational and applied mathematics at Penn State. The PC cluster will also be the basis for the creation of a new computational laboratory, which together with the Pritchard fluid lab, will provide a unique environment for multidisciplinary research as well as for (both undergraduate and graduate) student training doc22615 none A grant has been awarded to the University of Rhode Island to acquire an automated DNA sequencer and supporting equipment. The Environmental Biotechnology Initiative (EBI) at the University of Rhode Island was developed to promote biotechnology at the institution through research, teaching, and outreach. Four central facilities are envisioned for the EBI - Imaging, Genomics and Proteomics, Transgenics, and Bioinformatics. This grant award will establish the URI Genomics Facility by providing funds for the acquisition of a DNA sequencer and ancillary equipment dedicated for sample preparation. Additionally, funds to support the hire of a Research Associate to manage and operate the facility are provided by this award and matching funds from the University of Rhode Island. The instrumentation and Research Associate will support the currently funded research activities of the three Principal Investigators (PIs) and eight other major users in five separate departments in three different colleges at the university. The funded research projects of the PIs include: studies of gene regulation in the causative agent of Lyme disease (Borrelia burgdorferi), studies of gene regulation in Vibrio anguillarum (a major bacterial pathogen of farmed salmon and other fish), determination of the bacterial species succession of Narragansett Bay, identification of the microbes that inhabit the deep ocean biosphere, determination of the regulation of the molecular mechanisms of osmoregulation in fish, identification of the microbes that inhabit the gastrointestinal tract of salmon, and population genetics of selected marine finfish (e.g., haddock and tautog). The establishment of the Genomics Facility will allow user directed DNA sequencing with more rapid turnaround and lower costs then is presently available to URI-based investigators, who are forced to contract with other academic or commercial sequencing facilities. It also is anticipated that numerous other investigators at URI will make use of the facility. The ability to study life at the DNA level has fundamentally changed almost every aspect of research in the life sciences. The high sample throughput afforded by automated DNA sequencers allows researchers to address questions concerning genetic diversity and gene regulation that were unapproachable only a few years ago. The Genomics Facility also will play an integral role in training our students in state-of-the-art research methodologies and the art of scientific investigation. The Research Associate will work with interested faculty to develop and refine laboratory exercises in molecular biology that include the theory and practice of the DNA sequencer purchased with these funds. Additionally, it is anticipated that the acquisition of Genomics Facility will enhance the ability to attract new graduate students. URI has actively engaged in the recruitment of students from under-represented groups for some years to enhance the number and quality of such students in our graduate programs in the biological sciences. The availability of this core facility to support the research training of all students is expected to enhance recruitment and retention of students from under-represented groups. The combination of improved research infrastructure and training opportunities will enable URI faculty to better compete for research funds, new faculty, and students doc22616 none GC: A merger of the workshops on Generative and Component-based Software Engineering (GCSE) and on the Semantics, Applications and Implementation of Program Generation (SAIG) Walid M. Taha, Yale University, P.I. This document requests funding in the amount of $9K for a pilot joint event of two previously independent workshops called GCSE and SAIG. Both GCSE and SAIG are forums for publishing research generative techniques. GCSE focuses on generative techniques from the software engineering point of view, and SAIG from the formal and programming languages point of view. The pilot joint event, called the First ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Generators and Components (GC 02) will be held in October , in Pittsburgh, PA. The event will replace GCSE and SAIG this year. If this experiment is successful, the result will be a regular, three-day joint conference bringing the two communities in one consolidated forum doc22535 none For collaborative proposals: Rutgers University, Univ. of Maryland, Stephen s Inst. of Technology, VIMS, William & Mary, This collaborative award establishes the Mid-Atlantic Center for Ocean Science Education Excellence to serve 4 states (Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey and New York). Using a matrix model , the Center will scale-up successful individual programs at the partner institutions and establish strong linkages between partners. A primary thematic focus is on the visualization and K-12 classroom use of data from ocean observatories and monitoring buoys (Rutgers, UMCES, VIMS). Stephens Institute of Technology will contribute expertise in K-12 educational technology and delivery. Hampton University will serve as a conduit to under-represented minority groups and provide financial support for both undergraduates and graduate students doc22618 none This award provides funding for a Regional Center for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence with administrative offices located at the South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium Office in Charleston, SC. The center will focus on the North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia region, and center personnel will work to forge stronger relationships between research organizations, researchers, schools and informal educational sites in the region. The Southeastern Center for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence (SECOSEE) will also reach out to under-represented groups in the ocean sciences by creating programs based on the unique African American coastal heritage in the area. Activities include an inventory of existing ocean science materials and programs, awareness workshops for educators and researchers, collaborations between researchers and educators, enhanced professional development opportunities, supplemental school and summer science programs, website development, and evaluation. This center will be one of seven COSEE s that represent the initiation of the COSEE network. The initial set of centers covers most of the East Coast, Florida, the Gulf Coast, and California. A central coordinating office for the seven centers will also be funded. Substantial funding for the SECOSEE program will be provided by NOAA s Coastal Ocean Services and Office of Ocean Exploration doc22619 none This Major Research Instrumentation RUI development project expands the capabilities of a low-cost optical apparatus based on a Helium-Neon (HeNe) laser and a Michelson interferometer that can be used to measure refractive index and film-thickness variations in planar polymer samples. The development incorporates a tunable light source and a visible-NIR digital camera imaging system. The use of a coherent HeNe laser light source in the current system greatly limits the versatility of the apparatus because it is limited to differential refractive index measurements. These measurements can only be carried out at 633 nm. The replacement of the coherent HeNe laser with a tunable, low-coherence arc-lamp source makes possible the determination of absolute and differential refractive index. These measurements can be performed at any wavelength, thereby permitting one to characterize the dispersion properties of samples. The addition of a visible-NIR digital camera and a hardware-software image capture system will advance the capabilities of the apparatus by allowing one to resolve graded refractive index profiles in optical materials. An imaging system will permit one to confront optical wave-front distortion problems, arising from surface roughness and sample inhomogeneity, that have plagued previous interferometer systems. The study, involving undergraduate students at a non-Ph.D. granting institution, will also promote training and learning through the integration of research in the educational process. The expanding use of the internet and the accompanying demand for high-bandwidth transmission media has fueled interests in all-optical networking. Polymers are emerging as key materials in the development of optical networks, owing to their flexibility, light weight, low cost of fabrication, and the potential to create materials with a variety of physical and optical properties. Research and development of optical polymers is currently hindered due to a lack of instrumentation for fully characterizing the bandwidth capacity of candidate materials in the visible and near-infrared (NIR) spectral regions. In particular, there is interest in developing optical imaging systems that allow one to characterize the absolute refractive index, refractive index stability, and overall dispersion properties of new polymeric materials. A secondary goal of this study is to use the new instrument to measure differential and absolute refractive indices in a wide range of freshly prepared polymer films. A collaborative study at the University of Central Florida will focus on the refractive index characteristics of polymer films doped with candidate photochromic compounds. These organic compounds are capable of two-photon induced photoisomerization. When incorporated into a polymer film, the switching characteristics of these compounds make possible three-dimensional holographic data storage doc22620 none The mesoscale convective system (MCS) is an organized ensemble of deep convective clouds with a contiguous precipitation area of about 100 km or more in horizontal scale. In semi-arid regions with seasonal rainfall, agricultural productivity, stream flow, and aquifer recharge depend greatly on the size and characteristics of the MCS population. MCSs are a critical component of the hydrological cycle on local, regional and global scales. The purpose of this research is to quantify the influence of land surface characteristics on the initiation and development of MCSs in a semi-arid environment. The study will focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. The research has two components. In the first component, contemporaneous meteorological and land-surface satellite data products will be compared for four wet seasons, May-September - . From Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission microwave imager data, convective cloud clusters will be identified and classified (e.g., location, size, intensity, percentage convective stratiform). The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index data product will be the proxy for land surface conditions. The strength of the correlation between the characteristics of MCSs and the underlying land surface state will be assessed from the accumulation of statistics on convective systems at various stages of their life cycles. In the second component of the research, a three-dimensional coupled cloud-resolving and land surface model will be used to simulate MCSs. MCS development will be simulated over four common land covers in Sub-Saharan Africa, semi-desert, savanna grassland, woody savanna, and evergreen broadleaf forest. The experiments will vary vegetation density, vegetation type, and soil moisture and calculate the differences in MCS thermodynamic and dynamic profiles resulting from changes in the initial land surface conditions. Because precipitation from an MCS is a function of system size, structure and longevity, the spatial and temporal variability of precipitation will be the most important result used to evaluate differences among simulations. Successful completion of this research could lead to improved understanding and management of water resources in semi-arid climates doc22621 none For collaborative proposals: Rutgers University, Univ. of Maryland, Stephen s Inst. of Technology, VIMS, William & Mary, This collaborative award establishes the Mid-Atlantic Center for Ocean Science Education Excellence to serve 4 states (Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey and New York). Using a matrix model , the Center will scale-up successful individual programs at the partner institutions and establish strong linkages between partners. A primary thematic focus is on the visualization and K-12 classroom use of data from ocean observatories and monitoring buoys (Rutgers, UMCES, VIMS). Stephens Institute of Technology will contribute expertise in K-12 educational technology and delivery. Hampton University will serve as a conduit to under-represented minority groups and provide financial support for both undergraduates and graduate students doc22622 none The pathogenicity and host range of Pseudomonas syringae, a plant pathogenic bacterium, has been linked to the activities of a type III protein secretion system (TTSS) that essentially injects bacterial proteins into cells of its host. These injected proteins alter the host cells to assist the growth of the bacterium in susceptible plants, but in resistant plants these proteins serve as a signal to initiate cellular defense mechanisms associated with disease resistance. The assembly of the TTSS in P. syringae is induced during the interaction with host cells and is coordinated by a complex genetic regulatory system. Positive- and negative-acting regulatory factors that control assembly of the TTSS have been identified. This project will elucidate how these regulatory factors transduce signals produced during the interaction with the host to regulate and coordinate assembly of the TTSS. This research will determine how the activity of a specific regulatory protease is controlled during the disease process, define the role of another regulatory protein, HrpV, in coordinating the assembly of the TTSS, examine a possible gating mechanism controlling when proteins are released from the bacteria, and elucidate how the activities of key transcriptional factors are modulated. The proposed experiments will provide new insight into molecular mechanisms for controlling bacterial disease and disease resistance in plants, but since several bacterial pathogens of mammals use a very similar mechanism, this research may have application to managing bacterial diseases of mammalian hosts doc22623 none This research investigates the little-studied interaction between federal agencies and local policy networks concerned with the same policy arenas. The project extends Ostrom s ( ) framework to develop the hypothesis that dense, overlapping, locally-oriented networks of shareholders involved in governing the commons will increase both enforcement and compliance with federal regulations. While Ostrom s analysis clarifies the potentially adverse impact of central regulatory policies on local institutions that govern the commons , this project investigates the potentially beneficial impact that local networks may have on federal policies in the more complex federal system in America. Water resource management provides the critical research site for observing the interaction between two institutional approaches to the governance of water usage; the EPA s first generation federal permit system created by the Clean Water Act of , and the local watershed management networks and institutions that have evolved during the last decade to resolve pollution and water usage issues not addressed by the federal permit system (Kraft and Vig ). In the complex institutional environment of the U.S. Federalist system, water policy networks may involve pollution dischargers, stakeholders affected by pollution, and in particular the elected and administrative officials from federal, state, and local institutions that have local jurisdiction over water management issues. Effective networks can provide cooperative advantages to its members comparable to those of the self-organized institutions studied by Ostrom ( ). We explore three implications of this perspective for the interaction between local networks and federal enforcement: Local Sanction Hypothesis: Effective networks increase compliance. Magnification Hypothesis: Effective networks increase the deterrence impact of enforcement actions on compliance. Concentration Hypothesis: Effective networks increase inspection activities. To test these hypotheses, the project integrates two independent traditions that study opposite halves of the enforcement system: the democratic control of bureaucracy literature that analyzes political influence on regulatory enforcement actions, and the deterrence literature that analyzes the deterrence effects of enforcement actions on compliance. The first phase of research uses regression analysis based on available archival records of all permit holders to test the hypotheses, while the second phase develops direct measures of local networks for a sample of permit holders to provide a more intensive analysis: Phase One: The first phase analyzes quarterly enforcement and compliance data from the EP A s Permit Compliance System (PCS) for the full period for which data are available, from to present. The required supplementary data on permit holders and local policy networks will be appended from census and governmental databases. We apply Feinstein s detection-controlled estimation procedure (Feinstein , ) to simultaneously estimate enforcement actions and compliance responses for all major permit holders active throughout this period. Empirical results from phase-one analysis are then used for developing the phase-two sample. Phase Two: The second phase has five specific goals: I) develop survey-based data on the local policy networks relevant to the permit enforcement and compliance system for a sample of permit holders, 2) calculate survey-based measures of network capabilities and analyze the link between these measures and the county-level factors from the previous analysis, 3) repeat phase one tests with the improved measures, 4) extend phase one tests to include the analysis of beliefs and attitudes related to compliance, and 5) develop confirmatory case studies in four selected communities. The project will produce journal articles in the fields of the political economy of institutions, bureaucratic controls, and enforcement and deterrence theory. Detailed efficiency analysis of enforcement will be directly relevant to EPA enforcement policies. Finally a book will integrate project findings with the broader research context of the design of governance institutions, with a focus on the advantages, limitations, and interactions between federal and local approaches to governing the commons doc22535 none For collaborative proposals: Rutgers University, Univ. of Maryland, Stephen s Inst. of Technology, VIMS, William & Mary, This collaborative award establishes the Mid-Atlantic Center for Ocean Science Education Excellence to serve 4 states (Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey and New York). Using a matrix model , the Center will scale-up successful individual programs at the partner institutions and establish strong linkages between partners. A primary thematic focus is on the visualization and K-12 classroom use of data from ocean observatories and monitoring buoys (Rutgers, UMCES, VIMS). Stephens Institute of Technology will contribute expertise in K-12 educational technology and delivery. Hampton University will serve as a conduit to under-represented minority groups and provide financial support for both undergraduates and graduate students doc22625 none This funding will allow Florida International University (FIU) to contribute a key technology component to the AMPATH StarLight Rio Grid Workshop in Brazil. FIU has lead the nation in establishing research networking connectivity to South Amercan through the AMPATH Project. A corporate donation has been made to provide high-speed connectivity between StarLight in Chicago and AMPATH in Miami and thus from Miami and to Rio. The proposal forms a partnership with three scientific applications. This will bring an un-paralleled level of network services to them for an appropriate tuning period and then for the length of the conference. The workshop has a high likelyhood of inciting subsequent non U.S. investment in networking infrastructure that would benefit currently challenged U.S. programs doc22626 none The investigators propose to use a combination of behavioral, ecological and genetic techniques to understand the development of genetic differentiation among populations of a butterfly species, Euphydryas editha. One outcome of this study will be an analysis of past and current movement patterns of these butterflies among habitats of different types. The investigators will ask whether and to what extent the movements of insects among habitats depend on the distance between those habitats, the nature of the landscape in the intervening terrain, and the adaptations of the insects to particular host plant species. Plant-feeding insects possess sophisticated behavioral mechanisms for choosing their hosts, that is, the plants on which they feed. Understanding of the basic biology of these mechanisms is important in several contexts. It assists humans in tracking and predicting the changes of diet that insects undergo, changes that are involved in the transformation of innocuous insects to crop pests. It also helps in assessment and manipulation of the quality of habitats for endangered insect species. This is because insects that are introduced to a restored habitat will leave if they are not sufficiently attracted to the plants that are present. The proposed work includes populations that are closely related to a federally endangered sub-species, and will assess how the food preferences of these insects should influence plans for habitat restoration and conservation doc22627 none P.I: Thoroughgood Proposal: The Consortium for Oceanographic Research and Education (CORE) will provide coordination, communication, evaluation and strategic planning services to the Centers for Ocean Science Education Excellence network. Central Coordinating Office activities supported by this award will include a series of network PI and outreach meetings to build community consensus and enhance communications between Centers. The COSEE CCO will also conduct an annual value-added workshop on a topic of concern to the network. Topics will include program and network evaluation and assessment as well as the development of an overall strategic plan for COSEE. In addition, the CCO will handle the recruitment and organization of an appropriate national advisory group for the network. The office s functions will also encompass outreach to non-COSEE educators and scientists as well as agencies and institutions with an interest in ocean science education. A COSEE network website will be established in conjunction with the Bridge website. Subcontractors include the Office of Program Evaluation at the University of South Carolina (evaluation) and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (website development doc22628 none New insights in biology have often come from studies of animals that exhibit some extreme of performance. In such animals, principles of function common to all animals are exaggerated, and are therefore observed and studied more readily. Ballistic tongue projection in toads represents one such extreme of performance. During ballistic tongue projection, toad tongues can be projected from the mouth at accelerations exceeding m s2. Previous and ongoing research in our laboratories has focused on elucidating the mechanisms by which the mouth opening muscles of toads produce the power required for this extremely rapid movement. During ballistic tongue projection, the mouth opening muscles of toads are activated for about 200 ms prior to rapid mouth opening. Inspired by this pattern of activation, the investigators developed a novel technique to quantify the in vivo force-velocity behavior of this muscle. The technique is similar to the well known quick-release or load-clamp techniques. The insertion of a muscle is attached to a dual servo motor force-lever, preserving the in vivo origin and line of action of the muscle. A stimulator is programmed to preactivate the muscle tetanically for a given time against a load that prevents the muscle from shortening. The force-lever is then released instantaneously to some smaller load that is varied systematically. The smaller the load, the greater the velocity of shortening. Preactivated isotonic force-velocity and power curves were constructed using data collected from these experiments, an innovation of this laboratory. The investigators have demonstrated that 200 ms preactivation increases the shortening velocity, and therefore the power output, of the mouth opening muscles of toads by about twenty-fold. They further showed that 200 ms preactivation increased the power output of a frog hind limb muscle by the same factor. These results suggest that enhancement of muscle power by isometric preactivation is likely a fundamental, though previously unknown, property of skeletal muscle. Both jaw and hind limb muscles shorten rapidly when clamped to smaller loads after 200 ms preactivation, and reach final velocity in a very short period of time (3-8 ms), which increases with increasing load. At the instant of release when the muscle is shortening rapidly, the force of shortening (F) is equal to mv t, where m = the mass of that part of the muscle that is shortening plus the external load, v = the observed shortening velocity, and t = the time required to reach the observed velocity. The shorter the time required to reach a given velocity, the greater the force at the time of release. The present results demonstrate that the force of shortening increases substantially when muscles are preactivated compared to standard isotonic tests. The proposed studies will permit validation of this new technique, and quantification of the effects of preactivation on the force-velocity behavior of other muscles. This novel method has the potential to significantly impact the field of muscle physiology, and to inform our basic understanding of the mechanism of contraction in striated muscle doc22629 none Catherine Constable The PI s request funds to help support travel costs of conference participants to the 8th symposium of Study of the Earth s Deep Interior, to be held in July, in Lake Tahoe, California. The program this year will focus on the geophysical and geochemical evolution of the Earth s deep interior and is focused mainly on the Earth s core. This meeting will be an important venue for a diverse group of researchers to integrate their ideas and develop a consistent picture on questions such as the age of the inner core, the driving forces for the geodynamo, the structure of the inner core, and the behavior of the paleomagnetic fielding the distant past. The meeting format is well designed and should stimulate discussion among conference attendees doc22630 none NSF Proposal PIs: Hardin, Ellingham, Horn, Saff, and Schumaker Computational Equipment for Approximation Theory, Control Theory, and Graph Theory The Department of Mathematics at Vanderbilt University will purchase computer equipment dedicated to supporting research in the mathematical sciences. The equipment will be used for several research projects, as follows. Professor Ellingham will investigate conjectures in graph theory involving surface embeddings, traversability, and independent sets. Professor Hardin will construct and develop applications of local orthogonal bases. Professor Horn will investigate the controllability of linked elastic structurres using numerical methods. Professors Hardin and Saff will investigate discrete minimum energy problems on the sphere. Professors Saff and Schumaker will research the theory and applications of splines, especially on the sphere. Professor Ellingham s research involves graphs, which are mathematical models of networks. Communication, transportation and other networks are often modeled using techniques from graph theory. Professor Hardin s research involves wavelets, which are an important tool for compressing images, sounds, and other real-world information. They may be applied to problems in fitting equations to data points in any area of science, or processing images, for example from medical scanning equipment. Professor Horn s research involves control theory, which allows computation of how forces should be applied to a complicated system to achieve a desired outcome. There are applications to many real-world structures such as trusses, robot arms, solar panels, and suspension bridges. The work by Professors Hardin and Saff involves the best way to place points on a sphere so that the sphere is covered as uniformly as possible. This problem has applications in many fields, including the structure of viruses, crystallography, structure of molecules, and electrostatics. The research by Professors Saff and Schumaker involves trying to provide accurate but easily computable representations of quantities on the surface of a sphere. For example, these technique may be used to construct an accurate model of the Earth s gravitational field doc22631 none NSF Proposal Number: PIs: Kawczak, Cai, Lucas, Sun, and Zhu. The Department of Mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte will purchase computer equipment which will be dedicated to the support of research in the mathematical sciences. The equipment will be used for several research projects, including in particular: a) fast algorithms for wave scattering in layered media for electronic packaging and geophysical exploration, b) a PDE based nonlinear least squares approach to imaging in diffusion tomography, c) tests for comparing mark-speciffic hazards, d) pricing lookback-Asian options. The newly established Ph.D. program in Applied Mathematics is developing very rapidly and so are the demands for the computing power coming from the body of graduate students and researchers. The Mathematics Department has played a prominent role in the University s recent change in status to a doctoral status by the state and continues to do so as the University aggressively pushes its next goal of becoming designated as Research Extensive. The availability of a high performance computing server will be an integral part of the Mathematics Department s continuing push to be at the forefront of the University s research enterprise doc22632 none Under the SCREMS program, the Department of Mathematics at the College of William & Mary will purchase equipment for the creation of a computing network dedicated to the support of research in the mathematical sciences. The award will provide funds for high-bandwidth networking equipment, high-performance computers for numerical calculations, and a file server. This equipment, together with desktop machines providing platforms for smaller computations, will provide a numerical file server cluster for the faculty investigators and students working on a number of research projects. This equipment will be used for computationally intensive research projects spanning a wide range of applied mathematics. These include numerical methods for engineering design, numerical mathematics, computational biochemistry, and operations research. The projects specifically included in the grant are: (1) Efficient approaches to the optimization of systems governed by partial differential equations, (2) distance parameterized methods for molecular conformation, (3) a parallel Hessenberg QR eigenvalue algorithm, and (4) the calculation of the exact distribution of the time to traverse a stochastic activity network and the elimination of resampling error in bootstrapping. PI Leemis and two former doctoral students have written APPL (A Probability Programming Language). This Maple-based language is used to compute probabilities and perform operations on random variables. The size of many problems that can be solved by APPL is limited by computing speed. The speed offered by the hardware obtained as part of the SCREMS grant is crucial to solving problems of the magnitude encountered in practice doc22633 none This project examines the effects of laws regulating campaign financing in state legislative elections. A comparative analysis of states with varying statutory and regulatory provisions provides analytical leverage necessary for determining how the legal context shapes various aspects of electoral behavior. Major differences in the regulatory regimes across states provide an ideal laboratory for testing how such features affect candidacy decisions, fundraising practices, and election competition. Multiple research strategies are employed to test a model of elections in which campaign finance laws play a prominent role. A primary concern of this project is to evaluate the effects of legal conditions on such electoral features as contribution strategies of interest group and parties, candidate spending, candidate characteristics, and electoral outcomes in the states. The investigtors have confidence this project will generate findings that will have important theoretical and practical implications. Such as: Define and clarify the statutory and regulatory provisions of campaign finance laws across the fifty states for a 30-year time frame ( - ). Propose a model of elections in which the influences of campaign finance laws are posited to impact various stages of the electoral process. Collect data on campaign contribution patterns, campaign spending, candidate characteristics, and election competition in state legislative elections during the election cycle. Analyze the data collected to determine both the direct and indirect effects of campaign finance laws while holding constant a range of other factors and conditions. Prepare written reports on the findings and disseminate the information to scholars and policy makers. Release the data so that other scholars may explore additional dimensions of campaign finance laws. Overall, the results of the project promise to enhance substantially our understanding of campaign finance regulations and how these laws shape electoral behavior in the United States. The findings are expected to contribute to the theoretical development of several sub-fields in the study of American politics. In addition, the findings are likely to have practical implications by informing the policy debate over existing campaign finance policies at both the state and national levels doc22634 none This Doctoral Dissertation Research Support investigation studies the causes of varying forms of political corruption observed in post-socialist Eastern Europe. Most attention in the academic literature has hovered around the orthodox debate about institutional reform and the related policy issue of privatization. Consequently, throughout the 12 years of reform, the continued large involvement of the state in the economy has received little consideration and its resulting impact is not well understood. Increasing evidence suggests that such interactions, collaborations, and often collusion and violence between the state and economic actors are widespread. These interactions can be classified according to their form. However, what causes these interactions to assume a particular form is one of the major puzzles facing political scientists studying post-socialist states. This study is designed to explain outcomes in various countries. Since empirical evidence shows that extensive relations between the state and the leading 200 firms, are a given in post-socialist economies, how can we explain the widely varying outcomes of such links? When do links with the state facilitate firm development (Poland), when do they spiral into widespread asset-stripping (Romania) and when do they create a class of interest holders that is ready to enter into a violent conflict with the state (Bulgaria)? This study approaches the questions above by proposing a theory that links the patterns of access to political power and alternation in government (IV) and the resulting dynamic of state actor-economic actor interaction (DV). The research has testable hypotheses generated through close case studies and original data on the network connections between firms and the state in Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. It uses regression analysis to test these hypotheses against a larger set of post-socialist cases. This study will contribute to the debate on state-economy relations in post-socialism by providing a framework through which to explain the differences between various countries. The data, research and conclusions are also a valuable asset to inquiries on the behavior of political parties, interest groups and bureaucracies in post-socialism doc22635 none This award provides funding to The New England Aquarium (NEAq), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), and the University of Massachusetts (UMass) for development of a New England Regional Center for Ocean Science Education Excellence (NER-COSEE). This center will focus on capacity building in the New England region by: 1) providing educators (teachers and other formal and informal educators) with multiple tools to create programs and curricula that convey knowledge of the oceans, and 2) providing research scientists and scholars the means and training to be more effectively involved in K-12 education and undergraduate formal and informal education. All three partners are highly visible centers of public education, outreach and ocean science research and work with a wide network of educators from public, private and informal education centers. In addition, U.Mass has an extensive track record in educating under-served students and has a strong teacher-training program. Activities will include working with informal educators throughout the region via workshops and by providing a pool of resources for prototyping and evaluation; working with researchers to help them learn to communicate effectively with teachers, informal educators, students, and journalists, and providing them with a network by which they may collaborate with educators and the media; working with K-12 educators to develop innovative curriculum modules that teach national and state science standards using ocean science, and to assist in the development of networks and programs that recruit and train more qualified K-12 science teachers. The NER-COSEE will initially work with the Global Learning Center School New Bedford Public School and Harbor School in Boston to pilot test and evaluate programs. They will also create a Resource Center, housed in the NEAq s Education Center that will make resources available for broad distribution doc22636 none This award provides support to establish a Florida Center for Ocean Science Education Excellence that will serve as a regional hub with a strong emphasis on the integration of ocean research and education. The partnerships to be established include a diverse mix of institutions: three state universities, one private university, four state and federal research entities, multiple informal education entities and public schools and systems from three different geographic areas in the state. Stakeholders and audiences for the Florida COSEE include ocean scientists, K-12 teachers, preservice undergraduates, state and school-district decision-makers and the general public. Specific activities will include workshops and outreach using multiple formats and platforms. There will be a strong focus on diversity with the technology group for the Center located at Florida A and M Univesity, a historically African American institution. On a national scale, the Center will nurture development of new model programs for educator-scientist training and collaborations.This COSEE Center will establish a dynamic mosaic of partners that have excellent potential to promote the use of the ocean sciences as an interdisciplinary vehicle for effectively integrating research and education at multiple levels in Florida. The key role to be played by the state s primary historically black university will strengthen minority outreach and enhance educational and career opportunities for the diverse mix of ethnic, racial and cultural groups statewide doc22637 none The Laboratory in Comparative Ethnic Processes (LiCEP) will conduct four biannual workshops on the theme of ethnic mobilization, nationalism and civil war. LiCEP is an inter-university research group that seeks to improve our understanding of the causes and consequences of ethnic mobilization through the systematic cross examination of formal theoretical models and empirical evidence. The substantive questions that LiCEP explores include: What are the conditions under which individuals participate in ethnic as opposed to non-ethnic collective action? What are the conditions that lead to large-scale rebellions against the state? When and why do inter-ethnic riots occur? How are inter- ethnic relations renegotiated in the aftermath of civil violence? What are the conditions under which ethnic mobilization takes the more routine forms in the form of ethnic voting and party formation? What is the impact that different forms of ethnic mobilization have on policy-making and processes of state consolidation? And how does ethnic mobilization interact with the process of identity formation itself? The principal goals of the workshops are to evaluate lab-generated datasets, reverse engineer statistical, formal and agent-based models, and bring formal models into more direct interaction with empirical evidence doc22638 none The detection of gravitational waves will require detectors with great sensitivity that can be maintained over many years of observation. Long observing times will be needed to catch those few rare and ephemeral bursts of gravitational waves expected from a gravitational collapse. The ALLEGRO detector at Louisiana State University has the best record in the world for long time operation at its best sensitivity; it has been in continuous operation for 4 of the past 5 years, as the only U.S. member of the International Gravitational Event Collaboration (IGEC). The sensitivity of ALLEGRO will be upgraded, to roughly match the improvements underway elsewhere in the IGEC. ALLEGRO will run for extended periods of time over the next three years, until the cryogenic bar technology is fully eclipsed by full time operation of the new interferometric detectors of the LIGO project. Two unique experiments in collaboration with LIGO, enabled by the close physical proximity of the two detectors, will be performed. One is a search for burst events which uses the negligible wave travel time to good advantage, and the other is a search for a random omnipresent gravitational wave background left over from big bang doc22639 none Proposal Number: PIs: Duursma and Stein The Department of Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will purchase a cluster of 16 dual processor PCs connected by gigabit network connections. The computer equipment will be dedicated as a powerful distributed computing resource to the support of research in the mathematical sciences. In particular, it will support the project Computational Aspects of Secure Cryptosystems. Public-key cryptosystems occur in applications such as digital signatures, message encryption, user authentication, online payments, and others. The equipment provides an adequate and up-to-date testing environment for implementing cryptosystems and for simulating attacks doc22640 none This project will provide computing support for research on computationally intensive applied statistical methods: wavelet methods for finding filiments in two and three dimensional data, microarray data analysis of gene expression data, Monte Carlo method of finding interpretable approximations to black box functions, spatial smoothing of functional MRI images, and automatic clustering of flow cytometry data. The research frontiers of statistics are now a far cry from the t-tests and chi-squared tests of introductory courses. Modern scientific equipment gathers millions of data measurements in complex settings. For example, biologists measure the expression levels of thousands of genes on a single chip, and brain scientists watch maps of brain activity as a subject performs a task. Handling data from these and related problems requires new statistical methods to sort out patterns from randomness. These methods in turn require substantial computating power, in both speed and memory. This project will pay for computating resources to support five such research areas doc22641 none NSF Proposal PIs: Fairweather, Bialecki, Heremann, Rockwood, and Wang. The new research computing facility in the Department of Mathematical and Computer Sciences (MCS) at the Colorado School of Mines will enhance its research computing infrastructure by providing faculty and graduate students with a state-of-the-art high performance computing environment. It will comprise 14 dual processor workstations, each with 1 GB memory and 40 GB hard drive, and a dual processor server with 2GB memory and 108GB hard drive. The machines will be configured with the latest version of RedHat Linux. These machines will be linked with some currently existing machines at MCS to extend the local distributed network for high performance computing purposes. Code development will be completed in the Linux Unix environment with programming primarily in C C++, FORTRAN90 95, and Java. In addition, MCS has site licenses for Mathematica, Maple, Splus, and Matlab to provide a full suite of symbolic computing capabilities. The new research computing environment is required to solve the complex problems being considered by researchers in MCS, specifically in the areas of matrix decomposition algorithms, nodal collocation for partial differential equations, development of symbolic software for nonlinear partial differential equations and lattices, data interpolation by finite element methods, and generalized least squares interpolation for modeling. Nine of the machines will form the nucleus of a computer laboratory to be used by graduate students assisting faculty members in their research. Under the proposed system, the machines can be used for individual computing by researchers, and also comprise a distributed computing network. The purchase of dual processor computers rather than single processor computers will double the number of processors in the distributed computing network at a cost increase of less than 20%. The distributed network will be used for code development, compilation, debugging, and production runs doc22642 none This award provides support to establish a COSEE West in the greater Los Angeles area with a diverse mix of activities aimed at 1) enhancing regional awareness of ocean sciences, 2) using ocean science as a vehicle to increase general science literacy and 3) increasing the number of students who choose science and ocean science careers. These goals will be addressed by through catalytic, multi-faceted collaboration between the University of Southern California and the University of California at Los Angeles with additional links to the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History and the greater Los Angeles school districts. A distance learning partnership will be established with the College of Exploration in Virginia. Activities will include an extensive professional development and leadership program for science teachers, a community lecture series, an ocean science web site, a college mentorship program and curriculum development activities. COSEE West has the potential to enhance science education in a densely populated and diverse major urban area. The program conveys a focused vision and a set of interesting plans for incorporating ocean scientists and their research results into classrooms, informal education activities and public outreach. Because of its focus on the LA basin, this COSEE Center has the potential to have a major impact on science education in school districts within the greater Los Angeles area doc22643 none This project will operate the Shelf-Basins Interactions (SBI) Project office at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville for a five-year period beginning in . The SBI Phase II project begins its field season in and the project office will be responsible for communication and coordination between the PI s and other national and international researchers. In addition, the project office will support the activities of the SBI Science Steering Committee; conduct outreach and public relation activities such as the maintenance of its web site; and coordinate meetings and workshops including two international workshops. The project office will also facilitate the transfer of data sets to the various data centers. Aside from project office activities, a logistics manager will conduct field support activities for the research cruises and ice camps. This will involve operations at Nome, Dutch Harbor, Barrow and Prudhoe as well as planning activities in Seattle, where the USCGC Healy is home ported doc22568 none This award provides support to establish a COSEE Center in California with three distributed complementary partners: the Lawrence Hall of Science on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley (informal science partner), Scripps Institution-University of California San Diego (research partner) and Monterey Peninsula College (a public community college and formal education partner) in Monterey. The activities of the proposed COSEE will be organized around four primary initiatives: 1) an outreach effort based at Scripps to engage ocean scientists in K-14 education and the interpretation of their research, 2) the development of an undergraduate course Communicating Ocean Science designed to increase the involvement of undergraduates, graduate students and scientists in educational outreach, 3) the development of an Ocean Careers web site and 4) developing and testing an Ocean Immersion Site for K-12 education based at Scripps to serve the large and culturally diverse population of the San Diego area. The work of this COSEE will enhance the integration of research and education in California by linking some of the best ocean science researchers in the world to science education in both formal and informal settings. The California COSEE s focus on working with schools and school districts in the diverse San Diego area will provide additional resources to strengthen science education and increase access to knowledge and careers among under-represented populations. Several of the initiatives in this proposal will add diversity and balance to the mosaic of approaches and activities to be implemented by the COSEE network. In particular, the extension model is a unique user-centered approach to getting more scientists involved that clearly needs to be developed and its effectiveness assessed. The undergraduate course in communicating science has potential as a professional development vehicle for college faculty, graduate students and undergraduate majors; this component is being co-funded by NSF s Division of Undergraduate Education. The DUE s Advanced Technology Education program is also providing co-funding for the Careers website at Monterey Peninsula College doc22645 none Hicks Environmental factors such as light and temperature play a major role in regulating plant development and physiology, and have a significant impact on agricultural production. This proposal concerns the molecular and genetic basis for the regulation of flowering time by daylength, or photoperiod, focusing on the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Although recent progress has significantly increased the understanding of photoperiodic regulation of flowering, it is apparent that a number of key components of this signal transduction pathway are still unknown. Mutations at the EARLY FLOWERING 3 locus offer a unique inroad to the interactions between biological clocks and complex developmental processes such as floral initiation and light regulation. New genes that influence photoperiodic flowering will be identified and analyzed by isolating modifiers of the elf3 mutant phenotype using a genetic screen. Modifiers of the strong reduced function elf3-1 allele that restore photoperiod sensitivity (pse mutants) are likely to identify proteins that function downstream of ELF3 in the photoperiodic pathway. A number of mutations that restore photoperiod sensitivity in the absence of ELF3 function have already been identified. New loci identified in this modifier screen will be mapped using PCR-based molecular markers, and positional or candidate gene cloning will be undertaken for at least two modifier loci. In addition, this project aims to understand the links between photoperiodic regulation of flowering, photomorphogenesis, and circadian regulation. Phenotypic analysis of pse elf3-1 double mutants will test the hypothesis that these three processes are genetically separable. The discovery of new genes that influence photoperiodic flowering time will add to the repertoire of loci that are known to affect the transition to reproductive growth and might be manipulated to increase agricultural yield. An integral component of this project is the training and mentoring of undergraduate students. Their involvement in this research program will foster the development of laboratory skills and intellectual abilities that will enrich their lives and enable them to contribute to further progress in science doc22646 none This award provides support to establish a COSEE West in the greater Los Angeles area with a diverse mix of activities aimed at 1) enhancing regional awareness of ocean sciences, 2) using ocean science as a vehicle to increase general science literacy and 3) increasing the number of students who choose science and ocean science careers. These goals will be addressed by through catalytic, multi-faceted collaboration between the University of Southern California and the University of California at Los Angeles with additional links to the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History and the greater Los Angeles school districts. A distance learning partnership will be established with the College of Exploration in Virginia. Activities will include an extensive professional development and leadership program for science teachers, a community lecture series, an ocean science web site, a college mentorship program and curriculum development activities. COSEE West has the potential to enhance science education in a densely populated and diverse major urban area. The program conveys a focused vision and a set of interesting plans for incorporating ocean scientists and their research results into classrooms, informal education activities and public outreach. Because of its focus on the LA basin, this COSEE Center has the potential to have a major impact on science education in school districts within the greater Los Angeles area. This proposal is collaborative with proposal #02- doc22647 none More Americans than ever before - about 125 million - are currently participating in acts of investing. In spite of the growing popularity of investing and of the constant ebbs and flows of emotions in the world of investing, the actual effect of emotion on investment behaviors has not been a major subject of scientific research. The purpose of this project is to explore and examine the role of emotion in investment behaviors. The research focuses on the relationship between affect and two dimensions that can be used to describe investment decision making: defensiveness-aggressiveness and overreaction-underreaction. Specifically, it is predicted that positive feelings may promote aggressive investment decisions, defined as a tendency to focus primarily on obtaining possible gains rather than preventing possible losses in decision making (for example, concentrating investment on a set of high-return assets), whereas negative affective states will foster defensive investment decisions, defined as a tendency to focus primarily on avoiding possible losses rather than obtaining possible gains in decision making (for example, diversifying assets or pursuing low-risk assets). Another prediction is that positive feelings may promote a response pattern of underreaction, defined as a tendency of being relatively insensitive to market signals in making decisions (often failing to respond to meaningful signals), whereas negative affective states may foster a response pattern of over-reaction, defined as a tendency of being overly sensitive to market signals (often responding to meaningless signals). The investigators plan to test these hypotheses in an Internet-based stock investment game combined with an experience-sampling procedure. Thus, the study will investigate the role of affect in decision making in an ecologically valid way. If successful, it will have both theoretical and practical implications. By exploring the critical role of affective experience in decision making process, this research will enrich the decision making literature that has been overly cognitive in nature. It also may help investors enhance their understanding of how, when, and why affective experience influences investment decision making doc22648 none Rahman Description: This project supports the participation of nine US scientists in the 27th International Nathiagali Summer College on Physics and Contemporary Needs, scheduled for June 24-July 5, in Nathiagali, Pakistan. Dr. Talat S. Rahman, Department of Physics, Kansas State University, is organizing the US delegation. Dr. Riazuddin, Director of the National Center for Physics at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan is the organizer of a one-week session on condensed matter physics (CMP) at the College. Attendees include scientists, mostly recent Ph.D. s, from a number of developing countries in the region, including Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, China, India, Iran, Nepal, Tajikistan, and Turkey, as well as Pakistan. They also include graduate students from Pakistan. There are two sessions of one week each: the first week is dedicated to topics in CMP and the second week to topics in particle and plasma physics. This award supports the participation of the US scientists in the first week s session, whose theme is Novel Characteristics of Nanostructured Materials. Lectures will focus on magnetic, semiconductor and metallic nanostructures, and the processes of nanostructuring materials. Special emphasis will be placed on providing insight into topics such as spintronics, quantum dots, quantum wells, nano-wires, nano-tubes, photonics, and microelectronics. Speakers will also lead informal discussions and tutorial sessions. The proceedings will be published. Scope: International Nathiagali Summer Colleges (INSC) have been organized every year since . Scientists from the United States and Western Europe present lectures and hold discussions on a variety of subjects of current interest in physics and their contemporary applications in developing countries. The INSC is attended by laboratory and industrial researchers, university professors, college teachers, and graduate students. The INSC provides the US lecturers the opportunity to establish useful links with scientists from developing countries and to disseminate scientific knowledge broadly. At least one junior scientist and one graduate student will be selected as participants in the US delegation. The broader impact of this activity will be to create a more scientifically aware society worldwide doc22649 none A grant has been awarded to Pepperdine University under the supervision of Drs. Vandergon, Brewster, Nofziger Plank, and Helm to acquire research instrumentation that will enhance the undergraduate research and teaching programs in cell and molecular biology. The instrument funded by this grant is designed to perform real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (QPCR) experiments. QPCR is a technique in which low copy number DNA or RNA samples are amplified and detected in real time with fluorescent dyes as the reactions are progressing. The ability to detect the amplified samples in real-time is of enormous value in addressing many questions in cell and molecular research because it allows for accurate quantitative analyses. The QPCR instrument will be utilized in both summer undergraduate research programs and in the Honor s research program during the academic semesters. This instrument will facilitate research projects carried out in the context of the biology department s current summer program funded in part through a NSF-REU site grant. The PI s will also develop four new undergraduate laboratory teaching modules that specifically utilize real-time QPCR in addressing low copy gene presence in samples, and gene expression in cells, tissues, or organisms. A variety of methods have been utilized traditionally for measurement of normal gene expression and detection of changes in gene expression, however, it is challenging to quantify traditional PCR and RT-PCR (reverse transcription PCR) assays which are prone to template conversion errors and amplification errors. Recent advances in QPCR technology overcome these problems and allow for accurate quantification of amplified templates in real time experiments. Specific research programs in which the QPCR instrument will be used are: (1) analysis of photolyase gene expression in response to UV radiation in amphibians (Vandergon), (2) examination of stress-response signals and apoptotic signals in eukaryotic cells (Brewster), (3) characterization of Notch signal transduction in mammalian cells (Nofziger Plank) and (4) examination of glycogen synthase regulation in animal cell culture model systems (Helm). In addition, this instrument will be used to introduce new concepts into the laboratories of the core cell biology and biochemistry courses, several upper-division biology elective courses, and related courses in nutritional science. Each faculty member associated with this grant will develop a new undergraduate laboratory teaching modules that explores gene presence within samples, temporal changes in gene activity, or induced changes in gene expression. The four laboratory teaching modules that will be implemented using this instrument include: (1) an analysis of intermediary metabolism gene responses of E. coli grown in different nutrient media, (2) an analysis of gene expression changes in response to environmental stress in yeast, (3) an analysis of the expression patterns of two genes involved in vulval development in C. elegans, and (4) an analysis of the presence of genetically modified organism (GMO) material in foods. The developed laboratory modules will be made available freely on the Natural Science Division Web site at Pepperdine University. This grant will foster undergraduate research in cell and molecular biology at Pepperdine University. This instrument will provide a powerful new tool for use in student-generated independent research. The grant will provide undergraduate students with access to the latest equipment for research in molecular and cellular biology. It will aid also in generating student interest in graduate studies in cell and molecular biology and will provide training to students interested in employment in the biotechnology industry. Cross-department connections will be made in research and teaching between the biochemistry program, biology program, and nutritional sciences program. Ultimately, this grant will assist in training scientists in cutting edge techniques to keep research at Pepperdine University at the forefront of science doc22650 none NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION GEOGRAPHY AND REGIONAL SCIENCE PROGRAM RESEARCH AWARD Melissa Wright Pennsylvania State University Economic globalization proceeds through a dynamic co-ordination between global economic activities and the localized, non-market relationships found in civil society. Nevertheless, even as more scholars emphasize the significance of local civic institutions for global economic processes, the dominant views articulated in globalization studies recreate the bias that global entities are immune to the influence of local institutions. This bias is particularly found in the literature on multinational firms, which frequently are portrayed as globalization s principal agents, operating beyond the influence of local practices. As a result, such studies fail to consider how local organizations affect multinational corporations and their impact around the world. This research project will investigate how multinational firms and local non-profit organizations establish common ground for action through the creation of joint civic projects. These projects fall under the rubric of corporate citizenship , which is a concept increasingly employed by corporations to describe their funding for and reliance upon local civic institutions to meet their human resource and technology needs. Despite the proliferation of references to corporate citizenship in the business press, this concept remains understudied and its meaning for the local civic domain is virtually unexplored. The research will be carried out in a two-year case study in Ciudad Juarez (Mexico). Three sets of questions guide the research: 1) How do corporate requirements for human resources and technological development contribute to the exercise of corporate citizenship in Ciudad Juarez? 2) How do local interpretations of gender and nationality mediate the formation of the corporate-civic alliances that constitute the practice of corporate citizenship? 3) How do these alliances affect the institutional practices and objectives of their participating organizations? Ciudad Juarez has been chosen as the study are for several reasons. It is the birthplace of the maquiladora industry (the export-processing factories in Mexico) and is representative of many Third World industrial enclaves where multinational firms seek to upgrade the labor force and social infrastructure through civic activity. The city s export-processing maquiladora industry has increased its civic participation with educational and community-based organizations over the last five years. This increased corporate activity in the Ciudad Juarez civic sector mirrors a global trend in the expansion of multinational corporate citizenship across Third World regions. The project will investigate not only what decision-makers in the corporate and civic sectors are doing, but also how their motives change through interaction with other organizations and how such changes affect the behavior of their institutions. The research methods, therefore, are qualitative and involve both open-ended interviews and participant observation. The qualitative techniques will be combined with archival research to put the fieldwork data into a larger theoretical and empirical context. These methods will investigate how leaders in corporate and non-profit organizations make they decisions they do, how they implement and modify them and how their stated intentions sometimes diverge from their actions. While qualitative methods do not lend themselves to formal hypothesis testing, they will amplify and enrich the results derived from quantitative investigations that link corporate behavior with civic action. Further, they will provide valuable insight into processes touched upon but not investigated by quantitative studies of the maquiladora industry and its impact on the regional development of Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico border doc22651 none With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Alice C. Harris will conduct four years of linguistic research on historical morphology (changes over time in the forms of words). The goal of the research is to discover the universal forces that change the forms of words. Previous studies of historical morphology have emphasized the languages of Europe and the Indo-European family, but a broader database is more likely to reveal universals of change. This project will continue Dr. Harris s earlier research on languages of the Kartvelian and North East Caucasian families. It will also draw on published discussions of historical morphology of many other language families. The method that will be used involves cross-linguistic comparison of very similar changes in very different languages. For example, it has been found that in a number of unrelated languages, the third person singular form of the verb has been generalized as the base of all persons and numbers, leaving the third person singular verb with no special marking. In this research, both the similarities and differences in such generalizations will be studied. An understanding of how complex linguistic paradigms arise and are restructured will tell us a great deal about the role of cognition in managing the use of linguistic categories, such as tense and case. This study of morphological change will thus contribute to a better understanding of language change broadly. In addition, this study will contribute to morphological theory doc22652 none EIA - Krim, Hamid North Carolina State University TITLE: Workshop Proposal: Genomic Signal Processing and Statistics This grant provides partial support for a Workshop on Genomic Signal Processing ands Statistics (GENSIPS). The workshop is being held October 12 and 13, , near the North Carolina State University campus. The goals of the workshop are 1) to identify potential areas of research collaboration between the biological, statistical and signal processing communities and 2) to explore potential new avenues of research in genetics by exploiting synergies in research between signal processing, statistics, and genonomics. The workshop brings together a diverse set of outstanding researchers from each of these areas to address the challenges of the multidisciplinary area of genomics. Twelve internationally known researchers are presenting plenary and invited talks and the workshop also features poster sessions and round-table discussions of the key topics doc22653 none This dissertation investigates how immigrants learn ideologies about the U. S. racial social structure. Focus groups and in-depth interviews will explore how new immigrants perceive the racial hierarchy and how these perceptions compare with racial categories in their countries of origin. Questions will focus especially on personal experiences and media exposure that have conveyed knowledge of the racial hierarchy. A second set of issues will investigate how contact with this racial ideology has affected the immigrants own racial identity, for instance, whether they have maintained specific national affiliations or developed more pan-ethnic identities. These processes of acquiring racial knowledge and adopting new racial identities are bound up with immigrants acceptance or rejection of racial ideology and the ideologies characterizations of their own position in that hierarchy. A variety of immigrant groups will be interviewed to investigate how past experiences and their position in the racial hierarchy influence acquisition and acceptance of racial ideologies doc22654 none van Keken Most of the world s earthquakes occur in subduction zones where oceanic lithosphere descends into the mantle. Intermediate-depth earthquakes, which occur at 40-300 km depth, and the transport of water into the mantle are intimately linked to metamorphic reactions in the subducting lithosphere. The researchers propose to better understand subduction-zone processes by integrating seismological observations with thermal and petrological models. In order to test the dehydration-embrittlement hypothesis for intermediate-depth seismicity, the investigators will construct two-dimensional kinematic-dynamical thermal models for a set of subduction zones that span a range in subduction parameters and that include regions with significant along-strike variations in observed seismicity. Events in global and regional seismicity data sets will be systematical evaluated and relocated in order to test the hypotheses that (a) upper seismic zones are confined to the subducting mafic crust, (b) lower seismic zones are related to dehydration reactions in the subducting mantle, and (c) the forearc mantle is aseismic. Petrologic models of subducting lithosphere will be created using new phase diagrams and rock property data bases and the resulting layered seismic-velocity models will be tested against observed dispersion of seismic body waves. The amount and distribution of forearc mantle hydration (serpentinization) will be quantified by integrating seismological observations with mineral physics calculations doc22655 none The extracellular matrix (or cell wall ) of higher plants plays numerous protective and growth-regulating roles during the life cycle of a plant. Furthermore, plant cell wall material represents the most abundant source of newly synthesized biomass on earth making it an important renewable source of energy, and the raw material for industrial applications ranging from textile production to wood processing. Despite this importance of plant cell walls both from a basic and applied point of view, little is known about the synthesis of cell wall material on the molecular level. Plant cell walls consist primarily of polysaccharides representing long strings of sugar moieties that are attached to each other by enzymes referred to as glycosyltransferases. One of the most important and challenging areas in plant cell wall research is the identification of genes encoding these glycosyltransferases, and the determination of their function. To address this issue by a genetic approach, mutants of the plant model organism Arabidopsis thaliana were isolated which showed alterations in the composition of their cell wall material. One of these mutants turned out to be unable to synthesize normal xyloglucan (the major hemicellulose in most higher plants) because of a defect in a specific glycosyltransferase. An evaluation of the Arabidopsis genome sequence indicated the presence of ten coding regions with substantial structural similarity to this enzyme. These ten genes are expected to encode additional glycosyltransferases in cell wall synthesis. In our future research, the functions and properties of most of these enzymes will be investigated via three complementary approaches: (A) Determination in which parts of the plant these predicted glycosyl-transferases reside. (B) The identification of mutant lines which are defective in the activity of these enzymes. This will be followed by an analysis of their cell wall composition and an evaluation for changes in growth habit, physiology, and wall properties. (C) Production of the predicted glycosyltransferases in microorganisms followed by enzyme assays to determine their functions. The proposed experiments are designed to further our understanding of cell wall synthesis in higher plants with the potential to manipulate the cell wall composition of important crop plants to improve digestibility of forage crops, facilitate the production of fibers for paper products and clothing, and to improve the properties of cell wall components in human nutrition doc22656 none Nonhuman primates are the most social among all organisms and exhibit the broadest range of variation in social organization. Consequently, research on the behavior and ecology of nonhuman primates has been most influential in addressing questions as to why organisms including humans live in groups in the first place, why they live in groups of particular sizes, and what factors influence the social relationships among group members. Leaf-eating monkeys are particularly interesting, because the relationship between their ecology and social organization is not consistent with current theory. Feeding on supposedly large abundant resources, they should live in large groups and exhibit weak dominance relationships. Quite often, however, they live in small groups with strong dominance hierarchies. The study is following up new explanatory ideas to resolve this controversy examining (i) whether indirect feeding competition or infanticide or both constrain group size of Phayre s leaf monkeys (Trachypithecus phayrei) and (ii) whether resource distribution, feeding competition, and female reproductive success conform to the predicted female social relationships and dispersal patterns. Research is conducted at Phu Khieo Wildlife Sanctuary, Northeastern Thailand harboring eight sympatric primates including two leaf monkeys (T. cristatus, T. phayrei) and four macaques (Macaca arctoides, M. assamensis, M. mulatta, M. nemestrina). The study area (156,000 ha) is undisturbed including two major habitat types (hill evergreen and dry evergreen forest). In the long range this setting will allow comparisons within primate genera and species of similar body size across habitats as well as across species and genera of similar body size within the same habitat. The study is based on a collaboration with researchers from two Thai Universities (Kasetsart and Mahidol University, Bangkok) and officials from governmental agencies (Royal Forest Department, Bangkok). Per year it will involve a minimum of two local staff, two recent graduates and one post-doctoral researcher and provide the opportunity for thesis research. The study will foster cooperation within Thailand and with the United States, support conservation efforts in the sanctuary, and provide training and career opportunities for students doc22657 none The small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) play essential roles in eukaryotic ribosome biosynthesis. Critical snoRNA functions include directing cleavage of the pre-ribosomal RNA precursor and guiding the modification of specific nucleotides in the ribosomal RNAs. More than 100 snoRNAs have been identified in the nucleolus, thus establishing the snoRNAs as the largest class of small stable RNAs found in eukaryotic cells. Investigations have demonstrated that the box C D and H ACA snoRNAs exhibit evolutionarily conserved sequences and folded structures characteristic of each family. Each of these RNA motifs bind family-specific proteins to establish the snoRNA:protein (snoRNP) complex. Both the box C D and H ACA snoRNA motifs and their associated core proteins are required for snoRNA processing, snoRNP transport, and snoRNA-guided nucleotide modification of ribosomal RNAs. Most recently, two novel accessory proteins have been identified that are also essential for snoRNP synthesis. Accessory proteins p50 and p55 interact with the snoRNP core complex in the nucleoplasm and regulate snoRNP production. Despite their critical nature, nothing is yet known about how p50 p55 function in the synthesis of new snoRNP complexes. Therefore, the goals of this research are twofold. First, p50 p55 s role in snoRNP biogenesis will be examined in vivo in the Xenopus oocyte nucleus. Microinjection experiments will determine the possible role of these accessory proteins for snoRNP assembly in the nucleoplasm as well as their potential function in transporting mature snoRNP complexes into the nucleolus. Second, structural studies will define the interactions of p50 p55 with the box C D core snoRNP complex, providing mechanistic details of accessory protein function in regulating the snoRNP biosynthetic pathway. p50 and p55 are the first identified snoRNP accessory proteins essential for snoRNP biosynthesis. Defining their functional roles will provide fundamental insight into the snoRNA snoRNP biosynthetic pathway. The involvement of p50 p55 in other nucleoplasmic events such as chromatin remodeling and RNA synthesis has suggested that p50 and p55 are multifunctional proteins and may serve as molecular bridges to coordinate various processes in the eukaryotic nucleus. Therefore, this research has the potential to impact our basic understanding of RNA metabolism in the eukaryotic nucleus and reveal new regulatory paradigms of gene expression doc22658 none Grove It is paradoxical that the mantle sources with the highest 3He 4He and 22Ne 21Ne, and argued to be the least-degassed and therefore the most primitive or primordial, have uniformly depleted (not primitive) Sr, Nd, and Hf isotope signatures. This is an unexplained and long-standing flaw in the Standard Model for rare gas evolution in the earth. One of the assumptions underlying the Standard Model is that He is more incompatible than Th and U during upper mantle melting processes, and that it will be preferentially removed during melting and subsequent eruptive degassing. Existing data for mineral-melt partitioning of He ranges over several orders of magnitude, and does not place any real constraints on this most important assumption of the Standard Model. This project will address this issue by methodical experimental measurement of He, Th and U partitioning between olivine, clinopyroxene and silicate melt. The study will provide new solubility data for true structural-bound He in both natural and synthetic olivine and clinopyroxene, and in silicate melt, over a wide range of temperature, pressure, and oxygen fugacity. Helium in single-phase experimental charges will be analyzed first by crushing in vacuo (to release helium from cracks, voids and defects) followed by fusion in an utrahigh vacuum furnace. He in multi-phase charges will be analyzed by in-situ laser-ablation. U and Th partitioning data will also be determined over the same range of conditions for olivine melt and clinopyroxene melt equilibrium pairs in simple Fe-free haplobasaltic systems. The experiments will be designed to provide a direct comparison between Th-U partitioning and He partitioning. Ultimately, the resulting data will allow an assessment of a key question in terrestrial helium isotope evolution: is high 3He 4He synonymous with an undegassed or relatively primordial mantle source? The answer to this question has broad significance to the CSEDI community, as helium is one of the only lines of evidence for relatively undegassed material in the deep earth doc22659 none This award supports a research consortium (workshop) of promising doctoral students and distinguished research faculty in the field of human-computer interaction. The consortium will be held in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ) in Minneapolis, Minnesota, sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery s Special Interest Group on Human Computer Interaction (SIGCHI). The goals of the workshop include building a cohort group of new researchers who will then have a network of colleagues spread out across the world, guiding the work of new researchers by having experts in the research field give them advice, and making it possible for promising new entrants to the field to attend their research conference. Student participants will make formal presentations of their work during the workshop, and will receive feedback from the faculty panel. The feedback is geared to helping students understand and articulate how their work is positioned relative to other human-computer interaction research, whether their topics are adequately focused for thesis research projects, whether their methods are correctly chosen and applied, and whether their results are appropriately analyzed and presented. Student participants will also present their work during the technical program of the CHI conference. Extended abstracts of the students work will be disseminated via publication in the CHI Extended s, which has wide print and electronic distribution. Evaluation of the consortium will be conducted by ACM SIGCHI s conference management committee, and results of the evaluation will be available to the organizers of future consortia. Human-Computer Interaction is a multidisciplinary field of increasing importance to science, commerce, and society. This workshop contributes to the professional development of young scientists, whose professional careers will be devoted to understanding how computer systems and software can be designed to serve the needs of users doc22660 none A central goal of the National Consortium on Violence Research s (NCOVR) capacity-building activities is to increase the number of new researchers trained in cross-disciplinary violence research. The objective is that by training young scholars, NCOVR can impact the field of violence research. NCOVR has three strategies for attaining this goal. The first is to increase the number of NCOVR fellowships that are awarded. The second is to establish affiliations with selected minority-serving institutions to increase the pool of under-represented students introduced to violence research. The third is to conduct special outreach to minority undergraduates to encourage their choice of violence research as a career. NCOVR will increase the number and discipline diversity of researchers participating in the NCOVR experience. They recruit senior researchers from new disciplines and establish affiliations with other extant research teams. They sponsor a number of intellectually compelling substantive and methodological workshops each year designed to appeal to senior researchers by promoting intellectual scientific exchange and research that cuts across disciplines. Some workshops bring together diverse perspectives on important research questions or address a difficult methodological question. Others develop proposals for outside funding, using small grants for pilot projects needed to strengthen the proposals. Some synthesize research findings in areas where there are already extensive significant findings. The objective of these workshops is to foster both new and expanded collaborations. These collaborations may lead to the preparation of larger proposals for outside funding that can provide opportunities for young researchers to participate in multidisciplinary research doc22661 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project aims to develop a step-out technology for paraffin alkylation to produce high-octane clean gasoline. Conventional alkylation processes require large volumes of corrosive liquid acids, which can inflict serious injury via skin contact or inhalation. The new alkylation process will be fundamentally safer and cleaner, reducing the use and generation of toxic chemicals. It uses a first-of-a-kind engineered zeolite catalyst that is environmentally benign and eliminates the risks associated with liquid acids while producing alkylate of comparable quality. The new catalyst promises significantly improved yields and selectivities, minimizing waste by-products and disposal problems associated with liquid acids. The engineered zeolite catalysts can be used most effectively for liquid phase alkylations of paraffins and aromatics, such as the production of high-octane alkylate, and industrially important petrochemicals such as cumene and ethylbenzene doc22662 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. David Relman (Stanford University) and sponsoring organization the American Academy of Microbiology (Washington, DC) for a colloquium entitled The Global Genome Question: Microbes as the Key to Understanding Evolution and Ecology, October 11-13, , in Longboatkey, FL. A group of 30-40 invited scientists will participate; spending 2 days in deliberations designed to produce the intellectual material for an analytical and comprehensive report. The primary objective is to map out a new research paradigm that departs from analysis of the genomes of cultivated microbes and moves toward understanding the relationship and interplay among the genome and community evolution and dynamics. Microbes carry enormous genetic wealth and biological aptitude. Humans have already exploited the biochemical competence and versatility of these tiny creatures in medicine, agriculture, ecology, and studies of evolution. But while investigators tap into the tremendous resources stored in microbial genomes, more questions--and some problems--have become apparent. Many of these difficulties are typical of any rapidly growing enterprise; still others are specific to this new scientific arena. The unparalleled benefits of genome science make it critical that important questions receive coordinated attention and that issues are resolved. Building on the groundbreaking work of sequencing individual genomes in the laboratory, scientists know that much more can be learned from a new research approach that focuses on (1) understanding genomes in an evolutionary and ecological context and (2) addressing evolutionary and ecological questions using genomics-enabled methods and analyses. Population dynamics, recombination, and lateral gene transfer look to be driving forces of genomic and ecosystem evolution. If so, genome evolution and ecosystem dynamics are part of the same process--a process that can be understood through the study of communities of microorganisms in environments, rather than individual strains or isolated systems in the lab doc22663 none Lay for proposal # Sexual dimorphism and UV signaling in birds The brilliant colors of birds have played a prominent role in the study of sexual and natural selection. In many species of birds males possess bright colors, while females are cryptic. This sexual dimorphism in plumage is traditionally explained as a consequence of variation in sexual selection (i.e., mating success). However, there are several reasons why this explanation may be inadequate. First, all comparative analyses to date have relied on subjective evaluations of plumage color and brightness by human observers, and it is now clear that birds see quite differently than humans. Not only do birds see in the ultraviolet (UV) spectrum to which humans are blind, they also see differently in the human visible spectrum. Unfortunately, there has not yet been a large-scale comparative analysis of UV reflectance in birds, so it is not known if UV signaling is widespread or if such signals commonly differ between the sexes. Second, recent studies of sexual differences in plumage color have found that evolutionary changes in plumage have been more common among females than males, suggesting that we have been focussing on the wrong sex. Indeed, there are many cases of bright colors in both sexes (e.g., parrots, tanagers, toucans) suggesting that selection has acted on females as well as males. Bright plumage in females may be favored by male mate choice or aggression between females over access to mates or food. In addition, natural selection may favor brightly colored females when both sexes defend a territory year-round or color patterns are involved in camouflage. Thus, other forms of selection besides sexual selection on males appear to be important in the evolution of avian plumage patterns. The three year study proposed here will examine the evolution of avian plumage patterns and sexual differences in plumage color using objective measures of color (spectrometer measurements) taken from museum specimens. We will measure spectral reflectance of both sexes of the species used in our previous study of avian dimorphism. By building on our previous work, this study will lead to significantly deeper understanding of signaling in birds and the evolution of plumage patterns, a subject that has enthralled and perplexed both biologists and lay persons for over 100 years. In addition, this study will provide opportunities for training students in comparative methods, enhance research facilities at UWM and produce a web site with spectral data of birds that can be used by other researchers and teachers doc22664 none Simon M. Peacock Most of the world s earthquakes occur in subduction zones where oceanic lithosphere descends into the mantle. Intermediate-depth earthquakes, which occur at 40-300 km depth, and the transport of water into the mantle are intimately linked to metamorphic reactions in the subducting lithosphere. The researchers propose to better understand subduction-zone processes by integrating seismological observations with thermal and petrological models. In order to test the dehydration-embrittlement hypothesis for intermediate-depth seismicity, the investigators will construct two-dimensional kinematic-dynamical thermal models for a set of subduction zones that span a range in subduction parameters and that include regions with significant along-strike variations in observed seismicity. Events in global and regional seismicity data sets will be systematical evaluated and relocated in order to test the hypotheses that (a) upper seismic zones are confined to the subducting mafic crust, (b) lower seismic zones are related to dehydration reactions in the subducting mantle, and (c) the forearc mantle is aseismic. Petrologic models of subducting lithosphere will be created using new phase diagrams and rock property data bases and the resulting layered seismic-velocity models will be tested against observed dispersion of seismic body waves. The amount and distribution of forearc mantle hydration (serpentinization) will be quantified by integrating seismological observations with mineral physics calculations doc22665 none Under the direction of Dr. Ludo Max, Ms. Margaret Earnest will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. Her research includes three studies investigating the control and coordination of lip and jaw movements in infants and children from 6 to 37 months of age. This work builds on increasing evidence that the transition from babbling to meaningful speech is a crucial stage during which motor constraints may determine important aspects of speech sound acquisition. One major question related to this transition is whether it reflects a maturation that is gradual and continuous or whether early speech requires an extensive reorganization of the previously acquired motor skills. Therefore, two of Ms. Earnest s studies will investigate developmental trends in (a) the respective contribution of individual articulators (lips and jaw) to bilabial closing and opening gestures, and (b) the typically asymmetric nature of these articulatory movements during speech production. Her third study will examine the potential neuromotor basis for infants selection of the jaw as the primary articulator in babbling and early speech production. Each of these three questions will be addressed by recording movements of the lips and jaw with a camera-based movement tracking system and comparing a variety of kinematic parameters across different age groups. This research on the early development of orofacial control for babbling and speech is significant for several reasons. First, it will lead to new insights into the neuromotor processes underlying speech development in children. Second, an enhanced understanding of the different stages of speech motor development may be critical for explaining commonly observed trends in the sequence of speech sound acquisition during babbling and early speech. Third, given this potential influence on the order of speech sound acquisition, the constraints imposed by developing speech motor abilities may affect other aspects of language development doc22666 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Bruce Kohorn at Bowdoin College in order to purchase a confocal laser scanning microscope. The microscope will provide the ability to obtain high resolution fluorescent images from both live and fixed biological samples, and will become the only such instrument in Maine at a liberal arts undergraduate college. The microscope will be used to explore fundamental questions in neurobiology and behavior, plant development, nuclear protein transport, evolutionary genetics, and biomechanics. Seven faculty and their students from the Biology and Psychology departments of Bowdoin College, and two faculty from Bates and Colby College will use the instrument to achieve high resolution images for basic biological research. The new instrument will be used by many faculty in their research on topics that include the function of the nervous system, the organization of cells, and the comparison of cellular structures so as to understand basic processes of evolution. The students in research labs will be exposed to current and standard technologies that they too will need to use once in more advanced degree programs. Students will be prepared for careers in Biology and related fields by providing the technical and theoretical background for one of the most common methods of imaging in cell and molecular biology doc22667 none Beginning in the summer of , four training institutes ( - ) on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis will be offered to bridge the divide between formal and empirical analysis. The goal is to advance the study of methods and models and to expand the research community with cutting-edge expertise. Each NSF EITM Summer Institutes is comprised of four one-week seminars --- a basic seminar and three advanced seminars. The instructors and the subjects addressed in the advanced seminars rotate over the four-year period of the program. All seminars are held in the conference rooms of the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy and the departments of political science and economics. Each advanced seminar concerns the relationship between formal models of politics and empirical research methods in a substantive field of political science or political economy. The formal models addressed span game theory, spatial theory, social and public choice theories, general equilibrium models, adaptive learning models, behavioral economic models, and hybrid approaches such as agent-based modeling. Empirical methods include basic and advanced econometric techniques and spatial models. Students attending the NSF EITM Summer Institute also may attend seminars in the summer program of the Center for New Institutional Social Science that will have a complementary schedule. The faculty for the seminars is drawn from Washington University faculty and from faculty from several other universities. The Washington University faculty participating in the NSF EITM Summer Institute include Randall Calvert, John Carey, Lee Epstein, Andrew Martin, Gary Miller, Norman Schofield, Itai Sened, and Steven Smith. The non-Washington University faculty instructors include Charles Cameron, Keith Krehbiel, Kevin Quinn, Thomas Palfrey, and Rick Wilson. Seminar guests include Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Eric Brown, John Ferejohn, Simon Jackman, Rebecca Morton, Keith Poole, and Kenneth Shepsle. 25 student participants will be recruited on a competitive basis. Students will be offered on-campus housing and will be provided travel and lodging subsidies. An EITM committee comprised of Washington University faculty will administer the program doc22668 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Douglas Parks and colleagues will conduct one year of linguistic research documenting South Band Pawnee, Skiri Pawnee, and Arikara. These languages belong to the Caddoan language family spoken on the Great Plains from Texas to North Dakota. Fluent speakers of these three languages are no longer living. Most of the linguistic data included in the project were recorded by the PI between and . There are two aspects of linguistic documentation in this project: bilingual dictionaries and analyzed text collections (the latter primarily traditional stories, such as myths and tales) for each of the three languages. These materials will be made available on the World Wide Web. An integral aspect of the project is completion of software begun under a previous NSF grant. That software facilitates the development of multimedia dictionaries and analyzed text collections in a single working environment. This project contributes to the long tradition in anthropology and linguistics of scientific documentation of American Indian languages. Such study contributes to the understanding of linguistic diversity in human speech worldwide and to the understanding of the interrelationships and historical development of American Indian languages. It also preserves a record of the fast disappearing Native American languages. Since South Band Pawnee, Skiri Pawnee, and Arikara are closely related to one another, comparison among them will offer insights into the development of the Caddoan language family and, more generally, processes of language change. Because these languages share exceptionally complex verb structures, their documentation will provide linguists with a large amount of new data for the theoretical study of language history and structure. The software completed by this project will serve as a valuable tool to aid description and analysis of endangered languages worldwide. Finally, the dictionaries and texts will provide critically needed resources for the three tribes in their efforts to revive and teach their native languages, and to perpetuate their cultures doc22669 none Geoffrey A. Abers Most of the world s earthquakes occur in subduction zones where oceanic lithosphere descends into the mantle. Intermediate-depth earthquakes, which occur at 40-300 km depth, and the transport of water into the mantle are intimately linked to metamorphic reactions in the subducting lithosphere. The researchers propose to better understand subduction-zone processes by integrating seismological observations with thermal and petrological models. In order to test the dehydration-embrittlement hypothesis for intermediate-depth seismicity, the investigators will construct two-dimensional kinematic-dynamical thermal models for a set of subduction zones that span a range in subduction parameters and that include regions with significant along-strike variations in observed seismicity. Events in global and regional seismicity data sets will be systematical evaluated and relocated in order to test the hypotheses that (a) upper seismic zones are confined to the subducting mafic crust, (b) lower seismic zones are related to dehydration reactions in the subducting mantle, and (c) the forearc mantle is aseismic. Petrologic models of subducting lithosphere will be created using new phase diagrams and rock property data bases and the resulting layered seismic-velocity models will be tested against observed dispersion of seismic body waves. The amount and distribution of forearc mantle hydration (serpentinization) will be quantified by integrating seismological observations with mineral physics calculations doc22670 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program funds a major enhancement of the capabilities for small-angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) located at Princeton University. The award permits the acquisition of a point-focusing SAXS instrument, which will be shared principally amongst users at Princeton and the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). This instrument uses double-focusing mirror monochromator optics to focus a substantial solid angle of x-radiation to a small spot in the detector plane. This optical geometry provides access to the very small angles needed to characterize structures with size scales from 1-100 nm. SAXS also has the important advantage of being readily adapted for in-situ measurements; cells for operation at elevated temperature and a scanning calorimeter stage will be incorporated into the SAXS system. Since this instrument permits detailed characterization of anisotropic specimens with structure on the nanoscale, it will support a range of research avenues where controlling the orientation of nanostructural features is the aim. Projects at Princeton and NJIT which will this instrument will support are directed towards: guided self-assembly of mesoporous silicates through applied electric fields; templated crystallization in block copolymers; new nanostructured organic inorganic composites for proton exchange membrane fuel cells; orientation of block copolymers and block copolymer carbon nanotube composites; and structure-property-processing relationships in crystalline polymer fibers and crystallizable ionomers. The instrument will be used by researchers ranging from postdocs to undergraduates, from Princeton, NJIT, and elsewhere. Moreover, the modular nature of the SAXS system encourages the design of new sample stages and modification of existing modules, thus allowing students the opportunity to gain valuable experience in instrument design. %%% This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program funds a major enhancement of the capabilities for small-angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) located at Princeton University. SAXS is a powerful technique for characterizing nanostructured materials (size scales from 1-100 nm), and fully complements existing electron and scanning probe microscopy facilities at Princeton. The new SAXS instrument will be shared amongst users at Princeton and the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) and elsewhere in the study of organic, inorganic, and composite materials with applications as diverse as nanoporous filters, membranes for portable fuel cells, and biodegradable polymer fibers. The state-of-the-art instrument will be incorporated into a facility with two existing SAXS systems (of complementary, but more limited, capabilities). Users will include postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, and undergraduates, the last of these through both undergraduate research and by utilizing the instrument in an undergraduate materials science laboratory course doc22671 none This award funds the Physics Frontiers Center for Self-Organization in Laboratory and Astrophysical Plasmas. At the heart of the center s program is the engendering of new collaborations between plasma physicists and astrophysicists to examine six phenomena within the unifying theme of magnetic self-organization. The six research topics are dynamo activity, magnetic reconnection, magnetic helicity conservation and transport, angular momentum transport, ion heating, and magnetic chaos and transport. Each phenomenon occurs in the laboratory and in many astrophysical venues. The occurrence of each is not in doubt, but the physics mechanisms are poorly understood or unknown. All six phenomena can occur as part of one process. None can be understood in isolation of the others. Thus, there is tremendous gain from collective study of these six topics, united by the theme of magnetic self-organization. The research will be carried out by a core Center group of 24 physicists covering all the needed areas of expertise - laboratory plasma physics and astrophysics, and experiment, computation, and theory. New links between astrophysicists and plasma physicists, essential to solve the problems, will be established. Recent advances in plasma physics, particularly experimental measurement techniques and computation, and the wealth of new astronomical data, imply that the present time is right for the Center. Three core institutions, each with a group involvement, provide complementary expertise and functions. The University of Chicago provides astrophysical and computational expertise, whereas Princeton University and The University of Wisconsin mainly provide complementary experiments. Overall management responsibility will reside at the University of Wisconsin. The key activities, applied to each topic, are to compare lab and astrophysical observations, compare results from different experiments, perform joint experiments, apply theoretical and computational tools developed in one venue to other situations, and convene topical workshops. The Center will also initiate a new, professionally-evaluated, educational outreach effort, building on a very successful lecture-demonstration series (the Wonders of Physics ) at the University of Wisconsin. The Center expects to provide a pool of young scientists with interdisciplinary training and enhance the connection between plasma physics and the larger physics community. This award is co-funded by the Physics Division and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate doc22672 none Patrick O Leary Kenrick Mock University of Alaska Anchorage MRI: Acquisition of Research Computational Equipment This proposal from an EPCoR state, aiming at performing collaborative research on computational and visualization aspects of various application areas, targets interactive computational environments and intelligent systems; more specifically, parallel processing, scientific visualization, and intelligent systems. The work, requiring a high performance infrastructure, supports complex computing and the ability to visualize, store, and easily retrieve large data sets. The advancement of research techniques again requires significantly improved distributed computing and visualization capabilities. The computational steering tools require analysis involving consistency, latency, scalability, and perturbation costs. Research activities in an Interactive Computational Environment (ICE) involve: 1. Seamless Monitoring and Steering of High-Performance Distributed Computations, 2. Realistic Simulators, and 3. Computational models. The intelligent systems component explores information systems (new techniques and applications for machine learning, e.g., user profiles), information relevance and retrieval, efficient methods for human-computer interaction, and multi-agent research doc22673 none The investigators seek to advance the creation of a Cooperative Institute for Deep Earth Research (CIDER). This award will provide funds to hold a series of 2 workshops over a period of one to two years whose goal will be to define the scope and activities of a possible future CIDER. The workshops will be interdisciplinary in nature and will address the question of global Earth structure, evolution, and dynamics. Participation will be open to the community. The direct product of each workshop will be a report listing the key questions identified during the workshop, whose resolution requires an interdisciplinary approach, as well as recommendations for the activities and structure of the future CIDER. These documents will then be used as a basis for the preparation of a detailed proposal for the establishment of CIDER doc22674 none Paul Rosenbloom University of Southern California Digital Government: Responding to the Unexpected This workshop will explore the technical and social research issues associated with unexpected events. These are occurerences, man-made or natural, for which prior planning has not been done, and formal response processes have not been agreed upon or established. In such cases, virtual temporary organizations must be created quickly, to share and coordinate data, people, and resources. Attendees will include engineers, emergenccy response experts, computer and information scientists, and social organizational science researchers doc22633 none This project examines the effects of laws regulating campaign financing in state legislative elections. A comparative analysis of states with varying statutory and regulatory provisions provides analytical leverage necessary for determining how the legal context shapes various aspects of electoral behavior. Major differences in the regulatory regimes across states provide an ideal laboratory for testing how such features affect candidacy decisions, fundraising practices, and election competition. Multiple research strategies are employed to test a model of elections in which campaign finance laws play a prominent role. A primary concern of this project is to evaluate the effects of legal conditions on such electoral features as contribution strategies of interest group and parties, candidate spending, candidate characteristics, and electoral outcomes in the states. The investigtors have confidence this project will generate findings that will have important theoretical and practical implications. Such as: Define and clarify the statutory and regulatory provisions of campaign finance laws across the fifty states for a 30-year time frame ( - ). Propose a model of elections in which the influences of campaign finance laws are posited to impact various stages of the electoral process. Collect data on campaign contribution patterns, campaign spending, candidate characteristics, and election competition in state legislative elections during the election cycle. Analyze the data collected to determine both the direct and indirect effects of campaign finance laws while holding constant a range of other factors and conditions. Prepare written reports on the findings and disseminate the information to scholars and policy makers. Release the data so that other scholars may explore additional dimensions of campaign finance laws. Overall, the results of the project promise to enhance substantially our understanding of campaign finance regulations and how these laws shape electoral behavior in the United States. The findings are expected to contribute to the theoretical development of several sub-fields in the study of American politics. In addition, the findings are likely to have practical implications by informing the policy debate over existing campaign finance policies at both the state and national levels doc22676 none It is paradoxical that the mantle sources with the highest 3He 4He and 22Ne 21Ne, and argued to be the least-degassed and therefore the most primitive or primordial, have uniformly depleted (not primitive) Sr, Nd, and Hf isotope signatures. This is an unexplained and long-standing flaw in the Standard Model for rare gas evolution in the earth. One of the assumptions underlying the Standard Model is that He is more incompatible than Th and U during upper mantle melting processes, and that it will be preferentially removed during melting and subsequent eruptive degassing. Existing data for mineral-melt partitioning of He ranges over several orders of magnitude, and does not place any real constraints on this most important assumption of the Standard Model. This project will address this issue by methodical experimental measurement of He, Th and U partitioning between olivine, clinopyroxene and silicate melt. The study will provide new solubility data for true structural-bound He in both natural and synthetic olivine and clinopyroxene, and in silicate melt, over a wide range of temperature, pressure, and oxygen fugacity. Helium in single-phase experimental charges will be analyzed first by crushing in vacuo (to release helium from cracks, voids and defects) followed by fusion in an utrahigh vacuum furnace. He in multi-phase charges will be analyzed by in-situ laser-ablation. U and Th partitioning data will also be determined over the same range of conditions for olivine melt and clinopyroxene melt equilibrium pairs in simple Fe-free haplobasaltic systems. The experiments will be designed to provide a direct comparison between Th-U partitioning and He partitioning. Ultimately, the resulting data will allow an assessment of a key question in terrestrial helium isotope evolution: is high 3He 4He synonymous with an undegassed or relatively primordial mantle source? The answer to this question has broad significance to the CSEDI community, as helium is one of the only lines of evidence for relatively undegassed material in the deep earth doc22677 none This Major Research Instrumentation RUI grant supports state-of-the-art nanoindentation equipment for Grinnell College to conduct research on the fundamental mechanisms of friction at the molecular level. The specific equipment, a Hysitron TriboScope nanoindenter, is a probe device that simultaneously measures normal and lateral forces, probe displacements, and contact area. It can be interfaced with the Digital Instruments control base already existing at Grinnell College. Student researchers will make use of the equipment. Grinnell College s Physics Department graduates 10 to 20 physics majors per year and has attained unique success in bringing women and minority students into physics. Half of Grinnell s physics graduates pursue graduate study in the sciences. The department views student-faculty research as an extremely valuable part of an undergraduate physics education, benefiting both students and faculty alike. The self-assembled monolayer systems to be studied using this nanoindenter show promise as lubricants for a new generation of microdynamic devices. They are also well-controlled experimental and theoretical model systems for investigating the energy dissipation mechanisms underlying friction doc22678 none Silver In the course of this project the investigators plan to construct two important global images that are directly relevant to mantle dynamics: 1) The strain field within deforming continental lithosphere and 2) The mantle flow field directly beneath the lithosphere. The former provides a strong constraint on the allowable physical mechanisms by which continents deform and evolve, while the latter constitutes arguably the most direct means of evaluating the coupling of the plate-mantle system, and the relevant forces that drive both mantle flow and plate motion. As a way of attacking both problems, they plan to utilize two large but rarely combined data sets: surface deformation measurements from geology and geodesy, and mantle deformation measurements from seismic anisotropy. With respect to lithospheric deformation, they plan to quantify the degree of vertical coherence of deformation between the surface and lithospheric mantle. This diagnostic constitutes an effective means of testing a wide variety of deformation models that predict varying degrees of vertical coherence. High vertical coherence is expected for models in which the lithosphere deforms like a thin viscous sheet. Low vertical coherence is expected for models that involve lithospheric delamination or flow within a weak lower crust. For mantle flow, they will estimate the sub-lithospheric flow velocity beneath both oceans and continents in as much of the world as possible. Observations of the surface velocity field, together with the orientation of mantle azimuthal anisotropy, enable inference of the mantle flow velocity at the base of the asthenosphere. Two regional studies have been completed that illustrate both the feasibility of this approach and its significant potential: in Tibet they have found high vertical coherence of lithospheric deformation beneath Tibet. If this stands up with further observations to be made in this project, it will serve to strongly restrict the range of allowable models for this and similar regions. Second, they have made the first direct observation of sub-lithospheric mantle flow velocity beneath western North America, where they find eastward-directed mantle flow of about 5 cm yr in a hotspot reference frame. Using these new observational constraints, the investigators seek to address basic questions about the sub-lithospheric flow field. Is this flow field fixed in a hotspot frame or any other reference frame? Alternatively are different subdomains, such as the various ocean basins characterized by distinct but relatively uniform flow velocities? Are predicted flow fields driven by deep mantle density generally compatible with the observed sublithospheric flow field? Do flow velocities in general require a weak asthenosphere beneath the lithosphere? While either lithospheric deformation or sub-lithospheric flow may be dominant within any given region, they will assume that both are contributing as two distinct layers in general. Their modeling methodology will explicitly account for this, thus providing the capability for separating these two important influences in any region doc22637 none The Laboratory in Comparative Ethnic Processes (LiCEP) will conduct four biannual workshops on the theme of ethnic mobilization, nationalism and civil war. LiCEP is an inter-university research group that seeks to improve our understanding of the causes and consequences of ethnic mobilization through the systematic cross examination of formal theoretical models and empirical evidence. The substantive questions that LiCEP explores include: What are the conditions under which individuals participate in ethnic as opposed to non-ethnic collective action? What are the conditions that lead to large-scale rebellions against the state? When and why do inter-ethnic riots occur? How are inter- ethnic relations renegotiated in the aftermath of civil violence? What are the conditions under which ethnic mobilization takes the more routine forms in the form of ethnic voting and party formation? What is the impact that different forms of ethnic mobilization have on policy-making and processes of state consolidation? And how does ethnic mobilization interact with the process of identity formation itself? The principal goals of the workshops are to evaluate lab-generated datasets, reverse engineer statistical, formal and agent-based models, and bring formal models into more direct interaction with empirical evidence doc22680 none In the past few decades, R&D efforts have resulted in production of high performance materials, which are stronger and more durable than before. We have also learned that many deterioration processes in our structures involve deleterious chemical reactions, rate-controlled by ionic transport, which lead to degradation of the physical properties of the material. Developments in sensing technology in the past decade have enabled us to measure the physical damage caused by these chemical reactions. However, with a few exceptions, tools for real-time monitoring and evaluation of the chemical environment of the system from within are not available. Availability of this information will help optimize repair and replacement strategies, and it will lead to significant reductions in rehabilitation costs. Development of a family of fiber optic chemical sensors for real-time distributed monitoring of civil and mechanical systems is proposed. The proposed chemical sensor comprises an optical fiber with a sensitive fluorescent polymer cladding coating, whose absorption and emission properties are altered by interaction with its environment. This interaction that leads to emission of specific wavelength by the target-specific fluorophore, provides a highly selective and sensitive process for distributed chemical sensing of chlorides, calcium, oxygen, pH and more doc22681 none The scientific study of politics requires empirical testing of theoretical models, but theories are often produced without adequate testing and empirical work too frequently uses sketchy and oversimplified theory. Gaps have appeared between theory and empirical method, and these gaps impair scientific progress. To ameliorate this scholars need to train a new generation of scholars who can better link theory and empirical work. The Principal Investigators will to foster this intellectual development by offering younger scholars an opportunity to learn by seeing and doing in conjunction with older scholars who have been leaders in advancing theory and empirical work, focusing on substantive areas where appreciable research integrating theory and methods already exists. A successful Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models (EITM) summer program, given the current relative infancy of this approach to social science, must as much develop as disseminate substance. Thus the key regarding training is that each institute include significant teaching and research components, providing students a high degree of individualized interaction with a far wider and deeper array of EITM mentors than are available at any individual institution. The Principal Investigators have activities transcending passive receipt of lecture material, involving also significant opportunities to advance participants own research by employing their newly gained knowledge about the integration of theory and method. The investigators foster integrated training by providing, in each of the four years from - , in four locations (respectively Harvard, Michigan, Duke, and UC-Berkeley), a four-week summer program. Each of these institutes accommodates up to 25 advanced graduate students and junior faculty. The program is selective and admission is based significantly on the quality and potential of research presented. A team of up to 15 research faculty conducts each institute in a framework detailed below. The investigators take a broad view of the theoretical models and empirical methods used to evaluate and test implications. Formal models on which instruction will build include game theory, differential equation dynamic models, and simple decision theory and more complicated behavioral decision-making models. The empirical toolkit should cover not only statistical inference but also focused analytically-based case studies, and experimental methods. Computational models have both theoretical and empirical relevance in the program. Six areas are outlined that have sufficiently matured in combining micro-oriented, institutionally rich theory with rigorous structural estimation to offer fruitful possibilities for integrated instruction. The six areas, with examples of integrated research and teaching outlines, cover spatial models, institutional analysis, macropolitical economy, bargaining and coalitions, international security, and international political economy. The researchers include three such areas each year, and guarantee that there will be at least one repeat for cumulation and development and at least one new module each year. Using multiple hosts capitalizes on diverse, regionally available deep pools of talent unavailable in any single location. It offers regional balance in accessibility and fosters outreach to other departments in several locales. The four have complementary strengths in computational models, experimentation, and macro- and international political economy doc22682 none This project investigates the effects of kinship on the behavior of wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Kinship plays an important role in determining how animals and humans behave. Evolutionary theory predicts that genetically related animals will develop close affiliative ties through the process of kin selection. Empirical observations are often consistent with this prediction. Despite the match between theory and observation, the explanatory power of kin selection continues to be debated. While some question whether the effects of kin selection have been overestimated, others continue to show how kinship can be used to explain the evolution of several aspects of animal social behavior. This research will provide behavioral observations of chimpanzees living in an unusually large community at Ngogo, Kibale National Park, Uganda. These observations will be combined with genealogical information derived from laboratory analyses of genetic markers from known individuals. Together, these data will be used to address five, unresolved questions regarding the impact of kinship on wild chimpanzee behavior and demography: (1) does kinship affect patterns of cooperation among male chimpanzees?, (2) do male and female chimpanzees associate non-randomly with their genetic relatives?, (3) do male chimpanzees share meat reciprocally with kin?, (4) are community males more closely related to each other than are females?, (5) do male chimpanzees use calls to recognize their genetic relatives? This project has broad theoretical, empirical, and practical significance. Theoretically, this research will contribute to the development of evolutionary models that are constructed to explain why animals behave in the way that they do. Empirically, this study will fill important gaps in our understanding of the behavior of our closest living relatives. Practically, research activities will help to safeguard one of the last vestiges of rainforest in East Africa; training and support of graduate students and Third World scientists will ensure that these conservation efforts are maintained in the future doc22683 none The transport properties of iron alloys are central to the understanding of dynamic processes in the Earth s core, including convective motions in the outer core (which drive the geodynamo) and solid-state deformation in the inner core, which may be responsible for the observed seismic anisotropy. To better understand these processes the PIs propose to conduct experimental studies of diffusional transport in iron at high pressure (up to 27 GPa). Rates of diffusion of several chemical species (Fe, S, O, and Os) will be measured in both liquid iron and in high-pressure solid phases (fcc and hcp). The experiments will extend to significantly higher pressures than have been examined previously and will provide a more secure basis for extrapolating diffusion rates and diffusion-related properties to the conditions of the core. The results will lead to a better understanding of inner core rheology and mechanisms for producing anisotropic textures; the viscosity and role of compositional convection in the outer core; and the spatial distribution of osmium isotopes and other chemical species within the core doc22684 none Holt In the course of this project the investigators plan to construct two important global images that are directly relevant to mantle dynamics: 1) The strain field within deforming continental lithosphere and 2) The mantle flow field directly beneath the lithosphere. The former provides a strong constraint on the allowable physical mechanisms by which continents deform and evolve, while the latter constitutes arguably the most direct means of evaluating the coupling of the plate-mantle system, and the relevant forces that drive both mantle flow and plate motion. As a way of attacking both problems, they plan to utilize two large but rarely combined data sets: surface deformation measurements from geology and geodesy, and mantle deformation measurements from seismic anisotropy. With respect to lithospheric deformation, they plan to quantify the degree of vertical coherence of deformation between the surface and lithospheric mantle. This diagnostic constitutes an effective means of testing a wide variety of deformation models that predict varying degrees of vertical coherence. High vertical coherence is expected for models in which the lithosphere deforms like a thin viscous sheet. Low vertical coherence is expected for models that involve lithospheric delamination or flow within a weak lower crust. For mantle flow, they will estimate the sub-lithospheric flow velocity beneath both oceans and continents in as much of the world as possible. Observations of the surface velocity field, together with the orientation of mantle azimuthal anisotropy, enable inference of the mantle flow velocity at the base of the asthenosphere. Two regional studies have been completed that illustrate both the feasibility of this approach and its significant potential: in Tibet they have found high vertical coherence of lithospheric deformation beneath Tibet. If this stands up with further observations to be made in this project, it will serve to strongly restrict the range of allowable models for this and similar regions. Second, they have made the first direct observation of sub-lithospheric mantle flow velocity beneath western North America, where they find eastward-directed mantle flow of about 5 cm yr in a hotspot reference frame. Using these new observational constraints, the investigators seek to address basic questions about the sub-lithospheric flow field. Is this flow field fixed in a hotspot frame or any other reference frame? Alternatively are different subdomains, such as the various ocean basins characterized by distinct but relatively uniform flow velocities? Are predicted flow fields driven by deep mantle density generally compatible with the observed sublithospheric flow field? Do flow velocities in general require a weak asthenosphere beneath the lithosphere? While either lithospheric deformation or sub-lithospheric flow may be dominant within any given region, they will assume that both are contributing as two distinct layers in general. Their modeling methodology will explicitly account for this, thus providing the capability for separating these two important influences in any region doc22685 none For this interdisciplinary grant in the mathematical sciences, Grant will spend August -July visiting the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder to collaborate with their research group in digital communications. The primary goal is to design modulation techniques for systems with multiple transmit antennas. This modulation is also referred to as space-time coding, and requires the production of sets of complex matrices which achieve maximal spatial diversity (that is, the difference of any of these matrices has maximal rank). The entries of these matrices are constrained to be so-called constellation points for the modulation scheme. Grant hopes to build upon recent work of those who have used algebraic number theory to build sets of matrices with maximal spatial diversity whose entries are in constellations for BPSK, QPSK, and rectangular QAM modulation schemes, and to apply algebraic number theory to the design of space-time codes for other constellations. This IGMS project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS doc22686 none Many theories of ethnic tensions are backward looking in the sense that they focus on how past experiences shape current attitudes. They therefore depict ethnic relations as relatively static and unchanging. By contrast, repeated game models of interpersonal relations are forward looking. In these models, a person s actions today are influenced by how she expects others will respond to those actions in the future. This project develops a theoretical model of racial or ethnic tensions in a forward-looking repeated game framework. If a community is partially segregated, then relationships will be more frequently repeated within groups than across groups. People may therefore cooperate more with members of their own group than with members of other groups. That is, people may trust members of other groups less than members of their own group. We interpret this as a form of ethnic tension. In this context, this study shows that everyone may prefer integration to partial segregation, in spite of these ethnic tensions. This is because the benefits from increased cooperation across groups may outweigh the cost of shifting from cooperative own-group interactions to less cooperative cross-group interactions. In addition, the study shows that minorities tend to suffer more from ethnic tensions than non-minorities. On the other hand, the study shows that an individual may not be able to improve her cross-ethnic relationships unless she is able to commit herself to interact more frequently with members of other ethnic groups in the future. It follows that individuals may need to use commitment mechanisms, such as residential proximity, a common employer, or marriage, to facilitate cooperation with members of other groups. Forward looking models of ethnic tensions are important because they suggest that ethnic relations can be very responsive to changing conditions. This can be a bad thing since, for example, ethnic demagogues may be able to break down trust across ethnic lines. Such a breakdown of trust can become self-fulfilling, as both sides become pessimistic about their future relationships, and so, treat each other worse today. On the other hand, the forward looking nature of ethnic relations can be a good thing since, for example, a community that was previously sharply divided along ethnic lines can quickly become less divided under favorable social and political conditions. If these favorable conditions make people more optimistic about their future cross-ethnic relationships, then they will be more careful to cultivate those relationships today. Models of ethnic tensions among forward-looking agents are therefore important because they highlight important risks and opportunities in improving ethnic relations. These models may also suggest new ways to help overcome these ethnic tensions doc22687 none An important puzzle in the study of comparative political behavior is the apparent variability, across countries and over time, of the extent and nature of economic influences on political support for parties and politicians. In this proposal, the Principal Investigators offer a theoretical solution to this puzzle and outline a plan for testing it empirically. The theoretical solution departs from previous work on comparative economic voting because it draws heavily on relatively recent insights into the nature, sources, and impact of information on public opinion (Zaller , ; Mutz ; Lupia and McCubbins ; Iyengar ; Page and Shapiro ; Delli Carpini and Keeter ). Such work differs from earlier literature in two ways. First, it assigns a dominant role to the media in communicating information to citizens and ultimately in influencing their political opinions and behavior. Second, it accounts for individual heterogeneity in political opinion and behavior largely through differences in people s incentive and ability to receive and accept media messages (i.e., their political awareness). Most of the insights of this literature, however, have not yet penetrated the comparative study of economic voting, which has maintained quite simple conceptions of the cognitive process that leads to the empirical phenomenon of economic voting. This is perhaps the reason that the leading explanation for cross-national difference in economic voting, the clarity of responsibility hypothesis, has had only limited empirical success. In this project, the Principal Investigators offer a more nuanced theoretical model of economic voting that builds on the recent literature in American public opinion (which is itself an outgrowth of advances in cognitive psychology). The Principal Investigators begin with the usual economic voting model, but recognize that it is really built from a series of connected opinions (i.e., an economic judgment, an attribution of responsibility for the economy, and an expression of political support). Consequently, a fruitful way of building a more fully realized model of economic voting would be to flesh out the explanation of how voters form and change each of these opinions. Fortunately, the public opinion literature mentioned above provides a general theoretical framework from which these opinion models can be built. This theoretical expansion of the economic voting model accommodates a number of the most prominent, but more ad hoc, hypotheses about comparative economic voting already in the literature, but it also generates a whole range of new theoretical hypotheses. Indeed, this theory promises to reorient students of comparative economic voting away from an exclusive focus on governmental institutions and party systems as the sources of difference in cross-national economic voting; and toward a focus on international differences in how the media reports on the economy. In addition, the theory produces a number of new sources of individual level heterogeneity in economic voting that (because of difference in the distribution of these characteristics in different populations) could also help explain variation in economic voting cross nationally. In order to explore whether this kind of theoretical expansion is useful the Principal Investigators will need to collect data on what the media in different countries say about the economy over time. To do this, the Principal Investigators will collect about 30,000 front-pages of selected newspapers from 15 developed democracies from - . These papers will be copied and coded for economic (and some political) messages by native language speakers. The project will also require information at the individual level. Many of the hypotheses specify relationships between variables like political awareness and economic judgments, political support, or responsibility attributions. To test these, the Principal Investigators need to ask a series of survey questions to citizens in different countries. The Principal Investigators will accomplish this inexpensively, by including a relatively short battery of the relevant items on the Gallup surveys conducted in each country doc22687 none An important puzzle in the study of comparative political behavior is the apparent variability, across countries and over time, of the extent and nature of economic influences on political support for parties and politicians. In this proposal, the Principal Investigators offer a theoretical solution to this puzzle and outline a plan for testing it empirically. The theoretical solution departs from previous work on comparative economic voting because it draws heavily on relatively recent insights into the nature, sources, and impact of information on public opinion (Zaller , ; Mutz ; Lupia and McCubbins ; Iyengar ; Page and Shapiro ; Delli Carpini and Keeter ). Such work differs from earlier literature in two ways. First, it assigns a dominant role to the media in communicating information to citizens and ultimately in influencing their political opinions and behavior. Second, it accounts for individual heterogeneity in political opinion and behavior largely through differences in people s incentive and ability to receive and accept media messages (i.e., their political awareness). Most of the insights of this literature, however, have not yet penetrated the comparative study of economic voting, which has maintained quite simple conceptions of the cognitive process that leads to the empirical phenomenon of economic voting. This is perhaps the reason that the leading explanation for cross-national difference in economic voting, the clarity of responsibility hypothesis, has had only limited empirical success. In this project, the Principal Investigators offer a more nuanced theoretical model of economic voting that builds on the recent literature in American public opinion (which is itself an outgrowth of advances in cognitive psychology). The Principal Investigators begin with the usual economic voting model, but recognize that it is really built from a series of connected opinions (i.e., an economic judgment, an attribution of responsibility for the economy, and an expression of political support). Consequently, a fruitful way of building a more fully realized model of economic voting would be to flesh out the explanation of how voters form and change each of these opinions. Fortunately, the public opinion literature mentioned above provides a general theoretical framework from which these opinion models can be built. This theoretical expansion of the economic voting model accommodates a number of the most prominent, but more ad hoc, hypotheses about comparative economic voting already in the literature, but it also generates a whole range of new theoretical hypotheses. Indeed, this theory promises to reorient students of comparative economic voting away from an exclusive focus on governmental institutions and party systems as the sources of difference in cross-national economic voting; and toward a focus on international differences in how the media reports on the economy. In addition, the theory produces a number of new sources of individual level heterogeneity in economic voting that (because of difference in the distribution of these characteristics in different populations) could also help explain variation in economic voting cross nationally. In order to explore whether this kind of theoretical expansion is useful the Principal Investigators will need to collect data on what the media in different countries say about the economy over time. To do this, the Principal Investigators will collect about 30,000 front-pages of selected newspapers from 15 developed democracies from - . These papers will be copied and coded for economic (and some political) messages by native language speakers. The project will also require information at the individual level. Many of the hypotheses specify relationships between variables like political awareness and economic judgments, political support, or responsibility attributions. To test these, the Principal Investigators need to ask a series of survey questions to citizens in different countries. The Principal Investigators will accomplish this inexpensively, by including a relatively short battery of the relevant items on the Gallup surveys conducted in each country doc22689 none W. Kendall Melville, University of California San Diego It is proposed to carry out experimental investigation of the dynamics of breaking waves. Experiments will be carried out in wave channels at Scripps Institution of Oceanography to achieve the following objectives. (1) Evaluation of the turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) budget under breaking waves. (2) Examination of the scaling of the total dissipation due to breaking as a function of Reynolds and Bond numbers. And (3) study of the initial stages of breaking and impact using high-speed video technique. The broader impacts of the proposed research include applications of the results to the practice of coastal and ocean engineering, naval architecture, and air-sea interactions, and training of Ph.D. student. The PI will continue to support K-12 education by hosting class visits to Scripps Institution of Oceanography doc22690 none This award is jointly funded by the Directorate for Geosceicnes and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources (National STEM Digital Library). The Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) is a distributed, community-based library dedicated to improving the quality, quantity, and efficiency of teaching and learning about the Earth as a system at all educational levels. As a community-owned library, DLESE is committed to the principles of participatory governance and distributed library construction. The DLESE Program Center (DPC) supports the DLESE mission and the DLESE community by serving as an integrator for community efforts and by providing the basis for program continuity. These integrating and continuity functions are achieved through the provision of technical infrastructure and community support services. The DPC work objectives for this performance period are to: (1) Develop an operational library backbone infrastructure that is tailored to specific geoscience education needs; enables distributed collections and services to act as an integrated whole; and interoperates with other library efforts such as NSDL. (2) Support community capacity building by providing tools, components, and services that enable the development of high-quality collections of teaching and learning resources by community members. (3) Enable systemic change as articulated by the national geoscience educational reform documents through the development of innovative resource discovery interfaces and services. (4) Promote overall library awareness to increase the use of library services by educators and students. (5) Conduct ongoing library operations, including support for community operation of diverse collections and services. (6) Support broad-based community governance. (7) Promote and support DLESE diversity initiatives. (8) Support distributed library evaluations of user experiences, library collections and services, and educational effectiveness. These objectives are informed by the DLESE governing bodies and the broader community, the results of work to date, and the overall library vision as articulated in the DLESE Strategic Plan. The objectives will be measured against two-year and five-year benchmarks for library functionality. These benchmarks were crafted with broad community input, and articulate the stages necessary for library development, growth and sustainability. Meeting these benchmarks requires significant technical developments in the first half of the performance period, with a transition towards an increased operation focus in the latter half. Constant throughout is continued support for DLESE governance and the distributed library building effort. DLESE governance processes are designed to involve community members in all major decisions and to maintain a balance between centralized and decentralized responsibilities. The effort will advance geoscience education by: (1) Establishing DLESE as the premier, trusted source for high quality geoscience education resources. (2) Promoting sustainable library growth through community capacity-building and community participation in library governance, development, and operations. (3) Enabling the library to serve as a catalyst for geoscience educational reform by (a) promoting broad and equitable access to quality geoscience education resources, (b) supporting geoscience literacy goals and Earth systems perspectives, (c) integrating research and education through increased access to and understanding of Earth systems data and data analysis tools, and (d) contributing to the body of evidence on the value and efficacy of digital libraries doc22691 none Bradley Hacker Most of the world s earthquakes occur in subduction zones where oceanic lithosphere descends into the mantle. Intermediate-depth earthquakes, which occur at 40-300 km depth, and the transport of water into the mantle are intimately linked to metamorphic reactions in the subducting lithosphere. The researchers propose to better understand subduction-zone processes by integrating seismological observations with thermal and petrological models. In order to test the dehydration-embrittlement hypothesis for intermediate-depth seismicity, the investigators will construct two-dimensional kinematic-dynamical thermal models for a set of subduction zones that span a range in subduction parameters and that include regions with significant along-strike variations in observed seismicity. Events in global and regional seismicity data sets will be systematical evaluated and relocated in order to test the hypotheses that (a) upper seismic zones are confined to the subducting mafic crust, (b) lower seismic zones are related to dehydration reactions in the subducting mantle, and (c) the forearc mantle is aseismic. Petrologic models of subducting lithosphere will be created using new phase diagrams and rock property data bases and the resulting layered seismic-velocity models will be tested against observed dispersion of seismic body waves. The amount and distribution of forearc mantle hydration (serpentinization) will be quantified by integrating seismological observations with mineral physics calculations doc22692 none This is a collaborative study of the deep mantle between the disciplines of body wave seismology, computational geodynamics, and isotope geochemistry. The project will systematically survey seismic data sets and compare waveform data with synthetics for a range of models (including tomographic, hybrid, and convection models). An assortment of modeling techniques have been assembled to take advantage of many different types of seismic phases to constrain dynamic models. With the release of two large datasets (South African array and Saudi Arabian network) along with the ever expanding IRIS and East African PASSCAL experiments, there will be an excellent opportunity to study the underpinning of the African continent from bottom-to-top. A concerted effort will be made to formulate, study, and apply dynamic models of the lower most mantle, especially the upwellings African superplume. Both 2-D (including a cylindrical geometry) and 3-D Cartesian finite element, mantle convection codes will be used to understand lower mantle and core mantle boundary dynamics. Spherical models of convection that have the history of plate motions imposed as boundary conditions will also be used. Model quantities (such as temperature, chemistry, phase, melt, and anisotropy) will be mapped into two and three dimensional seismic velocity fields. These predictions will be tested directly with body wave phases. Previous interdisciplinary work between seismology and geodynamics has allowed has supported the hypothesis that there are three types of structures within the lower most mantle where plumes arise: thermo-chemical super plumes, thermal upwellings which have ULVZ at their base, and thermal plumes which erupt through old subducted slabs. A new goal of this continuing research project is to use seismological observations and dynamical models as new organizing principles for interpreting the geochemistry of plume-related basaltic lavas. The seismology and geodynamics will be used to predict maps (predicted plume provinces) which will be tested with the geochemistry of MORBs and OIBs doc22693 none Learning involves changes in the chemistry, function and structure of neurons in the brain. In order to study these changes, it is first necessary to identify the neurons that mediate the learned behavior and to determine the steps at which communication between these neurons is modified. The next stage in studying learning involves pinpointing exactly which molecules undergo alteration, and what part these molecules play in the overall functioning of the neurons. In this project a well-defined reflex behavior will be utilized in order to investigate how learning modifies neuronal signaling. Habituation and sensitization of defensive reflexes are two simple forms of learning that have been studied extensively in the marine mollusc Aplysia, and the insights gained have proven to be generally applicable to learning in higher animals as well. Habituation of the reflex results from repeated activation of the sensory neurons, and sensitization is largely caused by the action of the neurotransmitter serotonin. The principal investigator will examine which steps in the signaling process are altered by sensory neuron activity and by two endogenous enzymes that are activated by serotonin. Prior work in the his laboratory suggests that the two enzymes act at different steps in the signaling process, and that different sets of neurons may preferentially make use of one or the other of the enzymes. Experiments will be done by intracellular recording from individual sensory and motor neurons and application of reagents that affect the activity of these enzymes. This work will contribute to the basic understanding of how the brain learns, and as such may have implications for education. For example, the principal investigator has found that the two enzymes affect signaling differently depending on how much neuronal activity precedes the application of serotonin, suggesting that different learning strategies might be appropriate in different circumstances doc22694 none This award provides partial support for a topical conference entitled Opportunities in Biology for Physicists , to be held in Boston on September 27-29, . The conference will be aimed predominantly at graduate students and postdocs in physics who are considering applying the methods of physics to biological topics. Physicists and biologists who are leaders in their fields will be asked to give broad overviews of selected areas at the interface between physics and biology. In addition, there will be talks on the how to of moving into the interface between the disciplines. Support is provided jointly by the Physics Division and by the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the MPS Directorate doc22695 none A central goal of marine ecology is to achieve a mechanistic understanding of the factors,, regulating the abundance and distribution of marine populations. With such an understanding, it should be possible to generate theory capable of predicting the effects of changes in physical and biological parameters on the dynamics of these populations. A critical component of the above goal is to quantify rates of exchange, or connectivity, among subpopulations of marine organisms. We have, however, little more than a rudimentary understanding of the spatial scales over which marine populations are connected by larval dispersal. This lack of knowledge represents a fundamental obstacle to any comprehensive understanding of the population dynamics of marine organisms. Furthermore, a lack of spatial context that such information would provide has limited the ability of fisheries scientists to evaluate the design and potential benefits of novel management strategies such as marine protected areas (MPAs). A recent community debate identified marine population connectivity as a key question in biological oceanography: Over what spatial scales are marine populations connected via dispersal of early fife stages? The report noted that the inability to accurately predict dispersal makes it impossible to determine the effect of climate change and or human exploitation on marine ecosystems. Thus, there is a clear need for an interdisciplinary effort to address this issue and the consequential need for programmatic funding in support of this effort. Considering the significance and scale of this problem and the obvious need for an integrated, interdisciplinary approach, a workshop will be held to: 1) Develop an appropriate Science Action Plan, and 2) Estimate resource needs to successfully execute this plan. The workshop will draw scientists from across the broad biological and physical oceanographic community, with additional representation, as needed, from other disciplines, especially those capable of providing unique methodologies applicable to the resolution of this problem. The workshop will enable scientists from all relevant disciplines to be involved in the planning of this scientific agenda to ensure compatibility of spatial and temporal scales in sampling strategies and model development doc22696 none The Space Studies Board (SSB) of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences requests funding to be used for travel grants for young scientists from developing countries (India, China, South America and nations of the former Soviet Union) and from within the United States who are involved in solar-terrestrial research (e.g., aeronomy, the magnetosphere, the sun, the interplanetary medium, and the upper atmosphere) to attend the World Space Congress . The World Space Congress is a joint scientific technical meeting of the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) and the International Astronautical Federation (IAF). The funding will be directed to the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR), which will administer the grants doc22697 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at McMurry University will upgrade their CW proton NMR Spectrometer to proton C-13 Fourier Transform NMR. This equipment will facilitate enzyme binding site activation studies and natural products chemistry research. This upgrade will also enable much faster scan times, and therefore allow classroom use. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas, especially biochemistry doc22698 none Phillips- A grant has been awarded to Dr. Thomas E. Phillips to fund the purchase of three cryo-preparative instruments: (i) a high-pressure freezing machine, (ii) an automated freeze-substitution and low temperature embedding processor, and (iii) a cryo-ultramicrotome. Conventional chemical fixation using aqueous fixatives cause unnatural changes in the fine structure of cells. Conventional fixation and embedding techniques at room temperature are also well known to interfere with immunocytochemical localization of target antigens. Cryo-fixation at ambient pressure results in the formation of ice-crystals that destroys the fine structure in all but the most superficial 10-20 mm of tissue. Freezing at very high pressure increases the depth of tissue without ice crystal damage to over 200 mm. The combination of cryo-fixation and freeze-substitution results in not only a truer preservation of tissue fine structure but also a greatly enhanced immunoreactivity. For samples which can not be fixed using high-pressure fixation, such as those collected in the field, conventional fixation followed by cryo-ultramicrotomy has been demonstrated to show much higher immunoreactivity than specimens dehydrated and embedded in plastic resins. To maximize the impact of this technology, these instruments will be housed in a multi-user electron microscopy facility for use by all researchers on our campus. Furthermore, investigators at other regional institutions will be able to use these instruments to prepare tissues that they can then examine on their home campuses. Examples of the type of research to be performed with this equipment include the Phillips laboratory s plan to freeze plant seed tissues to examine the pathway that both endogenous and exogenous transgenic proteins travel through plant cells. The Baskin laboratory studies how a plant organ attains a specific and heritable shape. High pressure freezing will allow this lab to define the role that the filaments of the cell s cytoskeleton play in determining the shape of the root. The sequencing of the complete or partial genomes of a growing number of bacteria, plant and animal species has created a wealth of information concerning what proteins are made by these different organisms. The next big breakthrough will be to determine the function of each of the proteins. The first steps in this process are determining in which cells the proteins are expressed and where exactly within the cell the proteins are located at different developmental or physiological stages. Electron microscopic immunocytochemistry offers a way to visualize the precise location of specific proteins and non-protein antigens within cells. These cryo-preparative instruments will not only increase the chances that our antibodies will recognize their target proteins but also ensure that the location that we find those proteins in accurately reflects their distribution in living cells doc22699 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Saint John s University will acquire a liquid chromatograph with mass spectrometric detection, including atmospheric pressure chemical ionization and electrospray probes. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) isolation of bioactive natural products; b) quantification of pesticides and pesticide residues in the Sauk River watershed; c) analysis of biological mechanisms for drug resistance; d) modeling a trinuclear site in multicopper oxidases; e) oxidized LDL studies; f) DNA repair in Saccharomyces cerevisiae; g) identification of endothelial proteins involved in tight junction formation; and h) vitamin K status in female athletes. Liquid chromatography with mass spectrometric detection (LC-MS) is an extremely powerful technique used for the separation and analysis of complex mixtures. It has become almost indispensable in industry; therefore, it will be crucial in the preparation of students for careers in industry or graduate school. This instrument will also be used by students at the College of Saint Benedict (an all women s college) and students at Saint Cloud State University doc22700 none This award provides funds for international travel by eight American scientists and engineers, and four students to Cheju Island, Korea to participate in an international workshop on Advanced Applications for Carbon Materials. The workshop will be co-organized by the Engineering Research Center (ERC) for Advanced Engineering Fibers and Films at Clemson University and Chungnam University, Korea. The expenses of Korean participation and costs for local arrangements will be borne by the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation (KOSEF). The conference program will include sessions on novel applications and processing techniques, carbon materials for environmental applications, carbon nanomaterials, carbon materials for storage applications, and carbon carbon materials doc19194 none Findley This award to University of Miami s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences provides instrumentation to improve the shared-use scientific instrumentation available to researchers using three research ships operated by University of Miami and the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution. These three vessels, R Vs Seward Johnson, Seward Johnson II, and Walton Smith, are all operated as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System research fleet. The specific instrumentation supported by this award includes a phased array, 75 kHz acoustic Doppler current meter for installation on R V Seward Johnson II, and a multi-corer device for collecting undisturbed seafloor samples from any of the three ships. These new capabilities will be of substantial advantage to marine scientists using the ships in their research during and future years doc22702 none The funds requested in this proposal are to help support the CAARI : 17th International Conference on the Application of Accelerators in Research and Industry. The conference is jointly sponsored by The Division of Nuclear Physics NSF, The Department of Energy (Nuclear Physics), The American Physical Society, and the University of North Texas. Approximately participants will attend the conference from 50 countries. The funds requested will be used specifically to help fund the participation of 15 young scientists, who will be invited speakers at the meeting. The conference is composed of 500 presentations on the use of particle accelerators in applied and pure science. The applied science includes topics such as; ion beam analysis of materials, synchrotron experiments, neutron and charged particle activation analysis, ion implantation, and medical radioisotope production and use. The research topics covered include mostly atomic and nuclear physics experiments below an incident beam energy of 25 MeV. Other details of the meeting can be found on our website: http: orgs.unt.edu CAARI doc22703 none Detrick This Major Research Instrumentation award to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts provides funds to develop and test a prototype deep-water, acoustically-linked, moored-buoy seafloor observatory. The system will consist of a discus buoy on a single-point, deep-water mooring, equipped with a satellite link for 2-way communication to shore and a high-speed acoustic modem for 2-way communication with sensors on the seafloor and on the mooring itself. The suite of sensors, at two seafloor nodes, will include an ocean bottom seismograph (OBS), an acoustic current profiler (ADCP), hydrothermal flow meters with associated temperature, chemical and pressure sensors and a conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD) instrument. All will be interfaced to two acoustic modems, and they will transmit data to the surface buoy of the mooring, from which they will be transmitted daily to shore together with meteorological data from sensors on the surface buoy and current meter data from instruments installed on the mooring. The mooring will be deployed for a 15-month demonstration project in the vicinity of the Nootka Fault, where complementary observatory experiments will be carried out under separate support from the Keck Foundation. The project is supported by the Division of Ocean Sciences at NSF. Cost-share support from non-federal funds will be provided for approximately 30% of total project costs doc22704 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is developing an advanced questions answering (QA) system with the use of innovative natural language processing (NLP). The specific areas addressed by this project are: (1) a true open-domain, high precision QA system optimized for commercial deployment; (2) distributed processing that provides an unprecedented QU system response time; and (3) system management and reporting tools for real-time customer feedback. The final product will provide accurate and short answers to questions asked in plain English. The need for this capability is widespread in companies, government agencies, and among individuals. The users may be casual questioners who ask simple factual questions, consumers who look for specific product features and prices, research analysis that collect market, finance, or business information, or professional information analysts such as law enforcement officials searching for very specific information requiring considerable expertise doc22705 none Gerald A Higgins Federation of American Scientists The Digital Human: Towards Unified Ontology for Biomedical Modeling and Simulation This workshop is bringing together researchers from a variety of disciplines to develop a unified ontology for biomedical modeling and simulation. The goal is to develop an ontology that can specify both lower-level cellular models and higher-level tissue, organ and systems models in a manner that is most useful for modeling and simulation. The workshop is organized to specify requirements for the ontology, based on existing models such as the Digital Anatomist Foundation Model of Rosse et al and the emerging BioSPICE ontology. An initial draft of a unified ontology that extends from gross anatomy to cellular components and a detailed plan for converting this draft into a system that can be widely accepted by the research community and can serve as the basis for developing interoperable simulations and other representations of these systems is in preparation. The draft is being prepared by the principle investigators supported by graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, prior to the workshop that will provide an in-depth peer review of the proposed ontology and the plan for next steps A final document being generated by the participants will be a concrete action plan for establishing a framework though which existing ontologies may be unified, expanded and enhanced. As a result, unification of cell-organ ontologies is enhancing the ability of researchers and developers to prepare interoperable simulation models in biomedicine, leading to advancement of our understanding of multiple levels of biological structure and function doc22706 none A unique professional consortium called the Asian-Pacific Network of Centers for Earthquake Engineering Research (ANCER) was established in in Seoul, Korea by 7 existing national earthquake engineering research centers. The vision of ANCER is to broaden the research and development impact and mitigation practices through cooperative activities that can be best advanced on a center-to-center basis over a large geographical area. ANCER will sponsor, for the first time of this kind, the International Conference on Advances and New Challenges in Earthquake Engineering Research in August 15-20, . The Conference will consist of two consecutive back-to-back meetings in Harbin and Hong Kong, China. The common underpinning of both meetings is the application of advanced technologies and new design philosophies methodologies to address recent challenges in earthquake engineering and hazard mitigation. This forward looking intellectual exercise will involve multiple agencies and major universities from the Asia-Pacific region, bringing together leading researchers in the field to develop a clear picture of the current status in the field, as well as to examine new opportunities on the basis of Asia-Pacific regional and global cooperation. This project provides the funds to allow a delegation of US researchers to participate in this important Conference doc22707 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, Dorota Abramovitch and Thomas Kozel of Anderson College will acquire a gas chromatograph with mass spectrometric detection that will be used to support the integration of research and courses in environmental analytical chemistry into the undergraduate curriculum. Anderson College is an undergraduate institution. The PIs will establish a research effort in analytical biochemistry that will involve undergraduates and emphasize environmental and green chemistry. One project involves monitoring the chemistry, flora and fauna of a local creek acquatic ecosystem. Eventually, they plan to carry out water, sludge and soil analyses for organic contaminants and heavy metals. The instrument will also be used in a number of courses doc22708 none This Major Research Instrumentation RUI grant supports acquisition of a Mossbauer spectroscopy system that will be used to further understanding of the structures and interactions that take place between tin-iron probe molecules and different liquid crystal polymer systems. Mossbauer spectroscopy will be applied to investigate the chemistry and structure of heterobimetallic polynuclear compounds containing iron and tin. These iron-tin compounds will be used as probe molecules to study the glassy phase of several liquid crystalline polymeric materials. This investigation will be carried out by undergraduate students involved in research projects directed by the chemistry and physics faculty at Bloomsburg University and Fayette campus of the Pennsylvania State University respectively. The equipment provides the capability to systematically investigate liquid crystal polymer systems by introducing both orientational and translational order by using the heterobimetallic and heterotrimetallic compounds. The equipment enhances the undergraduate research programs at two institutions by giving the students the ability to have hands-on experience with updated equipment. It will also be used as part of an undergraduate instrumentation course giving students the opportunity to learn the techniques of spectroscopy doc22709 none A grant has been awarded to the State University of New York at Stony Brook under the direction of Dr. Raleigh for the acquisition of an analytical ultracentrifuge. The analytical ultracentrifuge was first developed more than 50 years ago and its invention lead to a Nobel Prize. Since that time it has evolved from a custom made piece of specialized apparatus to an essential everyday tool for the investigation of basic biochemistry and chemistry. Analytical ultracentrifugation is the method of choice for studying the properties of large molecules that associate in solution. It is applicable to biological and non-biological systems and it is now an important research tool in biochemistry, structural biology and polymer science. The ranges of applications of this technique are immense and are rapidly increasing. Acquisition of an analytical ultracentrifuge will complement major ongoing initiatives in polymer science and in structural biology and biochemistry at SUNY Stony Brook. Ten investigators representing five academic departments at SUNY Stony Brook will conduct basic research projects. Their research interests span the range from the development of new materials, to biology, polymer chemistry, enzyme mechanisms, protein dynamics and folding, and viral assembly. Together they supervise more than 90 researchers. Professor Chu will use the instrument in his investigations of novel vesicle structures and surfactants formed by modified fullerenes. These new materials have a range of potential applications including delivery agents. Professor Kisker will use the ultracentrifugation in her studies of DNA repair while Professor de Los Santos will make use of the instrument in his studies of damaged DNA. DNA repair is essential for maintaining the correct genetic information. Mutations are the primary cause of hereditary diseases, as well as cancer, and may also be involved in aging. Professors London and Smith will investigate fundamental issues in membrane protein structure and folding and the ultracentrifuge will play an important role in their work. It is estimated that 30 % of all proteins are membrane proteins but very little is known about their structure and folding despite the fact that they play a central role in many important biological processes. Professor Raleigh will use the instrument in his studies of the process of protein folding. The protein-folding problem refers to the mechanism by which an initially unfolded protein achieves its final functional structure. It has long been known that the linear sequence of aminoacids dictates the final folded structure of proteins but the rules that govern this key assembly process are still not understood. Professor Sampson will use the instrument in her studies of the important enzyme cholesterol oxidase, which is used as a cholesterol sensor. Professor Sampson and Professor Tonge will make use of the instrument in their basic studies of enzyme functions while the laboratory of Professor Scarlata will apply the instrument to studies of viral assembly. Professor Schindelin will use the ultracentrifuge in his studies of the proteins involved in the biosynthesis of critical molybdenum cofactors. The consortium of investigators who will make use of the analytical ultracentrifuge study fundamental problems in biology, biochemistry and polymer chemistry. Many biologically important molecules as well as many man made macromolecules work in tandem with closely associated partners. Understanding the detailed nature of these interactions is key to understanding these complex systems. An analytical ultracentrifuge is required for these studies. Examples taken from work at SUNY Stony Brook include studies of critical proteins involved in the repair of damaged genetic material, the assembly of viruses, the behavior of novel new materials made from C60 ( buckyball derivatives), and studies of the fundamental processes by which proteins acquire their biologically active state. The instrument will also greatly enhance the infrastructure for training graduate students at SUNY Stony Brook and will also benefit researchers at nearby Brookhaven National Laboratory doc22710 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program provides supports for acquisition of a Quantum Design Physical Properties Measurement System (PPMS). The PPMS is essential for a broad research collaboration between the Physics and Chemistry Departments at Rutgers U., New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), various other universities, a national laboratory, and industrial labs. The instrument will be used in a wide range of research, including research on the microscopic electronic magnetic structural inhomogeneity found in functional oxides, and its corresponding roles in the macroscopic physical response of these materials, such as magnetoresistance, magnetic permeability, piezoelectric constants, and linear non-linear optical characteristics. The success of these research activities will depend on a speedy characterization of various material properties, and the PPMS will be essential for this purpose. The PPMS will be directly used for education of undergraduate students as well as high school students from under-represented groups. New experiments for an undergraduate class will be developed at the Department of Physics & Astronomy (Rutgers U.). In addition, T. Tyson at NJIT will incorporate magneto-transport and other magnetic experiments on superconducting cuprates to a seven-week summer workshop for high school students in the Newark area. Sabya Guha (Technician at Rutgers) will manage the maintenance and operation of the PPMS so that the safety of inexperienced students users will be ensured. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program supports Rutgers Univ New Brunswick with the acquisition of a Quantum Design Physical Properties Measurement System (PPMS), a multi-functional and user-friendly instrument. The PPMS can be used for measurements of a wide range of physical properties in complex materials. It will be essential for a broad research collaboration between Physics and Chemistry Departments at Rutgers, New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), various other universities, a national laboratory, and industrial labs. Modern electronic and magnetic devices often utilize the physical response of materials when subjected to external influences such as magnetic or electric fields, pressure, or optical irradiation. Recent investigation suggests that the large-scale physical response can be drastically enhanced in materials with microscopic electronic magnetic structural inhomogeneity. Thus, this enhanced response in microscopically inhomogeneous materials can provide the scientific underpinning for future technologies. The research will focus on understanding as well as controlling the inter-relationship between the microscopic inhomogeneity and macroscopic physical response. The success of this project will critically depend on a comprehensive characterization of various materials, and the PPMS will be essential for this purpose. The PPMS will be used directly for the education of undergraduate students as well as high school students from under-represented groups. New experiments for an undergraduate class will be developed at the Department of Physics & Astronomy. Furthermore, T. Tyson at NJIT, will add magneto-transport and other magnetic experiments on superconducting cuprates to a seven-week summer workshop for under-represented high school students in the Newark area doc22711 none This award is for the acquisition of an instrumented low to medium-velocity impact testing equipment (Instron Dynatup Model HV Impact Test System). The equipment will be used to enhance the research capability in the areas of mechanics of composite materials and structural mechanics, particular for aeronautics and aerospace engineering applications. This acquisition will have a broad impact on improving research environment of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU), which is an undergraduate institution. A multi-disciplinary research team is formed with five investigators from four engineering and technology departments. Several on-going as well as planed research projects will be conducted using this equipment, including Damage Identification for Laminated Composites Caused by Low Velocity Impact Using C-scan NDT, Impact Damage Detection on Filament Wound Pressure Vessels Using Acoustic Emission, Impact Response of New Cross Cell Sandwich Panels, and Impact Behavior of Modified Adhesive Bonded Joints. This acquisition will also have a significant impact on professional development of the investigators. Three of the five investigators are junior faculty members. Although they have demonstrated some success in their respective research areas, they have not yet established reputations in their research fields. This has also reduced their competitiveness in external funding solicitations. This award will provide them a much-needed equipment for their research activities and eventually makes them more competitive in research funding solicitations. While the main purpose of acquiring this impact equipment is to enhance the capability of ERAU in advanced materials and structures research programs, this acquisition will have an extensive impact to strengthen the educational quality of the university both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. With this advanced impact equipment, the investigators will be able to conduct more research projects. Students in the involved departments will be exposed to the most current research progress in the field. Such an exposure will significantly enhance the departments capability to prepare students for entry into advanced degree programs and or careers in aerospace aeronautical science and engineering. The increased research activities by the investigators will also provide an excellent opportunity to directly train our students by involving them in these projects through research assistant programs (both undergraduate and graduate doc22712 none With support from a National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation award, Dr. Richard Aslin and his colleagues at the University of Rochester will establish the Rochester Center for Brain Imaging (RCBI). The overall goal of this new center is to assess the plasticity of the adult and child brain as it adapts to altered and varied experiences. One type of alteration is the loss of sensory input in a single modality (e.g., the loss of vision or hearing because of blindness or deafness). Previous research at Rochester has shown that congenitally deaf individuals who use sign language do so with the same parts of the brain (the left hemisphere) that are usually used for spoken language, despite relying on the visual rather than the auditory modality. Deaf individuals also have greater sensitivity to patterns of movement in the peripheral visual field because they rely more on signed language inputs delivered in the visual modality. These patterns of brain plasticity are the result of altered sensory input during early development and have important implications for the brain s ability to compensate for deprivation and injury, provided that it has time during early development to adapt to these unusual circumstances. Similar mechanisms of plasticity may be present in adults as they learn a new task or compensate for brain injury. The Rochester group will use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study both long-term (developmental) and short-term aspects of brain plasticity in adults, children, and non-human primates. The research will provide important insights into the neural mechanisms of learning and plasticity and the keys to the brain s ability to adapt to novel experiences. Working with a team of cognitive scientists and neuroscientists, as well as magnetic resonance physicists and image processing engineers, Dr. Aslin will supervise the purchase, installation, and operation of a 3 tesla (T) fMRI system designed to measure the microscopic changes in blood oxygen level that occur in localized regions of the brain as participants perform a variety of tasks. This system, which is state-of-the-art in the field of human brain imaging, will provide a group of over 30 researchers from the University of Rochester and Cornell University (90 miles from Rochester) with the capability to explore a variety of issues in human brain plasticity and recovery of function after natural deprivation, injury, or disease. A key feature of the new center is a team of physicists and engineers who will develop new ways for fMRI to reveal even more fine-grained details about the functioning and visualization of the brain. This project is important for several reasons. It will provide a first-class facility for non-invasive brain imaging to a group of researchers at Rochester who have already demonstrated their ability to conduct cutting-edge research in cognitive neuroscience. The RCBI will also play a significant role in the training of future scientists by actively involving graduate and undergraduates students from the University of Rochester and Cornell University, as well as undergaduates from the State University of New York at Geneseo (a non-Ph.D.-granting college located 30 miles from Rochester) in state-of-the-art brain imaging research. The new center provides an excellent vehicle to teach the principles of fMRI to a new generation of students who will become leaders in the field of cognitive neuroscience doc22713 none This project entails the development, test, validation, and deployment of a mid-infrared laser based gas sensor system for continuous in-situ measurements of the isotopic composition of atmospheric carbon dioxide (13CO2 12CO2 ratio) with a precision equal to or better than 0.1 per mil. A science team from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Rice University, and the University of Colorado will utilize the latest developments in optical fiber technology, recent advances in difference frequency generation (DFG), and multi-year experience in carbon cycle research. The proposed DFG instrument will employ commercially available telecommunication lasers which operate at room temperature. Such a laser source presents significant advantages over more traditional laser systems for achieving high measurement precision. The instrument will be used to acquire high precision atmospheric measurements of 13CO2 12CO2 ratios - a measurement currently accomplished by a network of flask samples followed by mass spectrometric analysis. These data are crucial for understanding terrestrial and oceanic carbon sinks which requires an understanding of the distribution, contribution, and evolution of regional and local CO2 source and sink processes. High precision continuous measurements are needed to provide broad temporal and spatial coverage, even though the isotopic precision is inferior to the flask method (0.012 per mil) At present there does not exist a robust field-deployable instrument capable of continuous 13CO2 12CO2 measurements with a precision of 0.1 per mil or better with verifiable accuracy. The first phase of this effort will focus on extensive laboratory testing to identify and implement optimal experimental conditions and data acquisition and retrieval routines. The next phase will focus on optimal packaging for field measurements, and this will be followed by an extensive set of side-by-side comparisons with state-of-the-art flask sample mass spectrometric measurements carried out in the field at the University of Colorado s Niwot Ridge Observatory site. Co-located measurements will be carried out on both the ground and the University of Colorado tower facility. The new continuous measurements will provide the foundation for a long-term database from the Niwot Ridge site as well as the necessary experience to further extend these new measurements to other venues and platforms. This project has potential broad impacts in the area of carbon cycle research. In addition, the new instrument and associated new approaches can be adapted to other new research problems requiring ultra high measurement precision. Moreover, a multifaceted educational program with graduate and undergraduate students, high school students and teachers, will transfer the understanding and use of this new laser and fiber optic technology to a broader scientific community. The students will be introduced to 1) the potential of optical fiber technologies and its applications; 2) an overview of the carbon cycle; and 3) the challenges of, and information content offered by, high precision isotopic ratio measurements of CO2 doc22714 none This Major Research Instrumentation award to University of Washington supports the development of a fiber optic back scatter instrument, FOBS-2, which will be used for research in near-bottom sediment transport. The instrument will provide closely spaced, accurate measurements of suspended sediment concentration near the bottom in high energy, near-shore environments, providing a significant improvement over existing capabilities. The present award will support system design, fabrication of two instruments, and testing in both laboratory and field settings. The instrument design will be made available to other researchers, and University of Washington will also build instruments for other research groups doc22715 none Scott T. Weidman In the wake of the September 11, , terrorist attacks on the United States, the U.S. mathematical sciences community has become increasingly interested in contributing to homeland security. Many areas of defense and intelligence rely naturally on advances in the mathematical sciences, and a large number of talented mathematical scientists have contributed to those areas over the past 60 years and more. The current climate provides an opportunity for expanding that pool of mathematical scientists who are actively involved in such research. This award will partial support The National Research Council s Board on Mathematical Sciences and their Applications, in conjunction with its Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, in holding a workshop, preparing a report, and posting an on-line video on The Role of Mathematical Scientists in Homeland Defense in order to stimulate the involvement of more mathematical scientists in major areas of homeland defense doc22716 none This Major Research Instrumentation RUI grant supports instrumentation for research in ultrafast optics and semiconductor physics as well as undergraduate research training at Macalester College. The instrumentation is a 7 Tessa superconducting magnet cryostat with optical access. Initial research will use the instrument to support a NSF-funded program to study spin and charge dynamics in semiconductors. The Projects include ultrafast THz spectroscopy of spin-dynamics in semiconductors; time-resolved measurements of magneto-plasma oscillations in semiconductors; and quantum transitions in strongly driven semiconductor quantum wells and heterostructures. The PI is building an ultrafast THz system with spectral bandwidth of 0-30 THz at Macalester College. This acquisition will significantly strengthen the capabilities of the system, permitting investigation of spin phenomena and other magnetic phenomena. The research projects have a common objective of providing education and research training opportunities for advanced undergraduate students and will permit hands-on training in photonics and experimental materials physics. Student research training will also be enhanced through use of the instrument in advanced courses, independent projects and senior honors projects. As the switching rates in electronic devices are pushed to ever-higher frequencies, it becomes increasingly important to understand carrier transport phenomena in semiconductors on picosecond and femtosecond time-scales. Using ultrafast terahertz spectroscopy it is possible to impulsively excite a semiconductor with a femtosecond optical pulse or single-cycle electromagnetic pulse and record the resulting motion of charge in time. This allows the study of semiclassical phenomena such as carrier scattering and charge oscillations in semiconductors and semiconductor heterostructures on time-scales, which will be crucial to future devices. In addition, this technique is well suited to the study of quantum phenomena such as electronic transitions in semiconductor quantum wells and heterostructures (intersubband transitions) and spin transitions. Intersubband transitions are of interest for quantum coherent electronics and for the development of mid- and far-infrared semiconductor lasers. Spin-transport devices in which an electron s spin, rather than its charge, is used to control transport are of intense current interest. Among the most promising systems are quantum wells in narrow-gap semiconductors doc22717 none With support from a National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation award, Dr. Rinita Dalan will collaborate with Bartington Instruments Ltd. to develop a down-hole magnetic susceptibility logger appropriate for archaeological and other near-surface applications. Surficial processes affect soil magnetic properties and in depositional contexts it is possible to use magnetic variation over depth both to identify individual buried surfaces and to gain insight into the factors responsible for their magnetic alteration. Based on preliminary data, Dr. Dalan believes that humanly modified surfaces can be distinguishable in this way. Thus, in principle, a magnetic susceptibility logger could be used as a prospection device to locate and to determine the extent of archaeological sites. Because the logger currently under development can measure sections up to 1.6 meters in depth and be inserted within a 1 diameter hole, it has the potential for widespread use. Working with Bartington Instruments Ltd. Dr Dalan will help to develop a stage two prototype. Both field and laboratory tests will be conducted and experiments will compare the performance of the second-generation prototype to the original and be used to provide advice on further improvements. Performance will be evaluated in terms of a number of variables including repeatability (noise), sensitivity, stability and resolution. In addition, speed and ease of field operation as well as flexibility of application will be evaluated. Field and laboratory tests, together with analysis and presentation will be conducted over a period of 1.5 years. The southern lake Agassiz Region, an archaeologically important area easily accessible to Dr. Dalan provides a set of diverse soil and sedimentary environments and thus offers an excellent test situation. Three four sites, most archaeologically examined and pedologically described give a controlled context. In addition to down hole measurements, sediment samples will be collected for laboratory analysis. This project is important for several reasons. It will provide archaeologists and soil scientists with the ability to quickly and easily plot variation in magnetic susceptibility over depth and offer insight into the sediment characteristics responsible for this variation. It will also play a significant role in undergraduate student training. Dr. Dalan will actively involve Moorehead State University undergraduates in both laboratory and field aspects of the research. The project provides an excellent vehicle to teach principles of archaeology, geophysics and soil science and hopefully will provide an experience which encourages students to pursue careers in science doc22718 none Kreutz This award provides support to significantly enhance the elemental and isotopic analysis capabilities at the University of Maine through the acquisition of a high resolution inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (HR-ICP-MS). The HR-ICP-MS will enable environmental scientists and students at UMaine, as well as other educational institutions and state agencies, to substantially broaden their interdisciplinary research interests far beyond the current possibilities. Specifically, a state-of-the-art HR-ICP-MS will enable the PIs to: 1) Dramatically expand our element concentration and element ratio analysis capabilities in aqueous matrices. Existing UMaine research strengths in Quaternary science, environmental geochemistry, and marine biogeochemistry rely upon accurate elemental determinations at part-per-trillion and part-per-quadrillion levels. Each of these programs requires the sensitivity and low detection limits offered by HR-ICP-MS to perform multi-elemental analyses without time-consuming pre-concentration protocols; and 2) Perform rapid and highly precise elemental isotope ratio determinations, or constrain isotope ratios sufficiently for primary processes to be inferred. Isotope measurements made with the HR-ICP-MS will be immediately used in several ongoing projects investigating pollutant source and transport, biogeochemical processes, and climate variability. We will develop a HR-ICP-MS Facility in the Sawyer Environmental Research Center at UMaine for use as a regional resource. We plan to acquire a Finnigan ELEMENT2, the only commercially available high resolution single collector ICP-MS. In addition to its primary research focus, the HR-ICP-MS will be used in a range of undergraduate and graduate programs at UMaine. Integration of research and education will occur through graduate theses, undergraduate courses, and independent undergraduate research projects under the Honors Program and Capstone Experience program doc22719 none The characteristics of power system electromechanical dynamics and oscillations are complex and they are an integral part of most major system disturbances. Understanding these characteristics is essential for preventing catastrophic failures and blackouts. Until now, the complete picture of how the entire US power system behaves during disturbances is not well understood. Any information we have is from computer simulations that are subject to model errors and simplifications. Complete models for nonlinear loads are not available despite the critical roles they play in system dynamics. Most of all, no model could capture the time varying nature of power system operational conditions over long time spans. System frequency (and its rate of change) is one of the most important measures of the electric power system behavior. Individual frequency measurements made so far are meant for limited local use and do not have the accuracy and synchronization necessary for system level analysis. This project proposes to develop instrumentation for a wide-area frequency monitoring network (FNET) with research focus on power system dynamics measurement, analysis, and control. The proposed integrative instrumentation has the following unique features: (1) Phasor Measurement techniques will be used for precise dynamic frequency calculations, (2) Global Positioning System (UPS) synchronized time pulses will drive data sampling and time stamps. (3) Nation-wide system frequency information will be collected from potentially hundreds of sites chosen to satisfy observability criteria. (4) Internet will facilitate continuous data collection and results dissemination. (5) Measurements will be taken at 110Volt single-phase power outlets with the proposed frequency recording units (FRUs). Here, one crucial innovation is to make measurement at the 1 1OV level to avoid many obstacles in high voltage substation installations. This will reduce overall cost and enable measurements to be made easily and flexibly at many locations. The proposed instrumentation development work includes design and development of a GPS Internet based frequency monitoring network (FNET) that includes (1) frequency recording unit (FRU) development. (2) information management system (IMS) design, and (3) both real-time and offline data processing algorithm development. For the first time, the proposed FNET will make the global observation of the vast power network behavior possible. New observations from FNET could take the power system research to an entirely new level. A clear understanding of the phenomena will lead to innovative counter-measures against system blackouts, and increased reliability of nation s critical electric power system infrastructure under the deregulated environment. As more understanding of the complex power system dynamics is gained with the help of the first-hand FNET measurement data, it may be possible to devise early warning systems and activate control actions at selected points to damp system oscillations and prevent catastrophic power system failures. FNET opens a new window to the world of large power system behavior. Such information for education and training was never possible before doc22720 none Schaumloffel With this award from the MRI program, the State University of New York College at Oneonta (SUNY Oneonta) will acquire an inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometer (ICP-AES) and microwave digestion system (MDS). The research carried out with these instruments, both at SUNY Oneonta and with colleagues at nearby Hartwick College, involves a wide array of geological, environmental and chemical studies. These include studies of the elemental composition of metamorphic rock formations in New York and Montana, studies on the cycling of trace elements in environmental systems and specific studies of the accumulation and cycling of mercury in the Adirondack Region (New York). A major component of this project is the involvement of undergraduate students in laboratory-based research linked with field-work and the analysis of geological features in the field. The acquisition of this instrumentation will greatly enhance our suite of shared analytical instrumentation at SUNY Oneonta, benefiting the research of a number of faculty members and improving undergraduate education doc22721 none Holland This Major Research Instrumentation award to New York University s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences provides funds for acquisition of instrumentation for experimental research in geophysical fluid dynamics, especially focusing on quantitative aspects of atmosphere and ocean processes. Specific instruments to be acquired include a particle image velocimeter (PIV) and a planar laser induced fluorescence tool (PLIF) plus associated tanks, filters and plumbing fixtures, allowing accurate evaluation and measurement of 3-dimensional flow properties under controlled conditions. The instrumentation will be mounted for use on an existing geophysical fluid rotating table. The new instrumentation will provide an important experimental capability for testing and validating model and theory, as well as an important set of tools for laboratory studies by students in the Center for Atmosphere-Ocean Science. The project is supported by the Division of Ocean Sciences at NSF. New York University will provide cost-share support from non-federal funds for 30% of total project costs doc22722 none This proposal aims to develop a unique combination of state-of-the-art spatial, visualization, and experimental capabilities within a behavioral science research laboratory facility at Indiana University. The laboratory will be multi-purpose, with a focus on understanding complex systems at multiple temporal and geographic scales. It will contribute to both research and instruction. The laboratory will enable the development of new capabilities for spatially organized agent-based modeling, three-dimensional (3-D) visualization of social systems, multi-user 3-D virtual desktop worlds, as well as the implementation of behavioral experiments and GIS technologies in social science research. The research group proposing this set of development activities is multi-disciplinary with strong records of field and laboratory research in anthropology, economics, geography, information science, political science, and psychology. An important aspect of the proposed laboratory facility is to provide the infrastructure for fostering stronger linkages among the researchers involved in this proposal. It will create opportunities for enlarging the community of scholars and students at Indiana University interested in frontier social science that incorporates spatial attributes of decision environments important for understanding human and biological dimensions of social, political, and economic decision making. The laboratory will enable faculty and students to participate in the testing of current social science theories with computer-simulated, agent-based systems as well as the tools of laboratory decision-making experiments in controlled environments. Based on the research conducted in this laboratory, we hope to develop new theories of how complex individual interactions over space and time lead to emergent properties in complex social-ecological systems. The proposed laboratory will facilitate the productivity and breadth of several ongoing and future activities: (1) a recently funded biocomplexity project integrating agent-based modeling, laboratory experiments, and GIS technologies into the study of complex land-use decisions and emergent land-use patterns; (2) research on networks of political communication related to the accessibility of political attitudes, orientations, and judgments; (3) investigation of resource allocation decision making under risk and uncertainty; (4) multi-agent experiments in the laboratory, in the field, and at multiple sites; (5) the incorporation of GIS technologies into social science research integrating key incentive and outcome effects; (6) creation of artificial 3-D environments for experimental research and policy applications; (7) paleoanthropological research on human evolution; (8) international relations; and (9) education and outreach doc22723 none This Major Research Instrumentation RUI grant supports the acquisition of an X-ray microanalysis system with extended range parallel beam WDS spectrometer to augment the current research activities of a diverse faculty within CUNY and centered at the College of Staten Island. The new system includes two integrated components. The first of these components is an X-ray microanalysis system that utilizes energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) to collect, identify and map X-ray spectra from the samples. The electron beam from the SEM gun interacts with a sample, exciting elements in the sample. The sample then emits secondary electrons and X-rays. The energy of the X- rays emitted is element specific. Through the EDS system, it is possible to simultaneously collect secondary electrons (to obtain a three-dimensional image of a sample) and K a energies of 0.1 keV (also emitted following excitation by the primary electron bombardment) and to obtain an accurate map of the distribution of elements within a sample. These elements include those of atomic mass equal to or greater than Be. The second component to be acquired is a parallel beam wavelength dispersive spectroscopy (WDS) system. The WDS system allows for the detection of elements from 10 keV, that is, for light element detection. The equipment will be used in collaborative research efforts related to elemental distribution within polymers and biopolymers. Research topics include analysis of the alignment of metals in nanotubes, binding of metals to sediments, and distribution of metal bioaccumulated by aquatic and terrestrial organisms. This instrumentation acquisition supports a number of educational activities both at the College of Staten Island and the City University of New York. This includes its use in an Advanced Microscopy course Instrumental Methods in Chemistry and undergraduate research activities through the Independent Studies and Honors Thesis programs. Additionally, the instruments will support research activities in the College of Staten Island s NSF-funded REU program on Polymers and Biopolymers, as well as the Center for Environmental Science. As the Departments of Biology and Chemistry have an established interdisciplinary approach to research and teaching, the instruments will also be used in graduate education and training in the NSF-supported IGERT program on Nanostructural Materials and Devices doc22724 none Under the direction of Dr. Richard K. Larson, Ms. Hiroko Yamakido will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. Her research concerns dialect variation in Japanese, with focus on adjectival inflection. She will study the variants spoken in seven prefectures that extend from northern to southern Japan, including Hokkaido, Fukushima (or Niigata), Osaka, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, and Kagoshima. The project s core data will be gathered though oral interviews with native speakers, who will be consulted regarding the acceptability and range of meanings of example sentences and phrases involving adjectives. The adjectives include those showing the amibuity in English examples like OLD friend (which can mean aged friend or long-time friend ), as well as adjectives found in contexts like resultatives ( Mary hammered the metal FLAT ), causatives ( Mary made John HAPPY ), adverbials ( Mary spoke QUICK-ly ), and so-called secondary predicate constructions ( Mary ate the fish RAW ). Ms. Yamakido will also consult published sources available only in the relevant locales and several Japanese dialectologists. The results of her fieldwork will bear on the nature of prenominal adjectives in Japanese: whether they are projected into attributive structures (like blue house ) or into relative clause structures (like house that is blue ). This research is significant both for theories of generative syntax and semantics generally, and for Japanese dialectology in particular. It will not only advance understanding of Japanese grammar, and the relation between its morphological and syntactic forms; it will also demonstrate the rich diversity within a small sector of the grammar and the importance of cross-dialectal comparison doc22725 none This project will investigate a newly proposed mechanism by which humans can adapt to life in an extreme environment. Tibetans have lived at high altitudes for millennia and have been demonstrated to possess a number of adaptations for dealing with life on the Tibetan Plateau and in the Himalayan Mountains. The proposed research is designed to test the hypothesis that the high levels of exhaled nitric oxide produced by Tibetan high-altitude natives are responses that improve functional capacity in their environment where there are fewer oxygen molecules in every breath, a situation called high-altitude hypoxia. Based on the known effects of nitric oxide, it is hypothesized that high levels of nitric oxide in the lungs helps in two ways. First, it may offset the high-altitude hypoxia by enabling the extraction of a larger proportion of the oxygen in the inspired air. Second, it may improve oxygen delivery by increasing blood flow throughout the body. The recent finding that high-altitude native Tibetans exhale more than twice as much nitric oxide as sea-level natives at sea level requires explanation because a large body of evidence predicts less, rather than more, synthesis of nitric oxide under hypoxic conditions. The consistent finding of high pulmonary nitric oxide in both Tibetan and Andean indigenous high-altitude populations suggests an adaptive, beneficial function. The hypotheses will be tested with a sample of 91 high-altitude natives of the Tibet Autonomous Region living at m (~ 14,000 ) altitude. The study participants will be healthy, not pregnant, non-smokers, 18-55 years of age. The concentration of nitric oxide in exhaled breath will be measured and it is expected that there will be a wide range of variation including values two to three times higher than those found at sea level. The hypothesis of greater oxygen extraction will be tested by measuring the difference in the percent of oxygen in inspired air (20.9%) and exhaled air (to be measured). The hypothesis of greater blood flow will be tested noninvasively by quantifying blood flow in the lungs and in the forearm. The anticipated outcome is a positive association between exhaled nitric oxide and oxygen extraction, pulmonary blood flow, forearm blood flow at rest and in response to exercise and in response to breathing 50% oxygen (without the stress of hypoxia). These findings would indicate that Tibetan highlanders use elevated nitric oxide in the lungs to offset high-altitude hypoxia and to deliver adequate oxygen to body tissues. Pulmonary nitric oxide appears central to understanding human adaptation to high altitude and hypoxia. Nitric oxide biology has implications for explaining how Tibetan high-altitude natives can achieve sea-level values for necessary biological processes that require oxygen, such as basal metabolism and physical work capacity, although they live in an environment where ambient oxygen is severely limited relative to sea level. The Tibetan case contributes to basic knowledge of nitric oxide biology because healthy people produce amounts that would be considered pathological at sea level. The proposed research contributes new knowledge to a central question in physical anthropology: the causes and consequences of human biological variation. The significance of the proposed research lies in improving understanding of how people adjust to life with hypoxia. It directly investigates why the Tibetan population inhabiting a stressful, high-altitude environment has very distinctive biological features and also has implications for understanding the responses of sea-level visitors to altitude whether they are vacationers in the Rockies or military personnel serving in mountainous areas, and for understanding the pathophysiology of patients with diseases that cause hypoxia doc22726 none DNA segregation is a fundamental process that is poorly understood in bacteria. Recent work shows that E. coli plasmids are targeted to specific regions within the cell, rather than being randomly distributed in the cytoplasm as long thought. Multicopy plasmids form clusters that are targeted to the cell midpoint where they are duplicated. Following duplication, plasmids migrate with rapid kinetics from midcell to the future midpoints of the nascent daughter cells. Little is known about the mechanisms underlying plasmid localization or movement in bacteria. While a set of par genes important for DNA partitioning have been identified, how they contribute to plasmid localization is not understood. The goal of this study is to identify genes encoded by plasmids and their hosts that are directly responsible for mediating plasmid targeting, clustering and movement. Since bacterial DNA segregation is a fundamental process about which so little is currently known, the impact of this study will be extraordinarily broad, potentially affecting any area of research where bacteria are involved. Some areas that will be impacted include microbial ecology and evolution, pathogenesis, genetics, genomics, and bioremediation. For example, understanding the details of DNA segregation could contribute directly to the development of new antibiotics designed to inhibit the process. Since one of the plasmids used here is a broad host range antibiotic resistance determinant, these studies will also impact our understanding on the evolution and spread of antibiotic resistance. This work will also have a significant impact on undergraduate education by contributing to the training of students in the biological sciences doc22727 none EIA 02- Collins, Oliver University of Notre Dame MRI: Acquisition of High Speed Mixed Signal Test Equipment This proposal, studying quadrature and Sigma Delta modulation demodulation, supports communications signal processing research for experimental validation using simulators. Experimental verification of new ideas in Sigma Delta digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital conversion will be explored. Sigma Delta modulation allows an intrinsically linear two level quantizer to reproduce a high resolution signal by shifting the quantization noise away from the signal band for removal by filtering. The Sigma Delta modulator tries to find the optimal sequence of +1 s and -1 s such that, after filtering, the squared Euclidean distance between this sequence of +1 s and -1 s and a given, identically filtered, discrete-time, unity-amplitude-limited sequence filtering is minimized. The research aims to show that Sigma Delta modulation constitutes a crude optimization algorithm and that practicable techniques solve this optimization problem well enough to improve dynamic range beyond the current state-of-the-art. The PI claims that the substantial improvement will almost certainly expose the inherent nonidealities of even single bit quantizers. Because of the bit-to-bit interactions produced by reflections from imperfect impedance matches at its output, even single bit D to A generates noise and spurious signals. The equipment requested, three pieces of high speed, mixed signal test: a data generator, a network analyzer, and a signal analyzer, will allow investigation of these effects and permit the design of better single- and multiple-bit quantizers. The data generator will be used as a stimulus source in a wavelength division multiplexing project; the superior range of the network analyzer will contribute to a microwave remote sensing project. Improvement in analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog bandwidth and dynamic range is expected. The devices are important whenever digital computation must be interfaced to physical world (e.g., getting the analog signal radiated by an antenna). Since the digital revolution depends on these conversions, the interface is critical to send and store information. Improved performance and reduced complexity in manufacturing systems that depend on these conversions, such as personal CD players, cellular telephones, high definition TV, computer modems, deep communication systems would benefit us all. Moreover, in addition to supporting research, the equipment will support enhanced projects in three undergraduate courses and contribute to make the students attractive to industry for both hiring and mentoring the required design projects doc22728 none This research generates new insights into firms price-setting behavior and develops guidelines that will be helpful in a wide range of applied econometric work. Two areas of research are proposed. The first project studies the question, why don t firms instantly adjust their prices to new economic fundamentals? This question gets to the heart of many of the central issues in economics. The novel suggestion here is to study a long time series with a sufficient number of observed price changes that we can make a useful statistical statement about the conditions under which an individual firm is predicted to change its price. A base-case menu cost model is shown to have the implication that the past history of prices and fundamentals should influence the probability of observing a price change only through the gap between the current price and fundamental value. A framework is proposed for testing this implication and quantifying and interpreting alternative dynamics that are observed in firms actual prices. The second set of projects studies the role of normalization in econometrics. This issue, long thought to be irrelevant for substantive questions, has recently been shown to make a significant difference for the estimated impulse-response functions and confidence intervals as typically calculated in a number of models. This research proposal suggests a unifying principle that could be used to resolve both the problems that have already been documented as well as help in a number of econometric applications where this issue has yet to be recognized doc22729 none Recent studies on the autoignition behavior of fuel-rich methane air mixtures at elevated pressures suggests that mixtures at equivalence ratios of around 4 can be made to react rapidly for pressures above 8 atmospheres, and thus it may be possible to stabilize the process in a modified burner configuration for continuous production of product gases. Current mechanisms for fuel-rich methane combustion--those used to model cool-flame behavior of methane--predict that the product gases resulting from such combustion will have hydrogen yields that exceed current combustion approaches and hydrogen:water ratios of 3 or better. In this work, a high-pressure reactor for combustion of methane air mixtures at equivalence ratios of approximately 4 is designed and constructed. The reactor is designed to facilitate stabilization of these flows, which are characterized by long induction times and low heat release. In addition, the reactor has complete optical access, enabling detailed temperature and species concentration measurements in a flow that is optimized for comparison with the predictions of a kinetic model. Using this reactor, an extensive characterization of the combustion of very rich methane air mixtures at elevated pressures is conducted. Temperature and formaldehyde spatial profiles, induction times, and detailed product yields are measured as a functions of process parameters, and the propensity for soot formation is examined. Using these data, current kinetic models are evaluated and analyzed under these conditions. This study is designed to demonstrate the feasibility of elevated pressure, air-based combustion techniques for hydrogen synthesis from natural gas, as well as to develop the tools for computational process analysis and optimization, while simultaneously generating an extensive and detailed dataset on the unique combustion behavior of this important mixture. Economical conversion of natural gas to hydrogen fuel is critical to realization of large-scale use of hydrogen as a fuel for transportation and for industry. In addition, widespread use of fuel cells likewise requires an inexpensive source for hydrogen. Most current hydrogen synthesis schemes, for example steam methane reforming and catalytic partial oxidation, remain too costly, in part due to high costs associated with the catalysts that are inherent in these processes. Combustion technologies offer the promise of inexpensive hydrogen production through non-catalytic partial oxidation of natural gas to carbon monoxide and hydrogen (syngas). Such technologies can generate power and hydrogen simultaneously and can be designed to involve simple reactor facilities that require smaller capital costs. At least two such combustion processes are currently used by industry. Significant cost reduction in combustion process for hydrogen synthesis can be obtained if 1) the hydrogen:water ratio in the product gases (currently ~1 to 2) can be significantly improved, and 2) the required oxidizer is air rather than oxygen doc22730 none Despite major advances in characterizing components of eukaryotic transcription machinery, the mechanisms of the recruitment of these components to gene promoters are poorly understood. Activation domains (ADs) of gene-specific transcription factors are critical for these recruitment steps. Amazingly, there are little requirements for the sequences and structure of ADs, and they are easily interchangeable with preservation of functionality not only between different gene specific activators but even between activators belonging to different eukaryotic phyla. The excess of hydrophobic and acidic amino acid residues in natural and synthetic ADs suggests that their interacting targets may be hydrophobic and basic. The nucleosomal histones are the most abundant proteins in the nucleus with such properties. The PI hypothesizes that histones are among the targets of some ADs and that distortion of promoter nucleosomes by ADs triggers a chain of chromatin remodeling events involving different coactivators. In this project, yeast HSF will be used as a model system. The chromatin remodeling mediated by HSF ADs at heat shock promoters will be tested in yeast strains bearing different AD deletions employing Chromatin ImmunoPrecipitation (ChIP) technique. The involvement of known histone-modifying and nucleosome-remodeling activities will be tested in the strains where these activities will be inactivated. The above hypothesis of AD-nucleosome interactions will be addressed in vivo by an attempt to create a synthetic activator with AD substituted by known histone-binding protein and in vitro by DNase I footprinting experiments using a reconstituted nucleosomal template and recombinant HSF. This project potentially can have an impact on the dynamically developing area of gene transcription regulation by characterizing the general chromatin remodeling mechanisms taking place in any eukaryotic cell. Understanding of general mechanisms of natural and especially synthetic ADs function potentially will have an impact on pharmaceutical directions related to the design of synthetic activators and repressors targeting disease-related genes doc22731 none A grant has been awarded to the University of Minnesota-St. Paul, under the supervision of Dr. David A. Bernlohr to purchase equipment and technology in a dedicated facility termed the proteome analysis core. The resources allocated to the proteome analysis core will be used to develop a core facility for rapid, quantitative, high-volume detection of proteins from plants, animals, insects and bacteria. The rapid detection and identification of large numbers of specific proteins from mixtures and extracts is technically difficult, but is essential for a variety of biological applications including bio-identification, evaluation of treatment or conditions (bio-responses) and assessment of development (crop growth). The first goal of the project is to provide researchers with the experimental technology necessary to assess expression of fluorescently labeled protein samples using nano-scale separation methodologies. The second component of the technology is the utilization of a robotically driven sample analysis workstation that will interface with an existing mass spectrometry facility. The combination of fluorescence-based protein detection coupled with rapid sample identification via mass spectrometry allows the user accurate identification of large numbers of proteins for a variety of basic and translational research needs. Specifically, the proteome analysis core will instruct researchers on the use of differential in-gel electrophoresis for the analysis of fluorescently labeled proteins. The researcher will in turn be able to identify changes in protein expression or protein modification (precursor-product relationship). Using a robotically driven analysis system, target proteins will be harvested from the gel, enzymatically digested, and the produced peptides spotted onto a MALDI plate. The peptides are subsequently analyzed via mass spectrometry and using genome databases, identify proteins of interest. The short time of analysis coupled with robotically driven workstation allows for scale-up and the analysis of hundreds of samples of proteins. The major theme of the proteome analysis core is one of training and education. As opposed to an analytical service facility, the proteome analysis core trains students, postdocs, and faculty such that they themselves can manage a project. As such, the technology has broad significance for training students in such diverse research areas such as crop and animal science, horticulture, bioremediation, and environmental science. Because the proteome analysis core will be physically located in the BioDale technology corridor on the St. Paul campus of the University of Minnesota, it will be adjacent to other facilities linked to Genome Analysis, Imaging, Mass Spectrometry and Bioprocess Technology. Course work, both during the academic year and during summer session, are being planned to train students in proteomics and mass spectrometry. During the summer, minority scholars participating in the Life Sciences Undergraduate Research Program will make use of the proteome analysis core through workshops and their own research projects. The availability of such a training site will allow the Univesity of Minnesota to attract, train, and recruit under-represented minorities into our undergraduate and graduate programs and ultimately into science and technology based careers doc22732 none Fidan Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Professor Ismail Fidan, Department of Manufacturing and Industrial Engineering at Tennessee Technical University, Cookeville, Tennessee and Dr. Serdar Tumkor, Mechanical Engineering Department at Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey. They plan to develop an interactive knowledge based expert interface system of circuit board defects. The trend to high pin-count high-density packaging in surface mount assembly has highlighted inherent difficulties in the assembly line of these very fine pitch devices. A variety of defects is still common in printed circuit board assembly (PCBA) technology requiring rework. Increasing product complexity, decreasing component size, and using double sided boards have made rework more difficult and the economic reworking of PCBAs is one of the main problems facing PCB manufacturers. PCBA manufacturing has been relatively improved with fully automated, accurate assembly machines and the use of robots but it has been shown that the outcomes of the automated rework line have not produced a high enough level of the reliable yield percentage. The objective of this award is to make a contribution towards this surface mount rework. With the development of this knowledge-based system, the rework will be removed from the PCBA line, and PCBA process parameters, which cause joint level reliability problems, will be managed online with the help of the developed system. Scope: The expert interface system for electronic boards that the investigators plan to develop may be a cost-effective solution for detecting and correcting flaws in electronics manufacturers. The potential contributions into computer-aided process planning for surface mount rework may be a significant addition to the electronics manufacturing field by minimizing the number of the defects and waste of the electronics printed wiring boards. The developed system and its implementations may also be used in the senior and graduate level courses in industrial automation and in computer integrated manufacturing graduate courses. Funds for this project are provided by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Design, Manufacturing, and Industrial Innovation doc22733 none This research will develop theoretical and computational approaches for characterizing efficient social insurance institutions. We define a social insurance institution as a compulsory government-run program that provides a set of state-contingent taxes (premiums or contributions) and transfers (benefits) that cover a well-defined set of risks. An efficient social insurance institution is one that provides a given level welfare to the individuals in the system at minimal cost. Our research will attempt to provide characterizations of efficient social insurance institutions that cover the following risks: 1) longevity, via mandatory pensions or old age insurance , 2) disability, via disability insurance, 3) unemployment, via unemployment insurance, and 4) health care costs, via medical insurance. Another objective of social insurance is lifetime redistribution of income and or wealth. This can be viewed as insurance for a fifth class of risks, namely insurance for individuals who have certain fixed characteristics or types that may lead to permanently lower lifetime employment, earnings, wealth, and welfare. Social insurance programs are large and pervasive in developed economies. In the U.S., spending on Social Security (Old Age, Disability, and Unemployment Insurance), Medicare, Medicaid amounted to 48.3\% of total Federal spending and 9.8\% of GDP in (U.S. Congressional Budget Office). All forecasts indicate that unless benefits are reduced, social insurance spending will grow rapidly over the coming decades as the baby boomers age and start to retire. Although there have been proposals to shift the costs of social insurance from the government to the private sector via various privatization schemes, a variety of moral hazard and adverse selection problems hinder the operation of private insurance markets. We take market incompleteness as the principal rationale for mandatory government provision of insurance, and as the basic point of departure for our analysis. We assume that the government can compel universal participation, but we also assume that it faces the same informational constraints as private insurance institutions would face if they existed. We deal with these fundamental informational asymmetries via two very different but related strategies: 1) a dynamic mechanism design (DMD) approach where we search for an efficient policy over an infinite-dimensional space of all possible policies that satisfy certain participation and incentive constraints, and 2) a parametric mechanism design (PMD) approach where we search for an approximately efficient social insurance institution in a finite-dimensional subspace of social insurance institutions and where incentive constraints are ignored. Using these techniques we will not only be able to characterize the form of efficient social insurance institutions, we will also be able to quantify the degree of inefficiency in current social insurance institutions. We expect to be able to characterize optimal social security and disability insurance programs as part of a comprehensive, integrated analysis of social insurance in the U.S. and other developed economies. Given the large share of GDP devoted to social insurance, the potential cost savings from discovering more efficient social insurance programs provides a strong, practical rationale for this research doc22734 none The majority of greenhouse gases and other atmospheric pollutants originate in cities, but the linkages among urban vegetation, human activities, and the urban airshed are poorly understood. Carbon dioxide and water vapor are greenhouse gases that affect local, regional, and global climate, while volatile organic compounds are pre-cursors to the atmospheric pollutants that form urban smog. All of these gases are emitted by human activities and by vegetation in the urban environment. Interdisciplinary collaborations of atmospheric scientists, social sciences, urban planners, and ecologists are necessary to measure the concentrations and emissions of these gases, to trace their origins, and to evaluate the implications for effective management of the urban airshed. This research project will be undertaken by a multi-disciplinary research team in order to study the complex factors affecting emissions of carbon dioxide, water vapor, and volatile organic compounds in the valley containing Salt Lake City, Utah. An atmospheric measurement and monitoring program will be implemented throughout the Salt Lake Valley in different land-use areas, such as industrial areas, residential neighborhoods, and the intensively developed city center. Analyses will distinguish the compounds associated with trace gas concentration and emission, such as vehicular emissions, industrial emissions, contributions from residential heating, and emissions from urban vegetation. After identifying the factors controlling the different components in various land uses, the investigators will develop a system-dynamics model that will facilitate examinations of the urban system as a whole. The model also will assist in quantitatively evaluating options for public policy and management. Although urban environments are ecosystems, comprehensive studies of linkages between organisms and their physical environments. This project will contribute to understanding of the high degree of complexity in urban ecosystems, and it will provide a framework for evaluating the multiple interactive factors that influence airsheds in a variety of cities. Planners and decision makers from Salt Lake City and the state of Utah will participate in this project, providing input into model development and exploring policy implications of the research results. By applying scientific measurement techniques to quantitative modeling and collaborating with local decision makers, this project will evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of different approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions while maintaining high air-quality standards. This project is supported by an award resulting from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc22735 none Coordinate regulation of unlinked genes is fundamental to genetic expression in all organisms. Such regulation relies on the cooperative, site-specific assembly of regulatory, protein-DNA complexes. Combinatorial strategies are common. These involve both widely used transcription factors and also factors that are specific either to the gene, the tissue or cell type, or the development stage. Variable arrays of DNA sites, as are generally found in different genes, assemble different protein-DNA complexes from the same factors. In this manner, unlinked genes can be expressed differentially. Whole programs of gene expression are easily controlled by modulating the activity of only the specific factors. This project addresses the combinatorial mechanism of differential gene expression in the E. coli CytR regulon. This gene family consists of nine unlinked transcription units that are regulated coordinately by the interplay of just two regulatory proteins. One is the cyclic-AMP receptor protein (CRP) a widely used transcriptional activator in bacteria; the other, CytR, is a regulon-specific bacterial repressor. CytR is also a member of the LacI family of homologous repressors. A key feature of the regulation is that the various cistrons differ from one another in extents of activation, repression and induction. This differential regulation is achieved by nesting levels of local repression, mediated by CytR, on the global regulation mediated by CRP. An unusual feature of most CytR-regulated promoters is that they contain two CRP sites. These activate transcription via different mechanisms. CytR and CRP bind cooperatively to DNA, as a result of direct protein-protein interactions. The importance of cooperativity is underscored by the fact that induction occurs when CytR binds cytidine because the CytR-CRP cooperativity is lost and despite no affect on intrinsic CytR binding to DNA. Unlike most bacterial repressors, CytR does not repress transcription independently; instead it acts by modulating the CRP-mediated activation. It does so by interacting with DNA-bound CRP to control the interactions between activating regions on CRP and the bacterial RNA Polymerase. The objectives of the research are: 1) to understand how the different structures of CytR-regulated promoters mediate different patterns of cooperative interactions between CRP and CytR; and 2) to understand the role of CytR-CRP cooperativity in controlling activation and repression of RNAP at different promoters, using both site occlusion and allosteric mechanisms. To accomplish these goals a comparison of the interactions among CRP, CytR and the four class III CytR-regulated promoters will be made using DNase footprinting and gel mobility shift assays. The role of different binding modes of CytR and different arrangements of CytR and CRP binding sites will be assessed systematically using artificial promoters. These will allow independent controls on the structure of the CytR operator and locations of regulatory sites. These data will be combined with results of both steady state and pre-steady state assays of transcription initiation to develop a comprehensive kinetic model of differential gene regulation. CytR and CRP mutants that are defective either in their mutual interaction or in their interaction with RNAP will be used to assess the role of the interaction between CytR and CRP bound to CRP2 in modulating the class II mediated activation. This project is supported by the Biochemistry of Gene Expression Program and the Molecular Biophysics Program in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences in the Directorate for Biological Sciences doc22736 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Utah will acquire a wide-bore 600 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) measurements of chemical shift tensors in natural products, ionic compounds, aerosols and soots, b) quadrupolar interactions in shift tensors and couplings in biologically important molecules, and c) spin exchange in polarized noble gases. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including drug development and advanced materials doc22737 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Robert A. Kurt at Lafayette College to purchase a Confocal Microscopy System. The confocal system is capable of three-color fluorescent imaging and three-dimensional cellular analysis. Consequently, three different proteins can be analyzed with respect to each other and their location within a cell. This is ideal for studying protein-protein or cell-cell interactions and to discern the potential function of recently identified proteins. With the acquisition of this instrument many exciting projects can be carried out. The Confocal Microscopy System will enable Lafayette faculty to modify and enhance courses to include training in sophisticated research techniques, expand the areas of research for both students and faculty, and finally contribute to the advancement of knowledge within the field of biological science by exploring molecular and cellular interactions as they occur within living cells. The research projects to be performed with this instrument will focus on a variety of biological sciences including cellular, molecular, developmental biology and immunology. Some of the projects supported in this proposal include an examination of the molecular organization of G protein coupled receptors and associated molecules during T cell migration. For this project proteins utilized by T cells for migration will be labeled so that protein-protein interactions can be investigated as the T cells respond to chemokines. The chemokine receptor signaling cascade in T cells is poorly defined, thus this project should uncover some of the basic steps utilized for T-cell migration. Another project that will be carried out with the microscope will be an examination of the cross-regulation between T cell and chemokine receptor signaling pathways. This project will examine the interactions between proteins utilized by both the TCR and chemokine receptor signaling pathways in order to understand how these different pathways influence each other. Neural development and communication in Drosophila melanogaster is another area of research and training that will be enhanced with the confocal microscopy system. In particular the instrument will aid in the studies of bang-sensitive mutants. One project will investigate the effects of these mutants on mitochondria and their function. Another set of experiments is to examine the ability of third instar larvae of bang-sensitive mitochondria to maintain their electrochemical gradient. The broader impact of the proposal is that these projects will be carried out by undergraduate students and as a result facilitate the research, research training and education of students for careers in science. Some of the research training activities in the Department of Biology at Lafayette College include Independent Study, Honors Thesis, the Excel Scholar Program, and research-oriented courses such as Electron Microscopy and Tissue Culture courses. Thus, the Confocal Microscopy System will be utilized to further strengthen the curriculum and research in Biological Sciences at Lafayette College. The Biology Department has a long history of encouraging student participation in research. By graduation many majors have had at least two semesters of extensive research experience. Often, this in depth exposure to research fuels a desire to pursue post-graduate study. Additionally, several courses will be modified to include training in specimen preparation and analysis with confocal fluorescence microscopy. Consequently, it is anticipated that there will be three faculty members and approximately fifty students each year that will use the instrument doc22738 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, Tulane University will acquire a growth preparation apparatus for nanoscale and materials science. The new setup will combine a plasma source for non-invasive surface cleaning with thin film deposition equipment (physical vapor deposition, plasma-assisted vapor deposition, pulsed laser deposition) and basic in-situ characterization facilities (RHEED and XPS). The primary users will be researchers from Tulane University and Xavier University of Louisiana. This apparatus will be used for the synthesis of a wide variety of magnetic catalytic, biocompatible, nanoscopic and structural materials, and will play a key role in integrating Tulane s and Xavier s materials synthesis and advanced surface characterization programs. It will also enhance instruction through research training of undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate students; through implementation in several courses; and as a hands-on component in outreach programs doc22739 none Mathews and Wolfe By definition, plants are autotrophic organisms, capable of producing their own food via photosynthesis. Plants that become parasites suppress or lose their photosynthetic apparatus and come to rely on host species for carbon, nitrogen, and water. With a single exception, parasitism is unique to flowering plants, where parasitic species are found in at least eleven lineages. The plant family Orobanchaceae is a lineage of root parasites that includes the completely parasitic (holoparasitic) broomrapes and the partially parasitic (hemiparasitic) figworts. Within Orobanchaceae, a single autotrophic lineage apparently gave rise to the hemiparasites, and holoparasitic species have originated from different hemiparasitic lineages. Thus, a series of transitions from autotrophism to hemiparasitism and from hemi- to holoparasitism can be investigated to learn about the steps underlying this switch in lifestyle. Preliminary evidence suggests that development of the photosynthetic machinery in these parasites may be suppressed by upstream genetic regulators of photosynthesis. This would allow photosynthetic capacity to be suppressed but not lost. To test this model, an improved hypothesis of phylogenetic relationships within Orobanchaceae is required. DNA sequence data from nuclear and chloroplast genes sampled from the majority of genera in the family will be collected and analyzed to resolve their phylogenetic history. The focus of the nuclear DNA sequencing will be on phytochrome genes, which encode photoreceptors involved in regulating photosynthetic gene expression and development . Thus, data collected to address phylogenetic questions can also be used to test the role of altered phytochrome photoreceptor function in the development of parasites. Specifically, phytochrome gene copy number, molecular evolution, and expression in hemi- and holoparasites and in autotrophic relatives will be assessed to determine whether phytochrome function is altered. The capacity to exist without all or part of the photosynthetic machinery has given rise to parasitic weeds that significantly impact agriculture and forestry throughout the world, but the steps whereby plants become parasites remain unknown. Thus, mechanisms for their control remain underdeveloped. A widely accepted model suggests that gene loss leads to holoparasitism. But this does not fully explain the retention of intact photosynthetic genes by some holoparasites, nor does it explain why most parasitic flowering plants retain photosynthetic capacity. A model involving suppression but not loss of photosynthesis may better explain the data. These studies based on sequences from phytochrome genes, supplemented with sequences from nuclear ribosomal and plastid loci, will improve our understanding of phylogeny in Orobanchaceae and will provide a sound phylogenetic framework for testing models for the evolution of parasitism in plants doc22740 none Acquisition of DNA Sequencing and Genotyping Instrumentation for Research and Undergraduate Training at Middlebury College Matthew H. Dick, PI A grant has been awarded to Middlebury College under the direction of Dr. Dick to establish a DNA sequencing and genotyping facility at the college through acquisition of relevant instrumentation. DNA sequencing is used to determine the sequence of letters in DNA, and is best known through its application in the Human Genome Project. DNA genotyping allows unambiguous identification of genetically different individuals, and well-known applications include the DNA fingerprinting used in forensic work, as well as determination of paternity. These tools are now fundamental to all disciplines of biology. DNA sequences are used, for example, in studies ranging from identifying genes implicated in human diseases, to understanding the spread of HIV, to reconstructing the history of life on earth. The DNA sequencing genotyping facility at Middlebury College will enhance research by the faculty, foster new research directions, and help attract top faculty and students to the college. Furthermore, it will spark undergraduate interest and augment training in molecular biology and its application across biological disciplines. Dr. Dick and three other faculty in biology, who will be involved in the project as senior personnel, will make use of the sequencing genotyping instrumentation to address diverse research problems. Dr. Dick will sequence DNA from a widespread group of marine organisms called bryozoans in order to reconstruct their evolutionary relationships, which are poorly understood. Dr. Helen Young will use genotyping to examine the effects of bird versus insect pollinators on the exchange of genetic material among flowering plant populations. Dr. Vickie Backus will use genotyping to understand the diverse life history strategies of ants in New England forests. Dr. Joshua Kavaler will sequence DNA in a study of gene regulation in fruit fly sense organ development. In addition, several faculty will collaborate to design and implement a new undergraduate training course, Molecular Methods in Ecology and Evolution. This course will provide students in ecology and evolution the knowledge they need to utilize molecular techniques in their research. It will also give students in molecular genetics training they do not encounter in traditional courses. The course will thus foster communication among students of diverse biological disciplines. The research projects to which the instrumentation will initially be applied address basic problems in biology which, however, have broad significance. Bryozoans, for example, are important as indicators of environmental quality, are a source of one class of potent anti-cancer drugs, and are exceptionally useful for evolutionary studies because of their excellent fossil record. Studies of pollination are relevant to conservation, because they address the impact of introduced insect pollinators such as the honeybee on native plant populations. Studies on forest ants address fundamental problems in evolutionary theory. Cell signaling during fruit fly development makes use of molecular pathways identical to those in humans; indeed, much of what we know of human gene function has derived from such studies. Finally, the broadest and most important use of the instrumentation will be to spark interest in biology in the next generation of physicians and researchers, and train them in current techniques doc22741 none The objective of this proposal is to develop molecular dynamics simulations to study the interface and electrical double layer for model systems characteristic of copper electrodepostion baths containing additives. The intent is to investigate the nature of the electrical double layer and the copper surface using molecular modeling under the hypothesis that this is the most important region for modeling electrodeposition. The approach will employ recent computational advances and will explore novel methods in computational chemistry and molecular dynamics. Molecular dynamics simulations will be used to study the interface and electrical double layer for model systems characteristic of copper electrodepostion baths containing additives. Experimental measurements show important differences in double-layer capacitance, electrode polarization, and copper deposition with small changes in the molecular nature of the additives. Molecular dynamics simulations may be applicable for directly relating observed behavior to molecular structure and intermolecular interactions. The educational portion of the work will involve the mentoring and supervision of graduate students. Electrodeposition is currently being used in the microprocessor industry for submicron interconnects, and this work may have an impact on these processes doc22742 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is aimed at the continued development of novel microscale combustors evaporators, which are intended for evaporation of fuel and water in fuel reformers as well as for personal portable heating and cooling systems. The general objective of the Phase II program is to optimize and scale up a technology for microchannel combustor evaporators demonstrated in the Phase I and to develop a compact device, which could generate at least 25- 30 watts of thermal energy per square centimeter of heat transfer area and transfer that energy to fluid with efficiency greater than 85 percent. Innovative fabrication technology and a new microreactor concept were combined to create a highly efficient device, which uses hydrogen or hydrocarbon fuel combustion for heating and or boiling working fluids. Conditions of heat transfer and combustion of hydrogen and methane in microchannel combustor evaporators will be determined and optimal design of the microscale device will be established. Potential commercial applications include lightweight, safe and high performance microcombustors for microturbines, man-portable microheaters for cold climates, man portable cooling microsystems for hot climates, on-board fuel processors for hydrogen generation, distributed space conditioning of buildings, etc. Utilization of microchannel combustor evaporators for these applications will result in increase of energy efficiency, reduction of air pollution and enhancement of life quality doc22743 none Oppenheimer, Ben R. This project will produce a new coronagraph system to extend the well-understood and tested techniques of the classical coronagraph at the 3.67 meter Advanced Electro-Optical System (AEOS) telescope of the United States Air Force observatory at Haleakela, Maui, Hawaii. AEOS is equipped with a very high order (960 elements) adaptive optics unit to correct for atmospheric turbulence. The AEOS adaptive optics unit dramatically surpreses the seeing halo between radii of 0.2 and 1.5 arcseconds at a wavelength of 1.6 micrometers. It is within this region of the spatial information domain that enables compelling scientific analysis for the nearby vicinities of brown dwarfs, super-Jupiter planets, extra-solar system zodiacal dust disks. This instrumentation development establishes a new instrumentation program to provide graduate students in New York City to peruse instrumentation-based research programs. Undergraduates from an all-women college in New York will participate doc22744 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is designed to develop a nonintrusive diode laser sensor for detecting oxygen in the headspace of pharmaceutical vials. Many drugs are oxygen sensitive and must be bottled in an oxygen free environment. There are no nonintrusive methods available to measure residual oxygen levels in sealed product vials. A nonintrusive sensor would generate large cost savings for pharmaceutical manufacturers. During the Phase II project, a prototype off-line instrument will be constructed. This instrument will be tested at pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities. In addition if time permits, on-line experimental measurements will be performed. In addition to being useful for the pharmaceutical industry, this technology will be extendable to a variety of packaged products in other industries. These industries include the food, alcoholic beverage, and medical instrument markets. This technology can also be used to detect other species in packaged products such as water vapor or carbon dioxide doc22745 none In this dissertation project, Anna Noah (UCLA) will analyze large zooarchaeological collections from Island Chumash households. The data were recovered by Professor Jeanne Arnold s - NSF-supported Santa Cruz Island household archaeological research. With the exception of two sites in the Northwest Coast and Plateau regions, respectively, no other project has produced such a large and undisturbed collection representing simultaneously-occupied complex hunter-gatherer households. The excavated deposits date to California s Spanish period between and about and exhibit substantial cultural continuity with underlying Late period deposits. The data derive from commoner houses at three specialized bead-manufacturing villages and from an elite house within a village known ethnohistorically to have been a major trading port and home to an elite lineage. The port site also contains a dense stratum of animal remains and artifacts that may represent refuse from a feast that followed abandonment of the elite structure. Noah will identify approximately 35,000 fish, mammal, and bird bones and animal procurement tools from nine Chumash households representing the four villages. The UCLA Zooarchaeology Laboratory will identify another 25,000 bones. Because the sample is divided among nine households and several strata, the large sample size is crucial for reliable statistical results. Four-fifths of the faunal assemblage is fish bones, representing up to 100 species, making identification very time-consuming. A work-study student will assist with shellfish analysis, comparing the elite household and hypothesized feast strata. The fact that these data are provenienced to individual houses allows questions to be addressed that normally can be broached only with cemetery data and then only incompletely. By comparing households, the research will examine how the political and economic systems in a simple chiefdom were integrated in terms of acquiring and distributing animal food products. It will determine the extent and status of subsistence-oriented occupational specialization, focusing on fishing and sea mammal hunting. How food distribution was carried out within Chumash society, including the possibility of elite provisioning, will be explored. The use of animal products such as meat, fat, and furs in defining status will be ascertained by seeking evidence for status-related differences in access to these items. The nature of feasting in this kind of simple chiefdom society, actively threatened by colonial domination, will be investigated by determining the types of foods employed, how they were acquired and prepared, and what other artifacts were deposited with the food remains. This project offers a singular opportunity to study subsistence specialization, differential access to status animals, and feasting in a simple chiefdom reliant on fishing, hunting, and gathering. Only in the Northwest, where households were constituted very differently, have similar topics been systematically addressed, providing important data for comparative analysis. The research will fill a gap in our understanding of the evolutionary processes by which occupational specialization develops and elites become progressively differentiated from commoners. The study results will be available to the Chumash community, providing significant new information to these direct descendants about the lives of their ancestors doc22746 none Stevens, Deborah Institute for Women and Technology TITLE: Scholarship and Travel Grants for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing On October 9-12, , the fourth Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) is being held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. This international conference features talks by some of the most successful women in computing, technical presentations on topics of current interest, as well as panels, workshops, and technology innovation forums for an in-depth look at new issues in computing. This grant provides travel and registration funding for approximately seventy-five people in computing and related fields who otherwise would not be able to attend. The grants are awarded to advanced undergraduate and graduate students. One of the goals of GHC is to encourage women to pursue and stay in the field of computer science by providing support for young women before they leave the pipeline. By providing opportunities for them to attend GHC, they are exposed to women who are creating, improving, and studying advanced computer related technologies and sciences. GHC is an unusual conference that focuses strongly on women in computing and is an excellent venue for worthwhile interactions to develop between those established in the field and others early in their careers. This grant is expected to directly affect the careers of the attendees and to help to reverse the current trend showing declining numbers of women in computing doc22747 none Competitively awarded support for University of Idaho (UI) research has steadily grown from $35 million in FY 96 to $63 million in FY 01. This increase is due, in part, to the research activities of several multidisciplinary research institutes and groups. For example, UI s NASA Grand Challenge team provided the top-ranking concept for detecting extraterrestrial life. This concept would be accomplished in space using microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology. At present, UI simply does not have the capabilities needed to implement and test MEMS designs in their own laboratories for reliability in harsh environments. In addition, UI researchers are conducting other projects expected to result in a miniaturized tandem mass spectrometer system, miniature resonators, micro pumps, autonomous vehicle guidance systems, magnetic random access memories, and magnetic films for small monolithic microwave integrated circuits. All of these research activities will benefit from the added capabilities requested through the Major Research Instrumentation Program. As a result of current progress in funded research projects, and with the support of the university s administration, the PIs seek to acquire instruments to fabricate, test, and evaluate the robustness of new technologies. This request includes a plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition system, an e-beam evaporator, a vibration shock table, a thermal vacuum chamber, and a laser vibrometer. Acquisition of these instruments will also provide more opportunities to integrate research training with graduate and undergraduate education. The University of Idaho is requesting approximately $290,000 from the National Science Foundation from a total project cost of over $611,000. This equipment will add significant capabilities to their region by complementing existing equipment at neighboring Washington State University and by providing research equipment that is currently unavailable in the inland Northwest. It will also provide additional opportunities for participants in Idaho s HOIST program (Helping Orient Indian Students and Teachers to Science and Technology) to get hands-on experience in engineering research. The project will be managed by experienced PIs who will use proven instrument management approach to ensure efficient operation and maintenance of the equipment. A qualified engineering technician will assist them. The equipment will be housed within a single building on the main UI campus, and this MRI award will receive full administrative support from the Director and staff of the UI Microelectronics Research and Communications Institute doc22748 none Through the Major Research Instrumentation Program, 18 instruments will be purchased to provide an instrumentation framework for an integrated environmental research program at Lafayette College. The acquisition of these instruments, when coupled with the existing equipment and the recently initiated renovation of the laboratory space within the department, will produce a laboratory environment in which faculty can conduct high quality research related to the environment and provide advanced undergraduate students the opportunity to explore the underlying scientific and technical principals for a wide range of environmental measurement techniques. The project provides the advanced instrumentation required to adequately address the research needs of the sophisticated environmental problems facing the world today and provides training opportunities to undergraduates in research related to the environment. Faculty members will use the proposed equipment to expand their current environmental research programs of which most are conducted with undergraduates. In addition, the proposed equipment would benefit up to 21 courses offered by 7 faculty at Lafayette College. Approximately 200 undergraduate students per year are enrolled in these courses and will use the equipment to develop valuable laboratory and research skills. Typically 12 to 18 of these students will carry these skills into Independent Study courses, Thesis projects or sponsored research with faculty during their junior or senior years. A majority of these research students will continue their research in graduate programs. The intellectual merits of this project are threefold: the enhancement of the research opportunities for both faculty and advanced undergraduate students; the improvement of student learning; and development of new pedagogical methods of laboratory instruction. The broader impacts of this project include the development of outreach programs directed primarily towards under-represented groups encouraging participants to explore environmental studies, the dissemination of pedagogical developments through conference presentations and journal articles, the development of multi- and interdisciplinary courses within the environmental programs offered institution wide and the training of undergraduate researchers who will carry their experience on to various industries or graduate programs doc22749 none Short abstract for proposal Equipment Acquisition to Establish an Applied Electromagnetics and Communications Laboratory The purpose of this NSF MRI proposal is to acquire the basic equipment necessary to establish a laboratory for research and research training in applied electromagnetics and communications at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (SDSM space-based, gossamer zone-plate antennas; engineered electromagnetic materials incorporating active and passive circuit particles; ultra-wideband sensor webs; beam-steered, ultra-wideband radar; high speed circuits; compact antennas; ground penetrating radar; and electromagnetic properties of soils. There is little to no equipment at SDSM&T (or anywhere in the region) for microwave or millimeter wave research work or for producing and detecting fast rise time signals. While computational electromagnetic methods and simulation are valuable components in our research, we rely heavily on experimental measurements to provide a critical dimension in our work. Such measurement capability is also a key element we expect will enhance our competitiveness in future funding opportunities. The requested equipment will also allow us to educate and train engineers in microwave and high-speed circuits, which are critical components in wireless communications and computer engineering. It will also complement a burgeoning regional telecommunications industry primarily based in Rapid City, and assist us in the recruitment of faculty, students and under-represented groups doc22750 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project focuses on the development and implementation of a Solvated Metal Atom Dispersion (SMAD) technique to support high rate production and commercial application of metal nanoparticle materials. Synthesis of gold and silver nanoparticle colloids for commercial use in the health care industry will be pursued as part of the proposed effort; the SMAD synthesis method will be optimized for commercial-scale manufacturing of gold and silver colloids. This approach yields high purity colloids, free of unwanted byproducts and ready for further processing without the cumbersome purification steps characteristic of other synthesis methods. This innovation significantly simplifies the manufacturing process of colloidal products and reduces production cost. The proprietary digestive-ripening step will be scaled up and developed to achieve monodispersion and particle size control of the metal nanoparticles contained in the colloids. Methods for transferring solvent-based colloids into an aqueous environment will be developed. Synthesis steps involved in the manufacturing of colloidal gold and silver will be integrated in a semi-continuous or continuous process. The commercial potential of this project will be for immunological labeling and DNA detection using the colloidal gold solutions. The project offers an alternative-manufacturing route that significantly lowers the cost. Silver-based colloids have potential applications in burn wound treatment or as effective disinfectants and anti-inflammatory agents. The development of SMAD technology will enable high-volume manufacturing of many nanoparticle materials whose availability is currently limited by production inefficiencies. These nanomaterials will support future technologies in industry and find application in both commercial and academic research, as highly reactive catalytic materials, magnetic information storage media, ferrofluids, and magnetic tracers doc22751 none Landry This Major Research Instrumentation award to University of Hawaii at Manoa supports the acquisition of a high-performance, multi-laser sorting flow cytometer to continue an active program of plankton community research in open-ocean ecosystems, as well as providing a shared-use facility for other research in marine biology, microbial ecology, cell regulation and culture of aquatic organisms. It will replace a heavily-used, but aging, flow cytometer that has been operated as a shared-use facility since . The new instrument will provide important new capabilities, and will be particularly well suited for study of extremely small picoplankton such as the photosynthetic bacterium Prochlorococcus, that are important marine primary producers, but are very difficult to study with other techniques doc22752 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II Project will develop a novel microchip chemical analyzer that incorporates a new nanomaterial that performs both separation and detection of small quantities of chemicals and biochemicals. Phase I demonstrated feasibility by incorporating a proprietary nanomaterial in 20- by 50-micron channels etched in a glass microchip and performing chemical separation and surface-enhanced Raman spectral analysis of several test chemicals. Phase II will complete development of the microchip chemical analyzer by designing reproducible plastic microchip cards that fit into an integrated micro-fluidics and Raman system. Development will include the following chemicals: p-aminobenzoic acid, phenyl acetylene, adenine, acetaminophen, secobarbitol, cocaine, and related metabolites. The microchip analyzer will have broad commercial value to the agricultural, biotech, chemical agents, environmental, medical and pharmaceutical industries. Specifically, the microchip is being designed to measure drugs and metabolites in body fluids to aid clinical trials of new drugs, assist dosage control of chemotherapeutic drugs, and diagnose drug overdose doc22753 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. John T. Longino, Elizabeth M. Kutter, and Erik V. Thuesen at The Evergreen State College to acquire a variable-pressure scanning electron microscope, an inverted compound fluorescent microscope, and a stereomicroscope, including motorized drives and computer interfaces that allow remote operation over the internet. The Instrumentation will be used In studies of tropical biodiversity, microbial processes in biofilms, and ecophysiology of marine zooplankton. John Longino s research focuses primarily on ants, here and in Costa Rica. The variable-pressure scanning electron microscope and stereomicroscope equipment will be used to finish a taxonomic revision of the Costa Rican Crematogaster, one of the major genera of arboreal ants. The products will be both traditional published work and image-rich identification guides on the web. Elizabeth Kutter will use the fluorescent microscope to study phage infections of bacteria in biofilms - very widespread, elaborate communities of convoluted towers and fluid channels that are largely resistant to antibiotics and disinfectants. Erik Thuesen is investigating the ability of gelatinous zooplankton to survive in low-oxygen environments. He hypothesizes a facilitated diffusion mechanism which will be investigated using fluorescent microscopy to examine the distribution of mitochondria. Science teaching at Evergreen is strongly research oriented. Many Evergreen faculty members carry out research and teaching programs that rely substantially on microscopy, and their ability to expand and move in new directions will be greatly enhanced by these instruments. In addition to the microscopy-intensive research of the P.I. s, a number of other faculty involve their students actively in smaller-scale, locally-funded research projects and presentations, many of which involve sophisticated microscopy. This includes research into harmful algal blooms, environmental microbiology and soil biology. The instrumentation will also be used in ways beyond these specific research activities, attracting a broad range of students through exposure to exciting images and concepts and improving access for under-represented groups of students, especially at our Tacoma campus, which serves a high proportion of inner city students. The remote control capabilities will support serious research projects in bioremediation and microbiology already initiated at the Tacoma campus and expand microscope use from laboratory to classroom. Teaching at Evergreen is also inherently and intentionally interdisciplinary, and the SEM and other microscopes will serve as foci for full-time programs integrating arts and sciences doc22754 none The basic motivation of this investigation is to understand the power-law distributions that describe various properties characterizing large movements in stock price fluctuations, with characteristic exponents that seem to be universal for different sizes of stocks and different stock markets around the world. This project develops a model of the microbehavior of financial markets to account for these empirically observed facts. The model will have the following key components: (a) market participants behave strategically, i.e., they seek to minimize execution time and price impact, and (b) the size distribution of mutual funds has a power law tail with exponent 1. The model is tested for consistency with a series of equal-time codependences among return, volume, and number of trades that are displayed by empirical data. This project consolidates and extends the conceptual framework of the model in several directions. The model predicts that some mechanisms proposed to reduce extreme fluctuations are ineffective. For example, a Tobin tax and circuit breakers do not change the value of the exponent of returns, but a modified Tobin tax whose tax rate increases sufficiently quickly with volume traded decreases the fatness of the return distribution. The model also suggests a way to use volume to parse out noise from news in return fluctuations, and this project explores how useful this approach is. Volatility is known to be autocorrelated, and preliminary evidence suggests that number of trades and return volatility are similarly autocorrelated. Their long-term memory exponents are very close. The investigators study the propagation of volatility, volume and number of trades in a systematic way, particularly focusing on the extreme events and the long-term memory properties. This study achieves a reasonably complete description of the way market activity is created and propagates doc22755 none An unexpected finding of recent genetics research is that humans are remarkably homogeneous, belying old racial stereotypes. The region with the greatest established variation is sub-Saharan Africa, which implies this is the place of origin of our species. Mitochondrial genetic variation has provided the best illustration of this pattern. This pilot project will help determine how mitochondrial variation in another region - the Western Pacific - the Melanesians of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, compares with genetic variation in Africa. This group of researchers has identified a number of new mitochondrial genetic variants there, which suggest these populations are very ancient as well. The pilot project will compare these variants systematically and more thoroughly with other currently unclassified variants from Australian aborigines and south Asians, which may be related. Longer sequences of mitochondrial DNA (1,100 base pairs) and a uniform coverage of more variable regions (with high resolution RFLP analysis) on a selection of the candidate samples will answer these questions of similarity once and for all. This pilot project will provide the basis for deciding if more intensive genetic analysis in the Western Pacific is warranted. If, as the researchers believe, they have identified a genetically highly variable set of populations, it will be important to expand the analysis to other parts of the human genome - to the Y, X and to genes on other chromosomes, on a larger sample of populations. Unraveling the genetic history of this region is essential in providing a comparative base for similar studies in Africa, as well as Europe, Asia, and the Americas, where the trails of ancient population movements have been obliterated to a greater degree. The project will involve promotion of graduate training in molecular genetic methods for minority women and international collaboration doc22756 none Acquisition of a Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope for Cell Biology and Biophysics Project A grant has been awarded to Dr Peter J.S. Smith of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, for the acquisition of a confocal laser scanning microscope and image analysis system with multiphoton excitation capability. The system is to be housed in the MBL Central Microscopy Facility, making it available to a wide community of resident researchers, including scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, visiting and summer investigators, as well as by many of the graduate- and postdoctoral-level education courses offered at the MBL Several proposed research projects have already been formulated by the investigating team, spanning basic biology to the biomedical sciences. Amongst the resident community of the MBL these include: 1. An examination of vesicle trafficking in trypanosomes. Part of a larger project dealing infectious diseases. 2. The role of Ca CaM kinase II dynamics in LTP. Part of a larger project investigating the foundations of memory; 3. The physiology of single-celled eukaryotic extremophiles. Part of a larger project to investigate adaptive evolution and protein expression modification. 4. Multidrug resistance in pathogens. 5. Architectural dynamics of the mitotic spindle. A continuing project on live imaging of cellular dynamics. 6. Calcium oscillations in neurons. A component of several ongoing projects looking at calcium activity domains in the cell membrane and cytosol. 7. The effects of environmental pollutants on neuronal development. A key issue being studied by MBL investigators in the field of toxicology. 8. The mechanisms of iron trafficking in erythroid cells which forms part of a new mitochondrial program initiated at the MBL. Scientists at the MBL have had a long interest in the study of cellular dynamics, which by necessity requires observations on living systems. The microscope to be chosen maximizes this ability. System components were chosen to provide 1) capability for confocal fluorescent imaging of different fluorophores in the visible spectrum; 2) multiphoton excitation; 3) emission fingerprinting for simultaneous recording of multiple fluorophores with closely-spaced emission spectra; 4) a sufficient range of objective lenses to enable both structural studies and experiments on the physiology of living cells; 5) precisely localization fluorescent-labeled structures; 6) temperature control of live cells under study; 7) software to use fully the data acquisition capabilities of the confocal; and 8) software for image analysis and display. The research activities proposed in the grant reflect the diversity of scientific interest amongst the MBL community as well as outreach in research and education. The new microscope will be an invaluable addition the MBL facilities for cutting edge research. Its availability to residents and visitors alike (over 200 seasonal investigators visit the MBL for research purposes on an annual basis) will insure a high impact and use for the grant awarded doc22757 none A National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation award will allow the purchase a NanoSurf II Pro (NanoFocus Corp) white light confocal microscope for use in dental microwear analysis and other research activities at the University of Arkansas. Dental microwear analysis is the study of microscopic use-wear patterns in teeth to infer diet. The ability to reconstruct diet from dental microwear is important to both bioarcheologists and paleontologists because food preferences provide a key to understanding the biology and ecology of past peoples and fossil species. While dental microwear has been studied for many living and fossil groups, current techniques are stretched to their limits. Microwear feature measurement error is high, and repeatability is low. This both reduces the power to resolve diet-related differences within studies and limits the ability to compare results among studies. Measurement errors stem from two problems. 1) The scanning electron microscope (SEM) used in most such studies is not ideal for microwear analysis. Because the SEM forms an image by a complex interaction between a surface and an electron beam, different instrument settings can produce different images for a single surface. 2) Because a surface can have hundreds of microscopic scratches and pits with irregular and overlapping boundaries, it can be difficult to identify and measure those features. Drs. Ungar, Brown and Walker will use the Nanosurf II Pro instrument to solve both problems. This instrument creates a true rendering of a wear surface in 3-D to provide a repeatable, automated procedure to quantify patterns of wear. The microscope measures z-values at fixed x,y intervals and calculates a series of attributes, such as roughness and anisotropy for a microwear surface. This work is important because it will give researchers a new, more repeatable way to characterize dental microwear that should lead to new insights into the diets of past peoples and fossil species. This NanoSurf II Pro will also be used by researchers and students in other disciplines on the campus of the University of Arkansas. The combination of high resolution, long depth of field and large field of view of this instrument will allow new research in: 1) plant pathology (study of damaged leaves following insect predation); 2) mechanical engineering (study of impact of cutting tools and electronic packaging systems); 3) chemistry (measurement of patterned materials for lab-on-a-chip devices); 4) biological engineering (measurement and analysis of microorganisms for development of biosensors); 5) food science (assessment of effects of processing on food surface structure); and 6) geosciences (measurement and analysis of bedrock surface modifications due to weathering). Limited research infrastructure at Arkansas universities contributes to a limited science and technology environment in the state. Many students leave Arkansas for their education and employment, contributing to the fact that the state is last in the nation in percentage of its population with a college degree. Access to state-of-the-art major research instrumentation, such as the NanoSurf II Pro, will contribute toward recruiting and training students from geographically under-represented groups in a broad range of science and technology disciplines doc22758 none This proposal is for the acquisition of advanced physical and chemical testing equipment to characterize structural performance of current and emerging infrastructure materials. The equipment requested would facilitate both acquisition of performance data on new materials and development of a mechanistic understanding of the relationships between physical and chemical processes that lead to failure. Physical challenges to the nation s infrastructure are being presented by several forces: (i) deterioration due to aging, (ii) security threats by malicious or terrorist actions, and (iii) demands for increased capacity and safety. Examples include bridge and roadway structures, pipeline conveyance of gas, petroleum, chemicals and water, aircraft and aerospace structures, automotive structures and, management of nuclear materials and wastes. Common amongst all of these examples are the needs for improved mechanistic understanding, in-situ monitoring, prediction and prevention of structural failure under environmental conditions. Common chronic stresses to these systems that must be mitigated include loading, thermal cycling and chemical environmental reaction, many of which may occur simultaneously and have currently poorly characterized synergistic effects. Acute stresses include sudden impact and high temperatures. The set of materials that has been the focus of our research, based on national infrastructure challenges are Portland cement concrete systems used for highway and building construction and also used as the basis for treatment of nuclear wastes. This also includes composites and reinforced polymer laminates used in building and transportation structures and structural rehabilitation. The equipment requested will facilitate non-destructive evaluation of material performance, and local inorganic and organic compositional testing to assess corrosion and other failure mechanisms that result from chemical changes in materials (e.g., during thermal stresses, chemical attack). The specific equipment requested includes (i) laser ablation unit for an existing inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometer to facilitate elemental and isotopic profiling in materials, (ii) a thermogravimetric analyzer mass spectrometer system to determine organic composition as a function of environmental stresses, and (iii) an ultrasonic non-destructive analyzer to assess internal fracture formation during testing. The project team includes participation of faculty from the Departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Physics. The requested equipment will support and enhance ca. $10 million dollars per year of current sponsored research and training, including an NSF IGERT program in Risk and Reliability Engineering and Management. Complimentary collaborative linkages are provided with Sandia and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, DOE, Halliburton, and Tennessee Department of Transportation. $130,000 in matching funds are provided by Vanderbilt University for the $141,000 requested from NSF with a total project cost of $271,000 doc22759 none David A. Berque Carl Singer DePauw University MRI RUI: Acquisition of Touch Sensitive Plasma Displays and Supporting Equipment for Research and Research Training in Multiple Machine Interfaces This proposal, studying multi-device classroom technology, centers on the design, implementation, and evaluation of pen-based computing groupware. The work, using touch sensitive plasma displays in research and research training in multiple machine interfaces, emphasizes the applications of such groupware to educational technology allowing for more display area in the classroom as well as the use of hand-held calculating devices. Along with the challenges associated with the multiple-machine interfaces that we deal with in everyday life, areas of particular interest to the investigators, such as performance modeling, data structures for storing information, databases, intercommunication of different computing devices, and educational technology are specifically addressed. The interfaces run simultaneously on co-located interconnected machines with varying sizes of screens. The research enhances and continues previous successful work of the principal investigators (PIs) in a primarily undergraduate university doc22760 none Gary C. Lewandowski Michael Goldweber Elizabeth L. Johnson Xavier University MRI RUI: Acquisition of Wireless, Beowulf, and Distributed Computing Clusters This proposal from an REU institution, establishing a parallel and distributed computing research laboratory for CS faculty and students, includes An ad hoc mobile network cluster (handheld PDA and labtops connecting without a server), A Beowulf cluster ( a parallel computing cluster composed of off-the-shelf PCs with fast network connections between them), and Workstations connected in typical network style. With specific research activities that follow, the clusters will support the following areas: A. Parallel and Distributed Computation on Ad Hoc Networks 1. Development of a serverless location protocol 2. Development of parallel applications for ad hoc networks on top of serverless SLP, and 3. Utilizing idle cycles of wireless devices B. Parallel Algorithms for Graphs Coloring and Applications 1. Graph coloring heuristics 2. Historical study of the four-color theorem C. Parallel Genetic Algorithms (an optimization techniques based on the idea of survival of the fittest ) D. Language Support for Distributed Computing over Heterogeneous Networks (support for distributed data structures in High Performance C++) E. Distributed Database Systems F. Distributed Virtual Shared Memory Architectures G. High-Energy Astrophysics H. Dynamics of complex systems Depending on the configuration needed for a particular application, the three clusters will be combined into one heterogeneous distributed network or used as stand-alone parallel distributed networks doc22761 none This proposal seeks the acquisition of a state-of-the art small-angle X-ray scattering instrument. The configuration of this instrument, combining a rotating anode source with two independent cameras, has been carefully designed around a diverse user community whose interests include protein aggregation, polymer science, zeolite nucleation, DNA electrophoresis, and colloidal science. A rotating anode source was chosen due to its high beam intensity, facilitating analysis of samples that scatter weakly. The dual all-angle wide-angle (SA WA) camera is a robust unit ideally suited for a multi-user instrument. This camera employs a line source exposing a larger sample volume to the incident beam subsequently reducing the time needed for data acquisition. The dual SA WA camera can be used to study Bragg diffraction for analyzing crystallinity in polymers and the Kratky optics will allow us to characterize domains up to approximately nm in size. The dedicated small-angle camera, though more specialized, gives us the capability of two-dimensional imaging for samples that scatter anisotropically (e.g. semicrystalline polymers) and a wide range of sample-to-detector distances (100- mm), making it possible to observe a wide range of scattering angles on one camera. The instrument will be located in the Crystal and Molecular Structure Laboratory (CMSL) in the Chemistry Department and maintained by the Materials Characterization Facility (MCF). The MCF is supported by the Colleges of Science and Engineering and the Office of the Vice President for Research, and both the CMSL and MCF have a well-developed infrastructure for student training and instrument maintenance. The user community for this instrument is inherently multidisciplinary, including faculty from Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Chemistry, Biology, Biochemistry and Biophysics, and Medical Biochemistry and Genetics. The common need of these investigators is to understand structural issues that cannot be probed with methods such as diffraction or spectroscopy. Specific problems that will be addressed with this instrument include: 1. mechanisms of zeolite nucleation and the formation of other complex inorganic systems made in the presence of organic molecules 2. studies of core-shell particles and polymer-coated particles in concentrated systems 3. aggregation behavior of proteins and synthetic biomaterials in solution 4. in-vitro studies of biological membrane assemblies and macromolecules 5. determination of pore structures in gels used for DNA electrophoresis 6. processing-property relationships of amorphous and semi-crystalline polymers 7. non-destructive analysis of metal particle formation in dendritic materials This instrument will positively impact Texas A&M at several levels. It will be a focal point of several research programs and will give others a new tool for their current research. The proposed instrument would likely be one of the best laboratory SAXS instruments in the United States, so it will also enhance our ability to recruit leading faculty in the areas of polymeric and colloidal science. Finally, this instrument will positively impact education in two ways. Given the multi-user nature of this instrument it will be heavily utilized in student training of both graduates and undergraduates, with approximately 35 students initially performing research with the instrument. Second, this instrument will be integrated into a course one of us is developing (D. F. Shantz). As there is currently not a SAXS instrument on campus, this instrument will fill a large void in the infrastructure at Texas A&M, with research and education benefiting doc22762 none The project will develop a climatology of reactive nitrogen compounds in the lower free troposphere at the Pico Observatory in the Azores. The study is designed to address the need for measurement-based constraints on levels of nitrogen oxides in the remote free troposphere by providing approximately two years of nearly continuous measurements at m altitude over the North Atlantic Ocean. The data will be used to improve understanding of reactive nitrogen chemistry over the ocean environment, for comparison with models, and to look at the transport of continental emissions over the Atlantic Ocean doc22763 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Steven W. Runge and colleagues at the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) to obtain a Laser Scanning Confocal Microscope (LSCM). This instrument has the ability to capture images of cells and cellular structures that are tagged with fluorescent markers with a resolution unmatched by other types of light microscopy. The ability of the LSCM to acquire optical sections and construct 3-D images from a variety of live and prepared tissues and to perform time-course analyses on living cells and tissues will impact a wide range of research programs at UCA. Investigations that will employ the LSCM range from 3-D reconstruction of complex tissues such as actively growing plant shoots and brains of rats and marine snails to tracking the movement of structures inside of cultured cells and native tissues. Collectively, acquisition of this instrument will elevate faculty and student research at UCA to new levels of sophistication. This will allow researchers to address questions that previously were inaccessible. A significant benefit of having this work conducted at UCA, rather than at distant institutions, will be the heightened opportunities for our undergraduates to become involved in research. Our graduate students (master s level) will also acquire important experience and skills that will promote future research and professional study. The LSCM will be used to address a wide variety of research questions in the natural sciences. These include: the rapid assay and localization of plant pigments involved in responses to UV-light; morphological characterization of neurons in the white matter of mammalian brains; tracking the exocytic insertion of potassium channels into intestinal membranes for osmoregulation in marine gastropods; visualization of synaptic connections involved in behavioral decisions in whole brains of marine gastropods; understanding mechanisms that underlie the selective death of Purkinje cells during maturation of the rat cerebellum; tracking the movement of developmental signals that direct inflorescence architecture in flowering plants; examination of secretory canals in plants and the effects of trenching insects on latex oil distribution; and ratio imaging to monitor intracellular pH and time-course imaging of vesicular trafficking of Na+ H+ exchangers in cultured cells undergoing apoptosis. Methodologies to be employed include visualization of autofluorescent molecules and structures in plant tissues, tagging stuctures with fluorescent antibodies, filling individual brain cells with fluorescent molecules to identify connections to other cells, and labeling cell-surface proteins with fluorescent markers to follow the movement of these proteins to and from the cell surface under different conditions. In addition to research, the LSCM will be a valuable addition to science instruction at UCA. Confocal microscopy will help students visualize complex 3-D processes in biology and make measurements on living cells that will be invaluable assets to teaching. For instance, stages of frog embryo development will be recorded as a set of 3-D, time-course images that trace this dynamic process. These images will then be made available for analysis in the classroom. The stunning images produced by LSCM will also be used to generate interest in the sciences among high school students and teachers through various outreach programs and the Arkansas education media centered here on the UCA campus. The University s enrollment of about 8,500 students is 62% female and 19% minority, with the later group steadily increasing in proportion over the last decade. Acquisition of the LSCM will strengthen faculty research capabilities, support strong undergraduate research programs, attract more women and minority students to careers in the sciences, increase public appreciation of science, and support programs in a historically under-supported geographic area doc22764 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Sophia Passy (PI), Drs Grover, Marshall, Wilk, and Nelson (Co-PIs), and Drs Arnott, Burleson, and Smith (Senior Personnel) from the University of Texas at Arlington to purchase a confocal scanning laser microscope. The instrument will be used for a broad range of applications, including subcellular localization of molecules; monitoring ion channel clustering patterns; cytoskeleton visualization; emission fingerprinting, 3D reconstruction, and detection of gradients in biofilms. The unifying theme underlying these diverse research endeavors is the search for a relationship between structure and function in the organic world, which remains one of the most fundamental questions in biology. The equipment will be employed for the study of: 1) biofilm spatio-temporal dynamics as a product of small-scale proximate ecological processes of species dispersal, growth, and competition, and ultimate broad-scale environmental constraints of shear stress and nutrient limitation; 2) spectral fingerprinting of live algal communities developing in the freshwater plankton and benthos for the purpose of developing a new biomonitoring approach; 3) chemical and neural mechanisms that control cardiovascular and ventilatory reflex responses to environmental stimuli in fish; 4) three-dimensional reconstructions of sperm shape and structure through optical sectioning of the sperm cytoskeleton to assess the influence of variation in sperm shape on sperm motility and competition; 5) spinal cord and peripheral nerve regeneration by fabricating tissue engineered scaffolds that deliver drugs, proteins, growth factors, and DNA to support and regulate neuronal regeneration; 6) molecular mechanisms used by bacteria to establish and maintain Mg2+ homeostasis, and the consequences of disrupting these mechanisms, and 7) intracellular pathways involved in the regulation of ion channels and how alterations in the functional state of channels affect cellular functions under conditions of chronic pain and inflammation. This microscope will also provide the basis for the development of a new graduate course in Molecular Cytology and enhance existing courses such as Limnology and Phycology. The Biology Department at the University of Texas at Arlington has well established a specialized microscopy facility, the Center for Electron Microscopy, where generations of researchers and students have received training and explored the wonders of the organic and nonliving micro-cosmos. The addition of a confocal microscope to this facility will open new avenues for novel and interdisciplinary research, which should come as no surprise given that confocal microscope technology only became commercially available in the early s, with its use largely limited to medical studies. Hence, there are still a number of unexplored fields in biology, ranging from physiology and signal transduction to aquatic ecology and evolution, which will vastly benefit from the new approaches that confocal microscopy offers doc22765 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, Profs. Michael A. Dvorak and Daniel Gregory of St. Cloud State University will develop a time-resolved laser based instrument for integration into the undergraduate chemistry research and curriculum experience. This is a collaborative venture between St. Cloud State University and Dakota Technologies Inc. (DTI). The overall goal of these studies is to create affordable and easy-to-operate modules that can be readily coupled to commercial spectrofluorimeters, and greatly expand their capabilities. This research will focus on the development of two spectroscopic modules: a nanosecond laser light source, which will allow recording of fluorescence decay data, and a transient absorption accessory, which will allow absorption studies. Undergraduate and graduate students will be heavily involved in the development phase of this project and will use the instrument in their research. Thus, the educational impact from the instrumentation for undergraduate chemistry training will be significant. Central to any chemist s training is the understanding of spectroscopic techniques that play a critical role in all areas of chemistry doc22766 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Connecticut College will acquire a powder X-ray diffractometer for undergraduate research and research training. This equipment will enhance research studies involving the chemistry of microporous manganese oxides with layered and tunneled structures. These manganese oxide projects include a) nonaqueous sol-gel syntheses of layered and tunneled materials; b) sol-gel preparation of thin films; c) sol-gel preparation of aerogels; d) room temperature synthesis of manganese oxide colloids as precursors to layered materials with a wide variety of interlayer cations; e) solventothermal reactions of colloidal materials; f) electrochemical studies of colloidal films; and g) control of Mn valency in colloids. Faculty will also implement X-ray diffraction experiments in upper level laboratory courses. The X-ray diffractometer allows accurate and precise measurements of the full three dimensional structure of a molecule, including bond distances and angles, and it provides accurate information about the spatial arrangement of the molecule relative to the neighboring molecules. These studies will have a strong impact in materials chemistry doc22767 none This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) award provides funds to develop an instrument to create structures on semiconductor, metallic and oxide surfaces at the nanometer length scales. A research grade electrostatic discharge machine will be purchased and will be modified to enable substantially improved resolution. A new vacuum nanolithography tool will be constructed, which utilizes the principle of proximal probe technique wherein the highly controlled electrostatic discharge between surface and tip can dissociate atoms on the target surface with a high degree of specificity. The equipment will be used to create semiconductor and magnetic devices with nanometer dimensions in order to exploit quantum mechanical behavior such as quantization of resistance and nano-contact ballistic magnetoresistance. This project will improve upon current manufacturing capability down to1 nm feature size and will allow relatively inexpensive fabrication of quantum devices. It will be designed as a bolt-on addition to existing charged particle lithography tools such as focused ion beam milling machines as well as standard electron microscopes; and can be used by university researchers in various departments including chemical engineering, materials science, as well as chemistry and biochemistry. It will further strengthen the University of Maryland, College Park, in the field of nanostructures and can promote advances in nanomachining. The technique is straightforward and can be transferred readily to various universities and research laboratories. The instrumentation can be converted for use to either add or remove material by a straightforward replacement of the fluid layer, and being vacuum-based, it is compatible with semiconductor manufacturing processes. Nanostructures could thus be made relatively inexpensively and could stimulate vigorous research and development of artificial nanostructures doc22768 none Research equipment will be provided for new experimental research in the area of particulate mechanics. With the invention of the environmental scanning electron microscope (ESEM), it will be possible for the first time to view uncoated wet samples in their natural states, which will give a clearer insight into the phenomenon than has not been available previously. The newly manufactured ESEM will be used to perform advanced research on microstructure features of liquefaction of layered soils. The particulate materials to be considered are composed of sand, silt, gravel, and water. The long-term goal of this research is to provide fundamental understanding of the behavior of stratified silt-sand-gravel composites under seismic liquefaction conditions at both macroscopic and microscopic levels. The cyclic behavior of sand-silt-gravel composites is presently poorly understood, yet these materials are commonly found in alluvial deposits and hydraulic fill, which have a history of liquefaction during earthquakes. The research to be accomplished with this equipment will not only provide a fundamental advancement of modeling of these stratified soils, but also will provide insight when dealing with high hazard civil systems such as large dams and other structures. If we could sharpen our understanding of these materials, we would greatly benefit during earthquake hazard mitigation process. This equipment will significantly improve the research capability of the Department of Civil Engineering at Jackson State University (a minority, and non-Ph.D. granting institution based on the NSF s definition) in Mississippi. The ESEM, having wide range applications, will also be used in the scanning microscopy of environmental and biological systems. In addition, based on agreements with other organizations, the equipment will be available for their use. The wide range of student activities in this project and the student exposure to the experiments will significantly enhance the representation of under-represented minorities in science and engineering disciplines. The proposed program, by modern integration of research into education, provides research opportunities for students and thus enhances the existing research integration programs. A rigorous management, maintenance, and evaluation and assessment plan is implemented to monitor project development and outcomes, and to ensure the successful implementation of the project activities. The project activities and results will be disseminated broadly to enhance scientific and technological understanding. The technology transfer, outreach programs and procedures will include the continuation of the existing collaboration with national research laboratories such as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Engineering, Research, and Development Center (ERDC) Waterways Experiment Station (WES), publication of papers in refereed journals, presentations at the national or international conferences, undergraduate research presentations at the annual college research seminar, laboratory demonstration, pre-college outreach program, and the dissemination of the project activities through the university web site. It is expected that this instrumentation acquisition project, by substantially improving the research and training infrastructure, and by making it available to wide range of programs, applications, and students, will have a very positive long-term impact on large numbers of under-represented students doc22769 none A grant has been awarded to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, under the direction of Drs. Paul Selvin and Taekjip Ha to develop novel single molecule microscopes that combine the ability to both watch and manipulate individual biomolecules under conditions that simulate the native environment in a cell. The molecules are tagged with a fluorescent dye or dyes that emit light after excitation. Information about the position and or shape of the molecule can be gathered by monitoring this fluorescence. At the same time, the molecules are put under a variety of environmentally realistic stresses - including mechanical forces and torques, electrical and chemical forces, and temperature changes. How the molecules react to these stresses can then be monitored. Specifically, Selvin and Ha propose to build two microscope stations. One will examine one molecule at a time with very high spatial and temporal resolution. This uses what is called confocal optics, where a single molecule is interrogated with an intense, tightly focussed laser beam, while being manipulated. The other microscope will look at many individual molecules simultaneously, by placing the molecules in an array and interrogating them in parallel with more diffusely focused light. This method can acquire statistical data much more rapidly. Such pParallel detection is particularly important for monitoring irreversible reactions. High-resolution imaging will also be developed on this microscope station. These microscopes will be used to examine a variety of specific biological systems. One is a class of proteins called molecular motors. These biomolecules uses the chemical energy of small energy-rich molecules (such as adenosine triphosphate, ATP) and convert it into mechanical (or other forms) of energy. Membrane proteins are another class of biomolecules central to life yet in many cases poorly understood. Selvin and Ha will study how several classes of ion channels - membrane proteins that enable the cell to control its salt (ion) composition - open and close in response to small molecules (ligand) and transmembrane voltage. Folding reactions of proteins, DNA, and RNA are also essential to life. These will be studied by inducing folding via rapid changes in temperature or chemical concentrations. Single molecule studies have revolutionized our understanding of how biomolecules work. The ability to watch one molecule at a time reveals not only the average properties detected in ensemble measurements, but can yield the entire distribution of relevant properties. Single molecule studies also reveal the time evolution of biochemical reactions, which, if asynchronous, are not observable via ensemble measurements. At the same time, there is an ongoing revolution in the use of fluorescence, which, via specific labeling to parts of the biomolecules, enables scientists to dissect how each part of the biomolecule is moving. The combination of single molecule manipulation and fluorescence techniques has the potential for revolutionizing our understanding of how these tiny biomolecules work doc22770 none This grant supports development of a low-temperature, ultra-high vacuum, scanning tunneling microscope, which employs two 100% spin-polarized tips. In this new instrument spin-polarized electrons will tunnel into GaAs at one location, traverse through a small region of the sample, and then tunnel out through another tunnel junction. To achieve this, a novel double-cleaved sample preparation procedure will be developed that uses two STM tips separated by an adjustable parameter from a few nanometers to millimeters. This system will be used to study the coherent transport properties of spin-polarized electrons and, in addition, will allow the study of quantum mechanical transport properties for coupled spin-dependent tunneling junctions. A coherent electron spin current will be injected using a ferromagnetic-metal STM tip (100% spin-polarized single-crystal Ni 110 wire), and then coherently removed using another ferromagnetic-metal STM tip. By being at low temperatures the spin-relaxation lifetime is significantly extended, allowing high signal-to-noise ratio data acquisition. This development is complimented with an educational program designed to enhance the understanding of science by the general public. This equipment is critical for studying the complex properties of spintronics devices. Students will gain valuable skills in the development of this equipment and will be able to transfer the technology to other interested parties upon graduation. The revolutionary idea of spintronics currently hinges on discovering how to coherently transfer the electron spin from one material to another. This research can provide significant guidance toward achieving this goal, thereby influencing the research fields of surface physics, magnetism, device physics, basic electron-spin physics, electronic materials, and microscopy doc22771 none This award from the Major Instrumentation program supports the University of Southern Mississippi with the acquisition of an environmental scanning electron microscopes with energy dispersive X-ray capability. The instrument provides a means of high magnification, high resolution analysis of polymeric materials with minimum sample preparation. Low vacuum technology favors polymer analysis because non-conductive polymeric surfaces can be imaged. Imaging does not require that the specimen be coated with a conductive material, thus, saving time and resources. Furthermore, samples with high water content can also be imaged with low vacuum technology. Recent developments in low vacuum electron microscope design provide a number of advantages. Sample chambers can now accommodate samples up to eight inches in diameter. A simple command on the computer controller allows selection of either low or high vacuum chamber pressures. New electron microscopes are equipped with a number of automated features that improve performance and lifetime of the microscope components. Automated features now include focus, stigmation, gun saturation, gun alignment, contrast, and brightness. These adjustments were previously made manually by the operator and had detrimental impact on filament lifetime when multiple operators utilized the same electron microscope. Traditional scanning electron microscopes (SEM) require that samples are free from contaminates, dry, stable in a high vacuum environment, and electrically conductive to provide for successful analysis. The labor-intensive sample preparation techniques required to obtain useable samples often resulted in the creation of artifacts, thus obstructing the accurate analysis intended. The advent of the Polymer age in which we live further complicated SEM analysis. Almost all polymers are non-conductive, many are not stable under high vacuum, and some are sensitive to the electron beam. These problems led to the invention of a new generation of SEM. These environmental low vacuum scanning electron microscopes (ESEM LVSEM) have overcome a number of the problems encountered in traditional SEM analysis of polymers. ESEM LVSEM utilize partitions to separate high vacuum areas and low vacuum areas of the SEM. The acquisition of an ESEM LVSEM at the University of Southern Mississippi will aid in characterization of polymers developed for a wide range of applications. The incorporation of energy dispersive X-ray unit purchased in will enhance the capabilities by allowing for elemental analysis of polymers and other materials. This will accelerate the advancement of research by providing a technologically advanced tool capable of utilization by multiple operators in our research center doc22772 none The aim of this study is to better understand the early evolution of apes and other primates through paleontological research at sites in northeastern Uganda. The Ugandan fossil sites have yielded the oldest known ape of modern appearance, as well as the oldest Old World monkey and numerous other primates and mammals. Of particular interest is Morotopithecus bishopi. Analysis of fossils of this 20-million year old ape has revealed that unlike contemporaneous primates from Kenya who resembled monkeys in overall body plan, Morotopithecus would have engaged in upright postures and arm swinging behaviors like its modern relatives. The adaptations for upright posture and forelimb suspension suggest a close relationship between Morotopithecus and living apes and humans. Furthermore, as the oldest known ape to exhibit these adaptations, Morotopithecus is key to understanding their origins. Much remains to be determined about Morotopithecus including its relationship to both living and fossil ape species, its paleoenvironmental context and its anatomy. Research will include field collection of more fossils, as well as investigation of the geology and paleoecology of the Ugandan sites. The latter will provide crucial contextual data on the timing of evolutionary events and on the conditions under which Morotopithecus and other mammals evolved. Broader impacts of the study include the participation of four women (the P.I. and 3 senior personnel) and the training of American and Ugandan students. Although East Africa is the cradle of humanity , historically few East Africans have participated in paleoanthropological research doc22773 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, Prof. Peter C. Chen of Spelman College will develop a high resolution universal resonance Raman probe for studies in chemistry and materials science. The probe, which would use nonlinear resonance Raman spectroscopy for the selective identification and studies of species, would be able to provide resonance Raman spectra over an exceptionally broad range of input wavelengths (220- nm). Furthermore, this instrument will be able to provide this information with very high spatial, spectral and temporal resolution. The universal resonance Raman probe will be useful for non-intrusive probing of challenging but important samples such as high temperature, highly reactive gas phase samples that may contain complex mixtures and interfering species. Such challenging conditions are found in chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and related processes for creating new high-tech materials. Undergraduate students from groups that are under-represented in the sciences (Spelman College is an historically black women s college) will help design, construct and test this new instrument on a CVD system. These CVD experiments will be carried out in collaboration with scientists at Microcoating Technologies, a private company that specializes in combustion CVD doc22774 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. John V.H. Constable, Jerry G. Chmielewski, and Dean M. DeNicola at Slippery Rock University to purchase four controlled environment plant growth chambers. The requested chambers include control over temperature and illumination and will be configured as described below to maximize utility for all users. The configuration of the first pair of chambers includes a high light output option that provides illumination to approximately three-fourths of full sun level, control over humidity through linked humidification and dehumidification systems, and the control of CO2 concentration using CO2 injection and an integrated infrared gas analyzer. The configuration of the second pair of chambers are identical to those above, but lack the high light output option and control over CO2. Acquisition of these chambers will expand the future research efforts of John V.H. Constable; Jerry G. Chmielewski; and Dean M. DeNicola in the Department of Biology. The growth chambers will also expand Slippery Rock University s primary mission of excellence in undergraduate education in the classroom, the laboratory and independent faculty-supervised student research. The chambers will provide the capability for a diverse array of projects to be studied according to the primary research interests of the investigators. The goals of all proposed studies are to enhance our understanding of mechanistic relationships in biological systems. Dr. Constable s studies address the mechanistic relationship between nitrate and carbon assimilation at elevated CO2 that will enhance our predictive ability on the long-term growth response of vegetation to elevated CO2. Dr. Chmielewski s studies develop the understanding of evolutionary trends in reproduction between weedy and non-weedy aster species. Dr. DeNicola s investigations seek to build a predictive model of benthic algal succession based on growth form and potential colonizing taxa; and (ii) the determination of the effects of Acid Mine Drainage (AMD) on benthic algal community structure and primary production in order to improve remediation efforts in AMD impacted streams doc22775 none This grant supports purchase of a phase-modulated spectroscopic Picometer ellipsometer from Beaglehole Instruments. With response times on the order of 1 millisecond and adsorbed mass sensitivity on the order of 2 ng cm 2, this high-speed, high-sensitivity instrument will be used to study in real-time the assembly and organization of soft materials at interfaces over both short and long time scales. This instrument will also be used to monitor adsorption events at polymer-modified interfaces. A set of projects that will benefit immediately from the capabilities of this instrument include the analysis of the assembly of polymer amphiphiles, the growth of surface-confined polymers, the dynamics of redox molecules at electrodes, and the morphology of thin films of optoelectronic polymers. The spectroscopic ellipsometer will be housed in the recently created Surface Characterization Laboratory, located in the Chemical Engineering Department. Post-doctoral researchers and graduate and undergraduate students from several disciplines (the Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Environmental Engineering and Science Departments) currently utilize this multi-user facility. The scientific projects underway impact important areas, such as advancing the technology for molecular electronics and optoelectronic polymer devices, creating (bio) separation agents designed at the nanoscale, and tailoring interfacial layers that can screen antigenic displays on cells. These research projects will enable expansion of the diversity of students working in the Surface Characterization Laboratory to include students from Chemistry and Materials Science & Engineering, thus providing a truly interdisciplinary training environment. The Picometer and associated facility will be available to faculty and students from nearby non-Ph.D. granting colleges that have an association with Clemson s Chemical Engineering Department through the Research Exploration programs. The Picometer will also help to grow the Surface Characterization Laboratory into a state-of-the-art facility in the area of advanced materials research, a core research theme at Clemson University doc22776 none Pai, Dinesh DeCarlo, Douglas M. Mataxas, Dimitris N. Nguyen, Thu D. Rutgers University - New Brunswick MRI: Multisensory Human Interaction Measurement and Synthesis for Computer Graphics and Interactive Virtual Environments This proposal, measuring multisensory human interaction with everyday objects and with other humans, develops an integrated facility in which it will be possible to acquire synchronized measurements of visual, auditory, and haptic behavior with low latency. The work includes measuring motion at up to 250Hz using a marker-based motion capture system, acquiring dense range images, recording speech and contact sounds, and measuring forces and pressure distributions due to human contact. The facility will make a broad range of research activity possible. Multisensory models of objects will be developed; it will then be possible not only to see images of a virtual object, but to feel its stiffness and surface texture using a force feedback haptic device, and to hear its sound when hit. Multisensory models of human conversational behavior will be developed by tracking lip and arm movements at the same time as recording voice. Interaction capture will extend motion capture, the current state of the art for realistic computer animation. Hence, it will be possible to not only transfer and transform the motion of an animated character, but also the forces and sounds produced when the character interacts with the world. Moreover, the computing infrastructure needed to support interaction will be investigated. Multisensory interaction imposes new constraints on system behavior, particularly latency, and could lead to new designs of computer operating systems and communication networks. The instrumentation will enable more students to be educated about multisensory simulation and interaction, and to use multisensory environments in new ways to stimulate learning and discovery. Funds are requested for 1. Sensor systems for interaction and measurement, 2. Acoustical environment of experiment, 3. Audiovisual displays, and 4. Computing doc22777 none When both people and their natural environment are at the margin, small changes in the natural resource base often have important effects on people s lives. Conversely, modifications in human activities may significantly affect ecosystem functioning. This responsiveness makes it necessary to study the interactions between human behavior, natural capital stocks, and the flow of ecosystem services. Farmers make many decisions about land use and improvement, selection of crop varieties, livestock-management strategies, chemical applications, and labor allocation. These decisions fundamentally affect the growth of plants, livestock, and soil biology -- in short, the functioning of the entire agroecosystem. Complex feedback loops send responses to the different subsystems engendering dynamic reactions. Exogenous shocks, such as those associated with climate variability and changing economic incentives, regularly disrupt processes in this complex system. Over time, those disturbances propagate throughout the system, causing adaptation in behaviors and performance of the subsystems. Understanding the interplay between smallholder farmers in Kenya and their natural environment is the primary goal of this project. Within three Kenyan research sites, Embu in the central highlands, Siaya-Vihiga in the Lake Victoria basin in subhumid western Kenya, and upper Baringo in the Rift valley, some farmers have adapted their agricultural practices to sustain their soils through crop-livestock integration and use of a variety of conservation strategies. Within the same ecosystem, some farmers are able to maintain soil fertility and farm productivity, while their neighbors are caught in natural resource poverty traps that yield food insecurity and agroecosystem degradation. Studies of the systems that are able to maintain homeostasis as well as those that do not recover from human and natural shocks provide the opportunity to understand the central biophysical and socioeconomic processes that underpin agroecosystem functioning in the tropics. The investigators will develop a model using a system dynamics approach that includes the complex feedback loops among economic (conditioned by sociological constraints), livestock, crop, and soils submodels. The model will be calibrated and tested using data on soil status (nutrients, organic matter and microbial profiles), crop yields, plant biomass production, and livestock growth as well as production and socio-economic data. Depletion of soil fertility is increasingly acknowledged to be the fundamental biophysical cause of declining food production in Africa. Unless the causes for soil depletion are remedied, it will be impossible to increase food production to meet projected demand due to population growth and to ensure that the 37 percent of the sub-Saharan Africans receiving less that 2,200 calories per day are adequately nourished. Because this project s research sites vary by ecological zone and market access, they represent systems throughout Africa and much of the developing world. This research project will permit a comprehensive evaluation of socioeconomic and biophysical factors that contribute to degradation of tropical agroecosystems. The project will add to limited understanding of the microbial ecology of tropical soils, and to knowledge about when soils reach thresholds beyond which replenishment is difficult. The project also will contribute to knowledge of the processes through which people become trapped in poverty. The integration of the contributions to individual research areas will be made more useful through integration into a dynamic model that will permit exploration of the responses of these vulnerable systems to economic and biophysical shocks. This project is supported by an award resulting from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc22778 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Kennesaw State University will acquire a UV-VIS scanning spectrometer. Research will focus on the following studies: a) synthesis and characterization of novel monodisperse oligo(p-phenylene vinylene)s as models for poly(p-phenylene vinylene)s; and b) quantification of polymeric aluminum in water treatment coagulants. Scanning UV-VIS spectroscopy is a workhouse in a modern chemical laboratory. It is critical for the study of chemical reactions, as it enables the detection of ultraviolet or visible light-absorbing molecules. These studies will have an impact in a variety of areas, especially environmental sciences and materials chemistry doc22779 none Burles, Scott M. An infrared echelle spectrograph will be designed, fabricated, assembled and tested for use at the Magellan II telescope by researchers associated with the Magellan consortium. It will be capable of observing faint targets in the wavelength region in the UV (blueward of Angstroms), while maintaining high resolution and full wavelength coverage of the visible spectrum. The design incorporates a medium order reflection diffraction grating in combination with a large fused-silica prism to provide cross dispersion. A Schmidt camera with 140-mm focal length will focus the 100 mm collimated beam onto a low noise; back illuminated CCD optimized for UV coverage doc22780 none A grant has been awarded to Kalamazoo College under the supervision of Dr. Moore,to acquire a phosphoimager, which will allow faculty to investigate phosphorylation and regulation of the TNF-alpha converting enzyme (TACE). TACE is a protein that works as an enzyme, catalyzing the cleavage of large, full-length precursors (known as substrates of TACE) into smaller fragments. Understanding how the activity of the TACE enzyme is regulated will provide insights as to how, mechanistically, these fragments are generated. Specific experiments are planned to determine the sites (specific amino acids) on TACE that are phosphorylated by PKC, and to determine whether the phosphorylation state of TACE directly influences its activity. The former involves the use of mutated versions of TACE that lack critical proposed phosphorylation sites. This experiment will determine where on TACE these phosphate groups are added. The latter also involves the use of the aforementioned mutant versions of TACE in cleavage assays to determine whether the cleavage of TACE substrates (other proteins that TACE acts on and cleaves) is affected by phosphorylation state. In addition to providing basic science information about the regulation of the TACE enzyme, the experiments described above will have a much broader impact. For example, much of what we learn about the TACE enzyme may be generalized to similar proteases that are in the same protein family as TACE. Furthermore, understanding the mechanisms whereby TACE is turned on will illuminate general strategies used by cells to turn on protein enzymes. The broader impact of this work lies in uncovering the complexities of cellular function: the more scientist know about how cells work normally, the better prepared scientists are to determine what goes wrong in malfunctioning cells in disease or injury states. Moreover, because these experiments will be done in conjunction with undergraduate student collaborators, an important educational experience will be provided. In addition several other faculty members in the college are anxious to learn application of the technique, and they will benefit from the presence of this piece of equipment on the campus. Both faculty and students from the biology and chemistry departments will be involved in research utilizing the equipment doc22781 none A grant has been awarded to Cornell University to acquire a high-throughput robotics platform which will perform two-dimensional protein electrophoresis (2DE) gel spot picking, spot digestion, digest clean-up and spotting to matrix assisted laser-desorption ionization target plates (MALDI) for mass spectrometry (MS). This robotics platform will be housed in and managed by the Cornell University Biotechnology Resource Center (BRC) and it will be accessible by any investigator at Cornell or at any other institution. The Cornell BRC is a shared-use and fee-for-service facility encompassing nine core services and generating $1.5 million in income during FY . The robotic workstation will enhance the capabilities of the core facility by providing a state-of-the-art instrument which will automatically perform many of the laborious steps required in proteomics experiments. Although the definition can be interpreted broadly, proteomics , in this case, refers to the ability to measure changes in the protein expression of a given biological system with the goal of relating such changes to various disease states, metabolic states or other features of biological interest. The acquisition of this instrument will have a positive impact on the research programs of many of the investigators at Cornell and at any other institution interested in using this resource. In the field of proteomics, proteins are collected from biological samples of interest with the goal of identifying changes in protein expression that may be interesting. For example, proteins may be collected from various tissue sources with the goal of identifying changes that relate to the presence or absence of a particular disease. After collection, the proteins are often separated into a unique fingerprint of protein expression that serves as a barcode for that particular sample. These fingerprints or barcodes of protein expression can be compared with the goal of identifying changes in this pattern. Once proteins of interest are identified within this barcode, the proteins must be excised from their polymer matrix, digested with chemicals and placed onto metal plates which can be placed inside separate instruments for analysis. These steps of excision, digest and spotting to metal plates is very laborious and the high-throughput proteomics robotic workstation will be able to perform all of these steps automatically. Cornell University is uniquely positioned to benefit from an integrated proteomics robotics platform because of the relatively large number of established laboratories and investigators that are committed to proteomics. This commitment is reflected by the newly established Cornell Proteomics Program which is a faculty-led, University-wide Program. The CPP currently includes eleven core faculty from eight different units at Cornell spanning a number of different Departments, Colleges and Research Facilities. The acquisition of this instrument will have an important impact on several specific federally-funded research projects (NSF, NIH, USDA) which are being run by Proteomics Program faculty. Many of these projects involve graduate student research assistants that are female or from other under-represented minorities. Further, many of these graduate student research assistants are funded through NSF Graduate Research Fellowships. Further, this instrument may be used in laboratory teaching activities doc22782 none Coupled natural and human systems may be viewed mathematically as dynamical systems (systems of differential or difference equations) in which humans are involved either as parts of the system or by influencing some processes, whether intentionally or not. Alternatively they may be considered as complex systems -- collections of agents engaged in rule-governed behavior. In either case, robustness refers to the stability and resistance to perturbation of such dynamical or complex systems as they evolve in state space. A dynamical system is said to be structurally stable if reasonably small perturbations to the system result in a new dynamical system with the same qualitative dynamics. The concept of robustness raises questions that lie outside the purview of stability theory, such as the interplay of system organization and system dynamics. Processes like adaptation and positive feedback can increase the robustness of living systems and coupled natural and human systems, but the linkage between efficiency and robustness may be an inverse one in which optimal efficiency is at the expense of robustness in the face of changing environmental conditions. In some cases, robustness may be an emergent property of evolved systems, or it may be possible to engineer systems to enhance their robustness. To address these issues, this award will sponsor a conference to be held at the Santa Fe Institute in the Spring of . The conference will bring together scientists from a range of disciplines, including physics, mathematics, computer science, earth and climate science, ecology, anthropology and archaeology, to discuss theoretical research and case studies, with emphasis being placed on comparative discussion of the case studies. Papers will be circulated in advance and presented in a single forum attended by all conference participants. Results of the conference are expected to be published The robustness of coupled natural and human systems has become a matter of increasing concern as the modern industrial system s impact on the natural systems of the planet becomes more and more apparent and issues of sustainability become paramount. This conference will contribute to explorations of robustness in coupled natural and human systems at scales ranging from planetary (climate) and macroscales through the mesoscale of sociocultural systems to the microscopic scale of disease microevolution. Participants will explore the association of different spatial scale with varying temporal scales, and they will help answer a number of critical questions, including whether robustness is best assessed by analysis of existing data or through simulation modeling, how engineered systems compare to complex adaptive systems in terms of robustness and or a calculus of costs and benefits, and under what circumstances robust systems are most likely to develop. Through this conference, participants and other scholars will develop new insights into and new approaches for investigating robustness in coupled natural and human systems. Broader impacts of this project include the expansion of an interdisciplinary network of scientists to explore this important topic in a collaborative framework. The results of their discussions and subsequent collaborative activities could ultimately yield many practical benefits for land and resource managers as well as others who have responsibilities associated with maintaining environmental quality. This project is supported by an award resulting from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc22783 none This Major Research Instrumentation RUI grant supports the acquisition of an OMICRON Ultra High Vacuum (UHV) Variable Temperature Scanning Tunneling Atomic Force Microscope (VT- STM AFM) and surface analysis chamber. The VT-STM AFM, which includes an integral single cell evaporator, and the analysis chamber will complement the current array of surface spectroscopic and diffraction probes available by adding the capability to directly image structures at the atomic nano-scale in situ during formation. The MBE source will provide epitaxial growth capabilities for ultrathin film and nanostructure fabrication. Currently available UHV sample preparation instrumentation will be integrated into the acquired analysis chamber. Through an in situ transfer mechanism samples will be transferred between the STM AFM and analysis chambers for optimum surface preparation, imaging, and characterization. The research program will uniquely impact undergraduate education in a very significant way through a highly effective undergraduate involvement in research. The acquisition of the VT- STM AFM will make it possible for this program to become a nationally recognized model for undergraduate materials science education. With this experimental capability several fundamental and applied research activities will be pursued: investigations involving fabrication and chemical characterization of thin nitride films for use as a gate insulator in ULSI transistors, correlation of conductance measurements of ultrathin films with atomic-scale morphology, atomistic studies of mechanisms of interlayer diffusion in homo- and heteroepitaxial systems, studies of thin semiconductor alloy film formation as a result of electron and photon driven processes, and investigations of the role of Nb on oxidation processes of TiAlNb alloys. Also, collaborations with industrial partners will be established to efficiently convert fundamental research results into practical technological applications and provide undergraduate students with excellent work related training in applied science doc22784 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program will support faculty in the Applied Physics and Applied Mechanics groups at Harvard University with the acquisition of a thin film deposition system with in-situ stress monitor. The system will be used for the growth of metal films that range in thickness from tens of nanometers to several micrometers, for a comprehensive study of thin film mechanical properties. The main focus of this study is the deformation behavior of elemental metal and alloy films. Basic deformation mechanisms and interactions with microstructural features such as grain size, grain orientation, grain boundaries, interfaces, surfaces, and dislocation substructure will be explored. Alloy films will be used to investigate precipitation hardening and the shape memory effect in thin films. The deposition system will also support research on self-organized nanostructure evolution and amorphous metallic films. Students at the undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels will use the system. This award from the IMR Program will support faculty in the Applied Physics and Applied Mechanics groups in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University with the acquisition of a thin film deposition system with in-situ stress monitor. The system will be used in graduate research projects on thin film mechanics, self-organized nanostructure evolution, and amorphous metallic films. In addition to the graduate research program, a special program will be set up to involve undergraduate students in original thin films research in the framework of an independent research course offered by the Division. The deposition system will also significantly advance undergraduate education through the development of special laboratory sessions for an Introductory Materials Science course. These sessions will serve as a first introduction to thin film technology, but are also intended to foster interest in advanced Materials Engineering studies doc22785 none This Major Research Instrumentation award to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts provides funds for acquisition of a fast-scan, high resolution, inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometer with laser ablation capability. The instrument will be operated as part of a new Marine Research Facility, which will emphasize fisheries, climate and oceanographic research using trace element and isotopic analysis of calcified structures, such as fish otoliths, mollusc shells, foraminiferal tests, and sponge and coral skeletons. The project is supported by the Division of Ocean Sciences at NSF. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will provide cost-share support from non-federal funds for 30% of total project costs doc22754 none The basic motivation of this investigation is to understand the power-law distributions that describe various properties characterizing large movements in stock price fluctuations, with characteristic exponents that seem to be universal for different sizes of stocks and different stock markets around the world. This project develops a model of the microbehavior of financial markets to account for these empirically observed facts. The model will have the following key components: (a) market participants behave strategically, i.e., they seek to minimize execution time and price impact, and (b) the size distribution of mutual funds has a power law tail with exponent 1. The model is tested for consistency with a series of equal-time codependences among return, volume, and number of trades that are displayed by empirical data. This project consolidates and extends the conceptual framework of the model in several directions. The model predicts that some mechanisms proposed to reduce extreme fluctuations are ineffective. For example, a Tobin tax and circuit breakers do not change the value of the exponent of returns, but a modified Tobin tax whose tax rate increases sufficiently quickly with volume traded decreases the fatness of the return distribution. The model also suggests a way to use volume to parse out noise from news in return fluctuations, and this project explores how useful this approach is. Volatility is known to be autocorrelated, and preliminary evidence suggests that number of trades and return volatility are similarly autocorrelated. Their long-term memory exponents are very close. The investigators study the propagation of volatility, volume and number of trades in a systematic way, particularly focusing on the extreme events and the long-term memory properties. This study achieves a reasonably complete description of the way market activity is created and propagates doc22787 none This Major Research Instrumentation RUI grant supports acquisition of a powder x-ray diffractometer (XRD). The XRD is an extremely useful tool in materials characterization. The lattice plane distance measurements it yields make possible the identification of unknown crystalline compounds. The XRD will enhance a vigorous research program in novel materials by identifying compounds grown in single crystal form by precipitation from solution, a technique known as flux growth. Once identified, these single crystals will be characterized using an existing instrument at Grinnell, which measures dc magnetization, ac susceptibility, resistivity, magnetoresistivity, and heat capacity. This research is pursued as a strongly collaborative effort between the principal investigator, undergraduates at Grinnell, and colleagues at Ames Laboratory. Examples of current research projects the XRD will support include studies of magnetic anisotropy in rare earth intermetallic single crystals and the design of a strongly anisotropic spin glass in single crystal form, to be used as a model system for testing spin glass theories. The results of these projects will be disseminated broadly through peer-reviewed journal publications with student co-authors and through presentations at national conferences. Because research is always blended with teaching at Grinnell, the XRD will have impact beyond the research projects that it supports. Students will use the XRD in collaborative research with the principal investigator, faculty-mentored independent student projects, and experiments in courses taken by physics majors. Grinnell College has attained national recognition for its successful efforts to increase the retention of under-represented groups in science through programs such as the New Science Project. The XRD will help to broaden the exposure of under-represented groups to research quality instrumentation in their education and research training doc22788 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Xiahong Feng, Carol Folt and Stefan Sturup at Dartmouth College to purchase a Gas Chromatography-Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (GC-ICPMS) system. The unique feature of this instrument is that it provides an interface between a GC and an ICPMS. This makes it possible to simultaneously measure chemical speciation and isotope ratios of inorganic and organic metal containing compounds. For example, one can determine 201Hg 202Hg ratios in inorganic mercury and methylmercury of water or biological samples. Such analytical power offers a variety of opportunities for innovative observations and experiments, involving volatile metal compounds, with important applications in environmental and health sciences. Most organometallic compounds are significantly more toxic than the corresponding inorganic forms. Therefore, the importance of specific determination in environmental and biomedical samples is widely appreciated. This instrument will be installed at the Dartmouth Trace Element Analysis Core Facility (TEA Core), joining an existing High Resolution-ICPMS and an ion chromatography (IC) system. The Dartmouth TEA Core serves a large number of PIs and students doing interdisciplinary research in environmental and health sciences. The new instrument will promote our research activities in three ways. First, it provides new analytical capabilities, such as mercury speciation and isotope analysis and isolation of Se from selenoproteins. Second, it improves the quality of some elemental measurements (e.g., rare earth elements). Finally, it will share the analytical load of our HR-ICPMS, so that technical development work (e.g., As speciation) can be carried out using additional machine time. A new project enabled by this instrument is a study of the biomagnification of heavy metals, especially mercury, in aquatic food webs. Methylmercury in the tissue of plankton and fish from more than 20 lakes with different food web structures will be compared. Quantitative estimates of the influence of zooplankton species, size and relative abundance on the buildup of toxic mercury in fish from each lake will used construct a predictive model for mercury trophic transfer across lakes. Laboratory experiments with stable isotopes of mercury will be used to develop mechanistic models for trophic transfer at the low levels of mercury found in natural systems. Other new and existing projects that will benefit from this equipment include human health effects of exposure to toxic elements, interaction of toxic metal with cellular proteins, mechanisms of contaminant transport through watersheds, and reconstructions of chemical and climatic history of the earth. By becoming a part of Dartmouth s TEA Core, the new GC-ICPMS will offer expanded opportunities for graduate and undergraduate education in the area of emerging technology. The TEA core is served as major foci for interdisciplinary research and scientific communication among experts in many departments within Dartmouth. Dartmouth s TEA core is open for student research from first year undergraduates to Ph.D. students. Eighteen graduate students postdocs and 15 undergraduate students have used the instruments of the facility. The lab has also been used for classroom education in a few Dartmouth classes, including undergraduate level Environmental Geology, and graduate level Watershed Hydrochemistry and Analytical Chemistry and Instrumental Analysis doc22789 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project proposes to meet the demand from the microelectronics industry for improved wafer contamination analysis. Wafer contamination control is critical for Ultra Large Scale Integrated (ULSI) technology and there is a strong demand for a non-destructive analytical tool with improved sensitivity and spatial resolution over the conventional total x-ray fluorescence (TXRF) method. A new technique, focused beam TXRF, can meet this important market need. Based on point-focusing toroidal crystal optics, focused beam TXRF will improve the spatial resolution by a factor of more than 100 and provide 30 times better detection sensitivity for local contaminants on Si as compared to the conventional TXRF method. This technique also has potential for low-level Al, Na and other low Z elements analysis on Si that cannot be addressed effectively by the conventional TXRF and other techniques. In this project, preliminary focused beam TXRF data will be collected using WL1 excitation provided by a toroidal Si (220) crystal to demonstrate the improvement of sensitivity and resolution for transition metal detection. Theoretical calculation will be also carried out to determine the feasibility for Al and Na detection for wafer contamination control at 10^ 9 to 10^10 atoms cm^2 level. Focused beam TXRF analysis has commercial applications in the microelectronics industry for wafer contamination control including localized and homogeneous contaminants with high resolution. These contaminants include many important elements such as transition metals, Al, Na and other low Z elements. By being able to identify these contaminants, the quality of silicon wafers can be improved. This will be a tremendous cost savings to a multi-billion dollar industry doc22790 none Wilson, Grant Recently, two ground-breaking sets of observations -discoveries of continuum radiation from protogalaxies in the millimeter and submillimeter wavelength range, and the development of the largest catalog to date of galaxy clusters exhibiting the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect -have set the stage for advanced studies of galaxy and cluster evolution by a suite of continuum cameras on the US Mexico Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT), currently under construction. To ensure immediate scientific payoff from the LMT, this award will contribute to funding the construction of a copy of BOLOCAM -an existing, wide format (144 pixel) bolometer camera developed for the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory. This camera, called BOLOCAM II, will be the flagship continuum array receiver in the early years of the LMT, and will be essential for telescope commissioning as well as early science results doc22791 none This MRI grant will be used to create a state-of-the-art experimental facility for dynamic measurement, modeling, diagnosis and control of transient automotive emissions. Catalytic exhaust after-treatment systems play a key role in reducing automotive emissions, but to meet increasingly stringent legislated environmental targets, (as specified in SULEV or OBD II for example), it is now necessary to incorporate their dynamic behavior within the on-board engine control and diagnostic system. To measure and model these dynamics experimentally requires the state-of-the-art, dual-channel, fast-response gas analysis equipment. The MRI grant will also be used to acquire a hardware software system for data acquisition, and for rapid prototyping access to the engine management and diagnostic system, in order to be able to implement and test the algorithms developed. It is believed that there are currently only four facilities worldwide (within academia) that have fast response gas analysis capability, one of which was constructed at the University of Sussex (UK), by the principal investigator. The interdisciplinarity inherent in a system which has an engine, electronic control, and the catalytic after-treatment elements is reflected in the cross-departmental team of investigators who come from the Mechanical, Chemical, and Electrical & Computer Engineering departments within the College of Engineering at Villanova University. For each of these departments, the facility would strongly enhance the Undergraduate and Masters student exposure to the automotive industry in a geographic area, which is weak in this regard. The facility will be a regional resource, and is supported by Drexel and Temple Universities as well as local industry. Industrial support and cost share comes from a broad cross-section of the automotive industry including end user Ford Motor Company, international automotive consultants Ricardo Inc., locally based consultants, Environex, and local catalyst manufacturer Johnson Matthey doc22792 none Wojtal This Major Research Instrumentation grant provides funds to Oberlin College to purchase equipment that will enable the PIs to map, analyze, and visualize in three dimensions both mesoscopic geological structures and archeological sites as well as the geographic geologic environment in which they occur. The equipment will include: (1) a Trimble total station, a Trimble GPS total station, two Trimble ProXRS backpack-style GPS receivers, and four Trimble Explorer hand-held GPS units. The PIs will use this equipment to map with high precision the surface topography of geological and archeological research sites and to locate data stations, geologic samples, and archeological artifacts. The PIs are faculty from three departments at Oberlin College, a private, four-year undergraduate liberal arts college. They will use the requested equipment to enhance their existing individual research projects in geology and archeology, to undertake new collaborative research at an archeological site in Italy, and to train research students in modern techniques for surveying, three-dimensional visualization, and three-dimensional analysis. The equipment will be stored in the Department of Geology, and PI Wojtal will assume primary responsibility for training, equipment maintenance, and the scheduling of equipment use doc22793 none Mark Guiltinan (# ) A grant has been awarded to Pennsylvania State University under the direction of Dr. Mark Guiltinan to develop a Plant Growth Facility consisting of six growth chambers and a small greenhouse. The facility center will provide a physical home for the graduate programs, and an organizing role for the enhancement of Plant Sciences research, teaching and outreach programs. The objectives of the center will be to: provide state-of-the-art research facilities for a core group of resident plant scientists, including current faculty and new hires; provide collaborative space in the new building to members of the Plant Science Center; develop and enhance collaborative interactions among plant scientists and with researchers in other fields, at Penn State and elsewhere; improve the Plant Physiology and Ecological and Molecular Plant Physiology graduate education programs, and; develop outreach programs for the general public and for pre-college students. This center will support research in plant sciences for diverse studies, but will be particularly important to the growing number of plant scientists using the model plant species, Arabidopsis thaliana. The completion of the Arabidopsis genome sequence, along with major new funding programs in plant genomics at the NSF and USDA, have brought us to a new era in plant research, requiring high throughput facilities for functional analysis of genes. Penn State has made a priority effort to enhance the life sciences; enhancement of the Plant Sciences Center will help us move forward on this path, by providing necessary facilities and maximizing laboratory space in the main building. This will in turn help to attract top faculty candidates who will be concerned about availability of such facilities. The facility will provide for the first time, an interdisciplinary, inter-college facility for high quality environmental growth of plants to support the many plant scientists at Penn State. It will also serve our teaching and outreach programs, providing a facility available to all for the growth of plants doc22794 none Aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase complexes play a key role in protein biosynthesis. An understanding of the structure and distribution of these complexes and their variants is fundamental to understanding the mechanisms and regulation of this basic biological process, which critically impacts cell growth, maintenance and death. The core multisynthetase complex contains nine aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase activities and three auxiliary proteins, p43, p38, and p18. A tRNA binding protein, p43 enhances aminoacylation activity of specific synthetases within the complex. Metabolic stress induces cleavage of p43 at a caspase-like site as well as release and secretion of the C-terminal half of the protein (EMAPII), which functions as an inflammatory cytokine. Due to its central location in the core multienzyme aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase complex, a likely function of p43 is to maintain structural integrity of this particle. This project will determine the effect of metabolic stress on p43 cleavage and stability of the complex. Specifically, mammalian and non-mammalian cells will be grown under various adverse conditions. Multisynthetase complexes will be purified from these cultures and their compositions and structures characterized. The cellular localization and distribution of complexes, of tagged p43 and of its processed components will be quantitated by immunoblot analysis of subcellular fractions. This collaborative research project will be performed primarily by undergraduate students who will receive training in molecular and structural biology doc22795 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Yale University will acquire an Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) Spectrometer. The new instrument will support the research of major users in the Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, and Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry Departments. Some of the studies that will exploit this instrument include a) EPR studies of photosystem II and Mn model complexes; b) site directed spin labeling studies of protein secondary structure; c) de novo design of metal ion binding sites in proteins; d) bioinorganic studies of actIV cyclase and transition metal uptake; e) characterization of metal oxide catalysts; and f) EPR studies of RNase P. An electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectrometer is an instrument used to obtain information about the molecular and electronic structure of molecules. It may also be used to obtain information about the lifetimes of free radicals which are often essential for the initiation of tumor growth and or a variety of chemical reactions. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, in particular biological chemistry doc22796 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Mesa State College will acquire preparative scale supercritical fluid (SCF) extraction equipment, preparative scale centrifugal countercurrent chromatography (CCC) equipment with UV detector, and accessories . This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas: a) plant secondary metabolites as mediators of trophic interactions in a tropical forest community; b) phytochemical investigation of cryptobiotic crusts and their alleged allelopathic interaction with non-native grasses; c) phytochemistry of neotropical piper species related to piper cenocladum and their role in defense against attine ant species; d) caterpillars of the Costa Rican rain forest; e) chemical mediation of trophic cascades in alfalfa and implications for biological control; and f) development of methodologies utilizing supercritical CO2 as a reaction solvent. The green approach to natural products isolation that will be developed with this equipment is timely and will benefit students in their future employment. In addition, these techniques could be of great value to scientists in the developing nations of Latin America whose immense biodiversity represents a wealth of undiscovered natural products of enormous potential. Therefore, scientists from Latin America who would otherwise not have access to SCF and CCC equipment will collaborate with the PI doc22797 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program supports Florida International University with the acquisition of a structural monitoring system for a laser- molecular beam epitaxy (LMBE)-scanning tunneling microscope system. The PI s will construct comprehensive tools with multi-component growth capability coupled with in-situ nano-scale characterization capabilities. This is essential for success in Complex Materials Growth by Design. The in-situ structural monitoring system includes a newly designed in-situ reflection high-energy electron diffraction (RHEED) instrument for real-time monitoring of materials growth and low-energy electron diffraction (LEED I-V) optics for surface structure determination will be the essential component for the studies of artificial structured materials. The system will be added on a pulsed laser deposition (PLD) system, forming a controlled growth LMBE facility. This facility will be integrated with a variable temperature (VT) (25 - K) scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and other existing surface characterization probes with a growth capability in an ultra-high vacuum (UHV) cluster. The objective is to construct a unique facility capable of growing and characterizing materials in-situ for interdisciplinary research and education of materials scientists in the new field of nano-technology. The goal is to: 1) exploit materials tailoring for desired functionalities, 2) explore new physical phenomena in artificially structured materials, and 3) educate a new breed of materials scientists with an expertise in science-driven nano-fabrication. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program supports Florida International University with the acquisition of a structural monitoring system for a laser- molecular beam epitaxy (LMBE)-scanning tunneling microscope system. The PI s will construct comprehensive tools with multi-component growth capability coupled with in-situ nano-scale characterization capabilities. This is essential for success in Complex Materials Growth by Design. The in-situ structural monitoring system includes a newly designed in-situ reflection high-energy electron diffraction instrument for real-time monitoring of materials growth and low-energy electron diffraction optics for surface structure determination will be the essential component for the studies of artificial structured materials. The system will be added on a pulsed laser deposition system, forming a controlled growth LMBE facility. This facility will be integrated with a variable temperature (VT) (25 - K) scanning tunneling microscope and other existing surface characterization probes with a growth capability in an ultra-high vacuum cluster. The objective is to construct a unique facility capable of growing and characterizing materials in-situ for interdisciplinary research and education of materials scientists in the new field of nano-technology. The goal is to: 1) exploit materials tailoring for desired functionalities, 2) explore new physical phenomena in artificially structured materials, and 3) educate a new breed of materials scientists with an expertise in science-driven nano-fabrication doc22798 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will develop a passive, nonintrusive species-specific velocimeter (SSV) that simultaneously measures spatially resolved velocities of multiple species in a flame, sorting the information by species and spatial scale size. The SSV will be geared to spatially resolve the mixing and chemical dynamics occurring within flames, and to track these effects in real time. No instruments are available that can make such measurements passively and non-invasively in a com-pact geometry. The SSV will play a critical role in a novel deposition process, combustion chemical vapor deposition (CCVD). CCVD is a continuous open-air deposition process that is targeting a wide spectrum of thin-film-coating markets, including electronics, glass, anti-corrosives, superconductors, catalytics, polymers, and nanopowders. Phase 1 demonstrated feasibility by measuring spatially resolved, species-specific CCVD flame velocities on different spatial scales. Phase 2 will be a proof-of-principal program to (1) construct an engineering prototype, (2) demonstrate the correlation between SSV data and bottom-line CCVD film properties, and (3) design an SSV-based CCVD controller that can be fabricated economically and commercialized in a privately funded This technology will facilitate smart deposition that streamlines the reliability of CCVD. Incorporated into a CCVD system, the SSV will become the central element of a feedback control module that maintains the consistency of the flame and maximizes deposition efficiency. The commercial market for this technology generates about $50 million annually. This project addresses the interest in advanced control techniques for manufacturing. It supports the development of improved and more reliable coatings that will enhance technology and lower the cost of many common products, e.g. electronic memory devices in computers, appliances, and automobiles doc22799 none Under the Major Research Instrumentation program, a computational laboratory will be acquired that will facilitate and unite multidisciplinary research focused on regional climate change and the effects of that climate change on biologic, geochemical, sedimentologic, hydrologic, and societal systems. These topics involve faculty, researchers and students from 5 departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz (Earth Sciences, Ocean Sciences, Environmental Toxicology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Environmental Studies). Two main research avenues will be supported by this facility. First, a regional climate model will be utilized in investigations of future climate scenarios for key regions of interest. Second, the regional climate model results will be applied to a range of studies that focus on responses to climate change by various regional biologic (marginal marine ecosystems, marine algal blooms, terrestrial floral and fauna ecosystems), chemical (water quality, contaminant dispersal), hydrologic (surface and groundwater flow), sedimentologic (land slide and glacial hazards), and societal (water management) systems. The researchers will use an advanced regional climate model to investigate future climate change scenarios that include increasing levels of greenhouse gases and aerosols and for scenarios of projected future land use changes. Regional modeling cases will be carried out at model resolutions of 40, 30, and 20 km., to investigate effect of spatial resolution upon results. This project will provide a multidisciplinary and multidimensional view of the possible effects of future climate change at regional scales. The project will involve graduate and undergraduate students in research and computing projects, seek to engage under-represented students in scientific research, and allow for the inclusion of results from this research to be incorporated into 18 different courses across 5 different departments doc22800 none At some point in their lives, most people encounter stressful events that can have a major impact on the course and direction of their lives. However, after decades of research, it is clear that many assumptions held in society about how individuals respond to life s traumas have not survived empirical test. For example, in contrast to widely held myths about the coping process, the data fail to demonstrate universal reactions to stressful life events. Despite the popular belief that emotional and cognitive responses to stress follow a clear pattern, there is little empirical evidence for an orderly sequence of stages of response. Understanding the general process of coping will be enhanced through examination of group and individual differences, as well as similarities, in response to a variety of negative life experiences. The principal investigator started a longitudinal investigation of early emotional, cognitive, and social responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11, . Using an anonymous Web-based survey methodology, stress and coping data were collected from a large nationally representative sample of adults and adolescent parent dyads (with an over-sampling from 4 cities that have experienced community-based trauma: New York City, Oklahoma City, Miami, and Littleton, CO) at 9-14 days, two months, and six months following September 11. This project continues the prospective study, following the sample with four specific aims: 1) To investigate the psychological and social processes that help explain individual differences in response to a national traumatic event; 2) To identify early predictors of long-term adjustment to both the 9 11 attacks and subsequent events that may occur; 3) To compare responses to the 9 11 events among individuals who have previously experienced a traumatic event (either personally or in their communities) with those who have not previously encountered trauma; and 4) To investigate prospectively the psychological and social processes that help explain variation in response to various stressful life events more generally. The unparalleled nationwide impact of the September 11th attacks, coupled with the large and representative nature of the existing national sample and the early collection of emotional, cognitive and social responses to these events, provides a remarkable opportunity to examine longitudinally how individuals and communities respond to stressful life events more generally. Such an examination can be conducted without several specific methodological limitations that have plagued prior research (e.g., small or demographically homogenous samples). Information collected in this effort can illuminate the coping process more generally so as to advance future conceptual work in this area. Moreover, it can further the understanding of the unique needs of traumatized individuals and provide information to help identify individuals at risk for subsequent difficulties. With these data in hand, educational and intervention efforts that are designed and implemented among health care professionals and the community at large can be better informed, more cost-effective and more sensitive to the needs of the populace doc22801 none The goal of this proposal is to acquire the equipment needed to complete an interdisciplinary structural dynamics test facility. The requested equipment consists of a scanning laser Doppler vibrometer, a shake table control system, a spectrum analyzer, and various vibration transducers. This equipment will be used in conjunction with existing major laboratory equipment which consists of large capacity horizontal and vertical shake tables, a vibration isolation table, multiple holographic test systems, and a tension compression testing machine. This facility will provide long-term research and training capabilities to ISU and the state of Idaho by providing a sophisticated structural dynamics laboratory that will support many areas of research. The research will have wide application to engineering disciplines ranging from aerospace, civil, mechanical, environmental, and electrical. Existing research projects that will use this equipment consist of the development of noise control techniques, development of optical based small displacement measurement techniques, material integrity testing, vibration control of building structures and components, building structure response due to earthquakes and or explosives, and static and dynamic soil testing. Other related and unrelated areas of research will be generated, as the research facility becomes better known by researchers throughout the state. Researchers from the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL), local and state industry, the Measurement and Control Engineering Research Center (MCERC), as well as researchers from multiple colleges at ISU will use and benefit from this equipment. Furthermore, the laboratory will be used for K-12 student tours and undergraduate and graduate research. This facility will also significantly enhance the experimental testing background and training that our students currently receive in our two graduate programs in Measurement and Control Engineering and Engineering Structures and Mechanics doc22794 none Aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase complexes play a key role in protein biosynthesis. An understanding of the structure and distribution of these complexes and their variants is fundamental to understanding the mechanisms and regulation of this basic biological process, which critically impacts cell growth, maintenance and death. The core multisynthetase complex contains nine aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase activities and three auxiliary proteins, p43, p38, and p18. A tRNA binding protein, p43 enhances aminoacylation activity of specific synthetases within the complex. Metabolic stress induces cleavage of p43 at a caspase-like site as well as release and secretion of the C-terminal half of the protein (EMAPII), which functions as an inflammatory cytokine. Due to its central location in the core multienzyme aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase complex, a likely function of p43 is to maintain structural integrity of this particle. This project will determine the effect of metabolic stress on p43 cleavage and stability of the complex. Specifically, mammalian and non-mammalian cells will be grown under various adverse conditions. Multisynthetase complexes will be purified from these cultures and their compositions and structures characterized. The cellular localization and distribution of complexes, of tagged p43 and of its processed components will be quantitated by immunoblot analysis of subcellular fractions. This collaborative research project will be performed primarily by undergraduate students who will receive training in molecular and structural biology doc22803 none Proposal Numer PIs: St. John, Baumslag, Cleary, and Rouson. This project is a collaborative effort among members of several Departments and multiple institutions, all parts of the City University of New York (CUNY). The group effort includes the Department of Mathematics, the Department of Computer Science, and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at City College of CUNY; the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Lehman College of CUNY, the Department of Computer Science of the Graduate Center of CUNY, and the Department of Mathematics of the Graduate Center of CUNY. The research tool that serves as the hub for the planned activity is a large Beowulf computational cluster, to be housed at City College. The planned research projects are genetic algorithms in combinatorial group theory, evolutionary tree reconstruction in computational biology, computer experiments on parafree groups, modelling turbulent fluid flows arising in the early stages of combustion, and questions and simulations in computer networking. The cluster will be administered under the Center for Algorithms and Interactive Scientific Software (CAISS) at City College. This cluster will also provide an important resource for the undergraduate and graduate students of CUNY, by giving access to computing power not usually found at primarily undergraduate colleges. The research topics span a wide range of computer science, computational science, and mathematics. They share the common approach of involving both experiments and theory, relying on exploitation of computational resources doc22804 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. John T. Beneski at West Chester University to purchase an Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope with an EDS system. The addition of this equipment to West Chester University will significantly increase the research opportunities for our faculty and students (particularly in the sciences), enhance our ability to attract new students from the widest diversity of backgrounds, enhance our ability to train students in state-of-the-art marketable skills, and provide new opportunities for our faculty and students to collaborate with scientists from the local high-tech corridor of biotechnology-related industries. The new electron microscope will be used extensively by faculty and students in the Departments of Biology, Geology (2) the formation, structure, composition, and physiology of urine spheres in uricotelic vertebrates; (3) the examination of various halophilic bacteria isolated from ancient (250 mya and older) surface sterilized salt crystals; and (4) the dynamics of Mid-Cretaceous ocean circulation. Dr. Beneski will provide additional opportunities for students by actively promoting independent student research projects and internships. In addition to research and training, the new SEM EDS will be used as a recruitment tool for attracting new science majors from both traditional and non-traditional backgrounds. To accomplish this, Dr. Beneski will expand the hands-on demonstrations and tours that showcase the imaging technologies available in the Center for Advanced Scientific Imaging; these demonstrations and tours are presented to the potential students that regularly visit the University as part of existing programs targeting area high schools, transfer students, and underserved groups. West Chester University s continued growth in providing state-of-the-art imaging technologies and resources not only serves the immediate and future needs of our faculty and students in the sciences, it also mirrors a growing emphasis on the sciences and technology by the State of Pennsylvania and PA State System of Higher Education. Both of these institutions expect West Chester University to recruit and train more students in the sciences and technology. The acquisition of the requested equipment is a critical step in the continued development of Center for Advanced Scientific Imaging as a key resource for research and research training at West Chester University doc22805 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cincinnati will acquire an X-ray diffractometer with CCD detector for small molecule diffractometry. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including the following: a) the study of reactive intermediates in crystals; b) design of novel complexes as photodynamic therapeutic agents in the treatment of cancers; c) the study of unusual covalent and hydrogen-bonded geometries of promising catalysts and composite structures; d) the study of host-guest chemistry and molecular recognition; e) investigations on polymorphism and its role in drug interaction and design; and f) the design of supramolecular solids that can function as molecular machines, magnets and coordination polymers . The X-ray diffractometer allows accurate and precise measurements of the full three dimensional structure of a molecule, including bond distances and angles, and it provides accurate information about the spatial arrangement of the molecule relative to the neighboring molecules. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, including the preparation of more efficient catalysts, drug development, and materials sciences doc22806 none Stewart B. Priddy This award provides partial support for speakers from outside the area and for other active research mathematicians with limited means of support to attend and participate in the Midwest Topology Seminar, a triannual gathering of Midwestern mathematicians, established over thirty five years ago to provide a forum for new results and trends in topology. Sites for meetings to be held during the course of this award include Indiana University, Northern Illinois University, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Purdue University, Purdue University Calumet, University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Kentucky, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, University of Notre Dame, University of Wisconsin, Wayne State University, Western Michigan University. Further information on current and past meetings is available at: http: www.math.wayne.edu ~rrb MTS doc22807 none Rumble The acquisition of a new isotope-ratio-monitoring, gas chromatograph inlet mass spectrometer (IRMS-GC MS) equipped with four collectors and four channel output for simultaneous analysis of the ion beams of SF6 will make it possible to develop a new ultraviolet (UV) laser fluorination microprobe for the analysis of 32S, 33S, 34S, and 36S in sulfide minerals. Based on previous experience with the successful in situ microanalysis of oxygen isotopes in silicate minerals, it should be possible to measure 50-micrometer diameter spots on sulfide minerals with a precision of 0.1 to 0.2 per mil in d33S and d34S and 0.05 per mil in ?33S. Analysis for d36S will be at a lower level of precision owing to the rarity of the isotope 36S. A new UV laser macroprobe and GC purification system has already been built and validated for 400 micrometer diameter spot measurements of sulfur isotopes using an existing mass spectrometer that is incapable of GC-continuous flow operation. The new IRMS-GC MS requested from NSF-MRI is needed to improve analytical spatial resolution from 400 to 50 micrometers. The new sulfur isotope microprobe will be used to test the validity of the discovery of mass-independent sulfur isotope anomalies in Archean rocks by direct fluorination of sulfide minerals. The proposed relationship between the anomalies and the oxygenation of Earth s atmosphere will be tested by detailed measurements of drill cores spanning the Archean-Proterozoic transition. The mechanisms responsible for fixing mass-independent signatures in rocks will be investigated through spatially resolved analyses of inter-mineral fractionations and intra-mineral isotopic heterogeneity. The new microprobe s capacity to analyze microgram samples will be put to use in a laboratory study of the fractionation of sulfur isotopes by microbes. Use of the new sulfur isotope microprobe will be open to qualified users from throughout the research community doc22808 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Denison University will acquire a 400 MHz Fourier Transform Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (FT-NMR) Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) probing dynamics in macromolecules using coupled spin relaxation; b) synthesis and characterization of methylene bridge substituted calix[4]arenes; c) studies of the reactivity and stereochemistry of protonated cyclopropanes in terpenoid rearrangements; and d) NMR studies of nearest neighbor effects on chemical shifts in peptides and studies of chemically modified proteins. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. In addition to research involving undergraduate students, this instrument will be used in a number of advanced undergraduate laboratory courses at Denison University doc22809 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) and the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Programs, Prof. Brooks H. Pate of the University of Virginia will develop a state-of-the-art laser 2D microwave spectrometer. This will introduce time-domain molecular rotational spectroscopy as a new technique to study chemical reaction dynamics. Chemical reactions are described as population transfer between different localized structures. For example, the reaction can take place between different electronic states where the electronic configuration is different for the reactant and product. Molecular isomerization reactions can similarly be described as changes in the nuclear configuration of the molecule. One common feature of reactions is that the molecular structure is usually different in the reacting configurations. For isomerization reactions, this result is readily apparent. For reactions between different electronic states, there is often a structural change caused by the different bonding of the two electronic configurations. During the chemical reaction the moments-of-intertia are time-dependent quantities. The reaction kinetics can, therefore, be determined by measuring the time evolution of the rotational spectrum. The successful development of this new field of molecular spectroscopy will make it possible to unravel reaction pathways for complex reactions involving several isomers doc22810 none The Colorado School of Mines will to establish an Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope (ESEM) laboratory to meet the growing research and education needs of the CSM campus. The proposed ESEM laboratory will be a shared-use facility, with extensive participation from the majority of departments across campus. The facility will augment the recently established electron microscopy center in the materials science department, providing a focal point to enrich undergraduate and graduate education. In addition, it will serve as a resource facility for local industry. The proposed to acquire an ESEM equipped with temperature controlled sample stages (both heated and cooled), as well as energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) for elemental mapping. This configuration was chosen as the optimum with respect to maximizing versatility at a reasonable cost. An ESEM retains the performance advantages of a conventional SEM, but removes the high vacuum ( 10-6 torr) constraints. The ESEM derives its name from its ability to manipulate the sample environment through a range of pressure (10-6. 20 torr), temperature (-20 - degrees C), and gas composition. The flexibility offered by this research will allow it to find widespread use on the CSM campus doc22811 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II project will produce an emission-free control valve to address an industry need for environmentally safe valves. The axially rotated Venturi Off-Set Technology valve will be equipped with a conical seat for internal sealing and a magnetic coupling for leak-proof actuation. The commercial potential of this project will provide the Petroleum industry with valves that are emission-free which will result in a cleaner environment doc22812 none Ioannis Stamos Charles Ehlschlaeger CUNY Hunter College MRI RUI: Acquisition of Range-Scanning Equipment and of Data Servers for the Reconstruction of Large-Scale Scenes from 3D Range and 2D Color Data This proposal, addressing the problem of 3D-photorealistic reconstruction of large-scale scenes in a tightly integrated system that features novel registration, segmentation, modeling, and visualization algorithms, tackles the following issues: 1) Nonplanar segmentation, 2) Automatic registration between 3D and 2D data sets, 3) Integration of the data sets, and 4) Simplification of the complex geometry. The project requests the acquisition of a highly accurate range-scanner that can provide dense 3D data of outdoor scenes. Proposed is a system that operates on an input sequence of calibrated and uncalibrated 3D range and 2D image data. The system will segment the range and color images, extract their features, establish topological relationships between features, and derive global topological relationships between features in the final 3D geometric model. The whole process will be fully automated except for the range-to-image registration process that requires minimal user interaction. The expected output consists of a complete photorealistic model of the scene. The resulting 3D models will be utilized in geospatial; the acquired data will also be used for teaching purposes in CS and Geography departments. Aided by the Center of the Analysis and Research of Spatial Information (CARSI), urban areas of downtown New York and the interior of Grand Central Station in Manhattan are being used as testbeds doc22813 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Johns Hopkins University will acquire a X-ray diffractometer with CCD detector and low temperature capabilities for small molecule diffractometry. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including the following: a) bioinorganic modeling of metalloenzyme active sites; b) environmental inorganic chemistry and the development of copper mediated dehalogenation; c) synthesis, characterization and reactivity of aza-substituted corrole macrocycles; d) new metal-carbonyl diimine compounds of photochemical interest; e) photoinduced electron, energy, and atom transfer processes; and f) X-ray studies of metal-organic complexes for asymmetric catalysis. Faculty members from Morgan State University, Loyola College, Towson University, the University of Maryland in Baltimore County, the US Naval Academy and Gettysburg College will also have access to this equipment. The X-ray diffractometer allows accurate and precise measurements of the full three dimensional structure of a molecule, including bond distances and angles, and it provides accurate information about the spatial arrangement of the molecule relative to the neighboring molecules. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, including environmental chemistry, preparation of more efficient catalysts, and biochemistry doc22814 none This award is for acquisition of a new state-of-the-art scanning probe microscope (SPM) for the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology research community. The instrument is an atomic force microscope (AFM) that can be modified to operate in a variety of scanning modes, including phase-imaging microscopy, electric force microscopy, magnetic force microscopy (MFM) and scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). The principal investigators have successfully used AFM imaging to support their research on ceramic film fabrication and fluid interactions with geologic materials. Other researchers will use the AFM for characterizing a variety of materials, including metal surfaces, nanocomposites, self-assembled monolayers, carbon nanotubes, buckyballs, and DNA. The projects described herein involve some 14 faculty, several post-doctoral researchers, and many graduate students, from seven different academic departments at NMT. The microscope will enhance graduate student training and undergraduate teaching through experience with one of the best surface characterization tools available. %%% AFM detects surface topography by monitoring molecular force interactions between a probe tip and the sample. STM detects surface topography by monitoring the tunneling current between an electrically conductive probe and the sample. SPM offers resolution of surface features on the order of a few nanometers, the highest of any imaging technique. An additional important advantage of SPM over other techniques is the ability to image samples in air or under liquids without extensive preparation. Environmental and biological samples may be examined under near-natural conditions. Instruction in SPM techniques will be integrated directly into existing graduate and undergraduate courses and into a new short course. Budgeting for an instrument manager trainer will ensure instrumentation access for those with little or no prior experience with SPM techniques doc22815 none Continuing the recent progress in nanoscience and nanotechnologies requires the development of methods of chemical, conformational, and stress analysis with nanoscale lateral resolution. The objective of this award from the MRI Program is to develop a scanning Raman spectrometer with spatial resolution of the order of 10-50 nm with a strongly enhanced optical signal. A central feature of the proposed work is the use of apertureless near- field optics to provide a gain of at least 10 exp.10 in intensity of the Raman signal over what may be achieved with currently available commercial instruments based on aperture-limited optics created with fibers. This approach will provide both exquisite spatial resolution and large local enhancement of the Raman signal using a scanning metallic tip. The enhancement is absolutely essential for measurement of the signal from small volumes. A long-term goal of the work is development of a Raman spectrometer capable of single molecule detection. The following specific objectives will be met in achieving the overall goal of the work: (1) Development of the technology for the creation of a metallic tip providing strong local enhancement of the Raman signal; (2) Optimization of different optical schemes for providing the incident light and collecting the Raman signal for particular experimental tasks; and (3) Construction of the scanning Raman spectrometer prototype with nanometer scale spatial resolution. Development of a scanning nano-Raman spectrometer (SNRS) supported under the MRI Program will be applicable to several scientific activities. In the study of adsorption of human blood proteins to well-defined surfaces, SNRS will provide laterally resolved information on conformational changes in the protein upon adsorption. The distribution of surface nano-domains in biomaterials from block copolymers, assembly of collagen fibrils, and fibrin formation are further biomaterials problems for which the SNRS instrument will provide unique information. Lateral variations in chemical composition at the surface of adhesive blends can also be mapped with SNRS and correlated with variations in surface mechanical properties. In blends of long-branched and linear chains SNRS will provide a laterally resolved alternative non-destructive method to study near surface composition in blends with isotopic labeling. It will also offer a means to study near surface composition without labeling. Additional research activities include the study of hybrid nanostructures from polymer brushes and dendrimers and mapping of surface functionality in ultrathin films of various sorts, including self-assembled monolayers with mixed functionalities. Development of the scanning nano-Raman spectrometer will have a significant impact on the Nation s academic research infrastructure not only polymeric materials, but also semiconductor technology, biotechnology and biology. The unprecedented measurements it will provide will promote better understanding of structure property relationships in materials on the nanometer scale doc22816 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Kent State University will acquire an imaging Fourier transform infrared (FTIF) spectrometer. This instrument will support research in a number of areas, including a) the development of IR imaging for monolayers at the air water interface and the characterization of phosphoinositide protein interactions; b) the investigation of liquid crystal polymer interactions; c) the characterization of biofilm formation in the environment; and d) the development of new methods of multi-dimensional data analysis. The general effectiveness of Fourier transform spectroscopic techniques in academic and industrial research has been firmly established. Many advanced spectroscopic courses now routinely include the teaching of FT spectroscopy. Imaging technology is extremely important for the characterization of advanced materials in industrial research, and focal plane array IR imaging is becoming increasingly popular in industrial analytical laboratories doc22817 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Earlham College will acquire a 400 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) the synthetic applications of ring expansions and contractions of a series of cyclic beta-hydroxy tertiary amines under Mitsunobu and modified Mitsunobu conditions; b) the synthesis of phytosiderophores analogues, natural compounds that may facilitate active transfer of molecules into the roots of grasses; c) the effects of oxidative damage on proteins; and d) the effects of an NAD+ precursor on high energy phosphate metabolism and glycolysis in hearts from diabetic rats. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas, in particular molecular biology doc22818 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will develop novel DNA polymerase reagents for use in current and developing DNA diagnostic procedures. The approach is to develop thermophilic phage DNA replicases in place of the currently used DNA repair enzymes. The feasibility of this approach was demonstrated during Phase I research. This follow on Phase II project will extend the methods used in Phase I to isolate additional activities, characterize them and develop them as reagents for various amplification platforms. The commercial applications of this project will be in a number of markets that use molecular analysis of DNA. They include the areas of biomedical research, medical testing, genetic identity testing, public health and agriculture doc22819 none Thompson, Ian B. An infrared echelle spectrograph will be designed, fabricated, assembled and tested for use at the Magellan II telescope by researchers associated with the Magellan consortium. It will be capable of observing faint targets in the wavelength region in the UV (blueward of Angstroms), while maintaining high resolution and full wavelength coverage of the visible spectrum. The design incorporates a medium order reflection diffraction grating in combination with a large fused-silica prism to provide cross dispersion. A Schmidt camera with 140-mm focal length will focus the 100 mm collimated beam onto a low noise; back illuminated CCD optimized for UV coverage doc22820 none A matrix channel is the set of NT NR impulse responses (subchannels) that completely characterize the propagation between NT I transmit antennas and NR I receive antennas. The Ohio State University ElectroScience Laboratory (ESL) will develop a matrix channel measurement system (MCMS), consisting of a mobile multichannel transmitter (MCT) and a portable multichannel receiver (MCR) capable of any form of modulation with bandwidth up to 40 MHz at any frequency between 250 MHz and 6 GHz. The MCT will consist of 4 independent, coherent channels. Each transmit channel will consist of an arbitrary waveform generator and an upconverter. The MCR will consist of 16 channels, with each channel consisting of a downconverter digitizer, 75 ms capture at 40 MHz bandwidth (proportionally longer for smaller bandwidths), on-the-fly data processing, and long-term storage of results. Both the MCT and MCR will be battery-powered and built into transit cases suitable for two-person carry to allow measurements anywhere, including indoors, outdoors, and from vehicles. The MCMS will be employed in continuing ESL research programs including: (1) Measurements of capacity in matrix channels, (2) Development and evaluation of open loop forward link array processing techniques for frequency division duplex (FDD) systems, (3) Refinement of angle-of-arrival (AOA) estimation techniques for beamforming and mobile radio geolocation, and (4) Evaluation of interference mitigation techniques for GPS receivers. In each case, the superior tuning range, bandwidth, capture time, and portability of the MCMS will greatly enhance the quality of data relative to that obtained from previous systems developed by ESL and others. For example, in topic 1, the MCMS will be used to obtain improved and more thorough measurements of matrix channels to support development of the next generation of communications technologies, such as BLAST, that exploit antenna arrays to dramatically increase spectral efficiency. Of particular interest is learning under what conditions matrix channel systems significantly outperform vector (NT = 1) channel methods, and how to design antenna arrays (element geometry and polarization) to optimize this performance. The MCMS will possess unprecedented flexibility by virtue of its modular, software-defined architecture, and thus will be of great value for other research efforts as well. Despite the urgent need, no system with comparable features exists commercially, nor can such a system be assembled from off-the-shelf equipment at a reasonable cost. Instead, the project team will design the MCMS from the bottom up, bringing to bear its extensive previous experience in developing similar systems. To ensure the success of this project, ESL will partner with Aeroflex Lintek - a world-renowned developer of custom RF test equipment - to codevelop the MCMS. In this partnership, ESL will be responsible for design concept, requirements, proof-of-concept, and prototyping of hardware and software. Aeroflex Lintek will participate in the design effort and will be responsible for systems engineering and development of the final system. Aeroflex Lintek will perform this work for a small fraction of it s anticipated costs in return for the opportunity to develop, produce, and market a new generation RE test equipment based on technology developed from this project doc22821 none Transcription of protein-coding genes is one of the most fundamental processes that underlies all life and is a primary mechanism of biological regulation. The experiments included in this work are designed to provide new insights into the mechanisms of promoter escape, a critical, early event in the process of gene transcription by RNA polymerase II. The few initial steps in the process of mRNA synthesis that precede the completion of promoter escape are characterized by physical instability of the early RNA polymerase II transcription complex, formation of abortive transcripts, and strong dependence on ATP cofactor, downstream DNA, and the DNA-helicase activity of the general transcription factor TFIIH. Evidence recently obtained in the P.I. s laboratory indicates that inhibitory interactions impede the forward movement of the polymerase and cause its promoter-proximal arrest. These interactions are overcome by the presence of an ATP cofactor, downstream DNA and the DNA-helicase subunits of the general transcription factor TFIIH. Dependence on all three cofactors reflects a common mechanism operating to facilitate promoter escape, and that this mechanism is continuously needed through the addition of the first 14-15 nucleotides to nascent RNA transcripts. At the transition between promoter escape and the elongation stage of transcription, it is expected that protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions will be disrupted or adjusted, leading to the release of some of the general transcription factors that are required for the early transcription complex. The focus of this project is to further explore this hypothetical view of early transcription by RNA polymerase II and its underlying mechanism. The studies include (i) tracking functional and physical changes in the early elongation complex, with particular emphasis on TFIIH and CTD phosphorylation, (ii) identifying polypeptides involved in inhibitory interactions during promoter escape, and (iii) determining the role of specific downstream promoter sequences in the efficiency of promoter escape. To pursue these goals, all the experiments will be carried out using the in vitro system assembled from highly purified polypeptide components, providing the controlled conditions in which the contributions of individual cofactors to rate-limiting steps can be evaluated. The experiments included in this work will enhance our understanding of the fundamental mechanisms of transcription that are applicable to all protein-coding genes in eukaryotic systems. The studies will also provide information necessary to identify possible targets for cellular regulatory mechanisms within the basal transcription machinery doc22822 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program supports the University of Florida with the acquisition of of a gel permeation chromatography (GPC) instrument equipped with four detectors and high temperature capability to provide molecular weight information on a number of new polymers being developed. The projects span the range of modeling conventional polyolefins, to conjugated and electroactive polymers with especially low oxidation potentials, to examining the structure of highly organized core-shell polymers. The instrument is based on a Waters high temperature GPC, capable of making measurements at temperatures up to 150 degrees C, and possessing an array of detection systems (UV Vis, refractive index, light scattering, and differential viscometry) assembled from three vendors: Waters Corporation, Wyatt Technology Corporation, and Viscotek Corporation. Several NSF initiated or funded research in polymers science will benefit from using the instrument. In addition 40-50 undergraduate students, graduate students (including two NSF Graduate Research Fellows) and postdocs present at any one time in the Butler Laboratory will attain training on this instrumentation. Researchers from other Departments in the Center for Macromolecular Science and Engineering (especially Materials Science) will use the facility. Further, Professor Duran leads an NSF REU site with strong ties to France, and each of the faculty members directs REU students through this. %%% The research team that operates out of the Butler Polymer Research Laboratory at the University of Florida, will acquire instrumentation to measure the size (so called molecular weight) of the large polymeric molecules with which they work. The instrument is a gel permeation chromatography (GPC) instrument and will be fully equipped for modern research capability. The projects span studies of conventional polyolefins (e.g. polyethylene), to conjugated and electrically conducting polymers, to examining the structure of polymers for colloids. The instrument will be based on a Waters high temperature GPC possessing an array of detection systems assembled from three vendors: Waters Corporation, Wyatt Technology Corporation, and Viscotek Corporation. NSF initiated or funded research that will benefit from using the proposed instrument includes projects to make new plastics, polymers for drug release, polymers to make all-organic displays, and polymers for biological and chemical sensors. In addition 40-50 undergraduate students, graduate students (including two NSF Graduate Research Fellows) and postdocs present at any one time in the Butler Laboratory who will recieve training on this instrumentation. Researchers from other Departments in the Center for Macromolecular Science and Engineering (especially Materials Science) will use the facility. Further, Professor Duran leads an NSF REU site with strong ties to France, and each of the faculty members directs REU students through this doc22823 none This grant will fund a multifunctional thermal analysis (TA) system that can support the interdisciplinary engineering, materials research and educational activities at Lamar University and its collaborative outreach program to industry and other universities in the region. The system is designed to provide the following capabilities: differential scanning caloremetry, DSC, thermal gravimetric analysis, TGA over a temperature range from 120 to C and connectivity to FTIR and MS gas analysis systems. It will allow the determination of specific heats, melting temperatures, transition enthalpies, phase transformations, phase diagrams, crystallization temperatures, degrees of crystallinity, glass transition temperatures, decomposition effects, reaction kinetics, purity determinations, mass changes, dehydroxylation, corrosion oxidation, thermal stability, reduction oxidation studies, and composition changes. Lamar University is establishing a central engineering materials research facility for the University to be located in the College of Engineering with active participation of the departments of civil, chemical, mechanical, industrial, and electrical engineering. The major objectives of the Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory is to provide a productive environment for interdisciplinary engineering and materials research and an interactive learning experience for undergraduate and graduate students at Lamar and to encourage collaboration with off-campus engineering and materials research centers and individuals. In addition, the Departments of Chemistry, Physics and Geology will participate in the laboratory and have extensive use for the thermal analysis system in both teaching and research. The research and education projects will be in the following areas: environmental science and engineering, polymers, nano-structured materials, structured thin films, high technology alloys, super conducting and magnetic materials, and geological and paleontological materials. The instrument will support the work of 20 senior personnel, 70 graduate students and over 220 undergraduates and will initially have five industrial research collaborators. It will be used in graduate research education, undergraduate research education and in general thermodynamic and materials education in engineering, chemistry, geology and materials science. The senior personnel come from Lamar University, Prairie View A&M (a traditionally African-American university), Texas A&M University and the Technological Institute of Saltillo, Mexico, as well as catalyst, petroleum, steel and mining industries. The acquisition of the versatile thermal analysis system is justified by the difficulty numerous research and educational projects have in accessing a high quality broad temperature range thermal analysis system doc22824 none The sulfur butterflies, Colias eurytheme and C. philodice, common in fields and along roadsides across most of North America, are remarkable because they hybridize extensively. Up to 10% of the butterflies are hybrids, an interbreeding rate that is sufficient to blend them into a single species. Yet, they have remained distinct. Many other species pairs show similar patterns of hybridization, including Darwin s Finches and numerous plant species. These cases challenge our traditional definition of species, which do not normally interbreed. One untested hypothesis, first proposed in , is that hybridizing species do in fact share part of their genome, and that selection acts to keep the remaining parts of the genomes distinct. To test this, new methods will be used to map the chromosomes of these butterflies in great detail. This genetic map will then be used for a fine-scale analysis of the rates that genes are able to spread between species. If superficially distinct, hybridizing species do share major portions of their genomes in common, then it will cause biologists to restructure their thinking about what species are. It would suggest that species identities can exist as a mosaic of genomically complex, stable polymorphisms, maintained in an otherwise dynamic, fluid genome. If this alternative explanation is not upheld, the study will provide strong support of the traditional view of species doc22825 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Stephen Crews at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to purchase a high speed Drosophila embryo sorter. The Sorter allows large numbers of mutant organisms to be isolated for biochemical and molecular experimentation. The overall goal of the research at UNC-Chapel Hill involves using genetics and the study of mutant strains of Drosophila to understand the molecular and cellular basis of animal development and physiology. By comparing biochemical and cellular phenomena in mutant vs. non-mutant Drosophila strains, it can be determined how observed differences contribute to the biological process being studied. In this way, it is possible to understand, in great detail, how molecules work together to generate complex biological structures and phenomena. However, one major problem that has hampered progress is the inability to isolate sufficient numbers of mutant embryos for molecular and biochemical analyses. The recent development of the embryo sorter, which combines the technologies of flow cytometry and the use of Green Fluorescent Protein transgenic Drosophila strains, now allows the isolation of sufficient numbers of embryos for biochemical studies. The embryo sorter also allows high-throughput screening of mutant and transgenic embryos for the identification of novel mutants and genes. The Drosophila group at UNC-Chapel Hill consists of 8 labs focused on the molecular genetics of embryonic development and physiology. All of the labs are committed to understanding biological processes using a comprehensive array of technologies involving genetics, cell biology, biochemistry, and molecular biology. Labs are interested in nervous system development, cell adhesion, hormonal control, cell signaling, cell cycle control, RNA splicing, gene transcription, and DNA repair. Large numbers of embryos will be run through the COPAS Select to isolate pure populations of mutant embryos. These embryos will be analyzed for changes in: (1) RNA populations and gene expression, and (2) protein levels and modifications. This will provide important insight into the biological role that the mutant gene normally plays. In addition, the COPAS Select will be used to sort through tens of thousands of embryos looking for those that have exceptional properties indicating the existence of novel genes, transgenic insertions, cellular markers, and mutations. These new entities will allow the expansion of research efforts into promising new directions. Drosophila research has a number of benefits to the public involving novel insight into basic biological processes, human health, and agriculture. One of the most important lessons learned during the past 20 years of biological research is that the genes carrying-out important biological processes in humans are conserved in Drosophila. This includes many disease genes. The same is true for insect pests. Because of the advanced genetics of Drosophila, it is advantageous to initially study basic biological processes in Drosophila and then continue study in other species, including humans. There are currently a number of biotechnology companies that are utilizing Drosophila to study problems in applied science. It should also be emphasized that besides applied research, work on Drosophila has proven to be one of the best experimental systems for understanding how biological organisms function. This basic knowledge is one of the cornerstones of 20th century science (5 Nobel prizes have been awarded to Drosophila researchers), and promises to provide spectacular results in the 21st century. Further significance of the funded work concerns the educational mission of the University of North Carolina. The Drosophila labs are active training grounds for postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, undergraduates, and high school students. Use of sophisticated equipment, such as the COPAS Select, to solve complex scientific problems will enhance the education and productivity of these students doc22826 none Holk This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) award will provide partial support for the acquisition and installation of a gas-source isotope-ratio mass spectrometer in the Department of Geological Sciences at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB).. This mass spectrometer will enable research projects to be implemented by a consortium of stable isotope researchers at CSULB and California State University, Fullerton (CSUF). Areas of research to be carried out using this instrumentation include hydrogeology, the fluid evolution of the crust of the Earth, the origin of magmas, ore deposits, diagenetic processes in sedimentary basins, and the effect of water on deformational processes. Research opportunities involving stable isotopes will now be available to undergraduate students and this technology will be incorporated into the curriculum of many courses offered in geochemistry, petrology, and hydrology both at CSULB and CSUF. Thus, this instrument is expected to have immediate impact by servicing the teaching and research needs of the California State University, the largest educational establishment in the United States, as well as the most populous and ethnically diverse metropolitan area on the West Coast doc22827 none This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR)Phase II project will develop full waveform models and minimal sensor algorithms for the General Dynamics - Advanced Technology Systems (GDATS) eddy current sensor (ECS). These algorithms will enable the practical real-time high performance health monitoring for turbine engines. Current processing techniques could require four or more sensors; however, these approaches do not make use of all the information made available by the ESC. Using the full ECS signature, it is possible, in theory, to estimate integral vibration frequency, phase and amplitude using only a single sensor. The reduction of the number of sensors required in each engine stage could potentially save millions of dollars over the life of the engine. There are no systems commercially available today for continuous health monitoring of gas turbine engines. Once in use, this system will allow pilots to react immediately to critical engine health problems thus avoiding potentially catastrophic engine failures and loss of lives. The minimal sensor algorithms for continuous health monitoring have a large market spanning the aviation industry, as well as the rapidly expanding power industry doc22828 none Campbell This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant supports the acquisition of a state-of-the-art stable isotope ratio mass spectrometer (SIRMS) with on-line sample preparation systems for continuous flow analysis of stable isotopes of Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen in natural waters and carbonates at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. A new Finnigan Delta Plus SIRMS will replace a 14 years old machine (a Finnigan Delta E) that is no longer supported by the manufacturer and is having increasing periods of down time due to electronics and vacuum system failures. The enhanced capabilities of a new SIRMS with on-line sample preparation systems for continuous flow (CF) analysis will allow for the analysis of very small samples with high throughput. Indeed, the newer generation of CF-SIRMS systems allow for orders of magnitude smaller samples to be analyzed with improved precision. This capability is important for study of micro-spatial isotopic variability in authigenic carbonates, sedimentary cements and pegmatite minerals, as a result of which we are now learning of the great degree of heterogeneity and potential historic information recorded at this scale which was previously homogenized and analyzed in bulk to interpret geologic history. The new SIRMS will support research ranging from studies of the sources of volatiles in volcanic emissions to hydrological and ecological studies of the pathways groundwater transport and processes of evaporation and transpiration in the semi-arid to arid Southwestern U.S. to studies of the genesis of hydrothermal ore deposits. Further, this facility will be an attractive addition to New Mexico Tech s analytical arsenal in facilitating the recruitment of minority students to the geosciences through its relationship with a local Native American College (Dine College) and through its association with the NSF-supported New Mexico Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (NM-AGEP), which seeks to assist under-represented groups in preparation for careers in science academia doc22829 none This Major Research Instrumentation award supports acquisition of an atomic force microscope (AFM). This instrument will upgrade the research, education and training in surface science and characterization within the biology, chemistry, engineering, and physics departments. Clark Atlanta University (CAU), a historically black college and university, has embarked on an extensive program to increase the total enrollment of science, engineering and mathematics (STEM) students, the annual STEM graduation rate, and the percentage of STEM students that continue to pursue advanced degrees. To accomplish these goals CAU needs research and instructional labs equipped with state of the art instruments, such as the AFM, for cutting edge research and research training in areas as nanoscience and technology. Several faculty members in biology, chemistry, engineering and physics plan to utilize the AFM for research and research training. Research areas of importance that will be studied with the AFM include polymers, composites, microelectronics, photonics, nanotechnology, catalysis, and molecular biology. The acquisition of the AFM will significantly enhance the faculty and student research activities in surface science and material characterization. The AFM has wide application for the characterization of polymers, biomaterials, thin films and coatings, ceramics and glass, inorganics, optical storage, semiconductors, electronics, metals and insulators. Its use will impact virtually all the STEM students at CAU and other Atlanta University Center institutions. It will be available to an additional 100-250 STEM students from the other Atlanta University Center schools (Morehouse, Spelman and Morris Brown Colleges doc22830 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project is to develop electrically conductive polymer-silicone composite materials for improving the performance of implantable neural prostheses. Prior Phase I study has demonstrated the feasibility of synthesizing electrically conductive polymer nanocomposites with mechanical properties of silicone elastomers. Polymer-based prototype electrical devices were found to be stable toward simulated physiological conditions and cyclic current pulsing. The Phase II program will extend the benefits of these systems to the fabrication of more complex devices such as multi-poled cuff electrodes for chronic peripheral nerve stimulation and recording. An expanded test plan would include development of advanced device fabrication methods and extensive testing of the prototype neural prostheses for electrical response, tissue compatibility, and durability in chronic implantation applications. The optimized elastomeric electrodes will be characterized for biocompatibility, stability and electrical properties. Methodology will be developed for fabricating prosthetic electrodes for extensive in vitro pulsing studies and acute animal testing. Finally, test protocols for the new electrode products will be established in an effort to obtain FDA approval. The commercial applications of this project will be in the area of biomedical devices and systems that serve the needs of disabled individuals following stroke or spinal cord injury doc22831 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Chemistry and Medical School Departments at the University of North Dakota will acquire a high-resolution tandem mass spectrometer (MS MS, QQTOF geometry) with an atmospheric pressure ionization (API) source. The system will be interfaced to liquid chromatography (LC MS MS). This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) the identification of selenium-containing proteins and related compounds in plants and in biological functions once they have been consumed; b) studies on the dopamine transporter protein; c) analysis of the biochemistry of 4-hydroxy-2-nonenal (HNE) and its metabolites; d) characterization of suprachoroidal fluid in chick eyes; and e) synthesis of C-glycosides, C-disaccharides, and related compounds. Liquid chromatography with mass spectrometric detection (LC-MS) is an extremely powerful technique used for the separation and analysis of complex mixtures. This will be the first instrument with high resolution MS and tandem MS capabilities in the entire state of North Dakota. These studies will have a strong impact in biochemistry doc22832 none A grant has been awarded to The Cleveland Museum of Natural History (CMNH)under the direction of Drs. Keiper, Hannibal, Latimer and Matson to obtain the components for a computer-enhanced specimen analysis station. This will entail integrating two microscopes (one compound microscope and one dissection microscope), macrophotography equipment, a three-dimensional digitizer, a high resolution VCR, and a sound lab with two networked computers. These instruments will allow museum personnel, and their college and high school students, graduate students, colleagues, and visiting scientists, to accurately identify, study, and catalog research specimens housed at CMNH. New equipment will allow for more efficient computer cataloging, more accurate analysis of specimens (including, but limited to, animal, plant, fossil, mineralogical, archaeological, and anthropological materials), and open up new avenues of research for CMNH that will be enhanced with modern computer software capabilities. This equipment will improve the research capabilities of The Cleveland Museum of Natural History. It will facilitate analyses and new scientific discoveries by museum staff, students, and associates from multiple disciplines. Analysis of paleontological and anthropological materials will reveal new insights into the evolutionary history of a variety of organisms. The equipment will promote discoveries of new information on biological organisms necessary for conservation efforts, including survey work, animal ecology, and descriptions of new species and life stages. Because the public will be able to view ongoing work and observe computer-enhanced specimen analysis though a monitor, this project will promote public awareness of scientific research in museums doc22833 none This proposal provides funds for the purchase of a solid-state, frequency-stabilized, single-mode cw laser system that will have several applications within the context of an undergraduate research and education program. The laser will be used to pump a 12 femtosecond Ti:sapphire laser for the research purpose of probing and modifying collective motion of atoms in solids using shaped pulses, ultra-short pulses, and optical control feedback techniques based on genetic algorithms. The educational applications focus on optical trapping and acceleration of particles via a laser-tweezer technique, interferometry, and non-linear optics doc22834 none This Small Buisness Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project addresses the urgent need to improve control of the blast chemical reaction. These blasts are produced by drilling boreholes into the overburden and filling them with an ammonium nitrate fuel oil (ANFO) mixture. These explosive charges are then ignited to push the overburden into a previously excavated trench. This Phase II project will complete the design, fabrication, and testing of a prototype detonation system to be deployed in surface mining boreholes to preferentially initiate detonation of the powder column, thus insuring a high efficiency blast without the unwanted release of toxic air pollutants. This project will lead to commercialization of a method of improving the efficiency and environmental quality of the cast blasting technique used by the surface mining. The market for this detonation system is any mining that involves cast blasting, primarily the surface coal mining industry. The United States is one of the two world leaders in coal production with nearly one billion tons of coal being produced in doc22835 none Research diving over the last two decades has yielded important insights into the ecological importance of giant ( 1 mm) Foraminifera in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. Unfortunately, due to logistics constraints the in-situ behavior of these single-celled organisms and their interactions within the food web can be observed only in snapshots during summer dives, when algal production is at a maximum in conditions of 24-hour light. Much would be learned by observing Foraminifera over extended periods of time, to study mobility, response to food availability, and other directed behaviors. It would be very valuable to be able to extend observations to the winter months, in order to study these organisms under dark conditions with no algal production, and to experimentally manipulate in situ conditions and observe the behavioral response. Research diving requires costly support and cannot provide extended observation of individual organisms. Currently, logistical requirements, costs, complexities, and risks of winter diving at remote locations in Antarctica are prohibitive. However, manned diving is not required in order to make long-term in-situ observations. Technology and communications have advanced to the point where it is feasible and practical to install video macro- and micro-view cameras in a submersible enclosure, transmitting both live and sequential time-lapse images over the Internet to a remote user throughout the year. Such an instrumentation platform could then be used for experimental manipulation of the environment. The objective of this proposal is to develop a submersible, remotely-operable underwater observatory for the study of Foraminifera and associated benthic fauna. This observatory would be connected to a shoreline unit by fiber-optic cable and linked by radio to the Internet for year-round access. The design and operation of this observatory will function as a technology template to meet other year-round Antarctic research requirements by means of telescience rather than personnel deployment doc22367 none Large scale utility electrical power transmission systems such as the power system of the Western United States can and do suffer cascading events leading to widespread blackouts. These blackouts severely impact the public, commerce, and government and are a vulnerability in the nation s infrastructure. Rather than focusing on the detailed causes of individual blackouts, this project addresses the global, complex system dynamics of a long series of blackouts. New models, simulation and analysis methods will be developed to capture the essentials of criticality, self-organization and cascading failure. Particular attention will be given to the power tails of probability distributions of blackout sizes that occur in North American blackout data and generally in systems at criticality. These power tails imply that large, catastrophic blackouts are much more likely than predicted by conventional risk analyses. The project will develop new risk analysis methods and explore operating techniques to mitigate the risks of major blackouts. Communication networks such as the Internet also develop major cascading disruptions and work will also be pursued in this application to maintain some focus on universal features of disruptions in large, engineered networks of societal importance. The expected outcomes are the ability to understand, statistically analyze and to some extent mitigate major cascading disruptions in power transmission and communication networks. The scientific outcomes are an improved understanding and new application of complex system dynamics to the engineering and analysis of stressed networks. Educational outcomes include the training of undergraduate and graduate students in a multidisciplinary team doc22837 none Chernyak The PIs propose the acquisition of a state-of-the-art cathodoluminescence instrument which will enable nano-scale resolution optical measurements in-situ in a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). The Gatan MonoCL3 system for high-resolution cathodoluminescence (CL) imaging and spectroscopy will be integrated into a Philips XL3O TMP SEM operating in the PI s laboratory. The SEM by itself has been extensively employed in Electron Beam Induced Current (EBIC) and in-situ electrical measurements of III-Nitride nanostructures. The cathodoluminescence setup is critical, since it provides nanoscale information on optical properties, composition, and defect distribution. The CL instrument is equipped with a high efficiency collector, which is optimized for the SEM, and transfers light to an integrated spectrometer. Therefore, CL signals at the single photon level can be detected and low electron beam currents be used. The spatial resolution in CL measurements is determined by the range (penetration depth) of electrons from the SEM beam in the material, which depends on the accelerating voltage. Thus, a sampling range of 10 nm is achieved in III-Nitrides with a voltage of ~ 1 keV. The cathodoluminescence spectroscopy system will significantly enhance cross-departmental research projects focused on III-Nitride semiconductors and novel materials. These include studies of the fundamental effects, induced by electron injection in GaN and related compounds, as well as device applications. For instance, the efficiency of GaN photodetectors is determined by minority carrier transport, which will be investigated by combining in-situ electrical and cathodoluminescence measurements in the SEM. The broader impact of the new equipment will be the deeper understanding of electron interaction with semiconductors and nanostructrures as well as the integration of research and education in the graduate and undergraduate learning environment. Acquisition of the CL system will foster several research programs in advanced materials, which are currently funded or under consideration for funding, as well as partnership with industry. Drs. Chernyak and Schulte have established major activity [I -9] related to the UV-Florida program, which unites efforts of Uniroyal Optoelectronics and several Florida Universities, including the University of Central Florida, in the development of efficient A1GaN-based multiple quantum well light emitting diodes. Since Uniroyal has specifically expressed an interest in the proposed cathodoluminescence setup, there are clear benefits for this academia-industry partnership. The new instrumentation enables outstanding research and education opportunities for students in nanoscale experimental techniques. The UV-Florida program currently supports 5 graduate students whose rotations have been coordinated by the PI. It is anticipated that at least 15 more faculty and students (including undergraduates) will use the equipment. Knowledge of the state-of-the-art cathodoluminescence applications will broaden the students career options with the high-tech companies in the Central Florida 14-corridor doc22838 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) and Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Programs, Prof. Mark A. Berg of the University of South Carolina will develop a state-of-the-art 2D vibrational spectrometer for materials characterization based on NMR analogs. Two-dimensional vibrational spectroscopy can be used to directly probe the inter- and intramolecular vibrational coupling patterns in complex molecular systems. The 2D vibrational spectrometer combining infrared and Raman lasers can be used to study time-resolved structural evolutions of various systems including protein-ligand, organic-inorganic materials and other systems. Thus it promises to be one of the major experimental tools in characterizing the molecular nature of functional materials such as conjugated polyenes, in determining ultrafast dynamics of protein and protein-ligand binding processes, and in studying microscopic solvation dynamics by directly probing the real-time dynamics of solvent molecules close to solute molecules. These studies will have important consequences in each of the above areas, and accelerate the national development of two dimensional vibrational spectroscopy, an important emerging area. In addition, student participants will be exposed to a wide range of techniques doc22839 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire will acquire a Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometer and sampling accessories. This instrument will support research in a number of areas, including a) fundamental vibrational spectroscopy to determine molecular structures; b) investigations of protein structure, dynamics and interactions with surfaces; and c) inorganic synthesis, aimed at modeling enzyme functions, as well as developing catalysts for organic reactions and olefin polymerization processes. The general effectiveness of Fourier transform spectroscopic techniques in academic and industrial research has been firmly established. Many advanced spectroscopic courses now routinely include the teaching of FT spectroscopy. These studies will have an impact in areas such as surface science, catalysis, materials science and biochemistry doc22840 none Thompson This proposal is for the acquisition of instrumentation that can be used to measure the carbon-14 isotope. The equipment will support undergraduate research activities in Seattle University s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The research activities discussed in this proposal seek to study uptake and transformation of the explosives RDX (hexahydro-1,3,5-trinitro-1,3,5-triazine) and HMX (octahydro-1,3,5,7- tetranitro-1,3,5,7-tetrazocine) by plants. The requested equipment will enable mass balances on [U- 14 C]RDX and [U- 14 C]HMX to be performed which will in turn determine the transport and fate of the explosives in plant tissues. Previous plant uptake studies with RDX and HMX have indicated an undesirable tendency to accumulate in the leaves of plant tissues with slow rates of transformation. This project will explore two ways in which to decrease RDX and HMX accumulation in plants and thus increase the applicability of phytoremediation of these compounds doc22841 none This Major Research Instrumentation award to University of California at San Diego provides funds for developments that will improve the capabilities of eighty ocean bottom seismometers operated by Scripps Institution of Oceanography as part of the NSF-funded national Ocean Bottom Seismometer Instrument Pool. The seismometers will be outfitted with rechargeable battery packs, radio beacons for location during recovery, and Ethernet cards with flash memory to improve data downloading, and reduce noise and power consumption. The award is supported by the Division of Ocean Sciences at NSF. Scripps Institution will provide cost-share support from non-federal funds for more than 30% of equipment costs doc22842 none Nuclear Astrophysics has developed a very successful model of stellar nova explosions based on a series of reactions in which protons are captured by atomic nuclei and high-energy electromagnetic radiation is released in the form of gamma rays. The probabilities of these reactions determine the time scale for the stellar explosion events and are unknown in many cases. The measurement of these probabilities is a prominent research subject at a number of research facilities around the world. In many of these studies, a high-efficiency gamma-ray detection system would provide a great increase in sensitivity for these measurements. The aim of this project is to establish an efficient and versatile gamma-detector system which will be used for experimental research in nuclear physics and nuclear astrophysics. The system will be used at several laboratories (most of which are capable of producing exotic ion beams) in the United States in conjunction with charged-particle detector systems and spectrometers. The components of the detector system will be maintained and calibrated with the help of Undergraduate students at Purdue University Calumet. The students will learn essential skills and techniques of modern Nuclear Physics experiments, and will assist in the setup of the detector array in collaboration with researchers at Florida State University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Michigan State University, and Argonne National Laboratory doc22843 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Washington and Jefferson College will acquire a400 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will facilitate the following studies: a) characterization of polymers, specifically by studying the aging phenomena of solicone elastomers; b) design and synthesis of potential metallomesogens; and c) synthesis of new DNA analogs with an amide linkage. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including materials chemistry and biochemistry doc22844 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will demonstrate a capability for locating imperiled firefighters in buildings using wireless technology based on long wavelength signals that penetrate buildings with lower perturbation than observed at higher frequencies. The system is being developed for firefighters (estimated 5 year market of over $150 million) but is useful for any application requiring geolocation in buildings where GPS cannot work. Such applications include tracking personnel and equipment in crisis situations, military combat, inventory management and police and military training. This concept has significant advantages over competing technologies; ultra-wideband solutions pose frequency licensing problems, and man-portable inertial units are bulky, costly and have significant time-dependent errors. The Wireless Firefighter Lifeline (WFL) system is completely mobile and supports multiple firefighters. It complies with Part 15 rules and will not require FCC licenses. Phase II will demonstrate the underlying technology over a wide range of conditions and will produce a prototype system that will serve as the baseline for future system development. It provides extensive commercial and societal benefit, offers performance superior to that of other potential technologies, and is well positioned to attract further funding doc22845 none PROJECT SUMMARY A grant has been awarded to Dr. James T. Stivers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine to purchase a Varian 750 MHz NMR spectrometer equipped with a triple resonance probe, to upgrade existing 500 MHz and 600 MHz instruments with present generation consoles, and to purchase an additional high sensitivity triple resonance probe with a tunable X channel for the existing 500 MHz instrument. . These spectrometers will be located at the NMR facility, and will be used to significantly advance fundamental research into the structure, mechanism and dynamics of biological macromolecules using multi-dimensional heteronuclear NMR methods. This acquisition will allow the research programs of six primary NMR investigators to take advantage of revolutionary magnet and probe technologies that are essential for studying large biological molecules under dilute conditions. The 750 MHz spectrometer with cryoprobe will provide a significant increase in chemical shift dispersion and sensitivity that is essential for studying denatured states of proteins, aliphatic proton regions of nucleic acids, and obtaining spectral resolution of native 20-40 kDa proteins and large protein and protein-DNA complexes that are now under study. The 750 MHz spectrometer cryoprobe system will allow NMR data to be acquired with sensitivity that is over 4-fold greater than the spectrometers currently being used, and will enhance the measurement of residual dipolar couplings in macromolecules. This technology will also allow the study of biological molecules that are currently inaccessible due to inherent weakness of the NMR signals, low solubility, low sample availability, or short-lived stability. The types of NMR experiments that will be enhanced using the new NMR systems will include the complete array of double and triple resonance heteronuclear experiments using isotopically 13C, 15N and or 2H labeled protein and nucleic acid samples. In addition, the 750 MHz spectrometer will be used for homonuclear 1H experiments, such as DQF-COSY, TOCSY and NOESY on macromolecules that may be difficult to isotope label, or in situations where resolution is critical, such as the heavily overlapped sugar proton regions of nucleic acids, or the aromatic regions of proteins. The NMR experiments will be used to obtain chemical shift assignments, measure structural restraints for macromolecular samples in the form of NOE derived distances, J-coupling derived dihedral angles, and using residual dipolar couplings derived atomic vectors and alignment tensors. Additionally, heteronuclear NMR experiments will be used to study both fast (ps) and slower (ms to ms) dynamics in macromolecular systems. These instruments will be used to facilitate NMR studies on biological macromolecules and their complexes in efforts to probe the physical and chemical basis for protein and nucleic acid function. We anticipate that these fundamental discoveries will impact protein engineering efforts, protein fold predictions, as well as our ability to target enzymes with small molecule inhibitors and activators. The upgraded NMR facility will enhance student training by providing a user friendly instrument, and ample user time that is required for student researchers to become comfortable in the execution of modern NMR experiments. The participating investigators will initiate a new course covering the basics of executing homonuclear and heteronuclear NMR experiments on these new instruments. This course will augment the existing graduate curriculum, and will attract advanced undergraduate students from local universities, including minority serving inttitutuons doc22846 none Torres-Lugo Faculty at UPRM involved in biotechnology and related areas have access to the Department of Biology Microscopy Center (DBMC), located in the Physics Building, which houses a scanning electron microscope (SEM) and a fluorescent microscope. The addition of a confocal laser microscope to the DBMC would provide a new state-of-the-art microscopy visualization tool to the life sciences and biotechnology research community at UPRM and the island of Puerto Rico doc22847 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program supports scientists at Penn State University to develop new atomic resolution scanning probe optical spectroscopies by combining the spatial resolution of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) with well-established, readily interpreted near ultraviolet, visible and infrared spectroscopies. A vital missing piece in the vast majority of scanning probe measurements is the ability to make unambiguous interpretations of images and chemical assignments of adsorbates. The researchers focus on adding spectroscopies that are already well established for ensemble-averaged measurements that can accomplish these assignments, specifically ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) and infrared (IR) spectroscopies. By coupling IR and optical spectroscopies with a local probe, the researchers will gain the ability to characterize and to identify individual nanostructures and even individual molecules and atoms based on their optical and electronic properties. This work will advance the state of the art in nanometer-scale science, measurement, and analysis. Optical spectroscopies provide well-understood methods to determine chemical identity and bonding changes and to determine electronic structure using IR and UV-Vis excitation, respectively. These capabilities will be combined to create a local optical spectrometer in the near UV, visible and IR, with wide applications in surface and interface science. Evanescent coupling will be utilized to deliver photons to the tunneling junction, using the STM tip as a detector. The surfaces studied will be well characterized, as they will be grown epitaxially on a variety of prisms. These experiments will complement the recently built dispersed photon emission STM built under the auspices of an instrument development grant from the NSF Divisions of Materials Research and Chemistry. These instruments will then be transitioned to the broader scientific community after development and optimization. Two talented graduate students and an undergraduate will participate in the fabrication of the new instruments. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program supports scientists at Penn State University to develop new atomic resolution scanning probe optical spectroscopies by combining the spatial resolution of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) with well-established, readily interpreted near ultraviolet, visible and infrared spectroscopies. A vital missing piece in the vast majority of scanning probe measurements is the ability to make unambiguous interpretations of images and chemical assignments of adsorbates. The researchers focus on adding spectroscopies that are already well established for ensemble-averaged measurements that can accomplish these assignments, specifically ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) and infrared (IR) spectroscopies. By coupling IR and optical spectroscopies with a local probe, the researchers will gain the ability to characterize and to identify individual nanostructures and even individual molecules and atoms based on their optical and electronic properties. This work will advance the state of the art in nanometer-scale science, measurement, and analysis. These instruments will then be transitioned to the broader scientific community after development and optimization. Two talented graduate students and an undergraduate will participate in the fabrication of the new instruments doc22848 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program supports Wayne State University with the acquisition of a 200 kV Transmission Electron Microscope for interdisciplinary materials research and education at the institution. The proposed instrument will have wide accessibility to campus researchers and will be used as a central analytical tool for many NSF-funded nanomaterials research projects in the departments of Chemistry, Engineering, and Physics and the Institute for Manufacturing Research. Research areas that will be supported by the proposed instrument include discrete nanoparticle synthesis, nanostructure by design, and materials processing and manufacturing. The instrument will impact areas as diverse as solid state physics, materials science, electrical engineering, chemistry, and medical science. All of the Principal Investigators are currently supported by NSF (and other) grants. Furthermore, this instrument will be an important resource for the training and education of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers. Finally, this instrument will be accessible to local high technology startup companies and industry, and should play a key role in economic development and new job creation in southeast Michigan. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program supports Wayne State University with the acquisition of a transmission electron microscope for interdisciplinary materials research and education. An electron microscope is required to allow visualization of nanometer-sized materials that are prepared in many research projects that are being conducted at Wayne State University. The instrument will have wide accessibility to campus researchers and will be used as a central analytical tool for many NSF-funded nanomaterials research projects in the departments of Chemistry, Engineering, and Physics and the Institute for Manufacturing Research. Furthermore, this instrument will be an important resource for the training and education of our undergraduate and graduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers. Finally, this instrument will be accessible to local high technology startup companies and industry, and should play a key role in economic development and new job creation in southeast Michigan doc22849 none LAY SUMMARY Males and females typically resemble one another in some ways and differ in others. Differences may arise because one sex is subject to greater reproductive competition than the other (sexual selection) or because the sexes differ in their ecology (natural selection). Because males and females share a common genome, they are also subject to correlated selection, which occurs when genetic variants directly favored by selection in one sex ( like father, like son ) are carried along in the other sex ( like father, like daughter ). Correlated selection can hasten evolution if attributes directly favored in one sex also benefit the other, or it may serve as a constraint when the attributes are disadvantageous to the second sex. Proximate mechanisms underlying sex differences and resemblances include developmental programs, steroid hormones, and steroid-independent differences in gene expression that lead to sexually differentiated tissues. Gonadal steroids can act early in development to organize tissues so that they are or are (or are not) responsive to activation by a steroid later in life. Gonadal steroids can also affect the sexes as adults, and, when their effects are similar, there is potential for correlated selection. The focus of this proposal is the steroid hormone, testosterone, and its integrating effect on sex differences and resemblances in adult males and females of a songbird species, the dark-eyed junco. The research has four objectives: (1) to assess the role of testosterone in sexual integration by comparing natural profiles of male and female hormone levels, hormonal response of females to stimuli known to increase T in males, and hormone levels in females that do and do not produce young by extra-pair fertilizations (EPFs). Resemblance between the sexes will reveal the potential for correlated selection. (2) to alter the level of circulating testosterone experimentally and compare effects of altered testosterone in females to previous results from males. Individual experiments will address whether elevated testosterone in females alters attractiveness to males (sexual selection) and whether it affects parental behavior, social status, or immune function (natural selection). They will also address interactions between testosterone, corticosterone, corticosteroid binding globulins. (3) to determine whether female responses to altered testosterone are beneficial, neutral, or detrimental in the field. If the sexes constrain one another, alterations that are beneficial in one sex should be detrimental in the other. If the sexes reinforce one another, alterations may be beneficial in both sexes. If the sexes are independent, then alterations already known to be beneficial or detrimental in males may have no fitness consequences for females. (4) to compare how degree of relatedness affects a sexually selected trait and two hormone-related traits. Juncos of known genetic relatedness will be assessed for family resemblance in measures of body size and a plumage trait that affects attractiveness. Additional juncos will be reared and compared for three hormonally mediated traits. The presence of a genetic correlation would predict correlated selection; the absence of one would predict sexual independence. Research described in this proposal will provide opportunities for training future scientists of diverse backgrounds in the conduct of laboratory and field experiments that address the integration of proximate and ultimate explanations for biological differences. It will also enrich graduate and undergraduate courses taught at Indiana University. Potential societal implications of the findings to be expected include (1) importance of hormonally active agents in the environment, (2) improved methods for breeding captive songbirds for conservation, and (3) a greater understanding of the relationship between sex and gender doc22850 none The objective of this Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) award is the acquisition of equipment to evaluate and characterize plastic materials and packaging in support of a new Integrated Plastics Science Center at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The equipment includes a computer-controlled Fourier Transform Infrared spectrophotometer to fingerprint polymers; a computer-controlled Differential Scanning Calorimeter to assess thermal characteristics such as glass transition temperatures and melting points, a chamber for material testing of the tensile strength of plastics under different temperatures and relative humidity; an Oxtran 2 20 to measure the oxygen permeability of films and containers; and a Permatran 3 30 to evaluate water vapor transmission. The equipment will be used to develop innovative applied research projects as part of a multidisciplinary curriculum. The principal benefit of this proposal is student participation in innovative applied research that cuts across disciplines and addresses the kinds of problems they will face in technological careers in the plastics and packaging industries. Students will have hands on experience with advanced equipment and gain a better understanding of the principles of polymers and plastics in a multidisciplinary environment that mirrors industry. This approach will generate better prepared scientists, technologists and managers for an increasingly competitive global industry. A second benefit is the potential the equipment offers for the creation of new courses and the improvement of existing courses, leading to the participation of more students in graduate and doctoral studies. The equipment also will open up new possibilities for collaborative research with the food, pharmaceutical, automotive, and plastic-recycling industries, improving the quality of graduates entering the workforce and the international competitiveness of key industries doc22851 none Although rare relative to other social systems, cooperative breeding species present unique opportunities to examine hypotheses explaining the evolution of cooperation and competition in kin-based societies. Early studies focused on the adaptive significance of alloparental care. Specifically, why did mature adults remain in their natal groups helping to raise offspring not their own? For various species of birds and a few mammals, substantial progress has been made in addressing the original question of why helpers help. By staying at home, alloparents often improve their chances of finding a breeding opportunity and receive gains in indirect fitness. Early research on callitrichid primates (marmosets, tamarins and lion tamarins) in captivity suggested that social and genetic monogamy was the norm for the family but recent reports from the wild and in captive settings suggested that callitrichid social organization is highly flexible, both within populations and across taxa. This variability provides fertile ground for testing hypotheses concerning the basis of reproductive skew and delayed dispersal. Dietz, Baker and colleagues propose a 3-year continuation of behavioral and demographic research on golden lion tamarin monkeys in Poco das Antas Reserve, Brazil. This 17-year study is unique in terms of its ability to address questions at the population level and in its scope, maintaining an integrated set of databases including behavior, demography, kinship, morphology, reproduction, use of space, group dynamics, food habits and samples of blood, hair and feces. During the first 13 years of this research, lion tamarin territories occupied all suitable habitat in the reserve, most groups contained several helpers and population growth was limited by high mortality during dispersal from natal groups. In the past three years a novel form of predation, decimation of complete groups while in den sites, resulted in profound changes in the social, experiential and demographic context of individuals surviving in the study population. Population density, group size and number of helpers decreased, and the rate of group extinction recolonization increased. In effect, this pulse of increased predation resulted in a unique natural experiment. Relative to conditions before increased predation, Poco das Antas now contains more breeding opportunities for dispersing individuals, less competition to fill those slots and fewer alloparents to care for group offspring. By comparing patterns of dispersal and reproductive sharing before and after increased predation, and by integrating molecular genetic and endocrine techniques with field data, these investigators propose to determine if tamarins are assessing the availability and quality of reproductive opportunities outside the natal group, the extent to which ecological constraints affect dispersal and reproductive sharing, the effects of genetic relatedness on subordinate breeding, the relative effects of inbreeding avoidance and age on reproductive skew, and the circumstances and mechanisms by which dominants control reproduction of subordinates. Finally, the presence of this NSF-sponsored project provides resources, prestige and incentive to the Brazilian government agency managing the reserve and serves as a platform for training Brazilian and American biologists at all professional levels. Results of this research form the scientific basis for management of all four taxa of lion tamarins and were used to justify the creation of a new biological reserve and to inform and implement local projects including reforestation, planting of forest corridors, conservation education, reintroduction and translocation doc22852 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Vincent P. Markowski at the University of Southern Maine to equip a shared microscopy center. A critical element in developing a strong program of research and research training at publicly funded universities involves the acquisition of modern equipment available to faculty and their research trainees. The purchase of a confocal laser scanning microscope and a Fluorescence Research photomicroscope will greatly enhance the fluorescence microscopy capabilities of current University of Southern Maine faculty and will also serve the needs of new faculty being recruited into the recently formed multidisciplinary Bioscience Research Institute of Southern Maine. The confocal laser scanning microscope with its coherent light sources and the capability of rejecting out-of-focus interference will permit investigators to obtain clear images of optical sections and will permit three dimensional image analysis of specimens that would be impossible to effectively examine using conventional epifluorescence microscopy. Advanced capabilities such as time-lapse observation of fluorescent events will also significantly extend currently available imaging resources. The versatile fluorescence system will complement the confocal system. Acquisition of this instrumentation will allow the laboratory of Dr. Vincent Markowski to identify immunohistochemical effects from the crop fungicide vinclozolin. The laboratory of Dr. Michael Godard will use the instrumentation to examine the contractile mechanics of skeletal single muscle fiber samples. The laboratory of Dr. S. Monroe Dubois will use the instrumentation to gain new insights into the biology of gamma-herpesvirus persistence. High resolution optical sectioning of tissues will allow studies aimed at cellular localization and molecular interactions of viral gene products, temporal and cell type specificity of viral gene expression, and cellular signaling in virus infected cells. The laboratory of Dr. Stephen Pelsue will use the instrumentation to study the cellular localization and molecular interactions of a transcription factor. Analysis of translocation and activation of other transcription factors as well as B lymphocyte apoptosis will also be examined with confocal microscopy. A significant goal of the University of Southern Maine is to become one of the top-ranked, regional comprehensive universities in the nation by . In this endeavor USM is working to significantly expand academic programs in science and technology. In keeping with these two institutional goals, faculty are committed to prepare the next generation of American scientists in a modern scientific setting and to stress to our students, through active research, the importance of scientific inquiry. The acquisition of the desired instrumentation will substantially increase research productivity, research training and the success of external research support and funding. Furthermore, through the use of the proposed instrumentation, students who receive research training under the supervision of a particular Bioscience faculty member will have the opportunity to collaborate with undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty from other departments, thus extending the breadth of student research training and promoting the concept of interdisciplinary research in the next generation of scientists doc22853 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will replace current environmentally damaging metal pretreatment processes with an environmentally benign process whereby the metal surface is etched then coated with a sub-micron film of plasma polymerized SiO2. Current metal pretreatment processes for painting and adhesive bonding perform well, but generate tremendous volumes of wastes, including hexavalent chromium and various inorganic acids. To obtain performance superior to the current state-of-the-art wet chemical surface treatments, the surface chemistry and morphology of the plasma polymerized films need to be tailored for specific interactions with the adhesive. Effects of variables including substrate chemistry, monomer chemistry, and ion kinetic energy on surface chemistry and morphology of plasma polymers will be determined. Then, the effect of the resulting structure on the strength and durability of adhesive joints will be determined. By combining in-situ analytical techniques with accelerated aging and mechanical testing of adhesive specimens, a superior, environmentally benign process based on plasma polymerization will be developed and commercialized. These primers will have well understood morphologies and surface compositions tailored to the adhesive chemistry through control of the deposition conditions and or chemical derivitization of the plasma polymer surface doc22854 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program supports the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign with the purchase of a time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometer (TOF-SIMS). The TOF-SIMS system will be capable of ultra-sensitive surface and in-depth analysis at high mass resolution, high lateral resolution and high molecular weight detection. The instrument will be equipped with a UHV sample preparation chamber to perform in-situ experiments of film growth and surface treatments. The proposed instrument will be equipped with a cold stage to meet the needs of users in the expanding research area of biomaterials. The TOF-SIMS will be located in the Center for Microanalysis of Materials (CMM) which is part of the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory (FSMRL) located on the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois. The FSMRL is an interdisciplinary research unit that has been very successful in enabling cross-disciplinary research and collaboration involving about 130 faculty research groups distributed among seven academic departments. The TOF-SIMS is critical to many research programs active at the University of Illinois such as: (1) Nanobiology Assays; (2) Molecular Engineering; (3) Growth of Individual Neurons in a Living, Cultured Neural Network; (4) Silicon Nanotransitors; (5) quantum wire structures; (6) Nanoscale Quantum Dot Heterostructures; (7) Alternative Gate Dielectrics; (8) p-doping of GaN-based Nitride Semiconductors with Mg; Failure mechanisms in transition-metal (TM) nitride diffusion barriers and corrosion-resistant layers; (9) Microchemistry of large area solar cell materials. In addition to the above programs, the new instrument will see widespread use in many other graduate research and education programs. It is estimated that annually 50-75 researchers will directly utilize the TOF-SIMS in their programs. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program supports the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign with the purchase of a time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometer (TOF-SIMS). The TOF-SIMS system will be capable of ultra-sensitive surface and in-depth analysis at high mass resolution, high lateral resolution and high molecular weight detection. The instrument will be equipped with an ultra high vacuum sample preparation chamber to perform in-situ experiments of film growth and surface treatments. The instrument will be equipped with a cold stage to meet the needs of users in the expanding research area of biomaterials. The TOF-SIMS will be located in the Center for Microanalysis of Materials (CMM) which is part of the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory (FSMRL) located on the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois. The FSMRL is an interdisciplinary research unit that has been very successful in enabling cross-disciplinary research and collaboration involving about 130 faculty research groups distributed among seven academic departments. In addition, the new instrument will see widespread use in many other graduate research and education programs. It is estimated that annually 50-75 researchers will directly utilize the TOF-SIMS doc22855 none Browsky Tabin The long term goal of this research is to understand the nature of the developmental genetic differences that make all individuals of a species unique, and distinguish the various species from one another. Towards this end, differences between two types of fishes that are closely related, but genetically distinct, will be studied. The Mexican tetra, Astyanax mexicanus, has some populations that live in rivers and others that live in caves. Cave forms differ from their surface relatives by having greatly reduced eyes and pigmentation. The caves in which they live provide little food and they have adapted to this by developing a slower metabolism. Other senses are overdeveloped to compensate for the lack of vision: e.g., smell, taste and the ability to detect vibration and current. Not only can they survive eternal darkness, they thrive in caves. The genome of this species will be mapped at a fine scale using microsatellite DNA markers, in hybrids between the cave and surface forms. The map and further analysis of the hybrids will permit the detection and characterization of genes (QTL) that are responsible for the differences between cave and surface forms. The results will give estimates of the genetic architecture of trait differences: the number of genes involved and magnitudes of their individual effects, and their positions in the genome relative to one another. Positional information of some of the major effect QTL will be used to identify and clone the genes; this will facilitate their functional analysis. The results will shed light on the genetic pathways involved in development and maintenance of complex traits, like the vertebrate eye and other aspects of the sensory system, control of pigmentation, behavior and metabolism. The results will also inform on the nature of genetic differences distinguishing populations and species, and on the constraints on evolutionary change resulting from trait correlations doc22856 none Draine, Bruce T. The Principal Investigator and his team will create a powerful parallel-processing facility for research in astrophysics on problems, which do not require shared memory or ultra-fast inter-processor communication. Studies will include: Light scattering from irregular interstellar grains, cosmological structure formation, dynamical evolution of gaseous protoplanetary accretion disks, and several other compelling astronomical sciences research topics. The system will contain 96 dual CPU slave systems with a total of 192 Central Processing Units, and 192 gigabytes of RAM with a 3.8 TB disk doc22857 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project continue the development and commercialization of novel plasma display panels which utilize gas filled microspheres (Plasma-spheres) as the pixel elements. The project has six objectives: (a) improve process control of the Plasma-sphere production system, (b) produce Plasma-spheres with optimum properties and characteristics, (d) develop reliable microsphere-electrode configurations, (e) develop a semi-automated process for fabricating Plasma-sphere panels, (f) construct and evaluate prototype plasma-sphere panels, and (g) determine techniques for a fully automated production process. The Plasma-spheres will be produced with a prototype production system built in Phase I. The Plasma-sphere panels will be characterized for operating voltages, current and brightness. As part of the prototype panel construction a reliable method of applying the Plasma-spheres to substrates will be developed. The use of Plasma-spheres will dramatically increase manufacturing throughput, reduce materials cost by half, and eliminate many process steps and expensive specialized machinery which are part of the current plasma panel technology. These cost reductions along with new applications which will result from the availability of an open flexible substrate (e.g., large conformal and panoramic displays), will provide Plasma-sphere panels with a significant competitive edge doc22858 none A Scanning Probe Microscopy (SPM) facility for the improvement of research and student learning at Wayne State University (WSU) will be established through this grant. The major instrument to be purchased, Dimension SPM with Nanoscope IV control station, will be shared among researchers from five departments spanning two colleges. This investment addresses a critical need for surface characterization in many projects funded by the National Science Foundation at WSU and provides an advanced tool for materials study in our undergraduate and graduate curricula. Nanoscale science and engineering has emerged as a principal research thrust at WSU as evidenced by well-funded efforts in 1) nanoparticles, nanostructures, and devices for optical and magnetic applications, 2) protein, tissue, and biomaterial coating and engineering, and 3) encapsulation using biological or biologically inspired materials. In each of these domains, the SPM technique is an indispensable tool for elucidating and comprehending structure at the nanometer scale. The establishment of a centralized SPM laboratory with an additional SPM instrument with new, state-of-the-art features should allow us to build on our current strengths in interfacial and nanostructured materials research, increase individual research productivities, and foster collaborative research. A laboratory dedicated to SPM research will be established in the WSU College of Engineering to house the Dimension SPM and the current Nanoscope IIIa SPM. This laboratory will be made accessible to all principal investigators and other users. The computers will be networked so that the SPM image files can be easily accessed. This updated SPM facility will complement other existing material characterization instrumentation such as NMR, mass spectrometry, X-ray crystallography, optical microscopy and spectroscopy, and scanning electron microscopy. A microscopist at the postdoctoral level will be hired in order to oversee the installation, maintenance, and training of researchers The estimated number of researchers and students impacted by this proposal annually consists of 11 senior users, 5 postdoctoral associates, 20 graduate students, and over 100 undergraduate students. The impacted external research funding amounts to approximately $1,000,000 annually doc22859 none This Major Research Instrumentation RUI grant supports acquisition of a desk top x-ray diffractometer that will be used in materials science and solid-state chemistry research at Jackson State University, an undergraduate, teaching-oriented university. This diffractometer does not require water cooling and is sufficiently simple that undergraduate students can use it after a short training period. The diffractometer will be used in teaching laboratories as well as in research. The research is varied. One example is exploring new forms of silicon, including amorphous silicon that contains on the order of 40% molecular hydrogen. New open framework structures such as silicon-germanium and tin clathrates will also be characterized. This equipment will see shared use with the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Auburn University. It should enhance the on-going collaborations between the three universities. The equipment will also be used as a demonstration tool for high school students in collaboration with a program called Alabama Science in Motion and will be employed in the continuing education Masters Program for local high school teachers doc22860 none With support from a National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation award, the economics faculty at Morehouse College will develop a research computer laboratory to improve the quality and scope of research activities in economics and other related disciplines. The research computer lab will enhance the economics department s capacity to model and investigate substantive economic and social issues using national and international data sets employing well-designed econometric models. The department also will rely on this broadened instrumentation to augment student research within specific courses. Faculty and student researchers will carry out econometrics projects in urban economics, international economics, macroeconomics, public finance, economic development, environmental and health economics, labor economics and other socioeconomic research. The effort to significantly improve the number of computer applications for both student and faculty research is central to the department s strategic plan to strengthen economics and business education at Morehouse College, and to increase the number of Morehouse graduates pursuing graduate training in economics, public policy, and international affairs. Thus, in addition to strengthening the economics curriculum, this effort will significantly expand the amount of computer-based student research vital to increasing the pool of undergraduates applying to graduate programs. The lab also will be available to students and faculty in the political science department s Brisbane Institute, which will utilize the facility to conduct voting and political behavior research. In addition, the computer research lab will help the Division of Economics and Business address important social issues across the entire economics and business curriculum. Within the division, the marketing research course will utilize the econometrics research lab, as will the management faculty and students who do behavioral and social research. This lab, therefore, will be an important tool for the growth and development of the economic research program, related divisional business research, and political behavior research efforts. The MRI funding will underwrite a new effort aimed at addressing the needs and interests of students, the economics faculty, and other related faculty to expand the college s policy research capacity. The department is proposing an ambitious and forward looking program to begin an expansion of their infrastructure over three years to take advantage of data downloads from the University of Michigan Inter-University Consortium of Political and Social Research, to expand the climate of serious faculty student research, and to improve the traditional lecture learning approach with something more interesting, important and useful for cognitive development. The project is important for many reasons. It will increase the opportunities for Morehouse College faculty and students to engage in policy research, presentations, and programs. It will increase the depth and relevance of economics and business-related courses in their coverage of national and international issues through improved computer-based student projects and papers. Over time, it is expected that these activities will increase the number of students applying to Ph.D. programs in economics and public policy, thereby helping to expand the pool of highly trained African American economists and policy analysts doc22861 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. David Stock, Dr. William Friedman, Dr. Pei-San Tsai, and Dr. Robert Boswell at the University of Colorado to establish a common-use confocal microscopy facility. The research of these investigators in the broad areas of developmental and or evolutionary biology requires three-dimensional characterization of anatomical structures and domains of gene expression in relatively thick specimens. Traditional histological methods for such characterization are laborious, prone to artifacts, and cannot be applied to living specimens. Confocal microscopy is ideal for such applications, as it allows collection of data from single focal planes ( optical sections ) which can then be assembled by a computer into a three-dimensional reconstruction. This technique does not require physical sectioning of samples and can therefore be used with living material. The major item of equipment to be purchased is a laser scanning confocal microscope. Two additional pieces of equipment, an epifluorescence compound microscope and a fluorescence stereomicroscope, will be purchased to facilitate the preparation of specimens for analysis with the confocal microscope. These microscopes, along with an existing scanning electron microscope, will be housed in a facility open to all researchers at the University of Colorado. The common-use imaging facility to be established at the University of Colorado is expected to contribute to intra- and interdepartmental interactions. Developmental and Evolutionary Biology, the research fields of the users of this facility, are both split between two separate departments at the University of Colorado, with the majority of developmental biologists located in the Department of Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology and the majority of evolutionary biologists in the Department of Environmental, Population & Organismic Biology. Interactions between these departments have been minimal in the past, despite common interests highlighted by the recent rise of the subdiscipline of Evolutionary Developmental Biology. A facility bringing together researchers on the basis of shared technology is expected to encourage the exchange of ideas among developmental biologists of all types as well as between developmental and evolutionary biologists. In addition to representing a full spectrum of questions in and approaches to Developmental and Evolutionary Biology, potential users of this facility employ a diversity of organisms ranging from animals to plants. As these groups of organisms represent independent inventions of multicellular development, interactions among plant and animal biologists catalyzed by the planned facility may bring into sharper focus universal versus labile features of development and evolution. Students in particular should benefit from such interactions, as they are likely to be the ones spending the most time in the facility. Their educational experience will further be enhanced by the incorporation of confocal microscopy into an existing histology course, as well as by periodic training sessions aimed at attracting new users. In summary, in an era of increasing specialization in research and training throughout Biology, a common use confocal microscopy facility is seen as a means of exposing researchers in Developmental and Evolutionary Biology to a diversity of questions, approaches and organisms doc22862 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Min-Ken Liao at Furman University to acquire instrumentation for an undergraduate research program in environmental microbiology. The requested funds are for the purchase of (1) a Biolog MicroStation System to monitor the microbial community, (2) a Variable Angle System to perform pulsed-field electrophoretic analysis on microbial genomes, (3) a Dual Light Workstation to document electrophoretic results for further image analysis, (4) Basic Software to estimate the microbial diversity and its phylogenetic relatedness, and (5) an Opticon System to quantitatively analyze PCR products from different organisms. These five instruments form a complete package necessary for the study of the microbial community. The immediate goal of this project is to address the following question. What is the impact of urban expansion on the biogeochemical processes that occur within the Enoree and Saluda River basins in South Carolina? Several approaches will be taken. First, the impact of urbanization will be studied by comparing the microbial community compositions of streams associated with different land covers along an urban-to-rural gradient. Second, the impact of nutrient loading on rivers will be studied by comparing the diversity of the microbial communities above and below two adjacent sewage treatment plants. Third, the molecular approach will be undertaken to study the diversity and the relatedness of bacterial isolates including antibiotic-resistant ones. This interdisciplinary research project attempts to reach two long-term goals: (1) to answer fundamental questions about microbially-mediated biogeochemical processes associated with cycles of nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon occurring in watersheds; and (2) to describe the extent of human impact on river systems in the Lower Broad River basin in the Piedmont of South Carolina. The research team believes that the study of the microbial communities holds the keys to the assessment of the human impact on water quality and the microbial impact on biogeochemical processes doc22863 none This grant provides funding to produce a video record of the conference Progress in Precision that will take place in Raleigh, North Carolina, on April 17-18, . This video record will be in two phases: first, a verbatim video for each session will be created and made available as streaming video for viewing over the web; second, a summary of the conference (60-90 minute) will be produced and made available in the form of a DVD. This conference will emphasize the technical progress that resulted from the growth of precision engineering as a technical field over the past 20 years. Line widths for VLSI circuits have gone from 5 micron to 0.1 micron; magnetic data storage has increased by a factor of and now data can be stored at 10 Gb in2; biological labs-on-a-chip have been produced; new metrology systems have been developed including white light interferometers and scanning probe microscopes; diamond turning is in common use for lens fabrication and snap-together assembles for alignment; and the word nanotechnology has entered the lexicon. All of these systems have been at the focus of precision engineering research and development. The goal of the conference is to describe the wide range of technical fields intrinsic to precision engineering, to define the impact of the multi-disciplinary viewpoint that is at the heart of the field and to predict the future challenges. It will serve to remind the practitioners of the significant improvements in process and measurement that have taken place over the past 20 years and to introduce a new group of faculty, graduate students and undergraduate students to the importance of precision engineering. By creating the video record of the conference and distilling the 2 day meeting into a 90 minute DVD, a permanent record of the conference will be available that can be widely distributed to emphasize the contributions of this important field doc22864 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program supports instrument development of a spectroscopic ellipsometer capable of precision measurements of the optical constants of complex materials in a broad range of frequencies (400-45,000 cm-1) both at cryogenic and elevated temperatures (5-700 K). New spectroscopic capabilities provided by the ellipsometer are essential to carry out difficult experiments pertinent to physics of strong electronic correlations in oxides, to ferromagnetism in semiconductors and many other problems. The principal advantage of ellipsometry is that this technique eliminates or minimizes experimental ambiguities connected with the determination of the optical constants using more conventional spectroscopic methods such as transmission or reflectance measurements. However, practical realization of theses advantages in the infrared IR part of the spectrum requires development of an original set-up since instruments with the needed specifications are not commercially available. Broad spectral coverage of the proposed instrument will be achieved through a cost-efficient merger of an infrared home-build ellipsometer based on a Fourier-Transform interferometer with a standard rotating analyzer apparatus for visible-near-UV operation. The project integrates research and education thus aiding towards preparation of highly skilled personnel with expertise that is in high demand both in academia and industry. The systematic studies of the optical properties of new materials can provide unique insights into the electronic structure, both carrier and lattice dynamics that is difficult or impossible to obtain through alternative experimental approaches. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program supports the development of a spectroscopic ellipsometer capable of precision measurements of the optical constants of complex materials in a broad range of frequencies both at cryogenic and elevated temperatures. Novel experimental capabilities provided by this instrument will facilitate resolution of some of the long-standing issues in contemporary condensed matter physics and materials science. The development program naturally integrates research and education thus aiding towards preparation of highly skilled personnel with expertise that is in high demand both in academia and industry. Research infrastructure developed in the course of this project will benefit a large group of investigators at several institutions doc22865 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation program Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University will develop a new experimental tool for measuring colloidal forces. An understanding of these forces is important in materials science, cell biology, soil science, waste disposal and water purification, ceramic engineering, the development of personal products, and in quality control in the microelectronics industry. The instrument will combine capabilities of atomic force microscopy (AFM) and total internal reflection microscopy (TIRM), while overcoming most of the drawbacks for each technique. The instrument will provide a new capability: the ability to measure adsorption isotherms during particle collisions. The atomic force microscope is currently the most widely used method for measuring colloidal forces. A major problem with this application is that the separation between the particle and the surface is not measured; it is derived indirectly. With this apparatus, the separation will be obtained directly, from the scattering intensity from an evanescent wave produced by totally reflecting a laser beam at the substrate fluid interface. This approach is based on the TIRM technique. The TIRM technique will be improved through modulation of the scattered evanescent wave. The adsorption of material to surfaces is the main method by which colloidal forces can be modulated, so it is useful to determine adsorption during particle interactions. We will develop a technique for measuring adsorption during collisions using fluorescent tags on the adsorbates. Graduate and undergraduate students will participate in this instrument development project. Many of the objects that we encounter in everyday life actually consist of very fine particles. For example, bricks, paper, clothing, china, soil, most foods, cosmetics, and even humans are composed of small particles. The physical properties (e.g. stiffness, flow, and workability) of these objects depends on the forces between the particles. Part of the process of creating new and improved products is the manipulation of the forces between particles to obtain desirable material properties. The first stage of manipulating these forces is to measure them. With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation program Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University will develop a new experimental tool for measuring the forces acting on particles. The new apparatus will combine existing techniques, the force probe from Atomic Force Microscopy and the distance probe from Total Internal Reflectance Microscopy, and incorporate improvements through the use of signal modulation and fluorescent tagging of molecules. A graduate student and undergraduate students will participate in this instrument development project doc22866 none Christoph Hoffmann James Bottum; Davis S. Ebert; Ananth Grama; Ahmed H. Sameh Purdue University MRI: Acquisition of Equipment for Purdue Envision Center for Data Perceptualization This proposal, developing techniques to effectively utilize the information capacity available to human comprehension, aims at acquiring the visualization, sensing, and haptics infrastructure required for a new center. The center, connected to ultra high-speed network hubs, cable broadcast and high performance computing facilities, and on-campus technology incubators, will support applications needs by a spectrum of research graphics, visualization, and systems infrastructure, as well as provide development, technology transfer, education, and outreach. The infrastructure includes 3D and next generation ultra-high resolution displays, and sensing and haptic devices. The project addresses the challenges posed by the devices with respect to perceptualization techniques, infrastructure for supporting data and processing rates for effective use, and integration of applications into the environment. Educational and outreach efforts include a comprehensive graphics curriculum built around the facility, minority recruitment, and retention efforts, national visualization fore, series of symposia and workshops, development of online educational material, public domain software, and use of Access grid as a vehicle for dissemination and collaboration. Moreover, the I-Light high-speed optical fibre infrastructure (10Gb sec) will be connected with the facility doc22867 none Pedone With support through the Major Research Instrumentation Program, the imaging and analytical capabilities of a scanning-electron-microscope equipped with an energy-dispersive X-ray analytical system and a cathodoluminescence-imaging system will be applied to a wide range of natural and synthetic materials in the physical sciences at California State University Northridge (CSUN). Initial research use of this instrumentation will include the study of biotic and abiotic formation of lacustrine carbonate sediment and rocks; diagenesis of siliceous and siliciclastic deep-sea sediment; the identification of volcanic, carbonate, and carbonaceous phases for radiometric dating; the provenance of volcanic rocks in support of tectonic reconstruction in southern California; and the physical properties of metals, semiconductor and dielectric thin films. Acquisition of a research-quality SEM-EDS will allow faculty to expand existing research programs and to explore new avenues of collaborative research. It also will enhance recruitment of high-quality graduate and undergraduate students to the physical sciences at CSUN and provide them with first-rate research training to assure their success in future academic study and professional careers doc22868 none This grant supports enhancement of a synchrotron beamline for magnetics research and education. Development of a new generation of spintronic materials is occurring and there is a need for facilities targeted to characterize the relationship between magnetic properties and electronic and physical structures. This grant addresses this need by leveraging a significant investment in the existing beamline at the LSU CAMD synchrotron light source. The upgrade will provide for improved characterization of magnetic materials using circularly polarized light at energies spanning the L-edges of 3d transition metals. The upgrade consists of two sets of improvements. First, the current plane-grating monochromator beamline will be enhanced to allow for the use of tunable, circularly polarized synchrotron light. Stepper-motor controlled, cooled baffles will be constructed to extract circularly polarized light from the upper and lower portions of the orbit. The beamline was designed to accommodate two gratings, and a new, 300 - eV, grating will be installed to extend the current photon energy range. Finally, a triple-reflection polarizer will be installed beyond the last optical element in the beamline to measure the degree of light polarization. A second component is a general-purpose user-endstation to provide for sample preparation, evaporators for in-situ film growth, and coils for magnetizing samples. Spectroscopy will include total yield measurements as well as photoemission and provide for inclusion of current LEED and RHEED instrumentation. This enhancement will leverage investments in a group of magnetic materials researchers from Louisiana, Nebraska, Alabama s NSF-MINT Center, and Illinois and provide for a simple but reliable method to characterize a broad range of magnetic materials. The access provided by the location of this light source, located in an underserved region of the country, serves the needs of researche doc22869 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation program, SUNY Buffalo will acquire a high-resolution (1.5 nm) scanning electron microscope equipped to function as an electron beam lithography system and a wafer probe station for nanostructure device characterization, both for research and education purposes. This system will permit fabrication and test of metal, semiconductor, and polymer nanostructures for nanoelectronic, nanophotonic, and spintronic and molectronic applications, as well as for basic physics and chemistry studies. This acquisition will enhance existing and planned research programs in the Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics and its affiliated materials activity, the Center for Advanced Photonic and Electronic Materials (CAPEM), as well as other research programs in the Departments of Chemistry, Physics and Electrical Engineering. Research efforts in these areas are presently supported by NSF, DARPA, ONR, AFOSR and New York State. The system will be maintained and operated as a research facility through the Institute of Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics (ILPB). This is a University-supported institute that brings together faculty from science and engineering departments, and from departments in the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo, as well as from other universities. A half-time Ph.D.-level technical support person will be responsible for Daily operation and training of students, who will be supervised by faculty members. A wide range of research projects will make use of this facility: basic physics of low dimensional (nanoscale) quantum fluids and magnets, studies (through nano-apertures) of internal transitions of excitons in lateral fluctuation single quantum dots, fabrication and evaluation of nanoscale thin-film transistors and nanowires, fabrication and evaluation of molectronic device structures, and fabrication and basic studies of nanospintronic structures. In addition, this system will also be used to educate and train a generation of students in Electrical Engineering, Physics and Chemistry in nanoscale lithography and device structure fabrication and characterization; it will also enhance in an important way a recently funded NSF IGERT program. %%% With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation program, SUNY Buffalo will acquire a high-resolution (1.5 nm) scanning electron microscope equipped to function as an electron beam lithography system and a wafer probe station for nanostructure device characterization, both for research and education purposes. This system will permit fabrication and test of metal, semiconductor, and polymer nanostructures for nanoelectronic, nanophotonic, and spintronic and molectronic applications, as well as for basic physics and chemistry studies. The system will be maintained and operated as a research facility through the Institute of Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics (ILPB). This is a University-supported institute that brings together faculty from science and engineering departments, and from departments in the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo, as well as from other universities. A half-time Ph.D.-level technical support person will be responsible for Daily operation and training of students, who will be supervised by faculty members. A wide range of research projects will make use of this facility. In addition, this system will also be used to educate and train a generation of students in Electrical Engineering, Physics and Chemistry in nanoscale lithography and device structure fabrication and characterization; it will also enhance in an important way a recently funded NSF IGERT program doc22870 none Rahul Simha George Washington University MRI: Acquisition of Research Infrastructure for Distributed Sensor Applications in the Home of the Future This proposal, developing an infrastructure for applications that can exploit a network of sensors and actuators in the home environment, extends work already in progress on future technologies aiming at launching a long-term research program around the Home-21 theme with a broader base of applications and a stronger research focus. Applications (with respective examples) involve: 1. Sensors distributed around the home (detecting intrusion), 2. Sensors on an occupants (helping monitor infirm or disabled occupants), and 3. Sensors on a service provider (helping a fireman navigate a burning home). Faculty with research interests in networking, human-computer interaction, MEMS devices, sensors and biomedical engineering will collaborate on a single infrastructure to support these classes of applications. Although the theme centers on the home of the future, the infrastructure and applications apply to other living environments including, for example, hotels, dormitories, offices, ships, and assisted-living facilities. Special attention will be devoted to applications that will use sensors and actuators on occupants at multiple level of granularity, coarse-grained (location of occupant within the house) and fine-grained (movement of limbs). Such applications involve placing sensors on the occupant that are wireless connected to algorithms that track movement and can, in some cases, also send location-specific feedback (via the actuators) in accordance with the desired objective. Ancillary projects involve Safety (falls, fire, etc.), Security (intrusion monitoring), Health Monitoring Measuring (measuring telemedicine applications, monitoring and relaying vital signs), and RF monitoring (controlling harm from electromagnetic radiation). The equipment, including magnetic trackers, wireless equipment, RF analyzer and software, and support equipment, serves as a testbed for senior design students. Hence, a key component is its focus for undergraduate research and training doc22871 none This award funds the acquisition of an automatic load actuator system for enhancing civil engineering research and research training at an undergraduate institute. Currently the Department of Civil Engineering at Widener University has a Geotechnical, Concrete, and Structures Testing Laboratory that houses a 50,000 lb capacity testing frame equipped with a manually operated Enerpac hydraulic ram. The available loading system, although crude, is suitable for teaching purposes and for destructive testing of structural members under static load conditions only. The PIs are constructing a geotechnical testing box for future research purposes. Planning for these and other research projects makes the acquisition of a closed loop loading system suitable for dynamic testing and deflection studies highly desirable. Some of the areas of research include: (1) responses of geosynthetic-reinforced and pile-supported foundations under dynamic loads; (2) performance of fiber-reinforced polymer piles under horizontal dynamic loads; (3) geosynthetic-reinforced slopes under dynamic footing loads; (4) use of geosynthetic to span over sinkholes, (5) load-deflection response and crack patterns in FRP-reinforced concrete beams; (6) shear capacity of FRP-reinforced concrete beams; and (7) behavior of semirigid bolted connections in steel frames. The acquisition of this automatic load actuator will provide the testing facility necessary for faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students at Widener University to conduct high-quality research projects in structural and geotechnical engineering. This advanced testing system will establish a solid infrastructure for faculty to seek research funds from governmental agencies and private sectors and research collaborations with researchers at other research institutes. The unique combination of the load actuator and the geotechnical testing box will attract high-quality researchers to use this advanced testing system for different research purposes. Because students in the master s degree program at Widener University are primarily part-time, working full-time during the day and attending graduate courses part-time in the evening, most research projects have significant undergraduate participation. A closed loop load actuator with dynamic data acquisition capabilities would provide the students with valuable knowledge of state-of-the-art tools for experimental work and the analysis and interpretation of data. With increased research funds, more full-time students (including under-represented groups and women) can be supported to pursue advanced degrees in civil engineering. The acquisition of a load actuator system would also allow for significant enhancement of the civil engineering structural portion of the Summer Camp program that has a five-year track record of success to inspire local high school students interests in engineering research and careers doc22872 none PROJECT A grant has been awarded to Dr. Howard Berg at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, St. Louis, to acquire a confocal microscope. An essential component of molecular biology research at the Danforth Center is to analyze the function of protein molecules within the context of the living cell. The microscope to be funded by this grant, a Zeiss LSM 510 NLO Meta, is a powerful instrument for imaging proteins and their function in living cells. The confocal microscope produces images of much higher contrast and improved resolution, critical for the analysis of cellular biology. Another indispensable feature of the confocal microscope is its ability to acquire stacks of optical sections through a living cell, which then can be used to reconstruct three dimensional images, allowing the study of proteins in three dimensional space of the cell. The Zeiss LSM 510 also does spectral imaging, giving the added dimension of analyzing the kind o f light emitted from molecules. This is a sophisticated tool for simultaneously tracking the behavior of many spectrally similar fluorescent proteins and dyes simultaneously, and for quantitatively measuring the interaction of proteins and also physiological processes in cells. The equipment will be housed in the Danforth Center s Integrated Microscopy Facility, a leader in applying new microscopy technology to the study of plant cells. The Danforth Center is a non-profit plant science research institute home to several hundred plant scientists and from these there will be undergraduates, graduate students, post-docs, and senior personnel bringing projects that will use the instrumentation. The current projects from Danforth personnel that will use this equipment include: investigation of the cell and molecular biology of plant pathogenic viruses (tobamoviruses and geminiviruses) during infection of plant cells; investigation of Rab protein-mediated membrane trafficking in plant cells; analysis of proteins involved in regulating plant development in the shoot apex; membrane biology of giant cells induced by nematodes; study of the development of soybean allergen in soybean tissue; investigation of the binding sites of plant pathogenic viruses in their aphid vectors; investigation of enzyme complexes involved in nucleic acid metabolism; and study of antigens produced by plant vaccines to investigate their targeting in mammalian tissue. Scientists from regional institutes studying plant biology, including Washington University, Missouri Botanical Gardens, and the University of Missouri-Columbia, will make use of the instrument. The Danforth Center is a leader in using modern tools of molecular science to improve agriculture and human health and nutrition. The confocal microscope funded by this grant will be critical in our goal to understand the molecular biology of plant cells doc22873 none During the past few decades of oceanographic research, oceanographers have observed significant interannual variations in physical, biological, chemical and geological processes. The best-known example is the ENSO phenomenon in the equatorial Pacific. Interannual variations in the Southern Ocean are also known to occur in ice extent and concentration, in the composition of herbivore communities, and in bird and marine mammal distributions and reproductive success. Yet little is known about the interannual variations in production of phytoplankton or the role that these variations play in the food web. Furthermore, nothing is known concerning the potential interannual variations in the controls of phytoplankton production. This proposal seeks funds to augment a presently funded project which examines interannual variability in the Ross Sea and to collect time-series data on variables influencing the seasonal production of phytoplankton in the southern Ross Sea, Antarctica. This project will involve adding three instruments each to two independent oceanographic moorings in order to develop a mooring system capable of providing data to address the issue of interannual variability in the Ross Sea ecosystem. These new instruments include a fast repetition rate fluorometer, a whole water sampler, and an in situ silicic acid analyzer. These instruments will allow for the determination of the timing and extent of iron limitation (using an assessment of photochemical efficiency, which is a sensitive index of iron limitation), the measurement of dissolved silicate uptake rates to assess the role of diatoms in the southern Ross Sea, and the microscopic determination of the composition of the phytoplankton assemblage. Thus, insights will be obtained into the biological changes that occur continuously in such a rapidly changing, non-equilibrium environment. Furthermore, it will assess the interannual variations of the production of the two major functional groups of the system, diatoms and Phaeocystis antarctica, a colonial haptophyte. The new instruments will be added to two existing taut-line moorings with in situ nitrate analyzers moored in the surface mixed layer. These will collect for the first time in the Antarctic a time-series of euphotic zone nutrient concentrations over the late spring-summer period. By integrating the new instruments into the mooring systems, information on the period of transition between irradiance limitation and iron limitation will be obtained. Additional data from the new instruments will allow for a detailed temporal record of the role of diatoms in this region. Diatoms are critical, as they are considered to be the major talon contributing to the effect transfer of energy and organic matter through the Antarctic food web as well as significantly contributing to the vertical flux of biogenic matter to the sediments. Interannual variations of production are potentially significant the growth and survival of higher trophic levels of the Ross Sea. They are also important in order to understand the natural variability in biogeochemical processes of the region. Because polar regions such as the Ross Sea are predicted to be impacted by future climate change, biological changes are also anticipated. Placing these changes in the context of natural variability is an essential element of understanding and predicting such alterations doc22874 none Chemical analysis of polar ice cores is one of the most useful tools for obtaining valuable information on paleoclimate history and atmospheric chemistry. Measurements of major soluble chemical impurities are a necessary and integral part of almost all ice core research programs and projects. Ion chromatography (IC) is the most effective analytical technique for measuring all major and some minor ionic chemical species in polar snow and ice samples. Recently, melter-based continuous flow analysis (CFA) systems have been developed to increase chemical analysis speeds in order to meet the high demand for accurate, high-resolution ice core chemistry data. Current CFA systems cannot measure all of the major anions and cations in meltwater because of the limitations of the spectrometric (UV-visible spectrophotometry and spectrofluorometry) detection techniques. Important species in polar snow that cannot be detected by spectrometry include sulfate, methanesulfonate, magnesium and potassium. This award supports a project to acquire several high-quality, commercial IC instruments to interface with a new ice core melting system to perform continuous, on-line ice core analysis for all major ionic species, including sulfate and methanesulfonate. The project will develop an integrated ice core chemical analysis system based on continuous melting and on-line IC detection and determination. Project plans are: (1) to build a new ice core melter system, (2) to acquire the ion chromatographs, (3) to interface the ion chromatographs with the melter, and (4) to develop accessories, procedures and protocols for the integrated melter-IC system that can be used in routine lab analysis of ice cores and potentially in large field ice core programs doc22875 none This grant will establish an interdisciplinary collaborative facility, the Aerogel Fabrication, Characterization, and Applications Lab (AFCAL), for faculty and student researchers in the Mechanical Engineering and Chemistry Departments at Union College. An aerogel is a fragile nanostructure consisting of approximately 90-99% air (volume ratio), contained in an intricate pore structure with pore sizes primarily in the 2 to 50 nm range. An aerogel is formed by a highly cross-linked polymerization reaction and drying phase. The polymerization process forms a solid network surrounded by a liquid (sol-gel). The drying process removes the liquid and leaves behind a delicate pore structure. This pore structure gives aerogels the lowest known density, index of refraction, thermal, electrical, and acoustical conductivities of any solid material. The funds provided will purchase the equipment necessary to implement two aerogel fabrication techniques: an automated pressure and temperature controlled hydraulic press and a critical point drying system; and equipment to characterize those aerogels: a thermal constants analyzer, a gas adsorption system, an integrating sphere spectrophotometer, and a fluorescence spectrometer. The AFCAL facility will be used by faculty and students in Mechanical Engineering and Chemistry to: (1) further develop a new aerogel fabrication technique and perform fundamental studies on the effects of chemical reagents and process variables on the aerogel nanostructure, (2) characterize the thermal and optical properties of silica aerogels, (3) use fluorescence spectroscopy to perform fundamental studies of aerogel structure & applications of aerogels to chemical sensing, and (4) develop inorganic-organic scintillator composites and perform fundamental studies of the inclusion chemistry of aerogels. The Union College Mechanical Engineering and Chemistry Departments have a demonstrated history of excellence in introducing students to research at a formative stage of their academic careers, providing students with coursework that provides the necessary background for success in graduate studies, and placing these students successfully in graduate programs and industrial positions. As a result, these departments have had an impact on the scientific infrastructure of this nation. The four co-PI s will continue to involve undergraduate students in their research, including students from traditionally under-represented groups, and to encourage their students to consider graduate studies in engineering- and science-related fields and careers in research doc22876 none Microbial cell-surface enzymes (ectoenzymes) are important agents of polymer hydrolysis in aquatic environments and indicators of the state of microbial carbon, nitrogen, or phosphorus nutrition. However, like most other microbial metabolic rate measurements in aquatic environments, ectoenzyme activity measurements have usually been limited to manual assays with discrete water samples. An instrument for continuous underway measurements of microbial enzyme activities using high-sensitivity fluorescent substrates has recently been developed. This instrument has been used aboard ship to map the ectoenzyme activities alkaline phosphatase and leucine aminopeptidase in the surface waters of the Mississippi River plume. With this instrument these enzyme activities can be mapped in much the same way that temperature, salinity, phytoplankton fluorescence, and other parameters are mapped from a research ship while underway. However, this system is limited to horizontal mapping of water samples continuously pumped from the surface and requires frequent operator intervention. This Biocomplexity Instrumentation Development for Environmental Activities (IDEA) project will take the next much larger step. The research and education team includes a microbial ecologist (Dr. J. Ammerman) and a geochemist (Dr. G. Klinkhammer), both of whom have interests and expertise in sensor development, a coastal physical oceanographer and modeler (Dr. R. Chant), and a non-faculty education specialist (Mr. E. Simms). The goal of this project is to develop a remotely operated instrument for measurement of microbial enzyme activities and to deploy it at the Rutgers University Long-term Ecosystem Observatory at 15 meters depth, called LEO-15, for periods of weeks to months. This instrument is called the Multiple Enzyme Analyzer (MEA), and should be capable of the simultaneous measurement of up to four different enzyme activities. A simple mooring with biological, chemical, and physical sensors will be deployed near the enzyme analyzer to help provide a context for the microbial rate measurements (along with additional data from LEO-15). The enzyme and related data will be analyzed with time-series methods, spectral analysis techniques, statistical modeling, and other techniques to gain insight into microbial processes in the coastal zone. A second deployment of the MEA will take place at the new Martha s Vineyard Coastal Observatory (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), along with an automated flow cytometer and image analyzer used for plankton cell counting and sorting. This instrument is under development by Dr. R. Olson and colleagues with Biocomplexity IDEA support. This enzyme analyzer will provide continuous real time microbial metabolic rate measurements on time scales that are currently unavailable. Such measurements will add an important biological component to the extensive chemical and physical measurements that can be made at ocean observatories. In addition, education efforts in aquatic microbiology will include training workshops for primary and secondary school teachers followed by lesson development and implementation, as well as university undergraduate and graduate student research and education doc22877 none Schmidt Continuous progress in microscopy and ultrafast optics has allowed researchers to investigate phenomena on ever smaller length and shorter time scales, leading to a multitude of novel applications. Here, the PIs propose to build a measurement system that combines both ultrahigh spatial and temporal resolution. This system will enable access to a whole new class of experiments for which both characteristics are required and will significantly enhance the research facilities at UC Santa Cruz. They propose to develop a system that integrates the temporal resolution of a tunable ultrafast Ti:Sapphire laser with the spatial resolution of an atomic force microscope with NSOM capabilities and a high-resolution photodetector array. The ultrashort optical pulses emanating from the Ti:Sapphire laser are fed into the fiber of the near-field microscope or focused directly on a sample using far-field optics. A subwavelength aperture at the output of the NSOM is used to emit or collect the light pulses, and creates a unique optical probe for investigating a wide variety of samples and substrates. The tunability of the Ti:Sapphire allows for a large accessible spectrum in the near-infrared while leaving options for future upgrades. The complete system will simultaneously have a time resolution of about 200fs and a spatial resolution of 100 nm. If funded, research projects and student training in nanoscale electronics will be carried out: One example for the ensuing research activities is the study of the dynamics of magnetization switching in single-domain metallic nanomagnets for high-density magnetic storage. Only the combination of both high spatial and temporal resolution will allow studying the dynamics of individual magnets. Knowledge of the magnetization reversal time is critical for assessing the intrinsic limitations for write-operations using such nanomagnets. Magneto-optic Kerr spectroscopy is capable of capturing reversal dynamics, but so far not with the required capabilities for single-domain magnets. The second project is spatially resolved picosecond ultrasonics. Here, the goal is to analyze interfaces below a metal-covered semiconductor surface, a situation typical for integrated circuits. By heating the metal with a short optical pulse, an acoustic wave is created that propagates inside the semiconductor and is partially reflected at interfaces. The depth of the interface can be determined from the return time of the reflection signal. In combination with the high spatial resolution of a near-field scanning microscope and a unique multichannel heterodyning detection method using a photodetector array, non-destructive high-resolution imaging of the wafer can be obtained. These examples clearly demonstrate the wide range of experiments that will become accessible. The main components (Ti-sapphire laser, AFM NSOM) are each widely used state-of-the-art instruments and their combination which require significant development for pulse broadening compensation, polarization control and also multi-channel detector array will create unique capability for many more fields in nanotechnology, such as time-resolved spectroscopy of semiconductor quantum dots. Exciting collaborations across campus departments and with other universities are anticipated. The system will have broad impact on research and education in nanoscience. It will provide excellent training for students in several key areas of current interest such as nanoscopy, laser optics, and time-resolved spectroscopy. In addition, it will be integrated in a laboratory experiment for a nano-optics class that the P.I. is developing at UCSC as part of an NSF CAREER program doc22878 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at St. Cloud State University will acquire a Matrix-assisted Laser Desorption Ionization - Time of Flight (MALDI-TOF) Mass Spectrometer. This instrument will be used in a wide variety of studies, including a) the identification of molecular determinants of cellular sensitivity to cytostatic cytotoxic agents that may be unique to tumor cells; b) the identification of genetic polymorphisms in human aldehyde dehydrogenases that will render differential cellular sensititivy to cytotoxic agents; c) characterization of electroactive polymers; and d) the study of precursor molecules used as dopant sources for fluorescent sol-gel glasses. In addition, MALDI MS will be a major component in a new laboratory curriculum for biophysical chemistry. Matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization (MALDI) time-of-flight (TOF) mass spectrometry is the technique of choice for obtaining accurate molecular weights on molecules up to and over 300,000 daltons, with extremely high sensitivity. Use of a MALDI-TOF mass spectrometer has therefore become a standard technique in most DNA protein core facilities. The ability to obtain very accurate molecular weights of biological molecules is fundamental to all biological and biomedical research and essential in a modern research and training environment. These studies will have an impact in the areas of biophysical and materials chemistry doc22879 none Weathers, Kathleen C. A grant has been awarded to Dr. Kathleen C. Weathers of the Institute of Ecosystem Studies (IES) to upgrade IES s central Analytical Laboratory through the replacement of instruments that are both used heavily and outdated. Their manufacturers either have, or will soon cease to provide replacement parts or support for these instruments. The instruments are a carbon-nitrogen-sulfur analyzer, a continuous flow analyzer, and an inductively coupled plasma spectrometer. All of these instruments are critical for generating data for core ecological research programs at IES, and all are used by students. Many individual research projects will be supported through the use of these instruments. For example, the instruments will be used to generate data: 1) on the baseline chemistry for both of IES s Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites (Hubbard Brook and Baltimore), which are components of the NSF s LTER network. The Baltimore Ecosystem Study is one of only two urban projects in this network of nearly 25 sites; 2) for the Hudson River research group, who investigate many aspects of the function of the River, including the effect of an invading bivalve, the zebra mussel, on the Hudson ecosystem; 3) for a project testing the global hypothesis that earthworm invasion of north temperate forests will have large consequences for nutrient retention and uptake in these ecosystems; 4) for research on the loss of nitrogen (N) from forest ecosystems after insect defoliation and the role of N availability in controlling that loss; 5) for a project investigating the effect of beech bark disease invasion on the functioning of the Catskill Mountain ecosystem (whose streams are the source of drinking water for New York City); 6) and for the IES Environmental Monitoring Program, which has generated an extremely valuable record of precipitation chemistry, air quality, meteorology, wet and dry deposition, forest growth, forest nutrient cycling, and stream chemistry at a protected 800 ha location in the Hudson Valley. The IES Analytical Laboratory is a shared resource: on average 80% of its scientific staff and a large number of graduate students, postdoctoral associates, REU students, collaborators and visitors use its facilities for analysis of ecological samples, ranging from precipitation and throughfall to soils and saline waters. The IES Analytical Laboratory currently performs between 50,000 and 60,000 analyses a year for major inorganic and organic ions, including sample analysis for many of the 33 (currently funded) National Science Foundation (NSF)-sponsored projects. These projects include PIs from IES, as well as collaborators outside of IES whose affiliations vary widely and include colleagues from countries throughout the world. In addition, the IES Analytical Laboratory serves as the primary analytical facility for projects funded by the National Institutes of Health, the US Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Hudson River Foundation, and others. Extensive postdoctoral, graduate, undergraduate (through an NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates grant) student research is also done in this laboratory doc22880 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Sweet Briar College will acquire a 300 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) structure-activity relationship, and the synthesis and testing of analogs of bioactive compounds; b) structure elucidation and characterization of natural products; c) the synthesis of novel ligands for palladium and platinum bioactive compounds; and d) the synthesis and purification of dithiophosphate oligonucleotides, and the testing of activity in cell culture of antisense DNA. Faculty at Randolph-Macon Women s College, Hollins University and The University of the Virgin Islands will also have access to this equipment. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including biochemistry and drug development doc22881 none Duennebier This Major Research Instrumentation award to University of Hawaii at Manoa provides funds for development of a cabled oceanographic observatory, at the location of the existing Hawaii Ocean Timeseries (HOT) Station ALOHA, to be known as the ANZCAN-ALOHA Ocean Observatory. The goal of the project is to provide power and data communication capability over the abandoned ANZCAN telecommunications cable, which will be moved 26 kilometers to the existing site of the 13-year ALOHA time series. The cable comes ashore on Oahu, and it will be managed from University of Hawaii s Manoa campus. It will enable a major increase in experimental capability at and near the site, with a kilowatt of power and 2 mbaud data rate available to support instruments and ocean experiments in physical, chemical, biological and geological oceanography as well as meteorology, ocean optics, biogeochemistry and other fields. A moored profiler will provide continuous monitoring of the physical properties of the full water column, with operator control to respond to ocean events. An acoustic modem capability will be included to allow deployment and communication with experiments that are not physically attached to the cabled junction box. The cabled observatory will have Internet connectivity, allowing researchers to observe and control their experiments, and providing links to the observatory and to related educational sites for students at levels from grade school to graduate school. University of Hawaii will provide cost-share support equal to more than 30% of equipment costs, per MRI Program guidelines for development proposals undertaken at Ph.D.-granting institutions doc22882 none EIA 02- Skormin, Victor A. SUNY - Binghamton MRI: Development of an Advanced Laser Communications Research Facility with Internet Accessible Instrumentation This proposal, developing an experimental research laboratory, expands a concept of sharing advanced scientific equipment in cyberspace. This technology facilitates the access to equipment via the Internet offering the most advanced instrumentation and relevant interactive instruction to diverse groups of population; thus enhancing engineering education and training. This development will set unique space-qualified laser equipment intended for space communication and offer carefully designed fixed and open-ended experiments nation- and world-wide. The proposed project is not a virtual lab, offering instead enhanced real infrastructure of the laser communications research lab. The new development involves upgrading the equipment and auxiliary systems and enhancing its reliability, accuracy and rate of operation. Hence the facility developed will be suitable for unlimited global access via the Internet, enabling universities, industries, high schools, and individual users worldwide to perform advanced experiments in real-time and to collect data for analysis and interpretation. This project specifically enables and services an often forgotten population, the disabled. The Laser Communication Research Laboratory (LCRL), where the development will take place, contributes to satellite communication technology by addressing, among others, the following technical research problems: 1. Modeling, Characterization, and Control of Electromechanical Beam Steering Systems, 2. Free Space Propagation, Diffraction and Alignment of Laser Beams, 3. Optical Beam Modulation and Steering, 4. Rejection of Atmospheric Effects in Communication Systems, 5. Experimental Analysis, Modeling and Control of Acousto-Optic Laser Beam Steering Systems with Bragg Cells, 6. Gimbals Systems, and 7. Liquid Crystal Technology doc22883 none The objective of this project is to explore the fundamental aspects of enantioselective chemistry on chiral metal surfaces. The investigation is focused on naturally chiral surfaces formed from high Miller index planes of metals such as Cu and Pt. The chirality of these surfaces arises from the kink-step-terrace structures that are formed by the intersections of three low Miller index microfacets. In this sense this type of surface chirality is distinct from the chirality imparted by the traditional approach of templating a surface with chiral ligands. Past work has probed the structure of naturally chiral surfaces, enantiospecific adsorbate geometries, and enantiospecific surface reaction energetics. These properties of chiral surfaces determine the enantioselectivities of catalytic reactions and chromatographic separations. The work proposed focuses on the exploration of naturally chiral surfaces of various structures using a combination of experimental and theoretical methods. Although there are an infinite number of chiral high Miller index surfaces, they are composed of a finite number of types of kink-step-terrace structures. The proposed investigation will explore the enantiospecificity of this set of structures on Cu single crystal surfaces by using chiral adsorbates that have previously exhibited enantiospecific surface chemistry. The educational activities are expected to be the traditional mentoring of graduate students. The fundamental goal of the proposed work is to provide a basic understanding of the roots of enantioselectivity on a set of highly characterized, naturally chiral surfaces doc22884 none Huffaker The PIs propose the addition of an ultra-high vacuum (UHV) scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to the materials growth and characterization facility located at the University of New Mexico (UNM) Center for High Technology Materials (CHTM). The STM is capable of unprecedented resolution in probing nanometer scale atomic organizations and their local electronic structures. The high level of stability and positioning accuracy also makes the STM a capable nano-scale surface patterning tool. The UNM has a strong infrastructure for advanced materials research, including extensive growth and analysis facilities described below. The microscope will complement the PIs existing capabilities by allowing them to quantify materials structures and surface dynamics. Advanced materials for nanotechnology is one of their key interest areas at UNM. Very broad support for purchasing the STM capability is indicated by the level of cost-sharing from their Vice-Provost for Research, the Office of the Dean for the School of Engineering and the Director of CHTM. The UHV-STM facility will be physically located at CHTM, where they have excellent, permanent staff for system calibration and maintenance. Any UNM faculty will have access to increase participation of students and faculty in the emerging field of nanotechnology and advanced materials. To ensure the University-wide impact, the STM will be a multi-user facility for several departments (e.g., Electrical & Computer Engineering, Chemical & Nuclear Engineering, Physics & Astronomy, and Chemistry) and research centers (e.g., Center for High Technology Materials and Center for Micro-Engineered Materials). The new surface science capability will increase the PIs participation in nanotechnology and broaden their basis for attracting subsequent grants and collaborations. The proposed instrumentation will be the 1st UHV-STM at UNM with expansion ports to accommodate vacuum diagnostics and growth deposition chambers. The instrumentation will facilitate research efforts at UNM that range from crystal growth to inorganic synthesis. The proposal highlights several applications of the variable-temperature UHV-STM at UNM such as selective growth of SiGe on nanometer size silicon structures, cross-sectional and atom-tracking STM, incorporation of magnetic atoms into QDs and nano-scale positioning of QDs. One of the immediate areas of impact is strain-driven, self-assembly of quantum dots (QDs) using both molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) and metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD). The proposed acquisition of the UHV-STM contributes to the School of Engineering initiative to launch a degree program in nanomaterials science and engineering (NSE). The School recognizes that this emerging field bodes rapid growth and increased demand for trained labor. Education in NSE will foreseeably translate to students increased career potential. Within the scope of the School initiative, the proposed instrumentation will produce a knowledge base for course development and an attraction to recruit under-represented students. The research education provides a direct vehicle to prepare undergraduate and graduate students for a career in NSE doc22885 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Macalester College will acquire a continuous-wave ring laser system. This equipment will be used to measure and analyze the optical spectra of second- and third-row transition metal fluorides and oxides. The PI and his undergraduate collaborators will record laser excitation spectra at Doppler-limited resolution in order to determine the vibrational, rotational and fine-structure constants of newly observed molecules. Further work at sub-Doppler resolution utilizing the technique of intermodulated fluorescence will reveal the hyperfine structure of the observed transitions, which is useful for identifying the electronic configurations of the ground and excited states. In addition, the instrumentation will be used as a resource in advanced courses and laboratories in the Chemistry Department. Interest in understanding the complex electronic structure and spectroscopy of small, transition metal-containing molecules in the gas phase continues to grow. With the development of high-resolution and high-power tunable laser sources, spectroscopists can now record and assign spectra that previously were very difficult to acquire or analyze. Such molecules are of practical interest in fields as diverse as astronomy, catalysis, metallurgy and organometallic chemistry. Diatomic molecules containing a transition metal display the simplest form of metal bonding and are therefore relevant as initial models for more complex systems doc22886 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program will allow Brown University to purchase a field emission scanning electron microscope. The instrument will have new capability currently not available at Brown University. It will provide information about chemical composition and structural information. Furthermore, the LEO Model VP Variable Pressure Scanning Electron Microscope will enable researchers at Brown University to examine materials used in research on such topics as liquid crystals and reactive mesogens, biological cells, fuel cells based on microfluidics, organic crystal growth, carbon nano-tubes, and upper mantle rocks. Furthermore, the EDS capabilities will allow obtaining X-ray dot maps indicating chemical composition, and this is a new capability at the institution. Through the NSF-sponsored Materials Research Science and Engineering Center the PI s will provide outreach programs to three Historically Black Colleges and Universities. These colleges will have remote access to the instrument and use it in their teaching and research. This program will be piloted through Hampton University and then extended to two other colleges. This scope will be made available to industrial partners and will be used it in teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program will allow Brown University to purchase a field emission scanning electron microscope. The instrument will have new capability currently not available at Brown University. It will provide information about chemical composition and structural information. Furthermore, the LEO Model VP Variable Pressure Scanning Electron Microscope will enable researchers at Brown University to examine materials used in research on such topics as liquid crystals and reactive mesogens, biological cells, fuel cells based on microfluidics, organic crystal growth, carbon nano-tubes, and upper mantle rocks. Furthermore, the EDS capabilities will allow obtaining X-ray dot maps indicating chemical composition, and this is a new capability at the institution. Through the NSF-sponsored Materials Research Science and Engineering Center the PI s will provide outreach programs to three Historically Black Colleges and Universities. These colleges will have remote access to the instrument and use it in their teaching and research. This program will be piloted through Hampton University and then extended to two other colleges. This scope will be made available to industrial partners and will be used it in teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels doc22887 none Bonner Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, in collaboration with the University of Texas at El Paso and CODAR Ocean Sensors, proposes to extend High Frequency (HF) Radar data processing and hardware to improve the measurement of surface currents and wave conditions, and to incorporate directly into radar data output both transport and water quality model coefficients. The collaboration between these Minority Institutions and Industry partner will extend HF-Radar applications to predict the origins and fates of oil spills, water quality, thermal and contaminant plume tracking, study coastal processes, and develop improved techniques of real-time management, display and distribution of HF-Radar data. In addition, the extended HF-Radar system will improve navigational safety for Texas ports and waterways, which involve complicated hydrodynamic systems with shallow enclosed, embayment features doc22888 none David R. Alexander Wichita State University MRI: Acquisition of High Performance Computer For Wichita State University This proposal from an institution in an EPSCoR state, expanding the high performance computer in their High Performance Computing Center, enables the faculty in physics, chemistry, mechanical and aeronautical engineering, and their students to solve large-scale computational problems. Over 120 faculty, staff, and students will use this centralized facility. The National Institute would also use the machine cycles for Aviation Research (NIAR). The current facilities have been outgrown. Below follows some examples of the projects underway: 1. Integrated Computational Tool for Hypersonic Flow Simulations 2. Evaluation and Retro-fit of Fail-Safety in KC-135 Fuselage Structure 3. Design of Plasma Sprayed Coatings through Computer Simulation 4. Computational Analysis in Adhesive-Bonded Composite Joints 5. Quantum Neural Networks 6. Model Atmospheres for Cool Stars 7. Mixed-Metal Complexes: Multielectron Transfer Agents 8. Molecular Modeling of Dimeric and Polymeric Ionic Liquids doc22889 none Peck Funds from this Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant will be used to acquire a dual-inlet stable isotope ratio mass spectrometer for the Department of Geology at Colgate University. The instrument will be used primarily in the analysis of oxygen isotope ratios in silicates by on-line laser fluorination, in addition to analyses of gases prepared by combustion or reaction with acid off-line. Laser fluorination is the method of choice for analysis of refractory mineral separates for oxygen isotope ratio, has short analysis times (15-20 minutes per sample), and yields routine precisions of + -0.1 per mil or better for samples as small as 1 mg. A mass spectrometer at Colgate will allow new and continuing interdisciplinary research projects in the Geology Department, including studies of granulite facies stable isotope thermometry and hygrometry, tectonic, magmatic, and fluid studies of the Grenville orogen, plume-ridge interaction in the Galapagos, and studies of paleoclimate in Alaska, New York, and Antarctica. All of this research will expose undergraduate students at Colgate to the use of stable isotopes in the geosciences, allowing hands-on exposure to modern instrumentation doc22890 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. David H. Huber and Dr. Mark Chatfield at West Virginia State College for the acquisition of an Image Analysis system. The digital image analysis applications that are required by many molecular biology techniques that involve DNA, RNA and protein imaging. This instrument will be used for environmental microbiology and cell biology research, as well as molecular biology instruction in several Biology Department classes. The environmental microbiology research involves a long-term study of microbial diversity and microbial metabolism in model bioprocessing reactors that are used for degrading organic matter. This research will demonstrate how the composition of a microbial community is linked to its overall metabolism. A second area of research will examine the molecular controls of plant cell division using model plant cell cultures. The goals of the environmental microbiology research are: 1) to examine the composition of the microbial communities in thermophilic anaerobic bioprocessing reactors, and 2) to determine the fate of antibiotic resistance genes that enter bioprocessing reactors. Bioprocessing reactors, also called digesters, transform organic waste into methane, a useful combustible gas, and fertilizer. The microbial interactions responsible for these chemical transformations in bioreactors are very complex and not well understood. Improvements in reactor biotechnology will be a practical benefit of this research. The plant cell division research will improve our understanding of the molecular processes that govern plant growth. The analyzer will also be used for molecular biology training in several classes at West Virginia State College. The new instrument will significantly advance student training in molecular biology, microbiology and genetics doc22891 none Dunn This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant supports the research needs of Mount Holyoke College science faculty through acquisition of a new scanning electron microscope (SEM) with a low-vacuum sample chamber and energy-dispersive spectrometer. A new environmental SEM (JEOL JSM- ) will supercede an existing JEOL 35 CF SEM that is 17 years old and lacks beam stability, image quality and the capability to image hydrated or uncoated samples. Faculty from multiple departments including biology, chemistry and the earth sciences are all engaged in research that will make excellent use of a state-of-the-art ESEM. Specific studies that require high resolution textural and compositional analysis of materials include, taxonomic investigations of marine invertebrates (Rotifera, Copepoda and Cladocera), studies of latex coated industrial materials, studies of graphite-calcite carbon isotopic exchange during metamorphism as a proxy of the temperature of formation of metamorphic assemblages, compositional mapping of Fe-rich mantle phases to better understand deep earth chemical dynamics and redox conditions, and taxonomic investigations of agriculturally-engineered crops. This facility will also expand the resources available to Mount Holyoke s renowned educational program for women doc22892 none A grant has been awarded to Iowa State University to acquire instrumentation for the analysis of DNA oligonucleotide microarrays that allow the parallel evaluation of up to 22,500 genes in a single experiment. This system will enable researchers at ISU to employ state-of-the-art genomics technology to a variety of plant, animal, and human research topics including; the molecular characterization of genes coincident with disease, response to biotic or abiotic stresses, or cellular development. Oligonucleotide-based microarrays can already be purchased which have been designed for genome analysis of a number of different species. Research programs at Iowa State University that will be most advantaged by this system are those investigating questions in development, metabolic networking, biotic and abiotic stresses, and that involve Arabidopsis, Triticeae (barley wheat), yeast, Drosophila, C. elegans, mouse, rat, cattle, or human microarrays. A typical experiment could involve an organism infected with a pathogen compared to a control sample that was not infected. Messenger RNA would be extracted from both samples and then used to probe the oligonucleotide microarrays. This RNA contains the genetic code for the specific genes that are active during pathogen infection. The new instrumentation facilitates highly quantitative assessment of the expression levels of each of the 22,500 genes in the two samples, thus, comparison of the two sets of data would point out genes that are correlated with disease responses. The use of this technology will make it possible to systematically study how genes contribute to complex phenotypes ranging from disease, response to external stimuli, and normal growth and development. The rapid discovery of new genes associated with such complex traits is expected to lead to novel discoveries in medicine and agriculture. Another mission of ISU is to train graduate students and undergraduate students in contemporary biology, and it is essential that they become proficient in the theory and use of modern genomics tools. This instrument will be made available to graduate students conducting research in the departments of Agronomy, Animal Science, Biochemistry, Botany, Plant Pathology, and Zoology & Genetics as well as in the interdepartmental graduate programs in Genetics, Plant Physiology, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, and Molecular, Cellular, & Developmental Biology. In addition, several students from a NSF-funded REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates, Undergraduate Research Experience in Molecular Biotechnology and Genomics) program will have access to this advanced technology each summer. The REU program focuses on students from traditional minority universities and students from small Midwestern liberal arts colleges. Half of the students are members of under-represented groups and half are women. Thus, the instrumentation system will be integrated into both the graduate and undergraduate education programs at ISU doc22893 none This proposal provides funds for the purchase of a combination laser-amplifier system that would allow the PI to enhance her activities in the area of control of molecular motion and quantum state character through coherence effects inherent in the laser-molecule interaction. This control is achieved through the exploitation of the Autler Townes splitting and electromagnetically induced transparency in simple molecules. If successful, quantum control using these coherence effects would complement control achieved through ultrafast laser systems doc22894 none Under this MRI, the Principal Investigator will develop, acquire, install and test a new high performance offset Gregorian antenna for the Colorado State University (CSU)-CHILL radar facility. The CSU-CHILL radar facility has been operated for many years by CSU as a multi-user facility available to all qualified researchers. The facility is supported primarily through a cooperative agreement between CSU and NSF. The specifications for the new antenna are stringent and push the antenna design and manufacturing technology. A substantial reduction in sidelobe levels over the current CSU-CHILL antenna is expected. This improvement results from the offset Gregorian design that eliminates blockages by the feedhorn and feed support struts. The cross-polarization levels are expected to be less than -35 dB in any plane. The ratio of two dimensional integrated cross-polarized energy to copolarized energy over all planes is expected to be reduced by around 10 dB compared with the current antenna. These correspond to significant reductions in expected (two-way) sidelobe clutter-to-mainlobe signal power (16-20 dB), and significant improvement in the radiated polarization purity offered by the dual-offset design relative to the prime-focus parabolic reflector antenna. These high antenna performance levels are needed to accurately measure conventional Doppler data and the full polarimetric covariance matrix in the presence of strong spatial gradients of precipitation echo, especially in severe storms. Currently, the relatively poorer sidelobe performance near the planes of the feed support struts tends to cause large errors in many of the key polarimetric measurements even in the presence of modest precipitation echo spatial gradients. The new antenna performance is expected to nearly double the precipitation echo spatial gradient that can be tolerated without significant error in the polarimetric measurements. It will also greatly improve the quality of conventional Doppler data especially in the context of data assimilation by numerical models. The new antenna will permit cutting-edge research using the full covariance matrix to greatly improve the quantitative remote sensing of cloud and storm microphysics, and possibly in the future use of assimilation of polarimetric data by numerical models. It will be the only such research weather radar of its kind in the world at S-band operating frequency. Remote sensing using weather radar has been the impetus for many meteorological advances over the last few decades. Such advances have included gaining fundamental understanding of severe weather phenomena such as thunderstorms, flash floods, tornadoes, hurricanes and microbursts. Much of this knowledge has led to practical societal benefits such as radar warning systems that have been adopted by the operational weather agencies. The CSU-CHILL facility has made substantial contributions to this knowledge base over the years. The new antenna system will help keep what are robust, ongoing research and educational activities at the cutting edge of radar meteorological research doc22895 none Chilkoti A group of investigators at Duke University and North Carolina State University request funding to purchase an imaging X-ray photoelectron spectrometer (XPS) for the shared use of faculty. This request is motivated by an urgent need for contemporary surface analysis tools, especially XPS, in the research of participating faculty and the lack of such instrumentation currently at Duke University or in the Research Triangle area for shared use. The proposed Axis Ultra (Kratos Analytical Inc.) instrument allows XPS of both conductors and insulators with an energy resolution of 1 eV and a spatial resolution of ~10 um. This instrument will be used by the research groups of nine faculty at Duke University in the following departments: Biomedical Engineering (Chilkoti, Reichert and Truskey), Chemistry (Craig, Grinstaff, Liu, and Pirrung), Materials Science and Engineering (Zauscher), and Electrical Engineering (Massoud). In addition, two faculty at North Carolina State University in Chemical Engineering (Genzer) and Chemistry (Gorman) are also core investigators in this proposal, because of their pressing need for high spatial- and energy-resolution XPS in their research. The instrument will be located in the Shared Materials Instrumentation Facility in the Levine Science Research Center at Duke University, and will be used in diverse projects that require high spatial and energy resolution XPS doc22896 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop prototypes of fieldable eddy-current systems with GMR and SDT sensors that can detect defects in metals even with significant lift off from the material under inspection due to such things as thermal barrier coatings. Techniques for maintaining the a constant distance between the eddy-current probe and the conductive surface despite intervening coatings will also be developed in this project. Such a system can be used to lengthen the lifetime of mission critical components such as aircraft bearings, which at present have to be replaced on schedule using rather conservative lifetime estimates. The main commercial application of these systems would be military and commercial aircraft. A simple system capable of rapidly scanning an area would require eddy-current probes that can inspect a large surface in a single pass. Compact and low-power arrays of GMR and Spin Dependent Tunneling (SDT) sensors developed for this program can be used in this application as well as other applications such as nanotechnolgy read heads to read implanted magnetic noise that is extremely difficult to compromise. The implications for more secure forms of identification are clear for the post 9 11 world doc22897 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program at NSF, and the Department of Defense, Profs. Gina Hoatson and Robert Vold at the College of William and Mary will acquire a high field (18 tesla), multinuclear solid state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) ferroelectric and piezoelectric materials; b) high performance carbon nitride films; c) technologically important conducting polymers; and d) biologically important amino acids and cyclic dipeptides. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential for carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including development of wear-related coatings, ultrasonic transducers and electronic actuators, and electrochromic devices. In addition, amino acids and cyclic dipeptides are important to study because these model systems yield insight into problems of protein folding, molecular recognition and enzyme activity doc22898 none A grant has been awarded to the River Studies Center (Center) at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse for the acquisition of equipment to support research and undergraduate student training in aquatic science. Drs. Saros, Haro, Rolfhus, and Sandheinrich will oversee the research. The Center was established in to facilitate the University s scientific involvement with environmental and resource-management issues pertinent to the Upper Mississippi River. Subsequently, it has expanded its research activities to other aquatic resources in Wisconsin, the Upper Midwest and the nation, providing research opportunities to nearly 100 graduate students and more than 250 undergraduates. The Center has become nationally recognized for its investigations of non-point source pollutants in rivers, streams, lakes, and wetlands. Ongoing studies in the Center are focusing on two pollutants, nitrogen (as essential element) and mercury (a highly toxic metal), which have caused widespread degradation of aquatic resources. Members of the Center are currently exploring the extent to which atmospheric N deposition may be altering alpine lake communities in the western U.S. and are investigating how groundwater surface water interactions affect N dynamics and export in watersheds under multiple land management practices in the Upper Midwest. The Center s mercury investigations are assessing landscape factors controlling methylmercury contamination in food webs of lakes of Voyageurs National Park, the production and accumulation of methylmercury in nearshore environments of southern Lake Superior, and the linkages between methylmercury exposure and endocrine disruptors in wild fish. Collectively, the Center s investigations of non-point source pollutants provide a broad array of research opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students of aquatic science. The grant will support the purchase of equipment to further enhance the Center s capabilities in investigations of non-point source pollution and education of students in aquatic sciences. Analyses of water chemistry and aquatic food webs are critical to understanding the source and effects of non-point source pollution in lakes and streams. Nitrogen enrichment can alter the composition and dynamics of food webs, whereas the exposure of humans and wildlife to methylmecury occurs via the aquatic food web. The equipment purchased through this grant includes an elemental analyzer to measure ratios of various nutrients in aquatic organisms, and a total organic carbon analyzer to quantify dissolved organic carbon, an important factor influencing the transport and availability of inorganic mercury and methlmercury to aquatic organisms. Two microscopes will enhance the Center s imaging capabilities An automated mercury analyzer and temperature-controlled bath will enhance the Center s ability to determine mercury in water, sediment, and aquatic organisms. The variety and extensive nature of theses activities will promote the understanding of several issues related to non-point source pollution by nitrogen and mercury. Nitrogen enrichment and mercury contamination of aquatic ecosystems are problems of pressing regional and national concern, both from an ecological and human health perspective. The acquisition of this equipment will foster the synthesis of results among aquatic ecosystems that span an array of ecological, geological, and chemical characteristics; this information will aid managers and scientists in making more informed decisions. Moreover, the equipment will enhance the research of Center faculty, whose scientific credentials and motivation ensure competitiveness in obtaining financial support for research in aquatic science. In addition, the equipment will further enhance the training and research of the many undergraduate and graduate (M.S.) students who will benefit from ready access to well-equipped, scientific facilities doc22899 none This project seeks to develop a high-average power, femtosecond laser system with capabilities well-beyond what exists anywhere in the world at present.It will generate pulses with energies of 1-4mJ,with a pulse duration of under 20fs,and at a repetition rate of 10 - 40 kHz.It will also be capable of generating shaped light pulses for experiments in quantum control of matter,optimizing EUV generation,novel high-resolution microscopies,and micro- machining.This laser will be used for a wide variety of application experiments which will be done by the JILA group,and also involving collaborators from the University of Colorado,MIT, SUNY Stony Brook,UC Berkeley,Colorado State University,Princeton University,and Wayne State University.Thus,a new,high-performance laser system will be heavily used for a wide range of optical science and engineering projects.Furthermore,the laser designs will be made available to the ultrafast laser community through publications,web pages,and technology transfer to industry.The JILA group has a very strong track record of technology transfer,both to the scientific and engineering communities and to industry.Most importantly,this project will also provide an excellent training ground for students in high technology areas such as laser and optical design,fast electronics,EUV generation,novel pulse shaping technologies,and mechanical design doc22900 none Flarend This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant provides support for investigations of possible alternative Aluminum compound source targets for subsequent Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS)-based analysis of sputtered Al- ions to determine the isotopic abundance of the cosmogenic nuclide 26Al. Aluminum-26 is a rare isotope that can be used to date exposed rocks surfaces. The capability of AMS for high precision analysis of 26Al for surface exposure age dating has created something of a resurgence in the field of geomorphology where scientists have long struggled to nail down rates of erosional processes. This effort will investigate two alternatives to the current standard Al2O3 source target for subsequent AMS analysis of 26Al, namely, aluminum nitride (AlN) and aluminum boride (AlB2). Preliminary work conducted at PRIME Lab by the investigator has shown some evidence for much higher negative Al ion yield as a result of Cs+ sputtering of AlN and AlB2 targets than for standard alumina targets but potential isobaric interferences were not fully resolved. The PI and an undergraduate student will therefore conduct further interlaboratory AMS analyses of AlN and AlB2 targets at the Purdue Rare Isotope Measurement facility (PRIME Lab) and at the higher energy Livermore AMS facility, GEOCAMS to further characterize new target materials. In addition, they will conduct preliminary testing of storage, packing and loading of samples to assess possible sample degradation that would effect subsequent AMS analytical precision and accuracy and will disseminate the results doc22901 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will further develop a new Flow Path Management System (FPMS) representing an innovation in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) that is more effective than existing supply-chain management software paradigms, incorporates lean manufacturing principles, and is more available to smaller manufacturing companies than existing systems in that it can be delivered via the World Wide Web. The software has the potential to reduce inventory by 20% or more in companies with complicated manufacturing operations and or supply chains. In addition, the software can recommend supply chain planning policies that increase throughput, decrease cycle times, and improve customer service. The commercialization strategy is to use distribution channels: (1) on-site Intranet installations at large companies (2) delivery as a web service via the Internet for smaller companies, and (3) licensing the algorithms to larger ERP SCM vendors for incorporation in their software suites doc22902 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will enhance the company s approximate record-matching software, the Maximum Entropy De-Duper, MEDD(TM) by: 1) Enhancing MEDD s performance using advanced standardization tools to convert data, such as names and addresses, into standard formats; 2) Expanding MEDD s market by matching business names not only person names; 3) Internationalizing MEDD to support Canadian French or Mexican Spanish; 4) Benchmarking MEDD against the competition and developing a methodology to objectively compare matching systems; 5) Reducing MEDD s reliance on training data to ease deployment; producing the best possible untrained models that will adapt and improve through client use; 6) Applying the latest advances in machine learning technology to the record-matching problem to increase competitive advantage; and 7) Speeding MEDD word blocking with a fast, innovative memory-resident data-store. MEDD s market includes all business and government entities that store mission-critical information in large databases. The project will yield societal benefits for public health, anti-terrorist efforts, epidemiological research, the U.S. Census, and the data quality of records relating to racial and ethnic minorities doc22903 none A field emission scanning electron microscope (FESEM) is sought for the University of Delaware College of Engineering (COE) electron microscopy center to fill an immediate, widespread need for nanometer resolution scanning electron microscopy. FESEM has become an indispensable instrument in conducting micro- to nanomorphological material imaging and chemical imaging analysis. Importantly, true nanoscale data is obtainable from of an immense array of materials, spanning hard inorganics, both electrically conductive and insulative, to soft polymeric and biologicals. In comparison to traditional thermionic SEM (currenlty, the only functioning SEM in the college of engineering (COE) EM facility), the FESEM provides far superior resolution (nanostructures as small as 1 nm in diameter while our traditional SEM resolution is in the range of ~100 of nm) and can be operated at voltages as low as 0.5kV (the traditional thermal source in-house SEM must operate at ~30kV to reach its ultimate resolution of ~0.1 mm). It is important to stress that this low accelerating voltage allows direct nanoscopic imaging and elemental analysis of all materials currently being studied in COE and across the university. On the current COE SEM instrument, a JEOL JXA-840, imaging and chemical analysis is limited to conductive inorganics and only feasible at relatively low resolution ( 0.1 mm for secondary electron imaging and ~1.0 mm for x-ray analysis). Polymeric and other insulating materials must be coated by a thick (~10 s of nm) layer of conductive metal for feasible imaging which, consequently, completely masks true surface structure and chemistry. Biological materials with some level of hydration are simply not possible at ambient conditions in the traditional SEM due to high vacuum conditions. The sought FESEM system is equipped with state-of-the-art energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy and a cryogenic transfer and cold stage for imaging of in situ, hydrated (vitrified) biological materials. With the large emphasis on nanotechnology in the current research paradigm, and certainly here at UD, this new FESEM will fill a large materials characterization gap in the college of engineering s research capabilities. Consequently, it is estimated that over 18 faculty members and 30 to 40 graduate students will immediately benefit in their research from the acquisition of the FESEM. Educational training opportunities for graduate students and advanced undergraduates represent a clear benefit to the university as a whole. At present, our electron microscopy facility serves about 30 students and post doctors for predominantly TEM research purposes. In addition, over 25 students from engineering and other natural science majors on campus use the facility for their course work (the new TEM course MSEG CHEG 832 and the TEM lab module in MSEG602, Structure of Materials lab offered through Materials Science and Engineering). Specifically, a new MSEG602 lab module will be developed by the PI for specific FESEM introduction and instruction to incoming college of engineering graduate students. The addition of an FESEM will provide a unique opportunity for students at various levels and from various backgrounds to work in an interdisciplinary, advanced laboratory setting that is the College of Engineering electron microscopy center. Since the summer of , we have utilized our JEOL FasTEM system, contained in the FEG TEM microscope, to enhance our undergraduate and graduate classroom teaching and training. The FasTEM is a system integrated with our field emission transmission electron microscope (FE-TEM) that is capable of telecommunication and remote operation through computer networks. In addition to remote demonstrations, elementary and middle school students frequently visit the lab for in-house demonstrations of electron microscopy. It is obvious that these in-house and outside demonstrations generate significant student curiosity and interest in science and technology. To better achieve our educational outreach goals (and attract top quality undergraduates to the university) it is our desire that we also can demonstrate the nanostructures of modern engineered materials with an FESEM. Experience tells us that the 3-dimentional morphological images of the FESEM appeal more to K-12 students than 2-dimensional TEM data which is more difficult to interpret. Furthermore, the UD college of engineering electron microscopy facility has been highlighted in the popular media through a visit by the Discovery Channel in the fall of . Microscopic details of fracture surfaces from metal cables of the Hindenberg were observed indicating the nature of catastrophic tensile failure. This type of popular media outreach will also be further pursued in the future during which we can highlight the new experimental capabilities of the college of engineering electron microscopy facility doc22904 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will develop a new analytical tool for characterizing drug delivery aerosols and powders. This instrument will be based on a previously developed aerosal mass spectrometer that provides real-time size distribution and chemical composition measurements for aerosol particles. During Phase I research, a new inlet for the aerosol mass spectrometer, allowing detection of particles in the size range relevant to inhalable drug delivery aerosols and powders (2 to 10 mm in diameter), was successfully developed. The key objectives of the Phase II project are : (a) to further improve the collection efficiency for particles in the 2 to 10 mm diameter size range ; (b) to design and construct a sampling apparatus that conforms to Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and U. S. Pharmacopeia Convention (USP) guidelines for sampling drug delivery aerosols from metered dose inhalers (MDIs) and dry powder inhalers (PDIs); and (c)to develop and to validate an analytical method that meets FDA standards. The commercial applications of this project will be in the area of drug delivery doc22905 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Biosphere 2 Center at Columbia University will acquire a Proton Transfer Reaction Mass Spectrometer (PTR-MS) and a gas chromatography-time of flight mass spectrometer (GC-TOFMS) to support a collaborative, interdisciplinary research agenda in chemical ecology and biosphere-atmosphere chemistry. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) investigations of host-plant volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and CO2 emissions in insect neurobiology; b) analysis of chemical communication and defense in a pantropical ant; c) on-line measurements of biosphere-atmosphere chemistry influenced by plant emission of VOCs; d) understanding the role of plant-emitted isoprene in (insect) chemical ecology; and e) ion mobility spectroscopy development. Mass spectrometry (MS) is a technique used to probe intimate structural details and to obtain the molecular compositions of a vast array of organic, bioorganic, and organometallic molecules. The results from these studies will have an impact in a number of areas including chemical ecology and atmospheric sciences doc22906 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop a scanning automultiscopic 3-D visualization system. Current 3-D systems have very limited field-of-view or require intrusive headgear with head tracking to emulate look-around, and introduce inconsistencies between binocular convergence and eye accommodation. This project will develop a new class of 3-D displays based on proprietary liquid crystal scanner panels that time-sequentially project a large number of perspective images over a wide field-of-view into the view space in front of the display. The device will be a fully functioning full color, high resolution 3-D display system with large screen, large look-around field-of-view with many-perspective-image scanning at a flicker-free rate, using a high speed video projection system. The proposed 3-D system will be used for visualization of multidimensional scientific and medical data, for 3-D design and simulation, training and education of government and civilian personnel in a collaborative 3-D virtual environment, and for telepresence and teleoperation doc22907 none A grant has been awarded to Drs. Joseph V. Martin, Georgia A. Arbuckle-Keil, Daniel H. Shain, J. William Whitlow, Jr. and William M. Saidel at Rutgers University to obtain a scanning electron microscope for multidisciplinary use. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) provides high resolution imagery of surfaces ranging from synthetic materials to biological samples. Energy dispersive X-ray (EDX)-equipped scanning electron microscopes also have the capacity to detect heavy metals localized in tissue (e.g., brain) and synthetic polymers. In an effort to foster interdisciplinary research among faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at the Rutgers Camden campus, the IPCBS (Information Processing in Complex Biological Systems) group at Camden will acquire an SEM equipped with EDX capabilities. This unit operates under low vacuum, which permits samples to be examined without traditional time-consuming and costly preparative methodologies. Research initiatives that would result from the purchase of this instrument include the detailed morphological characterization of polymers with electroactive properties (Dr. G. Arbuckle-Keil), fine resolution of fungal hyphae for mapping leaf surfaces (Dr. J. Dighton), the accumulation of lead in brain tissue (Drs. J. Martin, W. Saidel, R. Whitlow), the distribution of iodine and zinc in the central nervous system as they relate to thyroid hormone function and circadian rhythms, respectively (Dr. J. Martin, P. Sarkar), characterizing the morphology of an unusual fish eye (Pantadon buchholzi) that receives light simultaneously from air and water (Dr. W. Saidel) and the taxonomic classification of annelid species from the Amazon River (Dr. D. Shain). The ease of use of an SEM will allow graduate and undergraduate researchers to have hands-on experience with a sophisticated research instrument. Courses that can incorporate an SEM component in their curricula include comparative morphology of plants, chemical principles, developmental botany, electron microscopy, general microbiology, instrumental analysis, invertebrate zoology, microtechnique and its applications, mycology and others. High school students will also have access to this instrument through the Science Preparation Alliance of Rutgers and Camden (SPARC). In summary, the acquisition of an SEM at Rutgers Camden will greatly facilitate a broad range of research and teaching initiatives on this campus doc22908 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, Prof. R. Graham Cooks of Purdue University will develop a state-of-the-art Kingdon trap mass spectrometer for high performance chemical and biochemical analysis. This instrument represents a fundamentally new approach to high accuracy precision mass measurements. In addition, its performance should be equivalent to a Fourier Transform-Ion Cyclotron Resonance (FT-ICR) instrument, which is considerably more expensive. The project will impact the education of a number of graduate students and postdoctoral associates at Purdue, who will work directly to develop the instrument or will be involved in its testing. A set of short courses in biological instrumentation will also be offered doc22909 none into components targeted at specific processors on the network based upon the resources required by the algorithm. This functionality will greatly benefit the industrial control engineer, who will be able to focus on algorithm and application development rather than details of hardware and networking realizations. As the commercial potential of distributed approaches are becoming more prevalent in industrial applications, the potential of this software system will grow at a fast rate. For example, 15 network controllers instead of one now manage a Proctor & Gamble diaper manufacturing line. Currently the market for distributed measurement and control is fragmented, with over 60 proprietary process network standards in use. The advent of the IEEE smart transducer standard creates a huge market opportunity by providing a portable application model that enables development tools, such as those being developed in this project, to be used with the multitude of existing commercial process busses doc22910 none Proposal PI: Sue Ellen F. Gruber Acquisition of Instrumentation for High Resolution Light Microscopy and Image Processing at Mount Holyoke College A grant has been awarded to Dr. Sue Ellen F. Gruber and five other biologists at Mount Holyoke College to acquire instrumentation for high resolution light microscopy and image processing. Light microscopy is core to the analysis of diverse biological questions under investigation by these faculty and their undergraduates in the Biology Department. The instruments to be obtained, including a research-quality fluorescence microscope coupled to a high resolution cooled CCD camera and computer hardware and software appropriate for image processing, will augment the research needs of these researchers, and in each case will permit experimentation and analysis not possible with existing equipment. This grant will, at the same time, enhance the research training of students in the Biology Department, as well as in the two allied programs of Biochemistry, and Neuroscience and Behavior. The new instrumentation, to become part of an integrated microscopy facility, will complement the existing electron microscopes with up-to-date sophistication in the several modes of light microscopy. Projects under investigation by the six participating biology faculty members are wide-ranging. One examines the immunological interactions between a mother and fetus that influence the success of pregnancy. A second explores the action of antimalarial drugs in microorganisms. A third, unique in North America, aims to document the biodiversity of neglected invertebrate groups. The remaining projects dissect the events giving rise to programmed cell death in plants, sort out the identity of cell surface features that may be responsible for AIDS-related immunodeficiency in mice, and examine the role of steroid hormones in the development of fruitflies. In all instances, the enhanced ability to obtain and process high quality microscope images will open up new avenues of experimentation. Mount Holyoke College is an institution dedicated to preparing women to be leaders in every part of productive society and has an especially outstanding record in training women scientists. Its mission is to train students to think and act as practicing scientists, by working with accomplished faculty who emphasize hands-on research with modern equipment. Thus, the benefits of the new instrumentation will extend beyond the particular faculty research accomplishments, as they nurture the research training of a generation of future scientists doc22911 none Montana Tech has an unusual combination of academic and practical talent that is uniquely suited to link the requirements of both laboratory and field testing with the increasingly important discipline of numerical modeling. Such a collection of individuals is rarely found in large universities, much less an institution the size of Montana Tech. Each of the four disciplines represented by the co-principal investigators investigate similar materials, but each conduct his or her investigation from a different perspective that is required by their respective disciplines. However, the equipment purchased through this award will allow for a combination of these different perspectives into a comprehensive program that will have a synergistic effect into how research is conducted into geologic and related materials and designs. The equipment will be used to form an Integrated Physical and Numerical Modeling Geomechanics Laboratory. The acquired equipment will be used to perform research into the triaxial testing of rock. Montana Tech s triaxial test device will be utilized to its full potential for research and instructional purposes as a result of the upgrade from this proposed research equipment grant. The components of the upgrade are data acquisition & control, confining pressure, pore pressure, and thermal modules. The acquired computers and numerical modeling software will be used to perform research into the behavior of geological and composite materials. Finite difference and discrete element software programs are thus requested for both continuum and discontinuum numerical analyses. Numerical methods are especially suitable for modeling materials over a wide range of scales. However, they require exceptionally powerful computer workstations that should be networked together so that parallel-processing techniques may more efficiently solve the problem at hand. The research applications will range from underground mining to micro-mechanical analysis of particulate reinforced composites to rock drillability and rock bit interaction. Most of the projects combine numerical modeling with physical testing of rock that is necessary to accurately determine material properties prior to the modeling. The laboratory will serve the research needs of all the respective programs within Montana Tech as well as the research needs of interested industries and governmental research agencies. An estimated 100 students year will benefit from the acquired equipment, primarily via lab activities required for in their coursework. Five undergraduate and nine graduate level courses would use various components of the equipment. Furthermore, since Montana Tech actively involves undergraduate and graduate students in research, both groups will utilize the laboratory equipment and the numerical modeling facilities, in addition to personnel from the extractive industries and other government research agencies. Co-PI Donovan is integrally involved in the Rocky Mountain Agile Virtual Enterprise Technical Development Center (RAVE-TDC) which is designed to match entities like the Integrated Geomechanics Laboratory that can provide services, with clients within Montana who need those services. Several tribal organizations are participating in the RAVE-TDC. The PIs have excellent records regarding encouraging students, particularly women, to participate in research activities. The Integrated Geomechanics Laboratory developed using the acquired equipment is expected to be an excellent recruiting tool doc22912 none Tiwari Research in nanotechnology is strongly dependent on the PIs ability to pattern structures at the nano-scale. Electron-beam lithography is the leading tool that makes such patterning possible for a vast variety of projects. Access and availability of this capability is critical to the success of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. This MRI proposal seeks funding for the acquisition of an advanced thermal-field-emission electron-beam lithography system to upgrade the nanolithography capabilities of Cornell Nanofabrication Facility (CNF). This will allow CNF to continue to provide state-of-the-art nanolithography capabilities to the nation s large and rapidly growing community of nanoscience researchers, with improved speed, resolution and placement compared to the existing capabilities in the National Nanofabrication Users Network (NNUN). In , this network served about users, with ~600 coming to Cornell. This proposal comes at a critical time because one of the two fully-utilized e-beam lithography systems currently in the CNF, a 15-year old Cambridge Instruments EBMF system, has ceased to be supported by the manufacturer and does not meet the requirements of new nanoscience projects. A new E-Beam lithography instrument is a major investment that can only be justified by a large user demand coupled with the infrastructure necessary to fulfill that demand quickly, efficiently and reliably. CNF serves a large and growing group of users with innovative projects from across the nation. It has the necessary staff, software, and hardware infrastructure to routinely achieve state-of-the-art nanolithography, and to transform the patterned structures into devices and systems of interest using integrated processing. CNF has a proven track record over the last 25 years of providing strong user support, a critical mass of expertise, and an effectively maintained resource to the national community. Over 130 researchers used the PIs e-beam tools last year. The manufacturer-unsupported EBMF system is now beyond its lifetime. A critical failure and loss of the machine is conservatively expected to increase the delay for new users from a period of six weeks to six months. At the same time, the National Nanotechnology Initiative is increasing the nation s demand for e-beam lithography in the 10-100 nm range beyond the capabilities of the EBMF system. CNF is one of the very few institutions throughout the nation that both provides open access and has a record of providing successful nanofabrication solutions. The machine to be purchased will be a choice between Leica GB6 and JEOL , with the final decision to be determined by the capabilities of the machines at the time of the selection. The selection will be based on funds available, reliability of the system, speed of the system, the usability of the software for research projects, the resolution and field-size afforded, and the ability of the manufacturer to service the machine rapidly and reliably, to meet the specifications and to minimize the costs. Researchers at CNF get very strong hands-on training as users of the facility. This allows the staff to work on multiple projects simultaneously and to lend special support to new and inexperienced users. This practical emphasis at CNF is reflected in the large number of electron-beam lithography experts throughout the nation (in industry and in academia) who obtained their major experience through Cornell. In addition to this graduate research emphasis, the PIs have similarly been successful in educational and outreach efforts at the undergraduate level and towards under-represented groups by integrating their research and educational efforts. To address the national resource need of under-represented nanotechnology experts, they will complement their other effort with a program that will identify and support the research of five graduate researchers per year from Howard University through the training and use of the proposed electron-beam lithography system doc22913 none A grant has been awarded to the University of Chicago to acquire a Surfac Plasmon resonance (SPR) analyzer. Underlying all biological processes are highly specific interactions between large molecules such as proteins, DNA and RNA. In order to determine the mechanisms that promote life it is important not only to detect interactions between macromolecules, but to measure their strength using quantitative methods. The members of our group of research laboratories share an interest in understanding how molecules recognize their specific partners among the huge number of macromolecules in and on cells. The instrument measures the change in light refraction near a surface that occurs when macromolecules interact on that surface. This phenomenon is called surface plasmon resonance (SPR). SPR allows very rapid and quantitative measurements of interactions between macromolecules. The instrument has robotic functions that allow automatic processing of many different samples making it possible to test many different interactions under a wide range of conditions with relative ease. The proposed funding would contribute significantly to the ability of investigators at the University of Chicago to contribute to the understanding of a number of biological processes. These processes include how pollen recognizes plants of its own species, how hormones recognize specific target cells, how viruses convert inactive virus precursor proteins into active ones, how cells repair their DNA, how cells turn on specific genes so that they are expressed as RNA, and how RNA is modified by large protein-RNA machines. In addition to advancing our knowledge of the living world, the proposed work will eventually lead to improvements in medicine, agriculture, and industrial manufacturing. Moreover, the availability of an SPR system will enhance the education of undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Chicago by providing them the opportunity to gain hands on experience with a state-of-the-art method for characterizing the interactions of biomolecules. The SPR instrument will be part of a series of instruments housed in the Biophysics Core facility. This facility contains several high-end instruments which contribute valuable learning tools for biology students. The Biophysics facility is one of a number of facilities at the University of Chicago that make the University attractive to a wide variety of students including women and people from under-represented groups. The University engages in a range of programs designed to specifically attract and retain students from under-represented groups doc22914 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program supports the acquisition of a Small Angle X-ray Scattering (SAXS) Facility at the University of Tennessee. The instrument will be used to characterize the structure of materials on a length scale of 1-100 nm. Current and future research that will benefit from the SAXS facility ranges from studies of the structure of soft materials such as polymers to the more traditional hard materials. The studies of soft materials include investigation of the morphology of (a) polymer blends and copolymers, (b) polymer crystallization, (c) polymer electrolytes, (d) polymer composites and (e) processed polymers (fibers, films, moldings, etc.). Studies of hard materials include investigations of (a) the nanostructure of new metal oxide based materials, (b) the nanometer-size dispersions of metals and compounds in sapphire, (d) development of nanoparticles through pulsed laser ablation techniques, and (e) void formation in carbon fibers. An interesting overlap involves the use of microphase separated diblock and triblock copolymers as templates to synthesize new nanostructures, well ordered carbon nanotubes, and nanoscale magnetic wires. In addition, studies of X-ray scattering of materials will provide background for neutron scattering studies at Oak Ridge National Laboratory with the HFIR reactor upgrade and, in the longer term, the completion of the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS). This acquisition will (1) foster the development of new areas of research in nanoscience and new collaborations among UT faculty in science and engineering, especially in the soft materials area, (2) develop new collaborations among UTK faculty and students with scientists and engineers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and with and other internationally prominent researchers, (3) provide opportunities for SAXS measurements to investigators from neighboring institutions, especially those that have traditionally served under-represented minorities. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program supports the acquisition of a Small Angle X-ray Scattering (SAXS) Facility at the University of Tennessee. The instrument will be used to characterize the structure of materials on a length scale of 1-100 nm. The SAXS system will serve faculty, postdoctoral research fellows, and students in a wide range of sub-disciplines of Materials Science, including polymer science and engineering, ceramics, metallurgy, and solid state physics. Examples of areas of study include investigation of the structure of (a) polymer blends and copolymers, (b) polymer crystallization, (c) polymer electrolytes, (d) polymer composites (e) processed polymers (fibers, films, moldings, etc.), (f) new metal oxide based materials, (g) the nanometer-size dispersions of metals and compounds in sapphire, (h) development of nanoparticles through pulsed laser ablation techniques, and (i) void formation in carbon fibers. This acquisition will (1) foster the development of new areas of research in nanoscience and new collaborations among UT faculty in science and engineering, especially in the soft materials area, (2) develop new collaborations among UTK faculty and students with scientists and engineers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and with and other internationally prominent researchers, (3) provide opportunities for SAXS measurements to investigators from neighboring institutions, especially those that have traditionally served under-represented minorities doc22915 none Skrutskie, Michael F. This project will equip the University of Virginia s Fan mountain observatory with a state-of-the-art infrared imager. Graduate and undergraduate students will design and build the instrument, which is based on a x HgCdTe Rockwell Science Center HAWAII array to provide sensitivity to 2.5 micrometers wavelength. In addition to broad and narrow-band imaging capabioity the camera design includes a low resolution (R~300) grism-based spectrographic mode. The completed system will be used for several scientific applications, including 1.variability studies of young stellar objects, 2. Spectral classification studies of brown dwarfs, parallax proper motion measurements of brown dwarfs, 3. Classification and variability studies of asymptotic giant branch stars, and 4 rotational mineralogy studies of asteriods and near-earth objects doc22916 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, Harold W. Pinnick and colleagues at West Virginia State College will acquire an inductively-coupled plasma (ICP) atomic emission spectrometer for metal analysis on environmental samples. They plan to investigate naturally-occurring metal ions, their concentrations and anthropogenic metal contamination in aquatic and terrestrial environments. The overall goal is to understand the chemistry that occurs at abandoned coal mine sites in West Virginia, as a first step to designing and implementing remediation. Inductively-coupled plasma spectroscopy is an effective technique for determining the presence of trace elements and their concentrations. It provides a rapid and quantitative determination of a large number of heavy metals in a variety of sample types. It can ascertain metal concentrations in the parts per billion range, and it can determine at least 35 elements simultaneously within minutes. The availability of an ICP will enhance the educational experience of the undergraduate students attending West Virginia State College doc22917 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Southwest Texas State University will add CCD capability to their P4 diffractometer, which will allow small molecule diffractometry. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including the following: a) site-directed mutagenesis; b) combinatorial synthesis of catalysts and sensors based on bis-bridged calix[6]arenes; and c) polyhedral borane anion investigations. The X-ray diffractometer allows accurate and precise measurements of the full three dimensional structure of a molecule, including bond distances and angles, and it provides accurate information about the spatial arrangement of the molecule relative to the neighboring molecules. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, including the preparation of more efficient catalysts, chemical sensors, and biochemistry doc22918 none The instrumentation being requested would support five currently funded research projects and would establish test capabilities to support the upcoming Microsystems Ph.D. program in the College of Engineering at RIT. The previously stated scope will not change significantly. Additional funding will be obtained through RIT, the College of Engineering and industrial support. Following is the scope and justification for the revised equipment list. The Microwave and Antenna Lab, within the EE Department, does have excellent RF measurement capabilities. However the lab is short of some key instrumentation for higher frequency characterization and the testing of micro-scale structures. The probe measurement system for interfacing the circuitry in the chip and on the package to the network analyzer is not available. The deficiency of this very crucial accessory is currently being addressed by making measurements at Georgia Tech. This short-term solution is tedious and slow, and prevents graduate students from optimizing designs on their own. There is a critical need for a probe measurement system. The number of probes and accessories previously requested has been reduced, to match with the available funding. Also, software that was previously requested for theoretical modeling of RF circuitry has been removed and will be obtained through research funding and in conjunction with support from the Electrical Engineering Department. Network analyzers at frequencies up to 6 GHz are available in the Microwave lab, for measuring the reflection and transmission characteristics of RF components, for characterizing CMOS and SiGe heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBT s) and for optimizing input characteristics of antenna arrays. However, for higher frequency microwave circuit characterization a network analyzer with capabilities extending to 40 GHz is required. Because of the reduced budget, some of the options requested previously have been removed. The most important ones, such as the time domain option, the TRL calibration and the frequency-offset mode have been retained. Accessories such as cables, the GPIB kit, repair and service will be provided, as needed, by the EE Department. The HP A vector signal analyzer required for optimizing the smart antenna system has been removed from the equipment list. At present, this instrument has been loaned by HP to the Electrical Engineering Department for classroom and research purposes. It is the intention to negotiate with HP, for acquiring this equipment as a donation. The chip and package fabrication would be done in the Semiconductor and Microsystems Fabrication Laboratory (SMFL) of RLT, which has a complete IC and MEMS fabrication capability. However, there is currently no Microwave and RF instrumentation in the facility for device characterization. It is critical that the test capability of the SMFL be strengthened in order to support the increased activity in RF-MEMS, and to support Ph.D. level research in Microsystems. Because of the reduced budget, some of the items that were originally requested were removed. Although an RF signal generator and a digital oscilloscope are needed for mixed-signal testing, other systems that are available from neighboring departments in the college (Electrical and Computer Engineering) should be adequate as a short-term solution. These systems may eventually be acquired through additional college funding. The semi-automated probe station, originally proposed, has been requested from Motorola. An equivalent model, the KLA probe station, has been recently committed by Motorola as a donation. The requested software packages for instrument control, data collection and parameter extraction will be obtained through research grants and industrial support doc22919 none A physical properties measurement system for characterizing transport and complex impedance properties at elevated temperatures will be developed. The primary function of this instrumentation is to elucidate the magnetic, electronic, and thermal properties of novel spin- and charge-functional materials through temperature and magnetic field-dependent measurements of transport and electromagnetic response. The proposed system will include a micro-heater platen technology to provide for the extended temperature range. Capabilities of the instrumentation will include AC susceptibility, dc magnetization, I-V, Hall measurements, thermal conductivity, and complex impedance in magnetic fields up to 7 Tesla over a temperature range of 4 to 700 K. Together with parallel efforts in materials and devices, this instrumentation will serve as a vehicle to educate students and post-graduates regarding transport and electromagnetic response in these materials In recent years, there has emerged a significant interest in the understanding and manipulation of charge and spin in a variety of electronic materials. In many cases, the spin charge functionality extends well above room temperature. The instrumentation developed under this proposal will enable the magnetic, electronic, and thermal properties of novel spin- and charge-functional materials to be probed through an extensive temperature range. Together with parallel efforts in materials and devices, it will serve as a vehicle to educate students and post-graduates regarding transport and electromagnetic response in these materials doc22920 none With support from theMajor Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Simmons College will acquire a Matrix-assisted Laser Desorption Ionization - Time of Flight (MALDI-TOF) Mass Spectrometer. This instrument will be used in a wide variety of studies, including a) the development and testing of organic light emitting diodes; and b) the investigation of cell signaling proteins associated with the activation of B lymphocytes in the humoral immune system. Matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization (MALDI) time-of-flight (TOF) mass spectrometry is the technique of choice for obtaining accurate molecular weights on molecules up to and over 300,000 daltons, with extremely high sensitivity. Use of a MALDI-TOF mass spectrometer has therefore become a standard technique in most DNA protein core facilities. The ability to obtain very accurate molecular weights of biological molecules is fundamental to all biological and biomedical research and essential in a modern research and training environment. Simmons College is a member of the Colleges of the Fenway consortium of six neighboring colleges. One of these colleges, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, will also benefit from the use of the proposed instrument doc22921 none Ekinci Funding is requested for the development of a novel matrix assisted laser desorption ionization time of flight (MALDI-TOF) mass spectrometer. The goal of this development is to replace the conventional microchannel plate (MCP) detectors in an existing MALDI-TOF mass spectrometer by resonant nano-mechanical sensors to improve its mass spectrometric capabilities. The proposed development will result in a room temperature MALDI-TOF mass spectrometer with very high mass resolution and sensitivity and practically no upper limit for detectable mass. This is a much-needed analytical tool for chemical and biological sciences and offers prospects for studying many different macromolecules. It also appears that this will be the first application where nano-mechanical systems are being employed as ultra-fast sensors doc22922 none Texas A&M University plans to design and build a 256 processor, medium grain parallel machine with as close to maximum floating point performance per dollar as possible. This system, commonly referred to as a Beowulf cluster, will require a modification of the usual paradigm in order to solve certain design problems inherent in these systems. The cluster will contain 256 processors consisting of 128 nodes using dual AMD motherboards, each with 1GB ECC DDR DRAM and will be interconnected with Gigabit Ethernet to form one of the largest and most powerful academic clusters. Components will be chosen to minimize cost while maximizing performance. Novel techniques for mounting and cooling the motherboards will be explored in an effort to maximize the density of the nodes. Multiple operating environments will also be made available, allowing the end user to determine which environment yields the peak performance for their application. This machine will be used to solve a variety of computationally intensive problems in the mathematical and physical sciences and support researchers primarily located in chemistry, mathematics, physics and statistics. One group, with a core in numerical analysis but with emphasis on fluid flowing porous media, will also include researchers with expertise in oil recovery and in groundwater flow (from Petroleum and from Agriculture Engineering) and in parallel architectures (from Computer Science). In addition to problems in large-scale computation, the groups will be solving problems in inverse problems, nonparametric function estimation, statistical methods for computational biology, quantum dynamics, high energy physics, inorganic and organometallic systems, and polyatomic molecules. This effort will also provide an educational benefit, both within the design and the implementation stages. Mechanical Engineering will use the novel power and cooling requirements of the system as source of activity in a senior design class. Once the system is in place, the departments of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science will provide courses in efficient utilization and programming to allow maximum benefit to the designated research groups, as well as the rest of the university community doc22923 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, Martin Kirk and colleagues at the University of New Mexico will acquire a combined X-band Q-band CW EPR ENDOR spectrometer. Projects that will exploit this instrument include a) studies of molybdoenzymes and relevant model complexes; b) research on thermally induced charge transfer materials; c) the use of cobalt as a spectroscopic probe of zinc sites in metalloproteins; d) spectroscopic studies of high symmetry cobalt coordination compounds; and e) biophysical studies of photosynthetic water oxidation and iron regulation. An electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectrometer is an instrument used to obtain information about the molecular and electronic structure of molecules. It may also be used to obtain information about the lifetimes of free radicals which are often essential for the initiation of tumor growth and or a variety of chemical reactions. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas, in particular biological chemistry doc22924 none This work will develop an Autonomous Real-time Remote Observatory (ARRO), which will be designed to accommodate an integrated suite of at least a dozen instruments, with the goal of enabling reliable multi-instrument observations from extremely cold polar sites, such as the Antarctic plateau and the interior of Greenland. It will include a power system and heated space sufficient for the experiments, as well as the capability for data acquisition, data storage, and real time data transmission via satellite. As part of the proposed work, two prototypes of this observatory will be built and tested for extended periods of time in cold chambers, on Mt. Washington, and at the South Pole. Significant outstanding science issues in several diverse fields drive the need for a network of reliable autonomous observatories capable of operation in polar regions. In solar-terrestrial physics, the geomagnetic polar cap forms a key window on the interaction between the solar wind and the Earth s magnetosphere. In the field of atmospheric science one vital object of study for this new technology is the Type 1a (nitric acid trihydrate) polar stratospheric cloud, implicated in the annual austral springtime destruction of stratospheric ozone over Antarctica. For terrestrial seismic studies, a central goal is determining the crustal and mantle structure from analysis of seismic signals received following earthquakes, a methodology which requires a network of receiving stations over the area of study. The seismic character of Antarctica is not well-known, and furthermore, the lack of seismic stations at very high latitudes translates into ignorance of the polar regions of the Earth s core, since acoustic ray paths penetrating this region can only be received at extremely high latitudes. While one of the immediate applications of the proposed ARRO development is to replace the current generation of Automatic Geophysical Observatories (AGO s) in the Antarctic interior, the ARRO design is sufficiently agile to incorporate additional instrumentation and enable pursuit of a broad science agenda by a large and growing group of institutions and individual investigators. Finally, ARRO development includes several different layers of research and research training. Students will be directly involved in the development, from the initial design stages to deployment of the units to Mt. Washington and the South Pole. The eventual establishment of a network of observatories over the polar cap will involve a much larger number of students in a broad scientific agenda. ARRO also includes significant connections to industry and government units outside of the academic science community, and their participation will sharpen the capabilities of these companies to serve the nation in applications of technology to challenging environments of cold weather and high altitudes doc22925 none This interdisciplinary research project explores human-ecosystem-climate interactions at the neighborhood scale in metropolitan Phoenix. The project draws upon social and ecological theories of spatial heterogeneity in cities in order to understand how urban development leads to economic, social, and physical inequalities among neighborhoods, which in turn produce neighborhood differences in microclimate conditions. Microclimate conditions influence the biotic environment, which then completes the cycle by influencing the socioeconomic and physical systems of neighborhoods. Because neighborhoods have unequal resources for responding to climate stress, socioeconomic status of the neighborhood and other local characteristics will moderate the effects of this process. The research has three specific objectives. First, the project will show how the settlement of neighborhoods between and transformed the landscape by altering land use, land cover, and climate. Second, the project will demonstrate whether and to what extent the resulting differences among neighborhood microclimates expose humans and other biota to unequal levels of climate-induced stressors, such as heat, poor air quality, and storm hazards. Third, the project will investigate the resilience of human and plant communities in neighborhoods that have unequal amounts of capital to cope with climate stress. The research sites are seven Phoenix neighborhoods located at monitoring sites of the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research project. The neighborhoods, bounded by census block groups, include cases that vary by age, distance to urban center, land cover, income, and ethnic composition. The project will use data from a wide variety of sources, including the census, social surveys of residents, historical land-use surveys and climate records, field measures of environmental conditions, and remotely sensed images of land cover and temperature. GIS mapping, graphing tools, spatial statistics, and multivariate statistical analysis will be used to develop indicators of human, ecosystem, and climate activities and changes over time using. Using key indicators, neighborhood socioecological cycles will be compared for places that differ by social class, physical features, and distance from the urban center. Research results will be disseminated through publications in several disciplines and presentations at professional meetings. Research on urban development in arid regions will contribute to understanding the regional dimensions of global climate change. This project will advance the development of integrative theory in the social and ecological sciences by explaining how human actions influence climate change at the neighborhood scale. This is a necessary link between fine-scale ecosystem processes, such as variation in neighborhood microclimates, and coarse-scale environmental phenomena, such as global warming. The research will help improve models of urban growth and models of regional climate change. The project also informs human vulnerability theory, which explains how social inequalities expose poor people to higher risks of environmental hazards. While many studies of vulnerability focus on natural disasters that are more likely to harm poor people, this project will study chronic environmental conditions, specifically climatic variability and change, which poses a more lasting but less obvious threat to vulnerable populations. This project will also provide opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to participate and learn about the interface between science and public issues as well as the conduct of interdisciplinary research. This project is supported by an award resulting from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc22926 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project is to complete the development of a low-cost, no preparation required, flexible dry physiological recording electrode. These electrodes have the potential to significantly improve quality of care and reduce total cost of biopotential signal analysis by reducing the time and preparation required to obtain a good signal and reducing the total cost of fabricating high quality electrodes. The Phase I results showed feasibility of fabricating dry electrode structures on rigid substrates onto low-cost flexible substrates. However, further work is necessary to optimize the fabrication processes and to ensure that the lowest cost and highest performing flexible dry electrode systems and fabrication processes are chosen to establish a solid foundation for future use. The key objectives of this Phase II project include parallel development of two particularly promising fabrication techniques, selection of a single fabrication technique for further development, and testing and evaluation of the capabilities of the dry electrodes in clinical environments. The commercial applications of this project will be in the area of physiological monitoring of patients in a clinical setting. Physiological measurements such as ECG (electrocardiogram), EMG (electromyogram), and EEG (electroencephalogram) are expected to benefit from the use of dry electrodes, in part due to the reduced time and preparation needed to apply the electrodes and in part, due to the elimination of abrasive skin prepping and electrolytic gels in the measurement procedure doc22927 none This award funds the acquisition of an axial Servo Hydraulic Test System, consisting of a closed loop control-loading frame with the appropriate electronic interface. The specific Test System requested by this proposal is manufactured by MTS with the following components: Model 810.25, 220,000 lbs ( kN) System Model 505.60 (60 GPM, psi) Hydraulic Power Unit MTS TestStar IIm Digital Control System and Software MTS Load cell, COD gage, grips and testing fixtures Desktop Pentium III Computer The test system provides a broad range of testing capability for performing load or displacement controlled testing. Testing capabilities include tension, compression, shear, flexural and cyclic testing of most materials and structural components. This test system was selected in order to fulfill the testing needs of not only the proposed research projects but also the current and future undergraduate and graduate laboratories in the area of materials and structural mechanics for the Civil and Mechanical Engineering programs at Clarkson University. The awarded equipment will be used in the following research activities: - Characterization of the Interfacial Crack Propagation in Reinforced Concrete Beams Strengthened by Externally Bonded FRP Laminates. - Time-Dependent Cleavage Fracture of Ice. - Conditions for Localized Deformation in Rock. - Testing of Composite Materials for Model Validation. Acquisition of the testing system will also strengthen the following undergraduate and graduate courses at Clarkson University: Introduction to Design, CE212; Fracture Mechanics of Concrete Structures, CE 401; Reinforced Concrete Design, CE 441; Structural Steel Design, CE 442; Advanced Design of Structural Concrete, CE 544; Manufacturing Processes, ME 390; Analysis of Materials Processing, ME 393; and Composite Mechanics and Design, ME 457. The awarded equipment will provide a critical enhancement to both the research capability and pedagogical scope of faculty as well as the relevant educational experiences of students. Moreover, these enhancements will affect students and faculty across several academic units as well as interdisciplinary work that cuts across customary departmental lines doc22928 none The Program of Integrated Science and Technology (ISAT) at James Madison University (JMU) features a multi-disciplinary curriculum that places a strong emphasis on hands-on, project-based learning. The Infrared Development and Testing Laboratory (IDTTL) was established at ISAT in to provide opportunities for effective hands-on, project-oriented, student-centered learning that reinforces concepts and skills introduced within the ISAT program. The IDTTL provides access to research in advanced topics and emerging measurement technologies, fosters development of teaming and communication skills in an interdisciplinary environment, and avails undergraduates of professional activities including writing papers, presentation at conferences, and participation in summer internships. A suite of projects ongoing in the IDTTL is presently supported by NASA including (i) non-contact measurement of the thermal-structural response of an aluminized thin-film polymer membrane, with application to sunshields, solar sails, and membrane optics and (ii) development of an imaging gas-filter correlation radiometer (GFCR) for measurement of tropospheric carbon monoxide. The laboratory also develops non-contact techniques for manufacturing process control, boiler analyses, and predictive maintenance. The common thread connecting these projects is the measurement of critical parameters where contact with the target object is either impossible or will alter the desired parameters. The equipment requested includes an infrared imager with multiple lenses, hemispherical directional reflectometer, laser vibrometer, shaker, and vacuum chamber with cold plate. These instruments will elevate the capability of the laboratory and allow undergraduates and faculty mentors the opportunity to advance existing studies, and to prepare proposals for future studies that are more competitive than would otherwise be possible. The equipment will also be incorporated into new course laboratory activities through which all ISAT majors will benefit, and undergraduates and faculty from other departments at JMU, including physics, chemistry, biology, and geology, will be invited to utilize these instruments. The IDTTL will improve its stature as a model for other colleges and universities that wish to develop an interdisciplinary research laboratory capable of conducting valuable research and development and providing undergraduates an extraordinary learning experience doc22929 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)Phase II project will continue the successful work from the Phase I project and develop integrated amplifier splitters through laser direct writing of wet-chemically derived, erbium-doped coatings. Precursor solutions will be mixed on the molecular level to produce pure and homogeneous materials. Waveguide structures will be written into the erbium-doped fluoride coatings with a laser, which raises its index of refraction to confine light. The erbium-doped channel waveguides will be pumped with a 980 nm source to amplify nm signals. Markets in which integrated optical devices, such as amplified splitters, can be used total several $100 million. This device will expedite bringing fiber the last mile because it will replace the current serial arrangement of discrete splitters and amplifiers, which is bulky and expensive due to the number of components and interconnects. The proposed integration techniques will also enable optical integrated circuits and next-generation computing. Prototypes will be fabricated during Phase II. TPL has extensive experience in wet-chemical processing and demonstrated ability to commercialize its technologies. The PI is a pioneering researcher of laser-fired, sol-gel derived films. LightPath Technologies will assist TPL with device and marketing development doc22930 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program supports Harvard University and UC Berkeley with the development of a focused ion beam system with multi-ion and direct-write implantation capability for fabrication of mesoscale structures. Harvard University and UC Berkeley-LBNL will develop a new Focused Ion Beam (FIB) system that is capable of producing a variety of ion species for direct implantation, maskless patterning, and ion beam sculpting, with nanometer resolution. Key Harvard and UC Berkeley faculty and staff will establish design specifications based on research needs. Postdoctoral appointments and senior technical staff will follow the project through completion and into operation. Ion sculpting research by the Golovchenko group at Harvard will be applied to fabricate critical ion source extraction apertures for the system. The primary ion source, ion beam manipulation, ion optics, and fabrication capabilities will be provided by Professor Ka-Ngo Leung s group at UC Berkeley. Selected specialized components will be fabricated under sub-contract at LBNL, where Professor Leung holds a joint appointment. The system will consist of an integrated, multiple-beam facility housed in a high vacuum processing and analysis chamber. A compact Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) will be configured for in situ imaging. A high resolution Focused Ion Beam (FIB) system will be designed that can be used for nanofabrication and direct write implantation. Ion sources will be easily interchangeable with the FIB column for maximum flexibility, including the use of negative ions. Systems with controllable, multiple apertures (multiple beams) will be explored to increase processing speed and versatility. In situ diagnostics will be designed into the chamber to facilitate future fabrication and research applications. The completed system will be installed, operated and maintained by technical staff of Harvard s Center for Imaging and Mesoscale Structures (CIMS) as a new shared equipment facility available to all faculty and collaborators for research and education. Current research to understand the science associated with mesoscale structures has shown the need for new approaches to the fabrication of future small-scale structures. For example, conventional Focused Ion Beam (FIB) systems utilize Gallium liquid metal ion sources and Gallium is an undesirable contaminant that severely limits many applications and fundamental studies. A second example of current limitations is the need to selectively dope modify small regions in nanoscale device structures. At present this requires complex masking, implantation, evaporation, diffusion, annealing, and lift-off steps that become increasingly difficult as device dimensions shrink. A third limitation is the lack of integrated diagnostics in conventional systems which limit research applications. Harvard University and the University of California (UC) Berkeley LBNL will collaborate to develop a new Focused Ion Beam (FIB) system capable of utilizing a variety of ion beams species for direct implantation, maskless patterning, and ion beam sculpting, all with nanometer resolution. This system will not only provide unique capabilities for research, but improvements made in the course of the development will also be of interest in the U.S. processing and equipment industries. By operating the new system as a shared equipment facility within Harvard s Center for Imaging and Mesoscale Structures (CIMS), existing Harvard programs such as the NSF Materials Research and Engineering Center (MRSEC), the NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC), and other faculty and students can make immediate use of the new system for research, training, and education. Close ties will be maintained with UC Berkeley and interested industries to ensure optimum future development and applications of the system doc22931 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II Project will develop improved monolithic carbon electrodes for capacitive deionization. Capacitive deionization technology (CDT) is a new method for purifying ocean and brackish well water. In this process, a constant voltage is applied between two porous carbon electrodes, and soluble salts are collected on their surface, thus purifying the water. The operating costs of CDT are roughly half those of reverse osmosis, the current system of choice. Obtaining a reliable and plentiful supply of clean water is becoming a worldwide problem. From this work, society (both in the U.S. and worldwide) will benefit from an inexpensive method of producing potable water from large existing reserves of brackish (saline) water. Inexpensive mesoporous carbon electrodes could also be used in capacitive deionization for industrial processes such as boiler feed, as well as in electrical energy storage, such as in capacitive energy storage doc22932 none Paul The objective of this research is to develop a sensor to detect enteric viruses that will have application to provide real-time monitoring of problem microorganisms in coastal waters. Solid phase immobilization of target mRNA, amplification and detection by means of microbial beacons is the plan that these investigators have. Each of these steps is available technology. Putting them together to provide real time monitoring of enteric viruses, and modeling the data to determine predictive patterns of enteroviral release to the environment as a function of environmental perturbation and climate variability is to be done with this grant doc22933 none This grant supports the acquisition of a BRUKER IFS 66v S Fourier Transform (FT) Raman and Infrared (IR) spectrometer. The optics bench of the instrument has rapid FT Raman, FTIR (far IR to near visible) and photoluminescence measurement capabilities. This instrument is configured for spectral analysis of micron-sized samples with the help of the Ramanscope and IR scope attachments. The FT Raman and IR spectrometer will assist current research activities on carbon nanotubes, thermoelectrics, photonics and biomaterials. The instrument will be used to enhance laboratory experience to students enrolled in spectroscopy courses taught at Clemson University. Raman and infrared are two forms of vibrational spectroscopy that yield complementary information of chemical substances. Both of these are used extensively in materials, physics, chemistry and biological sciences. The instrument brings unique research capabilities to teaching institutions in South Carolina by providing a well-equipped, interdisciplinary learning facility that will be used to train undergraduate and graduate students in the use of next generation equipment for materials research. It will facilitate joint research projects between faculty members engaged in interdisciplinary research fields doc22934 none This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) award is to purchase a fully analytical JEM- transmission electron microscope (TEM). The JEM- is a multipurpose high-resolution analytical microscope with wide range of capabilities, such as high-resolution image observation, microarea X-ray analysis, versatile analysis by convergent-beam electron diffraction, and analysis of the atomic structure and or bonding state of atoms. The primary TEM system will comprise: (i) a TEM with a high resolution pole piece for high resolution electron microscopy imaging (HREM) and convergent beam electron diffraction (CBED), (ii) a scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) accessory, (iii) an energy dispersive X-ray spectrometer (EDS), (iv) an electron energy loss spectrometer (EELS) with an energy filter, and (v) a multichannel analyzer and support computers for data acquisition, storage, and processing. This instrument is capable of high spatial resolution imaging of crystalline and amorphous structures, small-beam electron diffraction, and compositional and spectroscopic analyses of micro-and nano-scale features, all necessary tools for characterizing materials structure. Numerous new scientific investigations will be enabled with the new equipment. This instrument will support research in a variety of materials systems including nanomaterials, semiconductors, ceramics, metals, polymers, biomaterials and mesoporous materials. The proposed research projects cover a broad area of research related to synthesis and characterization of high-performance materials for manufacturing applications and TEM will provide an opportunity to conduct high-quality research to understand the microstructural properties of the materials. The proposed TEM instrument will not only stimulate the productivity of the existing research projects related to the characterization of materials but also will be used for educational purposes. The instrument will be used in undergraduate and graduate courses, and in outreach program for minority students from local schools. It will thus allow for research training of future scientists and engineers from diverse backgrounds in current techniques of electron microscopy and state-of-the-art instrumentation. A laboratory course will be introduced and the main purpose is to provide students hands-on experience starting from sample preparations to operations of TEM. Support for a TEM instrument will also allow the development and enhancement of creative partnership with the numerous local industries, including microelectronics manufacturing, optical coating manufacturing, biomedical company, and computer hardware company. Results of the project will be disseminated by paper presentation in regional and national conferences, and published in journals doc22935 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project concerns the development of an optical alloy composition sensor based on laser induced plasma spectroscopy. A key element of the sensor is the use of a microchip laser excitation source. The technology has the capability to detect industrially relevant compositions in steel alloys and possibly aluminum alloys. The Phase I results indicated the efficacy of the technique for the analysis of iron alloys. The Phase II project will focus on the development of a small, lightweight and mobile field prototype, which will be able to analyze various alloy samples. The key commercial application of this technology is aluminum and iron scrap metal analysis, substantial market niches which are not effectively covered by existing analysis technology. The major market is for steel and aluminum alloys that have significant components of light elements. These precision instrument currents have sales worldwide in excess of $10 million per year doc22936 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Nancy E. Rawson at the Monell Chemical Senses Center to purchase a confocal microscope with associated hardware and software. The Monell Center is a nonprofit research institute focused on acquiring a fuller understanding of the chemical senses. Recent studies have revealed that cell-cell interactions play an important role in modulating the output of a variety of sensory receptor cells. The confocal microscope permits us to directly observe intracellular processes and interactions between different cell types in preparations that more closely reflect those of the intact organism. In addition, chemosensory cells undergo regeneration throughout the life of the animal. In order to better understand this capability, studies of growing cells are carried out using methods to identify the different stages in the cells lifespan and evaluate the effect of drugs or other treatments on the growth process. The confocal microscope will be used in projects aimed at addressing a variety of questions ranging from understanding how individual receptor cells detect and respond to chemical stimuli; how experience influences the ways that organisms respond to chemosensory stimuli; how odor qualities are encoded in neural activity patterns in the brain; how stem cells divide and differentiate into mature sensory receptor cells; and how these sensory systems recover from damage. These projects utilize standard histology, lectin and immuno-histochemistry, in situ hybridization of fixed tissue specimens, and biophysical methods to study live tissue. These techniques provide a variety of kinds of data, ranging from protein and mRNA localization in peripheral and central components of the taste, olfactory and trigeminal systems to dynamic extra- and intracellular signalling in tissue slices, cultures and cell ensembles. The system will also be included as one educational component in our Minority Student Research Apprenticeship Training Program, which has provided summer research experiences for over 300 high school and college undergraduates since its inception. The ability to examine cells in ensembles, such as whole taste buds, or thick tissue sections will dramatically improve our ability to understand how the sensory systems of taste, smell and chemical irritation function in the intact organism. The confocal microscope will also enhance our ability to provide state-of-the-art training experiences for students participating in our high school, college, graduate and post-doctoral training programs doc22937 none Boise State University (BSU) is located in a high tech region with numerous microelectronic industries. The College of Engineering was created in and offers B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering and Computer Science. Faculty from Mechanical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Geophysics, and Biology are creating a Materials Science and Engineering (MS&E) program at BSU. The program consists of a minor for the Master s program in Engineering, a minor for undergraduates and a Master s degree in Materials Science and Engineering. As part of establishing the MS&E program and in support of MS&E research efforts, the team is establishing materials characterization capabilities at BSU. This proposal is requesting the acquisition of a number of key pieces of equipment to improve the infrastructure for a materials analysis facility at Boise State University. This grant will be used to purchase analytical tools that will be available to researchers on campus, in local industry, and at other universities and government labs around the region. It will support the work of undergraduates, graduate students, post-doctoral students, and faculty. As part of this effort, a mechanism to allow these tools to be used by local industry will be implemented. Over the last few years, Boise State University has been building research programs in several areas including engineering, physics, chemistry and biology. Successful grants have been focused in microelectronic materials and processing including a DARPA grant for 3-D circuits, fabrication of chemical field effect transistors, and a new federal initiative to develop environmental sensors. Several new research programs are emerging in high-k dielectrics, reliability of ultra-thin gate oxides, microelectromechanical systems (MEMs), ceramic MEMs, and optimization of microelectronic packaging. Funding of this proposal will enable the acquisition of expanded capabilities of the existing Atomic Force Microscope, add high frequency capabilities to the current semiconductor parameter test system, acquire a Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer with microscope attachment, and enhance the capabilities of a scanning reference electrode technology instrument. The intent in this proposal is to add to the MS&E equipment set and to establish a structure by which to make these instruments readily available to researchers at BSU, researchers in the inland northwest region (Montana State, Northern Utah, WSU, U Idaho, INEEL), and local industry. These additional capabilities will be utilized in several ways to improve the undergraduate education at BSU. In Materials Science coursework, students will obtain direct experience examining a wide array of materials properties in applications ranging from magnetic to microelectronic materials. Also, data from advanced materials characterization equipment will be used in class when relating theory and fundamentals to application specific examples. Undergraduates provide significant contributions in many research groups in the College of Engineering and will be using this equipment for their research. Overall, exposure to materials characterization at the undergraduate level will provide graduating BSU engineers a unique and valuable advantage in the workplace doc22938 none Drinkwater This is an exploratory project that will use meta analysis linked to modeling to provide a synthesis of the extensive literature published on carbon and nitrogen cycling processes in agricultural systems. The expectation is to be able to predict the impact of changes in management practices on primary productivity, yields and global biogeochemical cycles. Another product of this work will be to determine the impact of substituting N-fixation for mineral N fertilization doc22939 none for proposal Development of Wide Band Gap Semiconductor Materials Testing System Based on Light Induced Transient Grating Technique We propose to develop a unique Wide Band Gap Semiconductor Materials Testing System Based on Light Induced Transient Grating Technique. This system will allow us to obtain detailed information about materials properties of bulk substrates, epitaxial layers, and heterostructures for wide band gap semiconductors enabling the optimization of the device design for high power electronics, solid state lighting, and UV emitters and detector applications for detection of hazardous biological substances. In particular, we will evaluate substrate material and surface preparation, and buffer and epitaxial layers for LEDs, laser diodes and transistors. The studies of non-equilibrium recombination and transport parameters that will be made possible with this system will allow us to optimize growth regimes and structure design for heterostructures and quantum wells and to optimize n-type and p-type doping regimes and conditions. This unique system allows for nondestructive characterization technique, which could bridge the gap between optical and electronic characterization of wide band gap semiconductors. We believe that light-induced transient grating technique capable of performing in deep UV spectral range is the best method to extract carrier generation, trapping, recombination and diffusion characteristics. This system will be unique in several respects: it will allow for sub-picosecond pulses, will have sub-picosecond time resolution; tunability in 200-800 nm range, and automatic operation. It will allow us to apply both external electric field and mechanical deformation. The proposed system will perform in deep UV spectral range and will be used for the studies of GaN, AlGaN, AlInGaN and SiC materials, AlInGaN GaN heterostructures and AlInGaN-based high Al content quantum well structures doc22940 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop photonic devices based on a new and proprietary family of rare earth oxide - aluminum oxide glasses, the real glasses, doped with Yb, Tm, and Er oxides. Phase I research showed exceptionally broad emission from Yb 3+, efficient energy transfer in co-doped glasses, and fluorescence lifetimes and spectra of Tm and Er that meet device requirements at high dopant concentrations. Feasibility of scaled-up production of the glasses was demonstrated. The Phase II activities include: collaboration with firms engaged in the glass and optical device business; scaled-up glass synthesis; optimization of dopant concentration and optical properties for devices; and construction and characterization of prototype laser devices. Markets for optical device products are extremely large, multinational, and growing though expanded applications and displaced technologies. The Phase II R&D is focused on lasers, amplifiers, and optical devices for communications, laser surgery, and emerging military applications. The patent position and the absence of complex proprietary interests in the technology place this work in a strong commercial position doc22941 none The plant cuticle, being the outermost barrier, is the first point of contact in the interaction between plants and fungal pathogens. The cuticle is composed of an insoluble biopolyester, cutin, and a complex mixture of soluble, non-polar lipids collectively called waxes. Cutin is the first structural barrier that the fungal infection peg must penetrate in order to infect the plant. Prior support from NSF was primarily responsible for the basic information obtained about the chemistry and biosynthesis of cutin, as well as the role of the cuticle in plant-fungus interaction. Cutinase secreted by the invading fungus helps it to attach to the host and penetrate the outer barrier. According to previously obtained evidence, when fungal conidia contact a plant surface, the small amount of constitutively expressed cutinase present on the conidia releases hydroxy fatty acid monomers and oligomers from cutin, and these soluble products cause induction of high levels of cutinase that helps the infection process. With cloned cutinase genes and transcription factors, it has been shown that in Nectria haematococca one transcription factor, CTF1b, regulates a constitutively expressed cutinase gene (cut2), and another transcription factor, CTF1a, is involved in cutin monomer induction of another cutinase gene, cut1. The mechanism by which hydroxy fatty acids or their oligomers induce cut1 remains to be elucidated. Cut1 induction involves a palindromic promoter element that contains 2 overlapping palindromes. Palindrome 2 is required for cut1 induction by cutin monomers. Palindrome binding protein (PBP) binds palindrome1 of cut1 and acts as a repressor that prevents CTF1a binding to palindrome 2. Since palindrome 1 of cut2 has 2 nucleotide substitutions, PBP cannot bind to it and suppress cut2 expression, and thus this gene is constitutively expressed. It is postulated that ctf1a induction by cutin monomers allows CTF1a to outcompete with PBP to bind cut1 promoter and cause cut1 induction. Cutin monomer or oligomer-stimulated phosphorylation of this cutin response element binding protein (CREBP) allows it to bind CRE and transcriptionally activate ctf1a gene. It is also possible that phosphorylation of PBP might weaken its binding to palindrome1 of cut1 and thus help relieve the suppression. This project will test this hypothesis and define these regulatory processes at a molecular level. Disruption of ctf1a gene drastically reduces virulence of N. haematococca, but the drastic decrease in cutinase level resulting from this disruption cannot explain the loss of virulence because supplementation of the inoculum with cutinase or mechanical breaching of the cuticle does not recover virulence of the disruptants. Obviously, this Cys6Zn2 binuclear protein (CTF1a) also regulates other gene(s) required for virulence. This project will seek the identity of these virulence genes. The results expected from this project will elucidate novel molecular mechanisms involved in some of the fundamental processes in plant-fungus interaction, possibly suggesting novel approaches to control fungal diseases. Fungal infection causes by far the most damage to food and fiber production. This project could make a significant contributions to an understanding of this interaction that may help manage damaging fungal diseases of plants doc22942 none With support from a NSF Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) award, Dr. Roy Pea will develop a new develop a new instrument for high-resolution digital panoramic audio-video recording, analysis and communication. The Digital Video Collaboratory (DVC) will provide an integrated suite of hardware technologies and Stanford s DIVER software system (Digital Interactive Video Exploration and Reflection) will allow researchers and educators to generate and share different points-of-view (POV) and analytic perspectives on the same richly recorded classroom events. Panoramic image acquisition is make possible by using a multi-camera digital video system coupled with mirrors to capture images over 360 degrees of horizontal arc. These camera images are then stitched together by software so that the captured scene may be displayed on a computer monitor as a rectangle that depicts the unwrapped 360-degree field of view. To develop the DVC the team will integrate a state-of-the-art digital panoramic video capture system and a room-size microphone array in an experimental space with associated software and hardware tools for synchronizing, storing and managing the multimedia data streams. The DRIVER software system will be used to author and annotate POV-paths through these Free-D panoramic digital video records. Using a personal computer, the DIVER user pans and zooms a virtual camera window over a panoramic scene to focus on events of interest. The user may then mark interest points and record their POV-paths and associated textual annotations (for research or educational purposes). An annotated DIVER file can be shared through a computer network so others may re-experience and respond to the user s interpretive tour of the recorded activities. The user of DIVER is thus able to be a virtual videographer , after the fact of panoramic video capture. This project is important because researchers in the learning sciences increasingly rely on multimedia technologies to capture the complexities of learning environments and to repeatedly view recordings to deepen interoperation and analyses. Digital video and audio, integrated with other data types, promise far more complete records of learning activities than older methods, and enable multiple researchers to investigate common datasets, as in other disciplines. However, current approaches to multimedia recording are often ad hoc, yielding partial data and hindering the development of more powerful theory and practice. The Digital Video Collaboratory and the DIVER software system have potential for widespread use not only in learning sciences research and training and teacher education, but also in many fields for which panoramic audio-video recording and annotation can provide a useful function. An integral part of the project is the use of the DVC by many faculty at Stanford and elsewhere for their research, for graduate and undergraduate education in learning and cognitive sciences, and for teacher education doc22943 none This Major Research Instrumentation award to Old Dominion University in Virginia provides funds for acquisition of oceanographic instrumentation to outfit a 55-foot coastal research vessel for research and education projects in and around the Chesapeake Bay. Specific instrumentation to be acquired included a Conductivity-Temperature-Depth system (CTD), a precision depth recorder, an acoustic current profiler, a global positioning sytem, a box corer and a data logging computer system. The award also included partial support of a marine technician to integrate, install and oversee operation of the instrumentation during the initial three years. The project is supported by the Division of Ocean Sciences at NSF. Old Dominion University will provide cost-share support from non-federal funds for more than 30% of total project costs doc22944 none Lowman The acquisition of an Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope (ESEM),is requested. To date, no Philadelphia area universities have ESEM capabilities, so this project would also be of significant interest to local universities and industries through partnerships established through the Nanotechnology Center. Additionally, the proposed work will have a strong impact on Drexel University s educational initiatives with respect to community outreach, mentorship activity and graduate undergraduate education. This will also include high students through summer courses designed for under-represented minorities from Philadelphia schools as well as students from Math and Science academies. Additionally, new graduate and undergraduate curricula are being established that will make use of ESEM as a training tool doc22945 none Lee Spector Hampshire College MRI RUI: Acquisition of Instrumentation for Research in Genetic Programming, Quantum Computation, and Distributed Systems This proposal from a RUI institution, enabling work in genetic programming, quantum computation, and distributed systems, proposes acquiring a 16-node Linux NetworX Evolocity system for use in student and faculty research. The instrumentation will enable advance in multi-type genetic programming by allowing the user to specify a diverse set of primitives and related data types while simultaneously specifying little in the way of parameters. (Early genetic programming systems forced users to restrict all operation to a single data type to ensure the semantic validity of programs undergoing recombination and mutation. Strongly typed genetic programming systems allow the generation of programs that are able to manipulate diverse types.) For the quantum computation area, genetic and other automatic programming will be used to explore the space of possible quantum algorithms and their speed-ups relative to classical algorithms. Since quantum computer hardware is not yet available, the usual hindrance in so doing involves the time required for simulating the quantum algorithms; fitness must be tested using a quantum computer simulator that runs on conventional hardware. Preliminary promising results on problems with unresolved complexity will be employed to seek scaling algorithms for which asymptotic complexity results can be proved. Distributed systems, a primary focus of student s independent work at Hampshire College, will enable students to pursue the development of innovative software and programming techniques for networked, multi-CPU systems doc22946 none A heavy-ion tracking system is being developed by the University of North Florida to support nuclear astrophysics research at the Superconducting Accelerator Laboratory of the Florida State University (FSU). The tracking system consists of two identical ion detectors and is modeled after a focal plane detector system implemented at the Fragment Mass Analyzer of the Argonne National Laboratory. In each detector, a thin plastic foil emits delta electrons when a heavy ion passes through it. The delta electrons are accelerated away from the foil toward an electron mirror which reflects the electrons toward a stack of micro channel-plate electron multipliers. The detector system will provide position and direction information on heavy ions incident at rates up to approximately one million per second. The system will be used to track ion species generated by the exotic(radioactive) beam facility, RESOLUT, at FSU. The initial goal of the RESOLUT research program is to study nuclear reactions that are important in models of stellar nova explosions. Undergraduate students will participate in all aspects of this project doc22947 none Verosub Researchers at UC-Davis have recently developed a technique that uses partial hysteresis curves to determine the distribution of magnetic properties within a material. The method probes the microscopic mechanisms of magnetic behavior in greater detail than is possible with major hysteresis loops or with conventional magnetometry. This Major Research Instrumentation grant will provide funding for a combined Alternating Field Gradient and Vibrating Sample Magnetometer with high magnetic field and low temperature capabilities. The instrument will allow researchers to look at a much wider variety of materials under a much broader range of conditions than can be done presently. These enhanced experimental capabilities will lead to new advances in paleomagnetism, rock and mineral magnetism and environmental magnetism as well as new insights into condensed matter physics, particularly synthetic magnetic materials and magnetic nanostructures doc22948 none Since the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) in and the atomic force microscope (AFM) in there have been many vivid demonstrations of nanometer, molecular and even atomic -scale manipulation. Performing such experiments usually is non-trivial, tedious and labor intensive. Probably the most critical limitation to the wider use of nanometer-scale manipulation with commercial scanning probe microscopes (SPM) is their lack of real-time, interactive feedback. With current SPM s an object is found by scanning the surface to produce an image. Then the tip is positioned on or near the object. Mechanical forces are applied to move the object by typing in a tip motion command. The result of the operation is evaluated by re-imaging. This tedious procedure may need to be repeated countless times to achieve the objective (of say. bringing two nanoparticles on a surface into contact.) The SPM electronics do provide signals that could be used to make this process more interactive: however, traditional SPM interfaces are designed primarily to scan and collect an image, which can delay access to a single image data set by a few minutes. A related problem is that sight is not the best sense to use for all applications. For instance, even when two nanoparticles appear to be touching in the scanned image, they might instead be separated by a gap smaller than the width of the probe tip. Using the sense of touch it might be possible to feel when the particles are engaged. The increasing value and importance of nanometer-scale manipulation and assembly, both in fundamental and applied research, requires SPM interfaces that provide real-time interactivity. A University of North Carolina research group developed the first such commercial interface to a SPM, which in now being marketed through 3rdTech. Inc. The interface provides the operator a virtual presence on the surface of the sample. The operator views the surface topography in three dimensions from a chosen perspective, illumination and shading. A six degrees of freedom joystick is used to position the tip and manipulate objects on the sample surface. The operator can scan the tip over the surface in a non-perturbing tapping mode and feel the topography through the joystick. Then the SPM is switched to contact mode to apply prescribed forces (again, through the joystick) to move or modify the object. Force versus position of the manipulation is recorded to provide a quantitative understanding of the effect of (either in-plane or out-of-plane) forces applied to the object. Thus, the force-feedback or haptic interface enables the operator to find objects on the surface, to correct for thermal drifts and hysteresis in the piezoscanner in-real time, and to immediately determine the positional change after a manipulation. This tactile sense, in particular, greatly enhances the capabilities of the SPM as a nanomanipulation tool. Accelerated three-dimensional image rendering further assists the operator in viewing objects as they are moved or modified. The virtual presence SPM has been used to find the seam between two nanotubes and then to separate the nanotubes by pressing on the seam. Also, this SPM has been used to qualitatively feel (and also quantitatively measure) differences in how smoothly a nanotube rolls as it is pushed in different directions on a graphite surface. This result reflects the degree to which the atomic lattices of the graphite and the nanotube mesh. The virtual presence interface greatly enhances intuition, which is essential for using the SPM for fundamental discovery and for simplifying the custom assembly and fabrication of nanostructures. A 3rdTech virtual presence SPM will be acquired and installed. It will be used regularly in several ongoing research studies, in a hands-on laboratory class in nanotechnology practice, and in outreach presentations to secondary schools and the general public. The instrument will significantly enhance the capabilities of the proposers to measure electronic and mechanical properties of nanotubes, nanowires, nanoparticles and biological materials, and to construct networks, clusters and suspended structures with these materials. General interest demonstrations of the instrument will vividly illustrate the current abilities of man to probe, interact with, and manipulate the nanoworld. These outreach activities can profoundly influence more students to pursue education in scientific disciplines and promote increased public support of science doc22949 none Mandayam This project seeks support for the acquisition of a portable, large-scale visualization system in order to improve the state-of-the art in nondestructive evaluation (NDE) processes. In particular, the project will employ virtual reality technology for: (a) Defect characterization of NDE signals (b) Virtual prototyping of NDE systems. The project involves a collaborative effort among the following constituencies: (a) Faculty and technicians (b) Undergraduate and graduate students (c) Industrial affiliates The focus of the project is to create procedures for rapid deployment of VR technology in the NDE industry. This research project supports and enhances existing collaborative research activity at Rowan University s NDE laboratory and a local NDE research & development company doc22950 none This proposal will provide funds to upgrade a detector known as BigBite, which will be moved from its present location at the NIKHEF nuclear physics facility in the Netherlands to Jefferson Laboratory (JLAB) in Newport News, Virginia. The large acceptance of BigBite will complement the two existing high-resolution spectrometers in Hall A at JLAB, enabling experiments to be completed in months or weeks that might otherwise have taken years to complete. The upgrade supported by this award will enable BigBite to handle the much higher counting rates (up to six orders of magnitude) at JLAB compared to NIKHEF. Key approved experiments that will make use of BigBite include a high-precision measurment of neutral pion electroproduction (providing a test of chiral QCD dynamics), a measurement of the neutron electron form factor at high momentum transfer, and a study of short-range properties in nuclei via a triple-coincidence proton-knockout reaction. The detector upgrade and the experiments themselves will involved students and junior investigators in an essential way doc22951 none This MRI proposal requests support for several university groups for the development of new components for the trigger of the D0 experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron antiproton-proton collider. This facility is at the energy frontier of experimental particle physics. The primary goal of the experiment is to search for the Higgs boson, the physical manifestation of the Higgs field. Within the Standard Model of particle physics, the Higgs field provides a means of generating the particle masses and spontaneously breaking the symmetry of the electroweak interaction. There are many indications that the Tevatron collider could produce the Higgs boson, provided that enough antiproton-proton collisions are delivered to the experiments. The planned luminosity upgrade of the Tevatron will require the experiments to be even more selective than in the past and thus an efficient trigger system is essential. Selection algorithms giving background rejection factors of more than 105 with high efficiency must be implemented in real time. This proposal would support the development of the hardware and algorithms necessary for the D0 experiment to cope with the higher interaction rates produced at the upgraded luminosities doc22952 none The engineering department at The College of New Jersey seeks to build a foundation for research and learning through the acquisition of state-of-the-art technologies. Addition of a Digital Particle Image Velocimetry system will greatly diversify and enhance the current infrastructure of resources available to faculty and students. Digital Particle Image Velocimetry has become a standard in flow diagnostic techniques in industry and research sectors. The primary attractiveness of this technique lies in the ability to quantify planar or three-dimensional velocity fields with incredible accuracy, resolution, and speed. The heart of the system consists of a dual head pulsed Nd:YAG laser, high resolution CCD digital acquisition package, and a software interface that controls all acquisition and data processing functions. Two main activities will be generated at the College upon acquisition of the DPIV system: development of a research program capable of addressing issues faced by industry and society related to turbulence-driven phenomena and an educational improvement plan consisting of the enhancement of undergraduate laboratories and fluid mechanics courses and increased involvement of undergraduates in research. Specific thrust areas to be targeted by the research program will initially focus on noise generation due to turbulent flow and the quantification of turbulent multiphase flows. Issues addressed by the multiphase flow studies will include bubble interactions with turbulence and particle dispersion problems of interest to industry. Using DPIV, individual terms of the governing turbulent transport equations can be directly calculated so that the dominant source terms can be identified. In addition, particle motions and distributions can be directly observed. These capabilities can ultimately lead to validation of complex numerical models. Incorporation of a DPIV system into undergraduate laboratories and fluid mechanics courses will allow students to gain deeper physical insight into a host of fluid phenomena. Integration of theory and design is one of the cornerstones of the well- balanced engineering education received by students at the College. The quality of several student senior design projects will be greatly enhanced through access to a flow diagnostic tool such as DPIV for evaluating prototypes and testing innovative concepts doc22953 none This grant will be used to develop an x-ray system to perform noninvasive three-dimensional imaging of large-scale multiphase flows. This new instrument will allow for the study, characterization, and modeling of numerous multiphase flow processes found in many industries including fuel production, commodity and specialty chemical production, mineral processing, pulp and paper production, wastewater treatment, food processing, and biological organism and pharmaceutical production. Multiphase flows involve gas-liquid, gas-solid, liquid-solid, and gas-liquid-solid mixtures. The principle difficulty in characterizing and quantifying multiphase flows is the fact that the systems are typically opaque; even an air-water system becomes opaque at fairly low volumetric gas fractions. This necessitates either the use of invasive measurement probes when determining internal flow and transport characteristics or nondestructive (noninvasive) methods. The difficulty with invasive probes is that they can alter the internal flow of the multiphase system interfering with realistic process measurements. X-ray imaging methods provide one family of noninvasive measurement techniques used extensively for product testing and evaluation of static objects with complex structures. The project will develop an instrument that utilizes x-ray radioscopy, x-ray stereography, and x-ray computed tomography imaging techniques to characterize properties of multiphase flow processes, including those properties that are dynamic and time dependent. The project will develop the x-ray hardware, software, and facilities to complete x-ray computed tomography (i.e., CT scans) of multiphase flows in large vertical columns, providing time-averaged local phase distributions with a typical resolution of 500 microns. The system to be developed in this project will allow for vertical columns up to 4 m high and 32 cm in diameter to be studied. These dimensions will allow for the first time, without significant interference of either wall effects or mechanical interference from invasive probes, investigation of these industrially important systems. Various letters of support, from a variety of industries, have stressed this is a critical need. The explosion of computer power in the last three years allows for the first time the ability to acquire, process, and display the data volumes needed to adequately characterize these complex systems. The instrumentation that will be developed will include a novel application of x-ray stereography and stereographic reconstructions to visualize time-resolved flow structures in three dimensions. This new and unique capability will allow for the measurement of currently unavailable phase characteristics found in complex multiphase flows, such as phase rise settling velocities, phase trajectories, phase coalescence and breakup rates, and phase growth and shrinkage rates. With this instrument, data acquisition will be possible of internal characteristics of multiphase flow at a sufficient resolution to be used for model validation of these complex flows, and, to our knowledge, will provide a leading edge research capability currently unavailable at any institution. Once this instrument is developed, many other ISU researchers, as well as industrial collaborators (e.g., Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., Cargill, Inc., DOW Chemical Company, Fluent, Inc., Foster Wheeler Development Corporation, Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Potlatch, Proctor & Gamble Company, and Schlumberger Oilfield Services), have identified many potential uses of this instrument in studying gas-liquid, gas-solid, liquid-solid, and gas-liquid-solid flows. Even traditional computed tomography and stereography of industrial components requiring a large field of view can be done with this instrument. This instrument will also provide a unique opportunity to form various multidisciplinary collaborations between faculty, academic and industrial researchers, and students, and provide a one-of-a-kind instrument at a public university to which many different researchers will have access doc22954 none Mizaikoff The main thrust of this multi-disciplinary BE (IDEA) project is to develop and apply novel scanning probe microscopic (SPM) techniques for imaging chemical and biochemical processes at microbe-mineral interfaces. The ability to obtain chemical, topographical and ultimately optical information simultaneously at microbe-mineral interfaces has limited investigation of complex biological systems in previous research. Our project fosters interactions between experts in the fields of chemistry, biochemistry, geochemistry, microbiology, fluids and mass transport, microfabrication and spectroscopy. For the investigation of complex chemical and physical processes at microbe-mineral interfaces, correlation of in-situ obtained chemical, topographical and optical information is necessary, in order to understand microbial cell chemistry. Micro- and nanoelectrodes are integrated into atomic force microscopy (AFM) or scanning nearfield optical microscopy (SNOM) tips based on optimized microfabricated cantilevers. Besides mercury gold amalgam electrodes for detecting Fe2+ production, nano-pH-electrodes will be integrated into scanning probe tips, mapping pH variations at the microbe-mineral interface. Such multifunctional SPM tips will provide simultaneous topographical, optical and (electro)chemical information correlated in space and time down to the nanoscale. Quantitative mathematical modeling and simulation of the electrochemical and physical processes taking place during the scanning process is essential for fundamental understanding and interpretation of obtained results. The developed multifunctional scanning nanoprobes will be used to determine the mechanism of reductive dissolution of Fe(III) minerals in the presence of FeRB and or chemical reductants. Dissimilatory Fe(III) reduction is a relatively recent addition to the suite of anaerobic respiratory processes carried out by microorganisms and plays a significant role in global carbon cycling. Finally, this combined analytical technique can be extended to other environmental microbial processes involving minerals, such as the reductive dissolution of uranium, the precipitation of rhodochrosite and siderite, and the formation of manganese oxides. In addition, multifunctional scanning nanoprobes will be applicable to a wide variety of electrochemically active complex processes in a multitude of relevant fields, such as corrosion biocorrosion, neurophysiology and cell signaling doc22955 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Center for Laser and Optical Spectroscopy at the University of Akron will acquire a femtosecond picosecond laser for ultrafast spectroscopic probes of the structure and excited state dynamics of molecular systems. This equipment will enhance research in the following areas: 1) time-resolved optical spectroscopy of novel nanoscale, porphyrin-containing, dendritic photosynthetic mimics; 2) equilibrium geometries and excited-state dynamics of aromatic clusters; 3) real-time measurements of intramolecular vibration-energy redistribution (IVR) in OH-containing molecules; and 4) time-resolved optical spectroscopy of unusual porphyrins. A femtosecond picosecond laser provides ultrafast pulses of coherent visible or infrared light, which enables researchers to obtain important information about fast occurring chemical reactions. Its use may enable breakthroughs in our understanding of the properties of reactive and nonreactive molecules. This laser system will be available to researchers from a number of neighboring universities and colleges in Ohio doc22956 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project is focused on designing a series of extremely efficient metal extraction products (MEPs) with tailor-made properties for specifically extracting and purifying platinum group metal (PGM) anions from acid solutions. Existing PGM recovery and separation methods are complex and expensive. The Phase II project will fully develop the separation and purification of PGMs, scale up the MEP synthesis and expand the scope of the work to launch the technology into PGM recycling market. These novel MEPs will have wide applications in the precious metal refining as well as recycling industries. It is estimated that the total value of precious metal catalysts in spent automobile catalytic reactors in the United States alone is $ 800 million a year. Additionally, these MEPs could also be used in the separation and purification of actinides, such as plutonium, and in the pre-concentration of trace amounts of anions (e.g. chromate, arsenate) to aid in environmental analysis. Modifications of the structure may also lead to the production of highly specific environmental sensors for the in-situ detection of contaminants in groundwater and other aqueous streams doc22957 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program supports the University of Cincinnati with the acquisition of an e-beam lithography system: the Raith-150. Fifteen interdisciplinary group of faculty from departments of physics, electrical engineering, optoelectronics, and materials science representing the 6 major universities in Southern Ohio will make use of the instrument. The instrument, which will provide the foundation for nanofabrication of structures with sizes down to 10 nm, will support research in the areas of Nanoelectronics, Photonic and Electronic Nanostructures, Nano BioElectronics, and Novel Microscopies. Advances in each of these areas depend crucially on the ability to carry out the nanofabrication provided by the Raith-150 system. New fundamental understanding will result from the work on nanoelectronics (e.g.nanotransport experiments), photonic nanostructures (e.g. strongly coupled quantum dots systems), new and challenging advances is expected in technologically relevant areas including nano bio-electronics (e.g. biochips and optical integrated circuits), and new tools for researchers will be developed (e.g. novel microscopies). A key part of the activity is the education and training of undergraduates, graduate students, and post-doctoral fellows in modern methods of e-beam lithography. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program supports the University of Cincinnati with the acquisition of an e-beam lithography system: the Raith-150. Fifteen interdisciplinary group of faculty from departments of physics, electrical engineering, optoelectronics, and materials science representing the 6 major universities in Southern Ohio will make use of the instrument. The instrument, which will provide the foundation for nanofabrication of structures with sizes down to 10 nm, will support research in the areas of Nanoelectronics, Photonic and Electronic Nanostructures, Nano BioElectronics, and Novel Microscopies. Advances in each of these areas depend crucially on the ability to carry out the nanofabrication provided by the Raith-150 system. New fundamental understanding will result from the work on nanoelectronics (e.g.nanotransport experiments), photonic nanostructures (e.g. strongly coupled quantum dots systems), new and challenging advances is expected in technologically relevant areas including nano bio-electronics (e.g. biochips and optical integrated circuits), and new tools for researchers will be developed (e.g. novel microscopies). A key part of the activity is the education and training of undergraduates, graduate students, and post-doctoral fellows in modern methods of e-beam lithography doc22958 none Patrick A. Tebbe Lisa Grega The College of New Jersey MRI RUI: Acquisition of Computational Modeling Facilities for Research and Education in Engineering This proposal from an REU institution, advancing the computational infrastructure of the institution (TCNJ) in Engineering, aims at improving the areas of computer aided design and numerical modeling (structural and thermal fluids) in both research and education. Three high performance workstations with 3-D graphics and visualization capabilities and expanded dynamic memory are requested along with licenses and training for two industry finite element modeling packages. The proposal addresses two strategic areas of national importance: High Performance Computing and Advanced Materials and Processing. The former will be addressed through the infrastructure and training aspects; while the latter will be addressed through the research of the following topics: Numerical Study of Transient and Interfacial Effects in Physical Vapor Transport and Process Modeling of the Warm Forming of Aluminum. Modeling will be done using commercial code such as ANSYS and FLUENT. Education and training activities are also planned. The project also addresses educational outreach and curriculum integration opportunities. The funds requested include the equipment listed below and associated expenses. Sun Blade workstations ANSYS RFD upgrade license FIDAP and Exceed software Training for maintaining the packages The equipment will support educational outreach programs and will be integrated with the curriculum to involve high school student, undergraduates and under-represented groups doc22959 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop and commercialize an ultra fast block data retrieval method for the company s patented chiral film-based optical data storage system. The technology will combine ultrahigh storage capacity with ultra fast retrieval speed. The current retrieval rates of CD-ROM, DVD-ROM and MO technology is inherently limited for applications such as image retrieval for medical diagnosis or target recognition. The company s block retrieval technique is a new method for solving the bottleneck of data retrieval. Using imaging and pattern recognition techniques, data is retrieved in 2D blocks. This retrieval method will result in orders-of-magnitude increases in throughput and increases in storage density. Since the need for high density, high-speed storage is continuing to escalate, there will be a ready market from storage system vendors who supply products to the myriad of industries whose business depends upon volumes of storage and quick retrieval doc22960 none Wei The phenomenal growth of wireless systems in thc last 15 years represents a major paradigm change for society. Today, wireless, personal, and mobile communications are essential for our modern economy and the general well being of the country. Wireless technologies have not only brought in USA billions of dollars in technology export, but also significantly increased the productivity of the whole nation. The instrumentation the PIs are requesting in this proposal is a wireless communication systems emulator. In short, it can transmit and receive not only standard wireless signals and display them in detail, but it also allows them to deviate from these standards. It contains a universal wireless signal generator transmitter, a universal wireless signal receiver, a high resolution network analyzer and a multi-input network analyzer. Wireless communications has been a major research focus area in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS), UCF, over the past few years. A major mission of SEECS is to advance the future of wireless communications through education and research. The PIs involved in this effort have been conducting research in wireless communications for a number of years now. Some examples of the state-of-the art that they have been engaged are included below: (a) Invented new decoding algorithms that are not only best known for block lengths from 100-250 bits, but also specifically geared towards practical implementation and compatibility with existing wireless systems. With the proposed emulator, they will be able to test these algorithms for applications in the real world. (b) Introduced a new intelligent packet network architecture, called a cognitive packet network (CPN), in which the packets have intelligent capabilities for routing and flow control themselves. The PIs currently have a network test-bed, with fixed wire-line linkage, and their plan, with the help of the emulator, is to extend it to incorporate wireless linkages. With the proposed instrument, they can also increase the intelligence of the packets using the information gained from link-quality, channel state information, power levels. etc. (c) Teleoperated robots have wide application from search-rescue operation to factory operation. The robotics and controls lab has several robots, real-time control systems, and other equipments. The proposed instrument will enable the PIs to extend their capability to mobile robots with advanced wireless communication capabilities. The faculty members on this team have published several hundreds of papers in leading technical journals and conferences. In fact, all PIs and senior personnel have served or are serving as Editors Associate Editors for prestigious international journals in the areas of their expertise. This state-of-the-art instrumentation will help them verify their research results, extend their capabilities, and justify their future research directions. This equipment will also enhance their educational capabilities. The PIs currently offer a Wireless Communications option for their electrical engineering undergraduate students and have several graduate students working on projects in the field of wireless communications. This emulator will not only help demonstrate to the students the theory presented in the classroom, but also provide a hands-on platform for thesis and dissertation works doc22961 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is to develop a novel method for on-site and on-demand generation of an extremely potent and safe disinfectant. Phase I research has established the basic feasibility of this unique method to generate the disinfectant, as needed, at appropriate concentrations. The overall objective of the Phase II project is to design, demonstrate, and challenge test a fully operational bench-scale device for on-site and on-demand generation of the disinfectant. Additional work will be done to improve the yield of the disinfectant, to examine various additives, and to conduct antimicrobial experiments in accordance with EPA test requirements. The commercial applications of this project will be in the areas of domestic personal healthcare, food service and healthcare delivery doc22962 none A grant has been awarded to the University of Connecticut under the direction of Dr. Linda Strausbaugh to acquire multiple instruments for genomics-related research and education. Recent years have witnessed milestones in genetics research as the scientific community has developed advanced methods for the sequencing and analysis of the genomes of humans and other model organisms. These collective accomplishments herald a new era in genomics-related research and training, providing unparalleled opportunities for new avenues of investigation. It is the goal of this project to transport genome project paradigms to the study of a wide range of important research topics and organisms, and to train students at all levels in the theory and practice of genomics research. The instruments acquired in this project will provide the framework necessary to accomplish these goals. Specific research problems to be addressed fall into three current areas of interdisciplinary research strengths and one newly emerging area that builds upon these three foundations. Scientists from Genetics and Animal Sciences will address problems in Chromosomes and Mechanisms of Expression that focus upon how structural features of the genome influence expression in the context of development, aging, and genome changes. Scientists from Microbiology, Engineering and Plant Science will conduct research in Environmental Biotechnology by using genomic information and genetic engineering to study the complex interactions between microorganisms and their environments. Researchers in Evolutionary Biology, Molecular Biology, Civil Engineering and Computer Science will conduct research projects in Molecular Evolution and Comparative Genomics to better understand the molecular changes that accompany adaptation and evolutionary histories of organisms. In an emerging, highly interdisciplinary area, scientists from these three areas of research will join forces with Forensic Scientists to advance DNA typing research by innovative applications of genomics and new technology. The genomics-related accomplishments in research and training made possible by this project have significance on many levels. At the most basic level, knowledge of the structure, function and expression of relatively poorly understood components of the genetic blue prints of many plants, animals, and microorganisms will be gained. This knowledge will be applied to several pressing problems facing contemporary society, such as: the need to understand the responses of living systems to environmental or genomic stress and aging; the requirements for remediation of contaminated sites; and the necessity of expanding the spectrum of environmental conditions under which plant growth may be sustained. Equally important to its role in research, this project is also a key part of a research-intensive learning environment for undergraduates, students in two new and innovative professional master s programs in genomics and microbiology, and doctoral candidates. Ties to more practical applications should attract students from diverse populations. The advanced, state-of-the-art training possible under this project will help meet the demands for a highly skilled workforce required in a multitude of genomics-related applications from pharmaceuticals to agriculture to forensics doc22963 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Jeffrey M. Osborn at Truman State University to enhance undergraduate research opportunities at Truman through the acquisition of electron microscopy instrumentation. Funds from this grant will be used to purchase the following instruments: 1) a digital image system for an existing transmission electron microscope (TEM), 2) a digital image system for an existing scanning electron microscope (SEM), 3) an ultramicrotome, 4) a block trimmer, and 5) a critical point dryer. This proposal brings together five faculty members who utilize electron microscopy in their research and teaching. 1) Pollen Developmental Evolution in Basal Angiosperms - Jeffrey Osborn (PI). 2) Functional Morphology of Prey Capture by Arrow Worms - George Shinn (Co-PI). 3) Structure-Function Relationships in Fleas: Water Uptake - Laura Fielden (Co-PI). 4-5) Programmed Cell Death in Maize - Diane Janick-Buckner and Brent Buckner (Co-PIs). Truman is Missouri s highly selective, public liberal arts and sciences university, whose mission includes a significant emphasis on involving undergraduate students in original research. Student research is achieved through faculty mentoring of individual and group projects, as well as direct inclusion of original research into the curriculum. Electron microscopy continues to play a pivotal role in both approaches doc22964 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, Prof. Emanuel Waddell of Morgan State University will develop an in-situ near infrared Raman probe laser ablation system for chemistry research. This multi-wavelength pulsed UV laser ablation system with a controllable xy-stage will allow for the fabrication of microfluidic systems and analytical sensors in polymer substrates. It will also be capable of performing in-situ investigations of the polymer surface via near infrared Raman spectroscopy. The instrument will result in a clearer understanding of the surface chemistry that results as a function of laser ablation, and will provide insight into the effects of local atmosphere and ablation wavelength on the resulting moieties on the polymer surface. The in-situ near infrared Raman proble laser ablation system is a unique instrument as it will allow the in-situ, real-time investigation of the polymer surface during the ablation process. The near-infrared Raman analysis will provide a nondestructive method to probe chemical reactions on the polymer surface. Development of this instrument will significantly enhance research in the polymer sciences doc22965 none Izatt Over a three year instrument development program, a new generation of noninvasive quantitative three-dimensional microscopy technology specialized for longitudinal (nondestructive) studies of development and gene expression in small animals will be developed. This instrument will integrate recent developments in optical coherence tomography (OCT) and optical coherence microscopy (OCM), which employ cutting-edge ultrahigh-bandwidth optical communications technologies for micron-scale resolution non-contact imaging in translucent materials including living biological tissues doc22966 none Particle tracking in turbulent flows requires very high temporal (approx. 100,000Hz) and spatial resolution imaging detection systems (512 x 512 pixels). Such a system generates data at very high rates, which need to be transferred, stored, and analyzed. In addition three-dimensional tracking of many particles requires the simultaneous stereoscopic imaging by four cameras. Traditional detector technology cannot handle the resulting onslaught of data ( 26 gigabytes of data per second per camera) that would need to be streamed into memory and stored for further processing. Here, we will develop the next generation, ultra-high speed, high-resolution particle tracking instrumentation for following the motion of approximately 300 minute tracer particles in three dimensions with a temporal resolution of 100,000Hz. This new system will be two orders of magnitude faster than any existing conventional imaging system of comparable spatial resolution. The instrument will be based on stereoscopic imaging with four ultra-high-speed, high-resolution pixel array detectors (PAD) that will be developed at Cornell. Each PAD has x512 intelligent pixels. The development of the uniquely designed PAD detectors, the data acquisition system, and the data analysis software will result in a technological breakthrough for the Lagrangian analysis of high Reynolds number turbulent flows. Fully developed turbulence is ubiquitous. Virtually all engineering and naturally occurring flows (e.g., atmospheric, oceanographic, and astrophysical flows ) involve high Reynolds number turbulence. The transport and mixing properties of turbulence ultimately impact our daily lives. In systems from the mixing and chemical reactions in a turbulent burner or internal combustion engine to the transport of pollutants (or bioagents) in the atmosphere, or even the simple mixing of milk into a coffee cup, the understanding of turbulence is essential. It is clear that many aspects of turbulence are best studied by following the motion of fluid particles. The difficulty of tracking particles in high Reynolds number turbulence has thus far made it impossible to test many long-standing predictions. This project represents a major step to confront this issue. The detection and analysis system to be developed will simultaneously follow 300 particles at a rate of 100,000 pictures per second. (A standard TV camera takes 30 pictures per second.) This high speed will be achieved by using pixel array technology in which each pixel has local intelligence. Data of this kind will enable theoretical advances in a number of important applications such as scalar mixing and cloud formation. Moreover, the technology, once developed, is likely to impact broader fields than can not be envisioned at this time. For example, tracking of particles is at the heart of a number of environmental problems (e.g., contaminant or bioagent dispersion). A successful PAD fabrication will likely result in more sensor chips than needed for this study. Many of these chips would be made available to the larger community doc22967 none Items requested in NSF email of 5 2 02: Neither this proposal nor a similar one is under review at NSF or any other agency. NSF-MRI : A grant has been awarded to Dr. Ken Belanger at Colgate University for the development of a fluorescence light microscopy facility to be used for research and undergraduate education. This award will allow the acquisition of four fluorescence light microscopes and accompanying high-resolution digital cameras, as well as a variable temperature, stage-mounted incubation chamber. This instrumentation will be used for faculty and student research projects as well as investigative teaching laboratory exercises in the Biology, Geology, and Neuroscience Departments at both Colgate University and Hamilton College. The fluorescence microscopy facility funded by this proposal will initially support six research projects and seven undergraduate laboratory courses, and will be available for use by faculty members and laboratory courses not included in the original proposal. The research projects outlined in this proposal address a broad range of questions across a variety of disciplines, including examination of intracellular protein targeting (Belanger, project 1), Antarctic paleogeology (Leventer, project 2), dopamine-induced neuromodulation (Tierney, project 3), gene expression at temperature extremes (Hoopes, project 4), steroid hormone regulation of neurotransmission (Lehman, project 5), and intracellular signal transmission (Festin, project 6). In addition, the microscopy facility will be used for educational purposes for seven different laboratory courses (project 7), including Cell Biology, Environmental Studies, Genetics, Molecular Analysis, Neurophysiology, and Developmental Biology. Based on current research activities and course enrollments, approximately 30 independent research students and 180 - 200 lab course participants will utilize this microscopy facility annually. Thus, this facility will not only serve to enhance the quality of research performed within this consortium, but will also enhance the educational experience, technological preparedness, and enthusiasm for continued scientific research for a significant number of undergraduate students doc22968 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project concerns the processing and analysis of time-lapse seismic data on parallel computers, using the Internet to control the processing flow and visualize the results. In recent years, there has been exponential growth in time-lapse seismic project activity. Time-lapse seismic analysis facilitates the management of oil and gas reservoirs by imaging fluid movement in the reservoir over time. The results are used to guide reservoir management decisions-such as where to place a new well or where to inject water, gas, or steam to stimulate hydrocarbon movement-and help maximize the life of both new and existing fields while minimizing recovery costs. The computer algorithms needed to process time-lapse seismic data are complex and require advanced computational hardware-typically multiprocessor Unix workstations or clusters of personal computers-that many potential customers do not have. The proposed innovation will allow customers to process their data on a centralized PC cluster, using the Internet to control the processing and to visualize the results remotely. The proposed innovation will improve the links between the components of the time-lapse seismic workflow, leading to greater understanding and more widespread commercial acceptance of the technology. Potential applications of the research proposed by Fourth Wave Imaging include petroleum industry mapping of by passed oil, monitoring of costly injected fluids, and imaging flow compartmentalization and the hydraulic properties of faults and fractures. Non-petroleum applications include monitoring groundwater reserves, subsurface monitoring of contaminant plumes and environmental clean-up projects. The web-based parallel software system developed for this project could be applied to other computer-intensive fields such as earthquake seismology and medical and satellite imaging. Tools from this web-based software platform such as those for modeling rock physics and seismic data may also be useful for educational purposes doc22969 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Steven W. L Hernault at Emory University to support the purchase of a COPAS (Complex Object Parametric Analyzer and Sorter) cell sorter instrument. These funds will be used to purchase instrumentation that will be utilized by seven investigators that study either the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster or the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, which are species that are extensively utilized in developmental genetic experiments. Genetic experiments in these species usually employ relatively small numbers of animals because these multi-cellular animals are usually sorted by hand. Consequently, obtaining and analyzing large numbers of mutant animals is frequently impossible, especially if the mutant either dies during its maturation (is lethal) or is sterile. Biochemical approaches require large populations of such mutants and, until recently, this was not possible. However, the newly developed COPAS technology now permits accurate sorting and dispensing of multi-cellular animals based on size and or fluorescence differences. The COPAS can be used to sort either Drosophila or Caenorhabditis, and this permits two different experimental approaches. It is possible to construct Drosophila and Caenorhabditis strains where a specified chromosome is marked by the presence of a fluorescent green signal. Mutants can be sorted away from non-mutant siblings by selecting non-Green individuals, so this machine makes it feasible to purify large numbers of lethal or sterile animals. Secondly, it is possible to rapidly dispense a defined number of individuals of a chosen sex or life cycle stage with ~98% accuracy. This permits evaluating individual animals on a scale that is not possible by manual techniques and allows isolated mutants to be assessed for desired, but rare, events. The relevance of Drosophila and Caenorhabditis to significant human problems is well established; Drosophila is a model for the Mediterranean fruit fly, a significant agricultural pest, and Caenorhabditis is a model for a wide variety of parasitic nematodes that infect man, pets, domestic livestock and agriculturally significant plants. The COPAS technology permits application of innovative biochemical techniques to organisms that have traditionally been used for genetic analyses. Additionally, the COPAS is a single machine, cost-effective way for both Drosophila and Caenorhabditis investigators to gain access to a technology that permits these exciting, new experimental approaches doc22970 none Drexel University has been at the forefront of geosynthetic and fibrous materials engineering since establishing separate centers of excellence in these fields in . The Drexel-affiliated Geosynthetic Research Institute (GRI) is today the leading research and development institute dedicated entirely to geosynthetics. Drexel s geosynthetics and fibrous materials laboratory facilities have not kept pace with the University s achievements in these areas. Currently, many of the University s laboratory devices are outdated. Moreover, researchers are now recognizing that many of the existing devices used by the profession do not realistically simulate the in-service conditions of most geotextiles and industrial textiles. To remain a leader in these fields, and to significantly improve its laboratory infrastructure it is critical that the University develop and acquire state-of-the-art test equipment. Attempting to address this need, the University established a laboratory maintenance and equipment upgrade program. Accordingly, this award focuses on development and fabrication of a major test device that will greatly enhance the experimental capabilities of geosynthetic and fibrous materials researchers. This highly versatile devise will be capable of assessing geosynthetic and fibrous material behavior under confined or unconfined conditions in uniaxial, biaxial, or axisymetric tension. The device will be able to perform both monotonic and cyclic tests over a range of strain rates and frequencies (creep to seismic rates) and under loading conditions that closely replicate those experienced over a range of in-service conditions doc22971 none This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant provides resources to develop and install an ultraprecision absolute dilatometer and necessary supporting equipment at the Center for Precision Metrology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The dilatometer will be able to make length measurements of a variety of samples with nanometer accuracy. This will provide the capability of nanostrain measurements of material properties such as dimensional stability, thermal expansion, electrostriction and magnetostriction. A wide variety of products with critical dimensions, forms, and surfaces that have tolerances in the nanometer domain are of rapidly increasing commercial importance. At the same time that tolerance and feature size are becoming smaller, the overall scale of these products has remained fixed or increased. Where it had previously been sufficient to know properties such as creep, dimensional stability, thermal expansion, magnetostriction and electrostriction at the level of parts per million, current and proposed meso- and micro-scale products demand such understanding at the part per billion level. The instrumentation supported by this grant will enhance understanding of such properties and provide engineering data for the design of next generation precision systems such as semiconductor lithography machines. The facilities developed with support from this grant will also provide the means to train both graduate and undergraduate students in modern ultraprecision measurement methods doc22972 none This MRI proposal provides funding for the purchase of a three-dimensial particle imaging velocimetry (PIV) device to augment the existing equipment at the Auburn University Plasma Science Laboratory (PSL). The PSL has a unique niche in the dusty plasma community - the ability to perform real-time, two-dimensional particle transport investigations. This new device makes it possible to overcome the key limitation of the present PIV device, that it is only able to measure two of the three velocity components of the particles. Because dusty plasmas, plasmas containing charged microparticles, are present in many different environments, from astrophysical systems such as nebula and planetary rings to industrial processing tools, understanding the behavior of dusty plasmas in detail will have broad impact in a number of fields doc22973 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project is aimed at making Photovoltaic (PV) solar electric power more affordable to our nation and to the world. The technology in this program, represents a new process for the manufacturing of cadmium Telluride (CdTe) solar cells. In this process the contact layers of copper-doped tellurium nanoparticles are sprayed on rather than sputtered, which promises to be a more efficient method of manufacturing. The successful CdTe solar cell prototype will be designed with input from potential end-users as a means of increasing the likelihood for commercialization. It is anticipated that this process will result in solar cells with superior initial and long-term efficiencies. Such improvements in performance could result in reduced costs for solar cell manufacturing ($ W), higher power during operation (kW-h yr), and an extension of the useful lifetime - three aspects that will allow solar energy to be more competitive with existing methods for electric power production doc22974 none This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) award provides funds for the purchase of a scanning electron microscope and a Fourier transformation infrared spectrometer. This equipment will be used to support research on development of three-dimensional nanomanufacturing technologies and on those technologies applications in nanophotonic structures and devices. Most nanophotonic structures with designed functionalities are complicated and three-dimensional, therefore three-dimensional nanomanufacturing technologies are essential. The scanning electron microscope can provide images with high resolution, and the Fourier transformation infrared spectrometer can measure the essential optical properties of photonic structures and devices. These structural and optical properties will provide important information and guidance for the development and optimization of nanomanufacturing processes. The research conducted using this equipment is interdisciplinary and involves the collaborative efforts of researchers from various departments. This will likely lead to advances in the sciences and technologies of nanomanufacturing, photonic material, and devices. By creating a tight-nit environment of mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and chemists, a new generation of engineers with interdisciplinary knowledge and research experience will be trained through participating in these research activities. The advances in nanomanufacturing and education will benefit society by helping the United States maintain a competitive edge in this high technology industry and prepare a high quality workforce for the nation s economy and security doc22975 none This collaborative proposal would use establishment data from EEO reports to investigate changes in occupational segregation across nine broad occupational categories between and . Preliminary analyses have documented the national declines in average within-establishment segregation by gender and racial ethnic group across the 34 years of data. Average segregation by county and industry will be made available as a public use data file. The levels of and changes in establishment-level segregation will be analyzed to estimate the effects of factors at the establishment level (e.g., years since founding), the firm level (e.g., federal reporting requirements), the industry level (e.g., market competition), and the local area (e.g., minority concentrations and women s labor force participation doc22976 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Primus V. Mtenga and colleagues at Florida A&M University - Florida State University College of Engineering (FAMU-FSU CoE) to acquire an EchoTherm System for nondestructive evaluation (NDE) in infrastructure condition assessment and other applications. Infrastructure deficiencies such as cracking in concrete structures, corrosion in steel structures, production anomalies in materials have made condition assessment using NDE techniques a very important area of research and development . These NDE techniques include visual techniques, ultrasonic based techniques, x-ray techniques, and now increasingly thermographic techniques. Both ultrasonic and x-ray techniques require the attachment of probes or film on the component or structure to be evaluated. The attachment of devices to the location to be inspected is time consuming and may cause some inconveniences such as closure of a facility for extended periods. On the other hand, Infrared thermography (IRT) techniques have all the characteristics of providing an efficient and economical method for NDE. These characteristics include the ability of measuring surface temperature at a distance and the ability to cover a large area at a time. These characteristics make the technique very useful in situations such as the condition assessment of bridges where minimum inconvenience to the traveling public is desirable. The EchoTherm System to be acquired will complement an existing IRT capability at FAMU-FSU CoE. The EchoTherm system allows controlled heat pulse application, thus providing the ability to monitor heat decay precisely, which in turn allows the determination sizes of anomalies and their location with depth. The availability of the system will enhance the productivity of the existing IRT facility and increase FAMU-FSU CoE competitiveness in the area of infrastructure condition assessment. With anticipated funding from Florida Department of Transportation, studies on quality control of Fiber Reinforced Polymer retrofit will be the maiden project for the requested equipment. The Florida A&M Univerisity, a historically Black University, is a leading producer of minority and female engineering graduates. The requested Echo-Therm System, augmented by the existing IR Camera, will provide NDE exposure to the existing diverse body of undergraduate and graduate students, thus bringing under-represented groups to the condition assessment field doc22977 none A grant has been awarded to the BioMicro Center at MIT to acquire high-performance computers for research in biology and biological engineering. The systems will be among the most powerful at MIT and will be dedicated to advancing the research programs of an active group of young faculty. These Assistant and Associate Professors lead research teams working on a wide range of problems in computational biology. The teams are united in their interest in the application of numerical models, computational simulations and large-scale computation to biological problems. The completion of the human genome sequence has emphasized the remarkable complexity of biological processes. While traditional molecular biology and molecular medicine will continue to play an important role in unraveling how these processes work, it seems almost certain that fundamental advances will come from the application of quantitative and rigorous analytic methods. The research includes Professor Amy Keating s work on protein design. Dr. Keating s goal is to discern the rules governing protein-protein interactions through calculation and simulation and to then apply the rules to actual experiments. Professor Mike Yaffe will use computation to mine the human genome for proteins that play crucial roles in the transmission of signals within cells. Dr. Yaffe hopes to determine how circuits are constructed in cells, and to compare these circuits to electronic and mechanical circuits. Professor Tidor will use large-scale calculations to try to determine how proteins interact with each other and with small molecules (such as drugs). This is a long-standing problem in structural biology, but Dr. Tidor has recently shown that approximations drawn from engineering can be successfully applied to the problems that have proven to be impossible to calculate using conventional methods. The new facility will not only enhance novel research but also graduate and undergraduate education. A new set of courses have the unusual distinction of being in the curriculum of three different departments: biology, biological engineering, and computer science. The group s intention is to expose students to the very latest computational methods and computer systems. Thus, high-performance computing will not only have a direct impact on world-class science, but also on education and training. With the help of Prof. Amy Keating, the group is working hard to attract additional women to computational biology. In the physical sciences women are significantly under-represented. Computational biology holds great promise as a discipline in which the historically inequitable under-representation of women in physical sciences can be overcome by association with biology doc22978 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Thomas Kunz at Boston University to acquire an advanced infrared thermal (IRT) imaging system to investigate the ecology and behavior of animals and plants. The instrumentation is prepared for rugged fieldwork and includes a high resolution infrared camera and lenses, video-signal electronics for real-time data acquisition, and small computer with specialized software for operation. The system accurately measures the surface temperature of organisms and objects without making physical contact. Detailed observations of plants and animals can be made in total darkness and without impinging on an organism s normal activities. The highly sensitive data enables further inferences to be made about metabolic activity and behavior for known organisms under investigation. Research projects involve a variety of animal and plant species and address problems in thermoregulation and behavior, ecosystem mass and energy exchange, and biological field assessments in difficult environmental situations. The IRT system will be utilized for studies that address behavior, ecology, and physiological requirements for species of bats, lizards, migratory, ground-nesting birds, and carnivorous plants. Thermoregulation in lizards, insects, carnivorous plants, and several bat species will be investigated. Ground-based thermal imaging data to assess variation in energy balance from soils, individual leaves, and entire vegetation canopies will enable validation of computer models and space-based thermal remote sensing of land surfaces. Census data will be collected of migratory, ground-nesting birds and Brazilian free-tailed bats; field surveys will be made of foliage roosting bats. Several proposed studies involve the ecologically-important, Brazilian free-tailed bats which roost in the Southwest U.S. These particular bats provide one of the most impressive examples of a continental-scale, natural pest-control service in North America through consumption of enormous quantities of agricultural pests that could ultimately affect the Central U.S. corn belt. IRT technology will produce reliable estimates of the size and activity of the bat colonies, quantify aspects of insect life cycle and infestation, and ultimately link levels of bat activity and feeding with levels of insect infestation, crop damage, and the need for pesticides. Studies are proposed that will provide a better understanding of the behavior and ecological impact of a variety of animal species, provide new insight into the life processes of carnivorous plants, and validate larger-scale, space-based, remote sensing data and computer models for large land areas. The broader scope of research with this instrumentation is to develop a clearer picture of the complex processes within an ecosystem that regulate how water, energy, and carbon are exchanged between soil and vegetation. Research projects will also provide training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, and postdoctoral scientists. Projects will also use the visually striking images captured by the IRT system to communicate new discoveries to a broad public audience via articles in popular media, textbooks, TV, and on the world wide web doc22979 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program will enable the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at The University of Texas in Austin to acquire a Raman microscope nanoscope. With these new capabilities, faculty will carry out the following investigations: a) semiconductor materials characterization; b) quantum confinement in group IV nanostructures; c) compositional studies of advanced photoresists; d) nanoscale compositional mapping of nanostructured materials for electrochemical energy conversion storage; e) light-emitting polymers; f) characterization of polymer micelles adsorbed on surfaces; g) the nanomechanics and interphase chemistry of interfacial fracture; and h) Raman imaging as a diagnostic probe for cervical cancer. Optical and electron microscopy have informed essentially every area of modern science and technology whereas the vibrational spectroscopies (infrared and Raman) have been the most incisive probes of structure and bonding in molecules and solids. Recent developments in vibrational microscopy have made it possible to characterize materials on the micron and submicron length scales, probing, for example, chemical composition, crystalline phase, microcrystallite orientation and stress in both homogeneous and heterogeneous samples. Raman microscopy has very high intrinsic spatial resolution, and sample preparation is minimal. These studies will have a strong impact in a wide variety of fields including microelectronics, optoelectronics and polymer science doc22980 none Human activities are widely recognized as a major force behind rapid landscape changes and loss of biodiversity around the world, including those in numerous nature reserves. Many studies have found that government policies can significantly shape human activities, but most of those studies have focused on a single policy at a time and ignored the interactive effects among various policies. Little is known about the complex interactions among the effects of multiple policies on the spatial-temporal dynamics of biodiversity such as wildlife habitat. Studying the interrelationships of various policies for biodiversity conservation is critical and urgent because multiple policies often are implemented simultaneously. These policies may be nonlinearly complementary or counterproductive. An excellent site for studying such interactions is Wolong Nature Reserve in Sichuan Province in southwestern China. The reserve, which is 200,000 hectares in size, is one of the largest homes to world-famous endangered giant pandas and several thousand other animal and plant species. There are also more than 4,000 local residents and a variety of human activities in the reserve, such as farming and fuelwood collection. Since the establishment of the reserve in , human population size has increased by more than 70 percent. This rapidly increasing human population plays a novel and unique role in degrading the pandas habitat. To prevent further degradation of panda habitat and promote habitat restoration, the Chinese government is implementing three conservation policies in the reserve: an eco-hydropower plant program (to eliminate fuelwood consumption), a natural forest conservation program (to prevent illegal forest harvesting), and a grain-to-green program (to return cropland to forest). The interactive effects of these policies on local people and panda habitat are uncertain, however. The objectives of this research project are (1) to assess the interactions among the three policies and local residents; (2) to evaluate the interrelationships between local residents and panda habitat; (3) to examine the need for and feasibility of policy modification and improvement; and (4) to model and simulate multi-scale interactions among policies, people, and panda habitat across space and time. The methods to be used in this study include field observations, face-to-face interviews with stakeholders, geographical information systems, remote sensing, global positioning systems, statistical tools, systems modeling and simulation, and advanced computer visualization techniques. In addition to addressing many fundamental ecological and socioeconomic questions, the research will be tightly integrated with the education of students from elementary school to graduate school as well as outreach to various stakeholders from local to international levels. The project will have significant implications for biocomplexity theory, methodology, and application. In terms of theory, this project will shed light on complex patterns and interrelated processes (e.g., nonlinearity, thresholds, feedback, uncertainty) among multiple policies, humans, and wildlife habitat at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Regarding methodology, the research will take a systems approach by integrating multidisciplinary methods and advanced technologies to investigate the complexity of the study system. With respect to application, the project will provide practical information for conserving panda habitat in Wolong, and it will provide useful insights for designing and improving policies that attempt to balance the needs of biodiversity conservation and economic development in the world s most populous nation. The findings also will be of general interest to many other parts of the world because of escalating human pressures and increasingly complicated human-nature interactions. This project is supported by an award resulting from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc22981 none Luthy This proposal will create a modern analytical facility at Stanford University capable of accurately measuring emerging environmental contaminants at trace levels in aquatic systems. By building on the University s new campus-wide Environmental Initiative, this proposal represents a strategic opportunity to significantly impact environmental research and education at Stanford University among faculty and students in chemistry, biology, geological and environmental sciences, and environmental engineering. The proposed emerging contaminant analytical facility will create interdisciplinary research opportunities and promote the teaching on the fate, transport, and effects of emerging contaminants in aquatic systems doc22982 none Dugdale This Major Research Instrumentation award to San Francisco State University s Romberg Tiburon Center provides funds for acquisition of research instrumentation for isotope tracer research in coastal marine science and estuarine ecology. Instruments supported here include a stable isotope mass spectrometer with gas chromatograph interface, a high resolution scintillation counter, and an elemental analyzer and reduction furnace. The instruments will be used in a variety of projects, including ongoing studies of carbon and nitrogen fluxes in phytoplankton near Bodega Bay, CA, oceanic fixation of nitrogen by Trichodesmium, nitrogen dynamics of natural planktonic communities in response to iron enrichment, coupling of carbon and nitrogen cycles in coastal upwelling, and invasive species in the San Francisco Estuary. The instrumentation award is supported by the Division of Ocean Sciences at NSF. San Francisco State University will provide cost-share support from non-federal funds for a portion of total project costs doc22983 none With support from the National Science Foundation, The Public Research Institute (PRI) at San Francisco State University (SFSU) will revitalize its survey research facility. The award will be used to completely replace PRI s aging equipment with state-of-the-art technology and will dramatically enhance the research services and training PRI provides to the campus community, collaborating researchers, community organizations, and government agencies in the San Francisco Bay Area and California. The specific objectives of the proposal are to: (a) Improve PRI s sample management and quality control capacities in order to increase the quality and cost of collected data; (b) Support the integrated use of multiple survey modalities, innovative interviewing methods and multiple languages to improve research focused on under-represented populations; (c) Provide the foundation for a program of methodological research for the study of highly diverse populations and local communities; and (d) Provide technical support, training, and improvements to PRI s office environment, including access for the disabled. The proposed steps to reach these objectives include the replacement of PRI s Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) software and computers, comprehensive training of institute staff, refurnishing of the Institute s workstations, and support of a full time support technician. The proposed infrastructure will support a coordinated program of research by SFSU faculty and PRI staff. The goal of these combined efforts is to enhance PRI s capacity as a comprehensive center for community and regional research in the San Francisco Bay Area. The new infrastructure will allow innovative combinations of survey modalities (for example, internet-based data collection), as well as greater integration of qualitative data with the statistical precision of traditional survey methodology. Community-focused research must produce more than statistical profiles; the goal is to accumulate understanding of the region as it is understood by its inhabitants within their social, cultural, economic, geographic, and historical contexts. The project will bring substantial benefits to all the individuals and institutions served by PRI. SFSU students in the behavioral and social sciences will be introduced to the new technology and methods as employees, through classroom demonstrations and research projects, and involvement with faculty research. SFSU faculty will benefit through improved support for research and PRI s emerging role as a hub for interdisciplinary and collaborative projects. The support is likely to result in more competitive and innovative grant proposals by faculty members as well as enhancement of SFSU s ability to recruit top researchers. The proposed infrastructure will similarly enhance PRI s ability to provide high quality research to the public sector in the San Francisco Bay Area, particularly with regard to the growing importance of research concerning under-represented populations. Because the improvements will increase operational efficiency as well as covering the cost of acquiring the technology, the project will enable PRI to continue providing research services to all of its constituents at a reasonable cost doc22984 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation program, the University of Pennsylvania (Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter), the Nanotechnology Institute and the Rohm and Haas Corporation, a FEI Strata DB235 Focused Ion Beam will be installed within the Penn Regional Materials Characterization Facility at the Penn MRSEC. This multi-functional instrument will enable research in nanoscale structure-property relationships via in-situ experiments on individual molecules and molecular assemblies, as well as carbon nanotubes. Using enhanced etching modules, the DB235 provides key capability for the production of minute specimens for the study of mechanical properties at the nanoscale in polymer and intermetallic materials. Research groups will also use the instrument to conduct device-editing operations to efficiently explore new circuit designs for particle detectors and detector arrays that mimic human function. The flexibility and automated operation of the DB235 allows integration into educational programs, where it will contribute to NSF education programs for undergraduates and high school teachers, and to the Penn-Drexel-Community College NSF Partnership for Innovation for nano-biotechnology education. With support from the Major Research Instrumentation program, the University of Pennsylvania (Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter), the Nanotechnology Institute (NTI) and the Rohm and Haas Corporation, a FEI Strata DB235 Focused Ion Beam will be installed at the Penn MRSEC. With capabilities for sectioning and etching materials at the nanoscale, and for the deposition of nanometer-scale conducting features, the DB235 will have a broad impact on nanoscience and nanotechnology research. The flexibility and automated operation of the DB235 will be used in NSF-funded education programs for undergraduates and high school teachers, and in the Penn-Drexel NSF Partnership for Innovation for nano-biotechnology education. Housed in the Penn Regional Materials Characterization Facility, the instrument will be available to a large regional community of users, including corporations and academic institutions. Through the NTI, the DB235 will be used by research teams comprised of researchers from Penn, Drexel, Penn State, Temple, Widener and Villanova Universities, Thomas Jefferson, Penn and Windber Medical Schools Institutes, Children s Hospital and Haverford College doc22985 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program supports the University of California at Santa Barbara with the acquisition of a state-of-the-art field emission transmission electron microscope (FE-TEM) with capabilities for atomic resolution Z-contrast imaging and spectroscopy. The instrument is crucial to meet needs in ongoing and future research projects in electronic, inorganic, and structural materials, UCSB proposes the acquisition. The needs of the research can be fulfilled with a 200 kV TEM STEM equipped with a field emission source, high angle annular dark field detector, a 2Kx2K CCD detector, and state-of-the-art electron spectrometer energy filter. Z-contrast imaging and atomic resolution spectroscopy have been routinely demonstrated on the instrument with a 1.4 Angstrom probe size, 20 picoAmpere beam current, and energy resolution of ~0.7 electron Volts. The acquisition of the proposed FE-TEM will free an existing conventional 200 kV TEM for studies of soft materials. The acquisition of the new FE-TEM will strengthen the education of students in advanced TEM. Graduate students and post-doctoral researchers are the primary hands-on users of TEM at UCSB. Formal training in TEM is provided in a series of courses is offered in the Materials Department. A new course in advanced TEM that reflects the unique capabilities of a FE-TEM will be offered. The advanced TEM course will include a lab module to provide hands-on training in high-resolution imaging in CTEM and in STEM and in advanced analytical techniques, such as electron energy-loss spectroscopy. Through the Outreach program of the MRSEC, the scientists will work with high school teachers on TEM sample preparation and imaging and thus teach and connect to a broad community of students and teachers. To meet needs in ongoing and future research projects in advanced electronic, inorganic, and structural materials, UCSB will acquire a state-of-the-art field emission transmission electron microscope (FE-TEM). Such an instrument produces an atomic scale electron probe. This sub-nanometer probe (~2 x 10-10 meters) can be used to image individual atoms and atomic columns with direct information on structure, composition, and bonding. An advanced FE-TEM provides a unique combination of atomic-scale information that is essential for the advancement of nanoscience and nanotechnology. Graduate students and post-doctoral researchers are the primary hands-on users of TEM at UCSB. Formal training in TEM is provided in a series of courses offered in the Materials Dept. The new FE-TEM will strengthen the education of students in advanced TEM. A new course in advanced TEM that reflects the unique capabilities of a FE-TEM will be offered. The advanced TEM course will include hands-on training in high-resolution imaging in CTEM and in STEM and in advanced analytical techniques, such as electron energy-loss spectroscopy. Through the Outreach program of the MRSEC, UCSB scientists will work with high school teachers on TEM sample preparation and imaging and thus teach and connect to a broad community of students and teachers doc22986 none Moshe Y. Vardi Don H. Johnson; Ken W. Kennedy; John M. Mellor-Crummey; Willy Zwaenepoel MRI: Acquisition of CITI Terascale Cluster \(CTC\) This proposal, requiring access to the kinds of experimental computational resources needed for scalability experiments, aims to support scalability to thousands of processors. Achieving this goal requires experimentation of computational facilities of sufficient size to establish that solutions will scale to large systems. A high-performance computational cluster with a peak performance of approximately one teraflop, supporting both compute- and data-intensive science and engineering, will enable researchers to make fundamental advances in diverse areas such as biochemistry, biology, chemistry, computational mathematics, computer science and engineering, earth science, economics, physics, political science, and psychology. Experiments planned include: a. Scalability of compiler techniques for systems with hundreds of processors and deep memory and communication hierarchies; b. Development, simulation, and testing of scalable Web services on hundreds of processors; c. Simulations of ad hoc multihop wireless networks scaling to thousands of nodes; d. Scalable algorithms for Monte-Carlo studies of the physics of heavy ion collisions; e. Design and evaluation of scalable optimization algorithms based on component frameworks; f. Extraction and analysis of data on hundreds of millions of international events, to better predict and understand international conflicts (extend the Kansas Data System); and g. Scalability tests and practical application of new algorithms for modeling and simulation of biomolecular interactions using several thousand flexibility parameters. By integrating the equipment in the existing curriculum the educational impact is expected to be large, going beyond a course in parallel programming. Several programs are already in place addressing diversity doc22987 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, Ryan S. Winburn and John R. Webster of Minot State University will acquire an X-ray diffractometer. The research projects to be undertaken with this instrument include a) examination of instrumental factors affecting the accuracy of Rietveld quantitative X-ray diffraction; b) structure solution of materials; c) quantitative mineralogical analysis of volcanic rocks as part of petrologic research; d) determination of structural parameters of volcanic rocks; e) quantitative mineralogical analysis and determination of structural parameters in solid solutions for heavy mineral separates from North Dakota sandstones; and f) clay mineralogy of river embankment slopes to determine correlation with stability. The X-ray diffractometer allows accurate and precise measurements of the full three dimensional structure of a molecule, including bond distances and angles, and it provides accurate information about the spatial arrangement of the molecule relative to the neighboring molecules. These studies will have a strong impact in geochemistry doc22988 none A grant has been awarded to the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) under the direction of Dr. Dieter Wolf to purchase instrumentation which will open new opportunities in the emerging field of system-wide analysis of protein expression and function ( proteomics ). A detailed understanding of the information contained within the many sequenced genomes available in public databases today requires state-of-the-art means of analyzing quantitative and qualitative differences in protein expression and function in a high-throughput format. Peptide mass spectrometry is a relatively new technology that is ideal for these applications and is widely expected to remain the most important core technology of proteomics research for many years to come. There are two major areas of proteomics research that are addressed with this equipment: 1. protein expression profiling, and 2. identification of protein assemblies purified from complex samples. The research activities enabled by this NSF grant make extensive use of these applications in order to answer major questions in basic biology. The projects use samples derived from organisms across the evolutionary ladder. The scope of research activities is wide-ranging, and includes large scale analysis of the ubiquitin-dependent proteolysis system, analyzing determinants of cellular responses to radicals and oxidative stress, determining factors controlling membrane transport of metals and peptide growth factors, analyzing signaling and transcriptional activation pathways in cell lineage determination, determining protein interactions involved in establishing cell polarity, and many others. The grant awarded by NSF provides funds for the acquisition of a combined liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometer system (LC MS MS). This instrument adds an essential component of modern proteomics technology to preexisting tools HSPH has committed to this initiative by enabling rapid and highly accurate protein identification from diverse biological samples. The mass spectrometer is integrated with a high performance liquid chromatography system required for sample fractionation. Sophisticated software assists in protein identification and database searching. Apart from major scientific advances through proteomics technology, the main impact of this grant lies with the enhancement of the training environment at HSPH. The new research instrumentation provides students and postgraduates with hands-on experience in cutting edge proteomics technology, thereby optimally preparing them for the demanding mission of prevailing in the rapidly changing landscape of the post-genomic era. Through the Minority Internship Program administered by the Division of Biological Sciences at HSPH under-represented groups will be actively recruited to the burgeoning filed of proteomics research doc22989 none Nanomagnetic devices for applications such as quantum computing and high-capacity memory cannot be developed without faster, more sensitive characterization tools to directly probe phenomena and material structures at the nanoscale. The objective of this work is to advance the capability of a non-invasive, high-sensitivity technique, scanning superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) susceptometry, for the dynamic characterization of nanomagnetic materials, systems, and phenomena. The principal investigator achieves this objective through two innovations. First, spin sensitivity is improved from the current state of the art, a few thousand electron spins per Hz1 2 , to a few tens of spins per Hz1 2. This improvement is accomplished by reduction of pickup loop dimensions in a combined optical and electron-beam lithography process and by utilizing an ultra-low-noise dc SQUID process. Second, bandwidth is increased from the current state of the art, tens of kHz, to tens of MHz by the use of dc SQUID series array amplifiers as preamplifiers for the dc SQUID susceptometer. The devices are characterized for flux sensitivity and bandwidth at 300 mK and 20 mK. Operation at 300 mK is necessary for the e-beam defined Al pick-up loops to become superconducting, and operation at 20 mK is essential for the study of quantum decoherence mechanisms in electronic systems. Undergraduates, working with graduate students in the collaborator s laboratory, characterize the spin sensitivity of the devices and their performance under realistic scanning conditions by imaging individual cobalt nanomagnetic spheres of controlled diameters ranging from 3 nm to 10 nm and magnetic moments ranging from tens to tens of thousands of electron spins. Further, one SQUID susceptometer is used to image a second, identical device to quantitatively characterize the noise generated by the devices. The scientific emphasis of this project is to produce sensors that have applications in the area of nanoscale structures, novel phenomena, and quantum control and to use these sensors to image both static and dynamic properties of individual cobalt nanomagnets. Integration of a high-sensitivity, high-bandwidth SQUID susceptometer into a scanning platform significantly increases the number and kind of systems that can be studied, decreases the turn-around time, and increases the number of samples that can be studied in a single experiment. Thus, this project contributes to advances in nanoscale materials, devices and system architecture. An added benefit of this project is the educational benefits at both CU-Denver (PI s institution) and Stanford University (collaborator s institution) resulting from the collaboration between CU-Denver undergraduate students and Stanford graduate students doc22990 none A grant has been awarded to Northern Arizona University to acquire eddy covariance towers and a stable isotope ratio mass spectrometer. The eddy covariance equipment will be used to measure carbon, water, and energy exchange between southwestern ecosystems and the atmosphere. These fluxes are critical regulators of ecosystem processes, such as decomposition, nutrient cycling, consumer activity, and groundwater recharge to riparian ecosystems. They also influence regional and global climate and are of increasing interest to policy-makers concerned with management of greenhouse gases. Previous eddy covariance studies emphasize determining net fluxes in pristine ecosystems. The two major goals of this project are 1) to use stable isotope techniques to determine the mechanisms responsible for changing net fluxes (e.g., for carbon dioxide, determining how overstory trees versus understory grasses contribute to total ecosystem photosynthesis and respiration), and 2) using large-scale experiments, to determine how fluxes of carbon, water, and energy respond to disturbance and land use practices. Eddy covariance and stable isotope measurements will be conducted in two experimental settings. First, tracts of Ponderosa Pine forest that have been thinned to reduce fire danger will be compared with dense, control forests, documenting the impacts of so-called forest restoration on fluxes of carbon, water, and energy. Second, grasslands under varying grazing management practices will be compared to assess which land management practices, for example, are more effective at conserving water and storing carbon. In these experiments, instruments on towers will be used to measure eddies (turbulent air movements) carrying pockets of air upwards, downwards, and sideways. Measuring vertical air movements and the amount of carbon dioxide, water vapor, and heat they contain enables one to calculate the net fluxes of these constituents between the ecosystem and the atmosphere. The isotope ratio mass spectrometer will be used to analyze the stable isotope composition of carbon dioxide and water vapor in samples of air throughout the canopy. Stable isotopes of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen provide characteristic fingerprints of how individual components of ecosystems contribute to overall fluxes measured by eddy covariance, so coupling these two techniques will enable researchers to determine which ecosystem components are responsible for altering net fluxes. This equipment will be used to address research questions ranging from the effects of climate on ecosystem functioning to the implications of large-scale forest restoration for regional climate and site water balance. Once established, this new flux measurement array will attract additional researchers working on issues as diverse as design of new range management programs to regional influences of globally important phenomena such as El Nino and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Undergraduate students from under-represented groups will be recruited to participate in the proposed research through an NSF funded UMEB program already in place at NAU. The theme of the UMEB program includes specific research activities that dovetail nicely with the research enabled by this instrumentation grant (e.g., Carbon Balance of Colorado Plateau Ecosystems, and Livestock Management, Productivity, and Diversity of Southwestern Grasslands). Minority students recruited into the UMEB program will work with mentors involved with the flux and isotope studies and will attend special classes in which the findings of the ecosystem experiments are presented. In sum, the equipment funded by this grant will increase opportunities for training students of diverse backgrounds at NAU in state-of the-art techniques and research relevant to important issues in ecology and environmental biology doc22991 none A grant has been awarded to the University of South Dakota Department of Biology, under the supervision of Drs. Nepokroeff, Britten, Helenurm & Swallow, to acquire automated genetic analysis instrumentation. The equipment will be used for automated DNA sequencing, genetic fragment and genotyping analysis (e.g. microsatellite detection, DNA finger-printing using AFLPs). The equipment will be housed in the Biology Department, and will be used by an additional 17 faculty from USD s Departments of Biology and Basic Biomedical Sciences. The acquisition of this equipment at USD is especially significant because there is currently no such facility on campus, and no high-throughput facility in the state of South Dakota. Researchers in Biology at USD will address a number of important questions in evolutionary genetics, conservation biology and systematics using the genetic analyzer. Specific projects to be addressed by Dr. Nepokroeff include the systematics of the carnation family, Caryophyllaceae, using molecular phylogenetic analysis of several different DNA sequences and phylogenetic approaches to study biogeography, (colonization and dispersal) in Pacific island species of the tropical shrub genus Psychotria (one of the most species-rich genera of flowering plants). Additionally, she will study conservation and population genetics of several Hawaiian plant lineages using AFLP and microsatellite markers. Dr. Britten plans to address population genetic structure and genetic variability of several Federally endangered species. He will be investigating the effects of population fragmentation through habitat loss and historical sylvatic plague infections in Black-tailed prairie dogs using AFLP and microsatellite analysis. Additionally, he plans to examine genetic variation in trumpeter swans and sandhill cranes. Dr. Helenurm will address population genetics and evolution of insular endemic plants. He will use DNA finger-printing methods, e.g., microsatellite and AFLP markers to examine levels of genetic variability in several species of flowering plants endemic to California s Channel Islands, many of which are endangered. He will also use AFLPs and DNA sequences to examine within-species (or phylogeographic ) relationships for plant species in the Channel Islands, a system which is poorly known. Dr. Swallow will address questions concerning correlated evolution of morphological, behavioral and physiological traits in stalk-eyed flies (family Diopsidae), wild relatives of the fruit fly. He will use DNA sequences for reconstructing phylogenetic relationships among species and populations of stalk-eyed flies. Secondly, he will use DNA markers (AFLPs) in a QTL study to determine the number of genes involved in traits related to species recognition and mate choice. The equipment will be used in original research by faculty, postdoctoral researchers, graduates and undergraduate students at USD, will be integrated into three courses in the USD curriculum. The equipment will also be incorporated in several existing summer programs, geared to give research experiences to area minority high school students and their teachers. The new equipment and proposed programs are anticipated to serve at least four area colleges with research expertise and experiences, in addition to the USD community. Acquiring an on-site facility will enhance the PI s competitiveness for federal research funds and attract new faculty and graduate students to USD s growing research programs. Thus, a genetic analyzer facility will have an enormous impact on the quality of research and educational programs at USD, will allow the PIs to integrate teaching and research at a high level, and will enrich the USD community in a diversity of ways doc22992 none Acquisition of a Cryostage and Transfer System to Characterize Biological Systems and Frozen Materials with Environmental Scanning Electron Microscopy A grant has been awarded to Dr. Patricia A. Holden and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) for purchasing equipment to look at the fine structure of frozen materials. The equipment, a Cryostage and Transfer System, will be mounted on an environmental scanning electron microscope that UCSB acquired through a previous NSF award. The combined system supports every aspect of modern environmental, biomolecular, bioengineering and materials sciences. With an environmental scanning electron microscope, researchers can observe complicated biological, geological and manmade materials without having to damage the samples by coating or drying beforehand. The addition of the cryostage and transfer system allows scientists to look at snow or ice, or to freeze biological tissues and look at them while frozen. UCSB scientists and engineers will now be able to work with frozen samples of all types and thereby learn about the real, unaltered structure of important, delicate materials. Long term, many projects will use the CST-ESEM. Initial projects include: Discovering how much water is held by bacterial colonies in soil aggregates by freezing, fracturing and observing internal water. We will study temperate and tundra soils to learn about how bacteria live in each type of soil. Observing bonding of ice crystals, called sintering. Sintering, or lack of sintering, controls avalanche hazard in alpine regions. Determining the impurities in snow. Snow contains atmospheric pollutants that are released with initial melting. Freezing bacteria that have been tagged with special identifying molecules. We can learn where and how the tags attach and thereby study how pollutants interact with bacteria. Learning how new tunable biological materials change over time by freezing and imaging them at different times in their development. Such materials have promise for new artificial tissues, adhesives, and improved drug-delivery. The broad significance of acquiring the cryostage for our microscope is multifold. First, researchers from UCSB and beyond will use this instrument to study socially relevant themes such as pollutant biodegradation by soil bacteria, avalanche formation, release of concentrated pollutants in snowmelt, speculations about extraterrestrial life, likely changes that global warming will cause, and the next generation of biomedical materials and devices. Second, we will teach many students how to acquire state-of-the-art data so they can develop into the next generation of well-trained environmental and medical problem-solvers. Third, we will advance the research infrastructure nationally because ours will be one of the first environmental scanning electron microscopes with a cryostage in the USA. Finally, we will attract and help researchers from UCSB, the local region, and around the world, thus enlarging the influence of our research infrastructure doc22993 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will focus on developing polymer coated superparamagnetic nanobeads for isolation of biomolecules; namely cells and nucleic acids. The superparamagnetic nature along with the nano size of the particles offers low remnant magnetism, magnetization at low fields, and larger active surface area per unit volume. A proprietary microwave plasma synthesis technique was adopted to reduce these nanospheres and the feasibility of the technique was established during Phase I. Process scale up and extensive cell DNA isolation testing will be the main R&D objectives for the Phase II project. Industrial partners will evaluate beads produced to evaluate parameters, which are critical for transitioning the technology to an immediate useful product. The commercial potential of polymer coated nanospheres can be used in various separation modules. This technology could also be extended to isolation and detection of pathogens in water doc22994 none The microstructure of a semicrystalline polymer depends strongly on processing history. Imposing flow fields on a crystallizing polymer melt can accelerate the rate of crystallization and result in the formation of oriented crystallites. In spite of intensive research over the past three decades, the fundamental basis of the effects of processing on structure development remains elusive. This research probes the underlying molecular-level processes: the interplay of the relaxation dynamics of the molten chains, the distortion of segmental orientation created by flow, the kinetics and anisotropy of nucleation from a distorted melt, and their effects on the subsequent kinetics and morphology of crystallization. Under current DMR support, surprising discoveries have reshaped current thinking. The rate limiting factor in the formation of the oriented precursors that template the row-nucleated morphology is the rate of molecular motion in the subcooled melt, which is unanticipated by any existing model of flow-induced crystallization. The role of macromolecular dynamics, particularly the distribution of relaxation times, was demonstrated using relatively narrow distribution materials and their binary blends. Small amounts of long chains (with known molar mass and stereoregularity) added to a base resin of much shorter chains (approximately one-fifth as long), greatly enhanced the flow-induced formation of oriented precursors. The concentration dependence of the effect of long chains indicates that long-chain long-chain overlap plays a central role. In view of the profound effect of low concentrations of long chains, proposed research for the next three years focuses on the dependence of the long-chain effect on their relative relaxation time and stereoregularity compared to the bulk, searching for mechanistic clues. To clarify the interplay between the earliest stages of flow-induced structure formation (the creation of point-like precursors) and the subsequent formation of threadlike precursors, homogeneous and heterogeneously nucleated model polymers will be compared. The kinetics of disappearance of the threadlike precursors when held at elevated temperature will be used to test our current hypotheses regarding their structure. The diverse and ubiquitous application of polymers is largely due to semicrystalline polymers, which account for two-thirds of the annual production of synthetic polymers. Over 100 billion pounds a year are made of polyethylene and polypropylene alone! Their properties can be tuned over an enormous range by controlling the extent and form of crystallization. For example, the development of highly oriented crystallites during spinning gives certain polyethylene fibers a modulus approaching that of steel. However, fundamental understanding needed to achieve intended properties by design remains elusive because of the complex effects of molecular structure and processing history on material properties. New methods to observe the earliest events during crystallization are revealing surprising truths. Contrary to existing models, oriented nucleation induced by flow occurs as fast as the motion of the chain-like molecules permits-the usual activation barrier vanishes. And the polymer chains that matter most in this process are the longest ones, needing to be at least four times longer than average. Such advances in molecular-level understanding guide the design of semicrystalline polymers to optimize their processing characteristics and ultimate material properties, with benefits to the automotive, electronics, food and health care industries doc22995 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, Norbert F. Scherer and colleagues at the University of Chicago will acquire a high-resolution scanning transmission electron microscope (S TEM) for interdisciplinary nanoscience research. The STEM will be used to study systems in nano-physics, nano-chemistry, and nano-biology. Some of the applications include characterization of nanocrystals; diblock copolymer used for making nanoparticle array wires; phase separation and structure studies for electroactive diblock copolymers; hemoglobin fiber formation and sickle cell anemia; genome-scale genetic analysis and fabrication of nano-structured materials with novel properties; biomembranes; high resolution e-beam writing using photoresists; and new direct methods of pattern formation. Much of the research at the forefront of structural and cell biology and nanoscience requires routine characterization of specimens by a combination of transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and scanning transmission electron microscopy (S TEM). High-end TEM is unsurpassed in terms of image resolution and ease of interpretation. In addition, with new capabilities such as tomography, electron microscopy is entering a new era in which its application can visualize molecular structure with (near-) atomic resolution doc22996 none Heacox, William D. A 32-inch clear aperture telescope will be built and instrumented by the faculty and students of the University of Hawaii at Hilo, Hawaii for the purpose of training students in astronomical instrumentation technology development and for use by the astronomical sciences research faculty for compelling research in the areas of: evolution of galaxies in dense clusters, the formation and early evolution of multiple star systems, the formation and early evolution of planetary systems and the chemical evolution of our galaxy. The State of Hawaii will provide the building and observatory dome). The undergraduate astronomy degree program at the University of Hawaii, Hilo, will extensively use the planned observatory. Young people of the State of Hawaii will be trained for careers in astronomy and for technical jobs within the many Observatories on Mauna and in Hilo doc22997 none Behl This NSF Major Research Instrumentation Program award to the California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) will support the acquisition and installation of an Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope (ESEM) with microanalytical capabilities. This instrumentation will provide fundamental and necessary support for cross-disciplinary research and teaching programs in the natural sciences and anthropology. Productive research programs in sedimentary petrology, paleoceanography, structural geology, geochemistry, biochemistry, and archaeometry will directly benefit from access to this instrument. Student research and formal courses at all levels in the Departments of Geological Sciences, Biological Sciences, and Anthropology Archaeology will utilize this instrument for imaging and compositional analysis. Intramural benefits will be extended to the broader educational community via well-established, NSF- and NIH-funded programmatic ties and joint research with faculty and students of local community colleges and high schools. CSULB is designated a Non-Ph.D. Granting and Minority-Serving Institution. CSULB and the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, where the ESEM facility will be located, has a strong record of commitment to community outreach efforts. The new ESEM facility, with secondary and backscattered electron imaging, cathodoluminescent detection, and quantitative elemental microanalysis and mapping capabilities, will meet current research and pedagogic needs, and provide the flexibility to support new developments in research, teaching, and outreach missions over the next two decades. The Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope (ESEM) will image and analyze highly porous, delicate, moist, dirty, vacuum-sensitive or rare geologic, biologic or archaeological specimens without carbon or gold coating that would interfere with subsequent trace elemental or isotopic analysis. Joint use of the ESEM facility will foster synergistic, cross-discipline collaboration among the geology, biology, archeology and environmental science disciplines at CSULB doc22998 none Ihinger Funds from this Major Research Instrumentation (MRI)grant will be used to acquire a Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectrometer that will be housed in the Department of Geology at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire (UWEC). The instrument will be equipped with a microscope attachment that will aid in the study of the kinetics of mineral growth and diffusion in natural geologic environments. The FTIR facility will be the primary analytical tool for a variety of collaborative research projects with undergraduates at UWEC. In particular, the instrument will be used in conjunction with funds secured by the Petrology Division at the NSF (award ) to investigate the nature of water-bearing impurities in hydrothermal quartz crystals This research builds on previous contributions resulting from collaborative research with undergraduate students, including discerning the growth rate of natural crystals and the timing of thermal events in metamorphic processes. The instrument will be the first of its kind available for academic use in an educational environment in all of northern and western Wisconsin. The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire will provide a 30% match for the cost of acquisition of the equipment and will further provide 100% of the maintenance and upkeep costs of the instrument for the first five years after purchase doc22999 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Purchase College, State University of New York will acquire a gas chromatograph with mass spectrometric (GC MS) detection. This equipment will enhance research in a number of areas including a) cuticular hydrocarbons of Hawaiian Drosophila: Drosophila heteroneura and Drosophila silvestris; b) cuticular hydrocarbons and pheromones of the Drosophila paulistorum semispecies; c) organoselenium chemoprevention in promotion phase of rat mammary cancer; d) investigation of the effects of propylene glycol on the biodiversity and chemical balance of Blind Brook; e) synthesis of aryltrimethylsilanes via the Diels-Alder reaction; and f) biological degradation of methyl tert-butyl ether in aqueous systems and soil microcosms. Gas chromatograph with mass spectrometric detection (GC-MS) is an extremely powerful technique used for the separation and analysis of complex mixtures. These studies will have significant impact in a variety of areas, including chemistry, biology and environmental sciences doc23000 none Sharma Chakravarthy Yuksel A. Aslandogan; Sajal K. Das; Lawrence B. Holder; Jachoon Yu University of Texas Arlington MRI: Acquisition of High Performance Distributed Computing and Storage Infrastructure at UTA This proposal, acquiring high-performance computing and storage infrastructure, aims to satisfy the research needs of several groups that require distributed and parallel computing resources. Involving collaboration from the departments of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) and Physics at UTA, and Dermatology at UT Southwestern Medical School, the research efforts include: a. Database and Data Mining (e.g., visualization of search), b. Software Engineering (e.g., formal methods), c. Physics (e.g., high energy physics -HEP- experiments), d. Dermatology (e.g., image database analysis of skin lesion), e. Distributed Computing (e.g., scheduling, load balancing on Information Power Grid), and f. Networking (e.g., wireless, optical; simulations). The key characteristics involve: a. Multi-disciplinary use of common equipment and infrastructure, b. Multi-institutional sharing of equipment, c. Enhancing current-research efforts and creating new synergy leading to new research ideas, d. Combining the high-bandwith of Internet 2 with high-performance computing and storage infrastructure to facilitate large image databases and video streaming research, and access to vast amounts of experimental data from outside the campus. Educational impact is expected by enhancing the experiences of at least 40 CS and 10 physics students and 15 faculty using the resource in an interdisciplinary mode. Joint activities should lead to high quality of inter-disciplinary research fostered by the collaboration doc23001 none PROVIDING ACCESS TO SCANNING ELECTRON MICROSCOPY A grant has been awarded to Drs. Angel Valdes, Brian Brown, Kirk Fitzhugh, Gordon Hendler and Joel Martin at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (LACM) to acquire a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). The SEM is a fundamental research tool in biological and physical sciences, offering a level of resolution (magnifications over 300,000 times) not possible with light microscopy, which is limited to magnifications no greater than 1,000 times. A state-of-the-art SEM with variable pressure capability and an Energy Dispersive Spectrometry unit (EDS) will be purchased. The variable pressure capability is necessary to allow examination of uncoated samples, which is critical when dealing with type material or delicate specimens. The EDS unit will be essential for geological and archeological research. For most biological samples a sputter coater will be required. We selected a high resolution sputter coater that utilizes noble targets such as gold, gold palladium and platinum. The SEM will constitute the core of a new research unit shared by seven research departments including Invertebrate Zoology, Vertebrate Zoology, Botany, Earth Sciences, Invertebrate Paleontology, Vertebrate Paleontology and Anthropology. Another important component of the SEM usage at the LACM will be the identification of collection materials. Staff in the Marine Invertebrate Biodiversity Processing Center, Earth Studies, and Vertebrate Paleontology departments will be using the SEM on a regular basis for the identification of minerals, meteorites and biological specimens. The SEM will also be used by the Education Division to enhance public understanding of science and highlight the work of museum scholars. Images produced using the SEM will be a component of future exhibits, curriculum materials, and web sites produced for educational purposes. Education staff will be able to arrange tours to the SEM facility with research staff who will provide access to the machine and explanations of the application of the SEM technology to natural sciences. The installation of a SEM at LACM will offer a unique opportunity for integration of on-going research programs and education activities as a dynamic, interactive exhibit component. The SEM facility will also provide a tool for affiliated research associates and visitors, enhancing cooperative research activities with regional, national and international colleagues. The SEM will be a critical component of this training process and will provide the LACM students with the necessary tools for their research in situ doc23002 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop and customize advanced simulation software for the design and optimization of microsphere and cell-based assays. Current assay design by trial and error is slow, unreliable, expensive, and a bottleneck for multiplexed, high-throughput analysis. Prior Phase I research has successfully established a first-ever, truly integrated (buffer flow, resolved microsphere motion and surface biochemistry) assay design and analysis tool. The objective of the Phase II effort is to further develop the initial models demonstrated in the Phase I effort into a comprehensive, generalized design environment. A suite of bead-surface biochemistry models (enzyme kinetics, multi-step reactions) and including user specifiable surface reaction mechanisms will be developed and fully integrated. In seeking to expand the application to cell-based assays, models for the motion and capture of deformable cells will be created, and detailed flow visualization experiments tracking bead and cell motion as well as assay endpoints in microfluidic channels will be conducted to guide and validate these models. The value of the developed simulation tool will be demonstrated in the proof-of-concept design of a novel microfluidic, cell-based H-filter assay for red-blood cell based aminothiols. The commercial applications of this project will be in the biotechnology and bioassay design markets. Miniaturized, multiplexed, high-throughput, fast, efficient and sensitive assays are a pre-requisite to translating the wealth of data from the human genome and combinatorial libraries into effective therapeutics. The developed software product will enable rational, computer-based design of these bioassays doc23003 none Geological drilling to recover core for scientific investigations was successfully conducted in the McMurdo Sound Region during 10 austral summers over a 28-year period since . The sea-ice has been used successfully as a drilling platform for seven drill-holes in this area. Experience gained during these projects forms the basis for developing new drilling technology to advance this approach. The ANDRILL (ANtarctic DRILLing) Project considers future drilling from sea-ice, ice shelf and land platforms within its McMurdo Sound Portfolio. This Portfolio proposes more than ten individual drilling targets that will require varied drilling equipment and strategies. Most of these targets have several common requirements, including drilling through hundreds of meters of water (up to m), and to recover continuous core starting from the sea-floor to depths of as much as m. Most of the targets call for a drill rig with a greater capacity than that used for the highly successful international Cape Roberts Project (CRP from - ), to which ANDRILL is the successor. Although the CRP rig, as well as various other commercial drilling rigs and equipment are available to ANDRILL, the unique requirements (drilling in deep-water and through an ice shelf more than 300 meters thick) require acquisition and development of a new, more powerful drilling system adapted to the Antarctic environment. The desired rig will handle the required length of drill rod and recover rock at an appropriate speed within the short windows of time allowed for Antarctic drilling. Development of this new system will enhance the drilling capability by providing faster core recovery and the ability to sample from previously inaccessible areas, thus expanding the scope of geological sampling into deeper water and through thick shelf ice. The study of sediment drillcores represents a key means to decipher Cenozoic climate and glacial history of Antarctica, a region where most rocks of this age are hidden beneath the ice sheet cover. ANDRILL is an international consortium with objectives to recover stratigraphic core records for use in interpreting Antarctica s past climatic, glacial and geological history over the past 50 million years and at varying scales of age resolution (0.1 to 100 thousand years). Understanding the past history of ice volume variation in Antarctica and associated physical changes in this region is critical to proper assessment of the global climate system and interaction of ice sheets with the ocean, atmosphere and biosphere. ANDRILL will proceed in three phases: geophysical and site surveys ( - ), drilling and core recovery ( - ), and climate and glacial modeling and integration of recovered data into global records of climate change ( - ). For the past 40 million years the Antarctic Ice Sheet has played a critical role in regulating global climate and sea level. Climatic warming is expected to be most pronounced in polar regions; Antarctic temperatures may rise by the end of the century to levels that have not been achieved for several million years. It is therefore vital that we understand the past response of the Antarctic ice sheet to climatic change in order to provide constraints on models that predict the future. ANDRILL currently plans 4 seasons of drilling under the McMurdo Sound Portfolio, in the regions of New Harbour, Windless Bight, Mackay Sea Valley and on the Southern McMurdo Ice Shelf. Through subsequent Portfolios, the life of ANDRILL and this new drilling system will likely continue towards the year . Support for programs of this scale must come from contributions of several nations. To date, the ANDRILL International Consortium includes as member nations the USA, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Italy and Germany, and it invites membership from any interested nation. Similar to the CRP, close interaction of a diverse team of research scientists, postdoctoral scientists, graduate and undergraduate students will provide excellent opportunities for education and on-site training. REU appointments will target under-represented groups in the geosciences. ANDRILL plans to expand the educational and outreach component beyond that of CRP by direct on-site and remote learning opportunities through member-nation initiatives and ANDRILL sponsored outreach and education. An on-ice team of scientists would prepare the core and provide initial description and characterization. Samples would be shipped to off-ice scientists to study and present results at the first of two science workshops to be hosted at member-nations home academic institutions on a rotating basis. Publication of initial results would be followed by presentation of results in major scientific journals and at professional meetings doc23004 none Feinerman This grant will allow UIC to purchase a high resolution e-beam lithography equipment (Raith 150) with a minimum of 50nm patterning capability guaranteed and sub-10nm patterning has been demonstrated. UIC will set it up in a class 100 clean room bay devoted exclusively to lithography. The reasons for the selection of this particular machine will be elaborated on in section 3c Description of Research Instrumentation and Needs, and are the patterning performance, metrology capability, ease of use by a diverse population, purchase price, and annual maintenance cost. This machine will benefit 6 other members of the UIC consortium (Notre Dame, NWU, Purdue, UC, IIT, and NIU) as well as a large corporate base around UIC and a national laboratory. Basic science and engineering research are entering a new era where fundamental knowledge of nanoscale materials including magnetic, semiconductors, superconductors, electronic devices, bio-materials, fluids, and related interface phenomena will be essential for the design of advanced devices and engineered systems. A great deal of basic research and innovation will be needed as devices shrink below the natural length scales like the size of the minimum ferromagnetic domain (100- nm), the superconducting coherence length (~ 1-100 nm), or the characteristic size of bio molecules. The equipment will enable these programs and many more that can not be described here due to space limitations: UIC, Nanomagentism studies, and nanopatterning Note Dame, Nanoelectronics and high-speed circuits and devices lIT, Nanoelectronics NIU, Nanoelectronics Purdue, NEMS for the Direct DNA Characterization and Sequencing at the Molecular Level NWU, Two dimensional Photonoic band gap materials for biomolecular detection UC, Electronically controlled substrates for mechanistic studies of cell adhesion and migration. The additional applications mentioned are the 23 letters of support received to support e--beam lithography development at UIC that are in the supplementary documents section. These are letters of interest and intent from 10 companies, and from 9 non-profit institutions. The nano-lithography system will be a part of University of Illinois at Chicago s Micro Nanofabrication Applications Laboratory (MAL). The MAL has become a regional user facility for the Chicago area and in the last 3.5 years it has increased its user base 7 fold with over 50% of the users coming from outside of UIC. This rapid growth is due to the MAL offering open and inexpensive access, training, and guidance on a versatile set of fabrication and characterization equipment. The addition of e-beam lithography to the PIs facilities will allow them to greatly increase the participation of UIC and the surrounding community in the national nano initiative doc23005 none Harry With support from this Major Research Instrumentation grant, the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Alabama will purchase geophysical field equipment to facilitate research and teaching activities associated with our department s emphasis on Natural Resource Exploration, Conservation, and Remediation. Equipment to be purchased includes a ground penetrating radar system, potential field surveying equipment, a sediment coring system, and equipment to support high-resolution marine seismic surveys. Combined with existing land and marine seismic surveying systems, shallow coring facilities, and state-of-the-art Earth Imaging Computational Facility, the requested equipment will establish a robust facility for acquisition and analysis of geophysical data needed to support continued growth in a wide variety of research and teaching activities at UA. The equipment will create an environment conducive to interdisciplinary research that is ideally suited to the faculty in the department, and should greatly expand intra- and extramural collaborative research and teaching activities and efforts to provide service to state and local communities. Specific plans for use of the equipment include NSF, DOE, and privately funded research initiatives in coastal processes, groundwater flow and contaminant transport, fossil fuel resources, sedimentary basin analysis, and tectonics. Examples of such projects that will make use of the equipment in the immediate future include: (1) shallow geophysical imaging of the aquifer at the Macrodispersion Experiment (MADE) test site in Columbus Mississippi, with the goal of developing a stratigraphic context for hydrologic conductivity models used for contaminant transport modeling; (2) potential field surveying of the Black Warrior Basin and adjacent Appalachian and Ouachita Fold and Thrust belts, with the goal of determining the relationship between basin subsidence and orogenic tectonics; and (3) integrated geophysical and sedimentological studies of coastal systems with the goal of constraining the timing and physical processes of environment formation doc23006 none Geological drilling to recover core for scientific investigations was successfully conducted in the McMurdo Sound Region during 10 austral summers over a 28-year period since . The sea-ice has been used successfully as a drilling platform for seven drill-holes in this area. Experience gained during these projects forms the basis for developing new drilling technology to advance this approach. The ANDRILL (ANtarctic DRILLing) Project considers future drilling from sea-ice, ice shelf and land platforms within its McMurdo Sound Portfolio. This Portfolio proposes more than ten individual drilling targets that will require varied drilling equipment and strategies. Most of these targets have several common requirements, including drilling through hundreds of meters of water (up to m), and to recover continuous core starting from the sea-floor to depths of as much as m. Most of the targets call for a drill rig with a greater capacity than that used for the highly successful international Cape Roberts Project (CRP from - ), to which ANDRILL is the successor. Although the CRP rig, as well as various other commercial drilling rigs and equipment are available to ANDRILL, the unique requirements (drilling in deep-water and through an ice shelf more than 300 meters thick) require acquisition and development of a new, more powerful drilling system adapted to the Antarctic environment. The desired rig will handle the required length of drill rod and recover rock at an appropriate speed within the short windows of time allowed for Antarctic drilling. Development of this new system will enhance the drilling capability by providing faster core recovery and the ability to sample from previously inaccessible areas, thus expanding the scope of geological sampling into deeper water and through thick shelf ice. The study of sediment drillcores represents a key means to decipher Cenozoic climate and glacial history of Antarctica, a region where most rocks of this age are hidden beneath the ice sheet cover. ANDRILL is an international consortium with objectives to recover stratigraphic core records for use in interpreting Antarctica s past climatic, glacial and geological history over the past 50 million years and at varying scales of age resolution (0.1 to 100 thousand years). Understanding the past history of ice volume variation in Antarctica and associated physical changes in this region is critical to proper assessment of the global climate system and interaction of ice sheets with the ocean, atmosphere and biosphere. ANDRILL will proceed in three phases: geophysical and site surveys ( - ), drilling and core recovery ( - ), and climate and glacial modeling and integration of recovered data into global records of climate change ( - ). For the past 40 million years the Antarctic Ice Sheet has played a critical role in regulating global climate and sea level. Climatic warming is expected to be most pronounced in polar regions; Antarctic temperatures may rise by the end of the century to levels that have not been achieved for several million years. It is therefore vital that we understand the past response of the Antarctic ice sheet to climatic change in order to provide constraints on models that predict the future. ANDRILL currently plans 4 seasons of drilling under the McMurdo Sound Portfolio, in the regions of New Harbour, Windless Bight, Mackay Sea Valley and on the Southern McMurdo Ice Shelf. Through subsequent Portfolios, the life of ANDRILL and this new drilling system will likely continue towards the year . Support for programs of this scale must come from contributions of several nations. To date, the ANDRILL International Consortium includes as member nations the USA, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Italy and Germany, and it invites membership from any interested nation. Similar to the CRP, close interaction of a diverse team of research scientists, postdoctoral scientists, graduate and undergraduate students will provide excellent opportunities for education and on-site training. REU appointments will target under-represented groups in the geosciences. ANDRILL plans to expand the educational and outreach component beyond that of CRP by direct on-site and remote learning opportunities through member-nation initiatives and ANDRILL sponsored outreach and education. An on-ice team of scientists would prepare the core and provide initial description and characterization. Samples would be shipped to off-ice scientists to study and present results at the first of two science workshops to be hosted at member-nations home academic institutions on a rotating basis. Publication of initial results would be followed by presentation of results in major scientific journals and at professional meetings doc23007 none Research on the behavioral and energetic adaptations of Weddell seals (Leptonychotes weddellii ) to the cold dark Antarctic fast-ice environment have been facilitated by recent developments in animal-borne video systems. The PI has developed a small, analog video data recorder that can be attached to free-ranging marine mammals to observe their underwater behavior, track their three-dimensional movements, and simultaneously record data on their environment. The current effort will build on this success and advance the technology to the next level. The video data recorders will be redesigned include the following new features: digital video recording for up to 30 h, a Global Positioning System (GPS) for geolocation at the surface, extended data recording for up to 14 days, and a 50% reduction in size. Development includes specifications for an advanced digital video data recorder and operating software. The new video data recorder will be jointly designed and fabricated by Texas A&M University at Galveston and Pisces Design (San Diego, CA). The system will consist of two parts. The first will be a small aluminum housing for the microcontroller and sensors for pressure, swim speed, compass bearing, ambient temperature, ambient dissolved oxygen, ambient light level, tilt, pitch and roll. The use of a 31 gigabyte or larger mini-hard drive for storing compressed, digital video and audio will allow a considerable size reduction from previous designs while retaining full programmability and increasing the recording duration to ca. 30 h. The microcontroller will have at least 8 analog-to-digital converters at 12-bit resolution or greater. This housing will also contain lithium ion batteries that will power the micro-controller, compass, sensors and GPS. The second housing will contain the miniature video camera with near-infrared light emitting diodes (LED) as a light source. The camera will be a low light sensitive, black and white camera. This high-resolution camera is sensitive to visible and near-infrared wavelengths of light. The near-infrared LED light source is designed for imaging in total darkness without disturbing the animal s behavior (near-infrared light is invisible to marine mammals and fishes). This new generation of video data recorder will be used initially as part of current studies of the foraging behavior of free-ranging Weddell seals in Antarctica and will yield new insights into the activities of animals at sea. This includes the study of general foraging strategies, searching behavior, searching mechanics, modes of swimming, and foraging efficiency for different environmental conditions and prey type. The new instruments will advance the ability to conduct these investigations byproviding high quality digital video recordings, enhancing our ability to track the movements of animals at the surface (with GPS) and while submerged (with three- dimensional tracking), and reducing the size to decrease hydrodynamic drag. In addition to the study of marine mammals, the video data recorder has broad applicability to a variety of submersible platforms and human divers. The video data recorder will contribute to the development of new undersea technology and instrumentation that can be used to better understand and protect marine organisms and their habitats doc23008 none Developing a detailed knowledge of advanced solid state, biological, bioengineering, and environmental materials formation and behavior will facilitate a broad array of advanced technologies. Wide ranging advances can be engineered based on an enhanced understanding of natural and artificial materials and related processes. An essential component of advancing this understanding is in situ and ex situ observation down to the nanoscale, without significantly affecting the mechanisms and materials observed. The combination of field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM; 2nm resolution), with environmental control (up to 10 torr), temperature control (-186 oC to 1,000 oC), orientational imaging (e.g., phase and grain boundary characterization), and energy dispersive spectroscopy (elemental analysis and mapping) provide such an opportunity. The objective of this proposal is to acquire an environmental FESEM. This E-FESEM system will be used to advance our mechanistic understanding of a wide range of multidisciplinary materials and reaction processes through nanoscale observation and elemental biochemical and structural analysis. In particular, the E-FESEM will be utilized to support projects in the following research areas: (i) solid-state materials and processes (e.g., nanomaterials formation, nanolithography, chemical vapor deposition, and materials corrosion), (ii) biological materials and processes (e.g., cytoskeletal organization, fertilization, and photosynthesis), (iii) biomaterials and processes (e.g., tissue interface engineering, photosynthetic and photo-detection systems), and (iv) environmental materials and processes (e.g., atmospheric aerosols, mineral weathering and carbonation, including CO2 sequestration, and astrobiological systems). ASU is very well placed to provide full research, research training and educational access to this nanoscale laboratory. The instrument will be operated as a user facility within the Center for High Resolution Electron Microscopy, with access being provided to all qualified users. The proposed system will be fully integrated with the Goldwater Materials Visualization Facility (GMVF). The GMVF (http: gmsl.eas.asu.edu gmvf) will house 20 copies of the associated image, elemental and structural analysis software, enabling broad access to this advanced research tool, both in the GMVF and via the internet and vBNS networks. This broad, off-instrument, software access will allow the microscope to be dedicated to full-time image and data acquisition. Simultaneously, up to 20 researchers students will be able to perform image, elemental and structural data analysis. This capability will allow the diverse multidisciplinary research group using the system to integrate their research into the classroom, including on-line system observation. Students will be empowered to do hands-on, cutting-edge research image and data analysis in the classroom laboratory setting (e.g., in graduate laboratory courses, which already heavily use the GMVF and the integrated capabilities of the Goldwater Materials Science Laboratories). The acquisition of the controlled-temperature E-FESEM will substantially advance the multidisciplinary research and educational goals of a broad range of departments, centers, and programs at ASU. These units include the Departments of Bioengineering, Biology, Chemical & Materials Engineering, Chemistry & Biochemistry, Geological Sciences, Plant Biology, and Physics & Astronomy, as well as the Center for Solid State Science (CSSS) and the Astrobiology Program. This breadth of interest, together with the broad system access provided by the Visualization Facility, will bring the excitement of a wide range of multidisciplinary cutting edge research to university, and even pre-university, classrooms via the internet and high bandwidth vBNS networks doc23009 none John Texas A&M University-Kingsville (TAMUK) seeks NSF support for the acquisition of a gas chromotograph mass spectrometer (GC MS). The proposed GC MS will include peripherals to enhance and supplement the research abilities of the department. Research interests in the following areas would benefit immediately: Hydrocarbon characterization in the ambient urban atmosphere and the evaluation of voc n0x ratios in Corpus Christi. Characterization of sorption and interphase mass-transfer of complex mixtures and their constituents for use in risk and remedial applications. Research project to evaluate potential fruit and nut organic compound bio-accumulation near contaminated groundwater sites. Control of ozone precursors using an enhanced oxidation - biofiltration technology . Innovative biofilter designs for chlorinated compound and dioxin precursor air emission control. Surrogates for dioxins furans monitoring from combustion emissions doc23010 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project continues the development of new thermally activable reagents for bonding microbicidal polymers to inner surfaces of a variety of opaque tubing materials, initiated in Phase I under the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing (AM) topic, Surface Engineering subtopic (F). Materials have been developed with bulk physical properties needed for transport of aqueous mixtures; however, the development of biofilm on the wet surfaces is a continuing serious problem in the dental, pharmaceutical, food processing, and marine transport industries. Surface modification of waterlines could decrease the formation of biofilm while retaining the desired bulk properties of the tubing. Photochemistry has been proven commercially successful in enhancing the surface properties of medical devices with radical-based surface modification initiated by RF plasma or ultraviolet light. However, these energy sources are not effective for modifying the inner surfaces of opaque tubes such as waterlines used with dental units and plumbing in pharmaceutical plants. This project is designed to develop latent-reactive radical generators activatible with thermal energy which penetrates these opaque devices. This innovative approach to scheduled activation of radical generators will provide a method to modify inert surfaces which cannot be activated with external light or plasma sources. Microbial colonization and biofilm formation remain a major cost and threat to human health and product quality for dental and pharmaceutical industries, health care and public lodging, and marine vessel utilization. Successful development of microbicidal and antifouling coating technology for the luminal surface of opaque transport and storage vessels for aqueous liquid ingestible products, constitute an incremental market size of tens of millions of dollars, not subject to current commercial coating technology doc23011 none Stephen A. Zahorian R. Bowen Loftin Old Dominion University MRI MII: Acquisition of Collaborative High Performance Computing and Visualization Center This proposal from an MII institution, establishing a Beowulf cluster for High Performance Computing (HPC) and visualization, aims at enabling, supporting, and enhancing research and education in modeling and simulation. The main applications addressed use a variety of numerically intensive algorithms, which require many runs of a base computational algorithm in order to view the big picture. Technical areas which will benefit from the infrastructure include enterprise modeling and simulation and visualization, high performance computing in areas such as PDE solvers and bioinformatics, control systems modeling, automatic speech recognition, and physical electronics simulations. Current specific research activities at ODU include: 1. Modeling and Simulation Research, 2. A JSC Augmented Reality Trainer for International Space Station Space Lab Window Assembly, 3. Virtual Environments for Training, 4. VMASC Battle Lab (war gaming, human computer interfaces, visualization and distributed simulation) 5. Center for Computational Science, 6. Terascale Optimal PDE Simulations, 7. Bioinformatics, 8. Speech Communications Research, 9. Physical electronics simulations (Bio-electrics, Nanoelectronics, Lattice Boltzmann Simulations, and 10. Systems Research on Life Critical Control Systems. The computational cluster will have approximately 50 nodes on the main campus and a number of similar notes at the modeling and simulation center in Suffolk. Coupled via gigabit network and loosely coupled between the two subclusters, the machines within each local cluster will use public domain (e.g., Linux based) operating systems and scheduling such that computationally intensive investigations can be initiated from various locations. The equipment will support faculty and student training providing hands-on experience in advanced computing research doc23012 none A true triaxial testing apparatus will be developed to test 3-in per side, cubical specimens of unsaturated soil under simultaneous strain-, temperature- and suction-controlled conditions. The equipment will be a mixed-boundary type of device, with the specimen seated on top of an arrangement of nine 5-bar ceramic disks and between five flexible membranes on the remaining sides of the cube. The device will feature two independent pore-air and pore-water pressure control monitoring systems. Several specimens of silty sand will be subjected to a wide range of simple-to-complex stress paths for calibration and validation of the proposed device. Suction states in the specimens will be induced via the axis-translation technique. Successful completion of this development effort will considerably advance the existing knowledge and fundamental understanding of the stress-strain-strength behavior of unsaturated soils. The device will be the first of its kind to be ever implemented at any academic setup in the US, and will constitute a major state-of-the-art instrumentation for research and integrated research education activities at UTA in the geomechanics discipline. Development of this equipment is also aimed at promoting partnerships between academic researchers and private instrument developers interested in the advancement of the unsaturated soil mechanics discipline doc23013 none The early urban settlements in the Near East provide an ideal laboratory for the study of long-term human-environment interactions because they offer an enormous array of archaeological and textual data that can be incorporated into an overall social, economic, and environmental analytical framework stretching over several millennia. This research project will model and attempt to explain trajectories of development and demise of Bronze Age settlement systems for both the rain-fed and the irrigated zones of modern-day Syria and Iraq. The project goals are to develop a holistic, dynamic, object-based model that can help determine the conditions under which societies became more or less urban or even collapsed. The investigators will examine why third and fourth millennium B.C. cities in the irrigated zone of southern Mesopotamia grew to a greater size and complexity than those in the rain-fed north. Traditional models often view cities as being founded by an over-arching authority. Although the model will test such a top-down perspective, the project will emphasize settlement system development from the ground up. Concepts of complex adaptive systems will be used to test the hypothesis that systems of early cities and their regions co-evolved in an intimate relationship with their environment, primarily by means of aggregation through time of smaller fundamental units (households). Agent-based modeling will allow a wide range of choices and trajectories to contribute to the outcome of the modeling exercise. Simulation will employ advanced object-based frameworks (DIAS and FACET) designed by the Decision and Information Sciences Division of Argonne National Laboratory. The DIAS framework allows a range of simulation models and other applications to work together to address a complex modeling problem. It will incorporate climate (GCM), weather (MM5), hydrological and agricultural (EPIC SWAT), and demographic models plus agent-based models of social behavior built using the FACET framework. Input data will be derived from the large corpus of landscape data, epigraphic data, and regional-scale environmental studies housed within the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and elsewhere. The simulated settlement system will be validated against the archaeological landscape as it has been recorded by field surveys and satellite remote sensing. By the end of the project, investigators expect to have developed a general modeling framework with an associated user interface that will enable interactions between humans and the environment to be rigorously tested over periods as long as several millennia. The expected result of this work, improved understanding how humans interact with dynamic ecological and climatic mechanisms, is fundamental to ecological management and is applicable very broadly. In addition, studies of the interplay of coupled human and natural systems as a cause of collapse of past societies are also of fundamental importance. Cities and their hinterlands are among the most complex coupled natural and human systems, and urban systems will continue to play an increasingly important role in shaping the future of the planet. This project will provide new insights into the complex interactions between people and their environment, and it will contribute to the study of urbanization past and present. The proposed modeling framework also has potential utility as an educational tool, because it will enable both academic and general users to interact with complex environmental, cultural, and socio-economic databases in order to simulate the growth of settlements and cities and to analyze long term concepts of sustainability. This project is supported by an award resulting from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc23014 none NSF Award - Mathematical Sciences: VIGRE Program Meeting Straley The Mathematical Association of America (MAA), the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the American Statistical Association (ASA), and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), will host a meeting to provide information about the program in Vertical Integration of Research and Education (VIGRE) of the NSF Division of Mathematical Sciences. Attendees will be representative faculty members from U.S. institutions with Ph.D.-granting departments of mathematical sciences. This award supports attendance of these representatives at the meeting. Since the VIGRE program (now in its third year) has awarded approximately thirty grants, valuable experience with the various core elements of the VIGRE solicitation should now be shared with the mathematical sciences communities. This conference of interested parties will emphasize the experiences and exemplary practices of VIGRE projects nationwide. The format of the meeting allows for discussions of the impact that the VIGRE program has had on the mathematical sciences both locally and globally. The meeting, held in the Washington, DC area on 3-4 May , includes speakers from institutions that employ mathematical scientists, including a variety of academic institutions, business, industry, and government agencies. It is anticipated that between 125 and 150 interested mathematical scientists will attend this meeting doc23015 none Mussa-Ivaldi The goal of this project is to design and develop a specialized robot manipulator with a state-of-the-art augmented-reality display. This development project is a collaboration of world-leaders in engineering, robotics, virtual-reality, motor system neuroscience, and rehabilitation; affiliated with the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC), Northwestern University, the University of Illinois in Chicago and Barrett Technology Inc, an advanced robotics company based in Cambridge, MA. This system will be a natural extension of technologies that are currently employed at RIC s Robotics Lab doc23016 none McConnell Faculty, scientists, and students of the Desert Research Institute (DRI) routinely need to quantify trace elements and isotopes in their research in atmospheric, hydrologic, earth, ecosystem, and anthropological sciences. DRI s quadrapole inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (ICP-MS) is widely used for such measurements, but the detection limits of this instrument are inadequate for many projects. Therefore, the Principal Investigators have requested funding for two new ICP instruments: a Finnigan MAT Element2 high-resolution, double focusing ICP-MS and a Varian Vista-Pro axially viewed inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometer (ICP-OES) under the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program. Additional funds are requested for instrument development to incorporate the two ICP instruments into DRI s recently developed method for continuous trace element and isotope analyses in ice cores. Continual improvement of high-resolution capabilities specifically was identified by the NSF-sponsored U.S. Ice Core Working Group as a priority requirement for the continuation of U.S. ice core research. Given the high cost of collecting and storing ice cores and their potential to provide highly detailed information on past atmospheric chemistry, atmospheric and oceanic circulation, and anthropogenic pollution across a wide range of temporal and spatial scales, it is clear that the best possible analytical procedures and instrumentation for ice core analyses are warranted. DRI faculty has recently developed a novel, efficient method using ICP-MS to make continuous, high-resolution and exactly co-registered measurements of trace elements and chemical species on ice cores. Measurements of 15 chemical species and elements on a ~135 meter (M) core from Summit, Greenland, and pilot data developed using cores from Siple Dome, Antarctica, demonstrate the potential of this new approach as well as the limitations of DRI s quadrapole ICP-MS. In ice cores, the concentrations of some important elements and isotopes are below the detection limits of the quadrapole ICP-MS. This problem also hinders other environmental science applications where elemental and isotope data are fundamental to answering critical questions. While a major objective of this proposal is to significantly advance the level and scope of U.S. ice core research, the availability of a state-of-the-art ICP-MS and ICP-OES will improve and expand research capabilities for DRI and University and Community College System of Nevada (UCCSN) faculty working in other fields (e.g., impact of pollution aerosols on precipitation, groundwater fingerprinting, determination of sources of colloidal material in surface waters, trace element analysis in archeology). In particular, as the only ICP-MS in Nevada capable of dedicated, high-resolution elemental and isotopic analyses, the acquisition of the Element2 ICP-MS will attract new faculty to DRI and the UCCSN system (with a goal of increasing diversity) as well as improve and expand opportunities for graduate and undergraduate student training throughout the state doc23017 none Auerbach, Michael A grant has been awarded to Drs. Michael Auerbach, Paul Verburg, John Arnone, Eric McDonald, and Christian Fritsen at the University of Nevada Desert Research Institute (DRI), for the acquisition of three pieces of analytical equipment to be employed in current and future studies of nutrient cycling in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. The equipment includes a flow injection ion analysis system, a dissolved organic nitrogen analyzer, and a laser diffraction particle size analyzer. Specific goals that will be accomplished through the proposed equipment acquisition include the following: (1) enhanced analytical capabilities to benefit ongoing research; (2) pursuit of new research avenues in the field of physical and chemical characterization of dissolved organic and particulate nutrients in aquatic ecosystems; (3) integration of terrestrial, hydrologic, and air research within the university system of Nevada to address environmental research questions; and (4) establishment of a training facility for undergraduate and graduate students. Faculty from DRI are engaged in a wide array of studies focused on nutrient cycling in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Currently funded research includes assessment of nutrient loadings in rivers and streams, effects of management on nutrient cycling in terrestrial ecosystems, nutrient cycling in extreme environments, and interactions between climate and terrestrial ecosystems. These studies are carried out in a variety of ecosystems including high elevation semi-arid watersheds, deserts of the southwestern U.S., tallgrass prairie, and the Antarctic. These diverse studies share a common need to assess nutrient composition and particle size distribution of soils, particulate, and suspended nutrients in lakes and streams. Currently available equipment at DRI does not allow for routine analyses of inorganic and organic nutrients that are needed to satisfy the increasing demand for these data. In addition, the methods in use for particle size analysis do not provide the detailed information needed for many ongoing and new studies. Graduate student research training is an important part of the research enterprise at DRI. Graduate students will be trained in operating the equipment as part of their curriculum. A laboratory technician will be assigned to operate and maintain the equipment and will be responsible for training graduate students in conjunction with the principal investigators. The new equipment will greatly enhance DRI s analytical capabilities in soils and water research by creating an infrastructure that will support a series of fundamental studies. The requested equipment also has applicability to other areas of inquiry currently ongoing at DRI including research on dust emissions in deserts and transport of radionuclides in soils. Further, this new equipment will allow DRI to contribute to solving critical state and national environmental problems (e.g., increasing demands for drinking water, protection of endangered fish species doc23018 none Lindline The Natural Resources Management Department at New Mexico Highlands University (NMHU) will use this Major Research Instrumentation award to acquire a powder x-ray diffractometer and direct reading spectroscope for earth materials research. The new instruments will serve the following functions: (1) provide analytical capabilities for rock, mineral, sediment, and soil research; (2) facilitate teaching and applying key concepts in geology, environmental science, and natural resources management courses; and (3) support student training in modern analytical methods. The powder x-ray diffractometer will permit the identification of different crystalline phases, compositional determinations of solid solution minerals, and the calculation of mineral structures. The spectroscope will provide bulk chemical compositional data for rock and mineral samples. This instrument acquisition addresses the need for modern analytical equipment to support NMHU s mission of providing an excellent, up-to-date, undergraduate education within the sciences. NMHU is a historically Hispanic institution committed to programs that focus on its multiethnic student body (76% minority students), especially the Hispanic and Native American cultures that are distinctive of New Mexico. This equipment will facilitate student-involved faculty research in a number of regional projects of interest to New Mexico students including the Cenozoic volcanic history of northeastern New Mexico, the sedimentary record of local lakes, and the effects of fires on forest soils and native vegetation. Given the 76% minority student population served at NMHU and the approximately 40 earth science majors, the instrumentation will positively impact the education and training of under-represented groups doc23019 none Acquisition of a Digital Imaging System to Support Research and Research Training in Applications of Molecular Biology A grant has been awarded to Dr. Kirk Cammarata and colleagues at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi (TAMU-CC) to acquire a digital imaging system for sensitive detection of multicolor fluorescence, radioactivity and chemiluminescence data generated by a variety of DNA- and protein-based research techniques. The imaging package includes blue, green and red fluorescence excitation capabilities, bandpass emission filters, 10 um-resolution optics and microarray slide holder, storage phosphor cassettes and phosphor image eraser, and data analysis software. The instrumentation will support molecular biological studies on the health of the Gulf of Mexico coastal environment. The research will explore the mechanisms by which aquatic organisms respond to environmental contaminants such as endocrine disruptors and toxic heavy metals, and how DNA- and protein-based molecular techniques can be used to monitor environmental impacts. The Gulf coast hosts a diversity of uses including fisheries, wildlife, industry and recreation. But it is also a sensitive collection point for environmental contaminants originating from approximately two-thirds of the continental United States. Knowledge of how aquatic organisms respond to pollutants, in conjunction with molecular assay methods to measure these responses, will result in a cause and effect understanding that may support risk-based environmental assessment and regulation. The research facilitated by the imaging system will support the empowerment of regulatory agencies to make rational, fact-based decisions regarding environmental impacts of pollution. Moreover, the mission of the College of Science and Technology at TAMU-CC is, in part, to increase minority participation in the sciences. The research training and teaching needs of Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) in South Texas will be enhanced because the instrumentation will enable research projects not previously possible in the region doc23020 none A suite of new balloon-borne aerosol instruments capable of making size distribution measurements spanning the range from 0.03 - 30 micrometers in radius will be developed. This capability will require the development of two new instruments, and improvements to a third. The present capability consists of instruments to measure condensation nuclei and optically detectable aerosols from the surface to 30 km. These instruments have been developed at the University of Wyoming, and have a long history of successful measurements in the mid latitudes and polar regions. The expanded measurements will include one new instrument with size resolution for small particles, and a second new instrument with sensitivity to particles at the large end of the spectrum. This work will improve present capability to perform balloon-borne measurements of stratospheric aerosol concentrations during volcanically quiescent, or background, periods, to capture the effects of major volcanic eruptions, and to continue investigations into the characteristics of polar stratospheric clouds. Aerosol surfaces play a fundamental role in determining stratospheric ozone through their influence on the nitrogen cycle. Extending present measurement capability to lower sizes will provide more accurate estimates of stratospheric aerosol surface area during periods of low aerosol loading. Under those conditions, the particles are primarily below the size detection capabilities of present balloon-borne instruments and well below the sensitivity of satellite instruments. The new capability will help resolve currently existing discrepancies between in situ and satellite measurements, provide new information on the source and evolution of both background stratospheric aerosol and free tropospheric aerosol, and the sizes of cloud condensation nuclei. The expanded size coverage at the large, low concentration, end of the aerosol spectrum will be directly applicable to answer questions related to the removal of nitrogen oxides from the polar stratosphere. This process of denitrification plays a critical role in determining the longevity of the ozone loss which occurs in the winter polar regions. The role of large particles at low concentrations in denitrification was discovered in in the Arctic and there are only a few such measurements. It is not known how prevalent this process is, how large the particles can become, or what their size distributions are doc23021 none Agrarian transformations represent the most pervasive alteration of the Earth s terrestrial environment during the past 10,000 years. Many current conceptualizations of these transformations assume a simple linear model, however, positing that change is driven by present-day economic, demographic, and technological conditions. This interdisciplinary research project will trace the effects of the introduction, spread, and abandonment of agriculture at six sites in the U.S., with comparisons also made with comparable sites in Mexico and France. The U.S. sites are members of the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network. This project incorporates an integrated, long-term cycle that includes land-use change affecting landscapes, altered landscapes affecting ecological processes, and both influencing the ways in which humans monitor and respond to their surroundings, which engender further cycles of change. The central objective of this research is to identify and quantify the ways in which these integrated cycles differ across cultures, across biogeographic regions, and across time. A suite of quantitative and narrative analyses will be used to identify the prime determinants of long-term dynamics, present-day patterns, and reservoirs of ecological and social resilience in these systems. Analytical approaches will include structural-equation modeling, analysis of spatial and causal effects, and cross-site comparisons of case studies. As a practical test of the project s results, approaches and insights that includes an emphasis on eco-regional planning and scenario building will be examined in the context of conservation planning at The Nature Conservancy (TNC). This project will contribute to both science and society in many ways. It will demonstrate the importance of social science information and approaches in ecosystem investigations, expanding the results of the LTER network and breaching the divide between social and natural science. The data protocols developed will also benefit other communities of social and natural scientists through the involvement of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), a major national repository of social science data. This project will help to develop general theories on how socio-ecological legacies, as well as lags in the recognition of and response to change, vary across space and time. Through detailed case histories and quantitative analyses, the project expects to provide convincing evidence that humans act not only to disturb ecosystems but also monitor ecosystem values and respond to maintain stability and minimize crises. Project results will provide information of direct use to policy makers, TNC, and land managers by using an approach that explicitly relates socio-ecological processes to varying levels of political organization. The cross-scale data collection and analyses are expected to demonstrate that some patterns of human-ecological interactions are surprisingly long term, vary across space and time, and are non-linear. The project s most significant long-term contribution may prove to be through education; as this project will train new interdisciplinary scientists at all levels of the educational spectrum, inform public officials, and contribute to more effective land-management practices. This project is an award resulting from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc23022 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Computational Science Research Center at San Diego State University will acquire a computer system consisting of an Intel Linux cluster and 4 workstations. This equipment will enhance research in the following areas: a) calculation of structural and dynamical properties of reactive chemical intermediates with low-barrier mechanisms for chemical transformation; b) development of numerical integration techniques for application to oceanic flow patterns around static objects; c) modeling of protein-protein docking as a component in iterative protein design techniques; d) development and testing of mathematical models of flame dynamics; e) simulation of collisions between different planets and between planets and their suns; f) calculation of dynamical properties in quantum fluids; and g) three-dimensional mapping of mitochondrial structures and associated statistical analysis. A cluster of fast, modern computer workstations is vital to serving the computing needs of active research departments. Such a computer network also serves as a development environment for new theoretical codes and algorithms, provides state-of-the-art graphics and visualization facilities, and supports research in state-of-the-art applications of parallel processing. These studies will have a significant impact in a wide number of areas, including biochemistry, ocean sciences, drug development, combustion chemistry, astronomy, and materials sciences doc23023 none PROJECT SUMMARY HEMISPHERE: Developing a National High School Magnetometer Array. We propose to offer schools across the country the opportunity to measure and experiment with Earth s natural environment, to contribute data to the nation s space weather program, and to have effective teaching tools to educate young scientists about the space environment. We have developed a relatively inexpensive, robust, sensitive magnetometer in kit form that can be purchased and distributed to schools, assembled by students, then set up and used to take research-quality data. Teachers will be trained in their operation and how to use them in classroom activities that demonstrate space-weather. The data will be transmitted through a Web-based database, so that students can compare their local readings with those of students at other sites around the continent and can be used by university and other researchers to study geomagnetic Ultra-Low Frequency (ULF) waves. Low- to mid- latitude magnetic pulsations provide important information about the solar wind-magnetosphere interaction and the dynamic coupling of the magnetosphere and ionosphere. The magnetic variations observable at low to mid latitudes include: Pc 3-4 pulsations (periods of 10-45 s), which are thought to have their source in the upstream bow shock and or magnetosheath; and Pi 2 bursts (damped pulsations with 40-150-s periods) which are associated with substorm expansion onsets. This proposal seeks funding to train Master High School science teachers in the use of induction coil magnetometers, provide the basic space science content needed for the understanding of magnetic pulsation data in space physics research, and develop mentoring relationships between space physicists and local high school science teachers and their students. These relationships will allow the magnetometer data to be fully utilized both scientifically as well as educationally. Specifically we plan to develop the documentation for the magnetometer, training material for testing the instrument, and educational material for using the instrument in the classroom. This material will be the basis for a one-week teacher workshop at UCLA bringing together six geographically diverse science teachers that have already gone through a space weather workshop at NOAA Space Environment Center in order to train them as Master Teachers in the use and implementation of the magnetometer. This project directly impacts pre-college education by providing High Schools with real-life space physics instrumentation and ULF data for analysis doc23024 none This Major Research Instrumentation RUI award is for the development and construction of an improved Nuclear Reaction Analysis (NRA) detection system based upon the Alabama A&M coincidence scheme, but with one to two orders of magnitude improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio. Previous results indicate that by modifying the detector geometry and materials, a larger, more efficient detector is possible without increasing the background signal. By using sample cooling and beam rastering, this larger detector will be able to routinely profile hydrogen in semiconductors with a sensitivity of one part-per-million and a surface depth resolution of five nanometers while remaining compatible with existing IBA facility requirements. The development of this detector would likely increase the use of NRA in the materials characterization community since it could be easily added to any existing IBA facility with minimal cost. This would allow companies and universities to perform hydrogen profiling by NRA and to use NRA for calibrating other IBA techniques including SIMS. Finally, the detector s ability to dramatically reduce all background sources including competing nuclear reactions without the reduction in efficiency of a germanium detector should open up new opportunities for profiling other light elements including nitrogen, boron, and carbon with greatly improved sensitivities. Light trace elements are known to have dramatic effects on the electrical, chemical and mechanical properties of many types of materials in even minute quantities. NRA is a powerful ion beam technique for quantitatively profiling light impurities in materials with excellent depth resolution. NRA has previously been used to profile a wide range of trace elements including H, B, C, N, and F in problems ranging from hydrogen embrittlement of metals to the dating of arrowheads. Potentially important applications of NRA include passivation studies of SiO2 SiC and SiO2 Si interfaces using hydrogen or nitrogen and the profiling of carbon and boron in metals to test predictions of computer simulations. Presently, few electronic companies or universities have NRA capability due to the technical difficulties inherent in obtaining high sensitivity doc23025 none This is a Major Research Instrumentation award to support the development of an instrument for measuring the absorption of aerosol particles at different wavelengths in the solar spectrum. Aerosols absorb and scatter solar radiation and thus influence regional and global climate. Though accurate data on aerosol absorption spectra are lacking, the available evidence indicates that aerosols from different sources have markedly different spectra. For example, Saharan dust appears to absorb strongly in the ultraviolet but weakly in the visible part of the spectrum. Diesel soot, on the other hand, absorbs more uniformly over the spectrum. To now, no instrument has been available to measure the in-situ absorption of aerosols at more than two wavelengths, though what is needed for radiative transfer calculations is a detailed representation of the absorption spectrum. Accordingly, a multi-wavelength unit will be built, based on the resonant photoacoustic principle, to measure the absorption at six wavelengths spanning the spectrum from the ultraviolet to the infrared. Calibration is established by measuring the (known) absorption of the 760-nm oxygen A-band. The instrument will be employed for measurements of the spectral absorption of different kinds of natural and anthropogenic aerosols. This information is essential for understanding the consequences of the human use of combustion on climate doc23026 none This SBIR Phase II project will develop a through material imaging system that will locate human targets through opaque media. The technology will also provide wide area subsurface sensing for ground probing applications. The phase I results demonstrated that the system has the capability of detecting human targets on the opposite of building walls and through walls of granite over 10m thick. The thrust of the phase II research lies in software development to classify targets in the downrange profile, track targets, and count targets; and hardware development to eliminate the need for an external off the shelf receiver. The latter effort will also require software development to process data for the classification algorithms. The unique innovation of this project is that it can conduct full area investigations and locate stationary targets from a fixed location. There are two primary applications for this technology, situational awareness and subsurface investigation. The former, which is the most attractive for early market entry, comprises homeland security, police fire search and rescue, and military actions where the location of human subjects on the opposite side of walls, vegetation, snow, fire, or other opaque media is sought. The latter includes geophysical exploration, ore body investigation, utility detection and location, road-bed and bridge subsurface scans for cracks and voids, and unattended ground sensing from a fixed point to assess subsurface changes that can be used to predict earth or structural failure doc23027 none Biological physics is rapidly emerging as a new major new frontier for science in the 21st century. This field involves a cross-fertilization of ideas and methods from biology and biochemistry on the one hand and the physics of comple systems on the other. Its goals are to both develop the conceptual underpinnings of a new and more quantitative biology as well as to expand our notions of complex matter physics by learning from evolution. The center for Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP), located at UC San Diego and with the participation of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the Scripps Research Institute and the Salk Institute of Biological Studies, will act as a focal point for this emerging discipline. The CTBP will utilize the broad expertise of this La Jolla-based community to pioneer new approaches to a whole variety of critical issues, including the evolution and functioning of genetic regulatory networks, the specificity of protein-protein interactions, the dynamic control of cell motility and the synaptic mechanisms underlying learning. A complementary set of activities focused on developing state-of-the-art computational methods in support of biological physics is being funded by an ITR grant. Training at multiple levels, from undergraduate up to senior investigator, will be integrated directly into the CTBP s research efforts; this is particularly necessary for biological physics, as it is inherently cross-disciplinary and inherently requires close and continual contact between theory and experiment. Our success will be measured both by the specific research accomplishments of our members and visitors and by the overall effect will have in fostering the nationwide growth and coherence of this immensely exciting field of physics research. The CTBP is jointly funded by the Division of Physics in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate and the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences in the Directorate for Biological Sciences doc23028 none Montana Tech will acquire a new scanning electron microscope (SEM) and an attached energy-dispersive x-ray microanalysis (EDX) system. The system consists of a variable pressure SEM (LEO VP) and a digital x-ray detector with a PGT-SPIRIT EDX system. Both units operate from PCs running Windows . The SEM is essentially automatic, facilitating usage by inexperienced operators. The EDX system also will be far easier to use. The SEM will have excellent imaging performance at low accelerating voltage and at chamber pressures that permit observation of wet specimens. Hence the biosciences faculty, graduate and undergraduate students will have a system that will meet almost any need for SEM viewing of specimens. In consequence a significant female faculty and student body will have SEM EDX access not presently possible. Besides the metallurgy materials department other departments such as geology, environmental engineering, chemistry and health, safety and industrial hygiene will similarly benefit. Although a new SEM EDX facility will open doors for undergraduate training, the major role of the system will be to facilitate the ongoing research of faculty and graduate students. Much faculty and graduate student research is environmentally oriented since Butte is the location of the country s largest Superfund site. In other departments faculty researchers and their graduate students have similarly found it necessary to use the MSU SEM EDX facility. Undergraduate students in many departments are required to propose and carry out a senior thesis research project and a new SEM EDX facility will attract interested undergraduates from all over campus. The new SEM EDX system will be connected to the campus computer network permitting remote diagnostic troubleshooting when needed. Network connection will also allow for remote on-campus access to the SEM EDX. When this is successfully established it will permit undergraduate classes to experience relatively directly the applications of SEM EDX to their field. It will then be extended to the Distance Learning program, which deals with 36 tribal colleges thereby allowing access to Native Americans. In the future the SEM EDX facility would become part of the infrastructure needed for the college to play an active role in the Montana NSF-EPSCOR program, two target areas of which are nanotechnology and self-replicating biological structures doc23029 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Alexander Fernald and co-principal investigators Dr. Laurie Abbott, Dr. April Ulery, and Dr. Clint Loest at New Mexico State University to acquire major research instrumentation to analyze water, soils, and biomass for environmental research, monitoring and assessment. The awarded funds will enable purchase of four research instruments: 1) a Flow Injection Analysis System with ion chromatograph for analysis of major cations and anions in water, soils, and biomass; 2)a Nitrogen Carbon Analyzer for determination of N and C in soils and biomass; 3)a Laser Diffraction Particle Analyzer for measuring particle size distribution of suspended sediment and soils; and 4) an X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrum Analyzer for analysis of metals in liquids, soils, and biosolids. The instrumentation will support research that has the goal of providing information to: 1) reduce negative environmental effects of land use practices, and 2) enhance quality of natural resources in New Mexico and the arid Southwest. Land use impacts on water, soil and biomass threaten sustainable economic use and ecological health of rangeland, forest, agriculture, and wildlife in New Mexico. Water quality is a growing concern with increasing competition for limited water supplies and decreasing availability of high quality irrigation and drinking water. Rapidly growing dairies in New Mexico generate large amounts of animal waste, and pollution from confined animal production threatens water and soil resources. Metal contamination is a problem in areas of New Mexico with naturally high mineral occurrence and in areas impacted by mining, military, and agricultural activities. As a minority-serving land grant institution, the mission of New Mexico State University is to conduct meaningful research, to educate and train scientists, and to extend information to the citizens of the state. The state-of-the-art instrumentation will provide a leap forward in the ability of university investigators to conduct needed environmental research and fulfill the mission to educate. The instrumentation will initially support the research activities of four investigators, faculty in three departments, and federal researchers. It will be used to train graduate and undergraduate students in the use of the instruments as part of their research. Obtaining this equipment will increase NMSU competitiveness for future grant proposals. The equipment will support research to provide critical information that will allow agencies, communities, and individuals to participate in meaningful and sustainable programs that reduce negative environmental effects of land use practices and that enhance the quality of water, soil and biomass resources doc23030 none This project solicits support to acquire a state-of-the-art fluorine laser to be used in laboratory studies of atmospheric processes. SRI International will host this laser system in a modern laser laboratory that will be made available to the atmospheric research community as a shared facility. With this system, large quantities of oxygen atoms can be generated under conditions with a low concentration of residual oxygen molecules. These conditions mimic those in the upper atmosphere of the Earth and will permit the study of collisional processes that would be difficult or impossible to study with other methods. This laser will make possible a series of laboratory studies addressing important unresolved problems in the fields of aeronomy and atmospheric science doc23031 none A primary issue in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is the ecology of the northern elk herd winter range (NEWR), where elk and wolves cross the Yellowstone National Park boundary into areas managed as natural and altered systems. Land management inside the park and development of the winter range outside park boundaries suggests that wildlife management plays out on a landscape mosaic dominated by human decisions, values, and economic considerations. The main objectives of this research project are to gain a better understanding of the relationships between ecosystem dynamics and human decision-making and to use this understanding to construct an ecosystem model that facilitates exploration of plausible future scenarios in a manner that captures the uncertainty associated with complex systems. An investigative team drawn from multiple disciplines and from five different states will develop spatially explicit elk, wolf, and vegetation submodels and will integrate these models to assess the impacts of climate variability, land-use decisions, and economic valuation on the environment under changing conditions. The elk submodel will extend state-of-the-science energetics-based models to include information on changing landscapes and climate snow conditions that affect winter feeding habits. The investigators will develop predator components that mimic the impacts of the recent wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone. The snow climate submodel will be developed to produce snow depth and snow condition maps based on local and large-scale climate parameters and field measurements. Vegetation submodels will focus on willows and aspen, plants that often are browsed heavily by elk. The investigators will address the impacts of changing groundwater resources on these species to better understand their resilience to the combined impacts of elk browse and groundwater stress. Because elk, vegetation, and other factors have become measures by which humans place values on the landscape that influence decisions, stakeholder groups will be studied and interviewed to assure that the resulting models have relevance in the socio-political context of the NEWR. This is particularly important, because stakeholders have a long history of conflict regarding land-use decisions. This project will develop a land-use history, define key stakeholder-identified variables, and use probability-based land-use models. Knowledge derived from stakeholder studies will be integrated into the natural system models as coefficients of habitat availability and quality; as parameters on barriers, sources and sinks; as qualitative and categorical constraints on modeled variables and relationships; and as feedback loops between the human and natural system. The natural and human system submodels will be combined within the context of a single multi-agent system that can model complex adaptive systems. The multi-agent system-based model will be used to simulate alternative states that result from assumptions about decisions, natural conditions, and ecosystem processes. The results will demonstrate the complex nature of a highly integrated ecosystem and the role that climate, human decisions, and natural variability play in producing ecosystem change and or stability. This research will merge models of ecosystems and human decision-making. A primary focus is to build robust ecosystem models that can be integrated with a human system model based on land use decisions and valuation of ecosystem services. By interacting with NEWR stakeholders and by developing key linkages within natural and human systems, this project will evaluate existing and potential land-use strategies and alternative policy options. The models will demonstrate the complex interactions that exist within this changing landscape by simulating climate factors, policy decisions, and natural change in the vegetation. Models will be extended to simulate potential future conditions based on sound scientific principles, past trends in human decision making, and possible future human decisions. Scenarios may be used to help build consensus and diminish conflict in the NEWR before decisions are made. The NEWR is a critical component of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and understanding the complexity associated with human and natural system dynamics will help sustain the area for future generations. This project will serve as a model for protected areas worldwide that are undergoing similar boundary conflicts. This project is supported by an award resulting from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc23032 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop computational fluid dynamic (CFD) modeling technology that uses state-of-the-art techniques for modeling finite rate chemistry in chemically reacting turbulent flows with recently developed numerical methods for solving systems of non-linear equations. In Phase I an improved CFD solver was developed that used reduced chemical kinetic mechanisms to model finite rate chemistry effect and solved the resulting stiff system of partial differential equations with a matrix-free Newton-Krylov method. In Phase II two Newton-Krylov based CFD tools will be developed, one to model combustion from turbulent, diffusion flames and the second to model turbulent, pre-mixed flames. The commercial potential for this work is the electric power industry, designers and builders of commercial chemical plants, and designers of chemical process heaters and other industrial furnace applications doc23033 none James L .Caldwell Jeffrey Van Baalen Gamboa Ruben MRI: Acquisition of a Network of Workstations Serving as a Platform for Distributed Automated Reasoning This proposal from an EPCoR state, adapting current parallel and distributed theorem proving technology to a setting in which different computation servers become available in an unpredictable fashion, aims at building a network of workstations that can be used as a computational server for research. A cluster of high-performance workstations running Linux and the required networking infrastructure will be acquired. The effort will make available a large proportion of the computational facilities of the department for theorem proving efforts. In this setting, the search for the proof of a single theorem will be spread between all the idle workstations participating in the distributed proof effort. In extending model checking to infinite state spaces, the research involves exploring two approaches for protocol verification: Development of, 1. On-the-fly model checker based on a 3-values logic and, 2. Theorem proving methods that can reduce a protocol s state space to a finite size doc23034 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Edward Boyer at Prescott College to acquire equipment and instruments necessary to support research in the areas of marine ecology, marine conservation and management, and community outreach at the Kino Bay Center for Cultural and Ecological Studies (the Prescott College field station on the Gulf of California). The primary instruments to be purchased fall into three categories. First is a GPS base station, associated hand held units, computers, software, and set up service. This instrumentation will allow us to time base correct GPS data and serve as the Base Station for this region of the Gulf of California which has no such base station within a 500km radius. The work done will support mapping of islands, and coasts, desert vegetation, and tracking of marine mammals. The second set of instruments is to be utilized in our Fin Whale photo identification project in the Midriff Island region of the Gulf. These instruments include boat motors, cameras, plankton and physical oceanographic sampling devices, binoculars, and spotting scopes. The third set of instruments include microscopes, cabinets, herbarium supplies, and a small inflatable boat to support ongoing research on commercial crab growth and reproduction in nearby mangrove estuaries. All of these research projects are in cooperation with Mexican Federal (Instituto Nacional de Ecologia), and local agencies and NGO s Currently, research at the Center has two major foci, 1) Isla Alcatraz - island inventory, conservation, and community based management plan development and 2) Fin Whale (Balaenoptera physalus) photo identification. The island is small (about one half square km.), volcanic island, about 1.4 kilometer from the town of Bahia de Kino. A primary focus of this research is on nesting cormorants, egrets and herons on the island. A biological inventory and detailed mapping of the island are also part of the project. The majority of the users of our field station are undergraduate students and a small number of graduate students who overlap with and often assist visiting researchers thereby gaining invaluable field research training. An important component of our research activities is the dissemination of information via environmental education projects in the local community, by way of presentations at conferences, and through our web pages on the Prescott College website doc23035 none The primary aim of this proposal is to establish a semiconductor technology laboratory in the department of physics for students and faculty. We anticipate the participation of at least 5 faculty members as researchers, advisors and mentors for about 10 physics students per year. Our aim is to serve not only professional track students who will continue on to graduate school, but to provide training opportunities for those majors who will leave school with a terminal bachelor s degree to directly seek career employment. We propose here to obtain the equipment necessary to engage in silicon wafer fabrication and experiments. We propose to obtain a spin coater, argon laser, a sputter coating device, optics table, and optical accessories, ultraviolet spectrograph, oscilloscopes, photoresist polymers, and computer interfaces and software. A variety of appropriate undergraduate research projects spanning solar cell research to thin film optical elements will be available in our semiconductor technology lab. Hands on experience in silicon wafer technologies such as photoresist coating and exposure development techniques, sputtering methods, and vacuum deposition technologies will be learned as a matter of course. We believe that experience in fabrication techniques for wafers will also be invaluable to those physics students who do not continue to graduate studies, but will require familiarity with these techniques in industrial careers. We anticipate that our semiconductor technology lab will be versatile enough for some of our advanced students to develop research projects in areas as diverse as UV and soft X-ray optics, and perhaps in MEMS or nano-type devices. We also anticipate collaborations with other departments, such as electrical engineering and chemistry, providing students and faculty increased research opportunities This proposal outlines the benefits of establishing a semiconductor technology lab at Utah Valley State College to both prepare physics graduate students for university programs, and to produce industrial physicists, engineers and supervisors and managers for the local high-tech job market. This will be accomplished with projects and research in thin film deposition, thin film optics, surface physics, multilayer optics, silicon semiconductor technology, with possible future investigations into micro- and nanostructures manufacturing, integrated optics and other unforeseen new directions. The UVSC physics baccalaureate degree requires each recipient to engage in a senior thesis project. We anticipate that many seniors will choose to perform thesis work through our proposed laboratory doc23036 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program supports instrument development at to Arizona State University. The instrument is a solid-immersion lens (SIL) microscope for optical spectroscopy with a spatial resolution of at least 200 nm. The SIL microscope will feature an autofocus system and active control of the SIL-sample separation. These innovations will make optical spectroscopy with nm-scale spatial resolution routinely practicable. The proposed applications will emphasize Raman and fluorescence imaging. SIL-based micro- Raman spectroscopy offers a spatial resolution comparable or better than Near Field Scanning Optical Microscopy. The signal strength for SIL-based spectroscopy increases as the spatial resolution is improved. Furthermore, the SIL microscope makes it possible to collect spectroscopic images directly on a detector by using a global illumination technique. Initial areas of application include carbon nano-tubes, Ge and SiGe quantum dots on silicon, and the optical properties of photosynthetic membranes. The instrument will be build by graduate students who will gain valuable experience in instrument development. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program supports a project to design and build a Solid Immersion Lens (SIL)microscope for spectroscopic imaging with a spatial resolution of at least 200 nm. There is a critical need for such an instrument because the wavelength of light can be measured with unmatched precision, so that optical spectroscopy is one of the preferred techniques for the study of materials. However, diffraction effects pose a fundamental limit to the spatial resolution of any optical technique, and for conventional instruments this means that it is generally impossible to obtain spatially resolved spectroscopic information from nanoscale objects. An alternative technique to overcome the diffraction limit is the use of optical fibers with nanometer-size apertures. The SIL-microscope will have two fundamental advantages over this approach a much higher light-throughput and the ability to record spectroscopic images without physically scanning a fiber tip over a sample. The instrument will be build by graduate students who will gain valuable experience in instrument development doc23037 none With this award from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the Department of Chemistry at Western Washington University will acquire a 500 MHz NMR Spectrometer. This equipment will enable researchers to carry out studies on a) the total synthesis of allelopathic natural products and the preparation of medium ring ethers via phenol-epoxide cyclization reactions; b) synthesis and characterization of novel diamagnetic d10 metal isoindoline complexes; c) structural characterization of mutant proteins implicated in early-onset familial Alzheimer s disease; d) molecular recognition studies of neurosteroids important in a number of neurodegenerative diseases; e) structural characterization of circular permuteins of myoglobin to understand the folding-function relationship in oxygen transport proteins; and f) structural elucidation of novel sesquiterpenoid natural products. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most powerful tool available to chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used to identify unknown substances, to characterize specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and to study the dynamics of interactions between molecules in solution. Access to state-of-the-art NMR spectrometers is essential to chemists who are carrying out frontier research. The results from these NMR studies will have an impact in a number of areas including molecular biology and medicinal chemistry doc23038 none This award, funded by the Office of International Science and Engineering, the Division of Environmental Biology s Biotic Surveys & Inventories Program, and the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems Program, supports preliminary research to study the dynamics of climate and land-use change in the tropical Andes region in Peru and Bolivia in collaboration with teams of researchers from the Universidad Nacional San Antonio Abad el Cusco, Universidad Nacional Agraria, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Herbario Nacional de Bolivia, Nacional Forestal Martin Cardenas, and Universidad Autonoma Gabriel Rene Moreno. Data needed by climate, ecosystem, vegetation researchers, and species distribution modelers will be collected and analyzed to gain insight on how global and regional forces affect local biodiversity. It is anticipated that this work will facilitate interaction among a variety of research groups studying the Andes, and will provide general insight on the unique aspects of the Andean forests, the natural processes that produce and maintain life s diversity, and their conservation doc23039 none Social, Ecological and Genetic Variables in a Model Learning System Michael D. Beecher The use of elaborate acoustic vocalizations for communication is common in a wide variety of animal groups. In the oscine passerines (songbirds), such vocalizations are called song and have an additional, intriguing aspect: they are learned, with much of that learning occurring very early in life. Song learning in songbirds has been extensively analyzed in the laboratory and has become a major model system for studying the neurobiology of learning. Its value as a model system is enhanced by its many parallels with human language learning. These parallels include an early sensitive period, a perceptual filtering mechanism tuned to species communication signals, a crucial role for auditory feedback in normal development, a separation between sensory and motor learning, and an early subsong or babbling stage. Work on the neural basis of song perception and production in songbirds has revealed additional parallels between the neural centers for song in birds and those for language in humans. In this context, understanding the normal course of song development in songbirds becomes crucial if this model system is going to provide general insights into the development of vocal communication systems in general and human language in particular. Unfortunately, our understanding of normal song development is surprisingly incomplete, because most studies of song learning to date have been laboratory experiments in which essentially all social features have been removed. Four series of studies will be carried out to examine social, ecological and genetic variables in the song learning process for one particular species, the song sparrow. In the first series of experiments, singing interactions between tutor and tutee, and between tutors, will be manipulated and analyzed as a potential variable in song learning; this will be the first time this has been attempted in the laboratory. The setup will simulate four live song tutors, and both tutor-tutor and tutor-tutee singing interactions will be systematically varied; the general prediction is that birds will copy more songs from more interactive tutors. A second study will examine the role of genetic factors by comparing song learning by eastern and western song sparrows. On the basis of field studies, it has been hypothesized that birds in the two populations follow very different, genetically-based song-learning programs. This hypothesis will be tested by collecting birds from both populations and raising them in a common song-tutoring regime; according to the genetic hypothesis, the differences observed in the field should persist despite the common tutoring regime. In a third study, song learning will be directly examined in the field by radio-tracking young song sparrows through their first year and correlating the extent and timing of their interactions with potential song tutors and the degree to which the young birds copy their songs. In the fourth study, playback experiments in which the experimenter simulates a birds neighbor by playing recordings of the neighbor to the bird in a realistic simulation -- will be carried out to analyze how birds in both populations use their songs in territorial interactions with their neighbors. Field studies have suggested that the rules of communication in these two populations may be quite different, paralleling the presumed difference in their song learning programs. It is hoped that results from these different lines of research will combine to elucidate the social factors that shape the development of this model vocal learning system. In turn, such insights may shed light on human disorders such as autism that are characterized by a co-occurrence of language and social deficiencies doc23040 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, Lawrence Margerum and colleagues at the University of San Francisco will acquire electrochemical instrumentation to enhance research training and teaching. The equipment includes a very sensitive potentiostat galvanostat, a frequence response detector for AC impedance measurements and modern software to be used with microelectrodes. Research projects that will exploit this instrumentation include a) voltammetric studies of small molecule binding to potential macromolecular catalysts (dendrimers); b) characterization of the redox properties of potential bioinorganic catalysts; c) measurements of heterogeneous electron transfer rates via rapid scanning techniques; and d) characterization of the biological gels found in the electrosensory organs of sharks. This equipment will be used in advanced undergraduate courses in the Chemistry and Environmental Science departments at the university, and in an outreach program for a community-based sampling program in collaboration with teachers and students at local high schools. These studies will have an impact in a number of areas including development of more efficient catalysts for the manufacturing industry and polymer chemistry doc23041 none Project A grant has been awarded to Western Washington University under the supervision of Drs. Peterson, Moyer and Young of the Biology Department to support the acquisition of core instrumentation and software required for DNA sequencing, genotyping, and analysis. The ease with which DNA can now be sequenced, coupled with advances in molecular biology and computer science has revolutionized the biological sciences. This technology is now central to basic research in many disciplines, as well as integral to the training of future researchers and science educators. Funding from this proposal will facilitate primary research in eleven different labs with current and pending funding. A broad array of fields will be supported by this instrumentation, including Conservation Biology, Microbial Diversity, Evolutionary Biology, Plant Functional Genomics, Developmental Genetics, and Protein Biochemistry. State of the art instrumentation will further enable grant procurement and renewal by allowing us to perform rigorous research using modern techniques. This core instrumentation will also enhance our ability to attract and retain capable professors researchers. In addition to establishing and maintaining externally-funded research programs, we are dedicated to the integration of research and training through the mentoring of undergraduates in faculty research labs. This training will allow our students to continue to be recognized regionally and nationally with jobs in the biotechnology industry, admission to graduate and professional schools, and pre-doctoral awards. Furthermore, we are revising our core biology curriculum with a primary focus on the integration of molecular biology approaches at all class levels. In all, over 500 undergraduate students per year will directly benefit from this instrumentation through instruction in the Biology Department. Through WWU s Integrated Laboratory Network the equipment supported by this grant will be accessible to affiliated programs in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Huxley College of Environmental Studies, as well as to future K-12 science educators enrolled in the Woodring College of Education. In all, a broad spectrum of people, ranging from faculty and undergraduates to K-12 science students will benefit. Access to automated DNA sequencing and genotyping technologies will enhance student education and professional opportunities while furthering fundamental science research doc23042 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will develop the Local Electrode Atom Probe (LEAP) to rapidly provide three-dimensional atomic-scale imaging and elemental identification of nano-biotechnology devices. Structural characterization of nano-biotechnology devices is currently problematic because available microscopy and analytical techniques have substantial limitations in quantitative imaging at the atomic-scale. Moreover, current microscopy techniques cannot adequately resolve three-dimensional biomacromolecules, which are intrinsic to nano-biotechnology devices. Until better analytical instrumentation is developed, researchers will fly blind as they develop more complex nano-biotechnology devices. The overall goal of this Phase II project is to rapidly analyze the three-dimensional atomic-scale structure and elemental composition of biological and organic molecules on nano-biotechnology devices. The focus will be on developing technologies to analyze commercial specimens using LEAP technology, and to initiate commercialization and marketing of this technology to academic and industrial researchers. The commercial application of this project will be in the area of bioanalytical instrumentation and nano-biotechnology devices doc23043 none Miller Continuous observations using Global Positioning System (GPS) geodesy yield high-precision determination of horizontal and vertical deformation rates and their variation in time and space. This project builds on the stunning advances that data from the regional Pacific Northwest Geodetic Array (PANGA) has yielded over the last year. In partnership with the surveying community in Puget Sound, PANGA scientists will install a continuous GPS network that is optimally designed to determine the kinematics and locking of the Seattle fault zone, a major fault within the North America plate. In addition, this network provides important new constraints on the periodic recurrence of slow or silent earthquakes, which have been recently discovered along the transition zone of the Cascadia plate interface. Both studies have fundamental importance to characterizing the geodynamics of plate interaction, they also have broader impacts on quantifying seismic strain energy accumulation on a crustal fault that lies in the heart of the urbanized Puget Lowlands. This network will add new constraints to the relative balance between seismic and aseismic strain release mechanisms on the plate boundary fault that is known to generate great earthquakes (approximately magnitude 9) at frequencies of about 500 years. Finally, this project will foster the nascent collaboration between regional professional and academic communities. The Puget Sound surveying community has formed a consortium to support coordination of new GPS technology to the urbanized Puget Lowlands. This collaboration of cities, counties, state agencies, and engineering firms is committed to installing a virtual reference system GPS network known as the Puget Reference System Utility (PRSU) that can provide cm-level positioning in real time. Fortuitously, this network is optimal for the earthquake and geodynamics studies outlined above, with the caveat that the solid earth deformation community has the highest standards for monumentation in order that GPS antennas track real earth motion rather than the effects of soil, gourndwater or man-made structures. The Puget Lowlands present the greatest first-order challenges to stable monument design: thick soil horizons, deep sedimentary basins in the foot wall of the Seattle fault and a mantle of debris left behind in the last glacial retreat require use of the deeply anchored drilled braced monument. Such monumentation is thus critical to making geophysically meaningful observations of great precision required by the problems posed here. This project funds geodetic quality monuments in order to leverage the PRSU GPS network for solid earth deformation studies in a highly leveraged fashion doc23044 none This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II project will build upon and extend the encouraging results obtained in the Phase I program, which investigated the properties of thin, electrically conductive, UV transparent films and tri-layer metal coatings as possible diamond switch electrode structures for power electronics. Phase I benchmarked UV transmission, electrical conductivity and substrate adhesion for 14 to 44 nm Mo films, deposited using an energetic filtered cathodic arc deposition process. A companion program demonstrated a significant reduction in the diamond switch on-state resistance, and hence, improvement in switch efficiency, using these films as contact electrodes. The Phase II program will apply these results to a commercially relevant specification by demonstrating that the thin film deposition process can be scaled and the complex thin film mesa-shaped electrode topology can be realized. The anticipated mesa-shaped design will consist of a series of narrow tri-layer conduits, with the relatively large spaces in between coated with the thin UV transparent, electrically conductive film. This design maximizes the UV input into the diamond, which is used to activate the switch, while minimizing the electrical resistance. The properties of the electrode will be benchmarked against commercially relevant operating requirements. The project s commercial potential is considered significant since it both supports the entry of diamond switch technology into the $21 billion per year power electronic device market as well as advancing the energetic deposition process thin film knowledge base, which in turn provides an improved platform for launching additional commercial ventures doc23045 none A grant has been awarded to Loyola University Chicago under the supervision of Dr. Mota de Freitas, Professor of Chemistry, for the purchase of a new 300 MHz NMR console for hydrogen atoms, a variable temperature control module, a 5 mm pulse-field gradient, an indirect-detection probe, and a 10 mm multinuclear broadband probe. The console will be used in conjunction with the superconducting magnet with a magnetic field strength of 7 Tesla from an existing, but inoperable, narrow-bore 300 Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectrometer. The NMR facility also owns and maintains a second high-field instrument, a wide-bore 400S NMR spectrometer. Prior to May of , the multinuclear 300 MHz NMR instrument was used primarily for research whereas the 400 MHz spectrometer was used for obtaining one- and two-dimensional NMR spectra of organic compounds by graduate students as well as in undergraduate education. Since May of , the 400S NMR spectrometer is accessible to all faculty, technical staff, postdoctoral researchers, graduate and advanced undergraduate students. Five principal research groups, including that of Dr. Mota de Freitas, have a series of projects in the areas of biochemistry, neurochemistry, and in biophysical, bioinorganic, organometallic and environmental chemistry that will benefit greatly from a dedicated, upgraded 300 MHz NMR instrument. NMR spectroscopy is one of the most powerful tools available to biochemists and chemists for the elucidation of the structure of molecules. It is used in the identification of unknown compounds, the characterization of specific arrangements of atoms within molecules, and in the investigation of dynamic aspects of the interactions between molecules in solution. The equipment to be purchased will be used in several projects, including studies on the bioinorganic chemistry of lithium salts, synthesis of complex affinity crosslinking reagents for proteins, dicarboxylic acid linked gramicidin dimers, photochemically active dyes linked to hemoglobin, functionalized gem-bisphosphonic acid ligands for the extraction of metal ions using supercritical carbon dioxide, asymmetric synthesis by palladium (II) catalysis, and 33S and 17O NMR studies of sulfonic acids and sulfonate buffers. With the upgraded 300 MHz spectrometer, the existing 400 MHz instrument will be used more extensively in both undergraduate and graduate classes. As the undergraduate research program within the department continues to expand, the addition of another NMR spectrometer will allow our students to gain hands-on experience with a high-field spectrometer. The Department of Chemistry hosts a summer REU program, which in the past few years has made extensive use of our 400S NMR spectrometer. This past summer, all REU students were exposed to a one-week overview of the use of an NMR spectrometer. It is our hope that a new functional NMR spectrometer will allow the Department of Chemistry to continue to integrate undergraduate and graduate students, including women and under-represented minorities, in a research setting that will benefit greatly from the upgraded instrumentation doc23046 none This Major Research Instrumentation RUI grant supports acquisition of a 5-watt, 532 nm, CW laser and research-grade microscope so that the research on new particle trapping methods and on the interactions between particles in optically-bound structures can advance. Holographic techniques significantly extend the capabilities of laser tweezing, making possible optical manipulation of matter into complex two- or three-dimensional patterns and shapes containing large numbers of particles. This will also provide essential, on-campus research opportunities and will result in greater undergraduate research involvement. This instrumentation makes possible new course modules geared toward research training that will be shared with the larger community. Illinois Wesleyan University (IWU) students have helped to develop two techniques for non-lithographic means of assembly. The new instrumentation is essential to allow this research team to continue to develop further techniques. Moreover, this instrumentation offers novel opportunities for initiative in the undergraduate curriculum, affecting biology and physics majors, as well as pre-engineering students. %%% Organizing micro-and nano-components into larger structures or assemblies is crucial to many activities and disciplines. The technologies which the IWU research team has demonstrated have the potential to impact research in biology and bio-engineering, the field of micro-electro-mechanical devices, and many other fields where progress has been restricted by the need to configure non-lithographic structures at the microscopic level. The most noticeable impact may come in the field of Photonics: fiber-optic communication networks may benefit from the ability to engineer photonic-bandgap devices, which could play the same role in optics that semiconductors have played in the electronics industry doc23047 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program supports the acquisition an ultra-high resolution electron beam nanolithography system for research and education programs led by a multi-disciplinary team of investigators from physics, chemistry, electrical engineering, materials science, and biomedical engineering at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). The instrumentation will further enhance current research activities at UCI s Integrated Nanosystems Research Facility (INRF), currently serving over 100 academic users in collaboration with over 50 companies (25 of whom are users) in order to support research in the nascent fields of nano-electronics, nano-fluidics, molecular electronics, nano-mechanics, and nano-biotechnology. The system will offer a unique capability to university, industry, and community researchers to (among other things) design and process novel materials and devices at the nanoscale such as molecular wires and devices, carbon nanotubes, and single-electron transistors, to investigate single-molecule chemistry, to investigate the use of nano-electronic devices with the preparation of nano-biological polymer materials, and to accomplish nano-bio tasks such as cell membrane signal transduction characterization and protein and DNA analysis and sequencing. This MRI grant will support the acquisition an ultra-high resolution electron beam nanolithography system for research and education programs led by a multi-disciplinary team of investigators from physics, chemistry, electrical engineering, materials science, and biomedical engineering at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). The instrumentation will further enhance current research activities at UCI s Integrated Nanosystems Research Facility (INRF), currently serving over 100 academic users in collaboration with over 50 companies (25 of whom are users) in order to support research in the nascent fields of nano-electronics, nano-fluidics, molecular electronics, nano-mechanics, and nano-biotechnology. The system will offer a unique capability to the university, industry, and community researchers to (among other things) design and process novel materials and devices at the nanoscale such as molecular wires and devices, carbon nanotubes, and single-electron transistors, to investigate single-molecule chemistry, to investigate the use of nano-electronic devices with the preparation of nano-biological polymer materials, and to accomplish nano-bio tasks such as cell membrane signal transduction characterization and protein and DNA analysis and sequencing doc23048 none Small-scale fisheries are dominant actors in coastal marine ecosystems, engaging more than 90 percent of the fishers in the world and producing more than half of the world s annual marine catch. The dynamics of their operations and decision making are poorly understood, however. Scarcity of data, the multi-species and multi-fleet nature of most small-scale fisheries, and complex feedbacks among human institutions at the local, regional, and global scale render existing fisheries models inapplicable to most small-scale fisheries. Small-scale fisheries typically exploit multiple stocks, have limited mobility, and vary widely in the types of economic drivers, cultural values, and management systems regulating extraction. Most small-scale fishing is concentrated in coastal areas characterized by high productivity and diversity, such as coral reefs, coastal lagoons, and estuaries. In turn, these locales are maintained by complex interactions between oceanographic processes in the nearshore marine environment and exchanges occurring at the land-sea interface. Only the simultaneous consideration of these different facets of complexity will allow examination of higher-level, emergent behaviors that are likely to characterize these complex and variable systems. Examples of crucial questions that can be addressed only through simultaneous consideration of different biological and socioeconomic sources of variability are: (1) How robust are different management systems in the face of environmental variability and variable amounts and type of data? (2) What are the social, cultural, and economic correlates of management enforcement and users compliance? (3) What are the effects of local and regional dynamics of small-scale fisheries on the persistence of ecosystem function and structure? This research project will begin the process of developing an integrated theoretical framework regarding the coupled dynamics among small-scale fishers, coastal resources, and their biophysical setting in marine ecosystems of the Pacific coast of Baja California, Mexico. A multidisciplinary group of researchers will develop models through the conduct of workshops and preliminary data-gathering activities. At the first workshop, researchers will initiate development of a series of stochastic, bioeconomic models that fuse ecological dynamics of benthic organisms with spatially and temporally explicit social and economic behavior of fishers. Researchers will assemble and synthesize existing physical, biological, economic, and anthropological data needed for parameterizing models and testing the model assumptions following the first workshop. The development of a framework for integrating models incorporating subsets of the complex interactions and feedbacks linking small-scale fisheries and their biological resources will be the focus of two additional workshops. The significance of this project are expected to be threefold. First, it will provide a holistic scientific understanding of the interactions between small-scale fisheries and their resources. Second, it will provide a better understanding of the drivers and consequences of human impacts in the coastal marine environment. Third, Baja California is a region of extraordinary productivity and biological diversity, currently considered one of the highest priorities for international conservation efforts. The study will provide a modeling framework for predicting the outcomes of new and future use of coastal resources in Baja California, including anticipated increases in population densities and coastal development in the region, and will start building a theoretical framework more broadly applicable to small-scale fisheries worldwide. In addition to enhancing fundamental scientific understandings, the project also offers prospects for practical implementation regarding the management of abalone and fisheries in the study region. This project is supported by an award resulting from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc23049 none This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program supports the University of Oregon with the acquisition of a Time-of-Flight Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (ToF-SIMS) instrument. The instrument will be actively used in research programs in physics and chemistry under the auspices of the Materials Science Institute at the University of Oregon, as well as by research groups in the Departments of Geological Sciences and Neuroscience. It will also represent an important component of a unique University-based facility in Oregon and will be made available to other researchers in the state. The spectrometer will significantly impact a broad base of research programs. One of these involves developing and understanding the properties of a distinct class of complex semiconducting materials. A second area involves understanding a broader range of materials synthesis issues of metastable phases of ternary and quaternary superconducting, semiconducting, and thermoelectric materials. A third research project which will benefit from the requested instrument is the study of self-assembled inorganic organic multilayer thin films. The instrument will have enormous potential range of applications at the University of Oregon: (1) characterization of Er-doped glasses for photonic device applications; (2) measurement of boundary-layer compositional gradients around melt inclusions in naturally formed glasses; (3) characterization of a new family of peptide-containing alkanethiol adsorbates that form highly ordered monolayers on gold, and (4) characterizing the distribution of subcellular Ca2+ in sensory hair cells in the ear, and (5) characterization of an insulating layer at in InP doped conjugated polymer interface. The spectrometer, Trift III (Phi Model TFS- ), will be purchased from Physical Electronics. It includes a pulsed and bunched liquid metal (Ga) ion gun, a dual microchannel plate detector and includes the associated vacuum pumps, electronics, and computer hardware and software. An oxygen ion source will also be purchased to ensure optimal depth-profiling capability and enhanced sensitivity in depth profiles. The gallium source will allow chemical imaging with a lateral resolution of 0.3 microns. This award from the Major Research Instrumentation program supports the University of Oregon with the acquisition of a Time-of-Flight Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (ToF-SIMS) instrument. The instrument will be actively used in research programs in physics and chemistry under the auspices of the Materials Science Institute at the University of Oregon, as well as by research groups in the Departments of Geological Sciences and Neuroscience. It will also represent an important component of a unique University-based facility in Oregon and will be made available to other researchers in the state. The spectrometer will significantly impact a broad base of research programs. One of these involves developing and understanding the properties of a distinct class of complex semiconducting materials. A second area involves understanding a broader range of materials synthesis issues of metastable phases of ternary and quaternary superconducting, semiconducting, and thermoelectric materials. A third research project which will benefit from the requested instrument is the study of self-assembled inorganic organic multilayer thin films. Availability of the requested instrumentation will also improve research training at the advanced undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral levels, first and foremost because of the importance of hands-on experience doc23050 none Charles This Major Research Instrumentation award to University of California at San Diego provides funds for acquisition of an isotope ratio mass spectrometer for shared use in studies of climate and global climate change, ocean sciences and anthropology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and other UCSD departments. The award is supported by the Division of Ocean Sciences at NSF. UCSD will provide cost-share support from non-federal funds for 33% of total project costs doc23051 none A grant has been awarded to The Salk Institute to acquire a proteomics system. Proteomics, the rapid identification of large numbers of proteins in a short time frame, has been made possible by recent developments in mass spectroscopy equipment and by the development of powerful data interpretation software. The new Salk proteomics system consists of devices that allow the isolation and identification of small amounts of proteins involved in normal and abnormal events inside cells. The proteins are separated by two-dimensional gel electrophoresis. Fragments of the proteins are then identified by analysis in a mass spectrometer. The system includes robotic workstations that allow automated analysis of several hundred proteins per week. Numerous projects at The Salk Institute rely heavily on the ability to identify small amounts of proteins involved in cell growth and development. Changes in the level of specific proteins are associated with diseases such as cancer and nerve cell damage. Protein complexes regulate embryo development and gene activity throughout life. These complexes, often consisting of more than 50 proteins, can be analyzed in days with the new proteomics technology rather than years with previous methods. Plant development and plants responses to parasites are also regulated by changes in the level of a variety of proteins. Understanding these events in plants not only has implication for agriculture but can also lead to discoveries about human biology. The Salk Institute has been at the forefront of biological research for more than three decades and the proteomics system will allow investigators to expand the scope of their investigation to pursue new avenues of research. The Salk Institute employs a highly diverse staff of scientists and support personnel. Students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, from many ethnic backgrounds are trained in its laboratories. The Salk Institute has an on-going outreach program designed to attract minority students and staff members. The addition of a proteomics facility will expand the research possibilities and attract new investigators to the Institute doc23052 none With support from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, Stephen Dunham, Paul Greenwood and Dasan Thamattoor of Colby College will acquire an isothermal titration calorimeter (ITC) and differential scanning microcalorimeters (DSC) for chemistry and biology research. Research projects that will exploit this equipment include a) structural studies of modified oligonucleotides; b) metal ion binding affinities and stabilities of modified DNA aptamers; c) binding affinities of DNA aptamers to biological targets; d) ion binding affinities and structural characterization of proteins in nematocysts; e) ion binding selectivity of polyoxa[n]peristylanes; f) computer aided molecular design and guest-host chemistry of H2-antagonists; and g) structural analysis of RNase mutants that allow self-fertilization in plants. Calorimetry is an extremely useful tool in modern analytical chemistry. Calorimetric analysis is used to measure the thermal energy (heat) exchange that occurs during molecular interactions and reactions. Thus it can provide a very reliable and sensitive method for determining the thermodynamic properties of materials such as changes in heat capacity of liquid and solid samples. Colby College is an undergraduate institution, and the availability of these instruments will have a strong impact on undergraduate research. In addition, commercial ITC and DSC microcalorimeters are currently not available in the state of Maine doc23053 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project creates new technology and materials that emphasize data analysis in science education. Data analysis makes scientific concepts and processes concrete and gives students another way - besides memorization or analytical understanding - to learn quantitative science, often bypassing the need for advanced symbolic mathematics. This project will emphasize physics classes in high school and beyond, where labs are often cookbook demonstrations of phenomena and the data analysis mere verification. The first phase of this research, with the help of new technology, provided evidence those students understanding and competence could be improved beyond their previous capabilities. This project enhances that technology-Fathom Dynamic Statistics Software (KCP Technologies ) - to make it more useful in the science classroom, and it develops curriculum materials that use this software. Specifically, the firm will produce complete manuscripts for two supplemental books in physics appropriate for the high-school, AP, or college introductory course: a lab manual and a book of problem sets. In addition, Epistemological Engineering will begin to explore and prototype additional materials in physics, materials for other sciences, and staff development offerings. The proposed research will lead to significant enhancements to Fathom software and open the door to creating curriculum materials in science education using tools previously available only to math educators. Epistemological Engineering proffers technology that will contribute to strengthening science education in this country by teaching students to thoughtfully approach the world with a zest for measurement and prediction doc23054 none Computer Science Research and Education Project Proposed: This proposal from an RUI MII institution, establishing a Linux-based parallel computing cluster, aims to simulate meteorological phenomena and study and teach the use of parallel processors. The infrastructure will be used in support of ongoing Numerical modeling of the atmosphere of Mars using the Mars Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (MRAMS) and Computer Science Research in the parallel and distributed hardware and software. The first component will benefit the following current research underway: Large eddy simulations (LESs) of the Martian atmosphere to provide insight into the structure and dynamics of the highly unstable convective boundary layer (including the dynamics of dusts devils) Mesoscale simulations of past and proposed Mars landing sites Simulation of local and regional dust storms, and wind-produced landforms (aids satellite observations) Simulations of orographic water ice and carbon dioxide clouds. The second component will investigate and or explore Software optimization of the MRAMS code (tune it for maximum performance on hardware platform) and Alternative hardware architectures for high-performance computing The cluster will serve as a central research platform to investigate processor-to-processor communication overhead, memory contention of symmetric multiprocessors, cache coherence, and distributed processing. Moreover, performance of novel processor, memory, and network topologies will be evaluated doc23055 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase (SBIR) II project will further develop ELEX (Electro-Extrusion) which is a manufacturing process for prototyping and batch manufacturing high-aspect ratio microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and related microparts and microstructures. The goal is to replace (in many applications) the so-called LIGA process, which is an electrodeposition-based technique, requiring the use of a clean room and synchrotron. The commercialization potential of this project to the MEMS industry will provide a dramatic reduction in cost and time, which will greatly accelerate the commercialization of MEMS and other microscale devices doc23056 none This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project builds on algorithms developed for simulating turbulent incompressible flows in and around time-varying geometries. The Phase II project proposes to develop and commercialize a state-of-the-art computational fluid dynamics (CFD) package utilizing the algorithms developed. The computational engine is based upon an advanced parallel, adaptive fast multipole (FMM) implementation of a 3-D Lagrangian vortex-boundary element method. Turbulence is accounted for via Large Eddy Simulation (LES) using a dynamic Smagorinsky sub-grid scale model. The method is (1) grid-free in the fluid domain, (2) virtually free of numerical diffusion, (3) inherently solution-adaptive, and (4) capable of modeling inhomogeneous unsteady wall-bounded turbulent flow. During Phase II additional innovative algorithms will be developed for FMM to substantially increase it computational speed as well as accuracy. Additionally, an LES model for unsteady inhomogeneous flows will be implemented and tested rigorously using problems of potential interest to industry. The software is ideal for simulation and analysis of complex laminar-through-turbulent flow phenomena involving massive flow separation, unsteady vortex shedding, transient jets in cross-stream, and wake-body interaction. Examples of interest to industry are flow over bluff bodies such as ground vehicles or buildings, in data storage units with rotating and moving parts; in internal combustion engines; and in and around rotating machinery such as pumps and fans doc23057 none This Small Business Innovations Research (SBIR) Phase II project builds on demonstrated and patented new hydrogenation-based processes for producing silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers for the semiconductor manufacturing industry. It has been demonstrated that this new techniques can be bonded for improved activation of the surfaces of silicon wafers. The innovation also serves to suppress layer transfer faults. The improvement in yield and the reduction in cost in the SOI production process have also been achieved. The process is expected to scale down to the formation of SOI surface films of thickness well below 0.1 micron. During Phase I, an RF plasma treatment was developed which optimizes the amount of adsorbed activating species on surfaces resulting in an improved layer transfer yield over previous wet chemical activation techniques. The process optimization was based on molecular dynamics simulation of the sub-monolayer hydroxylized surface. In Phase II the simulation-based process design continues with experimental characterization of the resulting probability of the layer transfer faults. The Phase II work plan includes more detailed process design and optimization leading to a characterization of best effort SOI wafers by the venture partners. The impact of the proposed commercialization activity on the existing $10B worldwide silicon starting-wafer industry is potentially huge. The increasing usage of SOI by the leading semiconductor manufacturers is optimistically projected to grow from 1% to 10% of the worldwide silicon market. If successful, a ramp up to commercialization SOI pilot production will begin immediately upon the completion of this Phase II contract doc23058 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program is for the acquisition of a low temperature Near-field Scanning Optical Microscope Scanning Probe Microscope (NSOM SPM) for light emission spectroscopic studies of structures down to the nanometer-scale. Such a powerful combination will allow the simultaneous recording of topographical and spectroscopic data, with conventional far-field imaging, confocal microscopy, atomic force microscopy (AFM), and near-field optics in a single system. Examples include NSOM imaging spectroscopy of nanowire arrays, quantum dots, and related III-V and magnetic semiconductor heterostructures, NSOM fluorescence of disordered polymers, glasses, super-cooled liquids, and single molecule fluorescence studies of proteins. Novel experiments are also proposed to explore issues in quantum chaos at optical wavelengths using suitably fabricated structures. The Nanonics Imaging Ltd. NSOM SPM-100 confocal system is able to perform simultaneous NSOM and AFM imaging. Metal-coated tips will be used for the development of ballistic electron emission microscopy of semiconductor samples simultaneously with light emission spectroscopy. The instrument has the potential of satisfying many diverse users including identifying and building basic skill sets for undergraduate and graduate students and to train talented technicians. It will be a complementary tool to the ultra high vacuum Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM AFM) and a micro-Raman systems currently available in the physics department at Northeastern University that are devoted to the promotion of research and educational programs in nano- and biomolecular-science. This is an instrument award to Northeastern University for a Near-field Scanning Optical Microscope Scanning Probe Microscope (NSOM SPM) with analytical light emission spectroscopic (LES) capabilities. The new facility provides a complimentary platform for the universal integration of several other forms of frontier microscopies, such as an ultra high vacuum scanning tunneling microscope atomic force microscope and micro-Raman systems, that are currently in use in their physics department today. The instrumentation will enable the user to make direct comparisons between the topographical and optical spectroscopic properties of samples down to the nanometer scale. The instrument is equipped with a variable temperature capability from room temperature to10K and the proposal calls for future development of ballistic electron emission spectroscopy (BEES) using metal-coated tips for complementary BEES LES studies of semiconductor heterostructures. The facility has two central goals: 1) Collaborative research using NSOM imaging spectroscopy to explore issues in quantum chaos at optical wavelengths; studies of quantum dots, and magnetic semiconductors for spintronic applications; and NSOM fluorescence of disordered polymers, glasses; and single molecule fluorescence studies of proteins. 2) Education and hands-on training of undergraduate students, graduate students, and talented technicians in nanometer-scale characterization techniques. The instrument request includes 33% matching funds provided by Northeastern University and a substantial discount by the instrument manufactures doc23059 none The analysis of the structure of past ecosystems, or paleoecology, is regarded as an essential component of contemporary studies of human evolution. Through detailed investigations of the association between ecology and evolutionary transformation it is possible to generate hypotheses about the factors that ultimately contributed to major events in the evolutionary history of hominids (humans and their close extinct relatives), including speciation, adaptive shifts, and extinctions. Previously, interpretations of the paleoecology at the important fossil hominid site of Laetoli in Tanzania (dating to 3.5-3.8 million year ago) have suggested that it is either an arid to semi-arid grassland with patches of bush and woodland or a more heavily wooded habitat. The objective of this project is to resolve this contentious issue by more thoroughly documenting the paleoecological setting at Laetoli. This study will utilize a range of data from the fossil faunas from Laetoli, and will apply a variety of methods and techniques to these data, such as indicator species, ecomorphology, ecological structure and community composition analyses. The project will also investigate, for the first time, fine-grained ecological distinctions between individual stratigraphic horizons and different sub-localities. The overall goal will be to present a more detailed, more comprehensive, and more informed assessment of the paleoecology at Laetoli. This will take into account the broad spectrum of faunal evidence available, the geographical and temporal complexity represented at the site, and the limitations imposed by taphonomic factors. The results of this project will provide a better understanding of the types of habitats exploited by early hominids, and lead to a more critical appreciation of their habitat preferences. The project will ultimately provide an important building block in developing broader scale macroevolutionary models that are essential for understanding and interpreting the contexts that shaped human evolution doc23060 none This grant supports equipment needed for characterizing mechanical behavior of advanced structural materials, specifically in the areas of dynamic, high-rate fracture characterization and damage detection. The equipment consists of (1) a Dynatup instrumented low high-velocity impact test system with an integrated environmental chamber and (2) a Panametrics ultrasonic scanning system. When integrated with the existing facilities, these instruments provide a direct and immediate benefit to faculty and graduate and undergraduate students in the Mechanical Engineering and Civil Engineering Departments in their materials-related research and education activities. The equipment will be integrated into several courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels providing hands-on training and exposure to advanced materials characterization and evaluation methods. A significant area of concern when designing advanced structural materials for critical components is their durability and damage tolerance under a variety of loading and environmental conditions. The survivability of advanced materials must be fully understood before they can be utilized. Impact events, including high-velocity loading (ballistic projectiles) and low-velocity events (e.g., tool drops, bird strikes, hail damage, etc.) are of particular concern, as they can cause damage not visible on the surface, but which can result in significant degradation of performance. Full characterization of the response of materials to impact loading requires the capacity to experimentally generate controlled impact conditions as well as the ability to quantitatively measure the extent and growth of internal damage resulting from this dynamic form of loading doc23061 none Much progress has been made toward understanding how meiosis works, but in only a few organisms. It is, thus, unclear which aspects and functions in meiosis are most fundamental. Nonetheless, the data from these organisms provide a solid basis for initiating an evolutionary investigation of meiosis--more specifically, meiotic genes and their encoded proteins--in a more diverse sampling of eukaryotes. The central goal of this project is to better understand the evolution and function of the meiotic process and its molecular machinery. To accomplish this, the investigator will expand his ongoing evolutionary studies of the eukaryotic recA gene family (RAD51 and DMC1) in protists by (a) isolating these genes from additional protist species representing major eukaryotic lineages, and (b) investigating possible cases of gene loss in the recA family, some of which are associated with putatively asexual species. To complement and support the proposed experimental studies, he will employ and develop appropriate computational tools to carry out a systematic and comprehensive bioinformatic analysis of additional meiotic genes and proteins. This bioinformatic data-mining should result in the identification and initial characterization of key genes encoding meiotic proteins from all available eukaryotic (especially protist) species. In addition to providing information on the function and evolution of meiotic proteins, a major priority of this work is to establish when meiosis evolved, be it during extant eukaryotic evolution (leaving some surviving asexual eukaryotes that lack meiosis because they never evolved it), or alternatively, prior to the diversification of eukaryotes (making contemporary asexual eukaryotes simply the descendants of sexual species which have lost this ability). Phylogenetic analyses of the meiotic genes identified from protists will be used to directly address this issue, especially those genes that have duplicated and diverged from prior non-meiotic functions. The results from this project will guide future experimental efforts to isolate and study particular meiotic genes from other relevant eukaryotic lineages. Meiosis is the specialized cellular division cycle in which diploid cells are reduced to haploid cells (such as eggs and sperm), which then fuse to generate new (diploid) individuals. Meiosis is, thus, central to sexual reproduction and has been crucial in the evolution and success of eukaryotes. However, the origin and evolution of sex remains one of the major enigmas in biology. Developing a clearer evolutionary understanding of key meiotic mechanisms will not only broadly illuminate our understanding of the sexual process, but also lend insight into the evolution of proteins and the macromolecular assemblages in which they operate. Finally, these studies should clearly demonstrate the importance of combining information from model eukaryotic genetic systems with data from less well-studied organisms in a comparative evolutionary framework doc23062 none This grant supports a multi-user Field Emission-Scanning Electron Microscope (FE-SEM) to be installed in an Internet-connected facility. It will allow users to view SEM images from anywhere on Mississippi State campus and throughout the K-12 educational system. While the new SEM will reside at MSU, faculty at the other major research universities in Mississippi will also make use of this facility. The fully analytical FE-SEM will serve the multi-disciplinary research needs of a number of faculty members from various Colleges and Departments throughout MSU. The primary users will explore surface phenomena in catalysts; microfluidic MEMs devices; organic inorganic relations in soils and rocks; aspects of cell-biomaterial surface interactions and biocompatibility; and contributions of phase evolution and microstructure to deformation and fracture processes. This instrument will greatly expand the efficacy of current research, broaden the scope of future projects, and have a significant impact on materials education at MSU, sister research institutions in Mississippi, and the K-12 educational system. This SEM will help foster the integration of research and education by providing modern materials analysis instrumentation with general availability across disciplines. Installation of the FE-SEM in an interactive setting will promote materials research as a career choice to students in K-12. Currently offered summer Outreach Programs for Teachers will be used to advertise this resource. The co-investigators will have special broadcast demonstrations to assist students in exploring the microstructural world of materials and how microstructure affects their behavior. After initial exposure to microscopy through demonstrations in the classroom at MSMS, the students will have the opportunity to actively participate in research at the MSU campus. The modules and demonstrations developed at MSMS will serve as a model for use in other high schools throughout the state of Mississippi. MSU plays a leading role in attracting high tech industry to the state of Mississippi, and enhanced analytical capabilities will help provide the research support needed to enhance economic development in the South doc23063 none This award supports instrument development and student training at the University of Vermont. Faculty and students are developing a system that will enable study of the relaxation of surfaces as they are being bombarded by energetic particles in a set of processes known collectively as energetic beam deposition. Using a very intense beam of x-rays from a synchrotron source, the atomic structure of surfaces will be investigated as these technologically important processes are occurring. The new system under development will enable, for the first time, microsecond time resolution during the in-situ study of materials surface structures while undergoing crystal growth and etching. The system will make use of pulsed laser deposition and surface etching methods with pulse durations of 1 microsecond in order to study surface relaxation effects on this time scale. The system will permit extensive synchrotron x-ray access to the sample and incorporate standard characterization tools (e.g. RHEED) to better correlate the synchrotron results with in-house studies. Initial studies will concentrate on the fundamentals of processes that are vital for future electronics and information storage technologies. The first is pulsed laser deposition, which allows highly controlled growth of thin films by a single atomic layer at a time. The second is the erosion of surfaces with energetic ions, a process that can be used to produce nanoscale surface patterns. The basic understanding gained from these experiments could eventually lead to methods for growing new high quality materials for optoelectronics and to materials for information storage technologies such as magnetic and optical disk drives and quantum spin devices. This new instrument will provide research and educational opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Vermont in the areas of crystal growth, surface processing and surface analysis. Students will also gain access to a synchrotron-based materials research program doc23064 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program supports Florida International University with the acquisition of a structural monitoring system for a laser- molecular beam epitaxy (LMBE)-scanning tunneling microscope system. The PI s will construct comprehensive tools with multi-component growth capability coupled with in-situ nano-scale characterization capabilities. This is essential for success in Complex Materials Growth by Design. The in-situ structural monitoring system includes a newly designed in-situ reflection high-energy electron diffraction (RHEED) instrument for real-time monitoring of materials growth and low-energy electron diffraction (LEED I-V) optics for surface structure determination will be the essential component for the studies of artificial structured materials. The system will be added on a pulsed laser deposition (PLD) system, forming a controlled growth LMBE facility. This facility will be integrated with a variable temperature (VT) (25 - K) scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and other existing surface characterization probes with a growth capability in an ultra-high vacuum (UHV) cluster. The objective is to construct a unique facility capable of growing and characterizing materials in-situ for interdisciplinary research and education of materials scientists in the new field of nano-technology. The goal is to: 1) exploit materials tailoring for desired functionalities, 2) explore new physical phenomena in artificially structured materials, and 3) educate a new breed of materials scientists with an expertise in science-driven nano-fabrication. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program supports Florida International University with the acquisition of a structural monitoring system for a laser- molecular beam epitaxy (LMBE)-scanning tunneling microscope system. The PI s will construct comprehensive tools with multi-component growth capability coupled with in-situ nano-scale characterization capabilities. This is essential for success in Complex Materials Growth by Design. The in-situ structural monitoring system includes a newly designed in-situ reflection high-energy electron diffraction instrument for real-time monitoring of materials growth and low-energy electron diffraction optics for surface structure determination will be the essential component for the studies of artificial structured materials. The system will be added on a pulsed laser deposition system, forming a controlled growth LMBE facility. This facility will be integrated with a variable temperature (VT) (25 - K) scanning tunneling microscope and other existing surface characterization probes with a growth capability in an ultra-high vacuum cluster. The objective is to construct a unique facility capable of growing and characterizing materials in-situ for interdisciplinary research and education of materials scientists in the new field of nano-technology. The goal is to: 1) exploit materials tailoring for desired functionalities, 2) explore new physical phenomena in artificially structured materials, and 3) educate a new breed of materials scientists with an expertise in science-driven nano-fabrication doc23065 none Many nutrients, natural toxins, and manmade toxins and drugs are hydrosoluble (soluble in water). Efficient transport of hydrosoluble chemicals across the vertebrate small intestine is generally thought to depend on membrane transport proteins (mediated transport), but some birds can efficiently transport hydrosoluble chemicals through the gaps between cells (i.e., by a passive paracellular pathway). This research will (1) test the generality of this finding in other birds, mammals, and reptiles spanning a broad size range (0.05 kg - 50 kg), (2) test mechanisms that may explain differences among species in the importance of paracellular transport of hydrosoluble chemicals, and (3) determine hydrosoluble absorption of toxins by the paracellular pathway. Physiological, pharmacokinetic, and microscopy techniques will be used to test these hypotheses. The differential absorption of carbohydrate probes, which range in size from 150 -666 Daltons, will be used to assess how the gap between cells restricts transport according to molecular size. Differences in the absorption of two forms of glucose (D- and L-glucose) will provide information about the relative rates of glucose absorption by the mediated versus passive pathways. The effects of a nutrient (sugar) in the gut on absorption will be determined. Intestinal tissues will be examined via light and electron microscopy to characterize structural features (e.g., intestinal surface area and density of tight junctions at the gaps between adjacent cells) that may contribute to variation in paracellular absorption. Another study will measure absorption of a man-made hydrosoluble toxin (the herbicide glyphosate) and a natural hydrosoluble phytochemical (anthocyanin) in two species. Movement of the toxin glyphosate along the paracellular path between (not through) intestinal cells will be directly observed using autoradiography. The proposed studies have important implications for vertebrate ecology, digestive physiology, evolutionary physiology and ecotoxicology doc23066 none Thewissen Description: This award supports the US-India Cooperative Research: Evolution of the Cetacean Body Plan-Eocene Whales from India. US PI Hans Thewissen, Northeastern Ohio University College of Medicine and Sunil Bajpai, Indian Institute of Technology (IITR), Roorkee, India will study one of the most remarkable evolutionary transformations in the vertebrate fossil record, the transformation of cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) from terrestrial quadruped to obligate marine swimmer. They will examine the evolutionary processes and underlying causes, with special reference to the organ systems that underwent the greatest changes in the land to water transition. This project will test hypotheses about the evolutionary processes that determined much of the cetacean body plan. These systems (locomotion, balance, and sound transmission) are documented by fossils and underlie the evolutionary success of the order Cetacea. The PIs will integrate traditional anatomical and functional data with new insights from developmental biology to yield new understanding of the evolutionary process. The investigators will collect and study fossils in India. Scope: This will be a rare opportunity for the investigators to study the link between paleontology and development. The US and Indian PIs are eminently well qualified; they have complementary expertise and an established collaboration. Bajpai is the leading authority on fossil cetaceans in India and his institution houses its most significant collections. Beyond the scientific community, this study will enhance tools for teaching evolution to students and for explaining scientific processes to the public. The award will further partnerships among researchers including young scientists, collaborative links between the institutions, and advance theoretical interests in both countries. This project is jointly funded by the Indian Department of Science & Technology (DST) under the NSF DST joint program doc23067 none This IMR award supports an instrument development of an electrostatic force based Single Electron Scanning Tunneling Microscope. In previous work, single electron tunneling events from a special scanning probe tip have been clearly detected by electrostatic force. However, no surface imaging with the single electrons has yet been achieved. This research program focuses upon developing the methods needed to image individual, electrically isolated electron states at or near surfaces with atomic scale spatial resolution. The methodology will include understanding the mechanical behavior of oscillating atomic force microscope (AFM) cantilevers under large force gradients, exploring the effects of charge transfer and voltage dependence, optimizing and developing a force detection system for the single electron measurements and developing a method for height control while imaging with single electrons. The ability to image and characterize electrically isolated, localized, electronic states near surfaces (undetectable with the standard Scanning Tunneling Microscope) is a fundamental, new capability. The approach is to provide a detailed understanding of the atomic scale electronic properties of electrically insulating materials and isolated nanometer scale systems. %%% This IMR award supports an instrument development of an electrostatic force based Single Electron Scanning Tunneling Microscope. In previous work, single electron tunneling events from a special scanning probe tip have been clearly detected by electrostatic force. However, no surface imaging with the single electrons has yet been achieved. This research program focuses upon developing the methods needed to image individual, electrically isolated electron states at or near surfaces with atomic scale spatial resolution. The methodology will include understanding the mechanical behavior of oscillating atomic force microscope (AFM) cantilevers under large force gradients, exploring the effects of charge transfer and voltage dependence, optimizing and developing a force detection system for the single electron measurements and developing a method for height control while imaging with single electrons. The ability to image and characterize electrically isolated, localized, electronic states near surfaces (undetectable with the standard Scanning Tunneling Microscope) is a fundamental, new capability. The approach is to provide a detailed understanding of the atomic scale electronic properties of electrically insulating materials and isolated nanometer scale systems doc23068 none This IMR award provides Northwestern University with funds for the acquisition of a cluster of SMTP servers, having a 64-bit operating system, with a large memory subsystem and with Myrinet (medium speed) interconnects. This cluster will be used for computational chemistry and materials science research at Northwestern University, particularly applications in electronic structure, in computational electromagnetics, and in Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics calculations where large memory capabilities are essential. Distributed parallel applications will also be emphasized. The cluster will also be used in graduate and undergraduate courses in engineering and sciences, and in REU, REST, MRSEC and other initiatives which use software that require large memory capabilities. This IMR award provides Northwestern University with funds for the acquisition of a cluster of computers that will be used for computational materials research in chemistry and engineering, and for related educational programs. The computers in this cluster will have specialized performance characteristics which make it possible to run programs that require an exceptionally large amount of computer memory, and which in addition allow for several computers to run in parallel on the same program. Research applications to be considered include the modeling of a wide range of properties of materials, including structures, energies, interaction with light, motions of atoms, making films and patterns, and thermal properties. The computer cluster will be used in a wide variety of educational programs, including computational modeling courses, laboratories and summer research programs doc23069 none A state-of-the art (scanning)transmission electron microscope (TEM)will be upgraded to an environmental TEM allowing near-atomic resolution imaging at pressures up to 8 Torr and temperatures up to 900 degree C. These capabilities are vital for proposed nanoscience, biotechnology and environmental science research. Near-atom-scale patterns will be defined by electron-beam decomposition of molecules adsorbed on surfaces. In situ investigation of vapor-liquid-solid grown Si nanopillars will facilitate rapid process optimization allowing growth on technologically relevant Si(100) surfaces. Characterization of artificial bone synthesized using genetically engineered osteoblasts will be facilitated by the capability for imaging hydrated specimens. Imaging at elevated pressure and temperature will be employed to discover novel materials useful for mineral sequestration of greenhouse gases. These advanced characterization capabilities will be fully integrated into the classroom learning experience and will significantly enhance industrial outreach facilitating academic industrial knowledge transfer. %%% A state-of-the art (scanning)transmission electron microscope (TEM)will be upgraded to an environmental TEM allowing near-atomic resolution imaging of diverse samples at pressures of up to 8 Torr and temperatures of up to 900 degree C. These capabilities are vital for cutting edge research proposed in strategic thrust areas at ASU including nanoscience and technology, biotechnology and environmental science. Specifically, electron beam stimulated surface chemistry will be employed for writing near atomic scale patterns, real-time imaging will be used to optimize process conditions for Si nanopillar formation, characterization of tissue engineered artificial bone and in situ investigation of mineral sequestration of greenhouse gases. The advanced characterization capabilities of this instrument will be fully integrated into classroom learning at ASU through its internet connection to the Goldwater Materials Visualization Facility. Further, these capabilities will enhance academic industrial knowledge transfer facilitated by our highly successful Industrial Associates program doc23070 none The goal of this multidisciplinary collaborative project, to be carried at an undergraduate institution, is to develop optical sensors for the detection of chemical and biological samples. Applications include detection of organisms toxins in wastewater or environmental samples, airborne hazards, as well as, unique genetic sequences. These devices are expected to be inexpensive and robust with sensitivities exceeding that of conventional surface plasmon resonance sensors. The sensor design relies on a new surface wave technique that utilizes surface wave resonance in photonic band gap materials (PBG). The scope and limitations of the PBG surface wave technique will be tested using standard benchmark experiments. The progress will be made in the physics and engineering, chemical and analytical, and biological aspects of the sensor development simultaneously. Thus, development of instrumentation, PBG property prediction, a versatile interfacial layer and selection of appropriate genetic sequences will be the initial foci of effort. Then, a variety of specific biological binding pairs will be coupled to the surface via organosiloxanes that are capable of photopatterning and chemical differentiation, culminating in a multianalyte sensor. Advances in nanotechnology have made complex biosensing devices possible, however, there is an increasing need for improved detector sensitivity and specificity. The approach of this project is to involve students to address the fundamental science of biosensors, develop proof of principle sensors for specific applications, and capitalize upon collaboration among disciplines. Students participating in the research project will be trained for the increasingly multidisciplinary science and technology sector as they develop discipline-specific laboratory skills doc23071 none This IMR grant will enable the purchase of an ultrafast, high-resolution, video-imaging system for advanced imaging of fast motions in soft-condensed matter systems from a scale of microns to several centimetres. The physical systems worked on by the group of PIs include gels, colloids, crumpled membranes, granular materials, and multiphase flow in porous media. The unifying theme in this work is the study of non-equilibrium systems in which the elementary units are large compared to molecular scales. The underlying theoretical framework to deal with such non-thermal statistical systems is still in its infancy, however, with the appropriate instrumentation it is possible to perform detailed imaging of the dynamics of the individual macroscopic atoms and molecules of these systems in a way that is not possible in conventional materials. The video-imaging system will enhance the frame rate, spatial resolution and the length of data streams we are able to acquire. The increased frame rate will allow capturing fast dynamics, such as ballistic motions in highly excited granular media; the improved resolution will help resolve small motions such as thermal motions in caged systems and longer data streams will enable a search for rare but important dynamical events such as intermittent crack jumps and buckling events in stressed materials. The imaging system will also be available to other local users by scheduling time via a webpage. The users will be aided by graduate students, thus broadening their exposure to a broad spectrum of scientific problems. Many of the projects involve considerable involvement by undergraduate students and the new capabilities will afford them exposure to advanced techniques in a very visual branch of materials physics. This IMR grant will enable the purchase of an ultrafast, high-resolution, video-imaging system for advanced imaging of fast motions in soft-condensed matter systems from a scale of microns to several centimetres. The physical systems worked on by the group of investigators include gels, colloids, crumpled membranes, granular materials, and multiphase flow in porous media. These are all systems of immense industrial importance, however, they also present new basic scientific challenges in that they are statistically-sized systems with elementary units that are very large compared to molecular scales. The underlying theoretical framework to deal with such non-thermal systems is still in its infancy, however, with the appropriate instrumentation it is possible to perform detailed imaging of the dynamics of the individual macroscopic atoms and molecules of these systems in a way that is not possible in conventional materials. The video-imaging system will enhance the frame rate, spatial resolution and the length of data streams making it possible to study new phenomena. Apart from projects scheduled by the investigators themselves, the imaging system will be available to other local users by scheduling time via a webpage. The users will be aided by graduate students, thus broadening their exposure to a broad spectrum of scientific problems. Many of the projects involve considerable involvement by undergraduate students and the new capabilities will afford them exposure to advanced techniques in a very visual branch of materials physics doc23072 none Few ecosystems are now free of extensive human influence, but the ways that human activity affects ecosystems such systems and their reciprocal effects on human behavior are poorly understood. The major objective of this research project is to develop integrated models that couple forest ecosystem dynamics to human decision making. The project focuses on two major components and their interaction: (1) the structure and functions of forest ecosystems; and (2) the human behaviors that affect forest ecosystem structure and functions. The models of forest structure will be hierarchically arrayed, beginning with the dynamics of tree growth and distribution and work up to the stand and landscape scales. Changes in forest cover affect ecological processes and functions, leading to predictable changes in water quantity and quality. Human behaviors will be simulated using multi-agent models, and they will be coupled to the forest models through linkages that describe different forms of disturbance of human activities on forest and hydrologic system functions and by receiving feedbacks about the effects of such actions from the forest and hydrological models. Information about the values driving human decision making will be obtained through empirical social-science research, including survey questionnaires. The dynamics of the coupled natural and human systems will be analyzed mathematically to identify complex behavior (such as oscillations and chaos ) resulting from the interaction of the human and natural systems. The project will examine natural-human system interactions in four study areas: the Trinity River Greenbelt corridor and the Big Thicket in Texas and the Caparo Forest and Imataca Reserve in Venezuela. Considerable data already has been gathered for the first of these sites, permitting it to serve as a test bed for the project. This two-year pilot study will test the feasibility of modeling forest dynamics as they are reciprocally influenced by human decision making, and it will begin the extension of the research to the larger study areas. Application of the models to the sites in Venezuela, which are very different culturally and ecologically, will demonstrate the generality of this approach to understanding coupled human and natural systems. Results of this research will provide a better quantitative understanding of the interplay between human actions and forest dynamics. This enhanced understanding will give landowners, other stakeholders, and policy makers reliable information about the impact of their decisions on the future composition, structure, and functionality of local ecosystems. It will thereby facilitate a more informed analysis of the long-term consequences of private choices and public policies on the natural systems in which human systems are embedded and with which they interact. This project is supported by an award resulting from the FY special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems doc23073 none This project develops new tools and methodology to study properties of magnetic microstructures. A broad range of technology-enabling magnetic phenomena is emerging from research on thin films and thin-film based structures. The novel magnetic effects associated with engineered materials now provide the basis for a broad range of new magnetic devices including magnetic sensors that improve hard-disk performance in computers (giant-magnetoresistance read heads) and permit magnetic-materials-based random access memory (MRAM) to be developed. In order to optimize the performance of the new magnetic materials and explore new device architecture that exploits the new magnetic phenomena, precise understanding and control of the magnetic effects are required. The new instrumentation to be developed from this NSF award and the research to be carried out using it will advance our understanding of magnetic phenomena that enables new technological applications. The research will study factors that govern critical magnetic properties such as magnetic switching thresholds, the speed at which information can be stored and retrieved, and factors that govern how magnetic materials growth and microstructure fabrication affect the properties. The research is likely to result in discovery of new magnetic effects as well as deeper understanding of novel magnetic phenomena that have already been discovered. The research will provide rigorous training for graduate students in the important fields of condensed matter physics and materials technology that is essential for the United States to maintain a leading position in science and technology. This project develops new tools and methodology to study properties of magnetic microstructures. A broad range of technology-enabling magnetic phenomena is emerging from research on thin films and thin-film based structures. The novel magnetic effects associated with engineered materials now provide the basis for a broad range of new magnetic devices including magnetic sensors that improve hard-disk performance in computers (giant-magnetoresistance read heads) and permit magnetic-materials-based random access memory (MRAM) to be developed. In order to optimize the performance of the new magnetic materials and explore new device architecture that exploits the new magnetic phenomena, precise understanding and control of the magnetic effects are required. The new instrumentation to be developed from this NSF award and the research to be carried out using it will advance our understanding of magnetic phenomena that enables new technological applications. The research will study factors that govern critical magnetic properties such as magnetic switching thresholds, the speed at which information can be stored and retrieved, and factors that govern how magnetic materials growth and microstructure fabrication affect the properties. The research is likely to result in discovery of new magnetic effects as well as deeper understanding of novel magnetic phenomena that have already been discovered. The research will provide rigorous training for graduate students in the important fields of condensed matter physics and materials technology that is essential for the United States to maintain a leading position in science and technology doc23074 none Hammer This research will use human genomic variation patterns as a tool for testing hypotheses concerning the early peopling of North Asia and the Americas and for assessing the relative effects of sex-specific demographic processes and natural selection in shaping North Asian genetic diversity. Within genetics, the study of lineages that are inherited paternally, maternally or biparentally can offer different insights into the origins and global dispersals of Homo sapiens. The genetic analyses will be applied to a panel of 16 males from each of 6 Siberian populations. Comparisons of intra-specific patterns of variation within and among human populations, and with levels of divergence between humans and great apes at these loci, will enable tests of the effects of natural selection and potential differences in male and female effective population sizes. Informative polymorphisms discovered in this Siberian ascertainment panel will be genotyped in a larger set of North Asian samples to allow further tests of the associations between linguistic, geographic, and genetic variation and the effects of genetic drift, migration, and admixture on North Asian populations. These results will be used to aid in constructing more realistic colonization models involving different stages for the early peopling of the Americas. Results from this research will enhance our understanding of the evolutionary history of our species. Reconstructing the patterns and processes of human evolution in Asia is of interest because the the earliest dispersal routes of anatomically modern humans out of Africa are not well understood from the archaeological and paleontological records. Further, this region is the origin for subsequent migrations to Japan, Siberia, and the Americas. The 31 native ethnic groups of Siberia, 14 of which are available for this project, offer significant opportunities to examine the evolutionary forces that may have acted on early modern human populations. Until very recently many native Siberian groups retained traditional subsistence economies and lifeways that may have reflected a pre-Neolithic population structure. North Asian populations, especially those adapted to boreal climates in the northernmost regions inhabited by humans, are genetically subdivided, and genetic drift has played a key role in shaping patterns of variation in Siberia. Furthermore, the demographic history of Siberian populations has led to an unusually strong association between language and genetic variation. The proposed research is a first attempt to develop a comparative genetic framework using data obtained from the same set of samples. The proposed research will directly address three major challenges that now face anthropological geneticists. The multiple locus approach to be taken here will help to understand: (1) which portions of the human genome are variable; (2) how genomic and evolutionary processes have interacted to generate observed patterns of diversity; and (3) what the relative roles of each of these forces have been over different periods of time and in different populations. In addition to having a fascinating evolutionary history, Native Siberian populations represent an ideal model system within which to address these timely issues doc23075 none An IMR award is made to the University of Delaware to purchase a physical properties measurement system (PPMS) to support a number of complementary and multidisciplinary research programs in the areas of novel magnetic materials and superconductivity. The PPMS is an automated variable temperature-magnetic field system that will provide a suite of new electro-transport and magnetometry measurement capabilities that include resistivity, Hall effect, current-voltage characteristics, noise, DC magnetization, AC susceptibility and anisotropy. The system will serve the diverse needs of several faculty members who require routine characterization and detailed studies of materials in magnetic fields ranging from 50 mOe to 90 kOe and at temperatures ranging from 1.9 K to 400K that are currently not attainable. Active research programs that benefit from access to such a system include studies of: spin-electronics , in particular spin-polarized transport in ferromagnetic tunnel junctions, permanent magnets and small magnetic particles, soft magnetic nanocomposites, magnetism of transition metal organometallics, linear magnetoresistance of silver chalcogenides, and electromagnetic properties of recently discovered superconductors. These research programs address fundamental phenomena materials, as well as technological aspects related to materials synthesis, processing, and performance. This IMR award is to establish a state-of-the-art physical properties measurement (PPMS) facility at the University of Delaware. The facility will be used by a diverse set of faculty in the Departments of Physics and Astronomy, Materials Science and Engineering, and Chemistry and Biochemistry who require studies of the electrical and magnetic properties of materials under extreme temperatures and magnetic fields. The research programs address fundamental phenomena in novel magnetic materials and superconductivity, as well as technological aspects related to materials synthesis, processing, and performance. Some areas of research that will benefit from this new facility are related to magnetic field sensing and data storage, such as the unusually large and linear magnetic response found in silver telluride compounds and in the emerging field of spintronics . The latter is a revolutionary approach to electronics that is based on the spin of the charge carrier in addition to its charge. Spin-electronic devices have already found commercial application in the computer hard-drive industry and hold great promise for low power, non-volatile memory applications. The PPMS facility will significantly expand the scope of materials characterization efforts at the institution. In addition to its impact on the scientific goals of the IMR program, the PPMS facility will be integrated into the educational activities of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. These activities include curriculum development for graduate and senior undergraduate level courses (such as laboratory exercises for a course on Magnetic Materials), research opportunities for undergraduates, and established outreach activities that promote the benefits excitement of research to local high school students and parents doc23076 none Economic theory suggests that the lack of product market competition in non-competitive industries gives employers in these industries more latitude to employment discriminate relative to employers in fiercely competitive industries. This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) will utilize individual data from the Current Population Survey and industry data from the Census of Manufacturers and Manufactured Commodities to explore factors, which influence the racial composition of US industries. Particular emphasis will be given to examining the influence of product market competition on racial employment. The specification developed will measure the influence of both foreign and domestic competition on racial composition. Indeed, if the stated hypothesis holds true, competition, regardless of its source - international or domestic product markets- will reduce employers ability to engage in racial preference hiring. Additionally, the developed empirical model will allow for labor supply and labor demand effects that may influence the racial composition of industries doc23077 none Goldman Description: This award supports US-India cooperative research entitled Investigation of the Superelectron Density at the Superconductor-Insulator (SI) Transition in Two Dimensions. US PI Allen Goldman, Institute of Technology Distinguished Professor of Physics, University of Minnesota will start a collaborative research program with N. Chandrasekhar, Indian Institute of Science (IISc). Goldman s NSF supported research focuses on properties of electrons confined to a plane (2D), particularly superconductivity in the extreme 2D limit, where there are issues of quantum critical behavior and the existence of a metallic state in 2D. Chandrasekhar s efforts are concentrated on similar problems, but with specific experimental investigations, which differ from Goldman s. They propose to join forces to carry out investigations on a subset of their respective broader programs. Scope: This research will add an international dimension to both research programs and will greatly speed the progress of research on measurements of the superfluid density near the SI transition. The collaboration will enhance the training of graduate students and postdocs at both institutions and promote interaction between the powerful groups in condensed matter theory at the IISc, (Ramakrishnan) and at Minnesota (Larkin and Glazman). These individuals are world-class theoreticians. Goldman s research program is very strong in the development of young scientists. This activity is supported by the Indian Department of Science & Technology (DST) under the NSF DST joint program doc23078 none Ross This project studies the interaction between culture, activity-related expertise about the natural world, and the structure, content and intra-community distribution of folk biological knowledge. The study community is the Tzotzil Maya township of Zinacantan, Chiapas, Mexico. The research will explore the effects of the many economic and social changes that have occurred in the community in recent times on the distribution and content of folk biological knowledge. Several sets of formal tasks will be accomplished exploring the content, organization and distribution of knowledge about plants and animals as well as local religious rituals. In addition the PI will engage in ethnographic studies of daily life, informal interviews and surveys. The results will be compared with data from previous studies, to assess the changes (any observed loss of factual knowledge about the environment will be compared to any observed loss of religious knowledge). This research will contribute to our understanding of the nature of cognitive models in human populations, their stability and sources of variability. The wider impacts will include the training of local students in social science research methods doc23079 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program supports the acquisition of a Digital Instruments Dimension Scanned Probe Microscope (SPM) System with a NanoScope IV Controller. This instrument will be placed in a central facility to be employed in the research of dozens of undergraduate and graduate students from many departments at Cornell. It will also be used by Cornell nanotechnology classes, K-12 tours, and outside users. The microscope will enable new research directions dealing with nanoscale electrical devices, nanoscale chemical modification, polymer dynamics near surfaces, the development of new types of scanning microscopy, and biomaterials characterization. It will take the place of an older SPM that will be relocated to Simmons College, a women s college in Boston, to be used in undergraduate research aimed at developing polymer materials for organic light-emitting diodes. %%% This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program supports the acquisition of a Digital Instruments Dimension Scanned Probe Microscope (SPM) System, which will be placed in a central facility for use by dozens of undergraduate and graduate students in projects that require imaging samples with nanometer-scale resolution. For example, it will be used to examine molecular-scale electronic devices while they are in operation, the atom-by-atom processes by which chemicals can sculpt surfaces, and the self-assembly of biological materials. The microscope will also be employed by Cornell nanotechnology classes, visiting high-school teachers and students, and outside users. It will take the place of an older scanned-probe microscope that will be relocated to Simmons College, a women s college in Boston, Massachusetts. This will provide students at Simmons and nearby colleges the opportunity to work with a research-quality instrument as they are encouraged to consider technical careers doc23080 none Shifts In Wolf Spider Reproductive Behavior Under Predation Risk Matthew H. Persons, Susquehanna University At every moment, animals must weigh trade-offs and make decisions about how to allocate time and energy into foraging and reproduction while trying to minimize exposure to risks such as predation. The wolf spider, Pardosa milvina, displays effective anti-predator behavior in the presence of information about one of its major predators: the co-occurring wolf spider, Hogna helluo. The anti-predator behavior is mediated through cues (putatively silk draglines and feces) that the predator deposits as it occupies an area. Using these cues as a surrogate for predation risk, the specific costs (predation or reduced reproductive success) can be experimentally decoupled from the benefits (survival and increased reproductive success). Through manipulation of the presence or absence of H. helluo cues (perceived predation risk) with or without a living H. helluo (actual predation risk), the behavioral trade-offs and relative risk of predation can be quantified for every stage in the reproductive process. In each stage one can quantify: (1) the susceptibility of the animals to predation, (2) the behavioral changes made in response to a perceived threat of predation, (3) the degree to which those behavioral changes provide some protection from predation, and (4) the impact of altering reproductive behaviors in response to predation risk on reproductive success and fitness (survival, egg production, and phenology). Experiments will be conducted in the laboratory and in the field. The intellectual merit of this study lies in the fact that it will advance the understanding of predator-prey interactions. In addition, it will lead to a clearer understanding of how natural selection through predation interacts with sexual selection in shaping mating strategies at each stage of the mating process. This study will also provide a deeper understanding of the factors that allow the coexistence of two important predatory arthropods inhabiting agroecosystems. This information will lead to an understanding of the mechanisms that maintain biological diversity and will have important implications for biological control in agricultural systems. The broader impacts resulting from the proposed research lie in the development of a collaborative research community including PhDs and undergraduates from two very different institutions: a two-year, open admission campus of a state-assisted university (Miami University, Hamilton Campus) and a private liberal arts college (Susquehanna University). Recruiting efforts will target non-traditional students, students from local Appalachian populations, as well as traditional minority groups. This program will unite undergraduate researchers from the two institutions behind a common research goal and, in so doing, expose them both to the culture of a different educational environment. The research program consists of a number of technically straightforward experiments that can easily be undertaken by individuals or teams of undergraduates as independent projects. The beauty of such a research program is that undergraduates can take ownership of significant portions of the project and execute them to publication. When these various projects are considered together, a comprehensive understanding of the reproduction behavior of an economically important predator will be revealed. This research program will help build the research program of a new Assistant Professor (Persons), rejuvenate the research program of a senior faculty member (Rypstra) and help a recent Ph.D. (Postdoctoral Associate) learn how to develop a research program at an undergraduate institution. Undergraduates will explore the literature, write research proposals and papers, and present their findings to their peers and to professionals at regional and national meetings doc23081 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program supports the acquisition of a field emission gun for a scanning Auger Microscope at PA St U University Park. Scanning Auger Microscope is an important tool for the study of surfaces, interfaces and thin films. The purchase of an electron gun will allow this technique to be performed in existing equipment at Penn State. Materials researchers will use scanning Auger microscopy to address important questions in the development of both conventional and nanoscale semiconductor devices, superconductors, and carbon nanostructures. Users in the Center for Innovative Sintered Products, Center for Thin Film Devices, and National Nanofabrication Users Network at Penn State will also benefit from availability of the technique. The equipment will be integrated into an existing undergraduate laboratory course in materials science and engineering, and a new one credit graduate course will be offered to teach students about the principles and operation of the scanning Auger microscope. Both graduate and undergraduate students will use the equipment for research. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program supports the acquisition of a field emission gun for a scanning Auger Microscope at PA St U University Park. Scanning Auger Microscope is an important tool for the study of surfaces, interfaces and thin films. The purchase of an electron gun will allow this technique to be performed in existing equipment at Penn State. Materials researchers will use scanning Auger microscopy to address important questions in the development of both conventional and nanoscale semiconductor devices, superconductors, and carbon nanostructures. Users in the Center for Innovative Sintered Products, Center for Thin Film Devices, and National Nanofabrication Users Network at Penn State will also benefit from availability of the technique. The equipment will be integrated into an existing undergraduate laboratory course in materials science and engineering, and a new one credit graduate course will be offered to teach students about the principles and operation of the scanning Auger microscope. Both graduate and undergraduate students will use the equipment for research doc23082 none This award provides funding for the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics (JINA). The Institute acts as a broad forum for a collaborative and synergistic approach in addressing two fundamental problems posed in Nuclear Astrophysics, The Origin of the Elements and the fate of matter at the extreme conditions of Neutron Star Laboratories. JINA involves scientists from three universities, the University of Chicago, Michigan State University and the University of Notre Dame, in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory, the SciDAC Center at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of Arizona, and the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The JINA collaboration represents a spectrum of nuclear astrophysics experimentalists, modelers, and observers who focus their research programs on two fundamental research components and related problems. The first research component focuses on the laboratory and computational aspects of the associated nucleosynthesis processes. The second research component is focused on exploring the rapid nucleosynthesis during the thermonuclear runaways in the outer atmosphere of accreting neutron stars and the fate of their ashes in the deeper layers of the neutron star crust. JINA will organize an extensive series of workshops and exchanges of visitors as well as students with leading groups and institutes in all relevant fields in the US and worldwide. This allows JINA to address the open questions in nuclear astrophysics in a cross-disciplinary, coherent approach and to solve the relevant astrophysical and nuclear problems simultaneously. For nuclear astrophysics, such an approach is essential, as various aspects of the field are connected in complex and sometimes unexpected ways. A key element in JINA is an interdisciplinary educational program. Exchange of junior researchers between the associated institutions is a key in overcoming traditional field boundaries. An extensive outreach program addresses the public and helps to attract young people to pursue a career in science. This award is co-funded by the Physics Division and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate doc23083 none Karato This award will permit the purchase of a scanning electron microscope (SEM) with a range of capabilities for high-resolution analyses of structures and compositions of Earth materials, including biological samples. The SEM we will purchase is a Philips XL30 ESEM-FEG, which operates with both low- and high-vacuum modes with a field emission gun (FEG) and a software hardware package for an electron backscattered diffraction (EBSD) pattern analysis. This new facility is critical to the diverse research activities at Yale Geology and Geophysics including studies of: (1) deformation microstructures of experimentally and naturally deformed samples (Karato, Brandon), (2) fluid-rock interaction (Ague, Rye), (3) microbial geochemistry and geomicrobiology (Blake). Complete orientation measurements with high-spatial resolution, as provided by the EBSD package attached to this type of state-of-the-art SEM, are critical to microstructural studies on deformed rocks by Karato and Brandon. Geologic application of this technique is widespread in Europe, but has been limited to only a handful of labs in the United States. The spatial resolution of orientation measurements is close to 0.25 mm when the FEG electron source is used with an EBSD package. Such a high spatial resolution is critical, particularly for the experimental studies in Karato s group where microstructural developments under high-pressure conditions are studied using specimens with very fine grain size. Similarly, the ESEM mode of operation of this SEM has major advantages in several research areas at Yale Geology and Geophysics. This includes the study of fluid-rock interaction through the charge-contrast imaging technique (which works selectively at ESEM mode), and the study of microbial geochemistry and geomicrobiology, which requires high-resolution images of the morphology of mineral surfaces and associated microorganisms. Addition of this facility to the existing analytical and other experimental facilities will significantly enhance the research programs of experimental Earth science at the department of Geology and Geophysics at Yale University doc23084 none With this award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program the University of Pittsburgh will be able to acquire a laser system which would be a very flexible system for photonics research. This system will have wavelength tunability from the near-infrared to ultraviolet, variable repetition rate, and pulse width variable from 100 femtoseconds to picoseconds, plus a narrow linewidth constant-wave option for some wavelengths. This laser will be replace most of the functions of an existing dye-laser system which has become obsolete and will provide new optical functions which will allow a greater range of experiments. These experiments are part of the ongoing research at the University of Pittsburgh in the area of semiconductor photonics. This system would have immediate impact on undergraduate research at the University of Pittsburgh, because with the availability of the new system, the Nd:YAG-pumped dye laser system presently in use would be made available for a new undergraduate training facility for high-power lasers. This facility will be part of the existing Certificate in Photonics undergraduate education program at the University of Pittsburgh, created through a past NSF program and with continuing support from NSF. The new laser system would also have immediate impact in graduate education, because the primary users of the new system will be graduate students. %%% With this award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program the University of Pittsburgh will be able to acquire a laser system which would be a very flexible system for photonics research. This laser will be replace most of the functions of an existing dye-laser system which has become obsolete and will provide new optical functions which will allow a greater range of experiments. The experiments are part of the ongoing research at the University of Pittsburgh in the area of semiconductor photonics. This system would have immediate impact on undergraduate research at the University of Pittsburgh, because with the availability of the new system, the Nd:YAG-pumped dye laser system presently in use would be made available for a new undergraduate training facility for high-power lasers. This facility will be part of the existing Certificate in Photonics undergraduate education program at the University of Pittsburgh, created through a past NSF program and with continuing support from NSF. The new laser system would also have immediate impact in graduate education, because the primary users of the new system will be graduate students doc23085 none This grant supports the purchase of a continuous wave electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectrometer, which is essential in the synthesis of novel organic magnetic materials and is valuable in the characterization of other magnetic materials. The EPR spectrometer system will replace the current 20+ year-old X-band EPR instrument that is no longer functional. The superior capabilities of this new EPR spectrometer will be tailored to materials research in magnetism, which will complement existing bulk magnetic measurement capabilities based upon superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) magnetometry susceptometry. This new spectrometer will have a significant impact on the following projects: (1) synthesis of organic polymer magnets with stability at ambient conditions; (2) coordinating organic ligands with a few unpaired electrons (high-spin organic molecules) for new organometallic magnets with improved ordering temperatures; (3) organic molecules for potential magnetic resonance imaging contrast agents and radical ions of molecules and polymers with chiral p -conjugated systems; and (4) inorganic metal-based magnets, transition metal complexes, magnetic nanostructures and films. The results of the indicated projects will be disseminated in the peer review journals, conference presentations, and web-based publications. In particular, the significant progress toward practical organic polymer magnet is expected to attract wide attention, promoting better understanding of basic research in materials. These research activities will advance fundamental understanding of magnetic materials and may have a significant impact on the future electronic technology through the development of soft magnets based upon conjugated organic polymers. The EPR spectrometer is indispensable in the training and education of students and postdoctoral associates in the interdisciplinary area of organic magnetism. The spectrometer will make possible a more advanced computer-controlled operation that will facilitate the training of undergraduate and graduate students. The overall infrastructure for materials research at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln will be enhanced, which will benefit other researchers studying magnetic films, nanostructures, and metal-based inorganic magnets and complexes doc23086 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Karen Emmorey will conduct three years of psycholinguistic research on the the perception and production of American Sign Language (ASL). This project includes the first experiments using head-mounted eye tracking technology to study eye behaviors of signers. One set of studies will investigate the social and conversational functions of eye gaze during sign perception. Deaf signing dyads and hearing speaking dyads will be compared to identify perceptual, linguistic, and social demands on eye gaze for signed versus spoken language interactions. A second set of studies will investigate eye movements during sign production. These studies address the grammatical functions of eye gaze in ASL and identify how signers co-ordinate their eye movements with the linguistic structure of signed sentences. Tthe project will also compare the eye behaviors of native deaf signers with adult late learners (hearing and deaf) during sign perception and production. The study of signed languages is essential to an understanding of the nature of human language universals and variation. It is also significant for the development of second language programs that train sign language interpreters, as well as instructors for deaf education programs. The use of eye gaze to mark linguistic structure is unique to signed languages, and the results of this project will provide insight into how language modality can affect grammatical encoding. The project will also identify how second language learners must alter their eye gaze patterns during both sign language perception and production. Finally, deafness has a substantial impact on the ability of students to gain access to academic and scientific careers, and this project aims to promote the participation of deaf people in research by supporting a deaf graduate student and providing a research environment accessible to deaf students doc23087 none This Major Research Instrumentation RUI grant supports the acquisition of a scanning probe microscope (SPM)) for use in materials research and education. The selected SPM allows for temperature variation using hot and cold stages. For research purposes, the instrument has the needed measurement modes, sensitivity, resolution, and acquisition software to examine composition-structure-property relationships of elastomers and polymers, investigate magnetic domains and twin boundaries in magnetic shape memory alloys, assess surface roughness in thin films, characterize the defect structure in anisotropic superconductors, and provide quantitative feedback regarding dimension and quality of nanoimprinted features. These are topics that impact telecommunications, micromachining, industrial processing, polymer science, and nanotechnology industries. Several courses will benefit from SPM s broad array of scanning measurement capabilities, which include mapping of surface topography, hardness, elastic moduli, contact friction, magnetic domains, and tunneling current. Polymer science, nanotechnology, and magnetism have been extensively used in the development of new technologies and there is continued demand for fundamental research within these various fields of materials science. Without a doubt, scanning probe microscopy (SPM) has spearheaded many recent advances in these fields. Acquisition of an SPM will permit the faculty to expand current research efforts and continue to foster interdisciplinary collaborations already underway. In addition, the acquisition will allow researchers to initiate new projects with industry and will help prepare students for creative contributions in these areas doc23088 none Rutgers University will build a facility for very-high resolution ( 1 nm) depth profiling of light elements in thin films using narrow nuclear resonances. This facility will be installed at an existing accelerator at the Laboratory for Surface Modification (LSM) at Rutgers University and will complement several existing depth profiling techniques there. It will be the first facility of its kind in the US. The experiments will utilize several different extremely narrow ( 10 eV) nuclear resonances. By scanning the incident ion energy, the dept from the surface at which the nuclear reactions occur can be varied and information about the depth distribution of the species under study is obtained. Examples of the diverse applications to be pursued include studies of diffusion, segregation and breakdown in ionic conductors, diffusion of sodium in minerals in interplanetary space, novel materials for high performance computer chips, and the long term stability of materials used for storage of nuclear waste. Users outside the LSM, from Rutgers University and elsewhere, can also access this facility, primarily through collaborations. The educational program includes weekend hands-on work in the laboratory by high school students; computer based experiments by undergraduates and summer workshops for senior materials scientists. Research using ion beams is attractive to a wide range of students because of the technical sophistication of these experiments, the straightforward (classical, model independent) quantitative data analysis and the close coupling to very real modern technical applications. %%% Rutgers University will construct a novel facility for depth profiling of light elements by ion beam analysis using narrow nuclear resonances. This will be the first facility for nuclear resonance depth profiling in the US. In many scientific applications, one needs to quantify the number of atoms as a function of their distance from the surface. Examples of such diverse applications, described in the proposal, include studies of diffusion, segregation and breakdown in ionic conductors, diffusion of sodium in minerals in interplanetary space, novel materials for high performance computer chips, and the long term stability of materials used for storage of nuclear waste. The facility will utilize several different extremely narrow nuclear resonances. Depth profiling will be accomplished by changing the incident ion energy, so that the depth at which nuclear reactions occur is varied continuously. The educational program includes high school students, undergraduates and also senior materials scientists. Research using ion beams is attractive to a wide range of students. The technical sophistication of these experiments, the straightforward (classical, model independent) quantitative data analysis and the close coupling to very real modern technical applications makes it possible to attract promising students to science doc23089 none PI (s) Shane Thye Barry Markovsky David Willer University of South Carolina The relationship between social status and the allocation of societal benefits is a major research concern in Sociology. The PIs will conduct research that is at the intersection of two social psychological theories-Network Exchange Theory and status Characteristics and Expectations States theory-that have independently evolved over the last 25 years. The research investigates how status characteristics (such as age and education) affect the distribution of power in exchange relations. Specifically, the PIs seek to answer two fundamental questions regarding status in social exchange relation. First, does performance expectations (generalized anticipations regarding the abilities for one s self and partner) produced by age and education differences generate power for higher status actors? Second, is the purchasing power of money, as a commodity of exchange, is altered by the status of the buyer and or seller? The PIs posit that status characteristics induce power by altering the status value of exchangeable good and or the performance expectations actors hold for one another. The investigators will conduct a series of exchange experiments, in which college students bargain with one another via computers located in separate rooms. Status information regarding the partner is systematically manipulated and observations recorded on how this information alters the outcome of the negotiations. More generally, this research expands our knowledge regarding how status information alters how power is exercised doc23090 none A grant has been awarded to Dr. Pauline Lindo at Alabama A&M University towards the purchase of an ICP-MS instrument for conducting environmental research and training in the Dept. of Plant and Soil Science. The Inductively Coupled Argon Plasma-Mass Spectrophotometer (ICP-MS) is extremely useful in quantifying trace concentrations (ppb, ppt) of heavy metals in various media and will be used to identify and quantify the various species jeopardizing environmental quality, human and animal health, any seasonal peaks of these species, and to issue health alerts to the general public based on models to be developed from the research data generated. The research will include cropping of contaminated soils to a number of hyperaccumulators, plants capable of extracting large quantities of soil heavy metals. At specific intervals, soil and percolating water will be sampled at 6 depths to monitor track movement of heavy metals to groundwater supplies. Runoff water will be sampled almost immediately after each storm event and tested for transported heavy metals and species - sources of contamination for surface water. Runoff samples will be evaluated for sediment content, to determine the transport rate of heavy metals (in adsorbed, exchangeable, or soluble state) across the soil surface. All soil, water, and plant tissue samples will be analyzed for metals and species. Uptake by plants will be correlated with reductions in soil concentrations, to calculate a remediation rate for these soils by various plant species. This project will be repeated in the fall and winter to evaluate seasonal effects on heavy metal loadings and speciation, so that a model can be developed to predict toxicity levels in soil, plant, and water as affected by seasonal variability. Since sorption of metals from aqueous solution onto solid surfaces is an important process that influences accumulation and transport in the environment, fate and transport studies will include kinetics and mechanisms of heavy metal retention release on soil mineral clay surfaces as affected by inorganic anions. The data generated from this study will assist in designing practical and economical remediation strategies to effectively clean up toxic heavy metal-contaminated sites. Measurement of heavy metal species is necessary to determine adsorption desorption mechanism(s), and the instrument will be indispensable for this purpose. The instrument will offer research training and development of research skills to faculty, staff, and minority students at the BS, MS, and PhD levels through summer programs and internships (for BS students), and research projects (MS and PhD students). This study will offer minority students (many of them female), the future scientists, the opportunity to learn, grow, and develop the skills they need to launch their careers. This instrument will also be used for teaching several curriculum courses at Alabama A&M University as an integral part of training. Collaborators from nearby colleges will have access to this instrument primarily for faculty and graduate student research and training doc23091 none This project studies the development and implementation of a new environmental, health and safety system (EHS) that resulted from a consent decree between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a major research university. This agreement is an example of a relatively new form of regulation seeking to promote better management of private firms in ways that meet legislated public goals. Although most regulation attempts to manage some activities of private firms, this strategy supplants more familiar policies that mandate either the use of specific technologies or specific levels of performance. Instead, the consent decree uses a management-based strategy that locates the design, standard setting, and implementation of regulation within the regulated organization itself, creating a form of private management in the public interest, or regulation at a distance. While much research tries to determine if regulation works and whether it is cost effective, too few studies have looked at the ground level - inside the organizations, at the shop floor level - to trace the behavioral and cognitive threads between the routines of daily work and government regulation. By observing the invention of the new EHS organization, its implementation, and dissemination across very different organizational units, the research will unpack the black box of regulatory culture by mapping the ways in which local cultures influence health and safety practices and create the possibility of sustainable improvement in environmental conditions. How, and in what ways, do local organizational cultures instantiate or challenge legal norms and regulations? What forms of surveillance and control operate, and with what effects, in professional collegial versus bureaucratic hierarchical organizations? The research will also expand the already significant roster of ethnographies of laboratory practices while focusing on the creation and work of organizations that mediate the worlds of science, law, and politics. Participant observation, interviewing and ethnographic analysis will trace variations in the interpretations and responses to regulation, following the work of the committees and administrators designing the new system, a reorganization of the environmental health and safety office, as well as interviewing the lawyers from the University and the EPA who negotiated the consent degree. The major fieldwork will be a year and a half of daily observations in eight laboratories and four facilities that vary by authority structure, degree of risk, and past compliance with EP A and OSHA regulations doc23092 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program will allow the University of Tennessee to purchase instrumentation for chromatographic separation and molecular characterization of polymers and copolymers that are synthesized and or studied at the University of Tennessee (UT). More specifically, two chromatographs - one capable of operation at elevated temperatures and the other operating at ambient or near ambient temperatures - will be purchased. To optimize the utility of these systems for characterizing complex polymers, such as branched polymers, block and graft copolymers, and polymers with reactive end-groups, the instrument will include a variety of detectors including light scattering, differential viscometer, ultraviolet, and differential refractometer units. To further expand the usefulness of the room temperature chromatograph, columns will be purchased for operating this unit as either a size exclusion chromatograph (SEC) or as a temperature gradient interaction chromatograph (TGIC), as necessary. The acquisition of these instruments will provide UT polymer scientists and engineers with a state-of-the-art facility for measurement of polymer molecular weights, polydispersities, conformational characteristics, and branching. Improved polymer characterization capabilities will favorably impact the research of more than 60 researchers in the UT Chemistry, Materials Science, and Chemical Engineering Departments, including projects such as the correlation of molecular weight distribution to complex rheology, crystallization studies of polymers and copolymers, optimization of interfacial adhesion in polymer blends and composites, effect of biopolymer structure on food chemistry, and new branched polymers as novel elastomers and for testing polymer dilute solution theory. In addition, these instruments will allow us to develop new laboratories for Introduction to Polymer Chemistry, Polymer Physical Chemistry, and Polymeric Materials courses, thus exposing approximately 100 undergraduate and graduate students annually to the use of multi-detector SEC and TGIC for polymer characterization. The acquisition of instrumentation for chromatographic separation and molecular characterization of polymers and copolymers that are synthesized and or studied at the University of Tennessee. This will provide polymer scientists and engineers with a state-of-the-art facility for measurement of molecular weights, polydispersities, conformational characteristics, and branching of polymers and copolymers. Improved polymer characterization capabilities will favorably impact the research of more than 60 researchers in the UT Chemistry, Materials Science, and Chemical Engineering Departments. In addition, these instruments will allow the PI s to develop new laboratories for Introduction to Polymer Chemistry, Polymer Physical Chemistry, and Polymeric Materials courses, thus exposing approximately 100 undergraduate and graduate students annually to the use of multi-detector Size exclusion chromatography and temperature gradient interaction chromatography for polymer characterization doc23093 none INT- Herman Cummins, CUNY City College $31,350 This project is to perform research collaboration with researchers in Korea on a research project investigating the liquid-glass transition in several sugars and physical aging following a rapid temparture quench from avobe the glass-transition temperature to below it doc23094 none This grant supports acquisition of a research grade multi-wavelength laser Raman spectrometer. The laser Raman spectrometer has two main features: (1) multiple laser wavelengths (400 to 800 nm, visible range) to complement the nm line of the FT-Raman spectrometer, and (2) microsampling. The multiple laser wavelengths is accomplished through a standard 633 nm Ne He laser. Notch filters will be used to get within 50-cm. exp. (-1) of the 413, 568, and 647 laser lines. To minimize the cost, the standard operating mode of spectrometer will be the microsampling microscope. For bulk samples, this provides the ability to spatially resolve the spectra to look for texture and variation in the sample. For microsamples, this provides the micron level resolution required. The microscope is equipped with an auto-focusing and xy-scan microscope stage that enables efficient collection of the spectra combined with the ability to perform automated xy-scanning of the surfaces of samples, greatly extending the power and flexibility of the spectrometer. Finally, a heating and freezing stage allows temperature dependent studies to be conducted from -196 to 600 degrees C. This enables examination of thermal stability of samples as well as the effect of temperature on the material structure. This laser Raman spectrometer will be heavily used in undergraduate and graduate teaching, as a core component in materials characterization courses that cover thermal and spectroscopic techniques of characterizing materials. In this way nearly every student in the MSE department will use these new instrument systems The new spectrometer will also be used for a summer NSF-REU site, where 12 undergraduate students from all over the country come to ISU to learn about semi-conducting materials and devices. Raman spectroscopy combined with microsampling capability has been shown by many researchers to be a critical analytical tool in the study of bulk, surface, and micro samples. Its power, flexibility, and non-destructive nature lend itself to wide spread use for nearly all classes of materials. Recent advances in the development of highly efficient, tunable, reliable, compact, and cost effective lasers combined with high resolution and rugged grating monochromators and solid state CCD detectors has moved the use of laser Raman spectroscopy from the realm of highly skilled spectroscopists into routine use by practicing materials scientists and engineers. Raman spectroscopy is particularly well suited for use in materials research due to minimal sample preparation, wide flexibility of sampling conditions (low and high temperatures, low and high pressure, low and high magnetic field, etc.), generally very sharp well resolved lines for solid state samples, and its non-destructive nature. Combined with a microsampling Raman microscope, Raman spectroscopy can be used extremely effectively in the careful study of surface chemistry, structure, morphology, texture, and even stress doc23095 none Although its ethnobotanical importance in Mesoamerica has long been recognized, agave cultivation by indigenous peoples north of the present international boundary separating the U.S. and Mexico was not documented until the s. Since then, agave cultivation by pre-Columbian cultures in the northern Sonoran Desert has been studied by several scholars, but many questions remain. This research project will examine the genetic effects of pre-Columbian cultivation on three agave species that were grown by several prehistoric cultures in central Arizona from about 600 to A.D.. Because two of these species (Agave murpheyi and A. delamateri) are only found in association with archeological sites, they have been considered to be cultigens, or crop plants. They were most likely transported north from Mexico along prehistoric trade routes, although the identity of their ancestral species remains a mystery. The third species (A. parryi) exists in both wild and cultivated populations, with some of the latter constituting an area of purported human-induced range expansion. Thanks to their longevity and vegetative reproduction, coupled with the absence of agave cultivation in this area after roughly , these three agave species provide a unique opportunity to study the pre-Columbian domestication process, as well as the effects of prehistoric cultivation practices on the genetic variability and structure of wild plants. The investigators will use molecular techniques (a combination of allozyme, microsatellite, chloroplast DNA, and ribosomal DNA analysis) to examine both cultural and evolutionary aspects of agave cultivation in this region. Specific objectives of the project are (1) to determine levels of genetic variability within the two cultigens, (2) to clarify the number of times they were independently introduced into central Arizona from Mexico, (3) to identify the ancestors of the cultigens, (4) to determine whether human selection for different traits in A. murpheyi differed with cultural context, (5) to compare levels and partitioning of genetic diversity within wild and cultivated populations of A. parryi, and (6) to determine whether cultivated populations of this species were all derived from the same founder. Leaf samples for these molecular analyses will be collected from populations of the three target species and their close relatives in Arizona and Mexico. This project will break new ground in a virtually unexplored area of crop evolution. Because most research has focused on modern crops that are part of either a commercial or traditional agricultural system; much less is known about prehistoric plant domestication. Molecular markers have been used successfully to examine the domestication process in other crops, and to determine taxonomic relationships among genera within the Agavaceae (agave) family. Their use in this study will clarify poorly understood taxonomic relationships within the Ditepalae group of that family, and it will assess the genetic consequences of pre-Columbian cultivation on these two cultigens and A. parryi. Both A. murpheyi and A. delamateri are very rare plants that range over a small area of Arizona. Protection has been sought for both species under the Endangered Species Act, the Antiquities Act, and the Historic Preservation Act, but many populations have already been destroyed through urban development and reservoir impoundment. This project will advance fundamental knowledge of these important prehistoric cultigens and the cultural context within which they were cultivated, and it will assist efforts to ensure their preservation doc23096 none Members of the myosin family of actin-based molecular motors use the chemical energy from ATP hydrolysis to perform mechanical work such as vesicle, membrane and mRNA transport in cells. One member of the family, myosin VI, is unique in that it travels towards the pointed ends of actin filaments, as opposed to the barbed ends. Pointed-end directionality enables myosin VI to transport endocytic vesicles from the cell surface to the cell interior. Myosin VI is processive; for each diffusional encounter with an actin filament, a single myosin VI molecule possessing two catalytic subunits takes multiple steps, each coupled to an individual ATPase cycle, before dissociating. The two subunits alternate between leading and trailing positions on the actin filament track. Slow, rate-limiting ADP release enables myosin VI to remain attached to actin for a large fraction of its ATPase cycle time and is believed to coordinate the catalytic cycles of the two heads so that at least one is bound to actin and ADP at all times. In this project, biochemical and biophysical experiments will be employed to provide a complete and detailed characterization of kinetic and thermodynamic parameters of ADP and actin binding to myosin VI, and to identify the mechanism of communication between the catalytic subunits during processive stepping. The detailed analysis of reaction mechanisms will provide quantitative models for the molecular mechanisms of energy transduction, processivity and regulation in myosin VI. General principles about free-energy coupling and cooperativity in molecular motors will emerge from this work doc23097 none This comparative project addresses how information from the natural world is encoded by an animal s visual system to enable it to respond appropriately to resources, such as prey or mates, or stress sources, such as predators. The specific objective is to develop a rigorous quantitative understanding of the consequences of variation in photoreceptor performance in the eyes of two arthropods, a beetle and a crab, that live in relatively similar flat habitats, but which vary in their behavior, eye movements and types of objects to which they respond. As these animals move about their environment, the visual image will be blurred because the photoreceptors are too slow or too coarsely spaced. However, the blur may not be uniform throughout the image - photoreceptors that view regions of the world into which the animal is traveling or which are more likely to contain objects of interest may have been selected to perform better, whereas more blur in other areas of the visual field may be tolerable. We will combine anatomical and physiological data about photoreceptors over the eye with laboratory behavioral experiments and field recordings of natural scenes to learn how visual performance limits or enhances specific types of movement in the animal s natural world. The proposed research is the most comprehensive attempt to date to explore the transfer of information from natural scenes through an animal s photoreceptors during its normal behavior and will provide training in physiology, behavior, and scene analysis for young scientists and several undergraduate students, including under-represented minorities who have worked in the lab in the past. The results will allow, for other species, important insight into the degree to which behavior-driven degradation of visual information may adversely affect adaptive behaviors. In addition to their basic application for sensory ecology, the results of this project will have a strong bearing on machine vision and will be valuable to robotics engineers attempting to design visual sensors that allow optimal robot performance. A postdoctoral scholar and undergraduate students will be involved in the research, and an interactive web site about the research will be created doc23098 none Polymers with low average molecular weight and a low polydispersity index have many applications in the paint and coating industry. Production of such polymers requires tight control of the molecular-weight distribution of the polymers. Control is achieved by adjusting the temperature, diluting the reaction mixture, and adding chain transfer agents, mercaptans, and cobalt glyxins. Liquid-phase, high-temperature, free-radical polymerization is used to produce low average-molecular-weight polymers. Preliminary results also show that high-temperature, free-radical polymerization of butyl acrylate (BA) can lead to the production of low poly-dispersity index, BA polymers. Thus, high-temperature polymerization offers better controllability to produce the desired polymer product. This NSF GOALI project is a joint effort between Drexel University and DuPont aimed at improving the quality of acrylate and styrenic, homo-polymers and copolymers produced via high-temperature, solution polymerization. This Faculty-in-Industry project is motivated by the need to take a fundamental approach to improve the product quality. The PI Soroush will spend one year in DuPont s Marshall Laboratory to pursue the following research and education activities: Study the kinetics of liquid-phase, high-temperature (140-200oC), free-radical, BA and butyl methacrylate (BMA), homopolymerization reactions to develop mathematical models for high-temperature, BA and BMA, semi-batch, polymerization reactors. Calculation of optimal temperature and feed flow-rate profiles as well as loading conditions for high-temperature, semi-batch, BA and BMA, polymerization reactors. Formulation of a set of industrial, process modeling, open-ended problems to be assigned as projects to undergraduate students taking the process modeling courses at Drexel University doc23099 none With this award from the IMR program William Marsh Rice University will acquire an ultrafast laser system, consisting of a chirped pulse amplifier (CPA) and an optical parametric amplifier (OPA). This system will produce intense and coherent electromagnetic radiation with wavelength continuously tunable from 1.15 mm to 18 mm and significantly advance our on-going research at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL). The principal investigators are currently developing an ultrafast optics facility at the NHMFL under the In-House Research Program, for the study of semiconductor quantum structures, especially for investigating the dynamics of excitons in high magnetic fields. Particular emphasis is placed on how to create and control quantum coherence in excitons that are simultaneously subjected to an intense laser field and an intense magnetic field. Such a system provides an ideal environment in which to address fundamental and unresolved issues in nonlinear and quantum optics in solids in a well-controlled manner. The laser field manipulates discrete internal states of excitons whereas the magnetic field freezes the center-of-mass motion of excitons and tunes the internal energy levels. The large spatial extent of excitons, compared to atoms, leads to strong light-matter coupling, and dramatic non-perturbative phenomena are expected. Such research provides significant insight into the fundamental physics of light-matter interaction and can answer whether light excitation in solids is really quantum, as in quantum optics of atoms. Undergraduate and graduate researchers, including students from under-represented groups will be involved and will acquire expertise in cutting-edge techniques in ultrafast optics. %%% With this award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program William Marsh University will acquire a state-of-the-art laser system, which will produce ultrashort pulses of electromagnetic radiation with wavelength continuously tunable in a very wide range and significantly advance our on-going research at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL). The investigators are currently developing an ultrafast optics facility at the NHMFL under the In-House Research Program, for the study of semiconductor quantum structures, especially for investigating the dynamics of excitons in high magnetic fields. Such a project provides an ideal environment in which to address fundamental and unresolved issues in nonlinear and quantum optics in solids in a well-controlled manner. The research will involve a team of undergraduate and graduate researchers, including students from under-represented minority groups. They will acquire expertise in cutting-edge techniques in ultrafast optics doc23100 none Proposal ITR: Internet Disintermediation of Food Delivery - Spanning the Last Mile Kenneth K. Boyer, Michigan State University Tomas Hult, Michigan State University During the eBusiness frenzy of - , numerous new, pure-play Internet grocers promised consumers they could buy groceries at prices equal to or lower than from bricks-and-mortar stores, while enjoying unparalleled convenience without having to leave the house. The most prominent of these companies was Webvan, which reached a stock market value of $7.9 billion at the end of its IPO. Webvan, Home Grocer, PeaPod and several other grocers made huge bets that selling groceries online was both a growth market and a new way of doing business. Unfortunately, the widely publicized collapses of these high profile Internet grocers have illustrated the substantial gap between theory and practical application bridging the last mile to grocery consumers homes represents a substantial challenge. At the outset, many difficulties experienced by online grocers can be fundamentally attributed to a lack of alignment between marketing and operations strategies. In contrast, several examples also exist of grocery and other food delivery companies that appear to be making effective use of the Internet as a link to customers. In particular, both Tesco (a British grocer) and Albertson s (a U.S. grocer) currently have Internet channels for selling groceries that are profitable. Whereas many of the failed Internet grocers seemed to be hoping for a large market share, Tesco and Albertson s view Internet ordering of groceries more as a value-added complementary marketing channel. Our research project examines four cutting edge companies via case studies of their marketing and operations strategies, and via cross-sectional surveys of their Internet customers. Approximately 1,000 Internet customers of each of the four organizations are to be surveyed to assess their experiences with online-based grocery home delivery. Field studies of each organization will also be conducted via structured interviews and analysis of on-site data to assess operational components of food delivery. As an outcome of the study, the project scope is to document best-practice marketing and operations strategies and activities in applying Internet ordering to food delivery. As such, the data generated will provide important guidance to other companies regarding the best ways to match proactive and responsive marketing and operations strategies. The benchmark data should be generalizable to a wide range of companies with characteristics similar to the grocery industry doc23101 none This grant supports the purchase of an ultra-high vacuum (UHV) chamber pumped by a turbomolecular drag pump. The chamber will have a mass spectrometer, an Auger electron spectrometer, and a reflection absorption infrared spectrometer for analytical equipment. The chamber will also have an ion gauge, an ion gun, and a xyzq sample manipulator. The laboratory currently does not have access to a UHV chamber. Without a UHV chamber, the investigators can only observe the end products and the kinetics of their formation in a low-vacuum reactor. A UHV chamber allows determination of what intermediate species form on the surface, which in, turn, leads to a fuller understanding of the reactions. This is necessary for research to determine reaction pathways of b-diketones on various surfaces. With a deeper understanding of the reactions, the investigators can develop methods of cleanly etching surfaces such as nickel iron alloys, alumina, and tungsten with b-diketones. This UHV chamber will permit the training of graduate and undergraduate students in UHV techniques and will provide new opportunities for students in UHV surface science. This project will greatly enhance the training of students in surface science at the University of Tulsa doc22975 none This collaborative proposal would use establishment data from EEO reports to investigate changes in occupational segregation across nine broad occupational categories between and . Preliminary analyses have documented the national declines in average within-establishment segregation by gender and racial ethnic group across the 34 years of data. Average segregation by county and industry will be made available as a public use data file. The levels of and changes in establishment-level segregation will be analyzed to estimate the effects of factors at the establishment level (e.g., years since founding), the firm level (e.g., federal reporting requirements), the industry level (e.g., market competition), and the local area (e.g., minority concentrations and women s labor force participation doc23103 none This grant is for the acquisition of a scanning probe microscope (SPM) possessing both good temperature control and a sealed sample cell for the study of liquid samples. The instrument will be used to provide the first SPM study of surface behavior of liquids near either a wetting transition or a bulk critical point. These measurements will complement ongoing optical studies of these phenomena and provide a new perspective on these topics. Some subjects to be studied include droplet shapes, line tensions, and surface interaction potentials. Droplets on both homogeneous silane-coated and hydrophilic hydrophobic silane-patterned silicon substrates will be studied to ascertain the interactions between the line tension and the surface potential. Other factors considered include the influence of molecular-scale surface roughness and heterogeneity on the contact angle and line tension. The study will significantly enhance understanding of the wettability of surfaces. Surface phenomena, such as adsorption and wetting, play extremely important roles in many physical, chemical and biological processes. Important information about the processes of adsorption and wetting, and how they are influenced by surface interactions and by processes occurring simultaneously in the bulk, can be deduced by studying these phenomena near either a surface or bulk transition point, such as a wetting transition or a bulk critical point. The SPM should have significant impact on the education and training of graduate and undergraduate students by enabling them to conduct both optical and SPM measurements of the same or similar phenomena doc23104 none Synchrotron based high resolution x-ray emission spectroscopy has developed into a powerful approach to probe the metal site valence and spin polarized charge density in transition metal oxide systems. In addition, it can be used to obtain light-element x-ray absorption spectra (such as carbon) with bulk sensitivity. However, this approach has been limited to specialists because of the lack of dedicated systems. With this award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program and the Major Research Instrumentation program scientists at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) will develop a high resolution x-ray analyzer which will be stationed at the National Synchrotron Light Source in Brookhaven National Laboratory. Optimizing the instrument for thin films will makes it, in general, useful for chemical characterization of dilute systems. The instrument will be stationed the at the National Synchrotron Light Source and will be available to a broad range of users in fields as diverse of chemistry, biology, geology and physics. At all levels of the construction and research conducted with this analyzer graduate students will be involved. The instrument will be incorporated in graduate and undergraduate laboratory courses. In addition, the instrument will be utilized as a chemical analysis tool in a transition metal oxide preparation and characterization workshop for Newark area high school students conducted at the NJIT. This will serve to develop scientific literacy and to directly influence students from under-represented groups to pursue careers in science. High-resolution x-ray emission spectroscopy based at electron storage rings at national laboratories has developed into a powerful tool to examine the chemistry of metal atoms. This tool can be applied to study the valence of metal sites in protein molecules in order to understand their function. In addition, this approach can be used to study light atom such as carbon without the need for a high vacuum system. However, its use has been limited to specialists because of the lack of dedicated systems. With this award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program and the Major Research Instrumentation program scientists at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) will develop a high resolution x-ray analyzer which will be stationed at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) in Brookhaven National Laboratory. Stationing the system at the NSLS will make the system available to a broad range of users in fields as diverse of chemistry, biology, geology and physics. At all levels of the construction and research conducted with this analyzer graduate students will be involved. The proposed instrument will have a broad impact through the education of graduate and undergraduate students based on its use in laboratory courses. In addition, the instrument will be utilized as a chemical analysis tool in a transition metal oxide preparation and characterization workshop for Newark area high school students conducted at the NJIT. This will serve to develop scientific literacy and to directly influence students from under-represented groups to pursue careers in science doc23105 none Collaborative Research: RUI - Development and Identity of Sexually Dimorphic Reproductive Signals and Responses by African Elephants In the spirit of the BIO C-RUI program, this proposal crosses disciplinary, departmental, and institutional boundaries. The project will answer five questions regarding the proximate mechanisms of reproductive communication using innovative techniques at the interface of biology and chemistry. African elephants will be used to test hypotheses on developmental patterns of sexually dimorphic reproductive signals and responses. This is not only for the distinct advantages elephants offer as a research model, but also because basic scientific research can provide knowledge about these ecologically important, endangered animals that may aid in their long-term survival. This research team includes an animal behaviorist (Dr. Schulte) and an organic chemist (Dr. Goodwin), each with a track record of successful elephant-related research at predominantly undergraduate institutions. Dr. Rasmussen, who characterized the pre-ovulatory pheromone in Asian elephants and has made substantial contributions to the understanding of elephant biochemistry, behavior and olfaction, joins the team. These scientific collaborators are educators who believe that undergraduates learn science best by doing science, i.e. by research participation with scientists, presentation of results at scientific meetings, and co-authoring manuscripts. Undergraduate collaborators will actively participate in this research on sexually dimorphic reproductive signals and responses. Polygamous animals often display extreme sexual dimorphism, where males and females may live in very different social structures. In mammals, females typically raise the offspring often with little or no male assistance. African elephants (Loxodonta africana) illustrate this pattern very well. Intersexual interaction is especially prevalent during the breeding season when individuals use a variety of communicative behaviors to compete for and select mates as well as maintain social bonds. Chemical signals and related tactile behaviors are primary means of evaluating reproductive condition and attracting mates. The development of chemical signal production and sex-specific responses has received little attention. In fact, sexually dimorphic communication patterns related to reproduction have rarely been compared within the same species simultaneously in a single study. Focal questions in these arenas are posed in three sets: SET I: What are the specific chemical signals in pre-ovulatory urine that: A. Elicit male reproductive behavior? B. Elicit heightened female social responsiveness? SET II: During the differential development of males and females are there recognizable stages of: A. Male responses toward pre-ovulatory urine and its specific chemical signal(s)? B. Female responses toward pre-ovulatory urine and its specific chemical signal(s)? SET III: Based on the results in the first two sets, what are the comparative ontogenetic patterns of male and female responses toward known chemical signal sources and to specific signal compounds and more generally in the display of reproductively related behaviors? These questions are investigated first by a study of female-to-male signals (IA and IIA), then female-to-female signals (IB and IIB) and finally by comparing the two developmental pathways (III). Specifically, answers are sought by: (i) Collecting urine from captive and wild female African elephants; (ii) Performing behavioral bioassays of urine samples for the responses of both male and female conspecifics; (iii) Chemically analyzing bioactive urine fractions to identify organic compounds; (iv) Bioassaying selected urinary components with captive and then wild African elephants; (vi) Observing wild African elephants for reproductive chemotactile communication. The proposed research will identify proximate chemical causes of reproductive behavior and elucidate sexually dimorphic developmental patterns of communication. This study will lay the groundwork for future investigation on male based signals and of ultimate questions on this topic. The findings may assist in the conservation of endangered elephants in practice and other species doc23106 none The funds provided by the NSF Instrumentation for Materials Research program support Michigan State university with the acquisition of a unique micro-compounding molding system to support research in emerging new bio-based materials and polymers, and related educational programs. The equipment will be used in support of research which includes: (i) investigation of fundamental phenomena in newly developed bio-based materials and polymers, (ii) optimization of processing parameters at the micro-scale - - to establish structure, property, and performance relations and (iii) expansion of the integration of research and education in the area of polymer blending, polymer compounding and nanocomposites. The funds provided by the NSF Instrumentation for Materials Research program support the Michigan State University with the acquisition of a unique micro-compounding molding system. The system will support research in new bio-based materials and polymers, and related educational programs. The equipment will be used in support of research to establish structure, property, and performance relations and education in the area of polymer blending, polymer compounding and nanocomposites doc23107 none There are two major sources of errors that account for inaccurate weather predictions from numerical models: the initial-condition errors and model inadequacies. In this project, the PIs will tackle the model inadequacies problem through data assimilation and adjustment of physical parameters during forecast period. They will use the model output statistics (MOS) produced from forecasts as pseudo-data of the system s future states in a four dimensional variational data assimilation (4d-Var) to find the initial conditions that minimize the mismatch between the MOS forecasts and the model forecasts. A second, independent, application of MOS is then applied to the resulting forecast 4d-Var states. This procedure is termed as a forecast 4d-Var as it takes into account the model errors through 4d-Var during forecast. The second part of the research is to dynamically alter model parameters, instead of the initial conditions, using 4d-Var to bend the model toward the true state of the atmosphere. Self-correcting models will be developed to allow selected parameters to be slowly varying functions of time and space based on physical constraints. During this period, MOS for these parameters are obtained and then used to predict optimized parameters in forward runs. This procedure is termed as model bending . Models of varying levels of complexity will be used to gain a better understanding of model inadequacies overall. The research will bring more attention into model errors in numerical predictions. It has the potential of improving operational forecasts and directing future model development. If successful, it would lead to a major breakthrough in numerical modeling. The project provides good opportunities for training graduate students in the highly needed areas of data assimilation and predictability doc23108 none This grant is for the acquisition of a multilayer monochromator for the synchrotron microtomography station at the Louisiana State University Center for Advance Microstructures and Devices (CAMD). A SXM station has recently been assembled at the synchrotron facility by a multidisciplinary group of physicists, chemists, and engineers. The SXM station has been installed on a CAMD bending magnet with a maximum energy of about 15 keV. It is anticipated that in , the station will be placed on a 7.3T wiggler beamline, which will provide usable photons to 50 keV. While the early results have been highly successful, analysis of the data has highlighted the need for the monochromatic beam. As a polychromatic x-ray beam traverses a sample, the shape of the energy spectrum changes with the lower end of the incident energy spectrum absorbed more than the higher end. This property is known as beam hardening. For the lower Z elements found in environmental and biological samples, a monochromatic beam will aid in optimizing the contrast and thus minimizing the image artifacts from beam hardening effects. In addition, a monochromatic beam will also aid in chemical identification through contrast arising from a judicious choice of energies above and below core-excitation thresholds. The CAMD SXM beamline appears to be the only SXM beamline in the world currently without a monochromator. Synchrotron x-ray microtomography (SXM) is playing an increasingly important role in research in materials, biology, physics, geology, and environmental sciences. Many applications use tomographic imaging techniques to produce a three-dimensional representation of a sample. Since October , the SXM station at LSU has been used to acquire images from such disciplines as chemistry, physics, biology, oceanography, material science, and engineering. Because of CAMD s close association with the state of Louisiana and LSU, education and outreach are strongly emphasized. Participants in the SXM research program include local high school students, undergraduate research assistants (through several NSF-sponsored REU programs), graduate students, post-doctoral associates, and both LSU and Southern University faculty and staff doc23109 none This project seeks to expand our understanding of the years surrounding the South Sea Bubble of , the first great financial crisis of modern capitalism, by focusing on the individuals who actually purchased shares and thus made portfolio decisions. We examine in detail the responses of stock market participants before, during, and especially after the financial collapse of the South Sea Company. To do this, we exploit data we have already collected (NSF 99- ) and continue to collect and encode on the holdings and transfers of the major financial assets available in the London market among all individuals who held these assets before, during, and after the crisis of . We reconstruct the transfers of stock holdings in the South Sea Company itself after its reorganization in , as well as in the Bank of England, the East India Company (both competing with the South Sea Company for investors), the Royal African Company (complementary to the South Sea Company), and the Hudson s Bay Company (completely removed from the action). Combining all four sources, then, we determine how all stockholders responded to the spectacular rise and fall of the South Sea Company in two competing companies, a complementary company, and a noncommittal company. Our examination of the changes that took place in the distribution of these assets, especially in the period to , is an intensive analysis of the reallocation of financial risk by market participants in the first emerging market after a major financial collapse. Especially interesting to us are contrasts in trading activity between the pre- and post-bubble periods and the changes we observe in activity by specialized traders as well as the role played by the increasingly diverse consumer base. Analyzing these changes in individual behavior within the unregulated and untaxed stock market of the time helps us understand how financial markets recover from systemic shocks doc23110 none Advances both in the development of new materials and in fundamental understanding of new physics are often coupled to advances in experimental technology. This work extends such technology via an instrument permitting conventional transport style measurements to be made without the use of ohmic contacts. The approach is based on the use of capacitive coupling to samples. Such a system, while involving significant experimental challenges, offers considerable promise for the investigation of physical phenomena where conventional ohmic contacts can either not be used, or are unreliable to use. Examples of such areas of investigation include 2-D electron systems with extremely low electron densities, for which the relative importance of electron interaction are greatly enhanced, and low density samples at very high magnetic fields, where ohmic contacts can be notoriously difficult. Another area is the study of the metal insulator transition, where the combined effects of low densities, disorder, and magnetic field effects can combine to make ohmic contacts unreliable. These measurement capabilities will also benefit the investigation of new materials, since transport measurements can be used as a diagnostic tool without the considerable effort often necessary to develop ohmic contacts. The unique requirements of a capacitively-based measurement approach requires the development of new electronic and cryogenic techniques and instrumentation. Combined with the prospect for exploration of important topics in physics, its development will provide valuable training and experience for graduate students. Experience has demonstrated that pushing at extremes of temperature, magnetic field, or other measurement parameters, has exposed inadequacies in our knowledge of materials. Exploring such areas has often led to new and fundamental advances in our understanding of materials and their physics, and even to the development of new materials. This work will extend experimental capabilities by the creation of an instrument for making contact-less electrical measurements of electronic materials in cryogenic environments. The measurement system will provide experimental access to a number of areas, areas for which the difficulty of making conventional electrical contacts effectively prevents investigation. The instrument itself represents a technical challenge, involving low-noise measurements and complex sample environments, and its use will involve technologically important materials. It provides a valuable arena for the training of graduate students in both advanced technology and fundamental physics, whose training is a cornerstone of our technological infrastructure doc23111 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program to Cornell University will allow several teams of investigators to develop x-ray diffraction instrumentation that will provide unique experimental capabilities and powerful general use equipment for use at the G2 experimental station at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS). A six-circle diffractometer, two CCD area detectors, and a temperature- and environment-controlled sample stage will be built. The diffractometer will allow for a very wide range of experimental configurations and will be the basic diffractometer for the G2 experimental station. The area detectors will be used at G2 for a variety of different experiments, but will also be made available to users at other experimental stations easing a current very high over demand for such detectors at CHESS and at Cornell. The stage will be able to hold samples at any temperature between 20 and 900 degrees C in a range of atmospheres during diffraction experiments and will also be used at different experimental stations. Together, this equipment will be optimized for high resolution and time-sensitive x-ray diffraction work. Initial work includes: 1) studies of mechanical deformation, relaxation, and anelastic recovery, as well as interactions among microstructure development, phase changes, and solid state reactions in thin films and nanopattened structures, 2) studies of the evolution of strain and magnetic and electronic properties as a function of controlled oxidation in magnetic oxide thin films and nanostructures, 3) studies of formation and structure of highly ordered arrays by metal initiated self-assembly of ligand modified den-drimers, and 4) studies of the kinetics of interface growth of metal mono- and multilayers. This equipment will be made available to outside users and to students, and will be used in outreach programs such as the Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) and Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) programs sponsored by NSF through the Cornell Center for Materials Research (CCMR). %%% This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program to Cornell University will allow several teams of investigators to develop x-ray diffraction instrumentation that will provide unique experimental capabilities and powerful general use equipment for use at the G2 experimental station at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS). This equipment will be optimized for high resolution and time-sensitive x-ray diffraction work. It will be used to obtain rapid high resolution measurements of thermally induced phenomena in nanostructured materials, including strain, deformation, phase transformations, magnetic and electronic properties, film formation, and solid state reactions. This equipment will benefit a large number of research groups at Cornell, and also external US and international collaborators. It will be made available to outside users, to students, and will be used in outreach programs such as the very successful Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) and Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) programs sponsored by NSF through the Cornell Center for Materials Research (CCMR doc23112 none This research examines the ways in which immigrants to the United States and United Kingdom understand citizenship. Much of the theoretical debate over citizenship highlights two sets of issues: 1) the ways in which citizenship is understood and experienced as a result of the interplay between legal institutions and a feeling of belonging and membership in a political community, and 2) the ways in which ideas about citizenship may be changing in response to globalization. These debates suggest ideas about and the experiences of being a citizen are changing as a result of international migration. The research explores these debates through over 150 qualitative interviews and 36 focus groups with leaders and members of immigrant organizations in four US cities and two cities in the United Kingdom. The particular focus is on organizations serving Arab immigrants. The organizations will cover a range of social, cultural, and political activities, and respondents will be selected to ensure variation across gender, socio-economic status, and age. The research will examine the ways in which immigrants are incorporated into the cities and countries in which they currently live, how they understand citizenship, the connections they may continue to feel with the source country, and whether and how they reconcile feelings of belonging to communities in two countries. The research specifically asks how ideas related to citizenship affect political activism and whether conditions within specific places shape their identification as citizens of either the host or source country. The research will yield important theoretical and tangible advances. First, if migration is changing citizenship and the sense of belonging to a political community, then it is important to understand how they are changing and how the changes affect the lives of immigrants. In focusing on the people who negotiate changing ideas about citizenship on a daily basis, the research provides the basis for theoretical advances that are grounded in real experiences. This is particularly important in trying to understand the nature of citizenship and community in the context of globalization. Transnational migration show no signs of receding, so it is important for receiving societies to understand the ways in which immigrants understand the roles of community and citizenship. Recent events have demonstrated the importance of understanding why some groups feel marginalized or isolated within a society. Attending to the differing conceptualizations of citizenship and community may create a situation in which understanding between different groups can be fostered doc23113 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program supports the acquisition of an inductively coupled reactive ion etching (ICP-RIE) system at The Ohio State University. This facility will immediately generate new materials and materials-allied research programs at Ohio State with substantial teaming amongst interdisciplinary partners. It will have enormous impact on a very wide range of existing electronic materials - based research programs in several academic departments, many of which are currently supported by NSF. The equipment is engineered for research level and pilot line plasma processing using corrosive processing gases such as Cl2, BCl3 or SiCl4. It has an automatic switch dual power range RF generator, which makes etching possible under very low ion energies. The formation of this facility will allow the coalescence of inter-university research programs across the state, that span fundamental studies on the effects of ICP-RIE processing on the properties of semiconductors to the development of novel device structures, heterostructures and nanostructures. The equipment chosen for this purpose is explicitly designed for such flexible utilization, so that the breadth of activities and wide ranging impact expected will be achieved. %%% With this award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program The Ohio State University will establish a state-of-the-art facility for the plasma processing of a wide range of electronic and photonics materials, with the acquisition of an inductively coupled reactive ion etching (ICP-RIE) system. This facility will immediately generate new materials and materials-allied research programs at Ohio State with substantial teaming amongst interdisciplinary partners. Once in place, the ICP-RIE will rapidly attract local and statewide industrial joint projects ranging from sensor technologies to photonics and energy conversion technologies. To ensure open access to multiple users, the ICP-RIE system will be placed into our well-established Semiconductor Processing Clean room structure to be employed in the research and education of dozens of undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral associates from both inside and outside Ohio State. Finally, the ICP-RIE system will allow us the ability to process a wide range of materials, a core capability that we are currently lacking. This system will complement existing facilities in the clean room, and thus its impact will be greatly enhanced by the leveraging obtained via almost all projects using the clean room facilities doc23114 none Arzberger This is a proposal submitted by Dr. Peter Arzberger requesting funds to establish a Pacific Rim and Grid Middleware Assembly (Network). To accomplish this, he requests the involvement of domain scientists and technologies in the Pacific Rim countries through a series of working meetings (3 in , 1 in , and 1 in ) to accelerate daily use of the GRID for advancing science. The development and deployment of the East Asia GRID middleware and application network is critical for the cooperation in information technology between the U.S. and East Asia. This effort will promote a regional collaboration in software development and form a partnership between the U.S. and key western Pacific Rim countries, such as Australia, China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand. Efforts to promote this technology throughout Asia and the world could enhance the development of worldwide standards to make grid-enabled computing and resource sharing a reality. The initial efforts will be supported jointly by the Chinese Academy of Science, Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information, the Taiwan National Science Council and NSF doc23115 none The project will begin the development and demonstration of a new method to produce quantitative bounds on the risk that can be attributed to a set of environmental agents in circumstances in which conventional agent-by-agent front-to-back risk analysis produces results with extremely wide uncertainty bounds. The method will begin by summarizing available toxicological and epidemiological evidence on the end-point(s) in a form that facilitates easy comparisons. A constrained sum expert elicitation procedure will be developed which uses these data, together with expert judgment, to probabilistically attribute known and suspected causes of the health end-point to the observed cases. The result of this work should be a new set of methods which can be used by the risk analysis community in conjunction with more traditional risk analytic methods to bound the magnitude of possible health impacts from some types of environmental risks doc23116 none The award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program in the Division of Materials Research will allow Northwestern University to acquire a new Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer (FTIR) Instrument for research and education in the Departments of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Chemistry. The proposed FTIR instrument will replace the current outdated equipment and will be housed in the Polymer Characterization Facility of the Materials Science department. The instrument will consist of two modules: a conventional turn-key FTIR spectrometer with an array of attachments for standard spectroscopic techniques, and a highly customizable module specifically designed for measurements of molecular structure in ultra-thin films of organic molecules. The former will make the instrument easily useful to a broad audience of Northwestern researchers, while the latter will allow measurements of molecular conformations in more difficult samples, especially in biomaterials and nanomaterials research. The instrument will facilitate the training of undergraduate and graduate students in all three departments, by being utilized in laboratory sections of polymer materials class offered to the engineering undergraduate students, and a spectroscopy class offered through the chemistry department. The more advanced capabilities of the spectrometer will greatly advance the ability of students involved in the interdisciplinary bio- and nanomaterials research at Northwestern to elucidate and understand the molecular-level details of structure in their samples. %%% The award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research Program in the Division of Materials Research will allow Northwestern University to acquire a new Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer (FTIR) Instrument for research and education. The instrument will be housed in the Polymer Characterization Facility in the Materials Science and Engineering department, and will be used to characterize new polymeric, biological and nanomaterials prepared by researchers at Northwestern. In particular, it will enable measurements of the orientation, shape, and arrangement of molecules in extremely thin (just a few molecules thick) films deposited on the surfaces of solids and liquids. Such films are often critical in creating the new materials for biotechnology and nanoscience applications, governing, for example, the interactions of biomaterials with biological tissues, or the workings of nanoscale sensors capable of precisely measuring minute quantities of substances present in a gas or a liquid. The instrument will be used in instruction for several classes currently taught to science and engineering students at Northwestern. Moreover, students of the undergraduate and graduate levels will use the instrument for their research, improving the quality and scope of their training as future members of the science and engineering workforce doc23117 none The award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program (IMR) will be used to acquire a state-of-the-art Sum Frequency Generation (SFG) spectrometer at the University of Utah. SFG is the only truly interface-specific vibrational spectroscopic technique. The symmetry constraints on SFG prohibit nonlinear interactions in the bulk, while at an interface, such processes are allowed due to the local break in symmetry. As a result, the spectroscopy of molecules residing in the interfacial region can be probed selectively without any contributions from the molecules present in the more pervasive bulk phases. Analysis of SFG spectra can yield information on population, structure, and orientation of interfacial species with a nanometer in-depth resolution. Researchers from a variety of disciplines such as materials science, metallurgical engineering, chemistry, bioengineering, and polymer science, will use this equipment for advanced research and education. The research will study interfaces in polymer nanocomposites and self-assembling polymer and surfactant materials, as well as, probe the conformation and orientation of surface confined protein species. The investigation of adsorption phenomena and interfacial water structure at different technologically important interfaces will be an important new contribution. The studies will have far-reaching implications in many fields of nanotechnology, surface chemistry, biology and medicine and will advance our understanding of interfacial phenomena thus enabling new technological applications. The research is likely to result in the discovery of new interfacial structures, as well as, in deeper understanding and explanation of novel effects at solid liquid, solid gas and liquid gas interfaces. A number of graduate students from different departments will work with the SFG spectrometer and receive important training in the advanced fields of laser surface and nonlinear spectroscopy. %%% The award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program (IMR) will be used to acquire a state-of-the-art Sum Frequency Generation (SFG) spectrometer at the University of Utah. SFG is the only truly interface-specific vibrational spectroscopic technique.. Researchers from a variety of disciplines such as materials science, metallurgical engineering, chemistry, bioengineering, and polymer science, will use this equipment for advanced research and education. The research will study interfaces in polymer nanocomposites and self-assembling polymer and surfactant materials, as well as, probe the conformation and orientation of surface confined protein species. The investigation of adsorption phenomena and interfacial water structure at different technologically important interfaces will be an important new contribution. The studies will have far-reaching implications in many fields of nanotechnology, surface chemistry, biology and medicine and will advance our understanding of interfacial phenomena thus enabling new technological applications. The research is likely to result in the discovery of new interfacial structures, as well as, in deeper understanding and explanation of novel effects at solid liquid, solid gas and liquid gas interfaces. A number of graduate students from different departments will work with the SFG spectrometer and receive important training in the advanced fields of laser surface and nonlinear spectroscopy doc23118 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program will enable groundbreaking experiments that seek to apply the bottom-up approach of atomic and molecular manipulation to several focused areas in science and technology. The primary experimental apparatus for these investigations is a custom-built low-temperature scanning probe microscope capable of both studying and controlling matter at atomic length scales. The tunneling mode of the apparatus will be exploited to perform scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) within an environment comprised of ultra-high vacuum, ultra-low temperature down to 500 mK, a high magnetic field up to 14 T, and a multiple-probe sample stage for performing simultaneous electron transport measurements. Achieving these challenging conditions requires the acquisition of the specialized equipment described in this award. Undergraduate and graduate students working directly on these projects will integrate and operate the proposed instrumentation to perform state-of-the-art experiments. In synergy with these laboratory components, this instrumentation will critically augment a substantial educational and outreach program already being implemented by the PI and Stanford University. %%% This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program will enable groundbreaking experiments that seek to apply the bottom-up approach of atomic and molecular manipulation to several focused areas in science and technology. This scientific effort is interdisciplinary in nature, centering on physics and materials science but involving ideas, techniques, and conundrums from other fields such as chemistry, engineering, and information technology. The primary experimental apparatus for these investigations is a custom-built scanning probe microscope capable of both studying and controlling matter at atomic length scales, requiring the acquisition of the specialized equipment described in this award. Undergraduate and graduate students working directly on these projects will integrate and operate the proposed instrumentation to perform state-of-the-art experiments. In synergy with these laboratory components, this instrumentation will critically augment a substantial educational and outreach program already being implemented by the PI and Stanford University. Through these multifaceted contacts between the research agenda, students, and people outside the laboratory, the proposed instrumentation will have a broad and unique impact beyond the traditional realm of experimental science. In recognition of the importance of this award, Stanford University is providing cost-sharing funds amounting to 50% of the funds provided by NSF doc23119 none The Interpretation of Contemporary Gauge Theories Richard Healey, University of Arizona The proposed project is to analyze the conceptual foundations and implications of gauge theories in physics with a view to answering the central interpretative question: What is the world like if a gauge theory is true of it? Gauge theories are of fundamental importance to contemporary physics. Three of the four basic physical interactions acknowledged today are currently best described by quantized gauge theories, and the concept of gauge has also been fruitfully applied to the fourth, gravity. But the conceptual foundations and implications of gauge theories remain unclear. It is up to the philosopher of science to analyze these and make them clear to scientists, philosophers and interested laymen who seek a deeper understanding of the content and significance of contemporary physics. Besides contributing to the philosophy of science, it is hoped that conceptual clarifications resulting from the proposed research will broaden the education and facilitate the thinking of theoretical physicists in their attempts to go beyond the Standard Model of elementary particles, and to arrive at a successful quantum theory of gravity. Previous research by the proposed PI has yielded an interpretation of a class of classical gauge theories, including electromagnetism. The conclusion was that these theories are best understood as ascribing properties not simply at each point of space at each instant, but rather directly on closed paths in space-time. Arguments for this conclusion rest on an analysis of the behavior of quantum-mechanically described particles interacting with a classical gauge field. Do similar conclusions emerge from a fully quantum mechanical analysis which treats both particles and interactions by means of quantized fields? Recent loop-space quantizations of Yang-Mills fields suggest this may be so. A major goal of the project is to pursue this suggestion, and to explore the implications of this kind of non-locality for natural philosophy. The project then investigates the possibility of an interpretation of loop-space quantum gravity as a gauge theory that attributes properties non-locally on closed paths in space-time. Smolin ( ) takes the loops themselves as basic, with space-time emerging from appropriate structures of loops in some classical limit. This suggests a more radical form of non-locality in which properties are ascribed to objects more fundamental than space-time (though space-time itself emerges as an approximate construction out of such objects). The project will evaluate the coherence, credibility, and implications of this suggestion. The project is to be conducted over the course of two summers as well as the academic year - . The proposed PI intends to accept an invitation to spend several months during in London, England as a Visiting Fellow of the Centre for the Philosophy of the Natural and Social Sciences at the London School of Economics. This should facilitate consultations with both philosophers and physicists interested in the topic of the proposed research doc23120 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program support will allow Oregon State University to purchase a new X-ray detection system that will be utilized for the determination of atomic-level structures of new high-technology materials as well as small molecules of relevance in biology and catalysis. The instrumentation comprises an area detector and temperature-control devices for examining structures over the temperature range of 77 to K. Such variable-temperature measurements provide a means for establishing relationships between atomic-level structures and bulk physical properties, such as thermal expansion, electrical conductivity, and laser action. By extension, such relationships establish the framework for invention and development of new types of microelectronic and optical devices. Temperature control can also be important for establishing the structures of small molecules that might be thermally unstable or only weakly efficient in scattering an X-ray beam. The new system also has considerable value in education. Because an overall view of a diffraction pattern is available from the area detector, unlike in serial systems, graduate students can much more readily absorb the concepts of diffraction and crystallography, leading to more productive classroom and research experiences. The high throughput of the system also allows an extension of the education experience to students involved in a number of materials-research collaborative programs, to undergraduates both at OSU and neighboring institutions, and to others beyond the University community. Altogether, these new opportunities will provide students with robust foundations for pursuing their career objectives. This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program support Oregon State University with the purchase a new X-ray detection system. The instrumentation will be used to support research and education activities in the areas of solid-state inorganic materials and small-molecule synthesis. The proposed instrument cluster comprises a CCD area detector with four-circle goniometer, low-temperature and high-temperature devices, and a fiber-optic collimator. This cluster will provide a means to broaden and more fully integrate the research and education missions of the University in the area of structure determination. The area detector makes possible the ready identification of supercells and incommensurate structures, short data-collection times and high throughput, and much improved avenues for teaching concepts in diffraction and crystallography. Coupling the high throughput of the area detector with low- and high-temperature devices provides opportunities in variable-temperature measurements that are currently unavailable. Structures of inorganic materials can be determined at both low and high temperatures to establish relationships between crystal structure and thermal-expansion, electrical, or optical properties, while weakly diffracting or thermally unstable small molecules can be analyzed at low temperatures to obtain useful structural information. Further, local undergraduate education institutions and companies will have access to this instrument through collaborative projects doc23121 none Regulation of stomatal apertures by guard cells controls leaf gas exchange and modulates photosynthesis and plant water use. Guard cells sense many environmental and hormonal signals through complex sensory transducing cascades. Light is a major signal modulating stomatal responses. Like many other plant cells, guard cells have a specific sensory transducing cascade that uses blue light as an environmental signal. Recent, NSF-supported studies with guard cells have discovered that blue light-stimulated stomatal opening can be fully reversed by green light. The green reversal can be observed in light-pulse studies: If a pulse of blue light is followed by a green light pulse, stomatal opening is not observed, if the green pulse is followed by second blue light pulse, the opening response is restored. The green reversal is also observed under continuous blue and green illumination. In this case the reversal depends on the green light dose, with full reversal observed under a 2:1 green to blue light ratio. The action spectrum for blue light-stimulated opening has the 3-finger fine structure typical of many blue light responses in plants. The action spectrum for the green reversal also shows a 3-finger structure, red-shifted by about 90 nm. The carotenoid, zeaxanthin has an absorption spectrum closely matching the action spectrum for blue light-stimulated opening, and carotenoid isomerization in a protein environment often red-shifts the absorption spectrum. One of the objectives of this project is to determine the nature of the photochemical reactions mediating the blue-green reversal, the identity of the involved chromophore(s), and the early sensory transducing events leading to the green reversal of blue light-stimulated opening. The photochemistry of the early sensory transducing steps will be studied by HPLC, UV-visible, resonance Raman, and Fourier Transform Infrared Absorption Spectroscopy (FTIR). Several photoreceptor mutants such as npq1 and phot1 phot2 will be studied in order to determine whether their genetic lesions have impaired the blue green reversal response. Another objective is to investigate whether the blue green reversal response in guard cells senses the blue:green photon ratio of solar radiation reaching leaves growing in sun and shade conditions, and transduces it into acclimation strategies. Success in these studies will characterize a new photobiological mechanism of plant cells, which could mediate plant acclimations and adaptations. The recently discovered reversal of blue light-stimulated stomatal opening by green light offers a new understanding of the ways plant cells respond to light. Detailed investigation of the photochemical reactions mediating the blue green reversal could open the way for the unambiguous identification of a blue light photoreceptor in guard cells. In addition, research on the blue green reversal in the intact leaf could significantly enrich our understanding of ways by which leaves acclimate to sun and shade conditions. Success in the research project supported by this award should significantly enrich our knowledge of plant function doc23122 none This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program to the University of Washington supports the acquisition of a solid phase peptide synthesizer, and a triple channel CPMAS probe. The instrument will provide new NMR capability to the university. It will have impact in the area of molecular engineering, in characterization of biomolecules immobilized at material surfaces, in atomic level information on the structure of biopolymers adsorbed onto material surfaces and the details of protein side chain-surface interactions. %%% This award from the Instrumentation for Materials Research program to the University of Washington supports the acquisition of a solid phase peptide synthesizer, and a triple channel CPMAS probe. The instrument will provide new NMR capability to the university. It will have impact in the area of molecular engineering, in characterization of biomolecules immobilized at material surfaces, in atomic level information on the structure of biopolymers adsorbed onto material surfaces and the details of protein side chain-surface interactions doc23123 none This grant supports development of a pulsed laser deposition system, a key component in a new deposition facility that optimizes the various layers required for field-effect doping in a highly controlled manner and with well-characterized interfaces. The system is built upon existing laboratory capabilities. The development should permit versatile and reliable field-effect structures to be fabricated that can routinely withstand the enormous electric field stresses inherently present in such structures. An aim is to allow very good control over the interfaces at which the field-effect doping occurs must be achieved. The use of the field effect to dope the surface of a material is a well-established technique in the study and application of semiconductors. Until recently it was believed that field-effect doping could not be usefully applied to conducting (metallic) materials. Recent results using both direct, voltage-biased capacitive field-effect structures and ferroelectric field-effect structures have demonstrated that quite substantial charge densities can be induced. In some cases the consequences of this field-effect doping have been dramatic. For example, Schoen, Batlogg and coworkers have achieved a superconducting transition temperature of 117K by means of field-effect doping into CH3Br intercalated carbon C60. These results both provide an existence proof that the field effect in conducting materials can be made to work and demonstrate dramatically the possibilities. These results represent the opening of a new era in the study of two-dimensional electronic systems, one of the most fertile areas of condensed matter physics over the past few decades. Concomitantly, they represent a particularly effective venue for the training of graduate students doc23124 none This award from the Major Instrumentation Program provides support to scientists at the University of California, Riverside who are developing a microprobe that can take pictures revealing the spatial distributions of various atomic-scale defects that may be present in an object. Nanoscale imperfections in solids can interact to produce macroscopic effects in response to applied stress, such as aging, weathering and cracking. Understanding the mechanisms for the transformation of isolated defects into significant imperfections is crucial to predicting and ultimately preventing failure in many materials of key importance to society. An essential element to correlating macroscopic events with their precursors would be the availability of images that could show the spatial distribution and organization of atomic defects on many length scales. The positron microprobe has an unrivaled sensitivity for detecting open volume defects at the parts-per-million level of concentration in many materials. The objective is to develop an instrument that includes a scanning positron microprobe that can capture images of material defects with a high data rate and resolution such that centimeter size samples can be viewed with micron resolution. The microprobe will be useful across many scientific disciplines, leading to advances in diverse fields including environmental science and geology where the examination of rocks could reveal pathways for the transport of pollutants and elucidate important evidence for the earliest life forms. The microprobe instrument will combine (a) a positron microprobe for crystalline imperfections and porosity; (b) a picosecond laser probe for introducing thermal gradients and acoustic shocks and for measuring surface reflectivity; (c) a scanning electron microprobe for measuring features at 20 nm resolution on precisely the area of interest without disturbing a sample; and (d) a sample preparation and surface spectroscopy station. The scanning positron microprobe will have a two orders of magnitude greater data collection rate than any existing positron probe and would for the first time allow obtaining images at 1 micron resolution over macroscopically interesting distances in useful laboratory timescales, ie., several hours. The combination of this unique positron probe with two well-established tools, ie., SEM and optical imaging, would enable structure studies on spatial scales extending from atomic defects to macroscopic fracture on the mm scale and temporal studies from picoseconds to days. The object of having all instruments combined in the same sample chamber is to ensure that the atomic scale defects are not changed by remounting and handling of the sample and that the stresses on the sample remain the same for all 3 characterizations. The proposed instrument will thus have all the advantages of SEM laser optics combined with a unique positron contrast image linked to atomic-scale defects. Several students will be trained in the details of the principles, construction and operation of the proposed instrument. The availability of the microprobe will be the basis for the formation of an interdepartmental group of researchers focused on understanding the well known tendency of systems driven by stress or energy gradients to organize at many length scales. A new type of microscope combining positron, electron, and laser microprobes will be developed that will allow scientists to study how atomic-scale defects affect the physical properties of solid materials and how neighboring atomic-scale defects are gradually organized into much larger imperfections such as cracks. The core of the instrument is a positron microprobe, which has an unrivaled sensitivity for detecting defects in which a handful of atoms are missing from their usual location. By combining the positron microprobe with a conventional electron microscope that can resolve structures on the scale of 100 s of atoms and a pulsed laser microscope that can resolve structure on a micron scale, it will be possible to directly resolve how individual atomic defects evolve into larger and larger structures. With the new understanding made possible by such an instrument, materials scientists may one day be able to predict where cracks will form in a strained, aging, or weathered object. This will allow to test and design stronger and more durable materials for semiconductor devices, airplane turbines, and nuclear waste storage containers. The new microprobe will be useful in all scientific disciplines where solid material properties are important. For example, it may lead to advances in environmental science and geology where the examination of rocks could reveal pathways for pollutants to move and provide evidence for the earliest forms of life. several students will be trained in the details of the principles, construction, and operation of the proposed instrument. Once available, the microprobe will be the basis for the formation of an interdepartmental group of researchers focused on understanding the general tendency of all complex systems to respond on many length scales when they are strained. The ultimate goal would be to find new physical principles which would allow us to predict the behavior of a wide variety of seemingly unrelated complex systems ranging from systems of atoms in a solid to systems of astronomical bodies in a galaxy, molecules in a cell, or organisms in a colony doc23125 none Wolff Knowledge of the chemical compositions of rocks is essential for understanding Earth processes. In particular, chemical analysis is a major part of the investigation of igneous rocks. X-ray fluorescence is the primary workhorse technique providing accurate and precise analyses of the major chemical constituents of rocks, plus some important minor and trace elements. Centralized analytical services have the benefit of being cost-effective, and of reducing noise from inter-laboratory discrepancies in the geochemical data used by the scientific community. The GeoAnalytical Lab at Washington State University has offered such a centralized XRF service for over two decades. The current spectrometer has been in operation since , and needs replacement. This grant will enable the WSU Lab to purchase a new spectrometer, in order to continue to provide a reliable major- and trace-element analytical service to the geochemical community. Installation of the new instrument will improve sample throughput and turnaround time, and significantly enhance data quality for some trace elements, as well as enabling the Lab to continue to provide a service for the next decade or more doc23126 none This Small Business Innovation Phase II project is directed toward optimizing and scaling up fabrication of exchange coupled Fe ceramic nanocomposites for high performance soft magnetic applications. In Phase I, Inframat Corporation took pioneering steps to develop Fe ceramic magnetic nanocomposites, which resulted in significant improvements over microsized ferrites including higher saturation magnetization and lower power loss. The design of the Fe ceramic nanocomposite is based on an exchange coupling effect between neighboring nanoparticles, where Fe nanoparticles are uniformly distributed within an insulating ceramic matrix. Successful Phase I efforts have provided the scientific and technological groundwork for further magnetic nanocomposite technology advancement in Phase II. The proposed Phase II program scales-up the Fe ceramic nanocomposite technology performed in Phase I. Emphasis is on rapid commercialization of nanocomposite cores. Key Phase II milestones include (1) scale-up of the demonstrated chemical synthesis into pilot-scale production, (2) demonstration of prototype cores having desirable magnetic properties through exchange coupling, and (3) demonstration of high performance prototype DC-to-DC converters using the exchange coupled magnetic nanocomposite cores. Phase II participants include Ceramic Magnetics, UConn, Villanova Univ., Georgia Tech, and a converter specialist, Colonel William McLyman. Ceramic Magnetics has pledged $75,000 cost share to the Phase II and will carry a $250,000 follow-on funding doc23127 none A substantial literature explores various ways to estimate black-white wage gaps among men. Social scientists realize that it is difficult to measure black-white differences in labor market opportunities among men because large numbers of less-skilled black men do not work and therefore do not report wages. Thus, the sample of wages among black men is a highly select sample, and the resulting estimate of the average wage among black men is overstated because of this selection bias. While much progress has been made on statistical methods for addressing this important measurement problem, it is striking that the literature deals almost exclusively with the data on men. Many economists and demographers believe that selection bias is not a problem when measuring the black-white wage gap among women because black and white women have similar labor force participation rates. This research will explore how racial differences patterns of labor force participation among women may affect measured black-white wage gaps among women even though overall levels of participation are the same among black and white women. Preliminary results indicate that the relationship between labor force participation and family structure differs notably by race. Married women who are raising children account for a disproportionate share of white women who do not work in the market. Among black women, single mothers are over-represented in the sample of women who did not report any market work, and a significant fraction of black, single mothers who do not work in the market receive means tested government assistance in some form over long time periods. My initial results come from the cohorts of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79). By using data on wages over the -92 period, I construct a wage observation for at least ninety percent of black women and over 90 percent of white women in the NLSY79 sample. In addition, based on other data in the NLSY79 that describe family structures and income sources, I develop imputation rules that allow me to construct estimates of black-white gaps in both mean and median wages based on samples that include wage data for at least 95 percent of both the black and white samples. Thus far, my work with the NLSY79 data suggests that the measured black-white gap in wages among working women seriously understates the absolute magnitude of the black-white gap in potential wages among women. My findings are preliminary and apply only to one census year, , for women born in the years -64. Thus, much work remains. The research will address the following questions: (1) How robust are initial findings concerning selection bias and the measurement of black-white wage gaps among young adult women in ? (2) How have changes over time in racial differences in selection patterns affected the measurement of trends in the black-white wage gap among women? (3) How do racial differences in patterns of selection affect racial differences in wage growth over the life-cycle among women. (4) Has labor market discrimination against black women relative to white women increased, decreased, or remained constant during the past three decades? My research plan seeks to combine several of the NLS panel data sets as well as data from the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics. These panels provide histories of work experience as well as histories of labor and non-labor income. By combining the information in various panels, I will be able to replicate the work I have done with the NLSY79 using a broad range of age groups over the census years , , , and . Early results suggest that black women may not have made as much progress during the s as previous studies suggest. Further, black women may not have experienced losses in relative labormarket status during the s and 90s even though many studies argue that they have doc23128 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Manish Singh will conduct two years of research on visual perception-how we see a complex, changing world of overlapping objects. The perceived world includes three dimensional objects and surfaces. The inputs to our eyes, however, are not objects or surfaces, but fluctuations in the two-dimensional arrays of light projected onto each retina. These retinal arrays change a great deal as we move in the world-as a couch gets partly hidden behind a coffee table when walking across a room, or a dog is partly seen behind thick foliage. A fundamental and unsolved problem of vision is to understand how our brain can sort out such complex changing light arrays into perceived surfaces and objects. The funded research uses computer-generated stereoscopic displays in which some objects are partly occluded by other objects, and thus present only disjoined portions of their boundaries to the eyes. Despite this, observers perceive complete, unitary, objects-not disparate fragments. One aspect of the research program examines constraints involving both surface shape and contour geometry that may determine the continuity and shape of partly occluded objects. A second aspect of this research concerns when an occluding object is partially transparent. In this case, light reflected from two different surfaces (the transparent, and the underlying opaque surface) is merged at the retinas, but we see two separate surfaces placed at different depths along the same line of sight. This component of the research investigates the geometric (figural) and photometric (light intensity) constraints that the brain uses to split image luminance into two distinct surfaces placed at different depths. This research will enhance understanding of a central aspect of human vision. Additionally, it will contribute valuable knowledge that can be used to construct artificial vision systems for recovery of surface layouts from camera images doc23129 none This grant will provide travel support for participants in the 5th International Symposium of the ESIQIE of National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City, May 29 - 31, . The topics covered in the symposium are: environmental engineering, energy, process development, thermodynamics, supercritical fluids, catalysis and reactor engineering, polymers, process simulation, gas processing, petroleum refining, petrochemicals, optimization and control, quality, productivity, metallurgical and material processing and materials characterization. Plenary lectures deal with catalysis, thermodynamics, reaction engineering, data banks, process simulation, metallurgical processes and materials characterization. In addition to technical sessions, the symposium contains an industrial forum and cultural festival. Immediately preceding the symposium, international participants will present a series of short courses. The topics of these courses are: process simulation, experimental and theoretical thermodynamics, reaction engineering and catalysis doc23130 none Shifts In Wolf Spider Reproductive Behavior Under Predation Risk Ann L. Rypstra, Miami University, Hamilton Campus At every moment, animals must weigh trade-offs and make decisions about how to allocate time and energy into foraging and reproduction while trying to minimize exposure to risks such as predation. The wolf spider, Pardosa milvina, displays effective anti-predator behavior in the presence of information about one of its major predators: the co-occurring wolf spider, Hogna helluo. The anti-predator behavior is mediated through cues (putatively silk draglines and feces) that the predator deposits as it occupies an area. Using these cues as a surrogate for predation risk, the specific costs (predation or reduced reproductive success) can be experimentally decoupled from the benefits (survival and increased reproductive success). Through manipulation of the presence or absence of H. helluo cues (perceived predation risk) with or without a living H. helluo (actual predation risk), the behavioral trade-offs and relative risk of predation can be quantified for every stage in the reproductive process. In each stage one can quantify: (1) the susceptibility of the animals to predation, (2) the behavioral changes made in response to a perceived threat of predation, (3) the degree to which those behavioral changes provide some protection from predation, and (4) the impact of altering reproductive behaviors in response to predation risk on reproductive success and fitness (survival, egg production, and phenology). Experiments will be conducted in the laboratory and in the field at Miami University s Ecology Research Center. The intellectual merit of this study lies in the fact that it will advance the understanding of predator-prey interactions. In addition, it will lead to a clearer understanding of how natural selection through predation interacts with sexual selection in shaping mating strategies at each stage of the mating process. This study will also provide a deeper understanding of the factors that allow the coexistence of two important predatory arthropods inhabiting agroecosystems. This information will lead to an understanding of the mechanisms that maintain biological diversity and will have important implications for biological control in agricultural systems. The broader impacts resulting from the proposed research lie in the development of a collaborative research community including PhDs and undergraduates from two very different institutions: a two-year open admission campus of a large state assisted university (Miami - Hamilton) and a small private liberal arts college (Susquehanna). Recruiting efforts will target non-traditional students, students from local Appalachian populations, as well as traditional minority groups. This program will unite undergraduate researchers from the two institutions behind a common research goal and, in so doing, expose them both to the culture of a different educational environment. The research program consists of a number of technically straightforward experiments that can easily be undertaken by individuals or teams of undergraduates as independent projects. The beauty of such a research program is that undergraduates can take ownership of significant portions of the project and execute them to publication. When these various projects are considered together, a comprehensive understanding of the reproduction behavior of an economically important predator will be revealed. This research program will help build the research program of a new Assistant Professor (Persons), rejuvenate the research program of a senior faculty member (Rypstra) and help a recent Ph.D. (Postdoctoral Associate) learn how to develop a research program at an undergraduate institution. Undergraduates will explore the literature, write research proposals and papers, and present their findings to their peers and to professionals at regional and national meetings doc23131 none Wohl This one-year award for US-Italian collaboration in flow hydraulics along step-pool channels involves Ellen Wohl at Colorado State University and Mario Lenzo at the University of Padova in Italy. The objectives of the project are to add an international dimension to an ongoing experimental and field study of step-pool hydraulics. The goal of the project is to provide comparative data to measurements at East St. Louis Creek in the Colorado Rocky Mountains through a study of the Rio Cordon, a 5 km 2 watershed in the eastern Italian alps, which experiences periodic step-destabilizing floods followed by step re-formation. The US researchers bring to the collaboration expertise in the step-pool hydraulics in the Colorado Rockies, where the step-pool channels are very stable and do not permit direct measurement of hydraulic parameters during step-reorganization. This is complemented by the Italian researcher s extensive experience of the Rio Cordon, including ten years of automatically measured data, in addition to detailed field surveys of numerous channel reaches which have facilitated the study of step-pool evolution following flood-associated increases in discharge and sediment transport. The data resulting from this collaboration are expected to contribute to an improved understanding of step-pool hydraulics of great interest to both US and Italian groups, and to other researchers working in the Rio Cordon basin. One broader impact of this research lies in the access to diverse field sites, research methods, and research communities for two US Ph.D. students. A second impact of the research will be increased understanding and prediction of the mechanics of high-gradient channels, which supply a disproportionately large amount of water and sediment to lowland regions, which are at great risk than lowland channels for alterations associated with climate change and human activities doc23132 none The proposed research will investigate the ability of a vertebrate to use gradients in the inclination or dip angle of the earth s magnetic field (defined as the angle between the magnetic field lines and gravity) to determine geographic ( map ) position. Previous studies of homing orientation have shown that magnetic inclination may be used to derive one coordinate of a navigational map. To provide a more rigorous test of magnetic inclination s role in providing map information, the effects of small changes in magnetic inclination on homing orientation will be used to estimate characteristics of the local gradient of magnetic inclination within an animal s home range, e.g., the home value of inclination and the alignment of the gradient. These behaviorally derived estimates will then be compared with actual measured values obtained by mapping the spatial gradients of magnetic inclination around the sites where animals were collected. A comparison of the response of animals collected at sites along the north-south and east-west axes relative to our testing site will also be used to help distinguish map and non-map effects resulting from changes in magnetic inclination, and to determine whether a true bicoordinate map is being used to determine geographic position. The proposed experiments will contribute to a better understanding of the magnetic field s role in the map component of homing. These experiments will also help to determine the lower limits of the sensitivity of biological systems to variation in the geomagnetic field and, at a more general level, to determine the precision with which the vertebrate nervous system can measure the absolute values of physical stimuli doc23133 none Taylor Pollen tubes deliver sperm to the ovules via a process known as tip growth. Large amounts of plasma membrane and cell wall precursors, synthesized in the Golgi, are transported to the tip where they undergo the polymerization and cross-linking reactions characteristic of tip growth. This proposal describes a pollen-specific protein, CBP25 22, that was isolated by a functional interaction with calmodulin (CaM), the major Ca 2+-sensing protein in cells. CBP25 22 is located on the exterior face of an abundant class of pollen organelles and has oxalate oxidase (OxO) activity, a reaction that generates peroxide (H2O2). Based on these unique biochemical properties, we propose that the CBP25 22 OxO-generated H2O2 mediates cross-linking of wall proteins and polymers in growing pollen tubes. Moreover, given the pivotal role of tip Ca2+ gradients in pollen tube growth, we propose that the Ca 2+-sensitive binding of CaM to CBP25 22 confines expression of the OxO activity to the growing tip. The focus of this research is to demonstrate that the unique biochemical properties of CBP25 22 identified in vitro, are expressed within the growing pollen tube. The proposed experimental plan will use immunological, biochemical and protein-protein interaction techniques to localize the CBP25 22 and CaM proteins and the enzymatic product (H2O2 ) in situ . Specifically we will demonstrate a Ca 2+ -sensitive association of CBP25 22 and CaM in vivo and show that OxO-generated H2O2 co-localizes with the CBP25 22 protein in vivo. This research may provide a novel way to control pollination, thus alleviating the current concern about gene flow via pollen from transgenic crops. In addition it may have a broader impact on basic growth mechanisms; neurons and fungal hypha also exhibit tip growth. Significantly, CBP25 22 shares its unique CaM-binding characteristics with neuromodulin, a protein that functions in vesicle transport and fusion in the tip of extending neurons. This similarity suggests that there may be a common mechanism underlying tip growth in diverse organisms doc23134 none Scientists are in general agreement with the idea that urbanization and its accompanying habitat loss and fragmentation will result in a reduced communities of organisms-often referred to as opportunistic, generalist or weedy species-that are able to cope with the novel selection pressures and stressors of the urban environment through rapid evolution or plasticity, or both. Evidence for this point of view comes from the disproportionate persistence of broadly distributed species in urban environments, the rapid evolution of resistance to toxins by fungi, bacteria, plants, insects, and even mammals, and the rapid evolution among some invertebrate groups of preference for introduced plant hosts. While it is clear that specific selection pressure in the urban environment can result in rapid evolution of specific traits, it remains unclear how and by what mechanisms the overall physiology and life history characteristics of populations will change with urbanization. Specifically, will populations in urban environments become more opportunistic, and if so what roles will phenotypic plasticity and evolution play? To address these questions this project will investigate the response of a common stream fish, blacknose dace, to watershed urbanization. Past comparative studies have documented increased growth rates, younger age and size at maturity, increased swimming performance, and reduced predator avoidance behavior in populations occupying streams draining heavily urbanized watersheds ( 90 % urban land use). The general goals of this project are to continue comparative studies in greater detail, including extending them to the cellular level, and to investigate the relative roles of phenotypic plasticity and evolution in producing the differences observed in urban populations. Field studies will involve comparison of cellular and tissue structure, protein expression, metabolism, lipid storage, diet, and survival across a series of streams draining watersheds with 20 to 90 % urban land use. A common garden experiment will be conducted to investigate the potential genetic basis of any of the differences observed in past studies, or discovered during this study. By conducting programs to enhance undergraduate retention in the project over multiple years the investigators hope to increase undergraduate understanding of, and desire to pursue multidisciplinary studies in graduate school doc23135 none Jordan Funds from this grant will support the purchase of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery from agents of the European Space Agency. The SAR imagery will be archived at computational facilities of the Western North America InSAR (WInSAR) Consortium. SAR imagery supports tectonic, volcanological, and hydrologic research by consortium members through interferometric analysis of temporally separated SAR pairs to detect to spatially continuous, subtle (mm to cm) deformation of the earth s surface over large baselines (100s of km). As the U. S. does not currently have a satellite borne SAR sensor that provides global coverage while Western Europe, Canada and Japan do, WInSAR negotiated SAR data buys from ESA address a national deficiency in the short-term and create a cost-effective means of providing SAR imagery to the nation s geoscientists. The NSF Division of Earth Sciences, the USGS and NASA co-support WinSAR data buys doc23136 none Modern, componentized Internet services allow server consolidation by sharing common service components. Such sharing can potentially reduce the installation cost, space, and energy consumption. However, to date, services are seldom shared across server applications to avoid possible interference between them. Service providers often run multiple instances of shared services, one for each frontend service. The only benefit gained thus far, from the deployment of multi-tier services is that new services can be composed quickly using existing service components. Since these service components may execute on different machines, each optimally configured for its services, multi-tiered services tend to be more scalable than monolithic counterparts. The proposed research aims to address the shortcoming of current OSs in executing multi-tiered services. We will focus on OS extensions that correlate and trace service activities across the tiers of a multi-tiered server farm. We will develop mechanisms for online classification of activities (e.g., premium vs.~basic service classes), as well as mechanisms that allow system administrators to insulate (performance-wise) different service classes even when the activities of different service classes may overlap and share backend services. The same OS mechanisms that are used to manage multi-tiered services can be used to analyze the interactions between different tiers and the interferences between different service classes. We will show that a combination of service interaction analysis and service policing minimizes performance invasiveness between services applications. We will also investigate how to improve insulation between services in this environment. We will explore how service implementations may take advantage of an improved OS infrastructure for multi-tiered doc23137 none A new area of operations research is financial engineering, whose origin goes back to the landmark papers of Markowitz, Merton, Black and Scholes (which were awarded two Nobel prizes in Economics). It uses mathematical, statistical, computational methods and algorithms, along with economic principles and intuition, to study complex problems in the financial service industry and to help other industries to better manage their financial risks. The research, which focuses on the development of stochastic models in financial engineering, consists of three projects: (1) Using jump diffusion processes to model asset (e.g. stocks, bonds, etc.) prices. The goal is to improve the empirical performance of the classical Black-Scholes model based on the normal distribution, while still retaining analytical tractability. (2) Using renewal theory to price discrete path-dependent options, such as discrete barrier and look back options. The goal is to get accurate analytical approximations and fast algorithms to price complex financial contracts. (3) Using birth-death processes to model growth stocks (e.g. biotechnology and Internet stocks). The goal is to explain an empirical puzzle reported in the Wall Street Journal, and to try to understand the recent burst of the ``internet bubble . The United States holds a leadership position in financial services industry, an important sector of the service economy; future preeminence in this industry will rely on innovation in financial services and in the technology that supports these services. This research aims at developing mathematical tools that can be implemented by the financial service industry to better understand complex financial products, and to better manage financial risks for both financial and non-financial companies. The emerging field of financial engineering is attracting many bright students and professionals in engineering, mathematical and physical sciences. The field presents interesting new research challenges and many opportunities to see academic research impact industry practice. The research is integrated with the PI s educational activities at both the doctoral and master level, and seeks to meet a high academic standard while addressing issues of practical importance and providing graduate training that will prepare students for research careers in either a university or industry doc23138 none In the s, the birth and development of modern computers suggested the notion that minds, or brains, are computers. This thesis combined the advent of computers with both the old idea that reasoning is a form of calculation (from Hobbes to formal logic) and the materialist doctrine that reasoning, and more generally cognition, is carried out by the brain. The view that the mind-brain is a computer, here called computationalism, is the topic of this dissertation research project. The project will trace different versions of computationalism from their historical root in the cybernetics movement to the many disciplines that incorporated it. It will complement recent scholarship in related areas by showing how early attempts at mathematical modeling of the brain, the development of new mathematical and modeling tools, and new hypotheses about memory mechanisms came together to form a novel conceptual and methodological framework for studying the functional organization of the mind-brain. The study will interest not only historians, but also those who work in the sciences of mind and brain and those who are interested in their foundations. This research includes both a philosophical and a historical component. The pioneers who developed computationalism and many of today s concepts--A. Turing, J. von Neumann, N. Wiener, and W. McCulloch--had clearer motivations for their views than their followers of today. Through understanding the reasoning of the pioneers--the roots of today s positions--within their historical context, and studying how that context has since changed, the investigators hope to shed light on today s views. In order to carry out the historical component of this project, they will rely on published material in history, philosophy, and science, as well as unpublished material. Funding for this project will support four trips to archives containing the unpublished papers of Turing, McCulloch, Wiener, and von Neumann. Aside from its historical interest, clarifying the history of computationalism has several potential benefits. In the philosophy of mind and brain sciences, this project would illuminate current discussions of computationalism by showing what historical role computationalism played and still plays in shaping research programs in different disciplines. In addition, in philosophy of mind, it may stimulate functionalist philosophers, many of whom rely on computationalism, to rethink some of their views. It may equip funding agencies to more efficiently distribute research funds. And, finally, it would affect science and technology education. Through the future publication of articles directed at the general public and the design of an undergraduate course on Computers, Minds, and Brains, the expertise developed in this project would contribute to the education of the general public about computers and their relationship with psychology and neuroscience doc23139 none SES # Workshop on the History of Algebra in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Michael Singer, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Cal -Berkeley Karen Parshall, University of Virginia This proposal is for a workshop at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at the University of California at Berkeley in spring . The conference, which culminates a semester-long focus at the Institute on commutative algebra, brings together leading historians of mathematics and mathematicians for a five-day discussion of relevant topics. This workshop represents an important departure for the institute, which normally focuses on purely mathematical enterprises. The organizers are Jeremy J. Gray (Centre for the History of the Mathematical Sciences, The Open University) and co-PI, Karen Hunger Parshall (Departments of History and Mathematics, University of Virginia). The workshop should have two components: lectures and moderated discussions. Some twenty, hour-long lectures are to be delivered over a five-day period by established researchers, more junior scholars, and advanced graduate students. Ample time for questions and discussion follows each lecture. Each day closes with a moderated discussion period for a dialogue between the historians and the mathematicians visiting MSRI about critical issues in the history of modern algebra. Among the topics to be analyzed are: o the contribution of David Hilbert to modern algebra, his re-working of the ideas of Dedekind and Kronecker, and the role of his new formulation of the subject in guiding subsequent research; o the origins of Emmy Noether s work and its later developments; o the spread and development of algebraic thought from Germany to Britain, France, and the United States; o the importance and the nature of the connections between commutative algebra, algebraic geometry, and algebraic number theory; o the philosophy and the teaching of modern algebra; and o the institutionalization of modern algebra in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This workshop provides a unique forum for the interaction of historians of mathematics and mathematicians, who represent one of the primary audiences for research in the history of mathematics. Moreover, the workshop will allow us to take a major step forward not only in understanding the evolution of modern algebra in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but also in defining a common agenda for on-going research in the history of modern mathematics. Both of these objectives will be accomplished in the short term through interactions at the workshop and in the long term through a published, book-length volume with an explicitly historiographical component doc23140 none This research in mathematical and computational gravitation seeks to make Einstein s equations more useful for observations of the cosmos which will be coming to us within the next decade. Professor York will focus on the study of formulations of the Einstein evolution equations that are mathematically rigorous and useful for large-scale numerical implementation and for systematic analytic approximation. There are also significant improvements in the initial-value equations, the canonical action principle, and the Bianchi identities. This work will exploit the methods of hyperbolic partial differential equations from the mathematical literature, generalized so as to apply to Einstein s theory. Development of certain fundamental concepts required for the existence of a rational general-relativistic statistical thermodynamics will also be studied. There exists tremendous scope for advances in understanding and practical use of gravity theory, matching those in experimental and observational gravity and cosmology that have been, are, and will be continuing to occur. It is such theory that this research will continue to find, to exhibit clearly, and to put to work in the next several years and beyond doc23141 none This special meeting of experts in the field of molecular self-assembly is to promote intensive discussions on, and to identify future prospects and needs for, fundamental research on and implementation of these concepts in emerging technologies. It is anticipated that these discussions will catalyze cross-disciplinary and international collaborations to advance the state of knowledge and application of this important field. Molecular self-assembly lies at the heart of advanced applications in areas as diverse as medicine, information technology, bio-engineering and green chemistry, and is poised to play a significant role in fueling the growth of the rapidly-emerging field of nanotechnology. To realize the potential offered by these technologies, there is a need to advance the understanding of self-assembled systems, from both experimental and theoretical perspectives, and to develop a vision as to the most promising areas for applications and technology development of these phenomena. The purpose of this meeting is to bring together a group of eminent scientists spanning a range of appropriate disciplines (chemistry, physics, chemical engineering, materials science and biochemical physics) to stimulate identification of the prospects and needs for advancing our understanding of self-assembly phenomena in the context of advanced applications in a wide range of areas, and to promote inter-disciplinary and international collaborations. The organizers will provide an exciting and inspirational atmosphere for the conference. As well as describing recent advances, the speakers will be asked to look forward and raise significant issues that should be addressed in the short and intermediate term for the most effective way for furthering this area. In this way we intend to catalyze new collaborations, which will provide the foundation for future research programs in the area. A wide range of topics fit under the general heading of self-assembly, both in bulk solution and at interfaces, and these will be addressed at the meeting. Some specific topics, which will be discussed are not only the mechanistic aspects of self-assembly in surfactant systems, the role of binding energy concepts, and the nature of weak and long-range forces, but also how a deeper understanding of these principles can accelerate the development of new functional materials based on self-assembly principles, and of new applications of these materials. Many of the details of interactions at the molecular level such as lipid-protein interactions in biological membranes and phospholipid surfactant interactions are still not well understood. A related topic of current interest is the spatial and temporal control of the interfacial and bulk properties of both liquids and solids, which is of crucial importance in microfluidic applications, for instance, and which will require a better understanding of the dynamic aspects of self-assembly and development of methods to accomplish these goals. New interrogative techniques are key to facilitating advances in all these areas of colloid and interfacial science, and will be another focal point of this conference doc23142 none This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) will study the use of MEMS devices as distributed and embedded sensors for highway material monitoring. MEMS sensors and telemetry systems will be put on a chip (0.5-in in diameter) and will be embedded into concrete and act as distributed sensors. The position of each individual smart aggregate in the concrete over time will be monitored remotely using radio frequency (RF). Each chip will contain different sensors to monitor concrete compaction quality, concrete stress distribution, concrete damage, moisture, temperature, chloride and sulfate concentrations, concrete curing and traffic history as well as telemetry and long-life powering systems. To the Principal Investigator s (PI) knowledge, the use of MEMS devices as wireless and as integrated sensing method for highway material monitoring has not yet been explored. In the first phase of this research, MEMS sensors for temperatures, chloride, stress and traffic flow monitoring will be embedded into concrete specimens to evaluate their responses under different test conditions and evaluate their durability during concrete curing. If successful, wireless monitoring techniques, including telemetry and long-life powering systems will be developed. The SGER is appropriate for this work because of its novelty, and because this work has elements of risk in that the MEMS sensing technique may not be well- suited for concrete materials because the MEMS sensors may not survive during the concrete curing, or the possibility that unforseen difficulties with such a sensing technique may arise. This resesearch will allow the PI to quickly evaluate the concept of embedding MEMS sensors into the concrete doc23143 none The Origins and Determinants of Technological Change in Late Nineteenth Century Mexico Edward Beatty, University of Notre Dame Where domestic invention and subsequent innovation largely underlay early industrialization in Britain and the United States, later industrializing nations relied heavily on the importation of technologies from abroad. Yet new machines and processes rarely transferred across national borders without substantial friction and adaptation in new environments. Moreover, transfer did not always or automatically lead to the diffusion of productivity gains and, in many places, had little impact on domestic technological capabilities. This historical project uses late nineteenth century Mexico to explore current conceptions in the economic and social construction literature about technology transfer and its impact on domestic capabilities. First, the project reconstructs Mexico s late-century experience of technological change. Historians of Mexico have long known that new productive technologies lay at the center of accelerating economic and social change in these decades. But they have conventionally viewed this experience as one dominated by foreign technologies, initiated by foreign entrepreneurs, and limited to a relative handful of industries and regions. Railroads, electricity, and metallurgy provide the classic cases in a limited and anecdotal literature. Most assert that there was little diffusion of know-how, arguing implicitly or explicitly that imported foreign techniques had little or no impact on domestic capabilities. Yet no systematic work on these issues has been done. Using quantitative evidence and several case studies, this project traces and explains central patterns of technological change. Second, the project explores those factors which shaped the relationship between technology transfer and domestic technological capabilities. This requires moving beyond attention to the physical importation of machines and processes. Disparities between imported technology and the local environment (including the economic, political, and socio-cultural context) condition whether technology transfer leads to dependence or to an increased capacity to invent, improve, and innovate. In late nineteenth century Mexico, these disparities were substantial, and the question remains, to what degree did they retard diffusion and domestic capacity or, in contrast, were surmountable? Recent work suggests that in some cases (but not all) socio-cultural differences were malleable and technology transfer could effectively stimulate an initially laggard domestic capacity. Based upon the archival research supported by this award, the project makes contributions to the study of Mexican economic history as well as to historical studies of technology. The PI adopts insights from both economic and social approaches to technological change and ultimately seeks to integrate these in publications and teaching. Collaborative work with scholars in Mexico and Spain broadens the reach of this work. In addition to detailed case studies, one by-product includes a computer database of 11,000 Mexican patents registered between - . The database is to be made available to researchers in Mexico and elsewhere. Other projected outcomes of the project include a series of articles and a university press monograph doc23144 none PLN - Creating the Next Generation of Women Leaders in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) The Pima County Superintendent of Schools, a local education agency (LEA) will develop and pilot an after school program for Hispanic 5th and 6th grade girls -- Creating the Next Generation of Women Leaders in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Creating Leaders combines innovative leadership training with enhanced STEM programming. The Creating Leaders program is innovative and builds on research that has identified elements of successful programming for Hispanic girls. Innovative components of this program include: 1.combining leadership development training with STEM enrichment; 2. teaching practical applications of mathematics in finance and investment; 3. linking STEM with politics and public policy; 4. developing partnerships between women in STEM careers, 5th and 6th grade girls and their parents; and 5. awarding STEM mini-grants to elementary and middle school girls. Outcomes of the planning grant will include: 1. A more extensive literature search to inform curriculum design and program planning; 2. The development of curricula for the after school program to be utilized with Hispanic girls in 5th and 6th grades and their parents; 3. The development of an Advisory Board; 4. The development of partnerships for implementing the program at multiple sites; 5. A pilot test of the after school program in one elementary school; 6. Focus groups with participants in the pilot; and 7. The development of a full proposal for the Creating Leaders program. The Creating Leaders after school program will be piloted in the Elvira Elementary School in Tucson, Arizona. The culturally relevant program components are designed to work synergistically to make SMET fun and relevant to real life, raise SMET literacy, reinforce learning through hands-on activities, allow girls to practice their newly acquired skills and knowledge through community problem solving, and inspire girls to pursue STEM coursework, careers, and leadership positions in STEM fields. Program activities include: 1. Playing the Real Game which teaches students about the global economy while reinforcing the importance of teamwork and cooperation. 2. Raising financial literacy by playing the Cashflow Game which teaches about investing, rate of return, business ownership, and calculating cash flow; 3. Attending field trips to organizations which employ women in STEM careers and local colleges and universities. 4. Utilizing women in STEM careers and high school students to serve as role models and mentors. 5. Leadership development activities. 6. Teaching girls to develop proposals for funding and receive mini-grants to solve a community problem using STEM. 7. Learning about the relationship between STEM, politics and public policy. 8. Developing STEM educational and career goals through academic and career planning. 9. Involving family members in supporting girls STEM educational and career goals. 10. Developing on-line e-tools for teachers and girls in the program. This multi-disciplinary program will provide significant advances in knowledge in the fields of education, leadership development, public policy, and the wide range of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math fields. The activities proposed will broaden the discovery and understanding of how to successfully reach under-represented groups and will promote teaching, training, and learning among K-12 staff and administrators, students, families, women in STEM careers, and organizations which employ them. Creating Leaders will impact knowledge capital through the creation of a curriculum for use with Hispanic 5th and 6th grade girls and their families, social capital through the creation of a community-based partnership designed to improve the STEM achievement and career attainment of Hispanic girls, and human capital in the improvement in STEM educational and career attainment of Hispanic girls doc23145 none This award provides support for the Seventh U.S. National Conference on Earthquake Engineering, 7NCEE by partially underwriting the administrative and development costs, and to make possible increased participation in the conference of graduate students in earthquake engineering disciplines. The Conference is the seventh in a series of national conferences on earthquake engineering. Previous conferences have been held in Ann Arbor, Michigan; Stanford, California; Charleston, South Carolina; Palm Springs, California; Chicago, Illinois, and Seattle, Washington. They are held every four years, midway in time between the dates of the quadrennial World Conferences on Earthquake Engineering. Each of the national conferences has been sponsored by EERI, the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, a non-profit professional society devoted to earthquake engineering and earthquake loss reduction. The 7NCEE will be held in Boston, Massachusetts and will provide an opportunity for researchers and professional practitioners, in all the disciplines in the earthquake field, to come together and exchange research results, design practices, and organizational and policy perspectives that influence the effectiveness of earthquake preparedness, mitigation, and recovery. The Proceedings provide a valuable repository of information, critical to the future advancement of earthquake engineering doc23109 none This project seeks to expand our understanding of the years surrounding the South Sea Bubble of , the first great financial crisis of modern capitalism, by focusing on the individuals who actually purchased shares and thus made portfolio decisions. We examine in detail the responses of stock market participants before, during, and especially after the financial collapse of the South Sea Company. To do this, we exploit data we have already collected (NSF 99- ) and continue to collect and encode on the holdings and transfers of the major financial assets available in the London market among all individuals who held these assets before, during, and after the crisis of . We reconstruct the transfers of stock holdings in the South Sea Company itself after its reorganization in , as well as in the Bank of England, the East India Company (both competing with the South Sea Company for investors), the Royal African Company (complementary to the South Sea Company), and the Hudson s Bay Company (completely removed from the action). Combining all four sources, then, we determine how all stockholders responded to the spectacular rise and fall of the South Sea Company in two competing companies, a complementary company, and a noncommittal company. Our examination of the changes that took place in the distribution of these assets, especially in the period to , is an intensive analysis of the reallocation of financial risk by market participants in the first emerging market after a major financial collapse. Especially interesting to us are contrasts in trading activity between the pre- and post-bubble periods and the changes we observe in activity by specialized traders as well as the role played by the increasingly diverse consumer base. Analyzing these changes in individual behavior within the unregulated and untaxed stock market of the time helps us understand how financial markets recover from systemic shocks doc23147 none The first project covered in this grant is a continuation of work with on the estimation of general equilibrium models of the labor market (supported by NSF- ). It is well known but rarely addressed by applied microeconomists that one can not properly evaluate national policies in a partial equilibrium environment. This is particularly true for policies that address skill acquisition. When using data to perform policy analysis, labor economists typically only concern themselves with the supply of skill and ignore demand. The problem is that as the number of individuals possessing a particular skill increases, the value the skill in the labor market falls. This effect discourages skill formation. Our previous research shows that accounting for general equilibrium effects when performing policy evaluations can alter the results by as much as a factor of ten. The major weakness of our work to date is the empirical approach. We have estimated the parameters of the individual worker using standard methods which implicitly assume that the labor market is not changing over time. This steady state assumption is clearly questionable as there has been a large literature demonstrating the changes in the wage structure. The biggest problem is that the model we estimated is not consistent with the general equilibrium model that we used when we simulated it. The main goal of this work is to estimate a dynamic general equilibrium model of the U.S. labor market over the last thirty years. This involves simultaneously estimating and simulating the model accounting for the changing U.S. labor market. This procedure guarantees similarity between the simulated model and the U.S. economy. We are using the estimated model to examine several different policies aimed to address the increasing inequality in the workforce. A major goal of these programs is to lower earnings inequality. This version of the model will provide a consistent estimate of the distribution of earnings in the economy and will allow us to do a much better job of estimating the effects of the policies on earnings inequality than our previous work. We are also extending the model to consider the effects of welfare policies and wage subsidies aimed a low wage workers as well as a number of other policies aimed at addressing earnings inequality. The goal of the second project is to address one particular aspect that is likely to be very important in most implementations of difference-in-differences estimators. Identification of the key parameter often arises when a unit changes some particular policy. Researchers typically assume that the product of the number of observations and time period is large when they perform inference in their models. However, even when the number of units or time periods is large, the number of actual policy changes observed in the data is typically small. In this case these standard methods that researchers use for inference in these models are not appropriate and may be wildly misleading. We are developing two different approaches which allow researchers to perform inference in these models. For the first approach we assume that there are a finite number of policy changes in the data, but use asymptotic approximations as the product of the number of observations and time period gets large. In the second, we avoid large sample approximations altogether by using exact tests doc23148 none Children can develop a wealth of knowledge about science and technology from their everyday experience. When visiting museums, watching educational TV, surfing the Web, or reading science-oriented books, children are actively developing proto-scientific reasoning skills, nascent theories for scientific domains, knowledge of interesting science facts, knowledge about famous scientific narratives, and early ideas about what different kinds of scientists do in their professional work. When children encounter science instruction in elementary and middle school, when they dream about what they might do when they grow up, and when they make choices about the courses they want to take in high school and beyond, those with experience and interest practicing scientific and technical thinking are more likely to seek it out and to succeed. Virtually all children and their parents come equipped with the tools needed to cultivate early math or scientific literacy, but these conversations and activities need to start from a seed a simple observation, an unexpected outcome, a question. For families with high levels of scientific literacy and interest, these seeds can be sown from personal experience. Indeed, more than three quarters of scientists in a recent National Science Foundation survey reported developing their passion for science in early, out-of-school activities such as nature walks with their parents, family visits to museums, or taking apart radios or launching rockets at home. We have no doubt that museum-based and media-based informal science infrastructure will have a positive effect on scientific literacy and science achievement, but the biggest effects will be for those who already are most likely to enter the educational and professional pipe-line for science and technology--the children of families that go to museums, watch educational programming, and visit educational web sites. Interestingly, boys more than girls are most likely to reap these benefits within highly motivated families. There is evidence to suggest that parents are less likely to bring their daughters to science museums than their sons, and that even among museum-going families, parents were more than three times more likely to explain the science of an exhibit to boys than to girls (true even when the boys and girls were as young as one to three-years old). What of families who may not be as comfortable with or as interested in pursuing science? These parents, already less likely to visit science museums for family recreation, may also not be aware of how many teachable moments exist in everyday life to prompt conversations with their children about math, science and technology, and especially so if they re parents of girls. Building on a successful pilot project we propose to seed the development of scientific and technical literacy by developing, placing, and maintaining engaging gender-sensitive science-oriented signage in the places where the broadest cross-section of Pittsburgh s children and families gather. We call these signs explanatoids. While science museums and science-oriented media are important forces for informal science education, children and their families must seek them out over other forms of leisure activity. In contrast, our explanatoids bring science to the people, in a way that includes girls fully in that outreach. We are asking for support for three years to develop our pilot work into a full-scale regional project that can be replicated elsewhere as a gender-sensitive model for enhancing math science literacy within a community. The project will include the development and installation of gender-sensitive signage as well as the production of associated support materials for parents and teachers throughout the Southwest Pennsylvania region. The project will leverage unique partnerships already built between Family Communications, Inc. (producers of Mister Rogers Neighborhood), local foundations, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh s Learning Research (2) enhances girls interests and successful participation in those arenas in schooling and career aspirations; and (3) advances the recognition that math, science and technology are integral to the regions future economic well-being doc23149 none Aiming for Algebra is a project of Girlstart, a nonprofit organization in Austin, Texas. Its goal is to prepare middle school girls for and support their completion of Algebra 1 in the eighth grade as a means of readying them for college preparatory math and science classes in high school that lead ultimately to completion of the college majors required for SMET careers. The primary objectives of the initial 36-month demonstration period include improving girls self confidence and academic self-esteem; increasing girls awareness of SMET careers and the high school and college coursework required to enter such careers; enhancing girls knowledge of and ability to use algebra in their lives; improving parents awareness of SMET careers for women; and increasing parents awareness of ways to encourage their daughters success in algebra and subsequent math and science courses in high school and beyond. The proposed intervention methods to achieve these ends include participation in an integrated continuum of activities as part of a ifgirls-only science math clublc over a three-year period, as well as involvement in a range of other community- and Internet-based math and science experiences with parents and other adults. The intellectual merit of this project derives from its translation of a significant portion of the body of previous research on the best practices for addressing gender inequities in SMET careers and the disparity in the mathematics and science achievement of girls in the United States into a single, cohesive informal program approach. Moreover, the project will employ a cohort design that will facilitate an understanding of what parts of the intervention model have the most impact on the intended outcomes. A rigorous evaluation component and a strong dissemination plan further strengthen the likelihood that Aiming for Algebra will result in a better understanding of how specific programmatic activities affect girls mathematical skills and their attitudes about and aspirations for math and science careers. The straightforward, unwavering focus on the completion of Algebra 1 in the eighth grade is another feature that makes this project meritorious. By tying its success to a single, observable goal and directing all of its energies to achieve this one purpose, the project sets itself up for rigorous comparison with other efforts with an identical goal. Aiming for Algebra intends to make its methodologies so transparent and so well documented that future research and demonstration projects can be erected squarely on the intellectual capital it creates and disseminates. Insofar as its broader impacts, the project will contribute to an improved understanding of the ways girls can be best prepared for taking and making good grades in Algebra 1 before they reach high school; it will advance understanding among teachers and teacher preparation programs of how girls expectations of their science and math performance in high school and beyond can be improved; it will provide empirical evidence of ways that female members of groups under-represented in SMET careers- including but notlimited to those who are ethnic and racial minorities, low-income, linguistic minorities, and differently abled- can be included in informal programming designed to redress the inequity; and, perhaps most importantly, the project will benefit society by improving the nation s ability to identify and remedy long-standing social, economic and academic practices that have disadvantaged its female population and created obstacles to their full and equal participation in scientific, mathematical, engineering and technological professions doc23150 none The overall focus of this research is to apply scattering techniques to examine the phase behavior and kinetics of order-disorder and order-order phase transitions in multiblock copolymers in selective solvents using small angle neutron scattering (SANS), small angle x-ray scattering (SAXS), atomic force microscopy (AFM), and computer simulation methods. A major focus of this research will be to use synchrotron based time-resolved SAXS to follow the time evolution of structural features, and relate them to theoretical models of nucleation and growth kinetics of disorder-order transitions and of transitions between different ordered states. We will also initiate preliminary studies using AFM imaging to characterize the surface morphology of films of these micro-phase separated materials. The proposed research will provide detailed insight into the kinetics of the phase separation mechanisms involved in these different transitions, as well as in the mechanisms involved in the growth of micelles themselves. An understanding of the phase behavior of multiblock copolymer solutions and gels is important to their numerous applications in materials science and technology. An exciting potential application is to use them as templates for nanolithography of solid state devices. The proposed AFM and SAXS studies of block copolymer films have direct relevance to the potential application of these films in nanolithography. The research will also lead to advances in designing and building specialized components for use at beam line facilities and data analysis programs with a wide range of applicability. The proposed studies will lead to the Ph. D dissertations of two graduate students (including one female American student) and provide research opportunities for undergraduates. The project also involves international collaboration with scientists in Czech Republic doc23151 none This project studies the determination and effects of child labor laws using a dynamic general-equilibrium framework. In the first countries to industrialize, child labor was widespread up to the early stages of the industrial revolution. Today, child labor and compulsory schooling laws are in place in all industrialized countries, and child labor has mostly disappeared. In many developing countries, child labor is still common today, and there is a lively debate as to whether more restrictions should be introduced. There are a number of authors who have studied the welfare implications of child-labor laws. There are no investigations, however, which develop political-economy models that can account for the evolution and effects of these laws in their historical context. This proposal describes a dynamic general-equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents who determine child-labor restrictions (CLR) in a voting process. The research, which is joint with Fabrizio Zilibotti of the University of Stockholm, results in a positive theory of the adoption of CLR, and allows a detailed analysis of the effects of CLR on the economy and different groups in the population. The key mechanism in the model is an interaction between parental decisions on the number of children and their preferences for CLR. In particular, parents with few children have little to gain from child labor, and are therefore likely to favor the introduction of restrictions. Parents with many working children, on the other hand, would be expected to oppose CLR. A second factor influencing preferences over CLR are (human or physical) capital assets: agents who own factors which are complementary to child labor will be more likely to oppose the introduction of CLR. A key result is that if voting is allowed, the model can exhibit multiple steady states with different child-labor policies. The reason is a feedback in which policies encourage behavior, which in turn leads to political support for the same policies. The possibility of multiple steady states can account for the fact that there are large cross-country variations in CLR and the incidence of child labor, even across countries at the same stage of development. In addition, since CLR build their own constituency, the model explains why CLR generally tend to get more restrictive over time. The model can generate a transition from no regulation to CLR if technological change raises the skill premium over time. This change induces parents to choose smaller families and invest in human capital, which over time creates a majority in favor of introducing CLR. This account of the transition to CLR is consistent with the observation that in a number of industrialized countries CLR were introduced after a period of rising wage inequality, and coincided with a period of rapidly declining fertility and rising education levels. The project entails a detailed documentation of child-labor reforms and the preceding political debate in a number of countries, and simulations of a calibrated, quantitative version of the model to assess how well the model can reproduce the actual timing of reforms, as well as the ensuing consequences of the legislation. The basic analysis is extended to introduce additional policies, especially compulsory schooling laws and schooling subsidies. Preliminary results indicate that CLR are more likely to be successful if they are accompanied by education reforms, as they were in many industrialized countries. Another extension is to allow dynamic voting in a framework where voters foresee future policies. Here an anticipated future introduction of CLR can result in a decline in child labor even before the restrictions come into force. This mechanism can account for the fact that some empirical studies find only relatively small effects of CLR on child labor supply after they are introduced doc23152 none The Dissertations Initiative for the Advancement of Limnology and OceanoGraphy (DIALOG) is an interdisciplinary project that works through several professional societies to target recent Ph.D. recipients across the full spectrum of disciplines relevant to the biologically oriented aquatic sciences. This project will quantify and characterize recent aquatic science Ph.D.s, consolidate and disseminate Ph.D. dissertation abstracts, establish electronic lists to facilitate distribution of job opportunities, and run an international capstone symposium for selected recent graduates to foster interdisciplinary insight, peer networking, and early career development. DIALOG will foster international as well as inter?institutional contacts, and include graduates from both developing and developed countries. Demographic data will facilitate the characterization and tracking of human resources. The on?line Dissertation Registry will provide a comprehensive yet concise summary of new research for scientists, policy makers, and agency representatives and facilitates integration of a new generation of researchers into the broader community. The electronic distribution list will provide a mechanism to target and disseminate information across institutions and foster communication across disciplinary and international boundaries. The international symposium will support participant diversity at all levels, and bring together individuals whose work transcends traditional boundaries. Activities will establish peer networks and enhance insights and perspectives to accelerate career development and advance interdisciplinary approaches to science doc23153 none P. Foth, P. Bressler, Y. Hu, and J. Lu This award provides partial support for active research mathematicians with limited means of support to attend and participate in the Workshop on Geometry and Topology of Quotients to be held at the University of Arizona in December of . The main speakers are Igor Dolgachev (Michigan), Mikhail Kapranov (Toronto) , Janos Kollar (Princeton) , Robert MacPherson (IAS and Princeton) , Jun Li (Stanford), Reyer Sjamaar (Cornell), ( - to be confirmed). The plenary lectures will survey recent progress and current directions of research in Geometric Invariant theory and Symplectic Reductions, explain connections with other disciplines and applications to physics. In addition to principal lectures, there will be sessions of contributed talks and round-table discussions. The workshop will provide a forum for young researchers to meet and interact with leading specialists as well as for interactions across the traditional boundaries of disciplines. Women and minority researchers are encouraged to participate. Further information is available at http: www.math.arizona.edu ~foth gtq.html doc23154 none Title Integration of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Research, Education, and Outreach: Systematic Tailoring of Carbon Nanotubes to Designed Electronic Properties Investigator Jun Jiao Sponsor Portland State University P.O. Box 751 Portland, Oregon - This proposal aims at the development of an integrated research, education, and outreach program in nanoscience and technology at Portland State University, with an emphasis on carbon nanotube research. The objectives of the proposed research are focused on (i) developing a reliable method for synthesizing carbon nanotubes of controlled properties; (ii) studying the growth mechanisms of various forms of nanotubes as a function of preparation conditions, and establishing the correlation between microstructure and preparation conditions; (iii) investigating the electron field-emission properties of carbon nanotubes in relation to their geometrical configurations; (iv) fabricating individual carbon-nanotube field emitters and exploiting their use as electron sources for electron-beam instruments such as TEM, SEM, and electron-beam lithography systems. The innovative aspects of this research are 1 to combine nanotube synthesis, microstructural characterization, electron field-emission measurements, and individual nanotube field emitter fabrications into a single project, and 2 to explore the special requirements of electron-beam instruments, as opposed to flat-panel displays. The effectiveness of this approach is that progress at each stage will provide immediate feedback to advance the improvement of the others. The research program is highly multidisciplinary, involving close collaboration with colleagues in Physics, Chemistry and Electrical Engineering Departments, with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and with a local high-tech company (FEI). One Ph.D. graduate student will be trained through this program, in addition to eight undergraduate students and two high school students who will each year be offered opportunities to participate in the research activities. All of them will receive excellent training in preparation for careers in science and engineering. The educational objectives of this program include (i) incorporating research findings to develop a new curriculum. New courses, introducing students to up-to-date knowledge and state-of-the-art techniques, will be developed; (ii) involving undergraduate and high school students (in particular, female students) in research and science-education activities, and motivating them to pursue careers in science and engineering; (iii) enriching outreach activities by collaborating with local educational institutions to increase the awareness of local citizens with regard to the future impact of nanoscience and nanotechnology doc23105 none Collaborative Research: RUI - Development and Identity of Sexually Dimorphic Reproductive Signals and Responses by African Elephants In the spirit of the BIO C-RUI program, this proposal crosses disciplinary, departmental, and institutional boundaries. The project will answer five questions regarding the proximate mechanisms of reproductive communication using innovative techniques at the interface of biology and chemistry. African elephants will be used to test hypotheses on developmental patterns of sexually dimorphic reproductive signals and responses. This is not only for the distinct advantages elephants offer as a research model, but also because basic scientific research can provide knowledge about these ecologically important, endangered animals that may aid in their long-term survival. This research team includes an animal behaviorist (Dr. Schulte) and an organic chemist (Dr. Goodwin), each with a track record of successful elephant-related research at predominantly undergraduate institutions. Dr. Rasmussen, who characterized the pre-ovulatory pheromone in Asian elephants and has made substantial contributions to the understanding of elephant biochemistry, behavior and olfaction, joins the team. These scientific collaborators are educators who believe that undergraduates learn science best by doing science, i.e. by research participation with scientists, presentation of results at scientific meetings, and co-authoring manuscripts. Undergraduate collaborators will actively participate in this research on sexually dimorphic reproductive signals and responses. Polygamous animals often display extreme sexual dimorphism, where males and females may live in very different social structures. In mammals, females typically raise the offspring often with little or no male assistance. African elephants (Loxodonta africana) illustrate this pattern very well. Intersexual interaction is especially prevalent during the breeding season when individuals use a variety of communicative behaviors to compete for and select mates as well as maintain social bonds. Chemical signals and related tactile behaviors are primary means of evaluating reproductive condition and attracting mates. The development of chemical signal production and sex-specific responses has received little attention. In fact, sexually dimorphic communication patterns related to reproduction have rarely been compared within the same species simultaneously in a single study. Focal questions in these arenas are posed in three sets: SET I: What are the specific chemical signals in pre-ovulatory urine that: A. Elicit male reproductive behavior? B. Elicit heightened female social responsiveness? SET II: During the differential development of males and females are there recognizable stages of: A. Male responses toward pre-ovulatory urine and its specific chemical signal(s)? B. Female responses toward pre-ovulatory urine and its specific chemical signal(s)? SET III: Based on the results in the first two sets, what are the comparative ontogenetic patterns of male and female responses toward known chemical signal sources and to specific signal compounds and more generally in the display of reproductively related behaviors? These questions are investigated first by a study of female-to-male signals (IA and IIA), then female-to-female signals (IB and IIB) and finally by comparing the two developmental pathways (III). Specifically, answers are sought by: (i) Collecting urine from captive and wild female African elephants; (ii) Performing behavioral bioassays of urine samples for the responses of both male and female conspecifics; (iii) Chemically analyzing bioactive urine fractions to identify organic compounds; (iv) Bioassaying selected urinary components with captive and then wild African elephants; (vi) Observing wild African elephants for reproductive chemotactile communication. The proposed research will identify proximate chemical causes of reproductive behavior and elucidate sexually dimorphic developmental patterns of communication. This study will lay the groundwork for future investigation on male based signals and of ultimate questions on this topic. The findings may assist in the conservation of endangered elephants in practice and other species doc23156 none Biological invasions represent a major component of global environmental change. Invasions may lead to reduced biodiversity and often result in permanent alterations to ecosystems.Invasive non-native plant pathogens have dramatically affected ecosystems in many parts of the world.The mechanisms underlying dispersal of these pathogens and their ecological consequences are critical issues for conservation and ecosystem management.Spatial pattern is a fundamental property of disease dynamics because it reflects the genetic heterogeneity and environmental forces acting on pathogen dispersal and life history.A multidisciplinary approach is required to solve the challenges of 1)incorporating fine-scale processes of pathogen dispersal into landscape-level models and 2)integrating spatial variation in environmental factors and host population genetics with disease incidence. In this proposal,we describe research to analyze spatio-temporal dynamics of Phytophthora ramorum,an emerging,and probably exotic,pathogen that causes a lethal disease of oaks and tanoaks in coastal California.This disease,known as Sudden Oak Death (SOD),has reached epidemic levels in several counties.The proposal integrates spatial data on host genetics,community structure,and environmental variation with investigations of mechanisms underlying spread of P.ramorum to model changes in the distribution of this plant disease across the landscape.Model predictions will identify critical factors that influence the distribution of SOD and provide forecasts of habitat loss in oak woodlands as a consequence of SOD.This proposal describes a multidisciplinary program to model the spread of a destructive plant disease and to predict its ecological consequences.Our objectives are not developed as discrete activities for individual researchers,but rather a collaborative effort among researchers to attack a single problem.We aim to accomplish the following: 1.Develop a statistically based model that predicts spatial patterns of SOD risk on the landscape,based on relationships among several critical environmental factors.These factors include proximity to previously infected locations,genetic background of host species,plant community structure,landscape structure,abiotic conditions,and anthropogenic activities. 2.Develop a mechanistic model that predicts spatial patterns of pathogen activity and host susceptibility based on empirical studies of pathogen dispersal between hosts on fine spatial scales and on environmental conditions conducive to pathogen reproduction and dispersal. 3.Develop a model of SOD spread that integrates the most predictive components of the statistical and mechanistic models. 4.Foster participation of undergraduates in this cross-disciplinary research and integrate the research into the curriculum of core courses in the Departments of Biology and Geography at Sonoma State University. Sonoma State University is located within 20 km of the study area,which is easily accessible to PI s and their students.Previous analyses of the relationship between environmental variation and SOD spread have concentrated on the most heavily impacted regions in Marin County where the pathogen has infected trees throughout the study area.In contrast,the present study focuses on SOD spread into new areas that presently show no sign of infection.We believe that this approach will contribute substantially towards a greater understanding of the biology of this pathogen and to our understanding of the ecology and genetics of plant-pathogen interactions.The timing of this study will also ensure involvement by motivated undergraduates at Sonoma State University who wish to participate in research that everyone recognizes is of critical significance to the larger community doc23105 none Collaborative Research: RUI - Development and Identity of Sexually Dimorphic Reproductive Signals and Responses by African Elephants In the spirit of the BIO C-RUI program, this proposal crosses disciplinary, departmental, and institutional boundaries. The project will answer five questions regarding the proximate mechanisms of reproductive communication using innovative techniques at the interface of biology and chemistry. African elephants will be used to test hypotheses on developmental patterns of sexually dimorphic reproductive signals and responses. This is not only for the distinct advantages elephants offer as a research model, but also because basic scientific research can provide knowledge about these ecologically important, endangered animals that may aid in their long-term survival. This research team includes an animal behaviorist (Dr. Schulte) and an organic chemist (Dr. Goodwin), each with a track record of successful elephant-related research at predominantly undergraduate institutions. Dr. Rasmussen, who characterized the pre-ovulatory pheromone in Asian elephants and has made substantial contributions to the understanding of elephant biochemistry, behavior and olfaction, joins the team. These scientific collaborators are educators who believe that undergraduates learn science best by doing science, i.e. by research participation with scientists, presentation of results at scientific meetings, and co-authoring manuscripts. Undergraduate collaborators will actively participate in this research on sexually dimorphic reproductive signals and responses. Polygamous animals often display extreme sexual dimorphism, where males and females may live in very different social structures. In mammals, females typically raise the offspring often with little or no male assistance. African elephants (Loxodonta africana) illustrate this pattern very well. Intersexual interaction is especially prevalent during the breeding season when individuals use a variety of communicative behaviors to compete for and select mates as well as maintain social bonds. Chemical signals and related tactile behaviors are primary means of evaluating reproductive condition and attracting mates. The development of chemical signal production and sex-specific responses has received little attention. In fact, sexually dimorphic communication patterns related to reproduction have rarely been compared within the same species simultaneously in a single study. Focal questions in these arenas are posed in three sets: SET I: What are the specific chemical signals in pre-ovulatory urine that: A. Elicit male reproductive behavior? B. Elicit heightened female social responsiveness? SET II: During the differential development of males and females are there recognizable stages of: A. Male responses toward pre-ovulatory urine and its specific chemical signal(s)? B. Female responses toward pre-ovulatory urine and its specific chemical signal(s)? SET III: Based on the results in the first two sets, what are the comparative ontogenetic patterns of male and female responses toward known chemical signal sources and to specific signal compounds and more generally in the display of reproductively related behaviors? These questions are investigated first by a study of female-to-male signals (IA and IIA), then female-to-female signals (IB and IIB) and finally by comparing the two developmental pathways (III). Specifically, answers are sought by: (i) Collecting urine from captive and wild female African elephants; (ii) Performing behavioral bioassays of urine samples for the responses of both male and female conspecifics; (iii) Chemically analyzing bioactive urine fractions to identify organic compounds; (iv) Bioassaying selected urinary components with captive and then wild African elephants; (vi) Observing wild African elephants for reproductive chemotactile communication. The proposed research will identify proximate chemical causes of reproductive behavior and elucidate sexually dimorphic developmental patterns of communication. This study will lay the groundwork for future investigation on male based signals and of ultimate questions on this topic. The findings may assist in the conservation of endangered elephants in practice and other species doc23158 none To foster cross-disciplinary interaction, a conference in nanoparticles and nanostructure is planned for the period June 16-21, in Barga, Italy. This is a relatively small conference being organized thought he United Engineering Foundation. The conference title is Nanoparticles and Nanostructure Through Vapor Phase Synthesis. A mix of synthesis and applications as, outlined below, are planned. - Thermal and plasma synthesis of nanoparticles - Particle Cluster formation and growth processes - Advanced Characterization - Carbonaceous nanomaterials - Nanoparticle structure property relationships - Catalytic nanostructures - Nanostructures in drug delivery and biological imaging - Electronic Devices (single electron transistors) - Polymeric composite nanomaterials - Other applications doc23159 none Toole Analysis of existing finestructure and microstructure data will be conducted. The data, derived from two recent investigations of ocean mixing processes: the Brazil Basin Tracer Release Experiment and the study of Circulation in the Romanche Fracture Zone, consist of vertical profile observations from the High-Resolution Profiler and moored current meter measurements. Several signals in these data will be explored, documented, and presented in the scientific literature that address (1) the nature of the finescale shear and strain and the associated turbulent dissipation in the abyssal ocean above rough bathymetry (at subtropical latitudes and on the equator), (2) the flow within a mid-ocean ridge fracture, (3) the intensity and spatial distribution of turbulent dissipation in a field of equatorially trapped deep jets, and (4) the intensity of the mid-depth internal wave field and associated mixing at tropical latitudes away from the immediate vicinity of the equator. The projects are related by the common goal of improving understanding of mixing and diapycnal transport in the deep ocean doc23160 none OCE? Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Barrie Walden This proposal requests operating funds for the National Deep Submergence Facility (NDSF) during . Resources provided for under this proposal include the Human Occupied Deep Submergence Vehicle Alvin, the Remotely Operated Vehicles Jason, Medea, Argo and DSL?120. These assets will be used to support NSF?sponsored ,oceanographic science programs utilizing the engineering and operational personnel of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution s Deep Submergence Group. The proposed operating schedule contains a total of 321 operating days for DSV ALVIN and the ROVs. The DSV days will be supported on the R V ATLANTIS with 13 cruises for the National Science Foundation, The facility will also support 3 cruises for National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration and one joint cruise for NOAA, NSF and Navy. The ROV days will be supported on the R Vs ATLANTIS and THOMPSON. These cruises will mainly take place in the Pacific Ocean and will range from the Galapagos Islands off Ecuador to the Aleutian Islands off Alaska and include waters off Costa Rica, Mexico and Canada doc23161 none In many areas of the country, white-tailed deer populations are large, growing, and perceived to be causing many problems for f1uman comunities. In some of these areas, lethal measures have been used to cull the herds; in others, citizens have called for fertility control methods such as immunocontraception or surgical sterilization. In other locations, feral cats present a similar management problem. Because cats are kept as pets by many people, some states have laws offering wild cats a measure of protection from lethal control that other nuisance species lack. The examples of deer and cat overpopulation raise many interesting ethical questions about the appropriateness of managing animals by manipulating their reproductive systems. To address these questions, this study relies on two components: an empirical descriptive component and a normative philosophical component. In the descriptive component, the investigators ask: what do people believe about wildlife fertility control, and why do they believe what they believe? In the normative component, the central question is: how well do peoples moral beliefs about wi1dlife fertility control match the content of philosophical literature? The objectives of this project are to: (1) characterize the ethical arguments people use to support their judgments about fertility control for deer and feral cats; (2) identify the characteristics of fertility control methods that influence these judgments; (3) synthesize works in the ethical literature that have relevance to people s arguments about wildlife fertility control; and (4) analyze people s arguments about wildlife fertility control based on this synthesis. The classification of arguments will provide the basis for the subsequent ethical analysis, in which the beliefs and arguments described in the empirical component will be analyzed for their validity and cogency based on an analysis of the relevant ethical literature. This research will help to generate recommendations for improving the quality of deliberation about fertility control in wildlife management. In future research, the investigators will use the results of this study to guide the design and testing of educational strategies that will help stakeholders better consider the ethical ramifications of different decisions about wildlife fertility control. Improving how people are educated about the ethical ramifications of wildlife fertility control will help to ensure that management decisions are based on a thorough consideration of the ethical dimensions of these issues doc23162 none Eberhardt This award continues Design Projects activities begun under NSF award # at the University of Alabama, Birmingham (UAB), in which students designed and built custom projects for people with disabilities. The objectives of the activities are to enhance engineering education, provide students with insight into careers in rehabilitation, improve the quality of life of people with disabilities, and to serve the community. The previous award led to the successful completion of numerous projects and training of over 40 undergraduate students in basic design principles. Projects are to be featured in regional news media and local television specials, and will be described in international symposia. This new project is expected to expand the number of design projects and will include students from the new Biomedical Engineering (BME) undergraduate program at UAB. The majority of the projects are to be conducted in partnership with United Cerebral Palsy (UCP) of Birmingham doc23163 none Abdelrahaman Description: This award is for support of a joint research project by Dr. Mohamed Abdelrahaman, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Tennessee Technological University, Cookeville, Tennessee and Dr. Ibrahim Moustafa, Foundry Department at the Central Metallurgical Research and Development Institute in Helwan, Egypt. They plan to develop technology for the production of high purity pig iron by integrating automatic control technology and optimization of the composition of the charge materials. While cupola melting is simple in principle the actual physical and chemical details of the process are quite complex, and the phenomena occurring in the melt zone are difficult to measure directly. Automatic control of the cupola melting process promises improved energy efficiency, a less environmental impact and improved quality of produced iron. Thus, the project would achieve two objectives: the first is to test and demonstrate the general automatic control technology for cupola furnaces developed by the American side and the second is to investigate the production of high purity pig iron by the integration of optimized charge materials with the automatic control of the cupola furnace Scope: In this project the U.S. PI has been leading research efforts in the US for developing automatic control systems for cupola furnaces. However, the cost of performing the experimental testing of the developed control systems in the US is a hurdle that limits the demonstration of the developed technology and in turn the deployment of the technology in the industry. The Egyptian side (CMRDI) has an experimental cupola-melting furnace with a one ton per hour capacity, in addition to a well-equipped metallurgical laboratory with facilities to measure the chemical composition of molten metal, microstructure and mechanical properties. These facilities offer a relatively inexpensive way for developing and testing the desired technology doc23164 none Yang The project is to develop advanced analytical and numerical modeling techniques for understanding, analyzing, and predicting combustion dynamics in gas-turbine engines for propulsion and power-generation applications by international cooperative research with Hankuk Aviation Univertsity in Korea. The expected results would provide a general framework about various phenomena of combustion dynamics and the models could also serve as a backbone for implementing active control schemes doc23165 none This project will produce a one-hour general audience television program for Ohio and the surrounding region designed to raise the awareness of the viewing audience to the problemof gender inequity in our sciences, mathematics, engineering and technology workforce. Wewill engage our audience by tracking the root cause of this inequity back into our schools by examining the research done by NSF on women in SMET and exploring the ways that teaching methods can be either a window of opportunity to young women or a closed door. To maintain the attention of this general TV audience, the problem will be presented as a fast-paced mystery, why are we missing all this human potential in SMET? A top-selling mystery writer, Les Roberts, will host our audience in this investigation and he will be assistedby a young woman of high school age. His special guide in this quest will be Dr. Kathryn Sullivan, the first woman to walk in space. The program will examine NSF-identified researchthat will introduce and examine the problem. We will then explore a variety of efforts by school, community, and businesses to correct this inequity. The program will conclude with suggestions on what the viewing audience - - parents, community members, business, and educators -- can do to channel the future potential of girls into SMET. Once it has been broadcast in this region, The Case of Missing Human Potential will be offered to the national PBS network for national distribution. An interactive Web site designed to provide further information, suggestions for improving the situation, and links to existing summer camps and programs will be promoted during the show. All participating stations will be encouraged to set up call-in sites staffed by local SMET teachers and researchers to address questions from the viewing audience. This special effort will be addressed during pauses in the broadcast and will be designed to help the audience take action as a result of the interest stirred up by this broadcast. To draw new viewers we will publicize the show on all the PBS stations in Ohio; use the state designated TIMSS Consortia of schools (representing about 500,000 Ohio students) to advertise the importance of this problem to parents and community members and to invite their involvement; highlight the upcoming show through OhioDL one of the primary communications means for schools using distance learning in Ohio; and advertise the problem of gender inequity and the need for family and community action revealed in this TV program via the communication networks of the Ohio Mathematics and Science Coalition doc23166 none 4 Schools for WIE is a consortium of four engineering colleges in Massachusetts (MA) united in commitment to gender equity in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Each partner institution Northeastern University (NU), Boston University (BU), Tufts University (Tufts) and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) has a strong record of K-12 outreach and program delivery, K-12 teacher training and programming for girls and women in STEM related areas. Each partner institutions brings varied strengths and successes to the collaboration. By joining forces will be developed model to demonstrate how engineering concepts become part of the middle school curriculum in ways that encourage girls as well as boys to continue along the engineering pathway. As an important step toward achieving this mission, a unique intervention system centered around highly-trained STEM Teams consisting of all-female engineering faculty, students, teachers and practitioners will be developed and implementated. STEM Teams including middle school teachers will be trained together and then utilize their unique strengths to best implement the curriculum in eight different public school districts in the greater-Boston area. The STEM Teams will educate middle school teachers about engineering and gender-inclusive practices in addition to serving as role models in the middle school classrooms. The present situation in MA is opportune for developing this beneficial intervention system since the MA Department of Education recently adopted the Science and Technology Engineering Curriculum Frameworks. Beginning in September , MA became the first state in the nation to introduce engineering as part of mandated PreK-12 education frameworks. These frameworks reflect achievable and age appropriate learning standards that will provide strong background knowledge for students. In the middle schools, questions testing the engineering frameworks will be incorporated into the compulsory Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) in . STEM Teams will help middle schools implement the new engineering strand of the Massachusetts Frameworks. STEM Teams will help middle school teachers prepare students for the engineering strand MCAS exams. Simultaneously, STEM Teams will serve to build the conviction among the middle school students that engineering is an appropriate career choice for females. An important feature of the STEM Team concept is that each team will be composed of women only, yet this attribute will not be announced to the students prior the team s arrival. The participation of STEM Teams of engineering savvy women at participating middle schools, where team members will serve as coaches, mentors, and role models for middle school teachers and their students, will have a profound impact on gender attitudes toward engineering as a career. Simply put, STEM Teams composed solely of females will demonstrate to girls and boys that women do engineering. Some anticipated project outcomes are: Girls and boys in implementation classrooms will think differently about engineering and will understand that engineering is not just for boys. They will score higher on the engineering strand items in the MCAS, than children in the same school before the implementation of STEM Team support. Participating teachers will feel comfortable with these materials and will look forward to working with them. Over the three-year program, the intervention systems will be finely tuned for national dissemination. The STEM Teams approach is highly replicable at low cost. However, members need to be educated about national science standards, age-appropriate and gender-inclusive curriculum activities, serving as positive role models, and other issues pertaining to encouraging middle school girls in the STEM fields. This training will be available through a hard copy manual, the web, and because so many middle schools do not have convenient access to the Internet, on videotape. STEM Teams nationwide has the potential for significantly increasing the number of girls who continue interest in STEM areas during the middle school period as well as into STEM careers doc23167 none SES 02- The History and Philosophy of Science -- Advancing U.S. Interests in International Activities Laura Sheahan, National Academy of Sciences This proposal supports the operation of the U.S. National Committee for the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science (USNC IUHPS). The USNC represents the United States in the International Council for Science (ICSU) -- an international union. This support is designed support effective U.S. participation and strong leadership in the international union in response to expanding needs in international science and technology through the efforts of volunteer members. The goals of this USNC are to: 1) Assure that membership privileges and obligations to the international union are fulfilled and that the U.S. community is appropriately and fully represented in international congresses; 2) Serve as neutral fora where representatives of multiple U.S. societies and government agencies can meet to discuss trends in their disciplines; 3) Work with other USNCs in the network to foster interdisciplinary projects; 4) Serve as conduits of communication between the ICSU family and the professional societies and between ICSU and individual scientists; and 5) Serve as incubators of ideas that are then brought to the attention of professional societies, NRC disciplinary boards or commissions, and others. This specific proposal provides funds for two years for the support staff from the National Academy of Sciences, primarily to allow for the regular meetings of the volunteer members of the USNC , and in support of USNC activities related to the international activities of the IUHPS and ICSU doc23168 none This project synthesizes key aspects of production and energy flow, based on US-GLOBEC studies in the Northwest Atlantic, and augment the US-GLOBEC data with information from other sources on production processes at the lower and upper levels of the food web. The primary objectives examine several alternate model outcomes of GLOBEC and GLOBEC-related studies that help address a number of outstanding issues and re-examine patterns of energy flow on Georges Bank. This research enhances and expands the findings of previous investigations, with explicit consideration of factors not addressed in earlier models of this system including: (1) the microbial food web, (2) consideration of new and recycled primary production, (3) spatial heterogeneity of primary and secondary production on Georges Bank, (4) changes in biomass and production at higher trophic levels, and (5) the effects of environmental forcing on production processes. Incorporation of these elements into the modeling effort permits a more detailed understanding of production processes on the Bank. The first four elements provides the broader ecosystem context, while the last provides the link to one of the US-GLOBEC program.s principal themes, climate change. The latter is being addressed by comparing several different decadal-scale time periods that reflect differing environmental and fish community regimes: (1) the cold s characterized by abundant groundfish stocks fished by distant water fleets; (2) the s, characterized by average water temperatures, increased domestic fishing effort, and depletion of groundfish stocks; (3) the s, characterized by average water temperatures, overfishing of groundfish stocks, and increases in elasmobranchs; and (4) the average temperature, lower salinity s, characterized by reduced fishing mortality, rebuilding of groundfish stocks, and increases in elasmobranchs and pelagic fish. Because of large-scale changes in the fish community structure as a result of over-exploitation, a full understanding of the population dynamics of the target species will not be attained without consideration of changes in other ecosystem components. Individual model networks are being formulated to represent each of the above periods. Subsequently, dynamic modeling will be developed to describe the transformations or shifts between these regimes doc23169 none This project is concerned with solving several classes of difficult combinatorial optimization problems using very large-scale neighborhood (VLSN) search algorithms. The VLSN search algorithms are neighborhood search algorithms where the size of the neighborhood is very large, possibly exponential in terms of the input size parameters, and enumerating all neighbors and evaluating them is prohibitively expensive. The research relies on the use of improvement graphs for searching large neighborhoods. Improvement graphs allow optimizing over very large neighborhoods quickly. This methodology has been used to solve some classic combinatorial optimization problems as well as scheduling problems that have arisen in airline and railroad industries. For the problems that we have addressed, VLSN search algorithms, when implemented well, are robust and provide excellent solutions. The research project addresses VLSN search algorithms for three problem classes. The first problem class will be large-scale partitioning and constrained partitioning problems arising in clustering, data mining and timetabling. The second problems class will be integer multicommodity flow problems arising in logistics and telecommunication. Integer multicommodity flow problems are multicommodity flow problems where the flow of each commodity on any arc is required to be integer. The third class of problems to be investigated will be optional flight generation problem arising at United Airlines. The objective in the optional flight generation problem is to determine a set of good potential candidates for additional flight legs to be added to an airline schedule to improve overall profitability. The research of the PIs on VLSN search algorithms is motivated by the need to develop effective and practical heuristic (approximate) solution procedures for large-scale and structurally complex combinatorial optimization problems. The goal is to enhance the toolkit for heuristic search by developing new methodologies with broad applicability. We anticipate we and others will successfully develop and apply VLSN search techniques to a wide range of important combinatorial problem including problems arising in logistics and transportation and substantial savings will accrue by the use of these methods doc23170 none Chamberlain This grant is for a technical support person for the stable isotope geochemistry laboratory in the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences at Stanford University. The grant covers the costs of salary for two years. The stable isotope laboratory has Finnigan-MAT Delta plus XR and 252 mass spectrometers, and both are configured for continuous flow measurements and have on-line combustion devices for C, H, and N isotope analyses of organic matter and minerals. The Finnigan-MAT 252 also has UV and IR lasers and associated extraction lines for the analysis of O isotopes in silicate and oxide minerals. The technical support person will be responsible for: 1) assisting in construction of laser lines; 2) routine support and maintenance of the mass spectrometers; 3) training of students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty in the use of this laboratory; and 4) analysis of samples doc23171 none This U.S.-Slovak materials research project between John Fontanella of the U.S. Naval Academy and his partner, Josef Bartos of the Polymer Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, will study the mechanisms of ion transport and dipole reorientation in polymer electrolytes. To do so they will draw upon Slovak expertise in positron annihilation lifetime spectroscopy (PALS) and electron spin resonance (ESR) and the U.S. team s experience with electron relaxation and conductivity in polymer electrolytes at varying pressures, temperatures and frequencies. The goal is to produce experimental data for analysis that can better describe the free volume microstructure of polymer matrices, the segmental motions of polymer chains, and the diffusional motions of ions. Based on the free volume concept, theoretical methods will be developed jointly and applied to interpret these results, using modeling and computer simulations. If successful, findings should improve current understanding of the conductive properties of glass-forming materials and proton-conducting polymers with direct implications for developing better fuel cells and batteries. This collaborative project in polymers research fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc23172 none Fernelius Description: This award is to support a collaborative project between Dr. Nils Fernelius, Physicist, Dr. David Zelmon, Electrical Engineer, both in the Materials and Manufacturing Directorate, Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio and Dr. Kerim Allahverdi, Senior Scientist, Materials and Chemical Technologies Institute, the Turkish Scientific and Technical Research Council (TUBITAK), Marmara Research Center (MRC), Gebze-Kocaeli, Turkey. The investigators plan to make precise measurements of the ordinary and extraordinary refractive indices at various infrared wavelengths for pure and doped Galium Selenide (GaSe), so that reliable Sellmeier equations can be constructed. These equations are used in the design of various optical devices such as second harmonic generators and optical parametric oscillators. Scope: The U.S team has unique capabilities to measure the refractive indices. The Turkish team has expert capability in sample growing and polishing. Both of these capabilities are needed to achieve the research goals. In this cooperative research the staff of the MRC will manufacture GaSe samples as specified by the AFRL staff. These samples will be used by the latter in making precision measurements of the index refraction and to construct the Sellmeier equations. The process will be repeated to narrow the differences between the measured and calculated indices. One of the two U.S. PIs will visit MRC to compare the results of the Sellemeier equations from the obtained data doc23173 none Hear Our Voices is a Demonstration initiative that links twenty Clubhouses from the Computer Clubhouse Network in creating new opportunities specifically for girls and young women, to develop fluency with computer technology, and to learn valuable career and life skills as well. Hear Our Voices will serve as a model for the future in other Computer Clubhouses in the Network, as well as like-minded informal educational programs for girls and young women at other institutions. Founded at the Computer Museum in Boston in , the Computer Clubhouse has grown into a Network of 48 Clubhouses in 13 states and the District of Columbia, plus 11 Clubhouses overseas, touching the lives of thousands of young people. The Computer Clubhouses provide a successful, innovative, andempowering after-school learning environment for young people (ages 8-18) from underserved communities. A safe and welcoming milieu, skilled and caring mentors, and high-end hardware and professional software tools help Clubhouse youth become confident learners through a variety of creative computer applications. The flagship Computer Clubhouse moved to the Museum of Science in , when the Computer Museum joined forces with the Museum of Science. Since then, the Network of Clubhouses has grown rapidly; with the support of Intel Corporation and other sponsors, more Clubhouses are now being planned and implemented. Based on community interest and the success of the Clubhouse learning model in transforming young people s lives, current plans call for growth to more than 100 Clubhouses by . Located primarily in youth-serving organizations such as Boys & Girls Clubs and Urban Leagues, Computer Clubhouses serve inner-city neighborhoods as well as smaller communities with a high proportion of under-served populations. The Computer Clubhouse community is diverse, made up of African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, Native Americans, recent immigrants, and Whites. In an effort to recruit and retain more girls and young women in a field that has a dearth of participation by women -computer technology - the flagship Computer Clubhouse in Boston since has pioneered several programs especially for girls, providing them with access to rich technology resources, female mentors and role models, a community of peers, and a positive, creative, and supportive learning environment. The new Hear Our Voices program will significantly expand the flagship Clubhouse s programming for girls and young women, to 20 new venues and with new, locally-designed programming. Specifically, it will enrich opportunities for girls in four ways: Twenty of the Computer Clubhouses within the United States will receive funding and support to hire and train staff dedicated to gender equity and girls programming, and to launch locally-based Hear Our Voices programs at their Clubhouses, including at least one component of girls-only hours or days at each participating Clubhouse. Leveraging the experience gained at the flagship Computer Clubhouse, Network staff from the Museum of Science will provide professional development and program assistance for girls programming to Clubhouse Coordinators across the Network. Building on the momentum and resources of the growing Clubhouse Network, a digital network called the Clubhouse Village will support both a real and a virtual community of Clubhouse youth. An area on the Village will be designated especially for girls activities, and the Village will also support interaction among staff and mentors for mutual support and for sharing best practices. The Clubhouse Village will consist of a secure, private Intranet, using Internet technology and tools to enable Clubhouse youth to communicate with each other and collaborate on creative projects. The virtual community will be made more viable by a face-to-face gathering of participating youth and staff at a Computer Clubhouse Youth Summit in the summer of doc23174 none This project will study the gendered nature of learning science in the elementary grades. Standards-based science instruction largely consists of students engaging in first-hand investigation of scientific phenomena. This is in contrast to traditional science instruction that relies heavily on textbooks. The justification for investigation-based instructional design has typically been that the authority for scientific belief ought to reside in the actions of children rather than the authority of text. However, this unfortunate dichotomy between investigation and text undermines the potential uses of both. Girls are typically strong readers- an attribute that ought to make them strong in science. After all, at some point they must be able to read scientific text to excel in science classes. Unfortunately, research on text preferences shows that although girls are strong readers, they prefer to read fiction rather than nonfiction. The primary objective of the project is to learn how science-related text embedded in inquiry science instruction can be used to engage girls. The first year of this three year study willbe spent in four third grade classrooms to observe how science-related texts are used. This will include documentation of text experiences created by teachers and created by girls in encounters with text supplemental to regular instruction (e.g., library visits, classroom-reading centers, books from home). This will be supplemented by classroom observations and interviews with girls, teachers, librarians and parents to collect additional data on the use of and interest in science books. The second year of the project will consist of design experiments in the classrooms during which the teachers and researchers work together to analyze classroom activities and design instruction in cycles that allow research and teaching practice to influence one another. Data from the first year will be used to better understand how girls may engage with science text and design instruction to maximize girls interest in science and learning from science inquiry instruction that includes the use of text. The research questions are as follows: 1. What role does text play in girls classroom science experiences? 2. How do teachers view the role of text in girls learning of science? 3. What texts are present in girls homes and how are they used? 4. What science texts do girls prefer when exposed to a large range of text genres and uses? 5. How do girls uses of text enable and or constrain their engagement and development of scientific ideas? The final year will be spent analyzing results of the design experiment and conducting cross-year analyses, preparing research papers for submission to science and literacy education journals, and developing a web-based curriculum unit for use in teacher education programs, including our own NSF-sponsored science teacher education reform effort doc23175 none Girls Under the Hood is a demonstration project designed to encourage teenage girls in rural Madison County, New York, to achieve excellence in Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology (SMET) fields. Central to the success of this project is the hands-on experience that will demonstrate the relationship of SMET to the participants everyday lives. Using the automobile as a vehicle for inquiry-based scientific learning, 24 girls ages 14-17 will explore topics such as the science of internal combustion, the mathematics of fuel economy, the engineering of the power train, the technology of computerized diagnostic equipment, and the integration of all these fields. In addition to exploring and learning many scientific principles behind the various systems of the automobile, participants will acquire practical skills that they can share with their families. During a seven-day residential summer camp, participants will experience two different college campus settings a mere five miles apart: Colgate University, in Hamilton, New York, a nationally-ranked liberal arts institution; and in America s Most-Wired; two-year school, the State University of New York College of Agriculture and Technology, in Morrisville, New York. Morning sessions will be held in the new automotive technology building at the SUNY Morrisville campus, where participants will engage in hands-on exploration of the automobile. Meals, lodging, and most of the afternoon and evening sessions will take place at Colgate University, where the girls will further explore the basic scientific principles behind the operation of automobiles and how those same principles can be transferred to a variety of other applications. Girls Under the Hood will capitalize on the natural curiosity of females in a non-threatening (cooperative, welcoming, and predominantly female) environment at a critical time in their lives when they are focused on getting their driver s license. Through exposure to female role models (teachers, undergraduate teaching assistants and successful industry practitioners) and solicitation of parent, school, industry and government support, this project will seize opportunities to relate course content to SMET careers, and to challenge students ideas about gender appropriate careers. The confidence that girls gain in their ability to understand the science and technology of automobiles will carry over into confidence that they can succeed in other areas of SMET, and the applications they will see of SMET courses will encourage them to take more courses in those areas. The intellectual benefit of this project is that it will serve as an educational model for the application of contextualized science education, as well as provide a better understanding of gender-fair learning opportunities in SMET education utilizing a unique combination of rural public high schools, public and private universities, community, industry, and government. Broader impacts of the project include positive changes in participants interest in SMET, confidence in their ability to do math and science, and election of upper level math and science courses. An added benefit will be the establishment of an educational collaboration between a four year and a two year college doc23176 none Our world is composed of many ethnic communities in diaspora, each maintaining to a different degree a sense of identity related to their culture of origin. This research by cultural anthropologists studies patterns of variation in the cultural identity of Welsh communities. The current research adds two communities, one in Patagonia (Argentina) which retains the Welsh language and a variety of other cultural practices, and one in Ohio where Welsh-Americans live in self-consciously Welsh communities, but without retaining the language. The new information from this project will be integrated with that from previous studies of Welsh communities in Australia and Iowa as well as Wales. Hypotheses dealing with the importance of language, ethnic museums, performances, innovation in traditional institutions, and cultural exchange with Wales will be tested. Using a variety of methods including in-depth interviews and consensus analysis, a statistical technique that describes patterns of agreement and disagreement among individuals, the study will advance our understanding of the cultural construction of identity among diaspora communities. The broader impacts of the research will be important as the project will allow us to better understand how identity politics works in relation to cultural visibility doc23177 none In this project researchers at East Carolina University, Tulane University, and the University of Miami will attempt to a comprehensive approach to allow a quantitative estimate of groundwater discharge and associated dissolved constituents to continental shelf waters. A number of recent studies have shown that he transport of groundwater into coastal zones may be a significant process in the geochemical, nutrient, and carbon budgets of many marine nearshore waters. This project will address the manner in which we may evaluate interactions between groundwater and surface water a major river-dominated margin, the Mississippi River delta. The research team will develop and apply a novel multiple-tracer approach involving the use of 222Rn 226Ra, 4He 3He tritium, and short-lived radium isotopes as natural tracers of groundwater flow to examine the margin adjacent to the Mississippi River. Water samples will be collected from land-based groundwater wells near the Louisiana coast, deep porewaters via Kasten core, and surface waters from the lower Mississippi and adjacent continental shelf throughout the project. To evaluate the connection between groundwater inputs and surface water tracer inventories, we team will construct a balance of all possible inputs and outputs of these natural tracers.. This field-based research will be used to develop and constrain a numerical hydrologic model for the study area. Model results will be compared to estimates of groundwater flow obtained from geochemical modeling doc23178 none Developing a Women Interested in Mathematics and Science Advancement (WIMSA) Network in a Rural Community Women s deeply ingrained negative perceptions of science and mathematics are directly linked to their underrepresentation in these and related fields (Gottfried, ). The goal of our project is to increase the participation of women from rural communities in the fields of science, mathematics, engineering and technology (SMET). To achieve our goal, we will initiate a program that involves women throughout the community in a sustained network of support. This is an exciting, complex, long-term project. This proposal is for a PGE Demonstration Planning Grant, which will enable us to prepare a strong, comprehensive proposal for a full PGE Demonstration Grant. Our full grant will address the inequities experienced by girls, particularly in low-tech rural areas. The full grant will be used to create a program, called Women Interested in Mathematics and Science Advancement (WIMSA). The WIMSA program will consist of a network of people and organizations, all with the goal of increasing the participation and success of females in mathematics and science. The full proposal will address recruitment of WIMSA network members, sustaining their membership, and expanding the WIMSA program. The PGE Demonstration Planning project will focus on the design of all aspects of the WIMSA program. One of the two main planning grant objectives will be to design our pilot project, the annual WIMSA Summer Program (WSP) for middle school girls, which will have the dual purpose ofbeing the initial impetus to bring people into the WIMSA network, and of increasing the skill level of middle school girls and teachers. A planning committee, consisting of two K-12 teachers, two college students, and the two Principal Investigators, will be formed to develop the summer program. The committee will determine the size and scope of the program, design program activities and curriculum, and will collaborate with community organizations regarding WSP field activities. The program design will build on the successes of other SMET intervention programs for women across the country. Our other main planning grant objective will be to design the WIMSA network connections and activities. We envision this network bringing together Mesa State faculty and students, K-12 teachers and students, private businesses, government organizations, educational associations, community leaders and any local programs involved with science and mathematics. Our first activity will be a WIMSA kickoff meeting, hosted by Mesa State, which will include people from all target organizations and will introduce them to the WIMSA concept. We will create a WISMA Advisory Board that will oversee all aspects of the WIMSA project, including writing the full PGE Demonstration Grant. We will design college courses to provide ongoing SMET activities and training for WIMSA members, including a graduate credit component for K-12 teachers. We will collaborate with local businesses and professionals to design activities for the WSP, internship opportunities for WIMSA college students, job-shadowing opportunities for K-12 students, and presentation opportunities at Mesa State. In order to sustain such relationshipsand collaborations, there will be WIMSA meetings at least three times per year. Although there are no programs in our area addressing the lack of females in SMET fields, there are programs and organizations committed to improving our community, and many people who wish to make a difference. The WIMSA program will provide an incredible opportunity to harness and coordinate these resources and create a very effective program that will have long-ranging impact doc23179 none This dissertation project posits that biomedicine, even in the face of mounting ethical dilemmas raised by Islamic scholars condemnations of new body-modifying and life-altering possibilities such as organ donation, maintains authority and social legitimacy in the culture of contemporary Egypt. Further, the project proposes that the Egyptian state plays a crucial role in maintaining biomedical authority and its cultural legitimacy by closely mediating the relationship between Egypt s biomedical community and the opinions of Islamic legal scholarship. The project seeks to critique the polarization of Islam and science, predominant in local and international discourse, by uncovering the ways in which the production of knowledge about bioethics in the domains of biomedicine and Islamic scholarship in Egypt in fact occur within the same social and structural field. This study further questions how patients interests and understandings of bioethical dilemmas fit within this institutional complex in Egypt through a detailed ethnography of the reception and application of emerging biomedical technologies, Islamic legal decisions about them, state legislation, and their consumption by the general public. The politics of organ donation, currently the central problematic in contemporary Egyptian bioethics, constitutes a primary site through which to analyze how these various institutions manage bioethical debates. The project will rely on ethnographic analysis of biomedical practice involving organ donation in clinical settings (based in Kasr el Aini Teaching Hospital) in order to analyze patients lived experiences of these debates. Specifically, it will examine the ways in which physicians and patients encounter and manage ethical dilemmas. Further evidence will be drawn from analyses of medical training in ethics (whether explicit or implicit), interviews with Islamic legal scholars and state legislators, and textual analyses of contemporary bioethical debates in Egypt (including Islamic legal texts, state legislative reports and decisions, media reports, and biomedical treatises). This project will contribute significantly to the study of how Islamic scholarship deals with, and may often be overshadowed by, new scientific knowledge. It will also offer a non-western case study to the emerging field of science studies, in which scholars have provided analyses of the ways in which biomedical knowledge is produced and codified into daily practice. By focusing on ethics in an Islamic context, this study will offer new insights into the role religion plays in simultaneously embracing and shunning new biotechnologies. The study focuses on the place of an Islamic response to biotechnologies within the confines of the modern state, and within the context of global debates about bio-ethics. Results from this research will have broader implications for understanding what the collusion among dominant fields of knowledge (Islamic scholarship, science, and state legislature), in their negotiation of bio-ethical concerns, means for ordinary people faced with new technological possibilities for the management of their lives doc23180 none Borowsky Tabin The long term goal of this research is to understand the nature of the developmental genetic differences that make all individuals of a species unique, and distinguish the various species from one another. Towards this end, differences between two types of fishes that are closely related, but genetically distinct, will be studied. The Mexican tetra, Astyanax mexicanus, has some populations that live in rivers and others that live in caves. Cave forms differ from their surface relatives by having greatly reduced eyes and pigmentation. The caves in which they live provide little food and they have adapted to this by developing a slower metabolism. Other senses are overdeveloped to compensate for the lack of vision: e.g., smell, taste and the ability to detect vibration and current. Not only can they survive eternal darkness, they thrive in caves. The genome of this species will be mapped at a fine scale using microsatellite DNA markers, in hybrids between the cave and surface forms. The map and further analysis of the hybrids will permit the detection and characterization of genes (QTL) that are responsible for the differences between cave and surface forms. The results will give estimates of the genetic architecture of trait differences: the number of genes involved and magnitudes of their individual effects, and their positions in the genome relative to one another. Positional information of some of the major effect QTL will be used to identify and clone the genes; this will facilitate their functional analysis. The results will shed light on the genetic pathways involved in development and maintenance of complex traits, like the vertebrate eye and other aspects of the sensory system, control of pigmentation, behavior and metabolism. The results will also inform on the nature of genetic differences distinguishing populations and species, and on the constraints on evolutionary change resulting from trait correlations doc23181 none This dissertation research conducts an comparative study of the agricultural productivity of Removal Period ( - ) Cherokee Indian farmers and white farmers who later cultivated the same land. At this time, the argument for removal revolved around the inefficient agricultural practices used by the Cherokee. Using the stochastic distance frontier approach, the technical efficiency, as well as other productivity measures, for each Cherokee and white household can be estimated. Yet, the goal for this research is not to justify an antiquated policy, but to examine the variation of efficiency across Cherokee farms as well as between these two groups. By isolating the differences between Cherokee and white societies, this study will strengthen our understanding of Indian White relations at this particular juncture. The data collection and analysis will add greatly to the dearth of economic studies on Native Americans. Despite a vast literature on Cherokee acculturation and removal, this project is the first large-scale comparative study of the agricultural performance between these two groups doc23182 none Science on Patrol (SOP), a demonstration project of the Institute for Schools of the Future and the Police Athletic League in collaboration with the Manhattan Robbery Squad, the Crime Scene Unit, the Arson and Explosion Squad and other units of the New York City Police Department Detective Division, selected New York City public schools, community outreach organizations, science professionals and database and Web designers, is designed to promote interest and achievement in science by providing youngsters compelling problems ( crimes ) they can solve by applying the scientific processes and skills actually used by crime scene investigators to solve crimes. This approach capitalizes on the interest in high profile crimes treated in the popular press, movies and current television programs. The informal science project is aimed squarely at raising the level of participation and achievement in science for adolescent females and other members of under-represented minority groups by achieving thee goals: 1. using research-based strategies to attract and retain under-represented minorities, particularly females, in informal science programs; 2. increasing their interest and achievement in science knowledge and skills; and 3. raising their awareness and interest in science-based careers. This project will roll out through an existing structure, PAL centers in the Bronx in Year One, in PAL centers throughout New York City in Year Two and in PAL centers across the country in Year Three. Interdisciplinary teams comprising PAL center instructors, educators, police detectives, instructional designers, and scientists will work collaboratively to: (1) develop, field test and revise a minimum of 12 crime scenarios for the youngsters to solve; (2) develop additional course materials, including a Facilitator s Guide, the Science on Patrol website, a Student Activities Kits which include case folders for each of the crimes , and a manual for mentors and or volunteers; (3) increase the participants capacity to apply science knowledge and processes to solve real world problems; and, (4) build the capacity of faculty to implement compelling and challenging problems in environments that are gender-neutral, promote collaboration, encourage problem-solving and reflect both research and best practice for increasing participation and achievement in science-based areas. Decades of research on the root causes and outcomes of the under representation of females in mathematics, science and technology have amply demonstrated that the culture and context of K-16 schooling clearly lies at the heart of the issue. Yet the literature shows the very factors that constrain participation and achievement of females and other under-represented minorities in higher levels of mathematics and science are alterable. Science on Patrol is an innovative project that links science knowledge and skills with the real world applications of forensic specialists in a highly motivating course of study for middle and high school students. The key element, however, is the comprehensive use of research-based findings to shape learning environments specifically designed to attract and retain females and other under-representedminorities to advanced study of science and science-related careers. Science on Patrol does not single out specific research-based factors that promote success for female and other under-represented minorities. Instead, it integrates all in an integrated and coherent manner to create learning environments that are friendly to the target population. Information about the culture and context of these learning environments will be disseminated broadly and serve as a model for other informal science efforts and for school-based K-16 classrooms doc23183 none This proposal models the effects of job rotation, in terms of learning and forgetting, on the overall productivity of a group of workers. This reveals the cross-training tradeoff between worker flexibility versus potentially reduced efficiency. The research combines experimental psychology (leaning and forgetting curves) with robust mathematical programming and optimization methods to develop tools that could be of significant use to managers. The three research questions will be answered with the aid of computer simulation and validated in the field. The broad impact is the potential for enhancing productivity and improvements in the work environment that will benefit the economy. Modern manufacturing practices, which often use cellular designs and just-in-time operations, may disrupt the continuous learning process. While in the past managers relied on specialization over long production runs to improve productivity, today they often make use of cross training in an attempt to manage rapidly changing technology and uncertain demand. However, at present, no concrete guidelines exist to aid managers in deciding levels of cross training, task rotation, and the sequencing of jobs. The objective of this research is to improve productivity in organizations with job rotation through assignment and scheduling of workers to tasks and to examine preferred assignment and cross training levels in this environment. Based on individual learning and forgetting characteristics, workers are assigned and scheduled to tasks in ways designed to maximize productivity. An important contribution of the project is understanding the tradeoffs between lost productivity due to reduced specialization and the flexibility benefits due to cross training. The study will address the following research questions: 1. Within a work group, to which of m tasks should each of n workers be assigned for three objectives a.) Maximize throughput given n workers, b.) Minimize the number of workers needed for a given production requirement, c.) Minimize the time required for n workers to meet a given production requirement. 2. What degree of cross training should be allowed or required, including: a.) How many tasks in addition to the initial assignment should the n workers be responsible for? b.) How often and in what pattern should workers shift between these cross trained tasks (i.e., what is the schedule)? 3. What are the effects of environmental factors including, Workplace design implications (i.e., pattern of work and or information flow), Adjacent vs. non-adjacent worker-task assignments (i.e., tour travel time costs), Single vs. multiple products, and Batch size. First, the investigators will develop math programming based decision models for assigning and scheduling workers to tasks. The models will incorporate the effects of individual worker learning and forgetting. Second, the investigators will develop a measurement model for quantifying worker learning and forgetting for use in the math programming models. Third, the investigators will examine the research questions described above based on empirical distributions of individual workers learning and forgetting patterns, through simulation first and then subsequently applying the results in real work settings. The impact of this research is potentially broad, affecting directly the many service and manufacturing organizations that make use of cross training. Further, the proposed research will quantify the costs from learning and forgetting effects that are associated with cross training programs. While there are good reasons for cross training workers, many related to increased flexibility, when these workers are learning new tasks they are subject to forgetting others and productivity may suffer significantly. Thus, the research will provide both descriptive and prescriptive capabilities for organizations to quantify and plan cross training programs in manufacturing and service settings doc23184 none At the heart of the grant is a cutting stock problem - this is a classical problem familiar to most researchers in operations research and has applications in a number of continuous production applications including metals such as steel or aluminum, paper, textiles, fiber-optic and electrical cable, and glass, to name a few. However, the version around which the proposed research is built is fundamentally different. The grant address the case where a company has geographically distributed distribution points that it can stock with standard sizes from its plants, and the customer demand for smaller sizes comes from other geographically distributed points on a continuing basis. Second, this demand is stochastic in nature. Third, it addresses a sustainable manufacturing environment where the trim is not considered waste, but rather gets recycled and has an inherent value associated with it. Fourth, the problem is not a static one where a one-time decision has to be made. Rather, decisions need to be made on an ongoing basis, and decisions made at one point in time have a significant impact on decisions at later points in time. The overall objective is to find long-run rates of replenishment for the standard sizes as well as long-run policies for cutting these into smaller pieces so as to satisfy customer demand. The grant will extend this basic model to consider supply chain design problems and the analogous case for two-dimensional products. Supply chain problems are critical for most industries. While there has been much research into optimizing supply chains, most research considers only a small part of the supply chain. This grant is unique in that it provides optimal policies for the design and operations of a supply chain under uncertainty. Since it addresses one-dimensional and two-dimensional products it will have applications to many industrial problems doc23185 none Sugars are evolutionarily conserved signaling molecules that control many vital developmental processes and physiological responses from bacteria, yeasts, mammals, to plants. Extensive cellular and transgenic studies have provided compelling evidence that plant hexokinase (HXK), a sugar-binding enzyme, acts as a sugar sensor with both signaling and metabolic functions. To further elucidate the molecular mechanisms underlying the plant sugar-signaling network, a genetic approach has been taken to isolate sugar response mutants using Arabidopsis as a plant model. Based on a phenotypic assay in which a high level of glucose blocks the switch of post-germination development in Arabidopsis, both glucose insensitive (gin) and glucose over-sensitive (glo) mutants have been isolated. Genetic, phenotypic and molecular characterizations of these glucose-signaling mutants (gin1, gin2, gin4, gin5 & gin6) and their corresponding genes have provided many surprising new insights into the regulatory mechanisms connecting nutrient status to plant hormone biosynthesis and signaling. Currently, the most important sugar response mutant that is directly linked to glucose sensing and signaling is gin2 with HXK1 deficiency. The study of other HXK and HXK-like (HKL) genes, the characterization of gin2 suppressor mutants, the analysis of HXK1-mediated global gene expression using functional genomic tools, and the understanding of interactions between glucose and hormone signaling pathways will advance our knowledge on the molecular mechanisms underlying the regulatory roles of sugar signals in plant growth and development. Since sugar production and consumption constitutes the most fundamental activities of plant life in growth, reproduction and storage, and is tightly linked to environmental conditions and factors, understanding the molecular basis of sugar signaling network may help design new strategies for improvements in agriculture. The study of metabolic signaling mechanisms also offers excellent training opportunities for researchers, postdoctoral associates and graduate and undergraduate students especially from under-represented groups in science. Future research plans have four objectives: 1) Functional analysis of HXK and HXK-like (HKL) genes 2) Genetic, phenotypic and molecular analysis of gin2 suppressor mutants 3) Global gene expression and functional analyses of HXK-regulated genes 4) Elucidation of the molecular mechanisms underlying the interactions between glucose and hormone signaling Although the broad effects of sugars on plant growth and development have been known for decades, the molecular mechanisms of sugar signaling network have only been recently discovered. The sugar regulatory pathways are directly and extensively connected to multiple hormonal, metabolic, and stress signaling pathways and are modulate by environmental factors that determine the output of adaptive and flexible growth and development in plants. The discoveries have generated significant impact on basic and applied scientific research and have altered traditional concepts on metabolic regulation in plants. The intellectual contribution to our understanding of fundamental control of plant life will have practical applications from the improved production of plant fiber, food, medicine and alternative and renewable energy resources to the manipulation of environmental and ecological systems including the modulation of global CO2 sinks doc23186 none The University of Kentucky will to establish a demonstration project called the Girls in Science Program (GIS), to encourage young women from rural southeastern Appalachian Kentucky to pursue careers in science, math, engineering and technology (SMET). This three- year project, to begin in September , targets 120 girls entering the seventh-grade from 21 rural Kentucky Appalachian counties, parents of these girls, and a minimum of 30 rural Kentucky Appalachian middle school teachers from these 21 county school districts. This project targets a select group of middle school girls with a program that involves: 1) Weeklong Summer Institutes for each girl at the University of Kentucky campus for two years, 2) Saturday After-school sessions throughout two academic school years, and 3) Mentoring relationships with University scientists and community mentors. The project also the project targets middle school math and science teachers through professional development courses focused on engaging each girl in science and math for two years. This project will include parental involvement with a series of workshops. The project team will also develop and disseminate a model middle school curriculum manual focused on institutionalizing the program in rural Appalachian Kentucky. Girls and teachers who enroll in the program will be the primary beneficiaries; however, the program is designed to have a broad-based impact on other students, teachers, relatives, and ultimately rural Kentucky and Appalachia doc23187 none S: Virtual environments are increasingly being called upon to advance science learning. With possibilities for interactive multimedia displays and learner customization, these environments hold great promise. But are these environments friendly to girls? Computer games, designed by young men for boys and young men, epitomize technology s exclusion of girls, their interests, and values. Less obvious but more devastating, this technological estrangement exacerbates girls lack of interest and self confidence not just in computers but in science. Technology itself and even the design of technology-enhanced science experiences may disadvantage girls, turning them away from SMET instead of engaging them. Experts urge more women and girls to become involved in software and hardware design, to begin to transform computer culture. The ihInvolving Girls as Designerslg (IGD) project will look at what can happen when girls design their own technology-enhanced science learning experiences. Do girls and boys approach the design process differently? If so, what are the characteristics of a girl-friendly design process? Do all-girl design teams create products that are more appealing to other girls than products designed by all boy teams? Are gender differences more strongly polarized by the end of middle school, or are they equally evident even in fifth grade? METHODS: IGD will invite small teams of girls to experience and critically assess a series of high quality science-learning experiences diverse in their technology and extent and form of interactivity, ranging from planetarium show to role play simulated mission to Mars, from CD-ROM games to exploring space science on the web, television to immersive virtual reality. These young, newly expert technologists will then design their ideal science learning experience, with the goal of teaching science and inspiring kids to be interested in SMET. IGD will profile girl reactions to the diverse forms of science learning. The design process and design outcomes of the all-girl design teams will be analyzed and compared to all-boy teams. IGD will compare fifth grade girls (whose enthusiasm for science parallels boys) with eighth grade girls (whose enthusiasm and self confidence in science has declined), looking for similarities and differences in technology attitudes, design process, and design outcomes. Professional software developers will create visualizations of each team s prototype. With no indication of the gender of the designers, each set of visualizations will be shown to same-age students to discover whether boys and girls prefer prototypes developed by their own gender. INTELLECTUAL MERIT: IGD will test the assertion that involving girls as designers can impact design process and product and describe gender and age differences. IGD will contribute concrete understanding of girls attitudes toward diverse forms of technology-enhanced science learning. BROADER IMPACTS: IGD could provide compelling evidence to software developers about the critical importance of involving girls as designers and ways of enabling girl-friendly design processes. IGC could provide guidance to teachers and curriculum designers about choosing among technology-enhanced science learning experiences. The PIs teach graduate design research classes (in education and digital media design). They will involve their students in the research and integrate findings into their courses. New understanding about girl-friendly science education designs will be incorporated into the Mars Pioneer Learning Adventures initiative and into the overall Comm Tech Lab software design process and College of Education and Digital Media Arts curricula doc23188 none The Educational Television Endowment of South Carolina, in collaboration with the South Carolina Educational Television Network (SCETV), will carry out a program to increase middle school girls enthusiasm for and understanding of technology and introduce them to women who work in science and technology fields. The project is a three-year pilot program called TECH TEAM that consists of afterschool technology clubs, workshops in computer applications at SCETV and Summer Technology Day Camps. Partners include the Girl Scouts of the Congaree Area, Inc., the Girl Scout Council of the Pee Dee Area, and the College of Education of the University of South Carolina. In addition to the girls themselves, TECH TEAM will train the club facilitators - teachers and Girl Scout leaders - in video and computer-based technologies, project based curriculum development and techniques for gender equitable education in an annual series of Saturday workshops. The TECH TEAM project will take place in three South Carolina school districts - the School District of Fairfield County, Richland District One and Marion District One - all of which are considered critical needs districts. Fairfield is a rural county in which 40.8% of the adults have less than a high school education and unemployment is at the second highest level in the state. Marion District One is in a poor, rural area in which 76% of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch, over 50% come from single parent homes and 75% are minority. Richland District One is an urban district. 80% of students are minority and 58% qualify for free or reduced lunch. TECH TEAM is designed to increase girls technological fluency through a progressive sequence of technology applications in a hands-on, project based setting. In the first year, - , the girls will videotape interviews with local women who work in the fields of science, math, technology and engineering. To locate their interviewees, they will learn and use research skills, including both informal and Internet-based techniques. The girls will edit their videos using a computer-based editing program, and broadcast them to schools across South Carolina via SCETV s Instructional Television Fixed Service (ITFS). They will host two-way call-in shows on the ITFS, allowing students anywhere in the state to respond and ask the girls questions. In the second year of the project, - , the girls will create a Web site about TECH TEAM that will be integrated into www.knowitall.org, SCETV s Web portal for teachers and students. The girls will design the layout of their site and publish writing, post videos and contribute to a threaded discussion that will be developed for the site. In TECH TEAM s third year, - , the girls will create a searchable database of their videos for inclusion on the site, adding dynamic elements that require the use of computer codes, so that they extend their fluency in the use of computer technology. They will learn about SQL (Structured Query Language), and they will develop CFML (Cold Fusion Markup Language) to make their databases Web accessible. In addition to the afterschool clubs, they will attend a series of Saturday workshops taught by SCETV programmers. During each summer of the project the TECH TEAM girls will attend a Summer Technology Day Camps at SCETV s Telecommunications Center in Columbia. The camps will allow all the participants to meet each other, work in SCETV s computer labs, and present their work to an invited audience. Throughout each year a video crew will document the progress of TECH TEAM on videotape and interview the participants. This material will form the basis of a CD-ROM to be produced for teachers professional development. The CD will be mailed free of charge to every middle school in South Carolina and will be made available nationwide through SCETV s marketing division. Evaluation and assessment of TECH TEAM will be conducted by Dr. Kenneth Stevenson of the College of Education of the University of South Carolina. The impact of TECH TEAM goes beyond gender equity considerations to universal issues of technology education, teacher training, adolescent development, the design of afterschool programs, and partnerships between schools and informal education providers; TECH TEAM will advance understanding of these areas as they apply not only to girls but to all students and teachers doc23189 none The goal of this dissemination project is to develop a model public service ad campaign that will advance the participation of women and girls in SMET through effecting a positive shift in attitudes among parents, educators, students and others in the community regarding girls pursuit of interests careers in SMET. The projects lead institution is Stony Brook University and collaborating organizations institutions include the Long Island Fund for Women and Girls, Briarcliffe College, and television stations WLIW21 (PBS) and WLNY55. This informal education project will develop a series of dynamic television spots, to be disseminated through local television broadcasts and through online links. The target audienceconsists of parents, educators and other authority figures, as well as peers, who have a great deal of influence over young peoples perceptions of their educational and future professional options. Spots will reflect research findings that illustrate current gender inequities in SMET education and careers, and de-bunk some of the commonly accepted beliefs regarding gender-related causes for these disparities; information about often ignored or unremarked historical and current contributions of women in SMET; and national statistics on professional shortages in the SMET employment pool. This video campaign will attempt to re-shape public attitudes regarding the gender appropriateness of girls SMET pursuits. Using psychosocial research as a guide, the project will disseminate information in ways that may directly alter attitudes among individuals in the targeted groups, as well as encourage new behaviors that may then trigger compensatory attitude changes. This is a novel approach which combines technology-based applications, marketing strategies, and psychosocial research to target change in specific underlying public attitudes that hinder the participation of girls and young women in SMET doc23190 none During the elementary school years, children become increasingly skilled in the use of a broad array of techniques for the storage and retrieval of information. For example, kindergartners and fifth-graders differ markedly in the ways in which they rehearse and organize to-be-remembered material. Unfortunately, however, even though much is known about the memory skills of children of different ages, relatively little information is available concerning the ways in which the skills of individual children change over time. Moreover, even less is understood about the factors that influence the emergence, modification, and effectiveness of these abilities. To a considerable extent, these gaps in understanding reflect the widespread use of cross-sectional research designs in which age differences in performance are examined by assessing different groups of children at each of the ages of interest. Although these methodologies can yield precise descriptions of the skills of children at different ages, they do not permit statements about developmental change. To do so requires a commitment to a longitudinal design in which a sample is established and then assessed repeatedly over time as the children mature and reach specified age points. In this way, it is possible to identify contrasting developmental patterns and also to explore potential mediators of change. This research will address these issues using a short-term longitudinal study of memory development in the first and second grades of the elementary school. A sample of 120 first grade children, drawn from 12 first grade classrooms, will be followed for two years, with a wide range of memory assessments being made four times each year. In addition, in order to understand the forces that propel developmental change, the research will examine key features of the children s classrooms thought to influence the acquisition and consolidation of mnemonic skills. An extensive series of observations in the classrooms of the participants will emphasize in particular the nature of teacher talk about remembering, the memory demands that are expressed, the specific strategies that are modeled or discussed, and the expectations that are transmitted by teachers. The focus on linkages between the classroom and individual memory development emerges from a number of lines of evidence that suggest the role of formal schooling in the development of a repertoire of effective techniques for remembering. The multiple measures, both of the individual children and of the classrooms, will enable the research to describe in considerable depth children s changing skills as well as the context in which they develop. Moreover, the research will relate the children s trajectories of memory performance over time to various characteristics of the teacher talk to which they are exposed in their classrooms. The results of the research should have clear relevance to the educational enterprise in terms of helping to craft teaching strategies that will encourage the development of effective memory strategies in children and thus encourage them to reach their educational potential doc23191 none Throughout the Pacific Northwest there currently exist numerous organizations providing valuable but uncoordinated activities and support services related to motivating and supporting girls interest in SMET careers. Twenty such organizations in Washington State alone. The activities of these groups are not coordinated and in fact, some groups appear to be in competition for access to girls and to resources, particularly for resources from the corporate community. This funding source, in the face of recent layoffs, is less inclined to support such programs. Under these circumstances it becomes increasingly important to coordinate existing and evolving activities to effectively utilize resources. This project includes three primary activities: Dissemination and Outreach: In partnership with the Northwest Girls Coalition, document and promote coordination and collaboration among girl serving SMET programs in Washington and Oregon and establish an on-going communication system linking these organizations. Creation of a Program Evaluation Rubric: In collaboration with the Northwest Regional Educational Lab create a program rubric reflecting best practice models and program assessment tool based on the rubric. Mini-Grants: With the support of Washington and Oregon MESA, we will offer mini- grants to a minimum of twenty-two girl-serving STEM focused programs to support collaboration, assessment activities and projects related to addressing gaps and overlaps in service. The project is under the guidance of a Champions Board made up of individuals such as Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Washington, current presidents of the state Math and Science teacher associations, and representatives from both the Washington and Oregon state education departments doc23192 none The vast success of products like the GameBoy sends a clear message that technology is the domain of boys. The Girls Creating Games Program is a demonstration project designed to challenge this message by teaching girls to design and program a computer game. This project is unique in its approach: it puts girls in the role of producers of technology, rather than simply consumers. One hundred eighty middle school girls will participate in a study to determine whether producing technology (computer game design) can increase girls fluency, interest, active participation and persistence in technology studies. The specific project goals are to a)increase girls knowledge, interest, attitudes, and confidence with computers, b) increase adults capacity to support girls in technology, and c) add to research on the kinds of programs and technologies that increase the interest and persistence of middle school girls in technology studies and careers. The proposed project will take place with small groups of girls after school and during the summer in a small, urban county (70% White, 21% Hispanic) in California. It involves an unusual partnership between four entities: 1) researchers and program developers from a non-profit health promotion agency (ETR Associates); 2) school personnel and students from New Brighton Middle School; 3) staff and youth from a Boys and 4) female technology students, teachers, and professionals from local colleges and companies. This partnership is essential for building knowledge (e.g., identifying effective program strategies to increase girls interest and persistence in technology studies), and increasing social capital (e.g., building the capacity of adult female role models, teachers, and staff to provide a supportive environment). Teaching computer game design holds great promise as an intervention strategy for increasing girls interest in technology. Indeed, interactive games have an early influence on theskills and attitudes that are the best predictors of future technology-related behavior (Greenfield Levine Subrahmanyam Miller, Chaika, linking technology with its real-world application; focusing the game content on social issues; using a collaborative instructional model; involving technical female role models, school teachers and program staff; and assessing the impact of game design on participants as well as the teachers and staff. The proposed intervention will be evaluated using a quasi-experimental, pre-post test design. Two hypotheses will be tested. First, compared to the control group, the participants in the intervention group will report a greater increase in problem-solving and computer skills, interest in computers, positive attitude toward computers, intention to pursue computer studies, confidence using computers, knowledge about tech careers, and support to pursue a career in technology. Second, the instructional model that uses collaboration with peers and guidance from teachers, staff, and female role models will increase the adults capacity and interest to support girls active participation in technology, and challenge stereotypes about who is good at computers. Data will be collected using surveys, interviews, and student notebooks. The findings will result in a replicable version of the program that can be used to increase girls interest in technology and adults capacity to support them in other school and after school settings doc23193 none Whether winding through alpine meadows, migrating across continents, or circling garbage cans, insects display impressive aerodynamic agility. Although the science of aeronautics is sophisticated enough to design airliners, space shuttles, and stealth fighters, scientists are only just beginning to understand the aerodynamic mechanisms that enable tiny insects to fly and maneuver. This research program builds upon recent discoveries using a variety of experimental and theoretical techniques to construct a comprehensive theory of animal flight. The techniques used in this investigation include three-dimensional high speed videography, with which it is possible to capture the complex wing motions of tiny insects such as fruit flies as they actively steer and maneuver. The research also employs a giant robotic model of flapping insect wings, immersed in a 3 ton tank of mineral oil. By replaying the wing and body motion of real insects on the large robot, the researchers can directly measure the flows and forces created by flapping wings. Through such experiments it will be possible to determine not simply how insects manage to stay in the air, but how they carefully manipulate aerodynamic forces to actively steer and maneuver. Whereas much previous work on insect flight has focused on a small number of species, this research will investigate how the aerodynamic mechanisms used by insects vary with body size, wing shape, and flight speed. Because the physics of air flow can change with scale, this broad comparative analysis is necessary to construct a comprehensive theory of insect flight. Insects are among the most diverse groups of organisms on the planet, and their flight behavior plays a central role in their extraordinary success. Thus, by forging a clearer picture of how they fly, this research will greatly extend our understanding of this ecologically and agriculturally important group of animals. In addition, just as with complex weather systems, predicting the complex patterns of forces and flows created by flapping wings represents a challenging benchmark for computer simulations in the important and challenging field of Fluid Mechanics - the branch of Physics that determines such diverse phenomena as aerodynamics, heat flow, weather, and global warming. By providing experimental verification of the solutions to complicated flow problems, this research will help mathematicians around the world improve the accuracy of their computer models. Further, knowledge gathered in this study on the aerodynamics of flapping wings will provide new and creative design concepts for the aeronautics industry. Lessons from insect aerodynamics and sensory physiology are already being used in the design of small autonomous air vehicles, whose potential applications include search and rescue operations and planetary exploration. By moving towards a more comprehensive theory of flapping flight aerodynamics, this research will present engineers with a useful body of theory for the development of novel aircraft doc23194 none Rice is one of the most important crops in the world, and the main source of food for nearly half of the world s population. Rice research can be applied the other major cereals, such as wheat and maize, and many aspects of rice genomics can be transferred to the many minor economic grass species that have themselves not warranted extensive research and breeding. Drafts of the rice genome have been recently published, and current estimates indicate that 60,000 genes are present in rice. The plan is to construct a structural and functional model for every protein encoded by the rice genome using methods developed at the University of Washington. The project will further the understanding and elucidation of the function of characterized as well as novel proteins, identify those proteins that improve yield and confer disease and pest resistance, and enable genetic engineering of rice crops with beneficial traits not naturally found in rice. The research, involving the collaborative efforts of scientists from all over the world, will provide opportunities for the training of undergraduate and graduate students, and post-doctoral fellows. All the information generated by the research will be generated through a web server and database: http: bioverse.compbio.washington.edu, which will provide a synergistic portal to obtain a comprehensive picture of rice and cereal organismal biology. Besides helping understand how other plant genomes work, this research will also set up a framework for integrating single molecule and genomic data, and thus the science developed will help with projects on analyzing other genomes doc23195 none POWER SHIFT: A Proposal to Augment the Performance of Girls in SMET Studies In keeping with the mission to educate children and families, encourage creativity, and challenge all learners in new and innovative ways, the Maine Discovery Museum plans out-of-school-time programs that will increase competence in science and mathematics and promote technological fluency for middle school students. With the passage of a landmark initiative by the 119th Maine State Legislature that equips all 7th and 8th grade students with laptop computers, MDM plans programs that will expand the use of laptop computers beyond the school day, encourage parent involvement, and convey fresh ways of learning and teaching math and science. With a history of providing exhibits and educational programs that are based on recognized learning theories and that accommodate a wide-range of learning styles, we have an excellent opportunity to implement project-based activities that encourage creative problem solving, social interaction, and group communication. We believe these program ingredients, along with staff development workshops that focus on gender equity issues, will foster improved achievement and greater participation by females in SMET professions doc23196 none Students in the United States continue to show a significant gender gap in their academic achievement in mathematics. One reason for this is that females still fall victim to the stereotype of lower math ability; that is, they are vulnerable to stereotype threat. This project applies lessons from research on student motivation to understand the academic contexts that can heighten or lessen this vulnerability. The research is designed to show that math classes conveying the idea that math ability is a fixed trait -- you have it or you don t -- will lead females to fall prey to stereotype threat. In contrast, math classes that portray math skills as acquirable should defuse the impact of stereotypes. Even someone performing poorly now can still gain ability over time. This view of math skills, in addition to fostering greater achievement, is expected to increase females enjoyment of math and their sense of belonging to the math community. The research addresses two key moments in students educational lives: the transition to junior high school and to college. Educational experiences at these points lay the foundation for future interest in science, technology, engineering and math domains, and thus influence the career paths women take. The findings will have important implications for members of any group who face messages of limited ability in any area of achievement doc23197 none This award is to organize a workshop entitled Scaling New Heights to be held at the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center on May 20 and 21, . The NSF PACI leading-edge centers (NCSA, PSC, SDSC) together with the Center for Computational Sciences (ORNL) and NERSC, will jointly organize the workshop which will examine issues involved in scaling applications to thousands of processors. The goal of this workshop is to examine practical mechanisms for scaling these applications to closely coupled high-end distributed memory architectures doc23168 none This project synthesizes key aspects of production and energy flow, based on US-GLOBEC studies in the Northwest Atlantic, and augment the US-GLOBEC data with information from other sources on production processes at the lower and upper levels of the food web. The primary objectives examine several alternate model outcomes of GLOBEC and GLOBEC-related studies that help address a number of outstanding issues and re-examine patterns of energy flow on Georges Bank. This research enhances and expands the findings of previous investigations, with explicit consideration of factors not addressed in earlier models of this system including: (1) the microbial food web, (2) consideration of new and recycled primary production, (3) spatial heterogeneity of primary and secondary production on Georges Bank, (4) changes in biomass and production at higher trophic levels, and (5) the effects of environmental forcing on production processes. Incorporation of these elements into the modeling effort permits a more detailed understanding of production processes on the Bank. The first four elements provides the broader ecosystem context, while the last provides the link to one of the US-GLOBEC program.s principal themes, climate change. The latter is being addressed by comparing several different decadal-scale time periods that reflect differing environmental and fish community regimes: (1) the cold s characterized by abundant groundfish stocks fished by distant water fleets; (2) the s, characterized by average water temperatures, increased domestic fishing effort, and depletion of groundfish stocks; (3) the s, characterized by average water temperatures, overfishing of groundfish stocks, and increases in elasmobranchs; and (4) the average temperature, lower salinity s, characterized by reduced fishing mortality, rebuilding of groundfish stocks, and increases in elasmobranchs and pelagic fish. Because of large-scale changes in the fish community structure as a result of over-exploitation, a full understanding of the population dynamics of the target species will not be attained without consideration of changes in other ecosystem components. Individual model networks are being formulated to represent each of the above periods. Subsequently, dynamic modeling will be developed to describe the transformations or shifts between these regimes doc23199 none Over the past decade, wireless sensor networks have evolved from primarily unidirectional star networks into a wide variety of forms, with large-scale research programs and significant commercialization activity. These systems will increasingly connect the physical world to wide-area networks for monitoring and control purposes including homeland defense and industrial applications. Yet relatively little is known on the fundamental limits to how efficiently a network can glean useful information from the environment to process it and relay it to the larger public network. Research is being conducted on fundamental limits in four areas: the rate distortion region for correlated sources, capacity for distributed nodes, packet delay across networks, and the dependability of heterogeneous wireless networks. These four topics collectively address many of the important parameters in sensor network design and will allow practical algorithms to be tested against fundamental limits doc23200 none The research undertakes a preliminary investigation of a new decomposition approach that offers the potential for solving large-scale instances of an important class of graph problems effectively. This class, comprising such difficult problems as maximum weight independent subset, maximum clique, maximal planar sub-graph, and graph coloring, has significant economic impact in numerous applications, including plant layout, automatic graph drawing, computational geometry and circuit design. The purpose of the research is to demonstrate the possibilities for this technology, focusing on a typical problem from the class with the goal of optimizing large-scale instances within reasonable average-case run times. Research objectives are: (1) theoretical basis for the decomposition, (2) effective implementation techniques, and (3) computational evaluation of efficacy. Graphs in this class may be decomposed into disjoint sub-graphs and a problem of the same type as the original problem may be solved on each sub-graph. The method of approach applies existing algorithms to solve small sub-problems within reasonable average-case times, generating solutions that will be used in both branch-and-price and branch-and-cut methods. A master problem coordinates sub-problem solutions to optimize the original, large-scale problem. is based on six research questions. Answers will achieve all three objectives and entail both basic research and engineering contributions. Basic research includes extending the Co-PI s recent research on branch decompositions and the facet generation procedure. Engineering contributions include designing effective implementation techniques and computational evaluation. The research will have broad impact. It will advance discovery and understanding through basic research, contributing to the knowledge base. It will seek to recruit students from under-represented groups and promote teaching and training by engaging them in the field of optimization, contributing to the infrastructure for research and education. The plan for dissemination will contribute to training analysts, engineers, and managers. Research results will be incorporated in courses taught by the Co-PIs and by their colleagues at other universities. Benefits to society at large will accrue from laying the foundation for this new approach. Future research can extend this foundation, specializing the decomposition to other problems in this class and generalizing it to other classes of problems doc23201 none The Self as Political and Scientific Project in the 20th Century: A Symposium on the Human Sciences Between Utopia and Reform The Self as Political and Scientific Project in the 20th Century: A Symposium on the Human Sciences Between Utopia and Reform Greg Eghigian, Pennsylvania State University This award provides funding for a two-day conference on The Self as Political and Scientific Project in the 20th Century: A Symposium on the Human Sciences Between Utopia and Reforml to be held in the fall of at Penn State University. The organizers intend to bring together scholars conducting research in science & technology studies -- in particular, in the fields of the sociology, history, anthropology, and ethics of the human sciences -- for the purpose of disentangling the interaction between science and politics in the shaping of the twentieth-century self. In particular, the forum of a symposium serves as an opportunity for scholars to discuss how selfhood became a crucially important focal point of scientific research and social engineering in contemporary fascist, communist, and liberal polities. The event will be held at Penn State University-University Park campus and will be open to the public. Tentative themes for the panels are: The Making of the Socialist Self, Psychiatry and Identity in the United States, Fashioning the Fascist Self, Medical Ethics and the Making of the Self, Religion and the Self, and Medicalization and the Self. The focus is to be broadly interdisciplinary and comparative, encompassing developments within and across Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the United States. In addition to the panels, planned breakout sessions will enable participants to address issues raised during the previous panels and provide an opportunity for participants and audience members to interact, discuss, and develop ideas across disciplinary boundaries. It is the intention of the organizers to publish most of the contributions in the form of an edited volume or a special issue of a journal doc23202 none This SGER award supports an investigation of combinatorial materials processing techniques for the synthesis of age-hardenable aluminum alloys by powder metallurgy, which can also be simultaneously strengthened by a dispersion of a finely divided oxide phase. It is well known that the sintering of aluminum powder is hampered by the presence of a tenacious oxide film on the surface, which interferes with pressing and sintering of the powder compacts. Beneficial effects of a dispersion of refractory oxide particles in an alloy matrix for enhanced hardness and strength are well known; however, the technical difficulties are not easily overcome without the use of complex methods. Mechanical alloying techniques have been known to provide a significant benefit for inducing solid-state diffusion and alloying of materials. Sintering processes, enhanced by methods of plasma activation and similar techniques, have been used in combination with mechanical alloying to synthesize refractory metals, intermetallics, metallic glasses and other difficult materials. This proposal deals with the study of a novel combination of mechanical alloying and chemically activated sintering of Al-Cu age-hardenable alloys. In this work, powders of aluminum will be mechanically alloyed with nanocrystalline powders of copper of platelet or flake morphology, and subjected to chemical activation by exposure to selected dilute organic acids, to provide suitable metal-organic surface films on the treated powders. The decomposition of these films at low temperatures will provide a highly activated surface for rapid sintering and densification of the alloyed powders. The sintered compacts will be heat treated to provide the age-hardening effect. At the same time, the dispersion of the aluminum oxide particles during mechanical alloying will provide the possibility of dispersion-strengthening of the sintered alloy. This project will provide unique and excellent opportunities to enterprising young engineering students to pursue cutting edge research in advanced materials and manufacturing techniques, and to learn about the potential benefits of nanostructured and engineered materials. The establishment of this research program will provide a unique opportunity for the PI to develop new and exciting classroom and laboratory instructional materials and courses to augment the research effort. The PI is participating in the George Washington Carver Project administered by the University of Arkansas, which provides promising and talented young undergraduate students from the historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) in the State of Arkansas an opportunity to experience the excitement and benefits of a science or engineering career. Under this program, selected youngsters will spend several weeks on campus, working with a faculty member and assisting in an on-going or specially developed research project. The PI will be supporting one undergraduate student under the Carver Project during the upcoming summer session. The student will work on this SGER project, assisting a graduate student in Mechanical Engineering, to set up and use the laboratory P M processing equipment and conduct laboratory experiments. The student will learn research methods, laboratory procedures and safety issues, research documentation and analysis of experimental data, and acquire hands-on experience in the application of scientific and engineering principles in the development of advanced materials and manufacturing techniques doc23203 none Unlike typical eukaryotic taxa, Bacteria and Archaea are thought to evolve primarily through gene acquisition, that is, through the transfer of DNA between distantly related organisms. Such horizontal gene transfer occurs at high rates in many bacterial lineages, and virtually all prokaryotic genomes show a substantial fraction of recently acquired sequences. This project will extend our current understanding of the impact of horizontal gene transfer on the evolution of microbial genomes by examining constraints on DNA transfer between taxa. First, methods for detecting and quantifying recently acquired genetic material will be refined and extended by integrating identification of atypical genes (those not conforming to chromosome-wide sequence patterns) with detection of phylogenetic incongruencies. Second, these approaches will be used to develop a framework for understanding how and why the rate of successful gene transfer varies among species - that is, why some organisms are better DNA recipients; here organisms containing large amounts of low-value information may be more likely to accept horizontally transferred DNA since the incoming genes will be more likely to confer a benefit. Lastly, the probability of successful DNA transfer will be examined from a functional standpoint: that is, can chromosome structure impose a physical barrier to lateral transfer between distantly related organisms? Direct experimentation will test the roles of skewed, asymmetrically-distributed sequences in stalling replication forks, and computational analyses will determine if the strength of this barrier (the differences in these sets of sequences) increases with overall phylogenetic distance doc23204 none The Palmer, Antarctica, Long-Term Ecological Research Project (PAL) seeks to understand the structure and function of the Western Antarctic Peninsula s marine and terrestrial ecosystems in the context of seasonal-to-interannual atmospheric and sea ice dynamics, as well as long-term climate change. The PAL measurement system (or grid) is designed to study marine and terrestrial food webs consisting principally of diatom primary producers, the dominant herbivore Antarctic krill, and the apex predator Adelie penguin. An attenuated microbial food web is also a focus. PAL studies these ecosystems annually over a regional scale grid of oceanographic stations and seasonally at Palmer Station. Sea ice extent and variability affects ecosystem changes at all trophic levels. In recent years, sea ice extent has diminished in response to a general warming in the region. Long-term population trends of ice-dependent Adelie penguins in the region provide a clear example of impact of the climate warming trend in the in the region. Adelie populations at the five major colonies studied near Palmer Station have all shown a gradual decrease in numbers over thirty years. The Peninsula runs perpendicular to a strong climatic gradient between the cold, dry continental regime to the south, characteristic of the Antarctic interior, and the warm, moist, maritime regime to the north. North-south shifts in the gradient give rise to large environmental variability to climate change. Currently more maritime conditions appear to be replacing the original polar ecosystem in the northern part of the peninsula as the climatic gradient shifts southward. To date, this shift appears matched by an ecosystem shift along the peninsula, as evidenced by declines in Adelie populations that require longer snow-cover seasons for successful recruitment. The main hypothesis is that ecosystem migration is most clearly manifested by changes in upper level predators (penguins) and certain polar fishes in predator foraging environments. This is because these longer lived species integrate recent climate trends and because individual species are more sensitive indicators than aggregated functional groups. Analogous modifications are expected to be manifested at lower trophic levels in the marine parts of the system in the years ahead. However, these lower level changes are likely to be observed only through long-term observations consistent with the concept of expansion and contraction of ecosystem boundaries along the Peninsula. The PAL-LTER will continue to investigate ecosystem changes at lower trophic levels along the Peninsula, in response to the continued, dramatic climate warming and pole ward shifts in the climatic gradient. In addition to the long-term research activities, graduate student training, the involvement of K-12 teachers and web-based education are an integral part of the PAL-LTER doc23205 none This research project will study optimization algorithms rooted in the ideas of game theory in the context of complex network optimization, and particularly decentralized network optimization. Probably the central issue in managing such decentralized networks has been how to set prices so as to motivate the competing users to evolve to an overall system optimal configuration. The research will investigate the powerful paradigm of economic competition in the framework of artificial dynamic games that are played off-line, resulting in an algorithm that is potentially practical for large-scale systems optimization. The basic paradigm that will be investigated derives from Fictitious Play which is an adaptive procedure wherein each player assumes that other players will play according to the empirical distribution of their previous plays. The Fictitious Play method is a novel paradigm for optimization that draws from several distinct disciplines and application areas, including classical optimization, game theory, transportation science, and queueing network protocols. The robust nature of the algorithm allows for the ill-structured black box models of real systems which seldom exhibit the kind of smoothness properties that classical optimization methods demand. Its applicability in the context of two important real-world systems: a) internet traffic routing protocols and b) dynamic route guidance will be tested. Complex networks optimization is an important capability in a society increasingly dominated by ever more complex networks of people and machines. Examples include intelligent transportation systems, computer networks, and supply chains of customers and suppliers. The success of the research will lead to the development of a theoretical basis for the optimization of such complex-structured systems. The applicability of the proposed algorithmic paradigm of game theory through its application to realistic problems arising in the design and operation of the communications and transportation networks will be tested and refined. This research will not only lead to potential improvements in these application arenas but will also necessitate significant interactions with industry and government to insure realism for the models and data developed doc23206 none PI (s): Linda Molm University of Arizona The research is part of a long-term project investigating how different forms of social exchange affect major exchange outcomes. In previous work the PI established that negotiated exchange-in which actors jointly bargain over the terms of strictly binding agreements, and reciprocal exchanges-in which actors individually give benefits to each other without negotiation, have very different effects on behavioral and affective outcomes. Reciprocal exchanges produce weaker power use, greater feelings of trust and affective commitment, and stronger perceptions of fairness than equivalent negotiated exchanges. The goal of this research is to test the independent effects of three causal mechanisms proposed to account for these differences: (1) the risk and uncertainty of exchange, (2) the relative salience of the competitive or cooperative aspects of exchange, and (3) the value of voluntary reciprocity. The research focuses on affective outcomes (feelings of trust, commitment, fairness, and solidarity), and extends the analysis to a third form of exchange, generalized (or indirect) exchange, that entails even greater differences in risk, salience of competition, and reciprocity. Five laboratory experiments test predictions related to these goals. Experiments will be conducted to test the effects of risk and uncertainty on trust and commitment by manipulating whether negotiated agreements are binding or non-binding and whether actors can communicate their intentions in reciprocal exchanges. Another experiment will test the effect of increasing the salience of competition on perceptions of fairness in reciprocal exchange, by allowing actors to choose not only which partner to reward, but also how much benefit to give. Finally experiments will test the value that actors place on frequency and predictability of reciprocity, relative to the magnitude of benefits received and compare indirect (generalized) exchange with the two forms of direct exchange (negotiated and reciprocal). The research will contribute to expanding the scope of contemporary theory and research on social exchange to include the full range of exchange forms that characterize social life. Findings will also help explain why these forms of exchange have such different effects on the development of trust and affective ties doc23207 none Future continued economic growth of the United States is linked to the reliability and sustainability of our civil infrastructure systems, such as highways and bridges. It is widely recognized that optimal resource use in bridge infrastructure management should be based on integrating structural reliability, evaluated from a probabilistic perspective, and life-cycle cost. In the United States, transportation officials consider life-cycle cost and reliability analysis for bridges to be the most advanced techniques for assisting with investment decisions. In so doing, they attempt to determine and implement the best possible strategy for maintaining an adequate level of bridge reliability at the lowest possible life-cycle cost. The research delves into to rationally distribute limited available resources. The main objective of the research is to develop a model-based simulator to optimize management decisions for bridge networks based on simulated time-dependent performance and life-cycle cost. This innovative model will integrate computational sciences, bridge network modeling, and reliability technologies for simulating and visualizing optimal network-level bridge maintenance planning and management processes based on lifetime reliability and life-cycle cost. The solution is based on characterizing abrupt discontinuities, including phenomena such as failure of a bridge in the network and large-scale performance simulations of bridge networks. The approach will also entail representation of uncertainties propagating through the network during the service life of each bridge. By simulating the time-dependent performance of the bridge network, new data will be exploited to update the network performance as well as to auto-adapt. Finally, to facilitate real-time cost-effective decision-making in the bridge management process performance visualization techniques will be developed for each individual bridge in the network, the overall performance of the network, and the cost-benefit of each maintenance strategy. A database of about three dozen bridges located in highway networks in Colorado will be used to demonstrate the applicability and efficiency of the methodology. The research represents an important step in creating the basis of a new generation of bridge management systems where optimal maintenance decisions based on life-cycle cost are made at the network-level while explicitly taking into account the propagation of uncertainties during the entire service life of individual bridges in network. In this manner, the multi-billion dollar investment in the maintenance of bridge infrastructure in the US will be optimized. The impact of the optimization on improving the quality and functionality of the nation s highway bridges could be enormous. Finally, life-cycle cost modeling and simulation results will be integrated into engineering education at both undergraduate and graduate levels doc23208 none Seible The George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) is a project funded under the National Science Foundation Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction account. This cooperative agreement, awarded under NEES, establishes a NEES large high performance (LHP) outdoor shake table site at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and is an outcome of the peer review of proposals submitted to program solicitation NSF 01-164, NEES: Earthquake Engineering Research Equipment, Phase 2. This outdoor shake table will be a 7.6 m x 12.2 m long single (horizontal) degree-of-freedom system. The table will have a peak horizontal velocity of 1.8 m s, maximum stroke of + -0.75 m, maximum gravity (vertical) payload of 200 MN, maximum overturning moment of 50 MN-m, force capacity of actuators of 6.8 MN, and a frequency bandwidth from 0-20 Hz. The major equipment for the LHP shake table facility consists of servocontrolled dynamically-rated actuators with large-servo valves, a large power supply, a vertical load overturning moment bearing system, a digital three-variable real-time controller, concrete foundation and reaction mass, and weatherproofing system. The facility will be the only outdoor shake table in the U.S. and will enable large full-scale testing of structural systems and soil-foundation-structure interaction that cannot be readily extrapolated from testing at smaller scale, or under quasi-static or pseudo-dynamic test conditions, as well as testing large-scale systems to observe their response under near source ground motion. The LHP outdoor shake table will be located 15 km from campus at the UCSD Camp Elliott field site. This two-acre site was selected so that the shake table could be used in conjunction with an adjacent soil pit and laminar shear soil box being provided by the California Department of Transportation. This site will allow room for multiple test specimens to be constructed and instrumented before placement on the shake table. A 177 kN rough terrain crane will be provided at Camp Elliott for loading, unloading, and everyday construction purposes. For heavier lifting capabilities, an 880 kN crane will be available on an as needed rental basis, with the individual experiment requiring the larger crane to cover this cost. This equipment will be operational by September 30, , and will be managed as a national shared-use NEES equipment site, with teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities, to provide new earthquake engineering research testing capabilities through . Shared-use access and training will be coordinated through the NEES Consortium. UCSD is providing $1,363,000 in cost sharing for this facility. UCSD will integrate this shake table equipment into its research program involving undergraduate and graduate students, Department of Structural Engineering curriculum, and K-12 and general public outreach. The University will also provide training opportunities for outside faculty, students, and practitioners through web-based tutorials and on-site training doc23209 none shapes) and a variety of manipulations (semantic priming, visual priming, repetition, clarity). Specific psychological mechanisms underlying the fluency-affect-judgment connection are explored and the nature of the underlying affective reactions are examined with psychophysiological measures. This research project will advance our understanding of the relation between affect and cognition. Specifically, it will: (i) identify a new source of affective reactions (processing dynamics), (ii) provide an account of classic phenomena, such as the mere-exposure effect and beauty-in-averages effect, (iii) predict new preference phenomena, such as the influence of priming on affective responses that are not mediated by the semantic interpretation of the target, and (iv) identify potential biases that may result from differential fluency during social perception tasks doc23210 none There are celebrated cases where individual moral decision making in computing has mattered greatly, but there is little systematic work on how moral decisions are made by individual computer professionals. The literature on organizational issues in computing has focused on variables such as status, power, and organizational imperatives. It leads us to focus on situational parameters. This important perspective ignores or underestimates the influence of the individual decision maker in the process. This study explores the life stories of moral exemplars in computing in two cultures, those of Britain and Scandinavia. These two cultures are an interesting contrast because the associated countries have been heavily involved in computing research and design, but their national cultures differ markedly in their approach to workplace values. This case-based study, based on in-depth interviews and questionnaires, examines how particular moral exemplars in computing develop over time in their moral reasoning and action. This study will be done while the investigator is in residence at the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility (CCSR) at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. A panel of experts in computing ethics refines criteria for selecting moral exemplars in computing in British and Scandinavian cultures, and then helps develop a snowball sample of those moral exemplars. Once selected, the moral exemplars are asked to participate in interviews using a format called the Life Story Interview in which interviewees are asked to relate narratives of important episodes in their life (e.g. a peak experience, a nadir experience, a turning point). The interviews are transcribed and coded to identify important developmental milestones and influences. This research breaks new ground by combining developmental work in moral psychology with concern for moral values and behavior on the part of computer professionals. It will be of interest to psychologists studying moral reasoning and action and to the interdisciplinary field of computer ethics. Scholars in the related field of social informatics will also be interested. Finally, this exploratory research will provide an excellent foundation for a continuing research program in the moral development of computer professionals. Much effort has been expended in talking about teaching computer ethics and we have various curricula as guidelines for teaching computer ethics. If we knew something about what actually motivates computer professionals to be ethical, it might well change what (or how) we teach computer doc23211 none Inhorn This project by an anthropologist from the University of Michigan studies how masculine identity in Arab culture is affected by male infertility. The project studies how new reproductive technologies are used (or not used) in the Middle East, where religiously observant Muslim men are prohibited from accepting donor insemination or legal adoption. The project will study the use of reproductive technologies, including intracytoplasmic sperm injection (a technique which allows severely infertile men to father their own biological children) in an urban and a semi-rural infertility clinic in Egypt, as well as among Middle East men in Detroit, a city with the largest such population in the US. The project will interview in Egypt 100 infertile men, as well as a control sample of 100 fertile men, as well as a smaller sample of infertile men s wives, and medical specialists to understand how moral as well as pragmatic decisions are made when fatherhood, marriage, and a sense of manhood itself may be at stake. Several hypotheses will be tested linking male infertility to culturally relevant factors such as smoking, consanguinity, lead exposure, and also to the sense of masculinity, marital relations, medical treatment-seeking, and morality. The medical migration of Middle Eastern men to the US for infertility treatment will be studied through a focus on two Arab-American medical centers. The impact of the Western context on religious morality of Middle Eastern men will be studied through in-depth interviews with men, their wives, and medical specialists. This research will advance our understanding of male identity and masculinity in a Middle Eastern cultural context, and should be of wide interest to those concerned with the nature of Middle Eastern culture and society doc23212 none Early swimming in planktonic development provides a system for testing hypotheses on advantages of the water column rather than the benthos as a habitat for animals early in their life histories. Diverse marine animals release eggs into the water to develop as solitary planktonic embryos that swim early, often while still in embryonic stages. The widespread existence of early swimming stages suggests advantages of the water column as a habitat at early and vulnerable life history stages. Solitary embryos deposited on the bottom may be at greater risk. Benthic embryos receive greater parental protection, further indicating that the benthos is a risky place for solitary embryos. This project will answer three questions. Does early swimming remove early embryonic stages from benthic predators, despite turbulent mixing? Does early swimming reduce capture by common pelagic predators? Are animals at early stages less vulnerable to pelagic than to benthic predators? These questions will be addressed through a combination of lab and field studies that assay sinking and swimming velocities under turbulent and non-turbulent conditions. Because turbulence turns swimmers away from vertical orientation, experiments will also compare vertical bias in turbulence with vertical bias in still water to estimate effectiveness of reorientation to the vertical in turbulence. Temperature commonly varies with depth, so this project will also measure the effect of temperature on rates of sinking and swimming. Swimming faster than sinking could increase encounters with ambush predators, so velocities of sinking and swimming will be compared with those of predators relative to water, and to predicted turbulence generated shear within predators perception volumes. The hypothesis that swimmers displace water at smaller distances, and thus produce a smaller signal to predators than do passive sinkers, will also be tested. Quantifying capture and ingestion of embryos before and after they begin to swim will test the hypothesis that swimming decreases successful captures per encounter. Predators will include fish larvae, copepods, medusae, and ctenophores. Results on vulnerability of preswimming and swimming stages will be combined with published data on abundance and clearance rates of pelagic and benthic predators to test the hypothesis that animals at early stages of development are safer from predation in the water column than near the bottom. Two graduate students will participate in the proposed research in their dissertation research, and several undergraduates will participate in the research doc23213 none The aim of the project is to study how to minimize the torque ripple of disc brushless DC permanent magnet motors, keeping, at the same time, a high level specific torque (torque to motor mass ratio). Some preliminary results indicate that it can be achieved by modifying the shape of permanent magnets and the structure of the stator core, and by modifying the current waveform. The research on this subject will concentrate on analysis of magnetic field in 3-D space for two versions of disc motors: torus-type and disc motor with axial magnetic flux in a stator core, and on evaluation of motor performance using dynamic model of electronic converter - permanent magnet motor set in order to select the optimum solution. To verify the computer simulation a laboratory motor model, together with the appropriate converter will be built and tested. The results and experience obtained from the project will allow the design and manufacture of smoothly running motors that are required not only for light, low speed electric vehicles (in particular - wheelchairs), but also in a vast area of drives, where high torque ripple cannot be tolerated. The high efficiency motors with high specific torque, which will result from the project will contribute to the extension of the driving distance of electric vehicle and to save energy, if the motor is applied as a variable speed drive in industry, as well as to low the cost of the final product. This project will provide the subject for one M.Sc. and one for Ph.D. theses. The results of this project will be disseminated through reviewed publications doc23214 none This grant provides funding to develop a novel quality inspection system that will evaluate the defects in packaged electronic devices. Such defects would include misaligned, short, missing, cracked, voided, delaminated, partially connected, open, excessive and starved solder bumps that occur in such packaged devices as flip chip (with no underfill), direct chip attach (DCA), chip scale packaging (CSP), and cracks in chip capacitors and resistors. The PI proposes to develop an automated laser ultrasonic-interferometric system that uses a single optical fiber for evaluating the quality of packaged electronic devices. This system can be used in a production line as a go no-go inspection tool, or off-line during process development for process optimization. This will be a high resolution, non-contact, non-destructive, low cost, fast and accurate quality inspection system. The PI will also develop a signal processing procedure for determining the presence of one or more of these defects. A finite element analysis model will be developed to explain the experimental results. The final objective is to use the experiences gained in the conduct of this study to build an industrial grade prototype system for use as a Beta test in industry. The PI and his students will swiftly transfer this technology to the industry. This research will result in the development of a novel and automated non-contact, non-destructive, fast, sensitive, accurate and low cost solder bump quality inspection system. It is also expected to be applicable to many types of surface mount devices such as chip resistors and capacitors, and conventional lead frame packages, making it a versatile and cost-effective automated manufacturing tool. This tool could be used on-line as a go no-go inspection tool, and off-line during process development for process optimization. Use of this new Laser Ultrasound-Interferometric inspection technology for automated manufacturing inspection will bring tremendous cost savings by catching defects early in the process. With access to rapid, accurate inspection systems, cost savings will also be realized in process development by reducing the time to market new products, and allowing better process optimization before manufacturing ramp-up. If the research objectives are fully implemented, the proposed technique will help to increase the yield of DCAs, flip chips, CSPs, silicon chips, and chip resistors and capacitors. The research will impact the nation s human resources by training these students in the development and application of low cost and high performance sensors, for on-line and off-line quality evaluation of microelectronic packaging devices. The students who will be participating in this research will learn how to carry out applied and fundamental research in microelectronic packaging, on laser ultrasound, on optical techniques, on system integration, on signal processing and on finite element modeling. They will also learn about technology licensing and commercialization doc23215 none The cereals, including rice, maize, wheat, barley, sorghum, and the millets, are the most important group of plants in agriculture, and environmental stress is the major limitation to their productivity. Increasing their tolerance to abiotic and biotic stress is an important goal in agriculture and considerable progress has been made in discovering the mechanisms of cell signaling that regulate the response to these stresses in plants. This project will dramatically enhance this progress by generating a protein-protein interaction database for 275 rice protein kinases, that represent each of the protein kinase subfamilies present in the recently sequenced rice genome. The protein interaction data will be obtained using both the yeast two hybrid method and a method utilizing mass spectrometry analysis of affinity-tagged protein complexes that will be purified from transgenic plants. Additionally, 100 representative orotein kinases will be mutated by either insertional mutations or RNAi silencing, and their mutant phenotypes analyzed. This combined information will available at the PlantsP website and will advance the understanding of cell signaling pathways. The knowledge of the mechanisms that plant cells use to regulate their tolerance to environmental stress will be critical for improving the agricultural productivity of the cereals. Deliveables: Data. The project data will be deposited at the PlantsP website (http: plantsp.sdsc.edu) along with the gene annotations. Full-length cDNA sequences will be deposited in Genbank and PlantsP as soon as they are completed and checked. The protein interaction data, and knockout phenotype data will be entered into the PlantsP database at no longer than six month intervals after completing the individual experiments. Materials. The rice cDNA libraries, BD-kinase constructs, and yeast 2-hybrid bait arrays will be made available on request from the Song laboratory (Wen-Yuan Song, University of Florida). They will be advertised in a publication, which will occur in year. Availability of the libraries will also be advertised on the PlantsP website and at the annual plant phosphorylation meeting, which reaches most of the plant protein kinase community. Transgenic rice seeds will be made available from Pam Ronald s laboratory (UC Davis) or Jian-Kang Zhu s laboratory (Univeristy of Arizona) until a suitable rice resource center is available doc23216 none Geo-environmental, hydrogeological and geophysical studies of the earth s subsurface involving aquifer characterization, transport of contaminants and design of contaminant remediation strategies demand accurate and reliable prediction of the spatial variablity of hydraulic properties. The primary goal of this research is to develop an integrated approach, which incorporates physico-chemically based model developments, laboratory measurements, interpretational and imaging tools using artificial neural networks, to predict hydraulic conductivity and porosity images of the earth s subsurface from frequency dependent resistivity images. Models describing the frequency dependent resistivity of soils based on physico-chemical principles will be developed that will include hydraulic and petrophysical parameters as primary variables. Laboratory experiments will be designed to measure frequency dependent resistivity as well as the petrophysical and hydraulic properties of over 100 sil samples fromdifferent geological environments aiming to obtain adequate variablity in soil textural andstructural properties. These measurements will allow a comprehensive investigation of how spectral electrical responses of soils are influenced by their petrophysical and hydraulic properties. The soil samples will be fully characterized by measuring their hydraulic conductivity, porosity, density, moisture content and particle size distribution in the laboratory. The capabilities of artificial neural networks (ANN) to adapt, generalize and identify non-linearities in relations among variables, will be explored to determine the functional relationships between the spectral electrical response of soils and their hydraulic properties. Fieldmeasurements of resistivity and phase at specified frequencies will be conducted at selected geologic sites with known information on the hydraulic properties. An inversion procedure using a regularized Newton s method is proposed and will be utilized to obtain frequency - scanned tomographic images of electrical properties of the subsurface. Subsurface images of hydraulic properties will be predicted from the field measured tomographic images of electrical propertiesusing transformations to be developed based on ANN functional relationships. Uncertainties in the proposed prediction method due to noise and model parameter misrepresentations and inefficiencies in the training method will be assessed. The outputs of the method from field measured hydraulic properties will be compared to that of existing ground truth information doc23217 none The Center for Bibliographical Studies at the University of California, Riverside, is creating a union catalog of Latin American imprints to . Existing printed bibliographies are for the most part old and incomplete or non-existent. The Center has keyed all the extant bibliographies and catalogs it can identify that are within scope, producing some over 85,000 separate entries. Under this grant the keyed entries will be modifed to fit MARC standards, duplicate holdings eliminated and holdings records consolidated forming an initial data base of 60-70,000 records. Uniform library symbols will be created. The resulting file will be mounted in the Research Libraries Information Network for public access. The process of adding additional records from machine-readable files submitted by participating libraries in North and South America will begin, matching algorithms developed, and new holdings and records as well as citations to microfilm facsimiles added. Scholars will have access to a single source for identifying surviving imprints and where they can be found. The file itself will be searchable across all fields through Boolean searching. Libraries will be able to use the file for copy cataloging and obtaining machine-readable records of their holdings for loading into their online public catalogs doc23218 none Elnashai The George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) is a project funded under the NSF Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction account. This cooperative agreement establishes a NEES Multi-Axial Full-Scale Sub-Structured Testing and Simulation (MUST-SIM) Facility at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). UIUC will design, purchase, construct, install, commission, and operate new equipment and additions to the Newmark Laboratories to enable the testing of full-scale structures or part of structures, including their foundations and soil mass, while simulating the remaining parts. The MUST-SIM facility will be operational by September and will be managed as a national shared-use NEES equipment site, with teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities, to provide new earthquake engineering research testing capabilities through . This NEES equipment site will be connected to the NEES network system through a high performance network. Shared-use access and training will be coordinated through the NEES Consortium. This award is the outcome of peer review of this proposal submitted to program solicitation NSF-01-164, NEES Earthquake Engineering Research Equipment, Phase 2. The primary objective of the proposed effort will be to create a facility in which a full-scale subassembly can be subjected to complex loading and imposed deformation states at multiple connection points on the subassembly, including the connection between the structure and its foundation. The proposed MUST-SIM facility has the following components: (i) 6-DOF load and position control at three connection points, (ii) system modularity to allow for easy expansion and low-cost maintenance operation, (iii) multiple dense arrays of non-contact measurement devices, (iv) T-section strong wall creating two testing compartments each providing support in three loading planes and (v) advanced visualization and data mining capabilities for integrated teleoperation and teleobservation. The proposed MUST-SIM facility realizes the first two features through the development of modular six-DOF Loading and Boundary Condition Boxes (LBCB) that allow for precise application of complex load and boundary conditions. The LBCBs, which are 3.5 m x 1.5 m x 1.5 m and house six actuators each, will be able to impose motions on the test structures that are determined from the results of concurrently running numerical models of the test specimen and the surrounding structure foundation soil system employing pseudo-dynamic testing methods. Dense arrays of state-of-the-art, non-contact instrumentation, will allow near real-time model updating for the model-based simulation. The three systems envisaged are (a) the Krypton Rodyum coordinate measuring system, (b) Stress Photonics digital photo-elasticity and (c) close range digital photogrammetry. Additionally, this facility and its telepresence teleoperation capabilities will be enhanced by development of multi-function data visualization and knowledge interpretation tools in cooperation with the Automated Learning Group of NCSA. This is likely to be based on the D2K (data-to-knowledge) framework developed at NCSA, with state-of-the-art visualization and control facilities. The proposed reaction wall is a T-section structure of length 25 meters and height 9 meters. The T-section web is at mid-length and is 15 meters wide. The MUST-SIM facility will be deployed in testing complete soil-foundation-structure systems to meet the new and major earthquake engineering challenges, not only in research and development towards seismic risk reduction, but also towards education and training of engineers through integration into curricula at the University and through the NSF-funded Mid-America Earthquake Center s Education and Outreach program doc23219 none SES # Engendering Engineering: An Intellectual, Institutional, and Social History of Women s Engineering Education in the U.S. Amy Bix, Iowa State University This project traces the history of technical training for women in the United States from the s through s, concentrating on forces which transformed engineering from a male-defined field to its current status as a permanently yet tensely co-educational discipline. Bix presents a series of case studies showing how colleges approached engineering coeducation, how administrators and faculty in different institutions at different times dealt with both practical problems and social questions about attracting and integrating women. This work further examines the history of female engineering students themselves, looking at their attitudes and actions in light of changing opportunities and obstacles during the early twentieth-century, World War II, and the Cold War. Finally, analysis of events during recent decades discusses the role of support groups such as the Society of Women Engineers and the ways in which women worked to gain control over their own future in the masculine world of engineering. This research represents a multidisciplinary approach to science, technology and society, combining history of engineering and professionalization with issues in U.S. history, education, women s studies, and policy. To date, there is no comprehensive account of how women s engineering education developed. Bix s work builds toward such systematic analysis, addressing fundamental questions about technology and gender. This book on the engineering education of women promises to attract widespread interest across scholarly disciplines. For historians of technology, this work should add new dimensions to current understanding of American engineering. It should also carry significant interest for students of American history, women s studies, sociology, and education. Finally, this book should have a timely appeal to a broader audience, including female engineers and male and female engineering educators themselves, who have already expressed interest in better understanding how events of the past connect to ongoing debates about the place of women in engineering and in engineering education today doc23220 none This award is to support research that will develop a 400,000 year record of wet-dry conditions from the northern Andes using a multiproxy analysis of sediments accumulated in the Caribbean Sea. Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Site 999 is located over the delta of the Magdalena River and receives terrestrial sediment from the northern Andes. Analysis of foraminifers, dynoflagellates, charcoal, and stable isotopes of carbon and oxygen will allow reconstruction of moisture balance. The broader impacts of this proposed research are that it will lead to a better understanding of tropical climate conditions during glacials and provide baseline information on the movement of the inter-tropical convergence zone during the Quaternary. Ultimately, data generated by this research will be used to improve model predictions of changes in the terrestrial carbon reservoir doc23221 none Two forces have exacerbated problems associated with packet processing. First, demands for higher bandwidth and line rates challenge our abilities to perform real-time packet processing. Second, more complex functional requirements and services are being defined that significantly increase packet computational demand. In response, modern routers are being equipped with Network Processors (NPs) that include both general-purpose multiprocessing and special hardware capabilities. NPs push the envelope of our design capabilities. This research aims at quantifying NP design and at developing a performance driven methodology that is cognizant of both physical constraints (e.g., area, power) and the computational requirements of packet applications. Principal architectural approaches (parallelism, pipelining, instruction specialization) are investigated and design procedures for exploiting these architectural paradigms are developed. The NP architecture models along with associated benchmarking lead to a coherent NP design methodology and extend our understanding of real-time computer design. The research directly benefits the rapidly expanding area of NP and router design, and network performance. The techniques utilized are those of classical computer architecture, including the formalization of the design constraints, development of design models, and the use of benchmarks for quantitative model parameterization doc23222 none Morin and Covich This proposal requests funds to support travel to Switzerland for a joint European US workshop to examine biodiversity and ecosystem function in aquatic systems. This is an area that has not received as much attention in aquatic systems as it has in terrestrial systems. The Ecology program specifically encouraged inclusion of marine participants in the proposed workshop. More than half of the attendees supported by NSF Funds are junior participants (grad students, post-docs and young faculty), and 50% of these were women. The workshop will also foster international collaborations between groups of scientists that have had relatively little interaction doc23223 none The purpose of the Workship is to examine the influence of alliances, networks and partnerships on the innovation process. This is done to help to help statisticians measure activities associated with these linkages, to inform policy makers, and to promote discussion in the research community. It is the fifth such Workshop initiated by Statistics Canada and the first in partnership with the National Science Foundation doc23224 none For over a decade semiconductor saturable absorbers have been used very successfully in laboratories to modelock a variety of solid-state and fiber lasers. In this project, two new semiconductor devices for control of laser dynamics shall be investigated. The first device is an extension of the conventional semiconductor saturable absorber mirror used for modelocking of lasers by integrating it with an additional optically controllable modulator, for example by free carrier absorption. Even if the laser does not Q-switch, the absorber has to be saturated strongly, i.e. depending on the laser design by even more than ten times the saturation energy, to suppress this undesired Q-switching. However, such operation puts a heavy thermal load on the absorber, which reduces its lifetime. Therefore, the first goal of this proposal is to demonstrate absorbers that do not only control the mode locking but in addition the Q-switching of the laser. Such a device is able to suppress the undesired Q-switching, which often occurs in saturable absorber modelocked lasers and greatly reduces the life time of the absorber. With these absorbers a laser system can be operated in the continuous or Q-switched mode-locked regime independent of its other laser parameters such as pump power, repetition rate, output power, mode volume, upper-state lifetime, etc. In this project, the device will be applied to modelocking of high-repetition rate lasers. The second goal of this research project is to search for entirely novel control elements, i.e. semiconductor devices, that are able to detect the absolute optical phase of the pulses directly from the laser output. Such devices allow for phase control of few-cycle laser pulses and related quantities to which the absolute optical phase is ultra-sensitive, such as the intracavity pulse energy. Specifically, we want to investigate whether the recently discovered carrier-wave rabi-flopping in GaAs, which should also occur in other material systems, can be used to construct an optical phase detector. The improvement in control of solid-state laser dynamics by the envisioned devices will enable a new generation of more compact, stable and reliable laser sources with extended parameter ranges such as higher repetition rates and higher power handling capabilities. In addition, these devices will lead to a completely new generation of few-cycle laser sources, in which the absolute optical phase of the laser pulse directly emitted from the oscillator can be controlled. This has a broad range of applications in frequency metrology and strong-field ultrafast laser physics. The project is only possible because of the close cooperation between groups, which provide the know-how in material science necessary for device fabrication and groups that are able to characterize and test the devices in advanced laser systems doc23169 none This project is concerned with solving several classes of difficult combinatorial optimization problems using very large-scale neighborhood (VLSN) search algorithms. The VLSN search algorithms are neighborhood search algorithms where the size of the neighborhood is very large, possibly exponential in terms of the input size parameters, and enumerating all neighbors and evaluating them is prohibitively expensive. The research relies on the use of improvement graphs for searching large neighborhoods. Improvement graphs allow optimizing over very large neighborhoods quickly. This methodology has been used to solve some classic combinatorial optimization problems as well as scheduling problems that have arisen in airline and railroad industries. For the problems that we have addressed, VLSN search algorithms, when implemented well, are robust and provide excellent solutions. The research project addresses VLSN search algorithms for three problem classes. The first problem class will be large-scale partitioning and constrained partitioning problems arising in clustering, data mining and timetabling. The second problems class will be integer multicommodity flow problems arising in logistics and telecommunication. Integer multicommodity flow problems are multicommodity flow problems where the flow of each commodity on any arc is required to be integer. The third class of problems to be investigated will be optional flight generation problem arising at United Airlines. The objective in the optional flight generation problem is to determine a set of good potential candidates for additional flight legs to be added to an airline schedule to improve overall profitability. The research of the PIs on VLSN search algorithms is motivated by the need to develop effective and practical heuristic (approximate) solution procedures for large-scale and structurally complex combinatorial optimization problems. The goal is to enhance the toolkit for heuristic search by developing new methodologies with broad applicability. We anticipate we and others will successfully develop and apply VLSN search techniques to a wide range of important combinatorial problem including problems arising in logistics and transportation and substantial savings will accrue by the use of these methods doc23226 none The Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC) for Compact High Performance Cooling Technologies will address research and development needs of industries in the area of high-performance heat removal from compact spaces. All product sectors in the electronics industry (High-Performance, Cost Performance, Telecommunications, Hand-held, Automotive, and Military Avionics) face critical electronics cooling challenges, and the Center brings together faculty from the Schools of Mechanical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering and Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue University, and contribute complimentary competencies in heart transfer, microfluidics, microfabrication, refrigeration, computational techniques, mechatronics, controls, acoustics, sensing and actuation and diagnostics and measurements doc23227 none Stewart The George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) is a project funded under the NSF Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction appropriation. This cooperative agreement, under NEES, establishes a NEES collaborative facility for advanced experimental investigations for large displacement soil-structure interactions in lifeline systems. Cornell, in partnership with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), will develop advanced experimental facilities to simulate, at both centrifuge-scale and full-scale, capabilities for testing, evaluation, and analysis of soil-structure-foundation interaction (SFSI) in critical lifeline facilities. Full-scale testing usually is expensive and time consuming so supplementary centrifuge experimental models and analytical numerical simulations will be used to expand the scope of the testing, as well as to investigate parameter sensitivity and identify possible unforeseen effects prior to full-scale tests. This award is an outcome of the peer review of proposals submitted to program solicitation NSF-01-164, NEES Earthquake Engineering Research Equipment, Phase 2. Equipment located at Cornell will consist of upgrading the existing servo-hydraulic system for large geotechnical and structural testing of lifeline systems, and includes a) a hydraulic distribution system with one 190 liter min (lpm), 3-station hydraulic service manifold and three 1-station manifolds, each with 115 volt controls and 1 liter accumulator, b) electronic control systems and controllers, c) two large stroke hydraulic structural actuators with load capacities of 295 kN tension to 500 kN tension with strokes of + - 0.91m, d) one large stroke hydraulic structural actuator with load capacities of 445 kN tension 650 kN compression with a stroke of + - 64 m, e) one 227 lpm, 21MPa hydraulic pump, and f) friction grips for use in cyclic testing of advanced composites used in lifeline retrofit and design. In addition, a modular reaction wall will be designed, constructed, and installed at Cornell to accommodate the actuators used for large-scale physical models of reinforced composite cementitious materials used in bridge structures. Other support equipment at Cornell consists of a networked data acquisition system that will be tied in to the NEES data network. Video cameras and operational systems also will be installed for direct support of teleparticipation capabilities. New equipment at RPI consists of two advanced large split centrifuge boxes for longitudinal and transverse movements. These two new advanced containers allow for modeling large ground displacement of both large- and small-diameter pipeline centrifuge models, pulling on an elbow, etc. In addition, special container(s) to be used with existing RPI in-flight shaker (the shaker is provided under a separate NEES award to RPI) will study: a) the effect of uplift forces on pipelines during soil liquefaction, b) lateral forces on pipelines due to liquefaction induced lateral spreading, and c) pipeline damage due to slope failure. The equipment at Cornell and RPI will be operational by or earlier and will be managed as a national shared-use NEES equipment site, with teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities, to provide new earthquake engineering research testing capabilities through . This NEES equipment site will be connected to the NEES network system through a high performance network. Shared-use access and training will be coordinated through the NEES Consortium. Both Cornell and RPI will integrate the testing equipment into research and outreach programs at the undergraduate and graduates levels, as well as promote additional interest in earthquake engineering and simulation at the K-12 levels doc23205 none This research project will study optimization algorithms rooted in the ideas of game theory in the context of complex network optimization, and particularly decentralized network optimization. Probably the central issue in managing such decentralized networks has been how to set prices so as to motivate the competing users to evolve to an overall system optimal configuration. The research will investigate the powerful paradigm of economic competition in the framework of artificial dynamic games that are played off-line, resulting in an algorithm that is potentially practical for large-scale systems optimization. The basic paradigm that will be investigated derives from Fictitious Play which is an adaptive procedure wherein each player assumes that other players will play according to the empirical distribution of their previous plays. The Fictitious Play method is a novel paradigm for optimization that draws from several distinct disciplines and application areas, including classical optimization, game theory, transportation science, and queueing network protocols. The robust nature of the algorithm allows for the ill-structured black box models of real systems which seldom exhibit the kind of smoothness properties that classical optimization methods demand. Its applicability in the context of two important real-world systems: a) internet traffic routing protocols and b) dynamic route guidance will be tested. Complex networks optimization is an important capability in a society increasingly dominated by ever more complex networks of people and machines. Examples include intelligent transportation systems, computer networks, and supply chains of customers and suppliers. The success of the research will lead to the development of a theoretical basis for the optimization of such complex-structured systems. The applicability of the proposed algorithmic paradigm of game theory through its application to realistic problems arising in the design and operation of the communications and transportation networks will be tested and refined. This research will not only lead to potential improvements in these application arenas but will also necessitate significant interactions with industry and government to insure realism for the models and data developed doc23229 none Mao, Dera, Prewitt In recent years, increasing interest in ultrahigh-pressure research results primarily from the unique possibility to simulate in the laboratory the conditions that are characteristic of deep geological environments. The primary tool for achieving static pressures above about 25 GPa is the diamond anvil cell (DAC). Apart from isothermal compression studies, the DAC can also be used for in-situ experiments from room pressure to several megabars at temperatures from close to 0 K to several thousands of degrees. Most structure analysis at pressures above about 10 GPa has been limited to polycrystalline samples because the technology for single-crystal diffraction studies at higher pressures is not well-developed. This project will extend the pressure capability of single-crystal structure analysis from 10 to 120 GPa and even higher pressures. This pressure region is extraordinarily rich in phenomena that dramatically change electronic, magnetic, thermal, elastic, and bonding properties of materials. Precise determination of atomic positions and electron distributions accompanying these changes is the key for understanding the processes. The experimental and computational techniques we are planning to develop will make possible ultrahigh-pressure crystal-structure studies with both laboratory-based and synchrotron x-ray sources. With new developments in sample gaskets, pressure media, diamond anvils, backing plates, and diamond cell design, we will be able to bring a (10 ?m)3 sample of an unstrained single crystal to the pressures stated above. Experiments based on these developments will provide definitive long-sought answers to important scientific questions in Earth, planetary, and materials sciences, including the fundamental changes of silicates, oxides, ices, and condensed gases that are the main components of deep planetary interiors doc23230 none Ricles The George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) Program is a project funded under the NSF Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction appropriation. This cooperative agreement, under NEES, establishes a NEES large-scale laboratory equipment site towards real-time hybrid seismic testing at Lehigh University. Lehigh University will design, construct, install, commission, and operate a real-time multi-directional testing facility for seismic performance simulation of large-scale structural systems. The equipment provides the capabilities of integrated experimental and analytical research, and will lead to advances in experimental methods. This equipment will be operational by September 30, , and will be managed as a national shared-use NEES equipment site, with teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities, to provide new earthquake engineering research testing capabilities for large structural systems through . This NEES equipment site will be connected to the NEES network through the Mid-Atlantic GigaPop Internet 2 (MAGPI) connection, with 155 Mb sec Ethernet capabilities that can be scaled to 1 Gb sec Ethernet capabilities when necessary. Shared-use access and training will be coordinated through the NEES Consortium. This award is an outcome of the peer review of proposals submitted to program solicitation NSF 01-164, NEES Earthquake Engineering Research Equipment, Phase 2. The equipment will be installed at the ATLSS Engineering Research Center located at Lehigh University, and will make use of the existing strong floor (372 m2 in surface area), existing multi-directional reaction wall (15.2 m tall at one end that, over a distance of 32 m, steps down incrementally from 12.2 m to 9.1 m to 6.1 m), an existing mechanical testing laboratory, existing hydraulic systems, and existing static actuators. The following equipment is provided under this award: (1) two kN dynamic actuators ported for three 400 gpm servovalves, + - 500 mm stroke, (2) three kN dynamic actuators ported for three 400 gpm servovalves, + - 500 mm stroke, (3) ten 400 gpm high flow-rate servo-valves, (4) hydraulic distribution lines and service manifolds, (5) surge tank and accumulators that will enable strong ground motion effects to be sustained for over 30 seconds, (6) hydraulic system modifications, (7) digital 8-channel control system with real-time hybrid control packages, (8) digital video teleobservation system including a system of digital high quality video cameras, network video cameras, digital video server, data server, restricted access web server, and a public access web server, (9) high speed 256-channel data acquisition system, and (10) advanced sensors that include wireless MEMS-based accelerometers, piezoelectric transducers (strain and acceleration measurement), and fiber optic strain gages. The experimental facility allows for multi-directional real-time seismic testing, combined with real-time analytical simulations, to investigate the seismic behavior of large-scale structural components, structural subassemblages, and superassemblages (systems) through the combined use of the dynamic actuators, reaction wall, and strong floor. The experimental facility is also designed to support the development of new hybrid testing methods for multi-directional real-time testing of large-scale structures, including hybrid testing of multi-substructures, where the substructures involved in such testing are at different geographic locations connected by the NEES network. Lehigh University will integrate this large-scale real-time multi-directional testing facility into its research program and undergraduate and graduate curricula, provide training opportunities for outside researchers through on-site courses and web-based materials, and host visiting scholars doc23231 none This project focuses on the development of automatic process control (APC) methodologies based on Design of Experiments (DOE) regression models and real-time measurement or estimation of noise factors. The central idea of the proposed research is to develop a methodology to achieve automatic process control by integrating the disciplines of DOE, SPC, and control and estimation theory. Various fundamental issues will be studied, which include: (1) a new classification of controllable factors and noise factors applicable to serve as feedback information for APC; (2) test design and analysis of DOE for process modeling with consideration of system identifiability for the control purpose; (3) cautious control strategy with consideration of uncertainties in DOE regression models and noise factor estimation; and (4) on-line DOE model updating and adaptive control with supervision. The success of the research will lead to a new scientific basis and practical tools for designing and implementing APC in complex manufacturing processes. The research expands the existing theory in each of the three well-developed disciplines of DOE, SPC, and APC to form a new DOE-based APC methodology. This new methodology, in conjunction with robust design and SPC, will provide more effective techniques for a broad range of manufacturing processes. Examples of such processes include stamping, forging, semiconductor, and composite material manufacturing processes doc23232 none During the fifteen years immediately preceding the publication of Charles Darwin s Origin of Species ( ), the American public was already grappling with a theory of evolution. Robert Chambers anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (11 editions, - ) confronted the English-speaking world with the first comprehensive theory of evolution to reach a mass American audience. This dissertation research project investigates how three American intellectual communities at Princeton, Yale, and Harvard drew from their distinctive understandings of science when responding to Vestiges. Recent studies in the history of science have revealed the importance of Vestiges for the introduction of evolutionary thought into Victorian Britain, but this scholarship has generally left American reactions to Vestiges unexplored. This dissertation project extends to America the analysis of archival records that James Secord recently brought to Vestiges British respondents, tracing discussions of Vestiges through correspondence networks, diaries, and publishers records (Victorian Sensation, University of Chicago Press, ). The height of scholarly interest in Vestiges is further indicated by John Lynch s recently published reprints of British reactions to Vestiges ( Vestiges and the Debate before Darwin, 7 volumes, Thoemmes Press, ). Though several works in the history of American science have mentioned Vestiges, none compares in depth or scope to Secord s study, nor do Lynch s volumes contain a single American reaction. This dissertation project therefore fills two gaps in historical understanding: identifying in sharper precision than previous scholarship the scientific milieux of American intellectual communities on the eve of Darwinism, and determining Vestiges role in shaping those milieux. Grounded in specific case studies, this dissertation project also provides insights into two broader issues: the processes by which intellectual communities form their reactions to popular scientific theories and the relations between science and religion. This study will develop the first topic by expanding upon the localist case-study methodology that David Livingstone employed when comparing location-specific reactions to Darwinism among Presbyterians in distinct cities (Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective, Oxford University Press, , chap. 8). This project will engage the second issue by testing a claim made by John Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor (Reconstructing Nature, T and T Clarke, ): science and religion interpenetrate one another in ways too complex to be summarized by older methodological categories such as harmony or conflict. In particular, this project will extend Brooke and Cantor s concept of community- specific science-religion totalities, or amalgams , as an explanatory device for understanding the distinctive evaluations that individuals made of Vestiges in the respective Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Unitarian Congregationalist milieux of Princeton, Yale, and Harvard. Funds will support necessary archival research at the Smithsonian Institution and Princeton, Yale, and Harvard Universities in order to identify with sharp focus how the intellectual communities at Princeton, Yale, and Harvard responded to Vestiges. These results, in turn, may serve as foundation for sharing with a broad audience new insights concerning the nature of science, the process by which members of society evaluate scientific claims, and the ways in which religious convictions shape, and are reshaped by individuals engagements with science doc23168 none This project synthesizes key aspects of production and energy flow, based on US-GLOBEC studies in the Northwest Atlantic, and augment the US-GLOBEC data with information from other sources on production processes at the lower and upper levels of the food web. The primary objectives examine several alternate model outcomes of GLOBEC and GLOBEC-related studies that help address a number of outstanding issues and re-examine patterns of energy flow on Georges Bank. This research enhances and expands the findings of previous investigations, with explicit consideration of factors not addressed in earlier models of this system including: (1) the microbial food web, (2) consideration of new and recycled primary production, (3) spatial heterogeneity of primary and secondary production on Georges Bank, (4) changes in biomass and production at higher trophic levels, and (5) the effects of environmental forcing on production processes. Incorporation of these elements into the modeling effort permits a more detailed understanding of production processes on the Bank. The first four elements provides the broader ecosystem context, while the last provides the link to one of the US-GLOBEC program.s principal themes, climate change. The latter is being addressed by comparing several different decadal-scale time periods that reflect differing environmental and fish community regimes: (1) the cold s characterized by abundant groundfish stocks fished by distant water fleets; (2) the s, characterized by average water temperatures, increased domestic fishing effort, and depletion of groundfish stocks; (3) the s, characterized by average water temperatures, overfishing of groundfish stocks, and increases in elasmobranchs; and (4) the average temperature, lower salinity s, characterized by reduced fishing mortality, rebuilding of groundfish stocks, and increases in elasmobranchs and pelagic fish. Because of large-scale changes in the fish community structure as a result of over-exploitation, a full understanding of the population dynamics of the target species will not be attained without consideration of changes in other ecosystem components. Individual model networks are being formulated to represent each of the above periods. Subsequently, dynamic modeling will be developed to describe the transformations or shifts between these regimes doc23234 none Shors, Tracey STRESS, SPINES & NEW MEMORIES Dendritic spines are tiny protrusions that exist by the tens of thousands on many excitatory neurons in the brain, including those in the hippocampal formation. Spines are potential sites of synapse formation and thus represent a means for neuronal integration. Based on their potential for conferring associations between neurons, it has been hypothesized that they are involved in the encoding of experience. Exposure to an acute stressful experience greatly increases the density of dendritic spines in the hippocampal formation of the male rat. This effect is robust and persistent - lasting at least 24 hrs after the event has ceased. The effect is also regionally specific in that it is evident on pyramidal neurons in area CA1 of the hippocampus but not in the somatosensory cortex. The primary goal of the proposed experiments is to identify the neuronal and hormonal mechanisms that are responsible for the experience-induced change in spine density. Specifically, experiments will be done to determine whether activation of the NMDA type of glutamate receptors is necessary for inducing the persistent increase in spine density. It will also be determined whether the presence of the major stress hormones, glucocorticoids, is necessary for the stress effects on synaptic anatomy. Although dendritic spines were identified over 100 years ago, their functional significance has remained elusive. The results from these studies should provide important insight into their functional significance and the mechanisms that mediate their plasticity doc23235 none Zaera This Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute (PASI) will support Dr. Francisco Zaera of the University of California, Riverside in coordination with Dr. Francisco Machado of the Central University of Venezuela and Dr. Alfonso Loaiza of the University of the Andes in Merida, Venezuela. The main objectives of this PASI are to familiarize advanced graduate students, post-doctoral and junior scientists from the Americas on recent advances in surface science and catalysis as well as foster new inter-American research collaborations. The program will formally introduce beginning scientists to modern experimental techniques in surface science and to the latest theoretical methods used to study surface chemical phenomena. The proposed activity will be followed by a Symposium that will bring together research groups from Latin America and the United States to discuss the latest results in surface science and catalysis doc23236 none Youd The George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) is a project funded under the NSF Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction appropriation. This cooperative agreement, under NEES, establishes two permanently instrumented field sites for monitoring soil-foundation-structure interaction (SFSI), ground motion, ground deformation, and pore-water pressure responses. The field sites will be used to monitor responses generated by local and regional earthquakes and for active experiments with excitation by shakers such as those being constructed by other NEES projects at the University of California, Los Angeles (NSF NEES award and the University of Texas, Austin (NSF NEES award ). These two field sites are being developed by a team of investigators led by Brigham Young University (BYU), in partnership with the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) and the University of Southern California (USC). The sites will be connected to the NEES network system through a high performance network. This equipment will be operational by September 30, , and will be managed as a national shared-use NEES equipment site, with teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities, to provide new earthquake engineering research testing capabilities for geotechnical and SFSI testing through . Shared-use access and training will be coordinated through the NEES Consortium. This award is an outcome of the peer review of proposals submitted to program solicitation NSF 01-164, NEES Earthquake Engineering Research Equipment, Phase 2. The NEES equipment will be located as permanently instrumented field arrays at two sites in Southern California: the Garner Valley Downhole Array (GVDA) in Riverside County, east of Hemet, California, and the Salton Sea Wildlife Refuge Liquefaction Array (WLA) in Imperial County near Calipatria, California. Both sites are located adjacent to major faults and have previous histories of recording ground motions and pore-water pressures. The two sites are underlain by soft, liquefiable ground. The instrumentation at GVDA will be upgraded and enhanced for real-time data transmission. A reconfigurable, one-story structure will be constructed at that site and instrumented with sensors installed in the structure, foundation, and underlying soil. A small shaker will be permanently mounted on the roof of the building; larger shakers may be brought to the site and placed on the building or on a nearby pad to artificially excite the structure and underlying ground. Instrumentation at WLA will be upgraded and greatly expanded to allow monitoring of three-dimensional ground motion and pore-water pressure responses. Communications equipment capable of concurrent data transmission and teleobservation will allow rapid delivery of data to the NEES network and remote participation in experiments conducted at the sites. There is need to further study SFSI in real structures under seismic input, but there are always complexities in real structures that can mask understanding of SFSI phenomena. Study of ground failure is also complicated in urban or geologically complex settings. Simple, well-characterized test sites like these two are needed to increase understanding of the physics behind SFSI, ground response, and ground failure during earthquakes. This pair of NEES field sites will also provide an excellent test bed for new in-situ site characterization techniques and new sensor technologies. The field sites will have an impact on undergraduate and graduate teaching programs in earthquake engineering, geotechnical engineering, and engineering seismology by allowing students to participate in the active experiments through teleparticipation as well as on-site workshops. Data from both sites will be contributed to the NEES Data Repository and the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS). The collected information will aid development and verification of simulation models for ground response, pore-water pressure generation, and dynamic SFSI. Improved simulation of these fundamental earthquake engineering phenomena will lead to better, safer and more economical engineering design. BYU, UCSB, and USC will integrate experimentation at these sites into their research program and curricula, provide training opportunities for outside researchers through on-site courses and web-based materials, and host visiting scholars doc23237 none This IGERT project will develop a graduate program of cross-disciplinary research and training in Mathematical Biology. The goal of the program is to give students a solid training in core mathematics and genuine expertise in an area of contemporary biology. Such training will bring to bear the power of mathematics on the exciting and challenging problems of modern biology. Students will be recruited from a broad spectrum of mathematical, scientific and cultural backgrounds. It is expected that the graduates of this program will receive Ph.D. s in mathematics, but by virtue of their broad-based training will be able to contribute to collaborative research efforts in numerous academic and industrial settings. In the process, the program seeks to build many new bridges between mathematics and biology potentially reshaping research for a new generation of mathematical biologists. The research and training program will be organized around the four research themes of biofluids, ecology and evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and physiology. A unique feature of this research and training program will be the establishment of Special Interest Groups (SIG s). Each SIG will be led by one or more faculty members with activities that include discussion of research problems, discussion of recent seminars, formal and informal talks about recent papers, student presented talks on background literature, etc. The training of students will also include formal coursework in both Mathematics and Biology, laboratory rotations or field work in an area of the life sciences, mentoring by both mathematics and life science faculty, and journal clubs, laboratory group meetings, and workshops. In these ways, the training of students will put great emphasis on collaboration and interaction across traditional academic disciplines. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fifth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-one institutions for programs that collectively span the areas of science and engineering supported by NSF doc23238 none Effects of plant functional identity on ecosystem nitrogen retention following fire Recent warming trends and increased human activities have led to documented increases in fire occurrence in North American boreal forests. Forest productivity in the boreal biome is generally limited by the availability of nitrogen (N), and increased fire frequency causes increased opportunity for N to be lost from the ecosystem via combustion and post-fire losses to the atmosphere and water. Understanding controls over these N losses following fire is important for predicting the long-term consequences of increased fire frequency for forest productivity and carbon cycling. In this proposal, the investigators hypothesize that the functional traits of the plant species that initially colonize burned ecosystems will control the ability of the ecosystem to accumulate carbon and thus retain N following fire. The researchers will test this hypothesis with a study of N loss in a boreal black spruce forest that burned in June . The research approach will entail an ecosystem-scale addition of a stable N isotope that can be tracked, combined with experimental manipulation of plant colonization doc23239 none Sun Description: This award is for support of a joint research project by Dr. Jian-Qiao Sun, Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware and Dr. Ghazanfer Unal, Engineering Science Department at Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey. The goal of this project is to develop analytical and numerical methods to study the stochastic dynamical systems. The investigators plan to extend Lie s theory for deterministic differential equations to nonlinear stochastic dynamical systems. Specifically, they will extend their previous results on the approximate symmetries to stochastic dynamical systems in a manner which will remain consistent with the normal form theory of stochastic systems. An immediate use of the approximate symmetries of the stochastic dynamical systems would be to obtain their approximate conserved quantities. Furthermore, they will extend the results to the Fokker-Planck equation in order to obtain analytical approximate solutions. The analytical solutions to be obtained in the project by Professor Unal will be integrated with the cell mapping method studied by Dr. Sun. The approximate symmetries and the related conservation laws can help identify a sub-space in which the cell mapping method can be applied. This is expected to substantially reduce the computational effort for analysis and control of nonlinear stochastic systems by using the cell mapping method. Scope: Success in determining approximate symmetries and the related conservation laws would make it possible to identify a subspace in which cell mapping can be applied with much less resources than currently possible. The two scientists have complementary strengths, as Dr. Sun s expertise is in cell mapping, while Dr. Unal s expertise is in Lie s theory and in symmetries and approximate symmetries of dynamical systems. Research results will be integrated with graduate programs at both universities, and an exchange program of graduate students between the two universities may also result. Dr. Unal will travel to the United States in the first and third years while Prof. Sun will travel to Turkey in the second year. The project will lead to long-term collaboration between them since they will tackle difficult problems that require new insights, as well as advanced computational tools doc23240 none This research by a cultural anthropologist and his Russian colleague studies cultural models, which are standardized, inter-subjectively shared frameworks that afford meaning to people s lives. The models to be studied govern relationships between men and women in the context of marriage, career, the sense of self, dating and emotions. The project will select samples from metropolitan areas in the US (New York City) and Russia (Moscow) and from a rural town in the US (Rosendale, NY) and a Russian counterpart (Dolgoprudnyi, Moscow region). The study population will be composed of eight samples designed from the intersecting variables of males-females, urban-rural, US-Russia (i.e., US urban males, US urban females, Russian urban males, etc.). Free lists of data on emotions, thoughts and actions related to romantic love will be elicited from 20 informants in each sample. This data will then be analyzed through pile sorts, multidimensional scaling, and a clustering program to derive the dimensions of the cultural model. Following this phase, semi-structured interviews with five respondents from each sample will be carried out to elicit information about how cultural models are used to account for personal behavior. The project will describe the models which are extrapolated from the data, explain the evaluative ( good-bad ) interpretations given by informants, show how the models are used to guide behavior as well as to interpret the behavior of others, and relate differences in the US and Russian models to general cultural differences of the two countries doc23241 none The goal of this proposal is to help determine why individual variation (e.g. alternative strategies) is maintained in natural populations. In order to be maintained over the long-term, alternative strategies must have the same long-term success. If one strategy is better than the other, it will become fixed in the population and the poorer strategy will be lost over time. Both temporal and spatial factors can contribute to the success or failure of a particular strategy. Dr. Tuttle proposes to examine the maintenance of alternative strategies in the North American songbird, the white-throated sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis). This species is unique because males and females can have either tan or white crown stripes. White birds behave differently than tan birds; they are more aggressive, sing more often, and are more promiscuous than tan birds. Tan birds are less aggressive, guard their females more, and spend more time caring for their young than white birds. Tan birds almost always mate with white birds and this unusual mating system ensures that both types always occur in the population. Dr. Tuttle proposes to test two hypotheses. One, that these two alternative strategies (white and tan) may be affected by different environmental and social demands , and two, that each strategy does best under a different set of environmental conditions that might occur in space and time. For example during a year of limited resources and high predation, the more parental tan strategy may be more successful. However, during good years, the promiscuous white males may be more successful. Although these two strategies may have different success rates in the short term, long-term cycles may cause each strategy to have equal success over time thereby maintaining stability in the system. Long-term trends in previously collected data (13 years) and data to be collected over the next 5 years will allow testing for the effects of differential selection and environmental cycling. While pursuing the goals of this proposal, Dr. Tuttle will incorporate new technologies such as relational databases, GIS, and GPS. In addition, Dr. Tuttle proposes to develop web-based instructional materials based on the long-term data that will be obtained. Since empirical evidence is often lacking, factors maintaining variation in natural populations have long been debated. The white-throated sparrow system may prove to be a classic vertebrate example of how individual variation is maintained in nature. Study of this species will provide insight into similar mechanisms affecting diversity in other species, as well as how evolution proceeds in general doc23242 none For most children, the preschool and elementary school years are rife with opportunities to cultivate a wide variety of interests that set the stage for later learning. Some young children develop intense, focused interests on narrow topics such as dinosaurs or trains and doggedly pursue their parents and teachers to provide them with books, videotapes, and toys that will help to increase their knowledge in these areas. While developmental psychologists have long been interested in such children from the standpoint of examining the impact of heightened knowledge on children s processing of information, few researchers have attempted to answer the more difficult question of why some children develop narrow interests that could potentially lead to childhood expertise in the first place. This research entails the continuation of an ongoing prospective longitudinal analysis of the factors that contribute to the development of narrow interests in a sample of 215 preschoolers. A preliminary model of focused interest development has been constructed based on data collected through laboratory visits, bimonthly contacts with parents, and home visits. One consequence of focused interests, the early acquisition of childhood expertise, has been examined through a detailed analysis of the knowledge acquisition and strategy use of 20 children with very high levels of interest in dinosaurs. This research will follow children throughout the transition to elementary school and continue detailed analyses of the acquisition of expertise on dinosaurs. The work will consider the impact of the transition to school on the expansion of focused interests, in addition to the impact of developing metacognitive awareness on children s strategy use and the transfer of expertise to related areas of interest. This, this research will help to provide a link between research on intrinsic motivation and interest and research on the cognitive implications of childhood expertise. A second objective of this research is to investigate the effects of preschool interests related to science on subsequent science learning. During the first two years of the study, the majority of children with focused interests on topics that entailed concept learning concentrated their interests in domains related to science (e.g., insects, dinosaurs, horses). Most other children had considerable opportunities for science learning through books, toys, and family activities. Given the availability of extremely detailed information on the play habits and behaviors of all of the children in the sample, combined with psychometric data collected through yearly visits to the laboratory, this research is uniquely situated to investigate the impact of preschool play interests related to science (i.e., emergent science literacy) on children s achievement motivation and success throughout the transition to formal science instruction in elementary school. Due to the importance of science for the advancement of technology and global economic competitiveness, it is essential that the range of factors that contribute to children s scientific competence, particularly through the preschool and elementary school years, be assessed. These studies will support such an analysis and provide answers to important developmental questions that might not emerge in cross-sectional studies doc23243 none The proposed research project presents a new method for measuring the thickness of thin films. A non-destructive, non-contacting infrared imaging system is synchronized to an AC heat source located within or below the film layer of interest. An AC approach is chosen to exploit differencing schemes that enable high-resolution thickness measurements. The proposed method provides a new tool for measuring the thickness of film coatings with implications in both research and technology. Preliminary experiments have shown that the proposed method is perfectly suitable for measuring film thickness in the range of several microns to millimeters. This proposal aims to extend the method to nanometer thick films by utilizing a radiative heat transfer scheme. The proposed experimental method can be implemented into a production environment for closed-loop feedback control during film deposition. The method is also amenable to quality control in high throughput production environments. As such, the proposed experimental method will significantly improve coating processes and dramatically decrease the time and expense required to improve coating performance and reliability. Using the infrared sensing technology developed in this program, film thickness, integrity and stress can be quantified at any stage of the coating process, both during deposition and or after manufacture. The ability to monitor film thickness in-situ is a critical need for many applications, as current techniques are based largely on empirical processing studies and post-priori destructive evaluation. Add to that the ability to quantify stress and the method emerges as a significant contribution to the technology of thin film processing and characterization. The proposed method can be used in an enormous range of industrial applications, including (but not limited to): microelectronic fabrication and assembly, MEMS fabrication and performance, thermal barrier coatings used in the energy conversion industry, metallic coatings on glass, and paint or protective coatings in everything from airplanes to cell phones doc23244 none This dissertation research project is an ethnographic analysis of the ethical and aesthetic commitments of free software computer hackers. It addresses the following questions: 1) How do free software hacker practices, legal codes, and social values reconfigure normative meanings of scientific knowledge, property, and creativity? 2) How do hackers ethical commitments result from the interplay between their particular technical and aesthetic practices and the wider socio-economic and legal conditions that shape their activities? 3) What is materially and symbolically at stake in differing conceptions of knowledge production and protection? The free software movement, whose goal is to make software and its source code legally available, challenges the legal privatization of software production. Free software is developed by thousands of volunteer hackers. Working collectively over the Internet, they hold legal, open access to information indispensable to their craft, understood as a social practice and expressive activity fusing technological innovation with artistic creation. This research combines ethnographic and document-analysis research by following one software project and participation in a range of forums and conferences in the Bay Area. The researcher asks how knowledge, property, and creativity are reconceived by hackers, and she seeks to understand how their aims and practices emerged from specific institutional conditions at a particular historical moment doc23245 none An insect hormone called bursicon is essential for hardening of the new skin (cuticle) after the insect has shed its old one during molting (ecdysis). The timed release and actions of bursicon are critically important for the survival of all insects and, most likely, all arthropods. Although bursicon was discovered in and is known to be a peptide, its molecular structure has not been established, and remains a major unsolved problem in insect neuroendocrinology. The Honegger lab has purified the hormone and obtained partial amino acid sequences for bursicon from some insects. Recently they were able to use these sequences to identify a particular gene sequence, CG , in the genome of the fruitfly Drosophila. The primary aim of this collaborative project is to determine whether the CG gene product is the functional bursicon hormone, as an important step to understanding the actions of bursicon. Molecular techniques for gene expression in eukaryotic cells and overexpression in Drosophila will be combined with the ligated fly bioassay using the related blowfly (Sarcophaga) to test for bursicon activity. If bioactive bursicon is shown, the sequence will be used for cDNA screening in the moth Manduca, a well-studied insect system in which the complex hormonal interactions regulating ecdysis have been illuminated. From the recombinant proteins and synthesized peptides from conserved sequence stretches, new antibodies will be produced to identify neurosecretory cells in the brain, and to clarify the temporal and spatial activation of bursicon release in Manduca. Results from this work will provide a potential breakthrough for understanding how the brain and endocrine systems together orchestrate multiple biochemical events leading to periodic cuticular hardening. Knowledge about this key hormone may provide novel strategies for agriculture in developing insect pest controls, and in managing crustacean aquaculture. In addition, this collaboration between two institutions includes multi-disciplinary postdoctoral training doc23246 none Rivers GeoSoilEnviroCARS (GSECARS) is a national user facility for frontier research in the earth sciences using synchrotron radiation at the Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory. GSECARS provides earth scientists with access to the high-brilliance hard x-rays from this third-generation synchrotron light source. The research conducted at this facility is advancing our knowledge of the composition, structure and properties of earth materials, the processes they control, and the processes that produce them. All principal synchrotron-based analytical techniques in demand by earth scientists are being brought to bear on earth science problems: (1) high-pressure high-temperature crystallography and spectroscopy using the diamond anvil cell; (2) high-pressure high-temperature crystallography using the large-volume press; (3) powder, single crystal and interface diffraction; (4) inelastic x-ray scattering; (5) x-ray absorption fine structure (XAFS) spectroscopy; (6) x-ray fluorescence microprobe analysis; and (7) microtomography. The unique capabilities of the APS and GSECARS have allowed groundbreaking experiments to be conducted in research areas relevant to the NSF-Earth Science program. This project will provide funds to: (1) to support the continued operation of GSECARS as a national-user facility; (2) to increase significantly the available beamtime by enabling simultaneous operation of the two experimental stations on the undulator beamline and completion of a second station on the bending magnet beamline; and (3) to develop and implement new experimental instrumentation to extend the capabilities of the facility. Major new instrumentation to be developed includes: (1) x-ray optics and shielded transport for tandem operation on the undulator beamline; (2) beamline components and diffraction instrumentation for a new side-station on the bending magnet beamline; (3) a monochromator for use at high-energy on the undulator beamline; and (4) tooling for deformation experiments in the multi-anvil press. Our mission is to provide a research environment where users receive expert assistance in planning and conducting experiments, and in analyzing data. This collaborative mode of operation, which allows the facility to be accessible to synchrotron radiation novices, requires a staff of highly qualified beamline scientists and technical personnel doc23247 none This dissertation research project entitled Drought and Development is a social and intellectual history of scientific development and the political context in which such efforts take shape. This dissertation will contribute to the literatures of Latin American history, environmental history, and the history of science, preparing the author for a teaching and research career in those fields. Although Latin America has not been a significant regional focus for U. S. historians of science, scientific personnel (including experts from more industrialized countries) were often important promoters of national development there, particularly during the past century of urbanization, national integration and industrialization. This study compares environmental and social explanations for regional backwardness within a developmentalist discourse focused on the problem of drought, between and . During the early decades of Brazil s First Republic (formed in ), sanitarians and engineers undertook a range of technical efforts to ameliorate drought and disease in the country s impoverished Northeast interior. These projects provoked debate among Brazilian intellectuals as to which aspects of Northeastern poverty were the result of natural factors and which were attributable instead to social structure, in particular the colonial legacy of latifundism and continued political domination by the landholding elite. By researching in archives and libraries of both Rio de Janeiro and two Northeastern cities, the investigator aims to uncover a variety of attitudes prevalent in early twentieth-century Brazil about the effectiveness of science as a solution to rural poverty. The author considers how the training and social identity of several professional groups shaped their attitude toward medicine and technology as modernization tools. These include medical personnel in Brazil s rural sanitation movement; Rockefeller Foundation International Health Board staff working in Northeast Brazil; and engineers of the Federal Inspectorate for Works Against the Drought. Additionally, the author examines sociological studies undertaken by Northeastern intellectuals during the s and s. These analyses of regional poverty focused more on its social and political history than on technological solutions. The period in question marked a high point for the participation of doctors and engineers in promoting a progressive national vision for Brazil; in subsequent decades, economists became the professional group deemed best equipped to deal with regional underdevelopment. Brazil s Northeast thus provides a lively context for considering the political shaping and implications of scientific development proposals that took place against a backdrop of debates about national economic integration doc23248 none This Collaborative Research Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) provides funding for the development and implementation of a methodology for the analysis and optimization of a distributed sensor system in electronics assembly processes for the purpose of process fault diagnosis. The proposed modeling tool will integrate product quality information and process characteristics in a multi-station assembly system framework using a station-indexed state space model. Then, the diagnosability of a generic distributed sensor system will be explored by expending the concept of observability in control theory. This will further lead to development of the fault diagnosis method for fault feature extraction based on the multivariate data analysis. The understanding of the transformation of quality information, offered by the state space quality-fault model and diagnosability analysis, will guide the optimal design of a sensing system. This project will be carried out through a close collaboration partnered by Texas A&M University, the University of Wisconsin - Madison, and Motorola Florida Research Labs (MFRL). The methodology development will be based on, and the resulting technology will be tested and implemented in, the Motorola radio assembly process. If successful, the results of this project will contribute to sensing and information technology in manufacturing: new concepts and criteria regarding the performance of sensor systems will be defined and effective algorithms for sensing optimization and data analysis will be developed. Curriculum developed from research accomplishments will generate long-term impacts on the education of quality engineering and production system. The resulting technology will also benefit the US electronics manufacturers who are under great pressure from their international competitors. According to a White Paper issued by the Interconnection Technology Research Institute in , over 100 of 650 U.S. electronics fabricators have gone out of business in the past five years. The lack of six-sigma quality is identified as the weakest point of for US manufacturers. Industrial implementation of the resulting methodology will aid US manufacturers in remaining competitive and could generate substantial economic impacts doc23249 none The objective of this project is to develop a new normative design decision making methodology especially tailored to overcome cognitive biases associated with environmentally conscious design. Specifically, decision analytic procedures will be developed to direct a cost-effective product development process. A new technology being developed at the University of Illinois to capture and recover hazardous air pollutants from gas streams will be used as the test-bed. It captures dilute hazardous air pollutants from air and converts them to a pure liquid for reuse in the manufacturing process that generated the pollutant. Activated carbon fiber cloth is employed. The primary benefit of this research will be a shortened development time resulting in a product that will be more successful in the marketplace. The decision-based design methodology will be integrated into an industrially sponsored senior design course. The research and educational infrastructure will be improved by establishing this interdisciplinary collaboration, and also by development of new interdisciplinary course materials for both undergraduate and graduate courses in two different departments (General Engineering, and Civil and Environmental Engineering). In addition, two Ph.D. students will be trained in this new research area. The results of this interdisciplinary research will be broadly disseminated across both civil and mechanical engineering research communities. Societal benefits also include a new technology that not only removes hazardous air pollutants, but also cost-effectively recovers them for reuse doc23250 none Mitchell Description: This award is for support of a joint research project by Dr. Brian Mitchell, Dr. Lupei Zhu, both at the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Saint Louis University, Saint Louis, Missouri and Dr. Nihal Akyol, Department of Geophysical Engineering at Dokuz Eylul University, Izmir, Turkey. They plan to conduct a seismological study of the western part of Turkey using groups of both high-frequency (2 Hz) and broadband seismographs. They plan to use data from the high-frequency linear array to obtain a two-dimensional structural model of the grabens and underlying rock by using teleseismsic receiver functions and employing a stacking procedure recently developed by Dr. Zhu. They will use both the linear array and regional array recordings of local earthquakes to perform a combined inversion for precise event location and a tomographic velocity model of the region, and will use data from the broadband instruments for several additional studies. Objectives of this project are to obtain models for velocity structure, including possible anisotropy, for the region, to ascertain the degree of agreement or disagreement among crust upper mantle models of anisotropy obtained in different locations and by different methods, to infer from those models the directions and consistency of mantle flow and orientation of the crustal stress fields, and to determine the best methods for obtaining information on anisotropic structure in a region of complex structure and tectonics. Scope: The selected sites of this study are particularly suitable for the proposed research. Western Turkey is one of the most seismically active continental regions in the world, and much of it is undergoing extensive north-south extensional deformation. Because the region experiences a large number of low to medium-magnitude earthquakes it is particularly suitable for a seismological study of the continental crust in Eurasia. The region s high attenuation values have been attributed to fluid-filled cracks, which tend to cause the crust to be anisotropic. The project will lead to a better understanding of the tectonics of Western Anatolia, which comprises a portion of the Tethysides orogenic belt. The project will enhance international collaborations between scientists in the U.S. and in Turkey. It will involve a recent PhD (Zhu), as well as collaboration with and training of a female seismologist from Turkey doc23251 none This dissertation investigates how appropriate social networks help explain the relative success of four conservation and development projects in two regions in Brazil. The mobilization of multiple stakeholders, both local and beyond the project region, are critical for sustainable development. These networks also help diffuse a new identity supporting environmentally sustainable resource use. Both mobilization and diffusion depend on overlapping ties among the various stakeholders. Ethnographic and interview methods will be used to collect data on network connections and the flow of resources through those networks doc23252 none SES 02- AAAS History and Archives Web Site Project Amy Crumpton American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) intends eighteen-month project to enhance the original content and technical development of its AAAS History and Archives Web site (http: archives.aaas.org). The intent is to: 1) expand the complexity of searchable historical information on the site, 2) evaluate and further develop the usefulness of the database and applications that provide access to this information, and 3) publish the design code for the database and applications as an open source tool for use by other archives, manuscript collections, and libraries. The AAAS History and Archives site uses a content management system that generates pages by selecting information from a relational database containing data on people, meetings, documents, publications, awards, and archives collections related to the Association s history. Users have access to this information through links set between related elements in the database or through open queries. The site has several purposes: 1) an organizational management strategy for the AAAS archivist, 2) an online institutional memory for AAAS staff and membership, and 3) a research tool for scholars interested in the history of a key organization in American science or in broader issues related to the history of science for which the AAAS Archives might have pertinent information. This project is intended specifically to evaluate, refine, document, and publish the software code used for the project as a contribution to efforts to make database building tools accessible to archives, libraries, and other institutions. Interrelated with this task is the AAAS plan to increase the quality content of the database. The database lacks information on the scope and tenure of AAAS committees and programs, group data that provide context for the emergence of Association meetings, publications and resolutions. The database also lacks online finding aids for the collections. Gathering and editing this information will take place in conjunction with developments and refinements to our software code to ensure that new information connects well with other aspects of the database. The AAAS History and Archives Web site is an important mechanism to publicize the richness of the AAAS archives and the relevance of the Association s history to the development of science over the past 153 years. By enhancing the site s searchable content we will increase the breadth and usefulness of this research tool for scholars, AAAS staff and members, and the interested public. By publishing the software code for our system, we will make a content management tool available without charge to repositories with limited resources. Our proposal complements the interests of the NSF STS program to collect, preserve, and make accessible primary resources on the history of science and technology. It also complements efforts by the NSF National Digital Library Program to develop electronic infrastructure for archival and library resources on science, engineering, and mathematics via the World Wide Web doc23253 none Scholars agree that multi-ethnic democracies are vulnerable to the polarizing and zero-sum political competition that breeds anti-liberal politics. Yet despite this consensus there is still fundamental disagreement about who defects from liberal democratic politics and the conditions under which this occurs. This proposal will identify the social bases of extremist voting in multi-ethnic democracies. An original data base of 20 elections and matching censuses from the interwar era ( - ) in five East European countries will be assembled. Settlement-level voting data will be matched with census data on ethnicity, language, religion, occupation, social class, settlement size, industrial structure, and the structure of land holding. Estimates of social support for extremist and non-extremist parties among discrete social and ethnic groups will be derived using aggregate data analysis and ecological regression techniques. Causal models of extremist voting will also be developed using the derived individual estimates as dependent variables. This project serves three broader objectives. First, the estimates obtained will bring new information to bear on a number of questions regarding the social bases of political radicalism, in particular the contexts under which minority and other groups defect from liberal democratic politics. Second, in explaining electoral behavior in countries that would eventually fall victim to fascism and communism, this project will shed new light on deeply divisive scholarly and political debates concerning the loyalty of ethnic minorities and the role of both ethnic minorities and majorities in undermining first wave democracies. Finally, the resultant data base as well as estimated vote choice will be put in the public domain, allowing others to explore their own questions and theories concerning electoral behavior in multi-ethnic democracies doc23254 none Proposal Population Science and the Making of China s One-Child-Per-Couple Policy, - Susan Greenhalgh, University of California-Irvine The development of modern science and technology has played a crucial part in China s post-Mao economic and global ascent. Important political dimensions of Chinese science have been studied, but key issues in science studies--in particular, how scientific knowledge is created, and how science shapes public policy and society--remain largely unexplored in the Chinese context. China s controversial one-child-per-couple policy, introduced in -80, provides a striking case of the impact of science on policy and society. In the U.S., both scholarly and popular thinking associates the policy with China s (repressive) politics, not its (weak) science. Yet interviews with Chinese insiders suggest that, behind the scenes, Chinese population scientists, borrowing heavily from western science (especially the limits- to- growth models of the s), played a critical role in the making (and later unmaking) of the one-child policy. Today that role remains shrouded in mystery. This project seeks to open the black box, Chinese population science to see how its central notions of population crisis and the one-child policy as the only solution were constructed, how they evolved over 25 years, and how they produced their extraordinary political and social effects. Taking seriously the science in the social sciences, the project draws on science studies, histories of numbers, and governmentality studies to develop a science studies approach to population science (or demography) and its role in population governance. The approach seeks to problematize the term population by showing how population is actively constituted as a domain of science and governance, and how population problems such as crises and their optimal policy solutions are humanly constructed by historically situated actors operating in highly consequential political and cultural contexts. This project is the first to theorize the science of population and its connections to population governance in a non-Western context. The China work should underscore the unappreciated power of population science and make clear the stakes involved in how we view the human sciences. The project involves interviewing influential Chinese scientists and policymakers (as well as selected foreign scholars and practitioners); visiting policy pilot projects; and conducting archival research on the history of population science- and policy-making. During ten years as anthropologist and policy analyst at the Population Council , a nonprofit research organization, the PI built up a large personal network in Chinese demographic and policymaking circles, acquired an extensive specialist vocabulary, and gained a reputation as a friend of China. This familiarity with China s population field helps ease problems of access to interviewees and material doc23255 none Stromberg This Americas Program award will fund an international workshop on robust statistical methods to be held at the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences and the Department of Statistics of the University of British Columbia in conjunction with the International Conference on Robust Statistics (ICORS ). The workshop, which is being organized on the US side by Dr. Arnold J. Stromberg of the University of Kentucky and on the Canadian side by Dr. Ruben Zamar of the University of British Colombia, will bring together researchers and students in computational robust statistics. The Division of Mathematical Sciences is joining in the support of this workshop. Robust statistics deals with the problem that many classical statistical procedures work well only for data that comes from a population that is normally distributed. Robust statistical procedures, on the other hand, work well independently of the normality of the data or even when the data contains outliers. The last 25 years have seen tremendous advancements in the theory of robust statistics, but many very useful procedures are not used in practice due to the fact that they are difficult to compute. Improved computational methods for robust procedures would be beneficial in that current computational methods are only practical for small to moderate sized data sets. Outliers are much more likely to appear in larger data sets and thus improvement in computational methods will allow robust techniques to be applied to much larger data sets. The workshop will serve as a forum to develop and share knowledge on improved computational techniques that will allow more robust methods to be used in practice. A web page on the ICORS will be devoted to discussions related to the workshop and drafts of papers will be posted there. An electronic mailing list will be used to notify participants of important developments doc23256 none D. Richard Blidberg Autonomous Undersea Systems Institute This project is to have a 2-day workshop along with the first APEC Ocean-related Ministerial Meeting with the theme of Towards the Sustainability of Marine and Coastal Resources to be held in Seoul, Korea on April 22 and 26, . The Fourth Meeting of the U.S.-Korea Joint Committee on Scientific and Technical Cooperation was held on September 18, . At that meeting a cooperative program was defined related to technical cooperation in the development of a Deep Water Unmanned Underwater Vehicle. This project results from that effort. The workshop will be held in Daejon, Korea jointly funded by KOSEF in Korea and NSF in U.S. The subject of the workshop is Deep Water Unmanned Underwater Vehicle Technology doc23257 none This dissertation research project is an historical study of the United States Navy s efforts to develop sophisticated command and control technologies prior to and during the Second World War. Specifically, it explores the development of Combat Information Centers (CICs), focusing on efforts to integrate complex human-machine systems under the exigencies of war. As developed and utilized during the war, the CIC was primarily an information station, established to collect, evaluate, and disseminate tactical information to task force commanders and ships commanding officers. How best to organize the equipment and specially-trained personnel that together made up a CIC was a problem of enormous complexity. By studying the Navy s efforts to solve this problem, the project seeks to explain how the evolving relationship between humans and machines altered warfare at sea. The principal research method for the project involves traveling to official archives in order to view official and unofficial documents (e.g., letters, memoranda, reports, etc.) produced during the time period under investigation and related to the topic under investigation. This process is time consuming and requires a physical presence at relevant archives, frequently for several weeks at a time. For this project, the majority of archival documents are located within the greater Washington DC area doc23258 none NTL Renewal) Lakes are conspicuous, ecologically important, and socially valued components of landscapes. Lakes collect water, energy, solutes and pollutants from the land and atmosphere, provide habitats and resources for organisms, and interact with diverse human activities. The North Temperate Lakes (NTL) Long-Term Ecological Research program aims to understand the ecology of lakes in relation to relevant atmospheric, geochemical, landscape and human processes. The overarching research question is how do biophysical setting, climate, and changing land use and cover interact to shape lake characteristics and dynamics over time (past, present, future)? NTL will address this question through five inter-related goals: (1) perceive long-term changes in the physical, chemical, and biological properties, of lake districts, (2) understand the drivers of temporal variability in lakes and lake districts, (3) understand the interaction of spatial processes with long-term change, (4) understand the causes and predictability of rapid extensive change in ecosystems, and (5) build a capacity to forecast the future ecology of lake districts. Patterns, processes, and interactions of lakes, landscapes and people will be examined at four spatial scales: individual lakes, small drainage systems with several lakes, entire lake districts, and the western Great Lakes region of North America. Temporally, scales from a fraction of a day to decades will be considered. NTL will use multiple approaches of long-term observation, comparison across ecosystems, experimental manipulations, and process modeling. In this proposal, decadal forecasts of ecosystem change are specifically addressed, which become the hypotheses for future long-term research. The interdisciplinary research group includes ecologists, hydrologists, climatologists, chemists, demographers, an economist, rural sociologists, and specialists in remote sensing and information management. The research should produce new conceptualizations of lake district dynamics, including new insights on the dynamics and impacts of invasive species, understanding of the role of spatial location of lakes in landscape dynamics, the reflexive interactions of human and ecological processes, and the interactive effects of geomorphic setting, climate and human activity on long-term change in lake districts. The understanding of integrated landscape-lake-social systems developed through the NTL program will be useful for decision making by individuals and institutions concerned with the future of the western Great Lakes region and the welfare of its residents doc23259 none The objective of this program is to develop a method to print nanoparticles on a substrate with 100 nm resolution. The proposed method uses electrostatic forces to drive the assembly. This program includes three components: 1) the use of patterned surface charges to trap and position nanoparticles; 2) the use of externally biased electrodes to generate electric fields to trap and position nanoparticles; and 3) the study of the interrelation of electrostatic field strength at a substrate surface, thermal energy of the particles, and particle localizability. The mid-term goal of this research is to enable parallel fabrication of nanotechnological devices that use nanoparticles as building blocks. Device examples that can be realized using nanoparticles as device components are single and few electron transistors, quantum-effect-based lasers, photonic bandgap materials, filters, and wave-guides. As a first application the assembly of silicon nanoparticles to fabricate nanoparticle based transistors is proposed. It is difficult to overstate the broader impact of this research, if it proves successful. For example, materials could be created as nanoparticles in the vapor or in solution, where they could be processed using well established methods. The ability to localize particles and small components of arbitrary materials on arbitrary substrates would allow the merging of technologies based on otherwise incompatible materials. Examples of applications include quantum electronic devices (addressed in this proposal), data storage, integrated circuits on plastics or fabrics for wearable intelligence, and merged optical electronic structures for optical off-chip and cross-chip communication. The educational objectives of this proposal focus on creating awareness and transmitting excitement about the PI s research as well as exploratory, interdisciplinary research in general. It emphasizes on the importance of providing continuous opportunities for student involvement throughout their academic careers: 1) high school students and teachers will get a first hand impression of research through lab tours and lab experiments; 2) undergraduate students will be addressed through seminars where the PI presents different aspects of the proposed research and by providing the opportunity of direct research involvement through research assistantships, and honors thesis projects; 3) graduate students from different disciplines will benefit through participation in an interdisciplinary lecture in the area of Micro- and Nanotechnology that the PI proposes to develop within this program. Societal Implications: Advances in nanoscience and nanotechnology promise to have major implications for health, wealth, and peace in the upcoming decades. Knowledge in this field is growing worldwide, leading to fundamental scientific advances. In turn, this will lead to dramatic changes in the ways that materials, devices, and systems are understood and create. - after Mihail C. Roco. The proposed research is one element to advance knowledge. It suggests a dramatic change in the way that devices and systems are created doc23260 none City University of New York LSAMP Phase III The New York City Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation in Science, Engineeringand Mathematics (LSAMP) was initiated within CUNY in to promote interest in science engineering and mathematics among under-represented minority students. The main goal of LSAMP Phase III is to build a permanent CUNY infrastructure through augmentation of our demonstrated productive capacity and output built in Phase I and Phase II, with a coordinated program of summer and academic year research, teaching and service opportunities for participants. The NYC LSAMP Phase III will continue to work for systemic changes that will ensure the increased production of minority SMET graduates, and address the areas delineated by the NSF as national priorities. The areas are: 1) The Educational Continuum; 2) Institutionalization and Best Practices; 3) Undergraduate Graduate Transition; and 4) Mentoring. Since , minority undergraduate enrollment in science, mathematics, engineering and related technology courses has increased from 4,216 to 6,976 in , an increase of 65 %. In that same period, those earning baccalaureate degrees increased from 404 to 755 per year, an increase of 86 %. The total number of minority graduates since exceeds 5,800. LSAMP programs now serve more than 14,000 CUNY undergraduates annually. Clearly, the LSAMP has had a positive impact in the University during a period when CUNYs overall total enrollment, both minority and non-minority, decreased from about 230,000 to 200,000, and is testimony to the success of the LSAMP initiative. NYC LSAMP Phase III will augment and make permanent the following systemic changes and reforms: - A hierarchical organizational structure to foster delivery on its goal. - Restructuring of gatekeeper calculus, chemistry and physics courses. - Science and mathematics learning centers on CUNY campuses. - Seamless academic transitions at all critical points, from high school to graduate school. - The universitys investment in undergraduate research as integral to the undergraduate experience. - An undergraduate student and faculty research program across college boundaries. - Sustainable agency and industry collaborations. - Joint planning and resource commitment with other systemic initiatives. - Tracking individual student persistence to the baccalaureate and graduate level. - Producing a steady stream of high school students entering SMET curricula. Alliance activities in Phase I and Phase II centered on curriculum reform (Phase I), and integrating research into undergraduate education (Phase II). The strategy of increasing the enrollment in the SMET disciplines via curriculum reform in Phase I, led in a systemic manner to positioning students to take advantage of the increased research opportunities in Phase II. The Alliance Course Restructuring for gatekeeper calculus, chemistry, and physics courses included an emphasis on collaborative learning, a non-competitive approach to problem solving, and workshops conducted by specially trained peer tutors and faculty members. For the period - , CUNY enrolled over 46,000 students in NYC LSAMP institutionalized or restructured courses. It was in this context that over 5,800 students graduated with SMET degrees at the BS level, with increased numbers of students participating in LSAMP activities as research assistants. Phase III activities will involve a systemic approach to increase the number of participants that continue on to graduate school or teacher education at the graduate level doc23261 none Duman Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Professor F. Tolga Duman, Department of Electrical Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona and Dr. Ali Ghrayeb, Department of Electrical Engineering at the American University of Sharjah (AUS) in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Their research deals with providing voice and data services over the wireless channel. They have shown that for a multiple transmit multiple receiver antenna system over a quasi-static fading channel, with antenna selection, regardless of the underlying space-time code, the diversity order remains the same as that of the full complexity system. In this project they plan to: extend their earlier results to the case of antenna selection principles for space-time codes over various realistic fading channel models (e.g., block fading, frequency selective fading), conduct performance analysis and develop optimal code design principles for space-time codes when antenna selection is employed, consider the use and design of turbo coded modulation schemes and low-density parity check codes for multiple antennas and address the antenna selection issues in that context, and study space-time coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems (to convert the frequency selective fading channel into a frequency flat one) when antenna selection is employed. The two scientists have studied the problem from a channel coding perspective and produced some initial promising results. Scope: Transmitting voice and data services over the wireless channel is prone to several impairments such as fading and interference. Diversity is a most effective way of combating the adverse effects of fading. The research seeks to simplify the receiver complexity by employing antenna selection at the receiver that results in a great reduction in complexity, as only one receiver circuit is needed. Dr. Duman is presently carrying out research at his institute on coding for wireless communications and on smart antennas for wireless communications. This project will help his current research through the interaction with Dr. Ghrayeb (a Jordanian faculty member at AUS). Ghrayeb will visit Arizona State University during summers and Duman will visit the American University in Sharjah during winter break to continue the project. The proposed work will also have an educational impact both at ASU and the American University of Sharjah, and will result in a continued collaboration between the communications groups of the two institutions. The research results will be incorporated in educational material at both institutes doc23262 none Business-business e-commerce involves the use of computers and telecommunications in routine business relationships. It mostly affects the organizations operations and daily relationships with their suppliers, customers, banks, insurers, distributors, and other trading partners. Although most popular accounts of e-commerce focus on business-to-consumer e-commerce, business-to-business e-commerce is becoming the key in inter-organizational relationships, (Keen, ; Lee and Turban, ). The close coupling between buyers and suppliers (sellers) form inter-organizational relationships. Trust in e-commerce participation has received a lot of attention, especially in the recent years. However, to date there has been no systematic examination or formulation of a model of inter-organizational trust for business-to-business e-commerce. Much of the literature on trust has tended to focus from a psychological rationale, while neglecting factors such as trading partner trust behaviors, and the process involved in developing trust and its impact on organizational and social issues within which e-commerce operations take place. The purpose of this research project is to increase the growth of business-to-business e-commerce in Vermont by examining how trust mechanisms evolve and contribute to business-to-business e-commerce adoption in Vermont. Therefore, the core objective of this research project is to investigate, explore and examine the impact of trust mechanisms in business-to-business e-commerce. By doing this, success factors in business-to-business e-commerce can be identified and utilized to provide guidelines to enhance the growth of businesses in Vermont that will in turn create more jobs. This will in turn, increase the awareness of trust behaviors among e-commerce practitioners. E-commerce organizations in Vermont will be able to practice business-to-business e-commerce more confidently (by enforcing best business practices); thus improving their chances of surviving in a competitive global market environment (particularly against their neighboring cities such as Boston and Montreal). Indeed the geographical location of Vermont makes it even more attractive to conduct e-business. Experienced e-commerce practitioners (trading partners) will be able to observe the behaviors of their trading partners and will be able to monitor, assess, and evaluate trust behaviors of themselves and their trading partners. Although governance mechanisms (in the form of legal contracts, trust and security-based mechanisms in e-commerce) provide technological assurances (using digital signatures, encryption mechanisms, functional acknowledgment procedures, and trading partner agreements) that help mitigate perceived risks of e-commerce, this research project will emphasize on the importance of developing collaborative trustworthy trading relationships. A key strength of the research is that the respondents will include practitioners from a wide range of organizations and occupations. Therefore, while the organizations and their people will not be selected randomly, quite a diverse group from a cross-section of industries will participate that will in turn benefit the entire Vermont business community doc23263 none This RUI project addresses the chemistry of GaN surfaces and how these reactions are influenced by surface morphology (cluster-covered or smooth), and conversely how surface morphology is modified by reactions. Cluster formation on GaN appears to be especially facile, and is expected to result in Ga-rich surfaces compared to atomically smooth surfaces. Surface reactions that pres-age cluster formation as well as etching reactions will be the focus of the proposed research. Sur-face reactions will be monitored by changes in surface electronic structure using ultraviolet pho-toelectron spectroscopy and by determining the temperature at which molecules desorb from the surface. Surface morphology will be characterized using scanning tunneling microscopy and low-energy electron diffraction. Experiments will determine how surface morphology influences chemistry by preparing a surface with known morphology before surface reactions. How surface chemistry changes morphology will be characterized by re-examining the GaN surface after sur-face reactions to assess how local surface structure or composition has changed. Changes in composition and electron density will also be evaluated by ultraviolet and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. By comparing surfaces with known changes in morphology, it may be possible to establish whether a surface is smooth or cluster-covered by photoelectron spectroscopy. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in a topical area of materials science having technological relevance. Undergraduate students will play a primary role in the project, with op-portunities for research integrated directly into their academic program. A newly established collaboration between UW-Eau Claire chemistry and physics faculty enhances the project. In-strumentation recently acquired through NSF MRI awards has been combined into a common-use materials research facility in which faculty and students from several groups and departments work as a team on various research projects. This interdisciplinary approach to materials research provides an environment where undergraduate students work directly with their peers, and de-velop cooperative learning skills as well as mentoring less-experienced students. The research program enables forefront research and access to state-of-the-art surface science equipment to undergraduate students doc23264 none Two methods, discriminant analysis of Fourier transform mid-range and near infrared spectra, have been developed as high throughput approaches to identifying mutations in plant cell wall polysaccharide components and wall architecture. These methods will be employed to identify in insertion tagged populations of maize and Arabidopsis a broad range of mutants involved in the biogenesis and dynamic alteration of plant cell wall architecture during growth and development. A systematic protocol using biochemical, spectroscopic, and imaging methods has been devised to categorize defects in wall structure and architecture related to development into one of six stages of wall biogenesis or disassembly. Maize lines carrying Mu-insertions and Arabidopsis lines carrying T-DNA tags will be used as primary material for both forward and reverse screens. A major practical goal of the project is to generate plants with genetically defined variation in wall composition and architecture that will permit assessment of modifications on wall properties and plant development. Since cell walls are an enormously important source of industrial raw material, we anticipate that several of the genes we identify and characterize, as well as several of the plants with genetically defined alterations, will be of economic importance. As the heritability of the mutations is confirmed and information on the possible function of the genes identified is obtained, the plant biology community will be informed of them through a web site that has been created as a repository for all cell-wall related genomics. Maize and Arabidopsis stock centers will be provided with all materials to dispense to the community at large doc23253 none Scholars agree that multi-ethnic democracies are vulnerable to the polarizing and zero-sum political competition that breeds anti-liberal politics. Yet despite this consensus there is still fundamental disagreement about who defects from liberal democratic politics and the conditions under which this occurs. This proposal will identify the social bases of extremist voting in multi-ethnic democracies. An original data base of 20 elections and matching censuses from the interwar era ( - ) in five East European countries will be assembled. Settlement-level voting data will be matched with census data on ethnicity, language, religion, occupation, social class, settlement size, industrial structure, and the structure of land holding. Estimates of social support for extremist and non-extremist parties among discrete social and ethnic groups will be derived using aggregate data analysis and ecological regression techniques. Causal models of extremist voting will also be developed using the derived individual estimates as dependent variables. This project serves three broader objectives. First, the estimates obtained will bring new information to bear on a number of questions regarding the social bases of political radicalism, in particular the contexts under which minority and other groups defect from liberal democratic politics. Second, in explaining electoral behavior in countries that would eventually fall victim to fascism and communism, this project will shed new light on deeply divisive scholarly and political debates concerning the loyalty of ethnic minorities and the role of both ethnic minorities and majorities in undermining first wave democracies. Finally, the resultant data base as well as estimated vote choice will be put in the public domain, allowing others to explore their own questions and theories concerning electoral behavior in multi-ethnic democracies doc23266 none This research will examine sampling and zone estimation within an integrative framework for the form verification of cone, sphere and torus features. The objective is to develop a comprehensive and integrative approach to the inspection of these complex forms using coordinate metrology. Individual research problems within this integrative context include sample point location determination for complex forms using alternative strategies, probe path length optimization, and minimum zone estimation using alternate formulations and solution methodologies. The impact of sample size and strategy and the optimization method used will be assessed on the computed tolerance zone. Experiments will be conducted on actual Coordinate Measuring Machines and the role of multiple factors and their interactions determined. The applicability of appropriate models and methods for specific part inspection problems will be suggested through a decision support software system that will be developed using the research results. A guidelines repository will be attempted for effective dissemination of research findings. Research will be deployed to education, through multiple channels, throughout the project. Sufficient number of industrial parts such as nozzles, frustrum cylinders, dies, tapered holes, and balls, tapered rollers and roller races in bearings possess complex features that must be efficiently inspected for form. Considering these applications of complex features, and their impact on interchangeability, it is logical that these features be studied more exclusively and extensively. If successful, this project will lead to better standards and solutions for complex feature verification. Further, the mathematical developments for these advanced forms will be useful to other inspection methodologies. In addition, the integrative analysis will be useful to the development of formal guidelines for part-based inspection doc23267 none This project is a fundamental study of directional recrystallization processing, the process whereby one or a few grains or crystals nucleate at one end of a specimen and grow along with a moving hot zone. Directional recrystallization has a number of advantages: net-shape processing; potential energy and cost savings compared to directional solidification; and the ability to process materials not amenable to directional solidification. The overall goal is to understand how key microstructural parameters (the size and spacing of particles, and the grain size and orientation) interact with the processing conditions (rate of hot zone movement and temperature) to control the microstructure. How the initial microstructure and processing conditions can be exploited to produce columnar grains or single crystals of a particular orientation will be explored in polycrystalline nickel sheets. The role of particles will be examined in a model system of copper (both single crystals and polycrystals) containing finely-dispersed particles that can coarsen during processing. Determining the role of particle coarsening or dissolution is key to understanding how columnar grains or single crystals can be produced in many commercial alloy systems. The work will involve a close coupling of experiments with computational microstructural simulation of the processing utilizing a front-tracking grain growth model. While working on specific materials, the goal is to understand directional recrystallization processing at a fundamental level so that this generic technology and the associated modeling can easily be applied to many materials. In addition to graduate education, activities with the Women in Science Project and or Dartmouth Presidential Scholarships will be encouraged to expand participation of a diverse group of undergraduates on this project. In addition, material developed with the aid of a high school teacher will be presented to high school students doc23268 none Representing Genes: Testing Competing Philosophical Analyses of the Gene Concept in Contemporary Molecular Biology Paul Griffiths, University of Pittsburgh There is widespread agreement amongst historians and philosophers of biology that the gene concept is not merely vague or flexible, but rather that biologists in different fields conceive of the term gene in one or more specific ways that reflect their research practice. Philosophers and historians of science have made various claims about precisely how and why the gene concept varies amongst biologists and have argued that the variation is either functional or dysfunctional with respect to the actual conduct of biological research. Previous research by the PI has established that claims in this field can be operationalized and tested by statistical analysis of questionnaire data obtained from working biologists. The objective of this study is to construct, in cooperation with leading researchers in the history and philosophy of biology and with the help of researchers in other fields with relevant methodological expertise, testable versions of philosophical claims about how groups of contemporary biologists think about genes, and to test those claims. The purpose of the study is not to arrive at one or more correct definitions of the gene, but rather to map out the variation in the gene concept and to explore its causes and its effects. The project begins with a workshop of leading researchers in history and philosophy of biology and others with expertise in the relevant biological fields and in social scientific research. The aim of the workshop is to agree on research questions and operationalizations. It is to be followed by subject recruitment, data collection, and data analysis. A second workshop at the end of the project is to discuss the results and to plan publications by several overlapping collaborations of workshop participants aimed at several different target audiences. Among the many impacts of this project, one potential broader impact stands out. Although biologists are aware that the term gene means different things in different fields, the outside world is left with statements from different biologists that appear to be discussing the same thing, while the validity of those statements, in fact, depends on the specific gene concept held by the individual biologist. Thus, crucial law and policy decisions may be made based on faulty public, lawmaker, and policymaker notions of what import they should attach to these statements. The project can make a significant contribution by highlighting this circumstance doc23269 none North Carolina Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation - Phase III The North Carolina Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (NC-LSAMP) requests support for continuingits efforts during Phase III. The LS-NCAMP Alliance includes eight partner institutions - North Carolina A bridge programs to manage the school-college transition; supplemental instruction, cohort scheduling and workshops for undergraduate students during the first year to enhance retention and preparation for upper-class coursework; undergraduate research and professional development workshops aimed at motivating and preparing students for graduate study; and the development of networking and mentoring systems to improve retention in the first year in graduate school. A key emphasis during Phase III will be Alliance-wide institutionalization of proven strategies that have been known to improve the success rates of students in SMET. The Alliance partners together awarded over a thousand degrees and currently enroll over six thousand undergraduate minority students in SMET programs. In addition to students in the Alliance, dissemination activities under this proposal have the potential to impact several thousand students each year doc23270 none This award provides partial support for travel expenses for participants in a symposium entitled Polymer Diffraction Methods to be held at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in Orlando, FL, during the week of April 7-1, . The symposium is sponsored by the Polymer Division of ACS, and is chaired by John Blackwell (Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH) and Kenn H. Gardner (DuPont Central Research, Wilmington, DE.). It seeks to explore the latest research advances and to review the state of the art in structure analysis for polymers at the molecular level. There will be three full days for oral presentations by 36 invited speakers, plus a poster session with 7 contributions. The symposium will be truly international, with speakers from France (7), UK (6), Japan (2), Spain (2), Germany (1), Canada (1), Italy (1), Korea (1) and Russia (1), as well as from the USA 914). In addition to inviting the leading researchers in the field the organizers have also made deliberate efforts to include presentations by younger scientists: new faculty still establishing their careers (3) and highly promising postdoctoral research associates (7), whose participation as vital to the long-term continuity of research in the field. Polymer diffraction techniques provide the basis of much of our structural understanding of this important class of materials doc23271 none The formation of embryos within the seeds of pine trees differs from seed formation in traditional crop and vegetable plants. While in both cases an embryo forms inside a seed, develops and finally germinates to form a plant, the morphology, biochemistry and genetics of the processes in gymnosperms (e.g. pine) and angiosperms (e.g. carrot) are distinctly different. Embryogenesis is the result of a regulated program of gene activity and the elucidation of the program for loblolly pine is the goal of this project. The multiplication of pine embryos in a laboratory setting and the production of plantlets, has great implications for reforestation After corn, forest products are the second most valuable US agricultural product. Loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.) is the primary commercial species in southern conifer forests covering 13.4 million hectares, and over 1.5 billion loblolly pine seedlings are planted annually. Somatic embryogenesis, a tissue culture technique for embryo multiplication, is an excellent experimental tool for investigating embryogenesis in this tree. However, success of the technique is genotype-dependent and remains inefficient. Knowledge of the program of gene expression in natural and laboratory-cultivated embryos will provide insight into varying metabolism of these embryos and a basis for protocol improvement. A cDNA library will be created from loblolly pine zygotic (natural) and somatic (laboratory-cultivated) embryos. Together, these will represent a combined set of transcripts expressed during all stages of embryogenesis, thus giving a snapshot of genes participating in the formation of the pine embryo. Randomly selected cDNA clones will be 5 end-sequenced to generate 35,000 Expressed Sequence Tags or ESTs. These ESTs will be clustered and assembled to construct a non-redundant pine EST database (TIGR Gene Index). The non-redundant cDNA clone set will be used to obtain gene expression profiles during various stages of zygotic and somatic loblolly pine embryogenesis. This approach should identify the genes active in embryogenesis allow determination of their identities and temporal expression patterns. A comparison of profiles from laboratory-grown and natural embryos will allow insights into embryogenesis to be gained, and further development of improved protocols for loblolly pine somatic embryogenesis. Together, these data will provide the first detailed overview of genome-wide gene expression patterns in conifer embryo development. In the long-term, this kind of information will be useful in developing strategies to accelerate clonal propagation doc23272 none Funds are requested for the purchase of a stereoscopic particle imaging (SPIV) system for flow measurements. Proposed projects will include flow in a stirred tank reactor, resuspension of bottom sediments, flows in micro-channels, and stratified flows. These projects will be carried out by four members of faculty in Civil and Environmental Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Architecture Engineering Departments doc23273 none SES 02- Russian Basic Science: Changes Since the Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Impact of International Support Loren Graham, MIT The story of Russian science from the time of the advent of Gorbachev through the collapse of the Soviet Union and on to the present is a very dramatic one, but the details of that story are poorly known -- even in Russia. There is no overall description of these events and an analysis of their consequences. In just a few years one of the largest and most impressive scientific establishments in the world nearly collapsed. The combination of a slashing of the federal science budget to 20 percent of what it was before and the departure of thousands of the most talented scientists damaged Russian science so seriously that some observers predicted the death of Russian science. We now know that this prediction was incorrect; Russian science has survived and the first signs of recovery are evident. However, during the transition period it has become clear that the Soviet forms of the organization and financing of research inherited by the new Russia are inappropriate for the democratic and free society that is the hope of most Russian citizens. As a result the financial supports and organizational principles of Russian science have either changed or been seriously challenged. This proposal describes and analyzes these changes, including the important influences exercised by foreign foundations that have become active in supporting Russian science, strengthening, in the process, new principles of peer refereeing and open competition. The PI will work Irina Dezhina in Russia, using archival research, statistical data analysis, interviews, and scholarly publications and reports of foundations and government organizations to tell this story within a context of the historical, political, and economic dimensions of the recent crisis of Russian science. The product of their efforts will be articles and a book on the recent history and current policies of Russian science. These publications should interest not only to historians and science policy specialists, but educated people everywhere, since several of the questions being considered are of general interest: How should science change when it makes the transition from being in an authoritarian society to a democratic one? What organizational structures best promote excellence in research and teaching? Which aspects of foreign models should be followed and how closely doc23274 none Catlos Description: This award supports US-India Cooperative Research: Investigation of Activity along the Himalayan Main Central Thrust- Present Geomorphology and Past Slip, Garhwal, NW India. US PI Elizabeth Catlos of Oklahoma State University (OSU) and Indian collaborator Chandra Dubey of the University of Delhi will study mass movements within the Himalayan Main Central Thrust (MCT) shear zone and profiles of major rivers that cross the zone to gain understanding of the mechanisms involved during continental collision. The goal is to use a combined geochemical, structural, and geomorphologic approach to test the hypothesis that the MCT shear zone accommodated slip and has sustained seismic activity since the Miocene. They will also investigate the temporal and spatial distribution of mass movement within the MCT shear zone in NW India. The Himalayas are an ideal natural laboratory for studying continental convergence and this research will have broader significance and implications for most other mountain belts. Scope: The US PI is a first-time NSF awardee and new Ph.D. of considerable promise. The collaboration is career launching and will provide a framework for future interdisciplinary studies. The international collaboration, which pairs the field expertise of the Indian team with the analytical capabilities of the US team, will enhance this research and offer mutual benefits. For the Indian side, Dubey and his graduate student will be trained in electron and ion microprobe analysis in the U.S. OSU students will gain an international perspective through Dubey s participation in the OSU School of Geology Seminar Series. The PIs will present their findings to the Geological Society of America, Nov. . This project is cofunded by the Indian Department of Science & Technology (DST) under the NSF DST joint program doc23275 none This research will study the interpersonal activity between trainer trainee in a collaborative visual inspection Virtual Environment and will involve a new Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) capable of real-time capture and visualization of eye movements of one of the participants in the CVE. Of particular importance is the recording and real-time depiction of visual deictic references made with the eyes by either instructor or student in the environment. Deictic references are associated with pointing and verbal expressions (such as look at this or see that? ). Collection of explicit visual deictic references, as made by the eyes, will facilitate task-based analysis and modeling of visual attention during human-human interaction in Virtual and Physical Reality. The main objective of this project is to develop a new interactive 3D visual inspection system in Virtual Reality, based on an existing single-person virtual aircraft inspection environment. To allow the measurement of visual deictic reference, it will extend the current single-person Virtual Environment (VE) to a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) which will allow the simultaneous participation of two individuals. The main technological innovations are extensions to available eye tracking techniques to allow real-time capture and visualization of eye movements of one of the participants during simultaneous participation in the CVE. The fundamental exploration of visual deictic reference will be addressed during evaluation of visual inspection of the environment by the instructor (expert) and the trainee (novice). Existing approaches have failed to yield significant improvements in inspection performance. The successful completion of this research will provide a better understanding of the issues related to human-human interaction and training. Results from this research are expected to advance our understanding of complex multi-party environments where gaze-based communication is employed. The CVE will allow visualization and analysis of human attentional factors in shared-space environments. The study of visual deictic reference will lead to novel insights into human learning and behavior, notably learned improvement of visual search strategies. The research effort involves a multidisciplinary team of researchers with expertise in virtual reality systems, vision based research, human machine systems design, inspection systems design, and training and computer supported collaborative work. Educational activities involving the curriculum and laboratory training will be closely integrated with the research, involving both undergraduate and graduate students. Although primarily focused on aircraft inspection, the anticipated results have the potential to impact a wide range of tasks in the maintenance and service industries, such as inspection of products in a manufacturing environment, flight crew systems training and training of air traffic control personnel, real-time military target acquisition, process control monitoring, and baggage inspection (aviation security doc23276 none Louis Stokes South Carolina Alliance for Minority Participantion (LS-SCAMP) The Louis Stokes-South Carolina Alliance for Minority Participation (LS-SCAMP) has become a keystone for undergraduate science, mathematics, engineering and technology (SMET) retention and a catalyst for degree completion within the state. Committed leadership from top- level administrators is paramount to the successful implementation of the goals proposed herein.The new LS-SCAMP Phase I will be lead by South Carolina State University (SCSU),nationally ranked for African American Minority SMET degree completion and the largest producer of under-represented minority SMET degrees in the state. Currently all of SCSU s SMET baccalaureate degree programs are ranked nationally as a result of African- American Minority degree completion. Biology , Mathematics and Engineering Technology are ranked 4 th in the nation while Computer Science is ranked 13 th and Physics is ranked 21 st . LS-SCAMP includes all seven of the HBCUs in the state of South Carolina and represents a new beginning and a new era of support for the success of under-represented minorities in SMET. To meet the strong demand for higher education and to combat the persistent barriers toaccess, the new LS-SCAMP will build on the foundation established during the prior SCAMP phases. Specifically the following Phase I goals will be achieved: 1. Increase under-represented SMET baccalaureate degree production at a rate that is 40% higher than the national SMET degree rate. 2. Strengthen and expand undergraduate research opportunities for SMET students. 3. Provide opportunities for SMET students to develop knowledge and skills that will improve their qualifications and enhance their preparation for graduate studies in SMET fields. 4. Build a transfer bridge to increase by 100% SMET majors from 2-year institutions. The outstanding track record for the production of minority graduates at many of the Alliance institutions, the unprecedented level of support for the AMP program in South Carolina and the new statewide infrastructure, will allow the goals of Phase I to be met doc23277 none Proposal Colonial Botany: Gender, Politics, and Commerce between Europe and the West Indies in the Eighteenth Century Londa Schiebinger, Penn State The last several years have witnessed renewed interest in the history of botany, the big science of early modern Europe. This book-length project explores the movement, triumph, suppression, and extinction of different botanical knowledges in 18th century encounters between Europeans and the inhabitants of the Caribbean. The project has several purposes. First, it asks scholarly audiences to consider the cultural politics of plants. Plants rarely appear in undergraduate or graduate courses on European, American, World History or History of Science, and are rarely part of our grand narratives of war, peace, or even everyday life. But they are important cultural artifacts, often at the center of political and economic struggles. In the eighteenth-century, plants played a role in political struggles surrounding slavery (slave women, for example, employed abortifacients to resist producing more field hands for plantation owners). Plants also figured in battles between trading companies, states, and local bio-pirates for monopolies on profitable colonial commodities. Second, this project seeks to examine the linkage between colonial botany and gender relations. While gender has received some attention in the history of eighteenth-century anthropology and travel literature and in the history of slavery, it has received relatively little in the history of colonial botany. In this project, the PI explores how European gender relations guided naturalists as they explored other lands, peoples, and their knowledges. Third, this project contributes to rethinking the history of botany. A long-standing narrative has presented modern botany as the rise of taxonomy, nomenclature, and pure systems of classification. This approach does not capture the realities of botany in the eighteenth century as a matter of state. Emerging nation-states that vied for land and resources saw botanists who collected rare and beautiful plants for study and global exchange as crucial for European colonizing efforts in tropical climates. Fourth, this project seeks to develop further and apply a new methodological tool that Robert Proctor has called agnatology --the study of culturally-induced ignorances. Agnatology refocuses questions about how we know to include questions about what we do not know and why not. While much of the literature on colonial science has focused on how knowledge is made and transferred between continents, the PI explores the non-transfer of important bodies of knowledge from the New World to Europe. The PI will work in archives and libraries in Europe and the Caribbean to prepare a book, for a broad scholarly audience including those working in STS as well as botanists and naturalists doc23278 none Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) Indiana The LSAMP Indiana project is a result of collaboration among Ball State University; IndianaUniversity, Bloomington; Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis; Purdue University, Calumet; and Purdue University, West Lafayette. Each university surveyed existing studentretention and minority programs. At many of our universities, there are a substantial number of K-12 outreach programs designed to enhance initial interest in Science, Math, Engineering, and Technology (SMET) disciplines, as well as numerous programs to help freshmen transition from high school into college. In addition, there are a substantial number of programs to support research projects by upper-division students in SMET disciplines. However, there are fewer (if any) programs across the participating universities to help first-year students identify with their SMET discipline and help them to sustain that initial identification through research and mentoring experiences over their next two years of college. In response to this finding, the involve institutions formed an alliance to increase the number of minorities receiving baccalaureate degrees in SMET disciplines by providing (1) early research enrichment experiences; (2) sustained teaching and mentoring opportunities in gatekeeper as well as upper-level courses; (3) personalized interactions with graduate students and faculty mentors beginning in the students freshman year; and (4) professional and personal development opportunities. These early experiences with research and teaching are designed to encourage students to forge and sustain an academic and a social identification within their SMET discipline. These goals will be reached by the implementation of the following three programs: Summer Transition and Academic Research Programs (STAR Programs) -- The STAR programs will help LSAMP students transition from high school to college by exposing them to research and career enrichment experiences designed to enhance the student s initialcommitment to a SMET discipline beginning in the summer before their first year of college. Importantly, to sustain this initial commitment, the STAR programs then continue to provide research and career enrichment experiences from the students freshman year through the summer after their sophomore year. STAR programs will provide research and career enrichment experiences that include such activities as the following: (1) participation in a summer bridge program with a hands on introduction to research experiences component; (2) formal and informal meetings with faculty and or graduate mentors; (3) visits to laboratories that emphasize the active involvement of students; (4) participation in a higher-level summer research experiences between their first and second years of college; and (5) participation in the annual LSAMP Indiana Research and Alliance Enrichment Conference. Supplemental Instruction (SI) -- SI programs offer participants the chance to lead and or participate in review and study skill sessions to supplement course instruction. Some of the universities in this alliance have established SI programs for a few of the historically high-risk 100and 200 level gatekeeper courses, and they are particularly effective in raising participants (especially minority participants ) G.P.A. and retention rate. As an alliance, therefore, we are interested in the following: (1) beginning the SI program in SMET courses at universities with no SI program; (2) expanding the SI program to (more) SMET courses at universities with an established SI program; and (3) adding SI to upper-level courses known to be difficult for students (i.e., 2 nd level gatekeeper courses). Coordination and Development Programs -- To forge the Alliance, all parties involved in LSAMP Indiana will be invited to conferences in order to: (1) enhance the alliance by sharingdata, program experiences (successes and failures), and ideas for improving programs and the alliance; (2) provide conference experiences that serve academic and social identification needs; (3) build a supportive network of SMET scholars (faculty, graduate students, administrators, and students) working toward a shared goal who can help guide the alliance; and (4) develop diversity competencies among faculty, administrators, support staff, graduate students, and undergraduate students affiliated with LSAMP Indiana by developing new and innovative workshops that are then adapted and administered on each campus doc23279 none There is considerable literature in the area of human judgment and decision making demonstrating systematic use of simplifying heuristics and the biases that can arise from them. For example, framing effects are common in which people react to the manner in which information is labelled by assigning more favorable evaluations to, say, a medical treatment that is described as having a 75% success rate as opposed to a 25% failure rate . However, research by the Principal Investigator and others has uncovered considerable variation in the extent to which different individuals display such biases. Most recently, this research, which has been done almost exclusively with adults, has linked these individual differences to stable personality traits and decision styles. This naturally brings up the dual questions of when such biases develop and whether they can be linked to distinctive childhood dispositions. The present series of studies is proposed to address these questions. A major resource for these studies is an available population of 5-6 year-olds whose social and emotional development and cognitive capacity have been tracked since they were toddlers. Thus, we have the capability of relating children s decision making behavior to measures such as shyness, impulsivity, and intelligence. In an initial study we showed that these traits are related to risk-taking in a gambling-type game. We are in the process of developing a battery of tasks games which are child-friendly yet capture the essence of the decision processes observed in adults. An innovation of the new studies is that the parent as well as the child will complete the tasks so that we can correlate the two sets of responses to learn more about the development of decision biases doc23280 none Tennessee Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (TLSAMP) If America is to prosper in the new millennium, we must build a domestic science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) workforce that uses the talent of all segments of our population. America s prosperity is fueled by the nation s technical enterprise. As evidenced by the tragic episode of September 11, our country must build on the diversity within this country so that an increasingly large share of the work force will consist of women and under-represented minorities. Many national programs have been identified to enhance the quantity and quality of under-represented minorities in science and engineering. This proposal describes a program designed to improve the quantity and quality of under-represented scientists and engineers graduating each year with a bachelor s degree. The partners in the proposed alliance are all from the state of Tennessee. The existing knowledge base relative to minority participation in science and engineering will be the foundation of our efforts. The goal is to build on this foundation and to expand the available options to enrich programs at partner institutions and beyond. Tennessee State University, LeMoyne-Owen College, Middle Tennessee State University, University of Memphis, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and Vanderbilt University will partner to form the Tennessee Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (TLSAMP). The ultimate success of this collaboration rests in the fact that if there is any student s need, there is an institution within the alliance with the characteristics, experience, and or resources to meet the needs of the student. The alliance can draw on the strengths and experiences of each of the individual members. The goal of the TLSAMP is to increase the number of the under-represented SMET students by at least 75% at the end of the five-year period. The objectives to support the goal of the alliance are: 1) to recruit under-represented students to pursue science or engineering as a career, 2) to improve the quality of the learning environment for under-represented science and engineering students at all schools, and 3) to ensure that a larger number of undergraduate students are prepared to enter graduate programs. The Alliance will emphasize collaborative learning approaches, mentoring activities via faculty, staff, and upper level students, and hands-on research and internship experiences. Using this approach, three project areas have been chosen as critical focal points for achieving the qualitative and quantitative goals of the project. These project areas utilize strategies with demonstrable effectiveness in the retention of under-represented students in science and engineering. All project areas will involve faculty, staff, or students during the design phase as well as the continuous quality improvement phase. In this project, assessment will be built into each project area as a result of the formulation of specific, measurable quantitative and qualitative objectives. These objectives will be reviewed and revised on an ongoing basis. An Advisory Committee composed of the Vice Presidents and Deans from the six schools will oversee all aspects of the grant project doc23281 none SGS LTER Renewal Proposal) The shortgrass steppe (SGS) LTER has been in operation since . Three questions guide its work: (1) What factors regulate ecological structure and function over space and time? (2) How do factors that regulate structure and function and coupling of biotic and abiotic components vary spatially and temporally? (3) What are the thresholds that determine the vulnerability to changes in the factors influencing structure and function? The conceptual framework asserts that ecological structure and function are governed by climate, natural disturbance, physiography, human use, and biotic interactions. SGS work is divided into three topic areas, population dynamics (plants and heterotrophs), biogeochemistry, and land-atmosphere interactions. Disturbances are of such importance that they are embedded in each topic area. In addition to continuing long-term experiments, SGS will initiate new studies that primarily focus on Question 3. In the area of population dynamics, one grass species, Bouteloua gracilis, contributes most to biomass and net primary production (NPP) and has been the focus of most past work. New long-term studies of Opuntia polyacantha (prickly-pear cactus), a species that makes up a small proportion of NPP, will be initiated; its spiny growth form affords protection to other species and therefore may have a large effect under cattle grazing. Even though the SGS has proven quite resistant to invasive plants, the introduction of species that can successfully invade the SGS is inevitable. So the potential for invasion by plants with different life history attributes will be studied and surveys conducted to detect new invasions. In the area of faunal dynamics, small mammals simultaneously reflect and affect both the structure and function of the SGS ecosystem. Long-term studies will be continued that track small mammal populations, their resources and predators. New research will emphasize the dynamics of the black-tailed prairie dog (Cynomys ludovicianus) and its effects on biological diversity and ecosystem function. The once abundant prairie dog is now a candidate for listing under the Endangered Species Act. Under biogeochemistry, SGS conceives of biogeochemical processes as an integrated function of biotic components and those processes responsible for carbon and nutrient fluxes: primary production, decomposition, weathering, mineralization, and trace gas flux. Variations in biogeochemistry will continue to be studied as a function of climatic controls, and new studies that evaluate geologic (textural) and topographic controls, and the N budget will be initiated. Regarding land-atmosphere interactions, the processes of primary concern are water, energy, and gaseous fluxes. One of the most important alterations that has occurred and continues to occur on the SGS LTER is land-use change, which will be evaluated in terms of the interactions among human land use, biotic responses, and atmospheric processes at local to regional scales. The SGS has a major investment in simulation analysis, and each of topic areas has a simulation component. Models will continue to be used for synthesizing long-term data both within and across research areas. A new synthesis volume will be published during the next funding cycle. Finally, data management supports SGS research and contributes to ecoinformatics. The building of new interactions with federal land management agencies, NGO s, and the interested public will be continued. Through the use of supplemental funding, SGS will focus its sLTER on K-12 and community outreach through student mentoring, curriculum development, teacher professional development, community partnerships, and education research doc23282 none This project analyzes the impact of the stock market on the innovative capabilities of high-technology companies that have been central to the new economy. Through in-depth comparative analyses of the accumulation of innovative capabilities at various major optical networking companies, the impacts of the changing roles of the stock market as well as the impact of volatility in stock prices will be evaluated. In the speculative boom of the late 90s, many highly touted start-ups with little revenue were able to do IPOs with only a small portion of their stock being issued to the public while raising unprecedented amounts of cash that could fund future growth. A high stock price became important in the competitive bidding among these companies for high-technology acquisitions, and hence played an important role in determining which companies would exercise strategic control over new technologies that they did not develop in-house. Then, to develop and utilize the acquired technologies, the acquirer had to integrate the capabilities of the acquired companies with its own capabilities. This meant using a stock-based compensation for recruiting and retaining key personnel, mostly in non-executive positions, who might otherwise have gone to work for competitors. In established companies, stock option packages were used to keep personnel from leaving to join start ups. Corporate stock thus came to play an important ole in the accumulation of innovative capabilities by both new ventures and going concerns. This project analyzes the impact of the use of corporate stock as an acquisition and compensation currency on the accumulation of innovative capabilities by major optical networking firms. How did such use of stock, entailing as it did pressure on corporate executives to maintain high stock prices, affect the strategic decisions of these executives to invest in innovative capabilities? Did the existence of start-ups and high stock valuations bias top managers toward acquiring innovative capabilities externally when their companies may have accumulated these capabilities more effectively through internal development of the technologies? Did the use of stock options as a key component of compensation packages for large numbers of managerial and technical personnel motivate these employees to engage in organizational learning for the companies that employed them? Or did it encourage highly individualistic behavior, with concern for mobility within the labor market? Has the use of corporate stock as an acquisition and compensation currency in the boom made these companies more vulnerable than otherwise to the slump? Has the role of stock changed in the downturn? This project promises to provide useful answers to guide corporate growth strategies in the future doc23245 none An insect hormone called bursicon is essential for hardening of the new skin (cuticle) after the insect has shed its old one during molting (ecdysis). The timed release and actions of bursicon are critically important for the survival of all insects and, most likely, all arthropods. Although bursicon was discovered in and is known to be a peptide, its molecular structure has not been established, and remains a major unsolved problem in insect neuroendocrinology. The Honegger lab has purified the hormone and obtained partial amino acid sequences for bursicon from some insects. Recently they were able to use these sequences to identify a particular gene sequence, CG , in the genome of the fruitfly Drosophila. The primary aim of this collaborative project is to determine whether the CG gene product is the functional bursicon hormone, as an important step to understanding the actions of bursicon. Molecular techniques for gene expression in eukaryotic cells and overexpression in Drosophila will be combined with the ligated fly bioassay using the related blowfly (Sarcophaga) to test for bursicon activity. If bioactive bursicon is shown, the sequence will be used for cDNA screening in the moth Manduca, a well-studied insect system in which the complex hormonal interactions regulating ecdysis have been illuminated. From the recombinant proteins and synthesized peptides from conserved sequence stretches, new antibodies will be produced to identify neurosecretory cells in the brain, and to clarify the temporal and spatial activation of bursicon release in Manduca. Results from this work will provide a potential breakthrough for understanding how the brain and endocrine systems together orchestrate multiple biochemical events leading to periodic cuticular hardening. Knowledge about this key hormone may provide novel strategies for agriculture in developing insect pest controls, and in managing crustacean aquaculture. In addition, this collaboration between two institutions includes multi-disciplinary postdoctoral training doc23284 none This project will develop an online reference guide, called Pathfinder, primarily for non-technical audiences, including undergraduate and graduate students. This guide will enable users to gain an overview of the power and energy field in pursuit of educational opportunities and resources. Developed in conjunction with IEEE s Virtual Community on Power and Energy, this tool will aggregate quality resources and provide an orderly process for discovery. Recourses will include publications from the IEEE and other sources, as well as knowledge or learning objects found in online collections, including the NSF-funded DLNET collection. These objects will include publications and other resources that define the field of power and energy, its attendant industries, and specialized technical and applications areas. IEEE staff and volunteers from the IEEE Educational Activities will work with other volunteers from the IEEE Power Engineering Society and the IEEE Industry Application Society. They will also work with staff from IEEE Press and Wiley to identify and possibly make available resources for the user community. The IEEE Virtual Community on Power and Energy will provide the online platform for developing and reviewing this tool doc23285 none Quantum Cascade Lasers (QCLs) are a new kind of semiconductor laser based on intersubband transitions within a quantum well (QW). Among the more attractive features of QCLs are their unipolar transport, high power emission, ultrafast modulation ( 100GHz) and generation of wavelengths in the mid and far infrared, not ever obtained before. Considerable advances have been achieved in the development of the QCLs during the last few years, which have led to the appearance of the first commercial thermoelectrically cooled QCLs. However, there are still many limitations of these lasers. A critical one is the unavailability of QCLs operating in continuous wave (CW) mode at room temperature (RT). Another is the absence of QCLs operating at short wavelengths, such as l=1.55mm, needed to develop ultrafast optical communications. Both of these drawbacks are due to insufficient electron confinement in the materials combinations presently used. Therefore, new systems based on wide band gap materials are required. This program proposes to explore the use of wide bandgap II-VI materials for the development of QCLs. The large conduction band offsets and deep QWs offered by the II-VI semiconductors, such as ZnCdMgSe ZnCdSe, provide the possibility of higher electron confinement (and consequently the opportunity to obtain QCLs operating at RT in CW mode) and of QCLs that operate at 1.55mm for a new generation of ultrafast optical communications lasers. An important issue in favor of using II-VI semiconductors for QCLs is the fact that these devices are unipolar and do not require p-type doping, which traditionally has been a problem in most of the II-VI systems. While GaN-based materials are an alternative, the difficulties associated with the growth of high quality multi-layered structures of the nitride materials make them less attractive than the near lattice-matched, well-developed II-VI material systems. Several II-VI systems that are particularly promising for QCLs with low threshold current, operating at RT and some of them that should be able to generate emission at 1.55mm will be investigated. The QW properties, such as the energy levels available for intersubband transitions, will be investigated using modulation spectroscopy and other optical techniques. Such techniques have also been extensively utilized in the past by the PIs. Once a system has been identified to have potential for QCL applications, the QW structures will be optimized and incorporated in device structures to investigate the emission and lasing characteristics doc23286 none Microarrays are a powerful new technology offering plant biologists the opportunity the measure the expression of thousands of genes simultaneously. This potentially allows plant biologists to make major leaps forward by increasing the number of factors they can examine and offering the opportunity to study the complex relations and physiological coordination among entire genomes. For this technology to achieve its potential, a richer understanding of the statistical properties of the data produced and statistically sound methods for analyzing those data must be developed and made available. Unfortunately, many statistical procedures currently used in microarray research do not have a sound statistical foundation. This research will contribute novel statistical techniques to the microarray field that are, in all cases, rigorously validated by either mathematical proofs or computer simulations. Methods will be developed in three areas: Measurement & Estimation, Design, & Inference. Methods will be tested on real and simulated data. Software for all methods developed will be publicly available. A plan to educate and inform students, plant biologists and statisticians about the methods will be implemented including a short course held at a National plant biology meeting in year 4. The investigative team includes a cadre of investigators with track records in organizing large collaborative efforts, developing novel statistical techniques, and disseminating methods through educational activities and quality software. The investigative team is complemented by a blue-ribbon panel Advisory Committee with expertise in plant biology, microarrays, and computer science. Historically, plants of economic importance (e.g., maize, soy, wheat, pine) have been critical to our country s prosperity and growth. Today, America s strength in supplying food of high nutritional value for human and livestock consumption, cash crops for sale and export, and plant materials for construction remains critical. Indeed, as the world population grows, the ability to produce plants for nutrition and construction materials with tightening resources in a broadening range of environments will be essential. Given their potential to rapidly advance understanding of basic plant biology, microarrays can enhance the ability to produce plants with increased efficiency and enhanced characteristics in the greatest range of environments. Developing valid techniques and facilitating use via quality software and systematic dissemination and educational activities as will be done here can have greatly amplified impact by providing tools of use to the more than 100 other NSF-funded microarray grants and the vast ongoing microarray research world-wide doc23287 none Abiotic stress in the form of drought, salinity, and cold has a major impact on grape production and quality. Several studies have shown that water-deficit-stressed grapevines produce superior quality wine. The molecular genetic and biochemical basis for this correlation remains poorly understood. An integrative and quantitative analysis of mRNA, protein, and metabolite changes following abiotic stress imposition is required to enhance production efficiency under stress conditions and to understand the plant-derived contribution to constituents of wine quality. It will also require the customization and application of comprehensive bioinformatics systems to track and analyze changes that arise in response to abiotic stress and potentially related aroma, flavor, and color characteristics of grape juice and wine. One long-term goal of our research is to develop comprehensive genomic tools to facilitate the genetic engineering of improved abiotic stress tolerance traits in V. vinifera. The specific objectives for accomplishing this goal include: 1) extensive gene discovery through large-scale expressed sequence tag (EST) sequencing and mRNA expression profiling using oligonucleotide microarray-based expression monitoring in roots, leaves, and fruits of grapevines exposed to multiple abiotic stresses; 2) global mRNA expression profile data will be complemented by protein expression analyses using state-of-the-art proteomics methodologies; and 3) identification of specific metabolites and metabolite profiles in grapevines and fruit following abiotic stress that confer desirable aroma, flavor and color quality characteristics and improved health benefits. Metabolite profiles from grape juice of well-watered and water-deficit-treated vines will be compared with quantitative data from mRNA and protein expression patterns using comprehensive bioinformatics systems to store and analyze data sets. Ultimately, these data sets will be integrated into a reliable prediction model for wine characteristics. The proposed research will greatly facilitate future gene discovery and enable improvements to be made in both production efficiency and wine quality under environmentally adverse growing conditions doc23288 none This project will model the complex interactions that occur during the in-mold coating of thermoplastic and composite parts. The goals of this processing model will be to predict mold and molding machine deflection during filling and coating, as well as optimal injection parameters for the process. Plans to experimentally validate the use of this model for coatings for injection molded thermoplastic parts where issues such as substrate compressibility play a key role in the filling stage and subsequent coating performance In-mold coating has the potential to greatly reduce the need for spray painting and coating of plastic parts, a major environmental hazard in contemporary manufacturing. In-mold coating compounds have been used for many years to improve the surface properties of parts made from sheet molding compounds. To date, the process has not been applied to injection-molded thermoplastic parts, although the potential environmental benefits and cost savings resulting from elimination of painting are enormous. The major stumbling blocks have been the difficulty of predicting the behavior of the thermoplastic substrate during the coating process, and associated problems in mold design. Another potential application of large environmental benefit is as a substitute of gel coats for boat manufacturing. This work will have an immediate impact on the automotive and consumer products industries, and will be directly applied to manufacturing courses in polymer processing and mold design at Ohio State University. The potential for alleviating a major environmental hazard is clearly very large. Another major potential application of large environmental benefit is as a substitute of gel coats for boat manufacturing. The Director of the Women in Engineering Program will actively engage a diverse student participation doc23183 none This proposal models the effects of job rotation, in terms of learning and forgetting, on the overall productivity of a group of workers. This reveals the cross-training tradeoff between worker flexibility versus potentially reduced efficiency. The research combines experimental psychology (leaning and forgetting curves) with robust mathematical programming and optimization methods to develop tools that could be of significant use to managers. The three research questions will be answered with the aid of computer simulation and validated in the field. The broad impact is the potential for enhancing productivity and improvements in the work environment that will benefit the economy. Modern manufacturing practices, which often use cellular designs and just-in-time operations, may disrupt the continuous learning process. While in the past managers relied on specialization over long production runs to improve productivity, today they often make use of cross training in an attempt to manage rapidly changing technology and uncertain demand. However, at present, no concrete guidelines exist to aid managers in deciding levels of cross training, task rotation, and the sequencing of jobs. The objective of this research is to improve productivity in organizations with job rotation through assignment and scheduling of workers to tasks and to examine preferred assignment and cross training levels in this environment. Based on individual learning and forgetting characteristics, workers are assigned and scheduled to tasks in ways designed to maximize productivity. An important contribution of the project is understanding the tradeoffs between lost productivity due to reduced specialization and the flexibility benefits due to cross training. The study will address the following research questions: 1. Within a work group, to which of m tasks should each of n workers be assigned for three objectives a.) Maximize throughput given n workers, b.) Minimize the number of workers needed for a given production requirement, c.) Minimize the time required for n workers to meet a given production requirement. 2. What degree of cross training should be allowed or required, including: a.) How many tasks in addition to the initial assignment should the n workers be responsible for? b.) How often and in what pattern should workers shift between these cross trained tasks (i.e., what is the schedule)? 3. What are the effects of environmental factors including, Workplace design implications (i.e., pattern of work and or information flow), Adjacent vs. non-adjacent worker-task assignments (i.e., tour travel time costs), Single vs. multiple products, and Batch size. First, the investigators will develop math programming based decision models for assigning and scheduling workers to tasks. The models will incorporate the effects of individual worker learning and forgetting. Second, the investigators will develop a measurement model for quantifying worker learning and forgetting for use in the math programming models. Third, the investigators will examine the research questions described above based on empirical distributions of individual workers learning and forgetting patterns, through simulation first and then subsequently applying the results in real work settings. The impact of this research is potentially broad, affecting directly the many service and manufacturing organizations that make use of cross training. Further, the proposed research will quantify the costs from learning and forgetting effects that are associated with cross training programs. While there are good reasons for cross training workers, many related to increased flexibility, when these workers are learning new tasks they are subject to forgetting others and productivity may suffer significantly. Thus, the research will provide both descriptive and prescriptive capabilities for organizations to quantify and plan cross training programs in manufacturing and service settings doc23290 none Large columnar cacti, such as the saguaro (Carnegiea gigantea), are prominent features of many ecosystems. Because of their extensive distribution and abundant production of large succulent fruit they play an important role in structuring food webs and ecosystems. This research assesses the importance of the saguaro s fruit as a food and water resource to a desert bird community in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona and Mexico. Naturally occurring carbon and hydrogen stable isotope signatures of the saguaro s fruit are used to track the movement of nutrients and water from the plant into the bird community. This project will provide new insight the role of cacti as consumer resources in arid and semi-arid ecosystems and provide direct measurements of frugivory and nutrient transfer rates between the saguaro and animals that consume its fruits doc23291 none Florida Georgia Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP) Program (Phase III) Florida A (2) increase by ten percent (baseline ), the number of B.S. degrees awarded to under-represented minorities in SEM disciplines by the year ; and (3) institutionalize the FGLSAMP Project at each participating institution by to insure FGLSAMP permanence after NSF funding ceases. The Alliance proposes to utilize a holistic model to transition SEM scholars from high school to college, positively influence their retention in college, enhance their B.S. graduation rates from college and entry into Ph.D. degree SEM programs of study. Project activities to realize these goals and objectives include developing structured relationships with school systems and community colleges to attract students to SEM majors; establishing workshops to increase student academic performance; implementing a pre-matriculation institute; and implementing a pre-junior graduate school orientation program and pre-senior research apprenticeship to stimulate student competence and interest in graduate school. The FGLSAMP Project will form partnerships with AGEP Projects, Ph.D. degree granting institutions, other appropriate NSF agencies, national governmental laboratories, private foundations and private industry to assist in providing funds for research stipends and graduate fellowships for student participants. The Florida Legislature provides $640,000 in matching funds annually to support participating Florida institutions in the FGLSAMP Project. The results from this project will be shared with other institutions and scientists via reports, newsletters, FGLSAMP EXPOs and published articles doc23292 none The electric utility industry is in the transition from operating in a monopolistic environment to one that is regulated as a competitive marketplace. At this point in time, over eight markets have failed. The objective of this research is to analyze this new emerging electricity marketplace from the viewpoint of including reliability as a product dffferentiator as solved by adaptive agents. Reliability is a key feature of electric energy delivery and has provided national economic growth for almost a century. This research is interested in how a company would compete effectively for long term growth potential and for continuous financial performance. This is a computer simulation of the portfolio analysis of various electric contracts with various levels of reliability. All players must use complex decision making to properly bid and to make a positive profit. This effort proposes to use classical optimization techniques in conjunction with decision analysis for the buyers and sellers of electricity in such an electric marketplace. This project will investigate the steady state results for the application of forecasting and decision methods to determine if price discovery occurs using various learning algorithms. Previous research by this author and others has lead to new algorithms based on real option analysis. This effort proposes computer-learning algorithms (Modified Roth-Erev, genetic algorithm, genetic programming, and neural networks). Agents will be implemented with these techniques to generate a sustainable profit from the various energy markets. The long-term goal is to develop adaptive agents to assist humans who play the electric marketplace doc23293 none Hengge This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Alvan Hengge, with the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Utah State University, and Professor Ikenna Onyido, with the Department of Chemistry at the University of Agriculture, in Makurdi, Nigeria. They will study the reaction mechanisms of phosphonothioates. Phosphoryl group transfer from a variety of phosphorylated compounds is involved in energy transport and control mechanisms in biological systems, and is critical to genetic engineering techniques. For a complete understanding of enzymatic catalysis of phosphoryl transfer, it is necessary to know the characterization of the transition state for the reaction. The investigators will measure linear free energy relationships and heavy-atom kinetic isotope effects in order to delineate the hydrolysis mechanisms of a family of thiophosphonic esters, of the general formula compounds Me2P(S)-OAr, MePhP(S)-OAr, and Ph2P(S)-OAr. The results are expected to reveal how the hydrolytic mechanism depends upon the basicity of the leaving group, as well as the comparative behavior of a group of substrates that function as, or are structurally related to, pesticides and neurotoxins. This project is at the interface of chemistry and biology, and the results are expected to advance the current knowledge about biological phosphoryl transfer at the molecular level. It combines Professor Hengge s knowledge of enzymatic and nonenzymatic phosphoryl transfer mechanisms, and Professor Onyido s expertise in the areas of mechanistic analysis and linear free energy relationships. The Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Chemistry are jointly providing support for this project doc23294 none We will develop algorithms (and supporting theory) for optimizing the expected performance of a stochastic system with respect to discrete decision variables. We assume that the stochastic system of interest is represented by a simulation model, and hence that the performance of this system can only be estimated with noise. Our focus is on ``general-purpose optimization techniques that do not exploit particular problem structure, because we want our techniques to be suitable for inclusion in general-purpose simulation software. The goal is to produce algorithms that have provable asymptotic performance, competitive finite-time performance, and valid statistical inference at termination. The keys to our approach are (1) our algorithms will work within a global guidance framework that guarantees asymptotic convergence, while giving us wide latitude to be aggressive and adaptive; (2) within this framework, we will embed aggressive local-improvement schemes; (3) we will enhance the local-improvement schemes with highly efficient selection-error control to insure improvement even in the presence of estimation error; and (4) we will provide valid statistical inference at algorithm termination so that the solution reported as best will be the best, or near best, of all those solutions actually visited by the search, with a prespecified confidence level. In the United States, computer simulation is widely used to design and improve ( optimize ) manufacturing, service, military, telecommunication and financial systems that are subject to uncertainty. Our research will provide theoretically sound optimization algorithms that can be incorporated into new or existing simulation software packages. There is a critical need for this research, because every day simulation users are formulating and attempting to solve optimization-via-simulation problems using commercial products that ignore, or only slightly notice, that the simulation experiment incorporates uncertainty. These commercial products often work well, but they can also be dramatically misled, and the user has no indication of, or protection against, the incorrect and costly decisions that may result. The availability of optimization tools in nearly all commercial simulation modeling packages implies that optimization-via-simulation problems will be solved. The question is whether they will be solved efficiently with theoretically sound algorithms that provide specific guarantees of, and inference on, their performance. The goal of our research is to develop such optimization-via-simulation algorithms, representing a substantial advance over the state of the art in both theory and practice doc23295 none The University of Texas System Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation The University of Texas System Alliance for Minority Participation (UT-System AMP) brings together all nine academic components of The University of Texas System and ten regional community college partners in an effort to increase the number of under- represented minority students and students from other under-served populations enrolling in and graduating from baccalaureate programs in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology and entering graduate programs in SMET fields at UT-System universities. The activities of the UT-System AMP are supported by partnerships with industry and government agencies, particularly national laboratories. The educational institutions in the Alliance serve a rapidly growing region, where by the decade s end minorities will comprise a majority of the population. Prominent among the institutions are those in the U.S.-Mexico Border regions serving large numbers of Hispanic students and those in metropolitan areas serving mainly commuter students,including many minorities. The UT-System places a high degree of importance, system-wide, on improving retention among undergraduates and providing enhanced opportunities for these undergraduates to enter graduate programs in SMET. This proposal also emphasizes the system-wide sharing of resources to attain these goals. In Phase III, the University of Texas System Alliance for Minority Participation is committed to achieving the following objectives: 1) The UT-System LSAMP universities will enroll a minimum of 200 under-represented minority and other under-served student in their STEM doctoral programs by the fall of , an increase of about 100% over the fall baseline and 2) The UT-System AMP universities will continue to work towards the Phase II goal of graduating a minimum of 1,374 under-represented minority and other under-served students with B.S. degrees in SMET. It is estimated that we will achieve this goal by . When achieved, this will represent a 244% increase over - baseline. LSAMP program activities will focus on three major areas: (1) retention of students who are STEM majors through the development of strategies at all partner institutions to address retention of second year students in SMET; (2) mentoring and career development opportunities for STEM majors interested in pursuing an advanced degree. Activities will include the development of GRE workshops and career development mentoring activities at each partner institution; and (3) a summer research academy where rising junior and senior students will have the opportunity to work in a research laboratory at one of the five doctoral-granting institutions in the alliance. Students will receive stipend support, mentoring and training. The UT-System LSAMP has permanently changing the nature of SMET higher education in Texas. Through the UT-System LSAMP, the participating universities have raised the visibility and increased the awareness of the chancellor, presidents and chief academic officers about SMET program outcomes and the status of under-represented minority students. Providing leadership to the UT-System Alliance for Minority Participation will be a Governing Board, chaired by Ed Sharpe, Executive Vice Chancellor of The University of Texas System, which includes presidents, vice-presidents, or provostsof UT-System member institutions and participating community colleges as well as a selected number of experts from industry and the national R&D community. Meeting annually, the Governing Board will continue to provide general oversight of the UT-System AMP. The Academic Leadership Council (ALC), composed of deans, chairs and distinguished faculty are involved in the implementation of AMP activities at their institution. The ALC meets twice doc23296 none Transmission expansion is a nationally important area for reliable supply of electric energy and yet it is seriously under-invested in the U.S. According to North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), very few bulk transmission line additions are planned; new regional planning entities, adequate pricing incentives, and improved, streamlined approval processes also must be developed to deal with the need for new transmission lines for an open market. In a competitive environment, the Independent System Operator (ISO) (or Regional Transmission Organization (RTO)) is charged with the responsibility to maintain the system reliability of an interconnected power grid. The ISO also operates the power grid and implements the transactions of electric energy. However, the ISO does not invest in the transmission expansion; the investors such as transmission owners do. We propose a stochastic model for the revenues of the transmission owners. We will develop analytical methods that determine the point of decision where a transmission own would be willing to invest in a transmission expansion project based on the costs and revenues. The proposed method requires power system optimization incorporating system security and congestion constraints. This proposed research is expected to make an impact on how the market rules concerning transmission expansion should be designed. The resulting rules would provide the necessary economic signals in the market in order to ensure an adequate level of transmission capacity in the U.S doc23297 none This research deals with the integration of a Discrete Choice Analysis (DCA) based approach to demand analysis with a Decision-Based Design (DBD) framework that supports a company s goal of making profitable products. The research will address four major topics, including (1) improving predictive capability of demand analysis, (2) incorporating behaviors of multiple market players in demand modeling, (3) predicting uncertainties in demand analysis, and (4) extending engineering modeling for DBD implementation. The proposed approach and techniques will be demonstrated through a real vehicle engine design problem, and verified and validated based on the basic economic principles and the properties of a rigorous alternative selection method. If successful, the proposed research will have an immediate impact on improving the predictive capability of demand analysis in product design. The proposed method can incorporate many important factors that are currently ignored, such as the behavior of competitors and other players in a market and the uncertainty issues in demand estimation. The proposed DBD framework will offer a rigorous engineering design approach that supports a company s goal of making profitable products. The work on extending engineering modeling is beneficial for bridging the gap between business and engineering modeling in product design. The proposed research is expected to extend the extant knowledge in engineering design as well as in market research. The research is also expected to have a broader impact on increasing industrial competitiveness and improving educational activities. Research is anticipated to contribute to education in the areas of engineering design theory and methodology, decision analysis in engineering design, quality engineering, and market research for engineering design. A strong collaboration is planned among the university and industry teams including regular seminars, visits, and co-supervisions of graduate students doc23298 none In the first South American in-vitro fertilization (IVF) baby was born in Columbia. Since then clinics that offer assisted reproductive techniques like IVF and gamete donation have begun operations in most Latin American countries. This dissertation research study investigates the social impact of IVF and gamete donation in urban Ecuador. It asks what happens when reproductive biotechnologies travel from their initial sites of development in Europe and the United States to nations often considered marginal to scientific practice and research. The investigators will examine how religious practices, issues of political economy, and kinship narratives affect the way that IVF and gamete donation have been understood and put to use in Ecuador. The author s preliminary research in three infertility clinics in Ecuador shows that local Catholic practice plays a critical role in IVF laboratories in Quito where images of the Virgin Mary are used to bless eggs and sperm to aid in fertilization. In addition to documenting how local practice reshapes IVF in Ecuador, this study will examine how assisted reproduction affects Ecuadorian society. For example, how does the technoscientific production of children alter local understandings of overpopulation and the Ecuadorian ictraditionalli family? This study will focus on four Ecuadorian IVF and gamete donation clinics. Using the ethnographic tools of participant observation, semi-structured interviewing and discourse analysis, the authors will investigate how IVF and gamete donation are understood and practiced by clinical personnel and patients undergoing infertility treatment. To elucidate both the production and consumption of public narratives concerning assisted reproduction interviews will also be conducted with religious leaders, lawmakers, reporters and lay citizens about their perception of IVF and gamete donation. Although IVF and gamete donor clinics now operate worldwide, the vast majority of the social science literature concerning assisted reproduction has focused on North America and Europe. The data generated from the author s study of assisted reproduction in Ecuador, concerning issues of political economy, religious and kinship practices, will be used comparatively in a point by point reexamination of the Euro-American literature. This rigorous comparative approach to the study of bioscientific practice brings the cultural dimensions of science and technology to the forefront, elevating this study beyond a specific focus on reproductive technologies or Latin America. Ultimately this knowledge will allow for a more complex understanding of how the biosciences everywhere, both in nations considered developed and developing , are constituted and affected by the local social realities surrounding their practice doc23299 none This proposal seeks to advance our understanding of organizational innovation, learning, and adaptation to technological change. It examines organizational structures that are relatively new and unstudied alternatives to traditional corporate R 2) developing a typology of organizational structures for housing and pursuing CVI; 3) delineating the strengths, weaknesses, and effectiveness of these structural alternatives; 4) identifying best practices for pursuing corporate venturing and for codifying and diffusing these practices; 5) gathering real-time longitudinal data on the adaptation and selection of CVI programs and practices in the face of increasingly adverse macroeconomic conditions. Six interrelated studies have been designed to pursue these objectives. The studies collect varied types of data (secondary financial and economic data, semi-structured interviews, organizational documents, and non-participant observations).These data are being analyzed using varied methods (econometric forecasting, multivariate analysis, computer-based content analysis, and grounded theory building). The multi-method, multi-level and multi-theoretic approaches are well integrated with the overall theoretical approach doc23300 none Moaddel Description: This award is to support a US-Egypt Workshop on Explaining the Worldviews of the Islamic Publics: Theoretical and Methodological Issues, to be held in Cairo, Egypt, December . The organizer is Dr. Mansoor Moaddel, Professor, Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminology, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, Michigan. The co-organizer is Dr. Abdel-Hamid Abdel-Latif, Professor of Sociology, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt. This meeting will bring together the social scientists from the United States and Islamic countries who were involved in carrying out national surveys of the attitudes and value orientations of the Islamic publics in Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Jordan, Morocco, and Pakistan. This is the first time that comprehensive comparative surveys have been carried out in several major Islamic countries, generating a sociologically important data set. The questionnaire used in these surveys was based on key batteries of the World Values Survey questionnaire, as well as a series of items that were specifically designed for Islamic countries. To advance the fundamental knowledge of Islamic societies, the participants will address in a collective fashion several methodological and theoretical concerns. These include comparison of different translations of the questionnaire, an assessment of the final sampling frame used in the study, and an analysis of the findings within varying cultural and political contexts. Scope: This meeting expands the basis of social science understanding of Islamic societies by strengthening the network among social scientists that the comparative survey has generated. It deals with a topic that is of current importance in the United States and in the Islamic countries. The project is funded jointly by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Social and Economic Sciences doc23301 none Tilton This award supports Robert Tilton and a student from Carnegie Mellon University in a collaboration with Per Claesson of the Department of Chemistry at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. The project will focus on manipulation of the molecular-level structure of adsorbed polymer layers on solid surfaces. The manipulation is achieved by introducing surfactants hat bind with varying affinities to different segments of the polymer as it adsorbs. Particular attention will be paid to non-equilibrium configurations in the adsorbed layers and to the dynamics of their transformations. The goal is to develop techniques to design long-lived metastable layer configurations that are optimized for technological applications. The collaboration combines the distinct, but highly complementary, approaches taken by the Swedish and US groups: the US side uses optical and spectroscopic methods to characterize composition and micro-environmental aspects of adsorbed layers and the Swedish side uses surface force measurement to characterize the structure and mechanics of the layers. A key aspect of the collaboration is the initiation of a graduate student exchange between the US and Swedish groups doc23302 none With the support of the National Science Foundation a team of archaeologists and geologists led by Dr. Sally McBrearty will carry out three seasons of field work in the Baringo region of Kenya. The team will investigate how Middle Pleistocene landuse patterns changed with the appearance of Homo sapiens in the East African Rift Valley about 300,000 years ago. They will focus upon three stratigraphic intervals within the Kapthurin Formation, where sites containing Acheulian artifacts, thought to have been made by Homo erectus, are interstratified with those containing Middle Stone Age artifacts, thought to have been made by Homo sapiens. The ancient topography will be reconstructed by geological mapping with laser transit, and a three-dimensional model of each target interval will be reconstructed using GIS software. The ancient plant and animal communities will be documented through the study of mammalian and plant fossils, as well as fossil soil and fossil tooth stable carbon and oxygen isotopes. Surface collection, trial trenches, and horizontal excavation at two sites per stratigraphic interval will provide evidence for early human behavior in the form of stone tools and fossil bone which has been processed for food by early hominids. Patterns of association of these behavioral traces of with topographic features and plant communities will be sought for each target interval. A change in landuse patterns with early Homo sapiens, reflecting greater cognitive abilities, technical competence, and geographic range, can be predicted on anatomical and archaeological grounds, but the evidence to date has been drawn from widely dispersed sites which are not well dated. The Kapthurin Formation is confined to a single depositional basin, and the ages of the stratigraphic intervals to be studied are well calibrated by the 40Ar 39Ar dating method. Any landuse patterns detected in the three stratigraphic intervals will be compared to assess the nature and tempo of change through time. Dr. McBrearty and her collaborators will focus on five questions: 1) Is there a detectable change in landuse patterns between the Acheulian and Middle Stone Age? 2) Did Middle Stone Age hominids use a broader array of microhabitats than Acheulian hominids, such as uplands and distal floodplains, in addition to stream and lakeside settings? 3) Were Middle Stone Age hominids able to range further from sources of water or raw material for stone tool making than Acheulian hominids? 4) Were either Acheulian or Middle Stone Age tool makers designing specific implements to exploit particular habitats? 5) How does the competence of Acheulian hunters compare with hunters of the Middle Stone Age? This research is important because it will illustrate the nature of the behavior of the earliest members of Homo sapiens and illuminate some of the processes leading to the origin of our species doc23303 none Baylor University s Dirac Centenary Conference (http: www.baylor.edu Dirac) is an interdisciplinary evaluation of the seminal contributions of Paul Dirac ( - ) to the methodology, progress, and future of twentieth and twenty first century physics. Drawing together scholars from theoretical physics, mathematics, the history of science and the philosophy of science, it provides a rare chance for students and researchers across different disciplines to benefit from interaction with each other. The discussion into the cutting-edge developments in canonical quantum gravity, supersymmetry, superstrings and geometric functional analysis made possible by Dirac s innovations in mathematics and physical theory will give physics and mathematics students exposure to active research in their fields, and also contribute to an understanding of the development of physical theory in a way that will aid historians and philosophers of science as they examine the methodological, epistemological and metaphysical implications of modern physics. The cross-fertilization of different disciplines will also contribute to advancing knowledge and understanding within and across fields in beneficial ways. The fruits of this scholarly interaction will be published in an edited volume of conference proceedings. The conference also provides a unique opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers in physics, mathematics, philosophy and history to present their work in a context where they can get feedback from senior scholars at the forefront of their respective fields. The conference opens with a poster session competition for students in the physical sciences and mathematics, and a short paper presentation competition for students in the history and or philosophy of science. Conference scholarships are available for student participation and attendance with minority students strongly encouraged to apply. The impact of this effort on science education will be furthered by Baylor s coordination of a consortium of Texas schools co-sponsoring the conference, and by the recruitment of student involvement from many of the smaller colleges in the southwest, particularly those that are historically African-American or Hispanic. Publicity for the conference will draw public attention to issues in science and contribute to promoting science awareness and education in central Texas and beyond doc23304 none Philip Liu, Cornell University Collaborative Research on Tsunami-Structure Interaction Using the NEES Tsunami Facility This project addresses the forces generated by, and the destructive effects of, tsunamis. At some coastal locations, the tsunami runup occurs with a bore-like wave front with destructive energy - the steep wave front exerts high impact forces on coastal structures. In other locations, the greatest damage occurs during the rundown phase, where masses of water sweep already weakened structures back toward the ocean. As tsunamis move up and down a coast, they can transport large quantities of debris, such as cars, boats, boulders, and poles. These objects can impact and damage structures along the paths of the tsunami. Therefore, a means of estimating the forces on a structure resulting from the impact from a tsunami-borne moving object is needed. The objectives of this research program are. (1) To understand the dynamic interactions between a tsunami, rigid and flexible structures, and moving objects; (2) To improve the modeling capability of the complex runup flows within the context of their interactions with flexible structures and moving objects; and (3). To develop benchmark problems with high quality experimental data for validating numerical simulation models. These objectives are achieved via an integrated experimental and theoretical (numerical) research program. The analysis is based on the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations and the turbulence closure model, yielding simulation models describing the interactions between a tsunami, moving objects and flexible structures. To validate the simulation models, a series of experiments is conducted at the new Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) tsunami facility at Oregon State University. The research team at Cornell University also participates in the experiments at OSU, both in person and remotely using the facilities of the NEESgrid. This research operates at the interface between traditional fields of science and engineering - fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, soil mechanics and applied mathematics - and thereby serves as a bridge among these fields. The numerical simulation model being developed can be used as a research or design tool. For instance, engineers can use it to perform preliminary designs for offshore and coastal structures, and to study the impact of coastal structures on the environment. It can also be employed as a research tool to investigate ship slamming, submarine hydrodynamics, and mine detection methodology doc23305 none The proposed project is on the dynamical behavior of colloidal particles suspended in liquid confined within a narrow channel. This arrangement provides an experimental setup to investigate the particle transport characteristics in one-dimensional pores. It is shown that the presence of nearby walls affects the drag on a translating particle where interactions among particles produce non-Fickian transport within a pore. The experiments are designed to investigate the characteristics of one-dimensional diffusion, difficult to analyze theoretically in this complicated geometry and in realistic applications. The goal is to obtain new information about transport in confined geometry not anticipated from existing theories. The proposed project will shed light on the size of the particles (relative to the channel dimensions) for transport to be described by a one-dimensional diffusion model doc23306 none This conference is designed to assist key university and college leaders, those with responsibility for institution-wide undergraduate education, in adopting tested strategies to implement programs of change in STEM curriculum and pedagogy on their campuses. The focus is on ways to implement change and demonstrate its effectiveness. The program acquaints participants with a sense of what some of the exciting new pedagogies and technologies are and how to infuse these innovations into the curriculum. Presenters for the workshop detail the ways in which these innovations can be applied to several fields and then demonstrate how they use them in their own teaching. They discuss what worked and what failed in the process of implementation. Attendees will leave with both general ideas and the specifics of a particular application. Opportunities for interaction with industrial education leaders is included. The expected outcome is to have a group of leaders who can return to their campuses energized and with a better understanding of how to implement these changes within the curriculum doc23307 none The Sevilleta LTER (SEV) research site is located on the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge in central New Mexico, where a junction of four biomes (Great Plains Grassland, Great Basin Shrub-steppe, Chihuahuan Desert and Montane Coniferous Forest) provides a rich assortment of Biome Transition Zones (BTZs). Interacting with a highly variable climate, elevational range, complex topography, geology, and soils, this provides a complex spatial and temporal template for this project. SEV combines long-term research and an increasing array of collaborative, short-term research efforts that range from genetics to remote sensing of the landscape and focus on the floral and faunal properties of transitions between grass and shrub life forms represented by two components of the Chihuahuan Desert biome and their junctions with the Great Plains shortgrass steppe biome. The proposed new work will build upon and expand foundation studies ongoing since and initiate new long-term landscape experiments and measurements to develop and test a general theory of the dynamics of BTZs. A new conceptual framework will expand past studies to focus on patch-scale dynamics, biotic and abiotic drivers, and the consequences of different patch types, sizes, and their mosaics to landscape and regional scale dynamics. A series of experiments will be initiated that focus on the importance of plant-soil-animal-microbe interactions and feedbacks with ecosystem dynamics. An iterative approach combines a synthetic simulation model with data collected from short- and long-term interdisciplinary studies as a framework for extending our conceptual model to additional transitions in the future. Results will provide an important regional context for studies conducted within the shortgrass steppe biome at the SGS LTER and within the Chihuahuan Desert biome at the JRN LTER. Future studies will expand to other major biome representatives at SEV (e.g., shrubsteppe of the Colorado Plateau, Pinon -Juniper woodlands). These studies on other BTZs and ecotones present at SEV will further develop and test BTZ theory applicable to understanding and predicting ecosystem response to global change. Simulation modeling will be used to predict changes in the location and composition of BTZs through time under changes in climate and disturbance regime. Because the region is likely to experience a decade-long drought, directional changes in climate, and increases in atmospheric deposition, an understanding of the key processes driving patch and ecotone dynamics is critical to an ability to manage and preserve the biodiversity and natural resources of these systems. Common properties and patterns that can be used for many types of boundaries at many scales are expected. Extrapolating from patch mosaics, processes, and dynamics to the landscape and region will also be critical in determining the contribution of the Sevilleta to regional and global biodiversity and biogeochemical cycles doc23308 none This proposal seeks funding for partial support for a joint U.S. ECOHAB-European EUROHAB workshop. The goal of the workshop is to bring scientists from the U.S. and the European community together to exchange information on harmful algal events, identify high priority research topics for collaborative efforts, and to specify research objectives and approaches to developing a predictive understanding of harmful algal blooms. The Europeans are requesting comparable funding from the European Union (EU) for this effort. The workshop is to be held in September , along the northern Adriatic, with 30-40 scientists in attendance doc23309 none The proposed research seeks to develop continuous-wave (CW) solid-state THz lasers based on intersubband transition in multiple quantum-well (MQW) structures. If carried out successfully, this project will have a major impact on the science and technology of the THz (1-10 THz) or far-infrared spectrum, where currently no coherent and intense solid-sate sources operating in the CW mode are available. Towards this goal, extensive studies have already been performed on the radiation properties of intersubband transition, scattering, and magneto-tunneling spectroscopy; the simulation-aided design of suitable MQWs; and spectrally resolved measurements of THz spontaneous emissions from MQWs. Detailed analysis indicates that electrically pumped lasing can be achieved at a reasonable population inversion density of 2 109 cm2. A three-year project is proposed to start on August 1, . The first year will focus on two parallel tasks: improvement of the yield rate in fabrication of a novel metal waveguide structure for THz mode confinement, and investigation of several promising MQW structures. The metal waveguide structure will be very useful in achieving CW laser operation in two important ways, reducing the lasing threshold and thus the power dissipation and improving heat removal. The fabrication process involves wafer bonding and selective etching, and it has already been developed in the principal investigator s group. The promising MQW structures include a structure using electron-LO-phonon scattering for depopulation of the lower lasing level, a structure using electron-electron scattering for depopulation, and a chirped superlattice structure in which the radiative transition is to take place between two minibands. The design of these MQW structures will be aided by sophisticated computer simulations, including Monte Carlo simulation for transport analysis. Based on the results from this investigation, the second and third years will focus on the most promising structure and on the improvement of robustness of population inversion, in order to achieve CW lasing operations. Efforts will also be made to develop single-mode and frequency-stabilized THz lasers for local-oscillator applications in THz heterodyne receivers doc23310 none Hoffmann Description: This award is for support of a joint research project between Dr. Peter Hoffmann, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan and Dr. Ahmet Oral, Physics Department, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. They plan to study the development of a new high-resolution Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) technique for biological imaging. Commonly used AFM techniques face fundamental limits to further improvement. These limitations are due to fundamental operating principles of common AFM techniques, which cannot be changed by simple adjustments of parameters. The PIs plan to design and build a prototype of an AFM technique that avoids these limitations and, in principle, should be able to provide non-contact atomic resolution imaging and direct quantitative point-by-point measurements of interactions in situ in liquids. This AFM technique relies on a sub-resonance, ultra-small ( 1A) oscillation of the AFM cantilever. This linearizes the measurement and makes data interpretation straightforward. Scope: This award will allow a US scientist to collaborate with a Turkish scientist in a research project of high scientific potential. The nanomechanics of biomolecules and the direct imaging of biological structures are of great interest in biochemistry, bioengineering and medicine. The two scientists were directly involved in the development of an ultra-high vacuum (UHV) and a preliminary liquid-based version of the above described AFM technique which proved to be successful in UHV and in liquid. However, the liquid based AFM was very difficult to use and had some fundamental design issues, which will be addressed in this collaboration. The ultimate goal would be the construction of a user-friendly new AFM technique based on a novel operational principle, and the imaging and measurement of actual biological structures. The development of this instrument would enhance current work by the PI, at his university s medical school, on the mechanical behavior of tissues and antibiotic action of native antibiotic agents on certain bacteria, since it would allow for much higher resolution imaging and quantitative measurements of nanomechanical properties. Both investigators are junior scientists, and the project will also support two graduate students from each institution doc5501 none This award provides support for student attendance at the Gordon Conference on Multiphoton Processes. The Conference will discuss topics such as high harmonic generation, ultrafast processes, wave packet dynamics, and high-field laser-matter interactions doc23312 none This project investigates the public value of the research funded by social policy agencies of the US federal government. Public value refers not the outputs of research (in terms of papers, reports, patents, etc.), but the societal outcomes such research influences, according to the agencies missions and as measured by the broadest available social indicators. Studying this research will broaden the scholarship of public R&D management beyond such traditional agencies as NIH and NSF, facilitating the comparative study of techniques including merit review and technology transfer. Moreover, the study may illuminate mechanisms for producing public value from research and thus contribute to understanding the relationship between sponsored research and societal outcomes more broadly. Examining the public value of social policy research means studying the societal outcomes of the research and the hypothesized causal links between mission-related research programs and these outcomes. Sources for the articulation of goals and objectives include authorizing legislation, mission statements, and strategic plans. Societal outcomes include available, systematic social indicators, as well as ad hoc indicators that policy makers and stakeholders have used in articulating the societal problem triggering the need for the research program. The project will seek to learn how social policy agencies set priorities between current programs and investing in research, how they manage research for societal outcomes, how they transfer new knowledge and or technologies from their sponsored research into the pursuit of their missions, how they anticipate the linkages between their research and societal outcomes, and what those outcomes may be. The current funding is for planning purposes, to develop the necessary permissions to gather data, develop questions to be asked, and develop the research design, analysis and interpretation doc23313 none Carbon dioxide is a major waste product of cellular metabolism and an important determinant of body fluid pH in all air-breathing vertebrates. Body CO2 levels are detected by CO2 sensitive neurons (respiratory chemoreceptors) that provide critical feedback control of CO2 elimination by the lungs. Failure of CO2 regulation causes metabolic impairment or death, and is, unfortunately, a common complication of severe cardiopulmonary disease or neurological injury. Because the problem of CO2 sensing and regulation is fundamental for active air-breathing vertebrates, animals have evolved a variety of CO2-sensing neurons (respiratory chemoreceptors) in diverse locations including the brainstem, systemic arterial system, and lung airways. We are studying CO2-sensitive intrapulmonary chemoreceptors (IPC) in avian lungs to understand the fundamental steps of cellular CO2 transduction (i.e. mechanisms that alter IPC action potential discharge rate when CO2 levels change, thereby encoding neural information about lung CO2). Avian IPC are a powerful cellular model of respiratory chemoreception because they are extremely CO2 sensitive, their axons are easily accessible for measuring action potentials, the CO2 around their sensory endings can be precisely controlled in the laboratory, and they have a unique inverse response to CO2 (i.e. low PCO2 excites IPC, high PCO2 inhibits). Here we test the following novel hypotheses about IPC CO2 transduction: that IPC sense CO2 through changes in intracellular pH; and that at a given CO2 level the intracellular pH of IPC is uniquely determined by a dynamic kinetic balance between the rate of intracellular CO2 hydration catalyzed by carbonic anhydrase, the rate of intracellular H+ buffering, and the rates of transmembrane H+ and HCO3- extrusion by pumping mechanisms and antiports. We also hypothesize that IPC membrane excitability and action potential generation are coupled to changes in intracellular pH. Specific aims for this study include: (1) development of a mathematical model of CO2 chemotransduction to test the kinetic transduction hypothesis, (2) histochemical identification of IPC sensory endings in the lung and cell bodies in the nodose ganglia, (3) use of molecular antagonists, agonists and neurotoxins targeting specific ion channels, antiports and neurotransmitters to determine their role in CO2 transduction, and (4) altering intracellular pH buffering to test its role in CO2 transduction. Northern Arizona University emphasizes laboratory-based undergraduate biology education. Accordingly, this project is an efficient vehicle for introducing students to neurobiological research (so far ten students have been significantly involved, half of whom have been minority students--including two Navajo Native Americans). This remains a priority for the continuing grant cycle doc23314 none Block copolymers, comprised of two chemically distinct polymer chains linked together at one end, microphase separate into arrays of ordered nanoscopic features that, in thin films, can be used as scaffolds and templates for the fabrication of sub-micron devices and structures. By developing novel chemistries to synthesize block copolymers, where one of the blocks can be thermally crosslinked and the second block can be decomposed at higher temperatures, the fabrication of templates and scaffolds can be dramatically simplified, opening up new avenues in the manufacture and utilization of nanostructures. It is the intent of this work to develop new block copolymers and fabrication strategies, which will meet the demands of this one-step processing goal. In addition, routes will be investigated for the fuctionalization of these nanostructures and to enhance the lateral ordering of thin films of the block copolymers so that each element can be quantitatively described in terms of its lateral position. The integrated collaboration between academic and industrial institutions described in this proposal has the potential to provide a unique opportunity for enhancing the career development of students and postdoctoral fellows. Close interaction with industry will also help guide the academic research towards real-world goals, while at the same time facilitating technology transfer to industry. By performing cross-disciplinary research at both institutions, the students in this program will also develop fundamental skills in the synthesis, characterization and physics of polymeric materials and in the generation of well-defined nanoscopic structures. As a consequence, they will be better prepared for a multi-disciplinary industrial or academic career in materials science. The total educational experience gained by performing research at these two premier institutions will therefore far exceed that possible in a single academic environment. The utilization of x-ray and neutron facilities at national laboratories will further enhance the development of the researchers, exposing them to a third different research setting while at the same time integrating the program into a much larger national and international endeavor. The research environments of each of these institutions have strong, well-recognized efforts in the development of a diverse workforce and this program will draw on both efforts to promote the education and training of female and under-represented minority students doc23315 none Kevin J. Burns The Evolution of Sexual Dimorphism in Plumage: A Phylogenetic Perspective This study uses an evolutionary tree of a group of birds to investigate the evolution of differences between males and females in plumage. Evolutionary trees of a variety of organisms are providing a new perspective to classical ideas about the evolution of plumage coloration. For example, male ornaments can be lost frequently, and females often evolve elaborate traits. In this study, DNA sequences of three genes will be used to reconstruct an evolutionary tree for species of tanagers and finches. The resulting evolutionary tree will be used to examine patterns of evolution of sexual differences in plumage. Transformations between different types of plumage will be tabulated and the frequency of changes in male plumage will be compared to the frequency of changes in female plumage. In addition to providing information on the evolution of male and female plumage differences, the data resulting from this project will also address questions in a variety of areas including the biogeography of Central and South America, the prevalence of ultraviolet coloration in birds, the evolution of feeding characteristics, and evolutionary tree constructing methods. Beyond scientific impacts of this proposal, this project will also provide training and educational opportunities for several students, at both the undergraduate and graduate level. SDSU is a diverse campus, with no racial group making up a majority of the students. It is expected that the students that work on this project will reflect the diversity seen on campus. Results will be disseminated broadly within scientific journals, the popular media, and bird-watching literature. Both the molecular sequence data and the plumage data will be made accessible online. The teaching efforts of the principal investigator will also be enhanced by the results of this project by providing specific examples that can be included in lectures and inquiry-based activities doc23316 none Ojo This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Joseph O. Ojo, with the Department of Electrical Engineering at Tennessee Technological University, and Professor Michael O. Omoigui, with the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria. The investigators will study power flow control and stability improvement in longitudinal power systems using power flow controllers. Electric power systems in many developing countries are usually small and radial longitudinal with little connectivity, making them operate like isolated systems. They are susceptible to lengthy time interruptions, fluctuations in voltage currents, and poor voltage regulation, and as a result the transmission and distribution systems are generally overloaded. Nigeria is moving away from the more traditional mechanical power systems towards a more electronic system that will use converter-based devices, which can then offer greater flexibility and improved operation. The investigators will develop models for the power systems, and use them to analyze the power systems performance using a unified power flow controller under varying conditions. As part of the project, they will study the use of multi-terminal, converter-based power flow controller topologies to improve power flow capability and enhance the voltage system stability of weak and longitudinal power systems, especially in a deregulated environment. This project combines Dr. Ojo s expertise in power electronics with Dr. Omoigui s knowledge of power system analysis and control. Currently in the United States little study is being done on the unique problems of small and longitudinal power systems, but they will become increasingly important as more US power systems become deregulated. It is anticipated that the results of this project will provide viable and efficient solutions to perennial power system disturbances that are common in longitudinal power systems. Both investigators have a strong record in graduate education, and they also expect that a significant amount of knowledge transfer will occur among their students as a result of this project. The Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Electrical and Communications Systems are jointly supporting this project doc23317 none Sengupta Description: This award is for support of a joint research project by Dr. Arun Sengupta, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and Dr. Ulker Beker, Department of Chemical Engineering, Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey. The primary area of collaboration will encompass the preparation and characterization of Magnetically Active Polymeric Particles (MAPPs) for passive environmental monitoring. Partially sulfonated polymer beads will be prepared and magnetized in Lehigh University using the three-step procedure. Magnetic susceptibility of the particles will be determined at Lehigh University. One portion of the MAPPs will be sent to Dr. Beker in Turkey where she will carry out a series of sorption equilibrium studies with MAPPs, using both simulated and industrial wastewaters containing chlorinated hydrocarbons and other volatile organic compounds. Sorption studies will be carried out for multiple cycles with different batches of MAPPs. Propanol will be used as the regenerant for desorption. Subsequently, these MAPPs will be brought to Lehigh University by Dr. Beker. Magnetic susceptibilities of MAPPs after various cycles will be determined at Lehigh University and compared with the magnetic susceptibility of the parent MAPPs. The resulting information on sorption isotherms along with magnetic susceptibility data will help evaluate the effectiveness of MAPPs as recyclable passive monitoring agents. Scope: This project will allow a US scientist to collaborate with a Turkish scientist in the area of nanoparticle development for environmental applications. The research could lead to the development of technologically important materials, and to products for environmental cleanups, especially of environmental hazards such as organics and metal ions from waste. The project will involve the training of a U.S. graduate student. The Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Chemical and Transport Systems provide funding for this project doc23318 none Atekwana This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Professor Estella Atekwana, with the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Missouri-Rolla, Professors Motsoptse Modisi and Henri Kampunzu, with the Department of Geology at the University of Botswana, and Professor Stanislas Sebagenzi, with the Department of Geological Sciences in the University of Lubumbashi, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They will study geologic and tectonic processes during incipient rifting in the East African rift. Rift basins represent the initial stages in the development of passive margins. They are also target areas for sediment accumulation, and these sediments typically contain paleoenvironmental and climatic indicators that can provide important clues to past climate and global change. The seismically active Southwestern Branch of the East African Rift system (EARS) is one of the few places in the world where embryonic rifting can be studied at the beginning of continental extension--before volcanism has occurred. Atekwana and her colleagues will conduct kinematic studies, using a combination of field data and remote sensing data from sites in Botswana, Zambia, and Democratic Republic of Congo, in order to: 1) assess the role of pre-existing structures on rift basin development; 2) determine fault kinematics and direction of the extension; 3) characterize the geometry of the basins, and the underlying crustal and lithospheric structure of the Southwestern Branch; 4) assess current models for fault array development and linkage to form border faults; and 5) develop tectonic and geologic models for the evolution of rifts during the incipient stages of continental extension. The group will also map zones of potential earthquake activity. This project combines Dr. Atekwana s expertise in environmental geophysics and tectonics, with Dr. Kampunzu s expert knowledge of African geology, and that of Dr. Modisi, who is a structural geologist. Dr. Sebagenzi has worked on the extension of the Southwestern rift in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia, and he will contribute field data for those locations as well as his gravity data. The project also includes the participation of a student from the University of Missouri-Rolla as well as a student from the University of Botswana. The results of this project should expand the current knowledge about the geologic and tectonic processes that occur during the earliest stages of continental extension. The maps on potential earthquake activity will provide valuable hazard and mitigation information that can be applied to similar rifts that experience some of the largest and most damaging earthquakes in the world. The maps will also provide a detailed picture of the subsurface geology of this part of the Kalahari, which may be important for mineral resource exploration. The Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Earth Sciences are jointly providing support for this project doc23319 none This project concerns several interrelated approaches to managing complexity in large interconnected systems. Specific application areas addressed in the proposal include phase transitions in molecular models, and resource allocation in large network models. Ideally, we wish to build a collection of microscopes that allow us to view these systems on various scales, and filter away irrelevant information. The PI has recently developed methods that are intended to perform exactly this task. Over the proposed funding period he will develop these and new approaches for addressing visualization and optimization problems in complex systems. Specific analytical approaches to be developed include, (i) Relaxation techniques based upon separation of fast and slow time-scales. This involves workload-relaxations in the network domain, and recent approaches to spectral theory for diffusion models. (ii) General theory of Markov processes and diffusion models, especially recent results concerning large deviations theory and entropy. (iii) Methods for including prior knowledge to speed simulation and on-line learning for complex stochastic models, and for predicting and simulating rare events. (iv) Extend fluid model techniques for addressing control and sensitivity in network optimization in realistic settings. The PI will collaborate with graduate students at Illinois, researchers in applied mathematics at Brown University, and others in computer science and physics at research institutes in Germany. The expected impact of this research is far-reaching, and it is likely that cross-fertilization between all of these mathematical and application areas will be significant. In networks applications, these results will provide new methods for providing intuition about the behavior of large networks, new approaches to design, and efficient approaches to simulation and on-line tuning of policies. If successful, the research on spectral theory and diffusions will provide alternative-modeling techniques for molecular systems that capture essential dynamics and can be easily simulated doc23320 none Neurons, the cells of the brain that allow us to think, feel and move, have a very unique shape, which is referred to as polarized. Extending from one side of the neuron are many fingerlike extensions ( dendrites ) that receive information from other neurons, and extending from the other side is a longer extension (the axon ) that transmits the sum of this information to the next neuron. How neurons assume this unique polarized form, and then maintain it for the lifetime of an individual, is not entirely clear. However, it is dependent at least in part upon a fibrous network of proteins referred to as the cytoskeleton. This network forms a sort of skeleton for the neuron, which helps it maintain its shape. Unlike bones, however, the parts of the cytoskeleton are constantly replaced. This poses a difficult situation for neurons, since all proteins are synthesized in the cell body, and then must be assembled and transported into and along axons by a process called axonal transport. This process must be highly regulated, or the proteins will assemble incorrectly, or clump up within the beginning of the axon, and the neuron may die. In some neurons, axonal transport must be carried out over long distances. For example, the sciatic nerve, which runs all the way down our leg, receives all of its cytoskeletal proteins from a small cell body near the spine. Our studies examine how the neuron regulates axonal transport of one set of cytoskeletal proteins called neurofilaments. The neuron has a set of modifying enzymes, called kinases, that reversibly modify the neurofilaments. One simple analogy for such modifications is to put a cap on a pen. When the pen is capped, its writing function is altered. When the cap is removed, its function is restored. Rather than having to synthesize a new pen every time we need to write, we instead cap the pen until it is needed again. Kinases similarly turn various protein functions on and off. Our ongoing studies indicate that these modifications regulate how neurofilaments assemble, undergo axonal transport, and provide structural support to axons, and that certain modifications switch the neurofilaments from transporting along axons to instead interacting with other neurofilaments to form a strong bundle that supports the axon. Using genetically-engineered kinases and neurofilament proteins, we will monitor these changes. These studies will provide important information about axonal transport and stabilization doc23321 none The linkages between population and environment have become an increasing focus of attention at a range of scales from global networks of organizations to community-based projects and in a range of settings, including academic, government, and non-government organizations. The purpose of this project is to explore the efforts of two conservation non-government organizations (NGOs), The Nature Conservancy and Conservation International, to build population-environment (PE) issues into their portfolios of projects to protect biodiversity in less developed countries. These organizations have traditionally focused on the protection of biodiversity and their activities reflect a dominant concern with ecological aspects of environmental issues. In contrast, addressing PE issues requires attention to social aspects of environmental issues. This, in turn, generates a need to incorporate new frameworks of analysis and methods from the social sciences into conservation projects. Thus, the efforts of these NGOs raise questions about organizational capacity and change. The work of these two organizations to consider PE linkages is one example of a more general trend to incorporate social dimensions into, and develop integrated approaches for, environmental management. Some authors have argued that this shift requires a significant change in the dynamics of organizations in government, corporate, and non-profit sectors. It is not clear, however, the degree to which such change is episodic or continuous. This project investigates internal and external organizational dynamics of developing PE activities in field programs in less developed countries. It examines dynamics for projects that span six countries (Ecuador, Guatemala, Madagascar, Mexico, the Philippines, and the United States) with respect to how PE linkages are defined, what frameworks of analysis and methods are used in to address these linkages, factors internal and external to the organization that have helped and hindered in incorporating population issues into field projects, the connections between PE activities and other activities, frameworks of analysis and methods used in the organizations, the role of partnership arrangements, and how PE activities are adapted to local social conditions and priorities at project sites. Data about the field activities, and the NGOs more generally, are generated from documents, field visits, interviews, and observations, in collaboration with members of the organizations. This exploratory project provides lessons for future work on PE issues, generates insights into the organizational dynamics of linking ideas across disciplinary fields in environmental management, and contributes to the development of a larger research agenda. This research agenda addresses a broader range of organizations in the PE arena to develop understandings of how interactions in this arena affect the capacity of conservation NGOs to incorporate innovations related to PE (i.e., ideas, frameworks of analysis, methods to address conservation issues in new ways) into their programs. In addition, findings from the project will inform teaching materials and curriculum development related to the integration of social and ecological dimensions of environmental issues doc23294 none We will develop algorithms (and supporting theory) for optimizing the expected performance of a stochastic system with respect to discrete decision variables. We assume that the stochastic system of interest is represented by a simulation model, and hence that the performance of this system can only be estimated with noise. Our focus is on ``general-purpose optimization techniques that do not exploit particular problem structure, because we want our techniques to be suitable for inclusion in general-purpose simulation software. The goal is to produce algorithms that have provable asymptotic performance, competitive finite-time performance, and valid statistical inference at termination. The keys to our approach are (1) our algorithms will work within a global guidance framework that guarantees asymptotic convergence, while giving us wide latitude to be aggressive and adaptive; (2) within this framework, we will embed aggressive local-improvement schemes; (3) we will enhance the local-improvement schemes with highly efficient selection-error control to insure improvement even in the presence of estimation error; and (4) we will provide valid statistical inference at algorithm termination so that the solution reported as best will be the best, or near best, of all those solutions actually visited by the search, with a prespecified confidence level. In the United States, computer simulation is widely used to design and improve ( optimize ) manufacturing, service, military, telecommunication and financial systems that are subject to uncertainty. Our research will provide theoretically sound optimization algorithms that can be incorporated into new or existing simulation software packages. There is a critical need for this research, because every day simulation users are formulating and attempting to solve optimization-via-simulation problems using commercial products that ignore, or only slightly notice, that the simulation experiment incorporates uncertainty. These commercial products often work well, but they can also be dramatically misled, and the user has no indication of, or protection against, the incorrect and costly decisions that may result. The availability of optimization tools in nearly all commercial simulation modeling packages implies that optimization-via-simulation problems will be solved. The question is whether they will be solved efficiently with theoretically sound algorithms that provide specific guarantees of, and inference on, their performance. The goal of our research is to develop such optimization-via-simulation algorithms, representing a substantial advance over the state of the art in both theory and practice doc23323 none This research links the application of specific lean manufacturing practices and principles to organizational characteristics and business performance metrics for electronics manufacturers. Lean manufacturing is distinguished from traditional mass production in that it utilizes fewer resources, but results in more and a larger variety of products often distinguished by high levels of product quality and service. The emphasis of this research is on deriving from theory a practitioner model that can be used by organizational leaders in their decisions to invest in training, human resource development, equipment purchases, and or process development focused on creating a lean manufacturing enterprise. Current research demonstrates that manufacturing plants have improved operations as a result of implementing lean manufacturing practices. However, there is evidence to indicate that lean manufacturing may not be appropriate for all manufacturers. Because of the rate at which technology evolves, electronic manufacturers are under constant pressure to reduce new product introduction cycle times, reduce product costs, and to incorporate new technology in supporting processes and materials. While these pressures would seem to create an environment ripe for the implementation of lean manufacturing principles and practices, there is little research that links lean manufacturing implementation to business results for this manufacturing sector. Because existing research and the supporting literature are based on the automotive industry or related assembly operations, this research extends the existing body of knowledge by studying the role of lean manufacturing in the complex realm of electronics manufacturing, specifically in the area of printed circuit board assembly manufacturing. The proposal describes two distinct projects to be undertaken in this research. The first area is the development of a set of printed circuit assembly manufacturing profiles that help identify the most relevant lean manufacturing principles based on the key identifiers contained in the profile. This research is accomplished through the development of survey targeted at understanding what lean manufacturing principles and practices have been adopted. Defining characteristics of these electronic manufacturers will be developed using a multi-site case study. The second area of focus in the research is linking the implementation of specific lean manufacturing principles and practices to organizational results for an electronics manufacturer. This portion of the research will utilize a single-site case study. This case study will focus on the specific issues of implementing lean manufacturing practices in the operations of a typical electronics manufacturer engaged in the assembly of printed circuit boards utilizing both surface mount and through-hole process technologies doc23324 none This Doctoral Dissertation investigates whether trade unions help or hinder economic development. Because unions affect development by creating or disrupting social stability, it is crucial to know what protest strategies unions in South Asia pursue and why they pursue them. Instead of conducting research along these lines, many scholars have relied on arguments supported by the experience of advanced industrial states. This practice has led to a lack of evidence on the subject and a paucity of theory appropriate to the South Asian context. The Principal Investigator will work to overcome this problem through an examination of the political economy of labor protest in six cities in South Asia (Calcutta, Cochin, Colombo, Madras, Bombay, and Delhi) during the period - . This study advances the understanding of union behavior in South Asia on both theoretical and empirical fronts. First, it employs a network-based theory of union behavior, which holds that union strategies differ based on a union s degree of formalized connections to employers and institutions of the state. Unions with more ties protest less, and use routine strategies of protest. Unions without ties protest more, utilizing one of two alternatives: extreme acts of violence or Scottian weapons of the weak. This higher volume of alternative protest strategies disrupts economic development. Evidence to test the theory will come from a) hundreds of interviews with union leaders, government officials, and managers, b) descriptions of thousands of protest events as reported in the Indian and Sri Lankan press and c) two surveys of employers and investors. The relationship between the network ties of unions and the strike tactics they pursue will be tested with Ordinary Least Squares cross-sectional regression models. In these models, measures of strategies and volume of strike protest will be the dependent variables and measures of ties to parties and unions will be the primary independent variables of interest. The impact of protest strategies on economic performance will be assessed through a variety of methods. These will include: 1) a survey of representatives of private sector firms in India; 2) a survey of foreign investors in India; 3) interviews with employers in India; and 4) firm-level statistical models of absenteeism and productivity doc23325 none This project studies the effects of organizational learning through experimentation on firm performance and on the success of the firm s product portfolio. The research methods take a much finer grained view of the relationship between portfolio structure and performance. Builds on two existing knowledge streams in a novel way, the central hypothesis is that portfolios that contain too much innovation may result in organizations that are less successful, i.e., that some organizations may be too innovative and thus suffer problems. By rigorously controlling for external contexts, which have never before been controlled for in portfolio analysis, this research has the potential to uncover significant relationships that have eluded previous researchers. Past research suggests that innovative firms outperform their competitors, measured in terms of market share, profitability, growth and or market capitalization, but research has not examined how best to balance the product portfolio mix in terms of innovativeness. A portfolio approach to innovation creates both variety and redundancy, which in turn allow flexible responses in the face of uncertainty. While a portfolio approach to innovation sounds good in theory, making it happen in practice is reputedly not simple. This project proposes to study the effects on firm performance of product portfolio innovativeness and the moderating role of external market characteristics. Intelligent failure through experimentation is argued to be the foundation of learning that creates forward momentum in innovation. Experimentation in innovation is a key sense-making and feedback mechanism that drives organizational learning. Though past research has not examined how organizational learning through experimentation drives product portfolio innovativeness and firm performance, a successful product portfolio likely builds progressively (in steps or leaps) from an accumulation of learning resulting from experimentation and the development of new knowledge that transfers to all products in the portfolio. The proposed research program consists of three distinct phases. Phase 1 will involve qualitative research with six industry experts across a variety of industries to ensure the completeness, validity, and generalizability of the conceptual model and measures. Phase 2 will involve an empirical study in conjunction with Theatre Communications Group (TCG). The purpose of the empirical study will be to collect objective and subjective measures for the focal constructs and test the conceptual model. Based on prior research with TCG, participation of more than 120 of the largest professional theatres in the United States is expected. Phase 3 will involve sharing the study results with the six industry experts to inform inferences and explore the generalizability of the results doc23326 none Northwestern University Ferster, David Collaborative Research: CRCNS: Detection and Recognition of Objects in Visual Cortex A three way collaboration between the laboratories of Profs. T. Poggio at MIT, D. Ferster at Northwestern University and C. Koch at Caltech is exploring and evaluating the hypotheses that the cortical organization and the neural mechanisms of visual recognition can be explained by a coherent theoretical framework built on two existing computational models for recognition and attention and, secondly, that a combination of physiological work on monkeys and cats, together with visual psychophysics can be used to test and refine the theory. The research is organized into three main projects. The work at MIT is guided by a quantitative hierarchical model of recognition, probing the relations between identification and categorization and the properties of selectivity and invariance of the neural mechanisms in IT cortex. The work at Northwestern University is testing a key prediction of the model about the nature of the pooling operation (a max operation vs. a linear sum) performed by complex cells in V1. The experiments are done in the anesthetized cat, intracellularly, to allow for a characterization of the underlying circuit and biophysical mechanisms. Finally, work at Caltech is extending the basic model of recognition by integrating it with a saliency-based attentional model. The computational component of this work, centered around the development of a quantitative model of visual recognition, constitutes the primary tool to enforce interactions between the investigators: the model suggests experiments and guides planning and interpreting new experiments doc23327 none Mode-locked lasers can produce a comb of regularly spaced modes in frequency. We propose to investigate new approaches to stabilize frequency combs provided by mode-locked ring and linear solid state lasers, as well as locking the comb to an atomic standard. The stability is achieved by locking the frequency and repetition rates to a reference cavity. We have recently demonstrated that femtosecond laser stabilization to reference cavities provides an exceptionally fast feedback control to ensure stable operation on short time scales. Accuracy will be achieved by locking the reference cavity to atomic resonances provided by lambda (L) structures. A first part of the work will be an extension of our previous work involving Ti:sapphire mode-locked lasers, improving the present performances, and developing the methods and tools for long term stabilization and accuracy. In parallel, we will start the development of a compact system based on optical parametric oscillators, which has the advantages of orthogonal controls of wavelength and repetition rate, as well as offering access to a broad range of visible and infrared wavelengths. We will evaluate applications for these stabilized mode-locked lasers. In particular, the stabilized ring optical parametric oscillator will enable the measurement of phase shifts with a much better sensitivity than the value of 10-9 that we obtained with unstabilized ring lasers. A specific application is as a laser gyroscope that could be used for geodesic applications. Having at the end of the program simultaneously stabilized at least two independent mode-locked lasers, we will be able to study the synchronization of these lasers through injection lock-in. This will answer a question for ultrafast telecommunication: how much (or how little) optical power is required to phase lock two independent sources, once their modes coincide to a few Hz doc23328 none Robbins, Kay A Univ of Texas CRCNS: Collaborative Research : How is Information Coded in Turtle Visual Cortex ? Visual stimuli evoke a propagating wave of activity in the visual cortex of freshwater turtles. Preliminary work suggested that information about the position of stimuli in visual space is coded in the spatiotemporal dynamics of these waves. Effectively, there may be a map of visual space to the dynamics of the visual cortex. This hypothesis is being examined in a collaborative effort involving three laboratories. David Senseman in San Antonio is using voltage sensitive dye methods to record the waves produced by presenting spots of light at 35 spots on the retina. These studies will characterize the features of the map based on repeated presentations of stimuli at 35 loci. Philip Ulinski in Chicago is developing a large-scale model of the visual pathway of turtles. Models of individual retinal ganglion cells that combine both classic filter-based approaches to modeling ganglion cells, with compartmental modeling of ganglion cells are being constructed. They are being used to construct 35 patches of a model retina that match the 35 loci. Physiological studies of the biophysics of neurons in the lateral geniculate complex of turtles are being carried out. They are used to develop a model of the lateral geniculate complex, which is the last step in modeling the retino-geniculate-cortical pathway. Bijoy Ghosh in St. Louis is developing refined estimation techniques that allow the position of a visual stimulus to be estimated from the dynamics of the cortical waves. This work is providing the mathematical framework needed to characterize a potential map of visual space to the dynamics of the wave. This work is significant because it is characterizing a novel method of coding information in visual cortex that may apply to higher order cortical areas in mammals, as well as turtles doc23329 none Scholars in a variety of disciplines, including organizational theory, strategic management, and economics, have devoted substantial attention to two related questions: why are some firms more innovative than others, and when does innovation contribute to a firm s financial success. These questions warrant attention because innovative firms are critical drivers of technological progress and long-term economic growth. This study will enhance our understanding of these relationships by investigating how characteristics of a firm s scientific and technological knowledge, often referred to as its absorptive capacity, and a firm s alliance network jointly affect its ability to innovate. We focus particularly on how characteristics of absorptive capacity and alliance networks affect the number and value of patents firms produce, because these innovation outcomes positively affect firm profits and indicate how quickly technologies are advancing. Absorptive capacity is believed to enhance a firm s innovative capacity by enabling it to recognize the value of externally generated discoveries, to assimilate novel insights, and to apply this knowledge to technological development. However, attributes of firms knowledge stocks, and hence their absorptive capacity, vary greatly, and these differences may influence innovative productivity. We examine how the breadth and depth of a firm s absorptive capacity affect the number and value of the patents it produces. Whereas absorptive capacity facilitates the utilization of external knowledge, a firm s alliance network shapes the type and volume of external scientific and technological knowledge it has access to. Certain attributes of a firm s network, such as its size and the density of connections among its partners, have been related to the number of patents it produces. Studies have not yet explored how the type of knowledge a firm is exposed to through its network affect the value of its innovations, or how network variables and absorptive capacity interact to affect patent production. By exploring specific characteristics of absorptive capacity and network structure, and by investigating their interactive effects on innovation, we will learn when these two facets of innovative capacity complement each other and when they may substitute for one another. This is central to understanding how firms can make the best use of their investments in research and development. Alliances present opportunities for a firm to leverage the scientific and technological knowledge it acquires through its own research and development. However, the best mix of alliance partners may vary according to specific characteristics of a firm s absorptive capacity, particularly the breadth and depth of that knowledge. Some network structures may augment the value of a firm s absorptive capacity, while others may play essentially the same role in the innovation process as a firm s internal knowledge and hence could be viewed as a substitute for absorptive capacity. Our study will also shed light on when firms are better served by choosing between maximizing the quantity and the quality of their innovations, and when they can achieve both outcomes with an appropriate configuration of network partners and absorptive capacity. Finally, we expect to provide some insight into the role of alliance networks in directing and pacing technological progress. This study is set in the global pharmaceutical industry, where scientific and technological knowledge is critical to innovation, alliances are increasingly prevalent, and patents are effective and widely used to prevent product imitation. The study may have some value for policy discussions of how to spur innovation in a system of firms doc23330 none In many imaging applications, mobile agents--such as untethered reconnaissance robots and micro air vehicles--transmit and receive bandwidth-intensive image data over wireless networks. A key issue in developing small, mobile agents is minimizing their power requirements. The most significant source of power dissipation in a wireless communications system is the transmission of data over the wireless link. Compressing the data before transmission is a direct way to significantly decrease power requirements; thus, effective image compression algorithms are critical to realizing a mobile, wireless, real-time, high quality imaging system. Various hardware platforms can be considered for mobile computing. Of these platforms, field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are the most compelling for wireless, mobile, fast, low-power, handheld wearable embedded, image compression devices.FPGAs can be used as the basis for implementations that are low cost, easily updated, and significantly faster than microprocessor-based implementations. The objective of this project is twofold: to design new, efficient image compression algorithms and to design, build, demonstrate and evaluate FPGA implementations of state-of-the-art image compression systems. Our close-knit interdisciplinary team of image compression and hardware specialists will allow for end-to-end system performance analysis.This critical assessment is almost never performed and yet it is important to understanding the combined effects of algorithmic and implementation design choices. In addition, two or three real-world interdisciplinary projects that can be utilized in senior-level digital signal processing and digital design classes will be designed and published doc23331 none Twelve estuarine biogeochemists will be selected from the U.S. scientific community to participate in the 7th International Estuarine Biogeochemistry Symposium to be held in Grimstad, Norway in May, . During this meeting, special emphasis will be placed on discussions regarding new results on the biogeochemistry of high and low latitude fjords. In addition, the biogeochemistry of arctic, tropical, sub-tropical and temperate estuaries also will be addressed. Thematically, the symposium will discuss issues such as interactions between organic matter and trace metals, redox boundaries, nutrient control on productivity, climate change effects, experimental design of mesocosms, modeling of sediment-water exchange and new sampling techniques. Results from the symposium will be published most likely in a special edition of the journal Marine Chemistry doc23332 none The goal of this research is to advance the fundamental understanding of the behavior of anisotropic conductive adhesives that could replace lead-containing solders in electronic packaging. Of particular interest is the capability of creating a thin film (ACF) of this material that is stable, with a high current density capacity. Replacing lead-containing solder with alternative interconnect material would significantly impact the manufacturing processes of microelectronic packaging systems, such as flip-chip, ball grid array (BGA), chip scale package (CSP), and surface mount technology (SMT). ACFs are one of the candidates to replace lead-containing solder as interconnect material. Currently, the reliability and performance of these ACF materials are not competitive, and improvements require a better understanding of the interfacial behavior developed in electronics packaging processes. In this project, chemical and physical properties of ACA materials will be studied, and the interfaces in ACF joint will be investigated. Then, the interfaces will be modified to maintain the electrical properties in extreme environment by using corrosion inhibitors and or sacrificial alloys. To improve the current density of ACA, the interfaces will be modified with self-assembling molecular (SAM) wires. The mechanically bonded interface between ACA and chip pad substrate pad will be modified by SAM, which has been known to be able to deliver high current density. A computational modeling of the processing - property relationship will be developed. During the period of award, the PI will continue to address the integration of research and education with specific activities focused on high school teachers and students from under-represented groups in local high schools doc23333 none Caroly A. Shumway1, Hans A. Hofmann2 1New England Aquarium; 2Harvard University Collaborative Research: How Do Social and Habitat Complexities Shape Brain Structure? The human brain is larger than that of any other primate species. As humans evolved, what environmental or social forces caused our own brain expansion? If an animal lives in an extended family group, does the need to identify individual members within the group lead to a better ability to recognize faces, compared with species that are more solitary? Since most vertebrate groups offer only a limited number of species for comparison, these questions will be studied in the species-rich African cichlid fishes that live in diverse habitats and show an astonishing range of social behaviors. The principal investigators have found that complex behaviors occur more often in complex rock environments than in simpler sand habitats. Because of the large numbers of closely related but behaviorally diverse species in each lake (which makes cichlids the gold standard for comparative studies exploring how brain and behavior evolved), one factor (e.g., social behavior) can be kept constant in a comparative study while varying the other (e.g., habitat). In this way it has been possible to show that both factors - environment and social - are important evolutionary forces. In the present study brain structures and cognitive abilities (such as individual recognition and spatial memory) of species differing in social behavior or habitat will be compared. Ultimately, this work will shed light on how environmental and social factors like monogamy and familial groups shape brain structure and function. The complex behaviors being studied, such as spatial memory and recognition, are of direct relevance to humans doc23334 none Keller Description: This award is for support of a joint research project by Dr. Gerta Keller, Department of Geosciences, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, Dr. Ahmed Kassab, Geology Department at Assiut University, Assiut, Egypt and Dr. Abdel Aziz Tantawy, Geology Department at South Valley University, Aswan, Egypt. They plan to study the Cenomanian-Turonian (C-T) anoxic event across different bathymetric settings along the Gulf of Suez and Sinai in Egypt. The investigators plan to investigate these different bathymetric settings in Egypt and the Sinai based on a high-resolution study of the organic carbon-rich facies in a series of sections along the Gulf of Suez and in the Sinai. The study will be based on an integrated multidisciplinary approach that includes sedimentology, mineralogy, geochemistry, stable carbon and oxygen isotopes and microfossil and macrofossil biostratigraphies. The results are expected to yield critical information on the nature of organic carbon accumulation in variable settings, the biotic response of marine plankton to this crisis, and the climatic and sea level history of the region. The investigators expect to develop high-resolution biostratigraphic records that permit evaluation of the timing of the anoxic event and comparison and correlation with black shale deposition elsewhere in the Tethys. Scope: The C-T transition marks a major greenhouse warming accompanied by global ocean anoxia that was detrimental to marine benthic and planktic organisms. The resulting organic-rich facies are widespread globally and occur in a wide range of bathymetric settings with the thickest deposits with greatest source rock potential generally occur in outer-shelf environments of the low latitude Atlantic and Mediterranean Tethys. The eastern Tethys, and Egypt in particular, provides an ideal area for the study of the C-T anoxic event across different bathymetric settings from shallow shelf to deep basins, as observed in a series of dysoxic basins along the Gulf of Suez and Sinai in Egypt. This project will bring together an international team of experts in sedimentology, mineralogy, stratigraphy, stable isotopes, geochemistry and biology. At the same time the project will involve U.S. and Egyptian graduate and undergraduate students in the field and laboratory investigations and thereby introduce them to various Earth Science disciplines and expose them to working within a larger investigative team and in a foreign country. The project is funded by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Earth Sciences doc23335 none A grant has been awarded to the University of California, Santa Cruz for the purchase of an Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) spectrometer. The goal of this research program is to develop a deeper understanding of how metals, especially those found in the environment, influence living systems. Metals such as iron, copper, manganese and lead are found throughout our environment. Some of these metals are found as natural components of living systems, such as plants and bacteria, while others are contaminants. This research program centered on the new EPR spectrometer will provide critical new information at the molecular level as to how living systems store metals, utilize metals for natural biological processes and respond to metal imbalances. This research program brings together four interdisciplinary research groups from the Departments of Chemistry & Biochemistry and Environmental Toxicology. Working together, these research groups will examine the roles metals play in the prion diseases which include mad cow disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in humans, how metals are used in microbial metabolism, how cellular structures are chemically modified by metals and how metals such as manganese distribute in living systems and contribute to environmental diseases. This latter project is motivated, in part, by the Canadian Government s recent approval of manganese as a gasoline additive. In all of these projects, the molecular centers containing the metals will be directly studied with unprecedented detail using the EPR spectrometer. Our fundamental goal is to reveal important new molecular insights into how organisms use metals and respond to metal imbalances. The specific research projects will significantly expand our understanding of the basic biochemistry of metals. In addition, the findings will identify potential toxic metal species that could ultimately damage ecosystems. By identifying such species before they are widely distributed in the environment, such as manganese as a gasoline additive, we may help prevent a repeat of previous environmental catastrophes such as those experienced from lead, PCBs and asbestos. The instrument will be used primarily in research laboratories. From an educational perspective, having a new EPR spectrometer will allow us to train our future undergraduate and graduate students with this modern technique. We also plan to devote about 5% of the spectrometer time to class laboratories so as to enhance education and expose a new generation of chemists and environmental scientists to the fundamental technique of EPR doc23336 none Flexibility allows firms to compete more effectively in today s world of substantial price and demand uncertainty, product variety, short product life cycles, and rapid product development. In order to benefit from flexibility, managers and manufacturing systems must react to events as they unfold. The real options approach seeks to quantify just how valuable flexibility really is. It incorporates both the uncertainty that is inherent in business and the active intervention required for a strategy to succeed. The purpose of this research is to develop an evaluation approach to quantify flexibility in manufacturing operations in order to improve operational decision making. Specifically, the objectives are to (1) capture and (2) value that flexibility using a real options framework. In order to accomplish these objectives, the first research task will be to develop a model for multi-period options because there is usually a lag between the time when a decision to exercise an alternative option is made and when that alternative option can be implemented. The second research task is to develop a Monte Carlo simulation approach for valuing multi-time period options that allows switches among several choices during a decision horizon. Thus the third research task is to develop an efficient heuristic for fast approximation of option values so that the approach will be practical for industry application. This research is expected to make several contributions. Foremost, it will bring state-of-the-art financial option research to the area of manufacturing enterprises and emphasize realism by collaborating with industry partners. Additionally, as the methodological approach for valuing flexibility in manufacturing enterprises is developed, software tools that can execute the valuation calculations will also be generated. These tools and their research contexts will be incorporated into the engineering curriculum. Finally, this work will promote the careers of under-represented faculty and students doc23337 none This grant concerns the development of a statistical procedure for testing the quality of a feasible candidate solution for an important class of stochastic programs. Quality is defined via the so-called optimality gap and the output of the procedure is a confidence interval on this gap. Monte Carlo simulation-based tools will be employed to make the procedure efficient and to tighten the width of the resulting confidence interval. The method is not tied to specific solution algorithms. Hence, success will result in an approach that can be widely adopted for solving real-world stochastic programs. Stochastic programming is a powerful tool for making decisions in complex systems that contain significant uncertainties. Stochastic programming problems arise in many areas of application including financial planning, production capacity planning, managing natural resources, communications networks, and national security. Success with the proposed work will enable analysts to efficiently assess the quality of candidate solutions to such problems doc23338 none An aggressive investigation is planned on the structure nonlinear optical property relations of materials with special emphasis on several classes of organic compounds. An excellent collaborative team of experts has been assembled in this area along with the best experimental facilities for nonlinear optical (NLO) materials characterization. Along with the PI s at CREOL including a chemist, collaborators include Seth Marder, Joseph Perry and Jean-Luc Bredas with Chemistry at the University of Arizona, Francois Diederich in Chemistry at ETH, Zurich, Olga Przhonska, Alex Kachkovski and co-workers at the Institute of Physics, National Academy of Sciences, Kiev, Ukraine, and Anthony Brennan at the University of Florida. State-of-the-art laboratory facilities have been specifically designed and developed for the program outlined in this proposal. Five laboratories are devoted to this investigation. The latest addition is a femtosecond pump continuum probe, nonlinear spectrophotometer . This mimics the operation of a standard linear spectrophotometer and is the closest one can come to a facility that could be made into a commercial instrument for spectral analysis of NLO material properties. Data are consistent with the two-photon fluorescence (2PF) spectroscopy method, which takes considerably longer and requires fluorescent samples. Thus, a broader range of materials can be studied. These techniques, combined with the PIs previously-developed experimental Z-scan technique, along with complementary methods of single frequency pump-probe methods with femtosecond, picosecond, and nanosecond tunable optical parametric sources, provide a unique facility to carry out the goals of this proposed effort. The ultimate goal of this study is to develop a predictive capability for the NLO properties in terms of the linear optical properties and or molecular structure similar to what the PIs have accomplished for semiconductors. The femtosecond continuum can range in wavelength from 300 nm to 1.7 mm and can thus probe the NLA over this broad spectral range. Thus, in a single experiment the changes in absorption at all frequencies from the IR to the UV are measured. By temporally delaying the probe, the dynamics of this nondegenerate NLA are also obtained. This allows easy separation of the ultrafast NLA process of two-photon absorption from cumulative nonlinearities such as excited state absorption. With this instrument one can determine where are the strong two-photon absorption bands, and what is the excited-state absorption spectrum. The answers to these and similar questions will give theoreticians the information necessary to test theories and practitioners to find and exploit new NLO materials doc23339 none The physical, chemical and biological properties of matter undergo transitions over critical length scales in the range of 1-50 nanometers, leading to a diversity of new functionality. The investigation of fundamentally new phenomena is coupled with commercial interest in the development of devices based on nanostructured materials. This research project will investigate a novel technique for the controlled synthesis of mono-disperse, nanograined materials. Chemical and physical processing of materials on the nanoscale will be combined for the growth of coatings with columnar nanocrystalline grains of uniform size and distribution, which will be tuned on the nanometer scale. The formation of ordered, mono-disperse, dimensionally-controlled nanotemplates by chemical self-assembly will be followed by selective pulsed laser heating of the nanotemplates in synchronization with a pulsed dual-laser ablation growth process. This technique will be extended to commercially viable large-area deposition by substituting a pulsed, hollow-cathode plasma deposition process in lieu of the dual-laser ablation process. Our prior discoveries in pulsed laser ablation and plasma deposition will provide the basis for the growth processes. Au and TiO2 nanoparticles will be used as the template material while the hard coatings will be made using TiN and SiC, as representative examples. Morphological, structural and mechanical properties of the nanostructured material will be investigated for varying nanograin size and separation. The mechanical functionality of the nanograined coatings will be assessed by studying film properties such as hardness, ductility and wear resistance, yielding fundamental insight into the correlation of elastic properties with the nanocrystalline grain dimensions. Such studies have not been possible in the past because of poly-dispersity in grain sizes. The project will involve the hands-on training of graduate and undergraduate students in the exciting area of nanomanufacturing that is of national importance, and lead to curricular enhancements at both the graduate and undergraduate level. Pre-college outreach through annual summer workshops for high school teachers and research opportunities for high school students, particularly women and minorities, will permit the early introduction of suitable aspects of this emerging area to promote future careers in nanomanufacturing. If successful, the impact of the research project will be the development of a new hybrid manufacturing process combining chemical and physical processing on the nanoscale with nano-micro-meso scale integration. Potential applications include not only the investigation of new physical phenomena at the nanometer scale but also a manufacturing process with changes in functionality leading to improvements in mechanical properties of hard coatings doc23340 none Incorporating real-world experience in diverse science curricula through community building partnerships. The current proposal is a request for start-up funds to complement and extend my PFSMETE ( ) post-doctoral fellowship at Middlebury College (Middlebury, VT): Teaching science through real-world experience: an introductory course in applied conservation biology. That project tested a model of introductory level science teaching in which students are motivated to learn how to do science by giving them the opportunity to work on real-world projects in their laboratories instead of cookbook labs with pre- determined results. Partnerships with natural resource agencies supplied research opportunities for students in the course, and these partnerships contributed to both student learning (by enhancing motivation and reward), and to the partner agencies (by providing useful data, ideas and public exposure). The logical next step for this model of teaching is to expand it. In my new capacity as Assistant Professor of Biology and Co-Director of the Environmental Studies Program at Kalamazoo College, I hope to do just that. I will build upon the curriculum I developed under the previous project in order to incorporate real-world experiences in large enrollment introductory and non-majors courses, as well as upper level courses with students who are more skilled but would still benefit from the real-world motivating factors. Since enrollment in many undergraduate courses ranges from fifty to several hundred, it will be useful to learn which aspects of the partnership pedagogical model will be transferable to larger courses. I have included letters of support from two potential agency partners, Convening for Action (CF A), a local project with ties to Kalamazoo College that seeks to coordinate county-wide land use planning through a geographic information system (GIS) and intenet- based database, and the Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy, which oversees many of our region s important natural areas. Most of the data my students will be collecting will have a spatial component. That is, the data must be analyzed in the context of their location, or in the very least displayed spatially. A GIS is therefore essential to satisfy the goals of many of the partnerships I envision. By working under the CF A umbrella, and by using GIS I will ensure that the students efforts are concentrated in those areas where data are ,needed most. At Kalamazoo College, I will eventually be responsible for five biology courses: a non-majors Environmental Science course with an enrollment cap of 30, an introductory biology course with a cap of 48, and iliree senior level courses, each with expected enrollment of 12 to 15. The proposed research will test the feasibility of scaling up the partnership model for use in these larger format courses. Using student assistants during two summers, I will lay the groundwork for incorporating experiential learning based on real-world partnerships into these courses, and other funds will support the GIS technology and added expenses of enabling students to conduct research in the classroom. The short-term success for this project will be measured by students performance and attitude, and the utility of the partnerships for the agencies. To ascertain if real-world experience facilitates student learning, I will administer a questionnaire before and after each course to gauge students attitudes toward science, and their comprehension of the underlying basics of how we do science. The longer term success of this project will be measured by whether or not partnerships mature into mutually beneficial collaborations that have continuity across the academic calendar. Meeting these short-term and long-term goals will provide the track record to seek additional funding from regional resources to ensure continuity of the partnerships after the proposed project is completed in August doc23341 none Komanduri Description: This award supports a US-India collaborative research project in mechanical engineering entitled Magnetic Field Assisted Finishing Process. The investigators are Ranga Komanduri of Oklahoma State University (OSU) and Vijay Jain of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IITK). The primary focus of their research is the finishing of advanced materials by magnetic field assisted polishing. Their collaborative work will have a direct impact on ultra-precision machining and finishing of advanced materials. This is an area of high current interest and will contribute to fundamental understanding of the ultra-precision machining process. Scope: The US PI is a recognized leader in the development of magnetic float technology and has established a state-of-the-art research facility at OSU. They have been one of the most active groups in the finishing of advanced materials in the U.S. The Indian PI, an expert in magnetic abrasive finishing processes, is also well recognized for his work in manufacturing. Their collaboration will advance technologies in each of their complementary areas and, by taking advantage of their combined knowledge base, they intend to extend their studies to a new technology, the magnetorheological abrasive flow finishing of advanced materials. This project will support an international experience for a US graduate student and result in stronger cooperation between OSU and the IIT,Kanpur. This project is jointly funded by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Design, Manufacture, & Industrial Innovation doc23342 none The majority of biological databases today are broad, but shallow, covering large amounts of material but in a relatively cursory way. These are essential resources as scientists use molecular biological techniques to develop a catalog of the molecules founds in living cell. Now, it is time to move beyond simply cataloguing the molecules of a cell toward the time for understanding the dynamic interactions between molecules within a cell. This level of understanding requires a different kind of database, one that links together sequence, genetics, structure and function to create a deeper resource. The existing Protein Kinase Resource (PKR, http: pkr.sdsc.edu) will be extended to create a resource from which both novices and experts can learn about protein kinases, an important family of enzymes that play roles in processes as diverse as human disease and crop production. From a technical standpoint, the resource will integrate data from a variety of existing resources in ways not previously achieved. The integration at UCSD provides a location for developing detailed and well defined application program interfaces (APIs) that will allow these resources to interoperate. It will deliver both content and technological advances in the field of biological databases. All data, software and specifications will be publicly available. Beyond students involved in the research, workshops will provide instruction in community annotation of kinases using the PKR and ways to adapt the database for other uses. Modules of the database and APIs will enable the utilization of this work by other groups interested in other enzyme families doc23343 none A team of researchers from Cornell University (in close collaboration with a group from the University of Michigan) will develop advanced sources of ultrashort light pulses. The researchers will exploit a new degree of freedom that has recently been demonstrated for short-pulse generation: control of the sign and magnitude of effective cubic nonlinearities. Because cubic nonlinear processes underlie virtually all aspects of modern ultrashort-pulse generation, this is a substantial new capability. Ultrahigh-intensity lasers capable of producing petawatt ( W) power levels and intensities as high as W cm2 will benefit from new capabilities in pulse compression, pulse cleaning, and compensation of self-focusing and excessive nonlinear phase shifts. The new ability to control nonlinear phase shifts is referred to as nonlinearity management. The new approach to control and generation of intense ultrashort pulses is flexible and applicable to a variety of functions. The proposed research is certain to produce new information and understanding of ultrashort light pulses. Substantial impact is expected through the new instruments that will be developed. New ultrahigh-intensity lasers are expected to enable a wide variety of scientific studies. Students participating in the proposed effort will be involved in a highly collaborative effort, with aspects ranging from optical engineering to fundamental science doc23344 none Over the past ten years, the use of video surveillance technologies has become widespread. These technologies are increasingly used by government and corporate institutions to monitor individuals in public or quasi-public spaces with a view to enhancing personal and property security, productivity, efficiency, and peace of mind. The interaction between video surveillance technologies and human actors raises complex questions. An in-depth inquiry into the driving forces behind the use of these technologies and their implications on personal autonomy, human agency and privacy in general would lead to a better understanding of the interaction between technology and the social landscape. This dissertation research project will explore theoretical aspects of the video surveillance-privacy nexus, and by means of qualitative inquiry will investigate the lived, contextual experiences of (a) the watchers -- those who own, operate, install, and use video surveillance systems focusing on social control issues, and (b) the watched --those who are subject to video surveillance systems with specific attention to issues of personal autonomy and human agency. Funding is provided to conduct a series of interviews with people who are using video surveillance techniques, and to analyze these transcripts in order to see how questions of privacy, power and the benefits of the technology are being conceptualized. By investigating how and why the particular configurations of video surveillance have emerged, the proposed research will contribute to the literature on the centrality of visual technologies to social control mechanisms, and the understanding of privacy in terms of its philosophical dimensions doc23345 none The classical Poole-Frenkel (PF) effect is the thermal emission of charge carriers from Coulombic attractive traps in the bulk of dielectrics and semiconductors, enhanced by an electric field. This mechanism results in higher than ideal currents in electronic materials, including leakage currents in conventional dielectrics, Si3N4 and SiO2; leakage in high dielectric constant materials such as Ta2O5 and BaSrTiO3, which hold great promise as gate dielectrics in DRAMs and MOSFETs; and enhanced current in Silicon Carbide (SiC) diodes. The research objective is to investigate advanced models of the PF effect and experimental techniques to characterize PF conduction in electronic devices and materials. Our primary goals are: (i) Investigate a PF model using the Fermi-Dirac function to describe the trap population statistics, while still incorporating the Boltzmann approximation for the free electron density. Model the current at voltages above saturation. (ii) Investigate this model as a function of temperature. Determine if it predicts convergence of I-V(T) curves at saturation, as our earlier research suggests. (iii) Investigate the implications of this model on our technique for measuring saturation and trap ionization potential. (iv) Fabricate MIS structures with Ta2O5, measure I-V(T) curves looking for saturation, and verify our general technique. (v) Use the Fermi-Dirac function to describe both trap and free electron population statistics for the first time. (vi) Incorporate the model in a commercial simulator, and simulate 6H-SiC p-n diodes. This research will enhance our understanding of the PF effect, and improve the accuracy of modeling this effect in electronic devices doc23346 none The objective of this research project is to suggest how manufacturing process planning systems should be designed. In automated manufacturing, process planning is the intermediate step that transforms a design into an ordered list of instructions for fabrication. For instance, in machining, a block of homogeneous metal (the stock or initial workpiece) must be transformed by removing material appropriately. For each step, the position of the workpiece, how it is held in place (fixturing), the specific tool to be used, the tool access direction, and the precise tool path must be specified. A computer aided process planning system takes a computer file defining the design in a standard format---the output of a computer aided design system---and finds computerized instructions for computer assisted manufacturing equipment to make the desired artifact. Increasingly, such process planning systems contain multiple artificially intelligent agents (or distributed decision makers). Process planners (and multi-agent systems in general) define particular games. The examination of such games helps one to understand how process planners and multi-agent systems work, why they can fail, and how they can be improved. Game-theoretic mechanism design analyzes how games can be designed so that the desired outcomes arise as equilibria in the games. The proposed research will first use existing results in game theory and mechanism design to study process planners and multi-agent systems. Then new results will be derived for network and distributed games and the potential disaggregation of agents will be analyzed. The goal is to establish rigorous theoretical principles, based on strategic optimization behavior, to guide the design of multi-agent process planning systems and multi-agent systems in general. If successful, this research project will provide principles to improve the design of process planning systems. Process planning can be time-consuming and expensive; when it fails, it can lead to further costs and delays due to redesign. Moreover, process planning is a crucial step in a manufacturing industry (machining) that typically represents about five percent of gross domestic product in developed economies. Hence, it is important to design process planning systems well, so that they successfully find feasible---and, ideally, good, where good means relatively inexpensive to manufacture to tolerance specifications---process plans quickly on average when the design is manufacturable (and don t waste excessive amounts of time and resources if the design is not manufacturable). Broader impacts include involvement of students (including those from under-represented groups) in this research and the initiation of a new course at the University of Minnesota on game theory for engineers. Moreover, the project is inherently interdisciplinary and involves novel applications of game theory in manufacturing doc23347 none Finkel This grant will provides two years partial support for the operation of GeoCAMS, the Earth Science component of the FN tandem van de Graaff accelerator at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (CAMS) as a facility for isotopic studies in the Earth Sciences. In ten years of successful operation, GeoCAMS has developed and demonstrated capabilities to measure 3H, 7,10Be, 26Al, 36Cl, and 129I at levels found in terrestrial samples and 41Ca at levels found in meteorites. GeoCAMS has measured 15,000 10Be targets, 26Al targets, 36Cl targets, 300 41Ca targets and a lesser number of 3H, 7Be and 129I targets. GeoCAMS, built with DOE and UC funds, has served numerous NSF PIs, including more than twenty during the past year, and has, de facto, come to serve NSF Earth Sciences as a facility for AMS measurements. During this time GeoCAMS has played a key role in education. Twenty-seven Ph.D. students and seven master s students have been trained at GeoCAMS. The large majority of the new surface exposure dating labs set up at U.S. universities during the past few years have been started by young faculty trained at GeoCAMS. In parallel to the facility capability supported by this grant, a wide range of Earth science research in paleoclimate, ice core research, Earth surface processes and atmospheric mixing is carried out by GeoCAMS staff. The goal of this proposal is to make the GeoCAMS facility, which is rated at or near the top of such facilities worldwide, available to the NSF Earth Science community while at the same time continuing to improve the existing performance and to add capabilities for new nuclides, such as in-situ 14C and 53Mn doc23348 none Miniaturized sensors and actuators, also referred to as Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS), play a critical role in information technology revolution. For example, the development of wireless internet, complex systems on a chip for aerospace, medical, health and various other industries is enabled by the MEMS technology. Over the past decade, advances in microfabrication technologies have enabled breakthrough developments in miniaturized sensors, actuators, devices and systems (collectively called MEMS). Some of the most recent innovative applications include accelerometers in navigational-grade guidance systems, rate gyroscopes in antilock-braking systems, and chemical sensors in complex biomedical instrumentation. MEMS based sensors are more attractive as they are often less expensive and perform better than traditional devices and they can more easily be integrated with control electronics to enable the concept of systems-on-a-chip. The lack of efficient and accurate computational prototyping tools has thus far been a significant barrier to the development of MEMS, because most existing electronic and mechanical computational prototyping tools do not have the ability to analyze microscopic phenomena adequately. As a result, MEMS manufacturers have been forced to develop and test prototypes, both of which have been time-consuming and very expensive. In this proposal we focus on a particular class of MEMS - referred to as microelectrofluidicmechanical systems (MEFMS). MEFMS are miniaturized sensors, actuators, devices and systems, where mechanical, electrical and fluidic energy domains play a central role. Many electrofluidicmechanical devices have been designed and fabricated - e.g. pressure sensors, accelerometers, gyroscopes, digital micro mirrors, microphones and other devices. While fabrication approaches for these devices are mature enough, investigation of design alternatives for many of these devices is currently limited because of the lack of computational design tools. While computational research primarily addresses engineering analysis, in this proposal we focus on computational research for design and analysis of microelectrofluidicmechanical systems. We expect this work to break new grounds in the areas of software tools with advanced computational methods for MEMS. Graduate students will be trained on the MEMS technology, advanced computational methods and design methodologies for MEMS. We anticipate that the design of miniaturized systems based on MEMS will progress rapidly with the availability of efficient, accurate and robust computational prototyping tools. Aggressive designers, who are currently handicapped because of the limited computational analysis tools for MEMS, will be able to challenge their design skills when computational prototyping tools for MEMS are in place doc23349 none In light of the increasing role of knowledge work in the economy, a fundamental understanding of effective knowledge transfer has increasingly gained currency in both the academic and managerial communities. Transferring knowledge across organizational boundaries allows individuals to benefit from the experiences of others and access a greater breadth of organizational, technological, and market know-how. There is a considerable body of research documenting the beneficial effects of knowledge transfer for organizational performance. Substantial progress has also been made on investigating the psychological processes underlying knowledge transfer. However, our understanding is less well developed for how social networks influence knowledge transfer. An integrative network-based theory of knowledge transfer has yet to emerge. Developing such a perspective is important because it: emphasizes the ongoing patterns of interaction through which knowledge spreads, considers the informal organizational influences on knowledge transfer, and broadens the focus of research beyond that of single individuals and dyads to larger collectivities. This research tests a network-based theory of effective knowledge transfer, framed as a search-transfer problem. We argue that network patterns are important in solving both halves of the problem. For search, we argue that people with interactions that cut across multiple areas of expertise are better positioned to see how ideas developing in one area can be combined with ideas developing in another area. People solving the search problem can transfer knowledge using one of two strategies. The individual can move knowledge from the source to the recipient acting as an intermediary. Or the individual can facilitate the transfer of knowledge from the source to the recipient by bringing the two parties together. We maintain that the most effective knowledge transfer mechanism is contingent upon qualities of the knowledge being transferred and the amount of knowledge overlap between the source and the recipient. To test the predictions, the researchers will gather sociometric, human resource management, and performance data (at various levels) along with information about individuals areas of expertise. Data will be gathered from both primary and archival data sources. The setting for the study will be three member organizations of the Twin Cities Knowledge Management Forum (TCKMF), a consortium with the mission to help its members implement knowledge management within their organizations by sharing best practices. Members of the TCKMF include Fortune 500 and other leading corporations (e.g., Cargill, Medtronic, Oracle, 3M Company, Unisys) located in the Twin Cities area. Results of a pilot study completed with one member organization have been presented to the consortium and the attending companies agree that the initial findings are promising, the questions being addressed are worth further examination, and the study shows clear potential for broader impact doc23350 none The goal of this dissertation research project is to explore the design and use of educational computer technologies (EdSims), with the goal of generating findings that may both influence both the academic literatures of design, science and technology studies (STS), and education and also the practice of education. Study of the development of EdSims as a new educational tool should improve understanding of the design and use of educational technologies and technologies in general. Hopefully, EdSim designers and educators will be able to apply the findings of this study to improve educational pedagogy. This research project has three main objectives. The first objective is to understand and evaluate the design and use of EdSims in a broad context. Secondly, the study aims to train ethically aware and socially conscious designers who will work to level playing fields among individuals with different identities and social locations through conscious and conscientious decisions in the design process. Third, the project seeks to indirectly improve the design and use of EdSims by reaching out to and working with EdSim designers and educators. The central research questions in this study match closely with the study s objectives, as well as the background research and research design. First, how do EdSims compare to more traditional teaching methods? Next, how are social and cultural assumptions embedded in EdSims? Finally, how can EdSim design be improved? The literature review of this study focuses on three specific case studies of EdSim design and use and relates them to the project s objectives and research questions. The first case study on flight simulators demonstrates the importance of EdSims and how they are different from more traditional teaching methods. Second, animal dissection simulators are used to demonstrate the ethical implications of EdSim design and use. For third example, gross anatomy EdSims, specific design recommendations are made, in an effort to improve the design and use of EdSims. Data collection for this study will make use of a variety of qualitative and quantitative methodologies and will take place at a variety of sites, both geographical and virtual. Semi-structured interviews and participant observation will take place at EdSim conferences, EdSim design laboratories, and classrooms using EdSims. The Internet will be a site for collecting interview and survey data and contributing to the community of EdSim designers and users. Other forms of data collection will include analysis of EdSim advertising and a comparative usage study of EdSims. A total of 80 semi-structured interviews and 200 web-based surveys will be conducted. The intellectual merit of the proposed research project is based on its ontribution to the design, STS, and education literatures. The study seeks to contribute to the design literature by providing empirical data on how EdSims are designs, including the extent to which their design is participatory, culturally situated, and appropriate. In the field of STS, the research project contributes to understandings of the convergence of simulation and reality, whereby educational and training environments are becoming increasingly realistic, while activities such as aircraft flight and surgery are becoming more technologically mediated, automated, and simulated. Finally, the project will contribute to the field of education by exploring how EdSims can be used in combination with the pedagogies of situated learning and teaching for understanding. The broader impacts of this study all center around improving the practice of education. First, the study aims to determine how EdSims can be used in particular educational settings to meet specific educational goals. Secondly, the study will develop recommendations about how to use EdSims to make education more equitable, just, and participatory. The third impact should be to study how EdSims can be used to make education more economically efficient and environmentally sustainable doc23351 none The Coweeta LTER Research Program has evolved since from a site-based to a site- and region-based project examining the effects of disturbance and environmental gradients on biogeochemical cycling, and the underlying watershed ecosystem processes that regulate and respond to those cycles. The objective for the proposed - research is to advance scientific understanding of the spatial, temporal, and decision-making components of land use and land-use change in the southern Appalachian Mountains over the last 200 years, and forecast patterns into the future 30 years. This will be accomplished by addressing ecological and socioeconomic aspects of land-use change while continuing long-term studies of environmental gradients and natural disturbance regimes. The result will be a more complete understanding of ecological dynamics in the southern Appalachian Mountains that makes possible the development of reasonable forecasts of its future ecological state. The guiding hypothesis for the proposed research is that the frequency, intensity, and extent of land use represents human decision-making in response to socioeconomic and biogeophysical conditions with consequences that cascade through ecosystems. The research activities are organized into three initiatives: (1) characterization of the socio-natural template, (2) ecosystem responses to the socio-natural template, and (3) forecasting ecosystem responses to changes in the socio-natural template. The integrated scientific research will provide both a description as well as an explanation of the underlying causes of land use and the consequences of land-use change for southern Appalachian ecosystems and society. It thus recognizes the complexity of land use as a process and the research and outreach needs as defined in the LTER Program and the broader scientific and public communities doc23333 none Caroly A. Shumway1, Hans A. Hofmann2 1New England Aquarium; 2Harvard University Collaborative Research: How Do Social and Habitat Complexities Shape Brain Structure? The human brain is larger than that of any other primate species. As humans evolved, what environmental or social forces caused our own brain expansion? If an animal lives in an extended family group, does the need to identify individual members within the group lead to a better ability to recognize faces, compared with species that are more solitary? Since most vertebrate groups offer only a limited number of species for comparison, these questions will be studied in the species-rich African cichlid fishes that live in diverse habitats and show an astonishing range of social behaviors. The principal investigators have found that complex behaviors occur more often in complex rock environments than in simpler sand habitats. Because of the large numbers of closely related but behaviorally diverse species in each lake (which makes cichlids the gold standard for comparative studies exploring how brain and behavior evolved), one factor (e.g., social behavior) can be kept constant in a comparative study while varying the other (e.g., habitat). In this way it has been possible to show that both factors - environment and social - are important evolutionary forces. In the present study brain structures and cognitive abilities (such as individual recognition and spatial memory) of species differing in social behavior or habitat will be compared. Ultimately, this work will shed light on how environmental and social factors like monogamy and familial groups shape brain structure and function. The complex behaviors being studied, such as spatial memory and recognition, are of direct relevance to humans doc23353 none Between and , biological scientists in America engaged in a major program of secret weapons development. They did so in large measure in response to a perceived threat: namely, that, German and Japanese scientists, and later the Russians, were pursuing biological weapons programs of their own. The successes of the American scientists only confirmed for them the reality of the threat they had perceived. If American bioweapons scientists could solve the complex problems of production and delivery of pathogenic organisms (such as enhanced Anthrax bacilli) to military and civilian targets, they had every reason to imagine that America s major foes could do the same. American scientists earlier conception of the threat of organic weapons served to shape the direction of their subsequent researches and in so doing had a central influence in the development of the science of biological warfare. The perception of enemy threat was a critical stimulus for American weapons research and development during World War II and the Cold War. The side of the story involving the physical sciences has been intensively studied and is well known, particularly with respect to the development of nuclear weapons, Radar, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. In contrast, the side of the story involving the biological sciences and the development of biological weapons has only begun to be described. Recent studies have provided us a general outline of when and where the United States pursued its Cold War biological weapons program, but the intimate dynamics of that development have yet to be brought to light and examined in any meaningful way. Such an analysis is now possible, thanks to the declassification of crucial archival documents. The goal of this dissertation research project is to examine how fears of enemy biological weapons projects catalyzed American biological weapons research and development, and how the continued perception of threat proceeded to structure the assumptions, motivations, justifications, rationalizations, and scientific and technical accomplishments of American Cold War biological weapons scientists. Because of the very sensitive nature of the U.S. BW program and its relationship to national security, most reports, memoranda, correspondence, etc. concerning bacteriological weapons remained classified and thus little known until relatively recently. Over the last two decades, as the result of declassification, the Freedom of Information Act, and the willingness of former Biological Defense Research Program scientists, politicians, and military officers to talk about their experiences, new material has become available. An initial research trip to both the National Security Archives at George Washington University and the National Archives at College Park in May allowed the researcher to prepare a draft of a dissertation chapter, a lecture on biological warfare and its development, a conference paper delivered in November at the History of ScienceSociety s annual meeting, and to confirm the importance of this topic for the history of science. This funding will allow the researcher to continue and complete research at the National Archives-College Park, with particular attention to the large documents collection of the Chemical Warfare Service (Record Group175.3-7). These large record groups contain interoffice memos, overviews of meetings, group presentations to senior military and civilian officials and, most importantly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly reports on laboratory research for a significant portion of the period in question doc23354 none The purpose of the proposed research effort is to develop methodology which allows simulation of effects playing an important role in nano-scale devices, within the framework of existing device simulators. The important underlying mechanisms are, on one hand, quantum effects such as tunneling and quantization, and, on the other hand, many-body effects, electron-ion interactions and single-dopant effects. The goal of the project is to include these effects into existing models and codes in such a way, that their influence on device performance is accurately represented, while simulations can be made at a computational cost comparable to that of existing particle-based device simulators. The basic approach to achieve this goal consists of the use of novel forms of effective quantum potentials and quantum versions of existing particle-based approaches to simulate short-range many-body interactions. Comparison will be made with experimental data provided by the Nanostructures Research Group at ASU, and Intel and Motorola. The calibrated tools can help device designers in fabricating optimal device structures with a reduced cost. The educational effort of this project will be closely tied to the proposed research activities. This will be accomplished via specially developed interdisciplinary courses in a classical as well as a distance learning format, and through the direct participation of students in the research project on the graduate as well as the undergraduate level. Course materials will be developed for this purpose and will be placed on the Computational Electronics Hub that is being developed as part of an existing NSF sponsored project doc23355 none Paul This award supports a two-year collaborative research project between Professor Prabasaj Paul, with the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Colgate University, and Professor Daniel Nkemzi, with the Department of Physics at the University of Buea, in Cameroon. They will investigate the application of Pade approximants to the problems of scattering of electromagnetic waves, and of photonic materials with maximal bandgaps. The problem of electromagnetic wave scattering from rough surfaces is important to many branches of physics and mathematics. Using some powerful mathematical techniques, the multipoint Pade approximants, the two researchers will investigate the scattering of waves off uneven surfaces with very large roughness parameters, as well as the transmission of light through regions with a spatially varying refractive index. The Pade approximants of the scattering matrix will preserve two important properties, reciprocity and unitarity. The investigators expect their model to yield better results than existing mathematical models that are based on a classical perturbation series. The study combines Professor Paul s expertise in condensed matter and quantum physics with Professor Nkemzi s knowledge of applied mathematics, principally in wave propagation. The results are expected to add new knowledge about wave scattering from rough surfaces, and will have application to many areas of mathematics and physics doc23356 none This research project will conduct two complementary studies that focus on generational technology change at both industry and organization levels of analysis. One will analyze an important, common, but neglected kind of innovation, where several generations of product technology co-exist in a market. The hypotheses to be tested will illuminate how multiple generations affect the emerging variety of firms and patterns of competition over time and help explain why such markets are heterogeneous. The tests use hazard-rate estimation and other event-history methods and inclusive archival data for US software products and their developer firms over 10 years. A complementary study at INSEAD of the European software market, funded separately from NSF, enables comparative and joint analysis. Still, this study ignores ways that individual firms adapt to generational technological change. Firm-level adaptation is important to theory of organizational innovation and to improving managers capabilities to cope with complex, turbulent markets. Therefore the second complementary study will be of change inside a firm covering the same products and time period using case studies to describe in-depth the evolution of organizational forms and strategies. The cases highlight co-evolution with technology and the market of organizational units, product-line scope, firm boundaries, and dynamic capabilities. They are developed with the funding and cooperation of a corporate partner, Microsoft Corporation. Both studies are theoretically linked to evolutionary theory, technology change, and organizational theory literatures. Both are preceded by technical analysis of software product-technology and its evolution. Together, these complementary projects will produce more complete prescriptions for managers and researchers and make strong contributions to theory and management of innovation doc23357 none ion, which allows correlated versions of a group of files to be referenced even if they span multiple users and file systems. - client-side differencing, which allows redundant data to be eliminated during network writebacks. - wide-area prefetching and caching algorithms. The combined effect of these techniques will allow allow users to interact with their files in a flexible, secure, location-independent manner doc23358 none Desanker This award supports 16 participants (nine from the United States and seven from Africa) in a US-Africa Workshop on Integrated Land Use Change in Southern Africa: Process Modeling, Impacts, and Implications for Sustained Development, scheduled for July 8-12, , in Zomba, Malawi. The co-organizers are Professor Paul Desanker, with the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, and Professor Mzoma Ngulube, with the Faculty of Environmental Science at Mzuzu University, Malawi. There will be a total of approximately 27 participants, who will be drawn from academia and governmental organizations in the United States, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, South Africa, Lesotho, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The workshop will draw upon process studies of land cover-land use change (LCLUC) to advance the discussion of how the emerging field of sustainability science can inform and guide the sustained development of complex human-ecological systems. The meeting is also expected to establish linkages between investigators in the United States and Africa for the development of collaborative, interdisciplinary research and education programs. The way people use land is fundamental to the livelihoods, political stability, and economies of many countries, especially in Southern Africa where there is a heavy reliance on land-based economic activities. And while the adverse impacts of land use are well known, they have not yet been well quantified. Workshop participants will focus on better understanding the processes, rates, and modeling of land use change in Southern Africa, especially for the linked human-river basin-ecological systems within the greater Zambezi River Basin and its components, the Miombo biodiversity ecoregion, and Southern Africa in general. The meeting will consist of plenary talks and small group discussions, and will also include site visits to examine ongoing projects within the Lake Malawi and Lake Chilwa basins. It is expected that the results of the workshop will lead to a state-of-the art synthesis of land use change for the Zambezi region. More broadly, the meeting s findings will inform the larger scientific community about integrating fundamental, multidisciplinary research studies on LCLUC into sustained development programs. This information will also be useful to policy makers and resource managers. Results will be disseminated through professional journals and meetings, and via a web site. The project supports the participation of five junior investigators from the United States, as well as a postdoc and graduate student from Africa. The Office of International Science and Engineering, the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, and the Division of Environmental Biology jointly support this award doc23359 none Removal of ultrafine particles, particularly in the nanoscale, pose a challenge to the semiconductor industry and other industries manufacturing material with clean surfaces. The laser assisted particle removal (LAPR) is a promising method for efficient removal of fine particles when other methods fail. Depending on where the laser energy is transferred and how the particle is separated from the surface, the LAPR is categorized by the PIs into four mechanisms. The objective of the proposed GOALI project is to investigate the physiochemical mechanisms of LAPR by experiments and computational analyses. A model will be developed to clearly explain the underlying physics of energy transfer and particle removal depending on the laser wavelength, particle size and the characteristics of medium surrounding the particle doc23360 none This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) is a 12 months study to develop new theoretical ideas about the processes through which firms evolve their dynamic capabilities. The study will contribute to the emerging body of work on the dynamic capabilities in two ways: a) by examining the role of managerial knowledge structures in shaping a firm s dynamic capabilities and their development: and b) by comparing the effects of differential environmental change (e.g., rate and predictability) on the process of capability development. In conducting the proposed research the teams will take advantage of a naturally occurring experiment created by the terrorists attacks of September . The large-scale dramatic change created by the events of September 11th will enable the research team to determine the impact of such change on the evolution of firms capabilities. The study focuses on two industries - defense and biotechnology--that were both dramatically affected by the events of September 11th , yet have been characterized traditionally by different rates and types of change. The team will utilize a qualitative approach and rely primarily on an interview methodology to assess the processes of capability development in participating divisions of defense companies and biotechnology firms. The results of the study will be communicated through a series of company briefings, as well as publications in academic journals doc23361 none Kleywegt This award supports 10 US participants in a US-South Africa Workshop on Operations Research for Global Logistics Involving Africa, scheduled for August 12-15, , in Pretoria, South Africa. The co-organizers are Professor Anton J. Kleywegt, with the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Mr. Hans W. Ittmann, in the Information and Communication Technology Department at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. There will be a total of approximately 30 participants, who will be drawn from academic, industrial, and governmental organizations in the United States, the Republic of South Africa, Mauritius, and South East Asia. The workshop will focus on global logistics and supply chain issues, with an emphasis on operations research models and techniques for global logistics involving Africa. The co-organizers expect the participants to develop a better understanding of the similarities and differences between first-world and third-world logistics problems, as well as the usefulness of different techniques for addressing these problems. Site visits will be made to logistics facilities in the Johannesburg Pretoria Midrand region. A major goal of the workshop is to establish linkages between the logistics communities in the United States and the Republic of South Africa for the development of collaborative research and education programs. Most logisticians throughout the rest of the world know little about Africa s unique logistics challenges. For example, South Africa s logistics system can be characterized as heterogeneous, yet it has a fragile infrastructure. Workshop participants will share information about advances in supply chain management and operations research applications in logistics. They will also identify those operations research problems involving Africa that are the most relevant and important to global logistics. Results of the meeting are expected to identify new research problems not presently encountered by US investigators. Additionally, the African researchers and practitioners will be exposed to new skills and tools that they can use to address some of their logistics problems. Workshop results will be disseminated through the web page of The Logistics Institute at George Tech, at http: www.tli.gatech.edu, as well as by CD-R copies. The project supports the participation of five junior investigators from the United States. The Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Design, Manufacturing, and Industrial Innovation jointly support this award doc23362 none The Luquillo Experimental Forest LTER program (LUQ) focuses on the long-term dynamics of tropical forest ecosystems characterized by large-scale, infrequent disturbance, rapid processing of organic material, and high habitat and species diversity. Research by LUQ has stimulated a new appreciation of the significance of large-scale disturbances in tropical forested ecosystems and the key role of the biota in shaping the response to these events. Hurricanes occurring one and 10 years after the LTER program began permitted scientists to capitalize upon landscape-scale natural experiments which are followed closely. Among the most important findings from these natural experiments is that detrital dynamics plays a central role in forest recovery by influencing carbon and nutrient storage and flow. The central theme proposed is that disturbance, through its effects on detrital dynamics, is a dominant ecosystem driver at LUQ. Pulses of detritus shift the flow of energy within the food web, modify the availability and distribution of nutrients, and feed back on the composition and productivity of plant and animal communities. Rapid processing of detritus distinguishes LUQ from other forested LTER sites, where decomposition takes 2-20 times as long. A combination of long-term measurements, field experiments, simulation modeling, and cross-site comparisons are proposed to address five questions: (1) How do climatic factors, litter quality, and detritivore diversity regulate decomposition of detrital pulses? (2) How do terrestrial and aquatic food webs differ in response to detrital pulses? (3) What is the effect of disturbance frequency on nutrient cycling, plant community composition, and the accumulation of soil organic matter? (4) To what degree is the export of carbon and nutrients from watersheds a result of soil characteristics that are affected by detrital dynamics? (5) How do elevationally related changes in climate impact plant and detritivore communities, and how do these feed back on the quantity and quality of litter inputs and decomposition? The research will be conducted in two spatial contexts. In mid-elevation tabonuco forest, LUQ will continue long-term measurements of ecosystem response to hurricanes, landslides, and anthropogenic disturbance. An experiment will be initiated to mimic increased frequency of hurricanes to investigate the effect of increased detrital inputs on nutrient cycling, community composition, and organic matter accumulation, along with. Manipulations of key groups of invertebrates to gain a better understanding of similarities in detrital processing between aquatic and terrestrial food webs. New plots will be established to examine the effect of elevationally related changes in climate, plant communities, and decomposers on detrital processing. Manipulative experiments will compare the relative importance of abiotic and biotic controls on decomposition in terrestrial and aquatic habitats. Long-term measurements of hydrological and nutrient fluxes in watersheds will relate soil characteristics to stream nutrient and organic matter losses and provide information to gauge the effects of future disturbances. Simulation models of key population, community, biogeochemical, and landscape processes provide null-model predictions to inform these new observations and experiments doc23363 none This research focuses on the adoption of new process technologies by firms. In particular, it looks at how the consequences of technology adoption are related to firms organizational structures and the stages of the industry lifecycles. Existing evidence on industry evolution shows that industries go through one or more major episodes of restructuring during their lifecycles. The evidence suggests that changes in the number of firms in an industry often occur at times when new technologies are introduced that change the competitive advantage among firms. We will identify how the firm s organizational structure affects its ability to exploit industry transitions by successfully adopting new technologies and acquiring capacity through mergers and acquisitions in the restructuring of industries. This project will help understand how new technologies diffuse through the population of firms, and how this diffusion affects the size and organization of firms and their incentives to merge or acquire other firms. Understanding how the process of diffusion occurs will help statisticians project future productivity increases and help in the evaluation of government policies to monitor increases in productivity doc23364 none This award is for a study entitled Crossing Death Valley Together: Industry-University Intellectual Property Dynamics which is designed to provide a systematic inquiry into the organizational-level dynamics between industry and universities around intellectual property (IP). While interest in IP has soared since the Bayh-Dole Act of , virtually all data collected on IP centers on the positives in the aggregate; the number of licenses negotiated the number of patents or disclosures, the total number of revenues or number of products launched. There is little information on what doesn t work, failures and strained relationships, or the impact on broader industry-university relations on current emphasis on IP. The material will be gathered through confidential (i.e., not-for-attribution), face-to-face interviews essential to get at the rationales, expectations, criteria and comparisons that frame the decision-makers understandings. Sources for the study will include university administrators, faculty and technology management officers, industry managers responsible for dealing with universities and a limited number of interviews with venture capital managers. Data analysis will center on in-depth content analysis of interview materials in search of underlying models of practice together with statistics characterizing the interviews and comparisons with available quantitative data including AUTM surveys and information on IP failures. The research will be conducted with the cooperation with the Industrial Research Institute and the Center for Innovative Management Systems doc23365 none Sheaff Description: This award provides partial support for the first ICFA School Workshop at the new Center for Instrumentation at Istanbul Technical University (ITU) in Istanbul, Turkey, June 17-28, . ICFA, which is the International Committee on Future Accelerators, has been holding a regular series of instrumentation schools workshops every two years in different locations. The US organizers for this school workshop are Dr. Marleigh Sheaff, Senior Scientist Emerita, University of Wisconsin, Madison and member of the International Committee on Future Accelerators (ICFA), and Dr. Muzaffer Atac of Fermilab and UCLA and the Scientific and Technical Advisor for the Center. The Turkish co-organizer is Professor Mahmut Hortacsu of Istanbul Technical University, who is also the Director of the new Center. The Center for Instrumentation will be a permanent facility where lecture courses and lab exercises will be offered on a regular basis to students from Turkey and other countries in the Africa, Near East, and South Asia region. This first workshop at the Center focuses on instrumentation in elementary particle physics. The goals of the workshop are to encourage the development of instrumentation by the students at their home institutions and to promote collaboration among physicists at early stages in their careers. Scope: Turkey is a suitable host for this workshop because of its location between Europe and Asia and its proximity to Africa, from which it is especially desirable to attract students. The Center for Instrumentation will provide training and online help with questions on instrumentation for the students after they return to their home institutions. Support for the new center will be provided by Istanbul Technical University and by the Turkish Science and Technology Council (TUBITAK). Several other Turkish universities are also expected to contribute. This award is supported by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Physics doc23366 none The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) will to administer a travel grant program for approximately 50-60 U.S. mathematical and computational scientists and graduate students to attend the International Conference on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM03), to be held on July 7-11, in Sydney, Australia. SIAM will partially support the travel and subsistence of U.S. participants doc23367 none Attributing function to genes, their regulatory elements and other functional DNA sequences will be the next step in genomics. This functional phase involves researchers from a variety of disciplines, including computer science and engineering. To facilitate the use of genomic informatin in function studies, pathways will be used to present the information. Pathways require detailed integration of diverse sources of information. Researchers will need transparent access that will be provided through this project. The project will integrate the data from a pathways rather than a sequence perspective, enabling scientists who do not do the sequencing to add functional information. New tools will enable users to visualize pathways data at mutiple levels of detail and abstraction. The use of XML will permit dissemination of query outputs for control of the data. Metabolic pathways, transcriptional regulation and protein synthesis pathways and signal transduction pathways will be the first incorporated in this web-based system. The research provides both for student support in both biology and computer science and a resource for the functional genomics community doc23368 none Eichelberger This award will be used to support the participation of various professional scientists and graduate students on a workshop devoted to processes along the Kurile, Kamchatka, and Aleutians arcs that comprise one of the most active and least understood regions of volcanism and tectonism on Earth. This workshop will bring together workers from the US, Japan, and Russia who are dealing with understanding the same natural processes but within different politically designated intervals of this zone of subduction. The benefits are expected to extend beyond basic science to the coordinated monitoring and mitigation of natural hazards, such as those from earthquakes, tsunamis, and explosive volcanic eruptions and the sharing of information relevant to natural resources. An important role of the meeting will be to acquaint students with the broader context of their areas of fieldwork and to facilitate direct contact with students from other countries. The intent is to stimulate international and interdisciplinary collaborations that will last throughout their careers. The meeting will also serve to inform and stimulate involvement by American geoscientists in their own island arc, the Aleutians. Although there has been rapid growth in hazards-driven monitoring and research there, the academic community of the lower 48 states has yet to take full advantage of the opportunities for basic research that the high level of activity of the Aleutians offers. The wish is to stimulate broader American participation in the volcanology of subduction, with a view toward developing a center-type initiative in the future doc23369 none This project involves a conference on social science disciplines and American Indian peoples. The conference (a) integrates existing knowledge of Native psychology and develops a research agenda for advancing such knowledge, (b) exchanges information on strategies and tools for teaching Native social science and developing a model for such courses and curricula, (c) examines ways to better integrate social research, teaching and practice with the needs and goals of Native communities, and (d) plans strategies for enhancing links between social science and Native communities. Native communities and individuals face a variety of unique problems and opportunities. Effective scientific assistance is needed to help address those problems and opportunities. Skills and expertise from social science could play a critical role in assisting with such important issues as Native economic advancement, educational attainment, community and individual health, and management of tribal resources and services. The potential value of psychological science to these outcomes especially exists because many past efforts to execute applied projects in Native communities have floundered as much or more due to human factors (such as factional infighting, poor planning, poor leadership, or inadequate skills) as because of financial or technological inadequacies to the projects. Social science has only scratched the surface in investigating the unique dynamics of Native cultures, Native social patterns, and Native psyches. This project will 1) summarize the state of social science knowledge of Native individuals and communities. 2) Develop a social science research agenda. 3) Promote exchanges and development of collaborations among social science researchers who focus on Native issues. 4) Plan a curriculum to teach Native Psychology and create an educational pipeline and an educational structure to develop Native Psychology scientists doc23370 none Memon Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Professor Nasir Memon, Department of Computer Science, Polytechnic University of New York, Brooklyn, New York, Dr. Bulent Sankur, Department of Electric Engineering, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey and Dr. Ismail Avcibas, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Uludag University, Bursa, Turkey. They plan to develop new steganalysis techniques for audio and image data. The development of techniques for audio and image steganography and the widespread availability of tools for the same have led to an increased interest in steganalysis techniques for image data. Their approach is based on the hypothesis that hiding a secret message in audio or image data leaves definite artifacts that can be detected using statistical analysis. The steganalyzer is built using multivariate regression on selected audio and image features and a training set of cover and stego images. Scope: The three scientists, N. Memon, I. Avcibas and B. Sankur have already been collaborating on an international project for three years. The project is expected to lead to joint publications and to the development of software to detect hidden messages in audio signals and image files. The steganalysis tools developed would be of significant benefit to the intelligence community for surveillance and monitoring purposes. The project involves visits between the PIs for short periods and visits by one U.S. graduate student and two Turkish graduate students for longer periods. The proposed plan also involves co-advising of all the graduate students working on the project doc23371 none Faculty Workshop on Teaching of First Course on Power Electronics, Electric Drives and Power Systems Applications of Power Electronics It is proposed to organize a faculty workshop on Teaching of First Courses on Power Electronics and Electric Drives and Advanced Course on Power System Applications of Power Electronics during January 2-4, at the Arizona State University, Tempe. This workshop is intended to promote teaching of power electronics and electric drives courses with the following objectives: Provide the highest quality undergraduate and graduate education in this field. Motivate and attract talented students. Discuss up-to-date laboratories with digital control. Facilitate teaching of these courses by EE faculty specializing in other fields. Identify best practices and learn from the experiences at different universities. The workshop will be organized jointly by Arizona State University and University of Minnesota. At University of Minnesota, as well as at ASU, restructuring of power electronics related courses is being actively pursued since . Two NSF funded projects namely, Innovations in Power Engineering Education in and DSP-Based Software-Reconfigurable Laboratory to Nationally Revitalize Electric Drives and Power Electronics Curricula in , provided a big impetus to these efforts at University of Minnesota. In January 3-5, , a workshop was organized at the Arizona State University, Tempe, where the new methods of teaching first courses in Power Electronics and Electric Drives were presented and the newly developed hardware laboratory setups were demonstrated. This workshop was extremely successful with approximately 125 registrants from across the country. In the proposed workshop in January at ASU, new significant developments in the undergraduate power electronics and electric drives laboratory setups will be demonstrated. Teaching methods developed and the improved lecture notes based on suggestions at the previous workshop will be presented. A poster session for interested faculty will be organized, where they will have an opportunity to describe their own efforts at improving the related curriculum. A panel session consisting of experts from government agencies and industry will be arranged to discuss challenges and opportunities in these fields. Applications of power electronics in power systems, made possible by the advancements in power semiconductor devices, represent the new frontier in the field of power electronics. A course on this topic, which has important applications in electric power network efficiency and security, will be discussed at this proposed workshop. As a part of the workshop proceedings, copies of poster presentations, complete lecture notes, lecture transparencies, and the simulation exercises discussed during the workshop will be distributed. Ample time will be provided to critique the course material and the laboratories developed through NSF funding. Ways of tightly coupling lecture material to simulations and hardware laboratory will be discussed. Plans to acquire laboratory equipment in a collaborative manner and to develop laboratory experiments will be discussed doc23372 none Cellular polarization is essential to morphogenesis, immune response, neuronal development, chemotropism, and motility. The budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is a well studied model eukaryote that exhibits numerous polarization phenomena, including signal-induced changes in cell shape and nuclear position. In the life cycle of S. cerevisiae, two haploid cells of opposite mating type, MATa and MATa, can conjugate to form a MATa a diploid cell. Each mating type constitutively secretes a peptide mating pheromone that transforms vegetatively growing cells of opposite type into gametes. To prepare haploids for cellular and nuclear fusion, pheromone triggers the induction of mating specific genes, arrest in the G1 phase of the cell cycle, polarized growth toward the mating partner, and nuclear migration to the tip of the mating projection. The molecular mechanisms underlying transmission of the mating signal are well understood. Communication of the signal from the plasma membrane to the cytoplasm is mediated by a receptor-coupled heterotrimeric G protein. When occupied by ligand, the pheromone receptors activate the pheromone-responsive Ga protein (encoded by GPA1) via guanine nucleotide exchange and the concomitant dissociation of Ga?GTP from the Gbg dimer (encoded by STE4 and STE18). The signal is then transmitted by Gbg to a mitogen?activated protein (MAP) kinase cascade. The MAP kinase module consists of Ste11 (the MEKK), Ste7 (the MEK), and Fus3 (the MAPK). In addition to stimulating the mating signal, Gbg serves as a positional cue. It directs the dual function protein, Far1, to the growth site. Far1 serves as a scaffold. It brings together elements that stimulate polarization of the actin cytoskeleton. Under physiological conditions, the Gbg-Far1 complex is presumed to assemble in the region of the cell surface that experiences the highest concentration of pheromone, and to mark this area for growth. Thus, the cell orients its growth toward the source of pheromone. This is called chemotropism. Recent results implicate the pheromone-responsive Ga protein, Gpa1, in control of signal-induced polarization and nuclear movement. In cells responding to pheromone, Gpa1 interacts directly with the mating-specific MAP kinase, Fus3, and with Kar3, a kinesin-like protein that is essential for nuclear movement during mating. Disruption of the Gpa1-Fus3 interaction confers defects in chemotropism and nuclear migration. The goals of this investigation are to determine which chemotropic factors depend on the recruitment of Fus3 by Gpa1, and to determine how Gpa1 affects nuclear movement during mating. In the work funded by NSF, the following hypothesis will be tested: Gpa1 co-localizes Fus3 and Kar3 so that Fus3 can activate Kar3. Because there is no precedent for regulation of kinesins by Ga proteins or MAP kinases, and because it is not known how kinesins are activated, this work promises to be of great value to those studying microtubule-associated motor proteins. The broader impact of this investigation is that it will enhance our understanding of chemotropism and nuclear movement, two fundamental aspects of cellular function. Students at all levels will be involved in this research doc23373 none Harmon The Andrews LTER program seeks to understand the long-term dynamics of forest and river ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest. The Central Question guiding Andrews LTER research is: How do land use, natural disturbances, and climate change affect three key sets of ecosystem services: carbon and nutrient dynamics, biodiversity, and hydrology? These ecosystem services represent scientifically and socially important, tractable variables, and their responses are posited to represent different classes of ecosystem behavior at the landscape scale. Climate, land use, and natural disturbances are the major drivers of change in the Pacific Northwest region. The approach used to address this question will be multi-faceted involving retrospective analysis, time series observations, experiments, and use of simulation models for synthesis, extrapolation in time, and interpolation in space. The principal spatial scale of inference for LTER studies is the Andrews Forest and adjacent upper Blue River watershed, an area of 16,000 ha. Work associated with the LTER will be coordinated with studies aimed at regional questions. The principal temporal extent of proposed LTER studies spans the past 500 yr and to several centuries projected into the future. This proposal represents the strategic plan of activities designed to advance science for individual disciplines, integration, and cross-site comparisons. Thus, the Andrews LTER is used as the core of a larger set of integrated studies. Essential long-term studies will be continued and others added to increase spatial and temporal overlap of scales. The standard 5 LTER core activities will be addressed by work in seven component areas: (1) climate, (2) hydrology, (3) disturbance, (4) ecophysiology, (5) carbon and nutrient dynamics, (6) biodiversity, and (7) stream-forest interactions. In this grant cycle, studies continue to examine the interaction of the drivers of change and responding processes and taxa, but the conceptual emphasis will be on temporal behavior, its causes, and its consequences for ecosystem change. We will examine temporal behavior over time scales of days to hundreds of years focusing on: (1) modulation, (2) temporal lags, (3) spatial coherence, (4) path dependence, (5) hysteresis, and (6) alternative stable states. Exploring these aspects of temporal behavior help to address the Central Question by quantifying natural temporal variability and providing insights into mechanisms that control processes. A major goal will be to test predictive rules (i.e., hypotheses) regulating temporal behaviors. Another focus of synthesis will be small watersheds, an important landscape unit providing opportunity for integration of climatic, ecosystem, and hydrological processes as well as knowledge of temporal and spatial scaling. The ultimate goal in this integration is to create a spatially 3-dimensional (including subsurface and air flow) understanding of the temporal dynamics of the 3 states of matter involved in biogeochemical and hydrologic cycles within a watershed. Past experiments, long term records of climate, stream flow, nutrient exports, and vegetation change, as well as modeling will enhance this integration effort. By understanding this key landscape unit, future broader-scale efforts will be strengthened. Andrews science and scientists continue to advance understanding and management of forests and streams of the Pacific Northwest through communication with students, teachers, policy makers, land managers, and the general public. Information management, an essential activity for both research and education, emphasizes ease of use, increased accessibility, and portability of many forms of information doc23374 none This dissertation research project explores the ways in which systems of value are constructed within and around technology-based international development digital divide projects, where discourses and traditions of technology innovation, nonprofit fundraising, commercial technology, and international development intersect. A central hypothesis is that IT-oriented nonprofits will face a significant challenge as they reconcile these intersections, such as that between nonprofit principles (based on altruism and a concern about the conditions of disparity) and technoromantic ones (based on inevitable progress, often facilitated by commercial capital). The ways in which these contradictions are worked out within individual organizations will reflect the ways in which participants selectively identify with nonprofit, business, and technology traditions as well as the specific generational and historical experiences of the participants. Are these new systems of value fundamentally different from those of earlier nonprofit projects, and if so, can they be understood as expressing an elective affinity between new formations of capital and technoromantic ideals? (Gerth and Mills , Weber ) What is it about certain values that encourages actors to perceive them as worthy of adoption? The researcher will examine the ways in which individuals within these groups understand their work and participation in relation to broader projects of development, technology innovation, and global information infrastructures. Three nonprofit groups in Massachusetts have been selected for a multi-sited study; each represents a particular attitude towards the intersection of the fields of development and technology. Geekcorps, which sends techie volunteers to assignments in Ghana, is a nonprofit run in the spirit of a commercial startup. KITE accepts computer donations and then reconfigures them with open source software and redistributes them to nonprofits in Africa, bridging the international nonprofit community and the Open Source movement. ThinkCycle is a voluntary association of students at MIT working with nonprofits overseas to design aninformation architecture that allows engineers to work collaboratively with NGOs in the design of development solutions; engineers turned nonprofit development workers. In order to access both self-conscious and transparent systems of value and meaning, research methods will include participant observation, interviews, and textual and social network analyses. This study will bring theories of social dramas and liminality to bear on the emergent aspect of these organizations, and to the contestation of meanings that takes place in the negotiation of values and categories. The researcher will apply exchange theory to the analysis of the complex, layered web of giving and receiving that takes place around nonprofit and development work, and theories of value to make sense of the ways in which participants understand the value of technology and of nonprofit work as means to further certain ideologies, and as ends in themselves doc23375 none This research project will explore the impact of customer learning and behavior on the optimal pricing of constrained capacity. The research team seeks to characterize instances when incorporating customer behavior will lead to strategically optimal policies that deviate significantly from tactically optimal policies that ignore customer behavior and implicitly assume a single interaction between buyer and seller. This research will provide insight into how pricing dynamics are influenced by the interplay between seller policies and customer expectations. It has the potential to lead to significant improvements in current commercial pricing policies in practice. Such improvements would lead to better capacity allocation resulting in improved economic efficiencies. The key results of this research project will be published in archival and trade journals and presented at national conferences, academic and industry seminars. In addition, the principal investigators will create and co-teach a new Ph.D. level course in revenue management and develop educational software embodying the key concepts of this rapidly developing field, thereby promoting teaching, training and learning. The problem of optimal pricing of perishable constrained capacity over time has received considerable attention. If a good perishes instantaneously and the willingness to pay for the good increases over time -- as in the case of airline seats and hotel rooms -- the problem of determining optimal prices is known as revenue management. If the willingness to pay decreases over time -- as in fashion goods and consumer electronics, the problem is known as markdown management. Revenue management has been estimated to provide $1 billion annually for large airlines while markdown management has been credited with increasing revenues by up to 7%. It is therefore not surprising that both revenue management and markdown management have been the topics of considerable academic research and substantial industry investment. Research into pricing of constrained products has generally focused on maximizing the total expected revenue (or profitability) achieved from fixed capacity. This is the goal of the EMSRb approach to airline revenue management as well as the focus of markdown management systems. This approach is appropriate when buyers and sellers will interact only once. However, if there are repeated interactions among buyers and sellers, then a seller s action today will influence the expectations (and hence the behavior) of buyers in the future. For example, a seller who offers distressed inventory at a deep discount will train some buyers to expect this in the future and change their behavior accordingly. Similarly, a seller who provides more availability of inventory to a particular market segment than the competition will train buyers to turn to him first. In both cases, sellers may achieve higher returns over time from pricing policies that incorporate the impact of customer behavior rather than simply maximizing the return from their current stock of inventory doc23376 none In this Grant Opportunity for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) project, coordinated studies of materials will be conducted. Semicrystalline polymers offer the highly desirable combination of strength conferred by crystalline material and toughness provided by finely dispersed noncrystalline regions among the crystallites. The morphology and orientation distribution of this nano-scale composite structure dictates the ultimate material properties. This class of polymers enables production of high strength fibers, films and injection molded parts widely used from automotive to biomedical industries. Polyolefins are the dominant semicrystalline polymers (over 125 billion pounds produced annually) and play a vital role in economic growth and increased standard of living. Yet the fundamental understanding of structure formation that underlies their processing-structure-property relations remains largely a mystery. Scientists at Caltech and Chevron-Phillips Co. are teaming up to discover the molecular basis of the dramatic effects of processing history on the microstructure and material properties of polyethylene. Unique experimental capabilities at Caltech enable real-time observations of structure development during and after precisely-defined shearing under isothermal conditions. Chevron-Phillips is providing an array of polyethylene samples that span the molecular variables considered most important in industry. Coordinated studies of these materials will be conducted at Caltech and Chevron-Phillips to provide insight into the cascade of events that occur during flow-enhanced crystallization, how these dynamics depend on molecular attributes, and how these dynamics relate to the structure and mechanical properties of blown films made from precisely the same polyethylene samples. In turn, the molecular insights into processing-structure-property relations emerging from this university-industry collaboration can speed development of new polyethylene resins for improved production rates and or superior product performance. The partnership between Caltech and Chevron-Phillips will provide shared mentorships for graduate and undergraduate students relating their academic training to the industrial issues doc23377 none This grant provides funding for the development of models for analysis of part-fixture dynamics in machining and application of these models to the synthesis of dedicated and flexible fixturing systems. The models developed in this research will enable part-fixture interaction to be considered in the stability analysis of multiple-point machining processes such as milling. In addition, the models will allow the impact of part-fixture dynamics on the final part quality to be analyzed and accounted for in the synthesis of both dedicated and flexible fixturing systems. To achieve this goal, a dynamic model of the part-fixture system accounting for the effects of micro-slip induced damping will be developed. A simplified lumped parameter approach based on contact elasticity principles will be used to develop the model. The model will account for nonlinearities arising from unilateral contact conditions, micro-slip and gross stick-slip. In addition, a modified dynamic friction tester will be used to develop empirical models of part-fixture contact friction for use with the dynamic model. The dynamic part-fixture model will be applied to the analysis and synthesis of both dedicated and flexible machining fixtures such as the pin-array flexible fixture. On a fundamental level, the models developed in this research will complement the existing body of scientific knowledge in part fixturing. On a practical level, it will provide the necessary dynamic analysis and synthesis tools, heretofore unavailable, for designers and end-users of dedicated and flexible fixturing systems. Application of these models will lead to the development and implementation of truly process-capable fixtures doc23378 none ion will be a valuable tool to apply to many difficult optimization problems in large-scale manufacturing (e.g., factory process control), robotics (navigation), multi-agent coordination, and other state-of-the-art applications of reinforcement learning. Since this research combines ideas from the fields of decision theory, operations research, control theory, cognitive science, and AI, it may provide a useful bridge that has the potential to foster contributions in all of these fields doc23379 none Thatchenkery This award provides travel support for a delegation of senior and junior scientists to the US-India Workshop: Learning from the Indian Development Experience, Bangalore, November . US PI Tojo Thatchenkery, Department of Social & Organizational Learning, George Mason University (GMU) and Chiranjib Sen, School of Public Policy, Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Bangalore are co-organizers of this workshop. This gathering of scholars from a range of disciplines will focus on India s development experience, particularly as related to the emerging Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry. The assumption is that the Indian development model is different from other national development success stories such as for Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. The workshop will contribute to fuller understanding of India s innovation-led development (private sector) model and its applicability to other developing countries. The workshop will foster Indo-US collaboration and create a collaborative program between GMU and the IIM s School of Public Policy, which will study policy implications of ICT for India s globalization efforts. The proceedings of the workshop will be published. Funding for this workshop is provided jointly by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Social and Economic Sciences doc23380 none This GOALI project is a collaboration with Universal Instruments Corporation to study how a transition to lead (Pb)-free solders will affect manufacturing processes for electronic packaging. A comprehensive treatment of solder joint reliability requires at least three major research efforts: (1) Development of a fundamental understanding of solder joint microstructure (grain size structure, phase regions, intermetallics), including the ability to predict microstructure at any given time during any given thermal history. (2) Development of constitutive relations which quantify deformation properties as functions of temperature, strain rate, and detailed microstructure. (3) Development of damage functions that quantify the progression of damage for given temperature, strain stress (or integrated functions thereof such as ductility exhaustion) and microstructure. In principle, after characterizing these relations, establishing a predictive capability for the mechanical behavior and reliability of Pb free solder joints is relatively straightforward, although extensive, mechanical modeling is required. This capability would allow the prediction of accelerated test results for specific solder based assemblies, as well as the interpretation of experimental results and extrapolation to service conditions. However, without the ability to predict the variation of important aspects of the microstructure over the history of the joint, efforts 2 and 3 above become at best semi-empirical and highly questionable for purposes of extrapolation. Particular complications are the effects of the progress of damage and the (often cyclic) effects of the thermal mismatch induced deformations. This project addresses significant issues related to environmentally benign manufacturing, with specific emphasis on manufacturing electronics. It is expected that advancements in fundamental knowledge of material behavior and processing of this material substitution will be made. There is direct involvement of undergraduate and graduate students through both research and an educational component, strengthen by the industrial collaboration doc23381 none This is a US-Polish collaborative research project on new possibilities for Higgs physics and electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB). The principal investigator is Dr. John Gunion from the University of California at Davis. His Polish collaborator is Dr. Bohdan Grzadkowski from Warsaw University. The researchers will focus on exploring new possibilities for WESB and Higgs physics as well as on means for testing these new ideas using forthcoming accelerator data. Progress made in this research area could have profound impact on interpreting new accelerator data in such a way that fundamental progress in the construction of an ultimate theory of elementary particle fundamental interactions will be possible. This project will also provide US graduate students opportunities to enhance their experience and familiarity with the global science and engineering world. This project in physics fulfills the program objectives of bringing together leading experts in the U.S. and Central Eastern Europe to combine complementary efforts and capabilities in areas of strong mutual interest and competence on the basis of equality, reciprocity, and mutuality of benefit doc23382 none This project is designed to improve scientific understanding of the connection between family organization and child well-being. Surprisingly, despite the well-established connection, we continue to know little about how and why the organization and content of social ties shape child outcomes. This project uses the significant variation in family organization created by family disruption in Lesotho to elaborate mechanisms linking family organization and resource transfers to children. Adopting a life course approach, the research team will collect contextualized, child-centered data on living arrangements, social ties, and resource transfers, and the reasons for their variation within and across families. Methods will include the collection of life histories, as well as in-depth interviews, case studies, and participant observation focused on two lowland communities. Recent research with U.S. families has suggested that biological relatedness may be important to the transfer of resources to children. We assess the generalizability of this finding, and that of competing explanations, by exploring their plausibility in Lesotho, an African setting characterized by complex and varied living arrangements, where it has been argued that extended kin provide a safety net for children. Lesotho is one of four countries in the world where national adult HIV prevalence exceeds 30%. The devastation created by this epidemic is further compounded by long-term poverty and recent drought. A better understanding of the social processes that underlie resource transfers to children promises to inform policies designed to promote the welfare of children in Lesotho, and other countries in the midst of such crises. More generally, this project will contribute to our understanding of the factors that promote children=s resilience in times of family disruption, and in so doing, further delineate the boundaries of the family institution as a social welfare provider. This research is supported by NSF s Sociology program and NSF s Office of International Science and Engineering doc23383 none The objective of the proposed activities under the Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) with Agere Systems Inc. is to develop a strong well-integrated research and education program focused on the understanding of the mechanical and tribological properties of chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) processes for semiconductor manufacturing applications. Integration of low-k materials in the metallization structures creates severe problems during process integration. One of the major challenges in the process integration after the incorporation of low-k materials is CMP of these films due to the reduced modulus and cohesive strength. Due to the emergence of CMP as the method of choice for global planarization of dielectric and metal films, the frictional forces generated during the CMP process have assumed significant importance. Understanding the mechanical and tribological properties of complex stacks involving low-k dielectrics is critical for successful evaluation and implementation of these materials and the main goals of the proposed research are to obtain the fundamental understanding of the nature of surface planarization and identify the mechanism to control the CMP process. As part of this GOALI proposal, Agere Systems Inc. will support as in-kind services like: a) provide CMP consumables (wafer, slurry, and pad) to perform the CMP experiments, b) provide engineer scientist from the industry to serve as a thesis dissertation advisor, b) provide resident workspace for a graduate student together with all on-site cost of materials and supplies to support the research, c) assign one engineer scientist (approximately 10 % of their time to work and monitor the progress of the research), e) to emphasize technology transfer and implementation of research findings in manufacturing. This GOALI proposal aims to synergize the Agere-USF partnership by providing opportunities for faculty, postdoctoral fellows and students to conduct research and gain experience with production processes in an industrial setting. The university-industry collaboration will provide additional opportunity for students to work with industrial scientists and use of their additional state-of-the-art equipment facilities. Apart from providing hands-on experience, the proposed research will provide a unique opportunity for the students to be involved in interdisciplinary research- a must for future success. Results of the project will be disseminated by paper presentation in regional and national conferences, and published in appropriate scientific journals doc23384 none George E. Karniadakis Brown University ITR DDDAS Generalized Polynomial Chaos: Parallel Algorithms for Modeling and Propagating Uncertainty in Physical and Biological Systems The applications we target are prototype problems in bioengineering and in nanotechnology. The coupled nature of such problems and the many parameters involved provide a good testbed for evaluating the performance of the new algorithms at resolutions from 0.1 to 1 billion degrees-of-freedom. The sources of uncertainty may be caused by incomplete knowledge or fluctuations in boundary or initial conditions, geometric domain, transport coefficients, mechanical properties, and other external forcing or volumetric sources. The proposed work will have significant and broad impact as it will establish a composite error bar in large-scale simulations and will enable numerical stochastic approaches to large-scale simulations of physical and biological systems. It will also benefit many other fields including climate and network web traffic modeling, where current uncertainty modeling approaches are inadequate. Stochastically simulated responses can serve as sensitivity analysis that could potentially guide experimental work and dynamic instrumentation doc23385 none The increasing competitiveness of North American, Western European, and some Asian markets is forcing firms to search for new growth opportunities around the globe. At the same time, discontent with globalization has increased over concerns about environmental degradation, a widening gap between rich and poor, and loss of both local autonomy and cultural diversity. Consistent with theory, a growing number of US and foreign companies are seeking new business opportunities by focusing attention on the most ignored market segment of the world: those 4 billion at the bottom of the economic pyramid who earn less than $5 a day and lack access to goods and services that meet their most basic needs. The ability of firms to serve a market they have traditionally ignored requires significant reframing of the business challenge by managers, the development of cutting-edge innovations and technologies, and fundamental organizational transformation through the creation of new business models. With support from the National Science Foundation s Innovation and Organizational Change Program, this study will follow the attempts of five multinational firms over time to test that theory in the field as they conceive, propose, implement, expand or terminate projects that meet the needs of a new market segment. The study will occur over a period of three years, during which time managers expect that their initiatives will either succeed or fail. If successful, these initiatives will become businesses that signal a significant change for their firms in terms of strategy, structure, and process. This research will focus on how firms can most effectively organize to develop, implement, and diffuse these disruptive innovations. Five firms in three industries -- Chemicals (Dow and Dupont), Consumer Products (Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble), and Beverages (Coca-Cola) -- have committed to provide access to use a multi-method approach to collect longitudinal data on more than eight initiatives. Primary data collection will occur through on-site, semi- structured interviews with key managers who can lend insight into the processes employed to affect change in their companies. Interviewees range from members of the company s Executive Team to in-country project managers, as well as external stakeholders (e.g., NGOs, public entities) utilized by the focal organization to move their projects forward. Investigators will also analyze internal communications including memos, reports, meetings, and email, to validate data collected in interviews. These data will be used to inductively build and refine a testable model of organizational change related to these types of ventures. To test and validate the model, the final phase of the study includes the development of a survey instrument and its distribution to a larger sample of firms engaged in projects to serve the world s poorest people. This research has important intellectual and practical implications. Management literature has recognized that over the past decade a set of complex issues has emerged as a critical challenge for corporations attempting to optimize economic, social, and environmental performance. A substantial body of scholarly work focusing on global issues calls for fundamental industrial transformation in the future, but offers little insight or prescription for how or why that might occur. By grounding this work in the actual activities of real firms, this study will not only provide insight into actual bottom-up and top-down change and innovation processes employed by companies in the marketplace today, but also help explain how and why such processes succeed or fail. Results of the study will be extremely valuable to a broad group of stakeholders. Companies are interested in more tangible recommendations of how they might transform themselves to meet the challenges of sustainable development and grow in the future. NGOs and governments around the globe are interested in forming a better understanding of how to effectively engage companies to work together to increase the economic fortunes of a broader group of the world s population doc23386 none The academic underachievement of certain ethnic minority groups in America continues to perplex educators, scientists, and policy makers, despite thousands of studies, hundreds of remedial programs, and decades of being considered a crisis. Several recent trends add weight to the crisis. First, within the next 50 years, people identified as ethnic minority will comprise half the U.S. population. Second, new waves of immigrants continue to arrive, ensuring fundamental but unknown changes in the intercultural dynamics of schools and other contexts. Third, the United States has evolved into a knowledge-driven economy, making a solid education, particularly in math and science, vital for an increasingly large sector of the workforce. Finally, recent federal legislation calls for annual standardized assessments of school children, a prospect that may disadvantage certain minorities who typically underperform on these tests. More than ever, a sizable proportion of our nation s children are at risk of academic failure, posing a serious threat to the current Administration s goal of leaving no child behind. In line with this national goal, the Center for Research on Culture, Development and Education (CRCDE), housed at New York University (NYU) will conduct research designed to identify pathways to academic success for all children. Prior research has focused narrowly on a single context (e.g., the family, peer relationships, school quality, etc.) in predicting academic outcomes, or has investigated the roles of ethnicity, race, immigrant status, gender, or socioeconomic status separately. Neither approach, however, has adequately addressed the ways in which multiple contexts contribute to educational success and or disparities, nor how pathways vary by developmental period and culture. Furthermore, an over-emphasis on group differences has resulted in the neglect of patterns of academic outcomes within ethnic, socioeconomic, or cultural groups. Finally, studies across all of these areas have tended to utilize single methodologies, rarely integrating survey, ethnographic, experimental, and observational methods. To address these gaps, the CRCDE will gather and disseminate data about the pathways that lead to successful academic engagement and performance among culturally diverse children and adolescents. The scientific mission of the CRCDE is to use an integrative conceptual framework, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and multiple methods to (1) identify the nature of relationships that link children s experiences in five educationally relevant contexts, home, school, peers, caregivers work, and media, to their academic engagement and performance; (2) examine whether and how these processes vary within and across cultural groups and across developmental periods; and (3) advance an understanding of how home, peers, school, caregivers work, and media affect one another and jointly influence children s and adolescents academic engagement and performance. The educational mission of the CRCDE is to (1) train a new generation of scholars, especially those from under-represented minority groups, to engage in research that advances the scientific mission; (2) produce instruments and methods that will strengthen the scientific capacity of the research community to conduct culturally sensitive research on academic engagement and performance; and (3) transmit findings to policy makers, practitioners in education, and researchers, through dissemination of findings and lessons for educational policy and practice. The Center s location in the diverse context of New York City (NYC) is ideal for a center devoted to research at the confluence of culture, development, and education doc23387 none This Grant Opportunity for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) provides funding for the development of a unified time-scale-frequency domain signal processing technique that is germane to the health assessment and time-to-failure prediction of rolling bearings. The project is aimed at bridging an existing gap between the state-of-the-art of signal processing research in the academia and current bearing condition monitoring practice on the factory floor, and will focus on establishing the theoretical foundation for an effective and efficient algorithm to estimate a defective bearing s damage status and remaining service life. The research will consists of numerical simulations in multiple domains, custom-designed experimental validation, and systematic analysis of historical data provided by the industrial partner of this project. The developed technique will be implemented in the form of a bearing assessment firmware, residing on a Digital Signal Processor platform, and installed in a handheld bearing data analyzer, suited for direct industry translation to bearing manufacturers and end-users. This research, if successful, will lead to improved capability of concurrent machine fault feature extraction in multiple domains. Such a technique will be essential to reducing costly and unexpected machine downtime, and improving product quality. In a broader context, the research will enhance existing curricula in manufacturing and mechanical engineering, create new, research-based educational materials, promote collaborations between a major public university and the bearing industry, and improve the overall education infrastructure at the PI s institution. Ultimately, by being able to more reliably predict the health status of a machine system and improve operation safety and productivity, the research has the potential to impact a wide range of manufacturing processes other than bearings doc23388 none Strahler This award supports Professor Alan Strahler, a graduate student, and colleagues from Boston University for travel to collaborate in remote sensing research with Dr. David Lupp and others of the CSIRO Earth Observation Center in Canberra, Australia and with Professor Ziaowan Li and colleagues of the Institute of Remote Sensing Application of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. NSF support will enable the US group to participate in ongoing field measurements in Australia and China and to work with their collaborators to improve their theory. Their work focuses on the imaging of vegetation canopies from aircraft or satellites using radiometric instruments. They are developing an alternative to the radiative transfer theory of how light is scattered by vegetation canopies. Their approach describes the canopy as a collection of discrete three-dimensional objects, which leads to many practical applications. Their fundamental objective is to retrieve details from the vegetation cover such as the size, shape and spacing of the leaves and plants. This information will have direct application to studying the carbon balance and dynamics of vegetated ecosystems at landscape scales doc23389 none Award As the fourth most important contributor to human calorie consumption, the potato bears an enormous influence worldwide. Its economic significance is evidenced by the large output percentage of potato by the developing world. Thus, the global influence and impact of potato makes it extremely important and relevant to plant biology and genome research. No other crop system currently being subjected to intensive genomic research possesses such a high degree of real-world applicability juxtaposed with biological uniqueness. This project is focused on furthering the understanding of important features of potato biology: tuber development, disease resistance, heterozygosity, and polyploidy. As potato is highly related to other important Solanaceae species such as tomato, we will incorporate other Solanaceae species into our studies such that comparative analyses can be performed and that we can leverage our potato-based resources for maximal gain. This project will provide a comprehensive set of resources for genome and transcriptome profiling of disease resistance responses and key developmental traits and pathways. These comprehensive resources include: targeted genome sequence analysis of potato and other Solanaceae genomic regions where numerous resistance (R) genes and general resistance traits have been identified; an evolutionary resource for resistance traits including models and bioinformatic tools for prediction and functional analysis of durable candidate resistance genes. A transcriptome resource will be generated by microarray analysis of Solanaceae development, and response to abiotic and biotic stress. We will extend the use of these arrays outside the project by soliciting proposals focused on additional physiological conditions from the Solanaceae community. All data will be made public in a rapid fashion to allow the entire Solanaceae community access to the data. This database will provide the first comprehensive resource for gene expression patterns in the Solanaceae family. We will extend our knowledge of plant genomics to the community through an outreach program that will include a training program for high school and college students and instructors in plant genomics including bioinformatics and data mining for marker development for tracing the origin of Native American potato varieties and for studies on potato evolution and breeding for crop improvement. Solanacae gardens and associated public educational programs on plant genetic diversity, plant breeding and the impact of plant genome research on society. We will also have Each of these components, in conjunction with the overarching project objectives, will lead to a comprehensive understanding and working knowledge of potato, one of the most important dicot foods in the world. Deliverables: Public Solanaceae dataset of annotated R gene region sequence, R genes and R gene candidates (SOLAR) Conatcts: Baker, Buell, Brown, Jahn, Jiang, May, Bradeen, Helgeson, Austin-Phillips Public predictive bioinformatic tools to identify candidate resistance traits for functional testing of resistance genes Contact: May Public functional genomic Solanaceae resource, Solanaceae Gene Expression Database, of expression profiles Contacts: Buell, Baker, Jiang Gene expression profiling of Solanaceae through external collaborations with the plant community Contact: Buell Functional identification of genes operating in pathogen defense pathways using silencing Contact: Baker Genomics training program for high school and college students. Community Solanum gardens and public information on Solanum Contacts: Baker, Brown, Buell Internet Addresses (Web or Email) for Project Information: 1. NSF Potato Genome Project http: www.bakerlab.usda.gov NSFPotatoGenome 2. TIGR: NSF Potato Functional Genomics http: www.tigr.org tdb potato 3. Solanaceae Genome Network http: soldb.cit.cornell.edu index.html doc23390 none The objective of this Grant Opportunity for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) grant is to develop a solid freeform fabrication process, termed as Multi-Materials Laser Densification (MMLD), for dental restorations. There are currently between 10,000 and 15,000 dental laboratories in the US and a majority of these laboratories use porcelain-fused-to-metal (PFM) restoration for permanent fixed prosthodontics. PFM restoration is a very time consuming and labor intensive work. Labor costs account for about 90percent of the final cost to the patient, while dental materials only account for less than 5percent of the final cost. It is anticipated that with MMLD technology a dental restoration can be built in about one hour from a computer model without part-specific tooling and human intervention. As such, the labor cost of the dental restoration will be substantially reduced, while a better and faster service can be provided to dental patients. The eventual goal is to provide MMLD facilities as on-line stations for remote fabrication. At the end of this three-year project fixed single unit prosthodontic restorations will be demonstrated using the MMLD machine and the STL file of human tooth provided by the industrial partner. To achieve the goal set forth above, clear strategies have been defined to (i) investigate line-by-line and point-by-point powder delivery and localized laser densification of multiple materials, (ii) address various engineering challenges arising from complex laser-material interactions, mismatches of multiple materials, and small feature sizes due to the nature of dental restoration, and (iii) perform modeling and simulation so that dental restorations with adequate mechanical properties, desired aesthetic appearance, good dimensional accuracy and fine surface finish can be produced in a precise, economical and reproducible fashion. The PI plans to continue to encourage women and under-represented minority undergraduate students to participate in this GOALI project. The research experiences in integrating materials laser processing, and solid freeform fabrication for biomedical applications provides students with a strong incentive to take on graduate education in this emerging area doc23391 none An interdisciplinary research team at Lehigh University is exploring melt manipulation during polymer processing. Melt manipulation is promising for the manufacturing of polymer-based products with enhanced properties. Because property enhancements can be realized the expanded usage of recycled materials also becomes possible. During melt manipulation, an otherwise conventional molding cycle is augmented by the application of oscillatory mechanical energy to the polymer melt during processing. This affects the material orientation and relaxation dynamics that occur during processing and in-turn the internal structure and overall properties of the final product. The project is focused on learning how, when, and where to apply the technique to yield beneficial results. The detailed sequential cause and effect relationships that connect applied melt manipulation conditions to final product quality attributes are being explored using a coupled experimental and analytical approach. Components of the study are focusing on relationships between 1) applied machine processing conditions and localized processing conditions throughout the mold, 2) localized processing conditions and molecular orientation, 3) local molecular orientation and localized material response, and 4) localized material response and overall product performance. To assure the relevance and success of the effort, significant industrial involvement and guidance is included. The broad educational impact of the program is being enhanced by the inclusion of undergraduate students from a number of schools. In addition, a target group of middle school students from an under-represented minority population are being exposed to the research as part of an established and award winning cooperative education program doc23392 none Ghosh, Bijoy K Washington University CRCNS: Collaborative Research : How is Information Coded in Turtle Visual Cortex ? Visual stimuli evoke a propagating wave of activity in the visual cortex of freshwater turtles. Preliminary work suggested that information about the position of stimuli in visual space is coded in the spatiotemporal dynamics of these waves. Effectively, there may be a map of visual space to the dynamics of the visual cortex. This hypothesis is being examined in a collaborative effort involving three laboratories. David Senseman in San Antonio is using voltage sensitive dye methods to record the waves produced by presenting spots of light at 35 spots on the retina. These studies will characterize the features of the map based on repeated presentations of stimuli at 35 loci. Philip Ulinski in Chicago is developing a large-scale model of the visual pathway of turtles. Models of individual retinal ganglion cells that combine both classic filter-based approaches to modeling ganglion cells, with compartmental modeling of ganglion cells are being constructed. They are being used to construct 35 patches of a model retina that match the 35 loci. Physiological studies of the biophysics of neurons in the lateral geniculate complex of turtles are being carried out. They are used to develop a model of the lateral geniculate complex, which is the last step in modeling the retino-geniculate-cortical pathway. Bijoy Ghosh in St. Louis is developing refined estimation techniques that allow the position of a visual stimulus to be estimated from the dynamics of the cortical waves. This work is providing the mathematical framework needed to characterize a potential map of visual space to the dynamics of the wave. This work is significant because it is characterizing a novel method of coding information in visual cortex that may apply to higher order cortical areas in mammals, as well as turtles doc23393 none Sawyer & Thiaw This award supports a three-year collaborative research project between Ms. Karyn Sawyer, with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), Dr. Wassila Thiaw, with UCAR s African Desk at the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), and Dr. Saidou Sall, with the Laboratorie de Physique de l Atmosphere of the Ecole Superieure Polytechnique at the University of Dakar in Senegal. They will study the interannual variability of African waves and influence on Sahel precipitation. African waves are inherent components of the West Africa monsoon system. They start from the African interior, and as they multiply and move westward mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) often form and develop within the waves. These waves are most active during July and August. This is also the period of active convective rains in the Sahel. But little is known about the interannual variability of the waves or how they influence the interannual variability of rainfall in the Sahel. In order to determine the influence of the African waves on Sahel rainfall variability, the investigators will consider the relationship between the number of African waves and the amount of Sahel precipitation, the relationship between the number of African waves and the position and intensity of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), and whether the African waves and the position of the ITCZ modulate Sahel rainfall. They will use NCEP-UCAR data, satellite imagery, and field data obtained from observation studies. A convective index will be derived for each time step to determine the characteristics associated with the life cycle of the MCSs. Statistical analyses will then be performed to investigate the relationship between the number of African waves and Sahel precipitation. The results are expected to advance the current understanding of the West African monsoon system, especially the contribution of the interannual variability in the African waves to Sahel precipitation variability. It should advance our understanding of how large scale climate systems interact with local scale phenomena. It combines the international project expertise of Ms. Sawyer, with Dr. Thiaw s expertise in estimating rainfall and climate prediction in West Africa, and Dr. Sall s knowledge about convective systems doc23394 none Bhat This award will support Dr. Deepak G. Bhat and Dr Ajay P. Malshe to visit Dr. Mariana Staia, of the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgical Engineering of the Central University of Venezuela in order to plan a research collaboration on the fundamental tribological interactions of coated tools. While the need for durable surface-engineered tools has long been recognized, the tribology, chemistry, and physics of materials interactions at the mating surfaces and contact points between the tool and work-piece are not fully understood. For instance, stringent machining and frictional conditions require effective lubrication over a wide temperature range, where the stability of the coating may itself be compromised. The visit will help to design a study that aims to improve the process of producing coatings for cutting tools with the potential of minimizing the need for coolants and lubricants in machining and lessening negative impacts on the environment. The US group will contribute their expertise in machining and processing while the Venezuelan side has the equipment and the expertise for tribological and metallurgical tests doc23395 none The objective of the proposed project is to use computer simulation to study the feasibility of a new type of optical microscope for measuring the sizes and shapes of three-dimensional objects whose dimensions are smaller than the wavelength of the light employed. Conventional optical microscope based on measurement of the intensity distribution on the image plane is not capable of resolving spatial details much smaller than about one wavelength. The proposed optical microscope, however, is based on ellipsometric measurements of the electric field scattered by an object onto the back focal plane of the objective lens. The ellipsometric data allow the relative phases among different components of the Jones matrix of the optical system to be computed. This phase information is then used to determine the shape of the object by solving an electromagnetic inverse problem. The proposed microscope idea should be of great scientific interest, since the technique of using the phase information obtained from back-focal-plane ellipsometric measurements for object shape reconstruction is novel. Also, the proposed method is insensitive to positioning and focus errors of the sample, which is an important consideration if the method is to be applied to solving metrology problems in industry. The proposed feasibility study will consist of using computer simulation to generate hypothetical data, which will then he used to test the convergence and robustness of various numerical algorithms for solving the electromagnetic inverse problem of shape reconstruction from the hypothetical data. In the process of carrying out the feasibility study, the graduate student involved will gain in-depth knowledge of optical imaging theory and firsthand experience with various numerical methods of electromagnetic. As such, the proposed project should be of great value in the education of graduate students interested in working in an interdisciplinary area involving both optics and electromagnetics. Also, if the results of the feasibility study appear promising, future research projects may he initiated to test the proposed microscope idea experimentally doc23396 none All around the world people face problems in their daily lives and need to make decisions. In these times of globalization, many people live and work abroad or work together with people from different countries and consequently need to make decisions and solve problems together. How does cultural background influence individuals problem solving and decision making? Research in Cross-cultural Psychology rarely investigates these topics, whereas research in Cognitive Psychology rarely includes cultural variables in the investigation of decision making. This study will thus bridge a theoretical gap between the two disciplines. The research focuses on the relationship between cultural values and decision making. Cultural values - more specifically, individualistic versus collectivist, and vertical versus horizontal value orientations - will be measured by means of value orientation questionnaires. Decision making analysis will focus on different strategies and decision making success. Four hundred psychology and business administration college students from Germany and the US (individualistic cultures), from Brazil and the Philippines (collectivist cultures), and from India (neither individualistic nor collectivist culture) will participate in the study. To analyze dynamic decision making, two computer simulations WinFire and Coldstorage will be used. In contrast to simple decision tasks, these computer simulations about forest fires and a broken coldstorage are more realistic and related to daily life. In decision-making studies, computer simulations have proved to be systematic, fruitful, and productive methods for data gathering. The data from the simulations will be collected in individual sessions, saved on computer files and videotapes, and then analyzed. From a theoretical model, specific hypotheses will be derived on how decision-making strategies will vary according to different cultural value orientations. The model will then be tested with structural equation modeling. Besides the theoretical merit, results of this study will also have relevance to the field of applied psychology. Findings can be incorporated in educational training programs for strategic thinking and dynamic decision making as well as for training programs in intercultural competence and sensitivity. Implications and relevance for research, training, and practice will be addressed doc23397 none The recent successful launch of the Thermosphere, Ionosphere, Mesosphere, Energetics and Dynamics (TIMED) satellite presents a unique opportunity to obtain global measurements of the mesosphere that can be coordinated with ground-based instrumentation to further our understanding of the dynamics of this important region. This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) project requests support for ground-based Medium Frequency (MF) radar measurements using the Imaging Doppler Interferometry (IDI) technique as implemented on the dynasonde operating at the Utah State University Bear Lake Observatory. Because the IDI technique is viewed by many within the aeronomy community as being controversial, this study will also carry out a detailed analysis of coordinated meteor wind measurements, as well as undertaking a correlation analysis using similar measurements acquired with an MF radar being operated at the Platteville site in Colorado doc23398 none Discrete event systems (DESs) are systems evolving according to the occurrence of certain discrete qualitative changes, called events. Examples of events include the arrival of a customer in a queue, the termination of an algorithm in a computer program, the loss of a message packet in a communication network, the breakdown of a machine in a manufacturing system. In this proposal we consider stochastic DESs modeled by Markov processes, and study control problems that satisfy qualitative properties. We outline a program of work aiming to develop a unified framework for qualitative control of stochastic DESs. In particular, we propose to study the control of stochastic systems with general qualitative constraints such as safety, non-blocking, recurrence, and stability; optimal control subject to qualitative constraints; control under complete or partial observations; effects of using deterministic versus randomized policies; and effects of using stationary versus non-stationary and asymptotically stationary control policies. Safety constraints are specified as unit-interval-valued vectors serving as an upper bound for the state probability distribution of the controlled Markov chain. Non-blocking specifications require that the probability of hitting a target set of states stays above a certain minimum value. Recurrence or liveness amounts to the probability of hitting a target set of states infinitely-often being bounded below by a positive constant, while convergence or stability demands that the state probability distribution enters and stays in a `safe set within a finite number of steps doc23248 none This Collaborative Research Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) provides funding for the development and implementation of a methodology for the analysis and optimization of a distributed sensor system in electronics assembly processes for the purpose of process fault diagnosis. The proposed modeling tool will integrate product quality information and process characteristics in a multi-station assembly system framework using a station-indexed state space model. Then, the diagnosability of a generic distributed sensor system will be explored by expending the concept of observability in control theory. This will further lead to development of the fault diagnosis method for fault feature extraction based on the multivariate data analysis. The understanding of the transformation of quality information, offered by the state space quality-fault model and diagnosability analysis, will guide the optimal design of a sensing system. This project will be carried out through a close collaboration partnered by Texas A&M University, the University of Wisconsin - Madison, and Motorola Florida Research Labs (MFRL). The methodology development will be based on, and the resulting technology will be tested and implemented in, the Motorola radio assembly process. If successful, the results of this project will contribute to sensing and information technology in manufacturing: new concepts and criteria regarding the performance of sensor systems will be defined and effective algorithms for sensing optimization and data analysis will be developed. Curriculum developed from research accomplishments will generate long-term impacts on the education of quality engineering and production system. The resulting technology will also benefit the US electronics manufacturers who are under great pressure from their international competitors. According to a White Paper issued by the Interconnection Technology Research Institute in , over 100 of 650 U.S. electronics fabricators have gone out of business in the past five years. The lack of six-sigma quality is identified as the weakest point of for US manufacturers. Industrial implementation of the resulting methodology will aid US manufacturers in remaining competitive and could generate substantial economic impacts doc23400 none The much promoted promise of advancing mechanical design by using such smart materials as shape memory and superelastic alloys (SMA and SEA) did not materialize to a significant degree. The main applications of such materials are in medicine (arterial stents, bone reconstruction, etc.) and consumer products such as women s bras and non-destructible eyeglass frames. This project will extend application of the smart materials, especially of SEA, to structures of high productivity precision machines machine tools. SMA and SEA materials are largely produced as wires, tubing, or strips. Up to now, they were used in tensile or bending modes of load accommodation, wherein relatively small loads cause relatively large deformations. Structural applications are usually associated with high loads and relatively small deformations. A limited scale preliminary (non-funded) study demonstrated that very high forces can be accommodated while causing small deformations if the off-the-shelf wires or tubing made from SEA are loaded radially. Moreover, it was discovered that such loading mode is associated with extremely large elastic limits. The radially loaded SEA wire exhibit elastic limit 20-24 percent, similar to rubber-like materials, while having elastic modulus at least one thousand times greater than rubber ( giant superelasticity effect ). This unique and until recently not known property opens large areas for beneficial applications. Detailed experimental and analytical (finite element modeling) studies of properties of various SEA and SMA materials (wires and tubing) under radial loading will be performed in the course of this project, to accumulate data necessary for using the giant superelasticity effect in structural design applications. Application of this effect for toolholders will be explored, together with Command Tooling Systems Co. (one of the largest US manufacturers of toolholders for CNC machine tools). It is anticipated, based on the previous results, that application of structural dimensional compensators utilizing the unique elastic properties of the radially-loaded SEA wires and tubing will result in a significant enhancement of stiffness and accuracy of many thousands machine tools in the U.S., thus in increasing their machining quality and productivity. These effects will be achieved in a very cost-effective way, with minimum modifications of the existing toolholders. Assessment of other design applications of the giant superelasticity effect will be performed , such as for modular tooling systems and for reconfigurable machining systems doc23401 none The proposed research would continue and expand a comprehensive, long-term program in grassland ecology at Konza Prairie. The 20-year old, broadly-based KNZ LTER program crosses multiple ecological levels and spatial and temporal scales. Since its inception, the overarching integrates fire, grazing and climatic variability as essential and interactive factors responsible for the structure and function of tallgrass prairie. Organism-to-ecosystem processes and dynamics at KNZ are products of spatial and temporal variability in multiple limiting resources, primarily water, light and N. The interplay of these three disturbances across a heterogeneous landscape leads to the high species diversity and complex, non-linear behavior characteristic of mesic grassland ecosystems. Results from KNZ have relevance not only for understanding grasslands worldwide, but for broader ecological issues including human-caused global change. Specific goals for LTER V are to expand the strong core Konza LTER experiments on fire, grazing and climatic variability begun over 20 years ago, with site-based and inter-site studies and synthesis activities; 2) to further develop mechanistic and predictive understanding of grassland dynamics with particular emphasis on responses of grassland ecosystems to multiple global change factors; and 3) to use KNZ results to develop and test general ecological theory (e.g., diversity-stability relationships, community invasibility, top-down vs. bottom-up controls, soil-plant community feedback models, river continuum model). New studies of the causes and consequences of land-cover change in the region will be initiated, incorporating both sociological and ecological perspectives. Short-term experiments focused on key processes and mechanisms underlying responses to changing fire, grazing and climatic regimes will continue to be essential components. Broader impacts of the research include training a future generation of ecologists, contributing to public education, and development of a knowledge base essential for the ecologically sound management of grassland ecosystems worldwide doc23402 none Mathias Description: This award is for support of a cooperative project by Dr. Lon Mathias, Department of Polymer Science, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, Mississippi and Dr. Duygu Avci, Chemistry Department, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey. They plan to carry out an exchange of professors between the two universities for the purpose of teaching classes, running short courses, an exchange of scientists, graduate and undergraduate students for research purposes. They also plan to establish the first international symposium on multifunctional acrylates involving a workshop and proceedings containing comprehensive overviews of the polymer chemistry, properties and applications of alpha-hydroxymethylacrylates and derivatives (RHMA s). A novel aspect of the research in the area of multifunctional acrylates, a group of compounds distinguished by their unique cyclization and copolymerization properties, is the extensive use of computational techniques for modeling the chemical reaction kinetics of the molecules. Scope: In this project the collaborators plan to combine their expertise in an important scientific research effort, and to provide international experiences to U.S. graduate and undergraduate students. Previous collaborations between the two teams focused on experimental design and production. The combination of the proposed analytical and computational research and experimental approaches will contribute significantly to the advancement of new knowledge. New multimedia education material will be an outcome of this collaboration, focused on both synthetic and computational aspects of new monomer and polymer systems. These will build on courses taught or to be taught at University of Southern Mississippi and Bogazici by the collaborators. The international collaborations involving students is an important feature. This project is supported by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Materials Research doc23403 none Functional logic (FL) programming languages provide several advantages over declarative languages based on either functions or predicates only. A narrowing engine is an essential component of FL languages. Narrowing engines available to date are all prototypical and almost universally incomplete. The goal of this research is the design and development of a general, efficient and complete narrowing engine for FL languages. This research will define both internal and external representations of executable FL programs---the latter in XML. This approach will decouple the frontends of different compilers and interpreters of FL languages from the narrowing engine. This separation will enable frontends for different languages to use the same backend. By contrast to other contemporary research efforts, the proposed narrowing engine will map narrowing computations to computations in an imperative language. The internal representation of the executable code will be a thin-layer bytecode over the mapping of narrowing computations to computations in an imperative language. This approach promises a good efficiency without sacrificing tasks, such as tracing, debugging and profiling, that are more easily implemented in an interpreter. An integral part of the implementation will be a run-time environment for using the narrowing engine in the backend of a compiler interpreter of FL languages doc23404 none The objective of the proposed work is to develop an integrated suite of tools and approaches for the modeling of uncertain systems for feedback control design purposes. Our modeling framework is based upon robust control theory, which is supported by several sophisticated control design methods. These models are in effect set descriptions, where the sets are generated by unknown but bounded dynamic perturbations within the model. These models allow the designer to capture the variety of uncertain behaviors that a physical system will generate. Although this is a powerful and flexible modeling framework, the tools available for modeling physical systems are limited. We address this area in this proposal, with the ultimate goal being the development of a suite of modeling techniques and software tools for control system modeling. Our prior work on model validation for robust control models forms the basis for the work proposed here. This approach has led to tools which allow the designer to experimentally quantify the difference between a physical system and the closest member of a robust control model set. In the area of theoretical model development we propose extending our current model validation approaches to describe non-linear and parametrically varying systems. In the experimental application area, two systems will be studied: control of semiconductor growth rate and composition in a metalorganic vapor deposition (MOCVD) reactor; control of unstable rotating magnetic bearing systems. Both applications have a great deal of industrial relevance, as well as providing challenging testbeds for the theoretical work. In the algorithmic development work, we propose refining structured algorithms to handle the very large problems that arise when applying model validation methods to data driven problems. The strong experimental component has significant wider benefits. The MOCVD experimental system is a nontraditional area for control work and fosters interaction and the exchange of ideas between the control theory community and semiconductor and materials scientists. The experiments are also integrated into engineering course work at UCSB, and are currently used as demonstration examples in undergraduate control courses and graduate level design laboratories doc23405 none Craig Douglas University of Kentucky Collaborative Research: ITR AP-Predictive Contaminant Tracking Using Dynamic Data Driven Application Simulation \(DDDAS\) Techniques This project will lead to a leap-ahead technology in simulation capabilities. Research in the development of new methods and algorithms for the specific application areas is needed. The dynamic application requirements will dictate computing systems support that includes systems software technologies, such as active middleware services for real time, dynamic reconfiguration capabilities, resource discovery, load balancing, security, fault tolerance, quality of service, and dynamic interfaces with field measurement systems. An encoded web stream set of contaminations from actual situations (both above ground and underground) will allow researchers besides us to tap into our virtual reality DDDAS environment. Visualization systems will allow us to work with a variety of real networks, sensors, and environments doc23406 none This grant provides funding for research aiming to advance the understanding and knowledge of wire-sawn wafer grinding on soft pads and to promote the widespread application of the technology. Finite element simulation will be carried out to develop a fundamental understanding of the soft-pad grinding and its effectiveness in removing the wire-sawing induced waviness, and to generate knowledge of the effects of pad materials and process parameters on waviness removal. Experiments will be performed to validate the finite element model. The understanding and knowledge acquired will provide guidance to overcome the technical barriers that have hindered the widespread application of soft-pad grinding. Success of this project will substantially enhance U.S. companies competitiveness. Soft-pad grinding is more benign to the environment and more cost-effective than lapping. Achieving the project s goal will benefit not only the U.S. silicon wafer industry and semiconductor industry, but also society at large. Investigators with complementary experience and research skills are joining forces to conduct this research. Unique facilities at Kansas State University, University of South Florida, MEMC, Norton and Strasbaugh are integrated. Such collaboration provides excellent synergy for project resources, ensures the relevance of research to industry, and expedites technology transfer and commercialization. It also provides excellent opportunities for faculty and students to interact with industry, and will have highly positive impact to engineering education doc23407 none Berg The objective of the project described below is to dramatically improve the capabilities of a class of micro electromechanical (MEMS) and micro optoelectromechanical (MOEMS) systems of great promise in areas where miniaturization of optics and machines is advantageous. Applications include emerging technologies such as holographic data storage for genomic and security databases, wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) and adaptive optics. The PI s propose to demonstrate, using an interesting MOEMS device, that techniques of nonlinear control theory will play a central role in future of this field. Despite the fact that commercial applications of MOEMS are still in their infancy, notable successes like accelerometers in airbag deployment systems and digital micromirror arrays in high-end projection systems suggest a bright commercial future. This promise is accompanied by numerous interesting research problems, which are inherently cross-disciplinary. A very promising device in this class is the electrostatically-actuated analog micromirror and micromirror array, used as a spatial light modulator (SLM). At the heart of these microfabricated devices is a small ( 100 um square) mirror suspended by fixed springs and driven by applying an external voltage. While the micromirrors are interesting novelties, for them to reach their full commercial potential it is essential to control their displacements extremely precisely-within tens of nanometers or less. This poses a series of fascinating controls problems. This proposal has four major objectives: 1. Fabricate micromirror SLMs, both individual and in arrays. 2. Develop control methodology suitable for governing micromirror actuation both with and without optical position feedback. This control serves both a stabilizing and tracking function. 3. Set up and implement optical testing and metrology capabilities for studying deflection properties on the subnanometer scale. 4. Actuate them using custom-designed on-chip electronics combined with off-chip commercial digital signal processors. Each of these objectives possesses several challenging problems in various research fields. The PI s preliminary results are very promising and they are confident that they can meet these objectives in this research program. The team of researchers brought together under this proposal has the expertise necessary to carry out each of these objectives. Dr. Jordan Berg (Mechanical Engineering) will direct the proposal. He has expertise in control theory and in microfabrication. He will be primarily responsible for the fabrication of the micromirror devices, and closely work with the controls team. Dr. W. P. Dayawansa (Mathematics) is an expert in control theory. He will lead these efforts, and closely interact with the test team. Dr. Mark Holtz (Physics) works in microfabrication and optics. He will lead the optical test effort. This group is critically augmented by Dr. Richard Gale (Electrical Engineering, beginning 5 02). For the past ten years Dr. Gale has directed the development and commercialization of the Texas Instruments Digital Light Products (DLP) device. This is the world s most advanced commercial MOEMS device, the only commercialized micromirror array, consisting of over 700,000 micromirrors 12 um square, for high-end projection systems. Dr. Gale will lead the electrical test and work closely with the optical test and fabrication groups. While the emphasis areas are noted for each P.I., this network of interdisciplinary researchers will function together without boundaries to best achieve our proposed goals doc23408 none Bernardi Description: This award is for support of a joint research project between Dr. Giacomo Bernardi, Biology Department, University of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California and Dr. Shahid Amjad, Department of Oceanography, The National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), Karachi, Pakistan. They plan to study the population genetics of Benthosema pterotum, a mesopelagic fish from the Arabian Sea. The Arabian Sea has complex oceanography, which results in high biological productivity. In the open ocean, the topmost trophic level is represented by nekton such as marine mammals and large fishes such as tunas and mackerel. In the northwest Arabian Sea and adjacent Gulf of Oman, the topmost trophic level is represented by mesopelagic fishes. These are small, midwater species such as Lanternfishes (Myctophidae), Hatchetfishes (Sternoptychidae), and Bristlemouths (Gonostomatidae). The main species reported in abundance is the lanternfish Benthosema pterotum. This will be collected off the coast of Pakistan from the Gulf of Oman to the Central Arabian Sea. Specifically, the investigators plan to investigate the genetic differences between Gulf of Oman and Arabian Sea populations of B. pterotum off the coast of Pakistan (smaller-scale). They will extract DNA, PCR amplify and sequence nuclear intron, and mitochondrial loci to establish patterns of population structure in B. pterotum. The sampling protocol will have approximately 500 individuals to have enough statistical validity. Scope: This award will allow a US team headed by the PI to collaborate with a Pakistani team from the NIO in a research project of significant scientific interest. The PIs will be working closely with young Pakistani scientists at NIO to train them for the optimum methods for fish surveys and to catch the specific species. These scientists will then carry out most of the fieldwork. They will also be trained in the new molecular techniques. Pakistan s ocean science is at a stage of development where this collaboration will greatly help. This project will have a positive impact on NIO and the fisheries departments in Pakistan. All countries bordering the northwestern Indian Ocean would like to harvest B. pterotum commercially. Improved understanding of its population genetics, and other knowledge that will follow from this pilot study, will help scientists in the region utilize this unexploited fishery resouce doc23409 none Stanton & King This dissertation enhancement grant supports a US graduate student, Ms. Elizabeth King, working under the direction of Professor Maureen Stanton, in the Center for Population Biology at the University of California- Davis, to conduct a study in Kenya to evaluate the facilitative effect of the succulent shrub Aloe secundiflora on a perennial grass species, Cenchrus ciliaris, in degraded, semi-arid savannas. Facilitative interactions between members of different plant species can impact the population dynamics of the interacting species and the structure of plant communities. But the relationship between a facilitator and a beneficiary species is not constant and, depending on the life history stage of the species, can even become negative at certain times and under certain conditions. Under an array of different environmental conditions, Ms. King will measure the effect of transplanted aloe shrubs on each life history stage of the beneficiary grass in order to project the population-level consequences of the presence of the transplanted aloe shrubs. She will address the following questions. How does the interaction vector vary under a spectrum of possible environmental conditions? How does the interaction vector vary depending on the life history stage of the beneficiary? How do indirect effects of additional species in the plant community impact the interaction vector for a focal beneficiary species? When stage-specific fitness measurements are used in demographic models, how does the presence of a facilitator affect the projected population growth rate of the beneficiary? The results will be used to evaluate the potential impact of the use of these transplanted succulent shrubs as a means to enhance the recovery of grasses in overgrazed dry savannas. Dr. Joshua Muasya and Ms. Emily Wabuyele at the National Museums of Kenya will provide guidance on this project to Ms. King. The results of this study are expected to add to the current knowledge on the interactions of facilitator plants with a beneficiary species. It will also contribute valuable information to resource managers and policy makers involved in curtailing environmental degradation and improving human welfare--problems that face arid areas in Kenya and elsewhere in the world. This project will also support an international research experience very early in the career of an outstanding graduate student. The Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Environmental Biology jointly support this award doc23410 none Wendell Lim University of California- San Francisco Engineering Protein-Based Logic Gates Living cells use protein-based signal transduction circuits to decide how to respond to environmental stimuli. In eukaryotic cells these signaling networks are organized in a hierarchical, component-based manner -- they are assembled from multiple interacting proteins, while individual proteins are assembled from combinations of a finite toolkit that includes catalytic domains (e.g. kinases, phosphates) and protein interaction domains. Current hypotheses suggests that complex cellular circuitry may have evolved through recombination of these protein domain components. The overall goal of this project is to exploit this framework to engineer novel protein-based sensors, circuits, and computational devices. The initial focus is on individual signaling proteins that function as input output switches, analogous to the fundamental logic gates used to build complex electronic circuits. The proteins often have an output activity that is only triggered by a specific set of upstream inputs. Recent studies suggest that these regulatory properties result from a relatively simple mechanism in which the interplay of intra- and intermolecular domain interactions controls protein conformation and therefore activity. In this project domain recombination is being used to reprogram natural catalytic activities (e.g. acting nucleators, kinesis, phosphates) such that they are precisely controlled by a combination of selected molecular inputs (e.g. specific peptide ligands, phosphorylation dephosphorylation). Targeted switch designs include AND, NAND, NOR, and XOR-type input output relationships. If successful, this project will allow for engineering of complex cell-based sensors doc23411 none Milan N. Stojanovic Columbia University Decision-Making Deoxyribozyme Networks In this project, silicomimetic networks of enzymes are being developed. These networks will reproduce the functionality of individual silicon devices to perform Boolean algebra functions with analytical inputs and decision outputs and they represent first artificial autonomous decision-making sets of molecules with potential for incorporation into drug delivery or analytical systems. The computation components of these networks (i.e. circuits ) are being made modularly from deoxyribozyme-based logic gates (YESA, NOTA, AANDB, YESANOTB), which have oligonucleotides as inputs and outputs. Communication between individual molecular gates is being developed through connections in which an output oligonucleotide, formed or degraded by a catalytic action of an upstream gate, is an input allosteric effector of a downstream gate. This type of communication allows serial connection or tiling of individual elements. Computer program is being developed, which would aid in the construction of any decision-making tree from custom-made materials and then coupled to deoxyribozyme-based sensor arrays. For example, one analytical network under construction senses the presence of an oligonucleotide, a small molecule and a protein, and makes a decision to release or not a fluorescent signal doc23412 none This research project addresses the gap in the understanding of the polyhedral (geometric) structure of general mixed-integer programming problems. With an ultimate goal of developing efficient and effective cutting plane procedures for mixed-integer problems with general integer variables, strong cutting planes applicable to general mixed-integer problems will be identified through polyhedral analysis of fundamental single-constraint mixed-integer sets. The methods of the research are based on a recent work on sequence independent lifting of valid inequalities through the use of superadditive functions for general mixed-integer programming. The expected outcome of this research project is novel cutting plane procedures that will be incorporated in branch-and-cut algorithms for solving large-scale mixed-integer programming problems. If successful, the research project may lead to significant advances in the understanding of general mixed-integer polyhedra and in the solution methods for large-scale instances of mixed-integer problems with general integer variables doc23413 none This inter-disciplinary research examines a growing controversy in Hawai i over the introduction of marine aquaculture (mariculture) technology, which involves both a new technology and a new system of property. Hawai i is a multicultural society in which there is no racial or cultural majority, and where a strong indigenous cultural and political movement brings to the fore a clear cultural and epistemic dimension to technology policy controversies. The nature of open ocean mariculture technology that depends on a common resource demands a level of consensus among the broader community. These two conditions make the case of mariculture in Hawaii highly instructive for understanding the role of culture in mediating the interplay between technology and society. The main research questions are: How does culture influence the mutual interplay of technology and society in a multicultural plurality? How do cultural differences complicate conflicts, in this case those surrounding property changes brought by mariculture technology? What are the implications of the findings for the technological development, the evolution of property regimes, and cultural transformation? This investigation of the introduction of mariculture uses the qualitative method of event analysis; it follows the actors from different standpoint epistemologies to solicit their framing of the events, interactions and surrounding controversies. Key actors include mariculture entrepreneurs, scientists, Native Hawaiian advocates and cultural practitioners, fishers, state agency personnel, land-based aquaculture farmers and state legislators. Operational questions are organized along four areas of inquiry including: a) substance, character and dynamics of controversies; b) property claims; c) social contests, techno-scientific choices and evolving property regimes; and d) cultural norms and practices doc23414 none The project is to develop two innovative nano-stereo lithography (nSL) techniques: two-photon nSL and near-field nSL with the resolution down to 50nm. Both methods promise 3D nanofabrications with computer-aided design modeling capabilities. Preliminary numerical simulations suggest that a spatial resolution down to 60 nm can be achieved with near-field nSL. Techniques, such as electrical force controlled nano stereo lithography, will be investigated and employed to further enhance lithography resolutions. Through this project, not only novel nSL processes will be developed, but intriguing fundamental mechanisms of nano-stereo-lithography will also be studied to intensify our understanding on fundamental science on molecular-scale photon-material interactions, for instance self-focusing, radical diffusion, thermal transport and viscous effects, and their influences on the resolution. Upon the success of the development of proposed nSL techniques, a set of specific nano devices will be designed and fabricated. Viable three dimensional nanomanufacturing technologies and its applications developed in this project will have important impacts in human society from biomedical diagnostics to optical communications. The research outcome will also benefit the emerging high technology industries in United States in competition with foreign countries. Another important aspect of this proposed project is the integration of research and edcuation through summer undergraduate research. Armed with solid knowledgements, state-of-art techniques and innovative ideas, students, especially minority and women students will be ready to serve industry needs in the nanomanufacturing arena doc23415 none The goal of this research is a systematic computer-aided design system for the synthesis of mechanical devices that guide spatial movement. Existing design systems can display and animate a predefined device, but none have the ability to assist an inventor in finding a new device given a description of its desired function. This function to form synthesis process has been developed for planar mechanisms, and our goal is to extend it to spatial mechanisms and robots. The basic strategy is to evaluate the kinematics equations of an articulated chain at goal positions that define the desired movement workspace. The solution of these equations define the physical dimensions of the chain. The architecture of the design system is structured to provide platform independence and to be compatible with collaborative use and development via the Internet. If successful, this research will provide the theory and an example implementation of a design system that enables mechanical designers to specify a desired spatial movement and the topology of a device, to automatically formulate and solve the associated design equations, and then to interactively survey, evaluate, and modify candidate designs. Preliminary results show that this has the potential to make available a large number of devices for inventive applications. The resulting products can provide effective low-cost automation for the home, office and factory doc23416 none Freeouf The objectives of this project are to build upon the successful construction of a Far UV spectroscopic ellipsometer and apply this tool to improve the PIs understanding of new materials - and of older materials becoming newly important. The PI intends to share the impact of this new, next-generation tool by collaborative research with a variety of colleagues from many disciplines throughout the country. The project should train at least one PhD student at OGI and assist the research efforts of others at many locations. This effort will emphasize materials of technological importance and concentrate upon proposed high-K gate dielectrics such as HfO2. This system offers a substantially increased photon energy limit (hv 9 eV) over conventional systems (hv 6.5 eV), thereby permitting us the PI to examine critical point structures that would otherwise only be accessible at a synchrotron radiation source. This energy range especially impacts studies of wide band gap materials; both dielectrics such as HfO2 and wide band gap semiconductors such as diamond, SiC, and GaN are of immediate and urgent interest. This permits the PI to impact the current semiconductor industry search for materials with which to replace SiO2 as the gate dielectric in CMOS technology. It has permitted the PI to study surface damage layers on polished SiC surfaces, since the higher energies available also offer increased sensitivity to surface films. He seeks funding to continue to apply this instrument to such studies. He has partnerships with several groups that seek to strengthen his own efforts by using the information available from the proposed studies. The specific area of emphasis will be on high-? dielectrics for future CMOS technologies. This international effort is driven by the fundamental limitation upon CMOS scaling that is imposed by the onset of tunneling through a thin barrier layer. This quantum mechanical effect appears to restrict the use of SiO2 based gate dielectrics, even with the addition of nitride layers, to greater than 1 .0 nm thickness, and will fundamentally impact device design and production in this decade. In fact, the editio of the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors envisions these materials being required by for low power logic chips. The PI has already applied his current system to the study of some of these materials and established that there are clear areas where he extended photon energy range provides new and unique information. He seeks to build a database of dielectric response for many of the candidate materials, and to use this database in the study of these films as deposited upon silicon substrates. His partnerships permit him to study materials deposited by e-beam, jet vapor deposition, molecular beam epitaxy, and atomic beam deposition. The details of these depositions can strongly alter the interface and the film itself - as he has demonstrated for HfO2 already. At the same time it is crucial to ascertain what impact absorption involving the d-levels of transition metal and rare earth elements in these candidate materials will have upon the electrical properties of transistors containing those materials. The PI s studies will help to clarify the location and properties of these energy levels doc23417 none In an effort to redress the dominance of the evolutionary synthesis on histories of natural history between and , this dissertation research project will examine the life and work of Karl Jordan ( - ), a German-born naturalist who worked during the first half of the twentieth century as curator of insects for Walter Rothschild s Tring Museum, in Britain. It will investigate the context and influence of Jordan s contributions to the development of biology and the discipline of entomology, his experience as a German national living and working Britain during a series of tumultuous decades, and his constant endeavor to increase international cooperation between zoologists through both the International Entomological Congresses and the International Commission for Zoological Nomenclature. Jordan consistently corresponded with major entomologists for a period of six decades, organizing international cooperation, working on tedious insect systematics, and driving research into evolutionary theory. In its most general sense, this study is part of a broader aim to illustrate the various, dynamic contexts within which naturalists have worked, from the idealistic internationalism of the turn of the century to the post-World War world, and from the taxa-bound disciplines of the nineteenth century to the problem-based biology of the twentieth. In examining Jordan in a number of contexts, from the museum desk to the international stage, the research will examine the multifaceted variation in naturalists activities. Research has already been completed at the archives in the Eastern U.S., including the National Research Council, the Smithsonian Institution, and the American Philosophical Society for correspondence between Jordan and American entomologists. In addition entomological journals and the proceedings of the International Congresses of Entomology (ICE) have been surveyed. This funding supports archival work based predominantly in Britain (particularly at the Natural History Museum, London), with brief trips to continental Europe doc23418 none Origins of Cod on Georges Bank: Contribution of Early Developmental Stages from the Scotian Shelf Recent work in the Georges Bank-Gulf of Maine area has documented significant, and apparently episodic, fluxes of Scotian Shelf Water (SSW) from the Nova Scotian continental shelf to Georges Bank. SSW is a relatively cold and fresh water mass with a significant component from the St. Lawrence River, and is commonly identifiable with T-S analyses of hydrographic data and in satellite images of sea surface temperature. One such flux episode was observed March in satellite imagery and from shipboard hydrographic sampling on Georges Bank. Qualitative at-sea analyses of ichthyoplankton sampled on the March cruise revealed a remarkably tight association between abundances of gadid eggs and the distribution of SSW suggesting, along with other lines of evidence, that most of those eggs were spawned on the Scotian Shelf and were advected with the SSW water mass to Georges Bank. The fundamental question thus arises: to what extent are cod on Georges Bank imported to the Bank as early development stages by advection from Canadian waters to the east? The goal of this research is to answer this question. The approach will be two tiered: (1) performing retrospective elemental analyses of otoliths from archived larval cod samples, as well as of ichthyoplankton samples to be collected in and as part of the continuing Georges Bank GLOBEC project, analyzing them for Sr Ca ratios, using an X-ray electron microprobe, and elemental fingerprints , using UV lazer ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectroscopy (ICPMS); and (2) assessing the genetic identity of the larvae relative to larval and adult populations from Georges Bank and from the Scotian Shelf using nuclear DNA microsatellite techniques doc23419 none Technological advances have made effective knowledge management (KM) a requirement in many organizations and industries. As these technologies and applications become more ubiquitous, the ability to use these technologies for knowledge sharing and to impact work outcomes becomes even more urgent. This urgency is nowhere more evident than in the public sector, specifically in the law enforcement community. As a result of the events of September 11, , we have witnessed an increased effort of law enforcement agencies to share knowledge and collaborate to promote attentiveness for homeland defense and the security of local communities. These changes may be improved by a better understanding of how police use new knowledge management technologies now available to them. Similarly, we need to assess how these technologies will affect the nature of police work. Based upon a solid theoretical foundation, this research draws upon existing knowledge about communication and knowledge sharing, individual differences, organizational culture, group characteristics, incentive systems, and technology to understand organizational change in police departments. The three major objectives of the proposed research are: (1) to understand individual, group, and organizational factors that influence work practices in police departments, (2) to understand how changes in technology impact work practices, and (3) to understand how these changes in work practices affect individual, group, and organizational factors. The research uses multiple methods from empirical social science and behavioral research to validate our model of factor that influence police work in police departments. The research will have theoretical implications for the disciplines of social psychology, organization science, information systems, and criminology. The research outcomes will be particularly applicable to law enforcement agencies, academics studying public sector institutions, organizational change theorists, and knowledge management practitioners. The research is organized in three phases. The first phase serves to evaluate our original model, based on previous literature on the effects of individual, group, and organizational factors. The second phase builds upon our model to investigate the effects of KM technology implementation on work practices. The third phase investigates the issue of organization change over time by looking at the impact that KM technologies can have on the underlying individual, group, and organizational factors in police departments. By focusing on some of the most pressing issues for police departments, this research could have substantial impact on police departments throughout the United States and national homeland defense agencies doc23420 none Distribution systems are most commonly radial type and composed of overhead and underground lines. During the past decade, there has been increasingly more interest in utilizing distributed generators (DGs) in distribution systems to offer the best long-term solution to reliability, price and pollution issues for power utilities. Distributed generators provide a source of active electric power, and are directly connected to the distribution network or to the network on the customer side of the meter. Protection for distribution systems aims to minimize the duration of a fault and the number of customers affected by the fault. This entails the selection and coordination of appropriate protective devices. Presently, protection schemes for radial type distribution feeders are developed assuming there are no generation sources on the distribution system. Hence the protection schemes must be adapted for the new and different characteristics that the integration of DGs will bring to distribution feeder circuits. The PIs propose to perform studies of load and fault currents by developing new load flow and short circuit analysis methods for radial distribution feeders with DGs. Also the PIs propose to adapt the coordination and overcurrent relays methodology (directional and non-directional) for radial distribution feeder circuits when DGs are energized or not energized. The distributed generators that will be studied include AC generators (induction and synchronous) and inverter-connected generators (photovoltaic modules, fuel cells, etc.) The PIs will include one graduate student and three undergraduate researchers on the research project. Also the results will be integrated into two graduate courses doc23421 none A central tenet of evolutionary biology is that natural selection leads to adaptation. Studies of house finches in Montana and Alabama have documented that indeed, these birds have rapidly adapted to the local environment, despite having colonized these highly ecologically distinct areas only in the last few decades. Local adaptations include different sizes and shapes for males and females but these changes have occurred too rapidly to be explained by genetically based changes alone. It has been documented previously that rapid changes in how male and female house finches grow and develop in Montana and Alabama are responsible for differences between the populations. In particular it is the allocation of males and females to different positions in the laying order and strong and sex-specific effects of laying order on growth and development that led to rapid changes in the populations. How such maternal effects can affect the growth of males and females is the focus of this study. This investigation will test whether female allocation of hormones such as testosterone and prolactin, specific nutrients such as carotenoids and lipids, overall nutrient content of eggs, or the timing of egg incubation varies across laying order and how each of these factors affects the growth and development of male and female offspring. Our investigation is fundamental to a better understanding of how natural selection can lead to rapid adaptation to local environments. The ability to adjust the growth patterns of males and females as an adaptation to local environments may have enabled the house finch and some other invasive vertebrate species to colonize highly distinct and changing environments doc23422 none While important progress has been made in the use of in situ testing and geophysical methods to determine soil stress-strain-strength parameters for design, the state of practice for the foreseeable future will often rely on physical soil sample collection for laboratory testing. Samples collected for laboratory testing are often highly disturbed, but the geotechnical profession does not have adequate non-destructive tools for evaluating that disturbance or correlating it to the measured behavior either in situ or in laboratory tests. Existing methods of assessing sample disturbance, such as volumetric strain upon laboratory reconsolidation, are not a priori methods, i.e., one does not know a sample s quality until a laboratory specimen has been trimmed and set up in a testing device. At the same time, we face increasingly demanding geotechnical design and analysis problems that require more accurate estimates of soil behavior based on both in situ tests and laboratory tests on physical samples. The demands of infrastructure design as well as larger scale problems such as submarine landslide analyses require geotechnical engineers to produce not just a conservative answer, but the right answer, i.e., the closest to the true in situ mechanical properties as possible. This three year project involves an international effort to improve our existing state of practice in soft ground sampling technology, develop better techniques for assessing sample disturbance, and develop improved relationships between field-measured mechanical properties, the degree of sample disturbance, and the laboratory-measured mechanical properties from those samples. The Principal Investigators from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Northeastern University are building on over 15 years of individual and joint experience in sampling, laboratory testing and equipment innovation to help solve this longstanding problem in the field of soft ground engineering. In addition, the project extends an existing partnership with the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI) to jointly develop field-deployable non-destructive sample disturbance evaluation techniques. The project involves: 1) developing down-hole block sampling equipment for use with conventional U.S. drill rigs; 2) sampling a variety of soil types with different degrees of structure from 4 locations in North America, using both conventional tube and block sampling methods; 3) performing seismic piezocone (CPTU) tests at the four sites to obtain baseline CPTU measurements and in situ shear modulus (Gmax); 4) developing a field suction probe and bender element device to evaluate sample effective stress and Gmax, respectively, in block and conventional tube samples; 5) implementing bender elements in laboratory test devices to measure Gmax after specimen set-up and at small strain levels; 6) conducting a laboratory testing program with the modified equipment to comprehensively measure the stress-strain-strength behavior of the four soils, including that at small and medium strains; 7) developing accurate correlations between the field- and lab-measured behavior in the context of the degree of sample disturbance and degree of soil structure. It is anticipated that the results from this work will have an impact on the state of the art and state of practice in sampling soft soils and correlating disturbance effects to measured behavior. A comprehensive framework can be established to link sample disturbance with soil behavior fundamentals such as structure and anisotropy. The block sampling method will be demonstrated as a viable tool for U.S. practice, and a standard of practice is being developed for quantitative assessment of sample disturbance. The correlations between sample disturbance and measured behavior will ultimately lead to improved accuracy in laboratory results versus the true in situ behavior, and thus more reliable geotechnical design without excessive conservatism doc23423 none Something is fungible if one part or quantity may be replaced by another equal part or quantity in the satisfaction of an obligation. Oil, grain, and money are usually considered to be fungible. In the context of repeated monetary gambles, the money won in one gamble can replace the money lost in another, dollar for dollar. In other decision contexts, the outcomes of repeated trials may not be fungible. Consider, for example, a medical practice guideline that recommends surgery for a particular ailment. In one instance, successful surgery may extend the patient s life by some number of years. In another instance, unsuccessful surgery may result in the patient s immediate death. The life lost by the second patient cannot, in any real sense, be replaced by an equal quantity of life from the first patient. Perceived fungibility is important because it may affect how people make decisions. When considering decisions about monetary gambles, people often make different decisions when they can play the gamble many times instead of just once, because they realize that the money won in one gamble can replace the money lost in another. For example, many people would decline a gamble that provides a 50% chance of a $200 gain and a 50% chance of a $100 loss (a single-play decision), but would readily accept a series of 10 or 100 plays of the same gamble (a repeated-play decision). However, when outcomes are perceived to be non-fungible, as in the surgery example above, it is expected that people will not make different decisions when there are multiple patients instead of just one, because good outcomes do not really offset bad outcomes. The initial experiments in this project will assess the extent to which people perceive outcomes to be fungible in many different decision situations. In subsequent experiments, situations in which outcomes are perceived to be fungible or non-fungible will be used to determine how perceived fungibility affects single-play and repeated-play decisions. In addition to other contributions to the understanding of risky decision making, the planned research will help to establish limits on the appropriateness of aggregating outcomes across multiple decisions, with potentially broad implications for decision making in fields as diverse as marketing, research and development, medicine, law, land-use planning, and free-trade policy doc23424 none We propose to investigate the problem of routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) in optical data networks. This problem is widely viewed as critically important for increasing the efficiency of wavelength-routed all-optical networks. Mathematically, this problem contains an important special case the problem of routing in circuit switched networks. We propose several novel optimization problem formulations that offer the promise of radical improvements over the existing methods, which are mainly heuristic in character. Our work aims to use a blend of analysis and algorithmic development to obtain a better understanding of RWA, and to develop efficient and practical methods for computing optimal or near-optimal RWA and circuit switching policies under realistic assumptions. We plan to address the problem using two types of methodology: stochastic optimization, based on dynamic programming (DP), and deterministic optimization, based on linear programming (LP). There is some methodological coupling between the two types of methodology, because the deterministic methodology can be used to obtain cost-to-go approximations, which can in turn be used as the basis for an approximate DP method. In the framework of a stochastic model, we allow a dynamic and stochastically varying demand of the network resources, and a decision-making mechanism that is forward-looking and takes into account the cost of blocking future lightpath requests. This resulting optimization models are of the DP type, but typically cannot be solved exactly because of high dimensionality. We propose to address such problems using approximations and neuro-dynamic programming (NDP), a recent methodology that has been used to address challenging DP problems. In the framework of a deterministic model, we propose a new integer linear programming formulation. The salient feature of our approach, which distinguishes it from similar approaches proposed in the literature, is that it does not require the time-consuming and uninsightful machinery of mixed integer programming. We have shown this for some practically useful ring network topologies, and we propose further investigation and extension of our methodology to more general topologies. This is a pleasantly surprising circumstance, and offers the promise of spectacular improvements over the current state of the art. We plan to investigate and develop algorithms that may be used during the design or reconfiguration of a network, as well as during its on-line operation. We also plan to explore ways to use the deterministic linear programming methodology in the stochastic dynamic context and in combination with the NDP methodology doc23425 none This is a US-Russian collaborative research project that will explore the isospin dependence of fragmentation and spallation reactions produced in 1 GeV proton induced reactions. The principal investigator is Dr. ManYee B. Tsang from Michigan State University. Her Russian collaborators are Dr. Lyudmila Andronenko and Dr. Mikhail Andronenko from the St. Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute. This project will take advantage of the unique capabilities of both research groups. The US group pioneers the isoscaling analysis and modeling while the Russian group has accumulated 1 GeV proton induced fragmentation and spallation data on many different isotope targets over the past decades. This collaboration will further understanding of the global nature of the isoscaling phenomenon and possible extraction of the symmetry terms in the Nuclear Equation of State. This project in nuclear physics research fulfills the program objectives of bringing together leading experts in the U.S. and Central Eastern Europe to combine complementary efforts and capabilities in areas of strong mutual interest and competence on the basis of equality, reciprocity, and mutuality of benefit doc23426 none An innovative light source is assembled. The source consists of an ultrafast laser, a highly nonlinear fiber, and a highly dispersive fiber connected in series. It is robust, portable and wavelength-agile , scanning through a nanometer range of wavelengths in 3 microseconds. It will be applied to studies in high-pressure combustion, measurements of fluid fuels, and development of new sensors. It will also be incorporated into existing advanced laboratory courses doc23427 none Mobile elements are DNA segments that make copies of themselves that are then inserted elsewhere in the genome. These elements can influence many important evolutionary processes, including mutation and rearrangement of chromosomes. They may also play an important role in the development of new species. Although mobile elements make up nearly 30% of the human genome, little is known about their origins and their mechanisms of replication and insertion. The major goal of this research is to learn more about mobile elements and the roles they have played in human and primate evolution. Some mobile elements, particularly those termed Alus and L1s, are either present or absent at a specific chromosome location. Because the presence of a mobile element at a specific location is the more recent, or derived, state, and because these elements are not deleted after they are inserted, these polymorphisms are ideal for evolutionary analysis. In this collaborative project, a series of at least 100 Alu and L1 elements will be ascertained in a diverse collection of at least 16 primate species in order to provide a resource for primate evolutionary studies. Because of the role that some mobile elements play in key evolutionary processes, a comparison of humans with other primate species will help to define unique genetic attributes of our species. Key changes that accompanied human speciation may be identified. Thus, important information about the origins of our species will be obtained. A diverse collection of 300 humans will be typed for 100 L1 insertion elements (this will be added to an existing collection of 100 Alu insertion polymorphisms typed in the same individuals). This will produce a powerful resource for addressing questions about the demographic history of our species. Did anatomically modern humans experience a population bottleneck in their history? If so, how severe was this bottleneck, when did it occur, and where did it occur? This research will help to further test the hypothesis that modern humans originated in Africa, with a small subset of individuals later migrating out of Africa to other parts of the Old World. In addition to addressing questions about human origins, this project will provide a resource of newly identified and characterized mobile elements that can be used by any investigator interested in primate genetics. An important aspect of this project is the training of graduate and undergraduate students and of members of under-represented minority populations doc23428 none Mark Saffman University of Wisconsin-Madison Single-Photon and single atom sources for quantum informaiton processing This research project is demonstrating new ways of engineering single photon and single atom sources for a range of applications in quantum information science. The experimental approach starts with several thousand Rb atoms that are trapped at ultrahigh densities in a far-off-resonance optical beam. A many atom entangled state is then created using the dipole blockade mechanism that arises from atom-atom interactions in a dense atomic vapor as proposed recently by Lukin, et al. ( ). The trapped ensemble of entangled atoms is manipulated optically to create novel sources at the level of single atoms and single photons. Using additional near-resonant laser beams atoms are selectively ejected from the trap depending on their internal state. This enables deterministic loading of a single atom in an optical trap, as well as single- or multiple-atom-on-demand sources with optically controllable trajectories. By using entanglement between atoms in ground and excited internal states a single-photon source is being created that has a diffraction limited, steerable emission pattern. This approach is enabling a number of novel solutions to manipulation of matter and fields at the level of single quantum objects with applications to quantum communication, cryptography, and computing. A key component of this work is the enhancement of its impact through outreach and educational activities. Presentations at local schools and lectures for the general public on quantum information and computation are allowing the University of Wisconsin to communicate to the local community, including the burgeoning photonics industry in the Madison area, the importance and intellectual excitement of this research program doc23429 none Juan J. de Pablo, U of Wisconsin - Madison Fundamental Molecular Studies of Complex Fluids for Preservation of Biological Systems Labile biological systems such as proteins, cells, or tissue must often be stored for prolonged periods of time. This is generally achieved by freezing the system of interest in an aqueous solution containing various additives, whose purpose is to minimize the damage that arises from the formation of ice crystals. In some cases, it is also possible to freeze-dry the resulting formulation, thereby resulting in a product that can be stored without a need for refrigeration. In most cases, a large fraction of the biomolecules or cells do not survive the freeze-thawing or freeze-drying processes; the rates of recovery are low and contribute significantly to the cost and availability of the resulting product. Some examples of these additives, or protectants , are provided by dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO) and ethylene glycol, both of which have undesirable side effects. In practice, protectant formulations are generally conceived through a costly trial-and-error process. And, while some general ideas have emerged regarding their function, the precise mechanisms by which protectant molecules act to preserve viability during freezing and drying are not well understood. In this work the PI proposes to conduct a systematic and comprehensive study of the role of various protectant molecules on the stability of proteins in solution and in anhydrous, protectant matrices. The work is largely focused on the study of the disaccharides, which in recent years have shown promise for effective preservation of biological systems. The PI also examines how the same protectants act to stabilize lipid bilayer membranes in solution and in dry matrices. The project includes both modeling and experimental components. Computational aspects will take priority over experimental (X-ray structure analysis, NMR and calorimetry work will not be performed). At the modeling level, the PI uses molecular simulations to elucidate the mechanisms by which protectants work, and to identify the main structural attributes that render some protectant molecules more effective than others. This will require that new simulation methods be develop to facilitate the study of large ensembles of complex molecules (water, disaccharides, electrolytes and oligopeptides) both remote and near the glass transition point. At the experimental level, the PI intends to characterize the thermophysical properties of various protectant and model-protein solutions and glasses, and to relate these to preservation efficacy and to the results of our simulations. The PI may characterize the equilibrium thermodynamic properties of lipid bilayers in the presence of protectants and varying amounts of water. These data will be compared to simulation results, and will be used to rationalize his observations and those of others regarding the preservation of cells. The broader impact of the research is that it will lead to a deeper understanding of protein and cell stability in solution and in the presence of protectant solutes. It will also generate predictive models and experimental thermodynamic-property and transport-coefficient data for rational design and optimization of preservation processes. More importantly, it has the potential to result in improved protectant molecules and formulations that will permit long-term storage of food, pharmaceutical, and biomedical products. The potential educational impact of the research is considered high since the PI has a record of involving students, including under-represented groups, in his research doc23430 none Hao Yan Duke University Molecular Robotics for DNA Nanostructures The objective of this project is to develop molecular motors that are incorporated into self-assembled DNA lattices. The main goal of this project will be to develop experimental proof-of concept demonstrations of the construction of novel DNA motors such as a DNA motor that is designed to have both translational and rotational motion. Incorporation of molecular motors into DNA arrays has many applications: It can selectively manipulate molecules using molecular motor devices arranged on DNA tiling arrays; A DNA array of motors may offer a mechanism to do DNA computation of arrays whose elements (the tiles) hold state; Parallel cellular automata computation may be executed from arrays of finite state automata each of which hold state. This project is also developing DNA nanostructures containing motors that operate autonomously without environmental changes. Methods are being tested to use fuel DNA to provide energy to drive the motion of DNA nanostructures. As an alternative approach, experiments are conducted to incorporate protein motors such as Kinesin into DNA lattices. In particular, the use of selective aptamer binding to link protein motors to periodic sites of a DNA lattice will be tested. The resulting arrays of protein motors have many applications to nanorobotics, e.g., they are potentially very useful for sorting and transport of nanoparticles doc23431 none Charng H. Juang, Clemson University Effect of Fines Type and Content on Liquefaction Resistance and Ground Failure Potential The ability to accurately evaluate the liquefaction potential and the liquefaction-induced ground failure potential is important in the engineering planning and design of structures in seismic regions. This research project addresses two important issues in the mitigation of earthquake-induced liquefaction hazards, namely the effect of fines type and content on liquefaction resistance, and the liquefaction-induced ground failure potential. The first topic concerns the triggering of liquefaction, and the second addresses the consequence of liquefaction. With respect to the first topic, recent studies by numerous investigators have concluded that both fines content and fines type affect the liquefaction resistance of soils, but these affects are not fully accounted for in the existing simplified design methods. Data from recent earthquakes offers a rare opportunity to investigate these effects and to improve on the current state of the art on liquefaction triggering analysis. The second topic is more challenging, as reflected in the fact that no readily applicable site-specific model is currently available for evaluating liquefaction-induced ground failure potential. However, the number of case histories from recent earthquakes is now sufficient to establish empirical models for estimating site-specific ground failure potential. This project is collecting this additional case history data on liquefaction triggering and ground failure. This case history data, together with the existing databases, is used to improve the current state of the art on liquefaction triggering analysis, and to develop new empirical models for evaluating liquefaction-induced ground failure potential. Advanced data analysis techniques, including logistic regression analysis, mapping function approach based on artificial neural network, and Bayesian updating technique, are examined and utilized for developing the empirical models. Both deterministic and probabilistic models are being developed. Since the geotechnical engineering profession prefers the deterministic approach, the deterministic models will be developed, but equipped with suggested guidelines including risk-calibrated factor of safety. The probabilistic models are being developed for use in performance-based earthquake engineering, as well as for mapping liquefaction-induced ground failure doc23427 none Mobile elements are DNA segments that make copies of themselves that are then inserted elsewhere in the genome. These elements can influence many important evolutionary processes, including mutation and rearrangement of chromosomes. They may also play an important role in the development of new species. Although mobile elements make up nearly 30% of the human genome, little is known about their origins and their mechanisms of replication and insertion. The major goal of this research is to learn more about mobile elements and the roles they have played in human and primate evolution. Some mobile elements, particularly those termed Alus and L1s, are either present or absent at a specific chromosome location. Because the presence of a mobile element at a specific location is the more recent, or derived, state, and because these elements are not deleted after they are inserted, these polymorphisms are ideal for evolutionary analysis. In this collaborative project, a series of at least 100 Alu and L1 elements will be ascertained in a diverse collection of at least 16 primate species in order to provide a resource for primate evolutionary studies. Because of the role that some mobile elements play in key evolutionary processes, a comparison of humans with other primate species will help to define unique genetic attributes of our species. Key changes that accompanied human speciation may be identified. Thus, important information about the origins of our species will be obtained. A diverse collection of 300 humans will be typed for 100 L1 insertion elements (this will be added to an existing collection of 100 Alu insertion polymorphisms typed in the same individuals). This will produce a powerful resource for addressing questions about the demographic history of our species. Did anatomically modern humans experience a population bottleneck in their history? If so, how severe was this bottleneck, when did it occur, and where did it occur? This research will help to further test the hypothesis that modern humans originated in Africa, with a small subset of individuals later migrating out of Africa to other parts of the Old World. In addition to addressing questions about human origins, this project will provide a resource of newly identified and characterized mobile elements that can be used by any investigator interested in primate genetics. An important aspect of this project is the training of graduate and undergraduate students and of members of under-represented minority populations doc23433 none Thomas LaBean Duke University Novel DNA Nanostructures for Targeted Molecular Scale too Micron Scale The main thrust of this project is to develop fabrication techniques which bridge the gap between two size scales: (i) the micron scale, where conventional lithographic methods provide efficient top-down object construction, and (ii) the molecular scale, where viable bottom-up techniques for object assembly are beginning to emerge. The key problem addressed is how molecular scale structures can be selectively attached and interconnected with micron scale structures such that the molecular scale structures are functional. Bridging this gap is particularly important for advancing molecular-electronics into practical applications and for continuing the miniaturization trend of micro-electronics. This project approaches the scale gap challenge by the use of novel DNA nanostructures that have a scale between the two and can be made to selectively assemble with either. These structures present unique opportunities: (i) they provide for selective attachments via DNA annealing, (ii) they have length scales and flexibility permitting attachment to micron scale structures (iii) they can be metallized to provide conductive interconnects, (iv) potentially they can be used to orient other nanostructures such as carbon nanotubes. The major research steps to be taken include: (1) development of a diverse family of DNA nanostructures, (2) further characterization of existing DNA nanostructures, (3) further development of metallization techniques for these DNA nanostructures, (4) attachment experiments to various materials. The project impacts important educational objectives by providing training opportunities for science students at several educational levels. Funds are included for a high school student from the SEED project for under-represented minority students, as well as for a graduate student and half the salary of a post-doctoral fellow. Training of students at graduate and undergraduate levels is helping to create future scientists with strong interests in nanotechnology, DNA engineering, and related fields critical to continued growth in electronics and computer sciences doc23434 none Banerjee Earth materials - rocks, sediments, soils - all contain magnetic minerals in trace amounts. The properties of these minerals (chemical composition, grain size, concentration) are determined by the geologic processes and conditions under which the rocks sediments originally formed and by which they have been subsequently affected. Laboratory measurements of bulk rock sediment samples, under different conditions of temperature and applied magnetic fields, enable quantitative analysis of the trace magnetic mineral characteristics, and yields valuable information for reconstructing their history. Natural-material magnetic research has important applications over a broad expanse of science, including paleoclimate and paleoenvironmental research, paleogeographic reconstruction of the past locations of the continents and oceanic tectonic plates, and the history of the Earth s magnetic field. This grant provides for continued support of the Institute for Rock Magnetism (IRM) at the University of Minnesota over the next five years. The IRM (http: www.geo.umn.edu orgs irm irm.html) is the leading international facility for in-depth fundamental research on the magnetic properties of rocks, sediments and minerals. A state-of-the-art assemblage of instruments allows detailed magnetic characterization through measurements under widely-varying conditions of temperature, time and applied magnetic field. Research by IRM-resident scientists is complemented by that of Visiting Fellows, selected through a competitive proposal process from the global geoscience community. The IRM also enhances the research infrastructure for Earth sciences by organizing technical workshops and research conferences, developing and maintaining a public database of magnetic properties of geomaterials, and providing research-related news and information through a web site and quarterly newsletter doc23435 none Some small networks of neurons are remarkable for their ability to execute multiple functions. It has been a challenge to understand what the rules are for integrating feedback into features such as phase relationships among the firing patterns of active neurons, and how a small network can switch from one characteristic behavior to another. Although research is clarifying the cellular and molecular mechanisms of learning, it has been more difficult to understand how changes in the properties of individual neurons change the activity of a whole neural circuit, and in turn alter an animal s overall behavior. This project is a collaboration using computational, theoretical and experimental approaches to analyze the feeding behavior of a marine mollusk, the sea hare Aplysia. This animal ingests food with rhythmic rasping and sucking motions of a jawless buccal mass, run by a network of about 130 motor neurons and interneurons; if potential food is sensed by its physical properties as inedible, the pattern of muscle activity changes from ingestion to food rejection. The overall goal is to determine how small changes in the properties of individual nerve cells create the large changes in feeding behavior that are observed after learning. Specific Aim 1 is to construct a kinetic mathematical model of the buccal mass (finite-element method), its neural control (continuous-time recurrent neural network (CTRNN), with Hodgkin-Huxley models for motor and sensory neurons), and inedible food, and to conduct experimental studies to improve the understanding of each of these components of the model. The focus of this modeling is to reproduce the changes in motor pattern observed during repeated encounters with inedible food. Specific Aim 2 is to develop a numerically optimal controller for the new kinetic model, and use it to predict the effects of small changes in timing, phasing and intensity of neural input on the behavior generated by the buccal mass. The focus here is on how the biomechanics of the periphery influences the design properties of the neural controller. The models developed in Specific Aims 1 and 2 will be used to analyze the contributions of individual neurons to the shifting coalitions that stabilize the rhythmic behavior, and to predict the importance of local changes in synaptic strengths or intrinsic properties to the overall dynamics of the neural circuit both in isolation and when it is connected to the biomechanical model. Under Specific Aim 3, experimental studies will be designed to test these predictions from simulation studies. These experimental studies will record neural activity in intact animals as they learn that food is inedible, and in reduced preparations (that show feeding-like movements) after perturbations of the activity of specific nerve cells. This work will have an impact beyond computational neuroscience and behavioral neuroscience, to invertebrate physiology, engineering, robotics and control systems. First, it is likely to generate principles for understanding the effects of localized changes in neural activity on an animal s overall behavior. Second, it may suggest design principles for devices that can persistently pursue a specific goal despite distracting inputs, and at the same time be remarkably flexible and change behavior if an appropriate stimulus occurs in the correct context. . Third, these principles are likely to serve as the basis for novel biologically-inspired robotic and control devices. In addition, students and collaborators will be involved together in cross-disciplinary approaches and techniques that will enhance training for the next generation of scientists doc23436 none Development and Applications of the PS-I Computational Modeling Platform for Problems of Ethnic Conflict, Globalization, State Stability, and Terrorism, Professor Ian S. Lustick, University of Pennsylvania, P.I. Problems featuring non-linearities, local effects, multiple equilibria, positive feedback loops, and widely distributed processes among heterogeneous units, are understood to be common in the social world. They are also known to be intractable for conventional mathematical approaches, no matter how sophisticated, and have posed insuperable difficulties for the extension of formal modeling approaches in political science and other social sciences. Agent-based modeling, also referred to as computational modeling, is a technique for simulating and studying such complex problems by leveraging knowledge of simple mechanisms of interaction and performance at the micro-level to achieve insights into patterns that emerge at the macro-level. In the social sciences many attempts are being made to harness computers for the production of evolutionary simulations corresponding systematically enough to the empirical world to produce reliable explanations and predictions. The project s principal objective is to advance this general approach in three ways: 1) by providing social scientists with access to and training on PS-I, a flexible and powerful platform for the production of theoretically coherent agent-based models of social and political phenomena that does not require end-users to possess computer programming skills; 2) by working with these scholars to develop enhanced graphical and point and click interfaces for substantively-oriented rather than computer-oriented users; and 3) to use PS-I capabilities to produce high-end research addressing crucial substantive and theoretical problems. This project includes applications of PS-I simulation techniques to problems including the impact of globalization on ethnic and other identity related conflict, the potential of different institutional structures for the management or containment of ethnopolitical conflict, the consequences of catastrophic terrorism for the performance of market economies, mechanisms and conditions for political learning at the collective level, the evolution of threat perception, relationships between regional integration, nation-state integrity, and subnational self-determination movements, the peculiar dynamics of bio-terrorism, and the identification and operation of threshold effects and cascades of change in various political contexts. Of particular importance are applications of this simulation technology for producing templates to capture patterns of variability and similarity associated with particular kinds of countries, kinds of situations, or kinds of threats. The implications for intelligence gathering and analysis are direct and manifest. Indeed the most impressive obstacle to the effective use of these techniques for intelligence purposes has been the necessity for users to be computer programmers. An objective of this project is to make the open-ended potential of computational modeling available to any scholar or analyst with the requisite knowledge of his her subject matter, the imagination to use virtual tools to think about the real world, and access to a standard computer doc23437 none Podila Description: This award will enable participation by six American scientists in the US-India Workshop: Molecular Biology and Biotechnological Applications of Mycorrhizal Fungi. Co-organizers G.K. Podila of Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI and Ajit Varma of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi will convene a workshop at JNU, December 19-23, to discuss the beneficial effects of the soil fungi known as mycorrhizae on plants. The goals include: 1) a reappraisal of the importance of mycorrhizae to the health, growth and well-being plants, and 2) a discussion of their positive influence on reducing plant disease and returning crop production systems to levels of sustainability without large inputs of pesticides or chemical fertilizers. On this important topic, application technologies are being developed worldwide on biological diversity and the functioning of mycorrhizae in all ecosystems. Scope: This workshop is expected to raise awareness and appreciation of the role of mycorrhizae. For the U.S., the participants will become informed about the availability of mycorrhizal biodiversity from India and its potential applications in this country; for India, there is great potential to harness the usefulness of this type of soil fungi and positively impact economic development. For both countries, it is hoped the discussion will inform the thinking and practices that guide management strategies in agriculture and forestry, result in a more comprehensive view of the important role of mycorrhizae on the well-being of all plants, and foster better scientific relations between the U.S. and India. This activity is supported by the Indian Department of Science & Technology (DST) under the NSF DST joint program doc23438 none This project addresses fundamental issues of structure, composition, growth and reactivity on tech-nologically relevant thin films. The research explores film and interface behavior of ultrathin oxides in the critical 1-10 nm thickness range. Plans include growth and analysis of films grown on Si, Ge and SiC. The primary technique employed is high-resolution medium energy ion scat-tering (MEIS), enabling accurate determination of composition as a function of depth, and, in some cases, precise structure determinations. The MEIS experiments will be complemented with infrared absorption spectroscopy, scanning tunneling microscopy, atomic force microscopy, and photoelectron spectroscopy. Some aspects will be done in collaboration with industrial scientists at Bell Labs and elsewhere. The project also addresses fundamental studies of ion-surface inter-actions, specifically the effect of electronic excitation processes on ion scattering spectra as the film thickness drops below one nanometer. The aim is to provide fundamental understanding of high-resolution depth profiling of surfaces and ultrathin films. This work will be done in close collaboration with theorists. The broader technological impact of this work results from devel-opment of a microscopic understanding of thin film growth and of new experimental and theo-retical tools. A new level of conceptual understanding, based on atomic concepts, is expected to emerge which will aid in the continued development of electronics. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in areas of electronic materials science and condensed matter physics having technological relevance. An important feature of the project is the strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and education. The research program provides excellent opportunities for hands-on experience in the use of sophisticated sci-entific equipment. The combined resources, including experimental and theoretical methods, provide special opportunities for education and training of post doctoral associates, graduate and undergraduate students involved in highly interdisciplinary forefront research. The direct and visually oriented nature of the information obtained facilitates communication of the excitement of surface and materials science to undergraduates as well as middle and high school students doc23439 none Navin Khaneja Harvard University Time Optimal Control of Quantum Information Processing Systems Time optimal control of quantum mechanical systems can significantly minimize decoherence effects in coherent manipulation of quantum pheonomenon. The central theme of the project is to develop a mathematical theory for optimal unitary control of quantum networks. Network of coupled two level quantum systems form the benchmark for a quantum computer. Finding the minimum time it takes to produce a desired unitary evolution in a network of coupled quantum systems is of fundamental practical importance not just in the field of quantum information processing but the whole field of coherent spectroscopy. In particular, focus is on optimal control of network of coupled spin half particles (acting as qubits in liquid and solid state NMR quantum conputing with fixed interaction Hamiltonian and ability to selectively excite some of the qubits. One of the goals of this project is to develop geometric methods for computing fundamental bounds on the minimum time it takes to produce unitary evolution in a network of coupled quantum systems and find time optimal control laws which achieve these bounds. These methods are based on variational ideas as captured by the theory of optimal control. Finding optimal strategies to control the dynamics of quantum networks can be reduced to problems in Riemannian geometry of computing subriemannian geodesics in certain homogeneous spaces. Using these geometric techniques time optimal control strategies for quantum networks are being computed doc23440 none Time period: September 1, -August 31, The initiation and eventual institutionalization of fields of inquiry is heavily dependent upon generational cohorts of scholars who not only produce new knowledge but also produce new generations of scholars who will continue to develop the field. The project responds to a serious issue in the field of research on societal aspects of extreme events: the lack of an adequate cohort of junior faculty to sustain scholarship into future generations. This education and training initiative addresses this issue by developing a comprehensive, creative program of mentoring for recently appointed junior faculty at research universities. The objectives of the program are to: (1) identify and recruit another cohort of well-trained social scientists for undertaking relevant research about societal aspects of extreme events; (2) engage this cohort of researchers in discussions about social science scholarship as it relates to research about extreme events; (3) enable this cohort of faculty members to undertake sustained research on these topics; and (4) foster an expanded network of social scientists undertaking research on extreme events. To accomplish these objectives the project will bring bright, newly appointed faculty in sustained contact over a one-year period with seasoned researchers from the fields of decision sciences, economics, geography, political science, psychology, public health, sociology, and urban planning. They will engage in an intense period of mentoring with 16 junior faculty members who will be competitively selected to participate as fellows. Mentoring activities include two workshops, one-on-one mentoring by the faculty panel, and research and writing activities by the faculty fellows. The field of research on societal aspects of extreme events is at a critical juncture. This project is arguably important to its future development and fulfills a central mission of the National Science Foundation in enabling individuals to contribute to solving the nation s problems through new scholarship doc23441 none Research shows that U.S. Latinas, particularly recent immigrants, are more likely to be diagnosed with and die from cervical cancer than are white women. Qualitative studies suggest that Latinas face numeorus barriers in attaining health services, but there are no systematic quantitative studies that account for preventive behaviors. The work combines acculturation theories and the social psychology of belief and behavior relationships as conceptual frames in a stage model. This study uses constructs from two stage models to investgate the complex relationships among numerous individual variables - perceived vulnerability, subjective norms, self-efficacy, attitudes toward cervical cancer, knowledge, acculturation, and cultural factors - and precautionary behaviors. The work involves focus groups, scale validation exercises, and then a systematic survey designed to account for health-seeking practices among Latinas in North Carolina. The research will identify factors within the cultural ethos of Latinas that have the effect of increasing their risk of cervical cancer and lessening their propensity to seek cancer screening doc23442 none Over the past 50 years, an increasingly significant part of our understanding of Classic Period (A.D. 250-900) Maya society has derived from the study of Maya hieroglyphics. Scholars now recognize that Maya scribes used a mixed phonetic and iconographic system of writing to record elite exploits, document royal lineages and inscribe artifacts with ownership statements. Defined by linguists as full writing, Maya hieroglyphics represent a system of graphic symbols that could be used to record and convey any thought that could be spoken. Deciphering the texts painted on polychrome pottery has revealed information regarding the function, geographic and social origin of particular vessels and provided insight into Maya beliefs and the nature of elite interactions. In the process of examining these ceramic texts, epigraphers have divided the painted signs into two categories: (1) conventional hieroglyphs that can be phonetically read and translated into meaningful words or phrases, and (2) symbols described as pseudo-glyphs because they do not conform to the established canons of glyph morphology (Longyear , ). With National Science Foundation support, this study seeks to define more clearly the nature of literacy for members of Classic Period Maya society by documenting and examining a large sample of scientifically-excavated ceramics decorated with pseudo-glyphs. This study will emphasize both archaeological context and glyphic analysis to assess the social function and significance of pseudo-glyph-decorated pottery. After creating a comprehensive photographic database of vessels curated in Guatemala by the Museo de Antropologia e Ethnologia, the Ceramateca of the Instituto de Antropologia e Historia and the Morley Museum, and vessels from various in-process field projects, this study seeks to establish whether pseudo-glyphs, like conventional pottery texts, form a written symbol system that conveys meaning. Statistical and comparative analysis of the texts should reveal what pseudo-glyphs, if any, are consistently employed or combined and whether pseudo-glyphs exhibit a grammar. Additionally, comparing the vessels excavated from different locations may reveal whether pseudo-glyphs functioned stylistically to signal ethnic, gender, kinship, or economic identity. For example, does pseudo-glyph embellished pottery appear most frequently in household or lower-status contexts? Or is there an indication that such pottery appears disproportionately at a particular site or group of sites? By creating the first database of scientifically-excavated Maya ceramics that are embellished with pseudo-glyphs, this research will form a foundation for future interpretations of the nature of Maya literacy during the Classic Period. More broadly, this analysis may be cross-culturally compared with the uses of writing in other societies doc23443 none Meera Sitharam University of Florida Virus-Inspired Declarative Geometric Computation The goal of the project is to develop geometric computational models and tools for virus assembly from their constituent proteins, and virus crystal packing. Furthermore, inspiration of the above processes is being used to rethink computationally tractable declarative geometry (DG), defined as the intuitive, constraint-based representation and efficient realization of composites of simple interacting geometric objects, starting from a declarative specification of the composite s properties. In particular, a new game-theoretic constraint model is being developed for the underlying class of algebraic-geometric computations and corresponding algebraic varieties. Existing software in the form of the PI s geometric constraint solver FRONTIER is forming the base for implementing the new computational framework. The new virus computational models is used for the studying the following unanswered questions on carefully chosen, geometrically significant viruses: (a) the isolation of crucial geometric events during assembly (helpful for disrupting assembly); (b) the isolation of assembly events - such as molecular conformational changes - that require the involvement of viral genomic material, (helpful for understanding DNA-protein interactions); and (c) the isolation of key geometric events during virus crystallization (as an idealized version of molecular crystallization). The new DG virus models is being refined and validated by checking consistency with known behavior of viruses and their constituent proteins during assembly and crystallization. A small number of other highly focused experiments; selective X-ray crystallography and or cryoelectron microscopy is being performed. As a significant player to help with both of the above goals, use the distinctive Maize-streak virus (MSV) will be used, whose structure and properties are particularly suited to goals of the project. A comparison of the new geometric virus models with other geometry-based computational virus models is being made doc23444 none This is a SGER grant covering a period of twelve months. The proposed tasks are: To explore different neutrino detector designs in the proposed Homestake Yeats formation. To work closely with manufacturers who are developing new photon detectors (PDs) so that the new PDs will be suitable for detecting neutrinos. For example, they would supply specifications and check PDs for characteristics that are unique to neutrino detection, quantities such as: quantum efficiency as a function of wavelength, ability to stand pressure, longevity of the PDs, amount of intrinsic radioactive materials in the PDs, etc doc23445 none Alexander C. Russell University of Connecticut Collaborative Research: Quantum Mote Carlo Algorithms and Complexity This collaborative project with the University of New Mexico is exploring both new quantum algorithmic techniques and tools for proving impossibility results for quantum computation. Specifically, the focus is on quantum Monte Carlo algorithms, which try to solve problems by doing a random walk in the space of possible solutions. In addition, fundamental limits on the power of quantum computation, developing impossibility results for quantum circuits is being explored and proving that simple generalizations of Shor s factoring algorithm will not work for the Graph Isomorphism problem, which along with Factoring is a likely candidate for a quantum algorithm. Specifically, quantum walks (unitary analogues of stochastic processes) on various combinatorial structures by employing both Fourier analysis for groups and new tools suited for less symmetric Spaces are being studied. Cases where quantum walks explore the space more quickly than their classical counterparts, and other cases where they become localized and mix more slowly than a classical walk are being explored. In addition Fourier analysis to develop lower bounds for shallow quantum circuits and information-theoretic bounds on the process of sampling from the quantum Fourier transform are being studied. In particular, the quantum Fourier transform over non-Abelian groups, and hidden subgroup and hidden subspace problems for such groups is being investigated doc23446 none Andrew D. Ellington University of Texas at Austin Ribozymes as Molecular Logic Gates Biological macromolecules have the potential to perform computations. DNA computers such as those pioneered by Adleman and his co-workers have already been shown to be able to perform simple calculations. However, these computers have for the most part been based on hybridization logic involving base-pairing interactions between digitally encoded strands. The emphasis on hybridization logic limits the utility and applicability of nucleic acid computation because there are very few ways to read in environmental conditions or read out answers. Nucleic acid enzymes (ribozymes) may prove to be the equivalent of the transistors or logic gates that underlie silicon computation, and could potentially increase the ultimate applicability of nucleic acid computation by interfacing directly with the environment and generating easily read answers. Ribozyme logic gates will be developed and integrated with mesoscale shape elements (known as MUFFINS) for the logical evaluation of sets of analytes in the environment doc23447 none Distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks have emerged as a prevalent way to take down web sites and have imposed financial losses to companies. The CSI FBI survey (CSI ) shows that 36% of respondents in the last 12-months period have detected denial of service, which imposed more than $4.2 million financial losses. The effectiveness of DDOS defenses depends on many factors such that the nature of the network s topology, the specific attack scenario, and various characteristics of the network routers. However, little research has focused on the tradeoffs inherent in this complex system. The researchers are developing a computational testbed to study security policies and the associated technologies that provide defenses against DDOS attacks. The researchers are using this framework to evaluate various policies and technologies. Out model and the ensuing analyses are informed by research in the areas of computer science, information science, organizational theory and social networks. There have been a number of proposals on how to control the on-going DDOS attack traffic. None have been widely deployed. The effectiveness of DDOS defenses depends on many factors, such as the type of network topology, the type of attacks and whether all ISPs are compliant in establishing defenses. However, little is known about the interactions among these factors. Knowing what tradeoffs will occur as these factors vary will enable stakeholders to make more informed security policy decisions in which they adjust for the chance that others may not make the same decisions. Our research illuminates these tradeoffs. Moreover, the computational model the researchers are building enables the user to examine the tradeoffs associated with various DDOS defenses and attack scenarios at the router level. The researchers focus on two basic research questions. First, how do ISPs provide DDOS defenses at the lowest cost while their subscribers remain satisfied with the availability of network connections during attacks? A cost-performance analysis of the effectiveness of DDOS defenses is being conducted using results from the computational model. This cost-performance analysis will aid ISPs and local network administrators in their evaluation of DDOS defenses. Second, the researchers ask where are the critical points in a network to deploy defenses? The researchers examine the impact of network topology on the deployment location of defenses. Graph level indices and models from social network studies will be used to categorize network topologies and to select deployment locations for defenses. This analysis will provide guidance to decision makers. Benefits of this work research include: The policy framework the researchers are developing will help ISPs and subscribers to consider the benefits of providing DDOS defenses and to realize the tradeoffs in DDOS defenses. Results from this study will enable decision makers to make more informed security policy decisions for computer networks. It is costly and unethical to conduct real world experiments of DDOS attacks on large networks. This research will provide a cost effective and ethical means for evaluating various attack scenarios and defenses. Further, topological measures developed in this research should be useful for studies of other large-scale topologies. As such, this work extends social network measures typically used on small person-to-person networks to large-scale computer networks. Finally, this research provides a theoretical basis for evaluating DDOS defenses building on interdisciplinary studies from the fields of computer science, information science, organizational theory and social network analysis doc23448 none Jonathan R. Friedman Amherst College Toward Quantum Computing with Molecular Magnets; Studies of Spin Dynamics The viability for using molecular magnets as qubits, the processing elements of quantum computers by using pulsed microwave and millimeter-wave radiation to perform quantum operations on the spin states of these systems are being investigated. In the process, some important issues regarding the tunneling mechanism by which the magnetic moments of these systems reverse direction at temperatures below a few Kelvin are also investigated. A series of experiments are being performed to measure the effect of the applied radiation on the magnetic relaxation of the molecular magnets. These experiments include photon-assisted relaxation, which occurs when the radiation helps the molecule s spin reverse direction, Rabi oscillations of the probability of reversal with radiation-pulse duration, and free-precession of a quantum superposition of spin states produced by a series of radiation pulses. These experiments are aimed at providing a measure of the decoherence time of the excited spin state, a crucial parameter for determining whether the molecular magnets can be used as qubits. The project is also investigating methods of mitigating inhomogeneous broadening effects due to dipole interactions with neighboring molecules, nuclear spins and defects. The project has potential impacts for the fields of quantum computation and information storage. It is also promoting the education of undergraduate students, especially under-represented groups like women and minorities doc23449 none ing the modeling process into a statistical mechanics problem transforms a tedious, ill-posed search into an exciting new problem in complex, disordered systems. From an applications view, insights drawn from the materials physics community form powerful tools, allowing real predictive power where only qualitative exploration was previously possible. From a physics view, the prevalence of soft modes in parameter space provides new insights and provokes new methods. From an information technology view, intensive computational analysis can now be brought to bear on a large new class of problems of importance to science and society. The three signal transduction networks being studied are of particular interest to the development of drug therapies in cancer, and are a well-studied preview of the kinds of challenges the bioinformatics and proteomics revolution will present in the coming decade. The extension to ecological meta-modeling will lead to applications in many other complex systems where incomplete or preliminary data nonetheless need rigorous analysis. %%% This grant is made in response to a small proposal submitted to the Information Technology Research (ITR) Initiative. The PI will leverage information technology and sophisticated methods from the statistical mechanics of disordered systems to systematically explore large, complex biological models. These models are sloppy, and the key challenge is to extract reliable and falsifiable predictions from them. The PI will apply statistical mechanics not to the physical system, but to the parameters in the dynamical models of the system: this meta-modeling technique thus draws predictions from the entire ensemble of models that are consistent with the currently available data. Meta-modeling will be applied to four problems. Three of these are systems studied in the field of cellular signal transduction: the Erk system in PC12 cells; growth factor receptor trafficking and Cdc42; and the cell cycle in the colon cell line Caco-2. The final application is in ecology: the nutrient cycles in forested ecosystems doc23450 none Ulinski, Philip S Univ. of Chicago CRCNS: Collaborative Research : How is Information Coded in Turtle Visual Cortex ? Visual stimuli evoke a propagating wave of activity in the visual cortex of freshwater turtles. Preliminary work suggested that information about the position of stimuli in visual space is coded in the spatiotemporal dynamics of these waves. Effectively, there may be a map of visual space to the dynamics of the visual cortex. This hypothesis is being examined in a collaborative effort involving three laboratories. David Senseman in San Antonio is using voltage sensitive dye methods to record the waves produced by presenting spots of light at 35 spots on the retina. These studies will characterize the features of the map based on repeated presentations of stimuli at 35 loci. Philip Ulinski in Chicago is developing a large-scale model of the visual pathway of turtles. Models of individual retinal ganglion cells that combine both classic filter-based approaches to modeling ganglion cells, with compartmental modeling of ganglion cells are being constructed. They are being used to construct 35 patches of a model retina that match the 35 loci. Physiological studies of the biophysics of neurons in the lateral geniculate complex of turtles are being carried out. They are used to develop a model of the lateral geniculate complex, which is the last step in modeling the retino-geniculate-cortical pathway. Bijoy Ghosh in St. Louis is developing refined estimation techniques that allow the position of a visual stimulus to be estimated from the dynamics of the cortical waves. This work is providing the mathematical framework needed to characterize a potential map of visual space to the dynamics of the wave. This work is significant because it is characterizing a novel method of coding information in visual cortex that may apply to higher order cortical areas in mammals, as well as turtles doc23451 none Many computational problems of practical interest can be posed in terms of search. Examples include discrete optimization problem that arise naturally in many areas of science, engineering and business. The development of a robust network infrastructure coupled with the advent of reasonably-priced computing equipment has helped focus attention on techniques that use multiple processors operating in parallel to improve search performance. Our research focuses on the design, development, implementation and evaluation of scalable, fault-tolerant, distributed search technique and their application, generally in concert with other optimization techniques, to construct hybrid optimization systems. Much of the work described here relies on a unique underlying parallelization paradigm of our own design called nagging. It contrast to more traditional problem partitioning techniques, nagging plays mutiple reformations of a problem --- or portions of a problem --- against each other to improve performance. We will improve and refine our understanding of nagging, including research on adaptive strategies for combining nagging and partitioning strategies; to improve and refine our distributed search infrastructure, including, for example, the use of cryptographic protocols to support authentication and distribution of new applications across management boundaries; and to continue our interdisciplinary collaborative efforts to apply distributed search concert with other optimization techniques to scientific computing problems doc23452 none Fault tolerant protocols are essential for providing various services (routing, group communication, broadcasting, multi-casting, etc.) in large, dynamic, distributed systems, where both processors and communication links can malfunction intermittently. For example, in mobile and ad hoc networks, the communication links are unreliable and some nodes may be unreachable for certain amounts of time. Such networks, consisting of mobile hosts that communicate via wireless radio channels, are being increasingly used for local area networks, law enforcement, military operations and a myriad of other applications. The traditional approach in designing fault tolerant protocols assumes an upper bound on the number of faults and involves a worst case design by fault masking. While this approach provides 100% system availability under assumed conditions, the implementation becomes very expensive. At the same time there are numerous applications for which the lack of system availability for very short periods is acceptable. Self-stabilization is an ``optimistic model to design distributed fault tolerant systems; no upper bound on the number of faults is necessary, systems always reach a legitimate global state starting from any arbitrary (possibly illegitimate) state, and no central control is needed. However, system availability is not guaranteed during the convergence period. This research addresses the design and analysis of fault tolerant self-stabilizing protocols for global communication primitives for dynamic distributed systems, especially suitable for mobile ad hoc networks. The research focuses on several aspects: -- Create paradigms and guiding principles for designing self-stabilizing distributed algorithms; -- Explore methodologies for translating a conventional algorithm into a self-stabilizing analog; -- Discover and analyze self-stabilizing protocols for global communication primitives (resource center location, leader election, etc.) in a network; -- Explore fractional (rational) valued self-stabilizing algorithms as a way to obtain improved approximate solutions to otherwise NP-hard problems; -- Measure the degree to which self-stabilizing algorithms can contain a single fault. The research takes a combined theoretical and experimental approach, and applies its results to emerging distributed applications for ad hoc networks doc23453 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Paul Thacker and colleagues will conduct three seasons of geological and archaeological fieldwork in three different regions of Portugal: Estremadura, Ribatejo, and Alentejo. The interdisciplinary team includes Portuguese and American specialists assembled to investigate regional differences in flaked stone tools during the Magdalenian period, ca. 15,000 years ago. Changing environmental conditions at the very end of the Pleistocene make the Magdalenian especially interesting and appropriate for examining the articulation of prehistoric technology with hunter gatherer subsistence and settlement strategies. Untangling the meaning of stone artifact assemblage variability requires understanding the situational environment in which prehistoric tools were made and used. This project is of broad archaeological interest because each of the three study areas is characterized by different stone raw material types, abundances, and sizes. For example, high-quality, large chert cobbles were exploited throughout the Paleolithic in the Rio Maior region, in contrast to the Sor drainage which lacks chert sources but has abundant quartz and quartzite gravels. Comprehensive sampling and statistical description of these different raw material deposits will provide the context within which Magdalenian foragers generated stone tool assemblages. Four Upper Paleolithic open air campsites will be excavated to obtain large lithic assemblages with associated radiometric dates, two in the Alcobertas valley and two in the Sor valley. Intrasite spatial analysis of three-dimensionally plotted occupation levels will determine the impact of post depositional processes and the degree to which site assemblages are functionally-comparable analytical units. This sampling strategy will provide at least one Early Magdalenian and one Late Magdalenian assemblage in each region, facilitating chronological comparison as well as regional ones between the valleys and numerous Magdalenian assemblages previously published from the Rio Maior vicinity. Laboratory analyses and refitting studies of excavated flaked stone assemblages will explore variability at the site and regional level. The organization of stone tool technology, transport decisions and artifact use lives will be compared and contrasted across the three regions. Paleoenvironmental data will be obtained through charcoal-wood species determination while residue and use wear studies will contribute to the functional interpretation of site assemblages. This research is important for several reasons. Planned archaeological fieldwork will provide new data on the Stone Age occupation of two previously unresearched regions of Iberia. The comparative approach of this project will investigate the numerous behaviors that result in Portuguese Magdalenian lithic variability, possibly revealing stone acquisition and reduction behaviors that are social rather than functional in origin. Results will have theoretical and methodological significance for archaeologists working in other geographic regions and chronological periods, especially researchers exploring the interface of hunter-gatherer technological organization and raw material exploitation with subsistence and settlement strategies doc23454 none Burge, Christopher B MIT CRCNS: Bioinformatics of Alternative Splicing in the Nervous System Almost every human cell contains a huge instruction manual called the genome with many thousands of pages (the genes), each of which tells the cell how to make a particular building block (protein) that it needs to live or grow or to perform its assigned function in the body. The cell uses this manual in a complicated way, first copying (transcribing) each page that it needs to a piece of scratch paper (the pre-mRNA), and then cutting and pasting (splicing) pieces of the scratch paper (the exons) together to form the final recipe (mRNA) for the protein product. Interestingly, this cutting and pasting is often carried out in different ways in different types of cells or under different conditions in a process called alternative splicing (AS), generating many different varieties of a protein under different conditions. Alternative splicing is particularly common in neurons, helping to generate protein variants whose properties are optimized to the local environment of the neuron. For example, AS is used to tune the electrical properties of ion channels which help different sensory neurons in the inner ear respond to different frequencies of sound. In addition, mutations that affect AS are associated with a number of neurodegenerative diseases. The goal of the proposal is to gain a better understanding of the signals in a gene that determine how that gene will be spliced when it is expressed in a particular part of the brain, and of how alternative splicing is used to modulate brain function doc23455 none Stochastic Models of Executive Control in Monkeys and Humans With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Logan, Palmeri, and Schall will conduct a three-year investigation of the executive control processes that underlie flexible responding in monkeys and humans. It is the hallmark of primate intelligence to be able to respond flexibly, focusing on different aspects of the same situation to produce arbitrary responses that are appropriate to current goals. The goal of this project is to specify executive processes computationally and neurally, focusing on the control of attention, categorization, and response preparation. To accomplish this goal, monkeys and humans will perform tasks that require them to make saccadic eye movements toward or away from targets that appear in displays of distractors. Experimental variables will be manipulated to selectively influence attention to the targets, categorization of targets and distractors, and preparation of eye movement responses. The timing and accuracy of eye movements will be recorded in both humans and monkeys performing the task, and the activity of ensembles of neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys will be recorded while they are performing the task. The overt eye movement behavior of humans and monkeys and the neural activity of monkeys will be described in terms of a mathematically precise computational theory with three distinct components, as follows. (1) An attention component that selects behaviorally-relevant targets from a field of distractors; (2) a categorization component that selects goal-relevant interpretations of target stimuli; and (3) a response preparation component that selects responses necessary to accomplish the goals. The theory provides a common language that makes it possible to relate the overt behavior of humans to the overt behavior of monkeys and to relate the overt behavior of monkeys to the neural activity that underlies it. The research is significant in three respects. First, it will advance understanding of executive control processes by specifying them concretely in terms of computational and neural processes. Executive control processes are critical in a variety of contexts in the workplace, educational settings, and mental health settings that require people to deal with competing goals and switch between various activities, including the workplace, education, and mental health. The research will have implications for human factors, ergonomics, design of training programs in education and industry, and diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. Second, the research will advance understanding of neural processes by providing linking propositions that relate single-cell behavior to psychological states of the cognitive processes that the single cells implement. Single-cell behavior makes sense only in the context of the behavior it underlies, and the research will provide that relation. Third, the research will advance understanding of the computations that underlie cognitive processes of attention, categorization, and response preparation. Computational models of these processes are limited by an inability to open the black box and observe the inner brain processes that underlie them. Computational models with very different internal processes often predict the same overt behavior. The research will identify cognitive processes with neural behavior, allowing distinctions between these computational models of human and monkey cognition doc23456 none Adaptability refers to an organism s ability to endure environmental change, to spread to new habitats, and to respond in novel ways to its surroundings - all of which typify the living human species, Homo sapiens. The main objective of this project is to investigate the emergence of human adaptability in the dynamic settings that characterized the past four million years. Human origins during this period involved a lengthy transition from small apelike populations confined to equatorial regions of Africa to a worldwide, highly diverse human species capable of altering its surroundings in unprecedented ways. In this project scientists from diverse fields (anthropologists, paleontologists, geologists, and environmental scientists) will gather new data to further our understanding of how major human adaptations evolved in response to ancient environments. The period of human ancestry was typified by a very complex sequence of environments, including progressive change (global cooling during the ice ages), large climate oscillation (repeated change between glacial-interglacial and arid-moist conditions), and times of stability. It is not yet known, however, whether early technological change, brain enlargement, geographic dispersal, development of symbolic behavior, among other key events in human prehistory, coincided with periods of directional change, strong fluctuation, or stability. This project will compare detailed environmental, fossil, and archeological records in Africa and East Asia in order to test when, where, and why human ancestors developed a greater ability to adjust to new surroundings and to modify their habitats. This project will include the first comparative analysis of fossil and environmental records from both Africa and East Asia, funded by NSF and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Excavations and laboratory analysis in the two distant regions offer a novel opportunity to explore the connection between environmental and evolutionary change and the common prehistory of the two regions. Project research teams will collect data to measure change in early human behavior (from archeological sources) and in anatomy (from the fossil record). Change in past animal communities and ecosystems will also be studied to provide a context in which to judge the development of uniquely human strategies of interaction with the environment. Environmental research teams will use state-of-the-art techniques to examine the nature and rate of global change, evident in the ocean record, and of local change in areas where humans emerged and spread. The project also includes geneticists who will experimentally evaluate the possible genetic processes by which adaptability evolves. This research will investigate the model organism C. elegans (nematode), and will test for mechanisms of genetic change that favor adaptive flexibility to emerge in response to experimental sequences of environments. The combined components of this project are thus designed to stimulate communication across experimental and historical approaches within and across the natural and social sciences. Through workshops, conferences, and a publicly accessible website and database, our project seeks to unify fields that only together can address an unanswered scientific question, the origin of adaptability in humans and other organisms. The broader impacts f this research will include public outreach through the web, museum exhibitions, distance-learning curricula, and opportunities for student internships doc23457 none Lin, David Cornell University-State CRCNS: Modeling Pathfinding and Target Recognition in the Olfactory System Statement for public consumption The proper development of the nervous system is essential to the f unction of any organism. The nervous system integrates sensory input, coordinates motor output, controls autonomic functions, and shapes memory and cognition. To accomplish these tasks, the nervous system employs billions of neurons that will form trillions of connections with their appropriate targets. For example, in the olfactory system, odorant in the environment are detected by olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) located in the nose. In order for odorant information to be properly transmitted to the brain, however, these neurons must be connected, or wired together, with their appropriate partners in the brain. How this critical feat of pathfinding and target recognition is accomplished is still largely unknown. In one model, this process is mediated b cues located at various points within the brain that would interact with and guide neurons to their target. These cues would form, in essence, a roadmap , that would help guide neurons to their target. In this proposal, we will combine bioinformatics, statistical methods, and genomics to begin to determine the shape of this map. As a model system, we will study the ability of olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) to identify their targets in the olfactory bulb doc23458 none Christopher D. Moore University of New Mexico Collaborative Research: Quantum Mote Carlo Algorithms and Complexity This collaborative project with the University of Connecticut is exploring both new quantum algorithmic techniques and tools for proving impossibility results for quantum computation. Specifically, the focus is on quantum Monte Carlo algorithms, which try to solve problems by doing a random walk in the space of possible solutions. In addition, fundamental limits on the power of quantum computation, developing impossibility results for quantum circuits is being explored and proving that simple generalizations of Shor s factoring algorithm will not work for the Graph Isomorphism problem, which along with Factoring is a likely candidate for a quantum algorithm. Specifically, quantum walks (unitary analogues of stochastic processes) on various combinatorial structures by employing both Fourier analysis for groups and new tools suited for less symmetric Spaces is being studied. Cases where quantum walks explore the space more quickly than their classical counterparts, and other cases where they become localized and mix more slowly than a classical walk are being explored. In addition Fourier analysis to develop lower bounds for shallow quantum circuits and information-theoretic bounds on the process of sampling from the quantum Fourier transform are being studied. In particular, the quantum Fourier transform over non-Abelian groups, and hidden subgroup and hidden subspace problems for such groups is being investigated. This is closely related to Graph Isomorphism, and explore tractable special cases while showing it is hard for a Shor-type algorithm in general doc23459 none EIA- Bhubaneswar Mishra New York University Mathematical and Algorithmic Analysis of Natural and Artificial DNA Sequences The PI is developing tools that play an important role in understanding the properties of both natural and artificial genomes and thus, elucidates how such DNA evolves under natural and artificial conditions (in vitro or in vivo). The ultimate applications range from building error-resilient biological computers all the way up to understanding how genome structures (e.g., genes, gene families, synteny groups, haplotype blocks, chromosomes, etc.) have naturally evolved. With this goal in mind, the PI is developing several modeling and statistical algorithms with efficient implementations in order to solve design problems in genomics, biosensors, biocomputation and evolutionary biology. The final tool box design contains: a software environment and language that allows users to visualize and analyze long DNA or RNA molecules, a gene grammar to model various genome-wide evolutionary processes, statistical analysis of the structures of various natural genomic DNAs evolving under replication and proof-reading processes and finally, a physical annotation of the genome that can be used in designing genomic microarrays or aptamers for biosensors doc23460 none The PI proposes to develop an innovative algorithmic development to simulate physical problems involving large-deformatin interactions among multiple materials such as fluid solid regions with moving boundaries at the interface. The proposed research advances Information Technology through the development of a new paradigm, which incorporates leading-edge simulation techniques with high performance computing and data visualization doc23461 none Huntington The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) is an international project to assess the likely impacts of climate change on the physical, biological, and human systems of the Arctic. This workshop provides an opportunity for international collaboration in assessing the impacts on human systems. The workshop, called Snowchange, will bring together researchers and indigenous persons from Russia, Canada, and the Nordic countries to discuss climate change, its causes, and its significance for Arctic residents. The workshop will identify Russian case studies for the ACIA with regard to indigenous perspectives on climate change doc23462 none Andreas Klappenecker Texas Engineering Experiment Station Efficient Decoherence Control Algorithms This project investigates general classes of quantum error control codes and associated fault-tolerant operations to prevent derailing of computations on a quantum computer due to decoherence effects. The topics being explored in this project include i) the structure of nice error bases, ii) extensions of stabilizer codes, iii) Clifford codes, iv) efficient encoding, recovery, and decoding algorithms for quantum error control codes, and v) methods for the realization of fault tolerant operations doc23463 none This proposal sets out a fundamental study that is focused on probing the link between catalytic hydrodechlorination activity selectivity and catalyst structure. Previous work by the PI has established that nano-dispersed nickel on amorphous silica in the presence of hydrogen is highly efficient in the dechlorination of concentrated chlorinated gas streams; the chlorine that is removed is solely in the form of HCl that is easy to trap. The existing catalyst activity selectivity database will be extended in a strategic fashion, focusing on the treatment of chlorinated phenols as model reactants; the latter represents a class of commercially significant and highly toxic industrial waste. Preliminary results have revealed that chlorobenzene and chlorophenol hydrodechlorination over Ni SiO2 is structure sensitive in that larger Ni particles (in the range 1-4 nm) exhibit higher specific dechlorination rates but are more susceptible to deactivation. The issue of catalyst decay will be addressed through a comprehensive program of catalyst characterization before and after reaction. This will involve bulk structural studies (x-ray diffraction), high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (TEM), analytical TEM including EDX and EELS, surface area porosity measurements, chemisorption TPD TPO studies and x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy to probe changes in Ni electronic structure. Moreover, the nature of the reactant(s) product(s) interaction with the catalyst surface will be probed using spectroscopic (FTIR-DRIFT) and chromatographic techniques. The presence of chlorinated aromatics in industrial effluent is now established as a major source of environmental pollution. This work may form the basis for a more efficient pollution prevention method. The PI has previously worked with both graduate and undergraduate students in an international context. In this project he will also work with chemistry students and provide training in engineering research doc23464 none DIGITAL REPRESENTATION OF STRUCTURAL RESPONSE FOR THE RELIABILITY ASSESSMENT OF COMPLEX SYSTEMS Current research efforts in structural engineering are geared toward the development of performance based design and safety evaluation criteria that take into consideration the various uncertainties in estimating system behavior and future loading conditions. System reliability methods provide the means to address these important points. However, most existing analytical reliability techniques have one or more limitations in their ablity to: a) accurately model structural behavior at high loads, b) consider different performance criteria, c) identify multiple equally important failure modes, and d) account for load combinations. The application of simulation techniques in conjunction with general purpose finite element packages provides methods with a strong potential for resolving many of these outstanding issues. The purpose of this research is then to develop a simulation-based method for the reliability assessment of structural systems, which would realistically model their behavior at high loads, be implementable in practical situations, and provide accurate solutions for complex structures using efficient algorithms. The first tool required to perform a simulation-based reliability analysis of a structural system consists of an accurate and efficient nonlinear analysis program capable of modeling the behavior of the structure for a specific (deterministic) set of conditions. The second tool is a systematic search algorithm that can identify probabilistically dominant failure modes accounting for the randomness of loads and material properties. Closed-form solutions for the response of complex nonlinear structures are difficult to obtain and only a digital representation of their behavior is possible through the application of the finite element method. Point estimates of the response under different load intensities and material properties are usually obtained from variations on the Newton-Raphson algorithm. These point estimates may often misidentify the ultimate capacity and may not accurately model the softening part of the loading curve due to the accumulation of numerical errors and because of the properties of the stiffness matrix in these ranges. In this study, the Singular Value Decomposition, SVD, method in combination with the Lanczos algorithm will be used to accurately trace the response of a structure at high loads. The efficiency, robustness, and stability of the proposed method will be demonstrated. Due to the random nature of the problem, the safety assessment of a structure can only be established using reliability techniques. Since the behavior of a structure with several failure modes is best represented in digital form, modern heuristic techniques may provide the most appropriate tools to assess its reliability. In particular, Genetic Algorithms, GA, have been shown to provide robust techniques for the reliability analysis of structures with multiple failure modes but may be inefficient due to the shotgun search strategy that they are based upon. To improve the efficiency of GA, a filtration operator will be introduced based on the principle of genetic elitism. The modified GA will provide an efficient method to estimate the reliability of complex structures, as well as identify its dominant failure modes and controlling random variables. This project will introduce advanced tools of computational mathematics into the field of structural mechanics. The study will stress the application of the proposed methods for the simulation based design of civil engineering structures although they will be applicable to fields as varied as electronic circuit design and Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems. Training of students in the subjects of matrix computational methods, artificial intelligence, and statistical computing will be a primary goal. Such training will provide future generations of structural engineers with the well-rounded education needed to make decisions and provide solutions to real life complex problems under uncertainty doc23465 none Dimitri V. Nanopoulos Texas A&M Research Foundation Electromagnetic and informational processes in biomolecular polymers In this project the electric dipole moment and quantum properties of tubulin, microtubules (MTs), microtubule-associated proteins (MAPs) and cytoskeletal networks immobilized on thin metal films utilizing surface plasmon resonance and femtosecond laser pulses are being studied. The goal is to understand the electrical and conjectured quantum properties of the cytoskeleton and determine whether biomolecular polymers and specifically tubulin can be used as bits or qubits in the protein-based devices such as logic gates, nanowires and memory registers in the biological and quantum computers of the future. Measurements of the electric dipole moment of tubulin and its dynamics in polymerized and free tubulin, investigate the formation and propagation of the predicted kink-solitonic electric dipole moment flip waves and monitor the polymerization and dynamics of MT-MAP networks under different conditions are being measured. In addition, this research is ideally suited to test MT-based quantum brain and quantum neuron models predicting such phenomena as large-scale neuronal quantum coherence and teleportation of dipole quanta doc23466 none The objective of the proposed research is to investigate novel information technology (IT)-based approach for synthesizing electromechanically optimized smart structures. Specifically, we will develop an Agent-based Negotiation framework for the robust design of large-scale active-passive hybrid piezoelectric networks (APPN) for structural vibration control. The framework is to assist the designer in making high-level design decisions (e.g., the selection of circuit topology) and in analyzing the tradeoff among conflicting design objectives, which include the robustness requirement for dealing with model uncertainty. The research tasks include methodology development, system analysis, and experimental investigation. The goal of the education plan is to integrate the research with various educational programs at Penn State and achieve a broad range of impact on student learning. The significance and impacts are: (a) This study will be a pioneer effort exploring the feasibility of utilizing IT to optimally tailor a large-scale electro-mechanically coupled smart structure system, considering design uncertainties, tradeoffs, and circuit topology selections. (b) The investigation will have significant impacts on agent-based technology because it addresses the increasingly important issue of negotiation among a structured team of collaborative agents. It can increase the scalability of agent teams and enable them to adapt themselves to avoid cognitive overload in complex domains such as distributed decision makings. (c) The research will have broad influence on many engineering systems. The automotive, aerospace, manufacturing, instrumentation and many other industries will benefit from the vibration control technologies developed based on the outcome of this investigation. (d) The educational efforts will have broad impact on teaching the next generation of engineers and IT workforce to utilize modern computer technology for solving large-scale complex engineering problems with uncertainties and conflicting design requirements doc23467 none This ITR research and educational project is in an application area at the intersection of Information Technology and an engineering science discipline. Work is proposed that will develop computational models of complex nonlinear dynamical systems that are often encountered in nanoscale phenomena and devices such as biological and polymer materials that are currently being studied experimentally with Atomic Force Microscopes. The principal goal is to develop a hybrid discrete continuum model that will reduce by orders of magnitude the number of degrees of freedom needed to describe the system without any essential loss of information. The research will be complemented by an educational plan that includes a newly developed course, Dynamics of Very High Dimensional Systems , the writing of a new textbook monograph of that same title and the mentoring of a post-doc and undergraduate student who will assist with the research and the new course doc23468 none This proposal requests support for a collaborative effort between investigators at MIT and Rice University to integrate access to the Grid computing model with the existing ROOT software framework, which is the de-facto standard in high energy and nuclear physics data analyses. To deal with the large amounts of data to be collected by the high energy physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Switzerland, CMS and the other LHC collaborations are adopting the Grid paradigm that aims to provide consistent and efficient access to geographically distributed computing resources. The goal of the project is to make Grid services available to ROOT users. This will be based on the PROOF extension of ROOT and will be implemented in close collaboration with the ROOT authors at CERN. Phase I will involve the initial design, development and prototyping cycle and a detailed benchmarking and evaluation period. In phase II, production versions will be used on existing clusters for RHIC data and CMS simulation data doc23469 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Edward Gibson will conduct three years of psycholinguistic research on relations between intonational (or prosodic) phrasing and syntactic structure in sentence production and comprehension. This research asks where people tend to place intonational boundaries (pauses, roughly speaking) in producing sentences, and where people perceive such boundaries in sentences. The working hypothesis of the production experiments is that the probability of producing an intonational boundary at a given location is proportional to the sum of (1) the number of phonological phrases over which the most recently processed syntactic phrase extends, and (2) the number of phonological phrases over which the upcoming syntactic phrase extends, as long as it is not an argument of the most recently processed word. This and related hypotheses will be tested using analyses of natural speech corpora and a reader-listener paradigm. Participants in the reader-listener paradigm say sentences that they have read in advance. Other participants answer comprehension questions on the sentences after they are produced. The research also investigates whether preferences in comprehension mirror those in production. Methods for investigating comprehension will include complexity ratings, comprehension question accuracy, and cross-modal lexical decision. This project is important for several reasons. First, it will broaden our knowledge of the relationship between language and other aspects of human cognition, such as memory. The results of the work will also be of interest to researchers in computer speech generation and analysis, and language acquisition. Speech processing systems need to model human preferences in intonational boundary placement in order to both improve understanding of human speech and synthesize more natural sounding speech. With respect to language acquisition, it has been proposed that intonation can help learners acquire syntactic knowledge. Uncovering the relationship between intonational phrasing and syntactic structure will help to evaluate whether such claims are viable doc23470 none With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Nancy Ide and Randi Reppen will conduct a three-year project to annotate extensively a 10-million word portion of the American National Corpus (ANC). The ANC consists of both spoken and written language from North America across a range of registers, such as planned speeches, conversations, fiction, and newspapers. This research project uses techniques from both computational linguistics and corpus linguistics to annotate the ANC for a range of grammatical and semantic characteristics. Specifically the project seeks to accomplish three major objectives: 1) develop automatic tools for annotating various elements and structures in the corpus; 2) create a gold standard portion of the ANC, consisting of 10 million words in which the markup, annotation, and parts of speech have been hand-validated; and 3) describe the conceptual and meaning relations among words in the ANC within the framework of the semantic web , thus greatly enhancing analysis and retrieval capabilities. The investigators are to carry out this research through a variety of software programs (many created specifically for this project), and through extensive human computer interaction to hand-validate the computer assigned labels. This research project is important for several reasons. First, the resulting corpus will be the first publicly available tagged corpus of spoken and written American English. Second, because the annotation of the corpus will be hand-validated, the resulting product will approach 100% accuracy. With this carefully annotated 10-million word corpus, language researchers will be able to address a number of structural and linguistic relationships across texts that previously could not be addressed. Since the corpus will be hand-validated, researchers can use this information to develop models for processing previously unseen texts. The ANC corpus will be readily available to researchers via the web. In addition to the annotated corpus, the project will make available to researchers a suite of tools designed to retrieve information from the corpus doc23471 none Neurons communicate with one and other primarily by secreting chemical neurotransmitters that influence the electrical or biochemical activities of neighboring cells. These neurotransmitters are stored in small organelles called synaptic vesicles that are localized to presynaptic nerve endings. In order for neurotransmitter to be secreted, a synaptic vesicle must fuse with the surface membrane at the nerve terminal, which allows neurotransmitter to diffuse to the nearby target neurons. This tightly regulated fusion process is the fundamental event in interneuronal communication. Recent work has revealed that vesicle fusion is a low probability event related to the number of synaptic vesicles docked with the active zone, the site at which fusion occurs. A dynamic equilibrium exists between vesicles that are fusion-competent and the majority of vesicles that are held in reserve; this equilibrium is regulated in a Ca2+-dependent manner. The molecular basis for these Ca2+-dependent changes in the brain is incompletely understood, in part because billions of microscopic nerve terminals are distributed throughout the brain, making it difficult of impossible to synchronize the activity of the nerve terminals in an intact preparation. Work proposed by Dr. turner is designed to study the signaling pathways that regulate synaptic vesicle dynamics using synaptosomes, a preparation of isolated nerve terminals that is relatively uniform in composition. Dr. Turner s laboratory will use synaptosomes to measure biochemical changes in the activities of specific signaling pathways that have been implicated in regulating synaptic vesicle maturation, including Ca2+-regulated kinases and a monomeric GTP-binding known as Ral. In parallel, the relevance of these signaling pathways will be evaluatued by measuring the strength of synaptic transmission in a more intact preparation, the acute brain slice obtained from cerebellum. The parallel fiber to Purkinje cell synapse found in this preparation is a well-characterized excitatory synapse that should be representative of excitatory synapses found in all parts of the brain. Simultaneous measurements of neurotransmitter release and the attendant changes in cytoplasmic signaling pathways will advance a more detailed understanding of the mechanisms that underlie Ca2+-dependent changes in synaptic strength important to interneuronal signaling in the brain. The impact of this work will extend broadly throughout neuroscience because of the fundamental importance of synaptic transmission in information processing by the brain, for features including sensory reception, motor control, attention and decision, and learning and memory. In addition, this project will help launch the independent career of a young investigator doc23472 none The primary focus of this research activity is the development of the conceptual framework and methodological steps for determining optimal and robust tactical and operational strategies for rapidly evacuating a large burning building or a building that has come under attack by enemy or natural catastrophe. Both emergency preparedness planning and real-time execution are addressed. Tactical preparedness concerns involve the selection of carefully planned a priori evacuation paths that consider the inherent dynamic and uncertain nature of conditions that exist in emergency situations requiring evacuation. Operational concerns address the on-line determination of evacuation paths that are updated in real-time as actual conditions of the building structures and circulation systems (i.e. means of egress) are revealed and predictions related to risk of continued failure concerning the structural members and portions of the circulation systems are updated. The need for modeling the dynamic and uncertain nature of conditions in emergency evacuation stems from the fact that such events are often characterized by dangers that strengthen and spread over time. These circumstances induce the possibility that successful egress may be inhibited by partial or complete failure of key escape paths. Moreover, we cannot know how the situation will progress with certainty even if the exact location and type of event that initiated the need for the evacuation is known. Existing methodologies for determining optimal evacuation paths do not consider this uncertainty and the dynamically varying conditions inherent in post-blast, fire or other situations requiring emergency evacuation. Instructions that do not consider the evolution of damage over time and threats of probable additional destruction and deterioration can result in suboptimal decisions that can lead to unnecessary imposed risk and unnecessary lost lives. The algorithmic developments undertaken in this research effort will explicitly consider these characteristics in determination of the evacuation path strategies, resulting in robust evacuation plans with lower probability of failure than paths determined otherwise. Teaching, training and learning will be enhanced through the development of real-world case studies that will be studied in the classroom and through a comprehensive graduate course related to risk analyses and emergency management. Evacuation plans resulting from the proposed research activities will enable faster and more efficient evacuation of a building in the event of military attack, fire, natural disaster, discovery of a hazardous material or biological agent, or other circumstances warranting quick escape. This will result in reduction in: the number of injured persons, trapped evacuees, or lost lives. The methodologies developed in this research effort will also be pertinent for evaluating existing evacuation plans and for identifying potentially high-risk circumstances. These results will impact many other functional areas as well, including, evacuation of a geographical region due to military attack, human-made accident, or natural disaster, such as an accident involving a nuclear power plant or escape of hazardous chemicals, collapse of a structure such as dam walls, hurricane, earthquake, flooding, volcanic eruption, or tsunami doc23473 none Long The proposed research is focused on an innovative approach to develop radiation systems for wireless networks in which the antennas are effectively indiscernible in their local environment. It seeks to examine how both exterior and interior parts of existing buildings and structures might be used as transmitting and receiving systems for various wireless applications. The major issues that must be solved to successfully develop antenna systems that are essentially invisible, include understanding : how to effectively excite existing structures how to examine their basic radiation properties how to predict their radiated fields how to control their radiation characteristics. In some cases minor modifications may have to be made to the existing structures, but the visual and structural impact of such actions would be minimal. Possible candidates for investigation include flashing and gutters around the tops of buildings, lightning protection systems, metallic window frames, building supports, power lines and supports, portions of existing towers and billboards, metal roofs or cupolas, portions of the metal structure interior to a building, and non-structural conductors such as door frames and ceiling tile support grids. The initial phase of the proposed research program will address the following tasks: development of appropriate feeding and matching techniques evaluation of the radiation properties for the proposed radiation elements investigation of the use of perturbing materials and modifications of the structures for current and pattern control The impact of the successful implementation of such antenna systems on the world of telecommunications should be most significant. The final results of the proposed study should provide essential information on the feasibility of using existing structures as effective radiators, as well as providing preliminary tools and procedures for the design of this new class of antenna systems doc23474 none Ghiorso This Information Technology Research Program grant supports the development of a distributed computing infrastructure in computational petrology. The computational model calls for the development of highly optimized and rigorously tested server code that will be built to perform basic level phase property stability calculations. This code will be published as an Application Programming Interface (API) and distributed via a CORBA IDL to client machines on the Internet. Remote users will access the server in one of two ways: either as remote procedure calls from user written clients, or by downloading clients developed in conjunction with the server code effort that are designed to solve specific problems. Clients will be written to address the needs of both the research and the teaching community. Extensive documentation and tutorials will be produced doc23475 none Research is proposed on 1) visualization of the diffusion monte carlo algorithm as it is applied to He clusters and 2) calculations of the excited electronic states of He clusters using a new monte carlo development. The calculations will be treating many-body systems of up to 300 degress of freedom and will examine the computational issues associated with parallelization of the needed algorithm doc23476 none This study will continue the reference material program which for the last three years has made low dissolved organic carbon (DOC) reference material available to ocean chemists. During this three year renewal, the PI will collect deep ocean water from the Sargasso Sea, prepare the water samples and have the DOC analyzed via consensus by a group of six independent laboratories. Two of these consensus laboratories also will provide total nitrogen values for this DOC reference material. Lastly, this program plans to double the number of users of the product to 150 laboratories worldwide. The broader impact of this proposal is that of furnishing a DOC reference material to the scientific community involved in making DOC measurements which ensures that consistent, high quality DOC concentrations will be obtained by marine chemists both in the U.S. and abroad doc23477 none The objective of this research program is to study and develop an improved guided wave phase tuning technique and its practical applications to nondestructive evaluation (NOE) for inspecting thin and slender members in civil, mechanical and aerospace structures. An extended study of a novel method referred to as synthetic phase tuning (SPT) is being developed through this project, which could resolve many critical problems associated with guided waves by eliminating the complexities due to their multimodal and dispersive nature. The innovative concept of the SPT is to reinforce a specific wave mode of interest while suppressing or squelching undesired wave modes by constructing a phase-tuned wave in a virtual domain. This operational scheme may allow for extremely flexible guided wave pulse-echo operations with excellent spatial and temporal resolutions. The program is to understand the phase-tuning mechanisms and to study the wave-material (structure) interactions using various analytical and numerical methods. Various influencing factors such as the characteristics of spatio-temporalloading and transducer parameters, e.g., element width, number of elements, inter-element spacing, operating frequency, are investigated both theoretically and experimentally. In addition, the SPT scheme is extended using the laser- ultrasound techniques in order to relax the current limitations of narrow signal bandwidth. The concept of SPT may have a substantial and direct impact not only on scientific and technological advancements in the field of NOE, condition assessment, and health monitoring, but also on the industrial sectors in NOE manufacturing and services. Although the focus is specifically on NOE, the method does not preclude extensions to a broad spectrum of disciplinary fields such as communication, geophysical explorations, structural control, and MEMS doc23478 none John Ketterson Northwestern University A Qubit Based on SINIS Josephson Tunnel Junction Forming controlled super positions of quantum states lies at the heart of quantum computing and devices that perform this function have been termed qubits . The device chosen here to realize a qubit is based on a double-barrier SINIS Josephson junction (where S is a superconductor, I is an insulator, and N is a normal metal). The basic strategy involves the controlled manipulation of the occupations in a 2-level system comprised of the two lowest (the ground and the first excited) Andreev bound states (ABS) that can form within an SINIS junction. In fact the parameters of the SINIS-based qubit can chosen such that only the above two ABS levels are present; this conclusion, which independently follows from the theory, is in agreement with preliminary experimental data taken on Nb AlOxAl AlOx Nb double-barrier junctions. The required control of the two Andreev states is achieved by applying appropriate bias voltages and transport currents to a device fabricated in a three-terminal geometry. The control parameters turn out to be the voltage across one of the barriers, and the transport current across one of the super conducting layers; these quantities play the role of the dynamic magnetic fields, which enter the associated qubit Hamiltonian. The primary goal of this proposal is to achieve the controlled manipulation of the Andreev bound states and, in parallel, advance the understanding of the underlying physical mechanisms. This will include: i) extending the present technology for preparing two-terminal SINIS devices to 3-terminal devices; ii) performing measurements on the ABS characteristics, including the observation of Rabi oscillations between the two ABS levels, iii) further developing the theory of localized ABS inside double barrier junctions to allow for arbitrary barrier transparency and arbitrary impurity concentrations in all three electrodes, iv) performing detailed numerical simulations of the switching dynamics; v) studying the recombination and decoherence effects that relate to the performance of these devices, and lastly vi) examining strategies for connecting qubits to form simple logic circuits doc23479 none Research PROPOSAL NO.: INSTITUTION: PA St U University Park NSF PROGRAM: DYNAMIC SYSTEMS AND CONTROL PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Trethewey, Martin W. TITLE: Development of Force-Frequency Shifting for Low Frequency Structural Vibration Testing Experimental vibration testing of civil and architectural systems is useful for addressing a number of issues including; assessment of structural health (degradation of bridges), and reduction of troublesome oscillatory motion in buildings for sensitive installations such as medical MRIs in hospitals and electron microscopes. The testing of these systems requires that a high amplitude force excitation be applied at very low frequencies (0.1 - 10 Hz), which is inherently very difficult to accomplish. The research program is focused on developing a new technique, referred to as Force Frequency Shifting (FFS), to provide such an excitation. The FFS technique is based on the application of a high amplitude, high frequency force (at frequency fz) to a structure in a spatially time variant fashion (at frequency fx). The nonlinear dynamic behavior of the system produces an excitation at a sum and difference (fz+fx, and fz-fx) of the force and spatial motion frequencies. Of particular interest for low frequency vibration testing, is the difference frequency component (fz-fx). It is the innate ability of the FFS technique to create this low frequency component that is the focus of the project. The research will develop an FFS exciter with a computer-controlled array of variable stiffness actuators. This development will increase the low frequency force performance and control making the FFS suitable for vibration testing of the targeted systems doc23480 none In many imaging applications, mobile agents--such as untethered reconnaissance robots and micro air vehicles--transmit and receive bandwidth-intensive image data over wireless networks. A key issue in developing small, mobile agents is minimizing their power requirements. The most significant source of power dissipation in a wireless communications system is the transmission of data over the wireless link. Compressing the data before transmission is a direct way to significantly decrease power requirements; thus, effective image compression algorithms are critical to realizing a mobile, wireless, real-time, high quality imaging system. Various hardware platforms can be considered for mobile computing. Of these platforms, field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are the most compelling for wireless, mobile, fast, low-power, handheld wearable embedded, image compression devices. FPGAs can be used as the basis for implementations that are low cost, easily updated, and significantly faster than microprocessor-based implementations. The objective of this project is twofold: to design new, efficient image compression algorithms and to design, build, demonstrate and evaluate FPGA implementations of state-of-the-art image compression systems. Our close-knit interdisciplinary team of image compression and hardware specialists will allow for end-to-end system performance analysis. This critical assessment is almost never performed and yet it is important to understanding the combined effects of algorithmic and implementation design choices. In addition, two or three real-world interdisciplinary projects that can be utilized in senior-level digital signal processing and digital design classes will be designed and published doc23481 none The mammalian central nervous system has enormous capabilities for information processing; analysis; and generation of appropriate outputs for a huge variety of task. It far surpasses current best efforts with man-made hardware and software. Learning in detail about how real neural networks function holds the promise of guiding efforts to improve man-made systems, and perhaps showing the way to revolutionary rather than evolutionary improvements. Yet doing this is a daunting task for in vivo systems, where huge numbers of neurons operate cooperatively, and observation of their individual behaviors in full detail is far beyond the capabilities of current technology. Understanding the behavior of small neural networks in vitro is a potentially valuable start, and it is proposed here to create a silicon-based system, called a Neurochip , with unique capabilities for observing the behavior of every neuron of a small network in detail. Each neuron will be in an enclosure which incorporates an intracellular electrode for recording and stimulation. The experimental system is being constructed mainly from commercial components. The neurochip itself is being fabricated using novel methods, but ones, which can be duplicated, in any serious fabrication laboratory. The low temperature fabrication process for the neurochip can be done on a silicon wafer, which incorporates CMOS circuitry, so an on-board computer could be made part of the system doc23482 none This project systematically investigates the value of pedagogical agent features ( image: character, realism, gender, ethnicity; animation: task-related, expressive; and pre-defined agent roles: expert, motivational advisor, co-collaborator) in supporting learning-related outcomes. Using Multiple Intelligent Mentors Instructing Collaboratively (MIMIC) as the research environment, the standard experimental research design includes multiple factors and will be analyzed primarily via MANOVA. Additional micro-genetic data from logged agent-learner interactions and supplemental case studies triangulate the findings. All participants are individually randomly assigned to treatment conditions with large sample sizes (125-200 students), including educational technology undergraduate students from both a state university and a historically black university. The instructional content focuses upon the ill-structured domain of instructional planning with diverse learning outcomes, including metacognition, cognitive strategies, attitude motivation, as well as traditional performance. Through extensive dissemination of results to the relevant multi-disciplinary communities, this project proposes to: a) illuminate principles of learning with pedagogical agents, b) facilitate computer scientists in prioritizing areas of future development for pedagogical agents; c) inform teachers of the most desirable characteristics of agent-based applications for their students; d) refine key features for pedagogical agents within distance learning course nvironments; and, e) advise instructional systems designers in developing training systems for industry and government doc23483 none Poggio, Tomaso MIT Collaborative Research: CRCNS: Detection and Recognition of Objects in Visual Cortex A three way collaboration between the laboratories of Profs. T. Poggio at MIT, D. Ferster at Northwestern University and C. Koch at Caltech is exploring and evaluating the hypotheses that the cortical organization and the neural mechanisms of visual recognition can be explained by a coherent theoretical framework built on two existing computational models for recognition and attention and, secondly, that a combination of physiological work on monkeys and cats, together with visual psychophysics can be used to test and refine the theory. The research is organized into three main projects. The work at MIT is guided by a quantitative hierarchical model of recognition, probing the relations between identification and categorization and the properties of selectivity and invariance of the neural mechanisms in IT cortex. The work at Northwestern University is testing a key prediction of the model about the nature of the pooling operation (a max operation vs. a linear sum) performed by complex cells in V1. The experiments are done in the anesthetized cat, intracellularly, to allow for a characterization of the underlying circuit and biophysical mechanisms. Finally, work at Caltech is extending the basic model of recognition by integrating it with a saliency-based attentional model. The computational component of this work, centered around the development of a quantitative model of visual recognition, constitutes the primary tool to enforce interactions between the investigators: the model suggests experiments and guides planning and interpreting new experiments doc23484 none The principal goal of this project is to develop an integrated decision support system that can be used by the service industry to better meet their long-term, mid-range, and day-to-day staffing needs. At each of these levels, the underlying problems will be modeled as large-scale integer programs and solved with a combination of exact methods and heuristics. A significant portion of the research is aimed at devising efficient solution algorithms. An associated objective is to develop new decomposition techniques and bounding schemes. Because many of the subproblems that arise at each of these levels have yet to be addressed by the research community, it is likely that additional modeling will be required to deal with qualitative issues, uncertainty, and the intricate nature of the constraints that inform practical applications. The methodologies developed will be implemented with an eye toward computational efficiency and robustness in the face of uncertainty. Expected results include: (1) the development of improved solution methods for personnel planning and scheduling in the service industry; (2) a greater understanding of modeling issues with respect to weekly tour generation and disruption management; (3) theoretical and practical characterizations of the performance of related algorithms; and (4) the design of an integrated decision support system. Effective personnel scheduling has become one of the primary means by which service enterprises remain competitive. Unlike manufacturing where standard shifts and days off are the rule, service organizations operate up to 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and face widely varying demand. Poor staff schedules can lead to an oversupply of workers with too much idle time, or an undersupply with customer dissatisfaction and a resultant loss of business. Stated alternatively, an important goal of this project is to find robust schedules for a nonhomogeneous workforce. The general problem faced by management is to meet daily staffing requirements at minimum cost without violating labor agreements, company policies, and government regulations. At the long-term planning level, consideration must be given to issues that determine the size and composition of the permanent workforce. At the weekly level, critical resources must be tracked and schedules updated to meet changes in demand. Real-time control come into play at the day-to-day level where absenteeism, equipment failures, and other disruptions call for online rescheduling doc23485 none Structural reliability redundancy has become a serious concern in the building industry after the poor performance of some buildings in recent earthquakes. This research project carries out a systematic investigation of structural redundancy and application to design practice. Within the framework of structural dynamic and reliability analyses, the effects of major redundancy-contributing factors are systematically examined, with emphasis on structural configuration, member ductility capacity, over-strength, interaction of structural components, and torsional motions. Recent SAC Steel Project analytical and experimental results of structural member and system behavior are used. A risk-consistent redundancy factor is then developed for calculating the design forces such that structures of different configurations and designs can meet reliability-based performance requirements. The impact of the proposed research will be a timely contribution to fundamental understanding of structural redundancy and the development of a rational basis for a performance-based redundancy design factor in codes and standards doc23486 none GOALI Tribology of Nanocomposites This collaborative proposal between the University of Florida (W.G. Sawyer), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (L.S. Schadler) and Albany International (G. Toney) teams a tribologist and a materials scientist with a company focused on developing nanomaterials with improved wear behavior. 1.0 Intellectual Merit The overall scientific goal of the project is to gain fundamental understanding of the wear mechanisms in filled polymers by: a) experimentally isolating the effects of particle size (10 nm to 10 um), particle aspect ratio (1 to ), dispersion, filler matrix interface, and matrix properties on performance, b) obtaining a parametric understanding of the correlation between wear behavior and other mechanical properties, and c) modeling of the wear properties. Polymer nanocomposites significantly improve the tribological performance when compared to traditional filled polymers. It is unclear for non-lubricious nanoparticles what the mechanism is that lowers the coefficient of friction. Finally, nanoparticle filled polymers have not been comprehensively explored for wear applications despite evidence suggesting large improvements in performance. 2.0 Broader Impacts The impact of these new materials in polymeric bearings will be broad, covering the spectrum from industrial applications needing dry sliding bearings, to orthopaedic implant materials, to self-lubricating bearings for space environments. An indication of the industrial interest in this field is the support of Albany International for this work (~$60K). They are supporting a full time graduate student at Rensselaer and have also supplied funds to Florida for wear testing. They will be hiring a graduate student into a co-op position in order to transfer technology developed by Florida and Rensselaer and provide industrial experience for the student. Students will travel between both Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy NY and the University of Florida in Gainesville FL to broaden their knowledge in the synthesizing and processing of nano-particles and composites and tribological testing and modeling, respectively doc23405 none Craig Douglas University of Kentucky Collaborative Research: ITR AP-Predictive Contaminant Tracking Using Dynamic Data Driven Application Simulation \(DDDAS\) Techniques This project will lead to a leap-ahead technology in simulation capabilities. Research in the development of new methods and algorithms for the specific application areas is needed. The dynamic application requirements will dictate computing systems support that includes systems software technologies, such as active middleware services for real time, dynamic reconfiguration capabilities, resource discovery, load balancing, security, fault tolerance, quality of service, and dynamic interfaces with field measurement systems. An encoded web stream set of contaminations from actual situations (both above ground and underground) will allow researchers besides us to tap into our virtual reality DDDAS environment. Visualization systems will allow us to work with a variety of real networks, sensors, and environments doc23488 none In this ITR-Small project funded by the Chemistry Division, Stephen Leone of the University of California-Berkeley will investigate single and multiple qubit operations on pairs of superposition states formed among rotational, vibrational, and electronic degrees of freedom in diatomic molecules. Using multiple pulse sequences from ultrafast lasers, phase and amplitude pulse shaping, and evolutionary algorithms, optimal pulses will be determined for single qubit transformations in molecules, such as Z-gates and Hadamard transformations. The work is further extended to multiple qubit operations such as controlled-Z and swap gates. Lithium dimers will be used as the molecular system for these studies. The experiments in this project will address for the first time the use of molecular rotational states as a motional control qubit for controlled transformations of an electronic qubit. This project focuses on exploring logic gates that may be useful for constructing a quantum computer. In the course of this research students will receive training in quantum mechanics and the use of ultrafast lasers and pulse shaping. Since these areas are already of great relevance to optical communications and optical computing efforts, the students will experience the integration of basic science and its applications in advanced information technology applications. In addition, what is learned from molecular systems may enable the formation of qutrits (three-level systems) and multi-qubits (superpositions of many levels at a time) that will broaden thinking about potential algorithms for quantum information processing. This research has other possible applications to areas such as quantum cryptography and code-breaking, information storage and retrieval, and faster processing with quantum computing. Fields affected include fiber optic communications, information transmission, and data encryption doc23489 none Papapolymerou This proposal addresses design and implementation of adaptive RF front ends for the next generation communication systems that will require operation at several frequency bands. The adaptive RF front ends will be developed by a collaboration between the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) with expertise in microwave high efficiency circuits, and the Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT) with expertise in tunable RF MEMS. More specifically, this project will focus on the development of a multi-band RF power amplifier used in the transmitter sections of all communication hardware. The goal is to demonstrate adaptation of tuning impedances on the millisecond scale using MEMS switches for multiband transmitter operation (e.g., the 5.7 and 24-GHz unlicensed bands), resulting in a larger overall average efficiency and multi-band frequency coverage. For this reason, switched-mode PAs (classes E and F) will be tuned with a multi-band MEMS output circuit and a reconfigurable MEMS input circuit. Linearization using bias and drive control of multi-band high efficiency PAs will also be studied, with the main goal of proving that these amplifiers are advantageous for modulation schemes that require linearity. Results of this work will have direct impact on worldwide commercial wireless systems moving from 2G to higher standards in which RF front-ends must support multi-band operation under various modulation schemes. It could also potentially lead to revolutionary miniaturized load-pull systems that replace the bulky and very expensive load-pull systems currently available. The proposed solution adheres with the low-power, small-size, low weight and low-cost requirements of next generation communication systems. The proposed effort covers a period of three years during which the following will be accomplished: oDesign and demonstration of a multi-band impedance tuner using MEMS oDesign and demonstration of a multi-band high-efficiency power amplifier using switched-mode topologies (such as classes E or F) with a simple switch between two output and input matching circuits oStudy of linearization of multiband high efficiency saturated PAs using dynamic drive and bias control oIntegration of the amplifier and tuner oIntegration of transistor with tuners for miniaturized MEMS load-pull The proposed research will be complemented by educational activities that will integrate the research findings into the curriculum of both universities and other related outreach efforts. GIT and CU will provide travel funds for the PIs to visit the collaborator and give seminars to undergraduate and graduate students each semester. The PIs plan to propose REU projects, in addition to UROP, SMART and SIRFs (undergraduate research and minority programs funded by our respective universities), so that GIT undergraduates work at CU in the summer, while CU students work at GIT for a semester, with the goal of a graduate student recruitment program between the two universities. The investigators will follow NSF s reporting requirements and will also publicize their results in peer reviewed journals and conferences doc23490 none He The past decade, dubbed the Decade of the Brain , has witnessed explosive growth in the ability to observe and measure brain activity in human subjects. The technique of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has enabled precise anatomical localization of brain structures that are activated during certain psychological processes. Though fMRI has high spatial resolution, temporal resolution is on the order of a second. In contrast, electrophysiological (EEG type) recordings, which can be obtained from the scalp and measure the electrical activity of ensembles of neurons activated synchronously (event-related potentials (ERP) provide millisecond level temporal resolution but limited spatial resolution. Tremendous efforts have been made to localize electrical source generators within the brain that underlie ERP components evoked by specific sensory, motor, or cognitive events. The approach, called electrophysiological neuroimaing, attempts to image the neural source distribution within the brain from electophysiological recordings obtained over the scalp by deconvolving the volume conduction process. The focus of this proposal is to achieve high spatial and temporal resolution in brain imaging by mathematically combining MRI and EEG data. The method involves placing constraints derived from one imaging modality on possible inverse solutions of the other modality. Once the algorithms are developed, the method will be applied to obtaining finer localization of brain structures involved in detecting and responding to an error in a cognitive task. The multimodal brain imaging technique will be assessed for applicability and performance in studying executive control systems in healthy subjects and disturbance of executive functions in selected groups of patients with schizophrenia doc23491 none This proposal presents a visual approach to the representation and validation of document structures specified in XML and transformation of one structure to another, in a general framework of automatic language generation. The underlying theory of this visual approach is a context-sensitive graph grammar formalism. The proposal demonstrates the conciseness and expressiveness of the graph grammar formalism and its suitability to visual specification and automatic generation of visual XML languages. The PI s previous research on the graph grammar formalism and visual language generation will be extended and adapted to suit automatic generation of visual XML design languages with tools that assist the design of XML-like of documents and their translations between each other. A set of tools will be developed to facilitate the visual specification of XML-like document structures and automatic generation of target documents. The tools would therefore enable a wide community to use the latest computing and Internet technology in storing and exchanging digital documents. The tools and the concepts associated with them will also make excellent teaching and self-training vehicles for the courses on programming languages, compilers, and visual interfaces doc23492 none Greg Voth, Gary Ayton, and Thomas Cheatham of the University of Utah are supported by the Division of Chemistry through the Information Technology Research program in a collaborative effort between theoretical chemistry and computational biology. They will develop and implement a novel multi-scale computational grid simulation method designed to examine spatially and temporally coupled phenomena in large biomolecular assemblies. Applications include DNA, actin filaments, microtubes, and amyloid plaques. Currently, it is computationally intractable to perform atomistic simulations on macro-scale dimensional problems. Moreover, traditional continuum simulation methods break down as the meso-scale regime is reached. This research is expected to result in the construction of a viable micro-to-macro simulation methodology which, in the context of large biological systems, will address long-range electrostatics, water vibrations, solvent interactions, conformational sampling, and external fields doc23493 none This dissertation investigates how Danes mobilized in to rescue Danish Jews from Nazi deportation. Unlike rescue efforts in other parts of occupied Europe, the Danish case was a nationwide collective movement. The research should clarify the conditions facilitating high risk activism. The Danish case will be compared with two other cases: the Netherlands (a similar culture without a collective response) and Le Chambon, France (a similar although smaller collective response, but a different culture). The research will use archival data and interviews with participants to analyze the sources of the Danish movement. Close attention will be paid to the role of social networks and the development of inclusive collective identities. Pre-existing social networks connected by strong ties between separate clusters of people may be especially important for enabling this kind of high risk mobilization. These networks are relatively uncommon since strong ties usually characterize overlapping but separate groups. The usual use of weak ties to bridge those groups is not effective in high risk situations for which high trust is necessary to initiate mobilization attempts doc23494 none Popovic This proposal addresses design and implementation of adaptive RF front ends for the next generation communication systems that will require operation at several frequency bands. The adaptive RF front ends will be developed by a collaboration between the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) with expertise in microwave high efficiency circuits, and the Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT) with expertise in tunable RF MEMS. More specifically, this project will focus on the development of a multi-band RF power amplifier used in the transmitter sections of all communication hardware. The goal is to demonstrate adaptation of tuning impedances on the millisecond scale using MEMS switches for multiband transmitter operation (e.g., the 5.7 and 24-GHz unlicensed bands), resulting in a larger overall average efficiency and multi-band frequency coverage. For this reason, switched-mode PAs (classes E and F) will be tuned with a multi-band MEMS output circuit and a reconfigurable MEMS input circuit. Linearization using bias and drive control of multi-band high efficiency PAs will also be studied, with the main goal of proving that these amplifiers are advantageous for modulation schemes that require linearity. Results of this work will have direct impact on worldwide commercial wireless systems moving from 2G to higher standards in which RF front-ends must support multi-band operation under various modulation schemes. It could also potentially lead to revolutionary miniaturized load-pull systems that replace the bulky and very expensive load-pull systems currently available. The proposed solution adheres with the low-power, small-size, low weight and low-cost requirements of next generation communication systems. The proposed effort covers a period of three years during which the following will be accomplished: oDesign and demonstration of a multi-band impedance tuner using MEMS oDesign and demonstration of a multi-band high-efficiency power amplifier using switched-mode topologies (such as classes E or F) with a simple switch between two output and input matching circuits oStudy of linearization of multiband high efficiency saturated PAs using dynamic drive and bias control oIntegration of the amplifier and tuner oIntegration of transistor with tuners for miniaturized MEMS load-pull The proposed research will be complemented by educational activities that will integrate the research findings into the curriculum of both universities and other related outreach efforts. GIT and CU will provide travel funds for the PIs to visit the collaborator and give seminars to undergraduate and graduate students each semester. The PIs plan to propose REU projects, in addition to UROP, SMART and SIRFs (undergraduate research and minority programs funded by our respective universities), so that GIT undergraduates work at CU in the summer, while CU students work at GIT for a semester, with the goal of a graduate student recruitment program between the two universities. The investigators will follow NSF s reporting requirements and will also publicize their results in peer reviewed journals and conferences doc23495 none This project was funded under the Information Technology Research (ITR) program, which enables research and education in multidisciplinary areas, focusing on emerging opportunities at the interfaces between information technology and other disciplines. The program seeks innovative projects in research and education that elucidate, expand and exploit information technology. The Arctic and Antarctic Research Center (AARC) at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography has been an important source of polar satellite remote sensing data and related services. It receives direct-broadcast telemetry from NSF-supported satellite tracking facilities at McMurdo and Palmer Stations in Antarctica, and from the U.S. Coast Guard icebreakers when these ships are operating at high latitudes. The AARC provides specialized data distribution and instruction to polar researchers and expedition planners, including real time data access, near-real time sea ice mapping for research cruise support, customized data processing in support of research projects, and in-house training in the use of satellite remote sensing data over the polar regions. The AARC, as a regional data center providing customized support for polar researchers, has a threefold operating mandate: (1) to provide satellite data in a timely manner at no cost to the user, (2) to provide training that introduces a great many polar researchers from all disciplines in the use of remote sensing data, and (3) to develop low-cost ways to overcome the practical barriers to satellite data access. This project will remove two remaining significant barriers to satellite data access: a tape based archive, and a manual system of retrieving requested images. First, a server system that maintains the most recent year of satellite data on-line in three appropriate formats (raw binary telemetry, HDF-EOS, and high resolution JPEG imagery), with full internet access, will be developed. Most AARC users request data from the preceding 12 months, so this is an appropriate subset of the archive with which to begin. The architecture will be scalable to eventually allow on-line access to the entire archive. Second, a comprehensive on-line educational curriculum will be developed that discusses all important aspects and applications of remote sensing to polar research and expeditionary work. The goal is that a researcher should be able to log onto the AARC s web site, learn in great detail about the data, and then select and download the required data in a readily usable format using an easily navigable search facility. This project involves research into high level on-line access to remote sensing data for the geophysical sciences, and can serve as a model for other institutions or collaborative programs that need to make satellite remote sensing data available to a broader research or educational community doc23496 none The goal is to provide new numerical and computational tools to reach a new milestone: performing computer simulations of the last fewinspiraling orbits of two black holes and their violent collision and merger. The dynamics of such a binary black hole system is governed by Einstein s equations for general relativity. To solve the very complex Einstein equations on the computer, special methods are developed that improve the computational efficiency so that fully three-dimensional simulations become possible on a routine basis. This requires taking the pecularities of Einstein s general relativity into account, in particular finding good explicit coordinates (so that the computer can handle the `everything is relative of general relativity) and dealing with the spacetime singularities that lurk inside black holes. It is remarkable that even today the two body problem of general relativity still remains unsolved. Especially the problem of dynamics of two black holes in a binary has drawn considerable attention, but not even a single orbit of two black holes has been simulated. The orbital motion of black holes follows a spiral that leads to thecollision and merger of the black holes, which is expected to produce large amounts of gravitational radiation. The community of gravitational wave astronomers urgently awaits predictions for the merger waves of black holes from computer simulations doc23497 none PI: Alan Karr Proposal Number: Despite its ubiquity, the World Wide Web is poorly understood. As a consequence, many sites are difficult to navigate, hard to use and have confusing structure, to the extent that users may be unable to find content and abandon the site. Essential needs are to relate user behavior to Web site structure; to compare site usage at different times, or for different classes of users; segmentation of sessions; quantification of inter-relationships among pages; and prediction of user behavior, including forecasts, for example, of the economic impact of promotional campaigns. The ultimate impact is more efficient Web sites that serve users more effectively. This research will create a set of four increasingly complex, but scalable, Bayesian models that relate the usage (specifically, user page transitions) of a Web site to its structure. It will apply, validate and refine the models and use real data from four qualitatively different Web sites, an E-commerce site, a site operated by a large financial institution, a content site and an information site. The models are scalable because the destinations from a given page are classes of pages that mirror the tree structure of the site, rather than individual pages. Examples are the parent, children and siblings of a page. All four models assume Dirichlet prior distributions for transitions from each page. The first three employ very aggregated classes of transitions, and differ according to whether the transition distributions and the priors are the same for all pages. The fourth model disaggregates the child and sibling destinations. Calculation of posterior distributions varies in difficulty: some are available in closed form, while others require intensive Markov chain Monte Carlo computation. In addition rigorous model assessment will provide insight into what level of aggregation is appropriate to which analyses of Web data doc23498 none This proposal focuses on improvements in spectral boundary element method for simulation of multiphase flows. These include drops and cells suspended in Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids that may be subjected to steady and oscillatory flows. A convincing case was made that the computational time will be significantly reduced using the proposed algorithm. The proposed educational activities are well integrated into the planned research doc23499 none Water and carbon dioxide, in either liquid or supercritical phases, are widely regarded as environmentally benign media for organic chemical reactions. Significant effort has been devoted to developing useful chemistries in these solvents as a means of pollution prevention. All of this previous work has used either water or carbon dioxide separately. The proposed research involves the use of mixtures of these two compounds as the reaction medium for acid-catalyzed, organic chemical reactions. Water will be the main component in the system. Experiments with different acid-catalyzed reactions (e.g., phenol alkylation, alcohol dehydration, etc.) will be performed, and the effects of the composition of the reaction medium, the system density, temperature, reactant concentrations, and reaction time on reactant conversion and product yields will be determined. In terms of the broader impacts, acid-catalyzed reactions are used widely in the chemical industry. It has been estimated that the number of commercially important acid-catalyzed reactions exceeds the number of all other catalytic reactions combined. Therefore, advances that make acid-catalysis more environmentally benign could have a broad impact throughout the chemical industry. The practice of incorporating examples from the research in graduate and undergraduate class will be continued. The results from this research project will provide the reaction kinetics and mechanistic insights, information that is needed to assess the technical, economic, and environmental feasibility of doing acid catalysis in carbon dioxide-enriched high temperature water doc23500 none Mathematics (21) A National Agenda for Advancing the Undergraduate Mathematics Curriculum This project supports a major initiative to stimulate and direct curriculum development and collaborative multidisciplinary relationships for the undergraduate program in the mathematical sciences. The project creates a set of curricular recommendations and an agenda for implementing them, and these are disseminated to mathematics faculty and department chairs, deans, and faculty in partner disciplines. The goals of the project are 1. To expand the numbers of students undertaking substantial study of the mathematical sciences, majoring in the physical sciences and technology as well as in the mathematical sciences, and continuing to graduate study in these areas; 2. To better prepare students for teaching, scientific careers, employment in business or industry, and other jobs for which mathematical preparation is needed; 3. To improve curricular offerings for students who might take only one college-level course in the mathematical sciences. An outcome of the project is a publication of recommendations and models of good practice for the undergraduate program in the mathematical sciences that are based on extensive consultations with mathematicians and users of mathematics. The Division of Undergraduate Education and the Division of Mathematical Sciences jointly funded this project doc23501 none G. Tong Zhou Georgia Tech Research Corp A major challenge in wireless communications is that the channel changes, sometimes rapidly; thus channel state information needs to be acquired frequently before the symbol recovery stage. Two prevalent approaches for channel estimation are training based and self-recovering (i.e., blind) ones. Pilot symbol assisted modulation (PSAM) is a popular training method, in which known pilots are periodically inserted into the symbol stream prior to transmission. These pilot symbols occupy time slots and impose a recurring transmission overhead. Blind approaches on the other hand, are completely data-driven with no loss of information rate but a significant increase in complexity. For fast fading channels, blind algorithms may require too many data to converge or converge too slowly to be practical. This research investigates a class of superimposed training algorithms that combine the best of both worlds. Instead of inserting pilots as in PSAM, known periodic pilots are superimposed onto the symbol stream, prior to waveform modulation. The channel estimation algorithm may appear to be blind, but is superior to blind approaches because simple first-order, and no more than second-order statistical methods, are used for channel estimation. The superimposed training approach can also be viewed as a watermarking technique with the pilot sequence serving as the marker. It is shown to be applicable to a variety of wireless channels: frequency selective, time selective, and doubly selective fading channels, as well as nonlinear channels. Issues investigated include trade-offs among bit error rate, transmission power, information rate and capacity, as well as optimization of pilot strength, transmission power allocation, and the effect of the added pilots on nonlinear power amp! lifiers doc23502 none The Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder has served as a national and international clearinghouse for research data on natural disasters, related technological events, and programs to reduce damages from them since . This proposal requests renewal of support for the Center for the two-year period from October through September . While the Center s basic activities will not changer significantly, they will be adjusted to reflect the new challenges facing the hazard community in the 21st century. The Center will continue to monitor and disseminate hazards research information to multiple users. Furthermore, it will publish and distribute the Natural Hazards Observer to over 15,000 subscribers six times a year, operate the electronic Disaster Research newsletter, and disseminate information via the World Wide Web and traditional hard copy publications. The Center will continue to co-sponsor the Natural Hazards Review journal with the American society of civil Engineers and produce the Natural Hazards Information publication series. It will continue to build its library database as well as upgrade the system it uses to put the database on the Web. In July of and , the Center will sponsor an annual national and international workshop involving hazards researchers and practitioners. Also, the Center will provide travel grants to social scientists to conduct quick response studies of specific hazard events in the immediate post-disaster period, while simultaneously facilitate a conversation to explore the need for the United States to establish a more systematic approach to quick response research following major urban disasters. The Center s in-house research program will focus in two directions. First, it will develop a program to sponsor competitive dissertation grants for new scholars of hazards and risk. Second, research will continue to questions identified in Disasters by Design: A Reassessment of Natural Hazards in the United States (Mileti and others, doc23503 none This project will manage the coordination, synthesis, data collection and outreach for the PARCS (Paleoenvironmental Arctic Sciences) component of the ARCSS (Arctic System Science) Program. These activities will provide overall coordination of PARCS research to maximize its scientific impact and productivity. To achieve its goals, the PARCS Science Committee (SC) will support: (1) data and science management, (2) workshops and Working Group meetings to coordinate regional-scale projects and integration of specific data sets to address the two research priorities, (3) a PARCS Community Meeting to assess the outcome of research on the two priority topics and formulate new research priorities and collaborations, and (4) outreach efforts to disseminate information on current PARCS activities and the results of the PARCS research efforts doc23504 none Nader This is an AWARE developmental visit proposed by Mr. Richard Nader, Texas A & M University to establish International Research Experience for Undergraduates (IREU) sites in information technology, advanced materials, and geoscience in Taiwan. The purpose of this coordinated visit to Taiwan is to develop contacts and plans for developing a proposal for an international Research Experience for Undergraduates site based at the Texes A & M University, and involving the following universities in Taiwan: National Taiwan University, National Taiwan Ocean University, National Cheng Kung University, National Chiao Tung University, National Tsing Hua University and National Sun Yat Sen University. Texas A & M is well positioned for a program of this type and it will advance the NSF objective of developing an internationally competitive and globally engaged U.S. science and engineering workforce doc23505 none An important and challenging question currently facing biologists is the identification of binding sites in DNA. These regulatory elements are for the proteins that are involved in the regulation of genes. The appropriate computational tools can be extremely valuable for pruning the search space of experiments, efficiently suggesting potential regulatory elements on which to focus limited laboratory resources. As more related genomes are sequenced and our understanding of regulatory relationships among genes, improves, a novel problem arises that is addressed here. Namely, the data to be analyzed will often be heterogeneous, a collection of co-regulated genes from one species together with their orthologous, i.e., corresponding, genes in several related species. This project will design, implement, and test algorithms for this novel problem and related issues in the discovery of regulatory elements. All software will be made freely available on the Internet doc23506 none ITR AP\(EAR) Collaborative Research: Web tools for global time scale development: an example from the Pennsylvanian-Cisuralian\(Early Permian\) ( ) Vladimir Davydov, C. J. Northrup, Tamra Schiappa Boise State University Web Tools for Global Time Scale Development: an Example from the Pennsylvanian-Cisuralian (Early Permian) is an information technology project that deals with the development of the geologic time scale. The geologic time scale is a fundamental tool of Earth Science research. The correlation of global events and the calculation of rates of processes during Earth s history all depend directly on the accuracy and precision of the geologic time scale. These processes include, for example, the rates and causes of extinction, climate change, plate motions, and mountain building. Despite its critical role, portions of the time scale have not been formally defined. The focus of this project will be twofold: 1) to develop a method that will serve as a model for international discussion and agreement on the development of a complete time scale, and 2) to use a particular part of the time scale that is presently undefined, as an example of how to achieve this goal. Specifically, PIs will develop Web-based tools that will facilitate the international debate for establishment of the Pennsylvanian and Early Permian stage boundary definitions, and that will serve as a permanent resource for the data utilized for these definitions. This tool will allow all interested workers to easily enter and extract a wide variety of data from a system that is global in extent. The time scale is based on the succession of fossils that are preserved in the stratigraphic record, and therefore, these data will include a wealth of information on paleontology and biostratigraphy. The ability to interact with these data and other researchers over the Internet will help resolve issues about the terminology for specific species, and hence remove fundamental road blocks to international agreement. The system must also accommodate information about the stratigraphy - the architecture of the succession of sedimentary rocks - that are the hosts for the fossil record. It must also include so-called absolute ages of rocks based on radiometric dating. Various geochemical, paleomagnetic and other data must be included to form a true systems approach to building the time scale. By combining these and other data types into a single system, PIs hope to be able to, for the first time, develop a reliable approach to the development of the geologic time scale doc23507 none The objective of the proposed project is to significantly improve the effectiveness of the boundary integral method by hybridizing it with a finite-difference technique. The purpose is to be able to carry out numerical simulations with many particles suspended in a fluid with the objective to study flow characteristics of drops, capsules, and particles. The novel aspect of the approach is to project the point force distribution on the boundary on an underlying collocation points and solve for the flow field on this grid. The method will be applied to suspensions, emulsions with and without surfactants, capsules, and foams. The method is shown to be scalable on large parallel processors doc23506 none ITR AP\(EAR) Collaborative Research: Web tools for global time scale development: an example from the Pennsylvanian-Cisuralian\(Early Permian\) ( ) Vladimir Davydov, C. J. Northrup, Tamra Schiappa Boise State University Web Tools for Global Time Scale Development: an Example from the Pennsylvanian-Cisuralian (Early Permian) is an information technology project that deals with the development of the geologic time scale. The geologic time scale is a fundamental tool of Earth Science research. The correlation of global events and the calculation of rates of processes during Earth s history all depend directly on the accuracy and precision of the geologic time scale. These processes include, for example, the rates and causes of extinction, climate change, plate motions, and mountain building. Despite its critical role, portions of the time scale have not been formally defined. The focus of this project will be twofold: 1) to develop a method that will serve as a model for international discussion and agreement on the development of a complete time scale, and 2) to use a particular part of the time scale that is presently undefined, as an example of how to achieve this goal. Specifically, PIs will develop Web-based tools that will facilitate the international debate for establishment of the Pennsylvanian and Early Permian stage boundary definitions, and that will serve as a permanent resource for the data utilized for these definitions. This tool will allow all interested workers to easily enter and extract a wide variety of data from a system that is global in extent. The time scale is based on the succession of fossils that are preserved in the stratigraphic record, and therefore, these data will include a wealth of information on paleontology and biostratigraphy. The ability to interact with these data and other researchers over the Internet will help resolve issues about the terminology for specific species, and hence remove fundamental road blocks to international agreement. The system must also accommodate information about the stratigraphy - the architecture of the succession of sedimentary rocks - that are the hosts for the fossil record. It must also include so-called absolute ages of rocks based on radiometric dating. Various geochemical, paleomagnetic and other data must be included to form a true systems approach to building the time scale. By combining these and other data types into a single system, PIs hope to be able to, for the first time, develop a reliable approach to the development of the geologic time scale doc23509 none Hawkins The University of Arizona, in cooperation with and in the interest of the Federal Interagency Hydrology Modeling Conference (FIHMC), request $10,200. support for travel, registration, proceedings, and per-diem for selected non-federal conference participants. Selection for such individual support will be made from applicants based on need, and considering Conference participation such as authorship and presentation roles. The Conference is to be held in Las Vegas, NV on July 28 - August 1, . A summary report on this activity will be made to NSF following completion of the grant doc23510 none Kuga Despite the economical and technical problems with the current Iridium and GlobalStar and proposed Teledesic satellite systems, it is expected that a high-speed satellite-based internet will become practical in the near future. Iridium and GlobalStar do not have sufficient bandwidth to accommodate high-speed transmission of data. It is undeniable that the future anywhere-anytime high-speed internet access requires low-earth-orbit K or Ka-band satellite systems similar to the one proposed by Teledesic. One of the major problems with the proposed Teledesic system is the cost of the ground station antenna and control system. Unlike a geo-synchronous satellite, the low-orbit satellites move from horizon to horizon in 10 to 20 minutes. The antenna must be able to keep track of one or more satellite locations in order to obtain an uninterrupted connection. This is usually performed using phased array or mechanically steerable antennas. Unfortunately, the mechanically steerable antennas which use electro-mechanical actuators are usually bulky and prone to mechanical failures. The electronic phased array antennas are fast and no moving parts are involved, but they are very expensive. Their objective is to develop a low-cost steerable antenna using a novel phase shifter and electro-active polymer (EAP) actuators. In order to achieve this objective, the PIs propose the following four tasks. Task 1: Develop a low-cost phase shifter for a phased-array antenna using EAP. Task 2: Design a practical, low-cost phased-array antenna. Task 3: Develop a variable reflector surface antenna with EAP actuators. Task 4: Develop reliable and practical EAP materials and actuators. The phase shifter consists of a tiny mechanically movable dielectric element on transmission lines. To move the dielectric block, they will use a newly developed EAP actuator which requires only 1-2V. An EAP actuator can also be used as a microwave switch to create a controllable delay line. The whole unit can be integrated with the patch antennas on a multi-layer PCB. The proposed antenna does not contain any solid state microwave switches or electromechanical devices. It can be fabricated inexpensively. They have already conducted the numerical simulations and results were obtained for several TL configurations. Another application of the EAP actuator is for a mechanically steerable antenna. A profile of a flexible membrane or plates can be controlled accurately with an array of EAP actuators. A desired radiation pattern can be quickly created by adjusting the surface profile. There are many technical challenges to realize the EAP-based antenna. To achieve their objective, they must develop reliable EAP materials and actuators. The PIs believe that the proposed low-cost antenna will be one of the key components to realize the Internet-in-the-Sky . Although many aspects of this antenna have been tested and verified, they still need to work on several details. An EAP actuator is still in an infant state. To design the proposed antenna, they need a close collaboration between a material scientist who can design the EAP actuator and electrical engineers who can utilize the EAP actuator for the antenna applications doc23511 none This research project will develop improved mathematical representations of three-dimensional objects, for use across a variety of applications. Underlying model representations in computer graphics, computer-aided geometric design, engineering analysis, and medical visualization have historically been driven by different requirements. Thus, different algorithmic and computational foundations have evolved yielding two largely disparate formulations. Differences in model representations impede cross-pollination of valuable techniques, hinder model sharing, and limit cross-area applications. To attack this historically intractable problem, a unified mathematical representation that can work across a broad spectrum of applications will be developed, based on an extended, multidimensional, parametric tensor product B-spline hyper-volume. High dimensional NURBs (Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines) are used as a basis because of their ubiquity in practice, universality in modeling, good overall computational and interactive behavior, and extensive understanding. Distinguishing itself from the straightforward generalization, the extended representation will support a non-hyperrectangular domain (non-hexahedral for the trivariate) appropriate to the model, and include supplementary attributes, defined over a common multidimensional parametric domain. The attributes will model both functional characteristics and data represented as scalars or vectors. Recent advances in several key technologies are creating demand for higher dimensional representations and corresponding visualization algorithms to design and analyze truly solid geometry, i.e., working in a design space of non-homogeneous materials manifesting multidimensional attributes. This calls for fundamental advances in our computing and visualization environments. One of the practical applications is designing optical lenses that achieve refracting power by smoothly varying the index of refraction and keeping a simple geometric shape. The combination of simple shape with no discontinuities in the index of refraction offers substantial optical and mechanical advantages over traditional multifarious lens systems. The project will also have educational benefits, training students in the laboratory to help them become leaders in this increasingly important field doc23512 none An existing real-time virtual reality database, created since and currently available only on a supercomputer at UCLA, will be converted to a format that can operate on the Internet. This database is a real-time computer model of the Roman Forum as it appeared in late antiquity. Created and authenticated by a Scientific Committee of leading archaeological experts on the Forum, the model includes the interiors and exteriors of each building and monument in the Forum. Research issues to be explored include: (1) How are real-time 3D computer models of cultural heritage sites like the Roman Forum best viewed on the Internet? (2) What other multimedia resources should accompany the 3D computer models to make the information offered about the site useful to scholars and students? (3) What does it mean to create an authenticated 3D computer model of a cultural heritage site? The existing Forum model will serve as a testbed for developing solutions to these problems. The project will help promote a better understanding of a key monument of Western civilization; and it will develop methodologies and technologies that can become standard solutions for the digital presentation of other important cultural heritage sites around the world doc23513 none ITR: Spatio-Temporal Complexity and Non-Linear Dynamics of Coastal Ocean Flows Roger M. Samelson, John S. Allen, Gary D. Egbert Oregon State University The spatio-temporal complexity and non-linear dynamics of coastal ocean flows will be studied using methods adapted from recent work on the non-linear dynamics of low-dimensional systems. Stable and unstable periodic or approximately periodic solutions of a three-dimensional, numerical coastal ocean circulation model with realistic bottom topography and oscillatory atmospheric forcing will be computed and their dynamics analyzed. The linear stability and disturbance growth properties of these solutions will be studied using Floquet theory, optimal disturbance, and Lyapunov vector analyses. Applications toward ensemble forecasting methods for coastal ocean circulation will be explored. This research is expected to yield substantial new insights into the nonlinear dynamics and inherent predictability of the coastal ocean system doc23514 none Modern buildings and structures equipped with embedded control technology can dramatically increase structural and occupant safety during earthquake or other hazardous load conditions. Recent progress in wireless communications and embedded systems can potentially eliminate the main impediments faced in developing such intelligent structural systems. In the proposed research, a new class of semi-active devices will be developed, along ith an analytical framework for their optimal design and operation, using specially designed embedded chips that will lead to significant benefits regarding the cost of maintenance and installation, as well as reliability. Testing and demonstration of the proposed approach with a large-scaled building model on a shaking table will also be conducted. The breath of this multi-disciplinary research project (PI s from Mechanical, Civil, Electrical and Computer Engineering) provides a unique opportunity for training of students that can bridge several critical fields, with eventual development of curriculum modules for long-term educational impact doc23515 none Projects are often undertaken in an environment of considerable uncertainty. Uncertainty may be reflected in the duration and outcomes of specific tasks, as well as in the effectiveness of resources applied to them. Project and program managers must decide, in these uncertain conditions, how to allocate and manage scarce resources across many projects that have competing needs. The construction industry is one in which this need is particularly acute. Today, project planning and scheduling is done using algorithms that either ignore the resource constraints and consider uncertainty in task duration, or ignore the uncertainty in task duration and focus on resource-constrained scheduling. This research focuses on developing new computationally tractable modeling tools for allocating resources under uncertainty in realistic multi-project planning and scheduling environments. A key aspect of the mathematical approach we are using is that it provides an explicit mechanism to evaluate the tradeoff between the planned schedule for a project (or portfolio of projects) and the level of risk that the schedule will become infeasible (as a result of uncertainties in the task durations and outcomes). This research has obvious application to construction projects, as well as to many other industrial, commercial and public sector applications. Our approach will create significant new tools for use by project and program managers in many types of undertakings. Furthermore, since the need to work in the presence of uncertainty is a critical element of engineering practice, it is important to provide students with an exposure to project management under uncertainty. To this end, we will develop cases studies and a master of engineering project based on the research described in this proposal. Those case studies and project will support education in three programs: undergraduate civil engineering, and the Master of Engineering programs in engineering management and systems engineering doc23516 none The Materials Research Society Symposium on Solid State Chemistry of Inorganic Materials IV will be held in Boston, MA December 2-6, . The goal of the conference is to facilitate multidisciplinary interactions information exchange within a broad spectrum of researchers, to include CAREER grantees, and top post doctoral scholars and graduate students working in priority areas of the broad field of solid-state chemistry. The NSF funds will be used exclusively to offset the expenses associated with attending the symposium for U.S. participants, specifically graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, junior faculty and selected plenary speakers in the area of solid state chemistry of inorganic materials. The Solid State Chemistry community continues to have a direct impact on important technological areas that are crucial to advancing society through the design, synthesis and application new materials. Examples include porous solids for catalysis, thin films for electronics and electrooptic devices, and nanostructured materials for high-strength composite structural materials. Since these technical areas are of very high priority to industry, students educated and trained in these multidisciplinary areas involving solid-state chemistry compete very well in the job market and go on to contribute in many significant ways to the global economy doc10006 none The primary coupling between the magnetosphere and the ionosphere is accomplished via electric currents flowing along the Earth s magnetic field. Upward current regions generally result from downward flowing electrons which have been observed with many satellites. In contrast, downward current regions generally involve upward flowing electrons that have been more difficult to observe. Thus our outstanding of the downward current regions has lagged behind our understanding of the upward current regions. This study will develop a self-consistent picture of the plasma and field properties of downward auroral current regions. The results will lead to a better understanding of such features as ion conic particle distributions, downward pointing electric fields and ELF VLF turbulence. The theoretical underpinning of the study will be to break the problem into two separate but coupled problems with vastly different time scales. ELF VLF turbulence operates on times scales of milliseconds, while the evolution of the large-scale auroral current structures takes place on time scales of minutes to hours. Thus a self-consistent high frequency spectrum can be determined in the context of a slowly evolving background distribution doc23518 none Bayesian Learning at the Syntax-Semantics Interface Children easily learn features of novel verbs from small numbers of scene-utterance pairs. For example, after encountering a few examples of breaking an object, they infer that break might require an object, e.g., John broke the glass. They also learn semantic properties. Children and adults can then generalize to other scene instances representing break. This project hypothesizes that children combine syntactic and semantic evidence to learn verb features, using a probabilistic method called Bayesian inference. The project s first goal is to implement a computational model that can induce probability distributions on features from a very small number of scene-utterance pairs. This model will make explicit all the information sources used. Second, the project will confirm which cues are actually used by human learners in certain settings. The experimental method matches the computer model s predictions empirically, by presenting adult and child learners with training sequences of novel verbs used across varying syntactic and semantic feature situations. This project s results will advance adaptable computer systems and information-filtering, both in terms of robustness to noise and an ability to learn from a small number of examples. These results will improve the construction of a key component of natural language processing engines: the dictionary doc23519 none This is an award made in response to a (small) proposal submitted to the Information Technology Research (ITR) initiative. The award is co-funded by the Divisions of Materials Research and Chemistry. The highly computational research concerns quantum mechanical and statistical mechanical problems in which a multiplicity of length or time scales renders approximate solutions inaccurate and exact numerical methods intractable. The research focuses on problems that can be reduced to the solution of eigenvalue problems for which one can use and develop quantum Monte Carlo methods without uncontrolled approximations. In critical phenomena, a multiplicity of scales arises from the divergence of the correlation length and the relaxation time. For weakly-bound clusters, the quantum mechanical component of this research, strong anharmonicity with the attendant floppiness yields a multiplicity of length scales. Here solution of the Schroedinger equation poses the computational challenge. This research will develop novel computational methods to obtain quantum mechanical spectra of weak-bound clusters. In particular, it addresses a problem that was identified in as an important, unsolved problem in cluster physics, viz. the computation of energies of bound states of small 4He clusters. These clusters find themselves in the vicinity of continuous dissociation transitions, where ground or excited state is about to merge with the continuous part of the spectrum, and the various length scales in turn go to infinity continuously. In the statistical mechanical portion of the research, the goal is to perform high accuracy computations of dynamical critical exponents, which in particular will be used in high precision tests of extended scaling relations proposed for the two-dimensional XY model. The work is of theoretical interest for the field of dynamical critical phenomena, and has implications for the study of superconducting films, Josephson junction arrays, and 4He films. %%% This is an award made in response to a (small) proposal submitted to the Information Technology Research (ITR) initiative. The award is co-funded by the Divisions of Materials Research and Chemistry. The highly computational research concerns quantum mechanical and statistical mechanical problems in which a multiplicity of length or time scales renders approximate solutions inaccurate and exact numerical methods intractable. The research focuses on problems that can be reduced to the solution of eigenvalue problems for which one can use and develop quantum Monte Carlo methods without uncontrolled approximations. The research deals with two complementary projects. In critical phenomena, a multiplicity of scales arises from the divergence of the correlation length and the relaxation time. Here high precision calculations will be done to test scaling relations. For weakly-bound clusters, the quantum mechanical component of this research and of great interest in chemistry, strong anharmonicity with the attendant floppiness yields a multiplicity of length scales. This component of the research will be done in collaboration with the theoretical chemistry group at Berkeley doc23520 none The Genesis Group of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is working on a computational theory of human intelligence. Their work is grounded in two key assumptions: first, that humans think with their language, vision, and motor systems, and their interaction; and second that humans can think abstractly because they can build on a foundation of thinking about concrete events in the physical world. Their plan includes the development of a testbed that features paths, agents, causes, both language and visual inputs and outputs, complex state transitions, and support for abstract reasoning in abstract worlds. They propose to exploit both symbolic and nonsymbolic representations. The symbolic representations will include a representation for describing the movement of animals and artifacts along trajectories and a representation for describing state transitions in terms of a vocabulary of qualitative changes. The nonsymbolic representations will include memory traces lying close to experienced sensory inputs. The Genesis Group expects success to lead not only to a better understanding of natural intelligence buy also, in the long term, to important practical results, such as computer applications with genuine commonsense and educational applications that exploit an understanding of how best to engage human linguistic and visual problem solving faculties doc23521 none The aim of this International Symposium is to provide a forum for discussion of developments, in the GIS (Geographical Information Systems), CMMS (Computer Maintenance Management Systems), and IT (Information Technology) areas in the application of an intelligent assessment, renewal and management of underground municipal infrastructure. Research in this area is characterized by international and interdisciplinary cooperation. The proposed international forum by bringing together researchers from universities, municipal managers, and industry representatives, provides a major step towards a holistic approach to municipal infrastructure management. Research activities will help in advancing knowledge and understanding in the fields of assessment, monitoring & intelligent management of underground municipal infrastructure. The development of highly automated GIS systems capable of searching, organizing, preserving, and interacting with large quantities of condition & maintenance data will provide a cost-effective tool for municipalities faced with shrinking budgets, growing problems and increasing regulations. The workshop is being organized in three phases. Phase I is the Trenchless Technology Research Colloquium, hosted by the Infrastructure Engineering and Management Research Center, School of Engineering, The University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, UK. Phase II consists of field trips to visit the municipalities of Helsinki, Finland, and St. Petersburg, Russia. Phase III consists of presenting research findings and contributing to panel discussions at the International NoDig Conference, Copenhagen, Denmark. A Research Report containing the documentation of the research process, case studies, results of the data collection and analysis efforts, will be compiled by University of Birmingham, UK. Electronic copies will be made available through the Trenchless Technology Research Colloquium web site hosted by Trenchless Technology Center (TTC), Louisiana Tech University, Ruston, Louisiana (http: www.latech.edu tech engr ttc doc23522 none Self-Healing Polymers for Improved Fatigue Life This collaborative GOALI project seeks to improve the fatigue life of thermosetting polymers through the addition of self-healing functionality. Thermosetting polymers are used in a wide variety of applications ranging from composite structures to adhesive joints to microelectronic packaging. Because these polymers have low strain-to-failure, they are highly susceptible to damage in the form of cracking. Fatigue loading is particularly problematic, causing small cracks to initiate deep within the structure where detection is difficult and repair is virtually impossible. These cracks often lead to catastrophic failure of the material. Self-healing functionality is accomplished by incorporating a microencapsulated healing agent and a catalytic chemical trigger within a polymer matrix. Fundamental research will be undertaken to address critical issues relevant to self-healing of fatigue damage. The ability to autonomically heal fatigue cracks in brittle polymers has the potential to lead to safer, more reliable materials in microelectronics and related applications and represents the first step in developing materials systems that possess greatly extended lifetimes. This GOALI project will enable collaborative efforts to explore this new technology for microelectronic applications. Results will lead to fundamental scientific foundations on which new design and production practices are based for improved fatigue performance. The proposed work will result in the education and training for two graduate students and one undergraduate research assistant. Moreover, several concepts from this project will be incorporated into a new senior undergraduate first year graduate level course entitled Autonomic Materials Systems doc23523 none This an Information Technology Research (ITR) award. It is a computationally-intensive research program that will probe the microstructure property relationships of open-cell polymer foams with unprecedented detail. First, a comprehensive database of the full 3-dimensional (3-D) microstructures of a wide range of foam materials will be obtained by using high-resolution synchrotron x-ray microtomography with integrated with 3-D image processing. Second, these data will provide realistic initial conditions for supercomputer-based micromechanical simulations to allow isolation of key structural elements that are poorly understood in existing theories of foam mechanics. Third, the microstructure database will be rapidly disseminated on the Internet to provide a unique educational and research resource in the field cellular solids. This 3-D microstructure information should stimulate improvements in both materials processing and theories of foam mechanics. The results should have applications in areas spanning consumer, medical, industrial, and aerospace products. The graduate and undergraduate students involved in this project will receive multidisciplinary training in condensed matter physics, materials sciences, mechanical engineering, and information technology. This an Information Technology Research (ITR) award. With growing frequency, the frontiers of materials research are marked by an intimate interplay between experiment, computation, and theory. This project will apply this synergy to the study of polymer foam materials for the first time. These materials have global applications spanning consumer, medical, industrial, and aerospace products. However, lack of knowledge of their real 3-dimensional microstructures is constraining both the design of new materials and also the improvement of existing theories of foam mechanics. A new combination of 3-dimensional x-ray imaging, computer vision, and supercomputer-based simulations will be used to overcome this barrier. These techniques will enable a comprehensive study of the real microstructures, and lead to a realistically-simulated micromechanics for a wide range of open-cell polymer foams. A major output of the project will be the rapid creation of a unique Internet database of foam microstructures to provide a new educational resource and add significantly to the national materials research infrastructure. The graduate and undergraduate students involved in this project will receive multidisciplinary training combining condensed matter physics, materials sciences, mechanical engineering, and information technology doc23524 none The constantly increasing congestion in the sea lanes and air traffic lanes raises the risk of ship collisions and aircraft collisions. This danger was tragically illustrated in a recent air disaster over Germany. This research seeks to reduce the collision risk via the development of a high-performance, robust, real-time collision avoidance algorithm. The research approach is based on the combination of an offline optimization algorithm generating the structure of the solution and an online algorithm approximating the solution in real time. The collision avoidance problem is formulated as a maximin problem of Chebyshev type: the objective is to maximize with respect to controls the timewise minimum distance between the host vehicle and an intruder. A multiple-subarc version of the sequential gradient-restoration algorithm is being developed to solve numerically the optimal control problem. Because it is not feasible to compute the optimal trajectory in real time, a collision avoidance guidance algorithm is being developed to approximate the optimal trajectory in real time. This algorithm partitions the collision avoidance maneuver into an avoidance phase and a recovery phase. For the avoidance phase, the time interval for which saturation control can be applied is determined so as to quickly escape from the collision danger. During the recovery phase, the host vehicle is maneuvered back to the assigned path via a feedback restoration algorithm. To rapidly disseminate the research results and foster education in the fields of optimization, guidance, and system safety, an online demonstration of the algorithm is being developed. This software will allow remote users to simulate ship aircraft maneuvers with the aid of animated graphical displays and will help the development of collision avoidance instrumentation for ships and aircraft. The research results will also be relevant to the orbital debris avoidance for spacecraft doc23525 none The Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO coordinates and facilitates ocean research among governments. A total of 129 countries comprise the membership; the United States is a key participant and strong supporter of IOC activities. The IOC develops and promotes international research to improve global undestanding of ocean processes and their relationship to the sustainable development and stewardship of ocean resoruces. This project consitutes the NSFportion of support to the Ocean Science Section of the IOC, including development of a new program on Multidisciplinary Science and Natural Resources and an international initiative to examine critical issues of land-atmosphere-ocean biogeochemistry doc23526 none This is a grant funded through the Information Technology Research (ITR) initiative. The award is to a predominantly undergraduate institution. Time-of-flight neutron scattering experiments provide important insights into the structure and dynamics of materials. These experiments are critical for academic and applied research and are carried out at a small number of advanced research facilities around the world, including the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source (IPNS) Division at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL). To utilize these resources effectively, this project will develop a freely available, platform-independent, Java-based system for access, visualization and analysis of neutron scattering data. Initial work has already been undertaken. The result of this initial work is an Integrated Spectral Analysis Workbench (ISAW). ISAW is, in principle, applicable to data from a wide variety of sources and is extensible by users of the system both through plug-in operators written in Java and through a basic scripting language. The system provides some highly interactive visualizations, analyses and transformations of neutron scattering data in real time for some instrument types. The current project will add important new capabilities to ISAW. Single crystal diffractometers that utilize multiple area detectors and LPSD s to obtain volumes of data as a function of time-of-flight pose unique problems. There is a large amount of data and the data is not regularly gridded. These problems are exacerbated when the data is mapped into Q-space or reciprocal space. This project will construct operators and 3-D viewers that allow scientists to view, select and manipulate data from such instruments in scientifically meaningful spaces. In addition, the project will add interactive data modeling and extensive data access capabilities to ISAW. Specifically, access to raw time-of-flight event data and data from ancillary equipment will be added. Support for importing and exporting data will be extended to the file formats NeXus, XML, and some site-specific formats from other neutron facilities. This is a grant funded through the Information Technology Research (ITR) initiative. The award is to a predominantly undergraduate institution. Time-of-flight neutron scattering experiments provide important insights into the structure and dynamics of materials. These experiments are critical for academic and applied research and are carried out at a small number of advanced research facilities around the world, including the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source (IPNS) Division at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL). To utilize these resources effectively, this project will develop a freely available, platform-independent, Java-based system for access, visualization and analysis of neutron scattering data. Initial work has already been undertaken. The result of this initial work is an Integrated Spectral Analysis Workbench (ISAW). ISAW is, in principle, applicable to data from a wide variety of sources and is extensible by users of the system both through plug-in operators written in Java and through a basic scripting language. The system provides some highly interactive visualizations, analyses and transformations of neutron scattering data in real time for some instrument types. The current project will add important new capabilities to ISAW. Single crystal diffractometers that utilize multiple area detectors and LPSD s to obtain volumes of data as a function of time-of-flight pose unique problems. There is a large amount of data and the data is not regularly gridded. These problems are exacerbated when the data is mapped into Q-space or reciprocal space. This project will construct operators and 3-D viewers that allow scientists to view, select and manipulate data from such instruments in scientifically meaningful spaces. In addition, the project will add interactive data modeling and extensive data access capabilities to ISAW. Specifically, access to raw time-of-flight event data and data from ancillary equipment will be added. Support for importing and exporting data will be extended to the file formats NeXus, XML, and some site-specific formats from other neutron facilities doc23527 none The investigators are planning to determine the nature of interplanetary cosmic electrons by measuring the spectra of electrons (negatrons and positrons) in the nearly unexplored energy range from 50 MeV to 500 MeV at the time of the next solar minimum period. The main effort is to develop a lightweight balloon borne instruments capable of a long-duration (20-30 day) flight from McMurdo Station, Antarctica. Such a flight is also capable of examining variations in time of the relative abundance of positrons over a complete solar rotation. Electrons between 50 MeV and 500 MeV probe both large scale and turbulent structures in the solar wind on length and time scales not accessible when only ions are measured doc23528 none This project addressed problems associated with building Decision Support Systems to serve nursing. Most healthcare environments call upon nurse clinicians to make complex decisions on a contiual basis. Automated decision support systems backed by evidence-based knowledge and standardized guides, such as clinical algorithms, are capable of supporting clinical nursing decisions. However, effective real-time access is limited. This project addresses this problem by delivering current clinical knowledge via an off-the-shelf handheld computer using wireless access to a central server. Innovative data mining and knowledge discovery algorithms, using a combination of case based and rule based learning with added confidence measures, permit bi-directional inferencing based on individual client data. This technology provides real-time decision support for the multiple cases and sequential decisions characterzing present nursing practice. Nurses are able to consider a full range of alternative explanations, determine addtional data needs, find, isolate and examine patient case outliers for additional diagnostic data or verify the appropriateness of a selected strategy. A fully developed system may have the capacity to maintain a history of series of decisions and outcomes thereby, overtime, improving the case base and rule bases used for decision support. Outcomes of this real time decision support may include timely health care, less biased decisions, and improved patient outcomes doc23529 none Jankovic The focus of this research is large-scale contaminant spreading in aquifers that exhibit significant variations in properties that influence groundwater flow and pollutant transport. It is widely accepted that spatial changes in hydraulic conductivity play a major role in contaminant spreading. The main goal of the study is to apply novel mathematical solutions, powerful numerical models, and visualization tools to examine and quantify the influence of spatial variations in hydraulic conductivity on contaminant spreading in highly heterogeneous aquifers. Existing mathematical models of contaminant spreading can only be applied to aquifers that exhibit small variations in hydraulic conductivity. Existing numerical models can not be used to simulate large-scale three-dimensional contaminant spreading in highly heterogeneous aquifers. The key element of the present study is a new structural model of hydraulic conductivity, introduced by Gedeon Dagan that contains isolated inclusions and a homogeneous background. Hydraulic conductivity of each inclusion is constant. Actual statistical structure of hydraulic conductivity is reproduced by varying locations, sizes, and conductivities of inclusions. Both approximate analytic models and highly precise numerical models are developed based on this new structure. Analytic and numerical models are used in this study to predict rates of contaminant spreading in highly heterogeneous aquifers. Inability to visualize three-dimensional flow and transport is a bottleneck that prevents better understanding of many three-dimensional transport phenomena. A new visualization tool, designed for immersive virtual-reality facilities, will be developed and used to investigate transport phenomena such as transverse dispersion, contaminant tailing, preferential flow and molecular diffusion. The visualization tool will include the ability to interact with a simulation in real time. A user will be able to stop the simulation of contaminant spreading and get specific data associated with any part of the model. For example, it will be possible to choose a location in the three-dimensional medium, to introduce a contaminant particle at that location, and to follow the particle throughout the aquifer with a camera mounted on the particle. A web-based interface will also be developed to enhance research by facilitating interactions amongst scientists in different geographical locations and to integrate research and teaching. Development and application of these models and visualization tools, termed Virtual Porous Medium , will likely increase our ability to understand and predict contaminant spreading in aquifers. In addition, this first version of the Virtual Porous Medium will serve as a platform where other transport mechanisms (such as reactive transport) may be implemented at a later stage doc23530 none The ITR: Flathead Reservation Wireless Community Network at Salish Kootenai College would examine, explore, and adjust how people utilize wireless communications technology on this rural reservation to interface more effectively from remote locations. This project will facilitate changes in educational and business organizational processes in fixed wireless telecommuting through various wireless networking technologies. In addition, this project will also greatly enhance numerous programs and research projects both on campus and with other organizations throughout the reservation. Other activities that will be implemented are technologies and services that assist in teaching, training and the expansion of innovative educational environments. The goal of this project is threefold. First, to see how far you can push wireless technology in a rural and remote environment to provide high-speed network connections. Second, to radically change the way certain educational and business organizational processes are carried out. Third, enhance peoples experiences with information technology through a variety of wireless activities. During the first 6 months of the project, a single high-speed wireless link will be deployed to provide service to a selected part of the reservation. The second 6 months will focus on conducting the initial research activities, review of any results. The third 6 months will be devoted to making adjustments and modifications to ongoing research activities, and the addition of another high-speed link. The final 6 months will be focused on making the transition to a fully self-sufficient, community-owned network. The Flathead Reservation Wireless Community Network will be collaborating with other tribal entities on conducting research test connections to examine the usefulness and how people respond to high-speed wireless network connections. Over the course of the project, various wireless networking technologies will be employed as they become available to test the reliability, functionality and practicality of each. Also, this project will collaborate with other NSF-sponsored projects with a wireless component and or focus doc23531 none Johnson Development of computer-aided stereographic projection techniques has greatly aided interpretation of Earth Science structure and processes. We have developed and implemented an affordable PC Linux based stereo projection system ( the Geowall ) that can be used by individual research groups and within the undergraduate curriculum. The main goals of this collaborative Information Technology Research project between the University of Michigan (EAR- ; PI: P. van Keken) and the University of Illinois at Chicago are to greatly improve the content development and delivery for Earth Science applications. This will include the development of conversion software and viewers for existing Earth Science applications; implementation of tools for interaction and manipulation of 3D data; testing of these tools in Earth Science departments; improvement of the collaborative environment for work between groups of researchers; and dissemination through the Geowall consortium (geowall.org doc23532 none This proposed effort will create an internet-distributed, physics-based, three-dimensional virtual reality stress-testing machine. A stress testing machine (STM) will be purchased and then reproduced as a 3D CAD model, thereby creating a real STM and a virtual STM. The real STM will be placed on the internet using a personal computer. The virtual STM will be displayed using a semi-immersive virtual reality theater and also using a 3D web page. A large deformation elasto-plastic finite element code will be written and deployed on both a remote high performanc eomputer and on a local cluster of workstations. MPI will be used as a platform independent tool for process parallelization. A haptic interface and a data acquitstion tool will drive both the real STM and the virtual STM. The real STM will simply deform tensile specimens. The virtual STM will also deform a virtual object; however, the deformation parameters will be obtained from the near real-time finite element code running on the two aforementioned acrchitectures.Data regarding network communication, process parallelization, fault-tolerance, and graphical displays will be acquired and analyzed. The intellectual merit of this work will be the research into the creation of a platform in physics-based virtual reality for education and research. The broader impact of this effort will be the creation of tools to enable undergraduate students to possess their own personal, virtual physics labs. The result of this will enable universities to save on cost and wear and tear of expensive large-scale hardware doc23533 none This research aims to further integrate the study of behavior in both animals and robots. The research investigates how rules of animal behavior can be analyzed, quantified, coded, and instantiated in robots. It focuses on individual and group sensorimotor behavior from a developmental perspective using Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus). Robotic rat pups will be built that instantiate sensorimotor rules discovered by careful observation and computational modeling of pups in isolation and in groups at different stages of development. Specific attention will be paid to how these rules change at different stages of development. For the study of behavior, the aim is to use robotic systems to validate rule-based computational models of behavior and generate testable predictions. For robotics, the aim is to transfer information from organisms that start out life as simple sensorimotor systems, but subsequently develop social behaviors, while developing new sensorimotor, learning, and cognitive capabilities. By studying precisely how these capabilities develop, this research will provide additional insight into the emergence of group behaviors in robotics. In the longer run, this research should facilitate the design of group robotic systems that develop greater and greater sensorimotor, learning, and cognitive capabilities over time doc23534 none This proposal is to support work on developing an interactive Grid-enabled analysis environment for physicists working on the high energy physics CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Switzerland. The environment will be lightweight yet highly functional and will make use of existing CMS tools as plug-in components. It will consist of tools and utilities that expose Grid system functions, parameters and behavior at selectable levels of detail and complexity. Use will be made of Web services and it is expected that many of the components will be sufficiently generic to be useful for other experiments and scientific endeavors utilizing Grid computing technology. The effort is closely related to work ongoing in the GriPhyN, iVDGL, PPDG and SciDAC projects doc23535 none This project builds on this institution s prior successes with an educational software system called SMILE. This system provides structuring and prompting for students working in small groups or as individuals as they are getting ready to carry out project-based activities and as they are interpreting results and making sense of whole-class discussions. It builds on discussions about the how-to s of carrying out activities in class and reminds students what to pay attention to. The software suite, SMILE, includes tools for planning and reporting on several kinds of investigative activities, for reporting on and justifying design ideas, for reporting on and explaining design experiences, and for carrying on conversations across classrooms about each. SMILE s intentions are (a) to help students be productive while working in small groups and (b) to provide the kind of help that will make students presentations to the class more articulate and understandable by their peers. The goals of the current project are: 1) to investigate the hypothesis that relatively simple general-purpose software can be used to promote sophisticated reasoning among students about both content and process and that that same software is useful to teachers in providing them the kinds of reminders that help them better facilitate the kinds of reflective reasoning that result in transfer (a) in the contexts of both Learning By Design and more general-purpose project-based inquiry science classrooms, (b) across a variety of science disciplines, (c) across a variety of grade levels, and (d) possibly, in project-based contexts outside of science (e.g., math, social studies), 2) to iteratively extend the reach of the software tools already designed and constructed to make them more capable and to make them applicable to a larger variety of project-based contexts, 3) to develop guidelines for productive design and use of tools in support of planning and reflection in project-based inquiry classrooms, and 4) to develop teacher materials and disseminate software on the web. This institution s experiences with Learning by Design have contributed to understanding the ins and outs of creating opportunities in the project-based inquiry classroom for the kinds of reflective experiences that lead to lasting learning. This current project will provide additional insights and tools that may be of value in the broader educational community doc23536 none The proposed research aims at extending the benefits of scaling (i.e., Moore s Law) into the ub-0.07$\mu$m regime by developing error control techniques for digital sequential circuits. The overall goal is to evaluate the practical implications of recently developed dynamic error correction and algorithmic noise tolerance techniques in terms of enabling the design of sequential circuit architectures that are cost-effective and operate at speed and energy efficiencies that exceed the limits imposed by current VLSI architectures. The successful completion of this project can lead to the development of acomprehensive set of circuit design techniques that permit tradeoffs between reliability, speed and energy-efficiency in ways that have not been exploited before. The objectives of this research thrust are two-fold: (i) The immediate goal is to develop error control methodologies that enable the construction of functional sequential systems out of unreliable components that may be fast, inexpensive or have reduced energy requirements. The novelty of the proposed research lies in that it it explores the case when the error correction mechanism operates at a different time scale than the rest of the system. (ii) The ultimate goal is to build prototypes of such sequential circuits in order to evaluate their actual performance and potential. The proposed research also has a significant educational and outreach component, motivating graduate students to contribute to research that focuses on the fringes of circuit theory, signal processing, coding and graph theory, control theory and information theory doc23537 none The PI will carry out exposure experiments of fresh basaltic glass in seawater on the ocean floor, and compare the results to the behavior of natural basalt glass exposed at the same site in terms of the role of microbial communities in the alteration of the glass. Study environments are located on the submarine slopes of Hawaii at water depths ranging from 200- m, at water temperatures ranging from near freezing to hydrothermal spring temperatures of approximately 80 degree C. Exposed rock surfaces vary in age from a few years to several 100kyrs and include sites on Loihi Seamount, Puna Ridge and the submarine slopes of Kohala and Hualalai. With other funds from NOAA s NURP program, the PIs will undertake 16 submersible dives in FY s , to carry out the field portion of the study. This award will support cruise participation for the recovery of previously-placed exposure charges, and the chemical, and microbiological laboratory investigations of materials recovered from the dives. The PIs will observe and characterize the microbial populations and physical effects of natural microbial alteration on well defined glass surfaces. They will compare reaction rates in the one-year exposure experiments to the rates of basalt alteration in natural exposure of several years to nearly a million years. Chemical mass balance will allow the PIs to determine the chemical exchange rates between seawater and the basalt exposure experiments doc23538 none This award is made in response to a proposal submitted to the Information Technology Research (ITR) Initiative. The objective of the research is to design, develop and implement, test, and apply major enhancements of the high-performance, all-electron, full-potential, relativistic gaussian-basis density functional theory (DFT) code for crystals, slabs, and periodic polymers called GTOFF (Gaussian Type Orbitals for Fitting Functions). The goals are (a) to include imposed magnetic fields as a major extension of materials-specific DFT prediction and interpretation of periodic systems; (b) make major speed-ups to handle much larger systems, e.g., nano-featured surfaces, ordered hard-soft interfaces; (c) introduce algorithms and data structures that will enable treatment of extremely large and or complicated systems via grid technologies; (d) substantially improve the capability for revising and or adding methods and capabilities to do more science. A major advantage of GTOFF is use of the same kinds of basis sets and procedures as the majority of molecular codes. It thus provides a seamless way to study chemically differentiated systems, from constituent atoms to molecule, cluster or nanoparticle to crystal or slab, including cluster-surface interactions and nano-featured surfaces. Successful, robust spin DFT algorithms in GTOFF will be reimplemented in C++ (from Fortran 77) to achieve modularity, manageability, and extendability now lacking. Those algorithms include generalized Ewald techniques to sum long-ranged contributions (rather than more common, sometimes less reliable multipole expansions), variational Coulomb fitting to eliminate 4-center integrals, fitting of exchange-correlation densities to fitted densities (eliminates extra sums over Brillouin Zone points), accuracy-conserving constraints on fittings, Douglas-Kroll-Hess relativity (including spin-orbit contributions). GTOFF now is serial. The redsign reimplementation will exploit known parallelism opportunities as well as provide grid enablement. Current-density Functional Theory (C-DFT) will be built into the new design as a major extension to provide predictive treatment of materials at high magnetic field. The planned effort involves several major components: (a) redesign (not mere transcription) of the present GTOFF to take advantage of modern programming practices, construct a proper organization for parallelism (with hooks for MPI), include algorithms and data structures for grid-enabled computing; (b) design of gaussian orbital algorithms and techniques for current DFT; (c) re-implementation in C++ of the redesigned GTOFF for spin DFT; (d) extensive testing to assure reproducibility in serial mode, then in parallel; (e) implementation and testing of current DFT in the new GTOFF; (f) grid-enablement, including (but not limited to) interpolation among precalculated integral arrays, interpolation among approximate energy calculations, and energy gradient calculations direct from density fitting. The grant will provide support for a postdoctoral associate and graduate students who will will learn programming skills in addition to the fundamental chemistry and physics necessary to develop and apply the GTOFF codes. %%% This award is made in response to a proposal submitted to the Information Technology Research (ITR) Initiative. The objective of the research is to design, develop and implement, test, and apply major enhancements of the high-performance, all-electron, full-potential, relativistic gaussian-basis density functional theory (DFT) code for crystals, slabs, and periodic polymers called GTOFF (Gaussian Type Orbitals for Fitting Functions). The goals are (a) to include imposed magnetic fields as a major extension of materials-specific DFT prediction and interpretation of periodic systems; (b) make major speed-ups to handle much larger systems, e.g., nano-featured surfaces, ordered hard-soft interfaces; (c) introduce algorithms and data structures that will enable treatment of extremely large and or complicated systems via grid technologies; (d) substantially improve the capability for revising and or adding methods and capabilities to do more science. A major advantage of GTOFF is use of the same kinds of basis sets and procedures as the majority of molecular codes. It thus provides a seamless way to study chemically differentiated systems, from constituent atoms to molecule, cluster or nanoparticle to crystal or slab, including cluster-surface interactions and nano-featured surfaces. The grant will provide support for a postdoctoral associate and graduate students who will will learn programming skills in addition to the fundamental chemistry and physics necessary to develop and apply the GTOFF codes doc23539 none Proposal New Directions for Multilevel Spatial Analysis in the Social Sciences Stephen Raudenbush University of Michigan Research has long documented that risks and opportunities vary systematically over space and time. Just as poverty, residential instability, and home ownership are concentrated in certain sections of cities, so too are social disorder, crime, and violence as well as infant mortality, low birth weight, and accidents. Rates of crime and other outcomes surge and decline with time, and some neighborhoods are more strongly affected by these changes than are other neighborhoods. To examine how neighborhoods affect a variety of outcomes and how these effects change over time, this study will develop a method of statistical analysis that combines multilevel and spatial models. Four aims organize the proposed work: 1) to incorporate a spatial auto-regressive process into the now-standard two-level hierarchical linear model; 2) to elaborate this model to include repeated measures on participants; 3) to incorporate repeated measures at the neighborhood level; and 4) to exploit spatial dependence in order to improve the reliability and validity of measures of neighborhood social process. Predictive validity will be assessed using data from thc Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), which conducted a citywide neighborhood study in and will complete a replication of this study in . Methods will also be illustrated with PHDCN data on young people growing up in those neighborhoods between and . Software to implement the proposed methods will be tested through simulation studies before being distributed publicly. The multilevel aspect of the model expresses the notion that urban space is divided into uniquely defined, more or less contiguous, self-contained neighborhoods, often bounded by railroad tracks, major arteries, parks, or industrial districts. The spatial aspect of the model reflects theory and empirical evidence suggesting that neighborhoods, while somewhat distinct, are not independent. Rather, neighborhood social processes spill over into surrounding neighborhoods. The model thus represents the view that neighborhoods are socially meaningful units that are linked spatially. Using the proposed methods, it will be possible to study not only how the social composition and processes in each neighborhood are related to human development but also how the composition and processes in surrounding neighborhoods affect the development of persons within a given neighborhood doc23540 none This grant provides funding for a research project whose goal is to advance the understanding and knowledge to develop a new non-contact and non-destructive characterization technique based on the effect of thermally stimulated luminescence applicable for fast imaging of the full-size bulk silicon carbide (SiC) wafers and epitaxial films. The results acquired by this new technique will be correlated with other spatially resolved analytical tools, including photoluminescence mapping, scanning acoustic microscopy, atomic force microscopy and scanning electron microscopy. The objective of the research is to develop a fundamental understanding of the role of nano-porous buffer layers between the SiC substrate and the epitaxial films as a means to upgrading of the material quality by reducing concentration of defects in the SiC films and improvement of operational parameters of devices. The understanding and knowledge acquired will provide guidance to overcome the technical barriers that have hindered the widespread application of SiC-based devices for high-power high-frequency and optoelectronic applications. The project, when completed, will directly benefit SiC wafer and device manufacturers. The results should promote the industry-wide adoption of this new metrology applicable eventually for in-line process control. One of the major SiC wafers and epi-layers producers, Sterling Semiconductors has expressed a deep interest in this type of the metrology and offered in-kind support to the university group with pre-characterized 2 and 3 diameter research-grade SiC wafers. It is anticipated that the project will provide U.S. companies with more cost-effective quality characterization processes while simultaneously improving parameters of SiC devices. The project is an integrated step towards the building a strong research program on SiC technology at the University of South Florida. The facilities available for the program include a chemical vapor deposition system for epitaxial SiC growth and advanced state-of-the-art characterization equipment located at the university clean room. It is believed that the program will attract quality graduate students with diverse background. The program provides a unique opportunity for the graduate students to meet and work with experts from industry, and will have highly positive impact to engineering education. The project is based on the international cooperation between faculties of the University of South Florida (Tampa, Florida), National Politechnic Institute (Mexico) and professionals in industry (Sterling Semiconductors) possessing a complimentary expertise in SiC growth and characterization. The results of the program will be published in referred journals and presented at the major international conferences. Some of them will be included to new graduate courses developed by university faculties doc23541 none Software is multidimensional; it has many representations besides the program source. These include formal specifications, test suites, documentation and even the development history. As software evolves, these dimensions must stay consistent and reflect each other as thoroughly as possible. In practice, however, while these are usually consistent when first created, they tend to receive unequal attention and therefore gradually become inconsistent. Programmers thus typically rely on the source code to the exclusion of most other dimensions. This project s goal is to help programmers cope with software evolution by viewing the dimensions of software as constraints on one another. The project proposes a constraint representation common to the different software dimensions. Software evolution then becomes a process of maintaining consistency between constraints. These constraints also help programmers identify high-level features in their system, and generate rationales to document design decisions. The escalating costs of software maintenance give the project immediacy and its results high significance. It will have immediate impact by developing tools for programmers to use. It will have effect over the long term by employing these tools in educational settings so future developers have a better appreciation for the importance of maintaining the multiple dimensions of software doc23542 none Lynn S. Penn, Et al, University of Kentucky Design and Construction of Responsive Surfaces by Means of Tethered Chain Nanolayers This project explores use of a tethered chain strategy to create surfaces that respond dynamically to their environments or other external stimuli. (A tethered chain is defined as a polymer molecule that is attached by a single point along its length to the surface of a solid.) Tethered chains are uniquely suited for creating responsive surfaces because, except for chain segments adjacent to the point of attachment, their segmental mobility is not impaired. Thus, even though they are attached permanently to the substrate, tethered chains can change conformation-- and thereby change the nature of the surface-- in response to an applied field or alteration in the local environment. Tethered chains of the appropriate chemical structure and molecular architecture, and with specific chemical functionalities attached, can be used to construct surfaces that exhibit a wide variety of responses. Surfaces can be constructed to have dynamic capabilities such as reversible appearance of nanoscale patterns, trapping of hazardous biological or chemical agents, and mimicry of surface energy of contacting phases. Surfaces with these capabilities have applications in electronics manufacture, clean-up of environmental pollution, biomedical devices, adhesive bonding, sensors in scientific instrumentation, adhesion and wetting, and biological and chemical warfare defense. In this project the investigators will gather the remaining experimental data needed to broaden their current mathematical model of the tethering process and make it versatile enough for practical use and will use controlled tethering to construct three demonstration surfaces that exhibit diverse response capabilities. The three demonstration surfaces will be able to 1) exhibit reversible, in-plane phase separation in response to temperature changes, 2) trap large anionic species from a passing stream, and 3) change surface energy to match that of a contacting phase, respectively. Project activities include synthesis of large organic molecules and polymers, execution of tethering procedures under controlled conditions (with real time monitoring), and characterization of structure and function of the surfaces by means of a variety of techniques. Impact: The modification of surfaces with polymers to manipulate nano-surface structure and properties is technologically important on many fronts. This work addresses a critical need. The training provided in these sophisticated techniques will enable research in this important nano-technology to expand. The networking between departments and universities proposed in this proposal is considered to fully utilize the advantages of multidisciplary approaches and inculcates this approach in the formation of the many students involved. If the research is successful, new responsive surfaces will be available for a wide variety of important nano-technological applications which will provide great benefit to society doc23543 none This proposal requests support for investigators from Harvard and Northwestern Universities for an investigation of the creation and use of application signatures from the ATLAS high energy physics experiment, at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Switzerland, as estimators for resource usage and adaptation for computing on a Grid. The experiment will be working with the largest data sets ever used in a physics experiment and will involve physicists distributed world wide. The access to these data and the analyses of them will require a grid network. Rather than just transfer the large data sets around the world, the scientists need to be able to regenerate the data by taking a limited signature of a specific data set, called an application signature, and invoke methods to cause a physical materialization. The group proposes to develop application signatures for jobs in the ATLAS experiment; to develop tools to estimate the execution times required to complete computing tasks based on a limited set of application signatures; to use this information to help schedule tasks on a set of grid resources; to find the most efficient way to solve a particular ATLAS analysis problem; and to evaluate their results in terms of generalization to other applications doc23544 none This study will investigate online investing and virtual investing-related communities (VICs)looking at two broad research issues: (a) How is information generated, discussed, and diffused within and across VICs, and how do such activities impact market efficiency? and (b) How do economic, social and psychological influences together impact investor adoption, participation, and satisfaction? The study will involve processing over three million messages covering 40 stocks from 10 major VICs. The information will be parsed and categorized, and various hypotheses related to diffusion and market impacts will be tested. In-depth interviews and a large-scale survey of online investors will validate a comprehensive model of investor satisfaction. This research contributes to the information processing and diffusion, rumor propagation, impact of IT on markets, and individual group behavior literatures that lie at the intersection of information systems, psychology, marketing, and economics. The research results will lay the foundation for the design of software tools that can detect worrisome types of information flow in real-time. From a regulatory perspective, an understanding of social and psychological biases and distorting influences will support the design of regulatory measures that counter their negative impacts doc23545 none PI: Nemiroff, Robert Inst: Michigan Technological University Dr. Nemiroff is awarded funds to support the CONCAM project at Michigan Technological University. CONtinuous CAMeras (CONCAMs) are fisheye night sky web cameras that provide astronomers at major national and international observing sites with real-time images from which cloud cover, skyglow, and air transparency can be immediately recovered. Within the past two years, a global network of CONCAMs has begun to operate. The PI and his students will use the funds to write the software that will make CONCAM images available in real-time, and to design a pipeline that will eventually convert CONCAM images into real-time data products such as continuously updated all-sky maps of skyglow and transparency. These products will constitute a real service for observers and robotic telescopes needing to make observing decisions in real time. Software will also be designed for an automated bright transient search, potentially leading to significant discoveries from the CONCAM data itself doc23546 none This project explores new ways of searching, organizing, preserving, and interacting with large information resources in the humanities and the social sciences. It involves the creation and support of a digital library of materials of significant international importance drawn from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Digital Archives (which includes image, sound, video and textual data), and the encoding, annotation, and multi-modal linkage of a portion of the collection to develop state-of-the-art methods for search and retrieval. The goal is to establish methods and procedures that can be later applied to the full FDR collection, and to consider the best means to enable flexible and creative access to this important resource. The project involves, on the one hand, computer scientists with significant experience in the representation of and access to on-line data, together with historians who require sophisticated and intelligent access to on-line historical resources. Because we will apply techniques from several technical fields to data that is typical of the humanities, the project represents an important cross-disciplinary effort. Another benefit is the collaboration between two undergraduate liberal arts institutions, Marist College and Vassar College, and the potential to involve students from both institutions in cutting edge research doc23547 none The aim of the project is to develop nonlinear partial differential equation models and algorithms for processing multi-scale audio signals. Nonlinearities are present in human auditory pathways, most notably in active basilar membranes (BM) of cochleas and peripheral auditory neurons. Our approach is to model the nonlinearities by combining first principles (Newton s Laws) in cochlear mechanics with experimental measurements of acoustic responses, at either the active BM level or the psycho-acoustic level. This is achieved by enlarging the class of partial differential equations (PDEs) derived from cochlear mechanical principles and neural phenomenology, then optimizing solutions towards the given set of target data. The first phase of research is to develop accurate, robust and fast numerical methods and algorithms for solving model PDEs. These PDEs are nonlinear, nonlocal and dispersive. Mathematical analysis will also be performed on the well-posedness of the PDEs, as well as existence and approximation of multi-tone solutions. The second phase is to select the optimal parameters and functional forms for these PDEs to further approximate the given data set. Carrying out the project will generate accurate first principle based algorithms to enhance the evaluation of available experimental data on human audition, and strengthen our understanding of the computational role of human auditory systems. The results will have broad impact on digital hearing aid design, modeling of hearing loss, and audio compression. The project shall directly contribute to amplifying human sensory abilities, enhancing the performance of human beings, especially the hearing-impaired, in using audio information with ease and for more tasks. Date: June 26, doc23548 none The area of investigation is automated scene analysis. The main objective is to detect the appearance in image data of objects from a small repertoire. Two key liabilities in current methods are insufficient invariance, both photometric and geometric, and inefficient computation. To confront these difficulties, a unified statistical and computational framework is proposed which is based on a coarse-to-fine sequence of approximations to a full Bayesian model. Research topics include both algorithmic and mathematical issues arising in coarse-to-fine search, model selection and deformable shape analysis. The interpretation of natural scenes is effortless for human beings but is the main challenge of artificial vision. This semantic gap has largely resisted any satisfying solution and impedes scientific and technological advances in many areas, including automated medical diagnosis, industrial automation, and effective security and surveillance. The general objective of this project is to design computer algorithms for detecting and interpreting certain objects appearing in still pictures in order to relieve humans of wearisome visual search tasks in medical imaging, law enforcement, industrial inspection and everyday life doc23549 none In traditional theoretical computer science (TCS), computational agents are typically assumed either to be obedient, i.e., to follow the prescribed algorithm, or to be adversaries who ``play against each other. On the other hand, the strategic agents in game theory are neither obedient nor adversarial. Although one cannot assume that they will follow the prescribed algorithm, one can assume that they will respond to incentives. Thus, the economics literature traditionally stressed incentives and downplayed computational complexity, and the TCS literature traditionally did the opposite. The emergence of the Internet as a standard platform for distributed computation has radically changed this state of affairs: Ownership, operation, and use by many self-interested, independent parties give the Internet the characteristics of an economy as well as those of a computer. The emerging discipline of Distributed Algorithmic Mechanism Design (DAMD)lies in the intersection of TCS, economics, and networking. This project addresses the economic and computational foundations of DAMD. Fundamental problems addressed include but are not limited to notions of inherent tractability or intractability of DAMD problems, methods of approximation for DAMD problems found to be inherently intractable, and the extent to which agent privacy can be maintained in distributed algorithmic mechanisms doc23550 none Communities of scientists develop a specialized understanding of their specific domain of expertise, which manifests as differences in mental conceptualization. Within such information communities there may be quite high levels of agreement regarding conceptualization, in that members can communicate and share ideas, but insurmountable problems arise when data and knowledge must be shared between communities. But many emerging problems in science require that such disparate perspectives indeed be merged. For example, relationships between climate, land use, and ecology can have far-reaching impacts on human health via ailments such as West Nile Virus and Lyme Disease. Building predictive models that span communities and lead to proactive mitigation is only possible when the conceptual differences imbued in the data can be resolved, enabling a free exchange. Through this research project, the investigators propose an ontological approach to mediate the sharing of data resources among different information communities across the environmental sciences, ranging from human health exposures and outcomes to climate forecasts and climate-change predictions. Aside from the benefits arising from a deeper understanding of the conceptual similarities and differences among these information communities, several major outcomes are envisaged in terms of computational infrastructure. Specifically, the investigators will conduct research and development leading to (1) computational tools to mediate the interoperation (sharing) of data among disparate communities of scientists, focusing broadly on geospatial disciplines; (2) computational tools with which to construct, represent, store, and exchange ontologies generated from disparate information communities; (3) computational tools to visualize and explore ontologies and to support the human-centered sharing of understanding between information communities; and (4) measures to quantify ontological differences between specific entities and categories, and between entire ontologies, as a measure of the complexity and likely success of interoperation. This research project tackles a common problem that pervades the geospatial sciences - how to share information and results of analyses among communities of scientists in a way that takes account of the different ways in which those communities conceptualize the world (or parts thereof). The specific focus of this project is on better sharing of information and computational models among environmental scientists, ecologists and epidemiologists, with a specific focus on human health outcomes. Certain infectious diseases have a complex relationship with the environment. Changes in climate and land cover offer new habitats for disease-carrying organisms and their hosts that can cause harm to humans (exemplified by West Nile Virus and Lyme Disease). By improving the sharing of models and data relating to climate and climate change, host and vector life cycles, land use and land-use change, human demographics, and human health, scientists and policy makers will be better able to understand the problem in greater detail, plan for future outbreaks based on changes to the status quo, develop mitigation strategies more effectively, and inform and educate health practitioners and the general public to increase awareness doc23551 none Software systems have become increasingly complex, and are expected to provide service over wide operating ranges. To meet service goals, software developers provide many tuning parameters that must be set carefully for the system to provide acceptable performance and functionality. Tuning these parameters adequately often requires extensive trial-and-error experimentation by system administrators. As workloads and operating conditions continually change, the parameters must be endlessly re-tuned to provide good performance. This research project will apply feedback control to automate this parameter tuning loop in two example systems. The first, a wide-area replicated file system, provides variable consistency and performance through optimistic concurrency control. Feedback will be used to schedule replica reconciliation and data migration to provide acceptable performance and consistency to end users. The second system, a database engine, offers a large variety of tuning parameters to be considered. Feedback control will be used to enable database administrators to manage the growing complexity of their server systems. From these two examples and other work, a framework for feedback control of dynamic computing systems will begin to emerge. This framework will enable future computing systems to offer reliable and robust operation and predictable performance, without costly maintenance and continual manual tuning doc23552 none The aim is to provide a better mathematical framework and alternative design methodologies for coarse quantization of signals in a highly oversampled setting. The central themes is sigma-delta quantization in analog-to-digital conversion of audio signals and its counterpart error-diffusion in digital halftoning of images. In both cases, a given target analog signal is represented by a judiciously chosen one-bit (or few-bit) sequence which approximates the signal in a suitable low-pass subspace. A wide range of different schemes exist for this purpose, each corresponding to a different implementation and approximation order. As our primary mathematical objective, we expect to better understand the law of error decay of the existing schemes as well as to improve on these by new designs. On the algorithmic side, we aim to extend this analysis to settings with computational and other implementational constraints. The fact that digital signals and data sets can be processed, stored and retrieved with great precision and speed places high demands of accuracy on the conversion process from and to the analog world. However, the devices used in the translation process (such as in the case of analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion circuits in audio applications, and printers in image reproduction) are of necessity analog devices, which have physical limitations that, at first sight, conflict with those accuracy demands. To cope with this problem, engineers have empirically developed special signal processing techniques leading to alternative signal and number representations that are quite different from standard decimal or binary representations. Typical techniques take advantage of the highly accurate performance of the analog devices in sampling very densely in time or space to compensate for the lack of amplitude precision of those devices. Interestingly, while these empirical schemes have proved efficient and have been used in consumer products for a long time, the corresponding framework of signal processing has little mathematical support. We aim to study these schemes in more detail, with the goals of improving the mathematical theory as well as proposing variants that outperform those used presently, and to identify a wider range of applications doc23553 none Marcotte, Edward M University of Texas ITR: Development of novel computational methods for genome-wide discovery of gene function and networks Of the roughly 40,000 genes encoded by the human genome, as with every other genome sequenced to date, about half are completely uncharacterized and of unknown function. There is a broad need for methods to discover the functions of these thousands of uncharacterized genes, as well as how the gene products participate in networks, pathways and systems in the cell. This project s goal is to develop novel computational methods for discovering the functions of genes on a genome-wide scale, and to discover how the genes are organized into systems and pathways. Several novel methods are proposed capable of providing such information. The essence of these methods, called non-homology methods, is that they analyze contextual properties of genes-such as which organisms the genes appear in, which genes can be found fused together, and other properties-in addition to the sequences of the genes. Such contextual properties turn out to provide a tremendous increase in the ability of computational methods to discover gene function and gene networks. At the core of this proposal is a novel graph-based method for associating genes together that operate in the same cellular pathway, essentially resulting in a functional map of the genes. This method is combined with a new computational method for finding specific physical interaction partners for proteins in large sequence families, and with methods to visualize the resultant complex gene networks. Application of these methods should improve our understanding of the functions of the thousands of uncharacterized genes in each sequenced genome doc23468 none This proposal requests support for a collaborative effort between investigators at MIT and Rice University to integrate access to the Grid computing model with the existing ROOT software framework, which is the de-facto standard in high energy and nuclear physics data analyses. To deal with the large amounts of data to be collected by the high energy physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Switzerland, CMS and the other LHC collaborations are adopting the Grid paradigm that aims to provide consistent and efficient access to geographically distributed computing resources. The goal of the project is to make Grid services available to ROOT users. This will be based on the PROOF extension of ROOT and will be implemented in close collaboration with the ROOT authors at CERN. Phase I will involve the initial design, development and prototyping cycle and a detailed benchmarking and evaluation period. In phase II, production versions will be used on existing clusters for RHIC data and CMS simulation data doc23555 none Larry D. Brown The seismic reflection method, developed primarily by the oil exploration industry, is arguably geophysics most versatile and powerful tool for mapping the earth s lithosphere. It has been increasingly applied over the past 25 years to a wide variety of scientific problems associated with the earth s crust and upper mantle by a diverse mixture of individual, institutional, national and international programs. The results from these efforts have revolutionized, and continue to advance, our understanding of the Earth s interior. Yet until now there has been no central guide to the results of those efforts. A comprehensive, global, electronic library of deep seismic reflection surveys past and present is being developed in this project as a major new resource for both research and teaching. This catalog, in the form of a GIS database with user-friendly cartographic interface, will serve as an internet portal to a metalibrary of deep reflection data that is derived from the physical libraries that are now globally dispersed and heterogeneously maintained. A core component of this metalibrary, and a proposed template for organizing comparable physical collections worldwide, are the COCORP (US), INDEPTH (Tibet) and URSEIS (Russia) datasets currently archived at Cornell. These datasets are not only of considerable continuing scientific value in their own right; they typify the range of data characteristics of the larger global collection. The catalog includes expanded digital access to both raw and processed data in the Cornell holdings, as well as supporting documentation, field photos, corollary datasets and published interpretations. The facility greatly facilitates quantitative syntheses, evaluation of seismic techniques, and planning of future seismic geophysical experiments. Of special interest with respect to the latter is the EARTHSCOPE initiative in the U.S., for which the COCORP dataset in particular is a fundamental resource. Organized electronic publication will aid not only the serious researcher but also the non-specialist who finds the final product useful for synthesis with other data, the classroom instructor who needs an easily comprehensive form of the results for the general student, or the earth science student who simply wants to browse the earth s interior for inspiration. This global catalog, along with the revamped Cornell holdings, is being integrated with related programs in the U.S. and around the world doc23552 none The aim is to provide a better mathematical framework and alternative design methodologies for coarse quantization of signals in a highly oversampled setting. The central themes is sigma-delta quantization in analog-to-digital conversion of audio signals and its counterpart error-diffusion in digital halftoning of images. In both cases, a given target analog signal is represented by a judiciously chosen one-bit (or few-bit) sequence which approximates the signal in a suitable low-pass subspace. A wide range of different schemes exist for this purpose, each corresponding to a different implementation and approximation order. As our primary mathematical objective, we expect to better understand the law of error decay of the existing schemes as well as to improve on these by new designs. On the algorithmic side, we aim to extend this analysis to settings with computational and other implementational constraints. The fact that digital signals and data sets can be processed, stored and retrieved with great precision and speed places high demands of accuracy on the conversion process from and to the analog world. However, the devices used in the translation process (such as in the case of analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion circuits in audio applications, and printers in image reproduction) are of necessity analog devices, which have physical limitations that, at first sight, conflict with those accuracy demands. To cope with this problem, engineers have empirically developed special signal processing techniques leading to alternative signal and number representations that are quite different from standard decimal or binary representations. Typical techniques take advantage of the highly accurate performance of the analog devices in sampling very densely in time or space to compensate for the lack of amplitude precision of those devices. Interestingly, while these empirical schemes have proved efficient and have been used in consumer products for a long time, the corresponding framework of signal processing has little mathematical support. We aim to study these schemes in more detail, with the goals of improving the mathematical theory as well as proposing variants that outperform those used presently, and to identify a wider range of applications doc23557 none Overpeck Natural archives with year-by-year resolution (isannual resolution proxieslo), such as tree-rings, varved sediments, corals, mollusks, and speleothems, are becoming increasingly critical for understanding the nature of past environmental variability, and how it may change in the future. The most obvious use of these archives is in understanding the patterns and causes of natural interannual to century-scale climate variability, and how humans may be altering this variability. They are also central, however, to an increasingly broad range of Earth Science applications, including documenting paleoseismicity, calibrating the radiocarbon time scale, investigating hydrologic variability, and understanding paleoecosystem dynamics. Their capability to provide the absolute time scale needed to understand these dynamics on many societally-relevant time scales is particularly important. At present, extracting information from these sources is extraordinarily labor-intensive, resulting in undesirable limitations on temporal resolution and replication that result in excessive uncertainties concerning the environmental signals of interest. This applies even when sophisticated detectors are used to make basic measurements, since great care must be taken in stringing series of measurements together into very long time series whilst retaining all information that might turn out to be useful later in the analysis. Existing image-analysis software alone cannot solve this problem. The labor-intensive analysis that these records require has created a strong incentive to develop instrumentation that can be used to process samples more efficiently, and with more interpretive power than is available from off-the- shelf image processing software. This Information Technology Research Small Grants Program (ITR) award will support the development of software for automated counting of annually laminated climate change proxies (tree rings and varves). The developments are based on a prototype computer-assisted dendrochronology workstation and associated control and image analysis software (TREES v. 1) that was previously funded to co-PI Schowengerdt by NSF s Anthropology program ( ). This award will support the creation of TREES v.2, a Linux-based PC version of TREES v.1, which was written exclusively for the SUN platform, and VARVES v.1, also Linux-based software designed to automate counting of laminated lake and marine sediments doc23558 none Novel Imaging Devices for Motion Estimation Advances in both imaging sensors and the processing of image data will provide the ability to create accurate and detailed models of the world. The numerous applications of such a capability have driven a considerable amount of research into the problem of extracting structure and motion from image data. While progress has been made most of the research to date has concentrated on the use of conventional camera technology. The proposed research aims to explore novel ways to obtain image data. Optics will be used to manipulate the field of view of a conventional lens such that the estimation of motion and structure is accurate and robust. The first step of this research is to study the mapping from scene rays to image pixels to determine what type of mapping is optimal. Next, mirrors, lenses, and other optical devices will be used to build sensors that realize these mappings. To take advantage of these new sensors, novel computational techniques will also be developed. This research will result in a set of new imaging systems for three dimensional modeling and will be useful to scientists and engineers in a variety of fields including digital imaging, computer graphics, human-computer interaction, and robotics doc23559 none Jouline, Igor B Georgia Technology Research Corporation - GIT ITR: Comparative Genomic Analysis of Signal Transduction in Prokaryotes Whole genome sequencing projects revolutionize our understanding of biology and open up new opportunities for fundamental research and its applications to medicine, agriculture and environment. Accumulating genomic data generates the need for rapid biological interpretation of genome sequences and integration of this knowledge into databases of genomic information for immediate use by biomedical and environmental scientists. Proteins comprising signal transduction networks control most vital functions in any given organism, beneficial or harmful. However, current interpretation of genomic data for signal transduction proteins fails to provide sufficient information for understanding their biological role. The goal of this research project is to significantly improve prediction of biological functions for signal transduction proteins and to unravel potentially novel signal transduction mechanisms and pathways in various beneficial and pathogenic microorganisms. This will be achieved through a systematic computational approach, which integrates in-depth analysis of functional elements (domains) of individual proteins and evolutionary and genome context information. The results obtained will be incorporated into primary databases and will allow automated detection of biologically important proteins. The research proposed in this project will contribute to a better understanding of the organization and evolution of signal transduction systems (fundamental aspect). This, in turn, will assist experimental scientists in identification of targets for antimicrobial drug design in pathogens and in improving beneficial capabilities of microorganisms used for biofertilization and bioremediation purposes (applied aspect doc23560 none Ensuring the security of today s computer systems is an urgent and difficult problem. The complexity and rapid pace of change in current software systems prevents developers from verifying or auditing the code thoroughly enough to eliminate vulnerabilities. This project seeks to provide security defenses that work in the presence of compromised operating systems and applications. Even if an attacker compromises the operating system, these defenses will continue to ensure their intended security policies. This new level of security is made possible by adding a virtual-machine layer underneath the vulnerable operating system and applications. This additional software layer enables new security services that do not depend on the integrity of the target software. This project explores four new security services that can be added via virtual machines: 1) the ability to replay and analyze the complete, instruction-by-instruction execution of a computer system, including actions after the point of compromise; (2) the ability to recover the system to a prior state after an intrusion; (3) the ability to prevent intrusions by safely testing hypothetical what if scenarios; and (4) the ability to detect intrusions by monitoring all actions of the computer system doc23561 none Koch, Christof Collaborative Research: CRCNS: Detection and Recognition of Objects in Visual Cortex A three way collaboration between the laboratories of Profs. T. Poggio at MIT, D. Ferster at Northwestern University and C. Koch at Caltech is exploring and evaluating the hypotheses that the cortical organization and the neural mechanisms of visual recognition can be explained by a coherent theoretical framework built on two existing computational models for recognition and attention and, secondly, that a combination of physiological work on monkeys and cats, together with visual psychophysics can be used to test and refine the theory. The research is organized into three main projects. The work at MIT is guided by a quantitative hierarchical model of recognition, probing the relations between identification and categorization and the properties of selectivity and invariance of the neural mechanisms in IT cortex. The work at Northwestern University is testing a key prediction of the model about the nature of the pooling operation (a max operation vs. a linear sum) performed by complex cells in V1. The experiments are done in the anesthetized cat, intracellularly, to allow for a characterization of the underlying circuit and biophysical mechanisms. Finally, work at Caltech is extending the basic model of recognition by integrating it with a saliency-based attentional model. The computational component of this work, centered around the development of a quantitative model of visual recognition, constitutes the primary tool to enforce interactions between the investigators: the model suggests experiments and guides planning and interpreting new experiments doc23562 none The scale of data storage and analysis for the high energy physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Switzerland, provides new challenges and necessitates research into new concepts of CPU utilization. The quantity of data produced is too large to store at any single university. Rather, the data will be archived in a central location. This project will develop techniques and software packages to enable the efficient distributed analysis of these data by researchers at remote sites. This proposal would support the investigation into how to send a user s request for a particular analysis and some code to the locations where the data are stored and run the code there. The system would then collect and assemble the results and present them to the user. The framework would be the BlueOx system and Java will be the implementation language for the BlueOx framework so as to take advantage of its cross-platform compatibility. The most important challenge facing the framework is that of scalability. This project plans to study and improve the scalability by testing it with large dummy datasets of simulated data on a moderate-sized computing cluster. The aim is to keep the generality that can make it useful to many large scientific projects doc23563 none The proposal was submitted to the Chemical and Transport Systems Division in response to the FY Information Technology Research solicitation, described in NSF Announcement. NSF 01-149, in the Small category. The proposal is for development of a comprehensive set of numerical models and techniques for the simulation of ultra-fast laser machining and to employ these techniques to obtain a detailed understanding of the fundamental physics of ultra-fast laser processing. In particular, the PIs propose to develop numerical multiscale finite volume and molecular dynamics models of these processes and to implement them on shared-memory parallel computers. Phenomenological issues to be addressed include melting and ejection of molten droplets due to recoil pressure and droplet redeposition. Large-scale simulation offers the possibility of resolving a number of fundamental questions concerning mechanisms of the ablation process in ultra-fast laser machining. The large-scale parallel computing aspects of the research will broaden the capabilities of thermal science researchers in this important information technology area. Other technologies that may be impacted by the development of these computational techniques include high speed microelectronics device simulation, microscale energy generation, and in a variety of emerging bio- and non-technologies. Educational impacts include expanded computational science expertise in graduate students involved with advanced manufacturing sciences and the expansion of content in upper level courses taught by the collaborating PIs. Funding is from funds reserved for ITR-Small grants in the CTS Division as well as from the Thermal Transport and Thermal Processing program doc23564 none The project aims to establish a portable laboratory for high-resolution, three-dimensional digital imaging of craniodental morphology in primates and other mammals. This objective is designed to help meet a long-range goal of better understanding organismal diversity and the mechanisms and processes of evolution. The laboratory will use state-of-the-art, automated moire fringe projection to acquire three-dimensional digital specimens that are accurate to microscopic tolerances. In addition to being very accurate, the laboratory will be easily portable, making it ideal for remote use in museums. The laboratory will be used for data acquisition in a multifaceted research program that uses morphometrics, phylogenetics, the study of growth and development, and biomechanics to understand how mammals evolve and adapt to their environments. The project s major applications include research that is specifically focused on the skull and dentition, because of their important roles in the adaptations of all mammalian radiations. Three current, large-scale research projects will use the laboratory: 1) an evolutionary study of skull form and function in extant and fossil strepsirrhine primates; 2) theoretical and functional morphology of the teeth in primates and other small mammals; and 3) development, function, and evolution of evergrowing teeth in extant and fossil rodents. In addition, there is a series of smaller research projects (with collaborators at other universities) that will use the laboratory. All of these projects are focused on the same goal of better understanding mammalian diversity and also involve studies of craniodental (as well as soft tissue) form in primates and other groups of mammals. Each project will require the development of new and innovative quantitative methods, increasing the breadth of evolutionary questions that can be asked and hypotheses that can be tested. The project has a number of significant impacts on research in physical anthropology, mammalogy, and vertebrate paleontology: 1) the laboratory significantly advances the development of a large-scale research program that is dedicated to better understanding the patterns and processes of evolution and adaptation in primates and other mammals; 2) the major applications of the project should lead to new discoveries of the biological roles of craniodental structures in the interactions between mammals and their environments; 3) the archiving of digital specimens helps to advance the goal of museums without walls , where morphological specimens can be made freely and easily available to students and senior researchers throughout the worldwide scientific community; and 4) establishment of the laboratory contributes significantly to the interface between research and education, increasing the use of virtual-reality technology for undergraduate and professional education, including use of the Internet and the World Wide Web. More importantly, the laboratory should provide increased research opportunities for undergraduate and professional students in an urban university where there are significant enrollments of minorities who are currently under-represented in the scientific community doc23544 none This study will investigate online investing and virtual investing-related communities (VICs)looking at two broad research issues: (a) How is information generated, discussed, and diffused within and across VICs, and how do such activities impact market efficiency? and (b) How do economic, social and psychological influences together impact investor adoption, participation, and satisfaction? The study will involve processing over three million messages covering 40 stocks from 10 major VICs. The information will be parsed and categorized, and various hypotheses related to diffusion and market impacts will be tested. In-depth interviews and a large-scale survey of online investors will validate a comprehensive model of investor satisfaction. This research contributes to the information processing and diffusion, rumor propagation, impact of IT on markets, and individual group behavior literatures that lie at the intersection of information systems, psychology, marketing, and economics. The research results will lay the foundation for the design of software tools that can detect worrisome types of information flow in real-time. From a regulatory perspective, an understanding of social and psychological biases and distorting influences will support the design of regulatory measures that counter their negative impacts doc23566 none This research studies and designs coordinated trafficconditioning, network monitoring, flow control, and provisions the networkproperly to meet the demands for data and multimedia traffic in various applications. An edge router component to monitor a large network for service level agreement (SLA) violations and bandwidth theft attacks is developed. This network monitoring scheme involves only edge routers. The conditioner and flow control components alleviate the congestion and unfairness in resource allocation. The edge routers share the congestion information with upstream routers to save resource wastage in the downstream domains. Continuous monitoring of network activity is required to maintain confidence in the security of networks with quality of service (QoS) support. These solutions have to be scalable in order to deploy them in the heterogeneous Internet. A scalable edge router cannot use excessive per-flow information and cannot involve core routers. The researchers follow this principle in designing edge routers to achievescalability. The following is a list of contributions that are obtainedthrough experiments, simulation, and collaboration with industry. 1. For the edge router, we determine the optimal traffic assignment rate for each traffic class and weight assignments at the queue to maximize the profit for the service provider of a network domain. Proper provisioning provides service level agreement bounds, such as throughput, delay, and loss for each user. 2. To ensure all flows are getting their share of SLA, the flows of a network domain is monitored for possible SLA violation and bandwidth theft attack. We define and employ throughput, delay, packet loss, and security as QoS parameters for the design of an edge-to-edge SLA monitoring scheme. This contributes to detecting service violations and attacks, especially denial of service (DoS) attacks. 3. The traffic conditioners at the edge routers intelligently mark and shape packets differentially based on the class parameters and according to network state. Through experimental studies, we show that the flow characteristics provide better resource utilization and improve the application level quality of service. 4. The edge routers detect and regulate unresponsive flows that cause poor performance for adaptive flows, such as TCP, which retreats during congestion. The ingress (entry) edge routers propagate the congestion information to the egress (exit) routers of a previous upstream network domain. This reduces the resource wastage at the downstream network due to undelivered packets doc23567 none The project will investigate the impact of mesoscale motions on climate through careful analysis of extended integrations of a state-of-the-art model having very high horizontal and vertical resolution. Key issues in tropospheric-stratospheric dynamics, including interaction of very disparate scales of motion, will be addressed. Interest in more accurate modeling of the stratospheric circulation has recently been rekindled by observational analysis that suggests that a primary mode of tropospheric variability in the high latitudes is influenced by the downward migration of annular anomalies from the stratosphere. Dr. Hamilton will conduct a dynamically oriented diagnostic analysis of the high-resolution general circulation model (GCM) integrations completed at NOAA s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton. The objective will be to understand the role of small-scale processes, including gravity waves generated in the troposphere by deep convection, in the evolution and maintenance of the stratospheric general circulation. This research will lead to improved parameterization of small-scale processes in global climate models, and advance the understanding and modeling of dynamical interactions of the troposphere and stratosphere doc23568 none The increased urbanization, population density and traffic congestion in major urban centers in the US has lead to a greater demand for underground space. Current homeland security concerns have prompted consideration of use of underground space for placement and protection of critical and sensitive infrastructure along urban corridors. With new development, and increasingly more redevelopment within the urban areas, there is a clear need to efficiently and safely develop underground space. A major concern when placing deep excavations in urban environments is the impact of construction-related ground movements on adjacent buildings and utilities. The ground movements cause structures supported by the affected ground to deform and possibly sustain damage. It is critically important to predict and control the magnitude and distribution of the ground movements that result from creating the underground space. This collaborative research project aims to develop new, integrated tools for predicting, monitoring, and controlling ground movements associated with excavations in urban areas. The project is a joint venture between Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The project will explore and develop new technologies that offer substantial promise for greatly enhancing the construction control process and attendant mitigation of ground deformations including: (1) field instrumentation and sensors with wireless communication capabilities, (2) data storage and display, including the display of construction progress and ground and building movements in a virtual reality environment, and, (3) intelligent, self-updating numerical models to simulate the excavation and support process and to compute anticipated ground and structure movements. These new technologies and improvements will be field tested in real time during excavation projects. The project has strong educational and industry outreach components in addition to its research components. A group of contractors and engineering firms that have national practices will provide access to ongoing excavation projects and participate in the project advisory board. Faculty and their students from primarily undergraduate institutions will participate in the project doc23569 none Foltz There is a rapidly growing trend toward embedding wireless capability into a wide variety of information technology products; recently in the form of single chip transceivers, and in the future perhaps integrated on-chip with the main product function. These devices must have low power consumption to satisfy battery conservation and thermal considerations. Good receiver sensitivity and signal handling are also essential in a crowded radio frequency (RF) spectrum; however, this requirement conflicts with low power circuit design. The PI proposes to develop low power CMOS circuits that improve the trade-off between power consumption and RF performance. Current CMOS low noise amplifiers (LNA) have noise figures as low as 0.8 dB, input intercept points up to +18dBm, and power as low as 1.5 mW; however, these specifications cannot be obtained simultaneously. Likewise, CMOS mixers can meet demanding CDMA communications standards for linearity and noise figure, but only at high power cost. To address these problems the PI proposes a number of strategies for (a) reducing power consumption for a given level of performance, and (b) allowing a dynamic trade-off of power versus RF performance. These strategies include: (1) reuse of amplifier stages at two different frequencies through reflex arrangements, thus reducing the number of high performance, high current stages required in receivers, (2) dynamically controlled positive feedback and bias in LNA stages, to allow power, signal handling, and noise figure to be traded off based on signal strength and interference, and (3) integration of charge pumps into individual drain supplies, to optimize the voltage for RF-critical stages while allowing the non-critical portions of a CMOS chip to operate at low voltage. Successful implementation will lead to improved range and life for wireless sensors, more reliable communications under adverse interference conditions, and ultimately to wider application of information technology in industry and science doc23570 none Since the Galveston hurricane of , improved systems for detection, warning, and evacuation have decreased the loss of life from natural hazards in the United States. Population growth in hazard prone areas is likely to reverse this trend unless prompt and effective measures are taken. Hazard-resistant land use and building construction practices could help to contain loss of life despite population growth, but there are economic and political barriers to implementing them. Improvements in the ability to evacuate threatened populations will thus be needed. This research project addresses this need by developing an Evacuation Management Decision Support System (EMDSS) to assist public officials in monitoring a hazard s onset and determining when and where to initiate evacuations. A large data base on warning preparation times, compliance spontaneous evacuation rates, evacuation route utilization, and evacuation costs for both risk area residents and transients (especially business and tourist travelers), and economic impacts to business due to evacuations will be constructed using multiple surveys. Data on warning and preparation times, compliance and spontaneous evacuation rates, and evacuation route utilization are sparse; data on evacuation costs (as opposed to losses from disaster impact) are lacking in the literature. This database will feed the EMDSS to provide public officials support in facing hazards, such as hurricanes and help them balance the threat to public safety against evacuation costs under time constraints and uncertainty. Valuable disciplinary goals will be reached through the collection and analysis of data that advance theoretical disaster research. In addition, the project will perform a major interdisciplinary function by integrating social psychological theories with those from transportation planning to develop an improved evacuation time estimation model, and with theories from household and business economics to develop an evacuation cost model. These perspectives will be integrated with concepts from decision analysis and decision support systems to produce the EMDSS. Broader social utility will result through significant advances in technology to support evacuation decisions. This work will add value to and leverage the hazard vulnerability analysis and evacuation planning work performed by the Hazard Reduction & Recovery Center for the Texas Governor s Division of Emergency Management (DEM) for over twenty years. This close relationship with an operational agency is unique among university-based hazard disaster research centers. The relationship between HRRC and DEM provides an unparalleled opportunity for user input into software design and accelerated technology transfer to state and local emergency managers. The research will be coordinated with personnel from the Taiwanese National Science and Technology Program for Hazard Mitigation (NAPHM), who are interested in collaborating in the extending the EMDSS to evacuations from landslides and inland flooding. The Hazard Reduction & Recovery Center has a Memorandum of Agreement with NAPHM that has promoted cooperative exchanges between the two centers. Finally, graduate students will benefit by their involvement in survey development, data collection, and EMDSS development and evaluation. A broader group of graduate students will benefit from inclusion of this material in the investigators environmental hazard management courses (especially the one on disaster response planning) and in a future edition of the textbook, Behavioral Foundations of Community Emergency Planning. The project will employ members of under-represented groups, especially women and students from developing countries doc23571 none Lester This award supports Fraser Fleming and a student from Duquesne University in a a collaboration with Seija Kulkki of the Center for Knowledge and Innovation Research at the Helsinki School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland. The project will focus on the impact of different external and internal forces on the economic role of the universities, particularly the technological universities and thus on the nature of industry-university interactions. Implications for this dynamic relationship are to be found in many aspects of business development and entrepreneurship in Finland. While many scholars have written about the importance of research universities in the growth of agglomerations of high-technology industry and of close ties between universities and industrial organizations as a contributor to economic development, much remains to be learned about the dynamics of the process. The main questions to be addressed by the present study are how the universities are adapting to the chances in external forces that affect them, how the missions of the universities are changing in response to changing conditions in society with respect to stimulating regional growth, and what organizational structures and processes are used to help technology transfer and business incubation. The collection and analysis of data will be done in conjunction with the group in Helsinki and several junior researcher from the US group will participate in the international collaboration doc23572 none Although the internet s origins lie in computer and communication technology, control and stability theory have also had a major influence on its development. After the development of the additive increase, multiplicative decrease algorithm by Jacobson in , the first significant Active Queue Management (AQM) algorithm introduced was Random Early Detection (RED). In RED, the basic idea is to let the senders know about a high queue occupancy situation by increasing the drop probability at the gateways as a linear function of the time-averaged queue occupancy. Field observations of anomalous behavior for TCP networks with and without deployment of RED have been made that show irregular load batching, load oscillations, and high parametric sensitivity. Given the heterogeneity of the internet, and the associated wide variations of parameters, extending the range of stable operation in parameter space is clearly very important. In this research program, tools from nonlinear dynamical systems and from bifurcation and chaos control will be harnessed for the analysis and control of congestion in networks with one or several bottlenecks with TCP-type and or UDP-type (User Datagram Protocol) traffic. The project emphasizes work of a fundamental nature to develop an understanding of network congestion dynamics and address some of the difficult systems issues that are at the heart of the congestion avoidance and control problem. The project builds on recent work of the PI s group on the analysis of nonlinear dynamics in TCP-RED and mixed traffic networks. The project also leverages past contributions of the PI on control of nonlinear instabilities (bifurcation control) and on closed-loop monitoring of the stability of nonlinear uncertain systems doc23573 none This grant provides funding for the development of modeling data structures for representation and design of three-dimensional heterogeneous objects, with special application to tissue engineered structures. Representation of three-dimensional solid models is accomplished with a novel constructive heterogeneous solid geometry algebra and a heterogeneous boundary representation data structure. Heterogeneous structure design is accomplished by an adaptation of discrete optimization techniques that, when given a set of unit cellular structure primitives, determines the optimal (or satisfying) internal configuration of the three-dimensional solid that achieves engineering requirements. The approach introduces a graph theoretic optimization framework that exploits properties of heterogeneous representation elements to create structures that satisfy multiple criteria of anatomical fitting, structural integrity, biological function, and manufacturability. If successful, this research will deliver new techniques and tools to represent, design and develop heterogeneous tissue scaffolds. It will lead to fundamental and integrative computer science and engineering advances that span engineering design, solid modeling, computational geometry and algorithms, computer-aided design and manufacturing, and tissue engineering. This project actively engages industry and government, including collaborations with the developers of international standards and the data transfer protocols for heterogeneous structures, a major computer-aided design software vendor, a leading biopharmaceutical manufacturer, and a major medical center with expertise in tissue scaffold and replacement application. This research links the state-of-the-art in geometric computing and commercial computer-aided design and manufacturing software with the needs of the non-traditional materials found in biomedical tissue engineering. Therefore, it will enable new applications. This research also produces joint curricula, spanning mathematics, computer science and engineering to educate future generations of students who will design, manufacture and develop software for heterogeneous material applications doc23574 none LAY BARTNESS, TIMOTHY Animals in nature must forage for food to help pay their energy debts. Once they find a food source, the food found has three fates. First, it can be eaten and the energy used immediately if they have an immediate energy debt to pay. Alternatively, if no immediate need exists, the energy can be stored as body fat. Finally, it can be brought to their homes and stored as a food hoard. Little is know about what drives the animals to forage for food, in terms of underlying brain or hormonal factors, or what causes them to eat and burn the calories, eat and store the calories as fat, or hoard the food for later consumption. The purpose of the first experiments is to test some brain chemicals that control these fates of the foraged food, as well as foraging itself by applying them to the brain. The purpose of the second experiments is to test whether changes in body fat affect foraging, food hoarding and food eaten by experimentally removing or adding body fat and measuring these responses. How animals acquire, use and store food energy is a fundamental problem in the regulatory biology of all species doc23575 none With NSF funding, Robert Hard at the University of Texas at San Antonio and John Roney of the Bureau of Land Management have been exploring why hunters and gatherers began to farm in the Southwest. The shift to farming is perhaps one of the most important historical developments to humankind as agriculture is the economic basis of virtually all civilizations, past and present. In Hard and Roney began archaeological excavations at a dramatic hilltop settlement in northwest Chihuahua, Mexico about 125 miles southwest of El Paso, Texas. On this hill, three thousand years ago, Native Americans constructed over 500 terraces overlooking the surrounding desert grasslands and the Rio Casas Grandes. This site and a series of associated settlements have proven to be the largest, early settled farming communities in Northwest Mexico and the American Southwest and pushes the age of settled farming for the region back 1,500 years. The terraced site of Cerro Juanaquena has revealed numerous artifacts including spear points, pipes, food grinding implements, and house remains. Hard and Roney are examining these materials to consider the causes and consequences of these precocious settlements. They argue that the terraces were built, not as agricultural features, but to form flat living space so they could live atop this highly defensible hill and repeal potential raiders. The current NSF funding will be used to complete the laboratory analyses of the artifacts so a book and other publications may be completed. Hard and Roney s work has already resulted in numerous scientific publications including an article in Science. National newspapers, including the Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times, as well as broadcasts and publications in Canada, Mexico, and Europe have reported on their work. Hard and Roney have given 18 public presentations in Washington D.C., Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona and another 20 presentations at international, national, and regional scientific meetings doc23576 none This award addresses an important fundamental problem in computational mathematics: how to optimize complex systems described by partial differential equations (PDEs). The focus is on PDE simulations that can scale into millions of variables, and hundreds or thousands of processors. The size of the problems and the complexity of the techniques for solving these PDEs pose major challenges to modern optimization methods. The project uses a general framework for solving optimization problems in interaction with PDE solvers doc23577 none This NSF CONACyT grant provides funding for the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) to work with the Centro de Investigaciones y de Estudios Avanzados del IPN Unidad Guadalajara (CINVESTAV) and the Universidad Autonoma de Ciudad Juarez (UACJ) to carry out collaborative research in Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) control and implementation of novel Discrete Event (DE) Supervisory Controllers over the internet. By combining current results and developing new results by joint research, this research will develop an integrated approach to FMS design, decision-making, and on-line supervisory DE control. There are two goals in this NSF CONACyT research: 1) Structure and performance of DE supervisory controllers for manufacturing systems using UTA s patented matrix-based discrete event controller as a tool to perform high-level design of supervisory controllers for manufacturing systems and improve dispatching, routing, and part release; study bottlenecks and optimal dynamic rebalancing of jobs to alleviate bottlenecks; design, and study the performance and complexity of, distributed decentralized supervisory controllers for multiple networked cellular manufacturing workcells; and 2) improve academic and broader impact goals by offering a summer course at UTA for formal training on the analysis and design of DE controllers for undergraduate and graduate students from USA and Mexico; involve local high school students in course projects on actual manufacturing and robotic systems; jointly co-advise Mexican Ph.D. students, including visits to UTA for research and development; design and develop an internet-based supervisory control system for manufacturing workcells; and set up a distance-learning program over the internet to train Mexican students to program workcells. Also, the research will work on industrial partner chemical flowline implementation by designing a chemical processing flowline for aircraft parts for an industrial partner, designing a DE supervisory controller for part routing and resource assignment, and simulate various strategies for part routing and resource assignment. The automated, dynamically controlled chemical flow line is a new concept in aircraft manufacturing that has the potential to gain significant market share in a new industry doc23578 none This project involves the development and testing of an effective instructional methodology for software-supported, shared, active knowledge construction that is portable to a variety of science courses at different levels of student experience. The research focuses on the interface of cognition, collaboration and representational guidance and draws attention to issues that are universal in all interdisciplinary, scientific inquiry settings centered on enhancing understandingof technologically and methodologically sound ways to reach under-represented groups and perform cross-cultural, collaborative problem solving activities over distances. Using software tools developed under separate funding, the project involves a rigorous experimental study of the mechanisms of cognitive change that are embedded in the social circumstances of learning. With the participation of high school teachers, college students and high school students, the project will contribute to understanding of (a)the function of peer audience to foster learning, (b)the most effective methods of technological support for communication between local and distal peers and (c) congnitively-guided pedagogies that are effective in enriching the learning experiences of students in various technological and instructional setting and in under-represented regions and cultures. The project is geographically located in an urban setting with a large minority and under-represented population and involves college students, high school teachers, high school students and international collaboration. The outcome of the project will be a practical approach for effective pedagogies to elicit active learning in complex, interdisciplinary and technology driven environments that are expected to prevail in the 21st century doc23579 none Research: The purpose of this small Information Technology Research (ITR) project is to develop a new paradigm for semiconductor manufacturing equipment - flexible equipment design enabled by information technology. The current paradigm of fixed equipment design limits performance of equipment in a rapidly changing technology environment, where tradeoffs must be made between product performance and manufacturing efficiency. The concept is based on procedures where process conditions can be spatially programmed to (1) decouple manufacturing constraints (e.g., uniformity across large wafers) from product performance (e.g., material quality); (2) reduce experimentation time by enabling parallel, combinatorial experiments on each wafer; and (3) provide the basis for a flexible, extendible equipment technology. Work has already begun on an experimental test bed (chemical vapor deposition in a manufacturing cluster tool) using a physically based simulation of the prototype system. This project is for developing the IT infrastructure required to link object-oriented simulation and model reduction methodologies to web-accessible experimental data archives and physical property databases to techniques for real-time control of parallel and multiplexed sensor actuator arrays. Impact: The project has the potential to fundamentally change the design paradigm of a major industry - semiconductor-manufacturing equipment - to one that directly exploits a broad spectrum of information technology. Integration of research and education are planned on a number of fronts: (1) the project provides an opportunity for interdisciplinary teaming (e.g., between engineers and computer scientists and between materials engineers and systems engineers) in the classroom, (2) using spatially programmable equipment design as the project focus in a materials systems project course at the graduate level, and (3) developing simulation-based learning software for technicians and engineers in industry doc23580 none This proposal requests support for a group from the University of Wisconsin to develop a portal to facilitate the seamless access to the world-wide grid with computers that are not specially configured for the use of a particular project. The techniques developed will have general applicability to various computing intensive projects, including the high energy physics experiment CMS (at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Switzerland). It will leverage the tools developed by the GriPhyN (Grid Physics Network), iVDGL (international Virtual Grid Laboratory) and the PPDG (Particle Physics Data Grid) projects. The proposed activities are to develop an object IO model that allows local caching and organized streaming of data to central servers; to adapt a CMS simulation program to take advantage of an abundance of CPU resources; and to establish an on-demand CMS simulation facility using the above items. The deliverables will be implemented in such a way that generalization to other projects is possible and the validated software tools will be made freely available doc23581 none Proposal ITR: Industrial Organization of Internet Industries Glenn Ellison, Massachusetts Institute of Technology This project investigates a number of new businesses that have been spawned by the growth of the Internet: price search engines, online retail stores, and online auction sites. Several components of the project involve the construction and examination of a new dataset which includes high frequency pricing data from one online retail market, sales data from one of the firms operating in the market, wholesale cost data, and prices from traditional retailers which compete with the online firms. One part of the project will study the demand environment that price search engines create and whether demand becomes so price sensitive that firms are unable to cover their fixed costs. It explores practices of online retailers that may help them to avoid this outcome, including obfuscation in search markets and loss-leader pricing. A second part of the project will explore the sensitivity of online purchases to sales taxes and to differences between online prices and prices in traditional retail stores. This analysis exploits data on the location of consumers and differences between pre-tax and after-tax ranking of each retailer. A third part is an examination of how retailers react to cost shocks and rivals price changes and how these reactions and the entry of new firms have combined to produce the observed evolution of price-cost margins. The last component of the project will study competition between online auction sites. It will consist primarily of theoretical analyses of the factors that may allow one site to remain dominant even as the overall market grows. The results of these studies should improve understanding of the emerging internet industries. They are very directly relevant to some current public policy questions, such as whether taxes should be imposed on internet transactions and how this might affect both the viability of internet businesses and traditional retailers. By improving understanding of these industries they may also enlighten future debates that arise and help private firms direct investments efficiently. On a more general level the studies can be seen as using a unique opportunity that the internet provides to improve understanding of issues that have been and will remain important in many industries: how search costs affect pricing and market efficiency, how attempts to sell add-ons and a desire to keep consumers from focusing on price differences affects competition, and how repetition and the entry of new firms affects pricing doc23582 none This project is at the interface between Information Technology and Nuclear Physics. We will develop and apply a two-site data grid at Stony Brook and Brookhaven National Laboratory to analysis of heavy ion collisions in the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Collisions at RHIC produce many thousands of particles, resulting in enormous volumes of data to analyze. In order to study the rare process of gluon scattering at large angle, and how the nuclear medium affects this process, we must sift through hundreds of millions of these complex events. We will use the software tools developed by the Globus collaboration to allow seamless data analysis across two computer facilities comprising many computers and terabytes of disk storage. Jobs will be automatically directed to the facility where requested data are disk resident, and results returned to the user. We will take advantage of many developments by others in information technology, but we bring to the table a unique mix of real data, eager users, and a cutting edge data grid application with a simple demonstration grid of two nearby sites with very similar hardware. Testing and optimizing this prototype grid under battle conditions will provide information applicable to development of large-scale global data grids for the future, as well as physics results from PHENIX doc23583 none This project is concerned with a novel framework for Monte Carlo simulations based on recently developed coarse-grained stochastic mesoscopic models. Mesoscopic models are stochastic partial differential equations which are rigorously derived as asymptotic limits from microscopic Monte Carlo (MC) algorithms by means of techniques from non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. Although such models describe the mesoscopic scales, which are much larger than the underlying molecular scales, they still include detailed microscopic information on particle interactions and dynamics and can systematically model anisotropies and multiple micromechanisms. Another attractive feature of mesoscopic models is the inclusion of random fluctuations derived directly from the underlying master equation and yielding important nucleation and pattern formation and selection mechanisms. Finally, formal and rigorous asymptotics using Large Deviation and WKB expansions as well as preliminary numerical simulations indicate that the MC algorithms and the corresponding stochastic mesoscopic models produce essentially identical results for such delicate quantities as nucleation rates and phase transitions. The main research objectives of this proposal are: (a) to develop non-equilibrium coarse-grained MC algorithms by numerically solving the stochastic mesoscopic equations using highly efficient spectral-based methods and carry out detailed benchmarkings against conventional MC, and (b) to apply the proposed computational tools to applications arising in pattern formation in advanced materials and molecular separation in nanoporous films. Because of their fundamental nature and their versatility in describing complex out-of-equilibrium interactions between atoms and molecules, molecular dynamics simulations and Monte Carlo (MC) algorithms have become preeminent computational tools for science and engineering research. With the advent of enhanced computing capabilities, these methods can provide unprecedented insights into numerous problems ranging from physicochemical and biological processes to biomaterials, drug design, pattern recognition, and image processing. Despite their widespread use and the substantial progress in related computational methods, molecular algorithms are limited to short length and time scales. Hence, they are capable of simulating only a relatively small number of atoms or molecules for quite short time periods. On the other hand, device sizes and morphological features observed in experiments often involve much larger spatial and or temporal scales. A major obstacle in meeting this multiscale modeling challenge is the lack of a rigorous mathematical and computational framework providing a direct link from the atomistic scale to the complex mesoscopic and macroscopic phenomena that are the result of the microscopic interactions. In this direction, our work focuses on developing novel stochastic models and algorithms capable of describing much larger length and time scales than conventional MC simulations while still incorporating microscopic details. We intend to apply the computational methods to provide new insights into two engineering problems, which are currently intractable with conventional MC techniques: (1) the study of self-organizing micromechanisms and their role in pattern formation in advanced materials, and (2) the transport and separation of molecules in nanoporous films and membranes doc23584 none This project aims to develop novel sandwich structures to address the sound transmission problem in various land and air vehicles such as automobiles, airplanes, and helicopters. The research concept is motivated by the recent findings of sandwich structures made of anisotropic materials with normal-to-shear coupling to reduce sound transmission. The proposed research consists of an integrated effort of micro-structural material modeling, structural-acoustic analysis, and optimization of sandwich structures for minimum sound transmission. The objectives of the project are as follows: 1. To develop a mathematical theory describing the static and dynamic behavior of sandwich cores made of anisotropic materials, and to provide a foundation for structural-acoustic analysis and optimization of sandwich structures. 2. To carry out an extensive investigation of the sound isolation mechanism of flat and curved sandwich structures with anisotropic cores, and a study of the effect of incident angle of the sound wave and curvature of the structure on sound transmission. 3. To conduct an optimization study of sound transmission of sandwich structures with respect to various material and geometric parameters, and to develop sandwich structures with superior acoustic performance and guidelines for material selection and manufacturing of such sandwich structures. Traditionally, one of the research foci in composites has been lightweight and high strength laminates often with poor acoustic performance. The sound transmission problem identifies the needs for new composite materials. The project is anticipated to develop a body of new knowledge on the physical mechanism of sound transmission through sandwich structures made of anisotropic materials, and new methods for modeling, analyzing and optimizing anisotropic structures. The resulting technology of this project will have a broad social impact, and will likely enhance the ability of American industry to produce quieter aircraft, helicopters and automobiles. Furthermore, this project will involve women and other under-represented minorities, and encourage students from these groups to pursue a career in engineering research doc23585 none ITR: Communication in the presence of noise and Algorithms for error-correction PI: Madhu Sudan, MIT The increased reliance of information technology in our day-to-day life has resulted in an explosion in the amount of data that is stored in digital media and transmitted over the internet. Associated with the increased amount of storage are increased expectations: Over communication channels, one hopes to be able to transmit more information, faster; and on storage media one hopes to store more information, cheaply and for longer periods of time. However, all channels introduce noise over time and corrupt the stored transmitted information. The task of coping with errors in the new information technology era leads to new challenges and a resurgence of some of the classical ones. This research project investigates foundational questions and designs solutions for some of these challenges, with special focus on the following directions: A systematic study of ``list-decoding algorithms as an approach to push the limits of error-correction. A worst-case approach to information theory to capture more general models of error. A reexamination of classical models of communication from a new (algorithmic asymptotic) perspective doc23586 none This project addresses technical challenges that face next-generation immersive visual communication. It proposes to study one particular type of immersive communication system base on auto-multiscopic (eyewear-free multiview) 3-D display. Such a system would consist of three closely-spaced digital video cameras, standard PCs, some compression hard-ware software, and the said multiscopic display. This system would allow interaction in 3-D space by allowing depth perception, and moreover, look-around , i.e., geometrically correct viewing from a number of viewpoints. Anticipated applications are 3-D videoconferencing, remote collaboration, telecommuting, etc doc23587 none Torng, Eric K Michigan State University ITR: Evaluating Phylogeny Reconstruction Algorithms with Digital Organisms The investigators study methods of determining the historic relationship between species using only knowledge of currently existing organisms, a technique called phylogenetic tree reconstruction . Many tree reconstruction algorithms are known, but it is difficult to properly test them for the very reason that the algorithms are useful -- the original trees are lost to history. The studies proposed make use of a new evaluation methodology based on an artificial evolving system called Avida. In Avida, populations of digital organisms (self-replicating computer programs) experience natural selection as they compete for limited resources, and will evolve into new species often with entirely new genes. The history of such a system can be monitored, and hence a reconstruction from the final state can have its accuracy measured. The proposed activity has several broader impacts on society. It is a core activity in the Center for Biological Modeling, a new interdisciplinary research and education center at Michigan State University. Undergraduate students including under-represented minorities will be involved by studying small, self-contained questions. Finally, enhanced understanding of phylogeny reconstruction algorithms will improve our ability to interpret the sequences of genes, aiding in drug design and helping efforts to reconstruct an evolutionary tree of life doc23552 none The aim is to provide a better mathematical framework and alternative design methodologies for coarse quantization of signals in a highly oversampled setting. The central themes is sigma-delta quantization in analog-to-digital conversion of audio signals and its counterpart error-diffusion in digital halftoning of images. In both cases, a given target analog signal is represented by a judiciously chosen one-bit (or few-bit) sequence which approximates the signal in a suitable low-pass subspace. A wide range of different schemes exist for this purpose, each corresponding to a different implementation and approximation order. As our primary mathematical objective, we expect to better understand the law of error decay of the existing schemes as well as to improve on these by new designs. On the algorithmic side, we aim to extend this analysis to settings with computational and other implementational constraints. The fact that digital signals and data sets can be processed, stored and retrieved with great precision and speed places high demands of accuracy on the conversion process from and to the analog world. However, the devices used in the translation process (such as in the case of analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion circuits in audio applications, and printers in image reproduction) are of necessity analog devices, which have physical limitations that, at first sight, conflict with those accuracy demands. To cope with this problem, engineers have empirically developed special signal processing techniques leading to alternative signal and number representations that are quite different from standard decimal or binary representations. Typical techniques take advantage of the highly accurate performance of the analog devices in sampling very densely in time or space to compensate for the lack of amplitude precision of those devices. Interestingly, while these empirical schemes have proved efficient and have been used in consumer products for a long time, the corresponding framework of signal processing has little mathematical support. We aim to study these schemes in more detail, with the goals of improving the mathematical theory as well as proposing variants that outperform those used presently, and to identify a wider range of applications doc23589 none Since the introduction of the IBM PC in , personal computers have undergone rapid technological innovation in terms of performance, storage, communication capability, and portability. While significant effort has been directed at quantifying the price-performance relationship in PC s, surprisingly little attention has been paid to portability. This attribute is evidently highly valued by users: sales of mobile computers (laptops and palmtops) account for one third of total PC sales and are increasing rapidly, despite very substantial price premiums over desktop models with comparable performance. Using hedonics and other econometric techniques, this project evaluates the economic benefits to users arising from improved performance and rapid diffusion of mobile computers, through examination of the price, welfare, and demand implications of the emergence of portability as a new good in the PC market. This grant supports the data collection phase of the project. An existing large database of PC computer prices and characteristics will be extended and updated. This effort will include gathering data on sales volumes by model, as well as on prices and characteristics of new devices such as palmtops and PDAs, which have not been tracked in the past. Data for earlier years will be back-filled to increase the frequency of observations to quarterly or monthly. Rapidly falling prices and continuing technological innovation will continue to drive the diffusion of mobile devices into many areas of economic and social interaction. This work will provide insights into the economic consequences of this important trend, particularly those related to consumer welfare, tradeoffs between portability and performance, and complementarity substitutability of fixed and mobile computers. As government statistical agencies continue to develop procedures for tracking price changes and technological progress in computing-intensive sectors, this work will also make contributions to the vigorous debate on evaluating the contribution of IT to growth and productivity doc23590 none This is a grant funded in response to a (small) proposal submitted to the Information Technology Research (ITR) Initiative. The research will be done in collaboration with groups at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Oxford University (England). Three-dimensional simulations are increasingly providing a powerful information-based approach to both material processing and the design and manufacturing of components that support a wide range of technologies. The objective of this research, which focuses on phenomena that involve large plastic deformations of metallic materials, is to develop a physics-based methodology for accurate modeling. At the overall system level, i.e., microstructural in the case of materials processing or components under complex loading, both Lagrangian and Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) finite element implementations are the computational basis of most software. However, unique unit processes that arise at atomic and molecular scales often control critical phenomena, and this is where many models are significantly deficient. In particular, nearly all inelastic simulation codes are limited to a narrow class of crystalline materials, namely those that are close-packed which primarily includes face-centered-cubic (fcc) materials. There is a challenge to develop accurate models for a broader range of engineering materials and to adapt these models into current large-scale finite element, hydrodynamic, and dislocation dynamics codes. The focus of this research is on the development of multiscale models and algorithms for the accurate and verifiable simulation of the deformation behavior of metallic materials possessing complex - non-planar - dislocation core structures. The research focuses on the relationship between the three-dimensional atomic configurations of defects, their mobility, and macroscopic plastic flow. The multiscale methodologies to be developed will be applicable to many areas, including problems in nanotechnology. The principal goals are: (1) to develop a rigorous methodology to link theories at scales ranging from electronic and atomic through mesoscale and macroscopic; (2) to develop physically-based continuum constitutive relations that account for complex phenmonea arising from non-planar dislocation cores; and, (3) to explore the effects of such defects on critical phenomena such as strain localization and fracture. We will consider a range of technologically important materials from different crystal classes and under conditions that arise in both material processing and in components subjected to mechanical loading. The algorithms to be developed will be ready for installation into large-scale finite element codes, e.g., Abaqus, both for polycrystals in nanoscale regimes and macroscopic components. Although the structure of the constitutive relations will be significantly different from those currently in use, implementation in massively parallel codes will be straightforward. %%% This is a grant funded in response to a (small) proposal submitted to the Information Technology Research (ITR) Initiative. The research will be done in collaboration with groups at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Oxford University (England). The research focuses on the relationship between the three-dimensional atomic configurations of defects, their mobility, and macroscopic plastic flow in metallic materials. The multiscale methodologies to be developed will be applicable to many areas, including problems in nanotechnology. The principal goals are: (1) to develop a rigorous methodology to link theories at scales ranging from electronic and atomic through mesoscale and macroscopic; (2) to develop physically-based continuum constitutive relations that account for complex phenmonea arising from non-planar dislocation cores; and, (3) to explore the effects of such defects on critical phenomena such as strain localization and fracture. We will consider a range of technologically important materials from different crystal classes and under conditions that arise in both material processing and in components subjected to mechanical loading doc23591 none van Keken Development of computer-aided stereographic projection techniques has greatly aided interpretation of Earth Science structure and processes. We have developed and implemented an affordable PC Linux based stereo projection system ( the Geowall ) that can be used by individual research groups and within the undergraduate curriculum. The main goals of this collaborative Information Technology Research project between the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois at Chicago ( ; PI: A. Johnson) are to greatly improve the content development and delivery for Earth Science applications. This will include the development of conversion software and viewers for existing Earth Science applications; implementation of tools for interaction and manipulation of 3D data; testing of these tools in Earth Science departments; improvement of the collaborative environment for work between groups of researchers; and dissemination through the Geowall consortium (geowall.org doc23592 none Synergistic Effects of Multiple Environments on Composite Degradation This project employs an integrated approach to assess the long-term durability of polymer matrix composites exposed to complex multiple environments. Degradation conditions are simulated using several simultaneously operating environments to closely parallel real-world conditions, and the kinetics of main degradation mechanisms and their interrelations are identified through an extensive multi-disciplinary analysis. Finally, comprehensive experimental characterizations (mechanical, chemical and physical) of the degradation mechanisms across multiple length scales (nano to macro) are coupled with sophisticated analytical numerical techniques to develop predictive models of long-term reliability. By integrating life-prediction methodologies and the appropriate kinetic descriptions of physicochemical degradation, this project provides predictive capabilities for the service life of composite materials in real-world, multiple environmental conditions, e.g. composite material retrofit and replacement of structurally deficient bridges, all-composite automobiles with enhanced fuel-efficiencies and deep-water offshore oil drilling platforms. This project involves active collaboration with industrial partners (Cytec Engineered Materials, Inc. and Resolution Performance Products, Inc.) and support from research federal agencies (Brookhaven National Labs and Army Research Labs at Aberdeen Proving Grounds). An educational component provides for the significant enhancement of learning for both undergraduate and graduate students by integration of research and teaching. Specific activities also provide mentoring and outreach for under-represented minority students in collaboration with other programs at Stony Brook doc23593 none This proposal will explore fundamental research issues that impact performance and scalability of Wide Area Applications. The proposed research undertakes a comprehensive study of the access latencies and changing behavior of digital resources over time and across different applications, when accessed via the dynamic WAN. One objective of this research is to develop appropriate latency profiles and resource profiles to characterize this behavior. Latency profiles will be developed to reflect the end-to-end delay experienced by a cluster of clients and resources (servers). Resource profiles reflect appropriate metrics, such as existence checking, testing reachability over time, and learning patterns of updates. These profiles will be used to customize service and information delivery to clients, considering both application requirements and the noisy WAN environment. The corresponding algorithms will explore the trade-offs between end-to-end latency and data obsolescence for different application requirements. Research results will aim to establish a consistent framework for profiling and to answer the following question: to what extent can profiling be used in improving clients availability to resources. Formal results developed in the theoretical study will be evaluated on large scale applications. Collaboration with Corporation for National Research Initiative (CNRI) Handle protocol developers will provide a test-bed for large scale doc23594 none Modern mobile communication systems strive to maximize capacity within the system. The capacity of the system to handle multiple subscribers is adversely affected by adjacent channel interference (ACI). ACI results from nonlinear distortion created by the transmitter power amplifier (PA). This is especially problematic for high power base station PAs within the cellular infrastructure. Such distortion produces out-of-band signals that interfere with other subscribers reception. Thus ACI, effectively raises the noise floor forcing lower bit rates and or increased transmit power for those subscribers. As medium rate data services for internet access are being introduced into the cellular systems, higher demands are being placed on both capacity and quality of service. For these reasons, minimization of ACI, which requires PA linearization in basestation infrastructure, is of great importance. Commercially available state-of-the-art base station PAs use feed-forward linearization. While this method is effective in improving ACI, the architecture needs additional components as well as a high power combining. These added components, and the losses they introduce in both DC and RF power, tend to make PAs based on the feed-forward method both costly and inefficient. Predistortion linearization is another method of linearization. This approach is more cost effective than feed-forward linearization, because the signal processing is done digitally, and there are no components following the PA that waste power. However, the performance of predistortion is generally not as good as feed-forward linearization, because a near perfect model of the amplifier must be extracted and a predistorter model formulated to counteract the distortion mechanisms. One area in which current models are deficient is in characterizing memory effects. Memoryless predistortion has been thoroughly investigated in the literature, but for high peak-to-average signals, such as multicarrier CDMA or OFDM signals, self-heating effects arise, creating delay responses in the distortion that manifest themselves as memory effects. In general, higher power amplifiers, such as those used in basestations, are more susceptible to memory effects than those used in lower power mobile equipment. This proposal will outline a research program that will investigate modeling of PA memory effects, as well as linearization of PAs that exhibit such effects. The authors propose a research program that will develop new methods in PA characterization and modeling, as well as advance the state-of-the-art in predistortion linearization to achieve or exceed performance levels previously seen only using costly and inefficient feed-forward techniques doc23595 none This Information Technology Research (ITR) project aims to apply state-of-the-art software tools and methods to develop an advanced computational environment for molecular and mesoscale modeling. This work is performed to address specific, well-documented needs that block the broader adoption of molecular and multiscale modeling tools to solve practical problems. The environment is designed to be extensible (accommodates easily new methods and models), computationally efficient, and easy to use. It aims to be platform independent yet configurable to exploit features of different computing environments, including parallel and grid architectures. It is developed using the Java programming language, and consists of two distinct parts. First is an Application Programming Interface (API) that can be used to construct a wide variety of simulations from a common set of building blocks; the API can be used, for example, by programming in a text editor. Second is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which provides an alternative graphical environment for the development and application of complex molecular simulations. The work performed here consists of designing, developing and testing the API and IDE, researching how they can be best implemented on a wide variety of single and multiprocessor computing architectures, disseminating them, and conducting activities to promote understanding and use of them. A range of experts are consulted to assist in the detailed implementation of the best simulation methods and models in current use; this practice serves the dual purpose of speeding the development as well as broadening the interest in it. The focus of the development is to facilitate use in research applications, but there are significant educational components to the activity: (1) the tools are used to produce aids for teaching molecular phenomena and its role in producing macroscopic behaviors; (2) the development environment is used as a basis to teach ideas about molecular simulation to students from Buffalo-area high schools and freshman- through senior-level undergraduates at the University; (3) undergraduates contribute through tightly-focused development activities. Further, the object-oriented structure of the API provides a sound pedagogical basis for teaching molecular simulation in a way that promotes broader use. Accordingly the codes and concepts developed in this work are used as a central component in a regular series of national workshops in molecular simulation offered by the newly created Nanomaterials Theory Institute at Oak Ridge National Laboratory doc23596 none Peter Pulay and Amy Apon of the University of Arkansas are supported by the Chemistry Division through the Information Technology Research program in a collaborative effort between theoretical chemistry and computer science. They will develop quantum chemical methods and the supporting cluster software necessary for efficient execution on low-cost parallel hardware. The first effort in this project is the development of a computer program for correlated electronic structure calculations for large molecules on parallel computers. The second effort is the development of fault-tolerant parallel file system tools for large-scale scientific calculations. The broader impacts of this work include production of general-purpose tools for optimizing file and disk access for a variety of long-running large scale applications on low-cost parallel architectures doc23597 none Environmental problems that span regional geographic extent require multiple approaches to the modelling of natural system responses at various spatial, temporal and organismal scales. Analyzing responses of natural systems to alternative human actions requires mathematical and computer models for several physical and trophic scales. Computer modeling efforts require large spatio-temporal data sets, often derived from remote sensing, linked to complex models for abiotic factors such as rainfall and hydrology. Due to the large spatial data sets and heavy computational demands associated with such models, serial computing methods on workstation platforms are barely appropriate for analysis. The investigators will develop algorithms and software for linked ecological and physical models appropriate for both multiple-processor computers and clusters of machines across a computational grid. Included will be a comparison of the performance of alternative methods and algorithms for parallelization of ecological multimodels on a variety of platforms. The proposed research has potentially very broad impacts on the ability of managers of natural systems to effectively utilize the extensive remote sensing data currently being collected and archived, link these data with realistic ecological and physical models of natural systems, and provide assessments of the effectiveness of management scenarios. Given the costs and potential long-term impacts of alternative harvesting, water scheduling, and land-use designs, it is important to optimize decision making and monitor the effectiveness of the actions taken. Achieving effective use, however, also requires the development of a cadre of managers able to make use of new technologies. The investigators will initiate the development of educational materials through which environmental scientists can learn about the use of multimodels to address regional environmental problems. An objective is to formulate an explicit educational program that will lead to computational grid methods being accepted as part of the toolkit applied in regional planning for management of natural systems doc23598 none The PI has enhanced the supercritical antisolvent (SAS) process for micron sized particle formation by including an ultrasonic transducer in the precipitation vessel to interact with the solvent jet creating mush smaller particles in the sub-micron range. The technique is innovative and further knowledge of the fundamental mechanism of operation would provide the information to optimize the method doc23599 none This collaborative research project aims at advancing information technologies related to the preservation, retrieval, and dissemination of digital imagery for Asian art and cultural heritages. Researchers in the US, China, and South Korea will collectively investigate and develop technologies for acquiring, browsing, managing, and searching large collections of high quality art images. This project will contribute to the fundamental knowledge and technologies required to create and maintain information systems that can operate in multiple languages, formats, media, and social and organizational contexts. The US research team will focus on (1) multimodal media management, (2) distributed data mining, and (3) image storage and display. The team will develop theoretical foundations to associate linguistic terms with image features. The testbed databases of art images for this research project consist of high quality scans, with metadata information and detailed keyword information, as well as comprehensive textual descriptions. The research work will show that (1) modern machine learning and statistical data mining tools are capable of learning from non-structured or semi-structured input data such as human annotations, (2) statistical image modeling techniques can be used in automatic linguistic indexing and concept dictionary building doc23600 none Stancil High-speed internet access in buildings (residential, office, and commercial) is one of the most important challenges that next generation wireless networks face today. Further, modern buildings have complex communications infrastructures that may include provisions for building controls, alarms, wired and wireless telephones, high-speed data services, and wireless LANs. At present, these services are provided with separate wired wireless systems for each service. An alternative approach to providing the communications infrastructure in buildings is to recognize that every building is already equipped with a microwave distribution system: the heating and ventilation (HVAC) ducts. These ducts are designed to carry air to and from all parts of the building, but can also function as hollow metal waveguides for microwave signals. Combining the HVAC with communications to form a single integrated system could lead to a new paradigm in smart building infrastructure. If widely adopted, the impact of this research could be very far-reaching, potentially impacting the design and construction of every major new building constructed throughout the developed world. For the most common duct sizes and communication frequencies, the ducts behave as multimode waveguides. The possibility of using multimode waveguides for microwave communications was first suggested more than 50 years ago, although the detailed channel characteristics have not been fully investigated. The goals of this proposal are to gain an understanding of mode scattering and conversion at common duct components such as bends, tees, and wyes, and to investigate how the multimode nature of the channel can be used to increase the capacity of the channel. To investigate the mode conversion and scattering, a multiple-antenna structure will be constructed that is capable of exciting specific modes or combinations of modes. The mode content upon passing through a component under study will be determined by scanning the near-field mode profile at the open exit end of the duct. The possibility of increasing the capacity of the duct will be investigated by constructing a pair of multiple antenna arrays for use as input and output and output couplers. Multiple-input multiple-output multipath channel techniques will be used to demonstrate realization of two independent channels in the same frequency band. Two graduate students will be fully supported by this research. The topic provides a novel context for mastering concepts in microwave measurements, wireless channel models, channel capacity, and network architecture. Undergraduates will also be involved in the research for project credit. The results from the research will be presented at major international wireless conferences, and detailed papers will be submitted to archival journals to further disseminate the results. These presentations and papers also offer significant opportunities for the graduate students to hone their presentation and writing skills. Finally, results from the research will be used as examples and case studies in the introductory graduate Wireless Communications course offered each year. This course typically enrolls 50-60 students doc23601 none Modeling MHD (magneto-hydrodynamic) turbulence has become increasingly important both in terrestrial and engineering applications, such as fusion devices and plasma propulsion, as well as in space and astrophysical environments such as the solar wind and astrophysical jets. The magneto-hydrodynamic nature of the plasma fluid imposes constraints on the numerical procedures involved. Likewise, modeling in the turbulent regime -- for turbulence is ubiquitous -- also imposes constraints and challenges on the numerical procedures employed. The numerical approach and demands of computation time and accuracy translate into algorithmic (or software) advances which can avail the hardware -- itself advancing rapidly. In this project these advances entail: Adaptively refined grids, where fine resolution only in regions of interest reduces overall CPU requirements; MHD shock capturing methods, which improve accuracy of the calculation; parallel computing techniques, which take advantage of the availability of multiple processors and memory and cache hierarchy; and sub-grid models, which allow coarser grids than otherwise for turbulent regimes. The analysis of the resulting large multi-block multi-processor data requires advanced data visualization tools to examine the physics, the raison d etre for the calculations. The project will develop a computational environment, consisting of a 3D MHD simulation code with adaptive grid refinement capabilities, complex time-dependent boundary conditions and optimized to run under MPI on various parallel computers, and a visualization system that can handle multi-block multi-processor MHD AMR data. In this end-to-end modeling and discovery process, information technology (IT) plays a critical role. From software engineering principles that result in robust codes, and smarter data structures that are required for AMR, to single-node optimization and better communication strategies on parallel architectures, to visualization tool development and implementation, IT makes possible knowledge discovery through simulation in a more efficient and orderly fashion. The requirements for MHD turbulence modeling being so considerable, this efficiency of IT translates into enabling the science or technology. I.e. without the application of these IT principles, physically important and interesting regimes would not be analyzed. The results of this project will significantly enhance the modeling capabilities of diverse flows and will specifically be applied to the problem of heliospheric magnetic field configuration and solar wind turbulence. 3D MHD simulations of the heliospheric fields and flows that include rotation, shear, waves, turbulence, current sheets, pressure-balanced structures, and interaction regions, which thus represent most of the major physical effects of importance, will be performed. The effort will enable future studies on particle propagation and magnetic field configuration for space weather effects on Earth. The project will directly train a post-doctoral scholar and a graduate student in relevant physics and computational mathematics; project results will be communicated to the community via conference and journal publications and the web, and through classes taught by the PI doc23602 none This project is aimed at how to create and use elementary mathematics diagnostic tools in classroom contexts. An established diagnostic framework, the Diagnostic Test of Arithmetic Skills, that enables teachers to assess students procedural and conceptual approaches to mathematical problem-solving. The specific goals of the project are to: Revise, modify, and update the Diagnostic Test of Arithmetic Skills to bring it into alignment with the most current research on mathematics teaching and learning. Build a mathematics diagnostic application focused on multiplication, a content areas that is pedagogically and conceptually complex Identify the required professional development supports, and build prototype materials for the multiplication application Conduct research studies on the reliability of the diagnostic tool and on whether the use of the tool affects teachers thinking about mathematics and instruction doc23603 none This award under the Information Technology Research initiative explores and strengthens connections between computer science and the physics of complex systems, addressing the important examples of membranes and disordered materials from condensed matter physics. The proposed research brings these disciplines closer together by recognizing that not only are novel algorithmic tools crucial for modeling complex physical systems, but that there are fundamental links between the physical properties of the system and the computational complexity of the simulation. This project will also train students and researchers in this area at the interface between condensed matter theory and information technology and provide simulation software components for the research community. Many of the challenges in sciences such as physics and biology are problems in understanding the behavior of a very large number of strongly interacting degrees of freedom, where the macroscopic behavior is determined by the competition between local ordering and disordering effects, including temperature, heterogeneities, and geometry. Examples abound in the both the classical and quantum world, including vortex lines in superconductors, strongly correlated electrons in disordered solids, and fluctuating membranes, as seen in cells and artificial colloidal structures. Describing the phases and transitions in these systems relies upon being able to build up the large-scale behavior from microscopic models. This is quite challenging for conventional simulations. The intent here is to draw on ideas from computer science to develop new algorithms and to identify universal features using extensive simulations. In turn these features will be used to develop new simulation methods and analytical understanding. This project will focus on specific areas in condensed matter physics that are of direct experimental relevance and raise general algorithmic questions: The PIs will study the phase diagram of realistic models of physical membranes, with important applications to biological membranes. The PIs will explore the defect structure of crystals on topographies of fixed curvature, such as a crystal on the surface of a sphere, and more complex geometries. This work has direct relevance to the rich physics of colloidosomes, spherical viruses and other systems currently studied in many laboratories. This work will rely on combining knowledge about small-scale defects and long wavelength elasticity and exploring optimization algorithms. The PIs will investigate the phases of a class of disordered classical (e.g., vortex lines in superconductors) and quantum (interacting electrons in disordered solids) disordered systems that can be studied simultaneously by the same numerical algorithm. The PIs will explore the connection between polynomial time optimization algorithm and physical theories of disordered materials. This includes the development of new approaches to explain the timing of algorithms by adapting physical concepts of phases and correlation lengths to their nonphysical dynamics. The achievement of the scientific goals for specific physical systems and algorithmic studies will be closely linked with more general benefits: The training of undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who will have the expertise and inclination to work at the bridge between statistical physics and computer science. Building a common expertise and suggesting potential collaborations in the computer science and physics communities. Software development, in three parts (problem generators, solvers, and data analyzers), that can be adopted by researchers to solve related problems and for testing alternate computational approaches. %%% This award under the Information Technology Research initiative explores and strengthens connections between computer science and the physics of complex systems. The research enhances and builds connections between these disciplines by recognizing that not only are novel algorithmic tools crucial for modeling complex physical systems, but that there are fundamental links between the physical properties of the system and the computational complexity of the simulation. This project will also train students and researchers in this area at the interface between condensed matter theory and information technology and provide simulation software components for the research community. Many of the challenges in sciences such as physics and biology are problems in understanding the behavior of a very large number of strongly interacting degrees of freedom, where the macroscopic behavior is determined by the competition between local ordering and disordering effects, including temperature, heterogeneities, and geometry. Examples abound in the both the classical and quantum world, including vortex lines in superconductors, strongly correlated electrons in disordered solids, and fluctuating membranes, as seen in cells and artificial colloidal structures. Describing the phases and transitions in these systems relies upon being able to build up the large-scale behavior from microscopic models. This is quite challenging for conventional simulations. The intent here is to draw on ideas from computer science to develop new algorithms and to identify universal features using extensive simulations. In turn these features will be used to develop new simulation methods and analytical understanding. This project will focus on specific areas in condensed matter physics that are of direct experimental relevance and raise general algorithmic questions: The PIs will study the phase diagram of realistic models of physical membranes, with important applications to biological membranes. The PIs will explore the defect structure of crystals on topographies of fixed curvature, such as a crystal on the surface of a sphere, and more complex geometries. This work has direct relevance to the rich physics of colloidosomes, spherical viruses and other systems currently studied in many laboratories. This work will rely on combining knowledge about small-scale defects and long wavelength elasticity and exploring optimization algorithms. The PIs will investigate the phases of a class of disordered classical (e.g., vortex lines in superconductors) and quantum (interacting electrons in disordered solids) disordered systems that can be studied simultaneously by the same numerical algorithm. The PIs will explore the connection between polynomial time optimization algorithm and physical theories of disordered materials. This includes the development of new approaches to explain the timing of algorithms by adapting physical concepts of phases and correlation lengths to their nonphysical dynamics. The achievement of the scientific goals for specific physical systems and algorithmic studies will be closely linked with more general benefits: The training of undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who will have the expertise and inclination to work at the bridge between statistical physics and computer science. Building a common expertise and suggesting potential collaborations in the computer science and physics communities. Software development, in three parts (problem generators, solvers, and data analyzers), that can be adopted by researchers to solve related problems and for testing alternate computational approaches doc23604 none Sean M. Buckley Satellite radar interferometry (InSAR) provides earth-surface deformation measurements at finer resolution and greater spatial coverage than any other traditional geodetic technique and has quickly developed into a critical tool for measurement of deformation associated with natural and anthropogenic hazards. The routine production of InSAR measurements is a consequence of the general availability of InSAR processing software with each package producing the same general final product - the differential interferogram. Although recent InSAR research has considered the ensemble use of tens of interferograms to reveal complex and subtle surface deformation, a post-processing software package is not readily available to the InSAR geoscience community. This project involves the research and development of an InSAR post-processing software toolkit employing three general strategies missing from current InSAR software: mosaicking of multiple satellite tracks for complete surface displacement measurement, interferogram stacking for noise reduction, and InSAR time-series analysis for measurement of continuous, non-uniform deformation. The software is modular, coded in C and Fortran, called from a series of Unix-based shell scripts and developed generally independent of the InSAR software used to generate the differential interferograms. Where processor-specific information is required, the software is integrated with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory ROI_PAC software package. Distribution of the post-processing toolkit is through a GNU General Public License doc23605 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Timothy Pauketat and an experienced student crew will undertake in the summer of the excavation of a recently discovered outpost of pre-Columbian Cahokia, located in the central Mississippi River valley. Several previous seasons of fieldwork at this and five other nearby Mississippian villages by Pauketat and crew all now point to this one site for an answer to a critical research question: Did Cahokians, having constructed the premier religious and political center in North America 950 years ago (@ AD ), physically control the farming economy of the region s rural hinterlands? To date, excavations at other sites have provided suggestive but not definitive evidence of such control. These other sites have, however, shown that farmers with diverse cultural backgrounds moved into a rich agricultural zone coincident with Cahokia s emergence as a regional center. Discoveries from two previous seasons of work at the Grossmann site include densely packed non-domestic buildings, exotic artifacts, and a hoard of 70 ax-heads, all within a suspected four-sided village. Such finds make it unique to the farming villages of the region. These finds also make it plausible that (1) this one village was actually a planned outpost established in the midst of farmers by a group of Cahokians or closely related kin or administrative functionaries, and (2) that the establishment of the other farming villages in the vicinity was part of an overall planned transformation of the cultural and physical landscape. The physical attributes of stone ax-heads from the site suggest that clearing the woodlands may have been a significant part of the means whereby Cahokians instituted an agricultural system and obtained the cooperation of farmers. The excavations will reveal the spatial plan of the Grossmann site by mechanically removing the disturbed plowzone in a -square-meter area, an excavation strategy also necessitated by the imminent destruction of the site by urban sprawl. The site will be totally excavated recovering data of a sort seldom retrieved by archaeologists. Excavation will either verify the planned, high-status hypothesis or prove the site to be lacking a central plan. In either case, the relationships between Cahokia and the hinterland farmers will be apparent in the debris left behind from the day-to-day practices of the residents. In this debris, the team will recover the ultimate answers for a central question of concern to all that study complex societies: How were such societies and their agricultural systems instituted? This question is in turn important to the social sciences and to a broadened understanding global politics because it is a basis for an improved general understanding of the extent to which cultural traditions and actions of ordinary people play a part in larger-scale political changes doc23606 none Urbanization is a central force in altering core ecological processes such as biogeochemical cycling, decreased biodivesity and changing land use and land cover. Understanding and managing these processes is crucial to sustaining natural resources and maintaining quality of life. The goal for this project is to develop and deploy a distributed information infrastructure so that diverse members of the urban ecological research community in central Arizona can benefit from integrated ecological models and data. Government agencies involved will include the Maricopa Association of Governments and the Arizona Dept. of Water Resources doc23607 none This project develops time-domain solvers for wave propagation problems in two and three dimensions, with fundamentally improved properties, namely, significantly reduced sampling requirements and, at the same time, significantly higher accuracy. Such solvers would allow modeling of linear and, eventually, nonlinear wave propagation in domains that are thousands of characteristic wavelengths in size, with interfaces and variable coefficients. This approach would also provide improved bases for solving nonlinear advection-diffusion problems. The solvers are built upon two new techniques, namely, optimal quadratures to represent bandlimited functions, and a numerical generalization of separation of variables to accelerate applying higher-dimensional operators. Each technique contains the potential to significantly advance computational science across a wide range of applications. Together they provide a new paradigm that efficiently organizes the information contained in operators governing physical phenomena. This project develops these techniques further, and develops multiresolution representations for operators and functions, based on the optimal quadratures. Any computational modeling of natural phenomena requires discretization of the underlying mathematical equations. This project addresses questions of optimality and efficiency of such discretizations, and of organization of information for two important modeling areas, wave propagation and geophysical fluid dynamics. This research aims to generate a much wider use of efficient techniques for representing information in scientific modeling, and to increase the speed and accuracy of simulations by up to two orders of magnitude, with foreseeable benefits to such areas as seismology, remote sensing, acoustics, optics, geophysical fluid dynamics, and quantum chemistry. It would reduce the computational cost of obtaining high accuracy, which is necessary to describe phenomena that are highly sensitive to changes in physical parameters, and that often cause technological bottlenecks. This Collaborative Research is led by the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and includes the Department of Meteorology at the University of Maryland at College Park. It will fund one research associate, two visiting scientists from UMD and Ohio University, and one graduate student in a diverse research group that includes a research associate, two postdoctoral researchers, a graduate student, and four undergraduate students doc23608 none The overall objective of this project is to develop new intrusion detection techniques by integrating intrusion detection with visualization and intelligent interaction strategies. The resulting system allows a user to easily monitor an underlying intrusion detection system (IDS), intercede if it fails to detect potential attacks, identify and address attacks, and update the IDS with attack profiles so that future occurrences will be properly reported. The expected contributions of this project include (1) interactive intrusion detection algorithms that capitalize on human knowledge and judgment, (2) visualization and interaction techniques that support rapid, accurate, and effective monitoring of potential attacks, and (3) semi-automated tools for constructing and evaluating attack profiles to extend the capabilities of an intrusion detection system. Research in this project offers the potential for significant advances in our understanding of how to detect and prevent network intrusions. We expect to make important breakthroughs on a number of fronts, including (1) new methods to automatically identify sophisticated intrusion attempts, (2) new techniques that harness a human observer s unique analysis talents to augment and extend an automated IDS s ability to respond to new or unexpected attacks, and (3) new approaches that allow automated detection algorithms to continually improve by learning from their users. Moreover, the multidisciplinary approach we are using offers the significant benefit of making the problem-solving processes of intrusion detection accessible and available to non-experts. Interactive systems that incorporate visualization and some degree of intelligent assistance can be very appealing to students and even casual computer users, providing a platform for exploration and further learning about the topic. Due to growing interest in the area of intrusion and appropriate countermeasures, the impact of this work will be broadly felt. The research will lead to improved techniques for intrusion detection, and thus to significantly enhanced computer and network security doc23609 none Plants have evolved to cope with a variety of environmental stresses, including drought, heat, cold, salt, pathogens, and insects. The imposition of stress on a plant results in the marshaling of genomic defense mechanisms. Some defense mechanisms are common to the response to multiple stresses (e.g., drought and salt), while others are more specific. Defense mechanisms may interact collaboratively to combat a stress or may work independently to repair multiple kinds of damage inflicted by stress. This research proceeds on the premise that functional genomic and bioinformatics approaches together with data from drought stress experiments and information from multiple biological information sources can elucidate relationships among and within stress mechanisms. This project will capture these relationships in representations or models called multimodal models. Sources of biological information that will be utilized include (1) data from drought-stress experiments, especially gene expression data from microarray hybridizations; (2) sequence, protein, and other databases; and (3) the biological literature. Multimodal models will represent these multiple aspects of biological knowledge and of biological systems themselves: responses over time; response variation by subcellular compartments; uncertainty (our lack of complete knowledge of cell state); and the dynamic changes in biological information due to the boom in biological data and knowledge. These models are readily visualized, explored, analyzed, and extended via computational means. Current models for drought stress response will be available via the project web site. The microarray experiments for studying drought stress in loblolly pine and Arabidopsis thaliana (a model plant for biological research) will be designed, managed, and analyzed by the Expresso system, a microarray experiment management system for experimental design, data capture, and data analysis. The experimental and computational methods used in this research will have an impact on the ability of biologists to address additional complex, interrelated hypotheses using microarray technology and other tools of modern genomics. The multimodal networks will have predictive power that will enable biologists to explore hypotheses computationally in advance of experiments, to obtain estimates of probabilities associated with various drought response mechanisms given hypothesized drought stress conditions, to decide on future experiments based on the estimated likelihood of a large yield of information from the experiments, and to serve as the basis for mathematical models that have more quantitative predictive power. Enhanced understanding of responses to drought and other stresses in plants will ultimately benefit agriculture and forestry in the form of hardier crops and trees doc23610 none This project develops time-domain solvers for wave propagation problems in two and three dimensions, with fundamentally improved properties, namely, significantly reduced sampling requirements and, at the same time, significantly higher accuracy. Such solvers would allow modeling of linear and, eventually, nonlinear wave propagation in domains that are thousands of characteristic wavelengths in size, with interfaces and variable coefficients. This approach would also provide improved bases for solving nonlinear advection-diffusion problems. The solvers are built upon two new techniques, namely, optimal quadratures to represent bandlimited functions, and a numerical generalization of separation of variables to accelerate applying higher-dimensional operators. Each technique contains the potential to significantly advance computational science across a wide range of applications. Together they provide a new paradigm that efficiently organizes the information contained in operators governing physical phenomena. This project develops these techniques further, and develops multiresolution representations for operators and functions, based on the optimal quadratures. Any computational modeling of natural phenomena requires discretization of the underlying mathematical equations. This project addresses questions of optimality and efficiency of such discretizations, and of organization o information for two important modeling areas, wave propagation and geophysical fluid dynamics. This research aims to generate a much wider use of efficient techniques for representing information in scientific modeling, and to increase the speed and accuracy of simulations by up to two orders of magnitude, with foreseeable benefits to such areas as seismology, remote sensing, acoustics, optics, geophysical fluid dynamics, and quantum chemistry. It would reduce the computational cost of obtaining high accuracy, which is necessary to describe phenomena that are highly sensitive to changes in physical parameters, and that often cause technological bottlenecks. This Collaborative Research is led by the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and includes the Department of Meteorology at the University of Maryland at College Park. It will fund one research associate, two visiting scientists from UMD and Ohio University, and one graduate student in a diverse research group that includes a research associate, two postdoctoral researchers, a graduate student, and four undergraduate students doc23611 none This award is the result of a proposal submitted to the Information Technology Research (ITR) initiative. The research will be done in collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory. A long-standing obstacle to the understanding of condensed phase systems is that many important processes occur on a time-scale that is not easily accessible with conventional simulation methods. For example, molecular dynamics is generally limited to nanoseconds because of the small time-step required for the integration of the equations of motion. However, relevant processes that are activated, i.e., infrequent events, often take place on a time-scale of microseconds or even longer. Examples include the evolution of the surface morphology during crystal or film growth, the diffusion of point defects in solids, and the migration of grain boundaries during plastic strain. Recently, a variety of accelerated dynamics techniques, including hyperdynamics, parallel replica dynamics, and temperature-accelerated dynamics have been proposed in order to speed up the simulation of infrequent events in molecular dynamics. In particular, temperature-accelerated dynamics has been quite successful in extending the time-scales for simulations since it allows realistic simulations oflow-temperature processes over time-scales as long as seconds and even hours. However, due to the fact that the computational work required scales as the square or even as the cube of the number of atoms N, this technique can only be applied to extremely small systems. As a result, realistic simulations of materials over both extended time and extended length scales have not been possible. The research here will use parallel computations in order to extend accelerated dynamics so that both large system sizes and long time-scales can be simulated simultaneously. The development of such a capability to simulate both mesoscopic systems sizes and long time-scales should present a major breakthrough in our ability to carry out realistic atomic simulations. In parallel with this effort, sparse-computational algorithms will be developed in order to reduce the exponent corresponding to the dependence of the computational work on the system size in accelerated dynamics. The development of such algorithms is based on the realization that eliminating non-local moves or groups of non-local moves from the force calculations involved in these methods during the search for saddle-points should significantly reduce the dependence of the computational work required on the cluster size N. Parallel replica dynamics will also be used in both techniques to extend the time-scales of the simulations. As a first specific application of spatially parallel accelerated dynamics we will focus on simulations of metal-on-metal epitaxial growth at low temperature using temperature-accelerated dynamics. This is a problem of great interest due to the observation of a variety of unexplained phenomena including nanoscale facetting and strain-induced mound regularization at low tempertures. The methods developed here should be applicable to a much broader range of systems as well. %%% This award is the result of a proposal submitted to the Information Technology Research (ITR) initiative. The research will be done in collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory. A long-standing obstacle to the understanding of condensed phase systems is that many important processes occur on a time-scale that is not easily accessible with conventional simulation methods. For example, molecular dynamics is generally limited to nanoseconds because of the small time-step required for the integration of the equations of motion. However, relevant processes that are activated, i.e., infrequent events, often take place on a time-scale of microseconds or even longer. Examples include the evolution of the surface morphology during crystal or film growth, the diffusion of point defects in solids, and the migration of grain boundaries during plastic strain. Recently, a variety of accelerated dynamics techniques, including hyperdynamics, parallel replica dynamics, and temperature-accelerated dynamics have been proposed in order to speed up the simulation of infrequent events in molecular dynamics. In particular, temperature-accelerated dynamics has been quite successful in extending the time-scales for simulations since it allows realistic simulations oflow-temperature processes over time-scales as long as seconds and even hours. However, due to the fact that the computational work required scales as the square or even as the cube of the number of atoms N, this technique can only be applied to extremely small systems. As a result, realistic simulations of materials over both extended time and extended length scales have not been possible. The research here will use parallel computations in order to extend accelerated dynamics so that both large system sizes and long time-scales can be simulated simultaneously. The development of such a capability to simulate both mesoscopic systems sizes and long time-scales should present a major breakthrough in our ability to carry out realistic atomic simulations. In parallel with this effort, sparse-computational algorithms will be developed in order to reduce the exponent corresponding to the dependence of the computational work on the system size in accelerated dynamics. The development of such algorithms is based on the realization that eliminating non-local moves or groups of non-local moves from the force calculations involved in these methods during the search for saddle-points should significantly reduce the dependence of the computational work required on the cluster size N. Parallel replica dynamics will also be used in both techniques to extend the time-scales of the simulations. As a first specific application of spatially parallel accelerated dynamics we will focus on simulations of metal-on-metal epitaxial growth at low temperature using temperature-accelerated dynamics. This is a problem of great interest due to the observation of a variety of unexplained phenomena including nanoscale facetting and strain-induced mound regularization at low tempertures. The methods developed here should be applicable to a much broader range of systems as well doc23612 none VanBriesen The goal of the proposed research is to improve biological models for prediction of microbiological growth yield and stoichiometry in systems involving in situ bioremediation or ex situ biotreatment of anthropogenic compounds. A series of hypothesis-driven tasks are designed to evaluate current available yield, thermodynamic, and quantitative pathway information for anthropogenic compounds and to develop improved microbiological models for these compounds. The crux of the work depends upon the hypothesis that maximum theoretical bacterial yield is a fundamental parameter of cell growth that controls the removal of anthropogenic compounds by biodegradation pathways in natural and engineered systems. Further, bacterial yield, coupled with the principle of mass balance, specifies the stoichiometry of biodegradation, thus allowing prediction of the formation of intermediates, the requirement of co-substrates and nutrients, and the utilization or generation of inorganic species (e.g., O2, NH4 + ) that can affect the system biogeochemistry. Specific research objectives are to: 1. Evaluate the available yield data for microbiological systems growing under a wide range of environmental conditions and using a wide variety of natural and anthropogenic compounds. Compile these data into a searchable, web-enabled database for microbiological stoichiometric and kinetic data. 2. Modify an existing thermodynamic efficiency-based yield and stoichiometry prediction methodology to account for biodegradation mechanisms observed for anthropogenic compounds. 3. Evaluate the predictive ability of the newly developed model for multiple microbial systems using the database generated in objective 1. The improved model structures developed on this project will have widespread utility in biological ecosystem modeling, bioremediation and microbial ecology modeling, and biotechnology and engineered bioprocess modeling. Modeling in all these fields will improve our understanding of the complexity of living systems and will enhance our ability to control this complexity to our benefit doc23613 none Bastain Braams of the Courant Institute at NYU and Joel Bowman of Emory University are supported by the Chemistry Division through the Information Technology Research program in a collaborative effort between theoretical chemistry and mathematics. They will develop and apply dynamic, high-dimensional interpolation and approximation methods, combined with a sparse grid dimension reduction approach, to first-principles molecular dynamics calculations. Applications guiding the project come from chemical kinetics and reaction dynamics, and especially combustion. The methods and codes under development will have broad applicability in quantum chemistry and in high-dimensional function fitting and optimization. This project addresses a challenging and multi-faceted problem in scientifc computing, and combines research and research training in numerical analysis and computational chemistry. The computer codes developed herein will be useful to other areas of computational science, and will be written and documented for wide dissemination doc23614 none This award under the Information Technology Research initiative supports fundamental computational and theoretical research, including algorithm development, on dynamical correlations in materials. Methods to be explored include time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) and Baym-Kadanoff conserving approximations. An aim of this work is to establish a synergy between novel computational methods and insight into the dynamical electronic correlations in non-trivial solid-state archetypes involving insulators, transition metals, rare-earth metal hydrides, and transition-metal oxides. Dynamical charge-density and spin density response functions will be calculated; these quantities map directly into experimental loss functions, and contain unique signatures of correlation. The time-dependent optimized-potential method will be implemented. This method, which relies on a representation of the exchange-correlation potential as a functional of one-electron orbitals, is self-interaction free. So, it represents a promising approach for the study of correlated materials. Hybrid functionals, which have proved successful in the description of the ground state of antiferromagnetic insulators will also be explored. TDDFT will also be implemented without invoking the linear-response regime, by explicitly solving the time-dependent Kohn-Sham equation on a real-space grid, propagating the states on a time grid. Baym-Kadanoff conserving approximations will also be implemented and explored. The proposed theoretical and computational will contribute to the education of graduate students and postdocs in modern computational materials physics. College students from disadvantaged backgrounds will be actively recruited for research participation during the summers through the Ronald McNair program at UTK. %%% This award under the Information Technology Research initiative supports fundamental computational and theoretical research, including algorithm development on dynamical electronic correlations in insulators, transition metals, rare-earth metal hydrides, and transition-metal oxides. The work involves the development of new computational methods and the exploration of sophisticated theoretical formalism with an aim to forge a quantitative theory of electron dynamics and transport in real materials. The work will also contribute theoretical guidance to concurrent experimental investigations of materials using inelastic x-ray scattering. While this is fundamental research, the computational methods developed may support future advances in materials and optoelectronic device technologies doc23615 none There is a rapidly growing trend toward embedding wireless capability into a wide variety of information technology products; recently in the form of single chip transceivers, and in the future perhaps integrated on-chip with the main product function. These devices must have low power consumption to satisfy battery conservation and thermal considerations. Good receiver sensitivity and signal handling are also essential in a crowded radio frequency (RF) spectrum; however, this requirement conflicts with low power circuit design. We propose to develop low power CMOS circuits that improve the trade-off between power consumption and RF performance. Current CMOS low noise amplifiers (LNA) have noise figures as low as 0.8 dB, input intercept points up to +18dBm, and power as low as 1.5 mW; however, these specifications cannot be obtained simultaneously. Likewise, CMOS mixers can meet demanding CDMA communications standards for linearity and noise figure, but only at high power cost. To address these problems we propose a number of strategies for (a) reducing power consumption for a given level of performance, and (b) allowing a dynamic trade-off of power versus RF performance. These trategies include: (1) reuse of amplifier stages at two different frequencies through reflex arrangements, thus reducing the number of high performance, high current stages required in receivers, (2) dynamically controlled positive feedback and bias in LNA stages, to allow power, signal handling, and noise figure to be traded off based on signal strength and interference, and (3) integration of charge pumps into individual drain supplies, to optimize the voltage for RF-critical stages while allowing the non-critical portions of a CMOS chip to operate at low voltage. Successful implementation will lead to improved range and life for wireless sensors, more reliable communications under adverse interference conditions, and ultimately to wider application of information technology in industry and science doc23616 none This project addresses using technology to teach science in an effective and agile manner at the Community College level. As jobs requiring science and math increase in numbers, the burgeoning bio-technologies being only one example, future workers will be asked to learn new skills rapidly. The NSF-funded Molecular Workbench Project ( ), now in its final year of research and testing, has developed several powerful atomic-level models. These models, together called the Molecular Workbench, when combined with a scripting language that talks with our model, and with Berkeley s WISE program that delivers on-line projects in inquiry science, can illuminate some of the hardest-to-teach concepts in chemistry, biology and physics. Community Colleges are a critical gateway not only to career training but also, for many, to college itself. Infusing science courses with the powerful interactivity of models will allow students not only to master science, but facilitate their transfer to specialty courses. The overall goal of this project is to develop and evaluate the use of complex, interactive computational models in the real-world situations encountered in two-year college technical programs. The project will develop and evaluate flexible atomic-scale modeling software as well as the software architecture that supports the rapid development and deployment of educational materials that utilize this model. The Molecular Workbench software is capable of underpinning key physics and some chemistry concepts. It is situated between the rigor of professional science and the simplifications required by good teaching. This project proposes to develop the modeling software s capacity to model chemical bonds, and photon interactions as well as new computational and visualization algorithms needed to model different features of larger biomolecules (e.g. steric ligand-receptor interactions at active sites). Working together with science advisors and a set of community college educators, this project will not only enhance the Molecular Workbench software, but will also develop classroom activities using the models, and carefully evaluate their use and efficacy. This technology will be pilot tested in two-year college courses by providing a range of hypermodels, or scaffolded models, that use atomic-scale models to illustrate key science topics in the context of typical technical specialties. The principle investigators will identify a set of key science topics typically taught in biology, chemistry, and physics courses at this level and generate hypermodels for each that are based on technologies and processes used in specialty programs. They will capitalize on an existing platform for inquiry science projects that has been developed at the University of California, Berkeley. The Web-based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE) supports students as they work collaboratively on inquiry projects. Using WISE, the hypermodels will be integrated into complete online instructional units that faculty can adapt to their needs without significant changes in the organization or learning objectives of current instruction. They will all, however, have a consistent, atomic-scale approach that could be the basis of a new, interdisciplinary approach to the core sciences. The materials will be developed in collaboration with faculty at two-year colleges and curriculum experts, including Springfield (MA) Technical Community College (STCC) and others throughout the US recruited through the Center for Occupational Research and Development (CORD) and their Community College Presidents Council. The PIs will make all grant-supported code available as open source as part of their Open Source Library of Educational Technology (OSLET) initiative doc23617 none The educational system can be viewed as a dynamic environment influenced by many factors. In this project a multi-agent interaction and simulation model will be investigated as a tool for evaluating educational systems as dynamic environments. The long term aim of the tool will be to model the interaction between education policy and human learning by first using typically measured factors such as test scores and economic status and they exploring other factors that are harder to quantify but which may result in a more accurate model. The proposed work involved three phases: (1) constructing an initial model and calibrating it against historical data; (2) examining how other, less typical characteristics can be quantified and expanding the model to include these additional measures; and (3) introducing the model to education policy makers, building a user-interface that they can use and understand; and conducting a pilot study with potential users. The research team consists of computer scientists, dynamical system theorists, multi-agent researchers, school system experts, and AI researchers doc23618 none This project will advance understanding of how information technology is perceived, used, and reconfigured in diverse cultures in Central Asia. By conducting an empirical investigation into the cultural factors that affect information technology adoption, and articulating which of these elements are most significant in determining the success rate of IT initiatives, the research will provide a blueprint that can be used by programs delivering IT-related programs in disparate settings. The research will focus on Central Asia because of that region s unique combination of infrastructure and literacy combined with relatively low exposure to Western culture and early stages of Internet adoption. The project will draw on qualitative and quantitative methods, using survey instruments, statistical analysis, coded interview data, and ethnographic observation. Surveys will be developed based on previous research, and they will be distributed at Internet access sites in Central Asia. Interviews will also be conducted in Central Asia. The survey and interview data will be analyzed in an effort to correlate usage habits with local cultural factors. As information technology becomes increasingly important, effective implementation becomes even more critical. This project will make a significant contribution to understanding how culture affects technology adoption, thus advancing broad-based approaches to bridging the digital divide doc23619 none Multidimensional genome-wide gene expression profiling datasets are being generated for bacterial, plant and animal systems. This complex data reveals the interacting metabolic pathways that control cell metabolism. Ultimately, understanding these pathways will increase our ability to predict the effects of a given drug on human metabolism, the consequences of changes in a single gene on the composition of a seed, or the effect of a given mutation in a pre-cancer cell. The goal of this project is to develop a unique integrated information workspace that displays heterogeneous biological information using three-dimensional graphs, physical cell models, and wireless handheld devices for detailed textual information. This project will use a variety of levels of immersion, from desktop settings to the C6 immersive virtual environment. Two experimental applications will be developed. First, a prototype interactive visualization of a metabolic network, the Calvin cycle of photosynthesis, will be used to create a living dynamic example of a biochemical pathway for K-12 students to explore. The pathway will be brought alive by a computer game that students explore at their own pace, with rewards for particular achievements such as combining the proper molecules. Complex concepts such as the conversion of chemical, light and heat energy, metabolic flux, use and synthesis of chemical constituents of living organisms can all be illustrated through this pathway. Secondly, three-dimensional visualization will be applied to the analysis of the acetyl-CoA metabolic network in the genetic model-plant Arabidopsis. This visualization will be integrated with complex datasets taken from a group of genetic mutants in specific steps in this pathway. The research objectives of this project are to explore methods for interaction with three-dimensional graphs and the integration of different models for data exploration. The project will be performed by an interdisciplinary group of investigators with expertise in biology, bioinformatics, and computer engineering, who will apply elements of graph theory, immersive software visualization, and fuzzy logic to the problem of metabolic network visualization doc23620 none The long term goal of this research is to investigate whether there is compelling or conclusive evidence of computation in stomatal physiology. Stomata are tiny pores on the surfaces of leaves that control CO2 and H2O fluxes between the leaf and the atmosphere. Because stomata have the potential to interact collectively to process physiological information for the whole leaf, the first step in this research is to establish that stomata do indeed behave like a connected network. We will quantify spatial and temporal variation in stomatal conductance in Xanthium strumarium L. (cocklebur) using chlorophyll fluorescence imaging and mathematical analysis techniques such as power spectral analysis, mutual information, and approximate entropy. Sequences of images will be analyzed for evidence of various long-range spatial and temporal correlations that have been predicted by computer simulations to characterize collective networks. The emergence of complexity from simple networks is one of the most intensely investigated areas in contemporary science. Yet, there is no real system in which the details of how this emergence occurs have been established. This research has the potential to do so and to provide insight into how information is processed in the biological world. Undergraduate and graduate students will be trained in the interdisciplinary fields of experimental biology, dynamical systems, and computational science doc23621 none Blind identification of multivariate systems concerns with modelling, estimation and detection of multivariate systems driven by unknown sources. It is an emerging area of fundamental importance to applications such as wireless communications, human-computer interface, and video surveillance. It provides a foundation for, as well as a unification of many application-specific views arid techniques. In particular, it brings a bridge between the field of space-time coding for wireless communications and the field of speech recognition for human-computer interface. This project continues a systematic study previously conducted by the P1 in the past a few years. A primary focus is to understand the limits of blind identification of convolutive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems driven by nonwhite sources. This is known to be a challenging problem. Prior work in this area mainly concerns with single-input-multiple-output (SIMO) systems. instantaneous MIMO systems, MIMO systems driven by white sources, or MIMO systems driven by modulated sources. Preliminary discoveries on convolutive MIMO systems driven by nonwhite sources have been made recently by the P1. and more are yet to be discovered. Great efforts will be made to draw connections between the generic identifiability conditions associated with unknown sources and those associated with encoded and or modulated sources. The results of this work will be a complete understanding of the identifiabilty of MIMO systems. a complete taxonomy of identification algorithms for various conditions of MIMO systems with various coding schemes, and a complete evaluation of performance bounds of MIMO systems driven by unknown sources. This project will also explore a key application in speech enhancement. The acoustic channel in a common environment (such as offices) is known to have a convolutive distortion that severely hampers the performance of today s best speech recognition systems. Blind deconvolution is of great importance at the very front end of a speech recognition system. The flexibility or friendliness of future human-computer interface depends on how well blind deconvolution can be carried out and consequently how well speech recognition can be performed. To some degree, research has either neglected the structural model of acoustic channels or ignored the hidden models in speech signals. This project will cross-fertilize between the field of sensor arrays and the field of speech recognition. By exploiting multiple microphones, the structural details of acoustic channels as well as the hidden Markov model of speech signals, we are expecting a significantly improved speech recognition system by the end of this project doc23622 none Magnetic materials have unique properties that are driving their integration with microelectronic and micro-electro-mechanical (MEM) devices. Various microfabrication technologies are being pursued aggressively. In this proposal, it is proposed to develop a novel technique to deposit oxide magnetic material films applicable to micro magnetic devices. The magnetic materials chosen for the proposed study are low coercivity soft ferrites (manganese zinc and nickel zinc ferrites) with initial permeability ranging from 1,000-10,000. The films will find extensive applications in micro inductors, micro transformers and other on chip magnetic devices. These films will be deposited by electrophoresis i.e electrodeposition from nano to micron size ferrite particles suspended in a solution. The ferrite powders will be prepared by jet milling technique in conjunction with a ferrite company Ferronics and the Center for Advanced Ceramic Technology (CACT) at Alfred University. An electrochemical process will be developed to get uniform deposition of magnetic films on silicon wafers. The films will be characterized for their magnetic properties, thickness uniformity and adhesion. Subsequently, a lithographic technique will be developed to pattern ferrite films to form the cores of micro inductors. Fundamental investigations will be made to understand the effect of particle size distribution and electrodeposition in confined regions on the film morphology by modeling the deposition process. The magnetic properties will be measured on these films and structures. These film structures will be integrated with copper micro-inductors on semiconductor substrates. Inductors will be designed and modeled analytically and using an electromagnetic software. The fabrication will be carried out utilizing the IC fabrication facility at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Electrical measurements such as inductance and Q-factor will be done using network analyzer and impedance meters. The optimized structures will then be fabricated with circuitry on silicon wafers. This will be a multidisciplinary experimental and theoretical research program between Microelectronic Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Physics and Electrochemistry. In addition, there is support from industry and the CACT center. The project will enable fabrication of on-chip magnetic components for micro-inductors and micro magnetics. The proposed process can also be utilized to integrate other magnetic materials such as hard ferrites and microwave ferrites doc23623 none Twin photons have provided quantum optics with one of its most powerful tools to explore phenomena such as particle entanglement and the idea of teleportation of information, with additional glimpses of possible applications to quantum computation. Addition of angular momentum (AM) entanglement to the conjugated photon system in the parametric down conversion (PDC) process could extend entanglement to an unprecedented degree. It is the aim of this work to extend the fundamental knowledge on twin photons with angular momentum, which is in its early stages, and to determine the possibility of applications of these new ideas to Quantum Information Science. The specific plans include the following. 1) A coincidence experiment to confirm the angular correlations of entangled photons with angular momentum that have been predicted theoretically will be performed. 2) A second coincidence experiment will be done as a test for a possible application in optical fibers. 3) Light states entangled both in angular momentum and polarization will be created by a combination of path indistinguishability to produce multi-entanglement between entangled polarization states and entangled angular momentum states. The experimental efforts will be accompanied by theoretical studies doc23624 none This project examines the use of immersive virtual environment technology for eyewitness identification of criminal suspects. This technology allows individuals to enter and move about three-dimensional digital worlds in real-time, observing and interacting with the environment and virtual others within it. The rapid development of immersive virtual environment technology and increased sophistication in three-dimensional digital imaging of people promises a new age for determining accuracy of eyewitness identification of criminal suspects. This is important societally as the general accuracy of eyewitness identification of criminal suspects using older technologies (e.g., police lineups, mug shots) has been questioned in the research literature as well as in the judicial system. The scientific goals of the project are threefold. First, the investigators will determine the validity of using digital representations of humans within immersive virtual environments for person recognition. Second, they will determine differences between traditional and immersive virtual police lineups in terms of eyewitness identification accuracy focusing on the increased contextual realism described above. Finally, the investigators will use immersive virtual environment technology to develop quantitative indexes of fairness of such lineups based on the similarity of suspects to foils. Immersive virtual environment technology allows easier recreation of the same environmental conditions under which an eyewitness viewed criminal activity involving suspects. Replicating such conditions is not easily accomplished using older technologies. Hence, using immersive virtual environment technology, witnesses can be asked to identify suspects and foils at the same distance, viewing angle, lighting, weather (e.g., rain, fog) as was the case during their observation of the criminal activity. Furthermore, this technology makes it easier to match foils to suspects in terms of organismic variables (e.g., height, weight, hair style, coloring), clothing, and movements thereby eliminating potential sources of bias. This technology also allows the quantitative assessment of how well suspects and foils are matched as opposed to pure subjective assessment using older technologies doc23625 none This is an ITR proposal. The PI proposes to develop and demonstrate an effective synchronization of some 35 individual data acquisition systems, distributed over distances of several kilometer, to an accuracy of 1-2 nanoseconds using standard communication protocols doc23626 none Goldstein This project addresses mathematical and computational challenges posed by growth phenomena involving novel and difficult free-boundary problems in fluid flow, precipitation crystallization and evaporation. These appear in contexts as diverse as hydrothermal vents in the ocean floor, terrestrial caves, and electrochemical pattern formation, where one finds growth of complex structures by precipitation. These range from hollow soda-straw stalactites to fantastic curved helictites and undulating sheet-like draperies in limestone caves, to iron-sulfide chimneys tens of meters high on the ocean floor. Despite years of empirical study, these fascinating growth morphologies are largely unexplained in any quantitative manner. We will develop computational methods to study precipitative growth phenomena, based primarily on boundary-integral and differential geometric methods in the study of surface evolution. The enormous geological time scales on which many of these structures form has created a paucity of experimental results, and few if any laboratory analogs have been created. We will also develop and explore experimentally model systems that can display such pattern formation on accessible time scales. One such system, discovered in our laboratory, involves tubular growth by electrodeposition, in which macroscopic tubular deposits grow in tens of minutes around bubbles of hydrogen gas evolving off a cathode. Theoretical approaches will include the study of the underlying electrokinetics at large Peclet number and depletion layer modifications due to Lorentz forces, all as a means of understanding the geometrical laws of surface growth that can produce the rich and fascinating morphologies seen in nature, and the computational techniques to study such laws doc23627 none High Fidelity Simulation for Heterogeneous Civil and Mechanical Systems This award funds a three-year research program to develop and evaluate methods for high fidelity modeling and simulation of strongly heterogeneous coupled systems of importance in Civil and Mechanical Engineering. These systems are characterized by interacting components of widely different mechanical characteristics. The approach relies on multilevel decomposition, into subsystems, interface localization and regularization. The proposed research is based on two innovative concepts: (1) An interface localization method designed to link heterogeneous models of system components while maintaining consistency and energy conservation between nonmatching discretizations. (2) A regularization approach that preserves the full accuracy of the interactions transmitted across the interfaces for a wide spectrum of coupled problems. The research will be driven by and evaluated on two application examples that exhibit widely different physical scales: (1) A dam under seismic excitation, accounting for fluid-structure interaction with bulk cavitation as well as interaction with highly heterogeneous soil strata. (2) A wide-band MEMS frequency-sensor device consisting of a resonator mounted on a layered silicon substrate. Techniques for model-based simulation of physically homogeneous components have experienced great advances over the past three decades. Difficulties occur when interfacing such models. These difficulties can be traced to physical, modeling or computational method mismatches. For example, a degrading interface or a protective foam layer can produce highly inaccurate results in the prediction of inter-component fluxes and forces. The approach taken in this research aims to take maximum advantage of existing models and methods for the isolated subsystems, while developing interaction techniques that address those difficulties. Outcomes of this research will have application to other fields of science and technology that deal with the interaction of strongly heterogeneous models. These include aircraft and marine engineering, electronic packaging and the design of advanced materials. Computational multiphysics is expected to be a key component of ongoing US industry efforts to boost productivity through information technology by faster exploration of designs and concepts, and eventually optimization integrated with CADM. However, the complexity inherent in multiphysics simulations necessarily requires the collaboration of experts in the underlying disciplines. This can lead to difficulties and costly retrofits when models originally develop to address the individual problems are interfaced. The research aims at facilitating, through modularity and reuse, the timely incorporation of advances in modeling and interfacing techniques in simulation doc23576 none This award addresses an important fundamental problem in computational mathematics: how to optimize complex systems described by partial differential equations (PDEs). The focus is on PDE simulations that can scale into millions of variables, and hundreds or thousands of processors. The size of the problems and the complexity of the techniques for solving these PDEs pose major challenges to modern optimization methods. The project uses a general framework for solving optimization problems in interaction with PDE solvers doc23629 none Due to the expressiveness of Extensible Markup Language (XML) as compared to HTML, XML has become a standard format in data presentation for the web applications. However, in content based retrieval, if the database content does not match with the query conditions exactly, or if the query conditions are not well presented, the system returns null answer. The user must reformulate and resubmit the query for processing. Therefore, when the query conditions are not known exactly (e.g. matching an image with a set of features or a document with a set of key words), the user often specifies them in a general way to avoid a null answer. The drawback of such an approach is that the system may return too many and sometimes irrelevant answers. To remedy this problem, a systematic and scalable knowledge based (derived from the XML data) relaxation methodology will be developed to relax the query conditions (both in value and or structure). Further, the user can provide such relaxation control as the order of attributes to be relaxed, relaxation level, the unrelaxable attribute list, number of answers, etc. As a result, such technique provides a focused and controlled relaxation, and thus yields more accurate and relevant answers. In this proposal, the existing XML query language will be extended to support query relaxation and relaxation control constructs, and techniques will be developed to cluster similar data trees from XML data into a hierarchy to serve as an index to guide relaxation doc23630 none Generation and manipulation of quantum entanglement of light fields are key techniques in the development of practical schemes for quantum information processing (QIP). In this project, the investigators will explore the all-optical route towards generation and control of the wave-packet mode properties of single photons, photon pairs, and multi-photon entangled states. To achieve this they will use the rapidly-advancing techniques of optical frequency conversion in second-order nonlinear optical crystals having controlled periodic structure for the purpose of phase matching. Such nonlinear photonic crystals can have tailor-made properties, giving the flexibility to design the wave-packet mode properties needed. And index wave-guiding structures can be introduced to control the transverse properties of the spatial modes. Furthermore, recently the method of one-dimensional quasi-phase matching has been generalized to the case of two-dimensional nonlinear photonic crystals. The combination of custom-designed periodicity (1- or 2-D) and waveguiding has the potential to lead to an unprecedented level of optical quantum-state control doc23631 none The Center for Bibliographical Studies at the University of California, Riverside, is in the process of digitizing the Burney Collection of eighteenth-century English newspapers at the British Library. Access is currently possible only through a single microfilm copy in the reading room, because of the fragility of the originals. Use of even a digitized version could remain cumbersome and time-consuming because of the large size of the collection, 650,000 pages, and access limited by date and title. Heretofore the vagaries of handset type, uneven lines, broken letters, smudged or changing ink intensities and yellowing paper, it has not been possible produce an accurate, searchable text through available optical character reading software. The emergence of new technologies now enables the Center to produce a searchable text with a high degree of accuracy. A fully searchable text linked to digital images will permit extraordinary access and unlock for researchers the incredibly rich range of data the Collection contains. The result will provide a new model for accessing both periodicals and monographs of the hand-press era. It will open up whole new research strategies and topics. And it will extend the wonders of computer-based text searching to the corpus of texts that form the foundation of the modern world doc23632 none OF GEOTECHNICAL INFORMATION Geotechnical information describes the characteristics of upper soil deposits (typically down to a 50 m depth) on which rest most of our civil infrastructure (e.g., buildings, roads, bridges, airports, harbors, and factories). Each year, a large amount of geotechnical information is generated with great efforts and expense during the conduct of projects, including those sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and many other local, state, and federal agencies. The data and results of these projects are usually published as hardcopy reports, without digital data. In addition, the steps in data collection and processing are documented with conventional methods, making it often difficult even impossible to scrutinize, revise and apply data. An NSF workshop, held at the University of Southern California (USC) in , clearly established a unanimous consensus among researchers and practitioners for a better exchange of geotechnical information. Nowadays Information Technologies (IT) unleashes new powerful opportunities for collecting, exchanging, and utilizing geotechnical information, which should be explored for the sake of our civil infrastructures. Capitalizing on the benefits from recent experiences gained during several IT projects carried out at USC since , our research creates ITR methods for resolving major issues associated with the collection, exchange and utilization of geotechnical information. The research integrates different IT methods to produce a comprehensive and complete description and utilization of geotechnical information starting from the data generation in the laboratory and field to its end usage by engineers and planners involved in civil infrastructure systems. The specific objectives of the research are: 1. Define versatile data structures based on the knowledge of domain experts on selected geotechnical information. 2. Define metadata by geotechnical domain experts describing the processes generating geotechnical information, including development of automated metadata collection for facilitating user input. 3. Develop data mining tools for geotechnical information, and creating QA QC algorithms integrating data and metadata. The research is concerned with the development of IT methods for rendering geotechnical information usable to those involved with planning, designing, building, and maintaining our civil infrastructure systems. The tools and methods developed during the research will be tested in the realistic work environments of five research collaborators, namely the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), the California Geological Survey (CGS), the Bureau of Research in Geology and Mines (BRGM) in France, and Kobe University in Japan. It is anticipated that the IT concepts developed in this research will contribute to pave the way to the creation of a virtual repository of geotechnical information to be operated in the future by a consortium of local, state and federal agencies. The research will benefit the public in many ways. It will disseminate geotechnical information to the students, researchers and practitioners. It will organize geotechnical information, and improve its archival and retrieval for local, state and federal agencies, universities, and companies. It will generate an information platform for the development of large-scale geographic information systems of natural hazards such as liquefaction-induced lateral spreads during earthquakes. It will promote education and research in engineering, and stimulate data exchange and collaboration among researchers and practitioners doc23633 none A new design methodology for multi-antenna wireless system is proposed. The essential idea is based on the fusion of technologies and concepts in the antenna design, RF circuit and device technology, real-time DSP technology and communication theory. To embody this idea, novel designs of high-performance signal processing array front-ends and the associated communication processing research are proposed. The proposed array front-ends cover a broad range of hardware from the antenna array, RF circuits all the way to IF or baseband outputs. As a testbed, we propose a receiving antenna array with a single RF-channel and Spatial MultIplexing of Local Elements (SMILE). The communication processing research is focused on the study of space-time propagation channels and the applications of Continuous Phase Modulation (CPM) coding scheme in a Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) system based on the proposed front-end. Studies of system level issues in merging the hardware architectures and communication algorithms are also proposed. The interdisciplinary nature of this project ensures close interactions among faculty members and students from different disciplines. Hence, the project will benefit the curriculums and graduate research subjects in multiple areas such as microwave and RF technology, real-time signal processing and wireless communication doc23634 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Joseph E. Grimes will conduct two years of linguistic research to extend the capabilities of comparative linguists by matching their expertise in making pattern recognition judgments with a computational tool that organizes all their data in response to those judgments. This division of labor will allow linguists to stay on top of greater quantities of data from more speech varieties than has ever been possible, because it provides an information technology infrastructure for their discipline. Though notable work in language comparison has been done by hand, it consumes years; indeed, for much of the world there are more educated guesses about what the linguistic relationships might be than there is well-martialed evidence for those relationships. This project s linguist-machine partnership will empower investigators to do their analysis expeditiously (including adding in data from languages that could become extinct in the next generation and be lost to science), to follow out competing hypotheses, to work collegially as easily as individually, and to offer precise documentation to others through public archives. All these things have been difficult to do using traditional methods. To find out how human groups have diverged and migrated scholars must draw not only on written and oral history, but also on recoverable prehistory, which is accessible mostly through comparative linguistics, archeology, and genetics. If linguists are enabled to fill the gaps in their data and to make more precise their reconstructions of what our ancestral languages must have been like, it will lead to better insight into the processes by which all languages (including English) change over time, and to better understanding of connections between ancestral languages and ancient culture patterns. Seeing language history in this way also adds the time dimension to our understanding of humanity s capacity for language, and helps us to value language diversity rather than deplore it. Solid research in this area, which the proposed tool will promote, can also help traditional societies to become aware of a deeper heritage than what their oral history alone gives them. On a more immediate scale, it can identify areas where educational materials and literature developed in one of a closely related group of languages that share a common culture can be easily morphed into preliminary drafts of those materials for other languages in the same group doc23635 none The problem of developing efficient automated systems of logical inference is a key step toward the dream of creating verifiable, reliable, and secure hardware and software systems. This research is aimed at developing a well-founded, unified theory of practical logical inference, that combines complementary ideas and powerful approaches for propositional inference developed in AI, formal verification, and theoretical computer science. This unified theory will focus on (ii) combining the different representations used in the various approaches to propositional inference, such as Boolean decision diagrams and conjunctive normal form, in order to take advantage of the diverse algorithmic techniques associated with each; (ii) developing new and improved inference algorithms using the combined representation; (iii) precisely characterizing the power of various heuristic inference techniques, such as clause learning and randomized search; and (iv) developing a rigorous understanding of how problem structure indicates the potential effectiveness of particular inference strategies. The research will involve theoretical work using methods of proof complexity as well as experimental work on logical encodings of both real-world verification problems and AI planning problems. The ultimate goal research is to significantly expand the size and complexity of software and hardware systems that are amenable to formal analysis doc23636 none OF GEOTECHNICAL INFORMATION Geotechnical information describes the characteristics of upper soil deposits (typically down to a 50 m depth) on which rest most of our civil infrastructure (e.g., buildings, roads, bridges, airports, harbors, and factories). Each year, a large amount of geotechnical information is generated with great efforts and expense during the conduct of projects, including those sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and many other local, state, and federal agencies. The data and results of these projects are usually published as hardcopy reports, without digital data. In addition, the steps in data collection and processing are documented with conventional methods, making it often difficult even impossible to scrutinize, revise and apply data. An NSF workshop, held at the University of Southern California (USC) in , clearly established a unanimous consensus among researchers and practitioners for a better exchange of geotechnical information. Nowadays Information Technologies (IT) unleashes new powerful opportunities for collecting, exchanging, and utilizing geotechnical information, which should be explored for the sake of our civil infrastructures. Capitalizing on the benefits from recent experiences gained during several IT projects carried out at USC since , our research creates ITR methods for resolving major issues associated with the collection, exchange and utilization of geotechnical information. The research integrates different IT methods to produce a comprehensive and complete description and utilization of geotechnical information starting from the data generation in the laboratory and field to its end usage by engineers and planners involved in civil infrastructure systems. The specific objectives of the research are: 1. Define versatile data structures based on the knowledge of domain experts on selected geotechnical information. 2. Define metadata by geotechnical domain experts describing the processes generating geotechnical information, including development of automated metadata collection for facilitating user input. 3. Develop data mining tools for geotechnical information, and creating QA QC algorithms integrating data and metadata. The research is concerned with the development of IT methods for rendering geotechnical information usable to those involved with planning, designing, building, and maintaining our civil infrastructure systems. The tools and methods developed during the research will be tested in the realistic work environments of five research collaborators, namely the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), the California Geological Survey (CGS), the Bureau of Research in Geology and Mines (BRGM) in France, and Kobe University in Japan. It is anticipated that the IT concepts developed in this research will contribute to pave the way to the creation of a virtual repository of geotechnical information to be operated in the future by a consortium of local, state and federal agencies. The research will benefit the public in many ways. It will disseminate geotechnical information to the students, researchers and practitioners. It will organize geotechnical information, and improve its archival and retrieval for local, state and federal agencies, universities, and companies. It will generate an information platform for the development of large-scale geographic information systems of natural hazards such as liquefaction-induced lateral spreads during earthquakes. It will promote education and research in engineering, and stimulate data exchange and collaboration among researchers and practitioners doc23637 none This project will carry out the research needed to update a classic publication entitled, Designing for Earthquakes, originally published in . One of the few technical documents that dealt with seismic design for members of the architecture profession, this publication is now out of print. The new document will improve vastly on the earlier publication by incorporating advances that have been made in engineering knowledge and the development of the concept of Performance Based Seismic Design. The absence of technical seismic design information for architects has ignored the pivotal role they play in communicating seismic resistant strategies to building owners and community leaders. EERI will carry out the necessary research to gain a better understanding of the current status and limitations of seismic design education in university architecture and continuing education programs, identify the kinds of information and training that architects need to better understand and design for specific seismic performance levels, update the chapters of the publication, and finally, add several new chapters that reflect current engineering research and topics that were not considered two decades ago. The final publication will enable architects to play a significant role in designing a safer society doc23638 none Long-Term Degradation Mechanisms of Bond in Concrete Reinforced with Fiber Reinforced Polymers Thomas E. Boothby, The Pennsylvania State University Charles E. Bakis, The Pennsylvania State University The repair of the nation s deteriorating infrastructure requires the development and qualification of new materials. A class of composite materials known as fiber reinforced polymers (FRP), originally developed through basic research for use in the aerospace industry, have been gaining acceptance over the last two decades as suitable materials for reinforcement and repair of concrete structures, as well as for other construction applications. These materials have the advantage of exceptional strength-weight ratios and resistance to corrosion. However, the widespread adoption of these materials to repair and reinforcement of bridges, buildings, and other structures requires an understanding of the complex processes of environmental degradation, so that the material can be designed and built to be sufficiently durable. FRP s applied to reinforcement for concrete may be internal, such as reinforcing bars, or external, such as adhered plates or sheets. The external reinforcement may be used to repair or strengthen existing structures. In all cases, the ability of the material to bond to concrete over the lifetime of the structure (50-100 years, typically), and under continual environmental attack--due to acid rain, freeze-thaw, heat and humidity, etc.--is critical to its success as a reinforcing material. The proposed research will examine in detail the characteristics of bond between FRP reinforcing, both external and internal, and concrete, and the process of degradation of this bond due to age, long-term loading, and environmental effects. The research will investigate small and intermediate scale specimens aged in outdoor environments in temperate and tropical climates, and subjected to accelerated environmental conditioning. The research will enable designers of these materials to predict their durability with increased confidence doc23639 none This project will build information retrieval interfaces for the rapidly expanding but virtually unstudied domain of biodiversity databases. An understanding of the nature and magnitude of biological diversity is fundamental to most pressing environmental and conservation debates. Biodiversity databases contain organism-related information such as distribution, taxonomy, natural history, and conservation data. This project will combine information visualization techniques and rapid feedback dynamic query interfaces coupled with an aggressive approach of working with representative users at all levels, from design through evaluation. It will also utilize zoomable interfaces to allow users to navigate multiple hierarchies, in order to visually accommodate highly interconnected data. The goals of the project are: To develop a searching interface for biodiversity databases targeting domain-novice adults. To build interfaces combining folk and scientific understanding. To evaluate the developed interfaces and compare them to existing interface models in the biodiversity domain doc23640 none RCS structures consisting of reinforced concrete columns and steel beams are a cost-effective type of construction in seismic zones. Models for RCS joints have been restricted to either strength models or monotonic force-deformation models based on experimental results. The behavior of joints typically encountered in frame structures, such as connections with strong outer panels and T-configurations, is not well known. Inelastic behavior of connections with strong outer panels could significantly differ from that of joints with strong inner panel. Bearing failures might represent a threat in T-joints because of the lack of a column section above the connection. Macro models that simulate the behavior of RCS connections in shear and bearing for performance-based design will be developed based on new and existing experimental and analytical results. These models will include the effect of confinement, concrete softening, and relative strength contribution from shear resistance mechanisms on hysteretic response of RCS joints doc23641 none There are many different sources from which relevant information can be obtained for an intelligence task at hand, such as an analysis of operations planning by Al Qaeda. The accuracy of this information is frequently imperfect. Information obtained from each source is frequently also different in structure and scope. XML has emerged today as the standard for information exchange. Its flexibility permits the representation of information from heterogeneous sources in a single unified framework. The goal of this project is to manage uncertain (probabilistic) data, represented in XML. While there have been previous efforts to develop probabilistic relational systems, the need for representing and querying uncertain information is much greater for loosely structured data not readily amenable to a relational representation. XML data poses several modeling challenges that are the focus of this project: due to the data having (an inclusion hierarchy) structure, probabilities cannot be assigned independently; due to XML elements occurring at multiple granularities, probabilities may be assigned at multiple levels; due to the possibility of missing and repeated sub-elements, one may not be able to obtain complete distributions doc23642 none P.I. Webster, Donald (Georgia Tech) Proposal #: The PIs propose to develop a new apparatus to simulate oceanic turbulence in the laboratory. The work proposed is a one-year effort to complete the design, construct, and validate the apparatus. The proposed equipment is superior to traditional designs, such as grid-oscillating tanks, because of greater isotropy, improved homogeneity, increased simplicity, increased controllability, increased transportability, and reduced cost. The system consists of a cubic Plexiglas box with an actuator located at each corner. Each actuator alternatively forces fluid out of and draws fluid into a small hole in the box wall. This action induces a turbulent pulsed jet originating from each corner aimed at the box center; the net result of the eight actuators is a highly isotropic and homogeneous turbulent region in the volume surrounding the box center. This system is based on a previous apparatus constructed for use with gases. Once validated, the system will have broad application for research in physical and biological oceanography as well as fundamental fluid mechanics doc23643 none The growing popularity of mobile devices with wireless capabilities imposes new and fundamental challenges in extending the capabilities of wired Internet applications to the wireless domain. This project will investigate proxy-based techniques for enabling the next generation of mobile multimedia and web applications. The proposed research will focus on three characteristics of mobile environments, namely client mobility, intermittent connectivity, and resource-poor nature of mobile devices. Research issues that will be addressed in this project include (i) power-friendly streaming techniques and real-time handoffs for mobile multimedia applications, and (ii) caching and dissemination of time-varying and location-dependent data accessed by mobile web applications. The proposed techniques will be evaluated using an eclectic mix of simulation, analysis and prototype implementation. The significance of the proposed research arises from the widespread and growing use of mobile devices that provide ubiquitous, wireless access to data on the Internet. The likely impact of this research will be to advance the state of the art in proxy-based infrastructures for next-generation mobile multimedia and web applications doc23644 none Qing Huo Liu Duke University This research aims to develop a novel framework for rapid and accurate processing of geophysical subsurface measurements in multilayer media. At present, only 2-D mappings (i.e., the low-resolution images on the ground surface) are available, greatly limiting the target depth information. Due to the excessive computational demand, previous inverse scattering algorithms for these sensors have been developed, but only for objects in a homogeneous background medium. This new computational framework is expected to dramatically improve the way environmental site characterization is being performed. The investigator will develop rapid and accurate computational algorithms for the process- ing of some of the arguably most important measurements in environmental site characteriza- tion and oil exploration, namely electromagnetic induction (EMI), ground penetrating radar (GPR), surface seismic, and borehole sonic imaging measurements in 3-D heterogeneous, multilayer media. These algorithms, coupled with large-scale computing and visualization platforms, form a novel framework for current and future environmental site characterization where 3-D subsurface structures can be directly investigated, and sensor arrays can be adap- tively optimized. The main contributions of this research are: (1) Rapid inversion methods based on accelerated extended Born Rytov approximations in layered media; (2) High-fidelity imaging algorithms based on preconditioned contrast source inversion methods in a multi- layer background; (3) A 3-D imaging and adaptive optimization framework using these fast inverse scattering algorithms for multi-sensors. These approaches are expected to yield a high resolution because they account for the important multiple scattering effects that cause the resolution degradation in previous linear inversion methods. The development of the al- gorithms for objects embedded in multilayer media represents significant advances in inverse scattering and its applications in environmental site characterization and oil exploration doc23645 none The minimum signal-to-noise ratio required for convergence to error-free transmission, and the optimal allocation of power in pilot and coded symbols, are some of the issues that are investigated for a wide variety of adaptive iterative receiver architectures. Regarding propagation modeling for the indoor environment, the approach followed herein is a direct divergence from the classical approaches that include either measurements, or the well-established ray-tracing techniques. In particular, ultra-fast algorithms for the numerical solution of the electromagnetic problem are developed. These algorithms result in almost exact solutions that can be evaluated with complexity comparable to the less accurate ray-tracing techniques doc23646 none Proposal Proposal ITR: E-neighbors: Social Networks and Neighborhood Social Capital in the Internet Age Keith Hampton, MIT This research addresses concerns about the impact of Internet and computer use on community and family life. Through an empirical analysis of four case studies, this research project examines the current relationship between Internet use and the size and composition of people s social networks, and ii) explores the potential for new information and communication technologies to expand social networks, social capital and community involvement at the local level. This project is motivated by recent concerns that Americans have became more cynical; are spending less time with friends, relatives and neighbors; and have become less involved in clubs and organizations. Past research has concluded with mixed results as to whether the Internet further dissociates people from those around them, or if it holds the potential to reconnect the disaffiliated. The adult residents of four Boston area neighborhoods have been asked to complete detailed surveys on the composition, structure, and supportive content of their personal and neighborhood social networks. This project will analyze the results of those surveys and compare residents based on their level of technology use and the structure of their social networks. Following the first wave of surveying three of the four neighborhoods will be given access to a series of Internet services designed to facilitate communication and the sharing of information at the neighborhood level. A second and third waves of surveying will compare the three experimental neighborhoods with a control group, examining the impact of the provided Internet services on residents social networks and their involvement in neighborhood and community activities. It is vital to address concerns about declining of social capital in America, and any role that the Internet and home computing might have in continuing or reversing this decline. While the existing trend of reduced community participation originates to early to be associated with new information and communication technologies, the fear is that home computing will further accelerate this trend. The project investigators expect that this is not the case. Previous research in this area often privileges the Internet as a social system removed from the other ways people communicate. Peering into cyberspace and ignoring the network of social relations that extended to other social settings, fails to consider the crosscutting nature of community, including the many ways and the many places people interact. By embracing a social network perspective this project will demonstrate that Internet users have larger, more diverse social networks, and that they are more active communicators both on and off line. This research will also demonstrate that the growth of home computing and Internet use has the potential to reverse the existing trend of community noninvolvement. This study will show that the introduction of Internet services designed for use at the neighborhood level can increase the size and diversity of local social networks. Previous research points to the role of this type of social capital in facilitating a number of positive community outcomes, including; increased housing values and the prevention of neighborhood decline; helping youth find job contacts and avoiding social problems including, drugs, crime and teen pregnancy; increased neighborhood safety and reducing crime; and increases overall health doc23647 none The sheer size of the World-Wide Web mandates the provision of portals, hotlists, and other catalogs that organize Web content in a domain-oriented manner. However, the quality of the information contained is subject to degradation as content changes, sites reorganize, and host connectivity fluctuates. Simply detecting that a resource has changed is easy, but determining whether that change is significant requires understanding of the context in which the resource is used. This project will improve the stability of collections of Web pages, allowing the development of predictable collections that overcome the inherent instability of the World-Wide Web. To accomplish this goal, the project will investigate the applicability of semantic descriptors provided by collection creators and implicit contextual information extracted from the collection doc23648 none Jones This exploratory syudy aims to assess the relevance of two perspectives policy dynamics and policy learning for understanding domestic policy changes for the Arctic. Specifically, the political science team will assess whether the construction of a Canadian database capable of monitoring public change relevant to the Canadian North is feasible and whether a policy learning prspective can be applied to the study will consist of examination of the potential quantitative data sources for Arctic policy monitoring in Canada and some field travel to gain understanding of policy networks in the Canadian setting doc23649 none Reducing energy consumption is a key challenge in the design of modern microprocessors. Until recently, the primary source of energy dissipation in CMOS microprocessors has been the dynamic switching of load capacitances, but with continuing reductions in feature size and the accompanying reductions in threshold voltage, static leakage power is increasing exponentially. Most leakage power is dissipated on critical paths, especially after slower, low-leakage transistors are used on non-critical paths. To reduce leakage energy further, it is necessary to dynamically deactivate the fast leaky transistors on critical paths when they are not needed. This project is developing fine-grain dynamic leakage reduction techniques, whereby small pieces of an active processor are put to sleep for short periods of time. The project is investigating circuit-level leakage reduction technique that have low sleep transition energy and rapid wakeup times, together with micro-architectural and compiler techniques that increase the sleep time of micro-architectural components without impacting performance or dynamic power dissipation. Accurate static power models that capture the sleep-time dependence of leakage energy are being developed for use with architectural simulators. This work enables a new class of limited critical activity architectures, where fast but power hungry logic can be selectively enabled to speed critical paths while limiting overall power consumption doc23650 none Wide band gap GaN-based semiconductors are attracting increasing attention due to their importance in modern electronics. The applications of GaN necessitate the controlled modification of its fundamental electronic properties, in addition to the availability of high quality material. The spectral response of the GaN-based photovoltaic detectors is generally limited by the large absorption coefficient at high energies and the small minority carrier diffusion length. Recent design changes, to overcome these limitations, include the use of p-i-n instead of p-n junction [1-4], substitution of GaN by AlxGa1-xN [1-3] or semitransparent recessed windows [2], and a back-illuminated detector configuration [3]. However, a tuning of fundamental (Al)GaN properties, to boost the performance of III-Nitride devices, was never directly considered. The innovation in this proposal is to significantly enhance a photovoltaic detector performance by tailoring the minority carrier diffusion length in (Al)GaN. The diffusion length is a crucial parameter for the detector quantum efficiency and photoresponse. The underlying concept is defined by the PI.s recent findings [5-8] that electron injection into p-(Al)GaN from the application of an external voltage in a solid state device--p-n junction or Schottky barrier-increases the critical minority carrier diffusion length and lifetime. Consistent changes were observed in other material properties, including luminescence and spectral photoresponse, and were attributed to charging of deep metastable Mg-acceptor-related centers [6]. The practical significance of this research is a long-term (days), revolutionary (up to an order of magnitude!) performance enhancement for (Al)GaN-based photovoltaic detectors, achieved through short time (at most sec) electron injection. This is because the increased diffusion length improves minority carrier collection and eliminates the dead space , where carriers recombine before they are collected. The proposed project is of high risk, since it must be determined whether the novel electron injection-induced effects in p-(Al)GaN [5-8] are universal in nature and represent a fundamental property of the p-type material, or if instead they depend on the material s quality, growth, and processing conditions. If, indeed, the effects are universal, a high pay off will be manifested in a development of this novel and simple approach to revolutionize photovoltaic detector performance by manipulating the material.s transport properties, which will likely be used in combination with design and technology improvements. Success in this SGER application will lead to the implementation of this approach in commercial detectors, and will advance the frontiers of this technology for use in other bipolar devices for which the diffusion length is critical (transistors, thyristors) [6]. It is planned to submit a GOALI proposal (with Corning) based on success of this project. The broader impact of this research will be a dipper understanding of electron transport in GaN and related compounds, the integration of research with education, and partnership with industry doc23651 none Patrick O. Bobbie (Southern Polytechnic State University), Brian Davis (Kennesaw Mountain High School), and Jennifer L. Uboh (South Cobb High School) Institution: Southern Polytechnic State U., TITLE: ITR: A Community Based Partnership for Community-Based Education (COPIRE) This ITR- and ITWF-funded project is a partnership between Southern Polytechnic State University (SPSU) (a suburban technology-focused institution), Kennesaw Mountain High (KMH) School (a new school with a magnet program) and South Cobb High (SCH) School (an established school, also with a magnet program). The project is driven by an overarching goal of establishing a community-based partnership, which focuses on an integration of education, research, and training in the design and development of embedded system simulations. The motivation for the project stems from 1) the plausibility of extending embedded system research knowledge to high school students and 2) enhancing their opportunities and chances in the field. SPSU is involved in a Georgia statewide research initiative, Yamacraw, which is focussed on embedded software development and the design of broadband (high-speed) communications systems, devices, and chips. SPSU s partnership project is designed to dovetail with Yamacraw to take advantage of the research resources of Yamacraw and to train students early in the academic pipeline. SPSU is: 1. Partnering with KMH and SCH to select a cohort of both non-minority and minority students - females and males - at the 11th and 12th grade levels and SPSU undergraduates to be involved in various hands-on research projects. The students are participating in the program for 7 weeks during the summer and once a week when school is in session for 3 years; 2. Cstablishing a training, mentoring, role modeling, and a management group, which involves Yamacraw graduate students and the PIs, to support the program; and 3. Continually assessing and measuring achievements along the pipeline to ensure successful transfer of students across its stages doc23652 none Existing methods to validate mobile code integrity and author authentication include using certificates, encrypting the code, and using digital signatures to sign applications. This proposal addresses the challenge of providing users with a system that can overcome the weaknesses of certificates (which require additional bandwidth) and conventional signatures (which can be removed) without becoming as obtrusive as encrypted code. This research proposes a novel approach in which the code serves as its own authentication device. The overall goal of this proposed research is to develop both the foundations and a unifying framework for ensuring integrity and authentication of mobile code, and then to build a prototype environment consisting of a set of automatic tools that embody the developed techniques. The results will be: (1) techniques for statically analyzing mobile code representations to efficiently compute a tamper detection mark and to embed, extract, and validate the mark, (2) static analysis techniques for generating a unique program fingerprint to be used as a less stringent form of tamper detection and for intellectual property protection, (3) a suite of platform-independent tools that automate the process of ensuring integrity and authentication for mobile code, (4) thorough experimental evaluation of the developed techniques, and (5) increased participation of undergraduates in experimental computer science research, with particular attention to encouraging the pursuit of graduate education and women in computer science. This proposed research represents a significant step towards ensuring high confidence in the integrity of mobile code, which is becoming a major component of software systems exploiting the Internet doc23653 none This research will study the SPMP (Selective Private Model-based Prediction) problem demonstrated with the following scenario: A client with a private input wants to use a server s private model to make predictions; however, neither side wants to disclose its private data to anybody. More specifically, the research will study the problem for selected models including the Hidden Markov Model, the Neural Network Model, the Bayesian Network Model, and the Decision Trees Model. The goal is to develop efficient and practical solutions that enable such type of privacy preserving prediction. The project will investigate two approaches: commodity-server approach and multiple-server approach. The commodity-server approach uses the commodities (data) from a third party to preserve the confidentiality of the private data. The multiple-server approach uses duplicate servers so no single server can learn all information about the client s data. Based on these two approaches, various data disguising techniques will also be studied. Efficient solutions to the SPMP problems enable model owners to provide new forms of e-commerce services while protecting customers private information. Furthermore, the results, methodologies, and the building blocks gained from the proposed activity can provide invaluable understanding and insights into the Secure Multiparty Computation (SMC) research, and help to advance and expand the areas of SMC research doc23654 none GOALI: Reflective Crack Control Treatment and Design Procedures: A New Integrated Approach Proposal Number: PIs: Glaucio H. Paulino, Philip Blankenship and William Buttlar The University of Illinois will collaborate with researchers and staff from Koch Materials Company to vigorously expand fundamental knowledge of damage mechanisms in reflective crack control systems. The industry-academia partners will address the aforementioned problem through an advanced laboratory testing and instrumentation program, development of new models to field performance data. As the industry partner to this venture, Koch Materials Company will provide: (1) annual matching funds; (2) technical expertise, including access to field installation and performance data; (3) laboratory and field materials for laboratory testing at UIUC, and; (4) mentoring of UIUC students through extended site visits at the national laboratory in Wichita, Kansas, and by serving on doctoral thesis committees. Combined with the University of Illinois Kent Memorial Scholarship Fund, matching funds are proposed at a level of 168% of the requested NSF GOALI funds. The computational and laboratory facilities available at UIUC to bear upon the proposed research problem are truly world-class, and include the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Advance Transportation Research and Engineering Laboratory (ATREL). As a result of the proposed three-way leveraging, the research team will consist of two cross-discipline faculty members, three doctoral students, one undergraduate research assistant per year, several industry researchers from Koch Materials Company, and at least one student per year from the Summer Graduate Minority Program hosted at ATREL, each summer doc23655 none A technique has been identified that will enable ultra high-density electronic packaging connectivity: chip to package; package to socket; and board to board (connector). Named AC coupled interconnect , this approach has the potential to enable a massive increase in the functional density of connections across all layers of electronic packaging and permit pin counts to continue scaling. This technique will allow microprocessor chips to have thousands of pins, instead of the hundreds enabled today. It will allow connectors and sockets to also support thousands of pins. This will lead to faster computers, networking systems, etc. The central thesis is this effort hinges on the recognition that the DC component of a digital signal carries no information, and that non-contacting AC connections can be built a lot denser and simpler than DC connections. An array of non-contacting structures is inherently denser, more compliant and more mechanically robust than an array of contacting structures. By imposing direct contacts only where DC current transfers are needed, this approach will allow very high density interconnects to be realized and alleviate the compliance and rework problems encountered in other high density interconnect technologies. The AC connections can be inductive, capacitive, or a combination of the two doc23656 none New local-domain helioseismic observations reveal the presence of complex, large-scale, horizontal sub-solar-surface flows. These remarkable weather-like flow patterns, now called Solar Subsurface Weather, are occurring within a zonal shear layer in which the rotational angular velocity increases rapidly with depth. The flows possess intricate patterns that change from one day to the next, accompanied by steady large-scale handed zonal jets and meridional circulation cells. Synoptic maps of this solar weather indicate that the Sun s magnetic field modulates flow speeds and directions. This effort will (1) develop an improved ring-diagram analysis technique that will be applied to the GONG+ data to provide continuous real-time coverage of solar weather, (2) use the synoptic solar weather maps to better characterize the magnetic modulation, (3) determine if the modulation can be used to predict and forecast magnetic eruptive activity in the solar atmosphere, and (4) evaluate angular momentum transport within the solar convection zone with the goal of understanding how the Sun maintains its observed differential rotation doc23657 none Data storage systems represent one of the pillars supporting the modern information age. Advances in computing and communication technologies, and the networks that incorporate them, have increased the demand for high capacity data storage devices in applications ranging from biological research (e.g., the visualization and analysis of massive multimedia data-sets) to consumer electronics (e.g., the storage of high-resolution image, audio, and video data in digital cameras). The research addresses analytic and numerical methods for determining the information-theoretic limits on achievable storage densities and data transfer rates in recording channels. It also develops and evaluates modulation, coding, and signal processing techniques that can approach or achieve these limits. The research considers both one-dimensional channel models applicable to track-oriented storage devices, such as disks and tapes, as well as higher-dimensional models relevant to exploratory page-oriented and volumetric storage technologies, such as holographic recording and thermomechanical recording based upon atomic force microscopy. More specifically, new information-theoretic and algorithmic methods are being used to study lower and upper bounds on the capacity of recording channels, using analytical and empirically-based models for both longitudinal and perpendicular recording systems. Bounds on the information rates of channels in two and higher dimensions are also being developed. In order to achieve performance approaching the theoretical limits, new signal processing and coding methods are required. In the area of constrained modulation coding, the project is exploring the analysis and design of one-dimensional constrained codes that more efficiently combine the functions of modulation and error-correction. The nascent theory of constrained coding in two and higher dimensions is also being investigated, with a focus on fundamental problems, such as representation of multi-dimensional constrained systems, determination of constraint capacity, and efficient encoding and decoding algorithms. Channel coding techniques based upon concatenation architectures, graphical code models, and iterative decoding have been shown to effectively achieve capacity on certain memoryless channels. The channel coding component of this project addresses theoretical and algorithmic problems associated with the application of these new and powerful coding concepts to data storage channels. In particular, the research considers the design and performance analysis of turbo-like and low-density parity-check codes for channels with intersymbol-interference, the trade-offs between latency and complexity in message-passing decoder architectures, and new approaches to combining coding, equalization, and detection that can more closely approach the recording channel capacity. The project also addresses fundamental problems of channel coding and detection in two-dimensional recording systems doc23658 none Malicious code poses a significant threat to our society, which is becoming increasingly reliant on networked computer systems for commerce and communication. Malicious software, including viruses, worms, and Trojan Horses, has the potential to disrupt communications and threaten the stability of the Internet as a whole. Therefore the objective of this research is analysis, detection, and mitigation of malicious code. The many types of malicious code are being investigated and grouped by exploited vulnerability and effect. This makes it possible selectively to target each exploit class separately. Previous approaches to the analysis of malicious code relied on static reverse engineering, confined execution (via program language sandboxing), or network traces. These approaches are often inadequate for increasingly complex malicious code that may be self-modifying, using run-time encryption or dynamic polymorphism. Dynamic malicious code requires dynamic tools for analysis, detection, and mitigation. Therefore new dynamic tools to permit such analysis are being developed, together with security enhancements to allow detection and mitigation of known malicious code types. The research approach is to use run-time binary translation to achieve transparent code monitoring and rewriting. A prototype implementation of a system for software assurance and security based on binary translation is being developed, and the effectiveness of the solution and its potential deployment cost are being investigated doc23659 none Efficient reasoning about three-dimensional visibility is a challenging problem in many research areas and applications, including computer graphics (radiosity, virtual reality walkthroughs), robotics (sensor-based navigation, visual surveillance), computer vision (recognition, model building), architecture, urban planning, and visualization in computational biology. Visibility issues have been considered for four decades in these areas however, most early work has focused on computing visibility from a single viewpoint, while modern techniques require more global visibility information. Global visibility describes the visibility relationships etween objects that are more complex than points: visibility from a volumetric region of space, limits of umbra and penumbra with respect to an extended light source, mutual visibility etween pairs of objects, and loci of structural changes of visibility. Although great strides have een made in understanding visibility through the introduction of visibility space partitions and the visibility complex, they have so far had little impact on applications. This is due to several reasons: 1) worst-case theoretical complexity bounds are discouraging 2) there are many degenerate cases that must be handled, making it difficult to make robust implementations 3) equivalences in visibility lead to a four-dimensional cell decomposition, which is difficult to visualize 4) cells can be extremely complicated (some include holes). This work will make 3D visibility computations practical by approaching the problem in two parallel, integrated tracks. One involves the investigation of several key issues that will make 3D visibility algorithms more attractive and practical in applications: 1) performing practical complexity analysis that captures the expected performance for models that are typically used in applications, as opposed to theoretical worst-case ounds derived from uncommon pathological cases 2) rather than taking a generic precompute and return everything approach, we would like the amount of precomputation, information stored in data structures, and extraction algorithms to be nicely tailored to the number of queries and the type of information arises in a particular application 3) traversal through the space of visibility rays will be facilitated through the development of decomposition algorithms based on critical events and Morse theory 4) we will develop techniques for reasoning about the evolving shadow space (set of points not visible), which is required for many problems that involve moving viewpoints. The second track involves the development of a 3D visibility library ased on robust visibility primitives. We expect to make an immediate impact on applications by making this library available for free to other researchers. The library will serve both as a helpful visualization and evaluation tool during the development of the research, and as a way to stimulate other interest and applications of 3D visibility after the work is completed. This effort, combined with the understanding gained from investigating the key visibility issues, is expected to make a broad impact on a wide array of applications that depend on efficient processing of visibility information doc23660 none Game consoles, with price points below $300, performance rivaling or exceeding that of PCs, and graphics capabilities recently found only on high-end visualization supercomputers, are the vanguard of yet another computing generation . computing on toys. Moreover, market forces and fierce vendor competition (e.g., among Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony) continue to fuel technical innovation and performance improvements on these game platforms, creating research and development incentives and deployment opportunities in new domains. This proposal outlines a research plan to assess the utility and performance of game systems for both scientific computing and high-resolution visualization. This assessment of game systems will be based on development of a suite of adaptive performance analysis tools that support both offline and online performance optimization and their application to a suite of scientific and visualization codes. This effort leverages proposed Red Hat and NCSA software enhancements to PlayStation2 Linux software. In addition we currently are negotiating with Sony to acquire and deploy a large PlayStation2 cluster at NCSA for experimental assessment and scientific visualization. Our computing on toys software research plan focuses on three areas: (a) offline, multilevel performance instrumentation of applications and system software, (b) online, adaptive selection of multi-version code execution, and (c) experimental assessment using large-scale scientific applications and visualization software. New hardware performance measurements, instrumented scientific and graphics libraries, and performance derivatives, all integrated with our SvPablo performance analysis infrastructure, will provide the requisite data to move iterative performance tuning from an ad hoc style to one based on intelligent feedback and suggestions. The offline version of this SvPablo extension will accept performance metrics from hardware, software, and library instrumentation and generates suggestions for tuning locations and options using a fuzzy logic rule base that embodies performance tuning suggestions for the Sony PlayStation2 doc23661 none This project develops a decision-theoretic framework for planning and control of multi-agent systems by formalizing the problem as decentralized Markov process. It applies to a wide range of application domains in which decision-making must be performed by multiple collaborating agents such as information gathering, distributed sensing, coordination of multiple robots, as well as the operation of complex human organizations. While substantial progress has been made in planning and control of single agents using MDPs, a similar formal treatment of multi-agent systems has been lacking. Existing techniques tend to avoid a central issue: agents typically have different information about the overall system and they cannot share all this information all the time. Sharing information has a cost that must be factored into the overall decision process. Three approaches to communication are studied based on (1) a cost benefit analysis of the amount of communication, (2) search in policy space, and (3) transformations of the more tractable centralized policies into decentralized policies. The resulting techniques are evaluated in the context of several realistic applications. This research facilitates a better understanding of the strengths and limitations of existing heuristic approaches to coordination and, more importantly, it includes new approaches based on more formal underpinnings doc23662 none State and local governments invest approximately $150 billion annually in the construction, improvement and rehabilitation of capital assets. In the past four decades, several states have developed decision support systems to facilitate the management of their physical infrastructures such as pavements, bridges and public transit infrastructure. The primary objective of these infrastructure management systems is to assist public works agencies with identifying the most cost-effective investments for limited budgets. The infrastructure management systems have been used primarily for a priori planning and less for posteriori analyses either to validate existing models or assess the cumulative value of investments. In , the Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) introduced a requirement for state and local government financial reporting using full accrual-based accounting practices such as are used in private industry. This approach covers all capital assets and long term liabilities including civil infrastructure, and requires the depreciation of assets unless two distinct criteria are met: 1. The government manages the infrastructure assets using an asset management system; and 2. The government demonstrates that the infrastructure assets are being preserved at, or above, a condition level originally established. The GASB requirement reflects the growing importance of managing civil infrastructure as assets. In this research project, a focused body of knowledge and analytical tools for portfolio asset management for civil infrastructure will be developed using Portfolio Theory. Existing infrastructure management systems will be integrated into more comprehensive asset management systems. Research results will be used to design a prototype asset management system from independent infrastructure management systems for highways, bridges and public transit facilities, to demonstrate how one would comprehensively value these assets as a portfolio, analyze tradeoffs for competing alternatives under uncertainty, and identify superior alternatives based on the expected value of the portfolio. The education plan will support practitioner needs for asset management as well. Research results will be used to extend the curriculum in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech to include quantitative theory and tools for integrated asset management of civil infrastructure, and to develop a short course on asset management for practitioners. Furthermore, it breaks new ground by introducing the paradigm of portfolio asset management for managing civil infrastructure and opens the way for subsequent applications of Portfolio Theory to civil infrastructure management doc23663 none Through this project, the National Science Foundation provides partial funding for the acquisition of instrumentation and equipment for the development of a Fuel Cell Laboratory in the University of Michigan for Control and Diagnostic Systems studies. The experimental set-up allows the implementation of multivariable controllers, fault detection, and diagnostic algorithms for the regulation of reactant flow and pressure, stack temperature, and membrane humidity. It is anticipated that the development and testing of real-time control and diagnostic systems will accelerate the use of Fuel Cells by enhancing their safety, increasing their efficiency, and ensuring their robustness in real world applications. The equipment acquisition places the University of Michigan in a prominent position in FC research. The university s strategic location and collaborations with the automotive industry generates synergistic mechanisms for research and for training the future technical and corporate leaders in the field doc23405 none Craig Douglas University of Kentucky Collaborative Research: ITR AP-Predictive Contaminant Tracking Using Dynamic Data Driven Application Simulation \(DDDAS\) Techniques This project will lead to a leap-ahead technology in simulation capabilities. Research in the development of new methods and algorithms for the specific application areas is needed. The dynamic application requirements will dictate computing systems support that includes systems software technologies, such as active middleware services for real time, dynamic reconfiguration capabilities, resource discovery, load balancing, security, fault tolerance, quality of service, and dynamic interfaces with field measurement systems. An encoded web stream set of contaminations from actual situations (both above ground and underground) will allow researchers besides us to tap into our virtual reality DDDAS environment. Visualization systems will allow us to work with a variety of real networks, sensors, and environments doc23665 none Main memory has long been the weak link in high-performance Internet-connected computer systems, sandwiched between continuing rapid increases in both network bandwidths and CPU performance. As networks reach 10 Gb s and CPU clock rates shoot past 2 GHz, the memory system is under more pressure than ever to keep up. Meanwhile, increased transistor counts are enabling integration of multi-megabyte caches and DRAM controllers directly on the processor device, with switched interconnects built from high-speed point-to-point channels carrying I O and memory coherence traffic between chips. This inflection point in the configuration, level of integration, and capacity of the memory hierarchy represents an opportunity to optimize the memory system for high-bandwidth Internet networking support. This research will (1) establish a baseline analysis to characterize the key bottlenecks of future memory hierarchies on Internet server workloads, and (2) evaluate specific system enhancements to address these bottlenecks, leading to more efficient, higher performance Internet server systems doc23666 none Joyce Funding is provided for a two year continuation of the principal investigator s studies on the long-term variability of the North Atlantic as an Accomplishment Based Renewal. This research project builds on the successful field program of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE), and the analysis of most of the cruise data and other data relating to decadal variability in the region. The specific topics that will be investigated are: (1) continued studies of zonal circulation using in-situ data and inverse methods for the 52W hydrographic section; (2) understanding of the nature and source of sub-annual energy in the subtropical gyre, which seems to dominate inter-annual energy both in the long Bermuda time series and for the altimeter; (3) investigation of the reason for strong persistence of SST anomalies in the region of the Slope Water south of Cape Cod; and extending the use of proxy data for the study of wintertime climate variability extending back into the 19th century to understand long-term cycles in sensitivity to the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO doc23667 none Role of information technology (IT) is recognized to be a critical component in the effort of improving national security, including homeland defense. Applications of importance to national security, such as aviation security, pose significant challenges to current information technology and provide excellent source for further research in developing next generation IT solutions. Recently, there is significant advance in applying techniques from database and information systems, knowledge representation, AI, information retrieval including text categorization, lexical and language analysis and others in developing a new generation of semantic technologies. Semantic technologies help in associating meaning of data and in more meaningfully organizing data, in meaningfully correlating data, as well as in converting data into information for more effective decision making and in finding information that contextually relevant to users needs. They help with syntactic and representational as well as semantic interoperability. This general area of research is also getting renewed attention now that there is considerable excitement in the vision of the Semantic Web, characterized as the next phase of the Web. Results from several of our past and continuing research projects have led to the development a semantic technology called Semantic Content Organization and Retrieval Engine (SCORE). Using SCORE s ability to quickly create ontology-driven agents without programming, it has been possible to (a) quickly create and maintain large knowledge bases (such as over one million entities and relationships per domain) base from multiple semi structured and structured sources of knowledge in largely (but not fully) automated ways, and (b) ability to create semantic (domain specific) metadata from unstructured (text), semi structured and structured sources of static and dynamic (e.g., query driven) content. This technology has also been commercialized and is being used in aviation security and intelligence applications. While specifics of these applications cannot be discussed due to government and agency regulations, and many technologically possible capabilities have yet to pass through policy considerations, we imagine a prototype application of homeland security interest that help in identifying and screening a passenger with respect to security risk to develop requirements for relevant IT research. Two important challenges posed by such an application include (a) rapid identification of semantic associations involving entities (such as a passenger or a group of passengers on a flight), and (b) knowledge discovery that identify semantic associations of interest (such as those that may pose a risk). Our goal is to research new techniques and improving effectiveness of techniques to identify semantic associations and knowledge discovery by exploiting a large knowledge base. Specific objectives include (a) ontology driven lazy semantic metadata extraction (i.e., annotation) to complement traditional active metadata extraction techniques, and (c) formal modeling and high-performance computation of semantic association discovery including ontology-based contextual processing and relevancy ranking of interesting relationships. Our approach involves bootstrapping earlier research on semantic metadata extraction, multi-ontology query processing and other tools from on-going InfoQuilt project so that we can create knowledge bases and metadata from publicly available sources to enable meaningful evaluation of the techniques doc23668 none A PI from Oregon State University plans to test the hypothesis that during authigenic uptake Mo isotopes are fractionated with the lighter isotopes being preferentially taken up relative to the heavy isotopes leaving behind a residual (dissolved) Mo pool that is isotopically heavy relative to seawater. To prove the hypothesis, the PI will analyze existing near surface (top 20 cm) porewater and sediment samples from the Peru Chile margin and the California margin for 98Mo and 95Mo to assess the early diagenetic behavior of Mo. In addition, a cruise is planned to the Santa Barbara Basin, CA, to collect and analyze deeper sediment and porewater samples from a region where sediments are exposed to continuously changing redox conditions. Results from these samples will determine under what conditions molybdenum isotopes fractionate and whether this fractionation is preserved in the sedimentary record. This information will help determine whether this isotope can be used as a proxy for identifying reducing conditions in sediments doc23669 none Devika Subramanian William Marsh Rice University Events, Patterns, and Analysis: Forecasting International Conflict in the Twenty-First Century This grant will support work on international conflict prediction using techniques such as data mining, statistical machine learning, and stochastic modeling. News data from such sources as Reuters, AP, cnn.com, and UPI will be used to extract data about political events. Each event will code with a time, list of participants and other standardized characteristics to support the analysis and forecasting doc23670 none This proposal concerns new improvements that have the potential to achieve significant speed-up for the fast multipole method (FMM) for use in solving the Helmholtz and other problems used to model phenomena encountered in electromagnetics, acoustics, biology etc. Solving larger problems holds promise for better design on the one hand, and elucidation of new physics biology on the other. Discretizations of the partial differential equations arising from these equations yield large systems of equations for which both direct and iterative solution techniques are expensive. The introduction by Rokhlin & Greengard of the FMM generated tremendous interest in the scientific computing community, as it demonstrated a way to generate structure and achieve fast solution of equations without relying on the discretization. Despite its promise, the algorithm has not achieved widespread implementation for many practically important problems that could use the promised speedups. Some researchers have reported that the approximate integrals both make implementation difficult, and in practice they have been shown to introduce stability problems. We have recently derived exact expressions for the translation and rotation of multipole solutions of the Helmholtz equation, which enable fast computation via simple recursions. Further we have obtained very promising results on the properties of the translation operators that enable creation of very tight error bounds. Our translations have the same asymptotic complexity as the standard integral expressions, but with much smaller coefficients. We have also found that the translation operator can be decomposed into the product of sparse recurrence matrices and this can be the basis for a T(p2) algorithm, which we propose to pursue. Based on these expressions, we will develop software for solution of different problems using the FMM. To be useful in pushing ahead the information technology revolution our software will be well documented and published in accessible peer reviewed forums. Such availability will act to improve adoption by large numbers of practitioners doc23671 none ions that are specific to the domain of streaming applications, and to develop checking and compilation tools for mapping them to the underlying operating system mechanisms and network protocols. The approach is based on the Infopipe programming model, a novel approach to building streaming applications, currently under development by the PIs. Experiments with an early prototype have shown Infopipes to be very promising. However, language tools for simplifying the programming task, checking correctness properties and ensuring adequate performance of complex Infopipelines do not currently exist. This proposal outlines the research involved in creating these tools and presents some novel ideas on the language primitives and tools for Infopipes, the kinds of Infopipe properties that can be automatically checked, and the conceptual foundation that enables this checking to be rigorous doc23672 none Evaluation and Personalization of Synthetic Voices This project addresses two key issues in the generation of natural sounding spoken output by computer. The first aspect provides an evaluation strategy for synthetic voices. With no clear objective measure for speech synthesis quality, it is hard to show improvement in systems and compare techniques. This work provides a detailed list of evaluation techniques for sub-parts of the synthesis process including: text analysis, lexical pronunciation, prosody, and phonetic quality. The techniques are designed to act on existing and newly developed voices in other languages, where measures are often harder to come by. Appropriate human experimentation is used to justify the given metrics. The second aspect of this work is to improve modeling of speaker-specific acoustic phonetics. In unit selection synthesis techniques, matching the lexicon with the actual spoken form of a particular speaker can introduce significant noise in the selection process. Speakers will have particular idiolects for their dialect and style. Using data-driven techniques, within knowledge-based frameworks, we derive appropriate segmentation types for unit selection synthesis. Results are released through CMU s http: festvox.org site doc23673 none Kara Peters (PI), North Carolina State University Mohammed Zikry (Co-PI), North Carolina State University Proposal No. Optimized Structural Damage Identification through Multi-Scale Embedded Sensing The proposed research has as its major aim the development of a unified sensing and fracture methodology that will be used to identify damage at different physical scales in metallic structural systems. New fabrication and processing techniques are used to embed multiplexed sensors in metallic systems, such that material mismatch impedances and residual stresses are minimized in both the sensors and the host structure. Displacement, displacement gradient, and strain fields from these sensors are then filtered and fused with recently developed three-dimensional constitutive and fracture methodologies to predict failure initiation and growth in crystalline solids. Failure modes and damage progression are categorized in terms of intergranular and transgranular fracture. A three dimensional thermo-mechanistic physically-based predictive framework is needed to understand interrelated effects, such as embedded sensors in host metallic materials, interfacial thermal, stress and strain gradients, and grain-boundary distributions and orientations on the structural response at the global level. This results in effective life cycle predictions that are based on physical material mechanisms, as opposed to current estimates based on inadequate local strain-field distributions. The coupling of sensor data fusion with the three dimensional predictive framework provides insight and understanding of events that are difficult, if not impossible, to experimentally study, such as subsurface damage and crack nucleation in structural systems. The realization of these interrelated research objectives could significantly improve engineering and scientific capabilities for developing a new generation of in-situ damage identification and mitigation systems doc23674 none Development of high throughput data acquisition technologies together with advances in computing, and communications have resulted in an explosive growth in the number, size, and diversity of potentially useful information sources. However, the massive size, heterogeneity, autonomy, and distributed nature of the data repositories present significant hurdles in extracting knowledge from this data. This research seeks to overcome these hurdles through the design, analysis, and implementation of: a) Efficient distributed and cumulative learning algorithms with provable performance guarantees (relative to their centralized or batch counterparts) for knowledge acquisition from distributed data sources; b) Customizable information extraction agents that can effectively exploit domain or context-specific ontologies supplied by the users to extract the information needed for learning (e.g., statistics) from distributed data sources despite differences in query capabilities, interfaces, ontologies, and access restrictions to facilitate analysis of heterogeneous distributed data from different perspectives. c) INDUS - a test-bed for knowledge acquisition from heterogeneous distributed data in computational molecular biology (e.g., characterization of protein sequence-structure-function relationships using diverse sources of biological data). The resulting algorithms and software can accelerate, potentially by an order of magnitude, the rate of scientific doc23675 none A jet engine failure at 30,000 feet or a power plant shutdown during peak operational hours can be costly from a human as well as financial standpoint. Well-established procedures exist to monitor and diagnosis fairly severe problems with rotating machinery but little progress has been made in developing techniques to detect subtle changes in machine condition for both improved diagnostics, and to develop prognostic procedures for determining remaining service life. The proposed project uses a novel application of Active Magnetic Bearings (AMBs) as actuators for applying a variety of known force inputs to a spinning rotor in order to monitor and evaluate response signals resulting from these inputs on-line. The proposed procedure allows for multiple forms of force input signals to be applied to a rotating structure. An important aspect of this approach is that the AMB(s) will be used in mid-shaft locations in conjunction with conventional support bearings. In this manner, the diagnostic prognostic procedures are developed here for use on any general rotating machine that can be designed or retrofitted with a single AMB actuator and still be supported in the original mechanical bearings. The ability to examine a variety of known inputs and resulting outputs for condition monitoring in rotating machinery is unprecedented and the proposed technique has broad implications for improving operational safety and reducing maintenance costs in rotor-bearing systems in the aerospace, power generation, and petrochemical industries. In addition, the very nature of the proposed procedure will ultimately facilitate machinery self-diagnostics and prognostics by allowing a method for self-testing doc23676 none The goal of this project is to gain a mechanistic understanding of the influences of climate variation on the population dynamics and production of target zooplankton species on Georges Bank (Calanus finmarchicus, Pseudocalanus moultoni, P. newmani, and Oithona similis) through its effects on advective transport, temperature, food availability, and predator fields. Using data analysis and models as tools, results acquired during the first three phases of GLOBEC are being incorporated into a new synthesis of the physical and biological processes regulating zooplankton abundance on the Bank. Physical models will be forced with measured daily, interannually variable data, and coupled to biological models synthesizing the detailed observations collected during the GLOBEC program. To understand the role of advection, and to disentangle the effects of physical and biological processes, a hierarchy of physical and biological models are being developed. These include 1-, 2-, and 3- D physical models, ecosystem models, and individual-based models (IBMs) for the target species. The IBMs are being coupled to 1D physical models designed to represent the characteristic environments of the different Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank subregions. Ultimately, the IBMs will be coupled to the full 3D physical ecosystem model through particle tracking. This will provide a physical and biological milieu in which to develop and probe hypotheses regarding the combined influences of physical and biological factors on the copepod population dynamics. Although the population dynamics in all broadscale survey years will be studied, initial investigations are concentrating on , and . The data sets are the most complete for these years, and SeaWiFS data are available for and . These years also represent a wide range of environmental conditions: an extensive winter bloom in the Gulf of Maine in related to Scotian Shelf inflow and increased stratification; a slightly warmer year in ; and stronger storm activity in than . In addition , and to a lesser extent , gave the indication of being strong years for haddock recruitment but apparently not for cod. Specific issues that are being investigated include: wind control of the advective supply of the target zooplankton species to Georges Bank during January-April; interannual and or event-level variations in the advective flux of Calanus finmarchicus to Gulf of Maine basin diapausing populations during June-April; interannual and or event-level variations in advective losses of copepods from Georges Bank and bank subregions; the influence of stratification on the planktonic ecosystem, and how this affects the population dynamics of the target zooplankton species through food and predation. As a link to Phase IV synthesis studies on target ichthyoplankton, this investigation provides mechanistic insight into the factors determining production of copepod prey for larval cod and haddock on the Bank. A number of students will be trained over the course of the Phase IV research. These students are being trained as broadly educated researchers adept at combining techniques from a variety of disciplines in their work. In addition, this is the first major independent funding source since graduation for two young investigators (Pringle, Gentleman doc23677 none With the rapid emergence of Internet-based techniques and the explosive growth of pervasive computing, there will be an exponential increase of customers accessing information through battery powered mobile devices. Data access techniques proposed for wired networks may not be feasible for mobile environments due to the limitations of bandwidth and power. Therefore, it has become necessary to re-evaluate and possibly redesign data access strategies to efficiently utilize bandwidth and power considering the limitations of mobile environments. In single-hop mobile environments, the research will address the issues associated with broadcasting and caching techniques, i.e., the energy consumption issue, the query latency issue, the bandwidth utilization issue, and the scalability issue. The research in multi-hop mobile environments concentrates on designing and evaluating cooperative caching techniques to reduce the bandwidth and power consumption, and to address scalability, cache consistency, and security issues. A testbed will be used to evaluate the proposed data access mechanisms in an integrated manner and evaluate the effects of various techniques on the overall system performance. The research results will have significant impacts on making pervasive computing more affordable to the increasing customer demands and more amenable to commercial, civilian, and military applications doc23678 none Fourier analysis appears in many of the celebrated cornerstones of theoretical computer science. It plays essential roles in expander graph construction and derandomization, complexity lower bounds, probabilistically checkable proof systems, quantum computing, lower bounds for distributed computation, and traditional applications to computer algebra. The majority of these applications involve the familiar framework of commutative Fourier analysis. The proposed project brings together a multidisciplinary research team to apply the beautiful tools of non-Abelian (that is, noncommutative) Fourier analysis to investigate open questions in two areas where non-Abelian groups have recently become very important: lower bounds for parallel computation and quantum algorithms. The program also further develops efficient algorithms for the discrete Fourier transform over finite non-Abelian groups. This project focuses on developing tools for separating the complexity classes ACC^0 and NC^1, in order to demonstrate that there are natural (polynomial-time computable) problems which simply cannot be parallelized in the sense of ACC^0. The project applies a new family of tools for separating such circuit classes, using non-Abelian Fourier analysis to bound their computational power. These tools apply also to the problem of solving equations over finite groups, and the development of new probabilistically checkable proof systems based on non-Abelian groups. In addition, the project applies non-Abelian Fourier analysis to develop improved lower bounds on the standard Quantum Fourier Transform approach to Graph Isomorphism and study quantum Monte Carlo algorithms. Finally, the project focuses on adaptations of Bratelli diagrams and quivers to develop classical and quantum algorithms for the non-Abelian Fourier transform itself doc23679 none Kannan Ramchandran U of Cal Berkeley This proposal addresses some important components in the theoretical and algorithmic signal processing machinery needed to make low-power, ubiquitous sensor networks a reality. The physical and hardware attributes as well as the computing and communication capabilities of these low-power, low-cost sensors, particularly those based on high-density MEMS devices, have the potential to revolutionize next-generation information technology. Indeed, next-generation MEMs sensors are expected to be very cheap and very small (of the order of one millimeter cube) with a communication range of several hundred meters and a bandwidth of tens to hundreds of kilobits per second. The challenge is to build a pervasive, reliable, mas-sively distributed, dynamically self-conguring dense sensor network system out of these low-cost, ubiquitous devices. While the hardware and computational infrastructure are following Moore s law, the system-level expertise in terms of both theoretical and algorithmic knowledge-base needed to fully harness the potential of this infrastructure is sadly lagging behind. The challenges presented by these networks are far beyond existing theories and algorithms, and in many cases require a fundamental paradigm shift from centralized to distributed architectures. This proposal is accordingly motivated at developing some important components of the signal processing and communication system machinery needed to make this dream a reality doc23680 none Kurt S. Anderson Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute NSF Proposal No. State-Time Approach for Analysis and Simulation of Complex Multicomponent Systems Using Future Massively Parallel Computing Resources The principal objectives of this work are to research state-time methods for performing analysis, simulation, and optimization of complex dynamic systems. The goal is to produce dynamic systems analysis formulations which will be able to more effectively and fully exploit anticipated massively parallel computing resources (i.e. 106 processors). The proposed space-time formulation permits the treatment of time within the equations of motion as a generalized coordinate. This permits the problem of performing the computer simulation, and associated analysis to be parallelized over both space and time, resulting in a far greater level of coarse grain parallelization with an associated decrease in simulation turnaround time. This significant increase arises from the fact that the most advanced of today s parallel dynamics analysis algorithms are sequential in time. Thus parallelization over the domain of the system using currently promoted methods is only beneficial when using a surprisingly limited number of processors, even if many are available. Parallelizing over both space and time results in a drastic increase in the number of coarse grain calculations that may be distributed over the available processors. By forming the equations and solving them in the proposed state-time manner, the level of required sequential calculation relative that which may be performed in parallel is reduced by a factor approximately equal to the number of temporal integration steps (often 105) which would have been performed using current approaches. The proposed method, if successful, will allow the use of more detailed models, for more complex systems, with results obtained at a small fraction of the time required using current formulations doc23681 none Sandeep Sandanandarao U of Michigan This proposal addresses some important components in the theoretical and algorithmic signal processing machinery needed to make low-power, ubiquitous sensor networks a reality. The physical and hardware attributes as well as the computing and communication capabilities of these low-power, low-cost sensors, particularly those based on high-density MEMS devices, have the potential to revolutionize next-generation information technology. Indeed, next-generation MEMs sensors are expected to be very cheap and very small (of the order of one millimeter cube) with a communication range of several hundred meters and a bandwidth of tens to hundreds of kilobits per second. The challenge is to build a pervasive, reliable, mas-sively distributed, dynamically self-conguring dense sensor network system out of these low-cost, ubiquitous devices. While the hardware and computational infrastructure are following Moore s law, the system-level expertise in terms of both theoretical and algorithmic knowledge-base needed to fully harness the potential of this infrastructure is sadly lagging behind. The challenges presented by these networks are far beyond existing theories and algorithms, and in many cases require a fundamental paradigm shift from centralized to distributed architectures. This proposal is accordingly motivated at developing some important components of the signal processing and communication system machinery needed to make this dream a reality doc23682 none Advances in earth sciences have spurred a large growth in spatial- temporal databases with multidimensional attributes. Unfortunately, the improvement in data collection techniques has not been accompanied with the efficient methods that analyze large databases, which currently limits their use. To address the need for facilitating large-scale knowledge discovery at a wide range of spatial-temporal datasets the objective of the proposed project is development of novel techniques for (1) task-specific data reduction in spatial-temporal databases; and (2) efficient knowledge discovery on reduced spatial-temporal data. The first task builds on the observation that the amount of collected data is not necessarily correlated with specific knowledge discovery tasks, and that real-life datasets are often highly redundant. The second task addresses a number of open questions for more efficient mining of reduced spatial-temporal datasets including exploring trade-offs between model complexity and data reduction for efficient learning, exploiting residual correlations for prediction, and task-specific partitioning of nonstationary spatial-temporal data. The proposed techniques will be evaluated on multi-source datasets with various complexities. This project will result in guidelines for effective dissemination of spatial-temporal data sets to wider research audience and algorithmic tools for more successful knowledge discovery from such data doc23683 none The projects to be undertaken here have as their goal a substantial increase in the number of African American Ph.D.s in mathematics, statistics and other quantitatively based disciplines. Objectives include: -Identifying of students at participating HBCUs who have the potential to obtain an advanced degree in a mathematical science or a field employing mathematical skills and methods. -Providing mentoring, nurturing and research experiences for the students identified above throughout their undergraduate careers. -Building bridges between participating HBCUs and majority institutions to provide a seamless transition to graduate school. These projects will be carried out by the Alliance for the Production of African American Ph.D.s in the Mathematical Sciences, a consortium of departments of mathematics, statistics and testing and measurement at the three Iowa State Regents Universities and four Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Alabama A graduate student assistants will be selected, where possible, from among the twenty-seven under-represented minority graduate students in the University of Iowa Department of Mathematics. Preference will be given to eligible Alliance Scholars; remaining positions will be filled by undergraduate students who will most benefit from the sort of experience provided here. Further information may be obtained by calling Phil Kutzko at 319-335- or sending him email at pkutzko@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu doc23684 none Continuing support via the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will permit U.S. ocean scientists in the academic research community to participate in specific activities of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) and the Scientific Committee for Oceanic Research (SCOR). These activities are of particular interest to the ocean sciences community and the National Science Foundation. ICES is an intergovernmental organization that coordinates data and information exchange regarding scientific research, management of fisheries, environmental monitoring, and oceanographic research matters that are of common interest to countries bordering the North Atlantic. SCOR serves primarily as an organization to facilitate international collaboration of ocean research through the formation of working groups and publication of findings on various marine topics. Under this award U.S. academic research scientists will participate in selected ICES and SCOR activities in - doc23685 none Ciardo - College of William and Mary This research is devoted to the development and implementation of novel sequential and parallel algorithms for the verification of asynchronous software systems, such as communication protocols and distributed or embedded software. Existing automated techniques based on state-space exploration, in particular symbolic model checking based on Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs), focus on verifying synchronous hardware and software. Although symbolic model checking may in principle be applied to asynchronous software systems as well, this poses new challenges that are not, or only insufficiently addressed in the literature. Most importantly, the inherent complexity of asynchronous software makes state-space exploration a time-bound problem, in addition to a memory-bound problem. The research addresses these two fundamental limitations by developing algorithms that employ Multi-valued Decision Diagrams (MDDs) and Boolean Kronecker Operators to encode sets of states and transitions, respectively, in contrast to BDDs traditionally used for both purposes. This paves the way for exploiting the property of event locality that is inherent in asynchronous software and, thereby, for greatly improving the efficiency of sequential algorithms and enabling their efficient parallelization doc23686 none This proposed research project aims to explore several unanswered questions in the area of differentiated services for next generation Internet. In particular, the issue of routing SLAs in the presence of multiple alternative physical paths is a topic that has been seldom researched upon. It is an important issue since the objective is to maximize the probability of success for an SLA without opting for over-provisioning. Also, in the presence of multiple physical paths, which is typical in large networks, there is a need to choose the optimal path based on appropriate criteria. The proposed research directly addresses this critical issue. Currently, there are no standard schemes for hierarchical QoS routing. One of the most crucial problems in hierarchical QoS routing is to make intelligent decisions in the presence of out-of-date or stale network stateinformation. The proposed research will address this issue by making use of local statistics collected at each router and obtaining a time history of the network state information. Furthermore, every domain will have a finite traffic handling capacity. This capacity is bound above by the domain topology and the maximum link bandwidth. For computing feasible paths, current QoS routing schemes take only the individual link bandwidth into account as a constraint but not the domain capacity as a whole. The research will address this shortcoming by incorporating the domain capacity as a constraint in the path computation algorithms. Additionally, this research project will also study the problem of splitting aggregated flows in a transit domain with the goal of maximizing the domain resource utilization. The motivation comes from the fact that splitting of aggregated flows will lead to better utilization of the network bandwidth doc23687 none This research project explores the extent to which the proliferation of technology-enabled, international distributed teams can serve a social as well as an economic good by promoting cross-national understanding and the competence of members. Two issues of theoretical and practical significance are examined in depth, subgroup dynamics and cross-national learning processes. Understanding these processes in such teams and the impact of the use of communication technologies on them are important objectives. Moreover, the research will consider the role that each process plays in team effectiveness. Psychological processes and behavior at the team and individual levels will be examined by means of an ethnographic field study in a large, internationally distributed company. Particular attention will be given to patterns of communication, use of communication technologies, and the sharing of contextual information. The research seeks to advance science through the development of theory and evidence concerning subgroup polarization and collaboration in distributed groups, cross-national learning processes in moderately heterogeneous international groups, and the impact of these processes on team effectiveness. Envisioned advances also include recommendations for the design of supporting collaborative technologies doc23688 none McLetchie Differences in life history traits (growth and reproductive rates) among individuals within a species can be explained by the existence of tradeoffs that prevent natural selection from optimizing all traits in all individuals. One phenomenon often responsible for generating tradeoffs is resource limitation where resources can be allocated to improve one trait, e.g. growth rate, or another trait, e.g. reproductive rate, but not both. In plants, one major limiting resource can be fixed carbon, which is produced by photosynthesis. Variation in photosynthesis can result in differences in the fixed carbon budget, leading to variation in life history traits among individuals. The goal of this project is to determine the relationship between photosynthetic levels and trait variation among individual plants. The study involves measuring photosynthesis and life histories of individual plants in controlled and natural environments. In general, linking different fields approaches often results in synergisms facilitating significant scientific advances. The proposed project will train the principal investigator to measure photosynthesis and interpret photosynthetic levels within the context of life history tradeoffs. In plants, there are few reports on the relationship between photosynthesis and life history, and understanding this relationship will provide insight into how plants respond to the environment. The project also allows for undergraduate student participation, thus enriching the educational experience of current and future student participants in the PI s laboratory doc23689 none Small-scale flow dynamics at low Reynolds numbers (Re) are important to phytoplankton cells in delivery of nutrients, sensory detection by and physical encounter with herbivores, accumulation of bacterial populations in the phycosphere or region immediately surrounding phytoplankton cells and coagulation of cells themselves as a mechanism terminating blooms. In nature most phytoplankton experience unsteady flows, i.e., velocities near the cells that vary with time due to the intermittency of turbulence and to discontinuous, spatially distributed pumping by herbivores. This unsteadiness has not previously been taken into account in models or measurements with plankton. Moreover, there have been decade- and century- long lags in moving relevant models of unsteady flow effects at low Re from applied mathematics and engineering to ecological applications. Engineering models show unsteady effects due to the history of formation of spatially extensive flow perturbations or wakes should be important to unsteady motions of moderately small biota. This project will address these affects. Non-swimming phytoplankton, and in particular diatoms, will be used as the simplest case where important unsteady flow behaviors should arise. This research activity will include a multi-level educational program, aimed at graduate research assistants, undergraduate research interns, undergraduate marine sciences majors and high-school teachers. Low-Re behaviors afford unusual opportunities to experience how mathematics, physics and biology inseparably catalyze understanding of phenomena that run counter to intuition. This activity will also include international collaborations with world experts on organism-flow interaction in Cambridge (T.J. Pedley) and Copenhagen (T. Kiorboe & A.W. Visser). The overall goals of the activity are to accelerate the flow of understanding from modelers to measurers to users of the information and back again. Educational materials that project U.S. national standards will be developed during intensive summer workshops with the high-school teachers and be made available on the web. Unsteady flow effects on phytoplankton will be predicted with explicit models based on singularity solutions (that involve the useful simplification that force is applied to the fluid at a small number of points) and mathematical models that include both the near field at low Re and the far field over a range of Re, both representative of nature. Singularity solutions allow explicit treatment of the role of complex cell shapes. Scaled-up analog models will be placed in a large Couette vessel to better visualize behaviors for both the research and teaching efforts. Natural-scale, but simplified, unsteady flows will be produced in smaller Couettes (nested, counter-rotating cylinders with seawater in the gap between the two cylinders) containing live phytoplankton and will be quantified by magnifying, particle-imaging velocimetry (PIV). Image analysis will be used to measure translation, rotation and flexural deformation of the phytoplankton. These studies will test various hypotheses derived from the general thesis that cell shapes and mechanical properties interact with unsteady flows to produce potentially fitness-enhancing, relative motions of the cell or chain and its surrounding fluids. A basic hypothesis is that unsteady fluid motion will interact with bending of cells to produce relative motion of fluid and phytoplankter. A very exciting prospect is that periodic instabilities known to arise at low Re may allow flexible organisms to act as self-organizing engines - through elasticity to harness energy from decaying turbulence and thereby move relative to the fluid. It is also expected that this study of passively bending structures in unsteady flows will help to understand the use of flexible appendages in swimming. The work is likely to aid significantly in associating functions with the shapes and spines of microplankton that are used in the identification of fossil specimens. By including relevant, unsteady fluid motions at low Re, the study will also provide firmer linkages between form and function in living plankton in the size range from 10 - mm that many large phytoplankton, invertebrate and fish larvae and other small zooplankton occupy doc23690 none The world is rapidly being populated by a wide array of information appliances such as computers, personal digital assistants, video cameras, digital light projectors, and cable set-top boxes. These appliances are no longer simply islands of technology, but have the ability to communicate with other devices in their environment. Future Internet applications will increasingly make use of these devices by organizing them in a distributed fashion. Examples of these applications include distributed sensor arrays, tele-immersion, computer-supported collaborative workspaces (CSCW), ubiquitous computing environments, and complex multistream, multimedia presentations. In these applications, no one device or computational resource produces or manages all of the data streams transmitted. Instead, these applications will be distributed over a collection of devices in an environment. These types of applications are called cluster-to-cluster (C-to-C) applications. In a C-to-C application, a set of processes distributed on a cluster of devices or computers communicates with another set of processes on a remote cluster of devices or computers. Processes are distributed on the device clusters at either end to manage the data streams and control the application. Unfortunately, traditional network technologies and protocols are ill-equipped to support these kinds of applications. The fundamental problem is that current transport-level protocols operate in isolation from other traffic flows and within a strict understanding of end-to-end. The transport-level protocols used by multiple, related, data streams that share a common path have no coordination mechanism. As a result, each process in a C-to-C application competes with other processes within the same application for network resources. Also, each transport-level protocol must make independent assessments of current network conditions (e.g., delay, congestion, etc.) which can lead to inconsistent and adversarial protocol dynamics. Furthermore, the numerous data streams produced by a C-to-C application will have semantic relationships known only to the application. These relationships affect how the data should be transmitted and the operation of transport-level protocols. A C-to-C application needs a global view of performance across all of its flows in order to make adaptations to dynamic network conditions. Independent adaptation of the separate flows uninformed of aggregate application performance is insufficient. A key characteristic of C-to-C applications is that a large portion of the communication path is shared among all data flows. Although no two data flows may share an entire end-to-end path, all data flows share the path between the two clusters. Furthermore, this shared common path is likely to be where network conditions vary the most and the source of congestion due to outside traffic. Exploiting this characteristic, our general approach to the problem is to introduce mechanisms at the points of aggregation for data streams in a cluster application that determine network conditions along the shared common path and provide a consistent and coordinated view of available network resources. Specifically, a major contribution of our work will be to introduce an additional protocol between the network level (IP) and the transport level (TCP, UDP, etc.). We call this protocol the Coordination Protocol (CP). This additional protocol will be used to communicate information between forwarding mechanisms within the cluster infrastructure on either end of the application. The information exchanged by these mechanisms is used to estimate the dynamic network conditions along the shared path (i.e., congestion, latency, jitter, etc.). Because a single mechanism is charged with estimating network conditions across all flows of a multistream application, all individual transport-level protocols involved in a C-to-C application receive a consistent and coordinated view of current network conditions. The application can then react to congestion, loss, and other network events in a manner that incorporates application-level knowledge and achieves global objectives. The major features of the researchers approach are: - Provides a consistent measurement of network conditions across all application flows. - Preserves end-to-end semantics of transport-level protocols. - Locally deployable. - Independence from application architecture. - Serves as a framework for other types of coordination. As a whole, the aggregate network behavior of all the flows of a C-to-C application should respond appropriately to congestion and other network conditions. How each individual stream responds, however, can only be determined at the application level because only the application has an understanding of how the streams are related. The coordination protocol we will develop provides cluster applications with the ability to apply application-level knowledge about these interstream semantic relationships and coordinate the use of network resources. The protocol will help us explore coordination mechanisms and make possible a wide range of new application types that do not currently exist, but are envisioned by researchers and industry as the future of the Internet doc23691 none Gordon Sprintall The Indonesian Throughflow (ITF) links two oceans and in so doing provides a pathway for modifying the stratification within each of these oceans as well as sea-air fluxes that impact on such climate phenomena as ENSO and the Asian Monsoon. While a number of measurement programs have recently been undertaken in the Indonesian region, a serious shortcoming is their lack of temporal coherence: the data cover different time periods and depths in the different passages of the complex pathways linking the Pacific and Indian Oceans. This has lead to ambiguity of the mean and variable nature of the ITF, and of the transformation of the thermohaline and transport profiles within the interior seas. The INSTANT program, involving contributions of 6 countries (USA, France, Netherlands, Australia, Indonesia, Japan), will finally measure in a coordinated fashion the ITF in the key throughflow passages (Makassar Strait, Lifamatola Passage, Lombok Strait, Ombai Strait and Timor Passage) simultaneously. The measurements span a 3 year period beginning in August . The INSTANT objectives are: 1) To determine the full depth velocity and property structure of the Throughflow and its associated heat and freshwater flux; 2) To resolve the annual, seasonal, and intraseasonal characteristics of the ITF transport and property flux; 3) To investigate the storage and modification of the ITF waters within the internal Indonesian seas, from their Pacific source characteristics to the Indonesian Throughflow water exported into the Indian Ocean; and 4) To contribute to the design of a cost-effective, long-term monitoring strategy for the ITF. The intellectual merit and broader impact of INSTANT is clear: a quantitative view of the ITF will be gained and this will establish the basis for a long term proxy monitoring system, as required to capture the low frequency ITF variability. The ITF waters are known to play an integral part in the global thermohaline circulation and in the inter-basin transfer of climate signals and their anomalies. The benefit to the broader oceanographic community will be to finally allow the ITF to be faithfully simulated within ocean and climate models. In addition, INSTANT will involve education for a graduate student, and will offer research opportunities and training to undergraduates in both Indonesia and the US doc23692 none Lee This award supports a three-year collaborative research and education program between the Center for Intelligent Maintenance Systems (IMS) and counterpart centers laboratories in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Australia. IMS is an NSF multi-campus Industry University Cooperative Research Center between the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. The Center is focused on web-enabled technologies and predictive intelligence to enable products and manufacturing systems to achieve near-zero-downtime performance. IMS is developing a Web-enabled Manufacturing, Maintenance and Service Education, Training and Research Program in partnership with government, industry, and international institutions. Through the international center-to-center projects supported by this award, IMS will advance a) a comprehensive, multidisciplinary and highly collaborative research agenda, b) a cross-university educational curricula, c) virtual student research teams, and d) global educational experiences for American students. A critical element of the program will be the placement of U.S. undergraduate and graduate students in internships in the foreign partner laboratories to collaborate on research projects that are an integral part of the IMS research agenda. The new benchmark for competitive manufacturing companies is a paradigm shift to web-enabled engineering focused on e-intelligence for integrated product design, manufacturing and service. These transformations require a new breed of leaders, engineers and scientists who are internationally astute and knowledgeable in technical, social, economical and cultural issues in a global environment doc23693 none With National Science foundation support, Mr. Gregory Indrisano and a team of Chinese and American archaeologists will conduct an intensive archaeological surface survey of Liangcheng County, Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region (IMAR), People s Republic of China. This project, which will record the size and location of archaeological sites in a 200 square kilometer survey region, will bring together archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology IMAR, Jilin University and the University of Pittsburgh. The survey region is located 100 km east of the Yellow River and 300 km south of the great steppe regions of Asia, in an area marginal for both agriculture and herding. The environmental attributes of this area make Liangcheng County an ideal geographic location to study the development of subsistence strategies that combine agriculture and animal husbandry. Liangcheng s position, 400 km north of the dynastic capitals at present day Xi an and just south of the earliest of the Great Walls of China, makes this region appropriate for the study of the development of relations between the core of ancient China and its periphery. The Liangcheng County archaeological survey will include the lowland alluvial plains appropriate for farming, highland mountain plateaus used for herding and the intervening zones that allow access to both resource zones. Interviews with local herders and farmers, as well as analysis of satellite imagery will add to these preliminary subjective impressions of land use and allow the accurate delineation of this region s ecological zones. The information from the archaeological survey and the modern ecological map will facilitate the construction of a geographic database (GIS) to reconstruct how prehistoric peoples made use of their landscapes in response to local and regional level political processes, allowing a better understanding of the development of agro-pastoral adaptations on the periphery of China as well as a better understanding of how such subsistence adaptations develop world wide. In addition, data collected by other studies of the paleo environment of the region will be analyzed to better understand how ancient environmental fluctuations affected subsistence strategies in this region. Mr. Indrisano and his collaborators will concentrate on three main questions: 1. How did the known developments from the center of China affect the development of political and subsistence systems in this peripheral region? 2. Did indigenous political development have a different effect on subsistence strategies? 3. How do ancient environmental fluctuations affect the local subsistence systems of this region? This research is important for several reasons. It will continue the fruitful cooperation between Chinese and American archaeologists, in an area of the world that sees indigenous development of ancient empires. Marginal environs, like those found in Liangcheng County, existed on the borders of many of the world great ancient empires, but the subsistence strategies and political development of these peoples have rarely been a foci of anthropology; this project will provide a data set which will allow a better understanding of subsistence strategies and political development in north China but will also facilitate the comparison of these processes with other marginal regions around the world doc23694 none A Quantitative Framework for Long-term Performance Assessment of Waste Management Infrastructure Using Hazard Analysis Method The current and proposed Natural Hazard Loss Estimation Methodology (HAZUS) focuses on traditional structures such as buildings, utilities and transportation structures, e.g., roads and bridges. This project focuses on the development of methodologies to address damages to waste containment systems due to extreme events (human-induced or natural) for linkage with HAZUS. Damage to waste management facilities can result in the release of highly toxic contaminants into the environment. These issues here become even more important since the events of September 11, . The design service lives of these facilities range from about 10 to 200 years, which is significant enough to warrant consideration of vulnerability when the facility is located in areas of significant seismic activity. Ironically, high population densities characterize most of the earthquake-prone areas and generate high volumes of waste through domestic and industrial activities. This may lead to high concentrations of waste management facilities nearby, which when damaged may pose health and environmental risks to residents of disaster-prone areas. In this project, quantitative methodologies will be developed to enable integration into HAZUS the capability to assess potential damage to waste containment facilities in the United States. The overriding objective is to enable the estimation of the vulnerabilities of such system to intentional and natural threats. Performance, described in terms of probable release volumes of contaminants and, in some cases, system structural stability, will be indexed using Weibull shape and scale parameters. Research elements include analyses of containment system configurations to establish the ranges of series and parallel linkages among components with respect to functions; development of a methodology for representing deterioration-time functions for materials that constitute the transport media within containment systems; coupling the occurrence and damage from earthquakes and other transient events; development of a screening system for significant stressors; formulation of a transport assessment sub-module with an architecture open enough to accommodate existing submodels; and establishment of quantitative linkages between probable release volumes of contaminants and ecosystem human health exposure risk assessment methods. The broader impacts of this research includes the planned use of its results in technical assistance to local, state and federal agencies, and private firms on the design, siting, and operation of waste management facilities in sensitive environments. This project involves research, training of three students including women and minorities, development and engagement of practicing personnel in this composite natural disaster environmental security program doc23695 none Project St. Joseph s College provides a strong academic education rooted in a liberal arts tradition. The CSEMS program will supplement existing scholarships to encourage and support thirty eligible students, with demonstrated financial need, enabling them to complete degrees and enter the high technology workforce as qualified professionals. Consistent with the CSEMS goals, we are: 1. Increasing the number of well-educated and skilled employees in technical areas of national need by: Actively recruiting students, especially women and other under-represented groups for programs in Mathematics and Computer Sciences; Providing breadth and depth in a quality degree program; Maintaining and upgrading computer facilities and library resources; Creating a database of alumni, for a Speakers Bureau at recruitment events; Attracting younger competent students through high school Programming Competitions and class visitations. 2. Improving educational opportunities for students in these disciplines by: Promoting opportunities for students to engage in activities and research which enhance their understanding; Expanding courses with an Honors component; Involving our majors as volunteer tutors and mentors in the Math Clinic to assist disadvantaged high school students. 3. Increasing retention of students to degree achievement by: Providing additional scholarships of one-third tuition for qualified students, particularly under-represented minorities and women; Formalizing our assessment and mentoring programs. 4. Improving student support at institutions of higher learning by: Providing role models and individual mentors for students, particularly under-represented minorities and women; Assessing the needs of the supported student, the effectiveness of the curriculum, and the requirements of the high tech workplace; Expanding peer tutoring in our Math Lab; Extending career and placement services to provide a database of industrial contacts; Increasing assistance to students applying to graduate programs; Strengthening networking opportunities to enhance interaction between current students and successful graduates. 5. Strengthening partnerships between institutions of higher learning and the local high technology industry by: Extending internship programs and seeking additional partnerships with local business and industries; Promoting our BA BS + MS program with Polytechnic University; Involving more faculty in education-industry collaboration programs. Recruitment from incoming and existing student populations are through personal invitations and current strategies (publications, TV, school visitations). Transfer students are recruited through cooperation with the local community college, business and industries. The CSEMS Selection and CSEMS Retention Committees select students, encourage them to achieve and assure that they are qualified to enter the workforce. Both committees are by the PI and include the Co-PI s and appropriate representatives. One Co-PI is responsible for assessment and outcomes evaluation of CSEMS students. CSEMS scholars receive approximately one-third of their tuition at St. Joseph s College, where they receive personal attention in small classes, in a supportive learning environment. Internships and opportunities to contribute to their community reinforce classroom theory with practical experience, and to motivate them to complete their degrees doc23696 none The ongoing proliferation of battery-powered computing devices has created a new type of denial of service attack: If an attacker can drain a device s battery, for example, by having it repeatedly execute a energy-hungry program, the device will be rendered inoperable. Unlike other denial-of-service attacks where the attacker must keep up the attack in order to continue to deny the service, the attacker can quit attacking a battery-powered device once she has fully discharged the battery, and move on to attack another device. Just as the advent of computer networks enabled an increase in the number of computer viruses, Trojan horses, and other computer security breaches, the rising availability of and increasing dependence on mobile computing devices will lead to the creation and spread of power-related security attacks. The battery in a mobile computing device is thus a point of vulnerability and must be protected. The purpose of this research is to defend against attacks on the battery. In a typical mobile computer, the battery is expected to give a certain battery life under a set of usage conditions where the user is actively using the device for a small fractionof the time, and the device is idle the rest of the time. When the device is idle, power management software puts the device into low power standby and sleep modes, extending the device s battery life. If an attacker can prevent the device from entering low power modes by keeping it active, the battery life can be drastically shortened. There are three main methods for an attacker to drain the battery: (1) Service request attacks, where repeated requests are made to the victim for services, typically over a network--even if the service is not provided, the victim must expend energy deciding whether or not to honor the request; (2) benign power viruses, where the victim is made to execute a valid but energy-hungry task repeatedly, and (3) malignant power viruses, where an attacker modifies a program to make it consume more energy than it would otherwise. The ongoing research defends against these attacks by defining (1) a power-secure architecture for mobile computing devices that guarantees a minimum battery life, and (2) a design flow for identifying power-related security vulnerabilities. This work guarantees a minimum battery life by guarding against attacks on the device s battery, including service request attacks, benign power viruses, and malignant power viruses. The overall power-secure architecture employs two fundamental security features in the system, multi-layer authentication and energy signature monitor: The multi-layer authentication ensures that all untrusted services rendered consume less than a certain amount of energy. Additional resources are committed only to those requesters who have obtained further levels of trust. The energy signature monitor catches those intrusions that have entered the system to execute an energy-hungry application or service. The research consists of the following tasks: Classification of services to guarantee minimum mission time Generation, capture, and validation of energy signatures for trusted service requests Validation of the architecture by implementing power-related security attacks This project has a number of direct benefits to the stateof the art in information technology. First, it protects battery-powered mobile computing systems, an increasingly important portion of the information technology infrastructure, from a potentially devastating form of security attack. Second, it explores a new problem and attracts attention to an areathat should be studied by a large community of researchers. The broader impact of the this research is to ensure that mobile computing continues to be attractive to a growing community. By protecting against battery-based security attacks, this work ensures the ongoing adoption of mobile computing by a wider segment of society doc23697 none Projects of national importance critically depend on supercomputers, such as the ASCI White supercomputer deployed at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. Supercomputers such as these are comprised of thousands of microprocessors that share terabytes of main memory. In order to bring down the cost of these `shared memory supercomputers and to ensure their error-free operation during long-running simulations, their design and verification complexity must be significantly reduced. A significant amount of this complexity exists in the concurrent protocols that allow the microprocessors to reliably share memory. The investigators study how to automatically synthesize these protocols from higher level descriptions that are easier (and hence quicker) to verify correct. This research involves a formal understanding of high performance protocols in use this area, the creation of a guided synthesis procedure that allows designers to quickly explore the space of protocols and select one that meets the performance goals, and then mathematically prove the correctness of the high level protocol as well as its translation to a detailed hardware-level protocol description. Design and verification tools that the industry can adopt are being developed. The distributed shared memory (DSM) is a dominant organizational paradigm for multiprocessor machines. DSM machines are used as desktop computers, supercomputers such as the 512-node ASCI White of Lawrence Livermore, and in future sold as single-chip multiprocessor components. The high verification complexity of DSM machines is known to delay the shipping dates of microprocessors and parallel processing software. This complexity stems from a host of DSM protocol design issues, such as: (i) aggressive latency hiding through out-of-order processing, implying the use of complex weak memory consistency models; (ii) complex protocol actions that require buffer reservation and deadlock avoidance. This research involves a formal understanding of weak memory models (captured as a theorem-prover library), and high performance protocols in use this area. It develops guided synthesis procedures that allow designers to quickly explore a wide spectrum of protocols. Once a high-level protocol meeting estimated performance goals is selected, model checking is employed to verify conformance against the chosen weak memory model. A mathematically proven (using theorem proving) translation procedure is then applied to obtain a detailed protocol description. This description is analyzed for performance and iterated till convergence. Examples drawn from industrial multiprocessors are used to illustrate our new methods. Design and verification tools that the industry can adopt are being developed doc23698 none Thomas L. Martin Va Poly Inst. Wearable computing has the potential to allow access to information anytime and anyplace. Three of the major goals of wearable computing are to allow the user to go about a normal daily routine while constantly wearing a device, to be invisible to those around the user, and to be aware of the user.s actions and location. The purpose of this research is to investigate the wearable computing uses of electronic textiles (e-textiles), a novel hardware software platform that has the potential to solve many of the problems in achieving these goals, and to create a design environment for e-textile-based wearable computing. E-textiles are fabrics that have electronics and interconnections woven into them. The electronics consist of general-purpose microprocessors, digital signal processors, sensors, and actuators at regular intervals throughout the fabric. E-textiles allow the creation of systems with a physical flexibility and size that cannot be achieved with currently available electronic manufacturing techniques. Components and interconnections are a part of the fabric and thus are much less visible and, more importantly, not susceptible to becoming tangled together or snagged by the surroundings. Consequently, e-textiles can be worn in everyday situations where currently available wearable computers would hinder the user. E-textiles also have greater flexibility in adapting to changes in the computational and sensing requirements of an application for the purpose of managing power consumption and context awareness. The number and location of sensor and processing elements can be dynamically tailored to the current needs of the user and application, rather than being fixed at design time doc23699 none The large number and diversity of quality of service (QoS) measures present a significant challenge to the design and operation of multimedia wireless communications systems. Each information source (data, audio, video) has its own metrics of signal quality and the network has an aggregate measure of capacity for each source (for example, Erlangs of telephone traffic and data throughput). In addition to signal quality and network capacity, the battery life of a portable terminal has a major effect on the value of mobile information services to consumers. Existing knowledge of quality optimization is generally confined to studies of individual sources. In the s, a significant body of knowledge was created on radio resource management for cellular telephone communications. More recently, the research community has turned its attention to wireless data and video. Each study focuses on one or two quality measures for one type of information: for example, power and distortion for video; power and throughput for data. This project takes a more comprehensive view by considering the collection of QoS measures to be a point in a multidimensional space. Given a system design and a set of operating conditions, the achievable points constitute a feasibility volume, with optimum points on the surface. Within this formulation, we study simultaneous transmission of data and video by analyzing projections of the volume onto various combinations of QoS dimensions including: video distortion; data throughput for each source; data utility for each source; total power dissipation (signal processing power and transmission power) in a terminal; number of simultaneous video transmissions at a base station; aggregate base station throughput; aggregate base station utility. The emphasis is on power efficient communications and the results provide guidance on joint adaptation of the following properties of terminals that transmit signals to the same base station: transmission power and rate in data terminals and transmission power, compression, and channel coding in video terminals doc23700 none The idea of providing differentiated network services to customers with different usage profiles is gaining strong commercial support. Many companies are providing solutions to policy-based management for desired Quality of Service (QoS). These network-based services range from application level control to bandwidth management. However, the onus of deciding or designing these policies rests on network managers. The view taken by most solution providers is that of a static organization where requirements can be assessed in advance. Consequently, at the user end overprovision of services has become a norm. This proposal investigates the economics of differentiated network service arrangements in business environments and the design and development of realistic network environments to conduct experiments and evaluate performance of a wide class of pricing approaches. The class of approaches we propose to investigate range from purely deterministically guaranteed QoS through contracts to real-time pricing that provides consumers with option to buy a QoS for each application at the time of consumption. To test the various pricing schemes, the token-bucket paradigm will be used. It will simulate a given price contract arrangement. The framework for economic experiments developed by this project will provide a benchmark tool to assess network efficiency under different contractual arrangements doc23701 none The combined use of the Differentiated Services (DiffServ) and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) Technologies is a promising way to provide Quality-of-Service (QoS) in IP networks, while effectively using network resources. However, to efficiently carry DiffServ traffic over an MPLS network, a mapping between DiffServ classes and LSPs is needed. Moreover, the design and management of such a network is a fundamental key to the success of the QoS provisioning and it includes several open research issues. Many problems need to be solved such as LSP dimensioning, set up tear down procedures, routing, adaptation to actual carried traffic, preemption, initial definition of the network topology, etc. Furthermore, in designing network planning and management methods, we have to take into account the high unpredictability of the Internet traffic. Our proposal is a comprehensive study that describes practical solutions for MPLS network planning along with bandwidth and route management, which interwork in a synergetic fashion. The presented ideas are novel paradigms that allow MPLS networks to adapt their state to provide the best possible performance and resource utilization. We propose to design, evaluate and fine-tune these new ideas. In the bandwidth management portion of the project, new methods for LSP setup, dimensioning, preemption, and capacity allocation will be designed. The route management research includes novel algorithms for LSP routing and bandwidth request routing. Finally, in the network planning research we will investigate methods to design the optimal MPLS network topology and its dimensioning based on predicted traffic loads and long term Service Level Specification (SLS) contracts. To illustrate the inter-relations of the above mentioned research topics, consider a scenario where network planning methods have provided an initial topology of the MPLS network. Possible events include the arrival of a request for LSP setup or arrival of a bandwidth request. The first event can be handled by the combined use of three of our proposed methods, in the order: LSP routing, LSP preemption, and LSP capacity allocation. The LSP routing aims to find the route on the physical network over which the LSP will be routed. LSP preemption decides if any existing LSPs can be preempted on the route to make way for the new LSP in the case in which there is not enough available bandwidth. The LSP capacity allocation method tries to fine tune the LSP capacity to avoid unused reserved bandwidth. The event of arrival of a bandwidth request triggers the LSP setup and dimensioning, which may in turn trigger the LSP creation steps of routing, preemption and capacity allocation. The potential impact of this proposal is the development of novel and practical methods which currently are open issues in the design and management of DiffServ-based MPLS networks. Significant progress and contributions to the study of MPLS network management have already been made in our publications. This previous work will be useful towards achieving the proposed objectives doc23702 none Ellen M. Rathje, Kenneth H. Stokoe U. of Texas-Austin Collaborative Research: Static and Dynamic Properties of Municipal Solid Waste Over the past 15 years, municipal solid-waste landfills (MSW) have evolved from local dumps into sophisticated engineered systems. Yet, despite the sophistication and complexity of the engineered environmental protection systems required at modern solid-waste landfills, and the dependence of the performance of many of these systems on the behavior of the waste mass, our understanding of the mechanical behavior of MSW is, at best, rudimentary. Uncertainty regarding MSW mechanical properties is a major limitation on performance of reliable landfill stability analyses, the design of waste containment systems for new landfills, and the closure and redevelopment of old landfills. This action is to support a three-year collaborative research program whose objective is to evaluate systematically the significant factors that influence the static and dynamic geotechnical properties of municipal solid-waste landfills. The Environmental Protection Agency requires that all landfills in the United States be designed to withstand earthquakes. For landfills in areas having significant seismic shaking potential, the dynamic properties are needed for design. Currently, dynamic strength properties are assumed to be the same as the static properties, and dynamic stiffness is based on limited small strain data. MSW is a highly heterogeneous material composed of various degradable (e.g. paper, food waste) and non-degradable (e.g. soil, plastic) materials. While the behavior of MSW is likely to be influenced by waste composition and the state of material degradation, a fundamental understanding of the influence of these factors on the static and dynamic behavior of MSW is lacking. As a result, MSW properties for static and dynamic analysis are typically based upon rules of thumb, engineering judgment, and a handful of laboratory and field measurements. Factors being investigated in this study include waste composition (particularly with respect to the relative proportions of refuse and soil-like materials), waste degradation, and particle size. Shear strength, compressibility, and dynamic material properties of MSW are evaluated using laboratory and field investigations. Research on the influence of the refuse-to-soil ratio and on the state of waste degradation will further our understanding of the fundamental behavior of MSW as a composite material composed of refuse and soil. Research on the influence of test specimen size is intended to facilitate both further research and site-specific studies for engineering design by possibly reducing or eliminating the need for large-sized test specimens and testing devices in future studies. This collaborative project capitalizes on the insights and experienced gained by the principal investigators on previous studies of MSW characterization and landfill performance. It will advance the profession s understanding of MSW landfills as engineered systems, leading to safer and more economical landfill designs. It is an important step in moving beyond the over-reliance in current landfill design practice on rules of thumb and conjecture. This project involves collaboration between researchers at the University of California - Berkeley, the University of Texas - Austin, and GeoSyntec Consultants in Huntington Beach, California doc23703 none Wen A new approach to enhance load transfer from polymer matrix to carbon nanotubes by modifying multiwalled carbon nanotubes will be developed under an SGER award. The approach is based on the modification of multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWNT) by growing boron carbide nanolumps on nanotubes. Boron carbide is a covalent bonding compound, so the bonding between boron carbide and carbon nanotube is expected to be covalent too. In addition to this strong bonding, boron carbide nanolumps can be also bonded to inner layers of MWNTs through covalent bonding. Thus, the load transfer from a matrix to carbon nanotubes can be dramatically increased since usually only the outermost layer of MWNTs contributes to carrying load. This is because the interaction between cylindrical graphene sheets is through relatively weak van der Waals bonding. Therefore, MWNTs with boron carbide nanolumps are expected to be the ideal reinforcing fillers. This project will start from the synthesis of MWNTs with boron carbide nanolumps on a large scale. Secondly, the mechanical properties of the dispersed and aligned nanotube polymer composite will be measured in order to understand the influence of boron carbide nanolumps. Finally, a direct observation of load transfer using transmission electron microscopy by applying in-situ tensile stress on a microtomed slice of the nanotube polymer composite will be carried out. This test will utilize a specially fabricated in-situ tensile loading holder. This project will present a unique opportunity for carbon nanotube applications in light-weight super-strength materials doc23704 none M.E. Mear, K. Ravi-Chandar and G.J. Rodin Center for Mechanics of Solids, Structures and Materials The University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin is engaged in a four-year focused research effort aimed at providing the physical underpinnings of three-dimensional (3-D) crack evolution through an integrated theoretical, computational and experimental investigation. Specifically, we are: (i) performing critical experiments that will provide insight into general (mixed mode) 3-D fracture evolution, (ii) performing numerical analyses of the experimental specimens observations to determine the crack-tip fields corresponding to crack growth, and (iii) developing criteria for crack growth initiation and shape evolution which are consistent with the experimental observations and numerical simulations. The technological importance of this work stems from the staggering human and economic costs of structural failure resulting from material fracture. This cost is compounded by the fact that much of the infrastructure built in post World War II boom is aging yet excessively expensive to replace. While significant progress in failure analysis over the past four decades has aided in the design and analysis of fracture critical and flaw damage tolerant structures, limitations in the characterization and modeling of flaws in their early stages of development have restricted much of the success of fracture mechanics to situations where the flaws are fully developed and admit treatment within a two-dimensional framework. The objective of this investigation is to provide a basis for overcoming these limitations doc23705 none The goal of the proposed research is to efficiently exploit on-chip parallelism via the design and evaluation of a dynamically tunable clustered multithreaded (DT-CMT) architecture. The proposed architecture will combine the utilization advantages of simultaneous multithreaded architectures (SMTs) with the speed advantages of chip multiprocessors (CMPs). The PIs will design an architecture that can be rapidly configured into a restricted number of organizations (so as to minimize speed and density impact) in order to balance instruction-level parallelism and thread-level parallelism to maximize utilization and minimize energy. Key to this approach will be the development of software systems (compilers, runtime systems, multiprogramming and multithreaded support) that analyze application requirements and combine this knowledge with feedback mechanisms from the hardware. The performance and power saving potential of this approach will be characterized via simulation. This project has the potential to significantly impact the microarchitecture and software of future server and network processors, and will help train the graduate students in the design of future increasingly process technology-aware architectures. The proposed work will allow dynamic tailoring of the processor architecture in order to meet the needs of increasingly diverse applications, thereby allowing future processors to scale as process technology improves doc23706 none Tracking social agents that have a variety of mental states is quite different from and more challenging than tracking more predictable systems, say aircraft or ships. While multi-target tracking systems typically use physics-based models to track maneuvering vehicles, this work centers on developing probabilistic models of behavior and mental state to address the effects of interactions between agents. This work has practical applications in many areas including, for example: monitoring crowds of people, analyzing urban traffic patterns, and understanding robot and human team behavior. Additionally, this work should accelerate progress in experimental behavioral ecology, especially in the study of social insect systems. For this reason the investigation will initially be conducted in collaboration with biologists in the context of tracking and analyzing the behavior of captive live ant colonies. This research will yield novel, probabilistic algorithms for sensor-based identification, tracking, and modeling of the behavior of social multiagent systems. A tight coupling between tracking and modeling is critical, especially when the observed system is composed of many agents. The focus is on using models of behavior to improve the accuracy of sensor-based tracking, and on using improved tracking to learn better models doc23707 none This project will explore the capabilities of an array of 128 cameras, which can be combined computationally in many different configurations for a wide range of scientific, commercial, and communication applications. Over the past few years, the ability of image-based rendering (IBR) techniques to create photorealistic images of real scenes has generated great interest in building sensor systems that can capture environments from multiple viewpoints. At the same time, we have witnessed the advent of CMOS image sensors, which are inexpensive and easy to use because of their digital interface. Furthermore, because they are manufactured in a CMOS process, processing power can be placed on the sensors themselves. Finally, advances in semiconductor technology are making increasing computing power available for decreasing cost, power, and chip area. These trends raise the questions: What can we do with many inexpensive CMOS image sensors, equally inexpensive optics, and a lot of processing power? Can we use more cameras of lesser quality to enable more robust IBR algorithms? Can we use clusters of inexpensive imagers and processors to create virtual cameras that outperform real ones? Each camera in the 128-camera array contains a CMOS image sensor, MPEG encoder, and programmable processor, in order to investigate these questions. The device is designed to record 128 synchronized video datasets through three PCs to a disk array. This project will explore applications of the array to scientific imaging and computer vision and graphics. Multi-camera systems can function in many ways. If the cameras are packed close together, then the system effectively functions as a single-center-of-projection synthetic camera, which can be configured to provide high performance along one or more imaging dimensions, such as resolution, signal-to-noise ratio, dynamic range, depth of field, frame rate, or spectral sensitivity. For example, one configuration could produce high-resolution images 10,240 x 3,830 pixels, and another could generate 7,680 frames per second. Such capabilities are unprecedented for a video system, and they will have many scientific, engineering, and military uses. If the cameras are placed farther apart, then the system functions as a multiple-center-of-projection camera, and the data it captures is called a light field. Of particular interest are novel methods for estimating 3D scene geometry from the dense imagery captured by the array. This information can be used to improve compression of the light field and to interpolate smoothly between widely spaced cameras, allowing smooth virtual navigation through the scene. Potential applications include evaluation of design models for manufacturing, medical and forensic consultation, online shopping, and virtual museum displays doc23708 none This grant provides funding for the development of a theory on point-line kinematics and its applications on the analysis, characterization, synthesis, and control of point-line motion. A point-line operator based on geometry and Clifford algebra will be developed to express a point-line transformation. Subsequently, this transformation will allow a point-line to be considered as an independent rigid element having a completely specified motion without invoking rigid body transformation. Based on a principle similar to the point-line operator, the theory will be extended to include line displacement and rigid body motion, in which parameters responsible for causing incompletely specified motion can be removed or added as needed. Issues on the synthesis for finite and infinitesimal point-line motions will be investigated. The results will be applied to enhance the design capability of spatial mechanisms and manipulators. The project will also explore for the first time the full configuration space concerning the tool path generation in five-axis numerical control machining for interference avoidance. If successful, the results will lead to the first point-line kinematics theory comparable to the well-developed rigid body kinematics theory. In addition, it will lead to a unified kinematics theory for lines, point-lines, and rigid bodies. It allows one to understand and treat a point-line motion by viewing the point-line as an integrated rigid element in a way similar to that of points or rigid bodies. It will lead to a mathematical language such that the characteristics of point-line motions can be rigorously articulated. It will serve as a catalyst and foundation for advancements in kinematics, robotics, computer-aided geometric design, and manufacturing technology. Because many tool operations such as numerical control machining, drilling, screwing, riveting, cutting, probing, insertion, and electric wire discharge machining are basically point-line operations, the project s results will enhance the capability of making improvements on the motion synthesis, control, and quality of these operations. It is also recognized that because of the fundamental nature of the subject, the impact may extend to other aspects of science and engineering doc23709 none This project investigates two problems associated with the monitoring of human activities: The first problem is tracking of articulated motion as a whole without identifying individual limb motion. The goal is to address certain shortcomings in previous solutions to this problem, the main shortcoming being their over-constrained nature. The proposed solution, which is presented as a real-time human tracking system, will be capable of working under many difficult circumstances. The second problem is recognition of articulated motion. The goal here is to show that the recovery of three-dimensional properties of the object or even two-dimensional tracking of the object parts are not necessary steps that must precede action recognition. The proposed approach uses motion features only. Unlike other similar approaches, the motion features will be used in such a way to represent complex and long actions as well as to distinguish different actions with many similarities. Each action is represented as a manifold in the lower dimension space and matching is done by comparing these manifolds. As part of a homeland security scenario, its is planned to use these methods to monitor outdoor human activities based on the ability to recognize, for example, that a human runs in the opposite direction that a crowd moves doc23710 none PI: Morris Chang Iowa State The thesis of this project is very simple: the performance of garbage collection is critical to the successful deployment of distributed Java embedded systems. Applications for such systems have different operating requirements than applications written for desktop or server environments. They include frequent software update, low power consumption, low resource availability, distributed computing capability, and real-time operating constraints. Therefore, garbage collectors for such devices must be designed to support those requirements. Garbage Collection (GC), or automatic dynamic memory management, is one of the many attractive features available in Java. It allows programmer to be more productive and software to be more robust. On the other hand, it is also notorious for being intrusive and consuming large amount of power due to frequent memory accesses. As a result, the garbage collection can severely degrade the performance and affect the viability of Java embedded devices doc23711 none Behaviorally Situated Avatars for Tutoring: Beyond the Talking Head and Animated Icon One-on-one tutoring is a critical component of teaching and learning. This project investigates technology to deploy an anywhere-tutor anywhere-student system that permits a tutor to provide instruction via an animated avatar. Exploiting psycholinguistic information, the system translates time-situated pointing and communicative gestures performed on a LCD tablet in conjunction with speech into a stream of behaviorally correct, spatially situated 3D gestures performed by the avatar tutor. A camera tracks the student, facilitating socially aware behavior by the avatar. The system exploits the student s ability to use body motion cues in the embodied avatar to direct her attention to appropriate locations of projected graphics that serve as artifacts of instruction. The technology will potentially facilitate a tutoring program in which students may connect to a pool of tutors for help with a variety of topics. The approach essentially implements tutoring telephone handsets at both ends of the interaction. Tutors may be distributed across multiple sites at their convenience and take calls as they are needed. Widespread access to such tutoring will facilitate the vision of universally available educational opportunities. The project will investigate the necessary artificial intelligence and interaction technologies and evaluate the efficacy of this tutoring methodology doc23712 none We propose a novel marriage of new fundamentals of data structures and algorithms with the productive tools of generic programming. Together they promise tools that could make high performance computing available to any scientist. The data structure is the Morton-order representation of matrices (and arrays in general), which admits both row, column, and quadrant decompositions. Its benefits are grounded in architecture where it solves problems of locality at all levels of a memory hierarchy. The favored algorithms use divide- and-conquer recursion-a style associated with functional programming-because they address the problems of balanced scheduling and communication of distributed and multiprocessing. Generic programming contributes, also, to this higher-level algebraic view of program construction. The anticipated result is a style for parallel programming without requiring explicit choreography either of memory or of processors. That is, the programmer can specify computations, and eventually new algorithms, with a high-level language closer to mathematics. We propose to develop the tools and the techniques to carry these programs to an efficient parallel implementation. Products will include a new programming style, new efficiencies for parallel and Grid computing, tools to carry old codes into this environment, tools to support the new generation of programs, support for teaching a new generation of programmers, and new algorithms that can only be inspired by this high-level perspective on programming doc23713 none Image retrieval has been an active research area for many years, but two fundamental problems remain largely unsolved: 1) How best to learn users subjective query concepts, and 2) How to measure perceptual similarity with significant accuracy. The first problem concerns the completeness of formulating a query concept, e.g., how to formulate a query such as ``animals, ``cathedrals, or ``aircraft. The second problem concerns search accuracy, i.e., given a learned query concept, how to find all images that match that concept. To tackle these two fundamental problems and to ensure that our solutions are scalable, this project has four specific targets. First, we plan to develop novel active learning algorithms that quickly learn users subjective query concepts (thoughts and intents) despite time and sample constraints. Second, we will design semi-automatic image annotation and annotation refinement methods for assigning semantic labels to images in order to support multimodality query-concept learning and information retrieval. Third, we will devise perceptual distance functions for improving accuracy of visual searches. For instance, once a query concept such as ``enemy vessels is learned, we want to find every matching object in the surveillance database, not missing any. Finally, we plan to conduct validation studies} on developed learning algorithms, using experimental data provided by colleagues at various institutions (including IBM research centers and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco doc23486 none GOALI Tribology of Nanocomposites This collaborative proposal between the University of Florida (W.G. Sawyer), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (L.S. Schadler) and Albany International (G. Toney) teams a tribologist and a materials scientist with a company focused on developing nanomaterials with improved wear behavior. 1.0 Intellectual Merit The overall scientific goal of the project is to gain fundamental understanding of the wear mechanisms in filled polymers by: a) experimentally isolating the effects of particle size (10 nm to 10 um), particle aspect ratio (1 to ), dispersion, filler matrix interface, and matrix properties on performance, b) obtaining a parametric understanding of the correlation between wear behavior and other mechanical properties, and c) modeling of the wear properties. Polymer nanocomposites significantly improve the tribological performance when compared to traditional filled polymers. It is unclear for non-lubricious nanoparticles what the mechanism is that lowers the coefficient of friction. Finally, nanoparticle filled polymers have not been comprehensively explored for wear applications despite evidence suggesting large improvements in performance. 2.0 Broader Impacts The impact of these new materials in polymeric bearings will be broad, covering the spectrum from industrial applications needing dry sliding bearings, to orthopaedic implant materials, to self-lubricating bearings for space environments. An indication of the industrial interest in this field is the support of Albany International for this work (~$60K). They are supporting a full time graduate student at Rensselaer and have also supplied funds to Florida for wear testing. They will be hiring a graduate student into a co-op position in order to transfer technology developed by Florida and Rensselaer and provide industrial experience for the student. Students will travel between both Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy NY and the University of Florida in Gainesville FL to broaden their knowledge in the synthesizing and processing of nano-particles and composites and tribological testing and modeling, respectively doc23715 none We are in the midst of a new wireless revolution, brought on by the adoption of wireless networks for consumer, military, scientific and other applications. Wireless networks are a collection of terminals, or nodes, that are capable of transmitting and receiving information to nearby nodes using wireless access methods. The harsh characteristics of the wireless channel provide the fundamental challenge for communication between wireless network nodes. The key to reliable communication over wireless links is the exploitation of diversity, i.e., observation of the same information through different fading conditions. While it is possible to harness diversity by transmitting the same signal at different times or frequencies, the implied redundancy is costly from a bandwidth perspective. It has been shown, however, that introducing additional antennas at the source and or destination enables diversity gain without compromise in bandwidth efficiency. Wireless network nodes may or may not be equipped with multiple antennas. How then, can they ensure reliable and efficient communication over the fading wireless channel? In this research, we investigate novel strategies by which nodes transmit and receive cooperatively, allowing exploitation of spatial diversity gain that would otherwise be unavailable. The lack of structure in ``ad-hoc wireless networks is advantageous from the viewpoint of flexibility, re-configurability, and low management cost. The same lack of structure, however, makes the implementation of cooperative strategies challenging. It may be difficult, for example, to know which of the helper nodes have correctly received the message. In fact, it may be difficult to know which, if any, of the nodes can be enlisted as helpers. In this research, we solve these problems through the combination of distributed cooperative coding strategies, clever protocols, and sophisticated signal processing techniques. The PIs are leveraging their respective expertise in space-time coding and blind signal processing to devise practical strategies for cooperative communication in wireless networks. In addition, this research investigates the fundamental limits on the capacity of cooperative wireless networks through a study of information-theoretic bounds doc23716 none Co-Principal Investigators: Jan P. Allebach, Edward J. Delp, and George T. Chiu We propose to develop two strategies for printer identification. The first strategy is passive. It involves characterizing the printer and finding intrinsic features in the printed output that are characteristic of that particular printer, model, or manufacturer s products. We call this the intrinsic signature. Developing the intrinsic signature requires an understanding and modeling of the printer mechanism, and the development of image analysis tools that are used for printer characterization during the signature development phase, and then later, for the actual detection of the signature in printed pages with arbitrary content. The intrinsic signature is detected by scanning the printed pages with a high resolution drum scanner, and applying low-level image analysis routines to extract features. These features are processed with a soft classifier to yield likelihoods at each level of a decision tree that the document was printed with a device belonging to each particular class. At the highest level of the decision tree, likelihoods are provided for which of the two possible dominant printing technologies: electrophotography (commonly referred to as a laser printer) and inkjet was used. At the next level,likelihoods are generated for the candidate printer manufacturers, and so on. As we proceed down through the tree, we generate liklihoods regarding information that is more and more specific to the particular printer in question. The second strategy is active. Here we embed an extrinsic signature in every printed page. This signature is generated by modulating the process parameters in the printer mechanism to encode identifying information, such as the printer serial number and date of printing, in every printed page. To detect the extrinsic signature, we again scan the printed pages, and process them using image analysis techniques; but in this case, our goal is to decode the signature to extract the information embedded in it. Development of the methodology for extrinsic signature embedding will build directly on our work with intrinsic signatures. We will use our knowledge of the printer mechanism models and the results of the printer characterization to determine the printer process parameters that can be modulated to encode the desired identifying information. The modulation of these parameters will require modification to the actual printer mechanism. A distinguishing feature of the proposed effort will be the development of an undergraduate project course that will be associated with the research. In this course, students will learn about printing technologies and the application of electrical and mechanical engineering theory from their core courses to analysis and modeling of printing systems. They will also learn about image processing and decision theory; and they will see how all these tools can be applied to the solution of practical real-world problems doc23717 none This project will develop concepts and techniques to improve the security and reliability of system software by detecting and managing invisible links in the code. Invisible links are dependencies among program components that are difficult to find by looking at the code alone. A common source of invisible links is the optimization process that removes unnecessary code due to some system invariants. Software reuse and evolution may invalidate these invariants, break invisible links, and cause crashes such as the Ariane 501 rocket. Further, malicious attacks such as TOCTTOU (time-of-check to time-of-use) often exploit invisible links. Our approach combines three techniques that have not been brought together previously. First is a software abstraction with support for flexible correctness criteria definitions, called Transactional Activity Model, which will demark code boundaries that contain invisible links. Second is the use of wrappers to implement the enforcement of correctness criteria on top of production software, for example, concurrency control around the Unix file system for TOCTTOU. Third, program specialization techniques, in particular, the guarding of quasi-invariants, can make invisible links visible and generate the code to maintain the integrity of these links (e.g., making sure the file has not been replaced by the attacker). This combination offers the promise to reveal invisible links and therefore manage those dependencies explicitly doc23718 none PIs: S. N. Batalama and D. A. Pados PROJECT The effectiveness of a receiver designed for a rapidly changing multiple access communications environment depends on the following design attributes: (i) low computational complexity, (ii) multiple-access-interference resistance, and (iii) system adaptivity with superior performance under limited (short) data support. Adaptive short-data-record designs appear as the natural next step for a matured discipline that has extensively addressed the first two, (i) and (ii), design objectives in ideal setups (perfectly known or asymptotically estimated statistical properties). System adaptivity based on short data records is necessary for the development of practical adaptive receivers that exhibit superior signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) or bit-error-rate (BER) performance when they operate in rapidly changing communications environments that limit substantially the input data support that is available for adaptation and redesign. A novel line of research is identified and pursued in this project that lies in a multidisciplinary intersection of Estimation Theory, Communications Theory, and Mean-Square optimum linear filtering. Consider an arbitrary input signal vector space and a given information bearing signal vector to be recovered in the presence of multiuser or other forms of heavy interference. A key for the successful solution to the problem of adaptive receiver design under short data records is to employ receiver estimators with varying bias variance characteristics and to control effectively these characteristics in a data-centric manner. In this project, the investigators develop a short-data-record adaptive filtering framework that involves (i) the tools for the generation of a sequence of filter estimators with varying bias variance tradeoff, as well as (ii) the tools for selecting the most appropriate estimator in the sequence for a given input data record. The Auxiliary-Vector (AV) filtering means developed by the investigators during the past few years as a state-of-the-art practical engineering solution to the problem of short-data-record adaptive filtering is used as a benchmark case-study. The theoretical and practical implications of such a research framework are far reaching. Biased estimators and algorithms that offer full control over the bias variance balance are rarely reported in the literature, if any in a communications applicable context. While the target applications of this work are all critical communications problems, the pertinent theoretical developments may touch many aspects of multidisciplinary engineering that are hampered by the ``curse of dimensionality and could benefit from adaptive filtering and or adaptive system optimization through limited input data doc23593 none This proposal will explore fundamental research issues that impact performance and scalability of Wide Area Applications. The proposed research undertakes a comprehensive study of the access latencies and changing behavior of digital resources over time and across different applications, when accessed via the dynamic WAN. One objective of this research is to develop appropriate latency profiles and resource profiles to characterize this behavior. Latency profiles will be developed to reflect the end-to-end delay experienced by a cluster of clients and resources (servers). Resource profiles reflect appropriate metrics, such as existence checking, testing reachability over time, and learning patterns of updates. These profiles will be used to customize service and information delivery to clients, considering both application requirements and the noisy WAN environment. The corresponding algorithms will explore the trade-offs between end-to-end latency and data obsolescence for different application requirements. Research results will aim to establish a consistent framework for profiling and to answer the following question: to what extent can profiling be used in improving clients availability to resources. Formal results developed in the theoretical study will be evaluated on large scale applications. Collaboration with Corporation for National Research Initiative (CNRI) Handle protocol developers will provide a test-bed for large scale doc23720 none This research project will develop methods for content-based indexing of music databases, using a combination of signal processing and knowledge-based methods, design of statistical algorithms for enabling queries using sung or hummed melodies, and design of robust search techniques for retrieving the queried information, especially in the presence of uncertainty. The research approach, which is based on statistical modeling, is user-centric and comprises three major components: (1) Representation and Indexing - musical information utilizing theories and knowledge about human musical intuition, and music perception and cognition. (2) Query Formulation and Interaction Modality - algorithm design for enabling interaction with music data through humming, a natural activity. (3) Search and Retrieval - algorithm design to match user query against the database that will be robust to uncertainties and errors in the query generation. The architecture will include a front-end recognizer, that converts the humming signal to notes using a statistical pattern recognition approach, which interfaces with a back-end music database that is indexed using perceptually viable features. The search process matching a query against indices is formulated as a statistical information retrieval problem. The project will employ progressively rich indexing representation including repeating patterns for recurring themes, chord, beat, and key information. Derivation of such music-theoretic knowledge will benefit from a principled approach of mathematically modeling tonality in music. The statistical framework allows for handling variability and uncertainty in query formulation and retrieval. It also enables providing for quality of solution in the query results. This work will contribute not only to the specific economically significant application area of music, but also to general information science knowledge on how to index and search humanly-meaningful patterns in complex sensory data. The project will also serve as a vehicle to foster cross-disciplinary graduate and undergraduate research and education doc23721 none The coastal mud wave at Sinnamary, French Guiana and the clinoform muds in the Gulf of Papua are systems wherein massive suboxic diagenesis takes place and represent sites that effectively remineralize terrestrial and marine organic matter. Two scientists from the State University of New York at Stony Brook plan to continue their research efforts in these tropical mobile mud belts to refine their interpretations of the biogeochemical processes at these sites, determine the interaction between the mobile mud belts and surrounding sedimentary environments, complete laboratory experiments on authigenesis and microbial metabolic activity and develop comparative models of these two regions. In French Guiana, the PIs hope to assess the properties of sedimentary material which becomes entrained into the suboxic mobile zone during wave migration and mangrove erosion. In the Gulf of Papua, this team of scientists will sample across the shelf from the mangrove fringe to the foreset region at 60m water depth during the NW Monsoon and SE Trade Period. The goals of the project as this site are the following: (1) quantify and model cycling rates, reaction pathways, reactive material source, sedimentary storage of biogenic debris and nutrient remineralization in the top 1-3m; (2) determine relative role of unsteady versus steady sedimentation processes in maintaining the biogeochemical properties across the region: (3) characterize the associations and interactions of benthic biological communities with particular biogeochemical physical regimes; and (4) obtain sedimentary authigenic mineral suites and biogenic trace records for environmental reconstruction. The team of scientists will collaborate with scientists from the University of Washington whom will be looking at the sediment dynamics of the Gulf of Papua, as well as Australian scientists doc23722 none The ARCHway Project (Architecture for Research in Computing for the Humanities through collaborative research, teaching, and learning) will institute a technological infrastructure, an Edition Production Technology (EPT), for collaborative work at all levels between computer science and humanities disciplines to identify and solve problems of mutual importance in building image-based electronic editions of significant cultural materials. We will develop the EPT to implement and integrate both new and already available software applications, to construct a digital library of previously unedited Old English manuscripts as a testbed for our solutions, and to distribute the digital library to the public. We will design formal methodologies for collaborative teaching and research, based on our practical goals. We will maintain an open-standards architecture with modular, extensible, interoperable components to coordinate research and development of novel methods, tools, and associated technologies. The EPT will guide the definition and coordination of well-encapsulated collaborative student projects using our testbed from semester to semester, student to student, year to year. The PIs will lead teams of students in both disciplines in focussed research projects related to documenting, editing, storing, accessing, searching, and disseminating digital libraries of image-based electronic editions. ARCHway will produce a system for building digital libraries of image-based scholarly editions for the humanities. This system will be used to produce electronic editions of a number of previously unedited Old English manuscripts. The research results of this project will lay the groundwork for sophisticated technical tools to interpret, assemble, disseminate, and maintain image-based scholarly editions on a continuing basis doc23723 none In the past few decades, high-performance computing has driven the development of practical medical applications that are now widely available, such as magnetic resonance imaging and computerized tomography. In recent years, information processing is undergoing rapid advances driven by the use of distributed computing systems connected by world-wide networks. Analogous to power grids, computational grids have the potential to provide seamless access to high-performance computers from ubiquitous, network-enabled devices. The unprecedent levels of computation enabled by this model may foster the development of new medical applications that can substantially improve healthcare. An example is found in a class of emerging medical applications that use Light-Scattering Spectroscopy (LSS) imaging to allow in-vivo detection of pre-cancerous changes in human epithelium. Effective deployments of LSS imaging will depend on the availability of high levels of performance and require access to remote resources. This project aims to improve the state-of-the-art in data management techniques for grids to allow seamless and high-performance integration of data generated by medical instrumentation devices with distributed computers. The long-term objective is to enable deployments of network-computing based medical applications for early cancer detection that require processing capabilities beyond those available in healthcare facilities. In particular, this project will develop computing techniques to enable accurate and fast analyses of LSS images. To this end, this project will focus on three specific aims. The first aim is the development of high-performance, parallel implementations of LSS analysis algorithms. The second aim is the development of data management techniques that allow on-demand access to data generated by a network-enabled instrumentation device from off-site computing resources; these techniques are based on the notion of per-user virtual file system proxies that are controlled by grid middleware and allow latencyhiding performance enhancements to be decoupled from operating system and application implementations. The third aim consists of the integration of the proposed solutions with computational grid infrastructures to enable dissemination to the research community. The results of this project will be used and lead to the development and implementation of such LSS imaging system for clinical use in collaboration with the Northwestern University Medical School and Northwestern Memorial Hospital doc23724 none For many practical reasons (e.g., hardware development cost, power consumption, etc.), it would be attractive if we could increase the effective performance of a computer system by simply adding more processors to it. While it is reasonably straightforward to build such systems that support parallel processing , relatively few of today s programs would enjoy any performance gain on such machines because they were not written with parallel processing in mind. The ideal solution for harnessing the potential benefits of parallel processing without placing a large burden on the programmer would be for the compiler to automatically transform a sequential program into an efficient parallel program. While there has been progress on using compilers to automatically parallelize regular numeric programs (typically written in FORTRAN), there has been little progress in automatically parallelizing broader classes of programs. The key stumbling block has been that compilers have traditionally created parallelism by proving that potential threads are always independent. To circumvent this limitation, recent hardware prooposals enable the compiler to optimistically create parallel threads without proving independence. In this project, we plan to develop the compiler technology necessary to fully exploit this new potential for harnessing parallel processors doc23725 none The recent and growing popularity of thin-client systems makes it important to develop techniques for analyzing and comparing their performance, to assess the general feasibility of the thin-client computing model in modern networking environments, and to determine the factors that govern the performance of these architectures. This project involves carrying out a series of experiments to gain information and understanding on the effectiveness of thin-client architectural mechanisms for graphical and multimedia applications in various network environments. These experiments include performance analysis using several real applications as well as controlled experiments with specialized micro-benchmarks designed to isolate particular aspects of thin-client architectures that have significant impact on overall application performance. Application and user workloads will be varied to understand and analyze the scalability of different remote display mechanisms in terms of network and server resources. These experiments will be conducted in a testbed environment in which network characteristics such as bandwidth, latency, and packet loss are varied in a controlled manner to understand their impact on thin-client architectural design choices. The results of these experiments will have a fundamental scientific impact by laying a quantitative foundation for future innovations in thin-client computing research doc23726 none The project aims to improve the robustness of XML-based software systems using static typing. The primary goal is the design, formal analysis, and implementation of a new programming language called Xtatic-- a lightweight and completely inter-operatable extension of a mainstream object-oriented language, with native support for statically checked XLM processing. The key technology underlying the project is REGULAR EXPRESSION TYPES. The basic constructors of regular expression types ( union, concatenation, repetition, etc.) are similiar to those of existing XML schema formalisms. In a language with regular expression types, however, XML trees become built-in values of the language and the static analysis of the shapes of built-in value of the language and the static analysis of the shapes of trees that may appear at run time ( as values of variables, parameters to methods, result of complex expressions, or structued messages sent across the network)becomes part of the ordinary work of typechecking doc23727 none The September 11, attacks on the World Trade Center were an attack on corporate America. Of the almost 3,000 persons killed, most were employees of private corporations and most of the direct economic losses were sustained by the private sector. Corporate America is in the midst of a strategic change as the issues of crisis preparedness, physical sand information security and continuity of operations have become central and immediate in the days and months following the terrorist attacks. Private sector businesses have come to realize that their very survival may depend on their preparedness to mitigate the consequences of and respond to extreme events. The lack of a firm conceptual and experiential basis for business crisis management decision-making and planning raises the potential for relatively unproductive and wasteful decisions and resource allocations. The objective of this project is to conduct the necessary research to better understand the impacts of extreme events and to communicate the results in a manner that contributes to the ability of businesses to prepare for and recover from extreme events. The following research based products are proposed to meet this objective: 1. A methodology for quantifying the organizational and economic impacts of extreme events on businesses. 2. A framework for evaluating corporate preparedness for these extreme events. 3. A definition of the common body of knowledge for executive level crisis managers. The proposed research is unique in its focus on individual businesses and the consequences resulting form terrorist acts. Previous research efforts have addressed larger levels of aggregation such as impacts on regional economies resulting from natural hazard events and have typically address the impacts of individual disasters. The methodology for quantifying organizational and economic impacts will utilize the limited empirical results obtained in prior studies. The complex inter-organizational coordination among private sector businesses and between businesses and the government and non-government organization resulting from the September 11th attacks will be investigated and incorporated into the research products. The evolution of these relationships that include a level of uniqueness for terrorists attacks will be valuable to business crisis managers as they prepare for potential future extreme events. The research team comprised of faculty and students from The George Washington University and the University of Pittsburgh has the experience and credibility to complete the research and report its result with the proposed two year research schedule and proposed budget. This experience and credibility will enable the research team to know where to go for the required data and information and will provide the initial personal contacts necessary for access. The research will build on the results of a prior NSF supported evaluation of the inter-organizational response to the September 11 attacks and a current Sloan Foundation grant that is developing the requirements for the response to a mass casualty event in a metropolitan area doc23728 none Water is a strategic resource in the U.S. and impacts the sustainability and livability of both rural and urban communities. It is therefore critical to build monitoring and early warning systems for hydrologic events that inventory water resources and accurately model its usage and its impact on communities across multiple scales. Droughts have long been associated with Great Plain s environments from the Dust Bowl years. Many drought indicators such as the Palmer Drought Severity Index and Standardized Precipitation Index have been developed to model the intensity (severity) of meteorological drought. However, drought is a complex process that also has hydrological, agricultural, and socioeconomic components. Hydrological drought indicators are often treated as point observations in watersheds, reservoirs, lakes, and streams and these indicators have not been extended to spatio-temporal drought regions, reflecting the natural landscape. We propose an integrated framework that views droughts through various windows that can provide higher resolution, better detect emergence and closure of events, as well as their spatio-temporal impacts. The framework is based on an innovative methodology called the Intelligent Joint Evolution of Data and Information (IJEDI) that evolves data and information at multiple temporal (windows) and spatial scales to derive support decisions. In this methodology, data and information are considered as raw materials and products, respectively, with which the concepts of Quality of Data (QoD) and Quality of Information (QoI) are computed. This research will develop an information science-based framework to model droughts as they evolve from meteorological episodes to agricultural and hydrologic events doc23729 none This grant will support the development and application of high performance modeling and simulation techniques and tools to design and manage regional transportation systems. Tools will be developed to integrate forecasted travel demands with detail micro-level simulation of the transportation infrastucture; the intention is to enable more reliable projections of transportation system behavior. A reservation system will be developed to help manage traveler demands, rather than simply responding to individual traveler s priorities doc23730 none Complex spatial structures permeate the environment of the future. Nanoscale molecular machines allow sophisticated methods of computing and integrating data with environments. Human-scale industrial designs provide transportation solutions with greater control and efficiency. Architectural forms, growing in both complexity and inter-connectivity, define our experience in the ever-expanding city. While many advances have been made in visualizing these shapes in three dimensions, designers have yet to leverage the power of Information Technology in the early stages of creation. Initial ideas are still mostly constructed with two-dimensional paper sketches or simple physical tools, such as the molecular modeling kits commonly used in organic chemistry. Digital representations in contrast are mutable, dynamic, and re-configurable at a lowest level of the computer. These are difficult for humans to manipulate effectively with contemporary 2D interfaces. Thus designers, engineers, artists and architects must choose either a traditional, pre-Information Technology environment, where they can freely play with simple building blocks, or a digital space where complex elements can be composed only after exhaustive data transformations, strict planning and foresight, and the occasional trick. The work proposed here bridges this divide by creating tools that facilitate (1) the construction of 3D models with the speed of pencil sketches; (2) physical intuition of tangible models; (3) fluid representation of digital data structures; and (4) active response of algorithmic simulation. The results of the work will have immediate application in the fields of architecture, industrial design, and molecular chemistry. Because the research team treats these separate problems within a common framework the results will be broadly applicable to many diverse problems, fundamentally altering the human ability to create structures in space doc23731 none Patricia M. Gallagher, Drexel University Preliminary Evaluation of Colloidal Silica Transport Mechanisms for Passive Site Stabilization of Liquefiable Soils This project involves an exploratory evaluation of colloidal silica transport mechanisms to stabilize liquefiable soil formations. The results will be used to support development of a non-disruptive technique for ground improvement. Passive site remediation is a new concept for non-disruptive mitigation of liquefaction risk at developed sites susceptible to liquefaction. The concept is to slowly inject a stabilizing material at the up-gradient edge of a site, and deliver the stabilizer to the liquefiable area using the groundwater flow. The focus is on the ability to deliver colloidal silica solutions uniformly into liquefiable soil deposits, with subsequent gelation to mitigate the liquefaction susceptibility. The main goals of the research are: (1) to determine if colloidal silica grout can be transported through a column of liquefiable soils in an adequate concentration to stabilize the sand; (2) to determine if the grout will gel along the entire length of the column after delivery; and (3) to understand the mechanisms of colloidal silica transport through liquefiable sands. The research involves laboratory experiments consisting of short and long column tests to identify the variables that influence colloidal silica grout transport in liquefiable soils. The parameters to be considered include the geochemical and physical factors thought to affect grout transport most strongly, such as pH, ionic strength of the grout solution, flow velocity, and pore size of the sand formation. The effects on the transport of gelling fluids with variable density and variable viscosity will also be considered. This research will set the stage for future development of implementation technologies and field testing of passive site remediation. The research results will be widely disseminated among researchers and practitioners in the areas of geotechnical earthquake engineering, ground improvement, grouting, and environmental remediation. Passive site remediation techniques could have broad application for developed sites susceptible to liquefaction, where traditional ground improvement methods are difficult or impossible to implement. These techniques could also have application to urban areas where subsurface contamination is difficult to remediate doc23732 none A fundamental challenge in network design is how to choose the right protocol, with the right parameter settings, for some given circumstances. A key problem that lacks a systematic formal framework is the scalability issue in the design space: networks rapidly grow not only in size and heterogeneity, but also in the number of available design choices, such as the right protocol to select, or just setting the right parameters for a given protocol. To help remedy this situation we propose MERIT, a formal framework for systematically assessing protocols in dynamic scenarios. The key novelty of the researcher s solution is its inherent scalability: rather than comparing the different protocols directly, the researchers compute an inherent measure of the protocol. Using this measure the researchers define a spectrum, called a MERIT spectrum, for the protocol that characterizes it in a way that ensures comparability with other protocols without porting them to the same platform. In addition, we develop a systematic way of analyzing these spectra. While the traditional qualitative and quantitative measures areinformative, they do not provide a satisfactory framework for a systematic and unified comparison of protocols. For example, as shown in the literature, the resulting ranking often strongly depends on the chosen simulation model. The researchers take a new, orthogonal direction in the assessment of routing protocols in MERIT. Specifically, the MERITframework provides a systematic and general way to rank any given routing protocol by comparing it to a theoretical, yet efficiently computable, optimum in its own system, rather than to a competing protocol. For the problem of routing in a mobile ad hoc network, the researchers show that the theoretical optimum can be meaningfully defined and computed. The basis of the researchers approach is a characterization based on the ratio of the MEan ``Real to the ``Ideal cosT, or MERIT, of the protocol, and the researchers call the measure the MERIT ratio. The MERIT ratio as a function of some parameters defines the MERIT spectrum of the protocol, yielding a multi-faceted representation of protocol effectiveness. The successful preliminary theoretical and experimental results of the MERIT framework have encouraged the researchers to develop three primary research directions: (1) Further development of the mathematical model in the MERIT framework, with special emphasis on creating formal methods to analyze MERIT spectra. (2) Creating a software tool for the systematic study of routing protocols using the MERIT framework. (3) Extensive experimentation with real routing protocols to capture and systematically compare their behaviour through analyzing their MERITspectra. Regarding the broader impact of the project, the contributions combine to impact the research in the field of dynamic networks. For mobile ad hoc networks, there is an impact in both theoretical model development and also simulation based performance analysis. The three primary research directions of the project are appropriate to help train graduate students to become highly skilled to conduct both theoretical work with strong mathematical foundations, as well as experimental work using realistic network models in simulation. The methodologies will also be introduced into the graduate curriculum as well as research seminars that may also involve students from under-represented groups. While the original motivation for MERIT was to assess routing protocols in mobile ad hoc networks, the methods are also applicable to other dynamic scenarios. Thus, the benefit to society, in addition to the production of well educated and skilled rofessionals, is that networks will run more efficiently since MERIT provides a methodology to select the right protocol for the job. The results will be broadly disseminated in conference and journal papers, as well as book chapters doc23733 none This project uses a synergistic approach that involves use of field data, numerical simulation, and laboratory simulation to study tornado-induced wind loads on man-made or built structures. The primary objective of this project is to quantify tornado-induced wind loads on typical structures such as low-rise and high-rise buildings, dome-shaped and curved-roof structures, and slender chimneys and towers that comprise the majority of our built environment. In this project, a laboratory tornado simulator at Iowa State University (ISU) is used to realistically produce a variety of tornado-like vortices for testing their loading effects on geometrically-scaled models of built structures. Field measurement data from the University of Oklahoma s Doppler on Wheels studies along with the data generated by numerical simulations of tornado vortex winds at ISU to extrapolate the field data (available for 50 ft and above) to ground level are used to validate the flow field generated by the laboratory tornado simulator. This laboratory simulator uses an innovative mechanism that allows it to produce a translating tornado-like vortex with different Swirl ratios, core diameters and Reynolds numbers suitable for geometrically-scaled model testing doc23734 none The dynamics associated with blocking events remain unclear and current operational predictions have low skill. The PI will study the dynamics of anticyclones that exist both at and above the surface over middle and high latitudes. Using reanalyses from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), the PI and his students will examine the relative importance of (1) upper tropospheric cold-air advection in the formation and intensification of anticyclones near the earth s surface; (2) deformation in the development of blocking, easterly flow around midtropospheric anticyclones; and (3) nonquasigeostrophic processes in the development of blocking and midtropospheric anticyclones. A climatology of the anticyclones will be compiled from NCEP reanalysis and cases chosen for detailed analysis. Diagnostics using the quasigeotrophic and nonquasigeostrophic height tendency equations will be applied to examine the importance of the suggested processes in developing and maintaining these anticyclones. Results from this project have the potential to increase the understanding of the onset of blocking events and increase the forecast skill of them. The research will provide good educational opportunities for graduate students doc23735 none Fenyves This award provides travel funds for 25 U.S. scientists to attend the 21st Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics in Florence, Italy, on December 9-13, . The Texas Symposia take place every other year and serve as an international summary of recent developments in the main areas of modern astrophysics, cosmology, and relativity. The biannual meetings are held in different cities in the U.S., and every second or third meeting is held in a foreign country. The event in will take place in Florence, Italy, and will be sponsored by the newly established National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF), in collaboration with the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN doc23736 none Djuric, Petar SUNY @ Stony Brook Optimization of Reconfigurable Architectures for Efficient Implementation of Particle Filters In recent years particle filters have attracted great attention in several research communities. These filters are used in problems where time-varying signals must be processed in real time and the objective is to estimate various unknowns of the signals and to detect events described by the signals. The standard solutions of such problems in many applications are based on the Kalman or extended Kalman filters. In situations when the problems are highly nonlinear or the noise that distorts the signals is non-Gaussian, the Kalman filters provide solutions that may be far from optimal. A major drawback of the particle filters is that their implementation is computationally very intensive. They are, however, inherently parallelizable, and special hardware can be built for their implementation that can meet the stringent requirements of real-time processing. In this research, reconfigurable and physically feasible VLSI architectures for particle filters are developed. In the development of these architectures, many important problems are researched. The most critical of them is the balancing of hardware and software, which itself is tightly related to other important issues. They include reductions of computational complexities by transformations and approximations, investigation of the degree of parallelism implemented in the filter, investigation of various interconnection mechanisms, random communication schemes, hardware optimization, and design of low power VLSI processors. This effort also includes building of reconfigurable hardware so that it is suitable for different types of particle filters doc23737 none Intrusion detection systems, as their name suggests, are designed simply to detect intrusions. They may, at most, recommend courses of response, and for good reason. Attacks are not always detected when and where they occur. It makes good design sense to separate the detection facility from the response facility. Response systems to date have focused primarily on backup and recovery. Comparatively little effort has been spent on immediate response, or first-aid services; and what effort there has been is mainly in the area of network filtering and blocking. FACS is designed to fill the need for further services, such as suspending or disabling services and user accounts, and sequestering files for forensic analysis. FACS will integrate these responses with local system policy, so that the system administrator s knowledge of the resources and users available on the system is taken properly into account. In this way, more important data and accounts can be given higher priority; careful attention is paid to services that have more dangerous failure modes; trust is appropriately accorded (or not) to various outside domains providing information about attacks and responses; and so forth. Note that these are not attributes accessible to the operating system, but personal knowledge that the administrator would have as a matter of course. The FACS system will be constructed at multiple levels, enabling local host responses, responses across a local network, as well as responses between networks. FACS will design and incorporate a response prescription language enabling uniform and machine-independent specification of appropriate responses to attacks as they occur in real time. This language will also facilitate verification against the local system policy. FACS will enable systems to present a more complete defense against attacks, by bridging the gap between attack detection and complete restoration. And from a scientific perspective, it will give us insight into the complex small-scale interactions between attacks and recovery efforts doc23738 none Wei-Hsu University of Minnesota-Twin Cities ITR: DREAM-Dynamic RE-optimization for Application Migration This project proposes the design and implementation of a common dynamic binary re-optimization system called DREAM (Dynamic RE-optimization for Application Migration). DREAM can be used for migrating compatible legacy application binaries such as moving applications in Intel 486 code to Pentium IV processors, or moving IA-64 Itanium code to IA-64 McKinley processors. DREAM can also be used to improve the performance of migrating incompatible application binaries, such as moving applications in Unisys x code to the new IA-64 processors. In this case, a dynamic translator first translates the incompatible binaries into native code and stored in a translation cache. DREAM will focus on speeding up the native code stored in the translation cache. Furthermore, DREAM can be used to speed up applications released in intermediate form that may require generating native code dynamically for higher execution efficiency doc23739 none Wireless sensor networking is an emerging technology that has a wide range of potential applications including environment monitoring, smart spaces, medical systems and robotic exploration. While the technology is very promising, it raises serious challenges in network and system design. Sensor networks differ in many ways from than the traditional IP or voice networks, and have their unique features and requirements. Although MAC protocols such as 802.11 and TDMA are ideal for wireless IP or voice, no MAC protocol today meets the needs of sensor networks. This project will execute a systems-driven research program to address these problems through the development of sensor-network specific MAC protocols. Specifically, we are investigating: ADAPTIVITY AND ENERGY EFFICIENCY: Sensor network MACs must be adaptive in several dimensions, including energy consumption, traffic loads, and deployment density. Energy is the key limitation for battery-powered sensor nodes. The researchers are investigating and will provide designs for ENERGY CONSERVATION approaches that modify node duty cycle to conserve energy while considering user varying application traffic requirements. One approach to energy conservation is to trigger primary node radios with a paging channel, but this requires a second radio (with corresponding cost, space, and money requirements). Sensor nodes already must operate sensors full time, so the researchers are evaluating the use of sensors (acoustic, seismic, etc.) as a PHYSICAL SENSOR PAGING CHANNEL. MAC INTERACTION WITH THE PHYSICAL LAYER: With low-power, relatively unsophisticated radios, sensor networks applications and MAC protocols are very close to physical layer effects of radio propagation. A serious problem with current sensor applications is dealing with link error conditions such as packet loss and asymmetric communication. Energy-conserving MAC layers already keep track of neighbors, so the researchers will provide a BLACKLISTING SERVICE that allows the MAC to identify and exclude unusable links. The researchers also will study and report on radio POWER CONTROL AND APPLICATION INTERACTIONS to understand how MACs can control neighborhood size. UNIQUE APPLICATION NEEDS OF SENSOR NETWORKS: Sensor networks are fundamentally different from Internet-style networks of peer nodes in several different ways. A first differences is that sensor networks are primarily quiescent, but they occasionally become very active when something is sensed. The researchers will develop a MAC PROTOCOL WITH MULTIPLE OPERATING MODES to allow the MACs to adjust to this ``feast or famine traffic load. In addition, energy conservation introduces a directional bias in node communication; sleep wake-up schedules can either add latency to all directions equally, or can allow rapid communication in one direction and slower communication in the other. The researchers will evaluate how controllable MAC-LEVEL DIRECTIONAL BIAS INTERACTS WITH APPLICATION, exploiting it where possible. Finally, the research community has a compelling need for a publicly available, freely modifiable Sensor-MAC protocol for experimentation and simulation. Evaluation of our ideas requires implementation and evolution of a MAC protocol. We will provide this implementation to other researchers for use over existing sensor network radios (with a reference implementation on the UC Berkeley Mote hardware) and in simulation (with a reference implementation in the ns-2 simulator). Thus, in addition to opening up sensor-network-specific MAC protocols as a new subfield of research, this work will serve as a catalyst for wider sensor network research that is sorely in need of an appropriate and modifiable MAC doc23740 none To place the problem of condition monitoring in structures into an overall perspective and to highlight the growing need for guided wave condition monitoring strategies, it is important to note that the past decade of theoretical and applied experience in structural health monitoring has yielded two overarching conclusions. First, from a theoretical perspective, it has become accepted that transducer design must focus on distributed, localized measurements at critical members and attachment points. This is because of the low sensitivity of global measurements, such as mode shapes and natural frequencies, to degradation of any kind. Secondly, extensive experience from applied research and demonstration projects has indicated that a successful transducer must incorporate all following requirements: low unit cost, easy installation and wide applicability; high sensitivity and high S N ratios; low power consumption; capability for wireless operation or remote interrogation; and long-term durability Transducers for condition monitoring of structures based on guided wave interrogation principles, such as Rayleigh-Lamb wave transducers, address in principle both sets of concerns. However, transducers based on conventional piezoceramics do not meet all the necessary requirements. To address this need, it is proposed to develop an interdigitated Rayleigh-Lamb wave transducer based on polyvinyldine fluoride (PVDF) piezoelectric polymer films. The successful demonstration of such a transducer will combine the attractive approaches of ultrasonic guided wave testing and the highly evolved capabilities of interdigitated electrodes (IDEs) developed for RF SAW devices or high field, high force pizeoceramic actuators, with the highly desirable properties of PVDF films for structural monitoring. This will significantly enlarge the choice of piezoelectric materials available for maintaining the performance of the nation s infrastructure components doc23741 none The primary objective of the proposed research is to develop capability for application of large numbers of sensors in a very compact and portable manner in civil structures. This will be accomplished by condensing all the hardware components of the sensor system, which includes optical interferometer, and microprocessor modules into a single miniaturized unit. The micro fabrication methodologies will be employed for development of the Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS), which will include wave-guides, and micro mechanical optical switches and rotating micro mirrors. This system will drive a series of distributed optical fiber sensors designed for sensing of structural perturbations within a large sensing range. Conversion of the bulky system into the miniaturized MEMS device will allow for mass production of MEMS-sensor modules for integration within structures as needed. The sensory system will provide monitoring capabilities for excessive strains, cracks, delaminations, deflections, uneven load distributions, thermal shocks, impact loads, and corrosion. The outcomes of this research will have a tremendous impact on safety, maintenance, and efficient operation of the public works infrastructure systems that include myriads of facilities such as buildings, bridges, dams, tunnels, seaports, highways, pipelines, railroads, and power generation stations. This research will provide new educational opportunities for civil engineering students, as they will learn to develop and work with modern tools to solve problems of great importance for the nation s public works infrastructure. Students involved in this project will benefit greatly by exposure to different research areas of engineering, particularly sensor technology, MEMS, structural testing, and industrial packaging of micro devices doc23742 none Emulsions, or suspensions of droplets of one liquid phase in another, occur in a wide variety of chemical, biological and materials processes. Some examples include liquid-liquid extraction, the flow of blood cells, thermal induced phase separation for the formation of microporous membranes and the formation of the immiscible polymer blends with superior mechanical, thermal and electrical properties. In these and many other applications the emulsion is processed so that drops can undergo large deformations, break-up, and coalesce. The proposed project is an interdisciplinary collaboration concerned with large-scale micromechanical simulations of low-Reynolds-number or Stokesian emulsions. To deal with numerous challenges associated with this class of problems, the project brings together three researchers with expertise in geometrical modeling and visualization, fluid mechanical modeling and computations, and fast boundary element methods. The principal objectives of the project are twofold. First, explore, develop and implement various tightly integrated computational methods that will significantly advance existing computer simulation capabilities for Stokesian emulsions. Second, conduct simulations critical to the better qualitative understanding of the coalescence-induced-coalescence phenomenon and sheared emulsions containing highly deformable second-phase droplets capable of coalescence and break-up doc23743 none ITR: Information Representation for Cooperation Across Networks We define cooperation among the nodes of a network to include any activity where the action of a single individual relies on information from other individuals in a shared environment. Using this broad definition, information aggregation in sensor networks, group activities performed by autonomous robotic devices, internet exploration and modeling, and establishment of ad hoc networks are all examples of tasks involving cooperation among the nodes of a network. An essential feature common to cooperative tasks is the need to share information across a distributed system. Thus cooperation requires the flow of information. In environments limited by constraints on power, bandwidth, time, or memory, efficient information flow requires efficient data representation. We are currently studying strategies for efficient information representation in network systems. When we speak of information representation for a network, we consider the network as a whole, asking questions about where information resides in the network, where it is needed, and how to most efficiently represent the information to make it accessible where it is needed. Current topics of investigation include network data compression, functional source coding for networks, and joint source-channel coding for networks doc23744 none Curved geometry plays an important role in many applications, including manufacturing, robotics, and graphics. In many cases, highly accurate and robust operations and representations are desired, but the perceived implementation difficulties and inefficiencies (e.g. from exact computation) prevent application. Compared to the linear and combinatorial problems traditionally associated with computational geometry, problems involving curved solids are far more complicated. In practical terms, problems with accuracy, efficiency, and robustness are all significantly worse when dealing with curved geometry, and significant work remains in addressing these three areas. With further development, efficient implementations, and demonstrated applications, however, accurate and robust operations will find greater acceptance, giving a potential benefit to several application areas. This proposal outlines a plan of research that addresses accuracy, efficiency, and robustness of operations on curved geometry. Overall, it is a topic that is both challenging and promising in terms of potential impact and future research opportunities. The proposed research addresses fundamental areas needed for further development of precise operations with curved solids. Theoretical issues are addressed, but a primary focus of the proposed research is on implementation. Most of the areas of proposed research are geared toward finding highly accurate or exact implementations that still achieve reasonable efficiency. Software will be released to support dissemination of the results. Specific areas of research include: - Filtered Sequences of Computations - Incorporating Root-Finding into Expression Trees - Filtered Geometric Representations - Resultant Computations - Evaluating Combinations of Efficiency Improvements - Handling Degeneracies - Computing with Transcendental Functions - Exact Geometric Representations Application will be a major goal for all of the research areas. Application will serve both to drive new research ideas, and to allow testing and evaluation of research results. The primary application that will be used is solid modeling, from a traditional CAD perspective. The need for accurate and efficient representations in solid modeling is well recognized, making this research particularly relevant. In addition, solid modeling applications present a wide range of problems of varying complexity that allow thorough evaluation of the new methods. Besides solid modeling, we will also investigate application to geometric modeling of other objects, such as neurons, plants, and other naturally occurring objects. Application to neuron modeling will be in conjunction with an ongoing project on mapping brain microstructure, an exciting new interdisciplinary problem area with enormous potential that Texas A&M is in a unique position to address. The proposed research will be integrated into educational activities. A new course in practical computer algebra will be developed that supports the research areas. Undergraduate student research will be encouraged through direct involvement in projects, coursework, and interaction through service activities doc23745 none Jonathan D. Bray, U. of California-Berkeley Collaborative Research: Static and Dynamic Properties of Municipal Solid Waste Over the past 15 years, municipal solid-waste landfills (MSW) have evolved from local dumps into sophisticated engineered systems. Yet, despite the sophistication and complexity of the engineered environmental protection systems required at modern solid-waste landfills, and the dependence of the performance of many of these systems on the behavior of the waste mass, our understanding of the mechanical behavior of MSW is, at best, rudimentary. Uncertainty regarding MSW mechanical properties is a major limitation on performance of reliable landfill stability analyses, the design of waste containment systems for new landfills, and the closure and redevelopment of old landfills. This action is to support a three-year collaborative research program whose objective is to evaluate systematically the significant factors that influence the static and dynamic geotechnical properties of municipal solid-waste landfills. The Environmental Protection Agency requires that all landfills in the United States be designed to withstand earthquakes. For landfills in areas having significant seismic shaking potential, the dynamic properties are needed for design. Currently, dynamic strength properties are assumed to be the same as the static properties, and dynamic stiffness is based on limited small strain data. MSW is a highly heterogeneous material composed of various degradable (e.g. paper, food waste) and non-degradable (e.g. soil, plastic) materials. While the behavior of MSW is likely to be influenced by waste composition and the state of material degradation, a fundamental understanding of the influence of these factors on the static and dynamic behavior of MSW is lacking. As a result, MSW properties for static and dynamic analysis are typically based upon rules of thumb, engineering judgment, and a handful of laboratory and field measurements. Factors being investigated in this study include waste composition (particularly with respect to the relative proportions of refuse and soil-like materials), waste degradation, and particle size. Shear strength, compressibility, and dynamic material properties of MSW are evaluated using laboratory and field investigations. Research on the influence of the refuse-to-soil ratio and on the state of waste degradation will further our understanding of the fundamental behavior of MSW as a composite material composed of refuse and soil. Research on the influence of test specimen size is intended to facilitate both further research and site-specific studies for engineering design by possibly reducing or eliminating the need for large-sized test specimens and testing devices in future studies doc23746 none Eiler This grant provides partial support for an experimental gas source isotope ratio mass spectrometer commissioned from Thermo-Finnigan. This instrument will provide routine analytical capabilities needed to support our existing programs in the hydrogen isotope geochemistry of the solid earth and atmospheric reduced gases. Furthermore (and more importantly), it will be the first ever built with an experimental collection system designed to simultaneously measure relative abundances of common isotopomers (e.g., 12C16O16O, 13C16O16O and 12C18O16O measured in conventional mass spectrometry of CO2) and very rare isotopomers containing two or more rare isotopes (e.g., 12C18O18O, 13C18O16O and 13C18O18O). These species have unusual thermodynamic properties that suggest they can be used to develop intramolecular geothermometers; we also anticipate that their distribution in nature is influenced by non-equilibrium isotope fractionations, such as result from metabolisms, photochemical reactions, and mass transport. The natural geochemistry of these very rare isotopomers is unexplored and promises to add new dimensions to our understanding of the natural cycles of common molecular gases (e.g., N2, O2, CO, CO2, N2O - all of which will be analyzable using this instrument doc23747 none Development of Bolted End Plate Connections for Steel Reinforced Concrete Composite Structures (press-release format for general public) The most significant lesson learned from the Northridge earthquake and the Kobe earthquake was the cracking and brittle failure of welded moment connections of modern steel buildings. The structural engineering communities have since been working on development of improved designs. One possible solution for making steel structures more resistant to earthquakes is to combine concrete and steel to take the advantages of each material. Professors Xiao and Anderson at the University of Southern California have conceived several new details to achieve this. They proposed to use bolted steel and concrete composite connections instead of traditional welded connection to improve constructability and meanwhile to ensure excellent seismic behavior for building structures. In the proposed project, they plan to prove their ideas through experimental testing and analysis doc23748 none Rapid advances in networking and Internet technologies has fueled the emergence of the software as a service model for enterprise computing that enables organizations to outsource many Information Technology (IT) services. This model allows organizations to concentrate on their core business instead of sustaining large investments in IT. IT outsourcing results in savings from the economies of scale due to leveraging of hardware, software, personnel, as well as maintenance and upgrade costs. Outsourcing is a common practice in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) domains and it is gaining popularity in basic services such as email, storage and disaster protection. This research will explore the data privacy challenges that arise in outsourcing data management services. Data management systems are among the most common, expensive, and complex software systems used by almost all types of organizations. In the envisioned database as a service (DAS) model, the client s data resides on the premises of the service provider and is accessed using SQL queries. Since clients data as a very valuable asset, the service provider must implement sufficient security measures to guarantee data privacy. The research will explore the resulting challenges: (1) Privacy protection from malicious outsiders: protecting service providers from theft of customer data (e.g., hackers breaking into a provider s site and scanning all disks). (2) Privacy protection from database service providers: assuring that clients encrypted data cannot be decrypted at the service provider. Thus, techniques to evaluate queries over encrypted data at the service provider need to be developed. (3) Ensuring Integrity of the Results: developing scalable techniques to ensure that the service provider returns exactly the right answer set to the client s query doc23678 none Fourier analysis appears in many of the celebrated cornerstones of theoretical computer science. It plays essential roles in expander graph construction and derandomization, complexity lower bounds, probabilistically checkable proof systems, quantum computing, lower bounds for distributed computation, and traditional applications to computer algebra. The majority of these applications involve the familiar framework of commutative Fourier analysis. The proposed project brings together a multidisciplinary research team to apply the beautiful tools of non-Abelian (that is, noncommutative) Fourier analysis to investigate open questions in two areas where non-Abelian groups have recently become very important: lower bounds for parallel computation and quantum algorithms. The program also further develops efficient algorithms for the discrete Fourier transform over finite non-Abelian groups. This project focuses on developing tools for separating the complexity classes ACC^0 and NC^1, in order to demonstrate that there are natural (polynomial-time computable) problems which simply cannot be parallelized in the sense of ACC^0. The project applies a new family of tools for separating such circuit classes, using non-Abelian Fourier analysis to bound their computational power. These tools apply also to the problem of solving equations over finite groups, and the development of new probabilistically checkable proof systems based on non-Abelian groups. In addition, the project applies non-Abelian Fourier analysis to develop improved lower bounds on the standard Quantum Fourier Transform approach to Graph Isomorphism and study quantum Monte Carlo algorithms. Finally, the project focuses on adaptations of Bratelli diagrams and quivers to develop classical and quantum algorithms for the non-Abelian Fourier transform itself doc23750 none In order to develop Submerged Floating Tunnel (SFT) Technology within the United States, a workshop on the topic is planned in conjunction with the North American Tunneling Conference. SFT s are structurally self-contained tunnels, anchored beneath the surface of a deep body of water. In contrast to conventional tunnels, SFT s are surrounded by water on all sides. By floating the tunnels in location, a number of advantages over conventional tunnels can be realized. This technology can also provide advantages over surface methods (e.g. bridges, ferries) of crossing deep water bodies. The potential locations within the U.S. alone that could benefit from development of an SFT are numerous. Other countries have already directed substantial research efforts toward specific applications of SFT technology. No similar efforts, however, are underway in the U.S. Recognizing the advantages of this new technology, and that such tunnels will ultimately be built, it is important for U.S. researchers and practitioners to develop comparable expertise. It is also important to begin the process of public education, which is the first step in generating public support for a new technology such as this. The proposed workshop will serve as a necessary and significant step in advancement of this new technology. It will serve as the first U.S. forum to facilitate exchange of ideas between international experts, the U.S. academic community and other professionals doc23751 none Lighty The University of Utah (UofU) and the Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) are involved in a collaborative air quality modeling study of ambient particulate matter (PM) in selected areas of the Lower Rio Grande Valley (LRGV) section of the USA Mexico border. Special attention is being given to the peculiar evening episodes with very high PM levels observed near several large border cities and reported to be associated with increased mortality risk in at least one region. The partners have recently participated in a comprehensive PM characterization and source attribution study of the Paso del Norte airshed and propose to use a novel, integrated approach to PM source apportionment by cross-validating the results of PM Receptor Modeling (using factor analysis of receptor and source characterization data to estimate major source contributions) with PM Source Modeling results (using area emission estimates and geography- plus meteorology-based dispersion models to predict evening PM concentrations at specific receptor sites). Successful integration of both methods should permit some degree of interpolation between the limited sampling locations and time points afforded by Receptor Modeling alone while enabling calibration of Source Modeling predictions. Other potential benefits include improved PM exposure risk assessment opportunities for various population groups and more detailed evaluation of the widely reported statistical association between 24-hr PM averages and urban mortality plus morbidity. Most of the PM receptor characterization and modeling tasks will be carried out by the Uof U team whereas primary responsibility for the source measurement and modeling tasks will be undertaken by the ITESM team. Integration of measurement, data fusion, evaluation, and interpretation tasks will require a highly coordinated effort by both teams, an International Collaboration being supported by the NSF-CONACyT Collaborative Research Opportunities Program doc23752 none The regulation of genome dynamics has been evolutionarily conserved. A key factor involved in maintaining the genome s integrity is the ubiquitous DNA strand transfer protein Rad51p. Despite a full decade of research on RAD51 from model systems ranging from yeast to mammals, it is still unclear how Rad51p mediates its effects. This project focuses on RAD51 from the ciliated protozoan Tetrahymena thermophila. Due to Tetrahymena s unique cell biology and nuclear organization, genetic manipulations can showcase the separable functions of Rad51p, including roles unwitnessed in other model organisms. Ciliates possess an unusual genome organization that effectively divides the somatic and germ-line genetic functions between two distinct nuclei. The micronucleus (MIC) is the germline nucleus, dividing mitotically during vegetative growth, and transcriptionally silent. The macronucleus (MAC) is the somatic nucleus, dividing amitotically, and transcriptionally active. The MICs of a conjugating pair undergo a series of meiotic and mitotic divisions, followed by an exchange of haploid nuclei, which fuse to produce a zygotic nucleus. Late in conjugation the parental MACs are destroyed, and new MACs develop in a programmed manner from copies of the zygotic MIC. Tetrahymena RAD51 expression varies under a number of different environmental conditions and developmental stages. Constitutively high Rad51p expression during vegetative growth decouples MAC division from the cell cycle, leading to a high percentage of amacronucleate progeny. This project has two goals. First, a cDNA expression library will be screened for Tetrahymena gene products that suppress the severe amacronucleate phenotype exhibited by strains that constitutively express Rad51p. This experimental approach will help identify factors that directly and or indirectly interact with Rad51p during macronuclear division. Second, randomly mutagenized Rad51p will be constitutively expressed in an effort to identify missense mutations that alleviate the amacronucleate phenotype in transformants. This project, taking advantage of genetic manipulations possible only within the Tetrahymena experimental system, should extend our understanding of Rad51p structure and function and thus will contribute to the analysis of this highly important protein in other eukaryotic model systems. Both undergraduate and graduate students will help carry out this research doc23753 none As the demands on portable embedded systems increase with the incorporation of high-bandwidth wireless data along with multimedia and speech processing, it is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve the required performance and power requirements with programmable solutions. Current platforms for high-end embedded systems typically comprise one or more RISC or DSP processors, along with an increasing number of application-specific (ASIC) components that are necessary to deliver high performance at low power. As more and more functionality is implemented using ASIC components, the platform s range of application decreases and its vulnerability to obsolescence increases. Coarse-grained adaptable architectures bridge the gap between traditional processors and ASIC solutions and can be used to replace many of the ASIC components in high-performance embedded platforms. The goal of this research is to make these adaptable architectures accessible to programmers via a high-level programming language interface. This project will develop a compiler comprising a standard front-end combined with a parallelizing backend that performs scheduling and optimization using a simultaneous place and route algorithm based on those used in physical design automation. Posing the scheduling problem as a place and route problem allows the many constraints imposed by adaptable architectures to be solved by a single phase of the compiler doc23754 none This project, which is a collaborative effort between the University of California at Riverside and Los Angeles, focuses on processor and system architecture issues for Web Switches. Web switches are network processing elements that modify network traffic based on content. These devices are frequently used to provide load balancing between functionally equivalent servers as well as cryptographic services; in in the future will be used for a host of new applications including active security and multimedia trans-coding. This project will begin by developing a benchmarking framework that can be used to evaluate the performance of Web switches. The research will then use advanced processor simulation tools to study architectural tradeoffs in the face of the benchmark workload. In particular, the researchers will focus on the efficacy of hardware accelerator blocks that have been proposed. Finally, work will be completed to implement the workload and capitalize on acquired knowledge in the context of an existing test bed for network processors doc23687 none This research project explores the extent to which the proliferation of technology-enabled, international distributed teams can serve a social as well as an economic good by promoting cross-national understanding and the competence of members. Two issues of theoretical and practical significance are examined in depth, subgroup dynamics and cross-national learning processes. Understanding these processes in such teams and the impact of the use of communication technologies on them are important objectives. Moreover, the research will consider the role that each process plays in team effectiveness. Psychological processes and behavior at the team and individual levels will be examined by means of an ethnographic field study in a large, internationally distributed company. Particular attention will be given to patterns of communication, use of communication technologies, and the sharing of contextual information. The research seeks to advance science through the development of theory and evidence concerning subgroup polarization and collaboration in distributed groups, cross-national learning processes in moderately heterogeneous international groups, and the impact of these processes on team effectiveness. Envisioned advances also include recommendations for the design of supporting collaborative technologies doc23754 none This project, which is a collaborative effort between the University of California at Riverside and Los Angeles, focuses on processor and system architecture issues for Web Switches. Web switches are network processing elements that modify network traffic based on content. These devices are frequently used to provide load balancing between functionally equivalent servers as well as cryptographic services; in in the future will be used for a host of new applications including active security and multimedia trans-coding. This project will begin by developing a benchmarking framework that can be used to evaluate the performance of Web switches. The research will then use advanced processor simulation tools to study architectural tradeoffs in the face of the benchmark workload. In particular, the researchers will focus on the efficacy of hardware accelerator blocks that have been proposed. Finally, work will be completed to implement the workload and capitalize on acquired knowledge in the context of an existing test bed for network processors doc23757 none The continual and compelling need for accurately and efficiently simulating dynamical behavior of physical systems arising from a wide variety of applications has led to increasingly large and complex models. Reduced-order modeling (ROM), also called model reduction, techniques play an indispensable role in providing efficient computational prototyping tools to replace such large-scale models by approximate smaller models. Such reduced-order models must be capable of capturing critical dynamical behavior and faithfully preserving essential properties of the larger models they approximate. An accurate and effiective reduced-order model can be applied for steady-state analysis, transient analysis, or sensitivity analysis of large-scale models and the physical systems they emulate. Consequently, scientists and engineers can significantly reduce design time and pursue more aggressive design strategies. Designers can try ``what-if experiments in hours instead of days. In this proposal, we propose a broad range of synergistic research activities on ROM relating to three interlinking strands: computational theory, reliable algorithms, and high-performance software tools. We will also be actively involved with promoting applications of ROM techniques and testing our methods through existing and new collaborations with researchers in circuit simulation, structural dynamics, control systems, and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). Specifically, our proposed research activities on computational theory and algorithms include: Accuracy estimation in both time and frequency domains. Sensitivity analysis of linear systems using the techniques of ROM and statistical condition estimation. Development of ROM techniques that directly exploit so-called second-order model structures and generate a reduced-order model in second-order form. Exploration of a framework of ROM techniques for certain types of large-scale nonlinear systems of technological importance doc23758 none A new, completely-integrated processor-memory-interconnect (CI-PMI) architecture model suitable for a range of data-intensive applications is proposed. Compared to the existing processor-in-memory (PIM) architectures, the proposed CI-PMI approach integrates more completely the processing, memory, and interconnect. This is achieved by starting with the classical architecture of high capacity memory, namely, a binary tree of decoders with memory modules as leaves, laid out as an H-tree. In the proposed model, copies of one or more types of application-specific computing elements are added at different levels of the memory decoder tree, desired functionality added to the memory decoders to augment their role as interconnects as well as to support desired computation, and, if necessary, additional interconnects added between the application-specific processors, the memory modules, and the decoders. The proposed architecture will be developed and demonstrated for a data-intensive application, namely motion estimation for MPEG encoding. The results of the proposed research will be used to augment one advanced class, to be taught at USC as well as UCI. The class will take a top-down view of advanced processor-in-memory architectures including those developed in this project. The proposed research will advance the state of the art in computer architecture, VLSI, and VLSI CAD, leading to faster and cheaper designs for day to day computation and information retrieval, exchange, and management doc23676 none The goal of this project is to gain a mechanistic understanding of the influences of climate variation on the population dynamics and production of target zooplankton species on Georges Bank (Calanus finmarchicus, Pseudocalanus moultoni, P. newmani, and Oithona similis) through its effects on advective transport, temperature, food availability, and predator fields. Using data analysis and models as tools, results acquired during the first three phases of GLOBEC are being incorporated into a new synthesis of the physical and biological processes regulating zooplankton abundance on the Bank. Physical models will be forced with measured daily, interannually variable data, and coupled to biological models synthesizing the detailed observations collected during the GLOBEC program. To understand the role of advection, and to disentangle the effects of physical and biological processes, a hierarchy of physical and biological models are being developed. These include 1-, 2-, and 3- D physical models, ecosystem models, and individual-based models (IBMs) for the target species. The IBMs are being coupled to 1D physical models designed to represent the characteristic environments of the different Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank subregions. Ultimately, the IBMs will be coupled to the full 3D physical ecosystem model through particle tracking. This will provide a physical and biological milieu in which to develop and probe hypotheses regarding the combined influences of physical and biological factors on the copepod population dynamics. Although the population dynamics in all broadscale survey years will be studied, initial investigations are concentrating on , and . The data sets are the most complete for these years, and SeaWiFS data are available for and . These years also represent a wide range of environmental conditions: an extensive winter bloom in the Gulf of Maine in related to Scotian Shelf inflow and increased stratification; a slightly warmer year in ; and stronger storm activity in than . In addition , and to a lesser extent , gave the indication of being strong years for haddock recruitment but apparently not for cod. Specific issues that are being investigated include: wind control of the advective supply of the target zooplankton species to Georges Bank during January-April; interannual and or event-level variations in the advective flux of Calanus finmarchicus to Gulf of Maine basin diapausing populations during June-April; interannual and or event-level variations in advective losses of copepods from Georges Bank and bank subregions; the influence of stratification on the planktonic ecosystem, and how this affects the population dynamics of the target zooplankton species through food and predation. As a link to Phase IV synthesis studies on target ichthyoplankton, this investigation provides mechanistic insight into the factors determining production of copepod prey for larval cod and haddock on the Bank. A number of students will be trained over the course of the Phase IV research. These students are being trained as broadly educated researchers adept at combining techniques from a variety of disciplines in their work. In addition, this is the first major independent funding source since graduation for two young investigators (Pringle, Gentleman doc23760 none This project addresses some fundamental aspects of the theory and practice of wireless networking. An integrated approach, combiningphysical layer innovations with new protocols for medium access control and scheduling, while accounting for application requirements and transport protocol dynamics, is employed for solving the research problems that are identified. Two major research thrusts are considered. In the first research thrust, the concept of ``pseudocellular wireless networks, which combine the best features of cellular and ad hoc networks, is considered as a paradigm for plug-and-play fourth generation (4G) wireless networks. Such a flexible architecture is clearly critical for quick set-up of wireless networks in emergency situations, in which stationary, or perhaps even mobile, base stations are deployed at convenient (but not optimized) sites to serve both slow-moving and fast-moving users. However, it is also a key ingredient of our vision of achieving a quantum jump in wireless link speeds, by going beyond the current cellular frequency bands of 1-2 GHz to the large bandwidths available in frequency bands in the 10s of GHz. The path loss in such bands is high, forcing the use of a dense network of base stations on the one hand, and enabling more aggressive frequency reuse on the other. The focus of the research is to support a mix of user mobilities, and a mix of real-time and non real-time applications, over a packetized pseudocellular infrastructure. This setting differs from conventional cellular networks, in that the cell sizes are small, and cells may have substantial overlap. It differs from wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), in that it allows for rapidly mobile users despite the small cell sizes. Instead of a conventional hierarchical structure (i.e., large cells for fast-moving users, overlaid on small cells for slow-moving users) to deal with a range of mobility, a mobile-centric approach, which combines handoffs and reservation-based medium access control, is considered to allow for flexible deployment. A novel idea to be investigated is the support of priorities on the reservation channel, so as to allow, for example, highly mobile users with real-time calls in progress to rapidly reserve resources when entering a new pseudocell, thus implicitly achieving a handoff. Another important issue is transceiver optimization of the reservation channel, which requires solution of new problems in multiuser communications. The second research thrust is motivated by the well-known observation that Internet traffic has a heavy-tailed distribution, which typically calls for more conservative resource provisioning than for traditional Markovian traffic models. Since overprovisioning is unattractive in resource-constrained wireless environment, the approach considered is toemploy a new Quality of Service (QoS) framework that allows foraggressive resource utilization, by serving the bulk of the transactions (which are short) rapidly, and penalizing the small fraction of long transactions that contribute to the heavy tails. Scheduling disciplines that achieve this goal are very different from popular round robin or fair queueing schedulers, and were considered in the queueing theory literature more than three decades ago. The implication of these results for heavy-tailed Internet traffic is explored for the first time (to the best of our knowledge) in this project. The scheduling strategy is extended to a shared wireless channel, where fairness is traded off against system efficiency, with the latter dictating that users seeing the best channels are the ones that should get link access. The tradeoff is expected to be biased towards efficiency in order to support heavy-tailed traffic effectively. The interaction between scheduling and the dynamics of TCP connections (TCP is the Internet data transport protocol on top of which most transactions run) is explored, keeping in mind that a TCP connection that is starved of network resources can get locked out of the network due to repeated timeouts and rate cutbacks. Finally, the dependence of scheduling on mobility is explored, with the concept of assigning priority to highly mobile users (who have a smaller chance of getting access to the link during their sojourn in a given pseudocell), while keeping overall QoS and fairness in mind. The scheduling methods we develop place a high importance on overall system efficiency, and are therefore well-suited to flat rate pricing, which is arguably an effective mechanism of promoting usage growth in wireless data networks doc23761 none The overarching goal of this ITR-and ITWF-funded project is to increase the participation of women and minorities in the critical professional careers in information technology. Increased participation in information technology (IT) by women and minorities will lead to broader perspectives from which IT products and services are researched, developed, and supported; increased social equity; and greater size and diversity in the IT professional workforce. Prior research shows that middle school is a critical juncture for girls, since it is at middle school when girls begin to make choices more heavily influenced by stereotypical career choices and other culture-based beliefs than their genuine interests. This project is an extensive, triangulated study examining the recruiting messages and methods that persuade middle school girls to enroll in a public computer magnet high school. The magnet offers three information technology tracks and recruits from 22 middle schools in a diverse district serving 71,000 children (55% Hispanic, 21% white, 20% African-American, 3% Asian, 1% Native American). The project takes a communicative approach to the study of recruiting, in which recruiting is considered an act of persuasion. This permits a focus on: the content of messages and how they affect particular audiences (and not others) in particular social contexts; the individual characteristics of the recruiter; and the interactive processes among the recruiter, the recruited, and the social cultural setting. Since persuasion is a culturally situated accomplishment and therefore will vary by group, data will be gathered, analyzed, and reported according to demographic information. The University of Colorado-Boulder s principal campus-wide academic initiative, the Alliance for Technology, Learning, and Society (ATLAS), provides much of the structure for this project. ATLAS developed an IT certificate program open to all undergraduates (Technology, Arts, and Media certificate) which is attracting a surprisingly high percentage of women. Part of the recruiting research enlists the help of these students and the TAM curriculum. The results of the research will be widely disseminated through conference presentations, publications, and an information web site with special attention to reaching audiences that make policy decisions and can effect real change doc23762 none The objective of the proposed work is to develop a unified framework for synthesis and control of infinite-state reactive systems based on temporal specifications. With synthesis, the full program is generated directly from its specification. With control, part of the system is given and the task is to generate the modules interacting with the given components such that the overall system satisfies its specification. The framework will include a computational model to represent the notions of infinite games, control, realizability, and synthesis of reactive systems, a specification language that can assign goals (winning conditions) to sets of system components, and deductive-algorithmic methods to solve the synthesis and control problems in their various forms for the infinite-state case. The starting point for this framework will be a theoretical foundation built on the models and methods developed for algorithmic synthesis and control of finite-state reactive systems. These methods will be combined with methods developed for deductive verification and abstract interpretation of reactive systems, and with deductive synthesis techniques for functional programs to allow the synthesis and control of infinite-state systems. Preliminary investigations into this approach, described in this proposal and also accepted for publication, are promising doc23763 none The goal of the proposed research is to develop a multithreaded prototyping environment that allows hardware and software experimentation with fine-grain and speculative multithread chip multiprocessor (CMP) architectures. This environment will allow the analysis of single-chip fine-grain threaded systems at full hardware speeds in a much more flexible manner than is possible today with software simulation, and will be the first hardware implementation to execute speculatively multithreaded applications. This environment would be used to investigate threaded applications much more efficiently and thoroughly than any other system existing today. The prototyping environment will be built without doing any VLSI design. The key idea is that by combining ten-year-old microprocessor chips with state-of-the-art FPGA chips it is possible to build a single-board multiprocessor prototyping environment that provides support for thread level speculation (TLS) and operates at hardware speeds, yet has the latency and bandwidth characteristics equivalent to a modern CMP architecture. Such an environment will be ideal for architecture and software research on multithreaded microprocessors doc23764 none Web-based services delivered on scalable cluster platforms are playing an increasingly important role in today s society. A key aspect that has not been sufficiently addressed is delivering scalable performance with quality of service guarantees. It is all too common that web services suffer from outages due to unexpected demand. In the future, as even more computing devices (e.g., Sensor Networks) depend on services, ensuring scalability, reliability, fault-tolerance and quality of service will become paramount, and will allow our society to function normally. This proposal aims at solving the critical research necessary to achieve this vision. This project will study the problem of resource management for Internet services on large-scale clusters, and develop novel solutions that address the shortcomings of traditional approaches (i.e., poor resource utilization, high cost, and low flexibility). This work will develop models that express how clusters share the resources, and will devise metrics that capture the needs of Internet services. Performing extensive simulations using workloads of real web services, a variety of scheduling algorithms and techniques for managing resources will be analyzed. Results from these studies will be applied in building an actual cluster research prototype capable of delivering the desired service guarantees doc23765 none Automatic Analysis of Spontaneous Facial Expressions The goal of this project is to develop computer systems for automatic analysis of spontaneous facial expressions, with a focus on the scientific study of the role of facial expressions in deception. A state-of-the-art digital video database of spontaneous facial expressions will be developed. This database will be hand-coded by behavioral scientist experts on facial expressions. This database will be used to develop an array of software tools for automatic analysis of facial expressions from video sequences. These tools will be developed by machine perception scientists in close collaboration with behavioral scientists and will be evaluated and refined for application to the scientific study of facial expressions. The machine perception community is in critical need for standard video databases to train and evaluate systems for automatic recognition of facial expressions. This project will provide one such database and thus could potentially accelerate research in this field. Automated recognition systems would have a tremendous impact on basic research by making facial expression measurement more accessible as a behavioral measure, providing data on the dynamics of facial behavior at resolutions that was previously unavailable. Such systems would also lay the foundations for computers that can understand this critical aspect of human communication doc23766 none The University of California at Berkeley together with CUREE (the Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering) have planned a symposium in honor of Emeritus Professors Ray Clough and Joseph Penzien to be held on the Berkeley campus on May 9-11, . The event recognizes the notable contributions made by two of the most influential researchers and educators in structural and earthquake engineering. The wide-ranging careers of Professors Ray Clough and Joseph Penzien at UC Berkeley included teaching, research and consulting on topics such as the finite element method; shake table testing; seismic analysis and design of dams, bridges, water tanks, offshore structures, power plants, and buildings; analysis of strong ground motion records; and development of seismic design criteria. The Symposium features a technical program having broad appeal for practicing engineers, researchers, teachers and students. The program combines historical perspectives of structural and earthquake engineering with state-of-the-art discussions on topics represented by the seminal works of the honorees. Attention is given to emerging technologies, including those related to the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) and to protective devices and sensors. The program is particularly valuable to junior faculty starting careers in structural and earthquake engineering, as it provides them an opportunity to have a four-decade perspective of the field as well as an appreciation of the contributions of the two noted pioneers. They also have an opportunity to hear about emerging technologies and the future directions in the fields of structural and earthquake engineering. The opportunity to mingle with the giants of the field in an inviting technical environment is one that will make a lasting impression on the junior faculty in particular doc23767 none With the growing use of the Internet technology, unintentional faults and intentional intrusions directly on network protocols, such as routing protocols (e.g., BGP, OSPF), have become a serious threat to our Internet-connected society. Over the past few years, the researchers have seen many fault or security related instances happening to our Internet and, because of these problems, significant losses occurred one way or the other. In the research communities, such as fault tolerant networking, network security, and intrusion detection, many new ideas have been explored to enhance the existing network protocols or, more drastically, to propose a completely new Internet architecture. Some vulnerabilities have been reduced or removed, but yet the researchers expect many more new vulnerabilities and problems to be discovered. The researchers believe that, to effectively monitor and control a large system, they need not only a well-designed and implemented system but also, equally important, a good human interface to know the system after it is deployed and operated. The researchers also believe that, in the foreseeable future, human intelligence will play a critical role in managing and maintaining large distributed systems such as the Internet. But, surprisingly few research efforts are currently toward this direction. The main contribution in this project is a human-interactive approach to handle faults and security attacks on the Internet routing protocols such as BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) and OSPF (Open Shortest Path First). We will investigate several critical but very difficult (difficult in the sense if we would rely completely on machine intelligence) issues and offer solutions based on an interactive visual-based analysis process. For example, anomaly detection systems for unknown novel attacks are hard to build due to the consideration of effectiveness, coverage, and false positive. Also, network event correlation is very difficult because this task normally involves very complicated potential relations among various events on the Internet and the amount of resources to complete the task is prohibitively expensive. This research addresses two very fundamental problems. One is the formulation of typical visual-based anomaly detection processes. The other is the mapping of not only the protocol data but also the analysis process to appropriate visualization representations and associated operations. The resulting visual-based process would allow a human network operator quickly navigate to the right level of details to discover critical facts about the Internet. For the network routing protocol management, we study the optimal boundary between the machine intelligence and the human intelligence on detecting and tracking anomaly that was previously impossible to understand doc23768 none Spatiotemporal data appears in many real-life applications (global change, surveillance, transportation etc.) Together with regular attributes such data contains topological as well as temporal attributes. This combination creates novel interesting problems. Moreover, spatiotemporal data is usually presented in streams which drastically affects the data processing methods. We propose general exploratory techniques that will allow the user not only to verify specific hyphotheses, but more importantly, to understand the underlying process that controls the changes recorded in the spatiotemporal datasets. In particular: 1. We will first first address the problem of performing on-line analysis on spatiotemporal streams. This part of the project will provide the appropriate tools for the major effort of this proposal, i.e., understanding patterns of change. 2. We will then address the problem of understanding patterns of change in specific spatiotemporal applications, namely: (i) epidemiological, (ii) environmental and (iii) surveillance applications. In each application we will first define low-level analysis primitives. Such primitives are simpler to identify in each application area. We will then use combinations of such primitives to describe complex (high-level) patterns of change doc23769 none Hardware-based approaches to accelerate CPU intensive operations that arise in the context of non-standard database applications are proposed. Two hardware technologies, namely, off-the-shelf graphics cards and content addressable memories (CAM) that are used in contemporary Network Routers for very fast lookups are identified. The graphics functionality designed primarily for display applications can be exploited for polygon intersection in spatial databases and for distance-based query processing. Content addressable memories (CAM) can be gainfully deployed for accelerating join operations in databases. In the context of new database applications, the join constraint which is generally based on equality is being expanded to encompass other conditions such as set-containment. The major goal of this research is to develop a general framework for enabling fine-grained hardware acceleration within a commercial DBM doc23770 none EIA - Hood, Leroy Institute for Systems Biology TITLE: Development of an integrated computational and experimental approach to predict biological networks in Halobacterium sp. The extremely halophilic archaeon Halobacterium sp. NRC-1, whose sequenced genome contains 2,630 genes, is being used as a model for predicting biological networks in microbial systems. The genes are compared across species to identify putative protein interactions by integrating identified protein protein interactions from orthologous proteins, domain gene fusions, gene localization, and mRNA and protein expression data using both existing and new algorithms. The functional biomodules are being determined by integrating this information with additional information from biochemical pathways, shared promoter motifs, and a new protein distance algorithm. These approaches are then integrated into a visualization and integration platform, Cytoscape, being developed at the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB doc23771 none Gusfield, Daniel University of California-Davis ITR: Algorithmic Problems in Population-Scale Genomics Now that genomic level technologies are widely available (for sequencing, resequencing, micro-array screening of sequences etc.), the dream of comparing sequence variations at the population level is starting to become a reality. These comparisons will be used to help to identify the genetic basis of disease susceptibility, and will have additional uses. This shift to opulation-scale genomics introduces a new set of computational problems, and provides a huge opportunity for high-impact algorithm development and research. This project focuses on novel, critical computational problems that arise in population-scale genomic data acquisition and analysis. The specific computational problems to be addressed arise out of on-going population-scale investigations into population-level genomic variability. It will focus on novel computational problems that have not been previously formulated and addressed, and problems where additional formulations are needed to better capture the relevant biology. Although the algorithmic techniques will be grounded in theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics (and the results will be of interest in those fields), the standards for success will be the ultimate applicability of the results in genomics. The research will be conducted at several levels: modeling and defining important problems; finding and developing efficient algorithms; implementing and distributing software for the most important results; and applying the software on population-scale genomic data. Our first focus is on problems related to computationally extracting haplotype information from genotype information, and the construction and use of haplotype maps. The larger significance of the project will be the development of powerful computational tools for use by geneticists and gene mappers, which will help to more effectively identify the genetic bases for disease susceptibility and other important genetic traits doc23772 none Edward Kavazanjian, Neven Matasovic, GeoSyntec Consultants Collaborative Research: Static and Dynamic Properties of Municipal Solid Waste Over the past 15 years, municipal solid-waste landfills (MSW) have evolved from local dumps into sophisticated engineered systems. Yet, despite the sophistication and complexity of the engineered environmental protection systems required at modern solid-waste landfills, and the dependence of the performance of many of these systems on the behavior of the waste mass, our understanding of the mechanical behavior of MSW is, at best, rudimentary. Uncertainty regarding MSW mechanical properties is a major limitation on performance of reliable landfill stability analyses, the design of waste containment systems for new landfills, and the closure and redevelopment of old landfills. This action is to support a three-year collaborative research program whose objective is to evaluate systematically the significant factors that influence the static and dynamic geotechnical properties of municipal solid-waste landfills. The Environmental Protection Agency requires that all landfills in the United States be designed to withstand earthquakes. For landfills in areas having significant seismic shaking potential, the dynamic properties are needed for design. Currently, dynamic strength properties are assumed to be the same as the static properties, and dynamic stiffness is based on limited small strain data. MSW is a highly heterogeneous material composed of various degradable (e.g. paper, food waste) and non-degradable (e.g. soil, plastic) materials. While the behavior of MSW is likely to be influenced by waste composition and the state of material degradation, a fundamental understanding of the influence of these factors on the static and dynamic behavior of MSW is lacking. As a result, MSW properties for static and dynamic analysis are typically based upon rules of thumb, engineering judgment, and a handful of laboratory and field measurements. Factors being investigated in this study include waste composition (particularly with respect to the relative proportions of refuse and soil-like materials), waste degradation, and particle size. Shear strength, compressibility, and dynamic material properties of MSW are evaluated using laboratory and field investigations. Research on the influence of the refuse-to-soil ratio and on the state of waste degradation will further our understanding of the fundamental behavior of MSW as a composite material composed of refuse and soil. Research on the influence of test specimen size is intended to facilitate both further research and site-specific studies for engineering design by possibly reducing or eliminating the need for large-sized test specimens and testing devices in future studies. This collaborative project capitalizes on the insights and experienced gained by the principal investigators on previous studies of MSW characterization and landfill performance. It will advance the profession s understanding of MSW landfills as engineered systems, leading to safer and more economical landfill designs. It is an important step in moving beyond the over-reliance This collaborative project capitalizes on the insights and experienced gained by the principal investigators on previous studies of MSW characterization and landfill performance. It will advance the profession s understanding of MSW landfills as engineered systems, leading to safer and more economical landfill designs. It is an important step in moving beyond the over-reliance in current landfill design practice on rules of thumb and conjecture. This project involves collaboration between researchers at the University of California - Berkeley, the University of Texas - Austin, and GeoSyntec Consultants in Huntington Beach, California. in current landfill design practice on rules of thumb and conjecture. This project involves collaboration between researchers at the University of California - Berkeley, the University of Texas - Austin, and GeoSyntec Consultants in Huntington Beach, California doc23773 none Hogg The overall goal of the Kuroshio Extension System Study (KESS) is to identify and quantify the dynamic and thermodynamic processes governing the variability of and the interaction between the Kuroshio Extension and the recirculation gyre. Investigators from three US institutions will deploy a state-of-the-art array consisting of moored-profiler and current-meter moorings and inverted echo sounders equipped with near-bottom pressure and current sensors. Profiling floats will monitor the temperature and salinity structure in the recirculation gyre south of the Kuroshio Extension. The KESS array is designed to use these tools synergistically to observe the Kuroshio Extension in a more complete way than any one of them could do alone. In particular, the Inverted Echo Sounders will map features of the jet as they evolve and, in combination with the Moored Profilers, will quantify the cross-frontal fluxes, while the profiling floats will monitor the upper ocean structure around the Kuroshio Extension and its recirculation gyres. KESS will use these combined observations to identify and quantify the dynamic and thermodynamic processes governing the variability of, and the interaction between, the Kuroshio Extension and the recirculation gyre. The proposed approach makes extensive use of satellite data (surface temperature and sea-surface height). The investigators will also collaborate closely with Japanese scientists studying the overall Kuroshio system. The measurements from the KESS array will guide future planning for a long term observational program as part of CLIVAR doc23774 none PI: George T. Heineman, Computer Science Department, WPI A legacy system is any software system that is in use and must evolve to meet changing conditions. These systems must be re-engineered because over time, the ability to evolve the system decreases with each successive maintenance. The proposed research combines the concepts of features and software components in a novel way to extract feature-based software components from a legacy system. First, the features of the target legacy system are elicited and using existing code profiling tools, the code associated with these features is identified. This task is made possible by the regression test suite that many legacy systems already have to ensure proper functioning as the system is upgraded. Second, software components are refactored from the legacy system. In short, the data generated by execution traces is analyzed for evolution purposes. The research will provides a viable long-term strategy for an organization to incrementally modernize its software code base. A reengineering methodology will be defined and applied. A corresponding cost savings model will be developed based upon preliminary success with the legacy system for a financial company. The methodology will be packaged and disseminated to ensure other organizations with legacy systems can easily benefit from the results of this research doc4148 none This award form the Synthetic Organic Program will support a series of three annual Workshops on Organic Synthesis and Natural Products Chemistry. These workshops have the dual purpose of providing an effective forum for informal discussion among young industrial and academic scientists on current research in topical areas of organic synthesis and natural products, and assisting the Program staff in identifying emerging areas and researchers. This process, in turn, will aid the Program in long-range planning. The specific goals of the workshops include: 1) Providing an environment for the dynamic exchange of ideas in organic synthesis and natural products chemistry among a small group (about 20) of active young researchers in these fields. 2) Encouraging an attitude of cooperation among individuals working in related areas, and thereby, avoiding duplicative efforts. 3) Stimulating participants to study new problems and methods in synthetic and natural products chemistry. 4) Creating an atmosphere in which the scientific and social interaction among participants will be both stimulating and pleasant doc23776 none The main objective of the conference is to create an environment for AMPATH participants, potential participants and those with a regional, hemispheric or international interest in the project to exchange ideas, form new and solidify existing collaborations. The conference will continue the work of identifying the universities and research centers in the AMPATH service area who require, or would take advantage of, high-performance connectivity to research institutions in the U.S. and worldwide if it were available. Proposed speakers at the conference include researchers that participate in projects between collaborators in the U.S., Canada, the AMPATH service area, Europe and Asia Pacific. AMPATH is a project of Florida International University in collaboration with Global Crossing, in support of scientific research applications that either involve collaboration between U.S. and multi-national researchers or wholly run U.S. projects in the AMPATH service area. Research and Education networks to the UCAID Abilene network and the Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean and the rest of the world to further advance U.S. science and education doc23777 none The American Chemical Society METAL OXIDES Symposium on will be held in Boston, MA, August 18-22, . The goal of the conference is to facilitate multidisciplinary interactions and information exchange within a broad spectrum of researchers, to include CAREER grantees, post doctoral scholars and graduate students working in priority areas of the broad field of metal oxide solid-state chemistry. The NSF funds will be used to support the costs for invited speakers, junior faculty, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students to participate in the symposium. The Solid State Chemistry community continues to have direct impact on technological areas that are crucial to advancing society through the design, synthesis and application new materials. Examples include metal oxide materials for oxide ferroelectrics, thin films for electronics and electrooptic devices, oxide superconductors and oxides with negative thermal expansion coefficients. Since these technical areas are of very high priority to industry, students educated and trained in these multidisciplinary areas involving solid-state chemistry compete very well in the job market and go on to contribute in many significant ways to the global economy doc23778 none Practical and Performance Oriented Nonlinear Adaptive Robust Control -- Theory and Applications to Precision Control of Modern Mechanical Systems : The goals of this project are to (i) develop a general framework for the design of practical and performance oriented nonlinear adaptive robust controllers (PARC) that explicitly take into account the effects of typical implementation constraints while without sacrificing achievable implementation performance much and being structurally simple to facilitate design and implementation, (ii) determine practically meaningful criteria and appropriate optimization algorithms that can be used to systematically determine PARC parameters for an optimized control performance, and (iii) apply the integrated PARC design to the precision control of high-speed mechanical systems driven by either electro-magnetic motors or electro-hydraulic actuators as well as the coordinated control of high-speed robot manipulators. A fundamentally different new design philosophy on synthesizing nonlinear robust feedback is adopted to solve the structural complexity of existing adaptive robust controllers-proper nonlinear robust feedback with fixed structures is used so that the effects of typical implementation constraints such as the control input saturation, measurement noise, and neglected high frequency dynamics can be explicitly analyzed and quantified through a combination of global nonlinear synthesis and local quasi-linear analysis. The research emphasizes both general theory development and the integration of the proposed PARC with the particular characteristics of the application. The education plan focuses on the in-depth re-examination of current undergraduate and graduate control curriculum to set the right control design philosophy for students during their early stage of control education, as well as developing innovative course on performance-oriented nonlinear adaptive and robust controls. The proposed research is motivated by the lack of advanced and yet practical performance-oriented nonlinear adaptive robust control designs that are needed in engineering control curriculum to meet industry needs for high productivity and quality products. Once successfully completed, the results will have a lasting impact on future control curriculum, at both the undergraduate and the graduate level. The results also have a direct impact on industry as they directly address the common concerns of practicing engineers in applying advanced nonlinear controls doc23779 none Laci Jalics, Delphi Research Labs Giorgio Rizzoni, The Ohio State University Andrea Serrani, The Ohio State University Ahmed Soliman, The Ohio State University Hierarchical, Modular Fault Diagnosis in Complex Systems The objectives of this GOALI project program are: 1) to develop a methodology that permits the design of modular, hierarchical, model-based diagnostic algorithms that can result in re-usable software modules, and that can be methodically organized into a complete, self-contained monitoring system; and 2) to demonstrate the methodology in collaboration with an industry partner. Fault tolerance is a critical element in complex automotive systems because of the introduction of by-wire systems in vehicles. by-wire systems generate electrical commands through driver input and transfer them to the computer-controlled electro-mechanical actuators. With respect to traditional systems, by-wire systems require complex control and diagnostic strategies to guarantee proper vehicle behavior and to prevent system malfunctions. A significant roadblock for safety-critical by-wire systems is the realization of a robust fault-diagnostic strategy that can be accomplished quickly and with limited or no additional hardware. This project addresses these issues in three stages: 1) through the use of physically based system models to understand interactions and dependencies among subsystems in a complex system; 2) with the design of residual generator units that can locally diagnose faults in components, sensors and actuators; and 3) using a hierarchical structure that links components, systems, and subsystems through the use of fault propagation digraphs. The fault propagation digraph contains a hierarchical representation of available knowledge about the characteristics of fault propagation within the system. Each level in the hierarchy contains one or more structures that together represent a view of the system under a particular granularity. The granularity of view increases with levels. Thus as one traverses down the levels of the model, the resolution of view increases. If a high resolution of diagnosis is not required, failure analysis may be confined to the upper levels of the hierarchy, thereby preventing a slowdown of the diagnosis due to excessive detail doc23780 none An architectural framework for distributed computing is proposed, with a view to unifying multiple resource sharing models. Farm computing, private virtual machines, computational grids, and peer to peer technologies are examples of di.erent paradigms that have evolved to support di.erent application domains. However, despite their common underlying theme of sharing resources across computer networks, systems implementing these technologies tend to preclude interoperability and, in some cases, require substantial middleware to orchestrate resource aggregation. This project adopts a provider-centric view of resource sharing, emphasizes lightweight software infrastructures that maintain minimal state, and facilitates straightforward interfacing to current and emerging distributed computing standards. Through a reconfigurable, component-based approach, the proposed framework will attempt to provide support for multiple distributed computing paradigms in a unified setting. The provider perspective adopted in this project envisions resource owners hosting a software backplane onto which owners, clients, or third-party resellers may load components or component suites that deliver value added services. Complete control over usage, security, and protection of resources is retained by the owner. Components may implement primitive functions such as message transport or mathematical transforms, or may be aggregated to emulate concurrent computing environments, or may ofer portal interfaces to complex backend application services. Providers of primitive resources or components may publish their availability using either standard mechanisms, framework-supplied schemes, or private directories; clients discover, lookup, and use these services subject to usage and security constraints. In the conduct of this project, fundamental issues concerning commonalities and dualities in distributed systems, secure resource sharing, and software reconfiguration will be explored, and will likely contribute new and useful findings to the field. Owing to its strong pragmatic bias, the project is also likely to have broad impact by suggesting schemes to realize effective distributed computing systems, and by evolving prototype paradigmatic software doc23781 none A hallmark of gene regulation in eukaryotes is the central role played by multiprotein complexes that bind DNA and recruit additional proteins that modulate mRNA transcription. The study of the protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions that govern multiprotein complex formation is therefore essential to a mechanistic understanding of the complex molecular switches that regulate eukaryotic transcription. This laboratory s structural and biochemical studies of combinatorial regulation by yeast mating-type and human Hox homeodomain proteins have revealed principals for complex formation among homeodomain proteins, which are found in all eukaryotes and constitute the second largest class of human DNA-binding proteins. Prior work has focused on the heterodimerization and DNA-sequence selectivity of the yeast MATa1 and MATa2 homeodomain proteins and on comparative structural studies on the human HoxB1 Pbx1 homeodomain heterodimer bound to DNA. In addition, the structure was determined of a monomeric C-terminal fragment of the Tup1 corepressor that interacts with a2. This project builds upon this work, addressing questions of co-repressor recruitment, Hox homeodomain specificity and activity, and the structure of domains outside the homeodomain that play key roles in multimerization and nuclear localization. The crystal structure of the intact Tup1-Ssn6 corepressor complex, which is recruited to the DNA by MATa2 and other yeast transcription factors, will provide much-needed insights into the overall structure of this important yeast transcriptional repressor. In addition to revealing the fold of domains required for transcriptional repression and showing how the TPR repeats of Ssn6 bind to Tup1, knowing the domain organization of the entire 4:1 Tup1 Ssn6 will be key to building up a model of the complete a2 a1 Tup1 Ssn6 complex that is assembled upstream of target genes. Complementary biochemical studies of histone deacetylase recruitment will shed light on how Tup1 recruits selected histone acetylases to a target gene, and will provide a basis for the design of future structural studies. Since Tup1 and Ssn6-like proteins have been identified in many eukaryotes, including man, the findings from the yeast system will have direct implications for a general mechanistic understanding of eukaryotic transcriptional regulation. The PI s continuing studies of Hox proteins and their partners will provide further insights into how these important developmental regulators discriminate among potential binding sites in the cell and how they are regulated by post-translational modification. The structure determination of a Pbx1 Meis1 heterodimer will shed light on an aspect of homeodomain gene regulation that has not been previously addressed, namely the important regulatory role of domains that lie outside the DNA-binding domain. The results of these studies will yield fundamental insights into basic mechanisms of gene regulation, and in particular into the role played by large protein assemblies in regulating eukaryotic transcription. In addition, these projects provide outstanding opportunities for the training of graduate students in the methods and approaches of structural biology doc23782 none The stomach is an important organ, both physiologically and ecologically. From a comparative perspective, the structure and function of the stomach are similar across vertebrate classes, whereas the timing of its formation in the life cycle is variable. Little is known about the endocrine regulation of stomach organogenesis. In vertebrates, corticosteroids and thyroid hormones significantly regulate development, however their metabolic functions in adults are more thoroughly studied. The larger idea here is that these are the hormones that connect metabolism and metabolic state with growth and development. The proposed project tests the hypothesis that stomach organogenesis is regulated by sequential action of cortisol and thyroid hormones on cell proliferation and differentiation. The endocrine regulation of organogenesis is more easily studied in free-living larval stages than in embryonic fetal stages because of the ease of manipulation of hormone levels. The experimental animal used to test this hypothesis is the marine flatfish summer flounder (Paralichthys dentatus). In summer flounder, stomach organogenesis occurs at the end of the larval phase during metamorphosis. Metamorphosing flounder can be staged based on the translocation of the right eye to the left side of the head (like the hand on a clock). This permits stage-specific experimentation that is difficult or impossible otherwise. In the incipient stomach, the developmental progression of proliferation, morphogenesis, and cell differentiation is closely associated with sequential amplification of corticosteroid and thyroid hormone signalling. These hormones act through intracellular receptors that serve as transcription factors. How do these hormones coordinate the cellular and intercellular mechanisms of organogenesis? The research plan integrates responses at the organismal, organ, tissue, and cellular and molecular levels of organization. End-points are morphogenesis, morphometrics, cell proliferation and differentiation, hormone concentrations, and quantification and localization of the receptors for cortisol and thyroid hormones. The broad significance of the award includes the research training of early scientists, possible contributions to the development of aquaculture of marine fishes, and basic understanding of the endocrine regulation of cellular proliferation and differentiation doc23783 none This grant is supported jointly by the Divisions of Materials Research and Mathematical Sciences. The research will focus on interference effects in electronic systems driven by strong interactions and extends to nonlinear physics. In particular, problems to be addressed in quantum physics include interference effects in p- and d-wave chiral superconductors; magnetotransport and quantum Hall effect in organic quasi-one-dimensional conductors; and Aharanov-Bohm effect in the quantum Hall regime. In the area of nonlinear physics, problems to be addressed include singularities in moving fronts and diffusion driven aggregations; integrable aspects of nonlinear dynamics; application of random matrices in problems of analysis. This grant is supported jointly by the Divisions of Materials Research and Mathematical Sciences. The research will focus on interference effects in electronic systems driven by strong interactions and extends to nonlinear physics doc23784 none This project allows talented and needy students the opportunity to pursue their educational dreams in the field of computer science or information technology at Armstrong Atlantic State University. More specially, 28 two-year scholarships to undergraduates in computer science, 12 two-year scholarships to graduate students in computer science, and ten four-year scholarships to undergraduates in information technology would be awarded. Having a typical class size of less than twenty and an in-state cost of $3,969 for tuition, room and board, and fees for undergraduates, Armstrong Atlantic offers one of the best educational values in computer science or information technology in the country. Armstrong Atlantic s student body is 70% female and 30% of the students are minorities. Many of these students are unable to remain in school due to job pressures, broken homes, and or lack of financial resources. This project would change the lives of 50 individuals by providing scholarships so that they can pursue their studies full-time. A comprehensive plan is in place for recruitment, selection, support, and job placement issues. The recruitment plan includes developing brochures, pamphlets, and Web materials; advertising on bulletin boards and newspapers; attending college fairs and University open houses; and visiting high schools among other things. The selection process involves a well-defined set of criteria, a numerical evaluation form, student interviews, and selection committee discussion. Support for scholars includes community building, student activities, advising, mentoring, and tutoring. Job placement involves advising, internships, resume preparation, ACM and IEEE discussions, meetings with industry representatives, Savannah s Business and Educational Technical Alliance, and discussions with Armstrong Atlantic s Director of Career Services among other events doc23785 none The PIs propose to build a new system that will image multiple wavelengths of fluoresced and scattered light and perform stereo particle image velocimetry (3D PIV) measurements. These data will enable maps of fluid flow and derived quantities such as strain rate, vorticity, and the dissipation rate of turbulent kinetic energy to be produced. Measurements will be made on identical scales (20 x 20 x 0.6 cm with 100 um resolution), nearly simultaneously, allowing in situ 3D mapping of biological distributions to microscale physical flows. It is proposed that the multiple imaging wavelengths will allow a degree of taxonomic discrimination among fluorescent particles, while the side-scattered light will provide images of all particles that scatter the excitation irradiance including most of the phytoplankton appearing in the fluorescence images, as well as zooplankton. The 3D PIV-multispectral imaging fluorometer will be mounted on a free-falling platform with a suite of auxiliary instruments and a water sampler for image ground-truthing that has already been constructed and shown to provide undisturbed views of plankton in the water column. Images will be captured in a plane extending below the platform to obtain distributions unaffected by the platform. Shipboard epifluorescence microscopy will be used to identify dominant organisms in the images. Relating microscale distributions of plankton to microscale physical dynamics in the ocean has been largely limited by a lack of technology. The combination of multiple-wavelength imaging and PIV will allow in situ investigations of fluorescent particle bulk fluorescence relationships, microscale distributions of plankton in relation to microscale flows, spatial relationships of grazers and primary producers, and physical mechanisms underlying fine- and microscale biological patchiness. This instrument is an enhancement of an existing 2D imaging fluorometer developed by the PIs that has only one sensing wavelength, and does not gather simultaneous physical data on the same scales as the fluorescence images doc23786 none ion of software development with the performance of reconfigurable hardware. This will be done by converting a serial representation of an application into a spatial representation, and executing the spatial representation on a fabric of locally interconnected processing elements. The conversion from serial to spatial representation will be performed at run time, concurrently with execution. The first phase of this project will involve the definition and prototyping of a first generation of this architecture. The second phase of the project will refine the code generation techniques for the architecture. The third phase of the project will investigate the incorporation of various control-flow operations in the architecture doc23177 none In this project researchers at East Carolina University, Tulane University, and the University of Miami will attempt to a comprehensive approach to allow a quantitative estimate of groundwater discharge and associated dissolved constituents to continental shelf waters. A number of recent studies have shown that he transport of groundwater into coastal zones may be a significant process in the geochemical, nutrient, and carbon budgets of many marine nearshore waters. This project will address the manner in which we may evaluate interactions between groundwater and surface water a major river-dominated margin, the Mississippi River delta. The research team will develop and apply a novel multiple-tracer approach involving the use of 222Rn 226Ra, 4He 3He tritium, and short-lived radium isotopes as natural tracers of groundwater flow to examine the margin adjacent to the Mississippi River. Water samples will be collected from land-based groundwater wells near the Louisiana coast, deep porewaters via Kasten core, and surface waters from the lower Mississippi and adjacent continental shelf throughout the project. To evaluate the connection between groundwater inputs and surface water tracer inventories, we team will construct a balance of all possible inputs and outputs of these natural tracers.. This field-based research will be used to develop and constrain a numerical hydrologic model for the study area. Model results will be compared to estimates of groundwater flow obtained from geochemical modeling doc23788 none This proposal addresses two areas of critical emerging technology in the microwave and millimeter wave regions. The first area is the fundamental characteristics of dielectric resonator antennas and finite antenna arrays operating in a cylindrical waveguide environment. The study and analysis of single dielectric resonator antenna element show the advantages of this new antenna type at millimeter wave frequencies in comparison with traditionally used microstrip and patch printed antennas. This new radiator is expected to be an excellent element in antenna arrays used in many critical applications. This part of the project focuses on the development of new analytical and numerical tools for full-wave analysis of antenna radiation characteristics and on the investigation of performance of dielectric radiators as elements in waveguide-based antenna arrays. Based on the understanding of dielectric resonator antenna performance in cylindrical waveguides, the second part of the project addresses the issue of modeling a fully integrated cylindrical waveguide-based spatial power combining amplifier array. A cylindrical spatial power combining architecture, which utilizes an array of dielectric resonators, is proposed. In this system, dielectric resonator antennas play a critical role, which is justified by their radiation characteristics and high power handling capabilities. Our goal here is to develop an integrated modeling scheme for the full-wave analysis of a complete waveguide-based spatial power combining system, including the interaction of passive (dielectric resonator and hard-horn antennas) elements and active (amplifier) circuits. The newly proposed system will allow to operate in dual and circular polarization regimes. A high level educational component is considered here by training two graduate students during the course of this project that merge the basic research with high level practical applications. In order to broaden the scope of benefits, a new course will be developed to involve and expose more graduate students to this area. The course will be developed based on the study of dielectric resonator antennas in an array environment and the use of hard surfaces as an artificial magnetic surface doc23789 none The long-term goal of this research is to probe the structure and function of the potassium channel outer vestibule with peptide neurotoxins (a-KTx). Potassium channels regulate numerous cellular processes such as muscle contraction, nerve transmission, hormone release and cell growth. The essence of potassium channel function in all of these processes relies on regulation or gating of transmembrane K+ flux through the channel pore. The a-KTx peptides selectively inhibit potassium channels with high affinity by binding to and occluding the outer pore. This region is important since it is analogous to the active site of an enzyme in that it allows the exquisite selection of K+ ions over other ions in solution. In addition, dynamic changes in the outer vestibule may contribute to gating of K+ flux through the pore. With their rigid, known 3D structure, a-KTx peptides are valuable molecular probes for identifying cationic- and gating- dependent changes in the outer vestibule. Large-conductance calcium-activated (maxi-K) and voltage-gated (KV1) potassium channels exhibit striking differences in their a-KTx specificity that may correlate with structural and functional differences in their outer vestibules. Our first goal is to understand how a-KTx peptides discriminate between maxi-K and KV1 outer vestibules at the molecular level. Using site-directed mutagenesis, we will identify pairwise interactions between toxin and channel amino acids that underlie a-KTx specificity. Guided by 3D channel models, we will examine how these pairwise interactions change with gating. These findings will provide insight into the dynamic relationship between gating and permeation in the channel outer vestibule doc23790 none This small grant for exploratory research supports a geochemistry summer program for under-represented minority students to be based at Colby College. The goal is to expose two high school juniors to the excitement of geoscience research while building their formal mathematics, chemistry, and earth science skills. The program is unique from past programs in that the students and their high school teacher are all participants in the program. Students will be selected from the High School for Engineering Professions program or the College preparatory Magnet program at Scotlandville Magnet High School in Baton Rouge, LA. The students will be part of ongoing research at Colby investigating the geochemistry of the Belgrade lakes watershed. The summer program will be the launching point for the students senior-year advanced science courses. This experimental program may serve as a model for other partnerships between under resourced high schools and four-year colleges and universities doc23765 none Automatic Analysis of Spontaneous Facial Expressions The goal of this project is to develop computer systems for automatic analysis of spontaneous facial expressions, with a focus on the scientific study of the role of facial expressions in deception. A state-of-the-art digital video database of spontaneous facial expressions will be developed. This database will be hand-coded by behavioral scientist experts on facial expressions. This database will be used to develop an array of software tools for automatic analysis of facial expressions from video sequences. These tools will be developed by machine perception scientists in close collaboration with behavioral scientists and will be evaluated and refined for application to the scientific study of facial expressions. The machine perception community is in critical need for standard video databases to train and evaluate systems for automatic recognition of facial expressions. This project will provide one such database and thus could potentially accelerate research in this field. Automated recognition systems would have a tremendous impact on basic research by making facial expression measurement more accessible as a behavioral measure, providing data on the dynamics of facial behavior at resolutions that was previously unavailable. Such systems would also lay the foundations for computers that can understand this critical aspect of human communication doc23792 none This award will investigate the ability of block copolymers to direct polymer crystallization. Diblock and triblock copolymers with defect-free crystallizable blocks will test the prediction of an equilibrium degree of chain folding in crystalline-amorphous block copolymers, which contrasts sharply with the kinetically-induced chain folding typically exhibited by homopolymers. Control of crystallite thickness through crystalline and amorphous block lengths or the addition of a nonvolatile diluent will yield materials with narrow and tunable melting ranges. Diluted triblocks having crystallizable endblocks will represent a new type of thermoplastic elastomer gel with low modulus and good dimensional stability-desirable candidates for large-deformation actuators. In the second aspect of this work, novel block copolymers synthesized by combining ring-opening metathesis and anionic polymerizations will address the long-standing issue of cocrystallization between linear and short-branched polyethylenes. These polymers will contain blocks of linear polyethylene, PE, and poly(ethylene-co-butene), PEB, separated by an amorphous block of variable length. When this linker run is short, the polymers are essentially PE-PEB diblocks, which are expected to show an interesting crystal heterogeneity. When the linker run is of medium length (long enough to microphase-separate from the other blocks), then the PE and PEB blocks are tethered to amorphous domains, favoring PE PEB cocrystallization. Finally, when the linker run is the majority component, the mixed PE + PEB chains will be segregated within discrete microdomains, where they will crystallize only at deep undercoolings and with extensive cocrystallization. This provides a route to the preparation of PE PEB cocrystals for systematic examination of their structure and properties. Crystallization of polymers has a profound impact on their properties, and underpins many of their applications. At size scales ranging from nanometers to microns, a typical polymer s crystalline structure depends strongly upon details of method used to crystallize it. In this work, we propose to robustly control the crystallization process, and hence the structure, through molecular features built into the polymers-the so-called block architecture -during synthesis. The proposed work will provide an integrated research and educational experience for two graduate students and approximately six undergraduates, who will be able to disseminate results from their work both internally and externally. The PI and the graduate students will continue their active work in support of K-6 science education in Mercer County, both through the development of new educational materials and through teacher training doc23793 none Race, Ethnicity, and Science: The Case of Lung Function Lundy Braun, Brown University This award is for a professional development fellowship designed to enable the principal investigator (Lundy Braun) to acquire advanced background training in science and technology studies in order to study the practices by which biomedicine produces, naturalizes, and legitimizes notions of racial and ethnic difference. The training takes place with Evelynn Hammonds, historian of science in the Science, Technology, and Science Department at MIT. Elements of the training program include learning the methods and modes of analysis of historical Research through coursework; directed reading; and participation in relevant workshops, colloquia, and activities of the newly established Center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology, and Medicine at MIT. The research activities focus on several issues: i) how the technology of lung function testing has been deployed to produce knowledge about race and ethnicity from the mid-19th century to the present; ii) the ways in which notions of difference became embedded in the practices of pulmonary and occupational medicine and why they have remained invisible to practitioners; iii) the relationship between popular and scientific theories of race and ethnicity; and iv) the socio-political consequences of the knowledge produced. This research has several interrelated components. The first involves an examination of the explanations provided in the primary scientific literature for observed racial and ethnic differences in lung function. The second part of the project involves mapping the circulation of ideas on racial difference in lung anatomy, capacity, and disease in scientific disciplines -- physical anthropology, medicine, statistics, and epidemiology -- and popular culture, through an analysis of the scientific literature, conference proceedings, textbooks, popular journals, and newspapers. The third part examines contemporary understandings of the meaning of racial difference in lung function and the implications of those understandings in the medical subspecialties of occupational and pulmonary medicine through interviews with researchers, clinicians, and trade unionists. The research is to be presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science and should lead to several papers published in academic journals. Braun also plans to develop a course on race and science to be offered at Brown University for undergraduate students on her return. She intends to integrate science studies approaches into her teaching of basic science to lay people doc23794 none Application partitioning is the task of breaking up the functionality of an application into distinct entities that can operate independently, usually in a distributed setting. As networking changes the computing landscape, application partitioning is becoming an increasingly common form of distributed programming. This project examines the possibility of automating the partitioning of a software application. Instead of hand re-coding, higher-level tools allow the user to express how the application is to be partitioned. The tools can then rewrite the existing application code to replace local data exchange (e.g. function calls, data sharing through pointers) with remote communication (e.g. remote function calls, remote pointers or mobile objects). The tools are based on a novel static analysis and translation algorithm. The potential impact of this work is in significantly simplifying distributed program construction, a prime intellectual and practical challenge of computer science. Automatic partitioning can revolutionize the way a large class of distributed programs is developed. Additionally, the proposed tools have a high educational value: they can be used for illustrating crucial concepts in both programming languages and distributed systems, while minimizing distractions due to low-level complexity doc23795 none The goal of this project is to control Adaptive Optics (AO) systems. Features of the AO systems will be modeled in the usual control framework to allow existing control analysis, design and adaptation methodologies to be applied. New methodologies will be developed as needed. This research will examine the use of previously developed Linear-Quadratic-Gaussian (LQG) designs in both open loop and closed loop adaptive control architectures. The research will also determine the important modeling uncertainties of AO systems and apply or develop robust stability and performance analyses to AO systems. Finally, the research will extend LQG based designs and robustness analyses to Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) systems. This research will use data from the Max-Planck Instiut fur Astronomie (MPIA) telescope at Calar Alto, Spain, and simulations developed for the European Southern Observatory (ESO doc23796 none This symposium will encourage the participation of researchers from a broad range of disciplines, while maintaining a core representation from the areas of Dynamics and Controls. Many of the presentations will focus on new emerging research areas of key significance. These new areas share in common the fact the dynamics and control theory and methods provide the appropriate framework for the understanding of the corresponding phenomena, while at the same time providing many of the tools necessary for their application to relevant technologies. Examples of these opportunities include the areas of systems biology, quantum feedback and control, fluid dynamics, and control applications in nanotechnology. The importance of these emerging areas in the current research agenda in science and technology means that a unique opportunity exists to drastically extend the scope and impact of dynamics and control methods far beyond their traditional areas of application in engineering doc23797 none Recently there has been considerable interest in the design of power energy-aware electronics seeking to reduce the power consumption of military and consumer applications by over two orders of magnitude. This interest is driven by the power demands of today s high-speed, high-density, (portable) integrated electronics. Unless new power-efficient design methods are developed, there will be stringent limitations on the levels of electronics integration possible in the future as well as limitations on the speeds at which hardware can operate. Hardware portability will also be affected by battery size and weight. Simple calculations reveal that future microprocessors will dissipate several hundred watts of power unless drastic power reduction features are implemented. High power consumption and the associated high temperatures can also lead to reliability problems leading to early failure. If the trends in reduction of feature sizes and the increase in the levels of integration in silicon are to continue well into the future, the power consumption problem must be handled effectively and solved urgently. This research involves the study of hardware-software co-optimization methods to achieve ultra low power energy consumption over a range of applications. Such co-optimization has been difficult in the past due to the complexity of the optimization problem and the fact that the optimization parameters stretch across software, hardware and technology parameters. While factors of energy savings up to 5X are possible using software, hardware and technology optimization individually, much larger savings are possible if a vertically integrated power optimization approach across software, hardware and technology boundaries is undertaken. To handle the complexity problem of such a vertically integrated power energy minimization approach, a very simple optimization metric is proposed. This metric seeks to allocate delay to software and hardware modules in such a way that the delay of the module is proportional to the energy consumed by the module. Using such a metric, the problem of technology optimization (Vdd, Vt, device sizing) can be decoupled from that of system-level optimization without compromising the quality of the solution obtained. As long as the above metric is satisfied, software hardware and technology optimizations can be done independently with high confidence that the resulting solution will be close to the optimum. Note that the proposed metric relies on the knowledge of the energy consumption of each module relative to other modules than on the absolute values of energy consumption of each module. The energy consumed by a hardware or software module relative to that of other modules is computed easily using simulation. It is conjectured that the use of the proposed power metric will simplify the complexity of the optimization problem to a degree that will allow much bigger, vertical optimizations to be performed across the software, hardware and technology boundaries doc23798 none The ARM processor, a leading processor design for the embedded domain, supports a 32 bit ARM instruction set as well as a 16 bit Thumb instruction set. This project is aimed at exploring two approaches for generating code that will simultaneously achieve the goals of small code size, low energy consumption, and good performance. The first approach judiciously combines the use of ARM and Thumb instructions to generate mixed code either dynamically or at compile time. The second approach focusses on changing the data and code layout in a way that compact code can be generated without sacrifcing good performance. To thoroughly explore the above approaches an experimental infrastructure based upon the Simplescalar simulator and the gcc compiler is being developed doc23799 none ourier analysis appears in many of the celebrated cornerstones of theoretical computer science. It plays essential roles in expander graph construction and derandomization, complexity lower bounds, probabilistically checkable proof systems, quantum computing, lower bounds for distributed computation, and traditional applications to computer algebra. The majority of these applications involve the familiar framework of commutative Fourier analysis. The proposed project brings together a multidisciplinary research team to apply the beautiful tools of non-Abelian (that is, noncommutative) Fourier analysis to investigate open questions in two areas where non-Abelian groups have recently become very important: lower bounds for parallel computation and quantum algorithms. The program also further develops efficient algorithms for the discrete Fourier transform over finite non-Abelian groups. This project focuses on developing tools for separating the complexity classes ACC^0 and NC^1, in order to demonstrate that there are natural (polynomial-time computable) problems which simply cannot be parallelized in the sense of ACC^0. The project applies a new family of tools for separating such circuit classes, using non-Abelian Fourier analysis to bound their computational power. These tools apply also to the problem of solving equations over finite groups, and the development of new probabilistically checkable proof systems based on non-Abelian groups. In addition, the project applies non-Abelian Fourier analysis to develop improved lower bounds on the standard Quantum Fourier Transform approach to Graph Isomorphism and study quantum Monte Carlo algorithms. Finally, the project focuses on adaptations of Bratelli diagrams and quivers to develop classical and quantum algorithms for the non-Abelian Fourier transform itself doc23800 none Manipulating large scale data sources leads to question what are efficient algorithms. Even linear time algorithms may be much too slow on truly massive data. Similarly, even using linear space to store the data may be unreasonable when input data that is generated is far too voluminous. Applications abound where these constraints are natural. For example, data stores that archive web pages on the Internet, all telephone call records or molecular sequences are massive, and even linear time algorithms to process them prove slow. Data sources such as network traffic measurements are voluminous and rarely get archived; instead, it is desirable to process them as they are generated to obtain suitable sublinear space representations. Two approaches to building sublinear algorithms are sampling and streaming. In sampling, algorithms examine a (small) subset of input and solve problems of interest in sublinear time, typically to some provable approximation. While sampling has been studied in Probability and Statistics for decades, truly sublinear algorithms for sophisticated tasks such as clustering and building fourier representations have only recently been obtained. The algorithms should have solid theoretical foundations, and should be amenable to analysis using rigorous theoretical tools. However, some of the algorithms will be also implemented and subjected to experimental evaluation. It is expected that the algorithms developed in the context of this project will have significant practical impact doc23689 none Small-scale flow dynamics at low Reynolds numbers (Re) are important to phytoplankton cells in delivery of nutrients, sensory detection by and physical encounter with herbivores, accumulation of bacterial populations in the phycosphere or region immediately surrounding phytoplankton cells and coagulation of cells themselves as a mechanism terminating blooms. In nature most phytoplankton experience unsteady flows, i.e., velocities near the cells that vary with time due to the intermittency of turbulence and to discontinuous, spatially distributed pumping by herbivores. This unsteadiness has not previously been taken into account in models or measurements with plankton. Moreover, there have been decade- and century- long lags in moving relevant models of unsteady flow effects at low Re from applied mathematics and engineering to ecological applications. Engineering models show unsteady effects due to the history of formation of spatially extensive flow perturbations or wakes should be important to unsteady motions of moderately small biota. This project will address these affects. Non-swimming phytoplankton, and in particular diatoms, will be used as the simplest case where important unsteady flow behaviors should arise. This research activity will include a multi-level educational program, aimed at graduate research assistants, undergraduate research interns, undergraduate marine sciences majors and high-school teachers. Low-Re behaviors afford unusual opportunities to experience how mathematics, physics and biology inseparably catalyze understanding of phenomena that run counter to intuition. This activity will also include international collaborations with world experts on organism-flow interaction in Cambridge (T.J. Pedley) and Copenhagen (T. Kiorboe & A.W. Visser). The overall goals of the activity are to accelerate the flow of understanding from modelers to measurers to users of the information and back again. Educational materials that project U.S. national standards will be developed during intensive summer workshops with the high-school teachers and be made available on the web. Unsteady flow effects on phytoplankton will be predicted with explicit models based on singularity solutions (that involve the useful simplification that force is applied to the fluid at a small number of points) and mathematical models that include both the near field at low Re and the far field over a range of Re, both representative of nature. Singularity solutions allow explicit treatment of the role of complex cell shapes. Scaled-up analog models will be placed in a large Couette vessel to better visualize behaviors for both the research and teaching efforts. Natural-scale, but simplified, unsteady flows will be produced in smaller Couettes (nested, counter-rotating cylinders with seawater in the gap between the two cylinders) containing live phytoplankton and will be quantified by magnifying, particle-imaging velocimetry (PIV). Image analysis will be used to measure translation, rotation and flexural deformation of the phytoplankton. These studies will test various hypotheses derived from the general thesis that cell shapes and mechanical properties interact with unsteady flows to produce potentially fitness-enhancing, relative motions of the cell or chain and its surrounding fluids. A basic hypothesis is that unsteady fluid motion will interact with bending of cells to produce relative motion of fluid and phytoplankter. A very exciting prospect is that periodic instabilities known to arise at low Re may allow flexible organisms to act as self-organizing engines - through elasticity to harness energy from decaying turbulence and thereby move relative to the fluid. It is also expected that this study of passively bending structures in unsteady flows will help to understand the use of flexible appendages in swimming. The work is likely to aid significantly in associating functions with the shapes and spines of microplankton that are used in the identification of fossil specimens. By including relevant, unsteady fluid motions at low Re, the study will also provide firmer linkages between form and function in living plankton in the size range from 10 - mm that many large phytoplankton, invertebrate and fish larvae and other small zooplankton occupy doc23802 none This program provides scholarships to talented, low-income students pursuing careers in computer science. The goal is to encourage eligible students to study CS, and help them find a desirable job upon completion of their Associate Degree or transfer to a four-year university to enter in a baccalaureate program. Selected participants receive tuition, books and fees paid for by the grant. In addition to the financial assistance, they meet with the CS Advisor Mentor on a bi-monthly basis during the semester. This helps monitor their progress and assure their success in the program. A series of workshops, offered throughout the program, allow students to improve their problem solving skills, interviewing skills, job-hunting techniques, and writing a resume. Students also receive individualized support and peer mentoring as they move through the program doc23803 none This project concerns authentication, audit trails, and privacy in secure electronic transactions, with the intended scope encompassing a wide array of daily activities such as banking, on-line shopping, elections, and surveys. Some of these activities are already be based in part on electronic transactions today, but would benefit from better mechanisms for security. Other activities have the potential to be performed electronically given greater confidence in the security infrastructure surrounding electronic transactions. This project develops the design of a concurrent domain-specific language for distributed electronic transactions that will provide more security guarantees and automation of checks than has been previously done in such languages. It proposes an alternative to security based on software packages with dynamic checks, by a type-theory based approach where security guarantees are verified automatically and statically via typechecking, factoring out checks that other approaches perform dynamically for every execution, and performing them only once at compile time. Efforts in these directions are potentially rich in social and economic benefits. Research on secure electronic transactions will directly reduce the incidence of electronic fraud, theft, and forgery, improving the quality and extending the scope of the software available to the general public doc23804 none In a wireless network, multiple communications devices in close proximity form a natural distributed antenna array. If a group of such devices transmit and receive in some cooperative manner, then the system performance can be significantly improved. This researchexplores techniques for cooperative transmission and reception using multiple devices. This cooperative communication approach is differentfrom traditional array processing because the distributed nature of the communication nodes calls for network-oriented design approaches and processing algorithms. In particular, techniques that allow distributed and asynchronous processing that utilizes information provided by other nodes in a cluster will be considered. For cooperative transmission, distributed space-time coding will be employed to take advantage of transmit diversity provided by the distributed array. One crucial issue for distributed space-time coding is that only rough synchronization between the nodes can be achieved. Hence space-time coding in an asynchronous setting needs to be considered. This leads to research on asynchronous diversity and coding gain analysis, symbol waveform design, and tradeoff between the complexity of transmitter synchronization and complexity of the decoding process. For cooperative reception, distributed iterative decoding will be employed to obtain diversity advantage in reception. In this approach, multiple nodes form a distributed antenna array by collaboratively processing a received signal. By exchanging information in a distributed decoding process, the nodes are able to extract diversity from the channel and decode the message. The main obstacle to this approach is that there is a vast amount of information that can be shared between the nodes. This problem can be solved by using iterative decoding to extract important information from the received signal at each node, and only this information is passed to other nodes. Each node will then utilize the information from other nodes to perform further decoding to obtain the diversity advantage provided by the additional information. The objective is to develop distributed processing techniques that allow us to obtain the maximum degree of diversity advantage from the signals received at multiple receiving nodes, while requiring a minimum amount of information exchange between the nodes. In order to make the above cooperative communication schemes work, a control signaling strategy has to be designed to allow sharing of information between nodes. More importantly, the physical-layer communication performance of the proposed system will be dependent on the control signaling strategy. Therefore this signaling design problem will be attacked by a cross-layer design approach. Analytical guidelines for designing systems employing the proposed cooperative communication schemes will be developed. The expected results of this research can be utilized in many different commercial and military communication networks, such as cellular and sensor networks doc23805 none In , Louisiana State University began construction of GULFNET, a geodetic system consisting of continually operating reference stations and episodic campaign targets. Originally built to support high precision measurement of subsidence and lateral normal fault related strain, the system was also designed to support geodetic-quality positioning. This system currently consists of four continuously operating stations and 24 episodic campaign targets and is supported by contracts with the National Science Foundation (NSF- ) and the Louisiana Board of Regents. The continuously operating stations will soon become certified by the National Geodetic Survey (NGS) as official parts of the Continuously Operating Reference System or CORS, that supports the National Spatial Reference System (NSRS). Funds originating from US Army Corps of Engineers (New Orleans District) through this proposed contract will permit the expansion of GULFNET by adding three additional continuously operating sites and the infrastructure to continue operation of the network. This new part of the system will come on line in early and will provide near complete coverage of the Louisiana coast doc23806 none Perhaps one of the most important changes that occured in the history of humankind was the shift from hunting and gathering to farming. With agriculture populations dramatically expanded and cities, states and empires emerged. Over the millennia this pattern repeatedly occurred around the world. However, this sequence is not invariably the case. Learning how and why farming began, spread, and why many cultures began to farm, but others did not, remains one of archaeology and anthropology s major research priorities. Scientists worked for decades in southern Mexico to learn when, where, and how some of the world s most important crops, including maize, beans, and squash were domesticated. In the American Southwest archaeologists have long known that these crops diffused northward to become the economic mainstay of hundreds of Southwestern Native American cultures. However, archaeologists have almost no information about the spread of crops across the intervening hundreds of thousands of square miles. This project seeks to begin to fill this void by searching for archaeological sites that contain remains of these ancient crops that can begin to tell the story of how agriculture spread from Mexico to the Southwest, a topic of active debate but with little solid data. Archaeologists have argued that about years ago, either the crops spread northward with migrating Mexican Indians, or was passed along between successive groups of hunter-gatherers across northern Mexico. With NSF support, a team of five experienced scholars will search southwestern Chihuahua, about 300 miles south of the border for locations that may yield significant answers concerning these questions. This project is suitable for NSF s High Risk Projects in Anthropology program as the goal is to discover previously unknown sites of the appropriate age that contain maize. Yet they must search in the vast expanses of verdant river valleys, deep canyons and the uplands of southwest Chihuahua. All are potential routes for the spread of agriculture but have received little archaeological attention. The major river valleys of western Chihuahua are likely places to search as team members Robert Hard, John Roney, Karen Adams, and Art MacWilliams have been involved in excavating, with previous NSF support, the dramatic remains of large, year old, farming settlements built on hilltops above a major floodplain in the northwest corner of Chihuahua, only about 30 miles south of the border. Team member Art MacWilliams and colleagues have also previously found evidence that adjacent regions in central Chihuahua were occupied to years ago. Innumerable dry caves, ideal locations for preserved plant remains, in the Sierra Madre Occidental, current home of the Tarahumara Indians, of western Chihuahua may also contain key evidence of early agriculture. This mountain range, which extends from Mesoamerica north to the international border, is another previously suggested route for the advancement of agriculture. Project ethnobotanist Karen Adams, will work with plant remains recovered from these caves. The Tarahumara Indians, long studied by project member William Merrill, continue to practice corn farming in small, dispersed fields, using techniques and knowledge that may have extraordinary time-depth. We expect to obtain new information about strategies of subsistence farming in southwest Chihuahua. This NSF-supported project will provide new information about how and when agriculture spread from Mexico to the Southwest and contribute to the global questions of how farming spread around the world doc23807 none The Student Pipeline-Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology (SP-CSMET) Scholarship Program is a student focused, experience-based program. The SP-CSMET is used to identify incoming freshmen and sophomores that are interested in computer science, engineering, mathematics, and technology. High school administrators, the university admissions office, the financial aid office and faculty members help identify these students. The SP-CSMET provides enrichment experiences in engineering, mathematics, and technology by utilizing existing programs and by providing lecture series, workshops, and faculty mentoring for the students. The SP-CSMET supports 32 new freshmen the first year. The second year of funding supports all freshmen that meet the criteria for their sophomore semester. The scholarship slots that are open the second year will be used to support new incoming freshmen students. This process will be repeated the third and fourth year of funding. The new SP-CSMET Scholarship Program is a feeder (Student Pipeline) to a recent NSF-funded Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology (CSMET) Scholarship Program, serving juniors and seniors doc23808 none John Hetling University of Illinois-Chicago BITS: Sensory Coding and Pattern Recognition with Hybrid Olfactory The natural olfactory system combines high sensitivity with broadband detection, excellent discrimination, and fast response times. These characteristics are a result of the sensor array design and the down-stream neural processing. In addition to being relevant to the development of an artificial nose, the pattern recognition problem faced by olfactory systems is analogous in many respects to problems in data mining, especially related to DNA micro arrays. To further our understanding of the biological solution to this general problem, it will be advantageous to record from multiple olfactory neurons simultaneously. This proposal seeks to develop a novel hybrid-device olfactory biosensor, and then to use this system to investigate signal coding and pattern recognition. This will provide information about the coding strategy of the natural system, and provide a test case for new approaches to pattern recognition in complex signals doc23809 none In this project, researchers at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Miami will collaborate with colleagues at the Nordic Volcanic Institute in Iceland to investigate the crustal residence time of fluids circulating through hydrothermal systems of Iceland, utilizing isotopic tools developed by the PI for submarine hydrothermal systems in mid-ocean ridges. This will allow the refinement of these techniques for further seafloor studies, as well as afford the researchers an opportunity to develop new isotopic techniques for ultimate use in submarine systems. Additionally an in-situ gamma detector will be deployed within well waters to make remote, detailed, time-series measurements of radon gas. Previous work by Icelandic investigators has shown that radon measurements have great potential as an earthquake prediction tool doc23810 none An experimental investigation is currently underway, involving plane strain testing and digital image analysis of shear bands. The objective is to comprehensively evaluate the nature of the relationship between deposition void ratio and critical state line (CSL) for sands. The study has been motivated by results of recent research in which experimental quantification of localized deformations (shear bands), and thus critical states, in dilative sands has indicated that CSL position in void ratio-effective stress space may not be unique, but rather dependent on deposition void ratio. Since critical state concepts and the CSL are widely used in geotechnical analysis and design, the impact of these findings is potentially significant. The ultimate goal is to derive from the results a quantitative description of the relationship between deposition void ratio and CSL, and to develop recommendations for incorporating the findings into current analysis procedures for liquefaction potential and constitutive models that utilize the CSL in its current unique form. Experiments are being conducted in an advanced plane strain testing apparatus. The apparatus is configured to promote unconstrained formation of shear bands and to permit the localization process to be analyzed photographically. The technique of Digital Image Correlation (DIC) is used to measure directly localized displacements in sand specimens to a high level of accuracy. The incorporation of a higher resolution digital camera than in previous studies, combined with the synchronization of image acquisition with data acquisition and control, will enable more accurate quantification of shear band deformations, including displacement patterns associated with shear band formation. The highly developed photographic capabilities also will enable quantitative study of deformation mechanisms associated with other localized displacement phenomenon, such as temporary shear bands. The configuration of the biaxial testing apparatus as described above offers one of the only currently available experimental methods to quantify the evolution of localized displacements in soils. Unfortunately, however, in its current configuration only one plane of the shear band is visualized, yielding question as to the validity of the displacement quantification, in spite of its high accuracy. In addition, the potential occurrence of out-of-plane volumetric exchange within the shear band cannot be addressed. This study aims to overcome the stated limitations of the current experimental system by incorporating modifications to allow imaging through both plane strain walls, while keeping in tact the out-of-plane force measurement capabilities. The modifications consist of the addition of a second digital camera, and load wall redesign to accommodate imaging. These modifications shall affect several system improvements. First, quantification of local displacements on two planes through the depth of the shear band will enable confirmation of locally derived critical state void ratios. Second, the real-time comparison among displacement fields at both ends of the shear band and transducer measurements currently available at midpoint of the specimen depth will provide the opportunity to make more reliable observations about deformation uniformity through the depth of the shear band. Measurements of local deformations to such a level of detail should contribute significantly to the understanding of granular soil behavior doc23811 none With the emergence of micro electromechanical systems, we are fast approaching the days of having to understand how to control nonlinear systems containing massive numbers of actuators and sensors. Next generation applications such as holographic data storage devices, and wavelength division multiplexing, will require novel precision analog control methodology. At the same time, scientists are only beginning to get a glimpse of information processing activities in the brains of higher animals. It is argued that understanding control theoretic aspects of pattern generation in massive actuator sensor arrays is central to successfully tackling these challenging technological problems. Representative patterns of interest will be solitary waves, stationary impulses, travelling waves, and spiral waves. Existing theories explain the stability of these patterns, but fail to address how to control them. A research program focussing on controlling these patterns in desirable ways is outlined in the proposal. Primary mathematical tools will be (a) wave generation in networks with symmetry, (b) theory of solitons, (c) spiral waves, and (d) actuator-inhibitor equations. It is argued that feedback control techniques outlined in each case can advance the state-of art significantly, by discussing potential applications in the control of arrays of micro electromechanical systems, understanding signal processing aspects of the brain of primitive animals, and as template models of spiking networks doc23812 none The project proposes to formulate methods for representing and analyzing random heterogeneous materials in three directions. First, general probabilistic models are developed for the microstructure of cement based composites with carbon fibers. The models are random fields characterizing the geometrical, mechanical, and electrical properties of the material constituents. These cement based composites have an interesting microstructure, and are used in both mechanics and electronics as sensors of mechanical properties. Second, a computational environment is developed for calculating the evolution in time of the properties of microstructures subjected to deterministic loads. Finite element procedures are used to calculate changes in, for example, the stress, strain, damage and electric fields in cement based composite specimens generated from their probabilistic models. Development of the finite element code entails advances in numerical solver techniques as well as formulation of new mathematically sound traction-displacment relationships to model cohesive fracture. Third, the results of the finite element analyses are used to (i) update the probabilistic models of the material microstructure so they reflect the current damage state and (ii) develop macroscopic damage models for cement based composites by using homogenization procedures. The evolution of the material state is monitored by a mathematical object, referred to as digital material (DM), that defines uniquely the state of the microstructure at any time during loading and can be stored in the computer. The results of the analytical and numerical developments are validated against experimental tests providing information of the properties of the fiber matrix interaction and on the dependence of electric conductivity of macroscopic specimens on their damage state. The main outcome of the project is a novel methodology for predicting structural behavior of composite materials and for designing materials with better structural properties and better capabilities for sensing damage and strain. Other outcomes include new finite element codes, new mathematical models, and a strong educational outreach program doc23813 none The ARM processor, a leading processor design for the embedded domain, supports a 32 bit ARM instruc-tion set as well as a 16 bit Thumb instruction set. This project is aimed at exploring two approaches for generating code that will simultaneously achieve the goals of small code size, low energy consumption, and good performance. The frst approach judiciously combines the use of ARM and Thumb instructions to generate mixed code either dynamically or at compile time. The second approach focusses on changing the data layout in a way that compact code can be generated without sacrifcing good performance. To thoroughly explore the above approaches an experimental infrastructure based upon the Simplescalar simulator and the gcc compiler is being developed doc23814 none The emerging area of algorithmic game theory carries much promise because of new game theoretic issues arising from the Internet and because of the opportunity of applying recently developed powerful ideas from the yield of approximation algorithms to these issues. BGP is an important network protocol whose performance affects many applications, and in fact is critical to the integrity of the network. It is also one of the rare cases for which some routing data is available. We propose to study BGP routing stability from a game theoretic perspective. Our work will span all the way from mathematical modeling to a concrete proposal for developing network performance evaluation primitives. Our project is interdisciplinary. Our team, together with our collaborators in the networking community, combine excellent complementary expertise and has successfully carried out a theory networking project in the past. The impact of this work lies both in developing mathematical techniques and opening a new channel in technology transfer. We report several preliminary results. We also touch on other computational game theoretic issues such as cost sharing and protmaximizing pricing doc23815 none Houghton Mixing and circulation in the Delaware Coastal Current (DCC), a buoyant coastal jet, will be studied using a combination of numerical modeling and field work (moorings, rapid surveys, and purposeful dye releases) followed by analysis and interpretation of results from the two approaches. Working hypotheses are that mixing between the coastal buoyant discharge and ambient shelf waters is larger during upwelling than downwelling events, that this mixing during upwelling is primarily concentrated at the offshore plume boundary, and that the conservation of buoyancy is principally a balance between horizontal advection and vertical diffusion. Moorings will include standard current meters and bottom-mounted acoustic Doppler current profilers (ADCPs). There will be 5 moorings, three parallel to the DCC and three perpendicular. Multiple conductivity-temperature-depth recorders (CTDs) and temperature sensors will also be deployed on both taut and slack moorings. At the northernmost mooring, two ADCPs will allow estimation of the Reynolds stresses using Stacey s method. ADCP bin spacing will be 0.5 m allowing resolution of 1m eddies. Forty-five kilograms of Rhodamine dye will be released during each upwelling or downwelling event selected for study. This dye will be traced for 4-5 days. There will be two cruises and mooring deployments. One upwelling dye study will occur during year 1 and one upwelling and one downwelling experiment during year two. A previously utilized version of ECOM3d, configured for the DCC, will be used to analyze the dye study results. Significant effort will be devoted to comparing different turbulent closure schemes. After the model is calibrated, it may be used for sensitivity studies. Careful comparison and interpretation of field and model results will conclude the study doc23816 none Simulation and visualization technologies that have become fundamental to contemporary science, engineering, design, and medicine have made possible new ways of seeing and knowing and thereby can change the way practitioners think. This project will explore these processes as they are experienced by scientific and engineering professionals and the ways in which these new technologies reconfigure their professional identities. Five professional fields in which practitioners use simulation and visualization technologies will be examined: archaeologists working telerobotically in deep water; weapons scientists running simulations; neuroscientists imaging the brain; physical chemists analyzing nanoparticles with atomic force microscopy; and architects building in the virtual world. The methods include field interviews, oral histories, and workshops. Fundamental questions, approaches and techniques will be developed for further research and teaching. It is also expected that professional practice will be illuminated in a way that is helpful to researchers and designers in the development of ever more appropriate technologies doc23817 none Elnaggar Description: This award is to support a collaborative project between Dr. Mohammed I. El-Naggar, Department of Electrical Engineering, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio and Dr. Hamed El-Simary, Electronics Research Institute, Cairo, Egypt. The two investigators will focus their research on the microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and their interface circuit. They aim to integrate passive components permitted by MEMS technology to implement an integrated RF system on a chip, including the integration of sensors and the electronics circuits on the same chip. The deliverables from the various work-packages of this project will have an application in the area of RF circuits, which is important for industrial purposes. Scope: MEMS technology permits the fabrication of complex mechanical shapes on a micron scale, and it allows production of capacitive sensors, high-Q (Quality factor) resonant structures for oscillators, mixers, and filters. It also allows fabrication of variable capacitors and suspended inductor for high frequency tuned oscillators. The US PI has the facilities and expertise to develop such devices. The project will involve design activities by the Egyptian team and fabrication and testing by the U.S. team. It will facilitate transfer of technical know-how to Egypt and also intellectual transfer to the U.S. The two teams have already done some work in this area. Participation by industry is expected in assessing the degree of improvement of components. The project will involve one U.S. graduate student and exchanges of visits by the Egyptian and the U.S. investigators. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc23818 none This project provides 20 scholarships per year to economically disadvantaged students who major in avionics technology or related engineering technology programs. Incoming freshmen pursuing an associate s in applied science degree in avionics technology or related engineering technology programs, and college students who have already completed 64 credits toward a bachelor s of science in avionics technology or related engineering technology programs, are eligible to compete for the scholarships. Admission into the program is based on the following criteria: grade point average, class standing, recommendations, Scholastic Aptitude Test scores and an interview. The College provides support for the CSEMS recipients in their pursuit of a degree in engineering technology. There are programs such as faculty mentoring and a technology seminar series devised to assist the recipients to achieve academic success. In addition, the College sponsors many activities such as faculty recipient socials, which reinforce the objectives the College hopes to accomplish through CSEMS. Finally, the College provides the recipients many opportunities to interact with industry representatives, both on and off campus, through internships, job fairs and industry- recipient luncheons doc23819 none With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Fengxiang Li and Graham Thurgood will conduct two years of linguistic research on three endangered languages in China: Tsat, an Austronesian language of Hainan Province; Anong, a Tibeto-Burman language of Yunnan Province; and Oroqen, a Tungusic language of Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang Province in northeast China. Although these languages are undergoing rapid change because of their close contact with Chinese, they are geographically separated, typologically different, and genetically distinct. Comparison of them is a rare opportunity to study how very different languages change under intense contact, not with a variety of different languages, but with the same language. American scholars will work with Chinese specialists in these languages whose detailed but unpublished records predate the most intense contact and continue to the modern era. The PIs will translate the existing Chinese descriptions, incorporating new material to fill gaps. In collaboration with Chinese linguists, the PIs will then update analyses based on the data collected in summer fieldwork trips. A comprehensive reference grammar for each language will be produced at the end of the project period. This research is significant for three inter-related areas of linguistics: language change, typology, and history. In terms of language change, the project investigates effects of dialectal variation, patterns of bilingualism, intense contact of three distinct languages with the same superstratum language, and language obsolescence on structural shift. Typological studies are often based on well-known and better studied languages. This project will address that imbalance with typological information about minority languages in China. In all three cases, but especially for Anong and Oroqen, this project will provide more accurate assessment of the genetic affiliations within their respective language families. In addition, this documentation is urgent because the speakers of these languages are beginning to disappear and the Chinese linguists who worked on their earlier stages have begun to retire. Every time another language dies, aspects of culture are lost. For example, thousands of years of the history of a people can only be accessed through study of their language. The project also brings American and Chinese linguists together to save part of their mutual heritage doc23820 none Ocean energetics, tidal conversion and baroclinic instability William Young Scripps Institute of Oceanography The project is directed at understanding ocean energetics, mixing, baroclinic instability, tidal conversion, and the formation of the thermocline. The first part of the project is understanding the ramifications and extensions of constraints on the ocean energetics. Because there are no deep sources of buoyancy in the ocean (apart from small geothermal heating), one can show that in a statistically steady state there is no exchange between the reservoirs of kinetic and potential energy at every depth. The viscous dissipation of kinetic energy is balanced totally by tidal and wind forcing; there is essentially no net transformation o f potential into kinetic energy in the ocean. Theory will be developed and directed at analyzing Boussinesq energetics and the balances of available and background potential energies in the ocean. A second goal will be use primitive equation simulations and theory to examine the role of baroclinic eddies in forming the ocean thermocline. This will test the hypothesis that buoyancy flux associated with breaking internal gravity waves is balanced by baroclinic eddies. An extension of the quasi-geostrophic approximation, in which the background stratification is self-consistently determined, rather than simply prescribed, will also be developed and implemented numerically. The third goal will be an improved calculation of the generation of the internal tide by realistically large topography in an ocean with strongly variable buoyancy frequency. A new boundary-integral representation of the solution leads to an integral equation that enables efficient calculation of the internal gravity waves generated by topography. These goals relate to establishing the critical role of ocean mixing and turbulence in determining long-term changes in the Earth s climate via physical arguments based on energy balances doc23785 none The PIs propose to build a new system that will image multiple wavelengths of fluoresced and scattered light and perform stereo particle image velocimetry (3D PIV) measurements. These data will enable maps of fluid flow and derived quantities such as strain rate, vorticity, and the dissipation rate of turbulent kinetic energy to be produced. Measurements will be made on identical scales (20 x 20 x 0.6 cm with 100 um resolution), nearly simultaneously, allowing in situ 3D mapping of biological distributions to microscale physical flows. It is proposed that the multiple imaging wavelengths will allow a degree of taxonomic discrimination among fluorescent particles, while the side-scattered light will provide images of all particles that scatter the excitation irradiance including most of the phytoplankton appearing in the fluorescence images, as well as zooplankton. The 3D PIV-multispectral imaging fluorometer will be mounted on a free-falling platform with a suite of auxiliary instruments and a water sampler for image ground-truthing that has already been constructed and shown to provide undisturbed views of plankton in the water column. Images will be captured in a plane extending below the platform to obtain distributions unaffected by the platform. Shipboard epifluorescence microscopy will be used to identify dominant organisms in the images. Relating microscale distributions of plankton to microscale physical dynamics in the ocean has been largely limited by a lack of technology. The combination of multiple-wavelength imaging and PIV will allow in situ investigations of fluorescent particle bulk fluorescence relationships, microscale distributions of plankton in relation to microscale flows, spatial relationships of grazers and primary producers, and physical mechanisms underlying fine- and microscale biological patchiness. This instrument is an enhancement of an existing 2D imaging fluorometer developed by the PIs that has only one sensing wavelength, and does not gather simultaneous physical data on the same scales as the fluorescence images doc23691 none Gordon Sprintall The Indonesian Throughflow (ITF) links two oceans and in so doing provides a pathway for modifying the stratification within each of these oceans as well as sea-air fluxes that impact on such climate phenomena as ENSO and the Asian Monsoon. While a number of measurement programs have recently been undertaken in the Indonesian region, a serious shortcoming is their lack of temporal coherence: the data cover different time periods and depths in the different passages of the complex pathways linking the Pacific and Indian Oceans. This has lead to ambiguity of the mean and variable nature of the ITF, and of the transformation of the thermohaline and transport profiles within the interior seas. The INSTANT program, involving contributions of 6 countries (USA, France, Netherlands, Australia, Indonesia, Japan), will finally measure in a coordinated fashion the ITF in the key throughflow passages (Makassar Strait, Lifamatola Passage, Lombok Strait, Ombai Strait and Timor Passage) simultaneously. The measurements span a 3 year period beginning in August . The INSTANT objectives are: 1) To determine the full depth velocity and property structure of the Throughflow and its associated heat and freshwater flux; 2) To resolve the annual, seasonal, and intraseasonal characteristics of the ITF transport and property flux; 3) To investigate the storage and modification of the ITF waters within the internal Indonesian seas, from their Pacific source characteristics to the Indonesian Throughflow water exported into the Indian Ocean; and 4) To contribute to the design of a cost-effective, long-term monitoring strategy for the ITF. The intellectual merit and broader impact of INSTANT is clear: a quantitative view of the ITF will be gained and this will establish the basis for a long term proxy monitoring system, as required to capture the low frequency ITF variability. The ITF waters are known to play an integral part in the global thermohaline circulation and in the inter-basin transfer of climate signals and their anomalies. The benefit to the broader oceanographic community will be to finally allow the ITF to be faithfully simulated within ocean and climate models. In addition, INSTANT will involve education for a graduate student, and will offer research opportunities and training to undergraduates in both Indonesia and the US doc23823 none The novelty in this project is the application of mathematical analysis to investigate the dynamic properties of electrodynamic suspension (EDS) magnetic levitation (maglev). Objective of the research are to: a) develop, validate and analyze dynamical models for EDS on a perforated track, b) investigate fundamental limitations of the proposed technology with respect to design parameters and levitation control strategies, and c) guide the further technological development of maglev, and d) facilitate cost effective engineering designs. The intellectual merit lies in the application of tools from functional analysis and dynamical systems to forward the development of maglev technology, and to introduce these tools to the maglev research community. The program thereby advances knowledge in maglev, and across the fields of system theory, dynamical systems and functional analysis and magnetic levitation. By investigating the fundamental limitations of perforated track EDS maglev with respect to design parameters and levitation control strategies, we guide the technological development of and advance discovery of new maglev technology and facilitate engineering design. Understanding physical limitation will advance knowledge of maglev in a fundamental way, and we aim to define new research directions within maglev technology. The suggested research is well-organized through a cohesive plan of dynamical modeling, mathematical analysis, experimental validation and dissemination of results in engineering and mathematics communities. Our available resources is primarily through interactions with researchers within the field of maglev, dynamical systems and control theory, mathematics, and industry. Our ongoing interaction with Dr. Richard Post at LLNL, the inventor and patent holder of the Inductrack levitation concept, ensures support on the modeling of maglev. The strong position of the Center for Control Engineering and computation at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) gives valuable support in infinite dimensional dynamical systems and control theory through its affiliated members from multiple departments among Mechanical and Electrical engineering and Mathematics. MagTube, a newly started venture capital funded company located adjacent to our campus, provides know-how on important engineering issues in maglev design, and ensures relations with industry. Maglev technology has potential for significant impact on society at large by promoting efficient high speed transportation without direct combustion of fossil fuels, and with substantially higher energy efficiency than existing means of ground, air and sea transportation. The research will also contribute to MagTube.s innovative transportations concept (which has received $2 million in venture capital after a critically reviewed financial analysis) of a high speed transportation network based on magnetically levitated capsules moving in evacuated tubes in an automated network system resembling packet switched networks in communication technology. This research will broaden the participation of under-represented groups through support of the PI as he works with the LEGO-Robotics, which involves secondary school teachers and students from Latino communities. The experimental apparatus will enhance the infrastructure for research at UCSB by establishing instrumentation and data acquisition capabilities. The equipment will also contribute to the education facilities used in the PI s graduate dynamics and control lab course taught in collaboration with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at UC Santa Barbara. Research dissemination will be performed to fora on maglev, dynamical systems and control research, through conference attendance and journal publication. Our experimental results, data and simulation models will be made available through the internet for effective data sharing. Lastly, we have already significant interaction with MagTube and General Atomic who aims to commercialize the inductrack technology doc23824 none Many biotechnology applications related to secreted proteins have relied almost exclusively on the sec pathway mode of protein transport. However, many recombinant proteins are incompatible with secretion via the sec pathway for various reasons. The Principal Investigator (PI) proposes research to overcome the limitations of secretory protein expression in bacteria by capitalizing on the remarkable properties of the Tat secretion pathway. The PI proposes to exploit the unique features of the Tat pathway to overcome the limitations associated with secretory protein production and to develop completely new technology platforms for combinatorial protein screening and analysis. It is proposed to: (1) develop a useful technology for the high level expression of secretory proteins via the Tat pathway, specifically the PI will: (i) employ genetic means to identify leader peptides that maximize the flux of proteins exported though the Tat pathway; (ii) utilize cell engineering methods to further optimize protein secretion and (iii) examine in detail the effect of growth conditions on secretory protein production, (2) develop methods for the display of protein libraries by utilizing the Tat pathway and then investigate the hypothesis that altering the pathway of protein secretion will result in the isolation of additional and or novel proteins capable of performing a desired function, and (3) develop a new technology for the detection of protein-protein interactions analogous to the yeast two-hybrid system by exploiting the Tat pathway doc23825 none This project will utilize Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations of the interaction of the solar wind with the Earth s magnetosphere to study the dynamics by which the system changes from its normal condition to the magnetic storm condition and then back to the normal state. Previously it was thought that magnetic storms were characterized by a rapid series of magnetic substorms, but that the basic configuration of the magnetosphere and its current systems remained the same. More recent studies have suggested that the storm-time morphology of the electrical current systems in the magnetosphere may be quite different from the usual configuration. In addition to MHD simulations, the project will utilize data from a variety of satellites that cross the magnetopause at high latitudes. The project will also utilize measurements of the cross polar cap potential obtained from the DMSP satellites and other ground-based data, to determine if the polar cap potential drop shows the saturation effect that is predicted by the model to be investigated here doc23826 none P.I. Stokes, Malcolm (Scripps Inst. of Oceanography) Proposal #: The PIs propose to construct a robust, inexpensive sensor array for use in marine and terrestrial environments. This system will utilize a combination of standard technologies that will enable easy deployment of densely populated sensor arrays, (up to 96 sensors, on 8 cables in a single logging unit) in high-energy environments. An important advantage of the proposed network of sensors is that it can be built at low cost thus increasing the likelihood that this instrumentation will be widely used. Another advantage is that, the time-division multiplexing technology developed for the prototype will be easily adaptable to other transducers (i.e. salinity, light intensity). A prototype array constructed to measure pressure and temperature was deployed off Scripps Pier and showed the utility of the design for studies requiring high-resolution monitoring of environmental conditions over spatial scales of 100 to m. This proposal requests funding for the development of two autonomous instrument packages based on the prototype technology. These new generation arrays will significantly extend the capabilities of the prototype by incorporating a more robust cabling scheme; utilizing surface mount circuitry for miniaturization of individual sensor modules; and adding an autonomous data-logging microcontroller for long-term, underwater deployments. One instrument package would include 96 pressure sensors (arranged as 12 individual transducers on 8 cable elements) and the other would include 96 precision thermistors. Each microcontroller could be programmed to record data from any combination of pressure, temperature, or other environmental sensors in a modular fashion. The PIs propose to test the instruments as part of currently funded projects that would benefit from higher resolution sampling doc23827 none Speer In the course of the Deep Basin Experiment under the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) a new hydrographic and tracer climatology of the tropical and subtropical South Atlantic was constructed and a re-analysis of hydrographic sections was carried out. The meridional density gradients observed in hydrographic sections west of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (in the Brazil Basin) indicate a strikingly regular pattern of persistent zonal flows coherent over large spatial scales, consistent with the isopycnal distributions of several tracers in the new climatology. This pattern of alternating zonal flows is also apparent in the output from a state-of-the-art numerical model. While the observations (as well as the model) indicate that the notion of a mean deep circulation is sensible they also show that it is not possible to determine the time-averaged geostrophic flows from synoptic observations by simply determining a reference velocity (barotropic adjustment). The difference between the synoptic and the time-averaged geostrophic zonal velocity fields in the Brazil Basin is baroclinic and varies both in time and space. The excellent agreement between the hydrographically observed and the numerical zonal flows in the South Atlantic suggests that it possible to use the numerical results to separate the observations into long-term mean and low-frequency time-varying components. The current analysis will be extended and applied it to a larger region of the South Atlantic with the overriding goal to quantitatively describe the deep circulation in the tropical and subtropical South Atlantic during the WOCE period. The first step will consist of analyzing the spatio-temporal structure of the time-varying model flow to guide the separation of the time-varying from the mean geostrophic flows determined from the hydrographic sections. The fact that the model appears to simulate the mean zonal flows in the Brazil Basin realistically does not imply that the time-varying flows are as well represented, of course. While it is not possible to directly estimate the time-varying flow component from available hydrographic sections analysis of individual profiles as well as differences between two hydrographic sections will allow the PI s to compare important aspects of the time-variable flow field, such as spatial scales and baroclinic structure to the model output. Furthermore, the results of a recent analysis of the time-varying flows derived from ?oat data (Hogg et al. , ) will be used for comparison. In addition to revealing new aspects of the deep circulation (with implications for climate, tracer dispersal, biogeography, etc.), the results of the proposed project will significantly improve the analysis of synoptic hydrographic sections with important implications for inverse models and, therefore, for determining the mean circulation from the WOCE data sets. Direct comparison of numerical-model output and oceanic data is an intrinsic part of the proposed project and will reveal strengths and, more importantly, weaknesses of current numerical models. These insights will be useful for improving the models doc23828 none This dissertation research project will investigate how and why good intentions of forest co-management initiatives in Indonesia lead to unintended consequences. It will examine the institutional culture of and relationships between organizations involved in co-management, and map how these initiatives provide an arena to strengthen, negotiate and contest claims to forest resources at the local level. The Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and its co-management initiative in East Kalimantan will be the focal points through which these issues are examined. The study seeks to understand the process of knowledge production about forests and forest dependent communities in Indonesia, as well as the consequences of that knowledge for forest dependent communities. Research objectives are as follows: (1) to document the processes of and identify the factors that affect selecting, implementing and reporting research on forest co-management in Indonesia by CIFOR; (2) to trace the types and flows of information between CIFOR and other actors at local, regional and national levels; (3) to examine how local level actors negotiate and contest rights and claims to forest resources and determine how CIFOR s co-management initiative affects these contestations and negotiations; (4) to compare the consequences of CIFOR s intervention with the initiative s intentions; and (5) to contribute to a broader theoretical understanding of the culture and political economy of institutions that produce knowledge about forests and forest dependent people. Meeting these objectives requires an ethnographic focus on how knowledge is produced, used and transformed. Over a 12-month period, multi-sited research will be conducted in Indonesia, employing the following methods: participant observation, semi-structured and open-ended interviews, and content analysis of documents. Using this set of methods will allow triangulation of interview, observational and documentary data collected from multiple sources, as well as the analysis of the continuities and disjunctures between data sources. On a logistical level, collaborating with CIFOR provides the necessary access to conduct this study successfully. This study will contribute to theoretical debates concerned the culture and political economy of knowledge producing institutions, and the effects of that knowledge at global, national and local levels. Investigating the institutional culture of a forestry institution fills a major gap in the literature on development and environmental institutions. It also contributes to the science studies literature by investigating the nexus of science and management, and moving from the laboratory sciences, which has been most examined, to the field sciences and their application, which has been least studied. While most studies of forestry institution interventions at the village level limit their scope to village level dynamics, this study integrates an understanding of an intervention at the village level with an investigation of the institutional culture that gave rise to it, as well as analyzes the interplay between village and institutional realities. In doing so, it interrogates the assumed boundaries between western knowledge and its non-western subjects and between experts and those ostensibly in need of expertise doc23829 none The United States and other industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have made large investments in information communication technologies (ICT) for schooling and expect these investments to advance not only school reform but life-long learning as well. For these aspirations to be realized, policy makers require information on how ICT impacts schooling and learning and how ICT might best be used to achieve a range of educational goals. This proposal requests partial financial support for an international conference to disseminate results of major research efforts of these issues in 23 OECD countries doc23830 none Callaerts Drs. de Couet and Callaerts are trying to understand the molecular and developmental mechanisms underlying the invention of morphological novelty. Much of the progress in this area of evolutionary biology has been derived from comparing the developmental modes and the causative genes of model organisms such as Drosophila with those of representatives from other phyla. The identification of genes involved in pattern formation and their conserved structure highlight the importance of developmental events for the evolution of new form and function, and provides new directions for evolutionary biology. Whilst arthropod and vertebrate development have been studied in great detail, the development of Mollusks is poorly understood at the molecular and cellular levels. The phylum Mollusca comprises several classes of highly diverse invertebrates without overt segmentation and metameric organization. Mollusks are characterized by an external shell, a muscular foot and a rasping organ, and are commonly elongated along the dorsoventral axis. Among the Mollusks, the cephalopods have achieved the highest morphological and physiological complexity. It is proposed to investigate developmental processes and molecular parameters that give rise to the adult characteristics of the cephalopod Euprymna scolopes, a small sepiolid squid endemic to Hawaiian waters. Cephalopods are highly specialized Mollusks with a complex nervous system and powerful sensory organs. A subset of homeobox-containing genes, the Hox-genes, are commonly considered pivotal determinants in anteroposterior patterning. The expression patterns of these genes have been extensively used as molecular markers for judging evolutionary relationships, such as homologies of structures along the anteroposterior axis. In preliminary studies they isolated sequences of a family of Hox genes and of other homeobox-containing regulatory genes from Euprymna. Extensive phylogenetic analyses led to the conclusion that cephalopods have a set of at least nine Hox-like genes most closely resembling those isolated from polychaetes and ribbonworms. Specifically, this study aims to (1) To establish techniques for experimental and molecular-genetic manipulation of Euprymna scolopes arm development, and (2) To isolate and characterize Euprymna genes homologous to Dll Dlx, apterous Lhx2 Lmx1, Tbx genes, BMP2, hh, and Wnt, and to initiate the study of their expression patterns. The detailed molecular analysis of cephalopod axial patterning genes and their developmental expression patterns may hold important cues to explaining the diversification of appendage number and appearance doc23831 none This program provides scholarships to talented, low-income students enrolled in Computer Science, Engineering and Mathematics. The project brings faculty from the three campuses of Miami-Dade Community College together to help implement the program. Over a two-year period M-DCC seeks to award a total of forty scholarships to these students. Besides the financial eligibility, the scholarships recipients must also meet established academic criteria that will enable them to obtain Associate in Arts degrees in computer science, mathematics, and engineering. The students have the opportunity to get involved in summer internships with local industries. Upon completion of the program, the students may continue on to an upper division school or those who receive training, may directly enter into the workforce. Faculty Mentors are assigned to each scholarship recipient in order to improve the quality of their educational experience and thereby improve the student s chances for academic success doc23832 none This project at LaSalle University awards a total of thirty (30) scholarships to low income, academically talented students, including twenty (20) undergraduate students and ten (10) graduate students over a 4-year period. The target audience includes 30% women, and 10% minorities. A special effort is made to recruit additional women, particularly into the undergraduate Computer Science and Information Technology majors. The PI works with designated staff in the Admissions Office to increase the number of minority students majoring in MTH CSC IT by seeking transfer students from Community College of Philadelphia and from LaSalle s Bilingual Undergraduate Studies for Career Advancement Program, an innovative associate degree program for Latino students. In addition to scholarship assistance for the student recipients, NSF funds are also used for project management and for a special Career Exploration series of guest speakers who are employed in these fields. The University provides funds from its annual budget to the Mathematics and Computer Science Department for tutorial assistance for the undergraduate CSEMS recipients. 80% of the funded students are expected to receive their degrees within four years of matriculating at La Salle, and 80% are expected to attain new or advanced professional positions related to their field of study within one year of graduation doc23833 none Gene expression in nearly all eukaryotes requires the excision of introns from nuclear precursor messenger RNAs (pre-mRNAs) to produce functional mRNAs. The introns are excised by the spliceosome, which is a very large, macromolecular complex composed of five small nuclear ribonucleoproteins (snRNPs) and many proteins. Each snRNP is itself composed of a small nuclear RNA (snRNA) and several proteins. A fundamental question regarding pre-mRNA splicing is how the active catalytic site of the spliceosome is formed. The focus of this project is on interactions between two spliceosomal components (Snp1p and Prp8p) that may contribute to the formation and activation of the pre-catalytic spliceosome. The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is an ideal organism for these studies because genetics and biochemistry can be used in tandem to study dynamic and transient interactions. An interaction between Snp1p (a protein of the U1 snRNP) and Prp8p (a protein of the U5 snRNP), which was discovered in the previous grant period, is hypothesized to be important for association of the U1 and U5 snRNPs in the spliceosome. It may help dock the U5 snRNP onto the developing spliceosome, and promote rearrangements leading to formation of the spliceosome s catalytic site. One such rearrangement is the 5 splice site (SS) switch when the pre-mRNA s 5 SS switches from pairing with U1 snRNA to U6 snRNA. Preliminary results suggest that the Prp8 Snp1 interaction is important in destabilizing the U1 5 SS duplex as part of this switch. Mutations or inhibitors will be assayed to correlate functional changes with physical changes in the association of Prp8p with Snp1p. To map the region(s) of Prp8p required for interaction with Snp1p, a library of random prp8 mutations will be screened for those altering the interaction via a novel, high-throughput assay. Candidate mutations will be further assessed by a combination of in vivo and in vitro assays. A notable percentage of human genetic diseases including some types of retinitis and thalassemias are due to defects in pre-mRNA splicing. Furthermore, alternative splicing contributes to the development and life cycles of many organisms as well as to biodiversity. Thus understanding the basic mechanism of splicing will contribute to our understanding of several biological systems and, in the long-term, contribute to improving human health. The proposed research will also make several contributions to other areas of science and society. The development of a high-throughput assay will be a collaborative effort using instrumentation invented at the host institution. Results generated by this assay will be disseminated both by traditional scientific publication and by a website specifically designed as a database for yeast spliceosomal components and their interactions. The research will be conducted at an EPSCoR and designated minority institution. Thus it is likely that some of the students participating in the proposed research will be from minority groups doc23834 none This project supports students in Fairleigh Dickinson University s (FDU) new program in applied mathematics. FDU s current undergraduate enrollment in the mathematical and computer sciences is 135 fulltime students. Approximately one half of these undergraduates are academically talented, but financially needy (as per the criteria defined by the U.S. Department of Education). FDU actively recruits in the New York City metropolitan area, an area of high population density near inner city secondary schools. Students who participate in the new mathematics program come from the current FDU population, from regional high schools and from community colleges as transfer students. The objectives of the mathematics program are to encourage and enable qualified students to enter the high technology workforce following completion of their BS degrees. This emphasis was selected by an FDU university committee because of several intersecting factors: 1) The northern NJ NYC metropolitan area contains dozens of medium-to-large potential industrial partners who have a documented need for this type of workforce. These organizations include Merck, Pfizer, Bristol-Meyers Squibb (pharmaceuticals), and ISO, Aetna, Prudential and other casualty and life insurance firms; 2) The U.S. demographics strongly indicate a growing need for such a national technology workforce to keep pace with foreign competition in medical, pharmaceutical and actuarial research and production; 3) There has been an ongoing national decline in numbers of students entering the mathematical sciences. The possible high-technology workforce shortfall in this strong growth area appears to be increasing. A survey of schools in the region revealed there are few applied and computational mathematics programs currently offered by regional universities. There are none that specifically train students to enter the high-technology workforce as statisticians or actuaries immediately following receipt of an undergraduate mathematics degree doc10354 none Award: Principal Investigator: Tao Li Essential laminations and immersed essential surfaces are two important objects in 3-manifolds. They generalize embedded incompressible surfaces, and are remarkably useful in obtaining topological and geometric information of 3-manifolds. The main goal of this project is to explore the relationships between the topology of 3-manifolds and these two objects. The tools that the investigator will use include branched surfaces and immersed branched surfaces that have been proved to be extremely useful in the investigator s previous work. The investigator intends to continue his research on essential laminations and immersed surfaces with the following goals. (1) To construct essential laminations in 3-manifolds obtained from Dehn surgery on hyperbolic knots. The techniques to be developed in this research could potentially have great impact on some famous conjectures in knot theory, e.g., Property P for knots and the cabling conjecture. (2) To find an algorithm to decide whether a 3-manifold is a Seifert fiber space. The investigator intends to use immersed branched surfaces and normal surface theory to find a practical algorithm. (3) To show that two homotopy equivalent 3-manifolds, which contain essential laminations, are homeomorphic. (4) To find an algorithm to decide whether a 3-manifold contains an essential lamination. Three-manifolds are objects modeled on the 3-dimensional space that we are living in. These objects can be found in many other sciences, such as physics, biology, and chemistry. A geometric way of studying 3-manifolds, which is extremely fruitful, is to view a 3-manifold as a collection of 3-dimensional pieces glued together along 2-dimensional surfaces. The investigator plans to study the structure of 3-manifolds using such 2-dimensional surfaces, which are called essential laminations and immersed essential surfaces. The research in this project is related to knot theory, which has helped to understand the structure of DNA; it is also related to hyperbolic geometry, which has been used by physicists to understand the universe doc23836 none Proposal Number: Principal Investigator: Timothy Anderson Institution: University of Florida This CAREER workshop is intended to provide outreach to institutions that have not traditionally received a large number CAREER awards. The PI has planned a CAREER proposal-writing workshop in conjunction with a Southeastern Universities and Colleges Coalition for Engineering Education (SUCCEED) Regional Conference to be held on March 3, at the The University of Florida Doubletree Hotel and Conference Center in Gainesville, Florida. It is a general goal of the CAREER program to achieve a broader diversity of proposing individuals and institutions. The establishment of regional workshops for young investigators is one method of accomplishing this goal. The PI has invited young faculty from about 40 schools in the southeastern region. Institutions in most of the southeastern states are invited to send representatives. Funding will provide travel grants for the participants. This workshop is intended to help young PIs become more competitive in receiving initial grants, especially CAREER awards. In addition, the PIs will be invited to stay for the remainder of the SUCCEED conference (March 3 - 5), which will focus on educational issues such as teaching effectiveness, mentoring, and assessment doc23837 none This project provides 14 undergraduate (upper classman) and 16 graduate scholarships, focused enrichment activities and support-services to academically talented but financially disadvantaged students including non-traditional students and those from under-represented groups. The scholarships promote full-time enrollment and academic success in the Master of Science in Systems Technology program and in upper-division computer science curricula. The project encourages more students to pursue degrees in advanced technology needed for national competitiveness in the global economy of the 21st century. Students classroom and laboratory experiences are enriched through advanced technology utilization, research training, and interaction with industry partners. Student support strategies build upon institutional resources as well as established industry linkage to further Scholars career success. At least half of the scholarships assist students from under-represented groups. Project components include: recruitment; selection; financial assistance; student support services including faculty and peer mentoring; and professional development, research and internship opportunities doc23838 none Garvine Mixing and circulation in the Delaware Coastal Current (DCC), a buoyant coastal jet, will be studied using a combination of numerical modeling and field work (moorings, rapid surveys, and purposeful dye releases) followed by analysis and interpretation of results from the two approaches. Working hypotheses are that mixing between the coastal buoyant discharge and ambient shelf waters is larger during upwelling than downwelling events, that this mixing during upwelling is primarily concentrated at the offshore plume boundary, and that the conservation of buoyancy is principally a balance between horizontal advection and vertical diffusion. Moorings will include standard current meters and bottom-mounted acoustic Doppler current profilers (ADCPs). There will be 5 moorings, three parallel to the DCC and three perpendicular. Multiple conductivity-temperature-depth recorders (CTDs) and temperature sensors will also be deployed on both taut and slack moorings. At the northernmost mooring, two ADCPs will allow estimation of the Reynolds stresses using Stacey s method. ADCP bin spacing will be 0.5 m allowing resolution of 1m eddies. Forty-five kilograms of Rhodamine dye will be released during each upwelling or downwelling event selected for study. This dye will be traced for 4-5 days. There will be two cruises and mooring deployments. One upwelling dye study will occur during year 1 and one upwelling and one downwelling experiment during year two. A previously utilized version of ECOM3d, configured for the DCC, will be used to analyze the dye study results. Significant effort will be devoted to comparing different turbulent closure schemes. After the model is calibrated, it may be used for sensitivity studies. Careful comparison and interpretation of field and model results will conclude the study doc23839 none PROJECT SUMMARY This scholarship program is designed to provide increased financial assistance to qualified students pursuing a baccalaureate program in mathematics or computer science in preparation for successful entry into a career field or graduate study related to these disciplines. The objectives of this scholarship program are: 1) to increase the number of academically qualified low income students obtaining undergraduate degrees in mathematics or computer science, with special encouragement given to women, under-represented minorities and persons with disabilities; 2) to collaborate with the St. Louis corporate community in its efforts to attract, retain and develop a qualified talent pool of employees; and 3) to increase the number of qualified students who enroll and persevere in the mathematics and computer science programs at Fontbonne College. A total of ten students will be chosen as scholarship recipients. Seven students will be selected as entering freshmen, and will continue to receive a scholarship of $3,125 throughout their four-year program provided they meet the published academic standards of the department. Three transfer students, preferably from the St. Louis Community College system, will be selected in year one and three in year three. Each will receive the $3,125 per year scholarship for the two years they are at Fontbonne College. A Principle Investigator and two Co-PIs will direct the program. A review committee composed of the three directors, with appropriate input from the Directors of Admission and Financial Aid, will make the final selection of participants. Selection will be made based on criteria including U.S. citizenship status, financial need, published admission and department requirements, evidence of the candidate s ability demonstrated through transcripts, a written essay and personal interview, and the expressed desire to pursue a career or graduate study in an area related to mathematics or computer science. All students will agree to complete a baccalaureate degree as full-time students during the two or four year duration of the program. The CSEMS scholars will have access to all student support services available as needed through the Kinkel Center for Academic Resources, the Office of Multicultural Affairs and the Career and Counseling Center. In addition to their academic program, scholarship recipients will participate in department sponsored programs designed to optimize their chances for successful program completion and entry into the career of their choice. The PI and Co-PIs will serve as academic advisers to the scholars, closely monitoring each scholar s progress. They will participate in the career center s four year Professional Development Certificate Program for entering freshmen; the two-year Career Advancement Program will be recommended for the transfer scholars. Five graduates from the department will serve as mentors for these scholars throughout their academic program. A one hour supplemental instruction problem solving session will be scheduled weekly during each semester. Scholars will also have the option for Co-op which will be coordinated through the Director of Cooperative Education and internship placement coordinated through the academic department. All scholars will present a poster session on their research prior to graduation in addition to the regular presentation of their portfolio which is required of all graduates from the department doc23840 none This program provides scholarships to talented, low-income students majoring in computer science, mathematics, engineering, and engineering technology. Special consideration for scholarships is given to increase the minorities and women s participation in these fields. Through the CSEMS Academy at the college, students in the program receive individualized support and peer mentoring, and have opportunities to participate in internships with local industries such as Verizon and IBM, and with other colleges with which the Bronx Community College has an established relationship. The Academy also provides a physical place at the college where students can form study groups; receive tutoring and other services under the guidance of faculty members. Workshops on interviewing and job search and presentations by alumni from high-technology industry are also conducted by the CSEMS Academy in order to help students find employment with local industries once they complete their program. The transfer office at the college assists students who are interested to transfer to four-year schools to complete their studies doc23841 none Behringer The primary goal of this project is to understand the genetic differences that underlie morphological variation between mammalian species. Dr. Behringer hypothesizes that many of these genetic differences reside in DNA sequences that regulate the transcription of developmental control genes. He has chosen to focus upon the classic developmental biology paradigm of vertebrate limb development. He proposes to make functional comparisons between mouse and bat limb morphogenesis because compared to mouse, bats have highly modified limbs. The developmental control gene that he proposes to study, Prx1, encodes a paired homeodomain transcription factor that is required in mice for limb and craniofacial development. He has localized a discreet 600 bp DNA segment encoding a transcriptional enhancer that directs limb expression in a Prx1-specific pattern during mouse development. He has isolated the Prx1 orthologue from bat (Carollia perspicillata) libraries that we have generated. He is characterizing the expression pattern of this gene in bat embryos by whole-mount and section RNA in situ hybridization. He has identified the putative limb enhancer of the bat Prx1 gene by virtue of its conserved DNA sequence and genomic position relative to mouse and human orthologues. He will test the activity of this putative limb enhancer using a lacZ reporter assay in transgenic mice. He will then replace the endogenous limb enhancer of the mouse Prx1 gene with the bat Prx1 limb enhancer by gene targeting in mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells. Thus, mice will be generated where the mouse Prx1 gene is expressed under the control of the bat Prx1 limb enhancer. He will assess the morphological consequences of this regulatory element alteration in the limbs. He proposes that this type of highly focused in vivo test will provide important insights into the genetic basis of morphological divergence. In addition, his studies should further our understanding of how regulatory diversity can modulate organogenesis doc23842 none Quantifying the Effects of Swell on the Air-Sea Momentum Flux W. Drennan RSMAS Field measurements of momentum fluxes and velocity profiles will be used to help derive a new parameterization of air-sea fluxes under multiple roughness scales. Near-surface turbulence will be measured from an air-sea interaction spar buoy (ASIS) at a marine site in the Baltic Sea. Directional wave measurements will be made from ASIS and two waverider buoys. Meteorological measurements will be made from a nearby tower. This site was chosen to provide a regime of swell aligned with the wind field, a wide-range of atmospheric stability and a low-moderate wind-regime. The data will be analyzed to derive a better relationship between surface roughness and momentum flux in swell dominated or mixed sea regions. Incorporation of the new results into state-of-the-are coupled models should lead to improved forecasts of hurricanes and tropical storms doc23843 none Synthetic polymers command one of the largest commercial markets in the chemical industry with products ranging from ough trash bags to balloon catheters used in delicate angioplaty. Increasingly, polymeric materials must combine multiple functions (e.g., toughness, hardness, solvent resistance, permeability, clarity, etc.), while optimizing processing characteristics and minimizing cost. Block copolymers, formed by joining two or more chemically distinct macromolecules, provide unparalleled control over nanoscale morphology and the prospect for creating advanced materials with competitive properties. Linear two-monomer block copolymers (AB, ABA, ABABA, etc) are well understood thermodynamically; four microphase separated states have been established within the framework of a universal phase diagram, both theoretically and experimentally. Three-monomer triblocks (ABC, ABCBA, etc.), which offer a much richer spectrum of materials design combinations, phase behavior, and functionality, are significantly less well understood. This proposal targets several model ABC triblock copolymer systems, strategically selected for fundamental phase behavior studies, and for development as ion conducting membranes. Perhaps the greatest limitation in connecting ABC triblock copolymer theory and practice is a daunting array of experimental variables. A systematic and precise approach to varying composition and block sequencing through model anionic polymerization of styrene (S), isoprene (I), and ethylene oxide (O) is identified, thereby enabling an organized evaluation of phase behavior based on small-angle X-ray and neutron scattering (SAXS and SANS), dynamic mechanical spectroscopy (DMS), transmission electron miscoscopy (TEM), and other methods. ISO and SIO triblock materials will be assessed in the weak and strong segregation limits with an emphasis on identifying multicontinuous and triply periodic structures in coordination with a leading theoretical program. Synthesis and structural characterization of model polyolefins, obtained by anionic polymerization and catalytic hydrogenation, will compliment this fundamental thrust while contributing new materials to this most important sector of the polymer industry. Glassy poly(dyclohexylethylene) (C), rubbery poly(ethylethylene) (E), and semicrystalline poly(ethylene) (E) will be configured into complimentary sequences (CEE E, CE E E, and E ECE) and model nanostructures and evaluated for response to shear in the melt state and the associated mechanical properties in the solid state. Membranes present an attractive development opportunity for block copolymers. Selective transport characteristics can be combined with robust mechanical properties, chemical stability, and superior processability. Ion conduction membranes are identified as particularly attractive with applications as solid-state electrolytes and proton conducting fuel cell membranes. Ion conductivity will be determined as a function of morphology using lithium doped ISO and SIO triblocks. Multiply continuous morphologies, such as the gyroid, are anticipated to provide facile ion conduction without domain alignment. New triblocks containing acidic moieties (e.g., carboxylic or sulfonic acid) will be prepared using anionic or living free-radical polymerization methods, augmented by post polymerization functionalization. Poly(acrylic acid) in combination with fluorinated poly(butadiene) and poly(styrene) is an initial target compound. These proton-conducting materials will be characterized by SAXS, SANS, DMS, and TEM, thereby establishing the correspondence in phase behavior between conventional non-polar block copolymers and those containing ionic substituents doc23844 none This project is motivated by the need for a better method of measuring the absorption properties of aerosol particles for solar radiation. Current methods consist of capturing an aerosol sample on filter paper or some other material, illuminating it, and measuring the effect of the aerosol film on transmission or reflection of the light. A problem is to distinguish between the light that is scattered from the beam and that which is actually absorbed. The problem is approached by using an integrating sphere, a cavity with a diffusely reflective inner surface that traps the photons scattered by the aerosol film. A small port in the cavity allows a probe to sample the photon density of the trapped light, from which the transmittance and reflectance of the aerosol film may be determined. This project improves upon the concept of an integrating cavity by use of a tandem integrating sphere (called TANINS), an absorption meter consisting of two integrating spheres, joined at the sample port, capable of determining the hemispheric transmittance and reflectance of the filter sample with high accuracy and sensitivity. The instrument performance is evaluated by comparison with measurements using a well-understood integrating cavity of standard design and by measurements on laboratory-generated aerosols with known optical properties. The measurements are then converted to characterize in situ or undisturbed aerosols by theoretical modeling to account for the effects of particle clumping and the filter substrate. The work provides fundamental information on aerosol optical properties that is needed for atmospheric remote sensing and for evaluating the effects of aerosol layers on regional and global climate doc23159 none Toole Analysis of existing finestructure and microstructure data will be conducted. The data, derived from two recent investigations of ocean mixing processes: the Brazil Basin Tracer Release Experiment and the study of Circulation in the Romanche Fracture Zone, consist of vertical profile observations from the High-Resolution Profiler and moored current meter measurements. Several signals in these data will be explored, documented, and presented in the scientific literature that address (1) the nature of the finescale shear and strain and the associated turbulent dissipation in the abyssal ocean above rough bathymetry (at subtropical latitudes and on the equator), (2) the flow within a mid-ocean ridge fracture, (3) the intensity and spatial distribution of turbulent dissipation in a field of equatorially trapped deep jets, and (4) the intensity of the mid-depth internal wave field and associated mixing at tropical latitudes away from the immediate vicinity of the equator. The projects are related by the common goal of improving understanding of mixing and diapycnal transport in the deep ocean doc23846 none Glucocorticoids, such as corticosterone (CORT), are an important group of steroid hormones that modulate cellular and behavioral responses to stress. Their action can involve genomic mechanisms in the cell nucleus, and also much faster non-genomic actions involving receptors on the cell membrane. The cellular mechanisms mediating responses to acute, as distinct from chronic, stress are still not well understood. Recent evidence suggests that CORT interactions with behaviorally important peptide hormones, in particular arginine vasotocin (AVT), are critical during acute stress. This project examines how CORT and AVT interact within brain cells in response to acute stress, using the salamander as a novel and accessible system to combine biochemistry with behavior. The interactions of the hormones in triggering intracellular biochemical signaling pathways will be tested in specific contexts, in terms of behavior and neuroendocrine state. Results will be important for understanding fundamental cellular mechanisms of stress hormone action in vertebrates. The impact will extend beyond neuroendocrinology to endocrinology and stress-related behavior, as well as cell biology related to signaling. Valuable training of students at several levels in this productive laboratory also will continue to include students with handicaps and those from under-represented groups doc23847 none Award is for a multichannel seismic survey across the offshore portions of the Chicxulub impact crater. The multichannel seismic survey will be added on to a funded British tomographic survey that will be conducted in the summer of aboard the R V Maurice Ewing. The multichannel seismic survey will map features that cannot be constrained by the tomographic study, including the geometry of the peak ring, and the possible thrust boundary beneath the peak ring. The modeling effort, together with the multichannel seismic profiles will determine the approach direction of the impactor and constrain the angle of impact to with 10 degrees. The multichannel seismic profiles together with the tomographic data will complete the required site survey over two proposed IODP sites doc23848 none de Couet Drs. de Couet and Callaerts are trying to understand the molecular and developmental mechanisms underlying the invention of morphological novelty. Much of the progress in this area of evolutionary biology has been derived from comparing the developmental modes and the causative genes of model organisms such as Drosophila with those of representatives from other phyla. The identification of genes involved in pattern formation and their conserved structure highlight the importance of developmental events for the evolution of new form and function, and provides new directions for evolutionary biology. Whilst arthropod and vertebrate development have been studied in great detail, the development of Mollusks is poorly understood at the molecular and cellular levels. The phylum Mollusca comprises several classes of highly diverse invertebrates without overt segmentation and metameric organization. Mollusks are characterized by an external shell, a muscular foot and a rasping organ, and are commonly elongated along the dorsoventral axis. Among the Mollusks, the cephalopods have achieved the highest morphological and physiological complexity. It is proposed to investigate developmental processes and molecular parameters that give rise to the adult characteristics of the cephalopod Euprymna scolopes, a small sepiolid squid endemic to Hawaiian waters. Cephalopods are highly specialized Mollusks with a complex nervous system and powerful sensory organs. A subset of homeobox-containing genes, the Hox-genes, are commonly considered pivotal determinants in anteroposterior patterning. The expression patterns of these genes have been extensively used as molecular markers for judging evolutionary relationships, such as homologies of structures along the anteroposterior axis. In preliminary studies they isolated sequences of a family of Hox genes and of other homeobox-containing regulatory genes from Euprymna. Extensive phylogenetic analyses led to the conclusion that cephalopods have a set of at least nine Hox-like genes most closely resembling those isolated from polychaetes and ribbonworms. Specifically, this study aims to (1) To establish techniques for experimental and molecular-genetic manipulation of Euprymna scolopes arm development, and (2) To isolate and characterize Euprymna genes homologous to Dll Dlx, apterous Lhx2 Lmx1, Tbx genes, BMP2, hh, and Wnt, and to initiate the study of their expression patterns. The detailed molecular analysis of cephalopod axial patterning genes and their developmental expression patterns may hold important cues to explaining the diversification of appendage number and appearance doc23849 none Gentrification is a process experienced by cities around the world. It exemplifies the shift from an industrial economy to a service economy. Yet, the fact that manufacturing is still an important part of urban economies should not be ignored. Manufacturing is being threatened by the process of gentrification. The loss of manufacturing affects the employment and housing opportunities of inner city residents. The debate around gentrification has concentrated on its causes, while its effects on the existing communities has been largely unexplored. What work has been done has largely concentrated on the effects of gentrification on housing. The effect on work and the linkages between home and work for working class residents has gone unexplored. This doctoral dissertation research project explores the effect of gentrification on small manufacturers and blue collar-workers in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. The project asks the following questions: 1) To what extent has gentrification caused manufacturing displacement? 2) How has the job market changed as a result of gentrification? and 3) How has gentrification affected the residential and employment opportunities of working-class people in Williamsburg? In-depth interviews with key informants, business owners and workers will provide data on the changing structure of opportunity for working-class residents and the changing geography of their work, home, and social networks. The findings will demonstrate where manufacturing jobs move within the metropolitan region and explore the ability of working-class residents to maintain their socioeconomic levels in an area undergoing industrial displacement. It is expected that the study will demonstrate that manufacturers are being displaced because of gentrification and that those who lose these jobs are unlikely to find jobs at equal skill and pay levels. The proposed research looks at how a global process like gentrification affects a local neighborhood and the population that lives there. It analyzes the nature of urban change, the directions in which that change may lead, and the implication of this change not only for local neighborhoods, but for cities in general. In the process of gentrification, de-industrialization may be encouraged, so much so that the city loses its productive base. There may be a greater homogeneity not only of the economic base, but of the populations within urban neighborhoods as well, jeopardizing the economically and culturally diverse populations that are such a vital element to central cities. This research opens up the field of gentrification to examine the links between home and work in gentrifying areas and to analyze the effects of gentrification on labor and labor markets. This research has potential implications for urban policies on zoning, industrial retention, job creation, and affordable housing. It may also impact the literature of spatial mismatch and skills mismatch and the racialized and gendered patterns of work and residence. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc23850 none Ni This award supports a three-year collaborative research and education program between the Center for Intelligent Maintenance Systems (IMS) and counterpart centers laboratories in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Australia. IMS is an NSF multi-campus Industry University Cooperative Research Center between the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. The Center is focused on web-enabled technologies and predictive intelligence to enable products and manufacturing systems to achieve near-zero-downtime performance. IMS is developing a Web-enabled Manufacturing, Maintenance and Service Education, Training and Research Program in partnership with government, industry, and international institutions. Through the international center-to-center projects supported by this award, IMS will advance a) a comprehensive, multidisciplinary and highly collaborative research agenda, b) a cross-university educational curricula, c) virtual student research teams, and d) global educational experiences for American students. A critical element of the program will be the placement of U.S. undergraduate and graduate students in internships in the foreign partner laboratories to collaborate on research projects that are an integral part of the IMS research agenda doc23851 none Weber Description: This project supports a U.S.-Pakistan Workshop on High Salinity Plants to be held in Karachi, Pakistan in November . The organizers are Dr. Darrell Weber, Department of Biology and Range Science, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah and Dr. M. Ajmal Khan, Department of Biology, University of Karachi, Karachi, Pakistan. The workshop theme is High salt tolerant plant ecosystems and their use in restoration of highly saline soils and the focus will be on the restoration of highly saline soils. The subjects include: collection and characterization of halophytes for use in restoration of highly saline soils, molecular biology of halophytes and identification of their salt tolerant genes, critical factors involved in the establishment of halophytes on highly saline soils, mechanisms of salt tolerance for halophytes, factors involved in maintaining natural halophyte populations, factors involved in maintaining restored halophyte populations, and development of cash crop halophytes. The subjects covered focus on the restoration of highly saline soils, the mechanism of salt tolerance would have value in determining what type of plant is selected for restoration. The workshop is designed to involve a presentation by a U.S. or Pakistan scientist on each specific research area. Information on how to prepare a joint proposal will be presented. The proceedings will have information on restoration of highly saline soils, selected areas of high priority research, as well as a literature guide for the cooperative research. Scope: The workshop is being held in conjunction with the 8th national meeting of the Pakistan Botanical Society. The workshop objectives are consistent with the interests and priorities of the Pakistan Government. It will include U.S. scientists who are active in the field of plant physiology and ecological studies. The U.S. participants include four junior scientists. The results of the workshop will include identifying joint research that would benefit the United States, Pakistan and other countries that have high salinity, especially those that have intensive irrigation systems doc23852 none The primary objective of the PAthways to Careers in MAthematics and Computer Science (PACMACS) Bridge program at Saint Joseph s University (SJU) is to train and educate academically talented but financially disadvantaged minority students for careers in mathematics and computer science by providing them with an excellent, comprehensive, undergraduate education. SJU presently runs PACMACS, an innovative outreach program, for bright minority high school students from Philadelphia public and charter high schools. High school seniors (and exceptional juniors) in PACMACS attend up to 4 college classes at SJU (in mathematics and computer science), and receive college and career guidance. The PACMACS Bridge program is designed to help those students make the transition to full-time college once they are enrolled at SJU after graduating from high school. The PACMACS Bridge program is a comprehensive package of financial, academic and social support offer to undergraduates in the mathematics and computer science department at SJU. Students obtain financial support through the University Financial Aid Office and NSF CSEMS funding. Six to 10 eligible students will be identified and awarded CSEMS scholarships. Academic support programs include faculty mentors, upper level undergraduate student mentors, supervised study sessions, tutoring services and individualized attention in the small classes available at SJU. Social support programs include seminars on college life, peer support groups and panel discussions on cultural diversity to assist the students in the cultural adjustment to an urban, predominantly Caucasian Catholic University doc23853 none Michigan Technological University s College of Engineering strives to attract and retain more students from under-represented groups, specifically women and minorities. This project supports undergraduate students during their first two years of college. The goal is for these high-risk students to perform well early in their college career with the expectation that their strong performance will help them to obtain alternate funding sources (e.g.: co-op and internship positions) during the latter two years of study. In addition, the project provides graduate scholarships for engineering students who are in unfunded programs so that they can cost effectively complete an advanced degree. The project builds upon and utilizes pre-existing campus programs, campus Learning Centers, and peer tutoring programs. To facilitate undergraduate success, students attend and participate in the engineering seminar series and the Career Center Workshops associated with this program. They regularly meet with their mentor and the program advisor. To retain their scholarships, undergraduate students need to show satisfactory progress towards their degree, become active in an on-campus professional organization, and work toward obtaining a co-op internship position. The graduate scholars serve as academic mentors to the undergraduate scholars and offer insights regarding student life and the local community. Two groups of graduate students are targeted for the scholarships: Peace Corps International Masters students and the Master of Engineering students. (These graduate students are not typically eligible for traditional funding sources.) Graduate students in both programs are ideally suited to be mentors to undergraduate students: they have received a technical undergraduate degree and are interested in working with and supporting others. The graduate students receive training in mentoring and advising students. All target group engineering graduate and undergraduate students entering Michigan Tech are sent information and a scholarship application in the spring of each year of the program. Faculty staff evaluate the applicants based on need and individual merit. Each undergraduate scholarship recipient receives $2,500 per year to assist with college expenses. Each graduate scholarship recipient receives $3,125 per year to assist with college expenses. The graduate students receive funding for one year (the amount of time they are on campus for their degree program), while the undergraduate students are funded for two years. The interaction of undergraduates and graduate students is one of the most important components of this program doc23854 none P.I. Gargett, Ann (Old Dominion University) Proposal #: Collaborating Inst: Woolsey, Craig (VA Tech.) Proposal #: The PIs propose to construct a two-body towing system to create a stable measurement platform for ocean turbulence measurements. This work builds on the potential for an effective turbulence survey tool using acoustic Doppler current measurements in non-standard ways. In particular, horizontally moving a 5-beam VADCP through the ocean can produce vertical-plane swath-maps of crucial turbulence quantities such as vertical momentum stresses, turbulent kinetic energy, and its dissipation rate, as well as standard measurements of mean currents and their vertical shear. These measurements require a sufficiently stable platform, as proposed here. Preliminary offshore measurements taken from a prototype towing system suggest that a two-stage design can provide the required stability. This preliminary testing also clarified the design modifications needed for continuous mapping in offshore environments: provision of shipboard controls for (i) the length of cable between primary and secondary tow bodies and (ii) mean attitude of the secondary tow body. Specifically, the PIs propose to design the necessary control systems, build a complete towing system for operation to depths of 200m, and carry out a coastal offshore test cruise to document the motion characteristics of the system and collect preliminary data with a 1.2MHz 5-beam VADCP, deployed in both upward and downward looking modes. During the course of this work with a shallow system, they will also explore options for accomplishing cable length adjustments in a subsequent system to operate over full ocean depths. If successful, this development would have broad impacts on upper ocean observational capabilities in areas other than turbulence research, enabling spatial mapping of such features as biological thin layers and the near-surface bubble clouds that dominate gas transfer between ocean and atmosphere doc23855 none Studies The objective of the program is to recruit, educate, support, and graduate students with financial need who are pursuing academic majors in, and subsequently careers related to, computer science, and mathematics. The project responds to both institutional priorities and the national need for individuals within these disciplines. The program supports 21 students annually for four years. The program consists of comprehensive recruitment and academic support programs, and appropriate career counseling programs targeting students majoring in computer science and mathematics. The CSEMS scholars are supported through activities that involve students in research, extensive internship program, and aggressive career services doc23856 none The Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC) for the Management of Information at the University of Arizona has been an I UCRC for the past five years and will continues to follow the model of the I UCRC program. The Center s goal is to create knowledge, methodologies, practices and software to support individuals, organizations and society in the collaborative use of information technology. Research in the area of collaborative computing is an integral part of the development of the office, school and government of the future. Current research centers within the Center include collaborative computing, knowledge management, and technology-supported learning. In the past five years, the Center has developed a synergistic partnership between university researchers and industry users through its industry relevant research and its structure. Research projects are developed and pursued with significant input from the industry partners doc23857 none EIA 02- Rao, Nagaraj MacIntyre, Richard Mercy College Mercy College Minority Institution Infrastructure: Planning This one-year planning award, expanding activities geared to attract and retain minority students, supports the development of a project that will position Mercy College, a minority serving institution, to expand its capabilities in the Division of Mathematics and Computer Science. Faculty members will be hired with experience in human communication technology to incorporate cutting edge technological advancements into teaching and research activities and to develop multidisciplinary, discipline-specific and foundational modules in key areas of the curriculum. The modules will provide a foundation for the integration of new technologies. The award will also facilitate further development by a planning group consisting of faculty members at Mercy, and researchers from the University Arizona, University of Colorado-Boulder, and University of Houston-Downtown. The project supports on-site faculty training at the University of Colorado s Center for Spoken Language Research and the development of a five-year infrastructure development proposal to improve faculty and student research capability at Mercy. The award will enable Mercy College to initiate and continue critical steps towards invigorating and strengthening offerings in the computer science and information technology fields doc23858 none Rahman Description: This award supports US-India cooperative research on the Digital Library Network. US PI Saifur Rahman of Virginia Polytechnic Institution (VPI) the students are well-versed in modern software techniques. The award will support an exchange of visits between Rahman and Chakravorti. Jadavpur University will host the US PI s visit to Kolkata doc23859 none The class of planar domains which satisfy an exact Gaussian quadrature for all integrable harmonic functions was introduced 30 years ago by D.Aharonov and H.S.Shapiro. These rather rigid sets, with real alegbraic boundary, turned out to be essential objects of investigation in a variety of problems related to conformal mapping, fluid mechanics, approximation theory, potential theory, image processing and operator theory. Top experts in these areas will attend the conference and will discuss the future directions of research in this broad area. The conference will be devoted to a class of planar shapes, called quadrature domains, which are finitely determined by indirect measurements. They turn out to be important for applications ranging from inverse problems of geophysics and fluid flows to tomography. The meeting will be a unique opportunity for young researchers to meet experts in all adjacent areas and to share ideas and information about quadrature domains doc23860 none Bell : The exquisite control of the levels of metabolites within the cell involves a combination of both long-term adaptation involving control of gene expression and short-term regulation involving either the covalent modification of an enzyme, frequently by phosphorylation, or the binding of an allosteric regulatory ligand. The effectiveness of allosteric regulation is amplified in oligomeric enzymes by subunit interactions leading to cooperative interactions between regulatory ligands or between substrate binding events and catalysis. While several allosteric models have been presented to explain the roles that allosteric effects can play in the regulation of activity, the work proposed will investigate the requirement for subunit interactions in the normal catalytic cycle of an oligomeric enzyme, referred to as reciprocating subunits . The major aims of the work are to understand the role that subunit interactions play in the regulation [both homotropic and heterotropic] and activity of four important enzymes, Malate Dehydrogenase, Fumarase, 3-Phosphoglycerate dehydrogenase and Glutamate dehydrogenase, all of whose 3-dimensional structures are available. This work will provide direct evidence for or against the existence of a reciprocating subunit mechanism with these four enzymes. We will also test our hypothesis that reciprocating subunit mechanisms may also play an integral role in regulation of these enzymes, and will test whether our proposed mechanism where heterotropic regulators of either the K-type or the V-type effect subunit-subunit interactions to elicit their effects is appropriate for these enzymes. This work will involve the construction of a series of hetero-oligomers containing combinations of normal and modified sites to thoroughly test the roles that ligand induced changes across subunit interfaces play in the regular activity of these enzymes. Furthermore, working in conjunction with several crystallography labs, we will be able to obtain detailed structural information as to the mechanism of the subunit interactions involved in the activity and regulation of these enzymes doc23861 none This dissertation investigates the impact of high-skilled immigration on the earnings and employment of high-skilled native U.S. workers. It uses Census PUMS and March CPS data to describe trends in the highly-skilled labor market and to analyze the effects of proportion immigrant on earnings and employment in those labor markets. Highly skilled workers are defined primarily as those with higher education working in occupations with high average education. Multilevel models are used to estimate the effects of labor market variables on the individual employment and earnings outcomes doc23862 none The objective of the program is to develop a student support and scholarship program that builds on established relationships with local industry and with alumni. Students selected for the program based on financial need and academic potential receive annual grants of $ , for up to three years, as encouragement to complete a degree in computer science or mathematics. These grants are used to reduce the loan and employment portions of the students financial aid packages, rather than to replace grants from other sources. Thus, they provide substantial economic incentive to the students. Each of the four years of the program, 31 students majoring in computer science or mathematics are selected. Individual students are eligible beginning in their second year, and receive funding for up to three years, provided they continue to meet the eligibility criteria. In addition to meeting financial need and nationality criteria, the student must demonstrate the potential for academic success. Students in the program receive individual guidance from faculty and student support professionals, including the College s full-service Career Center. However, the most noteworthy aspects of the student support are those that connect outside of the College. Each year, students in the program are taken on trips to visit at least two companies in the region and talk with alumni there. Additionally, alumni employed at a wider sampling of employers participate in an annual round table discussion held at Gustavus. Last, but not least, alumni volunteers stay in touch with a few students each, in order to provide individualized mentoring. Frequent contacts with local industry, and in particular with alumni, provide the reminder that an exciting career awaits those who are well prepared doc23863 none This dissertation would investigate marriage market determinants of cohabitation and marriage using - data from the National Survey of Family Growth. The analysis uses characteristics of the labor market area (LMA), a group of counties defined by commuting patterns that generally constitute the spatial boundaries within which most individuals interact. Sex ratios and the economic characteristics of marriageable men in the area are expected to influence both cohabitation and marriage rates among never married women doc23864 none The goal of the Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics (CSEM) Scholarships for the 21st Century Program is to enable talented, economically challenged students to obtain undergraduate degrees in computer science, engineering, mathematics, or Internet technology allowing them to enter the workforce in their chosen field or to enter post-graduate school. The program has the following objectives: (1) Recruit talented, economically challenged students, particularly from our Tri-State region, and especially minorities and women, into majors in the CSEM disciplines. (2) Retain such students in these programs through the sophomore year and beyond. (3) Strengthen the current variety of support services for these students. (4) Supply ample opportunities for these students to engage in professional development. By achieving these objectives, more students will enroll and graduate in the CSEM disciplines at the University of Evansville. The program offers the incentive of financial support for economically-challenged students, plus many support services and professional opportunities that increase the likelihood that these students will graduate with degrees in the CSEM disciplines. There are 40 scholarships of $ each year for two years being awarded to freshman and sophomore students. The University is continuing these scholarships to qualified students for their remaining junior and senior years. Recipients are selected by a Scholarship committee on the basis of their academic record (high school GPA and class rank, SAT or ACT score) and potential for success in a CSEM discipline as evidenced by a written essay and a letter of recommendation. Students have access to the University programs and support services currently in place including the EXCEL Student Academic Success Center, the Office of Career Services, and various professional student organizations and conferences. In addition, to provide cameraderie among the CSEM Scholars, the program offers two activities specifically for the CSEM scholars each semester doc23865 none Christian Wagner The objective of this faculty s work from Oakland University is to increase the number of college students entering the high technology workforce in computer science, engineering, mathematics, and statistics. Their efforts involve contact with the area high schools and the city administration of Detroit. Their plan is to give special consideration to students in the Automotive program. Their efforts focus on the Detroit Public system. There are crucial curriculum modifications at Oakland University designed to support the students in this plan. All the students in this program will have a required interdisciplinary course focusing on professionalism and ethics in technology. A student completing his her program in 4 years instead of 5 or 6 is a goal of the plan. Finally their student population is involved with summer internships with local industries on various research projects. Oakland University has partnerships with a number of universities. These are University of South Carolina, Anna University (India), Hanover University (Germany) and Cariff University (Wales). Oakland University has partnerships with a list of technology and industrial firms doc23866 none The American Association of University Women (AAUW) Educational Foundation is producing a summary of what has been learned from projects funded by NSF and the AAUW Educational Foundation from through . Both organizations have funded research and demonstration projects in education, particularly science, mathematics, engineering, and technology education, that increase the participation of girls and women, and provide equal access to learning. The research team will summarize what is found in a number of areas, including gender differences in math and science skills and performance, differences among girls due to ethnicity and race, successful approaches that engage female students, factors that influence girls and women to pursue study in these fields, critical junctures for female SMET majors in higher education, and determinants to persistence at the graduate level. The study will use findings, evaluation results and accounts of innovative efforts reported in 175 projects funded by NSF and 200 projects funded by AAUW Educational Foundation. The published synthesis of findings and results will be disseminated widely to education policy makers, teachers and administrators via AAUW s publishing and marketing programs doc23867 none Khan Description: This award is to support a joint research project by Dr. Sarosh I. Khan, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Colorado, Denver, Colorado; Dr.Jobair Bin Alam, Civil Engineering Department, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh; and Dr. Lars Persson, Centre for Health and Population Research (ICDDR,B), Dhaka, Bangladesh. The investigators will develop a traffic flow model to represent the interaction between motorized and nonmotorized vehicles. The model will provide microscopic and macroscopic measures of traffic flow, and generate emission estimates for transportation networks. The broader goal of this grant is to estimate the impact of traffic flow on pollutant concentrations near roadways, and how those pollutants affect the children in Dhaka. The researchers will use an integrated model development approach based on field data. Dr. Khan will develop a traffic interaction model for two-and three-wheeled motorized and nonmotorized vehicles that travel in the same right-of-way, but which is not lane-based due to significant lateral movement primarily by smaller sized vehicles. The information from the model will then be incorporated into a dispersion model to be developed by Dr. Alam to estimate air pollutant concentrations. Dr. Persson and other ICDDR,B epidemiologists will examine the impact on children exposed to vehicular emmisions. Scope: Dhaka, Bangladesh, experiences air pollution that is more severe than in many larger cities, and the degraded air quality can have a significant negative impact on children. In part this pollution is caused by emissions from the increased number of motorized vehicles on Dhaka s roads. The current models for predicting emission impacts were created for the lane-based, homogeneous traffic found in developing countries. These models are much less reliable when used in developing countries, where the vehicles are heterogeneous, and driver behavior patterns and traffic regulation and enforcement are different. This research initiates a new partnership with international counterparts to develop and test integrated models for a problem that plagues several megacities in developing countries doc23868 none This project involves the construction of a Low Energy Neutron Scattering (LENS) facility at the Indiana University Cyclotron Facility (IUCF). LENS will use the existing linear accelerator at IUCF to produce 11 MeV protons, generating a pulsed neutron beam through (p, n) reactions on a Be target. Not only is LENS a novel and relatively inexpensive pulsed cold neutron source, but also - when completed in - LENS will enable the design of novel neutron instrumentation for small angle scattering, a broad program of research in materials science and biology, the development of novel neutron sources and moderators, and the education and training of the next generation of neutron scientists in the United States. LENS will also serve as a regional user facility that will be particularly well-suited for high-risk experiments and feasibility studies. The particular aspects of LENS that are being completed through this project are (1) the construction of neutron guides and (2) the development of a novel Larmor Precession Scattering Instrument (PSI) for spin-echo small-angle neutron scattering (SESANS) experiments. PSI will use polarized neutrons and will be sensitive to structures in the size range from 10 nm to nm. It can be operated either as a relectometer or as a high-resolution difractometer. In addition, use of coherent neutron waves from pinhole sources, a coded aperture mask, and newly developed phase-contrast imaging will allow imaging of structures from 1 micron to 1cm in size. With conventional small-angle neutron scattering (SANS), the SESANS PSI, and phase-contrast imaging, LENS will enable qualitatively new types of neutron scattering measurements, leading to new science. Among the initial experiments that will be conducted at LENS are studies of heterogeneities in glasses and ceramics, spintronics in magnetic semiconductors, hydride formation in alloys and pure metals, polymer networks and blends, nanostructured polymers, RNA helicases and protein:protein complexes, and chlorophyll aggregates. Small-angle neutron scattering (SANS), using neutrons with relatively low energies (so-called cold neutrons), allows scientists to study aspects of materials and biological substances that are not accessible using other types of radiation, such as X-rays. In particular, neutrons are sensitive probes of the structure and dynamics of atoms and molecules. For this reason, they have now become widely used, not only in physics, chemistry, and materials science, but also in biology, earth science, and engineering. With the completion of the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in , neutrons promise to be used increasingly as sensitive and versatile scientific probes. However, the relative dearth of neutron sources in the United States up to this time has contributed to the depletion of the ranks of U. S. neutron scientists. The Low Energy Neutron Scattering (LENS) facility at Indiana University will help to correct this situation by providing in a university setting the opportunity for the education and training of the next generation of neutron scientists, including those from fields such as biology that have not traditionally employed neutron scattering techniques to the full extent of their usefulness. In addition, LENS will serve as a regional user facility, enabling investigators from other institutions - including industry - to make use of neutron-scattering methods. LENS will also be used for potentially high-payoff experiments that are too risky to justify time on larger pulsed-neutron sources doc23869 none This proposal, facilitating research on high-performance database management and Internet dissemination of geospatial data, aims at attracting, recruiting, and retaining minority students while engaging these in research. The project enables the creation of a consortium between Florida International University (FIU) and Florida Memorial College (FMC). A pipeline of students from FMC, a four year HBCU, to FIU, a Carnegie-I HSI will be formed, encouraging FMC s students and others to enter FIU s masters or doctoral program in computer science. The consortium will focus on research necessary to enhance TerraFly, a web-based geospatial data viewer stemming from research performed at FIU s High Performance Database Research Center (HPDRC) under grants from NSF and other agencies. Researchers will work in Affinity Groups that consist of undergraduate and graduate students, post-docs, and faculty members. These groups provide the framework that enables deepening knowledge of a field by procuring a physical setting in a cooperative research-engaging environment. The project enhances TerraFly s underlying data storage mechanism, client-server interaction, user interface, its ability to overlay additional information layers, and its ergonomics of use and maintenance. The following specific research issues are addressed. Efficient and ergonomic dissemination of imagery with spatio-temporal data overlays, Data storage and querying methods for spatio-temporal data, Integration of heterogeneous data sources including relational and semantic databases and web sources with the spatial data, Testbed applications using geospatial data dissemination for aviation needs. Thus, the requested infrastructure will be used to perform this research, as well as the training of students at both institutions. Showing TerraFly s potential applications, FMC s knowledge of the aviation industry will be leveraged as the test beds are developed and tailored. The deployment of infrastructure at FMC will enable FIU s distributed database research to be incorporated into TerraFly research, as FMC students gain valuable hands-on experience with the requested infrastructure on a daily basis doc23870 none Clarke Data analysis and modeling will be used to understand the interannual variability of coastal flows, particularly those associated with El Nino - Southern Oscillation phenomena, along the west coast of the Americas and the South Australian Bight. The data sets for characterizing this variability include many decades of coastal water level data, a decade of altimetry, the California Coastal Fisheries Investigation data set, and the Canadian line-P data set. The models to be used will include an improved version of the existing Clarke and Van Gorder model, including expected dependence on background velocity and sloping stratification, and a statistical model. Existing theory predicts transmission of an equatorial signal along the coast, but not propagation of the signal, as observed. This discrepancy between theory and observation will be explored doc23871 none Metabolic Engineering Conference IV is the fourth of a continuing conference series on the interdisciplinary field of metabolic engineering, and provides a new window into quantitative analysis and synthesis of metabolic networks. The increasing awareness of metabolic engineering in both the academic and industrial scene has been stimulated by some critical challenges of modern molecular biology and recombinant DNA technology. The two most important elements of metabolic engineering, quantitative physiology (analysis) and metabolic design (synthesis), are aimed to address these problems. Concepts and methodologies of metabolic engineering have potential value in direct application of metabolic design of cellular systems for the degradation of recalcitrant pollutants, production processes, and cell-based and gene therapies, which could provide critical insight in many areas of medicine. Themes to be discussed at this upcoming conference include: 1) Systems analysis in metabolic engineering 2) Metabolic engineering of cell cultures 3) Metabolic engineering of prokaryotes 4) Inverse metabolic engineering 5) Human metabolic systems biology 6) Metabolic engineering of quality traits in plants 7) Metabolic engineering of primary and secondary metabolites 8) Quantitative experimental analysis 9) Computational methods 10) Biocatalysts 11) High-throughput analysis doc23872 none Winant Using 10 years of data from the Mineral Management Service s Santa Barbara Channel-Santa Maria Basin study, the PIs will characterize the local internal tide regime. The major objectives of the proposed study will be to identify the structure of tidal band motions in the central California region, calculate the energetics associated with the internal tide, and identify possible dissipation and mixing sites. Mean annual time series of the key internal tide properties will be developed and assessed in terms of the annual cycles of the local mean flow and stratification. The influence of intermittent events in the mean flow field, stratification and meteorology on the internal tide structure will be identified. Aberrations from the mean annual cycles corresponding to El Nino and other interannual induced changes in meteorology and ocean conditions will be identified. With the information generated by this study, it will be possible to quantitatively assess the effects of internal tides on water quality and resource management issues in the geographical region of study and in similar coastal shelf regions of the western United States doc23873 none Prop #: PI: Joseph Coburn This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessels Knorr Atlantis, Oceanus operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, Joseph Coburn is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire doc23874 none Uhlmann The Pan America Advanced Studies Institute (PASI) award on inverse problems, organized by Gunther Uhlmann of the University of Washington in collaboration with Dr. Raul Manasevich of the Centro de Modelamiento Matematico (CMM) in Santiago, Chile, will take place at the CMM from July 22 to August 2, . The event will bring together leading experts in the areas of partial differential equations, inverse problems and non-linear analysis. The proposed activities will consist of intensive mini-courses followed by complementary lectures and further discussion. The interaction between partial differential equations, inverse problems and non-linear analysis has produced remarkable developments in the last couple of decades. These developments have implications for different fields, including geophysics, medical imaging, and the non-destructive evaluations of materials. One of the main objectives of this PASI is to bring many of these developments to advanced graduate students, postdocs and other scientists in the Americas interested in these fields and their applications. It is expected that the PASI will bring about increased collaboration between United States researchers and researchers in the rest of the hemisphere doc23875 none This is a continuation of the current CSEMS scholarship program for 30 mathematics and computer science majors at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, MN. Our program targets under-represented groups and non-traditional age students. The program includes a mentoring seminar to be held one evening per month, internship and career placement at major Twin Cities companies, and the opportunity to work on research projects with faculty members. A selection process has been designed for entry into the program with specific criteria which applicants must satisfy. Yearly renewal of the scholarship is required of each recipient. The recruitment plan includes working with the Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College to bring in more Native American students and visits to inner city high schools located near the Augsburg campus. Support structures incorporate and augment existing campus programs. The program has been designed to be not only a scholarship award but a concerted effort to keep these students from falling through the cracks. The emphasis is on mentoring from faculty, fellow students, and industry and community representatives with ties to the college doc23876 none This proposal, expanding activities geared to attract and retain Native American students, aims at developing a solid collaborative research backbone, enhancing its educational program, and improving participation of a diverse student population in computer-related disciplines. The backbone, enabling a cooperative research efforts in the Computer Science Department, fosters research and educational collaborations with other departments (specifically Biology and Psychology) and with other research institutions. The proposed research backbone is articulated in four inter-dependent threads: Data structures and methodologies for efficient parallel execution of logic and constraint programming languages Languages and methodologies for the design of knowledge based systems Application of knowledge-based technology in Semantic Web, Universal Accessibility, and Computational Biology Automated debugging and component-based programming for knowledge-based applications Enhancement of the educational program is expected to lead to improved recruitment and retention, increased transition towards graduate programs, and a stronger integration between research and education at the graduate and undergraduate level. These goals will be accomplished through the introduction of a pathways system throughout the undergraduate curriculum, where different pathways will accommodate the diverse student backgrounds. Focusing on an educational model for the training of Native American students in Computer Science, the institution expects to improve participation of a diverse student population in computer-related disciplines, with particular focus on the creation of an educational model for the training of Native American students in Computer Science. The proposed infrastructure provides research support, in the form of computing equipment (e.g., a 64-processor Beowulf platform, HP shared memory platform, robotic equipment) and human resources support (for faculty, students, and visiting scientists). The educational infrastructure includes the creation of a new computing classroom and provides human resources for the development of the new educational programs. A research team, consisting of 14 investigators, will benefit from this infrastructure by strengthening their interdisciplinary research through cross-fertilization of new ideas doc23877 none Tober This pilot project will allow a young scholar to do preliminary research on the topic of how Afghani refugees in Iran access local health care services. The problem to be addressed is how adherents to a more conservative branch of Islam interact with social services predicated on a more liberal Islamic philosophy. The specific focus of the project will be family planning as part of a package of health promotion and education. The project will be carried out in the city of Isfahan, Iran and in the surrounding countryside, including rural urban and Afghani Iranian comparisons. Using participant observation, semi-structured interviews and collecting demographic data from clinic files, the researcher will assess the capability of Islamic philosophy in practice to deal with fundamental cultural differences. The work will contribute to an increased understanding of Islam as a religion and a cultural value system, and will advance our understanding of how refugees in general, from more traditional cultures, adapt to novel settings, opportunities and constraints in more innovative settings. The broader impacts of this research by a Western scholar in Iran are very significant, in making human contacts between societies that have been in an adversarial relationship, and in advancing our understanding of social life in this part of the world doc23878 none The Academic Involvement For Professional Success (AIPS) Program targets needy students, many of whom are first-generation college students, at Adams State College (ASC), a small rural public institution in the San Luis Valley of Southern Colorado. Scholarship money helps qualified students become role models for the other students in the pre-engineering, mathematics, and computer science areas. Fifteen (15) scholarships are awarded in year one, increasing to 20 for years 2 through 4 of this project. These selected scholars are encouraged to participate in departmental and campus-wide activities that not only expose them to opportunities designed to heighten their academic experience, but that increase their chances and desire to succeed as professionals. The involvement of the AIPS students in these programs also provides a critical mass of students, giving non-scholarship students within the mathematics, Computer Science and Physics Department at ASC the same opportunities for development and encouragement doc23879 none The goal of this research is to determine what processes control the transport, cycling and preservation of vascular plant debris, fossil kerogen, mineral-associated soil organic matter and marine phytoplankton in the Fly River Gulf of Papua (GoP) shelf system. A PI from the University of South Carolina plans to accomplish this task by isolating and characterizing these four organic carbon pools (OC) from suspended and bottom sediments at the elemental, isotopic and molecular level using a suite of novel techniques. With the results, the PI will address the following three objectives: (1) determine the distribution of the four OC pools within the Fly River dispersal system in the GoP shelf; (2) follow the changes in concentration and composition of the four OC pools along the dispersal system; and (3) determine the sequestration rates and compositional changes of the four OC pools during burial in the GoP doc23880 none This CSEMS program provides support for a cohort of 15 students for 4 years to complete the Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science. Three target population groups have been identified, with the intent to secure, as much as possible, an equitable representation of students from each group: traditional high school graduates, community college transfer students, and students from U.S.-affiliated Pacific Islands, including U.S. territories of American Samoa and Guam, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands (CNMI), and the Republic of Palau (Belau). Students are selected based not only on academic ability and financial need, but also on their understanding of the rigors of the degree requirements. Student support services for the first two years include both academic and social support structures in an attempt to improve retention. These services concentrate on mentoring and providing supplemental instruction. The following two years include an emphasis on skills and opportunities to transition to a high technology workforce, and exposure to career opportunities. The program builds on existing strengths such as the quality of the computer science degree program, a caring faculty, a high sense of identity among computer science majors, and support services and activities designed to broaden the path to graduation for students. Consistent with the program guidelines, academically talented but financially disadvantaged students are identified, challenged, supported, and guided through completion of the degree and on into the workforce doc23881 none The proposed WSSU Computer Science and Technology Scholarship Program is going to provide scholarship support to academically talented minority students who demonstrate financial need. To fulfill the goal of increasing the number of students who enter the high tech workforce or higher education programs, this program provides scholarships to junior and senior level undergraduates, associate degree transfer students pursuing a degree in computer science; as well as to graduate students pursuing a MS degree in computer science and information technology. The program is going to attract, enroll, mentor, and enhance the academic performance of CSTSP scholars, thereby increasing the graduation rate of minority and women students in the fields of computer science and information technology. The program is going to provide 27 scholarships of $3,125 per year per student during the first year, and 27 scholarships per year during years two to four. Three primary objectives of the program are to: 1) increase the number of minority and women who enroll in computer science; 2) increase the number of minority and women who graduate with a BS or MS in computer science and or computer science and information technology; 3) increase the pool of students who are prepared to enter the computer technology workforce or pursue high education in the field. Additional benefits of the program include: 1) enhancement of the undergraduate computer science curriculum; 2) increased collaboration with business and industry; 3) development of collaborations with the growing body of bio-medical and high tech industries in the city of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, as well as state and national employers; 4) strengthen collaborations with the departments of mathematics, life sciences, physical sciences, and health sciences; 5) enhance the professional development of faculty resulting from mentoring scholars engaged in research doc23882 none The overall goal of this Radford University project is to produce more highly skilled graduates in Computer Science and Mathematics. The project s approach is one of aggressive tracking and continuous financial, academic, and social support throughout the crucial freshman and sophomore years. At least 30 scholarships are awarded to freshmen and sophomores in each of the four years of the project. Program objectives are (1) to recruit and select students, especially nontraditional students, to pursue careers in CSEM fields; (2) to support participants with intensive academic advising and with social activities; and (3) to obtain internships and other experiential learning positions for all participants. Recruitment of academically strong students, especially women and minority students is in cooperation with the university s Admissions Office and through the Office of Multicultural Services. Students are supported by individual attention from project staff as well as a well-developed institutional support system. This includes constant monitoring; frequent, individualized advising; academic support (through tutoring and other services); social support (through clubs and social events related to CSEM disciplines); internships; and career counseling (in individual sessions with the university s Career Services Center). Participants meet monthly with project staff, and are required to seek tutoring or other help as appropriate. Project staff meets regularly to discuss participants progress and needs. Project evaluation is based on student progress, and on student opinion as revealed in annual structured interviews. Evaluations are used to modify the project to provide the best possible support for students doc23883 none The faculty at Texas A&M University - Kingsville developed their CSEMS project to increase recruitment, retention and graduation of targeted CSEM majors. Then plan includes increasing the number of transfer students from community colleges in the CSEM disciplines and increasing retention of CSEMS students to 75%. Their CSEMS students attend orientation meetings with advisors and career service personnel. Their Career Services Office offers internships and permanent employment. They have created partnerships and formal articulations agreements with community colleges in South Texas to help graduates gain employment in the high tech workforce in the area. In addition their faculty is heavily involved with student mentoring, guidance, and tutoring support. They will also coordinate internships and research opportunities for their students doc23884 none Project Lamar University Computer Science-Mathematics Scholarship Program (CSEMS) serves 24 financially disadvantaged university students to assist them with their financial and academic needs over their junior and senior years. A combination of factors including a disproportionately large number of first-generation college students coming from low-income households exacerbates the problems of retention and graduation rates. Fully 62% of Lamar s first-time, full-time entering freshmen are first-generation college students, and 81.3% of the student body at Lamar University is eligible for financial aid. In an effort to address the problem of low graduation rates among low-income student populations in computer science and mathematics, Lamar s CSEMS Scholarship program expects to increased rates of retention, graduation, and entry into graduate professional programs by providing essential services to ameliorate academic, economic, and social barriers to the completion of a college education. In addition, Lamar has developed a management system and an evaluation process that includes assessment of the project s progress in meeting its goals and objectives, and to serve as a basis for future planning doc23885 none A three-day workshop will be conducted to synthesize information and evaluate critically important unresolved issues, the means for pursuing those issues and the logistics and support needed to improve our understanding of the Arctic Ocean sea ice-snowpack-atmosphere interactions. The Ocean-Atmosphere-Ice-Interactions (OAII) Scientific Steering Committee, a component of the ARCSS science program, endorsed this workshop. A primary goal of the workshop is top plan a series of field campaigns, model development studies and laboratory studies aimed at understanding air-snow-ice-water chemical exchange and how this influences climate. Key scientists in the relevant sub-disciplines will be involved and will bring together investigators that would not normally interact. Linkages and leverages to the U.S. effort will also be identified. The workshop product will be a preliminary research plan defining the objectives and logistical needs for field, laboratory and modeling work. The meeting will further address the wider ARCSS goals pertaining to OAII type research and address the implementation issues in the context of the new thematic phase of ARCSS doc23886 none This four-year project increases educational opportunities at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) for low-income, academically talented students by providing scholarships and supplemental academic and student support services for 36 full-time students in bachelor s degree programs in computer science (CMSC), mathematics and statistics (MATH), chemical engineering (ENCH), mechanical engineering (ENME), computer engineering (CMPE), and information systems (IFSM). Support services include peer mentoring, faculty advisement, tutoring, a one-week summer orientation and career identification experience, and informal learning opportunities. This model is one that builds upon the program success of the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) CSEMS project which began in summer and is going to provide a doorway for easy transfer for CCBC s computer science, engineering and mathematics CSEMS students to UMBC s quality four-year programs. Objectives include the recruitment, enrollment, graduation, and work placement of increased numbers of students, particularly under-represented groups. Women are targeted as they are both under-represented in computer science and engineering programs and over-represented in the pool of economically disadvantaged students at UMBC. The project also fosters an informal consortium relationship between UMBC and CCBC. An independent external evaluator oversees the project and provides data analysis on all measurable outcomes doc23887 none The goal of the program is to extend the NSF CSEM scholarship opportunities to beginning Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) students while extending the opportunities to J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College (JSRCC) students. These new scholarships enable undergraduate students in CSEM majors to complete their degree programs within the normal time frame and subsequently enter the work force in CSEM occupations. The program provides 29 scholarships of $3,125 per year per student over four years to students majoring in computer science, engineering, and mathematics. The comprehensive support structure, which has undergone minor refinements over the two-year span of the current program, is extended to the new scholars. The opportunity to offer CSEMS awards to beginning VCU students presents an exciting possibility to the VCU Director of Admissions who is committed to using these awards to help recruit more students into CSEM disciplines doc23888 none This project, called Scholarships for Academic Recruiting and Retention (SARR) , provides scholarships to increase recruitment and retention, and graduation rates for computer science, engineering and mathematics students. The key elements of the project are: 1) a scholarship awards program; 2) intensified recruitment of community college students; 3) a broader base of student research and design experiences both on campus and in off campus internships; 4) a set of support services to help scholarship recipients succeed academically and facilitate the next steps toward achieving their career goals. The program initially accommodates 25 science, engineering and mathematics scholars in the first year and 28 scholars for each of the last three years. CSU has a number of existing activities and resources that provide a sound foundation for the proposed program. These include a comprehensive tutoring program, a supplemental instruction program, a first- web-based course applicability system that allows community college students to quickly assess course equivalencies and academic ranking for CSU programs, and a learning communities program that facilitates student collaborative study to improve academic performance. CSU has established standards for the scholarship awards to provide entry to students who are just beginning to realize their potential, while strongly motivating them to push for and to sustain higher levels of academic achievement. SARR provides a network of support services for the scholarship recipients to assist them in overcoming any problems that might impede their progress, and to smooth the way to meet their academic and career objectives. The core of the support network is the assignment of faculty mentors to scholarship recipients. These mentors are charged with tracking and reporting on the progress of their students throughout their undergraduate residence, and for five years beyond. Mentors also counsel students on academic and aptitude matters, and guide them in maximizing their educational experiences and career opportunities. Other elements of the support network provide assistance in finding other sources of financial support if needed, facilitate student participation in internship opportunities, provide entry level career placement assistance, and provide graduate professional school entry guidance and assistance doc23889 none This project outlines a solution to a two-fold problem in Texas. The two-fold pieces of this problem are: 1) the productivity of the flourishing high technology economy in the state of Texas is being negatively impacted by the severe lack of well-educated engineering professionals; and, 2) a significantly large human resources, particularly minorities living in the state, do not participate in the development of the high technology industry. Consequently, economic prosperity bypasses this group. Therefore, what is needed is some economically feasible funding source that allows all Texas state residents to gain employment in the high technology industry. Hence, the scholarships afforded through this grant are assisting in alleviating this dual dilemma. The MEET-SWT project management plan is providing a system of prudent strategies for recruiting, retaining and ultimately graduating traditionally under-represented individuals. These graduates enter into and to become productive members of the Texas high technology workforce. The Department of Technology at SWT is optimistic about the opportunity that this scholarship program is having in promoting education and career opportunities in engineering and engineering technology for all Texas state residents doc23890 none The project provides a unique opportunity for talented but financially disadvantaged high school students from Southeastern Massachusetts to enter and complete an innovative education program in computer science, civil, mechanical, electrical, and computer engineering disciplines at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth (UMD). Residents of Southeastern Massachusetts are going through a major economic transition that resulted from almost total loss of textile industry in the United States. This region was once one of the richest communities in the nation, but it is now home for mostly working class population with first generation college attendees. UMD is well known for providing one of the best undergraduate engineering programs in northeast United States. However, it still loses the battle for attracting highly qualified students who cannot afford college on their own. UMD has developed a strategic plan to play a major role in the economic revival of the region. As part of this plan, the University has established an Advanced Technology and Manufacturing Center (ATMC). ATMC assists technology based companies in the region to develop new products and processes and helps them commercialize university- developed technologies. While ATMC has a staff of professionals, it also employs a good number of student interns who function as junior engineers on its projects. This project combines internship opportunities available at the ATMC with an NSF supported Foundation Coalition program that has been established for freshmen and sophomores in the College of Engineering at UMD. This combination provides a unique educational opportunity for students with financial needs. Students admitted through CSEMS spend their first two years in the College of Engineering s integrated math science engineering curriculum and are supported by NSF scholarships. In their last two years, they join the ATMC as interns. During their ten hours a week internship at the ATMC, CSEMS students are not only gain invaluable experience, they also earn internship salaries that are higher than what they receive during the first two years work study program. With this plan, CSEMS students are trained similar to that of medical school students who get experience in teaching hospitals. In order to take maximum advantage of this scholarship program, we plan for a project cycle of six years funded by a combination of NSF and private industry. During the first three years we admit three cohorts of twenty students each. By the end of the four-year NSF project period, each student is supported by NSF funds for the first two years of his her education. During the last two years, each student is supported by industry projects at ATMC. To accomplish the objectives of this project a partnership has been developed with eighteen of the area high schools, and a contact person has been identified for each school. All schools have expressed their enthusiasm to identify qualified students for this program. In addition, a set of programs and activities has been planned to add to the exceptional features of this project doc23891 none Oregon Institute of Technology (OIT) draws the majority of its students from a large, sparsely populated, rural region of South Central Oregon. This region has a significant number of under-represented, low-income populations who are currently not in a position to participate in career opportunities in engineering and information technology. This region also suffers from shortage of students trained for jobs in engineering and information technology sectors. The primary goal of this project is to provide scholarships to low-income computer science, computer technology, engineering and engineering technology, and mathematics students in the region. The project targets under-represented groups, first-generation students, and persons with disabilities. The project awards thirty students per year scholarships worth $3,100. It contains several new programs, which help to ensure its success. All CSEMS students are required to participate in a new Learning Community program in their first quarter in the project. As part of the Learning Community, they are required to take a newly developed CSEMS seminar. Furthermore, an intensive September Bridge program orients new participants to the college and the program doc23892 none This project is establishing the Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering (MACSER) Scholars program. The scholarships provide financial support to full-time students who have demonstrated need and are enrolled in or plan to enroll in our mathematics, computer science, engineering science and engineering technology programs. Both part-time and non-traditional students are being encouraged to apply for MACSER scholarships. Offering financial support to those students whose current economic situation prevents them from attending college on a full-time basis provides a mechanism that enables the student to shorten the amount of time required to complete his or her respective program. It also leads to an increase in the number of full time students enrolled in the mathematics, computer science, engineering science and engineering technology programs. By providing scholarship opportunities, the project is relieving some of the burden full-time employment places on them, and helping to ensure academic success. Extra efforts are being spent on increasing the number of women and under-represented minorities in the targeted majors as well. The program provides a support network for scholarship recipients, which builds community and is the cornerstone and strength of the MACSER Scholars program. This network includes personal advising, academic support, mentoring, peer tutoring, a virtual community, and MACSER workshops. These serve to increase the academic success of students enrolled in the MACSER Scholars majors doc23893 none The objective of Tuft s CSEMS program is to improve the recruitment, retention, and graduation of students with demonstrated financial need, especially women, and under-represented minorities, who pursue studies in computer science, engineering, and mathematics. Two-year scholarships are going to be awarded each year to a cohort of entering freshmen and community college transfers to Tufts. The program is going to support 28 students per year over a four-year period. Four scholarships are going to be allocated to students who transfer from community colleges. The program also aims to relieve students of the necessity to work, so that they have more time to concentrate on their academic program. Yet, as important as this additional study time is, experience indicates that students with demonstrated financial need confront several other obstacles to succeeding at college as well. They are, for example, less likely to have parents who graduated from a four-year college, and are, therefore, less familiar with many of the expectations, and protocols of an academic environment. The absence of role models, such as older siblings or friends, who have experienced academic success, also denies to them opportunities to map out the expectations they will confront in college. Together with the substantial demands that the regimens of computer science, engineering, and mathematics make on them, these students can become discouraged, and eventually seek out other fields, or leave school entirely. Through early intervention, the CSEMS Scholars program at Tufts expects to provide participants with an integrated set of support services that is going to both monitor their progress and address problems, both academic and non-academic, as they occur. By doing so, students are going to be afforded the maximum opportunity to succeed academically. The program offers them close contact with a specially designated CSEMS faculty advisor, peer mentoring, graduate student mentors, accelerated access to academic and other university support services, and a series of seminars that brings together faculty, graduate students, and support staff to form an integrative experience for CSEMS Scholars across the two years they are in the program doc23894 none The college is a public, Hispanic-serving, two-year associate degree granting college charged with advancing the state s economic development by educating a skilled workforce. The vast majority of the residents in the College s service area are of Hispanic origin, reflecting the College s 87% Hispanic student population. Students receive an associate of applied science degree in one of four areas: Biomedical Engineering Technology, Electro Mechanical Engineering Technology, Electronic Engineering Technology, and Telecommunications Technology. Award recipients are being selected on the basis of a submitted application, interviews, a written statement on choosing an engineering related field, and assessment of career goals. A campus National Science Foundation (NSF) Scholarship Committee selects qualified students for awards. Awarded students maintain a 3.0 GPA and if they continue in an engineering-related field until graduation, they remain eligible for the scholarship award. The scholarship awards are being integrated into the overall recruitment and retention efforts of the college. As a result of additional funding, specific initiatives for outreach and recruitment to Hispanic families, Texas Workforce Commission, and parental involvement centers are ready to be implemented. Intensive retention strategies such as assessment methods using the Noel-Levitz Retention Management System, intrusive academic advising, a structured first year student success course, supplemental instruction, tutoring and mentoring, and the establishment of learning assistance centers provide awarded students with a strong retention infrastructure for student success as measured by persistence until graduation doc23895 none This project is creating a comprehensive scholars program for students whose goals are to pursue degrees and careers in high technology fields. The program provides $3,000 scholarships annually to 30 students who have academic ability and documented financial need, and who enroll full-time in our computer science, engineering, network technology or computer information systems (CSEM) associate degree programs. The program particularly targets women and first generation college students. Two activities in particular contribute to the overall success of the scholarship recipients, as well as other students enrolled in these high technology curricula. The activities are: (a) intensive instructional support for historically difficult classes. A supplemental instruction program assists students in the targeted curricula who are enrolled in classes that have high attrition rates. Each of the five courses identified as historically difficult is a requirement for at least one of the CSEMS degree programs. (b) creation of a community of scholars to engage students receiving the CSEMS scholarships, faculty, alumni, local high school faculty, and local industry representatives in developing relationships and fostering an environment that supports and inspires students to achieve. The project builds on existing relationships between high school faculty and guidance counselors to recruit and enroll academically gifted students. Student development events include annual scholars reception, open house and a high technologies career forum. Opportunities for student enrichment activities, including internships with local industry, faculty mentoring, and field trips are being developed. The goals of the program are to increase the number of : (1) educated workers prepared for placement in the high technology careers, especially in the region. (2) students recruited, enrolled, retained, graduated and transferring in the CSEMS disciplines. (3) under-represented populations (women and first generation college students) enrolled and graduated in CSEMS majors. (4) quality of support services and educational opportunities available to students enrolled in the targeted curricula. These goals are being assessed and evaluated by measuring annual rates of retention, graduation and transfer; subsequent success of transfer students at baccalaureate institutions; and employer satisfaction with our graduates doc23896 none This proposal seeks funds to recruit and retain 29 students from the community college transfer population in the Mathematics and statistics department as well as the computer science department. It will target the financially needy student with special attention being given to the enrollment of women and other under represented minorities. The students will come from either community college transfers or current junior and senior programs. In the previous CSEMS program the university funded 10 talented freshmen to participate in the program with the other CSEMS selected scholars. The recruiting program detailed here is innovative, careful and well supported by the University doc23897 none This program provides scholarships to low-income, academically talented students in architectural technology, civil engineering technology and electronics and mechanical design technology programs. Our efforts are expanded to recruit individuals from groups under-represented in CSEM fields, including women, ethnic linguistic and racially under-represented groups and students with disabilities. Strong and varied student supports are in place to retain scholarship recipients through services such as academic support, counseling and mentoring activities. The College has successfully administered similar scholarships and fellowships and this scholarship program compliments existing resources. MATC and the MATC Foundation are providing additional funds and services to enhance the program. Our main objectives of the ACE M program are to increase enrollment of under-represented students, including women, minorities and persons with disabilities in CSEM programs at MATC, monitor their progress to promote and assure timely completion of their programs, increase overall graduation rates and achieve either full employment for CSEM graduates related to their program or continuing on to a four-year college within six months of graduation doc23898 none This program provides scholarships to talented, low-income students enrolled in Computer Science, Computer Support Specialist, Engineering, Engineering Technology and Mathematics. The program uses existing facilities at BSC to recruit high school students and provide them with a host of academic support and faculty and peer mentoring to succeed in their education. Efforts are also focused on recruiting women and minority students in the program. The participating students can earn additional college credits through internships and cooperative education experience. The students in the program also have the opportunity to do research by participating in internships with industrial and government partners. This experience provides an opportunity for them to apply their knowledge gained in classes to finding solutions to real world problems. Job placement assistance is provided to participants who graduate from the program and desire employment in their fields doc23899 none This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will develop a clinical predictive algorithm for hypertension medication response based upon patient genetic and medical information. The development of effective treatment for hypertension is critical to controlling costs of this disease which has the largest negative impact on the U.S. economy in loss of productive years. Anti-hypertensive drugs have a large window of therapeutic options, including significant variation in dosages, medications, and combinations of therapies used. The objective of the Phase II project is to continue development of the software platform, GeneRx, which incorporates pharmacogenetics and nonlinear adaptive algorithms toward optimizing anti-hypertension therapy on a patient specific basis. Genetic data for each patient will be acquired by genotyping DNA from the blood samples, and scored as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) present or absent in key hypertension-related genes. GeneRx will take a patient s individual genetic, demographic, and environmental variables and predict lickely efficacy of a hypertension medication. In Phase I, the basic feasibility of a predictive algorithm for predicting patient response for the ACE inhibitor class of hypertension drugs was established. The Phase II project will use patient information and blood samples from both archival and ongoing hypertension studies to predict the effectiveness of other classes of hypertension medications, including calcium channel blockers, dieuretics, and beta blockers. The commercial application of this project is in the area of hypertension therapy doc23900 none This program provides scholarships to talented, low-income students majoring in computer science, computer technology, engineering, engineering technology and mathematics. Special consideration for scholarships is given to the recruitment and retention of women and minorities in these fields. Students are retained in the program through strategies to enhance learning experiences, by participation in cohort group learning and support, and with academic tutoring and faculty advising. Information about the scholarship program is broadly disseminated in order to encourage other low-income students to aspire to and prepare for college careers in these fields. The program builds on relationships with industry to assist in recruitment, retention and in providing employment opportunities. The college also continues to foster relationships with 4-year colleges for both AS and AAS transfer students. Ridgewater College Foundation, the financial aid office, and the counseling office, ensure timely and careful selection of scholarship winners and processing of student information. Scholarship recipients are identified as winners on campus and in the community and are encouraged to participate in cohort groups of 15 members on each of two campuses. An advocacy team made up of faculty, counselors, industry representatives and high school staff meet twice yearly to review progress in achieving program goals and to make recommendations for improvements doc23901 none The objective of the program is to recruit and retain top students into the Industrial & Systems Engineering Department with an emphasis on Information Systems Engineering. Scholarships are awarded to students at the undergraduate and graduate level who are pursuing degrees in Industrial and Systems Engineering and who are concentrating in information systems engineering. The scholarships are awarded based on merit and financial need. Recruiting is done through a multitude of channels to ensure a high quality pool of candidates. The number of scholarship recipients is 6 in the first year, 15 in the second year, 24 in the third year, and 30 in the fourth year. The scholarship program builds on other programs in the College of Engineering including a research experiences for undergraduates (REU) program, a Telecommunications Institute, and a new degree track in Information Systems. The management plan includes mechanisms for tracking students, support activities, and an effective evaluation design. The tracking mechanisms are packaged into a system that can be used by any institution to measure the retention of engineering students doc23902 none The goal of this program is to increase the number of economically disadvantaged students entering the technological workforce through the achievement of two specific objectives: 1) increase the number of economically disadvantaged students graduating with mathematics degrees from Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) and 2) increase the number of Northeastern Illinois University mathematics graduates going on to Ph.D. programs in mathematics. These objectives will be accomplished by creating a program at NEIU that supports, motivates and monitors student progress through their undergraduate or masters degree and by providing a bridge program to the doctoral degree in mathematics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Twelve students, ten undergraduate and two graduate students, have been selected as Chicago Math Scholars. Undergraduate scholars were recruited from undergraduate mathematics majors, from promising incoming high school students and from targeted community college transfer students. Scholars had GPA of 3.0 and were economically disadvantaged as determined by their eligibility for Pell grant awards. Graduate Chicago Math Scholars were selected from among those students admitted to the masters degree programs in mathematics at NEIU. Students were economically disadvantaged by virtue of their eligibility for Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GANN) and express an interest in pursuing a Ph.D. degree in mathematics. Key strategies for achieving the program objectives include: the provision of tuition waivers and monetary stipends; mentoring of students by both undergraduate and graduate faculty; academic and personal support; career guidance and enrichment; technology training; professional development through activities such as membership in professional associations and conference attendance; job placement assistance; interaction with Ph.D. program faculty and students; GRE preparation courses; graduate seminars and orientation programs; and research participation. Northeastern Illinois University is an urban, comprehensive university, serving the northwest side of metropolitan Chicago. Seventy nine percent of its enrollment is comprised of first generation college students. Sixty four percent are female, 75.6% work full or part-time, and 60% receive some form of financial aid. NEIU is the only four year, federally designated, Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) in the Midwest. By virtue of its demographics, the students most likely to benefit from this program are under-represented minorities. The National Science Foundation s report Science and Engineering Indicators l notes that only 2.2% of all graduate students in mathematics and computer science are Hispanic. In , only 34 Ph.D. degrees were awarded to Hispanics in math or computer science. By facilitating student retention, graduation and transfer to Ph.D. programs in mathematics, this program has the potential to significantly impact the number of under-represented minorities attaining advanced degrees in mathematics and who are prepared to enter the U. S. technological workforce at the highest levels doc23903 none Qiu The overall goal of the Kuroshio Extension System Study (KESS) is to identify and quantify the dynamic and thermodynamic processes governing the variability of and the interaction between the Kuroshio Extension and the recirculation gyre. Investigators from three US institutions will deploy a state-of-the-art array consisting of moored-profiler and current-meter moorings and inverted echo sounders equipped with near-bottom pressure and current sensors. Profiling floats will monitor the temperature and salinity structure in the recirculation gyre south of the Kuroshio Extension. The KESS array is designed to use these tools synergistically to observe the Kuroshio Extension in a more complete way than any one of them could do alone. In particular, the Inverted Echo Sounders will map features of the jet as they evolve and, in combination with the Moored Profilers, will quantify the cross-frontal fluxes, while the profiling floats will monitor the upper ocean structure around the Kuroshio Extension and its recirculation gyres. KESS will use these combined observations to identify and quantify the dynamic and thermodynamic processes governing the variability of, and the interaction between, the Kuroshio Extension and the recirculation gyre. The proposed approach makes extensive use of satellite data (surface temperature and sea-surface height). The investigators will also collaborate closely with Japanese scientists studying the overall Kuroshio system. The measurements from the KESS array will guide future planning for a long term observational program as part of CLIVAR doc23904 none The goal of this research is to construct a series of process models to examine the transport of heat and moisture from low to high latitudes in the atmosphere and oceans and their interactions with ice sheets. The central thesis of the research is that the Earth s obliquity controls the differential of insolation between high and low latitudes and, hence, ice volume and climate. Milankovitch theory postulates that ice-age cycles are controlled by insolation in high northern latitudes in summer. This insolation is dominated by the 23,000-year period of the precession cycle. Paleoclimate evidence, however, indicates that the dominant period in ice volume over the last three million years is the 41,000-year period of obliquity. This discrepancy represents a crucial gap in understanding in the science of paleoclimatology. Validating the insolation gradient hypothesis would greatly advance our understanding of Earth s past climate history. Since no climate model has yet succeeded in reproducing the record of the ice ages, the knowledge gained in validating the hypothesis would also point the way towards constructing climate models with greater reliability for predicting future climate changes. Funding is primarily for the support of a graduate student who would carry out the proposed research as part of a doctoral research project doc23905 none This program provides scholarships to talented, low-income students pursuing careers or transfer associate degrees in computer science, computer information systems, engineering, or mathematics. Special consideration for scholarships is given to women, ethnic and racial minorities and persons with disabilities. Students in the program receive individualized support, peer mentoring, and opportunities for field trips and internships with local employers. The scholarship recipients are required to take 2-credit Special Topics course in Engineering, Mathematic, and Computer Technology, which encourages group discussion and interaction, and focuses on problem solving activities. The College has well-established transfer agreements with 4-year colleges throughout Washington and graduates have many opportunities for high-paying employment with local industries. Strong collaboration with the local business and industry is a critical component of this program doc23906 none Gregg Observations suggest there exists a qualitative difference between deep ocean turbulence and turbulence in lakes and fjords. The Black Sea may represent an intermediate situation. A study to characterize the turbulence environment in this large sea, which is devoid of strong tidal flows, is proposed. An acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) will be implanted on the slope and a Lagrangian float released in the interior of the Black Sea to define the context of a series of microstructure measurements. Microstructure probe drops and a depth-cycling conductivity-temperature-depth recorder will be deployed around these to: 1) quantify mixing produce by internal wave scattering at the slope in an environment where tide contamination is absent, 2) measure and parameterize the diapycnal diffusivity in the upper 300 m of the Black Sea, and 3) determine diapycnal diffusivity at the anoxic oxic interface, when accompanying chemists are taking measurements to understand the associated reactions. (The processes have short time scales and appear sensitive to the choice of diapycnal diffusivity in models.) Some effort will also be made to control for three-dimensional effects. Field work will occur during the energetic winter season. Synergy with EPIC , an ongoing field program in the Pacific Ocean, will improve understanding of high stratification regions. Seasonal variability will be addressed by leaving the ADCP in place and collaborating with Steve Riser, who has ONR funding to deploy profiling floats in the Black Sea doc23907 none Gas Flux under Hurricane Winds Eric D Asaro UW Craig McNeil URI The air-sea fluxes of O2 and N2 will be measured at wind speeds of 30 ms-1 or greater using a newly developed polarographic oxygen sensor and an improved total gas tension sensor mounted on neutrally buoyant floats and air-deployed into the path of hurricanes. These data will be used to extend the gas flux parameterizations to higher wind speeds. This is important because the flux of CO2 between the atmosphere and the ocean across the air-sea interface is a major term in global carbon budgets. The gas flux parameterizations now used to compute this flux are highly uncertain at high wind speeds. The floats will make profiles of O, N, temperature and salinity before and after the storm, accurately following the 3-dimensional motions of water parcels within the surface mixed layer. Gas fluxes will be inferred using 4 different methods; each method is sensitive to different errors and thus the use of many methods will provide a check against each other. The existing gas tension sensors will be modified to increase the area of the gas exchange membrane in order to increase their response time and support the methods of suing covariance fluxes and flux profiles from changes in gas content. Detailed modeling of bubble-induced gas fluxes from both measurements and Large Eddy Simulations will be used to understand mechanisms of gas flux at high wind speed. Float deployments will be made as part of the ONR-funded CBLAST field experiments in and doc23907 none Gas Flux under Hurricane Winds Eric D Asaro UW Craig McNeil URI The air-sea fluxes of O2 and N2 will be measured at wind speeds of 30 ms-1 or greater using a newly developed polarographic oxygen sensor and an improved total gas tension sensor mounted on neutrally buoyant floats and air-deployed into the path of hurricanes. These data will be used to extend the gas flux parameterizations to higher wind speeds. This is important because the flux of CO2 between the atmosphere and the ocean across the air-sea interface is a major term in global carbon budgets. The gas flux parameterizations now used to compute this flux are highly uncertain at high wind speeds. The floats will make profiles of O, N, temperature and salinity before and after the storm, accurately following the 3-dimensional motions of water parcels within the surface mixed layer. Gas fluxes will be inferred using 4 different methods; each method is sensitive to different errors and thus the use of many methods will provide a check against each other. The existing gas tension sensors will be modified to increase the area of the gas exchange membrane in order to increase their response time and support the methods of suing covariance fluxes and flux profiles from changes in gas content. Detailed modeling of bubble-induced gas fluxes from both measurements and Large Eddy Simulations will be used to understand mechanisms of gas flux at high wind speed. Float deployments will be made as part of the ONR-funded CBLAST field experiments in and doc23909 none The faculty at Auburn has requested funds to support 30 scholarships for four years, focusing on African Americans and women in eight engineering, departments (including computer science), and mathematics. Eighty percent of the awards will be for their undergraduates, the balance for graduate students. Undergraduates and PhD-level students will receive four-year commitments; master s degree students will receive a two-year commitment of support doc23910 none Ghil Dewar It is proposed to study coupled mid-latitude climate variability on decadal and longer time scales. The main hypothesis is that a critical component of this variability arises from intrinsic ocean sources. This hypothesis will be analyzed using a numerical model of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system, focusing on the oceans wind-driven variability, rather than on that of the thermohaline circulation. An intermediate complexity model is ideally suited to test this hypothesis. The model consists of an oceanic and an atmospheric component, each of which captures the turbulent nature of the corresponding fluid. The new feature of our proposal is in coupling these two models, and analyzing the nature of the coupled turbulence that results. To achieve turbulence simultaneously in the two fluids requires working with reduced models of each. One fundamental problem faced by more dynamically complete models in achieving this same goal is insufficient computer power. Parameterization of small-scale oceanic variability as a feedback on the ocean s general circulation and on climate thus stands as a critical problem for understanding and predicting coupled climate variability. Initial steps will be taken towards formulating such parameterizations and testing them within this model. Coupled general circulation models also face the problem that the phenomenology of coupled behavior is not currently known, thus complicating the analysis and interpretation of model results. This work will contribute to a solution of this problem by providing a conceptual paradigm for coupled system behavior. The intellectual merit of this proposal is to analyze a viable hypothesis relevant to the coupled climate problem on inter-decadal timescales. The broader impacts of the work lie in developing scientific partnerships between two leading institutions (UCLA and FSU) in this field, broadly disseminating the results of our work by means of publications, seminars and presentations at national and international meetings, and addressing a problem of crucial societal importance in climate prediction doc23911 none The META Program is a targeted scholarship program for students in mathematics, computer science, computer technology, engineering, or engineering technology. The META s Structured freshman year experience includes comprehensive academic and career counseling, student development courses, tutoring, study groups, supplemental instruction, and learning communities. With an emphasis on academic success, the bulk of META activities are designed to help the students handle course material better, including faculty instruction in alternative learning strategies and computer-based instruction. Extensive contact is being provided to META scholars who meet regularly with faculty, counselors, with one another, and with peer mentors. There is a dedicated staff and directors with strong institutional attachments as the five principal investigators have a combined 62 years of experience at the college. Project objectives are to recruit and select 60 to 80 majors and provide needed support to all scholarship recipients. Project outcome objectives include: (a) at least 90% of students receiving META scholarship for more than a year have a grade point average of 2.75 or higher; (b) at least 75% of META scholarship recipients receive associate degrees or certificates or transfer into a four-year program; and (c) at least 75% of META scholars completing the degree or certificate and not continuing their education find employment in their field of study doc23912 none The National Science Foundation Scholars Program is targeting seven academic programs. All seven are associate degree programs and two offer baccalaureate degrees. Based on a mission review, the college implemented a process calling for a broader, polytechnic baccalaureate mission. This is reflected in the expanding number of baccalaureate offerings. The goals of the NSF Scholars Program are to: 1. Enroll academically talent and financially needy students in computer and engineering technology degree programs by the end of the four-year period. 2. Increase the diversity of students who matriculate into the college s computer science, engineering, and engineering technology degree programs. 3. Retain 100% of the NSF Scholars through graduation (AAS or BS). 4. Evaluate the outcomes of the NSF Scholars Program. 5. Disseminate the results of the NSF Scholars Program. Associated Objectives and Specific Activities are designed to achieve these goals. Among these are to: (a) increase the proportion of students who are African-American and or Hispanic by producing advertising material in English and Spanish, and recruiting in the Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo city school districts; (b) increase the proportion of students who are female by highlighting current support for women in non-traditional programs at the college, and designing advertising material specifically addressing the needs of women; (c) increase the number of students who are financially needy by targeting the 25 poorest rural school districts as identified by the New York State Education Department; and (d) increase the retention rate of all students enrolled in targeted programs by tapping the power of peer support in a variety of ways. The selection process is based on an essay, letters of recommendation, academic performance, extra-curricular activities, and financial-eligibility. Evaluation is designed to determine whether the quantitative goals of the project are met. The outcomes of the NSF Scholars Program are being disseminated in academic, student affairs, enrollment management, and financial aid outlets nationally and regionally doc23913 none This project examines the vulnerability of 120 of the nation s largest cities to natural hazard events. The research will identify and integrate within a geographical information system, those specific biophysical, social, and built environment variables that either increase or decrease vulnerability in cities. Three questions drive this research: 1) What underlying factors produce human systems (or social) vulnerability and what metrics are most appropriate for measuring it? 2) Can we develop a consistent and robust comparative measure that allows us to compare the overall vulnerability of one metropolitan area to another using hazard, social, and built environment indicators? and 3) Does the relative importance of the three key indicators (hazard, social, and built environment) change over time and space? The project will utilize existing hazard and demographic databases as well as those created by the investigator through prior NSF-funded research. For each metropolitan area we will develop a series of composite indexes that allow us to paint a picture of the vulnerability of the natural, social, and built environment in each city. The availability of historic data enables us to monitor changes in vulnerability during the past 40 years ( - ). By using a geographical information system, we will be able to map not only the geographic differences in vulnerability, but also the historic changes as well. In this way, we should be able to determine which urban areas are the most vulnerable and why doc23914 none This project awards 24 four-year scholarships to incoming full-time freshman in the Class of who demonstrate financial need, show academic promise, and declare intent to major in one of the eligible disciplines when entering the College. A Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Scholarship (CSEMS) Committee was established to work with Admissions and Financial Aid staff during the recruitment and application period. The Committee helped recruit candidates locally with a special emphasis upon increasing diversity in these majors. The Committee monitors student performance throughout the program to ensure academic success and continued eligibility. Students are assigned an advisor in their chosen disciplines who closely monitors their performance. Other support services available to students include tutoring, mentoring, and internship opportunities. Scholars receive a rigorous education in the major field of study as well as a strong grounding in the liberal arts doc23915 none During the first year, the project team plans to award scholarships to twelve first year students who are enrolled in a mathematics or a computer science major. The scholarships are renewed each year for up to a total of four years. During the second year of the project, an additional six scholarships are awarded to sophomore majors students to support and encourage them to change their majors to math or computer science. These scholarships are renewed for a total of three years. The ` awards are renewed as long as students make satisfactory academic progress and remain within the major. The primary goal of this scholarship program is to increase the number of and the retention of majors in computer science, computer information systems and mathematics. Because our curricula provide a solid theoretical and practical foundation for careers in these fields, increasing the number of majors will have the effect of increasing the number of skilled and knowledgeable workers qualified for many high-tech jobs. A secondary, but equally important, goal is to increase the number of women and minority majors. This is especially important in computing where women and minorities are traditionally under represented. To meet these goals, the project team is enhancing existing student support systems and extend existing research and project opportunities to provide training and job experiences. Ithaca College has extensive recruiting programs through the admissions office and the Higher Educational Opportunity Program (HEOP). The latter program specifically targets minority recruiting. Both of these programs provide additional support for new initiatives such as this scholarship program. Faculty members are traveling to selected high schools to inform faculty and staff about these scholarships. The project team is providing printed and on-line materials to prospective students, and is encouraging prospective students to communicate directly with mathematics and computer science faculty. The selection of students for the program is made by a team that is composed of two faculty from mathematics, two faculty from computer science and one academic advisor staff member from the student Adacemic Advising office . Students Academic qualifications data are provided by the admissions office, and financial need data are provided by the financial aid office. Combining the requested scholarships with college funds and other federal funds, we aim to meet 100% of financial need while minimizing loans. Support for matriculated students to remain in a mathematics or computer science major is provided through many venues. Upper level students serve as teaching and lab assistants in open labs during evening and weekend hours and in walk-in help rooms. Courses are available to provide academic prerequisites for students who are lacking some specific skills. Additional opportunities for faculty and upper-level student mentoring especially for women and minorities have been established. Real-world experiences are provided within courses and by providing the students with relevant work experiences, e.g., as assistants in courses and computer laboratories. The project team plans to establish a networking program between recent graduates and current undergraduates to provide regular communication channels to support mentoring. Processes are in place to aid and ensure that students effectively use the services provided by career planning function at Ithaca College doc23916 none Through collaboration between UCSD s Jacobs School of Engineering, Mathematics Department, San Diego Supercomputer Center, and Division of Student Affairs, this institution will refine and continue its CSEMS Program in order to provide scholarships for freshmen and upper-division, low-income undergraduates majoring in computer science, engineering, or mathematics. Ten qualifying freshmen will receive $3,030 annually over four years beginning in fall, while 40 upper-division students will receive $3,030 annually for two years, 20 effective in fall, and 20 in fall, . Recruiting will be initiated through personalized letters sent from PIs to students identified as potentially eligible. To encourage applications from low-income women, under-represented students and those with disabilities, notices will be posted in specialized campus locations such as the Women s and Cross-cultural Centers. Applications will undergo review by a committee including PIs and the CSEMS Coordinator. Due to under representation of ethnic minorities, women and persons with disabilities in CSEMS fields, priority will be given to students from these groups. Alternate Scholars will be identified to insure a consistent participant level of 30 doc23917 none This project is strengthening the completion and graduation rate of students who are non-traditional majors in engineering and technology. Students are being selected on academic merit and financial need criteria. The purpose of the program is to close the financial assistance gap, increase time on task, and support graduation for the associate degree for selected scholars within two years. A broadly representative Scholarship Committee is being formed; composed of faculty, administrative staff including the Director of Financial Aid, and industrial partners. Applications require a personal statement of educational and career goals and at least one letter of recommendation. This program aims to sustain award recipients to completion by providing intensive supportive services including small classes and a learning community approach, goal-based developmental advising, a college success seminar, a new student orientation, and internships. Other support services include tutoring and writing centers. The scholarship program enables the college to provide supplementary support for tutoring and monthly scholar seminars. Industrial partners provide mentoring and cooperative education opportunities. The Department of Engineering and Engineering Technology offers an associate degree in both career and transfer programs and is currently implementing an NSF Advanced Technological Education project, which establishes a new automated manufacturing curriculum and laboratory (also referred to as computer-integrated manufacturing or CIM program). This program is recruiting and enrolling two cohorts of non-traditional students for engineering and technology. Program scholars in this project are being drawn from this ATE project as well as from other engineering programs at the college doc23918 none This grant permits the continuation of the Technology Leaders Scholarship Program at Youngstown State University. The program makes available $3,125 per year over a four- year period for up to 29 undergraduate and graduate students. The relative number of scholarships to be distributed at each degree level is approximately 25% A.S., 60% B.S., and 15% M.S, although flexibility is built into the program with a minimum recruitment goal in each area. The scholarships are disbursed to students majoring in computer science, mathematics, and engineering, with the ratio of disbursement reflecting the relative population of students currently in those disciplines. Entering students are required to have a minimum ACT score of 23 or be in the top 20% of their academic class. Continuing students are required to maintain at least a 3.0 4.0 GPA. Recruitment efforts are focused on the local service area of YSU, with particular emphasis placed on recruitment of minority populations and women. Retention of students through completion of their degree is to be achieved through careful selection of candidates, student student and student faculty mentoring, tracking, career guidance, and selecting programming aimed at keeping each student focused and maintaining their interest doc23919 none Over a four-year period, this project provides scholarships to 20 economically disadvantaged, first-generation students who are pursuing a B.S. in Computer Information Science, and an A.S. in Computer Science. Participants are selected largely from the rural, and economically distressed area of Vermont. Scholarship recipients are full-time undergraduate students who demonstrate financial need, academic potential, and a desire to enter the fields of Computer Science or Interactive Digital Media. Throughout their participation in the CSEMS project, participants have access to a full array of academic support services designed to ensure their success. They participate in activities geared to preparing them for careers in the CIS or IDM fields. These activities include career counseling, upper-class and professional mentors, workshops on study skills and time management, brown bag lunch seminars to discuss career options, visits to job sites, internships and attendance at occasional professional conferences doc23920 none This project is establishing a new scholarship for Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Scholars. Recipients are being chosen from candidates majoring or planning to major in Computer Science, Engineering Technology, or Mathematics (CSEM). Scholarships are available to students in both Associate of Science and Associate of Arts programs. The objectives of the program are to: 1. Annually provide scholarships to 30 academically talented, financially disadvantaged CSEM students, including those from under-represented groups. 2. Provide support to CSEM scholars, enabling a minimum of 70% of the recipients to maintain or exceed a 2.5 grade point average and persist until associate degree achievement. 3. Provide job placement assistance to 100% of the project participants who complete requirements and desire employment in CSEM disciplines. 4. Provide transfer assistance to 100% of students who complete program requirements and desire to enroll in a four-year institution. The program build upons existing recruitment, support and career placement activities at the college and integrates new programs to provide a complete infrastructure. Candidates are being recruited through existing college recruitment efforts as well as the College Board Tutoring Partnership, a program providing college readiness tutors to local high schools, and the Jacksonville Urban Systemic Initiative. In addition to existing student support programs present on the four campuses and three centers of the College, each scholar is paired with a faculty mentor to assist the scholar and provide guidance. The College also has a CSEM counselor who is responsible for coordinating all support services college-wide for the scholarship recipients. The counselor works closely with the mentors and assures all support services are fully accessed by the scholars. In the area of career services, the scholars have access to all existing career services. Industry partners provide internship activities and mentoring to students wishing to seek employment upon graduation with an A.S. degree. An innovative support structure is being established built upon existing programs and partnerships improving the success of students in these demanding disciplines doc23921 none Clauer This research is directed toward the continuation of the operation of the Magnetometer Array on the Greenland Ice Cap (MAGIC) and the continued analysis of the data from these stations together with data from other ground based and satellite instruments. The overarching objective is to explore a new approach to investigate the multi-scale solar wind - magnetosphere - ionosphere electrodynamic system through high temporal and spatial resolution, magnetically conjugate arrays of digital magnetometers deployed in Greenland and Eastern Antarctica. Major new elements of the proposed investigation include: (1) the upgrade of existing Greenland magnetometers to 1-second samples, (2) simultaneous visualization of interhemispheric ground geomagnetic field variations with the goal to investigate multi-scale magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling, and (3) the detailed study of the transition in magnetospheric electrodynamic morphology from weakly southward IMF to weakly northward IMF conditions and vice versa. This project is a cooperative effort between the University of Michigan and the Danish Meteorological Institute. The project is a continuation of a collaboration that began with the installation of the original magnetometer stations on the Greenland ice cap in . The autonomous magnetometer systems in central Greenland provided valuable intermediate variometer measurements of magnetic perturbations between the Greenland west and east coast stations. One station is located at the central Greenland summit site to provide continuity between the west and east coast stations, and one station was placed at the Air National Guard LC130 Raven skiway to provide a dense two-dimensional array for detailed current calculations. The MAGIC data in combination with data from the Greenland coastal stations and Sondrestrom incoherent scatter radar have been crucial in resolving the spatial and evolutionary characteristics of various dynamic ionospheric current systems, including traveling convection vortices, poleward propagating DPY currents, and the transition of large scale convection systems from one state to another. Using data from the Greenland stations in combination with Canadian, Scandinavian, and Antarctic magnetic data, and coordinated with other ancillary ground based and satellite data, this effort will investigate high latitude magnetic pulsations and interhemispheric auroral oval and polar cap relationships. The focus is on understanding the various electrodynamic current systems that couple energy and momentum from the solar wind to the magnetosphere and ionosphere doc23922 none The nearly complete sequence of the human genome has greatly enhanced our understanding of human genetics. This single reference sequence, however, is not able to capture the extent and nature of human genetic variation. Efforts are now are shifting to describing patterns of variation across populations and regions of the genome particularly as it relates to human genetic diseases. Disease association studies are proving useful in identifying individuals at risk for certain diseases; however, much of human genomic variation is not related to disease. Patterns of variation can be shaped by natural selection (e.g. on variants in disease-related genes) and historical processes (e.g., migration and genetic drift). Natural selection affects variation associated with a specific gene or set of genes. Additionally, regions associated with a given disease comprise a relatively small portion of the entire genome. Historical processes, on the other hand, affect the entire genome. While a clearer picture of human evolutionary history is emerging, it is not known to what extent historical processes have shaped patterns of variation at disease genes. This study will assess the role of historical processes in shaping variation at genes conferring resistance to the infectious disease, malaria. Each year malaria affects ~500 million people and kills ~2 million with the vast majority of these deaths occurring in Africa. Alternate forms (alleles) of the beta-globin and G6PD genes are known to confer resistance to malaria and these alleles are found at high frequencies in populations residing in malarial environments. Interestingly the same alleles that confer resistance to malaria can also cause inherited diseases (i.e., sickle cell anemia, G6PD deficiency). The question is what is the relative role of natural selection and historical processes in shaping patterns of variation in and around these genes? To address this the reseachers will perform a two-way controlled comparison of patterns of DNA sequence variation in these two genes in four African populations with different susceptibility to malaria as a selective agent. Two of the four populations (the Luo and Dogon) occupy regions of sub-Saharan Africa that are strongly impacted by malaria, and two populations (the San and Southeastern Bantus) live outside malaria areas. Additionally, to dissect the role of historical processes in shaping variation in these populations, DNA sequences of two other gene regions that are not affected by malaria will be determined. One of these regions is on the tip of chromosome 16 (16p13.3) and the other is within an intron of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy gene (Dmd intron 44) on the X chromosome. This experimental design should provide a sound hypothesis-testing framework for distinguishing those forces that act a single gene from those that affect the whole genome. Furthermore, collaborations with researchers at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta and at the Kenya Medical Research Institute in Nairobi, Kenya, as well as the involvement of students from the University of Arizona and Pima Community College, will enhance the intellectual and training environment of this research doc23923 none Southwest Texas Junior College (SWTJC) serves a vast rural region encompassing eleven counties (16,812 square miles) and is home to 215,000 residents. The vast majority of residents are Hispanic reflecting the College s 78% Hispanic student population. Located in the extreme southwest corner of the state of Texas, the area is characterized by high poverty, high illiteracy, low educational attainment, high unemployment, is the poorest in the state and one of the poorest in the nation. Southwest Texas Junior College is a comprehensive open-door institution that provides quality Associate Degree and Certificate programs with campuses located in Crystal City, Del Rio, Eagle Pass and Uvalde, Texas. This project creates a Scholarship program to be awarded to students in the discipline areas of Computer Science, Engineering and Mathematics. Thirty scholarships are awarded each year at $1,515 per semester ( $3,030 per year). Award recipients are selected on the basis of low-income guidelines, a submitted application, interview and written statement and assessment of career goals. A campus ASICST Scholarship Committee selects qualified students for awards. Awarded students must maintain a 3.0 GPA and continue in a Computer Science, Engineering or Mathematics career path until graduation to remain eligible for continued assistance. The goal of this project is to encourage and enable academically talented, financially disadvantaged persons to enter the high technology workforce following completion of an associate, baccalaureate, or graduate degree in Computer Science, Engineering or Mathematics. The project uses a combination of expanded scholarship opportunities, a rigorous recruitment plan, mentor-designed workshops, industry involvement, career placement and student support structures delivering services such as academic enrichment, advising, tutoring, mentoring and career exploration. The specific objectives are to; 1) decrease the attrition rate for students between the first and second years, with 90% (27) of spring semester scholarship recipients returning to school the following fall semester; 2) eighty percent (24) of scholarship awardees complete an Associate Degree program; and 3) 75% (18) transfer to a four-year institution to continue their studies. Scholarships are renewable for two years at Southwest Texas Junior College and two years at a four-year institution of their choice to complete a Baccalaureate Degree in Computer Science, Engineering or Mathematics doc23854 none P.I. Gargett, Ann (Old Dominion University) Proposal #: Collaborating Inst: Woolsey, Craig (VA Tech.) Proposal #: The PIs propose to construct a two-body towing system to create a stable measurement platform for ocean turbulence measurements. This work builds on the potential for an effective turbulence survey tool using acoustic Doppler current measurements in non-standard ways. In particular, horizontally moving a 5-beam VADCP through the ocean can produce vertical-plane swath-maps of crucial turbulence quantities such as vertical momentum stresses, turbulent kinetic energy, and its dissipation rate, as well as standard measurements of mean currents and their vertical shear. These measurements require a sufficiently stable platform, as proposed here. Preliminary offshore measurements taken from a prototype towing system suggest that a two-stage design can provide the required stability. This preliminary testing also clarified the design modifications needed for continuous mapping in offshore environments: provision of shipboard controls for (i) the length of cable between primary and secondary tow bodies and (ii) mean attitude of the secondary tow body. Specifically, the PIs propose to design the necessary control systems, build a complete towing system for operation to depths of 200m, and carry out a coastal offshore test cruise to document the motion characteristics of the system and collect preliminary data with a 1.2MHz 5-beam VADCP, deployed in both upward and downward looking modes. During the course of this work with a shallow system, they will also explore options for accomplishing cable length adjustments in a subsequent system to operate over full ocean depths. If successful, this development would have broad impacts on upper ocean observational capabilities in areas other than turbulence research, enabling spatial mapping of such features as biological thin layers and the near-surface bubble clouds that dominate gas transfer between ocean and atmosphere doc23925 none This endeavor examines the implications of recent work in Science and Technology Studies (STS) for understanding the connection between ethics and technology. It involves integration of insights from two fields of research that have significantly evolved in the last two decades: Social studies of technology; and Applied and practical ethics related to technology. STS theories of technology provide a rich foundation for understanding the connection between ethics and technology insofar as they reveal the intimate connections between technology and society, and especially the social shaping of technology. STS scholars have rejected the idea that technologies simply appear and then have social impacts. They now favor more complex, co-creation models of technology and society. However, many ethicists continue to use a model of technology arriving intact and then having impacts, i.e., threatening particular social values or raising ethical issues. When the seamless connection between technology and society is better understood, many new and promising directions for research on ethics and technology become apparent. This project aims to develop, articulate, illustrate, and disseminate a theoretical account (or accounts) of the connection between ethics and technology, an account that incorporates and builds on STS social shaping co-creation theories. The major task of the project will be to draw out the implications of STS theory for ethics. Three directions will serve as starting places for this endeavor. STS theory suggests that technology should be understood to be not just material objects but material objects together with social institutions, social practices, and human relationships. In this view, ethical and value issues may be present at any point in the life cycle of a technology, from design, to manufacture, to marketing and distribution, to adoption and use. Second, a good deal of STS literature addresses the values embodied in the design of material objects and this has enormous implications for understanding the possibility of moral values being in material objects. Third, understanding the connection between ethics and technology opens up the possibility of better understanding the role of human agency in technology-mediated activities and consequently the accountability of humans for such activities. The project is philosophical and theoretical in nature, not empirical. While the research to be done will draw on empirical studies of technology, the methodology of the project is conceptual, thematic, and analytical. The investigator is a philosopher who has worked both in STS and in the field of applied practical ethics, especially ethical issues in computer technology. Two post-doctoral research associates, one post-doc with a background in STS and one with a background in ethics are involved. Each will be trained to understand the other field so that both can assist in the development of the theoretical account and work on an individual project doc23926 none This project is serving students in the western portion of Phoenix and Maricopa County, Arizona. The Project seeks to recruit academically talented yet financially needy students interested in the fields of computer science, computer technology, engineering, engineering technology, and mathematics (CSEMS), especially those from under-represented groups in these disciplines. The Project s goals are to support CSEMS recipients in their academic endeavors, promote student success through the completion of an associate s degree and or the transfer to a four-year institution, and expose participants to the various professional avenues that the CSEMS disciplines offer. The project utilizes existing structures at the college with a proven success record in promoting diversity and academic quality in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Through the college s Achievement in Mathematics and Science (AMAS) Program, Achievement in Mathematics, Engineering, and Science (AIMES) Programs, and Summer Bridge Program, strategies have been developed to recruit capable students, especially under-represented groups, into the these disciplines and ensure their success in academic programs. The project aims to achieve the following objectives: (1) 90% of CSEMS scholarship recipients make satisfactory progress (GPA of 2.5 or better) in a targeted program of study leading to an associate s degree as full-time students during semesters for which they receive scholarship support. (2) 100% of CSEMS scholarship recipients participate in at least 90% of CSEMS special events and activities during semesters for which they receive scholarship support. (3) 85% of CSEMS scholarship recipients make satisfactory progress towards their educational goals (i.e. be enrolled as full-time students at a community college in the following semester, transfer to a university, or have met the requirements for been awarded an AAS or AS degree in the targeted programs.) (4) 50% of CSEMS recipients are from groups that are traditionally under-represented in the CSEMS disciplines (women, persons with disabilities, Hispanics, African-Americans, and or Native Americans). The Project is establishing support structures that are exclusive to CSEMS recipients. These include mentoring from Faculty Coordinators, Individual Education Plans, tutoring services and study groups, supplemental instruction, special events and activities, career counseling, and university transfer options. The Team is monitoring the progress of the students and conducting both formative and summative evaluations of project processes and outcomes doc23927 none This college has requested funds to support a new group of CSEM scholars. Their first CSEM award created two-year scholarships for 42 students, 30 in the fall of and 12 in the fall of . The program was open to enrolled students who completed their first year of study, and to transfer students all of whom had to meet eligibility requirements. Their current project has been designed to provide funds for 40 talented and needy students in the areas of STEM with annual scholarships and programmatic support services to graduate in a timely manner. Eligible students will consist primarily of those who have completed their first year of study and have demonstrated financial need and academic potential. Up to $ per year will be awarded to each scholar ($ from NSF funds, and $875 from institutional funds). Twenty 3- year scholarships will be awarded in the spring of years and doc23928 none This project provides scholarship support for academically talented and economically disadvantaged students seeking to earn undergraduate degrees in Engineering or Mathematics at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. The primary goal of this project is to improve the recruitment and retention of these students, thereby increasing both the number and quality of students in these disciplines who are well prepared to enter the high-technology workforce. The program provides scholarship support to seventy-two students during the crucial first two years of their university training. By the end of this period, the students have achieved a sound foundation in the fundamentals of science and mathematics on which to build their specialized training in their chosen disciplines during the final two years of their university training. Following the period of scholarship support, the students in the program are provided with the opportunity to participate in: 1) a cooperative educational experience or an internship designed to prepare them for the transition into their professional careers, 2) a departmental research project as an undergraduate researcher, or 3) the College of Engineering supplemental instruction program as a mentor or the Department of Mathematics tutoring program as a tutor. These experiences help develop a sense of responsibility and instill leadership skills in these students as well as provide them with financial support to partially offset their school expenses. To complement the job offerings, an industrial scholarship coalition provides additional financial support to the students during their junior and senior years. There are two target groups of students being recruited for this program: 1) economically disadvantaged high school students from the southern Illinois region, which constitutes the northernmost part of the Delta Regional Authority of 236 counties and parishes in the eight-state Mississippi delta region, and 2) African-American and Hispanic-American high school students from Illinois, mainly from urban centers such as Chicago and East St. Louis. There is a special emphasis on attracting female students from these groups. Recruitment and support activities for the scholarship recipients is being carried out within the context of established mechanisms that exist in the College of Engineering and the Department of Mathematics and builds upon established collaborations between all of the involved departments doc23929 none This project is designed to encourage low-income, academically talented students to major in computer science and mathematics and to assist them in being successful in the completion of their academic program. Through innovative community building activities, the scholarship program is having a significant impact on the entire cohort of students enrolled in Computer Science and Mathematics programs at NJCU. This cohort of students are predominately female and disadvantaged minorities. New Jersey City University is designated as a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) and a Minority Institution, with a Hispanic enrollment of 30% and a total minority enrollment of 62%. The Program consists of four components: (1)recruitment of talented, low-income students into Computer Science, Pre-Engineering and Mathematics majors; (2) targeted academic support initiatives, in addition to existing student support services; (3) structured scholarship community activities; and, (4) internships and cooperative education work experiences. The overall goals of the Project are the increase in enrollment, retention and graduation rates of high-ability, low-income students in Computer Science, Pre-Engineering and Mathematics baccalaureate degree programs. These goals and objectives are being accomplished through existing programs, services and resources, as well as through the addition of new academic support initiatives, and scholarship community activities. This initiative represents a congruence between NJCU s mission and the goals and purposes of the National Science Foundation s Computer Science, Engineering and Mathematics Scholarship Program. The Project enables the creation of a sustainable system for academics, student services and career planning supports for our diverse student population, thereby increasing the technological capacity of our nation s youth, and strengtheing and diversifying of our nation s workforce doc23930 none Lefer In the past few years there has been an explosion of scientific interest in the chemical processing occurring in sunlit snow. Rather than simply acting as a passive sink for the products of tropospheric reactions, the snowpack has been shown to be one of the most photochemically active, and strongly oxidizing, regions of the entire troposphere. The group of investigators assembled for this proposal has played a central role in this revolution in our thinking about the role of the snowpack in atmospheric chemistry. One key finding has been that photolysis of snow chromophores initiates the release of a number of important trace gases. Initial modeling suggests that photolysis of a number of these gases (HCHO, HOOH, CH3CHO and HONO) results in an enormous production of HOx (i.e., OH and HO2), which in turn causes a large enhancement of these radicals in the snowpack and in the air just above the snow. Because oxidation by OH is the main sink for many tropospheric gases, including some of those important for climate change and stratospheric O3 depletion, this enhancement in HOx might significantly perturb tropospheric chemistry. Snowpack chemistry likely also modifies the chemical records of atmospheric composition ultimately preserved in glacial ice. While recent work has shown that photochemical and physical processes in the snowpack can impact the chemistry and composition of both the atmosphere and snowpack, these processes are, in general, poorly understood. This is especially true for the processes that produce and consume OH and HO2. The research will elucidate the processes that produce and consume OH and HO2 radicals within and above sunlit snow over a wide range of environmental conditions, thereby improving our understanding of fast photochemistry within this unique environment doc23931 none The Garden in the Machine: The Adaptation of Canine Biotechnology and Human Society Edmund Russell, University of Virginia We have long thought about the relationship between technology and nature as the machine in the garden, which focuses our attention on ways that technology intrudes into nature. This project reverses our framework by focusing on the garden in the machine (more accurately, the organism in the artifact), or ways that technology emerges from nature. Organisms shaped to serve human ends, such as domesticates, became one form of biotechnology. Analyzing the workings of this process can help us understand the past, present, and future of biotechnology. This project uses the history of dogs in the 19th and 20th centuries in the United States and United Kingdom as a case study. Dogs were the first domesticated species, make the impact of breeding easily visible, have done a wide variety of jobs (with companionship becoming an ever more important source of employment), and are important to many people -- a fact that increases interest in the products of this research. This study analyzes several factors important in shaping canine biotechnology: economics, class, gender, institutions, culture, gambling, breeding, and national differences. We like to think that we have been in control of dog evolution, but dogs have also shaped us. To understand the coevolution of humans and dogs, this project introduces a new field to history called evolutionary history. This field pairs strengths of history of technology, environmental history, history of science, and evolutionary biology to gain a fuller understanding of the coevolution of humans and other species than we could obtain from one field alone. One of evolutionary history s strengths is focusing on cultural as well as genetic evolution. This project relies on standard historical methods, including research in libraries, archives, and museums. It will produce conference papers, articles, and a book doc23932 none This project (MACSTECH Scholars: Mathematics and Computer Science Technology Scholarship Program) allows the Mathematics and Computer Sciences Programs to provide 28-45 scholarships each year for four years to financially needy, academically talented students. Both programs have been identified as economic development programs by the Board of Regents because of their strong technology emphasis and the critical need for graduates in these areas within the state of South Dakota. MACSTECH is designed to strengthen the current programs and to provide a foundation for future success. The project contains a comprehensive management plan that incorporates student recruitment (particularly to develop a critical mass of students in the Mathematics major and to increase under-represented populations and women in the programs), develops multiple mechanisms to improve student retention at various points in their degree studies, increases the number of highly qualified double majors in Mathematics and Computer Science, and provides an extensive student enrichment and support structure. A strong retention program involving continued support for successful scholars fosters the success of those individuals to degree completion. This is accomplished through advising, building group cohesion, and extensive use of student support services, tutoring, enrichment activities and the resources and activities of existing university programs doc23933 none This project provides scholarships for academically talented and financially needy students pursuing baccalaureate degrees in math, computer science or information systems. The project focuses on recruitment of eligible students and builds upon the university s strong academic programs, assists the math computer science department in meeting their goal of increasing majors in the department. These scholarships enable the scholars to afford a high-quality private education, complete their degree, and attain a job with a high technology company or be accepted into graduate school. Current effective programs, such as faculty academic advising and peer tutoring, are maintained and expanded to ensure that the institution s strong graduation and placement rates are maintained for the scholars. Student recruitment is conducted via a number of avenues, including the college s Outstanding and Distinguished Scholar Days, Science visit day, the college s admissions office, contacts with regional high school teachers, and utilizing the college s established Upward Bound and Educational Talent Search programs. The scholar s applications are reviewed by a team comprised of the PI and representatives from the offices of admissions, registrar, and student financial planning. The CSEMS faculty works with the university s Department of Career Services to seek out internship opportunities for the scholars as well as interviews for job placement doc23934 none Owens Davis This collaborative project between Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Scripps Institution of Oceanography will demonstrate the feasibility of using an autonomous underwater glider to monitor the structure and strength of western boundary currents. During the first year of the proposed work the reliability of the glider will be demonstrated in a less severe environment. During the ensuing years, the complexity and duration of the glider missions will be increased as we begin deploying them to make transects between the New England continental shelf and Bermuda. The choice of the Gulf Stream as the initial boundary current to be investigated was made for obvious logistical reasons. The gliders will provide cross-sections of velocity, temperature and salinity between the surface and - m depths which will be available in real-time. These data will be combined to provide approximately monthly estimates of the relative and potential vorticity of the Gulf Stream and its fluxes of heat and salt. The broader impact of this research will be in providing a new autonomous oceanographic instrument platform and observational techniques that will, first of all, be applicable to all other western boundary current including those believed to be crucial for predicting climate variability. Beyond that this instrument will find application in coastal zone monitoring for pollution and living resources, for military surveillance and as a general tool for oceanographic observation doc23935 none Despite recent economic downturns, the demand for skilled information technology (IT) professionals in the United States and in Central Florida remains significant. Community colleges play significant roles in the success of students (especially under-represented populations) who pursue high skill, high wage technical degrees and careers such as those in IT-related areas. Valencia CC s project provides educational opportunities to low-income, academically talented students through scholarships and support services that promote full-time enrollment and degree achievement in six Associate in Science degree programs related to computer technology and engineering technology: Computer Engineering Technology (CET), Computer Information Technology (CIT), Computer Programming and Analysis (CP they provide students with networking opportunities critical to finding eventual employment after graduation. Marketing to students is targeted at: (1) current Valencia students in the targeted programs who have at least 25 percent of their coursework remaining; (2) high school seniors and recent high school graduates who are or were enrolled in dual enrollment programs related to the targeted programs; (3) high school seniors and recent high school graduates who are or were enrolled in schools with high minority student populations; (4) female high school seniors and recent high school graduates who have or had an interest in IT or EET programs. The likelihood of success in achieving the objectives of this project are increased by the fact that Valencia will be able to implement the project rapidly by building upon existing academic and support services doc23936 none The departments of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire have developed a scholarship program called the Excellence in Mathematics and Computer Science (EMACS) program. The EMACS scholars will be UWEC mathematics and computer science students selected on the basis of financial need and academic potential. The project contains academic support in the form of faculty and peer mentoring, student faculty research opportunities, capstone experiences and independent study opportunities. These students are also provided with solid career counseling that includes preparation for graduate school, service learning opportunities, internship opportunities and effective employment strategies such as resume writing and interviewing skills. This project also contains an excellent sustainability component doc23937 none Lentz In order to better understand the annual and interannual variability of the density structure over the Middle Atlantic Bight shelf and the linkages between forcing mechanisms and responses, others have studied temperature and salinity variability, but not the important density parameter. The PIs propose to utilize, in their research, National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) reanalysis products and historical data from a variety of sources, including light ships, buoys, moorings, and cruises. Initially, the PIs propose to characterize the temperature structure over the shelf and determine its response to heat flux from the atmosphere as opposed to wind stirring and advection. Then they will address the effects of salinity and the variability of the full density field. NCEP reanalysis products are available for the period to present. Oceanographic observations extend to , but most observations post-date . Air-sea fluxes may need to be recalculated to account for significant variability at scales unresolved by the NCEP grid. Bin sizes for analysis will be determined by data coverage. Temporal resolution of interannual comparisons will also be determined by data coverage doc23938 none This proposal requests support to collect a series of high accumulation rate cores from the Indonesian region. Analyses of the cores will be used to document the nature of centennial-millennial variability in the Western Pacific Warm Pool and Indonesian throughflow. The field program will obtain a series of cores in depth transects beginning at about 200m water depth along the main route of the Indonesian throughflow including the Makassar Strait, Sulawesi Sea and Timor channels. The post cruise analytical program will focus on establishing a basic stratigraphic framework for selected cores using planktic foraminifer oxygen isotope measurements and AMS 14C dating. In addition surface sediment samples will be used for an initial temperature calibration study on shallow water benthic foraminifer Mg Ca doc23939 none The faculty team at Rochester Institute of Technology has created the EMC^2 Scholars Program represents a collaborative effort of four academic programs (Mechanical Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Engineering, and Computer Science) across three colleges, and the Enrollment Management and Career Services Division at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Their program builds upon their existing infrastructure for mentoring students, and involves their co-operative education program, both of which help students address their financial needs and facilitate placement in the high technology workforce. Their scholarship program supports 62 scholars each year. RIT will provide an equal matching support to more than double the scholarship amount to students positively impacted by the EMC^2 program. RIT s 1.6-to-one matching support to this program indicates the university s enthusiasm, a firm commitment of support to their students, and an endorsement of the goals and objectives of the EMC^2 program doc23940 none This scholarship project provides funds for 30 computer science and information system (CSIS) students at Kennesaw State University (KSU). The amount of each award is $ .00 annually. The support for the students in this program is leveraged on the experiences gained from existing programs within the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, for example, a summer program for high achieving under-represented high school students from the local area of KSU. This program is called the Cybertech 2k. There are two existing and significant support and complementary programs to the CSEMS project at KSU: 1) Yamacrew program which is a Georgia economic development initiative intended to make Georgia a world leader in the design of broadband communications systems, devices and chips; and 2) Mentor-Protege program which was established to incorporate undergraduate research into the fabric of the College of Science and Mathematics degree programs. These programs support the educational quality of the course of instructions delivered to the students, and they aid in curbing the high attrition rate of the CSIS majors doc23941 none The goal of the University Mathematics, Engineering and Computer Science Scholarships (UMECSS) program is to increase the number of low-income, and under-represented students able to enroll in, successfully matriculate, and graduate from the University of Toledo in the fields of Engineering and Mathematics. This is accomplished by utilizing numerous individuals and organizations from various departments at the University that have an interest and proven history in preparing students from these groups for success in college and beyond. Furthermore, the UMECSS project builds on numerous already-established programs, many of which have successfully collaborated on similar projects in the past. After identifying and selecting students with an interest and potential for success in Engineering and Mathematics fields of study, services help these students to complete their degree programs and secure professional positions. These services include a bridging program to assist recipients with the transition from high school to college, tutoring, mentoring, and establishing cohort groups that utilize Supplemental Instructors to assist students (by sitting in on classes, helping with note taking, and providing Supplemental Instruction). This comprehensive set of support services, which is designed to augment their course work and help them adjust to the University setting, improve recipients chances of successfully completing their degree programs and securing professional positions. The primary components of UMECSS focus on creating small learning communities, which enable students to form closer relationships with each other and University faculty and staff. Clustering or grouping students in core Math and Science classes with the same instructor in the same courses also allows for closer relationships, and allows for students to review the materials more effectively. Field trips and job shadowing activities with industry and faculty mentors help students begin to the make the transition from an academic setting to that of the workplace, and they familiarize students with a professional environment. Co-op assignments with industry and business partners, job fairs, help with resume preparation, interview skills, and professional etiquette are gradually incorporated as the students progress in their degree programs doc23942 none This scholarship program serves students attending two of the ten community colleges of the Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD). The goal is to recruit academically talented but financial disadvantaged students into the high technology disciplines, while providing a solid support system to help them succeed through degree completion and or transfer to a four-year institution. The two community colleges combine their resources to enhance student success. Phoenix College brings an expertise in providing a solid infrastructure of student support services designed to promote academic success. Mesa Community College brings a history of curricular reform in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) disciplines and its unique relationships with the business community through its Business & Industry Institute. Together these colleges will work towards the following scholarship program objectives: (a) 90% of computer science, engineering, or mathematics (CSEMS) scholarship recipients make satisfactory progress in their program of study (12 credit hours completed with a cumulative GPA of 2.5 or better). (b) 100% of recipients participate in 90% of CSEMS special events activities during the semester for which they receive scholarship support. (c) 85% of CSEMS scholarship recipients make satisfactory progress towards their educational goals (i.e., be enrolled as full-time students at a community college in the following semester, transfer to a university, or have met the requirements for been awarded an AAS or AS degree in the targeted programs). (d) One-third of CSEMS scholarship recipients are from groups that are traditionally under-represented in CSEMS (women, persons with disabilities, Hispanic, African-American, Native American). A CSEMS Faculty Advisor, CSEMS Faculty Mentors, and a CSEMS Advisory Committee that includes representation from financial aid, student support services, and industry representatives are guiding the program. Each scholarship recipient works with the CSEMS Faculty Advisor to develop an Individual Education Plan. Support services include campus orientations (including financial aid, counseling services, advisement, and career centers), college visitation days, industry visits, monthly CSEMS support activities, and an ongoing monthly relationship with each CSEMS recipient s assigned CSEMS Faculty Mentor. The CSEMS Faculty Mentor not only monitors progress, but also works with the scholarship recipient to identify additional resources, such as tutoring or internship opportunities doc23943 none The Industry & Engineering Technology (I&ET) Scholarship project is identifying, recruiting, graduating and placing in jobs related to the degree discipline 12 students with the Associate of Applied Science degree in I&ET. The project doubles the number of students who typically graduate from the program in any given year and enables the college to address a significant local industrial need, as well as serve a traditionally underserved population of low income academically talented students. Within the past year, three new light-manufacturing plants have opened in the college s service area. Data compiled by local economic development officials indicate that these plants alone create a need for approximately 1,000 new jobs during the next five years, many of which require high technology skills. The I&ET program prepares graduates for the kind of high technology skills these new employers demand. A unique feature of the I&ET Scholarship Project is that it makes use of existing federally funded outreach and student support programs already in place at the college that have been operating successfully since the s and whose target populations are identical to the target population for I&ET scholarship recipients: low income, traditionally under-represented, academically talented students. I&ET faculty collaborate with the staff of these existing federal programs, Upward Bound (UB) and Educational Talent Search (ETS), to recruit and select project participants. Once enrolled, I&ET faculty collaborate with Student Support Services (SSS) staff to develop a comprehensive Individual Education Plan for each student that serves as a blueprint for academic success. Successful retention and support strategies are then incorporated in the plan so that students become part of a learning community who succeed in the classroom and persist to graduation. I&ET faculty and industry representatives then collaborate with the college s Placement Office staff to ensure that all graduates receive job search training and are successfully placed within six months of graduation. Since the inception of the I&ET program, 100% of its graduates have been successfully placed in jobs related to the discipline doc23944 none This project provides thirty scholarships to academically talented financial needy sophomore students majoring in electrical, civil and industrial engineering. Students are selected based on grade point average and strength of essays and recommendation letters. The motivations of the student and career goals are also important factors. The project centers on building a community of engineering scholars using faculty mentors and other support mechanisms. The engineering Student Work Employment office plays a significant role by coordinating efforts with partners in industries and government for summer internship opportunities, career placement and seminar development, which are designed to enhance career or higher education placement. Faculty members in the students disciplines mentor the scholars throughout the duration of the program. The mentorship program is expected to be a major component of the project, building students confidence and enhancing students learning. Professional development is also an important part of the program, where students attend professional meetings or professional development workshops doc23945 none This project provides 30 computer science and engineering scholarships to academically talented financial needed students. The amount of each award is $ annually. The support for the students in this program is leveraged on the experiences gained from a previous CSEMS award within the College of Engineering, Architecture and Physical Sciences. Student support activities include comprehensive faculty mentoring, tutorial programs, and advising and counseling. These activities support the educational quality of the course of instructions delivered to the students, and they aid in curbing the high attrition rate of the computer science and engineering majors doc23946 none The University of Texas at Austin is partnering with the Hispanic Scholarship Fund Institute to produce outstanding undergraduates for service and research in the public sector as part of a unique academic experience for computer science, mathematics and engineering majors. A total of 32 four-year scholarships are being awarded to talented students who are entering the University as Longhorn Scholars with an interest in technology fields. The highly successful Longhorn Scholars Program, now in its third year of operation, identifies financially needy students who graduate in the top 10% of their class from 70 historically under-represented high schools in the State of Texas. The Colleges of Engineering and Natural Sciences participates by providing a rigorous curriculum and associated degrees in the targeted areas. Recognizing the substantial population of minority students graduating from these high schools, the Hispanic Scholarship Foundation has offered to assist in devising a collection of retention strategies including mentoring programs and placement opportunities in public sector research laboratories, research internships and cooperatives. Despite its large size, the University of Texas is committed to a personalized academic experience for its students. In particular, Longhorn Scholars are evaluated to identify career interests as well as academic strengths and weaknesses. This information is used to determine the appropriate academic track for each student. Depending on major and background, students become part of either the Equal Opportunity in Engineering Program (EOE), the Partnership for Excellence in the Natural Sciences program (PENS) or the Emerging Scholars Program (ESP) that serves both Colleges. Each of these programs provides an intricate support structure that includes strong faculty participation, personalized academic advising and mentoring and an intensive math and science curriculum. The Hispanic Scholarship Fund Institute is augmenting these existing services with external mentoring programs as well as seminars and field experiences to introduce students to the function and significance of the public sector in technology advancement. By their junior and senior years, students will be poised to begin capstone experiences through academic research, internships and co-ops. It is expected that many will participate in the public sector opportunities made available as a part of this initiative. The CSEMS scholarships and the support programs surrounding them contribute directly to the primary mission of The University of Texas at Austin to effectively serve all populations of the State of Texas in producing outstanding graduates. The ability to bring together such a wide array of collaborators speaks to the importance of this mission in producing a new generation of leaders in technology fields doc23947 none This is a dissertation improvement grant for a modest $12,000 to cover transportation, video supplies for a Youth Video Documentary sub-project, informant honoraria, and a part-time research assistant. Knowledge and Ethics in the Debate Over Inuit Suicide (Knowledge and Ethics) is a long-term (12 month), multi-sited (Iqaluit, Pangnirtung, Toronto) ethnographic research project that seeks to understand how knowledge about suicide is produced in a multi-cultural and post-colonial milieu. Through semi-structured interviews, conversation, archival research, and a youth video project, Knowledge and Ethics proposes to study the social and political implications of western medical, scientific and journalistic knowledge on the subject of Inuit suicide. In addition, Knowledge and Ethics identifies and analyzes the dialog between Inuit ways of knowing and western biomedical knowledge. The divergent responses of psychiatrists, family members and suicidal individuals to research questions concerning human life, the preservation of life (ethics), and the self should provide data about different conceptions of reality and how meaning is created. Through careful discourse analysis the investigators hope to identify new ways of conceptualizing human life that are emerging in the Canadian arctic. Through such analyses, this research proposes to enhance and challenge theoretical discussions on the cultural construction of knowledge, indigenous identity, and the meanings of suicide, as well as, contribute to the ongoing debate about the creation of knowledge amidst upheaval and cultural confrontation doc23948 none This project awards 25 scholarships annually to students enrolled on a full time basis in Engineering Technology, Mathematics, or Computer Sciences. The primary objectives are to increase the number of students pursuing and obtaining degrees, improve the performance of enrolled students, and increase the marketable skills of the students in Mathematics, Computer Sciences, and Engineering Technology. Mentoring, advising, counseling, career placement, internships, and research opportunities are integrated through teams that meet regularly focusing specifically on the scholars. Within the project is an assessment plan that is designed to foster continuous improvement doc23949 none The goal of this project is to increase the numbers and percentages of area high school graduates that enroll as full-time students in pursuit of associate degrees with majors in Computer Science, Engineering Technology, and Mathematics (CSEM). The project seeks to (1) address the need for greater access and retention of students in the college s technical programs, (2) attract more women into the non-traditional computer science and engineering technology fields, and (3) provide opportunities for a rich pool of academically talented students who lack financial resources to complete their studies on a full-time basis, thereby speeding student progress in completing an associate degree or in transferring to a four-year institution. Priority is given to eligible first-generation and low-income students. An environment is being created that encourages academic and personal growth for CSEM Scholar. In addition to financial support, the program includes an array of intensive student support and career services, including comprehensive assessment of academic deficiencies; individual and computerized tutoring; study skills and standardized test preparation workshops; academic, personal, and career advising; and faculty, student, and industry mentors. A major component is the active recruitment of high school students enrolled in computer science and engineering related courses in the 42 school districts participating in the Weatherford College Tech Prep Consortium, with a special focus on recruiting female students. The project strengthens the transfer bridge between the college and the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) and increases the incentives for students to pursue higher education through the newly implemented Texas TWO-STEP (Technology Workforce Opportunities through Seamless Transitions and Educational Partnerships) Project. Over time, the combined efforts of these students provided can make a large impact on communities in high-poverty areas like those in the Weatherford College service area. This program increases the number for women choosing high-demand career fields. As graduates, they are role models to under-represented students and women as they join national and international firms across the nation doc23950 none To assist with the recruitment and retention of promising students in the Computer Science, Engineering and Mathematics (CSEM) fields and to help improve the quality of their education, this project supports a scholarship program for students in the CSEM fields. The goal of the SDSU CSEMS project is to increase the number of students pursuing and successfully completing degrees in the CSEM fields, with special consideration given to women and minority students under-represented in these areas. To accomplish this goal, the Management Team has established the following objectives: 1. Advertise the CSEM scholarship opportunity and recruit 30 students in the CSEM fields who have demonstrated academic merit and financial need; 2. Promote high quality and sustained faculty-student relationships between the scholarship recipients and their faculty mentors and monitor student progress; 3. Increase the students awareness of the academic support, career planning, and educational enhancement opportunities available to them and encourage them to utilize these resources and opportunities; 4. Increase the students awareness of and interaction with the high technology industry and higher education. To achieve these goals the CSEMS scholars each have extensive contact with faculty mentors who guide their proteges through the college experience. Under the direction of their mentors, scholars attend a variety of Educational Enhancement Activities designed to provide a mixture of practical knowledge, academic discourse, appreciation of the university, and global and community awareness. Each CSEM scholar also has contact with a member of the business and industrial community in order to gain insight into different degree-related careers that will be available to them. The SDSU CSEMS project has the potential to increase not only the number of financially needy and under-represented students, but also the overall number of students majoring and graduating in high-demand technology-based fields doc23951 none This project will explore the genetic and physiological diversity of the marine cyanobacteria Synechococcus, which are major contributors to primary production in the world s oligotrophic oceans. In addition to its role in the oligotrophic oceans, Synechococcus can also be found in mesotrophic and eutrophic waters. This is in sharp contrast to the members of the closely related genus Prochlorococcus that are restricted to the subtropical open oceans. At present it is not clear if the increased range of Synechococcus reflects a broader physiological tolerance by all the strains of this genus, or the existence of ecotypes that are specifically adapted to higher nutrient and colder temperature conditions. These alternate scenarios have very different implications in terms of how the Synechococcus community may respond to changes in environmental conditions such as global climate change or eutrophication of coastal waters. In this project, this question is being addressed two ways, by characterizing the physiology of multiple genotypes of Synechococcus, and by determining the seasonal abundances of these genotypes in water samples from around the globe. It has been established that marine Synechococcus consists of a number (seven or more) of genetically distinct lineages. Three of these lineages are specifically associated with a characteristic physiology (motility, chromatic adaptation and lack of phycourobilin), and a fourth consists of a single strain which is incapable of utilizing nitrate as a nitrogen source. However, the physiologies associated with the other three genotypes have not yet been determined. To begin to understand physiological responses of all of the genotypes of Synechococcus to factors that are likely to influence their growth and distributions, in this project, several representative strains of each genetic clade are being grown in a range of light levels, temperatures and nitrogen sources. Several lines of evidence suggest that additional genetic lineages exist in nature but have not yet been cultivated. To explore this further, the genetic diversity in open ocean Synechococcus populations in the Atlantic and Pacific and coastal populations in Puget Sound, Washington are being examined by terminal Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism and sequencing analyses of the 16S-23S ribosomal RNA internal transcribed spacer (ITS). Using these sequences and those already determined from Synechococcus isolates, primers will be designed that are specific for each of the genetic clades. These primers will be used in real-time quantitative PCR in a set of monthly samples from the same three environments to quantify the abundance of each genetic type over two annual cycles. This project will directly involve a graduate student and one or more undergraduate students. Establishing a research program in Puget Sound is providing opportunities for additional undergraduate involvement through the UW School of Oceanography senior field course. In addition, data on Synechococcus distributions and dynamics in Puget Sound will be shared with the Washington State Department of Ecology and incorporated into a Puget Sound food web model. Ultimately, examining the global distribution and population dynamics of Synechococcus in conjunction with experiments measuring the growth of each genotype under a suite of physical conditions will provide insights into the relative importance of ecotypic differentiation and physiological plasticity in determining these distributions doc23952 none This project is increasing the pool of well-trained plastics technicians in eastern North Carolina by implementing a program at six community colleges that is improving educational opportunities for economically disadvantaged students, increasing retention of students transitioning from high school to the Plastics Engineering Technology (PET) associate degree level, and improving student services programs designed to recruit and assist PET students in the six county area. By involving plastics industry personnel and services, this project is also strengthening the partnerships of the consortium and helping to stimulate the depressed economy of the region. This project assists the Eastern North Carolina Plastics Technology Consortium, or ENCPTC (NSF grant ), in its efforts to provide well-trained plastics technicians. To achieve the above goals, the specific objective of this project is to expand, refine, and refocus recruitment efforts to develop a target pool of 350 interested high school students; from which, 20% or 70 students are being selected to receive student support services, including financial assistance. This population of 70 economically disadvantaged or under-represented first year students are being provided student services and economic support in order to maintain an 80% retention rate for second year students. Ultimately, a 90% employment rate (in plastics technology) of all program completers will be achieved. The PETS Project Director, (who also serves as ENCPTC Site Director) and the Recruiter Mentor work with the Financial Aid Directors of the six colleges to provide approximately 295 students with scholarships or stipends over a 4-year grant period. This program enables students to progressively increase their amount of assistance as they prove their potential and reach certain milestones doc23953 none This project provides 40 scholarships per year to first or second year computer science and mathematics majors who are financially needy and academically talented. The program aggressively advertises from under-represented groups, including women, racial and ethnic minorities, and persons with disabilities. Current university programs are used to provide additional academic support, which include study skills training, tutoring, and professional mentoring. The program also includes interviewing skills, peer support, and professional mentoring through internships and industry contacts doc23954 none The Departments of Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics, in collaboration with the Office of Strategic Initiatives and the Center for Academic Success at Louisiana State University, is increasing the educational and career opportunities for academically talented, financially disadvantaged students to reach their fullest potential through a student faculty partnership with a comprehensive monitoring system. The goal of this project is to recruit financially disadvantaged students, to retain these students, and to enhance the educational experience of these students in the technology disciplines. Specific objectives are: (1) Recruit qualified students through an active K-12 educational outreach program, including math and science fairs, competitions, and in-school math and science laboratories, (2) Retain these students through the incorporation of student support and mentoring programs, (3) Enhance the educational experience of these students through workshops seminars, industrial outreach, and community service opportunities, (4) Increase the number of undergraduates, including women and minorities in the above-mentioned disciplines, and (5) Promote intercultural participation among non-minority and minority students. In addition to the scholarships, the project consists of three activities: (1) mandatory computer and information technology training (average 2 hrs wk), (2) mandatory academic enhancement activities (average 1 hr wk), and (3) optional educational and industrial outreach programs (up to 3 hrs wk). CSEMS Scholars receive additional information technology training through various workshops and training courses. The Office of Strategic Initiatives and the Center for Academic Success, Co-PIs, and several other faculty members provide active mentoring and academic assistance for the CSEMS Scholars to maximize their chances for academic success. The faculty mentors also assist CSEMS Scholars in pursuing their professional careers though continuing graduate studies or job placement in industries relevant to their education. There are 29 students per year majoring in computer science, engineering, or mathematics disciplines who hold scholarships. Scholarships can be renewed up to graduation. CSEMS Scholars form a community that interacts regularly with each other, with faculty, and with other students on campus doc23955 none State Fair Community College has been serving the residents of central Missouri for 34 years. In their 14-county service area, only 11% of the residents have baccalaureate degrees and 80% of the students at SFCC are low-income. To meet the cost of attending college, over 90% of SFCC s students must work while attending school. Thus, high-maintenance degree programs such as Computer Science, Engineering and Mathematics are difficult for students and result in low-retention rates in these programs. With special emphasis on underserved-populations, the goal of this project is to recruit, retain, and graduate or transfer each year 12-13 academically talented but financially needy students in the fields of Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics thus increasing the numbers of well-educated and skilled employees in technical areas of national need. The project targets individuals from under-represented groups such as women, African-Americans, Hispanics and persons with disabilities, focusing on recruiting and retention activities. A recent report in the American Association of Community Colleges College Times indicates that the number of minority students attending college must be increased if a severe shortage of skilled workers in the future is to be prevented. For example, the rapid growth in the Hispanic population is not being reflected in college enrollment. Recruiting activities includes visits to high schools by faculty, a Career Fair, and training of high school counselors to promote careers in Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics. Retention activities include new student orientation, mentoring, supplemental instruction, tutoring, the buddy system , business industry tours, internships partnerships, tracking student success, cultural opportunities, and financial aid counseling. The objectives of the project are as follows: 1. Each year recruit 12 to 13 academically talented students who are disadvantaged and under represented, into the fields of Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics. 2. Improve educational opportunities for these students and others enrolled in Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Programs. 3. Establish support systems that maximize the students ability to achieve and maintain a 2.5 GPA. 4. Increase the number of students completing degrees and or transferring to four-year colleges and universities. 5. Implement, improve, and or utilize student support programs for these students. 6. Strengthen and utilize, for the benefit of students, partnerships between institutions of higher education and high technology industry. The foundations for success at SFCC include articulation agreements with the University of Missouri and Central Missouri State University. SFCC also is a recipient of an Implementation Site Seed Grant for the adaptation and implementation of curriculum for an Associate Degree in Networking. In addition, SFCC received a federally funded TRIO Student Support Services project in the fall of . As a result of this program, supplemental instruction was established on campus. The outcome of this project results in students successfully completing a two-year degree program and either transferring to a four-year program or being immediately placed in employment directly related to Computer Science, Engineering or Mathematics. Additionally, a strong foundation is formed on which to perpetuate the process of attracting and retaining talented students doc23956 none Peter A. Monson, University of Massachusetts - Amherst Modeling Adsorption in Complex Porous Structures: Equilibrium, Hysteresis and Dynamics This research will use molecular modeling to understand the behavior of fluids confined in porous materials with complex pore structures. The primary goal is to develop a more refined understanding of how the combined effects of molecular interactions and the structure of the porous material over several length scales yield particular kinds of adsorption behavior. This understanding is central to important applications such as separations and catalysis, as well as in porous materials characterization. A combination of dynamical as well as equilibrium modeling techniques is a central feature of this project. Two complementary areas of research are planned. In the first area the PI is concerned with coarse-grained lattice models of adsorption desorption in complex pore structures. The goal of this work is to develop a framework for understanding the relationship between adsorption measurements and the porous material microstructure - particularly for states in the capillary condensation and hysteresis regime. The recent work has shown that coarse-grained lattice models provide important insights into hysteresis and the PI seeks to build on this in several ways. In the proposed work the PI will extend the range of materials that can be treated by this approach, including applications to a variety of mesoporous silica materials, and apply the approach to analysis of intrusion extrusion hysteresis in mercury porosimetry. The second research area is concerned with the dynamics of adsorption and desorption. The PI s goal here is to use simulations that mimic dynamic uptake experiments to investigate the stability of states in the hysteresis region. The PI has used this approach to establish the significance of the hysteresis loops encountered in Monte Carlo simulations and to investigate the role of pore blocking in hysteresis. The proposed work deals with dynamical simulations of coarse-grained lattice models as well as application to mercury porosimetry. The PI also plans to extend these techniques to the study of wetting dynamics in confined geometries in the context of nanotechnology applications. Broader Impact: The research while fundamental is closely linked with application, especially in the context of porous materials characterization. Traditionally engineers and others using porous materials have had to view the porous material microstructure using rather imprecise quantities like the pore volume, surface area and pore size distribution. It is anticipated that the project could provide a foundation for a new approaches to the characterization of porous materials. There is substantial potential impact in applications of porous materials ranging from traditional areas such as catalysis and separations to emerging areas in nanotechnology. The research program has a strong educational component through the involvement of graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and undergraduates. The students regularly attend and present their work at major conferences. Research group meetings are designed in part to develop the ability of students to communicate their research achievements, and our graduate students participate in teaching undergraduate courses as an educational requirement of their degree program. The project features collaboration with industry (Quantachrome Corporation) as well as an international collaboration with researchers at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany doc23957 none Chang This Pan American Advanced Studies Institute (PASI) award on Materials for Energy Conversion and Environmental Protection, jointly supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE), is being organized by Dr. R. P. H. Chang of Northwestern University in collaboration with Dr. Guillermo Solorzano of the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. The proposed PASI will take place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil during the first week of September . Experts in fields of energy conservation, energy storage and environmental remediation will present lectures and engage students in discussion sessions. Lecturers will discuss new materials and processes for fuel cell design and applications, new catalytic materials for hydrogen gas generation, and the use of carbon and metallic materials for hydrogen storage. Another part of the PASI will be devoted to the study of environmental protection and emissions reduction for a range of pollutants. Students participating in this PASI will develop a collaborative research plan and gain an understanding of the latest research related to energy conservation doc23958 none The project supports 33 talented, academically qualified, students with financial need, many from traditionally under-represented groups, during their beginning, core coursework in the targeted disciplines (Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics). The program offers scholarships for students and provide an extensive set of academic support services and educational opportunities, including tutoring and inviting speakers. Primary Objectives 1. To allow such students who major in Computer Science, Engineering, or Mathematics to complete the first half of their undergraduate education in four semesters by reducing the need for outside employment during the school year. 2. To increase the number of such students who choose to attend the university as freshmen. 3. To increase the proportion of such students who go on to complete their degrees in a timely fashion. Methods 1. $ scholarships annually for two years. 2. Visits to local high schools to recruit prospective scholarship recipients. 3. Peer mentoring, faculty advising, and extramural speakers. 4. Tutoring and other academic services. Impact These scholarships benefit students both financially and academically. The scholarships are equivalent to about 75% of annual in-state tuition at the university. Students on scholarship are able to work at least 12 fewer hours per week, giving them more time to devote to their studies. Students funded by this program are required to earn 58 credit hours, compared with the current average of about 48 credit hours. By the end of the scholarship period, the successful student is better able to find employment at higher wages and to find work that reinforces their recently acquired academic skills. The program benefits the university by making it more attractive to the pool of talented low income students in the surrounding community. It meshes well with the current Pre-College Academy, which attracts about 100 students annually for training in the Natural Sciences, by providing funds for these students to continue their education at the university. The presence of students in this scholarship program enhances the academic climate at the university doc23959 none This project is developing a scholarship program for students entering the degree programs developed through the activities of The Southeast Consortium for Advanced Network Technology Education (SCANTE). The level of intensity of these advanced network technology degree programs dictates that students in these programs devote a great deal of time to their studies. In addition, work-based learning experiences give students the necessary job experience to enter into the workforce and or further their education. Full time faculty educated and trained by the SCANTE activities direct this project. The project objectives are to: 1. Increase the numbers of well educated and skilled employees in technical areas of national need by targeting recruitment efforts toward females, minorities, nontraditional students, and first-generation college students; 2. Improve educational opportunities for students in the following disciplines: Advanced Computer Network Technology --- Local Area Networking, Wide Area Networking; Computer Programming; Internet Development Technologies; Computer Servicing Technology; and Telecommunications Technology; 3. Increase retention of students to degree achievement (A.A.S. or an A.A. degree) by providing mentoring and work-based learning experiences; 4. Increase success in transfer of students into baccalaureate degree programs by increasing the initial communication between the student and the faculty in the baccalaureate degree program; 5. Improve student support programs through faculty, industry, and peer mentoring of students; successful student participation in work-based learning opportunities; on campus student seminars focusing on workplace behaviors, attitudes, and dress; and 6. Strengthen partnerships between Jones County Junior College and the industries in the southeastern United States through participation of the industries in JCJC job fairs, work-based learning opportunities, mentoring of students, and the hiring of graduates; participation of industries in student field trips and presentations to student organizations doc23960 none This project continues the analysis of data collected in the summer of at Langmuir Laboratory of New Mexico Tech as part of the SEET project (Study of Electrical Evolution of Thunderstorms). The data consist of thunderstorm observations by two research radars, a surface network of electric-field measurements, the precise locations and times of lightning flashes measured by the Lightning Mapping Array, and balloon-soundings of the electric field in the storms. The objective is to synthesize the data to produce a coherent picture of thunderstorm electrical evolution. The locations of the main charge regions are inferred from the balloon soundings of the electric field. The locations and magnitudes of the charges measured in sequential soundings are then compared to study the electrical evolution of the cloud. The locations of the charged regions are also compared with the lightning paths and the radar-observed precipitation patterns to learn how these quantities are related. The work advances the understanding of charge generation and lightning production by thunderstorms, explores the relations between the radar structure of storms and the lightning they produce, and lays groundwork for better predictions of the electrical hazards that accompany thunderstorms doc23961 none This project encourages and assists qualified financially needy students majoring in computer science, engineering, and mathematics in the completion their degrees. Central to the project is the fostering of socially cohesive cohorts of students progressing together through their programs in an academically enriched, interdisciplinary, supportive environment. A special effort is made to increase the participation and retention of under-represented groups. The project supports an initial group of 10 students, recruited in the first year, through four years of study. A second group of 10 students, recruited in the second year of funding, are supported for three years of study with their final year of study funded by other sources. An outstanding feature of the project is the coupling of this very individualized environment typical of a liberal arts college with a high quality School of Engineering. Existing university programs are integrated into the project. Activities for the CSEMS students include a weekly interdisciplinary seminar and social gathering, the opportunity for shared housing, opportunities to work together as peer-leaders in courses relevant to their disciplines, shared volunteer projects that use their academic expertise, and group interactions with professionals in their fields of interest. Students work closely with an academic advisor, have the opportunity to work with an industry contact, and participate in internships in his or her field of study doc23962 none The goal of this collaborative proposal is to increase the number of high achieving, but financially challenged, students graduating with a four-year degree in computer science, engineering, or mathematics. The approach is to create a formal link between the University of Texas at Arlington and two local community colleges (Tarrant County College-Southeast Campus and Mountain View College) to tap a rich pool of academically talented students who lack the financial resources to complete their studies on a full-time basis. First generation students, in particular, tend to fall into this category, and they often lack the visibility or knowledge to seek needed resources and career guidance effectively. Many of these students begin their higher education at community colleges, while working full- or part-time. Lack of funds negatively affects the retention rate of this group, thus shortchanging the technical workforce of much-needed potential talent. Therefore, UTA and its CC partners formed a CSEMS collaborative partnership that could have a tremendous impact on the Dallas Fort Worth (DFW) technical workforce. Eighty-nine scholarships are awarded annually with priority given to eligible first generation students. The objectives to support the goal include establishing a structured pipeline from the CCs to UTA; developing retention strategies and adapting existing academic support resources to target this pool of students in CSEM disciplines; formalizing an optional research component or industry internship experience to the Scholars degree plan; and developing CSEM specific programs to prepare the students for professional experiences beyond graduation. Faculty and industry mentors are available, and a Peer Bridge Group of CC alumni, who are now attending UTA, assist CC students through the transfer process. A formal CSEM Articulation Agreement was developed to create seamless curricula and concurrent enrollment opportunities in these fields by which to transition CC students to UTA. This collaborative encompasses a significant portion of North Texas, and it builds capacity and critical mass for the technical workforce in this leading high tech region doc23963 none Linn-Benton Community College s (LBCC) project expands opportunities for education, increases retention to baccalaureate degree achievement, and improves employability of low-income, academically talented students in transfer programs in Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics. This is accomplished by providing targeted academic, career, and other support services to the recipients of 30 scholarship awards each year. The four main components of the LBCC Tech Scholars Program (TSP) are: oFinancial support through TSP scholarships to allow talented low-income students to pursue full-time studies in Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics oAcademic support through existing programs and new initiatives to assist students with current coursework and prepare them for success in upper division coursework oMentoring and student support to increase retention at LBCC and to promote a smooth transition to the transfer institution oActivities to strengthen employability, including career explorations, preparation for internships, and development of job-seeking skills The theme permeating all components of this project is community building a focus on establishing a cohort that provides peer support; develops an increased sense of belonging; and promotes identification with the discipline at LBCC, the target transfer institution, and the chosen profession. Enhancements to existing support services as well as new initiatives are designed specifically to strengthen these bonds and reduce feelings of isolation. There is a great need in Oregon for skilled high tech employees. LBCC is in a prime position to work toward meeting that need because of high unemployment in parts of our service district, a large percentage of students who have financial need, strong community support for this community college, robust transfer programs in Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics, and extensive articulation with both high schools and transfer institutions. LBCC initially recruits low-income students who are currently enrolled at the college and who have demonstrated academic talent in Computer Science, Engineering, or Mathematics into the TSP. After the first year, the program expands to include low-income high school students who have demonstrated academic talent and expressed an interest in majoring in one of these three areas. The financial support provided by the scholarships increases full-time enrollment and improve academic life by reducing the need to work long hours for an income. TSP scholars are then able to more fully utilize the academic, career, and personal support services. TSP scholars benefit from extensive academic support systems currently available, including free tutoring; Supplemental Instruction; and a Learning Center with Math, Science, Writing, Reading, and Study Skills assistance. Enhancements and additions included as part of the project include the establishment of a Tech Scholar Center (a designated room on campus where TSP scholars can hang out, work on their studies together, and get academic assistance); expanded connections between TSP scholars and faculty, students, and organizations at transfer institutions; site visits and presentations by industry representatives; development of job-seeking skills; and increased participation in career-enhancing activities such as internships doc23962 none The goal of this collaborative proposal is to increase the number of high achieving, but financially challenged, students graduating with a four-year degree in computer science, engineering, or mathematics. The approach is to create a formal link between the University of Texas at Arlington and two local community colleges (Tarrant County College-Southeast Campus and Mountain View College) to tap a rich pool of academically talented students who lack the financial resources to complete their studies on a full-time basis. First generation students, in particular, tend to fall into this category, and they often lack the visibility or knowledge to seek needed resources and career guidance effectively. Many of these students begin their higher education at community colleges, while working full- or part-time. Lack of funds negatively affects the retention rate of this group, thus shortchanging the technical workforce of much-needed potential talent. Therefore, UTA and its CC partners formed a CSEMS collaborative partnership that could have a tremendous impact on the Dallas Fort Worth (DFW) technical workforce. Eighty-nine scholarships are awarded annually with priority given to eligible first generation students. The objectives to support the goal include establishing a structured pipeline from the CCs to UTA; developing retention strategies and adapting existing academic support resources to target this pool of students in CSEM disciplines; formalizing an optional research component or industry internship experience to the Scholars degree plan; and developing CSEM specific programs to prepare the students for professional experiences beyond graduation. Faculty and industry mentors are available, and a Peer Bridge Group of CC alumni, who are now attending UTA, assist CC students through the transfer process. A formal CSEM Articulation Agreement was developed to create seamless curricula and concurrent enrollment opportunities in these fields by which to transition CC students to UTA. This collaborative encompasses a significant portion of North Texas, and it builds capacity and critical mass for the technical workforce in this leading high tech region doc23965 none This program provides scholarships to talented, low-income students majoring in mathematics. Special consideration for scholarships is given to minority and under-represented students who desire to receive an associate degree and transfer to a baccalaureate program. Students in the program receive individualized support via peer mentoring, academic advising, career exploration and advisement, and tutoring. The scholarships, renewable for three additional semesters after the initial award, provide for the cost of tuition, fees and books for a 12-hour full-time course load. The college has partnered with the Texas A&M University System on an articulation agreement that provides a collaborative support structure to facilitate seamless transition for the student allowing them to complete a four-year degree on the college campus doc23966 none This project is establishing a CSEMS Scholars Program for academically talented, low-income undergraduate students in the fields of computer science, engineering, and mathematics. The intent is to encourage such students to enroll in these disciplines, and then to provide them with a comprehensive plan of scholarship, academic, and professional support throughout their undergraduate years, to improve their retention and graduation rates. In engineering at UC Riverside, much of the attrition occurs in the first two years. Family financial pressure and the subsequent need for students to work part-time are seen as primary contributing factors in this attrition. Thus, the core of the UCR CSEMS program is scholarship assistance to the targeted student cohorts. Twenty $2,500 freshman scholarships and twenty $2,500 sophomore transfer student scholarships are awarded annually for each of four years, to academically talented but economically disadvantaged undergraduates majoring in the named fields. The primary goal of the program is to demonstrate that reduction of financial concern on the part of the students can result in a significant improvement in their retention statistics, and thereby their graduation rates. Only the freshman, sophomore, and transfer students who have been selected as CSEMS Scholars receive scholarships. However, the project intends to continue financial support to these students through junior senior year summer internships at companies, or undergraduate research positions with faculty members. In addition to the financial component, this program is accompanied by an extensive support infrastructure of academic assistance and advising, career placement services, and faculty and professional mentoring throughout the students academic years. During the annual recruitment activities of the College, the College of Engineering distributes brochures and provides other information that explains the CSEMS Scholars Program to potential UCR applicants. Selection of program participants is made by an Oversight Committee that includes faculty members as well as staff members from the campus Financial Aid Office and the offices of other support services. The Oversight Committee is responsible for general supervision of the program. Day-to-day operations, however, including student tracking and data analysis, is administered by the College Office of Special Programs with the active collaboration of the College Office of Student Affairs. Students receiving the NSF scholarship support are designated as UCR-COE NSF Scholars. As they continue into the later phases of the program, they are designated as UCR- COE Advanced Scholars. Together, the group is referred to as the UCR-COE Scholars doc23967 none Blake In the past few years there has been an explosion of scientific interest in the chemical processing occurring in sunlit snow. Rather than simply acting as a passive sink for the products of tropospheric reactions, the snowpack has been shown to be one of the most photochemically active, and strongly oxidizing, regions of the entire troposphere. The group of investigators assembled for this proposal has played a central role in this revolution in our thinking about the role of the snowpack in atmospheric chemistry. One key finding has been that photolysis of snow chromophores initiates the release of a number of important trace gases. Initial modeling suggests that photolysis of a number of these gases (HCHO, HOOH, CH3CHO and HONO) results in an enormous production of HOx (i.e., OH and HO2), which in turn causes a large enhancement of these radicals in the snowpack and in the air just above the snow. Because oxidation by OH is the main sink for many tropospheric gases, including some of those important for climate change and stratospheric O3 depletion, this enhancement in HOx might significantly perturb tropospheric chemistry. Snowpack chemistry likely also modifies the chemical records of atmospheric composition ultimately preserved in glacial ice. While recent work has shown that photochemical and physical processes in the snowpack can impact the chemistry and composition of both the atmosphere and snowpack, these processes are, in general, poorly understood. This is especially true for the processes that produce and consume OH and HO2. The research will elucidate the processes that produce and consume OH and HO2 radicals within and above sunlit snow over a wide range of environmental conditions, thereby improving our understanding of fast photochemistry within this unique environment doc23968 none The goal of UW-CSEMS is to recruit more high school students to computer science, engineering, and mathematics careers, and specifically those students with demonstrated financial need. Since it is well documented that women and ethnic minority students are particularly under-represented in technical fields, these populations are being expressly recruited for UW-CSEMS. In addition, UW-CSEMS includes initiatives to retain these students in computer science, engineering, and mathematics once they enroll. The UW-CSEMS support program involves entering freshmen in a community-building model. UW-CSEMS recipients participate in a biweekly seminar the first year they hold their scholarship. The seminar includes presentations on academic success skills (such as time management and study skills), career options, and research internship opportunities. These students are also encouraged to take advantage of on-campus programs in subsequent years such as career guidance, undergraduate research opportunities, and industry internships facilitated through the Career Fair. Each UW-CSEMS student is assigned a Peer Mentor and a Faculty Mentor. These triads meet biweekly to assist in the student s transition to the university. A total of 115 students in computer science, engineering, and mathematics are being supported with $ scholarships (25 in year 1, and 30 each in years 2, 3, and 4). A management team of faculty from the three disciplines and a representative from Student Affairs assist in recruiting and selecting the scholarship recipients. Students are recruited using resources from the Office of Admissions, Multicultural Affairs Office, and a network of over natural science teachers doc23969 none The primary goal of this project is to address three transition points critical to increasing the number of CSEMS students qualified and prepared to enter the high technology workforce. These three transition points present barriers that impact the recruitment and retention of incoming freshmen, rising juniors, and community college transfers. The project plan strengthens existing efforts and renews collaborations among the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science faculty, the Center for Excellence in Engineering and Diversity, industry, and alumni in an effort to effectively develop, graduate, and place CSEM students into career positions or graduate school. At the end of this multi- phased, four-year project the governance team expects to positively impact 80 economically disadvantaged and under-represented engineering, computer science and mathematics students. Along with new recruitment programs, the CSEMS Project team includes faculty in key retention and student support components and institutionalizes promising pilot programs. The UCLA CSEMS Project team includes four faculty members and the Director for the Center for Excellence in Engineering and Diversity doc23970 none The Multicultural Engineering Program (MEP) of the University of California at Berkeley Center for Underrepresented Engineering Students (CUES) administers the CSEMS at Cal III program, which builds on two current CSEMS at Cal awards being administered by MEP. These prior CSEMS grants serve two two-year cohorts of students whose outcomes can be studied as a basis for future scholarship endeavors. CSEMS at Cal III is following a single cohort of freshman and sophomore students over a four-year period, and it awards scholarships of $ per year to twenty-nine economically disadvantaged students, with a special emphasis on students from under-represented groups in engineering and science. Recruitment of the Cal-CSEMS Scholars targets three groups: 1) freshmen admitted for Fall or Spring , 2) freshmen participating in the MEP Summer Pre-Engineering Program , and 3) freshmen and sophomores participating in academic workshops and mathematics placement testing during Cal Summer Orientation (CalSO) offered by the Coalition for Excellence and Diversity in Mathematics, Science and Engineering. This group includes students from majors in Berkeley s College of Engineering, chemical engineering majors in the College of Chemistry, and students in the computer science or mathematics majors in the College of Letters and Science. All students targeted for the scholarships demonstrate financial need. Students are chosen by a committee of Berkeley faculty and staff from Coalition academic support programs, which employ a comprehensive approach in evaluating each student s academic merit and professionalism. Currently, 60% of Berkeley students demonstrate some type of financial need and are receiving need-based support in order to attend college. Financial need is perhaps a more serious impediment to timely completion of engineering degrees--the technical course load is often not compatible with long hours of outside work. Cal-CSEMS scholars participate in a variety of retention-related activities tied to the existing student support infrastructure of CUES, the EECS Center for Undergraduate Matters, and other partner programs. This includes faculty advising, academic excellence workshops, tutoring, mentoring, internships in industry and or research experience, and assistance with graduate school applications or job placement. A unifying theme of the CSEMS at Cal program is to increase student retention by helping each student develop into a committed member of the engineering and academic community doc23971 none Under this award, NSF will provide funding to the University of Washington to purchase a Finnigan MAT 253 Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometer to replace the existing again instrument in the university s Stable Isotope Laboratory doc23972 none Portland Community College s(PCC), along with its contracting community colleges in Tillamook Bay (TBCC) and Columbia Gorge (CGCC,) project is a scholarship program called Increasing Access and Diversity in Engineering and Microelectronics Careers . This CSEMS project serves students in Electronic Engineering Technology, Computer Software Engineering Technology, Civil and Mechanical Engineering Technology, and Microelectronics Technology. The Increasing Access and Diversity program awards a total of 60 two-year scholarships over four years, with each scholarship worth $3,000 per year. The scholarships are targeted to students who demonstrate financial need and academic promise, with special efforts to recruit and retain students who are under-represented in technology disciplines, including African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and women. The Increasing Access and Diversity scholarship program places special emphasis on recruiting students who have recently finished high school. The goal of this program is to increase opportunities and access to higher education and employment for under-represented minorities and women in engineering and microelectronics technology by providing scholarships that will cover the cost of tuition, books, and supplies for full-time students. The objectives that will help the program achieve this overall goal are: 1. Increase the number of under-represented minority students in participating departments by 50%. 2. Increase the number of female students in the targeted departments by 25%. 3. Increase by 20% the number of students in targeted departments who enter PCC, TBCC, or CGCC within 12 months of graduating from high school. 4. 80% of CSEM scholars will complete the two-year program in which they enroll. 5. 95% of graduating CSEMS scholars will be employed or enrolled in a four-year program related to their discipline within 12 months of graduation. To achieve these objectives, the Increasing Access and Diversity scholarships are publicized through meetings at area high schools, community organizations, and one-stop career centers, where eligible people will be encouraged to apply. The participating departments are committed to recruiting students directly from high school. The scholarships give motivated high school graduates a chance to begin their college careers immediately, rather than interrupting their education due to lack of funds. Once on campus, CSEM scholars benefit from the existing array of support services designed to help students at PCC, TBCC, and CGCC achieve academic success. These include student success seminars, communication skills workshops, academic advising, internships, job placement workshops, and career counseling. Each CSEM scholar benefits from CSEMS-specific services and activities, such as monthly workshops and troubleshooting sessions, an ongoing relationship with an industry mentor, increased access to tutoring, exposure to area universities and high-tech firms, and job placement assistance. These activities build peer and mentoring relationships for scholars that enhance retention and degree completion doc23973 none This project provides up to four years of scholarship support to 25 talented, low-income undergraduates pursuing bachelor degrees in mathematics or computer science along with a carefully crafted program of enriched student support activities. Special consideration is given to recruiting women, ethnic and racial minorities, and persons with disabilities. The project also includes a strong collaboration with South Puget Sound Community College (SPSCC), a neighboring two-year institution from which many of our students transfer. Collaborative elements include integrated recruitment activities, cross-institution advising and student support services, and transfer agreements. Integrated into this project is the scholarship award process, which ensures that successful students at SPSCC are given priority for CSEMS scholarships at Evergreen. The project has a clear and effective management plan and collaboration with an existing Evergreen student services program, Keep Enhancing Yourself (KEY), which has proven highly effective in retaining and graduating low-income students. An Individual Action Plan has been developed with each student and monitored regularly. Additional student support activities include faculty advising, career planning support, internships and work study opportunities on and off campus, and workshops on various subjects known to be relevant to student success. A required biweekly Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics seminar is the vehicle for structuring many of these activities. A unique feature of the project is a three-day summer institute for CSEMS students, relevant faculty and staff, and industry partners. Partnerships with industry and state, federal government agencies and MESA (Math, Engineering and Science Achievement) Program, are also part of the project through advisory board participation, involvement in the seminar and summer institute, in some cases, internships and field placements doc23974 none Global biogeochemical research must increasingly address the problems of detection or quantification of changing fluxes to the atmosphere, and attribution or explanation of those fluxes in terms of specific mechanisms. Today, neither our measurement nor analysis capabilities are sufficient to meet the twin challenges of biogeochemical detection and attribution with sufficient accuracy and resolution. We propose a summer school to advance both analysis techniques (inverse and assimilation modeling) and observing system design. The Summer School will involves lectures from a broad and distinguished group of scientists on the biogeochemical cycles, current and planned measurement capability, process and data analytical modeling, and new approaches in applied math. It will have as its centerpiece a hands-on simulation exercise. Estimates of global terrestrial and oceanic fluxes will be produced from existing data and models, combined to produce flux fields with reasonable time-space variability. They will be distributed in a global simulated atmosphere using an atmospheric transport model, run at the maximum achievable resolution to produce a 4-D data set of concentrations. The participants will form competing teams to reconstruct surface fluxes. Each team will choose a measurement strategy and obtain data corresponding to that strategy by querying a referee. Each measurement will have a price and each team will have an identical budget in dollars to fund its observing program. Each team will have access to the same models. An adjoint carbon model is being developed at NCAR using the NASA DAO model in assimilation mode. The model will be available for the participants to use in network design, and to demonstrate concepts and application of data assimilation in biogeochemistry. The teams may choose any strategy they wish to estimate the real fluxes. The conclusions from the workshop will be summarized in a report and a series of articles on 1) design of the exercise and implications for observing system design, 2) a review of data assimilation approaches for biogeochemical cycle research, 3) possibilities for use of the simulation exercise in education. In the year following the workshop, we will make the psuedodata bases and analysis tools available and improve them to better meet the research needs of the biogeochemical research community doc23975 none This project annually provides 29 students with a scholarship sufficient to cover tuition, fees, and books. In addition, a comprehensive set of academic support services are provided to ensure that each recipient attains a 4-year degree and is prepared for graduate studies and or placement in an appropriate workplace. Each of the recipients is majoring in mathematics, computer science, or engineering, and is either a sophomore, junior, senior, or graduate student. The project provides scholarship recipients with the following academic support services: admission and matriculation assistance, workshops, access to a study center, advisement and counseling, tutoring, support in joining and participating in professional organizations, eligibility to compete for additional grant funds reserved for engineering, computer science, and math students, support in securing appropriate internships and summer employment, professional activities, job placement assistance, and involvement in a social support network doc23976 none Interactions of Meddies with Seamounts Georgi Sutyrin URI William Dewar FSU This study will address the dynamics and transport properties of self-propagating, baroclinic-eddies in the presence of topography. Eddies of Mediterranean origin (Meddies) are examples of these features. The dynamical impact of vortex property transport and propagation of seamount-Meddy collisions have been observed buy are poorly understood. Numerical models will be used to examine the following related topics: topographic effects on Meddy transport, topographic influences on Meddy propagation, mean flow generation on topography by Meddies and consequent feedbacks. These studies are pertinent to the question of how to parameterize tracer transport in large-scale models doc23977 none Measurements of Turbulence and flow Structure in the Water Column of the Coastal Ocean using PIV Thomas Osborn and Joseph Katz John Hopkins University A novel and unique measurement system will be deployed to obtain measurements of oceanic turbulence. A submersible PIV system will be used during 3 campaigns at SABSOON, a coastal observatory in the South Atlantic Bight, to measure turbulence and mean flow characteristics in the bottom 10 m of the water column and to compare these to stratification, wave climate, and circulation. Reynolds stresses, dissipation, production, transport, and buoyancy flux will be related to elevation, mean velocity distribution, shear, stratification, Richardson number, and wave phase. When and where a local balance between production, dissipation, and buoyancy flux holds will be explored. The correlation, or lack thereof, between turbulent and wave stresses will be investigated. The origin of gusts will be characterized. In the context of Large Eddy Simulation (LES) modeling, subgrid scale (SGS) turbulent stresses will be compared to typical parameterizations. Wave-turbulence separation will be performed using a version of the Trowbridge technique doc23978 none The accumulation rates of Mo, Re and U in marine sediments can be useful proxies for reconstructing past redox conditions. While an increase in accumulation rates of authigenic Mo, Re and U is often a clear indication of more reducing conditions in sediments, it is more difficult to deduce whether the change is due to a decrease in bottom water oxygen content or an increase in organic carbon flux. Three scientist from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution plan to develop a means of distinguishing between these two potential causes utilizing porewater samples obtained from the Washington margin and seasonally from sediments in Buzzards Bay (coastal site). The PIs will acquire these samples using benthic flux chambers, centrifugation and in-situ polyacrylamide gel probes. The porewater and solid phase samples will be analyzed for U, Re and Mo as well as the necessary supporting parameters. Results from the profiles obtained at Buzzards Bay will serve to document the seasonal evolution of porewater concentrations and benthic fluxes as a function of bioturbation, bioirrigation and non-steady state O2 penetration into the sediments. Samples from the Washington margin region will be used to assess the influence of water depth, carbon flux and O2 bottom water concentrations on the burial of these redox sensitive metals. Results from this study will be incorporated into a steady-state sediment-pore water model to use the derived parameters to obtain realistic solid phase metal profiles doc23979 none MS- Denis Zorin Mathieu Desbrun Peter Schroder This is a collaborative project funded by the CARGO program under , , and . Accurate computational representations of complex geometry are of great importance in many disciplines ranging from engineering and manufacturing to medicine and biology. With the wide availability of powerful computational resources and ever better acquisition technologies such as 3D laser scanning and volumetric MRI or CAT imaging the geometries used in applications are becoming increasingly complex. One aspect of this complexity is topology, i.e., the presence of holes and tunnels and of a network of one and zero-dimensional surface features such as creases and spikes. Typical examples of topologically complex shapes are a perforated plate or the system of blood vessels of the body. Traditional representations of geometry are at worst weak and at best cumbersome and inefficient in representing such complex topologies. Modeling of macro- and microscopic biological structures is becoming increasingly important for medical research, training, and treatment support. Such structures often have extremely complex shape and topology (e.g., the blood vessel or the nervous system, facial muscles, a folded protein molecule). The representations and algorithms we develop will result in new efficient ways of manipulating and processing computer representations of such structures. In this project a team with expertise in numerical analysis, geometric modeling, discrete algorithms and computer graphics is studying ways to bring fundamental mathematical tools and highly efficient algorithms to bear on the challenge of creating efficient and accurate computational representations and algorithms for surfaces of complex topology. In particular we are investigating theory and practical algorithms for (I) removal of topological noise in existing models as well as in raw data used for surface reconstruction; (II) topology discovery in volumetric data sets; (III) construction of multiresolution representations of geometry which can meaningfully abstract fine level topology at coarser resolutions to enable powerful multiscale techniques for rendering, modification and simulation. Particular attention is paid to exploring measures of topological scale which are crucial to most of the algorithms being developed. The algorithms to be developed by the team will have immediate applications in two areas: Computer-Aided Design and Medical Visualization. In CAD, examples of potential applications include topology cleanup, simplification for integration of scanned 3D data with manually constructed models and use of multiscale representations for interactive conceptual design representations doc23980 none Jackie Smith Fletcher Winston SUNY at Stony Brook This Doctoral Dissertation Improvement project examines the tactics of two environmental social movement organizations-one that uses moderate tactics, and the other more radical modes of action. The goal is to understand these different approaches to collective action, and how relationships with government, businesses, and other nonprofit association might impact tactical decisions. The study has two components-participant observation of two environmental groups on Long Island, one using moderate and the other radical tactics. This will allow the PI to study how processes of interaction influence tactical choice. The second part of the project includes a mail survey of a representative sample of environmental groups to gather data on the types of relationships they hold. Findings from the project could potentially contribute to our knowledge of how social movement groups come to select tactics and the effect of relational ties on group mobilization doc23981 none This dissertation research project, Fighting Engineers: The U.S. Navy and Professional Mechanical Engineering, - , investigates nineteenth century Navy social hierarchy, engineering style, and engineers. Navy engineers were few in number before the Civil War, but the engineering corps expanded several fold during the war. Social conflict developed between combat and engineering officers, known throughout the second half of the century as the line-staff dispute. At stake was authority and prestige; line officers were unwilling to share either with shipboard engineers and fought against any encroachment on their traditional privileges. For their part, engineers rallied support in Congress, academia, and industry to gain the respect they felt they deserved. This dissertation connects to a broader historical theme: government sponsorship of technology, an American phenomenon that often has a military genesis. From to , the U.S. Navy created modern mechanical engineering at the Naval Academy. The formation of this new body of technical knowledge had dramatic and unforeseen multiplier effects for the nation. By century s end, Navy engineer veterans directed the largest industrial corporations in the country and taught at its finest universities. They were one critical but overlooked factor in nineteenth century American economic development. Funds for this project support research at the National Archives in Washington, D.C doc23982 none This dissertation investigates how the social ties created by students in university settings affect their values and are, in turn, affected by those changing values. 512 entering students were surveyed about their values using questions from the World Values Survey and the General Social Survey. Information about their social networks was also collected based on questions from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (AdHealth). Approximately 100 of these students were followed up with a more detailed e-survey about how networks are formed and change. A second wave of data collection will be undertaken to document changes in networks and values. These data will be supplemented by 30 in-depth interviews to explore the subjective aspects of network formation and change. Foreign students are a particular focus in these data since their values are expected to undergo the most change. The principal hypotheses specify a relationship between increased network diversity and changes towards more individualistic and relativistic norms, especially on topics such as gender and tolerance doc23983 none This award provides partial support for an interdisciplinary workshop to bring biologists, geologists, glaciologists and paleoclimatologists together to discuss the various scientific studies that could benefit from the development of a new, fast and mobile drilling technology for accessing the base of the polar ice sheets. Some of the scientific applications which have been mentioned which would be made possible by such technology include opening of access to subglacial lakes, detection of life in ancient ice, borehole paleothermometry, site selection for deep ice cores, logging of climate proxies with geophysical tools, ice rheology studies, investigation of basal conditions and their control on basal sliding, sampling of subglacial geology and geothermal heat flow measurements. This workshop will provide a forum for discussions with experts in ice drilling, conventional drilling and downhole sampling systems and will lead to the formulation recommendations to NSF for future directions in rapid access drilling technology. This workshop will contribute to research on sub-glacial lakes in Antarctica, such as Lake Vostok. Prior to the initiation of a research program to study the interrelationship among geologic history, glaciology and biology in sub-glacial lakes, it is necessary to make progress on sampling, measurement and contamination control technologies so that the Lake can be sampled in order to maintain sample integrity in an environmentally sound manner. This workshop will contribute to technology development that will have application to the study of subglacial lakes doc23938 none This proposal requests support to collect a series of high accumulation rate cores from the Indonesian region. Analyses of the cores will be used to document the nature of centennial-millennial variability in the Western Pacific Warm Pool and Indonesian throughflow. The field program will obtain a series of cores in depth transects beginning at about 200m water depth along the main route of the Indonesian throughflow including the Makassar Strait, Sulawesi Sea and Timor channels. The post cruise analytical program will focus on establishing a basic stratigraphic framework for selected cores using planktic foraminifer oxygen isotope measurements and AMS 14C dating. In addition surface sediment samples will be used for an initial temperature calibration study on shallow water benthic foraminifer Mg Ca doc23985 none This grant provides partial financial support for the 5th CIRP International Workshop on Modeling of Machining Operations to be held at Purdue University (West Lafayette, IN) on May 20-21, . The objective of the proposed workshop is to review the current state of the art and to promote modeling research aligned with industry needs. The workshop program covers three major areas: materials, processes, and performance. It is planned to have paper sessions, three breakout discussion sessions and a final analysis discussion session. The goal of the workshop is to identify existing and future research capabilities for modeling of machining operations. The NSF grant will be used for participation by young researchers faculty and graduate students and for producing a bound volume of workshop proceedings. The workshop participants will benefit from the paper sessions, focused breakout discussion sessions, and the final discussion. The industry viewpoint in all planned sessions will provide stimulus for initiating, broadening or redirecting current academic research. The workshop will provide deeper insights into contemporary research issues providing an opportunity for the exchange of research ideas leading to cooperative research. The analysis of the breakout session findings will set the direction for future research. A bound volume of the workshop proceedings containing presented papers from the workshop will be produced. Also, discussion summaries will be made available to all participants. The academic researchers will have an opportunity to bring the new knowledge into the classroom for teaching, labwork, and for dissemination through seminars, projects, etc. It is also planned to develop a website containing the proceedings of the workshop including a summary of the final discussion and conclusions. The list of participants (with their contact information) will also be included to facilitate networking and for the dissemination of new knowledge doc23934 none Owens Davis This collaborative project between Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Scripps Institution of Oceanography will demonstrate the feasibility of using an autonomous underwater glider to monitor the structure and strength of western boundary currents. During the first year of the proposed work the reliability of the glider will be demonstrated in a less severe environment. During the ensuing years, the complexity and duration of the glider missions will be increased as we begin deploying them to make transects between the New England continental shelf and Bermuda. The choice of the Gulf Stream as the initial boundary current to be investigated was made for obvious logistical reasons. The gliders will provide cross-sections of velocity, temperature and salinity between the surface and - m depths which will be available in real-time. These data will be combined to provide approximately monthly estimates of the relative and potential vorticity of the Gulf Stream and its fluxes of heat and salt. The broader impact of this research will be in providing a new autonomous oceanographic instrument platform and observational techniques that will, first of all, be applicable to all other western boundary current including those believed to be crucial for predicting climate variability. Beyond that this instrument will find application in coastal zone monitoring for pollution and living resources, for military surveillance and as a general tool for oceanographic observation doc23987 none There has been intensive research focused on the development of an electronic replacement for the ubiquitous UPC barcode. To replace consumer barcodes, ultra-low cost will be paramount. Organic-based circuits may enable this due to their low fabrication cost. In this work, the investigators will develop the technologies necessary for RFID barcode replacement systems, and will use these to demonstrate a major subcomponent of any REID system - the power harvesting subcircuit. Power for barcodes will be supplied by inductive coupling since battery integration is not feasible. To achieve the cost points required for UPC replacement, it is necessary to integrate this and other REID circuitry on existing packaging with little or no perturbation of the packaging process. Specifically, the elimination of the need for lithography, plasma etching, and vacuum evaporation is critical to ensuring adequately low cost. The investigators will use nanocrystal-based and organic-based materials and processes that they have developed to demonstrate high quality active (diodes and transistors) and passive (inductors, wires, and capacitors) components, and will assemble these to fabricate the first functional power-harvesting sub-circuit on plastic. The entire process will be performed at low cost using a custom inkjet printer, eliminating all lithographic and vacuum-based process steps. High-Q Spiral inductors will be fabricated using a novel low-temperature gold nanocrystal inkjetting technology that has been developed by the investigators. Parallel plate capacitors will be formed using nanocrystal electrodes and inkjetted polymer dielectrics. Schottky diodes will be developed using inkjetted gold and silver nanocrystals as the rectifying and ohmic contacts and inkjetted organic semiconductors as the active layer. Transistors will be fabricated by inkjet processing using an existing polythiophene-based process. Finally, the various components will be integrated to form a power-harvesting circuit. An undergraduate and a graduate student will be involved in this work. In particular, the mentoring of the undergraduate student will be emphasized through a series of tutorials and review programs. The results of this proposal will also be used in a University-sponsored highschool outreach program. This will increase the level of interest in science and engineering among local high-school students doc23988 none SIOSEIS is a software package used for enhancing and manipulating marine seismic reflection and refraction data on UNIX computers. As with all software, SIOSEIS must be enhanced and maintained as advances in computer technology and seismic imaging are made doc23989 none Cramer This award supports a twenty-four month Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral Fellowship for Benjamin Cramer. He will be collaborating with Professor Kunio Kaiho at Tohoku University in Japan. They will be undertaking research on Milankovitch and climate change in the Cretaceous and Paleogene period. This topic is a major focus of current research in paleoceanography. Most characterizations of long-term climate change in this time period rely on low-resolution records that are most likely compromised by aliasing of the underlying orbital cyclicity. In addition, high-resolution studies of climatic and biotic perturbations lack a context for evaluating how the climate response to insolation forcing may have changed during different events or how insolation forcing may have affected the structure of these events. The major objectives of the research are 1) to produce a Milankovitch stratigraphy for the Cenomanian-Turonian, Cretaceous-Tertiary, and Paleocene-Eocene transitions and 2) using this stratigraphy as a guide, to investigate climate changes on Milankovitch timescales in discreet intervals during these transitions. The researchers hope to produce a reliable Milankovitch-based stratigraphy that will greatly enhance studies of all three boundaries. Understanding the relationship between climate proxy records and orbital forcing is a crucial step in understanding Cretaceous and Paleogene greenhouse climates and will be useful in understanding isolated perturbations that affected those climates. This project will offer a good opportunity to join efforts between the two countries. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of the research on the web and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc23990 none Jeff Roberts of the University of Minnesota is supported by the Special Projects Office to organize a workshop for the RSEC (Research Sites for Educators in Chemistry) program. He is assisted by the PIs of the other for RSECs, who are Kelsey Cook (University of Tennessee), Tom McCarthy (University of Massachusetts - Amherst), and Paul Rillema (Wichita State University). This workshop will be held at NSF headquarters on 10-12 March, and will involve up to fifty participants. These participants include representatives from the existing RSECs, potential PIs for new RSEC proposals, resource people, and NSF personnel. The workshop has two interrelated goals, information exchange and assessment. The format for the workshop includes breakout sessions. A written report is to be drafted based on discussion in general and breakout sessions doc23991 none The current levels of mortality owing to fisheries are unlike anything in the long evolutionary history of exploited species and, therefore, that fisheries are a powerful ecological force. Understanding fishery effects as causes of perturbation offers important lessons about the ecological processes that regulate structure and function of pelagic ecosystems. The previous project, Apex Predators in Pelagic Ecosystems, focused on trophic interactions in the central north Pacific (CNP) ecosystem based on modeling analyses at three scales: bioenergetics of individual fish species, predator-prey interactions and ecosystem models. The ecological effects of long-line fisheries for tunas, billfishes and sharks has been a consistent theme in all three areas of model development. The major lessons were that: 1. Characterizing trophic ontogeny was a key component to building effective models for this system of strongly overlapping use of prey resources and intra-guild predation, and 2. Fisheries have become and continue as the main cause of change in trophic structure of the CNP. This project will support continuation and expansion of the first project. Dr. Kitchell and collaborators will develop models that can evaluate the role of fishery effects in food web dynamics, expand that to include interactions with large-scale environmental effects such as those due to ENSO, PDO, and or climate change dynamics and use the consequent models as a basis for evaluating resource management policies that can change ecosystem structure and function. Three major objectives will be pursued: Experimental Approach to Modeling. They have developed a model of trophic interactions and fishery effects for the central north Pacific (CNP) based, in part, on merging population-scale data with food web information and the history of fishery development. An ecological analogue exists in the central south Pacific (CSP) where fishery development occurred at a later time. The researchers will use the CNP approach to develop a CSP model, then conduct the equivalent of an independent, replicate analysis of the trophic changes owing to fishery development. Merging these models creates a single tool that allows evaluation of local effects expressed in a large-scale context. Characterizing fisheries as the equivalent of new predators allows an evaluation of .strong interactions in food webs and the complex feedback mechanisms that emerge from fishery effects. Modeling to Include Environmental Drivers. They will implement environmental forcing due to ENSO, PDO and or global change effects expressed in our models of the CNP, CSP and a similar model of the eastern tropical Pacific (ETP) developed through collaboration sponsored by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS). The investigators will use statistical approaches that evaluate anomalies in the population data as the basis for differentiating effects of the fisheries from those of the environmental forcing that alters primary production rates and its expression in production of higher trophic levels. Bycatch and Ecological Interactions. Major conservation issues revolve around bycatch of threatened or endangered turtles, birds, sharks and billfishes in these pelagic ecosystems. Dr, Kitchell and co-workers will use a scenarios approach to simulation of alternative management actions, the likely responses of changes in fishery exploitation processes, their consequent ecological changes and their socioeconomic consequences. The basic Ecosim model now includes the capacity to evaluate the latter using inputs of fish prices plus weighting for goals based on employment, conservation and or ecosystem management doc23992 none The Geologic Data Center at SIO has multibeam bathymetry data for 241 cruises on three vessels. These data have been locally archived and used to create custom data products for the MGG community. In the future, the intention is to make all these data available on line to the community and much of the cost for doing this is provided by other support (other NSF directorates and programs). Under this award, the PIs will clean up the existing data (systematically make appropriate corrections, edit bad data, make consistent file names, etc..), and migrate all the data to a common medium- a robotic digital tape library that will be under the control of the Storage Resource Broker, an archive management product of the San Diego Supercomputer Center doc23993 none Evaporation is a key link between the surface energy, carbon and water balances of Arctic tundra ecosystems. Because of the sensitivity of Arctic ecosystems to future change, understanding the links between changes in the surface energy, carbon and water balances are important for predicting the impacts of climate change on the global water, energy and carbon cycles. Given that the evaporation process is acutely non-linear, using time and space averaged inputs in evaporation models may potentially lead to significant errors. It is hypothesized that heterogeneity associated with permafrost dynamics, soil moisture, vegetation (vascular non-vascular) and the occurrence of free water bodies (lakes) leads to large uncertainties in model estimates of evaporation where time and area averaged inputs are used. This doctoral dissertation research project will investigate the significance of sub-grid spatial and temporal heterogeneity on modeled evaporation estimates at scales ranging from landscape (1 km2) to regions (100 km2) in Arctic Coastal Plain ecosystems. The significance of these effects will be examined within the framework of the BIOME-BGC model adapted to Arctic ecosystems. BIOME-BGC is a widely used ecophysiological process model designed to compute water, carbon and nutrient fluxes at a variety of scales. Data for model inputs, calibration, and validation will be derived from a combination of eddy flux tower, eddy flux aircraft, field, and satellite remotely sensed data. A field based, high resolution, geographic information system map will be developed at each eddy flux tower locations for improving representations of vegetation and soil moisture in model estimates of evaporative fluxes. While improving our understandings of the controls over the evaporation process in Arctic coastal plain ecosystems, this research provides the foundation for adapting a regional model of the energy, carbon, and water cycles to Arctic ecosystems. Arctic ecosystems are of particular importance to global climate change studies due to their sensitivity to temperature change and potential positive feedbacks that may amplify warming across the globe. This study seeks to integrate and synthesize knowledge of evaporation (a key component of the climate system) at multiple scales in order to improve model predictions in Arctic ecosystems. Additionally, this research is expected to increase our knowledge of the complex interactions among the atmosphere, soils, biota, and permafrost in Arctic ecosystems. Finally, results from this study may be used as a basis for developing and implementing a complete carbon, water, and nitrogen model for improving our understanding of the affects of climate change in Arctic tundra regions. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc23994 none Photosynthetic fixation of CO2 in the oceans accounts for approximately half of total primary production. A significant component of this primary production is due to the growth of oceanic cyanobacteria, such as the diazotroph Trichodesmium. For example, in the tropical and subtropical North Atlantic, Trichodesmium spp. are thought to be the most significant primary producers. Additionally, in this region Trichodesmium introduces the largest fraction of new nitrogen to the euphotic zone (~30mg N m2 day), a value that exceeds the estimated flux of nitrate across the thermocline. Although there are many biogeochemical factors that may impact Trichodesmium productivity and N2 fixation (e.g. nutrients, light, temperature), recent studies have emphasized the critical importance of P and Fe bioavailability. To increase our understanding of how the bioavailability of these elements may constrain primary production and N2 fixation, these PIs developed specific molecular diagnostics for Fe and P limitation in Trichodesmium. The PIs have determined that axenic cultures of P-stressed Trichodesmium colonies induce the enzyme PhoA and Fe-stressed colonies express the protein IdiA. The PIs have also demonstrated that they can detect PhoA activity and IdiA expression in field populations. In this project, laboratory studies will be used to determine how these diagnostics correlate with decreases in both Trichodesmium productivity and N2 fixation. This work will result in the development and application of two well-tested molecular diagnostics for determining if P, Fe, or both, limit Trichodesmium C and N2 fixation. The assay for species-specific PhoA activity, called Enzyme Labeled Fluorescence, utilizes commercially available reagents, and as with IdiA heterologously-expressed in Escherichia coli, the PIs will provide the IdiA protein or antiserum to others. The impact of this research will be tools that can be used by investigators to quickly and easily identify P and Fe limitation in Trichodesmium species from any environment doc23995 none The plurality of science in China is a large unexplored topic in the world history of science. Rather than a single narrative of traditional science, the issue calls for a new framework that acknowledges that many modes for understanding nature coexisted in pre-modern China. Most of these survived modernization and nation-building in the early twentieth century. This dissertation research project will examine the plurality of science in China, analyzing the relationship between science and popular culture from the seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries. The approach of this doctoral dissertation subordinates the investigation of elite intellectual traditions that has so far dominated the historiography of Chinese science. Historians such as Margaret Jacob and Larry Stewart have examined the transformation of European culture through the popularization of science in the eighteenth century; it is time to study Chinese counterparts. This study will add new perspectives to themes familiar to historians of western science such as the professionalization of scientists and the relationship between science and the nation-state, avoiding the one-dimensional approach. The relationship between science and popular culture offers a key framework not only for understanding the plurality of science in traditional China, but for showing in what ways its evolution differed from that of the European technical enterprise. That will make it possible to avoid conventionally exaggerating the very limited impact of small groups of reformist scientists and traditional doctors on Chinese culture. Popular understandings of nature, intermixed with elite intellectual traditions, pervaded every aspect of Chinese society from the imperial court to the peasant village. Despite the great diversity of customs and language within China, everyone shared an understanding of gods, ghosts, and spirits as intermediaries between man and the cosmos. The spiritual world affected the practice of science and medicine and, through state sacrifices and local rituals, organized craft production. The natural world served as a stage for social interactions that created and applied modes for rational understanding. This study will examine the diversity and flexibility of these human relations, and their underlying conceptions of the natural world, in the areas of craft production and healing. Studies so far indicate that attention to scholarly discourse, local and supra-local community relations, and state appropriation or suppression of popular religious practices will cast light on science, technology, and medicine as Chinese actually practiced them. This proposal requests $12,000 to be used over twelve months for travel to the archives in China and Taiwan doc23996 none Meese This proposal is being jointly funded by the Arctic Natural Sciences Program, Antarctic Glaciology Program, and the Paleoclimate Program in the Division of Atmospheric Sciences. The Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) depth-age scale is accurate within one per cent on an annual basis through the Holocene and into the Wisconsin and therefore has been of great interest to the paleoclimate community. Researchers have used, and want continue to use our most valuable paleoclimate archives, the GISP2 and the Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP) ice cores, to calibrate chronologies from other materials. Because the GRIP core was drilled simultaneously and in close proximity (30 km) to the GISP2 core, comparison between the two cores was expected to be similar. However, there are segments of the cores where there is sufficient variability and the chronologies have been questioned. This has caused confusion within the ice coring and the paleoclimate communities. An example of these errors can be seen in the Antarctic Siple Dome core. Like the GISP2 chronology, the Siple Dome chronology is based on annual layer counts, but the gas age chronology deeper in the core is based on correlations with the GISP2 record perpetuating the errors that exist in the GISP2 chronology. It is critical that the GISP2 chronology be reexamined and any discrepancies be resolved, if possible. The Principal Investigator will: 1) use new volcanic records obtained since the completion of the original GISP2 depth-age as additional tie points for greater calibration; 2) revise the Holocene portion of the GISP2 depth-age scale based on the new Berylium-10 and Carbon-14 results; and 3) revisit areas of the depth-age scale where discrepancies exist between the GISP2 and GRIP ice cores based on a recent publication. Revision of the GISP2 depth-age scale will be accomplished by reexamining areas of the core that have been identified to be in error by new data that have come available since the completion of the original GISP2 chronology. Additionally, areas of the core where the GISP2 and GRIP chronologies vary will be reexamined. The goal in the cases where discrepancies exist with the GRIP record is not to adjust the GISP2 chronology, but to identify any errors that are now evident due to new data and make adjustments as necessary to obtain the best possible GISP2 chronology doc23997 none Aerobic anoxygenic photoheterotrophs (AAPs), and their characteristic pigment, bacteriochloropyll a (BChla), were recently discovered throughout the surface waters of the open ocean (Kolber, ; Kolber, ). AAPs comprise upwards of about 11 % of the total microbial community, they are globally distributed in the euphotic zone, and display high levels of photosynthetic activity. More than twenty isolates have been obtained from different ocean basins. These organisms are facultative photoheterotrophs, and represent a potentially significant, but hitherto unrecognized component of the marine microbial community. Their potential role in the ecology of the upper ocean is determined by their contribution to the energy and carbon fluxes, and by their interactions with other components of marine ecosystems. To elucidate this role, this project is investigating mechanisms of photosynthesis, carbon fixation, and respiration in AAPs, to identify factors controlling expression of phototrophy vs. heterotrophy, and to estimate the extent of AAP-specific energy, carbon, and redox under varying environmental conditions. AAPs are readily cultivated on organic-poor media. The investigators are establishing a library of the open ocean isolates, and characterizing the phylogenetic relationship between AAPs from different geographical regions. AAPs use photosynthesis to produce ATP and to fix CO2. The investigators are characterizing the photosynthetic properties of AAPs, evaluating the effect of light on their carbon metabolism, and investigating the effect of photosynthesis on the incorporation of dissolved organic material (DOM). Where DOM is abundant, AAPs perform mostly heterotrophic metabolism, respiring the available organic carbon. When DOM is limited, AAPs synthesize photosynthetic pigments and reaction centers, shifting their metabolism toward phototrophy. The investigators are assessing the extent and the factors controlling these transitions. Unable to oxidize water, AAPs rely on other substrates to serve as electron donor(s). Although most of the photosynthetic electron transport in AAPs is cyclic, external electron donors are necessary to replenish the electrons lost to photosynthetic carbon fixation, or to external electron acceptors. The researchers are investigating which of the organic inorganic reductants present in the upper ocean serve as potential electron donors to AAPs, and explore the AAP-mediated redox reactions, with particular emphasis on oxidation of the reduced sulfur species, and reduction of iron and nitrogen species. Phototrophy alleviates AAPs dependence on the organic carbon, reducing the rates of carbon remineralization in the upper ocean, thus affecting the extent of new production. If effective in reducing iron and nitrogen species, AAPs will also affect the physiology of oxygenic phototrophs. By addressing these questions, this project is providing the most basic knowledge regarding the potential role of AAPs in the upper ocean ecology doc23998 none Taking advantage of existing cruise opportunities to take place in the Eastern Tropical North Pacific, off the coast of Mexico, a number of field analytical measurements and laboratory investigations are proposed to further research into iron bioavailability and marine iron ligand chemistry. Dominant phytoplankton communities in this region, Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus, are to be studied in the context of a layered euphotic zone overlying a suboxic zone presenting distinct sub-environments having strong chemical gradients in nutrient, trace metal, oxygen and light regimes. Activities such as trace metal sampling, on-deck incubations using competitive ligand binding voltammetric techniques, deliberate iron amendment and natural ligand photochemical decomposition studies will be studied in a mechanistic and process study manner. The anticipated outcome of these investigations is increased understanding of the biogeochemistry, speciation and cycling of dissolved iron, a trace element often thought to be limiting to phytoplankton growth, in the ocean doc23999 none Science : Under this award, the PIs propose to study oxygen and hydrogen isotopes in samples from the deepest one km. of core from ODP site 735B on Atlantis Bank, the deepest penetration of seafloor gabbros in existence. The PIs will also analyze strontium isotopes in vein minerals and whole rocks to complement the stable isotope measurements. The purpose of these analyses is to determine whether the bulk gabbro section is depleted in 18O, as expected in models in which seawater d18O is buffered by hydrothermal activity, or whether instead the bulk gabbro is enriched in 18O as it is in some inferred slow-spreading ophiolites. A final possibility is that the signal of seawater interaction diminishes with depth in the crust as observed in the Troodos ophiolite and it is this particular hypothesis that the PIs will try to test. The bulk d18O values will have implications for mantle effects after subduction of 735B-like materials. A second important objective is to determine to what extent seawater was involved in high temperature deformation zones in the 735B gabbros, and whether late stage magmatic fluids (oxide-rich and or silica-rich) were also involved in the deformation. In addition, the PIs will evaluate the extent to which brittle faults served as major conduits for fluids. This part of the study has important implications for fluid pathways into the deep ocean crust. A final objective of the study is to measure the d18O, D H, and strontium isotope values of secondary mineral veins and felsic veins in the lower one km of the core. This is important because these veins affect the bulk composition of the section, and also because the veins document the interaction between the lower crust and circulating seawater and late magmatic fluids doc24000 none The objectives of this doctoral dissertation research project are to reconstruct the climate, vegetation, and fire history in the northern Great Basin from an examination of fossil pollen and charcoal records contained in lake-sediment cores. The Great Basin is a region of diverse topography, vegetation, and climate, and as such it provides an excellent opportunity to study the response of ecosystems to a wide array of environmental changes in the past. By focusing on three lake sites at different elevations, this study will (1) elucidate the response of vegetation and fire regimes to changes in effective moisture, temperature, and other bioclimatic variables; (2) reconstruct the biogeographic history of important conifer species growing at different elevations; and (3) apply modern pollen-climate relations in western North America to identify the magnitude of past climate and vegetation changes. Past changes in vegetation will be determined by changes in the relative and absolute abundances of pollen types in stratigraphic records. The presence of plant macrofossils in the cores will help confirm species identifications in cases where the pollen cannot. Variations in past fire activity will be inferred from changes in the rates of macroscopic charcoal accumulation in contiguous samples. Interpretation of the fossil pollen data in terms of past climate and vegetation will be based on the quantitative relationship between modern pollen data and present-day climate information. The chronology of environmental changes will be developed from a series of radiocarbon dates and lead-210 dates, as well as the age of known tephra layers. The products of this study will be a better understanding of Holocene forest development at different elevations in the northern Great Basin, and information on the role of fire and climate in the ecological history. The results of this research will contribute to a better understanding of (1) the effects of global climate change, past and present, on regional vegetation patterns and fire regimes in the Great Basin; (2) modern pollen-climate relations and their use in the reconstruction of past climates; and (3) the environmental controls on human activities in the northern Great Basin during the Holocene. Since , the western U.S. has experienced a number of large, stand-replacing fires. In the year over 8 million acres burned in the U.S., and in the first six months of there have been ~2.5 million acres consumed by wildland fires. Many of these fires may be attributable to anomalously dry conditions throughout the west. Heightened fire activity is predicted in models of future climate change, and the best analogue for these conditions may be past periods when the climate was warmer- and drier-than-present. By understanding the linkages between climate, vegetation, and fire in the past, recent fire events can be placed within a context of natural variations occurring on decadal-to-millennial time scales. Information on the natural range of variability will help land-use managers in the United States develop strategies that consider forest sensitivity to climate change and disturbance regimes. The use of modern pollen and climate analogues will improve our ability to reconstruct past climate conditions from fossil pollen records. Pollen data are the primary terrestrial database used to reconstruct past climate, so this refinement is an important contribution to paleoclimatology and geography. Finally, this study will contribute to archeology by providing an environmental backdrop for cultural changes in the Great Basin. Periods of drought, for example, seem to be associated with changes in subsistence patterns in this region. This research will help to clarify these relationships. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc24001 none Research and development activities, innovations, subsequent technological changes, and spillovers are important factors that influence economic development. New growth theory emphasizes the role of technology spillovers and subsequent scale effects, which lead to increasing returns to scale and long-term growth. Research and development may not be a sufficient condition for regional growth, however. Although research and development has been considered the most important factor contributing to technological progress and hence productivity increase through spillover effects, when it comes to regional economies, research and development itself does not automatically guarantee technology spillovers within regions, which would eventually drive regional economic growth. For example, a new innovation introduced in California can be picked up and implemented in North Carolina, and vice versa. What may be more important to regional economies is the degree to which externalities created by innovative activities are localized within geographical boundaries. Strong evidence has been presented in the scholarly literature that research and development activities and consequent new innovations are the source of productivity growth. Evidence also has mounted that technology spillovers, which lie at the center of this mechanism, often are localized. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine technological and regional attributes that influence the geographic localization of technology spillovers. The study mainly focuses on what kinds of technological and regional attributes affect the degree to which technology spillovers are localized and how much. The study will use U.S. Patent and Trademark Office patent citation data and county business pattern data and will apply simultaneous equation modeling techniques to explain the relative importance of technological and regional attributes to the localization of technology spillovers. This project will help fill gaps in the literature on spillovers and regional economic development. So far, a major interest of many researchers has been to show that technological innovations often spill over space and that such localized technology spillovers affect the productivity level in a region. Relatively few considerations have been given to the influence of technological and regional attributes on geographical technology spillover patterns. The project also will provide guidance for future science and technology policy development. State and local governments can design policy instruments that specifically aim to promote important regional attributes influencing geographical technology spillover patterns. More efficient allocation of resources may result if it is known how technological attributes influence the localization of spillovers. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc23962 none The goal of this collaborative proposal is to increase the number of high achieving, but financially challenged, students graduating with a four-year degree in computer science, engineering, or mathematics. The approach is to create a formal link between the University of Texas at Arlington and two local community colleges (Tarrant County College-Southeast Campus and Mountain View College) to tap a rich pool of academically talented students who lack the financial resources to complete their studies on a full-time basis. First generation students, in particular, tend to fall into this category, and they often lack the visibility or knowledge to seek needed resources and career guidance effectively. Many of these students begin their higher education at community colleges, while working full- or part-time. Lack of funds negatively affects the retention rate of this group, thus shortchanging the technical workforce of much-needed potential talent. Therefore, UTA and its CC partners formed a CSEMS collaborative partnership that could have a tremendous impact on the Dallas Fort Worth (DFW) technical workforce. Eighty-nine scholarships are awarded annually with priority given to eligible first generation students. The objectives to support the goal include establishing a structured pipeline from the CCs to UTA; developing retention strategies and adapting existing academic support resources to target this pool of students in CSEM disciplines; formalizing an optional research component or industry internship experience to the Scholars degree plan; and developing CSEM specific programs to prepare the students for professional experiences beyond graduation. Faculty and industry mentors are available, and a Peer Bridge Group of CC alumni, who are now attending UTA, assist CC students through the transfer process. A formal CSEM Articulation Agreement was developed to create seamless curricula and concurrent enrollment opportunities in these fields by which to transition CC students to UTA. This collaborative encompasses a significant portion of North Texas, and it builds capacity and critical mass for the technical workforce in this leading high tech region doc24003 none Extreme climate variations, such as droughts and floods, have broad social and economic consequences for agriculture and water resources. A major challenge to climate researchers, however, are to effectively formulate and present depictions of climate change. The objectives of this doctoral dissertation research project are to develop a conceptual model of the controls of North American climate on multiple spatial and temporal scales and to illustrate this model using animated cartographic methods. Specifically, this project is designed to provide a general process-based description of daily and month-to-month variations of atmospheric circulation that contribute to surface climate anomalies such as drought. This study will also describe the influence that such phenomena like El Nino have on year-to-year variations of North American climate. Data for this project are provided through the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) 50-year Reanalysis Project. These data sources, which contain meteorological fields, many not directly observable, can be used for analyzing the spatial and temporal variability of the climate system. The long-term averages of each variable provide information about the broad-scale climate variations through the seasonal cycle. Composite-anomaly patterns show relationships between large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns and surface climate responses. Cartographic animations using these data incorporate time progression into analyses of climate variability, thus providing an opportunity to visualize the build-up and demise of anomalous events such as droughts and floods. Results from this project will provide a greater understanding of the processes involved in climate variability in North America and how those processes vary through time and space. This research will show the surface and atmospheric climate processes that control extreme events like drought in the modern climate record in order to help understand what has driven past climate change. The project also will provide tools for predicting the impact of drought in future climates. The process-based approach taken in this project will contribute to understanding of the mechanisms and feedbacks that cause climate variability on multiple spatial scales (e.g., regional to continental) and temporal scales (e.g., daily to yearly). In addition, this research will enhance the field of cartography through the application of animations for both data exploration and communication of results. Animations created from this research will be made available via the internet to researchers, educators and the general public for use as teaching and resource tools. Such products provide a link between research in the lab and learning in the classroom. In K-12 education, for example, teachers will be able to use the web-based materials created for this project to help develop their own student-centered learning activities. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc24004 none This Advanced Training Institute in Social Psychology will offer workshops for training social psychologists in the use the Social Relations Model (SRM), which is used to study individual, dyadic, and group phenomena. The SRM is a methodological tool for the study of social behavior that holds great promise for new understanding of phenomena that have interested social psychologists (e.g., interpersonal and inter-group processes) and as a heuristic device that directs attention to new phenomena (e.g., dyadic uniqueness in behavior). Although the SRM has been used in over 110 published studies, the technical details of the model and the software used for estimation are not well known by social psychologists. The training institute will provide a venue where social psychologists can quickly learn the essentials of social relations modeling from a team of expert investigators and instructors. Participants will receive training in the theoretical, statistical, and practical application of the model in a broad array of research contexts, and will have the opportunity to analyze their own data or data provided from the SRM data archive at the University of Connecticut. This unique combination of outstanding facilities, a highly experienced training staff, and access to the SRM data archive on-site offers great potential for dissemination of the SRM methodology to social psychologists doc24005 none A PI from the University of Alaska plans to measure concentrations of Fe and Fe-binding ligands in the soluble ( 0.02 um) and the colloidal phase (0.02-0.4 um) of surface waters from the BATS and HOT regions to understand the chemical and physical speciation of Fe. Samples will be separated into the soluble and colloidal phase using a new microfiltration technique developed by the PI. Iron concentrations will be measured by an isotope dilution-high resolution inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry microanalytical method. The thermodynamic stability constants and kinetic rate constants of Fe-complexing natural ligands in the soluble and colloidal phases will be determined by the competitive ligand equilibration cathodic stripping voltammetric method. The PI also plans to assess the spatial and temporal variability of these parameters at these two sites. Results from this study will provide useful constraints for models to determine the biological availability of soluble and colloidal Fe, the fate of Fe from dust inputs to the surface ocean and the Fe limitation on nitrogen fixation doc24006 none SGER: Rethinking Technology After September 11 Rosalind Williams, MIT This SGER award supports a small conference at MIT, where a small group of scholars gathered to discuss the implications for research, education, and public engagement among historians and social scientists in technology studies following the destructive events of September 11, , and their aftermath. Participants discussed the following four questions: 1. What knowledge and perspective do historians and social scientists have to offer to scholarly and public understanding of those events? 2. What do those events suggest in the way of new agendas, priorities, and directions for research in these fields? 3. What do those events suggest in the way of new agendas, priorities, and directions for education in these fields? 4. What do those events suggest in the way of new forms of political and social engagement for practitioners and organizations in these fields? The primary outcome of the meeting is several sessions and workshops at the annual meetings of the major scholarly organizations in the field: the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) in October (Toronto), and the joint meeting of SHOT and the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S) in Atlanta in October . In addtiion, a weekly seminar is to be held at MIT, in conjunction with the Knight Science Journalism Program and the new Science Writing degree program at MIT, on Current Events in Science and Technology. Also the workshop is to be highlightedin the newsletter for the Society of the History of Technology and newsletters of several other scholarly societies in order to stimulate thinking about the subject among as wide an audience as possible. John Krige, Editor of the journal History and Technology has offered to publish a summary of the workshop and any papers that are produced as a result of our discussions doc24007 none Garzione The purpose of this SGER award is to assess the potential for using the 18 O values of carbonates deposited on the Bolivian Altiplano as a paleoaltimeter. The 18 O paleoaltimetric technique relies on an understanding of the changes in the 18 O values of meteoric water vs. altitude in the region of study and has been used successfully in the Himalaya. The PI s would like to extend the use of this technique to the diverse climatic regimes across the Bolivian Andes and Altiplano. Additionally, a cosmogenic paleoaltimeter is theoretically feasible, and this project seeks the funds to the lay the groundwork for development of a new geologic paleoaltimeter. If successful, the information gained by this project will allow an independent calculation of paleoelevation that can be compared with existing paleobotanical, geomorphologic, and structural estimates. The exploratory nature of this project and the potential impacts of 1) quantitatively calculating Altiplano paleoelevation and 2) assessing a new paleoaltimetric technique makes this work highly appropriate for SGER funding. The broader impacts of this proposal are to better establish the use of oxygen isotopes in studies of paleoelevation and to test a new cosmogenic method for paleoelevation determination. Both of these techniques will be broadly applicable to other modern and ancient orogenic systems doc24008 none Albert In the past few years there has been an explosion of scientific interest in the chemical processing occurring in sunlit snow. Rather than simply acting as a passive sink for the products of tropospheric reactions, the snowpack has been shown to be one of the most photochemically active, and strongly oxidizing, regions of the entire troposphere. The group of investigators assembled for this proposal has played a central role in this revolution in our thinking about the role of the snowpack in atmospheric chemistry. One key finding has been that photolysis of snow chromophores initiates the release of a number of important trace gases. Initial modeling suggests that photolysis of a number of these gases (HCHO, HOOH, CH3CHO and HONO) results in an enormous production of HOx (i.e., OH and HO2), which in turn causes a large enhancement of these radicals in the snowpack and in the air just above the snow. Because oxidation by OH is the main sink for many tropospheric gases, including some of those important for climate change and stratospheric O3 depletion, this enhancement in HOx might significantly perturb tropospheric chemistry. Snowpack chemistry likely also modifies the chemical records of atmospheric composition ultimately preserved in glacial ice. While recent work has shown that photochemical and physical processes in the snowpack can impact the chemistry and composition of both the atmosphere and snowpack, these processes are, in general, poorly understood. This is especially true for the processes that produce and consume OH and HO2. The research will elucidate the processes that produce and consume OH and HO2 radicals within and above sunlit snow over a wide range of environmental conditions, thereby improving our understanding of fast photochemistry within this unique environment doc23976 none Interactions of Meddies with Seamounts Georgi Sutyrin URI William Dewar FSU This study will address the dynamics and transport properties of self-propagating, baroclinic-eddies in the presence of topography. Eddies of Mediterranean origin (Meddies) are examples of these features. The dynamical impact of vortex property transport and propagation of seamount-Meddy collisions have been observed buy are poorly understood. Numerical models will be used to examine the following related topics: topographic effects on Meddy transport, topographic influences on Meddy propagation, mean flow generation on topography by Meddies and consequent feedbacks. These studies are pertinent to the question of how to parameterize tracer transport in large-scale models doc24010 none Huey In the past few years there has been an explosion of scientific interest in the chemical processing occurring in sunlit snow. Rather than simply acting as a passive sink for the products of tropospheric reactions, the snowpack has been shown to be one of the most photochemically active, and strongly oxidizing, regions of the entire troposphere. The group of investigators assembled for this proposal has played a central role in this revolution in our thinking about the role of the snowpack in atmospheric chemistry. One key finding has been that photolysis of snow chromophores initiates the release of a number of important trace gases. Initial modeling suggests that photolysis of a number of these gases (HCHO, HOOH, CH3CHO and HONO) results in an enormous production of HOx (i.e., OH and HO2), which in turn causes a large enhancement of these radicals in the snowpack and in the air just above the snow. Because oxidation by OH is the main sink for many tropospheric gases, including some of those important for climate change and stratospheric O3 depletion, this enhancement in HOx might significantly perturb tropospheric chemistry. Snowpack chemistry likely also modifies the chemical records of atmospheric composition ultimately preserved in glacial ice. While recent work has shown that photochemical and physical processes in the snowpack can impact the chemistry and composition of both the atmosphere and snowpack, these processes are, in general, poorly understood. This is especially true for the processes that produce and consume OH and HO2. The research will elucidate the processes that produce and consume OH and HO2 radicals within and above sunlit snow over a wide range of environmental conditions, thereby improving our understanding of fast photochemistry within this unique environment doc23689 none Small-scale flow dynamics at low Reynolds numbers (Re) are important to phytoplankton cells in delivery of nutrients, sensory detection by and physical encounter with herbivores, accumulation of bacterial populations in the phycosphere or region immediately surrounding phytoplankton cells and coagulation of cells themselves as a mechanism terminating blooms. In nature most phytoplankton experience unsteady flows, i.e., velocities near the cells that vary with time due to the intermittency of turbulence and to discontinuous, spatially distributed pumping by herbivores. This unsteadiness has not previously been taken into account in models or measurements with plankton. Moreover, there have been decade- and century- long lags in moving relevant models of unsteady flow effects at low Re from applied mathematics and engineering to ecological applications. Engineering models show unsteady effects due to the history of formation of spatially extensive flow perturbations or wakes should be important to unsteady motions of moderately small biota. This project will address these affects. Non-swimming phytoplankton, and in particular diatoms, will be used as the simplest case where important unsteady flow behaviors should arise. This research activity will include a multi-level educational program, aimed at graduate research assistants, undergraduate research interns, undergraduate marine sciences majors and high-school teachers. Low-Re behaviors afford unusual opportunities to experience how mathematics, physics and biology inseparably catalyze understanding of phenomena that run counter to intuition. This activity will also include international collaborations with world experts on organism-flow interaction in Cambridge (T.J. Pedley) and Copenhagen (T. Kiorboe & A.W. Visser). The overall goals of the activity are to accelerate the flow of understanding from modelers to measurers to users of the information and back again. Educational materials that project U.S. national standards will be developed during intensive summer workshops with the high-school teachers and be made available on the web. Unsteady flow effects on phytoplankton will be predicted with explicit models based on singularity solutions (that involve the useful simplification that force is applied to the fluid at a small number of points) and mathematical models that include both the near field at low Re and the far field over a range of Re, both representative of nature. Singularity solutions allow explicit treatment of the role of complex cell shapes. Scaled-up analog models will be placed in a large Couette vessel to better visualize behaviors for both the research and teaching efforts. Natural-scale, but simplified, unsteady flows will be produced in smaller Couettes (nested, counter-rotating cylinders with seawater in the gap between the two cylinders) containing live phytoplankton and will be quantified by magnifying, particle-imaging velocimetry (PIV). Image analysis will be used to measure translation, rotation and flexural deformation of the phytoplankton. These studies will test various hypotheses derived from the general thesis that cell shapes and mechanical properties interact with unsteady flows to produce potentially fitness-enhancing, relative motions of the cell or chain and its surrounding fluids. A basic hypothesis is that unsteady fluid motion will interact with bending of cells to produce relative motion of fluid and phytoplankter. A very exciting prospect is that periodic instabilities known to arise at low Re may allow flexible organisms to act as self-organizing engines - through elasticity to harness energy from decaying turbulence and thereby move relative to the fluid. It is also expected that this study of passively bending structures in unsteady flows will help to understand the use of flexible appendages in swimming. The work is likely to aid significantly in associating functions with the shapes and spines of microplankton that are used in the identification of fossil specimens. By including relevant, unsteady fluid motions at low Re, the study will also provide firmer linkages between form and function in living plankton in the size range from 10 - mm that many large phytoplankton, invertebrate and fish larvae and other small zooplankton occupy doc24012 none Watts The overall goal of the Kuroshio Extension System Study (KESS) is to identify and quantify the dynamic and thermodynamic processes governing the variability of and the interaction between the Kuroshio Extension and the recirculation gyre. Investigators from three US institutions will deploy a state-of-the-art array consisting of moored-profiler and current-meter moorings and inverted echo sounders equipped with near-bottom pressure and current sensors. Profiling floats will monitor the temperature and salinity structure in the recirculation gyre south of the Kuroshio Extension. The KESS array is designed to use these tools synergistically to observe the Kuroshio Extension in a more complete way than any one of them could do alone. In particular, the Inverted Echo Sounders will map features of the jet as they evolve and, in combination with the Moored Profilers, will quantify the cross-frontal fluxes, while the profiling floats will monitor the upper ocean structure around the Kuroshio Extension and its recirculation gyres. KESS will use these combined observations to identify and quantify the dynamic and thermodynamic processes governing the variability of, and the interaction between, the Kuroshio Extension and the recirculation gyre. The proposed approach makes extensive use of satellite data (surface temperature and sea-surface height). The investigators will also collaborate closely with Japanese scientists studying the overall Kuroshio system. The measurements from the KESS array will guide future planning for a long term observational program as part of CLIVAR doc24013 none Award is for a seismic stratigraphic mapping and piston coring project to determine the age, configuration and paleoceanographic significance of the sedimentary sequences on J Anomaly Ridge and Southeast Newfoundland Ridge. These ridges are ideally located to record any evidence for strong boundary currents dating to the early Paleogene. Existing data show that the ridge system is draped by sedimentary sequences that record development of the boundary current during the Oligocene and Neogene, and suggest that deposition of Paleocene-Eocene sequences may have also been influenced by currents. If strong Deep Western Boundary Current or related northward flow occurred in the North Atlantic prior to the onset of extensive Antarctic glaciation in the early Oligocene, it likely affected deposition of sediment on the J Anomaly Ridge and Southeast Newfoundland Ridge. The seismic stratigraphic mapping and piston coring will test the hypothesis that the sediment sequences deposited on these ridges record strong overturning circulation in the North Atlantic prior to the onset of Antarctic glaciation doc24014 none PI(s): Timothy Dowd Maureen Blyler Emory University This Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant proposes to take a more holistic approach to the examination of the emergence of new cultural product markets by examining the role of cultural, structural and economic factors. Past sociological research has detailed the role of culture, social structure, and the state and public policy in the emergence of markets. However, much of this work focuses on production factors associated with markets emergence and generally highlights the social construction of markets. The PIs suggest that markets are more driven by demand-side factors than factors of production. This project will investigate how advertisers, consumers, and producers contributed to the emergence and accommodation of a new consumer specialty magazine market within that particular market sector. The investigators argue that to truly understand markets, we must understand not only how markets are created and persist, but also how they are enabled by factors that are not exclusively social or economic. Recent archival data and a content analysis of major U.S. newspapers and magazines will be used to examine how the new economy magazine market emerged and was legitimized by advertisers, consumers and producers doc24015 none Investigation of the chemical structures of the uncharacterized fraction of marine dissolved organic matter remains an elusive goal for marine organic chemists. An approach to be used in this work is to directly address supramolecular size scales of marine organic matter structures by assessing their microheterogeneity on micro to nanoscales. Using Scanning Transmission X-ray Microscopy (STXM), a technique that allows the registration of Near Edge X-ray Absorption Fine Structure (NEXAFS) spectra, will allow the quantification of the relative abundance of different functional groups and element bonding types. This spatial mapping of the chemistry of macromolecular assemblages at scales intermediate between bulk chemical analysis and analysis individual molecules or molecular classes offers the capabilities of a important new analytical tool to marine chemistry. In a survey mode, a range of organic materials collected and contributed by several researchers from different parts of the world s oceans will be examined using these techniques. This approach will be extended with additional samples of collected sediment and suspended (trapped) particulates. Laboratory experiments using whole phytoplankton and bacterial cultures will be used to provide materials appropriate to the earlier stages of organic matter diagenesis doc24016 none Recent studies with highly sensitive CCD camera systems deployed from the submersible ALVIN have revealed light being emitted from hydrothermal fluids venting at the ocean floor. In general, these studies reveal photon fluxes from the vent fluids in excess of those predicted from simple blackbody radiation, suggesting a number of in-situ light-generating processes. In particular, chemiluminescence (emission of light that accompanies chemical reactions), sonoluminescence (light emitted by vapor bubble implosion or cavitation), or crystalloluminescence (emission of light accompanying onset of mineral precipitation) are thought to be the mose likely processes to account for this. This investigation is designed to assess unambiguously the intensity and spectral characteristics of light generated by chemical reactions, vapor generation, effects and crystallization processes at temperatures and pressures applicable to marine hydrothermal systems. Under this award, the PIs will use a series of computer controlled Ti-flow reactors, modified to contain optical windows, fiber optic cables, spectrometer, and CCD detector that will allow the intensity and spectral variability of light to be measured and monitored. The experiments will be designed to specifically assess the role of chemiluminescence, sonoluminescence and crystalloluminescnce on light generation for an appropriate range of temperatures, pressures, compositional effects, and fluid flow rates. The experiments will include a number of in-situ chemical sensors developed at to better constrain the distribution of aqueous species during the experiments, while simultaneously linking these data to spectral observations doc24017 none Understanding the causes and manifestations of biological variability over long time scales remains a critical and elusive goal for ecosystem ecology. In the Northeast Pacific, long-term variation in atmosphere-ocean coupling appears to have organized biological production into a series of distinct interdecadal regimes during the last century. For instance, up to three-fold changes in salmon fishery catches in the Alaska Current were coindicent with shifts between interdecadal climate regimes. Despite this enormous temporal variability in fish population dynamics, we have only a weak understanding of the long-term climatic drivers that control biological productivity in this vast and important ecosystem. A key hypothesis proposes that the main drivers of biological change in the Northeast Pacific involve the interactive effects of pan-Pacific, bi-decadal and penta-decadal climate oscillations. Historical records of biological productivity prior to the 20th century have not been established for the Alaskan Current domain of the Northeast Pacific; their absence represents a major impediment towards understanding the temporal organization of biological productivity in this ecosystem. Here, the investigators propose to quantify the fundamental modes and magnitude of interdecadal variability in sockeye salmon populations of the Alaska Current during the last 500 years, to improve our understanding of the critical sources of temporal organization in the Northeast Pacific. These scientists will use paleoecology to characterize the long-term patterns of biological variability in the Alaskan Current domain of the Northeast Pacific. Specifically, they will infer historical changes in populations of sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) by tracking variation of a natural geochemical tracer (15N) that accumulates in the sediments of spawning lakes in proportion to salmon density. High resolution dating of sedimentary sequences will be accomplished through detailed radio-isotope analyses of sediments and by identifying volcanic ash layers with known ages. Existing 35-to-100 year long historical records of salmon population dynamics, climatic conditions, and lake production will enable them to calibrate sedimentary chronologies of geochemical and biological markers. They will also use carbon stable isotopes and fossil algal pigments from sediments to quantify the impact of salmon-derived nutrients on lake productivity. They will use spectral analysis and temporal domain time-series models to quantify the frequency, duration, and magnitude of historical shifts in fish production, and how these relate to independent proxies of paleoclimatic conditions. They will then apply the time-series models developed from sedimentary and other existing paleoclimate records to forecast future changes in the biological productivity of the Northeast Pacific for the next century. This synthesis of new and existing data will provide a high-resolution, concrete description of the long-term variability in the biological productivity of the Alaska Current domain of the Northeast Pacific. They will test the hypothesis that the biological productivity within this oceanic domain has been synchronized by inter-decadal climate regimes associated with bidecadal and pentadecadal climate oscillations. These data will provide the information needed to investigate the spatial and temporal coupling of biological productivity to climate oscillations throughout the Northeast Pacific. In particular, our work will provide the data needed to test the hypothesis that biological productivity in the Alaska and California current domains of the Northeast Pacific respond synchronously, but out of phase, to interdecadal climatic forcing. The synthesis of historical- and paleo-indicators of oceanic conditions, climatic conditions, and biological productivity will place the recent century of ecosystem dynamics in a substantially longer temporal context than is currently available. This knowledge will provide a scientific basis for adapting management to the time scales relevant to the coastal marine, freshwater and riparian ecosystems of the Northeast Pacific doc24018 none A tomographic model that includes Axial volcano and nearby portions of the Juan de Fuca Ridge will be used to develop quantitative 3D models of stress and deformation in this region. Predictions of these models will be compared with geodetic, tidal-loading, and seismicity data doc24019 none Columbia University is establishing a new, multi-departmental graduate program in Applied Mathematics and the Earth & Environmental Sciences. The aim of this new IGERT Joint Program is to train a new generation of scientists whose level of mathematical sophistication will be considerably higher than that of typical students currently graduating from earth and environmental science programs and, at the same time, whose familiarity with the important issues and major open research questions in the earth and environmental sciences will be much deeper that what is usually expected of students trained uniquely within applied mathematics departments. To achieve this goal, five departments at Columbia - Mathematics, Statistics, Applied Physics & Applied Mathematics, Earth & Environmental Sciences, and Earth & Environmental Engineering - under the coordinating role of the Columbia Earth Institute, will collaboratively train graduate students under this new IGERT Joint Program. While students in the IGERT Joint Program will be individually admitted by each department, their progress will be monitored by a Steering Committee of faculty associated with the Joint Program. In addition to satisfying the requirements of the departments into which they are admitted, all students in the Joint Program will take a new integrated two-semester sequence in Applied Mathematics specifically tailored to issues and problems in the global environmental sciences, and will be expected to earn a minimum number of credits in both mathematical and earth science courses. In addition, they will be expected to attend a weekly colloquium organized by the Joint Program, give a formal presentation of their research results once a year to the faculty and other students affiliated with the Joint Program, attend special series of invited lectures, assist in the mentoring of undergraduates, and complete a one summer internship during their graduate training at a research institution, national laboratory, or industrial research center. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fifth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-one institutions for programs that collectively span the areas of science and engineering supported by NSF doc24020 none This dissertation compares the process of racial identification among first generation Dominican and Puerto Rican immigrants in New York with racial identification among these groups in their countries of origin. Latin Americans tend to see race as a continuum with many more categories than are accepted in the United States. For immigrants from these racially heterogeneous countries, racial identification should be affected by cultural contexts in both the U.S. and their countries of origin. In depth interviews will ask about attitudes toward race, the perceptions of how their group is viewed by others, and the respondents systems of racial classification. Changes in racial identification because of immigration should be related to the respondents social networks and economic outcomes doc24021 none Long pollen records of terrestrial vegetation change are used to quantify past climatic conditions, to identify mechanisms of past climatic variability, to verify model simulations of past climate, and to reconstruct past biogeographic patterns. A gap currently exists in such records regarding glacial to recent conditions near the coast from central Oregon to central California. The goal of this doctoral dissertation research project is to develop a high-resolution pollen record to reconstruct changes in vegetation in northwestern California over the past 45,000 years, with particular emphasis on the period between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago. A pollen record from Twin Lake, California, near the Oregon border, will partially fill this gap and provide an analysis of forest history and climate dynamics in the Klamath Mountains. Lake sediments collected from Twin Lake indicate that the site contains a continuous record of local vegetation since at least 45,000 radiocarbon years ago. This study will focus on high-resolution pollen analysis of sediments deposited between 20,000 and 10,000 radiocarbon years ago, a period of rapid global and regional climate changes. Sedimentary characteristics such as magnetic susceptibility, organic content, and pollen influx rates will also be measured to identify changes in productivity and erosion rates in the Twin Lake watershed. Accurate chronological control will be ensured through 20 accelerator mass spectrometer radiocarbon dates on sedimentary charcoal and identifiable plant remains. This century-resolution study will complement a 500-year resolution analysis already completed for the entire length of the record, from 45,000 years ago to the present. Pollen data will be will be compared with modern pollen composition from 83 lake sites in the Klamath Region to attempt to quantify past climatic conditions at Twin Lake. The results of this study will serve to fill spatial and temporal gaps in our understanding of the regional variation of past climate change as well as provide insight into mechanisms of climate variability. In addition, the results will provide insight into the effects of rapid climate change on the forest systems of the west coast of North America. The Klamath Mountains region is known for having an unusually high diversity of coniferous tree species (including several endemic species of limited range), and has been recognized as an ecosystem of global significance. Rapid climate change at the end of the last glacial period may provide a reasonable analogue for projected carbon dioxide-induced climate change during the next century. Understanding past forest dynamics may help to predict potential future threats to regional biodiversity due to climate change, and perhaps aid in mitigating their effects. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc24022 none This project seeks to combine fieldwork with a systematic review of the published literature to define environmental governance ostensibly, identify its underlying normative principles, clarify exactly what the key-words, such as democracy, and sustainability mean operationally, and lay down criteria to measure the success of developmental schemes that embrace the environmental governance model. It also seeks to analyze what it takes to re-tool state expert communities and institutionalize a new set of practices and procedures in state bureaucracies. Moreover, it seeks to discover what is entailed in scaling up technological and institutional design that have been successful in micro contexts to larger scales, or to transfer successful models across cultural contexts. Last, but by no means the least, it seeks to address the question of conflict resolution: how, in the process of engendering such paradigmatic change and institutionalize environmental governance are the inevitable political conflicts to be negotiated at various levels of state bureaucracies and technocracies? Research will focus on three sectors: forests and biodiversity, water, and renewable energy, in India, which offers a large number of case studies in the context of a vibrant democracy. Combining the insights of Political Ecology and Science and Technology Studies, the proposed program aims to be a landmark analysis of the environmental governance paradigm, provide a path breaking study of the role of expertise in the environment and development in the third world, and thereby add to the theoretical understanding of democracy and technology doc24023 none This collaborative project between the laboratories at Yale (Ruddle and Wagner) and Boston University (Amemiya) seeks to understand the evolutionary diversification of the vertebrate body plan in molecular and developmental terms. Key organisms such as the lamprey, horned shark, and the primitive bony fish Bichir will be major subjects for research. A primary approach to the problem of the vertebrate radiation will be to isolate and sequence the Hox gene clusters that govern pattern formation on the primary and secondary body axes. In particular, the investigators will be interested in determining copy number of the clusters in the selected species, the identification of conserved non-coding elements that may serve as regulatory elements, the history of Hox cluster duplications and their possible role in vertebrate evolution. Finally, the investigators want to test the neutralist theory with respect to the duplication and diversification of gene complexes governing body plan doc24024 none Anastasio In the past few years there has been an explosion of scientific interest in the chemical processing occurring in sunlit snow. Rather than simply acting as a passive sink for the products of tropospheric reactions, the snowpack has been shown to be one of the most photochemically active, and strongly oxidizing, regions of the entire troposphere. The group of investigators assembled for this proposal has played a central role in this revolution in our thinking about the role of the snowpack in atmospheric chemistry. One key finding has been that photolysis of snow chromophores initiates the release of a number of important trace gases. Initial modeling suggests that photolysis of a number of these gases (HCHO, HOOH, CH3CHO and HONO) results in an enormous production of HOx (i.e., OH and HO2), which in turn causes a large enhancement of these radicals in the snowpack and in the air just above the snow. Because oxidation by OH is the main sink for many tropospheric gases, including some of those important for climate change and stratospheric O3 depletion, this enhancement in HOx might significantly perturb tropospheric chemistry. Snowpack chemistry likely also modifies the chemical records of atmospheric composition ultimately preserved in glacial ice. While recent work has shown that photochemical and physical processes in the snowpack can impact the chemistry and composition of both the atmosphere and snowpack, these processes are, in general, poorly understood. This is especially true for the processes that produce and consume OH and HO2. The research will elucidate the processes that produce and consume OH and HO2 radicals within and above sunlit snow over a wide range of environmental conditions, thereby improving our understanding of fast photochemistry within this unique environment doc24025 none Although community and government leaders often promote programs that can lead to significant transformations of major parts of cities with terms that use the word public as an adjective, there is not one public but rather many different groups who have interests in public space, public works, and other manifestations of public activity. These different groups can have fundamentally different views of what is best for the public, and the ways in which they organize space and interact with each other can have profound consequences for the groups individually and for the overall cumulative product. This Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award proposal outlined plans for a doctoral student to examine the transformations of public space in Belleville, a community in northeastern Paris, France, that now is dominated by relatively poor, recently arrived immigrants. The student will use ethnographic approaches to assess how the quarter s public spaces have developed as a result of the struggles between urban designers and local residents during the major redevelopment of the quarter in the s. The study will focus on the urban development process itself, paying particular attention to the determining if and how immigrant struggles for political and representation have influenced the design process. The student will conduct archival research and use participant observation of both local residents and the design offices engaged in redevelopment efforts. This project will provide valuable new insights into the ways that different groups conceive of and deal with public spaces. In particular, it will shed light on the varying ways that urban designers, who often are situated far away from the sites where their designs are to be implemented, and residents based directly in affected communities participate in debates on the political economy of public space. The study will provide useful information to residents and designers in the study area, and its insights may have practical benefits for comparable actors in other communities. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc24026 none Krembs Exopolymeric substances (EPS) comprise a suite of microbially produced, structurally diverse polysaccharides that play important roles in organismal physiology, aquatic ecology, and the oceanic biological carbon pump . High concentrations of EPS are known to significantly alter the physical properties of water containing habitats as diverse as rocks, aquifers and sediments. EPS have long been observed in high concentrations in polar seas. They have recently been observed in high concentrations in arctic sea ice with an unknown variable, poorly understood balance of microbial production in the ice and loss via biochemical conversion and export at the ice-water interface. The PIs have also observed a relationship between EPS concentration and sea ice salinity, which indicates a fundamentally new and prospectively consequential interaction between biological processes and the physical structure of Arctic sea ice. The difficulty of separating temporal from spatial variability in ice core observations impedes understanding of environmental forcing of the balance of EPS production and losses. Neither can ice core methods illuminate the key process of biomass incorporation at the ice-water interface, nor the mechanism (and thus environmental sensitivity) underlying the covariation of EPS concentration and salinity. Thus effects of changing arctic climate on marine ecology, carbon cycling, and sea ice properties via EPS production cannot be assessed. This grant sets out to investigate the environmental factors leading to high EPS production and interaction with arctic sea ice physical properties using a combination of field observations and theory for sea ice growth. The group will collect and analyze fast ice core samples over the course of three ice seasons to track the evolution of the autotrophic community and the organic material pool. They will apply theory for the growth of sea ice to investigate the mechanism(s) of salt retention and biological influence on ice physical properties, and develop and apply nondestructive, in situ fluorometric measurements of Chlorophyll a in the water column and in the ice to observe the key process of biomass incorporation at the ice-water interface. This work will build a basis for automated in situ acquisition of time series of the dynamic of sea ice biota across the ice-water interface, which will be essential for future investigations of large scale polar marine ecological changes in response to varying climate doc24027 none Smyth A sequence of direct numerical simulation (DNS) experiments designed to extend earlier two-dimensional results to more general ocean flows will be performed. Turbulence evolution will be simulated in a variety of initial flows in which density changes in thin layers (compared with velocity) and oscillatory instability results. The physics of turbulence will be studied in detail, and turbulence statistics will be compared with DNS of Kelvin-Hemholtz billows, with laboratory experiments on Holmboe waves, and with turbulent events observed in the ocean as has been done for Kelvin-Helmholtz waves. Besides adding directly to the knowledge of oscillatory instabilities in the ocean, diagnostics that will permit the identification of instability classes (e.g. Kelvin-Helmholtz or Holmboe) more clearly in future observational studies will be defined doc24028 none For many decades, a fundamental tenant of development economics is that developing countries have great difficulty becoming creators of technology. This assumption has been based on the belief that multinational corporations (MNCs) function according to a locational hierarchy of global innovation networks, with intellectual activities located in more advanced countries while routine production is situated in developing countries. Empirical evidence indicates that these traditional assumptions no longer are viable. In recent years, many world-class MNCs now are locating advanced research and development (R&D) centers in Shanghai and Beijing, China. This trend is typified by Microsoft s establishment of its first academic-style R&D center in Beijing in , three years before it established a similar center in Silicon Valley in . Once principally a routine production site, China appears to have become a center of excellence in global innovation networks. This advanced type of MNC activity represents not only an important turning point in China s development but a possible harbinger of developments that may occur in other large developing countries, thereby transforming the processes of globalization and economic development. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine the processes that have been evident in China. The focal questions of the project are: Why are MNCs locating their R&D centers in developing countries like China? How can a developing country like China integrate itself at the highest level of global innovation networks? An ancillary question to be examined is: Why have MNC R&D centers tended to concentrate in Beijing (a highly controlled political city) rather than Shanghai (a commercialized global city)? The doctoral candidate will conduct case studies of a set of MNCs that have established R&D centers in China. She will conduct surveys of company officials, and she will undertake statistical analyses of economic data. This project will contribute to the understanding of how developing cities become integrated into global innovation networks. This study will consider the increasingly important role of global (exogenous) factors in the study of knowledge-based development of city-regions. Moreover, it will explore the thesis a developing nation s strategy for knowledge-based economic development no longer should rely solely on local and national (endogenous) factors. This project will consider the relationship of local, national, and global variables, especially in developing countries or transitional economies. Among the broader impacts of the project are practical insights regarding how cities and regions can mobilize its knowledge assets (human capital, specialized industrial clusters, local business networks, enabling industrial policies, and or skilled labor policies) to bargain with both the central government and the MNCs to improve its competitiveness in the global economy. Understanding the current direction of extensions of global innovation networks and the ways in which cities and regions can cultivate and capitalize on these processes will provide policy makers and investors alike with the tools necessary to support and maintain more dynamic forms of economic growth. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc24029 none Microzooplankton assemblages in the sea are often dominated by oligotrich and choretrich ciliates. Ciliate communities are diverse and dynamic, with rapid changes in abundance and species composition over short time scales. Understanding the nature and implications of diversity in ciliate communities is critical if we are to extrapolate measurements (e.g. grazing, growth) obtained with one ciliate community or a few species in culture to regional or global models of food webs. In addition, the degree of inter- and intraspecific genetic variability across spatial and temporal scales is unknown for these ciliates. Finally, analysis of morphological markers alone has generated considerable debate between researchers who argue that all ciliates are cosmopolitan versus those who believe that there is limited gene flow between geographically isolated ciliate populations. One key to addressing all of these issues is to quantify the correspondence between molecular markers and morphology within and between populations. At present, however, molecular data are sparse for these ecologically important groups. This project combines molecular and morphological methods to elucidate the diversity of marine ciliates in the subclasses Choreotrichia and Oligotrichia (Cl: Spirotrichea). This large group of planktonic grazers comprises an important trophic link between phytoplankton and bacterial production and higher consumers. The main focus of the study is to collect DNA sequence data from natural populations of choreotrichs and oligotrichs, and to relate these sequences to morphospecies determined by traditional methods. A combination of techniques will be applied to handpicked cells from natural assemblages to evaluate diversity across a range of scales from meters to thousands of kilometers, with intensive sampling of ciliates along the southern coast of New England and the western coast of the United Kingdom. Intraspecific genetic variability will also be quantified as changes within populations over short temporal and spatial scales. The study has two objectives: 1) to quantify diversity within a subset of marine oligotrich and choreotrich species sampled from nearshore environments using both morphology and molecular markers, and 2) to assess patterns of intraspecific variation on short spatial and temporal scales in a few abundant species of oligotrich and choreotrich ciliates. For both objectives, individual cells will be picked for genetic analysis and preserved for species identification. For objective one, small subunit ribosomal gene sequences will be compared. For the second objective, more variable markers will be analyzed, including the internally transcribed spacer regions (ITS1 and ITS2) of the ribosomal genes and an intervening sequence between histones H3 and H4 (H3H4IS). Combining molecular and morphological approaches, this study will produce comprehensive data on genetic diversity of populations of oligotrichs and choreotrichs. These data are an essential first step for connecting information on individual species abundances sampled across time and space to whole communities of ciliates. In addition, this work will provide the first test using molecular data on marine ciliate endemism and will train graduate students in relevant morphological and molecular techniques. The resulting data will have broader implications for questions regarding global protist diversity and biogeography and will be necessary to fully explore the role of ciliates in energy flow and nutrient cycling in marine systems doc24030 none This project will develop a model system for the study of speciation in marine holozooplankton populations, to examine the biogeographic and ecological factors important during speciation in the open ocean. The calanoid copepod family Eucalanidae is oceanic in distribution, and component species are likely to have evolved entirely in the open ocean. The 23 extant species in this family will serve as our model system. The research will consist of two parts. First, a species level molecular phylogeny based on one mitochondrial (16s rDNA) and one nuclear (Elongation Factor-1-a) gene locus will be developed, including all known species within the family. Sister species pairs will be identified based on the phylogeny. Three central hypotheses are being tested regarding the comparative biogeographic distributions, morphological characteristics, and genetic diversity of these sister species pairs. Results will elucidate patterns in the extent of biogeographic range overlap, post-speciational range evolution, divergence in reproductive morphological characteristics, divergence in ecological characteristics, and differences in historical population sizes. Such results will provide insight into those factors that play a role in the speciation process. The second, intraspecific, part of the study will examine geographic distributions of genetic lineages in circumglobal Eucalanus hyalinus s.l. and Rhincalanus nasutus s.l. This component will identify oceanographic features that create boundaries to gene flow between conspecific populations on a global scale. Intraspecific haplotype networks will be generated based on the mitochondrial gene locus Cytochrome Oxidase I (COI). The goal of this second portion of the research is to understand how populations undergo the initial differentiation process, a step critical to speciation models. Initial results demonstrate the tremendous potential value of the proposed work. At least three previously cryptic species have been uncovered within the family, and current understanding of the biogeographic distributions of existing species has been modified. Half of the DNA sequencing for the mtDNA molecular phylogeny has been completed, and most of the specimens required for this work have already been collected. The sequences resulting from this research will be deposited in GenBank, and thus disseminated broadly to all interested parties. The proposed research is the doctoral study. In addition to answering the specific questions posed, this proposal will contribute to the training of a new generation of oceanographers with abilities in systematics and modern molecular techniques doc24031 none In this collaborative investigation, a nested-scale survey of major rift escarpments that expose the upper oceanic crust at Pito Deep, located on the northeast edge of the Easter microplate on the EPR will be surveyed and sampled. Major fault scarps bounding a propagating rift along the NE edge of the Easter Microplate cut abyssal hill lineaments and magnetic anomalies at right angles creating a natural cross section of the oceanic crust. Outcrop areas would be located using DSL-120 sidescan sonar, and observed using ALVIN and Jason II. The rationale for this investigation is to extend knowledge of the internal structure and composition of the upper oceanic crust, and by inference, processes at superfast spreading ridges doc23910 none Ghil Dewar It is proposed to study coupled mid-latitude climate variability on decadal and longer time scales. The main hypothesis is that a critical component of this variability arises from intrinsic ocean sources. This hypothesis will be analyzed using a numerical model of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system, focusing on the oceans wind-driven variability, rather than on that of the thermohaline circulation. An intermediate complexity model is ideally suited to test this hypothesis. The model consists of an oceanic and an atmospheric component, each of which captures the turbulent nature of the corresponding fluid. The new feature of our proposal is in coupling these two models, and analyzing the nature of the coupled turbulence that results. To achieve turbulence simultaneously in the two fluids requires working with reduced models of each. One fundamental problem faced by more dynamically complete models in achieving this same goal is insufficient computer power. Parameterization of small-scale oceanic variability as a feedback on the ocean s general circulation and on climate thus stands as a critical problem for understanding and predicting coupled climate variability. Initial steps will be taken towards formulating such parameterizations and testing them within this model. Coupled general circulation models also face the problem that the phenomenology of coupled behavior is not currently known, thus complicating the analysis and interpretation of model results. This work will contribute to a solution of this problem by providing a conceptual paradigm for coupled system behavior. The intellectual merit of this proposal is to analyze a viable hypothesis relevant to the coupled climate problem on inter-decadal timescales. The broader impacts of the work lie in developing scientific partnerships between two leading institutions (UCLA and FSU) in this field, broadly disseminating the results of our work by means of publications, seminars and presentations at national and international meetings, and addressing a problem of crucial societal importance in climate prediction doc24033 none Under this award, the PIs will measure 176Hf 177Hf and 238U-230Th-226Ra-232Th activities in basalt glasses from the Southeast Indian Ridge (SEIR)to test how the depth and rate of melting control the sampling of regional heterogeneity in the underlying mantle during ocean ridge magmatism. With these new data, it should be possible to sort out differences in the mineralogy of the mantle source, the depth and extent of melting, and the source compositions. The SEIR was chosen for the study, because along it a number of systematic variations occur at constant full spreading rate (70-75 mm y) and in the absence of large transform offsets and nearby ocean island hotspots:(a)there is a large eastward increase in axial depth ( to m) and a morphological transition from axial high to axial valley; (b) there is evidence that melt production rate and crustal thickness decrease eastward along axis; and (c) lavas from this setting record systematic variations in temperature and mantle composition. It has also been the subject of previous petrologic and isotopic analyses of numerous basalt glasses. The PIs will search for and use correlations of 230Th 232Th, 230Th 238U, Th U, 226Ra 230Th, Ba Th and 176Hf 177Hf with these physical and geochemical variations to test two fundamental hypotheses:1) A regional increase in ridge depth at constant spreading rate is primarily controlled by the depth and rate of melting. 2) The distinctive Pb-Sr-Nd isotope signature of Indian Ocean MORBs is due to the presence of garnet pyroxenite in the shallow asthenosphere doc24034 none Rossby Funds are requested to analyze a large body of recently collected data from the Northwest Corner (NWC) of the Atlantic Ocean. The PI will characterize the structure of the region as completely as possible. He will construct mass, kinetic energy, and vorticity budgets, and will assess the spatial and temporal stability of the NWC. He anticipates that significant temporal dependence of the flow structure occurs as the NWC sheds potential energy, which accumulates either as rings or subducting eddies. He will explore two explanations for the broadening of the flow as it leaves the NWC - control by the Mid-Atlantic Ridge structure and competition between the zonal flow of the Subpolar Front and the meridional recirculation of waters leaving the NWC. The PI suggests that the two fronts observed within the Subpolar Frontal region reflect, through westward Rossby wave propagation, the two fracture zones of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge through which the Subpolar Front waters flow. Available data is from Eulerian moorings, Lagrangian floats, hydrographic surveys, acoustic Doppler current profiler surveys, and satellite altimetry. Some rotating table experiments will be performed doc24031 none In this collaborative investigation, a nested-scale survey of major rift escarpments that expose the upper oceanic crust at Pito Deep, located on the northeast edge of the Easter microplate on the EPR will be surveyed and sampled. Major fault scarps bounding a propagating rift along the NE edge of the Easter Microplate cut abyssal hill lineaments and magnetic anomalies at right angles creating a natural cross section of the oceanic crust. Outcrop areas would be located using DSL-120 sidescan sonar, and observed using ALVIN and Jason II. The rationale for this investigation is to extend knowledge of the internal structure and composition of the upper oceanic crust, and by inference, processes at superfast spreading ridges doc24036 none Secondary pelagic dispersal of juvenile benthic organisms following initial larval settlement may strongly influence local and regional population dynamics, yet secondary dispersal is rarely considered in recruitment studies. While the relative importance of post-settlement blue crab dispersal in determining recruitment patterns in Pamlico Sound, NC, is presently recognized, the factors initiating movement by early juvenile blue crabs away from settlement habitats, the mechanisms mediating across-sound transport, and the population-level consequences of redistribution to alternative habitats, have not yet been explored. This project will address these issues through an interdisciplinary study that incorporates: (1) small-scale field measurements in seagrass beds along the sound-side of the Outer Banks to identify the factors cueing initial movement from settlement habitats, (2) laboratory experiments to test the behavioral mechanisms that drive pelagic emigration, and (3) sound-wide hydrographic surveys to characterize Pamlico Sound circulation coupled with synoptic measurements of the spatiotemporal distribution of postlarval and juvenile blue crabs. The project will be conducted during - to take advantage of concurrent postlarval and juvenile sampling supported by another NSF award. This project will contribute to the understanding of how pelagic dispersal occurs in estuaries that are not dominated by tidal motions, but by irregular or persistent wind-induced motions. Generalizations of recruitment dynamics from past work on systems with strong tidal signals (e.g., Chesapeake and Delaware Bays) may not accurately characterize patterns of estuarine recruitment in predominantly large, wind-driven systems such as Pamlico Sound doc24037 none This dissertation uses Health and Retirement Study data to investigate the role of exercise in explaining racial and gender disparities in health among older Americans. Exercise can be regarded as a type of investment that people make in their own health. These health investments are hypothesized to be affected by the other kinds of capital that people possess: economic, social, and cultural. Multiple dimensions of each of these forms of capital will be tested for their relationships with exercise. Racial ethnic and gender differences in exercise may be explained in part by varying levels of social, economic, and cultural capital doc24038 none This dissertation investigates how communal riots in Ahmedabad, India, have created homogeneous ethnic neighborhoods where mixed neighborhoods previously existed. The research will use geographical information systems to track the city s major religious processions and riots. Archival records (e.g., government inquiries, newspapers) will be examined to analyze the state s changing position on riots and processions. Finally, semi-structured interviews with local leaders and residents living near the major procession route will be used to analyze the mechanisms that link the processions and communal violence with the creation of ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods doc24039 none P.I. Widder, Edith (Harbor Branch Oceanographic Inst.) Proposal #: The PIs propose to upgrade the Low Light Auto-Radiometer (LoLAR). LoLAR is a submersible, radiometrically calibrated detector that was developed with joint funding from NSF and ONR. It is currently deployed on the Johnson- Sea-Link submersible, down to depths of m to measure downwelling irradiance with respect to the vertical distribution and migration patterns of mesopelagic organisms, as well as to make in situ measurements of bioluminescence. LoLAR combines the high quantum efficiency of a photomultiplier tube with a solid-state autocalibration circuit. The funds requested would be used to redesign LoLAR based on a proven auto-calibration concept, using recent technological developments that make it possible to greatly reduce the cost, size, and complexity of the system with the intent of developing a versatile instrument that can be made accessible to a wider range of users doc24036 none Secondary pelagic dispersal of juvenile benthic organisms following initial larval settlement may strongly influence local and regional population dynamics, yet secondary dispersal is rarely considered in recruitment studies. While the relative importance of post-settlement blue crab dispersal in determining recruitment patterns in Pamlico Sound, NC, is presently recognized, the factors initiating movement by early juvenile blue crabs away from settlement habitats, the mechanisms mediating across-sound transport, and the population-level consequences of redistribution to alternative habitats, have not yet been explored. This project will address these issues through an interdisciplinary study that incorporates: (1) small-scale field measurements in seagrass beds along the sound-side of the Outer Banks to identify the factors cueing initial movement from settlement habitats, (2) laboratory experiments to test the behavioral mechanisms that drive pelagic emigration, and (3) sound-wide hydrographic surveys to characterize Pamlico Sound circulation coupled with synoptic measurements of the spatiotemporal distribution of postlarval and juvenile blue crabs. The project will be conducted during - to take advantage of concurrent postlarval and juvenile sampling supported by another NSF award. This project will contribute to the understanding of how pelagic dispersal occurs in estuaries that are not dominated by tidal motions, but by irregular or persistent wind-induced motions. Generalizations of recruitment dynamics from past work on systems with strong tidal signals (e.g., Chesapeake and Delaware Bays) may not accurately characterize patterns of estuarine recruitment in predominantly large, wind-driven systems such as Pamlico Sound doc24041 none PI(s): Meyer Kestnbaum Elena Vinogradova University of Maryland College Park One of the major most profound changes to occur in Europe or Asia in the past century was the fall of communism and the subsequent transition to capitalism of the former Soviet countries. This Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant examines organizational adaptation and change in business practices resulting from the changing role of the Russian state in its economy. The project focuses on small individual enterprises, and in particular on relationships between Russian small firms and their trading partners and the Russian state. In western countries the legal system and public authorities guarantee property rights and contracts, but in Russian state enforcement institutions are unable to provide these same protections. The goal of the study is to specify how the inadequacies of state enforcement affects business practices among small and medium sized privately owned business firms in contemporary Russia, what kind of informal enforcement strategies develop, and to trace the roots of these strategies and the implications they may have for the building of capitalism in Russia. The dissertation candidate will interview owners and managers of 72 small and medium-sized firms in St. Petersburg, Russia. Structured interviews will be used to gather information on views and practices. This data will be integrated with similar interviews conducted with owner and managers of 18 small private firms in St. Petersburg as part of a pilot study doc23847 none Award is for a multichannel seismic survey across the offshore portions of the Chicxulub impact crater. The multichannel seismic survey will be added on to a funded British tomographic survey that will be conducted in the summer of aboard the R V Maurice Ewing. The multichannel seismic survey will map features that cannot be constrained by the tomographic study, including the geometry of the peak ring, and the possible thrust boundary beneath the peak ring. The modeling effort, together with the multichannel seismic profiles will determine the approach direction of the impactor and constrain the angle of impact to with 10 degrees. The multichannel seismic profiles together with the tomographic data will complete the required site survey over two proposed IODP sites doc24043 none Urban energy consumption and land-surface modification create distinct patterns of urban climates by altering the exchange of energy, mass and momentum with the atmosphere. These processes are linked to phenomena such as the urban heat island, the transport and dispersion of pollutants and are fundamental to understanding urban impacts on weather and climate. This doctoral dissertation research will investigate the transfer of energy between the urban landscape and the atmosphere through a combination of meteorological measurements, remote sensing and numerical modeling. This combination of methods generates accurate measurement of exchanges over the local-scale (~1 km, e.g. neighborhoods) and extends them to the scale of a city. Previous studies, conducted mostly in North America, were limited by short-duration campaigns or lacked direct measurements by which to evaluate models. The study will be conducted in Lodz, Poland; selected because it experiences a different seasonal climatic regime to those sites already studied, large amounts of anthropogenic heat are released in the winter-time, and the building style (density and morphology) of the city is distinct from North American cities but typical of many cities in central Europe. This research will enhance existing long-term measurements in Lodz and address the lack of understanding of within urban variability by adding direct measurements in areas with differing building densities and land-uses. These sets of measurements will provide the basis for calibrating remote sensing and numerical models of the exchange processes. The patterns and magnitudes of fluxes predicted by the two approaches can be interpreted in the context of emerging understanding of heat exchange across the urban landscape given that direct observations on this large an extent are not possible. Urban areas, although small in terms of total land surface area, are growing and contain an increasingly large share of the world s population. Thus urban-atmosphere interactions disproportionately impact humans with implications for human health, safety and comfort. Moreover, urban effects extend beyond the boundaries of cities, with implications for regional and larger-scale atmospheric conditions and climates. With increases in computing capacity, numerical weather forecasting, air pollution and long-term climate models now run with greater spatial resolution and can explicitly incorporate urban areas. This research will contribute directly to the development of such models, by producing a methodology by which to study local urban impacts as well as providing data against which to evaluate predictions. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc24044 none Oxidative stress is a pervasive problem for oxygen-evolving plants, and is likely to be especially important for marine phytoplankton growing in nutrient-impoverished waters with high fluxes of visible and ultraviolet (UV) solar radiation. Very little is known about how marine algae cope with oxidative stress. In this study, a new hypothesis is presented that dimethylsulfoniopropionate (DMSP) is a unique and very important antioxidant in the ocean that serves as a primary defense in combatting and alleviating oxidative stress. Its role as an antioxidant is likely because DMSP is the dominant cellular sulfur compound in, and a major organic constituent of many marine algae worldwide. Furthermore, preliminary results indicate that DMSP and its enzymatic lysis product, DMS are highly effective scavengers of toxic reactive oxygen species (e.g., hydroxyl radicals) in cells, removing these species faster, in some cases, than the well documented antioxidants, ascorbic acid and glutathione. DMSP and DMS oxidation yield dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO), which is also an effective oxidant scavenger as is acrylate, the other product of DMSP lysis. Together, these related compounds should serve as a multifunctional, highly flexible antioxidant system in DMSP-containing algae. To investigate this DMSP antioxidant system, the following related hypotheses are being tested by this research team: 1) Intracellular DMSP concentrations in phytoplankton will increase in response to chronic oxidative stress, and will decrease in response to acute oxidative stress. 2) Turnover of cellular DMSP is induced by oxidative stress, resulting in increased production of putative antioxidants. 3) Phytoplankton with high DMSP content and high DMSP lyase activity will be more resistant to oxidative stress than phytoplankton with low DMSP or low lyase activity. To test these hypotheses, axenic cultures of ecologically-important phytoplankton species and natural seawater populations are being exposed to various forms of oxidative stress, including high photon fluxes of visible light (400-700 nm) and or UV radiation (290-400 nm), nutrient limitation (Fe and N), and addition of paraquat or copper. During these exposures, changes in cellular DMSP and related compounds will be determined along with DMSP lyase activity. Complementary measurements of other antioxidant defense systems (e.g., ascorbate, reduced and oxidized glutathione, ascorbate peroxidase, superoxide dismutase) will provide information on how the DMSP system varies in relation to these well-established antioxidant defenses. This project will elucidate the mechanisms that control DMSP levels in the ocean and its rate of conversion to DMS, which is globally-significant because of the important role of DMS in atmospheric chemistry and, possibly, climate. If the DMSP antioxidant hypothesis is correct, then an important, hitherto unknown, cellular function of DMSP will have been identified. Understanding the cellular physiology of DMSP and its relationship to other poorly-understood algal antioxidant systems will increase our understanding of the factors that control the distribution of ecologically-important phytoplankton in the sea. This study will also result in the interdisciplinary training of advanced undergraduate and graduate students in algal physiological ecology and oceanography. The PIs and students will disseminate results of this study through scholarly and public presentations, scientific journals, popular articles and freely-accessible web pages doc24045 none Dibb In the past few years there has been an explosion of scientific interest in the chemical processing occurring in sunlit snow. Rather than simply acting as a passive sink for the products of tropospheric reactions, the snowpack has been shown to be one of the most photochemically active, and strongly oxidizing, regions of the entire troposphere. The group of investigators assembled for this proposal has played a central role in this revolution in our thinking about the role of the snowpack in atmospheric chemistry. One key finding has been that photolysis of snow chromophores initiates the release of a number of important trace gases. Initial modeling suggests that photolysis of a number of these gases (HCHO, HOOH, CH3CHO and HONO) results in an enormous production of HOx (i.e., OH and HO2), which in turn causes a large enhancement of these radicals in the snowpack and in the air just above the snow. Because oxidation by OH is the main sink for many tropospheric gases, including some of those important for climate change and stratospheric O3 depletion, this enhancement in HOx might significantly perturb tropospheric chemistry. Snowpack chemistry likely also modifies the chemical records of atmospheric composition ultimately preserved in glacial ice. While recent work has shown that photochemical and physical processes in the snowpack can impact the chemistry and composition of both the atmosphere and snowpack, these processes are, in general, poorly understood. This is especially true for the processes that produce and consume OH and HO2. The research will elucidate the processes that produce and consume OH and HO2 radicals within and above sunlit snow over a wide range of environmental conditions, thereby improving our understanding of fast photochemistry within this unique environment doc24046 none This study sets out to make chemical measurements of inorganic and organic carbon compounds found in a complex and poorly understood environment, shallow water marine hydrothermal systems. Due in part to limited sampling opportunities, our understanding of marine hydrothermal microbial systems and especially of their organic geochemistry is lacking. The metabolic energy requirements of microbial lifeforms in these environments is also unclear. Determination of the chemical structures and concentrations of a series of aqueous low molecular weight organic compounds (amino acids, carbohydrates and organic acids) will allow the modeling of the energetic bounds associated with the metabolism of these substrates by heterotrophic thermophiles. A series of studies, including using direct SCUBA field sampling of the study site (Aeolian Islands, Sicily), will allow hydrothermal vent fluid collection including temporal variation. Thermophilic bacteria are known to be metabolically opportunistic, having the capability of utilizing a variety of carbon sources present in their environment along with one or more electron acceptors. How these organisms perform such metabolic manipulations and how they dynamically adapt to changes in their chemical and physical environment is not yet known. These investigators will employ a thermodynamic modeling approach, using known concentrations of specific substrates at known temperatures, to calculate the possible bioenergetic energy yields of the respiratory and fermentative reactions these organisms use in hydrothermal environments. This in turn will increase our understanding of the biogeochemical processes that may fuel the microbial energetics in the deeper subsurface biosphere doc24047 none Baker This proposal will be jointly funded by the Arctic Natural Sciences Program and Antarctic Glaciology Program. Several Greenland and Antarctic ice cores have revealed considerable information about the concentration and depth distribution of particles, trace gases and impurities. In order to accurately model phenomena such as diffusion and grain growth, and the electrical and mechanical properties of natural polycrystalline ice, including the impacts of temperature changes, it is necessary to know the concentrations of these impurities and their microstructural location. For example, understanding if the impurities are in the grain boundaries, triple junctions, or the lattice will enable the electrical conductivity to be modeled accurately with a clear physical basis. Thus far, the microstructural location of impurities in natural ice has received little attention. Recently, the Principal Investigator developed a new technique, using a low-vacuum scanning electron microscope, energy-dispersive x-ray microanalysis, a cold stage and controlled sublimation, to determine the microstructural location of impurities in polycrystalline ice. Preliminary work on ice cores from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) showed that sodium chloride was located in the grain boundaries while most of the sulfate was in the lattice. Other impurities such as magnesium, calcium, aluminum, potassium, and silicon, were occasionally observed in either location. In contrast, examinations of ice core specimens from both Byrd Station and Vostok Station, Antarctica do not have sodium chloride at the grain boundaries, although magnesium sulfate has sometimes been observed there. The purpose of the research is to apply this novel technique to determine how the microstructural location of impurities changes with depth age and impurity content in ice cores from three sites (Dye 3, Camp Century and GISP2) in the Greenland ice sheet and three sites in Antarctica (Siple Dome, Vostok and Taylor Dome). Comparison between the different sites is important because they are in different locations, at different elevations, have different snow accumulation rates, and are at different temperatures. Electrical conductivity measurements and simple mechanical tests will also be performed on specific grain boundaries from the cores prior to their microstructural characterization in the scanning electron microscope doc24044 none Oxidative stress is a pervasive problem for oxygen-evolving plants, and is likely to be especially important for marine phytoplankton growing in nutrient-impoverished waters with high fluxes of visible and ultraviolet (UV) solar radiation. Very little is known about how marine algae cope with oxidative stress. In this study, a new hypothesis is presented that dimethylsulfoniopropionate (DMSP) is a unique and very important antioxidant in the ocean that serves as a primary defense in combatting and alleviating oxidative stress. Its role as an antioxidant is likely because DMSP is the dominant cellular sulfur compound in, and a major organic constituent of many marine algae worldwide. Furthermore, preliminary results indicate that DMSP and its enzymatic lysis product, DMS are highly effective scavengers of toxic reactive oxygen species (e.g., hydroxyl radicals) in cells, removing these species faster, in some cases, than the well documented antioxidants, ascorbic acid and glutathione. DMSP and DMS oxidation yield dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO), which is also an effective oxidant scavenger as is acrylate, the other product of DMSP lysis. Together, these related compounds should serve as a multifunctional, highly flexible antioxidant system in DMSP-containing algae. To investigate this DMSP antioxidant system, the following related hypotheses are being tested by this research team: 1) Intracellular DMSP concentrations in phytoplankton will increase in response to chronic oxidative stress, and will decrease in response to acute oxidative stress. 2) Turnover of cellular DMSP is induced by oxidative stress, resulting in increased production of putative antioxidants. 3) Phytoplankton with high DMSP content and high DMSP lyase activity will be more resistant to oxidative stress than phytoplankton with low DMSP or low lyase activity. To test these hypotheses, axenic cultures of ecologically-important phytoplankton species and natural seawater populations are being exposed to various forms of oxidative stress, including high photon fluxes of visible light (400-700 nm) and or UV radiation (290-400 nm), nutrient limitation (Fe and N), and addition of paraquat or copper. During these exposures, changes in cellular DMSP and related compounds will be determined along with DMSP lyase activity. Complementary measurements of other antioxidant defense systems (e.g., ascorbate, reduced and oxidized glutathione, ascorbate peroxidase, superoxide dismutase) will provide information on how the DMSP system varies in relation to these well-established antioxidant defenses. This project will elucidate the mechanisms that control DMSP levels in the ocean and its rate of conversion to DMS, which is globally-significant because of the important role of DMS in atmospheric chemistry and, possibly, climate. If the DMSP antioxidant hypothesis is correct, then an important, hitherto unknown, cellular function of DMSP will have been identified. Understanding the cellular physiology of DMSP and its relationship to other poorly-understood algal antioxidant systems will increase our understanding of the factors that control the distribution of ecologically-important phytoplankton in the sea. This study will also result in the interdisciplinary training of advanced undergraduate and graduate students in algal physiological ecology and oceanography. The PIs and students will disseminate results of this study through scholarly and public presentations, scientific journals, popular articles and freely-accessible web pages doc24049 none Hartley Partial support is provided for an NSF-AFOSR-ARO workshop on materials in design, to be held April 10-12, , in Tampa, Florida. The purpose of the workshop is to explore the modeling and simulation processes of use in development and application of materials in design. The goal is to eventually improve these processes to the point where the materials development cycle can be radically shortened to match the cycles for other steps in the design and manufacturing processes. The results will significantly impact the development cycle for new products of many different types and should have substantial cost and safety benefits to society doc24050 none Ioannou This is a proposal to carry out research on the interaction between device physics and circuit design using nano-scale double-gate SQI CMOS technology. Fully depleted, double-gate (FD-DG) S0I is currently recognized as the most suitable SOI version for nano-scale integration. Published research has focused on the physics of the device in isolation, in an effort to establish and examine the many attractive advantages, and connect them with the device design. However, viewed from the circuit point of view, more often than not these advantages come at the expense of higher capacitances and leakage currents, which (if unchecked) might degrade the circuit performance and reliability. It will be the central theme of the proposed research to seek out the subtleties of the devise design most relevant to circuit implementations, with the ultimate goal to skew the device design space towards better circuit performance, and suggest suitable circuit alternatives that derive maximum benefit from the use of DG devices. For example, it is not known a priori that the enhanced drive current of the DG transistor will make up for its enhanced capacitance, and one needs to examine the circuit topology for each of the DG structures available. Since DG structures suffer less from short channel effects (SCE) and supply double the current, thicker oxides can be used, which also lower the gate capacitance. Floating body effects (FBE) are thought to be inactive in DG structures; FBEs might, however, be triggered by deliberate (or otherwise) bias conditions, for example by inducing an overpopulation of holes in the body of an nMOS device. DG devices are currently been vigorously researched and evolving, and are commonly categorized as symmetric (SDG) and asymmetric (ADG). The SDG is a normally on device and for this and other reasons the favor is currently with the ADG device. Rather than modify the SDG device at the expense of complicated processing, the possibility will be investigated of using this intrinsically on structure as a load device for DG-SOI based ratioed logic, with ADG drivers doc24051 none High tensile steel wires have structural applications as individual wires, or as tendons, cables or ropes. Typical structures include pre-tensioned and post-tensioned concrete bridges and buildings, cable-supported bridges and anchors in ground engineering. Structures and facilities exposed to the ambient deteriorate and eventually wear out or become unsafe. Understanding when to replace them and how to prolong their useful lifetimes is a critical issue. The objective of this investigation is to develop a magnetoelastic nondestructive technique that would detect corrosion early, and quantify its progress. The magnetoelastic technique is based upon the dependence of the magnetic properties of structural steels on the state of stress and the magnetic permeability is the property that has been used as the parameter to precisely measure the internal stresses. It is recognized that high vibrations and fatigue, coupled with the existing stress state in these cables, are factors that can influence the progress and perhaps the initiation of corrosion in these cables. Hence the corrosion assessment will be monitored by how the magnetoelastic properties are altered by the onset of corrosion. To confirm the performance of the magnetoelastic sensor for early corrosion detection, two electrochemical techniques, DC electrochemical polarization and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, will be used. The impact of the proposed investigation will be the development of a nondestructive technique for structural health monitoring and life extension. This will benefit society by improving the safety of bridges and other civil structures doc24052 none Exhumation in the northern California Coast Ranges, and orogens in general, results from the interplay of geodynamic processes that drive uplift and surface processes that respond to the rates and patterns of uplift. A variety of approaches have been used to determine patterns of exhumation, but placing robust, quantifiable constraints on these estimates is difficult because of the feedbacks and linkages among large scale geodynamic, thermal, and landscape evolution processes. There is a critical need for a technique to constrain the trajectory of rocks at shallow- crustal (low-temperature) levels to constrain uplift and exhumation in active orogenic belts. Most recently, (U-Th) He thermochronometry has been identified as a potential tool to help quantitatively constrain exhumation and uplift. The (U-Th) He system has the advantage of a low closure temperature (~ 60-70 C for apatite) and thus in principal it records the last few kilometers of unroofing. As a low-T thermochronometer the same characteristics that make (U- Th) He so appealing for geomorphic studies also raise questions about its utility in regions of complex thermal and or tectonic histories. It is uncertain whether this tool can extract meaningful information from a complex signal that incorporates both the exhumation history and the inevitable thermal feedbacks driven by that exhumation. In this project we will apply (U-Th) He thermochronometry coupled with landscape evolution, thermal and geodynamic modeling, to evaluate if (U-Th) He dating can be confidently applied in regions of active tectonism that are not in thermal or geomorphic steady-state doc24053 none This dissertation investigates the growth of foreign direct investment in the post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Foreign direct investment is conceptualized as a social relation between two parties and thus subject to the cultural understandings, power struggles, institutional support, and social ties that govern all social relations. Statistical analyses of longitudinal, cross-national data will test economic and institutional effects on foreign investments in eleven post-socialist countries. These will be supplemented by more qualitative interviews with state officials and investment experts. Analyses of investor-host country dyads will test how institutional, political, and cultural relations determine levels of investment for the pair. Finally, firm level success in attracting foreign investment will be investigated using contrasting successful and unsuccessful cases from Slovenia doc24029 none Microzooplankton assemblages in the sea are often dominated by oligotrich and choretrich ciliates. Ciliate communities are diverse and dynamic, with rapid changes in abundance and species composition over short time scales. Understanding the nature and implications of diversity in ciliate communities is critical if we are to extrapolate measurements (e.g. grazing, growth) obtained with one ciliate community or a few species in culture to regional or global models of food webs. In addition, the degree of inter- and intraspecific genetic variability across spatial and temporal scales is unknown for these ciliates. Finally, analysis of morphological markers alone has generated considerable debate between researchers who argue that all ciliates are cosmopolitan versus those who believe that there is limited gene flow between geographically isolated ciliate populations. One key to addressing all of these issues is to quantify the correspondence between molecular markers and morphology within and between populations. At present, however, molecular data are sparse for these ecologically important groups. This project combines molecular and morphological methods to elucidate the diversity of marine ciliates in the subclasses Choreotrichia and Oligotrichia (Cl: Spirotrichea). This large group of planktonic grazers comprises an important trophic link between phytoplankton and bacterial production and higher consumers. The main focus of the study is to collect DNA sequence data from natural populations of choreotrichs and oligotrichs, and to relate these sequences to morphospecies determined by traditional methods. A combination of techniques will be applied to handpicked cells from natural assemblages to evaluate diversity across a range of scales from meters to thousands of kilometers, with intensive sampling of ciliates along the southern coast of New England and the western coast of the United Kingdom. Intraspecific genetic variability will also be quantified as changes within populations over short temporal and spatial scales. The study has two objectives: 1) to quantify diversity within a subset of marine oligotrich and choreotrich species sampled from nearshore environments using both morphology and molecular markers, and 2) to assess patterns of intraspecific variation on short spatial and temporal scales in a few abundant species of oligotrich and choreotrich ciliates. For both objectives, individual cells will be picked for genetic analysis and preserved for species identification. For objective one, small subunit ribosomal gene sequences will be compared. For the second objective, more variable markers will be analyzed, including the internally transcribed spacer regions (ITS1 and ITS2) of the ribosomal genes and an intervening sequence between histones H3 and H4 (H3H4IS). Combining molecular and morphological approaches, this study will produce comprehensive data on genetic diversity of populations of oligotrichs and choreotrichs. These data are an essential first step for connecting information on individual species abundances sampled across time and space to whole communities of ciliates. In addition, this work will provide the first test using molecular data on marine ciliate endemism and will train graduate students in relevant morphological and molecular techniques. The resulting data will have broader implications for questions regarding global protist diversity and biogeography and will be necessary to fully explore the role of ciliates in energy flow and nutrient cycling in marine systems doc24055 none Lay Experience plays an important role in the development, maintenance, and modification of the nervous system. Activity-dependent changes in the nervous system are responsible for the strong effect of early experience on adult behavior and the modifications in behavior (learning) that continue throughout life. A major goal of brain research is to understand how electrical activity influences the properties of individual brain cells (neurons) and their interconnections (synapses) . It is very difficult to study single neurons and synapses in the vertebrate brain; this is much easier in the simpler invertebrate nervous system. In the crayfish neuromuscular system, single axons (elongated portion of the neuron), which form synaptic connections on the muscle, can be studied in the living animal or in a culture dish. Here axons with different levels of electrical activity develop differences in synaptic structure and function. The proposed research examines the activity-dependent development of intracellular calcium ([Ca2+]i) regulation and the formation of synaptic structures at the axon terminal: both of these are important for the release of neurotransmitter, the signal used at synapses. The regulation of [Ca2+]i is very important since [Ca2+]i also controls gene regulation, as well as neuronal growth and death. The developmental effect of electrical activity will be examined by removing the crayfish nerve cord and studying regenerating (developing) axons in a culture dish over a period of days. Pharmacological agents will be used to alter electrical activity, calcium influx, and perturb intracellular signal-transduction pathways. Calcium regulation will then be examined at the growing tip of the axon (growth cone) using fluorescent calcium indicators and electrophysiological techniques, and synaptic structures will be visualized with electron microscopy. To determine whether similar activity-dependent changes occur in mature axons, the electrical activity of axons will be altered in an intact, adult crayfish, and the axon terminal will again be examined. Findings from these studies will add to our knowledge of the basic mechanisms responsible for nervous system development. In particular, these results will further define the role of experience in specifying neuronal structure and function, and the range of adaptation of the nervous system to altered use doc24056 none This doctoral dissertation research project will examine the vulnerability of farming households to irrigation water shortages that result from no-flow events in Lower Yellow River in the Shandong Province of China. Prior to , severe flooding was the major threat in this region. Ironically, the increasing frequency, duration, and extent of no-flow events mean that a lack of water, rather than a surfeit, may be the problem of the future. But just how vulnerable are farmers to irrigation water shortages resulting from no-flow events on the Yellow River? What factors determine vulnerability to these shortages? How have farmers been coping with no-flow events to date, and how can farmers reduce their vulnerability to no-flow events in the future? The research will attempt to answer these questions by developing and testing a framework that conceptualizes vulnerability as a dynamic, evolutionary and iterative process that operates at different time and space scales. The research will focus on the experiences of farming households in two villages in Shandong Province during the period - . Household surveys will be conducted in these villages to gather information about farmers knowledge and awareness of no-flow events and the coping strategies that they have employed. Additional interviews will be conducted with key informants at the village and regional levels. Interview data will be supplemented with official data on the frequency, duration, and extent of no-flow events, crop yields, and irrigation quotas. These data will be used to map the temporal patterns of vulnerability at the household level, using a modified version of the coping response sequence developed by the Famine Early Warning System (FEWS). The data will also be used to identify the links between coping capacity and the transitional economy by examining socio-economic factors that have influenced the pattern of entitlement changes, and explore the differing social processes that affect vulnerability at various spatial scales. Qualitative analyses will be used to generate a meaningful understanding of the effects of agricultural policies and water management institutions on farmers livelihoods, and the linkages between institutional responses at different levels. Quantitative analyses will be used to determine the statistical association between stress levels and household coping responses, between household assets and coping responses, and between household coping responses and specific institution strategies, and thus to identify the main factors affecting household vulnerability to irrigation water shortage. The research will contribute to the study of vulnerability in several practical and conceptual ways. First, by focusing on household coping sequences, the research will clarify the factors that determine the nature and temporal dynamics of vulnerability for specific people in specific places. Second, the study will extend the empirical analysis of vulnerability to a transitional economy, which have been largely ignored to date. Third, the study focus on the Lower Yellow River will provide better understanding of water shortage problems in North China, and help improve the coping capacities of water management institution and farming households, and thus aid in the development of a sustainable water resource management regime at the regional and national levels. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc24057 none Hutterli In the past few years there has been an explosion of scientific interest in the chemical processing occurring in sunlit snow. Rather than simply acting as a passive sink for the products of tropospheric reactions, the snowpack has been shown to be one of the most photochemically active, and strongly oxidizing, regions of the entire troposphere. The group of investigators assembled for this proposal has played a central role in this revolution in our thinking about the role of the snowpack in atmospheric chemistry. One key finding has been that photolysis of snow chromophores initiates the release of a number of important trace gases. Initial modeling suggests that photolysis of a number of these gases (HCHO, HOOH, CH3CHO and HONO) results in an enormous production of HOx (i.e., OH and HO2), which in turn causes a large enhancement of these radicals in the snowpack and in the air just above the snow. Because oxidation by OH is the main sink for many tropospheric gases, including some of those important for climate change and stratospheric O3 depletion, this enhancement in HOx might significantly perturb tropospheric chemistry. Snowpack chemistry likely also modifies the chemical records of atmospheric composition ultimately preserved in glacial ice. While recent work has shown that photochemical and physical processes in the snowpack can impact the chemistry and composition of both the atmosphere and snowpack, these processes are, in general, poorly understood. This is especially true for the processes that produce and consume OH and HO2. The research will elucidate the processes that produce and consume OH and HO2 radicals within and above sunlit snow over a wide range of environmental conditions, thereby improving our understanding of fast photochemistry within this unique environment doc24058 none PI(s): Charles Bidwell Julia Gwynne University of Chicago The Doctoral Dissertation Improvement project investigates the role of schools and neighborhoods in shaping early labor force experiences of non-college bound youth in Chicago. Specifically, it proposes that social experiences within schools and neighborhoods influence three dimensions of labor force participation: The choice of labor force participation versus college attendance, the type of first employment, and the early stages of development in an employment career. The proposal argues that social experiences within schools and neighborhoods are composed of two elements, form and content. While content involves any sort of interest, purpose or motive, form is the structuring mechanism by which content is experienced. Within the school context attention is focused on the form (degree of differentiation) and content (academic vs. vocational) of the curricular program as well as the form (frequency, intensity) and content (encouragement of information about college vs. labor force) of social interaction with school personnel. Within the neighborhood, the focus is on the form (frequency and intensity) and content (encouragement of and information about college vs. labor force) of social interaction with local adults. These two elements of social experiences in both neighborhood and school bear directly on the way in which youth make decisions about post-secondary opportunities. The project makes contributions to research on labor force experiences of non-college bound youth. First, it expands the literature on occupational attainment by examining mechanisms other than educational attainment that are important in facilitating the location of employment. Second, by simultaneously considering the role of both schools and neighborhoods in transition into the labor force, this project offers a more complete picture of resources available to youth as they negotiate the job search process doc24059 none Under this award, the PIs will attempt to quantify the cold seep barite contribution to the marine sediment record. This will first involve quantifying the cold seep barite (an important carrier of Ba ) contribution to Ba and Ra fluxes within the San Clemente basin. Secondly, the PIs will quantify the effects of this source on the chemical signature of barite in the basin sediments. In general, the idea is to better understand the sources and sinks of Ba and its mass balance in preserved sediments in the San Clemente basin. The study will involve a field component to study the water column, deploy sediment traps, and collect core samples. The laboratory component consists of a very wide variety of elemental and isotopic techniques to characterize sample materials. The results of this general study of the stability, transport and diagenesis of barite has numerous applications to a variety of related questions, and may result in better use of Ba as a paleoproxy of productivity doc23177 none In this project researchers at East Carolina University, Tulane University, and the University of Miami will attempt to a comprehensive approach to allow a quantitative estimate of groundwater discharge and associated dissolved constituents to continental shelf waters. A number of recent studies have shown that he transport of groundwater into coastal zones may be a significant process in the geochemical, nutrient, and carbon budgets of many marine nearshore waters. This project will address the manner in which we may evaluate interactions between groundwater and surface water a major river-dominated margin, the Mississippi River delta. The research team will develop and apply a novel multiple-tracer approach involving the use of 222Rn 226Ra, 4He 3He tritium, and short-lived radium isotopes as natural tracers of groundwater flow to examine the margin adjacent to the Mississippi River. Water samples will be collected from land-based groundwater wells near the Louisiana coast, deep porewaters via Kasten core, and surface waters from the lower Mississippi and adjacent continental shelf throughout the project. To evaluate the connection between groundwater inputs and surface water tracer inventories, we team will construct a balance of all possible inputs and outputs of these natural tracers.. This field-based research will be used to develop and constrain a numerical hydrologic model for the study area. Model results will be compared to estimates of groundwater flow obtained from geochemical modeling doc24061 none This award will support approximately 15 students in attending the ACM HotNets-I Workshop being held in Princeton, NJ on October 28-29, . The purpose of the workshop is to bring together researchers in the networking and distributed systems community to debate emerging research directions doc24062 none This project proposes an investigation of the performance and continued viability of BGP system, including development of new techniques for correlating massive volumes of routing and topology data and tools to support modeling and prediction of routing behavior. The research will include evaluation of incongruity between topology and articulated routing policy, and modeling of peering policy dynamics doc24063 none The proposal requests support to investigate the influence of surface ocean productivity on the carbon isotopic composition of the benthic foraminifer Cibicidoides wuellerstorfi. Analyses of live (stained) benthic foraminifers in 12 NE Atlantic drift sediment sites and 12 continental margin sites in the NW Atlantic to test the hypothesis that high accumulation rates and or strong seasonality in phytodetritus flux results in anomalously low delta 13C values in C. wuellerstorfi. The NE Atlantic and NW Atlantic sites have high accumulation rates but the seasonal variation in phytodetritus flux is much higher in the NE Atlantic sites. The occurrence and frequency of benthic foraminifer phytodetritus species (Epistominella exigua and Alabaminella weddellensis ) in fossil assemblages will be tested as an indicator of altered C. wuellerstorfi carbon isotope values doc24064 none The Mechanisms for Interior Dissipation of the Oceanic General Circulation M. Jeroen Molemaker and James McWilliams UCLA This work addresses the fundamental question of how dissipation is accomplished for the large-scale circulation while in equilibrium. The hypothesis to be addressed is that a crucial step en route to dissipation is that instabilities of mesoscale structures arise due to unbalanced motions. Computation models based on different dynamical approximations will be used to help distinguish and determine the different mechanisms of forward energy cascades. Several different mesoscale circulation regimes will be examined to determine where energy transfer exchange with the sub-mesoscale unbalanced motions is likely to occur; these regimes will include the following: an inflowing jet, boundary upwelling, and homogeneous turbulence. The standard for dynamical behavior will be the non-hydrostatic Boussinesq equations. New methods will be devised to partition the flow and its dissipation routes into balanced and unbalanced parts in order to say when the interior dissipation is likely to be enhanced over the expectation of geostrophic turbulence. The broader goal will be to determine how the vertical and horizontal eddy viscosities in GCMs should depend upon the large- and mesoscale properties of the resolved circulation and stratification doc24065 none The proposal was submitted in response to the FY Chemical and Transport Systems equipment solicitation, described in NSF Announcement. NSF 01-93. The PIs propose to acquire two pieces of equipment that will establish a significant experimental capability in micro nanoscale transport phenomena at the University of Texas at Austin. Research activities enabled by this equipment include thermal property measurements of nanostructures and in low conductivity dielectric films, investigation of heat dissipation mechanisms in carbon nanotubes, and near-field laser manufacturing and nanoscale fluorescence imaging. Application of these nanostructures, including carbon nanotubes and semiconductor nanowires, in the areas o nanoelectronics, optoelectronics, and thermoelectric cooling has great technological potoential. The equipment will also be utilized in new graduate courses at U.T.-Austin. Funding is from the Thermal Transport and Thermal Processing of the Chemical and Transport Systems Division doc24066 none The presence of thousands of halogen and especially chlorine containing secondary metabolites in marine organisms has long been documented by marine natural products chemists. However, the presence in marine biota of many halogenated organic compounds very close in structure to specific man-made chemicals leaves their ultimate source in question. A multi-isotopic abundance measurement approach is suggested as a means of differentiating anthropogenic halogenated organic compounds (HOCs) from those arising naturally in the marine environment. This investigation seeks to measure the compound specific isotopic 14C abundance of several HOCs whose anthropogenic vs natural origin is uncertain, using the expected isotopic depletion of any fossil fuel derived carbon implied for anthropogenically sourced compounds. Further source discrimination may be afforded by consideration of the stable chlorine isotopic ratios of HOCs. Stable isotopic chlorine (d 37Cl) ratios, as yet only preliminarily studied for this purpose, may be expected to exhibit larger, or simply different, chlorine isotope effects during enzymically controlled biochlorinations compared to those observed during industrial synthesis. A dual isotope approach may be additionally useful in unraveling both the complex sources, widespread distribution and chemical transformations that these molecules may undergo in the natural environment. Proposed activities to be undertaken include graduate student training, employing unique analytical capabilities and infrastructure and enabling continuance of international collaborations on a problem of high scientific interest. The recalcitrance or reactivity of HOCs in the marine environment has important implications for societal concern and policy as to the environmental persistence, bioaccumulative properties and toxic effects of HOCs in the environment, in marine life, and in humans doc24067 none Award is for a project to analyze multichannel seismic data acquired in the offshore Cantebury Basin, on the eastern margin of the South Island of New Zealand. Interpretation and mapping of the high resolution multichannel seismic profiles and integration with existing commercial and deep-penetration academic multichannel seismic profiles will allow evaluation of the relative roles of eustacy, tectonics, sediment supply and currents on stratigraphic development. The Cantebury Basin comprises a southern hemisphere counterpart to the New Jersey margin: both representing siliciclastic margins. The analysis will define the 3-D sequence geometries to reveal spatial and temporal changes in sequence geometry, and evaluate the relative importance of local versus global controls by using forward stratigraphic modeling to reproduce observed geometries doc24068 none Ponce This Pan-American Advanced Studies Institutes (PASI) award on physics at the nanometer scale, jointly supported by the NSF and the Department of Energy (DOE), will engage graduate and post-doctoral students from the hemisphere in an intensive course of 10 days duration in an area of nanotechnology of much current interest. Organized by Dr. Fernando Ponce of the Arizona State University and Dr. Carlos Balseiro of the Centro Atomico de Bariloche, Argentina, the PASI will be held at the Centro Atomico de Bariloche, June 1-12, and will feature tutorials and lectures on nanomagnetism, nanowires and nanotubes, nanoparticles, nanoelectronics and transport through nanodevices, nano-optoelectronics, nano-fabrication and nano-characterization, and bio-nanotechnology. In addition, the PASI will include poster sessions for the presentation of research studies and results by junior and other participants, in order to foster content-specific interactions. This intensive exchange should promote future collaborative research with the next generation of scientists. Expected outcomes are a book, videotapes of the proceedings, and a web site with at least summaries of the lectures doc24069 none Werner This recommendation for an award is being made as a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER). This is a collaborative proposal among Principal Investigators at the Universities of Massachusetts and Illinois at Chicago, Bates College, and Mt. Holyoke College. The Principal Investigators will determine the feasibility of establishing an Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site in Svalbard that focuses on studying modern physical processes and proxy records of Holocene environmental change in glacial, lacustrine, fjord, and near shore marine environments. Svalbard is an important location for understanding climate and geophysical feedbacks on global scales where, in the 20th century, there have been profound reductions in sea ice and retreating glacier margins associated with atmospheric warming. Proxy records indicate that Svalbard experienced significant climatic fluctuations during the Late Holocene, culminating with the Little Ice Age at the end of the 19th century. This area should offer excellent opportunities for marine and terrestrial paleoenvironmental research to understand the ocean atmosphere system on a variety of spatial and temporal timescales due to its excellent record of Late Holocene climate. There are currently no REU Sites in the Arctic that focus on Late Holocene environmental change. The Principal Investigators anticipate that students will participate in modules or projects at several sites and that the projects undertaken will become senior thesis projects during the subsequent academic year. They will conduct an annual symposium where the students will present their research results. An important goal is to inspire a diverse group of undergraduate students (especially women, under-represented minorities, and if possible, persons with disabilities) to the rewards and challenges of conducting climate change research in the Arctic doc24070 none Eggs of free-spawning copepods are reported to have extremely high mortality rates. Typical estimates of losses before hatching exceed 90%. Most planktonic eggs of near-surface spawning plankton sink, rather than rise. Thus, it is expected that embryo age will, on average, increase downward in the water column as numbers sharply decrease. This study will quantify egg abundance as a function of developmental progress, thus producing estimates of egg mortality rates, and to examine the vertical distribution of egg development stage. Sampling will be carried out with MEGAPUMP, an overside, 2 m 3 min -1 pumping system that has nine sequential filters mounted in a carousel and an onboard CTD system. Lowering MEGAPUMP through the water column with the pump off will produce temperature and salinity profiles. Pumping on retrieval will produce a 9-level, stratified abundance profile of 50 mm zooplankton, including the eggs of all but the smallest calanoid copepods. The study will be conducted in the calm waters of Dabob Bay, a fjord arm in Washington State, deploying MEGAPUMP from the UNOLS vessel R V BARNES. Four cruises will be conducted in each of two years, and . Two cruises in the first year will be in cooperation with a group at the Univ. of Washington headed by Dr. Bruce Frost. They are studying the mortality imposed on eggs by a diatom diet. Proposed OSU work will complement the UW project, since they do not propose water column sampling of eggs. UW sampling in Dabob Bay is scheduled weekly for February through April, intending to sample before, during and after the reliable diatom bloom that occurs in this fjord in March. The two programs are compatible aboard. Two OSU spring cruises are proposed for , and two summer cruises are proposed in each of and . In summer, female copepods will still be abundant and reproducing, but the water column will not have abundant diatoms. Target species for both OSU and UW programs will be Calanus pacificus and Metridia pacifica, the dominant free-spawning copepods in Dabob Bay. Usual abundances and fecundities of both species are high enough to produce large numbers of eggs from samples of only a few cubic meters, readily done with MEGAPUMP. These copepods have large, specifically recognizable eggs. Egg development will be classified morphologically and by DNA content, which is a function of cell number. Cell number in these, and at least some other copepods, is around at hatching. Thus, DNA should increase through 10 doublings and provide a finely divided development stage series. Mortality rates will be calculated from estimates of egg abundance in each stage. Broader Implications: Copepods are the dominant zooplankters in both oceanic and coastal waters. They are a main pipeline from primary production to fish suitable for harvest, often perhaps as the first consumers at the large-animal side of the microbial loop. It is likely that a major part of the transfer in that pipeline is via copepod eggs. For example, copepod eggs and early nauplii are the main food for larvae of North Atlantic cod. Spawning female copepods are not just stocking future generations; they are feeding much of the food web above them. Well quantified egg mortality rates will be data essential to accurate modeling of copepod population dynamics, rates for which few estimates exist. A study in Dabob Bay will be a prelude to studies in more complex coastal and oceanic habitats. The work will contribute to the overall goals of planktology at the present day, as exemplified in the U.S. and International GLOBEC programs. Training of a student by the project will contribute to the future of planktology doc24071 none This dissertation will investigate the joint personality and neighborhood determinants of juvenile and adolescent antisocial behvaior. Data come from the Rural Substance Use and Violence Project, a longitudinal survey of middle school students in Kentucky. Part of that survey included measures of the Five Factor Model of personality; data on the child s neighborhood context are also available. Analyses using multilevel models will focus on whether each determinant has independent effects on antisocial behavior and whether the two interact so that both are jointly necessary. These statistical analyses will be supplemented by qualitative data from school personnel including their reactions to the survey instrument and the statistical results as well as an assessment of the school atmosphere doc24072 none Lewenstein This award supports a total of 37 participants from the United States, South and East Asia, and the Americas in a US-Africa Workshop on Achieving Public Understanding of Science in Developing Countries, scheduled for December 5-9, , in Cape Town, South Africa. There will be a total of approximately 60 participants, which will also include attendees from Europe and Australia. A special effort has been made to include participants from developing countries throughout the world. The co-organizers are Professor Bruce Lewenstein, with the Department of Communication at Cornell University, and Ms. Marina Joubert, with the Department of Science Communication at the Foundation for Education, Science, and Technology (FEST), Pretoria South Africa. The workshop participants will explore issues on the public understanding of science, and build networks and collaborations that can lead to innovative projects and research. The meeting will bring together knowledgeable practitioners of public communication of science and technology, scholars, and scientists. They reflect a great diversity of expertise, with some coming from the electronic or print media fields, while others are experienced in presenting research to the public. The meeting will explore two cross-cutting issues: 1) the difference between public understanding of science and public understanding of research, and 2) the differences between a traditional deficit model of science communication and newer contextual, lay knowledge expertise, and participation models of science communication. Prior to the workshop each participant will produce an op-ed piece about the challenges and opportunities for achieving public understanding of science in developing countries. These position statements will be circulated to all participants in preparation for discussion during the meeting. As an outcome of the workshop a guide will be produced for use in the development of a Southern African Science Communication Network. Results will be disseminated through professional journals and via a web site. The project supports the participation of two junior investigators from the United States, and one from Nigeria. The Office of International Science and Engineering, the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, and the Division of Social and Economic Sciences jointly support this award doc24073 none This dissertation investigates major architectural debates in Hungary and East Germany between and . Issues such as Socialist Realism, Public Housing, and Postmodernism are analyzed to uncover changes over time and across countries in the social role of the architect. The principal goal is to show how the production of expert knowledge is shaped by the political, cultural, and economic conditions in which experts practice their trade. The project will also examine the complex interaction between authoritarian states and professional knowledge: both the authority of the state over professional conduct and the ways in which state predominance was challenged or legitimated by professionals. The research uses 1) archival materials such as architectural journals and legal regulations, 2) interviews with architects, and 3) secondary statistical data such as census data on architects doc24074 none The process of speciation requires the evolution of characters that act as barriers to gene flow. The barriers themselves are well studied but the genetic details of how they evolve and persist remain surprisingly obscure. Recent results from genetic linkage mapping reveal that races of pea aphids specialized on different crop plants differ at relatively few key genomic regions, with much of the genome remaining quite similar between these incipient species. This project concerns whether the same genetic markers linked to genomic regions controlling divergent host plant use in one geographical population of pea aphid (New York) are also associated with divergence between specialized pea aphid races in other locations (Iowa and Maryland). This will be accomplished by genotyping 200 aphids from each location. Finding that the same markers tag divergent genomic regions in different specialist populations will improve our understanding of the genetic processes involved in the evolution of divergent populations and demonstrate the utility of these mapped markers in further analyses of the evolution of specialization and speciation in pea aphids. This project will form the basis of a novel approach to the study of the genetic mechanisms of ecological specialization and speciation. It will also serve as a training ground in multidisciplinary approaches to speciation for undergraduates and graduate students. Moreover, this investigation of the genetics of crop pests will inform and influence future work in agricultural entomology. Both PIs are actively involved in outreach activities designed to further understanding of basic evolutionary principles among agriculturalists, conservation biologists, religious leaders and the general public doc24075 none Impelluso The proposed work will create a 3D finite element (FE) mesh of the human femur in which each element possesses unique material properties and principal material directions. The effort will introduce modal analysis into an algorithm to model bone adaptation. The mesh will be deployed to conduct near real-time FE analyses, using a new FE code written by the PI and optimized and parallelized for a massive parallel computer whose output can be viewed in 3D virtual reality mode at a high performance visualization facility. The ultimate goal is to bring the power of high performance computing into the surgical ward, thus enabling the surgeon to visualize the stress shielding consequences of a particular fixation method doc24076 none This dissertation investigates the causes and earnings outcomes of employment in ethnic niches among the Latino population in Boston and Los Angeles. Data from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality will be used because this survey identifies the ethnic backgrounds of the respondents coworkers and supervisor. In addition to the usual human capital variables as determinants of employment and earnings (e.g., education, English fluency), the study will focus on nativity, skin color, national origin, and gender. The research will also investigate the role of job search strategies that use informal networks of family and friends as an explanation for how Latinos and especially Latinas end up employed in ethnic niches doc24077 none Inman This Pan America Advanced Studies Institute (PASI) award, jointly supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE), is being organized by Dr. Daniel Inman of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in collaboration with Dr. Vincent Lopes of the Universidade Estadual Paulista. The proposed activity will take place in Florianopolis and Santa Catarina, Brazil in November , and will bring together well-qualified researchers in diverse disciplines related to damage prognosis. The main objective is to involve forty to fifty postdoctoral, advanced graduate students, senior scientists and engineers in a two-week intensive course that highlights interdisciplinary efforts in fields related to damage prognosis. The key unifying theme of the proposed course is to tie in three areas: 1) hardware to implement prognosis; 2) damage mechanics to model and understand the physical principles of prognosis; and 3) algorithms to make appropriate predictions, to form a Prognostic System and understand the nature of the interface between the three areas doc24078 none Environmental genomics, wherein the total genomic diversity of a natural community may be sampled and analyzed in an ecological context, remains an elusive goal. This is due, at least in part, to (I) a lack of reliable estimates of total community diversity and (II) a lack of information regarding the exact phylogenetic, genomic and ecological units measured by commonly used diversity estimators. Although ribosomal RNA approaches have provided the first steps towards diversity estimation, and are widely used as a proxy for unique bacterial types in natural populations, the genomic unit a ribotype measures remains largely unexplored. It is generally believed that ribotype is a poor indicator of ecotype because its slow molecular clock does not track many other genomic changes that are significant with respect to physiological functions and ecological roles. Further, there are reasons to believe microbes in typical natural environments encounter forces much different from those that shape genome evolution among the cultivated opportunists and pathogens that predominate in genomic studies. This project is using an approach that will allow the systematic sampling of environmental genomes by capturing large gene fragments anchored to ribosomal genes (the current standard biomarker for diversity estimation) as well as methods by which this approach can be extended to reassembling larger genome regions of uncultivated bacteria. The goals of this investigation are: 1) to estimate total ribotype diversity in a coastal marine environment taking into account new developments in understanding of PCR artifacts and new statistical approaches toward estimating sampling coverage, 2) to explore the relationship of ribotype diversity to genome diversity by sampling sequences contiguous to rRNA genes in abundant ribotypes, 3) to explore the mechanisms that may contribute to shaping genomes in natural communities, and 4) to continue development of methods to automate and extend the reach of genomic research in natural communities. This research will provide (I) boundaries for bacterial diversity estimates in the environment and (II) insights into how processes that are important in shaping the structure and dynamics of microbial communities may also be influential in shaping the evolution of microbial genomes doc24079 none Soft-sediment benthic habitats are ubiquitous in the marine environment and typically feature macrofaunal assemblages that include large numbers of deposit-feeding invertebrates such as polychaetes, bivalves, gastropods, crustaceans, holothurians, and hemichordates. Via their feeding, modulated in part by chemoreception, these organisms have profound effects on the ecology, biology, geology, and chemistry of their habitats. Very little is known, however, concerning the physiology and molecular biology of chemoreception in deposit feeders. This research is a comprehensive investigation of the sensory mechanisms coordinating chemoreception in deposit feeding spionid polychaetes. It directly addresses this lack of information and will therefore have a significant impact on the current understanding of chemoreception in polychaetes and other marine invertebrates. In the first of three objectives, the ultrastructure and innervation of putative sensory structures on spionid polychaete palps will be described using electron and confocal microscopy. Second, the chemoreceptive capacity of palp sensory cells and nuchal organs will be tested with behavioral assays and activity-dependent cell labeling studies. The behavioral assays will identify chemical cues that elicit significant feeding responses and establish their threshold sensitivities. Complementary immunocytochemistry experiments will determine (1) if the chemicals that elicit behavioral responses activate the sensory cells described in objective 1; (2) the sensitivity of the sensory cells (i.e., stimulation thresholds); and (3) the distribution of cells responding to a particular chemical cue. Third, a functional biochemical approach will be used to characterize and isolate candidate chemoreceptor proteins associated with the peripheral sensory cells and nuchal organs. Several outcomes of the research are of particular significance. First, the cell-labeling method will be further refined for use with small invertebrates, and will provide a powerful tool for future studies of the neural mechanisms coordinating habitat selection by many species of marine invertebrate larvae. Second, the sequence information and purified receptor will set the stage for development of mRNA and antibody probes that can be used to examine gene expression and detail the chemosensory transduction pathways in polychaetes and other marine invertebrates. Such information will be useful to researchers interested in the evolutionary relationships among invertebrate phyla and the in evolution of sensory structures. In addition to its scientific relevance, the project provides significant opportunities for graduate and undergraduate student training. Three K-12 educators or high school students will also participate through the Maine Research Internships for Teachers and Students program. Their participation not only increases the capacity of this over subscribed program, but also strengthens the links between the local K-12 community and the University of Maine. Internet activities and resources will be created that focus on sensory perception and ecology in the marine environment. These materials will extend the research to an even larger Internet audience and facilitate the incorporation of ocean science examples into topics typically approached only from a terrestrial and human perspective doc24033 none Under this award, the PIs will measure 176Hf 177Hf and 238U-230Th-226Ra-232Th activities in basalt glasses from the Southeast Indian Ridge (SEIR)to test how the depth and rate of melting control the sampling of regional heterogeneity in the underlying mantle during ocean ridge magmatism. With these new data, it should be possible to sort out differences in the mineralogy of the mantle source, the depth and extent of melting, and the source compositions. The SEIR was chosen for the study, because along it a number of systematic variations occur at constant full spreading rate (70-75 mm y) and in the absence of large transform offsets and nearby ocean island hotspots:(a)there is a large eastward increase in axial depth ( to m) and a morphological transition from axial high to axial valley; (b) there is evidence that melt production rate and crustal thickness decrease eastward along axis; and (c) lavas from this setting record systematic variations in temperature and mantle composition. It has also been the subject of previous petrologic and isotopic analyses of numerous basalt glasses. The PIs will search for and use correlations of 230Th 232Th, 230Th 238U, Th U, 226Ra 230Th, Ba Th and 176Hf 177Hf with these physical and geochemical variations to test two fundamental hypotheses:1) A regional increase in ridge depth at constant spreading rate is primarily controlled by the depth and rate of melting. 2) The distinctive Pb-Sr-Nd isotope signature of Indian Ocean MORBs is due to the presence of garnet pyroxenite in the shallow asthenosphere doc24081 none Interdomain routing performs the critical function of gluing together individual pieces of the Internet topology to create a connected data delivery infrastructure. Today this critical function is performed by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) [rfc ] which establishes reachability information among Autonomous Systems (ASes). However despite its importance, current measurements and analysis have not led to a basic understanding of BGP s dynamics, performance under stress, fundamental weaknesses, and potential breaking points (if any). Although a few data collection points have been set up in the last few years [ipe,routeviews], the routing data collected by these measurement points are mixed with measurement artifacts [ftntalk], thus the data do not necessarily reflect the protocol s behavior in actual operation. In order for the Internet to continue its unprecedented growth, the interdomain routing protocol must continue to evolve to meet ever increasing and sometimes contradictory requirements. There is a general belief that the current BGP routing protocol may be unable to meet its new requirements (for instance, accomodating the sharp increase in use of site multi-homing, which keeps routing tables from optimally small sizes[huston:scale: ]). BGP is generally thought to be reaching the end of its useful lifetime, although this has not been validated by analysis or measurements [nimrod,irtfrr,huitema:ipng,huston:scale: ]. Due to the lack of a shared understanding of the problem and lack of sufficient data and analysis, there is no consensus on where when BGP collapses and what (if anything) should be done. To address the above critical questions facing interdomain routing, the researchres have assembled a team with research and operational experience, and expertise in network protocols, algorithms, modeling and analysis. The resarchers have identified the following fundamental technical requirements that the global routing must meet: it must scale in order to handle the growth (both in the number of users and in the richness of connectivity); security and resilience are critical issues, so it must continue to function in face of ever increasing faults and attacks; it must be able to fully utilize the rich Internet connectivity; and it must both allow network operators to apply various policy constraints and implementors to easily extend the protocol s functionality when needed. Based on the above criteria the researchers propose to tackle the challenge with the following 3 steps. (1) Develop measurement methodologies and collect data necessary to understand the current BGP operation, its overhead, dynamics under stress, potential vulnerabilities, inadequacies in functionality. The research will base this measurement effort on precise requirements that isidentiied as lacking in existing data, such as for the data not to be collected over vulnerable multihop links [ftntalk]. A new effort at University of Oregon, separate from this proposal, is the measurement companion, if funded. (2) Guided by our measurement and analysis, evaluate several proposed design approaches, including meeting the requirements by tinkering with BGP, by a NIMROD-like [nimrod] maps-approach, by two different approaches to handling multihoming scalability, and by a Clean Slate approach of a complete BGP replacement. Each of these approaches emphasizes different aspects of the interdomain routing problem. The researchers believe there are fundamental trade-offs between many of the desired technical requirements and that these trade-offs are currently not well understood. The combination of measurement and rigorous analysis with a team including operations expertise will bring these trade-offs into clear view. (3) Based on the data analysis and design evaluations the researchers will produce a final approach as the recommendation for moving forward. Through iterations of the above steps, the proposed research undertaking is expected to produce new understanding of current interdomain routing operations, their dynamics and resilience (or lack of it), and vulnerabilities; a new analysis will also be produced that draws on direct and intensive measurement and operations knowledge to capture the fundamental trade-offs among interdomain routing requirements; and a conclusion will be reached on how to meet the future Internet s interdomain routing needs doc24082 none This dissertation investigates how sibling-headed households (SHH) in Namibia cope with the loss of both parents to AIDS. In , 16% of Namibian children were orphans. The research will measure the actual and perceived support received by SHHs. How much instrumental, emotional, and informational support are provided by the children s networks? Which SHHs receive more support and how do contextual factors help explain those differences? Interviews, observation, and surveys will help map children s networks and the resources they receive from them doc24083 none This doctoral dissertation research project will utilize a political ecology framework to investigate the relationship between domestic racial conflicts, industrial and conservation globalization, and Amerindian political differentiation in Guyana. New mining, timber, and conservation development pressures are the basis for multiple legal and political actions of Amerindian organizations. In contrast to unified federations and ethnic based politics, however, the panoply of resource conflicts in Guyana has not catalyzed political unity among Amerindians thus far. The richness in this movement s diversification provokes a reconsideration of important meta-questions in debates of human and environmental change: What is the relationship between land and ethnicity? How do histories of environmental uncertainty affect the modes of social movements? What is the connection between environmental changes and political space that restricts ethnic discourses? Has the practice of development and conservation become more accountable to indigenous communities? In pursuit of the idea that different community histories of economic security and resource access since liberalization are the primary variables affecting political activity and organization, fieldwork will be conducted in the capital of Georgetown and two Amerindian regions in the interior. A blend of qualitative research methods drawing on archival documents, interviews, participant observation, and legal case analysis will be employed. The research findings will illuminate complex community associations that intersect contours of ethnic boundaries within the Amerindian movement of Guyana, perhaps reflecting more critical alliances based on specific histories of ecological change and economic security. This doctoral dissertation research will engage a variety of literature, including studies in political ecology, accountability in international development, the political economy of the Caribbean, and social movements of indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups. This research most distinguishes itself, however, from those cases and studies that collapse environmental crises with homogeneous ethnic politics. The research will reveal some general constraints and opportunities of alternative indigenous political strategies and approaches to survival, potentially illuminating unusual tactics for engaging the development-conservation nexus. It will also be a challenging discourse to dominant resource management agencies, international NGOs, and development institutions. As such, this research on the context of Amerindian politics in Guyana will also inform other marginal groups experiencing similar ecological, social, and economic marginalization in other countries. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc24084 none Primary production and remineralization in oligotrophic ocean waters like those around Bermuda are phenomena of central importance in the ocean carbon-cycle and figure prominently in climate change impact modeling. Geochemical constraints on primary production at Bermuda, characterized by annual and longer time-scales and based on three fundamentally different systems, lead to quantitatively consistent estimates of new, net community and export production. This agreement between the three types of primary production would at first seem to be expected on such time-scales, but leads to the basic Redfield Paradox : nutrients advected or mixed upward into the euphotic zone must carry with them an associated oxygen debt (AOU) and dissolved inorganic carbon sufficient to negate largely the observed seasonal photosynthetic oxygen buildup and carbon drawdown. An exhaustive consideration of various explanations and scenarios that can be offered fail to explain the observations -- a dilemma here referred to as the Ocean Primary Production Paradox (OP3) . A team of researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will re-examine the OP3 by simultaneously and definitively measuring all three geochemical systems over a period of three to four years. These three systems are, specifically, euphotic zone oxygen production, aphotic zone oxygen consumption, and nutrient flux-gauge determinations. The euphotic zone oxygen system will be constrained by the time-series measurement of the full suite of noble gases (He-Xe) plus O2 and N2,with emphasis on precision measurements of O2 and Ar (to 0.1%),the latter as a biogenic analog of oxygen. The other gases will be used to more completely constrain and refine the air-sea gas exchange and upper ocean model. Aside from addressing fundamental problem in ocean biogeochemistry, this work is expected to have considerably broader impact in the field of ocean geochemistry by providing the oceanographic community with new sampling technology (the noble gas sampler) that can be used in a broad variety of biogeochemical problems. The design and expertise will be made freely available to those who request it doc24085 none Under this award, the PIs will measure the seismic velocities, modal mineralogy, water content, and mineral and rock elastic properties in order to understand what controls the seismic velocity variation with depth in the lower ocean crust. Whereas conventional wisdom suggests that the observed velocity changes with depth in lower ocean crust (seismic layer 3) and the observed velocity gradients are controlled by increasing pressure and decreasing alteration (chlorite) with depth, recent evidence by the PIs indicates these factors are unlikely to exert major control. Instead, preliminary data suggest that the presence of hydrous minerals and the overall water content of the rocks may control the seismic velocities. The additional measurements for samples from ODP holes 504B, 735B, 894G, and 923A will be used to test this hypothesis and extend the findings to answer several specific questions about the relationships between mineralogy, cracks, water content, and hydrous phases, on the seismic velocities and velocity gradients in the lower ocean crust doc24086 none In many parts of the developing world, societies that traditionally engaged in pastoralism, small-field farming, and other livelihoods that had relatively minor impacts on the natural environment have been adopting more modern forms of economic activity, often with more profound impacts on natural systems. With these changes, the need has grown to better understand how biodiversity and other qualities of the natural environment can be maintained in landscapes being impacted more significantly by humans. This Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement project will investigate the interplay between cultivation and conservation along one of the most important remaining wildlife corridors in Northern Tanzania s Tarangire Region. These corridors are used by several large species to reach fertile rainy season pastures east of Tarangire National Park. The region is also undergoing social and land-use change as pastoral Maasai adopt cultivation and engage in mixed farming methods. It is hypothesized that constraints to production vary across both the social and physical landscapes. The research will determine which constraints most strongly impact cultivation decisions, the relationships between landscape structure and agricultural change in the corridor area, and the way that changing land use alters vegetation composition and habitat structure. Responses to constraints may impact long term sustainability and resilience by reducing effort to counteract other constraints to higher yields. Changes will be reflected spatially in the pattern of species composition and in the temporal pattern of field establishment, fallowing, and abandonment. Methodologies from the natural and social sciences will be used within a landscape ecology framework. Participant observation and social surveys will be used to understand food production strategies of Maasai. A cluster sampling design using the boma (a group of households that live as a unit, sharing herding and sometimes cultivation decisions) will be used to interview households. Constraints to cultivation will be measured through survey of crop losses to predation, disease, and drought as well as soil analysis. Vegetation sampling will examine the physical impact of cultivation across the landscape, verifying verbal responses. The vegetation of a nearby village with a less developed cultivation system will also be surveyed and both will be compared to available surveys from the s. This village will provide a baseline for water table and climate driven changes in vegetation composition. This project will provide valuable insights into the processes through which natural systems are impacted by human activity as well as the processes through which people experiencing change monitor and respond to environmental change. These insights will have significant utility both for academic discourse and for land and resource managers in this region and elsewhere. The broader impacts of the research include contributing to knowledge of how pastoralists diversify their economies, while adding ecological data to the impact of changes on natural resources. This research will also enhance the integration of social and natural science data within the context of landscape ecology. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc24087 none This research examines the geopolitical perceptions of Russian citizens and how these perceptions are tied to their collective sense of national identity and Russia s sphere of influence. While much is known about the geopolitical attitudes and ideologies of Russian elites, less is known about the views of ordinary Russians. Entirely absent from the literature is the meta-geography or the regional and global mental maps of ordinary Russians. This doctoral dissertation research project will map the perceptual geography of Russians in order to understand how they regard and conceive of the Russian geopolitical spheres and how these territorial domains relate to their perceptions of Russian national identity. A large, representative, nation-wide survey (sample size of ) conducted across Russia in 202 sampling points will gauge opinions on various geopolitical and national issues, as well as measure socio-demographic characteristics of the respondents. Using regression analysis, the survey data will be used to account for the variation in nationalist beliefs and geopolitical mental maps. Because the sample is large, comparison of the mental maps of national groups in Russia, as well as difference by ideology, gender, income, age, occupation, religion, education and region of residence, can be carried out. It is expected that Russian citizens will have varying perceptions and conceptions of territory that parallel those of Russian elites, but they will have a more practical sense of the importance of territorial national issues and the limitations of Russia in the framework of the difficult economic transition. This doctoral dissertation research seeks to make an impact on four broad areas of research. First, it expands the use of mental mapping within political geography beyond textual analysis or small sampling of particular groups. By expanding the use of cognitive mapping techniques to large groups of ordinary citizens, this research will provide a framework for future work using mental maps beyond this research s focus on Russian nationalism and geopolitics. Second, this research engages the gaps and similarities between ordinary Russians and Russian elites on contemporary political matters and attitudes. The geopolitical conceptions and territorial perceptions of Russians has not been examined thoroughly and in a democratizing society, these attitudes increasingly matter. Third, the new geopolitical relationship between Russia and the West in the post-September 11th world depends on the popular support of the Putin Administration s rapprochement with the US. This study will indicate if the new pro-West positioning matches the beliefs of the average Russian. Fourth, the strength of ordinary Russians feelings towards the Russian near abroad (the countries of the former Soviet Union) is necessary for understanding the long-term prospects of Russian-U.S. cooperation or potential conflict in Eurasia, particularly in the Trans-Caucasus region and in Central Asia. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc24088 none Oxygen transport into sediments in natural marine environments is mediated by the turbulent transport scales of motion of the bulk overlying solution, molecular diffusion being orders of magnitude slower and a virtually insignificant term. The oxygen consumption by sediments, conventionally quantified by either laboratory measurements on recovered cores or by the artifice of an in-situ enclosure experiment, is a key parameter in assessing organic matter decomposition rates and also controls the oxidation of sediment reductants such as NH4+, Mn2+, Fe2+, HS-, FeS etc produced during anaerobic respiration. Ventilation and irrigation of sedimentary layers either by wave induced pumping or bioturbation activity are also processes that could potentially be quantified by more reliable measurements of sediment O2 uptake. This proposal will extend and explore a recently suggested approach being jointly developed by the PI together with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology (Bremen). The technique involves correlating the time varying concentration of dissolved oxygen, measured by fast response microelectrodes, in the sediment boundary layer within a few cm of that surface with locally sensed vertical velocity components also sampled at high frequency by acoustic Doppler velocimetry (ADV). An eddy correlation approach has direct analogues with similar techniques that are used by atmospheric scientists measuring scalar (e.g. heat, moisture (momentum) and trace gas) fluxes in the planetary boundary layer. Theoretical and practical considerations for the adaptation of the basic approach into aquatic systems are discussed and will be explored at shallow coastal field sites in Denmark (Aarhus Bay doc24089 none Why are there so many animal species? Why are so many species ecologically specialized, using a narrow range of resources and habitats? Biologists have long suspected that ecological specialization and species formation (= speciation) are causally connected. However, empirical tests of ecological speciation models are extremely rare. This project evaluates populations of Neochlamisus bebbianae leaf beetles that are associated with different tree species (host plants) in eastern North America. Specifically, it experimentally quantifies the ability of beetle populations associated with different tree species to use each other s host plants and their willingness to mate with each other, and it evaluates patterns of genetic exchange among these populations by collecting DNA sequences and protein polymorphism data. These data are integrated and analyzed at the individual and population levels to test a variety of hypotheses on the diverse genetic and environmental mechanisms by which ecological divergence may drive speciation and biological diversification. Such investigations on speciation ecology are rare yet critical for understanding the origins of Earth s tremendous biodiversity. Because many herbivorous insects (including some Neochlamisus species) are also economic pests, understanding the factors that determine which plants an insect uses, how plants are used, and how new herbivorous insect populations and species form is of applied as well as academic importance. Ecological principles underlying insect-plant relationships are increasingly being used to develop agricultural strategies. The current proposal will provide insights into these principles as well as their consequences for speciation doc24090 none The Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Teacher Education Collaborative (STEMTEC) is an NSF Collaborative for Excellence in Teacher Preparation (CETP) involving the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in partnership with Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges, Greenfield, Holyoke, and Springfield Technical Community Colleges, and local school districts. STEMTEC accomplishments include the revision of mainstream courses for science and math majors who are potential teachers, faculty development to enable the adoption of student-active teaching strategies, alternative assessment, and collaborative group work, and early teaching experiences for preservice students. New science and mathematics teacher preparation transfer programs were developed for community college students and a post-baccalaureate summer fall secondary certification option was created. A follow-on project is supporting a comprehensive summative evaluation of STEMTEC, emphasizing the outcomes of STEMTEC efforts in K-12 schools. The evaluation effort focuses on the extent to which STEMTEC has improved the preparation of K-12 math and science teachers, recruited students into math and science teaching, and supported new math and science teachers. The project provides an induction program for new teachers coordinated with district programs and state and national certification requirements. It includes a teacher collaborative group, STEM Education Institute programs including Science and Engineering Saturday Seminars, and a redesigned UMass Teacher Education Program that features an online seminar and a master s program with a discipline research experience. The project is contributing data to the CETP Core Evaluation effort doc24091 none This research focuses on marine uncultivable microorganisms. The uncultivables represent one of the largest reservoirs of biological diversity in the ocean. The project will answer the following two questions: 1) what is the nature of uncultivability and why do the uncultivables not grow in the laboratory? and 2) how to change this and domesticate the uncultivables? Answering these questions is the long-term aim of the research and this project is a contribution towards this goal. With support from an NSF SGER, the PIs developed a novel approach for growing uncultivable microorganisms in pure culture in situ. The current research builds on these results and has the following objectives: Objective 1: to resolve the nature of uncultivability in selected microorganisms. Using their new technique, they isolated individual members of several consortia in pure culture in situ, and maintained their co-cultures in vitro. Using an array of fine chemical tools, the PIs plan to resolve the chemical nature of the interactions within these microbial synergisms. The PIs have designed the chemical analyses such that the objective will be achieved whether these microbial interactions are based on cross-feeding, removal of inhibitors, signaling, or other kinds of chemical exchange. Objective 2: to domesticate selected uncultivable microorganisms. Once the PIs have resolved the nature of chemical interactions between the members of microbial consortia, they plan to chemically mimic the presence of synergistic partners in Petri dish. The domestication process may prove highly specific to each microbe, or it may be applicable across a wider range of different microorganisms. Objective 3: to initiate a new culture collection of previously uncultivable microorganisms. The PIs see the detailed study of these uncultivable microorganisms as their long-term goal and, at this point, plan to make use of the newly isolated strains by building a new collection of novel microorganisms. The PIs plan to make this collection open to everyone so that their characterization will proceed in a timely manner. Broader impact of this research includes training of two graduate students, involvement of undergraduate students through work-study and honors programs, and data dissemination to the public at large through meetings with local residents doc24092 none This dissertation investigates the rise of racial profiling as a political issue in the civil rights movement. The history is seen as an instance of how groups use cultural tools in political conflict. The results will demonstrate that politics are profoundly cultural and culture is often profoundly political. The research analyzes the cultural framing process in public discourse through a systematic content analysis of newspapers, TV news, legislation, legal arguments, and judicial decisions. Interviews with key leaders will help reveal how deliberate cultural strategies were developed to mobilize opposition to racial profiling doc24093 none Kirchhoff This Pan-American Advanced Studies Institutes (PASI) award, jointly supported by the NSF and the Department of Energy (DOE), will engage graduate and post-doctoral students in an intensive ten days of activities focusing on presentations by leading experts in green chemistry, discussions on policy and economic factors driving green chemistry, group problem-solving sessions, and hands-on laboratory experiments. Organized by Dr. Mary Kirchhoff of the Green Chemistry Institute of the American Chemical society and Dr. Patrick Moyna of the Universidad de la Republica in Montevideo, Uruguay, this PASI will be held at the National University of Uruguay from July 6-17, and will feature case studies and interactive discussions between participants and lecturers. The proposed activities will provide participants with a foundation in green chemistry and will demonstrate the applicability of green chemistry principles to different branches of chemistry, as well as to specific industrial sectors. In addition, this PASI will help to establish a network of scientists throughout the Americas who can promote green chemistry through their teaching, research, and industrial involvement doc24094 none This dissertation investigates the effects of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on economic development. Among the studies planned are a cross-national analysis of the effects of the extent of international NGOs in a country in on economic growth over the next twenty years. This effect is expected to vary by regime type: NGOs may be more important in more authoritarian countries where they compensate for the weak civil society. Other measures of institutional development may also determine the size of the NGO effect: data from the World Bank on the legal environment and on local administrative capacities will be tested as possible factors moderating the effectiveness of NGOs in promoting development. A survey of World Bank development experts will be developed to assess the variation in state - NGO ties (e.g., state contracting with NGOs); measures of state-civil synergy based on these ties are expected to be associated with higher economic growth and social development doc24095 none This dissertation investigates the organizational factors that affect a union s efforts to organize nonunion workplaces. Fifteen locals will be randomly selected for study from each of the largest 20 international unions. Annual measures of resources used for organizing will be taken from financial disclosure forms unions filed with the Department of Labor. These include estimates of the total expenditures on organizing and the size of the staff devoted to organizing. These same disclosure forms also include data that will be used to measure the degree of oligarchic leadership structure that may depress organizing and rank-and-file mobilization. These include the expenditures on officer salaries, the tenure length of officers, and the extent of union investments. Other measures in the analysis include union size, the proportion of union income from member dues, and whether union officers are elected by the rank-and-file. The outcomes to be studied are the number and success of union organizing efforts between and , a period of growing union organizing efforts. Event history analysis will evaluate which of the union organizational variables are associated with union organizing efforts and union success two years later doc24096 none This dissertation investigates privatization of energy and water utilities in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Privatization has become one of the leading strategies in international development circles and yet most of our knowledge is based on the experiences of developed countries. This study will compare the recent experience in two Central American countries with different histories of privatization. In Costa Rica, privatization has been slow and deliberate while Nicaragua has embraced international pressures to privatize quickly with less public participation. Secondary data will be used to document the type and extent of privatization in each of the industries in each country. Interviews with government, business, and union leaders in the two countries will evaluate who the important actors were in the transition to privatization, what the perceived benefits and costs have been as a result of privatization, and how state regulation has played a role in the water and energy industries doc24097 none This dissertation investigates the ability of a state to manipulate national identity by investigating the history of the former German city of Koenigsberg after it was taken over by the Soviet Union in and renamed Kaliningrad. In the following decades, the pre-war history of the city became the focus of a struggle between the Soviet state, the local administration, and the Russian speaking citizens. Despite Soviet prohibitions, the local population maintained the German history of the territory. Interviews and archival data will be used to document the state-promoted official history and the efforts by the local intelligentsia to reproduce the German history of the territory. Architectural projects (deconstruction, reconstruction, and preservation) provide an especially valuable historical record for understanding how these conflicts over collective memory varied over time with changes in the political regime doc23904 none The goal of this research is to construct a series of process models to examine the transport of heat and moisture from low to high latitudes in the atmosphere and oceans and their interactions with ice sheets. The central thesis of the research is that the Earth s obliquity controls the differential of insolation between high and low latitudes and, hence, ice volume and climate. Milankovitch theory postulates that ice-age cycles are controlled by insolation in high northern latitudes in summer. This insolation is dominated by the 23,000-year period of the precession cycle. Paleoclimate evidence, however, indicates that the dominant period in ice volume over the last three million years is the 41,000-year period of obliquity. This discrepancy represents a crucial gap in understanding in the science of paleoclimatology. Validating the insolation gradient hypothesis would greatly advance our understanding of Earth s past climate history. Since no climate model has yet succeeded in reproducing the record of the ice ages, the knowledge gained in validating the hypothesis would also point the way towards constructing climate models with greater reliability for predicting future climate changes. Funding is primarily for the support of a graduate student who would carry out the proposed research as part of a doctoral research project doc24099 none Hamilton Recent compilations of climate-related observations show that important changes are now underway in the High Arctic, probably as a response to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions over the last approximately 250 years. These changes include warming of the troposphere, reductions in sea ice cover, decreases in snow cover area, warming of tundra permafrost, and negative mass balances of glaciers and ice caps. In many instances, observations of change are relatively short in duration or sparse in spatial extent. The Principal Investigators will study glacier and ice cap variations over the approximately last 80 years and at a large scale on Svalbard. The islands contain the largest extent of glacier ice in northern Eurasia, amounting to about 0.03 meters of sea level equivalent water in storage. Measurements of glacier variations and mass balance have been conducted continuously on Svalbard since , but most investigations are restricted to small glaciers in northwestern Svalbard. The behavior and current status of most large glaciers and ice caps is largely unknown. The work contained in this proposal involves using high resolution, modern satellite imagery to map current glacier and ice cap extents. These maps will be compared with archival information to assess rates and styles of change. The primary type of modern imagery to be used will be from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument carried onboard Terra. Archival sources of information include geodetic maps, Declassified Intelligence Satellite Photography (DISP) imagery and Landsat MSS (Multi-spectral Scanner) imagery. The overall aim of the proposed work is to understand the current mass balance of ice masses in Svalbard and their current and future contribution to sea level change. There are several objectives: 1) mapping modern boundaries of glaciers and ice caps in Svalbard using satellite imagery and comparing those with archival information to assess changes over a 50 or longer year period; 2) constructing time series of snow facies extent and late summer snowline positions using remotely sensed data to determine short- and medium-term variability; 3) mapping changes in ice flow to determine the importance of flow instabilities; 4) using observed changes to assess spatial variability in glacier and ice cap mass balance across the archipelago; and 5) interpreting the causes of observed changes doc24015 none Investigation of the chemical structures of the uncharacterized fraction of marine dissolved organic matter remains an elusive goal for marine organic chemists. An approach to be used in this work is to directly address supramolecular size scales of marine organic matter structures by assessing their microheterogeneity on micro to nanoscales. Using Scanning Transmission X-ray Microscopy (STXM), a technique that allows the registration of Near Edge X-ray Absorption Fine Structure (NEXAFS) spectra, will allow the quantification of the relative abundance of different functional groups and element bonding types. This spatial mapping of the chemistry of macromolecular assemblages at scales intermediate between bulk chemical analysis and analysis individual molecules or molecular classes offers the capabilities of a important new analytical tool to marine chemistry. In a survey mode, a range of organic materials collected and contributed by several researchers from different parts of the world s oceans will be examined using these techniques. This approach will be extended with additional samples of collected sediment and suspended (trapped) particulates. Laboratory experiments using whole phytoplankton and bacterial cultures will be used to provide materials appropriate to the earlier stages of organic matter diagenesis doc24101 none Female choice is a form of sexual selection well documented at the level of precopulatory choice and helps to explain many male traits (e.g. peacock feathers). After or during copulation, however, females may differentially influence the fate of ejaculate from two or more males to affect paternity outcomes. This phenomenon, referred to as cryptic female choice (CFC), is currently under intense investigation because 1) it adds a new dimension to the evolutionary conflict between the sexes, and 2) it changes our views on the degree to which females influence male reproductive success. This study examines the relationship between two species of tephritid flies with divergent mating systems and the potential for female influence on sperm use and storage. One species mates infrequently and has a complex courtship behavior, whereas the other species mates frequently and has minimal courtship behavior. CFC is predicted to be more important in species that exhibit multiple matings with little pre-copulatory choice. This study uses a multi-pronged approach to estimate the presence and degree of female influence on reproductive outcomes by examining sperm storage, mating behavior, neuromuscular control, and paternity outcomes in relation to male characters doc24102 none This dissertation compares professionalization and unionization as means for promoting the interests of family child-care workers. Initially, qualitative methods will investigate two Illinois campaigns representing each strategy. The professionalization and unionization campaigns differ in their reliance on child development experts or grassroots organizers; in their advocacy of better training and certification or their emphasis on worker solidarity; and in their state lobbying efforts for higher child care standards or increased pay for workers. Surveys will evaluate the success of each type of campaign in mobilizing support among child care workers. The study expects the unionization campaign to be more attractive to lower income child care workers while the professionalization campaign should be better supported by the child care workers who are already better educated doc24103 none Motyka Taku Glacier has been steadily advancing for the last several decades, excavating its bed and entrenching itself into glaciomarine, fluvial, tidal, sediments and glacier outwash deposits. The cause of this advance is related to the advance phase of the tidewater glacier cycle . A 19th century calving retreat resulted in a high area accumulation ratio (AAR) during most of the 20th century (~ 0.90). The high AAR and gradual diminishment of calving due to infilling of the fjord by glacial and fluvial sediments resulted in a positive net balance for several decades, driving the current advance 7 kilometers (km) since . Taku Glacier therefore presents an ideal setting and rare opportunity for the study of slow glacier advance onto and into soft sediments. Continued thickening of ice in the terminus region indicates this advance should continue over the next several years. Reconnaissance observations have documented contemporaneous deformation of proglacial sediments about 200 meters (m) in front of the terminus and prominent bulges up to 10 m high have formed in the compressed sediments with buckling of the overlying soil and vegetation. The Principal Investigators will study the dynamics of the advancing glacier terminus and investigate the effects of this advance on the proglacial geomorphology. Surface velocities, strain rates, and surface elevation changes will be measured both on the glacier terminus and on proglacial features, along with measurements of changes in terminus position. Ground penetrating radar (GPR) and radio echo sounding (RES) will be used to define the glacier geometry and the nature of the bed. They will repeat RES surveys to investigate ongoing subglacial sediment excavation and entrenchment. GPR will also be used to develop a 3-dimensional picture of the structure of the proglacial sediments and their deformation. Existing and new markers on the sediments will measure motion and strain. A key feature of this study will be simultaneous measurement of short-term changes in terminus ice speed and proglacial sediments using precision GPS over several months. Terminus dynamics and the mass balance are integral parts of glacier response theories, but they are poorly understood. The Principal Investigators will use finite element analyses to investigate the deformation and stress fields in the terminal ice wedge and of the sub- and proglacial sediments, using strain data and geometry as constraints. Their aim is to understand the detailed dynamics of terminus advance and the rheological properties of the sediments and the ice near the terminus. They will also investigate the relation between glacier thickening and terminus advance, using our continuing airborne altimetry and photogrammetric measurements of surface elevation doc24104 none Because tropical forest fires are a threat to global biodiversity, developing nations are implementing increasingly aggressive fire-suppression policies. Such management policies tend to reveal ignorance of indigenous fire-management strategies, such as those practiced by the Pemon in the Gran Sabana of Venezuela. As a result of state fire-suppression policies, the Gran Sabana now appears to have contradictory patterns of fire, with too much burning in the wrong places, in particular near permanent communities. At the same time, fire suppression combined with political-economic pressures and acculturation processes has led to a decline in traditional, prescriptive burning in forest savanna boundaries. This decrease in burning in the right places may ultimately lead to excessive fuel accumulations and contribute to damaging fire events. To assess whether fire patterns in the Gran Sabana in fact are contradictory, this doctoral dissertation research project will use participatory mapping and fuelbed, remote sensing, and statistical analysis to evaluate changes in fuel levels in the grasslands along riverine forests in the upper Rio Caroni river basin since roughly . To assess the political-economic and cultural reasons for these contradictory fire patterns, the doctoral student will employ ethnographic methods and reviews of state documents to uncover changes in indigenous and state practices, knowledge, and representations of fire since roughly . The project will integrate these biogeographical, technical, and ethnographic methods into a theoretical framework that draws from post-structural political ecology, landscape theory, and the work of social theorist Henri Lefebvre, and it will provide important primary data on fire patterns in savanna forest boundaries in southeastern Venezuela. On a broader level, this study will contribute to the literature on social forestry, in particular to the emerging research on culturally sensitive and participatory forest fire management. Although such participatory practices show great promise for biodiversity conservation, tropical fire management in Venezuela and elsewhere continues to rely on traditional, technical methods. This conservatism is often inherent in the institutional cultures of state agencies, which may be influenced by social and political-economic imperatives, long-held notions of the inadequacy of indigenous knowledge, and erroneous but powerful ideas about the inherent danger of any sort of forest fire. At the same time, indigenous people may respond in contradictory and often unexpected ways to socially insensitive fire suppression policies, depending on particular social contexts and cultural processes. In the case of the Gran Sabana, some young Pemon now burn more in the wrong places to protest state policies, while many elders have abandoned prescriptive burning practices (such as in forest savanna boundaries). Other elders, bowing to pressures from state agencies, neglect to teach their children appropriate uses of fire, which occasionally leads community members to mistakenly start large dry season fires. Ultimately, the case of the Gran Sabana suggests that fire management is not simply a technical issue but also a social, cultural, and political problem that can not be solved through fire-suppression strategies alone. This study will advance understanding of the intricate cultural, social factors, and political-economic pressures and tensions that lead to contradictory and often destructive burning practices. It therefore will make a fundamental contribution to biodiversity conservation and indigenous rights in tropical forest regions. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc24105 none This dissertation will investigate the cultural frames that state policy makers use when advocating change in laws regarding social welfare and criminal justice: Are criminals and welfare recipients portrayed as rational actors, as victims, or as morally deficient? Is criminal law described as intended to rehabilitate, deter, punish, or incapacitate? How is race included in these debates? The research will collect texts from hearings, legislation, speeches, op-eds, editorials, and other advocacy surrounding proposals to change eight laws in each of four states (New Jersey, Minnesota, Indiana, and California) that vary on their welfare generosity and criminal law. Computerized content analysis will be used to identify themes and compare them across states, time, legislative outcome, and advocacy source doc24106 none This project will test the utility of extraterrestrial 3He as a constant flux proxy for paleoceanographic research over long time scales (last 1.5 Ma). The study will determine 3He accumulation rates at three sites, ODP 806, TT013-PC72, and ODP 849, representing a transect in the equatorial Pacific. Absolute 3He rates will be evaluated by using 18O dating of sediments over the last 1.5 Ma. Relative changes in 3He accumulation rates will be evaluated by normalizing concentrations of 3He to those of 10Be (decay corrected). In addition the project will measure 230Th at each site over the last 300,000 years to test the sensitivity of 3He and 10Be accumulation rates to climate variability doc24107 none Duncan It has been observed that the rate of gas transfer across the air-sea interface correlates well with the mean squared slope of the high frequency surface waves. It has also been noted that the presence of surfactants, at concentrations that have almost no effect on surface tension, dramatically reduces the high frequency components of the wind wave spectrum. Wave tank studies of wind waves, and wind waves plus mechanically generated waves, with and without soluble surfactants, will seek to understand the mechanisms for this reduction in mean squared slope in the presence of surfactants, as well as the characteristics of high frequency waves. At low concentrations, it is hypothesized that the effects may result from the concentrating of surfactants at the wave crests, where capillary effects are typically largest. A variety of laboratory measurement techniques will be used. A cart carries measurement devices along the wave tank at speeds commensurate with the wave phase. Second Harmonic Generation techniques allow dynamic measurement of surfactant concentration. For these latter studies, the system will be at a fixed location and randomly sample the wind waves doc24015 none Investigation of the chemical structures of the uncharacterized fraction of marine dissolved organic matter remains an elusive goal for marine organic chemists. An approach to be used in this work is to directly address supramolecular size scales of marine organic matter structures by assessing their microheterogeneity on micro to nanoscales. Using Scanning Transmission X-ray Microscopy (STXM), a technique that allows the registration of Near Edge X-ray Absorption Fine Structure (NEXAFS) spectra, will allow the quantification of the relative abundance of different functional groups and element bonding types. This spatial mapping of the chemistry of macromolecular assemblages at scales intermediate between bulk chemical analysis and analysis individual molecules or molecular classes offers the capabilities of a important new analytical tool to marine chemistry. In a survey mode, a range of organic materials collected and contributed by several researchers from different parts of the world s oceans will be examined using these techniques. This approach will be extended with additional samples of collected sediment and suspended (trapped) particulates. Laboratory experiments using whole phytoplankton and bacterial cultures will be used to provide materials appropriate to the earlier stages of organic matter diagenesis doc24109 none Environmental genomics, wherein the total genomic diversity of a natural community may be sampled and analyzed in an ecological context, remains an elusive goal. This is due, at least in part, to (I) a lack of reliable estimates of total community diversity and (II) a lack of information regarding the exact phylogenetic, genomic and ecological units measured by commonly used diversity estimators. Although ribosomal RNA approaches have provided the first steps towards diversity estimation, and are widely used as a proxy for unique bacterial types in natural populations, the genomic unit a ribotype measures remains largely unexplored. It is generally believed that ribotype is a poor indicator of ecotype because its slow molecular clock does not track many other genomic changes that are significant with respect to physiological functions and ecological roles. Further, there are reasons to believe microbes in typical natural environments encounter forces much different from those that shape genome evolution among the cultivated opportunists and pathogens that predominate in genomic studies. This project is using an approach that will allow the systematic sampling of environmental genomes by capturing large gene fragments anchored to ribosomal genes (the current standard biomarker for diversity estimation) as well as methods by which this approach can be extended to reassembling larger genome regions of uncultivated bacteria. The goals of this investigation are: 1) to estimate total ribotype diversity in a coastal marine environment taking into account new developments in understanding of PCR artifacts and new statistical approaches toward estimating sampling coverage, 2) to explore the relationship of ribotype diversity to genome diversity by sampling sequences contiguous to rRNA genes in abundant ribotypes, 3) to explore the mechanisms that may contribute to shaping genomes in natural communities, and 4) to continue development of methods to automate and extend the reach of genomic research in natural communities. This research will provide (I) boundaries for bacterial diversity estimates in the environment and (II) insights into how processes that are important in shaping the structure and dynamics of microbial communities may also be influential in shaping the evolution of microbial genomes doc24110 none Swap This award supports 15 African participants in a US-Southern Africa Workshop on Synthesis of SAFARI - Implications for Local and Regional Science and Policy, scheduled for October 8-13, , in Charlottesville, Virginia. The co-organizers are Professor Robert Swap, with the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, and Professor Harold Annegarn, with the Atmosphere and Energy Group at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. There will be a total of about 150 participants, approximately one third of whom will come from US academic institutions, one third from various countries in Southern Africa, and the remainder from governmental, nongovernmental and international organizations. This workshop will enable the researchers to synthesize and interpret valuable information from the Southern African Regional Science Initiative (known as SAFARI ), and to also plan the next phase of regional environmental research. It is expected that this meeting will lead to the development of collaborative, interdisciplinary research and education projects. SAFARI was an international science project to investigate the linkages across time and space scales between Southern Africa s terrestrial, atmospheric, and biogeochemical processes, and their impacts on regional and global environmental change. The project involved nearly 300 participants from 18 different countries. This workshop will enable participants, some of whom are US and African students and junior investigators, to review the current state of understanding about and missing information on land-atmosphere-biosphere interactions concerning Southern Africa, and explore emerging areas of cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary research that will advance the knowledge on the natural functioning of Southern Africa s ecosystems. They will also participate in the process for translating the research results into a format that is relevant to society. A synthesis of the results of SAFARI will be produced in a workshop report, thus providing valuable new information to the international global environmental change community, as well as to local and regional policy makers. Results will also be disseminated through professional journal articles and via a web site. The Office of International Science and Engineering, the Division of Atmospheric Sciences, and the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences jointly support this award doc24111 none problem for information dissemination in sensor networks, and identify a set of requirements and objectives. Then, the researchers configure the required functionalities into modules in across layers, and figure in their functional dependency.Under this unified framework, one can design protocols specific to a layer without negligence of their interaction, and compatibility, with protocols in other layers.Also, cross layer issues can be identified and appropriately addressed. Hierarchical cluster formation and routing: Due to the unique characteristics of data-centric sensor networks, the researchers believe topology in the form of hierarchical cluster structure offer the greatest performance benefits.Also, as the information collected by various sensors may be correlated, redundant, and or of different qualities, this structure facilitates digests of sensor data. The researchers propose to develop, and rigorously prove its optimality of, a decentralized cluster formation scheme that captures and utilizes these unique characteristics. The researchers will also exercise motion control of mobile routers base stations to effectively recover network partition and or to relieve communication bottlenecks. Topology control and power management: The researchers consider, in conjunction with the hierarchical cluster formation scheme, how to exercise power management so as to maintain network connectivity, optimize spatial network reuse, and mitigate MAC-level interference.This is achieved by (i) powering off sensors that are not relay nodes when there are no events; and (ii) devising strategies for setting (a set of) minimal transmission powers when sensors are not evenly distributed.Again tasks in this avenue will be carried out with a rigorous theoretical base. MAC design for timely dissemination of delay-sensitive data: The researchers address several medium access issues: (i) how to mitigate medium contention to improve short-term and long-term throughput fairness, (ii) how to incorporate well-grounded scheduling policies in MAC to achieve temporal QoS within between clusters, and (iii) how to tradeoff throughput for delay when real-time messages are involved. Empirical study with the use of Motes: To validate the design and to empirically study the overall performance, the researchers will leverage the tiny wireless sensors, Motes, and construct a sensor network testbed. As Motes are rather limited in their processing and communication capability, the researchers will integrate Motes with MOPS 520 PC104 boards.This is realized by attaching a Mote to the PC board and use the Mote s serial peripheral interface (originally for synchronous data transfer between the Atmega 163 processor in Motes and peripheral devices) for data transfer between the two boards.The researchers will also simulate acoustic sensor behaviors by using the sound cards and microphone on the PC104 board.With such a sensor network testbed in place, the researchers will be able to implement and experiment with the proposed protocols and algorithms. The researchers plan to simulate homeland surveillance where acoustic sensors can give clues to guards who watch close circuit TVs doc24112 none Award is for a coordinated seismic and coring study of the Storegga Slide on the Norwegian Margin. The Storegga slide developed in sediments thought to have contained substantial amounts of gas hydrate. Examining this slide area will test the hypothesis that submarine landslides can release methane from hydrates into the oceans and or atmosphere and thereby affect climate. The study will test three major hypotheses; 1) How much gas hydrate is present in the Storegga region, 2) did methane escape as a result of the slide, and if so, how much? 3) does hydrate dissociation promote submarine landslides? A 43 day cruise of the R V Ewing will acquire high resolution seismic reflection data, three component ocean bottom seismic data and jumbo piston cores doc24113 none Under this award, the PI will attempt to constrain the evolution and origin of the unusual Indian Ocean mantle domain by determining the initial hafnium isotope compositions and Lu and Hf concentrations of old oceanic crustal basalts from 21 DSDP ODP drill sites and two Tethyan ophiolite complexes already studied for Sr, Nd and Pb isotopes. Establishing the Hf isotopic composition of old Indian Ocean and Tethyan crust will help to determine when and where this isotopic signature first appeared in the Indian Ocean mantle domain, and if it was present in the composition of Tethyan crust produced before the opening of the Indian Ocean basin. It will also help to determine whether the distinct composition of the Indian Ocean mantle domain is primarily derived from subducted, deeply recycled components that have undergone extensive mixing and homogenization in the mantle, or whether it more likely derives from shallow contamination via the foundering of local Gondwanan continental lithosphere, which has evolved in isolation from the convecting mantle for billions of years doc24114 none Marshall Simple theoretical models of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) will developed and applied to further our understanding of this central component of the global ocean circulation. The formalism of the residual mean will be exploited in an attempt to develop a theory for the stratification and overturning circulation of the ACC and how it depends on eddy transfer processes and the patterns of wind and air-sea flux acting at its surface. Specifically, solutions of the zonal-average residual mean problem will be fully explored to investigate processes that control the pattern of meridional overturning and interior stratification of the ACC. Those solutions will then be extended to 3-dimensions to explore the role of regional patterns of air-sea interaction and topographic interaction on ACC dynamics: this will be done by numerical solution of the residual mean equations in 3-dimensions. Finally, the theoretical model will diagnosed in terms of more realistic models and observations. The intellectual thrust of the proposal is that it addresses issues that are fundamental to our understanding of the general circulation of the ocean: the role and representation of the ocean s geostrophic eddy field in shaping the large-scale circulation of the ACC. It seeks to develop a simple conceptual framework that, if successful, could provide a reference point for observation and models of circumpolar flow. The study has the potential for broad impact because the ACC is a system of great importance to the global ocean and to global climate, is thought to be major player in glacial-interglacial cycles, uptake of anthropogenic CO2 and global biogeochemical cycles doc24115 none Paleoenvironmental reconstructions from high Arctic settings have been extremely valuable sources of information for a range of purposes, but especially as indices of climatic change, which is amplified at high latitudes. High Arctic lakes have been sources of information for many paleoenvironmental reconstructions because their watersheds and sediments usually are undistrurbed, ice cover limits wind-driven disturbance, and they receive highly seasonal sediment inputs. Glacial lake sediments from the high Arctic are particularly useful, because annual to semiannual temperature resolution is possible and sediment supplies usually are not limited. This doctoral dissertation research project will study of how varves (distinct annual layers of sediments) form in Arctic lakes. The project will examine the varves and varve-forming processes of Lake Tuborg on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada. Lake Tuborg was formed when ice advanced across the mouth of a fiord, creating a lake with seawater trapped beneath freshwater. This has led to strong chemical and density stratification of the water column and a lack of oxygen at the bottom of the lake. Burrowing organisms therefore could not disturb the sediments that have been carried into the lake by rivers and streams, allowing relatively undisturbed layers of sediment to accumulate each year. The sediments have accumulated in this way for more than 3,000 years, so the lake contains an unusually long, pristine record of environmental change. The specific tasks of this project are to understand the modern distribution and deposition of sediment by monitoring physical processes in the lake and to elucidate spatial, temporal, physical and chemical changes in recently deposited sediments (those deposited over the last century or so). Physical processes will be recorded to monitor within lake conditions and the movement of sediment. Concurrent measurements of air temperature and precipitation will be made, and recent sedimentation will be analyzed with networks of well-dated short gravity cores. This study will provide insight into the climatic significance of undisturbed sediments from Lake Tuborg by providing a better understanding of the varve-forming process. These analyses will improve understanding of past climate change at high latitudes, thereby providing a framework for placing future changes in a long-term context. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc24116 none Coral reefs are arguably the most diverse and vulnerable coastal ecosystems and are currently undergoing unprecedented decline. Both their diversity and vulnerability are influenced by genetic structuring, the spatio-temporal scale and pattern of geographic differentiation within and among species. By documenting such structuring, we gain a better understanding of the origin and distribution of reef biodiversity. Furthermore, data on the level and scale of genetic interconnections are crucial for predicting reef response in the face of stressors and for the design of appropriate conservation strategies. On the basis of morphological species ranges, previous workers have generally characterized reef organisms as widespread, especially in the Indo-West Pacific (IWP), the largest and most diverse marine region. Wide species ranges in the IWP imply dispersal across numerous, vast, open ocean barriers, supporting the belief that reef organisms have tremendous dispersal abilities. Past molecular studies found IWP populations to be typically interconnected over basinal to sub-basinal scales. However recent studies on stomatopods in Indonesia and supratidal crustaceans in the Americas encountered finer levels of genetic differentiation. These studies raise the question: is fine-scale genetic structuring common among reef organisms? Preliminary data show fine-scale genetic differentiation in several widespread, reef- associated gastropods. Each species is composed of numerous, divergent populations with ranges limited to archipelagoes or islands. Their life history attributes are typical of many reef organisms, and initial data show considerable structuring in co-occurring taxa with different life history strategies. The goals of this project are to document the extent of geographic, genetic structuring in selected reef-associated gastropods in the IWP, and to use these patterns to address questions about large-scale, spatio-temporal processes in the marine biosphere. Evolutionarily significant units (ESUs), the relevant conservation and evolutionary units, will be identified throughout the region. Hypotheses about the source and dynamics of ESUs, and thus patterns of distribution and diversification, will be tested using sequence data. The significance of the proposed work lies in the nature of fine scale genetic structuring encountered in these taxa, which makes them model systems for studies of marine speciation and biogeography, and has major implications for reef management and conservation of biodiversity. Fine-scale, but deeply divergent genetic structuring has rarely been encountered in marine taxa and only in continental settings; its occurrence on islands is unprecedented and contrary to expectations. How can organisms capable of dispersing far into Oceania differentiate on an archipelagic scale? This conundrum implies that rare dispersal events may be highly important in the spread as well as differentiation of marine populations. Exploring the phylogenetic nature of genetic structuring in independent gene trees will shed light on a variety of hypotheses about the origin of marine biodiversity and distribution of reef organisms. High levels of genetic differentiation also imply that conservation and resource management strategies on reefs need to be appropriately scaled. Understanding the size and distribution of genetically interconnected units is crucial for designing appropriate management units, such as marine protected areas. Congruent genetic structuring delineates intrinsic breaks in the distribution of reef biota and thus identifies natural management units. This project will lead to better management strategies for reef-associated marine resources, and will also have direct educational impact at several levels. The project team will be interacting with resource managers regularly. The species studied are important food organisms, and provide an excellent venue to introduce implications for resource management and thus influence reef management strategies on numerous Pacific islands. The results of this work will be disseminated regionally as well as in the scientific literature doc24117 none Since NOAA PMEL has monitored seismicity in the NE Pacific using Navy SOSUS arrays, and since using an autonomous hydrophone array in the equatorial Pacific. This project is an effort to use analyze these data to address questions related to the first-order patterns in seismicity, stress transfer and earthquake interactions doc24118 none ES- Charles Bidwell Robert Petrin University of Chicago This Doctoral Dissertation Improvement project examines ways in which post-secondary educational institutions (PSEIs) contribute to stratification of technical personnel in the contemporary American economy. Among the specific questions it seeks to address are: (1) do PSEIs that science and engineering graduates attend have pervasive effects on subsequent occupational outcomes, and (2) does the functional differentiation among science and engineering graduates reflect differences in their social backgrounds and the regional clustering of technologies and industries. In order to shed light on these questions this research will develop a framework for embedding post secondary educational institutions in labor market analyses by providing a description of labor markets and career structures segmented by relations between PSEIs and regions. Several post-industrial trends have led to the re-evaluation of structuralist concepts from economics and sociology and contributed to a resurgent interest in theories of labor market segmentation. The role of regions and education in science and engineering suggests that PSEIs might play a role in structuring labor markets. Indeed, prior research on science and engineering has found that rewards in technical subsystems are often products of institutions positions in networks of information and resource exchanges. Therefore, in the proposed research the structure of science and engineering practice is posited as manifest, at the individual-level, in the distribution of individuals from various social backgrounds and with various educational credentials across fields and functional roles in the economy. At the college and university-level, the structure of practice is believed to be manifest in enduring relationships between PSEIs and other key actors in their environments which shape the opportunities available to graduates over the course of their careers. The primary data for this research will be drawn from selected national data on college graduates collected by the Nations Science Foundation (i.e., Scientists and Engineers Statistical Data System and Survey of Earned Doctorates). These data will be matched to a number of other sources to generate a composite data set linking science and engineering graduates to relevant information on the PSEIs they attended, as well as economic data on regional and sectoral conditions believed to be correlated with labor market processes. Since employer characteristics play important roles in determining returns to education, it will be necessary to collect and include these types of supplementary data in analysis, as well as data on PSEIs relationships with key actors in their environments. Analysis will consist of two major phases. The first will provide a description of PSEIs positions in labor markets. The second will examine individuals functional roles in the economy as correlates of their socioeconomic background and characteristics of their degree granting institutions. Career trajectories will be similarly analyzed using appropriate methods for multicohort data doc24119 none Commercial wetland mitigation banking is a market-based environmental policy that has developed in the United States since . The policy allows individuals to fulfill the requirements of Section 404 of the Clean Water Act by purchasing credits from a wetland bank rather than building their own wetland restoration to mitigate their proposed impact to a wetland. Commercial wetland banks are large tracts of restored wetland created by private developers in anticipation of credit demand. The general objectives of this doctoral dissertation research project are to clarify the unique problems of creating a market for wetlands, conceived of as a bundle of ecosystem services, in contrast with the now-common markets for units of individual air or water pollutants. This research will use ecological fieldwork, key informant interviews, documentary histories, and spatial analysis to investigate the process by which a market in wetland functions has been created and stabilized over the past decade. It will focus on two regions that adopted banking practices early, but in sharply contrasting ways: the state of Minnesota and the Chicago District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. While wetland mitigation banking is a very promising policy tool with a number of enthusiastic supporters, both its ecological and economic features are largely assumed rather than investigated. This project will examine these related features together. This project will be both quantitative and qualitative in nature The investigation will be composed of a regional study and an extended case study of a single transaction and a single bank in each region. The regional study will describe broadly the development of social networks, technologies, landscape functional changes, and business strategies that have accompanied the rise of a wetland mitigation banking industry in both the Chicago area and in Minnesota. Documentary research and interview-based work will map the social and political networks between regulators, private capital, and wetland scientists that have created, spread, and institutionalized the conventions of banking. GIS-based spatial analysis will provide information on the structural and functional changes in the wetland landscape of the region. The case study of a single transaction is intended to give practical content to the broad outlines sketched by the regional study. Research activities will closely examine the process of moving wetland functions from the site of impact to the bank site. Metrics of landscape analysis, hydrologic modeling, and fieldwork-based comparison with reference sites will be used to explore the physical basis for the creation of equivalence between the impact and mitigation sites of the transaction. Results of this research will indicate the potential for banking practices to create a stable market for wetland functions within the larger trend in United States environmental policy towards using market forces to create private interests in public goods such as clean air and clean water. The project will make a timely contribution to a very active and ongoing debate about the future of wetlands policy in the United States. Recent years have seen the expansion of pollution credits trading to a broad range of air and water pollutants, and an expansion across national borders as trade agreements guide the expansion of market relations into the domain of ecosystem services, which have usually been conceived of as public non-market goods. The current Administration recently reinforced its commitment to establishing market-based policy tools as the primary way of resolving environmental policy problems. In general, such policies are a departure from the historical trends of environmental management in the United States, and their successful implementation requires a thorough understanding of the process of creating markets in ecosystem services. Specifically, the results of this study will be of interest to the large population of regulators involved in Clean Water Act administration, many of whom have only recently encountered banking practices. Because banking is a complex regulatory arrangement that has not yet attracted a great deal of attention from the public or from non-profit environmental groups, the results of this study will be disseminated among these groups to foster an understanding of the features of banking policy. Furthermore, wetland mitigation banking has received little scholarly attention. This project will be one of the first to examine banking using integrated approaches of the social and natural sciences. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc24120 none The faculty at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University proposes to continue their NSF Computer Science, Engineering, Engineering Technology and Mathematics Scholarship (CSEMS) Program to provide an additional thirty talented students, who are majoring in these disciplines, with individual scholarships of up to $3,125 per year. Award amounts will be based upon academic achievement and will provide supplementary income to students with financial need. Their participating major departments are electrical, mechanical, civil, chemical, industrial engineering, electrical engineering technology, construction engineering technology, computer and information sciences, biological and agricultural engineering systems and mathematics. Their CSEMS program will also provide scholars with the necessary support and experiences to be successful and competitive in graduate schools or in careers of the CSEM disciplines. The program will continue to assist the CSEM scholars for two years following the receipt of the academic degree to assure a successful transition to graduate programs or career paths. CSEM Scholars will be selected in Spring and will commence activities in Fall . Their program includes faculty advising mentoring as well as technical professional development seminar series. In addition they provide summer internships in industrial or governmental setting and graduate school career counseling and placement. These program enhancement activities and scholarship funds are expected to enable their CSEMS Scholars to complete the degree requirements within the appropriate time frame as determined by the academic level, up to four years doc24085 none Under this award, the PIs will measure the seismic velocities, modal mineralogy, water content, and mineral and rock elastic properties in order to understand what controls the seismic velocity variation with depth in the lower ocean crust. Whereas conventional wisdom suggests that the observed velocity changes with depth in lower ocean crust (seismic layer 3) and the observed velocity gradients are controlled by increasing pressure and decreasing alteration (chlorite) with depth, recent evidence by the PIs indicates these factors are unlikely to exert major control. Instead, preliminary data suggest that the presence of hydrous minerals and the overall water content of the rocks may control the seismic velocities. The additional measurements for samples from ODP holes 504B, 735B, 894G, and 923A will be used to test this hypothesis and extend the findings to answer several specific questions about the relationships between mineralogy, cracks, water content, and hydrous phases, on the seismic velocities and velocity gradients in the lower ocean crust doc20890 none Spiegelman The distribution of melt and solid within partially molten regions of the Earth s mantle is one of the key parameters controlling the dynamics, properties and compositions of these regions. Field observations, experiments and theory all suggest that melt should be distributed in some form of channelized network at depth but the physical mechanisms for producing these networks are still not well understood. This project will develop new tools to investigate mechanical instabilities for flow localization based on fluid flow in deformable permeable media with strongly variable solid shear viscosity. These tools will complement existing models for flow localization due to reactive melt transport. Developing accurate flow solvers in heterogeneous media is numerically quite challenging, however, the investigation will be guided by recent experiments from David Kohlstedt s laboratory (U. Minnesota) on flow induced melt localization that provide clear and diagnostic tests for the theory. The opportunity to directly combine theory and experiment is rare and the investigators plan to work closely in consultation with the Kohlstedt group. However, the initial objective of this project is the development of the needed numerical tools. Once developed and validated with the experimental results, they will be used to extrapolate the experimental results to larger scales and investigate geologically relevant systems such as melt transport beneath mid-ocean ridges and island arcs doc24123 none Brook This is a collaborative proposal between Principal Investigators at the University of California - San Diego and Washington State University. They will develop a large-volume atmospheric archive at the margin of the Greenland ice sheet in order to test two competing hypotheses for the cause of the abrupt increases in atmospheric methane concentration that punctuated the last glacial period. The main objective is to measure the carbon-14 (14C) content of atmospheric methane before and after these events. These events have been attributed to 1) destabilization of sedimentary methane hydrate (clathrate) or 2) increased methane production in terrestrial wetlands due to warmer and wetter climatic conditions. The carbon-14 content of atmospheric methane should distinguish between clathrate and wetland sources because clathrates are made from carbon-14-free sedimentary organic matter, whereas the carbon-14 content of wetland-derived methane is essentially the same as that of atmospheric carbon dioxide. This test is important because the wetland hypothesis has been used to infer large-scale tropical abrupt climate change, with broad implications for our understanding of the potential for rapid change in both past and future climates. The main obstacle to this measurement is that it requires ~200 liters of air, much more than is available from ice core samples. This work will use ice that outcrops due to ablation and ice flow at the margin of the Greenland ice sheet at a location called Pakitsoq, enabling virtually unlimited sample size. Preliminary fieldwork has demonstrated that ice of the appropriate age (11,000-15,000 years ago) can be found, and that it is not contaminated with respect to methane or gas isotopes, by comparison with the known atmospheric record from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) ice core. Ice of Eemian (last Interglacial) age also appears to be present at this site, and this work will use gas measurements to establish the chronology of the entire margin ice section including a thick Holocene section doc24124 none This project attacks the problem of how to help those in states and districts understand and use data accurately and effectively. The project uses a multi-dimensional approach to achieve three goals. It: (1) targets training for 300 mathematics and science education reform leaders, (2) creates a national cadre of 50 data facilitators; and (3) provides intensive implementation support in four sites to build the knowledge base about the conditions that support the effective and collaborative use of data to guide educational improvement. The project builds on the publication Using Data Getting Results, developed by TERC, and the materials synthesized in this publication will inform the workshops that the project implements. Professional development activities will be carried out by WestEd, and the Goodman Research Group will conduct the summative evaluation. There are partnerships with the Eisenhower Consortia, TIMSS-R Benchmarking jurisdictions, and NSF-funded systemic initiatives, including local systemic change projects, and dissemination and implementation sites who will work with this project doc24125 none Soboyejo This award supports a one-year collaborative project among Professor Winston Soboyejo, at Princeton University; Professor Aboubaker Beye, at the Universite Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, Senegal; Professor Yunus Ballim, at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa; and Professor Christopher Chama, at the University of Zambia. The purpose of the grant is to promote research collaborations in materials science and engineering between the United States and Africa. Nine US universities and one national laboratory will be participating in this program. Sixteen scientists (15 from Africa and one from South America) will spend nine weeks conducting collaborative research projects at the participating US institutions. They will conduct research in the following major areas: 1) failure mechanisms in micro-electro-mechanical systems; 2) processing, characterization and deformation of nano-scale thin films; 3) holistic approaches to infrastructure materials; and 4) the microstructural design of thermal shock resistant refractory ceramics. The collaborations will continue with reciprocal visits by the US scientists to their African counterparts. Support is also being provided to assist with the establishment of Africa MRS chapters in North Africa (Egypt), and West Africa (Nigeria). In addition, US graduate students will gain valuable experience about the process of international collaborative research. This project will also provide assistance for the coordination and or organization of the following symposia that were proposed at prior NSF-supported workshops: 1) micro-electro-mechanical systems and thin films; 2) infrastructure materials; 3) affordable materials; 4) low cost manufacturing; 5) biomaterials and biomedical systems; and 6) entrepreneurship in materials. The symposia will feature talks by US researchers, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, as well as their counterparts from Africa and South America. Symposia presentations will be published in special editions of peer-reviewed international journals. Overviews of the Africa MRS activities will also be presented at the US MRS meetings in Boston and San Francisco. The Office of International Science and Engineering, the Directorate for Engineering, and the Division of Materials Research are jointly providing support for this project doc24046 none This study sets out to make chemical measurements of inorganic and organic carbon compounds found in a complex and poorly understood environment, shallow water marine hydrothermal systems. Due in part to limited sampling opportunities, our understanding of marine hydrothermal microbial systems and especially of their organic geochemistry is lacking. The metabolic energy requirements of microbial lifeforms in these environments is also unclear. Determination of the chemical structures and concentrations of a series of aqueous low molecular weight organic compounds (amino acids, carbohydrates and organic acids) will allow the modeling of the energetic bounds associated with the metabolism of these substrates by heterotrophic thermophiles. A series of studies, including using direct SCUBA field sampling of the study site (Aeolian Islands, Sicily), will allow hydrothermal vent fluid collection including temporal variation. Thermophilic bacteria are known to be metabolically opportunistic, having the capability of utilizing a variety of carbon sources present in their environment along with one or more electron acceptors. How these organisms perform such metabolic manipulations and how they dynamically adapt to changes in their chemical and physical environment is not yet known. These investigators will employ a thermodynamic modeling approach, using known concentrations of specific substrates at known temperatures, to calculate the possible bioenergetic energy yields of the respiratory and fermentative reactions these organisms use in hydrothermal environments. This in turn will increase our understanding of the biogeochemical processes that may fuel the microbial energetics in the deeper subsurface biosphere doc24127 none This project will enhance a facility for calibration and testing of seismometers. Specifically, the project will upgrade two existing, observatory-class shake tables with new electronics and interferometric optical displacement sensors. The facility will be made available to all qualified researchers in the academic, government, and commercial sectors, and will be a invaluable community resource doc24128 none This dissertation investigates how blind and partially sighted peoples inability to respond to visible, non-vocal gestures leads to disruptions in interactional encounters. A consistent set of problems occur during everyday social interaction between sighted and visually impaired blind people. Conversational analysis will explore how interactional repairs (e.g., recycled turns) maintain the achievement of meaning in spite of these problems. The research will not only analyze how these particular interactions are negotiated, but will demonstrate the role of taken-for-granted visible gestures in interpersonal communication among sighted people. Participant observation and interviews with partially sighted blind people will develop a broad description of interactional problems. Videotaped interaction will be used to analyze the conversational process of disruption and repair in more detail doc24129 none The University of Kentucky will provide engineering and computational equipment support to the AMPATH Project s First International Conference in Valdivia, Chile, April 10-12, . The main objective of the conference is to create an environment for AMPATH participants in Latin America, potential participants and those with a regional, hemispheric or international interest in the project to exchange ideas, form new partnerships and solidify existing collaborations. The University of Kentucky had agreed to lend AMPATH the technology required for this conference to be accessible via the Access grid. The Grid node will be connected to the REUNA network, and through this connection, to the UCAID Abilene network. Interested participants worldwide, who are unable to attend personally, will be able to monitor the conference from their own sites, using the Access grid connection. The conference support offered by UK includes shipping of the portable Access grid node, sending engineering staff to set up and maintain the equipment, as well ad international airfare, meals and lodging for the UK and AMPATH engineers, and the cost of the network connection to the Abilene backbone. In addition, the University of Kentucky will receive technology support from the University of Illinois at Chicago, which will send equipment for its AGAVE (Access Grid Augmented Virtual Environment) system and an engineer to maintain this equipment. The AGAVE system will connect to the Access Grid using the University of Kentucky s node. The workshop will continue the exploration of connectivity of research and education networks between USA and South America doc24081 none Interdomain routing performs the critical function of gluing together individual pieces of the Internet topology to create a connected data delivery infrastructure. Today this critical function is performed by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) [rfc ] which establishes reachability information among Autonomous Systems (ASes). However despite its importance, current measurements and analysis have not led to a basic understanding of BGP s dynamics, performance under stress, fundamental weaknesses, and potential breaking points (if any). Although a few data collection points have been set up in the last few years [ipe,routeviews], the routing data collected by these measurement points are mixed with measurement artifacts [ftntalk], thus the data do not necessarily reflect the protocol s behavior in actual operation. In order for the Internet to continue its unprecedented growth, the interdomain routing protocol must continue to evolve to meet ever increasing and sometimes contradictory requirements. There is a general belief that the current BGP routing protocol may be unable to meet its new requirements (for instance, accomodating the sharp increase in use of site multi-homing, which keeps routing tables from optimally small sizes[huston:scale: ]). BGP is generally thought to be reaching the end of its useful lifetime, although this has not been validated by analysis or measurements [nimrod,irtfrr,huitema:ipng,huston:scale: ]. Due to the lack of a shared understanding of the problem and lack of sufficient data and analysis, there is no consensus on where when BGP collapses and what (if anything) should be done. To address the above critical questions facing interdomain routing, the researchres have assembled a team with research and operational experience, and expertise in network protocols, algorithms, modeling and analysis. The resarchers have identified the following fundamental technical requirements that the global routing must meet: it must scale in order to handle the growth (both in the number of users and in the richness of connectivity); security and resilience are critical issues, so it must continue to function in face of ever increasing faults and attacks; it must be able to fully utilize the rich Internet connectivity; and it must both allow network operators to apply various policy constraints and implementors to easily extend the protocol s functionality when needed. Based on the above criteria the researchers propose to tackle the challenge with the following 3 steps. (1) Develop measurement methodologies and collect data necessary to understand the current BGP operation, its overhead, dynamics under stress, potential vulnerabilities, inadequacies in functionality. The research will base this measurement effort on precise requirements that isidentiied as lacking in existing data, such as for the data not to be collected over vulnerable multihop links [ftntalk]. A new effort at University of Oregon, separate from this proposal, is the measurement companion, if funded. (2) Guided by our measurement and analysis, evaluate several proposed design approaches, including meeting the requirements by tinkering with BGP, by a NIMROD-like [nimrod] maps-approach, by two different approaches to handling multihoming scalability, and by a Clean Slate approach of a complete BGP replacement. Each of these approaches emphasizes different aspects of the interdomain routing problem. The researchers believe there are fundamental trade-offs between many of the desired technical requirements and that these trade-offs are currently not well understood. The combination of measurement and rigorous analysis with a team including operations expertise will bring these trade-offs into clear view. (3) Based on the data analysis and design evaluations the researchers will produce a final approach as the recommendation for moving forward. Through iterations of the above steps, the proposed research undertaking is expected to produce new understanding of current interdomain routing operations, their dynamics and resilience (or lack of it), and vulnerabilities; a new analysis will also be produced that draws on direct and intensive measurement and operations knowledge to capture the fundamental trade-offs among interdomain routing requirements; and a conclusion will be reached on how to meet the future Internet s interdomain routing needs doc24131 none This award is for an add-on to a funded field program to investigate the incipient rift located on the east side of the East Pacific Rise at 2 degrees 40 N by E. Klein and D. Smith ( ). This incipient rift is volcanically active and may provide the unique opportunity of sampling the melting regime under the EPR with increasing distance from the axis. This add-on would carry out theoretical modeling of the upwelling and melting reime in order to improve understanding of the melt production and migration bvelow the EPR. The PI will work with M. Spiegelman to modify existing 2D mantle flow and melt models to include the incipient rift. After that, 3D models will be developed and tested against geochemical data doc24132 none Lees This award will support a workshop in Chapel Hill North Carolina to address problems associated with the subduction of the Nazca Plate below South America along the Northern Andes. The purpose of the workshop is to develop a science plan and to organize and coordinate the diverse research objectives of the NASCAR (Northern Andes Subduction of the Carnegie Ridge) initiative. The NASCAR initiative involves researchers from a broad range of earth science (Geology, Geophysics, Geochemistry, Geodynamics) and coordination of goals and field logistics is critical to the success of the program doc24133 none Interdomain routing performs the critical function of gluing together individual pieces of the Internet topology to create a connected data delivery infrastructure. Today this critical function is performed by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) [rfc ] which establishes reachability information among Autonomous Systems (ASes). However despite its importance, current measurements and analysis have not led to a basic understanding of BGP s dynamics, performance under stress, fundamental weaknesses, and potential breaking points (if any). Although a few data collection points have been set up in the last few years [ipe,routeviews], the routing data collected by these measurement points are mixed with measurement artifacts [ftntalk], thus the data do not necessarily reflect the protocol s behavior in actual operation. In order for the Internet to continue its unprecedented growth, the interdomain routing protocol must continue to evolve to meet ever increasing and sometimes contradictory requirements. There is a general belief that the current BGP routing protocol may be unable to meet its new requirements (for instance, accomodating the sharp increase in use of site multi-homing, which keeps routing tables from optimally small sizes[huston:scale: ]). BGP is generally thought to be reaching the end of its useful lifetime, although this has not been validated by analysis or measurements [nimrod,irtfrr,huitema:ipng,huston:scale: ]. Due to the lack of a shared understanding of the problem and lack of sufficient data and analysis, there is no consensus on where when BGP collapses and what (if anything) should be done. To address the above critical questions facing interdomain routing, the researchres have assembled a team with research and operational experience, and expertise in network protocols, algorithms, modeling and analysis. The resarchers have identified the following fundamental technical requirements that the global routing must meet: it must scale in order to handle the growth (both in the number of users and in the richness of connectivity); security and resilience are critical issues, so it must continue to function in face of ever increasing faults and attacks; it must be able to fully utilize the rich Internet connectivity; and it must both allow network operators to apply various policy constraints and implementors to easily extend the protocol s functionality when needed. Based on the above criteria the researchers propose to tackle the challenge with the following 3 steps. (1) Develop measurement methodologies and collect data necessary to understand the current BGP operation, its overhead, dynamics under stress, potential vulnerabilities, inadequacies in functionality. The research will base this measurement effort on precise requirements that is identiied as lacking in existing data, such as for the data not to be collected over vulnerable multihop links [ftntalk]. A new effort at University of Oregon, separate from this proposal, is the measurement companion, if funded. (2) Guided by our measurement and analysis, evaluate several proposed design approaches, including meeting the requirements by tinkering with BGP, by a NIMROD-like [nimrod] maps-approach, by two different approaches to handling multihoming scalability, and by a Clean Slate approach of a complete BGP replacement. Each of these approaches emphasizes different aspects of the interdomain routing problem. The researchers believe there are fundamental trade-offs between many of the desired technical requirements and that these trade-offs are currently not well understood. The combination of measurement and rigorous analysis with a team including operations expertise will bring these trade-offs into clear view. (3) Based on the data analysis and design evaluations the researchers will produce a final approach as the recommendation for moving forward. Through iterations of the above steps, the proposed research undertaking is expected to produce new understanding of current interdomain routing operations, their dynamics and resilience (or lack of it), and vulnerabilities; a new analysis will also be produced that draws on direct and intensive measurement and operations knowledge to capture the fundamental trade-offs among interdomain routing requirements; and a conclusion will be reached on how to meet the future Internet s interdomain routing needs doc24134 none A few foreign transnational corporations (TNCs) dominate professional business services (advertising, accounting, legal, and management consulting activities) worldwide. An analysis of location patterns of branch offices of these global producers finds that Asia Pacific has the highest concentration of global business service centers of all developing regions, with Southeast Asian cities emerging as important third tier hubs in the global business service network. Existing literature on the internationalization of business services views these peripheral nodes of global networks as passive recipients of foreign investment. Yet in many business services in Southeast Asia, locally generated dynamics appear to be emerging which indicate that the region is shifting from being a passive recipient of foreign investment, to a generator of local business service activity and a source of competitive advantage for TNCs. The main goal of this doctoral dissertation research project is to examine foreign direct investment in professional business services -- the form it takes, its determinants and its impacts on developing metropolitan economies of Southeast Asia. A secondary goal of the research is to determine implications for public policy. This research addresses current theoretical biases based on a case study of the Southeast Asian advertising and marketing industry. The analysis has two components: an in-depth case study of the industry s development in a single city, Bangkok, to develop and refine the theoretical framework, and a cross-national comparative study of the development trajectories of a single TNC firm operating in Bangkok, Manila, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. The TNC acts as a proxy to control for variation in firm organization, strategies, ownership and services, thus regional variations in the TNC s strategy, role, and interaction with other locally based firms will indicate differences in country-specific factors. Hypotheses are tested using a mixed research approach that combines in-depth, semi-structured interviews with firms and key informants, archival research of organizational histories and government policies, and statistical analysis of the service economy and professional business services industries in each city. Anticipated findings from this research are that: (1) sources of firm competitive advantage increasingly originate locally, in the branch firm and through linkages with other local agencies, suppliers, and supporting institutions; and (2) TNC investment is having a stimulating, rather than stifling, effect on the development of local factors of production in this industry. This project research will contribute to a refinement and deepening of knowledge in three key theoretical areas of regional development studies: international producer services theory, East Asian development theory, and the theory of international networks of production clusters. In particular, the research will provide insights into urban economic development in Southeast Asia through enhanced understanding of the impacts of internationalization and emerging local dynamics in foreign-dominated global business service industries. The findings will also inform developing countries about the development of policy frameworks and initiatives aimed at promoting the knowledge economy and enhancing innovation and productivity through professional business services. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc24135 none Polyak The Principal Investigator will investigate the stratigraphy and morphology of Quaternary deposits in the northern part of the Kara Sea in order to delineate the ice-sheet limits at the Eurasian Arctic margin during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). This will test whether voluminous West Siberian rivers were dammed by the ice on the Kara Sea continental shelf and thus, prevented from discharging into the Arctic Ocean. He will conduct a study based on seismic-reflection data, including sparker, subbottom sonar and sidescan sonar records and sediment cores collected from the northern Kara Sea. A pre-evaluation of these data reveals a complex system of glacigenic deposits, riverine networks, extended on the shelf during low sea level and proglacial prodeltaic basins. A detailed investigation of these data, preferably supplemented by additional transects to be run in , and their comparison with glacial-geological results from adjacent land areas will allow them to answer whether the Barents-Kara ice sheet expanded across the entire northern Kara Sea during the LGM. This study will involve processing and interpretation of seismic-reflection records, construction of detailed digital bathymetric and seismo-stratigraphic models and determination of age and depositional environments of sediment-core material. The resulting products will include stratigraphically-controlled, three-dimensional terrain models or morainic deposits, adjacent depositional basins, and major paleo-river channels. Sidescan data will provide additional information on seafloor texture. These results will provide necessary boundary conditions for modeling the paleohydrology of the Eurasian Arctic for the last glacial cycle. Generated data on the configuration of the ice-sheet margin and the distribution of glacigenic erosional and sedimentary features will help understand the patterns of glacial development in northern Eurasia and the potential role of ice shelves in the Arctic Ocean. In addition, generated bathymetric grid models will improve the international bathymetric data base for the Arctic doc24136 none Severinghaus This is a collaborative proposal between Principal Investigators at the University of California - San Diego and Washington State University. They will develop a large-volume atmospheric archive at the margin of the Greenland ice sheet in order to test two competing hypotheses for the cause of the abrupt increases in atmospheric methane concentration that punctuated the last glacial period. The main objective is to measure the carbon-14 (14C) content of atmospheric methane before and after these events. These events have been attributed to 1) destabilization of sedimentary methane hydrate (clathrate) or 2) increased methane production in terrestrial wetlands due to warmer and wetter climatic conditions. The carbon-14 content of atmospheric methane should distinguish between clathrate and wetland sources because clathrates are made from carbon-14-free sedimentary organic matter, whereas the carbon-14 content of wetland-derived methane is essentially the same as that of atmospheric carbon dioxide. This test is important because the wetland hypothesis has been used to infer large-scale tropical abrupt climate change, with broad implications for our understanding of the potential for rapid change in both past and future climates. The main obstacle to this measurement is that it requires ~200 liters of air, much more than is available from ice core samples. This work will use ice that outcrops due to ablation and ice flow at the margin of the Greenland ice sheet at a location called Pakitsoq, enabling virtually unlimited sample size. Preliminary fieldwork has demonstrated that ice of the appropriate age (11,000-15,000 years ago) can be found, and that it is not contaminated with respect to methane or gas isotopes, by comparison with the known atmospheric record from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) ice core. Ice of Eemian (last Interglacial) age also appears to be present at this site, and this work will use gas measurements to establish the chronology of the entire margin ice section including a thick Holocene section doc24137 none The importance of tropospheric halocarbons as a source for stratospheric halogens and ozone depletion is well recognized. Industrial production of longer-lived CFC s have been banned under the Montreal Protocol and Clean Air Act, however the time scale for recovery of the ozone layer from such molecules is on the order of decades. As a result, attention has shifted towards the shorter-lived halocarbons that respond more rapidly to changes in emissions. In this project, researchers at the University of California at Irvine will continue their ongoing efforts to understand the role of the oceans in the biogeochemical cycling of low molecular-weight halocarbons, like methyl bromide (CH3Br) and methyl chloride (CH3Cl). In this phase of their research, oceanic degradation studies will be continued in order to extend prior spatial and temporal coverage of the oceans, and to include methyl chloride (CH3Cl). The degradation of other natural halogenated compounds such as dibromomethane (CH2Br2), bromoform (CHBr3), and methyl iodide (CH3I) will also be studied in coastal seawater. The proposed measurements will result in revised estimates for the uptake of atmospheric halocarbons by the oceans, the extent to which the oceans can buffer atmospheric halocarbon concentrations, and the production rate for these gases in the surface oceans doc24138 none Saltzman The gases trapped in polar ice cores are a unique and invaluable archive for investigating paleoatmospheric composition and variability. To date, efforts have focused on carbon dioxide, oxygen, methane, and nitrous oxide, which occur at mixing ratios in air of parts-per-billion and above. There are many more trace gases present at lower concentrations in ice cores that contain a wealth of information about biogeochemical cycles and atmospheric chemistry. In particular, ice cores potentially contain a record of natural variability of halocarbons such as methyl chloride (CH3Cl) and methyl bromide (CH3Br) that are major contributors to the atmospheric halogen burden and to stratospheric ozone loss. Ice cores also contain a record of paleoatmospheric carbonyl sulfide (OCS), the most abundant sulfur gas in the atmosphere and a precursor to the stratospheric sulfate layer. The Principal Investigator will measure CH3Cl, CH3Br, and a number of other trace gases on ice core samples from shallow and deep Greenland ice cores. Trace gases will be extracted by mechanically shredding ice core samples, with analysis by gas chromatography with mass spectrometric detection. Preliminary ice core measurements indicate that: 1) paleoatmospheric levels of CH3Cl and OCS can be obtained from ice core samples using dry extraction with analysis by gas chromatography mass spectrometric detection, and 2) the interpretation of ice core CH3Br measurements is more complex, as this gas is contained both in gas bubbles and in the ice matrix. Experiments will be carried out to differentiate between gas stored in the air and in the ice matrix, and to understand the factors controlling the partitioning of this gas between these phases. The objective is to provide new baseline data for the concentration of halocarbons and other gases in pre-industrial northern hemisphere air. These data will provide strong constraints on the anthropogenic contribution to their atmospheric budgets. This study will also provide insight into the relationship between the atmospheric levels of halocarbons and climate variability, over periods of widely varying climate conditions and rapid climate change. In terms of broader impacts on society, this research will help to provide a stronger scientific basis for policy decisions regulating the production and use of ozone-depleting and climate-active gases doc24139 none This dissertation investigates the rapid expansion of the casino industry in the United States and South Africa. These cases differ in industry regulation and competitive structure: competitive, privatized casinos in South Africa, and monopolistic, regulated ones in California. While both casinos were legitimated through their potential to develop indigenous peoples, different conceptions of development by casino supporters have led to different structures and regulation. The research will investigate the consequences of these different origins and structures with ethnographic fieldwork at both sites. Three issues will be central: financial relations between the corporations and indigenous peoples, management-worker relations, and marketing strategies with consumers doc24140 none Sensing Systems is an emerging topic of national and international interest in a variety of fields from living systems, e.g. biological, to non-living, e.g. engineered systems, to energy systems and infrastructures. Convergence of sensor technologies, communications, and computing has the potential to overcome barriers of time, scale, materials and environment. The scope of this program development in sensor technology encompasses the needs, the current and emerging technologies, and efficacious partnerships required to develop and implement future sensing systems. The main objective of this proposal is to create national forums for the development of R&D programs in smart structures and sensor technologies. Through a series of strategically crafted forum activities industry in sensors and devices and users community can be pulled together behind NSF s program aimed at advancing the emerging technologies expanding the commercial products and markets, and broadening the applications of advanced sensors and smart structures. These forums include a series of strategic programs in panel discussions, special interest topics, seminars, workshops, exhibitions, demonstrations, and projects that will be primarily held in conjunction with major conferences that address state-of-the-art research, education and development projects in the areas of smart structures and sensor technologies. Such conferences include the Smart Structures and Materials with SPIE (The International Society for Optical Engineering), ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers) and ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) annual meetings, AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) Adaptive Structures Forum, Modal Analysis, etc. As anticipated, the state-of-the-art technology and the state of the practices in these emerging disciplines will also be rapidly advancing. Thus, this three-year effort will update the research community about these technological advances. These forums will also focus on educational needs, curriculum modifications, laboratory developments and innovative pedagogy at both the undergraduate and graduate levels in the area of sensor technology and smart structures doc24141 none A grant has been awarded to John J. Marchalonis, Ph.D. for studies on Primitive Antibodies . This project addresses the molecular basis of diversification of the recognition molecules that are essential for the generation of specific immunity. The project focuses upon the immune system of sharks because these are the most primitive vertebrates to share with humans the combinatorial immune response. This is based uniquely upon the recombination of gene segments to generate the variability in antigen receptor molecules present in serum and on blood cells. Sharks, which arose approximately 450 million years ago, like humans have immunoglobulins (also termed antibodies), T-cell receptors (TCRs), major histocompatability antigens (MHC), and recombination activating genes (RAGs) that are required to allow rearrangement of the gene segments making up the antibodies and T-cell receptors. The project will address both conserved and unique features of the combinatorial system of carcharhine sharks to elucidate the molecular underpinning of combinatorial immunity as it is expressed in all vertebrates. The project includes three major areas of focus: The first is the complete characterization of the shark RAG locus with emphasis upon its evolutionary emergence and functional similarities and differences to the molecular homologs found in mammals and other higher vertebrates. The second major area of concentration is the characterization of the genes specifying the alpha beta and gamma delta T-cell receptors of carcharhine sharks including their diversity and gene organization, and the construction of recombinant single chain TCRs for functional and structural analyses. Because of the pronounced differences in organization of shark and mammalian antibody gene segments, it is crucial to determine the arrangement of shark TCR genes. The third aim tests the generality of clonal selection theory by determining whether sharks which have a cassette organization of antibody gene as opposed to translocons of higher vertebrates show clonal restriction in their antibody forming lymphocytes. These studies are directed towards applying molecular and protein chemical technologies to obtain precise answers to fundamental problems of the system as it obtains in all vertebrates, with implications for defense against invading pathogens, cancers and immunological dysfunction in autoimmunity doc24142 none Jumpponen Biological diversity and its function are focal areas in ecology, and the relationship between plant diversity and ecosystem function has been intensively studied. By contrast, few studies have addressed the role of mycorrhizal fungi and their diversity even though they are presumed to be critical in plant nutrient uptake and nutrient retention. This grant focuses attention on differential nitrogen (N) use among symbiotic fungi in the roots of ericaceous dwarf shrubs in the arctic. The researchers will address the role of diverse fungi in plants ability to access organic and inorganic N sources. Ericoid mycorrhizal (ERM) symbiosis may be the key to the abundance of ericaceous shrubs in arctic ecosystems as their fungal symbionts likely utilize organic N sources thus facilitating plant organic N uptake. Knowledge of ERM diversity and its function is a necessary foundation for understanding arctic and boreal ecosystem processes. This knowledge is especially crucial in arctic ecosystems where supply of inorganic N is low and plant N limitation is strong doc24143 none Biological museums and herbaria are estimated to contain three billion animal and plant specimens that document the temporal and spatial distribution of life on earth. Four hundred years of biological survey, species description and archiving in museums and herbaria have produced a massive, globally distributed knowledge resource documenting the planet s biological diversity. The Specify Software Project supports the computerization of biological collections data. Support and development of Specify, a biological collections database application, is provided free of charge at http: www.usobi.org specify. Specify is currently used by 55 collections. In this project, Specify s core data management will be enhanced and the usability of the interface will be improved and extended so that users can customize the web components considered. Further, there will be full integration with the Species Analyst Network. A help desk and technical support are provided to collections. Overall, the Specify Project will enable the capture and integration of millions of specimen records into computing architectures that will enable cross-domain research and education in environmental science doc24144 none This dissertation investigates the consequences of state decentralization on the expansion of civil society in two Venezuelan municipalities. Past theory has made contradictory predictions about these effects: on the one hand, the expansion of municipal government functions should stimulate the growth of local civic institutions as political decisions are being made closer to people s own experience. On the other hand, decentralization may just promote rent seeking by local elites that would inhibit associational life. The research will compare two municipalities with different histories of civic development. Directories and official data will be searched to estimate the growth of civic associations. Interviews with local leaders will ascertain how the activities and structure of these organizations have changed since the adoption of state decentralization doc24145 none The development of ecosystem-based management is a major paradigm shift in the study and management of native forests in the western United States. A key component of this new scientific-management paradigm is the recognition of past natural and human-caused variability in disturbance processes and forest conditions. Understanding the spatial extent and temporal changes of climatically-sensitive disturbances such as fire as ecological mechanisms that have affected forest composition and structure is essential for managing natural areas. However, in most ecosystems we lack detailed studies on the behavior and effects of ecological mechanisms such as fire. This doctoral dissertation research project will utilize fire history data in combination with intensive tree age data to determine past fire types and fire effects across the elevational range of ponderosa pine in the northern Colorado Front Range. The objectives of the study are: 1) to determine variation in past fire behavior in relation to topographic position and elevation within the ponderosa pine zone; 2) to determine the effects of past fires on forest regeneration through detailed reconstruction of forest age structure over a range of habitat types within the ponderosa pine zone; 3) to synthesize the results of objectives 1 and 2 into a series of fire regime-stand development models for major habitat types within the ponderosa pine zone. In order to characterize fire behavior and the resulting effects across the montane zone in the northern Colorado Front Range, a multi-scale sampling approach will be applied. Sampling and synthesis will be conducted at three scales: 1) broad-scale GIS analysis of fire regimes and habitat types across the northern Front Range; 2) meso-scale sampling of forest structure and fire history in areas of 30 to 100 ha; and 3) intensive age structure and fire history analyses in plots of approximately 100 to 500 m2. In the context of ecological restoration, it is important that we have a better understanding of the spatial variability of fire regime type (surface, stand-replacing, or mixed) as it has changed over the past several centuries in ponderosa pine forests and woodlands. Through a multi-scale approach of reconstructing past fire regime types and forest age structure, this study will produce a series of habitat-specific models of fire-regimes and stand development for the lower through the upper montane zone. These models can be used by resource managers in formulating the goals of fire and vegetation management in particular types of habitats. We know that fire regimes have varied significantly over both time and space in the montane zone, but we lack a useful classification of past fire regimes according to habitat type. A classification of fire behavior within different habitat types of the montane zone will allow managers to project appropriate fire management prescriptions within the historic range of variability. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career doc24146 none This dissertation investigates the meaning of consumption for parents seeking the good care of their children. The research focuses on the emotional processes by which these consumers decide just what is good care and what kinds of things are part of that care. Textual analysis of toy catalogs will be combined with ethnographic fieldwork on shopping trips and interviews with parents about consumption and raising children. These multiple methods (conversations about buying, observations of spending, and considerations of selling) seek to explain how people make sense of the convergence of consumption, class, and care in our contemporary culture doc24147 none Elemental profiles in the suboxic zone of the Black Sea suggest that the upward flux of sulfide may be oxidized by manganese oxides rather than oxygen and that ammonia reacts with nitrate to produce N2. In addition, the profiles suggest that Mn(II) oxidation occurs anaerobically, possibly coupled to denitrification. However, the occurrence of the proposed reactions remains controversial. A scientist from Scripps Institute of Oceanography, in collaboration with scientists from the University of Washington, the University of Delaware, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Russia and Ukraine, plans to carry out field work in the suboxic zone of the Black Sea, as well as laboratory culture experiments to test the hypothesis that Mn species act as a catalyst for oxidation of sulfide and ammonia and reduction of nitrate and nitrite. The PI also will assess the microbial and abiogenic reaction rates of the oxidation of Mn (II) and reduction of Mn (III, IV) and assess how oxygen affects these processes. In the laboratory, the distribution of bacteria and the genes involved in Mn(II) oxidation throughout the vertical and horizontal transects of the Black Sea also will be determined. Lastly, the PI will ascertain the importance of lateral inputs versus in-situ processes in controlling the suboxic zone of the Black Sea doc24148 none Transient luminous events (TLEs) such as red sprites, blue jets, and elves are spectacular phenomena that link tropospheric electrical activity with the stratosphere and mesosphere. These phenomena are almost always associated with positive cloud-to-ground lightning, which occurs less frequently than negatively charged lightning. Two storm types are known to produce positive lightning, namely supercell storms and nocturnal mesoscale convective systems. The STEPS project (Severe Thunderstorm Electrification and Precipitation Study), conducted in western Kansas in the early summer of , provided the most comprehensive data available on sprites and sprite-producing storms. More than TLEs were observed and video-recorded at the Yucca Ridge Field Station of FMA Research, Inc. These data were collected in association with other storm observations on STEPS, including dual-Doppler and polarimetric radar data, aircraft microphysical measurements, high-resolution lightning maps, and balloon-borne measurements of the electrical field. This award supports further analysis of the TLE observations from STEPS, and enables the continuation of sprite monitoring during the summers of - . The main objectives are (1) to characterize the relationship between lightning and sprites; (2) to classify the storm types that do and do not produce sprites. The approach is to analyze the TLE records from STEPS in relation to the radar, lightning, and other data. Results will be an improved understanding of the conditions attendant to sprite formation, and hence the physics of TLEs doc24149 none McConnell The Principal Investigator will develop three spatially distributed, continuous, multi-century glaciochemical records of more than 20 chemical species, trace elements, and isotopes with unprecedented temporal resolution (~50 to 100 samples). These unique records will significantly expand possible applications of glaciochemical data to the study of a range of environmental and global change issues. This work builds on recent NSF-funded development at the Desert Research Institute (DRI) of a new method for continuous, high-resolution ice-core analyses called Continuous Flow Analysis with Trace Elements (CFA-TE). CFA-TE is a novel analytical approach in which a continuous ice-core melter is coupled directly with an Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer (ICP-MS) and traditional Continuous Flow Analysis (CFA) system. The apparatus makes possible continuous, high-resolution and exactly co-registered glaciochemical measurements of a broad spectrum of chemical species, trace elements, and isotopes. Measurements on an approximately 137meter core from Summit, Greenland demonstrate the potential of this new approach. Using sample handling and analytical protocols developed for the successful Summit analyses, CFA-TE will be used to measure more than 20 chemical species, trace elements, and isotopes on one archived and two new approximately140-m ice cores from high accumulation regions of the dry snow zone in west-central Greenland. This area is strongly influenced by large-scale changes in atmospheric circulation and anthropogenic pollution from North America. These new glaciochemical records will extend from around A.D. to the present and will be the highest resolution, multi-century elemental and isotopic glaciochemical records ever produced from Greenland ice cores. The application of ice-core chemical data in environmental, biogeochemical, and global change studies has been limited by 1) relatively coarse sample resolution in time even for high resolution studies, 2) inexact co-registration in depth for different chemical measurements, and 3) the limited number of chemical species, elements, and isotopes routinely measured in ice cores. The recent development of the CFA-TE method for ice-core analysis eliminates many of these issues and presents a new opportunity to develop very high-resolution, broad-spectrum glaciochemical records at relatively modest cost. Together with similar, recently completed measurements from Summit, these rich data sets will open new avenues for using glaciochemical data to investigate environmental and global changes issues ranging from anthropogenic, volcanic and biomass-burning-related trace element fallout to changes in hemispheric-scale circulation doc24150 none Primeau The purpose of this project is to test the hypothesis that the observed variability is a manifestation of intrinsic variability associated with the transitions between multiple equilibria. To do this the investigators will apply the recently developed methods of numerical bifurcation analysis to a hierarchy of ocean models with increasing realism to compute the solution branches found in the simpler model. The following clear criteria will be tested. If they are not met, the hypothesis must be rejected. 1. The equilibria with elongated recirculation gyres should be relatively less unstable than the equilibria with elongated gyres to be consistent with the observation that eddy activity decreases during periods of elongated gyres 2. The unstable modes associated with elongated recirculation gyres should have amplitude patterns that dominate in the downstream region of the jet, and those for the contracted recirculation gyres should have amplitude patterns that dominate in the upstream region, to be consistent with the observation that the eddy variability moves downstream during elongated states. 3. The mean zonal path of the jet extension should be further north for equilibria with elongated recirculation gyres to be consistent with the observation that the zonal mean path of the Gulf Stream and Kuroshio Extension moves northward during elongated states. Through this study a Ph.D. student will be trained in ocean modeling and in the application of dynamical systems theory to climate problems. In addition a software package to do numerical bifurcation analysis of ocean models will be produced and made available to the community. The possibility that the observed large-scale patterns of low-frequency variability are the result of intrinsic variability is an exciting one because observations show that these current changes are signi?cant contributors to the maintenance sea surface temperature anomalies and thus could contribute to mid-latitude climate variability doc24151 none Imamoglu This Pan America Advanced Studies Institute (PASI) award on Quantum Information, jointly supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE), is being organized by Dr. Atac Imamoglu of the University of California-Santa Barbara in collaboration with Dr. L. Davidovich of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. The meeting, which will be held January 12 -23, in both Buzios and Salvador, Brazil, will bring together leading researchers, advanced graduate students, post-doctoral and junior scientists in the field of quantum information. Over the past few years, the field of quantum information has evolved to become truly interdisciplinary with contributions from computer science, quantum optics, and condensed matter physics. This interdisciplinary PASI will serve to increase and disseminate understanding of the fundamental issues in the field, and will lead to enhanced collaboration between researchers in the United States and in the rest of the hemisphere doc24152 none Funds are recommended for continued analysis of a high quality geophysical data set collected by the PIs from the northern Gulf of California. The PIs will undertake a sequence stratigraphic analysis and integrate the results with an ongoing structural study of the region. It will also take advantage of data from industry sources that will provide the important stratigraphic control. The goal is to work out the transition from rifting to seafloor spreading and the history of extension in the Gulf. The study will also lead to an understanding of the kinematics of deformation in nascent axial basins doc24153 none Biology has become an information science, fueled by high throughput genomic sequencing and functional genomics analyses. However, although many biological data resources are available, there is little ability to interoperate and existing software and tools are reinvented. A set of data models and supporting software libraries will be developed that support database interoperation. This effort will occur in collaboration with other systems in development. Resources developed under the NSF Plan Genome Research Program will be the resource targets. The approach is to define XML-based descriptions for types of object that are likely targets for inter-database queries. The effort will be in the context of a series of workshop that will enable the community to identify the target data objects and to cooperate in the implementation of software. The project will provide electronic resources for a wide variety of data that will enhance both research and education and training doc24154 none The Next Generation Internet (NGI) poses scalability challenges to the efficient operation of the transport protocol (TCP). In particular, as the product (bandwidth x delay) grows, the congestion window required to .fill the pipe. becomes quite large, especially on cross-country links. One well known problem in TCP in this scenario is the selection of the .initial window.. More recently, new challenges have emerged because of the increasing popularity of nomadic access to the Internet via wireless links (e.g., wireless LANs, satellite links, UMTS, etc). The data rates on wireless links have been constantly on the rise, approaching the 50Mbps on 802.11a wireless LANs and thus providing an effective extension of backbone services to mobile users. However, wireless links tend to introduce random packet errors and loss that are not correlated to congestion. This creates problems to conventional TCP protocols (e.g., TCP New Reno and TCP SACK), which interpret any loss as a buffer overflow (i.e., as a symptom of congestion) and thus reduce the congestion window unnecessarily with consequent loss in performance. The drop in performance is proportional to the (bandwidth x length) product of the connection and can be quite significant in the high bandwidth NGI environment, especially on cross country paths including .last hop wireless LANs, UMTS links, or high bandwidth satellites. Several approaches to enhance TCP congestion control over high bandwidth wireless links have been reported in the literature (e.g., TCP Peach, TCP Westwood (TCPW)). Some of these enhancements have been quite successful. For example, TCPW, a TCP variant that uses bottleneck bandwidth share estimation. to adjust the congestion window upon loss, has shown scalable properties and good link utilization in large leaky pipes., (i.e. large bandwidth delay product, and non negligible random packet loss). This proposal is about carrying out a systematic, experimental investigation of performance of TCP over wired wireless paths. This investigation will include the comparison of various TCP enhancements proposed so far in the literature. It will consider a representative set of experimental environments and application scenarios. The proposed project is in part motivated by our recent positive experience with TCPW Internet experiments of large file transfers over lossy paths. In this project the researchers will broaden the scope to include a vast gamut of TCP wireless enhancement techniques. The researchers will identify the pros and cons of each scheme, characterize the traffic network environment for which it is best suited, and, more generally, develop models that relate wireless media characteristics, TCP congestion control parameters and performance results. In summary, given: (1) the increasing importance of nomadic computing and wireless access to the high speed wired Internet; (2) the performance degradations observed in conventional TCP protocols over wireless path, and (3) the encouraging improvements offered by modified, wireless versions of TCP (which yet retain the basic end to end paradigm), the researchers believe this a very appropriate time to engage in a systematic, experimentally based evaluation of wireless TCP protocols by a team that includes protocol developers, applications developers and network measurement experts doc24155 none The SETI@home project has pioneered public-resource computing, using millions of computers in homes and offices around the world to perform scientific computing. This approach, though it presents some difficulties, has provided unprecedented computing power and has led to a unique public involvement in science. The researchers propose research in which anew software infrastructure for public-resource computing will be developed. The researchers call this the Berkeley Infrastructure for Distributed Computing (BIDC). Among the design goals of BIDC, two are of special importance: BIDC will provide mechanisms for efficiently and economically distributing data from project servers to participant hosts, which typically have commercial ISP connections. The mechanisms will use noncommercial networks like Abilene and organizational LANs where possible, and will use idle link capacity, similarly to the use of idle CPU cycles, with little or no impact on regular network usage. BIDC will be open-source, and will have an open architecture that will allow multiple independent projects to share a single participant base. Participants have fine-grain control over how much of their resources are used, and how they are divided among the projects. New projects can be started easily, and function even if existing projects fail. The researchers will use BIDC for upcoming SETI projects, including new searches using the Parkes observatory in Australia, the future multibeam receiver at Arecibo, and wider frequency bands from the current receiver at Arecibo. In addition the researchers will encourage and support the use of BIDC by other distributed projects; there are potential users in numerous areas including climatology, oceanography, physics, mathematics, and ecological science. There will be social and educational components as well. Public-resource computing projects succeed only if they attract and retain participants. In SETI@home, the researchers have developed a number of schemes for encouraging and harnessing friendly competition among users, and for keeping users informed and interested about the contributions of their computers to research. BIDC will include variants of these schemes that can be used within and across the projects based on it. The proposed research will advance knowledge in Internet-scale public-resource computing, which has emerged as an important direction both in Computer Science and in numerous application areas. In particular, the research will expand the range of applications for which public-resource computing is effective, including applications that involve large data. It will allow projects to develop and deploy these applications easily, and will allow many such projects to efficiently share a single resource pool. By carrying out the SETI@home project the researchers have demonstrated their qualification to do this research, and are in a unique position to connect new projects with their user base of 3,500,000 people worldwide. The research will have a broad impact. It will enable computational techniques that were previously impractical because of their resource requirements, and will therefore make possible new types of research in many scientific areas. It will provide a framework for experimental research in other types of Internetscale systems (storage, semantic-based searching, security and communication). By enabling new scientific computing projects, it will help educate and inform the worldwide public in multiple scientific areas, it will directly involve the public in science, and will give the public a voice in the directions of science research doc24156 none This grant undertakes an experimental study to elucidate and model the mechanical behavior and thermal stability of a new class of bond coat materials for thermal barrier coatings (TBCs). One of the key components of a TBC is its bond coat, and there is clear empirical evidence that platinum additions to aluminide bond coats enhance the overall performance and reliability of these coatings. Other platinum group metals (Pd, Ru, Ir, Rh, and Os) are believed to provide similar or even greater benefits, but the mechanisms that govern bond coat performance are currently not well understood. The proposed study will parallel and compliment a larger NSF-EC collaborative program on the dynamics of layered multifunctional surfaces. One aspect of the NSF-EC study involves processing and phase equilibria aspects of platinum group metal bond coats, and the current study will be conducted in close collaboration with the NSF-EC team to characterize the mechanical behavior and microstructural evolution of Ru-based alloys and bond coats. The grant supports for the principal investigator and graduate students to participate in annual workshops and collaborations with the NSF-EC team with extended reciprocal visits of students between European Countries and US. The overall focus of this research program will be to measure single-phase Ru-Ni-Al-Xn and ruthenium modified bond coat properties, to develop a fundamental understanding of the substrate-bond coat interactions that occur during thermal cycling (inter-diffusion, viscoplasticity, morphological evolution, crack formation, etc.) and to derive a science-based protocol for assessing the potential and assisting in the development of ruthenium modified bond coats. The microsample tensile testing approach to be used in this study permits characterization of small-scale and highly scale-specific coatings and properties (elastic modulus, yield and creep strength) in a way not possible by conventional means. The technological motivation for this proposal is rooted in the fact that TBCs offer tremendous opportunities for increasing the temperature capabilities and durability of gas turbine engines. Through the proposed participation in annual workshops and extended reciprocal visits, the students working on this project will gain valuable experience into how research is conducted in both the U.S. and Europe doc24157 none Maize is both a classical genetic model for plant research and an economically important crop. Having a sequence of the genes of maize will have a fundamental impact on maize genetics and crop improvement. However, the maize genome is large and complex, comprising a sea of highly repetitive DNA containing islands of genes. Current estimates indicate that the gene islands only make up 15-20% of the genome. Selective sequencing of just the gene islands would thus be a rapid and cost-effective alternative to sequencing the whole genome. The overall goal of this project is to develop and evaluate high-throughput and robust strategies to isolate and sequence maize genes. Two promising approaches will be tested. The first, termed methylation-filtering , is based on the finding that the highly repetitive DNA is modified (methylated) while the genes are largely free of such modification. The second, termed high Cot selection , exploits the relatively low abundance of the gene sequences, which are present in a small number of copies in the genome. Each method yields a fraction of the genome highly enriched for the genes. Libraries of these DNA fragments will be sequenced and the sequences assembled and annotated to give a first picture of the sequence and organization of maize genes. All sequence information will be released immediately into GenBank and project data analyses will be available through web-based resources. The outcomes of this project will provide the research community with a powerful resource for maize genetics, biology, and breeding. They will also facilitate determination of the best strategy for attempting large-scale sequencing of maize genes. Deliverables: Maize Libraries Contact Karel Schubert at the Danforth Center (www.danforthcenter.org) for information on the libraries. Contact Dr. Rod Wing at AGI (www.genome.arizona.edu) for access to the clones from the methylation filtered and high CoT libraries of maize. Maize Sequencing Results: Sequence reads will be submitted to the HTGS division of GenBank and the trace files submitted to the NCBI trace database on a weekly basis. Concomitant with submission to NCBI both the sequence data and trace files will accessible from the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center maize website for use by the broader Maize research community. Bioinformatics: At a minimum, assemblies of the sequence will be released every three months, with the goal of providing monthly updates. Assembled sequences will be available from the TIGR website doc24158 none Under this award, the PI will continue participating in a collaborative study of the Cleft segment of the Juan de Fuca ridge. The field work has been and will continue to be done with MBARI vessels and ROVs, in active collaboration with D. Stakes, M. Tivey, and others. The PI s main responsibility is in sampling of volcanic rocks, interpreting volcanic land forms, and undertaking laboratory analyses of the rock samples. One field program occurred in , and another will take place in . The PI has additional rock samples from the area collected in and . The PI proposes flow mapping of the axial and off-axis region with a variety of goals and objectives, one of which is to test the split-ridge model of Kappel and Ryan for tectonic and magmatic cycles forming the symmetrical land forms on either side of the present ridge axis. Axial and off-axis sampling out to ~6km (150 ka) will be used to test this idea, and elucidate the processes of crust creation and evolution in the near-axis region. A full laboratory program of major and trace element studies and isotopic studies are planned for ROV-collected and wax cored samples doc24159 none Recently, it has been shown that one major source of errors in numerical weather predictions is generated by using comparatively deterministic functions of resolvable variables to represent the unresolved sub-grid processes. One effort in improving ensemble predictions involves perturbing the physical parameterizations of the model. To tackle the problem, the PI will study the sub-grid scale signatures in various verification measures and use a combination of them to improve the ensemble forecasts. An idealized model with low-dimension configurations will be used for the study. The research focus will be on the interactions of the resolvable variables and unresolved processes with particular attention on the effects of different perturbation amplitudes, correlation scales for the random element of physical parameterizations, and possible signatures of these errors in appropriate diagnostics. The overall goal of the research is to provide knowledge on the structure of perturbations in physical parameterizations and to represent them properly in ensemble forecasts. The research study has the potential of generating useful information for operational weather prediction doc24160 none Drezek The proposed project leverages recent advances in nanoparticle technologies to develop innovative contrast agents which can be optically interrogated using noninvasive approaches and targeted to specific molecular signatures of disease. The contrast agents proposed - nanoshells and nanoemitters - possess ideal optical and chemical properties for optical imaging. The optical response of these particles can be precisely and systematically varied over a broad band including the visible and infrared spectral regions. The extremely agile. tunabilityof the optical resonance is completely unique to nanoshells: in no other molecular or nanoparticle structure can the resonance of the optical extinction properties be systematically. designed. Moreover, the nanoparticles are highly biocompatible and proteins (such as antibodies) are readily conjugated to their surfaces. To develop the potential of nanoparticles as contrast agents for optical imaging, the investigators will study a novel class of exogenous contrast agents designed and optimized to address the clinically important problem of detection of pre.invasive neoplasias doc24161 none The Principal Investigator has conducted a reconnaissance, land-based seismic experiment designed to address questions about whether a mantle plume is associated with the Galapagos hotspot, whether the plume penetrates the mantle transition zone, the location of the hotspot plume, the lateral dimensions of the hotspot plume, and the form of hotspot-lithosphere interaction. The present project will thoroughly analyze the seismic data, publish the results, and support scientific and educational collaborations with the Instituto Geofisico, Escuela Politecnica Nacional, Quito, and the Charles Darwin Research Station, Puerto Ayora doc24162 none The Glenn H. Brown Prizes were established in to advance and diffuse knowledge of liquid crystal states of matter by encouraging effective written and oral presentations of doctoral research results. At the International Liquid Crystal Conference to be held June 30-July 5, in Edinburgh, Scotland, the International Liquid Crystal Society will award prizes for outstanding thesis completed between January and December . Tesis on theoretical, experimental and or applied work on thermotropic, polymeric and or lyotropic liquid crystal systems will be considered. The liquid crystal community continues to have direct impact on education and the development of new materials for technological advances of high significance to society. The latter include the development of novel electro optic devices of high commercial interest. Since these technical areas are of very high priority to industry, students educated and trained in these multidisciplinary areas involving liquid crystal science and engineering compete very well in the job market and go on to contribute in many significant ways to the global economy doc8065 none The objective of this effort is to provide a rigorous understanding of atmospheric-pressure glow discharges (APGD). This new class of plasmas can produce large amounts of active chemical species near room temperature and atmospheric pressure and has potential to revolutionize plasma-based processing technologies. The research activities have the following components: (1) a computationally fast, one-dimensional physical model for prediction of APGD axial structure; (2) a two-dimensional model for investigating bulk flow plasma dynamics interactions; (3) analysis of the electron energy distribution function using a homogeneous, time-dependent electron Boltzman solver; (4) a bench-scale APGD experiment to assist in model validation and to explore the discharge phenomena, including visual characterization of discharge modes to establish stability boundaries as a function of discharge geometry and operating parameters, and electrical characterization of the discharge; and (5) investigation of a novel APGD-based silicon oxidation process with potential application in ultrathin integrated circuit gate-oxide formation doc24164 none Vesterlund It has been well established that charities often choose to announce past contributions during fundraising drives. However, this type of announcement strategy appears to be inconsistent with the standard prediction that sequential move games result in smaller contribution levels than simultaneous move games. The project outlined in this proposal will develop a theory that explains the use of announcement strategies in fundraising games. In addition, two experiments will be conducted to test the theoretical predictions for contributions in sequential public good games. The proposed project will not only improve understanding of the sequential nature of fundraising games but also our overall understanding of charitable giving. The results of the proposed research will be documented in six publishable papers--four theoretical papers and two experimental papers. In the first paper, a simple model is developed in which contributors are identical and the quality of the charity can be revealed by acquiring costly information. Results indicate that fundraisers for high quality charities prefer to announce past contributions. The reason is that the first contributor, contingent on the announcement, purchases information and reveals the quality of the charity through his first contribution. The second paper l relaxes the assumption that contributors are identical to demonstrate that heterogeneity of contributors implies an optimal solicitation ordering, and this ordering makes it impossible for the fundraiser to cheat and solicit first contributions from multiple contributors. In the first two papers the purchased signal is perfect and the fundraiser has no incentive to make more than one announcement. One reason why fundraisers make continuous announcements may be that the signal is noisy. Such a model is explored in the third paper. To keep the analysis simple, information on the purchasing option is ignored and instead, it is assumed that all contributors receive private and noisy signals. In this model contributors use information about past contributions to update their beliefs about the charity s quality, and an informational cascade is likely to arise. Two different experiments test the predictions of the purely altruistic theory for contributions in sequential public good games. The first experiment tests the predictions of sequential move contribution games by examining the contributions in three public good games: a simultaneous game, a sequential game and finally a sequential game where the first contributor cannot commit to a one-time contribution. The second experiment examines the effect of the public good s production technology on contributions in sequential public good games. In addition to testing the traditional voluntary contribution predictions these two experiments also provide empirical tests of recent models of fairness. An interesting feature of these fairness models is that they predict higher contribution levels in sequential public good games than in simultaneous move games, suggesting that preferences for fairness may be a third explanation for the use of announcement strategies in fundraising games doc24165 none Active vision - the confluence of control and computer vision - is positioned in an optimal situation to address the needs of a growing segment of the population. Aware environments would enable elderly people to carry on independent lives. Computers that interpret facial expressions to obtain cues to user confusion or frustration can lead to simpler interfaces. Finally, intelligent activity surveillance systems capable of detecting suspicious activities can substantially improve the ability to prevent tragedies. Clearly these applications would not be possible without the use of feedback to compensate for uncertainty and errors, stemming for instance, from poorly calibrated cameras, blurring or only partially determined feature correspondences between images. Indeed, computer vision and control are already linked through many successful proof-of-concept systems developed at several research institutions, including Penn State. However, there is a consensus in both the computer vision and control communities that, in spite of the implicit power of visual control, there are relatively few instances where these techniques have been successfully applied in unstructured environments. This can be traced, to a large extent; to theft-agility (i.e. lack of robustness) of active vision systems designed using classical methods. The present proposal is motivated by preliminary work by the Co-PIs strongly indicating that this fragility can be addressed by appealing to a common systems theoretic substrate to make the interconnection between the different aspects of the problem stronger and more direct. Specifically, the objectives of the proposed research are: Development of a paradigm for systematically designing provably robust active vision systems. This paradigm will address the computer vision and control aspects of the problem within a common systems-theoretic framework, exploiting their synergism to optimize performance. Examples of the advantages offered by this approach include: (i) Integration of robust identification model (in)validation based predictions into target localization algorithms to improve robustness and reduce search time. (ii) Robust identification of models that combine computer vision and dynamical effects, as well as the corresponding uncertainty structure. (iii) Controller design that exploits these models and the associated uncertainty structure to robustly optimize performance. Comprehensive experimental validation and performance characterization of the resulting systems, using several pan and tilt units and dedicated image processing hardware currently available in our lab. The key point of the research is the realization that the problems of robustly tracking an object in a sequence of frames and robust performance analysis, share an underlying common fact: they are equivalent to analyzing the existence of a bounded L2 to L2 operator that satisfies certain interpolation conditions. While the details are somewhat different in each case, this allows for developing a common set of tools, by appealing to the rich language of convex analysis to recast these problems into an LMI optimization form doc24166 none A fundamental challenge among all multicellular eukaryotes is coordinating the expression of critically important genes in different cells throughout development to produce a fully functional adult. This coordination is accomplished by short-range inductive signals between cells that rely on diffusible peptides and or direct cell contacts to initiate intracellular signaling cascades that ultimately influence the expression of specific target genes. Chromatin has emerged as one of the primary obstacles with which the cell s transcription and replication machinery must contend. Factors necessary to transcribe or replicate DNA must gain access to regulatory sites that are packaged into nucleosomes and higher order structures. This is especially problematic when cells are in mitosis and chromatin is extremely condensed. Energy dependent chromatin remodeling complexes have evolved to locally decondense regions to assist in factor binding. The best studied of these complexes is the highly conserved SWI SNF complex, found in yeast, flies and mammals, that is required for the activation of many, but not all genes. These complexes are very large (~2-MDa) and are composed of 8-11 polypeptides. Recent work with the purified yeast and mammalian complexes has elucidated many of the biochemical properties involved in chromatin remodeling; though many aspects regarding the in vivo biological functions are unclear. For example, while only one subunit has any identified catalytic activity, the remaining subunits are necessary for full in vivo function, modulating the complex activities or targeting it to specific genes or processes. Significant questions remain, such as why so many subunits and how do they individually contribute to the functions of the complex? Do any of the subunits have roles independent of the complex? Also, the complex appears to influence gene regulation both positively and negatively (activation and repression). How is this accomplished and is the regulation direct or indirect? What are the in vivo targets of the complex and how are they selected? Drosophila offers an ideal system for examining these questions, with the full array of genetic, biochemical and cell biological tools available, including a completed genome sequence and a wealth of existing mutations. Drosophila research also provides a detailed developmental framework to bridge these disciplines. This project utilizes molecular, genetic and biochemical analysis of the Drosophila SWI SNF complex, known as the Brahma (BRM) complex to address these questions. The efforts are focused on one of the most highly conserved and critically important components, known as SNR1. This subunit is crucial in both flies and humans for coordinating or targeting specific protein interactions between the complex and a variety of transcription factors and cell cycle regulatory proteins. A recently isolated temperature sensitive snr1 mutant allows for conditional removal of snr1 function, and the project takes full advantage of this property to fully characterize the biological requirements for SNR1 during development. This is especially important as the snr1 gene is essential in flies and loss of its human counterpart has been strongly correlated with aggressive childhood cancers. In addition to genetic and biochemical studies, DNA microarray analyses using RNA isolated from homozygous mutants at the restrictive temperature will be used to gain a much needed view of the range of targets of the complex in higher eukaryotes, setting the stage for a full investigation of how those targets are selected and regulated in developing tissues. The broader impact of the research is that, through the use of a conditional mutation that is unique among the metazoan SWI SNF complexes, the biological significance of chromatin remodeling in developmental processes can be better defined by examining in detail when and where the complex is required, and for what functions doc24167 none This award provides support for student attendance at the annual meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics (DAMOP) of the American Physical Society. The meeting will be held at the College of William and Mary from 28 May through 1 June, . This is the principal meeting covering principles of AMO physics held each year, and this award gives students the opportunity to participate in DAMOP sponsored events. A new event for this particular conference is a special pre-conference symposium for students to hear special presentations on topics of particular DAMOP interest doc24168 none Guangzhao Mao, Wayne State University Organic Crystal Growth on Flexible Templates This project will to explore the possibility of morphological control and confinement of organic crystals using polymeric templates. The nucleation and crystallization of model organic dyes will be studied on two-dimensional (2-D) polyelectrolyte templates, and in three-dimensional (3-D) polyelectrolyte shells by atomic force microscopy and other in situ methods. The proposed research aims at (1) understanding the effect of polyelectrolytes on organic crystallization; and (2) encapsulating organic crystals in polyelectrolyte shells. This research explores the rich interplay between the surface structure of polyelectrolytes and the habit of nascent crystals. Polyelectrolytes exert templating effect via preconcentration of lattice ions, geometric and stereochemical match, specific interactions, and adsorption-induced stabilization. Polymeric substrates differ from inorganic templates in that they do not show the order and rigidity implicit in the epitaxial mechanisms. However natural polymers are known to induce crystals of a uniform habit that is different from those grown without the polymers. Research in biomineralization has shown that the templating effect of polyelectrolytes does not require the same degree of geometric match as the inorganic counterparts. Polyelectrolytes may display rich stereochemical control because of their many surface conformations. There may exist several geometric matches for a given crystal face. Segments protruding into solution may stabilize side faces of the nascent crystal. Based on the above notions, an approach consisting primarily of experiments, but also utilizing the Cerius2 program, will be used to study the interfacial structure between the polyelectrolyte template and the nascent dye crystal. Initial experiments will focus on the crystallization of dyes on 2-D thin films so that the kinetics and crystal habit modification can be probed at the molecular scale. The kinetic parameters include critical supersaturation, pH, induction time, and rate of crystallization. The crystal habit variables include size, shape orientation, and correlation to the template structure. In the second stage, the study will focus on the dye crystallization inside the polyelectrolyte shell. The shell will consist of polyelectrolyte multilayers permeable to small polar molecules but not their crystals. In addition to the polyelectrolytes, supported phospholipid bilayers will be used as templates because they provide intermediate order and flexibility. This project is intended as a proof-of-concept study. Future work can go beyond the generic polyelectrolytes using polymers with higher architectural definitions such as amphiphilic polymers, ionomers, and biopolymers. This research may have broader impact in terms of its relationship to the concept of nano-science and technology especially in areas such as materials processing, color displays, information storage, nanocomposites, drug encapsulation, and sensors. For example, the encapsulated colloids can be used as tips for micropipettes, as chemical sensors to detect pollutants, and as heterogeneous catalysts. Also, the support will allow the P.I. to continue exploring the molecular mechanisms in the templated growth of organic with potential applications in encapsulation, coatings, and materials processing. It will also help the P.L to establish long-term collaboration and exchanges with a foreign research institution: the Max-Planck-Institute of Colloids and Interfaces. Some experiments will be conducted at the Institute with a number of characterization methods not present at the P.I. s home institution. The planned educational and outreach activities include incorporation of research topics into materials engineering curricula, global education associated with the World Bridge program, mentoring of Detroit high school students in the Science Summer Camp program, and training science teachers from local community colleges doc24169 none A 5-day symposium will be convened to explore how biocomplexity controls the sensitivity and stability of tundra systems over decadal time scales. Experts in the field will be invited to give keynote presentations and participate in appraising existing knowledge and prepare a science plan to identify avenues of research examining the complexity, function and dynamics of tundra systems. Five themes and primary questions related to climate and the tundra will be addressed across multiple spatial and temporal scales. This includes drivers of change; patterns of change; sensitivity to change; responses to change; and implication of change. This symposium will bring together scientists involved in the North American tundra Experiment (NATEX) that is part of a larger network of scientists known as the International Tundra Experiment (ITEX). The ARCSS program supports ITEX work as part of the Land-Atmosphere-Ice Interactions (LAII) component. To enhance international and student participation, real time video web casting and teleconferencing will take place. These broadcasts will be forwarded to the Joint Office of Scientific Support for ultimate inclusion in the ARCSS Data Coordination Center. A synthesis report will be prepared and circulated. Key personnel identified during the symposium will draft a science plan similar to the LAII science plan and will include an outline for biocomplexity related research in Arctic terrestrial systems. A manuscript for publication in an appropriate internationally recognized journal is planned doc24170 none This proposal describes an inter-institutional IGERT program in soft materials to be offered jointly at City College of CUNY and Columbia University, which are in close proximity. De Gennes defines soft materials as organic media that organize on supramolecular length scales via weak associative interactions. Examples include thin polymeric films for sensors, organic blends for electronic displays, and natural and artificial tissue, spanning the range from complex fluids to soft solids. They are intrinsically multi-scale, molecular to macroscopic. A stunning variety of structures and morphologies can emerge, enabling a wide range of new technologies, and all scales impact processing and use. The Ph.D. program will be built around joint seminars, an industrial internship, collaborative thesis research, and a core of joint course offerings, including two new laboratory courses. The research will be in three complementary areas: effects of confinement on polymer statics and dynamics, chemical and physical patterning, and multi-scale phenomena in bio-related materials. The proposed core curriculum will be taken in addition to the core disciplinary requirements in the student s major department. Our proposal is consistent with existing Ph.D. requirements for all five participating departments, and does not add in any way to the degree requirements or faculty teaching loads; the soft materials courses will satisfy existing elective requirements, but will enable the students to focus these electives within a coordinated program. The proposed collaborative program is unique in two respects: First, it leverages the intellectual and material resources of two neighboring, urban, public private institutions with complementary faculty and diverse student bodies. Second, it creates a unique, synergistic environment for research and graduate education in a niche area that is at the heart of numerous technologies essential to industries based in the greater New York regional area. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fifth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-one institutions for programs that collectively span the areas of science and engineering supported by NSF doc24171 none IBN 97- Neural Regulation of Adrenocortical Cell Functions Recent studies indicate that the autonomic (sympathetic and parasympathetic) nervous system contributes to the regulation of the cells of endocrine glands. In particular, the PI has discovered that autonomic nerves control proliferation and secretion of corticosteroids by the cells of the adrenal cortex. These autonomic nerves include both sympathetic nerves and the chromaffin cells of the adrenal medulla. In these studies, the PI s propose to determine the mechanisms used by nerves to stimulate these adrenocortical cell activities. Four general questions are addressed: (1) Is the cell proliferation regulated by sympathetic nerve activity and by which neurotransmitter? (2) Does the growth factor, bFGF, play a role? (3) Do the chromaffin cells of the adrenal medulla contribute to the regulation of adrenocortical cell secretion? (4) What signal transduction pathway is turned on by the chromaffin cell activity? In order to study the direct neural- adrenocortical cell interactions, the PIs will use their recently established co-cultures of nerve and adrenocortical cells for these studies. Taken together, these studies will contribute to the overall understanding of how endocrine gland function is controlled and the mechanisms by which the central nervous system exerts this regulatory function doc24172 none The University of Arizona s IGERT program is an outgrowth of the emergence of the interdisciplinary field of archaeological science, in which expertise in one or more fields of scientific inquiry is integrated with training in archaeological theory and method. The program will integrate archaeology, geosciences, physics, tree-ring studies, and materials science and engineering into a coherent program of field- and laboratory-based training that will prepare doctoral graduates for employment in academia as well as the public and private sectors. The study of archaeology, and of the environmental contexts within which the human species evolved and diversified, requires the application of multiple techniques drawn from the sciences and engineering. These include techniques for (a) dating archaeological and paleoecological records; (b) reconstructing past climates, plant, and animal communities; (c) locating buried and submarine sites; (d) reconstructing extinct technologies and their impacts on past environments; and (e) identifying past exchange systems by tracing inorganic materials to their geological sources. Graduates of the IGERT program will acquire specific expertise in one or more of these areas, together with a knowledge of the broad range of archaeological sciences, plus a firm grounding in archaeological theory and techniques, blending experiences acquired in classrooms, laboratories and fieldwork. IGERT support will also provide minority undergraduate students and high school science teachers internships in archaeometric laboratories at the University, and will be paired with IGERT-supported graduate students to develop materials for school science curricula. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fifth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-one institutions for programs that collectively span the areas of science and engineering supported by NSF doc24173 none Ecological research is a traditional strength within many departments and colleges at Colorado State University. Nearby state and federal agencies also interact with CSU faculty to monitor and model ecological resources. Much of this research activity is interdisciplinary and uses advanced mathematical and statistical tools. But, due to disciplinary boundaries in our graduate programs, neither ecology students with interests in quantitative methods, nor mathematics statistics students with interests in ecology, are receiving the education they need to work on such interdisciplinary research. The vision of PRIMES is to break down these boundaries through early and uninterrupted exposure to interdisciplinary research projects, via a course called Team Research in Ecology (TREE). Students will obtain the tools they need to work effectively in TREE through reciprocal course offerings among the graduate programs, through modular courses on Advanced Quantitative Methods in Ecology (AQME), and through colloquia, workshops, and conferences. Teaching assistantships, research assistantships, and internships with nearby state and federal agencies will reinforce the interdisciplinary training of PRIMES and leverage IGERT fellowships. Existing projects in quantitative ecology at CSU will shape the curriculum of PRIMES, drive the interdisciplinary collaborations among faculty members and students, and lead to topics for Ph.D. theses. Projects will be organized into five Research Focus Groups to allow sharing of resources and ideas on related problems: Ecology of Managed Ecosystems, Ecology of Global Change, Dynamics of Introduced Disease, Aquatic Resources Modeling, and Evolution in Structured Populations. The PRIMES Council, with representatives from Biology, Mathematics, Statistics, and other participating departments, as well as an external agency, will guide the program toward the goal of making PRIMES a permanent fixture in graduate education at CSU. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fifth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-one institutions for programs that collectively span the areas of science and engineering supported by NSF doc24174 none Yamaguchi This award provides support to continue Design Projects activities begun under NSF award # at Arizona State University (ASC) in which students designed and built custom projects for people with disabilities. The objectives of the activities are to enhance engineering education, provide students with insight into careers in biomedical engineering, improve the quality of life of people with disabilities, and serve the community. The past 12 years of design projects activity at ASU led to the successful completion of 109 design projects and training of 115 undergraduate students in basic design principles. The design projects activity is structured to work successfully within the environment of ASU. Disability Resources for Students (DRS), which provides accommodations for hundreds of mentally and physically disabled students on the ASU campus, will be closely integrated with the student engineers work. Ten senior design projects are to be pursued each year in conjunction with DRS to develop the prototype devices. Two undergraduate summer interns are to be supported under the program to work part-time at DRS to develop a listing of appropriate projects for the student engineers. A graduate student is to assist in administering the program by helping the undergraduate design teams and fostering new connections between ASU and nearby communities to serve and or support persons with disabilities. This project is to introduce 10 to 20 new engineers each year to the daily problems faced by the disabled. Additionally, the disabled community will be directly involved as design consultants and thereby increase the participation of an under-represented group in the activity doc24175 none Interdisciplinary skills and knowledge are required to address issues related to the use and conservation of tropical forests that do not enjoy protected-area status ( working forests ). This IGERT builds on strengths at the University of Florida to construct a cutting-edge program that will serve as a model for how doctoral research and training can effectively and ethically contribute to solving critical problems facing tropical working forests. The research goals are to (1) analyze tradeoffs and complementarities among working forest options; (2) clarify how biophysical, social, economic and political constraints and their interactions influence the effectiveness of different kinds of working forests for conservation and development; and (3) measure the impacts of capacity-building interventions designed to improve forest management and promote conservation. The methods will be integrative across a wide range of disciplines and explicitly comparative across four tropical forest regions (Lowland Bolivia; Acre, Brazil; Eastern Amazonia, Brazil; and the tri-national Maya Forest). The training program includes (1) cross-disciplinary requirements, consisting of courses in ecology and social science, history culture of the research regions, and appropriate language proficiency; (2) integrative coursework, including Interdisciplinary Research Methods, Leadership and Communication Skills, Tropical Conservation and Development and Land-Use Land-Cover Analysis, a Working Forests Clinic, and a Working Forests of the Tropics seminar and field course; and (3) complementary learning teaching opportunities, including site visits within the four regions, annual conferences, retreats and workshops, an IGERT student group, internships, service as mentors, and sharing research results with stakeholders. This IGERT will (1) foster research that is more responsive to real world problems due to interdisciplinary training and strong partner linkages; (2) provide a better match between knowledge and skills developed by graduates and job market demands; and (3) develop a network of effective leaders, trained for the challenges of conservation and intensified use of tropical working forests. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fifth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-one institutions for programs that collectively span the areas of science and engineering supported by NSF doc24176 none This IGERT project is a multidisciplinary training program addressing two needs that are critical if society is to benefit from technological discoveries: (i) preparation of a professional workforce with the knowledge and skills needed to facilitate innovation, and (ii) research that improves our understanding of how business organizations and economic, regulatory, and legal mechanisms promote or impede the development and diffusion of new technologies. Faculty from the joint Georgia Institute of Technology Emory University Department of Biomedical Engineering and NSF-Engineering Research Center (ERC) for Engineering of Human Tissues, Manufacturing Research Center, Microelectronics Research Center, Microelectromechanical Systems, and NSF-ERC Packaging Research Center are collaborating with faculty in the Georgia Tech DuPree College of Management, Emory Law School, and Emory Economics Department. Central to the program are teams of NSF-funded PhD students, cost-shared Master of Business Administration (MBA), and Doctor of Jurisprudence students (JD) who participate over a two year period in activities focused on technical, market, and legal issues related to the science and engineering (S&E) students research. This multidisciplinary team approach is designed to (i) provide S&E students with the skills and multidisciplinary perspective needed to succeed in industry, (ii) produce S&E dissertations of technical merit and market relevance, (iii) facilitate dissertations in management and law & economics that improve our understanding of innovation, and (iv) provide MBAs and JDs with practical experience in a technical research environment. Educational features include two graduate level courses on the Fundamentals of Innovation and a case course developed specifically for this IGERT that all student participants take as a community of students, universities-wide seminar & workshop on Innovation Fundamentals, Intellectual Property Track for the JDs and PhDs in Law & Economics, a Minor in the Management of Innovation for S&E PhDs, a formal mechanism to initiate management and law & economics research at the doctoral level on innovation, internships and frequent interaction with industrial partners, and an annual Doctoral Research Institute on Innovation for graduate students invited from universities nationwide. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fifth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-one institutions for programs that collectively span the areas of science and engineering supported by NSF doc24177 none Kassab There is no doubt that knowledge of the adaptation mechanisms in structure and function during normal growth is important in human health. The objective of this proposal is to gain a better understanding of the adaptation mechanisms in the structure, zero-stress state and function of the coronary arteries during normal cardiac growth. The specific aims are: 1) To obtain a complete set of morphometric data on the branching pattern and vascular geometry of the coronary arterial tree during cardiac growth and to demonstrate some of the hemodynamic applications of the morphometric data; 2) To determine the changes in the stress-strain relationship of the epicardial coronary arteries during cardiac growth and development, with reference to the zero-stress state; and 3) To obtain a complete set of morphometric data of the micro-structural components of the epicardial coronary arteries during cardiac growth and to correlate the structural components to the hemodynamic and mechanical data of Specific Aims 1 and 2. The branching pattern and vascular geometry of the coronary arterial trees will be measured with the elastomer-casting method. The order number, diameter, length, and connectivity matrix will be measured for all orders of vessels of the right coronary artery, left anterior descending and left circumflex arteries. The vessel wall structural remodeling will be studied with light and electron microscopes. The changes in the volume density of arterial components, including intima, smooth muscle cells, fibroblasts, collagenous bundles, and elastic laminae will be determined. The remodeling of the zero-stress state (the state of the organ when the external loads are removed) of the epicardial coronary arteries will be determined by first cutting the arteries into short ring-shaped segments perpendicular to the longitudinal axis of the blood vessel, and then making a radial cut. This procedure causes the ring to open into a sector whose internal and external circumferential lengths will be measured and used as reference parameters at the zero-stress for the analysis of arterial mechanics. This research will lay a structural and mechanical foundations for the study of tissue engineering of the blood vessels during growth and development doc24178 none Welker This research effort will quantify the coupling of the carbon and water cycles and the interacting physical, chemical and biological (PCB) processes that control C exchange between cold, dry terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere. They are focusing on cold, dry ecosystems because: (1) understanding of carbon and water interrelationships and net C exchange is only rudimentary for this extreme environment, making it impossible to predict the vulnerability of this ecosystem to the expected anthropogenically-exacerbated warming; (2) these tundra systems are sufficiently simple allowing the quantification of all key components and the development of a system behavior conceptual model and (3) the vital role of unfrozen water in this cold, dry environment underlies the importance of thresholds and highly nonlinear interactions between PCB processes. Results will contribute to the understanding and the quantification of global carbon and water cycling, as well as to the understanding of extreme habitats on Earth, and possibly on other cold, dry planetary bodies. They will quantify the seasonal changes in the coupling of C and water at the leaf and ecosystem scales using in situ isotopic approaches, evaluate and quantify how the seasonal patterns of physical, chemical and biological processes interact to regulate the dynamics of net C exchange, and use a biogeochemical model to investigate net CO2 exchange and the complex PCB interactions under current climates and a range of likely future climate change scenarios and integrate these with arctic and global carbon budget estimates. The program will be based on articulating the complexities of carbon and water coupling under current conditions, but also on the responses of the biological, chemical and physical processes and interactions in response to field manipulations of winter and summer precipitation and warming. They anticipate that the study will result in a new insight into the adaptations of plant and microbial life in cold, dry ecosystems and the coupled nature of carbon and water in an ecosystem that is very different from more temperate ecosystems where most current understanding of these processes has originated. Furthermore, they expect to gain a more precise understanding of the extent to which this ecosystem responds to future climate change and the consequences of these changes for arctic and global C budgets doc24179 none Award is for a project to install the first operational borehole seismometer in the deep ocean at the Hawaii-2 Observatory site. ODP Leg 200 drilled and cased a re-entry hole for this purpose during December . This project will develop and test an improved seismic sonde, and develop a method and apparatus to lay a fiber optic cable from the borehole1.5 km to the Hawaii-2 Observatory junction box, using a deep submergence ROV. In addition, a thermistor string will placed in a nearby, uncased hole. After installation of the seismometer, it will be tested and validated by comparison with land-based seismometers and with a seismometer located on the sea bed at the H2O site doc24180 none The University of Michigan and The Santa Fe Institute, two leading institutions in the study of complex adaptive systems, are jointly organizing and supporting an IGERT graduate program for social scientists interested in institutional performance and design. The analytic core of the curricula borrows from multiple disciplines: economics, political science, computer science, physics, and sociology. The emphasis will be on how collections of diverse agents behave and adapt when their interactions are structured by formal and informal institutional constraints. Student researchers will study how formal institutions adapt and respond, how informal institutions emerge, how the structure of relationships between and within institutions affects performance and robustness, and when and how cultural, social, economic and behavioral diversity matter for institutions. The program will be housed at the University of Michigan but students will have the opportunity to visit the Santa Fe Institute for a semester. The IDEAS IGERT will enable students to become active members in the social science research communities at both institutions through seminars, research assistantships, interdisciplinary courses, and interactions with faculty. IDEAS students will also take courses and attend seminars with students enrolled in STIET (another NSF sponsored IGERT at UM). IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fifth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-one institutions for programs that collectively span the areas of science and engineering supported by NSF doc24181 none Photosynthetic plants and algae provide the energy and molecular building blocks necessary to support most life on Earth. In terrestrial ecosystems, sugars (and other easily utilized compounds) lost from living roots are important for supporting soil microbial activity. This microbial activity in turn influences decomposition of detritus and thus the recycling of nutrients to support plant growth. It is not yet clear how extensively plants can control the loss of sugars from roots depending on environmental conditions or plant nutrient status. Currently there is no way to continuously monitor concentrations of simple organic compounds at fine spatial scales around roots in field soils. This project will develop miniaturized sensors for detecting glucose in soils. Modeled on subcutaneous sensors that report blood sugar in diabetic patients, sensors will detect glucose around roots by relying on the selectivity of immobilized glucose oxidase enzyme to generate a glucose-specific electrical signal. Ultimately, these sensors could be used for spatially resolved, continuous monitoring of concentrations of a variety of compounds in soil and in water around algae. The sensors will provide a new window into dynamics and magnitude of labile carbon loss from photosynthetic organisms, and the implications of that loss for microbial activity in ecosystems doc24182 none For proper functioning of the nervous system, each nerve cell must assemble the molecular machinery required for the release of its signal, the neurotransmitter, at the precise location on its target cell where the signal can be received and a response produced. This precise alignment between the release machinery of nerve terminals and the reception molecules of their targets presents a challenge not only for its construction and growth but also for its maintenance. The precision of this organization between nerve cells and targets is beautifully illustrated at the frog neuromuscular junction where a linear array of release sites in nerve terminals is separated by distinct nonrelease domains. Using the frog motor nerve terminal, Dr. Connor s laboratory discovered that cytoskeletal molecules including F-actin, a molecule involved in the structural support and movement of cells and organelles, is concentrated in nonrelease domains. The long range goal of Dr. Connor s project is to determine the role of the cytoskeleton and F-actin in fundamental processes of nerve terminals that may occur in nonrelease domains: the recycling of the neurotransmitter release machinery and the stabilization of nerve terminals at their targets. Partial funding is provided to Dr. Connor s laboratory to launch initial experiments using state-of-the-art, electron microscope tomography to construct a high resolution, three-dimension map of the cytoskeleton in nonrelease domains of nerve terminals. Further, this will provide training opportunities for graduate students in the current techniques doc24183 none The objective of this IGERT project is to initiate an interdisciplinary, inter-institutional degree program in Functional Genomics of Model Organisms supported by an interactive faculty from the University of Maine, the Jackson Laboratory, and the Maine Medical Center Research Institute. The major challenge for biological and biomedical research for the foreseeable future is to understand how the information encoded within a genome determines the development and functioning of a living organism. To move from the level of DNA sequence to an understanding of the molecular interplay producing the final traits of an individual will require a continuum of experimental approaches ranging from experimental genomics, molecular biology, and novel biophysical methodologies, to advanced data screening schemes and computational techniques. Traditional alignments of the biologically based disciplines will be insufficient to solve the complex problems associated with functional genomics. Genome projects, regardless of the organism, will rely increasingly on the physical and computational sciences. The increased need for interdisciplinary research will require scientists trained to work interactively in multiple disciplines. This program introduces a new educational paradigm, developed to train students to move freely among the disciplines needed to investigate genome function. Students receive training in the biological, physical and computational sciences through a combination of core and advanced courses, intensive workshops, and research seminars. Emphasis is placed on a high-quality research environment and a tutorial relationship between the student and her his mentors and program committee. Central to the students training in interdisciplinary research will be the use of a paired mentoring system, a concept referred to as twinning. The primary mentor plays a role similar to the traditional graduate advisor and comes from the student s primary area of research. The secondary mentor comes from a second discipline, and each student develops a research project dependent upon interdisciplinary collaborations. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fifth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-one institutions for programs that collectively span the areas of science and engineering supported by NSF doc24184 none This is a three-year research project to understand the role of convection in forcing equatorial waves, and the effects of these waves on the dynamics of the middle atmosphere. The tool to be adopted for this investigation is the National Center for Atmospheric Research s Whole Atmosphere Climate Chemistry Model (WACCM), a comprehensive numerical model spanning the range of altitude from the Earth s surface to the lower thermosphere. The focus of the project are the equatorial waves, forced in the tropical troposphere by transient convection heating, that propagate upward into the stratosphere, mesosphere, and lower thermosphere. It is expected that this project will have broad impact on theoretical, numerical and observational aspects of wave propagation, dynamics, and chemical composition of the middle atmosphere doc24185 none The vision of the Center for Biologically Inspired Materials and Material Systems research and educational program is to map traditional engineering onto biology. Through this approach, the IGERT project seeks to establish a new curriculum for graduate education in Biologically Inspired Materials and Materials Systems. The curriculum serves as an integration of natural science, life science, and engineering. This program will create a new graduate training program that uses biologically inspired approaches to bridge a gap in current biomedical and bioengineering programs. The Center s vision is to bring nature s engineering into the engineering curriculum and engineering principles into the study of materials, revolutionizing the way engineering and life sciences are taught at the graduate student level. Thus, this IGERT project will develop a new paradigm for education and research, using nature as an example for engineering, while explaining nature using engineering principles and rigor. This program focuses on three specific areas: (1) Bio-NanoScience and Engineering (single molecules and self-assembly), (2) Encapsulation, Coatings, and Surface Patterning (materials at the cellular scale where the lipid bilayer serves as the defining basis of all life), and (3) Hierarchical Systems (larger, more macroscopic, functional organisms). This focused approach will allow students and faculty to develop mapping concepts to the leading edge of knowledge and to explore the intellectual and practical aspects of creating a new curriculum at the interfaces of biology, medicine, engineering, and basic physical and chemical sciences. This is an initial step towards establishing a new paradigm in science and engineering education that explores life s mechanisms at the molecular level and translates these findings up through hierarchical scales of structure and organization to bring greater understanding of mechanism to the biological organism and unique designs to engineered devices. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fifth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-one institutions for programs that collectively span the areas of science and engineering supported by NSF doc24161 none The Principal Investigator has conducted a reconnaissance, land-based seismic experiment designed to address questions about whether a mantle plume is associated with the Galapagos hotspot, whether the plume penetrates the mantle transition zone, the location of the hotspot plume, the lateral dimensions of the hotspot plume, and the form of hotspot-lithosphere interaction. The present project will thoroughly analyze the seismic data, publish the results, and support scientific and educational collaborations with the Instituto Geofisico, Escuela Politecnica Nacional, Quito, and the Charles Darwin Research Station, Puerto Ayora doc18227 none Peter Schroder Ronald A. Devore Mathieu Desbrun This is a collaborative project funded by the CARGO program under , , and . This is the Age of Information. Whether it be in scientific computation or reverse engineering, in remote sensing or medicine, data sets of incredible resolution and exquisite detail are created daily. These data sets often have geometric structure which contains important information about the data and its application. The usefulness of such geometric datasets rests on our ability to process them efficiently, whether it be for storage, transmission, visual display, correlation, or registration against data from other modalities. Compression is the common critical issue in all these applications. Current data processing technology does not provide the efficient and geometrically faithful representations demanded by applications. In fact, a satisfactory data processing platform will not be created by incremental advances of current technology but rather through a fundamental investigation of how to represent large data sets with inherent geometry. To pursue the necessary advances a team of researchers and application developers representing expertise from several disciplines including mathematics, computer science, and engineering has been assembled. As drivers of the research, specially targeted applications (DTED, reverse engineering, physical simulation) have been selected to guide the formulation of the most critical and meaningful problems, as well as testing approaches to solving them. The team is carrying out fundamental investigations on the representation and compression of data sets with geometry by building new mathematical theory including deterministic models, appropriate application specific error metrics (e.g., Haussdorf distance rather than Lp norms), an information theory based on Kolmogorov entropy to determine the optimal compression, and the development of nonlinear methods for representing the data sets which are near optimal in the entropy sense doc24188 none The question of how support from social welfare systems affects a household s economic reliance on natural resources is of interest in many social contexts. This pilot research by a cultural anthropologist will ask how forest peoples in Suriname and French Guiana participate in small-scale gold mining given access to national social welfare systems. Previous research suggests that gold mining in this area attracts large numbers of poor people, who have few subsistence alternatives, and a small number of relatively well off people, who can earn revenues by investing in mining equipment. The research predicts a U-shaped relation between access to social welfare and participation in gold mining, with poor people with the least access to welfare and rich people being the most likely to engage in mining. This hypothesis will be tested in two adjacent countries that are culturally and environmentally similar but differ in their systems of social welfare. The researchers will study three Maroon villages in Eastern Suriname and Western French Guiana, varying in their access to public services. Socioeconomic survey interviews will be carried out with fifty households in each village, ethnographic interviews and observations will be recorded at both sides of the border, and statistical information will be obtained from government offices and non-governmental organizations. Two U.S. graduate students will be trained in the fieldwork and will conduct their own research on comparative topics. Aside from contributing to the training of students in social science and advancing our understanding of the relation between access to welfare and work, the project will inform us about the relation between social welfare policy, socioeconomic development, and forest resource use and conservation doc24152 none Funds are recommended for continued analysis of a high quality geophysical data set collected by the PIs from the northern Gulf of California. The PIs will undertake a sequence stratigraphic analysis and integrate the results with an ongoing structural study of the region. It will also take advantage of data from industry sources that will provide the important stratigraphic control. The goal is to work out the transition from rifting to seafloor spreading and the history of extension in the Gulf. The study will also lead to an understanding of the kinematics of deformation in nascent axial basins doc24190 none Research on protein structure, function and assembly is an inherently multidisciplinary enterprise that is also driving rapid change and growth across many types of companies. The goal of this IGERT program is to create a new model for graduate education to prepare students for this evolving world. In this new model, students will learn how to pool the knowledge of different scientific, engineering and business disciplines, and different socially diverse groups to achieve creative and productive research collaborations. Students will understand their research in a larger perspective to include its impact on academic, industrial, and social environments. The program will include science and engineering doctoral students and MBA students of twenty-four University of Delaware faculty from four Colleges and seven Departments. The program is supported by a diverse local biotechnology industry from incubating start-ups to large global companies. It links these research groups to form a network of university and industrial collaborators having complementary expertise. The research projects are collaborative across disciplines and are synergistic, spanning topics that include living cells, new tools, and synthetic materials. The educational program augments a strong academic experience by incorporating the additional features of workforce skills, career guidance, and collaboration between business and technical students. A new course, Multidisciplinary Teamwork in Research , is introduced that includes scientists, engineers, and MBA students. This course brings industrial speakers into the classroom to discuss unmet challenges that need to be addressed by research, and brings in social scientists to train students in teamwork and diversity. The course includes training in writing and oral presentations, and experience in working creatively on problems in teams that include science, engineering and business students. The educational program also features laboratory experience in other departments, industrial internships, attending conferences, presenting posters, an industrial mentoring program, participation of minority undergraduate researchers, and lectures and seminars on ethics. The IGERT program will be the subject of a doctoral dissertation by a social scientist to provide detailed assessment and dissemination. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fifth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-one institutions for programs that collectively span the areas of science and engineering supported doc24191 none This IGERT project is an integrated program of education and research in the area of Biogeochemistry and Environmental Biocomplexity. Conceptual, technical, and computational developments are driving a major convergence among the biological, earth, and physical sciences. Over the next several decades, this disciplinary convergence will transform understanding of basic processes that control the stability and sustainability of natural environments. These insights will have extraordinary implications for the ability to predict and manage the effects of modern human activities on the structure and function of ecosystems across local, regional, and global scales. Such new knowledge is critical in planning for a safe, sustainable, and prosperous future. The IGERT project goals are to create an environment where researchers from ecology and evolutionary biology, biogeochemistry, environmental engineering, hydrology, environmental microbiology, and materials science come together to create novel interdisciplinary approaches to major questions in environmental science, and to train the next generation of leaders in this new interdisciplinary science. Emphasis will be on intellectual diversity and non-traditional pedagogies in training students across disciplinary boundaries, while deliberately enhancing connections with international and non-university partners. Workshop and seminar style learning will be employed, as well as active involvement of students in the management and implementation of the program. The intellectual foci will be the interaction of biological and physico-chemical controls on the cycling of metals and nutrients, especially terrestrial nitrogen; the role of microbiological processes in mediating biogeochemical cycling; and the effects of variation in genotype and phenotype on ecosystem functioning. Ultimately, the program will consider how complex behavior arises from the interaction of individually simple relationships in natural and managed ecosystems. Cornell University has outstanding resources in individual disciplines, and the IGERT program offers a unique opportunity to bring together many of these individual efforts into an integrated whole. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fifth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-one institutions for programs that collectively span the areas of science and engineering supported by NSF doc24192 none The motivation for this IGERT project is to educate a new class of engineers and scientists who will participate in multi-disciplinary, team-based research projects that are at the forefront of the emerging field of nanoscale engineering and science. Research in this area will lead to the ability to manipulate matter at the molecular and atomic levels in order to produce materials and devices with unique and controllable properties. Undertaking a timely response through an integrated and cohesive program of education and training in the area of nanoscale engineering and science will provide the IGERT Fellows with the unique opportunity of being at the forefront of the developments in this exciting platform. Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania will support 14 doctoral students (7 at each university) through the NSF IGERT program every year. The unique opportunities, capabilities, and strengths of each institution will be enhanced through an integrated graduate educational program. IGERT Fellows enrolled at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania will have access to about 30 faculty members representing disciplines encompassing chemistry, physics, chemical engineering, biomedical engineering, materials science and engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and education. IGERT Fellows will be encouraged to select topics of research that are co-advised by faculty members from both institutions. There are four major activities that comprise this IGERT project: (1) interdisciplinary research and training; (2) new courses and seminars; (3) internships in industry, federal research laboratories and leading universities in Europe, Asia and South Africa; (4) career-integrated education. The pooling of talent, resources, and efforts from the two institutions will result in a one-campus, two-institution approach that effectively integrates education and research training. The proximity of the two contiguous campuses is ideal for developing and delivering joint courses on nanoscale engineering and science and allowing for reciprocal use of laboratory facilities. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fifth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-one institutions for programs that collectively span the areas of science and engineering supported by NSF doc18224 none Denis Zorin Mathieu Desbrun Peter Schroder This is a collaborative project funded by the CARGO program under , , and . Accurate computational representations of complex geometry are of great importance in many disciplines ranging from engineering and manufacturing to medicine and biology. With the wide availability of powerful computational resources and ever better acquisition technologies such as 3D laser scanning and volumetric MRI or CAT imaging the geometries used in applications are becoming increasingly complex. One aspect of this complexity is topology, i.e., the presence of holes and tunnels and of a network of one and zero-dimensional surface features such as creases and spikes. Typical examples of topologically complex shapes are a perforated plate or the system of blood vessels of the body. Traditional representations of geometry are at worst weak and at best cumbersome and inefficient in representing such complex topologies. Modeling of macro- and microscopic biological structures is becoming increasingly important for medical research, training, and treatment support. Such structures often have extremely complex shape and topology (e.g., the blood vessel or the nervous system, facial muscles, a folded protein molecule). The representations and algorithms we develop will result in new efficient ways of manipulating and processing computer representations of such structures. In this project a team with expertise in numerical analysis, geometric modeling, discrete algorithms and computer graphics is studying ways to bring fundamental mathematical tools and highly efficient algorithms to bear on the challenge of creating efficient and accurate computational representations and algorithms for surfaces of complex topology. In particular we are investigating theory and practical algorithms for (I) removal of topological noise in existing models as well as in raw data used for surface reconstruction; (II) topology discovery in volumetric data sets; (III) construction of multiresolution representations of geometry which can meaningfully abstract fine level topology at coarser resolutions to enable powerful multiscale techniques for rendering, modification and simulation. Particular attention is paid to exploring measures of topological scale which are crucial to most of the algorithms being developed. The algorithms to be developed by the team will have immediate applications in two areas: Computer-Aided Design and Medical Visualization. In CAD, examples of potential applications include topology cleanup, simplification for integration of scanned 3D data with manually constructed models and use of multiscale representations for interactive conceptual design representations doc24194 none Though this TCUP planning award Little Big Horn College, located on the Crow Reservation, will develop a comprehensive long-term plan for strengthening the institution s Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) programs. The project will be divided into four phases: assessment of the current status of STEM curricula, infrastructure and student support; implementation of a 2-day planning retreat; development of the detailed long-range STEM plan; and preparation submission of a TCUP implementation award proposal. The institution feels that the planning process and the development of a long-term STEM plan will provide it with the potential to make significant and sustainable improvements in the STEM programs including better integration and leveraging of information technology doc18227 none Peter Schroder Ronald A. Devore Mathieu Desbrun This is a collaborative project funded by the CARGO program under , , and . This is the Age of Information. Whether it be in scientific computation or reverse engineering, in remote sensing or medicine, data sets of incredible resolution and exquisite detail are created daily. These data sets often have geometric structure which contains important information about the data and its application. The usefulness of such geometric datasets rests on our ability to process them efficiently, whether it be for storage, transmission, visual display, correlation, or registration against data from other modalities. Compression is the common critical issue in all these applications. Current data processing technology does not provide the efficient and geometrically faithful representations demanded by applications. In fact, a satisfactory data processing platform will not be created by incremental advances of current technology but rather through a fundamental investigation of how to represent large data sets with inherent geometry. To pursue the necessary advances a team of researchers and application developers representing expertise from several disciplines including mathematics, computer science, and engineering has been assembled. As drivers of the research, specially targeted applications (DTED, reverse engineering, physical simulation) have been selected to guide the formulation of the most critical and meaningful problems, as well as testing approaches to solving them. The team is carrying out fundamental investigations on the representation and compression of data sets with geometry by building new mathematical theory including deterministic models, appropriate application specific error metrics (e.g., Haussdorf distance rather than Lp norms), an information theory based on Kolmogorov entropy to determine the optimal compression, and the development of nonlinear methods for representing the data sets which are near optimal in the entropy sense doc24196 none In recent years the demand has been growing rapidly for non-silicon miniature devices with highly-precise features. At the same time, commercialization of these devices is hindered by a great need for novel molecular engineering and miniaturization techniques. Progress will require highly interdisciplinary collaboration between engineers, chemists, physicists, and biologists. Four centers at OSU have organized an inter-center IGERT program uniting the broad range of expertise necessary to foster new manufacturing technologies. These technologies will be achieved by integrating molecular self-assembly with micro nano-manufacturing of polymeric and ceramic materials. A unifying molecular engineering protocol will be developed and applyed to the design, fabrication, and testing of devices in two major areas: (a) polymer- and ceramic-based biomedical devices (i.e. BioMEMS), and (b) high performance ceramic sensors, sensor arrays, and membranes for transportation and environmental applications. Although a few inter-center research projects have been conducted among these four centers, they are isolated cases having limited scope. The technical breadth and complexity of this integration, to our knowledge, has not been previously attempted on this scale. A natural outgrowth will be the development of a broad-based, cross-center educational program. The vision is to integrate the latest research developments into a practical student curriculum, and to impart to doctoral students the necessary multidisciplinary skills and global awareness needed to catalyze broader impacts on society. The key elements of the inter-center education and training program include four to five new MEMD courses (multipurpose seminar course, overview course, sensor technology, nanotechnology and or membrane science and technology); an interdisciplinary curriculum; dedicated research at two or more centers; industry internships and internships at national laboratories; travel to national and international meetings; tours and visits to research labs in the U.S. and abroad; and a web-based dissemination plan. The recruitment and retention of minorities and women will be emphasized in the award of thirty IGERT-MEMD fellowships. Each institution will commit to providing the necessary infrastructure, including appropriate laboratory and or clean room and common space and sharing of equipment, in support of an external user community. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fifth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-one institutions for programs that collectively span the areas of science and engineering supported by NSF doc24197 none Science and technology of the twenty first century will be dominated by computing. The training of well prepared computational scientists and engineers demands an approach that transcends the strictures of the standard academic curriculum. This IGERT project will provide students who follow discipline-specific studies with a multidisciplinary program of training in computational science that will maximize their exposure to the cross-disciplinary nature of computational science and to its realm of industrial applications. This program will build a three-way interface between graduate students, the academic faculty training them, and industrial, government, and academic research laboratories who may ultimately be their employers. It will offer training opportunities through a program of visits and internships at such institutions. As the students proceed towards a Ph.D. within their chosen field, they will also earn a certificate in computational science in recognition of the special expertise that they have developed. The students will have access to state-of-the-art computational facilities at the University and will participate in multidisciplinary seminars, workshops and regular meetings with faculty and students in this program. They will also attend specialized lectures on ethics and issues of law that are relevant for scientists in the computational field. Special efforts will be made to enhance the participation of students from groups under-represented in the sciences. The IGERT project will have the merit of providing a large number of doctoral students pursuing disciplinary research with broad education on the methods and scope of application of computational science, through the teamwork of faculty from many different departments. The results of this interdisciplinary project will be widely disseminated through seminars, workshops and web publishing and thus it will have the broad impact of establishing a model for training in computational science students who are pursuing education in a variety of disciplinary fields. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fifth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-one institutions for programs that collectively span the areas of science and engineering supported by NSF doc24198 none The objective of this IGERT proposal is to develop a fellowship program in the multidisciplinary area of Sensory Knowledge-based INterface Science (SKINS). This program investigates the dynamic, information-rich molecular structure of the ultimate smart interface - human skin - by coupling advances in biomedical engineering, microsystems, and information technology. The interdisciplinary approach that is required to understand the signal processing, chemical synthesis and microfluidics of this unique biological interface forms the innovative theme of this proposal. Another compelling aspect of this program is to investigate the technology transfer development cycle through collaboration with USF s College of Business Administration, industrial internships and international exchange. Research outcomes of this proposal would facilitate the understanding and optimizing of the science and technology of MEMS, nanotechnology and information processing for cells and tissue studies, and contribute towards the goal of transitioning the clinical laboratory into the point-of-care. The program will also facilitate the transformation of six traditionally strong research programs (from Colleges of Engineering, Medicine, Arts and Sciences, Business and Marine Science at USF and the Colleges of Engineering and Arts and Sciences at UCF) into a strong multi-disciplinary research program with a thematic focus that leverages the advances in bio, micro, nano, info and medical technologies. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fifth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-one institutions for programs that collectively span the areas of science and engineering supported by NSF doc24199 none This IGERT project is a multidisciplinary program of education and research focused on biomechanics. Biomechanics is the study of phenomena in biology that is broadly concerned with the mechanical characteristics of cells, tissues, and organs. It deals with both structural aspects - for example, the strength of the cytoskeleton and the Young s modulus of the cell - and dynamic aspects - the motion of fluids in biological microchannels and the action of biological micromotors. Understanding these phenomena and processes requires combining methods, tools, and styles of research from biological and physical sciences, and from engineering. The IGERT program is intended to offer Ph.D. students an education designed to make them proficient in the methods of both biological and physical sciences. The research component of the program will generate improved understanding of important and relatively unexplored biological processes; it will also use this understanding to design inanimate systems that mimic aspects of the biological systems (biomimetic systems). The educational component will combine thesis programs that require co-advisors from biological and physical science and engineering, research rotations through laboratories with different styles of research, and active interaction among students with different backgrounds. The program will support 10 students per year, and involve 20 faculty at Harvard in the departments of biology, chemistry, and physics, the Division of Applied Science and Engineering, and the Medical School. Many of these research groups already collaborate in other projects: the proposed program will strengthen and extend these collaborations, to the benefit of both students and faculty. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fifth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-one institutions for programs that collectively span the areas of science and engineering supported by NSF doc24200 none Due to an increase in population and economic development along the coast, our society is increasingly exposed to natural hazards including hurricanes and tornadoes. Every year these hazards cause many fatalities and injuries; major disruption in community lifelines such as power, communication and transportation; and large amounts of property damage. The events of September 11, , showed us that man-made hazards are likely to be part of our lives. Since, such natural and man-made hazards are unpredictable, we can curb losses through careful planning, effective public policies, and good engineering. The objective of this IGERT program is to produce a cadre of professionals prepared for broader multidisciplinary research, comprehensive planning and balanced decision-making in the future. This objective will be met by integrating graduate research and training in a program that crosses the disciplines of atmospheric science, engineering, and economics leading to an interdisciplinary doctoral degree. The focus of the program is wind science and engineering and associated economics risk management. Scientist and engineers at Texas Tech University have pursued wind-related research since when a devastating tornado struck near the university and destroyed much of downtown Lubbock. Over the past three decades the research program has continued to grow in the areas of building response and design, the atmospheric boundary layer and economics risk management. With close to twenty faculty members participating in the program, a variety of research projects are in progress at a given time. Some of the research areas are wind characteristics in tornadoes and landfalling hurricanes, post-disaster investigation of building damage and economic losses, deign criteria for shelters, full-scale building response in the field, wind tunnel studies, simulation of damage, forecast for wind power, hurricane evacuation and others. NSF IGERT Fellows will take core courses in atmospheric sciences, wind-related engineering, economic risk management, ethics and GIS. The fellows will also be trained through a rotation of three laboratory courses in meteorological measurement, wind-related engineering experimentation and statistical analysis of random phenomena. A one-semester internship in a national laboratory, industrial organization or governmental agency is part of the program. This training along with selected courses in a specific discipline will prepare the Fellows to pursue multidisciplinary research in wind science and engineering. The goal is to complete a Ph.D. degree in four to five years after completion of the bachelors degree. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fifth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-one institutions for programs that collectively span the areas of science and engineering supported by NSF doc24201 none The NSF EPSCoR National Conference will focus on new research opportunities and future developments in information technology, strategies for promoting research and development partnerships, methods for increasing participation in research and education, and best practices in multi-state collaborations and cross-agency initiatives. The conference will be held in Anchorage, Alaska, in September . Representatives from academe, state and national government, and private industry will participate. The Alaska EPSCoR program staff will organize and manage the conference doc24202 none This is a three year project to continue the investigations of emissions in the terrestrial atmosphere using data obtained with the 10-m W. H. Keck telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Much of the data to be used have already been collected and have been used in a co-added form to provide dramatic advances in the spectroscopy of the MLT region. However, some aspects of these data have not yet been tapped, and much new information is potentially available from 50-min data sets on oxygen, nitrogen and sodium emissions. The Physical Sciences Division at SRI International makes a substantial contribution to developing human resources over a range of educational levels, from undergraduate to postdoctoral training. The Molecular Physics Laboratory has been particularly active in the NSF REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) Program doc24203 none Kono This award supports a two-year collaborative research project between Professor Junichiro Kono at Rice University in Houston, Texas and Professor Noboru Miura at the University of Tokyo in Japan. The researchers will undertake studies on structures fabricated from the 6 Angstrom III-V semiconductors. Their goal is to increase the fundamental understanding of these quantum structures. They will be undertaking magneto-optic studies in very high (up to 600 T) magnetic fields at Rice University and carrying out additional experiments utilizing the Free Electron Lasers at the University of California at Santa Barbara and at Stanford. They will also be performing ultrahigh field magneto-optics experiments at the Megagauss Laboratory (MGL) in Tokyo. This is a unique high field facility where different types of high-field magnets are available. Finally, theoretical efforts at understanding and interpreting the spectroscopy experiments will be provided by some of the researchers that have expertise in optical, transport, and electronic properties of bulk and quantum confined semiconductors and devices. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. The U.S. researchers have expertise in optical spectroscopy of semiconductors, THz dynamics of semiconductors using free electron lasers and theoretical input. The Japanese researchers have expertise in the growth of magnetic structures, knowledge of electronic and optoelectronic devices, growth of mesoscopic structures, high-speed electron transport and optical properties and devices. It is likely that some of the interesting properties phenomena learned in these systems will be used in future semi-conducting devices. The research will offer a good opportunity to join efforts between the two countries. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. A number of postdocs, graduate students and undergraduate students from the participating institutions will also be participating in the research. The researchers plan to distribute the results of their findings through the Web, publications and presentations at conferences doc24204 none The Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC), a multi-campus research institute of the University of California, is establishing an IGERT program to train NSF Fellows on Public Policy and Nuclear Threats. IGCC will use its long-established programs on all nine campuses of the University of California and institutional ties with Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories to implement this program. During the Cold War, nuclear threats drove investments and keen young minds into the study of nuclear weapons issues. Today, the incentive to become experts in nuclear matters is much reduced. Yet, the nuclear threat has not gone away. As has been underscored by the events of September 11, and their aftermath, it is time to build a new community of scholars and practitioners trained in strategic analysis, nuclear policy issues, the roles of nuclear weapons, the regional and global realities that comprise today s nuclear threats, and in traditional and prospective responses ranging from arms control to nonproliferation to counter-proliferation. The principal goals of the program are: to attract and train the next generation of strategic thinkers to address the public policy issues of tomorrow about nuclear threats; to produce new incentives for interdisciplinary research in the field of public policy and nuclear threats; to provide students with access to organizations and individuals engaged in nuclear policy development at home and abroad; to develop career opportunities at such organizations for post-doctoral employment; and, ultimately to provide the expertise the United States needs to develop sound nuclear policies in a changing international environment. Another important goal is to create an interdisciplinary and intergenerational community of scholars who can learn from one another and create synergies across disciplines that last well beyond this program. The IGERT program is designed to achieve these goals. Two groups of approximately ten UC doctoral dissertation students will be chosen by statewide competitive selection, and supported fully for five years each. IGERT Fellows will be supported for one of these years by their respective UC departments that will provide research or teaching assistantships in nuclear policy-related topics. IGCC will work with science, social science, and humanities departments to recruit new Ph.D. students for this program. Applications will be reviewed and Fellows selected by a statewide interdisciplinary subcommittee of the IGCC steering committee. IGCC, Ph.D. programs on the UC campuses, Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories, and senior mentors will team to conduct this program. Students will receive their fundamental Ph.D. education in their home departments; this education will be enhanced by a series of required IGERT training activities: a four-week summer training seminar on the historical and current security implications of nuclear weapons both globally and regionally, including their strategic and political roles, arms control, nonproliferation, missile defense, terrorism, and related technology issues; a research or teaching assistantship; two-month summer internship at Lawrence Livermore or Los Alamos National Laboratory; an overseas fellowship in Asia or Europe; a summer policy internship at a governmental or non-governmental organization in Washington, DC; and monthly interdisciplinary video-conferences focused on contemporary research issues surrounding nuclear weapons and public policy. Where appropriate and possible, additional UC students will be invited to participate in IGERT training activities. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fifth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-one institutions for programs that collectively span the areas of science and engineering supported by NSF doc24205 none PI: Francesco Lanza di Scalea Co-PI: Frieder Seible University of California, San Diego Proposal number: Proposal title: Health Monitoring of Multi-Strand Steel Tendons and Cable Stays for Civil Structures Monitoring the structural health of existing constructed facilities is becoming an increasingly relevant aspect of engineering. Structural health monitoring includes ensuring proper structural performance and providing early detection of critical damage. This project is aimed at developing a health monitoring method for multi-wire steel strand tendons and cable stays that are widely used in civil structures such as cable-supported bridges and prestressed concrete members. The ultimate purposes of the method are 1) real-time measurement of the applied loads and 2) detection of critical damage including corrosion and broken wires. The project will investigate the use of ultrasonic stress waves as potential candidates to perform these tasks. Intermediate objectives of the research include: 1) the characterization of the dispersive behavior (velocity frequency relationship) of stress waves propagating in multi-wire strands; 2) the perfection of a method for load measurement based on monitoring the stress wave propagation velocities; 3) the assessment of the sensitivity of stress waves to structural damage in the strands; 4) the development of a method for correcting the effects of temperature on the measurement of load. Successful completion of the proposed activities will contribute to ensuring the safety of the Nation s critical civil infrastructure components, such as bridges. Broader impacts of the project will include educational aspects. A graduate student will be directly involved in all of the research activities. An undergraduate assistant will also collaborate to the project. The topics of structural health monitoring and non-destructive evaluation have been recently included in the curriculum development of UCSD s Structural Engineering department. Two courses on these topics are being developed, one at the undergraduate level and the other at the graduate level. Relevant findings resulting from the research activities will be incorporated into the classroom lectures for these courses. Demonstrations on ultrasonic measurements in strands will be given as part of the courses programmed laboratory sessions doc24206 none This IGERT award will support the establishment of a multidisciplinary graduate training program of education and research at UCSB in the broad field of interactive digital multimedia. The objective of the program is to train students in a truly interdisciplinary approach to digital multimedia, while preparing them for careers in industry, research, and education. The convergence of digital media, computing, and communication has created new and exciting opportunities in science, engineering, and the arts. The goal of this program is to integrate multiple, diverse approaches to the creation, analysis, deployment, and utilization of digital media within a coherent educational framework of training and research. This multidisciplinary endeavor necessitates collaboration between students and faculty from a broad spectrum of backgrounds and perspectives, including computer science, electrical and computer engineering, psychology, geography, design, composition, and art. Through innovative and interdepartmental courses and seminars, opportunities for internships in industry, and guidance by faculty from several departments, students will gain a unique perspective on interactive multimedia, including the creation, encoding, and distribution of multimedia content, as well as applications of multimedia systems in education, communication, and arts and entertainment. Areas of focus for research and education include image, video, and audio processing, networking, human-computer interaction, graphics and visualization, visual arts, interactive media, and computer music. The graduate training program will emphasize a broad background in several of these areas, while research projects, interactive installations and artistic performances will bring together small, interdisciplinary teams of researchers with diverse expertise. The IGERT-supported program will leverage existing strengths at UCSB in related areas and will involve the participation of several departments. The program will complement the UCSB Media Arts and Technology Program, a masters-level graduate program, by enabling doctoral students from several departments to build upon the current foundation it provides. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fifth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-one institutions for programs that collectively span the areas of science and engineering supported by NSF doc24207 none This IGERT program is structured to provide a unique Ph.D. program in interdisciplinary research and education in Computational Science and Engineering (CSE). The vision is to educate students for whom working in interdisciplinary teams is the norm, and who have the ability to acquire knowledge, ways of thinking, and perspectives from other disciplines. The proposed IGERT PhD experience is different from one in a traditional discipline, and possibly unique among CSE programs in the USA. The IGERT PhD theses will be jointly supervised, and those students with a particular disciplinary orientation will share resources, knowledge, and approaches with IGERT students with other orientations. While a typical IGERT PhD thesis will still have a strong focus in a discipline, it will contain major elements of independent creative work in other disciplines relevant to the general problem area under study. IGERT students and faculty will work together in three Focus Groups: Microscale Engineering, Complex Fluids, and Computational Materials Science, to solve a wide range of important and timely problems that depend deeply on integration of information from the smaller scales to the larger scales. These multiscale problems require a strong foundation in both engineering and the mathematical and computational sciences. The curriculum ensures depth in one area and a significant exposure to high level courses in one or more ancillary areas. It includes new courses in atomic-scale computer simulation, and computing for high performance, to specifically address the multiscale nature of the Focus Group problems and their computational requirements. An internship is required to broaden and reinforce the interdisciplinary research experience, and a required series of workshops and seminars will give IGERT students a significant exposure to important aspects of career development and ethics. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the fifth year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-one institutions for programs that collectively span the areas of science and engineering supported by NSF doc24208 none This project will examine the framework for supporting cybersecurity research. It will consider where and how important topics are covered (building on past work, which has identified many important and often enduring topics), the distribution of research effort among actors (with emphasis on universities, in part to address the link between the conduct of researchers and the education and training of cyber security experts to ensure that there are enough researchers to perform the needed work), and the distribution and range of support programs among federal funding organizations. The project will examine issues regarding and options for improving coordination and efficacy in the national pursuit of cybersecurity research. A brief report with recommendations will be developed doc24209 none 21,400 Franklin Cheng, University of Missouri-Rolla The proposal requests support for 10 U.S. participants to a 3-day workshop to be held in Pusan, Korea. This U.S.-Korea Joint Workshop is about Smart Infrastructural Systems. Objectives of the workshop are to assess the current state of theory and practice and to foster communication across a variety of technical disciplines representing theoretical and experimental research as well as design, for a broad range of applications; to stimulate future cooperative research and development in subjects of common need and importance; to evaluate the results of Korea s civil infrastructure research program and their practical application to U.S. engineering practice; and to continue to build the long-term bilateral scientific relationship doc24210 none Eisenberg This is a 12 month project submitted by Dr. Robert Eisenberg, Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke s Medical Center to request funds for 12 U.S. participants to attend a five-day U.S.-China workshop on introduction of physicists and chemists to ions in protein channels, to be held in Nanjing and Chongqing October 12-18, . This is an interdisciplinary workshop to introduce physicists and chemists to relevant problems in biology. Bringing these scientists together to focus on problems in a different discipline, with their counterpart researchers from East Asia is a laudable goal. The NSF provides partial support to the U.S. participants to attend this conference. The National Science Foundation of China, Nanjing University of Chemical Technology, the Hong Kong University, and the University of Utah also provide support to this workshop doc24211 none Objectives and Methods: The goal of this proposal is to determine how the biodiversity and activity of specific living microbes and or microbial communities are required to create the terraced architectures universally observed in high-temperature and low-temperature carbonate spring deposits. Results will provide a fundamental knowledge of microbe-water-mineral interactions during carbonate precipitation that are needed to more accurately reconstruct the history of microbial life on earth and other planets. This project advances the field of biocomplexity by combining geological studies, microbial rDNA and gene analyses and quantitative modeling to provide a detailed geobiological account of carbonate terrace formation. The integrated multidisciplinary research and educational aspects of this project meet a national need to train personnel for future geobiology and biocomplexity studies. The project is headed by a unique interdisciplinary research team with specific expertise in geology, microbiology, and physics. Project milestones include:1) performing in situ crystallization experiments to determine the form and chemistry of travertine deposited when the microbes have been UV-irradiated, a sterilization technique that will leave the other fundamental physical and chemical conditions of the spring drainage outflow relatively unchanged; 2) documenting associations between calcite crystal growth form, distribution and chemistry with microbial form, diversity and metabolic activity; and 3)quantitative modeling of carbonate terrace formation using stochastic differential equations to describe the combined effects of geological and biological processes. Mammoth Hot Springs is the most appropriate natural laboratory in the world for conducting the proposed research. Although CO2 degassing and decreasing temperatures strongly influence the spring water chemistry, significant biological controls on travertine crystal form and isotope chemistry have recently been quantitatively documented. Mammoth Hot Springs uniquely offers:1) precipitation rates as high as 5 mm day that allow short-duration in situ crystallization experiments in a regime of coupled biological and physical influences;2) the full spectrum of high-to low-temperature carbonate precipitates at one site;3) long-term familiarity of the study site by the PI s who have all required research permits in hand; and 4)the only easily accessible hot spring complex in the world protected in its natural state. Intellectual Merit: The main question addressed is whether the presence of terraced carbonate architecture is prima facie evidence for the presence of microbial activity. Results from this study will permit the identification of microbiologically influenced crystallization in other modern and ancient high-temperature and low-temperature terraced carbonate spring deposits. The techniques employed in the quantitative modeling provide a first principles understanding of significant geological features from a physical and biological perspective. Of equal importance, the results from this study will establish a systematic and quantitative toolkit to identify microbial influence during carbonate deposition that can be used in a wide variety of other important terrestrial, marine, and burial environments on earth and other planets. Broader Impacts: This systems-level understanding of the interaction between biological and geological processes and resultant conceptual approaches will provide learning opportunities at all levels from postgraduate to K-12, as well as to the general public. The program to train personnel in biocomplexity studies will include undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs, international student exchange with the University of Siena in Italy, web-based curriculum development for Geobiology courses, and the development of a formal Geobiology program at Illinois. This project enhances public awareness of the need for biocomplexity studies through museum displays, brochures, and interpretive trail signs for the Canyon and Mammoth Hot Springs Visitor Centers in Yellowstone National Park, which will be seen and used by over 3 million park visitors each year doc24212 none Matrai Ocean ecosystems are part of a complex geophysical-biogeochemical web that transforms matter and energy and sets the conditions for life. Feedback between different parts of this web is mediated to a significant degree by the exchange of radiatively important, biogenic trace gases. One such feedback involves marine plankton, the volatile sulfur compound dimethylsulfide (DMS), and global climate. In this feedback, DMS produced by marine phytoplankton and the food web enters the troposphere and is oxidized there to sulfate particles, which influence cloud albedo and, consequently, climate. Large-scale climate change, in turn, affects phytoplankton abundance and food web processes in the oceans and thereby closes the feedback loop. The strength-and even the sign-of this feedback loop is still unresolved, largely because of the exceedingly complex network of biogeochemical and ecological processes that affect the concentration of DMS. Fascinating new interactions in this cycle are still being discovered with some regularity, but mechanistic and prognostic mathematical models of this system have yet to incorporate many of these developments. Furthermore, there have been no field studies in which all of the relevant rates and concentrations in the marine DMS cycle have simultaneously been measured, nor have complex interactions or measurements been included for important geophysical or chemical parameters, hampering the ability of models to accurately map spatial and temporal variations in surface DMS concentrations. This effort will: 1) Measure and model all known relevant fluxes of concentrations of DMS and related species during intensive field studies in two ocean biomes: a subtropical gyre and the Southern Ocean; 2) Develop a global marine DMS model built upon the proposed field measurements and other existing measurements and models; and 3) Use such a model to evaluate the potential for feedbacks between climate and the marine DMS cycle. The DMS biogeochemical system represents a tractable research subject that can aid in understanding the complexities involved in biosphere-geosphere regulation at the regional and global scales. The DMS system also serves as an excellent, research- accessible model for food-web dependent biogeochemical processes. This investigation of the complex controls on the DMS cycle should shed light on the critical factors influencing the ecological distributions of organisms in the sea and the biogeochemical cycles of major nutrient elements. Advancing the knowledge of DMS biogeochemistry will allow better predictions of the local, regional and global scale responses to anticipated shifts of climate, and provide valuable insights into the connections within the biogeochemical-geophysical web that sustains life on Earth doc24213 none Funds are recommended for assessment of average and seasonal sea-surface temperature and seawater delta O-18 at annual to decadal scales from monthly sub-samples in select intervals of the Holocene on samples from the Dry Tortugas. The study also includes a calibration effort for the past century. It aims to reconstruct Holocene (selected time-slices over the last 8.2 Ka) changes in western Tropical Atlantic SSTs and salinity using Sr Ca and stable isotope analyses of fossil corals. The approach takes advantage of the fact that corals record temperature and (salinity) histories over a narrow depth range of the tropical ocean, and that fossil corals provide a means to reconstruct ocean properties for discrete short (multi-century) time slices throughout the Holocene. Coral paleoclimate reconstructions from the tropics will improve our understanding of the mechanisms driving the climate changes in the Holocene doc24214 none Marine viruses (principally bacteriophages) are perhaps the most abundant form of life on the planet. Active (lytic) viral infections cause cell to lyse and thus control carbon flow through marine microbial food webs, in some cases initiating the collapse of algal blooms. In contrast, inactive (lysogenic) infections confer immunity to superinfection and cause conversion to a diverse array of phenotypes. The majority of marine bacteria in culture produce some type of virus-like particles (VLP.s), indicating that the occurrence of lysogeny is widespread. Marine viral genomes are economical to study because of their small size (usually 50-100 kb). The biocomplexity of viromics arises from the interaction and response of viral genomes to environmental cues. This project will focus on lysogeny, whereby a viral genome establishes a stable interaction with its host. The occurrence of lysogeny in the marine environment is complex, as indicated by the seasonal distribution of lysogens observed in estuarine environments. The lytic-lsyogenic shift is hypothesized to occur when viral genes respond to environmental cues, and preliminary evidence suggests that phosphate levels and the pho genes may play a role in this interaction. Specific research objectives are to: 1) determine what physiological and environmental cues catalyze the shift from lysogenic to lytic lifestyles in cultures and natural microbial populations, 2) sequence the genomes of several temperate phages, 3) determine how phage genes work together to confer lytic or lysogenic existence in marine bacteria, and 4) incorporate the effects of temperate phage into models of the marine microbial food web. The first objective will be addressed by employing cultures (cyanobacteria and heterotrophic bacteria) and natural populations to investigate cues that might control the lysogenic decision . Cultures and natural populations will be exposed to shifts in temperature, nutrients, sunlight, salinity, and exposure to xenobiotics to elicit shift from lytic to lysogeny and vice versa. For the second objective, five of these phage-host systems will be sequenced. Comparative genomics will be used to identify common genes and modules. For the third objective, prophage gene expression will be quantified by northern analysis. Differences in patterns of expression will yield information on genome response to shifting environmental conditions. If conserved lysogeny genes are found in cyanophage, their expression in natural bacterial populations of Tampa Bay will be measured. Finally, a computational model will be developed to describe the interaction of temperate phage with marine microbial food webs, based upon a 13 month seasonal study of lysogeny in Tampa Bay. The broader impacts of this research include educational outreach in the form of undergraduate workshops at San Diego State University, and participation in Oceanography Camp for Girls and Project Oceanography at the University of South Florida doc24215 none Environmental chemistry is largely controlled by the interplay between microbial activity and geochemistry. The complex nature of most communities in natural systems makes it difficult to unravel the specific mechanisms of this interaction. A compounding factor is that most microorganisms have not been isolated, and thus their biochemistry and actual roles in geochemical cycling are largely unknown. This project will study a community at the level of its metabolic network in order to develop and test ecological models for community resilience and function. The approximately five member community is derived from a subsurface extreme acid mine drainage (AMD) site within an ore body. The environmental geochemistry is simple because the ore deposit is ~95% pyrite (FeS2), and receives minimal inputs of fixed carbon and nitrogen. Energy is supplied to autotrophs from only two sources: aerobic iron and sulfur oxidation. These and other characteristics make the system tractable to bioreactor experiments and modeling that can document ecosystem structure and function. Two groups of hypotheses based on established ecological principles will be tested. First, microorganisms responsible for nitrogen fixation and oxidation of elemental sulfur are hypothesized to be keystone species because their impact on the community is disproportionate to their abundance. Perturbation studies will be used to test this hypothesis. Second, iron-oxidizing organisms are hypothesized to be adapted to higher pH conditions. Microbes colonize pyrite surfaces, and through a series of species succession events, lead to a climax community at an optimal low pH (facilitative succession). The identity and metabolic characteristics of early to late colonizers in bioreactor communities will be determined in a series of eight washout-perturbation treatments in order to test this hypothesis. The central product of this study will be a genome-enabled elucidation of the metabolic pathways that regulate and determine survival of individual species and the community. Genome data and gene expression will be analyzed to identify and monitor activity of genes responsible for oxidation of ferrous iron (the primary sulfide oxidant) and sulfur (the key acid generating reaction), and CO2 and nitrogen fixation. Metaphysiological trophic models will be developed to describe the system and test hypotheses. This modeling technique is particularly adept at handling non-linearities in complex systems. Outcomes will include the first tests of ecological theories of succession and species interactions with genetic-level resolution, and students trained in the development of new approaches to ecology doc24216 none Richards This grant supports costs associated with a planning conference to be held at the Granlibakken Conference Center in Tahoe City, CA on 25-26 July . The intent of the planning conference is to develop the foundation of a community-supported and accessible science center computational facility proposal to be submitted in the future to the Division of Earth Sciences. Approximately 40 participants representing leading scholars in the fields of geophysical modeling, seismology and geodynamo theory from U.S. and international academia and government laboratories will attend. In principle, the center would focus on open development and implementation of complex numerical algorithms for simulating the dynamics of deep earth processes, many of which are difficult if not impossible to verify experimentally. The facility would enable more realistic and complex models of mantle and core convection and geomagnetic field behavior to be developed and run than is currently possible due to limited and or dedicated computational and personnel resources of individual investigators, academic institutions and supercomputer centers. The ideal facility would also ensure sharing and standardized benchmarking of important geodynamic codes not only across the U. S. academic community, but also internationally. Further, such a facility would ultimately provide access to investigators and their students who are currently hampered by insufficient resources, both computational and intellectual, to become involved in state-of-the-art theoretical geodynamic research doc24217 none Mesoscale Variability and Processes in an Eddy-Resolving Global POP Simulation Julie McClean NPS A high-resolution global configuration of the Parallel Ocean Program (POP) model will be analyzed to determine the mescoscale transfer of properties between basins, hemispheres, and gyres with the goal of identifying the role of these fluctuations with thermohaline properties. Global eddy variability will be quantified by calculating energy levels and intrinsic length scales (Eularian and Lagrangian) to allow comparison with global or near-global coverage (drifters, altimetry, and floats). Meridional heat transports, their components, and divergence and time variability will be calculated. Particular emphasis will be placed on eddy heat transports. The western boundary current and tropics will be regions of interest for the analysis of the characteristics, generation and dissipation mechanisms, and dynamics and property fluxes associated with mesoscale eddies. The studies will be coordinated with those of the Kuroshio Extension System Study (KESS). Mixing rates along isopycnals will be computed from the model eddy and dispersion statistics and then will be compared with rates obtained from the Southern Ocean Floats on Isopycnal Experiment (SOFIE). A web-based autonomous extraction system will be set up to disseminate subsets of model output to help facilitate collaborations and community use doc24218 none Professor Richard Yuretich of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and coworkers are supported by the Biocomplexity-Coupled Biogeochemical Cycles program to study the microbiology, hydrology and environmental science of acid mine drainage (AMD) sites. The team will study the processes of Fe(III) and sulfate reduction in an AMD site in western Massachusetts through field studies, modeling and laboratory experiments, and will quantify the roles of acidophilic and acid-tolerant anaerobic microorganisms. Changes in hydrology and geochemistry of the stream and groundwater will be monitored as a function of distance from the AMD source. Sediment from the stream and surrounding aquifer will be examined for anaerobic microorganisms, for iron and sulfate reducing microorganisms and for the metabolic potential of these species. A variety of molecular genetic probes and polymerase chain reactions (PCR) will be used in the identification of species. Additional experiments will involve in situ microcosms in the laboratory that will be modeled in order to study attenuation. International collaboration will enable comparisons with similar mines in the United Kingdom. K12 teachers in training will act as research assistants, and real pedagogical work will be done on the effects of teaching style. Acid mine drainage results from the oxidation of pyrite and other sulfide minerals in streams and shallow groundwater. Much research has been directed toward understanding the formation of these conditions, however, the biogeochemistry of natural attenuation is relatively unknown. Organisms discovered here might have global significance in the reduction of iron and sulfate in other environments. Knowledge about microbial cycling of iron and sulfur can be applied to other ecosystems doc24219 none PI(s): Jess Gilbert Jenifer Sharp University of Wisconsin Madison This rural sociology Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant examines the beef livestock sector, which has remained small scale and decentralized relative to that of the poultry and hog industries. The research seeks to increase our understanding of adaptations that allow family-owned businesses to compete in a restructuring industry. More generally, the co-PI will address the question of whether the persistence of small-scale beef production derive from capacity to remain competitive or reflect resistance to dominant trends in society. The project combines quantitative and qualitative research. Government statistics from the US Department of Agriculture, Census of Agriculture and American Meat Institute will be integrated to determine direction and forces of structural change in beef production. Approximately thirty in-depth structured interviews will be conducted with farmers in three regions of the US, and other key informants (typically persons at other stages of the beef commodity chain, including input and service suppliers, processors, and retailers). These will provide information on the dynamics of structural change and household decision-making doc24220 none Modern marine stromatolites are a highly organized, yet compact ecosystem that is uniquely appropriate for studies of coupled biosphere-geosphere interactions. Results from recently funded NSF research indicate that these living examples of Earth s oldest macrofossi s form by repeated transitions among three distinct microbial communities, whose predominance appears to be driven by interactions between microbial population dynamics, biogeochemical cycling, and mineral deposition. The compact nature of this ecosystem allows components to be sampled, experimentally manipulated, and modeled, such that the sensitivity of the system to internal and external perturbations can be evaluated and biogeochemical cycling and minera formation can be quantified. It is thus an ideal model system for investigating functional linkages between microbes, minerals, and the environment and for addressing fundamental questions such as what is the role of biodiversity in biogeochemical processes and what are the effects of geochemical processes on species richness ?how do microorganisms modify and adapt to their abiotic environment? what constrains a seemingly equilibrium state and what are the forces that produce ecosystem transitions? The proposed research will use diverse but highly complementary methodologies to investigate the complexity of the stromatolite ecosystem over spatial scales ranging from single cells (m) to kilometers and temporal scales ranging from minutes to seasonal and multi-annual. The program adopts a powerful approach to the investigation of linkages between populations processes and products through integration of field studies of natural systems, experimental studies, and quantitative modeling. Our studies of microbial populations will focus on composition, abundance, and distribution of species in four main functional groups (cyanobacteria, aerobic heterotrophs, sulfate reducers, and sulfide oxidizers) using a variety of techniques including 16S rDNA, Terminal Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism analysis, and fluorescent in situ hybridization coupled to confocal microscopy. A combination of field measurements and flume experiments will determine the response of populations, metabolic rates, and chemical gradients to variations in hydrodynamic conditions, sedimentation and light; chemical gradients will be measured in situ using microelectrodes. As exopolymeric secretions (EPS) are likely to regulate mass transport and so the exchange within the stromatolites, EPS structure and composition will be measured using a variety of techniques, including Fourier-Transform Infrared and Raman spectroscopies, atomic force microscopy, and GC-MS; solute flux will be measured using benthic chambers. Effects of EPS properties and elemental cycling on mineral deposition will be determined through construction of C, O and S budgets, complemented by studies of Ca 2+ binding, microscopy analyses to define micrometer-scale relationships between activities and microstructure, and culture studies of precipitation by species. Flume and field studies will determine critical erosion thresholds and erosion rates of emergent macrostructures. Finally, we will look for fingerprints of microbial and environmental processes preserved in the rock record through analyses of stable isotopes, morphometric parameters, and intracrystalline organic matter. Ultimately, a full understanding of the stromatolite system will rely on development of quantitative models. Three separate modeling approaches, which relate to different aspects of the stromatolite ecosystem, will be developed -(1)a diagenetic model, which will quantify elemental cycles;(2) a simulation model, which will quantify the interactions between elemental cycles, populations of microbes and community status in the stromatolite and (3) a stage-based matrix model, which will attempt to relate environmental components to the distribution of, and transitions among, the microbial assemblages at the level of the ecosystem. These models will serve as critical tools for understanding the reciprocal interactions between elemental cycles, microbial populations, and sedimentation in past,present, and future environments on earth and beyond. Educational activities that foster the integration of education and multidisciplinary research will include (1) active participation of undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral associates in field and lab studies, and an international student exchange program (2) expansion and maintenance of the RIBS public web site; and (3)a field guide to Bahamian stromatolites for the general public. Participation by four European scientists will establish global networks for continuing collaborative studies in the emerging field of geomicrobiology doc24221 none At 80 by 600 microns, Epulopiscium is the largest heterotrophic bacterium that has been identified to date. It also has the unusual ability to produce multiple live offspring internally. This project takes an aggressive approach to increase our understanding of the biology of this organism by determining the complete genome sequence, and identifying the unique features of Epulopiscium that have allowed these exceptional bacteria to attain cellular sizes that are orders of magnitude larger than most bacteria. These analyses will identify genomic and cellular modifications that may have been employed in the progenitor of all eukaryotes as a first step toward the development of the contemporary eukaryotic cell. Comparative analyses with the complete genome sequences of endospore-forming bacteria will identify sporulation gene homologues in the Epulopiscium genome that can serve as targets of future analyses to determine the role of these genes in intracellular offspring production. Finally, this project will generate a physiological profile of Epulopiscium sp. based on the complete genome sequence. This component will address how the normal environment of this species (the guts of surgeonfish) may have enabled the evolution of these life-style novelties, and serve as a framework for developing culture media to grow Epulopiscium in the laboratory so that more detailed experiments on this species can be conducted. Collaborations, discussions, and data exchange with both domestic and international groups that are studying Epulopiscium biology, spore-forming bacteria, and extremely large bacteria will be encouraged. Training and educational workshops will be held at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, Maryland for these biologists. The project team will make every attempt to ensure that under-represented groups are included in the students and post-doctoral candidates who will be involved for the duration of the proposed study. Sequence and microarray data will be continuously posted and updated on our public web site (www.tigr.org doc24222 none The Biocomplexity in the Environment (BE): Coupled Biogeochemical Cycles (CBC) project will investigate the complex relationships between large-scale climatic forcing factors, local climatic changes across the region, salmon population dynamics both before and after European cultural impacts, and vegetation and lake-ecosystem responses to these changes. Dr. Abbott, and colleagues, Bradley and Francis (both from U Mass, Amherst), and Finney (U Alaska), will analyze high-resolution sediment records from the region to provide detailed records over large temporal and spatial scales. The two thrusts of the research are to produce multi-proxy records of moisture and temperature variations during the last 12,000 years from lakes in the Pacific Northwest and reconstruct salmon abundance at one of these sites. The project will produce a sub-decadal to century-scale climate history of the Pacific Northwest, and advance understanding of its biogeochemical cycles. The project will focus on the response of salmon populations and lake-ecosystems to climate change. The broader impact of this research would be in the area of salmon management and restoration in the Pacific Northwest doc24223 none The PI s propose to study the formation of colloidal arrays within emulsion droplets to template supraballs (which they define as solid spheres containing arrays of colloidal spheres or holes templated by colloidal spheres). Some of the goals include achievement of better control over suprasphere sizes by optimizing a previously developed break-off process and by employing a microfluidic device; understanding of hole colloid ordering in supraballs and emulsification of colloidal particles; and understanding of optical properties of supraballs (light diffusion). In addition, the PI will attempt to prepare directional colloids within emulsion droplets, intending to assemble these in non close-packed structures which are advantageous for photonic materials doc24224 none The study focus is to consider the range of dissolved organic matter (DOM) release processes exhibited by marine phytoplankton species, to describe how these processes regulate and couple to the cycling of fixed carbon and nitrogen species in the surface ocean, and to model, based upon both controlled laboratory and field experiments, the interactions of these chemical species between phytoplankton trophic structure, community succession and senescence as mediated by viral lysis, micro and macrozooplankton grazing and bacterial heterotrophy. A series of hypotheses, involving the production and consumption of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and nitrogen (DON) compounds, will be tested on each of a series of manipulable culture experiments and a program of seasonal cruises in both estuarine Chesapeake Bay and coastal upwelling dominated Monterey Bay as contrasting physical systems. Modeling objectives include a mechanistically informed simulation of field and culture experiments capable of descriptive and predictive insight as to DOC and DON composition, molecular weight and bio-availability as a function of trophic structure and complexity. Associated educational activities will be centered around highlighting the current research efforts of this multidisciplinary investigation in the context of public education programs coordinated by the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences Mini-School program. This existing course development program has intensive participatory and outreach components and proposes to expand the opportunities of the pubic to learn about how contemporary scientific issues such as biocomplexity in marine environmental systems are being approached by research scientists doc24179 none Award is for a project to install the first operational borehole seismometer in the deep ocean at the Hawaii-2 Observatory site. ODP Leg 200 drilled and cased a re-entry hole for this purpose during December . This project will develop and test an improved seismic sonde, and develop a method and apparatus to lay a fiber optic cable from the borehole1.5 km to the Hawaii-2 Observatory junction box, using a deep submergence ROV. In addition, a thermistor string will placed in a nearby, uncased hole. After installation of the seismometer, it will be tested and validated by comparison with land-based seismometers and with a seismometer located on the sea bed at the H2O site doc24226 none Much has been learned in recent years about the biogeochemical cycling of trace elements and isotopic tracers, but progress has been limited by the lack of any large-scale coordinated research effort in this area since the GEOSECS program. With NSF funding through this project, researchers at the Lamont-Dougherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University will convene a workshop to lay the foundation for a coordinated international study of the biogeochemical cycles of trace elements and isotopes used as tracers in oceanography. Such a study would be disciplinary in the sense that its primary objective would be to improve understanding of the marine biogeochemical cycles of a suite of chemical tracers. However, it would at the same time interdisciplinary, in that it seeks to understand the complex couplings between the biogeochemical cycles of trace elements and the biological and physical processes that influence those cycles. The long-range objectives are highly interdisciplinary, in that the improved understanding of these tracers will be of immediate and substantial benefit to applications in biological, physical, and geological oceanography. The proposed study has been termed GEOSECS-II to reflect the fact that many of its objectives follow directly from those of the original GEOSECS program. Furthermore, the proposed study will be conducted in the spirit of the original GEOSECS program with the appreciation that a global perspective is required to understand completely the cycling of chemical tracers within the ocean doc24227 none Professor Thomas Pichler of the University of South Florida and coworkers are funded by the Biocomplexity-Coupled Biogeochemical Cycles program to study arsenic cycling in marine thermal vents in New Guinea. Arsenic can function as a toxin or a nutrient and more work is needed to understand its roles in an ecosystem. Little is known about arsenic biogeochemistry in vents; this site chosen was chosen because it is pristine and therefore the study will not be strongly affected by other pollutants. The work combines biochemistry, geology and ecology. Analyses include inorganic aqueous species, isotopes and dissolved organic matter from pore fluids and the water column. In addition, microbial, foraminiferan, meiofaunal and macrofaunal invertebrate diversities and community strucutres will be investigated in the sediments using morphological, isotopic and PCR-based molecular methods. Bioenergetic computations as well as mathematical models of biota will be performed. Interactive broadcasts will link the research with middle school science classes. The effects of arsenic on human health are a well-documented global concern. Understanding how arsenic moves through the environment and whether it is bioavailable is crucial in evaluating water quality world-wide. In the pristine environment in New Guinea, natural arsenic will be observed in relation to the biota. The results will have applications in understanding trace arsenic in other ecosystems doc24228 none The project will involve an interdisciplinary study at the Arctic Long-Term Ecological Research site that will use existing, state-of-the-art models of hydrology and biogeochemistry, and improve them with field studies of critical processes of plant production, microbial decomposition, and production rates of dissolved substances in soil water. The models will be eventually linked to determine how soil moisture, spatial connectivity, and the timing of meteorological drivers impact carbon-nitrogen cycling and catchment export. Dr. Stieglitz, and co-PIs, Drs. Griffin (Columbia), Hobbie (Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole), Kling (Michigan), and Schimel (UCSB), will analyze C-N cycling at the catchment scale to answer questions related to element coupling, impact of strength and synchronicity of external forcing, and impacts of spatial heterogeneity of vegetation and hydrological connectivity. The PIs expect this research to advance understanding of land-use changes and eutrophication of coastlines, climate change and altered ecosystem function, and global processes such as sea-ice and deep water formation in the Arctic ocean. This project is supported by the Biocomplexity in the Environment: Coupled Biogeochemical Cycles research program doc24229 none Aitken A stable isotope method will be used to prepare heavy DNA from incubations of mixed cultures and specific C-13 labelled PAH substrates in completely closed slurry aerobic bioreactors. The bioreactor is fitted with a gas chromatograph which allows on- line respirometric measurements. DNA and rRNA will be extracted from the slurry, amplified by PCR, and analyzed on agarose gels. Comparisons between the DGGE profiles obtainedfrom rDNA (PCR), rRNA (RT-PCR) and C-13 labelled rDNA and rRNA will provide insight into the metabolically active members of the community. Selected DGGE bands will be sequenced and submitted for phylogenetic analysis using PHYLIP software doc24230 none Previous studies assessing the impact of environmental stresses on ecosystems have typically focused on either the individual or population level. However, there is growing awareness that to more fully understand and predict environmental impacts on natural systems, one must link biological responses to environmental challenges across different levels of biological organization. The overall goal of this study is to integrate the genomic and population-level responses of a model sentinel species in aquatic systems (Daphnia pulex) to specific environmental stresses by developing and applying genomic tools to ecological studies. Natural populations of aquatic organisms are known to survive and even adapt to sub-lethal metal exposures, but little is known about the genomic basis of this response. Metal exposures typical of those encountered in aquatic environments will be studied to characterize the physiological, demographic, and adaptive responses of Daphnia in naive and metal pre-conditioned populations. This project has the following specific aims: 1) identification and characterization of the expressed genome of D. pulex and development of genomic resources for application in ecological studies, 2) characterization of the genomic and population-level responses of D. pulex to a range of exposure conditions studies using individual metals as model stressors, 3) assessment of whether the effects of metal combinations on genomic and population level responses combine in a linear or non-linear fashion, 4) characterization of genetic and ecological variation in response to metals among natural populations of Daphnia. A strong interdisciplinary team of researchers including specialists in ecology, toxicology, genomics, evolution, and statistics will conduct this research. The anticipated benefits of this research will be to provide tools for rapid, sensitive and specific assessment of environmental effects in natural systems doc24231 none The Jasper Ridge Global Change Experiment: Biocomplexity in Ecosystem Responses To Long-Term Environmental Changes The research proposed here utilizes annual grassland as a model system to test four hypotheses concerning the regulation of the cycles of carbon, nitrogen, and water in response to global change. Specifically, the PIs will explore the mechanisms through which (1) plant physiology and species dynamics alter cycles of C, N, and H2O, (2) levels and dynamics of C, N, and H2O regulate plant species composition, (3) microorganisms control short-term and long-term N availability, and (4) plant chemical composition regulates structure and function of the soil microbial community. Together, these hypotheses dissect the complex web of feedbacks linking biogeochemical cycles and ecological dynamics. The research builds on the infrastructure and ongoing operations of the Jasper Ridge Global Change Experiment, a multi-factor, ecosystem-scale manipulation. The manipulations were initiated in with NSF support and are now supported by the Packard Foundation. They include two levels of temperature, two of CO2, two of N deposition, and two of precipitation, with single-factor manipulations as well as all of the possible 2-way, 3-way, and 4-way combinations. The team includes biogeochemists, ecophysiologists, population biologists, and microbial ecologists. The project will explore interactions between biogeochemical cycles and species dynamics across a range of time scales, from short-term physiological changes, through changes in species composition that unfold over several generations, to slow feedbacks from changes in soil stocks of C and N. The experiment s large array of treatments, plots that contain thousands of individuals of the dominant plants, and duration of several generations of the key species, provides a unique framework for addressing specific questions about biogeochemical responses to realistic global changes as well as fundamental questions about controls on major biogeochemical cycles. A modeling framework will be used that combines biogeochemistry, species changes, and species effects on biogeochemistry for synthesizing results across the project and integrating those results in the broader fabric of global-change research. This experiment is intended as a model system, where ease of manipulation and rapid responses can facilitate testing mechanistic hypotheses and establishing a framework for generalizing underlying principles to other ecosystems. The proposed research will have a range of broader impacts. Jasper Ridge provides a core for diverse projects led by students as well as independently funded researchers. Located on university campus in a major urban area, the project is highly visible and widely integrated in Stanford classes as well as organized activities for K-12 students and the general public. It is an effective tool for communicating the nature of global changes, the diversity of their impacts, and the potential of biogeochemistry research. With the funding requested here, we will focus on increasing opportunities for secondary students, with an organized curriculum and internships doc24232 none The goal of this research is to advance understanding of the orographic modification of precipitation systems as they pass over major mountain ranges. The study will integrate data from two recent field programs: the Mesoscale Alpine Programme (MAP), conducted over the European Alps in , and the second phase of the Improvement of Microphysical PaRameterization through Observational Verification Experiment (IMPROVE II), conducted over the Oregon Cascades in . Data in both projects was collected from a variety of airborne and ground-based advanced weather radars. This collection of radars was effective at indicating the predominant precipitation mechanisms over the windward slopes in both projects. In MAP, mobile Dopplers provided further information in deep valleys hidden from the view of fixed site radars. In IMPROVE II the University of Washington Convair aircraft collected ice particle samples aloft, while ground observers collected ice particle samples at the crest of the Cascades. The tentative conceptual model of orographic precipitation enhancement inferred from the data collected in MAP suggests that coalescence of drops below the 0 degree C level and riming that generates graupel, just above the 0 degree C level, are key processes in producing particles that fall out quickly on the windward slopes. This process seems to work best in unblocked flow over the terrain, i.e., when the flow is strong and weakly stable, so it possesses the energy required to rise directly over the barrier. The process works even better when the flow up the terrain is slightly unstable, so that embedded convective cells can form and accelerate the coalescence and graupel-forming processes over the first large windward peak of terrain. Preliminary analysis of the new IMPROVE II data set suggests that similar processes are at work over the Cascades. The empirical conceptual models will guide the critical evaluation of high resolution numerical model runs for the MAP and IMPROVE II storms. Numerical model output provides a database which will be evaluated for consistency with the MAP and IMPROVE II empirical models of orographic enhancement. The numerical models also will be run for select cases to obtain finer spatial resolution and more details on the microphysical processes taking place in the model. The radar data will provide dynamical constraints on the model results and the data will be examined for consistency with the model-simulated microphysical fields. Improvements to the numerical models will help to advance the forecasting of precipitation and runoff in mountainous regions doc24233 none This project will improve understanding of terrestrial carbon sinks by linking process-level biological information obtained for individual plants or ecosystems over short time scales with observations and models that characterize the large spatial domain and long time scales of regional and global concern. The P.I. will obtain comprehensive observations and use archived data integrated across several spatial and temporal scales, including tower and aircraft flux measurements and forest biomass inventories, to develop an integrated ecosystem-atmosphere model that captures both slow and fast ecosystem processes. The combined results will provide quantitative constraints to the carbon budget at regional scales. The integrated model will be optimized using atmospheric and biospheric data that quantitatively link properties of the terrestrial biosphere-atmosphere system with the underlying fundamental biological and physical processes. The project has an outreach program that includes an interactive CD-ROM with information on the carbon cycle and climate change and a module for having students conduct hypothesis testing using project data doc24234 none This research project focuses on Bayesian and likelihood based multilevel models for small area estimation. These methods will be compared and contrasted against some of the existing methods, such as the pseudo maximum likelihood, penalized quasilikelihood, etc. Some of the novel features of this research will be the use of stratum varying regression coefficients, new priors for the variance-covariance matrix rather than the standard Wishart prior, development of small area estimation models allowing measurement errors for covariates, use of hierarchical likelihood in the context of small area estimation, and the use of survey weights for small area estimation. One of the major applications of this project will be the estimation of income and poverty for states and counties, and possibly even for lower levels of geography such as census tracts and school districts (when data become available) between decennnial censuses. However, the methods are fairly general, and can be applied to other studies as well. Among others, these methods will be applied to study youth unemployment for small areas based on the Scottish School Leavears Survey, effectiveness of schools and student character in an education survey conducted by the Inner London Education Authority, and a British Social Attitudes Survey. The terms small area or local area are commonly used to denote a small geographical area, such as a county, a municipality, or a census division. They may also describe a small domain; that is, a small subpopulation such as a specific age-sex-race group of people within a large geographical area. In these days, there is a global need for reliable small area statistics both from the private and public sectors. There are increasing government concerns with issues of distribution, equity, and disparity. For example, there may exist geographical subgroups within a given population that are handicapped in many respects, and need definite upgrading. Before taking remedial action, there is a need to identify such regions, and accordingly, one must have statistical data at the relevant geographical levels. Small area statistics also are needed in the apportionment of government funds, and in regional and city planning. In addition, there are demands from the private sector since the policy-making of many businesses and industries relies on local socio-economic conditions. Thus, small area estimation techniques have global applicability, and are useful for diverse applications doc24235 none This award will be used for a new state-of-the-art Nikon microscope with transmitted-reflected light, fluorenscence, phase contrast and Nomarski capabilities for geologic and microbiologic studies. The scope will also have high-resolution color and black and white digital cameras, and an advanced image analyses system that will allow documentation and analyses of spatially co-registered petrographic and microbiological observaions. Cost share provided by UW is about 14%. The new scope is needed for research focused on the linkages among geological and microbiological processes within submarine environments. Fundamental to understanding these complex systems is the ability to make detailed, integrated, microbiological observations in the context of the rocks that host these unique communities doc24236 none The objective of the proposed research is to develop the chemistry and techniques for the application of duplex wear resistant and anti-stiction coatings; onto polysilicon MEMS based structures from aqueous media. The anti-stiction properties will be evaluated through a characterization of the hydrophobicity of the coated surfaces under different temperature and humidly conditions. Friction and wear properties of the deposited coatings will be investigated using friction force microscopy. By working in collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories, a GOALI partner in the proposed research, coatings will be applied to test structures and the wear between coated surfaces will be measured using a microtribometer device. Using atomistic computer simulation methods, viz. molecular dynamics, the relation between the chemical structure of coatings and their friction wear properties will be explored. Designing anti-stiction and wear resistant coating begins with linking molecular structures, coating structure and morphology to film properties. Objectives of molecular level simulations are to understand the evolution of the coating structure during sliding as well as shedding light on the tribo-chemical processes in the anti-stiction film under dynamic rubbing conditions. The modeling work is driven by a need to compare simulated friction and wear properties of anti-stiction coating with experimental observations and gaining further insight into the physics and chemistry at scales inaccessible by experiments. The research project will provide educational and research opportunities to graduate, undergraduate and post-doctoral students. The principal investigators of the research program have a strong history of involving under-represented minority and female students in their research program through regular and REU research programs. The results from this work will be used to enhance the content of courses in applied surface chemistry and atomistic computation techniques taught in the department of Materials Science and Engineering as well as a teaching module for use in an IC fabrication class taught at the University of Arizona doc24237 none The fish Fundulus heteroclitus is widely distributed in estuaries along the eastern seacoast of North America. This species is found in areas where there is considerable variation in habitat spatial heterogeneity (i.e., landscape complexity) and in a region characterized by one of the world s steepest thermal clines: approximately 1.0 degree centigrade per degree of latitude. The goals of this project are to determine how landscape complexity within a local region and along the steep thermal cline affect genome-wide patterns of gene expression. Landscape structure is hypothesized to affect population size and genetic structure, and individual growth rates, longevity, and migration. These parameters in turn alter the process of natural selection and thus affect an organism s ability to adapt to local conditions. This project will measure these ecological and population variables and explore their relationships to patterns of gene expression. Genetic crosses of field-collected populations, and laboratory acclimation of their progeny, will determine if physiological induction or heritable genetic differences are responsible for the differences in gene expression. Genome-wide patterns of mRNA expression will be quantified with F. heteroclitus microarrays. Because variation in messenger RNA must be translated into changes in protein concentration to produce a phenotypic change, microarray experiments will be complemented by high-throughput analyses of protein expression (proteomics). If variation in gene expression is one of the most important adaptive mechanisms, this project will detect significant differences in gene expression associated with differences in landscape and thermal ecology. This research will determine how ecological factors operating at diverse geographic scales affect the population biology and gene expression of F. heteroclitus doc24238 none Silverstein The effects of acid mine drainage on natural biogeochemical nitrogen cycling will be studied with respect to the interaction of microbial nitrogen and iron transformations at the lowered pH found in receiving waters. Competition between ferric iron and nitrate as electron acceptors, use of ferrous iron as electron donor in denitrification, and mobilization of iron and other heavy metals from bacterial reduction will be investigated in acid main drainage impacted streams. Species identification in impacted and unimpacted streams will be made utilizing DNA probes and the FISH technique and microscopic counts will be used to produce quantitative estimates of chemolithotrophic iron oxidizers and heterotrophic acidophiles doc24239 none This grant supports the International Conference on High Performance P M Components, to be held in April 28 to May 3, in Coimbra, Portugal. The object of the meeting is to provide a forum for discussions in the area of powder and particulate materials. Senior scientists and engineers from the United States and Europe, and from other parts of the world will participate. In addition, it is intended to encourage young professors and students to attend and funds are sought through this proposal. Both conventional powder metallurgy such as pressing and sintering for production of cost-effective components for use in various transportation and energy industries, as well as new and cutting edge particulate materials such as nanotechnology for structural and device uses, are covered. The conference is organized with United Engineering Foundation with mainly invited overview presentations by experts followed by shorter more specific papers and posters solicited and selected from submitted abstracts. The conference will thus provide a forum for young scientists and research students to learn the past and current aspects related to particulate materials. The NSF funds are used to pay for travel and registration expenses for the appropriate personnel to attend and participate in the conference. The conference addresses the production of high performance powder metallurgy components using traditional and new techniques that include rapid solidification, mechanical alloying, thermal spraying and sputtering, cold spraying, vapor deposition, laser forming, metal injection molding, hot isostatic pressing, high strain rate compaction, loose sintering and powder forging, etc. In addition, new grades of alloys with higher densities and enhanced behavior will be discussed. The conference is expected to have over l150 participants from different countries; about 120 participants from Europe, 30 from the USA, and 20 from other countries. This conference will allow Portuguese researchers to present their work on powder metallurgy, and hear of developments in other parts of the world, and this will probably give rise to new scientific collaborations between Portugal and the United States. Because of the format that includes mainly invited talks followed by shorter more specific papers, the young scientists and students will have an excellent opportunity to develop new ideas on the related subject doc13914 none This project is a second-generation analysis of the ICEMELT and HOTSPOT data sets that will focus on four areas where additional work could lead to a fundamental new understanding of plume dynamics and plume-ridge interactions at Iceland. This work will (1) determine seismic velocity structure in the crust and uppermost mantle, (2) constrain upper mantle flow from mantle anisotropy, (3) improve mantle velocity structures by application of advanced methods, and (4) integrate seismic and geodynamic models doc24241 none Using sequence information gathered from the Drosophila Genome Project and Celera Applied Biosystems, the Drosophila DNA Repair project has identified several paralogs of the yeast Rad51 gene. These paralogs are thought to promote Rad51-dependent strand exchange during the process of homologous recombinational repair (HRR) of DNA damage in cells. An analysis of hamster cell mutations, coupled with targeted knockout experiments in chicken cells, has shown that these genes play an important role in providing resistance to ionizing radiation and chemical mutagens. The focus of this research project is the study of DmRad51D and DmXRCC2 and their role in mitotic homologous recombination repair in fruit flies. The long-term goals include the use of genetic screens to identify other genes that interact with DmRad51D and DmXRCC2 in the process of HRR. The objectives of the research include 1) confirming the functional role of these putative D. melanogaster Rad51 paralogs by assaying functional knockouts in Drosophila culture cells, 2) examining the protein-protein interactions among these genes, 3) examining the expression pattern of these genes in flies, and 4) using P-element excision to generate loss of function mutations in the DmXRCC2 gene. DNA contains the instructions that allow cells to function correctly. However, DNA is constantly damaged by chemicals in cells and by radiation such as UV or gamma rays. Cells with damaged DNA do not always work properly and aberrations can result. A large group of genes repairs damaged DNA. This project focuses on the roles of two related genes in DNA repair. While scientists have some understanding of how these genes work in the test tube or in single cells, they still do not know much about how they work in a whole organism. This project will use molecular and genetic tools to study the role of these DNA repair genes in the fruit fly, where the activity of these genes can be studied in the entire animal. Almost all of the genes that fruit flies use during growth and development play an important role in all animals. This project will not only use the fruit fly to explore questions that are inherently interesting, but will also help to elucidate the function of related genes in other organisms, including humans doc24242 none This project will investigate the roles of affective imagery and cultural worldviews in risk perception, decision-making and behavior, using global climate change as a case study. Past research has focused on the role of cognitive factors like knowledge, mental models and general environmental beliefs in risk perceptions of climate change. Recent research, however, has also begun to focus on the role of affective factors. This project will develop and test affective image analysis as an innovative method to study public risk perceptions along both cognitive and affective dimensions. Additionally, cultural theorists argue that cultural worldviews are also important factors and need to be included as explanatory variables. This project will operationalize and test the predictions of cultural theory. Finally, many researchers assume that risk perceptions and behaviors correlate, yet little focused research has been done. This research will test this assumption, using climate change as a case study. This project also addresses several applied questions: Does the American public perceive global climate change as a serious risk? What specifically do they fear about it? Do these risk perceptions translate into personal actions and or support for mitigation policies? This research will contribute to the continuing discussion on global climate change, as scientists and policymakers attempt to find scientifically appropriate and publicly acceptable solutions to this global problem doc24243 none This project is the initial development of an in-site sensor package designed to quantify spatial and temporal variations of environmental parameters within submarine hydrothermal systems. A prototype sensor will be developed that includes a titanium-sheathed, porous, multi-chambered prove that will allow in-site recording of temperature within the interior of active submarine hydrothermal sulfide chimneys. The ultimate goal is to explore the actual limits to life in vent systems and to define the conditions under which different species or consortia thrive, survive, or expire doc24244 none Cady A grant has been awarded to analyze the structural and chemical fidelity of biocomplexity indicators preserved in siliceous hydrothermal deposits in Yellowstone National Park, USA. Biocomplexity indicators characteristic of thermophilic microbes in ancient hydrothermal mineral deposits include organic and inorganic chemical fossils (e.g., carbon and sulfur isotopes, biominerals, trace element anomalies), carbonaceous microfossils, and microbially influenced sedimentary structures (stromatolites, microbialites, biofabrics). The structural and chemical fidelity of these biocomplexity indicators depend on the size of carbon reservoirs available to the microbes. This work is significant in that biocomplexity information gleaned from ancient siliceous hydrothermal deposits will provide details regarding the earliest life on Earth. This study provides a framework for analyzing surficial and subsurface hydrothermal silica deposits in Uzon Caldera, Kamchatka, Russia. The analysis of biocomplexity indicators in Yellowstone hot springs provides a means to study the preservation of Bacteria in silica deposits. The dataset acquired during this one-year study also establishes a baseline for interpreting how biocomplexity information indicative of mixed Bacterial and Archaeal thermophilic communities is preserved in the siliceous hydrothermal deposits of Uzon Caldera. Molecular phylogenetic analysis suggests that high-temperature microbial communities comprised of Bacteria and Archaea are more appropriate homologs for ancient hydrothermal ecosystems. By quantifying how carbon cycles through the various subsystems (fluids and gases, microbial communities, and mineral deposits) of active silica-depositing hot springs, this research addresses one of the central challenges of environmental research: understanding how the physical, chemical, geological, hydrological and biological processes that comprise the Earth s natural systems are functionally interrelated doc24245 none This award will support, under the aegis of the Biocomplexity in the Environment initiative, a conference at Oregon State University to examine the vertical organization of energy, carbon, and nutrient cycles in Crater Lake, Oregon. The unusual properties of this ultra-oligotrophic lake result in the vertical stratification of the ecosystem reminiscent of pelagic marine systems. Crater Lake provides a natural laboratory to study the coupling of biological processes, element cycles, and the physics of the environment. Specifically, the award will provide some organizational support for the workshop and travel and subsistence support for experienced and new investigators, as well as students, to participate in presentations and discussions that synthesize the latest scientific understanding of Crater Lake and nutrient cycling. Discussions will also involve how best to proceed in the future to increase our knowledge of such ecosystems. Crater Lake, the deepest lake in the United States (i.e., 590 m), is a closed-basin caldera lake formed after the explosive eruption of Mt. Mazama, ~ years ago. The lake, which rests at an elevation of meters in the Cascade Mountains of south central Oregon, is surrounded by steep caldera walls and has a very small watershed. There are no major inlet streams and no surface outlet. External inflows of nutrients to the lake are low and dominated by precipitation and dry deposition from the atmosphere. Thus, the lake is ultra-oligotrophic and one of the clearest bodies of water on the earth. In spite of its great depth, vertical mixing is relatively rapid (i.e., 3-5 years) and recycled nitrogen is mixed upwards from the hypolimnion representing the largest source of this limiting nutrient. Crater Lake is the centerpiece of one of the premier National Parks in the United States and it provides a unique setting to directly engage the public with compelling educational experiences demonstrating the function of complex aquatic ecosystems and the methods of interdisciplinary field research. It offers a unique resource for the study of the interaction of atmospheric forcing and land surface hydrology with biogeochemical cycles in aquatic ecosystems doc24246 none This project involves case studies and workshops to assess ethical, organizational, and socioeconomic issues involved in using spatial information technology for promoting community-based resource management in the Asia Pacific region. Recent growth in availability of modem spatial information technology such as geographic information systems (GIS), low-cost global positioning systems (GPS), and remote sensing image analysis software has empowered those traditionally disenfranchised by maps to record and control mapped information, a privilege formerly available only to state-funded mapmakers. At the same time, this newly acquired authority to define and exert control over the use of space compromises the customary uses it is intended to protect. Spatial information technology and mapping generally promote practices that shift attention and concern away from qualities of human environment relationship to quantifiable limits on that relationship implied by boundaries borders. The project s primary objectives are to: 1) analyze the impact of mapping technologies and activities on the cultural and social dynamics of rural communities, 2) understand the social and political dynamics involved in enrolling in and employing deploying new technologies, and 3) develop a general strategy for critically evaluating the ethical, organizational, and socio-political impacts of technology transfer. Since most research on the implications of spatial information technology has been conducted in North America, this project fills a gap in understanding the impact of importing technology conceived and developed in societies with different developmental histories. Participants are from seven Asian organizations currently involved in NGO projects that use spatial information technology for promoting community-based resource management in the Asia Pacific region will participate, and from Canadian and U.S. projects that have relevant prior experience. The project is structured to allow participants to learn from each other s experiences, and to develop a more realistic understanding of the challenges and opportunities involved in adopting spatial information technology for promoting community based resource management. Workshop discussions will be distilled into a publication that will provide a state-of-the-art survey of methodology and issues as well as specify specific technologies and how they should be used. Project activities are designed to provide social activists with conceptual tools to assist them in evaluating the roles of spatial information technology in advancing their goals doc24247 none Menon, Madhu University of Kentucky TITLE: ITR Large Scale Quantum Mechanical Simulations of Nonomechanics Large scale quantum mechanical simulations of nanomechanics of carbon nanotubes involving atoms in excess of 10,000 is underway using a collaborative effort involving material and computer scientists. Parallel software tools are being developed to accomplish this. The tools are based on a novel pipelined, parallel architecture designed to harness grid computing. The goal of the simulations is to study the potential benefits of nanomechanical applications of carbon nanotubes and use the results to guide experimental investigations doc24248 none A program of upper atmosphere dynamics studies is proposed that involves work at the University of Pittsburgh, at the equatorial Airglow Observatory in Arequipoa, Peru, and at the midlatitude Millstone Hill Observatory in Massachusetts. Determinations of Doppler shifts and widths of nightglow emission lines will be made by upgraded Fabry-Perot interferometer (FPI) instruments to yield velocities and temperatures. The FPIs are of both conventional and all-sky designs that make use of CCD detectors to provide greatly improved sensitivity. Accurate determinations of the Doppler shifts will be provided by zero velocity reference sources, either using the PIs newly developed oxygen afterglow reference source (OARS) that emits the forbidden OI 630.0 and 557.7 nm lines or by more portable Secondary Standard sources that will be interferometrically calibrated against the OARS standard. The improved precision will permit accurate determinations of the (small) vertical velocities, supplementing the usual horizontal velocity determinations to provide a 3-dimensional characterization of the thermospheric flow. For the equatorial measurements in Peru, the new, multi-wavelength capability of the FPI will broaden the ongoing 630 nm studies of upper thermosphere dynamics to include mesopause wind and temperature determinations via OH (731.6 nm) nightglow line studies. The all-sky FPI at Millstone Hill will be used to examine coupling effects between the midlatitude lower and upper thermosphere by sequential determinations of their wind and temperature fields using the 557.7 nm and 630.0 nm airglow emissions. At both latitudes, the neutral dynamics results can be compared to the ionospheric dynamics measurements obtained by either the Jicamarca or the Millstone Hill incoherent scatter radar doc24249 none Genetically-determined, intentional elimination of specific cells, programmed cell death (PCD), is indispensable for the growth, development and survival of multicellular organisms. In plants, PCD is an integral part of many aspects of development and responses to infectious agents pathogens. Despite the essential nature of PCD, there are large gaps in the knowledge of the mechanistic details and molecular components controlling PCD in both plants and animals. A model system to study plant PCD, using Arabidopsis thaliana and a purified fungal toxin, fumonisin B1, was developed during the Principal Investigator s tenure as an NSF postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Fred Ausubel s laboratory (Massachusetts General Hospital). This Research Starter Award supports her independent career as a faculty member at the University of Nebraska. Dr. Stone will continue to pursue a classical genetics approach of identifying Arabidopsis thaliana mutants defective in fumonisin B1-induced PCD. Identification of the genes responsible for this mutant phenotype will aid in unraveling the molecular mechanisms regulating PCD in plants. Our results are likely to advance our basic understanding of the functions and regulatory mechanisms of PCD in plant growth, development, and response to pathogens doc24250 none Increasing our understanding of sea ice dynamics is vital because of the role sea ice plays in global atmospheric and ocean dynamics. In particular, the ability to better predict the opening of cracks in the ice, or leads, will improve our understanding of the Earth s weather, climate and ecology, as well as our ability to navigate Artic waters. Existing ice models have been of limited usefulness for forecasting the location and orientation of new leads and make no attempt to calculate the degree to which any given lead will open for predicted, or even observed forcing conditions. Even if effective models existed, until recently, there have been no data available for verification. We propose research that will exploit two significant developments and will ultimately allow accurate predictions of lead opening and orientation. First, motion of material points on large-scale regions of the Arctic ice cover have been recorded and are now available for complete winter seasons. Second, theoretical and numerical procedures have been recently developed for describing crack formation through the use of cohesive crack models. The proposed research is to develop a multi-scale, computational procedure to predict crack initiation, orientation, and width, in sea ice, under an observed set of loading conditions, and to verify the procedure using the newly available data. The successful completion of the research will set the stage for the next generation of models and numerical procedures in which realistic geophysical forces can be used to predict the detailed behavior of the Arctic ice cover. For the first time, large-scale motion data are available for points on the Artic ice cover. This unique dataset, produced by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), is derived from high-resolution, spaceborn, Synthetic Aperature Radar (SAR) imagery, acquired by the RADARSAT satellite. These data are exactly what is needed to form a complete picture of ice deformation. A striking aspect of these images is linear features indicating the formation of leads, or openings in the sea ice. The ability to better predict the opening of leads will improve our understanding of the Earth s weather, climate and ecology, as well as our ability to navigate Artic waters. Existing ice models have been of limited usefulness for forecasting the location and orientation of new leads and make no attempt to calculate the degree to which any given lead will open for predicted, or even observed forcing conditions. Even if effective models existed, until recently, there have been no data available for verification. We propose to use the JPL data to develop and verify new material models for sea ice in order to predict crack initiation, orientation, and width. The successful completion of the research will set the stage for the next generation of models and numerical procedures in which realistic geophysical forces can be used to predict the detailed behavior of the Arctic ice cover. Moreover, sea ice is a central element in the Earth s climate system. An accurate ice model will benefit our ability to understand past climatic variability and to improve predictive capabilities through its inclusion in global ocean and climate models doc24251 none Sharon Dawes SUNY Albany Turning to Digital Government in a Crisis: Coordinating Government Business & Non-Profit Services in Response to the World Trade Center Attacks of September 11, This Small Grant for Exploratory Research will examine what government agencies did in the midst of and immediately after the attacks on the World Trace Center, and the role of information technologies in the events. Starting at Pier 92, where New York City s Emergency Operation Center was re-established, this work will document the network of relationships, information flow, and actions through interfiews with key participants. Research topics and policy questions will be identified doc24252 none Richard J. Reeder, Nicholas S. Fisher, Clare P. Grey, Gary Halada, Christopher Jacobsen, John B. Parise, Brian Phillips and Martin A. Schoonen of SUNY Stony Brook, James Kubicki of Penn State University and Daniel R. Strongin of Temple University are jointly supported by the Division of Chemistry and the Division of Earth Sciences for their interdisciplinary collaboration aimed at significantly advancing our understanding of the fundamental molecular basis for the sequestration of hazardous contaminants and radionuclide species in natural geomaterials and engineered materials. This award includes collaborations with five scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) at Brookhaven receiving parallel funding from the DOE. The team will be focusing on molecular-scale reaction mechanisms that govern the interaction of selected contaminant species (including actinides, toxic metals and metalliods, CFC s) with minerals and mineral-like phases. Enhanced understanding of the stability and lability of molecular contaminant species bound by mineral and organic phases is needed to ensure effective long-term sequestration of contaminants. The collaborations between researchers at Stony Brook, Brookhaven and selected industrial partners offers unique interdisciplinary training opportunities for the students and postdoctoral researchers involved with this work. Environmental Molecular Science Institute (EMSI) awards are given to interdisciplinary teams of university, industrial and or national laboratory scientists working on problems aimed at increasing fundamental understanding of natural processes and processes resulting from human activities in the environment at the molecular level. The emphasis in these awards is on collaborative research among teams with complementary research interests and the creation of broad educational experiences for students doc24253 none This project is an application of modern Bayesian hierarchical methods of statistical analysis to the problem of ocean state estimation. The goal is to use this statistical technique to combine hydrographic data, dynamical constraints, and knowledge about the uncertainties in both observations and dynamical assumptions, to arrive at: (a) slowly varying maps of oceanic property fields on a selection of isopycnals in the North Atlantic, (b) an estimate of the probability distribution function for possible states of the North Atlantic circulation consistent with the available data. The project unites statisticians and ocean scientists and provides training in interdisciplinary research for a graduate student and two post-doctoral researchers doc24254 none EAR- Gary A. Glatzmaier Earth s dynamo, which is responsible for the geomagnetic field, is a geosystem involving a broad range of interacting scales, a complex geometry and a rich variety of physical processes. Numerical simulations resolve only the largest-scale features; most parameterizations of the smaller, subgrid scale processes simulate dissipative processes only, and are incapable of simulating non-dissipative processes which affect transfers of energy among differing spatial scales. Exceptions to this statement are the recently developed similarity and Navier-Stokes-alpha models. Core dynamics is strongly affected by the action of the Coriolis and Lorentz forces, making the fields both anisotropic and non-local. Recent studies have provided valuable insight into these processes, which will help motivate generalized models that accurately account for these forces. This project will develop better parameterizations of subgrid processes in Earth s core by incorporating into the similarity and Navier-Stokes-alpha models, knowledge of the structure of the small-scale fields. The project will involve a combination of numerical simulation and theoretical analysis employing not only simplified models that isolate physical processes and analytical issues, but also realistic geodynamo models. The research will be undertaken by a group of mathematicians and geoscientists from US institutions and from abroad under the supervision of a management group. The project will foster interactions between members of the dynamo collective, and it is expected that further collaborations will result from the annual workshops that will be organized and partially supported by the project. It is anticipated that improved parameterization of subgrid processes in rotating magnetoconvection will interest all who wish to study magnetism and dynamos in other planets and in stars. It is believed that many of these people will wish to participate in the planned workshops. An improved numerical model of the geodynamo will be of interest to a second group of geoscientists and mathematicians who seek to quantify the structure, dynamics and history of the interior of our planet doc24255 none In March about 150 researchers gathered in Como, Italy for the first International Conference on Analysis of Microbial Cells at the Single Cell Level . The beautiful surroundings of Como were an excellent setting for discussing the function of individual cells and how individual cells can be analyzed. The Conference participants, a mixture of biologists and engineers, addressed the three questions: WHY do we need to analyze at the single-cell level? This gives important information about cellular function, cell-cell interactions in different ecosystems, and because population dynamics, to a large extent, determines the overall function of large scale cultures used in the biotech industry. HOW do we analyze at the Single Cell level? Through the use of flow cytometry, image analysis, and mathematical models it is possible to analyze cellular function at the single-cell level. WHEN to analyze at the single-cell level? Both in basic research on cellular function and in applied research aimed at improving biotechnology processes. In June , the second International Conference on this theme will take place in Vejle, Denmark. At the Conference, the focus will again be on the three questions: WHY, HOW and WHEN, and the latest developments within this interesting research field will be presented. With the advances in genomics, the rigorous analysis of the phenotype becomes an important and timely issue. The Conference also aims at further strengthening and enlarging the scientific network established at the first Conference, and to promote specifically communication between biologists and engineers. The organizing committee plans to submit a final report of the Conference to the National Science Foundation soon after the Conference doc24031 none In this collaborative investigation, a nested-scale survey of major rift escarpments that expose the upper oceanic crust at Pito Deep, located on the northeast edge of the Easter microplate on the EPR will be surveyed and sampled. Major fault scarps bounding a propagating rift along the NE edge of the Easter Microplate cut abyssal hill lineaments and magnetic anomalies at right angles creating a natural cross section of the oceanic crust. Outcrop areas would be located using DSL-120 sidescan sonar, and observed using ALVIN and Jason II. The rationale for this investigation is to extend knowledge of the internal structure and composition of the upper oceanic crust, and by inference, processes at superfast spreading ridges doc24257 none Although lead is a naturally occurring element present in many parts of the environment, human activities have dramatically increased lead levels in many locales, especially older parts of urban areas. Whereas lead normally constitutes about 0.002 percent of the Earth s crust, in cities, soil lead levels can be from five to 25 times as great. The heightened presence of lead translates into significantly increased exposure to lead contamination among urban residents, especially children. The average background lead level of the U.S. population is 2.8 micrograms per deciliter, but in many cities, substantial numbers of children have baseline blood lead levels in excess of 10 micrograms per deciliter. This research project will develop new methods for exploring spatial dimensions of pediatric lead poisoning. A multidisciplinary investigative team will study spatial relationships among urban environmental contaminants, the biogeochemical processes of their origin in soils and dust, and the potential for adverse public health risks associated with human exposure to them. A primary goal of this project is to quantitatively assess the community health risks associated with exposure to soils and interior household dusts that have been contaminated by heavy metals. A second major goal is to determine the feasibility of carrying out such assessments through the use of non-intrusive, ecological techniques. To accomplish these goals, the investigators will develop a geography-based lead-exposure assessment model for Syracuse, New York. Inputs to this model will be the blood lead monitoring results, population and housing census data, heavy-metal measurements for soils and dust, and other georeferenced data. This research will make a number of contributions to the spatial analysis literature. For example, it will extend small area estimation techniques to a nesting situation and establish a trade-off curve between effective sample size and accuracy precision of sample statistics. It will improve understanding of geographic dimensions of lead dispersal, and it will test new approaches for monitoring contamination. This project also will have a significant policy impacts for the public health arena. In particular, it will provide a widely applicable, cost-effective, childhood lead poisoning assessment tool for urban environments; it will foster a geographically explicit interpretive framework for evaluating intervention measures; and it will help contribute to improvements in EPA exposure modeling capabilities doc24258 none A marine reflection survey was conducted over the submarine flanks of Kilauea and Moana Loa volcanoes, Hawaii, in . Shot data from this survey were recorded by the permanent on-land seismic array maintained by the Hawaii Volcanoes Observatory. Raypaths for arrivals over the survey region sample a large volume of the volcanic edifice and subjacent ocean crust, with densest coverage at the offshore-onshore transition. These data will be processed and inverted to obtain a 3D tomographic image of the velocity structure of the volcano doc24259 none The objective of this research is to develop general methods that automatically discover original and useful knowledge from historical or experimental data. Learning discriminants and descriptors associated with patterns extracted from the data is a central issue in data mining. The project will develop techniques to do this. The results will be experimentally evaluated. In addition, an integrated data mining performance system will be developed doc24260 none The proposed research will use ancient DNA and mortuary data to examine the social organization, biological heritage, and cultural composition of the archaeological site of Chen Chen to determine whether the inhabitants of Chen Chen represent more than one distinct ethnic group and to compared Chen Chen to other modern and ancient Native American populations in order evaluate the population history of South America. The potential biological relationships between the Chen Chen population and the people of the Andean highlands, the Peruvian coast, or other valleys has been an important topic in regional archaeological research, and although cultural and skeletal investigations have made important contributions, there are still several unresolved issues. Molecular genetic data can provide a fresh look at the ongoing study of the Tiwanaku expansion and the biological composition and structuring of Tiwanaku colonies. The data from the proposed research will provide the first large number of genetic sequences (=50) for the Osmore drainage and the Tiwanaku population in general. Furthermore, these data, in combination with spatial and mortuary data, are an effective means of evaluating the hypothesis that the Tiwanaku polity was a multi-ethnic society. On a larger scale, these data will represent an ancient sample that can be compared to data from other native groups to make inferences regarding the time and nature of the peopling of the Americas in general and South America specifically. Ancient genetic data are particularly helpful in these studies because they provide information about the genetic composition for an indigenous population prior to Western influence. This is especially beneficial for the western coast of South America where direct colonization by Europeans, catalyzed by the rich geological and marine resources and arable land, had strong effects on the demography of native populations. An additional benefit of this research will be understanding the connection between prehistoric and modern American Indians. The focus of this study is to illuminate the biological connections of Chen Chen peoples, both to their time frame and society, as well as to modern Native populations throughout the Americas. Studies of DNA diversity from ancient and modern Native Americans have determined a degree of continuity both temporally and spatially for some regions. Yet, the occurrence of continuity is not universal. By comparing modern native DNA sequences to those of prehistory, we gain better understanding of the degree of genetic continuity over time as well as a temporal framework for population events. In conjunction with this research, a collaborative project between the Laboratorio Genetica at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos and the Stone Laboratory at the University of New Mexico has been formed to collection additional data on modern Native American populations throughout Peru so as to compare them with Chen Chen and other American Populations doc5864 none The University of Missouri-Columbia, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the University of Illinois, and the Missouri Botanical Garden are collaborating on this pilot project to build a prototype core integration system for a national digital library for SMET Education. The technical infrastructure for the system builds on the NCSA distributed information retrieval system, EMERGE. This system is being extended to an adaptive and flexible distributed search engine for a wide variety of learning environments and resources, and is being tested on the rich plant contents of the Missouri Botanical Garden, and the NSF Plant Genome projects at the University of Illinois (Soybean) and the University of Missouri-Columbia (Corn). Seamless coordination with services is being offered on several learning environments, including NCSA s Biology Workbench 3.2. A digital repository, BLOE (Biological Learning Object Exchange), serves to collect and organize experiments, simulations, and projects from learners and teachers for collaborative learning. Additional project activities include studies of requirements of user services, management procedures, evaluation methods, and technical standards using various undergraduate and graduate programs of the two universities and the K-12 educational activities of the Missouri Botanical Garden doc15758 none In this collaborative project faculty at a number of institutions are working together to develop and implement information technological solutions aimed at enhancing the interoperability of both collections and services for the NSDL. A particular emphasis is on exploring the requirements for supporting tightly federated collections, that feature close adherence to particular metadata frameworks so as to enable federated search services to be built. In this collaborative effort a team from the University of California - Berkeley is working primarily on collection interoperability while a team from the University of Missouri - Columbia is focusing its efforts on enhancing the interoperability of services (see doc24263 none The overall goal of the Environmental Molecular Science Institute (EMSI) centered at the Univesity of Notre Dame will be to provide a quantitative, mechanistic, molecular-scale understanding of the factors affecting the formation, stability, and impact of nano- and micro-particles. This EMSI has strong links with collaborators at several National Laboratories (Argonne, Oak Ridge, Sandia) and in industry (DuPont Engineering Technologies). Research conducted at the Instititue will provide a molecular-scale understanding of heavy-metal (Cd, Cu, Pb) and actinide (U, Np) interactions with nano- and micro-particles in the environment. The scientific activities of the Institute will integrate traditional macroscopic and microscopic techniques with state-of-the-art molecular-scale approaches such as x-ray absorption spectroscopy, atomic force microscopy, and molecular dynamics modeling. Concurrent with these scientific activities, the Institute will serve as a focus for a range of innovative educational programs with the purpose being: 1) to disseminate state-of-the-art understanding of environmental chemistry to an audience outside of the scientific community; 2) to provide broad, interdisciplinary educational experiences to a large number of undergraduate and graduate environmental molecular science students, and 3) to train students from traditionally under-represented groups in environmental molecular science. We will set up a M.Sc. program specifically aimed at talented undergraduate students from under-represented groups whose pre-requisites fall slightly below regular admissions standards. We feel that admission to a M.Sc. program will enable a large fraction of these students to blossom, and these successful students will then continue on in a Ph.D. program, either at University of Notre Dame, or elsewhere. In either case, our Institute will have played a key role in increasing the number of under-represented minorities working at the highest levels in environmental molecular science doc24264 none This grant enables the installation and operation of equipment at Duke University for measuring the ULF (ultra low frequency) magnetic field associated with certain lightning discharges. A strong and long-lasting current sometimes flows after lightning strokes in the conducting channel they leave behind. Called the continuing current, it is not well understood but is a detail of the physics of lightning that is thought to be related to cloud electrification and to phenomena in the high atmosphere such as sprites and elves. Continuing currents produce signals in the ULF magnetic field that can be detected as far as km from the lightning source. Methods will be developed on this project to detect continuing currents remotely and infer their duration and waveform from ULF measurements. The data interpretation will be validated by comparing measured waveforms of the continuing currents associated with triggered lightning at a field station in Camp Blanding, Florida, with the waveforms inferred from ULF measurements. A goal is to continuously record the magnetic fields from lightning discharges detectable at the Duke ULF station and relate the measurements to storm structure and meteorological conditions. If the continuing current turns out to be related to storm severity or stage of evolution, it may be a useful tool for the study and forecasting of storms doc24265 none This award is an Accomplishment-Based Renewal for the PIs to continue to develop mathematical models of seafloor hydrothermal processes. The award will support modeling studies divided into two main scientific themes: Stability and Temporal Variability. The models will be strongly linked to observations, and, hopefully, the model predictions will guide subsequent field efforts. The Stability theme addresses fundamental aspects of heat transfer across the basal boundary layer. The main objective is to develop a fracture mechanics model that yields heat and mass transfer in ridge crest systems that is consistent with observations and that addresses the stability and propagation of fractures at the base of the hydrothermal system. The Temporal Variability theme addresses processes of: (a) permeability evolution resulting from mixing between hot deep-circulating hydrothermal fluids and cooler, shallowly circulating seawater and (b) hydrothermal system response to earthquakes. Development of these models will be closely linked to various data sets including thermal and isotopic data from the EPR 9- 10N, the Souther EPR, and the Juan de Fuca Ridge. The Broader Implications of this research center on the training and education of both undergraduate students, suport of the RIDGE Integrated Studies (IS) program, and broa dissemination of research results doc24266 none Francois M. Morel, Ward, Groves, Spiro and Stiefel at Princeton; Moffett at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute; Young, and Zylstra at Rutgers; and Bruland, Butle, and Haygood at The University of California are supported by the Division of Chemistry for their interdisciplinary collaboration aimed at elucidating the molecular mechanisms of the function, fate, and effect of trace elements in the environment. This award includes collaborations between Princeton, Rutgers and ExxonMobil to work on hydrocarbon degradation, among three University of California campuses, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and Rutgers to work on iron and Trichodesmium, and between McGill and Princeton to work on the isolation of metalloenzymes from marine diatoms. The team will be focusing on the structure and function of important natural metalloenzymes and metal-binding compounds at the molecular level and creating new tools to study them in the environment. Enhanced understanding of the local and global effects of metals in the environment will lead to a more precise and predictive understanding of and establish the basic knowledge necessary to develop better technologies for pollution control, mitigation and remediation. The interdisciplinary collaborations between researchers at Princeton, Rutgers, three University of California campuses, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and Exxon-Mobil offer unique interdisciplinary training opportunities for the students and postdoctoral researchers involved with this work. Environmental Molecular Science Institute (EMSI) awards are given to interdisciplinary teams of university, industrial and or national laboratory scientists working on problems aimed at increasing fundamental understanding of natural processes and processes resulting from human activities in the environment at the molecular level. The emphasis in these awards is on collaborative research among teams with complementary research interests and the creation of broad educational experiences for students doc24267 none Reorganizations of large-scale ocean circulation very likely triggered the large and abrupt climate changes which punctuated the glacial world. Hence, as part of our preparation to deal with the ongoing greenhouse gas buildup, we must learn as much as possible regarding the nature of the ocean s alternate modes of operation. This project is aimed toward doing just this. Two paleo observations for the glacial deep Atlantic fail to jibe. One is the difference between the 14 C to C ages for coexisting benthic and planktonic foraminifera, which was greater than that for pre-industrial time but still far less than that for the deep Pacific. This suggests that the conveyor circulation was operating at a somewhat reduced but still significant rate. The other is the tilt of density horizons across the Florida Straits reconstructed from 18O measurements on benthic foraminifera which suggest that the strength of conveyor circulation was far less than today s. In the absence of a clear way to reconcile these observations with one another and also with the nutrient content reconstructed for glacial age lower deep water, researchers at the Lamont Dougherty Eart Observatory of Columbia University will attempt to improve upon both the paleonutrient reconstruction and the estimates of benthic-planktonic age difference. To do so, they have identified 21 cores in the LDEO collection forming a traverse sampling along the western flank of the Mid Atlantic Ridge extending from 45 N to 45 S (water depth 3.6 + 0.4 km). They will establish the stratigraphy in each core by 14C and 18O measurements on planktonic foraminifera and also attempt to quantify the extent to which Holocene foraminifera have been mixed downward into the late glacial section by analyzing single benthic foraminifera for 18O. They will then do d18O, d13C, Cd, and Zn measurements on benthic foraminifera, and neodymium isotope measurements on dispersed ferromanganese coatings on fine silicate debris, in late glacial sections for all cores. Additionally they will measure benthic-planktonic 14C age differences on late glacial samples from the cores with the highest sedimentation rate doc24268 none This project focuses on the synthesis of novel solid-state inorganic materials, including epitaxial growth of device-quality thin-film heterostructures and nanostructures. These materials will have applications in microelectronics, optoelectronics, and refractory ceramics. A unique aspect of this effort in materials design and synthesis is the ability to build in precise atomic arrangements primarily via molecular chemistry so as to overcome thermodynamic impediments arising from differences in atomic sizes, electronic level filling and electronegativities of constituent atoms and thereby form new and metastable materials that cannot be obtained by conventional routes. The range of target materials includes: (a) New semiconductors in the C-Si-Ge-Sn system, which are intended for integration of Si-based microelectronics with optical components; (b) Quaternary wide bandgap optical materials based on covalent carbides and nitrides of the main group; (c) Si based superhard dielectric materials and diamond-like compounds comprising light elements. The electronic structure, band structure, optical, dielectric, mechanical and structural properties of these materials are thoroughly investigated by experimental as well as theoretical methods. The work is well suited to provide broad preparation and state-of-the-art skills to undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral student researchers in synthetic solid-state chemistry and materials science. This research has significant potential for high impact in important areas of national interest including areas such as new optical, semiconducting, and superhard ultrastrong materials, which are of interest to microelectronics and defense industries. The research provides fundamental knowledge in novel device chemistry and physics, and thus makes important contributions to emerging and future technologies such as, high-speed computers, full color displays and communication and detection systems. In addition to significant research and technological accomplishments which include US and international patents, the work provides graduate and postdoctoral training to new generations of scientists and engineers in the preparation and processing of new materials and in the art of chemical vapor deposition, which is a vital field in the microelectronics industry. Collaborations are ongoing with local industries to develop materials for use in silicon-based high-speed electronic devices as well as new generations of solid-state lighting systems that are energy efficient and environmentally safe. The group maintains international collaborations and outreach with researchers in Germany, Norway, Mexico, and the Czech Republic doc3273 none Adler Ceramics used in high-temperature applications must match closely in coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) to avoid excessive stress associated with strain differences over large changes in temperature. Electrochemical ceramics (used as ion-transport membranes or in solid oxide fuel cells) present yet an additional challenge. These materials not only expand with temperature, but also with changes in chemical oxidation state. The majority of expansion at high temperatures in these materials may result from chemical rather than thermal effects. Yet today there is little knowledge or understanding of chemical expansion, or its consequences and technological applications. This project will enlarge our understanding of expansion in ceramics to include these chemical effects. A new continuum theory that defines expansion thermodynamically in terms of temperature and oxygen content will be presented and then an experimental study of expansion in several mixed conducting oxides as a function of cation stoichiometry, temperature, and oxygen partial pressure will be performed. By examining this data in the framework of the theory, a more complete and general understanding of expansion in ceramics will be gained, as well as into how expansion relates to electronic and defect structure. As a secondary goal, new experimental techniques will be developed involving non-equilibrium expansion for directly measuring oxygen surface exchange kinetics and chemical diffusion. The material systems under study include lanthanum-strontium-cobalt-iron-oxide (LSCF) and strontium-iron-cobalt-oxide (SFC). LSCF is of direct relevance to solid-oxide fuel cells and electrically driven air separation, while SFC is of particular interest to workers developing dense membranes for partial oxidation of methane to syngas. LSCF is also a good model material system because its defect thermodynamics are well understood, and its cation composition covers an enormous range of defect and electronic structure (both ionic and electronic). Electrochemical ceramics are of importance in a broad spectrum of applications, including fuels processing, electricity production, and air separation. A full understanding of expansion in is critical to advancing knowledge and application of electrochemical ceramics. This project will also provide a framework for approaching chemical expansion in all solids, thus extending the impact of it much further doc8133 none Electrochemical ceramics encompass a variety of present and emerging technologies, including gas sensors, fuel cells, gas-separation membranes, and membrane reactors. Of critical importance to modeling the properties of electrochemical ceramics, and developing new materials with improved performance, is a strong understanding of electronic structure. Since most electrochemical ceramics possess complex intermediate-length scale order, their properties often defy explanation when viewed from traditional paradigms invoking localized or collective viewpoints of electronic structure. In order to gain a more complete understanding of electronic structure in electrochemical ceramics, we propose to measure the populations of localized and delocalized electrons in transition metal perovskites having general composition LaSrCoFe oxides (LSCF) using a novel high-sensitivity Faraday balance. These measurements will be used to interpret parallel studies of electrochemical properties, including electron transport, ionic defect structure, chemical expansion and stress, and catalytic activity. In addition, the PI is currently developing a new program of undergraduate laboratory experiments that integrate research and teaching. This program provides undergraduates with formal opportunities to contribute to Ph.D.-level research in modern growth areas of chemical engineering, producing real data that will be published (not just put into a lab report). In this way research and undergraduate education are on the same track, with a complementary agenda. The proposed project will contribute one experiment to this educational program, which is linked (and feeds directly into) our research program in electrochemical ceramics. Students will screen new materials for electronic structure using high-temperature magnetic susceptibility measurements and Taguchi analysis methods. %%% This project will contribute broadly to our understanding of electronic structure in complex materials. The results are of general interest to all branches of materials science, including solid-state electrochemistry, electronic materials, ceramics, as well as inorganic chemistry and physics. This project will also provide specific information about electronic structure in one class of materials, of immediate value to workers developing reaction separation membranes and solid-oxide fuel cells. The principal investigator has 8 years academic and 4 years industrial experience in this field, bringing a strong mix of fundamental and practical perspectives. This work is highly original, and contributes several novel advances to proven experimental techniques. The experimental plan is well organized, and the proposing institution has a world-class infrastructure for work in this cross-disciplinary field. In addition, the career development plan of the PI will help establish a strong fundamental research and educational program in a new, exciting, area of technology. This program will not only educate individual scientists in its field, but will also tightly integrate research and teaching in a way that benefits both, and opens new opportunities for undergraduates (many of whom, at CWRU, are women and minorities) to participate in cutting-edge research on a broad scale. This approach provides a new template for teaching that other higher-educational institutions may benefit from. Knowledge gained from both research and educational development will be disseminated broadly through the literature, and directly through strong ties of the PI to industry and the American Society of Engineering Education doc7930 none This Faculty Early Career Development ( CAREER) project integrates research and educational initiatives focusing on micro- and nano-scale processing of biodegradable polymers using laser techniques for biomedical and bioMEMS applications. Research focusing on laser micro- and nano-scale processing with parametric studies using both a UV excimer laser and a femtosecond laser to produce controlled micro-features on polymer surfaces will be addressed. Biodegradable polymers hold immense promise as new materials for implantable biomedical micro-devices due to their biocompatibility and ability to naturally degrade and disappear in tissues over a desired period of time. This degradability eliminates a second surgery to retrieve the implanted micro-devices. The CAREER project will: (1) develop an advanced laser technique with a near-field beam delivery system to produce controlled micro- and nano-scale patterns on biodegradable polymer surfaces; (2) develop an experimental system and a numerical model to investigate the transient laser-material interaction process on extremely small time and length scales; and (3) implement the research into the development of biodegradable micro- and nano-devices. This research will make significant contribution to the emerging and interdisciplinary field of micro- and nano-manufacturing science and technology, bioengineering, and polymer science. The integrated education plan will focus on curriculum development in micro- and nano-manufacturing at the undergraduate and graduate levels by infusing emerging and multi-disciplinary research into the classroom. This plan also encourages women students in research and adopts cooperative learning techniques in teaching. The PI also incorporates a learning plan for himself in new methods of educational pedagogy and curriculum development doc24272 none The GONG Meeting and the 12th SOHO Workshop will be held jointly, October 27-31, , at Big Bear Lake, California. This workshop will focus on the study of the interior of the sun from a seismic perspective and also the prospects for similar study of other solar-like stars. It will also provide an unique opportunity to invite the scientific community to pause and reflect on the status of this fertile field of study, just past the first solar maximum since the deployment of the GONG network and the successful operation of SOHO. Significant time will be devoted to working group sessions, where outstanding, unresolved or controversial issues will be discussed doc24273 none The objective of this project is to develop a new process for Ta chemical vapor deposition (CVD). The deposition of TaN and Ta-Si-N films have potential applications in microelectronics, but useful methods for forming them have not been reported. The reactants will be TaF5 and SiH4. Calculations suggest that these materials are the simplest commercially available compounds that have favorable thermodynamics for producing Ta metal while avoiding silicide formation. Films will be deposited over a range of operating conditions and characterization measurements will determine whether Ta metal is being deposited cleanly and uniformly. Training of graduate students will be the primary educational impact. The results of this project may have a significant impact on the microelectronics industry. Tantalum and mixed Ta TaNx thin films are the leading candidates for diffusion barrier layers, which are essential for advanced interconnect technology based on copper metallization. The proposed work should also enhance the fundamental understanding of early transition metal chemistry. The mechanistic implications of the observed kinetics may be useful for subsequently developing an alternating layer deposition technology for the reactants used in this study doc24274 none Chemistry (12) A symposium and workshop are being held at the Electrochemical Society meeting, in May , to promote the development and use of innovative undergraduate chemistry course materials based on a recently discovered class of compounds called fullerenes. Because of their novelty and unique shapes, fullerenes can stimulate student interest in learning chemistry. Researcher educators active in such educational uses of fullerenes are giving detailed presentations on their course innovations and are holding discussions with the other participants. Ideas and findings from this event will be disseminated to a broad audience of college and university faculty through conference proceedings and other publications doc24275 none This project seeks to better quantify the role of marine ecosystem dynamics on the global ocean carbon cycle, focusing in particular on air-sea CO2 exchange, net community production, and vertical export. The research is motivated by two related hypotheses: multi-nutrient limitation (N, P, Si, Fe) modulates phytoplankton biomass and primary production, community structure, and biogenic carbon export, community structure governs the elemental composition of the exported dissolved and particulate material, major determinants of subsurface biogeochemical transport, remineralization, and sequestration. In this project a carefully designed set of numerical experiments will be run using a global 3-D coupled ecological-biogeochemical-physical model. The project directly builds upon recent progress and specific findings questions from a global mixed layer ecosystem model that includes explicit iron limitation and community structure, a full depth 3-D ocean carbon cycle model, and historical hind-cast simulations ( - ) of ocean physical circulation Specifically, the goals of the activity are to: o Complete development of a next generation, global 3-D ecological-biogeochemical-physical model that includes multi-nutrient limitation and explicit geochemical functional groups (picoplankton, diatoms, Trichodesmium, and coccolithophores). o Evaluate and iteratively improve on the simulated upper ocean ecosystem dynamics against regional JGOFS data sets, large-scale surface pCO2 and nutrient fields, and satellite ocean color data using retrospective, historical simulations for the period - . o Assess the skill of the resulting model in replicating the full depth, equilibrium distributions of carbon, oxygen and nutrients against the WOCE JGOFS global survey data. o Test the ecological and biogeochemical impact of dust deposition, calcification, nitrogen fixation, and silica production by selective modifications to the base coupled solution. The study directly addresses the overall goal of the U.S. JGOFS Synthesis and Modeling Project (SMP), to synthesize present knowledge into global numerical models that can be used for prediction, as well as two of the major research trajectories highlighted in the SMP program announcement: global and regional studies that link together the biological, physical, and chemical components of the marine carbon cycle and synthesis and modeling efforts that effectively combine field data sets and diagnostic and prognostic (forward) models doc24276 none This project is to develop a wireless dense sensor array based on PVDF sensors currently under development for identifying and monitoring the localized damage of infrastructure. The tasks involved in this project are: 1. New PVDF sensors development; the sensor will be installed in the model structure to form a dense sensor array for monitoring the damages of the structure. 2. Develop the smart sensor array by conducting the parallel vibration tests of two identical models structures on the shake-table, making different types and degrees of damages on one model, and leaving the other intact. 3. Develop the smart wireless sensor array: the TCP IP based data telemetry will be developed in the project. The sensor array will be divided into modules consisting of differently distributed sensors used for monitoring the different members of structure. Each module is connected to a programmed microprocessor. The signals of Warning , Danger-low , Danger , Danger-high or Failure identified in the sensor modules are transmitted wirelessly via the TC IP data telemetry to the maintenance central office doc24277 none C-RUI: Forever Wild, the Adirondack Uplands and Watershed Integrity The purpose of this study is to determine how underlying physical factors (such as geology) and forest land management practices interact to influence watershed integrity in the Adirondack Uplands of nothern New York State. We will address the central question: Does long-term forest preservation enhance watershed structure and function in Adirondack uplands? The proposed activity will involve a multidisciplinary approach to study patterns in multiple variables in reference catchments (subjected to forest removal durning the past 15 years) in the Adirondack Uplands. Within reference and managed categories catchments will be selected along a gradient of surficial soil conditions from shallow till soils to deep outwash soils. Comparison across watersheds will include hydrogeology, surficial geology, biogeochemistry, forest community, and aquatic community response variables. Data analysis will include multivariate statistical methods to extract patterns across the landscape in response variables doc24278 none With National Science Foundation support, Mr Gregory Zaro will conduct doctoral disserrtation research on the far south coast of Peru. The study seeks to explain the process of agricultural development in the coastal Osmore region of southern Peru between AD 300 and by understanding the interplay of both cultural and ecological variables that condition agricultural decisions. Previous research suggests the coastal Osmore springs fell in and out of production throughout the period of investigation, and today some remain under cultivation while others lie completely abandoned. For millennia the climate of this typically dry region has experienced punctuated interruptions in the form of periodic el Nino events, tectonic activity, and gradual oscillating periods of above- and below-normal highland precipitation. The Osmore drainage also played host to a complex history that witnessed the rise and fall of ancient political powers such as Tiwanaku and Wari. An adequate understanding of how agriculture transformed along this hyper-arid coastline requires archaeologists to first identify the often-ephemeral indicators of past agrarian activities and situate them in their cultural and ecological contexts. For this study, emphasis is placed on the well-preserved site of Wawakiki, one of a series of prehistoric historic spring-fed agricultural systems along the desert coast. The project will document diachronic changes in agricultural infrastructure and crop selection at Wawakiki, and place them in the context of wider patterns of resource exploitation among its neighboring spring systems north of the Osmore River. The resulting data will be analyzed using ESRI ArcGIS Desktop and ultimately interpreted against already defined sociocultural and environmental sequences from the main Osmore River valley. Excavations at Wawakiki are designed to generate data pertaining to the chronology of agricultural infrastructure and crop selection at Wawakiki, while analyses of semi-regional patterns of resource exploitation along the coast will be achieved using a survey database generated by Peruvian archaeologist Adan Umire. Wawakiki exhibits a well-preserved array of stone-faced terraces, furrows, seedling beds, and water impoundment tanks, and chronological development of these features represents agrarian technology, engineering skills, and the relative amounts of labor invested at a site. In addition, plant materials in archaeological contexts may provide direct insight into the nature of prehistoric agricultural production activities. Changes in crop selection reflect changing emphases on subsistence crops (e.g., maize), industrial crops (e.g., cotton), or both, and relative proportions of specific plants suggest the degree to which farmers specialized their production of particular cultigens. To determine the kinds of plants cultivated prehistorically, phytoliths, pollen, and macrobotanical remains from ancient fields at Wawakiki will be analyzed. Finally, these data will be contextualized within the regional sociopolitical and environmental setting of the Osmore drainage to understand the interplay of cultural and ecological variables that shape agricultural decisions at the local level. This research is important for several reasons. It will highlight the manners in which local communities sustained themselves agriculturally in this hyper-arid environment, and explain the degree to which cultural and natural factors contributed to agricultural decline and rebirth among the coastal Osmore springs doc24279 none Although wonders have been done in developing medical technology, delivery systems for health care - the instrumentalities and regimes for safe and effective application of the technology to patient care -- have received much less attention, especially from engineering researchers. This project will fund a National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and Institute of Medicine (IOM) study to begin remedying this shortfall by identifying opportunities for engineers to make critical contributions to health care delivery. Jointly funded by NSF, the National Institutes of Health, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation over a period of 14 months, NAE and IOM will convene a committee of distinguished members to lead an investigation accomplished mostly by NAE staff. Two major workshops will be part of the effort, one to highlight successes already underway and another to set an agenda for future research. Recommendations of the committee would be collected in a summary report that may show the way to exciting opportunities for engineers to contribute to a critical national problem doc24280 none Although the gross features of atmospheric dust transport and deposition to the ocean are well established, major uncertainties remain on the effective solubility of the iron in the dust entering the ocean and the effects of these deposition on the distribution and speciation of iron in the upper ocean. A PI from the Bermuda Biological Station for Research and a PI from the University of Delaware will participate in two cruises to a site near BATS during summer months to obtain atmospheric and water column samples when dust inputs are at peak values. Atmospheric samples (precipitation and mineral aerosols) will be analyzed for total-dissolvable Fe and Al, as well as readily-soluble Fe and Fe(II). Seawater samples from the upper water column will be analyzed for total-dissolvable Fe and dissolved Fe and Fe(II) in the dissolved ( 0.4 um) colloidal (0.4-0.03 um) and soluble ( 0.03 um) phases. Results from this work will be used to determine the effect of atmospheric depositions on the distribution, speciation and biological availability of iron in the upper ocean doc24281 none Spoilage and pathogenic bacteria affect the quality and safety of fresh produce such as strawberries and mushrooms. The surfaces of these products can be naturally contaminated with molds such as Botrytis cinera and bacteria such as E. coli O157:H7. For many years foods have been treated with antimicrobial agents however, packaging materials may also provide the same benefits using similar or different additives. A packaging system that allows for slow release of an antimicrobial agent into the produce could significantly increase the shelf life and improve the safety of fresh produce. The use of these packaging systems is not meant to be used as a substitute for good quality control standards. It can, however serve as an additional protective measure to help ensure safe and high quality foods doc24280 none Although the gross features of atmospheric dust transport and deposition to the ocean are well established, major uncertainties remain on the effective solubility of the iron in the dust entering the ocean and the effects of these deposition on the distribution and speciation of iron in the upper ocean. A PI from the Bermuda Biological Station for Research and a PI from the University of Delaware will participate in two cruises to a site near BATS during summer months to obtain atmospheric and water column samples when dust inputs are at peak values. Atmospheric samples (precipitation and mineral aerosols) will be analyzed for total-dissolvable Fe and Al, as well as readily-soluble Fe and Fe(II). Seawater samples from the upper water column will be analyzed for total-dissolvable Fe and dissolved Fe and Fe(II) in the dissolved ( 0.4 um) colloidal (0.4-0.03 um) and soluble ( 0.03 um) phases. Results from this work will be used to determine the effect of atmospheric depositions on the distribution, speciation and biological availability of iron in the upper ocean doc24253 none This project is an application of modern Bayesian hierarchical methods of statistical analysis to the problem of ocean state estimation. The goal is to use this statistical technique to combine hydrographic data, dynamical constraints, and knowledge about the uncertainties in both observations and dynamical assumptions, to arrive at: (a) slowly varying maps of oceanic property fields on a selection of isopycnals in the North Atlantic, (b) an estimate of the probability distribution function for possible states of the North Atlantic circulation consistent with the available data. The project unites statisticians and ocean scientists and provides training in interdisciplinary research for a graduate student and two post-doctoral researchers doc3996 none The central goals of this project are to develop and apply new statistical techniques to examine behavioral correlations across different contexts, and their effects on individual performance (survival, feeding rate, mating success) across contexts. For example, for aggression level, although all individuals alter their aggression levels depending on the situation, do the same individuals tend to be more aggressive than others across a range of situations? If so, how do these consistent aggression levels influence performance in the different situations? Experiments will examine behavioral and performance correlations: 1) across social and ecological contexts (different densities, sex ratios and levels of predation risk); 2) over a lifetime (correlating juvenile versus adult behavior); and 3) across genders (between male and female siblings). Experiments will focus on an insect, Aquarius remigis, that is ideal for generating the large amounts of data required to illustrate the new methods. Although it is clear that humans and some well-studied mammals exhibit correlated behaviors across contexts (i.e., personality types or behavioral syndromes), it is only now becoming clear that parallel behavioral correlations occur in other animals. The techniques and insights generated by this project should advance our understanding of the ecological and evolutionary significance of behavioral correlations doc7802 none Meyer The orthopedic community would benefit from knowing the ratio of the various constituents contained in the synovial fluid of patients with total hip and knee replacements before the onset of complications leading to revision surgery. Aspirating the joints of patients with indications is recommended most specifically prior to revision surgery. It is the aspirate from these patients that will be used as the basis for the proposed set of experiments. The ratios of the constituents to each other may be used by physicians as one of several tools in the decision whether to perform revision surgery. There may also be instances in which surgery will not be recommended based in part on the particulate ratios, in which case benefits to both the patient and the economy may be realized. The clinical relevance would be that the surgeon now has a quasi-inside look at the prosthesis before surgery, offering some information about what area(s) of the implant may require revision. This is not information that can be readily seen in x-rays or by other visual means. An SGER award supports research to examine the feasibility of using a technique called Bio-Ferrography to separate the various types of wear particles which form in total hip and knee replacements as they wear. The PI has access to a unique collection of over one hundred well-documented samples of synovial fluid aspirate which has been obtained from total hip and knee replacements prior to revision surgery. The primary wear particles are ultra high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) from the acetabular cup, metal particles such as stainless steel or cobalt-cromium-molybdenum from the femoral head, particles of bone cement used for fixation of the prostheses at the bone implant interface, and bone particulate itself. The particles will be tagged with magnetic tagging molecules which make it possible to sort them by the magnetic field in the bio-ferrograph. Identification of suitable tagging molecules, sorting of the particles by material and size, and relating the nature and amount of wear particles to observations made of the worn joint during and after surgery will be the main components of the study doc24286 none This project continues support to maintain and improve standby readiness to mount rapid and follow?up responses to a mid?ocean eruptive events along the mid?ocean ridge systems of the northeast Pacific. The project is composed of several cross?disciplinary components, including the geophysical interpretation of remotely detected seismic events, physical, geochemical and geomircobial oceanography, microbial diversity and community dynamics of event plumes, and geology, geochemistry and biological colonization of new seafloor lava flows doc24287 none Considering the recent advances in plant genome analysis and functional genomics, proteomics research in plant systems requires integration of research activities from different fields. The symposium entitled Plant Proteomes: Structure, Changes, Interactions and Functions is designed as a fusion conference to initiate and foster interactions between proteomics researchers who are using computational and experimental approaches and plant scientists who are adopting, or who plan to adopt, proteomics technology in their research. To our knowledge, this symposium, to be held June 20-23, , is the first to be devoted specifically to proteomics of plants. Speakers have been invited to present the results of their investigations of different aspects of proteomics and plant processes. The list of invited speakers includes a balance among different areas, backgrounds, career stages and genders. Each speaker will present cutting-edge research on the structure, function and interactions of proteins encoded by plant genomes; structural genomics; high-throughput analysis of protein functions, abundance and interactions; computational analysis of genome information to predict function and interactions; and functional analysis of gene families. The talks will cover many areas of plant biology, molecular physiology, enzymes and catalysis, signal transduction, metabolism, cell biology, and responses to abiotic and biotic stress conditions. The design of the symposium program is intended to: 1) foster collaborations between participants and speakers; 2) integrate research advances with education at the undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels; and 3) bring new ideas, new methods, and materials to researchers who are working in different fields. Therefore, this conference is inherently different from typical small conferences in which a group of researchers in one area meets regularly. This is a fusion conference where investigators in different areas of research will meet and discuss topics of mutual interest in the fast moving area of functional genomics. Attention to the educational impact has been given in the selection of speakers and during program development. In addition to the participation of students and postdoctoral researchers, special events during the conference will address educational challenges during the post-genomic era. Systematic and focused interactions with historically black institutions and undergraduate research experience programs will foster the attention of under-represented and under-served students doc24288 none Building upon the current two-year Computer Science Associate Degree Program, Salish Kootenai College will develop and implement a Bachelors of Information Technology Program (BIT) using the TCUP five-year implementation award. The structure of the BIT will enable students to obtain the most recent industry certifications such as those developed by Microsoft and Cisco and to pursue different educational tracks including networking, wireless communications, security and database administration. Components of the BIT will be offered online and through summer boot camps , allowing working professionals the opportunity to upgrade their knowledge. Project activities include development of curriculum, faculty and facilities. Project funds will also support student recruitment, retention and internship programs doc24289 none of shelter limitation at local scales and will be used to test specific hypotheses for the congruence (or lack of it) in population dynamics at local and meso-scales. Testing the expanded version of the recruit-adult hypothesis will provide a rare experimental test of the causal interactions shaping population dynamics at large spatial scales. Meso-scale populations are little studied, but a deeper understanding of their dynamics is of practical importance because it at this scale that marine reserves are designated and at which most reef fisheries are managed. Support for the hypothesis that meso-scale carrying capacity depends on shelter provided by the reef would also have important implications for the effects on fishes of the ongoing habitat degradation on coral reefs doc24290 none The foundation of community ecology has been constructed from studies conducted on relatively small spatial scales. In marine ecology, the building blocks of the foundation are analyses of species interactions at focal sites that are bathed by currents transporting nutrients, food and reproductive propagules of the next generation of organisms. Thus, the communities living at local sites are linked to some extent on larger spatial scales by oceanographic processes. Understanding the extent and scale of such linkages is essential for the growth of community ecology as an intellectual endeavor and also for predicting how local biota of coastal marine ecosystems will be modified by an increasing pace of global change. The latter situation applies because global atmospheric processes regulate the oceanic currents that couple local sites. Although the need to expand the spatial scale of marine research has been recognized for nearly two decades, progress in developing a regional oceanographic perspective in marine benthic ecology has been slow, particularly for sub-tidal ecosystems. This project herein relates to these broader goals by developing a regional context for benthic communities living on steep underwater sides of islands (rock walls) in the Galapagos Marine Reserve, (GMR) the second largest marine protected area in the world (Bustamente et al ). Due to nutritive upwelling currents and marine food webs that are nearly intact, GMR subtidal ecosystems provide an excellent opportunity to investigate the importance of bottom ?up (i.e. driven by food resources) vs top?down (predatory) regulation of benthic communities. Preliminary research by the project team indicates that the pace of community change is especially rapid where currents flow up rock walls at some of highest upwelling velocities reported (to 60 cm s) to date. An experimental design is used to test the general hypothesis that bottom? up and top ?down control of rock wall communities varies predictably as a function of upwelling. Regular measurement of upwelling currents, chlorophyll a, nutrient and zooplankton concentrations at 8 sites in the central GMR will be placed in a larger context by comparison to daily, high resolution images of chl a provided by the new SeaWIFS facility at the Charles Darwin Research Station. Measuring algal accumulation in treatments protected from and exposed to grazers will assess a response of benthic algae to the potentially enhanced upwelling nutrient regime. Because epifaunal. invertebrates feeding on plankton link water column production to higher trophic levels,, experiments are proposed to measure the growth and recruitment of 5 epifaunal species and their consumers (snails, sea urchins) to test the predictions of bottomup and top?down linkage . Key predators will be enclosed to evaluate the hypothesis that the strength of species interactions is greatest at upwelling sites while video cameras will provide another measure of site variation in consumer pressure. Finally, theory and observation suggest that the highest diversity and turnover of diversity occurs at upwelling sites due to rapid invertebrate production and high predation on primary space occupiers. By working at the crossroads of community ecology, oceanography and conservation biology, the research will increase our understanding of how productivity and local variation in species interactions influence species diversity in marine reserves. The broader merits of the proposal are that it will directly contribute to conservation planning, train a PhD student and positively impact undergraduate and graduate teaching doc24291 none Funds are provided for a cruise to collect a suite of cores from the Southwest African margin to construct several detailed depth transects to monitor the full dynamic range and stratal geometry of the mid depth water masses. The post-cruise proposed research program will establish the sensitivity of Southern Hemisphere ocean circulation to major instability during the Pleistocene and Holocene by mapping changes in the distribution of radiocarbon in benthic foraminifera over specific abrupt events to deduce the ventilation history of mid-depth water and help delineate northern vs. southern sources doc24292 none Horizontal convection refers to horizontal motions in a fluid slab caused by spatial gradients of fluid density. Rather surprisingly, theoretical arguments show that nonuniform heating or cooling at the top surface of a fluid layer is ineffective in driving the circulation. More specifically, if the only force acting on the fluid is nonuniform surface heating, and if the kinematic viscosity and thermal diffusivity are allowed to approach zero with their ratio fixed, then it can be shown that the energy dissipation per unit mass, determined by integrating over the whole volume of the fluid, goes to zero. Because no energy dissipation implies no turbulence, this is sometimes called the anti-turbulence theorem. This result is counterintuitive. In fact, it has been thought that the main features of the global-scale ocean circulation might be accounted for by the pole-to-equator temperature gradient, but the anti-turbulence theorem seems to imply that differential heating of the surface cannot by itself drive the circulation. This proposal is motivated by the need to understand the physical processes that account for the anti-turbulence theorem and other purely mathematical constraints on horizontal convection. Implications of these constraints are that fluid motions on the smallest scales must be closely coupled to larger-scale motions as part of a linked, multiscale system. The goal is to relate the improved understanding of horizontal convection to the problem of ocean circulation. The approach consists of a combination of analytical and numerical techniques such as upper bound theory, numerical computation of equilibrium solutions using continuation methods, linear stability analysis of these equilibria, multiscale asymptotic methods, and direct numerical simulation. The work will contribute to improved modeling of the ocean circulation and hence climate. It is supported jointly by the Division of Ocean Sciences and the Division of Mathematical Sciences through the NSF Program, Research Collaborations between the Mathematical Sciences and the Geosciences (CMG doc7994 none Increasingly, households are investing in common stock-from to the number of households investing directly in equities grew by over 30 per cent. At the same time many investors are eschewing professional advice--from through mid , investors opened 12.5 million online brokerage accounts. The importance of self-directed investing will only grow in future years as more and more households are handed responsibility for their own retirement investments through defined contribution plans and, possibly, through discretionary personal social security accounts. Individual s trading decisions affect not only their own welfare but, through their influence on market prices, the welfare of others. Yet little is known about what motivates the trading decisions of individual investors. The goal of my research is to increase our understanding of individual investors and of their influence on markets. I have obtained from various brokerage houses anonymous trading records for over one million individual investors. With these records, I can document how investors behave in real life investment situations and I can test theories of investor behavior. For example, I can test the hypothesis that investment success leads many investors to become overconfident. Based on the trading records in my databases, I plan to develop a computer simulation of financial markets in which individual investors interact with institutional investors and market-makers. The individual investors in this simulation will follow rules estimated from the databases. This simulation will model how the trading of individual investors changes stock prices and how this process affects investor wealth. I will also run experiments that test whether access to more information leads investors to become overconfident and, as a result, to trade excessively. Finally, I will survey investors to see whether aggressive trading by individual investors is more often the result of unrealistically optimistic beliefs than high tolerance for risk. In addition to increasing academic understanding of individual investors, these studies will provide guidance for investor education efforts doc24292 none Horizontal convection refers to horizontal motions in a fluid slab caused by spatial gradients of fluid density. Rather surprisingly, theoretical arguments show that nonuniform heating or cooling at the top surface of a fluid layer is ineffective in driving the circulation. More specifically, if the only force acting on the fluid is nonuniform surface heating, and if the kinematic viscosity and thermal diffusivity are allowed to approach zero with their ratio fixed, then it can be shown that the energy dissipation per unit mass, determined by integrating over the whole volume of the fluid, goes to zero. Because no energy dissipation implies no turbulence, this is sometimes called the anti-turbulence theorem. This result is counterintuitive. In fact, it has been thought that the main features of the global-scale ocean circulation might be accounted for by the pole-to-equator temperature gradient, but the anti-turbulence theorem seems to imply that differential heating of the surface cannot by itself drive the circulation. This proposal is motivated by the need to understand the physical processes that account for the anti-turbulence theorem and other purely mathematical constraints on horizontal convection. Implications of these constraints are that fluid motions on the smallest scales must be closely coupled to larger-scale motions as part of a linked, multiscale system. The goal is to relate the improved understanding of horizontal convection to the problem of ocean circulation. The approach consists of a combination of analytical and numerical techniques such as upper bound theory, numerical computation of equilibrium solutions using continuation methods, linear stability analysis of these equilibria, multiscale asymptotic methods, and direct numerical simulation. The work will contribute to improved modeling of the ocean circulation and hence climate. It is supported jointly by the Division of Ocean Sciences and the Division of Mathematical Sciences through the NSF Program, Research Collaborations between the Mathematical Sciences and the Geosciences (CMG doc24291 none Funds are provided for a cruise to collect a suite of cores from the Southwest African margin to construct several detailed depth transects to monitor the full dynamic range and stratal geometry of the mid depth water masses. The post-cruise proposed research program will establish the sensitivity of Southern Hemisphere ocean circulation to major instability during the Pleistocene and Holocene by mapping changes in the distribution of radiocarbon in benthic foraminifera over specific abrupt events to deduce the ventilation history of mid-depth water and help delineate northern vs. southern sources doc24296 none Wavelets are a relatively new - but increasingly popular - mathematical tool for analyzing data in the geosciences. Wavelets reexpress data collected over a time span or spatial region such that variations over temporal spatial scales are summarized in wavelet coefficients. Individual coefficients depend upon both a scale and a temporal spatial location, so wavelets are ideal for analyzing geosystems with interacting scales. In this project, the investigators develop wavelet-based statistical methodology to address three multiscale geophysical problems. The first is to characterize scale-specific variances covariances of atmospheric pressure time series from NOAA s Tropical Atmosphere Ocean buoy array. Because these series have gaps in them, the investigators construct special wavelets for computing statistically tractable wavelet coefficients. The second problem is to analyze atmospheric turbulence measurements collected by an aircraft. The investigators use statistical methodology to combine wavelet coefficients with aircraft heights to determine scale height variations of winds. The third problem is to assess spatial temporal variations in ground-based radar rainfall measurements. Here the investigators use wavelets to extract spatial gradients, to assess variations in area-mean precipitation, and to determine the variability in the estimated quantities using wavelet-based bootstrapping. The motivation behind this project is to further a scientific understanding of how the atmosphere changes over time, over heights and over different areas. A better understanding of the atmosphere is important for mankind because of the key role that the atmosphere plays as part of the climate of the earth. Federal agencies such as NOAA and NASA (in cooperation with its Japanese counterpart NASDA) are actively collecting sets of data that directly measure how the atmosphere changes. These data sets, along with others collected under NSF sponsorship, are inherently complex to interpret. In this project, the investigators study these data sets using wavelets, which are a mathematical microscope for interpreting changes in complex data sets. The investigators develop new methods for using wavelets to study atmospheric changes. In the future, other investigators can apply these new methods to data sets collected in other areas of science such as oceanography, astronomy, agriculture and forestry doc24277 none C-RUI: Forever Wild, the Adirondack Uplands and Watershed Integrity The purpose of this study is to determine how underlying physical factors (such as geology) and forest land management practices interact to influence watershed integrity in the Adirondack Uplands of nothern New York State. We will address the central question: Does long-term forest preservation enhance watershed structure and function in Adirondack uplands? The proposed activity will involve a multidisciplinary approach to study patterns in multiple variables in reference catchments (subjected to forest removal durning the past 15 years) in the Adirondack Uplands. Within reference and managed categories catchments will be selected along a gradient of surficial soil conditions from shallow till soils to deep outwash soils. Comparison across watersheds will include hydrogeology, surficial geology, biogeochemistry, forest community, and aquatic community response variables. Data analysis will include multivariate statistical methods to extract patterns across the landscape in response variables doc24298 none The climate system involves a huge range of interacting spatial and temporal scales. Development of tools to further understanding of this very complex system and its predictability is the major focus of this project. Theoretically rigorous methods allowing for the stochastic modeling of the system have been demonstrated by the investigators in simple dynamical systems. We extend these to the more complex but practical systems underlying climate. Additionally an entirely new perspective on dynamical predictability has been derived by the investigators using information theory. This will be applied to the problems of atmospheric and climate prediction and will also enable the development of rigorous reliability measures for dynamical predictions in general chaotic systems. These investigations enable us to gain a much clearer understanding of the complex system underlying the Earth s climate. Such an understanding will be of great benefit in interpreting results from societally important projections of future climate change. Further we anticipate the development of tools which will enable us to reliably decide when a particular prediction (climate or weather) is likely to be useful and when it is not likely to have any use. This ability has important practical implications for policy makers dealing with fundamentally uncertain systems doc24299 none Funds are provided to process the data collected on two geophysical cruises in the Sea of Marmara. The PIs will combine the results from the collected chirp, sidescan, and bathymetric data with detailed sedimentology of piston cores and land-based observations to work out the configuration of the fault zone and to determine the history of paleoseismicity by correlating submarine landslides and turbidites to individual paloearthquakes. The work will have important societal relevance as it will lead to better understanding of the nature of deformation associated with the earthquakes and their history in the region doc24300 none This US-Slovenian mathematics project between B. A. Sethuraman of the California State University, Northridge, and his partner, Tomaz Kosir of the University of Ljubljana, examines concrete and computational problems concerned with commuting sets of matrices. Together they intend to study varieties that are a generalization of determinantal varieties with some emphasis on determinantal varieties of invariant subspaces and varieties of commuting matrices. These are fundamental questions associated with geometric properties of matrices that have relevance to graphing. The joint research plan employs a mix of classical algebraic geometry, computational algebra, combinatorial commutative algebra and representations theory. Junior researchers from both universities will participate in portions of the research. This collaboration builds upon initial work by Sethuraman and Kosir on commuting triples of matrices and utilizes complementary strengths of the U.S. side in algebra and Slovenian expertise in matrix and operator theory. Results should lead to refined models for using linear algebra in numerical computations. This mathematics research project fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc24301 none This is an award under the CMG program (Collaborations Between the Mathematical Sciences and the Geosciences) to support mathematical modeling of processes in the magnetosphere. It is jointly funded by the Physical Meteorology program in the Division of Atmospheric Sciences and the Research in Undergraduate Institutions (RUI) program of the Division of Mathematical Sciences. Phenomena originating in the solar wind cause magnetic pulsations upstream from the earth and inside the magnetosphere. They propagate through the magnetosheath but their source and means of propagation are not understood. The broad range of spatial scales and complex dynamics of the plasma regions affected by the pulsations have posed major obstacles to modeling the phenomenon. A new mathematical tool, called multiresolution homogenization, circumvents some of the difficulties. The method constructs mathematical models that implicitly account for a wide range of scales while requiring explicit modeling of only selected scales. It will be applied to modeling waves in the turbulent magnetosheath with the objectives of (1) understanding wave propagation in the magnetosheath and (2) gaining insight on properties of the magnetosheath itself. As society becomes more dependent on satellite communications, it is increasingly important to understand phenomena in the magnetosphere that affect electromagnetic signal propagation doc24302 none This project will take techniques for identifying finite-time approximations to invariant manifolds in simple dynamical systems, further develop these so that they can be applied to complex, time-dependent fluid flows containing many coherent structures, and then use the improved techniques to examine transport in flows near strongly eddying oceanic fronts. A particular goal is to quantify the role of non-local transport events in the stirring produced by coherent structures and to examine the relation between Lagrangian dispersion statistics and the degree of hyperbolicity of the flow field. The project will extend two-dimensional lobe dynamics to quasi-three-dimensional flows. The oceanic flows to be studied are high-resolution, general circulation model representations of the Loop Current system in the Gulf of Mexico and of the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic doc24303 none In this collaborative investigation, a nested-scale survey of major rift escarpments that expose the upper oceanic crust at Pito Deep, located on the northeast edge of the Easter microplate on the EPR will be surveyed and sampled. Major fault scarps bounding a propagating rift along the NE edge of the Easter Microplate cut abyssal hill lineaments and magnetic anomalies at right angles creating a natural cross section of the oceanic crust. Outcrop areas would be located using DSL-120 sidescan sonar, and observed using ALVIN and Jason II. The rationale for this investigation is to extend knowledge of the internal structure and composition of the upper oceanic crust, and by inference, processes at superfast spreading ridges doc24277 none C-RUI: Forever Wild, the Adirondack Uplands and Watershed Integrity The purpose of this study is to determine how underlying physical factors (such as geology) and forest land management practices interact to influence watershed integrity in the Adirondack Uplands of nothern New York State. We will address the central question: Does long-term forest preservation enhance watershed structure and function in Adirondack uplands? The proposed activity will involve a multidisciplinary approach to study patterns in multiple variables in reference catchments (subjected to forest removal durning the past 15 years) in the Adirondack Uplands. Within reference and managed categories catchments will be selected along a gradient of surficial soil conditions from shallow till soils to deep outwash soils. Comparison across watersheds will include hydrogeology, surficial geology, biogeochemistry, forest community, and aquatic community response variables. Data analysis will include multivariate statistical methods to extract patterns across the landscape in response variables doc24302 none This project will take techniques for identifying finite-time approximations to invariant manifolds in simple dynamical systems, further develop these so that they can be applied to complex, time-dependent fluid flows containing many coherent structures, and then use the improved techniques to examine transport in flows near strongly eddying oceanic fronts. A particular goal is to quantify the role of non-local transport events in the stirring produced by coherent structures and to examine the relation between Lagrangian dispersion statistics and the degree of hyperbolicity of the flow field. The project will extend two-dimensional lobe dynamics to quasi-three-dimensional flows. The oceanic flows to be studied are high-resolution, general circulation model representations of the Loop Current system in the Gulf of Mexico and of the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic doc24306 none A combination of mathematical and numerical modeling, laboratory experiments, field experiments, and three-dimensional data visualization techniques will be applied to the problem of determining the influence of the microscale pore structure of sea-ice on the macroscopic thermodynamic and fluid transport properties of such ice. The work represents a collaboration between a mathematician, a glaciologist and a computer scientist. A variety of mathematical approaches, including both lattice and continuum percolation representations, to modeling the bulk properties of irregular three-dimensional media will be applied to ice with varying degrees of connectivity between microscale brine inclusions. Field and lab experiments, including MRI and X-ray imaging of ice samples, will be combined with modern three-dimensional rendering of the resulting data to provide quantitative and qualitative information about the variability of such connectivity, particularly as a function of ice temperature. Model predictions of macroscopic permeability and thermal conductivity will be compared to experimentally measured transport properties. Through a collaboration with Dr. J. Fry at Victoria University, New Zealand, and student research projects, the models developed for transport in sea-ice will be extended to fluid migration through rock and the diffusion of gas through glacial firn. The latter is an important factor in the interpretation of paleo-atmospheric composition from bubbles trapped in ice-cores. The project also includes a substantial amount of training and outreach, with field work for graduate and undergraduate students, and classroom demonstrations and experiments in elementary and secondary schools doc10790 none With National Science Foundation support Dr. Matt Sponheimer and his colleagues will investigate the ecology of the early human ancestor Australopithecus africanus and associated mammals from Makapansgat Limeworks, South Africa. The team brings together specialists in biogeochemistry, dental microwear, and ecomorphology to provide a more complete picture of the ecological background for human evolution. No single method of paleoecological research can provide a complete picture of an animal s ecology, as they all have intrinsic strengths and weaknesses. By using a variety of techniques in tandem, however, it may be possible to utilize their respective strengths, while partially overcoming their limitations. To this end, this team will examine the paleoecology of the Makapansgat fauna using dental microwear, cranial and postcranial morphology, carbon isotope, oxygen isotope, and elemental analyses. The initial phase of this project will be a large-scale modern collection and sampling program in South Africa and Kenya. This will provide the necessary background for interpreting data from fossil specimens. Once the modern specimens have been analyzed, the team will apply these techniques to the three million-year-old fossils from Makapansgat. The team will focus on the following questions: 1) What habitats did our early ancestors prefer; 2) What did our early ancestors eat; and 3) How much competition did they have for these resources. While this project is ultimately intended to provide information about the ecology of Australopithecus africanus and its associated fauna, it will also make important contributions to all of the individual subfields utilized, as the team will analyze a larger and more diverse African fauna than previous efforts. This research is important for several reasons. It will provide data on early human diets and habitats of long-standing interest to archaeologists and physical anthropologists. Moreover, it will provide a sound multidisciplinary basis from which the ecology of other extinct animals can investigated. This will shed new light on the ecological background of mammalian evolution in Africa doc24308 none This dissertation research project analyses the historical emergence of the notion of the scientific model, and specifically the emergence of the assumption that models are universally valid representations of nature, by investigating the role of anatomical models for the formation of science and the state around . Using archival sources and surviving model collections, the project will analyze and compare practices of model production and model use at two state institutions where science was developed in its conceptual and institutional framework explicitly for state use: a public naturalhistory museum and model workshop founded during physiocratic reforms in late eighteenth-century Tuscany, and a military training hospital established in enlightened absolutist Austria. The project will focus on three question areas: 1) How does the interplay between conceptual developments and social dynamics within the workshop establish the models as universal representations, and how does model use support or challenge these claims to universality? 2) What kind of science was developed conceptually and institutionally through model production and model use at the museum, and at the hospital? 3) What is the envisioned function of this science for the state, and what is the function of the image of the human body conveyed through the models for enlightened absolutism and subsequent regimes? Fund are for travel to relevant research sites in Florence and other parts of Italy doc24309 none Collaborative Research: CMG Research: Statistical Seismic Imaging A. Levander, W.W. Symes, S. Minkoff Both the crystalline crust and the shallow near surface ( 100m depth) environment are complex, mechanically heterogeneous regions, often having spatial distributions of mechanical properties that are distinctly different from the relatively smoothly layered sedimentary column. Exploration seismology is currently one of the most important means of exploring the subsurface: for petroleum in the sedimentary column, for geotechnical environmental purposes in the shallow subsurface, and for understanding of tectonic processes in the crystalline crust. Reflection seismology was developed by the petroleum industry to explore the sedimentary column, i.e., the medium is layered, the preponderance of energy is singly scattered, and scales are dichotomous. Its applications in both the near-surface environment and the deep crust have been very successful but also present problems not usually encountered in petroleum exploration. The near surface is subjected to chemical and mechanical weathering processes that produce a highly heterogeneous, nonlayered medium. Mechanical properties can vary by an order of magnitude within a few wavelengths due to compaction, chemical alteration, and the presence or absence of water. The crystalline crust, although lacking order of magnitude changes in mechanical properties, has a spatially complex, often self-affine (fractal) distribution of seismic velocity and density heterogeneities. For the relatively long path propagation in the crust, the wavefield often falls in a strong scattering regime in which linear imaging systems will produce mediocre or nonsensical results. This research program makes first steps toward a complementary imaging paradigm for complex media, termed statistical seismic imaging, in which statistical properties of the subsurface are mapped using statistical properties of the seismic wavefield. As this is an extremely large topic, the proposal scope will be limited to a few areas of endeavor. The investigations will explore (1) effective models relating subwavelength scale heterogeneity to macro-scale propagation effects (effective mechanical properties, velocity, attenuation, dispersion, etc), (2) the extent to which multiple reflection and refraction can be differentiated and their effects on traditional seismic imaging, and (3) the identification of the onset of strong scattering. The research involves a high level of software development and computational effort, including 3D seismic simulation and nonlinear inversion for material properties and statistics. No single discipline possesses the tools to make significant progress on statistical seismic imaging: expertise in geophysics, applied math, and high performance computing are needed. The principal investigators have expertise in these areas. The research has the potential of improving societally important environmental geotechnical investigations as well as more fundamental research on the structure and tectonics of the Earth s crust doc24310 none This award is to support research that will develop new data on the effect of changing climate on the climatically sensitive upper forest limit in the Pirin Mountains. Fieldwork will be undertaken to collect samples from a series of cirque lakes near the upper forest limit in the Pirin Mountains. Plant macrofossil data and radiocarbon dating will supplement pollen data already in hand. In addition, stable isotope analysis of carbonate in lake sediments will be used as an independent method of climate reconstruction. The broader impacts of this proposed research are that it will lead to a better understanding of the vegetational and climatic history of an area that is transitional between Western Europe and the continental interior doc24311 none PIs: Steven Hofmann, Loukas Grafakos, Alex Iosevich, Igor Verbitsky Proposal: Institution: University of Missouri at Columbia This proposal requests funding for a conference on Harmonic Analysis and Partial Differential Equations to be held in Columbia, Missouri during the period May 8--11, . The conference will last 4 four days and is expected to have 70-80 participants among which 20 will be invited speakers. Several world s leading experts in the emerging connections between combinatorics, analysis and PDE will speak at this conference. NSF funds will be use to support travel expenses and room and board for thirty graduate students doc24312 none Checkpoints were first identified as regulatory controls that stop the cell cycle after DNA damage. Such arrests of the cell cycle allow time for efficient replication and repair. Checkpoint genes are those that cause these arrests after DNA damage; checkpoint mutants fail to do so and either exhibit genome instability and or die. The mechanisms by which wild-type checkpoint genes ensure genome stability are still poorly understood, mainly for two reasons. First, individual checkpoint genes have roles in multiple checkpoints (e.g., one gene is essential for arrest during both DNA replication and chromosome segregation) and can have roles in other aspects of DNA metabolism as well (e.g., dNTP synthesis, stability of DNA replication forks, telomere synthesis). Second, genome instability is itself a complex process involving the gain or loss of whole chromosomes, and novel, sometimes complex chromosomal rearrangements. To understand how checkpoint genes stabilize a genome, the investigator has developed a model of chromosome instability termed fragile site instability. This instability can involve DNA breaks and recombination in a defined chromosomal region (a fragile site), the formation of multiply rearranged chromosomes, and a high frequency of aberrations in checkpoint mutants. Recent data from the investigator s laboratory suggest that fragile site instability may be linked to defects in DNA replication. This project is designed to reveal how instability is linked to specific DNA sequences in the fragile site, to checkpoint gene dysfunctions, and to DNA replication. The multiple links between checkpoint gene function and genome stability are important to understand because perturbations of genome stability have profound effects on the functioning of all organisms. Thus this project may lead to insights that will benefit all of society. In addition, the investigator will continue his educational activities, which in the past have included mentoring individuals from the level of high school students to postdoctoral fellows doc24313 none Loper Earth s dynamo, which is responsible for the geomagnetic field, is a geosystem involving a broad range of interacting scales, a complex geometry and a rich variety of physical processes. Numerical simulations resolve only the largest-scale features; most parameterizations of the smaller, subgrid scale processes simulate dissipative processes only, and are incapable of simulating non-dissipative processes which affect transfers of energy among differing spatial scales. Exceptions to this statement are the recently developed similarity and Navier-Stokes-alpha models. Core dynamics is strongly affected by the action of the Coriolis and Lorentz forces, making the fields both anisotropic and non-local. Recent studies have provided valuable insight into these processes, which will help motivate generalized models that accurately account for these forces. This project will develop better parameterizations of subgrid processes in Earth s core by incorporating into the similarity and Navier-Stokes-alpha models, knowledge of the structure of the small-scale fields. The project will involve a combination of numerical simulation and theoretical analysis employing not only simplified models that isolate physical processes and analytical issues, but also realistic geodynamo models. The research will be undertaken by a group of mathematicians and geoscientists from US institutions and from abroad under the supervision of a management group. The project will foster interactions between members of the dynamo collective, and it is expected that further collaborations will result from the annual workshops that will be organized and partially supported by the project. It is anticipated that improved parameterization of subgrid processes in rotating magnetoconvection will interest all who wish to study magnetism and dynamos in other planets and in stars. It is believed that many of these people will wish to participate in the planned workshops. An improved numerical model of the geodynamo will be of interest to a second group of geoscientists and mathematicians who seek to quantify the structure, dynamics and history of the interior of our planet doc24314 none Bao The applicants propose to develop a novel dual-FRET molecular beacons methodology for the detection of cancer cells with high specificity, sensitivity and efficiency. Molecular beacons (MBs) are single-stranded oligonucleotides with a stem-loop hairpin structure and dual-labeled with a fluorophore at one end and a quencher at the other. Delivering MBs into cells will result in a fluorescence signal if the MBs hybridize to target mRNAs. Thus, when the target mRNAs correspond to the molecular markers of a cancer, cancer cells (bright) can be distinguished from normal cells (dark doc24315 none This project involves a novel approach to the representation of sub-grid scale physics based on the assumption that there is self-similarity between the unresolved scales and the finest scales resolved. Computational geometry techniques will be used to represent structures seen in the resolved scales; optimization techniques will be used to quantify the relation between similar structures at different scales; finally self-similarity will be used to extrapolate these structures to unresolved scales. The techniques developed will be tested by applying them to two classes of dynamical simulations. The first is airflow over rough terrain and the second is groundwater transport in complex porous media. The work is a collaboration between mathematicians and scientists working in the area of environmental fluid mechanics. It will offer interdisciplinary research training, bridging mathematics, computational science and geophysical fluid flow, to graduate students doc24253 none This project is an application of modern Bayesian hierarchical methods of statistical analysis to the problem of ocean state estimation. The goal is to use this statistical technique to combine hydrographic data, dynamical constraints, and knowledge about the uncertainties in both observations and dynamical assumptions, to arrive at: (a) slowly varying maps of oceanic property fields on a selection of isopycnals in the North Atlantic, (b) an estimate of the probability distribution function for possible states of the North Atlantic circulation consistent with the available data. The project unites statisticians and ocean scientists and provides training in interdisciplinary research for a graduate student and two post-doctoral researchers doc24317 none This project will be a five-week summer school on the topic of spatio-temporal statistical analysis and its application to multi-platform, multi-sensor bio-optical oceanic data. The summer school seeks to address some of the analysis challenges anticipated as the Integrated Ocean Observing System is established. These are associated with the very diverse range of spatial and temporal sampling afforded by the different components of such a system and contemporaneous process experiments. Statistical experts in spatial information engineering with experience in collaboration with ocean scientists will discuss some of the modern tools for statistical analysis of such data and associated challenges, while ocean scientists will introduce students to the data and the underlying science questions. The primary focus will be on analysis of the distribution of phytoplankton, which is known to be a patchy and intermittent field, the interpretation of measurements of which are complicated by advection. This should serve as a model for the study of statistical techniques that can then be applied to other environmental fields. An interdisciplinary group of approximately 16 students will be recruited, half with background in mathematical sciences and half with ocean science backgrounds. The goal is to introduce students to interdisciplinary research questions and provide stimulating ideas that they can subsequently apply in their dissertation research doc24250 none Increasing our understanding of sea ice dynamics is vital because of the role sea ice plays in global atmospheric and ocean dynamics. In particular, the ability to better predict the opening of cracks in the ice, or leads, will improve our understanding of the Earth s weather, climate and ecology, as well as our ability to navigate Artic waters. Existing ice models have been of limited usefulness for forecasting the location and orientation of new leads and make no attempt to calculate the degree to which any given lead will open for predicted, or even observed forcing conditions. Even if effective models existed, until recently, there have been no data available for verification. We propose research that will exploit two significant developments and will ultimately allow accurate predictions of lead opening and orientation. First, motion of material points on large-scale regions of the Arctic ice cover have been recorded and are now available for complete winter seasons. Second, theoretical and numerical procedures have been recently developed for describing crack formation through the use of cohesive crack models. The proposed research is to develop a multi-scale, computational procedure to predict crack initiation, orientation, and width, in sea ice, under an observed set of loading conditions, and to verify the procedure using the newly available data. The successful completion of the research will set the stage for the next generation of models and numerical procedures in which realistic geophysical forces can be used to predict the detailed behavior of the Arctic ice cover. For the first time, large-scale motion data are available for points on the Artic ice cover. This unique dataset, produced by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), is derived from high-resolution, spaceborn, Synthetic Aperature Radar (SAR) imagery, acquired by the RADARSAT satellite. These data are exactly what is needed to form a complete picture of ice deformation. A striking aspect of these images is linear features indicating the formation of leads, or openings in the sea ice. The ability to better predict the opening of leads will improve our understanding of the Earth s weather, climate and ecology, as well as our ability to navigate Artic waters. Existing ice models have been of limited usefulness for forecasting the location and orientation of new leads and make no attempt to calculate the degree to which any given lead will open for predicted, or even observed forcing conditions. Even if effective models existed, until recently, there have been no data available for verification. We propose to use the JPL data to develop and verify new material models for sea ice in order to predict crack initiation, orientation, and width. The successful completion of the research will set the stage for the next generation of models and numerical procedures in which realistic geophysical forces can be used to predict the detailed behavior of the Arctic ice cover. Moreover, sea ice is a central element in the Earth s climate system. An accurate ice model will benefit our ability to understand past climatic variability and to improve predictive capabilities through its inclusion in global ocean and climate models doc24309 none Collaborative Research: CMG Research: Statistical Seismic Imaging A. Levander, W.W. Symes, S. Minkoff Both the crystalline crust and the shallow near surface ( 100m depth) environment are complex, mechanically heterogeneous regions, often having spatial distributions of mechanical properties that are distinctly different from the relatively smoothly layered sedimentary column. Exploration seismology is currently one of the most important means of exploring the subsurface: for petroleum in the sedimentary column, for geotechnical environmental purposes in the shallow subsurface, and for understanding of tectonic processes in the crystalline crust. Reflection seismology was developed by the petroleum industry to explore the sedimentary column, i.e., the medium is layered, the preponderance of energy is singly scattered, and scales are dichotomous. Its applications in both the near-surface environment and the deep crust have been very successful but also present problems not usually encountered in petroleum exploration. The near surface is subjected to chemical and mechanical weathering processes that produce a highly heterogeneous, nonlayered medium. Mechanical properties can vary by an order of magnitude within a few wavelengths due to compaction, chemical alteration, and the presence or absence of water. The crystalline crust, although lacking order of magnitude changes in mechanical properties, has a spatially complex, often self-affine (fractal) distribution of seismic velocity and density heterogeneities. For the relatively long path propagation in the crust, the wavefield often falls in a strong scattering regime in which linear imaging systems will produce mediocre or nonsensical results. This research program makes first steps toward a complementary imaging paradigm for complex media, termed statistical seismic imaging, in which statistical properties of the subsurface are mapped using statistical properties of the seismic wavefield. As this is an extremely large topic, the proposal scope will be limited to a few areas of endeavor. The investigations will explore (1) effective models relating subwavelength scale heterogeneity to macro-scale propagation effects (effective mechanical properties, velocity, attenuation, dispersion, etc), (2) the extent to which multiple reflection and refraction can be differentiated and their effects on traditional seismic imaging, and (3) the identification of the onset of strong scattering. The research involves a high level of software development and computational effort, including 3D seismic simulation and nonlinear inversion for material properties and statistics. No single discipline possesses the tools to make significant progress on statistical seismic imaging: expertise in geophysics, applied math, and high performance computing are needed. The principal investigators have expertise in these areas. The research has the potential of improving societally important environmental geotechnical investigations as well as more fundamental research on the structure and tectonics of the Earth s crust doc11552 none This grant will support a preliminary study of the uses of information technologies to support multilateral collaborations between two South American countries in the topic area of drug abuse and trafficking. Important topics to be surmounted include the many differences in infrastructure and processes related to data gathering, and the differing legal and security regimes in place. There will be an element of multi-lingualism to be explored also. The collaboration will begin with the support and approval of the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission of the Organization of American States (OAS). The Commission has developed a process and procedures for multilateral government evaluation of various drug abuse parameters, which will serve as the context in which to evaluate collaboration technologies research. Researchers from several US universities and the OAS will participate doc24321 none Climate simulation is a grand challenge problem requiring multiple, century-long integrations of the equations governing the Earth s atmosphere. Recently, it has been recognized that localized flow structures may play an important role in obtaining the correct climate signal. Higher-resolution climate simulations may be required in the near future at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and other climate modeling centers in convergence studies and to assess model uncertainty. Rather than increase resolution uniformly over the entire sphere, recent developments in adaptive mesh refinement techniques may be applicable to atmospheric general circulation models. High-order polynomial based spectral element and discontinous Galerkin methods offer the geometric flexibility required to implement adaptive methods and also exhibit the exponential convergence of the traditional spectral transform approach. The spectral element dynamical core is ideally suited to high-performance parallel computers based on microprocessors and a team at NCAR was awarded second place in the IEEE ACM Gordon Bell competition for achieving 370 Gigaflops, representing a sustained climate simulation rate of over 100 years per day. This work represents a major advance in geophysical fluid flow simulations. By implementing an adaptive non-conforming spectral element dynamical core for atmospheric general circulation models, we propose to study how small scale flow features develop and feedback to larger scales. We also plan to study simple idealized physical forcings in this context and explore, with NCAR and university researchers, how adaptive multi-scale physical parameterizations can be implemented. Weather and climate simulation is an extremely complex problem that requires many long time computer modeling runs for the Earth s atmosphere. Recently, with the advances in computer power and with advances in the understanding of the dynamics, it has been recognized that local flow structures can play an important role in determining specific weather and climate conditions. Computer models should thus advance to fully resolve these structures in an efficient way. This project is concerned with the development of new, efficient computer models that will automatically resolve local features while providing overall accuracy. The impact on the next generation of weather and climate models should be significant. Date: June 28, doc24299 none Funds are provided to process the data collected on two geophysical cruises in the Sea of Marmara. The PIs will combine the results from the collected chirp, sidescan, and bathymetric data with detailed sedimentology of piston cores and land-based observations to work out the configuration of the fault zone and to determine the history of paleoseismicity by correlating submarine landslides and turbidites to individual paloearthquakes. The work will have important societal relevance as it will lead to better understanding of the nature of deformation associated with the earthquakes and their history in the region doc24323 none Nonlinear problems with multiple scales, heterogeneity, and uncertainty are pervasive in science and engineering. In this context, analytical theories are limited by unrealistic modeling assumptions, and extensive large-scale physical experiments are impractical. Computational modeling and experimentation, the third methodology of science, has a critical role to play in conjunction with theory and physical experiments. This project combines the three methodologies to study multiphase flow in porous media, specifically the remediation of groundwater contaminated by dense nonaqueous-phase liquids (DNAPLs). Field scales are much too large for small-scale effects to be directly representable in practical computations. Multiphase flow in heterogeneous subsurface formations involves local phenomena at material interfaces whose valid effective representation at larger scales is not understood. Uncertainty is central, because of the lack of complete or precise data, and because of the randomness of small-scale properties and flows when viewed from a larger scale. The project develops a nonlinear upscaling methodology based on a macro-scale stochastic theory of multiphase flow and transport that accounts for local phenomena at micro-scale material interfaces. The theory is applied numerically, so that limiting theoretical assumptions are local in space and time. The model is validated by multiple-scale heterogeneous laboratory experiments, using realistic chemicals and soil properties, that creates a physical Monte Carlo database for comparison. Environmental restoration is important to society. Remediation of contaminated groundwater often requires the study of the simultaneous flow of multiple non-mixing fluids through porous subsurface soils and rocks. These aquifers consist of many different materials and exhibit features such as layers and faults on a multitude of scales, all of which affect the fluid flow. In small-scale detail, these effects are uncertain in practical situations, because available data are insufficient to describe the subsurface precisely, and because these details are quite random from the standpoint of the larger field scale at which a hydrologist wants to analyze the appropriate strategy for a remediation project. This project develops a methodology that enables a scientist to describe the aquifer at the field scale, so that strategies can be formulated and tested in the setting where they will be applied. This upscaling methodology based on probabilistic concepts is an advance with wide implications beyond environmental restoration itself, important as it is, because similar issues arise throughout science and engineering. The project s combination of theory, computation, and physical experiments requires the close interdisciplinary collaboration of a mathematician and a geoscientist doc24324 none May 22, is the closing date for NSF s High Performance Network Connections (02-73) solicitation. HPNC proposals are complex documents that include many nuances and requirements. This workshop will take the participants through the proposal preparation process and assist investigators in developing their proposals. This workshop will cover the technical, administrative and research justifications that are required, and the workshop will address budget, format and narrative requirements. The workshop will be a one day, hands-on event where the participants actually begin preparation of their HPNC proposal. The day will be divided into sessions that will focus on key areas of the proposal development process. Mentors will open each session with a brief discussion of the area of the proposal being addressed in the session. Then, the mentors will be available for questions and advice during the time allotted for proposal writing. Each session will contain actual proposal writing time doc24323 none Nonlinear problems with multiple scales, heterogeneity, and uncertainty are pervasive in science and engineering. In this context, analytical theories are limited by unrealistic modeling assumptions, and extensive large-scale physical experiments are impractical. Computational modeling and experimentation, the third methodology of science, has a critical role to play in conjunction with theory and physical experiments. This project combines the three methodologies to study multiphase flow in porous media, specifically the remediation of groundwater contaminated by dense nonaqueous-phase liquids (DNAPLs). Field scales are much too large for small-scale effects to be directly representable in practical computations. Multiphase flow in heterogeneous subsurface formations involves local phenomena at material interfaces whose valid effective representation at larger scales is not understood. Uncertainty is central, because of the lack of complete or precise data, and because of the randomness of small-scale properties and flows when viewed from a larger scale. The project develops a nonlinear upscaling methodology based on a macro-scale stochastic theory of multiphase flow and transport that accounts for local phenomena at micro-scale material interfaces. The theory is applied numerically, so that limiting theoretical assumptions are local in space and time. The model is validated by multiple-scale heterogeneous laboratory experiments, using realistic chemicals and soil properties, that creates a physical Monte Carlo database for comparison. Environmental restoration is important to society. Remediation of contaminated groundwater often requires the study of the simultaneous flow of multiple non-mixing fluids through porous subsurface soils and rocks. These aquifers consist of many different materials and exhibit features such as layers and faults on a multitude of scales, all of which affect the fluid flow. In small-scale detail, these effects are uncertain in practical situations, because available data are insufficient to describe the subsurface precisely, and because these details are quite random from the standpoint of the larger field scale at which a hydrologist wants to analyze the appropriate strategy for a remediation project. This project develops a methodology that enables a scientist to describe the aquifer at the field scale, so that strategies can be formulated and tested in the setting where they will be applied. This upscaling methodology based on probabilistic concepts is an advance with wide implications beyond environmental restoration itself, important as it is, because similar issues arise throughout science and engineering. The project s combination of theory, computation, and physical experiments requires the close interdisciplinary collaboration of a mathematician and a geoscientist doc23676 none The goal of this project is to gain a mechanistic understanding of the influences of climate variation on the population dynamics and production of target zooplankton species on Georges Bank (Calanus finmarchicus, Pseudocalanus moultoni, P. newmani, and Oithona similis) through its effects on advective transport, temperature, food availability, and predator fields. Using data analysis and models as tools, results acquired during the first three phases of GLOBEC are being incorporated into a new synthesis of the physical and biological processes regulating zooplankton abundance on the Bank. Physical models will be forced with measured daily, interannually variable data, and coupled to biological models synthesizing the detailed observations collected during the GLOBEC program. To understand the role of advection, and to disentangle the effects of physical and biological processes, a hierarchy of physical and biological models are being developed. These include 1-, 2-, and 3- D physical models, ecosystem models, and individual-based models (IBMs) for the target species. The IBMs are being coupled to 1D physical models designed to represent the characteristic environments of the different Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank subregions. Ultimately, the IBMs will be coupled to the full 3D physical ecosystem model through particle tracking. This will provide a physical and biological milieu in which to develop and probe hypotheses regarding the combined influences of physical and biological factors on the copepod population dynamics. Although the population dynamics in all broadscale survey years will be studied, initial investigations are concentrating on , and . The data sets are the most complete for these years, and SeaWiFS data are available for and . These years also represent a wide range of environmental conditions: an extensive winter bloom in the Gulf of Maine in related to Scotian Shelf inflow and increased stratification; a slightly warmer year in ; and stronger storm activity in than . In addition , and to a lesser extent , gave the indication of being strong years for haddock recruitment but apparently not for cod. Specific issues that are being investigated include: wind control of the advective supply of the target zooplankton species to Georges Bank during January-April; interannual and or event-level variations in the advective flux of Calanus finmarchicus to Gulf of Maine basin diapausing populations during June-April; interannual and or event-level variations in advective losses of copepods from Georges Bank and bank subregions; the influence of stratification on the planktonic ecosystem, and how this affects the population dynamics of the target zooplankton species through food and predation. As a link to Phase IV synthesis studies on target ichthyoplankton, this investigation provides mechanistic insight into the factors determining production of copepod prey for larval cod and haddock on the Bank. A number of students will be trained over the course of the Phase IV research. These students are being trained as broadly educated researchers adept at combining techniques from a variety of disciplines in their work. In addition, this is the first major independent funding source since graduation for two young investigators (Pringle, Gentleman doc24327 none This CAREER grant seeks funding for a systematic research program aimed at investigating the root causes of the underachievement of African American students in science. An important part of this project will be to use the research findings to propose and field test classroom intervention programs aimed at enabling teachers to help African American Students improvement their achievement. The work builds on that of Ogbu who has written extensively on the question of academic performance of minority students in American schools. A specific research question is how the performance of these students in science is affected by their language use. Both quantitative and qualitative research methods will be used. Individual students and teachers as well as classrooms will be used as units of analysis doc24306 none A combination of mathematical and numerical modeling, laboratory experiments, field experiments, and three-dimensional data visualization techniques will be applied to the problem of determining the influence of the microscale pore structure of sea-ice on the macroscopic thermodynamic and fluid transport properties of such ice. The work represents a collaboration between a mathematician, a glaciologist and a computer scientist. A variety of mathematical approaches, including both lattice and continuum percolation representations, to modeling the bulk properties of irregular three-dimensional media will be applied to ice with varying degrees of connectivity between microscale brine inclusions. Field and lab experiments, including MRI and X-ray imaging of ice samples, will be combined with modern three-dimensional rendering of the resulting data to provide quantitative and qualitative information about the variability of such connectivity, particularly as a function of ice temperature. Model predictions of macroscopic permeability and thermal conductivity will be compared to experimentally measured transport properties. Through a collaboration with Dr. J. Fry at Victoria University, New Zealand, and student research projects, the models developed for transport in sea-ice will be extended to fluid migration through rock and the diffusion of gas through glacial firn. The latter is an important factor in the interpretation of paleo-atmospheric composition from bubbles trapped in ice-cores. The project also includes a substantial amount of training and outreach, with field work for graduate and undergraduate students, and classroom demonstrations and experiments in elementary and secondary schools doc24329 none It has recently been observed that the majority of precipitation in water-limited ecosystems comes in large, sporadic storm events and that these pulse events, rather than annual mean precipitation, may be the more significant manner by which to characterize precipitation. This workshop will examine the effects of pulse events in precipitation in arid and semi-arid environments at multiple biological scales. The timing, length and intensity of rainfall events is naturally variable in these ecosystems and is thought to govern the life history strategies of its inhabitants, population dynamics, community change, resilience to invasion, soil nutrient dynamics and ecosystem nutrient fluxes. As a consequence of global warming, precipitation patterns are expected to change in arid and semi-arid ecosystems worldwide. The purpose of this workshop is to convene a diverse group of international researchers in order to facilitate interregional and interdisciplinary exchange, data synthesis, theory development and training. The workshop will produce a review article targeted for a broadly read ecological journal along with website resources for researchers, educators and professionals doc24330 none This project is a three-week summer school that looks at the interactions between atmospheric and oceanic sciences on the one hand and modern applied mathematics on the other. It is built around the three themes of numerics, stochastics and asymptotics. The numerics component emphasizes the development of modern conservative advection schemes and interface tracking schemes for geophysical transport problems. The asymptotics component emphasizes the dynamics of balanced flows, reduced models and homogenization. The stochastics component covers a variety of topics including particle models, stochastic calculus, kinetic theory and applications to Lagrangian stirring and moist convection. Approximately 15 faculty provide lectures and mentor the students as they conduct short projects to apply the lecture material. The student body consists of 20 or more graduate students and approximately 12 post-doctoral researchers. Faculty and students are drawn from both the geosciences and the mathematics communities doc24331 none Garnero The purpose of this proposed research is to employ two methods from the field of applied mathematics to seismic tomography; each is focused on the goal of improved imaging of spatial data. This work is a collaborative effort between geophysicist Ed Garnero and two applied mathematicians, Anne Gelb and Rosie Renaut. This effort will train two graduate students in a cross-disciplinary approach between the fields of applied math and seismology. While 3D images of Earth s mantle have come in clearer focus over the last 25 years, many challenges remain, most notably because of incomplete data coverage. Inversions of seismic data require smoothing and damping that effectively blurs resulting images. The investigators are motivated to better resolve the gradients and shapes of seismic velocity heterogeneity since they relate to temperature and or compositional changes in Earth s interior. The project will employ the following two methods. (1) Data reprocessing and inversion methods: deconvolution methods will be used to intelligently preprocess differential travel time computations. Inversion may also be improved by regularization through a total variation type penalty term. (2) Image reconstruction methods: apply the Gegenbauer reconstruction method for high resolution post-processing reconstruction, which has proven effective for removing Gibbs oscillations without compromising the finer image features even near jump discontinuities in other applications, such as magnetic resonance imaging. The tasks can be summarized as follows. (1) Pre-inversion processing: travel time series cleanup evaluated for blind and knowledge-based deconvolution, approximated from structural models of the Earth s interior. (2) Inversion experiments: determine effectiveness of a total variation regularization model, particularly in conjunction with the impact on post-inversion processing. (3) Post-inversion processing: sharpen images through removal of artifacts with the Gegenbauer reconstruction method. (4) Assess solution images with data: data from geographical regions with best data coverage will be analyzed and modeled to test solution structures doc24332 none Paul H. Roberts Earth s dynamo, which is responsible for the geomagnetic field, is a geosystem involving a broad range of interacting scales, a complex geometry and a rich variety of physical processes. Numerical simulations resolve only the largest-scale features; most parameterizations of the smaller, subgrid scale processes simulate dissipative processes only, and are incapable of simulating non-dissipative processes which affect transfers of energy among differing spatial scales. Exceptions to this statement are the recently developed similarity and Navier-Stokes-alpha models. Core dynamics is strongly affected by the action of the Coriolis and Lorentz forces, making the fields both anisotropic and non-local. Recent studies have provided valuable insight into these processes, which will help motivate generalized models that accurately account for these forces. This project will develop better parameterizations of subgrid processes in Earth s core by incorporating into the similarity and Navier-Stokes-alpha models, knowledge of the structure of the small-scale fields. The project will involve a combination of numerical simulation and theoretical analysis employing not only simplified models that isolate physical processes and analytical issues, but also realistic geodynamo models. The research will be undertaken by a group of mathematicians and geoscientists from US institutions and from abroad under the supervision of a management group. The project will foster interactions between members of the dynamo collective, and it is expected that further collaborations will result from the annual workshops that will be organized and partially supported by the project. It is anticipated that improved parameterization of subgrid processes in rotating magnetoconvection will interest all who wish to study magnetism and dynamos in other planets and in stars. It is believed that many of these people will wish to participate in the planned workshops. An improved numerical model of the geodynamo will be of interest to a second group of geoscientists and mathematicians who seek to quantify the structure, dynamics and history of the interior of our planet doc24333 none Genetic transformation of plants by Agrobacterium tumefaciens is the only documented case of gene transfer to eukaryotes in nature. As such, this system has attracted a great deal of attention from a broad scientific audience concerned with its biology, its use in unraveling complex problems in plant genetics and its biotechnological applications in creating transgenic plants. Recent findings have broadened the possible applications of Agrobacterium as a vector for the transfer of DNA to fungi, oomycetes and animals. Using cDNA-AFLP analysis, our laboratory demonstrated that Agrobacterium and E.coli alter the expression of plant defense and stress response genes of Ageratum conyzoides cells in culture. However, Agrobacterium also induced a gene encoding a nodulin-like protein which was not altered by E.coli suggesting that Agrobacterium can induce specific host genes. The project expands on these observations and will study global expression in cell cultures of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana using high density microarray technology. Cell cultures of Arabidopsis will be cocultivated for 24 hours with E.coli as well as transfer proficient Agrobacterium and mutants blocked at different major steps in the infection process. Comparing the genes expressed using microarrays will reveal these genes that are specifically altered by Agrobacterium. Comparing the alterations in gene expression induced by the transfer proficient strain with the mutants will begin to identify genetic factors responsible for these alterations. The effects observed using the first set of mutants will be further refined by using additional mutants blocked at single steps in the infection process. The results of these experiments should provide insight into the unique genetic factors of the near symbiont Agrobacterium which provides its ability to overcome host defenses and ultimately lead to the transfer of DNA to a remarkably wide range of plants and other eukaryotic cells doc2809 none This proposal addresses fundamental physical issues impacting the growing area of integration of high-frequency electronics with optoelectronics and photonics. Our focus is the optical properties of semiconductors (quantum wells, wires, and dots) in the presence of strong dc and high-frequency (GHz-THz) electric fields. In particular, we will concentrate on cases where the high-frequency field is applied capacitively, i.e., it does not introduce additional carriers. The particular phenomena we will consider involve an interplay of ultrafast carrier dynamics in high-frequency fields, screening of the field by the spatial motions of the carrier distributions, propagation effects of the high-frequency field, and the interaction of the carrier distributions with light. Thus, the work will unite both micro and macroscopic length scales as well as dynamics on the femto to nanosecond timescales. Our effort will be primarily theoretical and computational. Together with our experimental collaborators, we will study the spatio-dynamics of carriers in photoconductors, semiconductor optical amplifier, and VCSEL s in the presence of the high-frequency fields. In the phenomena we will explore, the spatial aspects play a key role; on the one hand, we will be concerned with how such high-frequency fields adversely perturb the operation of optoelectronics and photonics, while on the other, we will explore potential phenomena for device applications. Potential applications include ultrahigh-bandwidth optical switching, enhanced photoconductive THz generation, ultrahigh-speed optical modulators, lateral mode control from semiconductor light emitters, and ultrahigh-speed beem steering doc24335 none This award is to support research that will develop an aquaculture-based calibration of the M. edulis paleothermometer. A secondary goal is the application of the calibrated paleothermometer to fossil M. edulis shells from coastal Maine. The research team will design and develop aquaculture-based techniques for monitoring M. edulis growth in controlled water conditions. They will then document vital effects due to different age environmental conditions as well as those arising from different locations (Maine Greenland). Finally age location-specific transfer functions will be generated for temperate and polar regions. The broader impacts of this proposed research are that it will lead to a better understanding of an important paleothermometer. Ultimately, better paleotemperature estimates lead to a better understanding of the climate system and our ability to hindcast different climate states and forecast future climate change scenarios doc24336 none This research would extend NSF-funded research on home mortgage lending. Despite high levels of inequality in home ownership across races, ethnic groups, and neighborhoods in the United States, recent trends among minorities and low-income groups reveal record high levels of home ownership. In aiming to understand this development, this project examines how the race and income of both individuals and neighborhoods affect home mortgage lending to underserved neighborhoods over the last decade. It also gives special attention to the institutional factors responsible for changes in lending and the ability of minority and low-income groups to purchase homes. On one hand, banking deregulation may have increased competition in ways that serve all income groups, and new performance guidelines under the Community Reinvestment Act may have prompted lenders covered by the law to do more for underserved markets. On the other hand, institutional factors may have had less positive effects: the rapid changes in the home mortgage lending industry may have resulted in the use of less favorable loan terms, inadequate consumer protection, and financing of poor quality housing. To address these issues, this project analyzes the consequences of institutional changes in home mortgage lending using nation-wide data from - from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. It measures characteristics of the mortgage applicants and lenders, the requested loan amount and the outcome of the request, and the census characteristics of the neighborhood of the housing. The analysis then describes changes over time in the loans made to minority and low-income groups, and in the determinants of the decision to deny a loan application. By extending the previous work of the investigator on Indiana to the nation as a whole, and using an under-studied data source, the project contributes to our understanding of how housing inequality emerges and has changed in recent years. This project extends the original research with a more intensive analysis of the interesting case of South Dakota. Unlike most areas studied in mortgage discrimination research, South Dakota is primarily rural, has a lower level of national bank penetration than usual, and a distinct minority (Native Americans, 8.3% of the population). The smaller state-level scope, as compared to the nationwide data in the original research, will also permit the PI to undertake a more detailed institutional analysis than would be possible at a national level. In addition to the broad categories of institutional type used in the national study, the more intensive South Dakota research can undertake a more inductive analysis by directly comparing the more limited number of lenders (97 in ) on various dimensions of community reinvestment performance doc24337 none EIA- Salim Hariri University of Arizona NGS: The Fourth Annual Workshop on Active Middleware Services (AMS ) and The Third Annual International Workshop on Grid Computing (Grid ) The increasing complexity of the emerging ubiquitous grid network infrastructure in conjunction with active technologies requires additional support for application developers and users. Middleware will play a crucial role in the degree to which active technologies achieve their full potential. Such middleware will in all probability be deployed in grid environments. For these reasons, two workshops are proposed: one in active middleware and another in grid computing. While these two workshops will be held separately, each will bring together leading researchers in their respective fields. Research in related areas will be invited to add their expertise to the discussions. While the main focus of each workshop in different, there is nonetheless a synergy between them. Both could explore the advanced area of active grid middleware doc24338 none The long range goal of this project is to develop an understanding of the connections between the structure of complex enzyme-promoted metabolic networks and their structural capacity to admit more than one steady state. More generally, the Principal Investigator (PI) is interested in connecting his long experience with intricate reaction networks to important problems in both cell biology and biotechnology doc24339 none Congalton In response to an Announcement of Opportunity for the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment Program (GLOBE) this project is designed to meet GLOBE goals and objectives of linking scientists and schoolchildren in a global information network with the ultimate goal of better understanding Earth s environment and changes that take place within it. This proposal consists of various segments addressing GLOBE Program needs: support for existing protocols, development of new protocols, and scientific research with GLOBE data. This proposal will support the current set of GLOBE land cover biology protocols. This project will modify existing protocols, develop and test new ones, and review GLOBE data submitted to the archive. The project will support the overall training and outreach activities of the program, fostering student-scientist partnerships. The scientific issue addressed by this proposal is the need to integrate reference data collection and accuracy assessment (i.e. validation) into land cover data sets generated from remotely sensed data. Other GLOBE protocols provide data that are currently collected by other sources around the world (e.g. temperature, precipitation), however, no other source of regional, continental, much less global validation data is currently being collected anywhere except by GLOBE students. This land cover biology investigation has the double benefit of allowing student to experience the process of science while providing for a unique and valuable validation data set for use by the remote sensing community. This project is collaborating with NASA s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) team to provide the calibration and validation data for this NASA Earth Observing System sensor in order to generate regional land cover maps worldwide. The team is also collaborating with city planners of Auburn, ME, the University of Waikato and the New Zealand Ministry of the Environment s LENZ project. Students will work primarily with Landsat data, as well as learning how to use geographic information systems (GIS) to answer scientific questions about land cover mapping. %%% In response to an Announcement of Opportunity for the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment Program (GLOBE) this project is designed to meet GLOBE goals and objectives of linking scientists and schoolchildren in a global information network with the ultimate goal of better understanding Earth s environment and changes that take place within it. This proposal consists of various segments addressing GLOBE Program needs: support for existing protocols, development of new protocols, and scientific research with GLOBE data. This proposal will support the current set of GLOBE land cover biology protocols. This project will modify existing protocols, develop and test new ones, and review GLOBE data submitted to the archive. The project will support the overall training and outreach activities of the program, fostering student-scientist partnerships. The scientific issue addressed by this proposal is the need to integrate reference data collection and accuracy assessment (i.e. validation) into land cover data sets generated from remotely sensed data. Other GLOBE protocols provide data that are currently collected by other sources around the world (e.g. temperature, precipitation), however, no other source of regional, continental, much less global validation data is currently being collected anywhere except by GLOBE students. This land cover biology investigation has the double benefit of allowing student to experience the process of science while providing for a unique and valuable validation data set for use by the remote sensing community. This project is collaborating with NASA s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) team to provide the calibration and validation data for this NASA Earth Observing System sensor in order to generate regional land cover maps worldwide. The team is also collaborating with city planners of Auburn, ME, the University of Waikato and the New Zealand Ministry of the Environment s LENZ project. Students will work primarily with Landsat data, as well as learning how to use geographic information systems (GIS) to answer scientific questions about land cover mapping doc24340 none Although most stomatal responses to environmental factors appear to be sensed and transduced within the guard cells, circumstantial evidence suggests that this is not the case for the stomatal response to humidity. This project investigates the possibility that small changes in turgor pressure in the mesophyll or epidermal cells initiates a cellular signaling pathway that ultimately leads to changes in guard cell osmotic pressure associated with stomatal responses to humidity. The influence of humidity changes on intercellular concentrations of Ca2+ and components of phosphoinositide signaling pathways will be assessed in both epidermal and mesophyll cells. HPLC will be used to quantify components of the phosphoinositide signaling pathway, and fluorescent probes will be used to quantify intercellular Ca2+ concentrations. For the latter experiments, a ratiometric fluorescent calcium indicator protein (cameleon) has been expressed in Arabidopsis thaliana. The project will provide new insights into the mechanism for the stomatal response to humidity. This response has a major effect on the overall water use efficiency of plants in both natural and agricultural settings doc24341 none In response to an Announcement of Opportunity for the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment Program (GLOBE) this project is designed to meet GLOBE goals and objectives of linking scientists and schoolchildren in a global information network with the ultimate goal of better understanding Earth s environment and changes that take place within it. This proposal will continue to support existing protocols, and conduct scientific research with GLOBE data. The project will continue to support the protocol for the measurement of Atmospheric Aerosol Optical Thickness (AOT), which is based on an inexpensive hand-held sun photometer, and or sky-color cards. Measurements of AOT will introduce students to the connections between air pollution, natural events such as dust storms and forest fires, variations in surface insolation, and incidences of asthma. More advanced students can use the data in studies of Beer s law for radiative transfer. These measurements will enhance data from extremely sparse networks of ground-based AOT observations. Reducing the uncertainties in the global radiative transfer effects of the aerosols s currently one of the highest scientific priorities of the climate studies community. Local and global environmental conditions are affected by the presence of atmospheric haze layers. Visibility is a major parameter in environmental quality in its own right and haze layers affect the surface radiative transfer balance of Earth as well as influencing optical remote sensing measurements which are a major source on information for study of global environmental change. In addition, presence of high amounts of aerosols is thought to aggravate certain bronchial conditions, such as asthma. Students will be contributing quantitative measurements to the study of haze layers doc24342 none Quantities that serve in paleoclimatology as proxy data for temperature, such as oxygen isotope ratios measured in seabed cores, reveal periodicities ranging from about to 100,000 years. These cycles are caused by a combination of external forcing by known changes in the Earth s orbital parameters (so-called Milankovitch forcing) and by little-understood, complex, nonlinear, and usually nonstationary interactions of different atmospheric and oceanic processes. To now, the statistical tools most commonly employed for analyzing the records have been spectral techniques and correlation analysis based on the assumption of statistical stationarity. This project examines the effects of nonlinear and nonstationary processes on the climate record of the last 5 million years by employing modern statistical techniques that have not previously seen much use in paleoclimatology. These include time-frequency analysis to characterize the non-stationarity in terms of frequency and phase modulation, and bispectral and cross-spectral analysis to different combinations of climate variables to recognize nonlinear couplings. One of the objectives of the project, which is supported jointly by the Division of Atmospheric Sciences and the Division of Mathematical Sciences, is to make these statistical methods available to the paleoclimate community by offering software to students and researchers and arranging a workshop devoted to the subject doc2450 none Award: Principal Investigator: Sumio Yamada The two main subjects of the proposed research are Teichmueller spaces of compact Riemann surfaces of genus greater than one and the universal Teichmueller space, which can be identified with the diffeomorphism group of the circle. There is a natural Riemannian metric on both classical and universal Teichmueller spaces, called the Weil-Petersson metric. Although those spaces are not symmetric spaces, and there are no classical Lie groups acting on them isometrically (unlike the hyperbolic spaces with the special linear group), one notes that on the classical Teichmueller spaces the mapping class group of the Riemann surfaces acts isometrically, and that on the universal Teichmueller space the diffeomorphism group of the circle acts isometrically. These group actions on Teichmueller spaces can be utilized to construct flat bundles over various manifolds with its fibers being copies of Teichmueller spaces, which leads to the questions of strong super rigidity. It is in this context that the investigator intends to use the Weil-Petersson geometry of Teichmueller spaces. The subject of Riemann surfaces has been one of the central themes of modern mathematics over the last two centuries. In recent years, it has received renewed attention due to the interest created by the so-called super-string theory, with which physicists hope to construct the grand unifying theory (GMT) of graviation and quantum physics. The Teichmueller space, which is the subject of this investigation, plays an important role since it is known to parametrizes the shapes of the string. Interactions between mathematics and theoretical physics have proved to be fruitful for both sides, and it is the investigator s belief that the proposed research may offer some new way of understanding the outstanding issues in the relevant scientific fields doc24344 none A National Workshop on Future Sensing Systems and Objectives Recent technological advancements in material science, micro fabrication of MEMS, and bioengineered systems, have made the dream of inexpensive, powerful, ubiquitous sensing a readily achievable reality. With ubiquitous sensing comes extreme amounts of data, when the end user actually wants information (decisions and answers). Integration of distributed computing and extremely dispersed networking with new sensor technologies and wireless communications innovations, has the potential to overcome barriers of time, scale, materials and environment. Sensor informatics has not been seen as fundamental to the sensor community to date, although all experts polled for this document agreed it is central to real-time usability. We propose a National Workshop on future Sensing Systems - a vehicle to start researchers on the road to integrating the possibilities being developed by the many interests working in the common space. The workshop will focus on exposing future abilities of various disciplines working on new sensor science to other researchers possibly doing similar or complimentary work in their local space. Integration of industrial research and application development will provide that pull and an avenue to large-scale, inexpensive production. An example is the current availability of rugged, highly accurate, MEMS accelerometers due to their application as automotive air-bag triggers. It is hoped, for instance, that the medical researchers will become aware of advanced imaging technologies developed by DARPA to image non-metallic structural pieces, and can become an improvement on existing bio-imaging techniques. We hope to push the community to (1) move from merely providing data to providing information and answers; (2) build road maps for long-term research; (3) build broad partnerships; and (4) address educational needs. These opportunities and problems are common to many agencies of Government, as well as industry and academia, and is to be sponsored by Sensors Technology, NSF Division of Civil and Mechanical Systems, with co-sponsorship from Dynamic Systems and Control (CMS), DARPA, NIH, DOE, NIST, NASA, AFOSR, ONR, ARO, ARL, and NRL. We are expecting over 100 attendees, with 70 of them university researchers for whom all expenses will be covered by this proposal. The hard deliverable to NSF will be a workshop report which will serve as the leading edge for future of sensor-oriented research at the Civil and Mechanical Systems Division, NSF. The report will be written by the co-PIs (Glaser and Pister) with extensive guidance and input from the steering committee and participants. The report will be presented to NSF by 15 January, doc24345 none Yi-Sun Sea ice is a dominant feature of marine ecosystems in the Arctic. Its presence impacts Arctic marine ecosystems, especially on the shelves where benthic and pelagic systems are extensively coupled. If the extent and thickness of sea ice continue to decline, a shift is predicted in the type of algal material reaching the benthos (from ice algae to phytoplankton), which will potentially impact the food requirements of the benthos. Several pieces of evidence show that both types of ice algae (below-ice ice algae dominated by Melosira arctica and within-ice ice algae dominated by Nitzchia frigida) presently reach the benthos in significant quantities. This research effort will investigate the digestibility of ice algae and phytoplankton-derived organic matter by the Arctic macrobenthos. From the perspective of a macrofaunal organism, digestibility includes three separate components: 1) selection (is encountered organic material ingested or rejected?); 2) absorption (is ingested organic material absorbed during passage through the gut, or does it get egested in the feces?); and 3) assimilation (is absorbed organic material assimilated into biomass?). Assessment of long-term assimilation of the various types of algae (within-ice ice algae; below-ice ice algae; and phytoplankton) will be conducted by determining lipid biomarkers and their isotopic ratios, and by determining CHN and protein signatures of organisms collected during all aspects of the work in both Norway and Kotzebue, Alaska. Assessment of short-term absorption will first use the ash-ratio method in a whole-core delivery experiment. Following the whole-core experiments, dominant taxa from each trophic group will be identified and used in a comparison of absorption efficiencies as calculated by the ash-ratio method, and carbon retention efficiencies as calculated using a pulse-chase radiotracer approach. Finally, the group plans to repeat the dominant taxa absorption efficiency experiments in both Svalbard, Norway at the Ny Aalesund lab and in Kotzebue Sound, Alaska. This proposed project compliments, and will derive synergistic benefits from two projects funded by the Norwegian Research Council in Norway doc24346 none Clough Sea ice is a dominant feature of marine ecosystems in the Arctic. Its presence impacts Arctic marine ecosystems, especially on the shelves where benthic and pelagic systems are extensively coupled. If the extent and thickness of sea ice continue to decline, a shift is predicted in the type of algal material reaching the benthos (from ice algae to phytoplankton), which will potentially impact the food requirements of the benthos. Several pieces of evidence show that both types of ice algae (below-ice ice algae dominated by Melosira arctica and within-ice ice algae dominated by Nitzchia frigida) presently reach the benthos in significant quantities. This research effort will investigate the digestibility of ice algae and phytoplankton-derived organic matter by the Arctic macrobenthos. From the perspective of a macrofaunal organism, digestibility includes three separate components: 1) selection (is encountered organic material ingested or rejected?); 2) absorption (is ingested organic material absorbed during passage through the gut, or does it get egested in the feces?); and 3) assimilation (is absorbed organic material assimilated into biomass?). Assessment of long-term assimilation of the various types of algae (within-ice ice algae; below-ice ice algae; and phytoplankton) will be conducted by determining lipid biomarkers and their isotopic ratios, and by determining CHN and protein signatures of organisms collected during all aspects of the work in both Norway and Kotzebue, Alaska. Assessment of short-term absorption will first use the ash-ratio method in a whole-core delivery experiment. Following the whole-core experiments, dominant taxa from each trophic group will be identified and used in a comparison of absorption efficiencies as calculated by the ash-ratio method, and carbon retention efficiencies as calculated using a pulse-chase radiotracer approach. Finally, the group plans to repeat the dominant taxa absorption efficiency experiments in both Svalbard, Norway at the Ny Aalesund lab and in Kotzebue Sound, Alaska. This proposed project compliments, and will derive synergistic benefits from two projects funded by the Norwegian Research Council in Norway doc24347 none The PI s propose to investigate three specific problems for which there is reason to suspect that the ionosphere strongly influences phenomena previously thought to be driven solely by the magnetosphere. In each of these cases, UV insolation alters the ionosphere (through increasing conductivity, or through increasing polar wind outflows), which in turn may alter the phenomena. Each problem is expected to be solved in about one year with part time effort, yet yield worthwhile results. The first of the three problems is whether intense aurora are affected not only by local ionospheric conductivity, as previously determined, but also by conductivity in the opposite hemisphere. If it is true that southern hemisphere conductivity affects the formation of intense aurora in the northern hemisphere and vice versa, then the influence of ionospheric conductivity has a far more global influence on space weather than previously believed. A second problem is the possible coupling between the outflows associated with polar wind and the inflows from the distant magnetosphere (and ultimately solar wind) of the polar rain. In each case, the greater mobility of electrons leads to the creation of electric fields opposing electron flows, but in the opposite sense. Because the polar wind fluxes, driven by UV insolation, far exceed polar rain fluxes, it is likely the major direction of interaction is that when the polar wind is larger, the polar rain will be driven to higher fluxes. This can be relatively easily checked by determining whether polar rain is more intense when UV insolation is higher. The third problem is whether ionospheric conductivity affects the diffuse aurora (and or total auroral particle precipitation intensity). It is widely assumed that the diffuse aurora represents a direct dumping of the plasma sheet, and there is no obvious reason why it should be much affected by ionospheric conductivity from insolation. However it surprised much of the space physics community to learn that discrete aurora are suppressed by sunlight. There are some anomalies in recent reports in the literature which suggest that it would be well worthwhile investigating whether the direct dumping of the plasma sheet really is indeed independent of the insolation of the ionosphere doc24348 none Large-eddy simulation (LES) is an important computational method for analyzing small-scale atmospheric circulations. Depending on the density of the computational grid, LES can accurately depict eddies and vortices with scales as small as a few meters. Still smaller eddies become increasingly important at altitudes close to the ground. A fundamental problem with LES is that the eddies in the surface layer immediately next to the ground cannot be resolved and must be parameterized - that is, in calculations of the heat and momentum flux in the atmosphere near the ground, the effects of subgrid-scale (SGS) processes must be approximated. The goal of this research is to develop improved models of SGS processes for use in the atmospheric surface layer. The approach is to analyze data taken with a specially designed array of sonic anemometers during the SGS field project conducted in the San Joaquin Valley, California. These data provide unique information on the time and space structure of the wind near the ground with high resolution. The objectives of the work are (1) to investigate the effects of SGS fluxes on resolvable processes by use of joint probability functions of the resolvable velocity components and the resolvable temperature and velocity; (2) to understand the relationship between SGS fluxes and the resolvable velocity and temperature. Together, these will identify characteristics of the SGS flux that are important for resolvable processes and contribute directly to LES modeling. Progress in turbulence modeling is important not only for meteorology but also for other geophysical and engineering applications doc24349 none Ambrose Sea ice is a dominant feature of marine ecosystems in the Arctic. Its presence impacts Arctic marine ecosystems, especially on the shelves where benthic and pelagic systems are extensively coupled. If the extent and thickness of sea ice continue to decline, a shift is predicted in the type of algal material reaching the benthos (from ice algae to phytoplankton), which will potentially impact the food requirements of the benthos. Several pieces of evidence show that both types of ice algae (below-ice ice algae dominated by Melosira arctica and within-ice ice algae dominated by Nitzchia frigida) presently reach the benthos in significant quantities. This research effort will investigate the digestibility of ice algae and phytoplankton-derived organic matter by the Arctic macrobenthos. From the perspective of a macrofaunal organism, digestibility includes three separate components: 1) selection (is encountered organic material ingested or rejected?); 2) absorption (is ingested organic material absorbed during passage through the gut, or does it get egested in the feces?); and 3) assimilation (is absorbed organic material assimilated into biomass?). Assessment of long-term assimilation of the various types of algae (within-ice ice algae; below-ice ice algae; and phytoplankton) will be conducted by determining lipid biomarkers and their isotopic ratios, and by determining CHN and protein signatures of organisms collected during all aspects of the work in both Norway and Kotzebue, Alaska. Assessment of short-term absorption will first use the ash-ratio method in a whole-core delivery experiment. Following the whole-core experiments, dominant taxa from each trophic group will be identified and used in a comparison of absorption efficiencies as calculated by the ash-ratio method, and carbon retention efficiencies as calculated using a pulse-chase radiotracer approach. Finally, the group plans to repeat the dominant taxa absorption efficiency experiments in both Svalbard, Norway at the Ny Aalesund lab and in Kotzebue Sound, Alaska. This proposed project compliments, and will derive synergistic benefits from two projects funded by the Norwegian Research Council in Norway doc24350 none Dates: January 18, -January 20, . Location: Tucson, AZ at the Westin LaPaloma under the auspices of the University of Arizona Until recently, understanding of the organization and development of the primary olfactory pathway lagged far behind understanding of developmental processes in the visual and auditory systems. In the last half decade, however, technical and conceptual breakthroughs have allowed astonishing progress toward understand the olfactory pathway. The proposed conference will provide a timely accounting of the current status of research in olfactory system development. It is designed with three objectives: (1) to identify critical puzzles of olfactory system development that must be solved: (2) to highlight promising approaches to solving these puzzles; and (3) to provide direction for essential research in the next few years. The conference thus will be a working conference, using as its primary mechanism a series of discussion sessions whose moderators and panels will reflect the field s long-standing and productive use of model systems from across the animal kingdom. Seven 2-hour discussion sessions are planned, six of which will focus on the following questions: (1) what processes initiate the formation of the olfactory periphery and the olfactory bulb, the first olfactory processing center in the brain; (2) what molecular patterns govern the formation of the olfactory periphery; (3) how do olfactory receptors and their support cells develop and mature and how malleable is that process; (4) how do olfactory receptor axons find their target region in the developing brain; (5) how are glomeruli formed; and (6) how does behavior influence the circuitry of the olfactory bulb. The seventh session will be a summary session, with a focus on future directions. The conference is intended mainly for members of the broad olfactory community, at all levels including trainees, support for whom is the focus of the current proposal. Several participants whose primary research areas lie in other sensory systems but whose interests lie in related developmental questions also will be invited. Our overriding goal is to emerge with a firm sense of where the field is and where it needs to go, in so doing, setting the stage for future research initiatives that will take the field more rapidly toward revealing the mechanisms underlying olfactory system development. A subsidiary goal is to spark new collaborative interactions among people in the field. We expect that the trainees who will be involved will come away with a much stronger understanding of the critical issues facing the field. They also will have the opportunity to help define the experimental directions needed to resolve those issues. By constructing a venue to facilitate extended discussion, we expect to forge a broader understanding of the implications and limitations of the current research, to cross-fertilize ideas, to set the stage for new collaborations, and to identify necessary avenues for new research doc24351 none P.I. Rognstad, Mark Proposal: Bowen, Andrew The PIs propose to upgrade the DSL-120 sonar mapping system and resolve problems related to the integration of DSL-120A sensors and capabilities. Primary tasks to be completed as part of this work are: 1) Improvement of the signal to noise ratio of the system to enhance the ability to extract useful phase-bathymetry data from the basic sonar system. 2) The PIs will resolve the acoustic interference between the sidescan sonar and the Doppler velocity log (DVL), which has prevented the simultaneous operation of both systems. The inability to use the DVL results in sonar surveys with degraded navigation data, particularly for surveys covering areas too large for continuous transponder navigation. Attempts to synchronize the two sonars during the upgrade were unsuccessful, due to long and variable length latency in the response of the DVL to external triggering. 3) Bathymetric sonar capabilities of the DSL-120A system will be improved to enhance resolution of small-scale features closer to the resolving capabilities of the backscatter imagery. Phase bathymetric sonars like the DSL-120A cannot distinguish acoustic reflections from different parts of the seafloor that arrive at the sonar transducers at the same time - that is, that are the same distance from the tow vehicle. Over a flat bottom, this will be the case for that part of the seafloor closest to the vehicle; in areas with high relief, this can happen in any part of the mapped swath. Multibeam sonar, which combines signals from dozens of hydrophones, can synthesize narrow beams that reject adjacent reflections, giving greatly improved bathymetry in these situations. The capability to operate the SM with the DSL-120A sonar system will be added. The multi-beam system will be synchronized with both DVL and sidescan swath bathymetry sonars, so all three acoustic sensors may be used simultaneously. The proposed improvements will complete the full integration of all the requisite sensors and capabilities of the DSL-120A sonar system. These improvements will improve signal quality of the backscatter and phase-bathymetric sonar, improve navigation through the use of the DVL, and offer the potential for collection of SM near-bottom multibeam data to improve the quality of bathymetric data acquired using the DSL-120A sonar doc24352 none The ACS Division of Polymer Chemistry is sponsoring a three-day meeting entitled, Polymeric Nanomaterials, in Sonoma, California, during the period of November 17-20, . The organizers are A. D. English, B. L. Farmer, and R. A. Vaia. The conference has an outstanding collection of speakers from the U.S., Europe and Japan and anticipates a total attendance of approximately 150 people. They expect that 25 of these attendees will be graduate students and post-doctoral associates. Fees for the students have been discounted by 65% ($425 discount). The PI s request support in the amount of $3,000, to partially offset the expenses associated with underwriting graduate students, post-doctoral associates and younger faculty doc24353 none PIs: Douglas Lind and Selim Tuncel Proposal: Institution: University of Washington This proposal requests funding for a Concentration Year in Dynamical Systems at the University of Washington. A major focus of activity will be a collaborative effort to solve the Furstenberg Conjecture, a central problem in dynamics. Participants in the program will include a mix of long-term participants, including regular faculty, visiting faculty, post-docs, and graduate students at the University of Washington, and short-term visitors. NSF funds will be used to support graduate student travel to conference and workshops and six junior short terms visitors doc24354 none The fixed- or rotary-wings of aerospace vehicles comprise of airfoil sections with carefully designed profiles that are optimum for a certain design flight condition, or represent a compromise with acceptable performance over some range of conditions. The ability of an airfoil section to morph or change its profile, as required, can provide future aerospace vehicles with tremendously improved efficiency and versatility. Morphing airfoil sections would allow a single aircraft to be viable for very low-speed loiter surveillance and high-speed combat missions; or allow a helicopter in high-speed cruise to have a high figure of merit even though the outboard regions of the blades encounter compressibility effects on the advancing side and are close to stall on the retreating side, in every rotor revolution. However, airfoil sections are conventionally designed to be rigid, and must remain so under aerodynamic pressure distributions, even while morphing under actuation loads. This represents a considerable challenge. In the present project, an innovative smart-material based actuation scheme is proposed in conjunction with special skins that are ultra-flexible in extension yet have significant flexural rigidity. The actuation scheme comprises of an array of linkages or vertebrae (with both active and passive members) connected to the upper and lower skins of the airfoil section. In each linkage, extension of the upper active members produces stretching of the upper skin, while contraction of the lower active members produces shrinking of the lower skin, and together they produce a rotation of the passive member. Progressively larger rotations of the successive linkages in the array result in a camber of the airfoil section. Leading-edge droop of the airfoil section is produced in a similar manner. Skins that are highly flexible in extension and compression and can accommodate large elastic strains will be required to achieve significant profile changes. Yet it is required that the skins be flexurally stiff so sections between supports do not deform under aerodynamic surface pressures. Such skins are to be designed using Shape Memory Alloys or Flexible Matrix Composites, in conjunction with innovative geometric configuration. A finite element analysis of the airfoil section with spar, flexible skin and linkages (comprising of active and passive members), will be developed as part of this project. Using design optimization, the geometry of the linkages and the properties of the skin that produce both target as well as maximum profile changes will be determined. Design constraints will include actuator saturation limits, maximum strains on the skin, and rigidity under aerodynamic loading. Both Shape Memory Alloy actuators (for maximum actuation strain capabilities) as well as piezoelectric actuators (for high-frequency capabilities required for helicopters) will be examined. For high-frequency applications, amplification of actuation inputs due to structural resonance will be considered doc24351 none P.I. Rognstad, Mark Proposal: Bowen, Andrew The PIs propose to upgrade the DSL-120 sonar mapping system and resolve problems related to the integration of DSL-120A sensors and capabilities. Primary tasks to be completed as part of this work are: 1) Improvement of the signal to noise ratio of the system to enhance the ability to extract useful phase-bathymetry data from the basic sonar system. 2) The PIs will resolve the acoustic interference between the sidescan sonar and the Doppler velocity log (DVL), which has prevented the simultaneous operation of both systems. The inability to use the DVL results in sonar surveys with degraded navigation data, particularly for surveys covering areas too large for continuous transponder navigation. Attempts to synchronize the two sonars during the upgrade were unsuccessful, due to long and variable length latency in the response of the DVL to external triggering. 3) Bathymetric sonar capabilities of the DSL-120A system will be improved to enhance resolution of small-scale features closer to the resolving capabilities of the backscatter imagery. Phase bathymetric sonars like the DSL-120A cannot distinguish acoustic reflections from different parts of the seafloor that arrive at the sonar transducers at the same time - that is, that are the same distance from the tow vehicle. Over a flat bottom, this will be the case for that part of the seafloor closest to the vehicle; in areas with high relief, this can happen in any part of the mapped swath. Multibeam sonar, which combines signals from dozens of hydrophones, can synthesize narrow beams that reject adjacent reflections, giving greatly improved bathymetry in these situations. The capability to operate the SM with the DSL-120A sonar system will be added. The multi-beam system will be synchronized with both DVL and sidescan swath bathymetry sonars, so all three acoustic sensors may be used simultaneously. The proposed improvements will complete the full integration of all the requisite sensors and capabilities of the DSL-120A sonar system. These improvements will improve signal quality of the backscatter and phase-bathymetric sonar, improve navigation through the use of the DVL, and offer the potential for collection of SM near-bottom multibeam data to improve the quality of bathymetric data acquired using the DSL-120A sonar doc24356 none The long range goal of this project is to investigate a framework that can improve understanding of the topology connectivity of complex biological pathways. This research combines experimental molecular genetics with computational systems biology to develop new approaches for mapping complex signal transduction pathways in eukaryotic cells. The initial system for study is the Ras and Tor pathways in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The research will employ data sets from whole genome expression analysis to develop and validate the pathway map. The research will focus on three avenues of analysis with the objectives: (1) to study a genetic epistasis analysis approach using extensive DNA microarray data to define a qualitative connectivity map of the pathways, (2) investigate a new computational systems approach based on a superstructure representation and a mixed integer linear optimization framework for the prediction of the topology of the complex pathways, and (3) study a quantitative analysis framework for the effect of model uncertainty on the network topology of the metabolic pathways doc24357 none The University of Hawaii Manoa, located on the island of Oahu, will implement the project entitled: Hawai i Kumu-Ola: Source of Knowledge Program . This five-year TCUP project will adapt a successful Native American recruitment and retention model used at Oregon State University to increase the number of Native Hawaiians and under-represented students in STEM fields of study. The project will endeavor to increase the number of Native Hawaiian and under-represented students by: integrating traditional ecological knowledge in core courses; assisting teachers and students in the establishment of math learning communities; providing students with exchange, mentoring and internship opportunities; involving students in hands-on field-based learning; assisting students in their transition from high school to college; and involving students in the production and delivery of television and internet media used in program outreach doc24358 none Dixon The proposed research will refine and test, through collection of and comparison with new field data, a preliminary Geographic Information Systems (GIS) model designed to identify locales having a high likelihood that human-derived archeological artifacts will surface on mountain glaciers and icefields. Preliminary research has demonstrated that such locales can be identified using this method, which utilizes a combination of social cultural, biological, remote sensing and geologic data. Glaciers and ice patches are melting at an unprecedented rate, because of the current high rate of arctic warming. It is anticipated that increasingly older and significant artifacts, paleontological and other materials will be exposed in the resulting thawed areas. An estimated 10% of the world s land surface is covered by perennial snow, glaciers and icefields. Organic remains locked within these environments remain largely unexplored. Results obtained during preliminary work on these regions include recovery of rare and unique artifacts that can potentially make significant contributions to our understanding of human colonization and adaptation. The apparent acceleration of global warming, and the consequent melting of continental ice, creates an urgent need to develop the means to locate and preserve such frozen remains before the newly exposed materials decompose or are otherwise destroyed. The proposed research addresses this crucial issue doc24359 none The Hawaii EPSCoR Planning grant continues to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the current R (2) use applicable best practices from other states; (3) better coordinate all Federal EPSCoR programs to maximize their impact in Hawaii; (4) select research focus areas that are of high importance to Hawaii and where a strong collaborative relationship can be developed between the Manoa and Hilo campuses; and (5) advise on the best strategies to build nationally-recognized programs in the selected research focus areas. These goals will result in a coordinated state-wide effort to improve academic R&D capabilities in targeted disciplines, enhance training and education for students in science and engineering, and increase efforts to promote transfer of technology from the state s universities to Hawaii s private and public sectors doc24360 none This dissertation would investigate how social networks explain the health advantage of first-generation Mexican-American immigrants over second-generation Mexican-Americans born in this country. The research uses participant observation and in depth interviews with 60 first- and second-generation adult Mexican Americans in Detroit to describe how local and transnational networks differ between the generations and how these network differences help explain differences in health outcomes doc24361 none Lopez Sea ice is a dominant feature of marine ecosystems in the Arctic. Its presence impacts Arctic marine ecosystems, especially on the shelves where benthic and pelagic systems are extensively coupled. If the extent and thickness of sea ice continue to decline, a shift is predicted in the type of algal material reaching the benthos (from ice algae to phytoplankton), which will potentially impact the food requirements of the benthos. Several pieces of evidence show that both types of ice algae (below-ice ice algae dominated by Melosira arctica and within-ice ice algae dominated by Nitzchia frigida) presently reach the benthos in significant quantities. This research effort will investigate the digestibility of ice algae and phytoplankton-derived organic matter by the Arctic macrobenthos. From the perspective of a macrofaunal organism, digestibility includes three separate components: 1) selection (is encountered organic material ingested or rejected?); 2) absorption (is ingested organic material absorbed during passage through the gut, or does it get egested in the feces?); and 3) assimilation (is absorbed organic material assimilated into biomass?). Assessment of long-term assimilation of the various types of algae (within-ice ice algae; below-ice ice algae; and phytoplankton) will be conducted by determining lipid biomarkers and their isotopic ratios, and by determining CHN and protein signatures of organisms collected during all aspects of the work in both Norway and Kotzebue, Alaska. Assessment of short-term absorption will first use the ash-ratio method in a whole-core delivery experiment. Following the whole-core experiments, dominant taxa from each trophic group will be identified and used in a comparison of absorption efficiencies as calculated by the ash-ratio method, and carbon retention efficiencies as calculated using a pulse-chase radiotracer approach. Finally, the group plans to repeat the dominant taxa absorption efficiency experiments in both Svalbard, Norway at the Ny Aalesund lab and in Kotzebue Sound, Alaska. This proposed project compliments, and will derive synergistic benefits from two projects funded by the Norwegian Research Council in Norway doc24362 none The proposed project is to initiate a fundamental heat transfer study of the head and neck system to predict the brain temperature. The research will involve the collaborative efforts of an engineering research at Rice University and a medical researcher at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. There is considerable data at present to justify the need to know the brain temperature in infants who have suffered hypoxia-ischemia, or are at great risk for hypoxia-ischemia. Similar considerations extend to other patient age groups including children and adults with head trauma, surgical correction of congenital heart disease, and adults with stroke. A thermal model for head and neck will be initiated by incorporating the relation between metabolic heat generation and temperature, the effect of physiological parameters and regulatory mechanisms on the cerebral blood flow and the countercurrent heat transfer in the neck s vessels. As a component of Dr. A. Laptook s ongoing investigations on newborn miniature swine brain at UTSMC, additional measurements will be made available to Dr. Y. Bayazitoglu at Rice to include them in her head and neck thermal modeling, to determine how brain temperature is affected by acute alterations in arterial oxygen tension, arterial carbon dioxide tension, brain metabolic rate, and brain ischemia. The initiated research will provide foundation of important future contributions in understanding the pathogenesis of brain injury, and in monitoring of brain temperature during therapeutic interventions. In addition, the created mathematical models will eventually be used as teaching tools to search for optimal treatment by incorporating temperature as another variable doc24363 none The proposal plans to develop middleware that will allow individuals or groups using differing collaboration infrastructures to participate in an Access Grid-based session without the need for human intervention. This will be done by developing a web services model that will allow components to be updated as they become available without requiring the whole framework to be reworded. The proposal will develop three new modules: 1. Network Services Engine which acts as the principal point of contact between the users and resolution engine 2. Resolution Engine which matches user capabilities to the services available; it will also function as a Service Registry and, 3. Network Services User Interface which provides the user s view into the network services framework. The work will build on the extensive expereince base of the Access Grid developers. These modules will enable users to maximize their use of the Access Grid. The Network Services User Interface funnels user requests for resources to the Network Services Registry, and the Resolution Engine uses the Network Services Interface to interact with the user in the event that manual resolution tasks need to be performed. The work will be beneficial to the collaboration community beyond that of the Access Grid. The proposal also includes technical guidance, training and evaluation of the Access Grid space and advice on changes and improvements at University of Chicago and the NSF Access nodes doc24364 none The focus of this research is to design molecules to self assemble into one- and two-dimensional supramolecular motifs or aggregates that will serve as scaffolds with which to control three-dimensional structures. Cyclic diamides are targeted as the molecular building blocks . Among those to be studied are 2,5-diketopiperazines, 3,6-dioxo-1,2,4-triazines and 3,6-dioxo-1,2,4,5-tetrazines. The robust one-dimensional `tapes` obtained from these building blocks will then be used as precursors of interesting solid state materials. The educational focus of the project is the integration of supramolecular chemistry into the undergraduate curriculum. With this Faculty Early Development (CAREER) award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program is supporting the research and educational activities of Dr. G. Tayhas R. Palmore of the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Davis. Professor Palmore will focus her research efforts on understanding how the self assembly of molecules into supramolecular motifs can be used to control solid state structure. Self assembly of nanostructures promises to be one of the most powerful approaches to device miniaturization. The aim of the proposed educational activities is to stimulate interdisciplinary discussion and research in supramolecular chemistry and to integrate supramolecular chemistry into the undergraduate curriculum doc24365 none The goal of this collaborative proposal between the University of California at Santa Cruz and Duke University is the definition of features for recognition and classification of objects in imagery. Feature vectors are enriched and made invariant at the same time by an efficient, probabilistic coding of the feature-space manifolds that are obtained when features undergo all possible transformations in a predefined class. This coding is designed to circumvent the curse of dimensionality by reducing the representation requirements to the two properties that are essential for recognition and classification, that is, uniqueness and continuity. Uniqueness requires different manifolds to be coded differently, while continuity requires similar codings for similar manifolds. Theoretical and empirical investigations will study optimal feature design, the performance of these features with various classification and recognition methods, and the trade-off of computational efficiency and performance. Misclassification rates for families of features and transformations will also be measured, both by theoretical bounds and empirical tests. The behavior of the proposed representations will be examined in the presence of clutter and data corruptions such as occlusions. These concepts will be tested through their application to the automatic diagnosis of colon cancer from computerized tomography scans, and to the interpretation of American sign language from video sequences doc24366 none By their nature, volumetric data sets, such as CT, MRI and the Visible Human cryosection images, are not subject to the same form of visual inspection and cognitive refinement that human experts apply when viewing and interpreting 2D images. The internal cycle of choices made by humans as they visually survey an image is disrupted and forced into an external process where users must adapt to the technical requirements of the visualization system. This project proposes to continue research into an immersive visualization system that is a first step toward creating a user interaction paradigm that more naturally allows users to apply their interpretive expertise to the visualization and segmentation of volumetric data sets. In this environment, segmentation, the process of isolating discrete structures within a data volume, is performed in parallel with visualization. Users have continuous control of the visualization and segmentation algorithms and can freely exercise their expert interpretive knowledge. The current implementation, called the Immersive Segmentation Environment, emphasizes the controlled application of high computational cost algorithms to local regions of the data volume. Using stereo graphics, the user is presented with the illusion that the data volume occupies physical space. The user interacts with the system using a 3D space tracked probe. Visualization and segmentation algorithms continuously operate on the data volume within a local neighborhood of the user.s position. This neighborhood corresponds to the user.s visual focus point. The algorithms initialize themselves based upon an analysis of the local neighborhood and heuristics. The system is implemented as a client server application and consequently allows a user at a low-cost workstation to effectively use remote computational resources to visualize large volumetric data sets. The system implements two main classes of segmentation algorithms. Both determine initial algorithm parameters based upon a cluster analysis of the local neighborhood and are characterized by an iterative refinement approach. The proposed research will continue to investigate the capabilities of this unique user interaction model for visualizing, exploring and interpreting volumetric data sets. The research plan contained in this proposal is a natural outgrowth of prior work performed by the PI. This ongoing work has had a positive impact on the curriculum, student research projects and faculty research within the Computer Science department at the UW-La Crosse doc24367 none Signals from Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites propagate through the atmosphere with a velocity determined by the refractivity of the air, which depends on temperature, pressure, and humidity. This award supports research based on the principle that the difference between the propagation delays from two GPS satellites measured at the same position on the ground depends on the difference in the integrated refractivity along the two ray paths. The propagation delays are calculated from the measured phases of the GPS signals and are subject to uncertainty because of clock errors, uncertainties in satellite range, and receiver noise. However, short-term fluctuations of the phase difference about averages over periods from a few seconds to minutes are largely free of these uncertainties and depend mainly on changes in the path-average refractivity. These fluctuations are caused by the variability of atmospheric structure and hence may be regarded as a measure of the irregularity, or turbulence. The objective of the work is to evaluate the feasibility of continuous, accurate, all-weather remote sensing of turbulence by monitoring GPS signals. It holds the potential of improving weather forecasts and alleviating aviation hazards through better understanding of the occurrence and distribution of turbulence doc24368 none This project is the continuation of the maintenance and development of the RIDGE Petrologic Database (PetDB), which currently contains and serves over the internet the complete published geochemical dataset for sub-oceanic rocks and minerals generated at mid-ocean ridges. Technical aspects of the database will be transferred to a professional database environment, the database will be updated with all newly published data, development will be continued, and the database will be mined for second-order products that are of use to the broad community doc24369 none This award for research at an undergraduate institution will support the development and testing of methods to create recurrent reinforcement learning neural networks that can solve challenging problems related to time series generation and analysis. There are two main attributes of improvisation that make it an excellent research area for machine learning. First, it is a procedure in which one makes up a solution to a problem in real-time, using available materials and knowledge, and in response to environmental effects. Second, it requires variety, modifying the solution from one time to another, even under the same conditions. Yet the overall result must be cohesive from beginning to end. Thus, improvisation is a significant challenge for computer science. This project will extend the range of problems that can be solved, through a fusion of two separate methods. The first is recurrent neural networks, that are nonlinear neural networks in which the outputs of parts of the network are fed back to provide input to some or all parts of the network. They are emerging as feedback systems that can learn to model non-Markov processes, can learn to predict values in a time series, and can learn to generate actions or control signals that depend on past behavior. The second method is reinforcement learning, an area of machine learning that has taken on an important role in computationally solving problems that are characterized by sparse feedback as to whether a proposed solution is correct, given a situation or state. Human beings have a much greater ability than machines currently do to improvise in uncertain environments, and the ability to extemporize would be a very important asset for intelligent software systems. In addition to supporting promising research, this award will encourage broader participation of women in science, by involving women in research and by helping to enable progress in computer science at a college for women doc24370 none Turtle Mountain Community College PI - Carol Davis With NSF support, Turtle Mountain Community College (TMCC) will improve its capacity to enroll, retain, and graduate Native American students in STEM disciplines. The use of technology will be emphasized where it can be directly applied within the STEM curriculum and used as a mechanism to enhance teaching and learning. Faculty professional development will also focus on the infusion of technology into the STEM curriculum. Project goals include strengthening the institution s technological infrastructure and systematically enhancing TMCC s STEM capacity; improving STEM teaching and learning through curriculum development, reform and enhancement; and, broadening student participation in STEM programs through improved outreach, recruitment, retention and graduation. Special emphasis will focus on promoting student success in STEM gatekeeper and bottleneck courses doc24371 none The Oregon Collaborative for Excellence in the Preparation of Teachers (OCEPT) is a statewide collaborative established to improve the mathematics and science preparation of future teachers in Oregon and increase the diversity of the population of students preparing to be teachers. It has involved over 500 science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (STEM) and Education faculty and administrators, academic advisors, and K-12 teachers, from virtually all of the 34 institutions of higher education in the state, as well as numerous school districts. More than 200 courses and programs have been developed and or significantly impacted. Reported changes include using more diverse teaching and assessment strategies, adoption of standards-based instructional techniques, and inclusion of opportunities for related teaching experiences with K-12 students. OCEPT-influenced classrooms are more interactive, incorporate greater use of technology, conceptual development and more of a focus on scientific inquiry and or mathematics problem solving. The OCEPT II Follow-On project is conducting a comprehensive summative evaluation to provide evidence of the impact of OCEPT on faculty, preservice students, institutions, and new teachers. An Outcomes Research Study is the primary vehicle for providing evidence about new teachers and STEM faculty who taught them. Through this study, novice teachers are observed and interviewed over a 2-to-3 year time span, and OCEPT faculty who have taught these teachers are observed and interviewed. In addition, the project is utilizing instruments from the CETP Core Evaluation study and contributing to the overall CETP evaluation effort. Induction support and professional development is provided for novice teachers. In collaboration with the Oregon Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the Oregon Science Teachers Association, OCEPT II provides workshops specifically designed for new teachers and their mentors, welcomes new teachers to statewide conferences, and provides memberships in the statewide professional organizations. Dissemination activities include support for Faculty Fellows to develop and publish scholarly articles on their work through the WRITE ON! Institute doc24372 none Integrated circuit technology continues to progress in the direction of higher device density and with it, a higher density of waste heat that must be removed in order to maintain the electronics below their desired operating temperatures. In the majority of applications, including personal computers and workstations, cellular phones, hand-held electronics, and automotive applications, economic and other practical considerations restrict thermal management solutions to air-cooled systems. Air cooling technology is often the limiting factor in determining the size and performance of electronic products, and novel concepts to improve air cooling capabilities are much needed. The goal of the proposed work is to produce ion driven air flow at the microscale, integrated within micro-featured heat generating surfaces. It is the aim of this work to fill a technological gap in microscale convective cooling by developing a pump that is itself truly at the microscale. The key advancement proposed in this work is the generation of unipolar ions in air. A single ion species can be accelerated in an electric field, efficiently creating fluid motion. Preliminary calculations of the heat transfer rates achievable using ion driven pumping of air through microchannels show that as much as 40 W cm2 of heat rejection is possible by this technique. This cooling rate compares favorably to those in many liquid-cooled applications and would provide an air-cooling alternative to meet the needs of future semiconductor devices. Funding is being provided by the Thermal Transport and Thermal Processing Program of the Chemical and Transport Systems Division doc24373 none Childhood vaccination has become the single greatest defense against infectious diseases among children in the United States. Moreover, biotechnology breakthroughs are making it possible for vaccine manufacturers to develop vaccine antigens for numerous diseases. One unplanned consequence of such innovations is that the Recommended Childhood Immunization Schedule (as set forth by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices) has become sufficiently crowded that the prospect of adding additional vaccines (hence additional injections) to this schedule may not be well received by either health-care providers or parents guardians. This has prompted vaccine manufacturers to develop vaccines products that combine several antigens into a single injection. Such vaccines, termed combination vaccines, permit new vaccines to be added to the schedule without placing additional burdens on parents guardians, nor requiring children to endure an unacceptable number of injections during single clinic visits. Such innovations have also created a combinatorial explosion of choices for health-care providers that will continue to escalate and expand as additional vaccines are added to the immunization schedule and as new combination vaccines gain approved for distribution. The goals of this project are to design operations research models that capture all the vaccines that are presently in the recommended childhood immunization schedule, as well as vaccines that may enter the schedule over the next decade, to formulate and analyze optimization models that can be used to determine the maximal price at which new combination vaccine products provide good value to the health-care consumer, and to perform sensitivity analysis to determine the impact of new vaccines on the optimal vaccine formularies and vaccine prices. The results of this research provide a systematic approach to compare and evaluate existing and new pediatric vaccines within the recommended childhood immunization schedule. This, in turn, will provide a vehicle upon which opportunities for new vaccines and vaccine combinations can be evaluated using operations research models, hence has the potential to enhance immunization rates given the set of vaccine choices available. Moreover, the tools developed will provide a mechanism by which health-care providers and consumers can assess the economic value of such vaccines, hence facilitating the application of market principles within the pediatric vaccine industry. This in turn may also serve to put downward pressure on the prices of such vaccines, an issue of significant national concern. This research will be conducted in collaboration with personnel within the National Immunization Program at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC doc24374 none A conference on semiconductor insulator interfaces, and the interaction between materials science, device physics, and technology will be held December 5-7, in San Diego, CA. The conference is interdisciplinary, and will cover many areas of MOS science and technology, including: Alternative and high-k gate dielectric materials; Physics of thin dielectrics and their interfaces; Gate-dielectric conduction and breakdown; Silicon carbide and its interfaces; Physical and electrical characterization of Si SiO2 interfaces; Micro-roughness measurement, modeling, and device-related effects; Hot carrier, plasma damage and radiation effects; Nitrogen-containing oxides and stacked interfaces; Surface cleaning technology and effects on dielectrics and interfaces; Novel oxidation, deposition, and etching techniques; and Theory of oxide and interface defects. An important goal of the conference is to provide an environment that encourages interplay between scientific and technological issues. The program is organized as a workshop-style conference to provide a forum for device engineers, solid state physicists, and materials scientists to discuss topics of common interest both formally through invited and contributed presentations, and informally during a variety of events including a poster presentation session. In addition to the formal technical sessions of presentations, poster sessions and rump sessions for less formal discussion permit close interactions among participants. Objectives are to stimulate communications among the broad community of researchers addressing semiconductor insulator interfaces and their relationship to technology. A variety of disciplinary backgrounds-chemistry, physics, engineering and materials science, is represented and contrributes very positively to the intellectual content of the Conference. Along with the opportunity to assess the field and future directions, it is expected that new ties will be established between universities, research institutions, and industry. %%% An evaluation of the progress and status of semiconductor insulator interfaces and related device issues along with current assessments of the most important developments will be of significant value to the understanding and enhanced utilization of electronic materials in computing, data processing, and communications doc24375 none Through this award, Honolulu Community College will conduct an assessment of its Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) curriculum and infrastructure in order to develop an institutional action plan to improve STEM instruction. Project activities include: development of STEM course assessment instruments; development of a plan to recruit Native Hawaiians into STEM programs; outreach to potential industry, community, and or educational partners to provide student internship opportunities; and, development of a tracking system for STEM students and graduates who transfer to four-year colleges and universities and for those that gain employment in STEM fields doc24376 none North Carolina State University $8,400 The project is about a planning visit for developing collaborative research work in cellulosic fine materials with researchers at Chungnam National University in Korea. Scientific study of cellulosic fine materials would help drainage improvement and efficient utilization in papermaking doc24377 none The proposal builds on early work in developing and deploying an on-line credential service, MyProxy. MyProxy was created in to solve the problem of credential delegation and was specifically targeted to support web portal requirements. Grid entities, must be able to dynamically manage and select the most appropriate security credentials in order to support or complete the application or work. The project has a three-phased approach to create the persistent credential management support needed for production middleware. In the first phase, MyProxy will be redesigned to become more robust. In the second phase, additional functional will be created, tested and deployed to support multiple authentication mechanisms. In the third phase, the middleware will be expanded to include Web Services and Open Grid Services Architecture. Overall, the project expands Grid computing will contribute to the national and international Grid infrastructure by making Grid computing more secure and easier to use doc24378 none In response to an Announcement of Opportunity for the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment Program (GLOBE) this project is designed to meet GLOBE goals and objectives of linking scientists and schoolchildren in a global information network with the ultimate goal of better understanding Earth s environment and changes that take place within it. This proposal consists of various segments addressing GLOBE Program needs: support for an existing protocol, support for teacher training and outreach, data quality control, student surveys on attitudes about the environment and climate misconceptions, and finally, scientific research based on GLOBE data. This proposal will support the existing Atmosphere Protocols including an assessment of the quality of the data already received. Information from other GLOBE investigations (Soils, Land Cover Biology, Phenology) and external data will be used to address scientific questions relating to climate feedback, including that of human-caused land-use changes doc24379 none An Industry University Fellowship award will assist with the conduct of collaborative research at the Laboratory for Telecommunications Research in Telcordia Technologies. Telcordia is an industrial affiliate of the NSF Industry University Cooperative Research Center for Software Engineering Research (SERC). The PI is currently a professor at Purdue and a former site director of SERC. The general are of research deals with reliable operation of next generation systems. A next generation system is a collection of distributed components intended to work in harmony with the objective of providing services to authorized customers in an efficient, secure, safe, and reliable manner doc24380 none Short, mountainous rivers dominate the fluvial supply of sediment to the western margin of North America and to the oceans in general. As a result of rapid rates of landscape denudation and minimal sediment storage in these active margin systems, the particulate organic carbon (POC) discharged differs from that transported by larger rivers on passive margins. Recent investigations of two rivers in California indicate they carry a bimodal mixture of modern and ancient particulate organic carbon (POC), derived almost equally from extant vegetation and from the kerogen of uplifted sedimentary rocks. To a first approximation, soils are eroded in these systems before significant aging occurs or before the kerogen can be completely oxidized and replaced by modern material. Based on these preliminary results, the balance between modern, ancient, and intermediate-aged POC carried by rivers is hypothesized to depend on the residence time of particles in the regolith. To test this hypothesis, this investigation will characterize the suspended POC loads of six rivers that exhibit a three-order range of magnitude in sediment yield. Four rivers (Siuslaw, Noyo, Russian, and Eel) drain portions of northern California and Oregon. The Waipaoa and Waiapu rivers on the north island of New Zealand were chosen because of their extremely high sediment yields. Bedrock POC will also be characterized in each of the watersheds. The principle measurements, OC content, 13C 12C(d13C), and 14C 12C (?14C), will be made on bulk samples, as well as density- and size-fractionated subsamples, to determine the kerogen and modern C contents. Additional studies of soil profiles in the Eel watershed will be conducted to further delineate weathering and OC replacement processes in the regolith. The evolution of the POC pool from bedrock C to modern surficial material will be studied in thick horizons, to contrast with previous results from thin soil profiles. The results of this study will further understanding of the processes that regulate the quantity and character of OC transported from drainage basins to the ocean. This study also addresses a key issue in the long-term biogeochemical cycle, namely how previously buried OC is recycled. Interpretation of the sedimentary organic geochemical record of past environments, particularly on active margins, could be significantly improved by this investigation doc24381 none gThe major goal of the research is to understand the molecular mechanisms responsible for the formation of new species of microorganisms. The research will target a single gene known to separate two closely related naturally occurring species of yeast in the genus Pichia. The two species live in two different cactus types that have major differences in their host chemistry. Toxic natural products in one cactus type deter the growth of one species while allowing growth of the other. Identifying and isolating the gene(s) responsible for this difference is the specific goal of the research. A molecular genetic knockout library recently created for baker s yeast will be used to identify the candidate genes. This research addresses the nature of the fundamental process involved in the formation of new species. It could provide us with 1) the detailed molecular mechanism responsible for adaptation to novel chemicals in natural plants and 2) the reasons for increased genetic and biological diversity in microorganisms. An important aspect of the work is the use of modern genomic information from the widely studied baker s yeasts to learn about the origin of new species in natural systems doc24373 none Childhood vaccination has become the single greatest defense against infectious diseases among children in the United States. Moreover, biotechnology breakthroughs are making it possible for vaccine manufacturers to develop vaccine antigens for numerous diseases. One unplanned consequence of such innovations is that the Recommended Childhood Immunization Schedule (as set forth by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices) has become sufficiently crowded that the prospect of adding additional vaccines (hence additional injections) to this schedule may not be well received by either health-care providers or parents guardians. This has prompted vaccine manufacturers to develop vaccines products that combine several antigens into a single injection. Such vaccines, termed combination vaccines, permit new vaccines to be added to the schedule without placing additional burdens on parents guardians, nor requiring children to endure an unacceptable number of injections during single clinic visits. Such innovations have also created a combinatorial explosion of choices for health-care providers that will continue to escalate and expand as additional vaccines are added to the immunization schedule and as new combination vaccines gain approved for distribution. The goals of this project are to design operations research models that capture all the vaccines that are presently in the recommended childhood immunization schedule, as well as vaccines that may enter the schedule over the next decade, to formulate and analyze optimization models that can be used to determine the maximal price at which new combination vaccine products provide good value to the health-care consumer, and to perform sensitivity analysis to determine the impact of new vaccines on the optimal vaccine formularies and vaccine prices. The results of this research provide a systematic approach to compare and evaluate existing and new pediatric vaccines within the recommended childhood immunization schedule. This, in turn, will provide a vehicle upon which opportunities for new vaccines and vaccine combinations can be evaluated using operations research models, hence has the potential to enhance immunization rates given the set of vaccine choices available. Moreover, the tools developed will provide a mechanism by which health-care providers and consumers can assess the economic value of such vaccines, hence facilitating the application of market principles within the pediatric vaccine industry. This in turn may also serve to put downward pressure on the prices of such vaccines, an issue of significant national concern. This research will be conducted in collaboration with personnel within the National Immunization Program at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC doc24383 none DVD research reports can bring coherence to teachers and researchers perspectives on pedagogy that are very difficult to convey in written text, by embodying them as active learning supports. The research proposed here will explore the design and technological issues in making such DVDs imbedded in an ongoing NSF-sponsored research study of urban children s mathematical thinking. This new line of research draws on the substantial progress that was made in understanding of student mathematical thinking in inner city classrooms. Furthermore, this project will allow for dissemination efforts that will reach teachers in ways that allow them to change their own teaching in constructive ways. Additionally, researchers will be able to use the DVD material to support new research avenues. The research will generate 3 successive versions of the DVD with field-testing among audiences with each iteration version. Products of the research include the DVD s and a design framework for further work in the domain doc24384 none Rohatgi Description: This award is to support a collaborative project between Dr. Pradeep Rohatgi, Professor in the Department of Materials at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee (UWM), Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Dr. Atef Daoud, Central Metallurgical Research and Development Institute, Helwan, Cairo, Egypt. The two scientists plan to conduct research aimed at increased understanding of fundamental phenomena of particle clustering, settling, nucleation and particle pushing, which control the distribution of particles and influence the properties in cast metal matrix composites (MMC). The work should result in a decrease in cost and improvement in properties of cast metal matrix composites. MMC consist of a metallic matrix and a reinforcing phase such as fibers and particles. The main function of the matrix is to transfer and distribute the load to the reinforcement. The reinforcements impart strength, stiffness and other desirable properties like wear resistance and a low coefficient of friction to the composites. Reinforcements are generally ceramics, including oxides, carbides and nitrides. These materials are used because of their combination of high strength and stiffness at room and elevated temperatures. Particles are the cheapest form of reinforcement materials and they impart isotropic properties to composites. Among the reinforcements in aluminum SiC, aluminum oxide and fly ash are attractive materials because of their relatively low costs and interesting physical and mechanical properties. Scope: Although the U.S. automotive industry currently manufactures a limited number of components from cast composites, certain problems, such as high cost, low ductility and fracture toughness, a scatter in properties and casting defects, prevent the widespread use of cast MMC. This research will help overcome these issues. The U.S. PI has experience and a strong background in the solidification processing of alloys and MMC. He and the Egyptian scientist have established collaboration in previous joint research activities. In this project, Dr. Daoud s experience in laboratory-scale manufacturing of MMC components will complement the fundamental research experience of Dr. Rohatgi. The project is likely to benefit the U.S. as well as Egypt in promoting the use of cast metal matrix composites to conserve energy and the environment. The research is expected to involve a U.S. postdoctorate and a number of U.S. undergraduate students at UWM. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc24385 none This project is developing methods for studying the organic composition of clouds and fogs and the efficiency with which clouds and fogs scavenge carbonaceous aerosol particles. The project includes a laboratory development effort to improve capabilities for measuring concentrations of the diverse organic species suspected to be present in cloud and fog drops and a series of field experiments to collect samples suitable for application of the developed suite of organic analytical techniques. The field campaigns are being used to collect samples of cloud fog types that are seasonally important in three distinct environments: winter radiation fogs in the California s Central Valley, spring stratus clouds intercepting the coastal hills of Southern California, and summer orographic clouds intercepting the western slope of the Rocky Mountains doc24386 none This project will involve chemical analyses of carbon (collagen and apatite) and nitrogen isotope values from a large series of prehistoric human skeletons, prehistoric faunal remains, and modern plants to better understand dietary patterns of the inhabitants of northeast Thailand during the pre-state Metal Age ( B.C. to A.D. 500). The project has two central objectives: 1) to characterize possible temporal dietary changes and 2) to integrate these data with published results on subsistence, health and disease. The research results will provide the first detailed documentation of the paleodietary history of mainland Southeast Asia. Evidence from physical anthropology, and archaeological and geoarchaeological excavations suggests environmental, cultural, and biological changes occurred during the pre-state Metal Age in mainland Southeast Asia. People in this region modified their landscape to provide sufficient, and eventually surplus, food resources. Technological refinements in food procurement likely contributed to social stratification and foreign trade. The research hypotheses suggest dietary intake would have changed as a result of human modification of the environment as well as cultural technological changes. Because bone is remodeled over the lifetime of the individual and the carbon and nitrogen in bone derives from dietary sources, bone chemical composition broadly reflects the type of foods consumed. Bone isotope analysis can provide another line of evidence for examining dietary patterns and dietary change over time, and will permit greater understanding of paleodietary differences in northeast Thailand prior to state formation. Thus, this project will provide a foundation for future biogeographical and paleodietary research in this region. The proposed research has outstanding educational opportunities in both laboratory and field data collection and analysis for both the investigators and assistants in Thailand and Hawai. Experience will be gained in physical anthropology and stable isotope geoarchaeology by working closely with established researchers from diverse fields. The investigators will learn first hand a spectrum of state-of-the-art experimental and analytical methods and instrumentation doc24387 none In response to an Announcement of Opportunity for the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment Program (GLOBE) this project is designed to meet GLOBE goals and objectives of linking scientists and schoolchildren in a global information network with the ultimate goal of better understanding Earth s environment and changes that take place within it. This proposal consists of various segments addressing GLOBE Program needs: support for existing protocols, development of new protocols, and scientific research with GLOBE data. This proposal will support the development of a new protocol to assess the presence, extent, and duration of jet contrails and cirrus clouds at the same time of day as the other measurements in the Atmosphere suite of GLOBE protocols. Jet contrails, under the right conditions, can generate wide-spread cirrus cloudiness, which has the potential to affect the radiative budget of the planet. Given increases in jet traffic, the effect by could increase ten-fold, and be as large as one quarter of the current anthropogenic greenhouse gas radiative forcing. While models currently exist to predict the potential areas over which contrails can develop and spread, there is no consistent observation program to complement and validate efforts at satellite observation of contrails. This GLOBE protocol has the potential to fill a gap in observations and research. %%% In response to an Announcement of Opportunity for the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment Program (GLOBE) this project is designed to meet GLOBE goals and objectives of linking scientists and schoolchildren in a global information network with the ultimate goal of better understanding Earth s environment and changes that take place within it. This proposal consists of various segments addressing GLOBE Program needs: support for existing protocols, development of new protocols, and scientific research with GLOBE data. This proposal will support the development of a new protocol to assess the presence, extent, and duration of jet contrails and cirrus clouds at the same time of day as the other measurements in the Atmosphere suite of GLOBE protocols. Jet contrails, under the right conditions, can generate wide-spread cirrus cloudiness, which has the potential to affect the radiative budget of the planet. Given increases in jet traffic, the effect by could increase ten-fold, and be as large as one quarter of the current anthropogenic greenhouse gas radiative forcing. While models currently exist to predict the potential areas over which contrails can develop and spread, there is no consistent observation program to complement and validate efforts at satellite observation of contrails. This GLOBE protocol has the potential to fill a gap in observations and research doc24388 none In response to an Announcement of Opportunity for the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment Program (GLOBE) this project is designed to meet GLOBE goals and objectives of linking scientists and schoolchildren in a global information network with the ultimate goal of better understanding Earth s environment and changes that take place within it. This proposal will continue the development of surface ozone observation protocols using a chemically sensitive paper that changes color in response to ozone exposure. Ozone levels will be estimated by comparing the paper color to a reference color chart. This will complement and be supported by on-going work at NASA to separate stratospheric ozone from tropospheric and lower atmosphere ozone signals, all of which are detected by space-borne sensors, but are indistinguishable without ground data such as those provided by this method. The project has the endorsement of the International Global Atmospheric Chemistry Program Steering Committee (IGAC). Tropospheric and surface ozone are important for different reasons, and introducing students and teachers to the difference in effects of ozone at these different altitudes and to the different sources of ozone is valuable to the learning process. Accurate observations of surface ozone on the spatial and temporal scales afforded by the GLOBE program will provide a significant advance for science and its study of ozone s effects on health and biological systems in general doc24389 none The overall objective of this project is to determine the relationship between phenotypic variations and the associated whole genome transcriptional pattern in populations of E.coli and S. cerevisiae cells cultivated under well defined, reproducible conditions. This will be done in three types of experiments distinguished according to the cultivation mode. The first type of experiments will involve simple batch cultivation of cells. Samples will be taken from different growth stages of the culture. The second type of experiments will involve continuous cultivation of cells in a chemostat operated at different steady states. The third type of experiments will involve exposure of the cells to an environmental challenge. Such challenges will include the shifting of a steady state chemostat culture to a new dilution rate. The response to such a nutritional upshift or downshift will be analyzed. In all types of experiments the phenotypic variability of the culture will be determined by flow cytometry and subpopulations of cells will be isolated via cell sorting. Sorted cells will be subjected to protocols for microarray analysis to determine the whole genome transcriptional profile. To make this possible an amplification protocol will be developed to reproducibly generate a sufficient amount of RNA from only a few cells to permit quantitative microarray analysis doc24390 none This is a proposal for funding in support of the annual Clemson mini-Conference on Combinatorial Optimization, now in its 16th consecutive year of existence. This day-and-a-half long conference is held every year at Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina, on a Thursday and Friday, usually sometime during the first two weeks of October. The mini-Conference invites about 12 speakers to give 40-minute talks on their current research. Speakers are chosen equally between the fields of discrete mathematics (including combinatorics, graph theory, operations research and coding theory), and algorithmic computer science (including computation theory, computational complexity and the design and analysis of algorithms doc24391 none Project The PIs propose to complete the design and then install an advanced cabled observatory in Monterey Bay that will serve as the engineering testbed for a future cabled ocean observatory. The Monterey Accelerated Research System (MARS) cabled observatory would provide remote, continuous, long-term, high-power, large-bandwidth infrastructure for multidisciplinary, in situ exploration, observation, and experimentation in the deep sea using cutting edge power and communication technologies. MARS will be located in Monterey Bay offshore the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and will include one science node on 62 km of submarine cable with expansion capability for more nodes in the future. It is proposed that the science node will provide 4 science ports, and each port will have a 100-Mbit-per- second, bi-directional telemetry channel. The node will have the ability to deliver a total of 10 kW of power to the 4 ports. Extension cables can be plugged into any science port to provide power and communications up to 100 km away from the original node using the most cost effective deployment vehicle from several options including MBARI s ROVs, ships of opportunity, or UNOLS class I, II, III or IV fleet vessels. MARS will make use of the tools, techniques, and products developed over the last several decades for high reliability submarine telecommunication and military systems to ensure that this system can operate over a 30-year lifetime with minimal life-cycle costs doc24392 none Funding for this research project is provided under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Service Sector (ESS) program announcement. The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) manages the national organ donation and allocation system. When UNOS offers an organ to a transplant patient, the patient decides to either accept it or to continue waiting. The research question at hand is therefore: if offered an organ, when should a patient decide to accept it? This question is of great practical importance, as it is a life-or-death decision faced by thousands of people per year, and growing. This research will focus only on livers, however the methodology used is applicable to other organs. The key issue in modeling this decision process is the assumption made regarding the information available to the patient. In all cases, the pertinent characteristics of the liver are known at the time an offer is made, as is the patient s health. What is uncertain is the ranking of the patient relative to the other patients on the waiting list, and the timing of future offers. The simplest version of this problem is the case in which a living donor exists. Typically, however, donors are cadaveric. In the latter situation, liver offerings occur randomly and patients compete with each other for livers without knowing their relative position on the waiting list. This research project will formulate mathematical models for the living-donor as well as the cadaveric-donor situation, in which the objective is to maximize, for instance, quality-adjusted life expectancy or some other objective. A model will be developed for the hypothetical situation in which the composition of the waiting list is public information. Specifically, the reach team will formulate these situations as Markov decision processes and engage in numerical and analytical study of the resulting optimal policies. Numerical study will make use of extensive clinical data, identify patterns that will guide the analytical study, and allow the researchers to explore the potential value in publishing the waiting list. Analytical study will determine conditions under which the optimal policies have appealing, consistent structure. It is interesting to note that most of the existing literature focuses on modeling the organ transplant problem from UNOS s perspective, rather than from the patient s perspective as considered here. Note, however, that the research may have an impact on this policy-perspective line of research, since one of the objectives is to study the policy change that involves the publication of the waiting list doc24393 none This project will maintain and enhance the GLOBE teacher s guide in print, on the Web and on CD-ROM. The teacher s guide is a nearly 1,000 page document containing detailed instructions for setting up study sites, collecting data, and implementing math and science learning in the classroom. In addition, two teacher s enhancement guides will be developed for elementary and middle school teachers who participate in the GLOBE program. One guide will help teachers accomplish the Inquiry and Personal and Social components of the National Science Education Standards, and the other will help teachers develop their student s literacy and language arts through participation in GLOBE doc24394 none The atmospheric science community requires visualization of observed, measured, and simulated data for accurate analysis of the atmosphere and improved weather prediction. Unlike many scientific communities, weather observers and atmospheric scientists rely heavily on important visual cues in the atmosphere to determine the potential severity of many storms. However, the current state-of-the-art in weather visualization from systems such as Vis5D, VisAD, or D3D, lack important visual information that is crucial for atmospheric scientists to fully understand the development and evolution of weather systems. Recognizing the importance of these visual cues, this project will significantly enhance the visualization of weather data through the development of innovative software techniques that will provide more accurate and effective visual representations of weather data. Simple visualization practices, such as depth cueing, isosurface texturing, volume shading, shadows, and correct natural color effects (such as sunlight) are absent in current weather data visualization software. While advanced computer graphics applications (e.g., movie production) have effectively used these techniques for some time, they have yet to be applied in a robust way to weather data. In this project, we will not only fill this gap to create improved, visually accurate weather data visualization, but also increase the quantity and clarity of the information conveyed from the resulting visualizations. Using mature numerical weather prediction software, the Advanced Regional Prediction System (ARPS), to generate numerically simulated severe weather events, new software techniques will be developed to enhance the visualization of this data and begin a new era in weather data visualization. Beyond current capabilities of standard isosurfaces, scalar volume renderings, and two-dimensional images lies important rendering capabilities for weather visualization, such as shaded volumes, shadows, light-transport, and simulated natural cloud modeling. In this project, we will develop, enhance, and apply these techniques to atmospheric data in ways which have yet to be attempted. The primary goal of our research is to produce visually accurate images of weather model data that will provide more accurate information than current methods and use the same cognitive model and analysis process as the forecasters already use, allowing them to increase their effectiveness. We will additionally develop techniques to effectively incorporate non-visual data and allow the selective visualization of the visual non-visual weather data to enable better understanding of the relationships between these variables and quantities. Our goal is to develop these improved techniques, while also allowing interactive exploration of the observed, measured, and model data. Through the use of programmable graphics hardware with three-dimensional texture-mapping, we will implement techniques for interactive visually accurate weather visualization with low-albedo illumination, physics-based atmospheric scattering and attenuation, and volumetric shadowing. We will also implement slower high-albedo illumination models at coarser resolutions to give approximate multiple scattering effects and utilize this scattering information in the illumination calculation per-pixel fragment through three-dimensional texture mapping hardware. We will use perceptually motivated mapping of non-visual weather quantities (e.g., temperature, dewpoint, wind, atmospheric pressure, vorticity) to glyphs, particles, and isosurfaces to provide more information in an easily understandable manner, extending on our previous work in rceptually-motivated glyph rendering, fast isosurface rendering, and volume illustration. Given the capabilities of current graphics hardware, we won t be able to produce truly visually accurate images and animations of time-varying atmospheric data for at least the first half of the project, although we expect to be able to produce good approximations at interactive rates. We also plan to incorporate simple key-frame recording tools into the visualization system for off-line generation of atmospheric visualizations. The weather models produced contain multiple variables at each spatial location. By employing scientific-based combinations of these variables, it is possible to localize specific features contained in these models. We will extend our preliminary work in the development of multi-dimensional transfer function methods for multivariate data to effectively convey information from this complex model data. This improved interactive weather visualization system will increase the effectiveness of atmospheric analysis, improve severe storm forecasting, and enhance the formulation, parameterizations, and physics of numerical weather prediction models. Additionally, it will improve the training of weather observers and atmospheric science students (both undergraduate and graduate), and provide understandable animations to help in basic weather education at the K-12 level. The ultimate goal of this research is to produce a visually accurate, interactive rendering of a numerical severe thunderstorm simulation, thereby enhancing the ability of both the scientist and general user to discover and explore atmospheric processes in an unprecedented way doc24395 none The long range goal of this project is to develop a computational formalism, built on stochastic Petri nets (SPN) that will enable accurate and dynamic calculation of all system variables and their variances. In particular, computational models of two Escherichia coli genetic circuits (emergence and decay of heat shock transcription factor, s?32, upon heat shock, and cell-to-cell communication or quorum sensing ) will be constructed, validated, and combined, suggesting the incremental assembly of predictive models that will ultimately predict system-wide behavior. Quorum sensing is known to determine the virulence of Pseudomonas aeruginosa (causative agent for cystic fibrosis), E. coli O157:H7 (Enterohemorrhagic E. coli), and Salmonella typhimurium (food poisoning). The focus is on the identification of signature genes that contribute to the synthesis and perception of autoinducer-2 (the signal molecule for quorum sensing), as well as the interplay between this circuit and the ?s32 circuit. By assembling combined circuits and by creating an optimization formalism that captures the stochastic variance, the Principal Investigators (PIs) will create an approach by which phenotype can be predicted, manipulated, and ultimately optimized. The specific optimization objective for the proposed work is to streamline the synthesis process of biologically active recombinant proteins in E. coli and it provides significant motivation for this work. It is expected that stochastic variance information is important in understanding these circuits. However, the approach is intended to evaluate this assertion at each stage of the work doc24396 none This action funds a 3-year continuing grant to the National Academy of Sciences to coordinate the U.S. National Committees for 5 scientific unions thus ensuring effective U.S. participation and leadership in the international bioscience community. The unions are the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the International Union of Biological Sciences, the International Union of Pure and Applied Biophysics, the International Union of Microbiological Sciences, and the International Union of Physiological Sciences. Also supported is DIVERSITAS, an international program of biodiversity science. While each National Committee undertakes unique activities, they have a common mission to advance global access to scientific knowledge and research resources and to foster networks and communication worldwide doc24397 none The overall objective of this project is to develop an integrated quantitative framework, consistent with existing mechanistic knowledge and well-designed in-house experiments, for the study and eventual enhancement of the Escherichia coli oxygen and redox sensing regulatory system. Experimental data will be obtained from the literature and the investigators laboratories. The specific goals are: (1) to construct an experimentally verifiable model of the genetic network of the oxygen and redox sensing regulatory system; (2) to develop a scheme for distilling maps of metabolic pathways from the network models achieved in (1); (3) to generate metabolic patterns based on the predicted metabolic pathway maps using standard metabolic flux analysis techniques; (4) to construct mutant strains to be used in bioreactor experiments to support the modeling effort; and (5) to perform bioreactor experiments to generate quantitative data to be used to refine and validate the network and pathway models doc24398 none Symposium H: 3D Nanoengineered Assemblies , to be held in the context of the Materials Research Society (MRS) Fall Meeting in Boston, MA, during December 2-6, . The Symposium will provide a forum for scientific and technical exchange to advance the practice and progress of nanoengineering in three dimensions. The symposium will explore 3-D processing techniques with the promise to transport or modify material on the nanometer scale, as alternatives to conventional 2-D techniques. The technologies to be addressed include soft lithography, self assembly, biological or biomimetic-based processing, atomic manipulation using scanning probes, as well as non-contact methods such as holography, nonlinear optical processes, particle beam material interactions, and materials manipulation with an eye on developing 3-D nanoengineered systems and embedded 3-D nanostructures with nanometer scale resolution doc24399 none In response to an Announcement of Opportunity for the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment Program (GLOBE) this project is designed to meet GLOBE goals and objectives of linking scientists and schoolchildren in a global information network with the ultimate goal of better understanding Earth s environment and changes that take place within it. This project will support, develop, and promote the phenology protocol for use at GLOBE schools in order to detect the annual waves of plant green-up and senescence that occur as photosynthesis becomes active and then dormant with the cycling of the seasons. While satellites can detect such waves, there is very little data on what exactly the satellite derived greenness index is actually indicating, especially in areas like the dry tropical and semi-arid regions. This project will conduct phenology measurements near the existing network of carbon flux-measuring eddy covariance towers and also in urban and other data-sparse areas. A variety of remote sensing algorithms and processing techniques will be compared with the GLOBE phenology data, to allow a more accurate interpretation of this remotely sensed data. Scientists will benefit from improving knowledge of integrated phenological processes, and students will benefit from conducting real research with their own and others data. This project is being jointly supported by NASA s Terrestrial Ecosystems Program doc24400 none Crownpoint Institute of Technology seeks to broaden the current curriculum with increased emphasis on the quality of its instructional and outreach programs in STEM. The outcome of the project will be a comprehensive study and potential impact assessment of how increased investment in STEM can attract more Navajo students into these fields of study, identification of professional needs of faculty, as well as how these actions will potentially effect the economic status and quality of life of the peoples of the Navajo Nation. The primary goals of the project are to increase STEM resources to allow faculty to encourage and mentor students in scientific study and research, and to develop avenues for students to return to their homelands and help their own people, thus completing the circle of their journey doc24401 none The multi-institutional project focuses on a novel integration of video conferencing clients and services with NMI Middleware standards, functions and services. The outcome will be a videoconferencing application directory enabling secure, inter-domain authentication for calls that transit institutional organizational boundaries. A testbed for video middleware will be established to test the architecture, its implementation using multiple products, and the interoperability of these products. Testbed results will be provided to the higher education and research community in the form of a video middleware cookbook . The project has identified 4 goals. - develop the NMI Release 1 communications object class for use in H.323, SIP, MPEG2, VRVS and Access Grid implementations - develop a framework for specification of videoconferencing security requirements - develop a testbed to deploy and test middleware-ware, inter-operable videoconferencing services. - disseminate the results through conferences, publications including a Video Middleware Cookbook The proposal is based on substantial experience building ViDe.Net, the international videoconferencing service for higher education. As the global internet becomes a true multi-service infrastructure, use of internet videoconferencing will increase throughout education, including K-12. The ability to look up and connect to resources through secure, easy-to-use interfaces will enable greater use of this technology to enhances classroom instruction and overcome geographic and economic disadvantage doc24402 none The topic of this conference is the neurobiology of bird song. Many features of bird song have made it a useful model for research on important problems in behavioral neurobiology and have engaged the attention of researchers on species-typical behavior, communication, behavioral development, central sensory processing, motor learning, sensorimotor control, neurogenesis, and neuronal plasticity. Recent developments involving anatomical, neurophysiological, neuroendocrine, molecular, and behavioral techniques have further increased interest in the song system. Because many features of the bird song system also apply to vertebrate brains, studies of birdsong neurobiology have had a major impact on neuroscience research and fundamentally altered concepts of brain function. There has been no conference devoted to this topic during the past decade. A Conference on the Behavioral Neurobiology of Bird Song will take place at Hunter College, New York City, on December 12-14 th , . The Conference s objectives are (a) to provide a venue for interaction among several generations of researchers, including both domestic and foreign workers, (b) to present a program of sufficient breadth to reflect major current issues and indicate future research directions, (c) to provide materials for a published volume on the topic, (d) to facilitate participation of and communication among a group of new, young and promising researchers within the birdsong community and (e) to increase ethnic and gender diversity within this important field of neuroscience, Conference participants include individuals who have made some of the most exciting advances in the field during the past few years and who are in the middle of highly productive careers. Individuals currently at early stages of their careers, who are likely to make significant future contributions to the field will also be participants. The interactions of several generations of excellent researchers are expected to help advance discovery in this field and enhance the training and education of the younger researchers. A volume based upon Conference proceedings will be published, and will have a significant long-term impact upon a broader scientific community doc24403 none In response to an Announcement of Opportunity for the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment Program (GLOBE) this project is designed to meet GLOBE goals and objectives of linking scientists and schoolchildren in a global information network with the ultimate goal of better understanding Earth s environment and changes that take place within it. This project will design a new observation protocol for use at GLOBE schools in order to detect annual changes in migration of the ruby throated hummingbird (Archilocus colubris), the widest ranging hummingbird commonly observed in 38 Eastern U.S. states and 7 Canadian provinces, and in their wintering grounds in Mexico and Central America. Little is known about the drivers for migration, nesting and re-nesting activity, primarily because a systematic set of observations across the species range is absent, and because recapture of banded specimens is exceedingly rare. Trends in current data cannot be attributed to actual changes in the population because they simply may be due to an increased amount of reporting. This observation-only program will gather data on first appearance, flower species visited, sex and or age, and duration of feeding at participating schools. These observations will be taken in concert with other GLOBE measurements of atmospheric condition and phenology, giving the potential for correlating the humming bird s behavior with environmental factors such as time of year, location, and weather doc24404 none This project will develop four new instructional units for GLOBE: a middle and high school unit on Urban Atmosphere and a middle and high school unit on Coastal Ecosystems. These units will meet the needs of school systems for standards-based instructional units that also meet the needs of the research community for data from regions undergoing high rates of environmental change. In addition, the project will develop an on-line tool, Assemble an Inquiry, that will coach educators through the process of developing their own customized, standards-based units with the existing GLOBE materials doc24405 none The invention of agriculture is one of humankind s greatest achievements and archaeology s greatest challenges. Despite great strides in archaeological understanding, archaeologists still do not fully grasp why the first experiments with agriculture began so late in time (10,000 BP) and in only a handful of centers (Near East, Mesoamerica, South America, North China, South Asia, Africa). Of this handful, the North China center is the least known and most likely to shed new light on these questions. The problem in North China is that the archaeological hunter-gatherers whose knowledge of plants laid the foundation for agriculture are well removed in time and space from the oldest presently known agricultural cultures (Cishan, Peiligang, and Dadiwan), which are too highly developed to represent the first stages of agriculture. The transitional groups that connect the two, North China s earliest agriculturalists, are missing. For the Dadiwan culture ( BP) in western North China, the antecedent hunter-gatherer complex is found 250 miles (400 km) due north, in the Helan-Tengger sequence (12,700 - 10,000 BP) documented in surveys and excavations by a team of Chinese (Chen Fahu) and US scholars (R. Bettinger, R. Elston, P. J. Brantingham, and D. B. Madsen) have been conducting in Nei Mongol Autonomous Region and Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region since . The research suggests that early Holocene plant intensification began in the Helan-Tengger study area but that the earliest agricultural experiments were somewhat further south, toward Dadiwan. These probably began during a warm-wet episode about BP that encouraged northern hunter-gatherers to intensify plant use and experiment with plant propagation in a limited way to augment more favored food sources, mainly game. A severe, cold-dry climatic reversal documented around BP forced this pattern further south, to the Dadiwan area, where agriculture became established on a small scale and then expanded dramatically when climate turned warmer and wetter around BP. Plainly, the early agricultural sites that connect the hunter-gatherer Helan-Tengger complex in the North to the developed agricultural Dadiwan complex in the South must lie in the area between. The proposed survey will use substantial vehicle travel to locate, and foot travel to reach, likely site locations in this intervening area. Archaeological charcoal suitable for radiocarbon dating will be obtained from sites whose stone tools and ceramics place them within the Helan-Tengger to Dadiwan gap. Our research team of US and PRC scholars has extensive experience with this sort of survey north of the Yellow River but none in the proposed study area to its south, where site locations should be different and perhaps more difficult to detect. Success in finding and dating these sites is not assured but would surely be of great significance. It would articulate the first continuous record of the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture in China - and in so doing document this first critical step in the development of one of the world s greatest civilizations doc24406 none This project will develop intelligent robotic tools and a telepresence environment for performing off-pump coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery. In this context, off-pump CABG surgery means that the surgery is done while heart is still beating instead of using a cardiopulmonary bypass machine and stopping the heart to perform heart surgery. Although on-pump open heart surgery has been refined over the last 30 years and is now a common and successful procedure it remains highly invasive and fraught with potential complications. Due to the complications resulting from using cardiopulmonary bypass machine, performing CABG off-pump is highly desirable. However, off-pump CABG surgery can be potentially performed for only a small proportion (~10%) of all CABG surgeries due to technological limitations. Use of intelligent robotics technology promises an alternative and superior way of performing off-pump CABG surgery. The intelligent telerobotic tools that will be developed in this project will actively track and cancel the relative motion between the surgical instruments and the heart by Active Relative Motion Cancelling (ARMC), allowing CABG surgeries to be performed on a beating heart with technical perfection equal to traditional on pump procedures. A major focus of the research will be on developing complementary sensing systems, and algorithms for intelligent and model based fusing of information supplied form different systems for superior performance, and model based confidence evaluation to detect and handle variations in heart rhythm and arrythmias. The sensory systems that will be studied include sonomicrometry, vision, whisker, force torque, and MEMS based inertia sensors doc24407 none Information-sharing and privacy are fundamentally in tension, and it is important to study the trade-off from both technical and social-contextual perspectives. The emergence of ubiquitous computing opens up radical new possibilities for acquiring and sharing information, but today s methods cannot exploit the possibilites without grave privacy risks. This proposal explores a new methodology that provides much finer control over information exchange: only the information needed for the collaboration is shared, everything else is protected, and protection is provably strong. It is then possible to explore collaborative applications in ubiquitous computing settings that are exciting, but which would be otherwise impossible. Specifically, a class of collaborative applications called ``Ant Club Trails (ACT) will be developed. The idea behind Ant Club Trails is to combine information from the ``trails left by individual users, and to share it with other users by collaborative filtering in a way which protects individual privacy. The project draws on cryptography, probabilistic reasoning and computational geometry for the development of working ACT systems. It is also guided by sociology and critical theory toward design of socially realistic and desirable systems. The outcome should be better scientific understanding of the information-sharing privacy tradeoff, and a larger landscape of collaborative applications that protect privacy. The broader impacts of the work include: (i) empowerment of communities to share and possibly make a market in community knowledge; (ii) training of research graduate students; and (iii) involvement of undergraduates in developing ACT applications on smart phones doc24408 none The overall goal of this project is to integrate quantitative analysis with biology to provide a systems approach to understanding hepatocyte (liver) metabolism in order to gain insights into Type II diabetes. The specific goals of the project are to: (1) characterize a comprehensive set of metabolic alterations in the hepatocytes induced by environmental factors with the aid of metabolic flux analysis, (2) incorporate physiochemical information; namely, kinetic binding data to provide a mechanistic insight into hepatic metabolism beyond that obtained with metabolic flux analysis alone, and (3) develop a phenomenological model using multivariate analysis to identify candidate pathways or factors that contribute most to the diabetic phenotype. The objective is the development of a model capable of identifying the potential for diabetes doc24409 none In response to an Announcement of Opportunity for the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment Program (GLOBE) this project is designed to meet GLOBE goals and objectives of linking scientists and schoolchildren in a global information network with the ultimate goal of better understanding the Earth s environment and changes that take place within it. This proposal consists of various segments addressing GLOBE Program needs: support for existing protocols, development of new protocols, and scientific research with GLOBE data. This proposal will support the current set of GLOBE soil measurement protocols, with the cooperation of the USDA, Cornell University, ISRIC (The Netherlands). The project will use GLOBE student-collected data to derive and validate algorithms for physical and chemical soil plant atmospheric process simulation models, including the General Purpose Simulation Model of the Earth Atmosphere System (GAPS). The GLOBE soil data will be used to determine baseline estimates of soil quality within various ecosystems and land use scenarios. Seasonal measurements of surface soil characteristics will assess regional changes in soil quality. This proposal will also support the development of materials for education that will include soil science in the context of Earth Systems Science. Scientists, students, and the general public will be able to better understand the role of living soil in ecosystems and their role in the care of our natural resources doc24410 none This is a Collaborative Proposal between Northwestern University and University of Florida which addresses the key research challenges associated with management of dynamic Virtual Machines (VM) and interfacing these mechanisms with existing grid middleware techniques. The project will develop novel solutions that will address - resource management for distributed virtualized end-resources that can be created dynamically, - image management for the on-demand transfer of data representing the entire state to create a dynamic VM instance, and - data management for the on-demand transfer of user and application data between decoupled compute and data servers on the grid. The proposed approach will lead to middleware solutions that will form an information processing foundation for grid computing. The software generated in this project will be sued to implement the next generation of network computing hubs currently being used to support simulation needs in nanotechnology, electronics CAD, computer architecture and parallel programming. The project addresses key research challenges to allow the management of dynamic instances of virtual machine middleware and will lead to solutions that will form an information processing foundation for grid computing on virtualized end-resources. In particular, the software generated in this project will be used to implement the next generation of network computing hubs currently being used to support simulation needs in nanotechnology, electronics CAD, computer architecture and parallel programming doc24368 none This project is the continuation of the maintenance and development of the RIDGE Petrologic Database (PetDB), which currently contains and serves over the internet the complete published geochemical dataset for sub-oceanic rocks and minerals generated at mid-ocean ridges. Technical aspects of the database will be transferred to a professional database environment, the database will be updated with all newly published data, development will be continued, and the database will be mined for second-order products that are of use to the broad community doc24412 none Large pools of soil C have accumulated in high latitude ecosystems since glaciation as soil organic matter was climatically protected from decomposition by low temperatures and frozen soil. Air temperatures have been observed to increase at high latitudes over the last 25 years, and this old stored soil C may be susceptible to decomposition as soils thaw. Sustained and significant transfers of C to the atmosphere that could cause a positive feedback to climate change must come from stored soil C, which forms the bulk of the soil pool in these ecosystems. Therefore, understanding the sources of carbon respiration is critical to predicting the response of C cycling to climate change. The proposed research uses radiocarbon and stable isotope measurements of soil organic matter (SOM) and soil respiration to characterize the sources of soil C released following soil thaw. Organic and mineral soil cores collected from acidic and non-acidic tussock tundra sites at the Toolik Lake Long Term Ecological Research station will be studied to determine the potential of arctic soils to release old C as permafrost melts. This information is critical for predicting C loss from high latitude ecosystems to the atmosphere as a result of global change doc24413 none In response to an Announcement of Opportunity for the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment Program (GLOBE) this project is designed to meet GLOBE goals and objectives of linking scientists and schoolchildren in a global information network with the ultimate goal of better understanding Earth s environment and changes that take place within it. This proposal consists of various segments addressing GLOBE Program needs: support for existing protocols, development of new protocols, and scientific research with GLOBE data. This proposal will the support and development of support the current set of GLOBE soil moisture protocols and learning activities. Soil moisture data collected by GLOBE students represents a unique and valuable resource to Earth scientists. The GLOBE student data have the potential to become the first readily accessible, long-term, and consistent record of near-surface soil moisture available on a global basis. This soil moisture data can be used to validate satellite microwave-derived soil moisture estimates and to validate this component in GCM and mesoscale models. The prospect for direct validation of microwave data is limited by the current launch schedule, but there is much that can be done comparing these observations to seasonal patterns in forward models of microwave soil response. The area of weather and climate model initialization, updating, and validation holds more short-term promise, since the current parameterization of soil moisture is crude. Improving the representation of land-surface hydrology is a major focus of this research doc24414 none This project will develop an integrated framework for modeling, control, and guidance of robotic helicopters, which will enable these vehicles to exploit their full operating capabilities to fly fast, precise, and reliable missions in a variety of operations in urban and remote environments. Potential applications include search and rescue, surveillance, law enforcement, inspection, aerial mapping, wildlife observation, and cinematography. The integrated framework consists of three interrelated activities: (1) the development of a modeling technique for high-fidelity low-order dynamics modes, (2) the use of linear robust multiviariable control theory (H_infinity loop shaping), gain scheduling, and high-fidelity models for the design and simulation of high-bandwidth full-flight-envelope controllers, and (3) the use of optimal feedforward methods (model predictive control) for the design of guidance systems that rely on the performance and robustness of the closed-loop helicopter dynamics.A key aspect of the project will be the flight test validation and refinement of the framework on Carnegie Mellon s Yamaha R-50 and RMAX helicopters. Flight validation will include a complex mission in a known environment. The mission will consist segments of standard maneuvers (e.g. hurdle-hop, dash quick stop, coordinated turn, slalom, rearward flight, S-turn, etc.). The robotic helicopters will fly the missions in several different ways (e.g for aggressiveness, precision, fuel economy, etc.) according to the mission specification doc24415 none Aitken The Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (AEESP) and the American Academy of Environmental Engineers (AAEE) are preparing a conference on education and research needs in environmental engineering and science. The conference will be held August 10-14, , on the campus of the University of Toronto. Since no single professional society represents the entire field, this conference provides a unique opportunity for the community of educators, researchers and practitioners in environmental engineering and science to discuss mutual interests, compare methods, and identify needs for the advancement of the profession. The overall theme of the conference is Integrated Environmental Teaching, Research and Practice: Linking Engineering and Science to Address Complex Problems. Within this broad theme, five sub- themes will be addressed: Understanding Complex Environmental Systems; Use of Information Technologies for Monitoring and Data Management; Integrating Novel and Advanced Technologies into Understanding and Solving Environmental Problems; Sustainable Systems; and Innovative Educational Approaches. These sub-themes represent an extension of AEESP s last Research Needs conference ( , Penn State), which focused on complex systems, a sustainable environment, and advanced molecular tools; a recognition that information technologies play an increasingly important role in obtaining, organizing and analyzing a vast amount of data for use in decision-making for environmental systems; and an exploration of how advanced knowledge and methods can be incorporated into both education and practice. Such an emphasis on the continuum among research, teaching, and practice is critical to the long-term evolution of this engineering discipline doc24416 none This workshop will investigate the research issues and future associated with the new field of ubiquitous computing, which is centered on a vision of a world populated by networks of cheap and easily accessible computing devices. Such a vision has generated a great deal of excitement as there is a potential for improving the quality of our everyday lives. However, the realization of such a vision requires the resolution of a number of difficult technological and social problems. One major challenge is the interdisciplinary nature of such an endeavor, which requires coordinated advances in many fields of computer science including network design, security, user interfaces, coordination and collaboration theories, privacy, agent technologies, and mobile computing hardware. This workshop will focus on 1) supporting technology areas, 2) promising application areas, 3) research issues, and 4) evaluation methods. The steering committee spans both relevant technology and application areas. Position papers will be invited before the workshop. Formal papers will be gathered into a book-length manuscript after the workshop doc24417 none The National Science Foundation began the development of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) several years ago and it is scheduled to come online this coming year. The NSDL is a connection or system of separate data or information sources. Bringing these disparate sources together is a complex issue, from both the technical perspective and organization dynamics This study will focus on the institutionalization of NSDL from both a technical and contextual perspective. The latter includes such factors as priorities and culture of the participating organizations, how they interact with the technical considerations. A comparative case study will be used, with the internet serving as a comparison, a system that has already been institutionalized and studied. The study will provide an evaluative framework to employ with the NSDL as it is implemented but will be applicable to large-scale IT systems, as well doc24418 none With NSF support, Windward Community College (WCC) will conduct an assessment of its science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) curriculum and infrastructure, and develop an integrated institutional plan to improve and enhance WCC s STEM curriculum and infrastructure. The proposed 12-month effort will be divided into three phases: Phase I - Development and application of assessment tools for evaluation of WCC s STEM curriculum and infrastructure; Phase II - Development of a long-term integrated STEM enhancement plan including assessment instruments to evaluate progress; Phase III - Identify resources and secure support to implement the STEM institutional enhancement strategies doc24419 none Soil nitrogen (N) availability controls the decomposition of plant litter in two ways. First, it affects the quality or relative decomposability of litter through effects on plant growth and allocation. Second, soil N availability may directly limit the activity of decomposers. Because the Carbon (C) to N ratio of litter is usually higher than that of bacteria and fungi, these decomposers must immobilize N from the soil solution in order to use C in plant litter for metabolic activity and growth. The objective of this study is to develop a mechanistic understanding of how interactions between soil available N and plant litter quality affect decomposition using a novel method for measuring total N immobilization and loss during decomposition. This study will also provide information about the effects of fire on decomposition in boreal forest. Understanding how decomposition is altered by fire is key to understanding how ecosystem C balance may change with the increased fire frequency and intensity that is associated with anthropogenically-driven climate change. Finally, the mechanistic approach of this research should be make its findings generally applicable to understanding controls over decomposition in other systems doc24420 none Isosurface extraction and rendering is a useful and popular method for exploring volume datasets. While many studies of extraction techniques have been presented, few researchers have considered how to perform isosurface extraction from very large datasets in a way that utilizes parallel computation while also effectively managing memory access. For out-of-core datasets (i.e., those too large to be processed entirely in main memory), delays from access of secondary storage must be minimized if high performance is to be achieved. In this project, an investigation of new techniques for parallel, out-of-core isosurface extraction are conducted. The work seeks to exploit multiple types of parallelism, effectively organize memory access to minimize access penalties, and to effectively manage inter-process communication. A hallmark of the workis that it focuses on total system performance rather than attempting to only maximize intermediary measures of a single aspect of performance. One primary target platform for testing of the techniques is cluster computation environments comprised of commodity CPUs. Intellectual Merit. The proposed activity can benefit multiple disciplines. Many scientific and engineering enterprises generate and or wish to use large datasets. Some finance and consumer applications also desire to effectively utilize large collections of business data. Discovery of trends, phenomena, and structures in those datasets can be aided by more efficient visualization. In particular, for large datasets too large to be processed in-core, the time to compute a visualization is likely to be very high due to the relatively slow access times of the secondary storage. Reduction of these times by resource (memory, CPU, and communication)-effective processing will increase productivity among scientific visualization users and consumers. In addition, reduction of processing times may make tractable the consideration of certain very large problems. The proposed activity builds upon prior work of the PI and of the other experiences with parallel out-of-core isosurface extraction. The PI has access to the necessary computer resources to complete the work, including access to cluster computers at three sites and to supercomputers at three other sites. Due to the impact of the proposed activity on visualization methods that are used across the scientific community, society at large is likely to benefit via new knowledge discovery by the discipline science that this project aids. In addition, the proposed work will be beneficial in managing and understanding the increasing body of data being collected about scientific, engineering, and business phenomena. The project s results will be disseminated via publication in the open literature, in conferences, and on the web. Through the PI s partnerships with NASA, NIH, and other researchers, the results of the work have a high probability of producing an impact in multiple disciplines. The project will also aid undergraduate and graduate student training and development via (1) PI-mentoring of the graduate student supported on the project, (2) presentation, discussion, and analysis of results at a regular research forum, and (3) integration of research findings in graduate computer graphics visualization courses taught by the PI doc24421 none This is a Collaborative Proposal between Northwestern University and University of Florida which addresses the key research challenges associated with management of dynamic Virtual Machines (VM) and interfacing these mechanisms with existing grid middleware techniques. The project will develop novel solutions that will address - resource management for distributed virtualized end-resources that can be created dynamically, - image management for the on-demand transfer of data representing the entire state to create a dynamic VM instance, and - data management for the on-demand transfer of user and application data between decoupled compute and data servers on the grid. The proposed approach will lead to middleware solutions that will form an information processing foundation for grid computing. The software generated in this project will be sued to implement the next generation of network computing hubs currently being used to support simulation needs in nanotechnology, electronics CAD, computer architecture and parallel programming. The project addresses key research challenges to allow the management of dynamic instances of virtual machine middleware and will lead to solutions that will form an information processing foundation for grid computing on virtualized end-resources. In particular, the software generated in this project will be used to implement the next generation of network computing hubs currently being used to support simulation needs in nanotechnology, electronics CAD, computer architecture and parallel programming doc24422 none This project examines the dynamics of the Open Source Software (OSS) movement, a genuine behavioral and technical puzzle with a far-reaching impact on the world s economy. The OSS community has developed a substantial portion of the infrastructure of the internet and has many outstanding technical achievements, without the benefit of traditional project management techniques, organizational structure, face to face interaction, and in most cases, without direct monetary compensation. We seek to understand the factors that predict developer retention and project success, and to model the growth of the OSS network over time in order to inform policy decisions regarding the OSS movement. We develop an organizational behavior social psychological model of developer motivation and project effectiveness using a modification of Hackman & Oldham s job characteristics model and March s role identity construct, and use simulation, data mining, and agent-based modeling techniques to model how the OSS network develops over time doc24423 none This project will develop a systematic process of mapping Augmented Reality information organization to the human brain s prodigious capacity for spatial cognition. Fundamental to human thinking and utilizing much of the brain s resources is spatial cognition: a matrix for mental imagery manipulation, mathematical reasoning, spatial mental models of time, certain aspects of language organization, and memory organization. A neuropsychological human factors route to AR interface design may produce a solid basis for systematic theory, research, and guidelines for the design of mobile, AR interfaces. To accomplish this the research will: (1) extend neurological and behavioral research on human spatial cognition to systematically map egocentric (i.e., body centered) spatial perception and object manipulation in AR systems; (2) add new capabilities to the METLAB s ImageTclAR toolkit in support of this project and spatial AR interface design, and (3) develop multi-user mobile AR prototypes with both body and environmentally stabilized components using new hybrid tracking techniques based on visual tracking and ShapeTape sensors. It will also systematically conduct Human Computer Interaction experiments to evaluate and confirm the effect of new Mobile Infospaces interface techniques on: information object search and perception, tool and data object semantics, ease of object manipulation and procedural performance, memory for the location and properties of data tools and objects, group navigation, situational awareness, and cognitive maps of the environment. Finally, the project will organize and systematize findings and interface design experience into Mobile Infospaces AR Design Guidelines. The new models and methods developed for AR system design will impact mobile AR research and development in two main ways. For research, it will provide a empirically validated theoretical foundation for augmented reality design using a neuropsychological and behaviorally valid human factors model of spatial cognition in information displays. For interface design, it will provide information display guidelines and ImageTclAR interface development tools that can establish parameters for optimizing the placement of tools, organization of menus and data, and clustering of procedures for mobile, augmented-reality and immersive virtual reality users doc24424 none The project plans to solve two important network problems facing distributed computation and Grids. The first problem is to provide a sufficiently flexible and robust framework for authentication and authorization, and the second problem is to provide secure mechanisms to allow researchers to upload new or enhanced measurement tools in a secure and trustworthy fashion. Building on the National Internet Measurement Infrastructure (NIMI), the project plans to evolve NIMI to a truly large scale implementation. Work involves migrating messaging, authentication and authorization to commonly used components, and mitigating some of the security problems associated with uploading measurement tools by building fine-grained delegation support and different levels of security. These structures can be used for various forms of distributed passive monitoring and security monitoring such as intrusion detection systems. The NIMI architecture will be extended to support open large-scale grid technologies. The overall vision is to encourage researchers, especially grid-proejcts, to build clients which will interact with the NIMI infrastructure. The infrastructure can then be used for secure, flexible command and control mechanisms, and also be sued for distributed passive monitoring doc24425 none Collaborative Research: Semantic Map of Biological Data Sources: Entity Identity and Path Characterization A fundamental problem facing the biological researcher today is correctly identifying a specific instance of a biological entity, e.g., a specific gene or protein, and then obtaining a complete functional characterization of this entity instance by exploring a multiplicity of inter-related sources. While the diversity of available data presents an opportunity to attack this problem, it is accompanied by difficulties in harnessing and exploring data. This collaborative interdisciplinary, inter-institutional research project exploits the researchers prior expertise on wrapper and mediator technology and apply domain specific semantic knowledge to this problem. The goal is the correct identification and complete characterization of scientific entities by exploring multiple data sources. This project will address three tasks: (1) Construction of a Semantic Map of biological data sources including unique identifiers; links between sources; attributes; and search and query; (2) Learning at the data source, schema, domain and instance level uses the concept of Identity Link to identify equivalent identifiers for the same instance, and (3) Learning the properties of physical links and paths that are implemented among multiple data sources. The topology of links (paths) based on their properties, and Link (Path) Equivalence is applied to the tasks of entity identity and characterization. The tools developed in this project will be accessible via the project Web site (http: www.umiacs.umd.edu research CLIP BFEnt02 ), and can be applied by biologists to support ongoing scientific investigations in cancer research and diabetes, resulting in a broad impact in medical research and treatment. The educational impact includes a course on data management solutions for bioinformatics researchers and a workshop on experiment planning using data sources for biologists doc24426 none It is becoming increasingly difficult for scientists to identify, manage, and process all the information needed to conduct their research. Information work is especially complex in fields like neuroscience where new discoveries may require understanding of an extensive body of accumulated knowledge and the research is often carried out by multidisciplinary teams. This project investigates the information activities and resources associated with advances and roadblocks in neuroscience research. A typology of information work will be developed based on data recorded by participating neuroscientists on their day-to-day information needs and practices and on their specific experiences testing a new data mining system. Case studies of incidents that represent different types of information work will be built through field studies at three laboratory sites. Case files will be analyzed to develop profiles of high impact information, critical information problems, and effective combinations of information activities, resources, and tools. Constraints on the transfer and exchange of information within research teams and between specializations and disciplines will be documented and compared across the sites. The analysis will specify information technology needed to improve neuroscientists ability to synthesize existing research results and share information and to support different modes of discovery and collaboration doc24427 none This is a collaborative project involving University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Boston University. The project will build, deploy, test and package a middleware-oriented distributed account management system. The system supports the information exchange between grid-enabled systems that are necessary to implement distributed account management, resource allocation, usage accounting, and monitoring functions in a heterogeneous grid environment. The system will be coupled to the a grid transactions system to form a completely operational, grid-enabled reference implementation. The ability to manage user accounts, provide access control over its resources, manage allocations and generate usage reports in a distributed fashion is critical to the expansion of the grid. The proposed system can be used to build a highly automated, scalable account management system that will work across disparate computing systems. The software will be packaged as an open-source distribution for further development and adaptation by the grid community doc24428 none This research explores perception of task-level information from kinesthetic sense data in mobile manipulation tasks. A mobile manipulator interacts with the terrain through its feet or wheels, and it interacts with fixed or mobile objects through its hands, wheels, bumpers, or other effectors. All of these interactions contribute to the robot s motion and to internal shape deformations of the robot, which can be detected by encoders, strain gauges, and other sensors. This kinesthetic sense data can be used to estimate features of the terrain, locations of objects, location of the robot, contact state between the robot and objects, and other task variables. This project is developing a theory of task-level kinesthetic perception, by developing suitable models of task and robot dynamics, and using the framework of nonlinear observability to analyze specific tasks and develop algorithms for estimating task parameters and state variables. Experimental work includes evaluation of several mobile manipulator designs, implementation and testing of observers, and demonstration in mobile manipulation tasks doc24427 none This is a collaborative project involving University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Boston University. The project will build, deploy, test and package a middleware-oriented distributed account management system. The system supports the information exchange between grid-enabled systems that are necessary to implement distributed account management, resource allocation, usage accounting, and monitoring functions in a heterogeneous grid environment. The system will be coupled to the a grid transactions system to form a completely operational, grid-enabled reference implementation. The ability to manage user accounts, provide access control over its resources, manage allocations and generate usage reports in a distributed fashion is critical to the expansion of the grid. The proposed system can be used to build a highly automated, scalable account management system that will work across disparate computing systems. The software will be packaged as an open-source distribution for further development and adaptation by the grid community doc24430 none ly questions of these mechanisms; and (3) construction of more sophisticated collaboration-capable software agents. The research will contribute to the development of collaboration-capable software agents and collaborative human-computer interface systems, and, thus, will significantly increase the effectiveness of heterogeneous teams of people and software-systems agents doc24431 none Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Community College (LCOOCC) will enhance the ability of rural and minority populations on and near the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa reservation in northwestern Wisconsin and at two outreach sites that serve the Bad River and Red Cliff bands of Ojibwa to succeed in careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). The College will undertake a comprehensive assessment of community needs as well as institutional strengths and weaknesses in STEM fields. Assessment outcomes will drive systemic reform strategies, lead to more effective use of limited resources and further the development of the nation s technologically based workforce. Primary goals of the project are threefold: (1) assessment of community and employer needs and opportunities for STEM-related education and professionals; (2) identification of strategies for increasing student enrollment, retention and graduation in STEM foundation courses and program areas; and, (3) evaluation of STEM student performance to eliminate bottlenecks and strengthen STEM competencies doc24432 none In order to understand large vector fields, scientists typically attempt to simplify and visualize the data. Broadly speaking, there are two methods for visualizing vector field feature extraction techniques and general visualization techniques, that offer complementary advantages. Feature based techniques extract important features such as topology (critical point and critical curves), attachment or separation lines, vortices, bifurcations or shock waves, and attempt to present a simplified view of the vector field. There are two main dificulties with this approach. First, too many features may clutter the visualization. Therefore, there is a need to prune spurious and insignificant features. Second, feature visualization alone may fail to provide a comprehensive view of the data. This can be remedied by using popular general visualization techniques such as streamlines, line integral convolution (LIC), and stream surfaces. However, most attempts using this approach destroy the underlying important features early in the simplification or compression approach, as we have demonstrated in our preliminary work. Therefore, there is a need to tie the feature simplification process with the simplification of the underlying vector field in order to produce consistent visualization. In this work, we propose to develop controlled feature simplification and preservation algorithms for 2D vector fields that remove insignificant features and preserve important ones by removing noise and by utilizing feature-driven similarity metrics to measure and control the simplification process. The proposed algorithms will simplify the features and the underlying vector field simulatneously in order to produce consistent visualization. We will extend these algorithms to 3D and ime-dependent vector fields. Additional challenges include: (i) designing efficient algorithms and structure-similarity metrics based on the properties of more complex 3D features such as the 3D separation and attachement lines, vortices and shock wave regions, and (ii) tracking simplied features over time as bifurcations may take place. We will also quantify and visualize the uncertainty or loss due to simplification in order to give a better sense to the scientist as to what is lost or compromised during the simplification process. We will apply our algorithms to computational fluid dynamics and environmental data. We expect that the algorithms and techniques developed in this project will be applicable to a wide variety of disciplines including aeronautics, meteorology, oceanography, environmental sciences, astronomy, geographic information sciences, computer graphics, and computer-aided geometric design doc24433 none Despite many advances in the visualization community over the past decade, effective and efficient representations for three-dimensional flow fields are still elusive. Many techniques show promise, but do not represent a complete picture of the flow. This project consists of a systematic investigation of the current techniques, their advantages and disadvantages, research and analysis of combined techniques which complement each other, and research into new techniques. Cognitive analysis and user studies will be undertaken to investigate existing research. Many of these techniques, including those of the PIs, proposed a method of representing or rendering a flow field, with little selfexamination of the limitations towards garnering a true understanding of the flow field. Several of these techniques have obvious limitations, but present an improvement over the dearth of any good techniques for three-dimensional flow visualization. By combining several techniques appropriately, more improvements can be made. Are these improvements sufficient? What combinations work and which ones do not? These questions will be investigated and quantified in this research. Finally, we will ask: How can new techniques be developed that will overcome some of these limitations?Our subjective understanding of the field allows us to propose several avenues of investigation. These include an-isotropic volume renderings, embedded with flow differentiators; schematic texture algorithms for opaque and semi-transparent stream surfaces; level-of-detail models for representing the flow; multi-resolution representation of underlying features; and new representations that provide a more meaningful context for the flow. This research will greatly aid computational scientists across many disciplines: computational fluid dynamics scientists, environment scientists, atmospheric scientists, computational geological scientists and biomedical researchers. A primary component of their research is the investigation or simulation of natural phenomena. This phenomena is generally dynamic, leading to complex and interesting flow fields. For three-dimensional computations, effective tools to understand, represent and convey these flows are lacking. This research will provide a firm foundation for research in this area, as well as lead to new algorithms offering a much clearer representation for flows doc24434 none In response to an Announcement of Opportunity for the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment Program (GLOBE) this project is designed to meet GLOBE goals and objectives of linking scientists and schoolchildren in a global information network with the ultimate goal of better understanding Earth s environment and changes that take place within it. This proposal will support existing protocols, and conduct scientific research with GLOBE data. The project will continue to support the protocol for the measurement of snow and cloud cover, as well as soil moisture. In addition, this team will develop new protocols for the measurement of Surface Temperature, and lead the Soil Moisture investigation. This team is already using past GLOBE data to do validation work for the snow detection algorithm and cloud screening technique from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) on NASA s Terra satellite, and this grant will allow validation work on the MODIS surface temperature measurements. This grant will form part of an energy-budget suite of GLOBE investigations that will cover soil temperature and moisture, atmospheric temperature and humidity, cloud cover, and aerosol optical thickness - all factors that must be considered in an energy budget doc24435 none Rapid and substantial improvements in computing power and sensor and imaging technologies produce data sets of ever increasing size. No longer is it possible to rely exclusively on traditional approaches to interactive data exploration and visualization. It is becoming increasingly important to provide technology that enables scientists to analyze their data interactively at higher levels of abstraction. Two approaches are crucial to making possible higher-level data exploration: (1) hierarchical data exploration relying on a data format representing a data set at multiple approximation levels and (2) segmentation- (or feature-based) data exploration. Approach (2) as becoming increasingly important as it allows scientists to study qualitative behavior of their data, which, in turn, can lead to significant compression of data, i.e., the geometrical representations for extracted segments or features are typically much more storage-efficient than original data. We will do research based on approach (2), and our goal is to devise an entire new framework supporting more efficient and effective data exploration via segmentation. Complex scientific data sets represent physical phenomena with billions of elements. These data sets are multi-valued, muti-dimensional and time-varying, and we are no longer able to fully analyze them with merely traditional visualization technology. One can consider various paradigms when developing tools for the exploration of such data sets, and one must consider that scientists rarely needs to examine entire data sets. Typically, the interest is in particular regions where certain properties hold. Tools should therefore be developed that allow a scientist to specify the properties of interest, and to segment data sets accordingly. The proposed approach supports the definition of higher-level data properties, the efficient extraction of the implied data, and the effective visual representation of the extracted data. Our framework is aimed at multi-valued time-varying data sets, where, for example, grid vertices might have multiple associated scalar, vector and tensor quantities. Our goal is to devise new algorithms that support the numerically robust extraction of regions (or boundaries of these regions) that represent similar qualitative behavior. We propose this segmentation approach to massive data set exploration as we believe that it is a necessary to provide scientists with exploration technology that supports higher-level data representation coupled with real-time system behavior. The challenge is to generate segmented data from given multi-valued data sets, store the segmented data efficiently, generate the boundaries of segment boundaries, and display these boundaries. We propose an integrated scheme that supports common data presentation for segmentation and that can be applied to a number of data types (scalar, vector or tensor). In addition, we will combine the segmentation framework with new multiresolution techniques---multiresolution techniques that shall support the extraction and visualization of segmented data and extracted segment boundaries at multiple resolution levels. The need for new tools to explore multi-valued time-varying data sets is paramount. The innovative framework we propose to develop will augment current data exploration paradigms. The new framework will allow scientists to define, segment and track meaningful derived data regions. Scientists will be able to focus attention to those areas in a data set that carry largest information content, and the power of our framework lies in the fact that it will be possible to more effectively define and extract these area doc24436 none ly questions of these mechanisms; and (3) construction of more sophisticated collaboration-capable software agents. The research will contribute to the development of collaboration-capable software agents and collaborative human-computer interface systems, and thus will significantly increase the effectiveness of heterogeneous teams of people and software-systems agents doc24437 none Graph drawing and information visualization tools are essential in many fields, including telecommunications,databases, and software engineering, where the models contain millions of objects and relationships. Even though graph drawing is a rich discipline, the promising new concepts and algorithms in the field have had too little practical impact in application areas. This project presents an integrated research and education plan focusing on graph drawing and information visualization techniques for large data sets and graph processes. The research component of this work focuses on the design and implementation of efficient data structures and algorithms for visualization of large graphs with the goal of impacting real-world problems in application areas. This problem is especially relevant because recent technological advances have brought about increased data volumes and increased data complexity. The theoretical aspects of this work include designing scalable force-directed methods, hierarchical graph decompositions, alternative visual representations for graph processes, external memory algorithms, and data structures that support efficient navigation operations. The theoretical results will be used to develop practical tools that will be packaged in a software library and an Adaptive GrAph Visualization Environment, AGAVE, that uses the new graph modeling standard GraphML. Through industrial collaborations, the new methods will be calibrated and tested using real-world data. Alternatives graph representation methods and techniques for visuazalizing dynamic graph processes will also be investigated. The educational component of this proposal includes: (1) Creation and management of the already funded new Graphics and Visualization Lab; (2) Design and implementation of educational tools for visualization of large graphs and graph processes; (3) Supervision of graduate and undergraduate students; (4) Active involvement in outreach and integrative activities doc24438 none The proposed project addresses the development of a NEtwork ofAutonomous Robots (NEAR) with sensors and wireless network cardswith the goal of developing a distributed implementation of arobotic assistant. The key applications of NEARinclude: (a) transportation and retrieval of objects in asemi-structured environment; (b) organization and reconfiguration ofsensors for observations in dynamically changing environments; and (c) coordinated motion of multiple vehicles for cooperative manipulationor for efficient group locomotion. The NEAR robot network isalways near the human user, interacting with the user, andaugmenting her skills, providing a natural synergism.Our focus in this project is to leverage advances in automation andaugmentation and steer them in the direction of autonomy for servicerobotics. We will develop a network of simple mobile robots serving ahuman being. Each robot has some basic sensing capability (vision inour case) and the ability to communicate with other mobilerobots. Robots can be programmed to exhibit simple behaviors:controllers and estimators and policies that couplessensing perception at a very low level. The ability to use multiplerobots enables autonomy without increasing the complexity ofindividual robot behaviors but by instead exploiting the distributedexecution of these behaviors in a network. Since the human isexplicitly involved in programming and commanding the robots, it ispossible to exploit this natural synergy by allowing humans toinfluence the assembly of the behaviors and the organization of theteam in a top-down fashion doc24365 none The goal of this collaborative proposal between the University of California at Santa Cruz and Duke University is the definition of features for recognition and classification of objects in imagery. Feature vectors are enriched and made invariant at the same time by an efficient, probabilistic coding of the feature-space manifolds that are obtained when features undergo all possible transformations in a predefined class. This coding is designed to circumvent the curse of dimensionality by reducing the representation requirements to the two properties that are essential for recognition and classification, that is, uniqueness and continuity. Uniqueness requires different manifolds to be coded differently, while continuity requires similar codings for similar manifolds. Theoretical and empirical investigations will study optimal feature design, the performance of these features with various classification and recognition methods, and the trade-off of computational efficiency and performance. Misclassification rates for families of features and transformations will also be measured, both by theoretical bounds and empirical tests. The behavior of the proposed representations will be examined in the presence of clutter and data corruptions such as occlusions. These concepts will be tested through their application to the automatic diagnosis of colon cancer from computerized tomography scans, and to the interpretation of American sign language from video sequences doc24440 none The purpose of GridSolve is to create the Middleware necessary to provide a seamless bridge between the simple, standard programming interfaces and desktop scientific computing environments (SCE) that dominate the work of computational scientists and the rich supply of services supporting by the emerging Grid architecture. Users of scientific computing environments can easily access and reap the benefits of shared processing, storage, software, data resources and so forth, by using GridSolve. Gridsolve will be build upon the work done earlier on NetSolve software. The work will lead to a new RPC mechanism Grid RPC, will provide client interfaces for key general purposes SCEs, will ensure that GridSolve can bind to and utilize all major Grid backends, will adapt GridSolve to use existing Grid services (security, resource monitoring) ,and will provide support for flexible state management and data logistics through the use of distributed storage resources. Gridsolve is based on a substantial base of NetSolve software, and draws upon knowledge and experience using NetSolve with a variety of Grid environments and applications. The effort will make tools like Matlab and Mathematica work on the grid, with the result that grid technologies and capabilities will be useful to an even broader base of scientists and researchers doc24441 none As the objective of vision (human and machine) is to compute a hierarchy of increasingly abstract interpretations of the observed images or image sequences, it is of fundamental importance to know what are the concepts used at each level of interpretation. In more plain language, what are the visual strokes , visual characters , and visual words ? Or what are the visual electrons , atoms and molecules ? The goal of the proposed research is to discover dictionaries of various levels of visual concepts that correspond to fundamental topologic, photometric, geometric, and dynamic structures of the images and scenes. In a mathematical language, these structures are the low dimensional manifolds embedded in very high dimensional image space. More specifically, we propose to construct top-down generative models for natural images, 3D surfaces, human faces, video sequences, and 2D shape contours. The fundamental atomic structures are defined by parameters in the generative models, and these parameters are estimated by fitting the models to the training data. These structures are intrinsic to the ensemble of natural images and video. We propose stochastic (Markov chain Monte Carlo) learning algorithms which is capable of computing globally optimal solutions doc24442 none Chief Dull Knife College, in collaboration with the University of Montana, Montana State University and Northern Cheyenne Reservation high schools, will implement a five-year TCUP project to develop a seamless pathway for students between reservation high schools, Chief Dull Knife College and the two partner universities. The project will enable team members from these institutions to work together and to establish long-term positive relationships and networks. Project team members, including new faculty positions established through program funding, will work together to develop and revise high school and college math and science curricula; provide teacher training; develop capstone research and mentoring experiences; and implement a 2-week STEM workshop for high school students doc24443 none The project will improve MPICH-G2 collective operation performance to the state of the art and also improve MPICH-G2 s point-to-point TCP performance. Since MPICH-G2 is a popular package and has been used in a variety of Grid projects and applications, improvement will increase its usage and effectiveness. MPICH-G2 has been used to set and utilize QoS parameters having real-time network latency and bandwidth requirements, and has also been used in client server scientific visualization applications. The project will implement a solution to the new symbol collision problem, which will also broaden the base to include a new class of computing platforms, the Linux Cluster. The proposed enhancements coupled with the extension of MPICH-G2 s platform base to include Linux clusters, are significant improvements. The broader impact of this work will be realized by MPI application developers as the proposed activities will significantly increase the utility of MPICH-G2 as an effective middleware tool. This tool as been used in a number of traditional scientific applications, most notably receiving the Gordon Bell Prize, Special Category, for its role in an astrophysics application used for solving problems. The work will significantly improve teh bandwidth for large messages over non-vendor MPI communications and will further promote MPI as an effective Grid API for non-traditional scientific applications doc24444 none This project lays out our plan for research and development aimed atdramatically improving the process and outcome of scientific data analysis and visualization. The improvement will be achieved by coupling an expressive and extensible metadata management framework with novel visualization interfaces that facilitate effective reuse, sharing, and cross-exploration of visualizationinformation and thus will make a profound impact on a broad range of scientific applications. The process of scientific visualization is inherently iterative. A good visualization comes from experimenting with visualization and rendering parameters to bring out the most relevant information in the data. This raises a question. Considering the computer and human time we routinely invest for exploratory and production visualization, are there methodologies and mechanisms to enhance not only the productivity of scientists but also their understanding of the visualization process anddata used? Recent advances in the field of data visualization have been made mainly in rendering and display technologies (such as realtime volume rendering and immersive environments), but little in coherently managing, representing, and sharing information about the visualization process and results (images and insights). Naturally, the various information about data exploration should be shared and reused to leverage the knowledge and experience scientists gain from visualizing scientific data. A visual representation of the data exploration process along with expressive models for recording and querying task specific information help scientists keep track of their visualization experience and findings, use it to generate new visualizations, and share it with others. While previous research has addressed some related issues, a more comprehensive study remains to be done. Thus, we propose two complementary avenues of research: (1) new user interfaces for data visualization tasks, and (2) expressive metadata models supporting the recording and querying of information related to data exploration tasks. In addition, a set of user studies will be conducted on a Web-based visualization testbed realizing (1) and (2) in order to refine the proposed methodologies and designs. Traditional user interfaces cannot support the increasingly complex process of scientific data exploration. A fundamental change in the conventional designs and functionality must be made to offer more intuitive interaction, guidance, and enhanced perception. We will begin our study with enriching the graphbased and spreadsheet-like interfaces we have developed, and also investigate alternative designs. An expressive and extensible metadata model representing the data exploration process and its embedded data visualization process is needed. Such a model along with an appropriate user interface makes it possible to manage diverse information about the input and results of the visualization process, analyze parameter coverage and usage, identify unexplored visualization spaces, and incorporate findings on the process and results in form of visualization metadata. The model is independent of the actual visual interface used and is open in that its realization in form of a metadata repository can be loosely coupled with a variety of different visualization tools. A set of interfaces and protocols to the repository will be designed to manage, query, and analyze visualization metadata gathered from and utilized by different visualization tools. Our goal is ambitious and can only be accomplished by working closely with application scientists. They will help us understand application-dependent and independent visualization requirements, processes, and information. In return, we will offer them a new and greatly improved way to understand their scientific data, which will help them lead to new discoveries quicker, likely with reduced cost doc24445 none This research is intended to develop and evaluate a haptic simulator suitable for training people to detect very small features in a physical surface such as a human tooth. A driving force behind the apparent demise of professional haptic skill in recent years may simply be a failure to develop and maintain sufficiently rigorous standards of skill specification, training and assessment. Haptic information is not readily amenable to either verbal or visual clarification, and yet professionals such as dentists, jewelers and engravers must learn haptic skills. Limitations of our language make it difficult to accurately describe haptic techniques; our haptic vocabulary consists of vague words such as tough, spongy, and sticky. It is also difficult to visually demonstrate or assess haptic skills. Instructors are unable to see exactly how hard a student presses. Unlike visual information, instructors are generally unable to share a haptic experience with a student. The salvation of haptic skills may lie with computers, strain gauges and motors. These devices can accurately record, visually display, and endlessly reproduce haptic signals. Together, these technologies present an opportunity to reestablish a robust, rewarding culture of haptic skill in the professional workplace. Such a workplace would more productively and thoroughly engage the whole scope of human capability. Training dentists to elicit and recognize force signals is the primary design challenge for the simulator. It will be refined and developed around this simple criterion, placing force signal fidelity above all other competing design criteria including: 1) the geometry of the tooth surface, 2) the visual appearance of the tooth, 3) the precise shape and feel of the dental tool handle, 4) the spatial resolution of the simulator device and 5) the simulated hardness of the tooth itself. Ultimately the project will compare the clinical performance of dentists trained with the simulator against those trained with traditional methods. This work will provide an important contribution to the field of haptic simulation by suggesting a method to empirically identify force signals, benchmark a simulator s performance for reproducing these signals, and demonstrating a tangible, practical benefit to haptic simulator training doc24446 none Photocatalytic oxidation (PCO) surface processes will be investigated using transient reaction analysis, temperature-programmed desorption oxidation, co-adsorbed reactant studies, and isotope labeling. Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy will be linked to these transient reaction methods to monitor surface species during PCO while a mass spectrometer (MS) will quantitatively determine products in the reactor effluent. Both in situ DRIFTS and transmission techniques will be explored. The research will focus on the determination of the role of acid sites during PCO, examination of the activity of various sites on titania, investigation of the role of water during PCO, and quantification of the effect of rate promoters and mixture effects using co-adsorbed reactants. The research will provide a better fundamental understanding of the nature of active sites and adsorption on photocatalysts. The research will increase the applicability of PCO for the removal of volatile organic chemicals frequently found in wastewater streams. Impact on the basic understanding of photocatalyst deactivation is anticipated. Educational aspects of the broader impacts include the involvement of both graduates and undergraduates in research activities. Undergraduates will participate in the project through independent research courses, EPSCoR Advanced Undergraduate Research Awards, and a recently awarded NSF-REU grant. Because enrollment of Native Americans is high at the University of North Dakota, the project will strongly increase opportunities for under-represented groups in the field of engineering. Women undergraduates and graduate students have also worked on preliminary aspects of the research. The project will also increase opportunities to K-12 students through participation in the NSF EPSCoR Outward Bound program, which provides opportunities for high school seniors to participate in research activities at the University of North Dakota doc24447 none In response to an Announcement of Opportunity for the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment Program (GLOBE) this project is designed to meet GLOBE goals and objectives of linking scientists and schoolchildren in a global information network with the ultimate goal of better understanding Earth s environment and changes that take place within it. This proposal consists of various segments addressing GLOBE Program needs: support for existing protocols, development of new protocols, and scientific research with GLOBE data. This proposal will support the current set of GLOBE hydrology and snow protocols, strengthen the metadata submission standards, and carry out research in seasonal variation in pH and alkalinity due to snowmelt runoff, climate variability, and land use change. Calibration and validation of remotely sensed data on water transparency will also be pursued. This proposal will also support the development of materials for education that will include hydrology in the context of Earth Systems Science. Scientists, students, and the general public will be able to better understand the role of water in ecosystems and their role in the care of our natural resources doc24448 none On Line Analytical Processing tools are increasingly being used in diverse applications that range from business applications, earth science applications, to digital libraries. Such applications need to deal with sparse and very large data sets. Furthermore, such data is updated in append-only manner. In this proposal novel summarization and aggregation techniques are being developed for high-dimensional datasets which are sparse and are updated in append-only manner. These techniques are multi-resolution in nature, and exploit the efficiency with which disks can read sequentially stored information. Iceberg CUBES, which have proved to be particularly beneficial for sparse data cubes, are also being efficiently computed and materialized. Such sparse data cubes are represented using ranges, and approximations are derived by maintaining information regarding top-k and bottom-k elements. Multidimensional data poses significant challenges not only in terms of storage and retrieval but analyzing such data becomes a fundamental problem. The focus of this research is on the issue of developing efficient representations for very high-dimensional data that are both sparse and dynamic. Efficient representations will enable fast analysis of high-dimensional data specially in the context of spatial and temporal data, high resolution images, and time sequences. The research is timely and is likely to have a profound impact on the development of efficient analysis tools for large high-dimensional datasets. The research results will contribute towards the design and development of next generation of on-line analytical processing tools sorely needed both in industrial as well as scientific communities. Currently, earth scientists often need to scale down earth-science computational models due to the complexity of spatial joins for large datasets. Similarly, datacubes for high dimensional datasets are avoided by analysts. The tools and algorithms produced will be a step towards alleviating many of these problems. The PIs frequently interact with members of the local high-tech industry to provide necessary guidance for solving problems related to the scalable management of high dimensional data. The research results will directly contribute to such efforts. The research will also serve as a vehicle for the advanced training of graduate students and the software developed will be used in both graduate and undergraduate education doc24449 none With NSF support, Little Priest Tribal College (LPTC) will conduct an assessment of the institution s science and mathematics curriculum and infrastructure. Project activities include evaluations of science and mathematics course content, teaching strategies, use of technology for teaching and learning, undergraduate and faculty research opportunities, student progress, and S&E programming. An external advisory committee with representation from four-year institutions will assist College science and mathematics faculty in the development of an institutional plan to strengthen S&E teaching and learning. In addition, the College will develop a tracking system to assess the progress of the Colleges science and mathematics graduates that transfer to 4-year colleges and universities doc24450 none Paradigm for STEM Education University of Hawaii at Hilo HRD 02- PI - Rose Tseng University of Hawaii - Hilo (UHH) will significantly increase enrollment and graduation rates of Native Hawaiian students in mathematics and science disciplines and increase their familiarity with and the use of related technology. Elements of the project will take advantage of the extraordinary natural and cultural environment in which the University is situated. UHH will implement a new model for STEM education that is predicated on the integration of assets of culture and natural environment, and which recognizes the importance of early (K- 12 years) and positive exposure if increasing percentages of students are to be attracted to STEM disciplines. The model, called Hawaiian Compass for Advancement in Science and Technology, involves the advancement of faculty development which enculturates Hawaiian values, ways of knowing and learning, and use of current technology, curricula enhancement (technological and pedagogical) in STEM disciplines, faculty research, and outreach to Hawaiian students and communities through special enrichment classes and informational programs doc24425 none Collaborative Research: Semantic Map of Biological Data Sources: Entity Identity and Path Characterization A fundamental problem facing the biological researcher today is correctly identifying a specific instance of a biological entity, e.g., a specific gene or protein, and then obtaining a complete functional characterization of this entity instance by exploring a multiplicity of inter-related sources. While the diversity of available data presents an opportunity to attack this problem, it is accompanied by difficulties in harnessing and exploring data. This collaborative interdisciplinary, inter-institutional research project exploits the researchers prior expertise on wrapper and mediator technology and apply domain specific semantic knowledge to this problem. The goal is the correct identification and complete characterization of scientific entities by exploring multiple data sources. This project will address three tasks: (1) Construction of a Semantic Map of biological data sources including unique identifiers; links between sources; attributes; and search and query; (2) Learning at the data source, schema, domain and instance level uses the concept of Identity Link to identify equivalent identifiers for the same instance, and (3) Learning the properties of physical links and paths that are implemented among multiple data sources. The topology of links (paths) based on their properties, and Link (Path) Equivalence is applied to the tasks of entity identity and characterization. The tools developed in this project will be accessible via the project Web site (http: www.umiacs.umd.edu research CLIP BFEnt02 ), and can be applied by biologists to support ongoing scientific investigations in cancer research and diabetes, resulting in a broad impact in medical research and treatment. The educational impact includes a course on data management solutions for bioinformatics researchers and a workshop on experiment planning using data sources for biologists doc24452 none The project defines a workflow management system that allows for a portal construction that is fully integrated with emerging gird standards (e.g., Globus Toolkit), but can be dynamically reconfigured.. By defining an XML schema to describe both resources and application codes and interfaces, the project will enable a pluggable event-driven model where grid-enabled services can be composed to form more elaborate pipelines of information processing, simulation, and visual analysis. The workflow management system will be developed in close collaboration with computational chemists to not only provide proof-of-concept, but also to insure that the complete system is immediately useful to an established scientific community. The proposal is designed by chemists and grid portal technology specialists to work together to form a usable system. The technology science mix is essential as it ensures the success of grid-based projects in that it dramatically improves the utility for the end-user. The proposal also works closely with chemists and portal specialists to ensure a truly usable system. The resulting architecture will shield users from the complexity of the HPC resources, and allows them to focus on their scientific problem. The goal is to enable scientific programmers the ability to integrate their software into the workflow system in a simple, effective and uniform manner doc24453 none The objective of this proposal is to evaluate existing off-the-shelf sensing technologies and launch an exploratory research that will lead to a new class of low-cost micro-electro-mechanical sensors uniquely suited for health monitoring of civil structures. This one year exploratory project will include two phases. In the first phase, we will perform a comprehensive literature survey on the available off-the-shelf sensors that could be potentially used for health monitoring of civil structures. The comparison will be made against sensors cost, sensitivity, drift, dynamic range, size, weight, etc. This phase of research will be carried out in a close collaboration and consultations with leading experts in the field of health monitoring of civil structures. The result of this study will be a review paper on the state-of-the-art sensor technologies for structural health monitoring of civil structures which will be prepared and submitted to a journal for publication (the results will be also reported at the relevant NSF workshop). In the second phase, we will start preliminary development, design, and fabrication of prototype MEMS sensors that will meet the identified in Phase 1 performance requirements. Our approach will be based on a fundamentally new micro-fabrication technology that utilizes the processing of low Young s Modulus polymers, deposition of thin film dielectric coating, silicon surface micromachining, silicon bulk micromachining, and integration of Febry-Perot interferometeric techniques. The first version of the sensor prototype will be attempted by the end of this one year exploratory project. The background material gathered during this one year exploratory project will be used as a basis for a full three year proposal on development of novel sensors uniquely suited for civil engineering applications doc24454 none The goal of this project is to investigate a new class of stochastic probabilistic models, that make inferences and extract high-order dependencies from high-dimensional data. This research builds upon work that recasts existing unsupervised algorithms such as factor analysis, principle component analysis, and independent component analysis as energy-based feedback models. The diffusion network perspective investigated in this project affords new nonlinear generalizations of existing models, generalizations which are easily extended to overcomplete and undercomplete cases, and in which inference is relatively simple. Learning in diffusion based approaches is efficient and neurally plausible, making them good candidates for engineering applications and for modeling of neural and cognitive processes. The new models will be explored using a synergistic combination of theoretical work and computer simulations. Their practicality will be tested by applying them to a variety of exciting and difficult machine perception tasks, including efficient representation of natural scenes, person identification and facial expression recognition, and reconstructing three-dimensionally transformed faces from 2-D video. Because of their unique capabilities to model high-dimensional data in a nonlinear fashion, the diffusion networks studied in this project are likely to be important in a diverse group of fields including data mining, computer vision, and computational neuroscience, and could outperform existing algorithms in a wide variety of applications, including human computer interaction, image processing, and law enforcement doc24455 none This project will integrate GLOBE activities sponsored by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) with environmental research projects at UCLA s Institute of the Environment. A research program in air quality and human exposure that utilizes GLOBE data collected at LAUSD schools will be created. In addition, an innovative teacher training program will be implemented that reflects GLOBE research themes and includes new professional development extension courses offered by UCLA. Advanced placement environmental science courses that reflect GLOBE protocols will be established in a number of low socio-economic status schools in the Los Angeles area doc24456 none The long range goal of this project is to develop an integrated biological and computational approach to decipher gene regulatory networks. This project combines discovery-based approaches to identify and characterize new regulatory networks with hypothesis-driven approaches in which transcriptional control by two regulatory factors important in galactose metabolism will be examined. The specific aims of this project are: (1) to temporally profile the global genetic and proteomic response to galactose; (2) to globally identify the elements of transcriptional networks important for galactose utilization; (3) to develop an advanced computational framework for integration, modeling, and prediction of transcriptional networks; and (4) to experimentally test the networks models predicted from these studies doc24457 none Kauai Community College will assess its STEM curriculum, infrastructure, and evaluation procedures and determine a course of action to strengthen STEM instruction through the integration of curricula and research. Central to this effort is a pre-technology project-centered learning community to help address barriers that prevent entry of native Hawaiians into STEM-based career pathways. Research activities will serve as foci for the enhancement of STEM curricula and infrastructure. This approach will engage students in research and strengthen institutional partnerships with private and public sector organizations offering enhanced internship opportunities. An assessment instrument to track project outcomes and the success of STEM graduates will also be developed doc24458 none With National Science Foundation support, the University of Hawaii Manoa - Maui Community College will conduct a comprehensive self-assessment of current and planned science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) programs. The assessment includes a review of the existing STEM instructional infrastructure, curriculum, faculty professional development opportunities, technology used for instruction, high school to college transition programs, community service, and Native Hawaiian student retention and success in STEM fields. Assessment outcomes will support the development of a strategic plan to strengthen Maui Community College STEM programs to better meet the needs of the community and specifically, the Native Hawaiian population doc24459 none This project will conduct an overall evaluation of the GLOBE program. The evaluation will document the program s progress in achieving its objective of improving student understanding of science by involving students in real science. SRI will conduct an implementation evaluation and an outcome evaluation. The implementation evaluation will analyze the GLOBE educational materials, teachers access to technology, the influence of standards and teaching practice. The outcome evaluation will measure the impact of GLOBE on student learning doc24460 none the HBCU- UP Quality Education for Minorities (QEM) Network PI: Shirley McBay With National Science Foundation support, the Quality Education for Minorities (QEM) Network will continue to provide technical assistance in the Foundation s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU-UP) Program. The goal of the HBCU-UP Program is to strengthen the Nation s workforce by enhancing the quality of undergraduate Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology (SMET) programs at HBCUs. Support from the Foundation will enable the QEM Network to: (1) Conduct four proposal development workshops (two per year), prior to the HBCU-UP Program s annual deadline, for faculty at eligible institutions to improve the quality of multi-year and planning grant proposals submitted to the Foundation s HBCU-UP Program; (2) Conduct a follow-up workshop for institutions submitting proposals in the annual competition, whether or not their proposals were successful, to discuss next steps; (3) Conduct a workshop for new grantees focused on performance indicators, data collection, assessment, and annual reporting requirements as well as assist grantee institutions in developing an internal capacity for monitoring, assessing, and assisting in both the internal and external evaluation of their respective projects; (4) Provide on-site technical assistance to multi-year HBCU-UP award recipients linked to critical needs identified during implementation of their respective HBCU-UP Projects; (5) Create and maintain at QEM s Website links to potential sources of federal and non-federal support to assist grantee institutions in sustaining and institutionalizing the successful elements of their HBCU-UP projects as HBCU-UP funding ends as well as a listserv for HBCU-UP Project Directors doc24392 none Funding for this research project is provided under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Service Sector (ESS) program announcement. The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) manages the national organ donation and allocation system. When UNOS offers an organ to a transplant patient, the patient decides to either accept it or to continue waiting. The research question at hand is therefore: if offered an organ, when should a patient decide to accept it? This question is of great practical importance, as it is a life-or-death decision faced by thousands of people per year, and growing. This research will focus only on livers, however the methodology used is applicable to other organs. The key issue in modeling this decision process is the assumption made regarding the information available to the patient. In all cases, the pertinent characteristics of the liver are known at the time an offer is made, as is the patient s health. What is uncertain is the ranking of the patient relative to the other patients on the waiting list, and the timing of future offers. The simplest version of this problem is the case in which a living donor exists. Typically, however, donors are cadaveric. In the latter situation, liver offerings occur randomly and patients compete with each other for livers without knowing their relative position on the waiting list. This research project will formulate mathematical models for the living-donor as well as the cadaveric-donor situation, in which the objective is to maximize, for instance, quality-adjusted life expectancy or some other objective. A model will be developed for the hypothetical situation in which the composition of the waiting list is public information. Specifically, the reach team will formulate these situations as Markov decision processes and engage in numerical and analytical study of the resulting optimal policies. Numerical study will make use of extensive clinical data, identify patterns that will guide the analytical study, and allow the researchers to explore the potential value in publishing the waiting list. Analytical study will determine conditions under which the optimal policies have appealing, consistent structure. It is interesting to note that most of the existing literature focuses on modeling the organ transplant problem from UNOS s perspective, rather than from the patient s perspective as considered here. Note, however, that the research may have an impact on this policy-perspective line of research, since one of the objectives is to study the policy change that involves the publication of the waiting list doc24462 none Hazel Certain environmental signals and cues, such as background color and day length, are capable of altering the appearance (phenotype) of the pupae of swallowtail butterflies. The ability to respond to environmental signals is known as a conditional strategy. This research proposal offers a means to investigate the underlying biochemical and genetic mechanisms responsible for this conditional strategy. The research team will use methods from chemistry, molecular and cellular biology, mathematics, computer science and population genetics. Some of these methods include protein isolation, DNA sequencing, immunology and histology, computational biology and theoretical population genetics. Conditional strategies are now regarded as an important but poorly understood mechanism for adapting to changing environments. Such traits are especially common in important pest species, such as insects, and may be a key factor in the ability of insects to survive and reproduce in changing climates and agricultural conditions. Therefore the research will provide important insights into fundamental biological processes of potential economic importance. In addition, the proposed research is highly interdisciplinary, and will introduce several dozen undergraduate science majors to state-of-the-art research methods in the context of modern biological theory doc24463 none The annual meeting of the Phytochemical Society of North America will bring together (for the first time) chemical ecologists, biochemists, natural products chemists, molecular biologists, biomedical researchers and ethnobotanists pharmacologists with the goal of developing an integrative synthesis of these traditional and modern approaches. Symposia will address ways in which these subdisciplines can inform each other about the evolution, function, and potential applications of plant products. Submitted presentations also will address the meeting theme, Integrative Phytochemistry: From Ethnobotany to Molecular Ecology . This meeting will provide an unprecedented intersection of biology, chemistry, sociology and medecine and should produce truly novel, international and cross-cultural collaborative opportunities. The meeting will be held in Merida, Mexico; attendees will come from all over North America and Europe (at least), and strong representation by Mexican and other Latin American scientists and students is expected. Meeting organizers highlight participation by students and younger scientists by organizing a young researcher symposium and seeking support for travel by students, postdocs, and junior researchers. Proceedings will be published as a volume in the widely-read Recent Advances in Phytochemistry series doc24464 none Conference FASEB Summer Research Conference on Calcium Oxalate in Biological Systems will be held from August 3 - 8, at the Vermont Academy in Saxtons River, Vermont. The primary goal of this conference is to provide a multidisciplinary forum to discuss recent advances and future directions for research on all manner of calcium oxalate crystallization that occur in nature. More than 100 scientists are expected to attend this conference. Specific objectives of the conference include the following: 1) to promote scientific exchange of ideas, information, and methodologies among scientists from diverse disciplines whose common focus is calcium oxalate, 2) to discuss areas of controversy and to identify new areas requiring investigation in calcium oxalate research, 3) to foster cross-fertilization of ideas and facilitate interdisciplinary collaborations, 4) to integrate information from diverse systems encompassed by the topics and disciplines of conference participants, and 5) to promote and encourage entry of young and new investigators into all areas of calcium oxalate research. Special efforts have been made to include new young investigators and scientists from under-represented groups in the conference program. Seventeen of the scheduled speakers are new young investigators, including nine women, comprising 37% of the total program. In addition, the conference program includes a total of fourteen women, including two of the three organizers, a substantial increase over the previous conference on this topic. Funds requested by this proposal will be applied specifically to support the participation of young investigators and under-represented groups doc24465 none Dwyer The Principal Investigator will undertake core-top calibration studies to improve the applicability, accuracy, and precision of ostracode magnesium calcium (Mg Ca) paleothermometry to reconstruct the late Quaternary temperature history of the Arctic Ocean and adjacent seas. The existing core-top calibration is limited to adult shells of one genus, Krithe, and includes sediment core tops that are not likely to be of modern age. These factors, along with variations in the spatial and temporal abundance of adult shells of Krithe in the Arctic, contribute to diminish the accuracy, precision (1 to 20C, depending on number of shells available), and applicability of ostracode paleothermometry in the Arctic Ocean. However, studies suggest that the adult shells of other common Arctic genera may also be used for Mg Ca paleothermometry, and, furthermore, that eldest juvenile shells display thermodependent uptake of magnesium identical to that of adult shells. If so, the combination of juvenile adult calibrations and calibrations from multiple genera may provide the improvements necessary to more accurately and precisely quantify the temperature history of the Arctic Ocean and adjacent seas. To test this hypothesis, modern adult and juvenile shells of common Arctic genera Krithe and Cytheropteron will be analyzed from an extensive collection of existing, high-quality sediment core tops (box cores and multicores) from Arctic, Atlantic, and Pacific ocean basins at water temperatures ranging from -1 to 120C. A subset of these core tops have been used for benthic foraminifer Mg Ca calibration studies. The research will provide for the first comprehensive calibration-comparison of the two most promising deep-sea paleothermometers available for paleoceanographic and paleoclimate studies doc24466 none White The project between Texas Tech University (TTU) and Lehigh University (LU) is a collaborative program to conduct experimental and theoretical research in the area of advanced, ultra-thin, high dielectric constant (high-K) gate materials for CMOS devices. This project is motivated by the drive for advanced CMOS integrated circuits with sub-micron feature sizes and the need to scale the gate dielectric, while preventing quantum mechanical gate current between the silicon inversion layer and the overlying gate electrode. The Si02 gate dielectric will be replaced with a single or dual -dielectric film consisting of one or more monolayers of SiO2 to form the interfacial transition region covered with a high dielectric constant (high-K) insulator. The rationale for a collaborative proposal effort lies in the capabilities of the two universities with Texas Tech University expertise in high-K gate materials and Lehigh University integrating these materials into an advanced gate insulator for CMOS devices. Texas Tech University will form high-K, Hf02 or ZrO2 gate dielectrics with a custom electron-beam deposition system to be incorporated into advanced CMOS devices and test structures fabricated at Lehigh University. The collaborative project will employ the combined and complementary analytical techniques at both universities, such as reflection high-energy electron diffraction (RHEED) and low energy electron diffraction (LEED) at TTU combined with angle resolved photoelectron spectroscopy (ARXPS) and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) at LU. Electrical characterization will be performed with unique test structures and measurement techniques to determine carrier trapping in the high-K dielectrics. The PI s multidisciplinary faculty will bring together students from different departments and universities in a project to foster a broad research and educational experience. The project is enhanced with close collaboration and outreach to industry doc24467 none Gangopadhyay The project between Texas Tech University (TTU) and Lehigh University (LU) is a collaborative program to conduct experimental and theoretical research in the area of advanced, ultra-thin, high dielectric constant (high-K) gate materials for CMOS devices. This project is motivated by the drive for advanced CMOS integrated circuits with sub-micron feature sizes and the need to scale the gate dielectric, while preventing quantum mechanical gate current between the silicon inversion layer and the overlying gate electrode. The Si02 gate dielectric will be replaced with a single or dual -dielectric film consisting of one or more monolayers of SiO2 to form the interfacial transition region covered with a high dielectric constant (high-K) insulator. The rationale for a collaborative proposal effort lies in the capabilities of the two universities with Texas Tech University expertise in high-K gate materials and Lehigh University integrating these materials into an advanced gate insulator for CMOS devices. Texas Tech University will form high-K, Hf02 or ZrO2 gate dielectrics with a custom electron-beam deposition system to be incorporated into advanced CMOS devices and test structures fabricated at Lehigh University. The collaborative project will employ the combined and complementary analytical techniques at both universities, such as reflection high-energy electron diffraction (RHEED) and low energy electron diffraction (LEED) at TTU combined with angle resolved photoelectron spectroscopy (ARXPS) and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) at LU. Electrical characterization will be performed with unique test structures and measurement techniques to determine carrier trapping in the high-K dielectrics. The PI s multidisciplinary faculty will bring together students from different departments and universities in a project to foster a broad research and educational experience. The project is enhanced with close collaboration and outreach to industry doc24468 none The service sector is the largest and a fast growing sector of the US economy accounting for 80% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Specifically, warranty and repair services form a major component of the manufacturing and retail industry and there has been a rising trend to outsourcing the warranty services. This provides an opportunity for the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to improve turnaround times by using the core competencies of the vendors specializing in repairs and maintenance. However, it also poses downward risks in terms of customer satisfaction, particularly in cases where poor experience in repair services may translate into future lost sales. The investigators plan to explore the following main issues faced by the OEMs. (1) Contract: The original manufacturer s contract with the service provider could be based on a fixed or variable fee per repair, or a lump sum amount of money per customer for the duration of the contract or other combinations. The contracts could have quality of service requirements associated with it. The OEM also has to determine how many service providers to contract with and whether or not to treat all of them in an identical fashion. Furthermore, the vendors of warranty services typically compete among themselves for the outsourcing business from the OEM. The OEM needs to understand the implication of this competition while designing contracts. (2) Allocation: How should the OEM allocate its customers to the different service providers? One commonly used approach is to perform static allocation of customers based on costs, proximity, etc. Another approach is to route the customer (in need of service) to an appropriate service provider based on the current workload of all providers. A third option is to differentiate the customers based on priorities and treat them accordingly. While performing the allocation the manufacturer needs to balance the cost benefits of allocating more jobs to less expensive service provider with the service delays customers may experience when there is congestion at a service provider. Motivated by interaction with the PC industry, the investigators plan to model and optimize the contracts and allocations. The investigators strongly believe that this research will provide novel qualitative insights on effectively outsourcing warranty and repair services. In addition, the investigators plan to develop fast solution methods that can handle industry size problems and can provide a real-time decision support for managers doc24469 none Under this funding, the PI will attempt to determine the role of organic matter compositions in controlling carbon sequestration and turnover by quantitatively investigating how different organic carbon (OC) fractions are cycled within a well-characterized sediment system: the Atchafalaya River Louisiana Shelf. Specifically, the study will trace the changes in concentration and composition of four major OC pools of contrasting origin, particle characteristics (e.g. density), and reactivity: (i) vascular plant debris, (ii) soil organic matter, (iii) ancient fossil kerogen, and (iv) marine organic matter remains. The objectives of the work are to determine the distribution of the four OC pools within the Atchafalaya River Louisiana Shelf dispersal system, to follow the concentration changes and compositional transformations of these OC pools along the dispersal system, and to determine the sequestration rates and compositional changes of the four OC pools during burial in the Louisiana shelf. The study consists of field sampling followed by lab studies to determine: (a) density fractionation of sediments, (b) elemental (carbon, nitrogen) compositions, (c) stable carbon and radiocarbon isotopic compositions, (d) 13C-NMR characterization of organic isolates, and (e) biomarker concentrations and isotopic signatures doc24470 none The proposal is for an experimental and analytical investigation to improve the understanding of evaporation mechanisms and the effects of individual forces on fluid flow and heat transfer in thin films under high heat flux conditions. The PI will develop an analytical model for thin film evaporation that includes thermocapillary force, surface tension, friction, wetting, and disjoining pressure. He will also develop an experimental system to measure film thickness, interface velocity and film profile under high heat flux conditions. The effects of electrostatic fields on the disjoining pressure and the effects of surface microstructures on the thin film evaporation will also be addressed. The results would help advance applications in a variety of emerging technologies in which microchannel evaporative flows occur doc24471 none The objective of proposal is to provide partial travel support for U.S. researchers to participate in the 15th IFAC World Congress. The conference will cover a wide range of topics relevant to theory and practice of systems and control. The IFAC Congress provides a spectrum of categories for technical presentations, including plenary lectures, survey papers, regular papers of both lecture and poster session types, panel discussions and case studies. There are technical papers in the program selected from submitted papers. The number of accepted papers from USA is 197 that constitute about 11% of the program. Topics include robotics, manufacturing, power systems, process control, measurement and sensing, identification, estimation, fault detection, and intelligent control doc24472 none BIOCOMPLEXITY: Collaborative Research: Biocomplexity of aquatic microbial systems -- relating diversity of microorganisms to ecosystem function Microbial biogeochemical cycling of the elements regulates a dynamic environment in which the cycles of different elements are linked through the physiology of microorganisms. While a certain degree of understanding can be gained through physical chemical approaches to measurement and modeling of the net transformations, these approaches necessarily rely on gross simplifications about the role and regulation of the various functional groups (guilds) involved. Recent advances in molecular microbial ecology have shown the microbial world to contain immense diversity and complexity at every level: redundancy and duplication of functional genes within a single organism; molecular diversity among functional genes that encode the same process in different organisms; large genetic diversity among different organisms apparently engaged in the same biogeochemical function within single communities; great variability in the species composition of different communities that apparently perform equally well. The goal of this project is to investigate the functional relationship between complexity in microbial communities and the physical chemical environment at a range of biological and ecological scales. Previously, such analysis was technologically limited by the inability to assay large numbers of samples simultaneously for a large number of genes and phylotypes. Using gene array technology, the researchers will be able to detect the distribution and differential expression of functional genes in natural systems. The results of this study will constitute the first step towards application of DNA chip technology for gene expression of exotic (i.e., not of biomedical importance) processes and organisms in the environment. The gene arrays, along with a full suite of ecosystem process measurements, will be deployed along a transect that spans the eutrophic - oligotrophic gradient from the inland waters of the Chesapeake Bay out to the Sargasso Sea. Experiments and functional gene studies will focus on key transformations in the carbon and nitrogen cycles (C fixation, N fixation, nitrification, denitrification, urea assimilation). The diversity of guilds will be interpreted in terms of ecosystem function, assessed using geochemical data and tracer experiments. In addition to field studies designed to investigate and dissect the natural system, the group of collaborating scientists will also perform perturbation experiments using mesocosms. The goal of these experiments is to determine how microbial species diversity affects the major energy and nutrient flows within ecosystems, and to assess the degree of stability or instability associated with changes in redundancy within guilds of microorganisms responsible for major nitrogen and carbon pathways doc24473 none Helioseismic imaging has begun to yield unique diagnostic information about the hidden subsurface layers of the Sun. This effort will pioneer the development of a new approach to seismic imaging of the Sun, in which an adaptable physical model of the subsurface structure of the solar convection zone plays a fundamental part. This so-called direct modeling approach will be used to systematically probe the three-dimensional structure of the turbulent convection zone. Long sequences of SOHO MDI full-disk Dopplergrams will be used to detect turbulent convection as far into the Sun as sensitivity permits. The investigation will also assess the comparative advantages of the NSF supported GONG+ network. The focus of this effort will be on supergranular-scale flows (30 Mm), which will be characterized statistically in terms of velocity correlation functions doc24474 none Funding is requested to cover part of the travel cost for faculty in US universitites to attend the Fourth World Congress on Particle Technology being held in Sydney, Australia, July 21-25, . This World Congress covers all aspects of the particle technology and includes contributions from international investigators from many countries. this international meeting provides significant opportunties for international collaboration doc24475 none The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico through the University of Puerto Rico will implement a proposal aimed at (1) increasing the human resource base and research capacity in targeted thrust areas; (2) strengthening institutional research and development infrastructure; (3) accelerating NSF co-funding and movement of researchers into mainstream programs; and (4) continuing to transform the institutional science and technology culture. To achieve these objectives, the Puerto Rico Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (PR EPSCoR) will (1) increase the number and productivity of faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and students; (2) enhance high performance computing to support cutting-edge research that cuts across the disciplines; (3) institutionalize a research management system consistent with the significant increase in research funding and Research Extensive University status; and (4) support technology transfer and mutually beneficial collaboratives. PR EPSCoR will focus on three thrust areas and six sub-areas: (1) Environmental Science and Engineering with Atmospheric and Climate Studies, Terrestrial and Coastal Ecology, and Natural Hazards Mitigation Engineering as sub-areas; (2) Information Technology Research with sub-areas Telecommunications and Networking, and Computational Sciences and Visualization; and (3) Materials Science, including Nanoscience and Nanotechnology as its only sub-area. Furthermore, Puerto Rico has established benchmarks and target milestones for women graduate students and post-doctoral researchers in the fields represented by the thrust areas doc24476 none Carbon enters ecosystems through a single process, photosynthesis, and nearly all is returned to the atmosphere through respiration, some 50-80% of which occurs below ground. Soil respiration integrates root metabolism and the activity of decomposer organisms. While the major processes affecting plant metabolic (autotrophic) respiration and decomposition rates (heterotrophic respiration) are known, the ability to predict variations in soil respiration in space and time is limited - a major uncertainty in the current and future carbon cycle. The work proposed here will combine new measurement and modeling approaches for separating autotrophic and heterotrophic respiration, and determining the age of C respired from soils. At field sites in the Ameriflux network that span a range of North American biomes and climates, these methods will include: (1) frequent, automated, measurements of soil respiration and related factors; (2) isotope mass balance methods based on measurements of stable isotopes and radiocarbon in respired CO2; and (3) incubations to determine responses of heterotrophic respiration components to changing soil conditions; and (4) at some sites, manipulation of soil moisture content through rainfall exclusion. The data generated will be used to partition soil respired C into autotrophic and heterotrophic components, to determine the age of heterotrophically respired C and identify the components of soil organic matter contributing to its production, and to determine how these relationships chance with controlling variables (photosynthesis rate, soil conditions, etc). The results will be used to parameterize a new autotrophic respiration component of the CASA ecosystem model, and to test how well the model predicts the balance of sources of heterotrophic respiration on seasonal to interannual timescales. Predictions of the CASA model will be further tested across regional gradients spanning (1) a climosequence and (2) a suite of sites from tropical forest to tundra. We will use atmospheric records of seasonal variation in C isotopes (13C at the global network sites and 14C in atmospheric CO2 at Point Barrow, Alaska) as a global test of the CASA model s ability to determine the seasonal to interannual exchange of C between northern hemisphere terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere. . Separating the components of ecosystem respiration is one of the fundamentally important research challenges in ecosystem science. This activity will use new tools, in particular, innovative use of the radiocarbon tracer in measurements and models, to develop process level understanding of C fluxes at selected Ameriflux sites. Broader impacts. This work will advance fundamental understanding of how terrestrial ecosystems influence the global carbon cycle, and will improve projections of future atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide by showing how heterotrophic respiration will respond to changes in temperature and moisture. Our program to educate students through a short course in radiocarbon at the W.M. Keck Carbon Cycle Accelerator Mass Spectrometry facility will train the next generation of scientists in the applications of radiocarbon to study land and ocean C cycling doc24477 none The railroad industry played an important role in industrialization in the nineteenth century. The industry is characterized by high fixed costs but relatively low variable costs. Today, with the increased level of congestion on national highways and the rapid development in automation and computerization, the potential of the railroad industry is growing again in the service sector of the United States economy. While research on railcar management, such as minimization of the total empty car miles, is very extensive, allocation of the cost incurred from empty miles to a loaded trip, which is an important pricing problem in freight transportation, has not received adequate attention. The existing cost distribution schemes to allocate empty miles to loaded trips do not seem to explicitly take into account the gain and loss incurred in cooperation and, as a result, do not ensure the fairness in all situations. With the rapid development in information technologies in recent years, cooperation at various levels has already become a key factor to success for many service sectors. The objective of this research is to develop a cost-allocation scheme of empty car movements for a large-scale network with many participants. In specific, the cost-allocation scheme to be developed will reflect the level of participation in cooperation, the costs generated before and after cooperation, and the benefits obtained by each participant due to cooperation. The specific research approach adopted in this study is based on game theory. We will also incorporate the network flow theory of vehicular traffic into the study to characterize the costs incurred at various level of cooperation participated by a subset of participants. The advantage and disadvantage of the proposed pricing scheme will be studied under different operation settings, strategies and objectives. Though the proposed research is conducted in the context of the railroad industry, the cost-allocation scheme developed in this study can be applied, with some modifications, to other service sectors such as commercial fleet management, supply chains, and public transportation systems with timed-transfer between different modes doc24478 none This is a proposal from the National Academy of Sciences to assess the scientific opportunities proposed be the new underground neutrino detectors within the context of current and planned neutrino research capabilities throughout the world. This proposal results from a request from OSTP. The request for OSTP to take this immediate action can be found in the President s FY03 Budget. Funding of this proposal will be carried out from OMA and from the Office of Polar Programs doc24476 none Carbon enters ecosystems through a single process, photosynthesis, and nearly all is returned to the atmosphere through respiration, some 50-80% of which occurs below ground. Soil respiration integrates root metabolism and the activity of decomposer organisms. While the major processes affecting plant metabolic (autotrophic) respiration and decomposition rates (heterotrophic respiration) are known, the ability to predict variations in soil respiration in space and time is limited - a major uncertainty in the current and future carbon cycle. The work proposed here will combine new measurement and modeling approaches for separating autotrophic and heterotrophic respiration, and determining the age of C respired from soils. At field sites in the Ameriflux network that span a range of North American biomes and climates, these methods will include: (1) frequent, automated, measurements of soil respiration and related factors; (2) isotope mass balance methods based on measurements of stable isotopes and radiocarbon in respired CO2; and (3) incubations to determine responses of heterotrophic respiration components to changing soil conditions; and (4) at some sites, manipulation of soil moisture content through rainfall exclusion. The data generated will be used to partition soil respired C into autotrophic and heterotrophic components, to determine the age of heterotrophically respired C and identify the components of soil organic matter contributing to its production, and to determine how these relationships chance with controlling variables (photosynthesis rate, soil conditions, etc). The results will be used to parameterize a new autotrophic respiration component of the CASA ecosystem model, and to test how well the model predicts the balance of sources of heterotrophic respiration on seasonal to interannual timescales. Predictions of the CASA model will be further tested across regional gradients spanning (1) a climosequence and (2) a suite of sites from tropical forest to tundra. We will use atmospheric records of seasonal variation in C isotopes (13C at the global network sites and 14C in atmospheric CO2 at Point Barrow, Alaska) as a global test of the CASA model s ability to determine the seasonal to interannual exchange of C between northern hemisphere terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere. . Separating the components of ecosystem respiration is one of the fundamentally important research challenges in ecosystem science. This activity will use new tools, in particular, innovative use of the radiocarbon tracer in measurements and models, to develop process level understanding of C fluxes at selected Ameriflux sites. Broader impacts. This work will advance fundamental understanding of how terrestrial ecosystems influence the global carbon cycle, and will improve projections of future atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide by showing how heterotrophic respiration will respond to changes in temperature and moisture. Our program to educate students through a short course in radiocarbon at the W.M. Keck Carbon Cycle Accelerator Mass Spectrometry facility will train the next generation of scientists in the applications of radiocarbon to study land and ocean C cycling doc24476 none Carbon enters ecosystems through a single process, photosynthesis, and nearly all is returned to the atmosphere through respiration, some 50-80% of which occurs below ground. Soil respiration integrates root metabolism and the activity of decomposer organisms. While the major processes affecting plant metabolic (autotrophic) respiration and decomposition rates (heterotrophic respiration) are known, the ability to predict variations in soil respiration in space and time is limited - a major uncertainty in the current and future carbon cycle. The work proposed here will combine new measurement and modeling approaches for separating autotrophic and heterotrophic respiration, and determining the age of C respired from soils. At field sites in the Ameriflux network that span a range of North American biomes and climates, these methods will include: (1) frequent, automated, measurements of soil respiration and related factors; (2) isotope mass balance methods based on measurements of stable isotopes and radiocarbon in respired CO2; and (3) incubations to determine responses of heterotrophic respiration components to changing soil conditions; and (4) at some sites, manipulation of soil moisture content through rainfall exclusion. The data generated will be used to partition soil respired C into autotrophic and heterotrophic components, to determine the age of heterotrophically respired C and identify the components of soil organic matter contributing to its production, and to determine how these relationships chance with controlling variables (photosynthesis rate, soil conditions, etc). The results will be used to parameterize a new autotrophic respiration component of the CASA ecosystem model, and to test how well the model predicts the balance of sources of heterotrophic respiration on seasonal to interannual timescales. Predictions of the CASA model will be further tested across regional gradients spanning (1) a climosequence and (2) a suite of sites from tropical forest to tundra. We will use atmospheric records of seasonal variation in C isotopes (13C at the global network sites and 14C in atmospheric CO2 at Point Barrow, Alaska) as a global test of the CASA model s ability to determine the seasonal to interannual exchange of C between northern hemisphere terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere. . Separating the components of ecosystem respiration is one of the fundamentally important research challenges in ecosystem science. This activity will use new tools, in particular, innovative use of the radiocarbon tracer in measurements and models, to develop process level understanding of C fluxes at selected Ameriflux sites. Broader impacts. This work will advance fundamental understanding of how terrestrial ecosystems influence the global carbon cycle, and will improve projections of future atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide by showing how heterotrophic respiration will respond to changes in temperature and moisture. Our program to educate students through a short course in radiocarbon at the W.M. Keck Carbon Cycle Accelerator Mass Spectrometry facility will train the next generation of scientists in the applications of radiocarbon to study land and ocean C cycling doc24481 none This research will test the hypothesis that the adsorption of organic carbon onto the interlayer surfaces of smectitic clay minerals comprises a significant mode of carbon sequestration and preservation in the geologic record. This model provides a unifying theory for organic carbon burial and the formation of some black shale deposits in which dissolved organic carbon present in natural waters and pore fluids is attracted to charged mineral surfaces of detrital clay minerals, and preserved from microbial degradation by physical sheltering. Upon burial, mineral surfaces may act to coordinate polymerization of complex organic substances such as kerogen and catalyze cracking during catagenesis. The proposed research will: 1) determine the geological extent of the relationship between interlayer mineral surface area and total organic carbon in a range of black shale deposits, economically important source rocks, and modern sediments, 2) establish or dismiss the presence of organic matter within the smectite interlayer sites of these deposits using X-ray diffraction (XRD) techniques and high resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) imaging of crystal edges and determine whether there is amorphous kerogen that is mineral associated, and 3) measure the compositional differences of OM associated with mineral surfaces versus the total bulk TOC and particulate fraction separated using density and centrifugation techniques doc24482 none Recent discoveries have shown that photoxidation of colored dissolved organic matter (CDOM) also lead to the formation of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) or photo-CO2. Fluxes of photo-CO2 are estimated to produce one to several gigatons of CO2-C per year globally. A PI from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution proposes to constrain photo-CO2 production using the Pool Isotopic Exchange (PIE) method, a technique which does not require perturbing the sample as occurs in currently available methods (i.e., changing pH, removing carbonate system, bubbling of sample). In the PIE method, the DI12C pool in seawater is replaced via exchange with DI13CO2 during incubation of the samples; thus, the DI12C pool which dilutes the newly formed 12CO2 (DI12C) from dissolved organic carbon (DOC) is minimized without major perturbations of the physical and chemical properties of the sample. The rates of formation of DI12C as a result of photoxidation will be measured by isotope ratio mass spectrometry (IRMS). The objectives of the proposal are to develop, test and optimize the PIE approach both in the laboratory and in the field. In addition, the PI will apply the PIE method and compare his results with those obtained by a collaborator from the State University of New York, Stony Brook using the Pool Depletion (PD) technique on the same samples recovered from waters enriched in CDOM. Lastly, the PI plans to resolve any potential discrepancies obtained via the PIE and PD methods doc24483 none Pollock This cooperative research project between Professor John Pollock, Department of Biological Sciences, Carnegie-Mellon University, and Professor Philip Batterham, Department of Genetics, University of Melbourne, focuses on the molecular genetic analysis of normal and mutant visual system development of Drosophila melanogaster. The U.S. and Australian researchers and their laboratories bring complementary expertise to this study: image analysis and tissue culture in Pollock s laboratory, and molecular and genetic expertise in Batterham s laboratory. The research plan involves a multifaceted attack on the role of played by the lozenge locus in the progressive recruitment and differentiation of cells in the developing eye. This research should provide further understanding of how eyes develop and also how lozenge influences the development of smell and taste. It will also provide a platform for the training of young researchers in an international setting doc24484 none Continental margins are dynamic regions that receive inputs of organic carbon derived from both terrestrial and marine sources. Once introduced by the Mississippi or fixed on the Louisiana shelf, POC is carried along the shelf, decomposed, buried, or transported to deeper regions in the Gulf of Mexico. Based on coastal primary production estimates and riverine inputs, only 20-50% of the organic carbon in coastal waters off the Mississippi is actually buried in Louisiana shelf sediments, and 40% of that buried carbon is of terrestrial origin. Thus, the fate of 50-80% of the carbon fraction delivered by the Mississippi that cannot be accounted for in shelf sediments remains a key question in developing a North American carbon budget. Under this funding, the PIs propose a combined approach of compound-specific stable and radiocarbon isotopic techniques and biomarker distributions to evaluate fates and transport of organic carbon in the Mississippi River delta shelf and slope. The working hypothesis of this study is that seasonal changes in the composition and age of SOC across the Louisiana shelf slope are largely determined by pulses in terrestrially- and marine-derived organic carbon which occur at distinct time periods controlled by changes in Mississippi River discharge and storm energy doc24485 none This project involves a collaboration between the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) and the Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory (CMDL) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to create a single scale for reporting the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) from the two laboratories so that the CO2 data can be compared without instrumental bias. Since , SIO has maintained a global-scale program to measure the abundance of atmospheric CO2, calibrated with secondary standards using a constant-volume mercury-column manometer (CMM). From to , the World Meteorological Organization designated SIO as the Central CO2 Laboratory for maintaining standard reference materials (SRM) for CO2 measurements worldwide. In this designation was transferred to CMDL. The calibration standards of the two institutions have not been reconciled since this transfer and this reconciliation is the focus of this effort. NOAA will support the CMDL part. The broader impacts of this work will be improved accuracy of several time-series measurements of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide doc24486 none The PIs will obtain and interpret cave speleothem 14C 12C records and high-resolution climate records from the same samples from Crevice Cave, Missouri and Hulu Cave, Nanjing, China. The records will be dated independently and precisely with high precision 230Th and 231Pa techniques enabling determination of initial 14C 12C values and establishment of an absolute chronology. The PIs will use the records to (1) reconstruct atmospheric 14C 12C for the whole radiocarbon timescale (the last 45 ky) and (2) compare those records directly to the climate records from the same samples. The former will place constraints on the operation of the ocean-atmosphere carbon cycle since glacial times. The latter will characterize the interplay between changes in the carbon cycle and climate change. Both have implications for the understanding of the current and future carbon cycle. Recent work indicates extremely high and variable atmospheric 14C 12C for much of the interval between 44 and 34 Ka. The radiocarbon values are generally well above values that can be achieved with the modern carbon cycle, even if terrestrial and solar magnetic fields were negligible. These data therefore require significant differences between the modern and glacial carbon cycles, as well as large temporal changes in the glacial carbon cycle. The far-reaching implications of this work require replication, ideally at sites other than the Bahamas, the site where this evidence was collected doc24487 none Discussions about infrastructure security and survivability require system-wide comparisons and interdisciplinary approaches. Our consideration of survivability focuses on large-scale economic implications of attacks or vulnerabilities on major infrastructure sectors as defined by the Department of Commerce. We explore the critical connections between core service infrastructure sectors (e.g., telecommunications, electricity, and pipelines) using a total supply chain analysis model originally developed to estimate environmental and energy effects of production in the U.S. We propose to use publicly available data from the Department of Commerce s Bureau of Economic Analysis to show the actual economic dependencies between critical infrastructures and the service economy in general. The input-output tables of the U.S. economy detail the economic purchases that result between all 500 domestic economic sectors. Specifically, these tables show how much output is generated by each of the sectors, and the amounts of product other sectors purchase from each sector. For example, the model can show not only which sectors use electricity but also how much dollar value of electricity is used to produce goods or services in that sector. These data are real and tangible representations of how dependent service sector businesses are to other businesses within the infrastructure sector and the economy in general. Of course, the sectors of most interest to us when discussing vulnerabilities are sectors involved with critical infrastructure such as the information sector. Analysis of this kind can lead to new approaches to resource allocation for investments to assure infrastructure capabilities. To this end, we will contribute to the national dialogue on pending threats and risks as a result of targeted infrastructure attacks by providing a quantitative assessment tool that shows the potential connection and failure points present in the economy doc24488 none This US-Hungarian collaborative project between Lajos Horvath and Piotr Kokoszka of the University of Utah and their Hungarian partners, Istvan Berkes and Endre Csaki of the A. Renyi Institute of Mathematics in Budapest, examines several statistical and probabilistic problems concerned with the detection and analysis of nonstationarities of various types of stochastic processes. Emphasis is on careful analysis of the rates of convergence of the statistics of interest and on the properties of the associated permutation and bootstrap procedures. Junior researchers from the University of Utah also participate. The joint research plan includes an investigation of change point procedures and the properties of unit root tests, that are to be developed based on resampling and subsampling methods. These are fundamental questions associated with the detection of time series. Results may have practical applications in economics and the financial sector by leading to useful derivations of properties of CUSUM procedures and GARCH models. For example, findings may improve models for stock returns that can be refined to accommodate infinite error variance. This statistics research project fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc24489 none Boreal and subarctic peatland ecosystems cover about 3-4 % of the earth s land surface and store about 1 3 of the world s soil C as peat. Peatlands represent a major global C pool, yet it is unclear whether they function as sources or sinks of atmospheric C, both today and into the future. Based on a recent inventory of peatlands in boreal western Canada (Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba), peatland ecosystems collectively cover 365,157 km 1 of the land surface and store 42 Pg (10 15 g) of C as peat. Previous research, including our own, has focused on continental bog, permafrost bog, and internal lawn (areas of recent permafrost melt) peatland features in boreal western Canada, but we now know that 2 3 of the peatland area and C storage are not in these types of systems, but rather are in fens, peatlands hydrologically connected to surface water and groundwater systems. We propose to use approaches that we have used to study bogs in boreal western Canada to compare carbon accumulation and carbon cycling between continental bogs, poor fens and rich fens of boreal western Canada. We will address three specific objectives: 1) to characterize and compare recent C accumulation through coring, 210Pb-dating and modeling; 2) to quantify moss production and decomposition rates and gaseous C fluxes, and 3) to characterize the long-term historical development of C accumulation through coring, macrofossil analysis, 14C dating and modeling. Results will test an overall working hypothesis that net C accumulation is greater in continental bogs than in poor or rich fens. High accumulation in bogs is attributed to the resistance of Sphagnum fuscum to decomposition, despite a relatively thick aerobic acrotelm (upper, aerobic, non-saturated peat layer) in bogs. Although poor fens and rich fens also accumulate C, they do so at comparatively lesser rates - fen Sphagnum and brown mosses decompose comparatively rapidly very near the surface, but because of high water table positions, the acrotelm is thin. It is the thin acrotelm that promotes C accumulation in fens. Differences in C accumulation rates are determined more by differences in decomposition than by differences in NPP. Findings from this research will improve our estimate of the extent to which peatland ecosystems of boreal western Canada do or do not represent a net sink for atmospheric CO2 doc24490 none Inventory management has become a major concern in the service industries. Heightened customer service expectations and reduced product life spans have complicated inventory decision-making. Firms must decide where to stock inventory and how much inventory to maintain to satisfy customer demands. We will develop a new integrated facility location and inventory models that will allow managers to better decide (1) how many facilities to have, (2) where those stocking locations should be, (3) how much inventory to stock at each site, (4) how often to reorder inventory, and (5) which customers to assign to each site to minimize overall costs while satisfying specified customer service requirements. The research will build on earlier work of the PIs in which we have developed an elementary location inventory model. We will enhance the modeling approach in a number of different ways to allow the model to capture actual location inventory problems more realistically. In particular, we will incorporate (1) capacity restrictions at the distribution centers (DCs) and in the various transport channels, (2) more realistic local delivery routing from the distribution center(s) to the retailers including less-than-truckload (LTL) shipments, (3) multiple shipment modes from suppliers to DCs, and (4) multiple classes of inventory and multiple customer types. We will develop models that consider customer service requirements and that optimize service subject to resource constraints. We will then develop multi-objective models that explore tradeoffs between service and cost. Another significant task will be incorporating future scenarios in location inventory models to identify solutions that are robust with respect to uncertainty about the future. We also will develop a new class of location models based on concepts of reliability. A solution is deemed reliable if the system can continue to function adequately even if parts of the system (e.g., DCs or network links) are removed. Finally, we will explore the incorporation of information sources into integrated facility location inventory models. A variety of solution procedures will be employed for the models to be developed including optimal, non-linear integer programming based algorithms when possible and heuristic procedures when optimal algorithms cannot be devised doc24491 none The dynamics of soil aggregate formation and stability have profound implications to understanding and enhancing C sequestration in soil. Soil microaggregates are particularly crucial to long-term sequestration because they protect C against decomposition, resulting in much longer residence times for C. However, the reasons why organic carbon in soil microaggregates has such long residence times is not well understood. The goal of this research is to determine the structural and chemical bases of soil microaggregate formation and stability. This goal will be accomplished by investigating the internal surface morphology of microaggregates and the distribution of C within microaggregates, as well as the nanoscale organomineral associations underlying microaggregate structure and stability. The evolution of these features will be examined in a series of soils representing agronomic management systems that affect C accumulation (till versus no-till, conventional versus organic), as well as land-use options for enhanced C storage (prairie restoration, forage management systems). This proposal focuses on microaggregates; however, the value and significance of the proposed research will be leveraged by collaborations with several investigators who are working on the evolution of soil aggregates at the same field sites. Their participation links the results of our study to quantitative and qualitative changes in carbon storage, as affected by management practices. Conversely, our process-level insights will provide a mechanistic explanation for the changes they observe in accumulation or loss of soil carbon under different agronomic systems or land use options. Hypotheses relating aggregate structure to C accumulation and management practices will be tested using multiple state-of-science techniques including (1) N2 adsorption to determine the accessible surface area within microaggregates and assess whether exposed surfaces are organic or inorganic, (2) Small Angle Neutron and X-Ray Scattering to characterize the surface area and size distribution of the total porosity, and, using contrast matching techniques, determine the accessibility of internal porosity to microbes, exocellular enzymes, and nutrients, (3) Scanning Electron Microscopy to visualize intact microaggregates and help interpret N2 adsorption and scattering data, and (4) Scanning Transmission X-ray Microscopy that allows for collection of X-ray spectral data to evaluate the chemical composition of intra-aggregate OM and identify the presence of inherently recalcitrant molecules, or show preservation of labile compounds. Data from all four techniques will be interpreted in the context of a fractal model of pore space geometries. By comparing differences in the mechanisms influencing microaggregate formation and stability, coupled with information from collaborators on the size and dynamics of soil carbon pools, the emerging patterns will be broadly relevant to identifying major mechanisms controlling rates of carbon transfer in soils. This enhanced understanding will provide a scientific basis for developing effective management strategies to enhance C sequestration in terrestrial systems, which is one of the major goals of the Carbon Cycle Science Plan. Specifically, the proposal focuses on process-level studies to define and quantify key mechanisms for carbon transformation and retention in soil. The project will integrate research and education through participation of a student and postdoctoral fellow. Their scientific perspectives will be further broadened and enhanced by their interactions with our diverse group of collaborators. The students experiences in this project will position them to be leaders who will make major contributions to the long-term effort to understand the global carbon cycle doc24492 none Designing Dynamic Service Networks Effectively through Information Management: Case Studies on Construction Project Management and Crisis Management The service industry now dominates the US economy with over 67% of the labor force and 58% of the output. Taking manufacturing as the model, the service industry increasingly decentralized its operations and outsourced its activities, even their back office operations. This has resulted in a network of services that, in order to provide customer satisfaction, require effective designed, management, and control. Current approaches for service network design focus on maximizing the productivity, reliability, and quality at the individual service unit level; they neglect issues associated with the network that ties these units. Information dependencies are an important link betwee service units, often forming the backbone of the service network. Identification and management of information dependencies between different service units within a network is thus tantamount to designing and managing an effective service network. This research will develop formalisms for the design of effective service networks by modeling and management of information dependencies between service units. The development effort will target construction project management and crisis management services since the need for effective service design tends to be emphasized in these types of short-lived (discontinuous) services that are composed of dynamic networks of service providers. Additionally, the unique characteristics of these service will provide an opportunity to explore and formalize less-studied areas of the service management field. Within the context of construction and crisis management, the research will explore and identify important design parameters, performance metrics, and project requirements needed to design a framework for service networks. Information flows and management requirements of the networks based on these factors will be characterized. Information and communications technology will be investigated as ways to meet those requirements. Existing information and communications technology tools platforms will be evaluated as enablers of coordination and enhancers of performance for project-specific services. Existing operations engineering modeling tools for designing robust and dynamic project-specific service networks will be analyzed and evaluated. Finally, case studies and a service network design simulation game will be developed to educate business and engineering students as well as industry and academic leaders about the challenges of designing service network organizations and the role of information technology. This research will significantly contribute in terms of a list of common network design parameters of short-lived dynamic service networks, assessment of the role of current information and communications technologies within service networks, an initial formalism designing service networks, and a simulation game on service network design. This formalism will help define the gaps in our knowledge and frame a research agenda for refining a framework for service network design, construction management and crisis management doc24493 none This project involves characterizing the structure and function of tropical rain forest canopies to assess their carbon budgets and annual carbon fluxes. A variety of methods will be used at a variety of scales, ranging from scaled-up estimates of total canopy photosynthesis and ecosystem respiration from the forest floor to the canopy together with top-down approaches including eddy covariance and remote sensing. The project will take place at La Selva Field Station in Costa Rica. The measurements and modeling results will lead to an understanding of the causes of interannual variability in tree growth and net carbon exchange, will test models of carbon cycle in the tropical rain forest. This work contributes to concerns about the effects of global climate change on the carbon dynamics of tropical forest ecosystems doc24484 none Continental margins are dynamic regions that receive inputs of organic carbon derived from both terrestrial and marine sources. Once introduced by the Mississippi or fixed on the Louisiana shelf, POC is carried along the shelf, decomposed, buried, or transported to deeper regions in the Gulf of Mexico. Based on coastal primary production estimates and riverine inputs, only 20-50% of the organic carbon in coastal waters off the Mississippi is actually buried in Louisiana shelf sediments, and 40% of that buried carbon is of terrestrial origin. Thus, the fate of 50-80% of the carbon fraction delivered by the Mississippi that cannot be accounted for in shelf sediments remains a key question in developing a North American carbon budget. Under this funding, the PIs propose a combined approach of compound-specific stable and radiocarbon isotopic techniques and biomarker distributions to evaluate fates and transport of organic carbon in the Mississippi River delta shelf and slope. The working hypothesis of this study is that seasonal changes in the composition and age of SOC across the Louisiana shelf slope are largely determined by pulses in terrestrially- and marine-derived organic carbon which occur at distinct time periods controlled by changes in Mississippi River discharge and storm energy doc24495 none A call center is a service network in which agents provide tele-services, here to be interpreted as either telephone-based services or, more generally, any online-service with customers and servers being remote from each other. Sound scientific principles are prerequisites for sustaining the complex socio-technical enterprise of the call center. The overall goal is to contribute to the theory that supports these principles and to the creation of new ones. The proposed research builds from an analysis of two unique records of call center operations. These contain complete call-by-call data for the operation over approximately one year of two call centers of different size and operational character. This data will be analyzed in order to understand the mathematical queueing and network characteristics of such centers as they actually operate. Special attention will be given to developing an understanding of the role of scale and efficiency in relation to such operations. The operational features of these two call centers will then be adapted into realistic mathematical models for their operations. On the basis of preliminary work already done, it is expected that these mathematical models will differ in important respects from those in current use for analyzing and predicting performance of such large-scale service operations. In particular, it is expected that new theory will be specifically developed to model the queueing characteristics of centers that operate in the high-volume high-efficiency domain. Call centers can be viewed naturally and usefully as queueing systems. The most widely used queueing model for a call center is the Erlang-C model, also denoted the M M S queue. The Erlang-C model is deficient as an accurate model of a call center in several respects. One of these is that it does not accommodate customers impatience while waiting. The Erlang-C model also involves other assumptions such as Poisson arrival times and exponential service times. These will be tested against the data, and modified theory will be developed as needed. The statistical analysis will be derived according to the primitive elements of a call-center: system arrivals, queueing behavior, and services. The interactions of these primitives will then be analyzed, and alternate queueing models will be examined doc24496 none We have recently generated a long record of atmospheric between 11-45 ka BP using coupled AMS 14C and TIMS U Th and U Pa dating of a stalagmite recovered from a cave in the Bahamas (Beck et al., ;Richards et al., in Press).This record reveals highly elevated 14 C during the last glacial period, especially between 45 and 33 ka BP. Superimposed on this broad peak of 14 C are numerous rapid excursions, the largest of which occurs between 44.3 and 43.3 ka. While some of the structure revealed in this record is clearly linked to variations in the terrestrial magnetic field, other structures appear to be correlated with Dansgaard Oeschger variations revealed in the GISP2 18O record, or linked to Heinrich events H1-H5.Carbon cycle box models suggest that the major features of this record cannot be produced with solar or terrestrial magnetic field modulation alone, but also require significant fluctuations in the global carbon cycle as well. In this proposal, we plan to validate this existing atmospheric 14 C record by generating additional speleothem D14C records, and to further explore the causes of the observed fluctuations using carbon cycle box models using appropriate inputs from sedimentary Cd Ca,Ba Ca,, C, 15N and ice core 18 O to constrain ocean ventilation rates and biological pump variability. Existing ice core records of 36Cl and 10Be will be used in conjunction with the SINT-200 and NAPIS-75 paleomagnetic records, and with new stalagmite 10 Be and 129 I records to constrain 14 C fluctuations stemming from solar and magnetic forcing. A particular focus of these efforts will be evaluation of climate induced changes in the carbon cycle that may have accompanied Heinrich events H1,H2, H3, H4 and H5 and Dansgaard Oeschger cycles 1-12. Among the broader impacts of this proposed work is a better understanding of the potential linkages between climate and the carbon cycle for conditions of enhanced freshwater flux to the polar oceans. This work will be conducted in collaboration with researchers at the University of Bristol, England, and Royal Holloway, University of London, England. This collaborative effort will utilize stalagmites already in the Bristol collection and identified as good candidates in the appropriate age range for this exercise. Separate funding for the UK portion of this research for generation of TIMS U Th chronology, stable isotope records, and part of the modeling effort has already been procured through grants from NERC and the Leverhulme Trust foundation (see letter of support). Stalagmite 18O records will also be generated as part of the UK effort, to be used for correlating 14 C fluctuations with GISP2 climate records (Wang et al., ; Dorale et al., ). Funds are requested in this proposal to only support the AMS 14 C measurement component of this effort, and to support the University of Arizona component of the coupled carbon cycle modeling effort doc24497 none This is a proposal to conduct a workshop that will synthesize and advance understanding of terrestrial ecosystem respiration. Carbon enters ecosystems through a single process, photosynthesis, and nearly all is returned to the atmosphere through respiration. Respiration spans the activity of many organisms, from the plants that fixed the carbon to soil fauna decomposing plant tissue residues, and the time carbon spends in an ecosystem can vary from minutes to millennia. While the major processes affecting plant metabolic (autotrophic) respiration and decomposition rates (heterotrophic respiration) are known, our ability to predict the variation in soil respiration in space and time is limited. - a major uncertainty in the current and future carbon cycle. To reduce this uncertainty this workshop will bring up to 50 ecosystem, soil, and carbon cycle scientists together to 1) identify the current disparities and limitations in various measurement methods, 2) identify the key processes controlling autotrophic and heterotrophic that should be incorporated in models, 3) plan new observational, experimental, and modeling activities based on the new questions that emerge from a synthesis of our current understanding. This workshop will produce a group of synthesis papers that will constitute a journal special feature on trends and uncertainties in understanding and predicting ecosystem respiration. Recent advances in methodology and modeling have focused research in terrestrial ecosystem respiration on a few key topics, which are the ones this workshop will address: What factors control how total ecosystem respiration partitioned into (a) aboveground and belowground components and (b) autotrophic versus heterotrophic sources in a range of space and time scales? How do the different fractions of organic matter that contribute to heterotrophic respiration change with factors like temperature and moisture and how will these potentially provide feedbacks to climate change? What is the role of time lags and site history in determining the magnitude and variability of fluxes on seasonal, interannual and decadal timescales? Intellectual Merit. Terrestrial ecosystem respiration remains one of the key elements of the global carbon cycle that limits our ability to predict future CO2 concentrations. This workshop will provide a plan for the community to resolve current areas of controversy, such as the potential for increased heterotrophic respiration to act as a feedback to global warming. Broader Impact. By producing a series of papers on this topic in a peer-reviewed journal special issue, the workshop will have broad impact and influence future research planned in this area. The workshop will provide a venue for international exchange of ideas, and student participation in the workshop will be encouraged doc24498 none This research project studies the dynamic price competition of service products such as airline seats, hotel rooms, Internet bandwidth, and concert sport event tickets, etc. These service products are considered perishable because (a) the quantity is fixed; (b) the inventory can neither be replenished nor stored; and (c) unsold products have little salvage value. Due to the perishable nature of these products, a service retailer often has a strong incentive to dynamically adjust product prices based on the current inventory and the remaining time of sale. This approach allows the retailer to best meet the demand with the limited supply and to maximize profit. The competition aspect of dynamic pricing is especially relevant to the emerging e-commerce. The electronic market not only allows service retailers to update prices in real-time with minimal cost, but also allows consumers to compare easily the quality and prices of similar products. Motivated by these characteristics, this project proposes to study a set of quantitative models of dynamic pricing in an oligopolistic environment. In each of these models, the investigator will study the optimal policy, the Nash equilibrium, and heuristic policies. The goals of this project are: (a) providing tools that would help service retailers to maximize the profit by dynamically updating product prices in real-time; (b) exploring the market equilibrium in the dynamic pricing environment; and (c) providing commercial technologies that would improve market efficiency and increase overall social welfare. In addition, this project provides funding for training Ph.D. students in a new and rapidly expanding area of critical technology and commerce, and for enriching undergraduate and graduate education through course-work of research results doc24490 none Inventory management has become a major concern in the service industries. Heightened customer service expectations and reduced product life spans have complicated inventory decision-making. Firms must decide where to stock inventory and how much inventory to maintain to satisfy customer demands. We will develop a new integrated facility location and inventory models that will allow managers to better decide (1) how many facilities to have, (2) where those stocking locations should be, (3) how much inventory to stock at each site, (4) how often to reorder inventory, and (5) which customers to assign to each site to minimize overall costs while satisfying specified customer service requirements. The research will build on earlier work of the PIs in which we have developed an elementary location inventory model. We will enhance the modeling approach in a number of different ways to allow the model to capture actual location inventory problems more realistically. In particular, we will incorporate (1) capacity restrictions at the distribution centers (DCs) and in the various transport channels, (2) more realistic local delivery routing from the distribution center(s) to the retailers including less-than-truckload (LTL) shipments, (3) multiple shipment modes from suppliers to DCs, and (4) multiple classes of inventory and multiple customer types. We will develop models that consider customer service requirements and that optimize service subject to resource constraints. We will then develop multi-objective models that explore tradeoffs between service and cost. Another significant task will be incorporating future scenarios in location inventory models to identify solutions that are robust with respect to uncertainty about the future. We also will develop a new class of location models based on concepts of reliability. A solution is deemed reliable if the system can continue to function adequately even if parts of the system (e.g., DCs or network links) are removed. Finally, we will explore the incorporation of information sources into integrated facility location inventory models. A variety of solution procedures will be employed for the models to be developed including optimal, non-linear integer programming based algorithms when possible and heuristic procedures when optimal algorithms cannot be devised doc24484 none Continental margins are dynamic regions that receive inputs of organic carbon derived from both terrestrial and marine sources. Once introduced by the Mississippi or fixed on the Louisiana shelf, POC is carried along the shelf, decomposed, buried, or transported to deeper regions in the Gulf of Mexico. Based on coastal primary production estimates and riverine inputs, only 20-50% of the organic carbon in coastal waters off the Mississippi is actually buried in Louisiana shelf sediments, and 40% of that buried carbon is of terrestrial origin. Thus, the fate of 50-80% of the carbon fraction delivered by the Mississippi that cannot be accounted for in shelf sediments remains a key question in developing a North American carbon budget. Under this funding, the PIs propose a combined approach of compound-specific stable and radiocarbon isotopic techniques and biomarker distributions to evaluate fates and transport of organic carbon in the Mississippi River delta shelf and slope. The working hypothesis of this study is that seasonal changes in the composition and age of SOC across the Louisiana shelf slope are largely determined by pulses in terrestrially- and marine-derived organic carbon which occur at distinct time periods controlled by changes in Mississippi River discharge and storm energy doc24501 none The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased dramatically since the last glacial maximum. A major focus of ongoing research is the current and future role of terrestrial ecosystems in sequestering CO2. In grasslands, which are North America s largest potential vegetation type, the interactions of water availability with increased CO2 can be as important as the direct effects of CO2 in shaping primary production, decomposition, and C storage. The proposed research and modeling synthesis is a collaboration among Duke (Jackson, Maherali), Colorado State (Parton), and Kansas State (Owensby) Universities and the USDA-ARS (Polley, Johnson) to predict the consequences of increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations and climate change (increased summer drought) for the Southern Great Plains region of the U.S. The field experiment in an intact C3 C4 grassland in central Texas is unique in providing a continuous gradient of Ca from 200 to 550 umol mol -1, allowing the examination of critical threshold and nonlinear responses to past, present, and future atmospheric CO2. Nested within the CO2 gradient is a replicated factorial water manipulation of ambient and 60% ambient precipitation, the latter consistent with the summer droughts predicted for the central U.S. by general circulation models (GCMs) in the coming century and similar to an extended historical drought from the s in the region. The experiments described in this proposal will permit rigorous accounting of CO2 effects on carbon sequestration and the soil water balance, a factor that has emerged from previous studies as critical in explaining the integrated effects of CO2 enrichment on grasslands. Key hypotheses to be addressed include: H-1 Ecosystems respond nonlinearly to atmospheric CO2, with less carbon sequestration at future CO2 concentrations than observed in the recent past. H-2 Although the stimulation of plant production with increasing CO2 will be greater under the summer droughts predicted by GCMs for the central U.S., carbon storage will ultimately depend on the balance of soil water availability and decomposition. H-3 Water availability plays a key role in grassland carbon sequestration with CO2 through interactions with soil N availability. The DAYCENT ecosystem model will be used to evaluate the potential long-term impact of increasing atmospheric CO2 and climate change for grasslands in the Southern Great Plains. A substantial amount of data is already available to describe the potential impact of increasing atmospheric CO2 on grassland ecosystems in the Southern Great Plains from long-term CO2 experiments in Texas, Colorado, and Kansas. The impact of different environmental conditions and climate change will be evaluated for above-and belowground plant production, soil C and N levels, and net ecosystem production. Therefore, the proposed research and modeling integration directly addresses the ability of ecosystems to continue as carbon sinks in the coming century. The proposed project is relevant to three of the five goals outlined in the U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Plan (CCSP): 1) Improve projections of future atmospheric concentrations of CO2 through a combination of manipulative experiments and model development, 2) Establish accurate estimates of the impact of historical and current land use patterns and trends on the evolving C budget, and 3) Establish accurate estimates of the potential Northern Hemisphere terrestrial C sink and the underlying mechanisms that regulate it. The proposed research also contributes to the Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems (GCTE) and Biospheric Aspects of the Hydrological Cycle (BAHC) core projects of the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme (IGBP doc24486 none The PIs will obtain and interpret cave speleothem 14C 12C records and high-resolution climate records from the same samples from Crevice Cave, Missouri and Hulu Cave, Nanjing, China. The records will be dated independently and precisely with high precision 230Th and 231Pa techniques enabling determination of initial 14C 12C values and establishment of an absolute chronology. The PIs will use the records to (1) reconstruct atmospheric 14C 12C for the whole radiocarbon timescale (the last 45 ky) and (2) compare those records directly to the climate records from the same samples. The former will place constraints on the operation of the ocean-atmosphere carbon cycle since glacial times. The latter will characterize the interplay between changes in the carbon cycle and climate change. Both have implications for the understanding of the current and future carbon cycle. Recent work indicates extremely high and variable atmospheric 14C 12C for much of the interval between 44 and 34 Ka. The radiocarbon values are generally well above values that can be achieved with the modern carbon cycle, even if terrestrial and solar magnetic fields were negligible. These data therefore require significant differences between the modern and glacial carbon cycles, as well as large temporal changes in the glacial carbon cycle. The far-reaching implications of this work require replication, ideally at sites other than the Bahamas, the site where this evidence was collected doc24503 none The project focuses on the development of high-performance computational tools for financial engineering. The goal is to develop computational methods to evaluate complex financial products used to manage foreign exchange, interest rate, equity, commodity and energy price risks and credit risk, and manage large portfolios of assets. The methodology is based on extensions to financial engineering of finite-element methods successfully used in diverse branches of engineering to solve numerically multi- dimensional partial differential and integral equations. Partial integro- differential equations arise in the study of Markov jump-diffusion processes and associated optimal stopping and stochastic control problems in financial engineering. The aim of the present proposal is to develop both the necessary mathematical theory to extend finite element methods to jump- diffusion processes and develop high-performance computational tools based on these methods that can be effectively implemented and used by industry practitioners in the financial services, as well as researchers in financial engineering, applied probability and branches of operations research that use continuous-time Markov processes. Specific challenges in financial engineering to be addressed in the project include high dimensionality and jumps. Methodologies developed in this project will help financial institutions, corporate treasuries and energy companies accurately value complex financial instruments, efficiently manage risk of financial transactions, and dynamically manage portfolios of assets. In addition to financial engineering, we anticipate that this project will have a broader impact on research and application areas that use continuous-time Markov processes as a modeling framework. Constructive approximations and computational algorithms for jump-diffusion processes developed in this project should prove useful for diverse areas of application that use jump-diffusion processes. This proposal will support the new Ph.D. major in financial engineering at Northwestern University. This new Ph.D. major will result in training of highly qualified researchers in financial engineering. This project is a part of the long-term development effort at Northwestern University in the area of financial engineering. This project will also help the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Nevada Las Vegas establish a research program in financial mathematics doc24504 none This project will develop a demonstration system and test-bed for a method of using branch prediction and speculative execution in space weather forecasting. The WINDMI model, developed by Horton and Doxas, of magnetospheric substorms will be used as the basic forecast model, but the branch prediction and speculative execution technique is not limited to that particular model. The demonstration system will be a small, portable system that can be taken to meetings and workshops for educational and outreach purposes doc24505 none In this project, we will document costs and health outcomes associated with various financing mechanisms for delivering dental care to individuals age 65 and above. In addition we will analyze the cost-effectiveness of existing financing mechanisms and additional mechanisms developed for this research to deliver dental care to the elderly. Key to evaluation of financing mechanisms is an understanding of the roles of information asymmetries, which can drive up insurance premiums and result in the less than the socially optimal quantity of insurance purchased and utilization of dental services. The basic framework of the project is an optimization model that minimizes the total cost of dental services subject to receipt of primary and secondary prevention equaling its highest feasible value. We will use this optimization model to compare existing financing mechanisms for dental care as well as hybrid and new mechanisms designed in this research. The delivery of health services in the United States is considered by many to be at a crisis point due to both the continued rising costs and disparities in the health status and receipt of preventive care between the poor and wealthy. One area of health service for the elderly that is often ignored is dental care where the rate of inflation has recently outpaced the medical care inflation rate. Approximately $61 billion is spent annually on dental care. In this research we will estimate the impact that the lack of dental insurance has on disease, determine how effective various forms of health allocation are, develop strategies to improve this allocation, and design a framework to analyze costs which may be generalized to other areas of health care. For example, as health care costs incurred by the elderly increase, there will be increasing pressure to extend Medicare coverage, e.g. prescription drugs. However, there are unique characteristics to the elderly that may make allocation difficult. Many similar issues exist for the low-income population doc24506 none Experimental evaluations of the organic carbon export from the euphotic zone of the ocean are essential for verifying and calibrating estimates of the ocean s biological pump by both satellite color and Global Circulation Models. Studies of upper ocean oxygen mass balance have shown that carbon export from the euphotic zone can be accurately estimated by determining net annual biological oxygen production at locations where there are time-series measurements. Growing awareness of the present importance of nitrogen fixation in the subtropical North Atlantic and Pacific Oceans has lead to the suggestion that ocean productivity, and perhaps the organic carbon export, in these areas is limited by the wind blown flux of iron to the surface waters. One could evaluate the importance of this process in the subtropical ocean without the expense of an iron fertilization experiment by determining the net biological oxygen production in locations that receive very different atmospheric loading of iron. The ideal locations to contrast in this regard are the North and South Pacific Ocean; however, it has not been possible to carry out a time-series study south of the equator in the Pacific because it is too remote. The advent of glider technology and the evolution of our ability to quantify air-water gas exchange in the subtropical oceans make it now possible to study the oxygen mass balance by remotely measuring the T, S, and O2 concentrations in the upper ocean. In this study, investigators at the University of Washington will develop this new technology to determine the net biological oxygen production in the North and South Pacific. The subtropical oceans are ideal for introducing a glider study of upper ocean heat, fresh water and oxygen budgets because the relatively steady and slow surface currents. Specifically, the goals of this research are to demonstrate the utility of gliders to determine accurate and precise T, S and O2 concentrations in the open ocean from which budgets can be calculated and to contrast the net biological oxygen production in the North and South Pacific subtropical gyres. The research team will carry out glider surveys of the upper ocean at the Hawaii Ocean time series (HOT). The team will calibrate instruments on the glider against monthly measurements by the time-series scientists so that it will be possible to verify accuracies and make adjustments to improve results doc24503 none The project focuses on the development of high-performance computational tools for financial engineering. The goal is to develop computational methods to evaluate complex financial products used to manage foreign exchange, interest rate, equity, commodity and energy price risks and credit risk, and manage large portfolios of assets. The methodology is based on extensions to financial engineering of finite-element methods successfully used in diverse branches of engineering to solve numerically multi- dimensional partial differential and integral equations. Partial integro- differential equations arise in the study of Markov jump-diffusion processes and associated optimal stopping and stochastic control problems in financial engineering. The aim of the present proposal is to develop both the necessary mathematical theory to extend finite element methods to jump- diffusion processes and develop high-performance computational tools based on these methods that can be effectively implemented and used by industry practitioners in the financial services, as well as researchers in financial engineering, applied probability and branches of operations research that use continuous-time Markov processes. Specific challenges in financial engineering to be addressed in the project include high dimensionality and jumps. Methodologies developed in this project will help financial institutions, corporate treasuries and energy companies accurately value complex financial instruments, efficiently manage risk of financial transactions, and dynamically manage portfolios of assets. In addition to financial engineering, we anticipate that this project will have a broader impact on research and application areas that use continuous-time Markov processes as a modeling framework. Constructive approximations and computational algorithms for jump-diffusion processes developed in this project should prove useful for diverse areas of application that use jump-diffusion processes. This proposal will support the new Ph.D. major in financial engineering at Northwestern University. This new Ph.D. major will result in training of highly qualified researchers in financial engineering. This project is a part of the long-term development effort at Northwestern University in the area of financial engineering. This project will also help the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Nevada Las Vegas establish a research program in financial mathematics doc24508 none A scientist from Florida State University in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Hawaii and the University of Washington will collect a suite of dissolved and particulate samples from surface waters and vertical profiles (12 depths), as well as atmospheric aerosol and rainwater samples during selected legs of the Repeat Hydrography CO2 cruises. The PIs plan to participate in the following four cruises: (1) the North Atlantic Ocean meridional section (20-25 W) during ; (2) the Pacific Ocean zonal section at 30 N during ; (3) the South Atlantic Ocean meridional section (20-25 W) in ; and (4) the South Pacific Ocean meridional section (150W) in . Samples recovered during these cruises will be analyzed for Fe and Al. In addition, aerosol samples will be subjected to an ultrapure water leach to assess the fractional solubility of Fe and Al. This team of PIs also plans to collect and archive filtered and unfiltered water samples and aerosols for analysis by other scientists in the trace metal and tracer community. The primary objectives of this study is to generate an extensive database of Fe and Al concentrations in water and aerosol samples that can constrain global and regional dust deposition models and determine the role that atmospheric Fe depositions have in delivering Fe to surface waters in the major basins of the world s oceans doc24509 none This study will pursue opportunities for extending engineering- and science-oriented tools and approaches to newly emerging types of service enterprises. Consistent with this purpose, the study, after considering the scope, size and unique features of the U.S. service sector, identifies characteristics of emerging services from an engineering perspective, which, in turn, augur for a decision informatics paradigm for enhancing the production and delivery of services. Within the framework of this new and critical paradigm, the study is focused on the real-time fusion and analysis of multiple non-homogeneous data sources. The intellectual merit of the study is underscored from two critical perspectives. First, it is problem-driven, not solution-driven. Thus, it is the engineering-related characteristics of emerging services that have clearly identified a need for decision informatics, which represents a paradigm shift towards real-time, information-driven decision making. Second, it will add significantly to the body of knowledge on the real-time analysis and fusion of multiple data sources. While there is considerable literature on data mining and pattern analysis, tools for undertaking real-time data analysis are lacking. For example, from a real-time decision perspective, it is critical to know whether the most recently received data point is part of the historical distribution of data points or an outlier that is, in effect, the beginning of a new phenomenon -- thus, adaptive, real-time decision making is not only affected by data input but also by the sequence of that input. Additionally, while there is considerable literature on the fusion of data from multiple, homogenous -- mostly quantitative -- sources, tools for undertaking real-time fusion of data from multiple, non-homogeneous (i.e., quantitative and qualitative) sources are lacking. Moreover, the coincident real-time fusion and analysis of multiple, non-homogeneous data sources represents an area that has eluded investigation; yet, emerging services -- especially e(lectronic)-services -- require such tools to enhance their production and delivery. It should also be noted that the study seeks to have the broadest impact, especially in regard to the integration of research and education. First, it constitutes the basis for a doctoral dissertation effort. Second, the developed, real-time data fusion and analysis tools will be applied to an existing service problem, employing real data from multiple, non-homogeneous sources. Third, the results will be presented and published in a number of venues. Fourth, the results will be appropriately structured and integrated into two existing courses being taught by the Principal Investigator; a graduate course, entitled Evaluation Methods for Decision Making, and an undergraduate course entitled Decision-Focused Systems Engineering. Fifth, consistent with the exploratory nature of the study, additional research needs will be identified to further underpin the decision informatics approach, similar to the continuing development of bioinformatics doc24510 none This project examines the seasonal variation in the nature of the organic carbon deposited on continental margins. The flux of organic carbon reaching the seabed can be quantified by using particle traps or by modeling seabed burial and regeneration rates, but the quality (i.e., its lability) has been difficult to assess on continental margins because of co-deposition with old refractory carbon from marine and terrestrial systems. Bomb Carbon-14 (C14) is a useful tracer of recently produced marine organic matter, but this signal is masked in continental margin particle?trap samples and surface sediments by the older and refractory carbon that is re-suspended and reworked from shallower marine deposits. Surface deposit feeders in continental margin systems have been shown to sequester the labile fraction of the total organic flux reaching the seabed as a result of their selective ingestive and digestive processes. Therefore, the body tissues and the gut sediments of these benthic fauna can provide a record of the labile material reaching the continental margin seafloor. Initial C14 data indicate that the body tissues of surface depositing feeders are enriched in this radioisotope by 100 to 300 per mil relative to the surface sediments in which they live and feed. Based on mass?balance C14 calculations, the labile component may comprise only a few tenths of a percent of the total organic matter in the surface seabed, yet the surface deposit feeders exhibit C14 signatures in their body tissues (+20 to +80 per mil) dominated by the local bomb?produced signal . Thorium (Th) data from continental margins suggest that as much as 50% of the recently deposited organic matter on the continental margin sea floor may pass through the guts of deposit feeders prior to microbial degradation or burial. Therefore, C14 measurements on benthic fauna can provide a unique tool for assessing the lability of organic matter reaching the seafloor and for tracking the fate of this material in the benthic food web. Many existing diagenetic models treat organic matter regeneration by microbes and deposit feeders as a batch process with a single carbon degradation constant for the bulk organic matter. The C14 data clearly show that ingestion of organic matter and digestion of this material are very selective processes. The C14 analyses from the California Borderland and the Antarctic continental margin have shown the utility of this approach for documenting variations in the organic carbon lability of surface sediments. Drs. DeMaster and Smith will expand the initial studies to enable assessment of seasonal variations in the quality of organic carbon deposited on the seabed. Particle?trap samples, benthic?faunal tissues, gut samples and surface sediments have been collected during 6 cruises to the California Borderland and 5 cruises to the Antarctic continental margin covering the major seasonal variations in organic carbon supply. Funds are requested for making 150 C14 analyses (and complementary C13, N15, and C N measurements) on these samples so that a time series quantifying the nature and flux of organic matter reaching the seabed can be determined. They will assess not only seasonal variations in the nature of particle selection and digestive selection processes for organic matter, but also the changes in these processes as a result of feeding strategy (epibenthic surface deposit feeders, vs. subsurface deposit feeders vs. head?down subsurface deposit feeders) on the seafloor doc24511 none The large annual flux of organic carbon from land to the ocean largely disappears in the sea. Reasons for this loss are not clear. Under this award, the PI will examine abiotic and biotic aspects of the lability to loss of riverine particulate organic matter. Work will focus on the Mississippi, as it demonstrates the clearest loss of particulate organic material of any North American river upon deposition in the ocean. Photochemical experiments will follow up on initial work showing significant dissolution of particulate organic matter subjected to solar levels of radiation. Interactions with metal cycling will be studied, as will a variety of other physicochemical variables. Biochemical lability will be explored via enzyme hydrolyses and bacterial incubations. Seasonal patterns will be examined, as will be the influence of deposition in freshwater environments doc24512 none This award provides support for a cooperative agreement for the operations and maintenance of the U.S. National Ice Core Laboratory, hereinafter called NICL a government-owned facility for storing, curating, and studying ice cores recovered from the ice-covered regions of the world. NICL provides NSF- and USGS-funded investigators with the capability to conduct examinations and measurements of ice cores while preserving the integrity of these cores in a safeguarded environment. NICL fosters the utilization of these cores for scientific research by handling inquiries from scientists interested in obtaining samples of ice cores, by making inventory listings easily available through electronic distribution, by acting as an information resource to the scientific community and by improving current technologies for ice core analysis in accordance with the needs and requirements of their client base. NICL is located at the Denver Federal Center in Lakewood, Colorado and is housed administratively within the USGS Office of the Central Regional Geologist, Geologic Discipline doc24508 none A scientist from Florida State University in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Hawaii and the University of Washington will collect a suite of dissolved and particulate samples from surface waters and vertical profiles (12 depths), as well as atmospheric aerosol and rainwater samples during selected legs of the Repeat Hydrography CO2 cruises. The PIs plan to participate in the following four cruises: (1) the North Atlantic Ocean meridional section (20-25 W) during ; (2) the Pacific Ocean zonal section at 30 N during ; (3) the South Atlantic Ocean meridional section (20-25 W) in ; and (4) the South Pacific Ocean meridional section (150W) in . Samples recovered during these cruises will be analyzed for Fe and Al. In addition, aerosol samples will be subjected to an ultrapure water leach to assess the fractional solubility of Fe and Al. This team of PIs also plans to collect and archive filtered and unfiltered water samples and aerosols for analysis by other scientists in the trace metal and tracer community. The primary objectives of this study is to generate an extensive database of Fe and Al concentrations in water and aerosol samples that can constrain global and regional dust deposition models and determine the role that atmospheric Fe depositions have in delivering Fe to surface waters in the major basins of the world s oceans doc24514 none A contact center is a collection of resources providing an interface between a service provider and its customers. The classical contact center is a call center, containing a collection of service representatives (reps) who talk to customers over the telephone. In a call center, the service reps are supported by quite elaborate information-and-communication- technology (ICT) equipment, such as a private branch exchange (PBX), an interactive voice response (IVR) unit, an automatic call distributor (ACD), a personal computer (PC) and assorted databases. With the rapid growth of e-commerce, contact between the service provider and its customers is often made via e-mail or the Internet instead of by telephone. The design and management of contact centers is important, and worthy of research, because contact centers comprise a large, growing part of the economy and because they are quite complicated. Classic call centers are complicated because there are often many types of calls, requiring different service skills, such as knowledge of different languages and knowledge of different special promotions. The ACD is able to respond through skill-based routing, but there remains an opportunity to determine better routing algorithms and more effective methods for staffing. The difficulties are largely due to uncertainty about future arrivals of service requests of various kinds and the time and resources that will be required to respond to those requests. Given that contact with customers no longer need be by telephone, it is necessary to consider the other media. When service reps perform several different kinds of work, there is a need to allocate effort to the different tasks, which presents opportunities for improved efficiency if some of the work can be postponed. Multimedia also lead to more complicated contact experiences. For example, customers might alternate between periods of interaction with service reps and periods of browsing on the Internet. This project aims to respond to these challenges by conducting exploratory research on stochastic (probability) models of contact centers, aiming to uncover fundamental principles and develop performance-analysis tools that will make it possible to improve the design and management of contact centers. Effort will be made to find conditions for resource pooling in contact centers, where the efficiency of a large single-skill center is achieved in a multi-skilled center with minimal flexibility. Staffing will be studied in each of three important time scales: real-time, short-term and long-term. Effort will be made to understand the contribution of different sources of uncertainty: model uncertainty, parameter uncertainty and process uncertainty doc24515 none This investigation will focus on the Atlantic, where a large number of the newly available repeat hydrographic transects which included carbon measurements were performed, to study temporal variations in total inorganic carbon and anthropogenic carbon concentrations and the effects these changes could have on oceanic uptake, transport and storage. Since the carbon cycle is intimately related to the cycles of other properties within the ocean, other available hydrographic variables such as temperature, salinity, oxygen, phosphate, silicate, and alkalinity will be included in the study. Specifically, this project will Provide a physical consistent circulation of the entire Atlantic including transports of total Inorganic Carbon and all other available properties. Estimate anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) transport and storage throughout the basin. Describe temporal variations in the carbon cycle within the Atlantic as provided by early s and late s models. Determine the validity of the a mean state solution in terms of these changes Compare CO2 and anthropogenic CO2 divergences to the estimates of CO2 air-sea flux of Takahashi. Compare CO2 and anthropogenic CO2 results to the CO2 model comparison currently being performed at NCAR (S.Doney personal communication). This project is contribution to NSF Integrated Carbon Cycle Research Program doc24516 none DI14C and DI13C samples will be collected and analyzed along selected Repeat Hydrography cruises where there has never been radiocarbon sampling or where 15-20 years have passed since the last sampling. The isotopic data will be promptly provided to the community; and will contribute to the establishment of good reference materials for the measurement of both isotopes. Radiocarbon in DIC has long been recognized and used as an important tracer in studies of ocean processes and, in particular, of the ocean carbon cycle. Data collected as part of this study will be used to study mixing, ventilation rates and residence times in the deep ocean, air-sea gas exchange, thermocline ventilation rates, and to calibrate ocean general circulation models (OGCMs). Tracer studies of anthropogenic sources of carbon rely heavily on a precise knowledge of the oceanic bomb inventory and its changes over time. This can only be done globally with confidence if there are good datasets with good spatial representation of the oceans. Direct calculations of the bomb inventory penetration depth changes on a global basis are only possible with repeated global measurements over time. The sampled locations have been selected to reflect both the spatial and the time-series requirements for a successful ocean carbon study. DI13C tracks the input of anthropogenic CO2 in a complementary fashion to DIC. The d13C of CO2 added from fossil fuel and biomass burning (approx. -25 ) is significantly lower than that of atmospheric CO2 (approx. -7 , pre-industrial). The atmospheric change can be tracked in the surface ocean waters with the precise measurements of DI13C proposed here. The samples collected here will allow the modeling community to combine DIC, DI13C and DI14C in OGCMs. This will greatly improve the accuracy of the reconstructions possible and, consequently, increase confidence in the predictions made from these models. One cannot emphasize enough the importance of conducting these isotopic measurements in conjunction with the measurement of carbon parameters and other transient tracers. The combined amount of information possible will be far greater than that available alone. This project is contribution to NSF s Integrated Carbon Cycle Research Program and the CLIVAR Program doc24517 none Black carbon (BC), the product of incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and biomass, has been increasingly formed and released to the environment for the last century. Presently, it is not possible to quantify (a) the rate of BC burial in the oceanic margin sediments (where most of the OC is buried), (b) the size of the BC reservoir in seawater, nor (c) riverine fluxes of BC to the sea. Consequently, it is not possible to ascertain how important BC is to the global carbon cycle. Under this award, the PIs address the following questions: (1)What is the contribution of BC burial relative to the organic carbon burial in the Gulf of Maine? (2) How has the input flux of BC to the region s bed sediments changed in the past century? (3) What is the inventory of BC in coastal seawater off the Northeast United States and what temporal and spatial variability does this reservoir exhibit? (4) What are riverine inputs of BC to the Gulf of Maine and how do they vary seasonally? (5) Can we identify the major sources of BC (e.g., fossil fuel combustion-produced soots, biomass-derived chars) for coastal seawater and sediment of the Gulf of Maine? In addition to measurement of the abundance of BC in various samples, the approach taken includes field sampling of water and sediments, and a variety of analytical measurements including: 234Th 238U disequilibria in water and unsupported 210Pb in sediments, carbon isotopes in BC and specific compounds as well as with key marker compounds (PAHs), and BC analyses in radiometrically dated sediment cores collected from within and beyond the Gulf of Maine doc24518 none Many industries rely on the proper functioning of their key assets, such as airlines on jet engines, electric utilities on generators, and army on helicopters. A major obstacle on operation efficiency is asset unavailability due to forced outages and regular maintenance operations. The latter, although planned, are generally characterized by long and uncertain durations. Instead of embarking on more intensive preventative maintenance programs, the trend is to monitor asset conditions, and perform maintenance operations based on conditions to increase asset availability and reliability. This imposes major challenges on the networks of maintenance service providers, including overhaul shops, repair shops, part distributors, and spare part manufacturers, to have short and predictable turn-around-times while reducing inventory in systems traditionally characterized by massive uncertainties. The research is on scheduling, inventory optimization, and coordination of maintenance service networks under dynamic and uncertain environments to meet the challenges of condition-based maintenance. By closely collaborating with our industrial partners United Technologies Research Center and i2 Technologies, Inc., three tasks will be performed. The first is to develop stochastic scheduling models for large-scale maintenance service networks based on a realistic discrete event simulation model provided by our industrial partners. A solution methodology that synergistically combines Lagrangian relaxation, stochastic optimization, and simulation will be developed to provide near-optimal solutions with quantifiable quality and confidence. The second task is to optimize part inventory, balancing inventory costs and part availability for the scheduling method developed in Task 1. Continuous and periodic review policies will be examined, and ordinal optimization will be used to optimize policy parameters. In the third task, the autonomous nature of various organizations within a maintenance service network will be investigated. The models of Tasks 1 and 2 will be decentralized. A distributed and asynchronous coordination mechanism will be established, building on the pricing concept that is consistent with the methods developed in Task 1. A mobile multi-agent system will then be designed and implemented for Internet-based deployment of the methods, paving the way for the next generation e-maintenance service networks. Our goal is to reap the full benefit of the new maintenance service paradigm by having short and predictable turn-around-times while reducing inventory levels, making the best use of asset condition information and the information technology infrastructure. The research shall also significantly contribute to the fundamental theory and practice of scheduling, inventory management, and supply chain management, improving the competitiveness and reliability of service enterprises doc24519 none This project involves a three-year research program to study the exchanges of carbon dioxide between the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere, and the processes that govern them. Spatial and temporal variations of isotopic tracers in the atmosphere that contain information about the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide are being investigated. The effort involves the use of the Simple Biosphere model that describes these processes on land and has been successful at predicting variations in carbon dioxide on local, regional, and global scales when coupled to an atmospheric model. New inversion methods to estimate carbon fluxes are being developed and tested using synthetic data produced by the Community Climate System Mode at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The sensitivity to transport is being investigated using a suite of transport model response functions produced in a model intercomparison study doc24520 none This research addresses real-time dispatching of heavy-haul trains in a high-density complex railway network with multiple-track configurations, multiple priorities and multiple speed limits. The research will provide the theory and dynamic control algorithms for deadlock-free dispatching with minimal total train delay in complex heavy-haul rail networks that are increasingly common in urban areas. Determining the optimal dispatch policies that minimizes train delays and ensures deadlock-free operations is NP-hard. Therefore, most of the research efforts in this direction have focused on developing heuristics as well as detailed simulations to plan dispatching policies. Theoretical efforts thus far have only addressed trackage configurations like single, double, and partially double rail lines. However complicating entities in a rail system like junctions, crossovers, sidings, speed limits and goods priorities need to be considered in order to extend the current theory to large-scale urban rail networks. To address this need, our research will consist of the following tasks: (1) theoretical studies focusing on developing a network representation of this complicated physical system, and characterization of the nonlinear and stochastic dynamics underlying the operations for laying the foundations of developing effective dispatching algorithms, (2) development of deadlock-free and near-optimal algorithms for the real-time dispatching of trains operating in complex general rail networks, and (3) development of a simulation methodology to model complicated rail networks akin to Southern California rail networks, and validate the performance of algorithms and theory using this simulation model. As global trade continues to increase, cargo traffic at the nation s ports continues to increase at dramatic levels. For example, the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are among the busiest ports in America. Booming trade with Pacific Rim nations has seen the annual trade in the two ports exceed 100 million tons. The total volume that these ports handle is evenly divided between transcontinental and local shipments. Furthermore, a large portion of the local shipments are packaged and sorted at local facilities for shipment across the continent. Railways form the major means to transcontinentally move these goods. Forecasts show that volume growth of high-value containerized freight is set to triple in the next 25 years. The main impact of the proposed research will have a significant bearing on real-world urban rail operations, many of whose pertinent complexities have been ignored in theoretical studies thus far doc24521 none Manufacturing and service enterprises invest significant resources in the design and operation of factories and warehouses. If properly executed, the physical configuration of these facilities can simplify the flow of material and products. If poorly executed, it can lead to severe inefficiencies, high operating costs, and poor quality. Over the years, much attention has been focused on effectively planning the layout of manufacturing and logistical facilities. In contrast, the design and planning of retail facilities has been given little attention despite the importance of the retail sector to the overall economy. Retail layout problems differ from manufacturing logistics layout problems in several significant ways: (1) the objective of retail facilities is to maximize sales rather than to minimize travel time or material moves; (2) customer demand is both highly variable and unpredictable; (3) customers often augment an initial shopping list with impulse items that they encounter in their sojourn through the facility; (4) retail facilities are essentially self service facilities; (5) and except for checkout, customers are an integral part of the service mechanism. The goal of this research is to develop a framework for a quantitative approach to the design of retail facilities. Our activities are focused on modeling customer demand, characterizing customer flow, and formulating suitable optimization problem(s), including specifying an appropriate objective function and constraints for both the physical layout of customer paths and the sequencing of product families in the facility. We intend to focus on non-traditional layouts that we believe may significantly outperform traditional aisle-based layouts commonly found in many retail facilities. While this research is exploratory in nature, it will build on the long history of research in layout for manufacturing facilities. Moreover, we believe this research has the potential to extend operations research techniques to an important economic sector that has been overlooked in the past. Additionally, this research will open a new area for teaching facility design. It will provide the foundation for introducing retail facility layout into facility design courses, which are common core courses in industrial engineering curricula doc24522 none The research from this project is expected to produce significant methodological contributions to enhance revenue management practices through reservations control, in hotels and other service industries. In particular, to increase revenue potential, this project investigates the possibility of bridging the revenue gap between ideal revenue solution (if all requests were known ahead of time) and the current practice of maximizing expected revenue. To enhance the realism of demand assumptions, a statistical framework for modeling customer reservation decisions (consumption, cancellation, and duration) will be proposed. The project will also develop robust initial solutions by determining ideal revenue solutions for several demand request scenarios. Further, this optimal apriori solution will be updated over time as current reservation requests are revealed, thus accounting for discrepancies between forecasted and actual demands. The research findings and models will ultimately lead to the development of significantly improved and more robust revenue optimization practices in a variety of service industry networks, by synthesizing interdisciplinary principles from networks, reliability, algorithms, simulation, and forecasting to develop new models and tools for reservations control in the hotel industry. Benefits to various segments of the society include: (1) decision support tools for reservations managers; (2) improved revenues and revenue reliability for hotels and airlines; (3) health care service planning; and (3) reservations control for special events (e.g. concerts). In service sector industries such as airlines, hotels and rental car agencies, simple heuristic and empirical tools have been applied for reservations control. These current models are too restrictive in their assumptions, and do not account for the complexity of the revenue management problem. This project aims to develop methods for realistic modeling of the reservations problem, thus leading to increased revenue potential and robustness, through a network flow-based approach. To achieve these objectives, this project aims to: (1) develop a disaggregate framework to model the demand for reservations over time; (2) propose dynamic network models to obtain robust optimal solutions to the real-time reservations control problem; and (3) develop network-based models to maximize the robustness of revenues under uncertain arc costs (due to cancellation, no shows etc.). A graduate level course on Reliability and Optimization of Dynamic and Stochastic Infrastructure and Service Networks will be developed to prepare leaders in research and practice in various service and infrastructure industries operating complex physical and or virtual networks. The project will also aggressively recruit female and minority students to enhance the diversity of engineers in the service sector doc24510 none This project examines the seasonal variation in the nature of the organic carbon deposited on continental margins. The flux of organic carbon reaching the seabed can be quantified by using particle traps or by modeling seabed burial and regeneration rates, but the quality (i.e., its lability) has been difficult to assess on continental margins because of co-deposition with old refractory carbon from marine and terrestrial systems. Bomb Carbon-14 (C14) is a useful tracer of recently produced marine organic matter, but this signal is masked in continental margin particle?trap samples and surface sediments by the older and refractory carbon that is re-suspended and reworked from shallower marine deposits. Surface deposit feeders in continental margin systems have been shown to sequester the labile fraction of the total organic flux reaching the seabed as a result of their selective ingestive and digestive processes. Therefore, the body tissues and the gut sediments of these benthic fauna can provide a record of the labile material reaching the continental margin seafloor. Initial C14 data indicate that the body tissues of surface depositing feeders are enriched in this radioisotope by 100 to 300 per mil relative to the surface sediments in which they live and feed. Based on mass?balance C14 calculations, the labile component may comprise only a few tenths of a percent of the total organic matter in the surface seabed, yet the surface deposit feeders exhibit C14 signatures in their body tissues (+20 to +80 per mil) dominated by the local bomb?produced signal . Thorium (Th) data from continental margins suggest that as much as 50% of the recently deposited organic matter on the continental margin sea floor may pass through the guts of deposit feeders prior to microbial degradation or burial. Therefore, C14 measurements on benthic fauna can provide a unique tool for assessing the lability of organic matter reaching the seafloor and for tracking the fate of this material in the benthic food web. Many existing diagenetic models treat organic matter regeneration by microbes and deposit feeders as a batch process with a single carbon degradation constant for the bulk organic matter. The C14 data clearly show that ingestion of organic matter and digestion of this material are very selective processes. The C14 analyses from the California Borderland and the Antarctic continental margin have shown the utility of this approach for documenting variations in the organic carbon lability of surface sediments. Drs. DeMaster and Smith will expand the initial studies to enable assessment of seasonal variations in the quality of organic carbon deposited on the seabed. Particle?trap samples, benthic?faunal tissues, gut samples and surface sediments have been collected during 6 cruises to the California Borderland and 5 cruises to the Antarctic continental margin covering the major seasonal variations in organic carbon supply. Funds are requested for making 150 C14 analyses (and complementary C13, N15, and C N measurements) on these samples so that a time series quantifying the nature and flux of organic matter reaching the seabed can be determined. They will assess not only seasonal variations in the nature of particle selection and digestive selection processes for organic matter, but also the changes in these processes as a result of feeding strategy (epibenthic surface deposit feeders, vs. subsurface deposit feeders vs. head?down subsurface deposit feeders) on the seafloor doc24524 none This Exploratory Research on Engineering the Service Sector (ESS) addresses real-time dispatching of heavy-haul trains in a high-density complex railway network with multiple-track configurations, multiple priorities and multiple speed limits. The research will provide the theory and dynamic control algorithms for deadlock-free dispatching with minimal total train delay in complex heavy-haul rail networks that are increasingly common in urban areas. Determining the optimal dispatch policies that minimizes train delays and ensures deadlock-free operations is NP-hard. Therefore, most of the research efforts in this direction have focused on developing heuristics as well as detailed simulations to plan dispatching policies. Theoretical efforts thus far have only addressed trackage configurations like single, double, and partially double rail lines. However complicating entities in a rail system like junctions, crossovers, sidings, speed limits and goods priorities need to be considered in order to extend the current theory to large-scale urban rail networks. To address this need, the research will consist of the following tasks: (1) theoretical studies focusing on developing a network representation of this complicated physical system, and characterization of the nonlinear and stochastic dynamics underlying the operations for laying the foundations of developing effective dispatching algorithms, (2) development of deadlock-free and near-optimal algorithms for the real-time dispatching of trains operating in complex general rail networks, and (3) development of a simulation methodology to model complicated rail networks akin to Southern California rail networks, and validate the performance of algorithms and theory using this simulation model. As global trade continues to increase, cargo traffic at the nation s ports continues to increase at dramatic levels. For example, the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are among the busiest ports in America. Booming trade with Pacific Rim nations has seen the annual trade in the two ports exceed 100 million tons. The total volume that these ports handle is evenly divided between transcontinental and local shipments. Furthermore, a large portion of the local shipments are packaged and sorted at local facilities for shipment across the continent. Railways form the major means to transcontinentally move these goods. Forecasts show that volume growth of high-value containerized freight is set to triple in the next 25 years. The main impact of the research will have a significant bearing on real-world urban rail operations, many of whose pertinent complexities have been ignored in theoretical studies thus far doc24508 none A scientist from Florida State University in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Hawaii and the University of Washington will collect a suite of dissolved and particulate samples from surface waters and vertical profiles (12 depths), as well as atmospheric aerosol and rainwater samples during selected legs of the Repeat Hydrography CO2 cruises. The PIs plan to participate in the following four cruises: (1) the North Atlantic Ocean meridional section (20-25 W) during ; (2) the Pacific Ocean zonal section at 30 N during ; (3) the South Atlantic Ocean meridional section (20-25 W) in ; and (4) the South Pacific Ocean meridional section (150W) in . Samples recovered during these cruises will be analyzed for Fe and Al. In addition, aerosol samples will be subjected to an ultrapure water leach to assess the fractional solubility of Fe and Al. This team of PIs also plans to collect and archive filtered and unfiltered water samples and aerosols for analysis by other scientists in the trace metal and tracer community. The primary objectives of this study is to generate an extensive database of Fe and Al concentrations in water and aerosol samples that can constrain global and regional dust deposition models and determine the role that atmospheric Fe depositions have in delivering Fe to surface waters in the major basins of the world s oceans doc24526 none The area of the global coastal zone, approximated by the continental shelves, is about 7% of the surface area of the ocean, and its volume is about 9% of the volume of the surface ocean layer (3 x 10 km). Despite its relatively small size, up to 20% of total oceanic biological production occurs there, at least 80% of the mass of terrigenous materials reaching the ocean is deposited there, and 30 to 50% of total carbonate and 80% of total organic carbon accumulation in the ocean occur in the coastal zone. In addition, coastal zone environments are being heavily impacted, disproportionately more than the much larger area of the open ocean, by modifications of the biogeochemical dynamics and cycles of carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P), three of six of the major life-essential elements (the other three being sulfur, oxygen, and hydrogen). The coastal zone is strongly affected by the environmental biogeochemical changes occurring in its neighboring domains of land, ocean, sediments, and atmosphere. Because of both climatic change and human-induced forcings on the environment, it is this region of the ocean that is most susceptible to anthropogenic fluxes of materials and changes in water quality, organic productivity, and biodiversity. Until very recently, little attention has been paid to the coastal zone on a global scale and its role in the global C-N-P biogeochemical cycles that are important to life on land and in the oceans. In this proposal we address a fundamental scientific problem that is also of substantial concern to the human society: the recent past, present, and near future behavior of the coupled C-N-P biogeochemical cycles in the coastal marine zone that are influenced by climatic change and human activities. The time scale of our research is decades to centuries, including the past 300 years of increasing human perturbations and about a century of the future, as based on current projections of the magnitudes of the perturbations. To accomplish our goals, we employ a modeling methodology developed by us under previous NSF support to analyze environmental change in the global system of four do-mains: land, ocean, sediments, and atmosphere. We deal with the following research issues: (a) the changing roles of nutrient N and P fluxes to the coastal zone from land and from the open ocean as drivers of organic productivity and the carbon cycle in general; (b) the changing state of organic carbon metabolism in the coastal zone, and the release or uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide by coastal waters, as controlled by the production and storage of organic and inorganic carbon (CaCO3 ) in the coastal zone; (c) the effect of rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations on the organic and inor-ganic C-N-P cycles in the coastal zone, and (d) the effects of possible changes in the thermohaline circulation of the ocean and in coastal oceanic circulation (upwelling and onwelling) on the C-N-P cycles in the coastal margin and their linkages to the land, atmosphere, sediments, and open ocean. We expect our results to show to what extent the coupling between the C-N-P cycles and increased nutrient inputs from changes in the land domain have been responsible for the biogeochemical dynamics of the coastal zone from the recent past to the present. We also expect our results to show that the projected trends of environmental change on land, changes in the magnitude of thermohaline circulation and coastal upwelling, and global climate are likely to make the coastal zone a more active and quantitatively important site in the transfer of materials between it and the domains of land, atmosphere, and sediments and sub-domain of open ocean in the future. This tentative conclusion has important implications to the biogeochemical state of the coastal zone relative to the human population that depends on it doc24476 none Carbon enters ecosystems through a single process, photosynthesis, and nearly all is returned to the atmosphere through respiration, some 50-80% of which occurs below ground. Soil respiration integrates root metabolism and the activity of decomposer organisms. While the major processes affecting plant metabolic (autotrophic) respiration and decomposition rates (heterotrophic respiration) are known, the ability to predict variations in soil respiration in space and time is limited - a major uncertainty in the current and future carbon cycle. The work proposed here will combine new measurement and modeling approaches for separating autotrophic and heterotrophic respiration, and determining the age of C respired from soils. At field sites in the Ameriflux network that span a range of North American biomes and climates, these methods will include: (1) frequent, automated, measurements of soil respiration and related factors; (2) isotope mass balance methods based on measurements of stable isotopes and radiocarbon in respired CO2; and (3) incubations to determine responses of heterotrophic respiration components to changing soil conditions; and (4) at some sites, manipulation of soil moisture content through rainfall exclusion. The data generated will be used to partition soil respired C into autotrophic and heterotrophic components, to determine the age of heterotrophically respired C and identify the components of soil organic matter contributing to its production, and to determine how these relationships chance with controlling variables (photosynthesis rate, soil conditions, etc). The results will be used to parameterize a new autotrophic respiration component of the CASA ecosystem model, and to test how well the model predicts the balance of sources of heterotrophic respiration on seasonal to interannual timescales. Predictions of the CASA model will be further tested across regional gradients spanning (1) a climosequence and (2) a suite of sites from tropical forest to tundra. We will use atmospheric records of seasonal variation in C isotopes (13C at the global network sites and 14C in atmospheric CO2 at Point Barrow, Alaska) as a global test of the CASA model s ability to determine the seasonal to interannual exchange of C between northern hemisphere terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere. . Separating the components of ecosystem respiration is one of the fundamentally important research challenges in ecosystem science. This activity will use new tools, in particular, innovative use of the radiocarbon tracer in measurements and models, to develop process level understanding of C fluxes at selected Ameriflux sites. Broader impacts. This work will advance fundamental understanding of how terrestrial ecosystems influence the global carbon cycle, and will improve projections of future atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide by showing how heterotrophic respiration will respond to changes in temperature and moisture. Our program to educate students through a short course in radiocarbon at the W.M. Keck Carbon Cycle Accelerator Mass Spectrometry facility will train the next generation of scientists in the applications of radiocarbon to study land and ocean C cycling doc24528 none The overall question we are addressing in this proposal is, What role does the evasion (outgassing) of CO2 from the river system to the atmosphere play relative to fluvial carbon export to the ocean in the carbon cycle of the humid tropics? We have recently demonstrated that outgassing of CO2 from rivers and wetlands of the central Amazonian basin is 1.2 0.3 Mg C ha -1 y -1 , or, when extrapolated across the entire basin, an order of magnitude greater than fluvial export of organic carbon to the oceans. Such a flux would be an important loss, as it is approximately equal to lower estimates of carbon sequestration in the Amazon. These conclusions lead to the working hypothesis for this proposal, that Surface water CO2 evasion is the dominant source of carbon loss (exceeding export to the oceans by a factor of 10) in fluvial systems of the humid tropics, and in the aggregate reconciles the tropics in the global carbon budget. Evasion is driven primarily by in-stream respiration of organic carbon translocated in space and time from its terrestrial and riparian origins. While estimates are becoming better constrained in the Amazon, they are not elsewhere in the tropics, particularly in regions of much greater anthropogenic impact. With this proposal we intend to extend and test our Amazon-based working hypothesis to another significant region, Southeast Asia. We propose to (1) enhance an existing model with improved water routing and inundation, sediments, and carbon modules as a function of landscape condition, (2) conduct a field sampling campaign to determine region-specific processes and provide data for model validation, and (3) use the resulting improved model to analyze questions concerning the dynamics of carbon in the fluvial environments of Southeast Asia which will test our working hypothesis. The most significant intellectual merit of our proposal is (1) that a significant anomaly in the global carbon cycle is being addressed, and (2) the work represents a convergence of historically separate lines of earth science into a significant new view of the global importance of the processes and magnitudes of land-water-atmosphere coupling. The most important broader impact of the work will most likely come via improved tools and information networks for sustainability in a region of multiple transboundary environmental pressures doc24529 none Challenges in Ecological Science and the National Ecological Observatory Network The Ecological Society of America proposes two activities that explore the connections between current ecological science and the opportunities afforded by NEON. One component of the proposed work is the development of a technical paper that describes current ecological challenges and how they might be met by a program such as NEON. The paper will also highlight elements that will be useful in planning the new network. The second element is the development of a CD that visually and concisely encapsulates the objectives of the NEON program. These objectives will be attained through a series of workshops sponsored by the ESA doc24530 none Shing-Tung Yau This award provides partial support for mathematicians from under-represented groups and other junior mathematicians without other means of support to attend a Geometry and Topology Conference on May 3,4, and 5 at Harvard University. The first day of the conference will emphasize Karen Uhlenbeck s leading role in mentoring women in Mathematics and feature four female speakers from a well known leader in the field to other more junior mathematicians. There will be several poster session during the conference including one on Women in Science. The second and third days of the conference will feature lectures from twelve eminent Geometers and Topologists. Further details about the conference, including lists of speakers and local hotels can be found at http: math.harvard.edu jdg index.html doc24531 none National Wildlife productions is developing a large format film, Predators and Prey, and related educational resources. The film will introduce audiences to cutting-edge scientific research through a topic that already captures their imagination and will use visually exciting scenes to present the science behind predator prey relations. A preliminary conceptual structure, general approach and potential storyline have already been developed. The planning phase will include the following activities: -Further define the conceptual structure of the film -Conduct preproduction front-end audience research -Refine the approaches to the film based on feedback from front-end research -Plan educational resources -Conduct a front-end survey of large-format film theaters to evaluate the title, approach and relevance of proposed educational resources. -Draft a film treatment The principals for the project bring a background of filmmaking and science. Christopher Palmer, President and CEO, National Wildlife Productions (NWP), will serve as Executive Producer for the film. Educational resources will be designed by Jim Stofan, Vice President, Education, NWP; and the Chief Science Consultant will be Sterling Miller, Senior Wildlife Biologist, NWP. Treatments and scripts will be written by Mose Richards and evaluation will be conducted by Robert Russell. A committee of scientists and science educators will help guide the project during the planning phase doc24532 none This proposal was received in response to the Spin Electronics for the 21st century Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 02-036. The proposal focuses on the interplay between current-driven magnetization dynamics and the magnetic configurational dependence of spin transport in magnetic nanostructures, i.e., to give a holistic approach to the magnetic and transport properties of magnetic nanostructures subject to a high current flow. Spin accumulation and spin current of non-collinear magnetization configuration will be obtained by solving the generalized Boltzmann equation for several magnetic nanostructures, including the multilayered pillar structure and the magnetic nanoconstriction. Magnetization dynamics in the presence of the spin accumulation and spin currents will be investigated by solving Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation through micromagnetics codes. Since the spin accumulation and the magnetization dynamics are inter-dependent, the equations of motion for the non-equilibrium electron distribution and for the local magnetization must be self-consistently determined. An extensive comparison between the models developed in the program and updated (available and on-going) experimental data on spin-current induced magnetization dynamics will be given throughout this research project. The project calls for a well-balanced combination of fundamental studies and applications of the theory for spintronics devices. The outcome of the proposed research will be a general theoretical framework for understanding the magnetization dynamics of magnetic nanoconstrictions in a non-equilibrium state of conduction electrons. It is likely that the numerical modeling tools developed in this research can be widely used for experimentalists and engineers to explain, predict, and design for high-speed, high-density spintronics and other nanoscale devices. We anticipate a broad impact from this program through participation of a graduate student and a post-doc, and through partnership with industry. The research results will be integrated into an emerging course of the frontier of magnetism and magnetic materials that the PI intends to develop doc24533 none With support from the National Science Foundation, Bruce Huckell and David Kilby will investigate caches of artifacts made by Clovis hunter-gatherers. The Clovis culture, best known for its large fluted projectile points found in association with extinct mammals such as mammoth and giant bison, occurs extensively in North America, perhaps over the entire continent. Reliable dates from Clovis sites cluster tightly between 13,500 and 13,000 calendar years B.P. Clovis lithic tool assemblages commonly include fluted projectile (spear) points, large stone bifaces and bifacial cores, blades and blade cores, and a limited variety of smaller tools made on flakes and blades. Bone and mammoth ivory tools are less common, but equally geographically widespread components of Clovis assemblages. Clovis caches have been found throughout many areas of the United States Plains and Rocky Mountains, as well as the Great Lakes area and currently reside in museums and private collections around the United States. The goal of this research is to provide a comprehensive view of the organization of Clovis lithic technology. Most of what is known about Clovis technology is derived from artifacts at the end of their useful lives that have been discarded or abandoned at kill or camp sites. Current models of Clovis toolkits are largely reconstructed from these discarded portions of tools and waste material. Caches of Clovis artifacts, however, provide a unique window into Clovis technology that is not found in other Clovis assemblages, because artifacts from caches appear to have entered the archaeological record at some point before their usefulness was depleted. Thus, they may more directly represent the components and form of the working toolkit carried by Clovis people. By systemically linking artifacts from caches to those from kill and camp sites, we can address traditional issues of primary artifact production, artifact use, and discard, as well as issues concerning maintenance and storage strategies in between. Over 20 Clovis caches have been identified and reported; however, this designation obscures considerable variability. It is unlikely that all caches served the same purpose. Their functions may have included, among other things, artifact and raw material storage, and ritual abandonment. Deducing the general function of individual caches is a necessary step in relating them to abandoned artifacts from non-cache sites. Thus, in addition to understanding technology, this research will investigate caching as a behavior, and evaluate possible roles that it played in Clovis technological organization and land use. Caches are discrete assemblages that provide a snapshot of artifact form at some point along a continuum of stone tool reduction subsequent to raw material acquisition and previous to discard. Approaching cached assemblages from this perspective can potentially fill a critical gap in the available data concerning Clovis lithic technology. In the process we will gather and make available data that are not easily accessed due to inadequate publication, dispersed locations, and, in many cases, private ownership. Despite roughly six decades of intensive investigation, there remains significant uncertainty concerning even the most general aspects of Clovis adaptations. The results of this research will provide insight into the technology, subsistence, mobility, and ideology of these people who were arguably the first inhabitants of the New World. More specifically, this research stands to define and evaluate the role of material caching in the adaptations of Clovis people, the results of which may be applicable to a better understanding of all hunter-gatherer groups doc24534 none Project-based production (PBP) systems are dedicated to designing and making artifacts that provide value to project stakeholders. Their delivery is a type of service when the artifacts are engineered-to-order (ETO). Delivery of custom products that enable realization of customer purposes, while being responsive to the needs of multiple users and various life-cycle requirements, pushes PBP systems and ETO products firmly into the service category. Numerous services are delivered through PBP systems and produce ETO products. Examples of services belonging to this class of problems are health care (e.g., patient diagnosis and treatment), construction services, film and theatrical productions, software engineering, oil field development, consumer product development, custom ship building, and work orders (e.g., job shops). Learning how to design, control, and systematically improve the delivery of ETO products can be understood as a topic of importance to many-if not most-service functions. The objective of this research is to determine how to reduce lead times for one type of ETO product in the engineering and detailing phases of delivery using industry-practice data, computer-based simulation, and computer-based as well as practice-based experimentation. Taking one step towards the PI s larger objective, this exploratory research focuses on one type of ETO product, in one type of service function, namely the delivery of steel reinforcing bars used in pre-cast or cast-in-place concrete. What is learned from this project will be cast in a theoretical framework and applied to delivery processes for other ETO products in various service sectors, in an effort to establish one component of a general methodology for the design, control, and continuous improvement of project-based ETO product delivery. The working hypotheses are that (1) Traditional ETO delivery is characterized by sequential processing, with each participating company or department sub-optimizing total system performance; (2) Rework in engineering and detailing exceeds 10%; (3) The ratio of idle time to total time spent by an ETO product as it moves from engineering through fabrication and delivery exceeds 20 to 1; and (4) The ration of fabrication shop cycle time to fabrication lead time exceeds 10 to 1. The research will aim to reject these. Should findings, however, reinforce these hypotheses, then opportunities for radical improvement in the ETO delivery process abound. A research agenda will then be staked out, and, time permitting under this 18 month grant, selected improvements will be implemented and tested doc24535 none The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) will convene a symposium to address the role that the public domain plays now and may play in the future in both promoting and protecting the exchange of scientific data and information. The symposium will bring together 150 experts on scientific data and information; professionals experienced in management of such data and information; and scientists, from both the public and private sector. The symposium will evaluate the present role that the public domain plays in support of science, including research, and education; identify and quantify the various pressures on the public domain; discuss existing and prospective approaches for preserving the public domain in the face of such pressures; identify issues in these areas that may warrant further study; and recommend ways in which such issues might be addressed most effectively. Increasing legal, economic and technological pressures threaten to reduce the flow of scientific data and information to the public domain and thus constrain the ability of research scientists to draw data and information from the public domain and utilize it in their research. Scientific data and information in the public domain has been and remains essential to the conduct of scientific research. Similarly, the release into the public domain of data and information generated in the course of such scientific research also is essential to evaluation, verification and criticism of the results of such research. The proceedings of the symposium will be made available in both electronic and hard copy formats within twelve months of the symposium doc24536 none Sesame Workshop, in collaboration with the Adler Planetarium -- providing age-appropriate information about astronomy in an engaging, entertaining format; and -- fostering am understanding of one another among children in the two countries. During the planning phase, there will be three face-to-face meetings among the principals: at the Beijing Planetarium, at Sesame Workshop in New York, and at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. The purpose of these meetings will be to determine: -- What is the appropriate educational content for the show and complementary materials and what does research with children say about it? -- How does this type of project best reach preschool audiences? -- Is there a need or opportunity for producing alternative language or dialect versions of either the English or Mandarin versions of the show and complementary materials? -- What issues or problems affect the design of the show and complementary materials? -- What are the implementation issues? Particular attention will be given to exploring how the project might include cross-cultural information in the show and complementary materials, and how the cross-over characters (Da Naio appearing in the English version; Big Bird in the Mandarin version) might be included in the design doc24537 none This project aims to determine the genetic locus encoding [KIL-d], a cytoplasmically-inherited genetic element in yeast that exerts epigenetic regulatory effects on the M double-stranded (ds) RNA genomic segment of the cytoplasmic killer virus of yeast. In wild-type yeast cells, M dsRNA confers on infected cells the phenotypes of toxin production and toxin resistance, both activities of processed products of the virus-encoded preprotoxin protein. In the presence of [KIL-d], the expression of M dsRNA is normal in diploid cells, but upon meiosis each haploid progeny clone shows a different mitotically stable (variegated) defect in toxin production and or resistance function. Upon mating of the defective haploids, wild-type virus expression is restored (healing), and upon meiosis variegated defective phenotypic expression in each haploid progeny reappears (resetting). The investigator has previously shown that the effects of [KIL-d] are exerted on M dsRNA but not on a cDNA clone derived from it. [KIL-d] is transmissible to a new strain by cytoplasmic transfer, but it does not exert its epigenetic effects on M dsRNA expression until the recipient haploid cells have gone through a cycle of mating and meiosis, indicating that nuclear functions are involved in the epigenetic regulation. [KIL-d] does not map on the viral M or L-A dsRNA segments, mitochondrial DNA or the 2-micron DNA plasmid. [KIL-d] has a relatively high rate of loss (like many plasmids), and an even higher rate of reappearance with variegated phenotypic expression in clones that have lost it. This behavior resembles the known prions of yeast, but not any known nucleic acid plasmid. This research will quantify the epigenetic effects of [KIL-d] on M dsRNA by determining whether it alters the size or quantity of viral genomic or transcript RNA or of the protein products of the virus. In order to determine the molecular nature of [KIL-d], a genomic library from a primary isolate in which this element has appeared after mutagenesis (available in this laboratory) will be used to generate a genomic DNA library (or a cDNA library), that will be screened for genes that can generate [KIL-d] when transferred to wild-type recipients. If [KIL-d] is a prion, then this screen should identify the gene(s) encoding the protein that forms the prion. If the prion model is incorrect, this screen should identify the genetic elements involved in this virus-specific epigenetic regulatory process, which appears to be the first such process to be subjected to molecular genetic analysis. Further studies using the genetic methods available in yeast will allow characterization of the genes identified in this library screening procedure. This research will provide a training opportunity for a postdoctoral fellow, graduate student and several undergraduate students, who will be trained in the methods of yeast molecular genetics. It will also include a new group summer research experience for a group of summer undergraduate students participating in two programs run on this campus with support from the NSF and an Initiative for Minority Student Development Award from the NIH. Misfolded proteins that can cause normal proteins of the same type to misfold are termed prions. In yeast, prions are cytoplasmically-inherited non-nucleic acid genetic elements. [KIL-d] is an unusual genetic element in yeast that alters expression of the genes of a viral RNA. This research will characterize this genetic element and determine whether it is a prion doc24538 none The polymer industry is one of the most dynamic and expanding industries of our time. It is one of the few industries in which the U.S. still holds a strong leadership in an extremely competitive global market. A focused collaboration between industry and academia has been underway for nearly five years through the activities of the NSF Industry University Cooperative Research Center for Advanced Polymer and Composite Engineering (CAPCE) at the Ohio State University. CAPCE offers comprehensive and well-organized collaboration between application-oriented researchers in industry and fundamental-oriented researchers in universities, enhancing commercialization of advanced polymer and composites materials. The Center will continue to emphasize the needs of the more traditional manufacturing sector of the polymer and composite industry, since these members dominate the industrial support base. In addition, their efforts will include: - Cooperating with industry members to translate basic research results from NSF supported research into commercial products and processes; - Incorporating environmentally-friendly technologies in product manufacturing by reducing energy consumption and toxic chemicals; reducing the amount of volatile solvents and manufacturing waste; and increasing sustainability; and - Enabling efficient, low-cost mass production of parts for bio-MEMS, sensors, and other applications, using micro and nanno-fabrication techniques doc24539 none Teich AAAS The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) will continue the AAAS NSF Fellowship Program for a third year. Up to seven Fellows for the - year will be selected and placed in offices throughout NSF, working on projects of mutual interest to the Fellows and the host directorate or office. Fellows will learn how NSF funds science, while providing scientific, engineering and educational input on issues relating to NSF s mission support of fundamental science and engineering research and education. Fellows will work with staff involved in planning, development and oversight of agency programs in all fields of fundamental research. Assignments may involve significant interagency, congressional or international activity, as well as involvement with the National Science Board, NSF s policy-setting body. The program includes an orientation on executive branch and congressional operations, as well as a yearlong seminar program on issues involving science, technology and public policy doc24540 none Recent research has demonstrated that self-assembly of engineered components, usually built with silicon micromachining techniques, can be an enabling technology in the fabrication of powerful complex microelectronic microsystems that incorporate mechanical, optical, and wireless components. Self-assembly can produce microsystems containing thousands or millions of parts, eliminating the reliance on conventional, sequential pick-and-place approaches. A promising approach towards micro self-assembly is proposed, which employs capillary action and interfacial energies as its driving force. Parts and substrates with specially designed hydrophobic binding sites will attach to each other when immersed in an aqueous medium. The immediate goal of this high-risk, high-potential-payoff project is a proof-of-concept demonstration of a novel selfassembly technique using a thin-film biomaterial (plasma polymerized N-isopropylacrylamide, ppNIPAM, developed at the University of Washington Engineered Biomaterials Center,) on silicon microheater arrays. This approach exploits a remarkable property of NIPAM, which reversibly switches from hydrophilic to hydrophobic at approximately 32C. In this project, ppNIPAM will be coated onto micromachined heater arrays, effectively creating a programmable surface where self-assembly takes place only on selected, heated (i.e., hydrophobic) sites. A key point in this project will be the integration of a biomaterial into a MEMS device. If successful, this technique will provide a radical improvement over currently existing microassembly approaches, and could likely set off a larger research effort and numerous practical applications, e.g. in the next generation of portable communication devices or distributed microsensor networks. In addition to micro self-assembly, arrays of ppNIPAM microheaters have other exciting possible applications. In collaboration with Prof. Buddy Ratner (UWEB), this work will explore possibilities to create micro arrays for controlled protein adsorption ( protein chips ), and films with variable permeability for controlled drug release doc24541 none Leon J. Osterweil Norman Sondeimer University of Massachusetts Amherst SGER: Digital Government: Preliminary Evaluation of Process Formulisms for Defining Government Processes Much of the daily operation of government may be thought of as the faithful and precise execution of prescribed processes (law, rules, regulation). This small grant will explore the potential for the application of a special purpose computer language (LittleJIL) to aid in ensuring the accuracy and efficiency of government processes, such as the issuing of licenses. This preliminary grant will begin the building of a partnership between the PI and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in investigating the potential of this novel idea doc24542 none Stone This is a 36 month project submitted by Dr. Sheldon Stone, Syracuse University, to cooperate with Professor CHEN Ting-Yang, Nanjing University, and Professors HE Mao and FENG CunFeng, Shangdong University, China, to carry out a U.S.-China cooperative project on BteV calorimetry. This is an excellent proposal for understanding the use of lead tungstate crystals for applications in calorimetry, and can contribute to the research and training interactions between high-energy physics groups in the U.S. and China. This proposal addresses an important scientific question and contributes to the NSF goals of human resource development. The National Science Foundation of China and NSF will jointly support this project doc24543 none During the machining of metals, plastic deformation and friction lead to the production of heat in the workpiece, which results in complex deformation in the cutting zone. Recently, several numerical models of this highly coupled process have been produced in response to the increased interest in high speed machining. However, while a small number of researchers, in the past and recently, have examined temperature fields during cutting at low or traditional cutting speeds, few if any experimental studies exist that measure temperature fields in the work piece during cutting at high speeds, i.e. 20-100 m s. It is important to characterize the thermal field in the cutting zone during high speed machining in order to characterize friction and wear characteristics in this area and to understand the heat generated there, which affects chip formation and possibly residual stress formation as well. Ultimately, such investigations should direct further advancement in materials development for high speed machining applications. In this work, infrared detectors are used to experimentally measure the temperature distribution at the surface of a workpiece during high-speed orthogonal cutting, and complex numerical models are developed to predict and understand the active mechanisms of deformation and failure. Finally, from these temperature measurements and models, the heat generated in the primary deformation zone is examined, characterized and related to the residual stress distribution in the workpiece. The main thrust is to better understand, and therefore reduce, the effects of residual stress on distortion of high-speed machined, thin walled components. The approach draws on the experience of experimental, numerical and industrial researchers to attack this difficult, economically relevant problem with a comprehensive experimental, theoretical and developmental approach. Specific benefits of the proposed work are: (1) Detailed understanding the interplay between finished product quality, material behavior and heat generation in high speed machining; (2) New efficient and accurate computational algorithms to model high-speed machining in order to facilitate full understanding of the observed interactions between tool, material and cut quality or residual stress formation; and (3) New directions in aluminum alloy design for high-speed cutting with emphasis on minimizing the effects of machining and alloy processing parameters on the formation of residual stresses in the finished product. Overall, an integrated materials-mechanics modeling-experimentation approach to the problem will be used throughout the work leading to a multidisciplinary solution to the problem of residual stress distortion of parts machined at high-speed doc24544 none This proposal was received in response to the Spin Electronics for the 21st century Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF-02-036. The proposal focuses on the study of novel magneto-electronic and magneto-optic materials and the computational methods that need to be developed to understand their properties. The potential of alternative magnetic semiconductors based on rare-earth (RE) compounds such as GdN and Transition metal (TM) and or RE doped semiconducting ScN. Related metallic compounds, such as Mn-N compounds will also be studied. It is anticipated that the different nature of magnetic couplings of RE and TM atoms will enhance the magnetic effects when the two are combined. The main perceived advantage of the class of materials are: 1) full intersolubility because of the common rocksalt structure, 2) the complementary character of TM and RE exchange interactions and magnetic moments, 3) the possibility of n-type based spintronics. Heterostructures of these materials with the compatible high temperature semiconductor GaN will be studied. To develop a better understanding of the origin of magnetism in these and more traditional magnetic semiconductors, a new computational approach is proposed, based on the screened exchange method. This method will be extended to be capable of dealing with both the band gap problem of semiconductors and strongly correlated narrow band open shell systems and will be implemented within the context of the linear muffin-tin orbital band structure method. It will further be made compatible with the non-collinear magnetism approach based on the rigid spin approximation within atomic spheres. The calculations will provide information on the electronic structure and on the origin and the nature of the magnetism in the systems under study. To validate the new method, it will first be applied to systems for which experimental data are available already and subsequently will be used in a predictive character for new materials. To aid in the comparison with experimental data, magneto-optical properties will be calculated as well as basic electronic structure and magnetic exchange interactions. Extensions of currently available optical calculation methods to incoporate the new screened exchange methodology and its application to magneto-optical properties such as the magneto-optical Kerr effect and the Faraday rotation effect will be developed doc24545 none This grant supports research on the microphysics and kinematics of tropical convective storms using archival data from NASA TRMM experiments in Brazil, Florida, and Kwajalein. The data consist of Doppler spectra measured by UHF profiler, polarimetric radar data, and supporting airborne and surface-based meteorological observations. Special attention is given to the relation between the updraft profile in the cloud and the drop-size distributions that evolve through different growth processes. Key questions center on the existence and significance of equilibrium drop-size distributions, established when collision-induced drop breakup is balanced by drop growth, and the interpretation of the so-called balance level where the mean Doppler velocity for vertical viewing is zero. Comparisons will be made between the drop-size distribution measured by profiler and the polarimetric radar measurements. One goal of the study is to improve the ability to measure rainfall rate by radar. Another is to advance precipitation physics by synthesizing the data from a unique combination of observing instruments doc24546 none Professor Catherine Fenselau of the University of Maryland is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities for a symposium entitled: Analytical Chemistry for Homeland Defense and National Security at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Meeting in Boston MA on August 18-22, . This special symposium is in response to the urgent need for analytical chemists to identify basic chemistry research required for advances in national security. Several workshops have been held by various government agencies, including the NSF, however, it is useful to have open meetings to reach a broad audience, especially young scientists doc24547 none Gaudiot This three-year award for US-France cooperative research in high performance computing involves Jean-Luc Gaudiot of the University of Southern California, Guang Gao of the University of Delaware and Christine Eisenbeis at the French National Institute for Research in Informatics and Applied Mathematics (INRIA) at Rocquencourt. The objective of their research is simulation of multithreaded multiprocessors for high performance computing. The project adds an international dimension to an active NSF grant on functional programming of multithreaded systems. The US-France collaboration focuses on simulation. The investigators propose to specify, design and implement a trace simulator and to identify the sources of parallelism within a computer program. The US investigators bring to this collaboration expertise in processor architecture design, multithreaded architecture design and application. This is complemented by French expertise in parallel compilation, code analysis and optimization. The research addresses the development of more efficient memory for large-scale parallel scientific computing doc24543 none During the machining of metals, plastic deformation and friction lead to the production of heat in the workpiece, which results in complex deformation in the cutting zone. Recently, several numerical models of this highly coupled process have been produced in response to the increased interest in high speed machining. However, while a small number of researchers, in the past and recently, have examined temperature fields during cutting at low or traditional cutting speeds, few if any experimental studies exist that measure temperature fields in the work piece during cutting at high speeds, i.e. 20-100 m s. It is important to characterize the thermal field in the cutting zone during high speed machining in order to characterize friction and wear characteristics in this area and to understand the heat generated there, which affects chip formation and possibly residual stress formation as well. Ultimately, such investigations should direct further advancement in materials development for high speed machining applications. In this work, infrared detectors are used to experimentally measure the temperature distribution at the surface of a workpiece during high-speed orthogonal cutting, and complex numerical models are developed to predict and understand the active mechanisms of deformation and failure. Finally, from these temperature measurements and models, the heat generated in the primary deformation zone is examined, characterized and related to the residual stress distribution in the workpiece. The main thrust is to better understand, and therefore reduce, the effects of residual stress on distortion of high-speed machined, thin walled components. The approach draws on the experience of experimental, numerical and industrial researchers to attack this difficult, economically relevant problem with a comprehensive experimental, theoretical and developmental approach. Specific benefits of the proposed work are: (1) Detailed understanding the interplay between finished product quality, material behavior and heat generation in high speed machining; (2) New efficient and accurate computational algorithms to model high-speed machining in order to facilitate full understanding of the observed interactions between tool, material and cut quality or residual stress formation; and (3) New directions in aluminum alloy design for high-speed cutting with emphasis on minimizing the effects of machining and alloy processing parameters on the formation of residual stresses in the finished product. Overall, an integrated materials-mechanics modeling-experimentation approach to the problem will be used throughout the work leading to a multidisciplinary solution to the problem of residual stress distortion of parts machined at high-speed doc24549 none There are two closely related peptide hormones called arginine vasotocin (AVT) and arginine vasopressin (AVP) that have been implicated in several vertebrates as modulators of social behavior, including courtship, pair-bonding, parenting, and aggression. The mechanisms by which these molecules act in the brain to produce these behavioral effects remain unclear, but their widespread distribution suggests they are evolutionarily conserved. It has been suggested that AVT AVP may affect the processing of species-typical social releasing stimuli such as courtship calls, visual displays, or chemical signals. It is important to take a comparative approach to this question, to determine whether or not AVT AVP can selectively influence behavioral and brain responses to the specific releasing stimuli that have evolved in different groups of animals for social communication. This project is a Small Grant for Exploratory Research to test this hypothesis directly using goldfish, because the exact chemical stimuli important for courtship and aggressive communication signals in this species are uniquely identified and can be delivered quantitatively. The project is exploratory because it is not yet clear whether AVT will influence social behavior in goldfish, although AVT effects on social behavior have been shown in other teleost fish, and some AVT AVP effects are known for diverse other vertebrates. Experiments manipulating AVT levels in the brain will measure effects on courtship and aggressive behaviors in male goldfish during responses to particular chemosensory social stimuli that release those behaviors. This is a high-impact high-risk project because the outcome is not clear, but the potential impact of success is wide-ranging. If successful, the results will lead to further studies on social regulatory functions of hormones, will have an impact beyond behavioral neuroendocrinology to brain neurochemistry, animal behavior, and evolutionary neuroscience, and could have an impact on applications in aquaculture and fisheries industries doc24550 none Systemic Research, Inc. will collaborate with the awardee institutions of NSF s Tribal Colleges and Universities Program (TCUP) in the development and implementation of a Self Assessment and Evaluation System. Within the context of TCUP goals and relevant Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) requirements, the TCUP Self Evaluation System will assist TCUP awardee institutions with progress indicator data collection for formative self-assessment and evaluation. Electronic evaluation instruments will be designed and developed in close coordination with TCUP awardee institutions to collect relevant quantitative and qualitative indicator data. This activity will enhance TCUP awardee institutions capacity to monitor and assess institutional efforts to broaden participation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines. Proposed collaborative efforts will enhance institutional database management, evaluation and research capacity at TCUP awardee institutions doc24551 none Retinal Neurobiology and Visual Processing FASEB Summer Research Conference July 6th to 11th, Saxtons River, Vermont Stephen Massey, Chair, and Marla Feller, Vice Chair This is the sixth in a series of biannual conferences devoted specifically to the structure and function of the retina. The presentations will cover many facets of retinal biology including: the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying retinal development; the basis of neural signaling; the identification of neural circuits by which the retina processes visual input; the code by which retinal output is conveyed to the brain; and the resulting abilities and limitations of visual behavior. This five-day conference will attract approximately 180 participants from around the world. Thirty-five internationally recognized experts have agreed to present their work in formal talks, which are organized in nine thematic sessions, chaired by leaders in each field. Furthermore, emphasis has been placed on the contributions of younger scientists in an early career stage. In addition, there will be two informal workshops on new technology. Finally, all participants are invited to display their latest results during two poster sessions. The conference format is designed to foster direct scientific exchange among participants. Students and post-docs, particularly from under-represented minority groups, are strongly encouraged to attend. Many young scientists find new positions from contacts made at this meeting. There is ample time for discussion at the end of each presentation, during workshops and poster sessions and there is further free time for informal exchange at meals, which are communal. Because this conference attracts most of the field s senior investigators, it has been highly successful in disseminating results, and has significantly affected the course of retinal research. Furthermore, because the retina is at the forefront of neural circuit analysis and development, this conference will have far-reaching effects on the neuroscience community at large. Women are well represented and we have made a successful effort to attract under-represented minorities to the conference. However, we are particularly proud of our success in featuring young speakers and providing travel support for students to attend this meeting doc24552 none This one-year MUSES pilot study of industrial ecology is designed to define a workable framework for the analysis of new or environmentally beneficial solvents, considering the life cycle of industrial solvents and working fluids, the supply chain implications, and the factors that influence organizations decisions to adopt new solvent technologies that improve the environment. In contrast to many organics, which are reacted, formed, or consumed in manufacturing, industrial solvents and working fluids are generally recycled within a process, and therefore have a clear, extended life cycle. Over this life cycle, the influences on human and ecological systems occur from chemical losses and from energy emissions, and are both local and global. Economic influences are also manifested over the entire life cycle supply chain and affect decisions regarding particular solvents and working fluids. This planning project will 1) evaluate specific tools that are available or need to be developed in order to determine the environmental emissions and energy requirements for the five subsystems of the manufacturing industrial ecology system, 2) establish a set of chemical, material, or technology alternatives that have environmental benefits for a case facility s product, 3) identify pivotal factors that influence organizational decisions regarding the use of environmentally friendly inputs. With respect to these organizational decisions, we will consider how various factors influence organizations to green their supply chains and improve human and ecological environment, assessing how environmental information is used over the supply chain to achieve economic improvement. Educational planning includes cross-training of students in this interdisciplinary topic doc24553 none Martin This project involves research by a cultural anthropologist from Princeton University into the recent shift of opinion in American culture about the cognitive or emotional lability associated with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHP) and manic-depression. The project investigates the change in popular culture from seeing such lability as a defect towards seeing it as a talent that is adaptive in the contemporary social and economic environment of intense global competition. The need for rapid and flexible adjustment to changing conditions in the workplace, schools and communities may be supporting the more positive views of aspects of ADHD-type personalities. Using historical and ethnographic methods, the researcher will investigate these issues in neuroscience research laboratories, psychiatric clinics, patient support groups, schools and worker training programs, and pharmaceutical corporations. The research will take place in three sites: Orange county, California, Baltimore County, Maryland, and central New Jersey to cover a broad range of American society. By addressing the changing meaning of mental illness and disability in the context of other social and cultural processes that are changing, the research will contribute to making these highly stigmatized conditions seem more ordinary and understandable. This should lead to greater tolerance for people who suffer from the illness, as well as greater understanding of how the image of an ideal person is changing in contemporary American culture doc14834 none The Olin-Yale-Bayer New Haven Public School Science program of the New Haven Public Schools demonstrates an ability to assemble scientists from diverse disciplines to work with students and teachers on K-12 science projects. The program began six years ago as a partnership among seven schools -- it now encompasses more than forty schools in New Haven. It is a comprehensive program with multiple components that align goals with outcomes. Students learn the scientific method and associated skills by interacting with scientists; the scientists train participating teachers. Students are provided with authentic research opportunities, where teamwork is promoted and self-esteem is enhanced as a result. Older students are able to get academic course credit for their work. This program serves a significant number of minority students. As a result of program activities, student test scores in science have risen. The program has produced a network of mentors that are provided with training and support. More than 130 volunteer mentors participated in the - program. In the Connecticut science fair, thirty-four projects were based from this program -- those projects involved eleven mentors and forty-eight students (58% minority), seven of whom were medallists and ten of whom received special awards doc24555 none Richard L. Radtke University of Hawaii at Manoa Dr. Radtke effectively balances his time between scientific research and community youth education in a highly productive way. He engages students, parents and teachers in his laboratory, in the field, in his global expeditions and in countless civic presentations, schools visits and public television programs. Dr. Radtke works with a diverse student body including undergraduate and graduate students. He has mentored more than eighty youths with physical disabilities. He has inspired blind youth to paddle canoes; youth with mental health needs to control their emotions; and Deaf students to share their observations in American Sign Language. Dr. Radtke is an outstanding role model, particularly for physically disabled youth, since he too is severely disabled due to multiple sclerosis and has been paralyzed from the neck down since the mid s doc24556 none This project represents an interdisciplinary study to test the hypothesis that stochastic climate and habitat variation play a decisive role in the development of life history traits, adaptation mechanisms and population composition in Arctic charr (Salvelinus alpinus) in high Arctic freshwater systems. The study combines geophysical observations with ecological, retrospective and genetic studies. The circumpolar Arctic charr is ideal for the study of how environmental factors affect life history, population structure and diversity in fishes. Charr populations demonstrate a tremendous ecological plasticity and adaptations to harsh environments. Arctic charr is the only freshwater fish in the high Arctic and, as elsewhere, has a broad range of life-history strategies including anadromous, resident and landlocked populations. In lake systems with migrating charr, the population may consist of a mixture of parr, postsmolt and adult migratory individuals, as well as small-sized resident, large-sized resident and large formerly resident individuals transformed to anadromy. Determination of the effect of the environment upon phenotype, genotype and life history relies upon detailed information about environmental conditions, developmental rates, genetic information, migration rates and mortality in extreme conditions. In this study charr populations from lake systems from the Thule, Disko, Nuuk and Julianehaab, Greenland and Ellesmere Island, Canada areas will be compared. Charr in all systems experience highly stochastic environments. Whereas adaptive, genetic and behavioral mechanisms associated with migration are well known for salmonid fish at lower latitudes, knowledge about such mechanisms in anadromous charr inhabiting high latitude environments are still fragmentary. In general, mechanisms associated with seasonal events must be pre-adaptive. How such pre-adaptive mechanisms are timed with, and influenced by, the unpredictable physical conditions allowing for charr migration in high Arctic systems will be the main topic of this propject doc24557 none The abrupt flooding of the Black Sea in BC submerged wide coastal areas and human settlements. This catastrophic event and the environmental changes it would have caused must have influenced the progress of the agricultural revolution in the Near East and Europe. Apparently well-preserved archaeological sites pre-dating this flooding have recently been identified along the submerged ancient coast of the Black Sea. These underwater sites could shed new light on economic transformations of human society at the time of the spread of agriculture into Europe. Geologic evidence of the rapid infilling of the Black Sea basin received support when an ancient beachline was found during our deep water archaeological survey near Sinop, Turkey in . Bathymetry of the Black Sea floor off the Turkish coast identified a rolling river valley along a 12 mile wide submerged coastal plain. One hundred sonar anomalies (called targets) on the sea floor were identified by sonar and examined by remote video. Of these, four were ancient or historic shipwrecks. One sonar target (no. 82) was identified as a potential site of human habitation on the basis of its distinctive outline and size. Site 82, located under 95 m of water, is composed of large (1 x 1 m) slabs of limestone in a regular rectangular outline in an area 15 x 6 m. Preliminary testing in indicated that the surface of Site 82 is covered with approximately 7 cm of modern sediment. A sediment sample taken from the site had charcoal, seeds, and an elevated phosphate content consistent with submerged archaeological sites found in other areas of the world. Archaeological investigations are being coordinated at the University of Pennsylvania. The Turkish authorities have granted a permit to further investigate this site in . A grant from the National Science Foundation will allow mapping, sampling and archaeological excavations at this site, well below the depths at which divers can work. The methodologies for robotic excavation are experimental and are being developed in a collaboration between archaeologists, engineers and oceanographers expressly for this project. A new ROV which will have the capabilities to carry out archaeological investigations robotically is being built at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Approximately two weeks will be spent on-site aboard the NSF ship USS Knorr, which is scheduled to be in the Black Sea in July, . The proposed research at Site 82 will include: 1) fine scale mapping (to a resolution of 1 cm), 2) core sampling of sediments on- and off-site, 3) small scale excavation using the robotic vehicle, and 4) conservation of the site and of samples recovered. The submerged Black Sea coast appears to be a uniquely well-preserved Neolithic landscape, unmodified by any subsequent human occupation. Site 82 in its geographic setting offers us unusual potential for understanding the key relationship between human history and environmental change. Results of the investigation at Site 82 should provide detailed information about the ancient economy and culture of the Black Sea region prior to the flooding, The associated oceanographic studies should provide answers to questions concerning the nature and rapidity of environmental change at a critical period in the transformation of societies of the Near East and Europe. The robotic research tools being developed for this investigation will open new possibilities for the study of submerged surfaces, applicable in any shallow or deep water environment doc24558 none With the support of the National Science Foundation, Geoffrey Cunnar will conduct his dissertation research on the Liangchengzhen site, one of the largest known Longshan Period (2,600-1,900 BC) archaeological sites on the east coast of Shandong Province, China. The Longshan period existed just before the rise of Xia and Shang dynasties when numerous types of Longshan groups spread throughout a vast area of eastern China and appear to have consisted of well stratified, competitive, territorial polities, which often engaged in regional exchange of wealth items and warfare. Specialized production and exchange of ceramics, jade and other wealth items, along with the appearance of large towns, proto-writing and incipient bronze metallurgy are seen as hallmarks of the period. Seven years of collaborative systematic survey in the eastern Shandong region and three seasons of collaborative excavations ( - ), supported by the National Science Foundation and directed by Dr. Anne Underhill and Dr. Gary Feinman and their colleagues at Shandong University, have identified Liangchengzhen as the center of a multi-tiered settlement hierarchy. The excavation team has uncovered numerous important finds from the Late Neolithic period including houses, burial remains, and finely made craft goods. Analysis of these finds will enable the project to achieve their goal of understanding the origins and development of civilization in the region. Mr. Cunnar s dissertation work focuses on the production and use of ground and polished stone tools. By the Late Neolithic period in China, ground and polished stone tools appear to have become the dominant form of stone tools. In an effort to better understand the role of stone tools in Longshan society, Mr. Cunnar s research will focus on three questions: 1. How were stone tools used? 2. Where were stone tools made and what type of stone were they made from? 3. What was the organization of production? Mr. Cunnar will replicate and then use many of the ancient tool forms. The use of the tools will be guided in part by ethnographic observations of modern Chinese farmers in the region and their use of contemporary hand tools. The microscarring and polish formation on the edges of the replicated tools will be compared to that present on the ancient tools. Such a systematic study will aid in determining the use of ancient tools and elucidating the ancient manufacturing methods. A number of studies have proposed that elite control over economic systems is a major causal factor in the development of complex societies. Typically, elites hold the highest valued positions from which they control significant portions of the economy serving to bolster their own status, prestige and authority. Mr. Cunnar s research will explore what control, if any, the elite population might have exerted of the production of stone tools such as ritual battle-axes. The recent excavations systematically employed the use of screens and the collection of numerous soil samples. These procedures have resulted in the recovery of a very large amount of stone tools and tool fragments, a first for Shandong archaeology. Typological and contextual analysis of the several thousand stone tools will help understand where tools were being manufactured, what types of tools were made, and who was making them. The stone raw materials will be identified. These data can be correlated with the materials corresponding source location and frequency of use to understand the relative importance and role of the various stone types in the Longshan economy. Collaborative research projects are in their infancy in China. The results of this research will provide data of interest to many scholars studying the development of complex society in China doc24559 none The NSF Workshop on Learning and Approximate Dynamic Programming is proposed to take place on April 8-10, , in Playacar, Mexico. The technical focus of the workshop is to address one common cross-cutting problem: how do we do our best, using learning-based approaches or the equivalent, to develop general-purpose designs to try to maximize the sum of expected utility over future time, in a nonlinear stochastic environment, without just simulating the entire future? An important goal of the workshop is to bring people in diverse areas to unify their efforts to tackle some important problems. The workshop is therefore highly interdisciplinary, and the invitees are world leaders in machine learning, control systems theory, and neural networks. The technical program is intended to create opportunities for participants to carry on discussions and to form teams for their future work doc24560 none This proposal was received in response to the Spin Electronics of the 21st Century Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 02-036. The proposal focuses on spin-dependent transport and magnetic phenomena at interfaces of magnetic semiconductor quantum well structures and magnetic tunneling diodes which have potent ml applications in spin electronics. As interfaces in these heterostructures appear to play an essential role for the device characteristics, a detailed study of the electronic and magnetic interface properties as well as split transport across the heterojunctions is needed. The objective of our experimental program is to resolve fundamental questions regarding spin scattering, the magnetic state and the hand alignment at the buried heterointerfaces. The effects of compound formation (intermixing), roughness, magnetic state and defects will be studied and correlated with growth conditions, structural properties and magneto-transport measurements. Spin lifetimes and decoherence times will he measured by femtosecondresolved pump-probe linear and nonlinear magneto-optical experiments to elucidate spin scattering and spin relaxation processes at the buried heterointerfaces. Both electrical (via a photoconductive switch) and optical injection (with linear and circular-polarized ultrafast pulses) will be used to excite a spin population. Internal photoemission experiments (with circular polarization) will be employed to map the alignment of the spin-hands at the heterojunctions. The magnetization dynamics at the buried interface will be measured using the surface-sensitive magnetization-induced second-harmonic generation (MSGH) technique. Spectroscopic MSGH studies will he performed to reveal interface states, which may act as spin scattering centers at the heterojunctions. These measurements will he performed as a function of: temperature, applied magnetic field, applied electrical bias, composition, well thickness and or harrier height, built-in strain and growth conditions. The information on the spin-hand alignment obtained from these measurements can be used to tune into resonant states thereby enhancing the efficiency of the spin-injection process. A major focus of our program will be the education of graduate and undergraduate students in the nascent field of spin electronics. The students will benefit from the proposed research program, providing them with excellent training in an interdisciplinary field including optics and electronic materials and devices doc24561 none Sequence motifs in genomes are one of the ways genes are regulated in a coordinate fashion. The simple occurrence and correlation of sequences with specific function is supportive of the hypothesis that a given distribution is involved in regulation. The ability to identify motifs both by sequence and location, as well as to indicate a likelihood score will enable the generation of a series of possible regulatory motifs in both Arabidopsis and E. elegans. Introns as well as upstream regions will be examined. Genes with similar sequences will be clustered and the analysis compared with microarray data to determine possible biological significance. A similar approach could be extended from DNA sequence to short amino acid motifs to help cluster the proteome of each organism doc24562 none Gram-negative bacteria within the Proteobacteria group commonly use acylated homoserine lactones (acyl-HSLs) as molecular signals in the process of quorum sensing (QS). Quorum-sensing bacteria release diffusible signal molecules that accumulate with increasing cell number, eventually triggering adaptive responses. Regulatory proteins of the LuxI and LuxR families are usually required for synthesis of, and response to acyl-HSLs, respectively. Diffuse populations of cells generally produce a constant, low level of acyl-HSLs, and these rapidly diffuse out of cells down their concentration gradient. Elevated population density increases the relative acyl-HSL concentration, eventually fostering interaction of the signals with LuxR-type proteins, which in turn, control the transcription of target genes. Although this basic mechanism is well conserved, the context of QS regulation and the cellular functions under its control are highly variable among different bacteria. This project focuses on the regulatory context of a LuxI-LuxR-type QS system employed by the nitrogen-fixing plant symbiont Rhizobium sp. NGR234, its mechanism of action, and its effect on cellular growth rate. NGR234 incites the formation of nitrogen-fixing, symbiotic nodules on the roots of a wide range of leguminous plants. The molecular basis of this promiscuous host interaction has been extensively studied. Many of the functions that orchestrate the plant interaction are carried on the 536 kb pNGR234a plasmid. The pNGR234a plasmid also carries a large cluster of genes homologous to plasmid replication (rep) and conjugal transfer (trb tra) genes from other bacteria. The rep trb tra cluster includes a LuxI-LuxR-type regulatory pair, TraI and TraR, and the additional QS regulator TraM. TraI synthesizes 3-oxo-octanoyl-L-homoserine lactone and TraR interacts with this acyl HSL to regulate tra trb and rep operon expression. TraM acts to inhibit TraR through formation of an anti-activation complex. A molecular genetic approach is being employed to study the QS mechanism in NGR234. The regulatory signals and pathways that control traR expression will be investigated to determine the conditions that foster QS. Based on analogous systems, the host plant is likely to play a role in this regulation. The QS-regulated pNGR234a genes under TraR control will be identified and the mechanism by which TraR controls their expression elucidated. Lastly, control of cellular growth rate by QS, a common QS regulatory target among several Rhizobium species, will be examined. Findings generated from the research project will provide fundamental information on cell-to-cell communication in an important plant symbiont, and the role of this communication in its highly plastic host interactions. More generally, these studies will add to the understanding of how cell-to-cell communication directly and indirectly influences interactions with host organisms, and enables quorum-sensing microbes to balance their physiological activity with the host environment. The bacterium Rhizobium sp. NGR234 uses cell-to-cell communication during its symbiotic relationships with higher plants. The research project examines the biochemical and genetic mechanisms underlying this intercellular communication, and its influence on the interaction of this bacterium and host plants. The findings generated from this work will provide fundamental knowledge required to take advantage of these bacterial communication systems, for combating infectious disease in plants and animals, as well as promoting beneficial microbial interactions doc24563 none This award provides partial funding for the Polymers Physics Gordon Research Conference representing of the research in the field. The invited speakers are world leaders, and the tradition of the conference is that it s well attended by young scientists with potential to be the future leaders of polymer physics. The organizers great will engage graduate students, and young postdoctoral researchers in the discussions of the conference. The conference will consist of nine sessions with a total of 22 oral presentations, and two poster sessions. Invited speakers have been selected on the basis of their relevant expertise while emphasizing a program with gender balance and participation of young investigators that show promise as future scientific leaders doc24564 none The Midwest Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics Meeting will be held in Pittsburgh, PA on May 13-14, . Although, most of the speakers are faculty, this meeting also emphasizes presentations and participation by graduate students and postdoctoral scholars working in all areas of thermodynamics, including experimental and classical thermodynamics, molecular simulation, and statistical mechanics. Funding is requested to reimburse graduate students for travel and registration costs associated with the meeting. Funds for other aspects of running this meeting have been arranged from other sources, primarily donations from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. NST-CTS has provided student travel funds for this meeting several times in the past, and this action has been important in making attendance at this meeting widely accessible to graduate students doc24565 none Soffa, Mary L. Univ of Pittsburgh Group Travel Grant For Faculty at Minority Institutions to Attend FSE-10 This proposal, supporting travel by faculty from institutions with a large minority or female enrollment, represents an effort to improve the representation of women and minorities in CS. Organized by the ACM SIGSOFT, the Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE-10), will be held in Charleston, South Carolina, November 20-22, . Its organizing committee for developed a plan to help increase the participation of faculty from institutions with a large minority and or female student enrollment. Faculty actively involved with the education of women and minorities will be invited to attend FSE-10 tutorials and conference. Institutions that include Historically Black Colleges, current and former women s colleges, and other colleges with large minority enrollments will be targeted. As part of the tutorial series, tutorials will be provided for the selected faculty that contribute in teaching and stimulating interests in software engineering. The effort is expected to transitively develop the student s interest doc24566 none With National Science Foundation support graduate student Carolina Mallol will conduct the analytic stage of her dissertation research, which comprises a geoarchaeological study of three different Lower Paleolithic sites. As the main focus of the research, the technique of soil micromorphology (the microscopic analysis of soils sediments) will be applied to examine the nature of hominid occupations in the Old World at, Dmanisi (Republic of Georgia) 1.7 million years ago, and Ubeidiya (Israel) 1.4 million years ago, and Atapuerca-TD10 (Spain) 0.3 million years ago. The goal of this work is to identify anthropogenic remains such as the residues of prehistoric fires, to characterize them at a high level of accuracy and to associate them with activities that might have been performed by hominids at these sites. The research is integrated with the ongoing archaeological projects at each of the above-mentioned sites and exemplifies a form of successful multidisciplinary effort given that existing analytic results by other team members from other subdisciplines such as zooarchaeology and lithic technology are being considered complementary to this work. Soil micromorphology has been successfully applied to several prehistoric sites, revealing details of activities and interpretations that escaped field observation and laboratory analysis. In a geo-archaeological study of this kind, the first stage entails how the prehistoric deposits accumulated and under what kind of environmental conditions, followed by their analysis from an archaeological perspective using data available from the recovered remains. The high degree of resolution that can be accomplished by this technique will facilitate testing the currently debated hypotheses in the context of early hominid behavior, such as the use of fire. Conclusions obtained about the precise nature of the occupational contexts from Ubeidiya, Dmanisi and Atapuerca will represent a solid background on which to base further interpretations of early hominid behavior. Particularly significant is the fact that these three major archaeological sites represent the earliest hominid occupations of Eurasia containing well-documented lithic, faunal, and paleoanthropological assemblages. The first migrations out of the African continent, the colonization of temperate regions of Eurasia, and settlement in habitats where humankind was unprecedented, are phenomenal events that encompass morphological and behavioral implications for the hominid populations in question. While paleoanthropology and archaeology can reveal features of these events to us, search for archaeological evidence beyond the visibility of the naked eye, through soil micromorphology can provide reliable information concerning the natural and anthropogenic contexts doc24567 none Alfred O Hero University of Michigan The goals of this workshop are broad: to bring together a multi-disciplinary group of researchers to shed light on the important challenges, the open problems, the promising approaches, and to get a general picture of the state of the art in areas related to pattern recognition. Each of the eminent researchers listed below will present a 20 minute talk. They come from diverse communities including: computer science, applied math, information theory, signal processing, and statistics. There will also be representatives from NSF-CISE, NSF-DMS, NSF-BioMed, and possibly other federal agencies (CIA, NSA, DoD), who will be attending doc24568 none The PI is organizing an interdisciplinary workshop to provide a forum for discussion of the latest advances in nanomaterials to be held in Romania during the week of Sept. 30, . The challenges and issues with the science and application of nanotechnology will be identified and discussed along with identification of emerging areas requiring research and analysis. The specific intersection between areas is to be covered, such as quantum mechanics and biology, nanoparticles in polymers, electronics and biology, and their interactions doc24569 none Gordon Conferences have a long history of informal science exchange. This meeting seeks to bring together experimentalists in genomics with various kinds of computational and theoretical individuals to pose new problems and communicate recent advances. The focus of the conference is exploring venues of integration of structural information on genes and proteins with population genetics and evolutionary biology. The need and character of computational tools that will be developed will be part of the overall discussion. Encouraging the information exchange between two separate groups is a key part of the plan doc24570 none The Electrodeposition Gordon Research Conference (GRC) is relatively new, started in . It grew out of the Read Conference, one of the primary scientific forums for the electrodeposition community since the early 50 s. The understanding of electrodeposition at the atomic scale has increased dramatically in recent years as new analytical methods, like scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), have been developed. This has resulted in improved control over processes, and the ability to use electrodeposition in areas where control over the nanometer scale is required. Electrodeposition is becoming accepted as a standard thin film synthesis methodology in new areas. A clear example is the adoption of electrodeposition by the electronics industries to form copper interconnects in VLSI. Production VLSI circuits use 135 nm wide copper wires, with research and development teams currently working on 90 nm and smaller copper interconnects. In addition, electrodeposition has a central role in nearly all micro-technologies. New areas where it is playing an increasing roll include nanofabrication and the formation of compound semiconductor thin films. The conference has a special highlight on the role of electrodeposition in nano- and micro-fabrication. This proposal will allow the organizers to continue developing the Electrodeposition GRC into the premier electrochemical materials conference doc24571 none ion (of infinite-state programs into finite-state ones) with model checking (of the finite-state system), that had produced formal and automatic verification of many complex systems. There is a growing conviction in the research community that hybrid methodologies are imperative for the process of formally verifying analyzing full-fledged reactive systems doc24572 none The objective of the project is to address several key theoretical issues relevant to the frequency-range from 5kHz to 5MHz radio waves observed on the ground in the auroral zone, known as auroral roars. With the previous support from NSF, the PI and his colleagues were able to provide basic explanations for two types of emissions - the continuum roars are generated within the density depletion near the F -region source, while the discrete roars are eigenmodes of density enhancements. A key ingredient common to both types of emissions are the generation of upper-hybrid, or Z -mode waves, and their conversion to electromagnetic waves. The previous research project was largely concerned with the characterization and understanding of the generation process of upper-hybrid Z -mode waves. The focus of the proposed research will be on the conversion and or coupling of Z -mode waves to electromagnetic waves. Such a study is essential to put the theories of continuum and discrete roar emissions on a fully viable footing doc24573 none Recent advances in telecommunications, materials nanotechnology and biology have potential implications in the area of control. The purpose of this workshop is to define the generic methodological research needs pursuant to these advances as: (1) they will involve a more detailed description of nature, down to the cellular and molecular level, and (2) the next set of engineering systems will be of a larger size and their complexity will be far greater than in the past. This grant is for support of a multidisciplinary workshop that will address the research needs in the areas of Modeling, Dynamics, Control and Monitoring of Complex Engineering Systems. It will take place in Anchorage Alaska on May 11 and 12 following the American Control Conference. By scheduling it to follow immediately after the ACC, the cost will be substantially lower since most of the participants will already be on site and the meeting rooms on Saturday will be free. The organization of the workshop aims to avoid the segregation of issues and challenges along the traditional Engineering disciplines. A systematic effort will be undertaken to consider issues that are common to all engineering fields and breakout sessions will have participants that cover all engineering disciplines doc2938 none Citrin This research grant focuses on the optical properties of semiconductor heterostructures, including quantum wells (QW s), quantum wires (QWR s), quantum dots (QD s) and microcavities (MC s), in the presence of terahertz (THz) electromagnetic fields. This research area, in addition to being of fundamental interest, has received a two-fold impetus from high-speed electronics and from high-bandwidth optical communications. Of particular interest to this research is the regime of low carrier density in which few electrons or holes are excited by the optical beam; the coherence properties of the carriers play an essential role. Previous reseach considered the dynamics of electron-hole (e-h) pairs excited by ultrafast optical pulses in the presence of THz fields. Because the bandwidth of a sub-ps optical pulse can be in excess of 10 meV, e-h pairs with varying degrees of excess energy (or excitons in different states of their internal motion) are excited by the optical pulse forming a wavepacket. Such studies provide an analogy to several atomic physics phenomena, including the dynamics of Rydberg wavepackets, above-threshold ionization, and high-field harmonic generation. The focus of the proposed work is to explore this analogy further, but more so to push into the domain where intrinsic solid state effects, such as many-body effects and carrier-phonon scattering, begin to make their presence felt by leading to dephasing of the optically excited e-h pairs. Thus, the first optical nonlinearities that kick in as the optical intensity is increased beyond the linear optical regime will be studied. Specifically, how do carrier-carrier and carrier-phonon scattering lead to dephasing of the optically excited electronic excitations, and how does this dephasing modify the spatial motion of e-h wavepackets excited by short optical pulses and driven by THz fields? What is the nature of phonons emitted by such wavepackets; can coherent wavepackets of phonons be launched by THz-driven e-h wavepackets? Can scattering rates themselves be modified by the dynamics of the THz-driven e-h wavepackets? In addition to being an untapped area of fundamental importance in the spectroscopy of semiconductors, light propagation through THz-modulated quantum wells povides an optical analog for a class of time-domain single-particle quantum tranport phenomena that are otherwise infeasible to study. In particular, tracking the temporal evolution of coherent wavepackets during the tunneling process is of fundamental interest and yet difficult, if not in practice impossible, to access in quantum transport experiments. Fortuitously, there is a close analogy between the scalar classical electromagnetic wave equation and the single-particle Schroedinger equation. This means that in a certain regime one can model by correspondence the quantum mechanical dynamics of a particle by an appropriate light-propagation experiment. This correspondence extends to the phase, i.e., quantum mechanical phase maps to optical phase. Clearly, interferometric experiments are routine in optics but require a tour de force effort in quantum transport. A particularly interesting class of phenomena involves quantum tunneling through a time-modulated potential. The connections between the same type of processes that are associated with the formation of THz sidebands on optical spectra of THz illuminated semiconductors with quantum transport phenomena. The theoretical research will focus on regimes where neither the QW atom or optical transport analogies entirely hold, such as the nonlinear optical regime - where THz-modulated semiconductor heterostructures present new possibilities. Specifically, the propagation of cw and ultrafast optical pulses through heterostructures subjected to pulsed or narrow-band THz fields will be studied. %%% This research grant focuses on the optical properties of semiconductor heterostructures, including quantum wells (QW s), quantum wires (QWR s), quantum dots (QD s) and microcavities (MC s), in the presence of terahertz (THz) electromagnetic fields. This research area, in addition to being of fundamental interest, has received a two-fold impetus from high-speed electronics and from high-bandwidth optical communications. Of particular interest to this research is the regime of low carrier density in which few electrons or holes are excited by the optical beam; the coherence properties of the carriers play an essential role doc24575 none Mark S. Spector, Naval Research Laboratory Minority Research Opportunities in Science and Engineering at the Naval Research Laboratory Due to cultural and historic barriers, minorities continue to be under-represented in science, mathematics, and engineering. Despite some growth in the number of minorities receiving undergraduate degrees in science and engineering, there has been little increase in the number of minorities at the doctoral level. It is essential for the scientific community to provide training opportunities and role models for promising young students in order to encourage them to pursue advanced degrees in science, mathematics, and engineering and careers in research. The Center for Bio Molecular Science and Engineering (CBMSE) at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has developed a summer internship program for minority students that give the interns the opportunity to experience professional laboratory research first hand. Participation is essentially focused on undergraduates at the nation s Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Minority Institutions, and Tribal Colleges and Universities (HBCU MI TCU s). While there are several programs that provide support for students pursuing careers in health care, this program focuses uniquely on training future scientists and engineers. Based upon previous success, it is proposed to renew the program. It is proposes to increase the number of summer internships to approximately fifteen per year by placing interns in the NRL s Center for Bio Molecular Science and Engineering, Physical Metallurgy Branch, and Surface Modification Branch and increasing our recruiting effort to pursue students at additional HBCU MI TCU s. It is also proposed to support up to five students per year to continue their research at their home institute during the following school year as part of a collaborative effort between NRL scientists and faculty members at HCBU MI TCU s. The broader impact of this activity is highlighted by the accomplishments already made. During the first ten years of the program, ninety-three outstanding students have spent ten weeks working at the Naval Research Laboratory on exciting projects at the leading edge of science and technology. This has included 48 women and 45 men from a variety of scientific disciplines: Biology, Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Of the students who have completed their undergraduate degrees, many have gone on to receive master s degrees and approximately twenty are currently in doctoral programs doc24576 none This proposal, building an experimental testbed for research on high performance networked storage systems and the resulting issues in network resources management, builds system level software support for secure networked storage systems possible through iSCSI type of storage devices that directly attach to IP networks. Test applications comprise multimedia (i.e., videoserver application) and VLSI CAD (distributed fault simulation). An experimental networked implementing partial state architectures will be developed. The network element will utilize partial state to provide a better handle on networked and end-host traffic by regulating high bandwidth flows through individual state while aggregating the rest of the flows (similar to how caches are employed in current memory systems). Using realistic VLSI CAD and multimedia applications, the work will evaluate an integrated system consisting of storage and network elements. The project will employ video delivery as an application to evaluate the impact of attaching devices to the network, the storage services (i.e., third party transfers and data filtering), network centric issues (e.g., QoS, congestion management, and transport protocols), and new architectures and mechanisms in protecting storage systems against Denial of Service (DOS) attacks. Moreover, the equipment will be used for developing the target applications and for staffing DOS attacks against the new experimental systems. Specifically the proposed research encompasses: Providing third party transfers and Network security: QoS regulation for mitigating DOS attacks and security enhancement through partial state network architectures The infrastructure is expected to offer students valuable training in systems-building, I O and networked software, parallel and distributed programming, performance evaluation of real systems and interdisciplinary research doc24577 none A Penrose Conference entitled Three-dimensional flow, fabric development and strain in deformed rocks and the significance for mountain building processes: new approaches. will be held at Monte Verita, Ascona (Switzerland) on August 18 - 24, . Conveners are John Ramsay (Cratoule, France), Peter Hudleston (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, @), Hermann Lebit and Catalina Luneburg (PI s on this request, State University of West Georgia, GA). The conveners are using the Alps as a template in which to focus the conference on the spatial and temporal complexities of defon-nation and defon-nation processes in three-dimensions. Topics include heterogeneous strain patterns in multiply defon-ned rocks, shear zone kinematics and dynamics in 2D and 3D, scale dependency of structural analysis, micro-mechanics and dynamic boundary conditions of defon-nation systems. A combination of keynote talks and research presentations will fon-n the framework for six separate sessions representing different approaches and techniques employed. The sessions will cover a broad range of subjects and methodology from a large-scale view of lithospheric processes down to the micro-mechanics at the grain scale of deformation. Of the six conference days, three will be reserved for field excursions, while the rest will be devoted to lectures and poster presentations. The PI s also plan an optional pre-conference field trip that will transect the Western Alps. In this proposal the PI s request funding to support the participation in the conference of graduate students, young career scientists and senior scientists. In particular, they want to give scientists from economically weak countries the possibility to attend, and a large part of the budget is therefore dedicated to the assistance of such individuals. The major goal of a Penrose conference is to foster scientific exchange and discussion on frontier research topics. A good mixture of young scientists and more established ones will be fundamental to facilitating integration of new and emerging ideas with present knowledge and will help ensure stimulating discussion at the conference. Such discussion is a vital part of scientific progress and a key element of a Penrose Conference. The budget will support 15 graduate students, 6 young career scientists and 4 senior scientists, of whom about one third will come from economically disadvantaged countries doc24578 none This project seeks to better understand and quantify the physical processes involved in the newly proposed concept of wet drainage flow in major river valleys under sustained rainfall. The suggested mechanism behind this phenomenon is air subsiding as a result of cooling from melting and evaporation of precipitation particles. The subsiding air concentrates in river valleys, which act as air drainage. The resulting down-valley flow can develop underneath an opposite-directed flow of moist air that is lifted onto the topographic barrier in which precipitation is formed. The analyses to be carried out during this project are focused on (a) in-depth evaluation of ground-based and airborne Doppler radar and thermodynamic data collected in major river valleys on the south side of the European Alps during the Mesoscale Alpine Program (MAP), and (b) numerical simulation of the wet drainage flow phenomenon and numerical experimentation to delineate the conditions under which this occurs and evaluate a potential feedback to orographic precipitation formation mechanisms. This research is focused on the effect of moist processes on the flow of air within valleys, complementing substantial work performed on airflow in valleys under dry (clear sky) conditions. The proposed analyses will help to better define the new concept of wet drainage flow and assess the relevance of this flow phenomenon to dynamic and microphysical processes ranging from the local (valley) scale to the topographic barrier and larger scales. The research is tightly knitted to MAP, which is focused on exploring the mesoscale effects of complex topography on precipitation formation and flooding. MAP is conceived as an integrated program of basic research with direct applications in the realm of numerical mesoscale weather prediction. Orographic precipitation mechanisms in the Alpine region, as well as many other major mountain ranges around the world, are an important element of flooding, landslide and debris flow hazards doc24579 none This award is for partial support for the Southeastern-Atlantic Regional Conference on Differential Equations, which will be held October 11-12, , at the University of Tennessee. The conference has met annually since , and provides an opportunity for young investigators to discuss recent developments in the field with more senior researchers. Topics to be discussed include ordinary and partial differential equations, integral and functional equations, numerical methods, control and inverse problems, and applications to science and engineering. Funds will be used primarily for the support of advanced graduate students and recent PhDs doc24580 none The goal of this research is to characterize the microbial communities of several common tick species using DNA sequence-based techniques, analyze patterns of co-occurrence among microbial taxa, and mathematically model the consequences of those patterns on epidemiological dynamics of tick-borne pathogens. In particular, tick-borne microbial communities will be analyzed for evidence of competitive exclusion or mutual facilitation among species. Ecological interactions among species are one of the most important factors shaping community structure. Much research has demonstrated that ticks may simultaneously harbor multiple bacterial species, including symbionts transmitted through eggs and pathogens transmitted through bites. Habitat alteration, expanding ranges of tick vectors, and increased populations of shared animal hosts make the movement of pathogenic microorganisms among tick species more likely. On a worldwide basis, ticks serve as vectors for more human pathogens than any other arthropod. In the United States, the large majority of cases of vector-borne disease arise from tick bites (e.g. Lyme Disease), and new tick-borne pathogens are regularly being discovered. This research will contribute to our basic understanding of microbial communities of arthropods and the epidemiology of pathogen transmission. Further, this research will have a practical impact on management of tick-borne diseases and our understanding of the relationship between invasion of tick vectors and the emergence of novel, or more highly virulent, human pathogens doc24581 none A systematic and global re-occupation of select hydrographic sections will be conducted with the objective of quantifying changes in storage and transport of heat, fresh water, carbon dioxide (CO2) and related parameters. The program is in support of the CLImate VARiability and predictability (CLIVAR) and Carbon Science Programs, and is a component of a global observing system for the physical climate and carbon system. By integrating the scientific needs of the carbon and hydrography tracer communities, major synergies and cost savings will be achieved. In addition to efficiency, a coordinated approach will produce scientific advances that exceed those of having individual programs. These advances will contribute to the following overlapping scientific objectives: Data for Model Calibration, Validation and Model Based Synthesis; Carbon System Studies; Heat and Freshwater Storage and Flux Studies; Deep and Shallow Water Mass and Ventilation Studies; and Calibration of Autonomous Sensors. A joint study of the ocean carbon cycle and circulation will help identify critical areas where potential changes in ocean circulation could have serious consequences for future anthropogenic uptake. Global warming-induced changes in the ocean s transport of heat and freshwater, which could affect the circulation, can be followed through long-term measurements. The sections proposed consist of approximately two meridional and two zonal lines in each ocean, for a total of 10 sections over 6 field years. The core measurements include hydrography (CTD, salinity, oxygen, nutrients, L ADCP, Underway T, S, pCO2, bathymetry, navigation), carbon system (DIC, pCO2. TAlk, pH, DOC, DON), and transient tracers (CFCs, tritium 3He). In addition to the collection of the data, quality control measures will be routinely carried out by providers of reference-quality data. Post-cruise data updates, distribution, and archive will be managed by groups with separate funding. The field work will be integrated with a larger international effort to monitor the ocean s response to climate change. Broader Impacts: The results will be disseminated broadly to enhance scientific and technological understanding. The program is based on the fundamental concept that data collected belong to the community, and are available to the community at large rather than being proprietary for the investigators involved in the project. The data policy proposed will be stringent and geared towards rapid and open dissemination, and with a clear structure for all data to undergo thorough quality control. Such an ambitious goal requiring this degree of openness has not been tried on a large scale before. The program benefits to society include the collection of a high quality data set, and use of the data to assess climate change. The global program will provide full water column data of climatically significant parameters with decadal coverage. These data will be used to assess climate change by quantifying the uptake and storage of anthropogenic CO2 by the ocean, and contributing to an understanding and models of the processes that control the uptake and transport of CO2 into the ocean s interior. Since these are likely to be the only systematic observations below m, they will be used to document long term trends in ocean warming, and heat and freshwater fluxes. The data will be a resource for model calibration of the climate system. The proposed program will promote training and learning. It will serve as a community resource for training and entraining graduate students, postdoctoral scientists, and new scientists. Funds are budgeted in the lead proposal for graduate students, post-docs, and young, non-seagoing scientists to participate in each cruise doc24582 none Eric I. Altman, Yale University Spin-electronic Dynamics in Three Terminal Coupled Quantum Structures This project focuses on exploring enabling technologies to allow the spin degree of freedom to be used as the controlling mechanism for quantum communication and computing. The principal investigators will fabricate and study coupled quantum-dot (QD) systems consisting of closely spaced III-V semiconductor, gallium arsenide (GaAs) quantum dots controlled by separated electrodes. The systems will be designed to transmit spin charges into QDs and to couple them in the neighboring dots by exchange interaction. Such a system is the first step toward building quantum logic gates, because the spin of one dot affects the electronic charge transport in the other dots by the exchange coulomb blockage effect. The spin states and the degree of coupling between the quantum dots can also be controlled by applied magnetic and or electric fields. Magnetic contacts will serve as spin sources to provide carriers with particular spin orientation. The tunneling of these carriers through a particular dot will depend on the available spin state in the dot. This provides a convenient and practical way of determining the spin orientation of a particular dot and thus the variation of the spin in this dot after a certain time interval. Studying the spin dynamics in the context of manipulating and controlling individual spin states in each dot, and collectively in coupled quantum dots provides basic technology for fabricating quantum transistors and logic gates for quantum computing and communication devices. Successful fabrication of coupled dot systems requires employing state of the art synthetic methods at SUNY Binghamton. The fabrication of electrode structures at nanometer scales will use lithography on metallic thin films. The preparation of semiconductor quantum dots, such as GaAs, in the nanometer scales will utilize various synthetic, processing and assembling strategies. Methods will also be developed to produce GaAs:Mn nanoparticles; the manganese (Mn) doping can enhance spin state operating temperature in quantum dots. These semiconductor nanoparticles will be characterized using spectroscopic and microscopic techniques at both Yale and Binghamton. The spin charge exchange interaction between neighboring QDs will be studied by producing highly monodispersed III-V semiconductor nanoparticles self-assembled in a narrow gap about hundreds of nanometers wide between two metallic electrodes made by lithography. The study of detailed tunneling characteristics as a function of temperature and bias will be carried out in a magnetic cryostat at Binghamton. At Yale, scanning tunneling microscopy will be used to characterize the size, morphology, and electronic properties of the nanoparticles and their positioning between the electrodes. Magneto-infrared spectroscopy will be carried out on self-assembled semiconductor nano-particle arrays to examine spin exchange coupling between QDs. Broader Impact: This research will strongly impact future technologies in new functional devices based on spin degree of freedom, particularly providing assistance to the development of three-terminal spin field-effect-transistors using the developed techniques. These activities will allow the graduate students involved to learn and prepare themselves to become future technologists for developing next generation communication and computing devices. The integration of the nanostructure and novel computing technology into the curricula will provide interdisciplinary experiences for better career training for the students involved doc24583 none Greenberg Description: This award supports US-India cooperative research in quantum statistics. US physicist Oscar W. Greenberg, University of Maryland College Park and Indian collaborator Ashok K. Mishra, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Tharamani will explore the fundamental issues of mathematical physics that lie at the heart of quantum mechanics. In recent years, physicists have begun to study and apply new forms of statistics that are beyond the conventional fermi and bose statistics. The collaborators will study the new statistics with particular regard to their applicability to some basic postulates in physics that, due to technological advances, can now be tested to high precision through experiment. Scope: This collaboration is likely to bring about interesting advances in mathematical physics. It will also initiate a new partnership between the University of Maryland and the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, a premier center for research in theoretical physics. India has a tradition of excellence in this field that includes S.N. Bose s contributions to particle statistics (Bose-Einstein statistics). At best, this collaboration will enable each scientist to bring a distinct cultural perspective to their research on the statistics of elementary particles. This project is supported by the Indian Department of Science & Technology (DST)under the NSF DST joint program doc24584 none This proposal offers an approach for rapid and accurate non-destructive evaluation (NDE) to assess the in-place condition of concrete structures. Sensitive and practical NDE techniques are of great value to agencies that govern the infrastructure. However, the time and effort required to perform current NDE tests and to analyze the results limit widespread application. This proposal aims to develop a rapid and robust method to collect elastic wave data from a concrete structure and an approach for imaging structures that characterizes the location, type and magnitude of damaged areas. The proposed approach makes use of several innovations including (a) use of surface-guided waves, (b) sensitive, non-contact wave reception techniques such as air-coupled transducers and laser interferometry, (c) one-sided, point source, point receiver NDE measurements such as surface wave transmission and velocity scans, and (d) an imaging approach that makes use of the developed measurement data. An educational plan is closely integrated with the proposed research. The intent of the educational plan is to design an undergraduate and graduate engineering curriculum at Drexel University that responds to current needs of the infrastructure industry. The plan also includes additional educational outreach to encourage inner-city students to pursue a career in engineering doc9781 none The objective of this research project is to develop a post-processing technique to planarize curved freestanding thin film microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) devices by means of controlled exposure to a neutral ion beam. The method works by (1) affecting a thin highly stressed layer in the first few seconds of ion beam exposure through atomic rearrangement near the surface of the film; and, (2) removing initially stressed material in the film after several additional minutes of ion beam exposure. These effects can be combined in a controlled way to offset the initial relaxation curvature in the micro-mirror. MEMS micro-mirrors are important components in several next-generation optical communications devices. Freestanding MEMS micro-mirrors are often fabricated in a layer-by-layer process before being released from a host substrate; through-thickness dimensions may be as small as one micron or less. Once these thin structures are released, residual stresses due to processing are relaxed by transverse curvatures large enough to render the devices optically useless. The program includes both theoretical and experimental work. Using analytical and numerical models, the effects of various processing parameters will be studied; experiments will be carried out to test these parameters, and the quality of the resulting planarized mirrors will be characterized doc24586 none The abundance of water vapor in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere is an important determinant of the chemical and climatic state of the earth s atmosphere. The ability to predict water vapor at these high altitudes remains one of the most important challenges in general circulation models. The PI will investigate this using the National Center for Atmosphere Research (NCAR) Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model (WACCM). He will introduce two stable isotopes of water, HDO and H218O, and the associated physics, into the model. In addition, medium-lived tracers, such as ozone and carbon monoxide, that do not condense will be analyzed. The research will be focused in the tropical tropopause layer , a transition region between the troposphere and the stratosphere. Model integrations for several years will be compared with measurements using traces such as ozone, carbon monoxide, and the isotopes of water. The results should provide new understanding of the pathways by which air reaches the stratosphere and of the mechanisms that control the stratospheric water vapor concentration. The research work will be done in collaborating with the WACCM team at NCAR. The isotopic modules developed will be made available to the general community and, possibly, be included in the standard version of the WACCM. The research will also provide good opportunities for graduate studies doc24587 none This project concerns problems in representation theory. Recent progress in the theory of Types suggests that the Harmonic analysis on p-adic groups can be completely understood via harmonic analysis on the associated Hecke algebras. Moreover these Hecke algebras are expected to be generalized affine Hecke algebras and so should be easier to analyze. Dr. Kim will try to establish the fact that many of the classical groups defined over p-adic fields give rise to algebras that are generalized affine Hecke algebras. Further she intends to study the relation between buildings of the classical groups and buildings of the general linear group. Finally she intends to consider how base changes relate to the representations of Hecke algebras. Representation theory is a major mathematical technique for exploiting the presence of symmetry. For example, the structure of the hydrogen atom, one of the fundamental computations in quantum mechanics, is controlled by representation theory. Another way of thinking about representation theory is as a generalization of the theory of eigenvalues and matrices that many people see in a college course on basic linear algebra. This project addresses two important questions in representation theory. One potentially has important applications to number theory. The other concerns a generalization of the theory of angular momentum in quantum mechanics. It will help describe how pair of interacting quantum mechanical systems of a rather general type breaks up into simpler systems doc24588 none Cognitive Neuroscience of Category Learning With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Gluck and Poldrack and colleagues will conduct a three-year investigation to test two hypotheses about the roles of the basal ganglia and medial temporal lobe, and their interaction, in human category learning. They will test these hypotheses using a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and studies of patients with damage to either the basal ganglia (due to Parkinson s disease) or to the medial temporal lobe (due to anoxia or other causes). The first hypothesis to be tested is that the basal ganglia are particularly important for learning based on trial-by-trial feedback, whereas the medial temporal lobe is more important for observational learning in the absence of feedback. The second hypothesis is that the engagement of these two regions during category learning is modulated by the structure of the category that is being learned. For example, some categories are largely determined by single features; for example, most animals with a beak are classified as birds. Other kinds of categories require integration of information across multiple features. We will test the hypothesis that the medial temporal lobe is crucial for learning categories based on combinations of features, whereas the basal ganglia are important for learning categories based on single features. The topic studied in this project is categorization, oneof the most important acts of human cognition. Categorization is the recognition that various individual objects can be classified into larger groups that resemble each other in some way. Research in cognitive psychology has provided a set of sophisticated models for how humans learn new categories. However, little is currently known about how these operations are achieved in the brain. Most of our current knowledge comes from studies of patients with brain disorders. In particular, patients with Parkinson s and Huntington s diseases have trouble learning some kinds of new categories, though they are able to learn other kinds of categories. These diseases affect a set of deep brain structures known as the basal ganglia, and their impairment on some category learning tasks suggests that the basal ganglia may be critical for category learning. However, the exact role of the basal ganglia is unknown. Whereas patients with Parkinson s and Huntington s diseases are severely impaired at learning some new categories, patients with amnesia following damage to the medial temporal lobe (including the hippocampus) are only subtly impaired at category learning. Initial neuroimaging studies have shown that this region is deactivated when normal individuals are learning new categories, suggesting that it is not involved. Furthermore, imaging studies have shown that that activity in the medial temporal lobe and basal ganglia during category learning is negatively related: Individuals with more activity in one region tend to have less activity in the other. These findings suggest that these two regions may interact during learning, but the nature of this interaction is unclear at present. These studies have important implications, both for the basic understanding of category learning and for the understanding of the brain systems involved in such common disorders as Parkinson s and Alzheimer s diseases. Most importantly, the results of these studies will provide stronger constraints on theories of human category learning that are currently possible using behavioral measures alone doc24589 none This proposal was received in response to the Spin Electronics for the 21st century Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 02-036. The proposal focuses on x-ray studies of spin-electronic materials using synchrotron radiation. Systematic investigation of short-range-order structure, chemical valency, and local magnetic moment around constituent atoms in magnetic semiconductors will be carried out using state-of-the-art synchrotron radiation techniques including extended x-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS), near-edge x-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS) and x-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD). In addition, interface morphology, compositional intermixing and diffusion depth profile of magnetic ions in various heterostructures used in spin-injection devices will also be investigated by grazing incidence x-ray scattering (GIXS) and angular dependence of x-ray fluorescence (ADXRF) techniques. The nanostructure information obtained from these x-ray experiments is important for understanding the mechanisms responsible for the special electronic and magnetic properties of innovative spin-electronic materials for device applications. The materials to be studied include digital alloys and random alloys of III-V magnetic semiconductors, some have already been found with a Curie temperature above the room temperature. Other magnetic compound semiconductors such as II-VI, II-IV-V2, and II-VI2 systems with room-temperature ferromagnetism will also be investigated. These experimental approaches are based on this research team s extensive experience in the past decade of using x-ray scattering, fluorescence, and absorption techniques for nondestructive characterization of III-V magnetic alloy semiconductors and heterostructures. This group makes use of both soft and hard x-rays with both linear and circular polarization for materials research. Not many other x-ray research teams are doing experiments in both wavelength regimes with both types of polarization. The nanostructure information obtained in these experiments will be used as a feedback to crystal epilayer growers for nondestructive evaluation of the materials, and from which to select more appropriate conditions for improving the material characteristics to meet device requirements. For the upcoming fiscal years - , this research program will emphasize on the following areas: (i) local structures around magnetic ions in magnetic alloy semiconductors and magnetic digital alloys, and (ii) interface morphology, compositional intermixing and diffusion depth profile of magnetic ions in heterostructures of magnetic semiconductors and metals alloys as well as their relation with spin-injection efficiency. The proposed research is expected to make significant contributions to both fundamental understanding of layered magnetic semiconductors and applications of the new magnetic materials in the exciting field of spin-electronics doc24590 none Basic Ordering Agreement for the Management and Operation Of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory Giaconni The Basic Ordering agreement will enable the Associated Universities Incorporated to receive funds from the National Science Foundation for the beneficial operation and management of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO doc24581 none A systematic and global re-occupation of select hydrographic sections will be conducted with the objective of quantifying changes in storage and transport of heat, fresh water, carbon dioxide (CO2) and related parameters. The program is in support of the CLImate VARiability and predictability (CLIVAR) and Carbon Science Programs, and is a component of a global observing system for the physical climate and carbon system. By integrating the scientific needs of the carbon and hydrography tracer communities, major synergies and cost savings will be achieved. In addition to efficiency, a coordinated approach will produce scientific advances that exceed those of having individual programs. These advances will contribute to the following overlapping scientific objectives: Data for Model Calibration, Validation and Model Based Synthesis; Carbon System Studies; Heat and Freshwater Storage and Flux Studies; Deep and Shallow Water Mass and Ventilation Studies; and Calibration of Autonomous Sensors. A joint study of the ocean carbon cycle and circulation will help identify critical areas where potential changes in ocean circulation could have serious consequences for future anthropogenic uptake. Global warming-induced changes in the ocean s transport of heat and freshwater, which could affect the circulation, can be followed through long-term measurements. The sections proposed consist of approximately two meridional and two zonal lines in each ocean, for a total of 10 sections over 6 field years. The core measurements include hydrography (CTD, salinity, oxygen, nutrients, L ADCP, Underway T, S, pCO2, bathymetry, navigation), carbon system (DIC, pCO2. TAlk, pH, DOC, DON), and transient tracers (CFCs, tritium 3He). In addition to the collection of the data, quality control measures will be routinely carried out by providers of reference-quality data. Post-cruise data updates, distribution, and archive will be managed by groups with separate funding. The field work will be integrated with a larger international effort to monitor the ocean s response to climate change. Broader Impacts: The results will be disseminated broadly to enhance scientific and technological understanding. The program is based on the fundamental concept that data collected belong to the community, and are available to the community at large rather than being proprietary for the investigators involved in the project. The data policy proposed will be stringent and geared towards rapid and open dissemination, and with a clear structure for all data to undergo thorough quality control. Such an ambitious goal requiring this degree of openness has not been tried on a large scale before. The program benefits to society include the collection of a high quality data set, and use of the data to assess climate change. The global program will provide full water column data of climatically significant parameters with decadal coverage. These data will be used to assess climate change by quantifying the uptake and storage of anthropogenic CO2 by the ocean, and contributing to an understanding and models of the processes that control the uptake and transport of CO2 into the ocean s interior. Since these are likely to be the only systematic observations below m, they will be used to document long term trends in ocean warming, and heat and freshwater fluxes. The data will be a resource for model calibration of the climate system. The proposed program will promote training and learning. It will serve as a community resource for training and entraining graduate students, postdoctoral scientists, and new scientists. Funds are budgeted in the lead proposal for graduate students, post-docs, and young, non-seagoing scientists to participate in each cruise doc24592 none The objective of this Biocomplexity in the Environment (BE) for: Materials Use: Science, Engineering, & Society (MUSES) project is to establish a research framework for developing an assessment tool for product development that integrates engineering, economic, regulatory and environmental concerns. While the analytical elements exist for individual consideration of these concerns, environmental tools have seen little practical use in product development. This limited application derives from the absence of methods putting the environmental analyses into the appropriate engineering, economic and regulatory contexts so that consistent strategies can be devised. This project focuses on the automobive industry and the product & process development issues arising from the environmental challenges confronting these companies. The intention is to use this area as a testbed for developing general methods of tying environmental assessment with engineering, economic and regulatory analyses, forming an integrated product assessment tool. This effort also emphasizes two long-range educational objectives. One objective focuses on development of interdisciplinary, case-based courses to demonstrate the use of the design tools developed through the proposed research. The second educational objective is the development of the collaborative capabilities of faculty from disparate fields, including issues of faculty development in these areas. A key feature of the work is the formation of an interdisciplinary team that includes experts in the broad range of fields necessary to treat the multidisciplinary problem of refining the product development process in a large industrial firm. This planning project is expected to lead to fundamental research on design of alternative processes, systems, and product development structures that optimize the use of materials throughout their life cycles doc24593 none For this MUSES planning activity, the University of Washington, in collaboration with Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, will undertake a set of workshops to generate a coordinated, binational plan for research and education in the area of the interaction of materials processing and use with the environment in our regions. The project will build teams on both sides, which on the faculty level, incorporate expertise in materials science, design for the environment, computational approaches to environmental modeling, and economics and social science. Significant roles for undergraduate and graduate students in the research and educational planning process are incorporated in the program design. The program will support two planning workshops, one in Seattle and one in Chengdu, in which the binational teams will come together to more fully develop the research and educational agenda. There are three main foci for the collaboration 1) Design of comprehensive regional industrial ecology models for the effect of the materials processing industry on the environment. The regions of focus for this study are the Puget Sound Region and the Sichuan basin 2) Creation of a collaborative plan for research on materials for fuel cells, with a particular focus on the transportation sector, and; 3) Collaboration on the more effective incorporation of environmental issues in materials science curriculum. As a concrete result of the workshops, detailed plans for ongoing partnerships will be generated which can be incorporated in proposals for more comprehensive funding to national research organizations in both countries, to private foundations, and to the industrial sector doc24594 none This Biocomplexity in the Environment (BE) for: Materials Use: Science, Engineering, and Society (MUSES) project will establish an interdisciplinary framework for discovering practical generalizable concepts in the interface of biocomplexity and industrial ecology by focusing on a case study of the materials cycle of toxic metals such as lead (Pb) used in the electronics industry. The planned activities include preliminary research on alternative metal alloys used in the manufacture of solders, and educational workshops in industrial ecology and biocomplexity to explore the theoretical foundations of synergistic convergence between these concepts. The educational program will facilitate the integration of methods and expertise from faculty and students in materials science, engineering, economics, environmental science, and public health. Lead is widely recognized as one of the most pervasive toxic metals used in manufacturing products that are widely disseminated in the public domain. The use of Pb-solders in the microelectronics industry is undergoing intense scrutiny. There is currently no uniform policy at the state, national or international levels for regulating Pb for this purpose, and there are no specific programs for tracking the fate of Pb after the sale of products. The situation is changing rapidly as international initiatives in the European Union and Japan have emerged to limit public exposure to Pb-containing products. These initiatives threaten current manufacturing practices in the United States, and they may change the balance of international markets for electronics products. The proposed research will develop a framework for decision-making under conditions where multiple datasets in different disciplines intersect to predict toxic metal flows in the electronics industry and the consequent societal impacts doc24595 none The long-term goal of this proposal is to identify and determine the role of all the genes involved in a plants response to salt and water stress. Over the last decade, it has become clear that responses to water deficit and ion imbalance are governed by complex molecular and biochemical signal transduction processes, which coordinately act to determine tolerance or sensitivity at the whole-plant levet. Within the last five years, however, advances in genomics, informatics, and functional genomics have made it technically feasible to gain a global understanding of the gene complement or set that becomes integrated to effect abiotic stress tolerance. To tackle the genetic basis of this tolerance in higher plants in the most efficient, comprehensive, and integrative way possible Drs. R. Bressan, P. Hasegawa ( Purdue University), R. Burnap, J. Cushman, R. Prade (Oklahoma State University) and H. Bohnert, D. Gaibraith, J-K. Zhu (University of Arizona) have formed a consortium. Each participant has a documented and extensive experience in this research area with a proven record of productivity and in many instances past or present collaborations. This team will employ three distinct, yet complementary approaches to isolate, characterize, and assess the function of the core set of stress-related genes that provide the basis for the water and salt stress tolerance phenotype in plants. The first approach will encompass the functional identification of genes important to stress tolerance by random and targeted mutagenesis strategies in well-studied model organisms (Synechocystis PCC , Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Aspergillus nidulans, and Arabidopsis thaliana). For Arabidopsis, they will identify, map and clone genetic Ioci from a large set of mutants defective in stress tolerance or signaling. The resulting sets of mutants will be used for complementation studies using genes from higher plant sources. The second approach aims to define the core set of stress-related transcripts from both sensitive plants (Arabidopsis thaliana and rice) and resistant plants (Dunaliella salina and ice plant) using EST sequendng and microarray analysis. This approach will focus on the comparative study of gene expression patterns in salt and drought sensitive and resistant organisms, since recent studies of resistant organisms have revealed the existence of mechanisms of stress tolerance not present or not appropriately expressed in sensitive organisms. The third approach will extend the functional analysis of stress-related transcripts by monitoring in situ Iocalizations by using promoter trapping approaches and gain-of-function studies. These approaches represent logical extensions of ongoing work in individual groups within this center. They will foster interaction and integration of Consortium activities through daily interactions, workshops meetings and extended work periods in member laboratories for their students and postdoctoral fellows to ensure a new generation of researchers trained in multi-faceted and interdisciplinary problem solving. The impact of abiotic stress on crop productivity is remarkable according to USDA statistics and amounts to two-thirds of all yield reductions in agriculture. This proposal is exceptionally timely, combines unique expertise, is hypothesis-driven and culminates in a dearly defined goal - understanding the number, nature and networking of genes and physiological mechanisms that constitute plant abiotic stress tolerance doc24588 none Cognitive Neuroscience of Category Learning With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Gluck and Poldrack and colleagues will conduct a three-year investigation to test two hypotheses about the roles of the basal ganglia and medial temporal lobe, and their interaction, in human category learning. They will test these hypotheses using a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and studies of patients with damage to either the basal ganglia (due to Parkinson s disease) or to the medial temporal lobe (due to anoxia or other causes). The first hypothesis to be tested is that the basal ganglia are particularly important for learning based on trial-by-trial feedback, whereas the medial temporal lobe is more important for observational learning in the absence of feedback. The second hypothesis is that the engagement of these two regions during category learning is modulated by the structure of the category that is being learned. For example, some categories are largely determined by single features; for example, most animals with a beak are classified as birds. Other kinds of categories require integration of information across multiple features. We will test the hypothesis that the medial temporal lobe is crucial for learning categories based on combinations of features, whereas the basal ganglia are important for learning categories based on single features. The topic studied in this project is categorization, oneof the most important acts of human cognition. Categorization is the recognition that various individual objects can be classified into larger groups that resemble each other in some way. Research in cognitive psychology has provided a set of sophisticated models for how humans learn new categories. However, little is currently known about how these operations are achieved in the brain. Most of our current knowledge comes from studies of patients with brain disorders. In particular, patients with Parkinson s and Huntington s diseases have trouble learning some kinds of new categories, though they are able to learn other kinds of categories. These diseases affect a set of deep brain structures known as the basal ganglia, and their impairment on some category learning tasks suggests that the basal ganglia may be critical for category learning. However, the exact role of the basal ganglia is unknown. Whereas patients with Parkinson s and Huntington s diseases are severely impaired at learning some new categories, patients with amnesia following damage to the medial temporal lobe (including the hippocampus) are only subtly impaired at category learning. Initial neuroimaging studies have shown that this region is deactivated when normal individuals are learning new categories, suggesting that it is not involved. Furthermore, imaging studies have shown that that activity in the medial temporal lobe and basal ganglia during category learning is negatively related: Individuals with more activity in one region tend to have less activity in the other. These findings suggest that these two regions may interact during learning, but the nature of this interaction is unclear at present. These studies have important implications, both for the basic understanding of category learning and for the understanding of the brain systems involved in such common disorders as Parkinson s and Alzheimer s diseases. Most importantly, the results of these studies will provide stronger constraints on theories of human category learning that are currently possible using behavioral measures alone doc24597 none This award provides continued funding of The Nyanza Project, a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, Africa offering interdisciplinary research and training in paleoclimatology, atmospheric science, limnology, and biology for undergraduates, graduate students and secondary school teachers interested in tropical lake studies. The award provides support for administrative staff, academic mentors, and equipment at the site and allows for the participation American undergraduate students, graduate students, and secondary school teachers in the field. American students and mentors join their African counterparts for an interactive season of teaching and research at the field site. This REU award weaves science, education, and cultural exchange into a rich tapestry. As such, it has the potential for opening doors for educational opportunity while it opens minds to a greater understanding of natural science. The Nyanza Project also promotes capacity building and technology transfer between American and African students and colleagues. In general, the Nyanza Project offers a unique educational and cultural opportunity to young scientists interested in the natural sciences doc24598 none A workshop would be organized and held at Princeton to celebrate the introduction of quasiconvexity by C.B. Morrey 50 years earlier by surveying recent developments and stimulating future applications. Quasiconvixity was originally introduced as a condition to understand the closely related questions of lower semicontinuity and existence in the calculus of variations. It is now clear that quasiconvexity is fundamental in many other applications doc24599 none This proposal was received in response to the Spin Electronics for the 21st Century Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 02-036. The proposal focuses on spin dependent transport and spintronics functionality in a unique nanostructured system - Y-junction Carbon Nanotubes. The Y-junction nanotubes, first fabricated by one of the PIs (JMX)-combine the attractive properties of carbon nanotubes (effectively 1D electronic transport with long ballistic mean free paths and exceptionally high current densities)with a three-terminal geometry and a built-in heterojunction barrier at the Y-branching point. Spin transport in ordinary, straight ferromagnetically contacted multi-walled carbon nanotubes, first studied by another of the PIs, has yielded excellent spin-polarized injection efficiencies and long spin-scattering lengths on the order of 0.25 um, making ferromagnet-nanotube hybrids a promising spintronics platform. The spin transport in a Y-junction with the built-in heterobarrier is already interesting and unexplored. But what makes the proposed devices unique is the possibility applying both ferromagnetic and normal metal contacts to the three terminals of the Y-junction, as well as using different ferromagnetic materials (with separately switchable magnetizations)for contacts to the same device. This unprecedented flexibility will enable us, for example, to clearly distinguish spin-mediated injection and extraction of currents from ordinary injection, tune the transmission of spin up and spin down electrons by means of a control voltage on the third terminal, witch the spin-coherent current from one Y-junction arm to another by switching the magnetization with an external field, and more generally produce a true three-terminal spintronic transistor. However great the potential of this new nanostructured system may be, a great amount of challenging work, from fabrication of the Y-junction nanotubes to fabrication of nano-scale contacts to cryogenic measurements of the contacted Y-junctions in the presence of magnetic fields externally modulated, will have to done first to prove the concepts. This NSF project is launched for these proof-of-concept explorations, and for paving the pathway to this new and exciting field of opportunities doc24600 none Stoebe Partial support is provided for a one-week materials camp for 30 high school students, to be held at the University of Washington. Projects will include hands-on experiments in materials characterization, materials processing, and analysis of the failure of components. The camp is for high school juniors from across the US and is taught by mentors who are volunteer professionals. The camp concludes with presentations of each group of the results of a team project doc24581 none A systematic and global re-occupation of select hydrographic sections will be conducted with the objective of quantifying changes in storage and transport of heat, fresh water, carbon dioxide (CO2) and related parameters. The program is in support of the CLImate VARiability and predictability (CLIVAR) and Carbon Science Programs, and is a component of a global observing system for the physical climate and carbon system. By integrating the scientific needs of the carbon and hydrography tracer communities, major synergies and cost savings will be achieved. In addition to efficiency, a coordinated approach will produce scientific advances that exceed those of having individual programs. These advances will contribute to the following overlapping scientific objectives: Data for Model Calibration, Validation and Model Based Synthesis; Carbon System Studies; Heat and Freshwater Storage and Flux Studies; Deep and Shallow Water Mass and Ventilation Studies; and Calibration of Autonomous Sensors. A joint study of the ocean carbon cycle and circulation will help identify critical areas where potential changes in ocean circulation could have serious consequences for future anthropogenic uptake. Global warming-induced changes in the ocean s transport of heat and freshwater, which could affect the circulation, can be followed through long-term measurements. The sections proposed consist of approximately two meridional and two zonal lines in each ocean, for a total of 10 sections over 6 field years. The core measurements include hydrography (CTD, salinity, oxygen, nutrients, L ADCP, Underway T, S, pCO2, bathymetry, navigation), carbon system (DIC, pCO2. TAlk, pH, DOC, DON), and transient tracers (CFCs, tritium 3He). In addition to the collection of the data, quality control measures will be routinely carried out by providers of reference-quality data. Post-cruise data updates, distribution, and archive will be managed by groups with separate funding. The field work will be integrated with a larger international effort to monitor the ocean s response to climate change. Broader Impacts: The results will be disseminated broadly to enhance scientific and technological understanding. The program is based on the fundamental concept that data collected belong to the community, and are available to the community at large rather than being proprietary for the investigators involved in the project. The data policy proposed will be stringent and geared towards rapid and open dissemination, and with a clear structure for all data to undergo thorough quality control. Such an ambitious goal requiring this degree of openness has not been tried on a large scale before. The program benefits to society include the collection of a high quality data set, and use of the data to assess climate change. The global program will provide full water column data of climatically significant parameters with decadal coverage. These data will be used to assess climate change by quantifying the uptake and storage of anthropogenic CO2 by the ocean, and contributing to an understanding and models of the processes that control the uptake and transport of CO2 into the ocean s interior. Since these are likely to be the only systematic observations below m, they will be used to document long term trends in ocean warming, and heat and freshwater fluxes. The data will be a resource for model calibration of the climate system. The proposed program will promote training and learning. It will serve as a community resource for training and entraining graduate students, postdoctoral scientists, and new scientists. Funds are budgeted in the lead proposal for graduate students, post-docs, and young, non-seagoing scientists to participate in each cruise doc24602 none Many knowledge intensive products require the manufacturing of particulate materials, such as ferroelectrics, ceramics, powdered metals, cements, and pharmaceuticals. These materials often have their largest environmental impact during the particulate stage when they are the most soluble. Particulate production commonly involves the consolidation of individual particles. Moreover, these materials often play a pivotal role in new technologies that enable society to achieve greater energy and economic efficiency. Many scientists recognize the unique contributions of these materials but lack the information and analytical tools to consider the economic, social, and environmental impacts of their process and product design decisions. The objective of this MUSES project is to develop a research agenda to meet this need. To achieve this goal, an interdisciplinary team at Penn State, representing materials, economics, business and the environmental fields; will work with several participating material science centers to organize a one-day symposium for students and young researchers in the field and a two-day international workshop on the industrial ecology of particulate materials. The workshop will address the following key questions: What spatial and temporal detail is possible for particulate material balances? What are the determinants of particulate material flows? What modeling approaches are best suited to represent these determinants? How could these models guide process and product design decisions? And What material technologies could improve environmental quality? In addressing these questions, our inquiry will lay the foundation for a conceptual framework to identify and develop a research agenda in this emerging field doc24603 none The goal for this MUSES exploratory project is to integrate life cycle-based environmental, social and economic design criteria and ECC microstructure tailoring to enhance the sustainability of infrastructure systems. Worldwide construction of concrete infrastructure such as roads, bridges and pipes exceeds 6 billion tons yr. The resulting impacts are dramatic and include greenhouse gas emissions, land disturbances, air pollution, and construction-related traffic congestion and vehicle damage. Engineered cementitious composites (ECC) are a new class of materials being developed to improve the performance of infrastructure systems. ECC formulations are designed through microstructure tailoring of inputs including matrix (cement and fly ash), fiber (virgin and recycled polymers, and interface elements. While ECC strain capacity is far superior to normal concrete, overall life cycle costs and benefits have not yet been evaluated. Developing these criteria is complex due to widely varying scales of analysis (nanometers in materials science to kilometers in the geological sciences), the long-term nature and consequences of infrastructure systems, and the need to optimize the scheduling of large capital investments. To address this complexity, this research will draw upon a multi-disciplinary team from the University of Michigan s Advanced Civil Engineering Material Research Lab, Center for Sustainable Systems, College of Engineering, School of Public Health, School of Natural Resources and Environment, and Department of Geological Sciences. This project will emphasize student education and research training through two graduate student research assistantships; specialized industrial ecology curriculum; a field component at a local cement manufacturer; a MUSES seminar series; and monthly research team workshops doc24604 none Graedel This MUSES incubation project will convene an expert workshop to explore data needs and model formulation approaches for the steel-related elements. Materials budgeting is a technique that, in principal, can provide information useful for studies of resource availability, potential environmental impacts, and policy options. Though data for steel are relatively accessible, this is not necessarily the case for its common alloying metals, a group that includes silicon, vanadium, chromium, manganese, cobalt, nickel, molybdenum, and tungsten. The amounts of steel used are so large that, for these alloying elements, their cycles are dominated by their use a small-percentage alloying elements. To understand the interrelationships, and to predict the usage and availability of these elements in the future, detailed dynamic models that couple resource economics, potential technological evolution, and use and recycling strategies will be necessary. The workshop will draw participants from a broad geographic spectrum, and will explore available data archives, information networks, and partnerships among academia and between academia and industry. Graduate students will be used a focus group reporters, both to ensure a detailed record of the workshop and to expose them to a group of participants of international stature. Following the workshop, a scientific programmer, under the guidance of the principal investigators, will begin the implementation of the concepts developed at the workshop. The workshop report and the preliminary model construction are expected to be the basis for more comprehensive research on iron alloying element cycles in the future doc24605 none This Biocomplexity in the Environment (BE) for Materials Use: Science, Engineering, and Society (MUSES) incubation activity will investigate the physical, sociological, and economic impacts of disposable and reusable textiles used in healthcare facilities. Exploratory research conducted by an interdisciplinary team consisting of a polymer chemist, a marketing expert and a social psychologist, intends to address questions raised about textile materials currently being used in healthcare facilities and to reassess economic and environmental consequences of using the materials. The analysis of the acceptance and potential impacts of new materials and technologies that are environmentally benign in the healthcare arena is the longer-term objective. Protective clothing and textiles in the medical sphere include surgical gowns, gloves, drapes, wraps, sheets, covers, and facemasks; these are composed of two different textile materials--disposable and reusable fabrics-that serve primarily to impede the transmission of pathogens in healthcare facilities. Disposables, also called non-woven fabrics, are mostly produced from polyethylene, polypropylene, and their blends. After usage, they should be immediately disposed of as bio-hazardous materials. In contrast, reusable textiles, such as those comprised of pure cotton fibers and certain polyesters, can be repeatedly used in healthcare facilities. Specific research tasks include: (1) to determine the most effective, multi-functional (biocidal and water-repellent) materials for medical applications; (2) to assess the economic and environmental impact of using reusable biocidal textiles in the healthcare industry; (3) to determine the social and psychological factors affecting the acceptance of the new technology by healthcare workers. Educational activities include a) involving undergraduate and graduate student in the research and to incorporate the research results into a senior undergraduate course; b) providing educational materials to workers in healthcare community and other hazardous Cupertino as was as to manufacturers of textile materials; c) educating the public about the environmental and economic impacts as well as protective properties of the different textile materials in healthcare facilities. The results of this research will be used to make recommendations regarding materials that are environmentally benign, protect against pathogens and are acceptable to healthcare workers doc24606 none Edwards This MUSES project will build an interdisciplinary team to comprehensively address drinking water infrastructure corrosion, which is a multi-billion dollar world-wide problem plaguing water suppliers and home owners. Corrosion is devastating due to the economic burden of replacing plumbing, potential adverse health effects of corrosion by-products, and unwanted and fear-producing aesthetic problems including discolored water and off tastes and odors. The interdisciplinary team will synthesize a better understanding of corrosion through discussions of: chemical and biological causes of corrosion in pipes; economic models that assess costs of infrastructure damage and replacement; sensory properties of metals and sensory evaluation methods; health, consumer, and regulatory issues related to drinking water. The participating research professionals and students represent six disciplines (Civil and Environmental Engineering, Economics, Food and Sensory Science, Public Health, Regulatory Affairs, Water Treatment and Supply), three countries, six different national agencies and associations, and three universities. Participation of these diverse groups will produce the scientific and engineering insights necessary for improving safe water in a manner that is tempered by societal and regulatory needs. The project s impacts will be broader than just its technical discoveries. The participants are committed to scientific and public dissemination of their knowledge. Two white papers will be submitted for publication in scientific journals. The public will be directly served by involving a citizen s group in discussions, preparing public interest out-reach materials for a consumer-based website, and other non-technical articles will appear in Op-Flow (a widely read water industry publication for utility workers doc24607 none Roberts This planning grant provides support for a series of three workshops that will bring together technological, scientific, educational and management experts to develop a plan for the use and application of remote sensing and real-time monitoring technologies for research and management of rivers and estuaries. These workshops will be organized in partnership with the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and they will serve as a companion to a demonstration project, sponsored by the Rivers and Estuaries Center on the Hudson River, that will use a selected area of the Hudson estuary as a test site for real-time monitoring of physical, chemical and biological river parameters. The parallel tracks of these two projects will allow workshop participants to avail themselves of an operating river laboratory and will allow the demonstration project to utilize the guidance and expertise of the workshop participants. The workshop and demonstration projects will integrate their findings to support a proposal that will seek to use the 154 mile Hudson River estuary as the model for the deployment of a remote sensing array that will utilize novel miniaturized sensor technology, robotics and existing monitoring stations to produce a continuous stream of river data transmitted by an advanced high-bandwidth, real-time communications system integrated with satellite remote-sensing imagery. The specific objectives of the workshops will be to (1) understand the status of other efforts to wire the earth and the biosphere, (2) identify the technological requirements and management and educational applications for the unique setting of rivers and estuaries and (3) develop a plan for an integrated in-situ and watershed-wide instrumentation of rivers and estuaries doc24608 none Travel support is provided for US participants in a US-Brazil Workshop on Applied Mechanics, to be held in Brazil during Aug. 12-23, . The purpose of the workshop is to explore avenues for collaboration and joint research and to increase mutual awareness of research activities in the two countries. The workshop will be held immediately following The Second Symposium on Computational Modeling and Multi-Scale Phenomena . The workshop will also include a number of site visits to universities and government laboratories. Provisions have been made for the participation of students and new researchers doc24609 none Anex This MUSES project is aimed at developing the people, skills and tools needed for understanding the system-wide sustainability of biobased products. The transition to a sustainable raw material base will be one of the most important challenges facing society in the 21st Century. As part of this endeavor, substantial increases in the use of biomass-derived feedstock in the chemical industry are expected over the next 50 years. A key task of the project is organizing and hosting a two-day international workshop on assessing the sustainability of biobased products. The team will develop background materials for workshop participants that will include a survey of the technologies that underlie biobased material production and a survey of the literature on biobased material assessment techniques and sustainability indicators. Drawing on the expertise of the interdisciplinary research team, the literature, and the output of the consensus workshop, the team will develop a framework for evaluating the complex environmental-social-industrial system comprising biobased material production, use, and end-of-life disposition. The team will be working throughout the project with the Authentic Teaching Alliance (ATA) to prepare a teaching module appropriate for secondary math and science classes. A team of two ATA Fellows and one secondary math or science teacher will partner with our team to develop and evaluate a learning module. This module will serve as a template for planned future module development. A case study applying sustainability indicators to a biobased material life cycle will also be developed and distributed as an education resource doc24610 none Perfusion fMRI for Cognitive Neuroscience With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Detre and colleagues will conduct a three-year investigation aimed at developing perfusion functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for use in studies of cognitive brain function. The sensitivity of perfusion fMRI will be increased by adapting the methods to higher magnetic field strengths. Image quality will be improved by using imaging strategies that are not sensitive to degradation by variations in adjacent tissue types. In addition to optimizing image acquisition parameters, image analysis procedures will also be developed that are specifically optimized for perfusion fMRI. These acquisition and analysis methods will be disseminated to other scientists through publications, web-sites, and integration into currently available software packages. The larger goal of this project is to validate perfusion fMRI for use in cognitive brain mapping in experiments on face recognition and risk-taking. As is commonly known, MRI methods provide detailed pictures of brain anatomy. However, the methods can also be used to see how brain function changes with cognitive tasks such as learning, memory, language, and emotion. This is possible because blood flow increases in a brain region that is being used to perform a specific task. Most MRI methods used for mapping brain function only detect such regional blood flow changes indirectly. Over the past decade, Dr. Detre and others have been developing noninvasive perfusion MRI methods to directly measure cerebral blood flow. These methods can quantify blood flow both at rest and with cognitive tasks. Because the measurement is direct and quantitative, the results are more stable over space and time than with indirect and non-quantitative methods. They will be particularly useful for examining behavioral state changes, learning, and responses to pharmacological manipulation. Perfusion MRI can also measure changes in certain brain regions that are difficult to visualize with other methods due to the presence of adjacent tissues with differing effects in a magnetic field. It is anticipated that perfusion fMRI will contribute significantly to our understanding of cognitive brain function over the next decade doc24611 none This project, upgrading the current cluster for use in large pre-computations that enable effective real-time performance, supports equipment servicing the following four projects: Real Time Animation of Human Characters for Use in Immersive Training Environments, Probabilistic Recommendation Methods for Collaborative Filtering (CF), Machine Learning for Spatial and Sequential Data, and Reinforcement Learning for Learning Search Control Heuristics with Applications to Protein Structure Determination from Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy and to Real-Time Animation. The first project aims at automatically selecting and ordering short sequences of captured motion to drive a character along a trajectory while maintaining naturally looking transitions between the sequences. The project exploits off-line reinforcement learning (dynamic programming) algorithms to pre-compute a policy for moving between any pair of poses under a range of trajectory constraints. Real-time control of characters is then permitted without the need for large run-time searches. The second project utilizes collaborative filtering (CF) systems that can predict a probability distribution over the rating of an item. Currently CF, a method by which multiple computer users indirectly help each other make decisions and identify solutions to problems, provides ratings or votes returning the items with the higher number of votes, rather than attaching a probability. The equipment will speed the research process by enabling the testing of un-optimized prototype implementations of new algorithms, and hence allow the evaluation of proposed algorithms without the delay of manual optimization. The third project deals with emerging applications of machine learning (e.g., computer intrusion detection, information extraction from web pages, remote sensing) involving temporal, sequential, or spatial data where nearby data points are typically correlated. The PIs have developed a parallel implementation of a sequential analysis method for conditional random fields (CRFs) that gives near-linear speedups in the computation time, but which is limited in the size of data sets that can be processed. The cluster upgrade should yield a faster solution and allow consideration of larger data sets. The last project, experiments with two new algorithms for reinforcement learning that scale to large search spaces as long as the number of reachable states is small enough to fit in main memory. One method combines linear programming with support-vector machine techniques; the other combines gradient descent search with dynamic programming. These methods, requiring an expensive off-line computation, result in an efficient heuristic that can be applied to the run-time search. Moreover, the cluster will be used by students in a parallel computation course doc24612 none This Biocomplexity in the Environment (BE) for: Materials Use: Science, Engineering, and Society (MUSES) study aims to develop new tools to assess and optimize industrial networks in world city-regions. World city-regions are enormous digesters of material, water and energy, functioning as intermediate nodes in linear systems of material consumption and waste discharge. An ongoing transition from linear to looped systems in industrial regions holds great promise for reducing adverse human impacts of production and service industries on the environment. The tool to be developed through the proposed research will facilitate the design of alternative regional industrial networks with the objective of achieving an eco-industrial symbiosis. The overarching field of endeavor is industrial ecology with collaborations from industrial geographers, regional econometricians, reverse logistics and eco-industrial park development. The team will attempt integration of models and data sets from these fields and will develop an operational model of waste and by-product flows in a regional industrial network. The results will be ground-truthed through a series of discussions with a number of representative firms in a major urban infrastructure. This work will function as a proof of concept research, clarifying additional expertise needed to carry out a full-scale modeling and analysis. USC s NSF Integrated Graduate Education Research and Training (IGERT), Sustainable Cities Program (SCP) will coordinate the efforts among the multiple disciplines. The Program already funds several undergraduate and graduate students from a variety of fields related to sustainable development. The proposed project presents new opportunities for the SCP to train and educate undergraduate students and doctoral fellows in theoretical and applied industrial ecology doc24613 none 0 Bates This project concerns the dynamics of both spatially discrete and continuous but non-local evolutionary systems. In particular, we are concerned with the existence, stability, and variety of spatial patterns in interacting and reacting systems which exhibit threshold behavior. Not just stationary patterns but also those which evolve in a predictable way. The systems of equations arise in the field of computational neural networks designed to perform specialized tasks such as automatic image recognition. They also arise in population dynamics, in models of phase transitions, in models of the primary visual cortex of the brain, and in computer simulation of a wide variety of continuum processes where discretization is the standard approach. Results from the project will have a direct impact on the understanding of computational experiments and on the assumptions on which the mathematical models of many physical phenomena rest. From one perspective, the project explores some of the basic challenges of present day material science: The modeling of processes which cause and accompany change of phases or crystalline variants of a substance. New mathematical models are being continually proposed, with the hope of shedding insight into the basic physics of these processes. Successful modeling can offer help in the development of new high performance materials, which is vital to economic and other national interests. From another perspective, the theoretical study of neural networks will lead to the development of automatic pattern recognition, useful in such widely diverse areas as text analysis, target identification, and image enhancement doc24614 none This proposal was received in response to the NSF Spin Electronics for the 21st Century Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 02-036. The proposal focuses on investigation of techniques to locally induce, control, and detect electron spin in semiconductor microstructures by using properly located electrostatic gate voltages. Electrostatic gates are easily defined on a submicron scale and should provide switching and manipulations of spin currents. A variety of approaches to this goal will be pursued, including (i) gate-programmable nuclear polarization applied to single and double quantum dots, and the transfer of nuclear spin from dot to dot, (ii) gate-controlled spin-polarization in high-mobility GaAs AlAs epitaxial layers; and (iii) electron-spin-resonance {ESR) measurements in AlAs. Combining state-of-the-art fabrication technology, careful measurements, and theoretical analysis, the proposed research is highly interdisciplinary. It relies on expertise of three experimentalists and one theorist in engineering and physics. It also entails the full participation of graduate and undergraduate students, who will gain invaluable experience and knowledge in cutting edge materials science and engineering, with a focus on the emerging and potentially rewarding field of spin electronics. The work will be centered at Princeton University with one investigator at Harvard University. Existing facilities at Princeton and Harvard will be adequate to carry out all the proposed work. The majority of requested funding will be used to support graduate students. Workshops at Princeton are planned to insure a focused research effort and to enhance interaction among students working on the common research goals doc24615 none RUI: Stress, Stages of Memory, and Event Related Potentials With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Weekes and colleagues will conduct a three-year investigation into the relationships among psychological stressors, stress hormone levels, memory functioning, and electrical brain activity. In one study, they will investigate the effects of group differences (high vs. low) in chronic stress hormone secretion on memory performance and electrical brain activity during both the encoding and retrieval stages of a verbal memory task. In a second study, they will investigate the associations among the acute stress response, memory performance and electrical brain activity during both the encoding and retrieval stages of a verbal memory task. These studies explore suggestions from various prior studies that concentrations of stress hormones can significantly impact memory functioning. While studies suggest a detrimental effect of chronically high levels of stress hormones on memory, there is less known about the nature of the relationship between acutely high levels of stress hormones and memory. The strongest effects of chronic and acute levels of stress hormones on memory appear to be on verbal memory. However, it is unclear which stage of memory processing may be most sensitive to stress hormone levels, with some studies suggesting an effect on encoding or storage, and others on retrieval. Further, a number of recent studies have found effects of stress hormones on electrical brain activity. Few studies have questioned whether stress-induced changes in memory functioning are related to changes in regional electrophysiological activity. This is a particularly important field of inquiry given the evidence that the most significant effects of stress on such brain regions as the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex are electrophysiological in nature. The elucidation of these relationships will lead to a better understanding and better treatment options for individuals suffering from stress- or stress hormone-related memory deficits. These populations include, but are not limited to, individuals with Cushing s disease, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, schizophrenia, depression and the elderly doc24616 none This projects will create and release of three suites of spatial data products. The first is high-resolution, orthorectified radar imagery (ORRI, with 1.25 m grid cell spacing) and a co-registered, high-resolution Digital Elevation Model (DEM; 5 m grid cell spacing; 1 m vertical accuracy). The second suite is satellite imagery purchased through AeroMap U.S., specifically orthorectified panchromatic (0.7 m grid cells) and multispectral (2.8 m grid cells) imagery acquired by DigitalGlobe with the new QuickBird satellite. Third is a time-series set of orthorectified air-photo mosaics. After processing, the DEM and imagery would be made available to all NSF-funded researchers through the ARCSS Data Coordination Center. In the vicinity of Barrow, Alaska including the Barrow Environmental Observatory (BEO) there are more than 35 currently funded NSF research projects. These multi- and interdisciplinary studies primarily address local to global effects of environmental sensitivity and climate change. Many of the projects utilize quantitative spatial analysis through remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Others would utilize high-resolution spatial datasets if they were available. On a project by project basis, research groups work piecemeal with spatial data for their own, small, disconnected field areas. Sharing datasets is difficult due to differences in map projection, datum, data format, extent, and distribution channels. This new activity will provide the research community high-resolution data and images resulting in tangible scientific benefits across numerous disciplines, increasing the efficiency and significance of current and future research. On-going projects that would benefit are research on ecosystem dynamics, terrestrial-atmospheric fluxes of greenhouse gases, landscape dynamics, coastal flooding and erosion, permafrost melting, other environmental responses to unprecedented arctic warming, and other topics. These environmentally and societally relevant scientific problems can be addressed in new ways and with greater success using digital topography and imagery. By orders of magnitude, the spatial datasets would be more precise, accurate, and useful than existing data layers. They would permit state-of-the-art analysis for years to come, and would establish a temporal baseline for decades of change-detection studies. This vision is shared by this proposal s twelve collaborators from eight research institutions. With shared needs for high quality spatial information, a modest effort now would leverage results and promote interdisciplinary collaboration doc24617 none Inorganic carbon plays a crucial role in regulating marine productivity and species composition in phytoplankton communities. Therefore understanding the mechanisms underlying inorganic carbon fixation by different phytoplankton assemblages is critical if we are to understand the response of phytoplankt on photosynthesis to global climate change, and to develop realistic models of biogeochernical carbon flux in the ocean. Rubisco is a keystone enzyme that drives Calvin cycle function. However, it is now well documented that terrestrial plant Rubisco is catalytically non?functional without the co?operative interplay of Rubisco activase. To date, no information exists in the literature concerning the function of Rubisco activase for gLny chromophytic alga. In fact, except for Heterosigma akashiwo and two Cylindrotheca species, no data exists on Rubisco catalytic function for any other representative of this assemblage that is so critical in global carbon processing. The Goals of this project are to: a) Isolate and characterize Rubisco activase using Heterosigma as model chromophytic algal species; and, in particular, to b) Extend Rubisco activase studies to include diatoms since they rank as primary contributors in C02 management. The study is feasible because: a) The cloned, putative Heterosigma activase gene has now been over?expressed in E. coli; b) Extensive analysis of Heterosigma Rubisco has been accomplished; c) Patterns of Rubisco mRNA production in response to light cues have been documented; d) Heterosigma and diatom Rubisco antibodies have been shown to cross react; e) Flow cytometric measurements of antibody?tagged Rubisco have been made. While the effort in understanding the regulation of Rubisco by Rubisco activase in phytoplankton may be risky, this study will establish a primary database for chromophytic algae wherein the biochemistry of inorganic carbon processing via Rubisco Rubisco activase interaction is deciphered. The long?term benefit this study is highly significant when considered in terms of predicting photosynthetic performance in response to climate change doc7023 none Grosky This award supports the participation of American scientists in a U.S.-Japan seminar on MLabNet -advanced multimedia systems and applications, to be held in Karuizawa, Japan from October 10-12, . The co-organizers are professors William Grosky of Wayne State University and Professor Frederic Andres of the National Institute of Informatics (NII) in Tokyo, Japan. MlabNet is a virtual multimedia research framework between various institutions in the United States, Japan, France, Italy and Thailand and has existed since April . Two important projects being investigated under this framework are the Very Large-Scale Hypermedia Delivery System (VLSHDS) and MediaSys, which provides an extensible interface for multimedia management. The proposed seminar will include research presentations, posters, and demonstrations. It will assess the research cooperation inside MLabNet in the context of these projects, as well as address issues in information access and sharing multimedia content between the involved countries. They will also address issues in cultural heritage, in the context of future research issues related to the National Science Foundation framework, the Japanese Ministry of Education framework, and the Fifth Framework set by the European Union. Seminar organizers have made a special effort to involve younger researchers, postdocs and graduate students as both participants and observers. The exchange of ideas and data with Japanese experts in this field will enable U.S. participants to advance their own work, and will set the stage for future collaborative projects. Dissemination of information on the seminar will be available on the World Wide Web doc24619 none for Proposal # , Researcher and student housing at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory A grant has been awarded to Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL), under the direction of Dr. Ian Billick, to build researcher and student housing at the RMBL. The RMBL is a biological field station that was established in to promote research and education in the biological sciences. Unaffiliated with any university, scientists from numerous institutions throughout the United States visit the RMBL to conduct research and teach classes. Because students and researchers come from around the world, the RMBL provides housing in cabins onsite. Many of these cabins were constructed by miners in the s or biologists in the early s. This grant will allow the RMBL to provide safe, clean living facilities in order for scientists to conduct their work and for students to take classes. This grant will pay for the construction of three cabins, one noncooking cabin and two cooking cabins. The noncooking cabin will house six students in a two-story building. Each student will have a private bedroom and there will be a shared living area. The cabin will be of basic wood construction with gas heating. The two cooking cabins will each house either a researcher family or four graduate students. There will be two bedrooms upstairs with a cooking and living area downstairs. The RMBL has been an important center for biological research and training. Scientists at the RMBL have published approximately papers in peer reviewed journals. In addition to basic research conducted at the Lab on diverse areas such as butterfly physiology, stream ecology, and marmot behavior, science at the RMBL has been used to shape the revision of the Clean Air Act and has documented how climate change will affect montane ecosystems. Scientists who have trained or worked at the Lab have been influential in identifying the problem of human population growth as well as founding the academic disciplines of Conservation and Restoration Biology to provide solutions to real world problems. By providing funding to renovate housing, the National Science Foundation will help ensure that scientists at the RMBL can continue to provide information policy makers need in making decisions concerning the environment doc24620 none Proposal: PI: Bruce Kleiner : The proposed research is in the area of interaction between group theory, differential geometry, dynamics, and topology which evolved during the last 100 years from the study of surfaces with negative curvature. By thinking of discrete groups -- such as fundamental groups of compact manifolds -- in terms of their Cayley graphs, one can view them as geometric objects in their own right. This viewpoint, which is present throughout the proposal, leads to some remarkable insights (Mostow rigidity, Stallings theorem, Gromov s theorem on groups of polynomial growth, etc.) and to the striking fact that many discrete groups (for example word hyperbolic groups) act in a canonical way on a ``boundary . The first part of the proposed research focusses on biLipschitz maps. A byproduct of the project, if it is successful, will be an answer to the question of when certain aperiodic tilings of the plane (for example, Penrose tilings) are weakly combinatorially equivalent to the usual square tiling, in the sense that one can match the tiles of the two tilings so that adjacent tiles are matched with nearby tiles. The second project addresses Solv, the only 3-dimensional Thurston geometry that remains mysterious from a large-scale viewpoint. The remaining topics concern important issues in the fields of nonpositively curved spaces (the dynamics of the geodesic flow and the structure of the fundamental group), hyperbolic groups (the topology of the boundary and its relation to group structure), and Poincare duality groups (the relation between Haken PD(3) groups and 3-manifold groups). The proposal has two main themes: symmetry, classification, and recognition of tiling patterns; and dynamics. Tilings of the plane and 3-space have been studied intensely for centuries, and the resulting theory is fundamental in many branches of mathematics, as well as in solid state physics (crystal structure). In the s, mathematicians discovered striking new applications of tilings (especially tilings of hyperbolic space, the geometry underlying a number of Escher s images), by using the ``rough pattern of the tilings rather than the precise shape of the tiles and their intersection pattern. From this new viewpoint two tilings would be considered roughly the same if there is a one-to-one correspondence between the tiles of one tiling with the tiles of the other so that adjacent tiles in one tiling correspond to nearby tiles in the other. This is a very active area of research with connections to many areas of mathematics. Several of the proposed research topics relate to this: for example it is an open problem if the tilings associated with quasi-crystal structure are always roughly the same as classical crystal tilings. Another theme in the proposal is geodesic motion -- the motion of a free particle -- in a certain class of spaces. These systems have a long history and provide especially simple examples of ``chaotic mechanical systems; they can also be used to model a system of several billiard balls on a billiard table with circular (or convex) bumpers. The objective here is to describe and classify, at least in certain classes of examples, all possible trajectories of the system doc24621 none This proposal was received in response to the Spin Electronics for the 21st century Initiative Program Solicitation NSF 02-036. The proposal focuses on fabrication and characterization of two prototype carbon nanotube spin electronic devices: the nanotube spin transistor and the nano-helix magnetic field sensor. For molecular scale spin electronic applications, the carbon nanotube has compelling advantages. Carbon nanotubes are quasi-one-dimensional, crystalline wires having a low density of spin scattering centers. Therefore, current flows through nanotubes with very few electron or spin scattering events. This makes carbon nanotubes useful for molecular scale spin transmission lines, with spin detection signals remaining high over long transmission distances. Spin signals can be amplified or suppressed by gating the nanotube to change the electron density. High ballistic current flow also produces anomalously large magnetic moments in carbon nanotube circuits. This is useful for magnetic memory and switching applications to amplify and sense local magnetic fields. The nanotube spin transistor is a ferromagnetically contacted nanotube with a field effect gate. The gate bias modifies the transmission of the up and down spin channels, and acts to amplify or suppress the spin detection signal. The nano-helix magnetic sensor is an electrically contacted carbon nanotube grown into a helical shape. Due to the lack of electron scattering, current flow through the helix produces a giant orbital spin moment, which interacts strongly with applied magnetic field. This dramatically alters the resistance between the two field directions, even for low applied fields. Together, these devices display a range of behavior that will be useful for advanced spin electronic applications on the molecular scale. To accomplish this work, the PIs will combine their collective experience in carbon nanotube spin transport, nanotube device fabrication, nanotube electrical characterization and nanotube device modeling. They will work closely with collaborators within the chemistry departments at Duke University and UC Riverside to optimize nanotube growth, distribution of nanotubes for electrical characterization, and chemical surface modification of nanotubes for spin electronic device applications. As part of their project, they will be training two graduate students in the exciting area of spin electronics and nanoscale technology. The undergraduate and graduate curriculum including Nanoscale fabrication, Device Modeling, and Electrical Optical Characterization will incorporate their spin electronic research advances doc24622 none This proposal was received in response to the Spin Electronics for the 21st century Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 02-036. The proposal focuses on the synthesis, characterization and optimization of Cobalt-doped transition metal oxide nanostructures for spin-electronics applications. The proposed work is based on our recent demonstration of robust ferromagnetic and semiconducting behavior at room temperature in Co-doped anatase thin films. The proposed research will establish interrelationships among the structural, optical, electronic, and magnetic properties of ferromagnetic, semiconducting CoxTi-1-x02 fabricated by a variety of physical and chemical synthesis routes, including oxygen plasma assisted molecular beam epitaxy, reactive ion-beam sputter deposition, and solution-based hydrothermal, sol-gel, and aqueous co-precipitation methods. Different synthetic routes should lead to different morphologies and dimensionalities, including single-crystal films (2D), nanoparticles (OD), and planar arrays of nanostructures. They also have different prognoses and costs for scaling from laboratory to commercial operation. Spin-dependent transport and magnetic behavior of these materials as a function of dimensionality and structure will be investigated. Detailed evaluation of the band structure of the films, combined with proprietary technology involving SrTiO3 buffer layers, will be used to integrate these films on silicon substrates. The ultimate goal will not only be to engineer these materials at the nanometer length scales, but to develop a broad set of criteria that will serve as the framework to explore the viability of other doped-oxides for spintronics applications. Finally, the project has a broad education component that will add new dimensions to the research experience and training of graduate students participating in the nanotechnology IGERT program on the UW campus. This proposal is being co-funded by the Divisions of Civil and Mechanical Systems, Chemical and Transport Systems and Electrical and Communication Systems in the Directorate of Engineering of the National Science Foundation doc24623 none This proposal was received in response to the Spin Electronics for the 21st century initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 02-036. The proposal focuses on novel optical techniques for measuring carrier spin coherence on semiconductors. Spin based electronics promise to provide increased processing speed, increased integration density and decreased power consumption as compared to traditional microelectronic devices. In addition, electronic spins in semiconductors are attractive for implementation of quantum information processing. These advances require a firm understanding of electronic spin coherence in semiconductors and the development of techniques to probe spin coherence. Previous work has shown that n-doped GaAs has a remarkably long spin coherence time, which has prompted further investigation. Semimagnetic semiconductors display much shorter spin coherences, however the stronger carrier-ion interaction makes them better candidate materials for fabrication of spin filters and related devices. The techniques developed in this project will complement the predominant technique of Faraday rotation and provide information that is not available using Faraday rotation. Of specific interest is why the Faraday rotation signal saturates for high optical excitation density. The techniques are based on transient four-wave-mixing. Specifically, by using a three pulse excitation scheme, it is possible to probe the spin coherence and generate a signal in a background free direction. A modification of this that uses the fifth order nonlinear optical response can generate a Raman-spin echo, which will remove the effects of inhomogeneous spin precession rates due, for example, to a variation in the g-factor with k-vector. The experiments will be performed on n-doped GaAs and semimagnetic semiconductors such as CdMnTe and ZnMnTe. The former samples are commercially available wafers, while the latter will be provided by collaborators at the University of Dortmund, Germany. In the latter case, initial experiments to probe the optical coherence (as opposed to spin coherence) will be performed because it is not well understood and provides important insight into carrier-ion spin scattering, which is crucial for electronically controlled ferromagnetism. Preliminary Faraday-rotation experiments will be performed on both the GaAs and semimagnetic semiconductor samples to provide a connection to experimental results from other groups. During this grant, both spin-coherence and Raman-spin echo experiments will be performed on n-doped GaAs. For the semimagnetic semiconductors, optical coherence and spin coherence experiments will be performed doc24624 none This proposal was received in response to the NSF Spin Electronics for the 2fl Century Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 02-036. The proposal focuses on investigation of techniques to locally induce, control, and detect electron spin in semiconductor microstructures by using properly located electrostatic gate voltages. Electrostatic gates are easily defined on a submicron scale and should provide switching and manipulations of spin currents. A variety of approaches to this goal will be pursued, including (i) gate-programmable nuclear polarization applied to single and double quantum dots, and the transfer of nuclear spin from dot to dot, (ii) gate-controlled spin-polarization in high-mobility GaAs AlAs epitaxial layers; and (iii) electron-spin-resonance {ESR) measurements in AlAs. Combining state-of-the-art fabrication technology, careful measurements, and theoretical analysis, the proposed research is highly interdisciplinary. It relies on expertise of three experimentalists and one theorist in engineering and physics. It also entails the full participation of graduate and undergraduate students, who will gain invaluable experience and knowledge in cutting edge materials science and engineering, with a focus on the emerging and potentially rewarding field of spin electronics. The work will be centered at Princeton University with one investigator at Harvard University. Existing facilities at Princeton and Harvard will be adequate to carry out all the proposed work. The majority of requested funding will be used to support graduate students. Workshops at Princeton are planned to insure a focused research effort and to enhance interaction among students working on the common research goals doc24625 none This proposal was received in response to the Spin Electronics for the 21st Century Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 02-036. The proposal focuses on the application of semiconductor nanostructures in the emerging field of spin-based electronics. The program objectives are: To explore demonstrations of the spintronic applications of nanostructures, including nanoscale implementations of the spin filter, the spin valve, and the spin transistor To undertake experimental investigations of spin-polarized transport in semiconductor nanostructures To perform theoretical studies of the spin-dependent electronic structure of semiconductor nanostructures, and of the mechanisms of spin decoherence. The key outcome of this research is expected to be the development of a crucial understanding of the manner in which the unique properties of semiconductor nanostructures may be exploited in future spintronic devices. An important aspect of this program is its coordinated structure. The principal investigators have proven track records in the experimental and theoretical study of semiconductor nanostructures, and their collaboration is expected to result in a highly multidisciplinary interaction. The research program itself explores the implementation of complicated spintronic devices, such as the spin valve or the spin transistor, by integrating nanoscale implementations of the most basic of spin devices, the spin filter. Theoretical modeling explores the spin-resolved subband structure in these devices, the mechanisms for spin decoherence, and the transport properties of the structures being investigated. In addition to its scientific importance, this program also contributes to the creation of a superior environment for graduate and undergraduate education at Arizona State University. Its pedagogic impact is further enhanced by the collaborations it promotes with researchers at national laboratories in the US (Sandia) and Japan (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, AIST). Graduate and undergraduate students involved in this project benefit greatly from the opportunities provided by these collaborations. A significant component of these collaborations, for example, is the opportunities they provide for student internship during this program. At the same time, undergraduate involvement in this program is encouraged by coordinating the research with the two-semester senior-design projects, which form one of the graduation requirements of the undergraduate program in the Electrical Engineering Department. As we have done in the past, we continue to make efforts to involve both under-represented minorities and women in this program. A valuable opportunity for wider outreach is provided by the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) program, which we have a record of involvement in and which actively encourages female high-school students to enter engineering programs. Dissemination of the results of this program is promoted through publications in the top peer-review journals, student and faculty participation in conferences, and the posting of related material on a central web resource that is being developed under an existing NSF-sponsored project doc24626 none Lu This proposal was received in response to the Spin Electronics for the 21st Century Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 02-036. The proposal focuses on the study and development of metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) -grown transition metal (TM) -doped ZnO as a diluted magnetic semiconductor (DMS) layer, and explore its application through industrial collaborators, as well as government labs. This material offers the possibility of highly integrated device architecture along with the ability to manipulate carrier spin as well as charge. Practical application requires that the material have a magnetic Curie temperature above room temperature. While theoretical studies have identified GaN and ZnO as the most promising DMS materials in this regard, the high solubility of TM ions in ZnO, as well as its wide band gap (transparent!) its multifunctionality, and relatively low growth temperature make ZnO an excellent choice of room temperature spintronics material. To achieve their goals, they will focus on: A systematic study to develop low-pressure MOCVD technology for growth of TM-doped ZnO films. The most promising doping species are V, Co, Ni, and Mn, and R-Al2O3 is an optimal substrate; A coordinated characterization program using both in-house and synchrotron radiation based spectroscopic, imaging, and diffractive techniques to characterize the chemical, electronic, structural and magnetic properties of the MOCVD-grown TM-doped ZnO films; and through the industrial collaboration integrate the ZnO spin aligner layers with GaN LEDs to form the spin-polarized injection LED operational at room temperature. The successful completion of the proposed research will have a significant impact on the scientific understanding and practical application of diluted magnetic semiconductor spintronics. It is anticipated that new phenomena related to spin-electronic, spin-magnetic, and spin-optical integration in wide band gap DMS materials will be discovered, leading to fundamentally new devices and applications doc24627 none This collaborative proposal with Illinois Institute of Technology (Sun, 02- ) and Northwestern University (Taylor, 02- ), acquiring data nodes and compute nodes at five sites, contributes to build a Distributed Optical Testbed (DOT). The DOT system, a product of the paradigm shift from large-scale applications running on large parallel systems at single sites to those running on distributed systems, has come about by the availability of high-speed optical networks (E.g., Starlight, TeraGrid 40 Gb s network, the PacificRail 10 Gb s network). This shift necessitates techniques that allow applications to efficiently utilize distributed systems. In contrast to parallel systems, these systems must exploit two characteristics: Heterogeneity of resources (processors and networks) and Dynamic changes in performance of shared resources, especially wide area networks. The system, consisting of Linux clusters at six geographically different sites interconnected via two existing research DWDM networks, I-WIRE and OMNInet, involves the following sites: Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA), Northwester University Chicago Campus (NU-C), Northwestern University Evanston Campus (NU-E), and the University of Chicago (UC). DOT will facilitate the following research activities in the area of distributed applications: Dynamic Load Balancing (Taylor) Performance Monitoring and Prediction (Dinda, Sun, Taylor) Data Management (Choudhary, Foster) The first activity develops techniques utilizing network performance predictions that take into consideration the heterogeneity of the processors and networks of distributed systems to dynamically balance the load during execution. The second extends performance monitoring, modeling and prediction techniques that have been focused on parallel systems and broadband network to distributed systems with optical networks and different topologies. The last develops techniques that manage the distributed data such that the actual data location is transparent and the data is accessed efficiently. These research activities are driven by three applications that have been parallelized using MPI, such that the applications can be easily ported to DOT: ENZO, an adaptive cosmological application, Cactus, an open framework used to solve Einstein s equations, and AudioVoice, a virtualized distributed audio application with physical simulations that have real-time deadlines and varying computational demands. Each application presents challenges, which include adaptivity, flexible framework, and simulations with real-time deadlines doc24628 none This proposal was received in response to the Spin Electronics for the 21st century Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 02-036. The proposal focuses on synthesis of n-type dilute magnetic semiconductors based on GaMnN and AlMnN, and on using the resultant materials to fabricate tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) and spin FET devices. Materials growth and basic understanding of the structural, chemical and electrical properties governing the magnetism will be addressed first. A host of characterization tools will be employed to characterize and provide guidance for the optimization of the materials growth. Quantitative measurements of the magnetization as a function of temperature will be made using a SQUID magnetometer. The degree of magnetic order and the magnetic transition temperature will be ascertained from temperature dependence of the magnetization and susceptibility together with the application of Arrott plots. The roles of the nitrogen metal ratio, growth rate and growth temperature on material properties will be investigated. In order to determine the composition and microstructure, samples will be characterized using powder and high resolution XRD, TEM and AES. Once the dependence of magnetic properties on growth conditions has been established, experiments will be performed to determine the role of the Mn both physically and electrically. Bonding information will be obtained from EXAFS and XPS. This information will be correlated with Hall measurement, photoluminescence and photoluminescence excitation spectroscopy measurements to determine the position of the Mn level(s) in the bandgap. In general, samples with the same Mn concentration but different magnetic properties will be compared in order to discern any differences chemically, structurally or electrically which can explain the variance in magnetic behavior. One of the important objectives of this program is to look at the role of co-dopant concentration and carrier concentration on the magnetic and electrical behavior of the material. By varying the Si concentration in GaMnN and AlMnN with a fixed Mn concentration, it may be possible to vary the electron concentration independent of the Mn. This would not only allow independent tailoring of the electrical properties and the magnetic properties for device applications, but would also allow investigation of the role of the metal insulator transition in the ferromagnetic ordering. Through the comparison of GaMnN and AlMnN, it will also be possible to test theoretical predictions regarding the relationship between lattice constituents and Curie temperature. Further, because of the DX centers formed by the Si, AlMnN:Si may prove useful as a light activated magnetic material. By illuminating AlMnN:Si with below bandgap light, it may be possible to alter the magnetic properties. Device applications to be pursued in this program include light activated TMR devices using GaMnN spin sources and AlMnN:Si barriers, and spinFETS using conventional AlGaN GaN HEMTs in which n-GaMnN layers are used as the source and drain regions doc24629 none Luo This proposal was received in response to the Spin Electronics for the 21st Century Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 02-036. The proposal focuses on growth, characterization and device studies of III-V Mn materials and their heterostructures. The goal of this program is to develop ferromagnetic resonant interband tunneling diodes (FRITD) and polarization tunable infrared light emitting diodes. In order to develop optimized materials for these devices, and to demonstrate proof of principle operation, device structures will be fabricated and tested in parallel with the materials growth to provide direct feedback to the materials effort. Preliminary studies at the University at Buffalo (UB) of structural, transport magneto-transport, optical and magnetic properties of the constituent materials for these devices have revealed several interesting problems associated with the incorporation of magnetic Mn++ ions at high sheet densities. More importantly, it was found that the structural, optical, transport and magnetic properties of these materials are closely connected. These studies demonstrate the need for designing materials from the atomic level so that electrical transport, optical and magnetic properties are simultaneously optimized; this is one of the key tasks of this program. Specifically, to tackle these complex problems, it is proposed to form a multidisciplinary research team to carry out comprehensive studies of III-V-based ferromagnetic materials structures, fundamental properties, spin injection interface effects and devices. In this proposed work, the University at Buffalo group will: 1) fabricate systematic sets of samples of GaAs Mn, GaSb Mn, and InAs Mn digital alloys, in which submonolayers of Mn are inserted in the III-V lattice; 2) explore the magnetic, electrical transport, optical properties and structural quality as a function of growth conditions; 3) optimize growth conditions to produce the highest Curie temperatures; 4) fabricate and test device structures. The program is formulated to maximize student involvement in multidisciplinary research by engaging engineering and physics students working together to reach common goals. It will utilize existing infrastructure, both for collaborative research and for student interactions, which has been established for the on-going spintronic materials development project supported by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) focusing on other materials. A total of three full-time graduate students will be supported in this program, a substantial effort made possible by the synergism with the related work. The success of this program will have immediate impact on the key problems in the area of spintronics, namely, improving the Curie temperature and producing materials suitable for practical devices and spin injection into semiconductor heterostructures. Combined with the other materials currently studied in the DARPA-supported project, the materials effort at UB represents one of the strongest in the country. The device fabrication and characterization will lead the way in resolving bottlenecks in materials research related to spin-injection involving III-V materials, and the possibility of electron (rather than hole) spin injection doc24630 none This grant has been co-funded by the Division of Electrical and Communications Systems, and the Division of Chemical and Transport Systems in the Engineering Directorate. This proposal was received in response to the Spin Electronics for the 21st century initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 02-036. The proposal focuses on diluted magnetic semiconductors (DMS), which are promising materials for future electronic and opto-electronic devices that utilize both the charge and the spin of electrons. These materials have potential uses in spin valves, non-volatile magnetic random access memories, quantum computation and other spin polarized transport and optical devices. Much of the recent work has focused on the III-V DMS which have shown excellent low temperature ferromagnetic properties. DMS substitutional III-V alloys with Curie temperatures of 105 K have been realized Their utilization in thin film heterostuctures, however, has been limited because of difficulties in preparing materials with both a high Curie temperature and magnetization. Nevertheless, recent advances in the epitaxy of ferromagnetic semiconductors indicate that III-V materials with high Curie temperatures should be realizable. Furthermore other semiconductor systems including the pseudo III-V compounds II-IV-V2 chalcopyrites have been recently shown to have high Curie temperatures. The proposed work builds upon our recent demonstration of InMnAs alloys with transition temperatures in excess of 300 K prepared by metal-organic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE) as well as our discovery of high Tc II-IV-V2 compounds. MOVPE enables the preparation of III-V DMS with high magnetization not possible by bulk techniques. Specific systems to be investigated include: InMnAs, and II-IV-V2 compounds ZnMnP2 and MnGeP2. While these semiconductors already show considerable promise, the nature of the magnetic species is not well understood. In the proposed program DMS crystals, thin films and quantum structures will be deposited with a range of magnetic ion concentrations to optimize both the Curie temperature and magnetization. The relationship between the atomic structure and magnetic properties will be determined and compared to theory. The highly accurate fully linearized augmented plane wave (FLAPW) method will be used for these calculations. Of specific interest is the extent to which magnetic ion clustering occurs and their role in the formation of alloys with high Curie temperatures. Experimental techniques to be used included high resolution transmission electron microscopy, extended x-ray fine structure analysis (EXAFS), temperature and field dependent magnetization measurements, Hall effect and magneto-optical measurements. Several thin film spintronic electronic and opto-electronic heterostructures will be fabricated and their spin dependent properties measured. The program will involve the training of both doctoral graduate and undergraduate students in magnetic semiconductor materials and device research. Collaborations between Sandia National Laboratories and Northwestern. University will be further developed. International collaboration with U. of Ulsan, South Korea will be undertaken doc24631 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Canli and colleagues will conduct a three-year investigation into how changes in hormonal state affect brain activation patterns during cognitive and emotion-related psychological processes. Specifically, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) will be used to record brain activation patterns in response to cognitive and emotional stimuli in two groups of women. One group will consist of women who will be scanned at different times in the naturally occurring menstrual cycle. The other group will consist of post-menopausal women who will be scanned during a three-week period of estrogen progesterone or placebo (sugar pill) administration. The results of these studies will illuminate our understanding of hormonal regulation of mood and the neural structures that underlie these states. Very little is known about some fundamental aspects of brain function as a function of gender, as suggested by a call by the National Academy of Sciences to devote more biomedical research to sex differences. This work will not only fill a knowledge gap in basic neuroscience, but may also guide future clinical studies to understand the striking sex differences in the incidence of mood disorders such as depression, which strikes as many as four times as many women than men. Furthermore, the proposed work may be of benefit for postmenopausal women weighing the consequences of hormone replacement therapy on brain function. Such decisions will likely be contemplated by large segments of the population, as it is estimated that the average woman will spend at least half her adult life with decreased levels of circulating estrogen doc24632 none This proposal was received in response to the Spin Electronics for the 21st century Initiative, Program solicitation NSF 02-036. The proposal focuses on the study of spin injection phenomena in a variety of spin Light Emitting Diodes (spin-LEDs). The proposed work has an experimental as well as a theoretical component. All the devices that will be used in the experimental part of this proposal have an AlGaAs(n) GaAs AlGAs(p) light emitting diode at their core. The circular polarization of the diode emission is used to determine the relative spin population of carriers confined in the GaAs layer. In ZnMnSe based spin-LEDs the ZnMnSe contact layer is the source of spin polarized electrons. In this well studied system we will explore the effects of resonant heating of the electrons and holes at various components of the device using far infrared (FIR) monochromatic light. Choice of FIR wavelength and of the externally applied magnetic field allows the study of the effects of heating on the diode output of a particular carrier (electron or hole) in a specific component of the device (GaAs, AlGaAs or ZnMnSe layer) . In addition we will be using specially designed, n-type modulation doped ZnMnSe spin LEDs to study the population statistics of electrons confined in the GaAs quantum well of each diode and occupying a number of Landau levels. The second type of spin-LED will use a ferromagnetic layer as spin polarized electron source with the easy magnetization axis perpendicular to the layer axis. Such a device is expected to require only a few hundred Gauss to operate, as opposed to a few tesla required by the recently developed Fe-based spin LEDs in which the easy magnetization axis lies in the Fe layer plane. Finally we plan to explore AlGaMnAs as a potential spin polarized hole injector. In the theoretical component of this proposal we describe investigations of several important phenomena that take place in spin injection LEDs and affect the operation and efficiency of these devices. We propose to investigate the capture process of the carrier in the GaAs wells and the subsequent energy relaxation to the lowest confinement subbands e1 and h1. The role of phonon emission and the associated spin-flip processes will be explored. A very close and synergistic relationship between the experimental and the theoretical components of the proposed work is expected to contribute to the success of the project. An educational aspect of the proposed work will involve two undergraduate students in the program (from Physics and or EE) working closely with graduate students and the co-investigators. Support for the undergraduate students will be requested from the REU program doc24633 none This research project relates to electric power distribution: the delivery of electric power from a generation and transmission system to a point of utilization. An important power system component is the circuit breaker, essentially a switch, used to isolate and separate parts of the system under fault and certain other operating conditions. In this project, a radical departure from mechanical circuit breakers is planned: microelectrornechanical (MEMS) switches shall be operated at very high speed to effectuate rapid system operating configuration changes. The use of MEMS switches will allow the application of advanced optimal operating strategies to permit rapid disconnection of faulted components; rerouting of power from faulted segments to unfaulted segments; utilization of DC distribution in naval applications; and minimization of system losses. The economic aspect of the project shall relate to the optimization of the cost to benefit ratio of innovative distribution system designs. An important element of the project is education over a range of individuals including industrial and electrical engineers, students and industry engineers, researchers and practitioners. The premise of the educational component is the value of cross-fertilization in engineering education. The objective is to utilize cross-disciplinary topics for motivation as well as education -- at the undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education levels. The intent is to expose industrial engineers to electrical engineering topics; engineering students of all disciplines to MEMS technologies; and electrical engineers to optimization and uncertainty (especially from an IE point of view doc24634 none Optically Controlled Spin in Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers: Spin Optoelectonics Alan Kost & Axel Schulzgen This proposal was received in response to the Spin Electronics for the 21st Century initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 02-036. The proposal focuses on the role of spin in new types of optoelectronic devices with applications for optical data communications. In particular, optically induced spin states and spin relaxation in the active layers of semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) will be investigated. An optical pulse with a fluence of about 1 mJ per cm2 can excite electron-hole pairs across the band gap of a semiconductor and saturate absorption leading to a transmission increase of an order of magnitude. A drawback of resonant optical nonlinearities is their rather slow recovery. An optically excited semiconductor returns to its initial state after recombination of the excess electron-hole pairs, in about a nanosecond. This recovery is much too slow for many high speed applications like switching of data at rates of 2.5 Gbits per second. Various techniques have been explored to speed material recovery after optical excitation. Ion implantation has been used to enhance non-radiative recombination in semiconductors and speed recovery to an extent, at the expense of material quality. Electric fields have been applied to sweep away excess charge. Among the most promising approaches to ultra-fast material response is excitation with polarized light. Light with circular polarization is used to excite electrons and holes in definite spin states. Absorption saturation occurs and transmission is increased for light of similar polarization. The absorption recovers rapidly, in picoseconds or less, as dephasing events redistribute the spin. Selective spin excitation in GaAsSb quantum wells shows particular promise. These semiconductors have sub-picosecond spin relaxation times and they function with light that has a wavelength near 1.55 microns - an important wavelength regime for optical communications. Spin relaxation has not been examined in semiconductor optical amplifiers. The plan here is to further the knowledge of spin in semiconductors and investigate devices for ultra-fast optical switching by studying spin in semiconductor optical amplifiers containing InGaAs and GaAsSb quantum wells. Epi-layers will be grown at HRL laboratories - a pioneer and world leader in the growth of novel III-V semiconductor materials. The materials, to be grown on InP and GaSb substrates, will also include cladding layers for light guiding and doped layers to form a p-n junction. Dr. David Chow, a department manager in Microelectronics Laboratory at HRL, will lead the growth effort. The group of Professor Alan Kost at the University of Arizona will design and fabricate the semiconductor optical amplifiers. The composition and thickness layers in the active region of SOAs will be selected for optical gain near 1.55 microns. The composition of optical cladding layers will be chosen for optimum wave guiding. Professor Kost s group will process wafers from HRL into SOAs in a clean room at the University of Arizona. The clean room facility at the Optical Sciences Center at the University has all the equipment needed to make SOAs: including photolighographic equipment, a reactive ion etcher, metal evaporators for the deposition of electrical contacts and a rapid thermal annealer for contact annealing. Professor Kost s group will also perform initial optical characterization of the materials including photoluminescence and optical transmission measurements. The group of Professor Axel Schulzgen will characterize optical amplifiers using their extensive femtosecond laser facility. The semiconductors will be excited using circularly polarized light pulses of wavelength near 1.55 microns. Spin relaxation will be monitored and time-resolved by measuring the transmission of SOAs in a pump-probe configuration. Spin dynamics will be examined as function of the inversion in the gain medium by repeating measurements while varying the electrical bias to the doc24635 none A Comparative fMRI study of the Evolutionary Precursors to Written Language With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Josephs and colleagues will conduct a three-year investigation into whether humans have a specialized brain region for letter recognition, or whether letter recognition is accomplished with the same brain regions used for recognizing other categories, like everyday objects. To test this, the researchers will use fMRI to examine brain activation patterns in human adults as they process letters or pictures of everyday objects. We hypothesize that humans recognize individual letters using the same brain regions used for object recognition, rather than using a specialized brain region dedicated solely to letter recognition. The capacity for language is often thought to set humans apart from other primates, and some scientists have suggested that the human brain has special adaptations to support language. The second goal of this project is to ask the same question about rhesus monkeys brains. Because letters are meaningless and unfamiliar to untrained monkeys, special adaptations for letter recognition should not be detected in monkeys brains. However, if letter-specialized regions are detected in monkeys brains, this specialization is not likely driven by language capacity, but may instead reflect the novelty of letters to monkeys. The present proposal looks in more depth at this controversial idea of brain specialization for language by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare brain activation patterns in humans and rhesus monkeys. One challenge of this research is to determine whether monkeys are paying attention to and processing letters or objects. Like human infants, monkeys cannot express themselves through language or follow spoken or written instructions. However, both infants and monkeys will look longer at stimuli that are new, and looking time will decrease as a stimulus becomes more familiar. Therefore, by recording looking times in rhesus monkeys during fMRI scanning, Dr. Josephs and colleagues can monitor whether rhesus monkeys are paying attention to the stimuli and can distinguish different letters or objects from each other. This novel application of the looking time procedure to an fMRI environment makes comparative studies of humans and other species more feasible than currently available techniques that require months of monkey training. In addition, recording looking time minimizes the need for spoken communication or motor responses while in the MRI scanner. Therefore, this approach may be more widely applied to other special populations that cannot speak or move due to brain damage or developmental disability. The findings from this research are expected to provide important new understanding into evolution and functional organization of the human brain. In addition, several junior researchers will receive outstanding training in research experience doc4943 none Proposal Number: PI: Xi, Hongwei Institution: West Campus, University of Cincinnati TITLE: Imperative Programming with Dependent Types Programming is notoriously error-prone. As a consequence, a great number of approaches have been developed to facilitate program error detection. The proposed research intends to enrich practical imperative programming with a type discipline that allows for specification and inference of significantly more precise information on programs than those enforced in languages such as Java and Standard ML. The primary motivation for developing such a type discipline is to enable the programmer to capture with types more program properties such as memory safety and then enforce these captured properties through type-checking. This practice allows for detecting more program errors in less time. Another motivation is to use the type discipline to generate memory safety proofs for low-level code and thus effectively produce proof-carrying code that asserts its own memory safety. In short, the research studies a type discipline for practical imperative programming at both high and low levels, aiming for producing software that is not only more robust to run but also less costly to maintain doc24637 none Structural and Functional Neuroanatomy of Language Laterality With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Eckert and Binder and colleagues will conduct a two-year investigation of the brain specialization for language. Most people are dependent on brain areas in the left hemisphere to process language. Only rarely is the right hemisphere essential for understanding or producing language. The reasons for this left-hemisphere language dominance remain unexplained. One popular explanation suggests that larger left hemisphere language-related areas, compared to the right hemisphere, predispose language to organize in the left hemisphere. Superior verbal ability may stem from this structural and functional organization. The present research project tests this explanation for language organization, as well as an alternative explanation that proposes that left hemisphere language-related areas are not the basis for language dominance, but interact with language dominance to predict verbal ability. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and the intracarotid anesthetization procedure will be used to assess language laterality in normal (functional imaging only) and epilepsy subjects. Anatomical data will be collected from MRI scans. This study will be the first to directly test hypotheses about the relation between language, anatomical asymmetries, and cognition. In addition, this study will increase understanding of functional imaging results by examining how individual variation in neuroanatomy influences individual variability in functional imaging patterns of activation doc24638 none This proposal was received in response to the Spin Electronics for the 21st Century Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 02-036. The proposal focuses on the development of a room temperature ferromagnetic compound semiconductor material, Ga1-xMnxN, for spintronic devices based on the spin property of electrons. Many advances have been made in developing the materials and devices for III-V compound semiconductor materials doped with manganese (Mn), with Ga1-xMnxAs showing the most promise. However, the low Curie temperatures (Tc) for these materials require potential devices to be operated at temperatures below 77K. There is a need to produce a new class of materials that can operate at, or near, room temperature to facilitate the ease of measurement and the eventual commercialization of this technology. The III-Nitrides will be excellent for this application because recent theoretical predictions show that Ga1-xMnxN could have Tc higher than room temperature. The Ga1-xMnxN can also be integrated into existing base of microelectronics or optoelectronics existing for GaN-based devices. In this work it is proposed to produce Ga1-xMnxN by Metalorganic Chemical Vapor Deposition, the growth technique of choice for GaN based devices. There are no published reports of the growth of Ga1-xMnxN by this growth technique at this time. A systematic study of the growth of Ga1-xMnxN will be completed. Detailed characterization of the physical properties Ga1-xMnxN will be investigated using x-ray analysis, Hall measurements, time resolved photoluminescence, and other techniques. A novel Ga1-xMnxN Ga1-xAlxN Ga1-xInxN LED structure will be grown so that spin injection can easily be investigated at room temperature. The broader impact of this work is clear: Spintronic devices that can be operated at or near room temperature will be required if quantum computing based on compound semiconductor materials is going to have a commercial viability in the future doc24639 none EIA 02- DeFanti, Thomas A. Grossman, Robert L.; Leigh, Jason; Nelson, Peter C.; Yu, Oliver University of Illinois Chicago CISE RR: Matching Advanced Visualization and Intelligent Data Mining to High-Performance Experimental Networks This project, developing techniques for advanced grid computing with focus on visualization and data-mining applications, aims at setting up a high-performance, high-bandwidth Grid matched with Visualization and Data Mining Research. The Grid is made up of Lambdas (clusters of PCs) that are connected by high-bandwidths connections to other clusters. Software and toolkits to enable high-performance applications will be built with the goal of attaining a high-speed optical metropolitan-area network to be used in the data mining and visualization applications. The project expands grid technology to infrastructure, protocols, network memory and distributed control, and applications in constraint logic programming. Since optical networking technology is rapidly migrating from ultra-expensive long-haul carrier implementations to affordable regional- and metro-area community networks, this project explores inherent flexibilities in these new technologies to support large-scale data, visualization, and collaboration-intensive applications with very advanced real-time demands. Thus, application-aware software and middleware will be created to help interconnect tomorrow s terascale-class machines with distributed petabyte data stores, remote sensors, instrumentation and visualization over gigabit sec to terabit sec networks. LambdaNodes, defined as PC clusters with storage and visualization coupled to like clusters by numerous wavelengths (called lambdas), will be used connected by lambda networks to create a prototype metropolitan-scale LambdaGrid. With the goal of optimally matching data mining and visualization to high-performance optical networks with e-Science and homeland security model applications as expected drivers (achieving a 10x or greater end-to-end improvement over today), the equipment and support enables the following: 1. Matching data-mining and visualization capabilities on clusters to emerging wavelength-rich networks, 2. Distributing parallel computation and rendering for high-resolution volume visualization, 3. Providing applications signaling and control of both electronically and optically switched lambdas, 4. Measuring and monitoring multi-gigabit circuits over multiple wavelengths, 5. Providing users with networks that have known and knowable bandwidth and latency, 6. Investigating high-availability uninterrupted cluster computing to support time-critical collaborations, 7. Addressing real-time applications in security domain, and, eventually, security of the data as well, 8. Integrating metropolitan-scale LambdaGrids with the emerging Global Grid and the National TeraGrid, and 9. Incorporating distributed data mining and visualization into undergraduate African-American-centered coursework and research through the Virtual Harlem Project doc24640 none Mapping Higher Level Visual Areas in Humans With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Sereno and colleagues will conduct a three-year investigation aimed at generating comprehensive, high resolution maps of the borders and internal organization of intermediate and higher level human visual areas in occipital, parietal, temporal, frontal cortex using functional magnetic resonance imaging. The cerebral cortex of each hemisphere in humans contains more than one hundred distinct areas. Many of these areas are concerned with vision. The organization of lower level visual areas is well understood; but the location and number of higher level visual areas is much less clear and the goal of Dr. Sereno s project to produce insight into these areas. These maps he discovers will be made available to other researchers interested in determining how these visual areas differ in their functions. By analogy with the human genome project, this study will be carried out with the participation of a small group of professional subjects . The first set of experiments extends traditional methods for mapping visual areas (phase-encoded, surface-based analysis using moving, windowed checkerboards, and a simple fixation task) by turning to more attentionally captivating windowed stimuli (television action programs, videos of moving faces and objects, more complex monitoring tasks). The second set of experiments extends the mapping stimulus set to include linguistic visual stimuli (reading short stories at systematically varying retinotopic locations). These two kinds of stimuli are better suited to activating higher visual areas, but at the same time, are capable of revealing their borders and internal structure. To successfully carry out high resolution mapping studies, it is crucial to correct the subtle spatial distortions present in functional scans before the data is overlaid onto a cortical surface reconstruction. Therefore, the third main part of the proposal focuses on improving distortion correction methods (including pre- and post-hoc corrections for static field inhomogeneities and gradient nonlinearities). The programs implementing these methods will be freely distributed to other imaging centers, in a manner similar to the way our cortical surface reconstruction programs (FreeSurfer) have been freely distributed and maintained. The findings from this research are expected to provide important new understanding into anatomical and functional organization of the human brain. These findings will have significant impact on clinical and basic neuroscience. In addition, several junior researchers will receive outstanding research experience doc24641 none The Earth Science Storybook Project The Earth Science Storybook Project is a pilot project based upon the premise that current reform efforts in science education must have a focus on teacher education. The project develops a process whereby university faculty can serve as positive mentors to preservice teachers and foster sound professional development for teachers. The project presents preservice teachers the opportunity to research and write standards-based children s literature (storybooks) in earth science and test the idea that use of creative skills will be a meaningful learning experience leading to a more successful degree of professional development for teachers. Earth scientists help the preservice teachers to create scientifically sound products that teach concepts required by state and national standards for the K-4 grade levels. These geoscientists work with the participants to design simple experiments that will be included in the storybook narratives designed to promote scientific investigation in K-4 classes. The emphasis on the design and implementation of experiments gives the participating preservice teachers and K-4 students a glimpse of the way science is practiced. Elementary education majors enrolled in an introductory geology class at Brigham Young University are mentored as they research a specific earth science topic and write a short storybook on that topic. Potential storybook topics are taken from national and state science education standards and are appropriate for children at the K-4 level. Participating preservice teachers are mentored throughout the process of creating their storybooks in order to foster development of positive attitudes toward scientific inquiry and enhanced pedagogical content knowledge in science. The storybooks will be professionally illustrated. As the project continues past the pilot stage, it will focus on dissemination of the storybooks into a local school district. Assessment of the storybooks themselves will be conducted in terms of their affective outcomes on teachers and students and their effectiveness in fostering development of content knowledge for K-4 students at the district level doc24642 none Our study investigates landscape change and plague occurrence in the black-tailed prairie dog and associated species, to understand the human health and ecological risks of landscape alteration and disease introduction. Black-tailed prairie dogs have been considered a keystone species of short-grass prairie ecosystems in the western US. The abundance and distribution of prairie dogs may influence the occurrence of many native plant and animal species. Blood diseases like plague spread through contact between black-tailed prairie dogs and co-occurring alternate mammalian hosts. Through a combination of field data collection, laboratory studies, and computer simulation modeling, we will examine ecological relationships of hosts, vectors, and pathogens at the local, landscape, and regional scales. Because our study system includes landscape change and recent disease introduction, it is representative of problems faced by many ecosystems as habitat fragmentation and disease transport increase worldwide. By focusing on this host-vector-disease system we will isolate anthropogenic effects that influence disease emergence and resurgence. By carefully examining the modes and scales of contact within this complex community, we hope to discover the potential for ecological and epidemiological keystone effects of prairie dogs. This discovery will elucidate whether anthropogenic effects on ecological systems can have predictable consequences for disease transmission and dynamics doc24643 none FMRI Analysis of Emotion Regulation and Its Developmental Trajectory With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Gabrieli and colleagues will conduct a three-year investigation of the maturation of the brain systems that support emotion regulation using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a noninvasive technique that can identify brain regions recruited for specific emotion and cognition processes. Children and young adults, ages 8 to 30, will participate in two experiments that examine how they regulate an initial emotional response to either highly negative or highly positive photos. These studies will identify what brain regions initially respond to negative or positive emotional experiences, and what brain regions then support cognitive regulation of those emotional responses. Of greatest interest is how these brain responses mature, or change, from late childhood through early adulthood. Emotion regulation, the subject of this research, is a fundamental aspect of human experience and behavior, and the interaction between thoughts (cognition) and feelings (emotions) that guides how people evaluate and act on what is going on around them. Successful emotion regulation makes people resilient to difficult circumstances, and thus can help people avoid distress or psychiatric diseases such as major depression. Successful regulation also promotes prosocial behaviors, such as not behaving violently in response to feelings of anger. It is generally thought that children and adolescents have emotions as strongly felt as do adults, but that the cognitive regulation of emotion matures slowly as children and adolescents learn how to regulate their feelings in ways that promote positive social interaction and long-term mental health. Risky behaviors that pose severe health threats for adolescents may reflect the faster maturation of emotion than cognitive aspects of emotion regulation. Although emotion regulation is thus important for health and for social functioning, little is known about its underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms. For example, it is unknown whether people use the same brain systems to regulate negative and positive emotions. Further, nothing is known about how these mechanisms support the normal maturation of emotion regulation in childhood and adolescents. The findings from this research may also illuminate the roots of mental diseases that reflect a disadvantageous development of emotion regulation pathways of the human brain doc24644 none Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) are not yet reliable and efficient enough for electrical and mechanical power demands in Microsystems. Ball bearing mechanisms are expected to increase long-term reliability and efficiency in micro-machines through minimizing friction and wear, and to provide robustness and stability for moving parts while avoiding fabrication complexities. Therefore, micro-ball bearing technology is expected to have a pivotal impact on micro-machinery applications such as micro-generators, micro-pumps, and micro-coolers. Our research program investigates the use of micro-ball bearing technology for MEMS and micro-machinery applications. This goal is addressed by developing a MEMS-based electrostatically actuated micro-motor integrated with silicon micromachined bearings which house stainless-steel micro-balls as support mechanism between rotor and stator. The micro-motor is based on a novel scheme as a 6-phase, bottom-drive linear variable-capacitance micro-motor supported on micro-ball bearings. The proposed research activity focuses on (1) design, modeling, and dynamic simulation to realize an optimized structure and geometry for the device, (2) technology development to improve precision fabrication in conventional processing methods while minimizing stress-inducing processes and carefully characterizing each unit step, and (3) long-term reliability study to investigate (i) the operation of the electrical components, such as the electrical rotor and stator under controlled environment, and (ii) the dynamic behavior of the micro-ball bearings and their effect on the performance of the device. The educational objectives in this program are based on an interactive learning environment structured to incorporate research objectives into both undergraduate and graduate level courses in MEMS and Microsystems at the University of Maryland doc24645 none Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos Daniel L. Boley; William K. Durfeet; Maria L. Gini; Bradley J. Nelson University of Minnesota-Twin Cities CISE RR (Collaborative): Teams of Miniature Mobile Robots This project, redesigning and manufacturing a team of Scout-Ranger robots, improvises on the current scout design through novel design schemes, software development, sensory fabrication, and processing sensory data in real time. The research extends work based on a previous generation of Scouts. The institution developed a heterogeneous robotic team emphasizing the Scout robot, launched and controlled by a larger platform, the Ranger. After deployment, Scouts have a unique combination of mobility modes including rolling and hopping, multiple sensing capabilities for navigation (e.g., cameras, microphones), full communications for data and instructions (controlled by cellular phones), and onboard computational resources. Their functionality is increased by actuated wheels and miniature grappling hooks and can serve applications such as reconnaissance, earthquake rescue operations, homeland security space exploration, fire rescue missions, hostage release operations, etc. Their design requires a compromise in power, sensor types, locomotion, and size. However, rather than concentrating on size, this work focuses primarily on communications, sensor fabrication, and sensor placement. Solutions to research problems are sought in areas of miniature-robot design, communication for distributed robotics (especially in low-bandwidth situations), and resource allocation for distributed robotics. Specifically: 1. Designs of miniature robots: modifying original scout design, giving special care to image-processing 2. Software support for Robot Teams: sharing resources leading to decision making and planning 3. Tradeoffs between sharing communication channels and performance in motion detection 4. Sensor fabrication in the micro fabrication lab 5. Analysis of sensory data (images) of the team of robots; seeking optical positioning of the sensor to maximize coverage redundancy 6. Analysis of traffic patterns (of humans) in a building 7. Detection of anomalies on those patterns, or detection of unusual situations (i.e. smoke): using method of Principal Direction Divisive Partitioning 8. Innovative uses of Scouts: tele-rehabilitation, dynamic hopping devices, etc. The educational plan includes the incorporation and mentoring of women and minority students. The robots will be used not only in Computer Vision and Robotics classes, also, in Algorithms, Data Structures, Operating Systems, and Artificial Intelligence. Outreach activities, proposed for K-12, along with public outreach complement the research agendas doc24646 none Edward B. Allen David A. Dampier; Thomas Philip Mississippi State University CISE RR: Resources for Software Engineering Research This proposal from an EPSCoR state, enhancing capabilities for software-engineering research, aims at acquiring a data base server, a configuration management system, and workstations to support the following projects: 1. CAREER: Assessment of Open-Source Software for High-Performance Computing, 2. Using Pathfinder Networks to Model Perceptions of Software Requirements, 3. Automating Steps in Software Evolution, and 4. Integrated Information Sifting for Scientific Instruments. The first project ascertains the quality of the software using retrospective case studies by building and evaluating models that could have developed during the historical projects or releases. The second provides methods for uncovering divergent perceptions of software requirements by stakeholders and developers, thus giving an early indication of potential requirements issues in light of conceptual differences among groups. The third, creating automated techniques for semantics-based slicing and change-merging that will facilitate the reliable delivery of small increments, devises automated methods for incorporating incremental changes into software systems as they evolve. The last project, producing of imagery, develops an integrated set of algorithms and tools for analysis of scientific-instrument data to support on-line monitoring and process control. The information sifting approach includes artificial neural networks for classification of spectral images, statistical methods for rapid comparison of spectra, rule-based models of thermal imaging, and fuzzy classification using autonomous agents doc24647 none Under this award, the American Institute of Biological Sciences will continue its management of the Dissertation Symposia on Chemical Oceanography (DISCO), which it has run under joint NSF ONR NOAA sponsorship since . From the time of its inception twenty-four years ago, the objectives of DISCO have been (1) to bring together in a common forum recent doctoral recipients in chemical oceanography to discuss their cutting-edge dissertation research and (2) to encourage the formation of long-term scientific collaborative relationships early in their professional lives. DISCO has been a resounding success -- so much so that the enthusiastic publicity generated in the academic community led to DISCO becoming the de facto gold standard that led to the organization of other DISCO-like dissertation symposia in other branches of the earth sciences doc24648 none This collaborative proposal with Northwestern University (Taylor, 02- ) and the University of Chicago (Foster, 02- ), acquiring data nodes and compute nodes at five sites, contributes to build a Distributed Optical Testbed (DOT). The DOT system, a product of the paradigm shift from large-scale applications running on large parallel systems at single sites to those running on distributed systems, has come about by the availability of high-speed optical networks (E.g., Starlight, TeraGrid 40 Gb s network, the PacificRail 10 Gb s network). This shift necessitates techniques that allow applications to efficiently utilize distributed systems. In contrast to parallel systems, these systems must exploit two characteristics: Heterogeneity of resources (processors and networks) and Dynamic changes in performance of shared resources, especially wide area networks. The system, consisting of Linux clusters at six geographically different sites interconnected via two existing research DWDM networks, I-WIRE and OMNInet, involves the following sites: Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA), Northwester University Chicago Campus (NU-C), Northwestern University Evanston Campus (NU-E), and the University of Chicago (UC). DOT will facilitate the following research activities in the area of distributed applications: Dynamic Load Balancing (Taylor) Performance Monitoring and Prediction (Dinda, Sun, Taylor) Data Management (Choudhary, Foster) The first activity develops techniques utilizing network performance predictions that take into consideration the heterogeneity of the processors and networks of distributed systems to dynamically balance the load during execution. The second extends performance monitoring, modeling and prediction techniques that have been focused on parallel systems and broadband network to distributed systems with optical networks and different topologies. The last develops techniques that manage the distributed data such that the actual data location is transparent and the data is accessed efficiently. These research activities are driven by three applications that have been parallelized using MPI, such that the applications can be easily ported to DOT: ENZO, an adaptive cosmological application, Cactus, an open framework used to solve Einstein s equations, and AudioVoice, a virtualized distributed audio application with physical simulations that have real-time deadlines and varying computational demands. Each application presents challenges, which include adaptivity, flexible framework, and simulations with real-time deadlines doc24649 none This project, performing studies related to minimizing the energy consumed by mobile cellular and wireless networking hardware, builds a framework to understand, model and measure power consumption, as well as dynamic allocation of resources to affect power consumption in portable multimedia communication devices. Three platforms constitute the focus for implementing signal processing algorithms (general microprocessors, e.g., Pentium and ARM), digital signal processors (DSP), and reconfigurable hardwarefine grain field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) and coarse grain Application Specific Programmable Processors (ASPP). The work considers two communications systems that will carry the majority of traffic in wireless Internets: cellular networks and wireless local area networks (WLAN). Because battery life depends not only on total energy drain but also on the voltages employed in the terminal and the temporal profile of energy consumption, the research includes experiments with lithium batteries to determine the effects on battery life of continuous discharge and pulsed discharge with various peak-to-average ratios. The results of these experiments are then merged with the results of signal processing and communications studies in an energy-management testbed that verifies predictions and demonstrates the effects of the new adaptation techniques. Hence, the following four components form the research plan: Theoretical and simulation studies exploring power allocation among source coding, channel coding, encryption, and transmission in a multimedia, multiuser setting Measurement and design study examining the power and energy requirements of signal processing algorithms and producing a software library of software modules, FPGA configurations, and ASPPs that can be dynamically selected by a portable device Measurement and design study creating an intelligent power supply system that takes into account effects of battery discharge characteristics and demands of algorithms implemented on microprocessors, DSPs, FPGAs, and ASPPs. Creation of experimental testbed running in the WLAN network from the results of the first three studies The experimental testbed addresses three areas of research: Power allocation among different components of the processing pipeline (source coding, channel coding, encryption, transmission); Power and energy requirements of signal processing algorithms, producing a library of various granularity modules (software, FPGA, ASPP) to be selected dynamically; and Power supply system that takes into account both battery characteristics and algorithms needs. On the educational side, specific plans involve undergraduate students hands-on work, organization of workshop, and summer school. Industrial partners and international collaboration also form part of the research doc24650 none This project, building a mobile computing system, provides a set of mobile, connected, location-aware computing units consisting of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and wearable displays with some input ability to allow experimentation to affect deployment on the types of interfaces, applications, and technologies needed as these devices become commonplace. Devices will carry out a wide range of experimentation, from tightly controlled experiments to broad field studies, from previously planned extensions of existing research to last-minute ideas created by student projects, and from small pilot studies to large deployment studies. The infrastructure supports research projects in human computer interaction (HCI), recommender systems, and spatial data management for environments where users are mobile; specifically, Ubiquitous Peripheral Social Interaction (UPSI), Location-Aware Recommender Systems, and Spatial Data Management for Location Aware Mobile Computing. The first project presumes availability of several wireless communication channels. Information, at the periphery of users attention, is constantly streamed to the device and displayed as a scrolling ticker. A user carries a pocket computer and wears a Networked Wrist Device linked by Bluetooth. This approach presents challenges in populating and managing the information model driving the interaction, designing the interface for the networked wrist display, coupling the wrist computer and PDA, and identifying the types of tasks for which this interaction paradigm is suitable. Using algorithmic and interface research, pilot tests, real-world experiments, and metrics, the second project looks into suitable applications among wired, disconnected, and wireless connected recommenders. Given local and temporal patterns of users, this project examines when it is appropriate to interrupt its user with a recommendation, how to present recommendations most effectively across multi-device interfaces, and how to compute recommendations when the user is disconnected from the network. The last project looks into the requirements of spatial data management systems for applications like mobile location based recommendation systems. The project gathers a trace-based workload from location aware recommendation systems to evaluate solutions for critical design decisions such as algorithms for map compression and predictive pre-fetching strategies to cache relevant segments of maps based on past spatial queries, scheduled meetings locations, and related information. The educational plan includes integration of the platform into courses and student involvement in summer internships doc24651 none This project, developing and maintaining robotics kits for nationwide research, aims at facilitating research into robot-assisted urban search and rescue (USAR) by providing resources to overcome barriers presenting research involvement (lack of access to domain experts and meaningful sites combined with the need for expensive specialized equipment), while at the same time increasing the availability of mobile robots for an emergency response. This work supports the Expansion of existing caches of robots suitable for USAR research in two different regions, Training on these robots, data collection, and access to these robots and data sets via the Internet, Field data collection exercises with fire rescue professionals at USAR sites, and Loan of robots to individual researchers. The work facilitates groups, without rescue robots or access to domain experts, to have access to data and or work directly with USAR robots and rescue experts in the field. Rescue robotics is a complex domain in need of fundamental breakthroughs in distributed computing, networking and communications, software engineering and interoperability, real-time multi-threaded control, user interfaces and human-robot interaction, robotics, sensors, and artificial intelligence (AI). Hence, the Computing Research Association declared this research area a grand challenge. Four types of research equipment, micro-robots, mini-robots, image processing and video capturing equipment, and sensors, enable researchers to collect the data and evaluate their work in the cited areas. In addition to integrating existing technology and eliciting effective cooperation between professionals and researchers in the case of an emergency, the project provides education in robotics for homeland defense, and the potential to safeguard lives of rescue workers and locate victims doc24652 none This proposal, developing a real-time wireless communication testbed of six reconfigurable transceiver nodes that operate in the 900MHz or 2.4GHz ISM band, enables conducting experiments on network protocols and communications techniques. Performing real-time experiments over real-life wireless communication channels, the infrastructure enables three projects. Collaborative Communications, Wireless Medium Access Control Protocol Design and Experiments, and Reliability-Based Hybrid ARQ. The first project concerns collaborative transmission and reception among multiple nodes in a wireless network. Techniques of distributed space-time coding and distributed and iterative decoding will be employed respectively to achieve transmit and receive diversity. The second project uses the test-bed to test new medium access control (MAC) protocols that employ a set of back-off algorithms designed to avoid potential future collisions and reduce the percentage of idle slots. These MAC protocols have the advantage of fast collision resolution and hence give much higher throughput. The last project develops and investigates a new hybrid automatic repeat request (ARQ) scheme that can take advantage of reliability estimates generated by soft-input, soft-output (SISO) decoders. This ARQ scheme transmits additional information for the unreliable bits, and this information is used to do additional decoding. The test-bed will be utilized to perform real-time experiments on a real-life channel to examine the throughput and delay performance of this ARQ scheme, which can be evaluated via simulations otherwise. On the educational side, the platform provides integrated design training to undergraduate students. Conducting simulation studies on algorithms developed on the research projects, students will employ the test-bed to perform off-line experiments over a real communication channel to identify possible weaknesses of the algorithms developed based on theoretical models and then fine tune the algorithms to produce a real-time FPGA implementation doc24653 none Aravind K. Joshi Mark Liberman University of Pennsylvania CISE RR: Discourse Penn Trebank and Multimodal FORM: Development of Two Richly Annotated Corpora This project, providing critical resources for research discourse modeling and conversational interaction, aims at developing new technologies and systems for information retrieval and human computer interaction. Centering on the construction of annotated corpora, two large-scale resources, one in the discourse domain and one in the dialog domain will be built: 1. Discourse Penn Treebank (DPTB) and 2. MultiFORM: Augmenting the FORM corpus with body movements, speech, and intonation. The former project develops a large scale and reliably annotated corpus that will encode coherence relations associated with discourse connectives, including their argument structure and anaphoric links, thus exposing a clearly defined level of discourse structure and supporting the extraction of a range of inferences associated with discourse connectives. This annotation will be on top of the Penn Treebank (PTB) annotations as well as the predicate-argument annotations of PTB (called the Proposition Bank or Prop Bank). The latter involves a corpus of gesture-annotated videos, FORM that was designed to be extensible in order to eventually represent the entire multimodal experience of conversational interaction. This multimodal FORM , MultiFORM, will be created by adding body movement, speech and syntactic structure, and intonation. Large-scale annotated corpora have played a critical role in speech and natural language research by enabling large-scale integration of statistical knowledge (derived from the corpora) with linguistic knowledge (as represented in annotations) leading to scientific and technological advances. Representative examples constitute robust parsing and automatic extraction of relations and coreferences and their applications to information extraction, question answering, summarization, and machine translation. PTB, a resource developed a decade ago, represents an example of such a resource that impacts natural language processing worldwide. PTB deals with corpora at the sentence level warranting a new large scale and reliable discourse and dialog structure annotated corpora. Although intellectual and practical connections exist between studies of the structures of discourse and dialog, the initial requirements for resources to study these areas diverge while overlapping in conception. On the discourse side, we need for corpora that deals with the kinds of structures found in composed text such as journalistic articles. The dialog side needs to focus on interactions among people and on extemporized rather than pre-composed material doc24654 none Ponisseril Somasundaran, Et al Columbia University With the help of the Electron Spin Resonance Spectrometer (ESR) instrument acquired previously, the principal investigators have been able to establish techniques for probing polymer and surfactant layers at solid-liquid interfaces. Results of these studies have already provided some new information on the nature of the adsorbed microstructures. ESR spectroscopy, in conjunction with other techniques, has proved to be a powerful tool for studying molecular mechanisms of adsorption. The purchase of the Bruker EMX 6 1 HX ESR will enable them to analyze directly in-situ the nanostructue conformation and orientation of polymers and surfactants at solid-liquid interfaces and, importantly, changes in them as a function of system parameters and to develop guidelines for optimum conditions and reagents for efficient interfacial processes. The broader impact of this grant would be that an onsite ESR facility would aid in the endeavor of tailoring certain graduate courses to include practical training in spectroscopic methods. Also, it would produce professional scientists and engineers in the area of interfacial science doc24655 none This award provides funds to build a state of the art humanoid robot experimental facility at CMU s Robotics Institute. Developing humanoid robots pushes robotics and automation technology forward. Researchers build humanoid robots to test and explore their theories about how humans work. Humanoid robots are beginning to play an economically important role in the service segment of our society. Primarily, humanoid robots inspire. For example Japan is publicizing its humanoid robotics research to get more children interested in science and engineering, currently a major concern in the U.S. The PIs will purchase an upper body humanoid from Sarcos Research Corporation as well as two smaller robots and an advanced interface device. Using the proposed equipment, the PIs will undertake a number of projects which fall into four broad classes: core robotics and vision research that substantially increases the capabilities and skills of robots (Atkeson, Hebert, Rizzi, Pollard), authoring tools that will make it easier for people who are not roboticists and perhaps even not programmers to develop new applications on robots (Hodgins, Hudson, Kuffner), application prototyping and assessment of humanoid robots in various application domains (Pausch, Kiesler), and unifying applications, which involve a large number of interdisciplinary researchers. In addition to the expected robotics researchers, the team includes researchers from HCI and sociology to work on how these robots might be made easy to use and how they will fit into society. Taken together, these projects will significantly expand the ability both to control humanoid robots and to develop applications on them. These projects will also increase fundamental understanding of the power of the human form in a robot, and our fundamental understanding of human motion. The PIs will encourage other researchers at CMU and in the U.S. to use the facility, taking advantage of strengths in vision, speech, and reasoning. Finally, the PIs are using humanoid robots to explore computational models of how human behavior is generated. Using a humanoid robot as a research tool forces the researchers to deal with a complex physical apparatus and complex tasks. The knowledge required to recreate human motions will also serve to increase our understanding of how people move and may lead to advances in physical rehabilitation and sports medicine. In contrast to most biomechanical research, the PIs will attempt to refine scientific understanding of both the functional components of human motion such as locomotion and grasping and also the subtle stylistic components that make it appear normal, humanlike, and expressive. Combining these two components should make the models useful for analyzing the performance of aspiring athletes as well as diagnosing individual problems with locomotion and manipulation doc24656 none This proposal, acquiring a PHANTOM haptic device that can display full force and torque feedback to the user, aims at supporting two haptic research projects inspired by applications such as virtual assembly, virtual prototyping, remote collaboration, and teleoperation. The following projects will benefit from the instrumentation: Haptic Rendering of Complex Contact States and Compliant Motion and Cooperative Virtual Object Manipulation. The former is concerned with how to simulate and render, with high fidelity and in real time, the effect felt by a human operator due to the contacts involving the part he she holds and other parts during manual assembly in a virtual environment. The device will enable a human operator to feel the resulted collision and reaction forces and torques to test the quality and fidelity of simulation. The latter project is concerned with how to simulate, again with high fidelity and real time, the cooperative manipulation process of physical objects in a virtual world via haptic devices. With full force and torque display from the device, the collaborative parties can obtain the necessary cues for effective coordination. This project provides the opportunity for cross-discipline collaboration between the PIs doc24657 none Paul R. Woodward David H. Du; Ernest F. Retzel; Jon B. Weissman; Ted J. Wetherbee University of Minnesota-Twin Cities CISE RR: Collaborative Data Analysis and Visualization This project, creating a high-speed network that will enable coupling a large number of PCs and Macintoshes to tackle computationally-intensive problems during idle times, enhances the collaboration between the University of Minnesota Laboratory for Computational Science and Engineering (LCSE), Center for Computational Genomics and Bioinformatics (CCGB), Academic Distributed Computing Services (ADCS), the computer science research group, and Fon du Lac Tribal and Community College. The facility will be used as a platform to perform off-line batch jobs related to visualization and data mining. Augmenting network, storage, and graphics rendering capacity for a pre-existing student lab, the project will link together approximately 100 workstations at UMN via a Gigabit Ethernet network to service an interdisciplinary group or researchers. UMN collaborating teams, with on exception, will move the new Digital Technology Center (DTC) into a common location at the heart of the campus. This common location creates a special opportunity to exploit the workstations as a powerful data analysis and visualization engine for the genomics and scientific visualization applications of CCGB and the LCSE. The use of workstations during the time of low student utilization is expected to provide five-to ten-fold increases in data storage capacity and bandwidth, data mining processing power, and image rendering power. The collaboration with computer scientists, on distributed computing techniques and networked storage technology, plays a vital role in realizing the benefits. The project, involving two students from Fond du Lac Tribal College, provides platforms for research in cluster network design, cost-effective commodity-based storage area network design and operation, distributed computing, and distributed visualization. A fully connected Gigabit Ethernet network will be built by the collaborating team. This network-switching fabric will interconnect the machines of the ADCS lab and the machine and network attached storage of the CCGB and LCSE. A gigabit Ethernet link to UMN OC-12 Internet-2 connection will enable large amounts of data to be brought into the combined environment (e.g., NSF TeraGrid). The project leverages resources and expertise to create a combined capacity for data analysis and visualization far greater than existed in any one of the participating labs before the collaboration doc24658 none This collaborative proposal with Illinois Institute of Technology (Sun, 02- ) and the University of Chicago (Foster, 02- ), acquiring data nodes and compute nodes at five sites, contributes to build a Distributed Optical Testbed (DOT). The DOT system, a product of the paradigm shift from large-scale applications running on large parallel systems at single sites to those running on distributed systems, has come about by the availability of high-speed optical networks (E.g., Starlight, TeraGrid 40 Gb s network, the PacificRail 10 Gb s network). This shift necessitates techniques that allow applications to efficiently utilize distributed systems. In contrast to parallel systems, these systems must exploit two characteristics: Heterogeneity of resources (processors and networks) and Dynamic changes in performance of shared resources, especially wide area networks. The system, consisting of Linux clusters at six geographically different sites interconnected via two existing research DWDM networks, I-WIRE and OMNInet, involves the following sites: Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA), Northwester University Chicago Campus (NU-C), Northwestern University Evanston Campus (NU-E), and the University of Chicago (UC). DOT will facilitate the following research activities in the area of distributed applications: Dynamic Load Balancing (Taylor) Performance Monitoring and Prediction (Dinda, Sun, Taylor) Data Management (Choudhary, Foster) The first activity develops techniques utilizing network performance predictions that take into consideration the heterogeneity of the processors and networks of distributed systems to dynamically balance the load during execution. The second extends performance monitoring, modeling and prediction techniques that have been focused on parallel systems and broadband network to distributed systems with optical networks and different topologies. The last develops techniques that manage the distributed data such that the actual data location is transparent and the data is accessed efficiently. These research activities are driven by three applications that have been parallelized using MPI, such that the applications can be easily ported to DOT: ENZO, an adaptive cosmological application, Cactus, an open framework used to solve Einstein s equations, and AudioVoice, a virtualized distributed audio application with physical simulations that have real-time deadlines and varying computational demands. Each application presents challenges, which include adaptivity, flexible framework, and simulations with real-time deadlines doc24659 none This proposal, investigating the power, energy, performance, and functionality issues and trade-offs involved in cluster environments, aims at acquiring equipment for research on power aware clusters of servers. The bulk of the infrastructure consists of a cluster of blade servers. Since blade servers consume less power and allow finer control of power states than traditional servers, they are considered ideal for power and energy conservation research. The infrastructure supports two research studies in: Strategies for conserving power and energy in cluster-based Internet servers, such as high-capacity WWW, database, or file servers Computation and data servers in the context of a tamper-resistant and fault-tolerant sensor network. The former project involves servers that support most WWW data hosting centers, Internet companies, and a large number of teaching and research institutions, but consume significant amounts of power and energy. Conserving these resources is critical to reduce the installation and operation costs of these clusters. Conserving power and energy without degrading performance (or at least without degrading excessively) constitutes the challenge. The cluster blades proposed enable designs and experiments with techniques that can schedule the demand for resources, permitting transitioning from active to low-power model without relevant performance penalty. The project experiments with heterogeneous servers comprising combination of blades and traditional, power-hungry servers. The latter project designs the sensor network to identify, monitor, and track objects or subjects within a physical space. This overall space is divided into subspaces, where each subspace has its own server (or small cluster of servers), and all servers are connected via a network. The design allows local and global processing and evaluation of sensor data. Again, energy efficiency becomes crucial in this context because the servers need to be able to survive power failures for extended periods of time and still provide critical services. The cluster of blades enables the study of energy behavior of the critical server tasks in this environment, as well as experiment with techniques that can reduce the energy consumption of these tasks without noticeably degrading their performance and functionality. On the educational side, the blades and the systems will be exploited developing operating systems, distributed computing, and compiler courses. Power and energy consumption, as well as performance, design, implementation, and evaluation guidelines will be promoted doc24660 none This project, supporting experimental validation of computer vision algorithms for shape modeling and analysis, aims at building two independent systems to support computer vision. Methods for shape reconstruction and reflectance recovery, termed Helmholtz reciprocity stereopsis and light field reconstruction that exploit previously neglected physical principles, are able to recover surface shape regardless of the object s BRDF. The two special purpose imaging systems will be built at Columbia University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The Columbia rig, composed of sixteen imaging modules that can be arranged in different configurations, directly supports research in Helmholtz reciprocity stereopsis. The UIUC rig, consisting of two arms that move their endpoints over the surface of a sphere, directly supports the light field reconstruction method. The two new pieces of hardware will contribute to the following four projects: Helmholtz Stereopsis, Light Field Reconstruction, Image-Based Modeling and Rendering, and Texture and Reflectance Estimation from Small Datasets. The first project exploits the symmetries in an object s surface reflectance. The Helmholtz stereopsis method can reconstruct surfaces with complex reflectance, e.g., highly non-Lambertian. The Helmholtz rig will be used to gather datasets of objects in a manner such that they can be processed using the Helmholtz stereopsis shape recovery method. The second uses images gathered from a double covering of a surface s incident light field to reconstruct both the surface shape and an effective bi-directional reflectance distribution on a point-by-point basis. The illumination viewpoint rig will be used to gather data in a manner such that it can be processed with the light field reconstruction method. The third utilizes the datasets gathered by both rigs for image-based and modeling projects to render photorealistic images of objects under novel viewpoint and arbitrary illuminations. Datasets of objects, with their 3-D shape reconstructed, are collected and their reflectance is modeled. These models of shape and reflectance are then used to synthesize novel images of the objects and composite them into still pictures and video footage. The objects will be catalogued by their visual appearance. The last project uses the datasets gathered by the light field rendering rig for developing low-dimensional models of texture and reflectance. These models are then used to estimate texture and reflectance properties from a small number of images. Thus, images characterizing reflectance properties of a wide variety of materials will be created and distributed satisfying the following goals to Develop, refine, analyze, and empirically validate the method of Helmholtz stereopsis, Develop, refine, and analyze the light field reconstruction method, Apply the reconstruction methods to image-based rendering, and Develop and refine data-driven low-dimensional non-parametric models for surface reflection and textures that vary with viewpoint and lighting doc24661 none This proposal, creating, controlling, and interacting with real-time embodied virtual human agents, aims at supporting research projects that require interactivity support to Detect, model, and describe human participant motion either for building action models or for providing real-time input to interpersonal interactions, such as training and Immerse the human participant in a visual environment conducive to the execution of actions in a context of objects and both real and virtual people. Components will be purchased to construct an immersive room for real-time participants in interactive experiences. The room will consist of an Ascension ReaCTor motion capture system and a 4 surface rear-projection room, called the LiveActor. In turn, this facility supports at least three research projects: Computational Models of Verb Semantics. Real Time Decision Critical Training, and Virtual Animated Environments from Language. The first project utilizes a Parameterized Action Representation (PAR) that holds computational definitions of human and other agent motions. PAR is used to both synthesize animations and recognize presence in a motion captured input stream. An immersive environment in which participants interact with each other and with virtual agents provides opportunities for capturing, characterizing, and representing genuine physical and emotional actions, and for employing these actions to affect and control reactive behaviors in virtual agents. The second project utilizes the graphical portrayal of embodied agents to close encounter training requiring the user to analyze and react to facial actions, body posture, and gesture quality. Fundamentally different from VR navigation and exploration, these interactions require realistic human models and detailed, variable, controllable parameters. The last project encourages exploration, but not construction and animation, since the necessity to design and script VR worlds in advance constitutes a bottleneck. This project proposes an imagination machine in which users create, populate, and animate their own virtual worlds. Natural language that understands descriptions of situations and action, depicts the graphical arrangements, and sets current and future context-dependent behaviors into its animated agents, serves as the primary ingredient in this system. The immersive LiveActor space allows a user to input her own body motions for specific yet parameterizable movements for characters and their interactions doc24662 none This proposal, acquiring resources for real-time processing and display of large volume imagery and high resolution image sequences, aims at supporting collaborative research projects in compressing and analyzing extremely large-scale images and high-bandwidth video. The infrastructure supports the collection and display of high-resolution imagery as well as the image processing computations. Moreover, it enables improved data transmission over gigabit network. Medicine, terahertz radiation sensing, and hyperspectral imagery, and digital cinema constitute the sources of the research. The equipment, to be placed in the Center for Image Processing Research (CIPR), supports the following collaborative research projects. Volume and Hyperspectral Image Compression, Terahertz Image Processing, Multispectral Imaging in Electron Microscopy, Transparent Migration of Complex Scientific Computing Software to Real-Time Execution, Digital Cinema Compression, Remote Collaboration Environment, and Human Fatigue Monitoring and Machine Parts Tolerancing doc24663 none EIA 02- Luebke, David P. Skadron, Kevin; Stan, Mircea R. University of Virginia CISE RR: A High-Performance Shared-Purpose Cluster for Computer Architectural Simulation and Perceptual Interactive Ray Tracing This proposal, building a cluster platform (with high computing and memory requirements, and graphics and display hardware) to support research in computer graphics and architecture, enables projects studying interactive rendering, computer architecture, and temperature-aware computing. A 16-node rack-mounted cluster with dual CPUs, large memory (4 GB), gigabit networking, and high-end graphics is expected to facilitate the research. Specifically, the infrastructure supports the following three research projects: Perceptually Driven Interactive Ray Tracing, Thermal Simulation of Computer Architecture with Graphics Hardware, and Large-Memory Architectural Simulations. The computer graphics research investigates new scene rendering algorithms motivated by models of human perception, and requiring flexible (programmable) graphics hardware. This work investigates unconventional rendering techniques that exploit the ability to vary sample location, density, and frequency. Examples include frameless (replaces double buffering with randomized update of pixels), interruptible (unifies spatial and temporal error for a principles fidelity performance tradeoff), and gaze-directed (varies detail and resolution according to user s attention) rendering. Thermal modeling is directed towards solving heat transfer equations for studying the run-time thermal behavior of microprocessors, especially multithreaded (SMT) and single chip (SCC) systems. The computer architecture component involves performance of SMT and SCC systems and investigation of aggressive branch prediction techniques using distant correlations. The educational aspects involve folding relevant topics into the current graduate seminars and students in the research doc24664 none PI: Eduardo E. Wolf Institution: University of Notre Dame Proposal Number: Research: The short term objective of this work is to study the direct partial oxidation of propane to acrolein, a chemical intermediary, using a dual membrane reactor. This reactor has unique characteristics that can increase product yield, which is typically low for the propane to acrolein reaction when carried out in a conventional fixed bed reactor. The use of alkanes, such as propane, for the direct conversion by partial oxidation to acrolein is more attractive than the current process that uses propylene, a more expensive feedstock. The long term objective is to study, evaluate and optimize the capabilities of the dual bed membrane reactor. The reactor consists of an inert membrane, placed concentrically to the reactor tube wall. Catalyst is located between the membrane and the reactor wall and the membrane acts as a barrier between the oxidant (air oxygen) and the reducing feed (propane) thus reducing the danger of flammability encountered in reactors with premixed feeds. What makes the dual bed membrane reactor unique is that it has two catalyst beds fed separately so that reaction conditions can be independently controlled in each bed. This is different from two reactors in series in that in the dual bed membrane reactor the two catalyst beds are connected. The gas phase intermediates emerging from the first bed are utilized in the second bed. It thus allows the independent control of temperature, catalysts, gas phase intermediates, and residence time in a single reactor. Impact: If the results are successful, the technology could be extended to other alkane functionalization reactions to provide a less energy intensive technology for the environmentally clean production of oxygenate intermediates for the chemical industry. The project will integrate research and teaching both at the graduate and undergraduate level doc24665 none This proposal, designing a system using Massive Arrays of Idle Disks (MAID) as a replacement for data centers that would normally use tape archives, will utilize infrastructure in the design and fabrication of an alternative design to conventional mass storage systems that attempt to address critical data center issues such as data density (i.e., reduced floor space), reliability, power efficiency, and manageability. Using a combination of commodity disk drives, power management, distributed control, and caching hierarchy, the researcher claims that the MAID storage organization provides storage densities matching or exceeding those of tape libraries with performances similar to disk arrays. Studies have shown that through a combination of effective power management of individual drives and caching, this performance can be achieved using a very small power envelope. The large backing store will be composed of inexpensive IDE disks that, rather than spinning, are allowed to go idle when not in use. The main goal consists of replacing conventional tape archival storage with an alternative technology at significantly reduced power cost. The experimental testbed consists of 120 IDE drives, each of which holds 160GB of data for a total of 19.2TB of online storage, of which approximately 160TB would be available once redundancy is addressed. The infrastructure also includes 120 drive enclosures that connect commodity IDE drives to (firewire) I O networks doc24666 none EIA 02- Beck, Micah D. Dongarra, Jack J.; Livny, Miron; Plank, James S.; Wolski, Richard University of Tennessee - Knoxville CISE RR: A National Logistical Networking Testbed This project, investigating a distributed network storage architecture based on the Internet Backplane Protocol (IBP) and the external node (exNode) data structure, explores an approach to communication infrastructure, called Logistical Networking. This approach applies the Internet model of community resource sharing to network storage to infuse the network itself with storage resources that can be shared, scaled up, and exposed for external scheduling just like IP datagram delivery. A resource fabric that unifies the co-management of scheduling of data transport and data storage results, creating conditions for interoperable state management among distributed applications. The resources of the National Logistical Networking Testbed (NLNT) proposed attract the kind of diverse and heavy usage necessary to carry out critical research and testing on this technology under real world conditions. NLNT, an experimental communication fabric, places large depots of sharable storage on the nation s high performance network for the unbrokered use of the research community. These depots support the exploration and testing of Logistical Networking technology under meaningful loads by diverse middleware and application research groups. Its leading characteristics follow. NLNT 1. Storage: scalably sharable. To help maximize the share use of time-limited lightweight allocations of network storage resources, NLNT uses a network storage technology, Internet Backplane Protocol (IBP). IBP closely models IP datagram service and follows Internet design principles for scalable sharing to create shared storage service that can scale globally. 2. Target capacity: 1 Petabyte. Planned project funding and contributions from industrial partners support NLNT capacity of 100TB in year three. As the technology shows value, capacity grows. 3. Deployment: aims for ubiquity. To provide high performance access and support heavy use, NLNT locates massive depots at two major Gigapops with direct access to the national backbone. High value of well-provisioned local depots encourages ubiquitous provisioning of storage. The growth of the fully realized NLNT will be seeded by three storage depots: an advanced 11.68TB Storage Area Network system donated by Yotta Yotta; a special purpose 16GB RAM-only storage depot to be used for middleware research on high performance overlay networks; and a third storage cluster planned as a 88TB system attached to the network via a fast, non-blocking switch. The units will be placed at Gigapops in Chicago (Starlight) and near Washington D.C. (MAX). NLNT software foundation, IBP, has already been implemented and tested. Basic software components (xNode toolset for aggregating distributed storage allocations, the Network Weather Service (NWS) for monitoring and forecasting the performance of distributed resources, and the Logistical Backbone (L-Bone) for NLNT resource discovery) support NLNT middleware research, including scheduling with dynamic network topology, tools and methodologies to provide runtime support for key storage functions (e.g., replication, caching, etc.), and high performance overlay network technology. The research involves collaborators from the Universities of California-Santa Barbara (Wolski) and Wisconsin-Madison (Livny doc24667 none EIA 02- Fortes, Jose A. Figueiredo, Renato; George, Alan D.; Principe, Jose C.; Su, Stanley Y. University of Florida CISE RR: Collaborative Research on Wide-Area Network Computing Using Virtual Machines This collaborative research project (with Dinda at Northwestern University, proposal 02- ), requiring a wide-area test bed that enables experimentation with, access to, and running of applications on unique resources, requests PC clusters, an IBM server, and other ancillary hardware for projects in 1. Distributed grid computing and information processing systems using virtualization technologies and 2. Information grids with real users and research applications requiring capabilities enabled by virtual machines (VMs). Deploying a distributed system based on clusters connected by local, metropolitan, and wide area networks, the work aims to provide a virtual computing and data storage interface to clients that access resources on the underlying information grid. The test bed includes the following defining features. 1. Virtualization capabilities, i.e., the ability to instantiate independent logical machines that can be multiplexed on physical processors (or fractions of them), storage and network I O channels, and can use distinct operating systems; 2. Wide-area distribution, i.e., Internet-linked test bed components in independently-administered geographically-apart network domains; 3. Scalable capacity for both scientific computing and information processing; and 4. Heterogeneity. Interrelated projects enabled by the test bed towards the goal of developing VM-based middleware for grid computing include virtualized end resources, monitoring and prediction, interactive computing, virtual file systems, data management, cycle selling, and security. Information grids and web portals for use of CAD tools are also enabled by the infrastructure for dissemination of collaborative research results and data, and for digital government services. From the availability of the portals and grid-computing resources benefits are expected in brain-machine interfaces, biologically-inspired nanocomputing, auction-based computing, distributed knowledge applications, medical imaging and data archiving, light-scattering spectroscopy, and mixed non-linear optimization. Collaborations include the Sigmicro microarchitecture center, NETCARE and the Purdue-hosted Nanohub (enabling users to run tools for computer architecture and parallel computing, and nanoelectrnics). The project impacts some minority serving institutions such as Chicago State and Florida A& M Universities and enables a testbed for a transnational digital government projects involving Carnegie Mellon University, University of Belize, University of Colorado, University of Florida, University of Massachusetts, and Pontificia Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra of the Dominican Republic doc24668 none The Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC) for Virtual Proving Ground Simulation will focus unique capabilities and facilities for vehicle system simulation at the University of Iowa and electromechanical system simulation and design at the University of Texas at Austin on the goal of creating fundamental new capabilities for virtual proving ground simulation of complex vehicle and equipment systems, including off-road equipment, hybrid-electric vehicles, and next-generation enhanced vehicle mobility and vehicle power systems. The I UCRC will create and make available to its members an internationally unique virtual proving ground using (1) state-of-the-art networked computing facilities for high fidelity engineering simulation, (2) the National Advanced Driving Simulator at Iowa for driver-in-the-loop virtual proving ground simulation, and (3) unique capabilities at UT-Ausgtin, including access to facilities at the Center for Electromechanics. With these assets and significant extensions to be developed in the proposed research program, the I UCRC will support its members with internationally unique modeling , analysis, and virtual prototyping capabilities for simulation of complex vehicle and equipment systems doc24669 none EIA 02- Dinda, Peter A. Banerjee, Prithviraj; Kao, Ming-Yang Northwestern University CISE RR: Collaborative Research on Wide-Area Network Computing Using Virtual Machines This collaborative research project (with Fortes at University of Florida, proposal 02- ), requiring a wide-area test bed that enables experimentation with, access to, and running of applications on unique resources, requests PC clusters, an IBM server, and other ancillary hardware for projects in 1. Distributed grid computing and information processing systems using virtualization technologies and 2. Information grids with real users and research applications requiring capabilities enabled by virtual machines (VMs). Deploying a distributed system based on clusters connected by local, metropolitan, and wide area networks, the work aims to provide a virtual computing and data storage interface to clients that access resources on the underlying information grid. The test bed includes the following defining features. 1. Virtualization capabilities, i.e., the ability to instantiate independent logical machines that can be multiplexed on physical processors (or fractions of them), storage and network I O channels, and can use distinct operating systems; 2. Wide-area distribution, i.e., Internet-linked test bed components in independently-administered geographically-apart network domains; 3. Scalable capacity for both scientific computing and information processing; and 4. Heterogeneity. Interrelated projects enabled by the test bed towards the goal of developing VM-based middleware for grid computing include virtualized end resources, monitoring and prediction, interactive computing, virtual file systems, data management, cycle selling, and security. Information grids and web portals for use of CAD tools are also enabled by the infrastructure for dissemination of collaborative research results and data, and for digital government services. From the availability of the portals and grid-computing resources benefits are expected in brain-machine interfaces, biologically-inspired nanocomputing, auction-based computing, distributed knowledge applications, medical imaging and data archiving, light-scattering spectroscopy, and mixed non-linear optimization. Collaborations include the Sigmicro microarchitecture center, NETCARE and the Purdue-hosted Nanohub (enabling users to run tools for computer architecture and parallel computing, and nanoelectrnics). The project impacts some minority serving institutions such as Chicago State and Florida A& M Universities and enables a testbed for a transnational digital government projects involving Carnegie Mellon University, University of Belize, University of Colorado, University of Florida, University of Massachusetts, and Pontificia Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra of the Dominican Republic doc24670 none The existing Industrial Research Institute Center for Innovation Management Studies (IRI CIMS) Annual R&D Survey, which supports research on management of technological innovation, will continue to be performed. The survey instrument will be augmented so that data can be collected on variables that are uniquely relevant to firms and business units operating in dynamic and technology intensive business sectors such as software, defense aerospace, and telecommunications. Coverage will be increased to seek answers to important questions about the contribution of R&D to innovation outcomes, such as product and process cost reductions and revenue enhancements. Finally, the breadth of the Annual Survey sample will be expanded to include firms that may not be members of the Industrial Research Institute (IRI), but whose R&D activities are of significant economic interest and importance. In addition, the Management Practices Survey (MPS), which was last conducted in , will be repeated. The MPS contributes greatly to the database by providing information about changes in the structure of R&D organizations and laboratories that occur over time, shifts in the business goals supported by R&D, and changes in R&D program planning and project selection emphasis. Such information has strengthened researchers ability to interpret trends that have appeared in the Annual Survey data doc24671 none EIA- Adve, Sarita V. Hwu, Wen-mei; Kale, Laxmicant V.; Padua, David A.; Patel, Sanjay J. University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign CISE RR: Programming Environments and Applications for Clusters and Grids This proposal, building a cluster platform connected by gigabit Ethernet, enables the grid to be used in the following four research projects: Advanced Programming Environments for Cluster and Grids, Parallel Applications for Clusters and Grids, Dynamic Sequential Code Optimization, and Architectures for Multimedia and Communications Applications. The configuration permits experimentation on diverse subsystems with varying degrees of heterogeneity, up to three levels of parallelism, and a range of system sizes. The facility will be used in three ways: as an experimental test-bed for systems research on clusters and grids; as a prototype for the development of parallel and distributed applications for clusters and grids; and as a cost-effective production compute server for research in architecture, compilers, and machine learning. The shared facility addresses problems critical to computational infrastructure spanning architecture, compiler, and runtime research on systems ranging from single nodes to grids, covering various application domains doc24672 none This proposal, developing an infrastructure within the Center for Multimedia Communication (CMC) to enable repeatable fields experiments in the laboratory, aims to develop integration techniques beyond simulations and other modeling. Using actual field measurement in its emulation, the infrastructure fills a gap to experimentally validate theoretical results under real-world conditions promising seamless wireless content delivery (without any service disruptions). The equipment, mainly consisting of two channel emulators, a logic analyzer, and a spectrum analyzer, benefits three major projects. Reconfigurable Wireless Architectures, High Data Rate Multiple Antenna Communication, and Opportunistic Multi-Tier Wireless Scheduling. The first project involves the design of new communication architectures that reconfigure based on the network availability, channel conditions, and data requirements of a handset. The infrastructure will enable a complete suite of efficient prototypes, which will simultaneously connect to next generation wireless LANs, third generation wireless cellular, and Bluetooth personal area networks (PANs), bringing closer the ideal ability of a single device to seamlessly maintain its link to the network using whatever connectivity is available. The second project develops new communications coding and feedback methods for high data rate wireless access by prototyping new algorithms with multiple transmit and receive antennae on reconfigurable baseband platform and stress tested in different wireless configurations for their robustness, performance limits, and power efficiency. The last project involves the design of optimal methods for scheduling data using all the resources available by a multi-tier network, including other mobile nodes connecting the backbone infrastructure. The packet schedulers are being prototyped on a mobile network processor platform and will use the multi-tier network interface (mNIC) prototype developed within CMC in its field trials. On the educational side, students will continue their research on these projects, and new developments captured for new courses. Rice University is quite active with under-represented groups doc24673 none syntax, syntactic tools (parsers, typecheckers, pretty-printer), primitive operations (substitution, matching, unification, normalization), and advanced operations (constraint satisfaction, forward and backward chaining, rewriting, simplification, decision procedures, induction methods). Potential impacts include availability, reliability, quality, durability, productivity, visibility, uniformity, synergy, serendipity, and history. The following principles will be employed in running the repository: authenticity, uniqueness, access, relevance, format, quality and version control, and academic credit. QPQ is already recognized as a valuable resource for research and education in deductive software. With its role in facilitating the semantic web and through other applications of logico-symbolic computing, the QPQ repository might become crucial to society doc24674 none Pandey, Raju Aksoy, Demet; Devanbu, Premkimar T.; Olsson, Ronald A. University of California - Davis CISE RR: Infrastructure for Research in Parallel and Distributed Computing This proposal, supporting parallel computing, distributed systems, ubiquitous (autonomous) systems, and satellite communication, aims at establishing a parallel and distributed computing laboratory within the center for software systems. The lab will include four clusters, each connected through high speed network. The parallel computing cluster will host several multiprocessor systems; the distributed system cluster will include workstations and PCs, the ubiquitous systems cluster will connect embedded devices (including handheld device sensors); and the satellite cluster will host equipment for initiating the downlink communication for disseminating the data. The sensor network will primarily be connected through an ad hoc wireless network that will be routed to the main high-speed backbone. The infrastructure will meet the needs of four research projects in 1. Distributed Systems, 2. Parallel Computing, 3. Distributed Systems Software Engineering, and 4. Wide Area Data Dissemination. The distributed systems cluster will enable the distributed systems group to develop highly efficient, scalable, robust, and secure distributed systems that adapt to changes underlying systems conditions. Further, the ubiquitous systems cluster will permit the group to develop new application-specific routing algorithms, novel programming models customizable middleware that seamlessly integrate sensor-based systems and scalable resource allocation, and conservation algorithms for large sensor-based systems. The satellite communication cluster, along with the distributed systems cluster, will enable the distributed data dissemination group to develop highly scalable, robust, and secure data-dissemination techniques with adaptable quality of service. The concurrent programming group will use the parallel computing cluster to evaluate their work on both concurrent programming languages and efficient runtime systems for parallel systems. On the educational side, the infrastructure will be used as experimental test-beds in several courses and will form the basis for providing research students with development and analysis skills in parallel and distributed systems doc24675 none The Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) is an interagency center devoted to space weather modeling and prediction. One of the goals of the CCMC is to determine which space weather models are appropriate for use in operational space weather forecasting. This project will examine the various metrics and scientific validation methods that should be applied to space weather models. The CCMC staff will perform direct data-model comparisons for space weather events. It will also provide an independent, unbiased forum for calculating the prediction or nowcasting metrics for different space weather models. In addition to the calculation of metrics and general scientific validation of models, the CCMC will explore the models performances under different space weather conditions to determine the limits under which the models can be used doc24676 none This award supports an international workshop to bring awardees of the Arabidopsis Functional Genomics Networks program funded by the German Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and of the Arabidopsis Project funded by the National Science Foundation. The workshop is to take place on June 29-30, , in Seville Spain, during the XIIIth International Arabidopsis Research Conference. The goal of the workshop is to provide a forum for the two groups of scientists to meet face to face and maximize the opportunity to coordinate their research and to develop research collaboration where appropriate. The two programs share the same goal of identifying the function of all Arabidopsis genes by the year . Representatives from the -like programs in other countries will be invited as observers so that international collaborations could be expanded beyond Germany and the US. One of the expected outcomes would be an increased exchange of students and young scientists between participating laboratories doc24677 none Politics structures the regulatory and legal institutions that delimit the operation of financial markets. The political outcomes have major impacts on such important matters as the openness of financial markets, the balance between investor protection and managerial prerogatives, and the tradeoff between creditor and debtor rights. The need for a research agenda in this area led to the organization of a research network in Europe Understanding Financial Architecture: Legal and Political Frameworks and Economic Efficiency. The network was funded by the European Union. This grant supports a small conference on the Political Economy of Financial Markets at Princeton University. The purpose of the conference is to explore the development of an international and interdisciplinary community in this area. The potential topics include financial development, corporate governance, bankruptcy, debt forgiveness, and credit markets for the poor. Invitations to participate in the conference are extended to scholars, particularly junior scholars, from a broad cross-section of Universities in the United States. The conference brings together potential American partners to the European network on the political economy of financial institutions doc24678 none Recent declines in oceanic fisheries have occurred despite extensive scientific investigation of the impacts of commercial harvest on marine ecosystems. This research utilizes interviews to investigate the impact of scientific research on the normative ethics of fishers from declining, stable, and healthy or recovering fisheries. The interview protocol allows fishers to determine their own ethical priorities, and to report their concepts of right and wrong action by utilizing their own language and rationale. The POWRE grant will fund visits to maritime library collections and to the University of California for the purpose of discussing sampling design and ethical and social sciences professionals. The investigator will conduct a field test of new methodologies for determining why fishers accept or reject scientific findings and for evaluating the influence of increasing legislative and external, professional control of fisheries on the communal ethos of the fishers. This research is significant for the future of environmental ethics and of social science inquiry into environmental issues. It has clear relevance to wildlife preservation policy. The results of this project will help to improve understanding and communication between academic environmental ethics and communities economically dependent on maritime resources, as well as developing a more accurate view of how scientific information may influence the ethics of fishers. The project is appropriate to the POWRE program because the investigator s career has been interrupted by work-related injuries and by a job change from a federal agency to an educational institution. The POWRE grant will accelerate the investigator s transition into research in ethics at a critical career phase, and will allow her to develop a new line of investigation doc24679 none This award provides stipends and other supporting services for scholars in one-year residence as Fellows of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California. The objective of the project is to foster the advancement of knowledge generated by scholars conducting basic research in the behavioral sciences. The Center s structure and procedures provide an environment that is conducive to scholarly productivity as well as interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration. Fellows are chosen on the basis of their academic accomplishment and promise. The research they conduct at the Center is of their own choice and design. The Center organizes seminars, encourages the formation of informal groups, and plans common meals, all designed to promote intellectual interaction among Fellows. The Center s environment is designed to promote full-time research, and to minimize distractions from and interruptions to productive scientific work doc24680 none Bill Sprigg .Funds are requested ($22,721) to allow three U.S. scientists to participate in the 12th Conference of the International Soil Conservation Organization in Beijing, to help launch research under the Sino-U.S. Centers for Soil and Water Conservation and Environmental Protection, and to participate in, and report on, the opening ceremonies of the joint Centers in Yangling, China. The principal investigator, the director of the U.S. arm of the joint Centers, will also coordinate Centers research plans with personnel in other Chinese ministries and the U.S. Embassy, all of whom potentially play important roles in determining the success of the Centers. The facilitator for the Centers Joint Organizing Committee and a remote sensing specialist complete the trio. These funds will ensure participation of non-federal representatives among a larger delegation of Federal agency staff representing the Centers doc24681 none Although dissolved organic nitrogen (DON) is the largest reservoir of fixed nitrogen in the surface ocean, little is know about its relationship to nitrogen fixation and the nitrogen nutrient requirements of the oceanic phytoplankton. In this Small Grant for Exploratory Research, investigators at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will take advantage of a cruise to the centtral gyre of the North Pacific Ocean to study the relationship between climate variation, water column physics, the biological community dynamics of obligate diazotrophs, and the production of dissolved organic nitrogen. The research team will conduct observational studies as well as shipboard incubation experiments to determine how the fixed nitrogen generated by the activities of Trichodesmium and other diazotrophs are cycled in the surface ocean and how it relates to the pool of DON doc24682 none In June of , a workshop will be held on Fundamentals of Distributed Computing at Bertinoro, Italy. From a set of 43 outstanding submissions, a total of 30 white papers were selected for publication, and 46 researchers (including a number of students) invited to attend the workshop. NSF provides travel funding to support attendance by these students, many of whom are on very tight budgets. The workshop will help set the agenda for a new generation of research in distributed computing while also knitting together the European and American research communities in the area. Quality of the white papers was very high, and we have approached Springer-Verlag about the possibility of revising and extending them into a book-length treatment. Our hope is that we might use the workshop to develop a unified vision and to elucidate the research agenda in various areas of the discipline, then use this as a structure for the white papers. The resulting book will be both a snapshot of the state of the art and also a coherent articulation of research opportunities in the coming decade doc24683 none Cataclysms and Catastrophes-The Role of Science This project is developing and field-testing curricular materials based on the role of science in causing and or understanding catastrophes. The goal of the materials is to help high school teachers incorporate geoscience into the teaching of physics, mathematics, chemistry and biology. This is a collaborative effort involving The University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG), the Bureau of Economic Geology (BEG), and 4empowerment, an Austin-based private education company. Events that capture the imagination of teachers and students alike-for example, the devastation caused by Hurricane Mitch in Honduras, the Chicxulub asteroid impact event, and the Oklahoma City bombing-serve as the basis for inquiry-based, hands-on learning activities using data collected by UTIG and BEG scientists. Activities are expanded to include familiarity with technologies such as Lidar (LIght Detection And Ranging), drilling, seismic reflection and refraction, geophysical logging, and the Internet. In addition to teaching concepts in science and mathematics, the Cataclysms and Catastrophes theme carries implications for disaster prevention, awareness, and decision-making. Using seismology to identify nuclear explosions (monitoring nuclear testing worldwide), for example, is important to national security. Curricula materials developed for the project are posted to 4empowement s Web site, Cyberways and Waterways, and promoted through e-letters and collaborations with state and national science and mathematics educational agencies and organizations. Curricular materials are also available to DLESE (Digital Library for Earth System Education) and to the 76 institutional members of the National Consortium for Specialized Secondary Schools of Mathematics, Science and Technology. The project builds on the recent success of the ongoing TEXTEAMS (Texas Teachers Empowered for Achievement in Mathematics and Science) Leadership training program for the Texas high school science course, Geology, Meteorology and Oceanography (GMO), developed in by UTIG researchers. TEXTEAMS is a certification program of professional development and leadership training for K-12 teachers sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Texas Education Agency. The curricular materials developed for Cataclysms and Catastrophes-The Role of Science will also complement the TEXTEAMS GMO offering designed around the theme From Texas to Antarctica doc24684 none The Interactive Ground-Water Tutorial Prototype Web Site This project constructs a prototype web-based ground-water tutorial, a hands-on tool for teaching secondary Earth and Space Science and Environmental Science students concepts related to ground-water flow and to the human impacts on surface- and ground-water systems. Most of the work performed in this two-year, proof-of-principle project focuses on developing the interface that will enable the student to interact with the modules on the prototype web site. The project encourages inquiry instruction by incorporating role-play exercises and mathematical simulations of ground-water flow and contaminant transport in a stream-aquifer system to solve environmental problems. Role-play exercises could potentially include using simulation results to help prevent: (1) a contaminant plume from reaching the stream and (2) contamination of an aquifer by a spill that has been dumped into a nearby stream where the aquifer is used for public water supply. A guidance module will provide: (1) a framework to help guide role-play actions and (2) an orientation for the student and (3) a means to update the student about the simulated situation during the role-play. The project is a collaboration between the Kansas Geological Survey, the University of Kansas Upward Bound Math Science Center, Pathfinder Science, and Kansas StreamLink. Kansas City Kansas Community College, the Lawrence, Kansas USD #497 will participate in field-testin doc24685 none SeaMaven, a Prototype Virtual Learning Environment The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is collaborating with the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography (SkIO) in a two-year pilot project to develop SeaMaven, a prototype Virtual Learning Environment for studying the marine ecosystem. SeaMaven enables middle school age science students to actively engage in collaborative learning in the environmental sciences through the innovative use of telecommunications technologies. Students access an interactive Web site and take atmospheric and hydrology measurements of the ecosystem off the Georgia South Carolina coast in near real-time. The project provides a virtual tour of a square kilometer area of the continental shelf with access to a number of platform-based sensor stations for monitoring environmental parameters. The interactive online sensor displays give students the opportunity to record measurements, compare data, and generate hypotheses based on their observations. Working alone or in groups, students create their own science projects to monitor ocean-atmosphere interactions over a period of weeks, months, or years. The Web site also enables electronic discussion forums on the materials and ideas generated by the experience, and interaction with the scientists for answering questions, hypothesis posing and testing, and determining how the project is proceeding doc24686 none Community Integrated GIS Pilot Project: Sharing Scientific Knowledge This project develops a Regional Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Resource Center that will be part of a small but expandable GIS-based network for the dissemination and exchange of scientific data. The pilot structure initially consists of three community GIS workstations (separately- funded) on the Maine islands of Vinalhaven, Islesboro and Peaks, which will be integrated with and supported by the regional center at the Island Institute s facility in Rockland, Maine. The project is supported by other community-oriented research agencies, including: The Lobster Conservancy (Friendship, Maine), The Fisheries Atlas (MIT Rutgers), the Maine Office of GIS, the Maine State Planning Office, the Gulf of Maine Information Exchange (GOMINFOEX) and the National Mapping Project (USGS). GIS, while increasingly a common medium for the management and exchange of data between the science community and the lay audience, has great, and largely unexplored, potential as an educational and spatial decision support tool in small communities. However, training and capacity-building are needed on the ground in order to forge an effective and lasting link between communities and scientists, and to increase the practical use of scientific data locally. Two of the primary assumptions of this proposal are that 1) small towns have unique strengths which often are not maximized in the current education and information management paradigms; and 2) that new technologies like GIS create new opportunities to reconsider these paradigms. This project explores ways in which communities can be uniquely empowered through linkage to locally relevant scientific data. The aim is to create a truly integrated capacity to access, process, create, and share scientific data through GIS in small communities and to facilitate the connection between this local information and the broader world of science and research. The local GIS workstations will be common-format repositories for locally relevant geospatial information - a valuable resource for formal and informal place-based education, research activities, and community-based resource management doc18925 none The objective of this project is to advance the fundamental understanding of the Laser Additive Manufacturing processes that is necessary for the industrial implementation of LAM in a wide range of aerospace applications. LAM combines characteristics of conventional laser welding with the ability to automatically produce complex geometries. One goal of LAM is to reduce the cost of manufacturing new aerospace components with complex features. In conventional manufacturing methods, complex features must be incorporated into a casting or forging process, at substantial cost. Cost savings can be realized by using LAM to add complex features to easy-to-produce, generic manufactured components. Other applications of LAM include the repair of worn or cracked components by selective material addition, which is substantially more economical than part replacement. In this project, the relationship between deposition process variables and the three key deposit characteristics critical to aerospace applications: melt pool size, residual stress and microstructure will be developed. This understanding will be demonstrated through model results presented in the form of process maps, which map out the dependence of deposit characteristics on process variables such as laser power and laser velocity. Process maps will be of direct use to industry researchers working to advance LAM processes. This research establishes a strong collaborative team including academic researchers from three universities, government researchers from two national labs, and several industry partners. The results of this work are expected to have a significant impact on the widespread industrial implementation of LAM processes. This project will also expose graduate, undergraduate and high school students to research integrating aerospace applications and manufacturing constraints with the fundamentals of solid mechanics, heat transfer and materials science doc24688 none Geophysical Field Research and Training Program The proposed Geophysical Field Research and Training Program has two complementary objectives. The first is to broaden the geophysical science training facility to include field equipment for geophysical surveying. Students will participate in design and acquisition of geophysical surveys using sophisticated equipment, and in the collection of field data using a variety of geophysical methods. The purchase of geophysical equipment will strengthen the University s research and educational infrastructure in geosciences, and help faculty secure future funding for both academic and research projects. Geophysical field research and training will produce data and analysis that can be used as resources for both research and innovative course curriculum development, hence having potential of improving faculty research productivity and providing students with a responsive learning environment. The second objective is the complete geophysical characterization of a selected field site that will serve as a test case for seismic physical modeling and for computational modeling. It is anticipated that students coming through the proposed summer geophysical field research training program will be well equipped with knowledge and skills to conduct near-surface geophysical surveys using a variety of geophysical methods, hence broadening career paths for persons from under-represented groups in the environmental, geotechnical, and engineering fields doc24689 none Spanish Translation of Windows to the Universe Website This project supports translation of the successful Windows to the Universe website (http: www.windows.ucar.edu) into Spanish. The Windows to the Universe (W2U) project was initiated in , to develop a user-friendly learning system for students and the general public for the Earth and space sciences, linking to interdisciplinary humanities connections. All content on the W2U site is now available only in English. The site serves over 4 million users per year, ~65% of whom are K-12 students who visit the site frequently for classroom research and free-time browsing. The site is composed of thousands of multi-level hybrid cgi-html pages that are dynamically interpreted to serve content back to the user at the upper elementary, middle, or high school level. Each page also includes multiple images, and the main image on each page typically is linked to a larger version of the same image on a separate html page. All pages on the site include image credits, captions, and labeled and unlabeled buttons and navigation tools. Translation of the site into Spanish therefore requires a combination of text translation as well as graphics revision to develop a full second version of the site to serve the Spanish- speaking community. The project team will translate the web site with a multi-step process over a two-year interval, ensuring accuracy of the translation through the use of a full-time professional Spanish translator and Spanish-speaking geoscientists. They will also develop a page translation management interface that will facilitate the interaction of the translators and W2U project staff. Project staff will attend two Hispanic science education meetings in the second year to disseminate information about the availability of the new Spanish-language version of the W2U site doc24690 none Education Aquanauts: Exploration-Based Interdisciplinary Science Skills Enhancement During the last decade, more than half a dozen animal species have invaded the upper Great Lakes, some of them causing unequivocal and perhaps cataclysmic alterations in large lake ecosystems. All have established themselves in terms of having reproductively successful populations, but they are recent enough in some cases to have as-yet limited ranges. While both ecologically- and economically massive alterations in local and global habitats are occurring, the younger K-12 and even undergraduate population of the region is only slowly becoming aware of large water bodies including Lake Michigan. This program provides immersion science learning for teachers of primarily middle school students produces curriculum modules for use in in-school hands-on learning activities. The focus of the effort is the biological community of Green Can Reef, a local spawning reef at the heart (e.g., zebra mussels, perch recruitment) and also the edge (e.g., goby, amphipod decline) of invasive species influences. Specific objectives are to (1) expand teacher awareness of exotic species occurrence and activities in local waters; (2) engage teachers in short, intense hands-on workshops using modern-day tools including Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) and analytical instrumentation to test specific, tractable hypotheses; (3) provide educators with resources to access current environmental research activities and results in their own region; and (4) develop educator-produced, scientist-assisted curriculum modules offering experimental, hypothesis-testing, hands-on research activities for students and public learners using locally-relevant subjects. The entire sequence is repeated such that observations span a period of systematic change, for example during spring bloom conditions or across thermal (de)stratification regimes. At the conclusion of the effort, each teacher will develop a single class-period activity that incorporates some aspect of their experience (data, concepts, underwater video), nurtured by active research scientists experienced in teacher enhancement programs doc24691 none Education Using Audioguides on Research in the Sciences The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) will pilot the development of an audioguide that will help to improve knowledge about and accessibility to science learning for visitors currently underserved by programs at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Mesa Laboratory. This creative endeavor, entitled Education Using Audioguides on Research in the Sciences (EARS), will be informed by experts on the hearing and vision- impaired and low-income, native Spanish speakers. The goals of EARS are to engage and inform thousands of visitors who cannot or choose not to take a staff-guided tour at the Mesa Lab; improve accessibility to exhibits for visitors who have low vision, blindness, or hearing loss; extend this educational experience to the region s low-income immigrant population through the audioguide s translation into Spanish; and enhance family learning about hands-on exhibits and the science inquiry process. EARS will be developed under the experienced leadership of staff in UCAR s Office of Education and Outreach, in consultation with NCAR scientists and representatives of the Colorado Center for the Blind, Self Help for the Hard of Hearing, and the Family Learning Center. A well-recognized provider of audioguide technology and production has been selected to create the new EARS communications resource doc24692 none Career and Research Exploration for Students and Teachers (CREST) Career and Research Exploration for Students and Teachers (CREST) provides a model for integrating research and education by enhancing teacher content knowledge in the geosciences while providing students with exposure to geosciences and environmental research and related careers. During each of two summers, five teams, composed of one science teacher and three middle school students per team, will spend two weeks working with personnel from Mississippi Lignite Mine Company s Red Hills Mine and Mississippi State University scientists. Students and teachers learn academic content and research methods relative to development and utilization of a lignite coal resource, including resource identification, pre-mining, mining, and post-mining. Hands-on research accompanied by appropriate lectures in the areas of ecology, geology and reclamation gives students and teachers experiences with data collection, data analysis and data interpretation. Students and teachers are exposed to issues of mining and the environmental impact of the Red Hills Mine by working with scientists and participating in on-going research projects at the mine and in the local area. Academic year follow-up occurs through electronic communication among student-teacher teams, project and mine personnel and scientists. CREST has the potential to introduce geosciences and research to under-represented groups. Participants are selected from school districts in counties surrounding Red Hills Mine. The middle schools identified for participant recruitment have a minority population ranging from 25% to 100 doc24693 none Yau This is a U.S.-Hong Kong joint workshop proposal on Recent Developments in Complex Variables, Cauchy Riemann Geometry and Complex Algebraic Geometry submitted by Dr. Stephen Yau, University of Illinois and Dr. Ngaiming Mok, Hong Kong University. The meeting will be held at Hong Kong University, May 12-16, . The conference covers an important topic in mathematics, with the attendance of top level of researchers from the U.S., Hong Kong and China. With the inclusion of junior scientists from the U.S., this conference could provide an important venue for these U.S. scientists to meet with their colleagues from East Asia doc24694 none Development of a Field-Based Geochemistry Course in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex This project develops a national model for a field and laboratory based course in geochemistry at the undergraduate (and graduate) levels. Geosciences majors at the University of Texas at Dallas enrolled in Geochemistry (a required course for B.Sc. majors) will spend a total of 10 days in the field working from a pontoon boat on Lake Texoma, a large impoundment north of the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) metroplex. During the field exercises students will collect data and samples for analysis in the ICP analytical facility (inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer and optical emission spectrometer instruments). The purpose of the field and laboratory work is to incorporate Problem-Based Learning (PBL) methods into geochemistry instruction. The incorporation of the field work into the geochemistry course work is intended to stimulate students interest in geochemistry, provide hands-on experience with state-of-the-art sampling and analytical methodologies, and mesh research with learning to foster student understanding of real world problems. The study area, Lake Texoma receives input from two major river systems, the Red River and the Washita River. The Red River drains west Texas and Oklahoma and as a result typically has elevated salinity (typically - mg L total dissolved solids, TDS, where it enters the lake and 12,000 mg L TDS in some of the headwater reaches), making the Red River one of the saltiest major rivers in the world. In contrast, the Washita River drains west-central Oklahoma and is much fresher (typically 500 mg L TDS). Mixing between these two rivers results in horizontal chemical gradients in addition to vertical chemical gradients that occur during development of a summer thermocline. Large deltas are forming where both the Red and Washita rivers enter Lake Texoma, as a result of elevated suspended loads. This dynamic geochemical and sedimentological system is therefore ideal for students to develop hypotheses, collect the necessary data to test those hypotheses and then communicate the results as term papers and oral presentations. Following the semester-length course, a graduate student and two undergraduates will be involved in sampling the lake through the summer to track geochemical changes as the thermocline develops. After year one of the project, the course will be assessed by two external experts in geology and pedagogy. Their recommendations will be incorporated to improve the course for year two doc24695 none The Wisconsin Vertebrate Fossil Project The Wisconsin Vertebrate Fossil Project (WVFP) is a two-year pilot to be operated by the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum. WVFP will engage Wisconsin high school teachers and students in the discovery and study of vertebrate fossils, primarily from Wisconsin caves. WVFP totally integrates field experiences and inquiry-based classroom activities with original and important scientific research. The educational and scientific aspects of this project are united by a common goal: the production of high-quality scientific data by high school students. These data will be of far-reaching and contemporary scientific importance. As production of these data can be accomplished only by students with the knowledge and enthusiasm required to complete scientific research projects, the scientific success of the project hinges on its success in educating students. WVFP begins with a one-week summer workshop in which participants will conduct field work in Wyalusing State Park, located in the southwestern quarter of Wisconsin. Student and teacher participants will discover, collect, and learn to identify fossils of small vertebrates such as amphibians and reptiles. Following the workshop, participants return to their schools. Under the supervision of project staff during frequent follow-up visits, they will process and identify raw fossil samples loaned to them by the Geology Museum. Processed fossils, along with student identifications, will be returned to the Geology Museum doc24696 none Enlightening Lightning! Coupling Earth Systems Research to K-12 Education Using Planetarium Presentations This project introduces students to the foundations of earth and atmospheric processes using planetarium presentations as an out-of-classroom learning milieu. This project develops a curriculum ensemble on the topic of thunderstorms, with a concentration on lightning. The curriculum targets students in grades 5 through 8 and includes both a multi-media sky-dome program (slides, video, simulations) and companion written and laboratory materials with inquiry-based exercises. These materials are the first in a series of curriculum ensembles (covering climate, weather and the water cycle) for dissemination through planetarium facilities. Learning modules on thunderstorms and lightning are currently available in several formats, including web-based modules, conventional texts, video or film presentations, and as static displays in museums. However, planetarium facilities have typically been by-passed in the development of thunderstorm and lightning curriculum materials. The planetarium environment facilitates demonstration of lightning detection from space, for example, through data collected by NASA s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, Lightning Imaging Sensor, and Optical Transient Detector. In addition, field campaigns to validate lightning detection on the ground can be shown and described. Key questions in lightning research can be identified. Participation by faculty and students in diverse academic departments (atmospheric science, physics, education, visualization sciences) as well as at premier research institutions (NSSL) will demonstrably enhance the capacity at all those institutions to be actively engaged in transferring research to education for elementary and secondary students doc24697 none The project will improve the modeling of intra-seasonal variability in climate models. The Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) is a key component of intra-seasonal variability, and plays a significant role in modulating circulation and precipitation variability in the global Tropics and subtropical regions. MJO also influences the Asian-Australian summer monsoons and possibly even ENSO variability. Current climate models are notably deficient in simulating MJO variability. Because of being sandwiched between two notable fluctuation time-scales-the shorter time-scale weather and the longer time-scale seasonal-to-interannual variability-MJO has not received significant research attention until recently. Drs. Randall, Demott and Khairoutdinov (all from Colorado State University) will investigate the initiation and evolution of MJO variability in a climate model in which clouds are resolved (and not parameterized). A cloud-resolving scheme will be implemented in the NCAR Community Climate System Model (CCSM). Project tasks will include refining this scheme, and ascertaining the sensitivity of MJO simulation to various aspects of the implementation. The PIs will develop a diagnostic analysis package targeting MJO variability, and make it available for community use through the CCSM web site doc24698 none Alvarez Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are ubiquitous pollutants that can bioaccumulate and can be acutely toxic. Some plants can enhance the degradation of PAHs by stimulating microbiological activity in the root zone (rhizosphere) of plants. This phytoremediation is an attractive process where climatic conditions are favorable as in the tropics. Root exudates from tropical plants will be screened for their ability to enhance PAH degradation and the mechanism of enhancement studied. The humification and sequestration of PAHs into soil will be examined as an acceptable low-cost treatment doc24699 none Linking Geoscience Research and Education in Schools and Museums: A Model for Scaling up Successful Collaborations Student-scientist partnerships (SSPs) facilitate experiences of genuine inquiry while also contributing data to larger scientific questions. The Paleontological Research Institution (PRI) and TERC propose a collaboration to develop a model for successful, large-scale geoscience SSPs. SSPs have involved relatively small numbers of students in localized areas. Evaluations of student data, and learning outcomes, have posed a challenge to the few large-scale SSPs. To overcome these challenges, scientist-educators at the PRI have developed the Devonian Seas Project. Fourth through ninth grade classrooms have participated in classroom pilot-tests explicitly designed to meet specific challenges to the large-scale development of SSPs, including issues of data accuracy and educational pedagogy. The results of these paleontological SSPs have been encouraging: students are making important connections to their curricula and student data is sufficiently accurate to document paleontological patterns of interest. PRI proposes to partner with TERC to develop a model for scaling-up the Devonian Seas Project. To increase accessibility and dissemination, educational materials will be made available on the PRI Website, and catalogued with the Digital Library of Earth Science Education. By developing a model for scaling-up successful localized SSPs, PRI and TERC will lay the groundwork for other museums and universities interested in creating effective, large-scale projects linking research and education doc24700 none Disease interacts with the environment in a variety of ways. This is particularly true for diseases with complex life cycles. A basic understanding of the way that parasites with complex life cycles interact with man-made changes to the environment will help us anticipate future changes in such diseases. This project will use a variety of experimental, observational and theoretical approaches to develop a comprehensive and synthetic understanding of the interactions between man-made environmental change, parasite communities, and the extent to which these changes affect host communities. Salt marshes are a useful model ecosystem to address the role of diseases since these wetlands are subject to a wide range of man-made impacts and support a diverse community of trematode worm parasites. Examples of changes that can affect parasite communities include losses to biodiversity, pollution, introduced species and climate change. The effects of these impacts are not likely to be the same for all diseases. Because some parasitic diseases can alter the community of hosts that they infect (such as by altering the flow of energy through an ecosystem or by changing predator-prey relationships) there may be complex feedback between changes in the environment, diseases and ecosystems doc24701 none Developing Suitcase Lessons in Oceanography in concert with the FOSS-based K-6 Science Curriculum Currently in Use in a Tri-County Educational Service District Three counties in Oregon are currently involved in improving science education in schools by changing the education paradigm from teaching-centered to learning-centered via inquiry-based hands-on curricula. It is based on a Science-Teacher Partnership Program (SEPS), in which Full Option Science Systems (FOSS) have been adopted for each grade level from K-6, and partnerships have been established to help teachers provide a quality science education for all students. The program is advised by a panel composed of teachers, scientists and administrators with experience and or interest in hands-on science. The SEPS program has been successful not only in enhancing the young students interest and knowledge of science, but has also had a positive impact by increasing younger students awareness of opportunities and of careers made possible by higher education. However, there is no ocean science component in the curriculum. The objective of this project is to address that deficiency. The project will generate and test the concept of using Suitcase Lessons in Oceanography , in concert with ongoing curriculum, to infuse ocean science into K-6 science education in the Linn-Benton-Lincoln Educational Service District (ESD). A complete portable module ( Suitcase Lesson ) will be created which will allow any faculty member to introduce fundamental science concepts of ocean science to K-6 students. This approach aims at directly addressing NSES goals of science literacy for all; real understanding of scientific processes; and development of a desire for science learning throughout life. In addition it addresses the current need of integrating ocean sciences in a life-long educational program aimed at promoting a basic understanding of the oceans and their relevance to everyday life doc6401 none Family Science: Expanding Community Support for Inquiry-based Science is the University of Washington s innovative five-year plan for reaching youth and families in the Seattle school district. This program represents an enhancement of the NSF-funded Family Science program targeting grades K-5 and expansion of this successful program to include middle and high school students. The proposed activities, Science Explorations, Inquiry Science Conferences and Community Celebrations, are designed to help parents understand inquiry-based science instruction while heightening students confidence in their ability to understand science processes. The hands-on activities also support and complement Seattle s Local Systemic Change project by enlisting teachers, parents and community members to champion science education outside of the formal school setting. The implementation strategy includes workshops to train Family Science Lead Teachers and Parent Community Leaders to coordinate Family Science programs. Subsequent partnerships between teachers and community organizations are designed to establish regional clusters of community networks to support programmatic activities during and beyond the funding period. It is estimated that Family Science will result in the presentation of nearly 300 school and community-based events impacting 10,000 individuals doc24703 none Unifying Chronostratigraphic Databases Workshop Christopher Keane and Steven Stanley The American Geological Institute proposes to convene a workshop to bring together a number of the groups working on chronostratigraphic databases. The primary goal of the workshop is to establish the framework for a consortium of scientific entities that will undertake a sustained effort to continually recalibrate the time scale, while simultaneously reassessing its relationship to a wide variety of geologic data and temp[oral patterns through a coordinated data system of geologic time. Through the workshop, participants will identify the nature, similarities, and issues facing each chronostratigraphic effort currently underway. A well calibrated, properly applied geologic time scale is essential to our understanding the evolution of the Earth, including the ages of rocks and fossils, timing of major events in earth history, and rates of natural processes. The workshop will examine the needs of a range of end-users of a coordinated data system dealing with geologic time. By establishing a list of primary end-user needs as well as issues facing each organization, an effective plan for building a coordinated data system of geologic time can be effectively constructed doc24704 none Over the next ten years, demand for electric power in the USA is expected to increase by about 20% while under the current plans the electric transmission capacity will increase only by 4%. In addition, the policy of open access to transmission systems that helped create the competitive electricity markets, also led to a huge increase in the number of energy transactions over the grid. This, together with a shortage of generation in some areas, require optimal usage of existing infrastructure and the addition of FACTS devices and intelligent controllers. A power system is a dynamic nonlinear time-varying multivariable complex process. Any optimization strategies must therefore be carried out in real time and adapt to continuously changing conditions. Recent developments in optimization techniques, intelligent controllers, power electronics and digital hardware offer possible solutions. Power system engineers are aware of the problems and challenges of having some form of global optimization of the planning and control of the power system. Control engineers on the other hand have developed algorithms for solving control problems. Power electronics experts have knowledge of how to design and control high power FACTS devices when Inserted into power systems. This proposal is for holding a workshop to bring these groups together and to focus on discussions leading to fundamental technical solutions to the optimal control of the electric power network in view of the current energy crisis and to avoid the crisis in the future. Thirty persons from both academia and industry, will meet for three days. The program will consist of seven sessions, each of which will address salient issues. The outcome will be a report which summarizes the discussions, identifies challenges, strengths and weaknesses, and proposes a way forward to address the weaknesses. This should lead to more interdisciplinary research doc24705 none The objective of this project is to improve the productivity of indole alkaloids in a well-characterized model plant tissue culture system, C. roseus. The overall goals are to determine the metabolic effects of genetic manipulations of some key enzymes in the indole and non-mevalonate terpenoid pathways on flux through the indole alkaloid synthesis pathways, with special emphasis on the interplay between primary and secondary metabolism on the final alkaloid productivity. The specific objectives are to: 1) construct and characterize transgenic hairy root lines overexpressing key enzymes, such as ORCA3, G10H, DXS, DXR and AS-beta under the control of a recently characterized inducible promoter system; 2) develop methods for NMR- based metabolic flux maps; 3) perform metabolic characterization of these first generation transgenic lines; 4) develop techniques for co-transformation that allow the introduction of multiple genes; 5) construct and characterize a second generation of transgenic lines expressing strategic combinations of genes as determined from the results of the first generation transgenic lines above doc24706 none Succinate has many industrial applications and it maybe used in the future as an intermediary commodity chemical feedstock for producing bulk chemicals. Routinely produced from petrochemicals, succinate can also be produced by fermentation from glucose. Developing a low-cost fermentation process with high succinate yields would create a new use for agricultural products. The best succinate producer, Actinobacillus succinogenes, produces up to 100 g l of succinate. To engineer an A. succinogenes strain able to produce even more succinate at a higher chemical yield, the Principal Investigators (PIs) will determine which metabolic fluxes to target for genetic manipulation. A system of linear stoichiometric equations (expressed as a matrix) will be built, based on A. succinogenes metabolic network. Experimental data (i.e., fermentation balance, biomass production, and label distribution in succinate, formate, and acetate) collected from continuous cultures grown in the presence of 13 C-NaHCO3 or 2- 13 C-glucose will be fed into this stoichiometric matrix to calculate the fluxes in the different pathways. Control exerted on flux distribution by different metabolic branches will be evaluated by growing cultures in a variety of conditions. Each growth condition will differ from the optimized, standard conditions by a single parameter. Parameters will include enzyme-specific inhibitors, different carbon sources, new enzyme activities (by introduction of recombinant genes), and added reducing power (by the intermediary of an electrically-reduced artificial electron carrier). The conclusions drawn from these metabolic flux analyses should give insights on how to engineer A. succinogenes to produce more succinate doc24705 none The objective of this project is to improve the productivity of indole alkaloids in a well-characterized model plant tissue culture system, C. roseus. The overall goals are to determine the metabolic effects of genetic manipulations of some key enzymes in the indole and non-mevalonate terpenoid pathways on flux through the indole alkaloid synthesis pathways, with special emphasis on the interplay between primary and secondary metabolism on the final alkaloid productivity. The specific objectives are to: 1) construct and characterize transgenic hairy root lines overexpressing key enzymes, such as ORCA3, G10H, DXS, DXR and AS-beta under the control of a recently characterized inducible promoter system; 2) develop methods for NMR- based metabolic flux maps; 3) perform metabolic characterization of these first generation transgenic lines; 4) develop techniques for co-transformation that allow the introduction of multiple genes; 5) construct and characterize a second generation of transgenic lines expressing strategic combinations of genes as determined from the results of the first generation transgenic lines above doc24708 none Li This workshop award supports fifteen American researchers in technical innovation to meet with leading Chinese researchers in technical innovation on the occasion of the Third International Symposium on Management of Technology, Hangzhou, China, October . The U.S. and Chinese researchers will exchange information and explore opportunities for collaborative research in an area of research, namely technical innovation, that has been identified by NSF and the National Natural Science Foundation of China together as a key area of policy discussion and joint research during the first decade of the 21st century. Members of the U.S. and Chinese teams have participated in two NSF-NSFC sponsored policy dialogues. This bilateral workshop extends to discussions toward greater research collaboration doc24709 none The objective of this project is to metabolically engineer bacteria to produce high levels of folic acid directly from glucose as opposed to transforming a more expensive raw material such as para amino benzoic acid (PABA). Phosphoenolpyruvate (PEP), erythrose-4-phosphate (E4P), glutamate, and GTP are the glucose-derived precursors of folic acid. Thus, from the concentration and formation flux standpoints, these four precursors need to be engineered to be amply available. The metabolic engineering approach will initially focus on increasing further the formation of chorismate, a PEP and E4P-derived intermediate in folic acid biosynthesis. The proposed tasks are: (1) alter regulation to increase the flux to chorismate while limiting the side reactions from chorismate to amino acids, (2) model and map the fluxes in the folic acid-producing candidate strain of B. subtilis using the investigators software and NMR analyses, (3) test the strains in batch and continuous cultivation, and (4) based on the results of steps 1-3, further fine tune the pathways. After achieving success on the chorismate-side of the folic acid biosynthetic pathway, subsequent work can explore whether other precursors (e.g. GTP) have become limiting doc24710 none This award provides funds to conduct a multiple stage modeling study to investigate the role of freshwater inputs to the oceans and its influence on climate. Initially, the investigators will carry out fully coupled climate modeling experiments to generate a climate reference state for the Early and Late Miocene. Next, they will complete a series of ocean model experiments for each of the two periods to target the role of high-latitude in affecting ocean surface conditions. This effort will focus on the role of freshwater dynamics in altering the deep-ocean thermohaline circulation for differing ocean-land configurations. The results from these experiments will be compared to paleoceanographic data to determine which ocean solution best corresponds to the paleoceanographic record for these time intervals. In the last stage of modeling, the research team will use best-fit results from the ocean model experiments as a foundation for additional coupled model experiments. The Miocene was a notable step in the transition from global conditions of warm equable climates to a climate with persistently cold polar regions. This was accompanied by a fully developed southern cryosphere and the initiation of northern hemisphere ice. It is hypothesized that the initiation of Antarctic continental glaciation resulted from tectonic activity during the Miocene. This resulted in a major reorganization of deep ocean circulation that played a key role in the evolution of cooling polar climates. The main research objective of this award is to attempt to mimic the Miocene climate transition based on the connections between the freshwater impacts associated with a developing southern ocean-based cryosphere and intensification of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC). As such, the investigators hope to contribute to an improved understanding of the dynamics of the Miocene climate transition, especially with regards to the role of freshwater input in impacting climate. This research will provide a broader understanding of Earth climate during an important transition in its history when the physical features began to appear as they are in the modern world (i.e., continental separation, establishment of polar ice caps, circum-Antarctic ocean circulation doc24538 none The polymer industry is one of the most dynamic and expanding industries of our time. It is one of the few industries in which the U.S. still holds a strong leadership in an extremely competitive global market. A focused collaboration between industry and academia has been underway for nearly five years through the activities of the NSF Industry University Cooperative Research Center for Advanced Polymer and Composite Engineering (CAPCE) at the Ohio State University. CAPCE offers comprehensive and well-organized collaboration between application-oriented researchers in industry and fundamental-oriented researchers in universities, enhancing commercialization of advanced polymer and composites materials. The Center will continue to emphasize the needs of the more traditional manufacturing sector of the polymer and composite industry, since these members dominate the industrial support base. In addition, their efforts will include: - Cooperating with industry members to translate basic research results from NSF supported research into commercial products and processes; - Incorporating environmentally-friendly technologies in product manufacturing by reducing energy consumption and toxic chemicals; reducing the amount of volatile solvents and manufacturing waste; and increasing sustainability; and - Enabling efficient, low-cost mass production of parts for bio-MEMS, sensors, and other applications, using micro and nanno-fabrication techniques doc24712 none 96- Schwartzbach Most of the proteins in chloroplasts are nuclear-encoded, synthesized in the cytoplasm, and imported post-translationally into the chloroplast. Precursors of chloroplast proteins contain topogenic information for targeting to and import into chloroplasts. Precursors of Euglena light harvesting chlorophyll a b binding protein of photosystem 11 (pLHCP11) and of the small subunit of ribulose bisphosphate carboxylase (pSSU) are polyproteins that are composed of mature polypeptides covalently linked by a conserved decapeptide. In vivo pulse chase experiments demonstrated that pLHCP11 and pSSU are transported as integral membrane proteins from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) to the Golgi apparatus prior to chloroplast localization rather than being imported directly into the chloroplast. Once the polyproteins are in the chloroplast they are processed by an endoproteolytic polyprotein processing peptidase. PLHCP11 and pSSU each contain a signal peptide for targeting to the ER and a stop-transfer signal C-terminal of the signal peptide. Studies using canine microsomes and deletion constructs demonstrated that the stop-transfer signal anchors the protein in the membrane with the N-terminus in the microsomal lumen and the C-terminus in the cytoplasm. Previous work described the import and processing pathway of Euglena chloroplast proteins. The objective of this research is to understand the molecular mechanism of this novel trafficking pathway for Euglena chloroplast proteins. This will be achieved by developing an in vitro system that reconstitutes the Golgi apparatus to chloroplast transport event. This system should allow for the biochemical characterization of this step as well as for the identification of components that are essential for this process. This includes the isolation and characterization of the polyprotein processing peptidase(s). %%% Most of the proteins in chloroplasts are nuclear-encoded, synthesized in the cytoplasm, and imported post-translationally int o the chloroplast. Precursors of chloroplast proteins contain topogenic information for targeting to and import into chloroplasts. The objective of this research is to investigate a novel trafficking pathway for nuclear-encoded chloroplast proteins to Euglena chloroplasts. The precursors of chloroplast proteins are first targeted to the endoplasmic reticulum, transported to the Golgi apparatus and are then transported to the chloroplast. Nothing is known about the molecular mechanism of this novel trafficking pathway for precursors of chloroplast proteins to the chloroplast doc24713 none Recent improvements in operational numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, including increased resolution and better parameterization of sub-grid scale processes, have allowed National Weather Service (NWS) Forecasters across the country to enjoy considerably improved mesoscale forecasts. In the Great Lakes region, many of the mesoscale features that develop are, for one reason or another, forced by the Great Lakes - either individually or as an aggregate. As a result, marine forecasts over the lakes have benefited little. Forecasts over adjacent land masses, where mesoscale phenomena are likely influenced by the proximity of the lakes, have also not been without their challenges. The Great Lakes influence a wide range of extreme weather throughout the year. Lake-effect storms develop in winter when cold arctic air flows over the warm lakes. Thunderstorms develop in summer, when the temperature contrast between the cool lakes and the warm land generates strong lake breeze convergence zones. The ways that the lakes influence severe weather are not well known. It is anticipated that the effects can be significant. This research project is an extension of a previous NSF-funded project that has examined the impacts of the Great Lakes on synoptic scale systems in winter. The prior NSF Project involved performing and analyzing several series of numerical simulations where all the Great Lakes were included (with-lake or WL), none of the lakes were included (no-lake or NL), and select lakes were included (individual-lake or group-lake) to examine the effects of the Great Lakes on synoptic-scale systems in winter as well as some aspects of lake-effect snowstorms. The current research will focus on lake aggregate effects on additional winter season weather phenomena such as dominant lake-effect snow bands. These bands can dump 20 inches of snow in as little as 3 hours. Their development is not understood very well at all. Preliminary simulations suggest that the lake aggregate play a role in providing moisture and reducing wind shear. Other extreme winter weather phenomena that will be studied include freezing rain events. It is hypothesized that the lake aggregate can provide heat and moisture in such a way so as to produce a temperature and moisture profile that is conducive for freezing rain. The aggregate effects on severe weather heavy precipitation in the summer will also be examined. It is hypothesized that the negative surface fluxes of heat and moisture over the lakes lead to the generation of high pressure and anticyclonic flow over the region, and possibly enhanced surface convergence in areas to the south and west of the Great takes region. Finally, certain marine situations (over the lakes themselves) where high winds developed, possibly as a result of interaction between the atmosphere and warming lake surfaces, will be examined. A numerical simulation approach that effectively isolates the impacts of the lakes and which has been used successfully in past projects will be taken. Six case studies are planned in the current proposed study (e.g. Phase I). Each case study will involve several numerical simulations including with-lake, no-lake, selected individual- or group-lake simulations, and lake-surface temperature sensitivity simulations. Additional analyses will examine the impacts of the lakes on sea-level pressure, surface winds, surface convergence boundaries, thermal and vorticity advection patterns aloft, as well as wind and temperature profiles - to which severe weather is extremely sensitive. Information obtained from the study will be incorporated into forecast procedures that are currently being used at regional NWS Offices doc24714 none A grant has been awarded to the University of Oklahoma Biological Station (UOBS), under the direction of Dr. Lawrence J. Weider, to construct a triplex housing facility to expand and enhance housing accommodations for guest researchers and students. UOBS is located on the north-shore of Lake Texoma, an approximately 88,000 surface acre reservoir on the Oklahoma-Texas border. The UOBS faculty has both a national and international reputation in the field of aquatic (freshwater) ecology. Since the founding of UOBS in , thousands of guest researchers, students, and conference participants have visited and stayed at the Biological Station for various lengths of time. Nearly publications, 150+ theses, and nearly undergraduate research projects have been completed at UOBS during its history. However, one long-term problem at UOBS, relates to the inadequate housing facilities for long-term guest researchers (e.g. sabbatical visitors, post-docs) and accompanying family members. A 2,800 square-foot, fully-furnished, triplex guest researcher housing facility will be constructed at UOBS near Willis, Oklahoma. Each of the three fully-furnished apartments will consist of two-bedrooms, two bathrooms, a fully-functioning kitchen and living dining area. (One of the units will be handicapped-accessible.) The triplex unit will be constructed on a recently purchased 7.3 acre tract of land, adjacent to the main UOBS campus. This three-apartment unit will greatly enhance the ability of UOBS to host longer-term guest researcher teams (between 1-6 persons per apartment) or guest researchers and accompanying family members, and will complement present housing facilities that serve the needs of short-term guests (i.e. students, conference participants). UOBS is one of the largest field stations in the south-central U.S., and its year-round faculty staff conduct research related to important issues in aquatic ecology ranging from exotic species invasions to ecosystem studies of water resources. Nationally and internationally-recognized researchers collaborate with UOBS scientists. The benefits from constructing such a housing unit will be seen via increased guest researcher use, allowing more researchers to access unique habitats and features of the region surrounding UOBS, and tackle some of the key ecological and environmental issues related to aquatic resources. With an increased researcher-base, other programs at the station such as on-site undergraduate and graduate training, as well as public education programs (i.e. K-12 outreach) will benefit from enhancement of the intellectual scholarly climate at UOBS doc24715 none US Fish and Wildlife have provided support to the Office of Polar Programs by allowing the project of Dr. James Estes, University of California, Santa Cruz, to use the MV Tiglax. The project (OPP 99- ) titled Introduced Foxes And Seabirds: The Role Of Top-Down Processes In Controlling Marine Subsidies To Terrestrial Ecosystems worked in the Aleutian Islands, for 15 days, beginning 7th August ending 22 August, . The vessel was well matched for the type of work, and OPP intends to develop an interagency agreement with US Fish and Wildlife for future support using MV Tiglax doc24716 none This project involves the incorporation of enzymes or antibodies in sol-gel processed transition metal oxides with the purpose of producing advanced biosensor components for the detection of harmful chemical and biological species. The proposed approach primarily addresses the material-related issues for creating controlled porous structures in which the biomolecules may easily fit and function. Environmental transmission electron microscopy will be employed to assess the nature of bio-molecule-sol-gel matrix interactions. A prototype of a functional biosensor will be delivered at the end of the program. The operating principle of this device is based on the release of gaseous ammonia as a result of biochemical reactions occurring between the biological component and the analyte. The bio-doped ceramics to be developed in this program are expected to find uses beyond the fields of bio-sensing and medical diagnostics. The ability to detect the presence and monitor the concentration of harmful gaseous species and biological agents is important in any setting where humans live and work. This work proposes a novel way to mix ceramic and biological materials together in order to produce novel composites for use as sensing elements in miniaturized and possibly implantable, biosensors (such as a urea detector). These novel materials are expected to allow for faster and more efficient detection of contaminants and dangerous species. The students working on this project will learn new materials processing and characterization techniques and will obtain valuable skills on biosensor development that will be very useful for their professional development. This proposal was submitted in response to the Dear Colleague Letter: Next Generation Chemical and Biological Sensors and Sensing Systems [nsf 02-112 doc24717 none Interdisciplinary (99) This project is supporting a two-day national conference on Undergraduate Research and Scholarship and the Mission of the Research University at the Reinvention Center at SUNY Stony Brook. The conference, which will take place on November 14-15, , will bring together university faculty, administrators, and students, as well as representatives of disciplinary associations, government agencies, and private foundations, to focus on fundamental, institutional, cultural, and academic issues that are inherent to research universities. Such issues must be addressed if research universities are going to maximize their potential and bring research, scholarship, and creative activity to the forefront of the undergraduate education they offer, as envisioned in the Boyer Commission report, Educating Undergraduates in the Research University. Underlying the conference focus is the broader goal for research universities: (1) to define and articulate a vision of undergraduate education that builds upon and is synergistic with their research mission, and (2) to develop reasonable expectations for implementing this vision so that it impacts significant numbers of students. Understanding the role of undergraduate research and mechanisms for realizing broader participation is a first step toward this goal. In their efforts to infuse research into the undergraduate education, those in leadership roles in research universities confront the same panoply of issues and challenges that surround their larger efforts at reinvention. Thus the conference focus on undergraduate research provides a concrete and manageable way to address these issues doc24718 none Plant seeds are the world s most important agricultural product and the lowest cost biological source of carbohydrates, oils and proteins. An important goal of plant metabolic engineering is to develop chemical and nutritional production systems in seeds that are amenable to rational genetic engineering. To reach this goal, a quantitative understanding of fluxes through biochemical pathways is needed for seeds. This project will begin to provide such an understanding through analysis and engineering of the accumulation of storage oils in Brassica napus seeds. Three central questions about oilseed metabolism will be addressed: How do seeds cope with the CO2 generated during oil synthesis? By what pathways does carbon flow from sucrose to oil and storage proteins and how are these pathways influenced by availability of light? What is the source of reductant for fatty acid biosynthesis? These problems are interlinked by shared metabolic intermediates and pathways and the processes they represent must be coordinately regulated during seed development. This project will lead to a quantitative description of metabolic networks in a major agricultural production system, and to improved strategies for engineering changes in metabolism. The resulting progress in understanding, modeling and engineering seed metabolism and the interdisciplinary training of students and postdocs will help move plant metabolic engineering from the current hit and miss state toward a framework of rational design and analysis. This information will be crucial to expanding the use of plants as green factories that provide renewable and sustainable alternatives to petroleum and also aid nutritional improvements in the seeds that provide most of the world s food doc24719 none Sharma Description: This award supports US-India cooperative research entitled Fabrication of Doped Single-Mode Optical Fibers for Investigation of Bragg-Grating Characteristics. The collaborators are Anup Sharma of Alabama A AMMU is a leader in characterizing Bragg- gratings in optical fibers. Fiber Bragg-gratings have numerous important applications in sensing and communications. The research goals include developing a novel scheme for fiber sensing of strain and temperature. Scope: This activity will initiate a new international collaboration with a competent group of Indian materials scientists and will promote the participation of under-represented groups in research. A doctoral student will accompany the PI on trips to the IITKgp where he will learn about the modified chemical vapor deposition techniques; likewise, the Indian collaborator will gain exposure to fabrication techniques developed at AAMU. This proposal has strong educational aspects and there is a good chance that the investigators will produce novel results. The Indian Department of Science and Technology (DST) jointly supports this activity under the NSF DST program doc24720 none Jeffrey T. Clark Brian M. Slator North Dakota State University - Fargo CISE RR: Advancing Vidualization Projects Through the Use of High-Performance Virtual Reality Systems This proposal from an EPSCoR state, fostering development in computer visualization research, aims at acquiring equipment to support North Dakota s State University Archeological Technologies Lab. The research involves the use of compelling digital visualization experiences and authentic simulated virtual worlds to support the following projects: 1. Virtual reconstruction of Like-a-Fishhook Village (to be displayed at the Heritage Center - state museum - in Bismarck and the Cultural Center of Three Affiliated Tribes in New Town), 2. Virtual reconstruction of On-a-Slant Village (for display at the Fort Abraham Lincoln Museum in Mandan), and 3. Immersive virtual environment of a Native American powwow-dancing competition for use in diabetes prevention in Native American youth. An SGI Reality Center as a state-or-the-art technology augmentation to current NDSU facility and computer visualization capabilities will contribute to the virtual reconstructions of the villages and the computer simulation game for diabetes education. The work facilitates projects in archeology, anthropology, and museology. Expecting to develop and host a variety of virtual 3D environments at the highest levels and to send the virtual worlds to multiple remote location for concurrent display, the equipment and requisite software systems will constitute a qualitative leap in the capabilities to share high-detail 3D content for both research and education doc24721 none This award provides support for the improvement of facilities at the University of Guam Marine Laboratory (UOGML). The lab is a research unit that serves the U.S.-affiliated islands of Micronesia, including The Territory of Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, The Federated States of Micronesia (Yap, Chuuk, Kosrae, and Pohnpei), the Republic of Belau, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands. The lab is the only U.S. marine research station in the tropical western Pacific that includes a modern research laboratory. Funds provided by the award will permit the improvement of a multi-purpose room used for lectures, meetings and conferences, and various research purposes. Improvements include replacement of research benches and related furnishings, purchase of a new audio visual system, replacement of aging windows and doors, and purchase of microscopes for general and research-oriented courses, including a microscope system with display features for instructional purposes. Due to its location in the Pacific Islands, the UOGML has an important service component that includes providing data and research services to a broad group of users. These improvements in the lab s infrastructure will enhance both the research capabilities of the Marine Laboratory and its ability to disseminate the results of research to potential users who range from traditional leaders, chiefs councils and community-based organizations to territorial, state and federal agencies doc24722 none Engineering schools at research universities have for many years relied on non-residents to fill the ranks of its graduate students because most qualified American engineering graduates choose not to go to graduate school. Even with a large influx of international students, many engineering faculty have difficulty recruiting qualified graduate students to assist with NSF-sponsored research. Recently, international tensions and security concerns have created increased difficulties in recruiting non-residents to American graduate schools. This workshop is directed toward increasing the number of qualified US citizens and residents who chose to pursue graduate studies. Specifically the workshop discussion will concern students who attend engineering schools which do not have a Ph.D. program. Excellent students graduating from non-PhD-granting engineering colleges often do not consider graduate school because there is no presence of a research program and no (or few) graduate students at their institution. These engineering graduates are often not aware of the graduate school option, and they are often discouraged from going on to graduate school. These students appear to be an untapped resource of advanced-level engineering manpower. This workshop comprises Phase I of a project to encourage and assist engineering graduates from non-PhD-granting engineering schools to apply to and enroll in graduate programs in research universities. The workshop participants will be drawn from both Ph.D. granting and non-Ph.D. granting Institutions and will include engineering researchers, administrators and teachers. The participants will identify the sources of the problem and recommend several methods of addressing these problems. The end product of this workshop will be a report disseminated to engineering deans. A formal proposal to the National Science Foundation for initiating a prototype study (Phase II) incorporating some or all of the workshop recommendations will follow doc24723 none This proposal is for support of a symposium Physiological Ecology of Migration: How to Fly, Fast, and Feed En Route at the Third North American Ornithological Congress (NAOC) on 24-31 September in New Orleans, LA. The objectives for this symposium are twofold: (a) to bring together outstanding researchers who are actively studying migratory birds at different levels of biological organization (molecular, cellular, organismal, populations) and (b) to include researchers who can address the physiology of a taxonomically diverse set of migratory birds within a broad ecological context. Such a focus is timely in that significant recent work has addressed the metabolic physiology of flying birds and the importance of phenotypic flexibility in organ systems for migrating birds. However, this work has not been adequately integrated especially across various levels of biological organization, nor has this work been disseminated to a broader audience of ornithologists interested in the ecology of birds during migration. The contributors at the symposium will provide a diverse set of perspectives and approaches for studying the physiological ecology of migration in part because they include scientists at different stages of their careers, and from various countries represented by both men and women doc24724 none This proposal requests funding to support the participation of student attendees at the International Limnogeology Congress, to be held in Tucson, Arizona, Mar 29-Apr. 2, . The congress is intended to promote interaction between specialists in all aspects of the study of the geology of lake deposits. Specialists in geochronology, sedimentology, paleoecology, paleoclimatology and sedimentary geochemistry will all be in attendance at the meeting, which is expected to draw approximately 200 participants. Cross-fertilization of ideas at conferences such as this are critical for graduate students at an early stage of career, both in establishing a wide network of contacts (both in the US and internationally) and in efficiently showcasing their work to a key element of the scientific community. We request sufficient funds to defer registration costs and provide partial travel support for approximately 10 students. Selection criteria for student support grants will be based on both relevance of the student s research work to the general conference goals, and on evidence from the student (advisor s letter of support and personal statement) indicating the quality and significance of the work to be presented doc3877 none Ion channels are membrane proteins responsible for the passive movement of ions, and sometimes other substrates, across cell membranes. Channels function in various cell types, including epithelial cells where they regulate the flow of ions across membranes that separate major compartments in the body, and excitable cells where they transduce electrical signals across cell membranes. Ion channels are often the endpoint, or effector, of signal transduction pathways. The overall structure of a typical ion channel can be broken into two major domains -- portions that form the pathway for ion permeation by creating a pore through the membrane, and (usually separate) portions that serve to regulate the open closed configuration of the pore by gating in response to an appropriate stimulus. This proposal concerns one type of channel -- one crucial to the processes of chloride secretion and reabsorption in epithelial cells. This channel, the CFTR protein, is the product of the gene defective in the inherited disease, cystic fibrosis. A variant of CFTR is also involved in modulation of membrane excitability in cardiac ventricular myocytes. The long-term goal of this project is to understand the mechanisms of conduction, specificity, and gating in ion channels and transporters, with an emphasis on anion channels. Compared to cation channels, the structural architecture of anion channels is poorly understood. For this project, the overall objective is to determine the mechanisms controlling permeation in CFTR. Goal #1 is to identify transmembrane (TM) helices that line the pore, by localization of binding sites for open-channel blockers. Goal #2 is to identify groups of amino acids that serve as determinants of anion selectivity. The proposed approach relies upon the use of molecular biological techniques (site-directed mutagenesis) combined with expression in Xenopus oocytes and quantitative biophysical assays. The working hypothesis is that the pore is lined by TM domains 5, 6, 11, and 12. To achieve these goals, whole-cell and single-channel currents will be measured to determine the kinetics of two structurally-distinct classes of pore-blocking molecules, and to determine whether their binding domains contribute to the permeation pathway. Structural elements that contribute to the architecture of the pore will be defined by comparing the ability of wildtype and mutant channels to interact with open-channel blockers. Previous studies from the principal investigator s laboratory have shown that blocker kinetics are highly sensitive to the structure of the pore. A region within TM6 has also been identified that is critical for discrimination between different anions. This region also appears to lie close to the binding sites for pore-blocking molecules. To accurately describe the structure of the pore, it is necessary to consider the contributions made from portions of the channel other than TM6. This project will be guided by a three-dimensional model of the pore, proposed in the application, which takes into account the experimental data for TM domains 5, 6, 11, and 12. This approach hypothesizes that multiple helical domains contribute both to the binding sites for drugs and to the selectivity domains of the channel. A specific subset of residues that may determine the biophysical features of permeation is proposed. Residues in TM6 and TM12 will be addressed initially. Testing the importance of these residues will allow the construction of a detailed map of the conduction pathway in CFTR. Basic mechanisms used for permeation are likely to be common between CFTR and other anion channels. Hence, it is likely that conclusions drawn from the study of this molecular model will be relevant to the understanding of permeation in other anion channels doc24726 none This award provides partial support for improvements in the electrical systems and communications infrastructure at The Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, an independent, non-profit oceanographic institution and marine laboratory. The improvements include installation of fiber optic cabling that will provide high-speed digital connections between the administration building and the five outlying buildings at the Laboratory s site on McKown Point. Currently, a majority of the research staff does not benefit from the speed of the laboratory s T1 connection due to the lack of fiber-optic connections between the various outbuildings and the hub in the administration building. The integrity of the Laboratory s power system will be protected from power outages by the addition of a new 100kW auxiliary power generator that will augment limited back-up power currently provided by an existing 37kW generator. This addition will provide a reliable supply of electricity needed to maintain instrumentation, computers and large numbers of sensitive living, refrigerated and frozen materials stored at the Laboratory. Major activities that will benefit from both improvements include the Provasoli-Guillard National Center for the Culture of Marine Phytoplankton, an NSF-supported collection of marine algae, and the J.J. MacIsaac Facility for Flow and Imaging Cytometry, which serves users at other institutions as well as those at The Bigelow Laboratory. The improvements in communications is also expected to facilitate educational use of the laboratory s facilities, which has increased significantly in recent years doc24727 none The newly formed COGGE operates as a standing committee under the auspices of the National Research Council s Board on Earth Sciences and Resources and addresses scientific, technical, and public-policy issues pertaining to the engineering applications of Earth sciences. The committee s scope encompasses Earth processes and materials, including the mechanics of rock and soil, and focuses on safe and responsible human development, risk assessment, and mitigation of natural and anthropogenic hazards. The Committee s objectives are as follows: 1. To identify, investigate, and report on questions relating to geological and geotechnical engineering to government, industry, academia, and the public; 2. To promote the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge; 3. To identify new technologies and potential applications; 4. To improve public policy on geological and geotechnical engineering issues; 5. To provide a forum for discussion among academic and professional groups, government agencies, and private industry; and 6. To enhance national and international cooperation and exchange of information by acting as the U.S. representative for the International Society of Rock Mechanics and related organizations. Research and engineering developments in geological and geotechnical engineering are driven by concerns for the natural and built environment (including radioactive and hazardous waste isolation, remediation, and mitigation), mitigation of natural hazards such as earthquakes and landslides, environmentally sound recovery of natural resources, and interest in defense structures in rock. The technological, economic, social, and political impact of these issues engage the attention of many government agencies, business corporations, and public interest groups and posits the need for the COGGE. The expertise, judgment, and strategic perspective of the COGGE serves to define and help initiate sponsored studies and other activities with respect to major areas of national interest or concern in which rock mechanics problems represent critical or limiting factors. In this regard, the committee offers a forum for meetings with federal agency liaison representative and other interested organizations to exchange ideas and information on important topics that may merit inquiry through the National Research Council doc24728 none Modern innovations in computer based monitoring, protection and control of electric power supply systems, coupled with the availability of wide-band high speed communication channels have made it possible to bring about the development of very highly secure electric supply networks. The ability to bring about such a supply network requires a multi-disciplinary team of students and faculty members who are established researchers in the fields of electric power engineering, communication systems, and new sensor developments. The present proposal is offered by such a team consisting of Virginia Tech and Arizona State University personnel, along with a plan of work which will make significant progress in achieving these goals. At the same time, the research team recognizes the importance of the electric supply system to the social and economic well-being of modern societies. These issues are also addressed in the proposal. An important part of the proposal is the development of a metric to measure the societal and economic dependence on electricity supply, as well as the cost of insecurity of the supply system to the society. The research team is convinced that disseminating the results of their research to students - and particularly to minority and under-represented groups - is a very important societal responsibility. To this end, the research plan contains a significant effort towards creating educational modules which can be broadcast on the internet, and with a special emphasis on reaching the minority and under-represented communities doc24729 none Stankovic The main goal of this research project is to develop a comprehensive framework for dynamical state estimation, fault detection and fault accommodation in energy processing systems. Such systems include terrestrial and autonomous power systems, electric drives and power electronic systems, and can be found in both civilian and military sectors. The PI s approach is based on a family of experimentally verifiable and mutually consistent dynamic models, with various family members being suitable for different tasks in analysis, fault management and control. In addition to exploring hierarchical and distributed architectures for monitoring and accommodating for faults in energy processing systems, he will also study simulation environments in which multiple models with embedded redundant dynamics are used to detect inconsistencies, and to initiate more detailed simulations to resolve them. He will also study economic and environmental aspects of fault tolerance in energy processing systems doc24730 none The National Science Foundation has awarded $ 99, 545 to the Rutgers University under the direction of Dr. John Dighton for the construction of an accommodation building and classroom to its Pinelands Field Station. Due to recent growth in use of this field station in the New Jersey pine barrens, Rutgers University has sought to improve the facilities at the station to be able to host short-term residential courses offered by the university and to provide those facilities to other universities and colleges who are also seeking to teach their own courses in the unique ecosystem. The research station was formerly mainly a research facility. As such, interest in the ecology and forestry of the area has attracted many researchers who wish to use the laboratory facilities on a short-term basis or to set up long-term monitoring programs. The lack of adequate accommodation to support visiting researchers has been acute in recent years and has limited its use by non-local institutions. The proposed new building will provide accommodation for up to 20 people in both dormitory and individual rooms, thus accommodating both student classes and visiting researchers. In addition, the building will provide a classroom for educational use and meetings. An existing building will be converted into a teaching laboratory. In addition to serving the Rutgers University community, the facility will be available to other universities and teaching institutes who have expressed a desire to teach courses in the field. In partnership with the Pinelands Preservation Alliance and the New Jersey State Aquarium at Camden, the new facilities will provide a venue for field experiential education for inner city school children and, particularly, their educators doc24731 none A grant has been awarded to Plattsburgh State University, under the direction of Dr. William J. Ehmann, Assistant to the Vice-President for Academic Affairs, to assess the educational and scientific potential of a university-affiliated property in Essex County, New York. The site, known locally as Twin Valleys , lies within Adirondack Park and consists of a 660-acre forest with a lodge, cabins, and classrooms. Twin Valleys was used for summer science camps in the s and s, but the facilities have degraded and the site is currently under-utilized. Special natural features of the site include mature white pine forest, wetlands, and other habitats for migratory birds, mammals, salamanders, and at least 14 species of native plants listed as vulnerable in New York State. With this grant, Plattsburgh State will be able to carefully re-evaluate the property, with specific attention to its suitability for further development as a biological field station. A team of six experts associated with the Organization of Biological Field Stations (OBFS) will visit Twin Valleys with PSU faculty and staff and representatives of College Auxiliary Services, Inc., (the not-for-profit corporation that owns the property) in December and May . Through site visits, interviews, and workshops, OBFS experts will help assess the scientific merits of the property, prioritize needed upgrades in facilities, and suggest academic programs that could use the site to best advantage. A Team Leader will coordinate production of a written report and will make an on-campus presentation in September . The recommendations are expected to provide a basis for requesting more funds to implement the vision, through funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation, private foundations, and institutional donors. Eleven biological field stations in New York focused on terrestrial systems are currently listed with the Organization of Biological Field Stations, but the closest is 85 miles from Plattsburgh, which significantly reduces access for our teaching and research and that of other area educational institutions. PSU is interested in 1) furthering existing partnerships with North Country high school students and teachers and community colleges, 2) supporting field components of a proposed undergraduate major in ecology as well as current majors in Biology and Environmental Science, and 3) creating new research affiliations. Twin Valleys also has the potential to attract audiences from large urban areas such as Boston and New York City (both within a half-day s drive) to Adirondack Park, a 6 million-acre forest conservation area and model of public-private partnership doc24732 none The objective of this project is to improve recombinant expression systems. The major goals are to discover and characterize pathways that facilitate protein folding and subunit assembly in hyperthermophiles. The components of these pathways will be inserted into recombinant host cells to preempt induction of stress responses during recombinant expression, and to enhance the stabilization and solubilization of recombinant protein. Building on the approach and findings of the investigators previous research, the specific objectives are: (1) to determine the functions of interacting proteins encoded by the 23 genes in the heat shock regulon of the hyperthermophile, Pyrococcus furiosus, (2) to identify functional complexes of thermostable heat shock proteins and express them in E. coli, yeast and mammalian cells to enhance the durability of these cells, and (3) to determine the effects of combinations of chaperonins on high level recombinant expression of proteins in intact cells as well as cell-free transcription-translation systems doc24668 none The Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC) for Virtual Proving Ground Simulation will focus unique capabilities and facilities for vehicle system simulation at the University of Iowa and electromechanical system simulation and design at the University of Texas at Austin on the goal of creating fundamental new capabilities for virtual proving ground simulation of complex vehicle and equipment systems, including off-road equipment, hybrid-electric vehicles, and next-generation enhanced vehicle mobility and vehicle power systems. The I UCRC will create and make available to its members an internationally unique virtual proving ground using (1) state-of-the-art networked computing facilities for high fidelity engineering simulation, (2) the National Advanced Driving Simulator at Iowa for driver-in-the-loop virtual proving ground simulation, and (3) unique capabilities at UT-Ausgtin, including access to facilities at the Center for Electromechanics. With these assets and significant extensions to be developed in the proposed research program, the I UCRC will support its members with internationally unique modeling , analysis, and virtual prototyping capabilities for simulation of complex vehicle and equipment systems doc24734 none Strand This grant provides support for a workshop on the subject of creating transgenic plants for use in phytoremediation. While much progress has been made in recent years on genetic modifications of plants for remediation, the problems of heavy metal uptake and accumulation in levels useful for phytoremediaton remain. For organic phytoremediaton to be useful, a wide variety of trees must be transformed and activities optimized. This workshop will provide an opportunity for scientists working in this area to present their most recent findings and to discuss how this potentially powerful technology might best be advanced. The workshop is planned for September in Seattle, Washington doc24735 none This proposal focuses on the development of a conference on Cognitive Neuroscience Across the Lifespan. The conference will be a satellite to the Cognitive Neuroscience Meeting in April . The primary objective is to push development in this emerging area with the ultimate goal of understanding how to maintain lifelong cognitive function, and how to maintain a healthy mind. The conference will focus on understanding the link between overt cognitive behaviors and underlying neural functions across the lifespan. The conference is designed to bring together for the first time, leading researchers in the cognitive neuroscience of aging, to highlight emerging issues, methodological challenges, and the small body of existing research in this domain, and to foster the exchange of ideas doc24736 none A grant has been awarded to the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) at Duke University, under the direction of PI Dr. Gary Hartshorn to improve the research facilities at OTS Palo Verde Biological Station in Costa Rica. OTS is a nonprofit consortium of 65 universities and research institutions from the United States, Latin America, Australia, Canada and South Africa. Founded in , OTS mission is to provide leadership in education, research and the responsible use of natural resources in the tropics. OTS has operated the Palo Verde Biological station since . Located in lowland, monsoonally dry forest of Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica, OTS Palo Verde station is in the heart of Palo Verde National Park that protects one of the largest remnants of tropical dry forest in Mesoamerica. At Palo Verde, OTS works in cooperation with governmental and partner-organizations on scientific issues of training, conservation, environmental education, wetlands restoration and natural resources management. Over the past decade the demand to use Palo Verde by OTS and non-OTS education groups has almost doubled, while research use continues to increase. The facilities at Palo Verde are inadequate to meet the physical needs for student and researcher uses, such as laboratory and lecture space, offices and housing. OTS will use NSF funds to build a new facility to house the station director and staff; construct a four?unit cabin to house up to eight researchers; construct a new boardwalk into the marsh; and purchase a new generator to provide a back-up power source. The broad goals of this project are to: Achieve OTS long-term strategic goal of developing the Palo Verde Biological Station as a center of excellence in tropical dry forest ecology and wetlands management. Modernize the Palo Verde Biological Station to improve its education, research and conservation biology capabilities. To stimulate and support the development and dissemination of research in tropical dry forest ecology. The full implementation of this project will enable OTS to continue to build its education program at Palo Verde, assist scientists in achieving the region s vast research potential, and work with researchers on wetlands protection at a time when agricultural growth in the lower Tempisque river basin is having a major impact on Palo Verde National Park doc24737 none The U.S. Global Ocean Ecosystems Dynamics (U.S. GLOBEC) program has the goal of understanding and ultimately predicting how populations of marine animal species respond to natural and anthropogenic changes in climate. Research in the Southern Ocean (SO) indicates strong coupling between climatic processes and ecosystem dynamics via the annual formation and destruction of sea ice. The Southern Ocean GLOBEC Program (SO GLOBEC) will investigate the dynamic relationship between physical processes and ecosystem responses through identification of critical parameters that affect the distribution, abundance and population dynamics of target species. The overall goals of the SO GLOBEC program are to elucidate shelf circulation processes and their effect on sea ice formation and krill distribution, and to examine the factors which govern krill survivorship and availability to higher trophic levels, including penguins, seals and whales. The focus of the U.S. contribution to the international SO GLOBEC program will be on winter processes. This component will focus on seabird diet composition and foraging behavior. This will be accomplished by direct observation of diet samples from both penguins and flying birds. Foraging behavior will be studied using time-depth recorders and satellite transmitters. This research will be coordinated with the component focusing the large-scale distribution, abundance and habitat of seabirds. The result of the integrated SO GLOBEC program will be to improve the predictability of living marine resources, especially with respect to local and global climatic shifts doc24738 none Hadjicostis The main goal of this research project is to develop a comprehensive framework for dynamical state estimation, fault detection and fault accommodation in energy processing systems. Such systems include terrestrial and autonomous power systems, electric drives and power electronic systems, and can be found in both civilian and military sectors. The PI s approach is based on a family of experimentally verifiable and mutually consistent dynamic models, with various family members being suitable for different tasks in analysis, fault management and control. In addition to exploring hierarchical and distributed architectures for monitoring and accommodating for faults in energy processing systems, he will also study simulation environments in which multiple models with embedded redundant dynamics are used to detect inconsistencies, and to initiate more detailed simulations to resolve them. He will also study economic and environmental aspects of fault tolerance in energy processing systems doc24739 none Oak Lake Field Station is a 570 acre teaching and research facility operated by South Dakota State University in northeastern Brookings County, South Dakota. Utilization of Oak Lake Field Station for research activity by local and visiting faculty and students has increased over 400% over the past seven years. This increase has occurred in response to better advertisement of field station facilities and greater local funding for faculty and student research. The station recently underwent a facility review, funded by the National Science Foundation. Visiting reviewers recommended expansion and improvement of existing laboratory and classroom facilities to meet future needs. The objective of this effort is to improve research laboratory, classroom and computer room facilities at Oak Lake Field Station, South Dakota. Funds provided by the National Science Foundation will be supplemented with matching dollars by local sources to remodel and expand the existing classroom and laboratory building of Oak Lake Field Station. This construction will provide a 637 sq. ft. laboratory, 918 sq. ft. classroom and 294 sq. ft. office computer room facility. Lab space will increase 445%, classroom space will increase 266% and office computer space will increase 188% relative to existing facilities. Overall, building square footage will increase from ft2 to ft2. Building renovations will include total enclosure of the existing field laboratory and classroom, furnace installation to allow four-season use, new lab countertops, storage cabinets, chemical shower and eyewash station, telecommunications wiring, sinks, accommodations for digital projection, classroom to seat 32 students, expanded field library shelving, storage area and expanded office computer room. Oak Lake Field Station provides a unique site to study native tallgrass prairie and pothole environments within the northern plains. Located within two hours of several regional universities, colleges and public schools, this remodeled facility will provide a location for field courses, field trips, student field projects, graduate and faculty research, symposia, professional meetings and retreats. Field Station staff conservatively estimate a tripling of field station instruction and research utilization as a result of this remodeling effort. Instruction and research efforts will now be possible throughout the year. Expanded classroom and laboratory facilities will allow simultaneous use by larger groups of students and researchers. Telecommunications capabilities will be improved, allowing more efficient communication of field station programs and data to other academic institutions and organizations. These enhancements will greatly improve student learning opportunities and research productivity within a modest budget doc24740 none The objective of this project is to improve recombinant expression systems. The major goals are to discover and characterize pathways that facilitate protein folding and subunit assembly in hyperthermophiles. The components of these pathways will be inserted into recombinant host cells to preempt induction of stress responses during recombinant expression, and to enhance the stabilization and solubilization of recombinant protein. Building on the approach and findings of the investigators previous research, the specific objectives are: (1) to determine the functions of interacting proteins encoded by the 23 genes in the heat shock regulon of the hyperthermophile, Pyrococcus furiosus, (2) to identify functional complexes of thermostable heat shock proteins and express them in E. coli, yeast and mammalian cells to enhance the durability of these cells, and (3) to determine the effects of combinations of chaperonins on high level recombinant expression of proteins in intact cells as well as cell-free transcription-translation systems doc24741 none A grant has been awarded to the University of Hawaii s Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB), under the direction of Dr. Jo-Ann Leong, to improve the HIMB s linkage to the internet, and therefore the larger research community. Because of its location on a small island off Oahu, HIMB must negotiate daily with issues of transportation and communication. Communication links with other members of the research community both on the main campuses at the University of Hawaii in Manoa and Hilo as well as our collaborators on the mainland United States and the international community are critical to the success of the institute, its faculty and students. This grant will help to improve HIMB data management and communication systems and provide vastly improved electronic communications. Gigabit microwave dishes, provided by the manufacturer, will soon connect HIMB to the University of Hawaii communications system via Windward Community College. This grant will provide high speed switches and routers on HIMB and allow the institute to take full advantage of the new high speed microwave connection to the internet. A new server will enhance HIMB s data management and reduce software costs. The upgraded communications system will not only enhance HIMB s ability to communicate with colleague and collaborators the world over, but it will allow the high speed data transfer which is necessary for bioinformatics and the broadband communication needed for real time transmission of video. This NSF grant will HIMB to take full advantage of the opportunity created by the donation of the high speed microwave radios doc24742 none This award provides partial support for the expansion and improvement of the seawater facility at the Bermuda Biological Station for Research, Inc. (BBSR). Funds will be used to construct a new building to house tanks with flowing seawater, and to purchase equipment needed to expand the capacity of the seawater system. The project will enhance the ability of resident and visiting students and scientists to engage in research programs and educational activities that require the use of a well-controlled, high-quality seawater system. Among the research activities that will benefit from the expanded facility are programs designed to: assess human impact on Bermuda s inshore marine ecosystem; study the physiological ecology of oceanic plankton communities; examine the response of the Sargasso Sea ecosystem to global change; and understand the function of tropical marine ecosystems at the organismal, cellular and molecular levels. Among the educational activities that will benefit are the BBSR summer courses, the fall semester courses run in collaboration with the University of Rhode Island, the spring semester program run in collaboration with Duke University, the BBSR s Graduate Intern Program, and the Open Ocean and Sub-Tropical Marine Research Experiences for Undergraduates program doc24743 none Intelligent Power Routers for Distributed Coordination in Electric Energy Processing Networks Proposal No: We propose to develop a model for the next generation power network using a distributed concept based on scalable coordination by an Intelligent Power Router (IPR). Our goal is to show that by distributing network intelligence and control functions using the IPR, we will be capable of achieving improved survivability, security, reliability, and re-configurability. Our approach builds on our knowledge from power engineering, systems, control, distributed computing, and computer networks. Each IPR has embedded intelligence into them allowing the IPR to switch power lines, shed load and receive broadcast local state variable information to and from other routers. The information exchange capability of the routers provides coordination among themselves to reconfigure the network, even when the designated principal control center of the system has collapsed due to a natural or man-made disaster. The IPRs may achieve their task using direct monitoring, area-limited on-line security assessment and adaptive controls to establish a coordinated and local set of control actions to either apply preventive countermeasures against high risk operating conditions prior to a potential disturbance or corrective countermeasures following a disturbance. Our proposed approach borrows from computer networks, where data is moved over geographically distant nodes via data routers. In the event of a component or system failure, the IPRs will make local decisions and coordinate with other routers to bringing the system, or part of it, back into an operational state. Each IPR will operate on a Peer-to-Peer system (P2P) or a mesh hierarchy making irrelevant whether its inputs come from power producers or other IPRs, Research and education will be integrated through undergraduate research (UR) and adapting research results for class examples, seminars and demonstrations. The structure of UR will be improved by using the affinity research group model [31], a model that integrates the knowledge and skills required for research to those required for cooperative work doc24744 none Research: This research project addresses the problem of modeling simulation and optimization of realistic reaction systems involving a large number of reaction steps and different species. The specific objectives are the description of complex kinetic networks through reduced reaction systems, the determination of the range of validity in terms of the initial conditions of the reduced models and the problem of uncertainty propagation through the reaction network. The methodology that is developed will be applied to fossil fuels combustion but the techniques developed are applicable to a diverse range of chemical processes. Nitrogen oxides (NOx) in the atmosphere cause photochemical smog, the destruction of the ozone layer and global warming. Atmospheric NOx increases have been attributed to the combustion of biomass and fossil fuels, systems that are mathematically represented by very complex kinetic reaction networks. Accurate kinetic models could help identify the parameters responsible for the production of the pollutant NOx in the atmosphere and be used to reduce their formation. The PI will develop methods of kinetic model reduction to reduce the computational complexity associated with the consideration of the detailed kinetic mechanisms of such systems. The approach is to develop a comprehensive framework for the analysis of uncertainty effects of complex kinetic models, quantify the range of validity of a reduced model, and determine more flexible reduced kinetic models with respect to kinetic parameters and initial conditions. This will be achieved through the following steps: - The development of an efficient approach to quantify the range of validity in terms of initial conditions of a reduced kinetic model based on the ideas of uncertainty analysis - The investigation of various uncertainty propagation techniques to evaluate the effects of uncertainty in kinetic model parameters on systems outputs - The integration of the uncertainty analysis procedure whtin the framework for kinetic model reduction that will result in the determination of reduced kinetic model with the required range of validity and pre-specified flexibility. Impact: Besides the training of undergraduate and graduate students at Rutgers, the PI is involved in SUPER (Science for Undergraduates a Program for Excellence in Research) at Douglas College for Women. It is expected that one student affiliated with SUPER will work on this project during each summer doc24745 none In the first part of our proposal, we study the long run reliability (or security of supply) of electricity markets under price caps. This (and other forms or market intervention) cast doubts on the market ability to provide new capacity in a socially efficient manner (scale, technology and timing). We propose to develop a dynamic game model of investment. A full characterization of equilibrium investment will shed light on a number of contentious issues in the restructuring debate. Examples include; the possibility of boom and bust cycles in equilibrium, a potential technology bias with harmful effects on the environment, and the need to incorporate capacity markets. In the second part of our proposal we study learning algorithms as potentially powerful computational tools for electricity markets. The complexity of electricity markets calls for the incorporation of some form of bounded rationality in the modeling efforts. However, when players use simple, adaptive (possibly sub-optimal) rules, repeated interaction may induce equilibrium outcomes in the long run. Although, many agent based simulation models have been advocated for analyzing electricity markets, they lack solid theoretical support on issues such as convergence and or the nature of equilibrium. In this proposal we will represent competition in electricity markets under certain congestion management protocols, as games with a special structure, i.e. potential games . For this class of games, the class of fictitious play learning algorithms has been proven to converge with probability one. Computational tests a large-scale model will serve to validate and assess the practicality of the class of strategic learning models proposed doc24746 none This proposal is a request for funding to establish and operate an IGERT National Recruitment Program (INRP) that will serve all of the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) sites in the United States (soon to be 100 sites). The goal will be to identify potential IGERT students and to facilitate their recruitment by the IGERT sites. A high priority will be to increase the participation of under-represented groups including women and minorities. The national recruitment program will identify these students and educate them and their mentors regarding IGERT programs and future career opportunities. The INRP will assess student backgrounds and creer interests and will facilitate contact between prospective students and the directors and faculty of the appropriate IGERT program(s). This represents a partnership between the INRP and the IGERT directors and faculty to recruit students into appropriate IGERT sites and related opportunities. Recruitment will occur at colleges and universities throughout the United States and at national and regional minority student science conferences doc24747 none This award provides funds to aid in the purchase of a state-of-the-art nutrient autoanalyzer for use by researchers at the Baruch Marine Field Laboratory (BMFL) in the measurement of nutrients such as ammonium, nitrate, nitrite, phosphate, silicate, urea and other chemical compounds found in the sea and in freshwater. Low nutrient concentrations often limit plant growth and productivity - the reason for adding fertilizers to crops - while elevated concentrations are often harmful to the environment and subsequently to humans. At BMFL, several ongoing research projects are examining how some nutrients cycle naturally within an ecosystem, and how changes in the types and quantities of nutrients influences primary (plant) and secondary (animal) production. Other projects are evaluating how various human activities affect nutrient concentrations in the environment. Nutrient analysis is also an integral component of a long-term ecosystem monitoring program at BFML, a program that allows investigators to evaluate the impact of climatic events such as the current drought, storms or El Nino. In addition, the importance of nutrient cycling to the health of the environment makes nutrient analysis an important emphasis in BMFL-sponsored educational activities that include undergraduates, graduate students and decision makers (e.g., natural resource managers and public officials). The purchase of a state-of-the-art nutrient autoanalyzer will the commitment of the BMFL to support the monitoring and experimental research of nutrient status and trends in coastal ecosystems while expanding research and education capabilities for visiting investigators and students doc24748 none Research: Product design methodology is a mechanism that permits the synthesis of new materials with specifically tailored properties. Two challenges in computational molecular design are (1) the ability to predict the physical and chemical properties of a given molecule and (2) the ability to solve the large optimization problem which arises from the search for the best molecule for a given application. Research in molecular characterization can predict many physical and chemical properties to a reasonable accuracy for common molecules. A missing technology is a set of parallel algorithms which can efficiently solve the large mixed-integer optimization problems using parallel computing hardware. This project focuses the application of tabu search, a stochastic technique for the solution of such optimization problems, to the molecular design of novel polymers. Tabu search uses a neighborhood search algorithm which is efficient at searching the entire solution space, thus enabling globally optimal solutions to be found within a reasonable time. These algorithms are amenable to parallelization since each member of a solution set can be updated independently. As part of this project, the PIs plan to develop a parallel implementation suitable for use on clusters of workstations. The work will focus on the development of improvements to handle the types of constraint that occur when predicting the physical properties of polymers, and the application of these improvements within a parallel implementation for use on clusters of multiprocessor workstations. Impact: -Tailor-made molecules have huge potential in the chemical process industries. -This Small Grant for exploratory research will permit two young PIs to venture into a totally new research area for them. -This collaborative project between an undergraduate institution, Rose-Hulman, and the University of Kansas, will provide opportunities to undergraduates to be involved in research otherwise not open to them doc14106 none Funds are provided for the PIs to study the Upper Cretaceous to Lower Paleogene and Quaternary unconformities and stratal patterns on the New York and New Jersey margins. Two separate but fundamental questions to stratigraphy of the margins are to be addresed: how sequence boundaries and stratigraphic discontinuities formed during times of reduced sealevel fluctuations, and why the Quaternary section does not have unconformities associated with each sealevel cycle. The PIs plan to acquire side-scan sonar images, Chirp images (for subseafloor shallow features), MCS images and vinracores from this area. They will also use ODP site for chronology. These data will provide a high-resolution physical stratigraphy and precise chronology leading to understanding of eustatic vs. other factors in building sequences doc24750 none A $50,000 Planning Grant will be awarded to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to develop an environmental science education program that targets adult learners in literacy programs. The planning grant will support a survey of literacy agencies, a pilot program and a focus group evaluation. AAAS will first survey literacy programs across the U.S. to assess the need for science related programming. Using the results, they will then modify and pilot previously developed environmental science activities at the Learning Bank in Baltimore, a community literacy center. Participants will then take part in focus groups to determine the effectiveness of the materials used. The overall goal is to develop a program model that can be disseminated at literacy centers throughout the country doc24751 none This award supports strategic planning for Archbold Biological Station which has recently expanded its land holdings through a significant private donation. Archbold was established in as a not-for-profit research institution dedicated to long-term ecological research. Staff, visiting investigators, and students conduct research focused on the environments of the Lake Wales Ridge, central Florida. Areas of research strength are population and conservation biology, emphasizing ecological changes over local and regional scales, and demographic shifts in local species. In addition to research use, Archbold is used heavily for education by visiting classes and has its own active K-12 program. As the result of a large private donation, the area of the station will increase by 70%. The new land addition, which includes scrub habitat and extensive improved pasture, should allow the station to initiate new research programs in areas such as long-term studies in restoration ecology. With the funds provided through this award, the station will develop a long-term plan for future research, land management and education use of the new acquisition. As part of this effort, existing information will be collected, and placed in a geographic information system containing both current and historical site information. Three planning workshops will be held: a Research and Land Management Workshop, an Education Workshop, and a separate Financial Plan workshop. The PI will compile workshop results into a Research and Land Management, Education and Financial Plans for the Reserve including 2, 5 and 10-20 yr goals, objectives, measures of success, and a 5-year implementation timetable. Besides being used for management of the station, the plans will be made available to the public using the web and other distribution means doc24752 none Reactions of metal monohalides and monoxides of environmental concern are studied over wide temperature and pressure ranges. Similar measurements are made on combustion reactions of metal cations. Individual reactions will be studied in isolation using the Rensselaer HTFFR (high-temperature fast-flow reactor) and HTP (high-temperature photochemistry) reactors, suitable for the 300 to K temperature domain. Together these can be used to cover pressure from 10 to mbar. The measurements with these facilities are free from interference by other reactions; temperature, pressure, and concentrations can be varied independently. Very little is known of the temperature dependence of the kinetics of ion-molecule reactions. Such reactions are usually observed below combustion temperatures, frequently in non-thermalized environments. The use of the HTP reactors allows study of bulk, temperature-equilibrated reactions by laser-induced fluorescence, LIF. The use of LIF provides a novel method for the study of ion-molecule reactions, which are commonly studied by mass spectrometry. Exothermic and endothermic as well as addition reactions of alkaline-earth cations of combustion interest are addressed. The results of this work are needed by combustion engineers, particularly modelers concerned with pollution abatement, and are also useful for workers in high-temperature materials, propulsion, chemical vapor deposition, and atmospheric chemistry doc24753 none Forward contracts arid financial risk management instruments are essential elements of competitive electricity markets. They mitigate market power, suppress price volatility and ensure system reliability through market mechanisms. The design and study of such mechanisms in the context of electricity requires an interdisciplinary approach that capitalizes on developments in economics, operations research, and financial engineering while adapting and extending the existing knowledge in these areas to match the physical realities of electricity systems. This research project will develop such an interdisciplinary approach by bringing together a research team with expertise in power economics, optimization and financial mathematics. The project consist of three main technical components: Analysis of two settlement electricity markets through sequential Nash equilibrium models on DC power networks; Development of computational methods for calculating realistic two settlement equilibrium models as simultaneous optimization problems subject to equilibrium constraints; and Development of pricing methodologies for specific forward contracts and options under stochastic price movements. This research will help address technical and policy issues prompted by the restructuring of the electricity industry and will train graduate students participating in the research to cope with the multidisciplinary challenges facing that industry. The computational techniques developed under this project will be tested on realistic commercial models of the California market. New knowledge resulting from this project will be integrated through teaching modules into a broad spectrum of graduate and undergraduate courses offered to industrial engineering and to electrical engineering students doc24754 none A grant has been awarded to Central Michigan University, under the direction of Dr. James Gillingham, to improve the facilities at Central Michigan University Biological Station (CMUBS) on Beaver Island in Northern Lake Michigan. CMUBS has been in operation as an academic arm of CMU since and annually offers facilities for research and education to students and faculty from all over North America and beyond. Enrollments in undergraduate and graduate courses offered at CMUBS have grown steadily over the past two decades, and CMU has shown support for this growth through the periodic upgrade of the academic facilities at CMUBS. The addition of faculty, staff and student residence units, remodeling and upgrading existing service facilities and the planned construction of a media center reflect this support. Since and up to a little more than a decade ago, research was conducted at CMUBS on an intermittent basis. In spite of the attractive and easily accessible pristine habitat on this island and the wealth of biological problems that could be answered involving the surrounding ten-island archipelago, research activity was historically limited to a few faculty within the Department of Biology at CMU. In , in an attempt to stimulate the development of an active and on-going research program at CMUBS, the first building devoted totally to research was constructed. Although this provided adequate laboratory space for several years, by the mid s this research building reached its capacity. A recent and rapid increase in interest in undergraduate, graduate and faculty research at CMUBS not only created a significant shortage of research space, but brought into focus the need for basic research equipment that would allow field-gathered aquatic and terrestrial data to be processed and analyzed on site at CMUBS. This grant will be used to 1) construct an addition to the existing research building and 2) purchase several basic, but essential, equipment items. The research building addition will be constructed and functionally attached to the existing facility and will effectively double its size. A water still with storage tank and an automatic autoclave sterilizer will replace existing but inadequate similar pieces of equipment and an ultra-low temperature freezer and computerized weather station will provide equipment items never before available at CMUBS. These improvements will not only indirectly give further support to the long-standing quality teaching program at CMUBS, but will significantly augment its research program in such a way as to allow such new avenues of research to be pursued such as microbial ecology, molecular ecology and geographical biodiversity. These improved facilities will allow CMUBS to more effectively attract both faculty and graduate student researchers from other universities thus providing them with opportunities to study at a field station strategically located in northern Lake Michigan and would provide CMU faculty and students (undergraduate and graduate) a unique opportunity to gain experience from well-know researchers doc24755 none This project is an analysis of the separate contributions of greenhouse gases and tropospheric aerosols to the surface energy budget, including feedbacks associated with the hydrological cycle. The raw materials for the project are data on surface radiation and weather parameters from global and regional observing stations. The data will be used to test some of the current ideas about the positive and negative feedbacks associated with aerosols and changes in aerosol deposition rates. This work will be a step in the complicated but very important problem of determining the role aerosols play in climate, one of the major sources of uncertainty in the assessment of anthropogenic trends in climate variations doc24756 none This award supports the development of a strategic plan for Indiana University s newly established Research and Teaching Preserve (IURTP). The station s mission is to provide natural field settings for research, teaching and outreach that complement existing on-campus programs and facilities. The IURTP currently consists of two forest parcels that total nearly 200 ha encompassing a variety of upland, bottomland and aquatic habitats, and including the largest lake in Indiana. Despite the lack of infrastructure, the IURTP is of great value for research and training given its accessibility (the parcels are approximately 4, 15 and 35 km from campus), natural conditions, habitat diversity and proximity to extensive public lands. It is located within the largest forested region in the lower Midwest, and thus has considerable regional and national significance from conservation and biodiversity perspectives. The strategic plan will be developed with significant input from outside experts to help define research priorities, and site improvements that reflect these priorities, through two, sequential workshops: one a workshop focusing on research, the other focused on development of specific recommendations for IURTP infrastructure. In addition, the award supports visits by station staff to comparable field stations and preserves to gather information on common problems and solutions. For the workshops, experts in both research and administrative aspects of station use and operation will be invited to visit the IURTP, consult with current and potential users, and make recommendations on strategic directions that best reflect the combination of existing faculty interests and new opportunities at the preserve doc24757 none The deregulation of the electric power system has been plagued by missteps and finger pointing. It has been impossible to clearly and systematically delineate the issues so that meaningful policy decisions can be made. Missing from most discussions is the interplay between the economic, technical, social and environmental factors that influence the production, transmission and consumption of electric energy. This work will study these interactions and develop computer models suitable for use by both policy makers and researchers. The main effort will be focused on the development of simulation models, which extend beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries. For example, we will model consumer behavior, which affects efficiency and hence electricity demand, which in turn affects the prices on generation and the operation of the transmission grid. Such models will enable us to simulate short-term behavior such as electricity prices and congestion in the near term. The models will also be used to look at long-term behavior such as investment in new generation and transmission. These models will be tested with data from the Western power grid as the Benchmark Test System. The project will conclude with the preparation of several instructional modules using interactive simulation of the benchmark system. The modules will be designed for integration into syllabi for senior graduate level courses in sociology, economics, environmental science and engineering, the home departments for the research team. The modular approach will engage students from multiple disciplines in discussions and interactive simulations doc24758 none The issues of market power, generation adequacy, and vulnerability in network-constrained electric power markets are of increasing concern to market participants, policy makers, and the general public. Although price formation and investment are inherently dynamic processes, they are usually studied using static economic and game theoretic models. This disregarding of lags, expectations, and adjustment processes may yield distorted conclusions about the effects of proposed changes to market structure and designs. To investigate and overcome this distortion, there is a need for (a) realistic models of dynamic interactions among strategically behaved electric power market participants, and (b) the design of efficient computational methods that can handle the high dimensionality of realistic power systems. The proposed research and pedagogy have four objectives: a) formulation of dynamic game theoretic models of pricing and generation for transmission-constrained electric power markets, for a variety of competitive circumstances and market structures b) development of efficient algorithms for solving the models c) demonstration and testing of models and algorithms using realistic data d) development of educational curricula integrating game theory, economics, and electric power systems. The project has several broader impacts, including contributions to education and public policy. We will develop curricular offerings in dynamic optimization and differential games for the modeling of electric power markets. This material will be made available as a professional tutorial and distributed to the educational community via the project website. Our models hold the potential of significantly enhancing the capability of regulatory agencies, market operators, and stakeholders doc24759 none NSF Proposal (Phillips, Kunz, Rubendall, Woodcock) A grant has been awarded to Boston University, under the direction of Dr. Phillips, Dr. Kunz, Mr. Rubendall, and Dr. Woodcock, to make physical improvements in environmental data acquisition and communications infrastructure at Sargent Center for Outdoor Education (SCOE), a field station of Boston University located in southern New Hampshire. SCOE is a unique environment for field studies, containing a wide range of terrestrial and aquatic habitats, but this field station is currently under-exploited for research and education. The goal of this project is to utilize data acquisition and communications improvements to enhance ecological research and education opportunities at SCOE. The scope of the project is broad both in terms of providing data coverage from four distinct terrestrial and aquatic habitats, and in terms of making these data available to a large and diverse range of students, educators, and researchers from the New England region and around the world. This project will greatly further the central goal of SCOE, to facilitate greater understanding and appreciation of the human relationship to the environment, and contribute to making a difference in the world s social and environmental future. The exact work to be done is as follows. The principal investigators will direct the installation of a state of the art, spatially distributed system for automatically collecting and transmitting environmental data from a wide variety of habitats to a central base receiving station at SCOE. The base station will be linked to the Internet for remote data access and display for off-site education and research. The main elements of this system are: (1) environmental sensors and data loggers for data collection from four major habitats at SCOE (forest, meadow, aquatic, and small mammal habitats); (2) radio telemetry units to send data from all habitats to a central base station; and (3) a radio base station and a web-connected computer server to receive, manage and disseminate data both within a local area network and to the Internet. In addition, to provide physical access to the forest canopy in support of automated data acquisition, in situ research, and educational activities, NSF funds will support the construction of a secure walk-up canopy access tower. This canopy access tower will provide a unique facility at SCOE to study the spatial and functional complexity of forest ecosystems from a wide range of academic perspectives. With funding for this proposal, scientists from Boston University and outside collaborators will be able to pursue ecological research and integrated ecological education at SCOE. These activities will include research training for graduate students, research experiences for undergraduate students, and educational outreach for school children from diverse backgrounds. At the graduate level, a recently developed, interdepartmental field course at SCOE, entitled Measuring and Monitoring Biodiversity , will benefit greatly from the proposed improvements. At the undergraduate level, the requested equipment and infrastructure will directly benefit 16 courses within the Environmental Science major at Boston University. The proposed improvements will also be used to improve educational outreach to school children participating in five specific Environmental Studies courses currently offered at SCOE. In all of the above educational and research applications, the equipment requested will be used to investigate how critical environmental variables control a diversity of ecological processes, including small mammal function and reproduction in shelter habitat; environmental and biophysical variables important for land-atmosphere interactions in forest habitat, including light, temperature, humidity, and their gradients from canopy top to soil; forest structural variables that control forest carbon gain, including leaf area and phenology; soil science and biogeochemistry; and environmental variables critical to aquatic and amphibian species survival, reproduction, and conservation doc24760 none A grant has been awarded to Minnesota State University Moorhead, under the direction of Dr. Alison Wallace, Dr. George Davis and Dr. Donna Stockrahm, to conduct a workshop for the purpose of planning the development of a 5,000 acre tallgrass prairie biological field station. The MSUM Regional Science Center s Buffalo River site is well positioned to place an increased emphasis on ecological monitoring, research, and research training activities. Current educational programs are well established. Ecologically unique land has been purchased and placed under a management plan. Partnerships have been formed with adjacent high quality lands for research and instructional use, including property held by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, and the Nature Conservancy. The site has a basic facility that currently serves K-12 populations and the general public, and could easily be improved to handle expanded research activities by regional and visiting researchers and students. There are critical numbers of interested field researchers in the immediate area from three higher education institutions. Most importantly, there is a need for a field station that is situated primarily in a northern tallgrass prairie ecoregion and contains high quality tallgrass prairie acreage available for ecological monitoring and research. To make this planning effort a success, the following objectives will be addressed and met: 1) the articulation of an overall vision for the future of the proposed field station, 2) the elucidation of specific research and education missions of the proposed field station, and 3) the formation of a comprehensive plan for administration, facility, and program development to ensure a fully functioning field station within a five-year time period. These objectives will be met during a three-day workshop to be held at the site. An outside panel of field station professionals will be invited to join regional researchers and agency personnel. Working groups that concentrate on education, research, or administrative and facilities issues will be formed. An outside facilitator will help plan and run the workshop, and edit the final report generated by the working groups. A successful planning workshop will allow MSUM to proceed with the development of a field station in an efficient and effective manner, with the full support of partner institutions and agencies. The proposed field station contains a variety of native and restored tallgrass prairie, wetland, and riparian woodland areas. However, tallgrass prairie is by far the most representative of the site, and this rare ecosystem is not well represented in existing field stations, especially in the northern regions of the U.S. In order to better monitor and understand our changing ecosystems, research and educational efforts need to be put forth in a variety of ecosystems and at a variety of latitudes. Thus the proposed field station will be a valuable addition to the worldwide network of biological field stations doc24761 none This award supports the development of a strategic plan for the Big Sky Institute, a newly formed interdisciplinary research and education organization located at a site near Yellowstone National Park. Over the past decade researchers at Montana State University and other institutions have made great strides in understanding the diversity and dynamics of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE), especially in respect to three important aspects: processes that govern biological diversity, especially as it relates to ecosystem management; adaptations that permit life in the diverse thermal features of GYE; and, variations in the local climate over the last thousand-plus years as judged by proxy records of such variability and of ecosystem response. At present, efforts to build on this progress are limited in scope and integration by lack of modern laboratory and educational facilities at or near field sites in the GYE. Using the funds provided through this award, BSI will engage in an institutional planning process that will lead to development of a new, multi-user research and education facility. The development of BSI as a research and education facility will increase access to the GYE for field research and teaching in the areas of biodiversity, thermal biology, and climate change. The improved infrastructure will allow increased public participation in, and improve public understanding of federally-supported research activities while forging a unique partnership between the private sector tourist industry and a land grant university in a rural area doc24762 none This grant is investigating alternatives for a new framework for flexible power system analysis and design. The framework will be based on the need for power engineers that must be concerned with complex decision-making involving economic and environmental trade-offs in addition to added complications introduced by incorporation of new energy sources and increased reliability demands. This framework will be built from formal methods for flexible power systems. Power electronics provide the versatility necessary to physically implement flexible systems. This research will address use of localized power electronics control techniques for generation and load, resulting in a large, complicated switching network. Such networks have not been adequately studied. Therefore, analytical tools, including reduced-order and parallel methods, for large-scale switched systems will be developed. An economic analysis will be given in context of flexible power systems. These studies will help system planners make informed decisions about the trade-offs between electrical, environmental, and economic issues. However, making such difficult decisions is often done only qualitatively. This project will result in more scientific decision-making techniques for these complicated issues. Students will be better educated as a result of this project by new coursework in large system analysis and team energy projects doc24763 none This award provides partial support for renovation of the seawater system at the University of Texas - Pan American Coastal Studies Laboratory (CSL) on South Padre Island, Texas. The CSL supports research and educational activities of the University, and provides a variety of public education activities focused on marine life and related topics. The CSL is currently hampered in fulfilling this mission by the limited capabilities of its seawater system. These limits are imposed by the original design of the system, deterioration of the intake and discharge lines, and the aging of other equipment. The renovated system will have dual intake lines and pumps, sand-filtration, new plumbing for filtered water, and twin discharge lines. The system will support research on marine algae, seagrasses, and small marine animals. In addition to research, the seawater system will support general lab use, university and public outreach courses, and an aquarium intended for public displays doc24764 none Lave The PIs study distributed resources (DR) in nine areas involving large electricity networks. Our approach is interdisciplinary, involving electrical engineering, economics, and policy analysis. They will apply their research to improve undergraduate and graduate education, as well as provide training for working professionals. The research areas are: Distributed Decision-Making: Use economic theory and autonomous agents to decentralize decision making in complex systems, such as transmission grids and micro-grids, to increase efficiency and reliability. Engineering-Economics of DR: Study engineering design, operation, and economics of DR to understand how to optimize power system configuration for efficiency and survivability. Reliability & Security: Examine the reliability and security implications of introducing DR into current and advanced electric power systems with advanced computer modeling methods. Air Quality & Life Cycle Analysis of DR: Quantify the implications of DR for local and regional air quality and examine the environmental implications of DR over its life cycle. DG & Microgrids: Examine the technical difficulties of establishing microgrids powered by DG on total energy use, reliability, cost, and security. Interconnect Standards: Examine DR interconnection issues, e.g., implications for conventional systems and profitability. General Regulatory Environment: Study how the actions of regulators expedite or impede the introduction and operation of DR, e.g., microgrids. Other Applications of the Technology: Examine the implications of DR for small-scale systems, e.g., power systems on ships. Benchmarking Test Systems: Test the research in IEEE-PES testbeds and utility systems. Education: Design new courses and teaching modules for graduate & undergraduate course and develop new material for disseminating this research to practitioners doc24765 none This award provides partial support for construction of new visitor housing at the University of Washington s Friday Harbor Laboratory (FHL). The housing will be used in support of an innovative scientific research apprenticeship training program that brings together teams composed of faculty mentors, graduate students and undergraduate apprentices who work in residence at the Laboratory for 10 weeks during the academic year. Teams are selected from a national pool of applicants by an external review committee on the basis of written applications. The success and growth of this program has created a need for additional, modern housing at the FHL, most of whose existing housing units were built to serve as summertime housing. The program has a major impact on the numbers and quality of undergraduate and graduate students who opt for professional contributions to very high quality research programs nationally and internationally. Through direct involvement with world-class mentors, students learn how leading edge research is done, what some of the key questions in marine science fields are, and what career opportunities exist doc24766 none The purpose of this project is to organize the Third International Conference on the Numerical Solution of Volterra and Delay Equations. It will bring together leading world class experts in the newest numerical methods for delay equations, in the most recent aspects of high performance supercomputers, and in the most important applications (especially biological) that lead to Volterra problems. It will, for the first time, emphasize research and applications in the newly developing vast area of delay and Volterra partial differential and integral equations. The subject of Volterra equations includes functional differential equations (delay, advanced, and neutral) as well as delay and Volterra partial differential equations. Volterra equations have have important and crucial applications as models in diverse areas of science and engineering; e.g. biomathematics and medical science, population dynamics, control theory, electrodynamics, neutron transport theory, oscillation theory, and viscoelasticity. These applications arise in a variety of critical areas such as modeling of the spread of infectious diseases and biological agents like anthrax and smallpox, the design of nuclear reactors and weapons, aerospace technology, the guidance of drone weapons and intelligence vehicles, and even the design of super computers themselves. Since the solution of Volterra and delay equations can almost never be obtained in closed form, computational techniques must be used. By their nature, Volterra problems create enormous demands on computing resources (both on computer speed and memory) and therefore require the use of extremely high performance super computers. This conference will bring together the experts in these areas and will help to stimulate various research efforts. Date: June 25, doc24767 none This award provides funds to the Merriam-Powell Research Station for construction of new housing units at the Centennial Forest, 19,114 hectares of land set aside by the State of Arizona for research, educational, and outreach on the Colorado Plateau. The construction of the housing and related infrastructure is part of a facilities development project for the recently established Merriam-Powell Research Station (MPRS), a collaboration of Northern Arizona University, Arizona State University, The University of Arizona, and The University of Nevada-Las Vegas. The MPRS supports research in the Greater Grand Canyon-San Francisco Peaks Ecosystem centered along the 3,000 m elevation gradient first characterized by C. Hart Merriam in developing his Life Zone Concept. The Centennial Forest is a primary site within the Southwest Ecological Gradient Network, a latitude climate gradient extending from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada. The Forest includes old growth ponderosa pine, pinyon-juniper woodland, and high elevation grasslands. Existing research infrastructure includes elevational gradient plots with weather stations, a 5-year experimental fire history gradient, 20-year regional ponderosa pine common gardens, and replicated 50 ha ponderosa pine old growth restoration plots. Although the region has been used extensively for field research, the Centennial Forest lacks housing and laboratory facilities. Eventually MPRS expects to have 25 visiting scientist student housing units, in addition to buildings that include wet and dry labs, classrooms and offices, and a greenhouse complex. The housing units are designed to resemble the traditional Navajo Hogan, and will provide low-cost on-site accommodations for visiting scientists and university classes, and thus promote interdisciplinary and interagency collaborations for study of the Greater Grand Canyon-San Francisco Peaks Ecosystem doc24768 none This award provides support for improvements in the electrical and communications infrastructure of the Flathead Lake Biological Station (FLBS). Established in , the station located on the East Shore of Flathead Lake, within a remarkable area of the Rocky Mountains known as the Crown of the Continent. Station personnel and visiting staff conduct research, training and education activities, including various summer courses that take advantage of the station s location. The station has 4 long-term core projects: 1) floodplain ecology and river restoration, 2) biodiversity and bioproduction along biophysical gradients, 3) large lake limnology, and 4) environmental change assessment and ecosystem modeling. The station maintains large, long-term limnological databases and increasingly relies on high volume, remotely-sensed imagery for spatial analysis of ecosystem processes. Improvements supported through this award include: 1) underground placement of utility lines, 2) emergency backup power and refrigeration; 3) equipment and software for data management, network security and archival needs. The proposed improvements are central to securing past investment, will facilitate growth of collaborative research, and are essential for secure management, distribution, and archiving of the massive electronic databases rapidly growing and accumulating at FLBS doc24769 none A grant has been awarded to California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly) under the direction of Drs. M. Moline and N. Adams, to help develop a former petroleum transfer pier located 40 km from campus in San Luis Obispo Bay into the new Marine Education and Research Center (MERC). As an integral part of the conversion of this unique 1 kilometer-long steel and concrete pier, a 500-gpm capacity seawater system will provide life support for the rich fauna and flora that exist in immediate area for both undergraduate education and collaborative research efforts. The work to be performed for this project includes, fabrication of the piping system that will carry water to the main platform on the pier, fabrication of a primary and secondary pumping system, fabrication of a primary and secondary filtration system, integration fabrication of a series of seawater tanks aquaria, and fabrication of a discharge system. The seawater system will facilitate directed instruction and student research at the MERC. The seawater system will also provide the infrastructure required to conduct faculty student research projects focused on the reproduction, development and physiology of marine invertebrates, fish, and algae. Some specific core areas of research include; bioluminescence, fish population genetics, eelgrass and algal physiology ecology, satellite remote sensing as applied to phytoplankton, invertebrate larval settling development and developmental cell biology in purple sea urchins. The seawater system will also meet the requirements for in-line instrumentation being installed to monitor change in San Luis Bay over a range of time scales, which will provide the temporal environmental context for ongoing experimentation at the center. The system will provide the foundation for formal instruction at the undergraduate graduate levels to approximately 250 students at Cal Poly annually within the departments of Biological Sciences, Physics, Engineering and Chemistry. It will allow the University to attract visiting scientists and students to participate in research and courses and to promote marine sciences nationwide. The location of the new facility provides the only marine laboratory facility along 320 km of coastline from Santa Barbara to Monterey. The MERC and a flowing seawater system provide a cornerstone for a new program in marine education. There is a new emphasis is on marine-related curriculum with the understanding of the importance of collaborative research in education at Cal Poly. With pressures on coastal resources, there has been increased scientific interest in studying the biological dynamics in the area. The base of the facility is a pristine rocky intertidal habitat with a kelp forest 200m offshore. The majority of the coastline to the north extending to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary is relatively untouched unstudied and is ideal for the educational research goals of the Center. One of the primary missions of the MERC is to combine our nationally recognized and diverse student body with our learn-by-doing philosophy on education in marine biology and related marine fields. By exposing every student to active research programs and providing hands on experience at the MERC, we are in the unique position to fill the gap that exists in marine education targeting undergraduate learning doc9219 none Memory management consumes a great deal of time on today s computer systems, and will take even longer in the future. Software techniques have successfully hidden most of this overhead on personal workstations by shifting the work to times when the system is waiting for user interaction. Such techniques are less effective on SMP servers, where the overall computational overhead is what matters. The Dynamic Memory Management Unit (DMMU), a special-purpose hardware mechanism based on bitmaps and combinational logic can greatly diminish this overhead. Preliminary results for three languages show that this approach is much faster than software memory allocation, and consumes only slightly more memory than software-allocation techniques. This proposal calls for the integration of this hardware unit into SMP systems, which would allow concurrent garbage collection in multithreaded-multiprocessors environments. This can speed up the performance of server applications written in Object-Oriented languages such as C++ and Java doc24771 none This grant supports research on the nucleation, habit, and growth of ice crystals under the low temperature and pressure conditions characteristic of high cirrus clouds and polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs). It is a continuation of work on the physics of ice crystals that Dr. Hallett and his colleagues have done for many years for less extreme conditions. The static diffusion chamber used in previous work will be modified to operate down to temperatures as cold as -100C and pressures less than 100 mb. In the chamber crystals are grown on thin (5-10 microns) glass filaments under controlled conditions of temperature, pressure, and supersaturation. Crystal nucleation and growth are examined by optical microscopy from outside the chamber and video recorded. Likely nucleants will be added to the filament prior to insertion in the chamber. These include nonvolatile soluble particles, such a sulfuric acid, as well as insoluble mineral, meteoritic, and aircraft exhaust material. Cold, high-altitude clouds have important effects on the transfer of solar and infrared radiation, and hence global climate. They also play a part in the production and destruction of ozone. In spite of their importance, the physical properties of these clouds are not well known because of the difficulty of in situ measurements at heights above the ceiling of most aircraft. The laboratory experiments on this project will simulate the extreme atmospheric conditions and provide needed information on the microphysical characteristics of clouds which are nearly inaccessible by other means doc24772 none SGER Sequence stratigraphy and paleocommunity analysis of an Oligocene reef tract, Lares Limestone, Puerto Rico ( ) Claudia Johnson Indiana University The Lares Limestone in Puerto Rico provides a unique opportunity to study a 30 million year old Oligocene reef from its initiation surface through its drowning, and from its seaword to landward expression. The opportunity is short lived, for heavy tropical rainfall has compromised the quality of this roadcut exposure. There is an urgency to document and analyze this tropical carbonate platform and to address hypotheses in the fields of paleobiology, sequence stratigraphy and paleoclimatology. Research results will provide valuable information on evolution in a tropical environment doc24773 none Ratchford This Americas Program award will support the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in a partnership with three scientific organizations in Latin America to showcase the achievements of distinguished U.S. women scientists to wide audiences in Latin America. Organized by Marina Ratchford of the AAAS Department of International Programs, the initiative seeks to increase both the visibility of U.S. women scientists careers, and the participation of women in the scientific enterprise in Latin America. The AAAS will organize three panels, each composed of three U.S. women scientists interested in sharing their experiences with Latin American colleagues. Panelists will be selected, not only on their outstanding scientific careers, but also on how their experiences furnish compelling strategies to overcome the challenges of pursuing scientific careers. It is expected that the selected panelists will serve as role models for women in the U.S. and Latin America. Selected panelists will develop lectures and visual materials to be presented at the Annual Meetings of the Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science (SBPC); Costa Rica s National Council for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICIT); and the Panamanian Association for the Advancement of Science (APANAC). These venues will gather a diversity of participants that include scientists, educators, students, policymakers and journalists. AAAS will work with host associations to arrange additional activities to take place around the Annual Meeting lectures, including visits to local universities, schools, museums, and research institutes. Lecturers will provide a report about their interaction with Latin American colleagues, including suggestions to increase the participation of women in science and international cooperation among women scientists doc24774 none The project will investigate the dynamical processes that generate intraseasonal variability in the equatorial components of the atmospheric angular momentum. These components of the 3D angular momentum vector are orthogonal to its axial component, which has been intensely studied in the past because of its association with variations in the zonal-mean zonal wind. The equatorial components, on the other hand, are related to planetary-scale atmospheric wave variability (including, potentially, the Madden-Julian oscillation), and are consequential for polar motion. Dr. Feldstein will conduct a dynamically oriented diagnosis of the mechanisms generating intraseasonal variability in equatorial angular momentum. He will analyze long-term integrations of atmospheric general circulation model (albeit with an idealized lower boundary condition) and a record of reanalyzed atmospheric observations (produced by the National Centers for Environmental Prediction) to shed light on the evolution of this variability. The project will advance the understanding of atmospheric angular momentum variability, and contribute to improvements in prediction skill of the medium and longer-range weather forecasts doc24775 none The national need for improving the security of the electric power networks and efficiently has been articulated by several government policies including President Bush s energy policy that calls for the creation of a national energy grid, and the elimination of regulatory provisions that limit investment in transmission and curtail power generation. This requires a new dynamic architecture that can sustain vulnerabilities under different perturbations to the system while remaining stable, secure and cost-effective. The Center for Energy Systems and Controls at Howard University (CESaC) will develop a multidisciplinary perspective, to attain an integrated sustainable scalable and survivable power system in the context of a deregulated US market system. A multi-layered network inculcating system technology, financial network within the context of various market structures and environmental soundness will employ modem control and optimization techniques. It will also invoke risk assessment strategies in constructing, the architecture thereby generating and delivering power efficiently at minimum cost without sacrificing environmental and reliability standards. Proposed research and educational activities will increase the participation of under represented groups across disciplines as a workforce and intellectual leaders to address the complex secured networks of the future. A system simulator will be designed and developed to study various test beds based on the Navy challenge problem and civilian test bed system provided by utility companies that CESaC has worked with in the past. Results of the education pedagogy, including the assessment of the learning outcomes will be disseminated via cdrom, and distance learning information system technologies doc24776 none Voltage-gated sodium channels are essential for generation and propagation of electrical impulses in the nervous system and other excitable cells. There are at least ten voltage-gated sodium channel genes in mammals, but only one sodium channel gene in insects. How do insects achieve sodium channel diversity required for fulfilling different roles in different tissues and cell types? Why are some neurotoxins, including pyrethroids (a widely used class of insecticides) and insect-selective scorpion toxins, are more toxic to insects than to mammals? The research proposed by Dr. Dong is aimed at answering these questions. Dr. Dong s laboratory has isolated more than twenty naturally occurring variants of the German cockroach sodium channel. The functional properties of these sodium channel variants will be characterized in the Xenopus oocyte, which is a widely used in vitro functional expression system for ion channels. Based on the preliminary results from Dr. Dong s study, the functional diversity of the German cockroach sodium channel appears to be achieved by modification of the same sodium channel gene transcript via two cellular processes called alternative splicing and RNA editing. Variation in alternative splicing and RNA editing can result in changes in the structure and function of a gene product. Dr. Dong will examine the role of these two cellular processes in generating functional diversity of the German cockroach sodium channel. They will also determine the exact amino acid residues in the German cockroach sodium channel protein that are critical for the selective toxicity of neurotoxins to insect and mammalian sodium channels will be identified. Successful completion of this study may yield the first comprehensive picture of how alternative splicing and RNA editing enables a single gene to generate functionally and pharmacologically diverse sodium channels in insects. Elucidation of the structural basis of functional and pharmacologically diversity will provide valuable information for our better understanding of the structure and function of sodium channels. One postdoctoral associate will gain training in molecular biology, electrophysiology, and toxin pharmacology doc13865 none Iskander Description: This project supports a US-Egypt Workshop on Research and Development in Telecommunication Technology to be held in Cairo, Egypt, December - January . The organizers are Dr. Magdy Iskander, Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and Dr. Ayman El-Dessouki, President, Electronics Research Institute (ERI), Cairo, Egypt. Dr. Fatma El-Hefnawi, ERI, will also help plan the meeting. Discussions will focus on advances in telecommunication technologies and R&D needs for next-generation telecommunication systems. Example of topics to be discussed include: multidisciplinary research, MEMS technology, low-cost phased area antennas, innovative device designs based on photonic band gap structures, and advanced propagation models. Scope: This award encourages discussion among US and Egyptian scientists on an area of great importance to both countries. Potential collaborative research areas will be identified. Dr. Iskander has successfully managed an NSF program to promote wireless communications research in the United States. Dr. El-Dessouki is the head of the largest research organization in this field in Egypt and will invite persons from academia, industry, and government labs to the workshop. Several junior scientists will be among the US workshop participants. This workshop is also funded the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out collaborative activities, by funds from the Division of International Programs and from the Division of Electrical and Communication Systems doc24778 none s of their work will be invited to present that work in short talks. The conference will maximize participation of young scientists by inviting graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior P.I. s to present many of the talks. Because this is the premier international forum for exchange of the latest results and approaches in Arabidopsis research, it is imperative that young scientists from the US have the opportunity to attend this conference. The funds from this award will provide travel fellowships for approximately thirty junior US scientists. First priority will be given to those junior scientists who have been selected by the meeting organizers to give oral presentations and to junior scientists from under-represented groups. The fellowships, which will cover approximately half to two thirds of the expected travel and meeting costs, will be administered by the North American Arabidopsis Steering Committee, whose members are elected by electronic ballot by North American subscribers to the Arabidopsis electronic bulletin board (arab-gen@net.bio.net, http: www.bio.net hypermail ARABIDOPSIS doc5716 none This grant provides funding for research on methods for performance evaluation of large network models of complex systems that arise in manufacturing and communication systems. The systems in mind are so complex that simulation is typically the only viable tool for benchmarking the system. Unfortunately, simulation is not a particularly scalable technology. The research focuses on developing fast and efficient simulation methods for complex systems, by exploiting prior knowledge of the system s dynamics. Such prior knowledge may be obtained from examination of a fluid model , for example, which is an idealized model of complex systems where all entities are modeled as fluids flowing through pipes. A great deal is known about fluid models, and the hope is that this information can lead to very efficient simulation methods. If successful, the results of this research will ensure that simulation becomes a more scalable tool than before for a large class of systems. The central idea is that more accurate results may be obtained in (far) less time than would otherwise be the case. One can then implement more efficient algorithms for searching over different operating policies to determine the best operating policy, or at the very least one that is better than the existing policy doc24780 none The Workshop on Early Child and Brain Development will be held in Bucharest, Romania June 12-15, . The primary objective of the workshop is to open a dialogue between Romanian researchers, academics and practitioners and their American counterparts. The state of knowledge in Romania on early child development and brain development has suffered as a result of long communist rule, and has advanced slowly in the decade since the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu. As such, the workshop will also provide an introduction to the Romanian participants to state-of-the-art knowledge in early child development and early brain development. The Romanians and Americans participating in the workshop will be able to work together to determine the specific information and resource needs of the various fields represented by Romanian workshop participants. Finally, the workshop will enable the American participants to make connections with possible collaborators and or likely recipients for future academic research support doc24748 none Research: Product design methodology is a mechanism that permits the synthesis of new materials with specifically tailored properties. Two challenges in computational molecular design are (1) the ability to predict the physical and chemical properties of a given molecule and (2) the ability to solve the large optimization problem which arises from the search for the best molecule for a given application. Research in molecular characterization can predict many physical and chemical properties to a reasonable accuracy for common molecules. A missing technology is a set of parallel algorithms which can efficiently solve the large mixed-integer optimization problems using parallel computing hardware. This project focuses the application of tabu search, a stochastic technique for the solution of such optimization problems, to the molecular design of novel polymers. Tabu search uses a neighborhood search algorithm which is efficient at searching the entire solution space, thus enabling globally optimal solutions to be found within a reasonable time. These algorithms are amenable to parallelization since each member of a solution set can be updated independently. As part of this project, the PIs plan to develop a parallel implementation suitable for use on clusters of workstations. The work will focus on the development of improvements to handle the types of constraint that occur when predicting the physical properties of polymers, and the application of these improvements within a parallel implementation for use on clusters of multiprocessor workstations. Impact: -Tailor-made molecules have huge potential in the chemical process industries. -This Small Grant for exploratory research will permit two young PIs to venture into a totally new research area for them. -This collaborative project between an undergraduate institution, Rose-Hulman, and the University of Kansas, will provide opportunities to undergraduates to be involved in research otherwise not open to them doc24782 none Information security has become a critical concern of both government and industry, and numerous groups have independently called for more and better research and education efforts in computer security. During the first computer security education workshop ( ) attended by industry and government agencies, there was a clear call to action for universities to create programs in information security. In response to these demands, faculty members from several universities have been working to increase both education and research in the area of information assurance. This initiative proposes to build on the existing strengths of the faculty and universities involved by creating the Cyber Protection Center. The Center will be one of the first facilities dedicated to creating a simulated Internet for the purpose of researching, designing, and testing cyber defense mechanisms. The Laboratory will also be used to test key components of the critical infrastructure doc24783 none Conferences on frontier topics have played a central role in the development of Physics for decades. The possible detection of Gravitational Wave Radiation is one of these topics. A series of six Aspen Winter Physics conferences on Gravitational Waves and Their Detection has been very successful in exploring this subject and in galvanizing the community. The Aspen Winter Conference on Gravitational Waves, called the Gravitational Wave Advanced Detector Workshop (GWADW), usually held in January or February, will not take place in Aspen in , but is to be replaced by an analogous conference to be held in Isola d Elba, Italy, May 19-26, . The conference will return to Aspen in January or February, . The subtitle of the Elba workshop is, Toward a Global Detection Network . The goal is to discuss the physics coverage that can be achieved considering that, in the near future, there will be interferometers in the US, Europe (in Pisa and Hannover), and in Japan and these can be operated as a combined global array. There is, as well, an array of resonant detectors that can be included. Finally, space based detectors may be included someday. Sensitivity is going to improve thanks to the many ongoing Research and Development programs. This proposal requests travel support for participants in the Elba workshop doc13866 none A long-standing controversy in mid-ocean ridge dynamics is whether upwelling beneath fast spreading ridges is sheet-like with a relatively uniform magma supply along axis, or more three-dimensional with diapiric-like upwelling near segment centers and lateral redistribution of melt along axis at shallow magma chamber levels and or by lower crustal, ductile flow. The UNDERSHOOT experiment was designed to address this problem by mapping the pattern of magma delivery from the mantle to the crust along the entire length of a transform bounded segment of the East Pacific Rise between the Siqueiros and Clipperton fracture zones. The quality of the data are the important issues that remain warrant further analyses. Models of crustal thickness will be refined by employing improved algorithms that allow all data collected in the experiment to be modeled simultaneously. Understanding of the properties of the Moho transition and uppermost mantle will be improved. Improved models of along axis variations in the structure of the mantle and lower crust low velocity zones will be developed doc10327 none Iskander With this proposal the PI s respectfully request NSF support to develop a detailed, accurate, and computationally efficient propagation model for wireless communications in micro- and pico-cell systems. A new 3D model [or alternatively a 2D model with advanced calculation capabilities such as the vertical-plane-launch (VPL) technique] will be developed based on integrating three new and innovative approaches to improve calculation accuracy and increase the computational efficiency. This includes the use of the following: 1. A new unstructured triangular grid ray tracing method (TGRM) to provide significant savings in computational time when modeling outdoor regions. Preliminary results show that CPU time for the TGRM method is approximately 30% of that of the visibility ray tracing. 2. A space division procedure based on a uniform rectangular grid method (URGM) for indoor regions and assuming that the reflection transmission surfaces coincide with the grid lines. Preliminary results show that the CPU time for the proposed uniform grid method for indoor propagation regions is approximately 14% of that of the visibility ray tracing method. 3. An FDTD approach to calculate reflection (F ) and transmission (F ) coefficients of composite walls and incorporate these coefficients in the overall ray tracing code. This is important for short range signal prediction where average or effective values of materials properties of walls may provide inaccurate predictions. The multigrid Finite Difference Time Domain (multigrid FDTD) code will also be used to calculate diffraction coefficients from indoor and outdoor objects that are difficult to model analytically. Diffraction coefficient results will be incorporated with a 3D ray tracing code that implements the proposed procedures described above. Diffraction coefficients will be included as part of the program in the form of a database and look-up tables. 4. The development of the 3D version of the proposed ray tracing code will be based on using pyramidal or tetrahedral cells in the TGRM procedure, and solid rectangular cells in the URGM method. The proposed methods do not involve search algorithms and hence significant improvement in the computational efficiency is expected. The overall results from the developed new propagation model will be validated experimentally on scaled models in the 60 x40 x23 indoor antenna range available at the University of Utah. Scaled models will be carefully selected so as to present physical structures of interest, on the one hand, and an object that can be used as a building block towards the development of a fully understandable and physics-based propagation model, on the other. With the available experimental facilities (HP up to 40 GHz), it will be possible to use scale factors as large as 20 to model realistic structures at the higher frequencies (2GHz) presently being used in terrestrial wireless communication systems. In addition to the development of the deterministic EM-based propagation model, the PI s propose to use the calculated EM power distribution pattern to determine statistical parameters that may be used in the simulation of wireless communications systems. This includes calculations of coverage, delay spread, bit error rate, and angle of arrival. The project will involve two graduate students to work on the simulation part of the project, and one additional graduate student together with a team of undergraduate senior students to work on building the scaled models and conducting the experimental verification part of the project doc10329 none Iskander The PI requests NSF funding of the first Wireless Grants Review Workshop to be held on February 20-21, at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC. The main objective of this workshop is to help establish closer ties among the wireless communications researchers at NSF and to facilitate a forum for exchanging ideas, discussing progress, minimizing duplication, and ultimately helping build and maintain a stronger research program in this area at NSF. The workshop is also expected to help NSF learn of outcomes from ongoing research projects, highlight and display significant progress to communities at large, and also identify and focus future funding on promising technologies in this fast-growing area of research doc11678 none Inputs to the global nitrogen cycle have increased significantly due to human activities and there are many uncertainties in our knowledge of how this nitrogen enrichment will impact terrestrial biotic communities and ecosystem function. Among these is the impact that nitrogen enrichment is having on decomposer organisms and the litter decomposition process. The overall objective of this research is to examine how plant litter chemistry (lignin and nitrogen content) and external nitrogen availability interact to impact the composition and or activity of the litter microbial community. Because nutrient cycles are being significantly altered by human activities, basic ecological research is needed to determine whether anthropogenic disturbance is impairing the ability of ecosystems to function sustainably. This research will contribute to our understanding of how decomposer microorganisms respond to nitrogen additions and to enhance our ability to predict how nitrogen enrichment impacts the litter decomposition process doc24788 none Thadhani This award supports a three-year collaborative international research experience program for faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students and science teachers to conduct research in the multi-disciplinary field of materials science and engineering at sites in Japan, Korea, China and Hong Kong. The principal investigator for the project is Naresh Thadhani at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Five faculty student teacher groups will be participating each year. The teachers will be selected from Atlanta area high schools. The program will provide the opportunity for students to experience hands-on participation in materials research for up to eight weeks during the summer months. The research projects will be designed in a manner that allows promotion of research interactions between faculty from both the U.S. and the East Asian countries while ensuring that there are specific benefits for each of the team members in addition to their gaining an international research experience. The graduate students will be able to enhance the quality and or scope of their thesis work while also learning to be mentors. The undergraduate students will gain a sense of what graduate research is about, and an international perspective to the field of research that they may eventually become interested in. The teacher participants will become knowledgeable with the culture of baccalaureate education in East Asian countries and also learn about the field of materials science and engineering. This award is made under NSF s AWARE (American Workforce and Research and Education) program. The challenges of the twenty-first century require a new cadre of graduates in science and engineering who are broadly educated and are ready to effectively contribute to difficult technological problems requiring a multi-disciplinary, teamed, and global approach. This materials education project, with an underlying theme of structure and properties correlation across length scales, is of vital importance to users as well as developers of materials. Recent developments in quantitative microstructural characterization techniques, approaches for real-time testing of properties, and novel methods for synthesizing and processing materials, allowing microstructural control, provide a unique opportunity to cost-effectively design materials with desired electronic, magnetic, mechanical and optical properties. In addition advancements in computer technology make it possible to model and simulate process conditions and allow predictions and simulations of structures that are directly linked to properties. The participants will undertake studies of various materials and their applications, focusing on the common theme of linking and correlating material properties with structure across nano-, meso-, micro- and macro-length scales doc24789 none Schulz This award supports Michael Schulz, Don Madison and students from the University of Missouri, Rolla in a collaboration with Joachim Ulrich in the Department of Quantum Dynamics at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany. The collaboration will investigate single and double ionization of helium by ion impact. The U.S. group recently obtained for the first time complete three-dimensional images of the electron emission pattern in single ionization with the kinematics of all collision products fixed. It was found that even state-of-the-art theories, which have been successful in describing the ionization process under restricted geometries, do not reproduce the measured three-dimensional images very well. The present collaboration will develop new theoretical approaches designed to identify the important physical effects. The German group is world renowned in the experimental techniques necessary to this collaboration. The combination of experimental and theoretical expertise will lead to new and fundamentally important insight into the collision dynamics under study doc24790 none The project aims to build understanding of the empirical and theoretical links between the real economy and asset markets. The project considers a number of specific questions related to the aggregate consumption-wealth link, and focuses on the importance of macroeconomic indicators for separating permanent from transitory movements in stock prices and for documenting the extent to which the conditional mean of stock returns is related to its conditional volatility. The research also investigates ways in which key asset pricing facts can be reconciled with a complete business cycle model that preserves the realism of the model s implications for real variables. The methodology is both empirical and theoretical. The empirical methodology relies primarily on unit root econometric techniques to identify the short-run and long-run relations between various measures of real activity and asset markets, using U.S. aggregate time-series data. The theoretical methodology builds off of recent insights in both finance and macroeconomics to study a dynamic, general equilibrium model of the economy. Understanding how consumption is related to wealth is fundamental for the informed conduct of monetary policy and macroeconomic analysis generally, and for modeling, theoretically, how the real and financial sectors of the economy are related. As yet, however, there has been little formal empirical analysis of these relations. Moreover, we cannot hope to understand the volatility and predictability of asset returns without understanding the sources of macroeconomic risk that underlie this behavior. The empirical and theoretical investigations of this research agenda have the potential not only to help expand the state of knowledge about how consumption, production, investment and asset prices must be related theoretically, but also to facilitate the search for macroeconomic determinants of systematic risk factors that must ultimately govern the behavior of asset prices doc24791 none There is mounting ecological evidence that the oceanic ecosystem of the central North Pacific Ocean my be undergoing a shift from a system in which nitrogen limits primary production to one limited by the availability of phosphorous. Before we can evaluate this possibility and its oceanographic and ecological significance, we must first understand the biogeochemical mechanisms working in the cycling of phosphorous in the oceanic water column. To that end, the principal investigator on this project will conduct a study of phosphorous cycling and particulate organic carbon (POC) export in the North Pacific gyre using the naturally-occurring, short-lived radionuclides Phosphorous-32, Phosphorous-33, Thorium-234, and Beryllium-7. The P isotope measurements would permit the estimation of P residence times in the dissolved and particulate pools. The work would be carried out in conjunction with an already established monthly U.S.JGOFS-HOT (Hawaiian Ocean Time Series) cruise program doc24792 none The gopher tortoise is an environmentally-threatened species that is critically important for maintenance of upland habitats, biodiversity, and community ecology. Over 360 vertebrate and invertebrate species utilize gopher tortoise burrows as a refuge. Gopher tortoises also help maintain habitat diversity by dispersal of plant. Both upper respiratory tract disease (URTD) and anthropogenic effects such as development, habitat destruction and fragmentation are believed to play major roles in population declines. The long term goal of this project is to understand the relationship between URTD and tortoise population dynamics, with special emphasis on the impact of anthropogenic effects such as relocation practices and habitat alteration on disease transmission. This project will use an interdisciplinary approach to determine the interactive roles of human intervention, habitat quality, and bacterial factors on spread of disease in natural populations of gopher tortoises. A mathematical model will be developed to predict disease transmission. Lack of knowledge with respect to potential infectious diseases present in wild populations and the impact of disease on relocation and restocking efforts, population parameters, and long term population well-being creates a major dilemma for scientists, wildlife biologists, conservationists, and public policy makers. The model developed in this project can be used to make more effective, rational, and critical management decisions designed to protect gopher tortoise populations and the biological diversity that tortoises support in upland habitats. The management practice of relocation intended to preserve gopher tortoises may actually resemble natural migration patterns of humans. Important new insights into the relationship between population movements and transmission dynamics of an infectious chronic respiratory disease will be obtained in a natural tortoise population that mimics the life history of humans doc24793 none Migratory birds are widely recognized as superb animal athletes. When flying, birds exercise at twice the maximum rate of oxygen consumption attained by running mammals, and migrants can maintain this high intensity exercise for three or more days without water, food or rest. Most notably, birds are able to use stored fat as the primary metabolic fuel for migratory flight - a capacity unexplained by models of fuel selection developed in running mammals. Extensive study of mammals shows that fatty acids stored in adipose tissue should contribute minimally (10 %) to exercise as intense as flight, suggesting that birds must have a much enhanced ability to utilize lipids. In spite of its many interesting characteristics, surprisingly little is known about avian exercise physiology because of the technical difficulties of conducting physiological studies of birds in flight. The immediate objectives of this research are: (1) to determine the surgical techniques and experimental protocols necessary to apply constant tracer infusion and indirect calorimetry to birds flying under controlled conditions in a wind tunnel, and (2) to make the first direct, real-time measurements of fuel substrate (e.g. glucose and fatty acids) utilization during endurance flight. Over the long term, this new experimental system will be used by the investigator to study how factors like diet nutrient composition, obesity and migratory season affect fuel selection in various bird species. Ruff sandpipers (Philomachus pugnatus) will be trained to fly continuously for up to four hours in a wind tunnel while fitted with a respirometry mask to measure oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production. Minute quantities of isotopically labelled tracers (e.g. glucose or fatty acids) will be infused through a catheter into the circulation at a known rate. Blood will be sampled periodically through a second catheter and expired carbon dioxide samples will be collected. Metabolic fuel transport and oxidation will be calculated from the rate of tracer infusion, the relative concentration of labelled substrate in the blood and the rate of production of isotopically labelled carbon dioxide. Successful completion of this study will mark a major advance in the basic understanding of avian exercise physiology. Equally important, this research will catalyze a wide variety of future investigations by the development of a new experimental model. Physiologists will for the first time be able to study processes like fuel metabolism, kidney function and gas exchange during flight, and to infuse hormones and pharmacological agents to examine the metabolic regulation of exercise in birds. Birds have a nearly unparalleled ability among vertebrates to metabolize fats and they may provide insight into human obesity and its treatment doc24794 none Ponganis This project will investigate the effects of the iceberg, B-15, on the emperor penguin population at Cape Crozier. The population of this southernmost of emperor penguin colonies, although sometimes fluctuating radically, had steadily grown in past years, with as many as chicks counted. This probably represented an adult population of - birds. However, in , after B-15 ground into the Cape Crozier area during the winter breeding period, no live emperor chicks were found. The colony had disappeared. The goal of this project is to determine if the colony will re- establish itself at Cape Crozier or relocate nearby to a different site. If the colony reestablishes at Cape Crozier, we will estimate the previous year s loss with a census of the chicks present this year. The destruction of the colony site by the iceberg in represents a natural experiment to examine the resilience of breeding emperors to short term disasters. Broader impacts of this study are related to the historical importance and worldwide interest in this colony as it was the first emperor colony discovered, and has probably the longest census record of any penguin colony doc24795 none Schistosomiasis is a debilitating parasitic disease caused by trematodes of the genus Schistosoma, which alternates between human and snail hosts The disease now occurs in 74 countries and is ranked second to malaria as a cause of human morbidity by a parasitic agent. The proposed research program has been designed to determine if fish that feed on snails can be an effective biological control agent for schistosomiasis in Lake Malawi. Specifically, the researchers propose to (1) conduct seasonal surveys of the snail-feeding fishes and their snail prey on a lake-wide level; (2) identify and describe the shallow water snail-eating fishes in Lake Malawi; (3) determine habitat preferences of host snails; (4) determine seasonal snail infection status; and (5) determine infection and re-infection rates in human populations. These data will be used to develop models that predict the relationship of fish snail populations to infection rates in the human population. By comparing these data to a historical database (i.e., pre- ), researchers will be able to test the hypothesis that the reduction of snail-eating fishes, due to overfishing, led to the increase of schistosome infection in human populations inhabiting the lake shore of Lake Malawi. If low population numbers of snail-eating fish can be linked to an increase in schistosomiasis, then researchers will be able to convince government officials to effectively manage these fish populations. The successful management of indigenous snail-eating fish would have a major impact on the quality of life of the human population in the region. In addition, these studies will provide supplemental information needed to design a comprehensive biological control program for human schistosomiasis in other parts of the world doc24796 none The investigator and his colleagues study problems in the overlap of algebraic geometry and commutative algebra. A major goal is to understand the structure of minimal free resolutions of homogeneous ideals, particularly those defining zero dimensional schemes. Ideals of interest range from ideals of fat points (motivated by their intimate connections to questions about linear systems on projective varieties), to ideals of generic forms (work on which is closely connected to work on the Weak and Strong Lefschetz properties for Artinian algebras, and, via Matlis duality, to work on fat points), to ideals whose quotients are Gorenstein rings (and hence involve problems on arithmetically Gorenstein subschemes of projective space, and Gorenstein liaison). This broad range of methods and motivations is a significant hurdle that young and future researchers must overcome to do productive work in this area. This grant aims to advance the training and career development of young investigators and graduate students by providing travel support to attend and interact with leaders in the field at an international conference addressing the research cited above. Computational issues underlie much of this research, and machine computation is both an important tool in the research described above and the object of some of this research. However, work in this area can easily outrun the capability of any conceivable computer, so theoretical studies are essential not only for understanding the results of machine computations, but to achieve results beyond the reach of brute force computation. This is, for example, a significant issue for applications of the research described here to interpolation. Large data sets are a common feature of modern life, whether in science, technology or business. Such data sets often involve functional relationships among various variables. Among the most tractable functions are the polynomials. If one wants to model relationships with polynomials it is helpful to know theoretically how complicated the worst case such polynomial might be (as measured, say, by degree), whereas it might be expensive or impossible to determine this directly. Such theoretical results about polynomials are what researchers aim for in studying minimal free resolutions of homogeneous ideals doc2071 none A new type of integration, called motivic integration, has been proposed by M. Konsevitch and developed by Denef and Loeser. They show that many of the classical properties of p-adic integration can be extended to to the motivic context. The research of this proposal will adapt motivic integration to the representation theory and the harmonic analysis of reductive groups over fields of formal Laurent series in characteristic zero. This new theory will be developed from first principles, starting with the existence of motivic Haar measures. The starting point of much of modern mathematics is the theory of integration, as developed by Isaac Newton, and generations of mathematicians that have followed him. An unexpected development came in , when the mathematician M. Kontsevich developed an entirely new way to integrate. This new tool will allow mathematicians to significantly enlarge the scope of mathematics. The research of this grant will accomplish part of this project, by using this new tool to enlarge the scope of representation theory, a branch of modern algebra doc24798 none This project focuses on the study of the eigenvalue problem in geometry, combinatorial optimization, and information organization. As part of this research, efficient algorithms will be developed for computing and approximating eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a large class of matrices that arise in graph theory, computational geometry, scientific computing, and Internet applications. The following topics will be investiagated. Eigenvalues eigenvectors for graph partitioning: The main theoretical and algorithmic questions are: how to properly use eigenvalues eigenvectors to find the best possible partition in a graph, and what is a tight upper bound on the eigenvalue for graphs such as meshes, planar graphs, bounded genus graphs and N-body graphs. Constructive answers to these questions can be used to design efficient algorithms and software for graph partitioning. Geometric methods for eigenvector approximation: The primary goal is to understand whether geometry methods can be developed and used to speed up the approximation of eigenvectors. Many graphs such as planar graphs, finite element meshes, and nearest neighborhood graphs come with a geometric characterization. One can use their geometric structures in the solution and approximation of the eigenvalue problem. Applications of the eigenvalue problem to data clustering and information organization: The objective is to relate the work on spectral graph partitioning to the singular value decomposition based method for data clustering, such as the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). These spectral techniques for term-document matrices has enjoyed empirical success, but had heretofore been without rigorous mathematical explanation. The project is expected, by extending our techniques for spectral partitioning, to provide a mathematically sound framework and efficient software for these important problems in information retrieval doc24799 none The workshop titled ``Radical Innovations of software and systems engineering of the future to be held October 7-11, at Universita Ca Foscari di Venezia in Venice, Italy, will bring together leading researchers in all aspects of Software and System Engineering with a view towards discussing potential research topics of tomorrow. To accomplish this goal, the workshop will have several talks and several open discussions, with the hope that the latter would lead to cross-fertilization of ideas from several disparate sub-areas of Software and Systems Engineering doc24800 none Hispanic Association of Colleges and Univesities Kennedy The Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU) is the recipient of an award for summer internship support. HACU, a national, non-profit organization, has a long and distinguished record of providing summer internship opportunities through the organization s National Internship Program (NIP). Through the NIP academically prepared students throughout the US and Puerto Rico have received quality internship assignments through various federal government agencies. Students who participate in the NIP are exposed to various career options in the Federal sector that serve as a basis in helping them make informed career choices and solidify career objectives. By partnering with the Federal government, HACU has been able to successfully place over 3,400 students, representing 30 states and PR, in summer positions since NIP commenced in . In an effort to continue its collaboration with HACU, the National Science Foundation, a participating government agency for the last six years, will offer challenging assignments that will broaden the exposure of 16 students pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Internship opportunities create an unique opportunity to assist in the fulfillment of two core strategies related the goals of NSF s mission: developing intellectual capital, and integrating research and education. As a result the Foundation actively participates in strengthening the infrastructure to achieve excellence in STEM education doc24801 none This project applies state-of-the-art techniques of materials processing and characterization to the study of piezoelectric oxide materials, to establish quantitative links between domain orientation and the various mechanisms of poling. Monotonic and cyclic poling via electrical, mechanical and electromechanical processes are investigated, to determine their effects on the polycrystalline texture and domain orientation within the materials. The texture information, in turn, will be correlated to the piezoelectric response of the material, providing a fundamental understanding of the interrelationships between the processing, structure and properties of these materials. We will also study the degradation of the materials under service conditions, attempting to mitigate the process of piezoelectric fatigue. Piezoelectric materials are increasingly important as the active components of a wide range of devices, including various types of strain sensor, linear actuators and non-magnetic electrical microtransformers for high-frequency applications such as cell-phones. In all of these applications, the performance of the material is strongly linked to the manner in which it is processed. Since most pieozoelectric materials respond to stress (or conversely to electric fields) only in a single direction, related to their crystallography, it makes sense to design devices in which the desired response direction is related to the crystal structure of the material. If, however, the material is comprised of randomly-oriented crystals, with randomly-oriented piezoelectric response directions, there is no opportunity to achieve such an efficient device design. We seek, in this program, to find practical, low-cost methods of developing crystalline alignment that allows for optimized device performance, in applications such as vibration sensors and active vibration damping systems doc24802 none This award supports U.S. participation in a conference to be held in January in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The conference, titled Complex Geometry and Dynamics, is being organized in honor of Alberto Verjovsky of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and will range widely over the fields of dynamics and geometry. The award will fund conference travel expenses of 25 junior U.S. participants and several speakers. A special feature of the conference that will particularly serve the junior participants is a set of short courses offered by M. Brunella, E. Ghys, and Y. Eliashberg doc24803 none This award will support student travel and participation in a workshop focussing on climate science and science policy organized by the American Meteorological Society. The workshop will be held from June 2-11, in Washington, D.C. and participants include seasoned researchers, new investigators, and students. The workshop participants will explore, among other issues, the nexus of communication between those who generate climate data and those who use such information for formulating science policy. One area of focus for the workshop is examining the influence of paleoclimatic research in guiding our knowledge of climate variability and in formulating science policy doc24804 none Fong This proposal was received in response to the Spin Electronics for the 21st century Initiative, Program Solicitation NSF 02-036. The proposal focuses on the computational design of novel quantum structures in the forms of heterojunctions, quantum wells, and quantum dots composed of half-metallic compounds in zinc-blende structure with both magnetically and nonmagnetically doped semiconductors as new materials for spintronics. The unique features possessed by these half-metals compounds are: (A) the half metallic properties of each compound are preserved for a range of each lattice constant, (B) large magnetic moments (= 1 uB), (C) high Curie temperature (= 400oK), and (D) less intrinsic scattering (greater coherence) than for dilute magnetically doped semiconductors due to the fact that the half metals are stoichiometric compounds. They inspire a singular opportunity for making novel quantum structures. The outcome of this proposal will include (1) the technological information of quantum structures for spintronic applications, (2) specific scientific knowledge about the effects of interfaces, surfaces on the magnetic and electronic properties of the proposed quantum structures, and (3) the selections of elements serving as antisurfactants to grow half-metallic quantum dots. Specifically relevant to (1), The PIs will provide: (a) the compositions of quantum structures involving chromium and manganese compounds with magnetic and nonmagnetic doped semiconductors and exhibiting half-metallic behaviors as new spintronic materials, (b) the magnetic and electronic properties of the promising quantum structures, (c) the possibility of making spin polarized Schottky barriers, and (d) the conditions for ballistic spin transport in heterojunctions, and quantum wells. For (2), the information will lead them to understand: (i) Whether spin polarized Schottky barriers are being formed in heterojunctions and quantum wells made of half metal compounds with various doped semiconductors, and do the interfaces affect the corresponding half-metallic character and magnetic moment? (ii) What are the effects of the Schottky barrier formed by the metallic spin channel of a heterojunction on its semiconducting spin channel? (iii) Do subbands formed in a quantum well exhibit the stepwise feature in the conductance? (iv) How do the magnetic properties of a quantum dot made of a half-metal compound depend on the sizes of the dots, and on cation- versus anion-terminated surface? Finally, the results relevant to (3) will provide guidelines for facilitating the growth of quantum dots composed of half-metals with the zinc-blende structure doc24805 none Under the direction of Dr. Brian Billman, Ms. Celeste Gagnon will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. She will conduct an analysis of skeletal remains of approximately 900 individuals recovered from the site of Cerro Oreja, located on the north coast of Peru. Isotopic determinations will also be made. Cerro Oreja documents the development of the Moche state and provides insight into the emergence of a society which incorporated large numbers of people under centralized control. This process took place independently in many parts of the world and thus forms an important topic for anthropological research. Ms. Gagnon wishes to understand the effect of political centralization on individual health and nutrition and hypothesizes that positive benefits result. Because the occupation of Cerro Oreja spans almost years - from BC to AD 400 it will be possible to correlate social and biological change. Bioarchaeological data to be collected include frequencies of dental caries, periodontal disease, dental abscesses and antemortum tooth loss. In addition, measures of stable isotopes, rates and types of dental wear and identifications of microplant remains from dental calculus will be analyzed. The bioarchaeological data will also address issues of class, gender and age and the effects these had on access to specific foods. This research is important because it will provide insight into the relationship between social and biological change and assist in training a promising young scientist doc24806 none A major objective of the Gordon Conference in Chemical Oceanography is to bring together every one or two years leading members of the scientific community, along with post doctoral fellows and graduate students, to discuss new and exciting research in marine chemistry within an informal setting. In , the Gordon Conference in Chemical Oceanography will be held at the Queen s College in Oxford, United Kingdom to discuss research activities in the following areas: (1) gases in the ocean; (2) Redfield ratios; (3) ocean carbon sequestration; (4) metal isotopes in ocean cycles; (5) trace metal uptake by marine biota; (6) marine calcification; (7) carbonate dissolution; (8) chemical transformations by bacteria; and (9) novel organic proxies. The Gordon Conference has become recognized as an important venue to exchange ideas in the interdisciplinary field of marine chemistry and forge new scientific alliances. Having the Gordon Conference in the United Kingdom will enable U.S. scientists to discover what new research activities are being carried out in Europe and facilitate international collaborations. For this reason the National Science Foundation, along with the Gordon Research Conference, will co-sponsor the participation of 20 graduate students and 33 invited speakers in the Gordon Conference in Chemical Oceanography doc24807 none Rice University, in collaboration with the Houston Independent School District, proposes the Computer Science Computing and Mentoring Partnership (CS-CAMP), a demonstration project to enhance the interest and persistence of female students in pre-college computer science. The proposed CS-CAMP is an ambitious yet realistic plan to develop a model that can be used across the nation to make systemic school change while providing enriched learning experiences for under-represented groups. Even though women are making strides in some areas of science, their participation in computer science is actually declining. Even in high schools, the vast majority of girls opt out of advanced high school computing courses. Through its 2-year program, CS-CAMP will provide high school girls opportunities to learn computing in a female-centric environment outside school and increase enrollment of girls in advanced computer science classes in their high schools. This should give girls in these high schools enough high-quality exposure to computing so that they can make informed decisions about whether to pursue computer science as a college major and a life career. Program Goals are to: -Prepare high school girls so that they will succeed with confidence and enthusiasm in computer science courses; -Increase girls admission and retention in pre-college computer science courses; and -Improve the climate for girls and instructional experiences in high school computer science classes The proposed program will target eight high schools in the Houston area who will make a strong, long-term commitment to improve their schools computer science program with the goal that girls comprise 50% of the schools most advanced computer science classes, and if they are not currently teaching an advanced computing class, to begin to do so. The selected schools will form an implementation team consisting of a counselor, administrator, and computer science teacher to meet bimonthly at Rice with the other schools teams and CS-CAMP to develop and implement an action plan for their schools. CS-CAMP will seed the effort by engaging 16 girls from each of the eight schools in a two-year program consisting of 2-week summer computer camp and monthly follow-up sessions. Computer camp focuses on community building, computing-career awareness, mentoring, introductory computing courses, and lots of fun. The program will provide professional development on gender equity in technology to the schools principals, counselors, and computer science teachers. The participating computer science teachers will also facilitate at the girls computer camp under the tutelage of master teachers. This will afford the targeted teachers (1) solid knowledge of computer science content and curriculum; (2) skill in a variety of approaches to instruction; and (3) the opportunity to plan and reflect on instruction together with other teachers. CS-Camp will create a multi-level (middle school through university faculty industry worker) community that provides academic support and personal and professional mentoring to girls in the targeted eight schools in the hopes that those eight will become some of the country s premier schools in participation of girls in computer science and provide a model for the nation in this regard doc24808 none Patten This award supports an eighteen month Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Short-Term Postdoctoral Fellowship for John A. Patten at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. He will be collaborating with Professor Wei Gao at Tohoku University in Japan. They will be undertaking research on the machining of ceramics. This will involve working on three different silicon nitride ceramics. They are a reaction bonded silicon nitride from Ceradyne, a hot isostatic press (HIP) material from Japan and a commercial HIP material from Allied Signal. All three materials behave similarly when machined, in that they have a ductile to brittle transition (with increasing depth of cut or increasing feed) yet all behave differently in terms of their machining characteristics. They will be studying the forces, tool wear, cutting edge radius measurements, finished surface roughness and then evaluating the material removed (chips) and the finished surface for signs of phase transformations using TEM and Raman Spectroscopy. The researchers hope to determine the behavior differences for these three materials and then develop methods to exploit their differences. Ductile machining of ceramics is advantageous in that very smooth, crack free surfaces can be generated. Such surfaces are useful for many structural and also microelectronic applications. This project will offer a good opportunity to join efforts between the two countries. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The researchers plan to publish results of the research on the web and report on the findings at scientific meetings doc24809 none This project explores a unique materials science approach to understand and improve transport processes in organic semiconductor materials suitable for the fabrication of electronic or opto-electronic devices. The specific objective of the project is to explore and demonstrate an approach to substantially increase carrier mobility under ambient conditions in organic semiconductors by designing, fabricating, and analyzing structures with built-in strain. The proposed research is motivated by recent experimental results with pentacene. Despite recent progress in organic semiconductor materials research, electronic devices fabricated with pentacene have a primary impediment-a relatively low charge carrier mobility which appears to be limited by intermolecular charge carrier transfer. With decreasing intermolecular distances, as happens under compressive stress, and demonstrated utilizing high pressure, charge carrier mobility in organic materials increases. The research proposed here addresses this critical limitation of low mobility by exploring built-in strain enhancement under ambient pressure conditions. The approach is to deposit pentacene on bent, thinned-down Si SiO2 substrate wafers. When the substrate is allowed to relax, compressive strain is built into the active pentacene layer. Field effect transistors will then be fabricated on this material and tested for enhanced mobility. The proposed research will explore the feasibility of such an approach through a coordinated effort involving experiment and modeling. %%% The project addresses fundamental research issues in a topical area of electronic photonic materi-als science having technological relevance. An important feature of the project is high risk high payoff potential with strong emphasis on education, and the integration of research and educa-tion doc24810 none Koc This award is to support travel of Dr. Muammar Koc, Associate Director, Center for Intelligent Maintenance Systems, an NSF Industry University Cooperative Research Center at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, to Turkey. He plans to meet with scientists at two Turkish universities to work on plans to finalize collaborative development of a multi-year, multi-university, and multi-disciplinary program in the area of web-enabled e-manufacturing e-design, and e-maintenance e-service. His counterparts are Dr. Haydar Livatyali, Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering Department at Istanbul Technical University and Dr. Turkay Dereli, Chairman, Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Gaziantep doc7371 none Ferrari This project will test the general hypothesis that calcium (Ca 2+ ) transients within the presomitic mesoderm (PSM) and forming somites are necessary for somitogenesis (SMG). The specific aims are to 1) determine if somite formation is directed by Ca 2+ transients and, 2) examine the relationship between somitogenic gene expression and Ca 2+ transients. The morphogenetic movements which produce somites have been described, but the cellular control mechanisms have remained elusive. However, recent observations indicate that several genes are expressed with spatiotemporal patterns corresponding to somite formation. For example, the bHLH transcription factor c-hairy-1, a pair-rule segmentation gene, is transcribed such that the time for a single oscillation equals the time to form one somite. These patterns have generated much excitement, as they are consistent with theoretical models based on a clock and wave somite formation mechanism. However, the biochemical or molecular nature of this segmentation clock remains unknown. This proposal will test the hypothesis that Ca 2+ transients may form part of the clock mechanism and or serve to entrain cell populations via intercellular Ca 2+ waves. Ca 2+ signaling appears to play an important role in SMG. In both zebrafish and Xenopus, a high degree of Ca 2+ transient activity exists in the PSM and forming somites, and when this activity is blocked SMG is disrupted. Since somites are produced with high regularity, significant correlations between this process and Ca 2+ signals are possible. This regular patterning allows even subtle defects to be detected after experimental manipulation of Ca 2+ signaling. A large array of fluorescent compounds exist for observing and modulating both intra- and intercellular Ca 2+ signals. These fluoroprobes are used in conjunction with high-resolution fluorescence microscopy of living Xenopus embryos and explants. Of particular utility are a number of caged compounds, which can be photoactivated with temporal and spatial specificity to control Ca 2+ dynamics. Using these compounds, experiments are planned to determine if transients are part of an epigenetic signaling pathway responsible for somite patterning. For example, transients will be inhibited in specific regions of the PSM by photoreleasing BAPTA, a high affinty Ca 2+ chelator. These regions will then be examined for the ability to form somites and produce the correct pattern of somitogenic gene expression. The proposed work may further our understanding of how epigenetic signals can control and modify morphogenetic events doc24812 none WAMC Northeast Public Radio (WAMC) will produce, air, and distribute a series of segments on its radio programs 51% and The Best of Our Knowledge that will draw material from projects funded by the NSF Program for Gender Equity in STEM. The show 51% is dedicated to coverage of issues affecting women. The Best of Our Knowledge is devoted to coverage of issues and topics related to education, educational policy, innovation, and research. The program segments will place a national spotlight on gender equity in STEM, specifically in the areas of high school, undergraduate, teacher and faculty development, and educational technologies. They will be delivered in multiple media formats: radio, CD, tape, and the web. WAMC s long-term goal is to play a pivotal role in the national effort to broaden the participation of women and girls in STEM education and workforce. In the shorter-term, WAMC s goals are: 1) to significantly expand education and awareness of targeted audiences and the general public about research and strategies to improve education policies and practices; and, 2) to enhance the image of the STEM professions and their practitioners so that the image is positive and inclusive of women. Results of the project will be: a set of quality radio programs for multiple uses, targeted nationwide distribution, new segments within WAMC s regular programming, and new collaborations between a media organization and women groups, major science and education institutions engaging in research and demonstration projects, high schools, government agencies, trade associations, and private foundations doc24813 none This award provides partial support for construction of a new multipurpose building at the Alice L. Kibbe field station located on the Mississippi River near the Illinois border with Iowa and Missouri. The sq. ft. building will include dormitory accommodations for 48, and a combination dining hall and auditorium and associated kitchen. The facility will be constructed with using insulated concrete forms, which provides a building with significantly increased energy efficiency over standard frame construction, and protection from tornados and strong storms, which the existing station facilities do not provide. The Kibbe station has an active undergraduate and graduate research program, a long tradition of summer field classes, and an increasing number of K-12 educational and service-oriented programs. Ongoing research includes long-term studies on the population dynamics and diversity of freshwater mussels, turtles, fish, amphibians and fungi as well as, studies about the wintering ecology of bald eagles, and the influence of white-tailed deer browsing on herbaceous and woody diversity are in progress. Undergraduate and graduate level classes in a variety of biological fields have been offered since doc24814 none The Research Site of the Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC) entitled Repair of Buildings and Bridges with Composites (RB2C) at North Carolina State University is an extension to the currently active I UCRC located at the University of Missouri-Rolla. The research site at North Carolina State will focus on addressing the needs of the construction industry in development of new and innovative structural components as well as strengthening repair methods for existing structures using advanced composite materials. The primary research activities of the site will involve: use of the three-dimensional weaving technology, developed by the College of Textiles at North Carolina State University in cooperation with the textile industry and the fiber producer; Installation, understanding, manufacturing and use of more durable construction materials; Examination of the durability of the proposed advanced construction materials under severe environmental conditions using the unique environmental chamber installed at the Constructed Facilities Laboratory (CFL), North Carolina State University; Develop new construction materials for rehabilitation of steel structures using high strength and modulus composite materials; and Standardization and code approval of products and design control, education and transfer of technology to industry doc24815 none Under the direction of Dr. Charles Stanish, Amanda Cohen will collect data for her doctoral dissertation during the Summer and Fall of . She will direct excavations at a sample of three Formative Period ( B.C. - A.D. 300) sites in the Pukara Valley of the northwestern Lake Titicaca Basin, Peru. This research will assess the role of public or ceremonial architecture in the evolution of complex societies in the Titicaca Basin of southern Peru. A process of steady settlement nucleation and growth took place during the region s Formative Period, culminating in the emergence of the Pukara Polity (200 BC - AD 300), the earliest known urban-scale society in the southern Andean region. Prior to the rise of Pukara in the Late Formative Period, the Pukara Valley was populated by a series of small villages. It was within this context of interacting autonomous villages that public architecture emerged in the Early and Middle Formative Periods ( B.C.-200 B.C.). These social evolutionary processes were paralleled by the development and elaboration of a distinctive tradition of public architecture, sunken courts with associated surface structures, and an associated corporate ceramic and sculptural style. An earlier survey by the applicant has located at least a dozen sites in the Pukara Valley containing low mounds with central rectangular depressions, almost certainly indicating the presence of sunken courts. To test the relation between the sunken court architectural form and increasing sociopolitical complexity, three of these sites representing the Early and Middle phases of the Formative Period will be sampled. The resulting data will trace architectural and behavioral changes through time at sites with sunken courts. Two models that purport to explain the social significance of early ceremonial architecture will be evaluated. The first suggests that as societies become increasingly stratified ceremonial structures become increasingly specialized. In this scenario, early examples of public architecture are normally associated with a wide range of activities, ritual and domestic. As sociopolitical complexity increases, however, the range of activities associated with public architecture becomes restricted to ritual or ceremonial activities. An alternate model is that public architectural features are highly specialized early in their history, and become less specialized over time as community permanence and cohesion become increasingly institutionalized in the practices of everyday life. In this view, the social integrative function of public ritual facilities is most important in the early stages of sedentary life. The proposed research will evaluate these two models through a diachronic analysis of Pukara Valley sunken courts, their architectural form, and associated artifact assemblages. The study has implications for comparative social science study. Additionally, the survey, combined with paleoecological and paleoclimate data, may be of some use to development programs in the future. This project will provide data of interest to many archaeologists and shed new light on the development of complex societies doc24816 none Ecomorphology is the study of how an organism s anatomy is associated with its ecology. Behavior, or how animals use their anatomy, is an important bridge between animals and their environments. Specifically, comparing animals abilities to perform certain tasks can provide information about the ecological roles those animals play. Modern ecomorphology studies combine analyses of anatomy, performance and relationships among animals to understand the factors underlying the diversity of organisms in the world today. Scientists studying birds and fish have found a strong association between the anatomy of the skull and feeding behavior. This study investigates whether this same strong association is typical of mammals. By investigating this relationship, this study will test fundamental associations between skull form and skull function and shed light on the basis of ecological diversity within one group of modern mammals. The subjects of this study are two distantly related groups of fruit bats - New World fruit bats and Old World fruit bats. These groups were selected for this study because they each contain an array of species that divide the fruit resources available to them in similar ways. The anatomical and behavioral diversity within these two groups make them an ideal test case for studying the interplay between skull morphology, behavioral flexibility and feeding performance. The goal of this study is to explore the relationships among cranial morphology, feeding performance, and diet, and evaluate the roles that these factors play in the ecological diversity of fruit feeding mammals. This study will: 1) provide an assessment of flexibility in feeding behavior within and between species, 2) identify peaks in feeding performance within species, 3) test fundamental associations between skull morphology and dietary habits; 4) evaluate the role of body size in feeding performance, and 5) test the hypothesis that skull morphology and feeding behavior are tightly linked and reflect variation in diet more than evolutionary history. Each of these five areas will be explored through testing explicit hypotheses using specific statistical and systematic techniques. The importance of this study lies in testing the proposition that skull morphology and feeding behavior are tightly linked in mammals. Although mammals are generally well studied, the relationship between variation in feeding performance and ecological diversity has not been investigated. This study will assess the correlation of morphology, behavior, and performance in two ecologically similar but distantly related linages - a design that provides a natural test of the strength of association among these factors doc24817 none Two years of support are being requested if at all possible. The reason for this is because it is necessary to complete several key steps before submission as a regular proposal. The first summer is to prepare papers for presentation and or appearance in conferences and or journals. During the ensuing academic year, the intellectual content of this potentially controversial material will be circulated for comment, both publicly in talks and privately among colleagues. Based on the feedback received, the ideas put forth will be modified and corrected. Only then does it make sense to use the following summer to involve an undergraduate student in implementing the salient features of the proposed work for both a greater depth of understanding and demonstration purposes. By this point in time, that would mean there should be preliminary results appearing in print, with supporting documentation on the web explaining this material. In addition, more capable assistive computing technology will be available by then (to help me overcome my hand disability), so that I might be able to more actively participate in the implementation details of that work. When all of this is readily in place, then it will be possible to submit a competitive regular proposal doc24818 none West Virginia University is teaming with Step-Up for Women to prepare a full proposal. The objective of the proposed project to be implemented beginning in fall is to increase the number of women entering and remaining in the computer science major at West Virginia University. The research question to be addressed is whether an adaptation of the approaches used by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher at Carnegie Mellon University [Margolis, ] and by Jane Zimmer Daniels, formerly at Purdue University and now at The Henry Luce Foundation, are applicable at a university in a rural state with modest admissions requirements. Central to the work is a two semester course sequence which will be discovery-based with a real-world orientation. The results of this work should be transferable to colleges and universities in similar states seeking to increase all students and particularly female students in computer science doc24819 none The Center for Women and Information Technology (CWIT) at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County UMBC) will: 1) Create a four-minute, high quality video presenting diverse images of successful women in science and technology careers and targeting girls and young women ages 12 - 20. 2) Develop a speakers program involving female UMBC students and faculty and representatives from the business community, who will use the video as an exciting entree to a discussion of women s opportunities in science and technology careers. 3) Once the video is completed, evaluate a speaker s success, with and without the video, in educating a total of middle, high school, and community students about the opportunities for careers in IT and related science fields, with a focus on women. 4) Develop guidelines for integrating the video and speaker into any venue, including classrooms, after-school and summer programs, assemblies, career fairs, programs for college freshmen, and other programs for young people. Unlike the traditional videos currently available on the topic, this brief, high-intensity video will engage the emotions and interests of young people. Rather than presenting talking heads, this video will combine vibrant rock or pop music, striking color, and flash images and text to create energy and excitement around the topic of women s career possibilities in IT. The video is modeled upon a high-quality, four-minute music video developed by General Motors and used, with permission, as a template for feedback and evaluation by a diverse group of 102 middle school, high school, and community college students ranging in age from 13 to 26. Over 90% of these students, both male and female, believed creating a short video about women and IT modeled on the GM video was an excellent idea. Video Press, a small for-profit arm of the University of Maryland, College Park, and winner of an Oscar for its production King Gimp will develop the video under the guidance of the Video Project Committee (VPC). The VPC members represent UMBC faculty and staff and the video project subcommittee of Center s advisory board. Once the video is completed, the project team will work with an external evaluator to assess the effectiveness of the video in enhancing a speaker s success in educating students about career opportunities for women in IT and related fields. A booklet will be developed to support the use of the video and be distributed with 100 videos statewide for additional evaluation. VPC members will disseminate the video and guidelines for use nationally and internationally through the Maryland public school system, Maryland community colleges, national and international listservs, journals, radio and television, local and national conferences, and an internationally recognized website. The External Advisory Board is composed of high level executives from the following companies: T. Rowe Price Investment Technologies; Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development; Maryland State Department of Education; Northrop Grumman; Saraf Software Solutions; Hewlett Packard s Digital Village Project; SM Consulting; Allfirst Bank; the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC); and an entrepreneur and Founder CEO of WomenCONNECT.com. Maryland Public Television will serve in an advisory capacity on this project. Additional partners in this project include Meade Middle School, Pine Grove Middle School, Parkville High School and Center for Science, Mathematics, and Computer Science, and the Community College of Baltimore County. The Maryland Association of Community Colleges will support the program through the dissemination and assessment of the video project to all 16 community colleges in the state. Summer Days Math and Science Camp for Girls, Inc. will assess the video as a recruiting tool. The Director of the Center for Social and Community Research at Loyola College in Maryland will independently evaluate the project doc24538 none The polymer industry is one of the most dynamic and expanding industries of our time. It is one of the few industries in which the U.S. still holds a strong leadership in an extremely competitive global market. A focused collaboration between industry and academia has been underway for nearly five years through the activities of the NSF Industry University Cooperative Research Center for Advanced Polymer and Composite Engineering (CAPCE) at the Ohio State University. CAPCE offers comprehensive and well-organized collaboration between application-oriented researchers in industry and fundamental-oriented researchers in universities, enhancing commercialization of advanced polymer and composites materials. The Center will continue to emphasize the needs of the more traditional manufacturing sector of the polymer and composite industry, since these members dominate the industrial support base. In addition, their efforts will include: - Cooperating with industry members to translate basic research results from NSF supported research into commercial products and processes; - Incorporating environmentally-friendly technologies in product manufacturing by reducing energy consumption and toxic chemicals; reducing the amount of volatile solvents and manufacturing waste; and increasing sustainability; and - Enabling efficient, low-cost mass production of parts for bio-MEMS, sensors, and other applications, using micro and nanno-fabrication techniques doc13004 none This project focuses on the changing economic geographies of apparel production in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). After an initial period of rapid industrial collapse and only limited persistence of apparel firms, there has been a more recent rebirth of production throughout the region, linked primarily to changes in the international structure of the industry and in European Union legislation and markets. The project investigates four aspects of these changes. First, using international trade, production, and employment data, the project documents the emergence of these complex new geographies of apparel production and trade, and assess the specific roles played by changes in the international structure of the industry and by changes in international trade regulations. Second, through interviews with brand-name manufacturers, retailers, marketers, and national buying firms in Western Europe, the U.S., and CEE, the study analyzes the important role of buyer-driven commodity chains in sourcing and controlling suppliers in CEE under conditions of intensely competitive pricing and rapidly changing demand. Third, through detailed case studies in six regions in Slovakia and Bulgaria, the project examines the ways in which international sourcing restructures existing national industries, impacts upon the creation of new firms, and produces a variety of industrial forms and practices. Fourth, in seeking to explain this diversity of apparel production, the project examines the ways in which existing social, institutional, and community conditions in different regions of each country are shaping the enterprises and regional economies that are emerging. The pace of new firm creation in these regions is astonishing and the regional impacts of these firms and the scope of their integration with European markets surprising. Through this research we hope to contribute to our understanding of the specific forms and practices of what has been more generally characterized as low-wage, assembly production for export. In particular, we hope to contribute to the literatures in economic geography, globalization debates, and post-socialist restructuring about the roles of national suppliers and markets in the operation of the new firms, the extent to which uniform or differentiated production and marketing strategies are emerging, and the impacts local conditions have on the operation of primarily international contract and assembly production. The proposed research will enable us to examine more fully the conditions and contradictions associated with international integration and local economic reconfiguration in post-socialist Europe. The project will enable us to move beyond single-region and single-country case studies by providing a cross-national and cross-regional analysis of local economic transformations in apparel producing areas. Finally, the research will contribute to our understanding of the role of other economic and social practices in shaping the internationalization of the post-socialist apparel industry and its producing regions doc24822 none This proposal requests to continue support of the NSF Industry University Cooperative Research Center, the Center for the Built Environment (CBE). CBE was established at the university of California, Berkeley, in and is dedicated to the industries and professions that design and construct buildings, manufacture building components, and that operate and maintain buildings. Its objective is to improve the performance of buildings by enhancing their indoor environmental quality, and by improving the energy efficiency with which that quality is produced. There are great opportunities to improve the performance of buildings in the U.S. through applied research and development. Improved building design and technologies may reduce energy consumption, improve employee health and productivity, and improve economic competitiveness and domestic security by reducing US dependence on energy imports. CBE builds upon the accomplishments of an extensive group of faculty members that perform building science research at UCB. This group has an impressive record of achievements, both individually and in past joint projects, and maintains extensive and state-of-the-art research tools and facilities. Through collaboration with its industry partners, CBE s research focuses on providing tools and analysis to assist building industry firms and design professionals doc24823 none The Erebus Bay Weddell seal population study in eastern McMurdo Sound, Antarctica was initiated in and represents one of the longest intensive field investigations of a long-lived mammal in existence. Over the thirty-four year period of this study a total of 15,636 animals have been tagged with 144,927 re-sighting records logged in the current database. As such, this study is an extremely valuable resource for understanding population dynamics of not only Weddell seals, but also other species of both terrestrial and marine mammals with similar life-history characteristics. With the retirement of the original investigator, Dr. Donald Siniff, this proposal represents an effort to transition the long-term studies to a new team of investigators. Dr. Robert Garrott and Dr. Jay Rotella propose building upon the foundation with two lines of investigation that combine use of the long-term database with new field initiatives. The continuity of the demographic data will be maintained by annually marking all pups born, replace lost or broken tags, and perform multiple mark-recapture censuses of the Erebus Bay seal colonies. The new data will be combined with the existing database and a progressively complex series of analyses will be performed using recently developed mark-recapture methods to decompose, evaluate, and integrate the demographic characteristics of the Erebus Bay Weddell seal population. These analyses will allow the testing of specific hypotheses about population regulation as well as temporal and spatial patterns of variation in vital rates among colonies within the population that have been posed by previous investigators, but have not been adequately evaluated due to data and analytical limitations. The primary new field initiative will involve an intensive study of mass dynamics of both pups and adult females as a surrogate measure for assessing annual variation in marine resources and their potential role in limiting and or regulating the population. In conjunction with the collection of data on body mass dynamics the investigators will use satellite imagery to develop an extended time series of sea ice extent in McMurdo Sound. Regional extent of sea ice affects both regional primary productivity and availability of haul out areas for Weddell seals. Increased primary productivity may increase marine resources which would be expected to have a positive affect on Weddell seal foraging efficiency, leading to increased body mass. These data combined with the large proportion of known-aged seals in the current study population ( 60%) will allow the investigators to develop a powerful database to test specific hypotheses about ecological processes affecting Weddell seals. Knowledge of the mechanisms that limit and or regulate Weddell seal populations and the specific bio-physical linkages between climate, oceans, ice, and Antarctic food webs can provide important contributions to understanding of pinniped population dynamics, as well as contribute more generally to theoretical understanding of population, community, and ecosystem patterns and processes. Such knowledge can be readily applied elsewhere to enhance the ability of natural resource managers to effectively maintain assemblages of other large-mammal species and the ecological processes that they facilitate. Continuation of this long-term study may also contribute to understanding the potential impacts of human activities such as global climate warming and the commercial exploitation of Antarctic marine resources. And finally, the study can contribute significantly to the development and testing of new research and analytical methodologies that will almost certainly have many other applications doc24824 none A National Science Foundation grant has been awarded to San Diego State University Field Station Programs (FSP), under the direction of Ms. Sedra Shapiro, Drs. Claudia Luke and Kathy Williams to develop a wireless web-based community to integrate research, education and technology. Funding will be used to create a wireless telecommunications network and install an array of sensing devices at the Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve (SMER) sixty miles north of San Diego. Our mission is to support research, education, and university teaching through the collecting, sharing and understanding of environmental data. The Field Station reserves serve as foci for interdisciplinary work and relationship building among scientists, students, regional managers, community groups, and decision-makers. SMER will serve as a model system for environmental observation that collects and shares data from various scientific disciplines using novel data collection methods. With improved understanding, scientists and FSP staff will be able to better inform policy makers, natural resource managers, and the general public on how to address these, and other critical questions. New technologies allow us a whole new way of conducting environmental science with wireless sensor technology linked into a high-speed Internet backbone providing scientists with a new resource to monitor, probe, explore, and understand our ecoregion. Completely new things can be measured; completely new insights are inevitable. Development of a wireless communication network and automated sensor arrays within a remote field station will feed into major collaborations with other NSF-funded environmental data acquisition and distribution projects, such as ROADNet (Real-time Observatories, Applications, and Data management Network), under the direction of Scripps Institute of Oceanography s (SIO) PI, John Orcutt; and HPWREN (High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network), under the direction of the San Diego SuperComputer Center s PI, Hans-Werner Braun and SIO s Frank Vernon. Existing partnerships and collaborations along with the SDSU FSP personnel ensure success of this novel project. Currently, a fledgling network of Internet-accessible telecommunication facilities at SMER has attracted widespread interest from environmental and technology researchers, educators, and natural resource managers. Data collected by the FSP is non-proprietary and will be made freely accessible through the Internet. While the current system generated interest and collaborations, and provided basic biotic and abiotic information, new funds will be used to meet rising demands for a reserve-wide network. To achieve project goals, instrumentation to expand the SMER wireless network region or communications bubble allowing researchers to collect and share real-time data from novel sensor technologies on 65% of the ha SMER reserve. Additionally we will deploy a series of sensor arrays that collect hydrographic and meteorological data at strategic locations within the reserve. Collecting and sharing these data sets through real-time wireless streaming of data is important in that these types of data are frequently used by a wide community of researchers, can be important for education and outreach, and are significant environmental factors for real-time monitoring of water and air in our national quest for improved security and homeland defense. This project will benefit researchers, educators, students, and habitat managers, who may integrate their data with non-proprietary real-time and archived ecological data from SMER or elsewhere. This activity bridges the gap between environmental and technological research by establishing an extensive in situ sensor and telecommunication network. SMER will be a model site and living laboratory for ecological observation with emerging technologies benefiting environmental research being proto-typed at SMER. A novel aspect of this project, in addition to new data collection capabilities, is the broad interest by collaborators in assessing potential uses of wireless technology by the scientific community as a whole. The broader impact of this project will increase access to ecological data and support novel learning strategies for expanding educational uses. With an increasingly diverse undergraduate student population nation-wide, we must aggressively meet the challenge of increasing diversity of the Science, Math, Engineering, and Technology (SMET) workforce by improving preparation of ALL students. SDSU graduates one of the most diverse student bodies in higher education. These data sets will also be used in K-12 and community education doc24825 none This award provides partial support for renovation of small research teaching laboratories at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory (MDIBL). The Laboratory has a history of accommodating NSF-funded research and training programs, but is increasingly limited by the deteriorating quality and poor insulation of its older buildings. The three aging laboratories to be improved have been in service since (Kidney Shed), (Halsey Laboratory) and (Rappaport Laboratory). The planned improvements and renovations include restoration of exterior surfaces and roofing, improved insulation, replacement of bench tops, cabinetry, plumbing and installation of seamless flooring. These renovations will maintain the informal seaside appearance of the buildings. MDIBL provides facilities for visiting investigators who use marine species for investigating the mechanisms of basic biological processes such as osmoregulation, reproduction and cell division, and offers educational programs for students at all levels from high school through postdoctoral. The recent initiation of the Center for Marine Functional Genomic Studies at MDIBL, which includes modern genomics and bioinformatics capabilities, has increased the demand for laboratory space and made the planned improvements a high priority for the Laboratory doc24826 none This award supports participants in The Third IMACS International Conference on Nonlinear Evolution Equations and Wave Phenomena: Computation and Theory, held at the University of Georgia on 7-10 April . The interdisciplinary meeting, sponsored by the International Association for Mathematics and Computers in Simulation, focuses on computational and theoretical aspects of nonlinear waves and optical solitons, and brings together researchers in applied mathematics, computational mathematics, and applied physics. Topics of interest include theoretical aspects of solitons and integrability, nonlinear waves in fluids, symbolic and numeric computations for integrable evolution equations, numerical methods for nonlinear waves (symplectic, IST and Fast Fourier methods, adaptive methods of lines, parallel algorithms), nonlinear waves in optics, dispersion managed solitons in optical fibers, and advances in modeling optical fiber transmission systems. The interdisciplinary meeting will provide excellent opportunities for communication and collaboration between senior and junior researchers doc24827 none New Directions in Science and Engineering Ethics Curriculum A Workshop at Indiana University, June 10 and 11, , Hosted by the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics Brian E. Schrag This grant supports a one and one-half day workshop to explore new directions in science and engineering ethics curriculum, focusing primarily on web-based courses. The fifteen invited participants are leaders in research ethics education or are expert in the use of computer technology to create on-line research ethics curriculum. Participants will share their experience and ideas concerning objectives of research ethics education: new directions in content and pedagogy, and best uses of computer technology, combined effectively with other pedagogical approaches. Participants will recommend standards and guidelines for NSF grant applications that propose curriculum projects in research ethics, especially on-line curriculum. The main guidelines that derive from this project will be posted on the web site of the NSF program Societal Dimensions of Engineering, Science and Technology. The background papers from which the standards are derived will appear in appropriate publications where they can benefit the broader audience of professionals in the field of ethics education. Schrag doc24828 none The Center for the Study of Wireless Electromagnetic Compatibility was established in the College of Engineering at the University of Oklahoma in . Its purpose is to link with the various industries affected by wireless technology and bring them together to develop common solutions. This is essential for the health growth of these industries. It is expected that the growth of the cellular phone industry will continue to accelerate and exceed that of the personal computer industry in the s. The research focus of the Center has been carefully developed to support the needs of the wireless industry as defined through an original pilot study, the Charter of the Center, and the continual input from the Center s Industry Advisory Board. The Center s research focus encompasses the following: Electromagnetic compatibility between products in the wireless industry and the following electronics industries; Medical; Automotive; and Aviation. Research leading to the identification and resolution of interaction mechanisms between the radiating devices in the wireless industry and other electronic devices. Research concerning the development and growth of wireless technology as well as future bands of transmission doc24829 none States and communities increasingly are recognizing that universities roles in research, innovation, faculty entrepreneurship, and workforce preparedness provide the critical foundation for successful tech-based economic development. Paradoxically, the fiscal crises confronting all but four states is forcing difficult decisions regarding funding for higher education and tech-based economic development. The State Science and Technology Institute (SSTI) sixth annual conference in Dearborn, MI will serve as a forum for nurturing stronger alliances between university and economic development officials during challenging financial times. The university track will allow participants to examine and strengthen higher education s contributions toward forging local, state, and regional economic vitality. The goals of this track are to (1) increase among technology-based economic development professionals recognition of and support for the important roles universities play in building technology-based economies; (2) attract more university leadership and research administrators to participate in the gathering, allowing the opportunity to foster stronger working relationships with their state, local and regional economic development partners; (3) provide a forum for universities to discuss shared challenges and issues in and examples of effective tools and techniques for increasing commercialization of university technology, building the research enterprise, encouraging faculty entrepreneurship, and preparing tomorrow s workers and leaders; and (5) promote interstate and intrastate cooperation toward common goals for research and economic development doc24830 none The Industry University Cooperative Research Center research site at Northeastern University will work jointly with the industrial members and the existing Microcontamination Control center at the University of Arizona and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to develop solutions that will improve the industry s yield and contribute to their competitiveness. The industrial members at all three sites will share the research results of all the sites. The research focuses on the fundamentals of surface cleaning and preparation, particle adhesion and removal mechanisms, reduction of the use of chemicals through dilute chemistries, cryogenic aerosols and supercritical fluids (such as supercritical CO2) and reduction of water use through increased cleaning efficiency. Contamininants in gases will also be addressed through physical modeling of particle generation, transport, deposition resulting in contamination in thin film process. The center will also work toward the development of micro-sensors that can be used to detect impurities insitu in ultra pure gases used in semiconductor and other processes doc24831 none This project will continue to operate, develop, and improve the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) over the five-year period 1 April through 31 March . CHESS is a unique national synchrotron radiation user facility that operates parasitically on the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR), producing high energy X-rays from the 5 - 8 GeV electrons and positrons in the ring. Since , CHESS has hosted visits from investigators from all over the world to conduct research in a wide range of science and engineering disciplines in academia, industry, and government. For example, CHESS has been used for investigations of the atomic structure, properties, and time-resolved behavior of electronic, structural, polymeric, and biological materials, protein and virus crystallography, environmental science, radiography of solids and fluids, and microelemental analyses. CHESS is an incubator of new synchrotron science, people, methods, and instrumentation. To date, 449 students have received Ph.D. degrees using data taken at CHESS. In consequence, CHESS is a national resource for new beamline scientists. X-rays are produced as byproducts from the acceleration of electrons to very high energies. This occurs in the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR), producing X-rays that are utilized by the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS). This radiation can be used to determine the properties and time-resolved behavior of a wide range of electronic, structural, polymeric, and biological materials. In addition, the X-rays can be used to determine the structures of proteins and viruses, for environmental science, and to obtain radiographs of solids and fluids. Many of these pieces of information can be obtained in no other way. For example, time-resolved X-ray images of pressurized fuel sprays have been obtained that may lead to significant improvements in engine performance. This project will continue to operate, develop, and improve CHESS over the five-year period 1 April through 31 March . CHESS is a unique national synchrotron radiation user facility, which has hosted visits from investigators from all over the world to conduct research in a wide range of science and engineering disciplines in academia, industry, and government. CHESS is an important incubator of new synchrotron science, people, methods, and instrumentation doc24832 none This award, under the auspices of the Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) program, will establish a unique proxy isotopic record for the lower free troposphere of the western Pacific convection system. This system plays a dominant role in the climate of the tropical Pacific. The study site on Lake Guam is situated adjacent to the Pacific warm pool and at an elevation of meters on the high plateau of the Huon Peninsula, Papua New Guinea (6 degrees S and 147 degrees E). The researcher will generate and calibrate isotopic records of Oxygen-18 and Carbon-13 from carbonate sediments in Lake Guam to instrumental records of temperature, humidity, and winds from historical atmospheric soundings in the western tropical Pacific. The rationale for considering this award is the high-risk challenge of validating the first high altitude isotopic record of the lower troposphere in the western tropical Pacific and developing the first proxy vertical soundings of this convection system doc24833 none Kansas State University is developing an interactive CD-ROM DVD set for use with pre-service and in-service high school teachers, teacher education faculty and college faculty in SMET fields. The set will: (1) introduce the user to the research base on gender and gender socialization, (2) sensitize these educators to the inadvertent gender bias that operates in SMET classrooms and programs, (3) provide classroom strategies and interventions designed to reduce bias, and (4) present school-wide or department-wide efforts to increase the presence of women in SMET classes and programs. Components of the CD-ROM DVD include: (1) classroom segments or dramatizations of bias, research, or interventions; (2) interviews with female high school and college students about their experiences in SMET classrooms; (3) interviews with high school teachers and college faculty members about the process by which they became sensitized to gender issues and began working towards change; (4) interviews with researchers familiar with the research on gender bias conducted in both psychology and education; (5) abstracts of relevant journal articles; and (6) essays that invite further reflection. The CD-ROM DVD will be field-tested with the target population and disseminated through existing professional organizations. In addition, guidelines will be prepared for introduction of the CD-ROM DVD in classroom settings for pre-service teachers as well as in professional development seminars for in-service teachers and college faculty. The project is innovative in its use of an interactive CD-ROM DVD to provide instruction, in its integration of presentations of gender bias in education with a solid research base, and in its use of student and teacher college faculty members voices to explore their own experiences in SMET classrooms and the processes by which change is implemented. Because it can be used both individually and as part of a classroom or seminar, the CD-ROM DVD has the capacity to reach thousands of pre-service and in-service teachers, teacher educators, and college faculty who work in SMET disciplines. This potential for reaching a broad audience makes this project a cost-effective and efficient method of strengthening the social infrastructure in SMET education in ways that ultimately increase the number of women working in SMET fields doc24834 none The University of Louisville will examine the experiences of over 400 students working on team projects in scientific and technical writing and computer science classes over three semesters. The results of this study should provide technical writing and computer science instructors and researchers with new insights into the different communication styles and values of male and female students, new information about differences in the epistemological styles of men and women and how these affect teamwork experiences, empirical data on the effectiveness of a variety of workshop interventions for improving teamwork experiences, and extensively-tested materials suitable for inclusion in a textbook or CD-ROM on teamwork. Teamwork and collaboration are often proposed as ways to augment the experiences of female students in SMET disciplines. However, in practice, women frequently have negative experiences with team projects that leave them feeling even more alienated than before. Men and women often conflict over their preferences for different types of communication and problem-solving styles, and these conflicts often result in women s silence and frustration. Such silence is harmful not only because women lose out on opportunities to contribute to the project, but also because their silence is often perceived by others as insecurity over their technical competence. In the first research phase, six to ten teams working on technically-oriented writing projects will be observed in detail. Data collection will consist of field notes, video recordings, and written documents. In addition, students will complete questionnaires assessing their attitudes towards teamwork and their favored epistemological styles (i.e., attitudes toward knowledge and authority). Relationships have been found between gender, the ability to manage conflict, and epistemological styles. Team interactions will be transcribed and analyzed for quantity of interaction, interruptions, roles played by different individuals, reactions to different types of conversational interchanges, and different approaches to problem-solving. These analyses will be compared against the questionnaire data to assess how communication, problem-solving, and knowledge styles can affect men and women s experiences in teams. The next phase of the project will draw upon these taped interactions to produce materials that will be used in workshops designed to enhance the team experience. Four different workshops will be compared for effectiveness: (1) analyzing tapes of team interactions; (2) analyzing transcripts of team interactions; (3) analyzing tapes of team interactions followed by role-playing activities; (4) listening to a lecture. It is hypothesized that analyzing the annotated transcripts of team interactions will be the most effective workshop intervention and the lecture will be the least effective doc24782 none Information security has become a critical concern of both government and industry, and numerous groups have independently called for more and better research and education efforts in computer security. During the first computer security education workshop ( ) attended by industry and government agencies, there was a clear call to action for universities to create programs in information security. In response to these demands, faculty members from several universities have been working to increase both education and research in the area of information assurance. This initiative proposes to build on the existing strengths of the faculty and universities involved by creating the Cyber Protection Center. The Center will be one of the first facilities dedicated to creating a simulated Internet for the purpose of researching, designing, and testing cyber defense mechanisms. The Laboratory will also be used to test key components of the critical infrastructure doc24836 none for Upgrade of Power, Electrical and Communication Infrastructure at the Shoals Marine Laboratory NSF Proposal submitted to the NSF Field Stations and Marine Laboratories Improvement Program A grant has been awarded from NSF to the Shoals Marine Laboratory (SML), Cornell University, under the direction of Dr. Morin to upgrade the (1) power and electrical distribution, and (2) basic communication infrastructure. SML is a seasonal field station situated on a 95-acre rocky island six miles off the coast from the Maine NH border in the Gulf of Maine. The isolated nature of the facility on a small, environmentally sensitive offshore island necessitates that SML carefully maintain its own systems for communications, power and electricity, water, seawater delivery, and waste water management. The station s existing generators are in need of being replaced or rebuilt, and much of the electrical distribution system dates back to the s. These systems have reached a critical state and urgent improvement is needed to conform to current standards. SML s communications systems also requires modernization; only limited and intermittent Internet access has been available at the field station up until now. It has been very difficult and often impossible for researchers, faculty, staff and interns to achieve electronic contact with the mainland and their labs. Through a grant from the American Distance Education Consortium [ADEC], an NSF sponsored project, SML will have Internet access in . However the award does not include hardwiring and network connections between and among the various, widely spaced building that house the laboratory facilities, classrooms, and administrative offices. Voice and facsimile communications are also outdated and not adequate for maintaining connections to SML s administrative offices at Cornell. The existing radiophones need to be replaced, and a third remote line needs to be added to provide more reliable connections to the mainland, and alleviate the problems associated with having only two phone lines available for as many as 25 staff, faculty and researchers on island at a time. All these improvements are critical and they will greatly enhance SML s ability to provide quality research and educational experience to its constituents. To accomplish the power and electrical upgrade: (1) a new 113 KW (kilowatt) generator will be purchased, (2) an existing 65KW generator will be rebuilt, and (3) transformers, transfer switches, electrical governors and panels, circuit breakers, and associated cables will be installed to revitalize the outdated electrical infrastructure. The generator room will also be improved by adding ventilation and sound-proofing. The communication infrastructure upgrade will include completion of hardwiring and network connections for SML s new satellite Internet system to the campus. These funds will also be used to purchase a new remote telephone system, and upgrade the existing radio-telephones currently used for voice and facsimile communications. SML is entering its thirty-seventh year as a field station dedicated to marine research, undergraduate instruction in the marine sciences, and educating the general public about our world s oceans. SML is situated in an extraordinary location for addressing significant questions related to field marine science. There is easy access to a rich variety of coastal environments including intertidal, subtidal, oceanic and terrestrial habitats. A valuable continuous set of biodiversity surveys along the island s intertidal zone has been catalogued over the past 30 years through SML s programs. For over 25 years SML s bird banding station has been documenting seasonal patterns of bird migration. Each summer over 200 undergraduates participate in more than sixteen courses, most of which have a strong research component. SML is also a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site. This NSF funded program allows nine REU interns to carry out directed independent research projects at SML. In addition, six to twelve visiting researchers use SML as a primary field research site. SML facilities are also available to numerous groups including SML adult education courses, visiting academic institutions, environmental organizations (e.g., Audubon Society), local high schools (over 200 participants each summer), and over 1,000 day and overnight visitors visit each summer to learn about the marine environment and the island s rich cultural history doc24837 none Illinois State University will shape the awareness, attitudes and knowledge of all freshman students and their parents by enhancing learning about gender issues in STEM before and during the freshman year. The interventions will be conducted within three overlapping spheres -- the family context, the peer context, and the University s curricular and co-curricular structures. It is at the nexus of these three spheres that students make educational choices that affect their careers for decades. Within the family context, there will be a half-day or four-hour workshop that addresses gender equity in STEM, as part of the two-day Summer Orientation sessions for incoming 900 freshmen and their parents. All the 150 undergraduate advisors at the University will also participate in the workshop. Within the peer context, learning communities will be formed to provide a support group that nurtures freshmen females who express interest (or even mild enthusiasm) in STEM. The learning communities will be modeled on the existing Connections program at the University. Each learning community will consist of a maximum of 30 students (females and males), a science, mathematics, or technology professional on or off campus, who will serve as a role model, and a student leader (university junior or senior in one of the STEM fields) to help guide the students through their first year at the University. Within the context of the University s curricular and co-curricular structures, a four-week topical excursion (learning module) will be part of an existing general education course, Foundations of Inquiry (FOI), which all freshmen take during their first semester at the University. In that topical excursion , the approach to Science Technology Society -- current issues in which the science, mathematics, engineering and technology play major roles -- will be combined with a more gender-related subtext -- choosing female scientists as authors, showing female scientists, engineers, and technologists at work, or raising the issue of gender bias in science research. The model exemplified in this project has the potential for replication at comparable institutions since many universities have some form of a summer orientation session for incoming freshmen and their parents, an introductory course that most freshmen take during their first year at the university, a structure for peer support, and undergraduate student advisement. Gender-role attitudes of society are widely thought to deter college age women from STEM college courses, majors, and subsequent career paths. Experiences during the transition to adulthood are particularly strong. The goal is to challenge traditional concepts and definitions of femininity and its relationship with STEM disciplines taking a whole community approach at this critical stage in education -- getting male and female students, their parents, student advisors, and faculty involved doc24838 none For the past decade, a variety of courses at Michigan State University (MSU) have used the Computer-Assisted Personalized Approach (CAPA) system, a network tool designed to facilitate and improve the way assignments, quizzes, and examinations are delivered and graded in large enrollment courses (E.Kashy et al., ). An instructor uses the system to generate unique assignments for each student in a class. The system then provides immediate feedback to students (and instructors) on conceptual understanding and correctness of solutions and allows students to rework incorrect solutions. Recent analyses of data from introductory physics courses suggest that women are particularly likely to benefit from the broader use of such systems (D. Kashy, Albertelli, E. Kashy, ). MSU will conduct a planning study with two objectives: 1. Examine the vast database from courses in many areas of the sciences that have used the CAPA system in the past to see whether and to what degree the gender differences found in physics are found in other science fields. 2. Plan a comprehensive study that will attempt to identify the critical elements that promote gender equity in science, mathematics, and engineering education when using this technology. The courses in the study make use of the LON-CAPA system (Learning Online Network with CAPA), an integrated tool that uses network technology for learning and assessment. In addition to providing improved versions of the tools in CAPA, it includes a content authoring and management system that allows new and existing materials to be broadly and easily exchanged among instructors and institutions, an extensive data collection and retrieval system, and a content delivery system that will provide gateways to and from NSF s National STEM Digital Library. The study will investigate whether the use of this widely available and free technology is also a tool for enhancing the success rate of women in science courses doc24839 none The Black Hills Special Services Cooperative, South Dakota, is planning for the development of a research-based professional development model designed to help middle school teachers appropriately integrate technology into mathematics and science content in a way that raises the interest and persistence of female students in STEM. In this model, professional development for technology integration will be the vehicle used to address and apply principles of gender equity at the middle school classroom level. As middle school teachers learn how to appropriately use technology to add value to existing mathematics and science curriculum and methodology, they will do so through the lens of gender equity. Target participants in this project will initially include 30 middle school teachers of mathematics, science and computer science in five selected middle schools in western South Dakota which serve approximately students in grades 5-8. Collaborating partners in the planning proposal are Technology and Innovations in Education (TIE), Rapid City, South Dakota; the Center for the Advancement of Mathematics and Science (CAMSE) at Black Hills State University, Spearfish, South Dakota; the Midwest Alliance for Professional Learning and Leadership (MAPLE), Rapid City South Dakota; and the following pre-K school districts in western South Dakota: Belle Fourche, Lead-Deadwood, Meade, Spearfish, and Todd County. These districts represent a cross section of South Dakota s student population doc24840 none The University of Oklahoma (OU) will study the factors that impact the retention of female undergraduate majors in its Industrial Engineering program. The program is especially successful: as of Fall , 58% of the undergraduate majors in Industrial Engineering are women. This proportion is strikingly higher than both the nationwide proportion in industrial engineering and the proportion in other STEM degree programs at OU. Furthermore, the proportion has more than doubled in the space of five years, having steadily increased from 27% in . OU did not set out specifically to accomplish this rate of retention of female students. The study will investigate combinations of factors that affect students choices. For example, one factor is the proportion of female faculty. Industrial Engineering at OU has a high proportion of women faculty (4 of 10 faculty, 40%), which is one of the factors identified by Seymour and Hewitt ( ) as having an impact on retention of women majors. This phenomenon alone is unlikely to account for the present high retention, as evidenced by nationwide trends in other disciplines (e.g., chemical engineering and computer science). The primary source of data will be 600 interviews with students. Students will be sophomore to senior, as well as alumni. During the first year, the team will interview only Industrial Engineering majors at OU. In the second and third years, they will interview students at OU majoring in Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, and Physics, in addition. Finally, during the third year, they will include additional interviews of Industrial Engineering majors at Arizona State University, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and the University of Pittsburgh. To assure triangulation, other sources of data will include student transcript records, the Pittsburgh Engineering Attitudes Toward Engineering Survey(copyright), and interviews with faculty, program directors, advisors, and graduate students, all of whom affect student experiences in college. The fifteen-person research team consists of two anthropologists, two educational researchers, two faculty in industrial engineering at OU (one with expertise in engineering education research), one faculty liaison for each of the other participating departments at OU (one with expertise in undergraduate mathematics education research), one faculty liaison with each of the participating institutions, and an experienced project director doc24782 none Information security has become a critical concern of both government and industry, and numerous groups have independently called for more and better research and education efforts in computer security. During the first computer security education workshop ( ) attended by industry and government agencies, there was a clear call to action for universities to create programs in information security. In response to these demands, faculty members from several universities have been working to increase both education and research in the area of information assurance. This initiative proposes to build on the existing strengths of the faculty and universities involved by creating the Cyber Protection Center. The Center will be one of the first facilities dedicated to creating a simulated Internet for the purpose of researching, designing, and testing cyber defense mechanisms. The Laboratory will also be used to test key components of the critical infrastructure doc24842 none This award supports renovation of classroom and office space at the Fred Telonicher Marine Laboratory. Located in Trinidad, CA, the laboratory provides access to a variety of nearby marine and terrestrial habitats, including an extensive rocky intertidal zone, sand beaches, protected and exposed subtidal areas, lagoons and estuaries, mudflats, eelgrass beds, and submarine canyons. The Laboratory s main building includes two large classrooms, 14 offices for faculty and graduate students, research labs and additional space used to support education and research activities. A filtered seawater system supplies classrooms, a large wet laboratory with numerous holding tanks, and a small public aquarium. The Laboratory offers a diverse set of marine-oriented research and educational programs, including college level courses, graduate research, K-12 programming, and self-guided tours for the general public. The Laboratory s close proximity to a variety of habitats and the ability to maintain a wide variety of organisms at the laboratory permit hands on laboratory and field experiences for students. Fifteen faculty members regularly use the marine facilities for research and teaching. The amount and quality of existing laboratory space, offices and classrooms has made it difficult for the Laboratory to accommodate visiting scientists, additional faculty and more students. Using the support provided by this award, the institution will renovate three large rooms to create additional research space and to improve the quality and utility of space currently used for teaching and faculty offices. The renovated classrooms will provide a far superior space for conducting course lectures and laboratories. Separate rooms will allow the Laboratory to offer two courses concurrently, making more space available for new classes. The lecture and laboratory courses to be offered will include: biological oceanography, chemical oceanography, geological oceanography, zooplankton ecology, and estuarine ecology. In addition all three rooms will meet ADA requirements for wheelchair access as a result of the renovations doc24843 none Improving education and inclusion of students with disabilities in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) through camps, science fairs and other programs are imperative to the diversification of our future SMET work force. Students with disabilities in remote and rural regions are much less likely to have access to SMET resources because of their geographic location. Additionally, students with disabilities and their families are often strapped financially due to excessive costs in transportation, adaptive technologies, support personnel, personal care, and architectural adaptations. After families pay for these essentials, SMET camps and programs often are a financial burden. As one step in our project, we plan to collaborate with existing SMET camps and programs, to demonstrate that all camps can be appropriate for students with disabilities. This would enable students in rural and remote regions such as Alaska to participate fully in science and math education experiences leading to careers in SMET. The Shaping Vocational Frontiers Project will be directed by Drs. Radtke and Owens with assistance from Access Alaska. Dr. Radtke is a well known scientist and community activist and Dr. Owens is an experienced researcher and teacher, outdoor educator and inventor. Both men have severe disabilities and are intimately familiar with the problems faced by persons with disabilities in SMET related activities. Access Alaska will be instrumental in training, camp accessibility, and network development. The project will create a program that involves a core of students, families, scientists, educators, and university-level science teacher trainers. This amalgam will strive to enhance the opportunities for acquiring SMET education for students with disabilities throughout Alaska. As a group we will work towards this goal through changes in science education curriculum, educational practices, and policy in the state. We plan to identify students with disabilities across the state who can benefit from this program and provide them with hands-on, field-based science. We will emphasize activities that provide for integration of students with disabilities with their traditional counterparts who do not have disabilities. Role models and mentors, many with disabilities themselves, will advise, problem solve, and guide both individual students and heterogeneous teams of students (consisting of both able-bodied and students with disabilities) in these activities. The appropriate assistive technology will be used in concert with Internet to insure that students with disabilities will be fully included in SMET activities, Electronic technology (including the Internet) will be used to encourage networking and information dissemination among student teams, educational organizations, administrators, and members of the community. The project will be carefully documented for public television and Internet venues. All publications produced by the project will be available through fully accessible electronic media doc24844 none The continuation of NSF supported research on the DR of N2+ is proposed. Values for the DR rate coefficients of the lowest three vibrational levels of N2+ , calculated under prior support using theoretical quantum chemical methods, will be improved by including core excited Rydberg states in the calculation of the rate coefficients. For the excited vibrational levels, these will be the first results for the total DR rate coefficients. Additional electronic widths will be calculated in order to compute the rate coefficients for DR of the fourth and fifth vibrational levels. The atomic products of DR can be in excited electronic states. The calculation of the yields of ground and excited state atoms using wave packet methods will be carried out. The yields will be calculated as a function of ion vibrational level and electron and rotational temperatures. Because of a lack of data, vibrational excitation and deexcitation reactions have been ignored in ionospheric models. However, theoretical work indicates that the rate coefficients for vibrational change may be competitive with those for DR. If so, these reactions will be of the greatest importance to aeronomic models. The first theoretical studies of electron impact state to state vibrational change in N2+ will be done. These reactions can proceed by using the same intermediate states as those involved in DR reactions. State to state rate coefficients will be calculated for vibrational change within the ion ground state and for excitation from the ion ground state to two low lying excited electronic states. There are no experimental measurements of these state to state rate coefficients. All the results developed under this project will be made available on the internet and published in scientific journals doc24845 none Vinals This award is jointly funded by the Divisions of Materials Research and Mathematical Sciences. It supports a symposium to be held at Carnegie Mellon University on April 11-12, , entitled Moving Boundary Problems in Physics, Mathematics and Materials Science. The symposium recognizes the many contributions to this interdisciplinary field by Professor Robert Sekerka . Funds will be used primarily to assist young researchers to attend. %%% This award is jointly funded by the Divisions of Materials Research and Mathematical Sciences. It supports a symposium to be held at Carnegie Mellon University on April 11-12, , entitled Moving Boundary Problems in Physics, Mathematics and Materials Science. The symposium recognizes the many contributions to this interdisciplinary field by Professor Robert Sekerka . Funds will be used primarily to assist young researchers to attend doc24846 none This project evaluates the extent to which ad hoc networks of embedded systems (NESTs) may be used to implement feedback control systems. Ad hoc NESTs are inexpensive and easy to deploy, but their ad hoc nature makes it impossible to realize feedback controllers in hard real-time. NEST feedback control systems, therefore, are soft real-time systems in which feedback measurements are delayed or dropped. Maintaining specified levels of overall closed loop performance in such a soft real-time environment is extremely challenging. This project will develop methods for assuring overall closed loop performance in NEST systems. This goal will be achieved by adopting a cross-disciplinary approach that integrates research efforts in control, real-time systems, computer systems, and communications. In particular, the project tackles this problem by 1) the dynamic re-routing of connections using a polynomial extension of minimum hop routing schemes, 2) the development of novel soft scheduling methods whose behavior can be directly related to closed loop controller performance, and 3) the dynamic re-allocation of link capacities through the use of combined channel coding and ARQ methods. The project s broader impacts will be expressed through an undergraduate level course that integrates control theory concepts with embedded system principles. Futher project impacts will be realized by coordinating this work with an existing DARPA contract that is developing middleware technologies for NEST-type systems doc24847 none A grant has been awarded to the Whitney Laboratory, University of Florida, under the direction of Dr. Anderson, to protect the electrical power supply of the Whitney Laboratory. Because of its location in on the north east coast of Florida, a region traversed by tropical weather systems, the Laboratory is extremely vulnerable to disruptions of its power supply. Long term interruptions of the power supply can result in the loss of valuable and sometimes irreplaceable stocks of cells, antibodies and other supplies, and would put animals in the Laboratory s aquarium at risk because of a lack of flowing sea water and aeration. Furthermore, when power to the air conditioning system is lost, the Laboratory s sensitive cell and molecular biological equipment is be extremely vulnerable to damage from the high humidity and salt air that accumulates in the Laboratory. The Laboratory is also very vulnerable to short term outages and power surges caused by the many lightening strikes that typify weather pattern in the region. These can and have damaged equipment and cause unnecessary interruption to on-going research. While small items of equipment (i.e. computers) can be protected by commercial surge suppressors, large items such as ultracold freezers cannot be protected in this manner and are frequently damaged by power surges, putting frozen stocks and supplies at risk of thawing and subsequent loss. The Laboratory currently uses a 25 year old generator to provide emergency power. However, this unit, which was installed when the Laboratory was established and minimally equipped, supplies less than 50% of its rated power. Consequently, it is insufficient for the current needs of the Laboratory, to the point at which much of the critical equipment, including freezers, cannot be served by this unit. Furthermore, during prolonged operation it overheats and must be turned off to cool down every few hours. To correct this deficiency, the Laboratory will use the funds provided by this grant to purchase and install a replacement generator that will meet the current and projected needs of the Laboratory. To protect against power surges from lightening strikes, central surge suppressors will be installed in the Laboratory s electrical system. The Whitney Laboratory is recognized as one of the leading marine biomedical institutions in the country that has and continues to make significant contributions to our understanding of basic biological mechanisms, many of which directly affect mankind. To support this research, the Laboratory possess a diverse array of very sensitive instrumentation such as a DNA sequencer, numerous microscopes, including a laser scanning confocal microscope, a capillary electrophoresis systems, ultracentrifuges and electrophysiological equipment. In addition to its research mission, the Laboratory has developed a variety of training programs for college students, including a very active REU program, and a very active and well received program of outreach education to all age groups in the surrounding community. The funds provided by this grant will ensure that these activities are not jeopardized by short and long term power interruptions that are a common feature of the coastal environment that is so critical to the Laboratory s mission and success doc24848 none The University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the University of Pittsburgh are jointly planning to establish an NSF Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC) for e-Design and Realization of Engineered Products and Systems. The Center s mission is to serve as a center of excellence in IT enabled design and realization of discrete manufactured products by envisioning where information is the lifeblood of an enterprise and collaboration is the hallmark that seamlessly integrates design, development, testing, manufacturing and servicing of products around the world. The proposed Center, a fusion of expertise and resources from the already successful Center for e-Product Design & Realization at the University of Pittsburgh and the Center for Manufacturing Productivity at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is a joint effort to achieve synergy in the development of the enabling technologies to support the new project development paradigm. The proposed I UCRC would leverage the existing talent faculty from complementary engineering disciplines, infrastructure and experience of each university doc24849 none This proposal will fund a one-day workshop that will present NSF-funded research on science parks and gather experts in the area in order to stimulate an assessment of recent findings, as well as likely directions of future research. The workshop will also explore policy needs for national-level indicators on science parks doc24850 none Light Field Compression and Streaming In image-based rendering, a large set of conventional 2-D images is used to render arbitrary views of a 3-D scene. The images capture the light field around the scene. Since hundreds or thousands of individual images are required, the data sets are huge, unless they are compressed. A particularly important application of light field compression is the streaming of light fields stored on an Internet media server. For interactive viewing, this requires a framework to decide, which packets of compressed light field data to send over the network, and at what time. This project proposes to develop and study new techniques for efficient light field compression and interactive streaming. For compression, a novel, elegant disparity-compensated 4-D wavelet transform will be investigated that avoids the re-sampling problem of previous disparity-compensated wavelet schemes by incorporating the disparity compensation into a sequence of lifting steps. For light field streaming, the proposed work will build on recent advances in rate-distortion optimized packet scheduling and extend the state-of-the-art to interactive 3-D viewing. The project is expected to have broad impact for networked 3-D interactive graphics applications, ranging from distance education and remote visualization of scientific and medical data sets, to Internet e-commerce and networked video games doc24851 none Fan The Executive Vice-President of Northwest Science and Technology University of Agriculture and Forestry (NSTUAF), Dr. Jing Li, has sent his personal invitations to a group of American scientists to participate in a meeting of planning a scientific cooperation and opening a Sino-US Center for Soil and Water Conservation and Environmental Protection in Yangling on May 20, . Dr, Shou-Shan Fan, a Facilitator of the American delegation and Adjunct Research Professor of Clarkson University helped China establish the new Center. In addition, Dr. Fan has been invited to visit the Chinese Academy of Science in Shanghai on May 15-17, to participate in a study tour of wind-erosion problems in Ningxia and Gansu Provinces on May 21-26 and to attend an International Conference on Soil Erosion to be held on May 27-31 in Beijing. The invitations received by Dr. Fan are herewith attached This proposal requests travel support for Dr. Fan doc24848 none The University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the University of Pittsburgh are jointly planning to establish an NSF Industry University Cooperative Research Center (I UCRC) for e-Design and Realization of Engineered Products and Systems. The Center s mission is to serve as a center of excellence in IT enabled design and realization of discrete manufactured products by envisioning where information is the lifeblood of an enterprise and collaboration is the hallmark that seamlessly integrates design, development, testing, manufacturing and servicing of products around the world. The proposed Center, a fusion of expertise and resources from the already successful Center for e-Product Design & Realization at the University of Pittsburgh and the Center for Manufacturing Productivity at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is a joint effort to achieve synergy in the development of the enabling technologies to support the new project development paradigm. The proposed I UCRC would leverage the existing talent faculty from complementary engineering disciplines, infrastructure and experience of each university doc24853 none The existence of volumetric imagery is a natural consequence of distributed imaging and is a significant potential benefit of the sensor-network paradigm. Volumetric image data is important for many commercial, scientific, and military applications. Security-related imaging applications in both the military and commercial sectors are now receiving heightened attention, and volumetric imagery is expected to play an ever-increasing role within these important application domains. This proposal is concerned with novel methods for compressing volumetric imagery. We will focus primarily on volumetric data that has been generated by range sensors (e.g., ladar) and arrays of range sensors; however, many of the approaches will be extensible to more traditional imaging sensors and sensor arrays. The goal of the proposed work will be the efficient compression of volumetric image data: an issue that is expected to be especially critical for wireless and or mobile sensor applications, in which power constraints become severe. The project will assume a distributed sensing environment and will focus on balancing inter-sensor against downlink communication costs. When inter-sensor communication is not allowed each sensor must rely on its own measurements along with prior knowledge of the sensor constellation to predict which aspects of its measurements are unique and thus warrant transmission. We will pursue techniques for both prediction and compression of this unique sensor data. When limited inter-sensor communication is allowed, it is important to identify maximally informative data to exchange so as to optimize both inter-sensor and downlink efficiency doc24854 none A sensor should be sensitive, selective, reversible, and inexpensive. We have demonstrated, for the first time, a highly sensitive, rapidly responding, conductiometric device based upon the application of a stabilized porous silicon interface. This sensor, which operates at an extremely low bias voltage, at room temperature, is now able to detect gaseous HCl, NH3, and NO (L. Seals, et al, J. Appl. Phys., 91, ( )] at a level between 10 and 100 ppm (calibrated). The sensor, which has not yet been optimized, is simple in design, operates with a rapid response and is reversible. It can be made selective with surface coatings and can be integrated into arrays with measurement electronics. The key to the sensor response is a low resistance contact made to the silicon through electroless metallization of a modified porous silicon surface, resulting in contact resistances of less than 100O s, rather than the 200 kO - MO resistances normally observed with porous silicon devices. We propose to investigate the sensor response as a function of structure and interface variation and establish the sensing mechanism in order to optimize sensor design and enhance sensitivity, selectivity, and response time. As a means of increasing sensitivity, we will study the effect of surface morphology, in a combined microporour nanoporous structure, on response. To increase selectivity, surface coatings and selective membranes will be placed in combination with the sensor. Alternatively we will couple the sensor to a micro-GC column as a detector or in a multiple array format within the column itself doc24855 none Grimes This proposal seeks support for the design and development of networked sensors capable of operating in aqueous environments. Development of an aqueous network sensor technology is a challenging prospect, requiring careful design and systematic integration of the sensor platforms incorporated into the network nodes for operation in liquids, packaging of the sensors for an aqueous environment, and burst-spread acoustic communication schemes (pulse modulation of a steady state carrier) able to compensate for reflections due to the water-ground and water-air interface. The PI will design and integrate sensor technologies capable of aqueous operation with acoustic based communication technologies and data processing protocols to achieve a network sensor technology able to autonomously, continuously, and in-real time monitor streams, lakes, ocean bays, liquid streams in processing plants, etc. He proposes to integrate arrays of magnetoelastic sensors into the nodes for measurement of liquid chemical composition, liquid density and viscosity, pH and temperature. Beyond helping to ensure water quality, the aqueous networked sensors would be a tremendous tool for biologists seeking to monitor the temperature, flow characteristics, and chemical environment of lakes and, ultimately when the technology is fully developed, oceans. Without question a viable networked sensor technology for aqueous environments would find great application for environmental monitoring, industrial process control, homeland security and scientific discovery doc24856 none The proposal is a request for funds to help support students and young scientists from U.S. institutions that otherwise could not afford to attend the Particle Accelerator Conference (PAC 03). The conference will take place from May 12-16, in Portland, Oregon. This conference is the 20th in the biennial series. The conference will focus upon new developments in the science, technology and use of accelerators. Its purpose is to provide an opportunity for communication among accelerator scientists, engineers and others concerned with accelerator applications doc24857 none This award, provided by the Office of Polar Programs of the National Science Foundation, provides support for a US research-planning workshop for Antarctic geological drilling. Geological drilling to recover core for scientific investigations was successfully conducted in the McMurdo Sound Region during 10 austral summers over a 28-year period since . The sea-ice has been used successfully as a drilling platform for seven drill-holes in this area. Experience gained during these projects forms the basis for developing new drilling technology to advance this approach. The ANDRILL (ANtarctic DRILLing) Project considers future drilling from sea-ice, ice shelf and land platforms within its McMurdo Sound Portfolio . This award provides funds for organizing and operating a workshop to develop the US science plan for the McMurdo Sound Portfolio of the ANDRILL Initiative. It has been advertised widely across the US Antarctic science community as well as beyond, to the general US geoscience community, and it will be open to all interested individuals. The aim of the workshop is to bring together scientists to: (1) discuss and refine the scientific goals and objectives of the McMurdo Sound Portfolio; (2) to inform the US science community of past and planned ANDRILL activities; (3) provide a vehicle for the distribution of information to scientists new to Cenozoic geoscience in Antarctica; (4) devise a plan agreeable to the US community for the structure of the US ANDRILL program, its style of funding and mode of operation; and (5) prepare a report that will summarize the interest and potential contributions of US scientists to this program, and provide guidelines as to how scientists can participate in the program. ANDRILL is an international consortium with objectives to recover stratigraphic core records for use in interpreting Antarctica s past climatic, glacial, and geological history over the past 50 million years and at varying scales of age resolution (0.1 to 100 k.y.). Understanding the past history of ice volume variation in Antarctica and associated physical changes in this region is critical to proper assessment of the global climate system and interaction of ice sheets with the ocean, atmosphere and biosphere. ANDRILL will proceed in three phases: geophysical and site surveys ( - ), drilling and core recovery ( - ), and climate and glacial modeling and integration of recovered data into global records of climate change ( - ). For the past 40 million years the Antarctic Ice Sheet has played a critical role in regulating global climate and sea level. Climatic warming is expected to be most pronounced in polar regions; Antarctic temperatures may rise by the end of the century to levels that have not been achieved for several million years. It is therefore vital that we understand the past response of the Antarctic ice sheet to climatic change in order to provide constraints on models that predict the future. ANDRILL currently plans 4 seasons of drilling under the McMurdo Sound Portfolio , in the regions of New Harbor, Windless Bight, Mackay Sea Valley, and on the Southern McMurdo Ice Shelf. This Portfolio proposes more than ten individual drilling targets that will require varied drilling equipment and strategies. Most of these targets have several common requirements, including drilling through hundreds of meters of water (up to m), and recovering continuous core starting from the sea-floor to depths of as much as m. Through subsequent Portfolios, the life of ANDRILL and this new drilling system will likely continue towards the year . Support for programs of this scale must come from contributions of several nations. To date, the ANDRILL International Consortium includes as member nations the USA, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Italy and Germany, and it invites membership from any interested nation. Similar to the Cape Roberts Project (CRP), close interaction of a diverse team of research scientists, postdoctoral scientists, graduate and undergraduate students will provide excellent opportunities for education and on-site training. REU appointments will target under-represented groups in the geosciences. ANDRILL plans to expand the educational and outreach component beyond that of CRP by direct on-site and remote learning opportunities through member-nation initiatives and ANDRILL sponsored outreach and education. An on-ice team of scientists would prepare the core and provide initial description and characterization. Samples would be shipped to off-ice scientists to study and present results at the first of two science workshops to be hosted at member-nations home academic institutions on a rotating basis. Publication of initial results would be followed by presentation of results in major scientific journals and at professional meetings doc24858 none The National Council for Research on Women (NCRW) proposes a 12-month planning project to design a multi-site three-year project aimed at improving the recruitment and retention of undergraduate women students in selected physical and computer science departments, and engineering disciplines. The larger project will focus on women students of color, who are severely under-represented in these fields. The fields that will be encompassed in this project are all areas in which there are increasing opportunities, given the ways technology is transforming whole sectors of the world economy and increasing demands for scientific and technological expertise to extend knowledge and capacity. NCRW will draw on its 95 member centers, and specific SMET departments representative of a wide range of racial and ethnic diversity, where a base of institutional support for such an approach is present. Its aim will be to develop fresh approaches to assessing environments and implementing strategies for change in specific SMET institutions and or departments through partnerships with women s research centers, and its methodology will focus on the development of assessment protocols and change strategies by the project s partners on each campus. The innovative emphases are: intersections of race, gender; assessment tools and institutional change across a wide range of undergraduatel environments; and partnerships for change across campuses. This project will build on the findings and recommendations of the recent NCRW report Balancing the Equation: Where are Women and Girls in Science, Engineering and Technology?, roundtables and convenings sponsored by NCRW, and on the work of its centers engaged in work on issues related to women and girls in the sciences doc24859 none The Energy-Aware Articulation in Sensor Networks program will develop and demonstrate a fundamental, new distributed sensing capability that combine intelligent nodes with articulated electromagnetic communication systems, articulated sensors, and articulated energy collection devices. This program directly addresses primary, long-standing problems in distributed wireless sensors with a comprehensive, new approach. Distributed, networked, wireless sensor systems are being developed and deployed for diverse applications ranging from physical security to environmental monitoring. In the past, conventional systems have been deployed in a static fashion with their critical components (communication, sensing, and energy collection) being fixed to the sensor node package. This limits the antenna structure choices and sensor systems to only general purpose, fixed systems that may operate at far from an optimal configuration with severe limitations on antenna gain and link energy requirements as well as sensor event detection and identification capability. The Energy-Aware Articulation in Sensor Networks program will develop the principles for a direct solution to these system limitations through a convergence of actuator principles, energy-aware articulated networking, articulated distributed sensing, and distributed computing fundamentals. This will be based on distributed sensor node systems in an open, shared testbed that include nodes carrying articulated antenna structures (for optimized, high gain communication), articulated sensors (for optimized and cooperative event detection), and articulated solar energy collection (for extending operating life.) The combination of these capabilities promises to impact nearly all the system characteristics from deployment through detection capability doc24860 none This award supports an integrated research and education program that is centered on computing motion strategies in geometry-intensive applications. A healthy synergy will be obtained by balancing efforts between both core issues and specialized applications. The core of this research program is rooted in robot motion planning, and it is built on a broader unified mathematical framework that incorporates concepts from optimal control theory, computational geometry, statistical decision theory, and dynamic game theory. This leads to the proposed investigation of three core algorithmic issues: 1) searching high-dimensional spaces that have algebraic and differential constraints, 2)responding to unpredictable changes and on-line information, and 3) solving sensor-based tasks and processing incomplete information. The focus is significantly broader than traditional path planning. The core research is guided by efforts in several applications, such as mobile robotics with active sensing, virtual prototyping-hazardous environments. These research efforts are incorporated into an education plan that: 1)builds an interdisciplinary group of graduate students who are carefully guided through the education and research process, ii) introduces undergraduates to research, particularly through mobile robotics and graphical simulation projects, iii) takes steps towards an interdisiplinary curriculum in geometric algorithms, and iv) helps those from disadvantaged backgrounds to realize their potential and excel in their careers doc24861 none The non-invasive imaging and quantitation of micro-scale flow within the body is still a challenge for current clinical imaging systems. The development of an ultrasound-based imaging system for detection and quantitation of micro-scale flows is proposed here. Two sets of commercially available phased-array broadband transducers will be used. These will be coupled to custom electronics and analysis systems to image gas-filled micro-bubbles (diameters: 3 - 8 microns) within the flow field. The first part of this problem is precise particle detection and tracking. The second part is the development of an imaging system that reveals local flow characteristics. The non linear components of backscatter from the highly reflective micro-bubbles will be analyzed in the RF domain to detect particles. Once the particle is detected, a particle tracking algorithm will be employed to track the particles over a specified distance. This will allow calculation of local particle velocity. The project aims are: 1) Characterize the design specifications for an ultrasound-based micro-flow imaging system. 2) Build a prototype version of this system using a combination of existing broadband ultrasound transducers, coupled with custom electronics and algorithm development. 3) Validate the performance of this prototype system using a mock circulatory flow loop with velocity and flow quantified using independent reference techniques. At the end of this project, significant work toward the development of an ultrasound-based micro-flow imaging system will be complete. The work can then move toward implementation of the system in hardware for testing under in vivo conditions doc24862 none The goal of the proposed research is to implement a conversational intelligent environment containing a distributed array of active cameras and other sensors, and communicating with users via natural dialogue, augmented where useful with imagery and pointing devices. This artificial spatial intelligence, termed a Voluble Intelligent Environment or VIE, will actively obtain information about, and provide assistance within a real physical domain. The project requires grounding natural language understanding in machine perception. A major difficulty is that outputs supplied by current perceptual algorithms are too low-level to serve as primitives for traditional understanding and reasoning systems. To address this, the PIs will integrate the results of machine vision and other perceptual functions into mid-level representations termed perscripts , which represent items of perceptual information of the sort that would typically be described by a phrase or simple sentence. The project also requires advances in distributed systems technology to permit the various perceptual, computational, and communication components to be efficiently and flexibly configured. The integration framework will be based on a prototype distributed resource interface, InterWeave, developed at the University of Rochester. Interweave provides an efficient implementation of a network-wide global name address space that directly supports the proposed approach to grounding language in perception. The work will be validated in a ``Household Assistant application that provides occupants of a ``smart house with information useful in activities of daily living (such as ``where did I leave my glasses? or ``did I take my meds? ). This application is being developed in conjunction with the University of Rochester Center for Future Health. It addresses needs of the elderly and the disabled, and has the potential to have a significant economic impact as part of an overall system that unloads caregivers for this population doc24863 none Brady A group of engineers specializing in multiplex sensors and computer scientists specializing in computational geometry will jointly develop physical and logical geometric processing to improve sensor network efficiency. The efficiency of sensor system may be defined as a ratio of the number of sensor states to the number of system output states. An efficiency ratio near 1 dramatically reduces the computation and communication costs of sensing. Reduced computational loads are critical to real-time operation. Multiplex sensing (meaning non-isomorphic mapping between the source state and sensor pixels) is the critically enabling feature of efficient systems. Geometric structure is used to encode multiplex sensitivity. This project may lead to motion and tracking sensors for human-computer interfaces at much lower cost and with much lower computational complexity than current technology. This project will leverage sensor network testbeds developed through the Duke Information Spaces Project (DISP), including Argus, a 128 video camera array on a 14 meter ring connected in parallel to a Beowulf processing cluster, 5,000 square foot pyroelectric and acoustic sensor volume in the Smith tobacco Warehouse and ad hoc sensor networks in the Duke Forest doc24864 none In this project, we will extend and advance the state--of--the--art in the field of sensor network research in two important ways. First, we will design, implement, and distribute a simulation environment designed specifically for sensor networks of hundreds of thousands of network elements. The basic simulator will be designed from the beginning with scalability in mind, and will use distributed simulation methods to increase the available memory and CPU power that and be utilized to conduct the simulation experiments. Secondly, we will design and demonstrate a set of protocols designed specifically for data dissemination in a very large--scale sensor network environment. These protocols will be power and bandwidth aware, allowing a maximization of data throughput while at the same time extending the overall life of the network by limiting energy costs at individual network elements. The protocols will be designed to support a hierarchical view of the network, and will support primitives for data aggregation methods and selective attention of high--priority measurements. Our simulation environment will be freely available to all researchers working on large--scale wireless networks, and will foster increased attention to network performance as the network scales to tens or hundreds of thousands of elements. Our power and bandwidth aware protocols will encourage deployment of inexpensive environmental sensing devices that interact in a cooperative manner to insure sensor data is reliably delivered to the end--user on a timely basis doc24865 none Oldow The GEOscience Network (GEON) project seeks to bring leading-edge information management research to bear on creating a cyberinfrastructure for the solid earth geosciences to interlink multidisciplinary geoscience data sets in 4D space. The need to manage the growing amounts of diverse Earth science data has been recognized through a series of NSF-sponsored community meetings on Geoinformatics. The GEON collaboration between IT researchers, who represent key technology areas relevant to GEON, and Earth science researchers, who represent a broad cross section of Earth science sub-disciplines, will provide the foundation for a national Geoinformatics program. There is a pressing need in the Earth sciences for a national information infrastructure that enables the community to share databases and tools to enable interdisciplinary analysis of networked data sets in studying a wide range of phenomena including the interplay between tectonics and the evolution of sedimentary basins; the role of mountain building in the evolution of climate and life; broader predictive understanding and modeling capabilities of geologic hazards, such as earthquakes and volcanoes; the 4D reconstruction of the Earth through time; and, managing the natural resources of our planet. Each of these problems requires interdisciplinary research to discover relationships among Earth science disciplines, and depends on the community s ability to construct an integrated geoscience information system. The goal of GEON is to develop the necessary IT foundations and create such a system. Many past and on-going projects in the geosciences have produced valuable sub-disciplinary and disciplinary databases. Numerous national centers and organizations such as IRIS, UNAVCO, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), as well as government agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), are contributing research and data to the community. Building on this base, the imperative now is to take a step beyond research resulting in disciplinary databases, towards a new paradigm for interdisciplinary information integration and tool sharing via the creation of the GEON cyberinfrastructure. The research products and services arising from GEON will be available to the entire scientific community and will transform the way in which geoscience research is conducted, opening unprecedented avenues for research and collaboration and providing the foundation for creating geoscience collaboratories doc24866 none Brown This proposal is being submitted under the Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) program and it focuses on answering critical feasibility questions pertaining to a new technique for the detection and location of buried landmines and unexploded ordnance. The subject technique comprises a standoff, ground based, pulsed radar that launches electromagnetic energy into the Norton surface wave mode of propagation. The Norton surface wave travels along the air-ground surface at the speed of light in a vacuum and exponentially decays into the ground due to the losses in the ground. By selecting the frequency properly, sufficient energy will be scattered by the landmine back along the same propagation path and then received by the radar. This energy is usually insufficient to be above the system noise level so return pulse averaging is carried out using coherent techniques. If N return pulses are averaged coherently the signal-to-noise power ratio will increase by a factor of N rendering the signal scattered from the landmine detectable. Location of the mine is achieved by using the pulse width to accomplish resolution in the range coordinate and the radar antenna to achieve resolution in the azimuth angle. In order to achieve area coverage and the best possible angular resolution close to the antenna, it is proposed to simultaneously employ both beam steering and near field focusing techniques. The critical study, to establish feasibility, is the determination of the highest operating frequency for which the Norton surface wave can propagate on the surface and penetrate sufficiently deep to detect antipersonnel and antitank mines. It is also proposed to develop the appropriate radar range equation for the Norton surface wave, investigate techniques for maximizing the coupling of the radar antenna to the Norton surface wave, determine the variation of soil conductivity and the radar cross section values for typical nonferrous landmines, and investigate the maximum range and angle resolution or the acceptable frequencies of operation. Having answered these questions, it should be possible to establish the viability of such a radar subject only to the need to compute the effects of surface roughness and buried debris on the mine scattered signal strength, i.e., the low signal-to-clutter ratio problem doc24867 none The University of the Virgin Islands seeks NSF support to undertake a series of planning activities designed to identify and address the competitive research and education challenges facing the Virgin Islands. The principal outcome of this effort will be development of a 10-year plan for strengthening the Territory s Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) research and education enterprise. Specific activities will assess existing STEM research resources and strengths; identify potential institutional and territorial barriers to development of competitive research; develop a priority list of research areas and disciplines for development tied to UVI s strategic mission and the Territory s development needs; and determine the human, financial and technological resources required to succeed. As the only institution of higher education in the U.S. Virgin Islands, the University of the Virgin Islands fulfills a variety of community needs - from community college to workforce training to liberal arts education to research university. The strengthening of the research enterprise is clearly associated with enhancing the Territory s ability to meet its workforce training needs and take advantage of new opportunities for technology-based diversification of the Virgin Islands economy. The University will build and expand on a number of existing collaborations with institutions and private sector organizations within and outside of the Virgin Islands. Furthermore, plans for establishment of a research and technology park will be developed to maximize these collaborations and to grow and sustain the science, engineering and technology enterprise in the Virgin Islands doc24868 none Sensors and sensor systems are used in a wide range of industrial and consumer applications, providing real-time information that allows decisions to be made when and where required. Sensors allow industrial processes and applications to be more cost effective, reliable, and safe. In many applications, sensors and data collection processing must be distributed and placed in inhospitable or inaccessible environments. This complicates sensor and system design by requiring devices with small size, rugged construction, an efficient power supply for active components, communications for derived information, and simple installation with a minimum amount of infrastructure and overhead. Integrated Smart Wireless surface acoustic wave (SAW) sensors and systems composed of distributed wireless SAW sensors, sensor communication transceivers, and a centralized host. New generations of SAW microsensors promises to provide measurements of a wide range of physical and chemical parameters, including: temperature, pressure, chemical concentration, gas concentrations, etc. Compatible with integrated circuit-processing techniques, SAW devices can and will be combined with active circuitry into integrated smart SAW sensors. For Western Michigan University, this project will provide a basis for the development of laboratory facilities for SAW design and fabrication and the expansion of our wireless communications capabilities. It will provide student research opportunities and demonstrate technology and results that are widely applicable to a broad range of electrical and computer engineering classes. This project will provide a range of distributed wireless sensors while significantly advancing WMU s goal of being a student centered research institution doc24869 none Zaghloul For the purposes of public safety, health and wellness, it is often critical to have available smart sensors that can detect and identify toxic and poisonous gases in the air. Here the PIs seek low cost arrays of SAW gas sensors clustered as a network node that can be placed and operated with minimal supervision, yield continuous real time monitoring capability through the network and are based on well established CMOS MEMS technology. Since the sensors are fabricated employing CMOS technology, additional signal processing circuitry can easily be integrated into the chip thereby readily providing functions, such as, multiplexing and analog-to-digital conversion, i.e., Systems On a Chip (SOC). The proposed CMOS design offers other potential benefits, such as, temperature drift control and noise immunity. The chips will be designed at The George Washington University and fabricated by the MOSIS service. Select post-fabrication steps will be performed by the MEMS Exchange and the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Chemistry Division. This proposal addresses the critical research issues, estimated time line of tasks and educational opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students doc24870 none Objective-Oriented Mobile Heterogeneous Sensor Networks for Coordinated Control This proposal focuses on a comprehensive study of large, mobile ad hoc reconfigurable networks for coordinated control, using coordinated autonomous flight as a guiding example problem. State estimation provides a link between control and communications which admits heterogeneous sensors, that is the combining of dissimilar or different accuracy data using concepts which underpin data fusion. Management of complexity and preservation of design principles are keys to the development of workable, tunable, mission-oriented systems with many components. The intellectual merit of this collaborative research proposal hinges on the drawing together of cognate and disparate elements from coordinated control, dynamic state estimation, ad hoc network management, resource assignment, and fault tolerance. Its aim is to provide a formalism in which the methods of sensor networking may be integrated as part of a systematic design process focused on achieving a specific control objective. This provides a framework for the development of methodologies for embedding a sensor network in a context of control performance. The broader impact of this research is that it ties together tools and techniques from distinct areas using concepts of information quality. The team is multi-disciplinary across a gamut of Systems Engineering and the problem area impacts a range of fundamental problems in the individual areas of specialization. This linkage across communications, control, networking and estimation is a perceived bottleneck of current design techniques doc24871 none In biological research, the study of cellular functions in vitro is basic to other fields, such as clinical diagnostics, therapy, pharmacological drug screening, and environmental monitoring. In our proposal, biotechnology, silicon micromachining, microelectronics sensor and signal processing technology are used to realize a multi-purpose biological sensor with integrated lownoise signal processing. We research program to for culture, characterization and manipulation of biological cells in silicon chips. In particular, the proposed integrated biosensor system structure can be used as a planar patch-clamp setup for the experimental testing and evaluation of the effect of drugs on prepared ion channels. The proposed device can also act as a miniaturized platform for cell culture and characterization of a cell population together with counting and sizing within the culture chamber. The basic biosensor is a 2D planar patch-clamp , which can be employed for sensing the ion-transport through ion channels, the count and size of biological particles, and culturing or sorting cells. We believe the proposed biosensor will enable eventually electronic DNA sequencing through the measurement of ionic current changes as a sequence single-stranded DNA bases pass through a nanoscale pore, which is fabricated and sized to electrically control the single-stranded DNA. A major objective of our proposal is to develop a bio-electronic interface that integrates biological ion channels into a nanowell with associated integrated electronics. The biosensor combines control electronics into a low noise, correlated-double-sampling (CDS)sensitive signal readout with a switched capacitor headstage preamplifier. On-chip electronics will reduce the recording impedance levels, minimize the output leads, prevent crosstalk, and amplify the low-level ion-channel signals. In addition, the biosensor system will enable rapid, computer-aided, automated testing and characterization of ion-channels and their interaction with drugs. The biosensor will also enable experimental verification of ion channel models as well as provide data, which can be analyzed with various algorithms to extract information regarding time and frequency response of the ion channels and their relationship to pharmacological drug investigations. This effort will also explore the use of on-chip adaptive signal processing to electrically model biological cells in real-time with voltage-clamp stimuli applied to the cells doc24872 none Recent advances in nanometer scale science and technology offer novel approaches for the development of ultra-miniature low-power sensor nodes for distributed wireless sensor networks in applications such as environmental monitoring, civil infrastructure monitoring, condition-based maintenance, security and surveillance. The reduced dimensions and masses of nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) are of great interest for highly-sensitive force- and mass-sensing. We propose a novel technology based on assembly of nanostructured nanomechanical sensors rather than their direct machining from the substrate material. Nanomechanical sensing structures will be produced using bottom-up synthesis, then surface assembled and integrated with foundry-fabricated monolithic circuits through electrofluidic assembly, allowing on-chip integration of nanomechanical sensors with transduction, readout, processing, and communications circuitry. This approach also offers flexibility and scalability, enabling the assembly of a larger range of functional structures. Leveraging our core competencies in NEMS device development and analog RF microwave IC design, we will develop a micropower nanosensor-based microsystem containing nanosensor assembly integration sites, sensor-specific transduction, and read-out electronics. These research activities are complemented with related education outreach goals. These include the groundwork for Summer Microelectronics Workshops that will provide cleanroom research experiences to local high-school teachers. This pilot program offers the promise for substantial impact in K-12 science and mathematics education. The combination of these pedagogical and research activities will enable a complete academic program that bridges the gap between bottom-up nanotechnology and microsystems. More specifically, the proposed integration of electrofluidic assembly of nanosensors with prefabricated functional circuits represents realistic possibilities for the development of Integrative Nanosystems that can sense, think, or communicate doc24873 none The project will investigate the extent and impact of tropospheric-stratospheric exchange associated with convective storms. The transfer of momentum, energy, and trace constituents between the troposphere and stratosphere profoundly influences the dynamical and chemical climatology and variability of the stratosphere and upper troposphere. Dynamical interaction between the two regions can moreover influence weather in the Northern winter. Drs. Holton and Durran (Univ. of Washington, Seattle) will use a cloud-resolving numerical model to analyze gravity wave generation and propagation, resulting from orographically generated convection. The project will also advance the 3-D modeling of tropical and extratropical storms to better understand the transport of trace chemicals from the boundary layer to the upper troposphere, and across the tropopause. The PIs expect to be able to distinguish between transport resulting from transient lifting of the tropopause and that resulting from irreversible transfer across the tropopause. Improved modeling of the mechanisms and distribution of troposphere-stratosphere coupling should lead to more accurate parameterizations of momentum and chemical transports in global weather and climate models, and advance the understanding of the stratospheric general circulation, ozone chemistry, and tropospheric weather and climate doc24874 none Wireless communication is essential for coordination of emergency response efforts. However, the various kinds of unit (fire, police, FBI and unattended sensors) do not necessarily have access to common radio architectures. To achieve high levels of flexibility and scalability for wireless communication, the processing of the wireless waveforms must be performed in software: i.e., software radio . Migrating algorithms from hardware to software can increase the level of functionality but only if the communication protocols are established at run time. We propose an approach to establishing communication by explicitly maintaining self-awareness and communication of knowledge about the operation of the communication nodes. The self-awareness and communication of knowledge is based on the maintenance of an explicit, declarative knowledge base or ontology of communication. Hence, we refer to the concept as Ontology Based Radio (OBR). An ontology captures the basic terminology (concepts) of the domain of interest and the relationships among the concepts. Ontologies can be expressed in the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML), and processed either off-line using a theorem prover or in real time using an expert system engine. The main idea of OBR is that the communication nodes ``understand the contents of information to be transferred, their own capabilities and capabilities of the destination units. The goal of the proposed project is to develop a proof of concept that demonstrates optimized dynamic interoperability between different kinds of communication node, especially unattended sensors as well as radios used by emergency response teams doc24875 none The vision of this proposed work is to create more versatile information systems by using autonomous and distributed sensor networks: hundreds of small sensors, equipped with limited memory and actuation capabilities will autonomously organize themselves and move to track a source and convey information about its location to a human user, and to the rest of the team. Such distributed active sensor networks are pervasive computing systems, well-suited for tasks in extreme environments, especially when the environmental model and the task specifications are uncertain and the system has to adapt to it. To create active sensor networks capable of such applications, a fundamental goal of this research is to develop a science base for distributed sensor network control and information gathering and coordination. This is a considerable challenge, which we propose to meet by the synergistic integration of the following directions of work: (1) new ideas for communication in sensor networks; (2) new ideas for developing adaptive active control and coordination in sensor networks; (3) new ideas for information gathering and aggregation in sensor networks; and (4) experiments grounded on realistic scenarios that measure empirically the performance and scalability of the proposed communication and control algorithms. More specifically, the central challenges for this proposed work are focused on developing, implementing and evaluating a suite of scalable network protocols that (1) guarantee message delivery; (2) are fault tolerant; (3) maximize the network lifetime; and (4) are adaptive to the environment and to the task doc24876 none Urban transportation systems face important challenges concerning safety, delays due to congestion, pollution from vehicle emissions, and vulnerability to natural and man-made disasters. Sophisticated, integrated sensor actuator systems offer the potential to make significant inroads in alleviating these problems. Vehicle-to-vehicle communication via ad hoc wireless networks present new opportunities for innovative applications with reduced public infrastructure investments. This project will explore the realization of simulation-based test beds for rapid evaluation and integration of sensor and actuator systems in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), and use this test bed to explore architectural alternatives for data networks supporting ITS applications. An integrated distributed simulation approach will be utilized, focusing on interoperable simulations of transportation infrastructures, wired and wireless communication networks, and distributed computing applications. The project will incorporate data from a pool of instrumented vehicles operating in the Atlanta metropolitan area providing second-by-second sensor data concerning the vehicle s location, velocity, and acceleration, among others; data from road sensors in the Atlanta area will also be used for model and scenario development and validation of simulations. Test bed research will focus on developing a modular, federated simulation emulation approach using a software backplane to interface simulations and data doc24877 none At the core of the next generation of networking applications and technologies lies the potential of embedding sensing and actuating capabilities in the network so as to support a variety of monitoring and controls applications. In this proposal we target applications that require stringent quality of service guarantees, e.g., applications needing global snapshot(s) of the state of a physical attribute, or requiring correlating various such attributes. For example, one might jointly track the wind speed and the density of a given pathogen to create evolution models. To support such applications while achieving high sensor utilization we propose to investigate two complementary problems: (1) What are fundamental characteristics and requirements of estimation and control applications drawing spatio-temporal data from networked sensors; and (2) What types of network support, e.g., sensing `primitives and resource traffic management mechanisms will be critical to enable wide-spread shared usage of such networks. Due to the expected heterogeneity of sensor networks and possible mismatch between a sensor s `capacity to process queries and the network bandwidth delay product, achieving timely coordinated responses from a potentially large set of sensors shared by multiple users may be difficult. This is exacerbated by the inherent asymmetry of communications associated with such sensing activities, i.e., one-to-many queries resulting in many-to-one sensor responses. As a result one can expect unpredictable bursts of traffic, network hot spots, and degradation in performance. As part of the proposed research we will investigate these problems from the perspective of the applications, the network and the sensors doc24878 none This project concerns the interface between application software and the real-time data in large-scale arrays of wireless sensors and actuators. The objective is to develop the theory and algorithms for creating a virtual sensor-actuator array (VSAA) that will make it possible for application algorithms to avoid dealing with the continually changing features of physical sensor-actuator arrays. Using the VSAA, application-specific software can be written as if the sensing and actuating devices are located as assumed in the application design model, and that information is received with appropriate time stamps, in addition to being filtered and integrated in a near optimal manner. This project will build on recent research in intelligent data integration for distributed systems. Raw data will be delivered and manipulated as soft decisions in the form of probability distributions. Information from multiple sources will be integrated using novel algorithms based on graphical representations of the information relationships among the sources, and information-theoretic techniques will be developed for sharing and moving the computations among the nodes so that performance does not degrade significantly in the face of intermittent communication and node failures. The algorithms developed in this project will be evaluated for intelligent building control applications using in a wireless sensor-actuator array in the Intelligent Workplace, an existing experimental facility at Carnegie Mellon University doc24879 none ACTIVE STEREOSCOPIC VISUAL SEARCH DRIVEN BY NATURAL SCENE STATISTICS Alan C. Bovik, Lawrence K. Cormack, J. Ghosh The primary thrust of this proposal is to develop methods based on the natural statistics of stereoscopic images that will enable the design and implementation of the next generation of foveated, fixating machine vision systems that are capable of efficient and intelligent visual search, by exploiting and applying knowledge about human fixation and search mechanisms. We summarize the intention of our proposal via the following key goals: Goal 1: To develop a quantitative description of human active stereo vision as a function of natural scene statistics in a variety of three-dimensional visual search and learning tasks. Our emphasis will be on developing statistical models of stereo primitives that attract low-level visual attention based on a unique and in-depth statistical analysis. We feel that statistical models based on natural scene statistics have a very good chance of succeeding where deterministic models have failed. Goal 2: To train a state-of-the-art foveated, fixating active computer vision system (named FOVEA) to search and to learn to search 4-D (space-time) scenes. To do this, back-end artificial neural networks trained on telepresent human search patterns will be used. The statistical models and extracted statistical stereoprimitives discovered as part of the research in Goal 1 will be used as a priori knowledge to improve the configuration and learning of the networks. We envision that these experiments will result in smart active machine vision protocols for exploring, searching, and interacting with 4-D environments, while giving new insights into visual cognitive processes doc24880 none Of the emerging infectious diseases, zoonotic and generalist viral pathogens pose a particular threat to public health and biodiversity. The effective control of these diseases requires both the identification of reservoires of infection and an understanding of viral transmission dynamics within complex host assemblages. Yet for most emerging infectious diseases, reservoirs remain to be identified and little is known about mechanisms by which infections are maintained. This study will propose a theoretical and practical framework for recognizing reservoirs in the field, which will be applied to identify reservoirs of viral infections in the Serengeti, Tanzania. The recent emergence of viral diseases in this area provides the opportunity for a comparative study of zoonotic and generalist pathogens within a diverse, well-studied and important ecosystem. Furthermore, the area is surrounded by rapidly expanding human and domestic animal populations which have profound impacts on the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases. This study will investigate the transmission dynamics of three viral pathogens, rabies, cane distemper virus (CDV), and canine parvovirus (CPV), identifying reservoirs of infection through a combination of approaches that include intervention trials, genetic analyses and disease surveillance. Empirical data on the spatial distribution of hosts and contact rated will be integrated into mathematical models of transmission between and within species. These models will be used to (a) investigate mechanisms by which viral infections are maintained in multi-population systems; (b) anticipate future requirements for disease management in relation to changes in human activity and climate patterns; (c) design cost-effective programs for the control of disease in human and animal populations doc24881 none With National Science Foundation support, Mr. Jorge Montenegro will conduct one year dissertation research to define the sociopolitical organization of local polities and the nature and dynamics of interregional interaction in the Upper Piura Valley on the Peruvian Far North Coast. Previous archaeological studies of culture contact have often emphasized the strategies and perceptions of dominant external core polities while ignoring those of the subjects or peripheries . There is evidence of powerful Mochica (AD 300-750) and the Middle Sican (AD 900- ) core polities, from coastal valleys to the south, in the study area. Yet the significance of this evidence and the nature of interaction between the local and these foreign polities are poorly understood. For example, was this interaction coercive or peaceful and or negotiated? Was it politically or economically motivated? Was it continuous or discontinuous in time and space? Did it involve only a specific social segment or a broader segment? What led to their interaction? These research questions will be answered through a characterization of the local polities as reflected in their sociopolitical and economic structure, and testing of different scenarios and their expected material evidence. The first possibility is that interaction was coercive; a second scenario considers interaction as a more peaceful and or negotiated process; and the last scenario is a potential situation of physical coexistence without much or any interaction. Settlement land use pattern survey, test excavations, and pottery and architecture stylistic analysis are the methods proposed for data collection. Systematic surface survey will localize and determine the nature and patterns of site distribution and its surrounding environment. Aerial photographs and topographic, soil, hydrological, and vegetation maps will be used for this purpose. A total of ca. 100 sq-km is the estimated survey area. Sites thus discovered will be described, recorded, and mapped, and dimensions and locations will be measured and determined using a GPS receiver. A purposive collection of artifacts found on surface will give a good idea of the range of variation within a site s surface artifact assemblage. Finally, small test (2 x 2 or 4 x 4 m) pits will be excavated at some of the sites to collect radiocarbon samples, stratigraphic and site formation data. The data collected will be used to create a GIS database and perform spatial analysis. Laboratory analysis will be focused on a detailed observation of pottery recovered. A technological, stylistic, and morpho-functional classification and analysis will be carried out to better define the local polities traditions and their relationship to those of foreign polities. This research is important for several reasons. It offers an excellent opportunity to study culture contact and to test and or refine competing models of interregional interaction. It will establish a sound and necessary foundation for the planned long-term project investigating interactions between: 1) the Far North Coast and North Coast, and 2) these regions and the North Andes. Finally, this investigation will yield new information on an area that is relatively unknown archaeologically doc24882 none Seber The GEOscience Network (GEON) project seeks to bring leading-edge information management research to bear on creating a cyberinfrastructure for the solid earth geosciences to interlink multidisciplinary geoscience data sets in 4D space. The need to manage the growing amounts of diverse Earth science data has been recognized through a series of NSF-sponsored community meetings on Geoinformatics. The GEON collaboration between IT researchers, who represent key technology areas relevant to GEON, and Earth science researchers, who represent a broad cross section of Earth science sub-disciplines, will provide the foundation for a national Geoinformatics program. There is a pressing need in the Earth sciences for a national information infrastructure that enables the community to share databases and tools to enable interdisciplinary analysis of networked data sets in studying a wide range of phenomena including the interplay between tectonics and the evolution of sedimentary basins; the role of mountain building in the evolution of climate and life; broader predictive understanding and modeling capabilities of geologic hazards, such as earthquakes and volcanoes; the 4D reconstruction of the Earth through time; and, managing the natural resources of our planet. Each of these problems requires interdisciplinary research to discover relationships among Earth science disciplines, and depends on the community s ability to construct an integrated geoscience information system. The goal of GEON is to develop the necessary IT foundations and create such a system. Many past and on-going projects in the geosciences have produced valuable sub-disciplinary and disciplinary databases. Numerous national centers and organizations such as IRIS, UNAVCO, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), as well as government agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), are contributing research and data to the community. Building on this base, the imperative now is to take a step beyond research resulting in disciplinary databases, towards a new paradigm for interdisciplinary information integration and tool sharing via the creation of the GEON cyberinfrastructure. The research products and services arising from GEON will be available to the entire scientific community and will transform the way in which geoscience research is conducted, opening unprecedented avenues for research and collaboration and providing the foundation for creating geoscience collaboratories doc24883 none In this two-year effort, we propose to address some of the basic research issues that arise in the interpretation of video streams, simultaneously collected by a set of indoor or outdoor cameras. Specifically, we are interested in inferring movements and activities of one or more humans using distributed cameras. We propose to develop novel methods for detecting and tracking humans using 3D models for body parts, and quasi-invariant recognition of activities humans are engaged in. We will make use of the recent advances made in the computational aspects of estimating posterior probability density functions using Monte Carlo Markov Chain techniques to infer human descriptions and their activities doc24870 none Objective-Oriented Mobile Heterogeneous Sensor Networks for Coordinated Control This proposal focuses on a comprehensive study of large, mobile ad hoc reconfigurable networks for coordinated control, using coordinated autonomous flight as a guiding example problem. State estimation provides a link between control and communications which admits heterogeneous sensors, that is the combining of dissimilar or different accuracy data using concepts which underpin data fusion. Management of complexity and preservation of design principles are keys to the development of workable, tunable, mission-oriented systems with many components. The intellectual merit of this collaborative research proposal hinges on the drawing together of cognate and disparate elements from coordinated control, dynamic state estimation, ad hoc network management, resource assignment, and fault tolerance. Its aim is to provide a formalism in which the methods of sensor networking may be integrated as part of a systematic design process focused on achieving a specific control objective. This provides a framework for the development of methodologies for embedding a sensor network in a context of control performance. The broader impact of this research is that it ties together tools and techniques from distinct areas using concepts of information quality. The team is multi-disciplinary across a gamut of Systems Engineering and the problem area impacts a range of fundamental problems in the individual areas of specialization. This linkage across communications, control, networking and estimation is a perceived bottleneck of current design techniques doc24885 none Smela The PIs will develop integrated microstructures and circuitry for single cell capture and characterization. Each of these clinics will consist of a cell-sized cavity, or microvial, and a lid. The lid can be opened and closed by hinges constructed from polypyrrole microactuators which link rigid plates to the substrate. These clinics will be fabricated on conventional bulk silicon as well as on ultra-thin silicon-on-sapphire (SOS) substrates. Integration of the microstructures with CMOS electronics allows integrating sensors, detection, and stimulation circuitry together, while SOS provides a transparent substrate which allows optical measurements of cell activity within the chamber. Sensing modalities will be tailored for specific applications and include: impedance measurements, extracellular recording and stimulation of electrically active cells, optical measurements, and current or voltage clamp measurements using microfabricated needles within the chamber. The potential applications are numerous, spanning a spectrum from detailed physiological studies of specific mechanisms to whole cell studies of ecology or developmental biology to collecting concentrated cell secretions to statistical studies of assayed cell properties doc24886 none A pair of testbeds will be built to study the behavior of very dense sensor networks. The first involves constructing small sensor nodes in the form of a pushpin, having a pair of insulated-jacket conductive pins that provide power to the nodes when they are pushed into a large piece of laminated conductive wallboard. The nodes couple to their immediate neighbors via local communication once inserted, and form an ad-hoc network across the wallboard. The wallboard substrate will accommodate relatively large numbers (e.g., over 100) of these pushpins, and they can be trivially reconfigured, essentially as one would move tacks about on a bulletin board, allowing different network densities and geometries to be easily investigated. Likewise, the pushpins themselves have a configurable, layered structure, allowing the processor, communications system, and sensor suite to be easily swapped. Our second testbed will push these ideas towards the concept of a multisensory electronic skin - a sheet of material with circa 100 or more processor sensor nodes, now spaced significantly closer than a centimeter to one another. The processors will talk to their neighbors to reject background while isolating and parameterizing sensor stimuli and routing the results peer-peer to external connections at the network s perimeter. In order to scale gracefully, most data reduction (feature clustering, detection, parameterization, etc.) must be done by the network itself, using regional communication. Accordingly, these testbeds are useful for exploring and developing new kinds of self-organizing and physics-inspired algorithms to reduce and process the data locally on the network doc24887 none Meertens The GEOscience Network (GEON) project seeks to bring leading-edge information management research to bear on creating a cyberinfrastructure for the solid earth geosciences to interlink multidisciplinary geoscience data sets in 4D space. The need to manage the growing amounts of diverse Earth science data has been recognized through a series of NSF-sponsored community meetings on Geoinformatics. The GEON collaboration between IT researchers, who represent key technology areas relevant to GEON, and Earth science researchers, who represent a broad cross section of Earth science sub-disciplines, will provide the foundation for a national Geoinformatics program. There is a pressing need in the Earth sciences for a national information infrastructure that enables the community to share databases and tools to enable interdisciplinary analysis of networked data sets in studying a wide range of phenomena including the interplay between tectonics and the evolution of sedimentary basins; the role of mountain building in the evolution of climate and life; broader predictive understanding and modeling capabilities of geologic hazards, such as earthquakes and volcanoes; the 4D reconstruction of the Earth through time; and, managing the natural resources of our planet. Each of these problems requires interdisciplinary research to discover relationships among Earth science disciplines, and depends on the community s ability to construct an integrated geoscience information system. The goal of GEON is to develop the necessary IT foundations and create such a system. Many past and on-going projects in the geosciences have produced valuable sub-disciplinary and disciplinary databases. Numerous national centers and organizations such as IRIS, UNAVCO, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), as well as government agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), are contributing research and data to the community. Building on this base, the imperative now is to take a step beyond research resulting in disciplinary databases, towards a new paradigm for interdisciplinary information integration and tool sharing via the creation of the GEON cyberinfrastructure. The research products and services arising from GEON will be available to the entire scientific community and will transform the way in which geoscience research is conducted, opening unprecedented avenues for research and collaboration and providing the foundation for creating geoscience collaboratories doc24872 none Recent advances in nanometer scale science and technology offer novel approaches for the development of ultra-miniature low-power sensor nodes for distributed wireless sensor networks in applications such as environmental monitoring, civil infrastructure monitoring, condition-based maintenance, security and surveillance. The reduced dimensions and masses of nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) are of great interest for highly-sensitive force- and mass-sensing. We propose a novel technology based on assembly of nanostructured nanomechanical sensors rather than their direct machining from the substrate material. Nanomechanical sensing structures will be produced using bottom-up synthesis, then surface assembled and integrated with foundry-fabricated monolithic circuits through electrofluidic assembly, allowing on-chip integration of nanomechanical sensors with transduction, readout, processing, and communications circuitry. This approach also offers flexibility and scalability, enabling the assembly of a larger range of functional structures. Leveraging our core competencies in NEMS device development and analog RF microwave IC design, we will develop a micropower nanosensor-based microsystem containing nanosensor assembly integration sites, sensor-specific transduction, and read-out electronics. These research activities are complemented with related education outreach goals. These include the groundwork for Summer Microelectronics Workshops that will provide cleanroom research experiences to local high-school teachers. This pilot program offers the promise for substantial impact in K-12 science and mathematics education. The combination of these pedagogical and research activities will enable a complete academic program that bridges the gap between bottom-up nanotechnology and microsystems. More specifically, the proposed integration of electrofluidic assembly of nanosensors with prefabricated functional circuits represents realistic possibilities for the development of Integrative Nanosystems that can sense, think, or communicate doc24889 none Sivakumar The convergence of micro electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) technology, wireless communications and digital electronics have enabled the development of low cost, low power, multi-functional sensor nodes that are small in size and communicate un-tethered in short distances. They can perform tasks, which traditional stand along sensors are hard to match. Although sensor networks have some similarities with another class of wireless networks called ad-hoc networks, they have several distinguishing characteristics that necessitate dedicated communication protocols. The PIs overall objective in the proposed project is to develop a system architecture, which includes new protocol entities and interfaces. Their focus will be on the integration of the proposed algorithms into an efficient overall system. While they propose to develop new algorithms and protocols for the transport and network layers, specifically, their deliverables will include: (a) a new transport protocol called SNTP (Sensor-Nets Transport Protocol) that is designed specifically for a sensor network environment, and (b) a power aware and scalable routing protocol that allow an end-user to control the sensors and reconfigure the interconnection of the sensor network. The PIs will evaluate their proposed protocols in a ns2 network simulator based simulation environment, and make available for public use any protocol simulation software. Since the ns2 simulator currently does not extensively support the simulation of sensor network environments, they will also develop such support and make it available for public use doc24890 none Crawford The GEOscience Network (GEON) project seeks to bring leading-edge information management research to bear on creating a cyberinfrastructure for the solid earth geosciences to interlink multidisciplinary geoscience data sets in 4D space. The need to manage the growing amounts of diverse Earth science data has been recognized through a series of NSF-sponsored community meetings on Geoinformatics. The GEON collaboration between IT researchers, who represent key technology areas relevant to GEON, and Earth science researchers, who represent a broad cross section of Earth science sub-disciplines, will provide the foundation for a national Geoinformatics program. There is a pressing need in the Earth sciences for a national information infrastructure that enables the community to share databases and tools to enable interdisciplinary analysis of networked data sets in studying a wide range of phenomena including the interplay between tectonics and the evolution of sedimentary basins; the role of mountain building in the evolution of climate and life; broader predictive understanding and modeling capabilities of geologic hazards, such as earthquakes and volcanoes; the 4D reconstruction of the Earth through time; and, managing the natural resources of our planet. Each of these problems requires interdisciplinary research to discover relationships among Earth science disciplines, and depends on the community s ability to construct an integrated geoscience information system. The goal of GEON is to develop the necessary IT foundations and create such a system. Many past and on-going projects in the geosciences have produced valuable sub-disciplinary and disciplinary databases. Numerous national centers and organizations such as IRIS, UNAVCO, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), as well as government agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), are contributing research and data to the community. Building on this base, the imperative now is to take a step beyond research resulting in disciplinary databases, towards a new paradigm for interdisciplinary information integration and tool sharing via the creation of the GEON cyberinfrastructure. The research products and services arising from GEON will be available to the entire scientific community and will transform the way in which geoscience research is conducted, opening unprecedented avenues for research and collaboration and providing the foundation for creating geoscience collaboratories doc24891 none Water covers approximately 70% of the earth surface. However, this majority of the planet is under-explored and poorly understood. This is largely a result of the significant challenge posed by the underwater environment, with its high pressure, unpredictable currents, nearly freezing temperatures, attenuation of electromagnetic waves and light, and harsh chemical compositions. A variety of scientific, military and industrial tasks call for tools that function in the ocean environment. Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are important platforms for carrying out sophisticated underwater tasks. Currently some tasks are not suitable for AUVs due to technical limitations. More advanced applications demand small, integrated, power efficient and potentially networked AUVs to increase the effectiveness and reduce the costs. A key step in moving toward this vision is improved sensors for AUVs. This project aims to develop integrated underwater sensors inspired by the fish lateral line system. Prototypes of sensors will be built and used to investigate the fluid mechanical behavior of such sensors through computational and experimental means. The potential applications include the detection of hydrodynamic wakes, tracing of chemical plumes, and determination of hydrodynamic properties at the interface of fluid and structures. The proposed effort will focus on one problem - that of detection of hydrodynamic wakes. Planned research activities consists of three integral components: (1) The development and improvement of biomimetic integrated microsensors; (2) The validation and prediction of sensor performance using full scale direct numerical simulation and reduced-model simulation; (3) The experimental validation of sensor performance and computational results doc24892 none This award will support approximately 16 graduate students to attend the ACM SIGMOBILE International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom ) to be held in Atlanta, Georgia in September 23-26, . This is a premier networking conference on mobility and data management and services in wireless environments doc24893 none This proposal is aimed at producing novel images of a scene from arbitrary new viewpoints using a sparse set of compressed panoramic snapshots or sample images of the scene. The samples are taken from a relatively small number of strategically placed cameras. A major application and evaluation testbed of the proposed work is to enable walkthroughs of a 3D scene by generating the images of the scene along a trajectory dynamically chosen by a remote user. The focus of the proposed work is on the acquisition of panoramic stereo images which serve as scene samples, and their interpolation (or extrapolation) for producing a new stereo pair of images of the scene from an arbitrary new viewpoint. The user follows a dynamically chosen arbitrary trajectory and wishes to continuously teleview the scene from along the trajectory points. It is assumed that relative locations of the objects in the scene for which walkthroughs are to be generated are known; the object locations are sparse; and that the strategic placement of the cameras does not change significantly to warrant camera replacement. Development and implementation of a stereo panoramic camera is proposed. Limited work is proposed on joint image compression. The topology of the camera network also allows the determination of which cameras are to be used to generate the walkthrough image at any given point along the user drawn trajectory. Applications of the proposed work include video surveillance, virtual museums and video conferencing doc24894 none Maloberti The generic autonomous platform for sensor systems, GAP4S, project aims at the development of a basic platform for sensor systems with on-board micro-battery remotely rechargeable via a MicroWave (MW) signal, full-duplex wireless Radio Frequency (RF) and MW communications, power-aware and reliable protocols. The sensing modules will ensure mobility without demanding huge communication and processing bandwidth. Moreover, the wireless interconnection shall be responsible for getting and supplying data and power in a reliable, secure, programmable manner. Power will be wireless received (microwaves) by the module, transformed, stored in an integrated battery. Power consumption of all the electronics will be reduced significantly with respect to present levels and the functionality will be managed on the basis of the amount of energy available and received. The sensor nodes will be in the footprint (with medium radii, e.g., 100 m) of a (mini) base-station that will be the entry point of a wider communication network. The project will experimentally demonstrate the co-integration of multi-sensors (optical and humidity) with a general-purpose analog interface, a digitally programmable data converter, and a smart power management section. Moreover, the project will integrate a SiGe RF uplink module with optimum control of the transmission power and with data recovery from the MW powering flow. Also, the project will identify and implement power-aware and reliable protocols that span across the wireless sensor network and the existing network infrastructure, namely the Internet. The feasibility of on-board multi-GHz antenna will be verified doc24870 none Objective-Oriented Mobile Heterogeneous Sensor Networks for Coordinated Control This proposal focuses on a comprehensive study of large, mobile ad hoc reconfigurable networks for coordinated control, using coordinated autonomous flight as a guiding example problem. State estimation provides a link between control and communications which admits heterogeneous sensors, that is the combining of dissimilar or different accuracy data using concepts which underpin data fusion. Management of complexity and preservation of design principles are keys to the development of workable, tunable, mission-oriented systems with many components. The intellectual merit of this collaborative research proposal hinges on the drawing together of cognate and disparate elements from coordinated control, dynamic state estimation, ad hoc network management, resource assignment, and fault tolerance. Its aim is to provide a formalism in which the methods of sensor networking may be integrated as part of a systematic design process focused on achieving a specific control objective. This provides a framework for the development of methodologies for embedding a sensor network in a context of control performance. The broader impact of this research is that it ties together tools and techniques from distinct areas using concepts of information quality. The team is multi-disciplinary across a gamut of Systems Engineering and the problem area impacts a range of fundamental problems in the individual areas of specialization. This linkage across communications, control, networking and estimation is a perceived bottleneck of current design techniques doc24896 none The goal of this proposal is to develop a novel paradigm for high-speed, three-dimensional (3D) image scene acquisition and rendering. This project is especially directed at imaging 3D dynamic microscopic scenes at video rates that can be further visualized off-line at variable speeds and from multiple viewpoints with stereoscopic display systems. As of today, no other technique can offer simultaneously the high temporal and 3D-spatial resolution of the proposed system. The new microscope is expected to acquire images simultaneously containing large depth of field, high resolution, and 3D-range information. The optical-digital system is based on a novel approach in which a) the optical, b) the digital computational, and c) the rendering parts of the system are simultaneously designed. The microscope will combine, for the first time, the rotating point-spread-function and the wavefront coding technologies. The system will be oriented to surface relief applications where very fast dynamical processes affect the microscopic 3D scene. In particular, it will be tested for MEMS inspection. The proposed system will be extremely valuable in micro-nano pattern recognition and inspection for advanced manufacturing, remote microscopic information sharing, biological imaging, and other applications that require the acquisition and visualization of 3D miniature scene-mappings at very high speeds. Graduate and undergraduate students will be actively involved in the analysis, design, and experiments. The instrumentation developed will be available for education in the area of microscopic visualization in subsequent years doc24897 none The goal of this proposal is to extend the lifetime of wireless sensor networks by addressing the hotspot problem for a given application set. We propose to develop a collection of techniques, each addressing one particular aspect of the problem: o Ad-hoc routing techniques to distribute the traffic over the complete network rather than along a number of bottleneck traffic lanes. o Network topology management to equalize traffic density over the network. o Aggregation and distributed source-coding to compress the traffic flow in the vicinity of the monitor node. Algorithmic approaches to each of these problems are being proposed. Their impact will be quantified using a combination of analysis, simulation, and hardware prototyping on a smart building scenario doc24898 none Arrowsmith The GEOscience Network (GEON) project seeks to bring leading-edge information management research to bear on creating a cyberinfrastructure for the solid earth geosciences to interlink multidisciplinary geoscience data sets in 4D space. The need to manage the growing amounts of diverse Earth science data has been recognized through a series of NSF-sponsored community meetings on Geoinformatics. The GEON collaboration between IT researchers, who represent key technology areas relevant to GEON, and Earth science researchers, who represent a broad cross section of Earth science sub-disciplines, will provide the foundation for a national Geoinformatics program. There is a pressing need in the Earth sciences for a national information infrastructure that enables the community to share databases and tools to enable interdisciplinary analysis of networked data sets in studying a wide range of phenomena including the interplay between tectonics and the evolution of sedimentary basins; the role of mountain building in the evolution of climate and life; broader predictive understanding and modeling capabilities of geologic hazards, such as earthquakes and volcanoes; the 4D reconstruction of the Earth through time; and, managing the natural resources of our planet. Each of these problems requires interdisciplinary research to discover relationships among Earth science disciplines, and depends on the community s ability to construct an integrated geoscience information system. The goal of GEON is to develop the necessary IT foundations and create such a system. Many past and on-going projects in the geosciences have produced valuable sub-disciplinary and disciplinary databases. Numerous national centers and organizations such as IRIS, UNAVCO, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), as well as government agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), are contributing research and data to the community. Building on this base, the imperative now is to take a step beyond research resulting in disciplinary databases, towards a new paradigm for interdisciplinary information integration and tool sharing via the creation of the GEON cyberinfrastructure. The research products and services arising from GEON will be available to the entire scientific community and will transform the way in which geoscience research is conducted, opening unprecedented avenues for research and collaboration and providing the foundation for creating geoscience collaboratories doc24899 none Liu The GEOscience Network (GEON) project seeks to bring leading-edge information management research to bear on creating a cyberinfrastructure for the solid earth geosciences to interlink multidisciplinary geoscience data sets in 4D space. The need to manage the growing amounts of diverse Earth science data has been recognized through a series of NSF-sponsored community meetings on Geoinformatics. The GEON collaboration between IT researchers, who represent key technology areas relevant to GEON, and Earth science researchers, who represent a broad cross section of Earth science sub-disciplines, will provide the foundation for a national Geoinformatics program. There is a pressing need in the Earth sciences for a national information infrastructure that enables the community to share databases and tools to enable interdisciplinary analysis of networked data sets in studying a wide range of phenomena including the interplay between tectonics and the evolution of sedimentary basins; the role of mountain building in the evolution of climate and life; broader predictive understanding and modeling capabilities of geologic hazards, such as earthquakes and volcanoes; the 4D reconstruction of the Earth through time; and, managing the natural resources of our planet. Each of these problems requires interdisciplinary research to discover relationships among Earth science disciplines, and depends on the community s ability to construct an integrated geoscience information system. The goal of GEON is to develop the necessary IT foundations and create such a system. Many past and on-going projects in the geosciences have produced valuable sub-disciplinary and disciplinary databases. Numerous national centers and organizations such as IRIS, UNAVCO, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), as well as government agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), are contributing research and data to the community. Building on this base, the imperative now is to take a step beyond research resulting in disciplinary databases, towards a new paradigm for interdisciplinary information integration and tool sharing via the creation of the GEON cyberinfrastructure. The research products and services arising from GEON will be available to the entire scientific community and will transform the way in which geoscience research is conducted, opening unprecedented avenues for research and collaboration and providing the foundation for creating geoscience collaboratories doc24900 none This is a Small Grant for Exploratory Research to enable additional observations and analysis during the NASA-sponsored Matador project of the University of Arizona. Planned for May-July at a site in the Arizona desert, the purpose of Matador is to document the characteristics of dust devils, as measured by remote and in-situ sensors. Vortex circulations in the atmospheric boundary layer, of which dust devils are a visible example, carry heat and particulate matter (aerosols) from the earth s surface into the atmosphere, though the physics of these circulations and the contribution they make to the overall vertical transport of heat and mass are not understood. This grant enables the deployment of additional instruments for flux measurements and provides for data analysis by Dr. Renno, students, and collaborators. Outcomes of the research will be quantitative estimates of the heat and mass transport by vortices in the boundary layer and the data needed to test theoretical models of dust devils. This supplement to the Matador project is a sufficient incentive to entrain the collaboration of boundary-layer researchers from academic and research institutions in Mexico and The Netherlands doc24901 none Sikora The GEOscience Network (GEON) project seeks to bring leading-edge information management research to bear on creating a cyberinfrastructure for the solid earth geosciences to interlink multidisciplinary geoscience data sets in 4D space. The need to manage the growing amounts of diverse Earth science data has been recognized through a series of NSF-sponsored community meetings on Geoinformatics. The GEON collaboration between IT researchers, who represent key technology areas relevant to GEON, and Earth science researchers, who represent a broad cross section of Earth science sub-disciplines, will provide the foundation for a national Geoinformatics program. There is a pressing need in the Earth sciences for a national information infrastructure that enables the community to share databases and tools to enable interdisciplinary analysis of networked data sets in studying a wide range of phenomena including the interplay between tectonics and the evolution of sedimentary basins; the role of mountain building in the evolution of climate and life; broader predictive understanding and modeling capabilities of geologic hazards, such as earthquakes and volcanoes; the 4D reconstruction of the Earth through time; and, managing the natural resources of our planet. Each of these problems requires interdisciplinary research to discover relationships among Earth science disciplines, and depends on the community s ability to construct an integrated geoscience information system. The goal of GEON is to develop the necessary IT foundations and create such a system. Many past and on-going projects in the geosciences have produced valuable sub-disciplinary and disciplinary databases. Numerous national centers and organizations such as IRIS, UNAVCO, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), as well as government agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), are contributing research and data to the community. Building on this base, the imperative now is to take a step beyond research resulting in disciplinary databases, towards a new paradigm for interdisciplinary information integration and tool sharing via the creation of the GEON cyberinfrastructure. The research products and services arising from GEON will be available to the entire scientific community and will transform the way in which geoscience research is conducted, opening unprecedented avenues for research and collaboration and providing the foundation for creating geoscience collaboratories doc2906 none Technological and architectural innovations have enabled development of powerful microprocessors that can issue several instructions concurrently at a very high clock rate. In future processors with aggressive speculation techniques, an even larger number of instruction issues per cycle are expected. Efficient handling of memory references for data access is one of the keys to achieving high performance in future processors. This research addresses methods to provide sufficient bandwidth at fast latency for data access in wide-issue processors issuing tens of instructions per cycle. The methods are based on the concept of data decoupling . Data decoupling divides the memory reference instructions into multiple independent streams before the actual addresses of the data they access are known. Partitioned memory reference instructions are then fed into a separate memory pipeline. This research investigates the issues in effective and efficient hardware and software support for multiple memory pipelines based on data decoupling. The data decoupling approach of providing multiple memory pipelines can provide two crucial advantages over a conventional design. First, the cost and the complexity of building a large cache with many ports are reduced. Second, partitioning memory references can facilitate more specialized handling of each partitioned stream doc24903 none W. Gilbert Clark Description: This award supports a US-India cooperative research project entitled Spin and Charge Dynamics in Conducting Polymers by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Studies. US PI W. Gilbert Clark, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) will collaborate with Reghu Menon and two other researchers from the premier Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. The objective is to investigate the dynamics of charge carriers in electrically conducting polymers by NMR measurements. They will carry out related electrical transport and electron spin resonance studies and synthesis of the appropriate samples. This research will address many key questions on the mechanisms for electron transport in conducting polymers that are of current interest such as the length scale of disorder and nature of the metal-insulator transition. The ultimate research goal is to increase understanding of the mechanisms for electron transport in these materials. Scope: Professor Clark is a well-known expert in applying the NMR technique to study properties of conducting molecular crystals and solids. He has extensive experience with NMR, electrical transport, and measurements at ultra-low temperatures and high magnetic fields. His Indian collaborators, who have complimentary expertise, will carry out sample synthesis and well-defined transport measurements at the IISc, Bangalore. The PIs will use UCLA facilities, the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, and the Grenoble High Magnetic Field Laboratories in France. This collaboration takes advantage of a synergy between Clark and Menon first established during Menon s tenure at UCLA as a post doc. This project will provide an international experience for a UCLA postdoc and graduate student, and will enhance collaboration between UCLA and the IISc. This project is jointly supported by the Indian Department of Science & Technology (DST) under the NSF DST program doc24904 none Flessa The GEOscience Network (GEON) project seeks to bring leading-edge information management research to bear on creating a cyberinfrastructure for the solid earth geosciences to interlink multidisciplinary geoscience data sets in 4D space. The need to manage the growing amounts of diverse Earth science data has been recognized through a series of NSF-sponsored community meetings on Geoinformatics. The GEON collaboration between IT researchers, who represent key technology areas relevant to GEON, and Earth science researchers, who represent a broad cross section of Earth science sub-disciplines, will provide the foundation for a national Geoinformatics program. There is a pressing need in the Earth sciences for a national information infrastructure that enables the community to share databases and tools to enable interdisciplinary analysis of networked data sets in studying a wide range of phenomena including the interplay between tectonics and the evolution of sedimentary basins; the role of mountain building in the evolution of climate and life; broader predictive understanding and modeling capabilities of geologic hazards, such as earthquakes and volcanoes; the 4D reconstruction of the Earth through time; and, managing the natural resources of our planet. Each of these problems requires interdisciplinary research to discover relationships among Earth science disciplines, and depends on the community s ability to construct an integrated geoscience information system. The goal of GEON is to develop the necessary IT foundations and create such a system. Many past and on-going projects in the geosciences have produced valuable sub-disciplinary and disciplinary databases. Numerous national centers and organizations such as IRIS, UNAVCO, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), as well as government agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), are contributing research and data to the community. Building on this base, the imperative now is to take a step beyond research resulting in disciplinary databases, towards a new paradigm for interdisciplinary information integration and tool sharing via the creation of the GEON cyberinfrastructure. The research products and services arising from GEON will be available to the entire scientific community and will transform the way in which geoscience research is conducted, opening unprecedented avenues for research and collaboration and providing the foundation for creating geoscience collaboratories doc24905 none Sinha The GEOscience Network (GEON) project seeks to bring leading-edge information management research to bear on creating a cyberinfrastructure for the solid earth geosciences to interlink multidisciplinary geoscience data sets in 4D space. The need to manage the growing amounts of diverse Earth science data has been recognized through a series of NSF-sponsored community meetings on Geoinformatics. The GEON collaboration between IT researchers, who represent key technology areas relevant to GEON, and Earth science researchers, who represent a broad cross section of Earth science sub-disciplines, will provide the foundation for a national Geoinformatics program. There is a pressing need in the Earth sciences for a national information infrastructure that enables the community to share databases and tools to enable interdisciplinary analysis of networked data sets in studying a wide range of phenomena including the interplay between tectonics and the evolution of sedimentary basins; the role of mountain building in the evolution of climate and life; broader predictive understanding and modeling capabilities of geologic hazards, such as earthquakes and volcanoes; the 4D reconstruction of the Earth through time; and, managing the natural resources of our planet. Each of these problems requires interdisciplinary research to discover relationships among Earth science disciplines, and depends on the community s ability to construct an integrated geoscience information system. The goal of GEON is to develop the necessary IT foundations and create such a system. Many past and on-going projects in the geosciences have produced valuable sub-disciplinary and disciplinary databases. Numerous national centers and organizations such as IRIS, UNAVCO, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), as well as government agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), are contributing research and data to the community. Building on this base, the imperative now is to take a step beyond research resulting in disciplinary databases, towards a new paradigm for interdisciplinary information integration and tool sharing via the creation of the GEON cyberinfrastructure. The research products and services arising from GEON will be available to the entire scientific community and will transform the way in which geoscience research is conducted, opening unprecedented avenues for research and collaboration and providing the foundation for creating geoscience collaboratories doc24906 none Dr. Burch will use the bacteriophage phiX174 and its alternative hosts, E. coli and S. typhimurium, to investigate the impact of host limitation on the evolution of host range in this virus. By manipulating host limitation, she will test the hypothesis that the benefits of host range expansion outweigh the costs when hosts are limited, and that the costs of host range expansion outweigh the benefits when hosts are abundant. The advantages of host range expansion for parasites include reduced competition for hosts, reduced time spent searching for hosts, and increased probability of transmission to a suitable host. However, parasites are most often observed to specialize on a limited number of hosts. This specialization may be explained by a variety of costs associated with broad host range, including a possible trade-off between fitness on one host and fitness on alternative hosts. Experimental studies of host range have tended to concentrate on the potential costs of expanded host range rather than the potential benefits. In contrast, Dr. Burch will study the evolution of host range by presenting the bacteriophage phiX174 with ecological conditions in which the benefits of expanded host range differ. Studies of this nature may help identify ecological conditions that favor acquisition of new hosts, as in the recent movement of HIV into humans from chimpanzees doc24907 none The proposal is a request for partial support for a two-day conference to recognize the scientific achievements of P.A.M. Dirac. The conference will take place in Tallahassee on December 6-7, . There will be lectures on various frontier topics in physics research, many of which were strongly influenced by Dirac s work. The conference will be of great educational value to young scientists and the proceedings will be published by World Scientific. The funds will be used to cover the costs of registration and travel for attending students working in experimental or theoretical particle physics doc24908 none Global climate change has the potential to produce serious impacts on natural and human systems in permafrost regions. The Circumpolar Active Layer Monitoring (CALM) program is concerned with observing the response of the active layer and near-surface permafrost to climate change at multi-decade timescales, and is one of two major international observation networks devoted to permafrost. Now at the end of its first decade, the CALM network incorporates more than 100 sites involving field scientists from 15 investigating countries in both hemispheres. This project will conduct a workshop designed to analyze the rich database obtained from the observational network, evaluate active-layer models for application under climate-change scenarios, review existing CALM analytical methodologies and protocols, discuss future data formatting, submission, and archive protocols, review the relation of CALM to other international programs, discuss the role of CALM at the International Permafrost Conference in July , and the future of the CALM program. Because widespread, systematic changes in the thickness of the active layer could have profound effects on the flux of greenhouse gases and on the human infrastructure in cold regions, it is critical that observation and analysis procedures be optimized. The proposed workshop will bring together permafrost scientists with workers in closely related areas, many of whom have divergent but complementary skills. A thorough examination of data from the major CALM sites will permit assessment of the overall performance of the network and its components. The workshop will also facilitate evaluation of the effectiveness of observation strategies and sampling designs doc24909 none Computer scientists, together with biological chemists will collaborate using statistical and computational tools and methods that the computer scientists have been developing for dealing with human language to better understand the function of proteins. Proteins are major players in the functioning of human and all other living cells. As in languages, where sequences of letters determine patterns of words and sentences, sequences of amino acids in proteins determine protein structure, dynamics and function. Such sequences and their constituents can be thought of as syllables or words that have particular properties. Given these sequences, scientists want to be able to predict their geometrical structure and dynamics, and hence their function. A deeper understanding of the relationship between these is required so that the information hidden in the DNA sequences of genes can be used to develop drugs to fight disease. In particular, there is great societal demand to understand and treat degenerative diseases, many of which are based on defective triggers for protein shape and interactions. Work toward these goals requires deep knowledge both in computer science and in biological chemistry, and must therefore be collaborative in nature. Carnegie Mellon computer scientists will therefore be partnering with colleagues with expertise in Biological Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston University and the National Research Council of Canada. Industry collaborators include Mathworks, Inc., and medical bioinformatics company, Medstory, Inc. Using tools like statistical language modeling, machine learning methods and high-level language processing for understanding how proteins work inside cells is a relatively new field called computational biolinguistics. At this point, the researchers have been able to detect protein fragment signatures from pathogens by application of statistical language modeling technologies to genome sequences, promising novel strategies in identifying and targeting such pathogens doc24909 none Computer scientists, together with biological chemists will collaborate using statistical and computational tools and methods that the computer scientists have been developing for dealing with human language to better understand the function of proteins. Proteins are major players in the functioning of human and all other living cells. As in languages, where sequences of letters determine patterns of words and sentences, sequences of amino acids in proteins determine protein structure, dynamics and function. Such sequences and their constituents can be thought of as syllables or words that have particular properties. Given these sequences, scientists want to be able to predict their geometrical structure and dynamics, and hence their function. A deeper understanding of the relationship between these is required so that the information hidden in the DNA sequences of genes can be used to develop drugs to fight disease. In particular, there is great societal demand to understand and treat degenerative diseases, many of which are based on defective triggers for protein shape and interactions. Work toward these goals requires deep knowledge both in computer science and in biological chemistry, and must therefore be collaborative in nature. Carnegie Mellon computer scientists will therefore be partnering with colleagues with expertise in Biological Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston University and the National Research Council of Canada. Industry collaborators include Mathworks, Inc., and medical bioinformatics company, Medstory, Inc. Using tools like statistical language modeling, machine learning methods and high-level language processing for understanding how proteins work inside cells is a relatively new field called computational biolinguistics. At this point, the researchers have been able to detect protein fragment signatures from pathogens by application of statistical language modeling technologies to genome sequences, promising novel strategies in identifying and targeting such pathogens doc24911 none This ITR project is aimed at developing the foundations of a modern systems science that is simultaneously computational and physical; it remarries time, concurrency, robustness, continuums, and resource management to computation. This project, because of its focus on foundations, will provide a fundamentally new paradigm, based on hybrid systems, for modeling and analysis of many complex phenomena that occur in the physical and biological sciences on both microscopic and macroscopic levels. These outcomes of the project are prerequisites for the deployment of embedded, autonomous computing in many safety-critical applications, from medical devices to transportation to national security needs in avionics. The attention to a new education model will create a new generation of engineers who will be able to master the design of complex, heterogeneous systems that will be the backbone of the future IT industry. The proposed ITR has four focus areas of research. (a) Hybrid systems theory. The focus here is on scaling up pioneering approaches that integrate physical modeling with computational systems. (b) Model-based design. The main effort here is to develop a set of models with solid mathematical foundations that allow for the systematic integration of diverse efforts in system specification, design, synthesis, analysis and validation, execution, and design evolution (c) Advanced tool architectures. The deliverables from this project will be a set of reusable, inter-operating software modules, freely distributed as open-source software. (d) Experimental research. The program will leverage existing system-building efforts involving avionics, anti-terrorism technologies, vehicle electronics, and autonomous robots. In addition we will apply our methods to networks of embedded systems for applications such as environment monitoring, building protection, and emergency response. The impact of this change on teaching and research is profound, and will not be confined to the graduate level. Based on the ongoing, groundbreaking effort at UCB, we propose to deliberately re-architect and retool undergraduate teaching at the participating institutions, and to engage in course development at a set of California community colleges with which UCB has established relationships and which have a high enrollment of Hispanic and African American students. Faculty and graduate student researchers from minority and other institutions will be recruited each summer to participate in a program called SIPHER (Summer Internship Program in Hybrid and Embedded Software Research doc24912 none Neural Plasticity and Functional Adaptation in the Human Brain With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Scheiber and Sirigu and colleagues will conduct a three-year investigation of adult human amputees who will undergo bilateral hand transplantation. Brain imaging, stimulation, and recordings of muscle activity underlying finger movements-all will be applied longitudinally before, and at intervals after, hand transplantation to address the following experimental questions. (1) Is reorganization limited to the cortical representation of the grafted hand, or does it involve additional body segments? (2) Is reorganization observed in the primary motor cortex correlated with changes occurring in the homologous regions of the primary sensory cortex? (3) Upon loss of the hands, does use-dependent reorganization in the sensorimotor cortex result in a loss of motor skills, which must be reacquired when the hands are restored? (4) Does re-expansion of the motor cortex hand representation correlate with the return of motor skill? The parts of brain studied in this project are the primary somatosensory and primary motor cortices, which contain the most detailed maps of bodily sensation and movement in the brain. These representational maps undergo considerable reorganization, however, in response to altered sensory stimulation, behavioral use, or amputation of a body part, such as the hand. After amputation, the cortical territory that has been deprived of its specific body part reorganizes to represent remaining nearby body parts. Amputation-induced reorganization occurs even in adult humans, and can occur rapidly and reversibly. Little is known, however, about the reversibility of such plastic reorganization months to years after amputation, when structural changes in nerve cells and their interconnections have had time to occur. Transplantation to replace amputated body parts offers the opportunity to study the reversibility of reorganization in the primary somatosensory and motor cortex after such long-term changes. The results of these studies will expand our basic understanding of how representations of bodily movement in the sensorimotor cortex are shaped and re-shaped by plastic reorganization doc24913 none Shaoyi Jiang, University of Washington Upgrade of a Scanning Probe Microscope for Chemical and Biochemical Analysis The scanning probe microscopic (SPM) technique can be used not only for the characterization of surfaces at the sub-nanometer resolution, but also for the measurement of nano-scale forces. SPM has been one of main techniques used in the PI s group for various ongoing nanotechnology projects, including (a) characterizing self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) formed by alkanethiols on Au(111), dendrimer monolayers on Au(111), and alkyl monolayers on Si(111) at the molecular resolution, (b) studying protein adsorption and detecting antigen-antibody interactions, and (c) measuring quantitative frictional properties of various thin films. Tapping mode SPM is very important for these ongoing projects, particularly for the study of interfacial phenomena and properties of biological systems on surfaces in liquids. The current SPM system in the PI s group was acquired from Digital Instruments (DI) about five years ago. It has been heavily used in various research and teaching activities. However, it does not have many important features, such as tapping mode operation. The PI proposes to upgrade the existing SPM from NanoScope E to NanoScope IIIa Control Station with Extender Electronics Module. This upgrade will allow the PI s group to perform tapping mode SPM in liquids. Upgrade of the SPM will greatly enhance the PI s research capacities, broaden his research areas, and facilitate collaborations with people on and off campus. The broader impact of this grant will be that many graduate students and undergraduate students will benefit from the instrument through their research experience or laboratory sessions in a course. If the research is successful, society will benefit through better biocompatible materials doc24914 none The proposal requests travel expenses for US researchers to participate in a DELOS workshop on methods and metrics for evaluating digital libraries from a number of perspectives. The workshop will be held at MTA SZTAKI in Budapest, Hungary in June . The workshop is co-organized by US and EC funded researchers. The workshop is part of a larger, coordinated planning and research activity being carried out by NSF-EU working groups. The findings of the working groups is expected to inform funding programs in the US, EU and other nations. DELOS is a major forum for and organizer of digital libraries research and planning activities in Europe. It is funded by Information Societies Technologies (IST) 5th Framework Programme of the European Commission. This proposal seeks travel support for six participants from the American research community doc24915 none A Center for Computational Biological Physics is established at the University of California, San Diego as part of the Information Technology Research Initiative (ITR). This ITR Center, located in La Jolla, CA and operating as a partnership between UC San Diego, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the Scripps Research Institute and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, will pioneer new computational paradigms in support of this overall goal. This is critical as biology evolves into a data-rich predictive science and increasingly turns to complex systems physics for help in in developing the necessary conceptual underpinnings and the concomitant calculational strategies. Specifically, the Center will focus on two major projects, one each at the supra-molecular and sub-cellular scales. The first involves combining molecular dynamics with powerful electrostatic solvers so as to enable the study of large-scale biological machines. The system to be used as a testbed is the ribosome, where the recently determined structure allows for the application of these ideas. The second involves extending the MCell concept, originally developed for synapse simulations, into a broadly useful tool for studying sub-cellular-cellular scale signal transduction processes. Here the target applications concern calcium dynamics in cardiac cells and its control by hormonal action. In addition to these research goals, the Center will be actively involved in training a new class of computational scientist, one who can directly communicate with experimentalists and focus the computation so as to answer meaningful questions for these systems. Finally, the ITR Center is directly coupled to a complementary effort, the Physics Frontiers Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, which is focused on the conceptual advances that will eventually serve as a source of new demand for novel computational strategies. The ITR award is jointly funded by the Physics, Materials Research and Chemistry Divisions of the NSF doc24916 none Understanding and sustaining the natural world in the 21st century depends on improving our capacity to access ecological, earth science, and human-dimension data; mining these data for new knowledge; and conveying new insights to decision-makers and the general public. Computer science and information technology research can effectively address many of these issues and advance our ability to conduct ecological science. This multidisciplinary research investigation will create a Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge (SEEK)-an information technology framework and infrastructure that will be used to derive and extend ecological knowledge by facilitating the discovery, access, integration, interpretation, and analyses of distributed ecological information. SEEK will provide for the integration of local desktop data with a larger network of data and analytical tools, enabling ecologists and other researchers to tackle complex research problems that were hitherto intractable. The SEEK initiative stands on the foundation of substantial and productive NSF investment in ecological and biodiversity informatics and it brings together four highly collaborative, forward-looking institutions in a partnership committed to inventing and supporting a global computing infrastructure for environmental biology. The project involves a multidisciplinary team of computer scientists, ecologists and technologists from the Partnership for Biodiversity Informatics (PBI), a consortium comprising the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS); the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC); the University of Kansas (KU), and the University of New Mexico (UNM)) and partnering institutions (Arizona State University, University of North Carolina, University of Vermont, and Napier University in Scotland). This five-year initiative will lead to fundamental improvements in how researchers can 1) gain global access to data and information, 2) rapidly locate and utilize distributed computational services, and 3) exercise powerful new methods for capturing, reproducing, and extending the analysis process itself. SEEK will also specifically provide ecologists and other researchers access to a large-scale network of information resources and computational services, via powerful data discovery and analysis tools that operate from desktop computers. These capabilities will significantly build research capacity to more effectively address global research, management and policy issues in environmental biology that increasingly require much more efficient, automated access to distributed and heterogeneous data. A multi-faceted approach will be employed to insure that the research products, software, and information technology infrastructure resulting from SEEK optimally benefit science, education, and the public. Outreach includes community involvement, a WWW portal, informatics training, and an innovative annual symposium and training program that focuses on information technology transfer to young investigators and students, particularly those from under-represented groups. In the information economy, access to information for knowledge creation and decision-making is as valuable as the information itself. This project will enable bringing the intellectual content of biodiversity and ecological information into currency for science and society. Examples of significant project outcomes include: (i) revolutionizing discovery, access to and integration of ecological, earth, and human dimension data and information through the SEEK infrastructure; (ii) developing intelligent analytical tools and infrastructure to support the needs of scientists, decision-makers, and the general public; (iii) education and training of the next generation of ecologists in information technology skills; and (iv) improving the opportunities for scientists, resource managers, policy makers, and the public to make scientifically-informed decisions about the environment by expanding access to ecological data, information, and knowledge doc24909 none Computer scientists, together with biological chemists will collaborate using statistical and computational tools and methods that the computer scientists have been developing for dealing with human language to better understand the function of proteins. Proteins are major players in the functioning of human and all other living cells. As in languages, where sequences of letters determine patterns of words and sentences, sequences of amino acids in proteins determine protein structure, dynamics and function. Such sequences and their constituents can be thought of as syllables or words that have particular properties. Given these sequences, scientists want to be able to predict their geometrical structure and dynamics, and hence their function. A deeper understanding of the relationship between these is required so that the information hidden in the DNA sequences of genes can be used to develop drugs to fight disease. In particular, there is great societal demand to understand and treat degenerative diseases, many of which are based on defective triggers for protein shape and interactions. Work toward these goals requires deep knowledge both in computer science and in biological chemistry, and must therefore be collaborative in nature. Carnegie Mellon computer scientists will therefore be partnering with colleagues with expertise in Biological Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston University and the National Research Council of Canada. Industry collaborators include Mathworks, Inc., and medical bioinformatics company, Medstory, Inc. Using tools like statistical language modeling, machine learning methods and high-level language processing for understanding how proteins work inside cells is a relatively new field called computational biolinguistics. At this point, the researchers have been able to detect protein fragment signatures from pathogens by application of statistical language modeling technologies to genome sequences, promising novel strategies in identifying and targeting such pathogens doc24918 none ions to deliver unique capabilities in a lambda-rich world, a world in which endpoint-delivered bandwidth is greater than individual computers can saturate. This research on campus and metro-scale OptIPuters complements State (CENIC ONI in California, I-WIRE in Illinois), national (TeraGrid), and international (StarLight) projects. The six-university OptIPuter research team spans applications, software, networking and hardware expertise to address the challenges. This team has a long history of successfully managing large multidisciplinary and multi-institutional projects, working with companies, and delivering high-impact innovations in hardware and software systems. Since industry is developing key subcomponents of the OptIPuter, several leading companies are involved as partners. The new architectural models and the software systems to make them function should contribute important capabilities to other large-scale Federally funded networked science facilities. Going beyond research, the collaborative visualization data-fusion OptIPuter centers coupled to remote instrumentation will be enabling technologies for broader societal needs, including emergency response, homeland security, health services, and science education doc24919 none PI: Szalay, Alexander Inst: Johns Hopkins University Dr. Szalay is awarded funds at Johns Hopkins University to continue expanding, advertising, and evaluating its pilot website, Skyserver (http: skyserver.sdss.org). This site makes data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) freely available to anyone with Internet access. By the time the SDSS is finished in , it will have mapped one-quarter of the entire sky in detail, determining the positions and absolute brightnesses of more than 100 million celestial objects. It will also take spectra of more than a million galaxies and quasars. Dr. Szalay has built a team of astronomers, programmers, science writers, education experts, and teachers in order to reach a wide audience. They have designed several tools to allow students and the general public to easily and intuitively access SDSS data. They are also designing several interactive educational projects in which students use SDSS data to learn concepts from astronomy. For example, students will make Hubble diagrams to show the expansion of the universe, calculate temperatures of stars from spectra, and look for asteroids in SDSS images. All projects will include teachers guides that give complete solutions, advice on teaching the projects to a class, and applicability to national education standards doc24909 none Computer scientists, together with biological chemists will collaborate using statistical and computational tools and methods that the computer scientists have been developing for dealing with human language to better understand the function of proteins. Proteins are major players in the functioning of human and all other living cells. As in languages, where sequences of letters determine patterns of words and sentences, sequences of amino acids in proteins determine protein structure, dynamics and function. Such sequences and their constituents can be thought of as syllables or words that have particular properties. Given these sequences, scientists want to be able to predict their geometrical structure and dynamics, and hence their function. A deeper understanding of the relationship between these is required so that the information hidden in the DNA sequences of genes can be used to develop drugs to fight disease. In particular, there is great societal demand to understand and treat degenerative diseases, many of which are based on defective triggers for protein shape and interactions. Work toward these goals requires deep knowledge both in computer science and in biological chemistry, and must therefore be collaborative in nature. Carnegie Mellon computer scientists will therefore be partnering with colleagues with expertise in Biological Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston University and the National Research Council of Canada. Industry collaborators include Mathworks, Inc., and medical bioinformatics company, Medstory, Inc. Using tools like statistical language modeling, machine learning methods and high-level language processing for understanding how proteins work inside cells is a relatively new field called computational biolinguistics. At this point, the researchers have been able to detect protein fragment signatures from pathogens by application of statistical language modeling technologies to genome sequences, promising novel strategies in identifying and targeting such pathogens doc24921 none ion can support a wide range of applications, by building a variety of DHT-based systems. Our recent work has used DHTs to support such varied applications as distributed file systems, multicast overlay networks, event notification systems, and distributed query processing. DHTs simplify the structure of these systems by providing general-purpose key value naming rather than imposing structured keys (e.g., hierarchical names in DNS). These systems are early prototypes, but they suggest that DHTs may be as useful to distributed applications as ordinary hash tables are to programs. The second conjecture relies on techniques for creating robust, secure, and self-organizing infrastructures out of many mutually distrustful nodes. Our initial work on robust DHT designs gives us confidence that such techniques are within reach. The bulk of our proposed research will be devoted to the in-depth study of these techniques, with the express aim of producing a sound and coherent design for the infrastructure. To investigate the real-world behavior of our design, we will create a large-scale open testbed for which we will distribute our infrastructure software, some enabling libraries, and a few key compelling applications. In addition to its impact on the creation of distributed applications, our research program will have benefits in education and outreach. Given their current importance, security, robustness, and the design of distributed systems should become central topics in undergraduate computer science education. To this end, we are planning a new interdisciplinary course that will address these issues, and bring them into sharper focus early in the undergraduate course sequence. Our testbed and research agenda is also a good vehicle for encouraging the participation of organizations not traditionally involved in networking and systems research. Participation in the testbed requires little cost (a PC and an Internet connection) and minimal levels of systems expertise and over-sight. Moreover, because the material is closely related to the P2P systems with which many students are familiar, the project might appeal to students who would not normally be attracted to research in this area. Based on this premise, we plan an active outreach program to under-represented populations at non-research undergraduate institutions doc24916 none Understanding and sustaining the natural world in the 21st century depends on improving our capacity to access ecological, earth science, and human-dimension data; mining these data for new knowledge; and conveying new insights to decision-makers and the general public. Computer science and information technology research can effectively address many of these issues and advance our ability to conduct ecological science. This multidisciplinary research investigation will create a Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge (SEEK)-an information technology framework and infrastructure that will be used to derive and extend ecological knowledge by facilitating the discovery, access, integration, interpretation, and analyses of distributed ecological information. SEEK will provide for the integration of local desktop data with a larger network of data and analytical tools, enabling ecologists and other researchers to tackle complex research problems that were hitherto intractable. The SEEK initiative stands on the foundation of substantial and productive NSF investment in ecological and biodiversity informatics and it brings together four highly collaborative, forward-looking institutions in a partnership committed to inventing and supporting a global computing infrastructure for environmental biology. The project involves a multidisciplinary team of computer scientists, ecologists and technologists from the Partnership for Biodiversity Informatics (PBI), a consortium comprising the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS); the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC); the University of Kansas (KU), and the University of New Mexico (UNM)) and partnering institutions (Arizona State University, University of North Carolina, University of Vermont, and Napier University in Scotland). This five-year initiative will lead to fundamental improvements in how researchers can 1) gain global access to data and information, 2) rapidly locate and utilize distributed computational services, and 3) exercise powerful new methods for capturing, reproducing, and extending the analysis process itself. SEEK will also specifically provide ecologists and other researchers access to a large-scale network of information resources and computational services, via powerful data discovery and analysis tools that operate from desktop computers. These capabilities will significantly build research capacity to more effectively address global research, management and policy issues in environmental biology that increasingly require much more efficient, automated access to distributed and heterogeneous data. A multi-faceted approach will be employed to insure that the research products, software, and information technology infrastructure resulting from SEEK optimally benefit science, education, and the public. Outreach includes community involvement, a WWW portal, informatics training, and an innovative annual symposium and training program that focuses on information technology transfer to young investigators and students, particularly those from under-represented groups. In the information economy, access to information for knowledge creation and decision-making is as valuable as the information itself. This project will enable bringing the intellectual content of biodiversity and ecological information into currency for science and society. Examples of significant project outcomes include: (i) revolutionizing discovery, access to and integration of ecological, earth, and human dimension data and information through the SEEK infrastructure; (ii) developing intelligent analytical tools and infrastructure to support the needs of scientists, decision-makers, and the general public; (iii) education and training of the next generation of ecologists in information technology skills; and (iv) improving the opportunities for scientists, resource managers, policy makers, and the public to make scientifically-informed decisions about the environment by expanding access to ecological data, information, and knowledge doc24923 none Keller The GEOscience Network (GEON) project seeks to bring leading-edge information management research to bear on creating a cyberinfrastructure for the solid earth geosciences to interlink multidisciplinary geoscience data sets in 4D space. The need to manage the growing amounts of diverse Earth science data has been recognized through a series of NSF-sponsored community meetings on Geoinformatics. The GEON collaboration between IT researchers, who represent key technology areas relevant to GEON, and Earth science researchers, who represent a broad cross section of Earth science sub-disciplines, will provide the foundation for a national Geoinformatics program. There is a pressing need in the Earth sciences for a national information infrastructure that enables the community to share databases and tools to enable interdisciplinary analysis of networked data sets in studying a wide range of phenomena including the interplay between tectonics and the evolution of sedimentary basins; the role of mountain building in the evolution of climate and life; broader predictive understanding and modeling capabilities of geologic hazards, such as earthquakes and volcanoes; the 4D reconstruction of the Earth through time; and, managing the natural resources of our planet. Each of these problems requires interdisciplinary research to discover relationships among Earth science disciplines, and depends on the community s ability to construct an integrated geoscience information system. The goal of GEON is to develop the necessary IT foundations and create such a system. Many past and on-going projects in the geosciences have produced valuable sub-disciplinary and disciplinary databases. Numerous national centers and organizations such as IRIS, UNAVCO, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), as well as government agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), are contributing research and data to the community. Building on this base, the imperative now is to take a step beyond research resulting in disciplinary databases, towards a new paradigm for interdisciplinary information integration and tool sharing via the creation of the GEON cyberinfrastructure. The research products and services arising from GEON will be available to the entire scientific community and will transform the way in which geoscience research is conducted, opening unprecedented avenues for research and collaboration and providing the foundation for creating geoscience collaboratories doc24924 none Baru The GEOscience Network (GEON) project seeks to bring leading-edge information management research to bear on creating a cyberinfrastructure for the solid earth geosciences to interlink multidisciplinary geoscience data sets in 4D space. The need to manage the growing amounts of diverse Earth science data has been recognized through a series of NSF-sponsored community meetings on Geoinformatics. The GEON collaboration between IT researchers, who represent key technology areas relevant to GEON, and Earth science researchers, who represent a broad cross section of Earth science sub-disciplines, will provide the foundation for a national Geoinformatics program. There is a pressing need in the Earth sciences for a national information infrastructure that enables the community to share databases and tools to enable interdisciplinary analysis of networked data sets in studying a wide range of phenomena including the interplay between tectonics and the evolution of sedimentary basins; the role of mountain building in the evolution of climate and life; broader predictive understanding and modeling capabilities of geologic hazards, such as earthquakes and volcanoes; the 4D reconstruction of the Earth through time; and, managing the natural resources of our planet. Each of these problems requires interdisciplinary research to discover relationships among Earth science disciplines, and depends on the community s ability to construct an integrated geoscience information system. The goal of GEON is to develop the necessary IT foundations and create such a system. Many past and on-going projects in the geosciences have produced valuable sub-disciplinary and disciplinary databases. Numerous national centers and organizations such as IRIS, UNAVCO, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), as well as government agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), are contributing research and data to the community. Building on this base, the imperative now is to take a step beyond research resulting in disciplinary databases, towards a new paradigm for interdisciplinary information integration and tool sharing via the creation of the GEON cyberinfrastructure. The research products and services arising from GEON will be available to the entire scientific community and will transform the way in which geoscience research is conducted, opening unprecedented avenues for research and collaboration and providing the foundation for creating geoscience collaboratories doc24916 none Understanding and sustaining the natural world in the 21st century depends on improving our capacity to access ecological, earth science, and human-dimension data; mining these data for new knowledge; and conveying new insights to decision-makers and the general public. Computer science and information technology research can effectively address many of these issues and advance our ability to conduct ecological science. This multidisciplinary research investigation will create a Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge (SEEK)-an information technology framework and infrastructure that will be used to derive and extend ecological knowledge by facilitating the discovery, access, integration, interpretation, and analyses of distributed ecological information. SEEK will provide for the integration of local desktop data with a larger network of data and analytical tools, enabling ecologists and other researchers to tackle complex research problems that were hitherto intractable. The SEEK initiative stands on the foundation of substantial and productive NSF investment in ecological and biodiversity informatics and it brings together four highly collaborative, forward-looking institutions in a partnership committed to inventing and supporting a global computing infrastructure for environmental biology. The project involves a multidisciplinary team of computer scientists, ecologists and technologists from the Partnership for Biodiversity Informatics (PBI), a consortium comprising the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS); the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC); the University of Kansas (KU), and the University of New Mexico (UNM)) and partnering institutions (Arizona State University, University of North Carolina, University of Vermont, and Napier University in Scotland). This five-year initiative will lead to fundamental improvements in how researchers can 1) gain global access to data and information, 2) rapidly locate and utilize distributed computational services, and 3) exercise powerful new methods for capturing, reproducing, and extending the analysis process itself. SEEK will also specifically provide ecologists and other researchers access to a large-scale network of information resources and computational services, via powerful data discovery and analysis tools that operate from desktop computers. These capabilities will significantly build research capacity to more effectively address global research, management and policy issues in environmental biology that increasingly require much more efficient, automated access to distributed and heterogeneous data. A multi-faceted approach will be employed to insure that the research products, software, and information technology infrastructure resulting from SEEK optimally benefit science, education, and the public. Outreach includes community involvement, a WWW portal, informatics training, and an innovative annual symposium and training program that focuses on information technology transfer to young investigators and students, particularly those from under-represented groups. In the information economy, access to information for knowledge creation and decision-making is as valuable as the information itself. This project will enable bringing the intellectual content of biodiversity and ecological information into currency for science and society. Examples of significant project outcomes include: (i) revolutionizing discovery, access to and integration of ecological, earth, and human dimension data and information through the SEEK infrastructure; (ii) developing intelligent analytical tools and infrastructure to support the needs of scientists, decision-makers, and the general public; (iii) education and training of the next generation of ecologists in information technology skills; and (iv) improving the opportunities for scientists, resource managers, policy makers, and the public to make scientifically-informed decisions about the environment by expanding access to ecological data, information, and knowledge doc24916 none Understanding and sustaining the natural world in the 21st century depends on improving our capacity to access ecological, earth science, and human-dimension data; mining these data for new knowledge; and conveying new insights to decision-makers and the general public. Computer science and information technology research can effectively address many of these issues and advance our ability to conduct ecological science. This multidisciplinary research investigation will create a Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge (SEEK)-an information technology framework and infrastructure that will be used to derive and extend ecological knowledge by facilitating the discovery, access, integration, interpretation, and analyses of distributed ecological information. SEEK will provide for the integration of local desktop data with a larger network of data and analytical tools, enabling ecologists and other researchers to tackle complex research problems that were hitherto intractable. The SEEK initiative stands on the foundation of substantial and productive NSF investment in ecological and biodiversity informatics and it brings together four highly collaborative, forward-looking institutions in a partnership committed to inventing and supporting a global computing infrastructure for environmental biology. The project involves a multidisciplinary team of computer scientists, ecologists and technologists from the Partnership for Biodiversity Informatics (PBI), a consortium comprising the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS); the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC); the University of Kansas (KU), and the University of New Mexico (UNM)) and partnering institutions (Arizona State University, University of North Carolina, University of Vermont, and Napier University in Scotland). This five-year initiative will lead to fundamental improvements in how researchers can 1) gain global access to data and information, 2) rapidly locate and utilize distributed computational services, and 3) exercise powerful new methods for capturing, reproducing, and extending the analysis process itself. SEEK will also specifically provide ecologists and other researchers access to a large-scale network of information resources and computational services, via powerful data discovery and analysis tools that operate from desktop computers. These capabilities will significantly build research capacity to more effectively address global research, management and policy issues in environmental biology that increasingly require much more efficient, automated access to distributed and heterogeneous data. A multi-faceted approach will be employed to insure that the research products, software, and information technology infrastructure resulting from SEEK optimally benefit science, education, and the public. Outreach includes community involvement, a WWW portal, informatics training, and an innovative annual symposium and training program that focuses on information technology transfer to young investigators and students, particularly those from under-represented groups. In the information economy, access to information for knowledge creation and decision-making is as valuable as the information itself. This project will enable bringing the intellectual content of biodiversity and ecological information into currency for science and society. Examples of significant project outcomes include: (i) revolutionizing discovery, access to and integration of ecological, earth, and human dimension data and information through the SEEK infrastructure; (ii) developing intelligent analytical tools and infrastructure to support the needs of scientists, decision-makers, and the general public; (iii) education and training of the next generation of ecologists in information technology skills; and (iv) improving the opportunities for scientists, resource managers, policy makers, and the public to make scientifically-informed decisions about the environment by expanding access to ecological data, information, and knowledge doc24927 none Manasreh Intersubband transitions in III-nitride multiple quantum dots will be investigated for their applications in the infrared spectral region. The polarization effect on the intersubband transitions measured at the normal incident, Brewster s angle, and waveguide configurations is an essential part of the current study. This will be important for optimizing the growth conditions and the sample design for normal incident coupling of photon-electron in advancing the sate of the art of infrared detectors. The normal incident coupling of photons with electrons that undergo the intersubband transition will eliminate the need for the extra steps of fabricating metal grating at the top of the device structure. Infrared devices based on intersubband transitions are extrinsic, i.e. the quantum structure has to be doped to populate the wells. Doping the quantum dots with silicon will be investigated using the local vibrational mode spectroscopy. One of the major parts of the PIs proposed research is directed toward solving various issues associated with the growth optimization and doping level. Since GaN-on-AlGaN interface possesses a large piezoelectric effect, the polarization-induced charges at the interfaces will be investigated. From the total integrated area of the intersubband transitions in the multiple quantum dots, he will accurately determine the carriers density, which is the sum of the carriers contributed from the intentionally Si-doped material and the polarization-induced charges formed at the GaN AlGaN interfaces. The broader impact of the proposed research is to explore the infrared applications of III-nitride quantum structures and integrate the infrared detectors fabricated from these structures into pre-existing GaN ultraviolet sensors. The intersubband transitions in the multiple quantum dots will also be investigated for the 1.3-1.5 mm spectral range. This spectral range is technologically very important for long distance optical communication systems doc24928 none This action funds the payment of international dues for the U.S. National Committee for SCOPE, Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment, an international scientific organization charged with advancing knowledge of the interactions between humans and the environment. Forty countries are members of SCOPE, each with a national committee that operates through the country s national academy of sciences. SCOPE was founded as, and continues to be, an important forum for identification of and recommendations for international scientific discussions of environmental situations affecting humans doc24929 none This is a proposal to conduct a wide-ranging program of research on the mid - and low-latitude ionosphere. The research involves observations to be made with a small coherent scatter radar at Clemson University and with the Jicamarca incoherent scatter radar (ISR) and the JULIA radar near Lima, Peru. Topics to be investigated include midlatitude sporadic E ionization layers, lower thermospheric winds in the equatorial E region, and the response of the low latitude ionosphere and plasmasphere to substorms. These topics have overtones for the National Space Weather initiative as well as for the CEDAR TIMED project and several other CEDAR initiatives (Topside, POLITE). The proposal has experimental and theoretical elements and should result in the development of new radar hardware, new numerical codes, and an improved and enhanced radar database doc24930 none This project is supported by the Product Realization and Environmental Manufacturing Innovative Systems (PREMISE) Program to develop the analytical understanding and predictive modeling capability or the quantitative planning of near dry lubrication parameters in turning operations. The targets are set on the control of air quality and tool wear in achieving environmental and productivity missions. This project utilizes machining science, fluid mechanics, heat transfer theories, and liquid atomization principles to develop a set of predictive models that estimate the aerosol concentration and the tool wear rate as functions of near dry lubrication parameters and cutting conditions. To this end, the temperature and stress distributions under mixed or boundary lubrication will be developed; the generation of cutting fluid aerosol through evaporation, splash, and dissipation mechanisms will be examined; and the volumetric wear rate of cutting tool due to adhesion, abrasion, and diffusion will be quantitatively evaluated. Experimental calibration in non-machining tests and full-range validation in machining tests will follow the theoretical development. The results of the project will provide a scientific infrastructure needed for the evaluation, quantification, and optimization of near dry machining performances. The broader impacts of the project include the extendibility of the resulting scientific understanding to support process optimization, activity based costing, and life cycle analysis of a wide range of part integrity issues, various waste concerns, and in different machining configurations. The project will also aims to integrate research into educational programs, to encourage the involvement of under-represented student groups, and to involve the collaboration of several industry sectors, including fluid dispensing system vendors, tool manufacturers, machine makers, and technology end users. The successful completion of this study will open up opportunities for future full-scale, team-based research programs to follow doc3007 none Collaborative Research: Sequential Monte Carlo Methods and Their Applications Jun Liu, Harvard University Rong Chen, Univ. Illinois at Chicago Xiaodong Wang, Texas A investigate roles of resampling which is critical to the effectiveness of SMC; and propose system reconfiguration strategies for more efficient SMC algorithms. In the application part, they plan to design novel signal processing and network control algorithms for wireless multimedia communications; develop better multiple sequence alignment models and SMC-based optimization method for protein structures; and build SMC-based modeling and analysis tools for business data. It is anticipated that the proposed research will culminate in the formulation of novel SMC methodologies and will bring the promise of the SMC paradigm into the practical arena of many emerging applications. Stochastic dynamic systems are routinely used in many application fields such as automatic control, engineering, and finance. The statistical analyses of these systems are crucial. However, except for a few special cases, quantitative analyses of these systems still present major challenges to researchers. Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) technique recently emerged in the field of statistics and engineering shows a great promise on solving a wide class of nonlinear filtering, prediction, and optimization problems, providing us with many exciting new research opportunities. The name Monte Carlo was coined in s by scientists involved in designing atomic bombs and it refers to a technique in which computer is used to simulate and study a complex stochastic system. The technique was named after the famed gambling resort because its procedures incorporate the element of chance. A distinctive feature of SMC is its ability to sequentially simulate the system by considering one variable at a time. The general use of SMC appeared recently and its invasion into many fields of science and engineering has just begun. Researchers including people in this research group have demonstrated that SMC can be successfully adapted to solve chemistry, engineering, and statistical problems. Understanding its theoretical properties and extending the use of SMC to other fields are the main focuses of this project. More specifically, this research group will focuse on three major theoretical issues regarding the design of effective SMC-based computational tools and three important application areas including wireless communications, computational biology, and business data analysis. These applications are not only important by their own merits, but also essential as the test ground for the new theories being developed and as the sources of stimulation for new research directions for SMC. It is anticipated that this research will culminate in the formulation of novel SMC methodologies and will bring the promise of the SMC paradigm into the practical arena of many emerging applications. In particular, this research will bear fruits in the following areas: novel designs of signal processing and network control algorithms for wireless multimedia communications; developments of better algorithms analyzing biological sequence and structure data; and a SMC-based tool for business data analysis and prediction doc24932 none MacKay Human and veterinary pharmaceutical compounds are detected increasingly in many environmental media, including soils, sediments, groundwaters and surface waters. It is unknown how humans and organisms will adapt to increasing environmental exposures to these bioactive compounds. Health effects of concern include the spread of antibiotic resistance, endocrine disrupting activity and adverse responses in non-target organisms. Hypothesis and Goal: In addition to interactions with natural organic matter, we hypothesize that pharmaceutical sorption to soils and sediments is governed by 3 mechanisms: (1) electrostatic attraction to oppositely charged sites on mineral surfaces; (2) cation exchange reactions with aluminosilicate clay minerals, and (3) surface complexation to iron and aluminum oxides. The ultimate goal of the proposed research is to quantitatively describe sorption of pharmaceuticals to clay and oxide soil minerals based on a mechanistic understanding of sorption phenomena. Methods: The research goal will be achieved by investigating pharmaceutical sorption to model sorbents so that with sorbent phases present in real soil or sediment samples can be probed independently. Five model sorbents will be used: 2- and 3-layer clays (kaolinite and montmorillonite), and iron and aluminum oxides. The high-use veterinary antibiotics oxytetracycline, ciprofloxacin, and FCQA and Enro-CO2 (substructures of ciprofloxacin) will be employed as test sorbates because agricultural antibiotic use represents the most concentrated pharmaceutical release to the environment. Results from this research can be used to predict pharmaceutical sorption from compound properties (solution complexation constant) and sorbent characteristics (surface chemistry at given pH ionic strength). Significance and Benefits of Research: The proposed research will provide the first mechanistic model of solid-water partitioning of important veterinary antibiotic compounds. The quantitative models developed for high-purity sorbents can be adapted to develop a general partitioning model for any soil or sediment phase. Accurate descriptions of soil- and sediment-water partitioning will help to interpret observed pharmaceutical distributions in field surveys of ambient concentrations of pharmaceutical compounds, including our test sorbates, in surface and groundwater (USGS Toxic Substances Hydrology Program). Ultimately, the quantitative model of pharmaceutical sorption developed here can be used in an environmental fate model that, coupled with a toxicology model, will enable accurate assessments of the risk posed by the release of veterinary pharmaceuticals to aquatic environments. Educational Benefits: Integration of undergraduate students into research activities will provide an opportunity for these students to work closely with faculty to solve open-ended research problems. The proposed research will also form a foundation for future integrated research activities between Environmental, Pharmacy, and Agricultural programs at UConn and Duke doc24933 none Our objective is simple and straightforward - use novel porous SiC materials to develop an all- solid state fuel cell that it ll more than double the output power of Si based fuel cells while completely eliminating the problem of CO poisoning of expensive Pt electrodes! Currently available proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFC5) suffer from three major limitations connected to cell design and materials used. First, most PEFC designs require elaborate manifold design and hydrodynamic control schemes which include humidification modules and rotating components such as pumps and compressors. The second major limitation comes from the Pt anode electro catalysts, which are extremely CO intolerant down to the 5 to 10 ppm level. Thirdly, poor thermal dissipation from the exothermic process limits membrane lifetimes and power density output. Our objective is to make use of rapid advances in novel SiC nanoporous materials to completely eliminate the need for platinum and low-temperature polymer membranes. Preliminary results from catalytic reactor studies show that SiC has a high degree of catalytic activity and. due to its wide band gap, high output fuel cells operating at higher thermal budget efficiencies will be possible. The objective of this work is to demonstrate such a fuel cell that will revolutionize the portable power storage industry. Advantages advances over conventional PE FC s are summarized below: o Completely passive operation designed run on dry, low pressure, solid-source hydrogen and atmospheric pressure air without the need for humidification modules. Elimination of compressed gaseous hydrogen fuel and negative public perception (e.g.. hydrogen bomb, Hindenburg, etc.). o Elimination of hydrodynamic auxiliaries such as pumps, compressors, fans or blowers resulting in completely quiet operation. Increased power, efficiency and reliability by eliminating the parasitic power required to run auxiliaries and absence of moving mechanical parts. o Elimination of the costly Pt electrode and CO poisoning problems. o Solid-state microfabrication, thin-film deposition, and micromachining approaches provide a manufacturable modular, self-contained unit. o Greatly improved fuel cell stack size and weight, fuel storage and delivery, packaging, robustness and thermal management due to microfabrication and material properties of SIC. o Significantly improved thermal budget efficiencies due to the high thermal conductivity of SiC, which is higher than that of copper at room-temperature, 430 verses 540 W mK respectively. Rapid development of this technology is critical. Therefore a seed grant to get these novel ideas from the concept stage to the demonstration stage is needed. Traditional proposals to expand this research at the University of South Florida are planned. However the graduate students who are already working on this project were being funded on a grant that has just ended. Therefore immediate funding is required to cover this research if progress is to continue doc24934 none This award supports research and education that aims to elucidate the interplay between electron-electron interaction and disorder in low dimensional electronic systems. This remains a major and difficult problem in modern condensed matter physics. This award supports studies of: edge states of fractional quantum Hall liquids, especially in the presence of edge reconstruction; bulk fractional quantum Hall liquids in the presence of disorder, focusing on the effects of disorder and interaction on their transport properties and critical behavior near the quantum phase transitions between different quantum Hall phases; quasiparticle transport properties in two-dimensional non-s-wave superconductors in the absence of time-reversal symmetry, with the cuprates as the prototype; and magnetic and superconducting properties of quantum dots and nano-size metallic grains. The PI will combine numerical and analytical methods in these investigations. Specific methods include mapping to an effective field theory, exact diagonalization, and quantum Monte Carlo simulation. Numerical studies will elucidate the topological properties, such as Chern numbers, of many-electron wave functions and quasiparticle wave functions in the PI s investigations of bulk fractional quantum Hall liquids and quasiparticle transport properties in superconductors. Calculations will focus on physical quantities that can be directly measured experimentally, and compare our results with experiments whenever possible. The broader impacts of this award are primarily educational; the work involves training the next generation of condensed matter theorists. This award supports fundamental research and education that seeks to advance our understanding of strongly interacting electrons confined to one or two dimensions and disrupted by imperfections. The PI will study the combined effect of strong correlations and disorder in a variety of materials and systems including quantum Hall systems and nanoscale ferromagnets and superconducting grains. This basic research helps improve understanding of fundamental and novel electronic states and phenomena that occur in materials and contributes to the intellectual underpinnings of potential future electronic device technologies. This award also supports training the next generation of condensed matter theorists doc24935 none Basic properties such as the particle shape and size distribution have significant influence on the processing of particulate in various chemical and pharmaceutical applications. For example, the shape and size distribution of crystals used in pharmaceutical tablet production have a strong influence on compaction and dissolution properties of the product. This proposal focuses on understanding and modeling the variation in the size and shape distribution due to breakage of dry crystals in various applications. The objectives of the proposal are to investigate the effect of the system operating conditions on crystal shape distribution due to breakage and to develop a novel procedure quantitatively measure changes in particle shape and size in a stirred vessel due to breakage. A stirred tank is used to obtain data for the rate of breakage in terms of various process parameters. The data is used to establish new and effective models for multidimensional population balance for the variation in size and shape distribution doc24936 none With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Xiong will develop imaging and modeling strategies to study mechanisms underlying adaptive changes of the human brain. The focus of this proposal is to explore the mechanisms underlying motor learning. Learning-induced neural plasticity and functional reorganization are well-established and well-documented, but not well-understood. Current neuroimaging studies investigate neural mechanisms underlying learning by exploring the changes in regional neural activity and inter-regional activity of task-performance. Little effort has been given to studying the more fundamental changes of neural connections and synaptic weighting. On the technical front, human functional imaging research sorely needs more rigorous approaches, as can be provided by mathematical modeling. A modeling framework - Structural Equation Modeling - is now accepted as appropriate for human imaging data. Structural equation modeling however, is currently performed with anatomical constraints based on neuroanatomical studies in non-human species. The performance of structural equation modeling might be greatly enhanced if anatomical constraints are individually optimized using the same subject s task-independent anatomical connectivity data. To date, this strategy has not been reported by any laboratory. The present proposal seeks to develop system-level modeling strategies for neuroimaging and to apply these novel strategies to mechanisms of action of motor learning. The overall goal of this proposal will be accomplished through the following four goals. First, developing and optimizing imaging strategies for detecting anatomical connectivity for each individual subject. Second, developing a structural equation modeling strategy by incorporating individual anatomical constraints to enhance those models performance. Third, investigating changes in regional neural activity and inter-regional activity of task-performance induced by motor learning using the enhanced modeling strategy. Fourth, investigating synaptic plasticity by applying the enhanced modeling and demonstrating that synaptic plasticity is an underlying mechanism of action of motor learning. When completed, this research project will increase the understanding of mechanisms of adaptive learning and has the potential of defining a new strategy by which functional imaging can be applied to study mechanisms of action and disease pathophysiology doc24937 none This award provides partial funding to support a summer school as an addition to the Eighteenth International Conference on Atomic Physics, ICAP , to be held in Cambridge, MA, July 28-August 3, . The purpose of the summer school is to serve the AMO community in two ways: 1) attraction and education of new workers into the AMO field, and 2) wider and more comprehensible dissemination of the results doc24938 none There is at present a worldwide effort to develop next-generation wireless communication systems. It is envisioned that many of the future wireless systems will incorporate considerable signal processing intelligence in order to provide advanced services such as multimedia transmission. In general, wireless channels can be very hostile media through which to communicate, due to substantial physical impediments, primarily radio-frequency interference and the time-varying nature of the channel. The need to provide universal wireless access at high data rates (which is the aim of many emerging wireless applications) presents a major technical challenge, and meeting this challenge necessitates the development of advanced signal processing techniques for multiple-access communications in non-stationary interference-rich environments. This research involves the development of adaptive signal processing algorithms and architectures for application in future wireless communications systems featuring high user mobility, high data rate and high quality of service. The primary emphases of this research are on advanced receiver signal processing techniques, and on advanced transmitter signal processing techniques for wireless systems. The first of these focuses on developing adaptive signal reception techniques for jointly combating various impairments in time-varying wireless channels, such as radio-frequency interference (narrowband interference, multiple-access interference, impulsive ambient noise), multipath fading, channel dispersion, etc. A particular approach that will be examined in depth is the exploitation of the redundancy introduced by channel coding at the receiver for interference mitigation and channel tracking. The second addresses adaptive signal transmission techniques in time-varying wireless channels for improving network capacity. Specifically, adaptive antenna array transmission techniques and adaptive frequency hopping techniques are being studied, with the focus on rapid adaptivity to dynamic channel environments. This research is expected to culminate in the formulation of novel signal processing techniques and system design concepts applicable to future wireless communication systems. It is also anticipated that this research will influence many current and next generation communication systems planners and designers, to bring the promise of many new research techniques into the arena of wireless communications doc24939 none The study of nonlinear partial differential equations is necessitated by countless problems from diverse disciplines: physics, economics, biology, etc. Fully nonlinear equations is a more recent subject within this field, but its importance is increasing due to the growing number of connections to other fields. In particular, the study of special Lagrangian submanifolds of Calabi-Yau manifolds is of particular interest in string theory, and consequently an active area of research among physicists and mathematicians alike. Because of the rapid growth and broad interest of the field, it is a natural topic for a CBMS Regional Conference. Researchers and graduate students who are new to the field can see how geometric problems of current interest can be reformulated as problems in nonlinear PDE, and at the same time witness the often surprising ways in which the geometric aspects of the problem inform the analytic aspects (and vice versa). Adding to the appeal of the meeting is the principal lecturer, Prof. Neil Trudinger. His reputation as an eminent researcher and gifted expositor make him an ideal choice to deliver the lectures. Moreover, the monograph resulting from the meeting will be of interest to scientists in a wide range of fields doc24940 none There is a growing recognition of a role for the inclusion of stochastic terms in the modeling of complex systems. The addition of such terms has led to interesting new mathematical problems at the interface of probability and partial differential equations. In order to quantify uncertainty and estimate predictability of these systems, we need better understanding of stochastic partial differential equations. Thus, the investigation of stochastic partial differential equations has attracted a lot of attention recently, from both theoretical and applied communities. It is now the very time to have a sharply focused conference in this field. The Principal Lecturer for this conference is Professor Jerzy Zabczyk, Institute of Mathematics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland. Jerzy Zabczyk s research on stochastic partial differential equations places him at the forefront of this exciting area. He is the co-author of the research monographs ``Stochastic Equations in Infinite Dimensions ( ) and ``Ergodicity in Infinite Dimensions ( ). He is uniquely qualified to provide an overview of the major recent developments in the subject and point to research directions in the future. Scientific and engineering systems are often subject to random influence. Stochastic partial differential equations are appropriate models for many randomly influenced systems. This conference is to stimulate new research on stochastic partial differential equations and their applications in engineering, science and finance, by bringing together both established researchers and graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. The lecture notes will be published and will be accessible to a wide audience of professionals interested in the subject doc24941 none The change in biology to a data driven science has meant that new educational needs have become apparent. Primary among these is the skills associated with biological informatics, skills in understanding algorithms and databases. This workshop will draw together a group of scientist with a background and experience in developing curricula in bioinformatics to identify best practices and the challenges that remain. The programs represented at the meeting cover the US and, by holding it in association with a major meeting, will help to raise awareness of the importance of education and training in biological informatics. A report of the meeting will be made available on the web doc24942 none This project proposes to continue the efforts of the Student Meeting Activities Subcommittee of the Power Engineering Education Committee (PEEC) of the IEEE Power Engineering Society (PES) to promote student interest and participation in the power engineering field by sponsoring 90-100 electrical engineering students to attend the IEEE-PES annual Summer Meeting to be held in Chicago, Illinois July 21-25, . The goal of this project is to provide an opportunity for students to be exposed to the most recent developments in design, operation, construction, and research in the power engineering field, to share ideas amongst themselves, and to interact with practicing engineers. This is a particularly critical time for power engineering as the industry undergoes significant change due to the restructuring of the traditional utility structure. It is crucial to recruit the nation s best and brightest engineering students into this evolving field. The career opportunities for students interested in power engineering are many and varied; opportunities exist within utilities, vendors, manufacturers, and consulting firms doc24943 none This award provides funds to subsidize the travel and housing expenses of students selected to participate in the sixth SIGART AAAI Doctoral Consortium, which will be held on July 28 and 29, , in Edmonton, Canada. The consortium will be collocated with the Eighteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (NCAI), which will be held from July 28 to August 1 in Edmonton. ACM SIGART and AAAI together organized the first six Doctoral Consortia, which have also been collated with NCAI (except for last year, when the consortium was collocated with the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)). At the consortium, Ph.D. students who are doing their dissertations on AI-related topics present their proposed research, and receive feedback from a panel of established researchers as well as from the other students. This provides the students with invaluable exposure to outside perspectives on their work, at a critical time in their research, and also enables them to explore their career objectives. There will also be a panel on career options as part of the consortium. This workshop contributes to the professional development of young scientists who will lead this growing field in the coming decades doc24944 none The Mathematics Department of Wayne State University is hosting a National Science Foundation--Conference Board of Mathematical Sciences (NSF-CBMS) Regional Research Conference during the period of May 18 to May 22, . The conference topic is ``Free boundary problems in partial differential equations and applications. This five-day-long conference is intended to stimulate further interest in this important mathematical research area. The aim of this conference is to highlight the new methods, directions and most recent developments in variational and nonvariational free boundary theory. It will focus on the existence and regularity of solutions of free boundary problems and applications to problems arising in science and technology. Professor David Jerison from MIT will present ten lectures in this focused area along with additional invited speakers including Luis Caffarelli (UT, Austin), Avner Friedman (Ohio State University), Carlos Kenig (University of Chicago) and Fanghua Lin (Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences), each of whom will give one hour lecture. These additional lectures are meant to complement the ten lectures given by the principal speaker and motivate more active discussions among the participants. The format of the conference will be intensive lectures by the featured speaker and four invited speakers along with semi-structured discussion sessions following the invited talks. To meet the requirement of CBMS meetings, we will not schedule any contributed talks by the participants. Anticipated participants shall include not only well established researchers, but also graduate students, postdoctoral and young researchers. In particular, the conference will encourage the participation of women, persons with disabilities and people from under-represented groups doc24945 none This award will fund an NSF-CBMS Regional Research Conference entitled ``The Web of Modularity to be held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the summer of . The conference lecturer will be Professor Ken Ono of the University of Wisconsin at Madison; Professor Ono will give ten lectures centered around the diverse roles which the theory of modular forms plays in various areas of mathematics related to Number Theory. The conference will focus on a wide array of problems which can be addressed through the use of modular forms. These include, among others, problems from representation theory, partition theory, arithmetic geometry, the theory of L-functions, hypergeometric series, and combinatorics. Although these comprise a very broad array of topics in active areas of mathematical research, they share the feature that they can be understood using a unified set of techniques from the theory of modular forms. The main goals of the conference are: 1) To present an organized and motivated description of the important and diverse role which modular forms play in Number Theory and other areas of mathematics. 2) To provide young mathematicians and newcomers to the field (particularly graduate students and post-docs)with an accessible account of important techniques, theorems, and open problems at the forefront of this area of research. 3) To provide established researchers an opportunity to share their expertise and to interact with each other and with junior mathematicians. 4) To strengthen regional ties among researchers working in areas connected to the themes of the meeting. 5) To plan a scientific program which will lead to a published monograph of lasting importance to the wider mathematical community doc24946 none We shall organize a Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences conference on `Expansion Methods in Combinatorics to take place in Memphis in May . The principal lecturer will be Christian Borgs of Microsoft Research and the conference will be aimed at young researchers as well as established researchers in combinatorics, computer science and other areas related to statistical physics and probability theory. Although several methods from statistical physics have already found applications in combinatorics and theoretical computer science, one of the classical methods of statistical mechanics, cluster expansion, has hardly been employed in these fields. There is every reason to believe that in the right hands these expansion techniques will find important and far-reaching applications in combinatorics and theoretical computer science. For this reason, the conference will address these important techniques with the twin aims of raising awareness of them and working towards their simplification doc24947 none This small grant for exploratory research will support development of novel computer systems that will enhance the quality of life of people suffering from Alzheimer s Disease and similar cognitive disorders. Assisted Cognition systems use ubiquitous computing and artificial intelligence technology to replace some of the memory and problem-solving abilities that have been lost by an Alzheimer s patient. Assisted Cognition systems: sense aspects of an individual s location and environment, both outdoors and at home, relying on a wide range of sensors such as Global Positioning Systems (GPS), active badges, motion detectors, and other ubiquitous computing infrastructure; learn to interpret patterns of everyday behavior, and recognize signs of distress, disorientation, or confusion, using techniques from state estimation, plan recognition, and machine learning; offer help to patients through various kinds of interventions including speech and natural language processing; and alert human care-givers in case of danger. Two concrete examples of the Assisted Cognition systems that will be developed are an activity compass that helps reduce spatial disorientation both inside and outside the home, and an adaptive prompter that helps patients carry out multi-step everyday tasks. This project will explore an emerging area that could be of great humanitarian, commercial, social, and scientific importance in the coming decades doc24948 none The objective of this investigation is to examine the downstream impacts of large dams on the nation s rivers. In particular the PI wishes to develop new knowledge about how dam installation and operation have affected the characteristics of river channels and riparian environments. Specific questions include the temporal and spatial distributions of stream power downstream in relation to scale and engineering characteristics of dams, as well as, operating rules. In addition the geographic effects of distributions of stream power will be assessed from the perspectives of channel width, flood plain dimensions, channel patterns and near channel landforms, and spatial distributions of riparian ecosystems. The strategy is to compare present conditions on experimental river reaches that have been impacted by dams with nearby similar control reaches that are without such structures for up to 42 of the largest dams in the country. Methods of investigation focus on hydrologic analyses of streamflow data using statistical techniques, geographic analyses of aerial photographic images using GIS, and field investigations to collect sediment and vegetation data. The project will advance present fluvial theory for impounded rivers for such theory is in its infancy and does not include generalizations about the range of hydrologic and geomorphic impacts of dams. From an applied perspective the work will provide new information on the effect of rivers on critical habitat doc24949 none Szilagyi Naturally occurring long-term mean annual recharge to groundwater over a large region (i.e. the state of Nebraska) will be estimated with the help of a water balance approach coupled with an automated baseflow-separation technique. Evapotranspiration is to be calculated with the WREVAP model at the Solar and Meteorological Surface Observation Network (SAMSON) sites. Mean annual base recharge will be obtained by the product of Long-term mean annual runoff (the difference between precipitation [about 400 stations] and evapotranspiration) and the Baseflow Index using discharge data from the USGS gaging stations (about 130 stations) in Nebraska. Base recharge will be augmented by the amount of evapotranspiration that comes directly from groundwater and will be obtained by using satellite-derived multi-year Normalized Difference Vegetation Indices to locate the areas where this happens. Mapping will be achieved using Geographic Information Systems technology and geostatistics. This work builds upon recent advances in hydrology (the WREVAP model using Bouchet s complementary hypothesis which proved to be pivotal in explaining climate-induced changes in the hydrologic cycle [see this author s works on evaporation trends: http: csd.unl.edu csd staff szilagyi szilagyi.html], and the automated baseflow separation algorithm) while making use of remote sensing and GIS. The present approach can easily be extended to continental scales to define fluxes to the groundwater which may become important in the understanding of the global hydrologic cycle as it relates to climate change. Currently there is no standard approach in estimating recharge fluxes to the groundwater, especially at a regional scale. The existing approaches generally build upon the use of complex water balance and or hydro-geological models, with typically large number of parameters related to: soil and vegetation type and status, and diverse aquifer properties (permeability, saturated thickness, etc.), many of which must be optimized. Instead, the proposed approach utilizes measured data of streamflow, precipitation and a state-of-the-art evaporation estimation technique enhanced by satellite remote sensing images without the need of complex modeling and parameter optimization doc24950 none Hysteresis is a ubiquitous phenomenon arising in diverse areas of engineering. In applications, it is closely linked to energy dissipation, and it is associated with quasi-static memory-dependent behavior. Many applications involve rate-dependent hysteresis, which merges quasi-static hysteresis with fully dynamic behavior, thereby yielding quasi-static hysteresis as a limiting feature of dynamic system properties. In the proposed research, we plan to develop differential models for rate-dependent hysteresis and use these models for nonlinear system identification and adaptive feedback control. The proposed research will simplify and extend existing hysteresis models and provide new techniques for identification and control of hysteresis in diverse applications doc24951 none s, meeting proceedings, and a final summary report. The summary will include recommendations for future research strategies aimed at unraveling Antarctic climate and glacial evolution. A draft version of the workshop report will be presented to SCAR XXVII in July . An abbreviated workshop summary will be submitted to the primary literature, while the complete document will be disseminated via hardcopy mailings, through email list servers, and via the world-wide-web. An ACE website has already been established at the University of Massachusetts (http: www.geo.umass.edu ace). It is intended that the results of this workshop will help guide ACE related research for years to come doc24952 none Ayres The goal of the proposed work is to combine high-resolution Scanning Probe Microscope (SPM)-based imaging that has been achieved for biological specimens with a novel approach to SPM-based nanomanipulation to yield a significant new approach for direct nanobiological investigations. To achieve efficient and reliable manipulation in a micro nano environment, capabilities of sensing, processing and actuation in dynamic interactions are essential. Using the proposed approach, signals that would normally be projected as an SPM image are acquired and essential information is extracted for subsequent use as the sensing component within a feedback control loop formulation. The control loop is used to accurately steer the probe s tip along a prescribed trajectory. The feedback loop formulation involves landmark recognition and dynamic pattern matching through adaptive learning. With this capability, the tip is able to return to and stay centered on a specific site by recognizing the way the site feels to the probe tip. Except for high-level commands, the human operator can be eliminated from the operation and the full potential of this instrument with inherently sub-nanometer resolution can be utilized doc24953 none The workshop will bring together leaders from industry, government, academe and the financial community to explore in more detail their views on the future of nanotechnology. The workshop will draw attendees mainly from the Southern US region (Arizona - Florida) and will focus on the importance of nanotechnology to five areas of application: (1) human capital (education and training), (2) energy, (3) molecular electronics, (4) medicine life sciences, and (5) aerospace. Duncan Hall on the rice University campus doc24954 none This award supports the travel and subsistence expenses of student participants in the First International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agents Systems (AAMAS), being held July 15 - 19, in Bologna, Italy. This conference is entirely devoted to all aspects of research and application of agents technology, an important area of research in the success of the World Wide Web, electronic commerce, digital libraries, search agents, personal agents and synthetic agents. Participation in this conference will allow a diverse group of students, representing a wide range of research areas and methodologies, to present their research to the agents community. In addition, special mentoring activities are planned for them doc24955 none Stricker This award supports a one-year collaborative research project between Professor Stephen Stricker of the University of New Mexico and Professor Takeo Kishimoto of the Tokyo Institute of Biosciences and Biotechnology. The researchers will undertake a study on the role of Akt PKB in the maturation of marine worm eggs. For fertilization and development to proceed normally, eggs characteristically must undergo a maturation process that is mediated by an important cell cycle modulator, termed maturation-promoting factor (MPF). Immature eggs (= oocytes ) of nemerteans spontaneously mature after contacting natural seawater (NSW) by undergoing a process called germinal vesicle breakdown (GVBD). Such GVBD is blocked by isolating oocytes in calcium-free SW (CaFSW), but this inhibition can be overridden by adding low doses of the neurohormone serotonin (=5-HT). The researchers will attempt to determine if during 5-HT-induced GVBD in nemertean oocytes, Akt PKB is activated in a MAPK-and cdc25-independent manner that in turn downregulates Myt-1 and thereby activates MPF as in starfish oocytes. The research will be centered on optical imaging and spectroscopic techniques with high spatial and temporal resolution. The project brings together the efforts of two laboratories that have complementary expertise and research capabilities. Professor Kishimoto s laboratory in Japan is one of the leading centers in the world for investigations of MPF regulation in a variety of cells, including maturing eggs. The lab specializes in studies of starfish egg maturation. The lab practices a low-pressure form of microinjection that is particularly well suited for quantitative injections required for antibody inactivations of Akt. Professor Stricker s laboratory utilizes an alternative high-pressure microinjection system that does not readily lend itself to quantitation. The research will offer a good opportunity to join efforts between the two countries. Through the exchange of ideas and technology, this project will broaden our base of basic knowledge and promote international understanding and cooperation. The project advances international human resources through the participation of a graduate student doc24956 none Antsaklis This is a request for travel funds for a Workshop titled Advanced hybrid systems theory for the control of networked systems to be held in conjunction with the World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) in Barcelona, Spain on July 21, . The requested funds will be instrumental in enabling participation in the workshop of internationally recognized US experts in the area of hybrid control systems and control networks, as well as of young researchers, interested in this increasingly important area. This workshop is co-sponsored by the European Commission, IST Programme, Brussels, Belgium (Dr. Alkis Konstantellos), which will partially cover the travel expenses of the European participants and also cover the expenses for the meeting facilities. The Organizers Moderators of this workshop are Dr. Panos Antsaklis from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana and Dr. Manfred Morari from ETH, Zurich, Switzerland. Dr. Antsaklis is organizing the participation of US researchers and Dr. Morari is organizing the EU participation doc24957 none The coming generation of tetherless communication technology promises a giant leap forward in information accessibility. Advanced features of the so-called fourth-generation wireless systems and beyond, such as data rates compatible with multimedia applications, will enable many emerging applications not possible with current wireless systems. However, it is not at all clear how wireless receivers should be optimally designed to meet the technical challenges introduced by the wider bandwidths and higher data rates inherent in the future wireless systems. It is generally believed that the real niche for future wireless receivers lies in the development of adaptive systems to perform sophisticated signal processing functions. But, at this time there is a lack of concrete principles that can be used to design these futuristic receivers. It is important at this stage to acquire the insights and theoretical tools that may help spark revolutionary breakthroughs in this field. Investigation of design methodologies of adaptive Bayesian receivers in single-user and multiuser fading channels is proposed. The approach is to formulate the problems of signal reception in unknown time-varying channels as multivariate Bayesian inference problems. Sequential Monte Carlo filtering methods, the relatively simple but extremely powerful numerical techniques recently developed in the field of statistics, will be employed to develop adaptive systems for computing the Bayesian estimates of the channels and data. An array of receiver design problems found in wireless communications, such as mitigation of various types of radio-frequency interference (including multiple-access interference, narrowband interference, impulsive noise), tracking of fading channels, resolving multipath channel dispersion, space-time processing by multiple antennas, exploiting coded signal structures, etc., will be treated under the unified framework of sequential Monte Carlo Bayesian estimation. The theoretical effort in this project is expected to culminate in the formulation of novel receiver design concepts applicable for future wireless systems doc24958 none An Innovative underwater foundation system utilizing suction piles was introduced in the offshore industry recently. Since then, suction piles have been successfully used in numerous occasions on a variety of offshore structures. Suction piles have advantages over conventional underwater foundation systems due to their simplicity and efficiency. More obvious advantages of suction piles are easy installation, large bearing capacity, and retrievability. The retrieval of suction piles is achieved through careful application of increased water pressure inside the pile. The applied water pressure must be determined carefully so that the suction pile can be retrieved safely. The main objective of this study is to identify the relationship between the applied positive water pressure inside the pile and the resulting pile pull-out movement through full-scale field tests. These experiments will provide an invaluable insight for the future development of an analytical solution for safe suction pile retrieval. The field retrieval and instrumentation will be designed and supervised by the principal investigator and performed by the Naval Facilities Engineering Service Center with three suction piles that were successfully installed by the principal investigator in . Significant matching contribution commitment has already been made by the Naval Facilities Engineering Service Center as evidence of their interests and emphasis on the expanded use of suction piles doc24959 none The project is extending work on isotopic fractionation of nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for the purpose of elucidating the budgets and the processes that contribute to the sources and sinks of these greenhouse gases. A combination of two- and three-dimensional models are being applied to relate the observed atmospheric isotopic fractionations to various biospheric processes that will help constrain the values of their sources and sinks. This work is contributing to the understanding of two atmospheric trace gases that are likely to play a major role in future climate change doc24960 none In this Product Realization and Envrionmental Manufacturing Innovative Systems (PREMISE) project, Wayne State University and Lamar University plan to jointly develop a comprehensive profitable pollution prevention (P3) theory, with a specific focus on the development of an integrated reversed drag-out and dynamic water allocation methodology for maximum waste and energy reduction in general cleaning, rinsing, and plating systems in electroplating. The dynamic waste and energy reduction will capture all-time details of product and environmental quality and economics in the entire production system. This distinguishes it from commonly practiced approaches that focus on: (i) a solely steady-state result of waste reduction, (ii) individual units, and (iii) end-of-plant, rather than end-of-line waste. In this development, the PIs will conduct three types of integration: (i) the integration of cleaning, rinsing, and plating, (ii) the integration of design (modification) and control (operation), and (iii) the integration of economics and environmental concerns. In system design, the basic approach of the methodology is to pump cleaning, rinsing, and plating solutions back (seemingly very risky), to maximize the dirt residue on parts to the upper limits of dirtiness (seemingly not acceptable), to increase drag-out in certain operations (seemingly against convention), and to dynamically switch water allocation (seemingly very difficult). The methodology will be tested in a real industrial setting. The preliminary results will justify the initiation of the second phase of the project. The joint effort will also benefit the graduate education in the two universities as students will not only be co-advised by the professors with different strengths, but also have opportunities to work with collaborating engineers. As the second most environmentally regulated industry, the electroplating industry is facing tremendous challenges in achieving increasingly stringent environmental and energy goals and maintaining global economic competitiveness. An urgent need for the industry is the methodology that can substantially improve pollution prevention (P2) practice and gain economical benefits simultaneously in electroplating plants doc24960 none In this Product Realization and Envrionmental Manufacturing Innovative Systems (PREMISE) project, Wayne State University and Lamar University plan to jointly develop a comprehensive profitable pollution prevention (P3) theory, with a specific focus on the development of an integrated reversed drag-out and dynamic water allocation methodology for maximum waste and energy reduction in general cleaning, rinsing, and plating systems in electroplating. The dynamic waste and energy reduction will capture all-time details of product and environmental quality and economics in the entire production system. This distinguishes it from commonly practiced approaches that focus on: (i) a solely steady-state result of waste reduction, (ii) individual units, and (iii) end-of-plant, rather than end-of-line waste. In this development, the PIs will conduct three types of integration: (i) the integration of cleaning, rinsing, and plating, (ii) the integration of design (modification) and control (operation), and (iii) the integration of economics and environmental concerns. In system design, the basic approach of the methodology is to pump cleaning, rinsing, and plating solutions back (seemingly very risky), to maximize the dirt residue on parts to the upper limits of dirtiness (seemingly not acceptable), to increase drag-out in certain operations (seemingly against convention), and to dynamically switch water allocation (seemingly very difficult). The methodology will be tested in a real industrial setting. The preliminary results will justify the initiation of the second phase of the project. The joint effort will also benefit the graduate education in the two universities as students will not only be co-advised by the professors with different strengths, but also have opportunities to work with collaborating engineers. As the second most environmentally regulated industry, the electroplating industry is facing tremendous challenges in achieving increasingly stringent environmental and energy goals and maintaining global economic competitiveness. An urgent need for the industry is the methodology that can substantially improve pollution prevention (P2) practice and gain economical benefits simultaneously in electroplating plants doc24962 none The technical approach in this Product Realization and Environmental Manufacturing Innovative Systems (PREMISE) project involves the selection of conventional batch polymerization processes in solvent media and comparison with alternative solventless continuous processes. Application of the produced solid powders will be compared by considering: a) conventional high temperature curing and b) lower temperature curing by UV radiation. The research plan includes detailed engineering calculations; cost comparison and application of life cycle analysis (LCA) principles and Design for Environment (DFE) methodologies to identify the potential advantages of the alternative systems as well as initiation of experimental work towards developing UV curable powder formulations in continuous solventless reactors. Polymeric powder coatings provide environmental and corrosion protection to a variety of substrates for civilian and military applications. By comparison to solvent based coatings whose application is often associated with significant VOC emissions, the production of powder-coated items is sometimes considered as a green process. However, there are still many elements in the lifecycle of conventional powder coated products, from manufacturing of the powder by polymerization to its subsequent application and curing, which are excessive in energy and solvent usage. Systems based on continuous bulk polymerization processes in the absence of solvents, followed by UV initiated curing at low temperatures appear to be excellent candidates for reduced energy usage and lower environmental impact versus conventional systems. This research is highly relevant to the R&D priorities of the coating industry, i.e. lower overall cost and lower curing temperatures along with low VOCs and hazardous air pollutants (HAPs). It is also relevant to the growing need in polymer engineering academic curricula to incorporate case studies related to industrial ecology and environmental issues in process product design doc24963 none The goal of this Product Realization and Environmental Manufacturing Innovative Systems (PREMISE) Exploratory Research project is to allow policy-makers to better allocate research funds by providing an understanding of both the environmental value and market potential of an emergent technology. Realizing the energy and resource benefits of emerging materials, depends upon market success for those materials. This success is driven by the bundle of characteristics provided by the incumbent and emergent technology. Although classic value theory can identify the preferred alternative, it provides no guidance in describing the actual path of adoption. Solely retrospective analyses are also inappropriate for describing markets confronted with significant structural changes (e.g., revolutionary materials). A methodology that addresses the issues that drive a material s potential for commercialization is needed and will be developed by this project, including: 1) the cost and performance characteristics necessary to lead to substitution; 2) the potential for a material I process to achieve those characteristics; 3) the manner in which material markets evolve in the face of increasing demand; and 4) the net lifetime impact on resource use provided by an emerging technology. The planning activity will assemble an interdisciplinary team to identify the issues which drive adoption and the methodologies appropriate to their study. The planning effort will yield a research plan for assessing such issues and identifying preliminary case studies to guide the second phase of work. Another objective of this planning project is the integration of resource use considerations and industrial ecology concepts into engineering education. The project will focus on the development of interdisciplinary, case-based courses. The integrated framework that will emerge from this work will allow decision makers to identify those materials technologies most likely to make an impact on environmental burden as well as to understand under what conditions those substitutions will occur doc24964 none The objective of this research project is to understand how product development organizations use environmental information in their decision-making during the design of a new product. The research views product development as an information flow governed by decision-makers who must act under time and budget constraints. The project will conduct an exploratory study to describe the flow of information related to environmental decision-making in the product development activities of an electronics manufacturing company. The project will construct a long-term collaborative research agenda to improve environmentally responsible product development, particularly by integrating design decision support tools into other product development activities. If successful, this research will yield new models that guide the development of powerful decision support tools (for specific decision- makers) and the rational and systematic deployment of these tools across the entire product development organization. Ultimately, this will reduce the time and cost of environmentally responsible product development across a range of industrial sectors. The research will benefit society by helping manufacturing companies develop energy-efficient and environmentally benign products doc24965 none Charles Sukenik Old Dominion University The project is about a planning visit for developing collaborative research work in optical dipole traps for ultracold atoms with researchers at Korea University in Korea. The proposed work is to address the issue of creating a perturbation limited environment for conducting precision measurements by studying two regimes of optical dipole force trapping doc24966 none The goal of this Product Realization and Environmental Manufacturing Innovative Systems (PREMISE) Exploratory Research project is to establish a multi-disciplinary team that brings together several manufacturing engineering disciplines with system ecologists and city planning to understand how ecosystem and social valuations can be integrated into enterprise decision-making. The creation of tools that support this goal will enable systematic approaches to enterprise design to appropriately balance industrial activity and human development with ecosystem health, and the analysis of process modifications at spatial scales that span the local watershed to the global environment. The specific objective is to engage in a scientific atelier - a problem-based learning course that has participants, faculty and students, from Georgia Tech and the University of Vermont. The specific case studies will take existing ecosystem models, Patuxent Landscape and the Gwynns Falls Landscape Models, which contain both urban and rural land use and pressures for human system development, and combine them with at least two different types of manufacturing activities. The probable success of integrating models of ecosystems with manufacturing systems is built on the fact that both use unit models - convenient decompositions of the systems under study into re-useable components, and solve the resulting transient mass and energy balances. The key challenges are bridging conceptual and terminological gaps between the modeling communities, determining the appropriate scaling and abstractions of the models such that data that is transferred matches the information that is available, and understanding how manufacturing decisions can and should be influenced by ecosystem capital and service valuations. Ensuring environmental quality is emerging as a key societal goal for industrialized nations. This project will enable research on understanding how we can value, and account for, the ecosystem services upon which we build our wealth as we design and operate diverse manufacturing systems doc24967 none This proposal supports a highly visible dissemination outlet for grant holders in the Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) and Advanced Technological Education (ATE) Programs. The PI is organizing a poster session at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference in June of each of the next three years ( - ). He is inviting grant award recipients from one or two years earlier to submit an abstract for inclusion in the poster session doc24968 none The objective of this PREMISE research is to use engineering, business, environmental science and public policy knowledge to develop methods and design metrics that enable the integration of design for environment considerations into the design, development, production and marketing of global products. Enforceable guidelines for global manufacturers and material suppliers to use in rating their products will also be developed. This will include approaches for capturing the impact of single components as well as that of assemblies of globally manufactured components. The research results will lead to an educational module on design for environment in the Global Product Development course taught jointly at the University of Michigan, Oxford University and Seoul National University. In return, the course will provide a realistic test bed for research on topics that transcend local and national economies. The most important benefit of this research is that product designers will have available to them methods for designing environmentally friendly global products. The design for environment rating for global products will provide an analytical tool that can be used for tradeoffs and analyses in various phases of the product development. Global products with environmental awareness features will increase the consumer s awareness to environmental issues. The environmental rating scheme will facilitate decision making to distribute the product s raw materials and processing to regions where the environmental impact of production is the lowest. This research will also allow global product development teams to consolidate resources around environmental objectives in a way that is not possible for products that are predominantly local in their production, use and recycling doc24969 none The goal of this Product Realization and Environmental Manufacturing Innovative Systems (PREMISE) Exploratory Research project is to establish a multi-disciplinary team that brings together several manufacturing engineering disciplines with system ecologists and city planning to understand how ecosystem and social valuations can be integrated into enterprise decision-making. The creation of tools that support this goal will enable systematic approaches to enterprise design to appropriately balance industrial activity and human development with ecosystem health, and the analysis of process modifications at spatial scales that span the local watershed to the global environment. The specific objective is to engage in a scientific atelier - a problem-based learning course that has participants, faculty and students, from Georgia Tech and the University of Vermont. The specific case studies will take existing ecosystem models, Patuxent Landscape and the Gwynns Falls Landscape Models, which contain both urban and rural land use and pressures for human system development, and combine them with at least two different types of manufacturing activities. The probable success of integrating models of ecosystems with manufacturing systems is built on the fact that both use unit models - convenient decompositions of the systems under study into re-useable components, and solve the resulting transient mass and energy balances. The key challenges are bridging conceptual and terminological gaps between the modeling communities, determining the appropriate scaling and abstractions of the models such that data that is transferred matches the information that is available, and understanding how manufacturing decisions can and should be influenced by ecosystem capital and service valuations. Ensuring environmental quality is emerging as a key societal goal for industrialized nations. This project will enable research on understanding how we can value, and account for, the ecosystem services upon which we build our wealth as we design and operate diverse manufacturing systems doc24970 none This grant the National Science Foundation s PREMISE program provides funds to examine issues associated with the substitution of petroleum-based lubricants with bio-based (i.e. plant-derived) lubricants for industrial applications. Such an approach would appear to be an attractive material substitution; biolubricants are renewable, relatively nontoxic, biodegradable, and more easily extracted and processed than petrolubricants, with fewer environmental consequences. There are, however, three aspects of the use of biolubricants that must be addressed further in order to estimate the societal, environmental, and technological benefits and impacts of the widespread use of these substitutes: performance, regulatory, and life cycle. Using a variety of standardized testing procedures and data sources, this research will examine these three areas, comparing results with similar information for petroleum-derived lubricants. This research involves the assembly of a multidisciplinary group with members from academia, government, and the industrial sector, that possesses the collective expertise to address the diverse issues associated with bio- and petro-based lubricants. The main goals of the project are to begin the process of gathering data and integrating findings into a comprehensive assessment of the value and costs of biolubricants as replacement materials for petroleum-based products, and to establish a framework for extending the results obtained to specific applications. If it can be shown that biolubricants are as effective as mineral oils currently being used, are cost competitive, and result in fewer environmental problems, it is probable that much of the data collected can be extrapolated to a variety of industrial applications. from doc24971 none This Production Realization and Environment Manufacturing Innovative Systems (PREMISE) project is aimed at establishing the major effects of spray cooling under a wide range of cutting conditions, tool geometry and three major aluminum work materials (356, 380 and 390) in most commonly known automotive machining operations covering turning, milling, and drilling. The effects of influencing parameters such as the fluid (and mist) flow rate, air pressure, direction of spray (and the nozzle position), type and composition of fluid, etc., are to be studied and compared for machining performance measures such as tool-wear tool-life, cutting forces, chip-forms chip breakability, surface roughness, etc. A sensitivity analysis will be made in order to identify the major influencing parameters and relevant empirical relationships will be derived for practical applications. At the end, a full range of validation is proposed. The project will be conducted in four overlapping phases in twelve months. The findings of this project will validate and establish the feasibility of using spray cooling to replace conventional flood cooling in specific applications, thus avoiding the disadvantages such as extremely harmful environmental pollution, negative influence on personnel health, increased production costs and poor energy efficiency, etc., prevalent in flood cooling. The machining performance will not be compromised in spray cooling applications. The identification of the primary influencing parameters in spray cooling is important for machining process planning. The experimental data generated and the relevant empirical relationships established from this project will also serve as the basis for developing analytical models for use in the optimization of machining processes doc24972 none There is a growing urgency to develop novel biobased products and innovative technologies that can reduce the US dependence on fossil fuel. This PREMISE project seeks to replace existing petroleum-based glass fiber-nylon composites with sustainable, eco-friendly, green composites produced from a combination of engineered natural bio-fibers and a new, emerging bacterial-based bio-plastic (polyhydroxyalkanoate, PHA) for automotive applications. This green composite material has the attributes of recyclability and triggered biodegradability i.e. (stable during intended life but biodegradable only under composting conditions) to qualify it as a sustainable material. The objective is to strengthen the connection between DESIGN and MANUFACTURING of this novel green composite so that they can have a positive impact upon industrial applications. This project will address research issues related to the development of ideas and creation of tools for sustainable product development in the manufacturing enterprise. In order to achieve sustainability , all the components such as environment, economics, life cycle analysis, energy and education are included in this project. Product realization for industrial application of biocomposites requires complete Life Cycle Assessment, from production of bio-fibers and bio-plastics, to design and engineering of green biocomposites to their ultimate disposal or recycling. Energy calculations for the entire manufacturing system will be calculated from fiber plastic production to their processing and manufacturing based upon the existing scientific literature and preliminary experimental data collected from the pilot-scale experiments. A strong collaborative partnership with representative industrial participants, METABOLIX (manufacturer of bioplastic), FLAXCRAFT (natural fiber company) and FORD (automotive OEM) insures relevancy and a high potential for industrial implementation in the future doc24973 none The objectives of this Product Realization and Environmental Manufacturing Innovative Systems (PREMISE) Exploratory Research project are: (1) To conduct exploratory research into the feasibility of an alternative PCB recycling process based on cryogenic decomposition of the PCBs; (2) To establish an interdisciplinary research team that can develop a long-term collaboration that builds on the understanding developed in this project; (3) To evaluate the proposed recycling process against traditional PCB recycling processes in terms of recycle rate economics, energy consumption, and environmental performance; and (4) To examine the feasibility of reusing plastics in the proposed recycling process. The proposed recycling process is cryogenic decomposition of the PCBs. The process takes advantage of the fact that at very low temperatures, polymeric materials become highly brittle. In addition, the residual stresses set-up in the PCB resins due to thermal expansion mismatch between the polymers and other materials on the PCB is expected to lead to a better separation than might otherwise be possible simply due to the embrittlement of the plastics. Actual laboratory experiments will be performed using a cryogenic test system. Wide diffusion of electronic equipment and shortening of product lifecycles have caused a serious problem: how to deal with large quantities of end-of-life or obsolete electronic equipment. While there are various technical challenges for electronic product recovery and recycling, this research focuses on printed circuit boards (PCBs) or printed wiring boards (PWBs). PCBs are primary components in many electronic products built for both military and commercial applications. Due to their complex construction and the consequent complicated mixture of materials, PCB recycling presents a serious challenge to today s industry. The rich content of precious metals provides a strong economic justification for materials recovery and recycling. On the other hand, large amounts of toxic components and fiber-reinforced polymers create difficulties for recycling and adverse environmental impact doc24974 none The overarching goal of this Product Realization and Environmental Manufacturing Innovative Systems (PREMISE) research project is to develop supporting technology and knowledge to facilitate the diffusion of Closed Loop Direct Metal Deposition (DMD) technology as an energy, cost, and environmental improvement relative to traditional mold and die manufacturing processes. While the technological viability of DMD is proven, and the technology is poised to have a major impact on the metals and plastics industries, DMD must be evaluated for its economic, energy, and environmental impact before the technology diffuses into the standard practice. As experience has shown, once a technology has diffused widely and a standard practice is established around it, it is difficult to improve its environmental characteristics, especially if environmental improvement requires a change to the supply chain infrastructure. Therefore it is important to launch DMD at the outset with all of its potential environmental impacts, costs, and energy consumption minimized, and to develop an end-of-life recycling and re-use infrastructure that is prepared to handle pants generated by DMD operations. During Phase I of the proposed PREMISE research and education program following major tasks will be addressed to achieve the above-mentioned goals: 1) DMD and traditional mold manufacturing will be compared with respect to their energy consumption, environmental emissions, and costs to identify improvement opportunities; 2) CAD CAM-based design tools will be formulated for DMD that integrate design and manufacturing considerations (including eco-design and manufacturing); 3) An environmental thread will be established for the design and manufacturing curriculum of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. In today s fast-paced, environmentally conscious society, the cycle of consumer taste for products is becoming shorter and shorter, necessitating manufacturers to go to market with shorter and shorter lead times while continuously reducing cost. However, the long-lead time currently required to design and fabricate molds and dies in the manufacturing industry does not always support this urgency to move products to market quickly. In fact, it is not unusual for large, complicated molds and dies to take up to a year before they are ready to manufacture a product. Solid Free Form technologies such as Closed Loop Direct Metal Deposition (DMD) offers a viable alternative. DMD produces three-dimensional components including molds and dies with nearly full density and controlled macro- and microstructure directly from CAD software using one or more materials doc24975 none The Product Realization and Environmental Manufacturing Innovative Systems (PREMISE) Exploratory research and education activities will initiate one of the first efforts for integrated systematic analysis of technical, economic and life cycle environmental aspects of manufactured products and processes at multiple spatial scales, with specific emphasis on polymer composites. Advanced polymeric composite materials are used widely in their enormous range of lightweight products with superior physical mechanical properties. Although these composites provide many advantages in the use phase, they pose significant environmental challenges throughout their life cycle. These challenges include the use of non-renewable resources, emissions of hazardous chemicals, energy use, and difficulty in recycling. Many innovative processes for tasks such as, molding and coating seem to be economically viable with a smaller environmental impact. However, industry is often reluctant to adopt many of these techniques primarily due to a lack of comprehensive studies and tools to compare and evaluate the technical, environmental and economic aspects of various composite-manufacturing processes. The need for such research is identifies in the recent NSF DOE report on chemical industry. This proposal brings together investigators from different engineering departments and universities with complementary skills. The industrial partners, Omnova and Honda, will help in obtaining the required data for this work. Furthermore, through the university s Center for Advanced Polymer and Composite Engineering (CAPCE) the proposed work will have access to 27 industrial members and state-of the art facilities while providing access to undergraduate and graduate students doc24976 none Prop #: PI: David Powell This award will supply shipboard scientific support equipment for the research vessel Walton Smith operated by the University of Miami, Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences and dedicated to use in support of marine research. The Shipboard Scientific Support Equipment Program provides funds for ship equipment deemed essential to the proper and safe conduct of ocean science research. The Program provides support for such items as deck equipment including winch systems for the deployment and retrieval of scientific instruments, navigational equipment such as radars, gyroscopes and earth satellite receivers to pin point the location of research sites, communication equipment including radio transceivers and satellite transceivers for voice and scientific data communications and other equipment such as motorized workboats for transporting scientists to and from data retrieval sites. The Project Director, David Powell is fully qualified to direct this project having had considerable experience in overseeing the acquisition and installation of shipboard equipment. This project will allow the institution to acquire EM conductor winch with block upgrades, hydro cable winch with block upgrades and winch control modification doc24977 none Endres The research focus of this CAREER project is integrated analysis of the machine tool, tooling, and machining process in support of a systems-approach to the development, planning and diagnosis of machining systems. This requires a comprehensive analysis tool that merges detailed cutting mechanics and analytical machining dynamics, which represents a shift in paradigm from looking at the two as virtually separate problems. A 3-D mechanistic edge ploughing model will be formulated such that it adheres to slip-line theory. The ploughing model will be complemented by a model of the cut-chip deformation energy that is present when using curved cutting edges seen in industrially relevant processes. The result is the replacement of process-specific physical calibration experiments with predicted process-specific calibration pseudo-based solely on tube-end turning physical test data. It will then be merged with an analytical solution for chatter level, derived first for a linear process and then extended to account for process nonlinearity. Educational activities will include the redevelopment of a mechanical design course into a project-based experience including design, analysis and hands-on manufacture of components and simple systems, as well as the development of a graduate course on dynamics and mechanics of machining as a repository for the latest research in machining dynamics and fundamental process mechanics. The development of analytical dynamics solutions for performance and risk assessment increases the pool of analysis tools and allows industrial users to reduce calibration testing. The resulting advances in the science base will make possible economic implementation of emerging machining practices (high-speed, single-pass and hard machining doc24978 none This project involves the development of software to facilitate the understanding and use of brain model simulations. The project is based on the GENESIS neural simulation system developed over the last 12 years in the laboratory of the principal investigator. GENESIS is now used in many laboratories throughout the world as a tool to help construct and run brain models at many levels of brain organization from subcellular to whole networks and systems. This project will develop a modeler s workspace to help find, organize, and visualize the data on which these simulations are based. In addition this project provides support to link numerous other existing neuroscience databases to the workspace. Finally, the workspace will also provide a novel educational tool to allow students of neuroscience to understand both brain models and the areas of the brain they represent doc24979 none It has been discovered that a cold gas flow parallel to the anode surface can lead to a stable attachment with an enlarged non-equilibrium region between the luminous arc plasma and the anode surface. The current flow to the anode appears to be distributed over a relatively large area, thus drastically reducing the anode heat flux. In this study, this type of arc attachment, in which a constrictor-stabilized arc attaches to an anode perpendicular to the arc axis with a cold gas flow parallel to the anode surface, is investigated. The enlarged non-equilibrium region between the anode and the arc column is characterized with a newly developed data analysis technique using Thomson scattering of laser radiation to determine the electron temperature and density distributions. Measurements with a Langmuir probe imbedded in the anode provide values for the same quantities at the anode surface allowing determination of the current density distribution, and heat-flux probe measurements give the heat-flux distribution at the anode surface. A parallel modeling effort using a three-dimensional finite-volume code for a non-equilibrium plasma provides insight into the physical processes in this non-equilibrium region including a mapping of the electric field strength. Both kinetic and composition non-equilibrium are considered, and a self-consistent treatment for diffusion is used. Broader impact High intensity arcs have attracted considerable interest for materials processing because they can provide high fluxes of electrons, ions, or other radicals. However, because the arc plasma is usually close to equilibrium, these fluxes are usually coupled with high heat fluxes, limiting their usefulness for processing applications. Furthermore, electric arcs frequently operate in an unstable manner, and the high heat fluxes lead to erosion of the electrodes, limiting the life of arcing devices. This study addresses the problems of the high heat fluxes associated with the benefits of high electron densities in electric arcs. Two aspects of this investigation are expected to lead to results of practical importance. One is the generation of larger non-equilibrium plasma volumes that can be used for surface treatment or bulk chemical processing. The second is the existence of a wide-area diffuse attachment for high-intensity arcs with apparently low heat-flux densities and, consequentl doc24980 none This US-Hungarian research project headed by Peter Palffy-Muhoray of Kent State University and Agnes Burka of the Hungarian Institute for Solid State Physics and Optics Budapest examines a new class of liquid crystals consisting of bent-shaped molecules. These ester type bent core liquid crystals range from low molecular weight materials to elastomers. The collaborative research plan involves synthesis, characterization, and modeling of such bent-core, or banana-shaped, molecules. Junior researchers from Kent State University are part of the distinguished US-Hungarian team. To determine the mesophases and physical properties of bent-core liquid crystals, the research partners will employ three experimental techniques: 1)Mechanical studies of thin films including linear electro-mechanical and rheological measurements of banana liquid crystal systems, where the overall chirality is set by surface interactions. 2)Electrical measurements which include determination of the polarization and dielectric spectroscopy. 3)Optical observations consisting of polarizing and confocal microscopy as well as electro-optic measurements and laser spectroscopy. The goal is to resolve a number of fundamental questions concerning the correlation between material parameters and pattern forming instabilities. For example, the researchers hope to explain observed achiral symmetry-breaking mechanisms and to understand how the structures form helical filaments in an isotropic melt. If successful, their results may help identify novel synthetic materials with optical and pyroelectric properties that have practical applications in information technology and biotechnology. This research project in experimental condensed matter physics fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Central Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence doc24981 none A new type of bacteria in the ocean was discovered this past year using in?situ infrared fluorescence measurements. These cells, termed aerobic, anoxygenic photoheterotrophs, or AAPs, are capable of using sunlight and or carbon sources for energy. They can fix C02, but do not produce oxygen as traditional photosynthesizers do. They were shown to live in coastal ocean waters and in the Northeastern Pacific Ocean. The ecological role and importance of AAPs is not known. In current carbon models they are confounded with heterotrophic bacteria, yet may play a very different role. This project, a small grant for exploratory research, will analyze samples collected from 3 recent research cruises in the NW Atlantic for counts of AAP cells across seasons and across a trophic gradient from productive, coastal Maine, Gulf of Maine, and Georges Bank waters to offshore oligotrophic waters of the Sargasso Sea. This project will provide some of the first quantitative estimates of AAPs in different marine ecosystems and over different seasons, and will give the first indication of the potential ecological importance of this newly discovered microbial form. The findings from this study should have broad significance in understanding ocean ecology and biogeochemical cycling in the oceans doc24982 none Zinder Description: This award is to support a collaborative project between Dr. Stephen Zinder, Department of Microbiology at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York and a team of Egyptian scientists that includes Dr. Hany Hussein, Dr. Ahmed Gaballa, and Dr. Yasser Abd Elfattah, of Mubarak City for Scientific Research and Technology Applications in Alexandria, Egypt. The main objective of this research is to isolate the most potent microbial cultures capable of producing bioemulsifier. The investigators plan also to study methods for optimization of the production process through the study of the different environmental conditions and by assessing the influence of different carbon and nitrogen limitations on surfactant productivity. The investigators will isolate the most potent microbial cultures capable of producing biodegradable surfactants from the ecosystem. Samples will be collected from different parts of Egypt and the microbes capable of producing biosurfactants will be isolated and characterized. They also plan to examine the use of these optimized production processes to produce the biosurfactant on a large scale. It is expected that a fermentation process will have a key role in improving the economics of the overall process in biosurfactant production. Scope: Surfactants are surface-active compounds capable of reducing surface and interfacial tension at the interface between liquids, solids and gases, thereby allowing them to mix or disperse readily as emulsions in water or other liquids. The topic of biosurfactants is highly relevant to Egypt where sustaining the environment is a high priority. Discovering microbes that produce surfactants would have a very desirable impact on society and on the environment. A number of experiments are proposed, calling for expertise over a wide area. Drs. Zinder, Hussein, Gaballa and Abdel Fattah have the disciplinary experiences needed for this research. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities doc24983 none This study will help document the prehistory of Native American populations that lived in the Ohio River Valley by characterizing genetic relationships among the Archaic population of Indian Knoll, responsible for leaving large shell middens, like those found throughout the eastern United States, in Ohio County, Kentucky between and years ago, two Adena populations that built earth burial mounds in Boone and Montgomery counties, Kentucky between and years ago, and a Hopewell population that lived in Calhoun County, Illinois between and years ago. Although the archaeological traditions of these populations have been well described, little is known about their relationships with each other or to modern populations living in eastern North America during historic times. Were the populations who built Adena burial mounds in different counties of western Kentucky related to each other? Were the Hopewell populations of Ohio and Illinois, both of whom developed similar elaborate burial practices and artistic traditions, genetically related to each other? Were the Adena populations genetically related to the Hopewell populations who succeeded them in some areas of the Ohio Valley or, alternatively, were either more closely related to other adjacent populations of eastern North America? Were the Adena and or Hopewell populations genetically related to the Archaic populations that preceded them or the Late Woodland Mississippian populations (or, in fact, living populations) that succeeded them in eastern North America? Archaeological, ethnohistorical and historical linguistic evidence has been cited in favor of various hypotheses proposing either invasions of populations into this region from adjacent regions or, alternatively, genetic continuity in the region during the last years, but no consensus has emerged. Recent technological advances have made it possible to extract and study small quantities of DNA from prehistoric human remains and thus directly investigate genetic relationships among ancient and modern populations. DNA will be extracted from skeletal remains from four different prehistoric cemetery sites and both mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome traits known to be highly polymorphic in Native American populations will identified using restriction analysis and nucleotide sequencing. Genetic comparisons among these samples, published data on other prehistoric populations of eastern North America and modern populations will be made using sophisticated multivariate phylogenetic methods and computer programs. Populations to be compared in addition to those cited above include those from Glacial Kame and Red Ochre sites in the Lower Great Lakes region, other Hopewell populations in different geographic locations, later Mississippian populations that replaced populations throughout eastern North America during Late Woodland times. These comparisons will determine whether or not cultural traditions that were shared among groups that lived in different geographic areas represents admixture or, alternatively, cultural diffusion and whether or not the succession of populations in the Ohio Valley represents a continuous genetic continuity or, alternative, the replacement of indigenous populations by invading immigrants. The combination of genetic evidence with evidence from genetic, archaeological, ethnohistorical and historical linguistic research will allow more reliable inferences to be made about the prehistory of the Ohio Valley doc15312 none This award supports a program of field surveys of an area within the large, well-developed megadune field southeast of Vostok station. The objectives are to determine the physical characteristics of the firn across the dunes, including typical climate indicators such as stable isotopes and major chemical species, and to install instruments to measure the time variation of near-surface wind and temperature with depth, to test and refine hypotheses for megadune formation. Field study will consist of surface snowpit and shallow core sampling, ground penetrating radar (GPR) profiling, GPS topographic and ice motion surveys, AWS installation, accumulation ablation measurements, subsurface temperature, and firn permeability studies. Field work in two successive seasons is proposed. Continent-wide remote sensing studies of the dunes will be continued, using the new group of instruments that are now, or will shortly be available (e.g., MODIS, MISR, GLAS, AMSR). The earlier study of topographic, passive microwave, and SAR characteristics will be extended, with the intent of determining the relationships of dune amplitude and wavelength to climate parameters, and further development of models of dune formation. Diffusion, ventilation, and vapor transport processes within the dune firn will be modeled as well. A robust program of outreach is planned and reporting to inform both the public and scientists of the fundamental in-situ and remote sensing characteristics of these uniquely Antarctic features will be an important part of the work. Because of their extreme nature, their broad extent, and their potential impact on the climate record, it is important to improve our current understanding of these. Megadunes are a manifestation of an extreme terrestrial climate and may provide insight on past terrestrial climate, or to processes active on other planets. Megadunes are likely to represent an end-member in firn diagenesis, and as such, may have much to teach us about the processes involved doc24985 none This award provides partial support for travel of young researchers (advanced graduate students, post doctoral researchers and very new faculty) to attend the First International School and Conference on Nanoscale Molecular Mechanics to be held in Maui, Hawaii from May 12-17, . The school will be held two days prior to the conference. A panel of distingushed lecturers has been selected to make presentations. Many of the pioneers in nanoscale mechanics will make presentations at the conference doc24986 none This proposal is based on the assumption that there are valid scaling laws where a large bubbling fluidized bed, typical of industrial applications, can be scaled down to a bed with fewer particles? based on this assumption, the PI proposes to using these scaling laws to simulate an equivalent system with fewer particles and thus save significant computational cost which is typically proportional to the number of particles in a Lagrangian-Eulerian approach. Lagrangian simulations have several advantages and will be a very powerful tool in realistically modeling particulate flows if it is made computationally more tractable. The objectives of this work are to verify the existence of such a scaling or similitude by experiments and numerical simulations and to develop an appropriate numerical scheme for Eulerian-Lagrangian simulations doc24987 none The PI is organizing the 4th Winter School J.J. Giambiagi titled Nanophysics, Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. This meeting will take place at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. Support is requested for 1.5 graduate students from U.S. Institutions. This interdisciplinary program is to provide a forum for discussion of the latest advances in the general nano area and to foster collaboration between the scientists in U.S. and Argentina. The challenges and issues with science and application of nanotechnology will be identified and discussed along with identification of emerging areas requiring research and analysis doc24988 none Carter This one-year award for U.S.-U.K. dissertation enhancement research in novel materials involves Ms. Shelley Gilliss, a graduate student and Ms. Nicole Munoz, an undergraduate student in materials science at the University of Minnesota. Both students will travel to University of Oxford to participate in research in glasses and ceramic oxides under the guidance of the US investigator, Dr. C. Barry Carter and his U.K. counterpart, John L. Hutchison. Ms. Gilliss will iinvestigate interactions in the materials system, cerium oxide and silicate glass, cerium oxide and glass-ceramics. Glass oxide interactions play a critical role in a variety of processes, from liquid-phase sintering to chemical-mechanical polishing of glass. She will use scanning electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy and transmission electronic microscopy to elucidate the chemistry, structure, dimensions and morphology of these materials. The project takes advantage of British expertise in microscopy in general and specifically in high-resolution microscopy of oxides and glasses doc24989 none The proposal deals with models and experiments to study microporosity in casting. The goal is to understand how microstructure formation is influenced by microporosity growth and convective flow of an alloy liquid phase. Three distinct tasks have been laid out. The first is to use a phase field method to simulate the interaction among dendritic growth, microporosity formation and melt flow. These results will be coupled into a macroscopic model for predicting microporosity nucleation, growth, agglomeration, and migration. Finally, experiments will be conducted at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to provide data for validation of the predictions. If successful, the research will contribute to the fundamental understanding of microporosity formation. The computer codes to be developed could be used by commercial casting code developers to improve the modeling capability with respect to this important element of solidification processing. The present award will concentrate on the microscale modeling of microporosity formation and on developing the methodology for coupling this model with a macroscopic model. Planning for validation experiments will also be carried out, in anticipation of a future extensive collaboration with ORNL doc24990 none This award, provided by the Office of Polar Programs, allows a US investigator to participate in integrated geochemical and isotopic investigations of an unusual suite of ancient rocks from East Antarctica. This project entails a Lu-Hf and Re-Os isotopic study of the Archean Napier Complex on the East Antarctic Shield using rock samples collected by two Japanese expeditions to the remote regions of Mt. Riiser-Larsen and Tonagh Island in -97 and . These samples are being made available for a collaborative investigation with Japanese scientists. It is imperative that the work in the US and Japan move ahead simultaneously. The Japanese team is focusing on rock and mineral major oxide compositions, Nd, Sr and Pb isotopic compositions, as well as SHRIMP zircon U-Pb dating on aliquots of these samples. The component of the work supported by this award focuses specifically on Archean crustal and mantle evolution for which the Napier Complex has, potentially, some of the best-preserved rocks on Earth. This project will use the Lu-Hf and Re-Os approach because of increasing recognition that the Sm-Nd system can be perturbed severely by younger metamorphic and metasomatic events. Furthermore, presently the number of data for initial Os isotopic compositions of Archean mafic-ultramafic magmas worldwide is very small, largely because of post-crystallization alteration events and the analytical challenges that have only recently been overcome. In collaboration with Dr. Rick Carlson at the Carnegie Institution, we will attempt to exploit the freshness of Napier Complex ultramafic and mafic rocks and generate Re-Os data on several samples. In addition to providing a means of dating rocks that lack zircon, this approach will yield data critical to the understanding of Os isotopic evolution of the mantle with its implications for the timing and nature of crustal recycling, accretion of a late chondritic veneer and possibly core-mantle exchange through time doc24991 none This collections project builds on the earlier successes of the web site, www.eskeletons.org, and dramatically expands the range of content at the site, the degree of student interactivity with the materials, and the amount of student interaction with each other. New laser scanning equipment along with dramatic improvements in existing high resolution X-ray computed tomography technologies allows the inclusion of species of a much smaller body size than those initially posted at the site, with the completion of the scans accomplished on a much faster timetable. This site provides students with a more complete understanding of the range of primate diversity and facilitates a great diversity of lab exercises. Additions to the site include: 1) an expansion of the range of content including additional species, larger samples of particular species, and case studies that illustrate specific points, including forensic studies, and the option for researchers to post their datasets, 2) multiple entry portals that are age-specific and include separate portals for grade, college, and Gray learners, a collaboratorium link to serve as a clearinghouse for bringing together classrooms and instructors from different parts of the country, a series of tools and exercises that examine a variety of biological concepts and topics, 3) expansion of the current self-quizzing feature and the incorporation of prepared curriculum materials, PowerPoint presentations, and classroom exercises that can be downloaded by instructors for use in the classroom, 4) 3-D hard copy printouts to explore the use of anatomically accurate models at various scales as teaching tools, with a special emphasis on identification kits and comparative anatomy, 5) versions of the web site that can be downloaded for remote use on laptops and handheld PDAs, and 6) conformity with the NSDL Core Integration effort doc24992 none Cary Coglianese Harvard University Digital Government and E-Rulemaking: New Direction for Technology and Regulation Rulemaking is the process by which government agencies take laws passed by Congress, provide the detailed scientific, engineering, and economic analyses necessary to reduce those laws to regulation and practice, and then consult with any interested parties. They must then consider any external recommendations and accept or reject them. Documenting their reasons for doing so. The entire process and decisions must be open and transparent. Many Federal agencies have begun experimenting with using the Internet in the rulemaking process. The hope is that this will increase the accessibility of the process to the public, while providing an easier way to document the interactions between the agencies and the public. This proposed workshop will bring together information technology researchers, legal and administrative experts, and agency personnel to develop an information technology and social political science research agenda related to this very important democratic process doc24993 none Prediction of warm season convective rainfall remains a challenge, particularly for systems occurring in the absence of orographic or strong larger-scale forcing. Under a prior award, the Principal Investigator focused on improving numerical model Quantitative Precipitation Forecast (QPF) guidance for summer convection. The present research provides a continuation of this research, with a goal of improved use of mixed-physics ensemble guidance, while examining also physical processes associated with mesoscale convective system (MCS) morphology and evolution in the Upper Midwest. The Principal Investigator will explore MCS evolution and morphology, with primary emphasis on differences between systems with trailing stratiform regions and those with leading stratiform regions, by analyzing the outputs of fine grid spacing versions of the NCEP Eta and WRF (Weather Research and Forecasting) models. The use of different models and convection-related physical parameterizations will allow the following two goals to be pursued. First, careful analysis of observed MCSs and comparison with the different mixed model mixed physics ensemble members will improve understanding of physical processes important in system evolution. Also detailed spatial and temporal investigations of the realism of the simulated MCSs will be pursued. Second, it is suggested that mixed model mixed physics ensembles will be one of the most direct means of improving warm season mesoscale QPF. This approach will assist in improving QPF, particularly because the emphasis on different MCS morphology will reveal strengths and weaknesses within model parameterizations of physical processes important in the development and evolution of the different MCS modes. This analysis will additionally help improve understanding of the origins of diversity in model forecasts, which should assist in design of optimal mixed-physics ensembles. The researchers also will run selective cloud-resolving scale simulations for each case to which physical processes and QPF will be compared with the runs using parameterized convection. The Principal Investigator will implement new strategies for verification of high resolution models that will improve understanding about verification evaluation of rainfall on refined spatial and temporal scales. Completion of the proposed research will improve understanding of the development and evolution of convective systems in the Midwest. In addition, the research will facilitate future advances in mesoscale meteorology by establishing the most beneficial uses of refined resolution ensemble guidance for warm season convective system forecasting doc24994 none Early Experience and Neurocognitive Development: Socioeconomic Variables With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Farah will conduct a one-year study attempting to begin to characterize the cognitive outcomes of childhood poverty in terms of the framework of Cognitive Neuroscience. Dr. Farah aims to partition the known cognitive disparities, previously assessed with the relatively blunt instruments of IQ tests and school achievement measures, into 7 key neurocognitive systems using selective behaviorally-based neurocognitive tasks. These tasks are as follows: Dorsolateral prefrontal working memory, Ventromedial prefrontal reward processing, Anterior cingulate conflict monitoring, Parietal spatial, Occipito-temporal pattern vision, Temporal memory, and Fronto-temporal language. This partitioning may isolate the neurocognitive system or systems that are most sensitive to the effects of experiential factors related to socio-economic-status (SES). If such systems can be delineated, then researchers may be in a position to discover the potentially causal factors in the family and home environment, from a wide array of factors previously measured with the low SES participants, from somatic factors such as lead levels to psychological factors such as parental depression and stress. The primary goal of this proposal is to address the question: Given that SES has been shown to affect cognitive development, what underlying systems of the developing mind and brain are impacted by the complex bundle of experiential factors that constitute SES? Brain development involves a complex interplay between innate and experiential factors. Our understanding of the role of experience comes from animal and human evidence. Experimental manipulation of the environment of young animals has demonstrated profound effects of environmental stimulation and the presence of stressors on brain health. Studies of children raised under conditions of extreme deprivation, such as Romanian orphanages, have found measurable differences in brain development. What has not been established is the effect of differences in early experience within the normal range for our society. One dimension on which normal children s experience may differ is related to their family s socioeconomic status (SES). Furthermore, SES is known to impact a wide range of measures of cognitive development, from IQ tests to school achievement. The present project begins with the assumption that these SES disparities in cognitive development are not to be explained in terms of innate differences between families, but are instead due to some of the many experiential differences that correlate with SES doc24995 none Continued single-year, high-precision (0.2%) measurements of carbon-14 (C-14) from tree-ring samples will be made in order to provide a continuous record from AD 998 to . The record will be examined for evidence of high-energy solar flare events, and hard gamma-rays associated with Supernova RX J .0- (ca. - ). It will also be possible to determine if the 11yr and 22yr cosmic ray modulation cycles extend through the Oort and Wolf Minima. The search for correlations between changes in solar activity and climate change will continue to be emphasized. Participation in the construction of INTCAL 03 will also be supported doc24996 none Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) Use of Phase Imaging in Atomic Force Microscopy for Measurement of Viscoelastic Contrast in Polymer Nanocomposites and Molecularly-Thick Lubricant Films In the proposed work our goal is the development of a technique for quantitative imaging of viscoelastic properties across polymer nanocomposite bearing surfaces and surfaces lubricated with ultrathin films. This would be an important technological advancement that would provide a tool for measurement and optimization of polymer nanocomposites and a tool for measurement of lubricant film uniformity. Such a tool would be particularly important for MEMS and magnetic storage. So this project has a very high potential payoff. Although this is a high risk project (because such a technique has never been developed before), we have seen promising results in our preliminary experiments. Much more work must be carried out however. Preliminary studies of phase contrast, using an atomic force microscope (AFM) in both tapping and force modulation modes have shown that different regimes exist. Different AFM cantilever tip vibration amplitudes and tip-sample surface separation distances give different phase contrast images. We believe that hard tapping conditions, i.e. high cantilever tip vibration amplitude and low tip-sample surface separation, give phase images that emphasize viscoelastic properties, which are important in polymers. In commercial magnetic particulate tapes and polymer films with hard embedded particles, high phase contrast is found. The hard particles give lower phase lag than the surrounding polymer at hard tapping conditions, as expected. In the proposed research we will develop the technique with phase contrast measurements. We will make simultaneous measurements using several well-established AFM techniques: friction force (for contrast based on differences in lubricity among materials), force modulation (for contrast based on stiffness differences), and Kelvin probe (for contrast based on surface potential differences) microscopies. These should provide insight into the results of the phase contrast technique that is being developed here. We also seek to quantify results. We will attempt to relate phase data from the AFM for thin polymer samples to viscoelasticity data obtained for these samples by another proven technique known as dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA). In the DMA thin polymer samples are subjected to tension compression strain cycles and the corresponding stress is measured. The phase lag between the stress and strain is then found. If the AFM is truly measuring viscoelastic properties then it should be possible to find a correlation between loss tangent from the DMA and phase lag from the AFM. In order to quantify, it will be necessary to understand the physics of the contact. To this end we will develop a vibration model that accounts for the repulsive and attractive forces between the tip and the dissipation caused by the viscoelasticity of the sample. An award would support one graduate student and partially support one postdoctoral researcher. This would provide an opportunity to recruit and fund a minority or woman. The PI and his department have made efforts to attract such students in recent years. The department regularly invites, and provides travel grants for, students, particularly women and minorities, from other schools to attract them for graduate studies; we have had some success in this. Undergraduate students would work on the project as well. Projects like these provide hands-on opportunities for undergraduate students in a high-tech lab. Past undergraduates in the PI s lab have actually coauthored articles for technical journals. This project will provide additional material for the PI s course on tribology and in soon-to-be-developed nanoscale courses doc24997 none The objectives of the workshop are to: brief G-8 representatives on the roles, methodologies, and impacts of research assessment activities in the United States; compare and contrast U.S. and other G-8 approaches to research assessment; develop best-practices in research assessment; identify major unresolved research and implementation issues; and contribute to the development of collaborative policy and research networks in research assessment activities among G-8 members. Assuming these objectives are realized, all US agencies that conduct or support research will benefit from the development and dissemination of best practices in research assessment and the identification of major unresolved issues. The research community will also benefit from the dissemination of information on comparative methodologies for research assessment doc24998 none The investigators are developing a Digital Library Service Integration (DLSI) infrastructure to provide a systematic approach for integrating digital library collections and services. With this infrastructure, digital libraries will be able to share relevant services within a seamless, integrated interface. The project is integrating relatively simple services that may be used without modification. It is also exploring giving access to services that require customization, such as peer review, to a particular collection or community. Other contributions include incorporating collaborative filtering for customizing large sets of links, and developing advanced lexical analysis tools. Digital library collections and services generally will require minimal or no changes to plug into the DLSI infrastructure. With DLSI in place, users will see a totally integrated environment. They will use their digital library system just as before. But in addition, they will see supplemental link anchors, and when they click on one, they will be presented with a list of relevant links. The DLSI infrastructure will also filter and rank-order this set of generated links with respect to the user s preferences and current task. Digital library collections and services will gain several benefits from using DLSI: (1) Users will have direct access to related collections and services; this benefit, in effect, enlarges the feature set of a given collection or service. (2) Collections and services will gain much wider use, because DLSI linking will lead other users to them. (3) Users will become aware of a service or collection from seeing its links included in DLSI s list of links when using other collections and services. (4) DLSI will give the user direct, context-sensitive access to the features that a particular collection or service provides doc24999 none SRF cavities in high energy accelerator application are very costly to produce, at $44,000 per meter, however the reduced operating costs with these cavities creates the need to investigate means of producing these cavities in new and efficient fashion. This SGER aims to consider the deposition of textured niobium films on molybdenum structures by electron beam assisted PVD. The modification of the PVD adds addition process driver that can be used to produce higher quality conforming thin films. This is a high potential proposal considering the applications, and the advantage that would be gained if these SRF cavities could be produces in quantity and lower cost. The high risk is related to the uncertainty of producing relatively defect-free Nb films, where surface defects and grain boundaries would be extremely deleterious. This exploratory research will test the feasibility of creating these films on the moldy substrates, exploring the processing issues related to high performance thin films. If this proof of principle can be established, then further research will be needed to determine optimization conditions for high quality film producibility. The PIs will include undergraduate research assistants on this program through REUs. A subaward to Penn State will provide the necessary materials characterization capability and the collaboration will give students a chance to visit conduct research at either campus